Baarpijp

1. Life.

Brought up in Jackson, Mississippi, he started playing the violin at the age of four and several years later also studied clarinet and saxophone. He graduated from high school in 1931, having already demonstrated considerable skills in jazz ensemble performance and the composition of popular songs. His father’s professional involvement with mathematics (as an actuary) was influential in shaping Babbitt’s intellectual environment. In 1931 Babbitt entered the University of Pennsylvania with the intention of becoming a mathematician, but he soon transferred to New York University, concentrating on music under Marion Bauer and Philip James. He received the BA in music in 1935. As a student and during the ensuing years, Babbitt immersed himself in the intellectual milieu of New York, encountering influential philosophers such as Sidney Hook and James Wheelright, developing a life-long engagement with analytical philosophy, and reading widely in rapidly emerging and sometimes short-lived journals such as Symposium and Politics. His early attraction to the music of Varèse and Stravinsky soon gave way to an absorption in that of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern – particularly significant at a time when 12-note music was unknown to many and viewed with scepticism by others.

After graduation Babbitt studied privately with Sessions, wrote criticism for the Musical Leader, and then enrolled for graduate work at Princeton University, where he continued his association with Sessions. In 1938 he joined the Princeton music faculty and in 1942 received one of Princeton's first MFAs in music. His Composition for String Orchestra, a straightforward 12-note work, was completed in 1940.

During World War II Babbitt divided his time between Washington, DC, where he was engaged in mathematical research, and Princeton, as a member of the mathematics faculty (1943–5). Musically, these were years of thought and discovery, rather than of actual composition; they resulted in 1946 in a paper entitled The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System, which was the first formal and systematic investigation of Schoenberg’s compositional method. (The paper, which remained unpublished, finally gained Babbitt the PhD in 1992.) Between 1946 and 1948, shuttling between Jackson and New York, he once again directed his energies to composition, writing some film scores and an unsuccessful Broadway musical.

In 1948 Babbitt rejoined the music faculty at Princeton, eventually becoming Conant Professor of Music (1960); in 1973 he became a member of the composition faculty of the Juilliard School. He has also taught at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, the Berkshire Music Center, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Darmstadt summer courses. He has received several honorary doctorates and other honours, including a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1959), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960–61) and membership in the National Institute (1965). He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1982, and in 1986 was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (he also received its Gold Medal in Music in 1988). Throughout his career, he has been actively involved in contemporary music organizations, including the ISCM (he was president of the American section, 1951–2), the American Music Center, Perspectives of New Music (as a member of its editorial board) and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (as director from 1959). A prolific writer of articles and reviews, he has also travelled widely as a lecturer perceptive and adept at logical extemporization: his 1983 Madison lectures are published under the title Words about Music. He is also an inveterate follower of popular sports, a raconteur and punster, and an omnivorous reader.

(i) Serial theory and practice to 1970.

2. Works.

(ii) Electronic works.

(iii) Later serial developments.

Babbitt, Milton, §2: Works

(i) Serial theory and practice to 1970.

Babbitt’s early fascination with 12-note practice, particularly in its formal aspects, developed into a total reconsideration of musical relations. Throughout his compositional career he has been occupied with the extension of techniques related to Schoenberg’s (and Webern’s) ‘combinatorial’ sets; with the investigation of sets that have great flexibility and potential for long-range association; and with an exploration of the structuring of nonpitch components ‘determined by the operations of the [12-note] system and uniquely analogous to the specific structuring of the pitch components of the individual work, and thus, utterly nonseparable’ (Babbitt, 1955, p.61). He has been a pioneer in his ways of talking and thinking about music, invoking terms from other disciplines, such as philosophy, linguistics, mathematics and the physical sciences.

Babbitt revealed and formalized many of the most salient aspects of 12-note compositional technique in several important essays. In ‘Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition’ (1955), ‘Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants’ (1960) and ‘Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant’ (1961), he systematically investigated the compositional potential of the 12 pitch class set, introducing such terms (derived from mathematics) as ‘source set’, ‘combinatoriality’, ‘aggregate’, ‘secondary set’, and ‘derived set’. These terms facilitate the classification of the various types of pitch class set and contribute to the description of diverse procedures for the compositional projection of such sets. A secondary set, for example, results when a ‘new’ set of 12 pitch classes emerges from the linear linking of segments of two forms of a 12-note series, as shown in Table 1. Similarly, an ‘aggregate can be thought of as a simultaneous statement of … parts [of a 12-note set] … it is not a set, inasmuch as it is not totally ordered, because only the elements within the component parts are ordered, but not the relationship between or among the parts themselves’ (Babbitt, 1955, p.57). 12-note sets that yield such aggregate and secondary set formations are called ‘combinatorial’. (Further distinctions between various types of combinatorial sets are discussed in the same essay.) The nomenclature that Babbitt has introduced in his prose writings has become widely adopted and is the basis for much theoretical work and composition. Moreover, in his compositions he has demonstrated the efficacy of his theories. Thus Babbitt has extended the notion of compositional creativity to encompass the development of musical systems themselves, as well as specific compositional achievements within such systems. He has also persistently explored the relationships between set transformation and derivation procedures, and virtually all other aspects of musical structure, such as grouping and form, large- and small-scale rhythm, texture and register, instrumentation and timbre.

In ‘Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium’ (1962) Babbitt demonstrates a number of methods for interpreting the structures of pitch class sets in the temporal domain. By positing an analogy between the octave (in pitch structure) and the bar (in rhythmic and metrical structure), and by dividing the bar into 12 equal units (each of which can be musically articulated by individual points of attack), Babbitt provides a basis for mapping pitch class sets onto ‘time-point sets’. Thus an uninterpreted set of integers (for example, 0, 11, 6, 7, 5, 1, 10, 2, 9, 3, 4, 8) may be interpreted as a specific instance of a pitch class set (ex.1) or as a specific instance of a time-point set (ex.2). (The time-point of a particular point of attack is a measure of its position within the bar.) In ex.2 the metrical unit is a demisemiquaver, a 12th of the whole bar; time-point 0 therefore occurs on the first demisemiquaver of the bar, time-point 1 on the next, and so on. In this example the 12 available points of attack within a bar are ordered according to the numerical set given above.) Exx.1 and 2 each represent only one of the possible interpretations of the numerical set given above; pitch classes may be presented in various registers, just as time-points may be displaced to subsequent bars, as long as the same order of presentation (of pitches or points of articulation) is preserved. Furthermore, a time-point set and a pitch class set determined by the same set of integers may unfold at different speeds: in the first four bars of the second violin part of Babbitt’s String Quartet no.3 (1969–70) the first six notes may be understood as a realization in terms of pitch of the first five integers in the set indicated above (ex.3). Also, the three forte markings in this passage articulate the time-points that correspond to the first and third entities of the same numerical set (time-point 0 is reiterated in bar 2 before the third time-point, 6, is articulated in bar 4). The second time-point of this set is presented in a different instrumental line, the last note of violin 1 in bar 3 (ex.4). Each of the eight dynamic gradations from ppp to fff inclusive is employed in the String Quartet no.3 to articulate a particular layer of the time-point structure, and each of these layers is analogous to one of eight layers of pitch class sets simultaneously presented in the work; the eight layers of pitch class sets are differentiated by distinctions of instrumentation, register and mode of sound production (for example, the use of pizzicato and arco) throughout the work. This brief discussion of a musical fragment may serve as an indication of the extraordinary richness of structural relationships that are projected in Babbitt’s music.

An earlier example of Babbitt’s approach may be seen in his Three Compositions for Piano (1947), one of his first consistent attempts to extend Schoenbergian 12-note procedures. The surface of the music is, in some respects, reminiscent of Schoenberg: registrally dispersed lines alternate with thickly clustered chordal attacks (in the framework of a quasi-ternary structure), yet the absence of expressive indications and the reliance on metronome markings would seem to reveal a Stravinskian concern for a clear, undistracted projection of the temporal domain. Some of the innovative aspects of the work reside in the conjunction of the structuring of pitch and other domains, resulting in an early example of ‘totally serialized’ music. Points of articulation made by the superimposition of lines and the number of consecutive attacks within a contrapuntal line are determined by a set (whose prime form is 5, 1, 4, 2). In the first four bars of the work, this set is presented twice in its prime form (P), once in retrograde (R) and once in retrograde inversion (RI; ex.5). There is also a correspondence between dynamics and pitch set forms.

Babbitt’s Composition for Four Instruments and Composition for Twelve Instruments (both of which were written in 1948) go a step further towards a structuring of rhythm isomorphic with 12-note pitch structuring. In the 12-instrument work a set of 12 durations emerges and operates throughout. It is transformed by ‘classical’ serial operations: transposition (addition of a constant to each duration number of the set), inversion (the complementation of the duration numbers), retrogression (the complementation of the order numbers of the set) and retrograde inversion. The ending of each of the three major sections of the work is articulated by the completion of a rhythmic set. The presentation of the rhythmic sets is often complex – various instruments characteristically participate in the presentation of a single rhythmic set, and more than one rhythmic set may be presented simultaneously. Nonetheless, the surface characteristics of the work delineate a simple process. Beginning with sparsely textured single events (which can be considered an extension of Webern’s sound world) and slowly becoming more compact (with regard to aggregate completions), the work concludes with thicker textures and sustained sonorities, unfolding newly shaped but familiar harmonic environments.

Babbitt has been profoundly involved in the clarification and extension of the systematic aspects of 12-note composition, but his music is in no sense rigidly determined by precompositional schemes. Within the constraints of serial techniques, he uses a great range of expressive possibilities and contextually varied structures. A work such as Partitions (1957) demonstrates numerous precompositional constraints (such as the projection of an all-interval set, a polyphonic texture in which distinct transformations of 12-note pitch sets are unfolded in each line and aggregates formed by various vertical partitionings of segments of these lines). In the first four bars a hexachord is presented in each of four different registers (ex.6). The hexachords in the lower two registers (E A F F C E; C G A B D B) are complementary and are, respectively, the retrogrades of the hexachords presented in the higher two registers. There are 49 different ways in which the pitches presented in these hexachords might be partitioned to form aggregates. (For example, each hexachord might be divided 3 + 3; or the hexachords might be divided alternately 2 + 4 and 4 + 2 etc.) The actual partitioning of pitches (1 + 5 in the highest register, 3 + 3 in the next highest register, 5 + 1 in the next register, and 3 + 3 in the lowest register) contributes to a rich pattern of interval and pitch associations and echoes. Such partitioning establishes a specific rate of movement through the pitch class sets in each register and also suggests possibilities for hierarchical distinctions among the pitch classes that constitute the sets involved. Each registral line has its own rhythm of movement through its pitch class sets, and these characteristic rhythms are varied contextually throughout the work.

The commitment to systematic precompositional planning is maintained in works with dramatic, poetic or other associative aspects. In Du (1951), a song cycle for soprano and piano (which represented the USA at the 1953 ISCM Festival), there is continual interplay between the text and the vocal and piano lines. Phoneme, syllable, word and line are carefully contoured, subtly and imaginatively set to music: the pitch, durational, dynamic and registral schemata, themselves transformed from poem to poem, are allied with the verbal elements and indeed help to project the many delicate nuances of the text. These lyrical, imagist tendencies were most fully realized in Philomel (1964) but are also evident in All Set (1957), for small jazz ensemble, with its conjunction of 12-note structure (based on an all-combinatorial set) and what Babbitt calls ‘jazz-like properties … the use of percussion, the Chicago jazz-like juxtapositions of solos and ensembles recalling certain characteristics of group improvisation’.

Babbitt took a novel serial approach to handling the sonic resources of a large orchestra in Relata I (1965). Here timbral ‘families’ are correlated with set structure, with woodwind instruments as four trios, brass as three quartets, and string instruments as two sextets (one bowed, the other plucked). The work is insistently polyphonic (with as many as 48 instrumental lines), framed at both ends by massive sonorities and filled with constantly changing and recombined textures and colours. While parts of the work are analogous to other parts, there is no simple repetition: all aspects undergo reinterpretation, rearrangement and ‘resurfacing’. In the more timbrally homogeneous works of the late 1960s (Sextets, Post-Partitions, parts of Correspondences, the String Quartets nos.3 and 4), the handling of timbre and tone-colour seems even more refined. Sonorously embodied successions of relations are projected in ever varying contexts, producing changes of ‘atmosphere’ from the most rarefied to the most dense, with every conceivable gradation.

Babbitt, Milton, §2: Works

(ii) Electronic works.

Another continuing concern of Babbitt’s has been electronic sound synthesis. At the time of the first instrumental film soundtrack, in the late 1930s, he had already recognized the enormous compositional potential of such synthesis. Two decades later, in the mid-1950s, when he was invited by RCA to be a composer-consultant, he became the first composer to work with its newly improved and developed synthesizer, the Mark II (see illustration). Composition for Synthesizer (1961) was Babbitt’s first totally synthesized work. It was followed soon after by Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesizer (1961) and Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962–4). His basic compositional attitudes and approaches underwent little change with the new resource; rather, with the availability and flexibility of the synthesizer’s programming control they were now realizable to a degree of precision previously unattainable in live performances of his music. Babbitt’s interest in synthesis was not concerned with the invention of new sounds per se but with the control of all aspects of events, particularly the timing and rate of change of timbre, texture and intensity. (His Woodwind Quartet (1953) and String Quartet no.2 (1954) had already given some indication of the rapidity of dynamic change he wished to achieve, on both single and consecutive pitches.) The electronic medium allowed him to project time-point sets however he liked, without regard to the demands made on live performers.

Though the lucidity of his conceptual world finally became manifest under the ideal performance conditions provided by sound synthesis, Babbitt nevertheless retained his interest in live performance, and carried over to it several structural procedures from the electronic medium. Perhaps the most appealing work combining live performance with tape is Philomel, written in conjunction with the poet John Hollander for the soprano Bethany Beardslee. It is based on Ovid’s interpretation of the Greek legend of Philomela, the ravished, speechless maiden who is transformed into a nightingale. New ways of combining musical and verbal expressiveness were devised by composer and poet: music is as articulate as language; language (Philomela’s thoughts) is transformed into music (the nightingale’s song). The work is an almost inexhaustible repertory of speech-song similitudes and differentiations, and resonant word-music puns (unrealizable without the resources of the synthesizer).

Babbitt, Milton, §2: Works

(iii) Later serial developments.

Since the 1970s Babbitt has been extraordinarily prolific. The fecundity of his compositional thought has been revealed in such diverse combinations as female chorus, double brass sextet, orchestra and tape, and guitar duo. He has continued to explore the potential, and refine the procedures of, 12-note composition, always discovering new ways of extending and interpreting principles of combinatoriality and correlating the various dimensions of his musical universe.

In works such as Arie da capo (1973–4), Babbitt incorporates ‘weighted aggregates’ – transformations (by inversion) of pitch class arrays (abstract, precompositional designs made up of combinatorially related rows) in which at least one pitch class appears more than once (see Babbitt, 1973–4). Arie da capo also employs an ‘all-partition array’ that systematically uses all the possible partitionings of the structural elements that comprise an aggregate (in this case, all the possible partitionings of 12-note sets into as many as six parts). All-partition arrays are found in much of Babbitt’s music after 1960. Each of the sections of Arie da capo may be construed as an ‘aria’ for one of the five instruments; but the conception of the aria is reimagined so that ‘the central instrument dominates less quantitatively than relationally, in that its music is the immediate source of, and is complemented and counterpointed by, the music of the “accompanying” instruments’. ‘Da capo’ repetitions of set forms recur throughout the arias, both on the musical surface and as non-consecutive pitches associated by register, articulation or instrumentation.

A Solo Requiem for soprano and two pianos (1976–7) is Babbitt’s most extended composition for voice. This magisterial work (a memorial to the composer Godfrey Winham) incorporates a wide range of vocal techniques and reveals the extraordinary range and sensitivity of Babbitt’s response to a variety of dramatic and lyrical poetic texts. In My Complements to Roger for solo piano (1978), Babbitt succinctly demonstrates a number of methods for associating pitch and rhythmic structures. The partitioning of metrical units and pitch class sets is correlated in each bar. Often in the piece the grouping of a string of pitches extracted from the abstract pitch class array is articulated on the musical surface by presenting the pitch string within a single beat, subdivided into the same number of parts as there are pitches in the string (see Mead, 1983).

Babbitt has continued to expand the 12-note universe. Since the 1980s he has explored the premise of the ‘superarray’, the combination of individual arrays to form larger and more intricate 12-note structures. These very large arrays of pitch class structure have inspired ever more inventive musical textures. For example, in Transfigured Notes for string orchestra (1986), Babbitt divides each of four instrumental groups (1st and 2nd violins, violas and cellos) into two sub-groups and then distinguishes between three separate registers in each group in order to articulate 24 distinct areas. These instrumental groupings are then recombined to project the structural counterpoint which comprises one interpretation of the abstract superarray.

The world that Babbitt’s music evokes is not simple. He has said ‘I want a piece of music to be literally as much as possible’. While some critics have felt that such an attitude has resulted in a body of inaccessible music, others have praised his pioneering approach, involving as it has a systematic and comprehensive exploration of the 12-note compositional universe. His emphasis on the relationship between practice and theory, his insistence on the composer’s assumption of responsibility for every musical event in a work, and his reinterpretation of the constituent elements of the Western musical tradition have had a vital influence on the thinking and music of numerous younger composers.

WORKS

all published unless otherwise stated

instrumental

Orch: Generatrix, 1935, inc., withdrawn; Composition for Str Orch, 1940, withdrawn; Sym., 1941, inc., withdrawn; Into the Good Ground, film score, 1949, inc., withdrawn; Relata I, 1965; Relata II, 1968; Ars combinatoria, small orch, 1981; Conc. for Pf and Orch, 1985; Transfigured Notes, str orch, 1986; Conc. no.2, pf, orch, 1998

Chbr: Str Trio, 1941, withdrawn; Composition for 4 Insts, fl, cl, vn, vc, 1948; Composition for 12 Insts, wind qnt, tpt, hp, cel, str trio, db, 1948, rev. 1954; Str Qt no.1, 1948, withdrawn; Composition for Va and Pf, 1950; Ww Qt, 1953; Str Qt no.2, 1954; All Set, a sax, t sax, tpt, trbn, db, pf, vib, perc, 1957; Sextets, vn, pf, 1966; Str Qt no.3, 1969–70; Str Qt no.4, 1970; Arie da capo, fl, cl + b cl, pf, vn, vc, 1973–4; Paraphrases, fl, ob + eng hn, cl, b cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, tuba, pf, 1979

Dual, vc, pf, 1980; Str Qt no.5, 1982; Groupwise, pic + fl + a fl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1983; Four Play, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1984; The Joy of More Sextets, vn, pf, 1986; Fanfare, 4 hn, 4 tpt, 3 trbn, tuba, 1987; Souper, spkr, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1987; Whirled Series, a sax, pf, 1987; The Crowded Air, fl, ob, cl, bn, pf, mar, gui, vn, va, vc, db, 1988; Consortini, fl, pf, vib, mar, vc, 1989; Soli e Duettini, 2 gui, 1989; Soli e Duettini, fl, gui, 1989; Soli e Duettini, vn, va, 1990

Counterparts, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1992; Septet, but Equal, 2 cl, cl + b cl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1992; Fanfare for All, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1993; Str Qt no.6, 1993; Accompanied Recitative, s sax, pf, 1994; Arrivals and Departures, 2 vn, 1994; Triad, cl, va, pf, 1994; Bicenquinquagenary Fanfare, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1995; Pf Qt, 1995; Qnt, cl, 2 vn, va, vc, 1996; When Shall We Three Meet Again?, fl, cl, vib, 1996

Pf: 3 Compositions for Pf, 1947; Duet, 1956; Semi-Simple Variations, 1956; Partitions, 1957; Post-Partitions, 1966; Tableaux, 1972; Minute Waltz (3/4 ± 1/8), 1977; Playing for Time, 1977; My Complements to Roger, 1978; About Time, 1982; Don, pf 4 hands, 1981; Canonical Form, 1983; Playing for Time, 1983; It Takes Twelve to Tango, 1984; Lagniappe, 1985; Overtime, 1987; In his Own Words, spkr, pf, 1988; Emblems (Ars Emblematica), 1989; Envoi, pf 4 hands, 1990; Preludes, Interludes and Postlude, 1991; Tutte le corde, 1994

Other solo inst: My Ends are my Beginnings, cl, 1978; Melismata, vn, 1982; Sheer Pluck (Composition for Gui), 1984; Homily, snare drum, 1987; Beaten Paths, mar, 1988; Play it Again Sam, va, 1989; None but the Lonely Flute, fl, 1991; Around the Horn, hn, 1993; Manifold Music, org, 1995

vocal

Dramatic: Fabulous Voyage (musical, R. Childs, R. Koch, Babbitt), 1946

Choral: Music for the Mass I, SATB, 1940, withdrawn; Music for the Mass II, SATB, 1941, withdrawn; 4 Canons, female chorus, 1968 [after Schoenberg]; More Phonemena, 12vv, 1978; An Elizabethan Sextette, female chorus 6vv, 1979; Glosses, boys' choir, 1988

Solo vocal: Three Theatrical Songs, 1v, pf, 1946 [from musical Fabulous Voyage]; The Widow's Lament in Springtime (W.C. Williams), S, pf, 1950; Du (Stramm), song cycle, S, pf, 1951; Vision and Prayer, S, pf, 1954, unpubd, unperf.; 2 Sonnets (G.M. Hopkins), Bar, cl, va, vc, 1955; Composition for Tenor and 6 Insts, T, fl, ob, vn, va, vc, hpd, 1960; Sounds and Words, S, pf, 1960

Phonemena, S, pf, 1969–70; A Solo Requiem (W. Shakespeare, Hopkins, G. Meredith, Stramm, J. Dryden), S, 2 pf, 1976–7; The Head of the Bed (J. Hollander), S, fl, cl, vn, vc, 1982; The Virginal Book, C, pf, 1988; 4 Cavalier Settings (R. Herrick, T. Carew), T, gui, 1991; Mehr ‘Du’ (Stramm), Mez, va, pf, 1991; Quatrains, S, 2 cl, 1993; No Longer Very Clear, S, fl, cl, vn, vc, 1994

works with tape

Composition for Synthesizer, 4-track tape, 1961; Vision and Prayer (D. Thomas), S, 4-track tape, 1961; Ensembles for Synthesizer, 4-track tape, 1962–4; Philomel (Hollander), S, 4-track tape, 1964; Correspondences, str orch, tape, 1967; Occasional Variations, 4-track tape, 1971; Concerti, vn, small orch, tape, 1974–6; Phonemena, S, tape, 1975; Reflections, pf, tape, 1975; Images, sax, tape, 1979

recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publishers: Associated, Boelke-Bomart, Peters

WRITINGS

for fuller list see Mead (1994)

The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System (unpubd paper, 1946; diss., Princeton U., 1992)

‘The String Quartets of Bartók’,MQ, xxxv (1949), 377–85

‘Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 53–61

‘Who Cares if You Listen?’, High Fidelity, viii/2 (1958), 38–40; repr. in The American Composer Speaks, ed. G. Chase (Baton Rouge, LA, 1966), 234–44; repr. in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. E. Schwartz and B. Childs (New York, 1967), 243–50

‘Electronic Music: the Revolution in Sound’, Columbia University Magazine (1960), spr., 4–8; rev. as ‘The Revolution in Sound: Electronic Music’, Music Journal, xviii/7 (1965), 34–7

‘Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 246–59; repr. in Problems of Modern Music, ed. P.H. Lang (New York, 1960), 108–21

‘Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music’, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, 398–403; repr. in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 3–9

‘Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant’, JMT, v (1961), 72–94; repr. in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 129–47

‘Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium’, PNM, i/1 (1962), 49–79; repr. in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 148–79

‘Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky’, PNM, ii/2 (1963–4), 35–55; repr. in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (Princeton, NJ, 1968, 2/1972/R), 165–85

‘An Introduction to the RCA Synthesizer’, JMT, viii (1964), 251–65

‘The Synthesis, Perception and Specification of Musical Time’, JIFMC, xvi (1964), 92–5

‘The Use of Computers in Musicological Research’, PNM, iii/2 (1964–5), 74–83

‘The Structure and Functions of Music Theory I’, College Music Symposium, v (1965), 49–60; repr. in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 10–21

‘Edgard Varèse: a Few Observations of his Music’, PNM, iv/2 (1965–6), 14–22; repr. in Perspectives on American Composers, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1971), 40–48

‘Three Essays on Schoenberg’, Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (Princeton, NJ,1968, 2/1972/R), 47–60

‘Relata I’, The Orchestral Composer's Point of View, ed. R.S. Hines (Norman, OK, 1970), 11–38; repr. as ‘On Relata I’, PNM, ix/1 (1970–71), 1–22

‘Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History’, Perspectives in Musicology, ed. B.S. Brook, E.O.D. Downes and S.J. Van Solkema (New York,1972), 151–84

‘Since Schoenberg’, PNM, xii/1–2 (1973–4), 3–28

‘Responses: a First Approximation’,PNM, xiv/2 (1975–6), 3–23

‘The Next Thirty Years’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xxxi/4 (1981), 51–66

Words about Music, ed. S. Dembski and J.N. Straus (Madison, WI, 1987)

‘Stravinsky's Verticals and (Schoenberg's) Diagonals: a Twist of Fate’, Stravinsky Retrospectives, ed. E. Haimo and P. Johnson (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 15–35

‘On Having Been and Still Being an American Composer’, PNM, xxvii/1 (1989), 106–12

with others: ‘Brave New Worlds: Leading Composers Offer their Anniversary Predications and Speculations’, MT, cxxxv (1994), 330–37

Johann(es) Bach: see also under Hans Bach above.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VintonD (B. Boretz)

‘Babbitt, Milton’, CBY 1962

G. Perle: Serial Composition and Atonality (Berkeley, CA, 1962, 6/1991)

R. French: ‘Current Chronicle: New York’, MQ, l (1964), 382–8 [on Philomel]

P. Westergaard: ‘Some Problems Raised by the Rhythmic Procedures in Milton Babbitt’s Composition for Twelve Instruments’, PNM, iv/1 (1965), 109–18

E. Barkin: ‘A Simple Approach to Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations”’, MR, xxviii (1967), 316–22

J. Hollander: ‘Notes on the Text of Philomel’, PNM, vi/1 (1967), 134–41

R. Kostelanetz: ‘The Two Extremes of Avant-Garde Music’, New York Times Magazine (15 Jan 1967)

E. Salzman: ‘Babbitt and Serialism’, Twentieth-Century Music: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967, 3/1988), 154–5, 158

‘An Interview with Milton Babbitt’, Music Educators Journal, lv/3 (1968–9), 56 only

S. Arnold and G. Hair: ‘Champion of Serialism’, Music and Musicians, xvii/10 (1969), 46–7

H.W. Hitchcock: ‘Systematic Serial Composition’, Music in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, 3/1988), 252–9

P. Lieberson, E. Lundborg and J. Peel: ‘Conversation with Milton Babbitt’, Contemporary Music Newsletter, viii (1974), no.1, pp.2–3; no.2, pp.2–3; no.3, pp.2–4

J. Peel: ‘Milton Babbitt: String Quartet no.3’, Contemporary Music Newsletter, viii/1 (1974), 1–2

PNM, xiv/2–xv/1 (1976) [double issue, 3–23]

B. Benward: ‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime’, Music in Theory and Practice, ii (Dubuque, IA, 1977, 2/1981), 483–96

R. Gauldin: ‘A Pedagogical Introduction to Set Theory’, Theory and Practice, iii/2 (1978), 3–14

H. Wilcox and P. Escot: ‘A Musical Set Theory’, Theory and Practice, iv/2 (1979), 17–37

M. Capalbo: ‘Charts’, PNM, xix/1–2 (1981–2), 310–31

C. Gagne and T. Caras: ‘Milton Babbitt’, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1982), 35–52

A. Mead: ‘Detail and the Array in Milton Babbitt’s My Complements to Roger’, Music Theory Spectrum, v (1983), 89–109

J. Rockwell: ‘The Northeastern Academic Establishment and the Romance of Science’, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, 1983), 25–36

A. Mead: ‘Recent Developments in the Music of Milton Babbitt’, MQ, lxx (1984), 310–31

P. Lieberson: Milton Babbitt's ‘Post-Partitions’ (diss., Brandeis U., 1985)

P. Swartz: ‘Milton Babbitt on Milton Babbitt (Interview with the Composer)’, American Music, iii/4 (1985), 467–73

S. Blaustein and M.Brody: ‘Criteria for Grouping in Milton Babbitt's Minute Waltz (or) 3/4 ± 1/8’, PNM, xxiv/2 (1986), 30–79

W. Lake: ‘The Architecture of a Superarray Composition: Milton Babbitt's String Quartet no.5’, PNM, xxiv/2 (1986), 88–111

J.N. Straus: ‘Listening to Babbitt’, PNM, xxiv/2 (1986), 10–24

R. Taub: ‘An Appreciation of Milton Babbitt's Piano Music’, PNM, xxiv/2 (1986), 26–9

A. Mead: ‘About About Time's Time: a Survey of Milton Babbitt's Recent Rhythmic Practice’, PNM, xxv/1–2 (1987), 182–235

J. Peel and C. Cramer: ‘Correspondences and Associations in Milton Babbitt's Reflections’, PNM, xxvi/1 (1988), 144–207

J. Dubiel: ‘Three Essays on Milton Babbitt’, PNM, xxviii/2 (1990), 216–61; PNM, xxix/1 (1991), 90–123; PNM, xxx/1 (1992), 82–131

A. Mead: An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt (Princeton, NJ, 1994) [incl. further bibliography]

M. Brody: ‘“Music for the Masses”: Milton Babbitt's Cold War Music Theory’, MQ, lxxvii/2 (1993), 161–92

D. Lewin: ‘Generalized Interval Systems for Babbitt's Lists and for Schoenberg's String Trio’, Music Theory Spectrum, xvii/1 (1995), 81–118

Milton Babbitt, videotaped interview, Brandeis University Archive of Electro-Acoustic Music (1997)

Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer, documentary film, dir. R. Hilferty (1998)

Babcock, Alpheus

(b Dorchester, MA, 11 Sept 1785; d Boston, 3 April 1842). American piano maker. He began his career as an apprentice to Benjamin Crehore, as did his brother Lewis (b 13 Feb 1779; d Milton, MA, 14 Jan 1814); the brothers had their own firm from 1809 to 1811. Alpheus Babcock worked for, supplied pianos for, or was a partner in the following firms: Babcock, Appleton & Babcock (Boston, 1811–14); Hayts, Babcock & Appleton (Boston, 1814–15); J.A. Dickson (Boston); Christopher Hall (Norfolk, Virginia); John, Ruth and G.D. Mackay(Boston, 1822–9); J.G. Klemm (Philadelphia, 1830–32); William Swift (Philadelphia, 1832–7); and Chickering (Boston, 1837–42). His most significant contribution to the evolution of the piano was his invention of a one-piece cast-iron frame including hitch-pin plate, for which he received a patent on 17 December 1825. This invention is regarded as the basis for subsequent piano frame development. His patents for ‘cross-stringing’ (24 May 1830), improved action (31 December 1833), and improvement in the jack or ‘grasshopper’ (31 October 1839) were not of lasting importance. Many historians erroneously credit Babcock with having invented or advocated the overstrung scale. This conclusion undoubtedly results from the equation of overstringing with cross-stringing. Babcock's ‘cross-stringing’ patent concerns itself with unison double-strung piano strings (formed from a single wire which crosses over itself when looped over either hitch-pin or hook), not with bass strings running diagonally above the others. Babcock's instruments were acclaimed for their superb craftsmanship, and all known examples are of the square variety, patterned after English pianos of the period with a range of either five and a half or six octaves (F' to c'''' or F' to f''''). Recent research has shown that stamped numerals on his pianos from the 1820s are probably cumulative serial numbers. Representative instruments are at the Smithsonian Institution (see Pianoforte, fig.27), Yale University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Spillane: History of the American Pianoforte (New York, 1890/R1969, with a new introduction by Rita Benton)

C.M. Ayars: Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston, 1640 to 1936 (New York, 1937/R)

H.E. Johnson: Musical Interludes in Boston, 1795–1830 (New York, 1943/R)

K.G. Grafing: Alpheus Babcock, American Pianoforte Maker (1785–1842): his Life, Instruments, and Patents (DMA diss., U. of Missouri, Kansas City, 1972)

K.G. Grafing: ‘Alpheus Babcock's Cast-Iron Piano Frames’, GSJ, xxvii (1974), 118–24

KEITH G. GRAFING/DARCY KURONEN

Babell [Babel], William

(b ?London, c1690; d Islington, London, 23 Sept 1723). English harpsichordist, organist, violinist, composer and arranger. He received his early musical instruction from his father, Charles Babel, a bassoonist in the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra until he was 80, and later from Pepusch and possibly Handel (according to Mattheson, in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 1739, but denied by Hawkins). Babell led an active professional life in London. As a violinist he was said to have played in the private band of George I, while as a harpsichordist, from about 1711, his name frequently appears in London concert notices, usually in conjunction with those of Corbett, Paisible and (later) Dubourg. He was also associated with Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. From November 1718 until his death he was organist of All Hallows Bread Street and was succeeded there by John Stanley. Babell was buried at All Hallows.

He acquired an international reputation as a harpsichordist largely through his virtuoso arrangements of fashionable operatic arias and overtures, especially those of Handel. His keyboard style was undoubtedly influenced by his close acquaintance with Handel's playing; it has been proposed that one of the manuscript settings of ‘Vo' far guerra’ (GB-Lbl) is Babell's response to a reworking and development of the material by Handel himself (Pont), but this hypothesis has found no support. These arrangements by Babell, although appearing exceptional, nevertheless give an intriguing insight into early 18th-century practices of keyboard extemporization and ornamentation. Burney commented that Babell:

acquired great celebrity by wire-drawing the favourite songs of the opera of Rinaldo, and others of the same period, into showy and brilliant lessons, which by mere rapidity of finger in playing single sounds, without the assistance of taste, expression, harmony or modulation, enabled the performer to astonish ignorance, and acquire the reputation of a great player at a small expence … Mr Babel … at once gratifies idleness and vanity.

Hawkins, on the other hand, considered that Babell deserved his success; he remarked that Babell's arrangement of favourite arias from Handel's Rinaldo ‘succeeded so well … as to make from it a book of lessons which few could play but himself, and which has long been deservedly celebrated’. Babell's reputation reached France, the Netherlands and Germany, where some of his works were published; Mattheson reported that he was said to have surpassed even Handel as an organist.

The slow movements of Babell's own chamber sonatas, published posthumously, and ‘With proper Graces adapted to each Adagio by ye Author’, illustrate his approach to non-keyboard-designated ornamentation (ex.1), and offer useful comparative insights. In his preface to the original edition, Walsh described Babell as his ‘late lov'd friend’ and remarked that ‘When the World is so unfortunate [as] to lose and esteem'd Author, the only Consolation we have, is the enjoyment of his Works’. He asked owners of Babell's manuscripts to present them for publication to perpetuate ‘that Beautifull and lasting Monument which his genius rais'd to him in his works’. Tilmouth (in the introduction to his edition of the sonatas in G minor and F minor, London, 1963) wrote that ‘many of the sonatas seem best suited to the oboe, an instrument that at the time was played expertly only by a handful of professionals’, and suggested that this would have prompted Walsh to prescribe other suitable instruments on the title-pages.

Babell's Concertos in 7 Parts for violins and small flute, or ‘sixth’ flute (a soprano recorder in D), were also published posthumously (c1726); four are for one sixth flute, one for two sixth flutes and one for two trebles. The string parts exclude viola, but require a solo violin. Although Handelian influence is apparent in these works, Italian inspiration is stronger, particularly that of Vivaldi, both with regard to style and execution. The title-page records that the concertos were ‘performed at the theatre with great applause’, and several were probably known for a decade or so before they were eventually published. At least one of them was written by December 1714, when the sale catalogue of Thomas Britton's collection included ‘12 Concertos by Dr Pepusch, young Mr Babel and Vivaldi’.

WORKS

printed; including arrangements; published in London unless otherwise stated

The 3rd Book of the Ladys Entertainment, or Banquet of Musick, hpd/spinet (1709) [arrs. of N.F. Haym (after A. Scarlatti): Pyrrhus and Demetrius (op); Clotilda (pasticcio)]

Marianna's charms wound my heart: a New Song for the Spinnet (c1710)

The 4th Book of the Ladys Entertainment, hpd/spinet (1716) [arrs. of F. Mancini: Hydaspe fedele (op); Almahide (pasticcio)]

Suits of the Most Celebrated Lessons, hpd/spinet (1717) [incl. arrs. of arias in G.F. Handel: Il pastor fido, Rinaldo, Teseo (all ops); G. Bononcini: Etearco (op); Almahide, Antioco, Creso (all pasticcios); arr. in 4 sets, each with prelude by Babell, last set incl. 2 arias by Babell with variations]; as Suits of Harpsichord and Spinnet Lessons (c1718); partly repr. as Pièces de clavecin de Mr Händel, op.8 (Paris, c1745)

The Harpsichord Master Improved … with a Choice Collection of Newest and Most Air'y Lessons (1718), incl. 2 items from Suits of the Most Celebrated Lessons

Rigadoon, a (melody only), 6 Dances Composed By Mr. Kellom Tomlinson (1720)

Trios de diefferents autheurs choises & mis en ordre par Mr Babel, livre 1e [2e] (Amsterdam, c1720), probably all arrs.

Would you I the thing discover (L. Theobald), song, in 'Tis well if it takes (play) (c1720)

XII Solos … with Proper Graces Adapted to Each Adagio, bk 1, vn/ob, hpd (c1725)

XII Solos … with Proper Graces Adapted to Each Adagio, bk 2, vn/ob/fl, hpd (c1725)

Babell's [6] Concertos in 7 Parts, vns, 1/2 fl, op.3 (c1726)

The Milk Maid, song (c1730)

The Musical Pocket Book Containing an Extraordinary Collection of the Newest & Best Lessons of English & Italian Aires … Also Some of the Most Celebrated Song Tunes with their Symphonys taken out of the Choicest Operas (c1735), probably incl. reprs. of earlier pieces/arrs.

MSS; including arrangements; all for keyboard solo

5 preludes, G, e, a, d, G, minuet, G, 1714–17, GB-BENcoke*

Lesson (also as Air), E, BENcoke

2 pieces, G, 1 c1714, BENcoke, Lbl*, probably by Babell

Prelude, D, c1714, Lbl*, probably by Babell

Arrs. of arias in Handel: Teseo (op); Clotilda (pasticcio); ov. in Handel: Rinaldo (op); A. Corelli: Sonata, op.5 no.9; Handel: Allegro, d, hwv495b, c1714, Lbl*, probably by Babell

4 versions of the arr. of the aria Vo' far guerra in Handel: Rinaldo (pubd version in Suits, 1717), Ge, Lbl* (c1714), WCr, US-NYp

Arrs. of arias in G.F. Handel: Il pastor fido (op); G. Bononcini: Il trionfo di Camilla (op); Antioco, Arminio, Clotilda, Ernelinda, Thomyris (all pasticcios), 1714-17, GB-BENcoke*

Lost: music for St Cecilia's Day, c1718; conc., ? formerly D-Hs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

HawkinsH

S. Sadie: British Chamber Music, 1720–1790 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1958), 161–2

M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces, 1660–1719’, RMARC, i (1961), 1–107

A.J.B. Hutchings: The Baroque Concerto (London, 1961, 3/1973)

F. Palmer: ‘William Babell's Twenty-Four Oboe Sonatas’ Double Reed, iv/2 (1981), 23 only

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983) [incl. summary of Babell's will]

D. Lasocki: Professional Recorder Players in England 1540–1740 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1983)

B. Gustafson: ‘The Legacy in Instrumental Music of Charles Babel, Prolific Transcriber of Lully's Music’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg 1987, 495–516

J. Harley: British Harpsichord Music i: Sources (Aldershot, 1992); ii: History (Aldershot, 1994)

J.M. Thomson, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder (Cambridge, 1995)

G. Pont: ‘An Early 18th-Century Manuscript of Harpsichord Music: William Babell and Handel's Vo' far guerra’, British Library Journal, xxi (1996), 176–83

GERALD GIFFORD (with TERENCE BEST)

Babin, Victor

(b Moscow, 30 Nov/13 Dec 1908; d Cleveland, OH, 1 March 1972). American pianist and composer of Russian birth. He studied at Riga, in 1928 moving to Berlin for composition with Franz Schreker and the piano with Schnabel at the Hochschule für Musik. In 1933 he married another of Schnabel’s pupils, Vitya (Victoria) Vronsky (1909–92), and his career as a player thereafter was almost exclusively that of a duo-pianist with his wife. Vronsky and Babin quickly established themselves in Europe, then moved to the USA in 1937. Babin taught at the Aspen Music School (where he was director, 1951–4, and member of the Festival Quartet along with Szymon Goldberg, William Primrose and Nikolay Graudan), at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where he was director from 1961 until his death), and at Case Western Reserve University, also in Cleveland. His compositions, in a conservative, post-Romantic language, include two concertos for two pianos and orchestra, other compositions for one and two pianos, chamber music, and many songs, including a cycle, Beloved Stranger, on texts by Witter Bynner.

MICHAEL STEINBERG/R

Babitz, Sol

(b Brooklyn, NY, 11 Oct 1911; d Los Angeles, 18 Feb 1982). American musicologist and violinist. He was largely self-taught after leaving high school. His violin teachers included Carl Flesch and Marcel Chailley; his interest in performing practice was aroused by the writings of Arnold Dolmetsch and encouraged by Igor Stravinsky, whose string parts Babitz edited for many years. From 1933 to 1937 he was a violinist with the Los Angeles PO, then, until 1952, he played with Hollywood studio orchestras. From 1941 to 1962 he was an editor for International Musician. In 1948 he was a co-founder of the Early Music Laboratory, an organization which promotes historical accuracy in performance through the publication of bulletins and demonstration tape recordings. Babitz was concerned with a number of aspects of performance which he believed contribute to an accurate 17th- and 18th-century style. These aspects include clear articulation, use of metric accents, rhythmic freedom within the beat and a lighter tone. He also worked for the modernization of violin fingering to facilitate the performance of works by such contemporary composers as Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

WRITINGS

Dance Writing: Preliminary Outline of a Practical System of Movement Notation (Los Angeles, 1939)

‘Stravinsky's Symphony in C (1940)’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 20–25

Principles of Extensions in Violin Fingering (Philadelphia, 1947, enlarged 2/1974 as Violin Fingering)

‘A Problem of Rhythm in Baroque Music’, MQ, xxxviii (1952), 533–65

The Violin: Views and Reviews (Urbana, IL, 1955, 3/1980)

‘Differences between 18th-Century and Modern Violin Bowing’, The Score, no.19 (1957), 34–40

ed. and trans.: G. Tartini: Treatise on the Ornaments of Music (New York, 1959; practical edn, 1970)

‘On Using J.S. Bach's Keyboard Fingerings’, ML, xliii (1962), 123–8

‘Identifying the Renaissance, Baroque and Transition Violins’, The Strad, lxxvi (1965–6), 9–13

‘Notes Inégales: a Communication’, JAMS, xx (1967), 473–6

‘Modern Errors in Mozart Performance’, MJb 1967, 62–5

‘Concerning the Length of Time that Every Note must be Held’, MR, xxviii (1967), 21–37

‘On Using Early Keyboard Fingering’, The Diapason, lx (1968–9), no.3, pp.15–28; no.4, pp.21–6; no.5, pp.21–4; enlarged, pubd separately, Los Angeles, 1969

The Great Baroque Hoax: a Guide to Baroque Performance for Musicians and Connoisseurs (Los Angeles, 1970, 3/1972)

Commentary on EML Tape-Recording 2 (Los Angeles, 1971)

with G. Pont: Vocal De-Wagnerization and Other Matters (Los Angeles, 1973)

Rhythmic Freedom: a Historical Table in the Light of Wind-Instrument Tonguing (Los Angeles, 1975)

Note-Separation in Musical Performance, and Other Matters (Los Angeles, 1976)

How to Restore the Viols and Violins of the Renaissance and Baroque Eras (Los Angeles, 1977)

PAULA MORGAN

Babou, Thomas

(b Liège, 12 Feb 1656; d Liège, c1740). French organist and composer. He was organist of the collegiate church of St Jean l'Evangéliste in Liège at least from 1687 to 1704 (the registers preceding and following these dates are missing); from 1703 he was assisted by a young organist, Jean Buston (d 1731). The Babou recorded as organist in the accounts from 1726 to 1767 is his son Jean-François-Pascal (b Liège, 10 April 1700; d Liège, 13 May 1767), who was a notary from 1726 and secretary to the chapter of St Jean from 1742; he was probably the copyist of a Livre d'orgue at the Liège Conservatory containing several pieces attributed to ‘Mr. Babou’, dated 1709 and 1710, which must be by his father. The pieces (ed. P. Froidebise, Schola Cantorum, Paris, 1959) are in a lively and brilliant italianate manner with little counterpoint, and show the introduction of a secular style into church music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AudaM

G. Hansotte: ‘Le personnel musical de la collégiale Saint-Jean au XVIIIe siècle’, Leodium, xxxvi/7–12 (1949), 27–9

J. Quitin: ‘Jean Buston et les Babou, organistes de Saint-Jean l'Evangéliste, à Liège’, Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, no.2 (1973)

J. Quitin: Les musiciens de Saint-Jean l'Evangéliste à Liège de Johannes Ciconia à Monsieur Babou (Liège, 1982)

JOSÉ QUITIN

Babylonia.

See Mesopotamia.

Bacarisse (Chinoria), Salvador

(b Madrid, 12 Sept 1898; d Paris, 5 Aug 1963). Spanish composer. Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he lived in Madrid where he studied law and philosophy at the university, and music at the Real Conservatorio de Música; his teachers included Manuel Fernández Alberdi (piano) and Conrado del Campo (composition), among others. He was a leading member of the Grupo de los Ocho, whose efforts to combat musical conservatism coincided with the period in which the Second Republic flourished (1931–6). Between 1931 and 1934 he acted as music critic for the republican daily papers Crisol and Luz. As artistic director of Unión Radio, until the Madrid broadcasting station was closed in 1936, he promoted the performance of contemporary Spanish music both at home and abroad. He also served as a member of the Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos (founded in 1931) and as deputy chair of the Consejo Central de Música (after 1937), which founded the National Orchestra in 1938. After being appointed to direct the Gran Teatro del Liceo, Barcelona, for the 1938–9 season, he went into exile in Paris (February 1939), escaping reprisals at the end of the Civil War for his republican opinions and his signature on an anti-fascist manifesto published in 1936. From 1945 until his death he worked at RTF as an editor of Spanish-language programmes. His honours include three National Music Prizes (1923, 1931, 1934), RTF's chamber opera prize (1958) and the Jean Vigo Prize (1958).

Bacarisse's works composed in Spain can be assigned to two distinct style periods. The first (1919–23) is notable for its impressionistic, sound-oriented and non-functional compositional technique (Dos nocturnos, 1919; La nave de Ulises, 1922–3; Heraldos, 1923). The second, introduced by Ofrenda a Debussy (1926–7), is marked by neo-classical techniques; a transformation of impressionistic methods can be observed in Tres marchas burlescas (1928), La tragedia de doña Ajada (1929) and Concertino (1929), which resulted in a simplification of the complex harmonic structures characteristic of earlier works. A tendency towards musical parody created by mechanization and deformation (a prominent feature of the music of the Generación de la República to which Grupo de los Ocho belongs) can be perceived in these transitional compositions. Gradually he developed a polyphonic style common to later compositions such as Tres movimientos concertantes (1934), in which he used serial techniques for the first time.

Bacarisse's compositional style remained largely unchanged in exile, although a formalization of techniques can be traced back to the moderate neo-classicism of the Música sinfónica (1931). Two tendencies can be distinguished: a ‘humane’ nature, expressed in the adoption of neo-romanticism (Concertino, 1952; Concierto romántico, 1954–5) and folk elements (Fantasía andaluza, 1948, rev. 1959); and a simplified musical language, ‘dehumanized’ by an extreme use of mechanical methods (17 variaciones sobre cinco notas, 1962). At the same time, an extremely complex style, originating in late neo-classicism and in his own early impressionistic works, emerged in his later operas and songs.

WORKS

(selective list)

for fuller list see Heine (1990)

Dramatic: La tragedia de doña Ajada (M. Abril), 1929, Madrid, 1929; Corrida de feria (ballet, M. Bacarisse), 1930, Barcelona, 1938, orch suite, 1930; Charlot (op, 3, R. Gómez de la Serna), 1932–3; El estudiante de Salamanca (op, 1, E. Enderiz), 1944, radio broadcast, Monte Carlo, 1956; La fausse tante, ou L'amour à Salamanque (ballet, S. Bacarisse), 1949; La sangre de Antígona (op, 3, J. Bergamín, after Sophocles), 1955; Font-aux-cabres (op, 3, J. Camp and J. Cassou, after L. de Vega), 1956, radio broadcast, Paris, 1962; Le trésor de Boabdil (chbr op, 1, A. Camp and F. Puig-Espert), 1958, radio broadcast, Paris, 1958; El retablo de la libertad de Melisendra (incid music, J. Palau, after M. de Cervantes), 1960, Paris, 1960; film scores

Orch: Heraldos, 1923; 3 marchas burlescas, 1928; Concertino, 1929; Música sinfónica, 1931; Pf Conc. no.1, C, 1933, rev. 1945; Impromptu sobre el nombre ARBOS, 1934; 3 movimientos concertantes, str trio, orch, 1934; Balada, pf, orch, 1935; Vc Conc., a, 1935; Fantasía, D, vn, orch, 1937; Pf Conc. no.2, G, 1940; Fantasía andaluza, hp, orch, 1948, rev. 1959; Concertino, a, gui, orch, 1952; Pf Conc. no.3, B, 1952; Pf Conc. no.4, D, 1953; Concertino, pf/hp, orch, 1954; Concierto romántico, G, 2 pf, orch, 1954–5; Hp Conc., D, 1958; Fantaisie concertante, 2 pf, orch, 1960; Capriccio Concertante, 2 hp, orch, 1961; Clvd Conc., 1961; see also dramatic [La tragedia de doña Ajada, 1929; Corrida de feria, 1930]

Vocal: 2 nocturnos (V. Espinós), T, orch, 1919; La nave de Ulises, SA, orch, 1922–3; Ofrenda a Debussy (F. Villaespesa, J. Ramón Jiménez), 1v, pf, 1926–7; Cantata sinfónica, SATB, orch, 1941; El caballero de Olmedo (de Vega), Bar, SMezATBarB, 1949; Romance de la infanta de Francia, S, T, SATB, 1949; Cantata por la paz y la alegría de los pueblos (R. Alberti), solo vv, SATB, orch, 1950; Mimi Pinson (A. de Muset), SATB, 1950; Amor, no me dexes (J. Alvarez Gato), SATB/(4 S, 2 Mez, 2 A), 1951; Ojos claros, serenos (G. de Cetina), SATB, 1951; Cantata para celebrar el año nuevo (A. Sánchez Rebollo), S, Mez, Bar, orch, 1953; many songs

Chbr and solo inst: Danza de las brujas, vn, pf, 1929; Marcha fúnebre, vn, pf, 1929; Str Qt no.1, 1930; Str Qt no.2, 1932; Berceuse, vn, pf, 1936; Str Qt no.3, 1936; Adagio, vn/vc, pf, 1950; Petite suite, gui, 1950; Romanza, gui, 1952; Balada, gui, 1953; Partita, hp, 1953; Suite impromptu, 4 trbn, 1954; Introducción variaciones y coda, vn/vc, pf, 1956; Para dormir a Estela, hp, 1957; Triptique, vn, vc, hp, 1957; Sonatina, accdn, 1958; Petite suite, gui, 1960; Fantaisie en duo, fl, hp, 1961; Chant de l'orseau-qui-n'existe-pas, 2 fl, 1962; Toccata, vc, pf, 1962

Pf: Heraldos, 1923; Danza de las brujas, 1929; Toccata, 1929; 7 variaciones sobre un tema de las canciones del marqués de Santillana, 1935; Berceuse, 1936; 24 preludios, 1941; Pasodoble, 1943; Preludio, fugueta y rondó, 1950; Tema y variaciones, 1951; Carnaval parisien, 1958; Feuille d'album, 1960; Hommage funèbre, 1960; 17 variaciones sobre cinco notas, 1962

MSS in Fundación Juan March, Madrid

Principal publishers: Consejo Central de Música, Unión Musical Franco-Espagnole, Unión Musical Española, Ediciones Armonices, Schott

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Casal Chapí: ‘Salvador Bacarisse’, Música, no.2 (1938), 27–56

C. Heine: Catálogo de obras de Salvador Bacarisse (Madrid, 1990)

C. Heine: Salvador Bacarisse (1898–1963): Die Kriterien seines Stils während der Schaffenszeit in Spanien (bis 1939) (Frankfurt, 1993)

C. Heine: ‘Salvador Bacarisse: su obra de 1926 a 1930: del impresionismo al neoclasicismo’, Nassarre: revista aragonesa de musicología, xiv (1998), 119–71

C. Heine: ‘Salvador Bacarisse (1898–1963) en el centenario de su nacimiento’, Cuadernos de música iberoamericana, v (1998), 34–75

CHRISTIANE HEINE

Baccaloni, Salvatore

(b Rome, 14 April 1900; d New York, 31 Dec 1969). Italian bass. He studied with Giuseppe Kaschmann and made his début at the Teatro Adriano, Rome, in 1922 as Dr Bartolo. In 1926 he was engaged at La Scala, where he sang regularly until 1940, first in serious roles and then, on Toscanini’s advice, specializing in roles like Dulcamara, the two Bartolos and the buffo roles in Wolf-Ferrari’s operas. During this period he contributed significantly to several complete opera recordings by the La Scala company. He appeared at Covent Garden (1928–9) and at Glyndebourne (1936–9), where his Leporello, Dr Bartolo and especially Don Pasquale set a standard of excellence. He made his North American début in Chicago in 1930 as Melitone and sang at the Teatro Colón (1931–41, 1947). In 1940 he joined the Metropolitan, and sang there regularly until 1962, giving 297 performances, mostly in the Italian buffo repertory. He sang Falstaff at San Francisco (1944) and made numerous tours of the USA. Portly in build and good-humoured, Baccaloni had a communicative gift for comedy and was noted for his musicianship; in his early years he displayed a rare vocal quality in his buffo roles. (GV, R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

FRANCIS D. PERKINS/ALAN BLYTH

Baccelli, Matteo Pantaleone [Papia Leone]

(b Lucca, 1690; d Lucca, c1766). Italian composer. He was a priest, and although he was probably maestro di musica at the Seminary of S Giovanni e Reparata in Lucca by 1712, the first certain notice of him there is in 1725, when the seminarians participated in some of the most ambitious music in the city. Between 1717 and 1759 the Lucca confraternity of S Cecilia performed Baccelli’s music (for first and second Vespers and Mass, with orchestral accompaniment) on nine different celebrations of the saint’s feast; and each year he directed the Requiem Mass for dead members. He was further honoured by election to the society’s governing committee (together with Giacomo Puccini) in 1754. In 1756 his oratorio La concezione was presented by the Congregazione degli Angeli Custodi, Lucca. In 1758 and 1759 his seminary choir performed as ‘secondo coro’ for music at S Martino and S Frediano, directed by Puccini. The opera La donna girandola has been ascribed to him, but that is unlikely, for it appears from the libretto that its composer was married to one of the singers. Baccelli’s sacred music, to judge from his extant antiphon and psalm for Vespers, the Domine and Dixit, makes great and able use of the stile concertante: brilliant, rapid sections alternate with andante, lyrical writing; choruses alternate with solos; counterpoint with homophony; strings, trumpets and occasionally horns combine with continuo to provide rich four- or six-part accompaniment.

WORKS

Domine ad adiuvandum me, and Dixit Dominus, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 tpt, 2 hn, 2 vn, va, bc, 1753, I-Ls

La concezione (orat), Lucca, 1756, lost

Several vesper settings and masses, all lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

G. Puccini: Libro delle musiche, Libro C (MS, I-Li)

L. Nerici: Storia della musica in Lucca (Lucca, 1879/R)

E. Maggini: Lucca, Biblioteca del Seminario (Milan, 1965)

CAROLYN GIANTURCO

Bacchae.

See Maenads.

Bacchetta

(It.).

A drumstick, or the stick of a Bow or a conductor’s Baton.

Bacchini [Bacchino], Giovanni Maria [Fra Teodoro del Carmine]

(b Mantua; fl 1588–1607). Italian singer, composer and theorist. Canal erroneously gave his first name as Girolamo. He was a Carmelite priest. While at the Mantuan court, he wrote a treatise, De musica, now lost. In 1588 he published a madrigal, Più che Diana, in Alfonso Preti’s L’amoroso caccia (RISM 1588¹⁴), a collection consisting of compositions by Mantuan musicians primarily associated with the church. He also published a book of masses, the Missarum quinque et sex vocum, liber primus (Venice, 1589). In a letter dated 26 November 1594 to the vicar-general of the Carmelite order, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga requested that Bacchini, a ‘musico castrato’, be exempt from wearing his monk’s habit while singing in the court chamber. In 1594 he accompanied the duke to the Reichstag in Regensburg and in the following year, along with Monteverdi, G.B. Marinone, Serafino Terzi and other musicians from the Gonzaga court, took part in the duke’s military expedition to southern Hungary. A Mantuan court secretary, Fortunato Cardi, described musical performances directed by Monteverdi, in which Bacchini took part, on the eve of the Battle of Visegrad. It has been suggested that Bacchini sang the part of Euridice in the first performances of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607). The account books of the Mantuan court mention him in 1595, 1598 and 1605.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

P. Canal: Della musica in Mantova (Venice, 1881/R)

V. Errante: ‘Forse che sì, forse che no’, Archivio storico lombardo, xlii (1915), 31–2

I. Fenlon: ‘Monteverdi’s Mantuan Orfeo: Some New Documentation’, EMc, xii (1984), 163–72

PIERRE M. TAGMANN/IAIN FENLON

Bacchius [Bakcheios Gerōn]

(fl ?4th century ce). Greek writer on music. He was the author of a small musical catechism preserved under the title Introduction to the Art of Music (Eisagōgē technēs mousikēs). The treatise is usually (though not always) followed in the manuscripts by a second distinct treatise but with the same title and author; the second treatise in turn is followed in most (but not all) manuscripts by this epigram:

Of music, Bacchius the Elder described
the tonoi, tropoi, mele and consonances.
Echoing him, Dionysius writes.
The all-powerful Emperor Constantine
he shows to be a wise lover of the works of art.
For one who, of every wise subject of instruction,
has been seen as discoverer and giver,
it is most unseemly to be a stranger to music.

The epigram, however, is never found with the first treatise of Bacchius when it appears alone (the earliest instance of which is the marginal text in a 13th-century hand in I-Vnm gr.app.cl. VI/3: RISM, B/XI, 270), and even in its earliest appearance with the second treatise (Vnm gr.app.cl. VI/10: RISM, B/XI, 273), the epigram is separated from the text by a large space. When it does appear, the epigram is usually followed by the musical hymns attributed to Mesomedes (2nd century ce). Nevertheless, the epigram has commonly been taken to refer to the second treatise, the attribution of which is accordingly modified (even in some of the manuscripts) to Dionysius and dated to the reign of Constantine the Great (c283–337 ce). The epigram could, however, be referring to another emperor of the same name, including the Byzantine Constantine VII Porphyrogennetus (905–59 ce), known for his support of classical scholarship. Although Bacchius's floruit has been assumed to be contemporary with Dionysius, this cannot be demonstrated on any grounds. In the end, the epigram is of no use in dating either treatise.

The first treatise, written as a series of simple questions and answers, presents a mixture of definitions and theories that cannot be assigned exclusively to any one school. The first 88 questions deal with definitions of common terms and concepts in harmonics; questions 89–101 deal with definitions in rhythmics. Some of the answers (11, 13–18, 29–34 and 38–42) make use of musical notation, recognizable from the tables of Alypius. Nothing in the treatise is completely new, but several of the answers, especially in the section on rhythmics, provide useful clarification or confirmation of other sources. The unassuming character and routine content and style of the treatise suggest a date no earlier than the 4th century ce. Parts of the first treatise are also preserved in an untitled anecdoton surviving in seven manuscripts, including one of the 11th century (D-HEu Palat.gr.281: RISM, B/XI, 14).

The second treatise, written in prose, remarks on the inability of the senses (sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing) to make consistent quantitative discriminations, and for this reason musicians must turn to the canon for precise measurements. Most of this appears verbatim, but without attribution, in Bryennius's Harmonics (ii.6). The second treatise concludes with eight theorems demonstrating the proportions for the consonant octave, 5th, 4th, 12th and 15th; the dissonant 11th; the tone; and the impossibility of dividing the tone into two equal parts. In approach, style and content, the second treatise is entirely different from the first, and its attribution to Bacchius in some of the manuscripts is simply due to the inadvertent connection of the end-title of the first treatise with the beginning of the second.

The treatise of Bacchius was used by later writers, including Manuel Bryennius, Franchinus Gaffurius, Giorgio Valla, Francisco de Salinas, Girolamo Mei, Marin Mersenne (who published the first edition in 1623 and a translation in 1627) and others. Meibom included the treatise in his collection of 1652, but Jan's editions presented the first detailed study of the text. The second treatise was first published (under the name of Bacchius) by Bellermann.

WRITINGS

M. Meibom, ed. and trans.: ‘Bacchii senioris introductio artis musicae’, Antiquae musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam, 1652/R), i [separately paginated; with parallel Lat. trans.]

J.F. Bellermann, ed.: ‘Eisagōgē technēs mousikēs Bakcheiou tou gerontos’, Anonymi scriptio de musica (Berlin, 1841), 101–8

A.J.H. Vincent, trans.: ‘Introduction à l'art musical par Bacchius l'ancien’, Notice sur divers manuscrits grecs relatifs à la musique, avec une traduction française et des commentaires (Paris, 1847), 64–72

K. von Jan, ed. and trans.: Die Eisagoge des Bacchius (Strasbourg, 1890–91)

K. von Jan, ed.: ‘Bacchii gerontis isagoge’, Musici scriptores graeci (Leipzig, 1895/R), 283–316

C.E. Ruelle, trans.: Alypius et Gaudence … Bacchius l'Ancien (Paris, 1895)

O. Steinmayer, trans.: ‘Bacchius Geron's Introduction to the Art of Music’, JMT, xxix (1985), 271–98

L. Zanoncelli, ed. and trans.: ‘Bacchio il vecchio: Introduzione all'arte musicale’, La manualistica musicale greca (Milan, 1990), 245–304 [incl. commentary]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.F. Bellermann, ed.: Die Hymnen des Dionysius und Mesomedes (Berlin, 1840)

G. Hermann: ‘De hymnis Dionysii et Mesomedis’, Opuscula, viii, ed. T. Fritzsche (Leipzig, 1877/R), 343–52

J. Solomon: ‘Ekbole and Eklusis in the Musical Treatise of Bacchius’, Symbolae osloenses, lv (1980), 111–26

T.J. Mathiesen: Ancient Greek Music Theory: a Catalogue Raisonné of Manuscripts, RISM, B/XI (1988)

T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 583–93

THOMAS J. MATHIESEN

Bacchius [Bacchus, Bachus, Bachi, Bachy], Johannes de

(d before 29 Jan 1557). Composer, described by Eitner as French. He became an alto in the Viennese Hofkapelle in March 1554. An Adrianus de Bachy, listed as a singer in the boys' choir of the court, may have been his son. Bacchius's works are typical polyphonic compositions of his time. The motets, most of which appeared in the large anthologies of Berg & Neuber, are in the full-voiced imitative style much favoured in Vienna. The two chansons have their roots in the Parisian style of the earlier part of the century, although they, too, have a higher level of imitative writing.

WORKS

Christus surrexit, 4vv, 1564⁵; Considerate dilectissimi, 5vv, 1559¹; Da Pater omnipotens pacem, 5vv, 1564⁴; Domine Deus caeli, 8vv, 1564¹; Domine Deus qui conteris, 8vv, 1564³; Dum transisset Sabbatum, 5vv, 1564⁴; Ecce Maria genuit, 4vv, 1564⁵; Ego flos campi et lilium, 5vv, 1564⁴

Factum est silentium, 5vv, D-Bsb Z 39, Z 74.1; Fuit homo missus a Deo, 6vv, 1564³; Oculi mei semper ad Dominum, 4vv, Sl 30; Si quis diligit me, 8vv, Brieg Gymnasiumsbibliothek 1 (now in PL-WRu), WRu 1, 3, 5, 18; Surge illuminare Jerusalem, 5vv, 1564⁴; Visitabo in virga, 5vv, 1559¹

Quant je voy son ceur estre mien, 6vv, 1553²⁵; Susanna ung jour, 4vv, 1556¹⁸

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

KöchelKHM

MGG1 suppl. (W. Pass)

O. Wessely: Arnold von Bruck: Leben und Umwelt (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Vienna, 1958), 418ff

VICTOR H. MATTFELD

Bacchus.

See Dionysus.

Bacchylides [Bakchylidēs]

(b Iulis [now Tzia], Keos; fl c470 bce). Greek lyric poet. He was a nephew of Simonides and contemporary of Pindar; there are many indications of intense rivalry between the two as composers of victory odes and dithyrambs. Unlike Pindar, Bacchylides had little to say of the power of music; his references are correct but conventional, rendered distinctive only by colourful adjectives. Thus in one of the many victory odes the champion has returned home to the triumphal accompaniment of auloi ‘that delight mortals’ and revel-songs ‘sweetly breathing’ (Edmonds, frag.40.72–3). In another, the sound of the phorminx and ‘clear-ringing’ choruses are alien to war (Edmonds, frag.41.12–15; liguklangēs is one of many Bacchylidean coinages). Two poems begin with references to the barbitos, ‘lyre with many strings’ (Edmonds, frags.70, 71); here the term appears to be used with precision.

WRITINGS

F. Blass, ed.: Bacchylides: Carmina cum fragmentis (Leipzig, 1898, rev. 4/1912 by W. Suess, 5/1934 by B. Snell, 10/1970 by H. Maehler)

R.C. Jebb, ed. and trans.: Bacchylides: The Poems and Fragments (Cambridge, 1905/R)

J.M. Edmonds, ed. and trans.: Lyra graeca, iii (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927, 2/1928/R)

R. Fagles, ed. and trans.: Bacchylides: Complete Poems (New Haven, CT, 1961/R)

D.A. Campbell, ed.: Greek Lyric Poetry (London and New York, 1967, 2/1982)

D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, iv (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), 100–317

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Crusius: ‘Bakchylides, §§2–3’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ii/A (Stuttgart, 1898/R), 2793–801

A. Körte: ‘Bacchylidea’, Hermes, lxiii (1918), 113–47

A. Severyns: Bacchylide: essai biographique (Liège and Paris, 1933)

K. Preisendanz: ‘Bakchylides’, Der kleine Pauly, ed. K. Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, i (Stuttgart, 1964), 810–12

A.P. Burnett: The Art of Bacchylides (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985)

WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN

Bacciccia.

See Ricciotti, carlo.

Baccio Fiorentino.

See Bartolomeo degli Organi.

Baccusi, Ippolito [Baccusii, Hippolyti]

(b Mantua, c1550; d Verona, 1609). Italian composer. Although he was a prolific composer of madrigals and sacred music, the course of his career is not well documented. His earliest position appears to have been that of assistant choir director at S Marco, Venice. That he must have held the post for only a short time can be established from a letter (in I-MAc) dated from Ravenna on 22 April 1570 in which he requested permission to remain another year in Ravenna, since he would be able to complete his degree by the end of a third year of study: he must therefore have left Venice for Ravenna by 1568. On the title-page of his second book of six-part madrigals (1572) he is described as director of music to the ‘illustri signori di Spilimbergo’, a musical society in Verona. The book is dedicated to the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, and in the preface Baccusi indicated that he was employed as maestro di cappella at yet another institution there, the church of S Eufemia. The next document concerning his career occurs in the Prattica di musica seconda parte (Venice, 1622/R1967) of Lodovico Zacconi, which states that he went to Mantua in 1583 to study contrappunto alla mente with him and that he was a maestro di cappella there; Zacconi wrote as if Baccusi had held the post for some time, but the exact date of his appointment is not known. In the preface to his fourth book of masses (1593) Baccusi indicated that he was offered the choir directorship at Verona Cathedral in 1592; he accepted and remained in the post until his death.

Stylistically Baccusi belongs to the Venetian school of composers; he early came under the influence of Willaert, Rore and Andrea Gabrieli. He composed two settings of poetic cycles celebrating the Venetian victory over the Turks at Lepanto (in his second books for five and six voices, both 1572). Other works of particular interest are the settings of Petrarch's 11-stanza canzone Vergine bella (1605) and of one of the cycles in Francesco Bozza's quaternion I diporti della villa in ogni stagione (RISM 1601⁷). Among his contemporaries Baccusi had the reputation of being a fine contrapuntist and a master of improvisation: his works certainly illustrate the first quality. Baccusi was also one of the first composers to acknowledge and recommend the practice of instrumental doubling of vocal parts (see the title-pages of his masses of 1596 and psalms of 1597).

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise noted

masses

[2] Missarum, 5, 6vv, liber I (1570)

[4] Missarum, 5, 6, 8vv, liber II (1585)

Il primo libro delle [5] messe, 4vv (1588)

Missarum, 5, 6vv, liber III (1589)

[4] Missarum, 5, 9vv, liber IV (1593)

Misse tres tum viva voce, tum omni instrumentorum genere cantatu commodissime, 8vv (1596)

other sacred

[25] Motectorum, 5, 6, 8vv, liber I (1579)

Psalmi omnes qui in vesperis a romana ecclesia decantantur cum cantico Beatae Virginis, 4vv, liber II (1594)

Psalmorum qui a santa romana ecclesia, ut plurimum in vesperis decantantur, triplici distinctorum ordine, cum cantico Beatae Virginis, 4vv, liber III (Verona, 1594)

Sacrae cantiones psalmi videlicet et omnia quae ad completorium pertinent, 5vv (1596)

Psalmi omnes qui a sancta romana ecclesia in solemnitatibus ad Vesperas decantari solent, cum 2 Magnificat, tum viva voce, tum omni instrumentorum genere, cantatu commodissimi, 8vv (1597)

Psalmi qui diebus festivis a sancta romana ecclesia in Vesperis decantari solent, 5vv (1602)

Single sacred works in 1583², 1592³, 1596¹

madrigals

Il primo libro de [27] madrigali, 5–8vv (1570)

Il secondo libro de [18] madrigali, con una canzone nella gran vittoria contra i Turchi, 5vv (1572⁹)

Il secondo libro de [18] madrigali, con una canzone nella gran vittoria contra i Turchi, 6vv (1572⁸)

[21] Madrigali … libro III, 6vv (1579)

Il quarto libro de [21] madrigali, 6vv (1587)

Il primo libro de [19] madrigali, 3vv (1594¹⁰)

Le vergini … [11] madrigali, 3vv, libro II (1605¹¹)

Further madrigals, 4–6, 9vv, 1585¹⁶, 1585¹⁹, 1588¹⁴, 1588¹⁸, 1590¹¹, 1591²³, 1592¹¹, 1593³, 1594⁶, 1596¹⁰, 1598⁶, 1601⁷ (ed. in Collana di Musiche Veneziane Inedite o Rare, i, 1962) 1605⁹

1 French Psalm, 1597⁶; 2 German and 9 Latin contrafacta of madrigals, 1600^5a, 1601¹⁸, 1606⁶, 1609¹⁴, 1609¹⁵, 1612¹³, 1619¹⁶, 1624¹⁶, Provincial Archives, Torun, Kat.XIV.13a

4 intabulations, 1584¹⁵; 3 previously pubd, 1587⁶, 1588¹⁹, 1588²⁰

Various works in MS: A-Wgm, D-Bsb, Mbs, Z, I-Bc, PL-WRu, Wu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

F. Chrysander: ‘Lodovico Zacconi als Lehrer des Kunstgesangs’, VMw, x (1894), 531–67

P.M. Tagmann: Archivalische Studien zur Musikpflege am Dom von Mantua (1500–1627) (Berne, 1967)

PATRICIA ANN MYERS/R

Bacewicz, Grażyna

(b Łódź, 5 Feb 1909; d Warsaw, 17 Jan 1969). Polish composer, violinist and pianist. After early instrumental and theory studies in Łódź, she attended the Warsaw Conservatory, where she studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski, the violin with Józef Jarzębski and the piano with Józef Turczyński (she also studied philosophy at Warsaw University). She graduated in composition and the violin in 1932, furthering her studies in Paris in 1932 and 1933 with Boulanger and the violinist André Touret. After a brief period spent teaching in Łódź, she returned to Paris to study with Carl Flesch in 1934. At the request of the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, Bacewicz was principal violinist of the Polish RO (1936–8) and she performed as a soloist in several European countries before returning to Poland two months before World War II. She continued as a concert violinist after the war until the mid-1950s. Her prowess as a pianist should not be ignored: she was, for example, a notable interpreter of her own Second Piano Sonata.

Among her other activities, Bacewicz was an accomplished writer of short stories, novels and autobiographical anecdotes. Among the awards she received for her music were the top prize at the International Chopin Competition for Composers in Warsaw (1949) for her Piano Concerto, first prize at the International Composers’ Competition in Liège (1951) for her String Quartet no.4, first prize in the orchestral section at UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers in Paris (1960) for her Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion and the Gold Medal at the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels (1965) for her Violin Concerto no.7, as well as various State awards from 1949 onwards.

Bacewicz made her most lasting mark on 20th-century music as a composer rather than as a performer or teacher (she taught composition rarely, but notably at the Warsaw Conservatory during the last three years of her life). She had an uncommonly vibrant yet modest personality and was much admired and loved by her fellow Poles during her lifetime.

Her career as a composer may be seen to divide into three broad spans, of which the first (1932–44) is largely preparatory to the second (1945–59), with the third (1960–69) a more distinct entity. The first period shows the development and refinement of Bacewicz’s neo-classical persona. Although only a few of these early works have been published, her music’s salient characteristics of clarity, wit and brevity are already evident in the Wind Quintet, a piece in which she seems to be following Szymanowski’s example in the incorporation of folk elements. Her works from the time of World War II show a greater muscularity and unrelenting activity, with a daring disregard for traditional classical structures, as in the Sonata no.1 for solo violin. The Overture exemplifies Bacewicz’s unerring ability to propel her music towards a final goal.

After the war, Bacewicz’s music became increasingly personal, casting off any remaining Parisian chic and becoming distinctively resilient. Occasionally she indulged in pastiche (the Sonata da camera), but her stronger music is reminiscent of Szymanowski (the Violin Concerto no.3 and, later, the Piano Sonata no.2 and Violin Concerto no.5). These and other outstanding works such as the String Quartet no.3 and the Concerto for String Orchestra have mostly maintained their place in the international repertory. As with many of her contemporaries, she used folk materials (both directly and indirectly) during the period of intense socialist realism (1949–54), in large forms (the Piano Concerto) and in encore pieces for her recitals. Her output during the height of Stalinist cultural dogma is, however, remarkably free of mass songs or other pieces with a ‘message’. The three symphonies are the most grandiose works, though their scoring is at times refreshingly restrained. The chamber music reveals a tougher, more challenging musical idiom, most notably in the fourth and fifth quartets: the former is structurally loose-limbed, while the latter is highly integrated in its motivic design and adventurous for the time in its non-diatonic harmonic language. This innovatory streak in Bacewicz’s musical personality is carried through into the Partita, especially in its intermezzo. By the mid-1950s Bacewicz had already moved far from conventional notions of neo-classicism.

In the late 1950s Bacewicz, like her contemporaries, had to recognize the emergence of a new generation of younger composers and an influx of avant-garde influences from abroad. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she grasped the nettle, even though it was not always with absolute conviction. In some works, such as the String Quartet no.6, there are passages of outright 12-note writing. But she soon settled down to her own brand of chromaticism and dynamic gestures that veer from the routine (Cello Concerto no.2) to the highly imaginative (Pensieri notturni). At times, Bacewicz appears to have experienced some difficulty in putting pen to paper, although in 1965 she composed no fewer than seven large-scale works. The extensive self-borrowings which became evident when discarded works from 1965–7 were published posthumously seem to indicate a degree of uncertainty about the new directions she was taking. Her evident attachment to the Intermezzo from the Partita gave rise to citations from that movement’s opening bars in later works (e.g. the Viola Concerto); such quotations form part of a highly successful patchworking technique that Bacewicz developed during the 1960s. There is even the suggestion in the Viola Concerto that Bacewicz, like some of her younger compatriots, was returning to folk material.

Bacewicz’s position in Polish postwar music is undeniable: hers was an individual and independent voice; she was more innovative than is generally acknowledged and she carried the torch for the many Polish women composers who followed her example. Even though she may have lost her sure-footedness in the mid-1960s, this should not detract from a musical achievement that is being recognized outside Poland as one of the most remarkable of the mid-20th century.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Z chłopa król [The Peasant King] (ballet, A.M. Swinarski, after P. Baryka), 1953–4, Poznań, 1954

Przygoda króla Artura [The Adventure of King Arthur] (comic op for radio, E. Fischer), 1959, Polish Radio, 1959; televised 1960

Esik w Ostendzie [Esik in Ostend] (comic ballet, L. Terpilowski, after T. Boy-Żeleński), 1964, Poznań, 1964

Pożądanie [Desire] (ballet, 2, M. Bibrowski, after P. Picasso: Désir attrapé par la queue), 1968–9, inc.; Warsaw, 1973

Incid music for 7 plays

orchestral

Syms.: Sym., 1933, lost; Sym., 1938, lost; Sym. no.1, 1945; Sym., str, 1946; Sym. no.2, 1951; Sym. no.3, 1952; Sym. no.4, 1953

Vn concs.: no.1, 1937; no.2, 1945; no.3, 1948; no.4, 1951; no.5, 1954; no.6, 1957; no.7, 1965

Other concs.: Conc., str, 1948; Pf Conc., 1949; Vc conc. no.1, 1951; Conc. for Orch, 1962; Vc Conc. no.2, 1963; Conc., 2 pf, 1966; Va Conc., 1968

Other concert works: Sinfonietta, chbr orch, 1929; Suite, str, 1931; 3 karykatury, 1932; Pochód radości [Procession of Joy], 1933; Sinfonietta, str, 1935; Ov., 1943; Introdukcja i kaprys, 1947; Rapsodia polska, vn, orch, 1949; Uwertura polska, 1954; Partita, 1955 [arr. of Partita, vn, pf]; Wariacje, 1957; Music for Str, Tpts and Perc, 1958; Pensieri notturni, chbr orch, 1961; Divertimento, str, 1965; Musica sinfonica, 1965; Contradizione, chbr orch, 1966; In una parte, 1967

Pieces for radio: Mazur [Mazurka], 1944; Pod strzechą [Under the Thatch], 1945; Suite, str, 1946; Ze starej muzyki [From Old Music], 1946; Polish Dance no.2, 1948; Szkice ludowe [Folk Sketches], 1948; Groteska, 1949; Walc, 1949; Krakowiak, 1950; Serenada, 1950; Suita tańców polskich, 1950; Wiwat, cl, str, 1950; Oberek noworoczny, 1952; others

chamber

Str qts: no.1, 1938; no.2, 1943; no.3, 1947; no.4, 1951; no.5, 1955; no.6, 1960; no.7, 1965

Other works: Wind Qnt, 1932; Trio, ob, vn, vc, 1935; Sonata, ob, pf, 1937; Łatwe utwory [Easy Pieces], cl, pf, 1948; Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1948; Qt, 4 vn, 1949; 2 pf qnts, 1952, 1965; Qt, 4 vc, 1964; Inkrustacje [Incrustations], hn, ens, 1965; Trio, ob, hp, perc, 1965

violin

With pf: Kaprys no.1, 1932; Witraż [Stained Glass], 1932; Andante i allegro, 1934; Pieśń litewska [Lith. Song], 1934; Theme and Variations, 1934; Legenda, 1945; Concertino, 1945; Sonata no.1 ‘da camera’, 1945, 4th movt (Andante sostenuto) arr. vn/vc, org, 1945; Kaprys, 1946; Łatwe utwory [Easy Pieces], 1946; Sonata, no.2, 1946, no.3, 1948; Taniec polski, 1948; Łatwe utwory, 1949; Melodia, 1949; Oberek no.1, 1949; Sonata, no.4, 1949; Taniec antyczny [Antique Dance], 1950; Sonata no.5, 1951; Taniec mazowiecki, 1951; Oberek no.2, 1951; Kołysanka [Lullaby], 1952; Taniec słowiański, 1952; Humoresque, 1953; Partita, 1955

Solo: Sonata, 1929; Sonata no.1, 1941; Kaprys polski, 1949; Kaprys no.2, 1952; Sonata no.2, 1958; 4 kaprysy, 1968

2 vn: Suite, 1943; Łatwe duety [Easy Duets], 1945

keyboard

Pf: Theme with Variations, 1924; Preludium, 1928; Allegro, 1929; Sonata, 1930; Toccata, 1932; 3 pièces caracteristiques, 1932; Sonatina, 1933; Suita dziecięca [Children’s Suite], 1933; Scherzo, 1934; Sonata, 1935; 3 groteski, 1935; 3 preludia, 1941; Krakowiak koncertowy, 1949; Sonata no.1, 1949; Etiuda tercjowa [Study in 3rds], 1952; Sonata no.2, 1953; Sonatina no.2, 1955; 10 etiud koncertowych, 1956; Mały tryptyk [Little Triptych], 1965

Org: Esquisse, 1966

vocal

With orch: De profundis, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1932; 3 Songs (10th-century Arabic, trans. L. Staff), T, orch/pf, 1938; Kantata olimpijska (P. Pindar), chorus, orch, 1948; Kantata na 600-lecie Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego (S. Wyspiański: Akropolis), chorus, orch, 1964

Songs (1v, pf): Róze [Roses] (Arabic, trans. Staff), 1934; Mów do mnie, o miły [Speak to me, Dear] (R. Tagore, trans. J. Kasprowicz), 1936; Oto jest noc [Here is the Night] (K.I. Gałczyński), 1947; Rozstanie [Parting] (Tagore, trans. Kasprowicz), 1949; Smuga cienia [Trail of Shadow] (W. Broniewski), 1949; Usta i pełnia [Lips and Fullness] (Gałczyński), 1949; Boli mnie głowa [My Head Aches] (Bacewicz), 1955; Dzwon i dzwonki [Bells and Little Bells] (A. Mickiewicz), 1955; Nad wodą wielką i czystą [Over the Wide, Clear Water] (Mickiewicz), 1955; Sroczka [Little Magpie] (trad.), 1956

Principal publisher: PWM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (S. Wittig)

A. Malawski: ‘Uwertura Bacewiczówny’, RM, iii/17 (1947), no.17, p.19

J.M. Chomiński: ‘Koncert na orkiestrę smyczkową Grażyny Bacewicz’, Muzyka, vi/5–6 (1955), 20–29; repr. in Studia muzykologiczne, v (1956), 385–401

A. Helman: ‘Problem stylizacji muzyki dawnej w Sonacie da camera Grażyny Bacewicz’, [The problem of early musical idioms in ‘Sonata da camera’], ibid., 367–84

M. Gorczycka: ‘“Pensieri notturni”’, RM, v/21 (1961), 9–10

T.A. Zieliński: ‘Walor szlachetnego rzemiosła (o twórczośca G. Bacewicz)’ [The value of noble craftsmanship (in the work of Bacewicz)], RM, v/8 (1961), 1–2

S. Kisielewski: Grażyna Bacewicz i jej czasy [Bacewicz and her times] (Kraków, 1963)

H. Schiller: ‘Ze studiów nad muzyką Grażyny Bacewicz’, Muzyka, ix/3–4 (1964), 3–15

T. Marek: ‘Grażyna Bacewicz’, Polish Music, iv/1 (1969) 3–8

RM, xiii/7 (1969) [Bacewicz issue]

T.A. Zieliński: ‘Ostatnie utwory Grażyny Bacewicz’ [Bacewicz’s last works], RM, xvi/2 (1972), 3–6

J. Rosen: Grażyna Bacewicz: her Life and Works (Los Angeles, 1984)

A. Thomas: Grażyna Bacewicz: Chamber and Orchestral Music (Los Angeles, 1985)

S.G. Shafer: The Contribution of Grażyna Bacewicz to Polish Music (Lewiston, NY, 1992) [on the songs]

M. Szoka, ed.: Rodzeństwo Bacewiczow [The Bacewicz siblings] (Łódź, 1996)

S. Wittig: ‘Die Kompositionstechnik der letzen Schaffensperiode Grażyna Bacewiczs’, Jeder nach seiner Fasson, ed. U. Liedtke (Saarbrücken, 1997), 65–104

M. Gąsiorowska: Bacewicz (Kraków, 1999)

ADRIAN THOMAS

Bacfarc, Valentin.

See Bakfark, Valentin.

Bach.

German family of musicians. From the 16th century to the 19th the extensive Saxon-Thuringian Bach family produced an unparalleled and almost incalculable number of musicians of every kind, from fiddlers and town musicians to organists, Kantors, court musicians and Kapellmeisters. The outstanding figure among them was Johann Sebastian Bach, but a great many other well-known and distinguished musicians were born into earlier, contemporary and later generations of the family.

In the following pages a list of the musical members of the family, in alphabetical order, with brief biographical notes on those who are not discussed separately, precedes an outline of the family history. §III is then devoted to the most important members of the family, in chronological order. The italic numerals 1–53 given in parentheses after the names correspond to the numbers given to members of the family in the genealogy drawn up by J.S. Bach in 1735, the Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie. The numerals from 54 onwards continue on the same principle. The inadvertent fusion in the Ursprung of two family members, Caspar (b c1580; d 1642–4) and Lips (c1590–1626), into a single unnamed individual under the number 3 has been corrected, but in order to facilitate comparison the 3 is retained for them and their descendants along with the new numbers. The arabic numerals preceding the names refer to their individual entries in §III below. Non-musician members of the family are not listed, but some musicians with the surname Bach who did not belong to the main, Wechmar line are included.

I. List of the musicians

II. Family history

III. Individual members

CHRISTOPH WOLFF (I–II; III, 1–6, 7 (§7–21), 13, work-list, bibliography), WALTER EMERY/CHRISTOPH WOLFF (III, 7 (§1–6)), PETER WOLLNY (III, 8, 10), ULRICH LEISINGER (III, 9, 11, 14), STEPHEN ROE (III, 12)

Bach

I. List of the musicians

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (46) (b Weimar, 8 March 1714; d Hamburg, 14 Dec 1788). Son of Johann Sebastian Bach (24); see §III (9) below.

Caspar Bach (3/a) (b c1580; d ?Arnstadt, Sept 1642–1644). Son of Veit (1). He is mentioned as a Stadtpfeifer in Gotha in 1619 and as a court and town musician in Arnstadt from 1620; on 23 October 1621 he received the sum of 1 gulden to buy a bassoon (‘Dulcian’). As Hausmann (director of the town music) he lived in the so-called Neideckturm (the tower of Schloss Neideck, Arnstadt). In 1633 he left the count's service (as a result of the Thirty Years War the court could no longer afford his salary) and bought a house in the Jacobsgasse. Nothing is known about his subsequent activities.

Caspar Bach (3/54) (b c1605). Son of Caspar (3/a). He was trained as a musician (violinist) at the courts of Bayreuth (1621–3) and Dresden (1623) at the expense of the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt. In 1623 the court paid him 38 gulden for three months' educational and living expenses and for instruments, and on 11 October 1625 he signed a receipt in Arnstadt for the sum of 1 reichsthaler. He is thought to have gone to Italy, and from this point no more is known about him.

Christoph Bach (5) (b Wechmar, 19 April 1613; d Arnstadt, 12 Sept 1661). Son of Johann (2) and grandfather of Johann Sebastian Bach (24). He was in the princely service and a court musician in Weimar, then from 1642 a town musician in Erfurt and from 1654 court and town musician in Arnstadt. A musical entry by him in the album of Georg Friedrich Reimann, Kantor in Saalfeld, survives (BJb 1928, 175).

Ernst Carl Gottfried Bach (73) (b Ohrdruf, 12 Jan 1738; d Ohrdruf, 24 June 1801). Son of Johann Christoph (42). He was Kantor in Wechmar, 1765–72, then Kantor at the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf.

Ernst Christian Bach (74) (b Ohrdruf, 26 Sept 1747; d Wechmar, 29 Sept 1822). Son of Johann Christoph (42). He was Kantor in Wechmar, 1773–1819.

Georg Christoph Bach (10) (b Erfurt, 6 Sept 1642; d Schweinfurt, 27 April 1697). Son of Christoph (5). He was trained in music at Arnstadt , and was evidently academically gifted; he attended the Gymnasium Casimiranum in Coburg (1663–5) and Leipzig University (1665–6). In 1668 he became Kantor and organist in Themar, and from 1688 he was Kantor at St Johannis in Schweinfurt, where his uncles Johann (4) and Heinrich Bach (6) had been organists. A vocal concerto by him survives: Siehe, wie fein und lieblich ist es for two tenors, bass, violin, three gambas and continuo (ed. in EDM, 1st ser., ii (1935) and in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser. A.4 (Stuttgart, c1976)). It was composed on his 47th birthday, evidently for performance with his brothers, the twins Ambrosius (11) and Christoph (12), probably at some family gathering. A Schweinfurt inventory of 1689 (see Wollny, 1997) lists four other vocal works: Gott ist unser Zuversicht, Meinen Jesum lass ich nicht, Wie lieblich sind auf den Bergen and Wohl her, lasset uns wohl leben.

Georg Friedrich Bach (b Tann, 17 March 1793; d Iserlohn, 2 Oct 1860). Not a member of the Wechmar line, he was a son of Johann Michael (see §III (13) below). A flautist, he deserted from Napoleon's army and went to Sweden, where he became music teacher to the crown prince (later Oskar I). On returning to Germany he taught music in Elberfeld and Iserlohn. Several manuscript keyboard compositions and a harmony manual by him survive (D-EIb).

Georg Michael Bach (66) (b Ruhla, 27 Sept 1703; d Halle, 18 Feb 1771). Son of Johann Jacob (3/60). From 1732 he was Kantor at the Ulrichskirche in Halle, adn from 1747 he taught at the Lutheran Gymnasium.

Gottfried Heinrich Bach (48) (b Leipzig, 26 Feb 1724; d Naumburg, bur. 12 Feb 1763). Eldest son of Johann Sebastian (24) and Anna Magdalena Bach. Although he was mentally handicapped, he was evidently a good keyboard player and, according to his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel (46), showed ‘a great genius, which however failed to develop’. From 1750 he lived with his brother-in-law J.C. Altnickol in Naumburg.

Gottlieb Friedrich Bach (68) (b Meiningen, 10 Sept 1714; d Meiningen, 25 Feb 1785). Son of Johann Ludwig (3/64). He was court organist and painter (Kabinettsmaler) in Meiningen.

Hans [Hanns, Johann] Bach (b Andelsbuch, Vorarlberg, c1555; d Nürtingen, 1 Dec 1615). Not a member of the Wechmar line; see §III(1) below.

Hans [Johann(es)] Bach (2) (b c1580; d Wechmar, 26 Dec 1626). Son of Veit (1). In the funeral sermon for his youngest son Heinrich (6) he is described as a ‘musician and carpetmaker’, and he was the earliest member of the family known to have been a professional musician. According to the Ursprung, he trained as a Stadpfeifer in Gotha and later settled in Wechmar, from where he travelled as a musician to various Thuringian towns, including Gotha, Arnstadt, Erfurt, Eisenach, Schmalkalden and Suhl. He married Anna Schmied of Wechmar in about 1602, and after his father's death took over his business and property. In the Wechmar register of deaths he appears as ‘Hanss Bach ein Spielmann’.

Heinrich Bach (3/56) (b Gotha, c1609; d Arnstadt, bur. 27 May 1635). Son of Caspar (3/a). He is mentioned in the deaths register as blind, and is therefore probably the musician educated in Italy and mentioned in the Ursprung as ‘blind Jonas’ because of his adventurous experiences, in allusion to the biblical figure of Jonah.

Heinrich Bach (6) (b Wechmar, 16 Sept 1615; d Arnstadt, 10 July 1692). Son of Hans (2). He was taught music by his father and his eldest brother Johann (4); his first appointment as town musician and organist of St Johannis in Schweinfurt cannot be dated precisely, but was about 1629–34. In 1636 he went to Erfurt (probably to stay with his eldest brother; there is no evidence that he held any particular appointment there), and in 1641 he became a court and town musician in Arnstadt, where he was also organist of the Liebfrauenkirche. The printed funeral sermon delivered by J.G. Olearius (Arnstadt, 1692; the biographical sections repr. in BJb 1995, 101–2) describes him as an ‘organist who touched the heart’ and a ‘musicus practicus famous for his art’, as well as a composer of ‘chorales, motets, concertos, fugues and the like’. A vocal concerto, Ich danke dir, Gott (1681), for five voices, 2 violins, 2 violas and continuo (EDM, 1st ser., ii (1935)), three organ chorales (ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967)) and two sonatas for two violins, two violas and continuo (ed. in Stuttgarter Bach Ausgaben, ser. A.3 (Stuttgart, c1998)) are extant. The Lüneburg inventory of 1696 lists another vocal work, the ten-part Als der Tag der Pfingsten erfüllet war, now lost.

Johann(es) Bach (3/57) (b Gotha, c1612; d Arnstadt, bur. 9 Dec 1632). Son of Caspar (3/a). He was a town musician in Arnstadt.

Johann(es) Bach (4) (b Wechmar, 26 Nov 1604; d Erfurt, bur. 13 May 1673). Son of Hans (2). After spending five years as an apprentice and two years as a journeyman to the Stadtpfeifer Johann Christoph Hoffmann in Suhl, he became a town musician in 1633 and from 1634 was organist of St Johannis in Schweinfurt. In 1635 he was appointed town musician in Erfurt and on 16 April 1636 organist of the Predigerkirche there. In 1649, while he was still organist, the church acquired the largest and finest organ in Erfurt, built by Ludwig Compenius. Johann Bach's first wife, Barbara, was the daughter of his master Hoffmann; the marriage was childless and in 1639, after her early death, he married Hedwig Lämmerhirt, daughter of the prosperous and influential Erfurt councillor Valentin Lämmerhirt. Two motets have been ascribed to Johann Bach: Unser Leben ist ein Schatten for two sopranos, alto, two tenors and bass, with a three-part echo choir and Sei nun wieder zufrieden for double chorus, as well as an aria, Weint nicht um meinen Tod, for soprano, alto, tenor, bass and continuo (EDM, 1st ser., i (1935)). See S. Orth: ‘Neues über den Stammvater der “Erfurter” Bache, Johann Bach’ (Mf, ix (1956), 447–50); S. Orth, ‘Johann Bach, der Stammvater der Erfurter Bache’ (BJb 1973, 79–87); and Brück (1990).

Johann Bach (59) (b Themar, 1621; d Lehnstedt, 12 Sept 1686). Son of Andreas Bach, a councillor in Themar. He was Kantor in Ilmenau and a deacon there from 1668. In 1680 he became a pastor in Lehnstedt.

Johann Aegidius Bach (8) (b Erfurt, bap. 11 Feb 1645; d Erfurt, bur. 22 Nov 1716). Son of Johann (4). He was taught music by his father, and in 1671 was a violinist in the Erfurt town music, becoming its director in 1682. From 1674 he also held the post of organist at the Kaufmannskirche in Erfurt, and was appointed organist of the Michaeliskirche in 1690. His pupils, besides his sons and nephews, included J.G. Walther.

Johann Aegidius Bach (36) (b Erfurt, bap. 4 Aug 1709; d Gross-Monra, nr Kölleda, 17 May 1746). Son of Johann Christoph (19). He was Kantor of Gross-Monra.

Johann Ambrosius Bach (11) (b Erfurt, 22 Feb 1645; d Eisenach, 20 Feb 1695). Son of Christoph (5), twin brother of Johann Christoph (12) and father of Johann Sebastian (24). On 8 April 1668 he married Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt (b Erfurt, 24 Feb 1644; d Eisenach, 1 May 1694), daughter by his second marriage of the late Valentin Lämmerhirt, councillor of Erfurt. She was the half-sister of Hedwig, wife of Johann Bach (4). Ambrosius was first a Stadtpfeifer in Arnstadt, then from 1667 a violinist in the Erfurt town music, and from 1671 court musician and director of the town music in Eisenach. The town chronicler of Eisenach, Georg Dressel, said of this outstanding and versatile musician, ‘In 1672 the new Hausmann [director of the town music] made music at Easter with organ, violins, voices, trumpets and kettledrums, something no Kantor or director is known to have done before in the history of Eisenach’. When, in1684, he was offered the post of director of the town music in Erfurt the Duke of Eisenach was unwilling to let him go, and he had to decline the offer. A portrait of Johann Ambrosius in oils, painted after 1671, is extant (D-Bsb). See F. Rollberg: ‘Johann Ambrosius Bach, Stadtpfeifer zu Eisenach von 1671–1695’, BJb 1927, 133–52; C. Freyse, ‘Das Porträt Ambrosius Bach’, BJb 1959, 149–55.

Johann Andreas Bach (44) (b Ohrdruf, 7 Sept 1713; d Ohrdruf, 25 Oct 1779). Son of Johann Christoph (22). He was an oboist in the military band in Gotha in 1733. From 1738 he was organist of the Trinitatiskirche in Ohrdruf, and from 1743 of the Michaeliskirche in the same town. He owned the so-called Andreas Bach Buch (see Johann Christoph Bach (22) below), one of the main sources for the early organ and keyboard works of Johann Sebastian (24).

Johann Balthasar Bach (63) (b Eisenach, 4 March 1673; d Eisenach, ?5 April 1691). Son of Johann Ambrosius (11). He was apprenticed to his father as a Stadtpfeifer. (Not included in the Ursprung.)

Johann Bernhard Bach (18) (b Erfurt, bap. 25 Nov 1676; d Eisenach, 11 June 1749). Son of Johann Aegidius (8); see §III (5) below.

Johann Bernard Bach (41) (b Ohrdruf, 24 Nov 1700; d Ohrdruf, 12 June 1743). Son of Johann Christoph (22). He studied with Johann Sebastian (24) in Weimar and Köthen in 1715–19, and was organist of the Michaeliskirche, Ohrdruf, from 1721. Spitta mentions two harpsichord works by him (now lost), a suite in E and a sonata in B.

Johann Christian Bach (7) (b Erfurt, bap. 17 Aug 1640; d Erfurt, bur. 1 July 1682). Son of Johann (4). He was taught music by his father in Erfurt and by his cousin Johann Christoph (12) in Eisenach, and became director of the Erfurt town music in 1666 or 1667.

Johann Christian Bach (32) (b Erfurt, bap. 31 March 1696). Son of Johann Christoph (17). He worked as a musician in Sondershausen.

Johann Christian Bach (50) (b Leipzig, 5 Sept 1735; d London, 1 Jan 1782). Son of Johann Sebastian (24); see §III (12) below.

Johann Christian Bach (69) (b Halle, 23 July 1743; d Halle, 20 June 1814). Son of Georg Michael (66). He studied in Halle with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (45), who gave him the autograph of Johann Sebastian's Clavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann. He was a teacher at the Pädagogium (preparatory school) in Halle and is known as the ‘Clavier-Bach’.

Johann Christoph Bach (13) (b Arnstadt, bap. 8 Dec 1642; d Eisenach, bur. 2 April 1703). Son of Heinrich (6); see §III (2) below.

Johann Christoph Bach (12) (b Erfurt, 22 Feb 1645; d Arnstadt, bur. 28 Aug 1693). Son of Christoph (5). In 1666 he was a town musician in Erfurt, and from 1671 was a court and town musician (violinist) in Arnstadt.

Johann Christoph Bach (22) (b Erfurt, 16 June 1671; d Ohrdruf, 22 Feb 1721). Son of Johann Ambrosius (11). He studied in Erfurt in 1685–8 with Johann Pachelbel, and in 1688 was briefly organist of the Thomaskirche in Erfurt. He then deputized for his sick uncle and godfather Heinrich Bach (6) in Arnstadt, was organist of the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf from 1690, and from 1700 also taught at the Lyceum there. In 1696 he declined an invitation to succeed Pachelbel as town organist in Gotha, evidently made on Pachelbel's own recommendation. In 1695–1700 Johann Christoph taught his younger brother Johann Sebastian (24), who lived at his house in Ohrdruf after his parents' death, and dedicated to him the Capriccio in E bwv993, ‘In honorem Johann Christoph Bachii’, probably soon after leaving Ohrdruf himself. According to contemporary accounts, Johann Christoph was regarded as an optimum artifex, but it is not certain whether his reputation was confined to his practical abilities or whether he was also a composer. His wide-ranging musical interests are evident in two extensive collections of keyboard music compiled by him: the Andreas Bach Buch (D-LEm Sammlung Becker III.6.4; see Johann Andreas Bach (44) above), and the Möller manuscript (D-Bsb Mus.ms.40644). As well as being among the most informative keyboard and organ manuscripts of the period around 1700, they are also important sources of J.S. Bach's early works. No compositions are expressly attributed to Johann Christoph, but some keyboard works that have been assigned to Johann Christoph (13) could be by Johann Christoph (22) instead. See C. Freyse: Die Ohrdrufer Bache in der Silhouette: Johann Sebastian Bachs ältester Bruder Johann Christoph und seine Nachkommen (Eisenach, 1957); H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Christoph Bach (1771–1721), “Organist und Schul Collega in Ohrdruf”: Johann Sebastian Bach's erster Lehrer’, BJb 1985, 55–81; and documents in Bitter, iv, 40–47.

Johann Christoph Bach (17) (b Erfurt, bap. 13 Jan 1673; d Gehren, bur. 30 July 1727). Son of Johann Christian (7). After studying music with his father and attending the Erfurt Gymnasium, he became Kantor and organist in Niederzimmern, near Weimar. From 1695 he was Kantor and organist at the Thomaskirche, Erfurt, and from 1698 he pursued a similar career in Gehren. He compiled an organ book that later came into the possession of his son Johann Günther (33; see below) and a collection of works by Johann Pachelbel, J.C.F. Fischer and other 17th-century masters, including also some compositions of his own (US-NH LM 4983).

Johann Christoph Bach (28) (b Eisenach, bap. 29 Aug 1676). Son of Johann Christoph (13). He was a harpsichordist in Erfurt. In 1702–3 he was in Lübeck (perhaps studying with Buxtehude) and on the death of Johann Christoph (13) both he and his brother Johann Nikolaus applied for their father's post as organist in Eisenach. However, their cousin Johann Bernhard Bach (18) won the appointment. In 1706 he attended Jena University, and then went to Hamburg, where evidence of him is dated 1708–9 and where he married. He later went to Rotterdam (1717–20) and then to England, and seems never to have returned to Germany. It was evidently from him that the Duke of Chandos bought a harpsichord with two rows of keys in June 1720 for the sum of £572 (W. and M. Eisen, eds.: Händel-Handbuch, iv (Leipzig, 1985), p.93). See C. Oefner, ‘Neues zur Biographie von Johann Christoph Bach (geb. 1676)’, DJbM, xiv (1969), 121–3.

Johann Christoph Bach (19) (b Erfurt, bap. 17 Aug 1685; d Erfurt, bur. 15 May 1740). Son of Johann Aegidius (8). He was taught music by his father and attended the Ratsgymnasium in Erfurt. He was organist at the Thomaskirche, Erfurt, and from 1705 a member of the town music there, becoming its director in 1716.

Johann Christoph Bach (26) (b Arnstadt, 12 Sept 1689; d Blankenhain, bur. 28 Feb 1740). Son of Johann Christoph (12). He was organist in Keula in 1714, and from 1729 an organist, teacher and merchant in Blankenhain.

Johann Christoph Bach (42) (b Ohrdruf, 12 Nov 1702; d Ohrdruf, 2 Nov 1756). Son of Johann Christoph (22). He was in the service of the princely court at Sondershausen, and from 1728 was Kantor in Ohrdruf.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (49) (b Leipzig, 21 June 1732; d Bückeburg, 26 Jan 1795. Son of Johann Sebastian (24); see §III (11) below.

Johann Christoph Georg Bach (75) (b Ohrdruf, 8 May 1747; d Ohrdruf, 30 Dec 1814). Son of Johann Andreas (44). He was organist of the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf from 1779.

Johann Elias Bach (39) (b Schweinfurt, 12 Feb 1705; d Schweinfurt, 30 Nov 1755). Son of Johann Valentin (21). He studied theology at Jena from 1728 and then in Leipzig from 1738. He lived in the house of Johann Sebastian (24), was his pupil and until 1742 acted as his private secretary and tutor to the younger Bach children. In 1743 he went to Schweinfurt as Kantor of the Johanniskirche and inspector of the church boarding-school. See K. Pottgiesser: ‘Die Briefentwürfe des Johann Elias Bach’, Die Musik, xii (1912–13), 3–19; F. Beyschlag: ‘Ein Schweinfurter Ableger der thüringischen Musikerfamilie Bach’, Schweinfurter Heimatblätter, xi (1925); P. Wollny and E. Odrich: Die Briefentwürfe des Johann Elias Bach (1705–1755) (Hildesheim, 2000).

Johann Ernst Bach (25) (b Arnstadt, 5 Aug 1683; d Arnstadt, 21 March 1739). Son of Johann Christoph (12). He studied in Hamburg and Frankfurt, and in 1707 became organist of the Neukirche in Arnstadt in succession to Johann Sebastian (24), for whom he had already deputized during winter 1705–6 when Johann Sebastian was visiting Buxtehude in Lübeck. From 1728 he was organist of the Liebfrauenkirche in Arnstadt.

Johann Ernst Bach (34) (b Eisenach, bap. 30 Jan 1722; d Eisenach, 1 Sept 1777). Son of Johann Bernhard (18); see §III (10) below.

Johann Friedrich Bach (29) (b Eisenach, c1682; d Mühlhausen, bur. 8 Feb 1730). Son of Johann Christoph (13). He succeeded Johann Sebastian Bach (24) in 1708 as organist of the Divi-Blasii-Kirche in Mühlhausen. An organ fugue in G minor by him is extant (D-Bsb).

Johann Friedrich Bach (35) (b Erfurt, bap. 22 Oct 1706; d Andisleben, nr Erfurt, bur. 30 May 1743). Son of Johann Christoph (19). He attended the Ratsgymnasium in Erfurt and then worked as a schoolmaster, Kantor and organist in Andisleben. From 1739 he deputized for his father as director of the Erfurt town music, returning to Andisleben in 1742.

Johann Georg Bach (70) (b Eisenach, bap. 2 Oct 1751; d Eisenach, 12 April 1797). Son of Johann Ernst (34). He succeeded his father in 1777 as court and town organist of Eisenach, titular Kapellmeister, notary and town treasurer.

Johann Georg Bach (b ?Güstrow, 1786; d Elberfeld, 6 Dec 1874). Not a member of the Wechmar line. He was the son of Johann Michael Bach (see §III (13) below) and taught music in Elberfeld.

Johann Gottfried Bernhard Bach (47) (b Weimar, 11 May 1715; d Jena, 27 May 1739). Son of Johann Sebastian (24). He was a pupil of his father, and was organist of the Marienkirche in Mühlhausen, 1735–7. He then became organist of St Jacobi in Sangerhausen (a position for which his father had applied in 1702). He left Sangerhausen in spring 1738, with what intention is not known. In a letter of 26 May 1738 Johann Sebastian complained bitterly of his ‘undutiful son’, whose character was apparently unstable and who had got into debt. He matriculated as a law student at Jena University on 28 January 1739, but died only a few months later ‘of a high fever’.

Johann Günther Bach (15) (b Arnstadt, bap. 17 July 1653; d Arnstadt, bur. 10 April 1683). Son of Heinrich (6). From 1682 he was assistant organist to his father in Arnstadt, where he also made keyboard instruments and violins.

Johann Günther Bach (33) (b Gehren, 4 April 1703; d Erfurt, bur. 24 Oct 1756). Son of Johann Christoph (17). He was a town musician (a tenor and viola player), and at some time before 1735 became a teacher in Erfurt. The Günther Bach Buch in the Lowell Mason Collection (US-NH) was compiled by Johann Christoph (17; see above).

Johann Heinrich Bach (43) (b Ohrdruf, 4 Aug 1707; d Öhringen, 20 May 1783). Son of Johann Christoph (22). He was taught by Johann Sebastian (24) and while at the Thomasschule, Leipzig, in 1724–8 was one of his principal copyists (Havptkopist C). He then became assistant to his brother Johann Christoph (42) in Ohrdruf, and in 1735 went to Öhringen in Hohenlohe as Kantor and organist.

Johann Heinrich Bach (53) (b Hamburg, bap. 4 Nov 1709). Son of Johann Christoph (28). According to the Ursprung he was ‘a good keyboard player’.

Johann Jacob Bach (3/60) (b Wolfsbehringen, 12 Sept 1655; d Ruhla, 11 Dec 1718). Son of Wendel (b ?Wechmar, 1619; d Wolfsbehringen, 18 Dec 1682), a farmer ‘who could also sing well’, and grandson of Wendel (b c1580). He went to school in Eisenach, later became organist in Thal, near Eisenach, and then Kantor in Steinbach (1679–90), Wasungen (1690–94) and Ruhla. The Schweinfurt inventory of 1689 lists a vocal work by him, Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, for four voices and instruments.

Johann Jacob Bach (16) (b Erfurt, bap. 14 Aug 1668; d Eisenach, bur. 29 April 1692). Son of Johann Christian (7). He served as apprentice and then journeyman Stadtpfeifer under Johann Ambrosius (11) in Eisenach.

Johann Jacob Bach (23) (b Eisenach, bap. 11 Feb 1682; d Stockholm, 16 April 1722). Son of Johann Ambrosius (11). He trained as a Stadtpfeifer in Eisenach under Johann Heinrich Halle, his father's successor, joined the Swedish Guard as an oboist about 1704–6 and went to Turkey with the Swedish army under Carl XII. In Constantinople he took flute lessons from Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, and from 1713 he was a chamber musician with the Stockholm court ensemble. The occasion for the composition by Johann Sebastian (24) of his Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratro dilettisimo (bwv992) has often, but without plausible grounds, been identified with Johann Jacob's departure from Germany about 1704–6. See C. Wolff. ‘The Identity of the “Fratro Dilettissimo” in the Capriccio B-flat Major’, The Harpsichord and its Repertoire: Utrecht 1990, 145–56.

Johann Lorenz Bach (38) (b Schweinfurt, 10 Sept 1695; d Lahm im Itzgrund, 14 Dec 1773). Son of Johann Valentin (21). In 1715–17 he was a pupil of Johann Sebastian (24) in Weimar, and from 1718 organist and Kantor in Lahm. A fugue in D by him is extant (ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach, (Leipzig, 1967)), and the existence of other compositions by him is documented (BJb 1949–50). See O. Kaul, Musikgeschichte der ehemaligen Reichstadt Schweinfurt (Würzburg, 1935).

Johann Ludwig Bach (3/64) (b Thal, nr Eisenach, 4 Feb 1677; d Meiningen, bur. 1 May 1731). Son of Johann Jacob (3/60); see §III (6) below.

Johann Michael Bach (14) (b Arnstadt, bap. 9 Aug 1648; d Gehren, 17 May 1694). Son of Heinrich (6); see §III (3) below.

Johann Michael Bach (30) (b Eisenach, bap. 1 Aug 1685). Son of Johann Christoph (13). He left Eisenach in 1703 and was later active as an organ builder in Stockholm, but nothing is known for certain about his later life.

Johann Michael Bach (b Struth, nr Schmalkalden, 9 Nov 1745; d Elberfeld, 1820). Not a member of the Wechmar line, but from a subsidiary Hessian branch of the family; see §III (13) below.

Johann Nicolaus Bach (9) (b Erfurt, bap. 5 Feb 1653; d Erfurt, bur. 28 July 1682). Son of Johann (4). He was trained in music by his father and in 1673 became a member of the Erfurt town music as a viol player.

Johann Nicolaus Bach (27) (b Eisenach, 10 Oct 1669; d Jena, 4 Nov 1753). Son of Johann Christoph (13); see §III (4) below.

Johann Philipp Bach (77) (b Meiningen, 5 Aug 1752; d Meiningen, 2 Nov 1846). Son of Gottlieb Friedrich (68). From 1790 he was court organist and painter (Kabinettsmaler) in Meiningen.

Johann Samuel Bach (31) (b Niederzimmern, nr Weimar, 4 June 1694; d Gundersleben, 1 July 1720). Son of Johann Christoph (17). He was a musician and teacher at the princely court of Sondershausen and then a schoolmaster in Gundersleben.

Johann Sebastian Bach (24) (b Eisenach, 21 March 1685; d Leipzig, 28 July 1750). Son of Johann Ambrosius (11); see §III (7) below.

Johann Stephan Bach (3/62) (b Ilmenau, bap. 5 June 1665; d Brunswick, 6 Jan 1717). Son of Johann (59). From 1690 he was Kantor at Brunswick Cathedral (St Blasius). He was also a poet, and there are reports that he wrote sonnets.

Johann Valentin Bach (21) (b Themar, 6 Jan 1669; d Schweinfurt, 12 Aug 1720). Son of Georg Christoph (10). From 1694 he was a town musician and head tower watchman (Obertürmer) in Schweinfurt.

Lips [Philippus] Bach (3/b) (b c1590; d Wechmar, 21 Sept 1626). His relationship with the family of Veit Bach (1) is not clear, but he too was a musician.

Melchior Bach (3/55) (b 1603; d Arnstadt, 7 Sept 1634). Son of Caspar (3/a). He was a town musician in Arnstadt.

Nicolaus Bach (3/58) (b Arnstadt, 6 Dec 1619; d Arnstadt, 1 Oct 1637). Son of Caspar (3/a). He was a town musician in Arnstadt.

Nicolaus Ephraim Bach (65) (b Wasungen, bap. 26 Nov 1690; d Gandersheim, 12 Aug 1760). Son of Johann Jacob (3/60). He was a musician from 1708 and organist from 1719 at the Meiningen Court. In 1724 he became organist in Gandersheim.

Philipp Christian Georg Bach (72) (b Ohrdruf, 6 April 1734; d Wernigshausen, 18 Aug 1809). Son of Johann Christoph (42). In 1759–72 he was Kantor of the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf, and from 1772 he was a pastor in Wernigshausen.

Philipp Ernst Christian Bach (78) (b Eisenach, bap. 20 May 1780; d Eisenach, 29 March 1840). Son and pupil of Johann Georg Bach (70). He was an official copyist in Eisenach, and was also active as an organist and an authority on organs. After the death of his father in 1797, and again in 1809, he applied for the post of organist at St Georg and was considered on the grounds that his ‘father and forebears … have filled this position with credit for almost a century and a half’. However, when the choice was narrowed down he did not get the post. This was probably less to do with the claim made by Kehl, the organist who held the post in 1797–1809, that the organ of St Georg was ruined since Philipp Ernst had played it ‘wildly’ than because the other candidates had greater practical and theoretical knowledge. With Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst (76) he was the last musical member of the family.

Samuel Anton Bach (67) (b Meiningen, bap. 26 April 1713; d Meiningen, 29 March 1781). Son of Johann Ludwig (3/64). He studied with Johann Sebastian (24) in Leipzig around 1732, and was later organist, and for a time also painter, at the Meiningen court.

Tobias Friedrich Bach (40) (b Ohrdruf, 21 July 1695; d Udestedt, 1 July 1768). Son of Johann Christoph (22). From 1714 he was organist of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Ohrdruf. He was appointed court Kantor in Gandersheim in 1717, Kantor in Pferdingsleben in 1720 and Kantor in Udestedt in 1721.

Tobias Friedrich Bach (71) (b Udestedt, bap. 22 Sept 1723; d Erfurt, 18 Jan 1805). Son of Tobias Friedrich (40). In 1747 he became Kantor at the school of the Reglerkirche in Erfurt, and he was appointed Kantor of the Barfüsserkirche there in 1762.

Veit Bach (1) (b Pressburg [now Bratislava], c1555; d Wechmar, nr Gotha, 8 March 1619). As a result of the Counter-Reformation he emigrated from Hungary to Wechmar. The founder of the Wechmar line, he was a miller and baker by trade, and was the first to show musical inclinations and talent in what was to become an extensive family of musicians. Veit Bach had a house in Wechmar, and he and his son Hans (2) are explicitly mentioned as ‘musici’ in the Wechmar local registry of 1600–10. See §II below.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (45) (b Weimar, 22 Nov 1710; d Berlin, 1 July 1784). Son of Johann Sebastian (24); see §III (8) below.

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (76) (b Bückeburg, bap. 24 May 1759; d Berlin, 25 Nov 1845). Son of Johann Christoph Friedrich (49); see §III (14) below.

Bach

II. Family history

The Bach family lived and worked in central Germany, primarily in Thuringia, with the Ernestine Saxon duchies and principalities of Eisenach, Gotha, Meiningen and Weimar, the county of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt, Ohrdruf in Hohenlohe, and the town of Erfurt in the electorate of Mainz. This area was relatively densely populated at the time, and although bitterly split politically it was denominationally unified. In this economically sound and culturally sophisticated context musical life flourished, encouraged in particular by ambitious displays of magnificence on the part of miniature courts, an awareness of musical tradition in the churches of the area (which apart from the Catholic enclave of Erfurt belonged to the Lutheran heartland), and the desire for prestige of many towns both large and small. The rise and decline of the musical Bach family is closely connected with these social conditions: first with the construction and expansion of musical practice in courts, churches and towns towards the end of the 16th century, then with the gradual decline in importance of such leading musical institutions as court orchestras, church choirs and town bands as the middle-class musical culture of the later 18th century began to develop. Musical life in Thuringia was notable for its wide variety within a small area, but it lacked a major centre (with an opera company, for instance), so that there was nothing to attract really famous musicians to it. In the Bach family itself sound, average competence was the norm. Only a few of its members achieved anything extraordinary, and most of those who did left Thuringia.

The unusual concentration of musical gifts within one family in such a narrow regional context has long interested students of genealogy, heredity and talent. The continual reappearance of musical gifts through the generations, with an increasingly large and then suddenly declining number of prominent family members culminating in the remarkable figure of Johann Sebastian Bach, remains a unique phenomenon. An essential prerequisite for the development of such a dynasty was certainly a general attitude to music as a craft to be learnt, so that the careers of male family members were more or less decided from early childhood. Musical training was usually provided within the family, by fathers, brothers and uncles. This was typical even of later generations. For instance, Johann Sebastian, who had himself studied with his brother Johann Christoph (22), is known to have taught six of his nephews – Johann Ernst (34), Johann Lorenz (38), Johann Elias (39), Johann Bernhard (41), Johann Heinrich (43) and Samuel Anton (67) – as well as his own sons. Carl Philipp Emanuel regarded it as quite natural to take his youngest half-brother Johann Christian (50) into his care. Studies or educational tours outside the region were uncommon, although there are instances in the Italian journeys of Caspar Bach's sons (3/54–8; cf the Ursprung), of Johann Nicolaus (27) and finally of Johann Christian (50). In these circumstances even Johann Sebastian Bach's journey to Lübeck to study with Buxtehude must be considered decidedly out of the ordinary.

In a self-contained circle of this kind, which was in the nature of a guild, it was natural for relationships with other musical families and intermarriage with them to be frequent. There were other families of musicians in Thuringia, if not as extensive as the Bach family itself. They included the Hoffmann family of Suhl and the Schmidt family of Eisenach. A series of marriages took place with these two families: Johannes (4) and his brother Heinrich (6) both married daughters of the Hoffmann family; Johann Christian (7) and Johann Aegidius (8) married daughters of the Schmidt family. Johann Sebastian himself is a typical example of close relationships between musical families: his first wife was a Bach and his second a descendant of the Wilcke family of musicians from Zerbst.

The family was very close because of its shared social standing and musical interests. Their social status as ‘outsiders’ (for in the 17th century musicians did not normally have rights of citizenship) and their strict religious views were other important features. Some of the family members even showed a tendency towards sectarianism. Family gatherings were held regularly, and must have resembled small-scale music festivals. A particular speciality of the Bachs was the performance of quodlibets at such gatherings. Drawing on information from J.S. Bach's sons, Forkel wrote in 1802:

The meeting place was usually in Erfurt, Eisenach or Arnstadt. They devoted their time together wholly to making music. Since the company consisted entirely of Kantors, organists and town musicians, all of whom had to do with the church, and in any case it was then still the custom to begin everything on a religious note, the first thing they did on being gathered together was to strike up a chorale. They proceeded from this pious beginning to jests that were often in great contrast. For they now sang folksongs, some of a rather comic and indelicate content, in such a way that the various improvised parts made up a kind of harmony, but the texts for each part were quite different. They called this kind of extempore harmonizing a quodlibet, and not only enjoyed a hearty laugh at it themselves, but provoked equally hearty and irresistible laughter in all who heard them.

The family was well aware that it was maintaining a musical tradition. It is no accident that Johann Sebastian, in a letter of 28 October 1730 to Georg Erdmann, described his children as ‘born musici’, and even the first brief biography of Bach in J.G. Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon (1732) and the more extensive account of his career in the obituary of 1754 refer expressly to the great master's background in a remarkable family of musicians.

It was Johann Sebastian himself who systematically investigated the background of the family and its musical heritage. His genealogy of the family, drawn up about 1735, is still the most reliable document on the family history, particularly in its early generations. (The original manuscript of the Ursprung is lost, but several copies are extant, including an especially important one with additions by C.P.E. Bach.) Johann Sebastian's estate also contained a collection of compositions by the most important earlier family members, under the title ‘Alt-Bachisches Archiv’ (the original, containing 20 works, was once owned by the Berlin Singakademie; it was thought lost in World War II, but was rediscovered, along with other Bach manuscripts, in Kiev (Ukraine) in 1999. This collection was probably begun by Johann Ambrosius, as a number of entries in his hand suggest. Johann Sebastian later reordered it, providing new title-pages, and also made practical use of it, preparing some instrumental parts.

The Ursprung traces the family tree without a break to Veit (1) in the middle of the 16th century. However, many of the details are unclear up to the generation of Veit's grandsons, the sons of Hans (2), and they cannot be fully clarified for want of insufficient archival documents (for instance, the Wechmar church records do not begin until 1619). Studies of the Bach family have sometimes assumed that Veit Bach was born in Thuringia and merely happened to live in Hungary for some time, or that he was born in Wechmar and was the son of an older Veit who had already emigrated from Hungary in 1545, but these theories are untenable. There is no reason to doubt the data in the Ursprung, particularly as Johann Nicolaus Bach (27), in a letter of 24 April 1728, clearly stated that ‘The Bachs come from Hungary’ (see Schulze, 1989).

It has been shown that other Bachs as well as Veit had settled in the little town of Wechmar, near Gotha, but it has proved impossible to trace the family relationship. For instance, there was a Hans Bach living in Wechmar in 1561, and later a Lips (Philippus) and another Hans Bach. They may have been close relations who had left Hungarian Moravia at some earlier date, and whom Veit then followed, or they may have been more distant relations who had been living in Wechmar for some time. The name of Bach (pronounced with a long ‘a’, as ‘Baach’, and often written that way as well) was already common in the Thuringian region, and can be traced there to the 14th century, although there is no evidence of musical activity on the part of these earlier Bachs. Where musicians do occasionally appear (for instance, a trumpeter called Eberhard Heinrich Bach from Rohrborn near Erfurt, who was the son of a Heinrich Bach and went to Indonesia by way of the Netherlands in about 1598), there is no evidence of any concrete family relationship. It seems best to regard the close circle of the musical Bach family as confined to those mentioned in the family genealogy of the Ursprung.

Family tradition in that work says of Veit Bach, a baker by trade, that he often amused himself by playing a ‘cythringen’ (a small cittern). The explicit comment – ‘This was, as it were, the beginning of music in his descendants’ – seems to indicate that none of Veit's ancestors was a professional musician. Nor indeed was Veit himself. He came from the area of Moravia and Slovakia in what was then the kingdom of Hungary with its capital city of Pressburg, now Bratislava (according to Korabinsky, Veit's native city), but his date of birth is not known. Nor is it known why and when he emigrated to Thuringia, but at the time of the Schmalkaldian Wars (1545–7) Protestants were being expelled in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, and there were probably restrictions on the practice of Lutheranism in Hungary in the following decades. The mention of Hungary in the Ursprung as the Bach family's country of origin should be regarded, in accordance with the terminology of the times, as referring to the central area of the Habsburg possessions in general, including Bohemia and Moravia. There are records of various people surnamed Bach in the 16th and 17th centuries in Moravia and elsewhere in the Habsburg territories, for instance Hans Bach the Spielmann (violinist; see §III (1) below).

Veit Bach settled in Wechmar, where he became a householder, and died there on 8 March 1619. Hans Bach (2), his son (probably the eldest) was the first family member to have a thorough musical training; he then practised as a musician, although he was also active in other capacities. His sons were the first of the family to devote themselves entirely to music. Their acceptance of salaried positions shows that they had settled in one place, thus taking the first step towards entering the urban middle classes and breaking with the tradition of the itinerant Spielmann or ‘beer-fiddler’, although their varied activities as instrumentalists point to the Spielmann tradition behind them.

Genealogical problems arise with a number of family members who were certainly connected with Veit's main Wechmar line but whose precise origin is unclear. There is a lacuna in the Ursprung itself concerning the brother of Hans (2); no name is given under the number (3), only the man's trade (he was a carpet maker), although there is at least brief mention of three of his sons who were musicians. Obviously Johann Sebastian Bach, as author of the Ursprung, lacked clear information on this point, and the result was some confusion between two family members. It seems possible that Veit had two sons as well Hans (2) – Johann Sebastian Bach's great-grandfather – and that these sons, Caspar (3/a) and Lips (3/b), have been merged into a single figure in the Ursprung. However, it is also possible that Hans Bach and/or Lips Bach of Wechmar were brothers of Veit.

The mention in the Ursprung of visits to Italy by the nephews of Hans (2) can in fact refer only to the sons of Caspar (3/a); documents show that the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt encouraged the project. Moreover, Caspar had a son Heinrich (3/56), mentioned in the register of deaths as being blind, who must surely be identical with the ‘blind Jonas’ of the Ursprung; the nickname ‘Jonas’, deriving from the biblical Jonah, would presumably have referred to his adventures. On the other hand, the forebears of Johann Ludwig Bach (3/64) can go back only to one Wendel Bach, who must have been either a third brother of Hans (2) or, more likely, a son of Lips. This brother could only have been the elder Lips or the elder Hans. In any case, however, the younger Hans (2), Caspar (3/a) Wendel, Lips (3/b) and Andreas must have been closely enough related to each other for family tradition to trace them back to a common origin. The forebears of the Meiningen Bachs were originally farmers, although it is said of the younger Wendel that he could ‘also sing very well’. The descent of Andreas Bach in particular is obscure. He was a councillor of Themar, and his son Johann (59) was first Kantor in Lehnstedt and later a pastor, like several of his descendants. The Ursprung expressly mentions that Johann Stephan's brother was a priest. As Georg Michael (66) was present at his funeral in 1738, the Meiningen and Lehnstedt lines must have felt they were closely related, and in that case it can hardly be doubted that they were connected with the main Wechmar line.

In accordance with their origins, nearly all the Bachs were first and foremost instrumentalists. Keyboard instruments headed the list of the instruments they played, but almost all other kinds are also represented. In the true Stadtpfeifer tradition, most of the Bachs learnt several instruments. A number of them were also instrument makers, for instance Johann Christoph (12), Johann Michael (14), Johann Günther (15), Johann Michael (30) and Johann Nicolaus (27), who is credited with the invention of the lute-harpsichord. Johann Sebastian, who was a great expert on the organ, promoted the development of the viola pomposa and criticized Gottfried Silbermann's construction of pianos, clearly shows this aspect of the family's talents. The tendency of most of the Bachs to become instrumentalists made composition a subsidiary pursuit, reserved for those who both had the necessary training and were expected to provide musical works. At least in the 17th century, this meant almost exclusively organists, so it is not surprising that no compositions by Johann Ambrosius (11) are extant. As a court trumpeter, if he composed at all it must have been only as a marginal activity. On the other hand his two organist cousins, Johann Michael and Johann Christoph, were very productive as composers, primarily of works for non-liturgical use (sacred works were the responsibility of the church Kantors). In particular, they wrote funeral motets, no doubt a profitable sideline.

By 1700 the musical Bach family was so widespread in Thuringia that the name ‘Bach’ was often used as a synonym for ‘musician’. In many towns, particularly Erfurt and Arnstadt, they occupied all the key musical positions, and it was typical for a Bach in any post to be succeeded by another Bach. For instance, when Johann Christoph (13) left Arnstadt his younger brother (14) succeeded him, and Johann Sebastian was succeeded in Arnstadt by his cousin Johann Ernst (25) and in Mühlhausen by another cousin, Johann Friedrich (29). The post occupied by Johann Christoph (22) was even passed down through two generations. That of organist at St Georg in Eisenach was held by members of the family for almost 150 years, and it was in the same tradition that C.P.E. Bach applied for his father's position as Thomaskantor in Leipzig.

However, this almost automatic inheritance of musical positions became more difficult when the old institutions, which had enabled musicians to function as a guild, began to break up. It was these institutions that had provided the means of existence for such musical families as the Bachs, who rose gradually from their simple Spielmann origins to all positions in the musical hierarchies of the courts, towns and churches. They had been court musicians – Konzertmeisters or Kapellmeisters – Stadtpfeifers, directors of town musical ensembles, organists and Kantors. After the middle of the 18th century at the latest, structural changes were taking place that ran counter to the Bach family's old way of life. Moreover, the family now belonged to the middle class, and its sons had new educational opportunities (almost all the members of the generation of J.S. Bach's sons attended university) fitting them for a number of different professions, whereas previously they had few alternatives to becoming musicians. It is only natural, therefore, that fewer and fewer of them turned to music as a career. Some family members moved into another artistic field, that of painting: the descendants of Johann Ludwig (3/64) were court painters, and the younger Johann Sebastian (1748–78), son of C.P.E. Bach, went to Italy with a high reputation as a gifted painter and died in Rome at the age of 30. In view of the abundance of musical talent in over six generations of the Bach family, it may at first seem surprising, but is understandable if we look back at the circumstances in which they lived and worked, that at the unveiling of the Bach monument donated by Mendelssohn and erected outside the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1843 Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (76) was the last and only representative of a family tradition that had lasted for over 250 years.

Bach, §II: Family history

BIBLIOGRAPHY

catalogues, bibliographies

M. Schneider: ‘Thematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke der Familie Bach (I. Teil)’, BJb 1907, 103–77 [continuations never appeared]

P. Kast: Die Bach-Handschriften der Berliner Staatsbibliothek, (Trossingen, 1958)

J.F. Richter: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und seine Familie in Thüringen’, Deutsches Bachfest, no.39 (1964), 50–60

K. Beisswenger: Johann Sebastian Bachs Notenbibliothek (Kassel, 1992)

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

sources

‘Alt-Bachisches Archive’ [MSS of works by older Bach family members], Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art (formerly Berlin Singakademie)

[J.S. Bach]: Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie, 1735 [orig. MS lost]; ed. M. Schneider, Bach-Urkunden (Leipzig, 1917); ed. W. Neumann and H.-J. Schulze, Bach-Dokumente, i (Leipzig and Kassel, 1963), no.184; Eng. trans. in H.T. David and A. Mendel, eds., The Bach Reader (New York, 1945, rev. and enlarged 3/1998 by C. Wolff as The New Bach Reader), 283–94

M. Korabinsky: Beschreibung der königlichen ungarischen Haupt-Frey- und Krönungsstadt Pressburg, i (Pressburg, 1784), 110ff

C.S. Terry: The Origin of the Family of Bach Musicians (London, 1929)

J. Müller-Blattau: Genealogie der musikalisch-Bachischen Familie (Kassel, 1950)

P. Wollny: ‘Alte Bach Funde’, BJb 1998, 137–48

monographs

MGG1 (R. Benecke)

RiemannL12

C.F.M.: ‘Bemerkungen zu dem Stammbaum der Bachischen Familie’, AMZ, xxv (1823), 187–91

Kawaczynsky: ‘Über die Familie Bach: eine genealogische Mitteilung’, AMZ, xlv (1843), 537–41

P. Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1873–80, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1884, 2/1889/R), i

A. Lorenz: ‘Ein alter Bach-Stammbaum’, NZM, Jg.82 (1915), 281–2

G. Thiele: ‘Die Familie Bach in Mühlhausen’, Mühlhäuser Geschichtsblätter, xxi (1920–21), 62–84

H. Lämmerhirt: ‘Bachs Mutter und ihre Sippe’, BJb 1925, 101–37

C.S. Terry: Bach: a Biography (London, 1928, 2/1933/R)

E. Borkowsky: Die Musikerfamilie Bach (Jena, 1930)

H. Helmbold: ‘Die Söhne von Johann Christoph und Johann Ambrosius Bach auf der Eisenacher Schule’, BJb 1930, 49–55

C.S. Terry: ‘Has Bach Surviving Descendants?’, MT, lxxi (1930), 511–13

E. Lux: ‘Der Familienstamm Bach in Gräfenroda’, BJb 1931, 107–11

H. Miesner: ‘Urkundliche Nachrichten über die Familie Bach in Berlin’, BJb 1932, 157–63

H. Lämmerhirt: ‘Ein hessischer Bach-Stamm’, BJb 1936, 53–89

L. Bach: ‘Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen zu dem Beitrag “Ein hessischer Bach-Stamm” von Hugo Lämmerhirt’, BJb 1937, 118–31

K. Fischer: ‘Das Freundschaftsbuch des Apothekers Friedrich Thomas Bach: eine Quelle zur Geschichte der Musikerfamilie Bach’, BJb 1938, 95–102

C.U. von Ulmenstein: ‘Die Nachkommen des Bückeburger Bach’, AMf, iv (1939), 12–20

W.G. Whittaker: ‘The Bachs and Eisenach’, Collected Essays (London, 1940/R)

H. Löffler: ‘“Bache” bei Bach’, BJb 1949–50, 106–24

Bach in Thüringen:Gabe der Thüringer Kirche an das Thüringer Volk zum Bach-Gedenkjahr 1950 (Berlin, 1950)

H. Besseler and G. Kraft, eds.: Johann Sebastian Bach in Thüringen: Festgabe zum Gedenkjahr 1950 (Weimar, 1950)

K. Geiringer: ‘Artistic Interrelations of the Bachs’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 363–74

W. Rauschenberger: ‘Die Familien Bach’, Genealogie und Heraldik, ii (1949–50), 149–53

E. Wölfer: ‘Naumburg und die Musikerfamilie Bach’, Programmheft zu den Bach-Tagen (Naumburg, 1950), 9–14

C. Schubart: ‘Anna Magdalena Bach: neue Beiträge zu ihrer Herkunft und ihren Jugendjahren’, BJb 1953, 29–50

K. and I. Geiringer: The Bach Family: Seven Generations of Creative Genius (London, 1954/R; Ger. trans., enlarged, 1958, 2/1977)

C. Freyse: ‘Wieviel Geschwister hatte J.S. Bach?’, BJb 1955, 103–7

G. Kraft: ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des “Hochzeitsquodlibet” (bwv 524)’, BJb 1956, 140–54

G. von Dadelsen: Bemerkungen zur Handschrift Johann Sebastian Bachs, seiner Familie und seines Kreises (Trossingen, 1957)

K. Müller and F. Wiegand: Arnstädter Bachbuch: Johann Sebastian Bach und seine Verwandten in Arnstadt (Arnstadt, 1957)

K. Geiringer: ‘Unbekannte Werke von Nachkommen J.S. Bachs in amerikanischen Sammlungen’, IMSCR: Cologne 1958, 110–12

G. Kraft: ‘Neue Beiträge zur Bach-Genealogie’, BMw, i/2 (1959), 29–61

A. Schmiedecke: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Verwandte in Weissenfels’, Mf, xiv (1961), 195–200

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Marginalien zu einigen Bach-Dokumenten’, BJb 1961, 79–99

G. Kraft: Entstehung und Ausbreitung des musikalischen Bach-Geschlechtes in Thüringen: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Wechmarer Stammes (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Halle, 1964)

F. Wiegand: ‘Die mütterlichen Verwandten Johann Sebastian Bachs in Erfurt: Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen zur Bachforschung’, BJb 1967, 5–20

E. Zavarsky: ‘Zur angeblichen Pressburger Herkunft der Familie Bach’, BJb, liii (1967), 21

G. Kraft: ‘Das mittelthüringische Siedlungszentrum der Familien Bach und Wölcken’, Musa – mens – musici: im Gedenken an Walther Vetter (Leipzig, 1969), 153–64

P.M. Young: The Bachs, 1500–1850 (London, 1970)

I. Lehmann: Die Wirkungsstätten der Bach-Familie in Thüringen (Eisenach, 1984)

C. Oefner: Die Musikerfamilie Bach in Eisenach (Eisenach, 1984)

H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1984)

R. Hill: The Möller Manuscript and the Andreas Bach Book: Two Keyboard Anthologies from the Circle of the Young Johann Sebastian Bach (diss., Harvard U., 1987)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘“Die Bachen stammen aus Ungarn her”: ein unbekannter Brief Johann Nicolaus Bachs aus dem Jahre 1728’, BJb 1989, 213–20

H. Brück: ‘Die Brüder Johann, Christoph und Heinrich Bach und die “Erffurtische musicalische Compagnie”’, BJb 1990, 71–7

H. Brück: ‘Die Andislebener Bache’, BJb 1991, 199–206

H. Kock: Genealogisches Lexikon der Familie Bach, ed. R. Siegel (Wechmar, 1995)

D.R. Melamed: ‘The History of the Altbachisches Archiv’, J.S. Bach and the German Motet (Cambridge, 1995), 161–77

H. Brück: ‘Die Erfurter Bach-Familien von 1635 bis 1805’, BJb 1996, 101–31

Bach

III. Individual members

(1) Hans [Johann] Bach

(2) Johann Christoph Bach

(3) Johann Michael Bach

(4) Johann Nicolaus Bach

(5) Johann Bernhard Bach

(6) Johann Ludwig Bach

(7) Johann Sebastian Bach

(8) Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

(9) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

(10) Johann Ernst Bach

(11) Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

(12) Johann [John] Christian Bach

(13) Johann Michael Bach

(14) Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach

(b Andelsbuch, Vorarlberg, c1555; d Nürtingen, 1 Dec 1615). Violinist and court musician. He became a Spielmann (violinist) and jester at the Stuttgart court of Duke Ludwig of Württemberg about 1585, and in 1593 he followed the widowed Duchess Ursula to the court of Nürtingen, where he remained until his death. He apparently often travelled, both alone and in the court entourage. Of his work all that survives is the text of a narrative song of 1614 describing a visit to the town of Weil (Hanss Baachens Lobspruch zur Weil der Statt: ‘Es ist nun über zwantzig Jahr’); its manner is reminiscent of the late medieval style of Oswald von Wolkenstein. There are two extant portraits of him, an etching of about 1605 and an engraving of 1617. The etching bears the inscription:

(1) Hans [Johann] Bach

Hie siehst du geigen/Hansen Bachen
Wenn du es hörst/so mustu lachen
Er geigt gleichwol/nach seiner Art
Und tregt ein hipschen/Hans Bachen Bart.

Nothing is known of his extraction; he was probably related in some way to Veit Bach (1) of the Wechmar line – Hans was Protestant (no matter of course in the Catholic south) and like Veit he came from Habsburg lands. His portrait of 1617 was in the collection owned by C.P.E. Bach, but since C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlassverzeichnis of 1790 cited him as ‘Bach (Hans), a Gotha musician’ his ownership of the picture cannot be taken as confirmation that Hans was a member of the family. He had obviously been confused with the Spielmann Hans Bach (2), who trained in Gotha.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Wolffheim: ‘Hans Bach der Spielman’, BJb 1910, 70–85

W. Irtenkauf and H. Maier: ‘Gehört der Spielmann Hans Bach zur Musikerfamilie Bach?’, Mf, ix (1956), 450–52

(13) (b Arnstadt, bap. 8 Dec 1642; d Eisenach, bur. 2 April 1703). Composer and organist, son of Heinrich Bach (6). He was probably the most important member of the family before (7) Johann Sebastian (24). He received a thorough musical grounding from his father, and on 20 November 1663 was appointed organist of the Arnstadt castle chapel. Two years later he was invited by the Eisenach town council to apply for the post of organist at St Georg, and after an audition on 10 December 1665 he was appointed to that position and also to the post of harpsichordist in the court Kapelle of the Duke of Eisenach. He retained both positions until his death.

(2) Johann Christoph Bach

Little is known of his work in the court Kapelle. From 1675 the Kapellmeister was Daniel Eberlin, later to become the father-in-law of Telemann, who also conducted the Kapelle on occasion, and for a short while (1677–8) Pachelbel was a member of the Kapelle. During much of his time there Johann Christoph’s most important colleague must have been his cousin, the violinist Johann Ambrosius (11); Ambrosius often served as his copyist, and their relationship was doubtless a close one. The young Johann Sebastian must also have received his first impressions of organ music from his father’s cousin. While Johann Christoph’s court position was one of high standing, his tenure of the civic one was marred by a succession of quarrels between him and the town council, for which he was not entirely blameless. It must be said in extenuation that throughout his years in Eisenach he was constantly beset by severe family difficulties, particularly the illnesses of his wife and children. His quarrels with the town council were mostly about his salary and the council’s refusal to provide an official residence for him, a deficiency eventually made good by the court. For many years he also battled with the council over the long-overdue restoration (or reconstruction) of the organ at St Georg; he was successful only in 1696, and then did not live to see the completion (by G.C. Stertzing) of the famous instrument in 1707 (his copious, expert notes on the organ’s reconstruction are extant; see Freyse). He died in 1703, just ten days after the death of his wife.

Within the family Johann Christoph was highly respected as a composer (a ‘profound’ one according to the Ursprung). In Johann Sebastian’s obituary notice of 1754 he is mentioned expressly as one who ‘was as good at inventing beautiful thoughts as he was at expressing words. He composed, to the extent that current taste permitted, in a galant and cantabile style, uncommonly full-textured … On the organ and the keyboard [he] never played with fewer than five independent parts’. Johann Sebastian performed some of his motets and vocal concertos in Leipzig, as also did C.P.E. Bach later in Hamburg. Although Johann Christoph was primarily an organist and harpsichordist, his extant keyboard works are few, but they show him as a capable composer, stylistically akin to Pachelbel though in general less pedantic. His organ chorales (probably in effect written-down improvisations) demonstrate his mastery of the small form, while the strength of his artistry is developed in his extended harpsichord variations. His vocal works, in particular the motets and concertos, are notable for the variety of their settings. The concertos are characterized by their full instrumental writing, with unusually interesting inner part-writing. While the vocal writing is for the most part technically undemanding (the choral sections were intended for school choirs), the instrumental parts are usually highly elaborate and often call for a virtuoso solo violin (as in the two lamenti and the wedding concerto Meine Freundin, du bist schön). Johann Sebastian and Carl Philipp Emanuel thought particularly highly of his 22-part concerto for Michaelmas, Es erhub sich ein Streit, one of the finest vocal works of the late 17th century. Basically his double-choir motets follow the traditional central German model including both Spruch and chorale, with cantabile melodies and often lively alternation of tutti and soloists – a genre which indeed reached its peak in the works of Johann Christoph and his brother (3) Johann Michael (14). In both composers’ works the older style of writing, with alternating chordal and imitative sections, still predominated, for instance in the motet Der Gerechte, ob er gleich zu zeitlich stirbt, which is also a particularly fine example of Johann Christoph’s expressive harmony; but the newer style, with its livelier lines (including melismatic semiquaver passages) and looser, more concertante writing, is found in Sei getreu bis in den Tod and Der Mensch, vom Weibe geboren, obviously later works. The lack of documentation and the small number of the surviving works preclude the establishment of a reliable chronology of Johann Christoph’s music.

WORKS

vocal

Editions: Altbachisches Archiv, i, ed. M. Schneider, EDM, 1st ser., i (1935) [S]Johann Christoph Bach: Sämtliche Motetten, ed. E. Franke (Leipzig, 1982) [F]

Arias: Es ist nun aus mit meinem Leben, SATB, bc, S, F; Mit Weinen hebt sichs an, SATB, bc, 1691, S, F

Motets: Der Gerechte, ob er gleich zu zeitlich stirbt, SATTB, bc, 1676, S, F, ed. in Musica sacra, xxxix (Berlin, 1860); Der Mensch, vom Weibe geboren, SSATB, bc, S, F, ed. R. Kubik (Stuttgart, c1984); Fürchte dich nicht, SSATB, bc, F, ed. G. Graulich (Stuttgart, c1992); Herr, nun lässet du deinen Diener, SATB, SATB, bc, F, ed. G. Graulich (Stuttgart, c1980); Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe, SATB, SATB, bc, D-Bsb (anon.), F; Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt, SATTB, bc, F, ed. G. Graulich (Stuttgart, 1994); Lieber Herr Gott, wecke uns auf, SATB, SATB, bc, 1672, F, ed. G. Graulich (Stuttgart, c1994); Merk auf mein Herz, SATB, SATB, bc, bwv Anh.III.163, ed. P. Wollny (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1991); Sei getreu bis in den Tod, SSATB, bc, S, F, ed. R. Kubik (Stuttgart, c1983); Unsers Herzens Freude, SATB, SATB, bc, F; Was kein Aug gesehen hat, SATB, SATB, bc, Bsb (anon.), F

Vocal concertos: Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte (Lamento), A, vn, 3 va, bc, ed. T. Fedtke (Stuttgart, c1976); Die Furcht des Herren, SSATB, SATTB, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, S, ed. H. Bergmann (Stuttgart, c1986); Es erhub sich ein Streit, SATBB, SATBB, 4 tpt, timp, 2 vn, 4 va, bc, ed. D. Krüger (Stuttgart, c1960); Es ist nun aus, SATB, bc Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art (formerly Berlin, Singakademie); Herr, wende dich und sei mir gnädig (Dialogus), SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, ed. H. Bergmann (Stuttgart, c1988); Mein Freundin, du bist schön (Dialogus, wedding piece), SATB, 4 vn, 3 va, bc, S, ed. H. Bergmann (Stuttgart, c1989); Mit Weinen hebt sichs an , SATB, bc , Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art (formerly Berlin, Singakademie); Wie bist du denn o Gott (Lamentation), B, vn, 3 va da gamba, ed. in DTB, x, Jg.vi/1 (1905; attrib. J.P. Krieger), ed. D. Hellmann (Stuttgart, c1976)

Lost: Auf, lasst uns den Herren loben, S, insts, listed in Schweinfurt inventory, 1689; Der Herr ist König, B, insts, listed in Schweinfurt inventory, 1689; Gott schweig doch nicht also, 5vv, insts, listed in Schweinfurt inventory, 1689; Nun gehe ich hin, B, insts, listed in Schweinfurt inventory, 1689; Unsere Tage fahren alle dahin, a 10, listed in Stettin inventory, 1702

instrumental

Aria Eberliniana (15 variations], hpd, 1690, D-EIb (facs. (Leipzig, 1992)); ed. C. Freyse, Veröffentlichungen der Neuen Bachgesellschaft, Jg.xxxix/2 (1940)

Sarabande, G [12 variations], hpd; ed. H. Riemann (Leipzig, n.d.)

Aria, a [15 variations]; ed. G. Birkner (Zürich, 1973)

Praeludium und Fuge, E, org, doubtful; ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967)

44 chorales with preludes, org, ed. M. Fischer (Kassel, 1936)

4 chorales, org: Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder; Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr; An Wasserflüssen Babylon; Wer Gott vertraut, hat wohl gebaut; ed. C. Wolff, appx to Johann Michael Bach: Sämtliche Orgelchoräle (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1987)

Lost: 8 chorales, org , listed in GerberNL, i, 209

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (R. Benecke)

M. Schneider: ‘Thematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke der Familie Bach’, BJb 1907, 103–77

M. Fischer: Die organistische Improvisation im 17. Jahrhundert, dargestellt an den ‘Vieruntvierzig Chorälen zum Präambulieren von Johann Christoph Bach (BA 285) (Kassel, 1929)

F. Rollberg: ‘Johann Christoph Bach: Organist zu Eisenach 1665–1703’, ZMw, xi (1928–9), 549–61

C. Freyse: ‘Johann Christoph Bach’, BJb 1956, 36–51

P. Wollny: ‘Materialen zur Schweinfurter Musikpflege im 17. Jahrhundert: von 1592 bis zum Tod Georg Christoph Bachs (1642–1697)’, Schütz Jb 1997, 113–63

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

(14) (b Arnstadt, bap. 9 Aug 1648, d Gehren, 17 May 1694). Composer, son of Heinrich Bach (6). He received a sound musical education from his father and the Arnstadt Kantor Jonas de Fletin; the latter's influence may account for his early interest in vocal music. In 1665 he succeeded his brother (2) Johann Christoph (13) as organist of the Arnstadt castle chapel. After an audition on 5 October 1673 he succeeded Johann Effler (who later preceded Johann Sebastian as castle organist in Weimar) as town organist in Gehren. He was also active as an instrument maker there and held the important administrative post of town clerk. On 17 October 1707 his youngest daughter, Maria Barbara (b Gehren, 20 Oct 1684), married her distant cousin (7) Johann Sebastian (24).

(3) Johann Michael Bach

A pamphlet issued by the Gehren council refers to Johann Michael as a ‘quiet, reserved and artistically experienced subject’; within the family he was considered a ‘skilful composer’ (Ursprung). As a composer, in fact, he is on almost the same level as his brother Johann Christoph. Especially in the chorale motet, a genre to which he devoted himself with particular intensity, he composed works of real distinction, and his strophic arias, with their parts for obbligato instruments and their resourceful and expressive ritornellos, are also of undisputed value. A notable feature of his music is his varied, natural and convincing treatment of vocal declamation, whether in biblical texts, chorale verses or free poetry. In his motets, as in his brother's, the older, strongly homophonic style predominates; but in such works as Sei lieber Tag willkommen he turned to the freer and more modern style with melismatic passages. His works for double chorus stand firmly in the tradition of Schütz's Psalmen Davids, but go beyond their models. The nine-part funeral motet Unser Leben ist ein Schatten, which has been erroneously attributed to Johann Bach (4), is particularly moving in its illustrative and expressive qualities. His vocal concertos are less extended than those of his brother, but he too favoured a full-textured orchestral palette, which is often quite sophisticated and frequently includes a virtuoso solo violin part.

Almost all the extant keyboard compositions by Johann Michael Bach are organ chorales. They are mainly in the central German tradition of concise, contrapuntal and practical settings, showing a clear relationship to similar works by Johann Pachelbel. Recent discoveries have trebled the number of Johann Michael's extant chorale settings and, although the total remains considerably less than the ‘72 verschiedene fugirte und figurirte Choralvorspiele’ cited by Gerber, these permit a fairer assessment of Bach's merits as an organ composer than was previously possible. The central German organ chorale underwent a slight shift of emphasis in the work of Johann Michael Bach. His four-part figured chorales with the melody in the highest part, as well as others that combine forms more freely, show him to have been a decidedly independent composer, and he must have influenced the young Johann Sebastian in particular. Gerber wrote of him in 1812: ‘There is great variety and diversity in the preludes, after the manner of that period, and none is entirely unworthy of the name of Bach’.

WORKS

vocal

Edition: Altbachisches Archiv, ed. M. Schneider, EDM, 1st ser., i–ii (1935) [S i–ii]Arias: Ach, wie sehnlich wart ich der Zeit, S, vn, 3 va da gamba, bc; Auf, lasst uns den Herrn loben, A, vn, 3 va da gamba, bc: ed. in S ii, ed. H. Bergmann (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1985)Motets, SATB, SATB, bc unless otherwise stated: Benedictus, SATTB, ?bc, ed.; Das Blut Jesu Christi, SATTB, bc, ed. in S i, ed. R. Kubik (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1981); Dem Menschen ist gesetzt einmal zu sterben, ed. in S i, ed. R. Kubik (Kirchheim, c1985); Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe, ed. in DDT, xlix–l (1915), ed. D. Melamed (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1992); Fürchtet euch nicht, ed. in S i, ed. R. Kubik (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1980); Halt, was du hast, ed. in S i; Herr, du lässest mich erfahren, ed. in S i; Herr, ich warte auf dein Heil, ed. in S i, ed. R. Kubik (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1984); Herr wenn ich nur dich habe, SATTB, bc, ed. in S i, ed. R. Kubik (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1984); Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebet, SATTB, bc, ed. in S i; Nun hab ich überwunden, ed. in S i; Nun treten wir ins neue Jahr, ed. D. Melamed (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1992); Sei lieber Tag willkommen, SSAATTB, bc, ed. in S i; Sei nun wieder zufrieden, ed. G. Graulich (Stuttgart, 1993); Unser Leben ist ein Schatten, SSAATTB, ATB, bc, ed. in S i (attrib. Johann Bach (4)); Unser Leben währet siebenzig Jahr, SATTB, bc, ed. in S iVocal concertos: Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ, SATB, 2 vn, 3 va, bc, ed. in S ii, ed. H. Bergmann (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1985); Es ist ein grosser Gewinn, S, 4 vn, bc, ed. in S ii, ed. H. Bergmann (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1985); Herr, komm hinab, SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, ed. H.M. Balz (Merseburger, 1995); Liebster Jesu, hör mein Flehen (Dialogus), SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, ed. in S ii, ed. H. Bergmann (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1985)Lost, listed in Ansbach inventory, 1686 (see Schaal): Conditor coeli, a 8; Der Herr is König, a 12; Ich freue mich des, a 15; Lobet, ihr Knechte des Herrn, a 12; Mein Sünd betrüben mich, a 8; Miserere, a 15; Omnipotens Deus, a 12; Pater noster, a 12; Siehe, lobe den Herrn, a 12; Was willtu meine Seele, a 6; Welche ich lieb habe, a 10Lost, listed in Schweinfurt inventory, 1689 (see Wollny): Auf meinen lieben Gott, SATB, 2 vn, bc (also formerly in Berlin, Singakademie); Benedicat tibi Dominus ex Sion, 5vv, insts; Der Gott Abraham, der Gott Isaac, 5vv, insts; Dies ist der Tag, 6vv, insts; Gott ist mein Heil, 4vv, insts; Herr, lehre uns bedenken, 5vv, insts; Mag, 4vv, insts; Sit nomen Domini benedictum, 5vv, insts; Unser Herr Jesus Christus, B, insts; Wem ein tugendsam Weib, 5vv, insts; Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist, 5vv, insts; Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein, 5vv, insts; Wie bin ich doch so herzlich froh, 5vv, instsOthers lost: Ist nicht Ephraim, SATB, 4 va, bc, formerly in Berlin, Singakademie; Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen (see Brück); Zion spricht: Der Herr hat mich verlassen, listed in Stettin inventory, c1702

instrumental

Edition: Johann Michael Bach: Sämtliche Orgelchoräle, ed. C. Wolff (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1987) [W]Chorales, org, ed. in W: Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr; Auf meinen lieben Gott; Der du bist drei in Einigkeit; Derr Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt; Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot, also ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967); Es spricht der Unweisen Mund wohl; Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, bwv 723; Gott hat das Evangelium; Gott Vater, der du deine Sohn (anon. in source); Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn; In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr, also ed. in EDM, 1st ser., ix (1937); In dulci jubilo, bwv 751; Jesus Christus, unser Heiland, der den Tod; Komm, Gott schöpfer, Heiliger Geist (anon. in source); Kommt her zu mir, spricht Gotte Sohn; Mag ich Unglück nicht widerstahn; Meine Seele erhebt den Herren; Nun freut euch lieben Christen gmein; Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland; Nun lasst uns Gott dem Herren; O Herre Gott, Vater in Ewigkeit; Von Gott will ich nicht lassen; Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz; Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist, also ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967); Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein, also ed. in EDM, 1st ser., ix (1937) and ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967); Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält, also ed. in EDM, 1st ser., ix (1937)Other works: Partita, a, hpd, US-NH; Stark besetzte Sonaten, lost, cited in GerberL and WaltherML

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

WaltherML

M. Schneider: ‘Thematsiches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke der Familie Bach’, BJb 1907, 103–77, esp. 109

W. Freytag: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Stettin im 18. Jahrhundert (Greifswald, 1936), 138–42

R. Schaal: Die Musikhandschriften des Ansbacher Inventars von 1686 (Wilhelmshaven, 1966)

D. Sackmann: ‘Johann Michael, der “Gehrener Bach” (1648–1694)’, Musik und Gottesdienst, xlviii (1994), 49–57

P. Wollny: ‘Materialien zur Schweinfurter Musikpflege im 17. Jahrhundert: von 1592 bis zum Tod Georg Christoph Bachs (1642–1697)’, Schütz Jb 1997, 113–63

H. Brück: ‘Eine “Verordnung der Music” der Kaufmannskirche zu Erfurt von 1671 als Nachweis unbekannter Kompositionen von Johann Michael Bach (1648–1694)’, BJb 1998, 183–5

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

(27) (b Eisenach, 10 Oct 1669, d Jena, 4 Nov 1753). Composer and organist, son of (2) Johann Christoph Bach (13). After his early musical training at home, he entered the University of Jena in 1690, pursuing his musical studies with J.N. Knüpfer (son of Sebastian Knüpfer, Thomaskantor in Leipzig). After a journey to Italy, the purpose and duration of which are not known, he succeeded Knüpfer in 1694 as organist of the town church in Jena. The university authorities were however reluctant to allow him to act in addition as organist at the Kollegienkirche, as Knüpfer had done, and it was not until 1719 that he finally took on the double post of town and university organist. In 1703 he had refused an appointment at St Georg, Eisenach, as successor to his father, primarily, no doubt, because of the better salary in Jena, where he lived in modest prosperity. Presumably he was in contact with his relative Johann Georg Bernhard (47) during the latter’s period of study in Jena, 1737–9. From 1745, in consideration of his age, he was provided with an assistant organist. In the Ursprung Johann Sebastian called him ‘present senior of all the Bachs still living’.

(4) Johann Nicolaus Bach

Johann Nicolaus was a skilful composer, but his few extant works – some student music, Der Jenaische Wein- und Bierrufer (ed. F. Stein, Leipzig, 1921), and an organ chorale, Nun freut euch lieben Christen gmein (D-Bsb) – hardly permit an assessment of his style. There are, however, no noticeable italianate aspects such as might have resulted from his stay in Italy. Apart from being an organist, the leader of the university’s collegium musicum and a composer, he was also an instrument maker, particularly of harpsichords. Adlung called him the inventor of the Lautenklavier, and in a letter of 1728 Bach referred explicitly to a ‘Lauten Clavier’ which he had sold to a Hungarian nobleman in Jena. As an expert on organs he supervised the reconstruction of an instrument with three manuals and 44 stops in the Kollegienkirche, 1704–6. Among his pupils was F.E. Niedt, author of a well-known thoroughbass method, Musicalische Handleitung (Hamburg, 1700–17).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Koch: ‘Johann Nicolaus, der “Jenaer” Bach’, Mf, xxi (1968), 290–304

H.-J. Schulze: ‘“Die Bachen stammen aus Ungarn her”: ein unbekannter Brief Johann Nicolaus Bachs aus dem Jahre 1728’, BJb 1989, 213–20

T. Christensen: ‘Johann Nikolaus Bach als Musiktheoretiker’, BJb 1996, 93–100

H.-J. Schulz and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

(18) (b Erfurt, bap. 25 Nov 1676; d Eisenach, 11 June 1749). Composer and organist, son of Johann Aegidius Bach (8). He studied with his father and about 1695 took up his first post, as organist at the Kaufmannskirche in Erfurt; in 1699 he went to Magdeburg, and in 1703 he replaced his kinsman (2) Johann Christoph (13) as town organist and court harpsichordist in Eisenach, a post which Johann Christoph’s son Johann Nicolaus (27) had declined. Repeated rises in salary show the esteem in which he was held, particularly in the court Kapelle, which was directed by Telemann in 1708–12.

(5) Johann Bernhard Bach

His only extant works are instrumental; some of the organ works are in copies made by his pupils in Erfurt, who included J.G. Walther (according to Walther himself). Johann Sebastian Bach evidently valued his orchestral suites, for he had five of them copied (he himself was involved in some of the copying) for his collegium musicum in Leipzig. J.S. Bach’s obituary notice of 1754 says that Johann Bernhard ‘composed many beautiful overtures in the manner of Telemann’, no doubt referring particularly to the forces he employed (dessus, haute-contre, taille and continuo) and to the programmatic movement titles (‘Les plaisirs’, ‘La toge’) in the French tradition.

WORKS

4 ovs., orch, D-Bsb: g, ed. A. Fareanu (Leipzig, 1920); G; e; D, ed. K. Geiringer, Music of the Bach Family (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); all ed. H. Bergmann and H. Max (Stuttgart, 1985–8)

Ov., g, lost, listed in C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlassverzeichnis

Org works: fugue, F, ed. H. Riemann (Leipzig, n.d.); fugue, D, ed. in FrotscherG

Org chorales: Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ; Vom Himmel hoch: both ed. D. Hellmann, Orgelwerke der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1967); Christ lag in Todesbanden; Nun freut euch lieben Christen: both ed. in EDM, 1st ser., ix (1937); Wir glauben all an einen Gott [3 versions]

Chaconne, B, hpd

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FrotscherG

H. Kühn: ‘Vier Organisten Eisenachs aus bachischem Geschlecht’, Bach in Thüringen: Gabe der Thüringer Kirche (Berlin, 1950), 103–19

S. Orth: ‘Zu den Erfurter Jahren Johann Bernhard Bachs (1676–1749)’, BJb 1971, 106–11

C. Oefner: Die Musikerfamilie Bach in Eisenach (Eisenach, 1984)

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

(b Thal, nr Eisenach, 4 Feb 1677; d Meiningen, bur. 1 May 1731). Composer, son of Johann Jacob Bach (3/60). Nothing is known of his musical training, but he probably received some early instruction from his father before attending the Gotha Gymnasium in 1688–93. From 1699 he was a court musician at Meiningen, from 1703 Kantor and from 1711 court Kapellmeister. In 1706 he had unsuccessfully applied to succeed A.C. Dedekind as Kantor of St Georg, Eisenach, although he had been interested only in the musical and not the teaching duties of the post. His patron of many years, Duke Ernst Ludwig, died in 1724 and Johann Ludwig wrote the music for his funeral.

(6) Johann Ludwig Bach

Johann Ludwig wrote an imposing number of vocal works. Although orchestral music was probably his principal activity from 1711 onwards, hardly any music at that type is extant. The preservation of the cantatas is due primarily to Johann Sebastian, who performed 18 of them, as well as the two masses, in Leipzig in 1726; some were given again between 1735 and 1750. Denn du wirst meine Seele was long considered an early work by Johann Sebastian (bwv15). The cantatas constitute the most important part of Johann Ludwig’s work; in contrast with the main corpus of Johann Sebastian’s cantatas, they represent the older type of mixed cantata, consisting essentially of biblical text and chorale in the following scheme: text from the Old Testament; recitative; aria; text from the New Testament; aria; recitative; chorus; chorale. The standard scoring is for four-part choir, strings and (usually) two oboes; in one cantata two horns are required, but there are no solo woodwind. These works had at least some small influence on Johann Sebastian, for example in his use of a string ensemble to accompany the words of Jesus.

WORKS

manuscripts in D-Bsb unless otherwise stated

Messe sopra cantilena Allein Gott in der Höh, e, 1716, bwv Anh.III.166 [opening of Gl by J.S. Bach]; ed. K. Hofmann (Stuttgart, 1976)

Mass, G, bwv Anh.III.167

Magnificat, 8vv

23 church cants.: Darum säet euch Gerechtigkeit; Darum will ich auch erwählen; Denn du wirst meine Seele nicht in der Hölle lassen, bwv15, ed. in Johann Sebastian Bachs Werke, ii (Leipzig, 1851/R); Der Gottlosen Arbeit wird fehlen; Der Herr wird ein neues im Land erschaffen; Die mit Tränen säen, ed. H. Hornung and M.G. Schneider (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1980); Die Weisheit kommt nicht in eine boshafte Seele; Du sollst lieben Gott, D-Gs; Durch sein Erkenntnis; Er machet uns lebendig; Es ist aus der Angst und Gericht; Es wird des Herrn Tag kommen, F-Pn; Gott ist unser Zuversicht, ed. A.M. Owen (St Louis, n.d.); Ich aber ging für dir über; Ich will meinen Geist in euch geben; Ja, mir hast du Arbeit gemacht, ed. H. Max (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1984); Kommt, es ist alles bereit, lost, formerly in Berlin, Singakademie; Küsset den Sohn, dass er nicht zürne (frag.); Mache dich auf, werde Licht, ed. H. Max (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1984); Siehe ich will meinen Engel senden; Siehe, ich will viele Fischer ausssenden (frag.); Und ich will ihnen einen einigen Hirten erwecken; Wie lieblich sind auf den Bergen

11 motets: Das Blut Jesu Christi; Das ist meine Freude, ed. G. Graulich (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1980); Die richtig für sich gewandelt haben; Gedenke meiner, mein Gott; Gott sei mir gnädig; Ich habe dich ein klein Augenblick; Ich will auf den Herrn schauen; Sei nun wieder zufrieden, ed. in Cw, xcix (1964); Unser Trübsal, ed. in Cw, xcix (1964); Uns ist ein Kind geboren, ed. R. Moser (Leipzig, 1930), ed. K. Hofmann (Stuttgart, 1984); Wir wissen so unser irdisches Haus

Klingt vergnügt, secular cant.

Funeral music, 1724, 3 pts; pt 2 ed. K. Geiringer, Music of the Bach Family (Cambridge, MA, 1955)

Passion; cant. cycle for 1713, cited in S. Kümmerle: Enzyclopädie der evangelischen Kirchenmusik, i (Gütersloh, 1888/R), 67

Suite, G. orch, 1715; ed. K. Hofmann (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, c1984)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Dörffel: ‘Verzeichnis der Kirchenkompositionen des Johann Ludwig Bach in Meiningen’, Johann Sebastian Bachs Werke, xli (1894), 275–6

A.M. Jaffé: The Cantatas of Johann Ludwig Bach (diss., Boston U., 1957)

W.H. Scheide: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Sammlung von Kantaten seines Vetters Johann Ludwig Bach’, BJb 1959, 52–94; BJb 1961, 5–24; BJb 1962, 5–32

W. Blankenburg: ‘Eine neue Textquelle zu sieben Kantaten J.M. Bachs und achtzehn Kantaten Johann Ludwig Bachs’, BJb 1977, 7–25

K. Hofmann: ‘Forkel und die “Köthener Trauermusik” Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1983, 115–18

K.Küster: ‘Meininger Kantatentexte um Johann Ludwig Bach’, BJb 1987, 159–64

K. Küster: ‘Die Frankfurter und Leipziger Überlieferung der Kantaten Johann Ludwig Bachs’, BJb 1989, 65–106

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff, eds.: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

The history of the St Matthew Passion, with its double chorus, is less complicated, though not entirely straightforward. In this case the date of the first performance seems now to be established (the Thomaskirche, Good Friday 1727), but some details of that occasion remain unclear because of lacunae in the source material (version bwv244b). Furthermore, some ten movements from the St Matthew Passion were incorporated into the Cöthen funeral music of 1729 (bwv244a), and the consequences of that for the repeat of the Passion in the same year are not known. On the whole the St Matthew Passion is a considerably more unified piece than the St John, for which the primary reason is its use of Picander’s text. Its greater textual and musical scale allows more space for the arias and ‘madrigal’ pieces in which the coupling of arioso with aria is an especially characteristic feature. Another special feature is the way the strings provide an accompanying halo in Jesus’s recitatives. The pervading cyclical formation of the work (from the interrelating of the chorales, tonal organization and paired movements) is in some respects even more pronounced than in the St John Passion, while it lacks the earlier work’s ‘architectural’ centre. After 1729 the St Matthew Passion had at least two more performances under Bach’s direction. In 1736 he made some important changes, chief among them emphasizing the separation of the two choruses and instrumental ensembles by division of the continuo, exchanging the simple chorale at the end of part i for ‘O Mensch bewein’ and replacing the lute in ‘Komm süsses Kreuz’ with bass viol. The additional alterations of about 1742 were mainly a matter of meeting practical performing conditions.

In its main sections, that is in the ‘madrigal’ pieces, the St Mark Passion of 1731 was a parody work whose main sources are the Trauer Ode (Cantata no.198) and the Cöthen funeral music (bwv244a). While only the text survives, the musical design can in part be deduced from these models, although they scarcely permit it to be reconstructed satisfactorily. The Bach literature includes discussion of parody relationships which go further than this, but they seem to raise more questions than they answer. The most plausible suggestion, made by Smend (1940–48), is that some of the exceptionally large number of chorales in the St Mark Passion may have survived in the collections of Bach’s four-part chorales.

In Bach’s time Latin polyphonic music was still often used in ordinary Lutheran Sunday worship, particularly, in Leipzig, at important church feasts. Further, the concerted Magnificat continued to hold its place in Vespers. Bach had been interested in Latin polyphonic music at least since his Weimar period, as his copies of pieces by other composers demonstrate (Peranda, Durante, Pez, Wilderer, Bassani, Caldara, Lotti, Palestrina etc.; catalogue in Wolff, 1968). He also wrote insertions in this style for other composers’ works, and made some arrangements (Sanctus bwv241; Credo intonation for a mass by Bassani; ‘Suscepit Israel’ for a Magnificat by Caldara). His earliest surviving work of this type is probably the Kyrie bwv233a on the cantus firmus ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes’. Then in his first year at Leipzig came the five-part Magnificat, first the E version with four inserted Christmas pieces (bwv243a), revised in D major in 1733, without the Christmas pieces, for use on any major feast day (bwv243). Among the various Sanctus settings attributed to Bach, apart from bwv232^III, probably only bwv237 and 238 (both 1723) are original compositions. The four short masses (bwv233–6), mostly parody works based on cantata movements, date from about 1738. In the careful selection of models and the subsequent reworking of the musical material, these works, together with the B minor Mass, amount to a valuable anthology of Bach’s vocal writing in music of outstandingly high quality. The transposition of German cantata movements into mass settings did more than replace German words, contingent on the time and occasion of their writing, with the timelessness of the Latin (and Greek) texts; it also removed the limitations imposed on the cantatas by their place in the annual church cycle and gave them a more general validity. The longer-term outcome of this was seen soon after 1750, when specifically the Latin sacred music was hailed by connoisseurs like Marpurg, Kirnberger, Hiller and even the south German Prince-Abbot Gerbert as a particularly important sector of Bach’s music.

Bach’s masterpiece in this genre is of course the work known – though not conceived as a unity – as the B minor Mass. Its genesis stretched over more than two decades. Bach’s aim seems originally to have been to bring together a collection of exemplary large-scale mass movements rather than to create a single, cyclical work on an unprecedented scale. In assembling the whole score in 1748–9, however, the composer undoubtedly had the intention of making it a comprehensive work of consistent quality. The oldest section is the Sanctus of 1724. The Kyrie and Gloria come from the 1733 Missa dedicated to the Dresden court, while the Credo or ‘Symbolum Nicenum’ was composed only during Bach’s last years. In many respects these two main sections represent Bach’s ideals not of Latin polyphonic music alone but of vocal music altogether: in their stylistic multiplicity (the contrast of deliberately archaic and modern styles; the experimentation with the widest variety of instrumental and vocal techniques); their abandonment of the da capo aria and the recitative; and in their formal perfection. The 1733 Missa (reminiscent of the Magnificat in its five-part writing) emerges as a completely integrated, unified whole, typified by the inner logic of the tonal organization (B minor–D–F minor–D–A–D–G–B minor–D) and the disposition of the vocal and instrumental solos. The Credo is a particularly good example of Bach’s many-layered and symmetrical layout (Table 1). The Missa and the Credo have a series of parody originals (including movements from Cantatas nos.29, 46, 171, 12 and 120); in the latter the ‘Credo’, ‘Et incarnatus’ and ‘Confiteor’ seem to be the only original compositions.

An earlier version of ‘Credo in unum Deum’ exists, dating from the early 1740s, while ‘Et incarnatus’ may be the last vocal composition that Bach completed. However, Bach’s reworking of earlier material went much further than usual. In ‘Agnus Dei’, in particular, nearly half the movement was completely revised, using new thematic material. When the entire work was nearly finished Bach revised it once more, probably in 1749, adding ‘Et incarnatus’ (the words of which he had originally set as part of the aria ‘Et in unum Dominum’). The music of the new ‘Et incarnatus’ is reminiscent of a movement in Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, and in its combination of unorthodox polyphony and musically expressive gesture points the way forward to a new stylistic sensibility. It is all the more astonishing that Bach successfully followed it with the earliest music in the mass, the ‘Crucifixus’ (from the second movement of Cantata no.12) – though he did bring this up to date with a more empfindsam style of continuo and more subtle instrumentation of the upper parts.

It was obviously not by chance that Bach turned in his old age to the mass genre. With its centuries-old tradition, by comparison with such modern genres as the cantata and oratorio, the setting of the mass had a natural affinity to the historical and theoretical dimensions of Bach's musical thinking, which also bore fruit in the monothematic instrumental works of his last years.

15. Motets, chorales, songs.

In Bach’s time motets were sung as introits for services and on certain special occasions. The tradition established at Leipzig was to select introit motets from the Florilegium Portense (1603), a classical repertory from the 16th century compiled by Erhard Bodenschatz. For this reason, Bach wrote motets only for special occasions, probably only for burial services, although in only one case, Der Geist hilft (for the funeral of the Thomasschule headmaster Ernesti in 1729), is there documentary evidence of this. Bach’s motet texts, following the tradition, are based on biblical quotations and chorales; freely composed poetry is used in only one case, and even this is hymnbook poetry (Komm, Jesu, komm, Paul Thymich). On the occasions for which the motets were composed, Bach normally had more than the school choristers at his disposal; he was thus able to use between five- and eight-part writing, as he did in six pieces (bwv225–9 and Anh.159). In line with normal central German practice since the 17th century, it was a rule in the performance of motets at Leipzig, including those from Florilegium Portense, that a continuo part should be included – to be precise, organ, harpsichord (in Leipzig the so-called motet harpsichord), lute, with violone, cello, bassoon. In this way the bass of a vocal (choral or polychoral) movement was supported by a larger or smaller continuo depending on the circumstances, in the manner of a basso seguente. Colla parte accompaniment was required only occasionally. The performing parts that have survived for Der Geist hilft, with strings (first chorus) and reed instruments (second chorus) doubling the voices, must be connected with the exceptional nature of the occasion and cannot necessarily be taken as applicable to the other motets; similar special cases, with partly obbligato instruments, are bwv118, O Jesu Christ (both versions) and Der Gerechte kömmt um (not in bwv: bc C 8).

Bach’s use of double chorus and his exposition of forms of chorale treatment link the motets with the central German tradition in which he had grown up. That it was part of his direct family inheritance is illustrated by the fact, which can scarcely be coincidental, that motets are particularly well represented in the Alt-Bachisches Archiv. Bach’s earliest motet, Ich lasse dich nicht bwv Anh.159, long attributed to Johann Christoph Bach of Eisenach, adheres extremely closely to Thuringian models. Composed by 1712 at the latest, the work’s foundations in the tradition are typified by the highlighting of upper parts and the largely homophonic conception of the first section, and by the interweaving of a chorale tune in large note values in the second; by contrast, the harmonic intensity of the work (in F minor) and the unified, almost rondo-like, thematic construction of its first section are innovatory. Among later works, Bach’s debt to the tradition is best illustrated by the closing section of Fürchte dich nicht, in its combination of cantus firmus (‘Warum sollt ich mich denn grämen’) and freely imitative writing, and the opening section of Komm, Jesu, komm, with its chordal writing for double chorus. As a whole, the style of bwv118 too is retrospective, with its archaic instrumentation and its homophonic choral writing.

By contrast, most movements in the motets have a markedly polyphonic vocal manner, dominated by instrumental style and showing unifying motivic work. Another characteristic is the clear formal articulation, with multi-movement works demonstrating different kinds of treatment. Thus Jesu, meine Freude, the longest work of this kind, in 11 movements, is the most strictly (that is, symmetrically) conceived: the opening and closing movements are identical, the second to fifth correspond to the seventh and eighth, and the central sixth movement is a fugue. Der Geist hilft begins with a concerto-like movement, followed by a double fugue and a simple chorale setting. The form of the instrumental concerto (fast–slow–fast) is used in Singet dem Herrn. Precise dating is possible only in the case of Der Geist hilft (24 October 1729). Jesu meine Freude seems to date from a pre-Leipzig period, although there is no tangible evidence for this; it is possible that an earlier motet, with a text from Romans viii, was expanded into a chorale motet by the addition of stanzas from the hymn Jesu meine Freude. The other motets appear to date from the Leipzig years. This is certain in the case of O Jesu Christ (c1737): its instrumentation was revised for a repeat performance in the 1740s, with strings, oboes, bassoons and horns; the original had only two litui, cornets and three trombones. The authenticity of Lobet den Herrn has been questioned, probably groundlessly, but the paucity of material that would permit comparisons weakens the arguments on either side. Bach’s arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater with the psalm text ‘Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden’, dating from 1741–6, should be counted among the motets.

Bach’s composition of chorales is most closely associated with his production of cantatas. Four-part chorale style, or stylus simplex, was normal for his closing movements, particularly in the Leipzig cantatas; it also often occurred at the ends of subsections in the Passions and oratorios. Bach’s chorale writing is characterized by the ‘speaking’ quality of the part-writing and the harmonies – meaning that they aim to be a direct interpretation of the text. In its pervasive counterpoint and its expressiveness, Bach’s harmonic style stands out from that of his contemporaries, who preferred plain homophonic textures in their chorales. This simpler approach, found in the chorales of such as Graupner or Telemann, with movement mostly in minims, was well suited to congregational singing, but Bach took no account of that in his chorales, which are deliberately more artistic, rhythmically often more lively (written in crotchets) and frequently bolder in their harmonies. The first four-part chorale settings are in the Weimar cantatas (the last movement of no.12, performed on 22 April 1714, is among the earliest examples), and Bach’s stylistic development in this type of composition reached a final stage 30 years later in the chorales of the Christmas Oratorio, with their elegantly mobile bass lines and their polyphonic refinement of the inner voices. His training as an organist probably contributed to the personal stamp of his style; organ settings such as bwv706 display similar stylistic traits. Chorales such as bwv371, conceived with orchestral forces in mind, act furthermore as reminders that chorales were Bach’s favourite medium of instruction. C.P.E. Bach wrote in 1775: ‘His pupils had to begin by learning four-part thoroughbass. After that he went on with them to chorales; first he used to write the bass himself, then they had to invent the alto and tenor for themselves … this way of leading up to chorales is indisputably the best way of learning composition, including harmony’.

The posthumously published collections (Birnstiel, 2 vols., 1765, 1769; Breitkopf, 4 vols., 1784–7) contain almost all the chorales known from Bach’s vocal works, some under different titles. The Breitkopf edition, prepared by C.P.E. Bach and Kirnberger, contains 371 chorales, among them more than 100 not found in the extant vocal works. This provides an important pointer to the lost vocal music, and though extremely difficult to follow up it has borne some fruits, as in the reconstruction of the St Mark Passion or the Picander cycle. It is worth remarking that the number of excess chorales, that is those that cannot be assigned to extant works, more or less corresponds to the number thought to exist in the lost cantatas and Passions.

Under the generic heading of ‘sacred songs’ come the 69 melodies with figured bass in G.C. Schemelli’s Musicalisches Gesang-Buch (1736). According to the foreword, Bach edited the figured bass for some of the melodies, while others were entirely new compositions by him. Three are demonstrably his (bwv452, 500 and 505); of the rest at least seven pieces for two voices and ten ‘improved’ continuo parts can be associated with him. He seems to have been only peripherally occupied with the composition of songs and strophic arias, for which he took texts from religious poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries: that, at least, is the inference to be drawn from the limited surviving repertory, for which the only source is the second Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach (1725) containing bwv511–14 and 516 – works which probably have a direct association with the Schemelli Gesangbuch. Comparison of bwv512 with 315, and of bwv452 with 299, draws attention to the conceptual association between the composition of chorales for two and for four voices. The collection of four-part chorales which Bach’s pupil J.L. Dietel extracted from his teacher’s works (Leipzig, c1735), like the Schemelli Gesangbuch (1736), indicates that Bach was working on chorales rather intensively and systematically at the time, perhaps with a view to a more compendious publication.

Only exceptionally did Bach compose secular songs. A quodlibet for four voices and continuo (bwv542), surviving only in fragmentary form, is unique among his vocal works. It was probably composed for a wedding in Erfurt, at the latest by mid-1708. With its admixture of various melodies and humorous words, the piece forms a link with the musical games played, so tradition relates, when the Bach family got together (see §1 above). Other rarities, from a later period when he was settled in the university town of Leipzig, are the song addressing a pipe of tobacco (bwv515) and the ‘Murky’ (bwv Anh.40).

16. Organ music.

The obituary written immediately after Bach’s death and published in 1754 contains the following statement: ‘For as long as there is nought to confute us other than the mere possibility of the existence of better organists and keyboard players, we cannot be reproached if we are bold enough to persist in the claim that our Bach was the most prodigious organist and keyboard player that there has ever been. It may be that this or that famous man has accomplished much in polyphony on these instruments but was he for that reason as expert – with hands and feet together – as Bach was? Whosoever had the pleasure of hearing him and others, being not otherwise disposed by prejudice, will agree that this doubt is not unfounded. And whosoever looks at Bach’s pieces for the organ and the keyboard, which he himself, as is universally known, performed with the greatest perfection, will likewise have nothing to say in contradiction of the above statement.’ The claim illustrates the well-nigh legendary reputation that Bach enjoyed in his lifetime. His fame had already spread beyond the confines of central Germany by 1717, when he challenged the French virtuoso Louis Marchand to a competition at the court of Dresden and won by default when the Frenchman took flight. ‘It would be wrong to conclude from this defeat of Marchand in Dresden that he must have been a poor musician. Did not as great a one as Handel avoid every opportunity of confronting the late Bach … or of getting involved with him?’ (Marpurg).

Keyboard music as a whole occupies a crucial position in Bach’s life in many respects, but this is even more true of the works for harpsichord than of those for organ. No other genre occupied Bach so consistently and intensively from the beginning of his career to the end. His life as a professional musician began with learning to play on a keyboard, above all in Ohrdruf in 1695–1700 under the tuition of his elder brother Johann Christoph, and his study of keyboard music by the best composers of the 17th century laid the most important foundations of his training as a composer. The compositions for harpsichord, in particular, provide the opportunity to assess Bach’s development at each stage of his creative life.

Bach was bolder than any of his contemporaries: from the first he set no limits to his keyboard skills, and accepted no restrictions to his horizons – from the breadth of the foundations of his style to the comprehensive range of genres in which he composed. The stylistic basis was laid in his youth, and it was undoubtedly important that growing up in the central German environment of his time gave him the opportunity to learn about different stylistic tendencies side by side, without any bias towards one rather than another. As a result his models came from a highly diverse repertory. The north German school, including such masters as Buxtehude, Reincken, Bruhns, Lübeck and Böhm, were ranged alongside central German composers such as Pachelbel’s circle and older pupils (J.H. Buttstedt, for example, or A.N. Vetter) and Witt, Krieger, Kuhnau and Zachow, as well as their southern German colleagues J.J. Froberger, J.C. Kerll and J.C.F. Fischer. Italians such as Frescobaldi and Battiferri confronted Frenchmen such as Lully, Marais, Grigny and Raison. Many of these names are to be found in the large manuscript collections (the so-called Andreas-Bach-Buch and Möllersche Handschrift) copied by the Ohrdruf Bach, Johann Christoph. They give a clear picture of the repertory that the younger brother grew up with, and which showed him – like the young Handel, learning his craft in a similar environment – ‘the manifold ways of writing and composing of various races, together with each single composer’s strengths and weaknesses’. No comparable sphere of influence served to challenge this broadly based group of musicians and exemplars later in Bach’s life. There were, of course, individuals who had an effect on him, such as Vivaldi after 1710, or probably Couperin, or his exact contemporary Handel, but no group of musicians of a comparable range or variety.

Bach’s dedication to every keyboard genre and form appears equally boundless. The range remains constant throughout his career, from the earliest to the last compositions. All the major types are represented: the freely improvisatory (prelude, toccata, fantasia), the imitative and strict (fugue, fantasia, ricercar, canzona, capriccio, invention), the combinatory (multi-part preludes, prelude and fugue) and multi-movement forms (sonata, suite or partita, overture or sinfonia, chaconne or passacaglia, pastorale, concerto and variations); and then there are the various types and forms of chorale arrangement.

Unlike the vocal music and the chamber and orchestral works, Bach’s keyboard output covers his entire creative life. There are quite lengthy periods of heightened activity – organ music before 1717, harpsichord music after that date. As a whole, however, Bach seems to have cultivated the two genres alongside each other. It is thus the more surprising that, right from the beginning, consistently and in defiance of inherited 17th-century tradition, he abandoned the conventional community of repertory between organ and harpsichord, choosing to write specifically for the one or the other. The uncompromising use of obbligato pedals, in particular, is a distinguishing mark of Bach’s organ style. Only exceptionally (for example in the chorale partitas and the small chorale arrangements from the third part of the Clavier-Übung) do the performing possibilities coincide so that organ and harpsichord become truly interchangeable.

Since most of Bach’s keyboard works from the pre-Leipzig years survive in copies (generally made in the circle of Bach’s pupils) rather than in autograph scores, it is not possible to establish a precise chronology. Even a relative one is possible only in general terms, with considerations of style and authenticity holding the balance. In the earliest works the influence of Bach’s models is pronounced. Pachelbel had taught Johann Christoph Bach, and the master’s influence extended to the younger brother, most visibly and prevalently in the earliest of his extant compositions. Besides the little organ chorales which survive individually (bwv749, 750 and 756), regarded by Spitta as Bach’s first musical essays, the chorales in the Neumeister collection, which came to light only recently (bwv1090–1120, and bwv714, 719, 737, 742 and 756), are now taken to be among his earliest works. Although the Neumeister manuscript represents neither an integrated body of work nor a unified collection, in its dazzling variety it embodies some contradictory and simultaneously essential traits of Bach’s early organ music: imperfect technique alongside daring innovation; reliance on models such as Pachelbel, Johann Michael and Johann Christoph Bach and masters from north, south and central Germany, together with a determination to surpass and dispense with such models; and an entirely unorthodox mixture of free composition and strict polyphony, unconventional harmony and pronounced virtuosity.

A subsequent stage in Bach’s development is found in the chorale partitas bwv766–8, mostly wrought in the manner of Böhm (bwv768 was revised and expanded during Bach’s Weimar period). The Canzona bwv588, the Allabreve bwv589 and the Pastorale bwv590 show south German and Italian characteristics, while the Fantasia in G bwv572 looks to the French style. With their sectional layout, the preludes in E and G minor, bwv566 and 535a, must have been written under Buxtehude’s immediate influence.

The extraordinary harmonic boldness and the richness of fermata embellishment in the pieces bwv715, 722 and 732, intended to accompany chorales, imply that they belong to the Arnstadt period when Bach’s treatment of chorales caused confusion among the congregation. The fugues after Legrenzi and Corelli, bwv574 and 579, should probably be placed among the early works. Admittedly, the scarcity of autographs, combined with the complicated situation surrounding the other sources, makes it difficult to establish a reliable chronology. It is scarcely possible even to draw definite conclusions about which of the early keyboard works belong within the period of Bach’s youth, if that is set at about 1700–07.

The models recede in importance from the Mühlhausen period, at the latest, and Bach’s individuality begins to pervade every note of his compositions. This applies particularly to the many extended organ chorale settings probably dating from between 1709 and 1712–13 and already so much in accordance with Bach’s later ideals that he found this group of 18 chorales (bwv651–8) worthy of revising in and after about 1740. In his freely composed organ works (toccatas, preludes, fantasias and fugues) Bach tightened up the formal scheme, preparing the way for the two-movement prelude and fugue through an intermediate type in which the fugue was a long, self-contained complex but the prelude was not yet a unified section (such as the first movement of bwv532). Here is an early manifestation of one of the peculiarities of Bach’s working methods, encountered later in the ‘48’: fugues attain their final form almost instantaneously, preludes often go through several stages of development. Probably the most important work of these years is the Passacaglia in C minor bwv582.

In about 1713–14 a decisive stylistic change came about, stimulated by Vivaldi’s concerto form. Bach’s encounter with Vivaldi’s music found immediate expression in the concertos after Vivaldi’s opp.3 and 7 (bwv593 etc.). Features adapted from Vivaldi include the unifying use of motivic work, the motoric rhythmic character, the modulation schemes and the principle of solo–tutti contrast as means of formal articulation; the influence may be seen in the Toccatas in F and C bwv540 and 564. Apparently Bach experimented for a short while with a free, concerto-like organ form in three movements (fast–slow–fast: cf bwv545 + 529/2 and bwv541 + 528/3) but finally turned to the two-movement form, as in bwv534 and 536. Of comparable importance to the introduction of the concerto element is his tendency towards condensed motivic work, as in the Orgel-Büchlein. Bach’s conception of this new type of miniature organ chorale, combining rhetorical and expressive musical language with refined counterpoint, probably dates back to a relatively early point, possibly the beginning of the Weimar period, but he cannot have started to collect them systematically in the autograph before 1713–14. Among the earliest entered in the manuscript are, among new compositions, bwv608, 627 and 630, and around 1715–16 Bach added bwv615, 623, 640 and 644 (to cite some typical examples). Some of the pieces, such as bwv601 and 639, are of earlier date. By the end of the Weimar period the Orgel-Büchlein was complete in all essentials, although a few isolated pieces were added later, such as bwv620 and 631 (c1730), the fragment O Traurigkeit and bwv613 (c1740). The final total of 45 pieces falls considerably short of the 164 originally projected, but Bach had already ceased to work consistently at this major undertaking as early as 1716. The reason for this is unknown; when he took it up again in Leipzig it was only sporadically and apparently in connection with teaching, or so a copy made about 1727–30 suggests.

Bach composed few organ pieces at Cöthen, but among them is undoubtedly the C major Fantasia bwv573 which he added to Anna Magdalena Bach’s Clavier-Büchlein (1722). In Leipzig, in about 1727, he composed the trio sonatas, a new genre for the organ, which he wrote, according to Forkel, for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. It was probably in conjunction with renewed activity as a recitalist – he is known to have performed in Dresden (1725, 1731 and 1736), Kassel (1732), Altenburg (1739) and Potsdam (1747) – that he returned to the prelude and fugue genre. Now, surely as a consequence of the ‘48’, he always wrote them in two sections, with the preludes as important as the fugues. There was a final flourish of virtuosity (especially in the writing for obbligato pedal) in works such as bwv544 and 548 (both c1730), but always in the context of a clearcut structure (there is a da capo fugue in bwv548).

In 1739, as the third part of the Clavier-Übung, Bach published a comprehensive and varied group of organ works. Framed by a Prelude and Fugue in E (bwv552), there are nine chorale arrangements for Mass and 12 for the catechism, followed by four duets. Bach’s encyclopedic intentions can be seen in the form of the work – that of a collection of specimen organ pieces for large church instruments and smaller domestic ones (including the harpsichord), symbolized in his invariable coupling of a large piece with a small; they can equally be seen in the variety of his contrapuntal methods, whereby he constantly produced fresh kinds of cantus firmus treatment. At the very end of Bach’s output for the organ are such disparate works as the C minor Fantasia and Fugue bwv562 (1747–8), the ‘Schübler’ chorales (arrangements after solo movements from cantatas) and the canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch bwv769. The variations, written for Mizler’s society in 1747, survive in two original versions, printed and autograph, whose different sequence of movements shows Bach experimenting with symmetrical form and the placing of climaxes.

17. Music for harpsichord, lute etc.

Just as Bach learnt most about the craft of composition from keyboard music, so too did he use it for preference in teaching others. He was obviously already a sought-after teacher when still in Weimar, but the move to Leipzig brought a decisive expansion of his teaching activities. H.N. Gerber, who studied with him in the early Leipzig years, left an account of Bach’s method of introducing the widest variety of composition by gradual stages, along with the technical premisses of their performance. According to Gerber he used to begin with the Inventions and the French and English suites, and conclude the course with the ‘48’. This canon of characteristic works from the decade 1715–25 constitutes, so to speak, the stylistic core of Bach’s music for keyboard and for that reason served later as the yardstick by which to settle questions of authenticity. Nowadays, however, the yardstick’s usefulness has become somewhat problematic, since it does not take fully into account either the stylistic breadth of Bach’s early output or the unorthodox musical language of the late works.

One of the essential elements of Bach’s art as a keyboard composer is the attention he gave, from the first, to the idiomatic qualities of the individual instruments, respecting not only the differences between organ and harpsichord but also those within the family of string keyboard instruments, of which he used at least four types: harpsichord, clavichord, lute-harpsichord and fortepiano. He is specific about the main kinds of harpsichord in the Clavier-Übung (the first part is for one-manual harpsichord, the second and fourth for a two-manual instrument). One of the earliest manuscript sources refers to the suitability of the E minor suite bwv996 for the lute-harpsichord (‘aufs Lauten Werk’). Bach took an active interest in J.G. Silbermann’s experiments in developing the fortepiano during the 1730s and 40s. There is reliable testimony that he improvised on several new Silbermann fortepianos of different types in the presence of Frederick the Great in Potsdam in 1747, which makes it possible to regard the three-part ricercar of the Musical Offering as conceived primarily for this new kind of keyboard instrument.

There is an obvious association between Bach’s renown as a keyboard virtuoso, together with his work as a teacher, and the fact that his keyboard music is among the most accessible of his entire output, and also that it was the most widely available. Its dissemination shows a marked rising curve during the 18th century, internationally as well as within Germany. Bach’s harpsichord works were available in Italy, France, Austria and England by 1750, and in view of this it is not surprising that the young Beethoven was schooled in the ‘48’. The growing recognition of the significance of this part of his output was reflected in the first complete edition of the works for harpsichord (begun in Leipzig in 1800 by Hoffmeister & Kühnel and continued by C.F. Peters) in which Forkel, among others, was involved.

Bach’s early harpsichord compositions are in a similar situation to the early organ works as regards dating and evaluation. None of the very earliest can be dated precisely. The Capriccio bwv992 has been assigned to 1704; there are no biographical data to support this (it is extremely doubtful that it was written for Bach’s brother Johann Jakob), but it certainly belongs to the period immediately after 1700. Before 1712–13 there were countless individual pieces like toccatas, preludes and fugues (these last mainly using a ‘repercussive’ thematic technique like the early organ fugues); variation form is represented by the Aria variata bwv989. In the toccatas (bwv910 etc.) Italian, north German and French influences conjoin in equal importance (bwv912 is an interesting counterpart to the organ work bwv532); Bach’s penchant for the French style is evident in his abundant use of the style brisé. After 1712 the particular influence of concertos by Vivaldi, Marcello and others can be seen in Bach’s numerous concerto arrangements (bwv972 etc.).

To the last years in Weimar and the early years in Cöthen belong works such as the so-called English Suites and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue bwv903, and also the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann of 1720, which is predominantly didactic in layout. It is however less important for its instruction in playing technique (the Applicatio bwv994 gives fingering and tables of ornaments after D’Anglebert) than as a book of instruction in composition. For Bach himself, the two could not be dissociated: the Clavier-Büchlein contains the beginnings of the ‘48’ as well as early versions of the Inventions and Sinfonias, under such titles as ‘preambulum’ and ‘fantasia’. To some extent the 1722 Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena is a companion work, though differently laid out.

Then followed, also in 1722, Das wohltemperirte Clavier (book 1 of the ‘48’), with its 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, surpassing, in logic, in format and in musical quality, all earlier endeavours of the same kind by other masters, such as J.C.F. Fischer’s Ariadne musica. The work shows a perfectly balanced contrast between free and strict styles, each represented by several different types of prelude and fugue. Bach’s writing in book 1 of the ‘48’ in the most varied fugues – from two- to five-part, in a wide range of styles – represents the culmination of a 20-year process of maturation and stands unparalleled in the history of music. The final version of the two- and three-part Inventions and Sinfonias, also arranged by key but representing a different method of composition whose object (according to Bach’s foreword) was ‘to teach clear playing in two and three obbligato parts, good inventions [i.e. compositional ideas] and a cantabile manner of playing’, dates from 1723.

The first traces of the subsequent great works of the Leipzig period are to be found in the 1725 Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena, which in fact anticipates the so-called French Suites bwv812–17 and the Partitas bwv825–30. The Partitas in particular (appearing in print singly from 1726) represent a further culmination in Bach’s keyboard output; whereas the ‘48’ shows the prelude and fugue type developed to its most consummate maturity, these present similarly matured specimens of the most popular harpsichord genre of the time, the partita, comprising a suite of dance movements and ‘galanteries’. These – the burlesca, capriccio and the like – do not appear in the English or French Suites; as in the English Suites, each partita begins with a large-scale movement, each differently titled and each in a different style. Later, with the collected publication of all six in 1731, Bach inaugurated his series of published works under the general title Clavier-Übung (the title was borrowed from a publication by Kuhnau, his predecessor in office). In 1735 appeared the second part, whose contents were intended to be representative of the most prominent and fashionable styles: the Concerto in the Italian Style bwv971 embodies the ultimate stage in the process of transcribing instrumental concertos for keyboard, and stands in contrast to an Overture in the French Manner bwv831 which, more markedly than the partitas, represents what was specifically French in harmony, rhythm, ornamentation and melodic invention. 1741–2 eventually saw the end of the Clavier-Übung series with the aria and 30 variations known as the Goldberg Variations. Apparently Bach had not cultivated the variation form since his youth, so that the contrast between the Goldberg Variations and the early works (chorale partitas and the Aria variata) is the more marked. This work outshines all others as far as performing technique is concerned (Domenico Scarlatti’s influence is unmistakable in places). The large-scale cyclical layout (based on a sequence of 10 x 3 movements, incorporating a series of nine canons, one at every third variation, arranged in order of ascending intervals to move towards a climax, with a final quodlibet) is without precedent. The basis of the composition is a ground bass of 32 bars, developed from the Ruggiero and related bass patterns, first presented in the aria and then subjected to free and canonic elaboration in a wide variety of ways. In their monothematic and emphatically contrapuntal conception, the Goldberg Variations set the scene for Bach’s last keyboard works – the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue.

Besides the harpsichord works published in the 1730s, the only other major work is the second part of Das wohltemperirte Clavier (not so titled – the complete autograph does not survive). This companion-piece is less unified than book 1 and was partly assembled from existing preludes and fugues, some of them transposed. The freshly composed pieces probably date chiefly from the late 1730s; the work was complete by 1744 at the latest. Apart from this one major undertaking, Bach appears to have composed very few keyboard works at this period: perhaps the Fantasia ‘sur un rondeau’ bwv918, certainly the Fantasia in C minor with fragmentary fugue bwv906.

The dates of composition of the seven surviving works for lute – apparently almost his total output for the instrument – cover at least 30 years. The earliest work is the Suite in E minor bwv996, which dates from the Weimar period; it already shows a surprisingly balanced construction. The Prelude in C minor bwv999 shows an affinity with the ‘48’, and may thus belong to the Cöthen or early Leipzig period. All the other lute works were composed in Leipzig, starting with the Fugue in G minor bwv1000, an expanded polyphonic development from the violin fugue (in bwv1001), which (like bwv997) is in a tablature copied by Bach’s friend, the Leipzig lawyer and lutenist Christian Weyrauch. The Suite in G minor bwv995 (after 1011, for cello) dates from the period 1727–31 and is dedicated in Bach’s autograph to an unidentifiable ‘Monsieur Schouster’. The Suite in E (bwv1006a, after 1006 for violin) also survives in autograph form and is a much less demanding arrangement of its model as compared with bwv1000 and 995; it dates from the second half of the 1730s. Bach must have composed the Suite in C minor bwv997 before 1741; this is an original lute composition and is laid out in a similar virtuoso fashion to the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E bwv998 which can be ascribed to the early 1740s. The late works may have been written for the Dresden lutenists S.L. Weiss and Johann Kropffgans, and in any case were probably played by them. There is evidence that Weiss and Kropffgans performed at Bach’s house at least once, in 1739. Bach’s arrangement for violin and harpsichord of Weiss’s lute suite in A major (bwv1025) may have been made in connection with this occasion. His contributions to the repertory of the lute, long past its heyday but enjoying a final flowering in the German-speaking countries, represent, along with the works of Weiss, the culmination of the instrument’s 18th-century repertory. They require an instrument with 10 to 14 strings, but in Bach’s day were at least occasionally played on the lute-harpsichord, an instrument in whose construction Bach had assisted. The indistinct line between lute and harpsichord music is illustrated by the autograph of bwv998, marked ‘pour La Luth ò Cembal’.

18. Orchestral music.

Many of Bach’s orchestral compositions must be presumed lost. The surviving repertory can in any case give only an incomplete idea of his output for larger instrumental ensembles, for he must have written many further works during his years at Cöthen and while he was working with the collegium musicum in Leipzig. Traces of lost concerto movements may be found in numerous cantatas, such as no.42 (first movement), and other large-scale vocal works, such as the Easter Oratorio (first two movements); and various of the surviving harpsichord concertos, in particular, invite inferences about lost originals.

In the score bearing the dedication to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, the so-called Brandenburg Concertos are dated 24 March 1721. This is merely a terminus ante quem, for the concertos themselves must have been written over a considerable period before being assembled in 1721 as a collection of ‘Concerts avec plusieurs instruments’ (not as a single work in several parts). It cannot be proved that Bach composed instrumental music in his capacity as Konzertmeister in Weimar; but his position there and his preoccupation with the Italian concerto style during those years make it seem probable that he did. Of the Brandenburg Concertos, no.6 in particular points to the Weimar period, partly because of its indebtedness to the Italian type of concerto (above all in the middle movement) and also because of its unusual instrumentation (the particular combination of low strings is otherwise found only in Weimar cantatas). Other concertos (for instance the conjectural early version of no.1) may also belong to the Weimar period, but it is not possible to draw any firmer conclusion about a Weimar orchestral repertory.

The special significance of the Brandenburg Concertos resides in the fact that, like Vivaldi’s, they abandon the standard type of concerto grosso and use a variety of solo combinations. The originality of Bach’s ideas extends far beyond Vivaldi’s, as do the density of the compositional texture and the level of professional virtuosity. The devising of concise head-motifs, particularly in the first movements, shows a strong Italian influence. Most of Bach’s instrumentations are unprecedented. They feature all kinds of combinations, from homogeneous string sound (nos.3 and 6) to the heterogeneous mixing of brass, woodwind, string and keyboard instruments. Just as unusual is Bach’s conflation of the group concerto with the solo concerto in nos.2 and 5. No.5 probably represents the latest stage in composition of the set: it was written for the inauguration of the harpsichord he brought back from Berlin early in 1719 (an earlier version survives from about this date). At the same time it marks the beginnings of the keyboard concerto as a form.

For a long time Bach scholars assigned most of his chamber and ensemble music to the Cöthen years. Recent studies based on original sources and style criticism have led to a thorough revision of the chronology affecting this part of his output. It now seems that only the smaller part of the instrumental ensemble music (or at least of what survives of it) belongs to the Cöthen period, while the greater part was composed at Leipzig, and principally for the collegium musicum which Bach was associated with from 1723 and which he directed from 1729 to the early 1740s. Thus the four Orchestral Suites, with their leaning towards French style, were written in Leipzig: no.1 perhaps as early as 1725, nos.3 and 4 in about 1725 and after 1730 respectively and no.2 about 1739. The B minor Suite (no.2), with its hybrid mixture of concerto elements and suite form and the extraordinary virtuosity of its flute writing, is probably Bach’s very last orchestral work. The only solo concertos to survive in their original form from this time are the violin concertos in A minor and in E and the two-violin concerto in D minor, which again obviously relate to the collegium musicum. Pointers to lost works that may be supposed to have been composed in Cöthen can be obtained from Leipzig pieces showing clear signs of reworking, above all cantata sinfonias with obbligato organ and the harpsichord concertos. Among the putative originals discernible in later recensions are concertos for oboe d’amore (after bwv1053 and 1055), for violin (after bwv1052 and 1060) and for three violins (after bwv1064). The intended instrumentation of the original cannot always be conclusively determined from the later version, and allowance must also be made for substantial differences between the two versions, so that it is extremely rarely the case that reconstruction of a supposed but lost original is really possible. Bach never proceeded in a mechanical way; rather, he strove to give the arrangement an identity of its own by subjecting the model to further development and exhausting its potential. This often involved the addition of fresh contrapuntal parts, the alteration of detail and structural modification. Of special interest are Bach’s adaptations of instrumental works into vocal ones, such as the derivation of the first chorus of Cantata no.110 from bwv1069; also of note is the wresting of the outer movements of an ensemble concerto (bwv1044) out of the Prelude and Fugue in A minor for harpsichord (bwv894).

The most noteworthy of the later concertos composed in the 1730s, with substantial changes to the originals on which they draw, are the Triple Concerto in A minor bwv1044 (sharing several features with Brandenburg Concerto no.5), the seven harpsichord concertos bwv1052–8 and the concertos for two or more harpsichords bwv1060–65, all but one of them reworkings of earlier works by Bach himself (the exception is bwv1064, an arrangement of Vivaldi’s Concerto in B minor for four violins, op.3 no.10). In fact, Bach’s alterations and restructurings are sufficiently important – especially the deployment of the left hand of the harpsichord part and the invention of idiomatic harpsichord figuration – for works of this rank to be considered compositions in their own right. They owe their special historical importance to their occurrence at the beginning of the history of the keyboard concerto, a form which was to be taken up above all by Bach’s sons so that in Germany, until about 1750, it remained the exclusive preserve of the Bach family. A stimulus for the composition of the harpsichord concertos may have been the new instrument introduced on 17 June 1733 (‘a new harpsichord, the like of which no-one here has ever yet heard’), according to the announcement advertising the collegium musicum concert.

19. Chamber music.

As with the orchestral music, a great many chamber compositions are thought to be lost. Once again the greatest losses affect the Cöthen period, but the Weimar years also suffer. When the summary worklist in the obituary mentions ‘a quantity of other instrumental things, of every kind and for every kind of instrument’, it probably refers first and foremost to works for various chamber ensembles.

The unusual flexibility with which Bach manipulated the conventional genres of sonata and suite is comparable to his orchestral output, as regards formal and compositional aspects as much as textures. Particularly important is his emancipation of the harpsichord from its role as continuo instrument and its deployment as a true partner in the sonatas for harpsichord with violin (bwv1014–19), flute (1030–33) and viola da gamba (1027–9). The cycle of six harpsichord and violin sonatas (c1725–6) were the first in a series of works with obbligato keyboard and paved the way for a new musical genre. The traditional trio sonata with continuo still cast its shadow (for example, in the opening movements of bwv1015 and 1019), but it yielded by stages to a more integrated three-part style (for example, the opening movements of bwv1014 and 1018). The only genuine trio sonatas to survive, apart from the one in the Musical Offering, are bwv1038 and 1039, dating from the 1730s. Bach’s arrangement of the gamba sonata bwv1027, after bwv1039 for two flutes and continuo is an illustration of the development of the new type of trio writing from the trio sonata. A similar procedure stood behind his earlier development of the organ sonata. Most movements of the organ sonatas are based on instrumental trios, as the arrangement of the first movement of bwv528 from a trio sonata movement for oboe d’amore, viola da gamba and continuo in Cantata no.76 illustrates. This same movement preserves a trace of the many lost trio sonatas of the Cöthen years. Yet the trio sonatas of the Leipzig period, too, may represent only a small fraction of their original numbers, if the way the genre lingers on in the Musical Offering is any guide.

The list of surviving duo sonatas with continuo is also relatively short, and again dominated by works of the Leipzig period: the violin sonatas bwv1021 and 1023 and the flute sonatas bwv1034–5. The Fugue in G minor for violin and continuo bwv1026, from before 1712, is not only Bach’s earliest surviving piece of ensemble music, it is also the only chamber-music piece of the pre-Cöthen years to have survived as an independent entity. The only other sources we have for an idea of what kind of chamber music Bach wrote in his early years are the instrumental sonatas and sinfonias of the Weimar cantatas.

Bach’s creative powers in the Cöthen years appear in a special light in the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, dating from 1720, and the suites for solo cello, which are probably earlier. The sonata for solo flute (bwv1013) is not likely to have been composed in Cöthen, for the playing technique is much more advanced than, for example, the writing for flute in Brandenburg Concerto no.5. Yet all the works senza basso not only demonstrate Bach’s intimate knowledge of the typical idioms and performing techniques of each instrument, but also show his ability, even without an accompanying bass part, to bring into effective play dense counterpoint and refined harmony coupled with distinctive rhythms. The special importance of Bach’s chamber music was recognized at a very early date. J.F. Reichardt wrote in 1805, reviewing the first edition of the solo violin music, that the pieces represent ‘perhaps the greatest example in any art of the freedom and certainty with which a great master can move even when he is in chains’.

20. Canons, ‘Musical Offering’, ‘Art of Fugue’.

Bach’s preoccupation with the canon as the strictest form of counterpoint can be traced back to the Weimar period. In his organ chorales and particularly in the Orgel-Büchlein the canonic principle plays a major role. Canonic elements are present also in several of the early vocal works. Here however it is a matter of canonic technique cropping up in a context of complex contrapuntal construction; as a genre in its own right, the canon, in Bach’s day, would appear almost exclusively as a theoretical example in composition teaching. It was in this sense that it was often favoured – generally in the form of a circular canon – by musicians for entries in students’ albums: such entries were normally notated in enigmatic fashion, setting the would-be solver an intellectual exercise. Bach wrote such canons in albums more than once; for the most part they are probably lost. Except for bwv1076–7, all the surviving individual canons (1072–5, 1078, 1086) were probably dedicatory works of this kind; 1077 was re-used for this purpose. What is probably the earliest of them is dated 2 August 1713 (bwv1073, dedicatee uncertain); the latest is dated 1 March 1749 (bwv1078; dedicatee Benjamin Faber).

A new kind of theoretical canon came into being in connection with the Goldberg Variations, in which the canonic principle played a special part. In his personal copy of the Goldberg Variations Bach wrote in 1747–8 a series of 14 perpetual canons on the first eight bass notes of the aria ground (bwv1087), exploring the most varied canonic possibilities of the subject, subsequently arranging the individual perpetual canons in a progressive order, organized according to their increasing contrapuntal complexity. The types included range from simple, double and triple canons, retrograde canons and stretto canons to a quadruple proportion canon by augmentation and diminution. Nos.11 and 13 of this series are identical with bwv1077 and 1076 (depicted on Haussmann’s Bach portrait of 1746).

Closely related to these (and likewise probably dating from the later 1740s) are the Vom Himmel hoch variations, where Bach first used a strictly canonic scheme for a monothematic work in several movements of progressive difficulty. The Musical Offering (1747) is also plainly influenced by this mode of musical thinking. Here, for a theme incomparably more complex than that of bwv1087, he devised ten canons of differing structural types, notated as puzzle canons in the original printed edition of 1747. The series of canons on the ‘royal theme’ includes a canonic fugue, providing a bridge between the canons, which are primarily theoretical in conception though also intended for performance, and the two keyboard fugues or ricercares in three and six parts. A further constituent part of the Musical Offering is a trio sonata for flute, violin and continuo, also based on the royal theme. In its second slow movement Bach introduced echoes of the fashionable style practised at the Prussian court. The Musical Offering, in effect a compendium in three sections, shows Bach elaborating on the theme supplied to him by Frederick the Great in every imaginable way for an ensemble of up to three instruments.

The Art of Fugue constitutes the final contribution to this group of monothematically conceived works intended as representative examples of a specific principle. As a didactic keyboard work, the Art of Fugue in some ways forms a counterpart to the two books of the ‘48’, with the difference that here it is exclusively the fugue that is in question, and, what is more, the fugues are developed from a single theme. Bach’s work on the Art of Fugue was accomplished in two stages – from about 1740 to about 1745, and then (in connection with preparing the work for publication) in about 1748–50. The extant autograph score represents the conclusion of the first stage, in which the conception of the work already appears clearly: beginning with simple fugues (Bach avoided this term, speaking of ‘contrapunctus’), progressing through ‘counter-fugues’, double fugues and triple fugues, with interpolated canons, and culminating in a mirror fugue. For the printed version the number of movements was not only increased by four (two canons, a fourth simple fugue and most notably a closing quadruple fugue) but their order was rearranged so as to expound more logically the ‘chapter of instruction on fugues’. When Bach died the work may have been more ‘complete’ than it is in the form in which it has survived. In particular the quadruple fugue had surely been completed in all essentials, since the composition of its combinatorial section must necessarily be an early stage in the composition of a quadruple fugue. Only the three opening sections of the exposition, however, are extant, and these – further abbreviated by the editors, give the Art of Fugue the appearance of being a mighty torso.

The Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue mark both the end and the culmination of Bach’s activity as a keyboard composer in the broadest sense. While the two ricercars on the ‘royal theme’ of the Musical Offering represent different fugal styles (forward- and backward-looking) and different textures (three- and six-part polyphony), the Art of Fugue explores a notably more intensive monothematic conception. As a didactic keyboard composition in some sense it counterbalances the two parts of the ‘48’, yet with the difference that it concerns itself with fugue alone, in a series of compositions developed out of a single ‘principal composition’ (theme) – and does so using a technique in which forward- and backward-looking styles operate alongside each other, synoptically as it were. It was probably unintentional, and yet it is hardly by chance, that the initial premiss and the goal of Bach’s keyboard art and his musical thinking come together in the Art of Fugue.

21. Methods of composition.

Bach’s methods of composition can be outlined only roughly: the sources, musical and literary, present no more than a fragmentary picture. ‘Methods’ here refers to Bach’s general procedures of composition, as far as these can be described objectively (without venturing into conjecture about creative psychology) and can be related to certain essential impulses and particularly characteristic approaches.

Bach’s vast knowledge of the musical repertory was a decisive factor behind his art. He had an intimate knowledge of the types and styles of composition of his time and in particular of the work of his most important contemporaries; moreover, he had a sound idea of the music of the past, extending back as far as Frescobaldi and Palestrina. The study of works by other masters went hand in hand with experimentation in his own. It is thus characteristic that his acquaintance with the works of Buxtehude and Böhm, with Vivaldi’s concertos, with the Passions of Keiser and Handel and with the masses of Lotti and Palestrina should have left an immediate imprint on his compositions in the same genres. It was less a matter of imitation of a model than of an awareness of the possibilities, an expansion of his own manner of writing and a stimulation of his musical ideas. This is confirmed in a contemporary report by T.L. Pitschel on his manner of improvisation, according to which, before beginning his own fantasia, Bach as a rule played from music a work by another master (or perhaps one of his own) which would ignite his imagination. Further, C.P.E. Bach wrote that, in accompanying a trio, his father liked to extemporize a fourth part. This tendency to take compositions by others as a starting-point is paralleled in his late adaptations: in his arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater an obbligato viola part is added, replacing the one following the continuo in the original; and his version of the ‘Suscepit Israel’ from Caldara’s Magnificat in C expands it from a five-part into a seven-part piece. An important aspect of Bach’s procedure of composition is its systematic and encyclopedic nature. He habitually wrote works of one particular type within a relatively limited period: for example the Orgel-Büchlein, the ‘48’, the solo violin sonatas and partitas, the canons, the chorale cantatas etc. He was concerned to try out, to develop and to exhaust specific principles of composition. There are practically no completely isolated compositions. Relationships, correspondences and connections with other works can constantly be found. This approach to the procedure of composition is at once deep and yet of great natural simplicity; and it never results in mere repetition. Certainly there is repetition, of a kind, in the case of parodies or transcriptions of existing works. Yet even here it is inappropriate to speak of repetition, since in the process of parodying and transcribing, Bach always modified so that the end-product represents a fresh stage in the development of the original composition.

C.P.E. Bach related that his father did not actually compose at the keyboard – apart from some keyboard works whose material originated in improvisations – but that he often tried out his music on the keyboard afterwards. This procedure may be seen in the few instrumental works of which Bach’s autograph draft survives, for example the early versions of the Inventions in the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann, where an abundance of inserted corrections are to be found. In the vocal music, where a wealth of source material is available, the main stages of composition can often be reconstructed. In thematically and motivically self-contained movements, like arias and choruses, Bach normally began with the development and formulation of a motif, a phrase or a theme, which would be guided by the prosody of the text; he then added the contrapuntal voices, and continued in the same way, sometimes using ‘continuation sketches’ to plan the music’s progress in advance (see the critical edition of the sketches, Marshall, 1972). In choral fugues he usually began by outlining the thematic entries, and wrote in the accompanying parts afterwards. The decisive step was the embarkation on the writing of a movement, for progress was in its essentials determined by established models (harmonic-tonal groundplan, modulation patterns, aria schemes) and governed by the principle of unified continuation (‘style d’une teneur’ and ‘Affekteinheitlichkeit’ – ensured by a unified motivic organization and interchange, permutation and transposition of component sections). The invention of the central idea was for Bach the critical moment in the process of composition, as the title-page of the Inventions specifies: ‘gute inventiones zu bekommen’ (‘how to achieve good inventions’); and this is borne out by C.P.E. Bach’s report that his first requirement of his composition pupils was the invention of ideas. With this the die was cast, down to a work’s emotional content. Outlines and sketches relating to this operation can sometimes be found in the original manuscripts; typically, however, Bach hardly required more than one or two attempts before arriving at the definitive form of his principal idea. The further elaboration of the idea – the dispositio, elaboratio and decoratio – required mastery of his craft rather than inspiration.

In composing multi-movement vocal works Bach, understandably, began as a rule with the self-contained movements and only afterwards worked at the recitatives and chorales. In the recitatives he normally first wrote out the text and then added the melody and bass, section by section. In the chorales the bass was added to the melody and the middle parts were inserted later. Then all the movements were revised in detail, and sometimes corrections were made. The appearance of Bach’s working drafts is thus unusually clear and neat as a whole, although it is mainly in his fair copies that the particular quality of his handwriting, a quality comparable to that of his music, is expressed. The physical state of the fair copy had to reflect the degree of artistic perfection to which the composer aspired, and the pains taken to achieve neatness and clarity in the copy are not evidence of pedantry. Rather, Bach was aware of the dichotomy between the perfection of the musical idea and that of its representation in performance. For this reason and no other he made the following statement in 1738, through the mouth of his spokesman J.A. Birnbaum: ‘One does not judge a composition first and foremost by the impression of its performance. Yet if such judgment, which can be deceptive, is not to be taken into consideration, then I see no other way of forming an opinion about it except by looking at the work as it is set down in notation.’

Ultimately, for Bach, the process of composition was an unending one. Dynamic markings and indications of articulation would be inserted as he looked through the parts; he would revise and improve a work when he was copying it out, and when giving further performances would make fresh alterations and improvements. He also inserted corrections in works already in print. Throughout his life Bach was his own severest critic. Even in works which went through two or three different versions, like the chorale prelude An Wasserflüssen Babylon bwv653, the ‘final’ version does not represent a definitive one but merely a further stage in the search for perfection – the central and ultimate concern of Bach’s method of composition.

chorales, sacred songs, arias

WORKS

Bach did not always define instruments unambiguously; ‘corno’ could mean the normal horn of his time, the need for a brass player but not necessarily a trumpeter, or possibly the most suitable brass instrument (horn, cornett, slide-trumpet [tromba da tirarsi] etc.); parts for ‘three oboes’ at Leipzig may indicate any combination of oboes, oboes d’amore, tailles (tenor oboes in F, with no solo material) or oboes da caccia (a specific local tenor type, designed for obbligato work); four trombones indicate SATB and three ATB (usually below a cornett)

Dates of later copies or performances are given only if modifications are involved

Editions: J.S. Bach: Werke, ed. Bach-Gesellschaft. i–xlvii (Leipzig, 1851–99/R) [BG]J.S. Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Neue Bach-Ausgabe), ed. Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Institut, Göttingen, and Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, ser. I–VIII (Kassel and Basle, 1954–) [vols. in square brackets are in preparation] [NBA; CC = Critical Commentary]Catalogues: W. Schmieder: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Leipzig, 1950, enlarged 2/1990, rev. and abridged 1998 by A. Dürr, Y. Kobayashi and K. Beisswenger as Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) [BWV; A = Anhang]H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff: Bach Compendium: analytisch-bibliographisches Repertorium der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig and Frankfurt, 1985–) [BC]

†	variant versions exist; see bwv and BC

studies in counterpoint, canons etc.

church cantatas

Advent I = 1st Sunday in Advent; Trinity/Easter I = 1st Sunday after Trinity/Easter, etc.; most texts are compilations including at least one chorale; only single text sources given; where the text is entirely or mainly based on that of a chorale, its author’s name is given in parentheses



BWV	BC	Title (text/librettist)	BG	NBA

1	A 173	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, chorale (P. Nicolai)	i, 1	I/xxviii.2, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Annunciation; 25 March 1725
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
2	A 98	Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein, chorale (M. Luther)	i, 55	I/xvi, 83
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity II; 18 June 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 4 trbn, 2 ob, str, bc
3	A 33	Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid, chorale (M. Möller)	i, 75	I/v, 191
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany II; 14 Jan 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, trbn, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
†4	A 54	Christ lag in Todes Banden, chorale (Luther)	i, 97	I/ix, 1
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter; probably by 1708
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, str, bc [3 trbn added 1725]
5	A 145	Wo soll ich fliehen hin, chorale (J. Heermann)	i, 127	I/xxiv, 135
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIX; 15 Oct 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt da tirarsi, 2 ob, str, bc
6	A 57	Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden	i, 153	I/x, 45
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Monday; 2 April 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, ob da caccia, vc piccolo, str, bc
7	A 177	Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, chorale (Luther)	i, 179	I/xxix, 27
Occasion; 1st perf. : St John; 24 June 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
†8	A 137	Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?, chorale (C. Neumann)	i, 213	I/xxiii, 107, 165
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVI; 24 Sept 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
9	A 107	Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, chorale (P. Speratus)	i, 245	I/xvii/2, 93
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VI; c1732–5
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
10	A 175	Meine Seel erhebt den Herren (Luke i.46–55)	i, 277	I/xxviii.2, 10
Occasion; 1st perf. : Visitation; 2 July 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, str, bc
12	A 68	Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (? S. Franck)	ii, 61	I/xi/2, 1
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter III; 22 April 1714
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, ob, str, bc
13	A 34	Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen (G.C. Lehms)	ii, 81	I/v, 231
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany II; 20 Jan 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, ob da caccia, str, bc
14	A 40	Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit, chorale (Luther)	ii, 101	I/vi, 139
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany IV; 30 Jan 1735
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc
16	A 23	Herr Gott, dich loben wir (Lehms)	ii, 175	I/iv, 105
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan 1726
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
17	A 131	Wer Dank opfert, der preiset mich	ii, 201	I/xxi, 149
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIV; 22 Sept 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
†18	A 44	Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt (E. Neumeister)	ii, 229	I/vii, 109
Occasion; 1st perf. : Sexagesima; ? 24 Feb 1715 or ? 1713–14
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 4 va, bc [2 fl added 1724]
19	A 180	Es erhub sich ein Streit (after Picander)	ii, 255	I/xxx, 57
Occasion; 1st perf. : St Michael; 29 Sept 1726
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, taille, str, bc
20	A 95	O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, chorale (J. Rist)	ii, 293	I/xv, 135
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity I; 11 June 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, da tirarsi, 3 ob, str, bc
†21	A 99	Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (?Franck)	v/1, 1	I/xvi, 111
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity III; 17 June 1714 [part earlier]
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, ob, str, bc incl. bn [4 trbn added 1723]
22	A 48	Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe	v/1, 67	I/viii.1, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Quinquagesima; 7 Feb 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
†23	A 47	Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn	v/1, 95	I/viii.1, 35, 71
Occasion; 1st perf. : Quinquagesima, 7 Feb 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc [cornett, 3 trbn added 1724]
24	A 102	Ein ungefärbt Gemüte (Neumeister)	v/1, 127	I/xvii.1, 49
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IV; 20 June 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
25	A 129	Es ist nicht Gesundes an meinem Leibe	v/1, 155	I/xxi, 81
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIV; 29 Aug 1723
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, cornett, 3 trbn, 3 rec, 2 ob, str, bc
26	A 162	Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig, chorale (M. Franck)	v/1, 191	I/xxvii, 31
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXIV; 19 Nov 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, 3 ob, str, bc
27	A 138	Wer weiss, wie nahe mir mein Ende!	v/1, 219	I/xxiii, 223
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVI; 6 Oct 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, ob da caccia, org obbl, str, bc
28	A 20	Gottlob! nun geht das Jahr zu Ende (Neumeister)	v/1, 247	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas I; 30 Dec 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, 3 trbn, 2 ob, taille, str, bc
29	B 8	Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir	v/1, 275	I/xxxii.2, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of town council; 27 Aug 1731
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, org obbl, str, bc
30	A 178	Freue dich, erlöste Schar (adapted ?Picander from 30a)	v/1, 323	I/xxix, 61
Occasion; 1st perf. : St John; 24 June 1738 or later
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
†31	A 55	Der Himmel lacht! die Erde jubilieret (Franck)	vii, 3	I/ix, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter; 21 April 1715
Scoring : S, T, B, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc [taille added 1724]
32	A 31	Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, dialogue (Lehms)	vii, 55	I/v, 145
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany I; 13 Jan 1726
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
33	A 127	Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, chorale (K. Hubert)	vii, 83	I/xxi, 25
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIII; 3 Sept 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
34	A 84	O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe (adapted from 34a)	vii, 117	I/xiii, 131
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Sunday; c1746–7
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
34a	B 13	O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe [partly lost]	xli, 117	I/xxxiii, 29
Occasion; 1st perf. : ?wedding; 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
35	A 125	Geist und Seele wird verwirret (Lehms) [partly adapted from lost ob conc., cf 1059]	vii, 173	I/xx, 217
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XII; 8 Sept 1726
Scoring : A, 2 ob, taille, org obbl, str, bc
†36	A 3	Schwingt freudig euch empor (adapted ?Picander from 36c)	vii, 223	I/i, 19, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent I; c1725–30, rev. 2 Dec 1731
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
37	A 75	Wer da gläubet und getauft wird [inc.]	vii, 261	I/xii, 81
Occasion; 1st perf. : Ascension; 18 May 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
38	A 152	Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, chorale (Luther)	vii, 285	I/xxv, 219
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXI; 29 Oct 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 4 trbn, 2 ob, str, bc
39	A 96	Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot	vii, 303	I/xv, 181
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity I; 23 June 1726
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 rec, 2 ob, str, bc
40	A 12	Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes	vii, 351	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 2nd day of Christmas; 26 Dec 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob, str, bc
41	A 22	Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, chorale (J. Herman)	x, 3	I/iv, 39
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, vc piccolo, str, bc
42	A 63	Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats	x, 65	I/xi.1, 63
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter I; 8 April 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc incl. bn
43	A 77	Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen (?Helm)	x, 95	I/xii, 135
Occasion; 1st perf. : Ascension; 30 May 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc
44	A 78	Sie werden euch in den Bann tun	x, 129	I/xii, 167
Occasion; 1st perf. : Ascension I; 21 May 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
45	A 113	Es ist dir gesagt, Mensch, was gut ist	x, 153	I/xviii, 199
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VIII; 11 Aug 1726
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
46	A 117	Schauet doch und sehet	x, 189	I/xix, 111
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity X; 1 Aug 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, tpt da tirarsi, 2 taille, str, bc
47	A 141	Wer sich selbst erhöhet (J.F. Helbig)	x, 241	I/xxiii, 321
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVII; 13 Oct 1726
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, 2 ob, org obbl, str, bc
48	A 144	Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen	x, 277	I/xxiv, 107
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIX; 3 Oct 1723
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, str, bc
49	A 150	Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, dialogue [sinfonia adapted from lost conc. 1053]	x, 301	I/xxv, 109
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XX; 3 Nov 1726
Scoring : S, B, ob d’amore, org obbl, vc piccolo, str, bc
50	A 194	Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft (Revelation xii. 10) [movt of inc. or lost cantata]	x, 343	I/xxx, 143
Occasion; 1st perf. : St Michael
Scoring : 8vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, str, bc
51	A 134	Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen!	xii/2, 3	I/xxii, 77
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XV; 17 Sept 1730
Scoring : S, tpt, str, bc [2 tpt, timp added by W.F. Bach]
52	A 160	Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht	xii/2, 27	I/xxvi, 133
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXIII; 24 Nov 1726
Scoring : S, 4vv, 2 hn, 3 ob, bn, str, bc
54	A 51	Widerstehe doch der Sünde (Lehms)	xii/2, 61	I/xviii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Oculi or Trinity VII; 4 March or 15 July 1714
Scoring : A, str, bc
55	A 157	Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht	xii/2, 75	I/xxvi, 57
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXII; 17 Nov 1726
Scoring : T, 4vv, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
56	A 146	Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen	xii/2, 89	I/xxiv, 175
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIX; 27 Oct 1726
Scoring : B, 4vv, 3 ob, str, bc
57	A 14	Selig ist der Mann, dialogue (Lehms)	xii/2, 107	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 2nd day of Christmas; 26 Dec 1725
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, 3 ob, str, bc
†58	A 26	Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid, dialogue	xii/2, 135	I/iv, 219
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year I; 5 Jan 1727
Scoring : S, B, str, bc [2 ob, taille added 1733–4]
59	A 82	Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten (Neumeister)	xii/2, 153	I/xiii, 67
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Sunday; 28 May 1724
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, 2 tpt, timp, str, bc
60	A 161	O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, dialogue	xii/2, 171	I/xxvii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXIV; 7 Nov 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
61	A 1	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Neumeister)	xvi, 3	I/i, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent I; 2 Dec 1714
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, str, bc
62	A 2	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, chorale (Luther)	xvi, 21	I/i, 77
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent I; 3 Dec 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc
†63	A 8	Christen, ätzet diesen Tag (? N. Heineccius)	xvi, 53	I/ii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas; c1714–15
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 4 tpt, timp, 3 ob, str, bc [org obbl added after c1729]
64	A 15	Sehet, welch eine Leibe (Knauer)	xvi, 113	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 3rd day of Christmas; 27 Dec 1723
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, cornett, 3 trbn, ob d’amore, str, bc
65	A 27	Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen	xvi, 135	I/v, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany; 6 Jan 1724
Scoring : T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 rec, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
66	A 56	Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, dialogue [adapted from 66a]	xvi, 169	I/x, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Monday; 10 April 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, str, bc
67	A 62	Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ	xvi, 217	I/xi.1, 1
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter I; 16 April 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
68	A 86	Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt (M. von Ziegler)	xvi, 249	I/xiv, 33
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Monday; 21 May 1725
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, hn, cornett, 3 trbn, 2 ob, taille, vc piccolo, str, bc
69	B 10	Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele (partly Knauer) [adapted from 69a]	xvi, 283	I/xxxii.2, 113
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of town council; 1742–8
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
69a	A 123	Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele (Knauer)	xvi, 373 (inc.)	I/xx, 119
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XII; 15 Aug 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, rec, 3 ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
70	A 165	Wachet! betet! betet! wachet! (partly Franck) [adapted from 70a]	xvi, 329	I/xxvii, 109
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXVI; 21 Nov 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, ob, str, bc
70a	A 4	Wachet! betet! betet! wachet! (Franck) [music lost]	—	I/i, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent II; 6 Dec 1716
Scoring : —
71	B 1	Gott ist mein König	xviii, 3	I/xxxii.1, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of Mühlhausen town council; 4 Feb 1708
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv; 3 tpt, timp; 2 rec, vc; 2 ob; str, bc incl. org obbl
72	A 37	Alles nur nach Gottes Willen (Franck)	xviii, 57	I/vi, 59
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany III; 27 Jan 1726
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
†73	A 35	Herr, wie du willt, so schick’s mit mir	xviii, 87	I/vi, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany III; 23 Jan 1724
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc [later version, 1730s, with org obbl instead of hn]
74	A 83	Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten (Ziegler) [partly adapted from 59]	xviii, 107	I/xiii, 85
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Sunday; 20 May 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
75	A 94	Die Elenden sollen essen	xviii, 149	I/xv, 87
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity I; 30 May 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
†76	A 97, A 185	Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes	xviii, 191	I/xvi, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity II; 6 June 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, ob d’amore, va da gamba, str, bc
77	A 126	Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben (Knauer)	xviii, 235	I/xxi, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIII; 22 Aug 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt da tirarsi, 2 ob, str, bc
78	A 130	Jesu, der du meine Seele, chorale (Rist)	xviii, 257	I/xxi, 117
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIV; 10 Sept 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, 2 ob, str, bc
79	A 184	Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild	xviii, 289	I/xxxi, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Reformation Festival; 31 Oct 1725
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 hn, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
†80	A 183	Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (Franck) [adapted from 80a]	xviii, 319, 381	I/xxxi, 67, 73
Occasion; 1st perf. : Reformation Festival; 1727–31, rev. 1744–7 or earlier
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc [ob d’amore, taille added c1744–7; 3 tpt, timp added by W.F. Bach]
80a	A 52	Alles, was von Gott geboren (Franck) [music lost]	—	I/viii, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : Lent III; Oculi, 15 March 1716
Scoring : —
81	A 39	Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?	xx/1, 3	I/vi, 111
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany IV; 30 Jan 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
82	A 169	Ich habe genug	xx/1, 27	I/xxviii.1, 77
Occasion; 1st perf. : Purification; 2 Feb 1727
Scoring : B, ob, str, bc; other versions for S/A with altered ww
83	A 167	Erfreute Zeit im neuen Bunde	xx/1, 53	I/xxviii.1, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Purification; 2 Feb 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob, str, bc
84	A 43	Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Glücke (Picander)	xx/1, 79	I/vii, 23
Occasion; 1st perf. : Septuagesima; 9 Feb 1727
Scoring : S, 4vv, ob, str, bc
85	A 66	Ich bin ein guter Hirt	xx/1, 101	I/xi.1, 157
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter II; 15 April 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, vc piccolo, str, bc
86	A 73	Wahrlich, wahrlich, ich sage euch	xx/1, 121	I/xii, 47
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter V; 14 May 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
87	A 74	Bisher habt ihr nichts gebeten (Ziegler)	xx/1, 137	I/xii, 63
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter V; 6 May 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
88	A 105	Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden	xx/1, 155	I/xvii.2, 33
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity V; 21 July 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob d’amore, taille, str, bc
89	A 155	Was soll ich aus dir machen, Ephraim?	xx/1, 181	I/xxvi, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXII; 24 Oct 1723
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc
90	A 163	Es reisset euch ein schrecklich Ende	xx/1, 197	I/xxvii, 61
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXV; 14 Nov 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, str, bc
†91	A 9	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, chorale (Luther)	xxii, 3	I/ii, 133, 164
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas; 25 Dec 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, timp, 3 ob, str, bc
92	A 42	Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn, chorale (P. Gerhardt)	xxii, 35	I/vii, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Septuagesima; 28 Jan 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
93	A 104	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, chorale (G. Neumark)	xxii, 71	I/xvii.2, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity V; 9 July 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
94	A 115	Was frag ich nach der Welt, chorale (B. Kindermann)	xxii, 97	I/xix, 45
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IX; 6 Aug 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
95	A 136	Christus, der ist mein Leben, stanzas from 3 chorales	xxii, 131	I/xxiii, 67
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVI; 12 Sept 1723
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
96	A 142	Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn, chorale (E. Kreuziger)	xxii, 157	I/xxiv, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVIII; 8 Oct 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, trbn, fl piccolo, 2 ob, vn piccolo, str, bc
97	A 189	In allen meinen Taten, chorale (P. Fleming)	xxii, 187	I/xxxiv, 199
Occasion; 1st perf. : 1734
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
98	A 153	Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan	xxii, 233	I/xxv, 243
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXI; 10 Nov 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
99	A 133	Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, chorale (P. Rodigast)	xxii, 253	I/xxii, 41
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XV; 17 Sept 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
100	A 191	Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, chorale (Rodigast)	xxii, 279	I/xxxiv, 241
Occasion; 1st perf. : c1732–5
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, timp, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
101	A 118	Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, chorale (Möller)	xxiii, 3	I/xix, 175
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity X; 13 Aug 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, 3 trbn, fl, 2 ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
102	A 119	Herr, deine Augen sehen nach dem Glauben	xxiii, 35	I/xix, 231
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity X; 25 Aug 1726
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, fl, 2 ob, str, bc
103	A 69	Ihr werdet weinen und heulen (Ziegler)	xxiii, 69	I/xi.2, 25
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter III; 22 April 1725
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, tpt, fl piccolo, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
104	A 65	Du Hirte Israel, höre	xxiii, 97	I/xi.1, 113
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter II; 23 April 1724
Scoring : T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, ob da caccia, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
105	A 114	Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht	xxiii, 119	I/xix, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IX; 25 July 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc
106	B 18	Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Actus tragicus)	xxiii, 149	I/xxxiv, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : funeral; ?1707–8
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, 2 va da gamba, bc
107	A 109	Was willst du dich betrüben, chorale (Heermann)	xxiii, 181	I/xviii, 57
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VII; 23 July 1724
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
108	A 72	Es ist euch gut, dass ich hingehe (Ziegler)	xxiii, 205	I/xii, 19
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter IV; 29 April 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
109	A 151	Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben	xxiii, 233	I/xxv, 159
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXI; 17 Oct 1723
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, str, bc
110	A 10	Unser Mund sei voll Lachens [cf 1069] (Lehms)	xxiii, 265	I/ii, 73
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas; 25 Dec 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 3 ob, ob d’amore, ob da caccia, str, bc
111	A 36	Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit, chorale (A. von Brandenburg)	xxiv, 3	I/vi, 27
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany III; 21 Jan 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
112	A 67	Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt, chorale (W. Meuslin)	xxiv, 31	I/xi.1, 179
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter II; 8 April 1731
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
113	A 122	Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut, chorale (B. Ringwaldt)	xxiv, 51	I/xx, 81
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XI; 20 Aug 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
114	A 139	Ach, lieben Christen, seid getrost, chorale (J. Gigas)	xxiv, 83	I/xxiii, 289
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVII; 1 Oct 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, 2 ob, str, bc
115	A 156	Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, chorale (J.B. Freystein)	xxiv, 111	I/xxvi, 23
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXII; 5 Nov 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, ob d’amore, vc piccolo, str, bc
116	A 164	Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ, chorale (J. Ebert)	xxiv, 135	I/xxvii, 81
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXV; 26 Nov 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
117	A 187	Sei Lob und Ehr dem höchsten Gut, chorale (J.J. Schütz)	xxiv, 161	I/xxxiv, 153
Occasion; 1st perf. : c1728–31
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
119	B 3	Preise, Jerusalem, den Herrn	xxiv, 195	I/xxxii.1, 131
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of town council; 30 Aug 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 4 tpt, timp, 2 rec, 3 ob, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
120	B 6	Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille	xxiv, 249	I/xxxii.2, 55
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of town council; ? 29 Aug 1729
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
120a	B 15	Herr Gott, Beherrscher aller Dinge [adapted from 120, partly lost]	xli, 149	I/xxxiii, 77
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; ?1729
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, org obbl, str, bc
120b	B 28	Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille (Picander) [adapted from 120, music lost]	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : 2nd day of 200th anniversary of Augsburg Confession, 26 June 1730
Scoring : —
121	A 13	Christum wir sollen loben schon, chorale (Luther)	xxvi, 3	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 2nd day of Christmas; 26 Dec 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, 3 trbn, ob d’amore, str, bc
122	A 19	Das neugeborne Kindelein, chorale (C. Schneegass)	xxvi, 23	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas I; 31 Dec 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 rec, 2 ob, taille, str, bc
123	A 28	Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen, chorale (A. Fritsch)	xxvi, 43	I/v, 49
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany; 6 Jan 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
124	A 30	Meinen Jesum lass ich nicht, chorale (C. Keymann)	xxvi, 63	I/v, 117
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany I; 7 Jan 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn, ob d’amore, str, bc
125	A 168	Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin, chorale (Luther)	xxvi, 85	I/xxviii.1, 33
Occasion; 1st perf. : Purification; 2 Feb 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, fl, ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
126	A 46	Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, chorale (Luther)	xxvi, 113	I/vii, 157
Occasion; 1st perf. : Sexagesima; 4 Feb 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, str, bc
127	A 49	Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott, chorale (P. Eber)	xxvi, 135	I/viii.1, 107
Occasion; 1st perf. : Quinquagesima; 11 Feb 1725
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 rec, 2 ob, str, bc
128	A 76	Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein (Ziegler)	xxvi, 163	I/xii, 103
Occasion; 1st perf. : Ascension; 10 May 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 hn, 2 ob d’amore, taille, str, bc
129	A 93	Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott, chorale (J. Olearius)	xxvi, 187	I/xv, 39
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity or Reformation; 16 June or 31 Oct 1726
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
130	A 179	Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir, chorale (Eber)	xxvi, 233	I/xxx, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : St Michael; 29 Sept 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, fl, 3 ob, str, bc
131	B 25	Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (? G.C. Eilmar)	xxviii, 3	I/xxxiv, 69
Occasion; 1st perf. : 1707
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, ob, bn, vn, 2 va, bc
132	A 6	Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn! (Franck)	xxviii, 35	I/i, 101
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent IV; 22 Dec 1715
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
133	A 16	Ich freue mich in dir, chorale (K. Ziegler)	xxviii, 53	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 3rd day of Christmas; 27 Dec 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
134	A 59	Ein Herz, das seinen Jesum lebend weiss [adapted from 134a]	xxviii, 83, 287	I/x, 71
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Tuesday; 11 April 1724
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
135	A 100	Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, chorale (Schneegass)	xxviii, 121	I/xvi, 199
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity III; 25 June 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, cornett, trbn, 2 ob, str, bc
136	A 111	Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz	xxviii, 139	I/xviii, 131
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VIII; 18 June 1723
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
137	A 124	Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren, chorale (J. Neander)	xxviii, 167	I/xx, 173
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XII; 19 Aug 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc
138	A 132	Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz?, chorale (anon.)	xxviii, 199	I/xxii, 1
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XV; 5 Sept 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
139	A 159	Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott, chorale (J.C. Rüben)	xxviii, 225	I/xxvi, 99
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXIII; 12 Nov 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
140	A 166	Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, chorale (Nicolai)	xxviii, 251	I/xxvii, 151
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXVII; 25 Nov 1731
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, taille, vn piccolo, str, bc
144	A 41	Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin	xxx, 77	I/vii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Septuagesima; 6 Feb 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, 4vv, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
145	A 60	Ich lebe, mein Herze, zu deinem Ergötzen (Picander)	xxx, 95	I/x, 113
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Tuesday; ?1729
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, tpt, fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
146	A 70	Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal [partly adapted from lost vn conc.; cf 1052]	xxx, 125	I/xi.2, 65
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter III; ? 12 May 1726 or ? 18 April 1728
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, taille, org obbl, str, bc
147	A 174	Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (partly Franck) [adapted from 147a]	xxx, 193	I/xxviii.2, 65
Occasion; 1st perf. : Visitation; 2 July 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, 2 ob, ob d’amore, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
147a	A 7	Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (Franck) [music lost]	—	I/i, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent IV; 20 Dec 1716
Scoring : —
148	A 140	Bringet dem Herrn Ehre seines Namens (after Picander)	xxx, 237	I/xxiii, 255
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVII; ? 19 Sept 1723
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, tpt, ob, ob d’amore, ob da caccia, str, bc
149	A 181	Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg (Picander)	xxx, 263	I/xxx, 99
Occasion; 1st perf. : St Michael; ? 29 Sept 1728 or ? 1729
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, bn, str, bc
150	B 24	Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich [? inc.]	xxx, 303	[I/xli]
Occasion; 1st perf. : ? before 1707
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, bn, 2 vn, bc
151	A 17	Süsser Trost, mein Jesus kömmt (Lehms)	xxxii, 3	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : 3rd day of Christmas; 27 Dec 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, fl, str, bc [ob d’amore added c1727]
152	A 18	Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Franck)	xxxii, 19	[I/iii]
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas I; 30 Dec 1714
Scoring : S, B, rec, ob, va d’amore, va da gamba, bc
153	A 25	Schau, lieber Gott, wie meine Feind	xxxii, 43	I/iv, 201
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year I; 2 Jan 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, str, bc
154	A 29	Mein liebster Jesus ist verloren	xxxii, 61	I/v, 91
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany I; 9 Jan 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
155	A 32	Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange (Franck)	xxxii, 85	I/v, 175
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany II; 19 Jan 1716
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, bn, str, bc
156	A 38	Ich steh mit einem Fuss im Grabe (Picander) [sinfonia adapted from lost ob conc.; cf 1056]	xxxii, 99	I/vi, 91
Occasion; 1st perf. : Epiphany III; ? 23 Jan 1729
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
157	A 170, B 20	Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn (Picander) [adapted from earlier version as funeral cant.]	xxxii, 117	I/xxxiv, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Purification; ? 2 Feb 1728 or later
Scoring : T, B, 4vv, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
158	A 61, A 171	Der Friede sei mit dir [? adapted from earlier cant. for Purification] [inc.]	xxxii, 143	I/x, 131
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Tuesday; after 1723
Scoring : B, 4vv, ob, vn, bc
159	A 50	Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem (Picander)	xxxii, 157	I/viii.1, 159
Occasion; 1st perf. : Quinquagesima; ? 27 Feb 1729
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
†161	A 135	Komm, du süsse Todesstunde (Franck)	xxxiii, 3	I/xxiii, 3, 35
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVI; 6 Oct 1715
Scoring : A, T, 4vv, 2 rec, org obbl, str, bc
162	A 148	Ach! ich sehe, jetzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe (Franck) [inc.]	xxxiii, 31	I/xxv, 3, 23
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XX; 3 Nov 1715
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, hn da tirarsi, str, bc
163	A 158	Nur jedem das Seine (Franck)	xxxiii, 49	I/xxvi, 79
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXIII; 24 Nov 1715
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, str, bc
164	A 128	Ihr, die ihr euch von Christo nennet (Franck)	xxxiii, 67	I/xxi, 59
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIII; 26 Aug 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
165	A 90	O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad (Franck)	xxxiii, 91	I/xv, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity; 16 June 1715
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, str, bc
166	A 71	Wo gehest du hin? [inc.]	xxxiii, 107	I/xii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter IV; 7 May 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc
167	A 176	Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe	xxxiii, 125	I/xxix, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : St John; 24 June 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt da tirarsi, ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
168	A 116	Tue Rechnung! Donnerwort (Franck)	xxxiii, 149	I/xix, 89
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IX; 29 July 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
169	A 143	Gott soll allein mein Herze haben [partly adapted from lost conc.; cf 1053]	xxxiii, 169	I/xxiv, 61
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XVIII; 20 Oct 1726
Scoring : A, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, taille, org obbl, str, bc
170	A 106	Vergnügte Ruh’, beliebte Seelenlust (Lehms)	xxxiii, 195	I/xvii.2, 61
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VI; 28 July 1726
Scoring : A, ob, d’amore, org obbl, str, bc
171	A 24	Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm (Picander)	xxxv, 3	I/iv, 133
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan ?1729
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc
†172	A 81	Erschallet, ihr Lieder (?Franck)	xxxv, 37	I/xiii, 3, 35
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Sunday; 20 May 1714
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, ob, str, bc
173	A 85	Erhöhtes Fleisch und Blut [adapted from 173a]	xxxv, 73	I/xiv, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Monday; ? 29 May 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, str, bc
174	A 87	Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte (Picander)	xxxv, 105	I/xiv, 65
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Monday; 6 June 1729
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob, taille, str, bc
175	A 89	Er rufet seinen Schafen mit Namen (M. von Ziegler)	xxxv, 161	I/xiv, 149, 165
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Tuesday; 22 May 1725
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 tpt, 3 rec, vc piccolo, str, bc
176	A 92	Es is ein trotzig, und verzagt Ding (M. von Ziegler)	xxxv, 181	I/xv, 19
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity; 27 May 1725
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 ob, ob da caccia, str, bc
177	A 103	Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, chorale (J. Agricola)	xxxv, 201	I/xvii.1, 79
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IV; 6 July 1732
Scoring : S, A, T, 4vv, 2 ob, taille, bn, str, bc
178	A 112	Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält, chorale (J. Jonas)	xxxv, 237; xli, 204	I/xviii, 161
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VIII; 30 July 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, hn, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
179	A 121	Siehe zu, dass deine Gottesfurcht	xxxv, 275	I/xx, 57
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XI; 8 Aug 1723
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
180	A 149	Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, chorale (J. Franck)	xxxv, 295	I/xxv, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XX; 22 Oct 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, fl, ob, ob da caccia, vc piccolo, str, bc
181	A 45	Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister [? incl. earlier material] [inc.]	xxxvii, 3	I/vii, 135
Occasion; 1st perf. : Sexagesima; 13 Feb 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, tpt, str, bc [fl, ob added later]
†182	A 53, A 172	Himmelskönig, sei willkommen (?Franck)	xxxvii, 23	I/viii.2, 3, 43
Occasion; 1st perf. : Palm Sunday; 25 March 1714
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, rec, str, bc
183	A 79	Sie werden euch in den Bann tun (Ziegler)	xxxvii, 61	I/xii, 189
Occasion; 1st perf. : Ascension I; 13 May 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, 2 ob da caccia, vc piccolo, str, bc
184	A 88	Erwünschtes Freudenlicht [adapted from 184a]	xxxvii, 77	I/xiv, 121
Occasion; 1st perf. : Whit Tuesday; 30 May 1724
Scoring : S, A, T, 4vv, 2 fl, str, bc
185	A 101	Barmherziges Herze der ewigen Liebe (Franck)	xxxvii, 103	I/xvii.1, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity IV; 14 July 1715
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, ob, str, bc [later version with tpt da tirarsi instead of ob]
†186	A 108	Ärgre dich, o Seele, nicht (partly Franck) [adapted from 186a]	xxxvii, 121	I/xviii, 17
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VII; 11 July 1723
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, taille, str, bc
186a	A 5	Ärgre dich, o Seele, nicht (Franck) [music lost]	—	I/i, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : Advent III; 13 Dec 1716
Scoring : —
187	A 110	Es wartet alles auf dich	xxxvii, 157	I/xviii, 93
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity VII; 4 Aug 1726
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
188	A 154	Ich habe meine Zuversicht (Picander) [sinfonia adapted from lost vn conc.; cf 1052]	xxxvii, 195; xlv/1, 234	I/xxv, 267
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XXI; ? 17 Oct 1728
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, taille, org obbl, str, bc
190	A 21	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied! [partly lost]	xxxvii, 229	I/iv, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan 1724
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, ob d’amore, bn, str, bc
190a	B 27	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied! [adapted from 190, lost]	—	I/xxxiv, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : 200th anniversary of Augsburg Confession; 25 June 1730
Scoring : —
192	A 188	Nun danket alle Gott, chorale (M. Rinkart) [partly lost]	xli, 67	I/xxxiv, 109
Occasion; 1st perf. : 1730
Scoring : S, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
193	B 5	Ihr Tore zu Zion	xli, 93	I/xxxii, 203
Occasion; 1st perf. : inauguration of town council; 25 Aug 1727
Scoring : S, A, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
194	A 91, B 31	Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest [adapted from 194a]	xxix, 101	I/xxxi, 147
Occasion; 1st perf. : consecration of Störmthal church and org; 2 Nov 1723
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, 3 ob, str, bc
†195	B 14	Dem Gerechten muss das Licht	xiii/1, 3	I/xxxiii, 17
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; 1727–31, rev. c1742 and 1747–8
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 hn, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
196	B 11	Der Herr denket an uns (Ps cxv)	xiii/1, 73	I/xxxiii, 3
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; ?1707–8
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, str, bc
197	B 16	Gott ist unsre Zuversicht [partly based on 197a]	xiii/1, 97	I/xxxiii, 119
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; 1736/7
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
197a	A 11	Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe (Picander) [partly lost]	xli, 109	I/ii, 65
Occasion; 1st perf. : Christmas; 25 Dec ?1728
Scoring : A, B, 4vv, 2 fl, ob d’amore, vc/bn, str, bc
†199	A 120	Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (Lehms)	xli, 202 (inc.)	I/xx, 3, 25, 46, 48
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XI; 12 Aug 1714
Scoring : S, ob, str, bc
200	A 192	Bekennen will ich seinen Namen [frag. of lost cantata]	—	I/xxviii.1, 189
Occasion; 1st perf. : ?Epiphany or ?Purification; c1742
Scoring : A, 2 vn, bc

Lost or incomplete

Doubtful and spurious

Lost or incomplete



BWV	BC	Title (librettist)	BG	NBA, CC

223	A 186	Meine Seele soll Gott loben	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : —
Remarks : only incipit of last movt extant
244a	B 22	Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt (Picander)	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : funeral of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 24 March 1729
Remarks : music lost, text partly same as St Matthew Passion (244), and Trauer Ode (198)
1045	A 193	[Sinfonia], from lost cant.	xxi/1, 65	I/xxxiv, 307
Occasion; 1st perf. : c1743–6
Remarks : vn, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc
1083	—	Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden (after Ps li) [arr. of Pergolesi: Stabat mater]	—	[I/xli]
Occasion; 1st perf. : c1745–7
Remarks : S, A, str, bc
a2	A 147	[untexted frag.]	xxxix, p.xxix	I/xxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : Trinity XIX; 1729
Remarks : 6-bar frag. in autograph of 226
a3	B 7	Gott, gib dein Gerichte dem Könige (Picander)	—	I/xxxii.2
Occasion; 1st perf. : change of town council; 28 Aug 1730
Remarks : only text extant
a4	B 4	Wünschet Jerusalem Glück (Picander)	—	I/xxxii.1
Occasion; 1st perf. : change of town council; 26 Aug 1726 or 30 Aug 1728
Remarks : only text extant
a4a	B 29	Wünschet Jerusalem Glück (Picander)	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : 3rd day of 200th anniversary of Augsburg Confession, 27 June 1730
Remarks : only text extant
a5	B 30	Lobet den Herrn, alle seine Heerscharen (C.F. Hunold)	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 10 Dec 1718
Remarks : only text extant
a14	B 12	Sein Segen fliesst daher wie ein Strom	—	I/xxxiii
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; 12 Feb 1725
Remarks : only text extant
a15	B 32	Siehe, der Hüter Israel	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : degree ceremony, Leipzig; 1723–49
Remarks : cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1761; lost
a17		Mein Gott, nimm die gerechte Seele	—	I/xxxiv
Occasion; 1st perf. : funeral
Remarks : cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1761; lost
a193	B 9	Herrscher des Himmels, König der Ehren	—	I/xxxii
Occasion; 1st perf. : change of town council; 29 Aug 1740
Remarks : last chorus adapted from 208, otherwise lost
a190		Ich bin ein Pilgrim auf der Welt (Picander)	—	I/xxxiii, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter Monday; ? 18 April 1729
Remarks : only frag. of 4th movt extant
a192	B 2	[title unknown]	—	I/xxxii.1
Occasion; 1st perf. : change of Mühlhausen town council; 1709
Remarks : lost
a197		Ihr wallenden Wolken	—	I/iv
Occasion; 1st perf. : ? New Year
Remarks : cited in Forkel: Nachlassverzeichnis, 1819, lost
a64		[title unknown]	xxiii, p.xxxii	I/xi.1
Occasion; 1st perf. : Easter I
Remarks : 7-bar sketch in autograph score of 103
a80		Sie werden euch in den Bann tun	—	I/xxxi.1
Occasion; 1st perf. : ? Ascension I
Remarks : 6-bar sketch in autograph score of 79
a182		[title unknown]	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : St Michael; Sept 1729
Remarks : 14-bar sketch for opening of cant. in autograph score of 201
—	B 19	Was ist, das wir Leben nennen	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : dedication service; 2 April 1716
Remarks : —
—	B 21	[title unknown]	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : first funeral music for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 23 March 1729
Remarks : music lost

Doubtful and spurious

15	Denn du wirst meine Seele	Easter	by J.L. Bach	ii, 135	—
53	Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde (?Franck)	funeral	? by M. Hoffmann	xii/2, 53	—
141	Das ist je gewisslich wahr (Helbig)	Advent III	by G.P. Telemann	xxx, 3	—
142	Uns ist ein Kind geboren (Neumeister)	Christmas		xxx, 19	—
143	Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele	New Year		xxx, 45	I/iv, 167
160	Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt (Neumeister)	Easter	by Telemann	xxxii, 171	—
189	Meine Seele rühmt und preist	?Visitation	probably by M. Hoffmann	xxxvii, 215	—
217	Gedenke, Herr, wie es uns gehet	Epiphany I		xli, 207	—
218	Gott der Hoffnung erfülle euch (Neumeister)	Whit Sunday	by Telemann	xli, 223	—
219	Siehe, es hat überwunden der Löwe	St Michael	by Telemann	xli, 239	—
220	Lobt ihn mit Herz und Munde	St John		xli, 259	—
221	Wer sucht die Pracht, wer wünscht den Glanz	—		—	—
222	Mein Odem ist schwach	—	by (10) J.E. Bach	—	—
224	Reisst euch los, bekränkte Sinnen	c1733	frag., ? by C.P.E. Bach	—	—

secular cantatas



BWV	BC	Title (librettist)	BG	NBA

30a	G 31	Angenehmes Wiederau, freue dich (Picander)	v/1, 399; xxxiv, 325	I/xxxix, 53
Occasion; date : for J.C. von Hennicke; 28 Sept 1737
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
36a	G 12	Steigt freudig in die Luft (Picander) [music lost; arr. from 36c]	—	I/xxxv, CC; I/xxxix, CC
Occasion; date : Birthday of Princess Charlotte Friedericke Wilhelmine of Anhalt-Cöthen; 30 Nov 1726
Scoring : —
36b	G 38	Die Freude reget sich [inc.]	xxxiv, 41	I/xxxviii, 257
Occasion; date : For member of Rivinus family; 1735
Scoring : S, A, T, 4vv, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
36c	G 35	Schwingt freudig euch empor (?Picander)	xxxiv, 41	I/xxxix, 3
Occasion; date : Birthday; 1725
Scoring : S, T, B, 4vv, ob d’amore, va d’amore, str, bc
66a	G 4	Der Himmel dacht auf Anhalts Ruhm und Glück (C.F. Hunold), serenata [music lost]	—	I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; date : Birthday of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 10 Dec 1718
Scoring : 2vv, chorus, insts
134a	G 5	Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht (Hunold)	xxix, 209 (inc.)	I/xxxv, 51
Occasion; date : New Year; 1 Jan 1719
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
173a	G 9	Durchlauchster Leopold, serenata	xxxiv, 3	I/xxxv, 97
Occasion; date : Birthday of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 10 Dec ?1722
Scoring : S, B, 2 fl, bn, str, bc
184a	G 8	[some music preserved in 184, text lost]	—	I/xiv, CC; I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; date : ? 10 Dec 1720 or 1 Jan 1721
Scoring : —
193a	G 15	Ihr Häuser des Himmels, ihr scheinenden Lichter (Picander), dramma per musica [music lost]	—	I/xxxvi, CC
Occasion; date : Nameday of August II; 3 Aug 1727
Scoring : —
194a	G 11	[some music preserved in 194, text lost]	—	I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; date : ? for court of Anhalt-Cöthen; before Nov 1723
Scoring : —
198	G 34	Trauer Ode: Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl (J.C. Gottsched)	xiii/3, 3	I/xxxviii, 181
Occasion; date : memorial service for Electress Christiane Eberhardine; 17 Oct 1727
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, 2 va da gamba, 2 lutes, str, bc
201	G 46	Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan: Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde (Picander), dramma per musica	xi/2, 3	I/xl, 119
Occasion; date : ?1729
Scoring : S, A, T, T, B, B, 6vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
202	G 41	Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten	xi/2, 75	I/xl, 3
Occasion; date : Wedding; before 1730
Scoring : S, ob, str, bc
203	G 51	Amore traditore [not fully authenticated]	xi/2, 93	[I/xli]
Occasion; date : ? before 1723
Scoring : B, hpd obbl
204	G 45	Ich bin in mir vergnügt (Hunold)	xi/2, 105	I/xl, 81
Occasion; date : 1726–7
Scoring : S, fl, 2 ob, str, bc
205	G 36	Der zufriedengestellte Äolus: Zerreisset, zerspringet, zertrümmert die Gruft (Picander), dramma per musica	xi/2, 139	I/xxxviii, 3
Occasion; date : Nameday of Dr A.F. Müller; 3 Aug 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 hn, 2 fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, va d’amore, va da gamba, str, bc
205a	G 20	Blast Lärmen, ihr Feinde! [adapted from 205; music lost]	—	I/xxxvii, CC
Occasion; date : ? coronation of August III; ? 19 Feb 1734
Scoring : —
†206	G 23, G 26	Schleicht, spielende Wellen, dramma per musica	xx/2, 3	I/xxxvi, 159
Occasion; date : Birthday of August III; 7 Oct 1736; 2nd version, nameday of August III; 3 Aug 1740
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
207	G 37	Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten, dramma per musica	xx/2, 73	I/xxxviii, 99
Occasion; date : Installation of Professor Gottlieb Kortte; c11 Dec 1726
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, ob da caccia, str, bc
207a	G 22	Auf, schmetternde Töne, cant.	xx/2, 141; xxxiv, 345	I/xxxvii, 3
Occasion; date : Nameday of August III; ? 3 Aug 1735
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, ob da caccia, str, bc
†208	G 1, G 3	Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd! (Franck)	xxix, 3	I/xxxv, 3; I/xxxvii, CC
Occasion; date : Birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels; 23 Feb ?1713; later versions ?1713–17 or ? after 1738, ?1742
Scoring : S, S, T, B, 2 hn, 2 rec, 2 ob, ob da caccia, bn, str, bc
209	G 50	Non sa che sia dolore	xxix, 45	[I/xli]
Occasion; date : departure of scholar (?L. Mizler); after 1729
Scoring : S, fl, str, bc
†210	G 44	O holder Tag, erwünschte Zeit	xxix, 69	I/xl, 37
Occasion; date : wedding; ? 1738–41, after earlier version
Scoring : S, fl, ob d’amore, str, bc
210a	G 29	O angenehme Melodei! [music lost, mostly = 210]	xxix, 245	I/xxxix, 143
Occasion; date : for Joachim Fredrich, Graf von Flemming; before Oct 1740, after earlier version
211	G 48	Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Coffee Cantata) (Picander)	xxix, 141	I/xl, 195
Occasion; date : c1734
Scoring : S, T, B, fl, str, bc
212	G 32	Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet (Peasant Cantata) (Picander)	xxix, 175	I/xxxix, 153
Occasion; date : manorial accession celebration for C.H. von Dieskau; 30 Aug 1742
Scoring : S, B, hn, fl, str, bc
213	G 18	Hercules auf dem Scheidewege: Lasst uns sorgen, lasst uns wachen (Picander), dramma per musica	xxxiv, 121	I/xxxvi, 3
Occasion; date : birthday of Prince Friedrich Christian; 5 Sept 1733
Scoring : S, A, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
214	G 19	Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten!, dramma per musica	xxxiv, 177	I/xxxvi, 91
Occasion; date : birthday of Electress Maria Josepha; 8 Dec 1733
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
215	G 21	Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen (J.C. Clauder), dramma per musica	xxxiv, 245	I/xxxvii, 87
Occasion; date : anniversary of election of August III as King of Poland; 5 Oct 1734
Scoring : S, T, B, 8vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc incl. bn
216	G 43	Vergnügte Pleissenstadt (Picander) [only vv extant]	—	I/xl, 23
Occasion; date : wedding; 5 Feb 1728
Scoring : S, A, insts
216a	G 47	Erwählte Pleissenstadt [music lost]	xxxiv, p.xlvi	I/xl, CC
Occasion; date : for Leipzig city council; after 1728
Scoring : —
249a	G 2	Entfliehet, verschwindet, entweichet, ihr Sorgen (Picander) [music lost, but most in 249]	—	I/xxxv, CC; II/vii, CC
Occasion; date : birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels; 23 Feb 1725
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 3 tpt, timp, 2 rec, fl, 2 ob, ob d’amore, str, bc
249b	G 28	Die Feier des Genius: Verjaget, zerstreuet, zerrütet, ihr Sterne (Picander), dramma per musica [music lost]	—	I/xxxix, CC
Occasion; date : birthday of Joachim Friedrich, Graf von Flemming; 25 Aug 1726
Scoring : —

Lost



BWV	BC	Title (librettist)	BG	NBA

A5	B 30	Lobet den Herren, alle seine Heerscharen (Hunold)	—	I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 10 Dec 1718
Remarks : only text extant
a6	G 6	Dich loben die lieblichen Strahlen (Hunold)	—	I/xxxv
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan 1720
Remarks : only text extant
a7	G 7	Heut ist gewiss ein guter Tag (Hunold)	—	I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen; 10 Dec ?1720
Remarks : only text extant
a8	G 10	[title unknown]	—	I/xxxv, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : New Year; 1 Jan 1723
Remarks : lost; ? = 184a
a9	G 14	Entfernet euch, ihr heitern Sterne (C.F. Haupt)	—	I/xxxvi, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday visit of August III; 12 May 1727
Remarks : only text extant
a10	G 30	So kämpfet nur, ihr muntern Töne (Picander)	—	I/xxxix, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Joachim Friedrich, Graf von Flemming; 25 Aug 1731
Remarks : only text extant
a11	G 16	Es lebe der König, der Vater im Lande (Picander)	—	I/xxxvi, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : nameday of August II; 3 Aug 1732
Remarks : only text extant
a12	G 17	Frohes Volk, vergnügte Sachsen (Picander) [adapted from a18]	—	I/xxxvi, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : nameday of August III; 3 Aug 1733
Remarks : only text extant
a13	G 24	Willkommen! Ihr herrschenden Götter (Gottsched)	—	I/xxxvii, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : king’s visit and marriage of Princess Maria Amalia; 28 April 1738
Remarks : only text extant
a18	G 39	Froher Tag, verlangte Stunden (J.H. Winckler)	xxxiv, p.li	I/xxxix, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : opening of Thomasschule after renovation; 5 June 1732
Remarks : only text extant
a19	G 40	Thomana sass annoch betrübt (J.A. Landvoigt)	xxxiv, p.lviii	I/xxxix, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : in honour of new Rektor of Thommasschule J.A. Ernesti; 21 Nov 1734
Remarks : only text extant
a20	G 33	Latin ode [title unknown]	—	I/xxxviii, CC
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Duke Friedrich II of Saxe-Gotha; 9 Aug 1723
Remarks : lost
a196		Auf! süss entzückende Gewalt (Gottsched)	—	I/xl, 22
Occasion; 1st perf. : wedding; 27 Nov 1725
Remarks : only text extant
a194		[title unknown]	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of Johann August of Anhalt-Zerbst; 9 Aug 1722
Remarks : lost
—	G 25	[title unknown]	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : birthday of August III; 7 Oct 1739
Remarks : lost
—	G 49	Wo sind meine Wunderwerke	—	—
Occasion; 1st perf. : ? departure of Rektor J.M. Gesner; 1732–5, ? 4 Oct 1734
Remarks : frag. of inst parts

latin church music



BWV	BC	Title	BG	NBA

191	E 16	Gloria in excelsis Deo	xli, 3	I/ii, 173
Remarks : perf. Christmas 1745; adapted from Mass 232^I
Scoring : S, T, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
232	E 1	[Mass in B minor]:	vi	II/i
Remarks : assembled c1747–9
		Missa (Kyrie, Gloria)
Remarks : ded. new Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, 1733; Gratias agimus from 29, 1731; Qui tollis from 46, 1723
Scoring : 2 S, A, T, B, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, hn, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, 2 bn, str, bc
		†Symbolum Nicenum (Credo)
Remarks : added to autograph score c1747–9; Patrem omnipotentem from 171, ?1729; Crucifixus from 12, 1714; Et exspecto from 120, 1728–9; Credo (early version), c1740
Scoring : S, A, B, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
		Sanctus
Remarks : 1st perf. Christmas Day 1724; added to autograph score c1747–9
Scoring : 6vv, 3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, str, bc
		Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei et Dona nobis pacem
Remarks : added to autograph score c1747–9; Osanna from a9, 1727, and a11, 1732; Agnus Dei from 11, 1735; Dona nobis pacem from 29, 1731 (cf Gratias agimus, above)
Scoring : A, T, 8vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc
		4 missae breves:
Remarks : ?1738–9 or later; mostly adaptations of cant. movts
233	E 6	F	viii, 3	II/ii, 199
Remarks : from 11, 40, 102, a18
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 hn, ob, bn, str, bc
233a	E 7	Kyrie, F	xli, 187	II/ii, 287
Remarks : ?1708–17; orig. Kyrie of 233
Scoring : 5vv, bc
234	E 3	A	viii, 53	II/ii, 3
Remarks : from 67, 79, 136, 179
Scoring : S, A, B, 4vv, 2 fl, str, bc
235	E 5	g	viii, 101	II/ii, 129
Remarks : from 72, 102, 187
Scoring : A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
236	E 4	G	viii, 157	II/ii, 63
Remarks : from 17, 79, 138, 179
Scoring : S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
		5 settings of Sanctus:
Remarks : except 237–8, all probably arrs. of music by other composers
237	E 10	C	xi/1, 69	II/ii, 313
Remarks : perf. ? 24 June 1723
Scoring : 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc
238		D	xi/1, 81	II/ii, 327
Remarks : perf. ? Christmas Day 1723
Scoring : 4vv, cornett, str, bc
239		d	xi/1, 89	[II/ix]
Remarks : perf. 1735–46
Scoring : 4vv, str, bc
240		G	xi/1, 95	[II/ix]
Remarks : perf. 1735–46
Scoring : 4vv, 2 ob, str, bc
241	E 17	D	xli, 177	[II/ix]
Remarks : perf. 1747/8; arr. from piece by J.C. Kerll
Scoring : 8vv, 2 ob d’amore, bn, 2 str, bc
242	E 8	Christe eleison	xli, 197	II/ii, 306
Remarks : inserted in Mass, c, by F. Durante
Scoring : S, A, bc
243a	E 14	Magnificat, E	—	II/iii, 3
Remarks : perf. Christmas Day 1723; incl. 4 Christmas texts: Vom Himmel hoch; Freut euch und jubiliert; Gloria in excelsis; Virga Jesse floruit
Scoring : 2 S, A, T, B, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 rec, 2 ob, str, bc
243	E 14	Magnificat, D	xi/1, 3	II/iii, 67
Remarks : rev. of above, c1732–5; without Christmas texts
Scoring : 2 S, A, T, B, 5vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
1081	E 9	Credo in unum Deum, F	—	II/ii, CC
Remarks : perf. c1747–8; inserted in Mass, F, by G.B. Bassani
Scoring : 4vv, bc
1082	E 15	Suscepit Israel, e	—	—
Remarks : c1740–42, from Magnificat, C, by Caldara with addl 2 ?vn pts.
Scoring : 4vv, 2 ?vn, bc

passions, oratorios

244b		Passio secundum Matthaeum (St Matthew Passion) (Picander)	perf. Good Friday, 11 April 1727 and 15 April 1729	scoring similar to 244, but with only 1 bc group	—	II/va (facs.)
†244	D 3	Passio secundum Matthaeum (S Matthew Passion) (Picander)	perf. Good Friday, 30 March 1736, incl. 2 org; also perf. c1742	S in ripieno; chorus I: S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 rec, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, 2 ob da caccia, va da gamba, str, bc; chorus II: S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, va da gamba, str, bc [bc incl. bassono grosso, c1742]	iv, 1	II/v
†245	D 2	Passio secundum Joannem (St John Passion) (anon. compilation from B.H. Brockes and others)	perf. Good Friday, 7 April 1724; 30 March 1725 with 5 nos. replaced (see NBA II/v, suppl. ii); ? 11 April 1732 and 4 April 1749 with further revs.	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, 2 ob da caccia, 2 va d’amore, va da gamba, lute/org/hpd, str, bc [bc incl. bassono grosso in late rev., ?1740s]	xii/1, 3	II/iv
247	D 4	Passio secundum Marcum (St Mark Passion) (Picander)	perf. Good Friday, 23 March 1731; lost except for 1 movt ? rev. in 248 and 7 movts in orig. form in 198 and 54; see NBA II/v, CC	—	xx/2, preface	II/v, CC; I/xviii, CC
248	D 7	Oratorium … Die heilige Weynacht (Christmas Oratorio) (?Picander)	in 6 pts. for feast days Christmas to Epiphany 1734– 5; pts. of nos.1–5 adapted from secular cants. 213–15, most of no.6 from lost church cant. 248a		v/2	II/vi
		Jauchzet, frohlocket, auf preiset die Tage	perf. Christmas Day 1734	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
		Und es waren Hirten in derselben Gegend	perf. 26 Dec 1734	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob d’amore, 2 ob da caccia, str, bc
		Herrscher des Himmels, erhöre das Lallen	perf. 27 Dec 1734	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
		Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben	perf. 1 Jan 1735	S, S, T, B, 4vv, 2 hn, 2 ob, str, bc
		Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen	perf. 2 Jan 1735	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
		Herr, wenn die stolzen Feinde schnauben	perf. Epiphany, 6 Jan 1735	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc
249	D 8	Oratorium Festo Paschali: Kommt, eilet und laufet (Easter Oratorio)	perf. Easter, 1 April 1725 as cant.; rev. as orat c1738	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 rec, fl, 2 ob d’amore, str, bc	xxi/3	II/vii
11	D 9	Oratorium Festo Ascensionis Christi: Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen (Ascension Oratorio)	perf. Ascension, 19 May 1735	S, A, T, B, 4vv, 3 tpt, timp, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc	ii, 1	II/viii, 3
1088		So heb ich denn mein Auge sehnlich auf	incl. in Passion pasticcio, late Leipzig period; authenticity doubtful	B, insts, bc	—	[II/9]
—	D 1	[Passion]	?1717, lost; some numbers incl. in St John Passion, 1725			II/4, CC
—	†D 5	Addns to R. Keiser: St Mark Passion	c1713; perf. 19 April 1726	S, A, T, 4vv, str, bc	—	—

motets

texts of 225–8 and a159 are compilations, including chorale; other texts and librettist given in parentheses



BWV	BC	Title	BG	NBA

225	C 1	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied	xxxix, 5	III/i, 3
Occasion; date : 1726–7
Scoring : 8vv
226	C 2	Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf	xxxix, 41, 143	III/i, 39
Occasion; date : funeral of J.H. Ernesti; 20 Oct 1729
Scoring : 8vv, 2 ob, taille, bn, str, bc
227	C 5	Jesu, meine Freude	xxxix, 61	III/i, 77
Occasion; date : before 1735
Scoring : 5vv
228	C 4	Fürchte dich nicht	xxxix, 87	III/i, 107
Scoring : 8vv
229	C 3	Komm, Jesu, Komm! (P. Thymich)	xxxix, 109	III/i, 127
Occasion; date : before 1732
Scoring : 8vv
230	C 6	Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden (Ps cxvii)	xxxix, 129	III/i, 149
Scoring : 4vv, org
231	—	Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren	xxix, 167 (inc.)	—
Occasion; date : ? after 1 Jan 1725; from 28 and Telemann
Scoring : 8vv
a159	C 9	Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn	—	—
Occasion; date : before Sept 1713
Scoring : 8vv
†118	B 23	O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht (2 versions), chorale	xxiv, 183	III/i, 163, 171
Occasion; date : burial or memorial service; 1st version 1736–7, 2nd version c1746–9
Scoring : 4vv, 2 litui, cornett, 3 trbn; 2nd version 4vv, 2 litui, str, bc (2 ob, ob da caccia and bn, ad lib)
—	C 8	Der Gerechte kommt um (Isaiah lvii.1–2)	—	—
Occasion; date : ? late Leipzig period; reworking of J. Kuhnau: Tristis est anima mea
Scoring : 5vv, 2 ob, str, bc

chorales, sacred songs, arias



BWV	BC

		Wedding chorales, 4vv, 2 hn, ob, ob d’amore, str, bc, after 1730; BG 143 xiii/1, 147; NBA III/ii.1, 3
250	F 193.3	Was Gott tut das ist wohlgetan
251	F 59.4	Sei Lob und Ehr’ dem höchsten Gut
252	F 148.2	Nun danket alle Gott
		Chorales, 4vv, from Joh. Seb. Bachs vierstimmige Choral-gesänge, ed. J.P. Kirnberger and C.P.E. Bach, i–iv (Leipzig, 1784–7) [excluding those within larger works]; BG xxxix, 177; NBA III/ii.2, 3
253	F 35.1	Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ
254	F 1.1	Ach Gott, erhör’ mein Seufzen
255	F 2.1	Ach Gott und Herr
256	F 212.1	Ach, lieben Christen, seid getrost
259	F 5.1	Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen
260	F 10.1	Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr’
261	F 11.1	Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ
262	F 8.1	Alle Menschen müssen sterben
263	F 12.1	Alles ist an Gottes Segen
264	F 13.1	Als der gütige Gott
265	F 14.1	Als Jesus Christus in der Nacht
266	F 15.1	Als vierzig Tag nach Ostern war
267	F 17.1	An Wasserflüssen Babylon
268	F 19.1	Auf, auf, mein Herz, und du, mein ganzer Sinn
269	F 21.1	Aus meines Herzens Grunde
270	F 92.1	Befiehl du deine Wege
271	F 92.2	Befiehl du deine Wege
272	F 136.2	Befiehl du deine Wege
273	F 24.1	Christ, der du bist der helle Tag
274	F 27.1	Christe, der du bist Tag und Licht
275	F 28.1	Christe, du Beistand deiner Kreuzgemeinde
276	F 25.1	Christ ist erstanden
277	F 26.1	Christ lag in Todes Banden
278	F 26.2	Christ lag in Todes Banden
279	A 61/4	Christ lag in Todes Banden
280	F 65.1	Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam
281	F 30.1	Christus, der ist mein Leben
282	F 30.2	Christus, der ist mein Leben
283	F 31.1	Christus, der uns selig macht
284	F 32.1	Christus ist erstanden, hat überwunden
285	F 34.1	Da der Herr Christ zu Tische sass
286	F 183.1	Danket dem Herren
287	F 119.1	Dank sei Gott in der Höhe
288	F 36.1	Das alte Jahr vergangen ist
289	F 36.2	Das alte Jahr vergangen ist
290	F 38.1	Das walt’ Gott Vater und Gott Sohn
291	F 39.1	Das walt’ mein Gott, Vater, Sohn und heil'ger Geist
292	F 40.1	Den Vater dort oben
293	F 42.1	Der du bist drei in Einigkeit
294	F 43.1	Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich
295	F 178.1	Des heil’gen Geistes reiche Gnad’
296	F 44.1	Die Nacht ist kommen
297	F 161.1	Die Sonn’ hat sich mit ihrem Glanz gewendet
298	F 46.1	Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot’
299	F 47.1	Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen
300	F 51.1	Du grosser Schmerzensmann
301	F 50.1	Du, o schönes Weltgebäude
302	F 53.1	Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott
303	F 53.2	Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott
304	F 54.1	Eins ist Not! ach Herr, dies Eine
305	F 55.1	Erbarm’ dich mein, o Herre Gott
306	F 58.1	Erstanden ist der heil’ge Christ
307	F 150.1	Es ist gewisslich an der Zeit
308	F 62.1	Es spricht der Unweisen Mund wohl
309	F 63.1	Es steh'n vor Gottes Throne
310	F 64.1	Es wird schier der letzte Tag herkommen
311	F 66.1	Es woll’ uns Gott genädig sein
312	F 66.2	Es woll’ uns Gott genädig sein
327	F 105.2	Für deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit
313	F 68.1	Für Freuden lasst uns springen
314	F 69.1	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ
315	F 70.1	Gib dich zufrieden und sei stille
316	F 71.1	Gott, der du selber bist das Licht
317	F 72.1	Gott, der Vater, wohn’ uns bei
318	F 143.1	Gottes Sohn ist kommen
319	F 74.1	Gott hat das Evangelium
320	F 75.1	Gott lebet noch
321	F 77.1	Gottlob, es geht nunmehr zu Ende
322	F 76.1	Gott sei gelobet und gebenedeiet
323	F 140.1	Gott sei uns gnädig
325	F 79.1	Heilig, heilig
326	F 105.1	Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir
328	F 83.1	Herr Gott, dich loben wir
329	F 134.1	Herr, ich denk’ an jene Zeit
330	F 84.1	Herr, ich habe missgehandelt
331	F 84.2	Herr, ich habe missgehandelt
332	F 85.1	Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend’
333	F 86.1	Herr Jesu Christ, du hast bereit’t
334	F 202.1	Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut
335	F 170.1	Herr Jesu Christ, mein’s Lebens Licht
336	F 88.1	Herr Jesu Christ, wah’r Mensch und Gott
337	F 89.1	Herr, nun lass in Friede
338	F 90.1	Herr, straf mich nicht in deinem Zorn
339	F 23.1	Herr, wie du willst, so schick’s mit mir
340	F 91.1	Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr
341	F 94.1a	Heut’ ist, o Mensch, ein grosser Trauertag
342	F 95.1	Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn
343	F 96.1	Hilf, Gott, lass mir’s gelinge
344	F 97.1	Hilf, Herr Jesu, lass gelingen
345	F 99.1	Ich bin ja, Herr, in deiner Macht
346	F 100.1	Ich dank’ dir, Gott für all’ Wohltat
347	F 101.1	Ich dank’ dir, lieber Herre
348	F 101.2	Ich dank’ dir, lieber Herre
349	F 4.1	Ich dank’ dir schon durch deinen Sohn
350	F 139.1	Ich danke dir, o Gott, in deinem Throne
351	F 102.1	Ich hab’ mein’ Sach’ Gott heimgestellt
366	F 104.1	Ihr Gestirn’, ihr hohlen Lüfte
367	F 107.1	In allen meinen Taten
368	F 110.1	In dulci jubilo
352	F 187.1	Jesu, der du meine Seele
353	F 187.2	Jesu, der du meine Seele
354	F 187.3	Jesu, der du meine Seele
355	F 112.1	Jesu, der du selbsten wohl
356	F 113.1	Jesu, du mein liebstes Leben
357	F 114.1	Jesu, Jesu, du bist mein
358	F 116.1	Jesu, meine Freude
359	F 206.1	Jesu meiner Seelen Wonne
360	F 206.2	Jesu meiner Seelen Wonne
361	F 117.1	Jesu, meines Herzens Freud’
362	F 118.1	Jesu, nun sei gepreiset
363	F 121.1	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland
364	F 120.1	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland
365	F 123.1	Jesus, meine Zuversicht
369	F 124.1	Keinen hat Gott verlassen
370	F 125.1	Komm, Gott Schöpfer, heiliger Geist
371	F 129.1	Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit
372	F 82.1	Lass, o Herr, dein Ohr sich neigen
373	F 133.1	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier
374	F 135.1	Lobet den Herren, denn er ist freundlich
375	F 127.1	Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich
376	F 128.1	Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich
377	F 137.1	Mach’s mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt’
378	F 138.1	Meine Augen schliess’ ich jetzt
379	F 122.1	Meinen Jesum lass’ ich nicht, Jesus
380	F 141.1	Meinen Jesum lass’ ich nicht, weil
324	F 140.1	Meine Seele erhebet den Herrn
381	F 142.1	Meines Lebens letzte Zeit
382	F 144.1	Mit Fried’ und Freud’ ich fahr’ dahin
383	F 145.1	Mitten wir im Leben sind
384	F 146.1	Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr
385	F 147.1	Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist
386	F 148.1	Nun danket alle Gott
387	F 106.1	Nun freut euch, Gottes Kinder all’
388	F 149.1	Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein
389	F 153.1	Nun lob’, mein’ Seel’, den Herren
390	F 153.2	Nun lob’, mein’ Seel’, den Herren
391	F 154.1	Nun preiset alle Gottes Barmherzigkeit
392	F 166.1	Nun ruhen alle Wälder
396	F 155.1	Nun sich der Tag geendet hat
397	F 156.1	O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort
398	F 45.2b	O Gott, du frommer Gott
399	F 157.1	O Gott, du frommer Gott
400	F 160.1	O Herzensangst, o Bangigkeit und Zagen!
401	F 162.1	O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig
402	F 61.1	O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross
403	F 163.1	O Mensch, schau Jesum Christum an
404	F 165.1	O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid!
393	F 166.2	O Welt, sieh hier dein Leben
394	F 166.5	O Welt, sieh hier dein Leben
395	F 166.9	O Welt, sieh hier dein Leben
405	F 167.1	O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen
406	F 7.1	O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen
407	F 168.1	O wir armen Sünder
408	F 94.1b	Schaut, ihr Sünder!
409	F 173.1	Seelen-Bräutigam
410	F 174.1	Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig
411	F 175.1	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied
412	F 177.1	So gibst du nun, mein Jesu, gute Nacht
413	F 130.1	Sollt’ ich meinem Gott nicht singen
414	F 35.2	Uns ist ein Kindlein heut’ gebor’n
415	F 18.1	Valet will ich dir geben
416	F 181.4a	Vater unser im Himmelreich
417	F 185.1	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen
418	F 185.2	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen
419	F 185.3	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen
257	F 212.2	Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit
420	F 189.1	Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz
421	F 189.2	Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz
422	F 190.1	Warum sollt’ ich mich denn grämen
423	F 191.1	Was betrübst du dich, mein Herze
424	F 192.1	Was bist du doch, o Seele, so betrübet
425	F 195.1	Was willst du dich, o meine Seele
426	F 197.1	Weltlich Ehr’ und zeitlich Gut
427	F 200.1	Wenn ich in Angst und Not
428	F 201.1	Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist
429	F 201.2	Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist
430	F 201.3	Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist
431	F 203.1	Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein
432	F 203.2	Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein
433	F 204.1	Wer Gott vertraut, hat wohl gebaut
434	F 205.1	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten
435	F 207.1	Wie bist du, Seele, in mir so gar betrübt
436	F 109.1	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern
437	F 211.1	Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott
258	F 212.3	Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält
438	F 213.1	Wo Gott zum Haus nicht gibt sein’ Gunst
		Sacred songs, 1v, bc, in G.C. Schemelli: Musicalisches Gesang-Buch (Leipzig, 1736) [Bach was involved in the production of Schemelli’s hymnal, but research has discredited the methods by which these items were attrib. him; only bc ? by Bach unless otherwise stated]; BG xxxix, 279; NBA III/ii.1, 104
439	F 274	Ach, dass nicht die letzte Stunde
440	F 229	Auf, auf! die rechte Zeit ist hier [? melody by Bach]
441	F 245	Auf, auf! mein Herz, mit Freuden
442	F 257	Beglückter Stand getreuer Seelen
443	F 265	Beschränkt, ihr Weisen dieser Welt [? melody by Bach]
444	F 242	Brich entzwei, mein armes Herze
445	F 247	Brunnquell aller Güter
446	F 220	Der lieben Sonnen Licht und Pracht
447	F 221	Der Tag ist hin, die Sonne gehet nieder
448	F 222	Der Tag mit seinem Lichte
449	F 249	Dich bet’ich an, mein höchster Gott [? melody by Bach]
450	F 235	Die bittre Leidenszeit beginnet abermal
451	F 219	Die goldne Sonne, voll Freud’ und Wonne
452	F 250	Dir, dir Jehovah, will ich singen [melody by Bach]
453	F 225	Eins ist Noth! ach Herr, diess Eine [? melody by Bach]
454	F 230	Ermuntre dich, mein schwacher Geist
455	F 261	Erwürgtes Lamm, das die verwahrten Siegel
456	F 258	Es glänzet der Christen
457	F 275	Es ist nun aus mit meinem Leben
458	F 243	Es ist vollbracht! vergiss ja nicht
459	F 256	Es kostet viel, ein Christ zu sein
460	F 263	Gieb dich zufrieden und sei stille
461	F 255	Gott lebet noch; Seele, was verzagst du doch?
462	F 248	Gott, wie gross ist deine Güte [? melody by Bach]
463	F 223	Herr, nicht schicke deine Rache
464	F 276	Ich bin ja, Herr, in deiner Macht
465	F 231	Ich freue mich in dir
466	F 264	Ich halte treulich still und liebe [? melody by Bach]
467	F 269	Ich lass’ dich nicht
468	F 270	Ich liebe Jesum alle Stund’ [? melody by Bach]
469	F 232	Ich steh’ an deiner Krippen hier [? melody by Bach]
476	F 233	Ihr Gestirn’, ihr hohen Lüfte
471	F 228	Jesu, deine Liebeswunden [? melody by Bach]
470	F 271	Jesu, Jesu, du bist mein [? melody by Bach]
472	F 226	Jesu, meines Glaubens Zier
473	F 266	Jesu, meines Herzens Freud’
474	F 251	Jesus ist das schönste Licht
475	F 246	Jesus unser Trost und Leben
477	F 278	Kein Stündlein geht dahin
478	F 277	Komm, süsser Tod, komm, sel’ge Ruh’! [? melody by Bach]
479	F 285	Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag [? melody by Bach]
480	F 286	Kommt wieder aus der finstern Gruft [? melody by Bach]
481	F 236	Lasset uns mit Jesu ziehen
482	F 252	Liebes Herz, bedenke doch
483	F 279	Liebster Gott, wann werd’ ich sterben?
484	F 280	Liebster Herr Jesu! wo bleibest du so lange? [? melody by Bach]
485	F 272	Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen
488	F 281	Meines Lebens letzte Zeit
486	F 227	Mein Jesu, dem die Seraphinen
487	F 237	Mein Jesu! was für Seelenweh [? melody by Bach]
489	F 259	Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr
490	F 267	Nur mein Jesus ist mein Leben
491	F 238	O du Liebe meine Liebe
492	F 282	O finstre Nacht [? melody by Bach]
493	F 234	O Jesulein süss, o Jesulein mild
494	F 260	O liebe Seele, zieh’ die Sinnen [? melody by Bach]
495	F 283	O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen
496	F 253	Seelen-Bräutigam, Jesu, Gottes Lamm!
497	F 268	Seelenweide, meine Freude
499	F 240	Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig
498	F 239	Selig, wer an Jesum denkt [? melody by Bach]
500	F 241	So gehst du nun, mein Jesu, hin [? melody by Bach]
501	F 244	So giebst du nun, mein Jesu, gute Nacht
502	F 284	So wünsch’ ich mir zu guter Letzt
503	F 287	Steh’ ich bei meinem Gott
504	F 254	Vergiss mein nicht, dass ich dein nicht
505	F 262	Vergiss mein nicht, vergiss mein nicht [melody by Bach]
506	F 273	Was bist du doch, o Seele, so betrübet
507		Wo ist mein Schäflein, das ich liebe
		Pieces in Clavierbüchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach; BG xxxix, 289; NBA V/iv, 91:
511	F 214a	Gib dich zufrieden, chorale, g
512	F 214b	Gib dich zufrieden, chorale, e (arr. of 511)
513	F 218	O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, chorale [from 397]
514	F 216	Schaffs mit mir, Gott, chorale
516	F 215	Warum betrübst du dich, aria
524	H 1	Quodlibet, SATB, bc, frag., for wedding, Mühlhausen, by mid-1708
a40		Murky: Ihr Schönen, höret an, S, bc, before 1736

Doubtful

		Pieces in Clavierbüchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach; BG xxxix, 309; NBA V/iv, 102:
508		Bist du bei mir, aria (by G.H. Stölzel)
509		Gedenke doch, mein Geist, aria (anon.)
510		Gib dich zufrieden, chorale, F (anon. bass added)
†515	H 2	So oft ich meine Tobackspfeife, aria (anon., ? by Gottfried Heinrich Bach, ? arr. J.S. Bach)
517		Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seelen (anon.)
		Sacred songs, 5 for 1v, bc (probably spurious); NBA [III/iii]:
519		Hier lieg’ ich nun
520		Das walt’ mein Gott
521		Gott mein Herz dir Dank zusendet
522		Meine Seele, lass es gehen
523		Ich gnüge mich an meinem Stande

organ

independent of chorales

based on chorales

independent of chorales

BWV

Title

NBA

131a

J 62

Fugue, g

xxxviii, 217

—

Remarks :

arr. from 131

525–30

J 1–6

6 sonatas (E, c, d, e, C, G)

xv, 3–66

IV/vii, 2–76

Remarks :

c1730; no.3: cf 1044; no.4 arr. from 76

531

J 9

Prelude and fugue, C

xv, 81

IV/v, 3

Remarks :

? before 1705

†532

J 13, 54, 70

Prelude and fugue, D

xv, 88

IV/v, 58; IV/vi, 95

Remarks :

? before 1710

†533

J 18, 72

Prelude and fugue, e

xv, 100

IV/v, 90; IV/vi, 106

Remarks :

? before 1705

534

J 20

Prelude and fugue, f

xv, 104

IV/v, 130

Remarks :

? before 1710

†535

J 23

Prelude and fugue, g

xv, 112

IV/v, 157; IV/vi, 109

Remarks :

? before 1705; rev. ?1708–17

536

J 24

Prelude and fugue, A

xv, 120

IV/v, 180; IV/vi, 114

Remarks :

?1708–17

537

J 40

Fantasia and fugue, c

xv, 129

IV/v, 47

Remarks :

? after 1723

538

J 38

Toccata and fugue, ‘Dorian’, d

xv, 136

IV/v, 76

Remarks :

?1712–17

†539

J 15, 71

Prelude and fugue, d

xv, 148

IV/v, 70

Remarks :

? after 1720; fugue adapted from vn sonata, 1001

†540

J 39, 55, 73

Toccata and fugue, F

xv, 154

IV/v, 112

Remarks :

toccata ? after 1712; fugue before 1731

†541

J 22

Prelude and fugue, G

xv, 169

IV/v, 146

Remarks :

? after 1712; rev. c1724–5

†542

J 42, 57, 67

Fantasia and fugue, g

xv, 177

IV/v, 167

Remarks :

fugue: before 1725; fantasia: c1720

†543

J 26

Prelude and fugue, a

xv, 189

IV/v, 186; IV/vi, 121

Remarks :

after 1715; fugue: cf 944

544

J 27

Prelude and fugue, b

xv, 199

IV/v, 198

Remarks :

1727–31

†545

J 10, 51

Prelude and fugue, C

xv, 212

IV/v, 10; IV/vi, 77

Remarks :

? before 1708; rev. ?1712–17

†546

J 12, 53, 69

Prelude and fugue, c

xv, 218

IV/v, 35

Remarks :

?1723–9

547

J 11

Prelude and fugue, C

xv, 228

IV/v, 20

Remarks :

? by 1725

548

J 19

Prelude and fugue, e

xv, 236

IV/v, 95

Remarks :

rev. 1727–31

†549

J 14

Prelude and fugue, c/d

xxxviii, 3

IV/v, 30; IV/vi, 101

Remarks :

before 1705; rev. ? after 1723

550

J 21

Prelude and fugue, G

xxxviii, 9

IV/v, 138

Remarks :

? before 1710

551

J 25

Prelude and fugue, a

xxxviii, 17

IV/vi, 63

Remarks :

? before 1707

552

J 16

Prelude and fugue, ‘St Anne’, E

iii, 173, 254

IV/vi, 2, 105

Remarks :

in Clavier-Übung, iii, (Leipzig, 1739), see 669–89

553–60

J 28–35

[8 short preludes and fugues] (C, d, e, F, G, g, a, B)

xxxviii, 23

[IV/ix]

†562

J 41, 56

Fantasia and fugue, c

xxxviii, 64, 209

IV/v, 54, 105

Remarks :

fantasia: c1730; fugue (inc.) c1740–45

563

J 43

Fantasia, b

xxxviii, 59

IV/vi, 68

Remarks :

before 1708

564

J 36

Toccata, adagio and fugue, C

xv, 253

IV/vi, 3

Remarks :

?c1712

565

J 37

Toccata and fugue, d

xv, 267

IV/vi, 31

Remarks :

? before 1708

†566

J 17

Prelude and fugue, E/C

xv, 276

IV/vi, 40

Remarks :

? before 1708

568

J 47

Prelude, G

xxxviii, 85

IV/vi, 51

Remarks :

? before 1705

569

J 48

Prelude, a

xxxviii, 89

IV/vi, 59

Remarks :

? before 1705

570

J 49

Fantasia, C

xxxviii, 62

IV/vi, 16

Remarks :

? before 1705

571

J 82

Fantasia, G

xxxviii, 67

—

572

J 83

Pièce d’orgue, G

xxxviii, 75

IV/vii, 130, 154, 156

Remarks :

? before 1712

573

J 50

Fantasia, C

xxxviii, 209

IV/vi, 18

Remarks :

c1722; frag. in Clavierbüchlein, i, for Anna Magdalena Bach

†574

J 63

Fugue on theme by Legrenzi, c

xxxviii, 94, 205

IV/vi, 19, 82, 88

Remarks :

? before 1708

575

J 60

Fugue, c

xxxviii, 101

IV/vi, 26

Remarks :

? 1708–17

577

J 61

Fugue, G

xxxviii, 111

—

578

J 66

Fugue, g

xxxviii, 116

IV/vi, 55

Remarks :

? before 1707

579

J 68

Fugue on theme by Corelli, b

xxxviii, 121

IV/vi, 71

Remarks :

? before 1710

†582

J 79

Passacaglia, c

xv, 289

IV/vii, 98, 148

Remarks :

?1708–12

583

J 8

Trio, d

xxxviii, 143

IV/vii, 94

Remarks :

?1723–9

588

J 80

Canzona, d

xxxviii, 126

IV/vii, 118, 150

Remarks :

? before 1705

589

J 64

Alla breve, D

xxxvii, 131

IV/vii, 114

590

J 81

Pastorella, F

xxxviii, 135

IV/vii, 122

Remarks :

? after 1720

591

J 78

Kleine harmonisches Labyrinth

xxxviii, 225

[IV/ix]

5 concertos:

Remarks :

Weimar, c1714; arrs. of works by other composers

†592

J 88, 192

xxxviii, 149; xlii, 282

IV/viii, 56

Remarks :

arr. of conc. by Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar

593

J 86

xxxviii, 158

IV/viii

Remarks :

arr. of Vivaldi op.3 no.8 = rv522

594

J 84

xxxviii, 171

IV/viii, 30

Remarks :

arr. of Vivaldi op.7/ii no.5 = rv208

595

J 87

xxxviii, 196

IV/viii, 65

Remarks :

arr. of conc. by Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar

596

J 85

—

IV/viii, 3

Remarks :

arr. of Vivaldi op.3 no.11 = rv565

802–5

J 74–7

4 duettos (e, F, G, a)

iii, 242

IV/vi, 92

Remarks :

in Clavier-Übung, iii (Leipzig, 1739); see also 552, 669–89

1027a

Trio, G

—

Remarks :

transcr. from last movt of va da gamba sonata, 1027

a205

Fantasia, c

—

Remarks :

before 1705

Doubtful and spurious

536a		Prelude and fugue, A	variant of 536	—	IV/vi
561		Fantasia and fugue, a	spurious	xxxviii, 48	—
567		Prelude, C	by J.L. Krebs	xxxviii, 84	—
576		Fugue, G	spurious	xxxviii, 106	—
580	J 65	Fugue, D	spurious	xxxviii, 215	—
581		Fugue, G	spurious	—	—
584		Trio, g	probably spurious	—	—
585		Trio, c	by J.F. Fasch	xxxviii, 219	IV/viii, 73
586		Trio, G	after Telemann	—	IV/viii, 78
587		Aria, F	after Couperin: Les nations	xxxviii, 222	IV/viii, 82
597		Concerto, E		—	[IV]
598	Q 2	Pedal-Exercitium	? by C.P.E. Bach	xxxviii, 210	[IV/vii]

based on chorales



BWV	BC	Title	BG	NBA

599–644		Das Orgel-Büchlein, mostly 1713–15; BG xxv/2, 3, 159; NBA IV/i, 3
599	K 28	Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland

600	K 29	Gott, durch deine Güte
†601	K 30	Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottes-Sohn
602	K 31	Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott
603	K 32	Puer natus in Bethlehem
604	K 33	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ
605	K 34	Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich
606	K 35	Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her
607	K 36	Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schar
608	K 37	In dulci jubilo
609	K 38	Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich
610	K 39	Jesu, meine Freude
611	K 40	Christum wir sollen loben schon
612	K 41	Wir Christenleut’
613	K 42	Helft mir Gottes Güte preisen
†614	K 43	Das alte Jahr vergangen ist
615	K 44	In dir ist Freude
616	K 45	Mit Fried’ und Freud’ ich fahr dahin
617	K 46	Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf
618	K 47	O Lamm Gottes unschuldig
619	K 48	Christe, du Lamm Gottes
†620	K 49	Christus, der uns selig macht
621	K 50	Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund’
622	K 51	O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross
623	K 52	Wir danken dir, Herr Jesu Christ
624	K 53	Hilf Gott, das mir’s gelinge
625	K 55	Christ lag in Todesbanden
626	K 56	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland
627	K 57	Christ ist erstanden
628	K 58	Erstanden ist der heil’ge Christ
629	K 59	Erschienen ist der herrliche Tag
†630	K 60	Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn
†631	K 61	Komm, Gott Schöpfer, heilger Geist
632	K 62	Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend’
634	K 63a	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier
633	K 63b	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier
635	K 64	Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot’
636	K 65	Vater unser im Himmelreich
637	K 66	Durch Adam’s Fall ist ganz verderbt
†638	K 67	Es ist das Heil uns kommen her
†639	K 68	Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ
640	K 69	Ich dich hab’ ich gehoffet, Herr
641	K 70	Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein
642	K 71	Wer nun den lieben Gott lässt walten
643	K 72	Alle Menschen müssen sterben
644	K 73	Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig
a200	K 54	O Trauerigkeit, o Herzeleid (frag.)

		Sechs Choräle [‘Schübler’ chorales]:
Remarks : (Zella, 1748–9), transcrs. of cant. movts pubd by Schübler
645	K 22	Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme	xxv/2, 63	IV/i, 86
Remarks : from 140, movt 4
646	K 23	Wo soll ich fliehen hin	xxv/2, 66	IV/i, 90
Remarks : source unknown; cf 694
647	K 24	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten	xxv/2, 68	IV/i, 92
Remarks : from 93, movt 4
648	K 25	Meine Seele erhebt den Herren	xxv/2, 70	IV/i, 94
Remarks : from 10, movt 5
649	K 26	Ach bleib’ bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ	xxv/2, 71	IV/i, 95
Remarks : from 6, movt 3
650	K 27	Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter	xxv/2, 74	IV/i, 98
Remarks : from 137, movt 2
		[17 (18) chorales]:
Remarks : all probably begun before 1723, and all but 657 also preserved in an early version; 651–65 assembled as an autograph collection, c1735–45, D-Bsb P271; for 2 manuals, pedal
†651	K 74	Fantasia super Komm, Heiliger Geist	xxv/2, 79	IV/ii, 3, 117
Remarks : organo pleno; c.f. in pedal; cf 651a
†652	K 75	Komm, Heiliger Geist	xxv/2, 86	IV/ii, 13, 121
Remarks : alio modo; cf 652a
†653	K 76	An Wasserflüssen Babylon	xxv/2, 92	IV/ii, 22, 130, 133
Remarks : cf 653a and 653b
†654	K 77	Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele	xxv/2, 95	IV/ii, 26, 136
Remarks : cf 654a
†655	K 78	Trio super Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend	xxv/2, 98	IV/ii, 31, 140
Remarks : cf 655a
†656	K 79	O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig	xxv/2, 102	IV/ii, 38, 146
Remarks : cf 656a
657	K 80	Nun danket alle Gott	xxv/2, 108	IV/ii, 46
Remarks : c.f. in soprano; see above
†658	K 81	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen	xxv/2, 112	IV/ii, 51, 154
Remarks : c.f. in pedal; cf 658a
†659	K 82	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland	xxv/2, 114	IV/ii, 55, 157
Remarks : cf 659a
†660	K 83	Trio super Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland	xxv/2, 116	IV/ii, 59, 160
Remarks : cf 660a and 660b
661	K 84	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland	xxv/2, 118	IV/ii, 62, 164
Remarks : organo pleno; c.f. in pedal, cf 661a
†662	K 85	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xxv/2, 122	IV/ii, 67, 168
Remarks : c.f. in soprano; cf 662a
†663	K 86	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xxv/2, 125	IV/ii, 72, 172
Remarks : c.f. in tenor; cf 663a
†664	K 87	Trio super Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xxv/2, 130	IV/ii, 79, 179
Remarks : cf 664a
†665	K 88	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland	xxv/2, 136	IV/ii, 87, 187
Remarks : cf 665; Bach’s last autograph entry in Bsb P271
†666	K 89	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland	xxv/2, 140	IV/ii, 91, 191
Remarks : alio modo; cf 666a; copied into Bsb P271 by J.C. Altnickol, c1744–7
†667	K 90	Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist	xxv/2, 142	IV/ii, 94; IV/i, 58
Remarks : organo pleno; cf 631; copied into Bsb P271 by Altnickol
†668	K 91	Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit	xxv/2, 145	IV/ii, 113, 212; IV/i, 71
Remarks : partly in Bsb P271, copied ? after 1750; with minor variants, 668a, pubd as Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein in 1080; cf 641
		Chorale preludes in Clavier-Übung, iii, bestehend in verschiedenen Vorspielen über die Cathechismus- und andere Gesaenge
Remarks : (Leipzig, 1739); framed by 552; for 2 kbd, pedal unless otherwise stated
669	K 1	Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit	iii, 184	IV/iv, 16
Remarks : c.f. in soprano
670	K 2	Christe, aller Welt Trost	iii, 186	IV/iv, 18
Remarks : c.f. in tenor
671	K 3	Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist	iii, 190	IV/iv, 22
Remarks : a 5, organo pleno; c.f. in bass
672	K 4	Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit	iii, 194	IV/iv, 27
Remarks : alio modo, manuals only
673	K 5	Christe, aller Welt Trost	iii, 194	IV/iv, 28
Remarks : manuals only
674	K 6	Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist	iii, 196	IV/iv, 29
Remarks : manuals only
675	K 7	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	iii, 197	IV/iv, 33
Remarks : a 3; c.f. in alto; manuals only
†676	K 8	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	iii, 199	IV/iv, 33
677	K 9	Fughetta super Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	iii, 205	IV/iv, 41
Remarks : manuals only
678	K 10	Dies sind die heilgen zehen Gebot	iii, 206	IV/iv, 42
Remarks : c.f. in canon
679	K 11	Fughetta super Dies sind die heiligen zehen Gebot	iii, 210	IV/iv, 49
Remarks : manuals only
680	K 12	Wir gläuben all an einen Gott	iii, 212	IV/iv, 52
Remarks : organo pleno
681	K 13	Fughetta super Wir gläuben all an einen Gott	iii, 216	IV/iv, 57
Remarks : manuals only
682	K 14	Vater unser im Himmelreich	iii, 217	IV/iv, 58
Remarks : c.f. in canon
683	K 15	Vater unser im Himmelreich	iii, 223	IV/iv, 66
Remarks : alio modo, manuals only
684	K 16	Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam	iii, 224	IV/iv, 68
Remarks : c.f. in pedal
685	K 17	Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam	iii, 228	IV/iv, 73
Remarks : alio modo, manuals only
686	K 18	Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir	iii, 229	IV/iv, 74
Remarks : a 6, organo pleno, pedal doppio
687	K 19	Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir	iii, 232	IV/iv, 78
Remarks : a 4, alio modo, manuals only
688	K 20	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland, der von uns den Zorn Gottes wandt	iii, 234	IV/iv, 81
Remarks : c.f. in pedal
689	K 21	Fuga super Jesus Christus unser Heiland	iii, 239	IV/iv, 89
Remarks : a 4, manuals only
690	K 127	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten	xl, 3	IV/iii, 98
Remarks : manuals only; ? before 1705
691	K 99	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten	xl, 4	IV/iii, 98
Remarks : manuals only; autograph in Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach; c1720–23
694	K 139	Wo soll ich fliehen hin	xl, 6	IV/iii, 103
Remarks : 2 kbd, pedal; before 1708; cf 646
695	K 136	Fantasia super Christ lag in Todes Banden	xl, 10	IV/iii, 20
Remarks : manuals only; ? before 1708
696	K 142	Christum wir sollen loben schon	xl, 13	IV/iii, 23
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
697	K 147	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ	xl, 14	IV/iii, 32
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
698	K 149	Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn	xl, 15	IV/iii, 35
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
699	K 155	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland	xl, 16	IV/iii, 73
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
700	K 156	Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her	xl, 17	IV/iii, 92
Remarks : before 1708, rev. 1740s
701	K 157	Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her	xl, 19	IV/iii, 96
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
702	K 143	Das Jesulein soll doch mein Trost	xl, 20	[IV/ix]
Remarks : fughetta
703	K 148	Gottes Sohn ist kommen	xl, 21	IV/iii, 34
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ?1739–42
704	K 153	Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott	xl, 22	IV/iii, 62
Remarks : fughetta, manuals only; ? 1739–42
705	K 144	Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt	xl, 23	[IV/ix]
706	K 116	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier	xl, 25	IV/iii, 59
Remarks : ?1708–14; cf 706ii [alio modo]
707	K 137	Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt	xl, 26	[IV/ix]
708	K 158	Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt	xl, 30, 152	[IV/ix]
709	K 150	Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend	xl, 30	IV/iii, 43
Remarks : 2 kbd, pedal; ?Weimar, 1708–17
711	K 140	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xl, 34	IV/iii, 11
Remarks : bicinium; ?1708–17; rev. 1740s
712	K 151	In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr	xl, 36	IV/iii, 48
Remarks : manuals only
713	K 138	Fantasia super Jesu, meine Freude	xl, 38	IV/iii, 54
Remarks : manuals only
714	K 172	Ach Gott und Herr	xl, 43	IV/iii, 3
Remarks : per canonem
715	K 128	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xl, 44	IV/iii, 14
716	K 141	Fuga super Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xl, 45	[IV/ix]
717	K 106	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr	xl, 47	IV/iii, 8
Remarks : manuals only
718	K 119	Christ lag in Todes Banden	xl, 52	IV/iii, 16
Remarks : 2 kbd, pedal
719	K 160	Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich	xl, 55	[IV/ix]
720	K 103	Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott	xl, 57	IV/iii, 24
721	K 107	Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott	xl, 60	IV/iii, 28
Remarks : manuals only
†722	K 114	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ	xl, 62, 158	IV/iii, 30–31
724	K 108	Gott, durch deine Güte (Gottes Sohn ist kommen)	xl, 65	IV/iii, 33
Remarks : before 1705; alternative title in bwv, BG
725	K 199	Herr Gott, dich loben wir	xl, 66	IV/iii, 36
Remarks : a 5
726	K 130	Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend	xl, 72	IV/iii, 45
727	K 109	Herzlich tut mich verlangen	xl, 73	IV/iii, 46
Remarks : 2 kbd, pedal
728	K 101	Jesus, meine Zuversicht	xl, 74	IV/iii, 58
Remarks : manuals only; autograph in Clavierbüchlein, i, for Anna Magdalena Bach
†729	K 115	In dulci jubilo	xl, 74, 158	IV/iii, 52, 50
Remarks : sketch, 729a
730	K 133	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier	xl, 76	IV/iii, 60
731	K 134	Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier	xl, 77	IV/iii, 61
Remarks : 2 kbd, pedal
†732	K 117	Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich	xl, 78, 159	IV/iii, 63–4
Remarks : sketch, 732a
733	K 120	Meine Seele erhebet den Herren (Fuge über das Magnificat)	xl, 79	IV/iii, 65
Remarks : organo pleno
†734	K 125	Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein	xl, 160	IV/iii, 70
Remarks : manuals only; c.f. in tenor; cf 734a
†735	K 104	Fantasia super Valet will ich dir geben	xl, 86, 161	IV/iii, 77, 81
Remarks : with pedal obbl; Weimar, 1708–17, rev. ? after 1723
736	K 131	Valet will ich dir geben	xl, 90	IV/iii, 84
Remarks : c.f. in pedal
737	K 112	Vater unser im Himmelreich	xl, 96	IV/iii, 90
Remarks : manuals only
†738	K 118	Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her	xl, 97, 159	IV/iii, 94
Remarks : sketch, 738a
739	K 97	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern	xl, 99	[IV/x]
Remarks : ? before 1705
741	K 135	Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh darein	xl, 167	IV/iii, 4
Remarks : organo pleno
742	K 173	Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder	—	[IV/ix]
743	K 121	Ach, was ist doch unser Leben	—	—
744	K 122	Auf meinen lieben Gott	xl, 170	—
747	K 102	Christus, der uns selig macht	—	—
749	K 195	Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend	—	—
Remarks : ? before 1700
750	K 196	Herr Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht	—	—
Remarks : ? before 1700
753	K 124	Jesu, meine Freude	xl, 163	V/v
Remarks : frag.; ? before 1723
754		Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier	—	—
756	K 197	Nun ruhen alle Wälder	—	—
Remarks : ? before 1700
757	K 126	O Herre Gott, dein göttlichs Wort	—	—
758	K 198	O Vater, allmächtiger Gott	xl, 179	—
762	K 113	Vater unser im Himmelreich	—	—
764	K 98	Wie schön leuchtet uns der Morgenstern	xl, 164	[IV/x]
Remarks : frag.; ? before 1705
765	K 105	Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott	—	—
†1085	K 110, 111	O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig	—	IV/iii, 74
Remarks : manuals only
a49		Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott	—	—
a50		Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort	—	—
a58		Jesu, meine Freude	—	—
a75		Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn	—	—
a76		Jesu, meine Freude	—	—
		Partite diverse:
766	K 94	Christ, der du bist der helle Tag	xl, 107	IV/i, 113
Remarks : c1700
767		O Gott, du frommer Gott	xl, 114	IV/i, 122
Remarks : K 95
†768	K 96	Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig	xl, 122	IV/i, 132
Remarks : ? before 1710, rev. later
770	K 93	Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen	xl, 189	—
		Neumeister Chorales	—	IV/ix
Remarks : before 1705; in MS belonging to J.G. Neumeister, incl. also 601, 639, 714, 719, 737, 742
1090	K 161	Wir Christenleut
1091	K 162	Das alte Jahr vergangen ist
1092	K 163	Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf
1093	K 164	Herzliebster, Jesu, was hast du verbrochen
1094	K 165	O Jesu, wie ist dein Gestalt
1095	K 166	O Lamm Gottes unschuldig
1096	K 167	Christe, der du bist Tag und Licht
1097	K 168	Ehre sei dir, Christe
1098	K 169	Wir glauben all an einen Gott
1099	K 170	Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir
1100	K 171	Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ
1101	K 174	Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt
1102	K 175	Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ
1103	K 176	Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort
1104	K 177	Wenn dich Unglück tut greifen an
1105	K 178	Jesu, meine Freude
1106	K 179	Gott ist mein Heil, mein Hilf und Trost
1107	K 180	Jesu, meines Lebens Leben
†1108	K 181	Als Jesus Christus in der Nacht
1109	K 182	Ach Gott, tu dich erbarmen
1110	K 183	O Herre Gott, dein göttlich Wort
1111	K 184	Nun lasst uns den Leib begraben
1112	K 185	Christus, der ist mein Leben
1113	K 186	Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt
1114	K 187	Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut
1115	K 188	Herzlieblich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr
1116	K 189	Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan
1117	K 190	Alle Menschen müssen sterben
957	K 191	Machs mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt
1118	K 192	Werde munter, mein Gemüte
1119	K 193	Wie nach einer Wasserquelle
1120	K 194	Christ, der du bist der helle Tag

Doubtful and spurious

691a	Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten		xl, 151	[IV/x]
692	Ach Gott und Herr	by J.G. Walther	xl, 4, 152	—
693	Ach Gott und Herr	by J.G. Walther	xl, 5	—
695a	Fantasia super Christ lag in Todes Banden	c.f. in pedal	xl, 153	—
713a	Fantasia super Jesu, meine Freude	c.f. in pedal	xl, 155	—
723	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ		xl, 63	[IV/x]
734a	Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein	c.f. in pedal; *734; doubtful	xl, 84	—
740	Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott, Vater		xl, 103	[IV/x]
745	Aus der Tiefe rufe ich	by C.P.E. Bach	xl, 171	—
746	Christ ist erstanden	by J.C.F. Fischer	xl, 173	—
748	Gott der Vater wohn’ uns bei	by J.G. Walther	xl, 177	—
751	In dulci jubilo	by J.M. Bach	—	—
752	Jesu, der du meine Seele		—	—
755	Nun freut euch, lieben Christen		—	—
759	Schmüchke dich, o liebe Seele	by G.A. Homilius	xl, 181	—
760	Vater unser im Himmelreich	by G. Böhm	xl, 183	—
761	Vater unser im Himmelreich	by Böhm	xl, 184	—
763	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern		—	—
771	Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr’	chorale variations; nos.3, 8 (?all) by A.N. Vetter	xl, 195	—

other keyboard

†772–86	L 27–41	15 Inventions (C, c, D, d, E, E, e, F, f, G, g, A, a, B, b)	c1720, rev. 1723	iii, 1; xlv, 213	V/iii; V/v
†787–801	L 42–56	15 Sinfonias (C, c, D, d, E, E, e, F, f, G, g, A, a, B, b)	c1720, rev. 1723	iii, 19	V/iii; V/v
†806–11	L 13–18	6 [English] Suites (A, a, g, F, e, d)	? before 1720	xlv/1, 3	V/vii
†812–17	L 19–24	6 [French] Suites (d, c, b, E, G, E)	c1722–5	xlv/1, 89	V/viii
		Clavier-Übung [i] bestehend in Präludien, Allemanden, Couranten, Sarabanden, Giguen, Menuetten, und anderen Galanterien:	partitas pubd singly (Leipzig, 1726–31) and as op.1 (Leipzig, 1731)	iii, 46	V/i
825–30	L 1–6	6 Partitas (B, c, a, D, G, e)
†831	L 8	Ouvertüre [Partita] nach französischer Art, b	in Clavier-Übung, ii (Leipzig, 1735); see also 971; early version by 1733	iii, 154	V/ii, 20
†846–69	L 80–103	Das wohltemperirte Clavier, oder Praeludia, und Fugen durch alle Tone und Semitonia [i] [The Well-tempered Clavier]: 24 Preludes and fugues (C, c, C, c, D, d, E, e/d, E, e, F, f, F, f, G, g, A, g, A, a, B, b, B, b)	1722, rev. later	xiv	V/vi.1
†870–93	L 104–27	[Das wohltemperirte Clavier, ii]: 24 Preludes and fugues (C, c, C, c, D, d, E, e/d, E, e, F, f, F, f, G, g, A, g, A, a, B, b, B, b)	c1740; some pieces earlier, rev.	xiv	V/iv.2
971	L 7	Concerto nach italiänischem Gusto [Italian Concerto]	in Clavier-Übung, ii, (Leipzig, 1735)	iii, 139	V/ii, 3
988	L 9	Aria mit [30] verschiedenen Veraenderungen [Goldberg Variations]	Clavier-Übung, [iv] (Nuremberg, 1741)	iii, 263	V/ii, 69
		Miscellaneous suites and suite movts:
†818	L 25	Suite, a	c1705	xxxvi, 3	V/viii, 129, 146
†819	L 26	Suite, E	c1725	xxxvi, 8	V/viii, 136
820	L 173	Ouverture, F	c1705	xxxvi, 14	V/x, 43
821	L 169	Suite, B		xlii, 213	[V]
822	L 168	Suite, g	before 1707	—	V/x, 68
823	L 167	Suite, f	frag.; before 1715	xxxvi, 229	V/x, 50
†832	L 174	Partie, A	? before 1708	xlii, 255	V/x, 54
833	L 172	Prelude and partita, F	before 1708	—	V/10, 54
841–3	L 176	3 minuets, G, g, G	c1720; from Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 209	V/v, 16
		Miscellaneous preludes, fugues, fantasias, toccatas:
894	L 130	Prelude and fugue, a	c1715–25; cf 1044	xxxvi, 91	V/ix.2, 40
895	L 129	Prelude and fugue, a	before 1725	xxxvi, 104	V/xii.2, 69
896	L 128	Prelude and fugue, A	before 1710	xxxvi, 157 [fugue only]	V/ix.2, 72
900	L 77	Prelude and fughetta, e	before 1726	xxxvi, 108	[V/ix]
901	L 78	Prelude and fughetta, F	before 1730; fughetta = early version of 886	xxxvi, 112	[V/ix]
†902	L 79	Prelude and fughetta, G	? before 1730; fughetta = early version of 884	xxxvi, 114, 220	[V/ix]
†903	L 134	Chromatic fantasia and fugue, d	before 1723	xxxvi, 71, 219	V/ix.2, 76
904	L 136	Fantasia and fugue, a	Leipzig, c1725	xxxvi, 81	V/ix.2, 100
906	L 133, 138	Fantasia and fugue, c	fugue (c1704) inc.	xxxvi, 145, 238	V/ix.2, 110
910	L 146	Toccata, f	c1712	iii, 311	V/ix.2, 3
911	L 142	Toccata, c	before 1714	iii, 322	V/ix.1, 15
†912	L 143	Toccata, D	before 1710	xxxvi, 26, 218	V/ix.1, 28
†913	L 144	Toccata, d	? before 1708	xxxvi, 36	V/ix.1, 52
914	L 145, 163	Toccata, e	?c1710; fugue after ? B. Marcello	xxxvi, 47	V/ix.1, 80
915	L 148	Toccata, g	?c1710	xxxvi, 54	V/ix.1, 89
916	L 147	Toccata, G	before 1714	xxxvi, 63	V/ix.1, 102
917	L 140	Fantasia, g	? before 1710	xxxvi, 143	V/ix.2, 14
918	L 139	Fantasia on a rondo, c	? after 1740	xxxvi, 148	V/ix.2, 18
921	J 44, 52	Prelude (Fantasia), c	before 1714	xxxvi, 136	V/ix.2, 24
922	L 141	Fantasia, a	before 1714	xxxvi, 138	V/ix.2, 27
†923	L 131	Prelude, b	before 1725	xlii, 211	V/ix.2, 116
†944	L 135, 164	Fantasia and fugue, a	fugue after Torelli	iii, 334	V/ix.2, 133
946	L 160	Fugue on theme by Albinoni, C	? before 1708	xxxvi, 159	V/ix.2, 153
947	L 157	Fugue, a		xxxvi, 161	[V/xii]
948	L 151	Fugue, d	before 1727	xxxvi, 164	V/xii.2, 156
949	L 154	Fugue, A		xxxvi, 169	V/xii.2, 163
950	L 161	Fugue on theme by Albinoni, A	?c1710	xxxvi, 173	V/ix.2, 168
†951	L 162	Fugue on theme by Albinoni, b	c1712; *951a of earlier date	xxxvi, 178, 221	V/ix.2, 118
952	L 150	Fugue, C		xxxvi, 184	V/xii.2, 176
953	L 149	Fugue, C	after 1723 from Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 186	V/v, 46
954	L 165	Fugue, B	arr. of fugue from J.A. Reincken: Hortus musicus	xlii, 50	V/xi, 200
956	L 152	Fugue, e		xlii, 200	[V/xii]
958	L 155	Fugue, a		xlii, 205	[V/ix]
959	L 156	Fugue, a		xlii, 208	V/ix.2, 178
961	L 158	Fughetta, c		xxxvi, 154	V/xii.2, 182
		Pieces from Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach:	Cöthen, 1720–; incl. also 836–7, 841–3, 924a–5, 931–2, 953, 994; see 691, 753, 772ff, 846ff	xxxvi, 118	V/v
924	L 57	Praeambulum, C
926	L 58	Prelude, d
927	L 59	Praeambulum, F
928	L 60	Prelude, F
929	L 61	Trio, g	inserted in Partita, g, by G.H. Stölzel
930	L 62	Praeambulum, g
		Clavierbüchlein, i, for Anna Magdalena Bach	Cöthen, 1722–5; see 573, 728, 812–16, 841, 991	xliii/2, 3	V/iv, 3
		Clavierbüchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach	Leipzig, 1725; incl. 82 (recit, aria), 299, 508–18, 691, 812–13, 827, 830, 846 (prelude), 988 (aria); see a183	xliii/2, 6	V/iv, 47
933–8	L 64–9	[6 little preludes] (C, c, d, D, E, e)		xxxvi, 128	V/ix.2, 3
939–43	L 70–74	5 Preludes (C, d, e, a, C)		xxxvi, 119	[V/ix]
		Sonatas, variations, capriccios, etc.:
963	L 182	Sonata, D	c1704	xxxvi, 19	V/x, 32
964	L 184	Sonata, d	arr. of 1003	xlii, 3	—
965	L 187	Sonata, a	? before 1705; arr. of sonata from J.A. Reincken: Hortus musicus	xlii, 29	V/xi, 173
966	L 186	Sonata, C	? before 1705; arr. of part of sonata from Reincken: Hortus musicus	xlii, 42	V/xi, 188
967	L 183	Sonata, a	c1705; arr. of 1st movt of anon. chamber sonata	xlv/1, 168	—
968	L 185	Sonata, a	arr. of 1005, 1st movt	xlii, 27	—
†989	L 179	Aria variata, a	? before 1710	xxxvi, 203	V/x, 21
990	L 178	Sarabande con partite, C		xlii, 221	[V/xii]
991	L 177	Air with variations, c	frag.; in Clavierbüchlein, i, for Anna Magdalena Bach	xliii/2, 4	V/iv, 40
992	L 181	Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo [Capriccio on the Departure of his Most Beloved Brother], B	? before 1705	xxxvi, 190	V/x, 3
993	L 180	Capriccio, E		xxxvi, 197	V/x, 12
994	Q 1	Applicatio, C	early 1720; 1st entry in Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 237	V/v, 4
		16 Concertos:	Weimar, 1713–14; arrs. of works by other composers
972	L 189	D	after Vivaldi op.3 no.9 = rv230	xlii, 59	V/xi, 3
973	L 191	G	after Vivaldi op.7/ii no.2 = rv299	xlii, 66	V/xi, 12
974	L 194	d	after ob conc. by A. Marcello	xlii, 73	V/xi, 20
975	L 193	g	after Vivaldi op.4 no.6 = rv316	xlii, 80	V/xi, 30
976	L 188	C	after Vivaldi op.3 no.12 = rv265	xlii, 87	V/xi, 39
977	L 202	C	source unknown (?Vivaldi)	xlii, 96	V/xi, 50
978	L 190	F	after Vivaldi op.3 no.3 = rv310	xlii, 101	V/xi, 56
979	L 196	b	after vn conc. by Torelli	xlii, 108	V/xi, 64
980	L 192	G	after Vivaldi op.4 no.1 = rv381	xlii, 119	V/xi, 79
981	L 195	c	after B. Marcello op.1 no.2	xlii, 127	V/xi, 90
982	L 200	B	after conc. by Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar	xlii, 135	V/xi, 100
983	L 204	g	source unknown	xlii, 142	V/xi, 110
984	L 197	C	after conc. by Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar	xlii, 148	V/xi, 118
985	L 201	g	after vn conc. by Telemann	xlii, 155	V/xi, 128
986	L 203	G	source unknown	xlii, 161	V/xi, 137
987	L 198	d	after conc. by Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar	xlii, 165	V/xi, 142

Doubtful and spurious

824		Suite, A	frag.; by Telemann	xxxvi, 231	—
834		Allemande, c		xlii, 259	[V/xii]
835		Allemande, a	by Kirnberger	xlii, 267	—
836–7		2 allemandes, g (1 inc.)	c1720–22; from Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach; ? by W.F. Bach assisted by J.S. Bach	xlv/1, 214	V/v, 8
838		Allemande and courante, A	by C. Graupner	xlii, 265	[V/xii]
839		Sarabande, g		—
840		Courante, G	by Telemann	—	—
844		Scherzo, d	? by W.F. Bach	xlii, 220, 281	—
845		Gigue, f		xlii, 263	—
897		Prelude and fugue, a	prelude by C.H. Dretzel	xlii, 173	[V/xii]
898		Prelude and fugue, B		—	[V/xii]
899		Prelude and fughetta, d		—	[V/xii]
905		Fantasia and fugue, d		xlii, 179	[V/xii]
907		Fantasia and fughetta, B	? by G. Kirchhoff	xlii, 268	[V/xii]
908		Fantasia and fughetta, D	? by G. Kirchhoff	xlii, 272	[V/xii]
909		Concerto and fugue, c		xlii, 190	[V/xii]
919		Fantasia, c	? by J. Bernhard Bach	xxxvi, 152	[V/xii]
920		Fantasia, g		xlii, 183	[V/xii]
945		Fugue, e	spurious	xxxvi, 155	[V/xii]
955		Fugue, B	before 1730	xlii, 55	[B/ix]
960		Fugue, e		xlii, 276	[V/xii]
962		Fugato, e	by Albrechtsberger	xlii, 198	—
		Pieces from Clavier-Büchlein for W.F. Bach:	Cöthen, 1720–
924a		Prelude, C	reworking of 924; ? by W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 221	V/v, 41
925		Prelude, D	? by W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 121	V/v, 42
931		Prelude, a	? by W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 237	V/v, 45
932	L 63	Prelude, e	? by W.F. Bach	xxxvi, 238	V/v, 44
969		Andante, g		xlii, 218	[V/xii]
970		Presto, d	by W.F. Bach	—	[V/xii]
990		Sarabande con partite, C	spurious	xlii, 221	[V/xii]
		Clavierbüchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach [only anon. pieces listed]:	after 1724; also incl. pieces by C.P.E. Bach (a122–5, 127, 129), J.C. Bach (a131), Böhm (without no.), Couperin (a183), Hasse (a130), Petzoldt (a114–15); remainder anon., ? by members of Bach circle	xliii/2, 25	V/iv, 47
		Minuet, F (a113); Minuet, G (a116); Polonaise, F (a117a, 117b); Minuet, B (a118); †Polonaise, g (a119); Minuet, a (a120); Minuet, c (a121); Musette, D (a126); [Polonaise], d (a128); Polonaise, G (a130); Minuet, d (a132)

lute

995		Suite, g	c1730; arr. of vc suite 1011	—	V/x, 81
†996	L 166	Suite, e	? after 1712; orig. in d	xlv/1, 149	V/x, 94
997	L 170	Partita, c	c1740	xlv/1, 156	V/x, 102
998	L 132	Prelude, fugue and allegro, E	c1740–45	xlv/1, 141	V/x, 114
999	L 175	Prelude, c	c1720	xxxvi, 119	V/x, 122
1000		Fugue, g	after 1720; arr. of fugue from vn sonata 1001	—	V/x, 124
1006a	L 171	Partita, E: see 1006	c1736–7; ? for lute-harpsichord	xlii, 16	V/x, 134

chamber



BWV	Title, scoring	BG	NBA

†1001–6	Sonatas and partitas, solo vn:	xxvii/1, 3	VI/i, 3
Remarks : 1720; 1006 arr. lute = 1006a
	Sonata no.1, g; Partita no.1, b; Sonata no.2, a; Partita no.2, d: Sonata no.3, C; Partita no.3, E
1007–12	6 suites, solo vc (G, d, C, E, c, D)	xxvii/1, 59	VI/ii, 1
Remarks : c1720
1013	Partita, a, fl	—	VI/iii, 3
Remarks : after 1723
1014–19	6 sonatas, hpd, vn	ix, 69	VI/i, 83
Remarks : before 1725, rev. before 1740; earlier version of no.5 (Adagio only) = 1018a (BG ix, 250; NBA VI/i, 195); 1st version of no.6 incl. 1019a (BG ix, 252; NBA VI/i, 197); 3 versions of 1019 [9 movts], 2nd version related to 830
	no.1, b; no.2, A; no.3, E; no.4, c; †no.5, f; †no.6, G
1021	Sonata, G, vn, bc	—	VI/i, 65
Remarks : 1732–5
1023	Sonata, e, vn, bc	xliii/1, 31	VI/i, 73
Remarks : after 1723
†1025	Suite, A, vn, hpd	ix, 43
Remarks : c1740; after S.L. Weiss
1026	Fugue, g, vn, hpd	xliii/1, 39
Remarks : before 1712
1027–9	3 sonatas, hpd, va da gamba (G, D, g)	ix, 175	VI/iv
Remarks : before 1741
†1030	Sonata, b, fl, hpd	ix, 3	VI/iii, 33, 89
Remarks : c1736; earlier version, g
1031	Sonata, E, fl, hpd	ix, 22
Remarks : 1730–34
1032	Sonata, A, fl, hpd	ix, 245, 32	VI/iii, 54
Remarks : c1736; 1st movt inc.
1033	Sonata, C, fl, bc	xliii/1, 3
Remarks : c1736
1034	Sonata, e, fl, bc	xliii/1, 9	VI/iii, 11
Remarks : c1724
1035	Sonata, E, fl, bc	xliii/1, 21	VI/iii, 23
Remarks : c1741
1038	Sonata, G, fl, vn, bc	ix, 221
Remarks : 1732–5
1039	Sonata, G, 2 fl, bc	ix, 260	VI/iii, 71
Remarks : c1736–41; cf 1027
1040	Trio, F, vn, ob, bc	xxix, 250	I/xxxv, 47
Remarks : movt based on material from Cantata 208, ? perf. with cant.; later used in Cantata 68

Doubtful and spurious

1020	Sonata, g, hpd, vn	? by C.P.E. Bach	ix, 274
1022	Sonata, F, vn, hpd	arr. of 1038; ? by one of Bach’s sons or pupils	—
1024	Sonata, c, vn, bc	? by J.G. Pisendel	—
1036	Sonata, d, 2 vn, hpd	by C.P.E. Bach	—
1037	Sonata, C, 2 vn, hpd	by J.G. Goldberg	ix, 231

orchestral

where applicable, scoring given as concertino/solo; ripieno



BWV	Title, key	Scoring	BG	NBA

1041	Concerto, a	vn; str, bc	xxi/1, 3	VII/iii, 3
Remarks : c1730; cf 1058
1042	Concerto, E	vn; str, bc	xxi/1, 21	VII/iii, 35
Remarks : before 1730; cf 1054
1043	Concerto, d	2 vn; str, bc	xxi/1, 41	VII/iii, 71
Remarks : 1730–31; cf 1062
1044	Concerto, a	fl, vn, hpd; str, bc	xvii, 223	VII/iii, 105
Remarks : 1729–41; movts adapted from prelude and fugue 894 and trio sonata 527
	Brandenburg Concertos:
Remarks : autograph MS ded. Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, 24 March 1721
1046	no.1, F	2 hn, ob, vn piccolo; 2 ob, bn, str, bc	xix, 3	VII/ii, 3
1046a	Sinfonia, F	2 hn, 3 ob, bn, str, bc	xxxi/1, 96	VII/ii, 225
Remarks : formerly 1071; also used in 52
1047	no.2, F	tpt, rec, ob, vn; str, bc	xix, 33	VII/ii, 43
1048	no.3, G	3 vn, 3 va, 3 vc, bc	xix, 59	VII/ii, 73
1049	no.4, G	vn, 2 rec; str, bc	xix, 85	VII/ii, 99
Remarks : cf 1057
1050	no.5, D	fl, vn, hpd; str, bc	xix, 127	VII/ii, 145, appx
Remarks : *1050a
1051	no.6, B	2 va, 2 va da gamba, vc, bc	xix, 167	VII/ii, 197
	Harpsichord concertos:
Remarks : Leipzig, mostly c1738–9; mostly transcrs. of vn or ob concs; some orig./transcrs. also used in church cants.
†1052	d	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 3	VII/iv, 3
Remarks : from lost vn conc. reconstructed in NBA VII/vii, 3
1053	E	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 45	VII/iv, 79
Remarks : from lost ?ob conc; see NBA VII/vii, CC
1054	D	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 81	VII/iv, 127
Remarks : from 1042
1055	A	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 109	VII/iv, 161
Remarks : from lost ob d’amore conc. reconstructed in NBA VII/vii, 33
1056	f	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 135	VII/iv, 197
Remarks : outer movts from lost ob conc. in g reconstructed in NBA VII/vii, 59
1057	F	hpd, 2 rec; str, bc	xvii, 153	VII/iv, 221
Remarks : from 1049
1058	g	hpd; str, bc	xvii, 199	VII/iv, 283
Remarks : from 1041
1059	d	hpd, ob; str, bc	xvii, p.xx	VII/iv, 313
Remarks : inc., from lost ob conc., see NBA VII/vii, CC
1060	c	2 hpd; str, bc	xxi/2, 3	VII/v, 3
Remarks : c1736; from lost ob and vn conc. reconstructed in NBA VII/vii, 75
†1061	C	2 hpd; str, bc	xxi/2, 39	VII/v, 83, 109
Remarks : 1732–5; orig. for 2 hpd, ? without acc.
1062	c	2 hpd; str, bc	xxi/2, 83	VII/v, 43
Remarks : c1736; from 1043
1063	d	3 hpd; str, bc	xxxi/3, 3	VII/vi, 3
Remarks : c1730; source unknown, see NBA VII/vii, CC
1064	C	3 hpd; str, bc	xxxi/3, 53	VII/vi, 57
Remarks : c1730; from lost 3 vn conc. in D reconstructed in NBA VII/vii, 103
1065	a	4 hpd; str, bc	xliii/1, 71	VII/vi, 117
Remarks : c1730; from Vivaldi op.3 no.10 = rv580
	4 orchestral suites:
1066	C	2 ob, bn, str, bc	xxxi/1, 3	VII/i, 3
Remarks : before 1725
1067	b	fl; str, bc	xxxi/1, 24	VII/i, 27
Remarks : c1738–9
1068	D	3 tpt, timp, 2 ob, str, bc	xxxi/1, 40	VII/i, 49, 119
Remarks : c1731
1069	D	3 tpt, timp, 3 ob, bn, str, bc	xxxi/1, 66	VII/i, 81
Remarks : c1725; later version 1729–41
1070	Overture, g	str, bc	xlv/1, 190	—
Remarks : spurious
1071	Sinfonia: see 1046a

studies in counterpoint, canons etc.



BWV	Title, scoring	Remarks	BG	NBA

†769	Einige [5] canonische Veränderungen über das Weynacht-Lied, Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her, org	written on becoming member of Mizler’s Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften, June 1747 (Nuremberg, 1748); autograph version 769a, chronology of versions uncertain, several pubd in puzzle form	xl, 137	IV/ii, 197, 98
†1079	Musikalisches Opfer [fl, vn, bc, kbd]	May–July 1747 (Leipzig, 1747); 2 Ricercars, a 3, a 6; 10 canons; sonata, fl, vn, bc; insts not fully specified	xxxi/2	VIII/i, 12
†1080	Die Kunst der Fuge [kbd]	before 1742, rev. c1745 and 1748–9 (Leipzig, 1751, 2/1752)	xxv/1	VIII/ii.1–2
1072	Canon trias harmonica	a 8, in contrary motion; in F.W. Marpurg: Abhandlung von der Fuge, ii (Berlin, 1754)	xlv, 131	VIII/i, 3, 6
1073	Canon a 4 perpetuus	2 Aug 1713	xlv, 132	VIII/i, 3, 6
1074	Canon a 4	1727; ded. L.F. Hudemann; pubd in G.P. Telemann: Der getreue Music-Meister (Hamburg, 1728) and in J. Mattheson:Der volkkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R)	xlv, 134	VIII/i, 3, 7
1075	Canon a 2 perpetuus	10 Jan 1734; ded. ? J.G. Walther (1712–77)	—	VIII/i, 3, 7
†1076	Canon triplex a 6	before 1746; cf 1087	xlv, 138	VIII/i, 3, 8
†1077	Canone doppio sopr’il soggetto	15 Oct 1747; ded. J.G. Fulde; cf 1087	—	VIII/i, 4, 8
1078	Canon super fa mi a 7 post tempus musicum	1 March 1749; ded. ? Benjamin Faber; pubd in F.W. Marpurg: Abhandlung von der Fuge, ii (Berlin, 1754)	xlv, 136	VIII/i, 4, 9
1086	Canon concordia discors	a 2	—	VIII/i, 4, 10
1087	[14] Verschiedene Canones	after 1745; on first 8 notes of aria ground of 988; incl. earlier versions of 1076–7	—	V/ii, 119

a: bibliographies, research studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Bibliographies, research studies. B Catalogues. C Source studies: manuscripts and prints. D Source studies: documents, letters etc. E Iconography. F Biography: life and works. G Biography: special studies. H Works: general. I Works: special studies. J Vocal works. K Instrumental works. L Performing practice.

b: catalogues

c: source studies: manuscripts and prints

d: source studies: documents, letters etc.

e: iconography

f: biography: life and works

g: biography: special studies

h: works: general

i: works: special studies

j: vocal works

k: instrumental works

l: performing practice

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

a: bibliographies, research studies

M. Schneider: ‘Verzeichnis der bis zum Jahre 1851 gedruckten (und der geschrieben im Handel gewesenen) Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb 1906, 84–113

J. Schreyer: Beiträge zur Bach-Kritik, i (Dresden, 1910); ii (Leipzig, 1912)

W. Blankenburg: ‘Zwölf Jahre Bachforschung’, AcM, xxxvii (1965), 95–158

W. Blankenburg: ‘Die Bachforschung seit etwa 1965: Ergebnisse, Probleme, Aufgaben’, AcM, l (1978), 93–154; liv (1982), 162–207; lv (1983), 1–58

R.A. Leaver: Bachs theologische Bibliothek: eine kritische Bibliographie (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1983)

C. Wolff, ed.: Bach-Bibliographie: Nachdruck der Verzeichnisse des Schrifttums über Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach-Jahrbuch 1905–1984), mit einem Supplement und Register (Berlin, 1985)

R. Nestle: ‘Das Bachschrifttum 1981 bis 1985’, BJb 1989, 107–89

R. Nestle: ‘Das Bachschrifttum 1986 bis 1990’, BJb 1994, 75–162

D.R. Melamed and M. Marissen: An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford, 1998)

Bach Bibliography On-Line (Belfast, Queen’s University; Y. Tomita) [on-line database]

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

b: catalogues

W. Schmieder: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Leipzig, 1950, enlarged 2/1990, rev. and abridged 1998 by A. Dürr, Y. Kobayashi and K. Beisswenger as Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis)

P. Kast: Die Bach-Handschriften der Berliner Staatsbibliothek (Trossingen, 1958)

S.W. Kenney, ed.: Catalog of the Emilie and Karl Riemenschneider Memorial Bach Library (New York, 1960)

M. deF. McAll, ed.: Melodic Index to the Works of Johann Sebastian Bach (New York, 1962)

H.-J. Schulze: Katalog der Sammlung Manfred Gorke: Bachiana und andere Handschriften und Drucke des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1977)

R.W. Wade, ed.: The Catalog of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Estate: a Facsimile of the Edition by Schniebes, Hamburg, 1790 (New York, 1981)

T. Leibnitz, ed.: Katalog der Sammlung Anthony von Hoboken in der Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, i: Johann Sebastian Bach und seine Söhne (Tutzing, 1982)

G. Herz: Bach-Quellen in Amerika/Bach Sources in America (Kassel, 1984)

W. Neumann and C. Fröde: Die Bach-Handschriften der Thomasschule Leipzig: Katalog (Leipzig, 1986)

C. Wolff and H.-J. Schulze: Bach Compendium: analytisch-bibliographisches Repertorium der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig and Frankfurt, 1986–)

U. Balestrini: Catalogo tematico (incipit) delle opere di J.S. Bach: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis 1–1080 (Milan, 1988)

U. Leisinger: ‘Die “Bachsche Auction” von 1789’, BJb 1991, 97–126

K. Beisswenger: Johann Sebastian Bachs Notenbibliothek (Kassel, 1992)

R. Reeder: The Bach English-Title Index (Berkeley, 1993)

U. Leisinger and P. Wollny: Die Bach-Quellen der Bibliotheken in Brüssel: Katalog (Hildesheim,1997)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

c: source studies: manuscripts and prints

R. Schwartz: ‘Die Bach-Handschriften der Musikbibliothek Peters’, JbMP 1919, 56–73

G. Kinsky: Die Originalausgaben der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Vienna, 1937/R)

W. Schmieder: ‘Die Handschriften Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Bach-Gedenkschrift, ed. K. Matthaei (Zürich, 1950), 190–203

G. von Dadelsen: ‘Originale Daten auf den Handschriften J.S. Bachs’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 116–20

P. Krause, ed.: Handschriften der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs in der Musikbibliothek der Stadt Leipzig (Leipzig, 1964)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Beiträge zur Bach-Quellenforschung’, GfMKB: Leipzig 1966, 269–75

H. Zietz: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen an den Bach-Handschriften P 801, P 802 und P 803 aus dem ‘Krebs’schen Nachlass’ unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Choralbearbeitungen des jungen J.S. Bach (Hamburg, 1969)

A. Dürr: ‘Zur Chronologie der Handschrift Johann Christoph Altnickols und Johann Friedrich Agricolas’, BJb 1970, 44–65

K. Engler: Georg Poelchau und seine Musikaliensammlung: ein Beitrag zur Überlieferung Bachscher Musik im 19. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Tübingen, 1970)

P. Krause, ed.: Originalausgaben und ältere Drucke der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs in der Musikbibliothek der Stadt Leipzig (Leipzig, 1970)

Y. Kobayashi: ‘Zu einem neu entdeckten Autograph Bachs: Choral Aus der Tiefen’, BJb 1971, 5–12

W. Hobohm: ‘Neue “Texte zur Leipziger Kirchen-Musik”’, BJb 1973, 5–32

Y. Kobayashi: Franz Hauser und seine Bach-Handschriftsammlung (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1973)

‘Johann Sebastian Bach: Studies of the Sources’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R.L. Marshall (Kassel and Hackensack, NJ, 1974), 231–300 [contributions by P. Brainard, A. Dürr, G. Herz, E. May and C. Wolff]

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Wie entstand die Bach-Sammlung Mempell-Preller?’, BJb 1974, 104–22

K.-H. Köhler: ‘Die Bach-Sammlung der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek: Überlieferung und Bedeutung’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 139–46

Y. Kobayashi: ‘Neuerkenntnisse zu einigen Bach-Quellen anhand schriftkundlicher Untersuchungen’, BJb 1978, 43–60

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Das Stück in Goldpapier: Ermittlungen zu einigen Bach-Abschriften des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts’, BJb 1978, 19–42

Y. Kobayashi: ‘Breitkopfs Handel mit Bach-Handschriften’, Beiträge zur Bachforschung, i (1982), 79–84

H.-J. Schulze: ‘“150 Stück von den Bachischen Erben”: zur Überlieferung der vierstimmigen Choräle Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1983, 81–100

A. Dürr: Johann Sebastian Bach: seine Handschrift; Abbild seines Schaffens (Wiesbaden, 1984)

H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1984)

R. Elvers and H.-G. Klein, eds.: Die Handschrift Johann Sebastian Bachs, Musikabteilung der Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 22 March – 13 July 1985 (Wiesbaden, 1985) [exhibition catalogue]

H.J. Marx: ‘Wiederaufgefundene Autographe von Carl Philipp Emanuel und Johann Sebastian Bach’, Mf, xli (1988), 150–56

Y. Kobayashi: Die Notenschrift Johann Sebastian Bachs: Dokumentation ihrer Entwicklung, NBA, IX (1989)

C. Wolff: ‘From Berlin to Lodz: the Spitta Collection Resurfaces’, Notes, xlvi (1989–90), 311–27

L.A. Federowskaja: ‘Bachiana in russischen Bibliotheken und Sammlungen: Autographe, Abschriften, Frühdrucke, Bearbeitungen’, BJb 1990, 27–36

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Bach und Buxtehude: eine wenig beachtete Quelle in der Carnegie Library zu Pittsburgh/PA’, BJb 1991, 177–82

U. Leisinger: Die Bach-Quellen der Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha (Gotha, 1993)

A. Glöckner: ‘Die Teilung des Bachschen Musikaliennachlasses und die Thomana-Stimmen’, BJb 1994, 41–57

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

d: source studies: documents, letters etc.

J.A. Scheibe: Der critische Musikus (Hamburg, 1738–40, 2/1745/R)

L. Mizler: Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1739–54/R)

J.F. Agricola and C.P.E. Bach: Obituary in L. Mizler: Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek, iv/1 (Leipzig, 1754/R), 158–76; repr. in BJb 1920, 11–29

E.H. Müller von Asow: Johann Sebastian Bach: Gesammelte Briefe (Regensburg, 1938, rev. 2/1950 with H. Müller von Asow)

H.T. David and A. Mendel, eds.: The Bach Reader (New York, 1945, enlarged 3/1998 by C. Wolff as The New Bach Reader)

W. Neumann and H.-J. Schulze, eds.: Schriftstücke von der Hand Johann Sebastian Bachs, Bach-Dokumente, i (Leipzig, 1963; Fr. trans., 1976)

W. Neumann and H.-J. Schulze, eds.: Fremdschriftliche und gedruckte Dokumente zur Lebensgeschichte Johann Sebastian Bachs 1685–1750, Bach-Dokumente, ii (Leipzig, 1969)

A. Dürr: ‘Zur Chronologie der Handschrift Johann Christoph Altnickols und Johann Friedrich Agricolas’, BJb 1970, 44–65

H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs 1750–1800, Bach-Dokumente, iii (Leipzig, 1972)

H. Stiehl: ‘Taufzettel für Bachs Kinder: ein Dokumentenfund’, BJb 1979, 7–18

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

e: iconography

H. Besseler: Fünf echte Bildnisse Johann Sebastian Bachs (Kassel, 1956)

H.O.R. van Tuyll van Serooskerken: Probleme des Bachporträts (Bilthoven, 1956)

C. Freyse: Bachs Antlitz (Eisenach, 1964)

W. Neumann, ed.: Bilddokumente zur Lebensgeschichte Johann Sebastian Bachs/Pictorial Documents of the Life of Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach-Dokumente, iv (Leipzig, 1979)

H. Börsch-Supan: ‘Gruppenbild mit Musikern: ein Gemälde von Balthasar Denner und das Problem der Bach-Ikonographie’, Kunst und Antiquitäten, iii (1982), 22–32

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Zur Überlieferung einiger Bach-Porträts’, BJb 1982, 154–6

H. Raupach: Das wahre Bildnis des Johann Sebastian Bach: Bericht und Dokumente (Munich, 1983)

M. Staehelin: ‘Zu einer umstrittenen Bach-Porträtzeichnung des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 260–66

M. Korth and S. Kuhlmann, eds.: J.S. Bach: Bilder und Zeugnisse eines Musikerlebens (Munich, 1985)

G. Wagner: ‘Ein unbekanntes Porträt Johann Sebastian Bachs aus dem 18. Jahrhundert?’, BJb 1988, 231–4

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

f: biography: life and works

J.N. Forkel: Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke (Leipzig, 1802/R; Eng. trans., 1820/R)

C.L. Hilgenfeldt: Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Wirken und Werke: ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1850/R)

C.H. Bitter: Johann Sebastian Bach (Berlin, 1865, enlarged 2/1881/R; Eng. trans., abridged, 1873)

P. Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1873–80, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1884)

A. Schweitzer: J.S. Bach, le musicien-poète (Paris, 1905; Ger. trans., enlarged, 1908; Eng. trans., 1911/R)

A. Pirro: J.-S. Bach (Paris, 1906, rev. 1949; Eng. trans., 1957)

C.H.H. Parry: Johann Sebastian Bach (London, 1909, 2/1934/R)

C.S. Terry: Bach: a Biography (London, 1928, 2/1933/R)

W. Gurlitt: Johann Sebastian Bach: der Meister und sein Werk (Berlin, 1936, enlarged 5/1980; Eng. trans., 1957/R)

W. Neumann: Auf den Lebenswegen Johann Sebastian Bachs (Berlin, 1953, 4/1962; Eng. trans., 1957)

W. Neumann: Bach: eine Bildbiographie (Munich, 1960, 2/1961; Eng. trans., 1961, rev. 2/1969 as Bach and his World)

K. Geiringer: Johann Sebastian Bach: the Culmination of an Era (New York, 1966)

B. Schwendowius and W. Dömling, eds.: Johann Sebastian Bach: Zeit, Leben, Wirken (Kassel, 1976; Eng. trans., 1978)

A. Basso: Frau Musika: la vita e le opere di J.S. Bach (Turin, 1979–83)

M. Boyd: Bach (London, 1983, 3/2000)

D. Arnold: Bach (Oxford, 1984)

W. Felix: Johann Sebastian Bach (Wiesbaden, 1984; Eng. trans., 1985)

P. Buscaroli: Bach (Milan, 1985)

M. Geck: Bach: Leben und Werk (Reinbek, 2000)

C. Wolff: Johann Sebastian Bach: the Learned Musician (New York, 2000)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

g: biography: special studies

C. Scherer: ‘Joh. Seb. Bachs Aufenthalt in Kassel’, MMg, xxv (1893), 129–33

B.F. Richter: ‘Stadtpfeifer und Alumnen der Thomasschule in Leipzig zu Bachs Zeit’, BJb 1907, 32–78

C. Freyse, ed.: Eisenacher Dokumente um Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1933)

G. Herz: ‘Bach’s Religion’, JRBM, i (1946), 124–38

G. Fock: Der junge Bach in Lüneburg 1700 bis 1702 (Hamburg, 1950)

K. Müller and F. Wiegand, eds.: Arnstädter Bachbuch: Johann Sebastian Bach und seine Verwandten in Arnstadt (Arnstadt, 1950, 2/1957)

F. Smend: Bach in Köthen (Berlin, 1951; Eng. trans., rev. 1985)

H. Löffler: ‘Die Schüler Joh. Seb. Bachs’, BJb 1953, 5–28

K. Geiringer: The Bach Family: Seven Generations of Creative Genius (London, 1954/R, Ger. trans., enlarged, 1958, 2/1977)

W. Neumann: ‘Das “Bachische Collegium Musicum”’, BJb 1960, 5–27

F. Blume: ‘Outlines of a New Picture of Bach’, ML, xliv (1963), 214–27

G. Stiller: Johann Sebastian Bach und das Leipziger gottesdienstliche Leben seiner Zeit (Kassel, 1970; Eng. trans., 1984)

I. Ahlgrimm: ‘Von Reisen, Kirchererbsen und Fischbeinröcken’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 155–70

R. Eller: ‘Gedanken über Bachs Leipziger Schaffensjahre’, ibid., 7–27

W. Schrammek: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach, Gottfried Silbermann und die französische Orgelkunst’, ibid., 93–107

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und Georg Gottfried Wagner: neue Dokumente’, ibid., 147–54

E. Zavarský: ‘J.S. Bachs Entwurf für den Umbau der Orgel in der Kirche Divi Blasii und das Klangideal der Zeit’, ibid., 82–93

W. Siegmund-Schultze: ‘Über die “unvermeidlichen Lücken” in Bachs Lebensbeschreibung’, Bachforschung und Bachinterpretation heute: Marburg 1978, 32–42

C. Wolff: ‘Bachs Leipziger Kantoratsprobe und die Aufführungsgeschichte der Kantate bwv 23’, BJb 1978, 78–94

C. Wolff: ‘Probleme und Neuansätze der Bach-Biographik’, Bachforschung und Bachinterpretation heute: Marburg 1978, 21–31

W. Frei: ‘Bach, das konservative Genie – oder das Schicksal aus seiner Familie’, Musik und Gottesdienst, xxxiv (1980), 1–6

A. Glöckner: ‘Neuerkenntnisse zu Johann Sebastian Bachs Aufführungskalender zwischen 1729 und 1735’, BJb 1981, 43–76

A. Plichta: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und Johann Adam Graf von Questenberg’, ibid., 23–8

U. Siegele: ‘Bachs Ort in Orthodoxie und Aufklärung’, Musik und Kirche, li (1981), 3–14

W. Blankenburg: ‘Luther und Bach’, Musik und Kirche, liii (1983), 233–42

K. von Fischer: Johann Sebastian Bach: Welt, Umwelt und Frömmigkeit (Wiesbaden, 1983)

M. Petzoldt: ‘Zur Frage nach den Funktion des Kantors Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig’, Musik und Kirche, liii (1983), 167–73

W. Rehm, ed.: Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr (Kassel, 1983) [incl. W. Felix: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach: Leipziger Wirken und Nachwirken’, 88–92; H. Heussner: ‘Zur Musikpflege im Umkreis des Prinzen Maximilian von Hessen: Pietro Locatelli und Johann Sebastian Bach in Kassel’, 108–15; W. Neumann: ‘Über die mutmasslichen Beziehungen zwischen dem Leipziger Thomaskantor Bach und dem Leisniger Matthäikantor Stockmar’, 201–8; W.H. Scheide: ‘Bach vs. Bach: Mühlhausen Dismissal Request vs. Erdmann Letter’, 234–42; H.-J. Schulze: ‘“Monsieur Schouster”, ein vergessener Zeitgenosse Johann Sebastian Bachs’, 243–50; E. Zavarský: ‘Ein Besucher aus der Slowakei bei Johann Sebastian Bach’, 363–7]

U. Siegele: ‘Bachs Stellung in der Leipziger Kulturpolitik seiner Zeit’, BJb 1983, 7–50; 1984, 7–43; 1986, 33–67

J. Bahns, ed.: Ex libris Bachianis II: das Weltbild Johann Sebastian Bachs im Spiegel seiner theologischen Bibliothek, Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg, 1 June – 15 July 1985 (Heidelberg, 1985) [exhibition catalogue]

W. Blankenburg: ‘Wandlungen und Probleme des Bachbildes’, Musik und Kirche, lv (1985), 274–84

H.H. Cox: The Calov Bible of J.S. Bach (Ann Arbor, 1985)

W. Hildesheimer: Das ferne Bach: eine Rede (Frankfurt, 1985)

R.A. Leaver: J.S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary (St Louis, 1985)

M. Petzoldt: ‘“Ut probus & doctus reddar”: zum Anteil der Theologie bei der Schulausbildung Johann Sebastian Bachs in Eisenach, Ohrdruf und Lüneburg’, BJb 1985, 7–42

M. Walter: ‘J.S. Bach und die Aufklärung?’, AMw, xlii (1985), 229–40

J.J. Pelikan: Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia, 1986)

A. Glöckner: Die Musikpflege an der Leipziger Neukirche zur Zeit (Leipzig, 1990)

D. Kranemann: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Krankheit und Todesursache: Versuch einer Deutung’, BJb 1990, 53–64

R. Szeskus: ‘Bach und die Leipziger Universitätsmusik’, BMw, xxxii (1990), 161–70

U. Siegele: ‘“Ich habe fleissig sein müssen …”: zur Vermittlung von Bachs sozialem und musikalischem Charakter’, Musik und Kirche, lxi (1991), 73–8; Eng. trans., Bach, xxii/2 (1991), 5–12

P. Wollny: ‘Bachs Bewerbung um die Organistenstelle an der Marienkirche zu Halle und ihr Kontext’, BJb 1994, 25–39

K. Küster: Der junge Bach (Stuttgart, 1996)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

h: works: general

A. Pirro: L’esthétique de Jean-Sébastien Bach (Paris, 1907)

C.S. Terry: The Music of Bach: an Introduction (London, 1933/R)

G. Herz: Johann Sebastian Bach im Zeitalter des Rationalismus und der Frühromantik (Kassel, 1935)

A.E.F. Dickinson: The Art of J.S. Bach (London, 1936, enlarged 2/1950)

G. Frotscher: Johann Sebastian Bach und die Musik des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Wädenswil, 1939)

A. Schering: Johann Sebastian Bach und das Musikleben Leipzigs im 18. Jahrhundert, Musikgeschichte Leipzigs, iii (Leipzig, 1941)

W. Blankenburg: Die innere Einheit von Bachs Werk (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1942)

L. Schrade: ‘Bach: the Conflict between the Sacred and the Secular’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vii (1946), 151–94; pubd separately (New York, 1954/R)

W. Blankenburg: ‘Bach geistlich und weltlich’, Musik und Kirche, xx (1950), 36–46

R. Petzoldt and L. Weinhold, eds.: Johann Sebastian Bach: das Schaffen des Meisters in Spiegel einer Stadt (Leipzig, 1950)

H. Besseler: ‘Bach und das Mittelalter’, Wissenschaftliche Bachtagung: Leipzig 1950, 108–30; Eng. trans. in The Score, no.9 (1954), 31–42

A.T. Davison: Bach and Handel: the Consummation of the Baroque in Music (Cambridge, MA, 1951/R)

P. Hindemith: Johann Sebastian Bach: Heritage and Obligation (New Haven, 1952)

H. Besseler: ‘Bach als Wegbereiter’, AMw, xii (1955), 1–39

W. Mellers: Bach and the Dance of God (London, 1980)

C. Wolff: ‘“Die sonderbaren Vollkommenheiten des Herrn Hof Compositeurs”: Versuch über die Eigenart der Bachschen Musik’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 356–62

A. Dürr: Bachs Werk vom Einfall bis zur Drucklegung (Wiesbaden, 1989)

R.L. Marshall: The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach: the Sources, the Style, the Significance (New York, 1989)

H.H. Eggebrecht: Bach – wer ist das?: zum Verständnis der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Mainz, 1992)

L. Dreyfus: Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, MA, 1996)

J. Butt, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Bach (New York, 1997)

M. Geck: Bach und die Stile (Dortmund, 1999)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

i: works: special studies

E. Kurth: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Einführung in Stil und Technik von Bachs melodischer Polyphonie (Berne, 1917, 5/1956/R)

A. Schering: ‘Über Bachs Parodieverfahren’, BJb 1921, 49–95

K. Geiringer: Symbolism in the Music of Bach (Washington DC, 1956); repr. in Lectures on the History and Art of Music (New York, 1968), 123ff

A. Dürr: ‘Gedanken zu J.S. Bachs Umarbeitungen eigener Werke’, BJb 1956, 93–104

G. von Dadelsen: Bemerkungen zur Handschrift Johann Sebastian Bachs, seiner Familie und seines Kreises (Trossingen, 1957)

G. von Dadelsen: Beiträge zur Chronologie der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Trossingen, 1958)

E. Bodky: The Interpretation of Bach’s Keyboard Works (Cambridge, MA, 1960/R)

A. Mendel: ‘Recent Developments in Bach Chronology’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 283–300

A. Dürr: ‘Neues über Bachs Pergolesi-Bearbeitung’, BJb 1968, 89–100

C. Wolff: Der stile antico in der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Wiesbaden, 1968)

R.L. Marshall: ‘How J.S. Bach Composed Four-part Chorales’, MQ, lvi (1970), 198–220

M. Geck: ‘Bachs Probestück’, Quellenstudien zur Musik: Wolfgang Schmieder zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. K. Dorfmüller and G. von Dadelsen (Frankfurt, 1972), 55–68

‘Johann Sebastian Bach: Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R.L. Marshall (Kassel and Hackensack, NJ, 1974), 139–230 [contributions by W. Blankenburg, E.T. Cone, W. Emery, R.L. Marshall, F. Neumann, N. Rubin and W.H. Scheide]

W. Emery: ‘A Note on Bach’s Use of Triplets’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 109–11

H. Eppstein: ‘Zum Formproblem bei J.S. Bach’, ibid., 29–42

H. Grüss: ‘Tempofragen der Bachzeit’, ibid., 73–81

R.L. Marshall: ‘Bach the Progressive: Observations on his Later Works’, MQ, lxii (1976), 313–57

U. Meyer: ‘Zum Problem der Zahlen in Johann Sebastian Bachs Werk’, Musik und Kirche, xlix (1979), 58–71

U. Prinz: Studien zum Instrumentarium J.S. Bachs mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kantaten (Tübingen, 1979)

G.G. Butler: ‘Leipziger Stecher in Bachs Originaldrucken’, BJb 1980, 9–26

L. Prautzsch: Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit: Figuren und Symbole in den letzten Werken Johann Sebastian Bachs (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1980)

K.-J. Sachs: ‘Die “Anleitung …, auff allerhand Arth einen Choral durchzuführen” als Paradigma der Lehre und die Satzkunst Johann Sebastian Bachs’, AMw, xxxvii (1980), 135–54

W. Neumann: Über das funktionale Wechselverhältnis von Vokalität und Instrumentalität als kompositionstechnisches Grundphänomen, dargestellt am Schaffen Johann Sebastian Bachs (Berlin, 1982)

G.A. Theill: Beiträge zur Symbolsprache Johann Sebastian Bachs (Bonn, 1983–)

Q. Faulkner: J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Technique: a Historical Introduction (St Louis, MO, 1984)

Bach und die italienische Musik: Venice 1985

M. Dankwardt: Instrumentale und vokale Kompositionsweise bei Johann Sebastian Bach (Tutzing, 1985)

M. Petzoldt, ed.: Bach als Ausleger der Bibel: theologische und musikwissenschaftliche Studien zum Werk Johann Sebastian Bachs (Göttingen, 1985)

G. Wagner: Traditionsbezug im musikhistorischen Prozess zwischen 1720 und 1740 am Beispiel von Johann Sebastian und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: musikalische Analyse und musikhistorische Bewertung (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1985)

C. Wolff: ‘Johann Adam Reinken und Johann Sebastian Bach: zum Kontext des Bachschen Frühwerkes’, BJb 1985, 99–118; Eng. trans., rev. in J.S. Bach as Organist, ed. G. Stauffer and E. May (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 57–80, and in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 56–71

G. Stauffer and E. May, eds.: J.S. Bach as Organist: his Instruments, Music, and Performance Practices (Bloomington, IN, 1986)

W. Elders: ‘Kompositionsverfahren in der Musik der alten Niederländer und die Kunst J.S. Bachs’, Beiträge zur Bachforschung, vi (1987), 110–34

W.F. Hindermann: ‘“Seine Einsicht in die Dichtkunst … ”: Bachs Rhetorik-Verständnis im Spiegel von Quintilians Institutio oratoria’, Musik und Kirche, lvii (1987), 284–97

H.-J. Schulze: ‘The Parody Process in Bach's Music: an Old Problem Reconsidered’, Bach, xx/3 (1989), 15–33

K. Beisswenger: ‘Bachs Eingriffe in Werke fremder Komponisten: Beobachtungen an den Notenhandschriften aus seiner Bibliothek unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der lateinischen Kirchenmusik’, BJb 1991, 127–58

M. Little and N. Jenne: Dance and the Music of Bach (Bloomington, IN, 1991)

R. Tatlow: Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge, 1991)

E. Kooiman, G. Weinberger and H.J. Busch: Zur Interpretation der Orgelmusik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Kassel, 1995)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

j: vocal works

BlumeEK

K. Ziebler: Das Symbol in der Kirchenmusik Joh. Seb. Bachs (Kassel, 1930)

A. Schering: Johann Sebastian Bachs Leipziger Kirchenmusik (Leipzig, 1936)

W. Neumann: J.S. Bachs Chorfuge (Leipzig, 1938, 3/1953)

F. Smend: ‘Bachs Markus-Passion’, BJb 1940–48, 1–35

A. Schering: Über Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig, 1942, 3/1950)

F. Smend: ‘Neue Bach-Funde’, AMf, vii (1942), 1–16; repr. in Friedrich Smend: Bach-Studien, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1969), 137–52

A. Mendel: ‘On the Keyboard Accompaniments to Bach’s Leipzig Church Music’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 339–62

A. Dürr: ‘Zur Chronologie der Leipziger Vokalwerke J.S. Bachs’, BJb 1957, 5–162; pubd separately (Berlin, 1958, 2/1976)

W. Neumann: ‘Über Ausmass und Wesen des Bachschen Parodieverfahrens’, BJb 1965, 63–85

R.L. Marshall: The Compositional Process of J.S. Bach: a Study of the Autograph Scores of the Vocal Works (Princeton, NJ, 1972)

W. Neumann, ed.: Sämtliche von Johann Sebastian Bach vertonte Texte (Leipzig, 1974)

U. Siegele: ‘Bachs Endzweck einer regulierten und Entwurf einer wohlbestallten Kirchenmusik’, Festschrift Georg von Dadelsen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. T. Kohlhase and V. Scherliess (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1978), 313–51

L. Dreyfus: ‘J.S. Bach's Experiment in Differentiated Accompaniment: Tacet Indications in Organ Parts’, JAMS, xxxii (1979), 321–34

J. Rifkin: ‘Bach's Chorus: a Preliminary Report’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 747–54

W. Blankenburg: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und das evangelische Kirchenlied zu seiner Zeit’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 31–8

G. von Dadelsen: ‘Anmerkungen zu Bachs Parodieverfahren’, ibid., 52–7

R. Marshall: ‘Bach's Chorus: a Preliminary Reply to Joshua Rifkin’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 19–22

J. Rifkin: ‘Bach's Chorus: a Response to Robert Marshall’, ibid., 161–2

G. Wagner: ‘Die Chorbesetzung bei J.S. Bach und ihre Vorgeschichte: Anmerkungen zur “hinlänglichen” Besetzung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xliii (1986), 278–304

K. Häfner: Aspekte des Parodieverfahrens bei Johann Sebastian Bach: Beiträge zur Wiederentdeckung verschollener Vokalwerke (Laaber, 1987)

S.A. Crist: Aria Forms in the Vocal Works of J.S. Bach, 1714–24 (diss., Brandeis U., 1988)

H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Sinnbildlichkeit in Text und Musik bei Johann Sebastian Bach’, Musik und Kirche, lviii (1988), 176–84

E.T. Chafe: Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach (Berkeley, 1991)

M. Walter: Musik-Sprache des Glaubens: zum geistlichen Vokalwerk Johann Sebastian Bachs (Frankfurt, 1994)

S.A. Crist: ‘Bach, Theology, and Harmony: a New Look at the Arias’, Bach, xxvii/1 (1996), 1–30

D.E. Freeman: ‘J.S. Bach's “Concerto” Arias: a Study in the Amalgamation of Eighteenth-Century Genres’, Studi musicali, xxvii (1998), 123–62

cantatas

R. Wustmann, ed.: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kantatentexte (Leipzig, 1913, rev. 2/1967 as Geistliche und weltliche Kantatentexte)

C.S. Terry: Joh. Seb. Bach: Cantata Texts, Sacred and Secular, with a Reconstruction of the Leipzig Liturgy of his Period (London, 1926/R)

W. Neumann: Handbuch der Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig, 1947, 5/1984)

F. Smend: Joh. Seb. Bach: Kirchen-Kantaten (Berlin, 1947–9, 3/1966)

I. Finlay: Johann Sebastian Bachs weltliche Kantaten (Göttingen, 1950)

I. Finlay: ‘Bach's Secular Cantata Texts’, ML, xxxi (1950), 189–95

A. Dürr: Studien über die frühen Kantaten J.S. Bachs (Leipzig, 1951, 2/1977)

A. Dürr: ‘Zur Echtheit einiger Bach zugeschreibener Kantaten’, BJb 1951–2, 30–46

K.F. Tagliavini: Studi sui testi delle cantate sacre di J.S. Bach (Padua, 1956)

P. Mies: Die geistlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs und der Hörer von heute, i (Wiesbaden, 1959, 2/1966); ii (1960, 2/1968); iii (1964)

W.H. Scheide: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Sammlung von Kantaten seines Vetters Johann Ludwig Bach’, BJb 1959, 52–94; 1961, 5–24; 1962, 5–32

W.G. Whittaker: The Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (London, 1959)

J. Day: The Literary Background to Bach’s Cantatas (London, 1961)

P. Mies: Die weltlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs und der Hörer von heute, i (Wiesbaden, 1966–7)

A. Dürr: Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach (Kassel, 1971, 6/1995)

R. Gerlach: ‘Besetzung und Instrumentation der Kirchenkantaten J.S. Bachs und ihre Bedingungen’, BJb 1971, 53–71

W. Hobohm: ‘Neue Texte zur Leipziger Kirchen-Musik’, BJb 1973, 5–32

A. Dürr: ‘Bachs Kantatentexte: Probleme und Aufgaben der Forschung’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 63–71

K. Häfner: ‘Der Picander-Jahrgang’, BJb 1975, 70–113

W. Blankenburg: ‘Eine neue Textquelle zu sieben Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs und achtzehn Kantaten Johann Ludwig Bachs’, BJb 1977, 7–25

W.H. Scheide: ‘Bach und der Picander-Jahrgang’, BJb 1980, 47–52

K. Häfner: ‘Picander, der Textdichter von Bachs viertem Kantatenjahrgang: ein neuer Hinweis’, Mf, xxxv (1982), 156–62

C. Wolff: ‘Wo bleib Bachs fünfter Kantatenjahrgang?’, ibid., 151–2

W.H. Scheide: ‘Eindeutigkeit und Mehrdeutigkeit in Picanders Kantatenjahrgangs-Vorbemerkung und im Werkverzeichnis des Nekrologs auf Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb 1983, 109–14

L. Dreyfus: ‘The Metaphorical Soloist: Concerted Organ Parts in Bach's Cantatas’, EMc, xiii (1985), 237–47

A. Glöckner: ‘Zur Chronologie der Weimarer Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1985, 159–64

A. Dürr: ‘Noch einmal: Wo blieb Bachs fünfter Kantatenjahrgang?’, BJb 1986, 121–2

A. Hirsch: Die Zahl im Kantatenwerk Johann Sebastian Bachs (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986)

H.K. Krausse: ‘Erdmann Neumeister und die Kantatentexte Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1986, 7–31

A. Dürr: ‘Merkwürdiges in den Quellen zu Weimarer Kantaten Bachs’, BJb 1987, 151–7

A. Glöckner: ‘Überlegungen zu J.S. Bachs Kantatenschaffen nach 1730’, Beiträge zur Bachforschung, vi (1987), 54–64

W.M. Young: The Cantatas of J.S. Bach: an Analytical Guide (Jefferson, NC, 1989)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Bach's Secular Cantatas: a New Look at the Sources’, Bach, xxi/1 (1990), 26–41

F. Krummacher: ‘Bachs frühe Kantaten im Kontext der Tradition’, Mf, xliv (1991), 9–32

L. and R. Steiger: Sehet! Wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kantaten auf den Sonntag Estomihi (Göttingen, 1992)

K. Hofmann: ‘Neue Überlegungen zu Bachs Weimarer Kantaten-Kalender’, BJb 1993, 9–29

D.R. Melamed: ‘Mehr zur Chronologie von Bachs Weimarer Kantaten’, ibid., 213–16

U. Meyer: ‘“Flügel her! Flügel her!”: gepredigte Sterbekunst als Hintergrund Bachscher Kantatentexte’, Musik und Kirche, lxiii (1993), 258–65

M. Petzoldt: Texte zur Leipziger Kirchen-music: zum Verständnis der Kantatentexte Johann Sebastian Bachs (Wiesbaden, 1993)

R. Steiger: ‘So lerne nun die neue Evangelische Sprache: Elemente einer musikalischen Sprache des Trostes in J.S. Bachs Sterbekantaten’, Musik und Kirche, lxiv (1994), 255–63

F. Krummacher: Bachs Zyklus der Choralkantaten: Aufgaben und Lösungen (Göttingen, 1995)

D.L. Smithers: ‘The Original Circumstances in the Performance of Bach's Leipzig Church Cantatas, “Wegen seiner sonn- und festtätigen Amts-Verrichtungen’, Bach, xxvi/1–2 (1995), 28–47

C. Wolff and T. Koopman, eds.: De wereld van de Bach-cantates, i, Johann Sebastian Bachs geestelijke cantates van Arnstadt tot Köthen (Abcoude, 1995; Eng. trans., 1997)

Passions and oratorios

SmitherHO, ii

W. Werker: Die Matthäus-Passion (Leipzig, 1923)

F. Smend: ‘Die Johannes-Passion von Bach’, BJb 1926, 105–28; repr. in Friedrich Smend: Bach-Studien, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1969), 11–23

C.S. Terry: ‘The Spurious Bach “Lukas-Passion”’, ML, xiv (1933), 207–21

A. Schering: ‘Zur Markus-Passion und zur “vierten” Passion’, BJb 1939, 1–32

F. Smend: ‘Bachs Markus Passion’, BJb 1940–48, 1–35; repr. in Friedrich Smend: Bach-Studien, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1969), 110–36

A. Dürr: ‘Zu den verschollenen Passionen Bachs’, BJb 1949–50, 81–99

F. Smend: ‘Bachs Himmelsfahrts-Oratorium’, Bach-Gedenkschrift, ed. K. Matthaei (Zürich, 1950), 42–65; repr. in Friedrich Smend: Bach-Studien, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1969), 195–211

W. Serauky: ‘Die “Johannes-Passion” von Joh. Seb. Bach und ihr Vorbild’, BJb 1954, 29–39

B. Smallman: The Background of Passion Music: J.S. Bach and his Predecessors (London, 1957, enlarged 2/1970)

J. Chailley: Les Passions de J.-S. Bach (Paris, 1963, 2/1984)

A. Mendel: ‘Traces of the Pre-History of Bach's St John and St Matthew Passions’, Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. W. Gerstenberg, J. LaRue and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1963), 31–48

D. Gojowy: ‘Zur Frage der Köthener Trauermusik und der Matthäuspassion’, BJb 1965, 86–134

P. Brainard: ‘Bach's Parody Procedure and the St. Matthew Passion’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 241–60

A. Glöckner: ‘Bach and the Passion Music of his Contemporaries’, MT, cxvi (1975), 613–16

J. Rifkin: ‘The Chronology of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion’, MQ, lxi (1975), 360–87

E. Axmacher: ‘Ein Quellenfund zum Text der Matthäus-Passion’, BJb 1978, 181–91

G.A. Theill: Die Markuspassion von Johann Sebastian Bach (bwv247): Entstehung, Vergessen, Wiederentdeckung, Rekonstruktion (Steinfeld, 1978, 2/1981)

P. Steinitz: Bach’s Passions (London, 1979)

E.T. Chafe: ‘Key Structure and Tonal Allegory in the Passions of J.S. Bach: an Introduction’, CMc, no.31 (1981), 39–54

R. Steiger: ‘Die Einheit des Weinachtsoratoriums von J.S. Bach’, Musik und Kirche, li (1981), 273–80; lii (1982), 9–15

W. Blankenburg: Das Weinachts-Oratorium von Johann Sebastian Bach (Munich and Kassel, 1982)

E.T. Chafe: ‘J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion; Aspects of Planning, Structure, and Chronology’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 49–114

R.A. Leaver: Music as Preaching: Bach, Passions and Music in Worship (Oxford, 1982)

E. Axmacher: ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heyland sterben’: Untersuchungen zum Wandel des Passionverständnisses im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1984)

W.F. Hindermann: Johann Sebastian Bach, Himmelfahrts-Oratorium: Gestalt und Gehalt (Hofheim am Taunus, 1985)

C. Wolff: ‘Bachs Unvollendete: die Johannes-Passion. Mehrbändiges Kompendium erschliesst das monumentale Werk des Komponisten’, Neue Musikzeitung, xxxvi/2 (1987), 39 only

A. Dürr: Die Johannes-Passion von Johann Sebastian Bach: Entstehung, Überlieferung, Werkeinführung (Munich and Kassel, 1988)

C. Wolff: ‘Musical Forms and Dramatic Structure in Bach's Saint Matthew Passion’, Bach, xix/1 (1988), 6–20

M. Geck: Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannespassion bwv245 (Munich, 1991)

K. Hofmann: ‘Zur Tonartenordnung der Johannes-Passion von Johann Sebastian Bach’, Musik und Kirche, lxi (1991), 78–86

E. Platen: Die Matthäus-Passion von Johann Sebastian Bach: Entstehung, Werkbeschreibung, Rezeption (Munich and Kassel, 1991)

W.M. Young: The Sacred Dramas of J.S. Bach: a Reference and Textual Interpretation (Jefferson, NC, 1994)

Latin church music, motets and chorales

C.S. Terry: Bach’s Chorals (Cambridge, 1915–21/R)

A. Schering: ‘Die Höhe Messe in h-moll’, BJb 1936, 1–30

F. Smend: ‘Bachs h-moll-Messe: Entstehung, Uberlieferung, Bedeutung’, BJb 1937, 1–58

W. Blankenburg: Einführung in Bachs h-moll-Messe (Kassel, 1950, 3/1974)

R. Bullivant: ‘Zum Problem der Begleitung der Bachschen Motetten’, BJb 1966, 59–68

F. Smend: ‘Zu den ältesten Sammlungen der vierstimmigen Choräle J.S. Bachs’, ibid., 5–40; repr. in Friedrich Smend: Bach-Studien, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1969), 237–69

R. Leavis: ‘Bach's Setting of Psalm CXVII (bwv230)’, ML, lii (1971), 19–26

F. Krummacher: ‘Textauslegung und Satzstruktur in J.S. Bachs Motetten’, BJb 1974, 5–43

M. Geck: ‘Zur Datierung, Verwendung und Aufführungspraxis von Bachs Motetten’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 63–71

H. Rilling: Johann Sebastian Bachs h-Moll-Messe (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1979, 2/1986)

G.J. Buelow: ‘Symbol and Structure in the “Kyrie” of Bach's B-minor Mass’, Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and Other Divers Subjects: a Tribute to Gerhard Herz, ed. R.L. Weaver (Louisville, KY, 1981), 21–41

A. Mann: ‘Bach's A major Mass; a Nativity Mass?’, ibid., 43–7

R.M. Cammarota: ‘The Sources of the Christmas Interpolations in J.S. Bach's Magnificat in E-flat Major’, CMc, no.36 (1983), 79–99

H.-J. Schulze: ‘“150 Stück von den Bachischen Erben”: zur Überlieferung der vierstimmigen Choräle Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1983, 81–100

G. Wachowski: ‘Die vierstimmigen Choräle Johann Sebastian Bachs: Untersuchungen zu den Druckausgaben von 1765 bis 1932 und zur Frage der Authentizität’, ibid., 51–79

A. Mann: ‘Missa Brevis and Historia: Bach's A Major Mass’, Bach, xvi/1 (1985), 6–11

Y. Kobayashi: ‘Die Universalität in Bachs h-moll-Messe: ein Beitrag zum Bach-Bild der Letzten Lebensjahre’, Musik und Kirche, lvii (1987), 9–24

R.A. Leaver: ‘Bach, Kirchenlieder und Gesangbücher’, ibid., 169–74

W. Breig: ‘Grundzüge einer Geschichte von Bachs vierstimmigen Choralsatz’, AMw, xlv (1988), 300–19

C. Wolff: ‘Bach the Cantor, the Capellmeister, and the Musical Scholar: Aspects of the B-Minor Mass’, Bach, xx/1 (1989), 55–64

R.A. Leaver: ‘Parody and Theological Consistency: Notes on Bach's A-major Mass’, Bach, xxi/3 (1990), 30–43

J. Butt: Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge, 1991)

P. Wollny: ‘Bachs Sanctus bwv 241 und Kerlls “Missa superba”’, BJb 1991, 173–6

A. Durr: ‘Zur Parodiefrage in Bachs h-moll-Messe: eine Bestandsaufnahme’, Mf, xlv (1992), 117–38

R. Stinson: ‘Some Thoughts on Bach's Neumeister Chorales’, JM, xi (1993), 455–77

P. Wollny: ‘Ein Quellenfund zur Enstehungsgeschichte der h-Moll-Messe’, BJb 1994, 163–9

R.L. Marshall: Luther, Bach, and the Early Reformation Chorale (Atlanta, GA, 1995)

D.R. Melamed: J.S. Bach and the German Motet (Cambridge, 1995)

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

k: instrumental works

general

K.A. Rosenthal: ‘Über Sonatenvorformen in den Instrumentalmusikwerken Joh. Seb. Bachs’, BJb 1926, 68–89

C.S. Terry: Bach’s Orchestra (London, 1932/R)

J.M. Barbour: ‘Bach and “The Art of Temperament”’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 64–89

A.E.F. Dickinson: Bach’s Fugal Works (London, 1956/R)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Bach und der “lineare Kontrapunkt”’, BJb 1962, 58–79

H.-G. Klein: Der Einfluss der Vivaldischen Konzertform im Instrumentalwerk Johann Sebastian Bachs (Strasbourg, 1970)

C. Wolff: ‘Ordnungsprinzipien in den Originaldrucken Bachscher Werke’, Bach-Interpretationen, ed. M. Geck (Göttingen, 1969), 144–67; Eng. trans. in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 340–58

U. Siegele: Kompositionsweise und Bearbeitungstechnik in der Instrumentalmusik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1975)

J.R. Fuchs: Studien zu Artikulationsangaben in Orgel- und Clavierwerken von Joh. Seb. Bach (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1985)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘The French Influence in Bach's Instrumental Music’, EMc, xiii (1985), 180–84

R. Stinson: ‘Toward a Chronology of Bach's Instrumental Music: Observations on Three Keyboard Works’, JM, vii (1989), 440–70

organ works

FrotscherG

H. Grace: The Organ Works of Bach (London and New York, 1922)

F. Dietrich: ‘Analogieformen in Bachs Tokkaten und Präludien für die Orgel’, BJb 1931, 51–71

H. Klotz: Über die Orgelkunst der Gotik, der Renaissance und des Barock (Kassel, 1934, 3/1986)

H. Keller: ‘Unechte Orgelwerke Bachs’, BJb 1937, 59–82

S. de B. Taylor: The Chorale Preludes of J.S. Bach (London, 1942)

H. Keller: Die Orgelwerke Bachs: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte, Form, Deutung und Wiedergabe (Leipzig, 1948/R; Eng. trans., 1967)

H. Klotz: ‘Bachs Orgeln und seine Orgelmusik’, Mf, iii (1950), 189–203

K. Matthaei: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Orgel’, Bach-Gedenkschrift, ed. K. Matthaei (Zürich, 1950), 118–149

P. Aldrich: Ornamentation in J.S. Bach’s Organ Works (New York, 1950/R)

W. Emery: Notes on Bach’s Organ Works: a Companion to the Revised Novello Edition (London, 1952–7)

W. Schrammek: ‘Die musikgeschichtliche Stellung der Orgeltrio sonaten von Joh. Seb. Bach’, BJb 1954, 7–28

R. Donington: Tempo and Rhythm in Bach’s Organ Music (London, 1960)

G. von Dadelsen: ‘Zur Entstehung des Bachschen Orgelbüchleins’, Festschrift Friedrich Blume, ed. A.A. Abert and W. Pfannkuch (Kassel, 1963), 74–9

P.F. Williams: ‘J.S. Bach and English Organ Music’, ML, xliv (1963), 140–51

E.D. May: Breitkopf’s Role in the Transmission of J.S. Bach’s Organ Chorales (diss., Princeton U., 1974)

E. May: ‘Eine neue Quelle für J.S. Bachs einzeln überlieferte Orgelchoräle’, BJb 1974, 98–103

U. Meyer: ‘Zur Einordnung von J.S. Bachs einzeln überlieferten Orgelchorälen’, BJb 1977, 75–89

C. Wolff: ‘Bachs Handexemplar der Schübler-Chorale’, ibid., 120–29

T.F. Harmon: The Registration of J.S. Bach’s Organ Works (Buren, 1978)

G.B. Stauffer: The Organ Preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach (Ann Arbor, 1980)

P. Williams: The Organ Music of J.S. Bach (Cambridge, 1980–84)

P. Williams: ‘The Musical Aims of J.S. Bach's “Clavierübung III”’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 259–78

D. Humphreys: The Esoteric Structure of Bach’s Clavierübung III (Cardiff, 1983)

D. Kilian: ‘Zu einem Bachschen Tabulatorautograph’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 161–7

H. Klotz: Studien zu Bachs Registrierkunst (Wiesbaden, 1985)

F. Krummacher: ‘Bach und die norddeutsche Orgeltoccata: Fragen und Überlegungen’, BJb 1985, 119–34

R.A. Leaver: ‘Bach and Hymnody: the Evidence of the Orgelbüchlein’, EMc, xiii (1985), 227–36

C. Wolff: ‘Bach's Organ Music: Studies and Discoveries’, MT, cxxvi (1985), 149–52

G.B. Stauffer and E. May, eds.: J.S. Bach as Organist: his Instruments, Music, and Performance Practices (Bloomington, IN, 1986)

J.-C. Zehnder: ‘Georg Böhm und Johann Sebastian Bach: zur Chronologie der Bachschen Stilentwicklung’, BJb 1988, 73–110

G. Butler: Bach’s Clavier-Übung III: the Making of a Print, with a Companion Study of the Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’ BWV 769 (Durham, NC, 1990)

W. Breig: ‘Formprobleme in Bachs frühen Orgelfugen’, BJb 1992, 7–21

G.B. Stauffer: ‘Boyvin, Grigny, D'Anglebert, and Bach's Assimilation of French Classical Organ Music’, EMc, xxi (1993), 83–96

W. Breig: ‘Versuch einer Theorie der Bachschen Orgelfuge’, Mf, xlviii (1995), 14–52

R.D. Claus: Zur Echtheit von Toccata und Fuge d-moll BWV 565 (Cologne, 1995)

Q. Faulkner: ‘Die Registrierung der Orgelwerke J.S. Bachs’, BJb 1995, 7–30

R. Stinson: Bach: the Orgelbüchlein (New York, 1996)

keyboard and lute music

W. Werker: Studien über die Symmetrie im Bau der Fugen und die motivische Zusammengehörigkeit der Präludien und Fugen des ‘Wohltemperierten Klaviers’ von Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1922/R)

H. David: ‘Die Gestalt von Bachs Chromatischer Fantasie’, BJb 1926, 2–67

H. Neeman: ‘J.S. Bachs Lautenkompositionen’, BJb 1931, 72–87

H. Keller: Die Klavierwerke Bachs (Leipzig, 1950)

J.N. David: Das wohltemperierte Klavier: der Versuch einer Synopsis (Göttingen, 1962)

H. Keller: Das Wohltemperierte Klavier von Johann Sebastian Bach: Werke und Wiedergabe (Kassel, 1965, 4/1994; Eng. trans., 1976)

W. Breig: ‘Bachs Goldberg-Variationen als zyklisches Werk’, AMw, xxxii (1975), 243–65

H. Eichberg: ‘Unechtes unter Johann Sebastian Bachs Klavierwerken’, BJb 1975, 7–49

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Melodiezitate und Mehrtextigkeit in der Bauernkantate und in den Goldberg-Variationen’, BJb 1976, 58–72

C. Wolff: ‘Bach's Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations: a New Source’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 224–41; repr. in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 162–77

A. Burguéte: ‘Die Lautenkompositionen Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1977, 26–54

J. Barnes: ‘Bach's Keyboard Temperament: Internal Evidence from the Well-Tempered Clavier’, EMc, vii (1979), 236–49

C. Wolff: ‘Textkritische Bemerkungen zum Originaldruck der Bachschen Partiten’, BJb 1979, 65–74; Eng. trans. in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 214–22

A. Dürr: Zur Frühgeschichte des Wohltemperierten Klaviers I von Johann Sebastian Bach (Göttingen, 1984)

P. Williams: ‘J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: a New Approach’, EMc, xi (1983), 46–52, 332–9

D. Humphreys: ‘More on the Cosmological Allegory in Bach's Goldberg Variations’, Soundings, xii (1984–5), 25–45

I. Kaussler: Die Goldberg-Variationen von J.S. Bach (Stuttgart, 1985)

R. Dammann: Johann Sebastian Bachs ‘Goldberg-Variationen’ (Mainz, 1986)

A. Street: ‘The Rhetorico-Musical Structure of the Goldberg Variations: Bach's Clavier-Übung IV and the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian’, MAn, vi (1987), 89–131

G. Butler: ‘Neues zur Datierung der Goldberg-Variationen’, BJb 1988, 219–23

D. Schulenberg: The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach (New York, 1992)

Y. Tomita: J.S. Bach’s ‘Das Wohltemperierte Clavier II’: a Critical Commentary (Leeds, 1993–5)

orchestral and chamber music

ScheringGIK

N. Carrell: Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (London, 1963, 2/1985)

H. Eppstein: Studien über J.S. Bachs Sonaten für ein Melodieinstrument und obligates Cembalo (Stockholm, 1966)

H. Eppstein: ‘Grundzüge in J.S. Bachs Sonatenschaffen’, BJb 1969, 5–30

L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach als Schöpfer des Klavier Konzerts’, Quellenstudien zur Musik: Wolfgang Schmieder zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. K. Dorfmüller and G. von Dadelsen (Frankfurt, 1972), 69–77

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Konzertbearbeitungen nach Vivaldi und anderen: Studien- oder Auftragswerke?’, DJbM, xviii (1973–7), 80–100

A. Dürr: ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des 5. Brandenburgischen Konzerts’, BJb 1975, 63–9

W. Breig: ‘Bachs Violinkonzert d-moll: Studien zu seiner Gestalt und Entstehungsgeschichte’, BJb 1976, 7–34

H. Eppstein: ‘Chronologieprobleme in Johann Sebastian Bachs Suiten für Soloinstrument’, ibid., 35–57

W. Breig: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und die Entstehung des Klavierkonzerts’, AMw, xxxvi (1979), 21–48

R. Leavis: ‘Zur Frage der Authentizität von Bachs Violinkonzert d-Moll’, BJb 1979, 19–28

R.L. Marshall: ‘J.S. Bach's Compositions for Solo Flute: a Reconsideration of their Authenticity and Chronology’, JAMS, xxxii (1979), 463–98

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Ein “Dresdner Menuett” im zweiten Klavierbüchlein der Anna Magdalena Bach, nebst Hinweisen zur Überlieferung einiger Kammermusikwerke Bachs’, BJb 1979, 45–64

P. Ahnsehl, K. Heller and H.-J. Schulze, eds.: ‘Beiträge zum Konzertschaffen J. S. Bachs’, Bach-Studien, vi (1981)

H. Vogt: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kammermusik (Stuttgart, 1981; Eng. trans., 1988)

W. Breig: ‘Zur Chronologie von Johann Sebastian Bachs Konzertschaffen: Versuch eines neuen Zugangs’, AMw, xl (1983), 77–101

L. Dreyfus: ‘J.S. Bach's Concerto Ritornellos and the Question of Invention’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 327–58

C. Wolff: ‘Bach's Leipzig Chamber Music’, EMc, xiii (1985), 165–75; repr. in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 223–38

L. Dreyfus: ‘J.S. Bach and the Status of Genre: Problems of Style in the G-minor Sonata bwv 1029’, JM, v (1987), 55–78

M. Marissen: ‘A Critical Reappraisal of J.S. Bach's A-major Flute Sonata’, JM, vi (1988), 367–86

C. Berger: ‘J.S. Bachs Cembalokonzerte’, AMw, xlvii (1990), 207–16

E. Lang-Becker: Johann Sebastian Bach: die Brandenburgischen Konzerte (Munich, 1990)

M. Boyd: Bach: the Brandenburg Concertos (Cambridge, 1993)

J. Swack: ‘On the Origins of the “Sonate auf Concertenart”’, JAMS, xlvi (1993), 369–414

C. Wolff: ‘Das Trio A-Dur bwv 1025: eine Lautensonate von Silvius Leopold Weiss, bearbeitet und erweitert von Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb 1993, 47–67

M. Geck: ‘Köthen oder Leipzig?: zur Datierung der nun in Leipziger Quellen erhaltenen Orchesterwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Mf, xlvii (1994), 17–24

M. Marissen: The Social and Religious Designs of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

M. Geck: Bachs Orchesterwerke (Witten, 1997)

Art of Fugue, Musical Offering, canons

W. Graeser: ‘Bachs “Kunst der Fuge”’, BJb 1924, 1–104

D.F. Tovey: A Companion to ‘The Art of Fugue’ (London, 1931)

H.T. David: J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering: History, Interpretation and Analysis (New York, 1945/R)

G.M. Leonhardt: The Art of Fugue, Bach’s Last Harpsichord Work: an Argument (The Hague, 1952)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Kanonwidmungen’, BJb 1967, 82–92

C. Wolff: ‘Der Terminus “Ricercar” in Bachs Musikalischen Opfer’, ibid., 70–81

C. Wolff: ‘New Research on Bach's Musical Offering’, MQ, lvii (1971), 379–408

C. Wolff: ‘Überlegungen zum “Thema Regium”’, BJb 1973, 33–8

C. Wolff and others: ‘Bach's “Art of Fugue”: an Examination of the Sources’, CMc, no.19 (1975), 47–77

N. Kenyon: ‘A Newly Discovered Group of Canons by Bach’, MT, cxvii (1976), 391–3

W. Kolneder: Die Kunst der Fuge: Mythen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wilhelmshaven, 1977, 2/1983)

W. Wiemer: Die wiederhergestellte Ordnung in Johann Sebastian Bachs Kunst der Fuge: Untersuchungen am Originaldruck (Wiesbaden, 1977)

U. Kirkendale: ‘The Source for Bach's Musical Offering: the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 88–141

G.G. Butler: ‘Ordering Problems in J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue Resolved’, MQ, lxix (1983), 44–61

C. Wolff: ‘Zur Chronologie und Kompositionsgeschichte von Bachs “Kunst der Fuge”’, BMw, xxv (1983), 130–42; Eng. trans. in Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 265–81

E.T. Chafe: ‘Allegorical Music: the Symbolism of Tonal Language in the Bach Canons’, JM, iii (1984), 340–62

H.H. Eggebrecht: Bachs Kunst der Fuge: Erscheinung und Deutung (Munich, 1984; Eng. trans., 1993)

E. Bergel: Bachs letzte Fuge, die ‘Kunst der Fuge’, ein zyklisches Werk: Entstehungsgeschichte, Erstausgabe, Ordnungsprinzipien (Bonn, 1985)

R. Boss: Die Kunst des Rätselkanons im Musikalischen Opfer (Wilhelmshaven, 1991)

P. Schleuning: Johann Sebastian Bachs ‘Kunst der Fuge’: Ideologien, Entstehung, Analyse (Munich and Kassel, 1993)

P. Dirksen: Studien zur Kunst der Fuge von Johann Sebastian Bach: Untersuchungen zur Enstehungsgeschichte, Struktur und Aufführungspraxis (Wilhelmshaven, 1994)

M. Marissen: ‘More Source-Critical Research on Bach's Musical Offering’, Bach, xxv/1 (1994), 11–27

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach: Bibliography

l: performing practice

W. Emery: Bach’s Ornaments (London, 1953)

F. Rothschild: The Lost Tradition in Music: Rhythm and Tempo in J.S. Bach’s Time (London, 1953/R)

A. Mendel: ‘On the Pitches in Use in Bach's Time’, MQ, xli (1955), 332–54, 466–80

W. Emery: ‘Is your Bach Playing Authentic?’, MT, cxii (1971), 483–8, 697–8, 796–7

H. Grüss: ‘Tempofragen der Bachzeit’, Bach-Studien, v (1975), 73–81

F. Neumann: Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music with Special Emphasis on J.S. Bach (Princeton, NJ, 1978)

K. Hochreiter: Zur Aufführungspraxis der Vokal-Instrumentalwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Berlin, 1983)

R. Kirkpatrick: Interpreting Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier: a Performer’s Discourse of Method (New Haven, CT, 1984)

H. Klotz: Die Ornamentik der Klavier- und Orgelwerke von Johann Sebastian Bach: Bedeutung der Zeichen, Möglichkeiten der Ausführung (Kassel, 1984)

A. Newman: Bach and the Baroque: a Performing Guide to Baroque Music with Special Emphasis on the Music of J.S. Bach (New York, 1985)

G. Stauffer and E. May, eds.: J.S. Bach as Organist: his Instruments, Music, and Performance Practices (Bloomington, IN, 1986)

R. Szeskus and H. Gruss, eds.: Aufführungspraktische Probleme der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig, 1987)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach's Orchestra: Some Unanswered Questions’, EMc, xvii (1989), 3–15

P. Badura-Skoda: Bach-Interpretation: die Klavierwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Laaber, 1990; Eng. trans., 1993)

J. Butt: Bach Interpretation: Articulation Marks in Primary Sources of J.S. Bach (Cambridge, 1990)

H.-J. Schulze: Bach stilgericht aufführen, Wunschbild und Wirklichkeit: einige aufführungspraktische Aspekte von Johann Sebastian Bachs Leipziger Kirchenmusik (Wiesbaden, 1991)

1. Leipzig, Dresden, 1710–46.

(8) Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

(45) (b Weimar, 22 Nov 1710; d Berlin, 1 July 1784). Composer and organist, eldest son of (7) Johann Sebastian (24) and Maria Barbara Bach. Trained by his father and endowed with brilliant gifts, he expressed himself in the genres of his time in a sensitive and highly cultivated musical language.

2. Halle, Brunswick, Berlin, 1746–84.

3. Works, reception.

1. Leipzig, Dresden, 1710–46.

He was baptized on 24 November 1710; his godparents were the Weimar chamberlain Wilhelm Ferdinand von Lynker, Anna Dorothea Hagedorn and Friedemann Meckbach, the last two acquaintances of J.S. Bach from Mühlhausen. Friedemann attended the Lutheran Lateinschule in Cöthen (1717–23), and from 14 June 1723 he was a day-boy at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. On 5 March 1729 he matriculated at Leipzig University, where his father had already registered him as a depositus on 22 December 1723; he attended lectures on law, philosophy, mathematics and other subjects. His early musical education, provided by his father, is documented in the Clavier-Büchlein vor W.F. Bach, begun on 22 January 1720 and containing entries (mainly in the hands of J.S. and W.F. Bach) up to about 1725–6. It is unlikely that this keyboard book reflects his very first systematic music lessons, since even the earliest entries are technically demanding. More plausibly it may be regarded as instruction in composition. Its repertory consists of works (inventions, sinfonias and preludes) that J.S. Bach probably wrote specifically for educational purposes, as well as several pieces by other authors (Telemann, G.H. Stölzel, J.C. Richter). It also contains fingering instructions, a table of ornaments after D’Anglebert, and Friedemann’s own first attempts at composition, written with paternal guidance around 1720 and 1725–6 (two allemandes bwv836–7 and four preludes bwv924a, 925, 932 and 931). From Christmas 1724 until August or September 1726 (i.e. while he was a pupil at the Thomasschule) W.F. Bach is known to have copied performing parts for his father, and around 1726 he took violin lessons from J.G. Graun in Merseburg ‘to enable him to compose according to the nature of that instrument’ (Marpurg).

At this period Friedemann accompanied his father several times to Dresden and thus became familiar with the city where he was later to live and work. He also visited Halle in 1729, when he delivered an invitation from his father to Handel, and on 29 March that year he performed in J.S. Bach’s funeral music for Prince Leopold in Cöthen. In December 1732 he stood godfather, in Udestedt, to Dorothea Wilhelmine, the youngest daughter of his cousin Tobias Friedrich Bach (40). Little is known about his musical development during his last few years in the parental home. Copies in his hand of organ works by his father (the C major concerto arranged from Vivaldi, bwv594, and the sonatas bwv525–8) suggest that he took a particular interest in organ playing at this period. By about 1730 he must already have acquired a considerable reputation as a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist, since he took over the teaching of Christoph Nichelmann that year, perhaps to lighten his father’s workload. Except for the attempts in the Clavier-Büchlein mentioned above, there is no certain evidence of any compositions written in Leipzig.

After failing in a competition for a post at Halberstadt in March 1731, Friedemann applied for the post of organist at the Dresden Sophienkirche which had fallen vacant on the death of Christian Petzold; his father wrote the letter of application and signed it in his name. He probably played J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G bwv541 in the competition for this post. Christoph Schaffrath and Johann Christian Stoy were the other two short-listed candidates. Documents pertaining to the competition state that the deputy Kapellmeister Pantaleon Hebenstreit, who had been invited to adjudicate, praised ‘the skill of the younger Bach … adding that he was the best of these three well-qualified candidates’. Bach took up his duties on 1 August 1733; he was required only to play the organ for divine service and for the figural music performed on feast days, for which he was paid a modest salary of about 80 reichsthaler. However, the appointment gave him time to pursue other interests. He cultivated the acquaintance of Dresden court musicians such as J.G. Pisendel and S.L. Weiss, and presumably took an active part in the musical life of the court. A glimpse of his activities is provided by his mention of musical evenings at the house of the Electress Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Saxony, recalled in his dedication to her (in 1767) of his Harpsichord Concerto in E minor brC 12. It seems certain that he made close contacts with music-loving aristocrats, including the Russian ambassador Count von Keyserlingk, to whom Bach dedicated a harpsichord sonata from Halle in 1763, and the directeur des plaisirs C.H. von Dieskau, whose wife was godmother to Bach’s first son, Wilhelm Adolf, in 1752. At the same time Bach was teaching J.G. Goldberg, and continuing the study of mathematics he had begun in Leipzig under Johann Gottlieb Waltz (later court mathematician and Kommissionsrat). Bach is known to have been in Leipzig for four weeks in summer 1739, accompanied by the lutenists S.L. Weiss and Johann Kropfgans.

In Dresden Bach was also increasingly active as a composer. About 1735 he wrote the harpsichord concertos in A minor and D major (brC 14 and 9), several sinfonias (brC 1–6) and trio sonatas (brB 13–15) and a number of harpsichord sonatas and smaller keyboard works. The compositions of the later part of his Dresden period (c1740–46) include such works as the Concerto for two harpsichords in F major brA 12, the Harpsichord Concerto in F major brC 13 and the Sinfonia in D minor brC 7. The Harpsichord Sonata in D major brA 4 was Friedemann’s first work to be printed; it was published in spring 1745 and sold by his father in Leipzig and his brother Emanuel in Berlin. The intention of following it with another five sonatas was abandoned because of poor sales.

2. Halle, Brunswick, Berlin, 1746–84.

On 16 April 1746, the day that he signed the certificate of his appointment as organist to the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle, W.F. Bach also submitted a letter of resignation to the Dresden city council. He suggested that his father’s pupil J.C. Altnickol should replace him in Dresden, but Altnickol was not in fact chosen. For Bach, the move to Halle meant exchanging a city dominated by court life for a middle-class town, and a subordinate position for one of the most important organist posts in central Germany. In Halle he also held the title of director musices, and as well as playing the organ his duties included performing figural music on a regular basis, that is on all feast days, but only on every third ordinary Sunday. In his own compositions, Bach therefore concentrated on cantatas for special occasions, since these works could be re-used annually. With the increase in his official duties Bach’s income also improved, and indeed was more than doubled, for he now received an annual salary of some 180 reichsthaler. When he officially took up his post on Whit Sunday, 29 May 1746, he performed the cantata Wer mich liebet (brF 13). With its large-scale opening chorus and a virtuoso aria with organ obbligato, it is obviously intended for a grand occasion; the paper used for the autograph manuscript shows that he composed it while still in Dresden.

During his early years in Halle, Friedemann seems to have been in close contact with his father in Leipzig. He accompanied J.S. Bach to Berlin in 1747 on his visit to Frederick the Great, and in 1749–50 he and his father together supported the appointment of the organ builder Heinrich Andreas Contius to Frankfurt an der Oder. Friedemann seems also to have borrowed compositions of his father’s for performance in Halle (e.g. bwv31, 34 and 51). He made extensive use of his father’s compositions, especially after inheriting many of his cantatas in 1750. According to an (unverifiable) anecdote told by Marpurg, he was suspected of plagiarism on the occasion of a university ceremony in 1749, when he performed parody arias from one of his father’s Passions under his own name. Also in 1749, a performance was given in Leipzig of his Advent cantata Lasset uns ablegen (brF 1), perhaps with the purpose of influencing the choice of a successor to J.S. Bach there, a matter under early discussion by the Leipzig city council. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Sonnenkalb, a pupil at the Thomasschule, mentioned performances by W.F. Bach, both at private concerts in his father’s house and publicly in the Grosse Concert.

Bach was embroiled in several conflicts over issues of responsibility and charges of exceeding his authority, including a dispute in 1749 with his Kantor, Johann Gottfried Mittag, who had misappropriated money due to Bach. In 1750 he was reprimanded for overstaying a leave of absence after his father’s death; he had gone to Leipzig to settle the estate, and had then escorted his half-brother Johann Christian to the care of Emanuel in Berlin, where he himself stayed for several months. It is difficult to establish the veracity of the many other anecdotes about Bach’s neglect of his official duties.

On 25 February 1751 Bach married Dorothea Elisabeth Georgi (1725–91), eldest daughter of the tax collector Johann Gotthilf Georgi. The marriage produced three children, two sons who died in infancy and a daughter, Friederica Sophia (b 27 Feb 1757). Bach seems to have had numerous pupils in Halle. As well as his distant relative Johann Christian Bach (77, the so-called ‘Halle Clavier-Bach’), who acquired important original sources from Friedemann, and F.W. Rust, whose estate contained invaluable copies of some of Friedemann’s keyboard works, they included Daniel Christoph Vahlkamp, J.S. Petri, Samuel Friedrich Brede, Christian Leberecht Zimmermann and Johann Carl Angerstein, who gave an account of W.F. Bach’s style of chorale accompaniment in his treatise Theoretisch-practische Anweisung, Choralgesänge nicht nur richtig sondern auch schön spielen zu lernen (Stendal, 1800). Bach was also in contact with the Halle printer J.J. Gebauer, who owned a collection of his keyboard works, and with Marpurg, the second part of whose Abhandlung von der Fuge (Berlin, 1754), containing 13 canons by Friedemann, is dedicated to the brothers W.F. and C.P.E. Bach. Godparental ties also connected him with the family of the organ builder H.A. Contius, and he seems to have maintained a connection with the court at Cöthen, since the princely couple were godparents to his daughter and Friedemann composed a set of pieces for a grandfather clock mechanism at the castle there (brA 63–80, previously ascribed to J.S. Bach as bwv Anh.133–50).

Bach’s increasing dissatisfaction with his Halle post is evident in his repeated, but unsuccessful, attempts to leave. In 1753 he applied for the post of organist at the Johanniskirche in Zittau, in competition with his brother Emanuel and his father’s pupils J.C. Altnickol, J.L. Krebs and Johann Trier; in 1758 and 1759 he applied for the position of Kapellmeister in Frankfurt, with a letter of recommendation from Telemann; and in 1762 he was involved in negotiations with the Landgrave of Hesse for the post of Hofkapellmeister in Darmstadt, which had fallen vacant on the death of Christoph Graupner. He seems to have drawn these negotiations out at some length intentionally, and to have broken them off in the end for unexplained reasons; however, in the dedication of the Harpsichord Concerto in E minor brC 12 to the Electress of Saxony in 1767 he credits himself with the title of Hofkapellmeister at Darmstadt, so it seems that the title had at some point been granted to him. After 1756 Bach’s attempts to leave Halle may well have been reinforced by the hardships of the Seven Years War, which bore down with particular severity on the city and its inhabitants. The authorities placed Bach in a high tax bracket because of his wife’s landed property, so that the taxes regularly levied on account of the war weighed heavily on him, and in about 1759 he was obliged to sell some of the music he had inherited from his father to Johann Georg Nacke, Kantor at Oelsnitz. The tension in Halle led to Bach’s leaving his post in May 1764, a decision he took without the security of any other prospective employment. In a letter written at the end of June 1764 he mentioned plans for leaving the city, perhaps in the hope of a position in Fulda. However, he stayed in Halle until at least October 1770, and seems to have supported himself chiefly by private lessons, though his financial situation was obviously deteriorating so drastically in these years that in February 1768 he re-applied (unsuccessfully) for his old post, which had become vacant again after the death of Johann Christoph Rühlmann.

While discharging his duties as organist and music director of the Liebfrauenkirche, Bach also resumed the publication of his keyboard works: in 1748 his Sonata in E flat major brA 7 appeared with a dedication to Privy Councillor Wilhelm von Happe, and the same piece was published again in November 1763 (not 1739 or 1768, as has variously been claimed), with a dedication to Count von Keyserlingk. In about 1765 Friedemann announced the publication of his 12 polonaises brA 27–38 and in October 1767 that of the Harpsichord Concerto in E minor brC 12, but nothing came of these plans. In manuscript both works were dedicated to noble patrons: the first half of the cycle of polonaises to the then director of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Grigoryevich von Orlov, and the concerto to Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Electress of Saxony. The dedications of brA 7, 27–38 and C 12 are obviously connected with Bach’s search for employment outside Halle. A now lost Abhandlung vom harmonischen Dreyklang, mentioned by Marpurg in 1758 and announced by Friedemann himself in several advertisements in the same year, also remained unpublished. The content and purpose of this treatise is unknown, but it may have dealt with mathematical and philosophical issues.

The rest of Bach’s life was a tale of steadily deteriorating circumstances and unsuccessful attempts to obtain permanent employment. In 1770 his wife had to sell part of her property. The family left Halle and moved first to Brunswick, where they lived from about 1771 to the beginning of 1774. In summer 1773 Bach visited J.N. Forkel in Göttingen and in April 1774 he moved to Berlin, where he lived until his death. He applied for posts as organist at the Stadtkirche, Wolfenbüttel, and St Katharina, Brunswick, in 1771, and at the Marienkirche, Berlin, in 1779; documents relating to the Wolfenbüttel and Berlin posts reveal that the reason for his lack of success was his difficult character and unsteady way of life. In 1778 it seems that his efforts to find a permanent post even led him to try ousting J.P. Kirnberger as musician to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, whereupon the princess withdrew the financial support she had previously been granting Bach. This intrigue is known to us only from Kirnberger’s account of it; his rival Marpurg, in whose house Bach was living during these years, seems to have been involved as well.

In his later years Bach performed in public as an organ virtuoso on many occasions: in Göttingen in summer 1773, Brunswick (22 August 1773) and Berlin (4 May 1774 in the Garnisonkirche, 15 May 1774 in the Nikolaikirche and the Marienkirche, 9 June 1774 in the Marienkirche, and 10 October and 3 December 1776 in the Dreifaltigkeitskirche). These recitals contributed substantially to his reputation as the greatest living organ virtuoso and improviser, but this increase in improvising seems to have gone hand in hand with a decline in his ambitions as a composer. He apparently wrote only a few works in the last years of his life; they include the viola duets brB 7–9 (in part revisions of earlier works) and two of the six flute duets brB 1–6, the eight fugues dedicated to Princess Anna Amalia brA 81–8 (dedicatory copy dated 1778), the harpsichord sonatas in D and G brA 5, 14 and probably most of the fantasies. In 1778–9 Friedemann was working on an opera, Lausus und Lydie (a later libretto gives the title as Laurus und Lydie), but it was never completed and is now lost. The only pupil he is known for certain to have had in Berlin was Sara Levy, née Itzig, Felix Mendelssohn’s great-aunt.

Financial circumstances eventually forced Bach into the piecemeal sale of his music library and those of his father’s works he had inherited, as well as compositions of his own. On leaving Brunswick he entrusted the sale by auction of some of his music to J.J. Eschenburg, but whether the auction actually took place is not known; Bach himself did not make inquiries about the proceeds until four years later. It was presumably at this time, and in connection with the sale of manuscripts, that he manipulated the attribution of certain works. For instance, he gave the Vivaldi arrangement bwv596 the misleading inscription, ‘di W.F. Bach manu mei patris descriptum’, while he conversely ascribed works of his own to his father (e.g. Dienet dem Herrn, brF 25). During his last years Bach suffered from poor health and became increasingly resigned to retirement from public musical life, but he seems still to have been widely known at the time of his death, as the obituary in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik (1784) makes clear: ‘In him Germany has lost its foremost organist, and the musical world in general has lost a man who cannot be replaced’. Bach left his wife and daughter in great poverty; a benefit performance of Handel’s Messiah was given for them the following year.

3. Works, reception.

Little is known about the extent and location of Bach’s musical estate. Part of it was acquired second-hand in Berlin at the beginning of the 19th century by Carl Philipp Heinrich Pistor (1778–1847). Other items found their way into the library of the Berlin Singakademie through Sara Levy and C.F. Zelter, and some music evidently remained in the hands of Bach’s daughter and was taken by her descendants to the USA, where it was accidentally destroyed in recent years. The provenance of Georg Poelchau’s autograph manuscripts (now in D-Bsb) is still largely unexplained; some seem to have come from the organist Johann Nikolaus Julius Kötschau, others may have been acquired in Berlin in the early 19th century. The early dispersal of his works makes it difficult to assess W.F. Bach’s creative achievement satisfactorily. Extensive losses had probably occurred as early as 1800. Evaluations of Bach’s work have often been based on pieces incorrectly attributed (for instance the keyboard pieces in D-Bsb Mus.ms.Bach P 883–4).

In Leipzig Bach clearly concentrated more on virtuoso performance than on his career as a composer, perhaps in the depressing realization that he could never attain his father’s perfection in all musical genres. His creative energies were therefore expressed more readily in free improvisation, and particularly in his late years the improvisation of fantasies on the organ and harpsichord was very important to him. Only when he became relatively independent from his father in Dresden did Friedemann develop more fully as a composer, especially of keyboard music. Some of his early works (the Bourlesca brA 51, the Clavierstück brA 54) appear to derive from ideas that came to him while improvising. From the first, his compositions were marked by distinctly virtuoso tendencies; pieces like the harpsichord concertos in A minor and D major (brC 14, 9) and the Sonata in D major brA 4 are among the most difficult harpsichord works of their time. The last-named work is unique in its fusion of different stylistic and formal models; only the ‘Württemberg’ sonatas of C.P.E. Bach can to some extent compare with it. The Dresden compositions in particular employ many technical and stylistic features of J.S. Bach’s Clavier-Übung I, but even in these early works Friedemann’s individual and original style is strongly marked, above all in its characteristic melodic phrasings and a tendency to contrapuntal or imitative development. The capricious style of his ensemble music is obviously modelled on J.D. Zelenka.

In his cantatas, which were all probably written while he was in Halle, Bach employed melodic idioms of the Dresden operatic style, but in many details he followed his father’s style of vocal writing. In a series of cantatas probably composed about 1755, for instance, he included instrumental introductory movements, and his large-scale choral movements contain a number of complex fugues. Apart from this, his vocal style must have been strongly influenced by Telemann’s cantatas, which formed part of his performance repertory in Halle. Bach’s cantata Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (brF 19) is obviously modelled on Telemann’s setting of the same text (tvwv I:14). Bach’s vocal works illustrate the great demands he made on the technical abilities of singers and instrumentalists. He was rather conservative in his choice of texts, his favourite sources being Johann Jacob Rambach’s Geistliche Poesien (Halle, 1720) and Johann Friedrich Möhring’s Gott geheiligtes Beth- und Lob-Opffer der Christen (Zerbst, 1723).

The late keyboard works follow new stylistic ideals. There is a noticeable tendency towards formal, technical and melodic clarity in the sonatas, while some of the virtuoso fantasias anticipate 19th-century keyboard techniques. At the same time Bach obviously had a predilection for older forms such as the toccata and fugue.

The judgment of posterity on Friedemann Bach was chiefly influenced in the 19th century by the many anecdotes about his personal life that were spread after his death, particularly by Marpurg, J.F. Reichardt and J.F. Rochlitz – an image maintained to this day in A.E. Brachvogel’s popular pseudo-biographical novel. Scholarly study of W.F. Bach began with the works by Friedrich Chrysander and C.H. Bitter, although the work of the latter in particular suffers from prejudice, especially in discussion of the works. Martin Falck’s dissertation, published in 1913, is the first comprehensive monograph on the composer’s life and work, although many details are in need of revision. Falck’s work has been complemented by a series of specialist studies (including those of Braun, Miesner and Schulze) and individual groups of works have been more thoroughly discussed in studies of their genres (by Kelletat, Müller-Blattau and Schleuning).

Only a few of Bach’s works were at all widely known in his lifetime, among them the two printed harpsichord sonatas brA 4 and 7. Even better known were the 12 polonaises brA 27–38 (c1765) and the collection of eight fugues brA 81–8 (before 1778); more than 20 contemporary manuscript copies of the first collection, and almost 30 copies of the second, are known to have been in circulation. The polonaises were so popular, even at the beginning of the 19th century, that Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl published them in 1819. Adverse circumstances prevented publication by Hoffmeister & Kühnel of Forkel’s planned edition of selected works. Bach’s sonatas and fantasies are now available in reliable editions, and a critical edition of the complete works was inaugurated by Carus-Verlag, Stuttgart, in 2000.

Although Friedemann Bach’s work is more limited in both quantity and stylistic variety than the music of his brother Emanuel, he must be ranked beside C.P.E. Bach as one of the major composers representing the period between Baroque and Classical composition.

WORKS

Catalogues: M. Falck: ‘Thematisches Verzeichnis der Kompositionen Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs’, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1913) [Fk; † = addn from Wollny (1993)]P. Wollny: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der Werke Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs, Bach-Repertorium, ii (in preparation) [BR]

keyboard, organ

Edition: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Orgelwerke, ed. T. Fedtke (Frankfurt, 1968) [FO]



BR	Fk

A 1	†200	Sonata (C), c1735–40, D-Bsb
A 2a	1b	Sonata (C) (early version), c1735–40, Bsb; 2nd movt. ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 2b	1a	Sonata (C) (later version), ? after c1750, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*; ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 3	2	Sonata (C), c1760–75, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*; ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 4	3	Sonata (D) (Dresden, 1745); ed. in NM lxxviii (1930)
A 5	4	Sonata (D), c1760–75, rev. c1778, Bsb*; ed. in NM, lxxviii (1930)
A 6	11	Sonata (D), 2 hpd, lost, listed in J.C. Westphal catalogue, 1782
A 7	5	Sonata (E) (Halle 1748, 1763); ed. in NM, lxxviii (1930)
A 8	†201	Sonata (Eb), c1775, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*
A 9	†204	Sonata (e), ?c1735–40, lost, formerly RUS-KA
A 10	†202	Sonata (F), c1735, D-Bsb
A 11a	6c	Sonata (F) (1st version), c1735–40, Bsb; 2nd movt. ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 11b	6b	Sonata (F) (2nd version), c1740, Bsb; 2nd movt. ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 11c	6a	Sonata (F) (3rd version), ? after 1750, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art* [Trio from 2nd movt. = brA 80]; ed. in NM, clvi (1941)
A 12	10	Concerto (F), 2 hpd, c1740, Bsb; ed. in J.S. Bach: Werke*, xliii [attrib. J.S. Bach]
A 13a–b	40	Concerto (G) (2 versions), c1740, rev. ?c1775, Bsb
A 14	7	Sonata (G), c1775–80, Bsb*; ed. in NM, lxiii (1930)
A 15	8	Sonata (A), c1750–70, Bsb; ed. in NM, lxiii (1930)
A 16	9	Sonata (Bb), ?c1770, Bsb; ed. in NM, lxiii (1930)
A 17	14	Fantasia (C), c1770–75, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 18–19	15–16	2 fantasias (c, c), dedic. to G.U. von Behr, c1770–75, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 20–22	17–19	3 fantasias (D, d, d), c1770–75, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 23	20	Fantasia (e), 1770, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 24	21	Fantasia (e), c1770–75, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 25	22	Fantasia (G), ?c1750, Bsb [= brA 63]
A 26	23	Fantasia (a), c1770–75, Bsb; ed. P. Schleuning (Mainz, 1972)
A 27–38	12	12 polonaises (C, c, D, d, E, e, E, e, F, f, G, g), c1765, rev. c1775, F-Pc, PL-Kj*; ed. A. Böhnert (Munich, 1993)
A 39	24	Suite (g), ?c1730 [4th movt. = brA 48], D-Bsb; ed. A. Böhnert (Munich, 1993)
A 40–41	†205	2 allemandes (g, g), c1725, US-NH* [= bwv836–7]; ed. in NBA, V/5
A 42–43	—	2 minuets (G, g), c1725, US-NH* [=bwv841–2]; ed. in NBA, V/5
A 44–47	†206	4 preludes (C, D, e, a), c1726, US-NH* [=bwv924a, 925, 932, 931]; ed. in NBA, V/5
A 48	25/1	Minuet (g), D-Bsb
A 49a–c	25/2	Presto (Tempo di Menuet) (d), Bsb, US-NH
A 50	†208	Minuet (F), MS lost, formerly RUS-KA [also attrib. C.P.E. Bach]
A 51a–b	26	Bourleska (Imitation de la chasse) (C), c1735, D-Bsb*
A 52	27	Reveille (C), c1735–9, Bsb
A 53a–b	28	Gigue (G), c1735–9, Bsb
A 54	29	Clavierstück (Präludium) (c), c1740, Bsb*
A 55a–b	—	Scherzo (d/e), ?c1730–35 [=bwv844/844a]; ed. in J.S. Bach: Werke, xlii [attrib. J.S. Bach]
A 56	30	March (Eb), ?1770, Bsb
A 57	—	March (F), formerly RUS-KA [=brA 76]
A 58	13	Polonaise (C), D-Bsb [= Trio from 2nd movt of brA 11c; = brA 80]
A 59	—	Ouverture (E), Bsb
A 60	†209	Andante (e), ?c1775, GB-Cfm [= 2nd movt. of brA 13; see also ‘Secular vocal’, brH 1]
A 61	†203	Allegro non troppo (G), ?c1775, lost, formerly D-Bhm
A 62	—	Un poco allegro (C), c1775, LEm*
A63–80	†207	18 pieces for musical clock, 1759 [=bwvAnh.133–50]; ed. A. Klughardt [attrib. J.S. Bach] (Leipzig, 1897)
A 81–88	31	8 fugues (C, c, D, d, E, e, B, f), c1774–8, B-Bc, D-Bsb*; ed. in FO
A89	32	Fugue (c), before 1758, Bsb; ed. in FO
A 90	33	Fugue (F), c1740, Bsb; ed. in FO
A 91	36	Fugue (F), org, Bsb; ed. in FO
A 92	37	Fugue (g), org, US-NH; ed. in FO
A 93–99	38/1	7 chorale preludes, org, D-LEm; ed. in FO
A 100	38/2	Trio on ‘Allein Gott in der Höh’, org, lost
A 101–104	—	4 chorale preludes, doubtful, MS lost, formerly RUS-KA

chamber

B 1–6	54–9	6 duets (e, E, E, F, f, G), 2 fl, D-Bsb, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art* (1745–70); ed. G. Braun (Wiesbaden, 1988)
B 7–9	60–62	3 duets (C, G, g), 2 va, c1775, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*; ed. Y. Morgan (Winterthur, 1994)
B 10–12	51–3	3 sonatas (F, a, D), fl, bc, lost, cited in Breitkopf catalogues, 1761, 1763
B 13–15	47–9	3 trios (D, D, a), 2 fl, bc, c1740, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*
B 16	50	Trio (B), vn/fl, vn, bc, before 1762, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art
—	—	Trio (B), vn, hpd, US-CA, doubtful

orchestral

C 1–5	63, 67–69, 71	5 sinfonias (C, F, G, G, B), str (no.1 with 2 hn, 2 ob ad lib; no.3 with 2 ob, bn), c1735–40, MS lost, formerly D-Bsa
C 6	70	Sinfonia (A), 2 ob, bn, str, c1735–40, Bsb* (frag.)
C 7	65	Sinfonia (d), 2 fl, str, c1740–45, Bsb*; ed. W. Lebermann (Mainz, 1971)
C 8	64	Sinfonia (D), 2 ob/fl, bn, 2 hn, str, c1755, A-Wn* [used as introduction to brF 14 and ? G 1]; ed. W. Lebermann (Mainz, 1971)
C 9	41	Conc. (D), hpd, str, c1735–40, D-Bsb; ed. in SBA
C 10	42	Conc. (E), hpd, str, c1740–45, Bsb* (frag.)
C 11	46	Conc. (E), 2 hpd, orch, ?c1745, Bsb, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art
C 12	43	Conc. (e), hpd, str, c1767, Bsb, Dl; ed. W. Upmeyer (Berlin, 1931)
C 13	44	Conc. (F), hpd, str, c1740–45, Bsb
C 14	45	Conc. (a), hpd, str, c1735–40, Bsb*
—	—	Conc. (D), fl, str, c1775, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art
—	—	Conc. (g), hpd, str, Bsb, doubtful (? by J.C. Altnickol)

church cantatas

for SATB, instruments and continuo; MSS in D-Bsb unless otherwise stated


F 1	80	Lasset uns ablegen (J.F. Möhring), 1749
F 2	92	O Wunder, wer kann dieses fassen? (Möhring)
F 3	93	Ach, daß du den Himmel zerrissest (J.J. Rambach), 1755–60
F 4	†250	Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe, ?1759, F-Pc*; ed. K. Schultz-Hauser (Berlin, 1964)
F 5	73	Der Herr zu deiner Rechten (partly by Möhring), c1755
F 6	74	Wir sind Gottes Werke (Möhring), c1755
F 7	82	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, ?1764 [partly parody of brF 6 and 18]
F 8	74a	[cantata for Palm Sunday; parody of brF 6], lost
F 9	83	Erzittert und fallet, c1750–55; ed. in SBA
F 10	95	Auf, Christen, posaunt, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art [parody of brF 24]
F 11	75	Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen (Rambach), ?c1760–64
F 12	91	Wo geht die Lebensreise hin? (Möhring), c1755
F 13	72	Wer mich liebet, 1746
F 14	85	Dies ist der Tag (Möhring), c1755, F-Pc* [sinfonia = brC 8]; ed. in SBA
F 15	88	Ertönt, ihr seligen Völker (partly by D. Stoppe), c1755–60 [parody of brF 19]
F 16	[93]	Ach, daß du den Himmel zerrissest (after Rambach), c1755–60 [parody of brF 3]
F 17	89	Es ist eine Stimme (Möhring), ?1753
F 18	81	Der Herr wird mit Gerechtigkeit (Möhring), c1750–55
F 19	96	Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (Stoppe), 1752/3
F 20	76	Wohl dem, der den Herrn fürchtet, catechism music, c1750
F 22	86	Der Höchste erhöret das Flehen der Armen, on departure of G.L. Herrnschmidt, 3 Oct 1756 [partly parody of brF 18]
F 23	87	Verhängnis, dein Wüten entkräftet die Armen, for memorial service for Sophia Dorothea of Prussia, 24 July 1757 [parody of brF 22], PL-Kj*
F 24	95	Auf, Christen, posaunt, for the peace of Hubertusburg, 1763, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art

other sacred

for SATB, instruments and continuo; MSS in D-Bsb unless otherwise stated

E 1	100	Missa (g), formerly D-LEm*
E 2	98	Missa (d)
E 3	78a	Heilig ist Gott, chorus
E 4	98b	Agnus Dei [= brE 2/5]
E 5	99/1	Amen, chorus, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*
E 6	99/2	Halleluja, chorus, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*
E 7	78b	Lobet Gott, unsern Herrn Zebaoth, chorus; ed. in SBA
F 21	77	Wie ruhig ist doch meine Seele, recit from catechism music, A, bc, ?c1753 [from pasticcio after bwv170/i and 147/i]
F 25	84	Dienet dem Herrn (Ps c.1–2), 1755, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art, US-CA*
F 26	89/iii	Der Trost gehöret nur für Kinder (Möhring), aria, S, org, bc [= brF 17/iii], GB-Lbl*
F 27	94	Zerbrecht, zerreißt, ihr schnöden Banden (Rambach), aria, S, hn, org [? from lost cantata]
F 28	96/iv	Laß dein Wehen in mir spielen (Stoppe), aria, S, Fl, ob, org, bc, ?c1755 [= br F19/iv]
F 29	79	... Gnaden ein, aria (frag.), B, 2 fl, 2 ob, str, bc, ?c1750

secular vocal

G 1	90	O Himmel, schone, for birthday of Frederick the Great, 24 Jan 1756, SSATB, fl, tpt, 2 hn, timp, str, bc [partly parody of brF 9 and F 24; movts 1 and 7 lost, ? = brC 8]
G 2	106	Lausus und Lydie (op, C.M. Plümicke), 1778–9, inc., lost
H 1	97	Herz, mein Herz, sei ruhig, S, hpd, ?1780, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art*

didactic

I 1	39	canons and contrapuntal sketches, c1735–40, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art; some in F.W. Marpurg: Abhandlung von der Fuge*, ii (Berlin, 1754)
I 2–5	—	4 triple canons a 6; in J.P. Kirnberger: Die Kunst des reinen Satzes, ii (Berlin and Königsberg, 1776–9), 226–30
I 6	35	Fugal exposition (C), org, 14 June 1771, D-BS* [for organists’ audition at Katharinenkirche, Brunswick]
I 7	—	Fugal exposition on BACH, 25 July 1773, KIl * [in album of C.F. Cramer]

theoretical works

I 8

—

Abhandlung vom harmonischen Dreiklang, before 1754, announced 1758, unpubd, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Chrysander: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und sein Sohn Friedemann Bach in Halle, 1713–1768’, Jb für musikalische Wissenschaften, ii (1867), 235–48, esp. 241–8

C.H. Bitter: Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brüder (Berlin, 1868)

W. Nagel: ‘W.F. Bach’s Berufung nach Darmstadt’, SIMG, i (1899–1900), 290–94

C. Zehler: ‘W.F. Bach und seine hallische Wirksamkeit’, BJb 1910, 103–32

M. Falck: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: sein Leben und seine Werke, mit thematischem Verzeichnis und zwei Bildern (Leipzig, 1913/R)

P. Epstein: ‘W. Fr. Bachs Bewerbung in Frankfurt’, BJb 1925, 138–9

W. Guericke: Friedemann Bach in Wolfenbüttel und Braunschweig, 1771–1774 (Brunswick, 1929)

H. Miesner: ‘Einige neu entdeckte Notizen über die Familie Friedemann Bachs’, BJb 1931, 147–8

H. Miesner: ‘Urkundliche Nachrichten über die Familie Bach in Berlin’, BJb 1932, 157–63

H. Kelletat: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Orgelmusik in der Frühklassik (Kassel, 1933)

H. Miesner: ‘Beziehungen zwischen den Familien Stahl und Bach’, BJb 1933, 71–6

H. Miesner: ‘Graf v. Keyserlingk und Minister v. Happe: zwei Gönner der Familie Bach’, BJb 1934, 101–15

H. Miesner: ‘Portraits aus dem Kreise Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs’, Musik und Bild: Festschrift Max Seiffert, ed. H. Besseler (Kassel, 1938), 101–12

W. Serauky: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Halle, ii/2 (Halle, 1942/R)

C. Freyse: ‘Die Schulhefte Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs’, BJb 1951–2, 103–19

J. Müller-Blattau: ‘Bindung und Freiheit: zu W.F. Bachs Fugen und Polonaisen’, Festschrift Wilhelm Fischer, ed. H. von Zingerle (Innsbruck, 1956)

G.B. Weston: ‘Some Works Falsely Ascribed to Friedemann Bach’, Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 247–52

E. Simon: Mechanische Musikinstrumente früherer Zeiten und ihre Musik (Wiesbaden, 1960)

W. Strube: ‘Ein unbekanntes Probespiel Friedemann Bachs in Halberstadt’, Walcker-Hausmitteilungen, xxxi (July 1963), 42–3

W. Braun: ‘Material zu Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs Kantatenaufführungen in Halle (1746–1764)’ Mf, xviii (1965), 267–76

P. Schleuning: Die Freie Fantasie: ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der klassischen Klaviermusik (Göppingen, 1973)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Ein “Drama per musica” als Kirchenmusik: zu Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs Aufführungen der Huldigungskantate bwv205a’, BJb 1975, 133–40

E. Borysenko: The Cantatas of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (diss., U. of Rochester, 1981)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Ein dubioses “Menuetto con Trio di J.S. Bach”’, BJb 1982, 143–50

H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig und Dresden, 1984)

C. Henzel: ‘Zu Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs Berliner Jahren’, BJb 1992, 107–12

P. Wollny: Studies in the Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Sources and Style (diss., Harvard U., 1993)

P. Wollny: ‘Sara Levy and the Making of Musical Taste in Berlin’, MQ, lxxvii (1993), 651–88

P. Wollny: ‘Ein unbekanntes Autograph von Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’, BJb 1994, 185–90

P. Wollny: ‘Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s Halle Performances of Cantatas by his Father’, Bach Studies 2, ed. D. Melamed (Cambridge, 1995), 202–28

4. Character and temperament.

(9) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

(46) (b Weimar, 8 March 1714; d Hamburg, 14 Dec 1788). Composer and church musician, the second surviving son of (7) Johann Sebastian Bach (24) and his first wife, Maria Barbara. He was the most important composer in Protestant Germany during the second half of the 18th century, and enjoyed unqualified admiration and recognition particularly as a teacher and keyboard composer.

1. Early years.

2. Berlin.

3. Hamburg.

1. Early years.

He was baptized on 10 March 1714, with Telemann as one of his godfathers. In 1717 he moved with the family to Cöthen, where his father had been appointed Kapellmeister. His mother died in 1720, and in spring 1723 the family moved to Leipzig, where Emanuel began attending the Thomasschule as a day-boy on 14 June 1723. J.S. Bach said later that one of his reasons for accepting the post of Kantor at the Thomasschule was that his sons’ intellectual development suggested that they would benefit from a university education. Emanuel Bach received his musical training from his father, who gave him keyboard and organ lessons. There may once have been some kind of Clavierbüchlein für Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach containing early compositions by Wilhelm Friedemann and works by the young C.P.E. Bach himself, as well as educational pieces by his father. J.F. Reichardt’s reference to the difficulty of playing the string parts in Bach’s orchestral works may be taken to indicate that he also learnt the violin or viola, but the argument that the difficulties result from his having held the violin incorrectly because he was left-handed is not convincing. From the age of about 15 he took part in his father’s musical performances in church and in the collegium musicum. He appears relatively seldom as a copyist, no doubt because, as an able musician himself, he was usually excused such duties. The one large-scale work of sacred music in Leipzig mainly copied by him is the anonymous St Luke Passion bwv246, obviously arranged by J.S. Bach to an urgent deadline for Good Friday 1730. On 1 October 1731 Emanuel matriculated at Leipzig University. Following his godfather’s example, he studied law, although he was obviously destined for a musical career. His first compositions were probably written about 1730. They consisted mainly of keyboard pieces and chamber music as it was understood in the 18th century (i.e. solos with continuo, trios and concertos).

At the age of 19 Emanuel applied unsuccessfully for the position of organist at St Wenzel in Naumburg (the letter of application, dated 19 August 1733, refers incorrectly to the cathedral of St Peter und Paul). In September 1734 he moved to the university in Frankfurt an der Oder, where he was prominent in musical activities; the Musikalische Akademie mentioned in his autobiography would have been a student collegium musicum. Besides his own compositions, he performed works by his father in Frankfurt, including the Ouverture in D major bwv1068, the Coffee Cantata and the Concerto in D minor bwv1052 in what was probably his own arrangement (bwv1052a). He also wrote occasional pieces for university events and for weddings. The genealogy of the Bach family compiled by J.S. Bach about 1735 makes it clear that C.P.E. Bach was also teaching the keyboard in Frankfurt. In about 1738 he was offered the opportunity to go on an educational tour abroad as companion to Heinrich Christian von Keyserlingk, a son of Reichsgraf Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk, a patron of J.S. and W.F. Bach. However, his appointment to the service of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia prevented him from accepting.

2. Berlin.

The background to Bach’s entry into the service of the Prussian court is not clear. He says in his autobiography that his appointment became official only after the prince succeeded to the throne (as Frederick II) on 31 May 1740, but he then had the honour of accompanying the ‘first flute solo’ played by the new king ‘alone at the harpsichord’. The first mention of Bach in the court budget is as one of ‘those who joined the Kapelle in 1741’, so he must initially have been paid from the prince’s privy purse. The orchestra consisted of some 40 musicians and was one of the largest in Germany. It had grown out of the crown prince’s Kapelle in Ruppin and Rheinsberg, which was regarded as an outstanding ensemble, with Carl Heinrich Graun as Kapellmeister and his brother Johann Gottlieb as leader. Frederick, who took flute lessons from J.J. Quantz and studied composition with J.S. Bach’s pupil J.F. Agricola, usually played in the concerts himself. He was an enthusiastic advocate of the new italianate style of the time, and was also interested in Italian opera, which he promoted in the opera house inaugurated on 7 December 1742. As an absolute, though enlightened, monarch, Frederick dictated large areas of the musical life of Berlin and exerted considerable influence on the lively development of music in the city between about 1740 and 1755, but from the beginning of the Seven Years War at the latest his taste ceased to develop, and he eventually contributed to the stultification of musical life at court. The belief that Bach was poorly paid for his services is unfounded. His salary was 300 thalers a year from the time he took up his duties, as much as was paid to any of the other musicians engaged at the same time. Only those above him in the hierarchy – the Kapell- and Konzertmeister and the singers at the opera – were paid a distinctly higher salary.

Unless they were busy with chamber music, which was initially played to Frederick the Great daily, the court musicians took part in the performances of the Berlin Hofoper. Bach’s duties were considerably reduced from 1742 at the latest, when Christian Friedrich Schale was appointed second harpsichordist (succeeded by Christoph Nichelmann in 1745); the harpsichordists alternated monthly, and each drew a full salary. This meant that Bach could pursue other activities as a keyboard teacher and composer. His teaching in Berlin inspired the writing of his Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments; see §7 below), the most important 18th-century German-language treatise on the subject. However, Bach never won recognition at court as a composer and virtuoso: Frederick would allow only Hasse, the Graun brothers, Quantz and Agricola that status. Even the dedication to him of Bach’s first published work, the Prussian Sonatas h24–9 (w48) made no lasting impression on the king.

As early as 1743 an attack of the gout that was to trouble Bach all his life obliged him to visit the Bohemian spa of Teplitz for treatment. Early in 1744 he married Johanna Maria Dannemann, the daughter of a Berlin wine merchant. Of the three children of the marriage who lived to adulthood – Johann Adam (1745–89), Anna Carolina Philippina (1747–1804) and Johann Sebastian, also known as Johann Samuel (1748–78) – only the youngest showed any artistic inclinations. He became a painter, but died at the age of 30 in Rome. On 7 May 1747 the famous meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick II, to which we owe the Musical Offering bwv1079, took place in Potsdam. However, it brought no improvement in Emanuel Bach’s position at court, and his efforts to leave Berlin can be traced from that time. On 25 August he completed an impressive and ornate vocal work, his Magnificat h772 (w215), which was intended to pave his way to a post as a church musician and was evidently performed in Leipzig during his father’s lifetime, but his applications for the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1750 and 1755 failed, even though he had Telemann’s support, and so did an application for the post of organist at the Johanniskirche in Zittau in 1753. A journey in early summer 1751 took him to Bückeburg, where his younger half-brother Johann Christoph Friedrich had been a court musician since early 1750. The occasion for the visit was the award of the Order of the Great Eagle by Frederick II to his childhood friend Count Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst zu Schaumburg-Lippe, and Bach dedicated his two trios h578–9 (w161) to the art-loving count. He travelled home by way of Halberstadt, Brunswick and Hamburg, where he visited Johann Mattheson on 15 June, and no doubt he also took the opportunity of visiting his godfather Telemann, with whom he regularly corresponded. Three years later, on 21 June 1754, he stood godfather to his cousin Johann Ernst Bach’s son Johann Carl Philipp in Eisenach; he combined this private reason for travelling with his professional interests, and gave concerts in Gotha and Kassel.

C.P.E. Bach took part in the première of Graun’s Tod Jesu on 26 March 1755, playing continuo. Tensions at the Berlin court came to a head that year. In his treatise Die Melodie, nach ihrem Wesen sowohl, als nach ihren Eigenschaften (Danzig, 1755) Christoph Nichelmann had criticized Emanuel Bach’s style for its affectation; Bach commissioned a polemical riposte by ‘Caspar Dünkelfeind’ – in all probability the organist Christoph Gottlieb Schröter of Nordhausen, a friend of the Bach family – and this in turn unleashed a further onslaught from Nichelmann. Early in May 1755, in a memorandum which survives only in extracts, Bach complained to the king about what he regarded as Nichelmann’s unwarrantedly preferential financial treatment, and threatened to give notice. Although the details are not known, this dispute finally led to Nichelmann’s leaving the service of the court, while Bach’s salary was raised by 200 thalers. On 1 February 1756 the young C.F.C. Fasch was appointed second harpsichordist at the standard salary of 300 thalers.

As a result of these quarrels Bach evidently distanced himself still further from court life. He mingled more in the private musical circles of Berlin, although again not many details are known. Some conclusions about the people who were Bach’s friends may be drawn from the character pieces in h79–82, 89–98 etc. (w117), most of them portraying prominent characters in the cultural life of the city, and from certain secular occasional compositions such as the aria La Sophie h125 (w117.40) and the song L'Ernestine h24 (w117.38). Bach was a member of the so-called first Berlin lied school, founded by Christian Gottfried Krause, and played a prominent, but not central, part in it. His songwriting brought him into close touch with F.W. Marpurg, the leading Berlin music critic at the time. Bach assisted Marpurg by providing music examples for his treatises (e.g. the fugues h76 and 99 (w119.1 and 2) and two Allegros h338 (w116.16 and 17)), and he also wrote a short essay on double counterpoint printed in Marpurg’s Historisch-kritische Beyträge, iii (Berlin, 1757/R). His merits were appreciated at this period in the circle around Princess Anna Amalia and Kirnberger. He composed most of the organ sonatas for the princess, and possibly the two organ concertos h444 and 446 (w34 and 35) as well. The importance of these private musical circles increased after 1756, for the outbreak of the Seven Years War meant that Frederick II visited Berlin only occasionally, and on the whole there was no court life. The war brought with it conditions of great austerity for the people of Berlin. Salaries were paid in paper money which had only a fifth of its supposed purchasing power. In view of the military threat, Bach joined the militia, but when Berlin was occupied by the Russian army in 1758 he moved to Zerbst to stay with Carl Fasch’s family. He made a brief visit to the court of Mecklenburg in Strelitz in 1762.

The close relationship of the character pieces to the sonatinas for one or two harpsichords and orchestra, written between 1762 and 1764, suggests that they were intended for domestic performance, like some of the keyboard and chamber music works, for example h143 and 507 (w65.33 and w74). Bach composed most of his symphonies at the same time, and probably for the same kind of milieu. He made his name throughout Germany with a quantity of publications in almost all musical genres apart from vocal compositions with orchestral accompaniment. Typically, it was he rather than his brother Wilhelm Friedemann, director of church music in Halle, who was commissioned to write a festive work for trumpets and drums to celebrate in that city the Peace of Hubertusburg in 1763 (the piece is now lost, unless it is identical with the march h621 (w188), which bears the still unexplained epithet ‘für die Arche’. After Telemann’s death on 25 June 1767 Bach applied to succeed him as music director of the principal churches of Hamburg. His competitors for the post were H.F. Raupach, J.H. Rolle (music director at Magdeburg), and his own half-brother Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach; he narrowly defeated Rolle in the second and deciding ballot. There is no evidence to support the statement in his autobiography of 1773 that he had previously turned down several other offers. Although he was appointed to Hamburg on 6 November 1767, he did not arrive there until March 1768: at first Frederick II refused to release him, and then a particularly hard winter made it impossible for him to leave Berlin any earlier. Meanwhile Georg Michael Telemann, the composer’s grandson, acted as interim director of church music in Hamburg. By appointing Bach her honorary Kapellmeister Princess Amalia brought a note of conciliation to the close of his period in Berlin. Johann Christian Schramm (c1711–96) from Dresden was appointed his successor in the royal Kapelle.

3. Hamburg.

Bach took over as director of sacred music in Hamburg on Easter Saturday (2 April) 1768, but he was not officially inaugurated in his new post until 19 April. A festive work written for the occasion by G.M. Telemann exists (in D-Bsb Mus.ms.21729), but Bach’s inaugural address, De nobilissimo artis musicae fine, is lost. His duties in Hamburg were much like his father’s in Leipzig. He was on the staff of the Hamburg Lateinschule (still in existence today as the Johanneum) and was responsible for the teaching of music there. However, he claimed one of Telemann’s privileges, that of engaging a deputy at his own expense to teach at the school. His main task was the organization of the music in Hamburg’s five principal churches, the Michaeliskirche, Jakobikirche, St Katharinen, Nikolaikirche and Petrikirche. According to a report made after Bach’s death, the number of musical performances was almost 200 a year – a difficult task for a small choral establishment consisting of pupils from the Johanneum and a few professional singers.

Telemann’s 40 years and more in Hamburg and his extraordinary creative powers, which remained with him into old age, had aroused expectations which Bach certainly could not satisfy. He worked relatively slowly, and consequently tried to avoid the pressure of deadlines by planning well ahead. For instance, the Passion music for 1768 was evidently written for the most part while Bach was still in Berlin (and its performance was postponed until 1769 because of his delayed move to Hamburg), and in subsequent years he usually completed his Easter preparations by the previous Christmas. A plan to compose two cantata cycles for the church year, mentioned to G.M. Telemann in 1771, was never realized. Instead, much of the music he performed was by other composers (in particular Georg Benda, G.A. Homilius and G.P. Telemann), which Bach adapted, as was usual at the time, by changing the instrumentation, composing additional movements and, in particular, revising recitatives. Only for the ‘Quartalsmusiken’ – performed in turn in all the principal churches at the main festivals of Easter, Michaelmas and Christmas – did he write works of his own in appreciable numbers. In line with a tradition dating from the 17th century, Bach annually compiled Passions based on the accounts from the four Gospels in strict rotation, and these were performed in several smaller churches as well as in the principal churches of Hamburg. The official sacred music of the city thus consisted to a great extent of works by other composers and pasticcios, laying Bach open at first to accusations of performing his duties only vicariously. On the other hand, he took great pains with works commissioned for special occasions, such as the inauguration of clerical or administrative officials or mayoral funerals. Twice, in 1780 and 1783, he composed music for the celebrations of the ‘Bürgerkapitäne’, and in 1770 an Italian festive chorus for a visit by the Crown Prince of Sweden, later King Gustav III. He turned his attention in particular to oratorio, which was performed as often in churches as in concert halls, although obviously not within regular church services, since female singers took part (including Elisabeth Winthem, Klopstock’s wife). All three of Bach’s sacred oratorios – Die Israeliten in der Wüste, Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu and the cantata h776 (w233), derived from the first Passion music Bach composed for Hamburg – were performed beyond Hamburg itself; they are among the most important Protestant vocal works of the second half of the 18th century.

Bach’s circle of friends during his early years in Hamburg included Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whom he had known in Berlin, and the syndics Hans Jacob Faber and Jacob Schuback; later, his friends included theologians such as Christoph Christian Strum, the professor of mathematics Johann Georg Büsch, who with Christoph Daniel Ebeling was head of the Handlungsakademie, and the physicians Friedrich Ludwig Christian Cropp, Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus and Johann August Unzer. Bach was also a close friend of F.G. Klopstock, living in retirement, and he took care to maintain friendships outside Hamburg: with J.N. Forkel in Göttingen, J.J. Eschenburg in Brunswick, J.G.I. Breitkopf in Leipzig, Johann Friedrich Hering in Berlin, Ewald von Grotthus in Gieddatz (Curland) and Johann Jacob Heinrich Westphal in Schwerin. Bach was regarded as the undisputed leading figure in the musical society of Hamburg, and many musicians, men of letters and other artists visiting the city sought him out. The accounts relating to his early years in Hamburg by Matthias Claudius, Charles Burney and J.F. Reichardt are particularly informative. At this time Bach was much involved in teaching, and his pupils included professional musicians such as J.D. Holland, C.F.G. Schwencke and Nils Schiørring, and the future mayor of Altona, Casper Siegfried Gähler.

Besides performing his official duties as director of church music – a post that (except during a severe illness from February to April 1772) he filled conscientiously until his last years while (unlike Telemann and Schwencke) remaining on good terms with the contentious Hamburg clergy – Bach assumed from the beginning a leading position in the city’s concert life. In winter 1768–9 he announced a series of 20 subscription concerts; the following winter there were at least six concerts, and 12 Wednesday concerts were advertised for winter 1771–2. Over the next few years there were considerably fewer concerts in which Bach featured as a keyboard player; as far as is known, he stopped giving public concerts when he was 65. As well as his own oratorios he performed a number of other composers’ works in Hamburg, including Graun’s Tod Jesu and Telemann’s Seliges Erwägen and the Donnerode. Bach brought his public appearances (outside his official duties) to a close with a ‘historical’ concert on 9 April 1786, consisting of one of his own orchestral symphonies, isolated movements from works by J.S. Bach (the Credo from the Mass in B minor with a newly composed introduction) and Handel’s ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ from Messiah and his own two most powerful compositions, the Magnificat and the Heilig for double choir h778 (w217). Bach remained actively creative until the last year of his life, although he was in poor health after summer 1788. The double concerto for keyboard, piano and orchestra w47 (probably commissioned for Sara Levy in Berlin), the three quartets for harpsichord, flute and viola h537–9 (w93–5), preparations for a collection of songs, h700–60 (w200), published by Donatius in Lübeck in 1789, and a pasticcio Passion for 1789 were all written in Bach’s last year. He died on 14 December 1788 of a ‘chest ailment’, and was buried on 19 December in the crypt of the Michaeliskirche (the location of his grave was identified only in 1925). After his death Johanna Maria Bach temporarily administered the office of music director. Proposals for a reorganization of church music in Hamburg meant that a successor to her husband was not appointed until autumn 1789, and it was only in December that year that she handed the post over to C.F.G. Schwencke, who had been elected on 1 October in preference to J.A. Hiller and Bach’s own protégé J.N. Forkel.

4. Character and temperament.

Among his contemporaries Emanuel Bach had the reputation of being a pleasant, sociable man with a gift for wordplay, who was not afraid of making critical remarks even to persons of high rank. He seldom took sides in musical controversies, but when he did he expressed himself vigorously; some light is shed on his own views by his comment, printed in the Hamburgischer Unpartheyischer Correspondent of 20 September 1785, on an English newspaper report claiming that there was tension between him and Haydn: ‘It is my belief that every master has his own true worth. Praise and blame can do nothing to alter it. The work alone allots praise or blame to the master, and I therefore take everyone as I find him’. He reacted angrily to criticism of his father and to the publication of unauthorized editions, vehemently attacking Birnstiel’s edition of J.S. Bach’s chorales and Rellstab’s reprints of his own works issued when Rellstab took over the publishing firm of Emanuel’s friend G.L. Winter. Nor did he conceal his dislike of the modern Italian music of the time, in particular of such excesses as the intrusion into sacred music of stylistic elements from comic opera. He also had a low opinion of the style developed by Johann Schobert and by his own half-brother Johann Christian.

Bach was a good businessman. Most of his publications were commercially successful, and indeed he preferred not to publish a work if he thought it unlikely to sell, as in the case of his Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu in 1784. His business acumen was sometimes interpreted as avarice, but he was extremely generous to his friends and family, and would give them copies of his printed works and autograph manuscripts that he no longer needed, or let them have copies at cost price to himself. He took his half-brother Johann Christian into his family after their father’s death and later did the same for his nephew Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst on the latter’s return from England; he also provided regular financial support for his widowed half-sister Elisabeth Juliana Friederica. He was particularly close to his half-brother Johann Christoph Friedrich, exchanging sheet music with him on a regular basis.

Bach would often play for hours to visitors, his favourite instrument being a clavichord built by Gottfried Silbermann which he passed on to his pupil and friend Ewald von Grotthuss in 1781, together with the rondo Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere h272 (w66); Grotthuss responded with thanks in the form of a rondo composed by himself. Writing about rhetoric in his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, Bach emphasized that the musician must be able to place himself in the same emotional state as he wishes to arouse in his hearers, and warned against mannerisms and exaggerations. When improvising he seemed quite enraptured; his playing as a whole was notable for its clarity and cantabile style, and left a lasting impression on his audience.

Like many other musicians and music lovers of the time, Bach owned a large collection of portraits of musicians, which he was always seeking to extend through purchase and exchange. He even toyed with the idea of publishing a catalogue of his collection, but that project was realized only after his death.

5. Works: general.

In a composing career of almost 60 years Emanuel Bach wrote over 1000 separate works, ranging from songs to oratorios and from keyboard dance movements to orchestral symphonies. He must have begun compiling a catalogue of his own works at an early date, and it served as the basis for the Nachlass-Verzeichnis, or catalogue of his musical estate, printed in Hamburg in 1790. By about 1770 at the latest Bach had lists available enabling him to choose works for customers outside Hamburg who gave him details of the compositions they wanted and those they already owned. The Nachlass-Verzeichnis lists his works systematically classified into groups, with dates and places of composition. It gives information about published editions, while unpublished works are identified by their titles and the first words of the text where applicable, or by the opening bars in the case of instrumental works. The Nachlass-Verzeichnis is probably the earliest catalogue of the works of a single composer that can still satisfy the requirements of scholars today. Its publication served as both a record of Bach’s creative activity and part of the provision he made in old age for his wife and children, since it was intended to facilitate the purchase of compositions by interested parties outside Hamburg. The relatively large number of extant copies made in Hamburg around 1790 shows that the opportunity was taken up.

The Nachlass-Verzeichnis is our major source for the precise details of Bach’s output, and in many cases it gives more information about dates and places of composition than the autograph manuscripts. However, it is reliable only on the works of Bach’s prime. In the course of a systematic survey of his music collection made in 1786, he destroyed a number of juvenilia, sketches and rejected versions (the precise details cannot now be determined), as we learn from a letter he wrote to Eschenburg on 21 January 1786. Moreover, certain occasional works, such as the cantatas of his Frankfurt period, may no longer have been available to him at this date.

Bach’s musical estate remained intact until about 1797, apart from a few items auctioned in 1789. After Johanna Maria Bach’s death, however, the composer’s daughter Anna Carolina Philippina began disposing of some items, particularly works by other composers and portraits. After her death what remained of the estate was sold at auction. Much of it came into the hands of such collectors as Casper Siegfried Gähler in Altona and Georg Poelchau in Hamburg, and passed from their collections to Berlin before the great fire of 1842 in Hamburg. At the beginning of the 20th century, consequently, almost all the works were still extant in Bach’s autograph or in copies made under his supervision, and were available for modern scholarly evaluation. However, considerable losses, particularly of the occasional works written in Hamburg, were sustained during World War II when sources in the Berlin Singakademie and the library of Königsberg University were removed or destroyed. Those from the Berlin Singakademie were, however, recovered in Kiev in 1999. The next most important collection after Poelchau’s was made by the Schwerin organist Johann Jacob Heinrich Westphal (1756–1825). It comprised almost all the instrumental works in original prints and manuscript copies, as well as many vocal compositions. Most of it is now in the library of the Brussels Conservatory, which also acquired original manuscripts of symphonies and chamber works from the Guido Richard Wagener collection; a smaller portion passed with the Fétis collection to the Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, also in Brussels. There are also particularly valuable collections in the Library of Congress, Washington (purchased mainly in the Berlin antiquarian market around 1900), the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (including autographs from the Charles Malherbe and Auguste Vincent collections), and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna (domestic copies and autographs from Brahms’s estate and gifts from Anthony van Hoboken). In spite of losses the source material is good, and scholars face few problems of authenticity or chronology.

We have no information about Bach’s methods of composing. However, the few extant sketches (most of which survive only because he wrote them on blank spaces in manuscripts of other works destined to be kept) suggest that after the 1740s he sketched his compositions extensively before polishing them. Interim sketches of vocal works are usually set out on two systems (voice and bass), with only minimal indication of the text. Instrumental works are usually notated on one system only, though with indications of harmony or important subsidiary parts. Final versions often diverge only slightly from the sketches; however, some sketches do not fit any of the extant works, and we may surmise that the composer quite often noted down ideas which he never developed. There is support for this theory in a comment Bach made, on the composition of keyboard fantasias, in a letter to Forkel of 10 February 1775, saying that he had ‘a great many collectanea for that purpose’, and in the existence of a manuscript entitled Miscellanea musica h867 (w121, unfortunately extant only in a copy), only part of which coincides with the collectanea mentioned in the letter.

Bach’s ornamentation, arrangements and revisions pose considerable musicological problems because of the complex relations between the sources, Bach’s own mingling of procedures and the terminological inconsistency that still persists. His ornamentation entailed the writing down of procedures adopted in performance, as he remarked in a letter of 28 April 1784 to Johann Heinrich Grave in Greifswald, accompanying a copy of the Concerto in C minor h441 (w31) of 1753: ‘The concerto in C minor used to be one of my showpieces. The recitative is written out very much as I played it’. Prominent among his ornamental devices are the ‘varied repeats’, probably used for the first time in the third movement of the Probestück h74 (w63.5) in the Essay and developed further in the six sonatas h126, 136–40 (w50: 1760) dedicated to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. In his preface to the collection he described its aesthetic background, commenting that ‘variation in repeats is indispensable today’. It is expected to such a degree in performance, he adds, that the clumsiest of variations receive more applause than a faithful note-by-note rendering of the music as set down by the composer. He believed, he said, that ornamentation must suit the emotional affect of the piece, taking harmonic requirements into account, and must have some claim to be at least as good as the original. Here Bach was entering the debate on the variations of musical ideas expressed, for instance, in a series of articles signed ‘T.S.’ and published in the Berlinischer Magazin (reprinted in J.A. Hiller’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten) and in a contribution by F.W. Riedt to Marpurg’s Historisch-kritische Beyträge (ii, 1756). G.S. Löhlein’s op.2 sonatas (1768) are in direct line of descent from Bach. Except in the ‘Short and Easy Keyboard Pieces’ h193–203, 228–38 (w113, 1766;w114, 1766), Bach himself continued the practice of varied repeats only occasionally, for instance in the sonatas h240, 83 and 135 (w62.24, 65.29 and 65.32). However, a number of other sonatas and slow movements from concertos were varied and ornamented at dates that cannot now be determined; the Sonata in C major h150 (w51.1) even exists in two different ornamented versions, h157 and 174 (w65.36, 37). It is clear from the section ‘Variations and ornaments to certain sonatas and concertos for students’ in the Nachlass-Verzeichnis (p.53 no.11) that these ornaments were written down for teaching purposes. The original versions remained concurrent with, or were even preferred to, the ornamented versions and circulated in prints and authorized copies to which the ornamented versions represent alternatives. Ornamentation in the wider sense includes the cadenzas h264 (w120), numbering over 70. A striking feature is that several concerto movements are allotted more than one cadenza; a few bear general descriptions such as ‘cadenza for the Adagio’ and cannot be assigned to any of the surviving works.

Bach’s arrangements involve alterations in the scoring of a work. In the simplest cases they are merely alternative versions. Many of the Berlin trio sonatas exist in versions for two melody instruments and continuo or for one melody instrument and obbligato harpsichord; the Sonata in C h515 (w87), a special case, exists also in a version for two harpsichords. The composer’s arrangements here are chiefly limited to octave transpositions to suit the chosen instruments. There are variant settings among the concertos too: the Concerto in A minor of 1750 exists in authentic versions for cello (h432; w170), flute (h431; w166) and harpsichord (h430; w26); in all three versions the accompanying parts are the same except for some slight changes to the continuo. It is not always possible to be sure which is the original version. Other arrangements entail the rescoring of works for larger forces, particularly frequent in Bach’s symphonies. He also rearranged several songs with keyboard accompaniment for chorus; but it is debatable whether the term ‘arrangement’ is adequate for such processes of revision as occur in the reworking of Bitten, a strophic song with keyboard (h686.9; w194.9), as a four-part through-composed song motet (h826.3; w208.3).

Revision proper differs from the procedures described above in that the composer made substantial changes to the actual musical material and intended the second version to supersede the first. Revisions include newly composed or substitute movements (for example the new version of ‘Et misericordia’ in the Magnificat and that of ‘O Petrus, folge nicht’ in the Passion cantata), but above all reworkings of existing compositions, chiefly instrumental pieces from the Leipzig and Frankfurt periods, some of which Bach himself marked as ‘rewritten’ in the Nachlass-Verzeichnis. Judging from what can be traced in the sources, Bach cut some passages and extended others, eliminated whole movements, and now and then rewrote older works to adapt them to new compositional styles while retaining their form and thematic substance. Many of his early works, for instance the March bwv Anh.127, exist in three or more different versions. A number of major revisions are not noted in the Nachlass-Verzeichnis, including that of h211 (w65.44) the original central movement of which was incorporated in a revised form into the Sonata in B h282 (w59.3) in 1748 and replaced by a few transitional chords in h211 (w65.44), and that of Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu between 1774 and 1778, when Bach added a slow introduction and replaced the dramatis personae in the recitatives with a neutral testo. Although Emanuel Bach, like his father and his elder brother Wilhelm Friedemann, continued working on his compositions all his life, adapting them to changing conditions of performance and to different aesthetic requirements, various main phases of revision can be distinguished. Between 1743 and 1747 he revised works written before 1740; in the context of his publishing activities around 1760 he revised many earlier works, for example h171–2, 216 (w116.1, 2, 5) and h77 (w62.14); and during his Hamburg period he added wind parts to many of the orchestral works. A final phase of revision around 1786 was no doubt carried out so as to leave his musical estate in good order for his heirs; it included the systematic replacement of the slow movements in the sonatinas h7–12 (w64) in order to remove their outmoded tonal unity with a view to publication. There is no suitable term for Bach’s transfer of thematic material to a different musical genre, as occurred with some of the character pieces.

6. Keyboard music.

The keyboard music that Bach composed almost without interruption from about 1730 to the last years of his life lies at the heart of his creative work. The sources suggest that he began by composing separate dance movements, marches, minuets and polonaises. Some of these were entered in his own hand (c1732) in the Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach. Models were to hand in the first part of J.S. Bach’s Clavier-Übung; the Partita in G major bwv829 seems to have made the greatest impression on him, as can be seen from the minuet with hand-crossing, h1·5 (w111), and the G major suite (D-Bsb Mus.ms.Bach P 368), which is anonymous but can be shown to be at least partly by C.P.E. Bach. Dance movements could then be put together into cycles, preserving tonal unity; examples may be found in a manuscript volume (D-Hs ND VI 3191), thought until 1991 to have been lost, which contains sources going back to Bach’s years in Frankfurt. The composition of suites seems to have been considerably more important to Bach’s early creative period than the catalogue in the Nachlass-Verzeichnis might suggest. It is noticeable that the young Bach adopted the standard movements of his father’s suites only in exceptional cases; only the allemande and gigue are prominent, and feature in some of the keyboard ‘sonatas’ of the 1730s and 40s. Otherwise the composer showed an early preference for fantasia-like movements, which for all their technical deficiencies display harmonic boldness and a high degree of originality. J.S. Bach’s two- and three-part Inventions also provided an important stimulus (as they did later to Emanuel’s half-brother Johann Christoph Friedrich), for example in the first movement of h3 (w65.1); three-part invention style occurs chiefly in slow movements, including those of the sonatas h26 (w48.3) and h34 (w49.5).

Two collections of six keyboard sonatas, h24–9 (w48; the ‘Prussian’ sonatas, printed in 1742) and h30–34, 36 (w49; the ‘Württemberg’ sonatas, intended for Bach’s pupil Carl Eugen of Württemberg and printed in 1744), form a landmark in the history of keyboard music. They indirectly bear out Mattheson’s polemical statement in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R): ‘For some years now composers have been writing sonatas for keyboard to great acclaim, but they do not yet have the right form, wishing to be moved rather than to move; that is to say, they aim more at the touch of the fingers than to touch the heart’. J.F. Reichardt claimed with justice in his Musikalischer Almanach of 1796 that ‘no instrumental music had previously appeared in which as rich and yet well-ordered a harmony was united with such noble song, so much beauty and order with such originality, as in Bach’s first two sonata collections engraved in Nuremberg’. In these collections Bach systematically, and for the first time, showed how it was possible to write affecting keyboard music freed from the suite tradition, and he was able to develop his ideas over the following decades; the experimental instrumental recitative that serves as the central movement of the first Prussian sonata, for example, impressively illustrates a style of utterance to be found in the newest instrumental music. Unity of affect is evident in the dense thematic working of the opening movements of h24 (w48.1) and h30 (w49.1). Fantasia-like elements occur more particularly in the sonatas in E minor and B minor, h33, 36 (w49.3, 6), while the closing movement of h29 (w48.6) is particularly full of surprises. The unusual importance ascribed to these collections even by Bach’s contemporaries is evident from the fact that the Württemberg sonatas were still being reprinted in Vienna and Pest around 1800. Bach established quite early a basic three-movement sonata pattern in these collections, with fast opening and closing movements and a slow central movement in a related key. Later he also experimented with the use of different keys for all three movements, with transitional passages between movements and – particularly in the last years of his life – very short central movements. Like his father, Emanuel Bach regarded his printed collections as models, and made them as different as possible with a view to their usefulness in teaching.

Nowhere in Bach’s work is the distinction so clearly drawn between professional and amateur music-making, and between works written to commission and those for personal development, as in his keyboard compositions. The published works are principally for amateurs, particularly the collections published during the 1760s: the six ‘Easy Sonatas’ h162–3, 180–83 (w53; Leipzig 1766) and the six sonatas ‘à l'usage des dames’ h184–5, 204–7 (w54) eschew the daring of the early works. The Württemberg sonatas, with their greater technical and musical demands, constitute an exception among Bach’s printed works; unusually for Bach, they present public evidence that the composer was undergoing a personal mental crisis (most of the sonatas were written in Teplitz, where he was taking the waters in 1743, when an acute attack of gout at the age of only 30 seemed to endanger his career as a keyboard virtuoso). Most of the other experimental sonatas of this period were distributed by Bach to his friends only in manuscript copies or were published many years later; this group includes the sonatas h46–7 and 51 (w65.16–17 and 65.20) and the Sonata in F sharp minor h37 (w52.4).

Bach’s composition and publication of keyboard works temporarily moved into the background to some extent after 1770. He rounded off his keyboard writing with the six collections of keyboard sonatas ‘für Kenner und Liebhaber’; by public demand he included rondos in the second collection and rondos and fantasias in the third and subsequent collections. While the first collection, published in 1779, was a compilation of older compositions (h130 (w55.2) dates from as early as the 1750s), new compositions predominate in the later volumes, which employ a less astringent tonal language than the early keyboard sonatas and earned respect as individual creations fit to stand beside the works of Haydn and Mozart. The rondos were particularly popular, and for a while Bach considered publishing a separate collection of them. The number of subscribers began to fall, however, not necessarily because of any slackening of interest in Bach’s works but perhaps because of the competition provided by the soaring number of published keyboard sonatas by composers from north and central Germany and Vienna after about 1780; there was also a change in market conditions, with series sold in bookshops superseding individual subscriptions. From Bach’s letters to Breitkopf in May 1788, offering all remaining copies of the Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber at a fixed price (obviously to spare his family the trouble of selling his works after his death), it is clear that at this point over half the entire edition of 6300 copies had been sold, bringing Bach a considerable profit of over 3000 thalers, or 10,000 marks (several times his annual salary).

7. The ‘Essay’.

Bach’s keyboard music cannot be assessed in isolation from his didactic writing. Around the middle of the 18th century amateur music-making assumed proportions scarcely imaginable previously. As a result, there was a growing demand for instruction books and performance manuals, particularly in Berlin, where music-making had been encouraged to an extraordinary degree by the example of the flute-playing King Frederick II. In 1750 Marpurg had published a short manual entitled Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen, which proved so successful that it was reprinted the following year. With his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments Emanuel Bach provided what was to be the leading keyboard tutor for a long period. Together with Quantz’s flute tutor of 1752, Leopold Mozart’s violin tutor of 1756, and J.F. Agricola’s singing manual of 1757 (after P.F. Tosi), it was the most important work of practical musical instruction of the second half of the 18th century.

The first (self-contained) part, which appeared in 1753, sets out the basics of keyboard performance in three sections, tacitly giving precedence to the elements of harmony. The first section deals with fingering, for, says Bach, ‘more is lost by incorrect fingering than can be compensated for by all the art and good taste in the world’. Bach encouraged the use of the thumb but recommended avoiding it on black keys, and restricted the crossing of fingers still quite common at the time. Naturally, all his examples show the fingering. The second section deals with ornaments, distinguishing between those indicated by signs (Quantz’s ‘essential ornaments’) and those written out in full (‘optional ornaments’). The third section deals with ‘good performance’, comprising both practical and aesthetic criteria. Bach saw the absence of practical examples in the existing keyboard tutors of the time as a great drawback, and accordingly added 18 Probestücke (‘sample pieces’) as an integral part of the Essay, in different keys and in ascending order of difficulty; put together, they form the six three-movement sonatas h70–75 (w63). These pieces could be used either as studies or for performance; the sonata in F minor in particular, with hand-crossing, circulated widely in manuscript copies.

The Essay was complemented in 1762 by a second part containing mainly instruction in continuo playing and correct accompaniment. It clearly reflects Bach’s own activity at court. In it he moves systematically from simple intervals and their description to ‘refinements’ and ‘necessary precautions’ in accompaniment. Together with Quantz’s Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Bach’s Essay is our most important source of information about performing practices and issues of taste prevalent in Berlin in the mid-18th century. Bach’s introduction is also of particular interest today, dealing as it does with the choice of instruments and basic questions of accompaniment, and so too is the final chapter on improvisation (with the Fantasia in D h160 (w117.14) as a practical illustration), which was unique in its time. The Essay held an undisputed position in the 18th century, and its influence was not confined to north Germany; Haydn bought and studied it as a young man and Christian Gottlieb Neefe introduced Beethoven to it. Both composers continued into the 19th century to use the Essay in their own teaching.

The first part was reprinted in 1759, and a revised edition (1787) contained six new single-movement sonatinas that Bach hoped would make up for the excessively rapid increase in difficulty of the Probestücke. A new edition of the second part, also with corrections and additions by the author, did not appear until 1797. The two collections of piano pieces with varied repeats, h193–203 (w113) and h228–38 (w114), were also very popular; h193–7 (w113.1–5) were reprinted in rival editions in Berlin, Vienna and Linz until 1800. Bach’s immense influence as a keyboard teacher made the ‘Bach manner’ accepted as a general term for an elegant style of performance throughout the second half of the 18th century.

8. Chamber music.

Next to keyboard writing, chamber music was the most important experimental medium for Bach, particularly that with obbligato keyboard. His compositions in the genre from the 1730s onwards are notable for their originality and variety, and, like the keyboard compositions, they employ the whole spectrum of keys: the compositions for keyboard and violin, for instance, range from A to A major and from C to B minor. The trio in all its forms lies at the heart of his chamber music; solos (sonatas) featured less prominently after the 1740s, and in the last years of his life Bach turned to the quartet.

The early solos have continuo accompaniment, except for the flute solo in A minor h562 (w132), presumably composed for Frederick II. They correspond to the basic three-movement type described by J.A. Scheibe in the Critische Musikus (Leipzig, 2/1745, pp.681–3), and are succinctly written. All three movements are in the tonic key. The first is usually the slowest, and is followed by an Allegro (rarely, as in h554 (w127), in fugal style), followed in its turn by either a dance (usually a minuet with variations) or another Allegro. Locatelli’s flute sonatas op.2 (Amsterdam, 1732) may be regarded as the model.

Both numerically and in its importance for the history of the genre, the trio takes pre-eminence among Bach’s chamber compositions. The term ‘trio’ refers to the number of obbligato parts, not the number of participants. Trios with obbligato keyboard and those with continuo accompaniment are roughly equal in number; many survive in variant scorings, most of which may be regarded as authentic. While the solos aim at idiomatic treatment of the leading instrument, the upper parts of the trios, with the exception of some works with obbligato keyboard, are treated almost identically. There are contrapuntal trios, such as h567 and 569 (w143 and 145), in which the bass shares in the thematic material, and homophonic works in the Italian style, such as h578 (w161.2), in which the bass serves only as a harmonic foundation. The programmatic trio ‘Sanguineus und Melancholicus’ h579 (w161.1), published in 1751, made a great sensation.

Trios are found among Bach’s earliest compositions; they include a work (now lost) for violin, viola and bass, which according to the Nachlass-Verzeichnis (p.65, no.1) was ‘prepared together with Johann Sebastian Bach’. These works were revised while Bach was in Berlin; only in the case of h569 (w145) has the original version survived (as bwv1036). Comparison of the two versions shows Bach’s outstanding early talent and the tremendous progress he made by the time he produced the later version: the introductory fantasia and closing movement were cut, the two other movements thoroughly revised and a new opening movement added. In the 1740s, then, Bach entirely abandoned the basic four-movement form of the trio, which was initially at least as important to him as the three-movement form.

After the early 1760s figured bass played a less important role in Bach’s chamber music. During the process of composing the central movement of the Trio in C minor h514 (w78; 1763) he decided to write out the keyboard accompaniment instead of merely figuring the bass; the Trio in C major h515 (w87; 1766) has a fully written-out keyboard part. The pre-eminence of the keyboard is most in evidence in the three printed collections of keyboard trios, h522–34 (w89–91); the title-page of the English first edition of h525–30 (w89) fails even to mention the accompanying violin and cello parts. The type of rondo used by Bach in his trios and further developed later in his solo keyboard music, with the theme reappearing in different keys and varied, was noticed as a pointer to the future by Forkel (Musikalisch-kiritische Bibliothek, ii, 1778, pp.275–300) and was copied in England in particular (by Muzio Clementi and by A.F.C. Kollmann in his Essay on Practical Musical Composition, 1799). In his last year Bach composed three quartets (i.e. works with four obbligato parts) for keyboard, flute and viola, h537–9 (w93–5). Publication of these particularly attractive works was abandoned because of the composer’s death. During his Hamburg period he also wrote several smaller works for wind instruments; the occasion for their composition is not known. He wrote no chamber music for string instruments without continuo, a genre central to the development of the Classical style.

9. Orchestral works.

All the known orchestral works by Bach belong to the ‘modern’ genres of symphony and concerto. A special part was also occupied in the early 1760s by a genre evidently of his own invention, the sonatina for one or two harpsichords and orchestra, which no other composer imitated; Bach’s sonatinas differ from the Viennese divertimento for keyboard and strings, which they outwardly resemble and which may have influenced the composer, in the enormous technical demands made on the soloists.

The symphonies of the Berlin period are all in three movements and most of them were conceived as string symphonies; in many cases wind parts were added only during Bach’s Hamburg period. The absence of repeat signs in the opening movements is noticeable; slow movements are often not separated from the others, and in many cases serve as a transition. The famous four-part string symphonies h657–62 (w182) owe their existence to a commission from Baron Gottfried van Swieten, and the composer was subject to no restrictions. J.F. Reichardt wrote an account of the rehearsals of these daring works, admiring their ‘great variety and novelty of form and modulation’. Their importance was also recognized by music dealers; manuscript copies made for van Swieten’s private use were sold, against Bach’s will, by Johann Traeg in Vienna, C.G. Thomas in Leipzig and J.C. Westphal in Hamburg. There must have been similar interest in the four orchestral symphonies h663–6 (w183), which Bach had published in 1780 with a dedication to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia; they show an advanced handling of the wind instruments.

The keyboard concertos, numbering over 50, represent an early peak in the genre, the importance of which has not been fully appreciated. The first ones, like W.F. Bach’s early concertos, were written just after 1730. Their relationship to the concertos of J.S. Bach has yet to be studied, but it must be remembered that most of J.S. Bach’s harpsichord concertos did not take the shape in which they are familiar today until about 1738–9. C.P.E. Bach remained faithful to the ritornello form, and did not adopt dance, variation or rondo structures. Concertos such as h403, 409, 414, 420–22 and 442 (w1, 6, 11, 17–19 and 32) were widely distributed in their time. The orchestra here has equal importance with the soloist. The opening ritornello is usually on a broad scale, setting disparate musical ideas side by side, and these ideas recur in varying order in subsequent ritornellos. In the solo sections the orchestra continues to share in the thematic development. The uniformity of their overall structure, their consistent thematic development and their wide emotional range made the concertos of Bach’s early and middle Berlin period a model for other composers (e.g. J.F. Reichardt, J.W. Hertel and J.G. Müthel) and for the teaching of composition (H.C. Koch). The concertos of his later Berlin years and of his Hamburg period, written in the 1760s, contain more experimental features and are sometimes almost reminiscent of chamber music. With the exception of the six ‘easy’ concertos h471–6 (w43; Hamburg 1772) Bach prevented their dissemination during his lifetime.

10. Vocal music.

Emanuel Bach was a member of the first Berlin lied school, although he did not play a leading role in it and took no part in the controversies about the particular merits of French, Italian and German music. He was particularly fond of humorous texts such as those by Lessing and Gleim, and did not set odes (as Karl Wilhelm Ramler and Moses Mendelssohn understood the term) or foreign-language texts. It was also only at the beginning that Bach contributed to the joint publications of the Berlin lied school. In 1762 he published a collection of his own which was reprinted soon after with a new title-page and reissued in 1774. Contemporary song composition distinguished between Sing-Oden and Spiel-Oden; Bach’s songs fall predominantly into the latter category, with keyboard accompaniment an integral component. This does not mean that the keyboard part is entirely obbligato – the songs are notated on two, not three staves – but that its melodic phrases and harmony contribute to the emotional effect. The melodies are not therefore primarily intended to be catchy, and Bach only occasionally composed songs ‘in the folk style’ (e.g. the drinking-song Der Wirt und die Gäste, to a text by Gleim). The vocal compass is large by the criteria of the time and does not exclude extreme registers, particularly in the holding of high notes.

The collection of 54 sacred songs and odes by C.F. Gellert, which Bach set to music immediately after publication of the texts in 1757, was of particular historical importance. By 1784 it had been issued five times in all and influenced many other composers (right up to the time of Beethoven and his Gellert songs op.48). Many of the songs were included in hymnals. During his Hamburg period Bach followed the success of the Gellert settings with a collection of psalm settings (h733; w196) in the translation by the Copenhagen superintendent Johann Andreas Cramer and two collections of sacred songs to texts by his friend the principal pastor of Hamburg, Christian Carl Sturm. Bach’s compositions of this type cover the entire contemporary spectrum: the Cramer psalms, for instance, include chorale melodies with bass, songs with continuo and some with a fully composed keyboard accompaniment (e.g. the setting of Psalm viii, ‘Wer ist so würdig als du’, which Bach later arranged as a chorus). In Hamburg he frequently adapted solo songs for choral performance, often giving the separate verses individual form and making song motets of them.

Bach had a hand in the compilation of the Danish psalter of 1778, edited by his pupil N. Schiørring, the Schleswig-Holstein hymnal (Altona 1780 and 1783) and the Hamburg hymnal which in 1787 superseded Telemann’s of 1730. His secular songs were much sought after by the editors of the Musenalmanach volumes which became fashionable in the 1770s. They met with a good deal of criticism, however, for by comparison with typical Musenalmanach works by F.W. Weis, C.G. Neefe, J.F. Reichardt and others Bach’s songs seemed sometimes rather contrived and stiff. C.F. Cramer’s plan to publish in his Polyhymnia the secular songs previously printed elsewhere could not immediately be realized. Bach supervised the preparation of an incomplete edition of his unpublished songs (h700–60 passim; w200) which appeared in Lübeck in 1789.

With the exception of the Magnificat of 1749 and the Easter cantata Gott hat den Herrn auferweckt (1756; the text, by the Berlin court preacher Leonhard Cochius, was set at the same time by Telemann, twv1:615), Bach’s sacred vocal works date from his Hamburg period. Most of them were composed for particular functions; Bach did not expect them to be widely distributed and in general he restricted his efforts on their preparation to what was essential. The Passions provide an illuminating example: according to Miesner, the six St Matthew Passions (most of which perished in World War II) all employed the same biblical framework. Bach composed the recitatives himself, but he usually used the turba choruses from his father’s St Matthew Passion. This framework was repeated unchanged every four years, with new arias, choruses and chorales for which Bach again often resorted to works by other composers. Similarly, the St John Passions are based on Telemann’s printed Passion music for 1745 (Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld, twv5:30) and the St Mark Passions on a work by G.A. Homilius. The model for the St Luke Passions is not known. The Passions are thus pasticcios made up of a biblical framework, Bach’s own inserted movements (particularly arias and choruses, and in the 1770s and 80s hymns) and music by other composers. In this way he satisfied the constant demand for new Passion music without having to compose a new work himself each year.

Most of Bach’s occasional works are, however, original creations, particularly those for inaugurations of the clergy and the oratorios and serenatas he wrote for the ‘civic captains’ of Hamburg in 1780 and 1783 (the commission for 1788 came too late for him to meet it). His prime models were G.A. Homilius and Georg Benda. A certain development of the repertory in the inaugural music can be traced: the 1780s saw many repeat performances of older works and on occasion, at the request of the pastors, Bach even resorted to works in his library by Telemann. He distinguished meticulously between the price for composing a piece and that for simply performing or arranging one. The paucity of contrapuntal movements in his Hamburg church music is striking. An exception is the Heilig for double choir (composed in 1776), with its magnificent double fugue, ‘Herr, es ist dir keiner gleich’, which became an established part of the Michaelmas music and other festive music performed in Hamburg, and came to be regarded as one of the most important sacred vocal works of its time after its publication in 1779. Bach ascribed particular importance to his oratorios. The score of Die Israeliten in der Wüste, composed for the consecration of the Lazarethkirche in 1769, was printed in 1775. Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu, probably written in 1774 and revised 1778 at the latest, was offered for subscription in 1784 but did not appear in print until 1787. The third oratorio, the Passion cantata h776 (w233) derived from the composer’s first St Matthew Passion, was not printed but was nevertheless widely distributed: performances were given during the 18th century in Copenhagen, Berlin, Göttingen, Schwerin and Breslau, as well as in smaller places such as Halberstadt and Colditz. Bach himself owned two copies of the score, one of which he would lend to friends so that they could copy it. Because of the nature of the text, the distribution of the Passion cantata remained limited to Protestant Germany, but Die Auferstehung and Die Israeliten also reached Catholic parts of southern Germany and were occasionally even performed outside the German-language area (in England and Italy). Die Israeliten in particular maintained its place in the repertory as a concert oratorio until well into the 19th century.

11. Reception.

Between 1740 and 1775 Bach’s many publications ensured a wide distribution for his works, which substantially influenced the development of instrumental music in Germany. With Gluck and later Haydn, he was regarded by his contemporaries as the leading representative of a specifically German musical taste, as is evident from J.K.F. Triest’s description of him after his death as ‘a Klopstock using notes instead of words’. His sphere of influence was not confined to northern Germany, where J.C.F. and J.E. Bach, J.F. Reichardt, J.A.P. Schulz, J.W. Hässler and others were directly subject to it; soon after 1760 it spread to south German and Austrian areas as well, particularly through the Essay and the printed collections of keyboard works. Although accounts of the esteem in which he was held by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are partly anecdotal and cannot be verified in detail, they are a strong indication that the north German master also influenced the Classical Viennese style, not so much formally as in matters of thematic development and the idiomatic treatment of instruments. However, the late keyboard works, the double concerto h479 (w47) and the quartets h537–9 (w93–5) make it clear that C.P.E. Bach should by no means be regarded merely as a precursor of Viennese Classicism, but as a composer who wrote in his own independent style throughout his life. The posthumous publication of his compositions between 1790 and about 1802 in Berlin, Leipzig and Vienna bears witness to his enduring fame.

Developments during the 19th century made Vienna the musical capital of the German-speaking part of Europe, even superseding Leipzig as the centre of the music-publishing industry, and to the extent that J.S. Bach was rediscovered as the ‘father’ of German keyboard music, so Emanuel Bach’s reputation began to fade.

sacred cantatas and choruses

WORKS

Catalogues:J.M. Bach, ed.: Verzeichniss des musikalischen nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790/R) [NV]A. Wotquenne: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) (Leipzig, 1905/R) [W; addns from Kast (1958) shown as n.v.]E.E. Helm: Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (New Haven, CT, 1989) [H]

Principal MS sources: A-Wgm, B-Bc, Br, D-Bsb, F-Pc, GB-Lbl, Kiev, Archive for Literature and Art; for full information see H

composition dates of instrumental works are from NV unless otherwise stated

Oratorios and passions

sacred latin

secular arias and cantatas

songs, motets and chorales

theoretical works

arrangements

misattributed works

solo keyboard

Editions:Le trésor de pianistes (Paris, 1861–72) [T]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Die Sechs Sammlungen von Sonaten, freien Fantasien und Rondos für Kenner und Liebhaber, ed. C. Krebs (Leipzig, 1895, rev. 2/1953 by L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht) [K]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Klavierwerke, ed. H. Schenker (Vienna, 1902–3) [S]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Ausgewählte Kompositionen, ed. H. Riemann (Leipzig, n.d.) [R]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Kleine Stücke für Klavier, ed. O. Vrieslander (Hanover, 1930) [VK]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Vier leichte Sonaten, ed. O. Vrieslander (Hanover, 1932) [VL]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Sonaten und Stücke, ed. K. Hermann (Leipzig, 1938) [HS]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Leichte Tänze und Stücke für Klavier, ed. K. Hermann (Hamburg, 1949) [HL]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Six Sonatas for Keyboard, ed. P. Friedheim (New York, 1967) [F]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 1714–1788: The Collected Works for Solo Keyboard, ed. D. Berg (New York, 1985) [facs.] [B i–vi]

Musikalisches Allerley (Berlin, 1761) [1761]

Musikalisches Mancherley (Berlin 1762–3) [1762]

Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (Berlin, 1765) [1765]

Kurze und leichte Clavierstücke mit veränderten Reprisen, i (Berlin, 1766) [1766¹]

Kurze und leichte Clavierstücke mit veränderten Reprisen, ii (Berlin, 1766) [1766²]

Musikalisches Vielerley, ed. C.P.E. Bach (Hamburg, 1770) [1770]

sonatas: printed collections



H	W

24–9	48	Sei sonate per cembalo (Prussian sonatas), F, B, E, c, C, A, 1740–42 (Nuremberg, 1742/R in B i); ed. R. Steglich (Kassel, c1988), ed. in T, 29 ed. in R
30–31, 33, 32, 34, 36	49	Sei sonate per cembalo (Württemberg sonatas), a, A, e, B, E, b, 1742–3 (Nuremberg, 1744/R in B vi); ed. R. Steglich (Kassel, c1987), ed. in T
136–9, 126, 140	50	Sechs Sonaten für Clavier mit veränderten Reprisen, F, G, a, d, B, c, 1758–9 (Berlin, 1760/R in B i); ed. E. Darbellay (Winterthur, 1976), ed. E. Hashimoto (Tokyo, c1984), ed. P. Lescat (Courlay, c1992), 126 ed. in HS
150–51, 127–8 141, 62	51	Fortsetzung von Sechs Sonaten fürs Clavier, C, B, c, d, G, g, 1758–60 (Berlin, 1761/R in B i); ed. J.M. Rose (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1973), ed. E. Hashimoto (Tokyo, c1984), 127–8 ed. in HS
50, 142, 158, 37, 161, 129	52	Zweyte Fortsetzung von Sechs Sonaten fürs Clavier, E, d, g, f, E, e, 1744– 62 (Berlin, 1763/R in B i); ed. E. Hashimoto (Tokyo, c1984), 50 ed. in SBA, 142 ed. in F, 158 ed. in HS, 37 ed. in R
162, 180–82, 163, 183	53	Sechs leichte Clavier-Sonaten, C, B, a, D, C, F, 1762–4 (Leipzig, 1766/R in B i) [see also h 156–7]; 182 ed. in F
204–5, 184, 206, 185, 207	54	Six sonates pour le claveçin à l’usage des dames, F, C, d, B, D, A, 1765–6 (Amsterdam, 1770/R in B i); ed. K. Johnen (Frankfurt, 1950)
244, 130, 245, 186, 243, 187	55	Sechs Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber, i, C, F, b, A, F, G, 1758–74 (Leipzig, 1779/R in B ii); ed. in K, S, 130, 186–7, 244 ed. in T
260, 246, 261, 269, 262, 270	56	Clavier-Sonaten nebst einigen Rondos … für Kenner und Liebhaber, ii: Rondo, C; Sonata, G; Rondo, D; Sonata, F; Rondo. a; Sonata, A: 1774–80 (Leipzig, 1780/R in B ii); ed. in K, 246, 269–70 ed. in T, 246 ed. in S
265, 247, 271, 208, 266, 173	57	Clavier-Sonaten nebst einigen Rondos … für Kenner und Liebhaber, iii: Rondo, E; Sonata, a; Rondo, G; Sonata, d; Rondo, F; Sonata, f: 1763–80 (Leipzig, 1781/R in B ii); ed. in K, 173, 208, 247 ed. in T, S, 173, 165 ed. in R
276, 273–4, 188, 267, 277–8	58	Clavier-Sonaten und freye Fantasien nebst einigen Rondos … für Kenner und Liebhaber, iv: Rondo, A; Sonata, G/E; Rondo, E; Sonata, e; Rondo, B; Fantasia, E; Fantasia, A: 1779–82 (Leipzig, 1783); ed. in K, 267, 274, 276 ed. in T, 188 ed. in S (inc.)
281, 268, 282–3, 279, 284	59	Clavier-Sonaten und freye Fantasien nebst einigen Rondos … für Kenner und Liebhaber, v: Sonata, e; Rondo, G; Sonata, B; Rondo, c; Fantasia, F; Fantasia, C: 1779–84 (Leipzig, 1785/R in B ii); ed. in K, 282–3 ed. in T, 268, 282 (inc.) ed. in S
288, 286, 289–90, 287, 291	61	Clavier-Sonaten und freye Fantasien nebst einigen Rondos … für Kenner und Liebhaber, vi: Rondo, E; Sonata, D; Fantasia, B; Rondo, d; Sonata, e; Fantasia, C: 1785–6 (Leipzig, 1787/R in B ii); ed. in K, 286 ed. in HS, 291 ed. in R

sonatas printed separately



H	W

2	62.1	Sonata, B, 1731, rev. 1744 (1761/R in B iii); ed. in T
20	62.2	Sonata, G, 1739, in Nebenstunden der berlinischen Musen (Berlin, 1762/R in B vi)
22	62.3	Sonata, D, 1740, in F.W. Marpurg: Clavier-Stücke mit einem practischen Unterricht für Anfänger und Geübtere, iii (Berlin, 1763/R in B vi)
38	62.4	Sonata, d, 1744, in Oeuvres mêlées, iii (Nuremberg, 1757/R in B vi); ed. in T
39	62.5	Sonata, E, 1744, in Oeuvres mêlées, iv (Nuremberg, 1758–9/R in B vi); ed. in T
40	62.6	Sonata, f, 1744 (1761/R in B iii); ed. in T, ed. D. Schulenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xviii (Oxford, 1995)
41	62.7	Sonata, C, 1744, in Collection récréative, ii (Nuremberg, 1761/R in B vi); ed. in T
55	62.8	Sonata, F, 1748, in Tonstücke für das Clavier vom Herrn C.P.E. Bach und andern classischen Meistern (Berlin, 1762/R in B vi, 2/1774 as C.P.E. Bachs, Nichelmanns und Händels Sonaten und Fugen); ed. in T
58	62.9	Sonata, F, 1749, in Oeuvres mêlées, i (Nuremberg, 1755/R in B vi); ed. in T
59	62.10	Sonata, C, 1749 (1762/R in B iii); ed. in T
63	62.11	Sonata, G, 1750 (1761/R in B iii)
66	62.12	Sonata, e, 1730s, rev. 1751 (1761/R in B iii), ed. in T
67	62.13	Sonata, D, in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1756/R in B iii)
70–75	63.1–6	18 Probestücke in 6 Sonaten, C, d, A, b, E, f, 1753 [exx. for h868, see ‘Theoretical works’]; facs. in B i, vi, 71–5 ed. in T, 75 ed. in R
77	62.14	Sonata, G, 1754 (1762/R in B iii)
105	62.15	Sonata, d, in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1757/R in B iii); ed. in T
116	62.16	Sonata, B, 1757, in Oeuvres mêlées, v (Nuremberg, 1759/R in B vi); ed. in T
117	62.17	Sonata, E, 1757, in Oeuvres mêlées, xii (Nuremberg, c1765/R in B vi); ed. in T
118–20	62.18–20	3 sonatas, g, G, C, 1757 (1762/R in B iii); 118–19 ed. in T, B, 119 ed. in F
131	62.21	Sonata, a, 1758, in Oeuvres mêlées, xi (Nuremberg, 1765/R in B vi); ed. in T
132	62.22	Sonata, b, 1758, in Collection récréative, i (Nuremberg, 1760/R in B vi); ed. in T
179	112.7	Sonata, d (1765/R in B ii); ed. in T
209	60	Sonata, c, 1766, ? rev. later (Leipzig and Dresden, 1785/R in B vi)
210	62.23	Sonata, g, 1766 (1770/R in B iii)
240	62.24	Sonata, F, 1769 (1770/R in B iii)

sonatas: manuscript

3–6	65.1–4	4 sonatas, F, a, d, e, 1731–3, rev. 1744; 3–5 facs. in B iii, 6 facs. in B iv, 5 ed. in T
7–12	64	6 sonatas, G, G, a, e, D, c, 1734, rev. 1744 and ?c1786; facs. in B iii, ed. K. Johnen (Frankfurt, 1952)
13	65.5	Sonata, e, 1735, rev. 1744; facs. in B iii
15–19	65.6–10	5 sonatas, G, E, C, B, A, 1736–8, rev. 1743–4; facs. in B iii, 15 ed. in T, 18 ed. in F
21	65.11	Sonata, g, 1739, rev. later; facs. in B iii, ed. in T, VL
23	65.12	Sonata, G, 1740, rev. later; facs. in B iii
32·5	65.13	Sonata, b, 1743; facs. in B iii, ed. in T
42–3	65.14–15	2 sonatas, D, G, 1744–5; facs. in B iii, 42 ed. in VL, 43 ed. D. Schulenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xviii (Oxford, 1995)
46–8	65.16–18	3 sonatas, C, g, F, 1746; facs. in B iii, ed. D. Schulenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xviii (Oxford, 1995), 46 ed. in F, 47 ed. in T
49	65.19	Sonata, F, c1786 (1746 acc. NV); facs. in B vi, ed. D. Schulenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xviii (Oxford, 1995)
51–2	65.20–21	2 sonatas, B, F, 1747; ed. in T, R, 51 facs. in B iii, 51 ed. D. Schulenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xviii (Oxford, 1995), 52 facs. in B iv
53	69	Sonata per il cembalo a due tastature, 1749; facs. in B iii
56–7	65.22–3	2 sonatas, G, d, 1748; facs. in B iv, 56 ed in VL, 57 ed. in F
60, 371·5	65.24	Sonata, d [see also ‘Organ’]; facs. in B iv, ed. in T
61	65.25	Sonata, a, 1749; facs. in B iv
64	65.26	Sonata, G, 1750; facs. in B iv
68	65.27	Sonata, g, 1752; facs. in B iv, ed. in T
78	65.28	Sonata, E, 1754; facs. in B iv, ed. in T
83	65.29	Sonata, E, 1755; facs. in B iv
106	65.30	Sonata, e, 1756; facs. in B iv
121	65.31	Sonata, c, 1757; facs. in B vi, ed. in T
135	65.32	Sonata, A, 1758, rev. later [see also ‘Organ’, h133]; facs. in B vi
143	65.33	Sonata, a, 1759; facs. in B iv, ed. in VL
152	65.34	Sonata, B, 1760; facs. in B iv
156–7	65.35–6	2 sonatas, C, C, after 1760 [revs. of h162–3]; facs. in B i
174–8	65.37–41	5 sonatas, A, B, e, D, C, 1763; facs. in B iv, 174, 176–8 ed. in T, 176–8 ed. C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xxiv (Oxford, 1989)
189	65.42	Sonata, E, 1765; facs. in B iv, ed. in T, ed. C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xxiv (Oxford, 1989)
192	65.43	Sonata, A, 1765–6; facs. in B iv, ed. in T, ed. C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xxiv (Oxford, 1989)
211–13	65.44–6	3 sonatas, B, B, E, 1766, rev. later; facs. in B iv, ed. in T, ed. C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, I/xxiv (Oxford, 1989)
248	65.47	Sonata, C, 1775; facs. in B iv
280	65.48	Sonata für das Bogenklavier, G, 1783; facs. in B iv, ed. in T, HS
298–9	65.49–50	2 sonatas, c, G/a, 1786 [299 based on earlier ww compositions]; facs. in B iv, 298 ed. in T

variations

14	118.7	Minuet (from Locatelli’s Sonata op.2 no.10, fl, bc) with 18 variations, G, 1735; facs. in B vi
44	118.3	Minuet with 5 variations, C, 1745; facs. in B v
54	118.4	Arioso with 7 variations, F, 1747; facs. in B v, ed. in VK
65	118.5	Allegretto with 6 variations, C, 1750; facs. in B v, ed. in HL
69	181.1	Variations on Ich schlief, da träumte mir, F, 1752, enlarged later; 17 variations (1761), 7 variations (1770); facs. in B v, ed. F. Goebels (Mainz, c1986)
155	118.2	?8 variations on an Arietta (? by J.F. Agricola), 1760; contribution to set of 22 variations (collab. C. Fasch, ?J.A. Steffan and others), variations 1–17 (1761), 18–22 (1770); facs. in B v
226	118.6	12 variations on Romance: Colin a peine a seize ans, G, 1766; facs. in B v
259	118.10	Arioso with 20 variations, C, after 1775 [based on h534, see ‘Chamber’]; facs. in B v
263	118.9	12 variations on La folia d’Espagne, d, 1778; facs. in B v, ed. in HS
275	118.8	Canzonetta (? by Luise Dorothea of Saxe-Gotha) with 6 variations, F, 1781; facs. in B v
351	—	Arioso with 6 variations, A; doubtful, anon. (with 8 variations) in G.S. Löhlein: Clavier-Schule (Leipzig and Züllichau, 1765)
—	—	Arioso with 5 variations, A, 1781; see ‘Chamber’, h535

miscellaneous

1	—	March, D; Polonoise, g; March, G; Polonoise, g; Marche, E; Solo per il cembalo, E: 1730s, in Clavierbüchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach, bwv Anh.122–5, 127, 129; not listed in NV
1·5	111	Menuet pour le clavessin, C (Leipzig, 1731); facs. in B v
75·5	119.7	Fantasia and fugue, c; in F.W. Marpurg: Abhandlung von der Fuge (Berlin, 1754); facs. in B v
76	119.1	Fuga a 2, a; in F.W. Marpurg: Abhandlung von der Fuge (Berlin, 1754); facs. in B v)
79–82	117.17–18, 26, 37	La Borchward, polonoise, G; La Pott/Lott, tempo di minuet, in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1756); La Böhmer, murky, D; La Gause, F: c1754–5; facs. in B v
89–91	117.19–21	La Gleim, rondeau, a; La Bergius, B; La Prinzette, F: c1754–5, in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1756); 89, 91 facs. in B v, 90 facs. in B vi, 89–90 ed. in R, 91 ed. in HL
92–5	117.23–5, 27	L’Hermann, g; La Buchholtz, d; La Stahl, d; L’Aly Rupalich, C: c1754–5 (1762/R in B v); 92 ed. in HL, 94–5 ed. in R, 94 ed. in HS
96–8	117.34–5, 39	La Philippine, A; La Gabriel, C; La Caroline, a: c1755; facs. in B v, ed. in HL
99	119.2	Fuga a 2, d, by 1755; in F.W. Marpurg: Fugensammlung, i (Berlin, 1758); facs. in B v
100	119.3	Fuga a 3, F, by 1755; in Tonstücke … vom Herrn C.P.E. Bach und andern classischen Meistern (Berlin, 1762, 2/1774 as C.P.E. Bachs, Nichelmanns und Händels Sonaten und Fugen); facs. in B vi
101, 101·5, 102	119.4–6	Fuga a 3, A; Fuga a 3, g; Fuga a 4, E: all by 1755; 101 in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1757), facs. in B v; 102 in F.W. Marpurg: Clavierstücke mit einem practischen Unterricht (Berlin, 176), facs. in B vi; 101·5 (1765)
108	116.18	Andantino, F; in F.W. Marpurg: Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (Berlin, 1760); facs. in B v
109–13	117.28, 30–33	La complaisante, B; Les langueurs tendres, f; L’irréssolué, G; La journalière, c; La capricieuse, e: c1754–5 (1761/R in B v)
114	117.36	La Louise, D, c1755; facs. in B v
122–5	117.22, 29, 38, 40	L’Auguste, polonoise, F, in Raccolta delle più nuove composizioni (Leipzig, 1756); La Xénophon–La Sybille, C (1761); L’Ernestine/La Frédérique, D; La Sophie, B: c1754–5; facs. in B v, 122 ed. in HL
144–9	112.2, 4, 8, 10, 15, 18	Fantasia, D; Solfeggio, G; Fantasia, B; Solfeggio, G; Fantasia, F; Solfeggio, G: (1765/R in B ii), 144, 146, 148–9 ed. in VK, 145, 147 ed. in HL
153–4	116.21–2	Allegro, solfeggio, C; Polonoise, g: 1760; 153 ed. in HS
160	117.14	Fantasia, D [ex. for h870, see ‘Theoretical works’]; facs. in B v
165–70	112.3, 5, 9, 11, 16–17 [116.9–14]	Minuet, D; Alla polacca, a; Minuet, D; Alla polacca, g; Minuet, A; Alla polacca, D: (1765/R in B ii); 165, 169 ed. in HL, 166, 168, 170 ed. in VK
171–2	116.1–2	Minuet, E; Polonoise, E: (1762/R in B v)
190	112.1	Conc., C, hpd solo (1765/R in B ii) [orig. intended for kbd, str in D]
191	112.13	Sinfonia, G (1765/R in B ii)
193–203	113	Allegro, G; Arioso, a; Fantasia, d; Minuet, F; Alla polacca, C; Allegretto, d; Alla polacca, D; Allegretto, A; Andante e sostenuto, g; Presto, B; Allegro, d: (1766¹/R in B ii); ed. O. Vrieslander, Kurze und leichte Klavierstücke (Vienna, 1914), ed. O. Jonas (Vienna, 1962)
214–17, 219	116.3–6, 8	Minuet, D; Alla polacca, C; Minuet, C; Alla polacca, D; Minuet, F; Alla polacca, G: (1762/R in B v); 214–16 ed. in VK
220–22	117.2–4	3 solfeggios, c, E, A: (1770/R in B v); ed. in VK, 220 ed. in R
223–5	117.11–13	3 fantasias, G, d, g: (1770); 223, 225 facs. in B v, 223–4 ed. in VK
228–38	114	Allegro di molto, d; Andantino e grazioso, B; Presto, c; Minuet, G; Alla polacca, D; Alla polacca, E; Fantasia, d; Allegro, E; Allegretto, A; Andante, C; Poco allegro, e: (1766²/R in B ii); ed. O. Vrieslander, Kurze und leichte Klavierstücke (Vienna, 1914), ed. O. Jonas (Vienna, 1962), 234 ed. in R
241	117.1	Clavierstück für die rechte oder linke Hand allein, A; facs. in B v, ed. in VK
249–54	116.23–8	Sechs leichte Clavierstückgen, C, F, D, G, g, D, 1775 [no.6 also in variant version]; facs. in B v
256–8	n.v.37–9	Allegro, F; Allegretto, D; Menuet, F: c1775
264	120	Cadenzen , 1778 or later, B-Bc, for his own concs. and sonatas
272	66	Rondo: Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, e, 1781; facs. in B v
292–7	63.7–12	6 neue Sonatinen, G, E, D, B, F, d, 1786 [exx. for h868 (2/1787), see ‘Theoretical works’]; facs. in B i, ed. in VK, ed. L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht (Leipzig, 1957)
300	67	Fantasia (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs Empfindungen), f, 1788 [see also ‘Chamber’, h536]; facs. in B vi, ed. A. Kreutz (Mainz, 1950)
301–2	116.19–20	Allegretto, F; Allegro, D; facs. in B v
338	116.16–17	Allegro, A; Allegro, G; in F.W. Marpurg: Anleitung zum Clavierspielen (Berlin, 1755); ed. in HS
348	—	Fantasia, E, c1748; attrib. erroneously to C. Nichelmann
—	—	Suite, B, c1730, D-Kl; not listed in NV
—	—	Suite, E, c1730, Hs; not listed in NV
—	—	Suite, G, c1730, Hs; not listed in NV
—	—	Suite, G, ?1730s, Bsb; not listed in NV
—	—	Menuet, E, 1730s, in Klavierbüchlein attrib. W.A. Mozart; not listed in NV
—	—	March, F, 1730s, Hs; not listed in NV
—	—	Murqui pour l’amour, A, 1730s, Hs; not listed in NV
—	—	Allemande, A, 1730s, Hs; not listed in NV

two keyboards

610–13	115	4 kleine Duetten, B, F, a, E, ? after 1768
—	—	Sonata, C, after 1766, F-Pc* [based on h515, see ‘Chamber’]

organ

sonatas

60, 371·5	65.24	Sonata, d, 1749
133	70.1	Sonata, A, 1758, rev. later [see also ‘Keyboard solo’, h135]; facs. in B iv
134	70.2	Sonata, B, 1758, rev. later, in III sonates … par Mrs. C.P.E. Bach (Nuremberg, 1770); facs. in B iv
84–7	70.3–6	4 sonatas, F, a, D, g, 1755; facs. in B iv
107	70.7	Sonata, D, 1755; facs. in B iv

other pieces, mostly doubtful

336	—	5 Choräle mit ausgesetzten Mittelstimmen
—	—	Pedal-Exercitium (inc.), g, by 1734 [= bwv598]
—	n.v.66	Adagio, d
—	—	Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, e [= bwv745]
—	—	Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ, f [= bwv Anh.73 (after bwv639)]

chamber

Edition:Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Complete Sonatas for Flute and Obbligato Keyboard, ed. U. Leisinger (Monteux, 1993–) [L]

solos

548	134	Sonata, G, fl, bc, ? by 1735
549	135	Solo, g, ob, bc, ? by 1735, rev. later
550	123	Sonata, G, fl, bc, 1735
551	124	Sonata, e, fl, bc, 1737
552, 560	125, 130	Sonata, B, fl, bc, 1738, rev. 1746
553–5	126–8	3 sonatas, D, G, a, fl, bc, 1738–40
556, 561	129, 131	Sonata, D, fl, bc, 1740, rev. 1747
557	138	Solo, g, vc, bc, 1740, rev. 1769, lost
558–9	136–7	2 solos, C, D, va da gamba, bc, 1745–6
562	132	Sonata, a, fl, 1747 (1763); ed. M. Nastasi (Vienna, c1986)
563	139	Solo, G, harp, 1762 (facs. (Utrecht, c1996))
564	133	Sonata, G, fl, bc, 1786

trios, quartets

502	71	Sonata, D, kbd, vn, 1731, rev. 1746
503, 596	72	Sonata, d, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, kbd), 1731, rev. 1747
504, 573	73, 149	Sonata, C, kbd, vn/fl (or fl, vn, kbd), 1745
505, 575	83, 151	Sonata, D, kbd, fl (or fl, vn, bc), 1747
506, 580	84, 162	Sonata, E, kbd, fl (or 2 fl, bc), 1749
507, 585		Sinfonia, D, kbd, vn (or 2 vn, bc), 1754
508, 581, 157	85, 152	Trio, G, kbd, fl (or fl/vn, vn, bc), 1754; ed. C. Hill (Monteux, c1986)
509, 586	86, 153	Sonata, G, kbd, fl (or fl, vn, bc), 1755; ed. C. Hill (Monteux, c1986)
510, 541	88	Sonata, g, kbd, va/va da gamba, 1759
511	75	Sonata, F, kbd, vn, 1763
512	76	Sonata, b, kbd, vn, 1763
513	77	Sonata, B, kbd, vn, 1763
514	78	Sonata, c, kbd, vn, 1763
515	87	Trio, C, kbd, fl, 1766 [also for 2 hpd, F-Pn]
516–21	92	6 qts, E, E, E, B, E, B, after 1768
522–4	90	3 sonatas, a, G, C, kbd, vn, vc (Leipzig, 1776)
525–30	89	6 sonatas, e, B, C, A, E, e, D, kbd, vn, vc (London, 1776; Amsterdam, c1778)
531–4	91	4 sonatas, e, D, F, C, kbd, vn, vc (Leipzig, 1777) [h534 variations]
535	79, n.v.70	Arioso, A, kbd, vn, 1780 [orig. kbd solo]
536	80	Fantasie (C.P.E. Bachs Empfindungen), f, kbd, vn, 1787 [orig. kbd solo]
537–9	93–5	3 qts, a–D–G, kbd, fl, va, 1788
542, 570	146	Sonata, A, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, bc), 1731, rev. 1747
566	—	Trio, vn, va, bc, c1731, lost [composed under supervision of J.S. Bach]
567	143	Sonata, b, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, bc), 1731, rev. 1747
568	144	Trio, G, fl, vn, bc, 1731, rev. 1747
569	145	Sonata, d, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, bc), 1731, rev. 1747 [early version = bwv1036]
571	147	Sonata, C, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, bc), 1731, rev. 1747
572	148	Sonata, a, kbd, vn (or fl/vn, vn, bc), 1735, rev. 1747
574	150	Trio, G, fl, vn, bc, 1747
576	154	Sonata, F, fl/vn, vn, bc, 1754
577	155	Sonata, e, 2 vn, bc, 1747
578	161.2	Sonata, B, kbd, vn (or fl, vn, kbd), 1748 (Nuremberg, 1751)
579	161.1	Trio (Sangineus und Melancholicus), c, kbd, vn (or 2 vn, bc), 1749 (Nuremberg, 1751)
582	156	Sinfonia, a, 2 vn, bc, 1754
584	158	Sonata, B, 2 vn, bc, 1754
587, 543	159	Trio, B, 2 vn, bc, c1755 [= h588–9]
588–9	163	Trio, F, b fl, va/bn, bc, 1755, rev. later [= h587, 543]
590	160	Sonata, d, 2 vn, bc, 1756, rev. later
600	81	12 kleine Stücke, G g, e, a, D, D, D, B, D, C, F, d, kbd, fl, vn (Berlin, 1758)
628	82	12 … kleine Stücke, e, E, G, g, A, a, D, d, C, c, g, B, kbd, fl, vn (Hamburg, 1770)

miscellaneous

598	140	Duetto, e, fl, vn, D-Bsb*, in Musikalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770)
599	141	Duetto, d, 2 vn, lost
604–5	190.1, 3	2 polonoise, F, a, 2 cl, 2 vn, bc
607–9, 627	190.2, 4–6	4 polonoise, G, D, C, A, 2 vn, bc (with 2 cl in h608)
614–19	185	6 marches, D, C, F, G, E, D, 2 ob, 2 cl, bn, 2 hn
620	186	2 kleine Stücke, a, F, 2 cl, bn, 2 hn, lost
637	187	2 marches, F, D, 2 ob, bn, 2 hn
621	188	Marche für die Arche, C, 3 tpt, timp, after 1767; ed. H.M. Lewis (Monteux, c1988)
629–34	184	6 sonatas, D, F, G, E, A, C, 2 fl, 2 cl, bn, 2 hn
635	193	[30] Stücke für Spieluhren auch Drehorgeln
636	142	Duetto, C, 2 cl [= h635, 26–7)
—	—	?Marche, ?3 tpt, timp, 1763, lost (? = h621)
—	—	Marche, E, tpt, 2 ob, bn, by 1767

orchestral

Editions:Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Six Symphonies, ed. C.C. Gallagher and E.E. Helm, in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. C, viii (New York, 1982) [GH]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 1714–1788: The Collected Works for Solo Keyboard, ed. D. Berg (New York, 1985) [facs.] [B i–vi]

solo concertos and sonatinas

190	112.1	Conc., C, hpd solo (1765) [see ‘Solo keyboard’]; facs. in B ii
403	1	Conc., a, hpd, str, 1733, rev. c1740 and 1744
404	2	Conc., E, hpd, str, 1734, rev. 1743; early version (Paris, c1761)
405	3	Conc., G, hpd, str, 1737, rev. 1745
406	4	Conc., G, hpd, str, 1738
407	5	Conc., c, hpd, str, 1739, rev. 1762
409	6	Conc., g, hpd, str, 1740, rev. later
410–13	7–10	4 concs., A, A, G, B, hpd, str, 1740–42
414	11	Conc., D, hpd, str, 1743 (Nuremberg, 1745)
415–16	12–13	2 concs., F, D, hpd, str, 1744; listed as fl. conc. in Ringmacher catalogue (Berlin, 1773)
417	14	Conc., E, hpd, str, 1744 (Berlin, 1760), rev. later; also with 2 hn
418–24	15–21	7 concs., e, G, d, D, A, C, a, hpd, str, 1745–7
425, 484·1	22	Conc., d, fl/hpd, str, 1747, rev. later; also with 2 hn
427–8	23–4	2 concs., d, e, hpd, str, 1748
429	25	Conc., B, hpd, str, 1749 (Nuremberg, 1752)
430–32	26, 166, 170	Conc., a, vc/fl/hpd, str, 1750; 431 ed. U. Leisinger (Monteux, c1992)
433	27	Conc., D, hpd, 2 hn, str, with 2 fl, 2 ob, 2/?3 tpt/hn, timp ad lib, 1750
434–6	28, 167, 171	Conc., B, vc/fl/hpd, str, 1751
437–9	29, 168, 172	Conc., A, vc/fl/hpd, str, 1753
440–43	30–33	4 concs., b, c, g, F, hpd, str, 1753–5
444–5	34, 169	Conc., G, org/hpd/fl, str, 1755
446	35	Conc., E, org/hpd, str, 1759; also with 2 hn
447	36	Conc., B, hpd, str, 1762
448	37	Conc., c, hpd, 2 hn, str, 1762; ed. E.N. Kulukundis and P.G. Wiley, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, II/xv (Oxford, 1989)
449	96	Sonatina, D, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1762, rev. later; also with 2 hn
450–51	97–8	2 sonatinas, G, G, hpd, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1762; 451 ed. P.G. Wiley and C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, II/xxiii (Oxford, 1992)
452, 485	99	Sonatina, F, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1762 [also with 2 hn]; ed. P.G. Wiley and C. Widgery, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, II/xxiii (Oxford, 1992)
454	38	Conc., F, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1763; ed. E.N. Kulukundis and P.G. Wiley, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Edition, II/xv (Oxford, 1989)
455	100	Sonatina, E, hpd, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1763
456–7	102–3	2 sonatinas, D, C, hpd, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1763
458, 460	106, 101	Sonatina, C, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1763 (Berlin, 1764), rev. later; also with 2 hn
461, 463	107, 104	Sonatina, F, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1764 (Berlin, 1764), rev. later; also with 2 hn
462, 464	108, 105	Sonatina, E, hpd, 2 fl, str, 1764 (Berlin, 1766), rev. later; also with 2 hn
465–6	39, 164	Conc., B, ob/hpd, str, 1765
467–8	40, 165	Conc., E, ob/hpd, str, 1765
469	41	Conc., E, hpd, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1769
470	42	Conc., F, hpd, 2 hn, str, 1770 [also for kbd solo, h242; facs. in B iv]
471–6	43	Sei concerti, F, D, E, c, G, C, hpd, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1771–2 (Hamburg, 1772)
477–8	44–5	2 concs., G, D, hpd, 2 hn, str, 1778

double concertos and sonatinas

408	46	Conc., F, 2 hpd, 2 hn, str, 1740; ed. G. Kiss (Hamburg, c1988)
453	109	Sonatina, D, 2 hpd, 2 fl, 2 ob, bn, 3 tpt, 2 hn, str, 1762; also for 1 hpd, 2 fl, str, h480, 480·5
459	110	Sonatina, B, 2 hpd, 2 fl, str, 1763; also for 1 hpd, 2 fl, str, D-LEm
479	47	Conc., E, hpd, pf, 2 fl, 2 hn, str, 1788

symphonies

648	173	Sinfonie, G, str, 1741; GH, kbd red., 1745, h45 (w122.1), facs. in B iv
649	174	Sinfonia, C, str, 1755, rev. later; also with 2 fl, 2 hn
650	175	Sinfonia, F, str, 1755, rev. later; also with 2 fl, 2 bn, 2 hn; GH, kbd red., h104 (w122.2), by ? F.W. Marpurg, in Raccolta delle megliore sinfonie (Leipzig, 1761), facs. in B iii
651	176	Sinfonia, D, str, 1756, rev. later; also with 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 hn, 2 tpt, timp; GH
652–3	177–8	2 sinfonias, e, e, str, 1756 (Nuremberg, 1759), rev. later; kbd red. listed as h115 (w122.3), unrealized
654	179	Sinfonia, E, str, 1757, rev. later; also with 2 ob, 2 hn; GH
655	180	Sinfonia, G, str, 1758, rev. later, also with 2 ob, 2 hn; GH, kbd red. w122.4 (= h191; w112.13) in Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (Berlin, 1765)
656	181	Sinfonia, F, str, 1758 [not in NV], rev. ?1762, also with 2 fl, 2 hn; GH, kbd red., 1766, h227 (w122.5), in Musikalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770), facs. in B iii
657–62	182	Sei sinfonie, G, B, C, A, b, E, str, for G. van Swieten
663–6	183	[4] Orchester-Sinfonien, D, E, F, G, 1775–6 (Leipzig, 1780)
667	—	Sinfonia, str, c1751, collab. Count Ferdinand of Lobkowitz [cf NV, 65], lost
—	—	Sinfonia, G, str, by 1766, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1766, doubtful, lost
—	—	Sinfonia, C, by 1766, S-Skma, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1766, doubtful
—	—	Sinfonia, F, str, by c1766, D-Bsb, doubtful

miscellaneous

601	192	2 minuets, C, C, 2 fl, 2 bn, 3 tpt, timp, 2 vn, bc, in Musikalisches Mancherley (Berlin, 1762)
602–3	189.1–2	2 minuets, D, D, 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 vn, bc
606	189.8	Minuet, G, 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 vn, bc
622–6	189.3–7	5 minuets, G, G, G, F, D, 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 vn, bc
638	191	2 minuets, D, D, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 hn, 3 tpt, timp, str

Oratorios and passions

—	—	Ich freue mich des, das mir geredet ist, orat, 2 Dec 1736, for consecration of the Unterkirche, Frankfurt an der Oder, lost
775	238	Die Israeliten in der Wüste (D. Schiebeler), orat, 1 Nov 1769 (Hamburg, 1775)
777	240	Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu (C.W. Ramler), orat, 1774, rev. by 1778 (Leipzig, 1787); ed. G. Darvas (Adliswil, c1975)
776	233	Du Göttlicher, Passion cant. (A.L. Karsch, C.D. Ebeling and J.J. Eschenburg), 1770, rev. by 1772, rev. later; based on h782; ed. H.-J. Irmen (Vaduz, c1982)
782	—	St Matthew Passion, 1769, ?inc.
783	—	St Mark Passion, 1770, inc., based on G.A. Homilius: St Mark Passion
784	—	St Luke Passion, 1771, frag., incl. movt by G. Benda
785	—	St John Passion, 1772
786	—	St Matthew Passion, 1773, frag.
787	—	St Mark Passion, 1774, frag.
788	—	St Luke Passion, 1775, frag.
789	—	St John Passion, 1776, frag.
790	—	St Matthew Passion, 1777, frag.
791	—	St Mark Passion, 1778, frag.
792	—	St Luke Passion, 1779, frag.
793	—	St John Passion, 1780, frag.
794		St Matthew Passion, 1781, inc.
795	—	St Mark Passion, 1782, frag.
796	—	St Luke Passion, 1783, frag.
797	—	St John Passion, 1784, frag.
798	—	St Matthew Passion, 1785, frag.
799	—	St Mark Passion, 1786, frag.
800	234	St Luke Passion, 1787, frag.
801	—	St John Passion, 1788, frag.
802	235	St Matthew Passion, 1789
822a–b	—	Hebt an, ihr Chöre der Freude, orat – Der Trommeln Schlag, serenata (C.W. Alers), 7 Sept 1780
822c–d	—	Schallt Jubel, orat – Schlagt die Trommel, wirbelt Freude, serenata (Alers), 4 Sept 1783; music of orat lost

sacred latin

772	215	Magnificat, by 25 Aug 1749, rev. later; alternative version of ‘Et misericordia’, ?c1780–82; ed. G. Darvas (Adliswil, c1971)
825	207	Veni Sancte Spiritus, S, S, bc, after 1768
839–40	209–10	Antiphonia, 4vv; Amen, 4vv: after 1768, lost
828	219	Sanctus, after 1768
855	220	Veni Sancte Spiritus, after/?by Telemann, twv3:84

sacred cantatas and choruses

762	231	Er lebt! Ihm tönen unsre Lieder (Freudenlied for F.L.C. Cropp), (P.L. Cropp), 1785
778	217	Heilig, SATB, SATB, 2 ob, bn, 3 tpt, timp, str, bc, 1776 (Hamburg, 1779)
779	239	Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfest (F.G. Klopstock), 1783 (Leipzig, 1784)
803–5, 807	244, 242, 241, 243	4 Oster-Musik: Gott hat den Herrn auferweckt (L. Cochius), Easter 1756, rev. later; Jauchzet, frohlocket [partly from bwv248¹], Easter 1778; Nun danket alle Gott, Easter 178; Anbetung dem Erbarmer, Easter 1784
809–10	248, 245	2 Michaelis-Musik: Den Engeln gleich, St Michael 1769; Ich will den Namen des Herrn preisen, St Michael 1772
811	—	?Weihnachts-Musik: Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe, Christmas ?1772 [also for St Michael 1782]
812	247, 212	Michaelis-Musik: Siehe! Ich begehre deiner Gerechtigkeit, St Michael 1775 [incl. aria ‘Sing ihm voll Rührung’ w212]
814	246	Michaelis-Musik: Der Frevler mag die Wahrheit schmähn, Christmas 1785 [incl. Heilig h778]
815	249	Weihnachts-Musik: Auf schicke dich, Christmas 1775
816	—	4 Weihnachts-Musik: Die Himmel rühmen die Ehre Gottes, Christmas c1770, music lost; 3 others, Christmas 1782, 1784, 1786, lost
821	—	15 inauguration cants., 1769–87, music mostly lost
823	—	Versammelt euch dem Herrn zu Ehren, for completion of the tower of St Michael, 31 Oct 1786 [incl. Heilig h778], lost
824	—	6 celebratory cantatas, 1765–85, lost
829	216	Spiega, Ammonia fortuna, chorus for visit of Gustav III of Sweden, Hamburg, 1770
830	221	Mein Heiland, meine Zuversicht, chorus for Trinity X, 5 Aug 1787
831	222	Wer ist so würdig als du (J.A. Cramer), chorus, Easter 1780, ? used earlier
832	223	Zeige du mir deine Wege (Cramer), chorus for Trinity VIII, 20 July 1777
—	224	Lass mich nicht deinen Zorn empfinden (Cramer), chorus, 1775 [after h733.13; used in St Matthew Passion h798]
833	225	Gott, dem ich lebe, des ich bin (C.C. Sturm), chorus
834–5	226—7	2 choruses: Amen, Lob und Preis und Stärke (Sturm) for Quasimodogeniti, 27 April 1783; Leite mich nach deinem Willen (B. Münter) for Quasimodogeniti, ? 27 April 1783
836	—	Meine Lebenszeit verstreicht, funeral music for M.H. Schele, Dec 1774 [incl. w228], frag.
837	—	Meinen Leib wird man begraben, funeral music for J. Luis, Feb 1788 [incl. w229], frag.
838	n.v.1	Merkt und seht, chorus, ?1780s
—	—	Wedding cant. for J.S. Ungnad and A.E. Thiele, 18 Jan 1736, lost
—	—	Birthday cant. for Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia, 24 Jan 1737, lost
—	—	Frankfurt, lass in vollen Chören, cant. for visit of Friedrich Wilhelm I and Sophia Dorothea Maria of Prussia, 18 March 1737, music lost
—	—	Entdeckt durch tausend frohe Töne, cant. for visit of Friedrich Wilhelm I, Nov 1737, lost
—	—	Vater, deines Sohnes Geist, cant., ? Hamburg, 1770 [perf. with h829]
—	—	Oster-Kantate, Ist Christus nicht auferstanden, Easter 1771, lost
—	—	Freuet euch, ihr Kinder Zions (C.H.E. Müller), inauguration cant. for J.M. Müller and J.A.G. Schetelig, Hamburg, 7 Nov 1773, music lost
—	—	Funeral music for V. Rumpf, March/April 1781 [incl. h833 and movt from h856 (anon.)], frag.
—	—	Funeral music for F. Doormann, 7 Sept 1781, music lost
—	—	Funeral music for A. Schulte, 10 Jan 1786, lost

secular arias and cantatas

669	211	3 arias: Edle Freiheit, Götterglück; Himmelstochter, Ruh der Seelen; Reiche bis zum Wolkensitze: T, 2 fl, bc
697	232	Thirsis, willst du mir gefallen (Phillis und Thirsis) (J.E. Schlegel), S, S, 2 fl, bc, 1765 (Berlin, 1766)
723	237	Freude, du Lust der Götter (Der Frühling), cant., T, str, after 1760 [orch version of h688, see ‘Songs, motets and chorales’]
735	200.22	Als einem Frühlingsabende (Die Grazien) (H.W. von Gerstenberg), cant., S, kbd (Lübeck, 1789)
739	236	Sie liebt, mich liebt die Auserwählte (Selma) (J.H. Voss), S, 2 fl, str, after 1775
761	214	Fürsten sind am Lebensziele, aria, S, str, 1785, lost
767	213	D’amor per te languisco, arietta, S, 2 fl, bc
—	—	Reisst euch los, bekränte Sinnen, aria, S, ?orch, by 1734, frag., doubtful [= bwv224]

songs, motets and chorales

songs with keyboard or continuo

670–84, 687, 689–92	199	[20] Oden mit Melodien (Berlin, 1762) [incl. 3 in Samlung verschiedener und auserlesener Oden, ii–iv (Halle, 1741–3)]
685	—	La Sophie, by 1768
686	194	[55] Geistliche Oden und Lieder (C.F. Gellert), 1757 (Leipzig, 1758)
688	202/A	Freude, du Lust der Götter und Menschen (C.M. Wieland), in Drey verschiedene Versuche eines einfachen Gesanges für den Hexameters (Berlin, 1760) [also arr. S, orch, see ‘Secular arias and cantatas’, h723]
693–5	202/B	3 songs: Das Privilegium (N.D. Giseke); Die Landschaft; Belinde (K.W. Müller): in Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (Berlin, 1765)
696	195	Zwölf geistliche Oden und Lieder als ein Anhang zu Gellerts geistliche Oden und Lieder (Leipzig, 1764)
698	202/D	Bachus und Venus (H.W. von Gerstenberg), in Musikalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770)
699	201	Der Wirt und die Gäste (J.W.L Gleim) (Berlin, 1766), rev. later
700–08, 734–5, 740–41, 747–8, 755–60	200	[21] Neue Lieder-Melodien nebst einer Cantate (Lübeck, 1789) [incl. Die Grazien h735, see ‘Secular arias and cantatas’]
709–21	202/C	13 songs in Unterhaltungen (Hamburg, 1768–70)
724–9	202/E	6 songs (B. Münter) in Balthasar Münters 1. Sammlung geistlicher Lieder (Leipzig, 1773)
730	202/O/2	Klagelied eines Bauren (J.M. Miller)
733	196	[42] Psalmen mit Melodien (J.A. Cramer) (Leipzig, 1774)
742	202/O/1	Auf den Flügeln des Morgenrots (C.F. Cramer)
743	202/O/4	Die Trennung (J.J. Eschenburg, after P. Metastasio)
749	197	[30] Geistliche Gesänge mit Melodien (C.C. Sturm) (Hamburg, 1780)
752	198	[30] Geistliche Gesänge mit Melodien, ii (Sturm) (Hamburg, 1781)
763	—	Die Alster (F. von Hagedorn); Harvstehude (von Hagedorn): after 1768, lost
764	202/N	12 songs in Freymaurer-Lieder mit ganz neuen Melodien von der Herren Capellmeister Bach, Naumann und Schulz (Copenhagen and Leipzig, 1788) [also attrib., erroneously, to W.F.E. Bach]
765	202/O/3	Kommt, lasst uns seine Huld besingen (J.A. Cramer)
766	202/O/5	Die Schönste soll bei Sonnenschein
—	—	Allgütiger, gewohnt Gebet zu hören [another version of h700]
		Also 12 songs in various Musenalmanachs (1775–82): h731–2, 736–8, 739·5, 744, 746, 750–51, 753–4 (w202/F–L)

motets

773–4	205–6	2 pss (J.A. Cramer): Warum versammeln sich und dräuen, S, A, T, B; Wenn ich zu dir in meinen Ängsten flehe, S, A, bc
826	208	4 motets: Gedanke, der uns Leben gibt (Gellert), S, A, B, bc; Oft klagt dein Herz, wie schwer es sei (Gellert), S, A, T, B, bc; Gott, deine Güte reicht so weit (Gellert), S, A, bc; Dich bet ich an, Herr Jesu Christ (Sturm), S, A, T, B, bc: arrs. of h686.30, 53, 9, 752.3

chorales

337	n.v.18	Wo Gott zum Haus nicht gibt
780, 871	204	Zwey Litaneien aus dem Schleswig-Holsteinischen Gesangbuch, 1785 (Copenhagen, 1786); ed. in SBA
781	203	[14] Neue Melodien zu einigen Liedern des neuen Hamburger Gesangbuches (Hamburg, 1787): texts mainly by Gellert; nos.3, 6, 13 also with orch
842	—	[10] Choräle (H.E. zu Stolberg-Wernigerode) (Wernigerode, 1767)
843	—	Naglet til et Kors paa Jorden (B.J. Sporon), in Kirke-Melodierne til den 1778 udgangne Psalmebog (Copenhagen, 1781)
844	—	3 chorales: Erheb, erheb, o meine Seele; Des Ewigen und der Sterblichen Sohn; Von ganzem Herzen rühmen wir: in Vollständige Sammlung der Melodien … des neuen allgemeinen Schleswig-Holsteinischen Gesangsbuch (Leipzig, 1785)

theoretical works

285	—	Fughetta on C-F-E-B-A-C-H, by 1784
867	121	Miscellanea musica, B-Bc [incl. canons in J.P. Kirnberger: Die Kunst des reinen Satzes (Berlin, 1771–4)]
868	254	Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, i (Berlin, 1753/R, 2/1787); Eng. trans., ed. W.J. Mitchell, as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York, 1949)
869	257	‘Einfall einen doppelten Contrapunct in der Octave … zu machen’, in F.W. Marpurg, ed.: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, iii (Berlin, 1757/R); Eng. trans in Helm (1966)
870	255	Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, ii (Berlin, 1762/R, 2/1797); Eng. trans., ed. W.J. Mitchell, as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York, 1949)
—	—	Fughetta on B-A-C-H, in J.F. Reichardt: Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden (Hamburg, 1774)

arrangements

Various arrs. of vocal and inst works by J.E., J.C., J.C.F, J.S. and W.F. Bach, G. Benda, C.F.C. Fasch, J.G. Goldberg, C.H. Graun, Handel, G.A. Homilius, Telemann and others: for details see H; others in D-Bsb

misattributed works

115	122.3	Sinfonia, kbd: planned red. by J.J.H. Westphal of h652, unrealized
159	116.15	Minuet, kbd, C: arr. of h601 by Westphal
303–31	116.29–57	29 kbd pieces: arrs. by Westphal of works for mechanical insts or ww (facs. in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 1714–1788: The Collected Works for Solo Keyboard, v (New York, 1985))
333	—	La Juliane, F, kbd, A-Wn: doubtful, not autograph
540	—	Largo, e, kbd, melody inst, B-Bc: by C. Schaffrath
874	258	Kurze Anweisung zum Generalbass, B-Br; doubtful, not autograph
—	202/M	2 fantasias: Socrates: Nein, nein die ernste hohe Gestalt; Hamlet: Sein, oder Nichtsein: = h75, 3rd movt, with text underlay by H.W. von Gerstenberg

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: catalogues, letters, documents

J.M. Bach, ed: Verzeichnis des musikalischen Nachlasses des verstorbenen Capellmeisters Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790/R1981 with preface and annotations by R.W. Wade)

J.J.H. Westphal: Catalogue thématique des oeuvres de Ch.Ph.Emm. Bach (MS, B-Br, Fétis 5218)

A. Wotquenne, ed.: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) (Leipzig, 1905/R) [in Ger. and Fr.]

H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs 1750–1800, Bach-Dokumente, iii (Kassel, 1972)

H.-G. Ottenberg, ed: Der Critische Musicus an der Spree: Berliner Musikschrifttum von 1748 bis 1799, eine Dokumentation (Leipzig, 1984)

E. Suchalla: Briefe von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach an Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf (Tutzing, 1985)

R. Angermüller: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachiana: Briefe die bei Ernst Suchalla nicht veröffentlicht wurden’, JbSIM (1985–6), 9–168

E.E. Helm: Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (New Haven, CT, 1989)

U. Leisinger: ‘Die Bachsche Auktion von 1789’, BJb 1991, 97–126

W.S. Newman, ed.: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Autobiography, Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses (Buren, 1991)

E. Suchalla, ed.: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach im Spiegel seiner Zeit: die Dokumentensammlung Johann Jacob Heinrich Westphals (Hildesheim, 1993)

H.-G. Ottenberg, ed: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Spurensuche: Leben und Werk in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten seiner Zeitgenossen, Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach-Konzepte, Sonderreihe, i (Leipzig, 1994)

E. Suchalla, ed.: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Briefe und Dokumente. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Göttingen, 1994)

E.N. Kulukundis: ‘Die Versteigerung von C.P.E. Bachs musikalischem Nachlass im Jahre 1805’, BJb 1995, 145–76

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Regesten zu einigen verschollenen Briefen Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs’, BJb 1996, 151–4

P. Wollny: ‘Zur Überlieferung der Instrumentalwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs: der Quellenbesitz Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs’, BJb 1996, 7–21

S.L. Clark, ed.: The Letters of C.P.E. Bach (Oxford, 1997)

B. Wiermann: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und Hamburg: Dokumente aus der zeitgenössischen Presse bis 1790 (Hildesheim, forthcoming)

b: sources

J. Müller: Die musikalischen Schätze der Koeniglichen- und Universitaets-Bibliothek zu Königsberg in Pr. aus dem Nachlasse Friedrich August Gotthold’s (Bonn, 1870)

P. Kast: Die Bach-Handschriften der Berliner Staatsbibliothek (Trossingen, 1958)

K. Hortschansky: Katalog der Kieler Musiksammlungen: die Notendrucke, Handschriften, Libretti und Bücher über Musik aus der Zeit bis 1830 (Kassel, 1963)

T. Aigner: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Mederitsch detto Gallus (Munich, 1974) [incl. list of copies by Mederitsch in A-Sd, Sm]

R.W. Wade: ‘Newly Found Works of C.P.E. Bach’, EMc, xvi (1988), 523–32

U. Leisinger: Die Bach-Quellen der Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha (Gotha, 1993)

U. Leisinger and P. Wollny: Die Bach-Quellen der Bibliotheken in Brüssel: Katalog (Hildesheim, forthcoming)

c: exhibition catalogues, programme books

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Musik und Literatur in Norddeutschland: Ausstellung zum 200. Todestag Bachs, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg, 23 Sept – 31 Oct 1988; Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel 16 Nov 1988 – 29 Jan 1989 (Heide in Holstein, 1988) [exhibition catalogue]

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 1714–1788, herausgegeben anlässlich der Ausstellung zum 200. Todestag Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 10 July – 4 Sept 1988 (Berlin, 1988) [exhibition catalogue]

H.-G. Klein, ed.: ‘Er ist Original!’: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: sein musikalisches Werk in Autographen und Erstdrucken aus der Musikabteilung der Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 14 Dec 1988 – 11 Feb 1989 (Wiesbaden, 1988) [exhibition catalogue]

K. Maehnert and V. Wolf, ed.: Bach-Tage Hamburg ’88 (Hamburg, 1988) [St Michaelis-Chor Hamburg e.V.; programme book]

H.J. Marx, ed: Der Hamburger Bach und die Neue Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts: eine Veranstaltungsreihe anlässlich des 200. Todesjahres von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 1714–1788 (Hamburg, 1988) [programme book]

d: congress reports, essay collections

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die europäische Musikkultur: Hamburg 1988

S.L. Clark: C.P.E. Bach Studies (Oxford, 1988)

Fragen der Aufführungspraxis und Interpretation von Werken Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs: Blankenburg, Harz, 1988

Untersuchungen zur Musikkultur des 18. Jahrhunderts: Potsdam 1988

H. Poos, ed: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk (Mainz, 1993)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Frankfurt an der Oder 1994

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die Romantik: Frankfurt an der Oder 1996

e: biography: general

F. Rochlitz: ‘K.Ph.E. Bach’, Für Freunde der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 2/1832), iv, 271–316

C.H. Bitter: Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brüder (Berlin, 1868/R)

O. Vrieslander: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Munich, 1923)

H. Miesner: Philipp Emanuel Bach in Hamburg: Beiträge zu seiner Biographie und zur Musikgeschichte seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1929/R)

D. Plamenac: ‘New Light on the Last Years of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 565–87

H.-G. Ottenberg: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Leipzig, 1982, 2/1987; Eng. trans., 1987)

f: special studies, relationships, reception

H. von Hase: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und Joh.Gottl.Im. Breitkopf’, BJb 1911, 86–104

R. Steglich: ‘Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach und der Dresdner Kreuzkantor Gottfried August Homilius im Musikleben ihrer Zeit: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Stilwandlung im 18. Jahrhundert’, BJb 1915, 39–145

H. von Hase: ‘Beiträge zur Breitkopfschen Geschäftsgeschichte’, ZfMw, ii (1919–20), 454–81

B. Engelke: ‘Gerstenberg und die Musik seiner Zeit’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte, lvi (1927), 417–48

H. Killer: ‘Zur Musik des deutschen Ostens im 18. Jahrhundert’, Königsberger Beiträge: Festgabe zur vierhundertjährigen Jubelfeier der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek zu Königsberg Pr. (Königsberg, 1929), 228–43

E. Fritz Schmid: ‘Joseph Haydn und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’, ZfMw, xiv (1931–2), 299–312

H. Miesner: ‘Urkundliche Nachrichten über die Familie Bach in Berlin’, BJb 1932, 157–63

H. Miesner: ‘Aus der Umwelt Philipp Emanuel Bachs’, BJb 1937, 132–43

H. Miesner: ‘Porträts aus dem Kreise Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bachs’, Musik und Bild: Festschrift Max Seiffert zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Besseler (Kassel, 1938), 101–12

A. Holschneider: ‘C.Ph.E. Bachs Kantate “Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu” und Mozarts Aufführung des Jahres 1788’, MJb 1968–70, 264–80

M. Terry: ‘C.P.E. Bach and J.J.H. Westphal: a Clarification’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 106–15

A. Glöckner: ‘Neuerkenntnisse zu Johann Sebastian Bachs Aufführungskalender zwischen 1729 und 1735’, BJb 1981, 43–75

E.E. Helm: ‘An Honorable Shortcut to the Works of C.P.E. Bach’, Music in the Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, ed. A.W. Atlas (New York, 1985), 85–98

R. von Zahn: ‘Johann Maria Bach und das Hamburger Stadtkantorat’, Mf, xliii (1990), 146–50

R. von Zahn: Musikpflege in Hamburg um 1800: der Wandel des Konzertwesens und der Kirchenmusik zwischen dem Tode Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs und dem Tode Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwenkes (Hamburg, 1991)

U. Leisinger: Joseph Haydn und die Entwicklung des klassischen Klavierstils (Laaber, 1994)

g: theory, aesthetics

H. Mersmann: ‘Ein Programmtrio K.Ph.E. Bachs’, BJb 1917, 137–70

O. Vrieslander: ‘C.Ph.E. Bach als Theoretiker’, Von Neuer Musik (Cologne, 1925), 222–79

A. Schering: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und das “redende Prinzip” in der Musik’, JbMP 1938, 13–29

N. Fischman: ‘Estetika F.E. Bacha’, SovM (1964), no.8, 59–65

E.E. Helm: ‘Six Random Measures of C.P.E. Bach’, JMT, x (1966), 19–51

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Si vis me flere …’, Mf, xxv (1972), 51–2

E.E. Helm: ‘The “Hamlet” Fantasy and the Literary Element in C.P.E. Bach’s Music’, MQ, lviii (1972), 277–96

P. Cohen: Theorie und Praxis der Clavierästhetik Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (Hamburg, 1974)

H. Danuser: ‘Das imprévu in der Symphonik: Aspekte einer musikalischen Formkategorie in der Zeit von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach bis Hector Berlioz’, Musiktheorie, i (1986), 61–81

h: keyboard music

I.G. Faisst: ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Claviersonate von ihrem erstem Auftreten bis auf C.P. Emanuel Bach’, Caecilia, xxv (1846), 129–58, 201–31; xxvi (1847), 1–28, 73–83; repr. in NBeJb 1924, 7–85

H. Schenker: Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik als Einführung zu Ph.E. Bachs Klavierwerken (Vienna and Leipzig, 1908)

H. Uldall: Das Klavierkonzert der Berliner Schule mit kurzem Überblick über seine allgemeine Entstehungsgeschichte und spätere Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1928)

S. Clercx: ‘La forme du rondo chez Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’, RdM, xvi (1935), 148–67

E.H. Beurmann: Die Klaviersonaten Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1952)

K. von Fischer: ‘C.Ph.E. Bachs Variationenwerke’, RBM, vi (1952), 190–218

P. Schleuning: Die Freie Fantasie: ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der klassischen Klaviermusik (Göppingen, 1973)

D.M. Berg: The Keyboard Sonatas of C.P.E. Bach: an Expression of the Mannerist Principle (diss., SUNY, 1975)

R.W. Wade: The Keyboard Concertos of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Ann Arbor, 1981)

G. Wagner: Traditionsbezug im musikhistorischen Prozess zwischen 1720 und 1740 am Beispiel von Johann Sebastian und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1985)

A. Edler: ‘Zwischen Händel und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: zur Situation des Klavierkonzerts im mittleren 18. Jahrhundert’, AcM, lviii (1986), 180–221

D.M. Berg: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs Umarbeitungen seiner Claviersonaten’, BJb 1988, 123–61

W. Horn: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Frühe Klaviersonaten: eine Studie zur ‘Form’ der ersten Sätze nebst einer kritischen Untersuchung der Quellen (Hamburg, 1988)

P. Whitmore: Unpremeditated Art: the Cadenza in the Classical Concerto (Oxford, 1991)

D. Schulenberg: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’, Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, ed. R.L. Marshall (New York, 1994), 191–229

i: vocal and instrumental music

NewmanSCE

E. Fritz Schmid: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und seine Kammermusik (Kassel, 1931)

G. Busch: Busch: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und seine Lieder (Regensburg, 1957)

E. Simon: Mechanische Musikinstrumente früherer Zeiten und ihre Musik (Wiesbaden, 1960)

E. Suchalla: Die Orchestersinfonien Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (Augsburg, 1968)

S.L. Clark: The Occasional Choral Works of C.P.E. Bach (diss., Princeton U., 1984)

D. Schulenberg: The Instrumental Music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Ann Arbor, 1984)

S.L. Clark: ‘C.P.E. Bach and the Tradition of Passion Music in Hamburg’, EMc, xvi (1988), 533–41

W. Maertens: Georg Philipp Telemanns sogenannte Hamburgische Kapitainsmusiken (1723–1765) (Wilhelmshaven, 1988)

L. Miller: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Flute Sonatas’, JM, xi (1993), 203–49

G. Wagner: Die Sinfonien Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs: Werdende Gattung und Originalgenie (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1994)

A. Nagel: Studien zur Passionskantate von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Frankfurt, 1995)

G. Quarg: “‘Passions-Cantatte von Ph.E.Bach”: zur Kölner Markus-Passion’, Musik und Kirche, lxv (1995), 62–71

(10) Johann Ernst Bach

(34) (b Eisenach, 28 Jan 1722; d Eisenach, 1 Sept 1777). Composer and organist, son of (5) Johann Bernhard Bach (18). On 16 January 1737 he entered the Thomasschule in Leipzig and became a pupil of his uncle (7) Johann Sebastian (24). After studying law at Leipzig University he returned to Eisenach in 1741 and deputized, without pay, for his ailing father. Plans to go to Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, mentioned in a letter written by his cousin Johann Elias Bach (39), were never realized. In 1748 he became his father's official assistant and the next year his successor. He continued to practise as a lawyer as well, and in addition he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Weimar court in 1756 ‘in view of his well-known skill and musical knowledge’. This entailed regular journeys to Weimar, and during his frequent absences from Eisenach he was permitted to hire a substitute for his organist's duties. When the Hofkapelle was dissolved after the death of Duke Ernst August Constantin in 1758, Johann Ernst returned permanently to Eisenach but retained his Kapellmeister title and salary, for which he had to fulfil certain administrative duties. He wrote the foreword to Adlung's Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit (Erfurt, 1758), in which he criticized the current decay of church music and demanded that this be countered by ‘artistic and regular manners of composing’; as models of sacred cantatas he praised the ‘admirable masterpieces’ of J.S. Bach, Telemann and Stölzel. J.E. Bach was apparently in close contact with his cousin (9) Carl Philipp Emanuel (46), serving as agent for the first part of the Versuch (1753) and the harpsichord concertos w43 (1772). He contributed to the anthology Musicalisches Vielerley published by C.P.E. Bach in 1770.

As a composer Johann Ernst was abreast of the stylistic innovations of his time although, like Johann Sebastian's sons, he did not exclude contrapuntal writing. Characteristic of his personal style is the extended use of chromaticism and syncopated rhythms. His vocal works are often highly dramatic and full of effects. In his time he was particularly known for his ‘beautiful chorale settings’ (Musicalische Realzeitung, ii (1789), 179); these represent an important contribution to the genre of the sacred cantata as they form a link between J.S. Bach's chorale cantatas and the chorale settings of the generation of Doles and Hiller. His songs depend on the older tradition of Görner, Gräfe and Mizler; he wrote galant melodies full of expressive word-painting with lively basses and often elaborate accompaniments. His Passion oratorio is influenced by C.H. Graun's well-known Der Tod Jesu.

WORKS

vocal

O Seele, deren Sehnen (Passion oratorio), 1764, D-GOa, ed. in DDT, xlviii (1914); 2 Passions, lost, cited in GerberNL

Church cantatas: Ach Herr, strafe mich nicht (Ps vi), D-DS, US-CA; Auf und säumt euch nicht, ihr Frommen (Dank-Kantate), AAu; Der Herr ist nahe bei denen, for funeral of Duke Ernst August Constantin, 1758, D-Bsb, US-AAu; Die Liebe Gottes ist ausgegossen, D-Bsb, ed. in SBA; Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, 1762, LEb; Herzlich lieb hab ich dich (Ps xviii), Bsb, Hs; Kein Stündlein geht dahin, Bsb, Bhm, Hs; Kommt herzu, lasset uns frohlocken (Ps xcv), LEb; Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, lost, cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1770; Mein Odem ist schwach (= bwv 222), Bsb, Hs, GB-Lbl, choral movts also as motet, Unser Wandel ist im Himmel (= BWV Anh. 165); Meine Seele erhebet den Herren (i), D-Bsb, ed. in SBA; Meine Seele erhebet den Herren (ii), MLHb; Meine Seele erhebet den Herrn (iii), F-Pn; Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (Ps xxv), private collection; Sei willkommen, mächtiger Herrscher, D-CR, doubtful, probably by J.E. Bach; Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (Ps cxlix), BNu, WFmk (erroneously attrib. C.P.E. Bach); So gehst du nun, mein Jesu, hin, US-AAu; Straf mich nicht in deinem Zorn, D-BNu, GOa; Wenn Donnerwolken über dir sich türmen (Das Vertrauen der Christen auf Gott), Bsb (inc.), GOa; Wie der Hirsch schreiet (Ps xlii), lost, cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1764; Wünschet Jerusalem Glück, NTRE; others (?incl. annual cycle, 1766), lost

Mass [Ky–Gl] on Es woll uns Gott gnädig sein, SATB, bc, D-Bsb

Motets, SATB: Aus der Tiefen, GB-Lbl; Mein Odem ist schwach, in G.P. Weimar: Versuch von kleinen leichten Motetten und Arien (Leipzig, 1785); Unser Wandel ist im Himmel (= bwv Anh. 165), D-DS; 11 others, ARk, doubtful

Secular cantatas: Gesegneten Auftritt, for birthday of Duke Friedrich of Saxe-Gotha, 1756, lost, mentioned in H. Kretschmar, Preface to DDT, xlii (1910); Wer sagt mir doch, was für Entzücken, lost

Sammlung auserlesener Fabeln, i (Nuremberg, 1749) [pt ii ?unpubd]; ed. in DDT, xlii (1910)

Lächerliche Mammonshüter (An die Geizigen), in C.P.E. Bach: Musicalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770)

instrumental

Sinfonia, B, US-BETm; other sinfonias mentioned in GerberNL

3 Sonaten, kbd, vn, pt i (Eisenach, 1770); no.1 ed. in NM, ii (1927)

3 Sonaten, kbd, vn, pt ii (Eisenach, 1772)

Sonata, A, fl, vn, bc, D-Bsb

Sonatas, kbd: G, F, in J.U. Haffner: Oeuvres mêlées, v, vi (Nuremberg, 1759); A, Bsb

Org: Fantasia and fugue, d, Bsb; Fantasia and fugue, a, Bsb, ed. in Mw, xlii (1972); Fantasia and fugue, F, in C.P.E. Bach: Musicalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770), ed. in D. Hellmann: Orgelmusik der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1985); Chorale, Valet will ich dir geben, Bsb, ed. in D. Hellmann: Orgelmusik der Familie Bach (Leipzig, 1985)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

H. Löffler: “‘Bache” bei Seb. Bach’, BJb 1949–50, 106–24

H. Kühn: ‘Vier Organisten Eisenachs aus Bachischem Geschlecht’, Bach in Thüringen (Berlin, 1950), 103–19

C. Oefner: Die Musikerfamilie Bach in Eisenach (Eisenach, 1984)

H. Max: ‘Verwandtes im Werk Bachs, seiner Schüler und Söhne’ Johann Sebastian Bachs Spätwerk und dessen Umfeld: Duisburg 1986, 117–47

E. Odrich and P. Wollny: Die Briefkonzepte des Johann Elias Bach (Hildesheim, 2000)

(11) Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

(b Leipzig, 21 June 1732; d Bückeburg, 26 Jan 1795). Composer, son of (7) Johann Sebastian Bach (24) and Anna Magdalena Bach. He is known as the ‘Bückeburg Bach’.

1. Life.

He received his musical education from his father. After leaving the Thomasschule, Leipzig, he is thought to have studied law briefly, but there is no record of his matriculation at Leipzig University. At the express wish of Count Wilhelm of Schaumburg-Lippe he was appointed harpsichordist to the court in Bückeburg, where he may at first have been subordinate to the court organist Ludolf Münchhausen. In June 1751 his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel visited him in the retinue of Frederick the Great when the king awarded the Order of the Great Eagle to Count Wilhelm. At this time the musical life of the court in Bückeburg was dominated by the Konzertmeister Angelo Colonna and the court composer Giovanni Battista Serini; they left Bückeburg in the middle of 1756 for reasons which remain obscure. On 8 January 1755 Bach had married Münchhausen’s daughter Lucia Elisabeth, who was trained as a singer by Serini and held a position at court, probably as an alto, with an annual salary of 100 thaler. The Seven Years War imposed considerable restrictions on the court of Bückeburg. Bückeburg itself was occupied by French troops in 1757 and Count Wilhelm, with a few trusted courtiers including Bach, withdrew to his estate of Niensteden on the Elbe, near Pinneberg, from October 1757 to April 1758. Bach took this opportunity to apply, successfully, for the vacant post of organist at the German church in Altona, then under Danish rule, but for unknown reasons he never took it up. On 18 February 1759 he was appointed Konzertmeister of the Bückeburg Hofkapelle, with a rise in his annual salary to 400 thaler (later, temporarily, to 416 thaler), and he also received the usual allowances in kind. However, court life did not return to normal until after the Peace of Hubertusburg, for which Bach wrote a thanksgiving cantata performed on Ascension Day 1763, and the return of Count Wilhelm from his military missions in Portugal in November 1764. The Hofkapelle usually gave concerts twice a week; the ensemble consisted of about 15 musicians, with assistance when necessary from outside performers and military bandsmen. Bach was responsible for the composition or procurement of the works played at these concerts and for rehearsing them, and he adjusted his choices to the taste of Count Wilhelm, who liked secular Italian vocal music and played keyboard instruments and perhaps the flute himself. In the period up to 1770 Bach wrote symphonies, trio sonatas, a number of Italian arias and cantatas (mainly to texts by Metastasio) and perhaps his most important work of this time, the large-scale cantata Cassandra. After Count Wilhelm’s marriage to Marie Barbara Eleonore zur Lippe-Biesterfeld on 12 November 1765, Protestant sacred music was performed at the Bückeburg court. Perhaps encouraged by his successful application to Altona, Bach applied on 24 June 1767 to succeed the late G.P. Telemann in Hamburg. He was, in fact, one of the short-listed candidates, but his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel gained the appointment. Between 1765 and 1773 Johann Christoph Friedrich set the best-known Protestant oratorio texts of his time, Der Tod Jesu, Die Hirten bei der Krippe Jesu and Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu, all by C.W. Ramler, and Die Pilgrime auf Golgatha by F.W. Zachariä. The tendency towards sacred vocal composition increased with the arrival in Bückeburg of J.G. Herder, who was court preacher and superintendent there from 1771 to 1776. His oratorio texts, highly regarded by Countess Marie Barbara, had a lasting effect on the music of the court. In these years Herder and Bach, who later regarded this as the happiest time of his life, collaborated on the cantata Michaels Sieg, oder Der Kampf des Guten und des Bösen in der Welt (1771, not 1775), the ‘biblical painting’ Die Kindheit Jesu (1772, for the birth of Countess Emilie Eleonore Wilhelmine in June 1771), Die Auferweckung Lazarus (1773, on the occasion of the death of Countess Marie Barbara’s twin brother Ferdinand Benjamin on 23 April 1772) and Der Fremdling auf Golgatha (1776), as well as the secular ‘scenes with song’, Brutus and Philoktetes, which have not survived.

The death of Countess Marie Barbara in 1776, Herder’s appointment to Weimar in the same year and the death of Count Wilhelm in 1777 marked a watershed in the intellectual life of the Bückeburg court. Count Philipp Ernst zu Schaumburg-Lippe-Allverdissen (1723–87) took over the government, holding court partly in Münster and partly in Bückeburg. In spring 1778 Bach asked for three months’ leave to visit his brother Johann Christian in London. He took his son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst on this journey, which began some time between 16 March and 23 May 1778 and ended at the latest in November of the same year; the son was left with Johann Christian for further musical training. A series of string quartets and a set of six keyboard concertos, printed in London with dedications to members of the house of Schaumburg-Lippe, show how rapidly J.C.F. Bach adapted his music to English tastes. He also brought back an English piano from his travels, so his keyboard compositions after 1778 were not necessarily for the harpsichord. In 1780 Count Philipp Ernst took as his second wife Princess Juliane zu Hessen-Philippsthal (1761–99), who was particularly fond of the fine arts. At the Princess’s wish, attendance at court concerts was now open to the citizens of Bückeburg and to visitors. Forkel (Musikalischer Almanach, 1782) regarded the little Kapelle as one of the finest in Germany. Juliane took lessons in foreign languages and drawing, and studied the keyboard with J.C.F. Bach. Among the better known of his pupils (in addition to his son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst and C.F. Geyer, later Kantor of Bückeburg) were the future Thomaskantor A.E. Müller and perhaps Adolf, Baron von Knigge. For teaching purposes Bach wrote a number of pedagogically valuable keyboard works, including the Sechs leichte Clavier-Sonaten (printed in 1784 with a dedication to Princess Juliane), variations (including a set on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’), concertos and sonatas for four hands.

Bach also increased his efforts to get his compositions published. He could not muster enough subscribers for the edition of the large-scale sacred works he had been planning since about 1773, but he did publish the collection Musikalische Nebenstunden, containing mainly works by himself but also some songs by W.F.E. Bach and by noble dilettantes from Bückeburg and Minden. A comment in a letter to Breitkopf of 1 October 1788, in which Bach sought subscribers for a collection of three easy keyboard sonatas (‘These sonatas are easy, written in the latest style and composed in London, where they were much to the liking of Her Majesty the Queen’) may suggest that he paid a second visit to England, though further evidence of this is so far lacking.

The arrival in Bückeburg about 1793 of the brilliant Bohemian musician Franz Neubauer presented Bach with unaccustomed competition in the last years of his life. It inspired him to write new works (including a dozen large-scale symphonies and several double concertos) but it also intensified the latent depression from which he had been suffering since the death of his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel and which may have hastened the course of the chest ailment that brought about his death on 26 January 1795. In his obituary his friend Karl Gottlieb Horstig, superintendent at Bückeburg from 1793, described him as an industrious composer, always ready to be of service, and praised his upright character and ‘kindness of heart’.

2. Works.

With his predisposition towards the use of existing models, his extensive revisions and his liking for experimentation, Bach showed in his compositions several apparently contradictory tendencies. His father had given him a thorough grounding in keyboard and organ playing and in the rudiments of composition, but when he moved to Bückeburg he found himself in an entirely different world. As a result he was obliged to adapt to new stylistic principles, studying them on his own with concrete models. His first works in almost all genres, therefore, are stylistic copies: the early piano sonatas are based on models by C.P.E. Bach, the aria ‘Luci amate, ah, non piangete’ (c1760) is an arrangement of a work by Matteo Capranica, and Der Tod Jesu (1769) is influenced by C.H. Graun’s setting of the same text (1755). However, Bach usually managed to move on rapidly, leaving his models behind, and to find new forms of expression. His secular cantatas from the period around 1773 are particularly noteworthy. They include Die Amerikanerin (after H.W. von Gerstenberg’s Lied eines Mohren) and Ino (text by Ramler), which during Bach’s lifetime brought him a reputation as one of the major cantata composers in Germany. The oratorios and cantatas written in collaboration with Herder may merit similar interest; they remained unpublished but were circulated and appreciated in aristocratic circles in Rheda, Detmold and Wernigerode. Although Bach preferred a lyrical tone, he had a special feeling for dramatic development, particularly evident in accompagnato scenas. The style of his vocal compositions is close to that of C.H. Graun, Telemann, and (particularly in choral movements) his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, whom he even surpassed in his solidly constructed but fluent fugues. His keyboard compositions cover a wide range, from simple practice pieces in the style of J.S. Bach’s two-part Inventions (in the Musikalische Nebenstunden), through dance pieces and ‘easy keyboard sonatas’ to extremely demanding works written for his own use or for patrons outside Bückeburg. They felicitously unite the modern stylistic features of J.C. Bach with the sound musical construction of Carl Philipp Emanuel. The Drei leichte Sonaten fürs Klavier oder Piano Forte (Rinteln, 1789), as well as many of the works surviving only in manuscript, are among the best keyboard compositions of their time.

Bach’s compositions after the death of Count Wilhelm are notable for a willingness to experiment, encouraged by the attitude of Princess Juliane, who was always open to innovations, and by his continuing to work with an excellent Kapelle. He was turning to new genres even in the last years of his life, for example in the sonatas for two pianos of 1791, the wind septet of 1794 and two concertos for keyboard and another instrument dating from about 1791. In accordance with Bach’s conception of his duties, compositions written for the court and other patrons were exclusively for the use of those who had commissioned them, with the result that most of his music could not be widely disseminated. His reputation was therefore founded mainly on the compositions published during his lifetime. The music collection of the Bückeburg Hofkapelle, left by Prince Adolf in 1917 to the Fürstliches Institut für Musikforschung in Bückeburg which he had founded (in 1935 it became the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin), was destroyed in World War II, apart from a few fragments, making it difficult to evaluate Bach’s work as a whole. Almost without exception, the innovative compositions of his last years in particular were extant only in this collection.

WORKS

Catalogues:H. Wohlfarth: ‘Neues Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach’, Mf, xiii (1960), 404–17; repr. in Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (Berne, 1971) [W]Bach-Repertorium (forthcoming) [BR; Inc[ertum] = doubtful]Edition:Friedrich Bach; Ausgewählte Werke, ed. G. Schünemann (Bückeburg, 1920–23) [S]Sources:C.P.E. Bach, ed.: Musikalisches Vielerley (Hamburg, 1770) [MV]J.C.F. Bach, ed.: Musikalische Nebenstunden, i–iv (Rinteln, 1787–8) [MN]

keyboard

Edition:Le trésor des pianistes, ed. A. and L. Farrenc, xv (Paris, 1870/R) [F]



BR		W

A 1–2		XI/1–2		2 sonatas, F, C, MV; ed. in F
A 3–8	XI/3		6 leichte Sonaten, C, F, E, D, A, E (Leipzig, 1785); ed. H. Ruf and H. Bemmann (Mainz, 1966), nos.4–5 ed. in F
A 9–12		XI/4–7		3 sonatas, C, G, F, 1 sonatina, MN; sonatas 2–3 ed. in F, sonatina ed. in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser.F, ii (Stuttgart, 1989)
A 13–15	XI/8		3 leichte Sonaten, D, A, E, (Rinteln, 1789); no.2 ed. in S
A 16–21		XI/9 (= brA 18)		6 ‘easy’ sonatas, D, A, F, B, G, E, c1785, D-GOl
A 22–7	—		6 sonatas (nos.1–4 lost, no.5 E, no.6 F), c1785, GOl
A 28–34		—		7 sonatas (no.4 D, others lost), by 2 April 1789, HVl*
A 35–7	—		3 sonatas, after 1777, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799
A 38–9		—		2 sonatas, by 1789, lost, mentioned in letters from J.C.F. Bach to Breitkopf
A 40	XIII/1		Sonata, A, for 4 hands, 1786, Bsb*,
A 41		XIII/2		Sonata, C, for 4 hands, 1791, MS lost, formerly Bim; ed. in S
A 42–3	—		2 sonatas, 2 kbd, by 16 Feb 1791, lost, mentioned in letters from J.C.F. Bach to Breitkopf
A 44		XII/1		Romanza con XII variazioni, A, c1785–90, lost, formerly Bim
A 45	XII/2		Allegretto [‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’] con VXIII variazioni, c1785–90, Bsb*
A 46–50		XII/3–7		5 dance movts, MV
A 51–120	XII/13		70 pieces, MN
A 121–5		XII/8–12		5 dances morts, c1745–9, Bsb
A Inc 1	—		Partia, C, by 1745, WD
A Inc 2–7		—		6 fugues, g, e, C, F, D, C, only no.4 (also attrib. G.P. Telemann) extant; pubd (Erfurt and Leipzig, c1858)
A Inc 8	—		Galanterie-Stücke, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799

chamber

B 1	X/3	Solo, A, vc, bc, MV
B 2	X/1	Solo, G, vc, b, c1780–85, D-Bsb*
B 3	VII/1	Trio, A, fl, vn, bc, (or Kbd, fl), MV
B 4	—	Trio, e, fl, va, bc, by 1760, Bsb
B 5–10	—	6 trios, 2 fl, bc, by 1770, lost
B 11–12	VII/2–3	2 trios, A, F, by 1768, US-BETm
B 13	—	Trio, 2 vn, bc, by 1788, lost, mentioned in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790)
B 14	VIII/2	Trio, E, kbd, fl/vn, MV
B 15–20	VIII/3	6 Sonaten, d, D, D, C, A, C, kbd, fl/vn (Riga, 1777)
B 21–2	IX/2–3	2 sonatas, G, D, kbd, vn, MN
B 23–4	—	2 trios, kbd, fl, by 1770, lost
B 25	VIII/1	Trio, F, kbd, fl/vn, by 1777, MS lost, formerly D-Bim; ed. W. Hinnenthal (Leipzig, 1937)
B 26–7	—	2 sonatas, F, D, by 1777, RH* (inc.)
B 28	IX/1	Sonata, G, kbd, vn, after 1777, lost, formerly Bim
B 29	VII/4	Sonata, D, kbd, fl/vn, vc, c1780, Bsb*; ed. in S
B 30–35	VII/5–7 (= brB 31–2, 34)	6 sonatas (no.2 G, no.3 A, no.5 C, others lost), kbd, fl/vn, va, 1770–80, Bsb, PL-Kj**; nos.2, 5, ed. in S
B 36	X/4	Sonata, A, kbd, vc, 1789, MS lost, formerly D-Bim; arr. J. Smith (Brunswick, 1905)
B 37–42	VI	6 quartetti, D, G, C, A, F, B, fl, vn, va, bc (Hamburg, c1768)
B 43–8	—	6 quatuors, E, B, A, D, G, F, str (London, c1778)
B 49	IV	Septet, E, 2 ob, cl, 2 bn, hn, 1794, MS lost, formerly Bim; ed. in S
B 50–53	—	4 marches, after 1777, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799
B Inc 1	XX/3	Trio, B, 2 vn, bc, Bsb
B Inc 2	—	Trio, C, 2 fl, lost, formerly Berlin, Singakademie
B Inc 3	X/2	Solo, D, vc, bc, lost, formerly ?Bsb (?= brB 36)
B Inc 4	—	Sonata, kbd, ?vn, by 29 Sept 1789, lost

orchestral

symphonies; for 2 oboes, 2 horns and strings unless otherwise stated

C 1		—	Sym., D, MN (kbd red.)
C 2–3		—	2 syms., by 1770, lost
C 4		I/3	Sym., d, str, by 1768, US-WS
C 5–6		I/1–2	2 syms., F, B, by 1768, BETm
C 7		I/4	Sym., E, 2 hn, str, by 1768, WS
C 8–10		I/6 (= brC 10) 3 syms. (no.3 C, others lost), 1770, D-Bsb*
C 11–13		I/7–9	3 syms., D, G, D, ? by 1770, lost, formerly Bim
C 14		I/10	Sym., E, c1770–75, BÜC
C 15–17		—	3 syms., ? after 1777, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799
C 18–23		I/11–15	6 syms., D, F, D, C, G, nos.2–3 with 2 bn, c1792–3, lost, formerly Bim (= brC 19–23)
C 24–7		I/18–19, 16–17	4 syms., E, E, d, C, 1794, lost, formerly Bim
C 28		I/20	Sym., B, with fl, 2 cl, bn, 1794, Bsb*
concertos; for keyboard and orchestra (2 oboes/flutes, 2 horns and strings) unless otherwise stated
C 29		—	Conc., E, kbd, str (Riga, c1770)
C 30	—			Concerto II, A, kbd, str (Riga, c1772)
C 31–6		—	6 concs., G, F, D, E, B, C, kbd, vn, bc (London, n.d.)
C 37	II/1			Conc., E, kbd, str, by 1760, D-Bsb*
C 38		—	Conc., kbd, ?str, by 27 Oct 1766, lost
C 39	—			Conc., by 1788, lost, listed in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790)
C 40		II/4	Conc., F, 1782, Bsb*
C 41	II/2			Conc., D, c1780–85, Bsb*
C 42		II/3	Conc., A, ?c1785–90, lost, formerly Bim
C 43	II/5			Conc., E, 1792, Bsb*
C 44		—	Conc., E, va, kbd, orch, c1790, F-Pc*
C 45	III			Conc., E, ob, kbd, orch, 1791, lost, formerly D-Bim

oratorios

D 1	—	Die Pilgrime auf Golgotha (F.W. Zachariä), by 1769, D-F, Mbs
D 2	XIV/1	Der Tod Jesu (K.W. Ramler), 1769, rev. c1784, B-Bc*; ed. H. Salzwedel (Bückeburg, 1964)
D 3	XIV/10	Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu (Ramler), by 1772, rev. c1784, D-Bsb* (frag.)
D 4	XIV/9	Die Hirten bei der Krippe Jesu (Ramler), by 1773, lost, formerly Bim
D 5	XIV/2	Die Kindheit Jesu (J.G. Herder), 1773, rev. after 1777, Bsb*; ed. in DDT, lvi (1917/R)
D 6	XIV/3	Die Auferweckung Lazarus’ (Herder), 1773, rev. after 1777, Bsb*; ed. in DDT, lvi (1917/R)
D 7	XIV/7	Der Fremdling auf Golgotha (Herder), 1776, music lost, formerly Bim
D 8	XVII/3	Mosis Mutter und ihre Tochter (G.D. Stille), 1787, Bsb* (inc.)

other sacred vocal

in German unless otherwise stated

E 1	—	Miserere (Ps li) [Lat.], by 1770, rev. after 1777, F-Pc, private collection, USA (autograph); ed. in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser.F, i (Stuttgart, 1992)
F 1	XIV/4	Herr, wie lange willst du unser also veressen (J.G. Herder), cant. for Whitsun, c1773, music lost, formerly D-Bim
F 2	—	Sieh, Bückeburg, was Gott an Dir getan (J.H. Cramer), cant. for Ascension, 8 May 1763, music lost
F 3	XIV/8	Gross und mächtig, stark und prächtig, cant. for Ascension, 1776, perf. ?1777, Bsb*
F 4	XIV/5	Wie wird uns werden (Herder), cant. for feast of St Michael, 29 Sept 1771, Bsb
F 5	—	Nun, teures Land, der Herr hat dich erhört, cant. on birth of Countess Emilie Eleonore Wilhelmine, perf. July 1771, music lost
F 6	XIV/11	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, cant. on birth of Count Georg Wilhelm, perf. 6 Feb 1785, music lost, formerly Bim
F 7a–c	XIV/12	Gott wird deinen Fuss nicht gleiten lassen (G.D. Stille), cant. for birthday of Countess Juliane, perf. 8 June 1787, Bsb* [orig. as cant. for Count Philipp Ernst, unperf.]
F Inc 1	—	Funeral music for Count Philipp Ernst, perf. 31 May 1787, lost
F Inc 2	—	Heut ist der Tag des Dankens, ihr Völker, cant., ?1780s, music lost

secular vocal

G 1	XVIII/8	Luci amate ah non piangete, aria, S, insts, by 1760, rev. later, D-Bsb*
G 2–11	—	10 It. arias (P. Metastasio and others), by 1766, lost
G 12–17	—	6 It. cants. (Metastasio), by 1766, lost
G 18–44	—	27 cants. (Metastasio), incl. L’inciampo, S, bc (brG 27, wXVIII/2), Bsb*, others lost
G 45	—	scenes from Il pastor fido (G.B. Guarini), by 27 Sept 1766, lost
G 46	XVIII/1	Cassandra (A. Conti), A, insts, by 1770, B-Bc*
G 47	XVIII/3	Die Amerikanerin (H.W. von Gerstenberg), S, insts (Riga, 1776); ed. G.A. Walter (Berlin, 1919)
G 48	XVIII/4	Ino (K.W. Ramler), S, insts, D-Bsb*, vs (Leipzig, 1786)
G 49	XVIII/6	Prokris und Cephalus (J.E. Schlegel), S, S, insts, vs, MN
G 50	XVIII/5	Pygmalion (Ramler), A/B, insts, by 1772, Bsb
G 51	—	Ariadne auf Naxos (Gerstenberg), by 1773, music lost
G 52	XVII/1	Brutus (J.G. Herder), by 1774, music lost, formerly Bim
G 53	XVII/2	Philoktetes (Herder), by 1775, music lost, formerly Bim
G Inc 1	—	Stimmt an, greift rasch in eure Saiten, cant. on return of Count Wilhelm from Portugal, Nov 1764, music lost
G Inc 2	—	Va crescendo il mio tormento, aria, Mbs, by ?J.C. Bach

songs and motets

songs; for 1 voice and keyboard/continuo unless otherwise stated

H 1–5	XIX/1	5 songs, MV
H 6–10	XVI/1	5 sacred songs (B. Münter) in D. Balthasar Münters Erste Sammlung geistlicher Lieder (Leipzig, 1773)
H 11–60	XVI/2	50 sacred songs (Münter) in J. Balthasar Münters … Zweyte Sammlung geistlicher Lieder (Leipzig, 1774) [brH 47 also arr. 4vv (=wXV/3), D-Bsb*]
H 61–81	XIX/2	21 songs and arias, MN
H 82	—	Volkslied in Einige melodienreiche und leichte Klavier- und Singstücke von guten Komponisten unserer Zeit
H 83	—	Das schlafende Mädchen (H.W. von Gerstenberg) in J.C.F. Rellstab: Winterblumen am Clavier, ii (Berlin, 1794)
H 84	—	Feuerfarb (S. Mereau), c1794, in K.G. Horstig and C.U. Ulmenstein: Westfälisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1801 (Münster, c1800)
H 85–93	—	9 songs by ?1770, lost, listed in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790), [? some incl. in brH 1–5 and/or 61–81]
H 94	—	Klavier-Ode (C. Hölty), by 29 Sept 1789, lost
H 95	—	Berg-Lied, 1790, BÜC*
H 96	XVIII/7	O wir bringen gerne dir, aria, S, S, bc, c1790, Bsb*

motets; for 4 voices and continuo

H 97–99	XXI/1–3	3 motets after C.P.E. Bach (C.F. Gellert), Bsb*
H 100	XV/1	Ich lieg und schlaf, 1780, Bsb*; ed. in S, ed. in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser.F, i (Stuttgart, 1992)
H 101	XV/2	Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (P. Nicolai), Bsb*; ed. in S, ed. in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser.F, i (Stuttgart, 1992)
H 102	—	Wie sie so sanft ruhn, alle die Seligen (J. Stockmann), c1792, lost, mentioned in obituary
H Inc 1	—	Wiegenliedschen, by 1772, BÜC
H Inc 2–4	—	3 songs for Georg Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe, after 1784, inc.
H Inc 5	—	Der Unterschied der Künste, after ?1777, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberL

GerberNL

MGG1 (R. Benecke)

NewmanSCE

J.G. Meusel: Teutsches Künstlerlexikon (Lemgo, 1778, 2/1808–14)

J.N. Forkel: Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland (Leipzig, 1782–8)

K.G. Horstig: ‘Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach’, Nekrolog der Deutschen auf das Jahr 1795, ed. F. Schlichtgeroll (Gotha, 1797), 269–84; ed. R. Schaal in Friedrich von Schlichtegroll: Musiker-Nekrologe (Kassel, 1954)

C.H. Bitter: Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brüder (Berlin, 1868)

G. Schünemann: ‘Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach’, BJb 1914, 45–165

G. Schünemann: ‘Friedrich Bachs Briefwechsel mit Gerstenberg und Breitkopf’, BJb 1916, 20–35

G. Schünemann: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, DDT, lvi (1917) [ix]–xvii

G. Hey: ‘Zur Biographie Johann Friedrich Bachs und seiner Familie’, BJb 1933, 77–85

J. Domp: Studien zur Geschichte der Musik an Westfälischen Adelshöfen im XVIII. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1934)

K. Geiringer: The Bach Family: Seven Generations of Creative Genius (London, 1954; Ger. trans., enlarged, 1958; enlarged 2/1977)

K. Geiringer: ‘Unbeachtete Kompositionen des Bückeburger Bach’, Festschrift Wilhelm Fischer, ed. H. von Zingerle (Innsbruck, 1956), 99–107

U. Wulfhorst: ‘Ein Orgelgutachten von Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach’, Mf, xiii (1960), 55–7

H.-J. Schulze, ‘Frühe Schriftzeugnisse des beiden jüngsten Bach-Söhne’, BJb 1963–4, 61–9

H. Wohlfarth: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach: ein Komponist im Vorfeld des Klassik (Berne, 1971) [incl. list of works]

B. Poschmann: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, Schaumburg-Lippischer Capellmeister 1732–1795, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 1982 (Bückeburg, 1982) [exhibition catalogue]

L. Salter: ‘Which Bach?’, The Consort, no.42 (1986), 50–60

G. Rötter: ‘London gegen Bückeburg: fünf zu drei? Ein Bach-Porträt und zwei Komponisten’, Musica, xliv (1990), 83–6

B.J. Sing: Geistliche Vokalkompositionen zwischen Barock und Klassik: Studien zu den Kantatendichtungen Johann Gottfried Herders in den Vertonungen Johann Christoph Friedrich Bachs (Baden-Baden, 1992)

U. Leisinger: ‘Die geistlichen Vokalwerke von Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach: Aspekte der Entstehungs- und Überlieferungsgeschichte’, BJb 1995, 115–43

U. Leisinger, ed.: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732–1795): ein Komponist zwischen Barock und Klassik, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 8 June – 11th Aug 1995 (Bückeburg, 1995) [exhibition catalogue, incl. list of works]

H. Tiggemann: ‘Graf Wilhelm und Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach im Exil auf Gut Niensteden’, Shaumburg-Lippische Heimat-Blätter, xlvi (1995), 66–73

3. Mannheim and London, 1772–82.

(12) Johann [John] Christian Bach

(50) (b Leipzig, 5 Sept 1735; d London, 1 Jan 1782). Composer, youngest son of (7) Johann Sebastian Bach. As a composer he was the most versatile of J.S. Bach’s sons and the only one to write Italian operas. He was an important influence on Mozart and, with C.F. Abel, did much to establish regular public concerts in London.

1. Germany and Italy.

2. London, 1762–72.

4. Style and reputation.

5. Church music and oratorio.

6. Operas.

7. Symphonies and concertos.

8. Keyboard and chamber music.

1. Germany and Italy.

It is likely that J.C. Bach’s early musical education was supervised by his father, though some instruction may have been given by Johann Elias Bach (39), who lived in the Leipzig household between 1738 and 1743 and acted as secretary to the elder Bach. Johann Christian himself assumed some secretarial duties in 1749–50, preparing music manuscripts and receipts on his father’s behalf. Christian, evidently a favourite child of Sebastian, inherited three of his father’s harpsichords. J.S. Bach’s keyboard music played an important role in his son’s development: the second book of Das wohltemperirte Clavier was completed in the early 1740s and probably served as a teaching manual for Christian, as had the first book for his half-brother Wilhelm Friedemann in the 1720s; it is known that J.C. Bach owned a manuscript of the English Suites; a knowledge of the B keyboard Partita must be inferred from Christian’s use of a modified version of the opening in his accompanied sonata op.10 no.1; and the earliest datable music manuscript in J.C. Bach’s hand, a Stammbuch entry dated 23 October 1748, is a keyboard version in D minor of the Polonaise from J.S. Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite. None of J.C. Bach’s own compositions can be assigned to his Leipzig years except for a march in the second Clavierbüchlein of Anna Magdalena Bach (bwv Anh.131) and, possibly, a handful of keyboard dances.

After his father’s death in 1750 Christian moved to Berlin, where he studied composition and harpsichord with his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel. According to Gerber, the young Bach performed his own works on the harpsichord in Berlin ‘with great applause’ and composed his first large-scale compositions. Of the ‘5 harpsichord concertos, 1 cello concerto, 2 trios and 3 arias’ listed as Johann Christian’s in Emanuel’s Nachlass (1790), only the harpsichord concertos – large-scale works in the manner of C.P.E. Bach – are known to survive. The authenticity of the first publication attributed to J.C. Bach, the ode An Aeglen in a collection of 1755, has been disputed by Warburton (Thematic Catalogue, 1999). A similar song, Mezendore, printed in a similar collection the following year, is probably by Bach, though J.C.F. Bach’s authorship cannot be ruled out. A third song, Der Weise auf dem Lande, may be confidently attributed to J.C. Bach’s Berlin period; the autograph entry in a Stammbuch is dated 16 April 1755.

In late spring or summer 1755 Bach took his first steps towards abandoning the Protestant, Kapellmeister tradition which had nourished the Bach family for two centuries: he left for Italy, possibly in the company of an Italian lady singer, and took up residence in Milan. Little is known about his first months there: three arias attributed to him were evidently inserted in Cocchi’s Emira, performed in Milan in January 1756. Evidently he was installed in the house of his Milanese patron, Count Agostino Litta, by that time and began having lessons in counterpoint with Padre Martini in Bologna. The main biographical sources for Bach’s Italian years are his letters to Martini, beginning in January 1757 and continuing sporadically after Bach settled in London in 1762. These reveal Bach’s expanding reputation as a composer, first in Italy and later north of the Alps. His first music written in Italy was mostly liturgical, some of it in the antique contrapuntal style associated with Martini, and performed in churches in Milan and elsewhere. In June 1760 Bach was appointed second organist at Milan Cathedral, and it is probable that he embraced the Roman Catholic faith at this time. Increasingly, the opera house provided a stronger lure for him. After composing arias for pasticcios in Milan and elsewhere, he was commissioned to write an opera seria for the Teatro Regio, Turin; Artaserse was given its première there on 26 December 1760. In the following year Bach, neglecting his organist’s duties in Milan and thereby attracting Litta’s displeasure, travelled extensively in Italy, composing his next and most popular early opera, Catone in Utica, for the S Carlo, Naples, and Alessandro nell’Indie for the same theatre (performed on 20 January 1762; a cantata by Bach for the birthday of Charles III of Spain was performed on the same day). Catone was revived in Milan in 1762, performed in Pavia, Perugia and Parma in 1763 and again in Naples in 1764 and was heard as late as 1768 in Brunswick. Wider European recognition was achieved with the publication of the overture to Artaserse by Venier in Paris in 1761. Bach himself had signalled this recognition in an important letter to Martini dated 14 February 1761: ‘for some time past I have almost had to put my studies aside, being every day called upon to write something for concerts – a symphony, concerto, cantata and so forth for Germany or Paris’. The success of his operas attracted the attention of the management of the King’s Theatre, London, who commissioned two operas for the 1762–3 season; by accepting he gave up the opportunity of composing a third opera for Naples and one for Venice. Bach sought leave of absence for a year from the Milan Cathedral authorities, and although the post was kept open for him, he never returned. In late June or early July 1762 he made his way to London for the final and decisive stage of his career.

2. London, 1762–72.

During Bach’s 20 years in London he lived comfortably at various addresses in Soho, Mayfair and later Richmond and Paddington. He found fame, success and, at least until the late 1770s, financial stability. He enjoyed the acquaintance of the royal family, the patronage of the aristocracy and the friendship of musicians and artists, including Abel, the painter Gainsborough and Charles Burney, and soon established a pre-eminent position in the concert and operatic life of the city. If, as Burney stated, Bach was initially disappointed by the mediocre operatic standards in the city, his future in London was assured by the triumph of his first complete stage work, Orione (February 1763; the première was attended by King George III and Queen Charlotte), followed by the less successful Zanaida (May 1763), and by his appointment as music master to the queen. It was now unnecessary for him to return to the claustrophobic and restrictive atmosphere of Milan. Bach’s court duties involved giving music lessons to the queen and her children, organizing chamber concerts, directing the queen’s band and accompanying the flute-playing of the king. Links with the royal family were strengthened with the publication of the keyboard concertos op.1, advertised in March 1763 and dedicated to Queen Charlotte. The finale of the sixth concerto, a set of variations on God Save the King, became one of Bach’s most popular and oft-published works.

Bach’s earliest years in London were those of his most vigorous activity in the opera house. His relationship with the King’s Theatre was not without setbacks. The violinist Felice Giardini took over the management for the 1763–4 season, and although he and Bach were later to collaborate professionally there were tensions in their relationship; no operatic work by Bach was staged during Giardini’s tenure. Bach was invited to return to Naples, but he evidently preferred to remain north of the Alps. He travelled to Paris in July 1763, establishing an important connection with the city, and was immediately granted a privilege for the publication of his works there; a similar privilege was granted in London on 15 December that year.

In the 1764–5 season Bach returned to the King’s Theatre, contributing to two pasticcios and composing Adriano in Siria, given on 26 January 1765. The opera received seven performances and met with Burney’s disapproval: ‘Every one seemed to come out of the theatre disappointed’. Apart from a few arias contributed to pasticcios, Bach had little further to do with the King’s Theatre until Carattaco, performed on 14 February 1767. Like Orione, it is on a grand scale with choruses, but although praised by Burney and others it was never revived. The singer Cecilia Grassi, later Bach’s wife, was to have sung in it, but she was indisposed. Bach also contributed arias for the English stage, including music for the pasticcios The Maid of the Mill (1765), The Summer’s Tale (1765) and Tom Jones (1769). In addition, he supplied songs, occasionally arranged from operatic arias, for performance at Vauxhall Gardens; four sets of Vauxhall songs were published between 1766 and 1779.

From his earliest days in London Bach took advantage of the flourishing music trade, publishing a whole series of works and establishing a relationship with the printer and publisher Peter Welcker, and later with his son John. Bach’s practice for the most part in the 1760s was to publish a work under his own auspices; Welcker would usually reissue it shortly afterwards under his own imprint. This relationship began about 1765 with the reissue of the concertos op.1 (first published in 1763) and continued with the accompanied sonatas op.2, the first set of symphonies op.3 and the first set of canzonets op.4, all dating from 1765. Most of Bach’s works were published a few months later in Paris by Huberty (and later Sieber) and by Hummel in Amsterdam. There is reason to believe that Bach had some arrangement with the continental firms, especially Sieber, who published the first edition of the piano sonatas op.17 (as op.12) in Paris in 1773 or 1774. Bach evidently took great care to protect his interests, and in 1773 he took Longman, Lukey & Co. to court for the unauthorized publication of several pieces.

From early 1764 Bach shared lodgings with Carl Friedrich Abel, the composer and viol da gamba player who had lived in London since 1759 and whose father had served at Cöthen with J.S. Bach. Carl Friedrich himself had studied with Sebastian in Leipzig and therefore may have known Johann Christian as a boy. Their collaboration in the series of concerts later dubbed the Bach-Abel concerts was to have a major impact on London concert life. The first one took place at the Great Room in Spring Gardens on 29 February 1764. In the following year they participated in the subscription series organized by Teresa Cornelys at Carlisle House, Soho Square, giving ten concerts in all that year and increasing to 15 from 1766. Bach and Abel took over the management of the concerts from 1768 when they moved to Almack’s Assembly Rooms in King Street, St James’s, where they remained until 1774. The concerts were directed alternately by Bach and Abel. Although few details are known, the programmes included the latest symphonies, concertos, chamber and vocal works of Bach, Abel and other fashionable composers. The performers were the best in London, and often of German origin; they included the oboist J.C. Fischer, the violinist Wilhelm Cramer (father of John, the pianist) and later the pianist J.S. Schroeter, one of Bach’s pupils.

In April 1764 Leopold Mozart arrived in London with his family. Although there is no evidence that Wolfgang Amadeus appeared at the Bach-Abel concerts, he did perform at court and became a great admirer of J.C. Bach. They are known to have performed duets on the harpsichord together. Mozart had a high regard for the man and his music: in the early 1770s he arranged three of Bach’s piano sonatas from op.5 as keyboard concertos, and the symphonies and sonatas from the time of his 15 months in London bear the stamp of both Bach’s and Abel’s music. The Mozarts evidently left London in 1765 with an autograph manuscript of a piano sonata by Bach (later published in modified form as op.17 no.3) which was kept in Leopold Mozart’s library in Salzburg.

Bach’s keyboard sonatas op.5, published in 1766, are a landmark in that they are the first published in London to bear the option of the piano on the title-page. Bach’s central role in the development of the piano in London is defined by Burney: ‘After the arrival of John Chr. Bach in this country, and the establishment of his concert[s] … all the harpsichord makers tried their mechanical powers at piano-fortes’. Bach is credited with performing the first solo in public on the piano in 1768 and had dealings with many of the major instrument makers of the day. He is known to have sent pianos to France, to the pianist Madame Brillon and also to the daughter of the Encyclopedist Diderot. A square piano, apparently by Zumpe, survives in a British private collection, bearing Bach’s signature on the soundboard.

At the end of the 1760s Bach was well established as the leading composer and musician in London, and as an international figure much in demand as a composer, performer and teacher. He evidently charged high fees as a teacher according to Charles Wesley writing in the late 1770s. Works such as the symphonies opp.3, 6 and 9 and piano concertos op.7 were performed in all (and published in many) of the major music centres of Europe. In the early 1770s this fame was consolidated in London and on the Continent. In 1770 he wrote his last major religious work, the two-act Gioas re di Giuda, performed at the King’s Theatre and revived the following year. R.J.S. Stevens reports that Bach, persuaded to perform an organ concerto between the acts, was hissed at by the audience and laughed at by the choristers for his style of playing – the first reference, perhaps, to Bach’s deteriorating keyboard abilities. In 1770, also for the King’s Theatre, Bach and Pietro Guglielmi adapted Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, adding choruses and supplementary music to bring it to ‘a necessary length for an evening’s entertainment’. Although it blunted the reform elements in Gluck’s opera, this version was a success; it was revived with modifications in 1771 and 1773 and was also given at the Teatro S Carlo in Naples in 1774.

3. Mannheim and London, 1772–82.

Apart from the two-act serenata Endimione (1772), no new work by Bach was performed at the King’s Theatre until 1778. In the meantime he fulfilled operatic commissions abroad. In about 1770 he had befriended Johann Baptist Wendling, first flautist in the electoral orchestra at Mannheim and husband of the singer Dorothea (both were later friends of Mozart). It was perhaps due to Wendling, who had lodged with him during his time in London, that Bach was commissioned to write Temistocle, to a libretto adapted from Metastasio by the Mannheim court poet Verazi, for the nameday festivities of the Elector Carl Theodor. The orchestra in the German city was unrivalled in quality, and Bach’s sumptuous score exploits the capabilities of the Mannheim orchestra and soloists to the full. Bach was able to experience this at first hand when he travelled to Mannheim in August or September 1772 and remained there for the première on 5 November. The opera was extremely successful and was revived the following year. This elicited a further operatic commission, and the result, Lucio Silla, was performed on 5 November 1775. It is not known for certain whether Bach himself attended the performance, but given that he attended all his other operatic premières it is possible that he made the trip. Lucio Silla was evidently less successful, although it was valued by Mozart who examined the score in Mannheim in 1777. Mozart himself had set the same text, by Giovanni de Gamerra, for Milan in 1772. Other works by Bach performed at Mannheim include the cantatas Amor vincitore (first performed in London in 1774) and La tempesta (published in Mannheim in 1778). Endimione was revised for a performance there in 1774.

The early 1770s saw a number of new publications: the keyboard concertos op.7 (1770), the flute quartets op.8 (1772) perhaps written with Wendling in mind, three symphonies op.9 (1773), the accompanied sonatas op.10 (1773) and the quintets op.11 (1774) dedicated to the Elector Carl Theodor. Many of these pieces would have been used in Bach’s English concerts, which were not restricted to London. In 1773 he visited Blandford and Salisbury, performing there with Cecilia Grassi. Terry and others have suggested that they married later in 1773 or early in 1774, on the evidence that Bach moved to 80 Newman Street, while Abel moved elsewhere. But concert advertisements continued to refer to Cecilia as Signora (or Mrs) Grassi until at least 1776, and so the date of the wedding remains in conjecture.

In 1774 the Bach-Abel concerts moved back to Carlisle House, Soho, now vacated by the bankrupt Mrs Cornelys. But Bach and Abel had more ambitious plans: with Giovanni Andrea Gallini they acquired a property in Hanover Square, on the corner of Hanover Street, and in the garden built a new concert hall, the Hanover Square Rooms, a lavishly appointed building with paintings by Gainsborough. This was the final home of the Bach-Abel concerts, but it also marked the beginning of their decline. Bach’s finances were depleted and receipts diminished, especially after 1778. The concerts remained Bach’s main forum for new works, including the cantatas Cefalo e Procri (1776) and Rinaldo ed Armida (1778). It is likely that the final set of keyboard concertos, op.13 (1777), received an airing there, along with his last major set of symphonies (including three for double orchestra) op.18 and the last major chamber works, including a sextet for keyboard, oboe, strings and two horns and quintets and quartets for various combinations of strings, keyboard and woodwind. Probably these chamber works were also performed by the queen’s band at Richmond Lodge. Bach had taken a house nearby as early as 1770, and Mrs Papendiek recalled performances there led by Bach and Abel.

In the mid-1770s Padre Martini requested Bach to send him his portrait. Although Gainsborough’s celebrated painting (fig.10) was apparently completed by May 1776, Bach waited for over two years before despatching it to Italy. It survives in the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna, and another version, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Hillingdon, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Bach made a return to the King’s Theatre with the revival of Orione in 1777 (in a revised version) and in the following year produced his last and finest stage work for London, the opera La clemenza di Scipione (4 April 1778). Bach took the trouble to have the full score published (omitting most of the recitatives), a practice almost unknown in London in the 1770s. In 1778 Bach’s brother Johann Christoph Friedrich paid a visit to London with his son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst, who stayed behind after his father had returned to Germany and remained in London until after Johann Christian’s death in 1782.

Bach’s last complete operatic venture, the tragédie lyrique Amadis de Gaule was performed in Paris in 1779. The composer had visited the French capital in August 1778 to audition singers, at the same time renewing his acquaintance with Mozart, who reported to his father his delight in meeting again his former mentor. Amadis, an unusual work, clearly written to accord with the current French taste, was a failure. It was withdrawn for revision after only three performances and returned to the stage in January 1780. A manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris, presumably for the revised version, shows heavy cuts and alterations. In the printed score, which appeared shortly after Bach’s death, these cuts are restored. The first issue contains a poignant preface by Bach’s widow, in which she states that the published version is not as it was performed in Paris, but is the version preferred by the composer.

The last years of Bach’s life show declining fortunes and health. The Bach-Abel concerts continued to lose money; Bach was apparently defrauded of more than £1000 by a servant and his bank account became overdrawn. His pre-eminence in the opera house was usurped by Sacchini and others, and in the concert hall by his pupil Johann Samuel Schroeter; as Mrs Papendiek remarked: ‘Bach played occasionally, but Schroeder (sic) was the planet’. Ill-health supervened: Cecilia Grassi in the preface to Amadis reported on the ‘long illness which led him to the tomb’; the last known example of his handwriting, a list of subscribers for a proposed (but unrealized) series of new chamber works, dating from 1780 or 1781, reveals a shakiness of hand far removed from the confident script of Bach’s earlier years; and on 14 December 1781 the singer Angelo Morigi sent news to Martini that Bach was suffering from a chest illness. Bach died on 1 January 1782 and was buried in St Pancras churchyard on 6 January, leaving substantial debts which neither the last season of the Bach-Abel concerts, continued by Bach’s widow, nor a benefit concert on 27 May 1782 managed to efface completely. Cecilia Bach returned to Italy via Paris in summer 1782 after some of her debts had been repaid with assistance from Queen Charlotte.

Bach’s death elicited obituaries particularly in the German magazines. None is as eloquent as the few words of Mozart who, in a letter to his father, described Bach’s passing as ‘a loss to the musical world’.

4. Style and reputation.

J.C. Bach’s music is more cosmopolitan and varied than that of any other of J.S. Bach’s sons. Abandoning the restrictive Lutheran sensibility of his brothers, he turned his face towards the south, embracing Catholicism and Italian opera, and his musical style was transformed accordingly. Bach’s German works (before mid-1755), notably the keyboard concertos written in Berlin, are strongly influenced by C.P.E. Bach, with their preponderance of minor keys, their severe character, and their solid, lumbering ideas with long melodic lines, wide leaps, sudden interruptions to the rhythmic and melodic flow and syncopations. After the move to Italy, this severe style all but vanished. It is still to be found from time to time, for example in the opening movement of the Dies irae, the keyboard Toccata in B minor and the A Sonata, though in a watered-down manner. The influence of Padre Martini is prominent in the first Italian works, notably in the strict counterpoint and antique pseudo-Palestrina style of the music for the Office of the Dead (1757) and also in the keyboard Sonata op.5 no.6 which, although not published until 1766, recalls Martini’s sonatas of the 1730s in its serious prelude, double fugue and gavotte.

The main influence on Bach during his years in Milan was Italian opera seria, which he wholeheartedly embraced. It transformed his style, tipping the balance from severity to a lighter, more bland manner: the stiff, terse and long-winded ideas of the Berlin works are softened into smooth, clear, symmetrical phrases composed of short motivic ideas underpinned by simple harmonies, with none of the sudden dramatic surprises of the Berlin concertos and with a marked slowing-down of the harmonic rhythm. The slow movements are often imbued with a sensuality and quiet passion unknown in the earlier works. Most compositions of the Italian years (1755–62) – the three operas, at least one symphonie concertante, church works, accompanied sonatas and operatic overtures – are representative of this new galant manner.

It was this ‘international’ style that Bach brought to London. During his period in England his musical language developed: the short motivic phrases of his Italian works gradually expanded into a more wholeheartedly melodic style, in some cases influenced by British popular songs and folksong. Bach widened his tonal range and structures became more expansive and varied, the binary sonata forms of his earlier works becoming larger and more diverse, often embracing a full recapitulation in the tonic key. Burney remarked that Bach seems to have been the first composer who observed the law of contrast as a principle. Before his time, contrast there frequently was in the work of others, but it seems to have been accidental. Bach in his symphonies and other incidental pieces as well as in his songs, seldom failed, after a rapid and noisy passage, to introduce one that was slow and soothing.Burney thus draws attention to Bach’s habitual use of contrasting themes in the sonata structures of his London works, and these ‘second subject’ ideas are a consistent feature of his later style.

Bach’s orchestration is often imaginative and felicitous, and occasionally calls for new or unusual instruments to achieve effects – for example clarinets in Orione, a pair of ‘octave flutes’ in the Vauxhall song ‘Hither turn thy wand’ring eyes’ and obbligato instruments such as the bassoon in the aria ‘Non m’alletta’ from Temistocle. Perhaps as a result of exposure to the orchestral manner of the Mannheimers, his orchestration became even more adept and imaginative, with greater freedom in the use of woodwind and pizzicato string effects and the use of two orchestras in three of the op.18 symphonies.

In London Bach broadened his range of musical subjects, embracing (in addition to operas and concertos) symphonies, chamber works, popular songs, canzonets, cantatas and various types of keyboard work, including duet sonatas. These are written in a Classical style with italianate thematic material, enlivened by contact with French and British melodies and ideas and allied to German strength and rigour. This synthesis of musical idiom resulted in an essentially popular style geared towards the large, music-loving aristocratic and middle-class audiences of London, which, as Haydn discovered in the 1790s, appreciated new and lavish effects and at the same time enjoyed familiar themes. Bach’s use of national songs in concerto finales and his exploitation of the piano and other new instruments, such as the ‘voce umana’, in the Bach-Abel concerts can be regarded as catering to the taste of the new audience.

Bach’s music had considerable influence on contemporary composers in London, namely Schroeter and Mazzinghi (his pupils), J.C. Fischer, W.F.E. Bach and, most notably, Mozart, whose symphonies and sonatas of the mid-1760s reveal the influence of both Bach and Abel. Although commentators have often noted several resemblances, such as that between ‘Martern aller Arten’ in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and ‘Infelice, in van m’affanno’ in Bach’s La clemenza di Scipione, Bach’s influence on Mozart is probably more general and fundamental, notably in the sensual slow movements and in particular in Bach’s highly developed sense of musical balance.

It is often stated that Bach’s reputation was immediately eclipsed after his death, that his music was no longer performed and his influence died with him. This is not strictly true. Though his reputation continued to decline in the 1780s, an analysis of London concert programmes reveals that Bach’s music continued to be performed in London at least until the mid-1790s, when his symphonies were still played alongside those of Haydn. His works, and arrangements of them, were posthumously printed in London and on the Continent, albeit sporadically, until the mid-1790s, and they continued to be available in manuscript until the end of the century and beyond, to judge by the vast number of late copies now in libraries in Italy and elsewhere. It was in the early 19th century that Bach’s music virtually ceased to be performed and published. An exception was the extraordinarily late revival (in a thoroughly revised form) of La clemenza di Scipione at the King’s Theatre in 1805, perhaps due to the advocacy of his pupil Mrs Billington; there were also isolated pockets where Bach’s works continued to be played in the 19th century, such as the monastery of Einsiedeln, where his church music was still heard and where ‘new’ religious works were created by supplying contrafact Latin texts to Italian arias from his operas. The 19th century nevertheless proved to be the nadir of J.C. Bach’s popularity. His self-deprecatory remark, ‘My brother [C.P.E. Bach] lives to compose, I compose to live’, provided the underlying text of much of the critical writing on the composer. It was only in the early years of the 20th century, with the writings of Terry, Schökel and Tutenberg among others, that a more balanced view of J.C. Bach has been achieved and the composer has taken his place among the most gifted and influential musicians of the early Classical period.

5. Church music and oratorio.

Bach’s Latin church music comprises large-scale psalm and canticle settings, mass movements, music for the Office and Mass for the Dead (including three lessons, an invitatory, an introit, Kyrie and Dies irae), all scored for chorus, soloists and orchestra; and smaller works, such as motets for a single voice and orchestra, including settings of Attendite mortales and Salve regina. With only two exceptions, the oratorio Gioas, re di Giuda and Let the solemn organs blow, all the pieces are for Roman Catholic services; by contrast with his father and brothers, there are no Lutheran church works by J.C. Bach. Most of the religious works were composed during his Italian period (1755–62), and most date from 1757–9, that is, surprisingly, from the period before Bach took up his only church post as second organist at Milan Cathedral. The most important sacred composition of his later years is his only oratorio, Gioas (1770), to an Italian text by Metastasio.

The earliest church works, notably the introit and Kyrie from the Messa de’ morti, are in a pseudo-Palestrina contrapuntal style influenced by Padre Martini. For example, the responsory sections of the invitatory Regem cui omnia vivunt employ cantus firmus technique in the upper parts. All these apprentice works were shown to Martini for his comments, and though several have the manner of elaborate contrapuntal exercises they were nevertheless performed in churches in Milan. The impressive Dies irae, two early Magnificat settings and a Te Deum, all dating from 1757–8, are similarly somewhat backward-looking in their use of two choirs, often treated antiphonally. In the later church works, with Martini’s influence clearly waning, the style is more modern and the choral writing less contrapuntal, often with a simple chordal texture pitted against an active orchestral accompaniment, though the composition is frequently rounded off by a fugue, usually based on a brief, desultory subject treated in business-like fashion. Alongside the choruses, even those in archaic style, are arias and duets influenced by contemporary Italian opera, frequently of a virtuoso kind and sometimes with elaborate instrumental obbligatos (for organ, bassoon etc.). Perhaps the most ambitious of these is the aria ‘Intellectus bonus’ from Confitebor, which requires a chamber accompaniment of six solo instruments. As Bach matured, the number and importance of the arias increased, showing clearly where his true interests lay.

Arias dominate Bach’s only oratorio, Gioas, re di Giuda, an opera in all but name and a setting of a text by Metastasio. The choral writing is nevertheless composed with English taste in mind and displays the strong influence of Handel.

6. Operas.

Bach was no innovator in the world of opera seria. All ten works written for Italy, London or Mannheim use the Metastasian format of recitative punctuated by long arias. In the Italian works and those written for Mannheim, the da capo aria is frequently used; in the London operas there is more variety in aria forms and the da capo is used less and less (La clemenza di Scipione has none at all). The chorus is more prominent in the London operas, in accordance with British taste, notably in Orione, Zanaida and Carattaco. These three works also are not based on texts by Metastasio and in terms of subject differ from the statuesque classical dramas of the other operas, with their greater emphasis on spectacle and lavish effects.

Bach would have encountered Italian and italianate opera in Berlin. Indeed C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlass documents ‘3 Arien’ composed by Christian before he went to Italy in 1755. His arrival in Milan allowed him to encounter opera seria at source and he immersed himself in the music and style. Three arias attributed to Bach, evidently inserted in Cocchi’s Emira in January 1756, survive in a contemporary manuscript of Italian provenance in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Bach contributed arias to other operas elsewhere in the late 1750s, but his first complete score, Artaserse, was not composed until 1760 for Turin. In it he severely curtailed the Metastasian recitative and used a variety of aria forms. The da capo principle returned in force in his two works for Naples, Catone in Utica (1761) and Alessandro nell’Indie (1762). Two arias, ‘Confusa, smarrita’ from the former and ‘Non so d’onde viene’ from the latter, achieved great popularity in Bach’s lifetime, the second attracting the young Mozart’s approbation. Bach made use of them again in pasticcios in London.

Of the five operas for London, only Adriano in Siria (1765) is without chorus and is as dominated by arias as Bach’s works for Italy. Significantly, it was not a success. Perhaps the finest of the London operas is the last, La clemenza di Scipione (1778), in which, with da capo arias banished in favour of a variety of structures and with a more prominent use of the chorus, Bach achieved a greater sense of movement and dramatic flow. He also made an interesting attempt to integrate the overture into the opera: motifs from it appear in the final chorus in Act 3.

For the two operas for Mannheim, Temistocle (1772) and Lucio Silla (1775), Bach took advantage of the superb orchestral facilities of the electoral court orchestra and produced showpieces of vocal and instrumental virtuosity, with the woodwind in particular gaining especial prominence. Da capo arias predominate in Temistocle, but in Lucio Silla a greater variety of forms is used.

Bach’s most ambitious operatic venture was his only tragédie lyrique written for Paris, Amadis de Gaule (1779). The libretto, a botched condensation into three acts of Quinault’s five-act text written for Lully, is unlike anything Bach had previously set, with its vivid plot set in chivalric times – a tale of love, jealousy and attempted revenge with frequent interventions of the supernatural (ghosts, demons, etc.) and nature (thunder, lightning and enveloping clouds). The chorus, in various guises as prisoners or demons, is a protagonist, and ballets and divertissements are important elements. Bach rose to the challenge magnificently, taking advantage of the large Paris orchestra to create sumptuous and occasionally extraordinary effects. As in La clemenza, the overture is integrated into the opera: a dramatic crescendo and diminuendo on a diminished 7th chord scored for trombones, bassoon and woodwind is used again in Acts 2 and 3. The opera had the misfortune to receive its première at the time of the Gluck–Piccinni controversy and suffered accordingly; it was not revived until the 20th century.

7. Symphonies and concertos.

It is probably to the symphony and the piano concerto that Bach made his most important contribution. For Bach the symphony was intimately connected with the three-movement (fast–slow–fast) Italian operatic overture and all his mature symphonies follow that plan; indeed Bach regarded the word ‘overture’ as synonymous with ‘symphony’. C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlass records that Johann Christian composed a symphony and an overture, both in six parts, before he left for Italy. These are almost certainly lost. His first opera overtures written for Turin and Naples appeared in print in Paris and in London in the early 1760s. The first symphonies for concert use, the set of six op.3, appeared in London in 1765. Their publication coincided with the early years of the Bach-Abel concerts and these works were almost certainly performed there. They are fine pieces, with sturdy, sonata-form first movements, contrasting second subjects and practically all-inclusive recapitulations in the tonic key. The opening of the Fifth Symphony is a particularly fine example, with its playful, quasi-Baroque running bass and attractive syncopated melodic material. The central slow movements mine that particular vein of sensual, nocturnal music that Bach made his own and the finales are in dance rhythms – minuets, gigues or bucolic dances as in the earthy horn-calls of the last movement of no.6.

Bach himself published no other set of symphonies in England until 1781. Three sets, opp.6, 8 (containing three works from op.6) and 9, were printed in the Netherlands between 1770 and 1775 and are again, with one exception, concert works. The most extraordinary piece in these collections is op.6 no.6 in G minor, Bach’s only gesture in the direction of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ symphony and a work worthy to be mentioned alongside the early G minor symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. All three movements are, extraordinarily, in the minor key (the slow movement is in C minor) – a noteworthy feature for a composer normally reticent in his use of the minor mode – and they all seem to breathe the air of an earlier sensibility: the presence of C.P.E. Bach and the north German school is not far away. Given that J.C. Bach often recycled earlier material, there is reason to conjecture that much of the material here might have belonged to one of the lost works mentioned in C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlass.

Bach’s crowning achievements in the concert symphony are the three for double orchestra published in the op.18 set (1781). They are large, richly orchestrated works, making much interplay of the two orchestras treated antiphonally and combining different textures, for example violins in four parts. The woodwind instruments, now liberated from merely doubling and reinforcing the strings, are given solos and contrasting passages.

Most of Bach’s concertos are for keyboard, although works survive for flute, oboe and bassoon and an early lost composition for cello is listed in his half-brother’s Nachlass. Also listed there are the five keyboard concertos which survive in Bach’s autograph in Berlin. A manuscript of a sixth in F minor also probably dates from those early years. The influence of C.P.E. Bach presides over these works, which adopt the ritornello/solo technique of the elder Bach’s Berlin compositions. None of Bach’s keyboard concertos can be firmly dated to his Italian period, though it is possible that several of the op.1 set (1763) may have been composed there. This set and opp.7 (1770) and 13 (1777), all first published in London, established Bach’s new, more Classical concerto style, with fewer and pared down ritornellos and a simpler, sparer keyboard style. This became the model for the keyboard concerto in London in the late 18th century.

Most of Bach’s mature keyboard concertos are in two movements, without a slow movement; two concertos from each of the three published collections are in three movements. In the later two sets Bach, in line with his maturing style, broadened the musical range, expanded the length of the movements and enriched the melodic content. In a recently discovered, partly autograph manuscript of the solo part of op.7 no.6, is revealed a much more extended version of the concerto, with longer ritornellos and a more technically difficult and extended keyboard part. Bach evidently reduced the scale of the work for publication.

Although no concertos can be ascribed with certainty to Bach’s Italian years, he did experiment with the genre of the symphonie concertante. The existence of an autograph manuscript in Regensburg of a work in D major, in his early hand and written on Italian paper, suggests that Bach’s earliest essays may date from the early 1760s. In all about 17 works in this or related genres are attributed to Bach. Solo instruments vary from two to nine players; most works are in three movements, though a number, including the earliest, are in two.

8. Keyboard and chamber music.

As a keyboard performer and teacher Bach composed a large number of works for concert and didactic purposes, including two sets of solo sonatas, accompanied sonatas and chamber works with obbligato keyboard. The composition of keyboard works forms a constant thread throughout all three periods of his creative career. The only such works which can be dated from his German years are a march in the second Clavierbüchlein of Anna Magdalena a series of minuets and polonaises, which he may have composed even before he left Leipzig and also an early ‘Solo’ for keyboard in A minor, his first substantial German harpsichord work. These were followed by sonatas in B and A and an intriguing Toccata in B minor which have been dated to his years in Italy and survive in manuscript in Padre Martini’s library (and elsewhere). Bach’s lighter, italianate style can be seen in the eight accompanied sonatas in manuscript in Milan. This style was carried over into his first London works in this genre, the accompanied sonatas op.2. As in his other London works, Bach expanded and refined his musical language and forms, and in general the later sets of accompanied sonatas opp.10 (1773), 15 (1778), 16 (1779) and 18 (1780/81) are more accomplished. Opp.15 and 18 also include duet sonatas for keyboard.

The two most important keyboard publications of Bach’s London years are the sonatas opp.5 and 17. The earlier set was published in 1766 and was the first publication in London to mention the option of the piano on the title-page, preceding John Burton’s Lessons by a few months. The six works here are in a variety of styles and one at least – no.6 in C minor, with its imposing prelude, double fugue and gavotte all in the tonic key – may date from Bach’s Italian years. The grandiose D major sonata (no.2), with its orchestral sonorities and changes of dynamics, represents Bach’s first published attempt at idiomatic piano writing. The second set, commonly known by its London opus number, 17 (1779), was in fact published by Sieber in Paris (c1774) as op.12. Once again these works reveal a wide range of styles, from the vigorous gigue finales of the Second and Sixth Sonatas to the sensuous slow movement of the C minor, one of Bach’s greatest achievements.

Outstanding among the many chamber works, trios, quartets and quintets for strings and wind in various combinations are the four late pieces: a sextet, two quintets and a quartet with obbligato keyboard, published posthumously. The Sextet, for the unusual combination of keyboard, oboe, violin, cello and two horns has often been attributed to J.C.F. Bach, but a set of parts in J.C.F. Bach’s hand discovered in Kraców (PL-Kj) transmits the work, in a slightly different form from that of the published version (1783), with an attribution to ‘J.C. Bach’. The Quintet in D for keyboard, flute, oboe, violin and cello is justly one of Bach’s most popular compositions. Worthy of note is the highly attractive slow movement with its pathos-filled minore central section, as far away from the facile 19th-century view of a ‘porcelain’ composer as can be imagined.

oratorios, cantatas and serenatas

WORKS

printed works published in London unless otherwise stated

Edition:The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach 1735–1782, ed. E. Warburton, i–xlviii (New York, 1984–99) [CW]Catalogues:C.S. Terry: John Christian Bach (London, rev. 2/1967/R by H.C.R. Landon) [T] [t numbers show the page no./no. of the incipit on the page and are not Terry’s numbers; in a group the number of the first incipit only is given; roman numerals denote corrigenda pages]; E. Warburton: The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach 1735–1782, xlviii/1: Thematic Catalogue (New York, 1999) [W]

liturgical

operas

other vocal

symphonies and overtures

symphonies concertantes

liturgical



W		T

F2		199/4		Attendite mortales, motet, T, orch, ? after 1767, 1st aria arr. from Carattaco; CW xviii
E17	200/6		Beatus vir (F), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1758; CW xxiii
E16		202/1		Confitebor tibi Domine (E), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1759; CW xxiii
E5	202/3		Credo (C), SATB, orch; CW xx
E12		202/4		Dies irae; see [Messa de’ morti], below
E15	202/6		Dixit Dominus (D), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, by March 1758; CW xxiii
E13		203/3		Domine ad adiuvandum (D), S, SATB, orch, 1758; CW xlviii
E14	203/2		Domine ad adiuvandum (G), S, A, SATB, orch, 1760; CW xxii
E3		204/3		Gloria in excelsis (D), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1758/9; CW xix
E4	204/1		Gloria in excelsis (G), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch; CW xx
E2		204/8		Kyrie (D), S, T, SATB, orch; CW xix
F3	205/2		Larvae tremendae (D), motet, S, orch; CW xviii
E18		206/3		Laudate pueri (E), S, orch, Milan, 12 Aug 1758; CW xlviii
E19	206/1		Laudate pueri (G), S, T, orch, 1760; CW xxii
F5		199/1		Let the solemn organs blow (W. Dodd), anthem for Magdalen Chapel, London, c1764; CW xxv
E7–9	206/4		[3] Lezioni del officio per gli morti, 1757: Parce mihi, Domine (B), S, A, SATB, orch; Taedet animam meam (F), S, A, B, SATB, orch; Manus tuae (C), S, A, T, SATB, orch; CW xxi
E20		207/1		Magnificat (C), SATB, SATB, orch, 1758, inc.; CW xxii
E21	207/2		Magnificat (C), SATB, SATB; CW xxii
E22		207/3		Magnificat (C), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1760; CW xxii
E11–12	208/5, 202/4		[Messa de’ morti], 1757: Requiem aeternam (F), Kyrie (F), SSAATTBB, orch; Dies irae (c), S, A, T, B, SSAATTBB, orch; CW xxi
E10		207/5		Miserere (B), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1757; CW xxi
F1	—		Pater noster, lost, sent with letter to G.B. Martini, 6 Sept 1757
E6		208/4		Regem cui omnia vivunt (F), invitatory, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1757; CW xxi
E23	209/3		Salve regina (E), S, orch; CW xviii
E24		209/3		Salve regina (F), S, orch; CW xviii
F4a and b	209/5		Si nocte tenebrosa (F), motet, S/T, orch (two versions); CW xviii
E25		210/2		Tantum ergo (F), T, orch, 1757; CW xlviii
E26	209/7		Tantum ergo (G), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1759; CW xxiv
E27		210/3		Te Deum (D), 2S, 2A, 2T, 2B, SATB, SATB, orch, 1758, inc.; CW xxiv
E28	210/5		Te Deum (D), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1762; CW xxiv

doubtful

YE4	202/7	Domine ad adiuvandum (C), S, SATB, str, GB-Lbl
YE7	—	Expugna impugnantes me (d), SSATB, CW xxiv
YE3	—	Gloria solenne (C), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, inc.; CW xxiv
YE5	—	Laudate pueri (B), S, orch; CW xxiv
YE1	204/7	Messa in pastorale (Ky-Gl) (D), SATB, orch, Lbl (attrib. F. Durante)
YE2	204/6	Messa a più voci (Ky-Gl) (G), SATB, orch, Lbl (attrib. Durante)
YE6	208/6	Salve regina (D), S, S, A, T, B, SSATB, orch, Lbl

operas

drammi per musica in 3 acts unless otherwise stated; facsimiles of librettos in CW xliii–xlvii

LCG	London, Covent Garden
LKH	London, King’s Theatre in the Haymarket

G1	217; xl	Artaserse (P. Metastasio), Turin, Regio, 26 Dec 1760, CW i
G2	222; xlii, xliii	Catone in Utica (Metastasio), Naples, S Carlo, 4 Nov 1761, CW ii
G3	212; xxxii	Alessandro nell’Indie (Metastasio), Naples, S Carlo, 20 Jan 1762, CW iii; staged with his Cantata a tre voci
G4	237; xlvii	Orione, ossia Diana vendicata (drama, 3, G.G. Bottarelli), LKH, 19 Feb 1763, CW iv and xii; rev. LKH, 24 May 1777
G5	241; xlix	Zanaida (Bottarelli), LKH, 7 May 1763, CW iv and xii
G6	211; xxxi	Adriano in Siria (Metastasio), LKH, 26 Jan 1765, CW v
G42	—	The Fairy Favour (masque, 1, T. Hull), LCG, 29 Jan 1767, lib CW xlv, music lost [perf. by children as afterpiece]
G7	221; xli	Carattaco (Bottarelli), LKH, 14 Feb 1767, CW vi
G8	283/3; xlviii	Temistocle (Metastasio, rev. Verazi), Mannheim, Hof, 5 Nov 1772, CW vii
G9	232; xlv	Lucio Silla (G. De Gamerra, rev. Verazi), Mannheim, Hof, 5 Nov 1775, CW viii
G10	229; xliv	La clemenza di Scipione (serious op, 3), LKH, 4 April 1778, CW ix
G39	215; xxxiii	Amadis de Gaule (tragédie lyrique, 3, P. Quinault, rev. A.-D.-M. de Vismes du Valgay), Paris, Opéra, 14 Dec 1779, CW x

insertions in operas and pasticcios

G Inc 2	251/4	G. Cocchi: Emira, Milan, Jan 1756: 3 arias; CW xii
G21	252/2	A. Ferradini: Demofoonte, Milan, 26 Dec 1758: 1 aria; CW xii
G23	277/4	F. Gassmann: Gli uccellatori, Turin, Carignano, 1 Sept 1760: ov.; CW xii
G1/3	—	Zenobia, Lucca, aut. 1761: 1 aria
G22	275/3	G.B. Lampugnani and others: La Giulia, Milan, carn. 1761: ov.; CW xii
G24	273/2	Il tutore e la pupilla (pasticcio, Bottarelli), LKH, 13 Nov 1762: ov., from Cantata a tre voci with new 2nd movt; CW ix
G25	273/8; l	Astarto, re di Tiro (pasticcio, Bottarelli), LKH, 4 Dec 1762: ov., from Alessandro nell’Indie, qt, 2 duets (lost), 5 arias (2 lost); CW ix
G26	273/5	La cascina, (pasticcio, Bottarelli), LKH, 8 Jan 1763: ov.; CW ix
G27	272/5	B. Galuppi and others: La calamita de’ cuori, LKH, 3 Feb 1763: ov.; CW ix
G2/18	—	Catone in Utica (pasticcio), Turin, carn. 1763: qt, La
G1/9b, YG12	—	G.M. Rutini: Gli sposi in maschera, Florence, aut. 1763: 2 arias, I-Fc
G21, G1/3	—	J.A. Hasse, rev. Cafaro: L’Issipile, Naples, 26 Dec 1763: 2 arias, P-La
G Inc 7	244/1	Menalcas (pastoral, J. Harris), Salisbury, 22/24 Aug 1764: 3 arias 2 choruses; CW xxv
G3/19, 22b	225/1; xliii	Ezio (pasticcio, after Metastasio), LKH, 24 Nov 1764: 2 arias from Alessandro nell’Indie; CW ix
G2/16	219/3; xli	Berenice (pasticcio), LKH, 1 Jan 1765: 3 arias (1 from Catone in Utica, others lost); CW ix
G43	245/3	The Maid of the Mill (pasticcio, I. Bickerstaffe), LCG, 31 Jan 1765: 1 aria, 1 duet; CW xxv
—	—	Zophilette (pasticcio, J.-F. Marmontel), Paris, 17 May 1765: 2 ariettes (music lost)
G44	246/1	The Summer’s Tale (pasticcio, R. Cumberland), LCG, 6 Dec 1765: 2 arias, 1 duet; CW xxv
G6/20	—	Pharnaces, or The Revenge of Athridates (op, T. Hull), Dublin, Smock Alley, 12 Dec 1765: 1 aria; CW xxv
G2/3, 12; G3/18, 21	238/1; xlviii	Sifare (pasticcio), LKH, 5 March 1767: 4 arias; CW ix
G7/24, H24, H27	li	Tom Jones (pasticcio, J. Reed, after A. Poinsinet, after H. Fielding, LCG, 14 Jan 1769: 3 arias; CW xxv
G2/4	231/2	N. Piccinni: Le contadine bizzarre, LKH, 7 Nov 1769: 1 aria; CW ix
G28	231/3	L’olimpiade (pasticcio, after Metastasio), LKH, 11 Nov 1769: 1 aria; CW ix
G28	256/2	F. Tenducci and others: Amintas (op., R. Rolt), LCG, 15 Dec 1769: 1 aria; CW xxv
G29, LG1	234; xlvi	C.W. Gluck and P. Guglielmi: Orfeo ed Euridice, LKH, 7 April 1770: 6 arias (incl. 2 lost), 1 duet (lost), ballet music (lost), chorus (lost), CW ix; 3 arias, added 17 April 1770, ov. t346/8 added 30 April 1771, CW ix; rev. version, Naples, 4 Nov 1774, with new ov., 5 new arias, 5 choruses, ballets, CW xi; draft of discarded scena t251/5, D-Bsb*
LG2	245/2	The Flitch of Bacon (pasticcio, H. Bate), London, New Theatre, Haymarket, 17 Aug 1778: 1 aria; CW xxv
G45	—	The Genius of Nonesense (extravaganza, G. Colman), London, New Theatre, Haymarket, 2 Sept 1780: 1 aria, lost
Doubtful arias etc., incl. t250/5, 251/2–3, 252/1, 252/6–7, 253/2–5, 24 others, A-Wgm, Wn; B-Bc; CH-A, E; D-Bsb, Dl, Hs, LEb, LÜh, Mbs, MÜu; DK-Kc; GB-Er; I-Gl, MC, Nc, MAav, Tf, Rc; S-Skma; US-AAu, BEm

oratorios, cantatas and serenatas

G Inc 6	244/6	Ode on the Auspicious Arrival and Nuptials of … Queen Charlotte (Thanks to the God who rules the deep) (J.Lockman), S, SAB, vn, bc; CW xxv
G11	—	Cant. a 3 voci … per festeggiare il felicissimo giorno natalizio di sua Maestà cattolica, S, S, T, SATB, orch, Naples, S Carlo, 20 Jan 1762; CW xiii
G12	—	La Galatea (serenata, after Metastasio), 3vv, orch, London, Spring Gardens, 29 Feb 1764, music lost, lib in CW xlv
D1	226: xliv	Gioas, re di Giuda (orat., after Metastasio), London, King’s, 22 March 1770; CW xvii
G41	243/1	Happy morn, auspicious rise! (? birthday ode for George III), S, S, A, T, SATB, SATB, orch [incl. arrs. from Gioas, re di Giuda]; CW xxv
G15	248/3	Endimione (serenata, after Metastasio), S, S, S, T, SATB, orch, London, King’s, 6 April 1772; rev. Mannheim, Hof, 24 July 1773, with scene by N. Jommelli; CW xiv
G16	—	La tempesta (cant., Metastasio), S, orch, ? London, Hickford’s Rooms, 17 May 1773, perf. Mannheim, c1776; CW xiii
G18	247/2	Amor vincitore (serenata), S, S, SATB, orch, London, King’s, 15 April 1774; CW xv
G19	li	Cefalo e Procri (cant., ? G.G. Bottarelli), S, S, S, orch, London, Hanover Square Rooms, 26 April 1776; recit and aria pubd as Aurora: a Favourite Cantata. t248/1–2; CW xiii
G20	250/2	Rinaldo ed Armida (cant.), 3vv, orch, London, Hanover Square Rooms, 20 May 1778, lost except 1 recit and aria (c1785), A-Wn, B-Bc, D-Bsb, Mbs, F-Pn, GB-Lbl, I-PEsf, Vc
G38	—	Berenice che fai! (scena), S, orch, music lost, lib in CW xlv

other vocal

chamber duets

H4–11	—	[8] duetti (P. Metastasio), S, S, bc, ? before mid-1762: 1 Io lo so; 2 Trova un sol; 3 Che ciascun per te sospiri; 4 Chi mai di questo core; 5 Ascoltami, o Clori; 6 Lascia ch’io posso; 7 Parlami pur; 8 Eccomi alfin [nos. 3, 5, rev. as op.4 nos.5, 6; others different from opp. 4, 6]; CW xvi
H12–17	259/1	Sei canzonette (Metastasio), S, S, bc, op.4 (1765/R): 1 Già la notte; 2 Ah rammenta oh bella Irene; 3 Pur nel sonno almen talora; 4 T’intendo sí, mio core; 5 Che ciascun per te sospiri; 6 Ascoltami, o Clori; CW xvi
H18–23	260/2	Sei canzonette (Metastasio), S, S, bc, op.6 (1767); 1 Torna in quell’onda; 2 Io lo so; 3 E pur fra le tempeste; 4 Trova un sol; 5 Chi mai di questo core; 6 Se infida tu mi chiami; CW xvi

miscellaneous songs and arias

G36a	—	Perchè sì ingrata, S, orch [another version of aria Cara ti lascio; cf G36b]; CW xlviii/3
G36b	—	Ah che gl’istessi numi … Cara ti lascio, S, orch [cf G36a]; CW xxi
H2	—	Der Weise auf dem Lande (O Wald! o Schatten grüner Gänge!), 16 April 1755, in Stammbuch of Friedrich Nicolai; CW xlviii/3
LG5	247/1	Infelice … Là nei regni, S, kbd 4 hands, pubd as A Favourite Scene and Rondo on the Duke of Nivernois Air (c1783); CW xvi, xlviii/3
H1	—	Mezendore (Herr Nicolaus Klimm erfand) (F. von Hagedorn), in F.W. Marpurg: Neue Lieder zum singen beym Clavier (Berlin, 1756); CW xlviii/3
G7/24	258/1	The London Lass (While Cecilia we admire), S, bc (c1772), based on Non è ver from Carattaco; CW xxv
G17	252/3	O Venere vezzosa (Horace, trans. G.G. Bottarelli), S, orch; CW xvi
LG4	251/1	Sentimi, non partir … Al mio bene (récit and rondo, after G. Roccaforte), S, pf, 2 vc, orch, as Rondeau … sung by Mr Tenducci at Messrs Bach and Abels Concert (1779); CW xvi
G35	—	Sventurata in van mi lagno, S, orch, after 1772; CW xvi
Doubtful: An Aeglen (Und fehlten dir der Schönheit holde Gaben (?Gemmingen) wYH1, in Oden mit Melodien, ii (Berlin, 1755); Farewell ye green fields, S/T, bc (Edinburgh, n.d.) [version of canzonette Ich schlief, da träumte mir], CW xxv; Ist das Leben nicht ein Traum?, D-LÜh; La sorte spietata t251/6, in B. Mengozzi: Méthode du chant du Conservatoire (Paris, 1803); Luci amate a voi non chiedo wYG15 (1777), CW xxv; Neptune (When an angry woman’s breast) t256/3, S/T, bc (c1762), CW xxv; [9] Solfeggi … del Sig. Giovanni Bach in Genova wYH7–15, S, bc, I-Gl; So oft ich meine Tobacks-Pfeife, D-Bsb; The World (When launched into life) (J.M. Perrin), S/T, orch (n.d.), CW xxv

music for Vauxhall Gardens

H24–7	254/1	A Collection of Favourite Songs sung at Vaux Hall by Mrs Weichsell (1766/R), S, orch: 1 By my sighs; 2 Cruel Strephon; 3 Come Colin; 4 Ah why shou’d love; CW xxv
H28–31	254/5	A Second Collection of Favourite Songs sung at Vaux Hall by Mrs Pinto and Mrs Weichsell (1767/R), S, orch: 1 In this shady blest retreat; 2 Smiling Venus; 3 Tender virgins [arr. from Non è ver from Carattico, rev. as Blest with thee in Tom Jones (pasticcio, 1769)]; Lovely yet ungratefull swain; CW xxv
H32	—	When chilling winter hies away, S, orch, music lost, text pubd (1768)
H33–6	255/2	A Third Collection of Favorite Songs sung at Vaux Hall by Miss Cowper (1771/R), S, orch: 1 Midst silent shades; 2 Ah seek to know; 3 Would you a female heart inspire; 4 Cease a while; CW xxv
H38–9	—	A Fourth Collection of Favorite Songs sung at Vauxhall Gardens (1779/R): 1 Oh how blest; 2 Hither turn thy wand’ring eyes; CW xxv
H40	—	Ode to Pleasure, S, S, S, T, chorus, orch, music lost, text in A Genuine Collection (London, 1766)
H41	—	Ode to Summer, 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, music lost, text in A Genuine Collection (London, 1766)
H42	—	The Pastoral Invitation (Ye nymphs and swains), S, S, T, orch, music lost, text in Westminster Journal, 2 July 1768; CW xxv (text only)
H37	257/2	See the kind indulgent gales: a Favourite Song sung by Mrs Weichsell at Vaux Hall Gardens (1777/R), S, orch [Eng. rev. of Se spiegò from Zanaida]; CW xxv

folksong settings

LH1	—	Braes of Ballanden (Beneath a green shade) (T. Blacklock), A, ob, vn, va, vc, kbd (1779); CW xxv
LH2	257/3	The Broom of Cowdenknows (How blyth was I each morn), A, 2 fl, 2 vn, bc (c1784); CW xxv
LH3	—	I’ll never leave thee (One day I heard Mary say) (R. Crawford), A, 2 fl, 2 vn, bc (c1784); CW xxv
LH4	256	Lochaber (Farewell to Lochaber) (A. Ramsay), A, 2 fl, 2 vn, bc (c1785); CW xxv
LH5	—	The Yellow-Hair’d Laddie, lost, attrib. Bach in S. Storace: Gli equivoci, 1786, A-Wn; arr. in last movt of pf conc. op.13 no.4

transcriptions

LG2	250/2	Ebben si vada … Io ti lascio (after P. Metastasio), acc. recit and rondo, S, pf, orch, pubd as The Favourite Rondeau sung by Mr Tenducci (c1778); ? from cant. Rinaldo ed Armida; expanded version of Ombra felice … Io ti lascio from M. Mortellari: Arsace, 1775; another version, No ’twas neither shape nor feature, in A Flitch of Bacon (1778, London); CW xvi
LG3	251/7	Mi scordo i torti miei … Dolce aurette, S, orch, c1778, recit and aria from G. Gazzaniga: Perseo ed Andromeda with new coda by Bach, D-Bsb, WRgs; CW xvi
—	253/6	Wenn nach der Stürme, aria, S, bc, in J.A. Hiller: Deutsche Arien und Duette (Leipzig, 1785), based on Allor che il vincitore from La clemenza di Scipione

symphonies and overtures

for 2 oboes, 2 horns and strings unless otherwise stated

G4, 27, 1, 24, 26, 25	272/2	Six Favourite Overtures (1763): ovs. to the operas: 1 Orione (D), 2 ob, 2 hn, 2 bn, str; 2 La calamita de’ cuori (D); 3 Artaserse (D); 4 Il tutore e la pupilla (C); 5 La cascina (G); 6 Astarto (= Alessandro nell’Indie) (G); no.2 in VI sinfonie a più stromenti composte da vari autori op.13 (Paris, 1762); no.3 in VI sinfonie a più stromenti composte da vari autori op.12 (Paris, 1761); arr. kbd (1763)
G23B	277/4	The Periodical Overture no.1 (D) (1763): ov. to Gli uccellatori
C1–6	262/1	Six simphonies (D, C, E, B, F, G), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, op.3 (1765), =w C1a–6a, CW xxvi; arr. Bach as Six Overtures Composed and Adapted for the Harpsichord (c1769), =wC1b–6b, t347/2, CW xlii
G22B	275/3	An Overture in 8 parts (D) (1766); corrected version of Periodical Overture no.xv (1766): ov. to La Giulia
C16a	276/3	Symphony (C), as no.46 in Sinfonie a più stromenti composte da vari autori (Paris, 1770/71), CW xxvii; with different 2nd and 3rd movts wC16b, CW xxix
C7–12	264/1	Six simphonies (G, D, E, B, E, g), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, op.6 (Amsterdam, 1770); nos.3–5 in Six simphonies périodiques op.8 nos.1, 5, 6; CW xxvi–xxvii
C9, 13–15, 10–11	266/5	Six simphonies périodiques (E, G, D, F, B, E), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, op.8 (Amsterdam, c1775); nos.1, 5, 6 = op.6 nos.3–5; CW xxvi–xxvii
C17–19	268/3	Trois simphonies (B, E, B), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, op.9 (The Hague, 1773) [also as op.21]; no.1, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, str, in Six sinfoni … par J.C. Bach, Toesky et Stamitz (Paris, 1773); no.2 with addl movt (Paris, ?1776); 2 movts from no.2 arr. kbd in J.A. Hiller: Sammlung kleiner Clavier- und Singstücke (Leipzig, 1774), ed. S. Staral (Graz, 1981); no.1 ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xxx (1956); CW xxvii (nos.1 and 2), iv (no.3)
C26, G9, G15, C27, C28, XC1	269/4	Six Grand Overtures (E, B, D, D, E, D), 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, 2 tpt, timp, str, op.18 (c1782); nos.1, 3, 5 for double orch (2 ob, bn, 2 hn, str; 2 fl, str); no.1, I-Gl [dated 1779]; no.2 = ov. to Lucio Silla; no.3 = ov. to Endimione; no.4 = no.2 of t271/6, Deux sinfonies op.18; 2nd movt of no.4 = arr. of 2nd movt of ov. to Temistocle; no.6 arr. from Amadis de Gaule; CW xxviii
XC2, C27	271/6	Deux sinfonies à grand orchestre (D, D), 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str, op.18 (Amsterdam, c1785); 1st movt of no.1 = ov. to La clemenza di Scipione, 2nd movt = Andante from ov. to Amadis de Gaule; no.2 = no.4 of t269/4, Six Grand Overtures op.18; CW xxviii
G27a	—	Sym. (D) (inc., = ov. to La calamita de’ cuori with different finale), CW xxix; Sym. (D), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, CW xxix
G27b	—	Sym. (D), 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, CW xxix
—	279/4	Sym. (F), CW xxix
C Inc 4	279/7	Sym. (F), 2 ob, 2 hn/tpt, str, CH-A, Bu, E, I-MAav; CW xxix
C Inc 3	282/5	Sym. (E), as Divertimento notturno (Paris, before 1775); CW xxvii
C84	361/7	Menuett (F), for Her Majesty’s birthday, 1767; CW xxv
C85	361/8	Menuett (C), for Her Majesty’s birthday, 1769; CW xxv
Lost, listed in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790): Sym. in 6 pts, before 1755; ov. in 6 pts, before 1755
for doubtful and misattributed works see wYC1–83

symphonies concertantes

instruments listed as concertante; ripieno

C32	284/1	Sinfonia concertante (G), 2 vn, vc; 2 fl, 2 hn, str, ?c1760 (Paris, by 1772); CW xxx
C33	284/6	Concert ou symphonie (E). 2 vn, ob; 2 fl, cl, bn, 2 hn, str (Paris, 1773); CW xxx [also as pf conc., wC75, t300/8]
C34	284/4	Simphonie concertante (A), vn, vc; 2 ob, 2 hn, str (Paris, by 1775); CW xxx
C36a	286/1	Sym. conc. (C), 2 vn, vc; 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 hn, str, CW xlviii/3; rev. version w C36b, CW xxx
C45	286/4	Sym. conc. (G), ob, vn, va, vc; 2 fl, 2 hn, str
C Inc 5	—	Sym. conc. (G), fl, 2 vn, vc; fl, 2 hn, str, doubtful; CW xxx
C44	286/8	Sym. conc. (E), fl, 2 vn, vc; 2 ob, 2 hn, str, by 1775; CW xxx
C38	287/2	Sym. conc. (F), ob, bn/vc; ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxi
C46	287/7	Sym. conc. (B), vc; 2 cl, bn, 2 hn, str; CW xlviii/3 formerly D-Bsb (see White, 1958)
C42	288/4	Sym. conc. (E), 2 vn, vc; 2 ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxx [also as bn conc., wC82, t288/4]
C40	288/7	Notturno (E), 2 ob, 2 hn/tpt, 2 vn, 2 va, vc; str; CW xxxi
C43	289/4	Sym. conc. (C), fl, ob, vn, vc; 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, str; CW xxxi
C48	289/7	Sym. conc. (B), ob, vn, vc, pf; 2 fl, 2 hn, str; CW xxxi
C39	290/2	Sym. conc. (D), 2 fl, 2 vn, vc; 2 hn, str, c1760; CW xxxi
C37	290/4	Sym. conc. (E), fl, ob, bn; ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxi
C41	290/9	Sym. conc. (E), fl, 2 cl, bn, 2 hn; 1/2 fl, str; CW xxxi
C35	—	Concerto a più istrumenti (D), 2 vn; 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, ?doubtful; CW xxx
YC95	—	Sym. (B), vn, vc (ad lib); 2 ob (ad lib), 2 hn, str, I-MAav, attrib. J.C. Bach in Breitkopf suppl. 1767, doubtful; probably by F.P. Ricci, op.9 no.2 (The Hague, London and Paris, c1775)

concertos

C74	—	Conc., hpd, before 1755, lost, listed in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790)
C68–72	298/1	5 concs. (B, f, d, E, G), kbd, str; CW xxxii
C73	301/4	Conc. (f), hpd, str, CW xxxii
C77	—	Conc, vc, before 1755, lost, listed in Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses … Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Hamburg, 1790)
C49–54	292/1	Six Concertos (B, A, F, G, C, D), hpd, str, op.1 (1763); CW xxxiii
C79	286/7	Conc. (D), fl, 2 hn, str; CW xxxvi
C55–60	293/4	Sei concerti (C, F, D, B, E, G), hpd/pf, str, op.7 (1770); CW xxxiii–xxxiv [cadenzas for no.5 and expanded solo pt of no.6, private collection, USA]
C62–7	295/1	A Third Sett of Six Concertos (C, D, F, B, G, E), hpd/pf, str (2 ob, 2 hn ad lib), op.13 (1777); CW xxxv
C75	300/8	Conc. (E), kbd, 2 fl, 2 cl, bn, 2 hn, str; CW xxxiv [also as sym. conc., wC42 t284/6]
C61	301/1	Conc. (E), hpd/pf, str (2 hn ad lib), as op.14 no.1 (Paris, c1776); CW xxxiv
C80	287/4	Conc. (F), ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxvi [also as fl conc. (G)wC78, private collection, USA]
C81	290/7	Conc. (F), ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxvi
C83	288/1	Conc., (B), bn, 2 ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxvi
C82	288/4	Conc., (E), bn, 2 ob, 2 hn, str; CW xxxvi [also as sym. conc., wC42 t288/4]
C76	—	Conc. (C), vn, 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str; CW xlviii/3

doubtful

YC90–91	297/1	[2] Concerto (E, A), hpd, str (Riga, c1776), attrib. ‘I.C. Bach’, Breitkopf suppl. 1776–7, also attrib. C.P.E. Bach and J.C.F. Bach; no.1 ed. E. Praetorius (1937), no.2 ed. in Antiqua (1935)
YC92	300/1	Conc. (A), hpd, str, Bsb [? by C.P.E. Bach; also attrib. Schaffrath and C.H. or J.G. Graun]; ed. A. Hoffmann (Wolfenbüttel, 1963)
C Inc 6	300/4	Conc. (E), hpd, str, Dl

wind music

see Sadie for information on borrowed material and transcriptions

B Inc 7–12	285/3	Sei sinfonie (E, B, E, B, E, B), 2 cl, 2 hn, [2] bn (1782); CW xxxvii
B79–82	—	Military Pieces [Quintette] (E, E, B, B), 2 cl, 2 hn, bn (Dublin, c1794); CW xxxvii
B83–5	359/3	3 military marches: Marche du régiment de Prince Ernst; Marche du régiment de Braun[schweig]; Marche du régiment de Wür[tte]mb[erg], all in E, 2 ob, 2 hn, bn; CW xxxvii [nos.2–3 arr. kbd, GB-Lbl (part autograph)]
B88–9	360/1	2 Märsche … vom ersten … zweiten Batallion Garde-Regiment in Hannover (E, E) 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn, no.2 spurious, by Abel, Lbl (part autograph); CW xxxvii
B86–7	360/5	Due marce … di cavalleria e d’infanteria (E, E), 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, bn; CW xxxvii [also arr. kbd, Lbl (part autograph)]
B90–93	361/2	4 marches (E, E, E, B); CW xxxvii [also arr. kbd, Lbl (part autograph)
YB85–6	360/3	Due marce … Prince Walles (E, E), 2 cl, 2 hn, bn; spurious, by C.F. Abel

chamber music

B78	302/1	Sestetto (C), ob, 2 hn, vn, vc, kbd; CW xli [arr. kbd, vn in Three Favorite Quartetts and One Quintett (1785), = t311/3]
B Inc 5	305/1	Quintet (B), 2 vn/ob, va, vc/bn, bc; CW xli
B70–75	303/1	Six Quintettos (C, G, F, E, A, D), fl, ob, vn, va, bc, op.11 (1774); CW xli
B76–7	304/6	Deux quintetts (D, F), op.22 (1785), fl, ob, vn, vc, kbd; CW xli [arr. kbd, vn in Three Favorite Quartetts and One Quintett (1785) = t311/2, 4]
B51–6	306/1	Six Quartettos (C, D, E, F, G, B), fl, vn, va, vc, op.8 (1772); CW xl
B57–9	309/1	3 qts (D, C, A), fl/vn, vn, va, bc, nos.1, 3, 5 in Six Quartettos … by Messrs Bach, Abel and Giardini (1776); CW xl
B60	—	Qt (B), 2 vn, va, vc, no.1 in Six Quatuors … par J.C. Bach et C.F. Abel, op.14 (Paris, 1776); CW xl [also arr. eng hn, vn, va, vc, I-Gl; erroneously attrib. Haydn, hII:B4]
B66	310/9	Quartetto (G), vn, 2 vc, hpd, op.2 (Offenbach, 1783); CW xl [arr. hpd, vn in Three Favorite Quartetts and One Quintett (1785) = t311/5]
B61–4	307/4	Four Quartettos (C, D, G, C), op.19 (1784): nos. 1, 3, for 2 fl, va, vc; no.2 for fl, ob/fl, va, vc; no.4 for 2 fl, vn; CW xl [arr. hpd/pf, vn, fl, vc (c1787)]
B30–35	314/5	Six Trios (B, A, E, G, D, C), 2 vn, va/bc, op.2 (1763), also as op.4 (Amsterdam, 1767), in Breitkopf suppl. 1766 as first 6 of set of 12 (see also t317/5); CW xxxix
B36–41	317/5	6 trios (G, D, E, F, B, E), 2 vn, bc, in Breitkopf suppl. 1766 as second 6 of set of 12 (see also t314/5); CW xxxix
B43–8	313/1	Six sonates (F, G, D, C, D, E), hpd, vn/fl, vc, op.2 (1764); CW xxxix
B42	311/6	Sonata (B), 2 vn, vc, no.1 in Six Sonatas … by Messrs Bach, Abel and Kammel (1777); CW xxxix
B49–50	323/5	2 sonatas (C, A), hpd/pf, vn, vc, nos.1–2 in Four Sonatas and Two Duetts op.15 (1778); CW xxxix
B Inc 3	330/5	Sonata (B), harp, (vn, vc)/hpd, no.6 in Musical Remains, ed. E. Jones (c1796) [1st movt based on 1st movt of wB78; CW xxxix
B Inc 2	317/7	Trio sonata (G), 2 fl/vn, bc; CW xxxix
B20–26	332/4	[7] sonatas (F, D, G, A, G, D, F), hpd, vn; CW xxxviii
B27	—	Sonata (A), hpd, vn; CW xxxviii
B2–7	322/1	Six Sonatas (B, C, G, A, F, D), hpd/pf, vn, op.10 (1773), also for 2 vn, va, bc, op.17 (Paris, c1779); CW xxxviii [nos.1, 3, 5 arr. kbd, va da gamba, private collection, USA]
B8–9	324/2	2 sonatas (D, B), hpd/pf, vn, nos.3–4 in Four Sonatas and Two Duetts op.15 (1778); CW xxxviii
B10–15	325/1	Six Sonatas (D, G, C, A, D, F), hpd/pf, vn/fl, op.16 (1779/R); CW xxxviii [other versions of no.6, private collection, USA, and CW xlviii/3]
B16–19	326/3	4 sonatas (C, D, E, G), hpd/pf, vn/fl, nos.1–4 in Four Sonatas and Two Duetts op.18 (c1781); CW xxxviii
—	—	Sonata (F), hpd, va da gamba, private collection, USA [1st movt from op.10 no.5, 2nd movt from ob conc. wB80, t287/6
Doubtful: 4 canzonette (F, E, G, B), 2 vn, t336/6, arr. of Sei canzonette op.6 nos.1, 4, 3, 2; 2 qts (F, C), fl/vn, va, vc, in L’anné musicale (Liège, 1776); Qt (F), fl/vn, vn, va, vc I-Rdp; 2 qt (F, D), fl/vn, vn, va, vc, Gl; Sonata (C), gui, vn (c1770), CW xxxviii; Six Sonatas (C, G, D, A, E, B), hpd/pf, vn/fl, op.19 (1783), t327/5; Three [= 6] Sonatas [i, ii] (C, D, F, G, A, B), hpd/pf, vn, op.20 (c1785), t329/1; Trois sonates (E, B, D), hpd/pf, vn, op.21 (Paris, c1784), t344/2; Sonata (F), hpd, fl, D-Bsb (2 copies: 1 attrib J.C. Bach, 1 attrib. C.P.E. Bach), US-Wc (attrib. ‘Sigr. Bach’), also attrib. W.F. Bach, ed. K. Marguerre (Celle, 1960), t332/1; Sonata (D), vn, bc, D-Bsb, ?lost, t3323/5; 3 sonatas (D, G, C), fl, vn, A-Wn, t337/1; Sonata (C), hpd/of, vn, in The Feast of Apollo (1788), t352/2; Trio sonata (F), 2 vn, bc, lost, formerly D-Bsb, t318/8; for others see wYB1–86

keyboard

for harpsichord unless otherwise stated

A22	—	Untitled piece [March]bwv Anh.131, in Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach; CW xlviii/3
A23–31	—	6 minuets (c, C, d, g, C, C), 2 polonaises (B, E), aria (a), c1750; CW xlii
A13	358/4	Solo (a), ? before 1755; CW xlii
A14	—	Sonata (A), I-Bc, Mc, MC; CW xlii
A16	—	Sonata (B), Bc; CW xlii
A15	—	Toccata (b), Bc, Mc, MC (as Sonata); CW xlii, xlviii/3 (2 versions)
A1–6	338/1	Six Sonatas (B, D, G, E, E, c), hpd/pf, op.5 (1766/R); CW xlii
C1b–6b	347/2	Six simphonies (D, C, E, B, F, G), op.3 (1769); CW xlii [see ‘Symphonies and overtures’]
A10b	—	A New Lesson (G), hpd/pf (1772) [early versions of movts from op.17 nos.4 and 1]
A21, 18	340/5	2 duets (G, C): 1 for 2 hpd/pf, 1 for hpd/pf 4 hands, in Four Sonatas and Two Duetts op.15 (1778); CW xlii
A7–12	341/1	Six Sonatas (G, c, E, G, A, B), hpd/pf, op.17 (1779/R), previously pubd as op.12 (Paris, 1773/4), CW xlii; other versions of nos.2–3, CW xlviii/3; see also A New Lesson, above
A19–20	343/3	2 duets (A, F), hpd/pf 4 hands, in Four Sonatas and Two Duetts op.18 (1781); CW xlii
—	—	2 marches (A, C), GB-Lbl (part autograph)
For doubtful works see wYA1–54

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

BurneyH

DNB (S.W. Roe)

EitnerQ

FiskeETM

FétisB

GerberNL

MGG1 (H. Wirth)

WalterG

The Lyric Muse Revived in Europe (London, 1768)

G.J. Vogler: Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (Mannheim, 1778–81/R)

ABC Dario Musico (Bath, 1780)

C.F. Cramer, ed.: Magazin der Musik (Hamburg, 1783–6/R)

H. Angelo: Reminiscences of Henry Angelo (London, 1828–30)

Earl of Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences of an Old Amateur (London, 1824, 4/1834/R)

[T. MacKinley]: Mrs Cornely’s Entertainments at Carlisle House, Soho Square (Bradford, c1840)

Mrs V.D. Broughton, ed.: Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: being the Journals of Mrs. Papendiek (London, 1887)

M. Schwarz: Johann Christian Bach (1735–82): sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1901)

M. Schwarz: ‘Johann Christian Bach’, SIMG, ii (1900–01), 401–54

M. Brenet: ‘Un fils du grand Bach à Paris en 1779–1779’, Guide musical, xlviii (1902), 551–3, 571–3

H. Abert: ‘Joh. Christian Bachs italienische Opern und ihr Einfluss auf Mozart’, ZMw, i (1919), 313–28

G. de Saint-Foix: ‘A propos de Jean-Chrétien Bach’, RdM, vii (1926), 83–91

H.P. Schökel: Johann Christian Bach und die Instrumentalmusik seiner Zeit (Wolfenbüttel, 1926)

F. Tutenberg: Die Sinfonik Johann Christian Bachs (Wolfenbüttel, 1928)

C.S. Terry: John Christian Bach (London, 1929 [review by H. Miesner in ZMw, xvi (1934), 182]; rev. 2/1967/R by H.C.R. Landon [review by S. Sadie in MT, cviii (1967), 330–31)

A. Wenk: Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Opernschaffens von J. Christian Bach (diss., U. of Frankfurt, 1932)

C. Sartori: ‘A Milano J.C. Bach in disaccordo con il tesoriere’, La Scala, no.2 (1950), 29–31

S. Sadie: ‘The Wind Music of J.C. Bach’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 107–17

R. Seebandt: Arientypen Johann Christian Bachs (diss., Humboldt U., Berlin, 1956)

E.O.D. Downes: The Operas of Johann Christian Bach as a Reflection of the Dominant Trends in Opera Seria 1750–1780 (diss., Harvard U., 1958)

J.A. White: The Concerted Symphonies of John Christian Bach (diss., U. of Michigan, 1958) [incl. edns of 3 concerted syms.]

E.J. Simon: ‘A Royal Manuscript: Ensemble Concertos by J.C. Bach’, JAMS, xii (1959), 161–77

C.B. Oldman: ‘Mozart’s Scena for Tenducci’, ML, xlii (1961), 44–52

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Frühe Schriftzeugnisse der beiden jüngsten Bach-Söhne’, BJb 1963–4, 61–9

S. Kunze: ‘Die Vertonungen der Arie “Non sò d’onde viene” von J. Chr. Bach und von W.A. Mozart’, AnMc, no.2 (1965), 85–111

E. Warburton: ‘J.C. Bach’s Operas’, PRMA, xcii (1965–6), 95–106

A. Weinmann: ‘Eine “Arie von Bach” für die Storace’, ÖMz, xxi (1966), 53–61

B. Matthews: ‘J.C. Bach in the West Country’, MT, cviii (1967), 702–4

B.A. Mekota: The Solo and Ensemble Keyboard Works of Johann Christian Bach (diss., U. of Michigan, 1969)

M.A.H. Vos: The Liturgical Choral Works of Johann Christian Bach (diss., Washington U., 1969)

E. Warburton: A Study of Johann Christian Bach’s Operas (diss., U. of Oxford, 1969)

P.M. Young: The Bachs 1500–1850 (London, 1970)

N. Krabbe: ‘J.C. Bach’s Symphonies and the Breitkopf Thematic Catalogue’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 233–54

I.S. Baierle: Die Klavierwerke von Johann Christian Bach (Graz, 1974)

J. Bolen: The Five Berlin Cembalo Concertos P390 of Johann Christian Bach: a Critical Edition (diss., Florida State U., 1974)

B. Matthews: ‘The Davies Sisters, J.C. Bach and the Glass Harmonica’, ML, lvi (1975), 150–69

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Die Bach-Überlieferung: Pläydoyer für ein notwendiges Buch’, BMw, xvii (1975), 45–57, esp. 48

H. Brofsky: ‘J.C. Bach, G.B. Sammartini, and Padre Martini: a Concorso in Milan in 1762’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 63–8

D.J. Keahey: The Genoa Manuscripts: Recently Rediscovered Trios of J.C. Bach (diss., U. of Texas at Austin, 1977)

F.C. Petty: Italian Opera in London 1760–1800 (Ann Arbor, 1980)

D. McCulloch: ‘Mrs Papendiek and the London Bach’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 26–9

R. Maunder: ‘J.C. Bach’s “Endimione”’, ibid., 474–5

S.W. Roe: ‘J.C. Bach (1735–1782): Towards a New Biography’, ibid., 23–6

E. Warburton: ‘J.C. Bach’s Latin Church Music’, ibid., 781–4

S.W. Roe: ‘J.C. Bach’s Vauxhall Songs: a New Discovery’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 675–6

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Wann begann die “italienische Reise” des jüngsten Bach-Sohnes?’, BJb 1983, 119–22

R. Maunder: ‘J.C. Bach and the Basset Horn’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 42–7

J. Small: ‘J.C. Bach Goes to Law’, MT, cxxvi (1985), 526–9

S.W. Roe: ‘J.C. Bach and “new Music, at a more Reasonable Expence”’, ibid., 529–31

E. Warburton: ‘“Lucio Silla”: by Mozart and J.C. Bach’, ibid., 726–30

S. Staral: ‘Aufführungspraktische Aspekte im Klavierwerk von Johann Christian Bach, dargestellt an den Sonaten Op.V’, Mf, ix (1986), 245–53

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Noch einmal: Wann begann “die italienische Reise” des jüngsten Bach-Sohnes?’, BJb 1988, 235–6

J.R. Stevens: ‘Concerto no.6 in F minor: by Johann Christian Bach?’, RMARC, no.21 (1988), 53–6

S.W. Roe: The Keyboard Music of J.C. Bach (New York, 1989)

H. Gärtner: Johann Christian Bach, Mozarts Freund und Lehrmeister (Munich, 1989; Eng. trans., 1994)

C. Esch: ‘Lucio Silla’: vier Opera-seria-Vertonungen aus der Zeit zwischen 1770 und 1780 (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1991)

L. Finscher, ed.: Die Mannheimer Hofkapelle im Zeitalter Carl Theodors (Mannheim, 1991)

R. Maunder: ‘J.C. Bach and the Early Piano in London’, JRMA, cxvi (1991), 201–10

S. Staral: ‘Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Johann Christian Bach und Mannheim’, 176 Tage W.A. Mozarts in Mannheim, ed. K. von Welck and L. Homering (Mannheim, 1991), 164–73 [exhibition catalogue]

C. Esch: ‘Michele Mortellari, Johann Christian Bach’, MISM, xxxviii (1991), 133–58

M. Sickbert: ‘The Mozarts in Milan, February 9–10, 1770: a Funeral Performance of Johann Christian Bach’s Dies Irae and Vespers Music?’, MJb 1991, 461–7

M. Feldman: ‘Mozart and his Elders: Opera-Seria Arias, 1766–1775’, ibid., 564–75

K.-J. Sachs: ‘Impuls und Ingenium: der Kopfsatz aus Mozarts Haffner-Sinfoni KV 385 vor dem Hintergrund von Johann Christian Bachs “Grand Ouverture” Es-Dur op.19/1’, ibid., 844–51

R. Allorto: Gli anni milanesi di Giovanni Cristiano Bach e le sue composizioni sacre (Milan, 1992)

E. Warburton: ‘Johann Christian Bach und die Freimaurer-Loge zu den Neun Musen in London’, BJb 1992, 113–17

C. Price, J. Milhous and R. Hume: The Impresario’s Ten Commandments (London, 1992)

M. Argent, ed.: Recollections of R.J.S. Stevens, an Organist in Georgian London (London, 1992)

U. Leisinger: Die Bach-Quellen der Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha (Gotha, 1993)

S.W. Roe: ‘Johann Christian Bach’, The Viking Opera Guide, ed. A. Holden (London, 1993), 43–6

D.E. Freeman: ‘Johann Christian Bach and the Early Classical Italian Masters’, Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, ed. R.L. Marshall (New York, 1994), 230–69

C. Price, J. Milhous and E. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995)

Y. Kobayashi: ‘Breitkopf Attributions and Research on the Bach Family’, J.S. Bach, the Breitkopfs and the Eighteenth-Century Music Trade, Bach Perspectives, ii, ed. G.B. Stauffer (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1996), 53–64

Y. Kobayashi: ‘On the Identification of Breitkopf’s Manuscripts’, ibid., 107–22

R. Charteris: ‘The Music Collections of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg: a Survey of its British Holdings Prior to the Second World War’, RMARC, no.30 (1997), 1–138

C. Eisen: ‘The Mozarts’ Salzburg Library’, Mozart Studies 2 (Oxford, 1997), 85–138

U. Leisinger: ‘“Berlinischer Oden und Lieder” von Bückeburger, Londoner und Hallischen Bach’, JbSIM 1997, 117–21

U. Leisinger and P. Wollny: Die Bach-Quellen der Bibliotheken in Brüssel (Hildesheim, 1997)

B. Robins, ed.: The John Marsh Journals: the Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (1752–1828) (Stuyvesant, NY, 1998)

S.W. Roe: ‘The Sextet in C Major, by J.C. or J.C.F. Bach?’, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven: Studies in the Music of the Classical Period: Essays in Honour of Alan Tyson, ed. S. Brandenburg (Oxford, 1998), 13–19

S.W. Roe: ‘Neuerkenntnisse zu einigen autographen Notenhandschriften von Johann Christian Bach’, BJb 1999, 179–90

S.W. Roe: ‘The Paris Bach’ Bunte Blätter: Klaus Mecklenburg zum 23. Februar 2000, ed. R. Elvers and A. Moirandat, (Basle, 2000), 247–54

(13) Johann Michael Bach

(b Struth, nr Schmalkalden, 9 Nov 1745; d Elberfeld, 1820). Composer. He was descended from a Hessian line of Bachs that can be traced back to a Caspar Bach (d Struth, c1640) and already had many branches in the 17th century. It is probable, but cannot be proved, that this line was originally connected with the main Wechmar line of the Bach family. Johann Michael evidently went on his travels at an early date, and in about 1767 visited Holland, where he was in touch with the Amsterdam music publisher Hummel; he then went to England and America. On his return he studied law in 1779–80 at the University of Göttingen, where he met J.N. Forkel, and from 1781 at Leipzig University. He was practising as a lawyer in Güstrow, Mecklenburg, in 1790 but composed music at the same time, and in 1793 (or earlier) he was appointed Kantor and organist in Tann. He was then active as a music theorist and composer in Elberfeld, and when he died there he was employed as a music teacher at the Gymnasium.

As well as an early set of piano concertos (the finale of no.6 is a fugue on B–A–C–H), Johann Michael Bach published a treatise in 1780 which had a surprisingly wide distribution in its time. His musical style is reminiscent of that of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (49) and rather derivative. Two of his sons were also musicians, Johann Georg and Georg Friedrich (see §I above).

WORKS

6 Klavierkonzerte, C, G, D, F, D, B, op.1 (Amsterdam, 1767)

Cants.: Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen, D-Bsb; Jehova, Vater der Weisen, Bsb; others GOl

Jauchzet dem Herren, motet, GOl

Kurze und systematische Anleitung zum General-Bass und der Tonkunst überhaupt (Kassel, 1780)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Lämmerhirt: ‘Ein hessischer Bach-Stamm’, BJb 1936, 53–89

H.-J. Schulze and C. Wolff: Bach Repertorium (forthcoming)

(14) Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach

(84) (b Bückeburg, 24 May 1759; d Berlin, 25 Dec 1845). Keyboard player and composer, son of (11) Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. He was baptized on 27 May, with Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe standing godfather. W.F.E. Bach was musically educated by his father and Christian Friedrich Geyer, Kantor of the Stadtkirche, Bückeburg. In 1778 he went with his father to London and remained there in the care of his uncle (12) J.C. Bach, making a name for himself as a pianist and keyboard teacher. He appeared at one of the Bach-Abel concerts in Hanover Square as early as 6 December 1778, playing a sonata of his own, and his first keyboard and chamber works were published by leading English firms. Some time after the death of his uncle on 1 January 1782, W.F.E. Bach returned to Germany. His route took him through Paris and the Netherlands, where he met the publisher J.J. Hummel in Amsterdam, and then to north Germany, where he gave concerts in Oldenburg and elsewhere. According to his own account, he stayed for some time with his uncle (9) C.P.E. Bach in Hamburg before settling in 1784 in Minden, near Bückeburg. He seems to have given himself the title of Musikdirektor, since there is no evidence that such a post actually existed. His position, however, allowed him to perform dramatic works and cantatas (probably including compositions by his father). He received particular encouragement from the Kammerpräsident Franz Wilhelm Traugott von Breitenbauch (1739–96), whose daughter Antoinette (b 1766) was probably his pupil. Cantatas in celebration of the royal house of Prussia, performed in 1786 and 1788, secured for Bach a post in Berlin, where he arrived at the end of March or beginning of April 1789. There he succeeded Christian Kalkbrenner (1755–1806) as Kapellmeister to the widowed Queen Elisabeth Christine and he also taught keyboard to Queen Friederike. From 1798 at the latest he was employed as teacher ‘to the reigning Queen [Luise] and all the brothers and sisters of the King [Friedrich Wilhelm III]’, as he put it in a letter to W.C. Müller on 14 May 1830.

Bach’s salary in Berlin was a modest one, and in a letter of 15 October 1809 to the privy councillor and Oberpräsident von Altenstein, now lost, he dwelt on his poverty-stricken situation. It was improved only by a pension of 300 thaler thought to have been granted by Prince Heinrich in 1811 after the death of Queen Luise. Thereupon Bach, who had previously played an active part in Berlin concerts as a keyboard virtuoso and violinist, retired from public life. In 1843 he was present at the ceremonial unveiling of the J.S. Bach monument in Leipzig. He was twice married and had four children. He was survived by his second wife and an unmarried daughter from each marriage, one of them a good soprano and the other an alto.

W.F.E. Bach was a stylish if not outstandingly talented composer. His extant works are varied and substantial, but too many have been lost for a true assessment to be made. Apart from the few that were printed, they remained confined to the courts of Berlin and Bückeburg, which he regularly supplied with compositions until the death of Princess Juliane in 1799. Contrary to previous assumptions, most of the surviving works date from his Berlin period. Those written in London show him as a typical representative of the early London pianoforte school in the tradition of J.C. Bach and Clementi, while of the occasional cantatas written in Minden, only one survives (in vocal score). In Berlin he composed, as well as orchestral works for Queen Christine Elisabeth’s Kapelle, a great many pedagogical keyboard pieces for two, four or occasionally even six hands. The keyboard works are typical of early Romantic music, while the vocal compositions in particular are notable for a sense of humour and irony; they include, for instance, a Concerto buffo, probably composed for his royal pupils, which employs toy instruments and features a singing Kapellmeister, probably Bach himself. Some of the songs and keyboard pieces which circulated at the turn of the century, either singly or in collections, were very popular. From his Minden period onwards Bach was associated with freemasonry, and wrote several masonic songs. He apparently closed his career as a composer in 1822 with the publication of 12 grandes variations on the folksong ‘Gestern Abend war Vetter Michel da’, bearing in the autograph manuscript the title Reminiscences, ou XII Grandes variations sur un air allemand populaire, with a dedication to two of his former royal pupils. However, he is said to have written an overture of rejoicing for Prince Heinrich the year before his death.

The extant compositions do not support claims by Ledebur and others that Bach was an adherent of the strict style and despised modern music; there has probably been some confusion here with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was almost certainly also the composer of the strongly contrapuntal Trio in G major for two flutes and viola, published as W.F.E. Bach’s by Rudolf Ermeler. Bach’s modest and unassuming nature was an obstacle to a wide distribution of his compositions, and he was soon forgotten after his retirement in 1811.

WORKS

keyboard

4 Progressive Lessons and 2 Duets (London, 1782) [also attrib. J.C. Bach]

5 Sonatas and 1 Duett (London, c1785) [also attrib. J.C. Bach]

6 sonates (Berlin, ?1796)

16 pieces, in F.F. Franz, ed.: Musikalisches Journal (Berlin, 1799–1800)

Tempo di minuetto, with 7 variations, S-Smf* (Berlin, ?c1800), print lost

2 pieces, in Apollo, v (Stockholm, 1805–6)

12 pieces, in Monatsfrüchte für Klavier (Berlin, n.d.)

XII grandes variations sur un air allemand populaire (Berlin, 1822)

Amusement [Sonata, Andante with variation, Sonatina, Walzer, Sonatina], D-Bsb*; Das Dreyblatt, pf 6 hands, GB-Lbl*; Divertimento, Lbl*; Doppelsonate, by 1805, lost; Variations on God save Frederick our King, doubtful, Lbl; Grand Sonata, E, 1778, Lbl*; Grand Walzer, D, D-Bsb*; Le melancholique, GB-Lbl*; Minuet, D, CH-SObo; Variations, C, GB-Lbl*; 6 Waltzer, D-Bsb*, 3 ed. K. Geiringer (Vienna, 1936)

chamber

6 sonates, C, D, B, E, F, G, pf, vn (Berlin, c1781)

3 sonates, C, B, E, pf, vn (Berlin and Amsterdam, c1789)

6 Sonatas, C, D, F, B, E, A, pf, vn, vc (London, n.d.); nos.1, 2 ed. F. Goebels (Wolfenbüttel, 1986)

Divertimento, E, cl, 2 hn, vn, va, vc, GB-Lbl*; Fantasia, E, fl, cl, 2 hn, 2 vn, va, vc, D-Bsb; Parthie, E, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, GB-Lbl*; Sestetto, E, cl, 2 hn, vn, va, vc, D-Bsb, GB-Lbl*, ed. K. Janetzky (Halle, 1951); Sinfonia, C, D-Bsb*; Sinfonia, C, GB-Lbl*

Lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799: Divertimento, E; Qt, ? pf, str

orchestral

Ballet-pantomime (ov., 43 dance movts), GB-Lbl*; Conc., E, 2 kbd, orch, D-Bsb; Overture, D, 1793, private collection, USA; Sinfonia, C, private collection, USA; 2 syms., C, G, GB-Lbl*

Lost: 3 concs., G, E, E, kbd, orch, formerly D-Bsb; Jubel-Ouverture, 1844, mentioned in obituary; Sinfonia, C, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799; 2 intermezzos, C, D, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1799; Largo, A, kbd, orch, doubtful, formerly D-Bsb; 2 ovs., B, E, doubtful, listed in EitnerQ

vocal

Stabat mater, ? by 1784, lost, mentioned in Meusel

Colma (Ossian), perf. Minden, 1 May 1785, music lost

Der edelsten Freude geweihet (S.F. Martini), cant. for birthday of Friedrich II of Prussia, perf. Minden, 24 Jan 1786, music lost

Liesst von unsrer Wang herab (Martini), cant. for birthday of Friedrich II of Prussia, perf. Minden, 10 Sept 1786, music lost

Kommt vor sein Angesicht mit Jauchzen (Martini), cant. for installation of Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, perf. Minden, 28 Oct 1786, music lost

Triumph, Triumph, Westphalia (Martini), cant. for visit of Friedrich Wilhelm II, perf. Minden, 5 June 1788, A-Wn*, vs (Rinteln, 1791)

Wer spricht es aus, was wir verloren haben (Martini), funeral cant. for Pastor Wesselmann, perf. Minden, 6 Feb 1789, music lost

Vater unser (S.A. Mahlmann), T, B. choir, orch, by 1799, GB-Lbl*; ed. in Stuttgarter Bach-Ausgaben, ser.A, v, suppl. (Stuttgart, c1977)

Der Theaterprinzipal, by 1809, lost, mentioned in AMZ, xii (1809–10)

Auf muntere Zecher, T, B, pf, D-Bsb

Columbus, oder Die Entdeckung von Amerika (after F. Schiller), T, B, chorus, orch, GB-Lbl*

Concerto buffo, B, pf, toy insts, *Lbl

Der Schmerz, der Trost (Erinnerung an Schillers Sterbetag), 4vv, pf, Lbl*

Der Wechselschlag, lost, listed in estate catalogue of W.H. Cummings (London, 1917)

Durchs Leben führt so mancher Pfad (Der Pfad des Lebens), T, T, B, pf, D-Bsb, GB-Lbl*

L’amour est un bien suprême; Ninfe se liete: S, orch, Lbl*

Schön o schön ist diese Welt (Die Ruhe des Lebens) – Sie lebt (Der Dichter und der Komponist), T, B, pf, *Lbl

Wie sehr lieb ich mein Mädchen nicht (Der Vorsatz), 4vv, pf, Lbl*

Lieder: Auswahl [7] deutscher und [2] französischer Lieder und Arietten (Berlin, c1798); Etwas lieben und entbehren (An Lauren), in Blumenkranz dem neuen Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1800); Berlinade, oder Lindenlied (F. Monti) (Berlin, n.d.); Freude, schöner Götterfunken, ode (F. Schiller) (Berlin, n.d.), lost; Rheinweinlied (C. Müchler) (Berlin, n.d.); Ruf zur Freude, Lbl*; Seid gegrüsst, ihr grün bemooste Hügel (C.F.D. Schubart), in J.C.F. Bach, ed.: Musikalische Nebenstunden (Rinteln, 1787); 1 other in J.M. Böheim: Auswahl von Maurer-Gesängen, iii (Berlin, 1814)

Cavatines, ?S, orch, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventories, 1799, 1865

6 It. arias (Metastasio and others), S, orch, by ?1799, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1865, some listed in estate catalogue of J.F. Reichart (Berlin, 1815)

Oue des maux loin de toi, S, orch, by ?1799, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventory, 1865

3 romances, lost, listed in Bückeburg inventories, 1799, 1865

Doubtful: Als einst die Gottheit Völker zu beglücken (Martini), cant. for birthday of Queen Luise of Prussia, ? perf. Berlin/Minden, 10 March 1793/4, music lost; Er segnet Au, er segnet Felder, cant., D-BO; 3 Gedichte (Kahlert), T, pf (Leipzig, n.d.), ? by A.W. Bach; Lobsingt dem Gott der Ernte, cant., BO; song, in F.F. Hůrka, ed.: Auswahl maurerischer Gesänge (n.p., c1803)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

GerberNL

C. von Lederbur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon (Berlin, 1861/R)

J.G. Meusel: Teutsches Künstlerlexikon (Lemgo, 1778, 2/1808–14)

Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen, xxiii (Weimar, 1847)

H. Miesner: ‘Urkundliche Nachrichten über die Familie Bach in Berlin’, BJb 1932, 157–63

G. Hey: ‘Zur Biographie Johann Friedrich Bachs und seiner Familie’, BJb 1933, 77–85

K. Geiringer: The Bach Family: Seven Generations of Creative Genius (London, 1954; Ger. trans., enlarged, 1958; enlarged 2/1977)

H. Wohlfahrt: ‘Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach: Werkverzeichnis’, Schaumburg-Lippische Mitteilungen, xvi (1964), 27–32

J.K. von Schroeder: ‘Verschollene Werke von Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, Musikdirektor in Minden’, Mindener Mitteilungen 1965, 171–2

M. Jahrmärker: Ossian, eine Figur und eine Idee des europäischen Musiktheaters um 1800 (Cologne, 1993)

U. Leisinger: ‘Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, der letzte musikalische Enkel Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732–1795): ein Komponist zwischen Barock und Klassik, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 8 June – 11 Aug 1995 (Bückeburg, 1995) [exhibition catalogue], 71–82, 127–34 [incl. list of works]

A. Rockstroh: ‘Der Hofkapellmeister, Cembalist und Musiklehrer der Königlichen Familie: zum 150. Todestag von Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, dem letzten musikalischen Enkel Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Neue berlinische Musikzeitung, x/2 (1995), 97–102

B–A–C–H.

In German nomenclature, the letters of Bach’s name provide a motif (ex.1) which is frequently found as a germinal idea in musical compositions. It was used by Bach himself in the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV of the Art of Fugue (1751), and its possibilities were earlier mentioned in Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon (1732/R). Probably because of the context in which Bach used it, later composers have mostly regarded this rather intractable motif as a challenge to their contrapuntal skill. Bach’s son, Johann Christian, and his pupil, J.L. Krebs, both wrote organ fugues on it, but its wider popularity follows the 19th-century Bach revival and the development of a harmonic vocabulary which could more easily accommodate its tonal ambiguities. Schumann, whose interest in letter-pitch equations is well known, wrote six fugues on B–A–C–H (op.60) for organ or pedal piano, and Liszt, Reger and Busoni also used the motif to raise imposing contrapuntal monuments to its originator. Other 19th-century composers who have used it include Rimsky-Korsakov and d’Indy.

The B–A–C–H motif is easily incorporated into a totally chromatic idiom and has been widely used by members and disciples of the Second Viennese School, e.g. by Schoenberg as an incidental theme in his Variations op.31 for orchestra and Third String Quartet, by Webern as the basic set of his String Quartet, and by Humphrey Searle as a motto in his First Symphony. For a list of over 400 B–A–C–H-inspired works see Boyd. The name B–A–C–H has also been expressed as a single note (ex.2).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S.W. Robinson: The B–A–C–H Motive in German Keyboard Compositions from the Time of J.S. Bach to the Present (thesis, U. of Illinois, 1972)

U. Prinz, J. Dorfmüller and K. Küster: ‘Die Tonfolge B–A–C–H in Kompositionen des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts: ein Verzeichnis’, 300 Jahre Sebastian Bach (Tutzing, 1985), 389–419 [exhibition catalogue]

W. Häcker: ‘Erberezeption im Sozialismus: das Tonsymbol B–A–C–H im Musikschaffen der DDR’, BMw, xxxi (1989), 266–78

M. Boyd: ‘BACH’, Bach, Oxford Composer Companions (Oxford, 1999)

MALCOLM BOYD

Bach, August Wilhelm

(b Berlin, 4/5 Oct 1796; d Berlin, 15 April 1869). German organist, teacher and composer. He was not a descendant of J.S. Bach. He received his earliest musical training from his father Gottfried Bach, organist at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Berlin, and accompanied services there while still a boy. After completing his secondary education he took a teaching position in a noble household outside Berlin. On his father’s death in 1812 he returned to seek the post of organist at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche but did not succeed in obtaining the situation. He received instead an appointment in 1814 at the Gertraudenkirche, a less prominent position. During his two-year term there he studied counterpoint and fugue with Zelter and the piano with Ludwig Berger. He joined the Berlin Singakademie in 1815. He was appointed organist and music director at the important Marienkirche in 1816. In the following years he studied the violin with C.W. Henning and broadened his general education through travel and the study of languages. In 1819 Bach was one of the first members of Berger’s ‘jüngere Liedertafel’. The next year he became music director and teacher in Stettin. In 1822 he was engaged to teach the organ, harmony and chorale setting at Zelter’s new Institut für die Ausbildung von Organisten und Musiklehren, and in 1826 he received a commission to oversee organ building in Prussia; this gave him not only a wide influence on organ building but also the opportunity of travelling throughout Europe. A brief organ textbook by him survives in several manuscript exemplars; it gives valuable information about organ builders and instruments at the time. When Zelter died in 1832 Bach succeeded him as director of the institute. He was elected to the senate of the Royal Academy of the Arts in 1833 and taught theory and composition there. In 1845 he was awarded the medal of the Order of the Red Eagle and in 1858 was granted the title Royal Professor.

As organist Bach not only played for services but also gave important chamber and concert performances, becoming thereby a notable exponent of the works of J.S. Bach. Of his organ students Felix Mendelssohn is the most famous, though many others won local prominence in the mid-19th century. His organ method, Der praktische Organist (c1840), and his Choralbuch für das Gesangbuch zum gottesdienstlichen Gebrauch für evangelische Gemeinden, first published in 1830 and repeatedly revised for use until well after his death, established his reputation. His largest work is the oratorio Bonifaz, der deutsche Apostel, not inappropriately described by a contemporary critic as ‘a hotchpotch of opera and church’ (NZM, xiv, 1841, p.61). The style of his compositions, mostly sacred and keyboard music, shows his attempt to accommodate the academic tendencies inherent in his studies and his profession as a teacher to the lyricism and saccharine harmonies popular in his time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BlumeEK

FrotscherG, ii

MGG1 suppl. (T.-M. Langner)

ScheringGO, 427, 457

SchillingE

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin’s (Berlin, 1861/R)

H. Mendel and A. Reissmann, eds.: Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1870–80, 3/1890–91/R)

D. Siebenkäs: Ludwig Berger: sein Leben und seine Werke unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seines Liedschaffens (Berlin, 1963), 25–6, 244

A. Meyer-Hanno: Georg Abraham Schneider und seine Stellung im Musikleben Berlins (Berlin, 1965), 139, 141, 160ff

S. Jeans: ‘August Wilhelm Bach und seine Lehrbuch für Orgel’, Orgel, Orgelmusik und Orgelspiel: Festschrift Michael Schneider, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1985), 65–77

C. Albrecht: ‘August Wilhelm Bach (1796–1869): ein Berliner Organist, Organologe und Orgelpädagoge des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Studien zur Berliner Musikgeschichte: eine Bestandaufnahme, ed. H. Seeger and W. Goldhan (Berlin, 1988), 105–16

DOUGLASS SEATON

Bach, Cecilia.

See Grassi, Cecilia.

Bach, Jan (Morris)

(b Forrest, IL, 11 Dec 1937). American composer. He studied with Kenneth Gaburo and Robert Kelly (University of Illinois, BM 1959, DMA 1971), Donald Martino (Yale University, 1960), Aaron Copland and Roberto Gerhard (Tanglewood, 1961) and Thea Musgrave (Aldeburgh and London, 1974). The recipient of many honours, including a Koussevitzky Award (1961), he taught at the University of Tampa (Florida) (1965–6) before joining the music department at Northern Illinois University.

Bach's accessible style combines traditional and contemporary musical elements. A predominant aspect of his work is his charming and inexhaustible sense of humour. Four Two-Bit Contraptions (1964), for example, is a study in musical caricature cast in the form of rags, waltzes and other dances. Later works, such as Rounds and Dances (1980), are more eclectic in nature, employing playful and teasing thematic materials, but making more strenuous demands on the performer. His operatic works, the most frequently performed being The Student from Salamanca, exhibit an ingenious use of ensembles; contrapuntal textures are a primary feature. In all genres, Bach's works display both structural clarity and a subtle use of instrumental timbre.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: The System (1, Bach), New York, 5 March 1974; The Student from Salamanca (1, Bach), New York, 9 Oct 1980

Orch: Toccata, 1959; Dionysia, band, 1964; Burgundy Variations, 1968; Pf Conc., 1975; The Eve of St Agnes, band, 1976; Praetorius Suite, band, 1977; Hn Conc., 1983; Escapade, 1984; Dompes and Jompes, str, 1986; Hp Conc., 1986; Conc., tpt, wind, 1987; Euphonium Conc., 1990; Steel Drum Conc., 1994

Vocal: 3 Shakespeare Songs, chorus, 1960; 3 Choral Dances, female vv, 1969; 3 Sonnets on Woman, T, hpd, 1972; Hair Today, chorus, 1977; 5 Sylvan Songs, Bar, str qt, 1981; With Tpt and Drum, 16vv, pf, 1991; People of Note, vv, insts, 1993

Chbr: Str Trio, 1956; Str Qt, 1957; Four Two-Bit Contraptions, fl, hn, 1964; Laudes, brass qnt, 1971; Concert Variations, euphonium, pf, 1977; Qnt, tuba, str, 1978; Rounds and Dances, brass qnt, 1980; 8 Duetudes, fl, bn, 1983; Helix, a sax, fl, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, 2 perc, 1983; Anachronisms, str, 1991

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson2; Baker7

K.E. Shrum: An Analytical Commentary on the Euphonium and Tuba Music of Jan Bach (diss., Arizona State U., 1989)

R.H. Kornick: Recent American Opera: a Production Guide (New York, 1991), 36–9

JAMES P. CASSARO

Bach, Maria

(b Vienna, 1 March 1896; d Vienna, 26 Feb 1978). Austrian pianist and composer. Her ancestors, Catholic members of the Bach dynasty, came to Austria during Luther’s time. Brought up in an artistic milieu, she studied the violin (with Arnold Rosé) and the piano from an early age, presenting her first successful piano recital when she was ten. Although she decided to become a concert pianist, her Flohtanz for piano (1917) was so successful that she took up composition seriously, studying with Joseph Marx. In 1962 she received the first prize in the Buenos Aires International Composers’ Competition. In her later years she took up painting and writing poetry, composing music for her own poems. Her large output, in the late Romantic tradition, includes much vocal music with orchestra and smaller forces. A full account of her life and works is given in G.M. Eiselmair: Die männliche Gilde sehe sich vor! Die österreichische Komponistin Maria Bach (Vienna, 1996).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Silhouetten (ballet), orch, 1939

Vocal-orch (all song cycles): 4 Narrenlieder (after J. Bierbaum), Bar/T, orch, 1921; Japanischer Frühling (15 songs, trad. Jap. lyrics), S/T, orch, 1930; 4 Lieder des Hafis (trad. Persian texts), T/S, vc, orch/pf, 1940; 6 Marienlieder (trad. Ger. texts), S, str, 1944, rev. 1v, pf, 1944–5; 3 Orchesterlieder, S, orch, 1944; 2 Orchesterlieder, S, str, 1949; Das Marienleben (R.M. Rilke), S, Bar, str, 1952; 5 Orchesterlieder, S/T, 2 hn, str, 1952

Choral (for SATB): 7 Japanische Lieder (trad. Jap. texts), 1932; Draussen im weiten Krieg (C. Morgenstern), 1945; 4 Volkslieder (trad. Chin. texts), 1952

Other vocal (for 1v, pf): 6 Lieder (A. Wildgans, F. Hebbel, Hartlieb, G. Falke, Bierbaum, F. Werfel), 1925–8; 18 Lieder (Rilke), 1925–6; 5 Sonette (E. Barrett-Browning), 1940; 5 Lieder (song cycle, A. Lambe), 1959

Chbr and solo inst: Flohtanz, pf, 1917; Sonata, vc, 1922; Sonata, vc, pf, 1924; Pf Qnt, 1930; Str Qt no.1, 1935; Str Qnt, 1936; Str Qt no.2, 1937; Wilde Myrte (T. Lanjus), C (cl, vc, pf)/str, 1952; Stücke: Caravelle, Glockenspiel, Holztanz, pf, 1957

ROSARIO MARCIANO/R

Bach, P.D.Q.

See under Schickele, Peter.

Bach, Vincent [Schrottenbach, Vinzenz]

(b Baden, nr Vienna, 24 March 1890; d New York, 8 Jan 1976). American brass instrument maker of Austrian birth. He played the violin as a child and studied the trumpet (cornet) with Josef Weiss and Georg Stellwagen. In 1910 he earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the Maschinenbauschule in Wiener Neustadt. After a year as an Austrian navy bandsman, he studied the solo cornet repertory with Fritz Werner in Wiesbaden (1911–12), then toured as a cornet virtuoso in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Poland and England, arriving in New York in September 1914. While continuing his solo career in the USA, he played a season as assistant first trumpet with the Boston SO (1914–15) and a season as first trumpet with Dyaghilev’s ballet orchestra at the Metropolitan Opera House (1915–16). In 1916–18 he was bandmaster of the 306th Field Artillery Regiment. He became an American citizen in 1925.

On 1 April 1919 Bach set up a shop at 204 East 85th Street in New York, mainly for the purpose of making mouthpieces for his own use. In 1922 he moved to 241 East 41st Street, where he had ten employees; the manufacture of cornets and trumpets was started there in 1924. From 1928 to 1952 he was at 621 East 216th Street, with 50 employees, and began the manufacture of tenor and bass trombones. In 1953 he built a factory in Mount Vernon, New York. He sold his business to the H. & A. Selmer Co. in September 1961; four years later the firm moved to Elkhart, Indiana.

In combining his musical proficiency with his engineering training, Bach succeeded in establishing the most exacting standards of brass instrument design and construction. His point of departure, as with Elden Benge (1904–60), was the French Besson B trumpet; unlike Benge, however, who desired more flexible intonation, Bach strove to give his instruments a secure ‘feel’ for each note in the scale. Bach was also the first to set up a system for duplicating mouthpieces exactly. His instruments, especially trumpets, are employed more widely than any others. They are prized for their full and yet compact tone, with a solid core.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Fladmoe: The Contributions to Brass Instrument Manufacturing of Vincent Bach, Carl Geyer and Renold Schilke (diss., U. of Illinois, 1975)

A. Smith: ‘The Life and Work of Vincent Bach’, Journal of the International Trumpet Guild, xix (1994–5), no.2, pp.5–35; no.3, pp.4–34

EDWARD H. TARR

Bach-Abel Concerts.

London concert series organized between 1765 and 1781 by J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel; see London, §V, 2.

Bacharach, Burt (F.)

(b Kansas City, MO, 12 May 1928). American composer and pianist. He learnt the cello, drums and piano from an early age and developed a particular interest in jazz. He played as a night club pianist, and then served in the army, touring as a pianist (1950–52). He went on to study music at the Mannes College of Music, New York, the New School of Social Research, McGill University, Montreal and gained a scholarship to the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara, California. His composition teachers included Milhaud, Martinů and Cowell. Bacharach became an accompanist for Vic Damone, subsequently working with such performers as Polly Bergen, Steve Lawrence, the Ames Brothers and Paula Stewart, to whom he was married from 1953 to 1958. From 1958 to 1961 he toured internationally with Marlene Dietrich. Bacharach began writing arrangements and composing songs in the mid-1950s, working at the Brill Building and collaborating with the lyricist Hal David (b Brooklyn, NY, 25 May 1921), the brother of the lyricist Mack David, on a large number of popular songs, including The Story of My Life (1957), Magic Moments (1958), Anyone Who Had a Heart (1963), Walk on by (1964) and (There’s) Always something there to remind me (1964). Some 60 of their songs were recorded by their protégée Dionne Warwick and these, along with recordings by Dusty Springfield (notably I just don’t know what to do with myself and The Look of Love), remain among the best interpretations of the Bacharach-David repertory. Such songs, in addition to the Broadway musical Promises, Promises (1968), which was also staged to great success in Australia and Europe, made them one of the most successful songwriting teams in American music history.

Bacharach’s style, though eclectic, is well defined and accessible; its heterogenous elements include variable metre, irregular phrasing, pandiatonic and jazz harmonies, rhythmic ostinatos from various sources and effects from the black American styles. Many of his melodies – for example, Do you know the way to San Jose? – exhibit an internal momentum, created by the repetition of short, syncopated rhythmic patterns, which complements David’s clever, colloquial lyrics. Bacharach has written a number of film scores, and won two Academy Awards for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), for best score and best song (‘Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head’). He has also contributed to other films including the title song to Alfie (1966), and collaborated with Carole Bayer Sager on the song ‘Arthur’s Theme’ for Arthur (1981) which won an Academy Award. He married Sager in 1982.

A revival of interest in ‘lounge’ music and easy-listening in the early 1990s brought Bacharach back to international prominence, and his work has since been covered by such groups as REM and Oasis. He has continued to perform regularly in concert, wrote a further song for Dionne Warwick (Sunny Weather Love, 1993) and collaborated with Elvis Costello on the song God give me strength (1995) and the album Painted from Memory (1998).

WORKS

(selective list)

lyrics by H. David unless otherwise stated

Stage, writers shown as (lyricist; book authors): Promises, Promises (musical, 2, H. David; N. Simon after B. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond: The Apartment), Schubert, New York, 1 Dec 1968 [incl. I’ll never fall in love again; Promises, Promises; Whoever you are I love you]

Film scores and songs: What’s New, Pussycat?, 1965 [incl. Here I am, My Little Red Book]; Casino Royale, 1968 [incl. the Look of Love]; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969 [incl. Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head, Come touch the sun]; Lost Horizon (musical), 1973 [incl. Question me an answer, Reflections, The world is a circle]; Night Shift (C.B. Sager), 1982 [incl. That’s what friends are for]; Arthur 2: On the Rocks (Sager), 1988 [incl. Love is my decision]

Many popular songs, incl. Magic Moments, 1957; The Story of my Life, 1958; I just don’t know what to do with myself, 1962; Make it easy on yourself, 1962; (The Man who Shot) Liberty Valance, 1962; Close to You, 1963; Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, 1963; Wishin’ and Hopin’, 1963; Everyone needs someone to love, 1964; (There’s) Always something there to remind me, 1964; Walk on by, 1964; Don’t go breaking my heart, 1965; Trains and Boats and Planes, 1965; What the world needs now is love, 1965; Alfie, 1966; Made in Paris, 1966; Do you know the way to San Jose?, 1967; This guy’s in love with you, 1968; The Hurtin’ Kind, 1970; Arthur’s Theme (Sager, C. Cross and P. Allen), 1981; Sunny Weather Love, 1993; God give me strength (E. Costello), 1995

Principal publishers: Blue Seas, Jac, US Songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CBY 1970

D. Ewen: Popular American Composers (New York, 1972)

B.A. Lohof: ‘The Bacharach Phenomenon: a Study of Popular Heroism’, Popular Music and Society, i (1972), 73–82

R. Prendegast: A Neglected Art: a Critical Study in Films (New York, 1978)

J. Fitzgerald: ‘When the Brill Building Met Lennon-McCartney: Continuity and Change in the Early Evolution of the Mainstream Pop’, Popular Music and Society, xix (1995), 59–77

R. Platts: ‘Anyone who had a Heart: the Songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’, Discoveries (Dec 1997)

R.L. Doerschuk and H. Kubernik: ‘The Harmony of Opposites: Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach Explore the Art of Unlikely Collaboration on Painted from Memory’, Musician, no.242 (1999), 30–40 [interview]

MICHAEL J. BUDDS/R

Bachauer, Gina

(b Athens, 21 May 1910; d Athens, 22 Aug 1976). Greek pianist. Her father was from an Austrian family which had settled in Greece in 1877, while her mother came from near Trieste. Bachauer studied at the Athens Conservatory under Woldemar Freeman and later at the Ecole Normale, Paris, with Cortot. Freeman introduced her to Rachmaninoff, with whom she also took lessons. Her French solo début took place in the Salle Chopin, Paris, in 1929, and she first played in England in 1932 at the Aeolian Hall, London. In 1933 she won the medal of honour at an international piano competition in Vienna, and in the 1930s played concertos with the Paris SO conducted by Monteux and the Athens SO under Mitropoulos. For several years following her marriage in 1936 to John Christodoulo she lived in Alexandria, giving over 600 concerts for allied troops in various parts of northern Egypt during World War II. In 1946 she made her British orchestral début at the Albert Hall, London, playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the New London Orchestra under Alec Sherman. Following her American début at New York’s Town Hall in 1950, she undertook many coast-to-coast tours of the USA. After the death of her first husband she married Alec Sherman in 1951.

Bachauer was at her most formidable in the 19th- and early 20th-century repertory, impressing with the strength and breadth of her keyboard command and essentially balanced musicianship. Her recordings of concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Grieg, as well as solo works by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, have been re-issued on compact disc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Wade: Gina Bachauer: a Pianist’s Odyssey (Leeds, 1999)

GRAHAM WADE

Bach Choir.

London amateur choir founded in 1875. See London, §VI, 3 (ii).

Bach disposition.

A disposition used on many early 20th-century harpsichords (and thus specified in some 20th-century compositions) in imitation of the so-called Bach harpsichord.

Bache.

English family of musicians.

(1) Francis Edward Bache

(2) Walter Bache

(3) Constance Bache

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Bache

(1) Francis Edward Bache

(b Birmingham, 14 Sept 1833; d Birmingham, 24 Aug 1858). Composer and pianist. He was the eldest of the seven children of Samuel Bache (1804–76), a well-known Unitarian minister who officiated at the New Meeting, Birmingham (1832–59), and his wife Emily Higginson (d 1855), from whom Francis inherited his musical gifts. He was educated at his father's school and studied with James Stimpson, city organist of Birmingham, and with Alfred Mellon. He played the violin in the 1846 Birmingham Festival, and in 1849 went to London as a private pupil of Sterndale Bennett, with whom he studied composition for more than three years. In October 1850 he became organist of All Saints, Gordon Square. In this period he composed concertos, overtures, two dramatic pieces, a string quartet and a piano trio, as well as many piano pieces. His first appearance as a concert performer was at Keighley, Yorkshire, on 21 January 1851. When he played the Allegro of an unpublished piano concerto of his own in June 1852, Henry Chorley was moved to remark: ‘We have met with no Englishman more likely to give us the English composer for whom we have so long been waiting than Mr Bache’. In November 1851 he went to live with Mellon, by then resident in London, and in 1852 was given a contract by Addison, Hollier and Lucas to write light piano pieces, which he turned out in considerable numbers. Of one of these he wrote, ‘I must say that I would sooner have written my Galop di Bravura than many a Sonata which is only printed to lie on the shelf a dead weight on account of deficiency of anything like idea’.

In October 1853, on Bennett's recommendation, Bache went to Leipzig, where he studied with Moritz Hauptmann, and acquired the conventional prejudices against the music of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. He visited Dresden, and returned to England by way of Paris in February 1855. He attended the 1855 Birmingham Festival, writing some of the reviews for the local newspapers, but was then attacked by a severe recurrence of the tuberculosis which had troubled him for several years. Early in 1856 he went to Algiers on medical advice, where he gave a concert on 28 March. He travelled by way of Paris to Leipzig (June 1856), and then, through Dresden and Vienna, to Rome (December 1856). His health again deteriorated and he returned home in June 1857, spending the next winter in Torquay, where he succeeded in giving a concert in February 1858. On his return to Birmingham he gradually declined, and after a farewell concert of his music on 5 August, he died less than three weeks later, at the age of 24.

Bache's piano music has many qualities of his master, Sterndale Bennett, with a pleasant freshness and vitality to compensate for a certain lack of solidity and substance. He was most at ease in the virtuoso concert piece. More remarkable are the Six Songs op.16, which come near to establishing an English analogue of the lied; and the Piano Trio in D minor op.25, which, in spite of obvious gleanings from Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bennett, has a vigour found in few English instrumental compositions of its period (it was revived at a concert given by the Victorian Society at Leighton House on 26 September 1964). Bache's early death deprived Victorian music of one of its most promising talents.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in London unless otherwise stated

Which is Which? (op, A. Mellon), 1851, not perf.

Rubezahl (op, J. Palgrave Simpson), c1852, not perf.

Orch: 3 pf concs., 1, E, perf. June 1852; Fl Conc., 1852; Jessie Gray, ov., London, Adelphi, Nov 1850; Ov., E, March 1851, GB-Lam; Polonaise, pf, orch, op.9, pf score (1854), ed. in LPS, xvi (1985)

Chbr: Str Qt, F, July 1851, Lcm; Pf Trio, d, op.25 (1852); 2 romances, pf, vn/vc, op.21 (1859), op.posth.

48 pubd pf pieces, incl. 3 Impromptus, op.1 (1851); 4 Mazurkas de salon, op.13 (1855), ed. in LPS, xvi (1985); 5 Characteristic Pieces, op.15 (1855–8); [8] Souvenirs d’Italie, op.19 (1857); [5] Souvenirs de Torquay, op.26 (1859)

Introduction and Allegro, 2 short voluntaries, org, in Stimpson's Organist's Standard Library (London, n.d.), xxi, xxii, xxiv

17 songs, incl. 6 Songs (J.L. Uhland, J.W. von Goethe, H. Heine), op.16 (c1850); 4 songs, n.d.

Bache

(2) Walter Bache

(b Birmingham, 19 June 1842; d London, 26 March 1888). Pianist and conductor, brother of (1) Francis Edward Bache. Like his elder brother he attended his father's school and studied with Stimpson. In August 1858 he too went to Leipzig, but after a short stay at Milan and Florence he arrived at Rome in the summer of 1862, where for three years he received regular lessons from Liszt; this experience gave his life a different direction. In 1865 he returned to London, and soon began his lifelong crusade to establish his master's reputation there: he played a two-piano arrangement of Les préludes with Edward Dannreuther on 4 July 1865. In the summer of 1867 he and Dannreuther formed a small association for the promotion of the music of Wagner and Liszt in England, dubbing themselves ‘The Working Men's Society’, with Karl Klindworth as a kind of elder statesman. At first they had to be content with piano arrangements, but in 1871 Bache began annual orchestral concerts at which more and more works by Liszt and other controversial composers were introduced to the London public. In the course of these concerts (1871–86) Bache introduced five of Liszt's symphonic poems, the Faust and Dante symphonies, Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, and other major works. In this enterprise he had to face an almost continuous barrage of opposition and scorn from other musicians and critics. Joseph Bennett wrote of him: ‘I was content to remain on my own side of the great gulf which circumstances had fixed between us’. But, largely through Bache's indomitable perseverance, a section of the public was gradually brought round. On Liszt's visit to England in the spring of 1886 Bache gave a memorable reception at the Grosvenor Gallery on 8 April, followed by a series of concerts in which he and his master appeared together. Bache was a professor of piano at the RAM, and was instrumental in founding the Liszt Scholarship there.

Bache

(3) Constance Bache

(b Birmingham, 11 March 1846; d Montreux, 28 June 1903). Writer on music, sister of (1) Francis Edward Bache. She prepared the English version of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel and also translated La Mara's edition of Letters of Franz Liszt (London, 1894) and The Early Correspondence of Hans von Bülow (London, 1896).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.E. Bache: Letters to his parents, 1840–53 (MS, GB-Lbl Add.54193)

C. Bache: Brother Musicians: Reminiscences of Edward and Walter Bache (London, 1901) [with list of F.E. Bache’s works]

G. Langley: ‘The Pianoforte Works of Francis Edward Bache’, MMR, xxxv (1905), 83–7

J. Bennett: Forty Years of Music 1865–1905 (London, 1908)

Bachelbel, Johann.

See Pachelbel family, (1).

Bacheler [Bachiler, Batchiler, Batchelar], Daniel

(bap. Aston Clinton, Bucks, 16 March 1572; bur. Lee, Kent, 29 Jan 1619). English lutenist and composer. He was apprenticed at age seven to his uncle Thomas Cardell, lutenist and dancing master to Queen Elizabeth, suggesting that special talent was already evident. In 1587 his apprenticeship was transferred to the Queen’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, a move that was to determine the course of Bacheler’s career. In that same year he took part as a page in the funeral procession of Walsingham’s son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney. The earliest music attributed to Bacheler survives in the Walsingham consort books whose date, 1588, indicate that the music was composed and copied when Bacheler was only 15 or 16. His contribution includes seven pieces scored for the recently developed mixed consort of treble and bass viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora.

By October 1594, a year before the stipulated completion of his apprenticeship, he was in the service of the Earl of Essex at the generous salary of £30 (£20 was normal). The position may have been secured for him by Lady Essex (née Walsingham), who was Sir Philip Sidney’s widow. Most likely Bacheler was still servant to Essex in 1599, when he was paid to deliver letters from the Privy Council to him in Ireland. During the same period Bacheler set the Earl’s bitter sonnet To plead my faith, addressed and almost certainly sung directly to Queen Elizabeth. The song was printed in Robert Dowland’s Musicall Banquet in 1610.

Bacheler presumably remained as servant to Lady Essex after the Earl’s execution in 1601; he accompanied her to the court of James I two years later. There, he was appointed groom of Queen Anne’s Privy Chamber at the extraordinarily high yearly salary of £160. Other grooms were paid £60 and royal lutenists only £20–£40. Bacheler was also employed as secretary (a ‘thank-you’ letter on behalf of the Queen is preserved in Hatfield House Library, C.P.118/134), but no doubt his musical skills were specially valued. The advanced style of some lute solos suggests that he was still composing in the last years of his life. He applied for and was granted a coat of arms in February 1607, confirming his status as ‘gentleman’. He died at age 46 in 1619 and was buried at Lee, close to Queen Anne’s household at Greenwich, and where the Walsinghams had property.

More than 50 lute solos survive, an output exceeded only by Dowland and Holborne. Bacheler’s divisions are florid, requiring technical skill, and he was one of the first lutenists to explore the lower sonorities of the instrument, occasionally taking a melody down to the fourth and fifth courses. He wrote divisions on three French popular tunes and was probably the first English lutenist to play unmeasured preludes. These last are preserved in the lutebook of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (GB-Cfm) who may well have introduced Bacheler to French influence when he visited Queen Anne on his return from Paris in 1609. Many solos survive in unreliable texts with irregular strain lengths and one galliard exists in two versions (Long’s nos.13b and 29), suggesting that Bacheler improvised more than most lutenists and that scribes such as Matthew Holmes had difficulty notating his playing. Because he was employed as groom he probably did not feel constrained by the expectations placed on professional lutenists, encouraging a more experimental approach to composition and playing. He was frequently referred to as ‘Mr Daniell’, which has caused confusion with John Danyel, particularly as the same divisions of Monsieur’s Almain were ascribed to both composers. It is now clear that ‘Mr Daniell’ refers to Bacheler.

WORKS

Edition:Daniel Bacheler: Selected Works for Lute, ed. M. Long (London, 1972) [incl. complete list of works and sources][L]

lute solo

6 preludes, 1 in L; 1 fantasy, L; 1 pavan and galliard pair, pavan in L; 17 pavans, 2 in L; 15 galliards, 3 in L; 1 almain, L; 3 courantes, 2 in L; 1 volt, L (no.39 as ‘courante’); 4 divisions on popular tunes, 1 in L; Daniells Jigge, GB-Cu Dd.v.78.3, f.69 (not listed in L)

mixed consort

Sir Francis Walsingham’s Goodnight; Sir Francis Walsingham’s Goodmorrow; The Lady Sidney’s Felicity: The Lady Walsingham’s Conceits; Daniel’s Trial; The Widow’s Mite; Daniel’s Almain; all ed. in MB, xl (1977)

song with lute and base viol

To plead my faith (poem by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex); ed. P. Stroud: Robert Dowland: A Musicall Banquet (London, 1968)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Doughtie: ‘Sidney, Tessier, Bachelar and A Musicall Banquet: Two Notes’, RN, xviii (1965), 123–5

W. Edwards: ‘The Walsingham Consort Books’, ML, lv (1974), 209–14

A. Batchelor: ‘Daniel Bacheler: The Right Perfect Musician’, LSJ, xxviii (1988), 3–12

A. Batchelor: A Batchelor’s Delight (Beverley, 1990)

ROBERT SPENCER

Bachelet, Alfred

(b Paris, 26 Feb 1864; d Nancy, 10 Feb 1944). French composer. After studying with Guiraud at the Paris Conservatoire he won the Prix de Rome in 1890. He became chorus master and subsequently conductor at the Paris Opéra and succeeded Ropartz as head of the Conservatoire in Nancy in 1919. In 1929 he replaced Messager on the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

He was from the start drawn towards programmatic works for large orchestra, and extracts from projected works were performed in several concerts around 1900 with some success. He was considered a French Wagnerian by many critics and, apart from the Ballade for violin and orchestra, the Nocturne from which enjoyed some celebrity, it is for his operas that he is best remembered. His first, Scemo, set in Corsica, was first performed on the eve of World War I; it is an opulent, lengthy score somewhat in the manner of Richard Strauss. Its naturalistic subject matter was not well received by the critics either at the première or at its revival at the Opéra-Comique in 1926, although the music drew praise from Dukas and Hahn among others. The one-act Quand la cloche sonnera is set in World War I and concerns a girl who rings the church bell as a signal to soldiers to blow up a bridge, even though she knows her lover is waiting beneath it. His third and last opera, Un jardin sur l'Oronte, was widely considered his most successful. It tells of the love between an oriental princess and a Christian invader, and Bachelet uses pastiche of both oriental and medieval music to portray the clash of cultures. Gustave Samazeuilh, one of his most faithful supporters, considered the poème lyrique Sûryâ to be one of the finest pieces of French music to be written during World War II. Bachelet was also active as a conductor; his début at the Paris Opéra was with Gounod's Faust in 1907.

WORKS

stage

Cléopâtre (scene lyrique, F. Beissier), 1890

Scemo (drame lyrique, 3, C. Méré), Paris, Opéra, 6 May 1914, vs (Paris, 1914)

Quand la cloche sonnera (drame musical, 1, Y. de Hansewick and P. de Wattryne), Paris, OC (Favart), 6 Nov 1922 (Paris, 1922)

Un jardin sur l'Oronte (drame lyrique, 4, Franc-Nohain, after M. Barrèn), Paris, Opéra, 3 Nov 1932, vs (Paris, 1932)

vocal

Choral: Fiona (légende irlandaise), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1896; L'amour des Ondines, sym. poem, solo vv, chorus, pf, orch, 1903; Sûryâ, Hymne Védique (C.M.R. Leconte de Lisle), solo vv, chorus, orch (1943)

Songs (1v, pf unless otherwise stated): Vocalise-étude (1893); Tendresse (J. Lahor) (1894); Le vent (E. Vollaine) (1894); Le dormeur du val (A. Rimbaud) (1915); Noël (T. Gautier), 2vv, pf (1918); La chanson des trois roses (A. Bausil) (1924); Le vent (Vollaine) (1935); Terre Lorraine (J. Grosdidier de Matons) (1938); Chère nuit (Eugène Adenis); Mélodies: Au bois dormant (L. Durocher), Pâle étoile du soir (A. de Musset), also orchd

instrumental

Orch: Poème, vc, orch, 1890–5 (1952); Ballade, vn, orch (1920); Barcarolle, Nocturne et Petit Histoire, vn, vc, orch, pf (1927); Joie, sym. poem

Chbr and solo inst: 2 impromptus, pf (1894); Fantaisie mélancolique, pf (1895); Morceau de concours, trbn, pf (1902); Chant nuptiale, vn, vc, pf (1905); Dans la montagne, ballade, hn/vn, pf/orch (1907); Lamento, F, vc/hn, pf/orch (1927, 1935); Berceuse, pf (1928); Humoresque, pf (1928); Fantasie et fugue, org (1943); Sérénade

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Tiersot: Un demi-siècle de musique française (Paris, 1919)

L. Rohozinsky: Cinquante ans de musique française 1874–1925 (Paris, 1925)

G. Samazeuilh: ‘Alfred Bachelet’, Le théâtre lyrique en France (Paris, 1937–9), iii, 219–28 [pubn of Poste National/Radio Paris]

R. Dumesnil: La musique en France entre les deux guerres 1919–1939 (Paris, 1946)

P. Bertrand: Le monde de la musique (Geneva, 1947)

M. Kelkel: Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme dans l'opéra de 1890 à 1930 (Paris, 1984)

RICHARD LANGHAM SMITH

Bachelier, Louis

(b 1703; d Angers, 1782). French composer. He received his musical education in the Angers choir school, which he left in 1723 to become an adult chorister. On 14 November 1724 he was a candidate for the post of maître de chapelle to succeed Louis Vigné, and it is likely that he was appointed to the post and occupied it until 1732, the year in which he left Angers. He is next heard of in Orléans and then in Verdun, where a Te Deum and motets by him were sung before the king. In 1747 he became maître de musique at Clermont-Ferrand, a position he left in 1760 to return to Angers, where he was again maître de chapelle until 1768 at the latest, after which he undertook various responsibilities within the chapter. On 8 May 1772 he donated 14 masses (no longer extant) to the chapter.

Three works, dated 1749, by Bachelier have survived (F-Pn Vm1 1315–17). They are the grands motets Deus deorum locutus est (Psalm xliv), Nisi Dominus (Psalm cxxvi) and Deus misereatur nostri (Psalm lvi) for soloists, five-part chorus, symphonie (violins and oboes) and continuo, composed in the Versailles manner of the time. Certain short passages call for trumpets and a bassoon. (J. Poirier: La maîtrise de la cathédrale d’Angers: six cents ans d’histoire, Angers, 1983)

JEAN-CHARLES LÉON

Bach-Gesellschaft.

A society founded on the centenary of Bach's death (1850) to publish a complete critical edition of his works. By that time all the principal keyboard works had been printed, but it was obvious that a non-commercial scheme was needed for the vocal works.

The notion of a Bach-Gesellschaft, dating back to the 1830s, can be linked with Mendelssohn's efforts on the composer's behalf. A further stimulus came in 1843 when the English Handel Society was founded in London. In July 1850 Otto Jahn, together with Robert Schumann, C.F. Becker, Mortiz Hauptmann and the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel, issued a preliminary announcement which was sent to a number of prospective supporters. By the end of the same month it had gained the support, in various periodicals, of Liszt, Spohr and many others. The society's inaugural meeting took place in Leipzig on 15 December 1850.

As the first German musicological project of such vast scope, the Bach edition encountered many problems over the following years. The main difficulty was in obtaining a comprehensive overview of the composer's surviving output. A catalogue of his works begun in the 1830s by Franz Hauser was a basic source of information on Bach's compositions and the location of autographs and other relevant manuscripts. Individual volumes were delayed because the owners of various sources denied the editors access to important material. For example, the edition of the B minor Mass was deferred several times because Hermann Nägeli would allow no-one to inspect the autograph in his possession; it was not until Friedrich Chrysander had obtained the source that the volume could be completed. There were also differences of opinion among the members of the committee as to how far the edition should cater for the needs of practical music-making; it was debated, for example, whether the scores of the vocal works should be provided with piano reductions. When the idea was rejected, Moscheles, who had championed the cause of the performing musician, resigned from the committee. The first volume of the Bach edition, containing cantatas nos.1–10, appeared in December 1851; it was edited by Hauptmann, who over the next few years shared the responsibility for a number of volumes with Julius Rietz and Wilhelm Rust. From 1859 Rust assumed sole charge, which he finally relinquished in 1882 after disagreements with Philipp Spitta. The later volumes were again supervised by several different editors.

The complete Bach edition initiated a significant change in contemporary attitudes to early music, and paved the way for comparable editions of the works of Handel, Schütz, Palestrina and Lassus. Although it does not match contemporary standards of source criticism, the editors' approach was remarkably scrupulous and scientific for its time. The whole edition is free of editorial accretions. Rust prefaced numerous volumes with forewords discussing the sources and performance practice, and in volume xliv the editors provided a thorough documentation of the composer's handwriting. Only a few of Bach's works are missing, while a few compositions now known to be by other composers were erroneously included.

With the completion of volume lxvi, presented to the committee on 27 January 1900, the Bach-Gesellschaft was dissolved, in accordance with its statutes. On the same day the Neue Bachgesellschaft (NBG) was founded in order to disseminate and research into the composer's works, and from the early years of the century held regular Bach festivals. In its first years, especially, it published a large quantity of music, including collections of arias and arrangements aimed at the needs of performing musicians. Its journal, the Bach-Jahrbuch, has appeared almost every year since 1904. In 1906 the society acquired the house in Eisenach where the composer was once thought to have been born, and opened a Bach museum there. Unlike many other German musicological organizations, the NBG survived intact during the period of the country's division.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Aufforderung zur Stiftung einer Bach-Gesellschaft’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, viii (1850), 289–91

H. Kretzschmar: ‘Die Bach-Gesellschaft: Bericht im Auftrage des Directoriums’, Johann Sebastian Bach's Werke, xlvi (Leipzig, 1900), pp.xv–lxi

‘Die alte und die neue Bachgesellschaft’, Die Grenzboten: Zeitschrift für Politik, Litteratur und Kunst, lix (1900), 535–40

Passionsmusiken im Umfeld Johann Sebastian Bachs: Leipzig 1994

L. Klingberg: Politisch fest in unseren Händen: musikalische und musikwissenschaftliche Gesellschaften in der DDR (Kassel, 1997), 76–101

BARBARA WIERMANN

Bach Guild.

American record label. See Vanguard.

Bach harpsichord

[Ger. Bach-Cembalo, Bach-Flügel].

A two-manual instrument made after 1700 by the workshop of Harrass in Breitenbach, Thuringia. It was owned by the Voss family of Berlin at the end of the 18th century. The instrument then passed into the hands of the family of the Bach scholar Wilhelm Rust, and in 1890 it was sold by the Leipzig collector Paul de Wit to the newly founded Sammlung Alter Musikinstrumente, now the Musikinstrumenten-Museum des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (catalogue no.316). During the sales negotiations it was said that the instrument had once belonged to J.S. Bach and had come into the possession of the Voss family by way of W.F. Bach. This claim, which cannot be proved, led to its being regarded from about 1900 to about 1960 as the ideal of the harpsichord, so that it was copied and imitated in all sorts of ways. It has a rather unusual disposition (8' and 16' on the lower manual, 4' and 8' with buff stop and push coupler on the upper manual), which has been followed in instruments produced by Ammer, Dolmetsch, Neupert, Sperrhake and Wittmayer. Recent research has shown that the instrument originally had a three-register disposition (4' and 16' in the lower manual; 8' with buff stop and push coupler in the upper manual) which was expanded to four in the 18th century.

The characteristic four-register disposition of the Bach harpsichord, together with the rapid changes of register made possible by the addition of pedals in the modern instruments, is taken as the norm in many 20th-century compositions for harpsichord. The contrasts of sound made possible cannot be fully achieved with a normal historical disposition of 2 × 8', 1 × 4'. The Bach harpsichord should not be confused with the Bachklavier.

See also Registration, §II, 1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Ernst: Der Flügel Joh. Seb. Bachs: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Instrumentenbaues im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1955)

M. Elste: ‘Nostalgische Musikmaschinen: Cembali im 20. Jahrhundert’, in J.H. van der Meer and others: Kielklaviere: Cembali, Spinette, Virginale (Berlin, 1991), 239–77

D. Krickeberg and H. Rase: ‘Einige Beobachtungen zur Baugeschichte des “Bach-Cembalos”’, JbSIM 1987–8, 184–97

Das Berliner ‘Bach-Cembalo’. Ein Mythos und seine Folgen (Berlin, 1995) [incl. bibliography]

M. Elste: ‘Kompositionen für nostalgische Musikmaschinen: Das Cembalo in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts’, JbSIM 1994, 199–246

M. Elste: Modern Harpsichord Music: a Discography (Westport, CT, 1995)

MARTIN ELSTE

Bachiler, Daniel.

See Bacheler, Daniel.

Bachklavier.

A keyboard instrument of the harpsichord type designed and built by the Munich instrument-making firm of Maendler-Schramm in the 1920s. Its mechanism was designed to allow dynamic gradation: a pad was fitted diagonally between the back key lever and the adjustable screw of a specially sprung jack, so that the length of the plectrum could be regulated by touch (patented 25 May 1923). These instruments were advertised as ‘harpsichords with a sound capable of modulation in the modern way’. Similar instruments were built by other firms in the first half of the 20th century, but they did not prove popular. The Bachklavier should not be confused with the Bach-harpsichord.

MARTIN ELSTE

Bachmann, Carl Ludwig

(b Berlin, 1748; d Berlin, 26 May 1809). German viol player and instrument maker. He was a viol player in the royal chapel from 1765, and in 1770, together with J.F.E. Benda, he established the Berlin Liebhaberkonzerte. With Benda’s death in 1785 Bachmann succeeded him as director of the concerts; in the same year he married the noted singer and pianist Charlotte Caroline Wilhelmine Stöwe. Throughout this period he also made instruments in the shop of his father, the violin maker and court violinist Anton Bachmann (1716–1800), and may have been responsible for several innovations, including a screw-tuning mechanism for double basses which he introduced in about 1778, although a similiar mechanism was already known in France, having been developed by Benoît Fleury in 1766. He continued alone in his father’s business from 1791, at about which time he passed the directorship of the Liebhaberkonzerte to his younger brother, the court violinist Friedrich Wilhelm Bachmann (1749–1825). Rellstab, though agreeing with the generally held low opinion of Bachmann’s musical abilities, found his instruments excellent, a judgment which has been borne out by Henley alone among later commentators.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C.F. Rellstab: Über die Bemerkungen eines Reisenden (Berlin, 1789)

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin’s (Berlin, 1861/R)

W. Henley: Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (Brighton, 1959–60)

M. Elste: ‘Berlin als ein Zentrum des Grossstadtgeigenbaus’, Handwerk im Dienste der Musik: 300 Jahre Berliner Musikinstrumentenbau, ed. D. Droysen-Reber, M. Elste and G. Haase (Berlin, 1987), 11–27

H. Heyde: Musikinstrumentenbau in Preussen (Tutzing, 1994)

EUGENE HELM/MARTIN ELSTE

Bachmann [née Stöwe], Charlotte Caroline Wilhelmine [Charlotte Wilhelmine Caroline]

(b Berlin, 2 Nov 1757; d Berlin, 19 Aug 1817). German singer. The daughter of a musician, she received early training in singing and keyboard playing, and at the age of nine sang in the Berlin Liebhaberkonzerte, whose performances she was later to dominate. In 1785 she married the Berlin violist and instrument maker Carl Ludwig Bachmann (1748–1809). She was one of the original 20 members of the Berlin Sing-Akademie (founded in 1791), and was essential in establishing its annual performances of C.H. Graun’s Der Tod Jesu between 1797 and 1806, the beginning of the cult of that work. Her singing was highly regarded in her native Berlin, though the Bermerkungen eines Reisenden (1788) found her voice lacking in natural qualities, and declared her excellent keyboard playing to be her finest attainment. She also composed a few songs, one of which appeared in Rellstab’s Clavier-Magazin (1787).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (C. Schröder-Auerbach)

A. Hartung and K.W. Klipfel: Zur Erinnerung an Charlotte Wilhelmine Karoline Bachmann (Berlin, 1818)

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin's (Berlin, 1861/R)

EUGENE HELM

Bachmann, Sixt [Joseph Siegmund Eugen]

(b Kettershausen, nr Illertissen, 18 July 1754; d Reutlingendorf, nr Ehingen an der Donau, 18 Oct 1825). German composer and keyboard player. A child prodigy, he probably received his earliest instruction in music from his grandfather Franz Joseph Schmöger, choral director and organist in Markt Biberbach. It was there on 5 or 6 November 1766 that the famous organ contest between Bachmann and the ten-year-old Mozart took place, from which both emerged with credit. In 1771 he entered the Premonstratensian monastery in Obermarchtal, where he took his vows in 1773 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1778. There he met the writer Sebastian Sailer (d 1777), whose Schriften im schwäbischen Dialekte he later edited (Buchau, 1819). In Obermarchtal he taught music and directed choirs, and was professor of theology (from 1800). He was also responsible for the monastery parish of Reutlingendorf (1779, 1789, 1796–9); he then became pastor in Seedorf but returned to Reutlingendorf in 1800. In 1803 the monastery in Obermarchtal was dissolved and he settled in Reutlingendorf.

Bachmann obtained his grounding in composition principally from the study of theoretical works, especially G.J. Vogler’s. His output includes piano sonatas characterized by contrapuntal technique and monothematic movements; he also wrote organ works and ecclesiastical music combining (according to Wilss) the new homophonic style with the traditional contrapuntal language of church music. Gerber stated that one of his sonatas was arbitrarily altered by the Viennese publisher Hoffmeister.

WORKS

Pf: 2 sonatas (both Vienna, 1786); pieces in Clavier-Magazin für Kenner und Liebhaber (Berlin, 1787), Sammlung kleiner Clavier Stücke, i (Vienna, c1787) and Notenblätter zur musikalischen Korrespondenz (Speyer, 1792); Sonate, op.1 bk 1 (Munich, 1800); Sonatine, 4 hands, D-Rp; 6 sonatas, 2 fantasias, variations, further single works in Musikalische Aufsätze, i–ii, 1803–c1820, Rp [Allegrino from vol.ii in Siegele, 18–19]

Missa solemnis, C, S, A, T, B, double choir, insts, org, c1786, ed. in Denkmäler der Musik in Baden-Württemberg, v (Munich, 1997)

Other works, incl. masses, cants., syms., org fugues, str qts, pf sonatas and songs, many cited in GerberNL and Christmann

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

J.F. Christmann: ‘Brief’, Musikalische Korrespondenz der Teutschen Filarmonischen Gesellschaft (1790), 103–7, 163–6

L. Wilss: Zur Geschichte der Musik an den oberschwäbischen Klöstern im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1925)

W. Siegele: ‘Musik des oberschwäbischen Barock’, Der Barock, seine Orgeln und seine Musik in Oberschwaben: Ochsenhausen 1951, 40–58

EBERHARD STIEFEL

Bachofen, Johann Caspar [Hans Kaspar]

(b Zürich, 26 Dec 1695; d Zürich, 23 June 1755). Swiss composer and music pedagogue. The year of his birth has been given incorrectly in some sources as 1697. His father Joseph, originally a tailor and from 1692 a schoolteacher, planned a theological training for Johann Caspar, who was his second son. After study at the cathedral school, the Collegium Humanitatis, and (from 1715) the theology class, Bachofen gained the title V.D.M. (verbi divini minister) in 1720. In 1711 he joined the collegium musicum at the chapter house, and in 1715 he became a member of one that met at the German School. In 1720 he became a singing teacher at the lower grammar school. His small income compelled him to seek a secondary source of income, from trading in violin strings. Despite disputes with officials and colleagues, he was appointed, after J.K. Albertin’s death in 1742, to the important position of Kantor at the Grossmünster, the most important cathedral in Zürich; at the same time he became director of the chapter house collegium musicum. In 1739 he had also assumed the role of Kapellmeister at the German School, thus combining several of the most important musical posts in Zürich. By 1748, however, he had become ill, and bad health hindered the execution of his duties and overshadowed his final years.

Bachofen’s significance in the history of Swiss music lies primarily in the exceptional popularity of some of his works. His music was criticized, even by his contemporaries, for deficiencies of construction, harmonic language and melodic development; but his most important collection of sacred songs, Musicalisches Hallelujah, appeared in no less than 11 editions between 1727 and 1803, and became one of the favourite songbooks for popular music-making in the home. In the St Gall district the term ‘bachofele’ was used well into the 19th century for a gathering of singers for rehearsal. Three of Bachofen’s arrangements of sacred songs were reprinted by Goldschmid (1942), and he is represented today in the hymnbook of the Swiss Reformed Church by the hymn Auf, auf ihr Reichsgenossen.

As the preface of the Musicalisches Hallelujah makes clear, Bachofen’s works were specifically intended for domestic use. He broke away from the tradition of four-part writing (in the manner of Goudimel’s psalms), and most of his settings are in three voices. The continuo part, presumably to be played on the home organ, also constitutes the vocal bass, and there are two soprano parts which frequently cross. Solo songs with organ are inserted to fill gaps on the printed pages resulting from publication in separate parts, with each three-part song beginning a new page.

Bachofen is also important for his pedagogical work, in particular his expansion of the collegia musica, the centres of the day for German Swiss music and the predecessors of the future concert institutions. He also published a Musicalisches Noten-Büchlein (Zürich, n.d.), designed to provide the beginner with a ‘theoretical conception of the art of music and song in a short time’.

WORKS

all printed works published in Zürich

Musicalisches Hallelujah: Oder [206] schöne und geistreiche Gesänge, 1–3vv, bc (1727, rev. and enlarged 2/1733 with 570 Gesänge; rev. 3/1739; rev. 4/1743; rev. 5/1750 with 581 Gesänge; rev. and abridged 6/1754 with 380 Gesänge; rev. 11/1803 with 570 Gesänge), examples in A. Nef, Goldschmid (1917, 1942) and Geering

Psalmen Davids, 3vv, bc (1734, rev. 2/1759)

[12] Musicalisch-monatliche Aussgaaben, bestehend in teutschen, geistlichen Arien, 2–3vv, bc (?1729, 2/1732)

Herrn B.H. Brockes … Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in physicalisch und moralischen Gedichten, 1v, bc (1740)

Musicalisch-wöchentliche Aussgaaben, 2vv, bc (1748–50)

Musicalische Ergezungen, bestehende in [17] angenehmen Arien, 1–2vv, bc, vn ad lib (1755)

Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (B.H. Brockes) (1759), with appendix containing short solos

New Year’s cantatas for the Musikgesellschaft zur deutscher Schule, 1733–5, 1741

Kantate zum 50. Jubiläum der Musikgesellschaft zur deutschen Schule, 1729; Sonett, dem Obmann Hans Jacob Lavater gewidmet (J.H. Köchli), 1735; Kantate, dem neuen Obmann des Musikkollegiums ‘auf dem Musiksaal’, J.M. Köchli, gewidmet, 1739; Huldigungstück an den Obmann Junker Landvogt Escher, 1750; Konzert zur Einweihung des neuen Saales der Musikgesellschaft Bischofszell, 14 Nov 1745; all lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RefardtHBM

M. Friedlaender: Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902/R)

A. Nef: Das Lied in der deutschen Schweiz Ende des 18. und Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (1909)

T. Goldschmid: Schweizerische Gesangbücher früherer Zeiten (Zürich, 1917)

M. Fehr: ‘Kantor Joh. Kaspar Bachofen’, Zürcher Wochen-Chronik (1917), 397, 405, 413

M. Fehr: ‘Das alte Musikkollegium Bischofszell’, SMz, lviii (1918), 185, 194, 202

E.M. Fallet: ‘Johann Kaspar Bachofen’, SMz, lxvi (1926), 363, 379

K. Nef: ‘Schweizerische Passionsmusiken’, Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, v (1931), 113

A.-E. Cherbuliez: Die Schweiz in der deutschen Musikgeschichte (Frauenfeld, 1932)

A. Geering: ‘Von der Reformation bis zur Romantik’, Schweizer Musikbuch, i, ed. W. Schuh (Zürich, 1939), 54–130

T. Goldschmid: Geistliche Sologesänge und Duette … aus alten schweizerischen Gesangbüchern, ii (Zürich, 1942)

B.D. Arnold: The Life and Works of Johann Caspar Bachofen (diss., U. of Southern California, 1956)

PETER ROSS

Báchorek, Milan

(b Staříč, north-eastern Moravia, 18 Aug 1939). Czech composer. He studied the piano with Milada Šlachtová in Ostrava (1953–60) and composition with Miroslav Klega at the Ostrava Conservatory (until 1967). He began teaching at the Ostrava Conservatory in 1960 and was appointed its director in 1992. He was secretary to the Union of Composers in Ostrava for many years. His early compositions are influenced by 20th-century composers and by the folk music of his native region. Ritornello (1969) marked a new period in his composition, in which he evolved a more uncompromisingly modern language. His other pieces include an important series of three vocal works (Lidice, Stereophonietta and Hukvaldská poéma), and the Cello Concerto (awarded a prize by the Czech Composers’ Union in 1991). These works are notable for their imaginative exploration of timbre, their melodiousness and their sense of drama.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Dramatická předehra [Dramatic ov.], 1965; Ritornello, 1969; Scény [Scenes], ob, str, 1982; Concerto piccolo, vc, str, 1991; Symčcové rozmanilosti [Miscellaneous Pieces for Str], 1992; Konfrontace [Confrontations], vn, str, hpd, 1998

Vocal: Ztracená milá a Hezký Janek [Lost sweetheart and Sweet Jack] (folk texts), chorus, 1966, 1969; Lidice (K. Šiktanc), solo vv, spkr, male and female chorus, perc, orch, 1973; Balada (folk texts), S, spkr, female chorus, fl, va, pf, 1975; Klasy [Spikes] (J. Wolker), T, spkr, male chorus, vib, bells, 1976; Píseň domova [Song of the Home] (chbr cant., Z. Malý), Bar, chorus, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1976; Stereofonietta (V. Rakovsky), S, Bar, perc, org, 2 orch, 1977; Ke staré Lysé [To old Lysá] (3 choruses, M. Jahn), 1982; Omluvenky pro žáky poškoláky [Apologies from Kept-In Pupils] (L. Dvořák), children’s chorus, cel, pf 4 hands, children’s toys, 1985; Hukvaldská poéma [Poem of Hukvaldy] (K. Vůjtek), S, T, Bar, children’s and female chorus, orch, 1986; Cesta světla [The Way of Light] (L. Romanská), mixed chorus, 1989

Chbr and solo inst: Fantasia da camera, fl, cl, bn, str, 1966; Epigramy [Epigrams], cl, 1970; Dialogy [Dialogues], 2 va, 1970; Hudba pro žest’ové kvinteto [Music for Brass Qnt], 1979; Inspirace pro pět [Inspiration for 5], jazz qnt, 1984; 3 věty [3 Movts], cl, pf, 1989

Principal publishers: Czech Music Fund, Panton, Stylton Ostrava

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Navrátil: ‘Lidice a Stereofonietta Milana Báchorka’ [Lidice and Stereophonietta by Milan Báchorek], HRo, 1x (1981), 316–21

V. Gregor and K. Steinmetz, ed.: Hudební kultura na Ostravsku po roce 1945 [Musical life in the Ostrava region after 1945] (Ostrava, 1984)

J. Mazurek: ‘Sborová tvorba Milana Báchorka’ [Choral works by Milan Báchorek], Slovo v hudbě 20. století (Ostrava, 1990), 56–65

L. Zenkl: ‘Jak mi zní hudba M. Báchorka’ [What Báchorek's music sounds like to me], OM, xxii (1990), 21–4

B. Cigánková andJ. Mazurek: ‘Raná tvorba skladatele Milana Báchorka’ [Early works by the composer Milan Báchorek], Z hudební topografie severní Moravy a Slezska (Ostrava,1995), 80–91

KAREL STEINMETZ

Bach Revival.

The rediscovery during the first half of the 19th century of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music marked the first time that a great composer, after a period of neglect, was accorded his rightful place by a later generation. Palestrina, Lully, Purcell and Handel had never been quite forgotten by the musical public, but Bach was known only to a small circle of pupils and devotees until the Romantic movement stimulated a growing interest in his art. The Bach Revival was an early example of a new historicism which eventually opened all periods of Western music to discovery and performance, and which now constitutes the dominant factor in the musical taste of advanced Western societies. It began at about the same time in Germany, where most of Bach’s descendants and pupils, and most of his surviving music, were to be found; and in England, where musical historicism was already well advanced by the end of the 18th century.

See also Early music.

1. Germany and Austria.

2. England.

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY/PETER WOLLNY

Bach Revival

1. Germany and Austria.

Bach was always a conservative composer, and in the latter part of his career his style had become outmoded, failing to win for him any reputation as a composer in the fashionable world. His music was attacked by Scheibe in 1737 for ‘excess of art’ and for its ‘turgid and confused style’. In the works of his last few years – the completed Mass in B minor, the Musical Offering, the Art of Fugue and others – he virtually turned his back on what remained of his public, writing for himself and, perhaps, for posterity. At his death public knowledge of his music was at a low ebb. Even at the Leipzig Thomaskirche, his successors only occasionally used his cantatas; the organ works, too, were rarely heard, unless they were played by one of his sons or pupils. Recent research has, however, modified the widespread belief, dating from the late 19th century, that Bach’s compositions were largely ignored by his contemporaries and forgotten for more than 50 years after his death. Although few of his works were published during his lifetime, his keyboard music was disseminated widely in manuscript and enormous numbers of copies were made, particularly of Das wohltemperirte Clavier. There is evidence that Bach lent his sacred music to friends and former pupils such as J.W. Koch and C.G. Wecker. Indeed, Bach’s large circle of pupils was a major force in the distribution of his works.

In the latter half of the 18th century Bach was remembered as a master of organ playing and of learned counterpoint. The first extended biographical notice of Bach, by J.A. Hiller, his third successor at the Thomaskirche, gave only a superficial and condescending account of his compositions (1784); while Reichardt remarked in 1782: ‘Had Bach possessed the high integrity and the deep expressive feeling that inspired Handel, he would have been much greater even than Handel; but as it is he was only more painstaking and technically skilful’. Bach’s own sons played a part in the rejection of the artistic principles he stood for, which went far beyond the normal changes in style that are found at other periods. C.P.E. Bach’s feelings were ambivalent. During his Hamburg period (1768–88) he used recitatives and choruses from his father’s two Passions as a framework for his own Passion music; he also incorporated some of the cantatas in pasticcios and edited the four-part chorales for publication. J.C.F. Bach too included chorale movements by the elder Bach in his cantata Der Tod Jesu and his oratorio Die Auferweckung Lazarus.

It was at Berlin, where C.P.E. Bach was employed until 1767, that the strongest group of Bach disciples was concentrated. They preserved and passed on most of the original manuscripts of Bach’s works that have survived. Agricola, Kirnberger, Nichelmann and Marpurg owned large collections of music and published influential treatises which discussed Bach’s compositions for various purposes. Increasingly conservative tendencies were manifested in the veneration of Bach by Kirnberger and the circle of Princess Amalia, where Bach was seen as a counterweight to recent developments in musical aesthetics. In Leipzig the cantatas acquired in 1750 from Anna Magdalena Bach’s inheritance served as the basis for performance of his music by Gottlob Harrer, Bach’s successor at the Thomaskirche, and J.F. Doles. A wish to have some of the large-scale choral works that had left Leipzig with Bach’s sons available for performance by the pupils of the Thomasschule accounts for a number of spurious ascriptions (the St Luke Passion, the oratorio Jesu, deine Passion, the Mass in G major), which had a considerable effect on the image of Bach around the turn of the century. There is evidence that Bach’s cantatas were performed in Leipzig in the early 19th century as well as in the second half of the 18th.

The Bach revival in Vienna in the late 18th century was instigated and greatly encouraged by such key figures as Baron Gottfried van Swieten and Fanny von Arnstein. The former was familiar with the Bach tradition from his post as ambassador to the Prussian court, and the latter from her origins in the Itzig family of Berlin. These two patrons must have had considerable influence on the regard in which Mozart and Beethoven held Bach. In April 1782 Mozart wrote that ‘nothing but Handel and Bach’ was played at the Sunday recitals in van Swieten’s house. The Austrian government officer Franz Joseph, Reichsritter von Hess, also owned an extensive Bach collection.

A more general appreciation of Bach came only as a result of the Romantic cult of the past. Arising in England, this movement was immensely strengthened in its German phase by patriotic and religious motives. The military and political humiliations of the Napoleonic period generated a desire to recover older German traditions, while a religious revival prompted the search for what was truly and distinctively religious in the cultural heritage. In this Bach was to become the archetypal figure. The influence of J.N. Forkel, organist and music director at Göttingen University, was particularly important. Forkel began planning a biography of Bach in the mid-1770s, and consequently was in touch with Bach’s two eldest sons. Through them he became acquainted with many of Bach’s compositions, and was able to acquire copies and in some cases original manuscripts. ‘This great man’, Forkel wrote, ‘was a German. Be proud of him, German fatherland, but be worthy of him too. … His works are an invaluable national patrimony with which no other nation has anything to be compared’.

Forkel was joined by Rochlitz in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, whose first volume (1798) contained a portrait of Bach. Rochlitz was inclined to paint a romantic, saintly picture of the master, comparing him aesthetically and morally with Dürer, Rubens, Newton and Michelangelo. The religious aspect of Bach’s art was important to another early convert, C.F. Zelter, a conductor at the Berliner Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791 by C.F.C. Fasch, one of the earliest German institutions to organize historical concerts. He had inherited an extensive collection of Bach’s music from Kirnberger and Agricola, and he drew from it in his pioneering revivals of Bach’s motets and other sacred works. He rehearsed the Mass in B minor in 1811 and the St Matthew Passion in 1815, but did not think it practical to perform them. Through Rochlitz and Zelter, Goethe in his old age came to a profound appreciation of Bach. E.T.A. Hoffmann, another influential literary figure, developed the idealized Romantic conception that Rochlitz had begun to build.

The mounting enthusiasm for Bach culminated in the performance of the St Matthew Passion by the Sing-Akademie in 1829, with Mendelssohn conducting. This was the decisive turning-point in Bach’s reputation, for it swiftly transformed the revival from a cult of intellectuals into a popular movement. Zelter had allowed a copy of the autograph to be made in 1823; with commendable self-effacement he turned over the honour of conducting the performance to his pupil. Mendelssohn, though at first hesitant, eventually agreed to attempt the formidable task. He made his own arrangement of the music from Zelter’s copy; cuts, changes and additions were made (see illustration). After nearly two years of rehearsals, the performance took place on 11 March 1829, and was far more successful than the first performance exactly a century earlier. The audience was deeply moved; Hegel, who was present, later wrote of ‘Bach’s grand, truly Protestant, robust and erudite genius which we have only recently learnt again to appreciate at its full value’. Two more performances followed, the last conducted by Zelter. Mosewius, who also heard the work at Berlin, conducted it in 1830 at Breslau, an important centre of the Protestant religious revival and the home of Winterfeld. Königsberg was the next city to hear the Passion; it was not performed at Leipzig until 1841. Meanwhile the Berlin Sing-Akademie produced the St John Passion in 1833, and a truncated version of the Mass in B minor in 1835 (the Credo had been revived by Schelble at Frankfurt in 1828). A growing number of the cantatas were added to the choral repertory at this period.

The first half of the 19th century saw extensive efforts to preserve Bach’s oeuvre. With the deaths of his sons and pupils, there was a danger that the cultivation of Bach’s music, nurtured largely by oral traditions in the 18th century and based on private collections, would gradually fade away. In 1801 the Leipzig firm of Hoffmeister & Kühnel began publishing the keyboard works in a collection entitled Oeuvres complettes. It was subsequently supervised by Forkel, and concluded in 1804 with the appearance of the 16th volume. The publication of Forkel’s biography of Bach by the same firm in 1802 was influential in advertising this ‘complete edition’.

Further selections of Bach’s music appeared soon after 1800, published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel (the motets, a four-volume edition of chorale preludes for organ and the spurious mass bwv Anh.167), by Simrock in Bonn (Das wohltemperirte Clavier) and in the series Musikalische Kunstwerke im strengen Style, edited by Hans Georg Nägeli (the sonatas for violin and harpsichord, the Goldberg Variations, Das wohltemperirte Clavier and The Art of Fugue). These editions emphasized the instrumental works, and with few exceptions paid little attention to Bach’s vocal compositions. Significantly, music historians of the Romantic period saw Bach as a composer of instrumental music, and Forkel’s biography takes the same line.

The editions mentioned above had a crucial effect on the image of Bach in the first four decades of the 19th century. At the same time there was an increasing demand for a complete edition of Bach’s compositions. In many respects the London Handel Society editions, which began in 1843, were regarded as a model for the practicality of the project. The Bach-Gesellschaft was founded in 1850, on the 100th anniversary of Bach’s death, to promote the complete edition of his works, and the society devoted itself to the task for the next 50 years. As a result the full range of Bach’s achievement, particularly as a composer of vocal music, gradually became apparent to a larger audience. A companion-piece to the edition is Philipp Spitta’s monumental Bach biography, published in two volumes in 1873 and 1880, which superseded all previous biographical writings on the composer. Yet while all of Bach’s known music became available between 1850 and 1899, there was no immediate increase in the number of performances; indeed, during the 1870s, when the number of subscribers to the Bach-Gesellschaft dropped to little more than 300, it was doubtful for some time whether the edition could be completed. Nevertheless, the volumes, though they varied in scholarly precision, were a remarkable achievement, and established the basic principles for scholarly musical editions that have been followed ever since. They completed the Bach Revival, and made it possible for Bach to take his place in public esteem beside or above other great composers.

Bach Revival

2. England.

England lacked the group of pupils and descendants who formed the nucleus of the German Bach Revival; but historicism and antiquarianism were more advanced than in Germany. The music of Handel, Corelli, Domenico Scarlatti and other late Baroque composers continued to be popular throughout the 18th century, while such bodies as the Academy of Ancient Music (1710–92), the Madrigal Society (founded 1741) and the Concert of Ancient Music (‘Ancient Concerts’, 1776–1848) cultivated a taste for the music of the remoter past. Burney and Hawkins, though they failed to appreciate Bach’s importance, gave him due mention in their histories of music – books of a kind that did not yet exist on the Continent.

The earliest extant copies of Bach’s music in England come from the collection of Richard Fawcett and probably date from around 1750. According to Forkel, Bach composed his ‘English’ Suites for an English nobleman, but no documentation for this claim has been found. A note on a now lost manuscript containing excerpts from the Goldberg Variations stated that the copy was presented to the owner ‘J.H.’ (probably James Hutton) by Bach in 1749. There is evidence that a good deal of Bach’s music was circulating in manuscript in England during the last three decades of the 18th century. J.C. Bach probably had little interest in his father’s music, but he may have possessed some copies. Burney received a copy of book 1 of the ‘48’ from C.P.E. Bach in 1772, while Clementi possessed a partly autograph copy of book 2. Queen Charlotte owned a manuscript volume dated 1788, containing the ‘48’, Clavier-Übung, iii, and the Credo from the Mass in B minor. This music may have reached the queen through either of two German musicians recently arrived in London: C.F. Horn (1762–1830), her music teacher from 1782, or A.F.C. Kollmann (1756–1829), organist at the German chapel in the court of St James’s from 1784.

Clementi, Horn and Kollmann are the most important early figures in the English Bach Revival. Clementi is said to have practised Bach for hours on end during his time at Peter Beckford’s house in the early 1770s. His own music shows early traces of Bach’s influence which become much stronger in the late sonatas and the Gradus ad Parnassum. He incorporated several of the keyboard pieces in his didactic works. He must have passed on his love of Bach to his two most famous pupils, J.B. Cramer, whose studies of 1804 and 1810 show an obvious influence of the ‘48’, and Field, who astonished audiences with his playing of Bach during his European tour of 1802–3 and who taught Bach’s music to his Russian pupils. Kollmann consistently stressed the importance of Bach in his theoretical works in English, beginning with the Essay on Musical Harmony (1796), which offered a detailed analysis of the F minor fugue from book 2 of the ‘48’. In 1799 he advertised a plan to issue an analytical edition of the entire ‘48’, but the scheme was anticipated by the three continental editions of 1801, two of which were reissued in London. He published the Chromatic Fantasia in 1806, with ‘additions’ by himself, analysed 12 Bach fugues in his Quarterly Musical Register (1812) and translated excerpts from Forkel’s life of Bach into English, possibly assisting in a complete translation of the work (1820). Horn arranged 12 organ fugues for string quartet – with figured bass – and published them in 1807, and later collaborated with Wesley in the first English edition of the ‘48’. His son, C.E. Horn, another Bach enthusiast, included part of a fugue from the ‘48’ in the overture to his comic opera Rich and Poor (1812).

The movement quickly spread to native English musicians. William Shield’s Introduction to Harmony (1800) gave due place to Bach, and incorporated the D minor prelude from book 1 of the ‘48’. George Frederick Pinto, a close friend of Field’s, tried to imitate Bach in his C minor Fantasia and Sonata (published posthumously, c1808), and it was he who first introduced Samuel Wesley to Bach’s preludes and fugues, according to Wesley’s memoirs. Wesley took up the cause with feverish intensity, shown in his well-known letters to Benjamin Jacob, another English Bach enthusiast. Wesley edited, with Horn, the six organ trios, published (for the first time anywhere) in 1809–10 in instalments, and a ‘new and correct edition’ of the ‘48’ in 1810–13. In 1808 he began a series of concerts of Bach’s music at Surrey Chapel, with Jacob, who was organist there; and soon afterwards he began a similar series at the Portuguese Embassy chapel, where his friend Vincent Novello was organist and soon became a Bach convert. Because of the lack of pedals on most English organs, Wesley often played Bach’s organ music as duets with Jacob or Novello assisting him on a second manual (in some cases Dragonetti played the pedal parts on his double bass). He also played fugues from the ‘48’, which he regarded as organ music.

Wesley saw Bach as a superhuman genius, even though there is a touch of whimsy in the nicknames he used for him – ‘Saint Sebastian’, ‘The Man’, ‘Our Apollo’ and so on. He felt that militant propaganda was needed to persuade the English that any musician could be superior to Handel. He found that his brother Charles was an unrepentant Handelian. But he won many converts, including even the aged Burney who at last recanted his earlier criticism of Bach. William Crotch was recruited to the cause, and was the first to play the ‘St Anne’s’ fugue in public (on the piano). Both Wesley and Crotch gave prominence to Bach in lectures on the history of music. In later life Wesley’s enthusiasm was unabated, and he converted Henry John Gauntlett and his own son S.S. Wesley, who played the ‘St Anne’s’ fugue as an organ duet at St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, in 1827.

As well as the keyboard works, Wesley endeavoured to promote other music of Bach. The motet Jesu, meine Freude was sung at his concert in the Hanover Square Rooms on 3 June 1809, and the following year he presented to the Madrigal Society a score of the same work (with text translated into Latin). He played the sonatas for violin and keyboard many times with Jacob, and on 6 June 1814 he played one with Salomon at the latter’s benefit. Nevertheless, for many years Bach was known in England more by reputation than by experience. John Sainsbury’s Dictionary of Musicians (1824) gave twice as much space to J.S. Bach as to all his sons and relatives put together – in itself a surprising fact; yet as late as 1849, at the opening of the Bach Society, he was still called ‘this great and comparatively unknown master’. After Wesley’s early efforts there was a period when little new progress was made. Mendelssohn’s visits of 1829 and 1832 were a fresh stimulus, and his performances of organ works at St Paul’s Cathedral, with pedals, and played with a degree of confidence and understanding that no English musician could equal, were undoubtedly a revelation to English audiences. Moscheles also played his part: he performed the D minor keyboard concerto (with additional orchestral parts of his own) at the King’s Theatre on 13 May 1836, and the following year included preludes and fugues from the ‘48’ at several concerts. Monck Mason announced Bach’s Passion oratorios for the 1832 season of oratorio concerts at the King’s Theatre, but nothing came of this. Parts of the St Matthew Passion, B minor Mass and Magnificat were given at the Birmingham Festival (1837) and at the Ancient Concerts. Prince Albert, after his marriage to Victoria in 1840, introduced music by Bach into concerts at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle and at aristocratic musical societies in which he was concerned. Sterndale Bennett was another champion of Bach, performing keyboard and chamber works at many of his concerts and editing some of the music, including the St Matthew Passion, for publication. At Cambridge in the 1840s T.A. Walmisley lectured on Bach and taught his students to revere him above all other composers.

The English Bach Revival culminated in the formation of the Bach Society, founded by Sterndale Bennett. The first meeting, on 27 October 1849, at Bennett’s house in Russell Place, formulated the objects of the society, which included the collection and promotion, but not publication, of the works of the master (though the society did publish a volume of the motets, with English text added, in 1851). A number of concerts were given, and at last the St Matthew Passion had its first English performance (with English words) at the Hanover Square Rooms on 6 April 1854, Bennett conducting. Several other important works were revived before the society disbanded in 1870. The popularization of Bach was completed when his choral masterpieces were accepted alongside Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s. The St Matthew Passion was introduced at the Three Choirs Festival in 1871, and the Bach Choir undertook the regular performance of the larger choral works, beginning with the Mass in B minor in 1876.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.F. Reichardt: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, iv (1782), 196–7; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 357–60

J.A. Hiller: ‘Bach (Johann Sebastian)’, Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit (Leipzig, 1784/R), i, 9–29; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 395–403

[C.P.E. Bach]: comparison between Bach and Handel, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, lxxxi (1788), 295–303; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 437–445

J.N. Forkel: Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst, und Kunstwerke (Leipzig, 1802; Eng. trans. in David and Mendel)

A.F.C. Kollman: ‘Of John Sebastian Bach and his Works’, QMR, i (1812), 28–40

M. Mason: Announcement of plans for opera season, Harmonicon, x (1832), 29–31

E. Wesley, ed.: Letters of Samuel Wesley to Mr. Jacobs (London, 1875)

M. Schneider: ‘Verzeichnis der bis zum Jahre 1851 gedruckten (und der geschrieben im Handel gewesenen) Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb, iii (1906), 84–113

J.R. Sterndale Bennett: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge, 1907), 202–17, 232–5

H.T. David and A. Mendel, eds.: The Bach Reader (New York, 1945, rev.3/1998 as The New Bach Reader by C. Wolff)

F. Blume: Johann Sebastian Bach im Wandel der Geschichte (Kassel, 1947; Eng. trans., 1950, as Two Centuries of Bach)

W. Emery: ‘The London Autograph of “The Forty-eight”’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 106–23, esp. 114

S. Grossman-Vendrey: Felix -Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und die Musik der Vergangenheit (Regensburg, 1969)

W. Wiora, ed.: Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik (Regensburg, 1969)

L. Plantinga: ‘Clementi, Virtuosity, and the “German Manner”’, JAMS, xxv (1972), 303–30

H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach-Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972)

H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig and Dresden, 1984)

L. Finscher: ‘Bach in the Eighteenth Century’, Bach Studies, ed. D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989), 281–96

G. Stauffer: The Forkel – Hoffmeister & Kühnel Correspondence: a Document of the Early 19th-Century Bach Revival (New York, 1990)

C. Wolff: ‘On the Recognition of Bach and “the Bach Chorale”: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives’, Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 382–90

R. Kaiser: ‘Palschaus Bach-Spiel in London: zur Bach-Pflege in England um 1750’, BJb 1993, 225–9

P. Wollny: ‘Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's Halle Performances of Cantatas by his Father’, Bach Studies 2, ed. D. Melamed (Cambridge, 1995), 202–28

P. Wollny: ‘Zur Überlieferung der Instrumentalwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs: der Quellenbesitz Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs’, BJb 1996, 7–21

M. Heinemann and H.-J. Hinrichsen, eds.: Johann Sebastian Bach und die Nachwelt (Laaber, 1997)

Bachschmidt [Bachschmid], (Johann) Anton (Adam)

(b Melk, Lower Austria, 11 Feb 1728; d Eichstätt, 29 Dec 1797). German composer and violin virtuoso of Austrian birth. He came from a long line of musicians who emigrated to Melk late in the 17th century from Traunstein, Bavaria. While still a young man he was appointed Thurnermeister (director of instrumental music) in Melk, a post which he held from July 1751 to May 1753. He left his native town for travels as a virtuoso and may have been employed briefly at Würzburg (or Wurzbach) before settling in Eichstätt. There he established himself as a versatile musician in the court orchestra of Prince-Bishop Johann Anton II, using steadily in rank from violinist (September 1753) to Konzertmeister (March 1768) and finally to court Kapellmeister (July 1773). Although he developed a reputation primarily as a church composer, Bachschmidt wrote a number of dramatic works for Eichstätt’s theatres. His turn from Latin school drama to Italian opera reflects the closing of the Jesuit theatre in Eichstätt in 1773.

WORKS

MSS mainly in CH-E, D-BB, EB, Es, Ew, Mbm, OB, Rtt, WEY, WS

Operas: Erstickter Neid und Eifersucht, 1762, lost; Die Liebe zum Vaterland, 1766, lost; Il re pastore (P. Metastasio), 1774; L’eroe cinese (Metastasio), 1775, lost; La clemenza di Tito (Metastasio), 1776; Demetrio (Metastasio), 1777, lost; Antigono (Metastasio), 1778; Ezio (A. Raimund), 1780, lost

Lat. school dramas, music lost: Constantinus ultimus orientis Caesar, 1761; Jactura fidei, 1764; Pietas in parentem, 1765; S Richardus rex, 1766; Sol ex eclipsi, 1768

Church music: 21 masses, incl. Missa pastoritia, A-M; 1 Requiem; 3 Domine; 10 hymns; 29 litanies; 34 offertories; 2 processional songs for Corpus Christi; 9 psalms; 2 Stabat mater; 6 Te Deum; 12 vespers

Inst: 1 orch suite; 1 ov.; 3 vn concs.; Bn Conc.; 24 syms. listed in catalogue of D-Rtt; 6 str qts listed in Breitkopf catalogue (1773), lost; Ob Conc., listed in GerberL, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

EitnerQ

LipowskyBL

R. Schlecht: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Eichstätt (MS, 1883, D-Es) [with thematic catalogue]

J. Sax: ‘Musik und Theater in der fürstbischöflichen Residenzstadt Eichstätt bis zum Jahre 1802’, Jahresbericht des historischen Vereins für Mittelfranken, xlvi (1898), 6

J. Gmelch: Die Musikgeschichte Eichstätts (Eichstätt, 1914)

H. Dennerlein: ‘Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts in Franken: die Inventare der Funde von Ebrach, Burgwindheim, Maria Limbach und Iphofen’, Bericht des historischen Vereins Für die Pflege der Geschichte des Ehematigen Füstbistums Bamberg, xcii (1952–3), 273–321

R. Münster and R. Machold: Thematischer Katalog der Musikhandschriften der ehemaligen Klosterkirchen Weyarn, Tegernsee und Benediktbeuern (Munich, 1971)

R.N. Freeman: The Practice of Music at Melk Abbey, based upon the Documents, 1681–1826 (Vienna, 1989)

H. Unverricht: ‘Die Eichstätter Hofkapellmeister’, Musik in Bayern, xlii (1991), 97–109

ROBERT N. FREEMAN

Bach Society.

English society founded in 1849 by Sterndale Bennett as part of the English Bach Revival. See Bach Revival, §2.

Bach trumpet

(Ger. Bachtrompete).

A misnomer still prevalent in German-speaking countries for any high Trumpet used in modern performances of Baroque music. Originally, the term was applied to a straight trumpet in A (a 5th higher than the Baroque trumpet in D and a semitone lower than the modern B trumpet) with two valves; such an instrument was first employed by the Berlin trumpeter Julius Kosleck in September 1884 in Eisenach. He also played it on 21 March 1885 in a historic performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Walter Morrow and John Solomon playing the second and third parts on normal instruments. Kosleck’s trumpet was described as being in B/A and possessing a posthorn (conical) bore. Its mouthpiece was also deeply conical. Morrow and Solomon immediately had such instruments made (they were apparently imported by Silvani & Smith from France), although theirs had the standard cylindro-conical trumpet bore and were played with a normal trumpet mouthpiece. Morrow first employed his at the 1886 Leeds Festival; Solomon’s instrument still survives.

The public was misled by journalists to believe that the ‘Bach trumpet’ was a replica of the valveless trumpet of Bach’s day, even though W.F.H. Blandford, with Morrow’s support, published an article thoroughly exploding the fallacy. The straight ‘Bach trumpet’ in B/A was, furthermore, discarded as soon as still shorter trumpets in D were made, also in the straight form but with three valves. The first was manufactured by Mahillon in 1892. Even before that, in 1885, Besson of Paris had made a high G trumpet for the Parisian Teste for a performance of Bach’s Magnificat, and V.C. (not Barthélémy) Mahillon is said to have invented a so-called ‘piccolo B flat “Bach” trumpet’ a year later. The shorter instruments, with correspondingly greater distance between the notes of the harmonic series in any given register, considerably simplified the problem of accuracy in the high register. Curiously, the term ‘Bach trumpet’ was used to refer to the shorter instruments as well as to Kosleck’s original model.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Menke: History of the Trumpet of Bach and Handel (London, 1934/R), 228

W.F.H. Blandford: ‘The “Bach Trumpet”’, MMR, lxv (1935), 49–51, 73–6, 97–100

P. Bate: The Trumpet and Trombone (London, 1966, 2/1972), 174–80

H. Heyde: Das Ventilblasinstrument (Leipzig, 1987), 199–200

W. Waterhouse: The New Langwill Index (London, 1993), 249, 273

R. Dahlqvist and B. Eklund: ‘The Bach Renaissance and the Trumpet’, Euro-ITG Newsletter (1995/1), 12–17

R. Dahlqvist and B. Eklund: ‘The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2’, Euro-ITG Newsletter (1995/2), 4–9

EDWARD H. TARR

Bachus, Johannes de.

See Bacchius, Johannes de.

Bacilieri, Giovanni

(fl 1607–19). Italian composer. All that is known of his life is that for a time he was a priest at Ferrara. His three published collections are of church music intended for particular liturgical rites: some double-choir psalms and two rather more unusual compilations, for Holy Week and the Office of the Dead, neither of which was commonly set to measured music at this period. The Holy Week collection uses traditional styles, including falsobordone, chanting and alternation polyphony in five parts. This, together with the pompous Latin titles, suggests a rather conservative style for Ferrara, which on the whole had a progressive musical outlook at this time.

WORKS

all published in Venice

Lamentationes, Benedictus et Evangelia, quae publice in ecclesiis diebus Dominicis Palmarum, et Feriae Sextae leguntur, ad novum musicae concentum, 5vv, redacta, op.1 (1607)

Vesperae 8vv, una cum parte organica concinendae, op.2 (1610)

Totum defunctorum officium ex Pauli V Pont. Max. rituali recentiori modulatione, 5vv, musice redditum, op.3 (1619)

JEROME ROCHE/ELIZABETH ROCHE

Bacilly [Basilly, Bassilly], Bénigne de

(b ?Normandy, ?c1625; d Paris, 27 Sept 1690). French singing teacher and composer. He may have been a priest. He lived for most of his life in Paris but he was also in the service of Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Elbeuf. Although he was important as a composer and teacher, Bacilly’s most valuable legacy is the vocal treatise Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter, which has for long been recognized as one of the most detailed sources of information on French 17th-century vocal practice. However, until the publication of an English translation with the examples included, the application of its precepts to vocal performance had been virtually impossible since the examples Bacilly used to illustrate his teachings were not included in the text (he simply referred instead to specific passages in published volumes of airs de cour). The importance of the Remarques lies in two main areas: it is one of the earliest volumes to give specific descriptions and applications of the expressive melodic figures (agréments) that had been adopted into the musical language of all Europe by the 18th century, and fully half the treatise is devoted to an exhaustive discussion of the meaning, structure, pronunciation and rhythm of French poetry, with detailed instructions as to its amplification through musical ornamentation – ample evidence of the master–servant relationship between poetry and ornamentation. Bacilly took his examples from airs whose short, delicate couplets are matched by tender, unobtrusive melodies. In the anthologies of airs of Bacilly’s time it was the composer’s custom to print the melody of the second verse as an elaborate variation of the first. Bacilly referred to those diminutions as written-down improvisations of the singer-composer and analysed their relationship to the poetry. He was himself active as a composer in this genre, but many of his collections of airs were published in limited runs of 30 or fewer, and in some cases no copies are extant.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

sacred

Les airs spirituels … sur les stances chrestiennes de M l’Abbé Testu … avec basse continue, et les seconds couplets en diminution (1672)

Les airs spirituels … avec la basse continue, les chiffres pour l’accompagnement, et les seconds couplets en diminution, seconde partie (1677)

Les airs spirituels … dans un plus grand nombre et une plus grande perfection que dans les précédents éditions, deux parties (1688) [revision of the two collections above; further edns in 1692 and 1693]

secular

Nouveau livre d’airs (1661)

Premier livre d’airs (1662)

XXII livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire à deux parties (1663)

Second livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire à deux parties (1664)

Second livre d’airs à deux parties … dédié à son Altesse Mademoiselle de Nemours (1664)

III. livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1665)

IIII. livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1666)

V. livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1667)

Capilotade bachique à deux parties contenant les alphabets de fragmens choisis des meilleures chansons à boire (1667)

Les trois livres d’airs … augmentez de plusieurs airs nouveaux, de chiffres pour le théorbe et d’ornemens pour la méthode de chanter, première partie (1668)

VI. livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1668)

Meslanges d’airs à deux parties, d’airs à boire et autres chansons (1671)

II. livre des meslanges, de chansons, airs sérieux et à boire, à 2 et 3 parties (1674)

Second livre d’airs bachiques … contenant plusieurs récits de basses et autres airs à deux et à trois parties avec une seconde édition du premier recueil corrigée et augmentée (1677)

Recueil des huit livres de chansons pour boire e pour danser (1699)

Songs, sacred and secular, in Airs de différents autheurs à deux parties (1658); IIe livre d’airs de différents autheurs à deux parties (1659); XX recueil de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1661); IVe [–XIIIe] livre d’airs de différents autheurs à deux parties (1661–70); XXI. livre de chansons pour danser et pour boire (1662); Premier livre d’airs à boire … contre les incommoditez du temps (1673); Recueil de chansonettes de differents autheurs (1675); Mercure galant (1679–90); VIe recueil de Chansonettes de differents autheurs (1680); Nouvelles poésies spirituelles et morales (1737); Airs notez des cantiques sur les points les plus importans de la religion et de la morale chrétienne (1738); Airs et brunettes à 2 et 3 dessus pour les flûtes traversières tirez des meilleurs autheurs (n.d.); MSS in F-Pn

editions

Recueil des plus beaux vers … mis en chant, avec le nom des autheurs tant des airs que des paroles (1661)

Recueil des plus beaux vers … mis en chant. 3me partie (1661)

Suite de la première partie du recueil des plus beaux vers … (1661)

Recueil des plus beaux vers … Seconde et novelle partie dans laquelle sont compris les airs de Versailles (1668)

Journal de toutes le nouveautés du chant (?1668), lost

Recueil de tous les plus beaux airs bachiques, avec les noms des autheurs du chant et des paroles (1671)

Le bon mary. Comédie (1678), lost, cited in Le Mercure galant

Premier recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire de différents autheurs, à deux et trois parties (1679)

Nouveau recueil des plus beaux vers mis en chant, augmenté de tous les airs les plus nouveaux et de plusieurs grands récits et autres couplets de Mme la Comtesse de la Suze … (1680)

theoretical works

Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (1668/R, 4/1681; Eng. trans., 1968; Eng. trans. of pt 1 in Lorimer)

Traité de la méthode, ou Art de bien chanter par le sieur B.D.B. (1671)

L’art de bien chanter de M de Bacilly, augmenté d’un discours qui sert de réponse à la critique de ce traité (1679)

Traité de la méthode, ou Art de chanter par M de B*** (1681), lost, cited in FétisB

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Gérold: L’art du chant en France au XVIIe siècle (Strasbourg, 1921/R)

H. Prunières: ‘Un maître de chant au XVIIe siècle: Bénigne de Bacilly’, RdM, iv (1923), 156–60

A.B. Caswell: The Development of Seventeenth-Century French Vocal Ornamentation and its Influence upon Late Baroque Ornamentation Practice (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1964)

G.K. Ryhming: ‘L’art du chant français au XVIIIe siècle selon Bénigne de Bacilly’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxv/1 (1982), 10–25

C. Massip: Michel Lambert (1610–1696): contribution à l’histoire de la monodie en France (diss., U. of Paris-Sorbonne, 1985)

C. Guinamard: ‘Remarques curieuses sur l'art de bien chanter de Bénigne de Bacilly’, Aspects de la musique baroque et classique à Lyon et en France, ed. D. Paquette (Lyon, 1989), 73–86

C.E. Gordon-Seifert: The Language of Music in France: Rhetoric as a Basis for Expression in Michel Lambert’s ‘Les airs de Monsieur Lambert’ (1669) and Bénigne de Bacilly’s ‘Les trois livres d’airs’ (1668) (diss., U. of Michigan, 1994)

P. Lescat: ‘Catalogue des ouvrages de Bénigne de Bacilly’, Benigne de Bacilly: Les trois livres d’airs regravez en deux volumes [facs.] (Courlay, 1996), 4–15

E.M. Lorimer: An Annotated Translation of the First Part of Bénigne de Bacilly’s ‘Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter’ (diss., U. of Oxford, 1998)

AUSTIN B. CASWELL/R

Back [Bagg], Konrad

(b Haigerloch, 23 June 1749; d Ottobeuren, 10 April 1810). South German monastic composer. After studying in Zwiefalten and Ehingen an der Donau, he entered the Benedictine monastery of Ottobeuren in 1771. He was taught music by Ernestus Weinrauch in Zwiefalten and by Franz Schnitzer and Christoph Neubauer in Ottobeuren. He served the monastery as choir leader, music teacher and master of novices. After the suspension of the state endowment to Ottobeuren in 1802, he continued to live there as a pensioner. Back enriched the active musical life of the abbey primarily through his liturgical compositions, of which two masses, dated 1793, survive in the Munich Staatsbibliothek and several smaller works in Ottobeuren. He also wrote at least one cantata for the abbey (Der Tod Jesu, manuscript copies in Munich and Salzburg), and some stage works, including a drama musicum, Authore parente servata religio (1794, autograph in Munich), and Josephus honoratus, performed at Ottobeuren in 1792 and now lost. His only known printed work is a symphony which appeared in an anthology published in Berlin by Hummel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

P.A. Lindner: ‘Album Ottoburanum’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben und Neuburg, xxxi (1904), 1–90, esp. 45 [with list of compositions]

W. Klemm: ‘Benediktinisches Barocktheater in Südbayern, insbesondere des Reichsstiftes Ottobeuren’, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige, liv (1936), 95–184, 397–432; lv (1937), 274–304

W. Pfänder: ‘Das Musikleben der Abtei Ottobeuren vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Säkularisation’, Ottobeuren 764–1964: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Abtei (Augsburg, 1964), 58–9

S. Michl: ‘Theatermusik Ottobeurer Hauskomponisten im 18. Jahrhundert’, Musik in bayerischen Klöstern, i, ed. R. Münster (Regensburg, 1986), 189–224

ADOLF LAYER

Back, Oskar

(b Vienna, 9 June 1879; d Brussels, 3 Jan 1963). Dutch violinist and teacher of Hungarian origin. He studied at the conservatories in Vienna and Brussels (with Ysaÿe and César Thomson), and taught at the Brussels Conservatory, 1910–18. In 1919 he settled in Holland and was one of the distinguished violinists who supplemented the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mengelberg for the historic Mahler Festival of 1920. Back devoted himself chiefly to teaching, first with private lessons and later at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum and the Rotterdam Conservatory. He taught most of the leading Dutch violinists and orchestral leaders, among whom the best-known are Herman Krebbers, Theo Olof, Willem Noske, Jo Juda, Emmy Verhey and Jean Louis Stuurop; he also taught a number of foreign students, including Alma Moodie. The Oskar Back Foundation was set up after his death to provide assistance for talented young Dutch violinists; it organizes a national violinists’ competition, held every other year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Paap: ‘Oskar Back 80 jaar’, Mens en melodie, xiv (1959), 192–4

W. Noske: ‘In memoriam Oskar Back’, Sonorum speculum, no.15 (1963), 44–8

TRUUS DE LEUR

Bäck, Sven-Erik

(b Stockholm, 16 Sept 1919; d Stockholm, 10 Jan 1994). Swedish composer. He was born into a Protestant family and came into early contact with unpretentious chamber music, jazz and Lutheran church music. He studied the violin with Sven Karpe and then (1938–43) at the Stockholm Music High School with Charles Barkel, in whose quartet he played the viola (1944–53). The decisive influence on him, however, was Rosenberg, who gave him private tuition in composition (1940–45). With other Rosenberg pupils, including Blomdahl and Lidholm, he formed the Monday Group which met, from 1944 for some years, on Mondays at Blomdahl’s home to discuss and analyse their own and other music; they also studied Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz and other works. Bäck subsequently took a leading position in Swedish musical life: he was on the boards of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and of the Theatre and Music Council, and in 1958 he was appointed principal of the Edsberg Music School attached to Swedish radio, where he proved himself a brilliant teacher of interpretation and performance in Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary music. This side of his work dates back to 1948, when he visited the Schola Cantorum in Basle, the orchestra whose style was emulated by the Lilla Kammarorkestern in which Bäck played (1943–8) and by the Kammarorkestern –53, which he led from its creation in 1953 to 1957.

Bäck first developed an individual style in religious works, notably Ur Johannes 3 (1946) and Ur Jesaja 9 (1947). The much-performed Solo Flute Sonata (1949) shows how short was the step, in his mind, from vocal to instrumental writing, for its first movement is a direct development of a setting of Psalm xlii. Rosenberg’s teaching had stressed melody as an essential element even in polyphonic works, and Bäck introduced quite original melodic ornaments, easily recognized in his music of the 1950s. When, with the other members of the Monday Group, he discovered 12-note composition, he preferred the aphoristic and lyrical qualities of Webern, and this led him to a thoroughly pointilliste style best exploited in A Game around a Game for orchestra (1959). He often worked with artists in other media, notably in the successful chamber opera Tranfjädrarna (‘The Crane Feathers’, 1956), and extended the collaboration in such works as Favola (1962), for which Östen Sjöstrand wrote a poem and Björn Erling Evensen produced a sculpture; Evensen also constructed murals to be seen to the accompaniment of electronic music by Bäck. Towards electronic composition, as practised by Stockhausen and others, Bäck had at first remained sceptical, but from 1969 he worked intensively in the medium, composing some ‘electronic motets’ that form a sequel to those more conventional motets of his, for mixed choir a cappella, which are among the major contemporary contributions to liturgical music.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Operas: Tranfjädrarna [The Crane Feathers] (chbr op, B. Malmberg, after Kinoshita), 1956, Swedish radio, 1957; Gästabudet [The Banquet] (Ö. Sjöstrand), Stockholm, 1958; Fågeln [The Bird] (A. Obrenovic), 1960, Swedish radio, 1961

Ballets: Svanesång (B. Åkesson), children’s chorus, fl, va, timp, 1947; Danssvit (Åkesson), 2 pf, 1951; Nature morte (Åkesson), va, bn, perc, 1955; Ikaros (Åkesson), orch, 1963; Movements (Åkesson), orch, 1965

orchestral

Sinfonia, str, 1951; Variationer över en luthersk kyrkovisa, 1954, rev. as Fantasi över ‘Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot’, 1957; Sinfonia da camera, 1955; Vn Conc., 1957; A Game around a Game, 1959; Arkitektur, 2 ww orchs, perc, 1960; Intrada, 1964; Vc Conc., 1965; Movimento II [concert version of ballet Movements], 1966; O altitudo II, 1966; Ruoli, 1966; Serenade/Sumerki, str orch, 1977; Sumerki 90, 1990

vocal

Choral: Ur Johannes 3, vv, org ad lib, 1946; Ur Jesaja 9, 1947; Glädje i Gud, cant., solo vv, vv, org, 1948; Dityramb (G. Ekelöf), unison female vv, chbr orch, 1949; Kattresan (Conc. per bambini) (I. Arosenius), cant., children’s vv, rec, vn, perc, 1952; Himlaljusens fader, cant., solo vv, vv, str, org, 1952; Sinfonia sacra, vv, orch, 1953; 15 motets for the church year, 1959–81; Uppbrottets mässa (O. Hartman, L. Håkansson), vv, unison vv, org, perc. 1967; Humlan (F. Isaksson), vv, vc, pf, perc, 1968; Behold I am Making all Things New, vv, 1968; Vid havets yttersta gräns (cant., Sjöstrand), solo vv, mixed choir, orch, tape, 1979

Solo vocal: 3 kinesiska sånger, 1v, pf, 1945; Neither nor, S, pf, perc, 1971

chamber, instrumental and electronic

Str qts: 1945, 1947, 1962, 1984

For 3–10 insts: Exercitier, str qnt, 1948; Préambule pour Pierre, str qt, 1949; Str Trio no.1, vn, va, db, 1953; Nuovo su vecchio, old insts, 1962; Postludium, fl, pf, perc, 1967; sentire …, fl, vc, pf, 1969; Str Trio no.2, 1970; Decet, wind qnt, str qnt, 1972; Signos, perc ens, 1980; Trio (Sentire …), vn, vc, pf, 1986; Octet, str, 1988; Stella maris, wind qt, 1988; Sumerki 92, cl, vc, pf, 1992

For 1–2 insts: Sonata, fl, 1949; Elegie, a sax, pf, 1952; Sonata, 2 vc, 1957; Favola, cl, perc, 1962; 5 preludier, fl/vn/va/vc/cl/bn, 1964; O altitudo, org, 1966; For Eliza, org, tape ad lib, 1971; Time Present, 2 vn, elec, 1975

For pf: Expansiva preludier, 1950; Sonata alla ricercare, 1950; Impromptu, 1957; Tollo, 2 pf, 1974

Tape: In principio, 1969; Porten, 1969; Mur och port, 1971; Nox lucebit, 1971; Genom jorden genom havet, 1972; Muri, 1972; Les grands faux-penseurs …, 1975

Incid music for plays, films

Principal publisher: Hansen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nutida musik, x/3–4 (1966–7) [special number]

H. Connor: Samtal med tonsättare (Stockholm, 1971)

G. Bergendal: 33 svenska komponister (Stockholm, 1972)

P.A. Hellquist: ‘Bäck, Sven-Erik’, Sohlmans musiklexikon, i (Stockholm, 2/1975)

G. Aulén: Sven-Erik Bäcks motetter: en musikalisk teologisk studie (Stockholm, 1977)

G. Schönfelder: ‘Sven-Erik Bäck: “Den stund kommer”’, Prinzip Wahrheit, Prinzip Schönheit ed. G. Schönfelder and H. Åstrand (Stockholm, 1984), 129–172; Eng. trans. in Contemporary Swedish Music through the Telescopic Sight (Stockholm, 1993), 58–109

S.R. Peterson: A Performance Guide to the Unaccompanied ‘Motetter för kyrkoårt’ of Sven-Erik Bäck (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990)

J.L. Höglund, ed.: Sven-Erik Bäck: en bok om musikern och medmänniskan (Stockholm, 1999)

PER-ANDERS HELLQUIST, HANS ÅSTRAND

Back check.

See Check.

Backer Grøndahl, Agathe (Ursula)

(b Holmestrand, 1 Dec 1847; d Kristiania [now Oslo], 4 June 1907). Norwegian composer and pianist. She married the conductor Olams Andreas Grøndahl in 1875. She first studied the piano in Christiania with Winter-Hjelm and Kjerulf, then in Berlin at Kullak's Neue Akademie der Tonkunst (1865–7) and later (1871–2) with Bülow in Florence and Liszt in Weimar. She also studied theory and composition with L.M. Lindeman in Christiania and R. Wüerst in Berlin. Influential in Norway as both performer and teacher, she also made concert tours in the other Scandinavian countries and in Germany and England, and was recognized as an outstanding pianist by her contemporaries. Her chief significance, however, was as a composer of songs (of which she wrote about 190) and piano pieces (about 120); she also wrote some songs for chorus, and more than 50 Norwegian folksong arrangements; her orchestral compositions are limited to two works from her student days in Berlin.

The best of Backer Grøndahl's songs, such as the cycles Barnets vårdag (‘The Child's Spring Day’) to poems of A. Jynge, and Ahasverus, to poems of B.S. Ingemann, belong to the standard Norwegian Romantic song repertory. Their strength lies in the shapely, singable melodies reflecting the moods of the texts. Although the piano generally plays a supporting role, only rarely functioning independently, the accompaniments are nonetheless carefully worked out and sometimes include elements of tone-painting. Most of the songs are in varied strophic form, but there are also simple strophic and through-composed examples. Her piano works are for the most part descriptively titled lyric pieces in simple song forms or, less often, in larger fantasy-like forms. Among the best known are the Serenade (op.15 no.1), Ballade (op.36 no.5), Sommervise (‘Summer Song’) (op.45 no.3) and the fairytale suite I blaafjellet (‘In the Blue Mountain’) (op.44). The concert studies are among her finest works, and some of them make considerable technical demands on the performer. Although Backer Grøndahl's career was in the heyday of late Romanticism, her style remained conservative and principally modelled on earlier composers, including Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. The specifically folk-influenced Norwegian tradition, which left its stamp on many of her contemporaries, seems to have had only a slight effect on her music; her folksong arrangements show some of the characteristic traits of Norwegian folk music, but do not have the stylistic interest and originality of the arrangements by Grieg and Kjerulf. Her original compositions, however, have a melodic charm that has secured them a lasting place at the heart of the Norwegian Romantic repertory.

WORKS

(selective list)

published in Kristiania unless otherwise stated

songs

3 sange (V. Bergsøe, Caralis), op.1, 1868–9 (Copenhagen, 1872); 5 sange, op.2, 1871 (Copenhagen, 1873); 5 sange, op.3, 1870–73 (Copenhagen, 1874); 7 sange, op.4, 1869–74 (Copenhagen, 1875); 4 sånger (Z. Topelius), op.5, 1871–2 (Stockholm, 1875); 6 sange, op.6, 1867–71 (Stockholm, 1879); Sommerliv [Summer Life] (H. Hertz), 4 songs, op.7 (Stockholm 1879); 5 sange (Bergsøe), op.8, 1871–6 (Stockholm, 1879); 6 sange, op.9, 1871–9 (1879); 4 Gesänge, op.10, 1871–5 (1879); 5 sånger (Topelius, Runeberg), op.12, 1879 (Stockholm, 1882); 5 sange, op.13 (1881)

6 deutsche Lieder, op.14 (1881); 6 sange, op.16 (1884); Sange ved havet [Songs at Sea] (H. Drachmann), op.17, 1884 (Copenhagen, 1887); 7 folkeviser og romanser, op.18 (1886); Serenade (E. von der Recke), op.21 (1888); Blomstervignetter, 5 songs, op.23 (1888); 6 sange (Drachmann), op.26 (1890); 6 sange, op.27 (1890); Chant de noces: Bryllupsmorgen (H. Gréville), op.28 (1890); 10 sange (V. Krag), op.29 (1892); 10 sange (Krag), op.31 (1894); Norske folkeviser, arr. S, op.34 (1894); Natten er stille [The Night is Calm] (J. Halmrast), De gamles Vals [Old Folk’s Waltz] (H. Lunde), op.40 (1897)

5 sange, op.41 (1897); Barnets vårdag [The Child's Spring Day] (A. Jynge), song cycle, op.42 (1899); 8 kjaempeviser, op.43, 1896–7 (1897); 20 folke- og skjaemteviser, op.43, 1896–7 (1897); 5 sange, op.46, 1897–9 (1899); 2 sange fra havet, op.48 (1899); 3 sange i moll, op.49 (1899); Sommer (Jynge), 8 songs, op.50, 1899 (1900); 12 folkeviser og melodier fra fremmede lande, op.51 (1902); Mor synger [The Mother Sings] (Jynge), 8 songs, op.52 (1900); Sydover (H. Reynolds), 6 songs, op.54, 1900 (1901); Ahasverus (B.S. Ingemann), 6 songs, op.56, 1900 (1902); 6 deutsche Liebeslieder aus der Jugend, op.60, 1869–1900 (1903); Kløvereng [Clover Field] (T. Caspari), op.62, 1901 (1903); 4 sange, op.65, 1901–4 (1904); Endnu et streif kun [One more Glimpse] (Somerset), op.70 (1907)

piano solo

6 concert-etuder, op.11 (1881); 3 morceaux, op.15 (1882); 4 skizzer, op.19 (1886); Suite, 5 movts, op.20 (1887); 3 études, op.22 (1888); 6 idylles, op.24 (1888); 3 klaverstykker, op.25 (1890); [11] Norske folkeviser og folkedanse, op.30 (1891); 3 études de concert, op.32 (Copenhagen, 1895); [8] Norske folkeviser og folkedanse, op.33 (1894); 3 klaverstykker, op.35 (1894); [10] Fantasistykker, op.36 (1895); Serenade, op.37 (1896); 3 ungarske studier, op.38 (1896); [10] Fantasistykker, op.39 (1896)

I blaafjellet [In the Blue Mountain], fairytale suite, 6 pieces, op.44 (1897); [5] Fantasistykker, op.45 (1897); Etudes de concert, op.47 (Copenhagen, 1901); 3 klaverstykker, op.53 (1900); [12] Smaa fantasistykker, op.55 (1902); Etudes de concert, op.57 (Copenhagen, 1903); Concert-études, op.58 (Copenhagen, 1903); 6 klaverstykker, op.59 (1903); Prélude, op.61 no.1, Grand menuet, op.61 no.2 (Copenhagen, 1904); [5] Lettere fantasistykker, op.63 (Copenhagen, 1904); Danse burlesque, op.64 no.1, Valse caprice, op.64 no.2 (1905); Barnlige Billeder [Children Pictures], 6 fantasias, op.66 (1905); 2 klaverstykker, op.68 (1907); 3 klaverstykker, op.69 (1907)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Hoegsbro: Biography of the Late Agathe Backer-Gröndahl (New York, 1913)

W.P. Sommerfeldt: Boktrykker Christopher Grøndahls efterkommere (Oslo, 1916)

O.M. Sandvik: Agathe og O.A. Grøndahl 1847–1947 (Oslo, 1948) [with catalogue of works]

K.M. Ganer: Agathe Backer Grøndahls klaveretyder (diss., U. of Oslo, 1968)

B. Kortsen: Agathe Backer Grøndahl og folketonen (Bergen, 1970)

N. Grinde: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971, 4/1993; Eng trans., 1991)

H.-M. Weydahl: ‘Agathe Backer Grøndahl og Erika Nissen’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, xi (1974), 77–83

G. Risa: Agathe Backer Grøndahl som romansekomponist: en analyse av et utvalg romanser (diss., U. of Oslo, 1980)

J.L. Iverson: Piano Music of Agathe Backer Grøndahl (diss., U. of Northern Colorado, 1993)

C. Dahm: Agathe Backer Grøndahl: komponisten og pianisten (Oslo, 1998)

NILS GRINDE

Backers, Americus

(d London, Jan 1778). Dutch or German maker of harpsichords and pianos, active in England. He worked at 22 Great Jermyn Street, London, from 1763 to 1778. Writing to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1812, James Shudi Broadwood attributed the invention of the English grand-piano action to the ‘Dutchman’ Backers in 1772. It was not until 90 years later that Henry Fowler Broadwood wrote, in his observations on his father's manuscript notes, that John Broadwood and Robert Stodart had assisted Backers with his invention; since Backers had advertised his ‘Original Forte Piano’ in the Public Advertiser of 1 March 1771, claiming that it was ‘no Copy, being entirely his own Invention’, Backers must have been primarily responsible. The English grand action was an improvement on the action invented by Cristofori: the intermediary underhammer was removed, allowing the hopper to work directly on the notch in the butt of the hammer, and a regulating button and screw to control the escapement was incorporated. Simple but perfect, it was a direct lever action and became standard as the English grand action. (For illustration see Pianoforte, fig.12.)

The earliest surviving piano that incorporates the English grand action is owned by the Duke of Wellington, and is on loan to Edinburgh University. Its nameboard reads: ‘Americus Backers No. 21 Londini fecit 1772’; it is bichord and has una corda and damper pedals. Its hammers have rolled leather heads, although, according to Broadwood’s 1862 International Exhibition: List of the Articles Exhibited, Backers first planned to fit cork or softwood hammerheads, ‘with a view to obtain the Harpsichord tone so much admired at that period’. Burney stated that Backers was German, and that he made trichord pianos costing between £60 and £70. Backers made 59 grand pianos; his only surviving harpsichord, owned by Lord Hylton, is dated 1766. It has a compass of five octaves and its disposition is 2 x 8', 1 x 4', with a lute which was originally operated by a pedal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyGN

J.S. Broadwood: Some Notes made by J.S. Broadwood, 1838, with Observations & Elucidations by H.F. Broadwood, 1862 (London, 1862)

S. Newman and P. Williams: The Russell Collection and Other Early Keyboard Instruments in Saint Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1968)

W.H. Cole: ‘Americus Backers: Original Forte Piano Maker’, English Harpsichord Magazine, iv/4 (1987), 79–86

A. Ribeiro, ed.: [Letter of 21 Jan 1774 to Thomas Twining], The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, i: 1751–1784 (Oxford, 1991), 163–5

M. Cole: The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford, 1998)

MARGARET CRANMER

Backfall (i).

A term used to denote a short, descending appoggiatura applied on the beat to conjunct notes or notes a pair apart. The ‘forefall’ (‘beat’ or ‘half-fall’) was a rising appoggiatura. The less common slide or double backfall descended a 3rd onto the main note. See Ornaments, §6.

Backfall (ii).

A lever in an organ's key action or coupler mechanism, which transfers the key action to the vertical tracker or sticker, which in turn causes the pallet in the wind-chest to open. For illustrations see Organ, figs.5 and 6.

Backfall [backwell] (iii).

A lever in a carillon's mechanism.

Background

(Ger. Hintergrund).

In Schenkerian analysis (see Analysis, §II, 4) the first, i.e. fundamental, Layer that underlies a piece or movement. The background layer of a piece is represented by one of a limited number of basic contrapuntal designs, called the Ursatz of the piece.

Thus many pieces of tonal music have the same background structure. For this reason the word ‘background’ is sometimes used more loosely by analysts to mean structure itself, in opposition to ‘foreground’ which connotes the surface of the piece.

WILLIAM DRABKIN

Background music.

See Environmental music.

Backhaus, Wilhelm

(b Leipzig, 26 March 1884; d Villach, 5 July 1969). German pianist. He studied the piano with Alois Reckendorf and composition with Salomon Jadassohn at the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1898–9 he was a pupil of d’Albert, but after the age of 15 he was largely self-taught. In 1900–01 he toured England, substituting for Ziloti in a performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Hallé Orchestra under Hans Richter, and in 1901 he made his Promenade Concerts début with Mendelssohn’s G minor Concerto, returning to perform Brahms’s Paganini Variations at the Proms later the same season. In 1905 he won the Rubinstein Prize in Paris and commenced an intensive international career. Backhaus made the first of many North American tours in 1912–13, playing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with Walter Damrosch and giving a Carnegie Hall recital. A New York Town Hall recital given in 1921 drew a tumultuous response. However, between 1926 and 1954 his career was based chiefly in Europe, and in 1931 he became a Swiss citizen. His return to America in 1954 to give a series of Beethoven recitals in Carnegie Hall showed an undiminished authority. He held teaching appointments at the RMCM (1905) and at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (1925–6). However, he did not view himself as a teacher, and when questioned about his fabled technique commented drily that it was based on scales, arpeggios and Bach. Backhaus made the first-ever concerto recording (the Grieg A minor Concerto) in 1909, and the first complete recording of the Chopin études in 1928; shortly before his death he was completing a second recorded cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas which he had begun in 1964, when he was 80. His mastery in such daunting music as the Chopin études was legendary, although he is chiefly remembered for the ruggedness and integrity of his Beethoven and Brahms. Even in his 80s his command of the Brahms B Concerto (which he played in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Klemperer and recorded with Böhm) remained unfaltering, a tribute to his formidable technical security.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.H. Eichmann: Wilhelm Backhaus (Geneva, 1957; Eng. trans., 1958)

F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming: ‘A Backhaus Discography’,Gramophone Record Review, no.68 (1959), 578

J. Kaiser: Grosse Pianisten in unserer Zeit (Munich, 1965, 5/1982; Eng. trans., 1971)

E. Werba: ‘Wilhelm Backhaus zum Gedenken’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 462 only

BRYCE MORRISON

Backofen, Johann Georg Heinrich

(b Durlach, 6 July 1768; d Darmstadt, 10 July 1839). German harpist, clarinettist and basset-horn player. With his brothers Ernst (bassoonist) and Gottfried (violinist and clarinettist) he went to Nuremberg in 1780 to study music. The Kapellmeister, G.W. Gruber, taught him composition, and H. Birckman the clarinet. From 1789 Backofen made several tours as a clarinettist. He returned to Nuremberg in 1794 and studied the flute. In 1802 he lived at Gotha, where he taught the harp. In 1806 he was appointed court chamber musician and in the same year saw the marriage in Gotha of his pupil Dorette Scheidler to Spohr. In 1811 Backofen became court musician at Darmstadt, where he manufactured clarinets. He wrote a clarinet and basset-horn method in 1803, but as this became outdated when Müller's inventions appeared he produced a new edition in 1824; this contains much useful information. Backofen also wrote a harp method (1801) and compositions for harp, clarinet, basset-horn and wind band. It was probably his niece who appeared as a singer, and whom Hermstedt engaged for the Sondershausen theatre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (H.J. Zingel)

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977), 29–31

H. Rosenzweig: ‘Johann Georg Heinrich Backofen: die deutsche Harfe um 1800’, Historische Harfen: Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis historischer Harfen (Dornach, 1991), 80–97

PAMELA WESTON

Backus, John (Graham)

(b Portland, OR, 29 April 1911; d Los Angeles, 28 Oct 1988). American acoustician. After studying at Reed College, Portland (BA 1932), he undertook postgraduate study at the University of California in Berkeley (MA 1936, PhD 1940). His early research work was in nuclear physics, working under the supervision of Ernest Lawrence in the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. In 1945 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Southern California, and he continued in that post until his retirement in 1980. An accomplished performer on the piano and the bassoon, Backus was awarded the degree of MMus in conducting by the University of Southern California in 1959. In the later stages of his research career he made major contributions to the study of the acoustics of woodwind instruments, brass instruments and organ pipes. In 1969 the first edition of The Acoustical Foundations of Music was published; this became one of the most popular and successful introductory textbooks in musical acoustics. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1986.

WRITINGS

‘Small-Vibration Theory of the Clarinet’, JASA, xxxv (1963), 305–13

with T.C. Hundley: ‘Wall Vibrations in Flue Organ Pipes and their Effect on Tone’, JASA, xxxix (1966), 936–45

The Acoustical Foundations of Music (New York, 1969, 2/1977)

‘Input Impedance Curves for the Reed Woodwind Instruments’, JASA, lvi (1974), 1266–79

‘Input Impedance Curves for the Brass Instruments’, JASA, lx (1976), 470–80

‘The Effect of the Player's Vocal Tract on Woodwind Instrument Tone’, JASA, lxxviii (1985), 17–20

MURRAY CAMPBELL

Bacon, Ernst

(b Chicago, IL, 26 May 1898; d Orinda, CA, 16 March 1990). American composer and pianist. He studied at Northwestern University (1915–18), the University of Chicago (1919–20) and the University of California (MA 1935). Among his teachers were Alexander Raab and Glenn Dillard Gunn (piano), Weigl and Bloch (composition), and Eugene Goossens (conducting), under whom he was assistant conductor of the Rochester Opera Company. He taught at the Eastman School (1925–8) and the San Francisco Conservatory (1928–30); in 1935 he instituted and conducted the Carmel Bach Festival in California, and the next year he was supervisor of the WPA Federal Music Project in San Francisco and conductor of its orchestra. Subsequent teaching appointments took him to Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, as dean and professor of piano (1938–45), and to Syracuse University, as director of the school of music and professor (1945–63, professor emeritus from 1964). Among the awards he received were a Pulitzer Prize (1932, for the Symphony no.1) and two Guggenheim Fellowships.

As a composer Bacon is best known for his songs, which show unusual sensitivity to the colour and inflection of words and a masterly use of syncopation to give the impression of natural speech. His settings of texts by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are considered by many to be among the finest examples of 20th-century American art song. He made many folksong arrangements, and a number of his works on American subjects, such as the folk opera A Tree on the Plains (1942) and the orchestral suite From these States (1951), draw on various types of indigenous music, including black American and Appalachian tunes, hymns, spirituals and jazz. His music favours clear melodic contours, vigorous contrapuntal energy and strong rhythms that allude occasionally to ragtime and other dance idioms. Though he made use of non-diatonic scales, such as the octatonic, Bacon’s harmony remained fundamentally tonal, with an emphasis on open, diatonic intervals.

In addition to composing, Bacon performed as a pianist in Europe and the USA. His published writings include two books, Words on Music (Syracuse, NY, 1960/R) and Notes on the Piano (Syracuse, NY, 1963/R). His article ‘Our Musical Idiom’, published in The Monist in October 1917, represents one of the earliest attempts at a systematic classification of all possible harmonies within the 12-note system.

WORKS

Dramatic: Take your Choice (musical comedy), collab. P. Mathias and R. Stoll, San Francisco, 1936; A Tree on the Plains (musical play, 2, P. Horgan), Spartanburg, SC, 1942; A Drumlin Legend (children’s op, H. Carus), New York, 1949; Dr. Franklin (musical play, C. Lengyel), 1976; ballets

Orch: Sym. no.1, d, 1932; Bearwalla, pf, str, 1936; Country Roads, Unpaved, suite, 1936; Sym. no.2, 1937; Ford’s Theater, 1946; From these States, suite, 1951; Fables (E. Bacon, J. Edmunds), nar, orch, 1953; Great River (Sym. no.3), 1956; Conc. grosso, 1957; Elegy, ob, str, 1957; Erie Waters, suite, 1961; Riolama (Pf Conc. no.1), 1963; Over the Waters, ov., 1976; Pf Conc. no.2, 1982; Remembering Ansel Adams, cl, str, 1985; band works; songs with orch

Chbr: Buncombe County, vn, pf, 1943; Sonata, vc, pf, 1948; Qnt, str qt, db, 1950; Peterborough, suite, va, pf, perf. 1952; A Life, suite, vc, pf, 1966–81; Old Airs from Many Countries, wind ens, 1968; Pf Trio no.1, 1978; Tumbleweeds, cycle, vn, pf, 1979; Sonata, vn, pf, 1982; Pf Trio no.2, 1986; Sonata, va, pf, 1987; pieces for pf, pf 4 hands and org; other works for various insts

Choral: Ecclesiastes, cant., S, B, SATB, orch, 1936; From Emily’s Diary (E. Dickinson), women’s chorus, pf/small orch, 1947; By Blue Ontario (W. Whitman), cant., A, B, SATB, orch, 1958; Requiem ‘The Last Invocation’ (Dickinson, Whitman), B, chorus, orch, 1968–71; orats; choral folksong arrs, hymns, and anthems

Songs, 1v, pf: Songs at Parting (Whitman) (1930); 6 Songs (C. Sandburg, Whitman, Dickinson) (1942); The Erie Canal (Amer.) (1942); 5 Poems (Dickinson) (1943); Along Unpaved Roads (Amer.), 8 songs (1944); Is there such a thing as day? (Dickinson) (1944); Buffalo Gals (Amer.) (1946); The Grass (Dickinson) (1946); O Friend (Dickinson) (1946); 4 Songs (W. Shakespeare, J. Lewis, E. Millay) (1946); The Commonplace (Whitman) (1946); The Red Rose (R. Burns) (1947); Velvet People (Dickinson) (1948); over 200 others

Principal publishers: Associated, Birchard, Broude, Chappell, Lawson-Gould, Leeds, E.B. Marks, Mercury, G. Schirmer, Shawnee, Southern, Syracuse UP, Peters, L. Webster

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD; VintonD

J. St. Edmunds: ‘The Songs of Ernst Bacon’, Shawnee Review (Oct 1941)

W. Fleming: ‘Ernst Bacon’, Musical America, lxix/36 (1949), 8, 28

E. Bacon: Ernst Bacon (Orinda, CA, ?1974) [incl. bibliography, discography, and P. Horgan: ‘A Contemporary Tribute’]

R.C. Friedberg: American Art Song and American Poetry, i (Metuchen, NJ, 1981)

S. Neff: ‘An American Precursor of Non-Tonal Theory: Ernst Bacon’, CMc, no.48 (1991), 5–26

PHILIP L. MILLER/R

Bacon, Richard Mackenzie

(b Norwich, 1 May 1776; d Cossey [now Costessey], 27 Nov 1844). English journalist and writer on music. He was the only son of Richard Bacon (1745–1812), a grocer and printer from Yarmouth who in 1788 became co-proprietor of the weekly Norwich Mercury. R.M. Bacon joined him as manager of the printing department at the age of 18, and by 1804, on his father's retirement, became sole proprietor of the paper, a leading Whig journal with a county-wide circulation. The younger Bacon's musical interests – he had a good baritone voice and studied singing with Samuel Arnold – developed naturally in the convivial atmosphere of late 18th-century Norwich. He participated in cathedral events directed by J.C. Beckwith and vocal concerts given by the Anacreontic Society. He also gained local theatre ties, first through his marriage in 1797 to Louise Noverre (1768–1808), niece of the celebrated dancing-master Jean-Georges Noverre, and then through his share-holding interest in the Theatre Royal, Norwich (1806–12).

Bacon became a freeman of the city in 1798, served as captain (1803), then major (1804) in the Norwich Rifle Volunteers, and worked tirelessly to promote advances in local industry. From about 1805 he helped develop a new printing press using a rotary principle, and about 1807 formed a partnership to modernize the paper mill at nearby Taverham, installing a huge Fourdrinier machine. Neither project was completely successful; the mill speculation was in fact disastrous and Bacon spent several years trying to recover his loss. His idea for a quarterly music review – itself based on the innovatory critical approach of the new Edinburgh Review – sprang directly from personal financial need about this time. In 1816 he sold the mill and became salaried editor of the Mercury. Now living on the outskirts of Norwich, he and his second wife, Margaret Gilbert Burks, reared six children, and Bacon built a reputation as a cultured and articulate writer on many subjects. Liberal minded and humane, he proved to be one of the most distinguished newspaper editors of the early 19th century. Besides writing essays for the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (QMMR) and leading articles and arts reviews for the Mercury, he wrote pamphlets and essays on economic, social and political topics, drama and arts criticism (Literary Gazette), essays on music (London Magazine, 1820–25; New Monthly Magazine, 1833–5), two political biographies, and three books on singing: The Grace Book, or Guide to the Science and Practice of Vocal Ornament (London, c1821), The Elements of Vocal Science, being a Philosophical Enquiry into some of the Principles of Singing (London, 1824) and The Art of Improving the Voice and Ear (London, c1825). His ambitious plan for a two-volume encyclopaedia of music (c1819–22) was never realized.

Bacon's signal achievement in music was the QMMR (published by Robert Baldwin, then Hurst & Chance, autumn 1818–spring 1830), the first long-running English journal devoted to music literature. Its concept as both miscellany and serious critical organ, with a high literary-philosophical style, was unprecedented, and all the more extraordinary for originating outside London music circles. As the journal's founder, editor and chief contributor (all anonymously), printer and, probably, co-proprietor – with support from the London music seller Chappell – Bacon had complete control of the journal's content and tone. His goal was not only to establish a viable public forum for the exchange of musical ideas, but also to raise the intellectual respectability of music in Britain, and encourage mutual understanding among disparate social groups involved with its practise. He printed a mix of essays on theory, performance, musical institutions, vocal style in Italian and English music, social relations between amateurs and professionals, and issues in music education and patronage, as well as substantial reviews of printed music and books. A few articles are signed or initialled by genuine correspondents, many are translated excerpts from foreign music literature, and still more take the form of pseudonymous essay-letters ‘To the Editor’. A large proportion of these can be shown to be by Bacon himself, promoting his Handelian tastes, the need for serious, ‘all-sung’ English opera, the benefits of the provincial festival movement, and the place of music in society. Among his certain collaborators, William Horsley was particularly important, serving as Bacon's most trenchant reviewer and his inside line to the London professional scene. The editor also relied on a wide circle of musical correspondents, British and foreign, for news, opinion, essay contributions and technical information. The QMMR eventually failed for lack of purchasers, but not before Bacon's influence had been felt. It was he who, in 1822, first suggested the Norwich Triennial Festival (established 1824) and, about the same time, was personally consulted over the curriculum of the new RAM. Later he was an effective intermediary between nobility and profession in sharing out printed editions from the King's Library, and in engaging singers for the Ancient Concerts.

Bacon's preoccupation with systems of music education, the rudiments of singing, formation of taste and the social status of musicians was at least partly connected with his concerns as a parent. Each of his four oldest children had some musical skill or interest, and helped with the QMMR project. Richard Noverre Bacon (1798–1884) played the cello and probably wrote on cadenzas; an authority on Norfolk agriculture, he later became proprietor of the Norwich Mercury. Louisa Mary Bacon (1800–85) gave editorial assistance, possibly wrote on Haydn for the journal, and later published several popular-education works for and about children, 1833–51, giving attention to music. She married a local merchant, John Barwell, and raised a family. Jane Margaret Bacon (fl 1820–70) studied music theory and singing in London and Paris, and attained some notice as a mezzo-soprano; she sang for RAM and Philharmonic Society concerts as well as for provincial festivals. Her reputation and professional contacts were helpful in securing musical intelligence for QMMR. She married George Taylor, a physician of Kingston, Surrey. Mary Anne Bacon (c1805–75) translated and wrote articles for the journal, translated German, French and Italian songs for Norwich festivals and the Concerts of Ancient Music, and later served as organist of a village church. She also wrote verse and prose tales, and reviewed French literature for the New Monthly Magazine. Latterly she compiled and annotated Bacon family papers (now in Cambridge University Library), and served as executrix of her father's estate, valued at around £8000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon Collection (MS, GB-Cu Add.6239-6247)

‘The Late Mr. R.M. Bacon’, Norwich Mercury (7 Dec 1844)

‘Norfolk Notes: a Noted Norwich Editor’, Norfolk News and Weekly Press (9 April 1921)

Rex Stedman: Vox Populi: the Norfolk Newspaper Press, 1760–1900 (thesis for Fellowship of the Library Association, 1971), 92–101

Jamie Croy Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: a Catalogue of Writings, Lectures, and Inventions (New York, 1979)

Leanne Langley: The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1983), 194–281

LEANNE LANGLEY

Bacon [Baco], Roger

(b nr Ilchester, c1214; d Oxford, c1292). English theologian and philosopher. He studied first under Grosseteste in Oxford, then in Paris. In 1247 he gave up his official teaching in Paris, returning some three years later to Oxford. In about 1255 he entered the order of friars minor. Guy de Foulques (later Pope Clement IV), then Archbishop of Narbonne, wrote about 1265 asking him to outline a syllabus for the reform of learning – a sign of the high esteem in which Bacon and his teaching were held. Bacon responded by composing the three summaries known as the Opus maius, the Opus minor and the Opus tertium, submitting them to the pope in 1268. Clement died, however, that same year, before he had had time to study or implement them. During the next decade Bacon produced further writings on mathematics, science and language, including Greek and Hebrew grammars and a Compendium to the study of philosophy. His opponents in Paris contrived to have him formally condemned by the General of his order in 1277 and forced to remain for over ten years in some form of compulsory retirement. He died shortly after regaining his freedom.

Bacon brought to its full flowering the school of Oxford thinkers founded by Grosseteste and developed by Adam Marsh. He was the first to presume to the authority of Aristotle, suggesting that results obtained by argument must always be tested by observation and experiment. He wrote extensively on music, his thoughts on this subject being scattered through several of his encyclopedic treatises. Following Boethius, he divided music into its three customary categories, mundana, humana and instrumentalis, but questioned whether musica mundana (the ‘music of the spheres’) should be included, since it could not be perceived by the human ear. With Cassiodorus he subdivided instrumental music into percussion, strings and wind, a division still used today. ‘Human’ music covered both song and speech, the latter embracing prose, metre and rhythm. Bacon further discussed music as being either audible or visible, classifying under this last head dancing and other gestures of the body. His notion of an all-embracing aesthetic experience – music as a synthesis of poetry, dancing and the art of sound – can be traced back through Gundissalinus and al-Fārābī to Remigius of Auxerre.

Bacon considered a knowledge of music to be essential to the study of theology, and a fortiori to the practical exercise of public worship. It contributed to the fostering of the moral and the spiritual life. He recommended a systematic study of the effect of music on the temper and health of men and beasts. An understanding of the art of dance and gesture was necessary to those who preach.

In discussing the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic genera, Bacon asserted, on the authority of Boethius and the Fathers, that the enharmonic genus was the one best suited to chant and to the further development of music. He condemned abuses that had crept into sacred music in his own day, particularly falsetto singing, and he pointed the finger at great cathedrals and famous colleges that indulged in new-fangled and dissolute styles. He deplored a decline in the quality of hymn writing, attributing this to insufficient knowledge of metre and rhythm.

In the pursuit of knowledge, Bacon maintained, the importance of music could not be overestimated. All beauty, in his opinion, was ultimately derived from harmony and proportion, which in a final analysis was based on the science of numbers. Here alone could one find the absolute certainty of truth, for ‘in sola mathematica est certitudo sine dubitatione’.

EDITIONS

Rogeri Bacon opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J.S. Brewer (London, 1859/R) [incl. Opus minus, Opus tertium and part of Compendium studii philosophiae]

Opus maius, ed. J.H. Bridges, i–ii (Oxford, 1897/R); iii (London, 1900/R)

Opera hactenus inedita, ed. R. Steele and others (London and Oxford, 1905–40)

Compendium studii theologiae, ed. H. Rashdall (Aberdeen, 1911/R) [incl. appx by A.G. Little: ‘De operibus Rogeri Bacon’, with full list of writings]

Part of the Opus tertium of Roger Bacon, ed. A.G. Little (Aberdeen, 1912/R)

The Opus maius of Roger Bacon, ed. and trans. R.B. Burke (Philadelphia, 1928/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.H. Bridges: The Life and Work of Roger Bacon: an Introduction to the Opus Majus, ed. H.G. Jones (London, 1914/R)

H. Müller: ‘Zur Musikauffassung des 13. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, iv (1922), 405–12

E. Hutton: The Franciscans in England, 1224–1538 (London, 1926)

D.E. Sharp: Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century (London, 1930/R)

A.G. Little: Franciscan Papers, Lists and Documents (Manchester, 1943)

L. Ellinwood: ‘Ars musica’, Speculum, xx (1945), 290–99

E. de Bruyne: Etudes d’esthétique médiévale (Bruges, 1946/R)

S.C. Easton: Roger Bacon and his Search for a Universal Science (Oxford, 1952)

E. Massa: Ruggero Bacone (Rome, 1955)

J. Moorman: A History of the Franciscan Order (Oxford, 1968)

T. Adank: ‘Roger Bacons Auffassung der Musica’, AMw, xxxv (1978), 33–56

MARY BERRY

Bacquier, Gabriel (-Augustin-Raymond-Théodore-Louis)

(b Béziers, 17 May 1924). French baritone. Having gained a premier prix and two opera prizes at the Paris Conservatoire he began his career in Beckman’s Compagnie Lyrique (1950–52). After three years at La Monnaie, Brussels (début as Rossini’s Figaro), he joined the Opéra-Comique (1956) singing Sharpless, Alfio, Albert (Werther), Zurga, Ourrias, Yevgeny Onegin and Gianni Schicchi. At the Opéra (1958–81) his roles included Germont, Rigoletto, Valentin, Escamillo, Boris, Boccanegra and Leporello; at Aix-en-Provence (1960–89) he sang Don Giovanni, Don Alfonso, Golaud, Falstaff, Don Pasquale and the King of Clubs. In 1962 he made his British début at Glyndebourne as Mozart’s Count Almaviva and in 1964 sang Riccardo in I puritani at Covent Garden and the High Priest in Samson et Dalila at the Metropolitan, where his later roles (until 1981) included Melitone, the Hoffmann villains, Massenet’s Lescaut, and Iago. His voice became richer and firmer during the early 1970s, his command of vocal and dramatic nuance increasingly skilful. His Scarpia was the more formidable for being sophisticated, his Dr Bartolo the more humorous for being stripped of buffoonery; his Don Alfonso, if suave, was also dominating. During the 1980s he sang Sancho Panza, the Father (Louise) and the Viceroy (La Périchole) with great success. In 1990 he returned to Covent Garden as Rossini’s Dr Bartolo. Among his many recordings, his Dulcamara, Don Giovanni, William Tell, Iago, Sancho Panza and Golaud vividly reveal his native wit and skilled vocal acting. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1975. (S. Segalini: ‘Gabriel Bacquier’, Opera, xxxiii (1982), 577–81)

ANDRÉ TUBEUF, ELIZABETH FORBES/R

Bacri, Nicolas

(b Paris, 23 Nov 1961). French composer. After studying music analysis and composition with Françoise Gangloff, Christian Manen and Louis Saguer (from 1979), he entered the Paris Conservatoire (graduated 1983, premier prix for composition), where his teachers were Ballif, Marius Constant, Nigg and Philippot. During a two-year residency at the Académie de France in Rome (1983–5), he met Scelsi, who had a great influence on him. From 1987 he was head of the chamber music department of Radio France, a position he relinquished in 1991 to devote himself entirely to composition. He has also held residencies at the Casa de Velasquez (Spain) and with a number of French orchestras (from 1993). His early works, which culminate with the First Symphony (1983–4, dedicated to Elliott Carter), are rooted in a constructivist post-Webernian aesthetic. Later compositions, beginning with the Cello Concerto (1985–7, dedicated to Dutilleux), draw on the melodic continuity displaced by the predominant aesthetic of the postwar period. This change of style has placed Bacri in the musical aesthetic of his own time, where a spirit of reconciliation prevails. His honours include the grand prize of l'Académie du Disque (1993), and several awards from SACEM and the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Fleur et le miroir magique (conte lyrique for children, 1, C. Juliet), op.56, 1996–7

Orch: Vn Conc., op.7, 1982–3; Sym. no.1, op.11, 1983–4; Vc Conc., op.17, 1985–7; Capriccio notturno (Cl Conc.), op.20, 1986–7; Sym. no.2 ‘Sinfonia dolorosa’, op.22, 1986–90; 3 canti e finale (Vn Conc. no.2), op.29, 1987–9; Requiem ‘Musica notturna nos.1–3’, op.23, va/vc, chbr orch, 1987–8; Folia, op.30, 1990 [arr. as op.30b, va/vc, str orch, 1990]; Musica, op.36b, str, 1991–2; Tpt Conc. ‘Episodes’, op.39, 1992; Conc., op.51, 2 pf, str orch, 1995–6; Sym. no.4 ‘Classique Sturm und Drang’, op.49, 1995–6; Une prière, op.52, va/vc/vn, orch, 1995–7; Sym. no.5 ‘Conc. for Orch’, op.55, 1996–7; Conc. da camera (Cl Conc. no.2), op.61, 1998; Sym. no.6, op.60, 1998; Fl Conc., op.63, 1999; Tpt Conc., op.65, 2000; other pieces

Vocal: Notturni (E. Cetrangolo), op.14, S, 7 insts, 1985–6; Sinfonia da requiem (Sym. no.3), op.33, Mez, chorus, orch, 1988–94; Fils d'Abraham (3 cants. from Sym. no.3), 1988–94: Vitae abdicatio, op.33/1 (cant., S.A. Madyan), Mez, ob, chbr orch, 1992–4, Vita et mors, op.33/3 (cant., B.I. Paqûda), Mez, vc, chbr orch, 1992–3, Coplas de Don J. Manrique por la muerte de su padre, op.33/2 (cant.), mixed chorus, 1993 [arr. as op.33/2b, female vv, 4 insts, wind/org, 1993–5]; Sonnet 66 (cant., W. Shakespeare), 1v, str orch, 1994–5 [arr. as 44b, 1v, pf, 1994–5]; 5 motets de souffrance et de consolation (W. Raleigh, Psalms, Jeremy), op.59, chorus, 1998

Chbr: Str Qt no.1 ‘Fantaisie’, op.1, 1980; Str Qt no.2 ‘5 pièces’, op.5, 1982; Str Trio ‘6 Sonatas’, op.8, 1982–3; Esquisses pour un tombeau (Str Qt no.3), op.18, 1985–8, rev. 1989; Duo, op.25, vn, vc, 1987–92; Toccata sinfonica, op.34, pf trio, 1987–93; Str Qt no.4 ‘Omaggio a Beethoven’, op.42, 1989–94, rev. 1994–5; Sonata, op.32, vn, pf, 1990–94; Str trio, op.37, ‘Divertimento’, 1991–2 [arr. as op.37b, cl, str trio, 1991–2]; Sonata, op.40, vn, pf, 1993–4; Im Volkston, op.43, vn, cl, vc, 1994; Pf Trio no.2 ‘Les contrastes’, op.47, 1995; Pf Trio no.3 ‘Sonata notturna’, op.54, 1996; Str Qt no.5 ‘Elegiaco’, op.57, 1997; other pieces

Solo inst: 3 suites, op.31, vc, 1987–94; 2 préludes, op.24, pf, 1988; 3 préludes, op.28, pf, 1989; Prélude no.6, op.33/3b, pf, 1991; 3 préludes, op.46, pf, 1994–5; Sonata breve, op.45, vn, 1994; Suite no.4, op.50, vc, 1994–6; Sonata no.2, op.53, vn, 1996; other pieces

Principal publishers: Durand, Salabert, Peer Musik

PHILIPPE MICHEL

Bactria.

Ancient civilization in Central Asia. It flourished in the last three centuries bce in the area now covered by northern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and southern Turkmenistan. See Iran, §II.

Baculewski, Krzysztof

(b Warsaw, 26 Dec 1950). Polish composer and writer on music. He studied composition at the Warsaw Academy of Music with Rudziński (1969–74) and in Paris with Messiaen and Schaeffer (1975–6); he took the doctorate at Warsaw University in 1982. Subsequently, he became a lecturer at the Warsaw Academy. His music up to the mid-1970s shares many characteristics with Polish music generally at that time, including a concern with group textures and with focal pedal points. His involvement with extended instrumental techniques, however, came to an abrupt end with Is-slottet (1975). He has paid particular attention to musical form, and in several works, including Vivace e cantilena and Ground, he has developed a bipartite structure (also favoured by Górecki) of a segmented and often aggressive first section resolved in a quiet coda. Like some of his contemporaries in the 1980s and 90s, he found inspiration in 17th- and 18th-century idioms: The Profane Anthem is a mildly distorted reflection of the music of Purcell, while Antitheton I is based on Baroque musical-rhetorical figures (tirata, aposiopesis and circulatio) and Antitheton II incorporates more dislocated references, including overt allusions to the finale of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no.3.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Perc Sonata, 1972; Epitaphium, brass, perc, str, 1973; Meander, fl, 1973; La terra incompareggiabile, org, 1973; Vivace e cantilena, inst septet, 1974; 3 grâces, org, 1975; Is-slottet, chbr orch, 1975; Pf Concertino, str, 1978; Partita I, a sax, hpd, 1979; Passacaglia, 4 perc, 1979; Ground, orch, 1981; Quartier Latin, tpt, 1981; A la recherche des harmonies perdues, orch, 1981; Sonata wiosenna [Spring Sonata], fl, 1982; Conc. for Orch, 1983; Str Qt no.1, 1984; Suite de cheminée, 2 accdn, 1984; Str Qt no.2, 1985; Str Qt no.3, 1986; The Whole and Broken Consort, period insts, 1986; Concerto armonico, str, 1987; Qt for 12 insts, 4 perc, 1987; Partita II, vn, pf, 1988; Antitheton I, vn, vc, pf, 1989; A Walking Shadow, orch, 1990; Voyage à travers le paysage métaphysique, tpt, 1992; Antitheton II, 2 vn, continuo, b viol, 1996

Vocal: Nowe wyzwolenie [New Deliverance] (op, 1, S.I. Witkiewicz), 1974; La notte (cant., Michelangelo), S, chbr orch, 1975; Sierpniowy relief [August Relief] (cant., T. Gajcy), S, chbr orch, 1985; The Profane Anthem to Anne (cant., J. Donne), 2 S, A, T, B, chorus, 7 period insts, 1993; Christmas motet (trad.), S, A, T, B, chorus, 7 period insts, 1994; Rilke-Lieder, S, B, 2 choruses, 1994; Nox ultima, nox beata (motet, A. Tibullus), chorus, 1995; Tu ne quaesieris (motet, Q.H. Flaccus), male chorus, 1995; Gloria, A, chorus, 1996

Principal publishers: Agencja autorska, PWM

WRITINGS

‘In statu nascendi: a New Generation of Composers’, Polish Art Studies, vii (1986), 139–61

Polska twórczość kompozytorska 1945–84 [Polish composition] (Kraków, 1987)

Współczesność i: 1939-1974 [Contemporary i: 1939-1974] (Warsaw, 1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Kominek: ‘Wernisaż muzyczny Krzysztofa Baculewskiego’ [The musical Vernissage of Baculewski], RM, xxv/14 (1980), 8–9

O. Pisarenko: ‘Jeszcze raz Witkacy’ [Witkacy once more], RM, xxxi/14 (1986), 7–8

M. Ługowska: ‘Under Pressure of the Avant Garde, in Search of Independence’, Polish Music (1989), no.2, pp.15–20 [interview]

ADRIAN THOMAS

Baçus Correçarius de Bononia, Johannes.

See Johannes Baçus Correçarius de Bononia.

Badajoz, Garci Sánchez de

(b Ecija, province of Seville, c1460; d after 1524). Spanish poet, vihuelist and composer. He was one of the leading Castilian poets of the generation of Juan del Encina; one of his poems received a response by Pedro de Cartagena, who died in 1485. His poetic style, quick-witted sallies and ingenious conceits were praised long after his death by Lope de Vega and Baltasar Gracián. His poetry is characterized by a desperate amatory vein in which suffering and death are always present. He is supposed to have been imprisoned for some time, owing to a madness brought on by an incestuous passion for a close relation, probably his sister. He is last recorded attending an imperial feast in Toledo in 1525.

The Cancionero General (Valencia, 1511/14/R, 2/1520/R) contains eight poems attributed to ‘Badajoz el músico’, and there are five villancicos and three canciones ascribed to ‘Badajoz’ in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio (E-Mp II-1335, ed. in MME, v, 1947; x, 1951). Resende, reminiscing about the period around 1500, included ‘Badajoz’ among a group of great musicians. Literary scholars have supposed that the poet-musician was to be identified with João de Badajós, who was listed as a músico da camera of João III of Portugal in 1558 (a romance by Badajós was printed with Antonio de Portalegre's Meditação, Coimbra, 1547). But Román referred to Garci Sánchez de Badajoz as the best vihuelist from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and João de Badajós' dates are a generation too late. Garci Sánchez is therefore much more likely to be the poet and composer referred to in the Cancionero General and the Cancionero Musical de Palacio; he may well be the composer of eight further villancicos whose poems are ascribed either to Garci Sánchez de Badajoz or to Badajoz el músico (RISM c1516² [actually two separate publications: Rome, 1518; Venice, 1520], 1576⁸; F-Peb Jean Masson 56, I-Fn Magl.XIX.107bis, P-Cmn 3391, Em 11793, Ln Ivo Cruz 60; ed. M. Joachim, O cancioneiro musical e poetico da Biblioteca Públia Hortênsia, Coimbra, 1940; ed. in G. Haberkamp, Die weltliche Vokalmusik in Spanien um 1500, Tutzing, 1968; ed. in PM, xxxi, 1977; PM, xlvii, 1986; CMM, xcviii, 1987). Two villancicos by Garci Sánchez were set by Escobar and one by Peñalosa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSM

G. de Resende: Crónica de Dom João II e miscelânea (Lisbon, c1532/R), 362–3

J. Román y Zamora: Repúblicas del mundo (Medina del Campo, 1575, 2/1595), 304

J. Romeu Figueras: La música en la corte de los reyes católicos, iv/1, MME, xiv/1 (Barcelona, 1965)

P. Gallagher: The Life and Works of Garci Sánchez de Badajoz (London, 1968)

N.G. Round: ‘Garci Sánchez de Badajoz and the Revaluation of cancionero Poetry’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, vi (1970), 178–87

J. Castillo: Cancionero de Garci Sánchez de Badajoz (Madrid, 1980)

M. Frenk: Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica (Madrid, 1987)

B. Dutton: El cancionero del siglo XV, c.1360–1520, vii (Salamanca, 1991)

E. Ros-Fábregas: La obra musical del poeta Garci Sánchez de Badajoz (Granada, forthcoming)

EMILIO ROS-FÁBREGAS

Badalla, Rosa Giacinta

(b ?Bergamo, c1660; d Milan, c1710). Italian composer. A Benedictine nun, she took her vows at the musical convent of S Radegonda in Milan about 1678. Her only printed collection, Motetti a voce sola (1684), is notable among contemporary Milanese solo motets for its vocal virtuosity, motivic originality and formal experimentation, with frequent use of ostinato figures and some surprising modulations. Of her two surviving secular cantatas (a testimony to the practice of secular music inside S Radegonda’s walls), Vuò cercando is a succession of short da capo arias interspersed with recitative, while O fronde care (for which she also wrote the text) is a more extended piece with short melismas, repetitive bass patterns and instrumental sinfonie, probably dating from about 1700.

WORKS

Motetti a voce sola, 1v bc (Venice, 1684): 1 ed. in R.L. Kendrick: Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996); 1 ed. in S. Glickman and M.F. Schleifer: Women Composers: Music through the Ages, ii (New York, 1997)

Vuò cercando, A, bc, GB-Lbl; ed. in R.L. Kendrick: ‘Le sirene celesti’: Generations, Gender and Genres in Seicento Milanese Nuns’ Music (diss., New York U., 1993)

O fronde care, A, 2 vn/tpt, 2 rec, bc, F-Pn

ROBERT L. KENDRICK

Bądarzewska-Baranowska, Tekla

(b Warsaw, 1834; d Warsaw, 29 Sept 1861). Polish composer. An amateur, with no musical training, she is known chiefly for her Modlitwa dziewicy (‘The Maiden’s Prayer’). This piece, which won world-wide popularity, was originally published in Warsaw in 1856; later the music appeared as a supplement to the Revue et gazette musicale (Paris, 1859), entitled La prière d’une vierge, and was issued by more than 80 publishers in France, Germany, Italy, England, Australia and the USA. Arrangements were produced for piano (four or eight hands) and other instruments, and for voice. The Maiden’s Prayer is of no artistic merit, being a salon composition of a type common in the 19th century. Other works of a similar nature failed to repeat its success, although some of them gained some popularity: they include Seconde prière d’une vierge, Prière exaucée, ou Réponse à la prière d’une vierge, Wspomnienie chatki (‘Memories of a Hut’), Słodkie marzenia (‘Sweet Dreams’) and Pamiątka przyjaźni (‘Memories of a Friendship’).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PadzírekH [incl. complete list of works]

SMP

ZOFIA CHECHLIŃSKA

Badea, Christian

(b Bucharest, 10 Dec 1947). American conductor of Romanian birth. He was a boy chorister at the Budapest Opera, studied the violin at the conservatory and joined the Opera as a répétiteur. After leaving Romania in 1970 he studied further in Brussels and Salzburg and at the Juilliard School. He was music director at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy from 1978 and directed the festivals in both Italy and Charleston, South Carolina, from 1980 to 1986, conducting a variety of operas ranging from Mozart and Verdi to Menotti and Shostakovich. During this time he conducted the first European production of Menotti’s The Hero (1980) and made his British début in 1983 with Prokofiev’s The Gambler for the ENO. He has worked with the Metropolitan Opera, Canadian Opera, Netherlands Opera and at Verona, and made the first recording (with the Spoleto Festival Orchestra) of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra in 1985. He made his début with the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1996 with La Bohème. Badea is admired for his dramatic vitality and secure command of phrasing and balance, and has also appeared widely as an orchestral conductor. From 1983 to 1991 he was music director of the Columbus SO in Ohio, with whom he recorded works by Sessions and Mennin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Seckerson: ‘Taking a Gamble for a Stunning Impact’, Classical Music (30 April 1983)

NOËL GOODWIN

Bad Ems.

German town. See under Koblenz.

Baden, (Peter) Conrad (Krohn)

(b Drammen, 31 Aug 1908; d Oslo, 12 June 1989). Norwegian composer and teacher. He graduated as an organist from the Oslo Conservatory in 1931 and then studied in Leipzig (1931–2), with later periods of study with Rivier in Paris (1950) and Hanns Jelinek in Vienna (1965). In 1932 he became an organist in Drammen; he held organ recitals and was also active as a choirmaster, accompanist and music critic for several newspapers. He taught theory and composition at the Oslo Conservatory (1948–73) and continued there until 1978 as a lecturer when the institution became the Norges Musikkhøgskole.

The first public performance of his works in 1946 revealed his thorough knowledge of classical forms allied to a national Romantic style. A strong interest in the polyphony of Palestrina is reflected in the Mass (1949) and other vocal works. In Paris he became acquainted with French neo-classicism, and with Hindemith’s compositional technique as his background, Baden composed two symphonies, a concertino for clarinet and orchestra and chamber music that was frequently performed, such as the Wind Trio no.1. In the 1960s he ventured into 12-note technique (seen in his themes and his increasingly bold use of dissonance), and although he only used it extensively in the chamber work Hymnus (1967), he retained a certain freedom of approach (e.g. Fantasia breve, Concerto per orchestra and Intrada sinfonica). The form and treatment of dissonance is more free; at the same time greater importance is attached to sound planes and to timbre. In later works, such as the Symphony No.6 (‘Sinfonia espressiva’, 1982), there can be seen a synthesis of his earlier concentration on variation technique, on motivic-thematic development and on strict counterpoint. The tone is also warm and more lyrical, the form expressive and well-balanced.

WORKS

(selective list)

Divertimento, orch, 1950; Sym. no.1, 1952; Concertino, cl, str, 1953; Toccata, koral og fuge, org, 1956; Sym. no.2, op.42, 1957; Sym. no.3 ‘Sinfonia piccola’, op.48, 1959; Eventyrsuite [Fairy Tale Suite], orch, 1960; Str Qt no.3, 1963; Fantasia breve, orch, 1964; Pezzi concertante, org, 1966; Hymnus, A, fl, ob, va, 1967; Conc. for Orch, 1968; Sym. no.4, op.85, 1970; Sym. no.5 ‘Sinfonia voluntatis’, op.109, 1976; Sym. no.6 ‘Sinfonia espressiva’, op.124, 1980; other chbr works, org, works, solo vocal and choral works

Principal publishers: Lyche, Norsk Musikforlag

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Herresthal: ‘Kirkemusikeren og komponisten Conrad Baden’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, viii/2–ix/1 (1971–2), suppl., 1–76 [pubd in 4 instalments]

T.O. Baden: ‘Fantasia breve per orchestra og Conrad Badens symfoniske stil’, Studia musicologica norvegica, v (1979), 9–25

HARALD HERRESTHAL

Baden-Baden.

Town in south-west Germany. Before its 19th-century blossoming as a spa town, the town’s musical life was unremarkable. The margraves patronized music from the 15th century onwards, most notably Philip II (d 1588), and the Jesuit college gave comedies with music until 1771.

Baden-Baden became one of the most famous international spas in Europe in the 19th century, not least because of its casino. It was the artistic ‘summer capital’ of Europe, and a meeting-place of fashionable society. Such virtuosos as Liszt, Thalbert and Paganini gave concerts there. The newly renovated Konversationshaus opened in 1855 with the première of Les amoureux de Perrette, an opéra comique by the French composer Louis Clapisson, successor to Halévy at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Only a year later Clapisson’s opéra comique Le sylphe also had its première in Baden-Baden. Berlioz conducted the Baden-Baden orchestra in the summer of 1853 and the summers of 1856 to 1863. He composed his last work, the opera Béatrice et Bénédict, for the opening of the theatre (Theater der Stadt) in 1862, devising its construction with the director of the casino, Edouard Bénazet. Bénazet also persuaded Gounod to have his opera La Colombe given its première in Baden-Baden (1860).

In the 1860s a series of famous musicians visited the spa, including Anton Rubinstein, Hugo Heermann and Aglaja Orgeni. Others settled in the town, among them the pianist Jacob Rosenhain and the singer Pauline Viardot, who opened a popular salon there. Clara Schumann moved into a permanent residence in Baden-Baden in 1863 and regularly performed in the town. Her house became a meeting-place for musicians, among others Joseph Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, Hermann Levi and above all Brahms, who composed and conducted in Baden-Baden during his summer holidays between 1864 and 1872 (the apartment in which he lived is now a museum). Offenbach was another guest in the town, and Bénazet commissioned his opéra bouffe La princesse de Trébizonde. Offenbach conducted its première himself at the Kurtheater in 1869 with the Bouffes-Parisiens.

In 1854 the town founded its own orchestra, the Symphonie- und Kurorchester (still extant as the Baden-Baden SO). Its guest conductors included Johann Strauss, Hans von Bülow and Brahms, and later Richard Strauss and Reger. A peak was reached in 1880 with the Tonkünstlerfest des Allgemeinen Musikvereins, in which Liszt, Felix Dessoff and Saint-Saëns took part.

In the 1920s Baden-Baden began to acquire an international reputation for the performance of contemporary music. Particularly important was the move of the Kammermusik-Aufführungen für Zeitgenössiche Tonkunst concert series from Donaueschingen to Baden-Baden in 1927–9, where it was known as the Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden. So-called Minutenopern had their premières there in 1927, including Hindemith’s Hin und zurück, Milhaud’s L’enlèvement d’Europe and Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel (with Lotte Lenya), one of the most notorious premières of the 1920s. For the first time a radio station featured as co-promoter of a musical festival, broadcasting the premières of ‘Radiomusiken’ – works composed expressly for radio – including Der Lindberghflug by Brecht, Hindemith and Weill in 1929. Another important première was that of Bartók’s piano sonata, played by the composer.

After World War II the radio network of south-west Germany, Südwestfunk (SWF), had great influence in Baden-Baden. The Grosses Orchester des SWF was founded in 1946 (renamed SWF SO in 1966 and SWF Orchestra of Baden-Baden in 1990). It immediately attracted guest conductors such as Klemperer and Stravinsky, who made his first post-1945 appearance in Germany here. Conducted by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1946–8), Hans Rosbaud (1948–62), Ernest Bour (1964–79), Kazimierz Kord (1980–86) and Michael Gielen (from 1986), the SWF orchestra became one of the leading orchestras of the Federal German Republic, particularly for contemporary music. Boulez performed contemporary works with them for many years, and began his international career in Baden-Baden. In 1998 SWF merged with Süddeutscher Rundfunk Stuttgart (SDR) to form Südwestrundfunk (SWR). The orchestra was renamed SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg. In 1999 Sylvain Cambreling was appointed chief conductor. In 1955 the 29th international music festival of the ISCM took place in Baden-Baden. The radio orchestra has commissioned works from such composers as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Boulez, Nono, Zimmermann and Rihm. Since the 1950s the orchestra, and the radio station's experimental studio in Freiburg im Breisgau (next to IRCAM in Paris, the most important European studio for the production of live electronic music) have been the major musical institutions involved in the internationally renowned Donaueschinger Musiktage für Neue Musik.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Berl: Baden-Baden im Zeitalter der Romantik: der literarische und musikalische Romantik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden, 1936/R)

F. Baser: Grosse Musiker in Baden-Baden (Tutzing, 1973)

K. Schultz, ed.: Badener Musiktage 1927–1929, 1977: Texte, Bilder, Programme (Baden-Baden, 1977)

P. Martin: Salon Europas: Baden-Baden im 19. Jahrhundert (Konstanz, 1983)

U. Reimann and J. Draheim: Clara und Robert Schumann in Baden-Baden und Carlsruhe (Baden-Baden, 1994)

FRIEDRICH BASER/THORSTEN LORENZ

Bader.

German family of organ builders. Daniel Bader (b ?Münster, ?c1560; d ?1636) may have been a pupil of Arnold Lampeler (who worked in Münster from 1573 to 1579 and from 1585 to 1588); possibly on his recommendation Bader went to Antwerp, where from 1603 to 1604 he worked in the church of St James; he also worked in Liège. In Westphalia he carried out extensive rebuilding in Münster Cathedral (1610–12). His son Hans Heinrich Bader (fl c1626–65) worked in Paderborn (1626–7, 1655–60); in Zutphen (1637–43); at the Willibrordikirche, Wesel (1644–50); in Unna (1661–5) and in Hildesheim (1655–64). Arnold, Ernst, Conrad and Tobias Bader (all sons of Daniel Bader) often worked together, both in Westphalia (at Herford and Vreden) and in Friesland (at the residence in Leeuwarden). Johann Gottfried Bader (a grandson of Daniel) worked at Recklinghausen and Coesfeld as well as at Brussels. For their larger instruments Daniel and Hans Heinrich used the Lampeler pattern, which they extended by means of narrow foundation stops and pedal stops. The most important organ workshops in Westphalia followed the Bader family tradition, and used the Bader principle of the spring-chest until well into the 18th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.H. Biermann: Organographia hildesiensis specialis (Hildesheim, 1738); ed. E. Palandt (Kassel, 1930)

H. Wohnfurter: Die Orgelbauerfamilie Bader 1600–1742 (Kassel, 1981)

HANS KLOTZ

Badessa, Giovanni Battista.

See Abatessa, Giovanni Battista.

Badger, Alfred G.

(b Connecticut, 1815; d Brooklyn, NY, 8 Nov 1892). American flute maker. He began to make fifes and recorders at the age of 12, and in 1834 became apprenticed to Ball & Douglass, flute makers, in Utica, New York. In 1838 he went to Buffalo, where he was a partner in the Nickels & Badger music store from 1839 to 1841, making simple system flutes. After leaving Nickels he made flutes and clarinets on his own; these were BADGER/BUFFALO. He moved to Newark, New Jersey, after 1843, had opened a workshop in New York by 1846, and was briefly associated with Tebaldo Monzani in 1858.

Badger, a superb craftsman, stated that he always tried to make each instrument superior to its predecessor; many of his flutes are beautifully engraved. His instruments won silver medals and diplomas at several fairs and exhibitions in Massachusetts and New York. His insistence on excellence, his support of performers, and his widespread publications encouraged the rapid acceptance of the Boehm flute, of which he was the first commercial manufacturer in the USA (1846) and the most important American manufacturer during the mid-19th century. He was also the first musical-instrument manufacturer to use ebonite; he made four flutes in 1851 for Charles Goodyear, who exhibited them in London at the Great Exhibition (1851) and in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. By 1859 Badger had, at great cost, procured from the patentee of Goodyear’s hard rubber the exclusive right to use this material in the construction of the Boehm flute. How long he owned the rights is not known; Theodore Berteling began to use ebonite before 1883. Badger apparently made the first American silver Boehm flute (1886) and the first American Boehm-system alto flute (before 1873). He was the first to use ebonite heads on silver bodies. He also made piccolos, experimental flutes and a combination flute-clarinet. Were it not for the excessively high pitch at which most of Badger’s flutes were built (some as high as a'=452), his instruments might be played today. The Dayton C. Miller Collection at the Library of Congress has 11 of Badger’s flutes, four are in the Yale University Collection, and many others are maintained in public and private collections. Badger’s factory continued in operation after his death, and it was purchased by Penzel & Mueller in 1920.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

A.G. Badger: An Ilustrated History of the Flute (New York, 1853, 4/1875)

‘India-Rubber Flutes’, Scientific American, new ser., i (1859), 284

C.R. Anderson and A.H.Starke, eds.: Sidney Lanier, Centennial Editions (Baltimore, 1943) [vii–x, 1857–77]

M.J. Simpson: Alfred G. Badger (1815–1892), Nineteenth-Century Flute-Maker: his Art, Innovations, and Influence on Flute Construction, Performance and Composition, 1845–1895 (diss., U. of Maryland, 1982)

S. Berdahl: The First Hundred Years of the Boehm Flute in the United States, 1845–1945: a Biographical Dictionary of American Boehm Flutemakers (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1985)

N. Groce: Musical Instrument Makers of New York: a Directory of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Urban Craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991)

MARY JEAN SIMPSON

Badham, Charles

(fl London, 1698-1716). English church musician and copyist. He was probably a son (or other relation) of John Badham, vicar-choral and organist of Hereford Cathedral, 1660–88. Between 1698 and 1716 he was the seventh minor canon of St Paul's Cathedral, where his anthem Unto thee will I cry survives (incomplete). He was a none too reliable copyist of music by Blow, Purcell, Clarke and others. Manuscripts that are wholly or partly in his hand include GB-Ob Mus.Sch.B.7, Mus.Sch.C.38–40 and Tenbury 1031 and 1258. (I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford, 1995)

IAN SPINK

Badhan

(Yid.).

A master of ceremonies at Jewish weddings or social festivities. Badhanim often improvised poems and composed and performed their own songs. In eastern Europe they were also known as marshaliks or leyzim (sing. leyz) and performed at the almost obligatory traditional Purim celebrations, singing, dancing and acting in Ahashverosh plays. Thus they were the real forerunners of the Yiddish theatre. These merry-makers, wandering actors and musicians performed in all Jewish towns and congregations. Elyokum Zunser (1840–1913), a badhan from Vilna (now Vilnius), wrote about 600 songs, many of which were very popular and of strong Jewish appeal. Another very popular badhan was Mark Varshavsky (1845–1907), a scholar and lawyer from Kiev; he was much influenced by the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem, and notated and published some of his own songs. His Alefbet (‘Oyfn pripechok’) is still sung in Jewish schools and homes, and in Hebrew translation in Israeli schools.

See also Jewish music, §IV, 2(iv)(a).

SHLOMO HOFMAN

Badia, Carlo Agostino

(b ?Venice, 1672; d Vienna, 23 Sept 1738). Italian composer. His earliest known work is the oratorio La sete di Cristo in croce, a sepolcro written for Innsbruck in 1691. At the begining of 1692 he may have lived in Rome, where his earliest secular dramatic works were produced. By spring 1692 he was a court composer at Innsbruck. He gained the enthusiastic patronage of Eleonora Maria (1653–97), widow of both King Michael Wisniowiecki of Poland and Duke Charles of Lorraine, and stepsister of Emperor Leopold I. Besides the 1691 oratorio, Badia composed for Innsbruck two operas in 1692, as well as two sepolcri for Holy Week 1693. With the support of Eleonora Maria, who moved to Vienna late in 1693, and with a recommendation from the King of Poland, he was appointed Musik-Compositeur at the imperial court on 1 July 1694, receiving an initial monthly salary of 60 florins retroactive to 1 July 1693. Badia thus became the first in a succession of distinguished composers (including Fux, Giovanni Bononcini, P.F. Tosi and Francesco Conti) to hold the title of court composer at Vienna.

After initial successes, Badia was sent by the emperor to Rome, probably in 1695, to complete his musical education, but because of a lack of funds he returned to Vienna before the end of that year. Until 1697 he seems to have composed only oratorios for Vienna. His first opera for the Habsburg court, Bacco, vincitore dell'India, was produced during Carnival 1697 and dedicated to Eleonora Maria. During 18 years at the courts of Leopold I (d 1705) and Joseph I (d 1711), Badia enjoyed a period of remarkable creative activity, producing at least 34 oratorios and 20 secular dramatic works. He also composed more than 50 chamber cantatas and duets. His salary was increased by 30 florins in 1699 and by an additional 30 in 1702, making him one of the highest-paid musicians at the court. He seems to have become a favourite of Leopold I, and was praised by Draghi as a ‘guter Virtuoso’ and by Draghi's successor Pancotti as ‘gar guten Talento und ungeheimer prontezza’.

The date of Badia's marriage to the prima donna Anna Maria Elisabetta (Lisi) Nonetti, who arrived in Vienna in 1700, is unknown. In 1706 he probably accompanied her to Venice, where she appeared at the Teatro S Giovanni Grisostomo. Badia’s operas and oratorios continued to be performed in northern Italy, but there is no evidence that he had a direct hand in any of the productions. In 1709 he was commissioned to write the opera Gli amori di Circe con Ulisse for Dresden; the performance took place during a visit by the King of Denmark. It seems unlikely that Badia travelled to Dresden for the performance, which was directed by Baron Francesco Ballerini, one of the most famous singers at the imperial court. Badia composed less prolifically during the reign of Joseph I, who favoured the Bononcini brothers, Giovanni and Antonio Maria, but the emperor frequently supplemented Badia's income with secret sums of money that apparently rescued him from persistent debts. After the death of Joseph I, the imperial chapel was reorganized and many musicians were released. But on 1 October 1711 the contracts of both Badias were renewed, and Carlo remained in the employ of the Habsburgs until his death, serving 44 years as court composer.

Under Charles VI (d 1740), who preferred the more progressive composers Fux and Caldara, Badia's activity declined sharply. Between 1712 and 1738 he is known to have composed only six oratorios and secular dramatic works. Anna Maria Lisi died on 7 January 1726, and by 1729 he had married Anna Maria Sophia Novelli, his first wife's niece; a son, Antonius Nicolaus, was born in 1729. In his last years Badia was closely associated with G.J. Dornberger, a pupil of Caldara.

Badia was the first of a group of Italian composers (including the Bononcinis, M.A. Ziani and Conti) who introduced the stylistic innovations of the late Baroque era to the Viennese court, long dominated by the conservative Draghi. Badia's style underwent a gradual maturing process (as Wellesz, 1919, showed). The numerous early works are characterized by smooth melodic writing, lyric grace and a lack of contrapuntal complexity. He can be credited with increasing the importance of idiomatic string writing at Vienna. The ritornellos and sinfonias of his operas and oratorios are longer than those of his predecessors, and he also called for more varied instrumental combinations as well as more frequent solo obbligatos. He may have been the first composer at Vienna to use concerto grosso contrasts: in the trio ‘Quanti e di grande’ from Le gare dei beni (1700; also attributed to M.A. Ziani) the composer called for two large opposing groups (he was perhaps influenced by Torelli, who visited Vienna between 1699 and 1700). The overture to one of Badia’s best works, Ercole, vincitore di Gerione, is unusual in consisting of four movements, the third a minuet. In his oratorios and his secular dramatic works he made extensive use of vocal ensemble numbers, especially trios. La concordia della Virtù e della Fortuna (1702) ends with a trio, a technique that foreshadows the use of ensemble finales in the operas of Fux and Caldara.

Most of Badia's chamber cantatas are for soprano or alto with continuo accompaniment only, but about a dozen require obbligato instruments: lutes, violins, flutes, or larger combinations. Formally, the cantatas consist of the regular alternation of recitative and aria normally found in the late Baroque era; Badia used the da capo aria almost exclusively. The numerous ritornellos are often thematically related to the vocal writing, which includes some large melodic leaps and long virtuoso, sequential patterns. The recitatives are also characteristic of the time with their simple modulations and cadential formulae.

It seems likely that Badia was related to the two other musicians of the name at the Habsburg court: Giuseppe (b 1642; d Vienna, 30 March 1706), who began his service as an instrumentalist on 26 August 1690, and Giovanni Giuseppe, who was active in Vienna as a singer about the same time. A letter from Parma from a Carlo Francesco Badia to G.A. Perti is preserved (I-Bc) and reproduced by Nemeth, who indicates that the author was definitely not C.A. Badia.

WORKS

stage

performed in Vienna unless otherwise stated

Amor che vince lo sdegno, ovvero Olimpia placata (A. Aureli), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1692

La Rosaura, ovvero Amore figlio della gratitudine (O. Malvezzi), Innsbruck, April 1692

L'amazone corsara, ovvero L'Alvilda, regina de' Goti (dramma per musica, G.C. Corradi), Innsbruck, aut. 1692, A-Wn

La ninfa Apollo (favola pastorale o scherzo scenica, F. de Lemene), Rome and Milan, 1692

Bacco, vincitore dell'India (festa teatrale, D. Cupeda), 14 Feb 1697

La pace tra i numi discordi nella rovina di Troia (serenata, N. Minato), 21 May 1697, Wn

L'idea del felice governo (serenata, Cupeda), Laxenburg, 9 June 1698

Lo squittinio dell'eroe (componimento per musica da camera), Neue Favorita, 26 July 1698

Imeneo trionfante (serenata), 28 Feb 1699, Wn, for the wedding of Joseph I and Wilhelmine Amalie of Braunschweig-Lüneburg

Il Narciso (favola boschereccia, Lemene), Laxenburg, 9 June 1699, Wn

Il commun giubilo del mondo (musica da camera, Cupeda), Neue Favorita, 26 July 1699, Wn

Cupido fuggitivo da Venere e ritrovato a' piedi della Sacra Reale Maestà d'Amalia (trattenimento carnevalesco, G. Spedazzi), carn. 1700

Diana rappacificata con Venere e con Amore (trattenimento musicale), Schönbrunn, 28 April 1700, Wn

La costanza d'Ulisse (dramma per musica, Cupeda), Neue Favorita, 29 June 1700

Le gare dei beni (applauso poetico per musica), 25 July 1700, Wn; also attrib. M.A. Ziani

L'amore vuol somiglianza (dramma per musica, P.A. Bernardoni), 18 Jan 1702

La concordia della Virtù e della Fortuna (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), Neue Favorita, 21 April 1702, Wn

Enea negli Elisi (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 9 June 1702, Wn

L'Arianna (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 21 Feb 1702

La Psiche (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 22 July 1703, Wn

Napoli ritornata ai romani (componimento per musica, S. Stampiglia), Neue Favorita, l Oct 1707, Wn

Ercole, vincitore di Gerione (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 4 Nov 1708, Wn

Gli amori di Circe con Ulisse (dramma per musica, G.B. Ancioni), Dresden, 20 June 1709

Il bel genio dell'Austria ed il Fato (dialogo), Nov 1723, Wn

oratorios

first performed at Vienna, S Ursula, unless otherwise stated

La sete di Cristo in croce, Innsbruck, Jesuitenkirche, Holy Week 1691, lib A-Imf

Il transito de San Giuseppe, Innsbruck, Holy Week 1693, lib Imf

L'amor della redentione, Innsbruck, Jesuitenkirche, Good Friday 1693, lib Imf

L'innocenza, illesa dal tradimento, descritta in San Carlo (M. Angelico), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1694, Wn

S Ursula, vergine e martire (R.M. Rossi), 21 Oct 1694, Wn

Gesu crocifisso (?A. Catelani), 2 April 1695, lib I-Vnm

Sant' Orsola, vergine e martire, 21 Oct 1695, A-Wn

La morte del Redentor (P. de Massimi), 21 April 1696, lib I-Mb

Il sacrificio d'Abramo (?M. Cavesano), 21 Oct 1696, lib Vnm

L'invenzione della croce (Massimi), 6 April 1697, lib A-Wn, I-Vnm

Il pianto di Maria vergine, e di S Maria Maddalena al S Sepolcro raddolcito dalla consolatione (?G. Spedazzi), 6 April 1697, lib A-Wn

Lo sposalizio di S Orsola, vergine e martire (?S. Amerighi), 21 Oct 1697, lib I-Vnm

La vicende di Giosafatte, Re di Giuda (?Cupeda), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1698, A-Wn

La sepoltura di Christo (R.N. Batticassa), 29 March 1698, Wn

Il ritorno di Tobia (?G.B. Lampugnani), 21 Oct 1698, Wn

La depositione dalla croce, e sepoltura di Gesu, 18 April 1699, lib I-Mb, Vnm

Il trionfo della bellezza, della grazia e della virtu espresso nelle felicissimie nozze di Ester, la piu degna vergine del popolo eletto, con Assuero, il maggior monarco del mondo (G. Frigimelica Roberti), 21 Oct 1699, lib Vnm

Giesu nel pretorio, osia L'innocenza giudicata della malizia (Frigimelica Roberti), 10 April 1700, lib A-Wn, I-Vnm

La corte, noviziato del chiastre per la beata Caterina da Bologna (Frigimelica Roberti), 21 Oct 1700, A-Wn

L'empieta trionfante nella morte di Giesu Cristo, 26 March 1701, lib I-Vnm

L'amante innocenza, trionfatrice della perfidia, ovvero S Cecilia, vergine e martire, Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1702, lib A-Wn, Wst

La resurrezione di Giesu Cristo, 15 April 1702, lib Wn, I-Mb

Le promesse nuziali di S Orsola, 21 Oct 1702, lib A-Wn, I-Vnm

I pensieri divoti (Frigimelica Roberti), Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, Christmas Eve, 1702

La clemenza di Davide (P. Ruggieri), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1703, A-Wn

La fuga in Egitto dal Patriarca S Giuseppe con Giesu e Maria, 21 Oct 1703, Wn

Trattenimento divoto, place of perf. unknown, 1703, lib I-Vnm

S Romoaldo, Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1704, lib A-Wn, I-Vnm

La Giuditta (?P. Ottoboni), 21 Oct 1704 and 1710, lib Vnm

La fuga di S Teresa, 21 Oct 1705, lib Bc, Vnm

La sepoltura di Cristo (Bernardoni), place of perf. unknown, 1706

S Teresa (?Filippeschi), Vienna, Imperial Chapel and Milan, S Giovanni in Conca, Lent 1706, lib Wn, I-Vnm

L'innocenza calpestata dal mondo, e proletta da Dio (?Spedazzi), 21 Oct 1706, lib Vnm

Il ritorno di Tobia (P.A. del Negro), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1707, A-Wn

Il martirio di S Susanna (Negro), 1707, lib I-Vnm

Il pentimento di Davide (S. Stampiglia), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1708, A-Wn

Santa Teresa (Bernardoni), 21 Oct 1708, Wn

Il martirio de' Maccabei (Stampiglia), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1709, Wn

La Giuditta (Stampiglia), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1710, Wn

Santa Geltrude (Filippeschi), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, Lent 1711, Wn, D-MEI

La esaltazione di Salomone (B. Maddali), place of perf. unknown, ?21 Oct 1716, A-Wn

Ismaele (B. Perfetti), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, 11 March 1717, Wn, D-MEI

Il profeta Elia (G. Zati), Vienna, Imperial Chapel, 2 March 1730 [?previously perf. Venice, 1720], A-Wn

cantatas

Tributi armonici, 12 chbr cants. (Nuremberg, c1699)

La Pace e Marte, supplicanti avanti al trono della Gloria (Filippeschi), Vienna, 19 March 1701, score A-Wn

Il sacrificio di Berenice (P.A. del Negro), Vienna, 28 August 1712, score Wn

41 chbr cants., Wn, D-Bsb, Dl, MEIr, F-Pn, GB-Lgc; 4 chbr duets, A-Wn; facs. of 2 cants. in ICSC, xvi (1985)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

EitnerQ

GerberNL

KöchelKHM

LaMusicaD

SchmidlDS

SennMT

WaltherML

A. von Weilen: Zur Wiener Theatergeschichte (Vienna, 1901)

A. Koczirz: ‘Exzerpte aus den Hofmusikakten des Wiener Kammerarchivs’, SMw, i (1913), 278–303

E. Wellesz: ‘Die Opern und Oratorien in Wien von 1660–1708’, SMw, vi (1919), 5–138

L. Ferrari: ‘Per la bibliografia del teatro italiano in Vienna’, Studi di bibliografia e di argomento romano in memoria di Luigi de Gregori, ed. C.A. Barletta (Rome, 1949)

E. Wellesz: Essays on Opera (London, 1950)

F. Hadamowsky: ‘Barocktheater am Wiener Kaiserhof mit einem Spielplan (1625–1740)’, Jb der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 1951–52 (Vienna, 1955), 7–117; pubd separately (Vienna, 1955)

C. Nemeth: ‘Zur Lebensgeschichte von Carlo Agostino Badia (1672–1738)’, AÖAW, xcii (1955), 224–38

H. Knaus: Die Musiker im Archivbestand des kaiserlichen Obersthofmeisteramtes (1637–1705) (Vienna, 1967–9)

O.E. Deutsch: ‘Das Repertoire der höfischen Oper, der Hof- und der Staatsoper’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 369–70, 379–421

H. Knaus: ‘Die Musiker in den geheimen kaiserlichen Kammerzahlamtsrechnungsbüchern (1669, 1705–1711)’, AÖAW, cvi (1969), 14–38

H. Seifert: Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert (Tutzing, 1985)

L. Bennett: ‘The Italian Cantata in Vienna, 1700–1711: an Overview of Stylistic Traits’, Antonio Caldara: Essays on His Life and Times, ed. B.W. Pritchard (Aldershot, 1987), 183–211

S. Carter: ‘Trombone Obbligatos in Viennese Oratorios of the Baroque’, HBSJ, ii (1990), 52–77

R. Schnitzler: ‘Fux or Badia? The Attribution of Santa Geltrude and Ismaele’, FAM, xlii (1995), 205–45

LAWRENCE E. BENNETT

Badía [d’Agustí], Conchita [Conxita; Concepción]

(b Barcelona, 14 Nov 1897; d Barcelona, 2 May 1975). Spanish soprano. She studied with Granados, Casals and Falla, and made her début in Barcelona in 1913, giving the first performance of the Canciones amatorias of Granados (two of which are dedicated to her) with the composer accompanying. Many other first performances included Falla’s Psyché (1927), Gerhard’s Cançons populars catalanes (1928) and the Cançons of Casals (1934). She was a frequent oratorio soloist with the Pablo Casals Orchestra, and gave numerous recitals (often of lieder), sometimes to her own accompaniment. Her only important operatic appearance was in the title role of María del Carmen (Granados) at the Liceo, Barcelona, in 1935. Although much of her career was spent in her native city, she sang in Paris in 1937 (more than once with Cortot as accompanist) and in 1958, at the 1932 ISCM Festival in Vienna (first performance of the orchestral version of Gerhard’s Catalan songs), in London (five BBC broadcasts, 1937), in Belgium and Switzerland. From 1938 to 1947 she lived in Argentina, where she worked closely with Falla during the last years of his life.

Badía was professor of singing at the Barcelona Conservatory and of piano at the Granados Academy. Among her pupils was Montserrat Caballé. As a singer Badía combined intelligence and spontaneity with a keen sense of style and exemplary diction; her voice had a strongly distinctive, personal quality. She recorded a number of discs in the 1960s, including one with De Larrocha.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Alavedra: Conxita Badia: una vida d’artista (Barcelona, 1975) [with discography]

RONALD CRICHTON/ALAN BLYTH

Badian, Maya

(b Bucharest, 18 April 1945). Canadian composer and musicologist of Romanian origin. She began to study the piano from the age of five. Later (1961–8) she attended classes in composition under Tiberiu Olah at the Academy of Music in Bucharest. After graduation, she became an editor at Romanian Radio-Television (1968–72), after which she taught at the George Enescu School for the Arts (1972–86). Between 1972 and 1974 she completed her training in Weimar and at the Francesco Canetti Institute in Vicenza.

In 1987 she emigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal, teaching in the Music department at the University (1990–92), later transferring to the Faculty of Continuing Education at the same University (1992–5). Badian obtained her doctorate in music and composition in Montreal in 1992. She has given lectures about the music of Canada in Germany, Italy and Hungary.

Her compositional style interprets modernism through the ‘prism’ of Romanian traditional music, enriched by aspects of Canadian folk music which she collected enthusiastically, building a collection of lesser-known material. Through her melodic techniques, she makes these themes her own, with recurring motifs, incantations and outbursts of vitality.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sym. Movt, 1968, rev. 1975; Towards the Pinnacle (A. Blandiana), S, orch, 1971; Images, str orch, 1973; Sinfonietta, 1976, rev. 1982; Sym. Diptych, 1976; Pf Conc., 1978; Sym. Images, 1979; Vn Conc., 1980, rev. 1981; Gui Conc., 1981, rev. 1983; Toccata and Passacaglia, 1982; Conc., 4 timp, tpt, str orch, 1987; Holocaust in memoriam, sym., 1987; Conc., mar, vib, orch, 1988; Conc., ‘Accents’, vc, str orch, 1992; Conc., ‘Laurentian Reflections’, cl, sax, orch, 1994; Daily Tumult, str orch, 1994; Children’s World, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: Dance, str trio, 1972; Monolog, vn 1972; Monody, ob, 1973; Incantation, cl, 1974; Valachian Dance, vc 1974; Echoes, fl, 1974; Chbr Conc., hn, perc, 1977; Movimente, wind qnt, 1978; Profiles, trbn, 1978; Children’s World, 14 pieces, pf, 1988, rev. 1995; Suite on Romanian Themes, mar, vib, pf, 1988; Sonorous Mosaics, tuba, 1990; Cantus planus, ob, org, 1994; Fantasia, pf, 1994; Jeu de tons, 2 fl, pf, 1995

Choral: Canada 125, Cantata profana, 1992

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Badinage, badinerie

(Fr.: ‘jest’, ‘piece of fun’, ‘trifle’).

A term applied to suite movements of a playful nature. The titles ‘badinage’ or ‘badinerie’ first appeared in the early 18th century; they have no precise musical meaning but rather suggest a mood, jocular, frivolous or bantering.

The only known badinerie is the final movement of J.S. Bach’s Suite no.2 in B minor bwv1067. Rhythmically, this movement has much in common with the gavotte: it begins with a half-bar, the first phrase is eight beats long (the crotchet is the beat), with a caesura after the fourth and a point of repose on the eighth; the phrases are later extended. It is in 2/4, faster in tempo than an ordinary gavotte.

Telemann included a badinage in the orchestral suite in his Musique de table, iii (1733); the suite includes dances as well as character pieces with French titles. His badinage is based on gavotte rhythms: it is in common time, marked ‘très vite’. The piece uses drone basses and alternates with a trio. The third cantata of Montéclair’s first book is entitled La badine, and opens with an air in 2/4, in gavotte rhythm. The opening words give an idea of the cantata’s bantering nature: ‘The ever sighing lover makes me sigh with boredom’. Several 18th-century harpsichord collections include pieces entitled ‘badinage’ or ‘badine’ (see B. Gustafson and D.R. Fuller: A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780, Oxford, 1990).

Examples of the badinage in the 19th and 20th centuries are few. Lyadov’s Musical Snuffbox op.32 is subtitled ‘Valse-badinage’. Godowsky, in his Studies on Chopin’s Etudes, combined the two G études into a piece he called ‘Badinage’ – ‘a polyphonic joke’. Prokofiev included a badinage or shutka (‘little joke’) in his piano pieces of op.3.

ERICH SCHWANDT

Badings, Henk

(b Bandung, Java, 17 Jan 1907; d Maarheeze, 26 June 1998). Dutch composer.

JOS WOUTERS/LEO SAMAMA

1. Life.

Born of Dutch parents in Java, he went to the Netherlands in 1915 as an orphan. His wish to follow a musical career met with strong opposition from his guardian, who forced him to train at the Technical University in Delft. He graduated with honours in 1931 and was appointed demonstrator in palaeontology and historical geology there. During his student years he had been teaching himself composition and music theory, and in 1930 he sat for an examination set by Pijper. He then studied composition with Pijper for a time, but this contact was not particularly fruitful because of their widely differing views. Pijper did, however, stimulate Badings to write a major symphonic work, his prize winning First Symphony (later withdrawn), whose first performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1930 aroused the interest of press and public in the then completely unknown composer. In 1933 Eduard van Beinum conducted his Second Symphony and in 1935 his Third was given its première by the Concertgebouw under Mengelberg, followed by the Symphonic Variations, and the Second Violin Concerto.

In 1934 Badings was appointed lecturer in composition and theory at the Rotterdam Conservatory, and in 1937 he became co-director of the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum, his special task being the reorganization of the system of instruction. From 1941 to 1945, during the German occupation, he directed the State Conservatory in The Hague; he was subsequently punished for holding the post and banned for some years from public life, though in 1948 the Concertgebouw Orchestra commissioned him to write his Sixth Symphony. Until 1961, Badings mainly lived as a freelance composer. In 1960–61 he directed the electronic music studio at the University of Utrecht and was appointed there in 1961 to teach acoustics (until 1977). From that period his reputation as an outstanding teacher began to spread abroad; he had already achieved international renown as a composer. He was professor of composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Stuttgart (1962–72), and gave lectures at the University of Adelaide (1962–3), in addition to numerous lectures in the USA and South Africa.

2. Works.

The features of Badings’s music for which he became best known are his use of various scales of six, or especially eight notes, systems built on harmonic or subharmonic series and micro-intervals, in particular as part of a 31-note scale. However, Badings also retained a preference for counterpoint, a gift for striking instrumentation and great care for formal integration. The second of these is evident as early as the first movement of the Second Symphony, a sonata form which is clearly divided into five sections, partly through contrasting orchestration; formal integration is displayed in the work’s finale, where the rondo theme functions as a link between numerous ingenious variants developed from the material of the first two movements. There is also evidence here of Bading’s predeliction for contrasting motifs, on the one hand lyrical, on the other strongly punctuated, which result in a sort of Beethovenian dialectic propelling the music forward. Further examples of such propulsion are to be found in the other early symphonies and concertos, together with the first four piano sonatas and most of the chamber music.

All Bading’s finest works from the 1930s to the 1950s continued to exhibit traditional structures of three or four movements, coupled with the employment of sonata, song or variation forms. Such works include the Tema con variazioni for piano (1938), the Four Sacred Songs for a cappella choir (1941), the choreographic drama Orpheus en Euridice (1941), the Sinfonischer Prolog (1942), the Octet (1952) and the Double Concerto no.1 (1954). Stylistically speaking, Badings's music remained during these years mainly Romantic and expressive; nevertheless a predominant Germanic quality gradually gave way during World War II to a greater degree of French-like lightness and brilliance. Badings’s Fifth Symphony, written on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1948, typifies this change. This is a work which also clearly shows his preoccupation with non-diatonic tonalities; there are scales of six, seven and eight notes, which on the one hand suggest a combination of Lydian and Mixolydian modalities, and on the other, as a result of the successions of augmented and minor 2nds in the six-note scales, influence the music towards polytonality.

In the 1950s Badings began to experiment with new scales, micro-intervals and diverse acoustical phenomena. This resulted in the development of the 31-note scale, in conjunction with A.D. Fokker and based on ideas formulated by Christiaan Huygens in the 17th century (see Microtone). Bading’s first compositions with the scale are Preludium en Fuga I (1952) and the Suite (1954) written for the 31-note organ Fokker had constructed in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. The microtonal system (with the diesis as the smallest interval) allowed for a finer control of overtones as well as leading to experimentation with different kinds of tuning. Subsequent works which explore the various attributes of the scale include the Sonatas nos.2–5 for two violins, the Fourth String Quartet (1966) and the Fifth Double Concerto for two violins and orchestra (1969).

During the early 1950s Badings also worked in the electronic studio of the Technical University, Delft. This resulted in his first electronic compositions: a fragment of theatre music for The Countess Cathleen (1952) and parts of the radiophonic opera Orestes (1954). This attracted great international attention – it was awarded the Italia Prize in 1954 – for its skilful use of the manipulative possibilities offered by tape, and by electronic sound generators and filters. For example, Badings achieved a fearsome effect for the Eumenides by using a recording of a male chorus played at accelerated speed, and, in another choral section, a slower speed was used to attain extreme bass notes. Varied speed techniques were also employed with instrumental sounds, as well as reversed recordings of cymbals and tam-tams. Badings’s principle throughout was to realize previously unavailable pitches, timbres and rhythms. The ballet Kain (1956) was his first completely electronic work: an oscilloscope was used to assist in tuning in pure harmonics up to the 12th, and a ‘melody’ of timbre was produced by means of a photo-siren. A second radio opera, Asterion, was composed in 1957 to a commission from South African radio, and the television opera Salto mortale received a prize in the 1959 International Competition of Television Societies in Salzburg. From 1960 Badings used electronic sounds in combination with conventional instruments in many compositions, and his work with electronics influenced his orchestral writing. He was given a second Italia Prize in 1971 for the oratorio Ballade van die bloeddorstige Jagter, again commissioned by South African radio.

Electronics came to play a significant role in Badings’s music, but of his enormous output – he wrote over 600 compositions – most were acoustic and encompassed all genres, including, particularly in his later career, music for amateurs and for educational purposes. For example he wrote many scores for wind band, eight volumes of Arcadia for piano and piano four hands (1945–67), and 16 volumes of Trois Cosmos for three violins or three violin groups (1981–2) from beginning to advanced levels. His many choral pieces, e.g. Trios chansons bretonnes (1946), Languentibus in purgatorio (1959) and Missa antiphonica (1985), are still a backbone for amateur and professional choral societies alike.

WORKS

dates are generally of publication

stage

Ops: Der nachtwacht (dramatic op, 3, T. Bouws), 1942, Antwerp, Flemish, 13 May 1950; Liefd’s listen en lagen [Love’s Ruses and Snares] (chbr op), 3 Badings and Bouws), 1945, Radio Hilversum, 6 Jan 1948; Orestes (radio op, Badings and Starink), Florence, 24 Sept, 1954; Asterion (radio op, P.N. van Wijk Louw), Johannesburg, 1957; Salto mortale (TV chbr op, 12 scenes, Badings and Belcampo), Nederlandse Televisie Sichting, 19 June 1959; Martin Korda, DP (dramatic choral op.3, Badings and A. van Eijk), Amsterdam, Stadsschouwburg, 1960

Ballets: Balletto grottesco, 1939; Orpheus en Euridice (choreographic drama), 1941; Balletto serioso, 1955; Kain, tape, 1956; Evolutionen, tape, 1958; Jungle, tape, 1959; Die Frau von Andros, tape, 1959; Genesis, tape, 1968; Ballet notturno, 2 pf, 1975

orchestral

Vn Conc. no.1, 1928, unpubd; Vc Conc. no.1, 1930, unpubd; Sym. no.1, 1932; Sym. no.2, 1932; Sym. no.3, 1934; Largo en Allegro, str, 1935; Vn Conc., no.2, 1935; Sym. Variations I, 1936; Ov. I, 1937; Ov. II, 1937; Gedenckclanck, suite, 1938; Pf Conc. no.1, 1939; Concertino, pf trio, chbr orch, 1942; Ov. III, 1942; Sinfonischer Prolog, 1942; Sym. no.4, 1943; Fanfare de Jeanne d’Arc, 1944; Vn Conc. no.3, 1944; Vn Conc. no.4, 1947; Ov. IV; c1948; Aria trista e rondo giocoso, 1948; Divertimento, 1949; Pupazetti azzurri, 1950

Sym. Variations II, 1950; Conc., sax, orch/wind orch, 1951; Org Conc. no.1, 1952; Serenade, 1953; Sinfonisches Scherzo, 1953; Sym. no.6, chorus, orch, 1953; Sym. no.7, 1954; Ov. V, 1954; Vc Conc. no.2, 1954; Double Conc., 2 vn, orch, 1954; Pf Conc. no.2 ‘Atlantic Dances’, 1955; Fl Conc. no.1, 1956; Marcia, 1957; Niederländische Tänze, 1957; Sym. Variations III, 1956; Sym. no.8, 1956; Sym. Variations IV, 1960; Sym. no.9, str, 1960; Sym. no.10, 1961; Ov. VI, 1961; Fl Conc. no.2, 1963

Double Conc., bn, dbn, orch, 1964; Double Conc., 2 pf, orch, 1964; Double Conc., vn, va, orch, 1965; Sym. no.11, 1964; Sym. no.12, 1964; Pittsburgh Conc., 1965; Conc., va, str, 1965; Org Conc. no.2, 1966; Conc., hp, chbr orch/wind orch, 1967; Armageddon, S, orch, 1968; Sym. no.14, 1968; Double Conc., 2 vn, orch, 1969; Symphonietta, 1971; Twentse suite, 4 solo insts, 4 groups, 1976; Sym. Variations IV, 1960; Vijf Nederlandse Dansen, 1976; Conc., fl, ob, cl, orch, 1981; Conc. for Orch, 1982; Conc., 4 sax, orch, 1984; Serenade, str orch, 1985; Huygens Suite, chbr orch, 1987

Wind orch: Partita, 1960; Sym. no.13, 1966; Conc., 2 hn, wind, tape, 1970; Transitions, 1972; Lieshout en zijn molens, wind/brass band, 1976; Ciacona concertante, 1978; Cl Conc., 1979; Eng Hn Conc., 1979; Epiphany, 1979; Golden Age, 1979; Reflections, 1980; Sinfonietta no.2, 1981; Ciacona, seria, 1982; Sym. no.15 ‘Conflicts and Confluences’, 1983; Images, 1983; Figures sonores, 1984; 3 Apparitions of a Hymn, 1984; Vc Conc., 1985; Trbn Conc., 1986; Introduction, Variation and Indonesian National Anthem, 1986

chorus with orchestra

Kantate I ‘Festival kantate’ (W. Buning), solo vv, chorus, children’s chorus, orch, 1936; Kantate II (A. Verwey), S, chbr chorus, chbr orch, 1937; Apocalypse, orat, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1948; Kantate III (Rijnsdorp, Badings), chorus, children’s chorus, wind, carillon, 1954; Kantate IV ‘Laus pacis’ (Erasmus), S, male chorus, wind, 1956; Ps cxlvii, children’s chorus, chbr chorus, chorus, orch, 1959; Cantate VI ‘Laus stultitiae’ (Erasmus), chorus, large, ens, 1961; TeD, male chorus, orch, 1962; Jonah, orat., solo vv, chorus, orch, tape, 1963

Hymnus Ave Maris Stella, female chorus, orch, 1965; 4 Old Dutch Songs, 1967; Genesis, T, Bar, male chorus, perc, tape, 1967; Kantate VII ‘Ballade van die bloeddorstige Jagter’ (Watermeyer), solo vv, chorus, orch, tape, 1970; Klaagzang; Kantate VIII ‘Song of Myself’ (W. Whitman), nar, chorus, wind, 1973; Kantate IX (C. Huygens, Badings), S, T, chorus, chbr orch, 1987; see also orchestral [Sym. no.6, 1953]

other choral

Mixed chorus: Vechter, 1939; 3 Songs, 1940; 4 Sacred Songs, 1941; Geestelijke liederen, 1942; Missa brevis, 1946; 3 chansons bretonnes, chorus, pf, 1946; Daar was een wuf, 1947; Maria, 14 songs, solo vv, chbr chorus, fl, vc, 1947; Het kwezelke, 1947; Meisjes van Duinkerken, 1947; Pools volkslied, 1947; 6 images, 1950; Contrasten, 1952; Cantamus amici, 1957; Languentibus in purgatorio, 1959; 3 Schwärmereien, 3 songs, chorus, tape, 1965; 5 poèmes chinois, 1973; 2 Chorlieder, 1977; Aus tiefer Not, 1978; Finnigan’s Wake, 1978; Notturna triste alla lune, 1978; Requiem, 1978; Vocalizzo burlesco, 1978; Querella pacis, 1979; 3 Serious Songs, 1983; Missa antiphonica, 2 choruses, 1985; An den Mond, A, chorus, 1987; Ave maris stella, 1987; Ballade van de omkransde boot, 1987; Tristis est anima mea, 1987

Male chorus: Jagerslied, 1933; Dat Liet van den rhynscen wyn, 1934; Een weemoedig lied, 1940; Boutensliederen, 1947; 3 geestelijke liederen, 1947; 2 kerstliederen, 1947; 3 chants populaires, 1950; 3 romances, 1950; In memoriam, 1952; 4 geestelijke liederen, 1954; 4 wereldlijke liederen, 1954; Piet Hein, 1963; Carmina stultitiae, 1964; Lucerbertliederen, 3 songs, male chorus, tape, 1964; Folksongs, arr. male chorus, 1967; Ave Regina coelorum, male chorus, 1978; Gebed, male chorus, 1978; Gruselett, male chorus, 1978; Chanson de Bourgogne en rondeau, male chorus, 1982; Jub Deo, male chorus, 1982; Polnischer Winter, male chorus, 1982; Ps xxvii, male chorus, 1982

Female chorus: 3 ballades, 1950; 6 Christmas Songs, 1950; 3 chants populaires, 1953; Stabat mater, 1954; Ave Maria, 1978; Mater cantans filio, 1978; Kyrie eleison, 1979; Ballade van de twee konigskinderen, 1983; 3 chansons d’amour, 1983; 3 Liederen van Minne, 1983; Tria amoris carmina, 1983; Pastorale, 1985; De Zoom, 1985

chamber

3 or more insts: Qnt, fl, str trio, pf, 1928; Wind Qnt, 1929; Sextet, A, fl, cl, vn, va, pf, 1931; Str Qt no.1, 1931; Pf Trio, 1934; Str Qt no.2. 1936; Qnt, fl, str trio, hp, 1936; Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1943; Str Qt no.3, 1944; Trio, 2 vn, va, 1945; Trio, 2 ob, eng hn/3 vn, 1946; Trio, fl, vn, va, 1947; Qt, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, 1947; Wind Qnt, 1948; 3 Dutch Dances, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, 1950; Trio, 2 vn, pf, 1951; Pf Qnt, 1952; Octet, 1952; Trio, 2 vn, va, 1953; Trio, 3 rec, 1955; Trio, fl, va, gui, 1962; Str Qt no.4, 1966; Pf Qt, 1973; Trio, a fl, va, hp, 1977; 7 qts, any insts, 1978; Str Qt no.5, 1980; Trio, 2 vn, archiphone, 1981; Trio Cosmos, i–xvi, 3 vn.3 groups of vns, 1981–2; Qnt, cl, vn, vc, gui, hp, 1985; Trio, cl, eng hn, bn, 1986

1–2 insts: Sonata, vc, pf, 1927; Sonata, vn, vc, 1927; Sonata, vn, va, 1928; Sonata, 2 vn, 1928; Sonata no.1, vc, pf, 1929; Sonata, vn, pf, 1931; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1933; Sonata no.2, vc, pf, 1934; Capriccio, fl, pf, 1936; Capriccio, vn, pf, 1936; Canzona, ob, org, 1938; Intermezzo, vn, org, 1938; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1939; Sonata no.1, vn, 1940; Sonata no.1, vc, 1941; Suite no.1, carillon, 1943; Sonata, hp, 1944

Elfenland, 45 easy pieces, vn, pf, 1945; Duets, 2 vn, 1945; Air triste, vn, pf, 1947; La malinconia, a sax, pf, 1949; Sonata no.1, carillon, 1949; Sonata no.2, carillon, 1950; Ballade, fl, hp, 1950; Suite no.1, 2 rec, 1950; Sonata no.2, vc, 1951; Sonata no.2, vn, 1951; Sonata no.3, vn, 1951; Sonata, va, pf, 1951; Suite no.2, carillon 1951; Cavatine, a fl, hp, 1952; Cavatine, a sax, pf, 1952; Cavatine, vn, pf, 1952; Sonata no.3, vn, pf, 1952; Suite no.3, carillon, 1953; Suite no.4, carillon, 1953; Romance, vn, pf, 1957; Blues, harmonica, pf, 1957; Sonata, rec, hpd, 1957

Suite no.3, 2 rec, 1958; Rondino, vn, pf, 1960; 12 preludes, gui, 1961; Sonata no.2, 2 vn, 1963; Canzona, eng hn, org, 1967; Dialogues, fl, org, 1967; It is Dawning in the East, gui, org, 1967; Quempas, vn/va, org, 1967; Sonata no.3, 2 vn, 1967; Toccata, mar, 1973; Sonata no.4, 2 vn, 1975; pf, 1976; Sonata, accdn, 1981; Sonata no.5, 2 vn, 1981; Sonata, fl, hp, 1982; Sonata, fl, gui, 1983; Suite no.5, carillon, 1983; Variations, vn, gui, 1983; Sonata no.6, 2 vn, 1984; Preambolo, aria e postludio, gui, 1985; 3 Etudes, carillon, 1987

keyboard

Org: Toccata, 1929; Preludium, 1938; Preludium en Fuga no.1, 31-note org, 1952; Preludium en Fuga no.2, 1952; Preludium en Fuga no.3, 1953, Preludium en Fuga no.4, 31-note org, 1954; Suite, 1954, 31-note org, 1954; Reihe kleiner Klangstücke, 31-tone org, 1957; Variations on a Medieval Dutch Theme, 1969; Ricercare, 1973; Introduction, Chorale and Finale, 1975; Archifonica, 31-tone org, 1976; Apparizioni, 1977; Passacaglia piccola, 1979; 4 pezzi, 1980; Prelude and arioso, 1983; Preludium on B.A.C.H., org, 1985

Pf: Suite, 1930; Tema con variazioni, 1938; Balletto grotesco, 2 pf, 1939; Reihe kleiner Klavierstücke, 1939; Arcadia, easy pf pieces, i–iii, pf, iv–v, pf duet, 1945; Variations à la manière de …, 1951; Balletto serioso, pf duet, 1955; Foxtrot, pf duet, 1955; Xenie, pf, 1958; Adagio cantabile, 1967; Arcadia, easy pf pieces, vi–vii, 1967; 5 Pf Pieces, 1967; Balletto notturno, 1975; 4 sonori, 1976; La megicana, pf, 1978; Passacaglia, pf, 1979; Images de Noël, pf, 1982; 5 kleine Klavierstücke, pf, 1983; 6 sonatas, 4 sonatines

songs

3 Rilke-Lieder, 1v, pf, 1932; Coplas, 1935; Dullaert-Liederen, T, pf, 1935; Vildraclieder, 1935; 3 Baritonliederen, 1936; 3 Duette, 1936; 4 Wiegeliedjes, 1936; Minnedeuntje, 1937; Chansonettes, 1941; Chansons orientales, 1942; Ariettes méchantes, 1944; Liederne van de dood, 1946; Meiregen, 10 children’s songs, 1946; Liedjes van weemoed, 1948; Morgenstern-lieder, 4vv, pf, 1961; Burying Friends, 1963; 8 Cummings Songs, 1965; 6 Lechler-Lieder, 1966; 3 Oud-Nederlandse Liederen, 1v, fl, hp, 1967; 5 Reich-Lieder, Mez/Bar, pf, 1974; Najaarsnacht (R. Holst), 1976; 5 Rilke-Lieder, 1978; 2 Whale Songs, 1980; Ode aan Aphrodite, 1982; Sextet, S, fl, cl, vn, db, gui, 1987

tape

The Countess Cathleen (incid music), 1952; Sonatine, 1955; Variations electroniques, 1957; Capriccio, vn, 2 tapes, elektromagnetische Klangfiguren, 1959; Toccata no.1, 2 tapes, c1960; Toccata no.2, 2 tapes, 1964; Chaconne, tpt, tape, 1965; Conc., pf, 2 tapes, 1967; Kontrapunkte, pf, tape, 1970; Music, org, tape, 1970

Principal publishers: Donemus, Schott (Mainz)

WRITINGS

De hedendaagsche Nederlandsche muziek (Amsterdam, 1936)

‘Heilige huisjes’, Wereld der muziek, v (1938–9), 273–7

‘De ivoren toren van de componist’, Wereld der musziek, vii (1940–41), 1–4

‘Kompositionen für Kinder’, Musik im Unterricht, xliv (1953), 245

‘Spezielles Gesicht der Funkoper’, NZM, Jg.116, nos.10–12 (1955), 15 only

with J.W. de Bruyn: ‘Elektronische muziek’, Philips technisch tijdschrift, xix/9 (1957), 269–79

‘Sur les possibilités et les limitations de la musique électronique’, Revue belge de musicologie, xiii (1959), 57–62

‘Experiences with Electronic Ballet Music’, The Modern Composer and His World: Stratford, ON, 1960, 106–8

‘Sonata for Cello Solo’, Sonorum speculum, no.7 (1961), 23–4

Over 31-toon stemming (Brussels, 1978)

‘Aantekeningen over enige fundamentele elementen in de muziek’, Mens en melodie, xli (1986), 380–88, 452–53, 503–09, 547–51

(1) Heinrich (Joseph) Baermann

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. van Ameringen: ‘Henk Badings, Profil eines holländischen Komponisten von heute’, ÖMz, vii (1952), 297–300

C. MacDaniel: Henk Badings: Musico-Technical Study of his Woodwind Chamber Works (diss., U. of Texas, 1960)

J. Geraedts: ‘Symphony for String Orchestra’, Sonorum speculum, no.6 (1961), 9–13

J. Wouters: ‘Dutch Music in the 20th Century’, MQ, li (1965), 103–4

J. Wouters: ‘Henk Badings’, Sonorum speculum, no.32 (1967), 1–23; repr. in Dutch Composers’ Gallery, i: Nine Portraits of Dutch Composers (Amsterdam, 1971), 50–70

J. Ditto: The Four Preludes and Fugues: the Ricercar and the Passacaglia for Timpani and Organ by Henk Badings (diss., U. of Rochester, 1979)

M.K.K. Clardy: Compositional Devices of Willem Pijper (1894–1947) and Henk Badings (b.1907) in Two Selected Works: Pijper’s ‘Sonata per flauto e pianoforte’ (1925) and Badings’ ‘Concerto for Flute and Wind Symphony Orchestra’ (1963) (diss., U. of North Texas, 1980)

L. Samama: Zeventig jaar Nederlandse muziek (1915–1985) (Amsterdam, 1986), 138–48

R. de Beer: ‘An Odour of Taboo: Henk Badings, 1907–1987’, Key Notes, no.24 (1987), 28–9

P.T. Klemme: Henk Badings, Choral Compositions for Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus with Latin Text: Analysis and Commentary (diss., U. of Washington, 1988)

C. Becx: Henk Badings: Symfonische blaasmuziek/Music for Wind-Orchestra (Utrecht, 1989)

P.T. Klemme: Henk Badings, 1907–87: Catalog of Works (Warren, MI, 1993)

P.T. Klemme: ‘The Choral Music of Henk Badings’, American Choral Review, xxxv/2 (1993), 2–8

Badini, Carlo Francesco

(fl 1770–93). Italian librettist and journalist. He was in London by 1769, when he wrote the libretto for Pugnani’s comic opera Nanetta e Lubino. Probably supplementing his income by translating and teaching Italian, Badini wrote a few librettos for the King’s Theatre during the 1770s, including Le pazzie di Orlando (set by P.A. Guglielmi in 1771), a witty, ambitious work which Nunziato Porta adapted for Haydn as Orlando paladino (1782, Eszterháza). Badini’s other works from this period include Il disertore (1770), set by Guglielmi and revived in Lisbon in 1772, and L’ali d’amore (1776), which was set by Venanzio Rauzzini.

An early sign of Badini’s individuality is found in the libretto for Bertoni’s La governante, a free translation of the English dialogue opera The Duenna by R.B. Sheridan. While Badini retained many of Sheridan’s lyrics, he reworked the drama into a typical three-act burletta whose arias, unlike Sheridan’s, advance the plot. Another example of Badini’s interest in English drama is Il duca d’Atene (set by Bertoni in 1780), the plot of which is partly drawn from The Taming of the Shrew.

Badini kept abreast of new developments in opera, as evidenced in Il trionfo della costanza (set by Anfossi in 1782). Indebted to Sedaine’s Le roi et le fermier, this highly melodramatic libretto includes an exceptionally long first-act finale comparable to those of Casti and Da Ponte in its depiction of domestic chaos. Badini later expressed contempt for his fellow Italian librettists in the preface to his libretto L’amore protetto dal cielo, o sia La vestale (1787), an opera seria with music composed and assembled by Rauzzini.

Badini’s fortunes fluctuated during his later career. In 1779 he was sued by the King’s Theatre manager, Antoine Le Texier; two years later he was sued by the harpsichord maker Jacob Kirkman and sentenced to debtors’ prison. Beginning with the 1783–4 season, he was employed by the King’s Theatre as one of two house poets, with a salary of £100 which rose to £150 in the following seasons. In 1785 he was appointed principal librettist at the King’s and became a close associate of the manager, G.A. Gallini. In 1788 it was reported that he had briefly been editor of the Morning Post. With his compatriot Andrea Carnavale, he was accused of writing a libellous pamphlet, the Case of the Opera-House Disputes (1784), a vicious attack on the former owner-manager of the King’s Theatre, William Taylor, Gallini’s arch-enemy. He may also have been a newspaper critic.

In early 1791 Badini was commissioned to write a libretto for Haydn during his first visit to London: this was L’anima del fìlosofo (Orfeo ed Euridice), which Haydn did not finish. Badini’s brilliant though flawed libretto is one of the most peculiar for an opera seria. Taking a completely different approach from Calzabigi and Gluck, Badini reverts to Virgil’s violent ending, with Orpheus killed by the Bacchantes. In 1792 Badini was reappointed house poet at the King’s Theatre only to be dismissed a year later for unknown reasons. He was replaced by Lorenzo da Ponte, who had arrived in London in 1792.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

GroveO (C. Price) [incl. list of libs]

Documents in GB-Lpro: PRIS 10/51; C31/239/203 (Chancery Affidavits); C38/754 (Masters’ Reports); C107/201 (Masters’ Exhibits); LC 7/3

L. da Ponte: Memorie (New York, 1823; Eng. trans., London and Philadelphia, 1929/R)

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn in England 1791–1795 (London, 1976)

F.C. Petty: Italian Opera in London 1760–1800 (Ann Arbor, 1980)

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: ‘The Rebuilding of the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1789–1791’, Theatre Journal, xliii (1991), 421–44

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995)

J. Milhous, G. Dideriksen and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, ii: The Pantheon Opera and its Aftermath, 1789–1795 (Oxford, forthcoming)

CURTIS PRICE

Badinski, Nikolai

(b Sofia, 19 Dec 1937). Bulgarian composer. He graduated from the Sofia Academy of Music in 1961, and from 1962 worked in Halle as a violinist and composer. From 1967 to 1970 he studied composition with Wagner-Régeny and Günter Kochan as a postgraduate at the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. In 1975 and 1976 he attended courses in Siena given by Dallapiccola and Donatoni, and from 1974 took part in Darmstadt summer courses. In 1976 he moved to West Berlin, where he has since worked as a freelance composer. In 1980 he received a one-year scholarship to the Villa Massimo, Rome, and in 1981–2 and 1985–6 received stipends to live and work in Paris. He was composer-in-residence at the Djerassi Foundation, 1987, and has taught at a number of colleges and universities, notably in Stockholm and Copenhagen. He has won many international awards, for instance in the Viotti, Stockhausen and Trieste competitions, and in 1983 he became a corresponding member of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Literature.

In his extensive output (over 130 works) Badinski has a tendency towards a polystylistic means of expression, often in a late Romantic manner, as witnessed by his dense orchestration and the dynamic range of detailed and intricate treatment of individual instruments. His voluminous melodies, full of glissandos, tremolos and melismas, are particularly noticeable in his instrumental concertos. In both his acoustic and his electronically composed music there is often a wave-like or crescendo development of form based on superimposition of different rhythms and instrumental colours. His music alludes to styles ranging from Johann Strauss, Bach and Stravinsky to Bulgarian folk music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Str Qt no.1 ‘Das Leben – über dem Krieg’, 1965; Berlin Divertimento, fl, cl, db, perc, 1968; Moscow Wind Qnt, 1969; Vn Conc. no.1 ‘Triptychon’, vn, perc, str, 1970–71; Vn Conc. no.2, 1971–2; Die Ruinen unter Sofia, cl, bn, hn, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1972; Dialoghi, va, 1973; Str Qt no.2, 1973; Vn Conc. no.3, 1973; 5–1 Euphonien, db, 1974; Va Conc. ‘Col legno’, 1977; Cottidianus no.1, vn, 1977; Omaggio a BACH, hpd, fl, ob, cl, bn, 2 vn, va, vc, hpd, 1977; Klavieriada, conc., pf, tape/5 pf, 1977–8; Str Qt no.3 ‘Hommage à Bela Bartok’, 1978; AMEKDIL no.2 (Sym. no.2) ‘AaAaN’, large orch, 1978; AMEKDIL no.3 (Sym. no.3) ‘Situationi mobili’, orch, 1981; Connections, vn, pf, orch, 1982–3; Cottidianus no.2, vc, 1987; many pf works

Vocal: AMEKDIL no.1 (Sym. no.1), S, orch, 1967; Sono ancora qui, il sole gira … (cant., S. Quasimodo), medium v, cl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1970; Martialphonien (szenische Aktionen, Martial), 12vv, 1975; Wiederspiegelungen der Weisheit, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1983–6; … gia addolicito da un po d’aria di mare (P. Pasolini), S, perc, 1984–6

El-ac: Phönixe, 1974; Sevtoplis, 1974; Trio imaginable, cptr, 1980; Fridenpsalm, 1983; Begegnung von Unendlichkeiten, elec modified insts, tape, 1983; Schwebende Berliner Märchen, 1983–6; Gajdi [Bagpipes], 1984; Kukeri-eine Ritus-szene, 1984–5; Venexiana, cptr, 1984–5; Dance elektroakustique, 1985; Ab-stand, Ab-seits: Werste, Weiten … , vn, cptr, 1988; 6 Orpheus Gesänge, vn, elecs, 1988–9; Decipio no.6, 12 sax, 1990–91; Decipio no.7, 32hp/(hp, elecs), 1990–91

El-ac material in Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague

Principal publishers: Deutscher Verlag, Tonos

Principal recording companies: ABAN, ProVive

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Stürzbecker: ‘Der Komponist sollte mit Zuhören sprechen: ein Interview mit “multinationalen” Komponisten Nikolai Badinski’, NZM, Jg.140 (1979), 48

G. Eberle: ‘Schütz original, verfremdet und zerstückelt’, NZM, Jg.146 (1985), 41

G. Eberle: ‘Mental-integrales Komponieren: Nikolai Badinski und seine Musik’, NZM, Jg.148, no.11 (1987), 24–7

MARIA KOSTAKEVA

Badoaro [Badoer, Badoero, Badovero], Giacomo [Iacopo]

(b Venice, 1602; d Venice, 1654). Italian librettist. He was a member of the Venetian nobility. He wrote a great deal of verse in Italian and in Venetian dialect and had an extensive poetic exchange with G.F. Busenello. His reputation as a librettist rests on Monteverdi's supposed predilection for his work in his Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and Le nozze d'Enea in Lavinia (1641). The latter text, however, is by another (unidentified) poet, as its printed scenario makes clear. Badoaro's next libretto, L'Ulisse errante (1644, music by Sacrati), also drew on the Odyssey; each of its five acts presents an independent episode of Ulysses' adventure. The deliberate, even selfconscious rejection of Aristotelian unity of action may have been inspired by Giacomo Torelli, who created sets and machinery for the production. Chronicles of Venetian opera also attribute to Badoaro Helena rapita da Theseo (1653, music possibly by Cavalli), which is not, contrary to the assertion of Ivanovich, based on a plot by Giovanni Faustini. His works were given only single productions in Venice, except for the Bolognese performance of Il ritorno d'Ulisse (also 1640), one of several works exported there during the first decade of public opera in Venice. The presence at Vienna of the sole surviving score of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria has led some scholars to suppose that it was used for a performance there. Like many of the other early Venetian librettists, Badoaro was a member of the cynical and libertine Accademia degli Incogniti; he was financially involved in the Teatro Novissimo at the time of its closure in 1645.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Ivanovich: Minerva al tavolino (Venice, 1681, 2/1688)

W. Osthoff: Das dramatische Spätwerk Claudio Monteverdis (Tutzing, 1960)

T. Walker: ‘Gli errori di “Minerva al tavolino”: osservazioni sulla cronologia delle prime opere veneziane’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 7–20

L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454

E. Rosand: ‘Iro and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria’, JM, vii (1989), 141–64

T. Carter: ‘In Love's Harmonius Consort? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria’, COJ, v (1993), 1–16

E. Rosand: ‘The Bow of Ulysses’, JM, xii (1994), 376–95

THOMAS WALKER

Bado y Gómez, Juan del.

See Vado y Gómez, Juan del.

Badura-Skoda [née Halfar], Eva

(b Munich, 15 Jan 1929). Austrian musicologist, wife of Paul Badura-Skoda. She studied the violin, the piano and theory, both privately and at the Vienna Academy. She attended universities in Heidelberg, Regensburg, Vienna and Innsbruck, working with Stäblein and Wilhelm Fischer, and in 1953 received the doctorate from the University of Innsbruck with a dissertation on music teaching in Austria from the 16th century to the 18th. She was on the staff of the International Summer Academy of the Salzburg Mozarteum in 1962 and 1963 and taught at the University of Wisconsin, first as a guest professor in 1964 and then as professor from 1966 to 1974. She has also been a visiting professor at Boston University, Queens University, Ontario, the University of Göttingen and McGill Uiversity, and has lecturered at institutions in Europe, Asia and North America.

Badura-Skoda’s research has centred on 18th-century topics, particularly the music of the Scarlattis, Mozart and Haydn, and also on Schubert. She has also written on problems of editing and performing practice, the history of the fortepiano, Viennese music history and the development of various genres of comic opera such as Singspiel, opera buffa and opéra comique. As co-author with her husband of Mozart-Interpretation she has combined her experience as a pianist with her historical studies to give useful insights into the performance of Mozart’s keyboard works, particularly the piano sonatas and concertos. She has contributed articles to German and English music dictionaries (including MGG1 and Grove6) and is a member of the Joseph-Haydn-Institut and the Zentralinstitut für Mozart-Forschung. In 1986 she was awarded the Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaften und Kunst. She and her husband were concerned with the publicity surrounding the ‘Haydn’ sonatas later found to be forged.

WRITINGS

Beiträge zur Geschichte des Musikunterrichtes in Österreich (diss., U. of Innsbruck, 1953)

with P. Badura-Skoda: Mozart-Interpretation (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1957; Eng. trans., 1962/R as Interpreting Mozart on the Keyboard)

‘Über die Anbringungen von Auszierungen in den Klavierwerken Mozarts’, MJb 1957, 186–98

‘Zur Echtheit von Mozarts Sarti-Variationen KV460’, MJb 1959, 127–39

‘Eine private Briefsammlung’, Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. W. Gerstenberg, J. LaRue and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1963), 280–90

‘Textual Problems in Masterpieces of the 18th and 19th Centuries’, MQ, li (1965), 301–17

‘Clementi’s “Musical Characteristics” Op.19’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: a Tribute to Karl Geiringer, ed. H.C.R. Landon and R.E. Chapman (New York, 1970), 53–67

‘“Teutsche Comoedie-Arien” und Joseph Haydn’, Der junge Haydn: Graz 1970, 59–73

‘Haydn, Mozart and their Contemporaries’, Keyboard Music, ed. D. Matthews (London, 1972), 108–66

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Klavierkonzert c-moll, KV491 (Munich, 1972) [monograph]

‘The Influence of the Viennese Popular Comedy on Haydn and Mozart’, PRMA, c (1973–4), 185–99

‘Personal Contacts and Mutual Influence in the Field of Opera’, Haydn Studies: Washington DC 1975, 419–21

‘Performance Conventions in Beethoven's Early Works’, Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: Detroit 1977, 52–75

‘Zur Salzburger Erstaufführung von Joseph Haydns Singspiel “Die reisende Ceres”’, ÖMz, xxxii (1977), 317–24

‘Der Bildhauer Anton Dietrich: ein Beitrag zur Ikonographie Beethovens und Schuberts’, Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. M. Bente (Munich, 1980), 30–52

‘Giuseppe Scarlatti und seine buffa-Opera’, Musik am Hof Maria Theresias: Graz 1980, 57–75

‘Prolegomena to a History of the Viennese Fortepiano’, Israel Studies in Musicology, ii (1980), 77–99

ed.: Joseph Haydn: Vienna 1982

ed., with P. Branscombe: Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology (Cambridge, 1982)

‘“Clavier”-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770’, SMw, xxxv (1984), 65–88

‘The Piano Works of Schubert’, Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, ed. L. Todd (New York, 1990), 97–146

‘Komponierte J.S. Bach “Hammerklavier-Konzerte”?’, BJb 1991, 159–71

‘Aspects of Performance Practice’, Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, ed. R.L. Marshall (New York, 1994), 33–67

‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Symphonik der Wiener Klassik’, SMw, xliii (1994), 67–143

‘Stringed Keyboard Instruments after 1700: Reconstructions of Lautenwercke and a Hammerpantalone’, Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J. Buelow, ed. T.J. Mathiesen and B.V. Rivera (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995), 271–87

EDITIONS

Paul Homberger: Brautgesänge, MAM, vii (1959)

with P. Badura-Skoda: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Konzerte für ein oder mehrere Klaviere und Orchester mit Kadenzen, Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, V: 15/V (Kassel, 1965)

Franz Schubert: Trios für Klavier, Violine and Violoncello (Munich, 1973)

J. Haydn Die reisende Ceres (Vienna, 1982) [Singspiel, in Eng. and Ger.]

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf: Six Symphonies, The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. B, i (New York, 1985)

with A. Mann: J.J. Fux: Singfundament, Sämtliche Werke, vii/2 (Graz, 1993)

PAULA MORGAN

Badura-Skoda [Badura], Paul

(b Vienna, 6 Oct 1927). Austrian pianist, husband of Eva Badura-Skoda. He studied the piano and conducting at the Vienna Conservatory under Viola Thern (1945–8), and then in Lucerne at the masterclasses of Edwin Fischer, who exerted a great influence on him. After winning the Austrian Music Competition in 1947, he made his concert début the following year. He soon became one of the most prominent Austrian pianists, touring throughout the world. From 1966 to 1971 he was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, USA. His recital programmes have centred on the Viennese Classics, but have also embraced contemporary composers, for instance Frank Martin, whose Second Piano Concerto is dedicated to him. Badura-Skoda has a strong interest in historical keyboard instruments, and his own collection includes instruments by Schantz, Broadwood, Graf and Schneider. With these, and by means of his interpretative and editorial research, he strives to achieve fidelity to the original sources and tone-colours. He has made many recordings on period and modern instruments, including the complete sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert. He also composes and has written numerous cadenzas for concertos of the Viennese Classical period. His editions include three Mozart piano concertos (with his wife, Eva), k453, 456 and 459, for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (Kassel, 1965); Beethoven’s piano sonatas; Chopin Etudes opp.10 and 25 (Vienna, 1973); and piano works by Schubert.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

with E. Badura-Skoda: Mozart-Interpretation (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1957; Eng. trans., 1962/R as Interpreting Mozart on the Keyboard)

‘Chopin’s Influence’, Frederic Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician, ed. A. Walker (London, 1966, 2/1973 as The Chopin Companion), 258–76

with J. Demus: Die Klaviersonaten von Ludwig van Beethoven (Wiesbaden, 1970, 2/1974)

‘Eine ungedruckte Brahms-Kadenz zu Mozarts D-Moll-Konzert KV 466’, ÖMz, xxxv (1980), 153–6

‘Von der Vieldeutigkeit der musikalischen Notation’, Logos musicae: Festschrift für Albert Palm, ed. R. Görner (Wiesbaden, 1982), 3–7

‘A propos de l’interprétation des oeuvres de Frédéric Chopin’, Sur les traces Frédéric Chopin, ed. D. Pistone (Paris, 1984), 113–30

Bach-Interpretation: die Klavierwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Laaber, 1990; Eng. trans., 1993, as Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard)

‘Mozart’s Trills’, Perspectives on Mozart Performance, ed. R.L. Todd and P.F. Williams (Cambridge, 1991), 1–26

RUDOLF KLEIN/MARTIN ELSTE

Baehr, Joseph.

See Beer, Joseph.

Baena, Gonzalo de

(b ?Seville, c1476–80; d ?Lisbon, after 1540). Spanish composer. A number of musicians by the name of Baena were employed in the Castilian, Aragonese and Portuguese royal chapels in the latter part of the 15th century and first half of the 16th. At least three families or clans can be identified: from Valladolid (the royal singer Alonso de Baena and his son Bernaldino), Segovia (see Baena, Lope de) and Seville, Gonzalo’s home town. Gonzalo was one of three musical sons born to a different Alonso de Baena who served as a player of the bowed vihuela in the royal household of Isabella from May 1493 until 1499; he died in 1505. Gonzalo and his two brothers, Francisco and Diego, may have served at the queen’s court before moving to Portugal some time between 1496 and 1500; a document dated 1508 refers to all three as chamber musicians at the court of Manoel I. Gonzalo himself had a musical son, Antonio, who, together with his father and his uncle Francisco, was also in the service of João III. (Their relationship, if any, with the Afonso de Baena in the service of Don Enrique, the king’s brother, at Evora, is not clear.)

In June 1536 Gonzalo applied for a royal licence to print a keyboard manual and four years later he published his Arte nouamente inuentada pera aprender a tanger (Lisbon, 1540) with a dedication to João III. This is the earliest surviving book of keyboard music from the Iberian peninsula and its musical repertory includes intabulations of vocal works by Franco-Flemish and Spanish composers from the latter part of the 15th century through to his son’s generation of the 1530s. Ockeghem, Compère, Agricola, Févin, Josquin, Peñalosa, Escobar, Anchieta, Basurto and Morales are among the composers represented. Eight items (all of which are sections from Mass movements) are attributed to Gonzalo’s son Antonio, while two, a setting of the hymn Ave maris stella and a motet Si dedero, are by Gonzalo himself. The prologue includes a concise set of instructions on how to read the tablature (an alphabet-based version unique to this source) and how to play the keyboard (the frontispiece depicts an organ but Baena refers to the ‘monachordio’ or clavichord throughout). The didactic purpose of the collection is thus clear and is reinforced by the grouping of the pieces by the number of voice parts, from two to four; the volume ends with a four-part canon attributed to Antonio de Baena. Gonzalo’s own works are conservative in style. His three-voice setting of Ave maris stella preserves the chant unadorned and in equal note values in the tenor. The motet, likewise in three voices and on the same text as, and with a similar opening to, the well known version by Agricola (also included in the Arte), is more contrapuntally conceived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

V.A. Deslandes: Documentos para a historia da typographia portugueza nos seculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon, 1888), 19

G. de Resende: Miscelânea, ed. J. Mendes dos Remedios, Subsidios para o estudo da história da literatura portuguêsa, xix (Coimbra, 1917), 65

T. Knighton: ‘A Newly Discovered Keyboard Source (Gonzalo de Baena’s Arte nouamente inuentada pera aprender a tanger, Lisbon, 1540): a Preliminary Report’, PMM, v (1996), 81–112

TESS KNIGHTON

Baena [Vaena], Lope de

(b Segovia; fl 1476–c1506). Spanish composer. He was appointed ‘player [of the organ] and singer of the chapel’ of Ferdinand of Aragon on 15 April 1478 and served the king until at least 1482. By 1495 he was being paid as a member of the Castilian household as organist of the royal chapel, but after Isabella's death in 1504 he returned to the service of the king until August 1506 when his name disappears from the pay documents. He may have died shortly afterwards.

Baena's Segovian origins distinguish him from at least two other musical families using the name Baena, one from Valladolid, the other from Seville (see Baena, Gonzalo de). This has led to some confusion as to the identity of Lope: he was praised as a vihuelist and composer by Fray Francisco de Avila in 1508, but he was almost certainly not the organist-composer mentioned by the Portuguese chronicler Garcia de Resende, who was probably referring to Gonzalo.

Since several of the other Baenas are known to have been composers, there may be some doubt as to the authorship of those pieces attributed only to ‘Baena’ in the sources: all nine extant songs have until now been associated with Lope, but only five of these are firmly ascribed to him. Nevertheless, he remains the strongest candidate as the song composer. With the exception of the canción Vos mayor, vos mejor, all the compositions are villancicos. Four of the pieces are sacred and the rest are love songs. The refrain text and melody of Todos duermen, coraçón were well known throughout the 16th century. Baena's style is versatile: Vos mayor, vos mejor and Rogad vos, virgen, rogad, are in a hymnlike, chordal style, whereas the prayer to St Michael, Arcángel San Miguel, is in a fluid triple metre with independently moving parts. Todo quanto yo servi is exceptional in using F clefs for all the voices. Occasionally brief points of imitation are used to introduce inner phrases.

WORKS

Editions: La música en la corte de los reyes católicos: Cancionero musical de palacio, ed. H. Anglès, MME, v, x (1947–51) [A i–ii]E. Ros-Fàbregas: The Manuscript Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M.454: Study and Edition in the Context of the Iberian and Continental Manuscript Traditions (diss., CUNY, 1992)

Amor, pues nos das plaçer, 4vv (Lope de Vaena), E-Bc 454; Arcángel San Miguel, 3vv (Lope de Baena), A ii, no.409; A repastar mi ganado, 3vv (Vaena), A ii, no.433; ¡Que desgraciada sagala!, 3vv (Baena), A i, no.161; Rogad vos, virgen, rogad, 3vv (Baena), A ii, no.160; Todos duermen, coraçón (Baena), 3vv, A i, no.172; Todo quanto yo servi, 3vv (Lope de Baena), A ii, no.287; Virgen reyna gloriosa, 3vv (Lope de Vaena), Bc 454; Vos mayor, vos mejor, 3vv (Lope de Baena), A ii, no.394

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSM

Vander StraetenMPB, vii

F. Asenjo Barbieri, ed.: Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, 1890)

M. Schneider: ‘Studien zur Rhythmik im Cancionero de palacio’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Mons. Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), ii, 833ff

T. Knighton: Music and Musicians at the Court of Fernando of Aragon, 1474–1516, i (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1984), 255–7

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986), 54–5

T. Knighton: ‘A Newly Discovered Keyboard Source (Gonzalo de Baena's Arte nouamente inuentada pera aprender a tanger, Lisbon, 1540): a Preliminary Report’, PMM, v (1996), 81–112, esp. 89

ISABEL POPE/TESS KNIGHTON

Baer, Johann.

See Beer, Johann.

Baermann.

German family of musicians.

(2) Carl Baermann (ii)

(3) Carl Baermann (iii)

PAMELA WESTON

Baermann

(1) Heinrich (Joseph) Baermann

(b Potsdam, 14 Feb 1784; d Munich, 11 June 1847). Clarinettist. He and his brother Carl Baerman (i) (1782–1842), a bassoonist in the Berlin court orchestra, were sent by their soldier father to the School of Military Music in Potsdam. At 14, having first studied the oboe, Heinrich became a bandsman in the Prussian Life Guards and during this time studied the clarinet with Beer. In 1805, under the patronage of Prince Louis Ferdinand, he had lessons with Tausch. He fought at the battles of Saalfeld and Jena and was captured, but escaped and found his way to Munich. Here he obtained a court appointment, which he held until his retirement in 1834.

Baermann toured extensively, first to Switzerland and France in 1808. In 1811, after successful performances at Munich of Weber's newly composed Concertino and concertos, clarinettist and composer toured together through Austria and Germany. At Berlin Baermann's artistry helped to convince the musical public of the composer's worth. In Vienna and Prague in 1813, Italy in 1815–16 and Berlin in 1818, Baermann gave concerts with the Munich prima donna, Helene Harlas (1785–1818); she had four children by him. Paris gave him a phenomenal reception in 1817 and 1838, as did Russia in 1822–3 and 1832. In 1819 Baermann was invited to England, where he played for the Prince Regent at Brighton and, during six months of concerts in London, performed his own compositions on two occasions for the Philharmonic Society.

Heinrich Baermann was sometimes called the Rubini of the clarinet on account of his expressive playing and his luxurious, velvety tone, in contrast to the shriller style of some earlier players. Weber referred in his diary to the ‘welcome homogeneity of tone from top to bottom’, and gave great credit to Baermann for the success of his clarinet works. All of these except the Grand Duo were written for Baermann, as were Mendelssohn's concert pieces and Meyerbeer's Quintet and (also for Helene Harlas) his cantata Gli amori. His liveliness of mind and his companionable nature made him widely popular, and he became a close friend of these composers, who made frequent reference to him in their correspondence. His own works include quartets, quintets and concertinos for clarinet and various instrumental combinations. His instrument was first a ten-keyed clarinet made by Griesling & Schlott; by 1819 he had one of twelve keys.

Baermann

(2) Carl Baermann (ii)

(b Munich, 24 Oct 1810; d Munich, 23 May 1885). Clarinettist and basset-horn player, son of (1) Heinrich Baermann and Helene Harlas. He was taught the clarinet by his father and by the age of 14 was occasionally playing in the court orchestra. In 1832 he was officially appointed second clarinettist and in 1834 succeeded his father as principal. Carl accompanied his father on concert tours in 1827, 1832 and 1838, attracting much attention playing the basset-horn. Conscious of his father's superior talent as a soloist, he turned to teaching, making a great success of this as professor at the Königliche Musikschule in Munich. His Vollständige Clarinett-Schule (1864–75) remains one of the most used methods. His other compositions, comprising 88 opus numbers in all, were once popular with virtuosos. In 1860, in conjunction with Ottensteiner of Munich, he produced an 18-keyed Müller-type clarinet, which found favour with many players, including Mühlfeld. He was pensioned from the court orchestra in 1880 and retired from teaching in 1882.

Baermann

(3) Carl Baermann (iii)

(b Munich, 9 July 1839; d Newton, nr Boston, MA, 17 Jan 1913). Pianist, son of (2) Carl Baermann (ii). He studied in Munich with Franz Lachner and Peter Cornelius and later became a pupil and close friend of Liszt. He taught for many years at the Königliche Musikschule in Munich, becoming a professor in 1876. In 1881 he moved to the USA, where he made a successful début as a pianist in Boston and also became highly esteemed as a teacher (Amy Beach and Frederick Converse were among his pupils). His compositions include a Festival March for orchestra and a number of piano compositions including a set of 12 Etüden op.4 (1877) and a Polonaise pathétique (1914).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (H. Becker)

A. Lewald: ‘Heinrich Baermann’, Der Freimüthige, xxxi (1834), 649–63

A. Lewald: Panorama von München (Stuttgart, 1840), 130–48

M.M. von Weber: Carl Maria von Weber: ein Lebensbild (London, 1864–6, abridged 2/1912 by R. Pechel; Eng. trans., 1865/R)

M. Zenger: Geschichte der Münchener Oper, ed. T. Kroyer (Munich, 1923)

H. Becker, ed.: Giacomo Meyerbeer: Briefwechsel und Tagebücher (Berlin, 1960–85)

J. Warrack: Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1968, 2/1976)

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971), 114–53

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977), 35–8

Baervoets, Raymond

(b Brussels, 6 Nov 1930; d Rome, 19 Aug 1989). Belgian composer. After studying at the Brussels Conservatory, he attended Petrassi’s composition course at the Accademia di S Cecilia (1961–2). He received the Belgian Music Critics’ Prize (1961), the Koopal Prize (1962) and the prize awarded by the city of Trieste (1965). At Gaudeamus Foundation courses he received instruction from Seiber, van Baaren and Ligeti; in 1966 he joined the group Spectra in Ghent. His classical education led him at first to compose traditional works in a neo-classical style in which he did not venture beyond polytonality. Under the influence of Petrassi his aesthetic outlook changed radically. He followed a path leading towards post-serialism, with some incursions into the aleatory field, and he used quarter-tones in a systematic way. He retained the traditional orchestra, using it to create new sonorities.

WORKS

(selective list)

Gui Conc., 1959; Composizione, orch, 1962; Improvisazioni concertanti, vc, 19 insts, 1962; Musica, 14 insts, 1962; Metamorphoses, orch, 1963; Mag, S, orch, 1962–4; Erosions I, A, 9 insts, 1965; Erosions II (G. Soetens), female chorus, orch, 1965; Espressioni, orch, 1965–6; Constellations, 4 ens, 1966; Les dents de la terre, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1968; Musica ’72, chbr orch, 1972; Figures, brass, 1973; Immagini, 14 insts, 1974; Qt, fl, cl, vn, pf, 1974

Principal publishers: CeBeDeM, Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

C. Mertens: Hedendaagse muziek in België (Brussels, 1967), 54, 63

CORNEEL MERTENS/DIANA VON VOLBORTH-DANYS

Baethen [Batius, Bathenius], Jacob

(b ?Louvain, c1525; d ?Düsseldorf, after 1557). South Netherlandish printer. His publications are important in the history of music printing in the Low Countries. From 1545 to 1551 he worked at Louvain, probably as a university printer. Besides music, he printed mainly official documents and religious commentaries, of which a number were published by M. Rotaire and Phalèse. During this period he printed the first, third, fourth (and perhaps fifth) of Des chansons reduictz en tablature de lut, which were Phalèse’s first music publications and the first books of lute tablature printed from type in the Low Countries.

By 1554 Baethen was in Maastricht, where his publications included a book of Flemish songs, Dat ierste boeck vanden nievve Duytsche liedekens, one of five such anthologies published in the Low Countries during the 16th century. In 1555 he moved to Düsseldorf, where he published three books of motets, 1555–6 (for the heirs of Arnold Byrckmann), and a theory book, Practicae musicae (1557). The music type used by Baethen in Maastricht and Düsseldorf is identical with that used by Phalèse at that time so it may be assumed that he took a fount with him when he left Louvain. He is sometimes confused with Johan Baethen (perhaps his brother), who was a printer in Louvain and Cologne from 1552 to 1562, but who printed no music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

GoovaertsH

Vander StraetenMPB, iii

R.B. Lenaerts: Het Nederlands polifonies lied in de zestiende eeuw (Mechelen and Amsterdam, 1933)

S. Bain: Music Printing in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974)

A. Rouzet: Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop, 1975)

B.J.P. Salemans: ‘Jacob Bathen, Printer, Publisher and Bookseller in Louvain, Maastricht and Düsseldorf c.1545 to c.1557’, Quaerendo, xix (1989), 3–47

SUSAN BAIN

Baetz.

See Bätz firm.

Baeyens, August

(b Antwerp, 5 June 1895; d Antwerp, 17 July 1966). Belgian viola player and composer. He studied at the Antwerp Conservatory and was partly self-taught. Shortly after World War I he became the leader of the Expressionist school in Flemish music, his principal fellow members being Karel Albert and Jef Van Durme. He played the viola in the Antwerp Chamber Music Society, thereby wielding great influence in promoting modern chamber music, especially the works of the Second Viennese School. He was secretary of the Koninklijke Vlaamsche Opera in Antwerp from 1931 to 1944, when he was made director. In 1958 he retired from active musical life to dedicate himself entirely to composition.

In his last orchestral works, concertos for viola (1956) and for trumpet (1965), the Expressionist phrasing yielded to concertante playfulness, and in the late chamber works and songs the musical substance is treated with a remarkable purity of expression. (CeBeDeM directory)

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: De dode dichter (ballet), 1920; De liefde en de kakatoe (op, 1, R. Avermaete), 1928; Coriolanus (radio op, 1, L.A.J. Burgerskijk, after W. Shakespeare), 1940, Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 27 Nov 1941; De Ring van Gyges (op, A. Monet), 1943, Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 15 Dec 1945

Orat: Lofzang aan de Haven, 1929

Orch: 8 syms., 1923, 1939, 1949, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1958, 1961

Entrata, 1917; Niobe, 1918; 4 Pieces, 1922; Harlekijn (sym.), 1924; De Cyclopen (sym.), 1925; Notturno, 1926; Sinfonia breve, 1927; Arkadia, 1951; Va Conc., 1956; Hn Conc., 1960; Tpt Conc., 1965

Vocal: songs to words by the Flemish poets Paul van Ostayen, Gaston Burssens, Bert de Corte

6 str qts, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1949, 1951, 1962

CORNEEL MERTENS/DIANA VON VOLBORTH-DANYS

Baez, Joan (Chandos)

(b New York, 9 Jan 1941). American folk singer and songwriter. Her early repertory drew on Child ballads (Mary Hamilton), Appalachian songs (Wildwood Flower) and a smattering of international material such as Donna, Donna and Plaisir d’Amour, along with radical songs such as the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome and Earl Robinson’s Ballad of Joe Hill. The influence of Bob Dylan brought such contemporary songs into her repertory as Dylan’s Farewell Angelina, Suzanne by Leonard Cohen and There but for Fortune by Phil Ochs (1965). By the early 1970s Baez was beginning to compose, the most durable of her songs being Rider, please pass by (1972) and Diamonds and Rust (1975). She also varied the format of her recordings, choosing to work in Nashville, Tennessee, with a group of country session musicians supervised by producer Norbert Putnam. The most commercially successful of her recordings from this relationship was a version of The Band’s stirring Civil War ballad The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down (1971). She also increasingly paid tribute to her Latin heritage notably with a 1974 album, Gracias a la Vida, which contained songs by the Chilean musicians Violeta Parra and Victor Jara.

From her debut performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, Baez’s untrained yet pitch-perfect soprano has set the standard for female singers of folk revival material. Her purity of tone and almost unornamented vocal delivery is perhaps less suited to the singer-songwriter and even rock material which she has also performed and recorded in a prolific career which has included nearly 30 albums and some thousands of concerts. Throughout her career Baez strove to coordinate her professional career with her radical political convictions. In the mid 1960s she financed an Institute for Non Violence and withheld tax payments in protest at nuclear weapons; she has also performed numerous fund-raising concerts and appeared in war zones such as Vietnam and Bosnia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Cohen: ‘Joan Baez’, Sing Out!, xiii/3 (1963), 6–8

J. Swanekamp, ed.: Diamonds and Rust: a Bibliography and Discography on Joan Baez (Ann Arbor, 1980)

J. Baez: And A Voice To Sing With: a Memoir (New York, 1987)

DAVE LAING

Baeza [Vaeza] Saavedra, Juan de

(flPuebla, 1662–77). Mexican composer. His extant works – three romances, a villancico, a chanzoneta and a negrilla – are in the Jesús Sánchez Garza collection at the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical, Mexico City. They were composed for the Convento de la SS Trinidad, Puebla. The best known is the negrilla, Por celebrar este día (ed. R. Stevenson, Christmas Music from Baroque Mexico, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974; ed. F. Ramírez Ramírez, Trece obras de la colección J. Sánchez Garza, Mexico City, 1981; ed. in Stevenson, 1984–5); it imitates African American dialect and speech, and is rich in the metrical shifts and cross-rhythms typical of the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Stevenson: Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington DC, 1970)

R. Stevenson: ‘Puebla Chapelmasters and Organists: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Part II’, Inter-American Music Review, vi/1 (1984–5), 29–139

CRAIG H. RUSSELL

Baffo, Giovanni [Joannes] Antonio

(fl Venice, 1570–79). Italian harpsichord and virginal maker. Although many antique instruments were fraudulently given Baffo’s name, his genuine, signed work comprises only three harpsichords and one virginal. Two further harpsichords and five polygonal virginals may also be identified as his work (see Wraight), one of which is the so-called ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal’ (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; see Virginal, fig.3). This virginal and the signed harpsichord of 1574 (see Harpsichord, fig.3) in the same collection are excellent examples of the highly ornate style of case decoration used in late 16th-century Venetian instruments. Documents record that Baffo also made instruments for the court at Ferrara. Baffo’s harpsichords are of considerable interest since they were made for unusual pitches. The Victoria and Albert Museum harpsichord and one of 1579 (which originally had the unusually wide compass C/E–c'''') in the Musée de la Musique, Paris, were both built to be tuned a 4th lower than one of the most common 8' pitches of the time (a' = c467). Another unsigned harpsichord attributed to Baffo (private collection) is pitched a 4th above a' = c448. It would not be correct to call these ‘transposing’ instruments (see Transposing keyboard): a wide range of pitch standards were in use in Venice (see Harpsichord, §2(i)).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoalchM

D. Wraight: The Stringing of Italian Keyboard Instruments c1500–c1650 (diss., Queen's U. of Belfast, 1997), i, 235–6; ii, 317–21

D. Wraight: ‘The Pitch Relationships of Venetian String Keyboard Instruments’, Fiore musicologi: studi in onore di Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, ed. F. Seydoux (Bologna, 2000)

DENZIL WRAIGHT

Bafoyev, Mustafa

(b Ganchkash, Bukhara district, 10 Nov 1946). Uzbek composer. He trained at the Tashkent Conservatory as a performer on Uzbek instruments (1964–9) and as a composer (1972–7), finishing a postgraduate course under Boris Giyenko in 1979. He has taught at the Bukhara Pedagogical Institute (1969–72), has conducted the Uzbek folk instruments orchestra for the Uzbek TV and radio company (1980–86) and in 1986 was appointed artistic director of this folk orchestra. His works have a broad appeal and are heard in festivals and competitions as well as local celebrations; they are rooted in Uzbek folk traditions. Bafoyer has received numerous awards, including the A. Kadïri State Premium (1997) and the title of Meritorious Worker of Arts of Uzbekistan (1995).

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Ettinchi jin [Seventh magician] (musical drama, L. Babakhanov), 1983; Uzilgan torlar [The Ragged Strings] (musical drama, K. Amirov), 1984; Omar Haiyam (op), 1987; Radja (musical drama, after R. Tagor), 1987; Sunmas Alanga (Prometey) (musical drama, M. Martinkyavichyus), 1987; V Tashkente tuman [A Smog in Tashkent] (musical drama), 1988; Buhoroy Sharif [Noble Bukhara] (TV op-dastan), 1993; Sevgi nidosy (musical drama, F. Djurayev), 1994; Ulugbek Burgi (TV ballet, Yu. Ismatova), 1994; Mosyidan Nur (TV ballet), 1995; Ritualï Zaroastriytsev [Rites of Zoroastrianism] (ballet-orat.), chorus, orch, 1995; Velikiy shyolkovïy put' [The Great Silk Road] (ballet), pf, cptr, 1996; Ahmad Al-Farghoni (op, D. Djabbarov), 1998

Other: The Legend of Shirak, sym. Poem, 1974; Conc. Rhapsody, tpt, orch, 1979; Sym. no.1 ‘Gazel’, solo vv, chorus, perc, str, 1979; Pesn'o Tashkente [Song about Tashkent] (orat), 1983; Sym. no.2 ‘Pamyati Avitsennï’, str, 1984; Slyozï Roksanï [Tears of Roksana] (orat), nar, solo vv, chorus, pf, str, 1987; Sym. no.3, pf, str, 1987; Sym. no.4 ‘Mavranahr’, 1991; Sym. no.5 ‘Holoti Alisher Navoiy’, 1991; Hajnoma (orat), nar, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1995; chbr music, choral works, works for Uzbek folk orch

RAZIA SULTANOVA

Bagatelle.

A trifle, a short piece of music in light vein. The title implies no specific form. It is first found in François Couperin, who published in 1717 in his tenth ordre for harpsichord a rondeau entitled ‘Les bagatelles’. It was also used by the French publisher Borvin for a collection of dances (c1753), and in 1797 Breitkopf & Härtel published a series called Musikalische Bagatellen. The term as a generic title received its accolade with Beethoven’s three sets of bagatelles for piano opp.33, 119 and 126. Some of these are trifles (Beethoven called the first six of op.119 by the equivalent German term ‘Kleinigkeiten’), but many of the later ones are thoroughly typical of their composer and show affinities with the greater instrumental works written at the same time.

The bagatelle since Beethoven has usually been given a descriptive title, and more often than not composers have published them in sets; Smetana composed a collection of bagatelles and impromptus in 1844, and Saint-Saëns published a set of six as his op.3 in 1856. Sibelius’s Six Bagatelles op.97 have titles, including ‘Little Waltz’ and ‘Humorous March’. Other composers of bagatelles are Bartók (14, op.6, 1908; he orchestrated the last one as no.2 of Two Portraits op.5), Vítězslav Novák (op.5) and Krenek (Four Bagatelles op.70). The bagatelle is also found in the work of three British composers: Tovey (Bagatelles, 1900), Rawsthorne (Bagatelles, 1938) and Howard Ferguson (Five Bagatelles op.9, 1944).

Bagatelles have almost invariably been written for piano solo, but the four in Dvořák’s op.47 (1878) are charmingly scored for two violins, cello and harmonium. Webern’s Sechs Bagatellen for string quartet op.9 (1911–13) was probably the first in a series of 20th-century ensemble works to use the title; a later example is Nicolaus A. Huber’s Sechs Bagatellen of 1981.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (H. Schneider)

J. Schumway: A Comparative Study of Representative Bagatelles for the Piano since Beethoven (diss., Indiana U., 1981)

B.A.R. Cooper: ‘Beethoven's Portfolio of Bagatelles’, JRMA, cxii (1987), 208–28

MAURICE J.E. BROWN/R

Bagatti [Bagati], Francesco

(fl 1658–c1680). Italian composer and organist. He seems to have spent his whole life in Milan. From Picinelli and from the title-pages of his publications we know that he was organist and maestro di cappella of the churches of S Sepolcro, S Vittore al Corpo and S Maria alla Porta between 1658 and 1672. In 1662 he was also organist at the ducal court. In 1669, after the death of M.A. Grancini, he competed for the office of maestro di cappella at the Duomo, Milan, but was passed over in favour of G.A. Grossi. As far as we know, Bagatti composed only sacred music. In his concertato compositions he showed a marked preference for expressive solo writing, and he wrote a number of dialogues, for instance between Man, an Angel and the Devil in op.3, and between the Soul and an Angel in op.4.

WORKS

all published in Milan

Il primo libro de sacri concerti, 2–4vv, bc, con una messa, e Letanie della Beata Virgine, op.1 (1658)

Messa e salmi brevi con motetti, Te Deum laudamus, e Letanie della Beata Virgine, 4vv, bc (org), op.2 (1659)

Il secondo libro de concerti ecclesiastici, 2–4vv, bc, op.3 (1662)

Il terzo libro de concerti ecclesiastici, 2–4vv, insts, bc (org), con una messa, 4vv [op.4] (1667)

Motetti, messa, e salmi brevi, e pieni per li vesperi di tutte le solennità dell’anno, e Letanie della madonna, 8vv, bc (org), op.5 (1672)

Il quarto libro de concerti ecclesiastici con una messa, Magnificat, e Letani … 2–4vv, bc (org), op.6 (1676)

Motet, 1679¹, 1681¹; antiphon, 1669, I-Md

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Picinelli: Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670), 199

Annali della fabbrica del duomo di Milano (Milan, 1877–85), appx iii, 143

M. Donà: La stampa musicale a Milano fino all’anno 1700 (Florence, 1961)

MARIANGELA DONÀ

Bagg, Konrad.

See Back, Konrad.

Bagge [Bach], Baron de [Ennal, Charles-Ernest]

(b Fockenhof, Kurland, 14 Feb 1722; d Paris, 24 March 1791). French dilettante, amateur violinist and composer, patron of the arts and instrument collector. A magnificent and very wealthy nobleman, he both amused and astounded his contemporaries. M. Audinot in his comic opera La musicomanie (1779), and possibly E.T.A. Hoffmann in his tale Die Serapionsbrüder (1819), attempted to evoke his strange personality, emphasizing its ridiculous nature.

At the death of his father, a landed nobleman, in 1747, Bagge inherited a large fortune which enabled him to study the violin in Italy with Tartini. By 1750 he had settled in Paris; in the following year he was awarded the title chambellan du Roi de Prusse (then Frederick II) and married the daughter of the Swiss banker Jacob Maudry. With Maudry's death in 1762 the very large inheritance proved a source of contention to the ill-matched couple and they soon separated. Bagge later attempted to gain possession of the inheritance of Mme Maudry, who had died in 1767, and the resulting lawsuits scandalized Paris until the Parlement decided in his wife's favour in 1773.

After the separation Bagge devoted himself entirely to music, and exercised considerable influence on Parisian musical life as concert organizer, patron, performer, composer and teacher. Every Friday in his hotel on the rue de La Feuillade he held a concert at which his protégés performed; on one of these occasions in 1783 Kreutzer gave the first performance of one of Bagge's violin concertos. He travelled in 1778 to England and in 1784 to Vienna, where he performed before Mozart. In 1790, having left France at the outbreak of the Revolution, he was appointed Kammerherr to Friedrich Wilhelm II in Berlin. His death in the following year was accompanied by rumours that he had been poisoned by his mistress, though several public disclaimers later that year discredit the accusation.

Bagge was a freemason and belonged to two of the Parisian lodges with the most active music programmes: the celebrated Loge Olympique and particularly Les Neuf Soeurs, where he was director of concerts and organized the musical side of Voltaire's initiation. His talent as a violinist and particularly his technical capabilities were perhaps not so negligible as earlier writers have maintained. He showed special skill in performing ascending and descending scales on a single string using only one finger of the left hand. His compositions, though hardly original, reveal sureness of taste and irreproachable workmanship. He was criticized for his nervous twitches and strange attitudes while performing; the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (iii, 1800, col.841) recalled of his playing that

No Baron can ever have made such horrible grimaces the moment he took violin and bow in hand. His face, his muscles, the whole of his body underwent most painful contortions, and, as his playing increased in animation, the sounds that proceeded could only be likened to the wailing of a cat.

This doubtless gave rise to the ambiguous compliment paid by the Emperor Joseph II (‘My dear Baron, I have never heard anyone play the violin quite like you’), and the quatrain under one of his portraits:

Du Dieu de l'harmonie adorateur fidèle,
Son zèle impetueux ne saurait s'arrêter;
Dans l'art du violon il n'a point de modèle
Et personne jamais n’osera l’imiter.

As a patron Bagge was extraordinarily generous. Although he favoured artists who were also freemasons (Kreutzer, Viotti, Duport, Capron and Gossec), or who were closely linked with the order (Gaviniès and Boccherini), he nevertheless helped only deserving musicians. He insisted, however, on giving lessons to the violinists among them, paying them to accept his tuition, and was thus able to boast of himself as leader of the French violin school. His private collection of violins was prodigious, and included instruments by Stradivari, Amati and Gasparo da Salò, which he generously conferred on his ‘pupils’. This collection, as well as his large music library which he freely extended to other musicians, reverted at his death to his wife together with the rest of his largely depleted estate, and has since been untraced.

Several portraits of Bagge are known, one of them engraved by Nicolas Cochin (reproduced in Terry) and another portraying him with a violin ‘comme un ménétrier’.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

Orch: 3 sinfonie (1788); 4 vn concs., all (n.d.); vn conc., F-Pn; 2 symphonies concertantes, D-Bsb

Chbr: 6 quatuors concertants, str qt, op.1 (1773); 6 trio, 2 vn, b (n.d.); Airs de Marlborough variés, hpd, vn (n.d.); 2 str qts, 4 str qnts, collab. ?F. Fiorillo, destroyed

Cantata, 1786, for accession of Friedrich Wilhelm II, D-Bsb

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberL

L. Petit de Bachaumont and others: Mémoires secrets, xx (London, 1783), 83–4

F. Marpurg: Legende einiger Musikheiligen (Cologne [recte Breslau], 1786), 224–5, 277ff

P. Smith: ‘Les élèves du Baron de Bagge’, RGMP, xii (1845)

G. Cucuel: ‘Le Baron de Bagge et son temps’, Année musicale, i (1911), 145–86

C.S. Terry: ‘Baron Bach’, ML, xii (1931), 130–39

C.M. Carroll: ‘A Beneficent Poseur: Charles Ernest, Baron de Bagge’, RMFC, xvi (1976), 24–36

R.J.V. Cotte: Les musiciens franc-maçons à la cour de Versailles et à Paris sous l'ancien régime (doctorat d'Etat, diss., 1982, F-Pn)

R.J.V. Cotte: La musique maçonnique et ses musiciens (Paris, 2/1987), 72–4

ROGER J.V. COTTE

Bagge, Selmar

(b Coburg, 30 June 1823; d Basle, 16 July 1896). German critic, teacher and composer. He studied the piano and cello at the Prague Conservatory and moved to Vienna in 1842, where he studied theory with Sechter and was active performing, teaching and composing. He was appointed to the Vienna Conservatory in 1852, but his high standards and outspoken critical stance led to his dismissal in 1855. In 1859 Bagge became the editor of a new journal, the Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, which opposed the ‘New German’ sympathies of Franz Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He moved to Leipzig in 1863 to edit the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (later the Leipziger allgemeine musikalische Zeitung); it closely reflected his conviction that composers should strive to imitate music of the past. Bagge’s own reviews praise music by such composers as Bargiel, Volkmann, Reinecke and Kirchner. He regarded much of Brahms’s music as undisciplined, contributing to a critical climate that may have prompted Brahms to adopt a more classically-oriented style.

In 1868 Bagge became the director of the Musikschule in Basle, and held this post until his death in 1896. From 1876 he lectured at the University of Basle, was granted an honorary doctorate in 1880 and promoted to extraordinarius professor in 1893. Bagge’s published compositions include piano music, string quartets and songs. He also wrote choral works, symphonies, overtures and a piano concerto. His music is skilfully crafted and conservative, and its marked dependence upon Beethoven accords well with Bagge’s values as a critic.

WRITINGS

Gedanken und Aufsätze über Musik und Musikzustände in einer Reihe gesammelte Aufsätze (Vienna, 1860)

‘Robert Schumann’s “Szenen aus Göthes Faust”’, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, i (1860), 273–8, 281–4

‘Die alte Harmonielehre im Streit mit der neuen’, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, ii (1861), 177–9, 185–8

‘Das moderne Claviertrio und seine Vertreter’, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, ii (1861), 369–72, 377–80, 385–8, 393–4

‘Unser Programm’, AMZ, new ser., i (1863), 1–6

‘Johannes Brahms’, AMZ, new ser., i (1863), 461–7

‘Über die Stellung und Aufgabe der modernen Tonkünst’, AMZ, new ser., ii (1864), 3–5, 24–9, 41–6, 57–61

‘Der Künstler und das heutige Publicum in ihren gegenseitigen Anforderungen’, Leipziger allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, ii (1867), 133–6

Lehrbuch der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1873)

‘Robert Schumann und seine Faust-Szenen’, Sammlung musikalischer Vorträge, ser. I, vol. iv (Leipzig, 1879), 123–40

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Refardt: ‘Selmar Bagge’, Historisch-Biographisches Musikerlexicon der Schweiz (Leipzig, 1928), 17–19 [with work-list]

I. Fellinger: ‘Das Brahms-Bild der Allgemeinen Musikalischen Zeitung’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikkritik, ed. H. Becker (Regensburg, 1965), 27–54

H. Oesch: Die Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel (Basle, 1967), 13–17 [with portrait]

A. Horstmann: Untersuchungen zur Brahms-Rezeption der Jahre 1860–1880 (Hamburg, 1986)

Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 1860–1862, ed. B.J. Sing (Ann Arbor, 1994), ix–xii

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms and the Breitkopf and Härtel Affair’, MR, lv (1994), 202–13

N. Meurs: Neue Bahnen? Aspekte der Brahms-Rezeption 1853–1868 (Cologne, 1996)

ROSE MAURO

Baggiani, Guido

(b Naples, 4 March 1932). Italian composer. He graduated from the Conservatorio di S Cecilia as a pupil of Porena. In 1965 he joined the Rome-based Nuova Consonanza group, serving as one of its directors in 1971–2. He studied with Stockhausen in Cologne in 1966, an experience that decisively influenced him as a composer. The following year he attended Evangelisti’s seminars on electronic music in Rome. In 1972, together with Mario Bertoncini, Walter Branchi and Giorgio Nottoli, he formed the Gruppo Team Roma, an ensemble making use of live electronics. Again with Branchi, in 1977, he founded Musica Verticale, an association devoted mainly to electro-acoustic music. He taught composition at the conservatoires of Pesaro (1972–9) and Perugia (1979–95). In 1995 he returned to Rome to teach at the Conservatory.

In the first phase of his output (Mimesis and Metafora) the elements of the music are rigorously predetermined; later he used forms offering a choice to the performers. After exploring new forms of expression using electroacoustic and instrumental techniques, he has progressively abandoned timbral research in pursuit of more abstract formal possibilities, especially in orchestral works such as Gongora and Labirinti.

WORKS

(selective list)

Metafora, 11 str, 1968; Memoria, 20 insts, 4 × 2-track/2 x 4-track tape, 1972; Contr-azione, 2 orch, 1975; Double, 2 wind qnt, 2 hn, 2 db, 1977; 4 studi, 2 pf, 1981; Anabasi (A. Rostagno), 4 female vv, 4 winds and ring modulator, 1985; Danza, vn, vc, cl, pf, 1986; Gongora, S, pf, orch, 1989, text by the 17th-century Spanish poet Gongora; A più voci nell’ombra, 2-track tape, 1990; E con il suono per un instante l’eco fa ritorno, orch, 1993; Perso per perso (madrigale drammatico, V. Magrelli), 6vv, 1995; Labirinti, 5 str, 8 wind, 2 perc, 1997; Anelli del tempo, vn, vc, pf, 1998; Kahal (Bible: Ecclesiastes), 2 pf, 2 trbn, tape, 2000

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Baggiani: ‘Le miroir et son double’, Silences, i (1985), 151–6

F. Galadini: ‘Con Guido Baggiani’, La musica: rivista di musica contemporanea, xxi (1992), 24–6

PIERLUIGI PETROBELLI

Bag-hornpipe.

An early type of bagpipe. See Bagpipe, §8 and Hornpipe (i).

Bagiński, Zbigniew

(b Szczecin, 19 Jan 1949). Polish composer. From 1967 to 1972 he attended the Warsaw Academy, where his teachers included Paciorkiewicz. He was appointed lecturer at the Academy in 1987, and in 1989 he was elected general secretary of the Union of Polish Composers. Something of a late developer, Bagiński came to the fore as a composer during the mid-1980s. He developed a vein of lighthearted mock antiquity which owed more to pre-war European models than to contemporary postmodernist trends. His referential inclinations adopted a more serious tone in the Piano Quartet (1990) which carried echoes of 19th century music, while the impulse for Hawaiian Songs stemmed from a walk along Waikiki Beach. Bagiński’s sensitivity to humour in music is balanced by profound, introspective lyricism (as in the two symphonies), supported by his preference for clearly delineated ideas, forward-moving structures and resonant harmony. His music has a simple, unabashed directness which eschews unnecessary clutter.

WORKS

(selective list)

Tryptyk, cl, pf, 1968; Refren [Refrain], 2 pf, 1975; Sinfonia notturna, orch, 1984; Solo, Duo, Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1984; Hpd Conc, 1985; O, Sweet Baroque!, suite, str, 1985; Kanony, scherza, epigramaty …, 13 pfmrs, 1987; Inventores rerum (J. Protasowicz), chorus, 1988; Symfonia w 7 odsłonach [Sym. in 7 Scenes], orch, 1988; Blanc et noir, gui, 1990; Pf Qt, 1990; Solo IV, vc, 1991; Hawaiian Songs, 4 perc, 1982, rev. 1991; Str Qt no.3, 1992; Mass, chorus, 1994; Mała symfonia elegijna [Little Elegiac Sym.], orch, 1995; Pf Conc, 1995; Vc Conc., str, 1996

Principal publishers: Agencja Autorska, PWM

ADRIAN THOMAS

Bağlama.

Turkish long-necked lute of the Tanbūr family (for illustration see Kurdish music, fig.2). The pear-shaped bowl resonator is carved (oyma) or carvel-built (yapraklı). The soundtable is of wood, usually coniferous. The neck has a variable number of movable frets. Traditionally these were made of sheepgut or copper wire but nylon line is now used. The instrument’s name, dating from the 17th century, derives from these ‘tied’ frets (bağ: ‘fret’, ‘knot’; bağlamak: ‘to tie, knot’). The movability of the frets allows the setting of scales to include microtones. There are three double courses of metal strings tuned with wooden pegs. The bağlama is generally played with a cherry-bark plectrum, though formerly the fingertips were widely used. The melody is commonly played on the first double course of strings, while the remaining courses are struck open as drones. Sometimes, however, the second and third courses are also fingered. The second finger of the plectrum hand is often used to strike the soundtable to add a percussive element to the melody.

The bağlama is the most popular and widely played long-necked lute in Turkey. It is often known as, simply, Saz (‘instrument’). By the 11th century, a long-necked lute similar to the bağlama, called kopuz, was the favoured instrument of the minstrel poets (ozan) of the Oğuz Turkish tribes of south-west Asia. Their Ottoman descendants, called saz şairleri (‘saz minstrel poets’) or aşıklar (sing.: aşık), use the bağlama to accompany the recitation of epics and popular tales (halk hikayeleri) as well as their own compositions and repertory of songs by earlier aşıklar. The bağlama is still played in the dervish ceremonies of some sects, including the Alevi. The instrument itself is viewed as symbolically significant: the body is ‘Alī, the neck his sword, and so on; see Islamic religious music §III, 2(i).

The bağlama is also the prime melody instrument of entertainment and dance music in both town and country. In this case it is sometimes accompanied by percussion instruments such as dümbelek (goblet drum), parmak zili and zilli maşa (types of cymbal). The bağlama is also played in small ensembles with other types of saz (long-necked lutes). In the 1970s the addition of a built-in electric pick-up produced a type of instrument known as elekrosaz. This is used at rural weddings with voice and darbuka (goblet drum). The bağlama and elektrosaz are important in Turkish music (see Turkey, 1–4.

The Greek baylamas is a miniature version of the bouzouki, with three double courses of metal strings, and is used mainly to accompany the bouzouki or the smaller tzouras (long-necked lutes).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Picken: Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London, 1975)

M. Stokes: The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1992)

R. CONWAY MORRIS

Bagliani, Carlo.

See Baliani, Carlo.

Baglioni, Antonio

(fl 1780s–90s). Italian tenor and singing teacher. He may have been related to Francesco Baglioni. He sang in productions of comic opera, particularly in Venice during the late 1780s and early 90s, and of serious opera. Two of his most important roles were Don Ottavio in the first production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787, Prague) and Titus in La clemenza di Tito (1791, Prague). His range encompassed e to b'. He was said to have had a well-trained, pure and expressive voice. As a singing teacher, he taught, among others, Giulietta da Ponte, the niece of Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who claimed that Baglioni was ‘a man of perfect taste and great musical knowledge who had trained the most celebrated singers in Italy’. Baglioni published a set of vocal exercises (Milan, n.d.) and a duet Sommo ciel (Venice, n.d.); his only other extant works are an Ave regina for three voices and an aria, Come aboro fu deciso (MSS in I-Bc, Fc).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

ES (E. Zanetti)

A. Capacio: Poesia e lodi della cattedrale di Cracovia (Warsaw, 1790)

J.A. Rice: W.A. Mozart: La clemenza di Tito (Cambridge, 1991)

SVEN HANSELL/BARBARA D. MACKENZIE

Baglioni, Francesco [Carnace]

(fl 1729–62). Italian bass and impresario. He was one of the most popular comic opera singers of his day and a particularly important figure in the development and dissemination of the genre in the middle of the century. He performed in at least 100 productions beginning in the late 1720s, when he sang intermezzos in Foligno and Pesaro. He launched his comic opera career in Rome in 1738 with Gaetano Latilla’s La finta cameriera and Madama Ciana and Rinaldo di Capua’s La commedia in commedia. Productions throughout northern Italy of these operas along with another first performed in Rome, Rinaldo’s La libertà nociva (1740), dominated Baglioni’s career for the next decade. In 1749 he appeared in the dramma giocoso L’Arcadia in Brenta in Venice, the first collaboration between Galuppi and Goldoni, and for the remainder of his career he primarily sang texts written by Goldoni, in cities along the axis from Venice to Turin. His range encompassed B to f' and music written for him is predominantly syllabic and laden with comic effects. Baglioni sang in the opera troupes of at least three well-known impresarios: Angelo Mingotti, Eustachio Bambini and Girolamo Medebach. Evidence that he worked as an impresario himself include a payment record from 1744 indicating his fee of 155 lire for duties as impresario in Venice’s San Cassiano for the autumn and carnival seasons (I–Vas). Three of his daughters appeared in productions with him: Giovanna from 1752, Clementina from 1754 (she later created the role of Rosina in Mozart’s La finta semplice) and Vincenza from 1757. His other children include the singers Costanza, Rosina and perhaps Antonio (who created both Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Tito in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyFI; SartoriL

F.S. Quadrio: Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia (Bologna and Milan, 1739–52), vii, 251

E.H. Müller von Asow: Die Mingottischen Opernunternehmungen, 1732–1756 (Dresden, 1915)

‘Memorie di G. Zanetti’, Nuovo archivio veneto, new ser., xxiv (1912), 130, 133–5, 139

D. Heartz: ‘The Creation of the Buffo Finale in Italian Opera’, PRMA, civ (1977–8), 67–78

B.D. Mackenzie: The Creation of a Genre: Comic Opera’s Dissemination in Italy in the 1740s (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993), 256–67

BARBARA D. MACKENZIE

Baglioni [Ballioni], Girolamo

(b Milan, c1575; d Milan, 1608). Italian composer. He was organist of S Maria della Scala, Milan, and was a pupil of Guglielmo Arnone. At the end of his Liber primus et opus secundum sacrarum cantionum, published by his father Francesco soon after his death and dedicated in March 1608, the printer Filippo Lomazzo recalled that Baglioni was learned both in Greek and Latin literature and in philosophy. His first published works are two instrumental duos included in a collection of works by Gastoldi and other Milanese composers (RISM 1598¹³), dedicated by the printer to Baglioni’s father; they are described as ‘the first work by this his son’. This information shows that there was a close relationship between the two Baglionis, the well-educated printers Lomazzo, Tini, Besozzi and Castiglioni, and, through the agency of Arnone and Gastoldi, the musical centre at the Mantuan court. Baglioni’s compositions consist solely of sacred music. In the Sacrae cantiones he follows the practice, then popular in Milan, of treating the voices in a concertante style above a bass played on the organ. In the instrumental score the vocal lines are combined. One of these, ‘Maria Magdalena con una canzon francese in soprano’, uses instrumental passages alternating with vocal polyphony. The two instrumental duos of 1598 are skilful fugal pieces.

WORKS

Sacrarum cantionum, liber primus, 1–6vv, op.2 (Milan, 1608)

2 instrumental duos, 1598¹³; 1 antiphon, 6vv, 1612³; 1 motet, 1621²; 1 motet, 3vv, bc, 1627¹

MARIANGELA DONÀ

Baglioni, Luigi.

See Baillou, Luigi de.

Bagnacavallo, Giuseppe da.

See Tamburini, Giuseppe.

Bagni, Benedetto [Bagnius, Benedictus]

(b ?Ferrara; fl 1608). Italian composer and organist. His birthplace is given in FétisB. On the title-page of his publication of 1608 he called himself a ‘musician to the illustrious city fathers of Bologna’. This statement is confirmed by Banchieri (Conclusioni del suono dell'organo, Bologna, 1609/R, 2/1626 as Armoniche conclusioni nel suono dell'organo; Eng. trans., 1982, p.25), who referred to him as a distinguished organist in the service of the city of Bologna. His Motectorum octonis vocibus … una cum basso generalis pro organo liber primus (Venice, 1608) contains 21 eight-part motets for double choir, organized on the concertato principle and with two continuo parts. Several of the motets in this collection were included in leading German anthologies of the period and are also found intabulated in manuscripts.

JOHANNES GÜNTHER KRANER

Bagniera [Bagnera, Baniera, Bannieri], Antonio [Antoine]

(b ?Rome, 1638; d Versailles, 1740). Swiss boy (later castrato) singer, active in France. Son of one of Louis XIV's Swiss guards, Bagniera was a Page de la Chapelle (a boy singer in the royal chapel choir) noted for the ‘prodigious volume and extreme beauty of his voice’ (Bêche). Small stature and physical deformities may have been factors in his decision to persuade his cousin, a surgeon, to castrate him in a (successful) bid to preserve his greatest asset, his voice. When Louis XIV discovered what had taken place, he threatened Bagniera with banishment, but pardoned him after intervention by the Swiss guards who pleaded that his action had only been for the best interests of the king's music. Bagniera continued to sing both in the chapel and in court operatic performances (e.g. Lully's Alceste in 1677). He became a naturalised French citizen in 1680. From a year earlier, Louis XIV employed as many as five Italian castrati at any one time, alongside Bagniera, who sang to the age of 77, retiring at the king's death in 1715; he survived to 102.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.-F. Bêche: [Mémoires], F-Pn, Rés.F.1661, 92–106

M. Benoit: Versailles et les musiciens du Roi 1661–1733 (Paris, 1971)

L. Sawkins: ‘The Brothers Bêche: an Anecdotal History of Court Music’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 192–221

L. Sawkins: ‘For and against the order of Nature: who sang the Soprano?’, EMc xv (1987), 315–24

LIONEL SAWKINS

Bagnolesi, Anna Maria Antonia

(fl 1726–43). Italian contralto. She was a Florentine in the employment of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and married to the tenor G.B. Pinacci (1732). She sang in Florence (1725–6), Bologna (1726–8), Livorno (1727), Naples (1727, in operas by Vinci and Hasse) and Milan (1728, 1730). She may have been the Anna Bolognesi who appeared in Venice in 1729, and she sang in Turin in 1731 (Porpora’s Poro). Engaged by Handel for the London season of 1731–2, she made her début at the King’s Theatre as Alcestis in a revival of Admeto on 7 December. She sang in the original productions of Ezio and Sosarme, in revivals of Giulio Cesare, Flavio, the bilingual Acis and Galatea and Ariosti’s Coriolano, and in the pasticcio Lucio Papirio dittatore. The two parts Handel composed for her, Valentinian in Ezio and Erenice in Sosarme, are restricted in compass (b to e'' in the arias) and of no exceptional technical difficulty, but the scope and quality of the music suggests confidence in her powers of expression; her affected delivery, however, reminded Horace Mann of ‘a person talking upon a close stool’. After her return to Italy she sang in Naples in operas by Hasse, Pergolesi and N. Conti (1733–4), Milan (1736–7, 1739), Venice (1739–40) and Florence (1732–3, 1739, 1741–3). She often took male roles. There is a caricature of her by A.M. Zanetti in the Cini collection (I-Vgc).

WINTON DEAN

Bagnols, Magister Leon de.

See Gersonides.

Bagpipe

(Fr. cornemuse; Ger. Dudelsack, Sackpfeife; It. cornamusa, piva, zampogna; Port. gaita; Sp. cornamusa, gaita, zampoña).

A wind instrument which in its commonest forms consists of a chanter and one or more drones, all supplied with air from the bag, which is compressed under the player’s arm to provide a constant pressure. The instrument is classed as a composite reedpipe.

Bagpipes are generally used in the performance of traditional folk musics, and their designs vary in different countries or ethnic regions. The main exceptions to this rule include the occasional adoption of bagpipes by fashionable society and by composers of opera, ballet, concertos and chamber music, most notably in 18th-century France (see Musette, §§1 and 2), and the case of the Scottish Highland bagpipe, which became widespread in the 19th century and has displaced some local types. Some bagpipe traditions have flourished continuously to the present day, notably in Great Britain and Ireland, in north-western Spain, and in Bulgaria, but by the mid-20th century many regional types had become obsolete. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a considerable revival of interest, and many regional and older types are again being manufactured and played.

WILLIAM A. COCKS/ANTHONY C. BAINES, RODERICK D. CANNON

1. Structure.

The principal variables within the above definition are the type of chanter, either conical- or cylindrical-bored; the number and tuning of the drones; and whether the pipes are blown by mouth or with bellows strapped between the player’s arm and waist. Mouth blowing is generally associated with bagpipes intended for outdoor use; bellows with more delicate instruments for indoor playing. Some bagpipes have double chanters, and some have keywork to extend the tonal range.

In many traditions, bags consist of the whole skin of an animal such as a sheep or goat, variously cured or tanned, and with the hair side turned inside. Usually the pipes are tied into the natural neck and forelegs. Almost always the pipes are actually inserted into wooden or bone sockets (‘stocks’), so that they can easily be taken out to adjust the reeds. Most modern bagpipes have bags of cured or tanned skin cut to shape and sewn, and this type of bag can be seen in some medieval depictions as well. For a mouth-blown bagpipe it is of course essential that the bag should not only be airtight but should maintain a constant temperature and humidity. The materials that work best depend very much on the local climate; some are mentioned below.

Conical chanters are generally turned from one piece of wood, like a shawm; cylindrical chanters more often have a separable foot joint at the lower end. The foot joint may be formed from an animal horn (see Hornpipe (i)). Drones are cylindrical with one or more sliding joints for tuning. Conical chanters generally have a double reed; cylindrical chanters and drones have a beating reed, but there are exceptions, notably the British varieties of ‘small pipe’ which have the double reed in a cylindrical chanter, and the French musette and Italian zampogna which have double reeds throughout. Reeds are generally made from cane, especially arundo donax, grown in southern Europe and supplied to pipe makers’ particular requirements, but plastic and metal are coming into use, especially for drone reeds. Double reeds resemble the oboe reed in general design and construction (though they are usually much shorter and broader in the blade). The traditional beating (or ‘percussion’) is an ‘idioglot percussion reed’ (see Reed, and Reed instruments, fig. 1). It is formed from a short length of cane, closed at one end and with the pith removed. A transverse cut is made through the skin to form a tongue which is then split back and raised slightly so that it vibrates in the airstream. A waxed string or ‘bridle’ is tied tightly round the root of the tongue to prevent further splitting (fig.1). In some traditions the reed is cut so that the vibrating end of the tongue is closer to the open end of the reed, in others a greater gap is preferred. In modern bagpipes the chief timbers used for the pipes are ebony, cocus wood and brazil-wood, replacing native woods such as box and fruit woods, though these continue to be used in a few traditions. The ends of the pipes are reinforced with rings or ferrules, made of bone ivory, plastic, metal, or bone. The tone of the instrument depends very much on the nature of the wood, and recent experiments with Scottish bagpipes (Moore, 1991) suggest that it is the density more than any other factor which makes the difference. With the increase in prices of exotic timbers and the general desire to conserve non-renewable materials, synthetic materials are coming more into use.

2. General history.

There are a few references to bagpipes in ancient literature (Aristophanes, Suetonius, Martial, Dio Chrysostom; see Baines, 1960) but no surviving instruments, or unambiguous depictions. Popular writings on bagpipes over the last two hundred years have given a different impression about this ambiguity, but on re-examination, such claims may all be discounted, notably the persistent belief that the bagpipe had military use in the Roman army (Askew, 1940; Collinson, 1975).

Closely related to the bagpipe is the hornpipe, consisting of one or two pipes made from natural tubular materials (bone or cane), with beating reeds blown directly by mouth with circular breathing so that the music is continuous, as is that of the bagpipe. Hornpipes with bags also exist and constitute a supposedly primitive type of bagpipe. Although rare, hornpipes are distributed over a very wide area, ‘from Atlantic Europe and the Maghrib to the Urals and India’ (Baines, 1960), and if bagpipes are viewed as a technical development from the hornpipe this is the strongest reason for supposing that they too have an ancient history.

The historical record effectively begins in the early Middle Ages, in Western Europe. The word ‘musa’ (root of the medieval French word ‘muse’, meaning ‘bagpipe’) occurs between ‘tibiae’ and ‘fistula’, both pipe names, in the Epistola de armonica institutione of Regino of Prüm (c842–915). The term Estive, also believed to denote a form of bagpipe, occurs frequently in medieval French poetry and romances, usually in association with ‘soft’ instruments such as the harp and fiddle, which would indicate that it, too, had a refined and delicate sound. An Anglo Saxon riddle of the 10th century has been considered as referring to a bagpipe (Sutherland, 1967). The independent drone is mentioned in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et de Marion (c1283), and a drone pipe of this period has been found at Weoley Castle, Warwickshire, England. Depictions in pictures and carvings become abundant from then on. In the British Isles bagpiping was both a popular and a courtly entertainment at least from the early 14th century (Bullock-Davies, 1978), but began gradually to die out, receding northwards and westwards from the 16th century onwards (Cannon, 1971). From the 17th century, mouth-blown bagpipes tended to be displaced by bellows-blown forms for indoor use, and in Ireland and Northumberland these became progressively more elaborate during the 18th and 19th centuries. Historical references to ‘Lincolnshire’ (16th century) and ‘Lancashire’ (18th century) bagpipes presumably imply persistent playing traditions; they may or may not refer to distinctive regional types of instrument. The last traces of bagpiping in 19th-century Yorkshire have been carefully researched (Schofield, 1993–4), indicating that the Irish type of ‘union pipe’ was played.

3. Scotland.

(i) Highland pipe (pìob mhór).

The Highland bagpipe (figs.1 and 4a) has been a martial instrument at least since the 16th century. It has three drones, two tenor and one bass, the chanter and the blowpipe. The latter is long, thus enabling the bag to be held well under the left arm and the piper’s head to be kept erect. Blowpipes in other traditions are shorter, and the bag may be held in front of the body, leading to a crouching attitude unlike the military bearing of the Scots piper. The drones are spread fanwise and held at their distance by ornamental cords, the bass drone resting on the piper’s shoulder. Each tenor drone is 40 cm long and is tuned an octave below the six-finger note of the chanter (which is named A, i.e. a', though the actual pitch is closer to b). The bass drone is 80 cm and is tuned an octave below the tenors. Bagpipes with two tenor drones and no bass drone were customary in some districts in the 18th century, but the three-drone arrangement is now standard.

The chanter is of a wide conical bore, with eight holes and a double vent-hole which is never stopped. The tone is exceedingly loud and penetrating. Highland pipes are made in two sizes; in addition there is a miniature-sized pipe with a practice chanter in place of the normal bagpipe chanter. Scottish bagpipe manufacture is a well-established industry. The instrument is largely standardized in design and construction. The favourite timbers since the early 19th century have been African blackwood or cocus wood, with ivory or silver reinforcing rings and ferrules. Imitation ivory is now usual, and makers are experimenting with synthetic materials in place of wood. Moulded plastic ‘Polypenco’ pipe chanters are widely accepted for use by bands. Plastic and metal drone reeds are beginning to replace cane. For the bag, sheepskin, cured but not tanned, is traditional in northern climates, but leather works better in drier conditions; more recently the synthetic material Gore-Tex has become popular.

The scale of the Highland chanter consists of the notes g', a', b', c'', d'', e'', f'', g'', a''; but they are tuned in a characteristic way, which has given rise to a good deal of speculation and research (early results and discussions are summarized by MacNeill and Lenihan, 1960–61). In the 19th century there was fairly general agreement that the c'' and f'' were appreciably flatter, and the g' and g'' appreciably sharper than in the accepted diatonic scales of the period; in fact most of the 3rds were thought to be intermediate between major and minor 3rds. Baines (1960) pointed out that neutral 3rds are a common characteristic of folk wind instruments, and a general explanation is that pipe makers everywhere have tended to set the holes in the pipe at equal distances so as to lie comfortably under the fingers: some refinement of pitch is then obtained by varying the size of the holes. The first reliable measurements, made by Lenihan and MacNeill in 1954, gave somewhat different results, showing the following intervals, expressed in cents, between g' and each successive note: a' = 199 cents above g'; b' = 395 cents; c'' = 582 cents; d'' = 715 cents; e'' = 904 cents; f'' = 1086 cents; g'' = 1220 cents; and a'' = 1404 cents. The c'' and f'' are close to their values in just intonation while the d'' is appreciably sharp. Harris and others (1963) confirmed these intervals, and also reported details of the harmonic structure of the notes of both chanter and drones.

Measurements made by Mackenzie (1995) have used greatly improved techniques, sampling the notes actually played in performance, with the drones sounding, and taking care that the players were themselves satisfied with the sound produced. The results have shown very close agreement between different pipers and instruments, and a strong tendency to tune the chanter notes in consonance with appropriate harmonies of the drones. But no corresponding measurements have been reported for old chanters. What is certain is that all good players are keenly aware of, and strive to attain, what they consider to be the true intonation, different though this may be from the standards adopted by other musicians.

The nine notes are not produced simply by successive opening of the eight finger-holes: as with most bagpipes, the fingering system is such that when middle and upper notes are played, certain of the lower holes must be kept closed. Although in theory cross-fingerings could be used to produce additional chromatic semitones, in practice all the traditional music is restricted to the nine notes listed above. The 19th-century bagpipe maker David Glen published fingering charts showing two notes g'', one slightly sharpened, but this innovation was not generally adopted. A considerable number of tunes have been adapted to the bagpipe from other sources and this has led to a number of ‘wrong’ notes which are now accepted as traditional. Thus, g'' is accepted as a passing note in place of g'', in tunes which would otherwise be in the key of A major, and to a lesser extent c'' is accepted where parallel traditions have c''. Some tunes exist in minor modes in the song and fiddle traditions but in major modes in the bagpipe tradition, perhaps for a similar reason.

(ii) Other bagpipes.

The Lowland bagpipe is a bellows-blown instrument, with three drones all in one stock. They lie across the piper’s chest while in use, and the piper is seated. The chanter and drone are slightly smaller than in the Highland pipe, but in musical essentials they are the same (see fig.4b). By the end of the 19th century the Lowland bagpipe had almost ceased to be played (Duncan, 1990), though in the early 20th century some pipe makers offered instead the half-sized Highland bagpipe blown by bellows. In the late 20th century the Lowland pipe has been revived.

Another type of bagpipe made and played in Scotland in the 18th and early 19th centuries is essentially similar to early forms of Irish union pipe (see fig.4c and §4 below). In 20th-century literature it has been called the ‘hybrid union pipe’; more recently, the ‘pastoral’ pipe, following Geoghegan (c1746; see §4 below).

A Scottish form of small-pipe is found in some museum collections. The chanter is cylindrical and gives a nine-note scale. The three drones are set in one stock and tuned as in the Northumbrian pipes (see §5 below), i.e. the smallest in unison with the six-finger note on the chanter, the largest an octave below, and the intermediate drone at the 5th in between. After a long period of disuse, small-pipes are again being played, with a chanter redesigned to accept Highland pipe fingering. It is available in two pitches, one an octave below the Highland pipe (nominally ‘in A’) with the corresponding scale including g and g', both natural; and the other a 4th higher (‘in D’). Both mouth-blown and bellows forms are played.

4. Ireland.

Historical and literary references to the bagpipe in Ireland go back to 1544, and show that it was used for the same purposes as in Gaelic Scotland, notably in battle and for laments at funerals (see Donnelly, 1981). A crudely drawn illustration was given by John Derricke in Image of Irelande(London, 1581; fig.6): it depicts a mouthblown instrument with two drones of unequal length set in one stock, and a long chanter with bell; the proportions are grotesque, and the woodcut must be accepted with caution. These references imply a loud instrument, presumably mouth-blown and similar to the Scottish bagpipe of the time, but in the 18th century it died out and little is known about it. It is said that there used to be an example in the Musée de Cluny, Paris (Collinson, 1975).

The Scottish bagpipe began to be used in Ireland in the 19th century, and in time the custom began of using a variant form with a single tenor drone instead of a pair. The two drones are set in separate stocks, with the bass resting on the piper’s shoulder. Another pattern of Irish war-pipe was evolved about 1900–10 by Henry Starck of London and named the ‘Brian Boru’ bagpipe. It had three drones all set in one stock and sounding as follows: tenor, one octave below the key note; bass, one octave below this; baritone, the 5th between. The chanter was made with several differing key arrangements and was capable of sounding a diatonic scale from a 3rd below the key note to a 3rd above. The Brian Boru pipe was used by the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers from 1926 to 1968, but all Irish infantry regiments now use the Scottish Highland bagpipe, though their repertories still emphasize Irish tunes.

The Irish uilleann pipe is a bellows pipe, played sitting and with the drones lying across the knees, and is believed to have been introduced in the early 18th century. The name ‘uilleann pipe’, from the Irish word uilleann (‘elbow’), has been shown to be spurious (see Carolan, 1981–2) but is now firmly established. The usual term in the 19th century was ‘union pipe’. Successive elaborations in its design and musical capabilities can be traced through the earlier published tutors (Geoghegan, O’Farrell, Colclough).

The earliest known form of uilleann pipe was the ‘pastoral or new bagpipe’ (Geoghegan). It had an open-ended chanter without keywork, giving the six-finger note d' and a range of c' to d''', the upper register being obtained by overblowing; the two drones were set in one stock and tuned a and A. Subsequent developments include lowering the drones to d and D, the extra length of the bass drone being obtained by folding the tube back into the stock (see fig.4c), and the addition of a third, treble, drone (tuned d') and of what is now known as the tenor regulator. This latter is inserted in the same stock as the drones and is of conical bore, stopped at the end and possessing four or five keys. It is fitted with a double reed like that used in the chanter, and the purpose is to enable the piper to provide a variable chord by striking a suitable key with the heel of his hand. Bagpipes of this type are no longer played, but a number survive in museum collections. The chanter is characteristically made in two parts, the main part with the finger-holes, and a removable foot joint with two holes, bored crossways, which determine the pitch of the lowest note, as in the Scottish Highland and Lowland chanters. For this reason the pipes are sometimes called ‘hybrid uilleann pipes’, on the supposition that they represent a fusion of Irish and Scottish forms. This may not be correct: the alternative view is that these pipes represent the older form, and that the present Irish pipe is a further development.

In the modern Irish uilleann pipe (first described in O’Farrell, c1804, and later in Colclough) the chanter has no foot joint and its range is two octaves (d'–d'''), and it has three drones (D, d, d'). A fourth drone, occasionally found, is tuned to g'. Many drone stocks are fitted with a plug to silence the drones, at the same time allowing the regulators to sound. The bass drone is a simple folded pipe, not re-entering the stock, and the regulators are increased to three, and occasionally four, which together give the piper the ability to sound full chords. Players have been known to silence their chanter on occasion and play the air entirely on the regulator keys, to the plain drone accompaniment, but the general method of using regulators is either to provide an occasional chord or to emphasize the time by a rhythmic ‘vamping’. A modern set of regulators is tuned to sound: tenor, f', g', a', b', c'; baritone, d', f', g', a'; bass, g, a, b, c'. Where a double bass is provided, it usually sounds one octave below the baritone. Regulators are tuned by inserting a length of wire or rush pith into the bore. Many of them are very loud and have a tendency to overwhelm the chanter. Some players dispense with them.

Early chanters were made without keys, but at various times these have been added, and now up to nine may be found, the compass of two octaves remaining the same. The chanter, though an open one, is played with the end closed by resting it on a pad of leather on the piper’s knee, and raised for certain notes.

The uilleann bagpipe varies considerably in pitch from two whole tones below standard (a' = 440) up to standard pitch itself. For concert-hall work, where greater volume is desired, chanters have been made with a double bore and two reeds, the piper’s fingers spanning both sets of holes. Double reeds are used in all chanters and regulators, and beating reeds in the drones. The modern uilleann pipe has become such a complex instrument that it has sometimes been called the ‘Irish organ’.

5. England.

The Northumbrian half-long pipe may be identified with the Scottish Lowland pipe, having three drones in one stock, and an open chanter sounding nine notes. The drones, however, differ in one respect, for instead of bass, tenor and tenor, the Northumbrian pattern is bass, tenor and treble, the treble being a 5th above the tenor. Apart from this difference in the drones, the instrument is identical to the Lowland variety and, if played sitting, the drones lie across the breast, but if in use for marching they lie on the piper’s shoulder. Having died out in the 19th century, this instrument was revived in the 1920s with partial success for the use of Scout troops and other groups, and has been revived again since about 1980. The earlier revival used a different drone tuning with a baritone drone and no treble, but this is now considered erroneous and the later revival uses the tuning described here.

The shuttle pipe, long disused, had barrel drones of the musette type (see fig.7b below) and a chanter of early Northumbrian type, keyless and open-ended. Only two examples are known. One of these is dated 1695 and was formerly in the possession of J. Campbell Noble. The other, of about the same date, was in the collection of W.A. Cocks (now in the Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum).

The Northumbrian small-pipe (see fig.4d) is an indoor instrument and in its early form consisted of a plain open chanter, cylindrically bored, with double reed, giving a scale of nine notes. It had three drones sounding the key note, the octave below and the 5th between, all inserted in one stock. Small-pipe drones lie across the player’s chest in all cases. The small-pipe was not standardized, each maker having worked to his own set of measurements. The earliest known small-pipe (now in the Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum) probably dates from the late 17th century. It is of ivory, and has a plain open-ended chanter of narrow cylindrical bore, 16 cm long. The three open-ended drones are 22, 13·5 and 12 cm and sound g, d' and g' respectively. This type was in use until the middle of the 18th century. About that time an unknown pipe maker conceived the idea of closing the end of the chanter, and this has been the rule ever since; it is the only closed chanter found on any type of bagpipe. The closure reduced the compass of the chanter by one note, but, since the fingering method is to open only one hole at a time, it enabled the piper to play staccato and to repeat the same note many times in succession, without having to interpolate grace notes. It added greatly to the crispness and distinctness of the music, and this feature is characteristic of Northumbrian piping.

The small-pipe remained at this stage until about 1805, when John Peacock, one of the town waits of Newcastle upon Tyne, collaborated with John Dunn, pipe maker, also of Newcastle, to add the first four keys to the chanter. This increased the compass from d' to a'', the key note being g'. The later addition of a fifth key, c'', enabled the piper to play in the key of D, which necessitated a fourth drone to provide the correct harmony. At the same time stops were fitted to all drones, so that any of them could be silenced at will. The increased possibilities of the keyed small-pipe led other makers, notably Robert Reid of North Shields, to add further keys, and by the time of Reid’s death in 1837, at the age of 53, the number of keys had been increased to 14 and the drones to five, fitted with a switch in the drone stock, so that the piper may change over quickly from key G to key D, or vice versa. His son James Reid further increased the keys to 17, giving a full chromatic scale from b to b''.

These multi-keyed chanters are not common, the most usual pattern having seven keys only, with which nearly all the existing pipe music may be played. These seven keys are closed, worked by the little finger of the upper hand or the thumb of the lower, and the holes they cover are the seven plain finger-holes and top thumb-hole. Since the fingering principle is still to open only one hole at once, this gives 15 notes: d', e', f', g', a', b', c'', c'', d'', d'', e'', f'', g'', a'', b''. Of the four drones, three can give either of two notes, thus d, g/a, d'/e', g'/a', and by sounding only three drones at any one time, the harmonies g–d'–g', d–a–d', a–e'–a' can be selected. The six-finger note is called G and written g' on the stave, though the actual pitch is usually f''. (For a set of pipes designed to play with other instruments it is precisely f'' at a'' = 440 Hz, but traditionally it was little sharper than this). As regards the intonation, Butler (1987) describes a system in which G, B and D notes of the chanter are designed to be in consonance with the G drones, F and A with the D drones, C and E with the A drones, presumably seeking pure 5th, 4th and major 3rd intervals respectively.

Small-pipes were made mainly from home-grown materials in early days, the woods used including box, walnut and holly; modern pipes are usually of ebony or cocus-wood. Many old instruments were constructed wholly of ivory, with silver mounts and chains; they are exceedingly elegant, but the tone is not so mellow as that from pipes of wood. Small-pipe reeds are made of cane or elderberry, or often entirely of metal.

6. France, Belgium.

The bellows-blown musette is a highly developed bagpipe of great compass and refined musical quality (fig.7). It became fashionable at the French court and in society during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the artistic skill lavished on the adornment of the wood and ivory work was of an exceedingly high order. The bag-covers were of rich silks, often covered with embroidery and bordered with metallic fringe and tassels. These pieces of fine needlework required protection from the grease of the bag by means of padded undercovers, and they frequently had an outer cover in addition. Musettes were often made entirely of ivory (see Musette).

The origin of the musette, which appears to have been the prototype of the bellows bagpipe, is not known with certainty, but it was probably 16th-century, for at the beginning of the 17th century the instrument is found in an advanced state of development. It was described by Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, ii) as having a single chanter, a set of barrel drones, and bellows. The chanter was of narrow cylindrical bore and without keys; it was fitted with a double reed. By 1636–7, the date of Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle, it had been supplied with the first keys for the production of semitones. Later in the same century Martin Hotteterre added a second chanter with six keys, which lay parallel to the first and extended the scale upwards. Both chanters were set in a double stock which was in turn inserted into the bag stock. The larger of the two (grand chalumeau) sounded the scale from f to a'' by means of eight open holes and seven keys; the smaller (petit chalumeau) extended the scale to d''', all the extra notes being sounded by the six keys, three of which were on the upper- and three on the underside of the chanter. All the musette keys were actuated by the fourth finger of the left hand and the thumb of the right. The chanters remained in this form until the musette became extinct.

The drone barrel was formed of a cylindrical block of wood or ivory, about 15 cm long and 4 cm in diameter, inserted 2·5 cm into the stock. It was pierced longitudinally by parallel bores which were connected in series in twos or more to give the necessary lengths and terminated in slots in the side (fig.7a). These slots were in dovetailed grooves, in which were fitted layettes (slides), by means of which the drones were tuned. The layettes were the equivalent of the sliding joints on the usual type of bagpipe drone, and they could also be used to silence unwanted drones completely. Lissieu of Lyons was a noted maker of musettes, and a fine specimen by him, in the Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum, is fitted with six drones. Double reeds were fitted throughout the entire instrument. Musette drones were usually tuned in octaves of C and G. Very detailed descriptions and illustrations of all the French bagpipes were given by Mersenne in Harmonie universelle and in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (Paris, 1763).

The traditional bagpipe of the Auvergne and Bourbonnais is characterized by a chanter and drone set parallel to each other, either joined (fig.8), or set in a common stock. Some bagpipes of this type have a second, separate drone an octave lower than the first, and some also a third drone set behind the chanter, an octave higher. In the Auvergne the traditional names are chèvre(‘goat’), chèvrette or cabrette, but cornemuseis the name in standard French. Although it has pastoral and peasant associations, the elaborately decorated instruments produced by several makers in the 19th century catered for a self-consciously rural bourgeois taste (Montbel and Blanchard, 1990). The Auvergne piping tradition never died out, but by the later 19th century the cabrette was mainly played in concert with other instruments and the drones had ceased to be used; they were either blocked or replaced by unbored dummy drones. The instrument was regularly played in Paris in cafés with an Auvergnat clientele. The local traditions have been extensively researched by J.F. Chassaing (1982). Ladonne (1987) gives playing instructions and a collection of tunes with a compass of ten notes, the highest being the overblown five-finger note.

The biniou is the bagpipe of Brittany (fig.9). It is a mouth-blown instrument with a narrow conical chanter, fitted with a very small double reed. There are seven finger-holes, but no thumb-hole, and a double unstopped hole in the bell. The one drone lies on the player’s shoulder; it has two tuning-slides and a very wide bell, contracted at the mouth. The instrument was frequently made of boxwood, without any metal or mountings, but now is generally of blackwood. The bag is of sheepskin and it is held high on the piper’s chest in playing. The instrument is generally played àcouple, that is in conjunction with the bombarde, which is a separate chanter (without a bag; a type of shawm) of wide conical bore, pitched an octave lower and blown directly from the mouth of a second player (see France, fig.7d). Traditionally the two were used at weddings and dances. Since World War II a loud bagpipe, biniou bras (actually the Highland bagpipe introduced from Scotland), pitched in the same octave as the bombarde, has been introduced and is played in pipe and drum bands along with the bombarde. The older instrument is still played, nevertheless, and is enjoying a considerable revival (Bigot, 1991). The veuze is a similar instrument to the biniou, though larger and sounding an octave lower. It survived until the 19th century in the Nantes region, and has recently been revived.

In Belgium, the early history of the bagpipe was similar to that of the French mouth-blown pipes; the musette was also played. In the 19th century, up to 1900, two types of bagpipe were still played by shepherds in Hainaut and east Flanders. One had a chanter only; the other, the muse-au-sac, had two drones of which the smaller lay beside the chanter as in the French cornemuse. Examples of the second type are in the Instruments Museum of the Brussels Conservatory (fig.10). A few bagpipe melodies from France and Belgium have been published (Boone, 1983).

The bouha of the Landes de Gascogne had a double chanter, one bore having melody holes, the other bore a single hole giving alternate tonic and dominant drone, the whole strongly resembling the Hungarian duda (see §7(v) below; Dominique, 1987).

7. Other countries.

(i) Spain and Portugal.

In Asturias, Galicia and the Minho across the border the mouth-blown gaita (fig.11) continues to flourish. It usually has only one drone. The chanter has a wide conical bore, seven holes and a thumb-hole, three vent-holes lower down, and a double reed. The drone has two tuning-slides; it is fitted with a beating reed, adorned with a heavy silk fringe, and lies on the player’s shoulder. The pipes are still often made of boxwood with brass mounts for the drone but blackwood is used for the best quality instruments. Modern bags are made of moulded rubber covered with cloth. The chanter has a C major scale from b' to c''', though Galician pipers can reach f''' or g''' by overblowing. Instruments also exist in B and D. Among the many tutors published for the gaita, those by Covello (1978), Santiago (1978) and Estévez Vila (1987) may be mentioned.

The Catalan cornamusa has been extinct for a century, but the shepherd’s zampoña of the Balearic Islands is still played. The chanter resembles that of the gaita but the drone hangs down in front of the bag, held in a large stock in which are also two small drones, usually blocked up and silent.

(ii) Northern Europe.

Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, ii) gave the best descriptions and illustrations of old German bagpipes (fig.12). The Bock, with deep-sounding horn-belled chanter and drone, was of the western Slav type. It survived in use in the Böhmerwald, where it was recorded by Künzig (1958). The Schäferpfeife, called Sackpfeiffin Virdung’s Musica getutscht (1511), was of a kind which in one form or another was widespread over northern Europe up to the 18th century. The chanter was narrowly conical, and the two drones held in one drone-stock were of unequal length and probably tuned to a 5th. Only one bagpipe which fits this description is known to exist in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Its provenance is unknown but it is conjectured to be 18th-century German (Boone, 1983).

The Hümmelchen and the dudy (a Czech name) were much smaller, again with drones of unequal length, the dudy having three. Their chanter bores may have been cylindrical, as in the present Baltic types, but no specimens are known to survive and the nature of the reed is unknown. Praetorius also described a bagpipe that he heard in Magdeburg, with two chanters branching from a single stock (one for each hand and sounding a 5th apart), enabling the piper to play simple two-part melodies; it had a drone-stock with two drones like those of the Schäferpfeife.

A simple bagpipe, the Säckpipa, survived into the 20th century in the Swedish district of Dalarna. It has a cylindrical chanter 23 cm in length with six holes and a thumb-hole, and a beating reed. Two short drones are held in one stock, but the shorter is a dummy. In certain islands and coastal districts of Estonia the bagpipe consists of a bag made from a seal’s stomach, a cylindrical chanter 15 cm long with six holes and beating reed, and two drones tuned to a 5th, branching from a single drone-stock. The drones have cavernous terminations as in Scotland and Spain. There are (or were) similar instruments to be found in Latvia.

(iii) Italy.

The principal bagpipe is the zampogna (fig.13), native to the south and to Sicily (where the name is cornamusa) but often heard in the north played by itinerant players. It has a bag usually formed of a whole skin. The four pipes, all held in one large stock, include two conical chanters, one for each hand, and two crudely bored cylindrical drones. All four have double reeds of a characteristic long-bladed pattern. There are two main types of zampogna: one is played alone, the other accompanies a conical chanter (ciaramella, cornamusina, occasionally piffaro) which a second player blows directly with his mouth. The holes of the chanters of the first type, five in one, four in the other, give a series of notes a 4th apart whereby the chanters are sounded in 3rds or contrapuntally. The visual effect recalls that of the Roman Phrygian aulos. The chanters of the second type are an octave apart, and the lowest hole of the larger chanter is covered by an open key protected by a wooden barrel as in many Renaissance wind instruments (fig.13a). This type can be quite large, the longer chanter over 150 cm with F as its lowest note; such an instrument sounds rather like an organ. The two drones are tuned to an octave or a 12th; in neither type of zampogna do they necessarily sound deeper than the chanters. The two-man teams, zampognari or pifferari, make a practice of coming into the towns at the Christmas season to serenade the images of the infant Christ set up at the roadside. Baroque oratorio contains well-known allusions to this music, such as the pastoral symphonies in Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. A complex bellows-blown elaboration of the zampogna was described by Mersenne as a Neapolitan invention, sordellina, with numerous closed keys on the drones somewhat similar to the Irish regulators. A collection of music for this instrument was published in tablature by Giovanni Lorenzo Baldano (1576–1660). The piva of northern Italy, no longer heard, was a western form of bagpipe with conical chanter and cylindrical drone. (See Italy, §II, 6.)

See also Phagotum.

(iv) Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia.

The Polish dudy and kozioł (see Poland, §II, 5, figs.5 and 6) are bellows-blown, with a cylindrical, beating-reed chanter held in a carved stock. The drone rests on the shoulder and is either straight, or right-angled to hang down behind the player’s back. Often the tube is twice doubled back inside a wooden butt joint for compactness. Both chanter and drone have large upturned bells of cowhorn or horn and metal. The dudy has six finger-holes and a thumb-hole giving a plagal scale omitting the lower submediant. The kozioł includes a seventh hole for the little finger and covers a plagal 11th, the top two notes being overblown. Closed fingering is used in both types, and staccato can be made by closing all holes to interpose the low dominant, which when continually touched in this manner gives the effect of a subsidiary drone. The common name ‘wedding pipes’ indicates the instruments’ traditional association; they can be traced in pictures back to the 14th century. The earliest examples were mouth-blown. The Bohemian dudy is similar to the Polish; its beating reeds sometimes consist of a slip of cane tied over a slot in a short metal or bone tube, on the principle of the clarinet. This dudyis much used with fiddle and clarinet. Moravia and Slovakia have bagpipes of this kind or rather smaller (in Slovakia they are called gajdy and may be mouth-blown), and a double-bore chanter resembling the Hungarian type. Simplified instruments resembling the single-chanter dudy are found in Belarus and the Ukraine (duda).

(v) Hungary, Romania.

The Hungarian duda (see Hungary, §II, 6(iv)) is mouth-blown, though bellows-blown versions exist in museums. The goat-head stock holds a chanter carved in rectangular cross-section containing two parallel cylindrical bores. One is the chanter proper, with six holes and a thumb-hole. The highest finger-hole, placed opposite the thumb-hole, is very small (the ‘flea hole’) and when uncovered raises any note of the scale by approximately a semitone, whereby sharps and modulations are possible. The lowest note sounds through an oblong vent. The other bore, the kontra, has one hole controlled by the little finger of the lower hand. When open it sounds in unison with the bottom note of the melody bore. When closed the note is emitted through a bell extension (often ending with a cowhorn) and sounds a 4th lower. Movement of the little finger provides a drone harmony which pendulates between these two notes, independent of the fingering of the melody bore. A very efficient staccato is possible since the interpolated bottom note of the melody bore is in unison with the open hole note of the kontra, effecting a momentary silence in the melody. The instrument has a normal bass drone. Traditional playing died out in the 1960s but was revived in the 1980s, with instruments again being manufactured and music published (Csoóri, 1986). Romania has a similar instrument, the cimpoi (see Habenicht, 1972–4).

(vi) Yugoslavia, Bulgaria.

The bellows-blown gajde of the north-eastern plains and parts of Serbia has a double-bore chanter of oval outer cross-section with large upturned wooden bell. It has only five holes, but the kontra bore also has a hole for the little finger, which is used as in Hungary but at a slower speed appropriate to the deeper sound of the pipes; the bass drone may sound as low as G', the necessary length being obtained with the help of a butt section or a length of rubber hose. The diple sa mješinom or mihof Dalmatia and Bosnia is a simple mouth-blown instrument with double-bore chanter without bell, and no drone. There are six holes to each bore, spanned by the same finger and sounding a unison except on the low note, where one hole only is covered to produce a major 2nd. In some specimens one bore is a plain drone; in others different arrangements of the holes are found, similar to those among hornpipes. The diple is also played without a bag, the cup-like stock being placed directly to the mouth.

The Macedonian gajde has a single chanter turned in boxwood and mounted with horn. The lower end is formed in a characteristic obtuse angle carved from horn. There are seven holes and a thumb-hole, the first finger-hole being a ‘flea hole’ bushed with quill. The drone is also of boxwood and horn-mounted. This bagpipe is also found in Bulgaria, as are other types of gayda with conically bored chanters (still with beating reed) and a similar arrangement of holes. Its size and pitch vary according to region. The gayda remains strongly associated with weddings and village dance festivities, though mostly it is heard in large ensembles and ‘folk orchestras’. Accounts of Bulgarian piping at different periods are given in Katzarova, 1937; Levy, 1985; and Rice, 1994.

The Serbian gajde and the diple are now rare, but the Macedonian and Bulgarian bagpipes continue to flourish. (See Bulgaria, §II.)

(vii) India.

The native bagpipe of India (Hindustani maśak); also known by other names, e.g. śruti upanga) has a melody pipe and a drone pipe lashed together, but some examples have one pipe only, with the finger-holes often sealed with wax for sounding a drone to another instrument. It appears in ceremonial and devotional ensembles. The principal bagpipe in use throughout India and the Indian army is, however, the Scottish Highland pipe, which is manufactured commercially in both India and Pakistan. It sometimes is used at wedding ceremonies, especially in the North, where it is known by various local names such as mashak and bīn bājā (Alter, 1997–8). The Scottish bagpipe may have inspired the fitting of a long drone with a tuning-slide to many Indian snake-charmers’ pipes.

8. Bag-hornpipes.

This term conveniently describes numerous and widespread primitive bagpipes that lack a separate drone and possess a chanter composed of two parallel canes held in a cradle-like wooden stock or ‘yoke’ almost always mounted with a cowhorn bell or wooden imitation of one. Examples occur in the Aegean Islands (tsambouna) and Crete (askomandoura), in northeast Turkey (tulum), Armenia (parkapzuk), Georgia (gudastviri) and neighbouring regions of the Caucasus (chiboni etc.), and among the Mari and other Finno-Ugric peoples of the Volga (shüvïr etc.). Like the bagless hornpipes they differ mainly in the arrangement of holes and hence in the scales produced. One pipe always has the full complement, usually five. The other may have five, three, two or one, whereby many kinds of two-part effects are obtained: for instance, a drone rapidly alternating over a major 2nd (Karpathos); decoration by rapidly interposed high notes above the melody (Turkey); and a mixture of 3rds, unison and drone (Russia) so intricate as to defy description. Such instruments once had a wider distribution over Europe and the Mediterranean, and an old Welsh example with twin horn bells, now lacking its bag, is in the National Museum of Wales.

The common species of north Africa (zukra etc.) differ in that the two canes, which have four or five holes each, are held in a disc-shaped wooden stock tied into the kidskin bag; a small horn bell is attached to each pipe. Best known in Tunisia (fig.14) and Algeria, specimens have been found in Syria and Egypt, the Fezzan and by Lake Chad.

9. Music.

Scotland was for a long time the only region to print pipe music in any quantity (see Cannon, 1980), with Ireland, Northumberland and Brittany following far behind; but, along with the revival in playing, other countries have begun to print tutors and anthologies of traditional pipe tunes.

Among the chief characteristics of bagpipe music are the facts that the chanter is never silent, so that there can be no rests or momentary pauses between notes, and that its loudness cannot be varied. These problems are overcome to some extent by the use of grace notes, which at their simplest consist of the momentary uncovering of a hole by one finger, to produce a high-pitched grace note, or momentary covering of one or more holes simultaneously to produce a low-pitched grace note. The actual pitch of the grace note is not usually fully perceived, and the effect is of a bright or dull clicking sound. Grace notes are essential to divide two successive melody notes of the same pitch, and are also commonly played on the downbeat notes of the melody to mark out the rhythm. In many piping traditions grace notes are used sparingly, but Scottish pipers have a large fund of embellishments – ‘doublings’, ‘shakes’, ‘throws’ and ‘grips’ – which are carefully taught and are written into the music, and an analogous but largely different set in the older Pibrochrepertory. Irish uilleann pipers use multiple grace notes, but to a much lesser extent. The Northumbrian small-pipe chanter, being closed, can be silenced and this makes the use of grace notes unnecessary, though in fact they are played to some extent. On some bagpipes (for instance the Czech dudy and Hungarian duda; see §7(iv) and (v) above) the same effect is obtained by relying on the illusion of silence when certain chanter notes are sounded.

10. Present state.

The Scottish Highland pipe continues to dominate the public perception of bagpiping. It is played in ever-increasing numbers, and the standards both of playing and of construction and tuning have risen markedly in the last half of the 20th century. Although the British army maintains fewer pipe bands than before, this decrease is more than offset by the increase in civilian pipe bands throughout the world, and not only in countries of obvious British influence. Solo piping continues at virtuoso level including the traditional pìobaireachd, with pipers from the USA, Brittany and elsewhere regularly taking prizes in competitions. But throughout Europe, there has also been a revival of interest in other bagpipes, fostered usually by young players who have re-learnt the craft of pipe making by copying instruments from museum collections, and playing technique from old recordings or, when possible, directly from the remaining traditional players. There have also been attempts to reconstruct medieval and later bagpipes from purely iconographic evidence; among these may be mentioned the English Great Pipe by Jon Swayne, and impressive reconstructions of the large peasant bagpipes shown in paintings by Breughel and others. In the British Isles these activities have been generally encouraged by the foundation of the Lowland and Border Pipers' Society (1983) and the Bagpipe Society (1985), as well as the longer-established Northumbrian Pipers’ Society (1928) and Na Píobarí Uilleann (1963). These and similar groups in other countries publish periodicals, maintain websites, organize concerts and instrument making workshops, and provide a market for the sale of pipes. International gatherings of makers and players take place regularly at St Chartier, France, and Strakonice, Czech Republic. The publication of bagpipe music, arranged from old sources or from diverse piping traditions, has increased. The bagpipes of the revival tend to follow traditional models closely in general construction and playing technique, but entirely new or remodelled instruments are also being developed (Goodacre, 1992; Swayne, 1995; Moore, 1999). These are designed to play together with each other and with other instruments, and in public performance they may be heard as part of a line-up of instruments in many folk or folk-rock groups. Some of these groups have achieved international reputations, such as the pioneering Whistlebinkies (Scotland), Blowzabella (England), Battlefield Band (Scotland) and Run Rig (Gaelic, folk-rock). If the question is asked, whether some essential element of bagpiping is being lost in these new formats, it can be answered at least in part by noticing how, in many cases, it is still the bagpipe that dominates the sound and is perhaps the chief attraction to the listening public.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

general, early history

MersenneHU

PraetoriusSM

PraetoriusTI

G.H. Askew: ‘The Bag-Pipe in Early Britain’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 4th ser., ix (1940), 171

A. Baines: Bagpipes (Oxford, 1960, 3/1995)

J.H. van der Meer: ‘Typologie der Sackpfeife’, Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (1964), 123–46

R. Sutherland: ‘The Bagpipe in Old English Literature’, Piping Times, xix/4 (1967), 18–19

F. Crane: Extant Medieval Musical Instruments: a Provisional Catalogue by Types (Iowa City, IA, 1972)

F. Collinson: The Bagpipe (London, 1975)

C. Page: ‘Biblical Instruments in Medieval Manuscript Illustration’, EMc, v (1977), 299–309

C. Bullock-Davies: Menestrellorum Multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff, 1978)

D. Macmillan: ‘The Mysterious Cornamuse’, EMc, vi (1978), 75–8

G. and J.Montagu: ‘Beverley Minster reconsidered’,EMc, vi (1978), 401–15

R.D. Cannon: A Bibliography of Bagpipe Music (Edinburgh, 1980)

J. Rimmer: ‘An Archaeo-Organological survey of the Netherlands’, World Archaeology, xii (1981), 232–45

D. Stephens: ‘History at the margins: Bagpipers in Medieval Manuscripts’, History Today, xxxix/Aug (1989), 42–8

regional bagpipes

B. Bartók: Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramures (Munich, 1923); repr. in Ethnomusikologische Schritten, ii, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1966)

W.A. Cocks: The Northumbrian Bagpipes (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1933, 2/1967)

R.D. Katzarova: ‘Koprishki gaydi i gaydari’, Vjesnik etnografskog muzeja u Zagrebu, iii (1937), 14–22

M. Rehnberg: Säckpipan i Sverige (Stockholm, 1943)

Bretagne, art populaire, Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, Paris, 23 June – 23 Sept 1951 (Paris,1951), 101 [exhibition catalogue]

J.M.A. Lenihan and S. MacNeill: ‘An Acoustical Study of the Highland Bagpipe’, Acustica, iv (1954), 231–2

F. Dobrovolný: Lidové hudebni nástroje na Morava [Folk musical instruments in Moravia], i (Prague, 1958)

J. Künzig: Ehe sie verklingen (Freiberg, 1958)

S. MacNeill and J.M.A.Lenihan: ‘The Scale of the Highland Bagpipe’,Piping Times, xiii (1960–61), no.2, pp.6–10; no.3, pp.6–10; no.4, pp.8–11; no.5, pp.8–11; no.6, pp.6–10; no.7, pp.8–10

C.M. Harris, M.Eisenstadt and M.R. Weiss: ‘Sounds of the Highland Bagpipe’, JASA, xxxv (1963), 1321–7

L. Bonnaud: ‘Essai sur une chronologie de la cornemuse’, Bulletin de la Société archaeologique et historique du Limousin, xciv (1967), 207–29

L. Leng: Slovenské l’udové hudobné nástroje [Slovak folk-music instruments] (Bratislava, 1967)

I. Macák: ‘Typologie der slowakischen Sackpfeifen’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis I: Brno 1967, 113–27

J. Markl: ‘Typologie der tschechischen Sackpfeifen’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis I: Brno 1967, 128–33

B. Sárosi: Die Volksmusikinstrumente Ungarns (Leipzig, 1967)

R.D. Cannon: ‘The Bagpipe in Northern England’, Folk Music Journal, ii/2 (1971), 127–47

R.D. Cannon: ‘English Bagpipe Music’, Folk Music Journal, ii/3 (1972), 176–219

G. Habenicht: ‘Un cimpoier bănăţean’ [A bagpiper from Bănăţ], Revista de etnografie şi folclor, xvii (1972), 261–97

G. Habenicht: ‘Cimpoiul hunedorean’ [The bagpipe of Hunedoara], Revista de etnografie şi folclor, xviii (1973), 365–408

C. Ahrens: ‘Polyphony in touloum playing by the Pontic Greeks’, YIFMC, v (1973), 122–31

F.J. de Hen: ‘Folk Instruments in Belgium: Part II’, GSJ, xxvi (1973), 86–129

G. Habenicht: ‘Die rumänischen Sackpfeifen’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xix (1974), 117–50

J.K. Partridge and F. Jeal: ‘The Maltese zaqq’,GSJ, xxx (1977), 112–44

M. Bröckner: ‘Die Sackpfeifen Italiens’, Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments Bulletin, viii (1978), 16–52

B. Sárosi: ‘The Hungarian Bagpipe’, Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments Bulletin, viii (1978), 1–15

R. Le Moigne: Quelques éléments sur la tradition populaire de la veuze dans le pays nantais (Nantes, 1979)

N. Carolan: ‘Shakespeare’s Uilleann Pipes’, Ceol, v (1981–2), 4–9

S. Donnelly: ‘The Warpipes in Ireland’, Ceol, v (1981–2), 19–24, 55–9; vi (1983), 19–23

J.F. Chassaing: La tradition de cornemuse en Basse-Auvergne et Sud-Bourbonnais (Moulins, 1982)

R. Hollinger: Les musiques a bourdons, vielles a roue et cornemuses (Paris, 1982)

H. Boone: La cornemuse (Brussels, 1983)

H. Cheape: ‘The Making of Bagpipes in Scotland’, From the Stone Age to the ‘Forty Five’: Studies Presented to R.B.K. Stevenson, ed. D.V. Clarke and A. O’Connor (Edinburgh, 1983), 596–615

S. Donnelly: ‘Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s Pipes’, Ceol, vi (1983), 7–11

M. Levy: The Bagpipe in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria (diss., UCLA, 1985)

L. Mabru: La cornemuse des Landes de Gascogne, (Bazas, 1986)

I. MacInnes: ‘Who Paid the Pipers?’, Common Stock, iii (1986), 18–27

L.-C. Dominique: Musique populaire en Pays d’Oc (Garonne, 1987)

R. Butler: Handbook for the Northumbrian Small Pipes (Rothburg, 1987)

H. Cheape: ‘The Black Chanter of Clan Chattan’, Scottish Pipe Band Monthly, no.8 (1988), 12–14, 18, 24 only

A. Ricci and R.Tucci: ‘Folk Musical Instruments in Calabria’,GSJ, xli (1988), 36–58

R.D. Cannon: ‘Bagpipes in English Works of Art’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 10–31

P.-U. Allmo: Säckpipan i Norden (Stockholm, 1990)

J. Duncan: ‘A Man of Marrow’, Common Stock, v (1990), 21–5

H. Cheape: ‘“The Bagpiper” [painting] by Sir David Wilkie, 1812–1814: Caricature, Character Study, or Historical Document?’ Common Stock, vi (1991), 10–15

E. Montbel and J.Blanchard, eds.: Cornemuses: souffles infinis, souffles continus (Vouillé, 1991) [incl. L. Bigot: ‘Quand on entend le bruit de biniou’, 94–7]

D. Moore: ‘Bagpipe Woods’, Proceedings of the Piobaireachd Society Conference, xviii (1991) [unpaginated]

R.A. Schofield: ‘Piping in Yorkshire’, Chanter (1993–4), 59–66

T. Rice: May it Fill your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, 1994)

H. Cheape: ‘The Piper to the Laird of Grant’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, cxxv (1995), 1163–73

A.C. Mackenzie: ‘Some Recent Measurements on the Scale of the Great Highland Bagpipe’,Proceedings of the Piobaireachd Society Conference, xxii (1995) [unpaginated]

D. Campbell: ‘Eastern Bagpipes: Origins, Construction and Playing Techniques’, Chanter (1995–6), 8–20

A. Alter: ‘Garhwali Bagpipes: Syncretic Processes in a North Indian Regional Musical Tradition’,Asian Music, xxix/1 (1997–8), 1–16

H. Moore: Interview,Common Stock, xiv (1999), 10–21

bagpipe music

G.L. Baldano: Libro per scriver l’intavolatura per sonare sopra le sordelline (Savona,1600); ed. M. Tarrini, G. Farris and J.H. van der Meer (Savona, 1995) [incl. facs.]

C.-E. Borjon: Traité de la musette (Lyons, 1672, 2/1678/R)

J. Hotteterre: Méthode pour la musette (Paris, 1737/R)

J. Geoghegan: The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe (London, c1746)

J. MacDonald: A Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe (Edinburgh, 1803/R), ed. R.D. Cannon (Glasgow, 1994)

P. O’Farrell: O’Farrell’s Collection of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes (London, c1804)

S.T. Colclough: New and Complete Instructions for the Union Pipes (Dublin, c1819)

D. MacDonald: A Collection of the Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia, called Piobaireachd (Edinburgh, 1822/R)

D. MacDonald: A Collection of Quicksteps, Strathspeys, Reels and Jigs, arranged for the Highland Bagpipe (Edinburgh, 1828)

A. MacKay: A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd (Edinburgh, 1838/R)

J.C. Bruce and J.Stokoe: Northumbrian Minstrelsy (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1882, rev. 2/1965 with introduction by A.L. Lloyd)

L. Rowsome: Tutor for the Uillean Pipes (Dublin, 1936)

A. Campbell: The Kilberry Book of Ceol Mor (Glasgow, 1948) [incl. important historical introduction]

Scots Guards Standard Settings of Pipe Music (London, 1954) [incl. history of regimental pipes]

L. Vargyas: ‘Die Wirkung des Dudelsacks auf die Ungarische Volkstanzmusik’, Studia memoriae Bélae Bartók sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956, 2/1957; Eng. trans., 1959), 503–40

P. Monjarret: Waraok, kit! Toniou evit ar bagadou (Rennes, n.d.)

S. Karakazi: Ellinika mousika organa (Athens, 1970)

B. Breathnach: Ceol Rince na héireann [Folk music and dances of Ireland] (Dublin, 1971)

A. Janiszewski: Wielkopolskie dudy, kosioł weselny, kosioł slubny (Poznań, 1971)

M. Sarisonen: Kaval, tulum, cifte (Ankara, n.d.)

The Royal Irish Rangers Standard Settings of Pipe Music (London, 1976) [incl. history of Irish regimental pipes]

J. Mariano Barrenechea: Alboka: entorno folklórico (Lecaroz, 1976)

E.O. Covelo: Leccións de Gaita (Vigo, 1978)

M. de Santiago: Metodo de Gaita por cifra y música (Santiago de Compostela, 1978)

S. Csoóri: Dudanóták gyüjteménye (énekelt dallamok) [A collection of bagpipe songs] (Budapest, 1986)

P. James: Encyclopaedia Blowzabellica: the Blowzabella Tune and Dance Book (Blyth, 1987)

P. Ladonne: Méthode de Cabrette (Riom, 1987)

X. Estévez Vila: A gaita no eido música (Vigo, 1987)

B. Sárosi: ‘Sackpfeife und Sackpfeifenmusik in Ungarn’, Österreiche Musik Zeitschrift, xliii/9 (1988), 474–5

K. Govil-Willers and F.Capelle: Sackpfeifers Notenbuch (Brensbach,1992)

J. Goodacre: Toodle Oodle Bagpipes (Ashby Parva, 1992)

J. Swayne: Moebius Music for Three Bagpipes (Blyth, 1995)

Bags.

Milt Jackson. See also Modern jazz quartet.

Baguala [joi-joi, tonada, vidalita, vidala coya].

A lyric song form of Paraguay and northern Argentina. The baguala is characterized by melodies that use only the three pitches of a single major triad. Accompanied by the caja (frame drum) and tambor (bass drum), it is typically performed in Carnival season by men, women and children, grouped in a circle and singing choruses in unison and in octaves, while a leader uses falsetto and kenko (appoggiatura and vocal ornamentation) in the rendition of the main text. Bagualas are often sung as part of the music performed at the ritual marking of animals in the Argentine pampa and northern provinces, the señalada, accompanied by the erkencho (single reed concussion aerophone) and snare drum.

WILLIAM GRADANTE/R

Baguer, Carles [Carlos]

(b Barcelona, ?13 March 1768; d Barcelona, 29 Feb 1808). Catalan composer and organist. Known affectionately as ‘Carlets’ to his Catalan contemporaries, he studied under his uncle Francesc Mariner and in 1786 succeeded him as organist of Barcelona Cathedral, where he remained until his death. He played an active part in the city's musical life, was much admired for his organ improvisations and attracted many pupils, such as Francisco Andreví y Castellar, Ramón Carnicer and Mateo Ferrer. He was a prolific composer and his work was unusually widely disseminated for a Catalan composer of the day.

Baguer's sacred works testify to a clear Italian influence and he only occasionally used the learned style. His oratorios consist chiefly of four-part homophonic choruses alternating with arias (often with coloratura) and recitative interspersed with arioso passages. His sinfonías fall into two patterns: a single sonata-form movement with a slow introduction, or four movements. In the latter case the second movements take the form of theme and variations and the third are minuets. His style shows a desire to emulate that of Haydn, especially in his use of musical form and his melodic patterns. But in tonal range, thematic treatment, textures and harmonic progressions Baguer's style is simpler and more restrained. His keyboard works, for organ or piano and probably written for his own and his pupils' use, span a broad variety of styles and forms. Some pieces recall the Spanish polyphonic organ tradition. Others in the modern pianistic style combine Italian and Austrian influences with a traditional local style. On the whole, his output bears witness to this singular mixture of influences that affected Catalan music at the time. Baguer's works, however, remain the only surviving examples of a movement of unprecedented diffusion within this geographical area.

WORKS

all MS, principally E-MO and Bc, also Bu, E, SU, TAc and various other Catalan archives

vocal

La Principessa filosofa, o sea El desdén con el desdén (op), Barcelona, S Creu, 4 Nov 1797

14 dramas sacros (orats), mostly for S Felip Neri, Barcelona: El santo Job, 1804; La adoración del Niño Dios por los ángeles y pastores, 1805; La partida del hijo pródigo, 1806; La resurrección de Lázaro, 1806; El regreso a Barcelona su patria de Dr Josef Oriol, 1807; El regreso del hijo pródigo, 1807; Cavatina, recitativo y polaca, 1808; Aplaude festivo el mundo; Conozco de tu mano; Coro y aria de tenor; Dios supremo; Grande Dios tu fuerte diestra; La bondad y tierno amor; La mística Raquel: all E-Bc, OL or Manresa, S Maria de la Seu

Secular arias (for bass): Quel amabile sembiante; T'amerò benché tirana

Sacred arias: Al rigor de adversa suerte, A, orch; Bello infante, S, orch; Este nuevo esplendor, A, orch; El dolor, B, orch; Hasta que el cruel, T, orch; Hasta que mi contrario, B, orch; La dulce memoria, T, orch; La tranquilidad, S, orch; Si el arca; Varón perfecto

8 masses, 3–4vv, orch; requiem, 4vv, orch; motets, psalms, lamentations, other sacred works, 3–8vv, orch

instrumental

Orch: Conc., 2 bn, orch; 19 sinfonías, 8 ed. J.M. Vilar (Barcelona, 1996–7), many arr. by Baguer for solo kbd, 3 ed. M.A. Ester-Sala (Madrid, 1984); Pastorela, D

8 duos, 2 fl

Kbd: 7 sonatas, ed. M.A. Ester-Sala (Madrid, 1976); rondos, sinfonías, minuets, contredances, preludes, fugues, versos, other pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Saldoni: Diccionario biográfico-bibliográfico de efemérides de músicos españoles, i (Madrid, 1868/R)

F. Pedrell: Catàlech de la Biblioteca musical de la Diputació de Barcelona, i (Barcelona, 1908)

M.A. Ester-Sala: ‘Algunos datos biográficos de Carlos Baguer (1768–1808), organista de la catedral de Barcelona’, RdMc, vi/1 (1983), 223–51

M.A. Ester-Sala and J.M.Vilar: ‘Una aproximació als fons de manuscrits musicals a Catalunya’, AnM, xlii (1987), 229–44; xliv (1989), 155–66; xlvi (1991), 295–320

J.M. Vilar: ‘The Symphony in Catalonia c1760–1808’, Music in Spain during the Eighteenth Century: Cardiff 1993

J.M. Vilar: Les simfonies de Carles Baguer: fonts, context i estil (diss., Autonomous U. of Barcelona, 1994)

JOSEP M. VILAR TORRENS

Baguette

(Fr.).

A drumstick (as baguette de tambour), the stick of a Bow, or a conductor's Baton.

Bahatïrow [Bogatïryov], Anatol' Vasil'yevich

(b Vitebsk, 31 July/13 Aug 1913). Belarusian composer. He graduated from the Conservatory of Belarus' in 1937 where he studied under Zolotaryov. He was chairman of the board of the Belarusian Union of Composers (1938–41 and 1942–9) and pro-rector of the Sverdlovsk Conservatory (1941–3). From 1948 he taught composition at the National Conservatory, Minsk (rector 1948–62, professor 1960, head of department 1962) where his pupils included Hlebaw, Luchanok, Mdivani and Smol'sky. He was awarded many honours including the USSR State Prize (1941). Bahatïrow is one of the founders and leading representatives of the Belarusian school; he composed one of the first national operas – U pushchakh Palessya (‘In the Virgin Forests of the Poles'ye’) – while his contribution to the development of the genres of cantata, oratorio, a cappella chorus and the romance has been considerable. Whether vocal or instrumental, his works are arresting for the richness of their melodies and for their polyphonic textures. Remaining true to traditional tonal thinking, Bahatïrow enriched his style by unique use of natural modal systems and by the employment of rhythmic characteristics of Belarusian folk music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: V pushchakh Palessya [In the Virgin Forests of the Poles'ye] (Ye. Romanovich, after Ya. Kolas: Drïgva [Quagmire]), 1939, Minsk, 28 Aug 1939; Nadezhda Durova (I. Keller), 1946, Minsk, 22 Dec 1956

Vocal: Skaz o medvedikhe [The Tale about the She-Bear] (cant., A.S. Pushkin), 1937; Leningradtsï [The Citizens of Leningrad] (cant., Dzhambul), 1942; Belaruskim partïzanam [To the Belarusian Partisans] (cant., Ya. Kupala), 1943; Belarus' (cant., P. Brovka, P. Trus, Kupala), 1949; Belaruskiya pesni [Belarusian Songs] (cant., trad., N. Gilevich), 1967; Yubileynaya kantata [Jubilee Cant.] (Kolas), 1973; Bitva za Belarus' [The Battle for Belarus'] (orat, G. Buravkin, N. Gilevich, A. Kuleshov), 1985; Malyunki rodnaga krayu [Drawings of our Native Land] (cant., trad., Gilevich), chorus, Belarusian folk orch, 1987; choruses, romances, song cycles (A. Akhmatova and others), folk song arrs.

Inst: Pf Trio, 1943; Sonata, trbn, 1946; Sonata, vn, 1946; Sym. [no.1], orch, 1946; Sym. [no.2], orch, 1947; Sonata, vc, 1950; Pf Sonata, 1958; Vc Conc., 1962; Db Conc., 1964; Sonata, db, 1965; 12 Preludes, pf, 1995

Orthodox Church music, incid music, film scores

Principal publishers: Belgiz, Muzgiz, Muzïka, Sovetskiy kompozitor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Dubkova: Anatol' Bahatïrow (Minsk, 1972)

T. Dubkova: ‘Simfonii Bahatïrowa’, Belaruskaya simfoniya (Minsk, 1974), 150–61

T. Leshchenya: O putyakh rasshireniya narodnoy diatoniki v garmonicheskom yazïke kantatï A. Bogatïreva ‘Belaruskiya pesni’ [On the ways that Bahatïrow extends folk diatonicism in the harmonic language of his cantata ‘Belarusian songs’], Voprosï teorii i istorii muzïki, ed. K. Stepantsevich (Minsk, 1976), 36–53

YELENA SOLOMAKHA

Baher, Joseph.

See Beer, Joseph.

Bahia.

Brazilian state. See Salvador.

Bahr [Bähr], Johann

(b ?Schleswig, c1610; d Visby, Gotland, 3 June 1670). Swedish organist and composer of German birth. He went to Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, about 1630 as a poor music student in search of his brother. In 1633 he was appointed assistant organist to David Herlicius at the cathedral there, and at Herlicius's death in 1638 he became organist and registrar. He retained these posts until his death. On his arrival at Visby he had in his possession an organ tablature (now in S-VIl) copied in 1611 by Berendt Petri, who was probably a pupil of Jacob Praetorius (ii) in Hamburg. On the inside cover (now missing) he wrote ‘Johann Bahr organ m.m.: Anno 1638’, and for this reason the book is often misleadingly referred to as the Johann Bahr Tablature Book. His ownership of it suggests that he studied with Praetorius or Petri. The book contains compositions by Praetorius and his father, Hieronymus, as well as many anonymous pieces, possibly by the latter. On pages left blank by Petri, Bahr wrote out two organ pieces and two vocal concertos of his own composition (all ed. in Kite-Powell). The Magnificat a 4 voci octavi toni has three verses and is markedly influenced by the style of the pieces in the tablature; O lux beata Trinitas, dated 20 March 1655, is in the manner of a chorale fantasia consisting principally of passages using echo devices. The four-part concerto So ziehet hin is for two discants (instrumental or vocal), tenor, bass and continuo, and the solo concerto Befiehle dem Herrn deine Wege, dated 15 October 1666, is for discant or tenor and continuo (both ed. A. Sjögren, Slite, 1970). All four works are written in the new German organ tablature notation. The alto parts of two other vocal pieces by Bahr, Adora me in die and Die nobis Maria, are in the Källunge book (VIl).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

B. Anrep-Nordin: Johan Bahr: en gotländsk kompositör och organist (Stockholm, 1914) [orig. pubd in Musiktidningen xvi (1914)]

A. Sjögren: ‘Johann Bahr: gotländsk tonsättare’, Hundra kyrkornas ö, xlviii (1970)

J.T. Kite-Powell: The Visby (Petri) Organ Tablature: Investigation and Critical Edition (Wilhelmshaven, 1979–80)

JEFFERY T. KITE-POWELL

Bähr, Johann.

See Beer, Johann.

Bähr, (Franz) Josef

(b 19 Feb 1770; d Vienna, 7 Aug 1819). Austrian clarinettist. He was employed as a clarinettist from 1787 to 1794 in the Hofkapelle of Prince Kraft Ernst of Oettingen-Wallerstein. The prince sent him to Würzburg to study with the clarinet virtuoso Philipp Meissner, and in 1794 Bähr left on a concert tour to Potsdam and Ludwigslust. In 1796 he went to Vienna on a tour accompanied by the composer Friedrich Witt. About 1797 he resigned his position and entered the service of Count Johann Joseph Liechtenstein, who had brought his orchestra to Vienna for the season. The Liechtenstein family was associated with Beethoven, and it is quite possible that all of Beethoven’s solo clarinet parts composed between 1796 and 1802 were written for Bähr. Reviews of his playing were quite complimentary.

Bähr has often been confused with the better-known virtuoso Josef Beer because of the similarity of names. When both of these clarinettists performed in the same city Bähr received the greater praise for his playing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

L. Schiedermair: ‘Die Blütezeit der Öttingen-Wallerstein’schen Hofkapelle’, SIMG, ix (1907–8), 83–130

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971)

M. Jacob: Die Klarinettenkonzerte von Carl Stamitz (Wiesbaden, 1991)

ALBERT R. RICE

Bähr, Joseph.

See Beer, Joseph.

Bahrain

(Arab. Dawlat al Bahrayn).

An independent state, consisting of an archipelago of islands, in the Arabian Gulf.

Bahr-Mildenburg [née Mildenburg von Bellschau], Anna

(b Vienna, 29 Nov 1872; d Vienna, 27 Jan 1947). Austrian soprano. Having studied with Rosa Papier, she sang in 1895 to the Hamburg impresario Pollini, including in a formidable audition programme Bellini’s ‘Casta diva’, Weber’s ‘Ozean, du Ungeheuer’, Ortrud’s curse, Brünnhilde’s battle-cry and arias of Donna Anna and the Queen of Night. Pollini immediately engaged her, and presented her as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre on 12 September 1895 in a performance conducted by Mahler. This was the beginning of a relationship between the young singer and Mahler which was personally emotional and somewhat tempestuous, but artistically harmonious and fruitful. Though greatly admired in Hamburg, she soon followed Mahler to Vienna, where she remained a much valued member of the company from 1898 until 1916, returning as a guest in 1920 and 1921. She excelled in all the great Wagner roles (including Kundry, which she often sang at Bayreuth between 1897 and 1914) and as the heroines of Fidelio, Oberon and Don Giovanni (Donna Anna); she also appeared successfully as Norma and in other Italian parts. In 1906 she was seen at Covent Garden as Isolde and Elisabeth; she made a still greater impression in the Beecham seasons of spring and winter 1910, and in 1913, especially for her masterly study of Strauss’s Clytemnestra (see illustration). With such demands placed on it, her voice began to show signs of deterioration, and she gradually relinquished the heavier roles in favour of less vocally strenuous parts. As an intimate friend of the Wagner family, she assisted Cosima in her work at Bayreuth and later undertook similar duties with the Munich Opera. In 1922 and 1925 she appeared as an actress at the Salzburg Festival, and in 1927 gave an operatic recital there at the Mozarteum. Her one recording, made in 1904, is of the recitative only of Weber’s ‘Ozean’ aria, and gives a good, though tantalizing, impression of her brilliant voice and commanding style. In 1909 she married the Viennese author Hermann Bahr (1863–1934).

WRITINGS

with H. Bahr: Bayreuth und das Wagner-Theater (Leipzig, 1912; Eng. trans., 1913)

Erinnerungen (Vienna and Berlin, 1921)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Stefan: Anna Bahr-Mildenburg (Vienna, 1922)

H.-L. de La Grange: Mahler, i (New York, 1973)

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR

Bai, Tommaso.

See Baj, Tommaso.

Baiczka, Franz Xaver.

See Woschitka, Franz Xaver.

Baïf, Jean-Antoine de

(b Venice, 19 Feb 1532; d Paris, 19 Sept 1589). French poet. He was the illegitimate son of Lazare de Baïf (c1496–1547), a humanist and translator who served as François I's ambassador to Venice between 1529 and 1534. He studied Latin and Greek under Charles Estienne and Jacques Toussaint (1540–44). Like Ronsard, he continued his studies with Jean Dorat at the Collège de Cocqueret (1547–50) and became associated with the young literary group known as the Brigade and subsequently as the Pléiade. His first significant collection of 42 Petrarchan sonnets with 32 sensual ‘baisers’ and ‘chansons’ (based mainly on Latin or neo-Latin elegiac or erotic models) was published in 1552 as Les amours de J.-A. de B. and republished in the Euvres of 1573 as Les amours de Méline. In 1554 he accompanied Jacques Tahureau to Poitiers, where he fell in love with Françoise de Gennes, to whom he dedicated the Italianate sonnets and voluptuous chansons of his Quatre livres de l'amour de Francine (1555). Having received the tonsure, he enjoyed four church livings as well as a pension, first granted by François II and subsequently continued by Charles IX, whom he served as secretary. Much of the occasional and official verse which he wrote for the court appeared collectively in the Euvres of 1573, as did his neo-classical tragedy Antigone, his comedy Le brave (adapted from Plautus and staged in January 1567) and his eclogues.

Important as his innovations in drama and bucolic verse (eclogues) were, Baïf's most radical work dates from 1567, when he experimented with a new poetic style, the vers mesurés à l’antique, in order to achieve a closer union of verse and music. Here he made use of the quantitative metres of classical poetry in an attempt to revive the fabled moral and spiritual ‘effects’ of the ancients. Collaborating with the musician Joachim Thibault de Courville, he founded the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, the statutes of which were confirmed by letters patent from Charles IX. The Académie met regularly at Baïf's Paris home in the Fossés-St-Victor from May 1571 until 1576. It comprised ‘musiciens’ (poets, singers and instrumentalists) and ‘auditeurs’ (subscribers) and promoted the composition and performance of musique mesurée as well as intellectual, artistic and physical disciplines of many kinds. Henri III changed the enterprise to the Académie du Palais, holding meetings at the Louvre and indulging, under the guidance of Guy du Faur de Pibrac, in more philosophical debate and oratory.

Although the first Académie guarded the art of measured verse and music as secret, Baïf devised a new phonetic orthography in order to fix the pronunciation and thereby to determine the value of syllables and to regulate the laws of prosody. His first extended work in measured verse was a translation of the Psalter, which he began in 1567 (see Groth). He completed a second metrical translation by 1573 and a third, in rhymed verse, by 1587 (see Le Hir); manuscript copies of these, with three books of measured ‘chansonnettes’, survive (F-Pn fr.19140). In 1623 Mersenne referred to another measured version of the Psalms in Latin as being set to music by Le Jeune and Mauduit: this is now lost. Some of the psalms were printed, as were settings of chansonnettes mesurées (many not in the Paris manuscript) by Courville, Beaulieu and Caietain (1576), Lassus (1576), Le Blanc (1578), La Grotte (1583), Le Jeune (1583–1603), Mauduit (1586) and Du Caurroy (1610). The only collection published by the poet himself was the Etrénes (1574), which included official odes and translations of Greek gnomics but which betrayed the basic principles of measured verse by appearing without music.

Baïf reverted to rhymed verse with the Latin Carminum (1577) and the three editions of Mimes, enseignemens et proverbes (1576, 1587 and 1597), which reflect the new vogue for sententious poetry instigated by Pibrac's Quatrains (1574). His last works (Epitafes de feu M. Anne de Joieuse and Prières) are characterized by religious lyricism. On 1 November 1589 his friend Mauduit rescued his unpublished manuscripts from his home in the suburbs of Paris during the invasion of Henri IV's troops.

Baïf stressed rhythm rather than harmony as the prime element in lyric verse: an innovator in versification and prosody, he helped to establish the Alexandrine (12-syllable line), invented the 15-syllable vers baïfin and displayed great diversity of strophic forms and metrical patterns in his odes, chansons, chansonnettes and psalms. The weakness of measured verse was the arbitrary element in quantifying vowels by the 2:1 ratio in a language with accentual rhythm; by establishing fixed rules (he insisted for instance that all vowels followed by two consonants be long) he confused accent and quantity, counting stressed syllables as long and unstressed as short, and thus in many cases ignoring the effects of tonic accent. Yet his experiment had important results for music, liberating the rhythm of the new air from the chanson's conventional octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines, creating novel syncopations and fluctuating metres. In this he worked closely with Courville, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Le Jeune and Mauduit, whom he praised in his poetry. Some of his earlier sonnets and chansons were set by Janequin (RISM 1556¹⁴), Arcadelt (1557¹⁵), François Roussel (1559¹³) and Clereau (1559). Contemporary bibliographies by Antione Du Verdier (1587) and Philippe Maréchal (1598) refer to a collection of 12 chansons spirituelles by Baïf set for four voices by Adrian Le Roy in 1562; La Borde's Essai sur la musique (1780, iv, p.11) even suggests that the poet wrote both its words and music. Baïf dedicated a sonnet to Adrian Le Roy in Janequin's Verger de musique (1559) and in the Euvres (1573) there is an epitaph to Alberto da Ripa and an estrene to Costeley.

Baïf's measured verse made an immediate impact in England and is reflected in the work of Spenser, Harvey, Sidney, Webbe, Fraunce, Ascham and Campion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MersenneHU

M. Mersenne: Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1623)

C. Marty-Laveaux, ed.: Euvres en rime de Jean Antoine de Baïf (Paris, 1881–90/R)

E.J. Groth. ed.: Jean Antoine de Baïfs Psaultier (Heilbronn, 1888)

M. Augé-Chiquet: La vie, les idées et l'oeuvre de Jean-Antoine de Baïf (Paris, 1909/R)

H. Chamard: Histoire de la Pléiade (Paris, 1939–40/R)

D.P. Walker: ‘Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries’, MR, ii (1941), 1–13, 111–21, 220–27, 288–303; iii (1942), 55–71; Ger. trans. pubd separately as Der musikalische Humanismus im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel, 1949)

D.P. Walker: ‘The Aims of Baïf's Académie de poésie et de musique’, JRBM, i (1946–7), 91–100

F.A. Yates: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947/R)

D.P. Walker: ‘The Influence of musique mesurée à l'antique, particularly on the airs de cour of the Early Seventeenth Century’, MD, ii (1948), 141–63

D.P. Walker: ‘Some Aspects and Problems of musique mesurée à l'antique: the Rhythm and Notation of musique mesurée’, MD, iv (1950), 163–86

Y. Le Hir, ed.: J.-A. de Baïf: Le psautier de 1587 (Paris, 1963)

G.C. Bird, ed.: Jean Antoine de Baïf: Chansonnettes (Vancouver, 1964)

R.J. Sealy: The Palace Academy of Henry III (Geneva, 1981)

P. Bonniffet: Un ballet démasqué: ĺ'union de la musique au verbe dans ‘Le Printans’ de Jean-Antoine de Baïf et Claude Le Jeune (Paris and Geneva, 1988)

J. Vignes: Jean-Antoine de Baïf (Paris, 1999)

FRANK DOBBINS

Baij, Tommaso.

See Baj, Tommaso.

Baildon, Joseph

(b c1727; d London, bur. 2 May 1774). English composer and singer. He was for some time a lay clerk in Westminster Abbey and in 1754, 1758 and 1759 took part in the Foundling Hospital performances of Messiah under Handel. He was described in the subsequent list of Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1760) as organist of St Luke’s, Old Street, and All Saints, Fulham. Baildon’s best songs rival those of T.A. Arne and his music for ‘When is it best’, with which he won the Catch Club prize in 1763, was occasionally borrowed for the theatre by Arne and Stephen Storace (ii). In accordance with the spirit of the age Baildon sometimes parodied Handel, as for example with the extravagant figuration in ‘A Complaint’. The songs in the final version of The Laurel almost constitute a song cycle.

His brother Thomas Baildon (d London, 1 Oct 1762) was a member of the choirs of St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal; he sang in the Foundling Hospital performances mentioned above and was also in demand as a soloist. He composed some songs in Clio and Euterpe (London, 1758–9).

WORKS

printed works published in London

Sacred: St Luke’s, St Luke’s New, Fulham, hymn tunes in Parochial Harmony, ed. W. Riley (1762); Behold how joyful a thing it is, anthem, in Harmonia Sacra, ed. J. Page, ii (1800); Behold how good, anthem, GB-Lbl; Melodies for the Psalms … according to the version of Christopher Smart (c1760); single and double chants in Divine Harmony, ed. T. Vandermant (1770)

Song collections: A New Favourite Cantata and 2 Songs … sung by Mr Lowe at Vauxhall (1750); The Laurel: a New Collection of English Songs sung by Mr Lowe and Miss Faulkner at Marybone-Gardens (1750–57, enlarged as The Laurel: a Collection of English Songs sung by Miss Stevenson and Mr Beard, c1784); A Collection of New Songs sung … at Ranelagh (1760); A Collection of New Songs, sung by Mr Beard, Miss Stevenson and Miss Formantel (1765); A Collection of Glees and Catches (1768)

Many solo and partsongs pubd singly and in 18th-century anthologies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxii (1762), 504 only

W.A. Barrett: English Glees and Part-Songs (London, 1886)

PERCY M. YOUNG

Baile.

A Spanish term with a wide variety of connotations, all relating to dance. It can refer simply to an occasion for social dancing (thus as an equivalent of the English ‘ball’), or to a specific dance type like the waltz or the minuet, or it can be used as the Spanish equivalent of ‘ballet’. Some 17th-century writers (e.g. Rodrigo Caro and Gonzalo de Salas) distinguished between ‘baile’ and the nearly synonymous ‘danza’, saying that ‘danza’ referred to a courtly, ceremonious dance using grave and measured steps and little or no arm movement, while ‘baile’ referred to an energetic dance involving arm gestures, especially if performed in the theatre. Thus pavans were considered ‘danzas’ while zarabandas and ciacconas were ‘bailes’.

During the 17th and 18th centuries the term ‘baile’ was used for a specific literary form, a combination of poetry, music and dance performed between the second and third acts of a play (thus resembling the intermezzo; see Intermezzo (ii)). These bailes consisted of rhymed poetry recited by one or more actors to a usually simple musical accompaniment. Despite the dance connotations of the term, not all theatrical bailes actually included dancing, although most at least had dance-songs (e.g. sung minués). The bailes included in the plays of Lope de Vega are considered unusual for their dominance of dance over poetry. See also Spain, §II, 4.

In Central America ‘baile’ refers to a genre of music-dramatic spectacle performed at religious festivals that combine Christian and pre-Christian imagery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.A. Barbieri: ‘Danzas y bailes en España en los siglos XVI y XVII’, La ilustración española y americana, xliii–xliv (1887), 330

F. Pedrell: Teatro lírico español anterior al siglo XIX (La Coruña, 1897)

E. Cotarelo y Mori: Colección de entremese, loas, bailes, jácara y mojigangas desde fines del siglo XVI à mediados del XVIII (Madrid, 1911)

M.N. Hamilton: Music in 18th-Century Spain (Urbana, 1937)

Bailecito [bailecito de tierra].

A couple-dance common to the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and northern Argentina, featuring zapateo (foot-stamping), handkerchief-waving and other circular movements. Melodies are frequently pentatonic and performed in parallel 3rds to melancholy seguidilla verses. A common trait is the contrast between the 3/4 melodies of the voices, violin, harp and accordion, and the syncopated 6/8 accompaniment of the caja (frame drum), bombo (bass drum), guitar and charango.

WILLIAM GRADANTE

Bailey [née Rinker], Mildred

(b Tekoa, WA, 27 Feb 1907; d Poughkeepsie, NY, 12 Dec 1951). American jazz singer. She was educated in Spokane, Washington, and began her career on the West Coast as a cinema pianist and radio performer. In 1929 she made her first recording (with Eddie Lang), and from then until 1933 sang with the band led by Paul Whiteman, to whom she was introduced by her brother, Al Rinker, a member of the vocal trio Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys. On radio, she sang for the shows of George Jessel and Willard Robison (1934–5) and with Benny Goodman (1939). From 1936 to 1939 Bailey performed Eddie Sauter’s arrangements in Red Norvo’s band. During the 1930s she was known as the ‘Rockin’ Chair Lady’ because of her renditions of Hoagy Carmichael’s song Rockin’ Chair (1932, Vic.) Despite recurrent illness after 1940, Bailey continued to perform.

Bailey was the first white singer to absorb and master the jazz-flavoured phrasing, enunciation, embellishments, improvisatory fervour and swinging rhythm of her black contemporaries, notably Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She was essentially a jazz musician and at her best when inspired by a band of the finest players; she often used her voice as if it were the lead instrument, and was a skilled scat singer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Esposito: ‘That Rockin’ Chair Lady’, JJ, xxv/2 (1972), 2–3

S. Dance: The World of Swing (New York, 1974), 391–5

H. Pleasants: ‘Mildred Bailey’, The Great American Popular Singers (London, 1974), 143–56

M. Pinfold: ‘Dead, but not Remembered’, JJ, xxx/12 (1977), 12–13, 20 only

D. Chamberlain and R.Wilson, eds.: The Otis Ferguson Reader (Highland Park, IL, c1982)

L. Gourse: ‘Tales of Big-Band-Era Singers’, Louis’ Children: American Jazz Singers (New York, 1984), 100–05

RAYMONDE S. KRAMLICH/R, HENRY PLEASANTS

Bailey, Norman (Stanley)

(b Birmingham, 23 March 1933). English baritone. He studied at Rhodes University, South Africa, and at the Vienna Music Academy, making his début with the Vienna Chamber Opera as Tobias Mill in Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio in 1959. He sang at Linz (1960–63) and in Germany (1963–7), where his roles included Rigoletto, Boccanegra, Nabucco and Renato. He joined the Sadler’s Wells Opera (later the ENO) in 1967, making his British début in Manchester as Mozart’s Count Almaviva; he celebrated his 25th anniversary with the company in 1992 as Sharpless. His London début, as Hans Sachs under Goodall (1968), established him as a Wagnerian of more than local importance, and he later undertook the role at Covent Garden, in Hamburg, Brussels and Munich, and at Bayreuth. He was an equally impressive Wotan (in a new production of the Ring at the London Coliseum, 1970–73), while at Bayreuth (Gunther, Amfortas) and elsewhere he expanded his Heldenbariton repertory. In 1972, starting with Luna at the Coliseum, he resumed the big Italian roles of his early days in Germany. At the Coliseum Bailey sang Pizarro, Kutuzov (War and Peace), the Forester and Prince Gremin. His La Scala début was in 1967 as Dallapiccola’s Job. In 1975 he sang Hans Sachs with the New York City Opera and in 1976 made his début with the Metropolitan in the same role. In 1985 at Duisburg he created Johann Matthys in Goehr’s Behold the Sun. Later roles included Oroveso (1993) and Landgrave Herrmann in Tannhäuser (1997) for Opera North. In 1996 he made his Glyndebourne début, as Schigolch (Lulu). He was made a CBE in 1977. His timbre was definite, individual, firm, not rich or romantic in an italianate manner. Clarity, incisiveness and high musical intelligence distinguished his interpretations, as can be heard in his authoritative recordings of Wotan and Hans Sachs. His command of musical gesture, his vivid projection and his ‘three-dimensional’ presentation of a character have given his performances at once romance and uncommon dramatic power. (E. Forbes: ‘Norman Bailey’, Opera, xxiv, 1973, 774–80)

ANDREW PORTER

Bailey, Robert

(b Flint, MI, 21 June 1937). American musicologist. He received the BA from Dartmouth College in 1959. Following a year of study at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich, he began graduate work in musicology at Princeton University. He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann during this time, and his Princeton professors included Oliver Strunk and Milton Babbitt; he received the MFA from Princeton in 1962 and the PhD in 1969. Bailey taught at Yale University from 1964 to 1977. He was on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music, first as associate professor (1977–85) and then as professor (1985–6); in 1986 he was appointed Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University and a member of the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School.

In his research, Bailey has concentrated on German music of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Wagner, Brahms and Mahler, and on 19th-century musical autographs. In addition to his more strictly academic activities, he has lectured on Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival (1990 and 1992) and at the Seattle Opera (1991).

WRITINGS

‘Wagner’s Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H.S. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 459–94; repr. in The Garland Library of the History of Western Music, ed. E. Rosand, xii (New York, 1985), 91–126

The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde’, and a Study of Wagner’s Sketches and Drafts for the First Act (diss., Princeton U., 1969)

‘The Evolution of Wagner’s Compositional Procedure after Lohengrin’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 240–46

‘The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 48–61

‘Visual and Musical Symbolism in German Romantic Opera’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 436–44

‘The Method of Composition’, The Wagner Companion, ed. P. Burbidge and R. Sutton (London, 1979), 269–338

‘Musical Language and Structure in the Third Symphony’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 405–22

‘Musical Language and Formal Design in the Symphonies of Kurt Weill’, ‘A Stranger Here Myself’: Kurt Weill Studien, ed. K.H. Kowalke and H. Edler (Hildesheim, 1993), 207–15

PAULA MORGAN

Bailleux, Antoine

(b c1720; d Paris, c1798). French publisher, composer and teacher. On 27 April 1765 he took over the music publishing house known as A la Règle d’Or, which comprised businesses once owned by Boivin, Ballard and Bayard. During some 30 years he issued many works by both French and foreign composers, the latter including not only early masters like Corelli and Vivaldi, but also some of those who were influential in the development of the emerging Classical school: Carl Stamitz, Haydn, Piccinni, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Boccherini and Clementi. French composers included Gossec, Davaux, Monsigny and Brassac, and some of the earlier generation, Lully, Lalande and Campra. One of his major publications was the Journal d’ariettes des plus célèbres compositeurs, comprising 240 works issued in 63 volumes (scores and parts) from 1779 to 1788. Bailleux’s adoption of the royal privilege granted to the Ballard family led to his imprisonment during the Terror. He was released after the coup d'état of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). His publishing house was taken over by Erard between 1798 and 1801.

Although it was probably as a publisher that Bailleux exerted his greatest influence on French music, his compositions, especially the symphonies, must also be reckoned as interesting contributions to the music of their day. The stimulus of mid-century Italianism in France (after the 1752 performance of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, a work which Bailleux was to publish) can clearly be seen in his music. For his first published compositions, Sei sinfonie a quatro published by Bayard c1758, he even styled himself Antonio Bailleux; in a considerably later work, the cantatille Pigmalion (1770), the music is described as being in ‘le goût italien’ and stands in striking contrast to the Baroque texture of the earlier, more characteristic French cantata. As a teacher Bailleux’s qualities may be gauged from his Méthode raisonée pour apprendre à jouer du violon cited by La Laurencie as an important contribution to the pedagogy of the subject.

WORKS

all published in Paris

vocal

6 cantatilles: Le bouquet de l’amitié, 1v, orch (1758), Borée et Orithie (1760), Le prix de la beauté, 1v, bc (c1760), La vengeance de l’Amour, 1v, orch (1761), L’Hymne à Bacchus (1761), Pigmalion (1770)

Ariettes: Le berger malheureux (1758); La timidité (1765); Le ruisselet, with insts (1766); L’amour bravé, with insts (1771); Recueil d’ariettes choisis dans les meilleurs opéra-comiques (1773)

Duos: Duo français (1761); La constance couronnée, S, T, insts (1761)

Les petits concerts de Paris, airs, 1–3vv, some with hpd/hp, vn/fl acc. (1768)

Ode patriotique sur la prise de Toulon par les Français, et 2 romances, pf acc. (1794)

instrumental

6 sinfonia a quatro, 2 vn, va, b (1756–8)

6 symphonies à grande orchestre, op.11 (c1767)

pedagogical works

Méthode de chant (Paris, 1760)

Méthode pour apprendre facilement la musique vocale et instrumentale … et 100 leçons dans le goût nouveau à 1 et 2 parties (Paris, 1770, 3/1770 as Solfèges)

Méthode de guitarre par musique et tablature (Paris, 1773/R)

Nouveaux solfèges d’Italie avec la basse … suite aux Solfèges (Paris, 1783)

Méthode raisonnée pour apprendre à jouer du violon … précédé des principes de musique (Paris, 1798)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

DEMF, i

FétisB

HopkinsonD

JohanssonFMP

La LaurencieEF

J.P. Larsen: ‘Der musikalische Stilwandel um 1750 im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Pariser Verlagskataloge’, Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1968), 410–23

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)

DAVID TUNLEY

Baillie, Alexander

(b Stockport, 6 Jan 1956). English cellist. He studied with Joan Dickson and Anna Shuttleworth at the RCM (1972–5), with Navarra at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna (1975–8) and also with Fournier, Pleeth, Rostropovich and du Pré. He was a prizewinner in the ARD Competition in Munich (1978) and the Casals Competition in Budapest (1982). He made his recital début at the Wigmore Hall in 1978 and his orchestral début playing Dutilleux's Toute un monde lointain with the BBC SO under Mark Elder in 1981. From 1978 to 1980 he was a member of the Fires of London. Baillie also plays in the Villiers Piano Quartet, and in recital with the pianists Piers Lane and Kathron Sturrock. Several composers have dedicated works to him, including Colin Matthews (First Concerto and Three Enigmas), Gordon Crosse (Wavesongs), Mark-Anthony Turnage (Sleep On) and Richard Rodney Bennett (Sonata). He has also given the premières of Takemitsu's Orion and Pleiades, Schnittke's Cello Sonata and Lutosławski's Grave. His recordings include Britten's Sonata and suites for solo cello as well as contemporary British works. He was appointed visiting professor at the RCM in 1994 and professor at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen in 1995.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Campbell: ‘Alexander Baillie: a Profile’, The Strad, xciii (1982–3), 480–84

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Baillie, Dame Isobel

(b Hawick, Roxburghshire, 9 March 1895; d Manchester, 24 Sept 1983). Scottish soprano. She was brought up in Manchester and studied there before going to Milan. She made her London début in 1923 and was for more than 30 years one of Britain’s leading oratorio sopranos, particularly renowned for her singing in Messiah, Elijah and Brahms’s German Requiem. She sang at Covent Garden in Gluck’s Orphée in 1937, but did not consider opera her true métier. She was also an engaging recitalist, continuing to sing until well into her seventies. Her voice had a treble-like purity; ‘angelic’ was sometimes applied to it to suggest the effect, ‘not so much personal as brightly and serenely spiritual, made by her soaring and equable tones’ (R. Capell, Grove5). Her many recordings, particularly her early ones, give a fair idea of her attributes. An autobiography, Never Sing Louder than Lovely, was published in London in 1982. She was made a DBE in 1978.

ALAN BLYTH

Baillion [Ballioni, Baillon], Luigi de.

See Baillou, Luigi de.

Baillot, Pierre (Marie François de Sales)

(b Passy, nr Paris, 1 Oct 1771; d Paris, 15 Sept 1842). French violinist and composer. He showed remarkable talent when very young and, according to Fétis, was taught first by the Florentine Polidori and then by Sainte-Marie. When his father died in 1783 Baillot was placed under the care of M. de Boucheporn, a high government official, who sent him with his own children to Rome. There he was placed under the tuition of Nardini’s pupil Pollani. Between 1791 and 1795 he had a varied life in Paris, first as a violinist in the orchestra of the Théâtre Feydeau (an appointment gained thanks to Viotti, and one that led to a close friendship with Rode), then in the ministry of finance and afterwards in military service. However, his main enthusiasm was for music; when he was ten Viotti’s violin playing had fired his imagination. He applied himself with renewed zest to the study of the Classical violin composers and took lessons in composition from Catel, Reicha and Cherubini. After a successful public performance of a Viotti concerto he was appointed professor at the recently opened Conservatoire on 22 December 1795, at first temporarily as Rode's replacement, and then officially on 21 March 1799. In 1802 he joined Napoleon’s private orchestra to lead the second violins, and between 1805 and 1808 he toured Russia with brilliant success.

Baillot’s excellence as a chamber music player was firmly established when he led a series of concerts in Paris beginning in 1814 – both Mendelssohn and Spohr praised him enthusiastically – and his fame spread to Holland, Belgium and England where he toured in 1815–16. From 1821 to 1831 he was the leader of the orchestra of the Paris Opéra; from 1825 he occupied the same position in the orchestra of the Chapelle Royale, where he was officially appointed in 1827. In 1833 he made a final tour through Switzerland and Italy.

Baillot was the last representative of the Classical Paris school of violinists. A remarkable virtuoso, his playing was distinguished by a noble, powerful tone, neatness of execution and a pure, elevated style. It is said that he hid his face when Paganini played harmonies, left-hand pizzicatos or staccato passages. The founder in France of the first chamber music group of professional musicians, he made a major contribution to the diffusion of a hitherto unknown repertory (principally the quartets and quintets of Boccherini and Mozart and the quartets of Hadyn and Beethoven) as a result of his 154 concerts, organised between 12 December 1814 and 4 April 1840 and attended by an appreciative public; he also scheduled concerts of his own works (notably his ‘airs variés’) and those of his contemporaries (Cherubini, Onslow and Mendelssohn, but also Kreutzer, Rode, Romberg and Viotti among others). Respectful of the tradition he had inherited, he was responsible for a rediscovery of old music: J.S. Bach, Barbella, Corelli, Germiniani, Handel and Tartini.

A renowned and influential pedagogue, Baillot had numerous pupils, including Mazas, Sauzay, and Charles and Léopold Dancla. A prolific and talented composer, besides nine concertos and a symphonie concertante for two violins, he wrote ‘airs’ and ‘thèmes variés’, caprices and études, duos, trios, string quartets and a sonata for piano and violin. Although his compositions are almost entirely forgotten, L’art du violon (1834) still holds its place as a standard work. He took a prominent part with Viotti’s other two greatest pupils, Rode and Kreutzer, in compiling and editing the Méthode de violon and a similar work for the cello. His obituary notices of Grétry (Paris, 1814) and Viotti (Paris, 1825) and other occasional writings show remarkable critical power and elegance of style. He left an abundance of correspondence.

WORKS

published in Paris unless otherwise stated

orchestra with violin solo

Symphonie concertante, 2 vn, op.38, 1816 (Lyons)

9 concertos: no.1, op.3, 1802; no.2, op.6, c1804; no.3, op.7, c1804; no.4, op.10, c1805; no.5, op.13, 1807; no.6, op.18, 1811; no.7, op.21, 1809; no.8, op.22, 1809; no.9, op.30, cl820

Air russe, op.14, 1808; Thème varié, op.17, 1807; Air russe, op.24, 1807; Air ‘Vive Henri IV’ varié, op.27; Andante, op.29, 1817; Menuet favori de Pugnani varié, op.36, 1817 (Lyons)

chamber and solo violin music

Vn solo, 2 vn, va, b: Air russe varié, op.11, 1810; 3 airs français variés, op.15, 1807; Air russe varié, op.37, c1825

2vn, va, b: 3 airs russes variés, op.20, 1810; Romance variée et air russe, op.23, 1813; Charmante Gabrielle, air varié, op.25, 1814; 3 quatuors, op.34, 1805

2vn, b: 6 trios, op.1, 1800; 3 trios, op.4, 1803; 2 airs variés en trio, op.5, 1803; 3 trios, op.9, 1805; Air varié en trio de Paisiello, op.19, 1810; Air de Grétry varié en trio, op.33, 1815; 3 trios ou sonates, op.39, c1831; 2 trios, unpubd

Vn, pf: 3 airs variés, op.31, 1818; Sonate, op.32, 1820; 3 nocturnes op.35, 1821 (Lyons); Caprice, unpubd

2vn: 3 duos, op.8, 1804; 6 airs russes variés, op.12, 1806 [2nd vn acc.]; 3 duos, op.16, 1811; 24 études, op. posth. (1851 ) [2nd vn acc.]

Vn, b: 12 caprices, op.2, 1802; Andante, op.26, 1814; Air de la famille Suisse varié, op.28, 1815; Adagio et rondo, op.40; various unpubd pieces

pedagogical works

Méthode de violon (with Rode and Kreutzer) (1803/R)

Méthode de violoncelle (with Levasseur, Catel, Baudiot) (1804/R)

L’art du violon: nouvelle méthode (1834)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

EitnerQ

FétisB

L. Spohr: Selbstbiographie, ii (Kassel, 1860–61; Eng. trans., 1865/R, 2/1878/R); ed. E. Schmitz (1954–5), 129f

J. Tiersot, ed.: Lettres de musiciens écrites en français, i (Turin, 1924); ii (Paris, 1936)

P. Soccane: ‘Quelques documents inédits sur P. Baillot’, RdM, xx (1939), 71–8; xxii (1943), 15 only

B.François-Sappey: ‘Pierre Marie François de Sales Baillot (1771–1842) par lui-même: étude de sociologie musicale’, RMFC, xviii (1978), 126–211

J.-M. Fauquet: ‘La musique de chambre à Paris dans les années 1830’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties: Northampton, MA, 1982, 299–326

J. Mongrédien: La musique en France, des lumières au romantisme: 1789–1830 (Paris, 1986; Eng. trans., 1996)

PAUL DAVID/MANOUG PARIKIAN/MICHELLE GARNIER–BUTE

Baillou [Baylou, Ballion, Baillon, Baglioni], (Pietro) Luigi [Louis] (Francesco) de

(b Milan, 27 July 1936; d Milan, 14 March 1804). Italian violinist and composer. Burney’s erroneous alliance of Baillou with the famous 18th-century family of opera singers – the Baglioni – has led nearly every later writer to distinguish Luigi Baglioni the Stuttgart court violinist from the Milanese Luigi (Louis) de Baillou; but a programme for the ballet Le premier âge de l’innocence (in I-Ma) clearly states that the music was by ‘Monsieur Bailou, formerly in the service of the Most Serene Duke of Württemberg’, and a libretto for a Roman production of one of his ballets (Teatro Argentina, Carnival 1789) names the composer ‘Sig. Baglioni, primo viol. del ducal Teatro La Scala di Milano’.

Grigolato has shown that Baillou was born in Milan, not Paris, as Fétis and others have claimed; this is now confirmed by the discovery of his baptismal certificate in Milan Cathedral (under the metropolitan parish of S Tecla). There is documentation (in the archives of S Maria presso S Satiro) of the Baillou family’s presence in Milan from the second half of the 18th century onwards, although there is no information covering the years Baillou spent there before his appointment at Stuttgart (28 Jan 1762). Baillou may have studied in Paris with the virtuoso violinist Nicolas Capron, as Fétis reported, although no records of any Parisian orchestras of the late 1750s or early 1760s include his name. One of many foreign musicians at Stuttgart, Baillou advanced through the ranks to become first orchestral violin of the ducal orchestra by 1771. Little is known about his activities as a composer there however since the few works attributed to him are of doubtful authenticity. On 19 July 1774 he was dismissed along with all other remaining foreign musicians, and by the succeeding winter he had re-established himself in Milan where he remained until his death.

Between 1 February 1775 and 1 January 1777 Baillou composed scores for six ballets, four of them choreographed by the controversial Noverre, who had been at Stuttgart during Baillou’s tenure there. Baillou’s name does not appear again in Milanese productions until the inauguration of the Teatro alla Scala one and a half years later; during this period he wrote two ballets for Florence and possibly an opera for Stuttgart. The return to Milan of the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini coincided with Baillou’s elevation to the post of opera orchestra director at La Scala (1779), a prestigious position which he held for 23 years. Because Angiolini wrote his own ballet music, Baillou composed for the dance only during the choreographer’s sojourn at St Petersburg (1783–8), writing at least seven more ballets for La Scala. Also from 1783 Baillou was principal violinist and occasional spokesman for the newly founded Pio Istituto de’ Professori di Musica, an organization which provided employment for musicians and concerts for the city between the carnival and autumn opera seasons.

In January 1797 Bailiou contributed the ‘republican’ ballet Lucio Giunio Bruto for the first carnival season of Napoleon’s occupation of Milan. His last ballet; La disfatta di Abderamo written in collaboration with Capuci), was staged posthumously at the La Scala during the 1809 season. The registration of Baillou’s death on 14 March 1804, is held at the church of S Babila, Milan.

In the absence of Baillou’s ballet scores and of contemporary evaluations of them, little can be said about the quality of his efforts in his most important genre. His collaborations with Noverre were poorly received by Milanese audiences, but the cause lay with the choreographer, none of whose grandiose ballets succeeded there; indeed, Baillou continued to be called upon as a ballet composer for La Scala and his music was performed in Naples, Rome and elsewhere.

Baillou’s orchestral output, which includes five symphonies and an overture, reveals a brilliant, fluent, but not particularly inspired, composer: his themes are based on simple melodic ideas that are often repeated without modification; the harmony is fairly simple as is his orchestration. His pedagogic works include an Arpegio a 4 corde and Solfeggi; his duet for two violins and five trios were also probably composed for teaching purposes as they present only elementary difficulties.

Recent archive acquisitions (in I-Mt) reveal that several of Baillou’s children and grandchildren were also musicians. These include his son Francesco (b Ludwigsburg, 1772; d Milan (1842), first violin at La Scala and composer of two symphonies (I-Mc); His grandson Giuseppe (b Milan 1796; d Milan, 1739), a violinist at La Scala; and his granddaughter Felicita de Baillou Hillaret (b Milan 1804; dMilan 1871) a mezzo-soprano who sang leading roles at La Scala between 1831 and 1843.

WORKS

ballets

all performed as entr’actes; music lost

Rinaldo ed Armida (ballo eroico, 5, J.-G. Noverre), Milan, Regio Ducal, Feb 1775, in C. Monza’s Alessandro nell’Indie

Festa di villaggio (Noverre), Milan, Regio Ducal, 1 Feb 1775, in Monza’s Alessandro nell’Indie

Le premier âge de l’innocence, ou La rosière de Salency (ballet pantomime, 12 scenes, Noverre), Milan, Regio Ducal, Aug 1775, in Paisiello’s La Frascatana

La nuova sposa persiana (3 scenes, Noverre), Milan, Regio Ducal, 27 Jan 1776, in Traetta’s La Merope

Il disertor francese (ballo pantomimo, 5, D. Ricciardi), Milan, Interinale, 8 Oct 1776, in Antossi’s L’avaro

Andromaca e Pirro (ballo tragico pantomimo, 4, Ricciardi), Milan, Interinale, 1 Jan 1777, in Bertoni’s Artaserse

Il Tancredi, Florence, della Pergola, 13 Sept 1777, in Sarti’s Medonte, rè di Epiro

La guinguette allemande, Florence, della Pergola, 13 Sept 1777, in Sarti’s Medonte, rè di Epiro

Apollo placato (azione teatrale pantomimica, 3 scenes, G. Canziani), Milan, La Scala, 3 Aug 1778, in Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta; with recit, aria, chorus by Salieri

Mirza (V. Monari), Milan, La Scala, 9 Aug 1783, in Guglielmi’s I fratelli pappamosca

La guinguetta inglese (Monari), Milan, La Scala, 9 Aug 1783, in Guglielmi’s I fratelli pappamosca

La zingara riconosciuta (ballo comico pantomimo, 5, Monari), Milan, La Scala, aut. 1783, in Paisiello’s Il Socrate immaginario

Giulio Sabino (ballo eroico pantomimo, 5, P. Franchi), Milan, La Scala, 27 Dec 1783, in Tarchi’s Ademira

Ludovico il Moro (ballo eroico pantomimo, 5, S. Gallet), Milan, La Scala, 26 Dec 1785, in Rispoli’s Ipermestra

Il Vologeso (Gallet), Milan, La Scala, Jan 1786, in Tarchi’s Ariarate

Guatimozin, ossia La conquista del Messico (ballo eroico tragico pantomimo, 5, Franchi), Milan, La Scala, Jan 1787, in Zingarelli’s Ifigenia in Aulide

Bellezza e onestà, Osia Una cosa rara (ballo eroicomico, F. Beretti), Rome, Argentina, carn. 1789, collab. V. Martín y Soler

Lucio Giunio Bruto (ballo eroico tragico pantomimo, 5, Franchi), Milan, La Scala, Jan 1797, in Zingarelli’s Meleagro

Die beiden Nebenbuhlerinnen (Die allzustrenge Probe) (P. Angiolini), Vienna, Kärntnertor, 20 Jan 1809

La disfatta di Abderamo, ossia Consalvo di Cordova (ballo serio, 5, De Rossy), Milan, La Scala, 9 April 1809, collab. A. Capuci, in Weigl’s L’uniforme

other works

Aria in Gli avventurieri (op), I-Tf

4 syms., C, E, D, d; Ov., C, obbl insts; Padedù e Alemande, A, carn. 1796: Duet, G, 2 vn; Solfeggi, vn, b; Arpegio a 4 corde, vn: all Mc

Sinfonia, A, arr. hpd, IBborromeo; 5 trios, C, E, G, F, B 2vn, va, OS; Divertimento, E, CH-Zz; Marcia, f, F-Pn

doubtful works

Tancredi (op), Stuttgart Hof, 1770 or 1777, probably identical to ballet of same title

Il casino di campagna (comic op), Stuttgart, Hof, 1777

L’amante generosa (ballet, G. Canziani), Milan, Interinale, aut. 1777

Raimira ed Attida (ballet, L. Bardelli), Pavia, Associati, carn. 1792

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyGN

FétisB

MGG1 (G. Grigolato)

SartoriL

StiegerO

G. Chiappari: Serie cronologica delle rappresentazioni drammatico-pantomimiche poste sulle scene dei principali teatri di Milano dall’ autunno 1776 sino all’intero autunno 1818 (Milan, 1818–25)

J. Sittard: Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am württembergischen Hofe, ii (Stuttgart, 1891/R), 73, 144, 175–7, 194–7, 203–8, 211ff

R. Krauss: ‘Das Theater’, Herzog Karl Eugen von Württemberg und seine Zeit, i (Esslingen, 1907), 485–554, esp. 507, 530

E. Greppi and others, eds.: Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri [Oct 1766–Sept 1782] (Milan, 1923), vii, viii, xi

D. Lynham: The Chevalier Noverre: Father of Modern Ballet (London, and New York 1950/R), 152

W. Pfeilsticker: Neues Württembergisches Dienerbuch (Stuttgart, 1957), i, §885

G. Barblan: ‘La musica strumentale e cameristica a Milano nel ’700’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 619–60 esp. 654–6 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

G . Barblan: ‘L’Ottocento e gli inizi del secolo XX’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 668 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

C. Gatti: Il Teatro alla Scala nella storia e nell’arte 1778–1963 (Milan, 1964), ii, 147, 149–50, 156, 164

KATHLEEN KUZMICK HANSELL/CARLO BELLORA

Bailly, Henry du [de].

See Le Bailly, Henry.

Bails, Benito

(b San Adrián de Besós, nr Barcelona, 4 Feb 1730/31; d Madrid, 1797). Spanish mathematician. He attended university in France, at Toulouse and Perpignan. By 1755 he was in Paris, where he was acquainted with d’Alembert and became involved with work on the Encyclopédie. He returned to Spain in 1761 and in 1767 was appointed professor of mathematics at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando. He translated numerous foreign scientific writings, publishing them in the ten-volume Elementos de matemáticos (1772–83); the eighth volume contains a translation of d’Alembert’s Eléments de musique théorique et pratique, first published in 1752. An enthusiastic amateur musician, he prepared a Spanish version of Bemetzrieder and Diderot’s Leçons de clavecin, et principes d’harmonie (Paris, 1771) under the title Lecciones de clave y principios de harmonia (Madrid, 1775). In the dedication he described his frustration in endeavouring to learn keyboard improvisation until a friend showed him this work, which proved to be ‘the philosopher’s stone’. He was helped in preparing the translation by the royal organist Juan Sessé. Bails’s version is more a paraphrase than a translation; by suppressing the dialogue form and social small talk of the original, and by rearranging material, he achieved a clearer and more systematic though less entertaining approach to the subject. The modern harmonic concepts, wide-ranging modulations and advanced chord structures illustrated in the work were in striking contrast to the general conservatism of contemporary Spanish music pedagogy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SubiráHME

F.J. León Tello: La teoria española de la música en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Madrid, 1974)

A. Martín Moreno: Historia de la música española, iv: Siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1985), 434

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986), 55

F.J. León Tello: ‘D'Alembert en España: los elementos de música especulativa de Benito Bails’, Nassarre, xi/1–2 (1995), 275–98

ALMONTE HOWELL/ALMA ESPINOSA

Baily, Anselm.

See Bayly, Anselm.

Bainbridge, Simon (Jeremy)

(b London, 30 Aug 1952). English composer. Son of the painter John Bainbridge, he studied with Lambert (composition) and Sidney Fell (clarinet) at the RCM (1969–72) and with Schuller at Tanglewood (1973–4). He was Forman Fellow in Composition at the University of Edinburgh (1976–8), holder of a USA bicentennial fellowship (1978–9) and composer-in-residence at Southern Arts (1983–5). Subsequently he taught composition at the RCM (1988–2000), the GSM (1990–99), the University of Cardiff (1992) and the University of Louisville (1998-2000); in 1999 he was appointed head of composition at the RAM. His awards include the 1987 Gemini Fellowship, for which he wrote Cantus contra cantum for orchestra (1989), and the 1997 Grawemeyer Prize for Ad ora incerta (1994), four songs from Primo Levi for mezzo-soprano, bassoon and orchestra.

Bainbridge came to public attention with Spirogyra (1970), which already displays a characteristically luminous textural tracery and sensuous melodic nuance. In the works which followed, sonorous surfaces were moulded into gradually unfolding linear structures – in the 1970s exemplified by the expressive sweep of the Viola Concerto (1976), written for Walter Trampler, and the patterned continuities of Music for Mel and Nora for oboe and piano (1979, rewritten in 1983 as the Concertante in moto perpetuo for oboe and small ensemble). The use of close repetition in the latter work was in part a response to American minimalism, which Bainbridge had experienced during his fellowship year in the USA. But the unpredictability of harmonic change and the tension between stasis and directedness gives the music a quality quite its own. The interplay of ‘solid’ patternings and organic fluidity has remained a fundamental aspect: from the spaced, hypnotic recurrences of the low flute in The Path to Othona (1982) and the antiphonally pulsating, long-breathed harmonies at the start of the Fantasia for double orchestra (1983–4, rev. 1989); to the variation principle behind the beautifully understated For Miles (1994) – a homage to Miles Davis and to be-bop harmony – and the heterophonic Chant (1999). The last of these exemplifies Bainbridge's continuing passion for elaborate textures, not least in the intricate relationship of foreground to background layers. It is something which he has explored in a number of other pieces, including Metamorphosis, a chamber concerto for 13 players (1988), and the orchestral Toccata (1992), in which a long-limbed melody expands spiral-fashion against a polyrhythmic panoply of secondary lines. Though Bainbridge's music has often been built upon abstract ideas, this has rarely been at the expense of an expressive dimension. During the 1990s, a new expressivity emerged, exemplified by the searing melodic richness, at times reminiscent of Berg, of Ad ora incerta.

WORKS

Orch: Va Conc., 1976; Fantasia, double orch, 1983–4, rev, 1989; Cantus contra cantum, 1989; Double Conc., ob, cl, orch, 1990; Toccata, 1992; 3 Pieces, 1998

Large ens: 3 Pieces: Spirogyra, 1970, Flugal, 1973, the Path to Othona, 1982; Voicings, 1982; Concertante in moto perpetuo, ob, ens, 1983 [from Music for Mel and Nora, ob, pf, 1979]; Ceremony and Fanfare, 11 brass, 3 perc, 1985; Trace, dance work, 1987; Metamorphosis, 1988; Landscape and Memory, hn, large ens, 1995; Gui Conc., gui, large ens, 1998; Towards the Bridge, 1999

Vocal: People of the Dawn (Navajo Indian text), S, cl + sop sax, 2 cl, perc, pf + cel, 1975; Landscapes and Magic Words, S, ens, 1981; A capella, 6 solo vv, 1985; The Devil's Punchbowl, children's vv, chbr orch, 1987; Folksong, S, 1988; A Song from Michelangelo, S, 2 cl, va, vc, db, 1989; Caliban Fragments and Aria (W. Shakespeare), Mez, chbr orch, 1991; A Song from Tagore, children’s vv, ens, va, vc; From an English Folksong, S, 2 cl, va, vc, 1992; Herbsttag (R.M. Rilke), 2 SATB, 1993; Ad ora incerta (P. Levi), Mez, bn, orch, 1994; 4 Primo Levi Settings, Mez, cl, va, pf, 1996; ’Tis Time I Think (A.E. Housman), S, str qt, 1996; Éicha (Bible: Lamentations), Mez, SATB, wind ens, 1997; Chant, 12 amp vv, large ens, 1999

Chbr and solo inst: Ww Qnt, 1970–71, rev. 1974; Str Qt, 1972; Ww Qt, 1974; Music for Mel and Nora, ob, pf, 1979; Three Players, vc, b cl, pf, 1985; Path to Othona, hn, 1987; Marimolin Inventions, vn, mar, 1990; Mobile, eng hn, pf, 1991, version for solo va, fl, 2 cl, hp, 1994; Kinneret Pulses, 1992, viol consort; Cl Qnt, 1993; Henry's Mobile, viol consort, 1995; Henry's Rondeau, fl, ob, cl, tpt, pf, 1995 [after Purcell: Suite from Abdelazar]; 60 Seconds for Elliott, cl; Dances for Moon Animals, gui, 1999

Principal publishers: Chester Music, United Music Publishers

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Griffiths: ‘Simon Bainbridge’, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation (London, 1985), 39–45 [interview]

D.C.F. Wright: ‘An Introduction to Bainbridge’, MT, cxxix (1988), 294–7

G. Thomas: ‘L’emploi du temps’, MT, cxxxvi (1995), 585–8

MICHAEL ZEV GORDON

Bainbridge, William

(d c1831). English woodwind instrument inventor, maker and player and music publisher. Having originally trained as a turner, he began his career playing oboe, flute and flageolet at two London theatres. As maker, his first patent was in 1803 for a new model of ‘English flageolet’, which, by changing the fingering of the tonic from six to three fingers, led in about 1805 to the development of his double flageolet model in collaboration with John Parry (ii) (1776–1851). Between 1808 and 1821 he was in partnership with John Wood as Bainbridge & Wood, writing and publishing tutors and music for his instruments. From c1830 to 1835 the business was continued by Bainbridge’s widow Harriet, and thereafter until 1855 by his successor, Hastrick, whose mark usually included the words ‘late Bainbridge, inventor’.

The firm’s speciality was the ‘English flute’ or ‘English flageolet’ – not to be confused with the French or the ‘quadrille’ flageolet – in its single, double and occasionally triple form. In addition they made single and double concert flutes with flageolet-type heads to be held transversely. These instruments, designed for amateurs of both sexes, enjoued enormous popularity, the double flageolet being much plagiarised (in spite of two unsuccessful legal actions) by rival makers both at home and abroad. Bainbridge was perhaps the earliest wind-instrument maker with the all-round abilities required to launch such projects successfully, combining single-handedly as he did the diverse skills of inventor, performer, teacher, manufacturer, author and publisher.

WRITINGS

Observations on the cause of imperfections in Wind Instruments, particularly of German Flutes … also remarks on Oboe, Clarionet, & Bassoon Reeds (London, 1823)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

W.R. Waterhouse: ‘Das Doppelflageolett: “Made in England”’, Flöten, Oboen und Fagotte des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts [I]: Blankenburg 1991, 42–6; repr. in Tibia, xx (1995), 337–43; Eng. trans., rev., in GSJ, lii (1999), 171–82

PHILIP BATE/WILLIAM WATERHOUSE

Baines, Anthony C(uthbert)

(b London, 6 Oct 1912; d Farnham, Surrey, 2 Feb 1997). English musicologist, conductor and instrumentalist, brother of the double-bass player and composer Francis Baines. During his education at Westminster School (King’s Scholar, 1925–30), his musical talents became evident, encouraged by the school director of music, C. Thornton Lofthouse. In 1930 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied natural sciences and graduated with honours in chemistry in 1933. The award of an open scholarship to the RCM changed the direction of his career, and after two years’ study devoted mainly to the bassoon he joined the LPO as third bassoon and double bassoon in 1935. This appointment (interrupted by six years’ army service) continued until 1948 and led to his election as assistant conductor in 1949. The following year he became associate conductor to the International Ballet Company, but remained a regular conductor of the LPO Schools Concerts. Between 1955 and 1965, as teacher of wind instruments at Uppingham School and later Dean Close, Baines devoted himself to the training of young musicians. During this period his musicological activities expanded greatly, and he travelled extensively in Europe studying both folk and art instruments and taking part in international conferences. From 1970 to 1980 he was a lecturer in music at Oxford University and curator of the Bate Collection of wind instruments there. By his retirement in 1982 he had enlarged its scope and content and created a unique resource centre for the practical study of musical instruments of all periods. A founder-member of the Galpin Society, he edited its journal from 1956 to 1963, and again from 1970 to 1984. His writings are chiefly concerned with instruments, particularly wind instruments, and their history, however, as a man of many parts, his career emcompassed several diverse fields. As an organologist of world rank, his writings are informed by a rare combination of enthusiasm, with and authority, backed by an unrivalled range of practical experience and research. Some of his books are now standard texts, and many have also appeared in German and Italian. The American Musical Instrument Society presented the Curt Sachs Award to him in 1985 for his contribution to a ‘fuller understanding of the parallels and interactions between folk and art traditions’. Elected Ordinary Fellow of the British Academy in 1980, he received the degree of D. Litt. from Oxford University in 1977, and of D. Mus. from Edinburgh University in 1994. He is survived by his wife Patricia, née Stammers, whom he married in 1960.

WRITINGS

‘James Talbot’s Manuscript, I: Wind Instruments’, GSJ, i (1948), 9–26

‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26

‘Two Cassel Inventories’, GSJ, iv (1951), 30–38

‘Shawms of the Sandana Coblas’, GSJ, v (1952), 9–16

‘Two Curious Instruments at Verona’, GSJ, vi (1953), 98–9

Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967)

Bagpipes (Oxford, 1960, 3/1995) [on the Pitt Rivers Museum collection]

ed.: Musical Instruments through the Ages (Harmondsworth, 1961, 2/1966/R)

European and American Musical Instruments (London, 1966)

Catalogue of Musical Instruments, ii: Non-Keyboard Instruments (London, 1968) [on the Victoria and Albert Museum collection]

‘The Evolution of Trumpet Music up to Fantini’, PRMA, ci (1974–5), 1–9

ed.: The Bate Collection of Historical Wind Instruments: Catalogue (Oxford, 1976)

ed.: Brass Instruments: their History and Development (London, 1976)

ed.: The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (Oxford, 1992)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Montagu: ‘Anthony Baines, 1912–97’, EMc, xxv (1997), 345–6

J. Rimmer: ‘Anthony Cuthbert Baines (1912–1997): a Biographical Memoir’, GSJ, lii (1999), 11–26

PHILIP BATE

Baines, Francis (Athelstan)

(b Oxford, 11 April 1917; d Ballydehob, Cork, 4 April 1999). English double bass player, viol player and teacher, brother of Anthony C. Baines. He studied at the RCM, London (including composition with Herbert Howells), and became principal double bass of the Boyd Neel Orchestra and, later, the Philomusica, performing on an instrument by Nicolas Amati. In the 1970s he played with the newly formed period-instrument orchestras such as the Academy of Ancient Music. In 1959, with his wife June, he founded the Jaye consort of viols, which gave over 70 broadcasts. To popularize the Jaye Consort in its early days, Baines would also perform medieval music on medieval bagpipes, harp, pipe and tabor, and shawm. The Baines's sweet and lyrical treble-viol playing, modelled on the English choral tradition, heralded a new approach to the instrument. However, Baines's greatest legacy is perhaps as a teacher. He had an intuitive feel for period instruments which made them come to life for a generation of students, notably those studying at the RCM where he founded and directed the (conductorless) Baroque orchestra. The debt felt to him by the early music fraternity was demonstrated by the ‘Concert to remember Francis and June Baines’ on 20 June 1999 in which many of the most distinguished British players performed, among them Alison Bury, Monica Huggett, Annette Isserlis, Catherine Mackintosh and Andrew Parrott. Baines also composed three symphonies, two overtures, a violin concerto and many chamber works.

WRITINGS

‘Life with the viol: Francis Baines talks about the Jaye Consort and the revival of a tradition’, EMc, vi/1 (1978), 45–6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Holman and others: ‘Obituary: Francis and June Baines’, EMc, xxvii/3 (1999), 508–9

LUCY ROBINSON

Baines, William

(b Horbury, Yorks., 26 March 1899; d York, 6 Nov 1922). English composer and pianist. Although he came from a musical background (his father was a chapel organist and cinema pianist), his only training in composition came through lessons at the Yorkshire Training College of Music in Leeds and advice from the pianist Frederick Dawson. After a productive year in 1917, which saw many new compositions and his first solo recital, he was called up for military service in 1918. On his return to York in 1919 he worked as a relief pianist for his father at the Fossgate Cinema. His local concert recitals featured the works of Debussy, Ravel, Bridge and Scriabin in addition to his own compositions. Ill-health, exacerbated by influenza contracted in 1918 while in the army, led to his early death.

Baines was primarily a composer of impressionistic piano miniatures. The full spectrum of his style is encapsulated in the Seven Preludes (1919), whose characteristics range from virtuoso brilliance to rhapsodic contemplation, and from a lush Romanticism to sparse textures and acrid harmonies. A love of nature, frequently expressed in his diaries, is revealed in works such as Paradise Gardens and Tides. His fascination with light inspired a number of his later piano pieces, including the evocative ‘Glancing Sunlight’ from A Last Sheaf. Baines was an inveterate reviser, and works such as the F minor Piano Sonata underwent a number of metamorphoses. His other notable composition is a symphony, which, despite its individuality and original orchestration, was not performed until 1991.

WORKS

(selective list)

piano

3 Slumber Songs, op.6, 1917; 4 Miniature Tone Pictures, 1917, withdrawn 1922; Impression from Cherry Ripe, 1917, withdrawn 1922; 5 Pieces, op.8a, 1917; 3 Impressions, op.9, 1917; 2 Elegies, op.11, 1917; 3 Playtime Sketches, op.12a, 1917; Sonata no.2, a, op.13, 1917; 6 Pieces, op.14, 1917; Rococo, 1917; Passion of Destiny, 1917, unfinished; 4 Sketches, 1917–18; 6 Dream Impressions, op.16, 1918; Sonata, f, op.4, 1918, rev. 1919 and 1921; Poem, B, op.6/2, 1918; Introduction and Valse Caprice, op.3/1, 1918; Concert Study, a, op.6/3, 1918; The Island of the Fay, 1918–19; Paradise Gardens, 1918–19; 7 Preludes, 1919; Dead Heart Flower, 1919

The Little Wavelets, 1919 [from Sonata no.2]; February Pastoral, 1919; Vale of Memories, 1919; 4 Poems, 1919–20; Coloured Leaves, 4 pieces, 1919–20; 3 Concert Studies, 1919–20; Milestones, 3 pieces, 1920; Prelude, D, 1920; Cyril Scott Fragment, 1920; Silverpoints, 4 pieces, 1920–21; Tides, 2 pieces, 1920–21; Pictures of Light, 3 pieces, 1920–22; 7 Preludes, set 2, 1920–22; Prelude and 7 Diversions, 2 pf, 1921; Twilight Pieces, 3 pieces, 1921; Poème de concert, 1921 [from final movt of Sonata, 1919]; Idyll (Nocturne), 1921, rev. 1922; Prelude-Filigree, 1921; A Last Sheaf, 4 pieces, 1921–2

other works

Orch: Sym., c, op.10, 1917; Andante, a, 1918–19; Island of the Fay, 1918–19 [arr. of pf work]; Prelude to a Doll's Ballet, str, 1920; Thought Drift, 1921 [arr. of no.3 of Twilight Pieces]; Poem [from Poème de concert], pf, orch, 1921

Chbr: Pf Trio, d, op.5/2, 1917, rev. 1 movt, 1918; Aubade, op.8b, str qt, 1917; Sonata, G, vn, pf, 1917, rev. 1919; Str Qt, E, op.2, 1917–18; 2 Pieces, vc, pf, 1918; Romance, F, vc, pf, 1918; Rain Splash, vc, pf, 1919, unfinished; Marionettes, vn, pf, 1919; Piece, C, str qt, 1919; Rhapsody, f, str qt, 1920; Dream Temple, vn, pf, 1920; 2 Fragments, str qt, 1920–21; Andante, str qt, 1922

Songs: 2 Songs, op.12b, 1917; Nights of Music, 1919; 5 Songs, 1919

MSS in GB-Lbl

Principal publishers: Augener, Elkin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.J. Pirie: ‘William Baines’, Music and Musicians, xxi/3 (1972–3), 36–40

R. Carpenter: Goodnight to Flamboro’: the Life and Music of William Baines (Rickmansworth, 1977)

F. Richards: ‘William Baines and his Circle’, MT, cxxx (1989), 460–63

FIONA RICHARDS

Baini, Giuseppe (Giacobbe Baldassarre)

(b Rome, 21 Oct 1775; d Rome, 21 May 1844). Italian musicologist and composer. At 13 he entered the Seminario Romano and studied there under Stefano Silveyra. In 1795 he was accepted as a member of the choir of the papal chapel, even though he was not yet a priest (he became one in 1798). He studied singing with a bass from the choir, Saverio Bianchini, and, from 1802, counterpoint with Giuseppe Jannacconi. He was probably also a pupil of the organist G.B. Batti and of his uncle, the composer Lorenzo Baini. In 1814 he was entrusted with the reorganization of the archives of the papal chapel and in 1819 became camerlengo (general administrator) of the college of papal singers, an elective office which he held until his death. In 1825 he was made an examiner at the Congregazione di S Cecilia, although he was not a member of it. His efforts to persuade the pope to found a school of singing and a conservatory were unsuccessful. A member of many European academies and the teacher of numerous composers and musicologists, among them Cartoni, La Fage, Nicolai, Proske and Hiller, he spent the last part of his life in extreme seclusion.

Baini was most important as a Palestrina scholar. It is to him – and to Alfieri, who continued his work after his death – that one owes the publication of a large number of Palestrina’s works in the seven volumes of the Raccolta di Musica Sacra (Rome, 1841–6). The Memorie storico-critiche, in spite of its many failings in historical and philological method and its inaccuracies of fact, was the first attempt to provide a full and systematic view, biographical and musicological, of Palestrina. It contains much information on previously unknown composers. Baini also planned and gathered material for a history of the papal chapel, which was never written.

Baini demonstrated his devotion to the Roman tradition also on the political level, as a defender of the Catholic Church in its conflict with the Napoleonic empire. This resulted in some polemical works and in his refusing in 1811 the leadership of the ecclesiastical part of the reform of the Church within the empire. In 1838 he refused Spontini his support for a reform of sacred music because of his mistrust of the Prussian Protestant culture which Spontini at that time served. This aloofness and conservatism also influenced his own music, which aimed at an anachronistic and impossible reinstatement of the past, represented by Palestrinian polyphony. For the same reasons Baini did not understand the music of his own time, particularly instrumental music, to which he was strongly averse.

WRITINGS

all MSS in I-Rc

Dissertazione sopra i tuoni del canto gregoriano con l’aggiunta in fine delle regole per gli istromenti ebdomadarj: scritta a maggior chiarezza per interrogazioni e risposte ad uso de’ cappelani-cantori pontificj (MS)

Regole circa il modo di cantare le Lezioni, le Lamentazioni ed i Capitoli, e di intuonare il canto gregoriano secondo lo stile osservato dai cappellani-cantori della Cappella pontificia: epilogate da uno de’cappellani suddetti l’anno 1806 (MS)

Breve notizia istorica e regole del contrappunto solito farsi da’ Cantori pontificj nel cantare il canto gregoriano; e per incidenza, si tratta la questione se i cantori della Cappella giulia nella Basilica vaticana siano più antichi o almeno fosse immutuato il loro corpo per formare a parte li cappellani-cantori pontificj (MS)

Mottetto a quatro cori del sig. maestro D. Marco Santucci premiato dall’Accademia Napoleone in Lucca, l’anno 1806 (n.p., 1807)

Difesa del solfeggiamento regolato dalla variazione de’ tuoni, contro i partigiani delle mutazioni, del setticlave e dell’unica lettura (MS, 1808)

Dimostrazione della preminenza del solfeggio con dodici monosillabi, sopra tutti gli altri sistemi di solfeggio (MS, 1808)

L’artificio e le regole da osservarsi nel comporre tre sorte di canoni: 1° monotoni ne’quali la guida sia una sola parte; 2° monotoni ne’quali la guida sia in quattro parti; 3° sopra una sola riga (MS, 1808)

Controversia musicale fra Giuseppe Baini, cappello-cantore pontificio ed i sig. esaminatori della vener. Congregazione de’musici de S. Cecilia di Roma insorta per i pubblico concorso delli 2 maggio 1809, in cui fu rimesso a nuoo esame il giovinetto Giuseppe Giovannini, alunno nella vener. pia Chiesa degli orfani (MS, 1809)

Seconda Lettera … ai venerat. sig. Maestri esaminatori della Congregazione di S. Cecilia, sullo stesso soggetto (MS)

Trattato della fuga sul canto fermo (MS)

Risposta di Giuseppe Baini, cappellano-cantore pontificio all’opuscolo del sig. Maestro Giuseppe Rossi, impresso in Terni nel 1809, col titolo ‘Alli intendenti di contropunto’: opuscolo dove oltre la principal questione circa gli accordi da darsi alla scala, si dilucidano alcuni punti quanto interessanti altretanto oscuri della scienza musica (MS, 1810)

Saggio sopra l’identità de’ ritmi musicale e poetico (Florence, 1820)

Tentamen renovationis musicae harmonicae syllabico-rhythmicae, super cantu gregoriano, saeculo primo in ecclesia pervulgatae (MS)

Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, cappellano-cantore, e quindi compositore della cappella pontificia, maestro di cappella delle basiliche Vaticana, Lateranense e Liberiana, detto il principe della musica (Rome, 1828/R); 1st 6 chaps. ed. A. Cametti: La critica musica (1918–23)

Disquisizione sopra le note di canto delle sei sequenze o ritmi di Pietro Abelardo detti ‘Pianti’ (MS)

Risposta ai dubbj proposti al sig. Maestro Basily dal Maestro Catrufo con lettera dei 29 septembre 1843, da Londra (MS)

Intorno alla creazione di una scuola di musica nella pia casa di lavoro detta ‘Delle terme Diocleziame’ (MS)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

A.M. Carcano: ‘Cenni biografici intorno a Monsignor D. Giuseppe Baini’, Diario di Roma (3 Sept 1844)

A. de la Fage: Miscellanées musicales (Paris, 1844/R)

G. De Ferrari: ‘Biografia di Monsignor D. Giuseppe Baini’, Giornale arcadico di scienze, lettere ed arti, cxxxi (1850), 328–92

P. Alfieri: ‘Biografia di Monsignor Giuseppe Baini’, GMM, xiv (1856), 153–267

A. de La Fage: ‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Joseph Baini’, Essais de diphthérographie musicale (Paris, 1864/R), 17–60 [includes description of MSS in I-Rc]

F.X. Haberl: ‘Zum 50. Todesjahre von Joseph Baini: eine biographische Skizze’, KJb, ix (1894), 77–85

G. Stanghetti: ‘Nota biografica su Giuseppe Baini’, NA, i (1924), 290 only

O. Ursprung: ‘Palestrina und Deutschland’, Festschrift Peter Wagner (Leipzig, 1926), 190–221

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Verzeichnis der kirchenmusikalischen Werke der Santinischen Bibliothek’, KJb, xxvi (1931), 126–7

J.M. Llorens: Cappellae sixtinae codices musicis notis instructi (Vatican City, 1960)

A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961)

R. Giazotto: ‘La Congrégation de Sainte-Cécile et le retour à la culture classique dans la Rome musicale du début du XIXième siècle’, RBM, xxvi–xxvii (1972–3), 7–13

S.L. Balthazar: ‘The Rhythm of Text and Music in Ottocento Melody: an Empirical Reassessment in Light of Contemporary Treatises’, CMc, no.49 (1992), 5–28

R. Boursy: Historicism and Composition: Giuseppe Baini, the Sistine Chapel Choir, and Stile Antico Music in the First Half of the 19th Century (diss., Yale U., 1994)

SERGIO LATTES

Bainton, Edgar (Leslie)

(b London, 14 Feb 1880; d Sydney, 8 Dec 1956). English composer, pianist and teacher. He studied at the RCM under Stanford and Franklin Taylor. In 1901 he was appointed to teach the piano and composition at the Newcastle Conservatory of which he became principal a few years later. He was on the Continent at the outbreak of World War I and was interned at Ruhleben. On his return to Newcastle he resumed his activities as teacher, pianist, conductor and composer until the end of 1933, when he was appointed director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium, Sydney. Immediately before his departure he was elected an FRCM and awarded an honorary DMus by the University of Durham. In Sydney he exercised a strong influence on the development of musical life, particularly through his fine conducting. His symphony ‘Before Sunrise’ won a Carnegie Award in 1917. Bainton was less affected by the modality of English folksong than were many contemporaries, although much of his work has a pastoral tone. He was drawn to late-Romantic harmony, yet even his richest writing never obscures the direct lyrical impulse. His works have clarity of form and show a high degree of craftsmanship. One of his major works, The Pearl Tree, was produced with great success in Sydney in 1944.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Oithona, 1906, lost; Walookie the Bear (children's operetta, R. Buckley), 1912; The Crier by Night (G. Bottomley), 1919, unpubd; The Pearl Tree (R.C. Trevelyan), 1927, unpubd

Vocal orchestral: The Blessed Damozel, 1907, Sym. ‘Before Sunrise’, 1907; Sunset at Sea, 1910; The Making of Viola (cant.), 1913; The Vindictive Staircase, 1913; A Song of Freedom and Joy, 1920; The Tower, 1923; The Dancing Seal, 1926; Hymn to God the Father, 1926; 5 unpubd works incl. An English Idyll, 1946

Orch: Conc. fantasia, pf, orch, 1920; Pavane, Idyll and Bacchanal, str, 1924; 14 unpubd works incl. 3 Pieces, 1920; Epithalamion, 1929; Sym. no.2, 1940; Sym. no.3, 1956

Other works: Str Qt, A, 1915, rev. 1920; Sonata, va, pf, 1922; Sonata, vc, pf, 1924; 2 other chbr pieces; Fantasia on ‘Vexilla regis’, org, 1925; 32 pf works; over 100 songs, over 100 unison and partsongs

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Novello, OUP, Stainer & Bell

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Bainton: Remembered on Waking (Sydney, 1960)

D.E. Tunley: ‘Thoughts on the Music of Edgar Bainton’, Westerly (1963), no.2, p.55–7

M. Jones: ‘Edgar Bainton: Musical and Spiritual Traveller’, Journal of the British Music Society, xii (1990), 19–40

DAVID TUNLEY/MICHAEL JONES

Bainville, François

(b Chartres, 1 April 1725; d Chartres, 26 Sept 1788). French organist and composer. He began his musical training as a choirboy in Chartres Cathedral. In September 1741 he received permission to play the organ there, provided he was properly supervised, and he was soon substituting for the cathedral organist J.-P. Dumail. He later played the organ at the Benedictine abbey of St Père-en-Vallée (now the parish church of St Pierre, Chartres). In 1751 he married Marie-Claude Renault, an organist in the parish of Ste Marguerite, Paris, and they moved to Paris in about 1754. In 1763 he was appointed organist of the Cathedral of St Maurice in Angers. Four years later his only known published work, Nouvelles pieces d’orgue, composées sur différens tons, appeared in Paris and Angers. Bainville retired from his post at Angers in 1782 and, having been granted a pension on full pay by the cathedral chapter, returned to Chartres. According to Port, Bainville had a son (name not given) who served as organist of St Pierre (? at Angers) and who ‘soon departed for Paris’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

Mercure de France (April 1767), ii, 145 only

C. Port: Dictionnaire historique, géographique et biographique de Maine-et-Loire (Paris, 1874–8, 2/1965)

L. Merlet: Bibliothèque chartraine antérieure au XIXe siècle (Orléans, 1882)

J.A. Clerval: L’ancienne maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Chartres du Ve siècle à la Révolution (Chartres, 1898/R)

M. Jusselin: Les orgues de Saint-Pierre de Chartres depuis leur origine, 1592–1922 (Chartres, 1922)

KENNETH LANGEVIN

Baiocchi, Regina Harris

(b Chicago, 16 July 1956). American composer and writer. She studied at Roosevelt and De Paul universities, where her teachers included Robert Lombard and George Flynn. She has also studied jazz piano with Alan Swain and composition with Hale Smith. Her music reveals an eclectic mixture of idioms and techniques, from serialism to black American folk music. Jazz is seldom far from the surface in Sketches (1992) and Gbeldahoven: No One's Child (1996), an opera based on the lives of Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes that includes numbers inspired by African chant, spirituals, blues, jazz, gospel, work songs and rap music. The aria ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’ shares motivic material with the final movement of the brass quintet QFX (1993); both are based on a 12-note series she describes as her ‘stand-by tone row’, as well as on black American harmonies and rhythms. Her African heritage also provides sounds for African Hands (1997), a concerto for African drummer and orchestra. Works showing a strong influence of jazz include Miles Per Hour for trumpet (1990), which recalls the style of Miles Davis, and Friday Night (1995) for jazz singer and ensemble.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Gbeldahoven: No One's Child, 1996

Inst: Equipoise by Intersection, pf, 1978; Miles Per Hour, tpt, 1990; Orch Suite, 1992; Sketches, vn, vc, pf, 1992; QFX, brass qnt, 1993; After the Rain, sax, pf, perc, 1994; Deborah, pf, perc, 1994; Liszten, My Husband Is Not a Hat, pf, 1994; Kidstuff, chbr ens, 1995; African Hands, african drummer, orch, 1997; Message to My Muse, pf, 1997

Vocal: Black Voices, rap singers, perc, 1992; Best Friends, S, B, pf, 1993; Friday Night, 1v, jazz ens, 1995

MSS in Center for Black Music Research, Chicago

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Honaker: ‘A Musical Fete for Kids’, Chicago Tribune (1 Oct 1995)

H. Walker-Hill: Music by Black Women Composers (Chicago, 1995)

B. Herguth: ‘First Opera is a Dream Come True’, Chicago Sun Times (6 Oct 1996)

KARIN PENDLE

Baird, Tadeusz

(b Grodzisk Mazowiecki, 26 July 1928; d Warsaw, 2 Sept 1981). Polish composer. He first studied composition in Warsaw during World War II with Woytowicz and Kazimierz Sikorski. He was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1944 after the Warsaw Uprising, and after liberation underwent treatment for spinal tuberculosis in Cologne before returning to Poland to train with Rytel and Perkowski at the Warsaw Academy of Music (1947–51). During this period he also studied piano with Tadeusz Wituski and musicology at Warsaw University.

In 1949, in response to the imposition of socialist realism as the only acceptable basis for composition, Baird formed Group 49 with Serocki and Krenz, their aim being the composition of anti-elitist music without abandoning contemporary techniques. Baird’s works of these years were generally traditional in form (e.g. Sinfonietta, Concerto for Orchestra, First Symphony and the sonatinas for piano) and sometimes archaic in style (e.g. the Colas Breugnon suite based on 16th-century French dances), an approach he continued in later, post-socialist-realist works such as Cztery sonety miłosne (‘Four Love Sonnets’, 1956) and Pieśni truwerów (‘Trouvère Songs’, 1963). The slightly more permissive attitude of the authorities in the post-Stalinist era enabled Baird to collaborate with Serocki in the foundation of the Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music (the ‘Warsaw Autumn’) in 1956 and, after becoming familiar with some of Alban Berg’s works, to experiment with serialism, first evident in Cassazione per orchestra (1956).

Baird adopted an exceptionally free, essentially lyrical approach to serialism, introducing material unrelated to the original row, emphasizing specific intervals within the row (which becomes a freely exploitable fund of source material) and permitting tonal references to emerge. His encounter with Berg’s work also resulted in greater intensity of expression, evident in the String Quartet (1957) and Cztery eseje (‘Four Essays’, 1958), in which the orchestra is frequently treated in a chamber style. Sonata-schemes were abandoned in favour of freely-evolving structures, and by the late 1960s Baird regularly introduced static colouristic textures within his orchestral works. Such passages perhaps indicate the influence of Lutosławski’s aleatory technique, but Baird always maintained strict control over their progress in that the pulse is not relaxed and they are usually composed of short, rapid figurations, the general effect of which is consistent from one performance to another.

Baird is often regarded as a late Romantic lyricist and successor not only to Berg, but Mahler and Szymanowski. Melody was of prime importance in his work, and especially in his later music there was an increasing reliance upon the voice or some underlying programmatic concept in an attempt to transmit concrete, unambivalent matter to his listeners. At the same time there was a perceptible darkening in tone, first apparent in 1966 with the opera Jutro (‘Tomorrow’), based on a short story by Conrad, and culminating in his final work, Głosy z oddali (‘Voices from afar’), a song cycle for baritone and orchestra to words by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz dealing with death and personal extinction, its musical symbolism incorporating both the Dies irae and references to the sound world of ‘Der Abschied’ from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Baird admitted that the more direct style of his later works arose from an attempt to portray bitterness in the face of reality, most notably in the orchestral pieces Psychodrama (1972), in his opinion the most brutal of all his works, and Elegeia (1973), which reveals a continuing affinity with the music of Berg.

Throughout his career Baird played an active part in Polish musical life. He continued to be involved in the organization of the Warsaw Autumn until 1969, and from 1974 taught at the Academy of Music in Warsaw, becoming director of the composition department in 1977. His numerous honours included several awards from the Polish government, the Cologne Music Prize (1963), the Koussevitzky Prize (1968), the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation of New York Prize (1971), the Arthur Honegger Prize (1974), and three first prizes at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers (1959, 1963, 1966).

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic and orchestral

Stage: Jutro [Tomorrow] (music drama, 1, J.S. Sito, after J. Conrad) 1964–6; Warsaw, Wielki, 18 Sept 1966

Other dramatic works: 62 incid scores; 26 film and TV scores

Orch: Conc. grosso w dawnym stylu [In the Old Style], small orch, 1949; Pf Conc., 1949; Sinfonietta, 1949; Sym. no.1, 1950; Uwertura w dawnym stylu [Ov. in the Old Style], small orch, 1950; Colas Breugnon, suite, fl, str, 1951; Giocosa uwertura, 1952: Sym. no.2, 1952; Conc. for Orch, 1953; Cassazione, 1956; 4 eseje [4 Essays], 1958; Espressioni varianti, vn, orch, 1959; Wariacje bez tematu [Variations without a Theme], 1962; Muzyka epifaniczna, 1963; 4 dialogi, ob, chbr orch, 1964; 4 nowele [4 Novels], chbr orch, 1967; Sinfonia breve, 1968; Sym. no.3, 1969; Psychodrama, 1972; Elegeia, 1973; Ob Conc., 1973; Conc. lugubre, va, orch, 1975; Sceny, vc, hp, orch, 1977; Canzona, 1981

choral and solo vocal

Suita liryczna (J. Tuwim), S, orch, 1953; 2 Choral Songs (trad.), 1953; Ballada o żolnierskim kubku [Ballad about a Soldier’s Cup] (S. Strumph-Wojtkiewicza) (cant.), 1954; 5 Children’s Songs (J. Czechowicz), female v, pf; 4 sonety miłosne [4 Love Sonnets] (W. Shakespeare), Bar, chbr orch, 1956; Egzorta (old Hebrew) reciter, chorus, orch, 1960; Erotyki (M. Hillar), S, orch, 1961

Etiuda, vocal orch, perc, pf, 1961; Pieśni truwerów [Trouvère Songs], A, 2 fl, vc, 1963; 4 pieśni (V. Parun), Mez, chbr orch, 1966; 5 pieśni (H. Poświatowska), Mez, 16 insts, 1968; Listy Goethego [Goethe Letters], Bar, chorus, orch, 1970; Głosy z oddali [Voices from Afar] (J. Iwaszkiewicz), Bar, orch, 1981

chamber and solo instrumental

2 sonatinas, pf, 1949, 1952; Mała suita dziecięca [Little suite for children], pf, 1953; 2 kaprysy, cl, pf, 1953; 4 preludia, bn, pf, 1954; Divertimento, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1956; Str Qt, 1957; Play, str qt, 1971; Wariacje w formie ronda [Variations in Rondo Form], str qt, 1978

Principal publisher: PWM, Litolff/Peters

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMuz (B. Pociej)

KdG (Z. Helman)

S. Jarociński: ‘Nowe wybitne dzieło na orkiestrę’ [An outstanding new orchestral work], Przegląd kulturalny (1954), no.21 [on the Conc. for Orch]

Z. Lissa: ‘“Ballada o żolnierskim kubku” T. Bairda’, Muzyka, vi/1–2 (1955), 42–54

M. Gorczycka: ‘“Cztery eseje” Tadeusza Bairda’, Ruch muzyczny, iv/15 (1960), 5–6

T.A. Zieliński: ‘Wokół problematyki ekspresji’, Ruch muzyczny, v/3 (1961), 5–6

A. Prosnak: ‘Cztery eseje Bairda i perspektywy techniki serialnej’, Muzyka, ix/3–4 (1964), 26–43 [Ger. trans., abridged, 134–7]

J. Kański: ‘Dramat muzyczny Tadeusza Bairda’, Ruch muzyczny, x/23 (1966), 4–5 [on Jutro]

T.A. Zieliński: Tadeusz Baird (Kraków, 1966)

M. Kotyńska: ‘Pieśni Tadeusza Bairda’ [Baird’s songs], Ruch muzyczny, xii/23 (1968), 9–10

K. Tarnawska-Kaczorowska: Świat liryki wokalno-instrumentalnej Tadeusza Bairda [The world of Baird’s vocal-instrumental lyricism] (Kraków, 1982)

Muzyka xxix/1–2 (1984) [Baird issue; incl. articles on style and technique, analyses, catalogue of works, writings and bibliography]

ALISTAIR WIGHTMAN

Bairstow, Sir Edward C(uthbert)

(b Huddersfield, 22 Aug 1874; d York, 1 May 1946). English organist, composer and conductor. He studied with John Farmer of Balliol College, Oxford, and was articled to Frederick Bridge at Westminster Abbey, where he received organ tuition from the assistant organist Walter Alcock. In 1893 Bairstow became organist of All Saints, Norfolk Square, and in 1899 of Wigan parish church. In Wigan he built up a teaching practice, concentrating particularly on singing, and successfully directed the town’s Philharmonic and other choral societies. On being appointed to Leeds parish church in 1907, he became organist to the Leeds Festival of that year and of 1910 and, later, conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic Society (from 1917 until his death). In 1913 he was appointed organist at York Minster, and from then until 1939 he directed the York Musical Society. His conducting engagements took him further afield; his appearances in London included a notable concert with the Royal Choral Society, in 1927, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first English performance of Bach’s B minor Mass. In 1929 he was appointed professor of music at Durham, then a non-resident post that enabled him to continue his duties at York; he had taken the DMus degree at the same university in 1901. He was knighted in 1932, and received honorary degrees of DLitt (Leeds, 1936) and DMus (Oxford, 1945). An accomplished performer and accompanist, he was also in frequent demand as a lecturer and guest speaker, proving an avid supporter in particular of the competitive festival movement. Above all, he was aware of his own special aptitude as a teacher.

Bairstow’s compositions, published principally by OUP and Novello, are mainly for the church. Of his 29 anthems Blessed City (1914), Let all mortal flesh keep silence (1925) and Save us, O Lord (1902) are well known. As with most of his other compositions, they are possessed of a deeply felt sentiment and enduring quality. Both his settings of the Morning, Communion and Evening services – in D and E – and the late Evening in G are widely used and contrasted in style. Of his 13 organ pieces the Evening Song quickly gained popularity, but his finest is undoubtedly the Sonata in E (1937), a late Romantic work displaying consummate craftsmanship and inspiration. Equally inspired are the Variations on an Original Theme for two pianos (1908) and the unjustly neglected Six Variations on an Original Theme for violin and piano (1916). The choral works The Prodigal Son (1939) and Five Poems of the Spirit, published posthumously in 1954, were composed during his later years.

WRITINGS

Handel’s Oratorio ‘The Messiah’ (London, 1928)

Counterpoint and Harmony (London, 1937)

The Evolution of Musical Form (London, 1943)

with H.P. Greene: Singing Learned from Speech (London, 1945)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Bradbury: ‘Sir Edward Bairstow: a Birthday Tribute’, MT, lxxxv (1944), 233–6

S. Lindley: ‘Bairstow: the Leeds Legacy’, Church Music Quarterly, no.133 (1996), 21–3

F. Jackson: Blessed City: the Life and Works of Edward C. Bairstow, 1874–1946 (York, 1996)

FRANCIS JACKSON

Baitz.

See Bātz.

Baj [Bai, Baij], Tommaso

(b Crevalcuore, nr Bologna, c1650; d Rome, 22 Dec 1714). Italian composer and singer. He is first heard of on 20 October 1670 as an alto in the Cappella Giulia at S Pietro, Rome, which he served for the rest of his life. The account books from 1696 to 1713 list him as a tenor; he may have become a tenor shortly before this, but the account books for 1693–5 are missing. His long experience as a singer under such renowned directors as Benevoli, Ercole Bernabei, Masini and Lorenzani stimulated him to compose, and it may have been because of this that on 19 November 1713, shortly before Lorenzani died, he was himself appointed maestro di cappella, a post that he held for the 13 months until his own death. He was best known for his famous nine-part Miserere in falsobordone style. Except in 1768 and 1777 it has been sung regularly, together with Allegri’s Miserere, by the papal choir during Holy Week (in 1821 Baini’s Miserere was added). He was an adherent of the severe stile antico, but he also adopted an expressive manner more typical of his own day (as in the Miserere): the two styles are in apposition in his work, which includes choral parlando writing. Some of his works are for double choir.

WORKS

2 masses, 4, 5vv, A-Wn, D-Bsb, Mbs, Mm, Rp; Christe eleison, 4vv, MÜs

3 Miserere, 5vv, 8vv (1700), 9vv (1713, 1st chorus by Gregorio Allegri), A-Wn, D-AÖhk, Bsb, HEms, LÜh, Mbs, Mf, Mk, Mm, MÜs, OB, Po, Rp, TRb, I-Bc, Nc, Rf, Rvat; 1 ed. C. Burney, La musica che si canta annualmente (London, 1771)

c20 motets, D-Mbs, Mk, Mm, MÜs, Rp, TRb, I-Md; 3 ed. K. Proske, Musica divina, ii (Regensburg, 1854)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella)

P. Alfieri: Giudizi e osservazioni sui due Miserere di Gregorio Allegri e Tommaso Baj, riveduti e ristampati da Pietro Alfieri (MS, c1740, I-Rvat Capp. Sistina 658, ff.42–50)

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R), ii

SIEGFRIED GMEINWIESER

Bajamonti, Julije [Giulio]

(b Split, 4 Aug 1744; d Split, 12 Nov 1800). Croatian composer. He studied medicine in Parma and between 1785 and 1790 practised in Hvar, on the island of the same name, where he was also the organist at the cathedral. In 1789 he moved to Split in the hope of becoming the town physician but was rejected because he was a musician. In Split he again performed the duties of cathedral organist. Of about 140 surviving works, over 120 are church music. Most of his music is simple in harmonic structure, with an obvious bias towards the development of melody. Italian operatic style exercised a strong influence on his sacred works.

WORKS

La traslazione di S Doimo, orat, Split, 1770

17 masses for choir and orchestra; 2 requiem masses; 2 Passions; 2 Stabat mater; 3 TeD; 8 Tantum ergo; Miserere; Magnificat; 54 motets, a cappella and for choir and orchestra

10 syms.; Str Qt, F (attrib. Bajamonti); Org Sonata, C, 1776

Non temo, aria buffa for bass, 1776

MSS in HR-Sk, Zha

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Andreis: Music in Croatia (Zagreb, rev.2/1982), 90–94

I. Bošković: ‘Veze Julija Bajamontija s Lukom i Antunom Sorkočevićem’ [Bajamonti’s contacts with Antun and Luka Sorkočević], Luka i Antun Sorkočević, ed. S. Tuksar (Zagreb, 1983), 117–29

I. Frangeš, ed.: Splitski polihistor Julije Bajamonti (Split, 1995)

M. Grgić: Glazbena kultura u splitskoj katedrali 1750–1940 [Music in Split Cathedral 1750–1940] (Zagreb, 1997)

BOJAN BUJIĆ

Bajete [Bajón]

(Sp.).

See under Organ stop.

Bajić, Isidor

(b Kula, 10 Aug 1878; d Novi Sad, 15 Sept 1915). Serbian composer. He was a pupil of Koessler in Budapest and later became an organizer of musical life in Novi Sad. From 1901 until his death he taught at the high school there and was also the school’s principal conductor. He was editor of the magazine Srpski muzički list in 1903 as well as a series of music by Serbian composers (1903–4); he also founded a music school in 1909.

His Romantic style of composition, while rich in melodic invention, displays a lack of technical proficiency. His national opera Knez Ivo od Semberije (‘Prince Ivo of Semberia’, 1911), heavily influenced by folk music, is notable for its musical differentiation between Serbian and Turkish characters as well as its incidental music; some of its set pieces, such as the song Jesen stiže dunjo moja (‘Autumn is Coming, my Dear’) and the dance Srpkinja are more commonly thought of as folk pieces. His best works are those outside the folk tradition, such as Pesme ljubavi (‘Songs of love’) and the piano pieces with their Liszt-like virtuosity and romanticism akin to Tchaikovsky.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Ksenije i Ksenija (operetta), 1909; Knez Ivo od Semberije [Prince Ivo of Semberia] (op, B. Nušić), perf. 1911; Žrtva ljubavi [The Victim of Love] (operetta); incid music, incl. Seoska loia [The Village Good-for-Nothing], Čučuk Stana [Little Stana], Šaran [The Carp]

Orch: Miloš Obrenović, sym., 1902, lost; Mena, ov., 1902

Choral: Iz srpske gradine [From the Serbian Garden]; Srpski zvuci [Serbian Sounds]; Guslareva smrt [Guslar’s Death]

Other vocal: Božestvena liturgija, chorus, 1906; Pesme ljubavi [Songs of Love], 1v, pf, 1912

Pf: Album kompozicija, 1908; Srpska fantazija [Serbian Phantasy], 4 hands; Srpsko cveće [Serbian Flowers]; other pf works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Peričić: Muzički stvaraoci u Srbiji [Musical Creators in Serbia] (Belgrade, 1969)

S. Đurić-Klajn: A Survey of Serbian Music through the Ages (Belgrade, 1972)

R. Pejović: Kritike, članci i posebne publikacije u srpskoj muzičkoj prošlosti [Critiques, articles and other publications of the Serbian musical past] (Belgrade, 1994)

ROKSANDA PEJOVIĆ

Bajón

(Sp.).

See under Organ stop (Bajete).

Bajoras, Feliksas Romualdas

(b Alytus, Lithuania, 7 Oct 1934). Lithuanian composer and violinist. He grew up in Kaunas, where he received his first musical education. He then studied the violin with Aleksandras Livontas (1952–7), and composition with Juzeliūnas at the Vilnius Conservatory (1959–63). He worked as a violinist in the Vilnius Philharmonic Orchestra (1959–63), and also in the Lithuanian Radio Orchestra (1958–63). He was music director of the youth theatre from 1965 to 1984 and then spent four years in the USA. He then served as music director of the Academic Drama Theatre in Vilnius (1991–4) and since 1991 has been active in the Vilnius Music Academy, teaching music theory and rhythm to actors and theatrical and cinema directors. He was appointed to a lectureship in 1994. He has received 13 prizes for theatrical music, and was awarded the Lithuanian State Prize in 1981, the Balys-Dvarionas prize in 1989, the J. Švedas Prize in 1990 and the Lithuanian Art Prize in 1998.

Bajoras employs various techniques in his works. In the years from 1968 to 1979 he developed his own style, principally moulded by folk music. Characteristics of this style, which can be traced to Lithuanian folksong, are tonal variability, irregularity of structure and phrasing, traditional techniques of articulation, and rhetorical figures corresponding to these features. The theatre has had a strong influence on Bajoras, and his music indeed resembles a drama staged by performers (for instance in the Violin Sonata). He regards a musical work not primarily as a structure but as a conversation or incident, and consequently extra-musical factors are of great importance to him; in this he could be said to be continuing the Romantic tradition. From around 1980 he began to simplify his style: expressive, rhetorical and theatrical elements and those taken directly from folksong became less prominent, but his tendency towards polyphony and asymmetrical rhythms continued. The opera Dievo avinėlis (‘Lamb of God’, 1982) is regarded as his most important work. It is a psychological drama which, with its unique synthesis of contemporary techniques and folk music, represents a milestone in the history of Lithuanian opera.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Dievo avinėlis [Lamb of God] (op, 3, R. Šavelis), 1982, Vilnius, 1991

Vocal: Sakmių siuita [Legend Suite], T/S, pf, 1968; Kodėl? [Why?], cycle, S, pf, 1977; Žiemužė-balta eglužė [The White Fir Tree in Winter] (L. Gutauskas), cycle, B, pf, 1977; Karo dainos [War Song], cycle, S, str orch, 1978; Varpo kėlimas [The Raising of the Bells] (orat, J. Strielkūnas), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1980; Dzūkų dainos [Dzuku Songs], cycle, S, fl, ob, vn, vc, pf, 1981; Paslaptis [A Secret] (Gutkauskas), diptych, chorus, 1984; Mišių giemės [Songs of the Mass] (lit. texts), chorus, org, 1989; Missa in musica, S, trbn, db, pf, 1993, rev. 1996; 3 sonetai [3 Sonnets] (R. Dambrauskaitė), S, org/db, 1995

Orch: Padavimai [Legends], sym. poem, 1962, rev. 1965, 1969; Sym. no.1, 1964, rev. 1970; Intermezzo, str, 1966; Veiksmažodžių siuita, str, 1966; Sym. no.2 ‘Stalaktitai’ [Stalactites], 1970; Sym. no.3, 1972, rev. 1976, 1978; Rondo, 1976, rev. 1977; Diptychon, 1984, rev. 1993; Exodus I, 1995; Exodus II, 1996; Vn Conc., 1999

Chbr and solo inst: Variation Cycles, pf (1959–75); Sonatina, vn, pf, 1960; Trio, ob, vn, org, 1968; 4 Sketches, str qt, 1968; Variations, db, str qt, 1968; Elegija, ob, 1974; Muzika septyniems [Music for Seven], Lithuanian folk insts, cl, pf, elec org, 1975; Vilniaus kvartetas [Vilnius Quartet], str qt, 1975; Rauda [Complaints], pf, 1976; Prabege metai [Bygone Years], Sonata, vn, pf, 1979; Alias, accordion, 1980; Pulvis fiat, db, perc, 1997; Suokos [Chirping], str qt, 1998; more than 20 solo and duet works

Other: Film music, incid music, electro-acoustic works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Gerlach: ‘Feliksas Bajoras’, 50 sowjetische komponisten (Leipzig and Dresden, 1984), 27–33

D. Kalavinskaitė: ‘Felikso Bajoro muzikos darybos bruožai’ [Features of Bajoras's music], Menotyra, ii (1997), 21–30

M. Janicka-Słysz: ‘“Muzyka dla Sandomierza” F.B.’, W kręgu muzyki litewskiej, ed. K. Droba (Cracow, 1997), 35–46

based on MGG2 (ii, 38–9), by permission of Bärenreiter

DANUTE KALAVINSKAITĖ

Bakala, Břetislav

(b Fryšták, nr Holešov, 12 Feb 1897; d Brno, 1 April 1958). Czech conductor. At Brno he studied composition with Janáček (1912–15), conducting with Neumann (1919–20) and the piano with Vilém Kurz. He was engaged as a répétiteur and conductor in the Brno Opera in 1920, making his début with Gluck’s Orfeo, and in 1925 gave the première of Martinů’s ballet Who is the Most Powerful in the World?, which drew him towards new music. During the 1925–6 season he was an organist and accompanist in Philadelphia. He then worked in Czechoslovak Radio, where he conducted the (abridged) première of Janáček’s Fate in 1934, and in 1937 became chief conductor of the Brno RSO, that year touring the USSR and Latvia. From 1929 to 1931 he was conductor of Brno Opera, where in 1930 he gave the première of Janáček’s posthumous From the House of the Dead, completing the score with Osvald Chlubna. He was conductor of Vach’s Choir of Moravian Women Teachers from 1936 and from 1956 chief conductor of the Brno State PO. He also taught at the Janáček Academy (JAMU) from 1951.

Musical life in Brno owes much to Bakala’s development of the Brno RSO, with which he promoted many new works. One of the finest Janáček experts, he performed nearly all his compositions, and left exemplary recordings of the Glagolitic Mass, Taras Bulba and the Sinfonietta. His repertory also included the main works of Novák, with whom he had close ties, and of Suk and contemporary Moravian composers (he conducted Novák’s De profundis at the International Music Festival in Copenhagen in 1947). An intellectual conductor, of sparse gesture, he precisely displayed the internal structure of a work through his firm rhythmic control and careful balance. Among his compositions were popular folksong arrangements for choir. He orchestrated the second movement of Janáček’s Piano Sonata and made piano reductions of several of his major works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

F. Hrabal: ‘Břetislav Bakala’, Sborník JAMU, ii (Brno, 1960), 105–25

J. Trojan: ‘Břetislav Bakala-janáčkovský interpret’ [Bakala: a Janáček interpreter], Sborník JAMU, v (Brno, 1965), 91–9

B. Štědroň: ‘Břetislav Bakala, člověk a umělec’ [Bakala: man and artist], Sborník Státní filharmoníe Brno 1956–1966 (Brno, 1965), 10–25 [with a reproduction of Bakala’s MS ‘From my musical life’ and discography]

J. Racek: ‘Břetislav Bakala a VSMU’ [Bakala and VSMU (Vach’s Choir of Moravian Women Teachers)], 50 let VSMU (Brno, 1963), 45–50

‘Břetislav Bakala’, OHM (1977) [special issue, incl. bibliography]

E. Dufková and B. Srba, eds.: Postavy brněnského jeviště [Personalities of the Brno stage], i (Brno, 1984–9), 71–72

ALENA NĚMCOVÁ

Bakcheios Gerōn.

See Bacchius.

Bakchos.

See Dionysus.

Bakchylidēs.

See Bacchylides.

Bake, Arnold Adriaan

(b Hilversum, 19 May 1899; d London, 8 Oct 1963). Dutch scholar of Indian music. He studied oriental languages at the University of Leiden and in 1930 took the DLitt at Utrecht University with a translation of a Sanskrit musical treatise. With his wife Cornelia he spent over 15 years in India. He studied music and language at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan, and Bengal became one of his main areas of interest; subsequently he did fieldwork from Ceylon to Nepal, largely on folk and tribal traditions (financed by a fellowship from Brasenose College, Oxford, 1937–44). During the war he served as music adviser to the All India Radio in Delhi and as director of European music at the Calcutta Broadcasting Station. In 1948 he was appointed lecturer (later reader) in Sanskrit and Indian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; he also gave many lectures and recitals (accompanied by his wife) in Europe, India and North America. During his final visit to the Indian subcontinent (1955–6) he again collected invaluable material on music and dance, primarily from Nepal. In the summer of 1958 he and his wife were involved in a street accident in Leiden, from which he never fully recovered. Most of his recordings, which include folk, tribal, devotional and classical music of India (on cylinders, discs and a film-recording device), as well as his many photographs and films, are divided between the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, New Delhi, and the Institute for Ethnomusicology Archive, UCLA.

Bake's publications (which include articles for MGG1, NOHM and Grove's Dictionary, 5th edn) scarcely indicate his vast knowledge of his subject; at his death he was working on a survey of Indian music commissioned by the Oxford University Press. He was a tireless scholar, continually discovering new material and recasting his lectures, which ranged far beyond the usual discussions of north and south Indian classical music and its theory. They included such diverse elements as Vedic chant, ancient music theory, the philosophical and aesthetic basis of Indian music, folk and tribal music and dance of India, music of the devotional and mystic groups, and the music of Tagore. With the help of his recordings, photographs and films, as well as his personal reminiscences and performances as a singer, he succeeded in conveying a real feeling for India in the throes of the industrial revolution.

WRITINGS

Bydrage tot de kennis der Voor-Indische muziek (diss., U. of Utrecht, 1930; Paris, 1930) [Damodara’s Sangītadarpana, chap.i–ii, Sanskrit text with Eng. trans.]

‘Indian Music and Rabindranath Tagore’, Indian Art and Letters, new ser., v (1931), 81–102

‘Dr. A. Bake's Researches in Indian Music and Folklore: Short Report on the Work Done in 1931–1933’, Indian Art and Letters, new ser., vii (1933), 10–13

‘The Practice of Sāmaveda’, 7th All-India Oriental Conference: Baroda 1933 (Baroda, 1935), 143–55

with P. Stern: Introduction to Chansons de Rabindranath Tagore (Paris, 1935) [with transcrs. and trans.]

‘Indian Folk Music’, PMA, lxiii (1936–7), 65–77

‘Kīrtan in Bengal’, Indian Art and Letters, new ser., xxi (1947), 34–40

‘Indian Folk Dances’, JIFMC, i (1949), 47–54

‘Some Aspects of the Development of Indian Music’, PRMA, lxxvi (1949–50), 23–34

‘The Impact of Western Music on the Indian Musical System’, JIFMC, v (1953), 57–64

‘Bharata's Experiment with the two Vinās’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, xx (1957), 61–7

‘Folk Traditions in Nepal: Continuity and Change’, Folk-lore, lxix–lxx (1958–9), 313–22

‘Quelques éléments religieux dans le théâtre indien’, Les théâtres d’Asie: CNRS Royaumont 1959, 41–8

‘La musique indienne’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, i (Paris, 1960), 319–42

‘Tagore and Western Music’, Rabindranath Tagore: a Centenary Volume (New Delhi, 1961), 88–95

‘Charlemagne in Malabar’, Folk-lore, lxxiii–lxxiv (1962–3), 450–59

‘Stick Dances’, YIFMC, ii (1970), 56–62

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.S. Mundy: ‘Obituary, Dr. Arnold Bake’, Folk-lore, lxxiv (1963), 498–501

J. Gonda: ‘Herdenking von Arnold Adriaan Bake’, Jaarboek der Koninklijke nederlandse akademie van wetenschappen (1963–4), 429–35

J. Brough: ‘Obituary, Arnold Adriaan Bake’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, xxvii (1964), 246–61 [incl. list of writings by J.R. and W. Marr, 262–4]

N.A. Jairazbhoy: ‘Arnold Bake and the First Restudy of his Fieldwork, 1984’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1990)

Bake Restudy 1984, videotape, dir. N.A. Jairazbhoy and A. Catlin, Aspara Media (Van Nuys, CA, 1991) [incl. monograph]

NAZIR A. JAIRAZBHOY

Bakels, Kees

(b Amsterdam, 14 Jan 1945). Dutch conductor. He studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory and began his career as a violinist, later working with Franco Ferrara and Bruno Rigacci at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, and also with Kiril Kondrashin. His first conducting appointments were with the Amsterdam PO as associate conductor and the Netherlands CO as principal guest conductor. He has toured extensively in Europe and the USA, and in Britain with the BBC PO and BBC Welsh SO. His ENO début was in 1986 with Aida, and he returned for Fidelio in 1988; he has also conducted several productions for the WNO. He has a regular association as principal guest conductor with the Bournemouth SO and became principal conductor of the Netherlands RSO in 1993. He has also appeared frequently with the Netherlands Opera, and has conducted operatic performances in San Diego and Vancouver. His conducting is direct and unfussy, although singers have sometimes been disconcerted by his erratic tempos. Among his recordings are Mascagni's Nerone and Il piccolo Marat, and a series of Vaughan Williams symphonies with the Bournemouth SO.

NOËL GOODWIN

Baker, Arthur.

American record producer. A club DJ in Boston, he ventured into dance music production by borrowing money from relatives. After producing a number of obscure dance singles he moved to New York in 1979, the year in which the first rap records were released. A meeting with Tom Silverman led to Baker's engineering and producing Silverman's second release on his new Tommy Boy label, Jazzy Sensation by the Jazzy Five. The next single, Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, was influenced by the electronic music of Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Gary Numan and changed the sound of hip hop. Released in 1982, Planet Rock was produced by Baker, along with the ideas of Silverman and Bambaataa and the musicianship of John Robie. Baker's association with futuristic dance music, known as electro, led to production work for New Order and Freeze, along with further Afrika Bambaataa releases such as Looking For the Perfect Beat and Renegades of Funk. Launching a label, Streetwise, he released New Editions ABC. The trend of remixing artists for the dance market led to Baker's producing dance mixes of Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In the Dark. Later production and remix work included singles or albums by Hall & Oates, Bob Dylan, the Stylistics, Al Green and Diana Ross. After some years working in the mainstream, Baker returned to producing dance records, for clubs in New York, London and Miami.

DAVID TOOP

Baker, Chet [Chesney Henry]

(b Yale, OK, 23 Dec 1929; d Amsterdam, 13 May 1988). American jazz trumpeter and singer. He first encountered jazz while playing in army bands, and by the time of his discharge in 1951 his distinctive, reticent style was fully developed. In 1952 he played briefly with Charlie Parker before beginning an important association with Gerry Mulligan in the latter’s celebrated ‘pianoless’ quartet. His performances with the group, particularly his ballad rendition of My Funny Valentine (1952, Fan.), brought him instant fame; his clear tone and subdued, lyrical manner – he rarely played louder than mezzo-forte and sometimes restricted his melodic span to less than an octave – immediately became hallmarks of West Coast cool jazz, and were widely imitated. After leaving Mulligan in 1953 Baker rejoined Parker briefly and then led his own groups. He continued to dominate domestic and international jazz opinion polls for the next few years. Thereafter, owing largely to the effects of drug addiction, his career became erratic, being interrupted at one point by a prison sentence in Italy for drug-related offences (1960–61). Between 1964 and 1970 he played the flugelhorn after his trumpet was stolen. In the 1970s he resumed playing the trumpet regularly, particularly in ensembles without piano or drums, and by the mid-1980s he was again much in demand for club performances and recording dates. In 1989 he was the subject of Bruce Weber’s celebrated film documentary Let’s Get Lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.H. Lerfeldt and T. Sjøgren: Chet: the Discography of Chesney Henry Baker (Copenhagen, 1985, 2/1993, as Chet: the Music of Chesney Henry Baker)

B. Borgström and C. Landergren: Chet Baker (Stockholm, 1990)

L. Lewein: Chet Baker: Blue Notes (Vienna, 1991)

G. Rouy: Chet Baker (Paris, 1992)

W. Claxton: Chet Baker (Munich, 1993)

I. Wolff: Chet Baker in Europe, 1975–1988 (Kiel, 1993)

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Baker, Israel

(b Chicago, 11 Feb 1921). American violinist. He studied first at the American Conservatory, Chicago, and made his début at Orchestra Hall in Chicago at the age of six. After further periods of study with Louis Persinger at the Juilliard School and with Jacques Gordon and Bronisław Huberman, he developed a considerable reputation as a chamber musician, orchestral leader and soloist. Much of Baker’s career was spent in California, where he was the regular second violinist in the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Chamber Concerts and leader in the long series of recordings by Stravinsky and by Bruno Walter. As a soloist he had particular success with such works as Schoenberg’s Concerto and Phantasy and Berg’s Chamber Concerto; his recordings of those pieces combine stylistic acumen with the advantages of a thorough grounding in the Viennese Romantic tradition. Both as a soloist and as a member of the Pacific Art Trio, Baker performed and recorded works by Antheil, Ives, Korngold, Vernon Duke and Gail Kubik.

BERNARD JACOBSON

Baker, Dame Janet (Abbott)

(b Hatfield, Yorks., 21 Aug 1933). English mezzo-soprano. She studied in London with Helene Isepp and Meriel St Clair, making her début in 1956 as Miss Róza in The Secret (Oxford University Opera Club). In 1959 she sang Eduige in the Handel Opera Society’s Rodelinda; other Handel roles included Ariodante (1964) and Orlando (1966), which she sang to great acclaim at the Barber Institute, Birmingham. With the English Opera Group at Aldeburgh she sang Purcell’s Dido (1962), Polly (Britten’s version of The Beggar’s Opera) and Lucretia. At Glyndebourne she appeared again as Dido (1966) and as Diana/Jupiter (Calisto) and Penelope (Il ritorno d’Ulisse). For Scottish Opera she sang Dorabella, Dido (Les Troyens), Octavian, the Composer and Gluck’s Orpheus. At Covent Garden she made her début in 1966 as Hermia, and later sang Berlioz’s Dido, Kate in Owen Wingrave (the role she created in its original television version in 1971), Mozart’s Vitellia (see illustration) and Idamantes, Walton’s Cressida and Gluck’s Alcestis (1981). For the ENO she sang Poppaea, Mary Stuart, Charlotte (Werther) and Julius Caesar. In 1982 she retired from opera, after singing Mary Stuart at the ENO and Gluck’s Orpheus at Glyndebourne. She described her final opera season and her career in Full Circle (London, 1982). Complete emotional identification with her roles, many of which she recorded, and a rich, expressive and flexible voice enabled her to excel in florid as well as dramatic music.

Baker divided her time between the stage and the concert platform. Perhaps her greatest single success as a song recitalist was at her début in Town Hall, New York, on 2 December 1966; on that occasion her personal magnetism and sense of communication won her an entirely new audience. In her recital programmes she penetrated far beyond the normal confines of Schubert lieder, becoming a devoted exponent of French and English song. She gave the première (1975, Minneapolis) of Dominick Argento’s song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Britten wrote his dramatic cantata Phaedra for her in 1975 (first performance, Aldeburgh Festival, 1976). She was also a noble interpreter of Mahler (all the great song cycles) and Elgar, and a Bach singer of peculiar eloquence and technical accomplishment. Everything she sang was imbued with an innate feeling for the meaning and emotional import of the text. Many discs document fully all facets of her career. Numerous honours have been awarded her, including the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize (1971), and honorary degrees from the universities of London, Birmingham and Oxford. She was made a CBE in 1970 and a DBE in 1976.

WRITINGS

‘The Singer and the Art of Communication’, RSA Journal, no. 5468 (1996), 53–60

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Blyth: Janet Baker (London, 1973) [with discography by M. Walker]

J.B. Steane: The Grand Tradition (London, 1974), 500ff

ALAN BLYTH

Baker, Josephine

(b St Louis, 3 June 1906; d Paris, 12 April 1975). American singer and actress. She became a professional street musician at the age of 13, and toured with the Dixie Steppers vaudeville troupe. Following her success as end-girl in the chorus line on tour with the musical Shuffle Along (1921), she was featured in its sequel, Chocolate Dandies (1924), and in a New York nightclub revue. In 1925 she moved to Paris to star in La revue nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in which she indulged in frenzied dancing and exaggerated mimicry; the show concluded with a nude savage dance duet. Baker then appeared in the Folies-Bergère (1925), where she made her entrance clad in three bracelets and a girdle of rhinestone-studded bananas. Her combination of the erotic and comic made her one of the most celebrated performers in France: she became a darling of society, portrayed by such artists as Picasso and Calder (see illustration), and acclaimed as an inspiration to American blacks.

In the 1930s she ran nightclubs, appeared in films, toured, and played the leading role in a production of Offenbach’s La créole (1934). During this period her image became more cultured and she included more songs in her act; her theme song was Vincent Scotto’s J’ai deux amours. After World War II, during which she assisted the French Resistance and entertained troops, for which she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, she devoted much of her time to civil rights struggles and her 12 adopted children of different nationalities, her ‘Rainbow Tribe’. Although her popularity fluctuated after the 1940s, as a consequence of civil rights confrontations, controversial political alliances and fewer successful performances, she continued performing until four days before her death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB

‘Baker, Josephine’, CBY 1974

J. Baker and J. Bouillon: Josephine (New York, 1977)

L. Haney: Naked at the Feast: a Biography of Josephine Baker (New York, 1981)

B. Hammond and P.O’Connor: Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in her Time (London, 1987)

SAMUEL S. BRYLAWSKI

Baker, Michael Conway

(b West Palm Beach, FL, 13 Mar 1937). Canadian composer of American birth. He completed a BMus at the University of British Columbia (1966) and an MA at Western Washington University in Bellingham (1971); he also studied privately with Lennox Berkeley in London (1974–5). Baker’s compositional activities have been divided between concert and film music. His style is generally tonal, strongly grounded in lyrical melodic writing and particularly noted for its rich orchestration. These features make his music generally accessible, and have contributed to its popular success. He has received awards for his concert works as well as for his film and television scores. Baker has resided in Vancouver, British Columbia, since 1958. In 1997 he was appointed to the Order of British Columbia for his contribution to the province. A number of his works have been recorded by CBC and Summit records.

WORKS

Dramatic: Washington Square (ballet), orch, 1978; The Grey Fox (film score), 1982; Maggie (film score), 1982; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (incid music), 1989; Cinderella: Frozen in Time, 1993 [for D. Hamill’s ‘Ice Capades’]; c10 other stage and film scores

Orch: Counterplay, va, str orch, 1971, arr. va, pf, 1973; Fl Conc., fl, str, 1974; A Struggle for Dominion, pf, orch, 1975; Pf Conc., pf, chbr orch, 1976; Duo Concertante, vn, va, str orch, 1976; Sym. no.1 ‘Highland’, 1977; Fanfare for Expo 86, 1983; Symphonia concertante, 1984; Capriccio, solo insts, orch, 1986; Joyeuse, 1987; Celebration Canada, 1993; The Flight of Aphrodite, vn, orch/pf, 1993; Summit Concerto, tpt, orch, 1994; Vancouver Variations, ob, chbr orch, 1996; c10 other works for orch, c10 other works for orch with solo inst

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, fl, pf, 1963; Capriccio, 2 pf, 1964; 5 Epigrams, ww Trio, 1965; Concert Piece, org, pf, timp, 1969; Str Qt no.1, 1969; Music for 6 Players, fl, ob, str trio, hpd, 1973; Dance Sequences, vc, 1975; Sonata, pf, 1975; Rainforest Suite, pf, 1987; Star Warriors, synth, 1989; Capriccio, bn, str qt, 1991; To Play with Angels, vn, vc, 1995

Vocal: 5 Canadian Folksongs, 1v, pf, 1973; 6 Songs (Sappho), Mez, pf, 1975; The Unattainable (A.C. Bourne), song cycle, 1v, pf, 1978; A Hymn to Life (Baker), SATB, org, 1983; Rita Joe, tone poem, S, orch, 1983; Seven Wonders, song cycles, S, pf, 1983; Eve of the Garden, S, orch, 1985; Come Make the Music (P.A. Baker), chorus, org, pf, bells, 1988; Fanfare and Chorale (A Better Way) (P.A. Baker), chorus, brass band, 1991; Take Each New Day (P.A. Baker), S, tpt, org, 1992; Eridanus (A Tribute to Malcolm Lowry), fl, rec, ob, a sax, vn, pf, synth, db, perc, nar, 1993

Principal Publisher: Evocation

JOAN BACKUS

Baker, Peter.

See Meyer, Ernst Hermann.

Baker, Theodore

(b New York, 3 June 1851; d Dresden, 13 Oct 1934). American music scholar and lexicographer. Trained as a young man for a business career, he decided rather on music. For a time he was an organist in Concord, Massachusetts. He went to Germany to study in 1874 and took the doctorate at Leipzig in 1882 with a dissertation based on field studies among the Seneca Indians in New York state. This, the first serious work on American Indian music, was shown to MacDowell by Henry Gilbert, and provided themes for MacDowell's Second (‘Indian’) Suite for orchestra. Baker returned to the USA in 1891 and became literary editor and translator for the music publishing firm of Schirmer, Inc. (1892), a post he held until his retirement in 1926, when he returned to Germany. Besides making many translations into English of books, librettos and articles (the last especially for the Musical Quarterly, published by Schirmer), Baker compiled a useful dictionary of musical terms (1895) and a biographical dictionary (1900), the work for which he is best known.

WRITINGS

Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1882; Leipzig, 1882/R1976 with Eng. trans.)

Dictionary of Musical Terms (New York, 1895/R, 23/1923/R)

[Baker's] Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (New York, 1900, 2/1905, rev., enlarged 3/1919 by A. Remy, rev. 4/1940 by C. Engel, rev. 5/1958 by N. Slonimsky, suppl. 1971, rev. 6/1978, 7/1984, 8/1992 by N. Slonimsky)

A Pronouncing Pocket Manual of Musical Terms (New York, 1905, 2/1947)

Beethoven: a Critical Biography (New York, 1913/R) [trans. of V. d'Indy: Beethoven, Paris, 1911]

ed.: The Musician's Calendar and Birthday Book (New York, 1915–17)

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK

Baker, William

(d 1685). English violin maker. He worked in Oxford at the end of the 17th century. The baptismal record of his first child in 1672 refers to him as ‘Mr Baker the fidell maker’, possibly the earliest reference to the profession in England. A cello attributed to the same year is thought to be the earliest surviving English cello, and in addition a small viola still in virtually original condition, once in the possession of the Oxford Music School and bearing a facsimile label of 1685, the year of his death, tells us much about the working practices of early English violin makers. The form of the instruments reflects Brescian patterns of more than 50 years earlier, with full archings and occasionally double purfling, but is probably derived more directly from the work of the Tyrolean-born violin maker Jacob Rayman, who worked in London from 1620 to 1650. Two other Bakers are recorded as viol makers; Francis Baker was contemporary with William and worked in St Paul’s Churchyard in London, and John Baker worked in Oxford in the early 18th century. Neither has been proved to be related to William, although it would seem likely.

JOHN DILWORTH

Bakfark [Bacfarc, Bakfarc, Bakfarkh, Bakffark] [Greff alias Bakfark, Greff Bakfark], Valentin

(b Brassó [Kronstadt], Transylvania [now Braşov, Romania], ?1526–30; d Padua, 22 Aug 1576). Hungarian lutenist and composer. His biography, formerly founded on inadequate documentation and misconstruction of available facts, has been badly distorted; more recently discovered evidence and reinterpretation of received data allow a far more accurate story to be given. Bakfark’s family belonged to the German minority in Transylvania; the Hungarian form ‘Bálint’ for his Christian name, common in modern scholarship, is not found in contemporaneous sources. From 1565 he preferred the form ‘Greff alias Bakfark’ for his surname, which has also undergone variation in spelling in modern scholarship beyond what occurred during his lifetime. Bakfark’s father Thomas was a lutenist, and so were his brother Michael (probably) and Michael’s son Johannes (two dances ed. in Valentini Bakfark opera omnia, iii, appx 1–2). Valentin Bakfark’s date of birth was formerly believed to be 1507 (or 1506/7) on the evidence of his epitaph in S Lorenzo, Padua, according to which he died in 1576 at the age of 69. Other documents make it probable that he was born between 1526 and 1530.

Information from Bakfark himself, presented in a deed of János Zsigmond, Prince of Transylvania, in 1570, asserts that as a young boy he showed musical talent and was taught as a music apprentice at the court of the Hungarian King János I Szapolyai (ruled 1526–40). A Kronstadt document of 1536 tells of a lutenist being sent with his son (probably Bakfark and his father) to the king. According to the 1570 deed, Bakfark’s master was a learned court musician of János I. Although the exact identity of this person is obscure, some characteristics of Bakfark’s works suggest an Italian teacher. In the preface to his Kraków publication of 1565 Bakfark referred to the excellent musicians of Pope Leo X whom he followed in his youth; this is probably an allusion to Mathias Marigliano of Milan (formerly musico segreto to Leo X), in Hungarian royal service between around 1538 and 1544.

Although it has been assumed that after the death of János I (22 July 1540) Bakfark left Hungary and went to France or possibly to Italy, the deed of 1570 states that from 1540 Bakfark ‘served laudably many years’ János’s widow, Queen Isabella Jagiełło (who resided in Transylvania from 1542). Bakfark left her court in 1549 and went to Poland to seek employment. In Kraków on 14 May he was rewarded for his playing by King Zygmunt II August (brother of the widowed queen of Hungary), and from 8 June 1549 he appeared among the Polish court musicians. On 15 June he was officially admitted as an instrumentalist (‘fistulator’). Before the summer of 1551 he married Katharina Narbutowna, a widow from Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

In autumn 1551 the king was visited in Vilna by his uncle Albrecht of Brandenburg, Duke of Prussia, and it was probably on this occasion that Bakfark became acquainted with the duke, an influential patron until at least 1562 or 1563. Bakfark appeared later in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Albrecht’s city of residence, and also met the duke during his visits to Poland. He did not, however, act as an agent of the duke, as has been assumed owing to a misunderstanding of a letter from Bakfark to Albrecht of 1552. With Albrecht’s support, Bakfark left the Polish court in February 1552 and travelled to Italy by way of Germany. In Nuremberg he (probably by chance) encountered Philipp Melanchthon, who recommended him to the Fugger family in Augsburg. However, military actions in southern Germany forced him to return to Poland. In September, after some months at the court, he left Zygmunt August’s retinue in Königsberg and went to France (perhaps through Italy).

While in Lyons Bakfark published his first lutebook, which he dedicated on 23 January 1553 to Cardinal François Tournon, Archbishop of Lyons. According to a letter from Duke Albrecht (1554), Bakfark appeared at the French court – he probably accompanied Cardinal Tournon there in May – and also in Rome at the papal court. He returned to Königsberg about spring 1554 and rejoined the Polish king’s court in May. Royal accounts and other documents show that from this time he stayed with the court continuously, leaving it only for short periods. (His frequent travels in Poland and Lithuania have been misunderstood: they were not separate journeys of his own, but part of the court itinerary.) Soon after his return in 1554, on Albrecht's recommendation, the king increased Bakfark’s salary, making him one of the best-paid musicians of the Polish court; he continually received rises as well as gifts.

Within ten years of service Bakfark had amassed considerable wealth: he bought a house in Vilna in 1559; in the same year Duke Albrecht intervened on his behalf in a letter to Zygmunt August, which mentions some property given to Bakfark by the king; in a document of 1566 Bakfark referred to his estates (bona) in Vilna and its environs. His social status, fame and popularity increased immensely during his Polish years. While in Poland in 1552–6, János Zsigmond, son of Bakfark’s Hungarian royal patrons, ennobled Bakfark and presumably his brother Michael.

Bakfark’s actual service in Poland lasted until May or June 1565. About this time he travelled to Vienna to request a privilege (obtained on 16 July) for his second lutebook from the Emperor Maximilian II. Bakfark then returned to Kraków to take part in the process of publication. Although he dedicated the work to Zygmunt August on 15 October, he did not present it to the king in person. He remained in Kraków, but by the end of 1565 he had decided to transfer into Maximilian’s service. His motive for the sudden change is not known (there is no evidence for his political activity, as has been suggested). He left Poland in June 1566. In the meantime his possessions had been plundered by Polish soldiers, possibly in revenge by the king for his disloyalty.

On 1 July Bakfark joined Maximilian’s court, where his position was similar to the one he had left behind. He received the second highest (briefly the highest) salary among the musicians, comparable to that he had enjoyed in Poland. During his service at the Habsburg court he followed the emperor in his retinue to Hungary and Bohemia. His second marriage, to Juliana Taxear of Innsbruck, occurred most likely in 1567 or 1568. In 1569 Bakfark was accused of involvement in a rebellion against the emperor. After some hesitation he returned to Maxmilian in early October. He was arrested, but seems to have been released very quickly, since he left for Padua early in December.

Immediately thereafter, Bakfark entered into the service of János Zsigmond Szapolyai, Prince of Transylvania. In 1570 the prince rewarded the lutenist with the estate of a whole village close to his own residence in Gyulafehérvár (now Alba Iulia, Romania). In late summer or autumn 1571, some months after the death of the prince, Bakfark left Transylvania for Padua where his family had remained. He settled there close to the university and probably had pupils among the foreign students; his contact with them is well documented. Bakfark, his wife and their children (one daughter and three sons) all died during the plague of 1576. He was buried in S Lorenzo, Padua, on 23 August.

The Bakfarks’ neighbour and executor of Bakfark’s wife’s will, the famous lute maker Wendelin Tieffenbrucker, compiled an inventory of their goods, which proves that Bakfark did not destroy his manuscripts as legend had it. The inventory records, besides printed editions of Josquin, Palestrina and Pietro Joanelli Bakfark’s own Kraków lutebook and three tablatures in folio, two of them described as manuscripts. In 1578 Tieffenbrucker, together with the ‘natio germanica’ at the university, erected a memorial for Bakfark in S Lorenzo.

Bakfark’s fame caused his name and Polish sobriquet ‘Węgrzynek’ (‘the little Hungarian’) to become a part of Polish speech. The Polish proverb concerning those who ‘pick up the lute after [or in the presence of] Bakfark’ first appeared in print in 1566. Bakfark’s name was mentioned in Polish literature into the late 17th century, becoming a figure of legend. He was celebrated by poets, among them the famous Jan Kochanowsky (1530–84). In the next century the poet Andrzej Morsztyn wrote that he ‘never wanted to be Bakfark or [Antoine] Gallot’. Foreigners also praised Bakfark: Melanchthon called him an enchanting musician (1552), and the papal nuncio found him excellent (1560). The Hungarian Bishop A. Dudith, sent by Maximilian II as ambassador to Poland, characterized him as a marvellous and unique master of his art (1566), which mirrors Duke Albrecht’s statement in his letter to Zygmunt Augustus of 1559: ‘one rarely finds anyone comparable in his art, and hardly a king has such a musician’. The Paduan lutenist Giulio Cesare Barbetta commemorated Bakfark in his 1582 lutebook with a Passo’e mezo … detto il bachffart, based on a popular German dance-tune (ed. in Valentini Bakfark opera omnia, iii, appx 3).

Bakfark’s extant works, all for solo lute, date from his Polish years. More than three-quarters are strictly faithful intabulations of motets, chansons and madrigals by Arcadelt, Gombert, Clemens non Papa, Josquin and others. Bakfark’s nine fantasias are composed in a dense three- or four-part contrapuntal texture with consistent use of points of imitation. They show the influence of the vocal works of Gombert, Clemens and Willaert, and probably more immediately of the instrumental ensemble ricercares that appeared in Italy during the 1530s and 40s. The ‘recercati’ of Bakfark’s 1553 Lyons publication are among the first such compositions for the lute. They are a clear departure from the less contrapuntal and formally looser fantasias of Bakfark’s predecessors Francesco da Milano, Alberto da Ripa, Luis de Narváez and others. All Bakfark’s compositions are ornamented with remarkable taste and variety. The frequent use of stereotyped formulae, typical of many contemporaneous lutenists, is absent from his output (with the exception of cadences). Bakfark’s works are notably difficult; high left-hand positions and barré fingerings occur frequently.

WORKS

all for lute

Edition:Valentini Bakfark opera omnia, ed. I. Homolya and D. Benkő (Budapest, 1976–82) [HB]

Intabulatura Valentini Bacfarc transilvani coronensis liber primus (Lyons, 1553); ed. HB, i [1553]

Valentini Greffi Bacfarci pannonii harmoniarum musicarum in usum testudinis factarum tomus primus (Kraków, 1565); ed. HB, ii [1565]

9 fantasias: 4 in 1553 (HB, i, nos.1–4), 3 in 1565 (HB, ii, nos.21–3), 2 others (HB, iii, nos.34–5); arr. of no.4, HB, i, appx; HB, iii, no.33 is not a fantasia but an intabulation; HB, iii, no.35 is a parody of Clemens non Papa, Rossignolet

32 intabulations (14 motets, 10 chansons, 7 madrigals, 1 ?Pol. song): 16 in 1553 (HB, i, nos.5–20), 9 in 1565 (HB, ii, nos.24–32), 7 others (HB, iii, nos.33, 36–41); arr. of HB, i, no.11, 1573²⁷, PL-Kj Mus.ms.40598; arr. of HB, i, no.18, 1573²⁷; arr. of HB, i, no.19, Kj Mus.ms.40598; HB, iii, no.33 intabulates Arcadelt, De mes ennuys; HB, iii, no.41 intabulates Sandrin, Doulce mémoire

doubtful works

‘Fantasia V.B.’, D-DEl Anhaltsche Landesbücherei BB 12150

Non dite mai, galliard (?intabulation), HB, iii, no.42; arr. in 1556³², 1573²⁷, UA-LV 1400/1

Passamezo vom Ungern,

‘Gagliarda V.B.’CH-Bu IX.70

Pass’emeso detto L’ongaro, ‘Valentim Bachsen’, Italy, Castelfranco Cathedral

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Opieński: ‘Bekwark lutnista’, Biblioteka warszawska, ii (1906), 464–85

A. Koczirz: Österreichische Lautenmusik im XVI. Jahrhundert, DTÖ, xxxvii, Jg.xviii/2 (1911), pp.xxxii–xvl

H. Opieński: Beiträge zu Valentin Bakfark’s Leben und Werk (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1914)

E. Haraszti: ‘Un grand luthiste du XVIe siècle: Valentin Bakfark’, RdM, x (1929), 159–76

H.-P. Kosack: Geschichte der Laute und Lautenmusik in Preussen (Kassel, 1935), 13–19, 99

O. Gombosi: Bakfark Bálint élete és művei (1507–1576)/Der Lautenist Valentin Bakfark: Leben und Werke (1507–1576) (Budapest, 1935/R1967 in Ger. only with further bibliography)

D. Benkő: ‘Bakfark Problems I. (Lasso-Bakfark “Veni in hortum meum”)’, SM, xvii (1975), 297–313

G. Nussbächer: ‘Zur Biographie von Valentin Greff-Bakfark’, Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde, xxv/1–2 (1982), 103–5

I. Homolya: Bakfark (Budapest, 1984)

G. Nussbächer: ‘Precizări cu privire la biografia lui Valentin Greff-Bakfark’ [Corrections concerning the biography of Bakfark], Studii de muzicologie, xiii (1984), 139–48

I. Szabó: ‘Bakfark Bálint VIII. fantáziájának zenei mintája’ [The musical model of Bakfark’s Fantasia VIII], Magyar zene, xxvi (1985), 398–9

P. Király: ‘Újabb adatok és néhány korrekció Bakfark Bálint lengyelországi működésével kapcsolatban’ [New data and some corrections about Bakfark’s work in Poland], Magyar zene, xxvi (1985), 406–30

P. Király: ‘Bakfark Bálint adománylevele’ [Bakfark’s deed], Magyar zene, xxviii (1987), 88–100

P. Király: ‘Mikor született Bakfark?’ [When was Bakfark born?], Magyar zene, xxx (1989), 41–54

P. Király: ‘Adalékok Bakfark Bálint életéhez és munkásságához’ [Materials for Bakfark’s life and work], Magyar zene, xxxi (1991), 339–46

P. Király: ‘Bakfark hagyatékának inventáriuma’ [The inventory of Bakfark’s estate], Muzsika, xxxv/12 (1992), 25–7

P. Király: ‘Bakfark Padovai végrendelete és hagyatéka’ [Bakfark’s testament and estate in Padova], Muzsika, xxxviii/6 (1995), 18–20

P. Király: A lantjáték Magyarországon a XV. századtól a XVII. század közepéig [Lute playing in Hungary from the 15th century to the mid-17th] (Budapest, 1995), 103–10, 179–91

E. Deák: ‘“Albo Juss Dalej”, ein Chanson von Sandrin in Bakfarks Transcription’, Die Laute, i (1998), 18–23

PETER KIRÁLY

Bakhor, Firuz

(b Dushanbe, 19 Nov 1942). Tajik composer. Born into a family with a strong operatic tradition, he received his first training as a pianist, firstly with Rafael' Danilovich Ayrapetyants (1959–63) and then at the Gnesin Institute in Moscow (1963–6) where he started to show an interest in composition. He studied privately with Khagagortian and Ter-Osipov before transferring to the composition department of the Tashkent Conservatory in 1966. He worked in the Mirzo Tursun-zade Institute of Art (1971–6 and 1993–6) before settling in Germany. Although he has experimented with serial, aleatory and sonoristic techniques, these have always been subordinated to the national traditions which lie at the roots of his work. The six vocal and instrumental shashmakom which form the basis of Tajik folk music all constitute the main building blocks of Bakhor's compositions; they can be recognized not only by their modal properties, melodic contours and rhythmic or metrical characteristics of the works, but also by their instrumentation, methods of development, architecture and artistic imagery.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballets: Prekrasnaya Duvalroni [The Fair Duvalroni] (ballet), 1980; Makom lyubvi [The Makom of Love] (ballet), 1988

Inst: Marakanda, sym. poem, orch, 1970; Sym. no.1, orch, 1974–84; Sym. no.2, orch, 1976; Al'bom dlya Zukhrï [Album for Zukhra], pf, 1979; Sym. no.3, orch, 1980–85; Indiyskaya syuita [Indian Suite}, 2 pf, 1984; Sym. no.4 ‘Buzurg velikiy’ [The Great ‘Buzurg’], orch, 1984; Risunki po sholku [Drawings on Silk], preludes and fugues, pf, 1985; Irok, makom, orch, 1988

Film scores, incid music, choral and vocal-orch works

LARISA ALEXANDROVNA NAZAROVA

Bäkker, Dietrich.

See Becker, Dietrich.

Baklanov [Bakkis], Georgy (Andreyevich)

(b Riga, 23 Dec 1880/4 Jan 1881; d Basle, 6 Dec 1938). Russian baritone of Latvian birth. He studied with Pets in Kiev, Pryanishnikov in St Petersburg and Vanza in Milan. He made his début (1903, Kiev) as Rubinstein’s Demon, sang with the Zimin Private Opera in Moscow and was engaged in 1905 by the Bol'shoy, creating the Baron in Rachmaninoff’s The Miserly Knight (1906) and remaining until 1909, when he sang Barnaba (La Gioconda) at the inaugural performance of the Boston Opera House. At Covent Garden he appeared as Rigoletto (début, 1910), Scarpia and Amonasro, repeating the first two roles at the Komische Oper, Berlin in 1911. He sang in Boston (1915–18), then with Chicago Opera (1917–26), and in New York, where he later became a mainstay of the Russian Opera Company. Baklanov’s repertory included Yevgeny Onegin, Hamlet, Boris, Méphistophélès (Faust), the Father (Louise), Golaud (Pelléas et Mélisande), Telramund and Wotan. He was greatly admired for his dramatic talents, and his voice was rich and vibrant, particularly in the middle and upper registers. Between 1910 and 1930 he made a number of recordings. Further notes on his career can be found in M. Scott: The Record of Singing, ii (London, 1979), 12–14.

HAROLD BARNES, KATHERINE K. PRESTON

Bakshi, Aleksandr Moyseyevich

(b Sukhumi, 12 March 1951). Russian composer. He graduated in 1977 from the Musical Pedagogical Institute of Rostov (now the Rachmaninoff State Conservatory), and later moved to Moscow. He became a member of the Union of Composers in 1983, and was a laureate of the State Prize of Russia in 1994.

Bakshi has been concerned with the concept of synthesis of music and theatre since he wrote Drama for piano, violin and cello as a student. Among his works there are almost no purely orchestral or choral pieces. They do not usually involve collective music-making in the usual sense. His attitude to musical material could be likened to that of a theatre producer; he lines up his sonic mise en scènes, and interprets each instrumental or vocal line as an independent musical or stage role. Thus, his poem-play Ya – poėt … (‘I am a poet …’), set to verse by Aleksandr Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky, is a tragifarce for 13 people: two singers and 11 instrumentalists.

Sidur-misteriya (The Sidur-Mystery), inspired by themes drawn from the sculptures of Vadim Sidur (1991) and Igrï v installyatsiyakh (Games in Installations) (1993) – both for voice and percussion – were the first works performed in Russia which were wholly built on the principles of instrumental theatre. Collaboration with performers has acquired a particular importance for the composer; a regular participant in Bakshi’s instrumental theatre is the soprano L. Bakshi. Besides the works already mentioned, the play in one act 23/6 (1989), and Prevrashcheniye (Metamorphosis) for voice, an ensemble of exotic instruments, string trio, and piano (1995) were the result of collaborations with M. Pekarsky and his ensemble. The Pekarsky Ensemble has taken part in productions of Rokovïye yaytsa (The Fateful Eggs) and Kaligula (Caligula), for which Bakshi wrote incidental music; both were staged at the Yermolova Theatre. Bakshi wrote Zima v Moskve. Gololyod (Winter in Moscow. Icy Pavements) (1994), and Stsena dlya Tat'yanï Gridenko i skripki (Scene for Tat'yana Gridenko and a Violin) (1995) for the Academy of Ancient Music Ensemble, directed by Gridenko.

Starting from Numer v gostinitse goroda NN (A Room in a Hotel in the Town of NN), Bakshi has worked in collaboration exclusively with the producer Valery Fokin. In particular, works such as Poslednyaya noch' poslednego tsarya (The Last Night of the Last Tsar), and Karamazovï i ad (The Karamazovs and Hell) are based on the interaction of instrumental theatre and realistic psychological drama. Installyatsii (Installations) by Bakshi and Fokin was performed with great success at international festivals in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and the USA.

WORKS

(selective list)

Drama, pf trio, 1977; Ya – poėt … [I am a Poet …] (poetry play, A. Blok, V. Mayakovsky), 2vv, 11 insts, 1982; Vospominaniye o Gruzii [Recollections about Georgia], sonata, prep pf, 1988; Sonata, 1v, pf, 1988; 23/6, play in one act for the Pekarsky Ensemble, 1989; Sidur-misteriya, S, perc, 1992; Igrï v installyatsiyakh [Games in Installations], musical production, 1v, perc, 1993; Numer v gostinitse goroda NN [A Room in a Hotel in the Town of NN], musical production, 8 perc, kbd insts, S vv, 1994; Zima v Moskve. Gololyod [Winter in Moscow. Icy Pavements], vn, vc, str ens, 1994; Prevrashcheniya [Metamorphosis] (musical production, after F. Kafka), 1v, ens of exotic insts, str trio, pf, 1995; Karamazovï i ad [The Karamazovs and Hell] (musical production, after F. Dostoyevsky), Ct, vocal ens, perc, 1996; Poslednaya noch' poslednego tsarya [The Last Night of the Last Tsar], musical production after Ye. Radzinsky, unacc. vn, str qt, perc, vv, 1996

Chbr and vocal works

Incid music for theatre and film

WRITINGS

A. Bakshi: ‘ Opït vnutrennego dialoga’ [An experiment in an inner dialogue], MAk (1995), no.3, pp.13–16

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Gurevich: ‘Grob-art, zovushchiy k svetu. Fil'm o Vadime Sidure’ [Tomb-Art calling out to the light. A film about Vadim Sidur], Ėkran i stsena (1991), no.3

L. Semyonova: ‘Sidur-Misteriya’ [The Sidur Mystery], Ėkran i stsena ( 1993), nos.14–15

V. Sellier: ‘Synthese von Musik und Theater: Alexander Bakschi’, Theater am Neumarkt … 1992–1993 (Zürich, 1993)

L. Bakshi: ‘Sidur-Misteriya: syuzhet rozhdeniya teatra’ [Sidur Mystery: the subject of the birth of theatre], MAk ( 1994), no.1, pp.63–5

G. Zaslavsky: ‘Sil'nodeystvuyushcheye …’ [A virulent …], Ogonyok (1995), no.17, 44–5

Yu. Sidur: ‘Pastoral' na gryaznoy vode: povest'’ [A pastorale on muddy water: a tale], Oktyabr' (1996), no.4, pp.41–108 [see also no.5]

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Bakuradze, Teimuraz

(b Kutaisi, 17 April 1943). Georgian composer. In 1967 Bakuradze completed his musical education at the Tbilisi State Conservatory studying composition with Andria Balanchivadze. He lives and works in Tbilisi, composing on a freelance basis. Because of the originality and independence of his approach Bakuradze occupies a special place in Georgian music: having rejected prevailing norms and official aesthetic criteria from the start, he was the first Georgian composer to be interested in experimental instrumental theatre, ‘happenings’ and also the radical reinterpretation of traditional genres. His style is marked by the use of an array of techniques ranging from atonality and serialism to collage, minimalism, musique concrète along with aleatory and sonoristic methods. Most of his pieces contain extra-musical elements: some scores bear witness to his interest in mystical philosophy and Christian symbolism, which is organically combined with provocative wit and a touch of surrealism. In his first significant compositions (dating from the early 1970s), such as the String Quartet and Praeludium for soloists, orchestra and tape, instrumentalists are faced with problems concerning freely dramatic characterization, while he seeks to re-orientate the role of the listener who is obliged to participate in the performance process. By means of spatial arrangement of musicians, he has achieved acoustical effects which belie minimum numbers of performers. Later works – such as the Vespers and Two Books for Quintet – are characterized by further stylistic developments which lend greater depth and conceptuality, and incorporate static and meditative elements in addition to tonal episodes of a nostalgic nature. This minimalist, though highly expressive, music is defined by particular temporal relations, and is repetitive in not only thematic, but also textural, timbral, dynamic and rhythmical terms. The repeated elements are always of the utmost simplicity; the task of this sound-meditation is to transform the psyche of the listener, to propel him towards a state of ‘abstract consciousness’. Such penetration into the unconscious is of particular significance to Bakuradze, who is one of the most radical representatives of post-avant-garde music and the leader of the young generation of Georgian composers.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Praeludium (happening, 2, after Vazha-Pshavela), solo vv, orch, tape, 1974, Tbilisi, 17 April 1977

Vocal-orch: Lyric verses (cant., after Sh. Rustaveli: Vepkhis tkaosani [The Knight in the Tigerskin]), solo vv, chorus, ens, 1963; John Reed (orat, after G. Tabidze), solo v, chorus, orch, 1970; Sym.-cant. (after D. Agmashenebeli), chorus, orch, 1971

Chbr: Sextet, cl, perc, str qt, 1963; Dialogues, cl, bn, vc, 1968; Str Qt ‘Pshauri Natirilebi’ (after G. Tabidze), 1970; Mtsukhri [Vespers], str, 1978; Two Books for Qnt, pf qnt, 1992 [after anon. 9th-century Georgian author and Bible: Ecclesiastes]

Incid music

Principal publisher: Muzfond Gruzii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Mamisashvili: ‘Pshauri Natirilebi’, Sabchota Khelovneba (1975), no.1, pp.69–71 [on Bakuradze's String Quartet]

E. Sanadze: ‘Teimuraz Bakuradze’, Muzïka republik Zakavkaz'ya, ed. G. Orjonikidze (Tbilisi,1975), 152–5

LEAH DOLIDZE

Bālābān [balaman, yasti balaman, duduk].

(1) Cylindrical oboe of the Caucasus (particularly Azerbaijan), northern Iran and north-east Iraq. In northern Iran the bālābān is also known by its older Turkish name nerme ney or mey. It has a cylindrical wooden pipe, a broad reed and eight finger-holes, giving the scale E (with an A). The warm, full tone of the bālābān is often used with the choghur (lute) and qāvāl (frame drum) to accompany the singing of an ‘āshiq (poet-singer); it is also played solo, and in pairs with one instrument providing a drone.

The Azerbaijani balaban is 28 to 31 cm long and made of mulberry or apricot wood. The reed is 9 to 11 cm long and is inserted into the globular head. The older balaban had five to seven finger-holes, while contemporary instruments have eight finger-holes and one thumb-hole. Sometimes an additional hole is made in the lower end of the tube at the back.

The balaban produces a diatonic scale with a range of a 9th or 11th. Chromatic notes are produced by partly covering the finger-holes. The balaban has a soft, velvety sound rich in dynamic nuances. Primarily an ensemble instrument, it is often played in duet (see Iran, §II, 3); such instruments as the nagara (drum) or daf (frame drum) are played with the balaban duet for songs, dances and purely instrumental pieces. A balaban player also accompanies an ashug (poet-singer). The balaban is used in folk orchestras and played in larger professional or amateur ensembles belonging to urban and rural clubs.

The bālābān or qarnāta of the Turkmen and Kurds of north-east Iraq is made from a straight tube about 30 cm long, with seven finger-holes and one thumb-hole. The broad rectangular double reed (pīk, qamīsh) is 10 cm long and fitted with ring-shaped regulators. The instrument sometimes replaces the zurna at festivals, accompanied by a tabl (double-headed cylindrical drum). It accompanies the songs of the Turkmen and Kurds in the towns of Arbīl, Sulaymānīyah, Kirkīk and Tuz Khurmātū, either alone or with a single-headed drum. It is similar to the duduk of Armenia and Georgia.

(2) The balaban of the Uzbek and Tajik peoples of Central Asia is a clarinet. The instrument is called balaman by the neighbouring Qārāqalpaks and consists of a narrow cylindrical wooden bore, about 30 cm long, with a single reed inserted into the head. It has seven finger-holes and one thumb-hole.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveI (‘Duduk’, (i); R. At‘ayan)

C. Farr: The Music of Professional Musicians of Northern Iran (Azerbaijan) (diss., U. of Washington, 1976)

J. Jenkins and P.R. Olsen: Music and Musical Instruments in the World of Islam (London, 1976)

S. Qassim Hassan: Les instruments de musique en Irak et leur rôle dans la société traditionelle (Paris, 1980)

JEAN DURING, JOHANNA SPECTOR, SCHEHERAZADE QASSIM HASSAN, MARK SLOBIN

Balachander, S.

(b Madras [Chennai], Tamil Nadu, 18 Jan 1927; d Bhilai, Madhya Pradesh, 13 April 1990). South Indian vīnā player. S. Balachander was one of the greatest and most influential Karnatak musicians of the 20th century. From the age of five he showed a great interest in music and at six he appeared on the concert platform for the first time, as a kañjīrā accompanist to vocalists. He also learnt other instruments including the tablā, mrdangam and sitār. He was a concert artist on the sitār between 12 and 16 years of age. From the age of 15 for three years he was a staff artist at the Madras station of All India Radio, playing various instruments, as a soloist, accompanist and as part of an ensemble.

He took up the vīnā at age 16 and, self-taught, evolved a highly influential and original style which owed a great deal to the techniques of vocal music. This style is now known as the Balachander bāni. The features of the style are largely derived from the technique of deflecting the string across the fret to produce various phrases (sangatis) with a single pluck.

S. Balachander is credited with popularizing the vīnā in the concert hall (previously it had been thought of as a chamber instrument) and he contributed to a growing awareness of Karnatak music with his numerous tours in India and abroad. His extensive discography includes recordings in all the 72 melakartas. He was the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Padma Bhushan.

SHANTHA BALACHANDER and S.B.S. RAMAN

Balada, Leonardo

(b Barcelona, 22 Sept 1933). American composer of Spanish birth. After studying at the Barcelona conservatory, he won a scholarship (1956) to study at the New York College of Music; he graduated from the Juilliard School in 1960. His composition teachers included Aaron Copland, Alexandre Tansman and Vincent Persichetti. He taught at the United Nations International School (1963–70) and at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he became a professor in 1975.

Many of Balada's melodies have a Spanish flavour; although his works are primarily based on triadic harmonies, they are freely coloured by tone clusters, dense overlapping textures and other constructionist features. From around 1966 his experimentation with these techniques dominated his music, almost to the exclusion of melody (Cuatris, 1969; Cumbres, 1971). The two orchestral Homages (1975), to Casals and Sarasate, marked a return to a nationalistic melodic style. Bright colours and aggressive rhythms are characteristic. Whether scored for the piano, tuned percussion, pizzicato strings or staccato brass, hard-edged tones are typical. In the early stage works (Maria Sabina, 1969; No-Res, 1974) human speech is also treated percussively. Later operatic ventures, beginning with Hangman! Hangman! (1982), a satire set in America's Old West, make liberal use of folk melodies. A more traditionally operatic vocal style is used in Zapata (1982–4) and especially in Cristóbal Colón (1989), composed for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America, which also incorporates folk music and dissonant orchestral colours. Balada has cited the influence of Salvador Dali, with whom he collaborated; his presentation of familiar melodies in distorted surroundings often recalls Ives.

WORKS

Stage: Maria Sabina (C.J. Cela), nars, chorus, orch, 1969; No-Res (J. Paris), nars, chorus, orch, 1974, rev. 1997; Hangman! Hangman! (chbr op, 1, Balada), 1982; Zapata (op, 2, T. Capobianco and G. Roepke), 1982–4; Cristóbal Colón (grand op, 2, A. Gala), 1989; Thunderous Scenes (Balada), cant., 1v, chorus, orch, 1992; Thunderous Scenes (cant., Balada), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1992; Death of Columbus (op, 2, Balada), 1996; The Town of Greed (chbr op, 1, Balada), 1997

Orch: Musica tranquila, str, 1960; Pf Conc. no.1, 1964; Gui Conc. no.1, 1965; Guernica, 1966; Sinfonia en negro: Homage to Martin Luther King, 1968; Bandoneon Conc., 1970; Cumbres, band, 1972; Persistencies (Sinfonia concertante), gui, orch, 1972; Steel Stym., 1972; Auroris, 1973; Ponce de Leon, nar, orch, 1973; Conc. no.2, pf, wind, perc, 1974; Homage to Casals, 1975; Homage to Sarasate, 1975; Conc., 4 gui, orch, 1976; 3 Anecdotes, castanets/wood perc, orch, 1977; Sardana: Dance of Catalonia, 1979; Quasi un pasodoble, 1981; Quasi Adelita, wind band, 1982; Vn Conc., 1982; Zapata: Images for Orch, 1987; Fantasias sonoras, 1987; Alegrias, 1987; Divertimentos, str, 1991; Columbus: Images for Orch, 1991; Celebration, 1992; Sym. no.4 ‘Lausanne’, chbr orch, 1992; Song and Dance, wind ens, 1992; Music for Ob and Orch (Lament from the Cradle of Earth), 1993; Union of the Oceans, band, 1993; Morning Music, fl, orch, 1994; Concierto magico (Conc. no.2), gui, orch, 1997; Folk Dreams, suite, 1995–8; Shadows, Line and Thunder, Echoes; Reflejos, fo, str, 1999 [from chbr work]; Pf Conc. no.2, 1999; Passacaglia, 2000; Music for Fl and Orch, 2000

Vocal: 4 canciones de la Provincia de Madrid, song cycle, 1v, pf, 1962; 3 Cervantinas, song cycle, 1v, pf, 1967; 3 epitafios de Quevedo, song cycle, 1v, pf, 1967; Las moradas (S. Teresa de Avila), chorus, 7 insts, 1970; Voices no.1, 1972; Torquemada (Balada), B/Bar, 14 insts, chorus, 1980; En la era, song cycle, 1v, pf, 1989

Chbr and solo inst: Musica en 4 tiempos, pf, 1959; Sonata, vn, pf, 1960; Conc., vc, 9 insts, 1962; The Seven Last Words, org, 1963; Geometrias: no.1, fl, ob, cl, bn, tpt, perc, 1966; no.2, str qt, 1967; no.3, bandoneon, 1968; Cuatris, 4 insts, 1969; Minis, bandoneon, 1969; End and beginning, rock ens, 1970; Mosaico, brass qnt, 1970; Elementalis, org, 1972; Tresis, fl/vn, gui, vc, 1973; 3 Transparencies of a Bach Prelude, vc, pf, 1976; Transparency of Chopin's First Ballade, pf, 1977; Persistencies, pf, 1978; Preludis obstinants, pf, 1979; Sonata, 10 wind, 1980; Reflejos, fl, str, insts, 1987; Diary of Dreams, vn, vc, pf, 1995

Gui: Lento with Variation, 1960; Suite no.1, 1961; 3 Divagaciones, 1962; Analogias, 1967; Apuntes (Sketches), 4 gui, 1974; Minis, 1975; 4 Catalan Melodies, 1978; Persistencies, 1979

Principal publishers: Belwin-Mills, Beteca Music, General, G. Schirmer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leonardo Balada (Pittsburgh, 1982) [brochure of Carnegie-Mellon University]

P.E. Stone: ‘He Writes for the Audience, but on his own Terms’, New York Times (21 Nov 1982)

P.E. Stone: ‘Leonardo Balada's First Half Century’, Symphony, xxxiv/3 (1983), 85

DAVID WRIGHT

Balaguer, Juan de Sessé y.

See Sessé y Balaguer, Juan de.

Balakauskas, Osvaldas

(b Miliūnai, Ukmerge district, Lithuania). Lithuanian composer. In 1961 he concluded his studies at the Vilnius Pedagogic Institute, and then went to study at the Kiev Conservatory with Lyatoshyns'ky (1964–8) and Skoryk (1969). He then worked as an editor with the music publishers Muzychna Ukraïna (1968–72), and was adviser to the Lithuanian Composers’ Union (1972–85). In 1985 he was appointed to teach at the Lithuanian Music Academy (chair in composition 1988, full professor 1995). From 1992 to 1994 Balakauskas served as Lithuania's ambassador to France. He received the Lithuanian National Prize in 1996.

Since 1965 Balakauskas has used a serial technique of his own which is distinct from Schoenberg's. His series does not necessarily consist of 12 tones, but of 12 (or fewer) melodic or harmonic sequences, sometimes complete phrases, which are treated in the same way as the separate tones in serialism. The composer's overall aim is to control tensions and avoid extreme dissonances. As a fundamental idea this procedure could be described as a serialism of consonances. Many of his compositions are based on various diatonic systems with eight or more tones, each of which is distinguished by its own logic, colour, and functional possibilities. He set out the theory behind this system in his study Dodekatonik (1977). The metre of his works is influenced by jazz and the variable metres of Blacher. Another typical feature of his work is the combination of elements usually remote from one other, for instance his ‘harmonization’ of folk tunes with clusters (Studi sonori), his use of classical cadences as a serial element (in the second String Quartet), the combination of the medieval organum with jazz elements on a serial basis (Erasmus), and so on. However, he does not use these sources in a postmodern polystylistic sense, but brings them together to create a synthesis which gives rise to a style that is both integrated and individual.

WORKS

Stage: Macbeth (ballet, J. Smoriginas, after W. Shakespeare), 1988

Orch: Šokių siuita [Dance Suite], str, 1964; Concertino, pf, str, 1966; Ludus modorum, vc, chbr orch, 1972; Sym. no.1, 1973; Kalnų sonata [Mountain Sonata], cl, orch, 1975; … ad astra, 1976; Sym. no.2, 1979; Passio strumentale, str qt, orch, 1980; Conc., ob, hpd, str, 1981; Sinfonia concertante, vn, pf, orch, 1982; Spengla-Ūla, 16 str; Das bachjahr, fl, hpd, str, 1985; Opera strumentale, 1987; Sym. no.3 ‘Ostrobotnia’, str, 1989; Polilogas, conc., a sax, str, 1991; Meridionale, Hommage à Witold Lutosławski, chbr orch, 1994; Concerto RK, vn, chbr orch, 1997; Sym. no.4, 1998

Vocal: Prie mėlynos gėlės [To the Blue Flowers] (L. Gutkauskas), cycle, chorus, fl, ob, vn, va, vc, pf, 1976; Daugybė pravirų šulinių [Many Half-Open Springs] (Gutkauskas), cycle, S, trbn/vc, pf, 1979; Dada-Conc. (Gutkauskas), S, T, 2 B, insts, 1982; Chopin-Hauer (Schopenhauer), S, T, choruses, 2 pf, va, tape, 1990; Requiem in memoriam Stasys Lozoraitis, Mez, chorus, str, synth, 1995

Chbr: Impresonata, fl, pf, 1964; Sonata, vn, pf, 1969; Quartetto concertante, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1970; Str qts nos.1–2, 1971; Retrospective, vc, pf/pf trio, 1974; Neun Quellen, ob, hpd/pf trio, 1974; Medis ir paukštė [The Tree and the Bird], va, pf, 1976; Albertiana, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1981; Claqua, cl, str qt, 1984; Veda-seka-budi, perc, 1990; Lietus Krokuvai [Cracow Rain], vn, pf, 1991; Betsafta, vc, pf, str qt, 1995; Str Qt no.3, 1998; Tristan, gui, fl, pf, 1998

Solo inst: 10 Pieces, pf, 1964; Org Sonata no.1, 1965; Kaskados I, pf, 1967; Studi sonori, 2 pf, 1972; Eneatonika (Org Sonata no.2), 1980; Movimenti, 2 pf, 1981; Kaskados II, 1986; La Valse, vn, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Mikėnaitė: ‘O. Balakausko kompozicinės technikos principai’ [The principles of Balakauskas's compositional technique], Muzika, ii (1980), 19–23

J. di Vanni: ‘Une quête exigeante’, Aspects de la musique soviétique: la musique en Lithuanie (Paris, 1986), 119–133

R. Lampsatis: The Composer Balakausakas (Peine, 1988)

based on MGG2 (ii, 58–60), by permission of Bärenreiter

RŪTA GAIDAMAVIČIŪTĖ

Balakirev, Mily Alekseyevich

(b Nizhniy Novgorod, 21 Dec 1836/2 Jan 1837; d St Petersburg, 16/29 May 1910). Russian composer, conductor, teacher and pianist.

1. Life: up to 1866.

2. 1866–72.

3. 1872–1910.

4. Works and influence.

STUART CAMPBELL

1. Life: up to 1866.

Balakirev was the son of a minor government official. His musical education began with his mother’s piano tuition and proceeded to a course of summer lessons in Moscow with Aleksandr Dubuque. At that time the leading musical figure and patron in Nizhniy Novgorod (and author of books on Mozart and Beethoven) was Aleksandr Ulïbïshev, and it was through his household pianist and musical organizer Karl Eisrich that Balakirev’s induction to music, embracing the crucial discoveries of Chopin and Glinka, continued. Eisrich and Ulïbïshev provided Balakirev with further opportunities to play, read and listen to music, and to rehearse other musicians in orchestral and choral works, including, when he was 14, Mozart’s Requiem. His first surviving compositions date from the age of 15. Balakirev’s formal education began at the Gymnasium in Nizhniy Novgorod and continued after his mother’s death in 1847 at the Aleksandrovsky Institute there. In 1853 he became an unmatriculated student of mathematics at the University of Kazan', still spending holidays in Nizhniy Novgorod or on Ulïbïshev’s estate. While in Kazan' he met the composer-pianist Ivan Laskovsky and the pianist Antoni Kątski, from whom he thought of taking piano lessons in St Petersburg.

Through Ulïbïshev, Balakirev met Glinka in St Petersburg in the late autumn of 1855. This acquaintance was marked by discussions, by Glinka handing on several Spanish musical themes, and entrusting the musical education of his four-year-old niece to Balakirev. Concert appearances as pianist were made at Kronstadt (December 1855) and St Petersburg (on 12/24 February 1856 at a university concert, Balakirev playing the solo part in the first movement of his projected Piano Concerto; and on 22 March/3 April in a concert of his piano and chamber compositions). Also in 1856 Balakirev made the acquaintance of other important figures, including Cui, the Stasov brothers, Serov, Aleksey L'vov, Dargomïzhsky, Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky and Count Michał Wielhorski [Viyel'gorsky]. In February 1858 he played the solo part in the ‘Emperor’ Concerto before the Tsar. His first compositions to be published (12 songs) appeared in 1858–9. The deaths of Glinka (in 1857) and Ulïbïshev (in 1858) deprived Balakirev of influential supporters, but in the meantime he was forming a circle of his own, which included Vladimir Stasov and the young composers much of whose early work he was to superintend. He met Musorgsky in 1858, Rimsky-Korsakov in November 1861 and Borodin in November or December 1862; for these three musical amateurs Balakirev was an instructor of magnetic personality capable of inspiring them to improbable heights of creativity. Of projected music for Korol' Lir (‘King Lear’), only the Overture was completed in 1859 and performed on 15/27 November 1859; the other incidental music was finished in 1861, revised from 1902 and the whole work published only thereafter.

The early part of the reign of Aleksandr II (1855–81), especially the first half of the 1860s, saw a new political climate favourable to reform and innovation. In music, the principal developments were the establishment of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the opening of its conservatories in St Petersburg (1862) and Moscow (1866). While the new institutions had powerful champions, especially among the social élite, they also found eloquent detractors fearful of the consequences of introducing to Russia alien (i.e. German) musical precepts and teachers. Balakirev’s closest contacts (and sympathies) were with the latter group, and he frequently had derogatory comments to make about German musical ‘routine’, which, he considered, circumscribed a composer’s originality. (Ridenour gives a good outline of how matters of personal rivalry, social and political outlook and musical taste were interwoven in the relationships of Russia’s most prominent musicians in the 1860s.) Balakirev’s piecemeal musical education made him an improbable candidate to play a part in the new institutions, though an invitation to join the staff of the Moscow Conservatory was extended to him twice during the 1870s. The anti-Conservatory group found a focus in the opening (on 18/30 March 1862) of the Free School of Music, whose tasks included providing musical education free of charge (that is the meaning of ‘free’ in the title, contrasted with the expensiveness of the Conservatory’s provision), with an emphasis on singing and in particular on choral singing to meet the demands of the Orthodox Church. The initial idea for the School was Balakirev’s, though it made sense for Gavriil Lomakin, an esteemed choirmaster, to be appointed director rather than Balakirev. While the director conducted the School’s choral concerts, his assistant, Balakirev, directed the orchestral ones, and his programmes favoured music by Russian composers and by Western composers of more advanced musical idiom, thereby forming a contrast with the more staid, ‘classical’ programmes of the Russian Musical Society concerts. On Lomakin’s resignation Balakirev was appointed director on 28 January/9 February 1868, retaining the post until the spring of 1874, though latterly only nominally.

2. 1866–72.

In 1866 Glinka’s sister Lyudmila Shestakova asked Balakirev to take charge of performances of her brother’s operas in Prague; devoted as he was to Glinka, Balakirev accepted. After delays caused by the Austro-Prussian War, he conducted Ruslan and Lyudmila there on 4/16, 5/17 and 7/19 February 1867 and A Life for the Tsar on 10/22 February. Balakirev was never easy to get on with if disagreement was involved, and this visit gave rise to some antagonism, with bad relations between Balakirev and Smetana; it seems likely that competing ambitions and some national rivalry came into play. On 12/24 May 1867 Balakirev conducted a concert for visitors attending a Slav conference, for which Stasov in his review coined the term moguchaya kuchka(‘mighty handful’). He was referring to the group of Russian composers, belonging to several generations and schools, whose works were now available for performance; it was only subsequently that the phrase was applied to the group more helpfully known as ‘the Balakirev circle’ (the composers Balakirev, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin plus Cui – more as critic than as composer – and Stasov). The second expression is more helpful in that it describes with greater precision a group of friends who met regularly, with Balakirev as the presiding musician, to listen, play and speak about music, its objectives and methods, and in whose midst were forged ideas which exerted some influence on the course of Russian musical history. In the summer of 1867 Balakirev was also appointed conductor of the Russian Musical Society concerts in St Petersburg. This enabled him to present to the public even more of the music he admired, and he was responsible for inviting Berlioz to conduct a number of the concerts. For these two seasons (1867–8 and 1868–9) Balakirev was at the pinnacle of his career, having won recognition as Russia’s leading conductor in charge of the repertory and performing standard of the capital city’s two principal series of orchestral concerts. His dismissal from the Russian Musical Society conductorship in the spring of 1869 was the result of his determination to perform the modern and Russian music he liked, rather than offer a wider range of repertory with broader appeal. The arts of diplomacy and consensus passed Balakirev by.

The 1860s were a time of heroic activity, as conductor, teacher and composer. Balakirev encouraged to completion the first symphonies of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, whose premières he conducted on 19/31 December 1865 and 4/16 January 1869 respectively. He also conducted for the first time Musorgsky’s The Destruction of Sennacherib (6/18 March 1867) and the Polonaise from his Boris Godunov (3/15 April 1872). 1866 saw the publication of his Sbornik russkikh narodnïkh pesen (‘Collection of Russian Folksongs’), which showed a new level of insight into the rhythm, harmony and types of song, even if the choice of key signatures and the elaborate piano textures disclosed Balakirev as the arranger. Caucasian holidays in 1862, 1863 and 1868 opened Balakirev’s ears to the folk music of that region, which was to be an important source for his own compositions (not least Islamey, completed in 1869, second version 1902; fig.2) as well as deepening his love for the poetry and prose of Mikhail Lermontov, much of which also has a Caucasian background. The musical idiom known as ‘oriental’ and found, for example, in the ‘oriental fantasy’ Islamey looms large in Balakirev’s music, even though it first surfaced before his 1862 holiday. Nikolay Rubinstein, the work’s dedicatee, gave the first performance in St Petersburg on 30 November/12 December 1869. This dedication and its acceptance is one sign that the Moscow Rubinstein’s Russian aspirations were stronger than those of his brother in St Petersburg. Tchaikovsky too settled in Moscow, and for a time his music had ideas in common with that of Balakirev. Thus, the Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet was composed with the same kind of prompting and intervention which Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin had experienced. Tchaikovsky was a graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory and neither a dilettante nor an autodidact, and was therefore unlikely to tolerate much of Balakirev’s dictatorship in musical matters. Nonetheless, Tchaikovsky dedicated to Balakirev Fatum (‘Fate’, of which Balakirev conducted the St Petersburg première on 17/29 March 1869), Romeo and Juliet and Manfred; the last-named project originated with a proposal from Stasov to Balakirev in the 1860s, which Balakirev first passed to Berlioz; the idea was eventually given to Tchaikovsky in a letter of 28 September/10 October 1882, followed in further correspondence by Stasov’s programme, Balakirev’s recommendations for keys, and a list of compositions (by Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt and Tchaikovsky himself) which Balakirev considered might have some bearing on the new work.

On 3/15 June 1869 Balakirev’s father died in Klin, the town where he found his last job, bringing his son responsibility for winding up the estate and for the welfare of his younger sisters.

In the early 1870s, aware that the musical development of his pupils Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin was leading them away from him (not least in their interest in composing operas, an interest fostered by Dargomïzhsky and Cui), having lost ground as a conductor, forever struggling to make ends meet both for the Free School and himself (a good part of his life was spent giving piano lessons), and drained by his earlier efforts, Balakirev suffered some kind of breakdown. The earliest hint of the crisis may be traced to early 1871, when rumours about his mental state circulated. He sought consolation in rigorous observance of the prescriptions of the Orthodox Church (he dated his conversion to the anniversary of his mother’s death, 9/21 March 1871) and gradually withdrew from the world of music and his friends there. He found clerical employment with a railway company, starting work on 6/18 July 1872.

3. 1872–1910.

Balakirev later made a progressive return to musical activity, but never with the intensity of former years, and now with the narrower horizons which his changed religious and political outlook brought; if he was before a free thinker and radical, he was now a dogmatic Christian and reactionary. In 1876 Shestakova helped to draw him back into editing Glinka’s works for publication, and the score of Ruslan and Lyudmila was issued by Jürgenson on 10/22 November 1878; A Life for the Tsar came out in 1881, followed by other works. It was also in 1876 that Balakirev returned to the symphonic poem Tamara, started in 1867, all but finished in 1879, and actually completed on 14/26 September 1882; it was performed, with the composer conducting, on 7/19 March 1883. In 1881, after turning down the offer of the directorship of the Moscow Conservatory with the conductorship of the Moscow Russian Musical Society concerts (out of apprehension about the administrative workload and wiser after previous experience of the society), Balakirev accepted the invitation to resume the directorship of the Free School of Music. On 3/15 February 1883 he took up the appointment of musical director at the Court Kapella, a post in which his assistant was Rimsky-Korsakov. The two men worked in tandem, some disagreements notwithstanding, until 1894, thus serving for almost the whole of the reign of Aleksandr III. The Kapella’s men and boys sang at court church services and on some other occasions. The institution furnished boys with a general and musical education and played a role in editing and publishing music for use in the worship of the Russian Orthodox Church. Caring for his charges’ welfare was congenial to Balakirev, though the small number of church music compositions which he produced during his time at the Kapella have not generally been well thought of; however the work was well rewarded financially.

Rather than Balakirev, it was the Maecenas with the deep pocket, M.P. Belyayev [Belaïeff], who attracted the notice of the young composers of the 1880s and 90s. Musical gatherings chez Balakirev on Tuesdays were no match for Belyayev’s convivial Fridays. Belyayev’s musical advisers were from the St Petersburg Conservatory and included Rimsky-Korsakov and later Glazunov and Lyadov. Commissions more or less guaranteeing performance and publication were more appealing than anything the Free School could offer. In spite of his own problems in negotiating acceptable arrangements for his own compositions with music publishers, Balakirev did not use the services which Belyayev provided in that line (except when the latter acquired by purchase the rights in Balakirev’s 1866 folksong collection after the death of the original publisher). One of several reasons for the composer’s antipathy was his idea that Belyayev’s generosity gave artificial support to compositions which were unworthy, and thus contributed to lowering the quality of Russian music. It was only in 1899 that Balakirev encountered the music publisher J.H. Zimmermann whose firm was based in St Petersburg, and the latter’s persistence yielded him the scores of Balakirev’s symphonies (among other works), which he published in 1899 and 1908 respectively.

With the exception of Sergey Lyapunov, Balakirev was neglected by the younger generation of composers. Lyapunov came to him as a Moscow Conservatory graduate in 1884, and remained his faithful disciple and champion until his own death in 1924. Also from 1884 Balakirev enjoyed the friendship of Aleksandr Olenin, who composed, took an interest in folksong and accompanied his sister, the singer Mariya Olenina d’Alheim. Balakirev found stimulation and encouragement in a group gathered around the distinguished philologist, ethnographer and historian A.N. Pïpin and his family. Their musical evenings began in the mid-1880s, and the participants were known as the ‘Weimar circle’ after an evening when Balakirev had arranged a private concert in memory of Liszt in 1886. There Balakirev was once more the undisputed musical leader.

It is emblematic of Balakirev’s outlook that he should have contributed to commemorating the work of the two Slav composers Glinka and Chopin. He raised money to erect a monument to the former in his home town of Smolensk, something which was achieved in 1885. He also worked towards marking Chopin’s birthplace at Żelazowa Wola, which witnessed Balakirev’s final appearance as a pianist, playing Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata on 5/17 October 1894. In 1897 he became a member of the Folksong Commission of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and on their behalf harmonized 30 songs taken from the collection made in 1886 by G.O. Dütsch [Dyutsh] and F.M. Istomin in the Arkhangel and Olonets governments. These arrangements were published in about 1899, anticipated by Balakirev’s own piano duet versions of them in 1898.

In his final period Balakirev was in the odd position of attending performances of compositions begun long ago but only recently completed. One instance was the First Symphony, which he started to write in 1864 and finished only in 1897; the composer directed the first performance on 11/23 April 1898, his last appearance as a conductor. The Second Symphony was largely composed in the 1900s, though it made use of some earlier material, and first performed on 10/23 April 1909, Lyapunov conducting. It is often the case that musical ideas associated with Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin prove to have been prefigured in works by Balakirev, yet because of his slowness in bringing works before the public he has been denied credit for his inventiveness. On the other hand, works which if completed and performed in the 1860s or 70s would have enjoyed immense success, when heard for the first time towards the end of the composer’s life made a much smaller impact, overtaken by the newer languages forged by younger composers of several nationalities. The late writings of Stasov (d 1906) and especially Cui (d 1918) often reveal minds fixed in an era of heroic struggle (the 1860s), unable to adapt to a world which long since came to terms with their points of view and moved ahead to new controversies. The same may be said of Balakirev’s last years in composition.

4. Works and influence.

Balakirev’s first musical experience was as a pianist, and composers for his own instrument left their mark on the repertory and style of his compositions. All the genres developed by Chopin (except the Ballade) were cultivated by Balakirev, the largest number of whose solo piano works date from after the crisis of the early 1870s. Chopin’s textures and musical idioms, to say nothing of the primacy of soloist over orchestra, are clearly audible in the single movement of the Piano Concerto in F minor composed in 1855–6. The long line of nocturnes, scherzos, mazurkas, waltzes and kindred pieces, evoking a mood or derived from a dance, continue to recall the Polish composer, often with a comparable charm and grace, though on occasion without his sense of a satisfactory formal scheme, especially in later compositions where the spark of musical inspiration can seem weaker. Harmonic and emotional restraint seem also to relate these works to an early 19th-century style, of the kind which Balakirev himself met in studying Hummel, for instance; his powerful musical inheritance from Glinka may have strengthened the same characteristic. Noteworthy works for solo piano (besides the Lisztian Islamey) include the B minor Sonata, the Second Scherzo, the Berceuse, the first two waltzes, the Dumka and the Tyrolienne. Balakirev’s proficiency at the keyboard may have contributed to his strong predilection for certain keys. D major, with its comfortable mixture of white and black keys, is a grateful tonality in which to play. At any rate, key signatures of two sharps and five flats occur with extraordinary frequency in Balakirev’s compositions, and sometimes in works influenced by him, of which Romeo and Juliet is a striking example.

The other keyboard composer who strongly influenced Balakirev was Liszt. It was only after Schumann and Berlioz had long featured in Balakirev’s orchestral programmes that Liszt began to appear there too, but some of the piano works show Lisztian technical bravura and small signs of compositional influence (for instance, in short passages of music linking two principal sections of a composition). Islamey demonstrates both aspects, and it is hardly surprising that the work appealed so greatly to Liszt, even without its ‘oriental’ vitality and languor. The same influence is clear in Balakirev’s piano transcriptions of others’ compositions, and in his own Fantasia on themes from Zhizn' za tsarya (‘A Life for the Tsar’) (or, at least, from its second form). While Liszt as inventor of the symphonic poem has some claim on Tamara, credit for the orchestral compositions which are based on folk themes belongs properly with Glinka and Balakirev himself. On the other hand, Balakirev’s sympathy with Liszt’s ideals accounts in part for the introduction into Russian music of a number of symphonic poems whether described as ‘musical pictures’ (Sadko and In Central Asia) or ‘fantasy overture’ (Romeo and Juliet).

The example of Glinka is felt most strongly when Balakirev deals with folk material. The starting-point is indicated when Balakirev began with the Spanish themes bequeathed to him by Glinka, rather than with Russian material. It is there, in the Fandango-étude (of 1856, revised as the Sérénade espagnole in 1902) for piano and the orchestral Uvertyura na temu ispanskogo marsha (‘Overture on a Spanish March Theme’, 1857) that we see the ‘Glinka variations’, also known as ‘variations with changing backgrounds’ – without any trace of Russian ‘nationalist’ inclination. It is only later that explicit native ambitions manifest themselves, once the feeling of Russian distinctness from Europe had grown stronger. Like Glinka’s Kamarinskaya of 1848, the Uvertyura na temï tryokh russkikh pesen (‘Overture on the Themes of Three Russian Songs’), whether in its 1858 or 1881 versions, is an abstract work exploring musical relationships among folksong themes. What is most remarkable is the advance which Balakirev makes in handling material. Both the Overture and Kamarinskaya demonstrate how it is possible to construct a sustained musical argument employing folk musical resources. Neither composer, whether in his title or anywhere else, gives the slightest hint of any extra-musical narrative associated with his work. Balakirev goes further than Glinka, however, in reconciling the idiomatic treatment of folksong with the standard practices of art music: motivic fragmentation, contrapuntal combination, and a structure exploiting key relationships which also manages to draw on aspects typical of folk usage, such as ostinato, pedal, and harmonic practices foreign to most 19th-century art music. Between the two Overtures on Russian Themes came Balakirev’s involvement with folksong collecting and arrangement, which fell largely between 1860 and 1865. That work alerted him to the frequency of the Dorian mode, the tendency of many melodies to swing between a major key and its relative minor or its flat 7th key, and the tendency to accentuate notes not consistent with dominant harmony. These essential qualities were authentically mirrored in Balakirev’s harmonizations, and were recognized as significant new perceptions about the character of Russian folksongs. This activity finds reflection in his own subsequent handling of Russian folksong.

The second overture on Russian themes (first published in 1869 as 1000 let, ‘1000 Years’) is yet more sophisticated in compositional technique and more complex in the implications of its various titles. It shows the composer even more expert in deriving – Beethoven-like – short motifs from longer themes such that the motifs can be sewn together in a convincing contrapuntal fabric. This is a supreme example of how folk material may be reconciled with modern symphonic thinking, technique and structure. It can stand on its own as a specimen of abstract motivic-thematic working, yet since it employs folksongs it could also be represented as making a statement about nationality. It seems that it was first connected in Balakirev’s mind (in 1863–4) with Herzen’s campaign for political reform in Russia, then in its 1869 publication with the ideas evoked by its composer-given title 1000 Years, tied to the millennium of the Russian state founded in 862 ce, and finally with the less specific ancient ‘Rus'’ (as the final version of it was known in Russian, despite the published title, Russia) – a form of the title upon which Balakirev insisted, wishing to avoid the modern term Rossiya. The changing subtitles, from ‘Overture’ in 1863–4, to ‘musical picture’ in 1869 and ‘symphonic poem’ in 1890 and 1907, tell the same story in a different way. As Richard Taruskin has argued (1983), this work thus illustrates its composer’s evolution from a ‘progressive’, a ‘man of the sixties’, to the Slavophile obscurantist of his final years; increasing directness in claiming the work for the nationalist cause is underlined by the progression in the subtitles. It was these works of Balakirev, together with his Uvertyura na tri cheskiye temï (‘Overture on Czech Themes’, 1867), published in 1906 as V Čechách (‘In Bohemia’), which served as models when Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin came to write equivalent pieces. The finale of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, written in 1872 when the composer’s interest in Balakirev’s principles was at its height, demonstrates another way of creating a large-scale symphonic movement out of material which includes one folksong.

Balakirev’s techniques of developing folk material contrapuntally are evident in his own symphonies, of which the first is by far the finer, being a compelling series of contrasted but uniformly strong movements; as with other late compositions, the second, in spite of some strengths (especially the Scherzo alla Cosacca), too often seems to be retracing familiar paths. Economical and ingenious development of motifs, with not a few harmonic trouvailles, are features of the finale of the first symphony.

In 1861–2 Balakirev gave much thought to a Piano Concerto in E major, to the point where he was able to perform it all to Rimsky-Korsakov. Nothing beyond the first movement was written down then, and the composer returned to it only in 1906, even then leaving it unfinished on his death. In Lyapunov’s completion the work adds something to our knowledge of the composer chiefly through its references to Russian church music.

The ‘oriental’ idiom cultivated in parts of Ruslan and Lyudmila was developed and made into a more consistent style by Balakirev. It appears in the Georgian Song (1863), Islamey and Tamaraas well as occurring in (for example) the Polovtsian Dances, parts of Sheherazade, and the Dance of the Persian Slavegirls in Khovanshchina. Its ingredients comprise slow sinuous melody with decoration, often scored for clarinet or english horn, slow-moving harmonic progressions, often involving pedal with a movement between the fifth and sixth degrees via the raised 5th, and a drumlike accompanimental figure; the counterpart to that languorous vein is the ecstatic one, marked by a perpetuum mobile at a very fast tempo, with rapid melodic contours over not so rapid harmonic change with immensely colourful instrumentation. As the examples above suggest, this idiom was a somewhat anomalous matter. On the one hand, it served to evoke the mystery of the distant, or at least the exotic, ‘east’ with which Russia had not very direct contact; on the other hand, it could also be used to refer to recently colonized areas of the Russian Empire. It served to conjure up both the exotic and the local, both the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and precisely which depended on non-musical elements. For Western listeners, on the other hand, the style suggested only the exotic, only the ‘other’, so that the exceptionally strong representation of this strand in the music of Russian composers, with suggestive costumes (often by Bakst) in Diaghilev’s early seasons of opera and ballet in Paris, created a distorted image of Russian music in the minds of its new devotees. Tamara may reasonably be thought to be Balakirev’s masterpiece. Inspired by Lermontov’s poem and its beloved setting in the mountains and gorges of the Caucasus, Balakirev produced a wonderful evocation of the landscape and atmosphere in which the angelic and devilish seductive power of Tamara work their effect before the latest passing lover is discarded. The plot implies a wide musical range, and the composer supplies it with great subtlety within a satisfying structure.

Berlioz’s lucid writing for the orchestra, and his magical scherzos (especially that associated with Queen Mab in Roméo et Juliette) made their way into Russian music through Balakirev’s championship. In the case of orchestration, it was not surprising, since clarity was also a distinguishing aspect of Glinka’s scoring – traceable to Weber and again, perhaps, to Berlioz. That quality remained in a great deal of Russian orchestral composition until the influences of Schumann and later Wagner prompted a more experimental blending of diverse sonorities. Several of the symphonic scherzos of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin confirm the influence of Queen Mab. Like Berlioz (and, for that matter, Schumann), Balakirev turned to Shakespeare for one of his compositions, supplying sensitive treatments of English songs communicated by Stasov for some of his incidental music for King Lear. Incidental music for a play was a tradition likewise inherited from Glinka, even if he composed for Kukol'nik’s tragedy Prince Kholmsky rather than for Shakespearean drama.

Songs occur in both early and late periods of Balakirev’s output – again with a tendency for the earlier works to be more strikingly original while the later ones compensate for lower creative temperature with greater craftsmanship. Of some 45 songs, 11 have texts by Lermontov, 8 by Kol'tsov and 5 by Khomyakov, with such lyric poets on permanent standby for composers as Fet or Mey set twice each and Maykov once; Musorgsky’s friend Count Golenishchev-Kutuzov makes one appearance. Balakirev’s songs are marked by consistency of texture and elegance of vocal line. The piano parts are sometimes demanding; several songs also exist with orchestral accompaniments. All the songs have high ambitions: they are not for the middle-brow market. Sometimes a Russian folklore strand is obvious: Prologue (1903) is an excellent example. At other times the ‘oriental’ pattern is to the fore, as in Pesnya Selima (‘Song of Selim’, 1858) or Gruzinskaya pesnya (‘Georgian Song’) – Balakirev’s single song setting of Pushkin. Kolïbel'naya pesnya (‘Cradle Song’, 1858) demonstrates the composer’s skill in devising a beautifully simple but memorable specimen of a standard genre. Pesnya zolotoy rïbki (‘Song of the Golden Fish’, 1860) is wonderfully suggestive of the enticing mermaid amid the waves and of the escapes from reality afforded by love and dreams; the composer generates an ecstatic atmosphere by means of expert control of technical resources.

Balakirev was a crucial figure in Russian music. He extended and developed the fusion which Glinka had accomplished between on the one hand the common-practice music of his day and on the other some musical elements of Russian character and others of a boldly experimental nature. Balakirev established patterns which could be used to express overtly national feeling in music. In his own compositions he demonstrated how this could be done, laying the basis for a rich repertory spanning all the contemporary genres. By taking amateur musicians of prescribed musical education but enormous potential, he made of Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin composers of national and eventually international rank, whose music represented Russia through its history, literature and traditions to the world beyond the Empire’s frontiers. In doing so Balakirev imparted what he had himself concluded, so that a great deal of his thinking underlies the music of his pupils. Balakirev’s compositions began to find their way abroad with Islamey. Thereafter Tamara and some other works became known in the wake of compositions by Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky – partly on account of delay in completing works likely to be found attractive in other countries. When Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel and Falla learnt from their Russian predecessors, they were absorbing Balakirev’s discoveries and inventions, whether at first hand or through compositions by his pupils.

WORKS

theatrical



Title	Description		Composed		Publication/MS


Korol' Lir [King Lear]	incid music to Shakespeare’s tragedy

1st version			1858–61		USSR Lsc
2nd version				1902–5		Leipzig, 1902–6

Zhar-ptitsa [The Firebird]		op, frags. only		1864		Lsc

choral

unaccompanied unless otherwise stated



Title	Forces	Text	Composed

Pesnya: Zholtïy list	3-vv chorus	M. Lermontov	c1860–70
Translation : Song: The yellow leaf trembles
Publication/MS; remarks : Lsc, sketches only; arr. 1v, pf, 1903–4 (Leipzig, 1904)
6 anthems	mixed chorus	biblical	c1880–90
Publication/MS; remarks : Pubd as Dukhovno-muzïkal'nïye perelozheniya i sochineniya M. Balakireva [Sacred Music Arrangements and Compositions by M. Balakirev], Moscow, 1900
1 Kheruvimskaya pesn'
Translation : Song of the Cherubim
2 Da molchit vsyakaya plot'
Translation : All flesh is silent
3 Dostoyno
Translation : It is worthy
4 Svïshe prorotsï
Translation : From heaven the prophets
5 Da vozraduyetsya dusha tvoya
Translation : Thy soul is regenerated
6 So svyatïmi upokoy
Translation : Rest with the holy ones
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1888
Khristos voskrese	female or children’s vv	biblical	1883
Translation : Christ is risen
Publication/MS; remarks : Moscow, 1906; arr. mixed chorus (Moscow, 1906)
Gimn v chest' v.k. Georgiya Vsevolodovicha	mixed chorus	V. Likhachov	1889
Translation : Hymn in honour of the Grand Duke Georgy Vsevolodovich
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1904
Umchalos' vremya zolotoye: pros-chal'naya pesn' vïpusknïkh vospitannits Polotskogo zhenskogo uchilishcha dukhovnogo vedomstva	4 female vv	A. Yasherova	1891
Translation : The golden time has flown away; leaving song of the pupils of the Polotsky Ecclesiastical Girls’ College
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1891
Gimn v chest' avgusteyshey pokrovitel'nitsï Polotskogo zhenskogo uchilishcha, imperatritsï Marii Fyodorovnï	4 female vv, pf	A. Yasherova	1898
Translation : Hymn in honour of the most august patroness of Polotsky Girls’ College, the Empress Mariya Fyodorovna
Publication/MS; remarks : Lsc
Pod sen'yu shchedroy blagostïni: gimn dlya zhenskogo khora	female vv	Likhachov	1899
Translation : Beneath the shadow of Thy overflowing mercy: hymn for women’s chorus
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1899
Molitva russkikh, Gimn russkomu tsaryu: gimn dlya zhenskogo khora	female vv	A. Pushkin	1899
Translation : The prayer of the Russians, hymn to the Russian tsar: for women’s chorus
Publication/MS; remarks : Moscow, 1899; arr. mixed chorus (Moscow, 1899)
Gimn Khvala vsederzhitelyu bogu	4 female vv	M. Samochernova	1902
Translation : Hymn: Praise to Almighty God
Publication/MS; remarks : Lil
Tebe mï gimn poyem, o shkola dorogaya: shkol'nïy gimn dlya zhenskogo ili detskogo khora	female or children’s vv	P. Lebedinsky	1902
Translation : We sing you a hymn, o dear school: school hymn for women’s or children’s chorus
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1902
Kantata na otkrïtiye pamyatnika M.I. Glinke v Peterburge	S, chorus, orch	V. Glebov	1902–4
Translation : Cantata for the unveiling of the memorial to M.I. Glinka in St Petersburg
Publication/MS; remarks : Leipzig, 1904
Proschchay navsegda, nash priyut nezabvennïy: 2-ya proshchal'naya pesn' vospitannits Polotskogo zhenskogo uchilishcha dukhovnogo vedomstva	3 female vv	N. Zabelina-Bekarevich	1908
Translation : Farewell for ever, our unforgettable haven: second leaving song of the pupils of the Polotsky Ecclesiastical Girls’ College
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1908
Angel vopiyashe (valaamskogo rospeva)	male vv
Translation : The angel cried out (Valaam chant)
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1912
Ust tvoikh (Tropar' Ioannu Zlatoustu, valaamskogo rospeva)	SATB
Translation : From Thy Lips (Troparion to St. John Chrysostom, Valaam chant)
Publication/MS; remarks : St Petersburg, 1912

orchestral



op.	Title	Composed	Publication/MS

4	Grande fantaisie on Russian folksongs, pf, orch	1852	Lsc
Remarks : arr. 2 pf (Moscow, 1954)
1	Concerto, f, pf, orch	1855–6	Lil
Remarks : 1 movt only; score pubd (Moscow, 1952); arr. 2 pf (Moscow, 1954)
—	Uvertyura na temu ispanskogo marsha [Overture on a Spanish March Theme]
	1st version	1857	Lsc
Remarks : –
	2nd version	1886	St Petersburg, 1887
Remarks : –
—	Polonaise-fantaisie	1857	Lsc
Remarks : unfinished
—	Uvertyura na temï tryokh russkikh pesen [Overture on the themes of three Russian songs]
	1st version	1858	Lil, Lsc
Remarks : –
	2nd version	1881	Moscow, 1882
Remarks : Balakirev’s arr. pf 4 hands (Moscow, 1882)
—	Concerto, E, pf, orch	1861–2, 1906–9	Leipzig, 1911
Remarks : unfinished; completed by Lyapunov
—	Second Overture on Russian themes
	1st version	1863–4	St Petersburg, 1869
Remarks : Pubd as musical picture 1000 let [1000 Years]
	2nd version	1884	St Petersburg, 1890
Remarks : Pubd as Russia: poème symphonique pour orchestre; repubd with minor alterations (Leipzig, 1907); known in Russian as Rus'
—	Symphony no.1, C	1864–6, 1893–7	Leipzig, 1899
Remarks : Balakirev’s arr. 2 pf (Leipzig, 1899)
—	Uvertyura na tri cheshkiye temï [Overture on Czech themes]
	1st version	1867	Lil,Lk
Remarks : –
	2nd version	1905	Leipzig 1906
Remarks : Pubd as V Chechii [In Bohemia]
—	Tamara, sym. poem	1867–82	Moscow, 1884
Remarks : Balakirev’s arr. 2 pf 4-hands (Moscow, 1908)
—	Symphony no.2, d	1900–08	Leipzig, 1908
Remarks : Scherzo sketched c1864, orig. intended for Sym. no.1; Balakirev’s arr. 2 pf (Leipzig, 1908)
—	Suite, b:	1901–8	Lil,Lsc
Remarks : unfinished; completed by Lyapunov
	Préambule, Quasi valse, Tarantella
—	Suite on pieces by Chopin:	1909	Leipzig, 1909
Remarks : based on Chopin’s Etude, d, Mazurka, B, Nocturne, g, Scherzo, d
	Préambule, Mazurka, Intermezzo, Finale

chamber



op.	Title		Composed		Publication/MS		Remarks

—	Septet, fl, cl, 2 vn, va, vc, pf		1852		–		lost
2		String quartet (Quatuor original russe)		1854–6		Lsc		unfinished
3	Octet, fl, ob, hn, vn, va, vc, db, pf		1855–6		Moscow, 1959		1st movt and frags. of scherzo only, perhaps rev. of Septet; scherzo adapted for Scherzo no.2, pf, 1900
—		Romance, vc, pf		1856		Leipzig, 1911; Lsc		completed by Lyapunov

piano

Edition:M.A. Balakirev: polnoye sobraniye sochineniy dlya fortepiano, ed. K.S. Sorokin (Moscow, 1951–4) [B]

for solo pf unless otherwise stated



Title	Composed	Publications/MS	B

Fantasia on themes from Glinka’s Zhizn' za tsarya
1st version	1854–6	Lsc	–
2nd version	1899	Leipzig, 1899	iii/1, 6
Remarks : as Réminiscences de l’opéra ‘La vie pour le czar’
Sonata no.1, b, op.5	1855–6	Moscow, 1949	i/2, 93
Remarks : 3 movts only, adapted from an early Bol'shaya sonata, op.3; pt. of 1st movt used later in Scherzo no.2, 1900, 2nd movt rev. as 2nd movt of Sonata, 1900–05, and as Mazurka no.5, 1900
Nocturne no.1, b
1st version g	1856	Lsc	–
Remarks : –
2nd version b	1898	Moscow, 1898	ii, 117
Remarks : –
Fandango-étude	1856	Lsc	–
Remarks : rev. as Ispanskaya serenada, 1902
Scherzo no.1, b	1856	St Petersburg, 1863	ii, 3
Remarks : –
Polka, f	1859	St Petersburg, 1859	i/1, 30
Remarks : –
Impromptu, f	c1850–60	Lsc	–
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.1, A
1st version	1861	St Petersburg, 1861	ii, 240
Remarks : –
2nd version	1884–5	Moscow, 1885	ii, 55
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.2
1st version, b	1861	St Petersburg, 1861	ii, 248
Remarks : –
2nd version, c	1884	Moscow, 1885	ii, 62
Remarks : –
Na Volge [On the Volga], pf 4-hands	c1863	Moscow, 1949	iii/1, 288
Remarks : –
Zhavoronok [The Lark]
Remarks : based on Glinka’s song
1st version	c1864	Mainz, 1872	–
2nd version	1900	Mainz, 1900	iii/1, 58
Islamey, oriental fantasy
1st version	1869	Moscow, 1870	–
Remarks : –
2nd version	1902	Hamburg, 1902	i/1, 3
Remarks : –
Au jardin, D	1884	Moscow, 1885	i/1, 36
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.3, b	1886	Moscow, 1886	ii, 64
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.4, G	1886	Moscow, 1886	ii, 73
Remarks : –
Pustïnya [The Wilderness]	1898	Leipzig, 1898	iii/1, 3
Remarks : arr. of no.2 of Balakirev’s 10 songs, 1895–6
30 russkikh narodnïkh pesen [30 Russian Folksongs], pf 4-hands	1898	St Petersburg and Leipzig, 1898	iii/1, 169
Remarks : arr. of Balakirev’s 2nd collection, 1898
Dumka, e	1900	Leipzig, 1900	i/1, 43
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.5, D	1900	Leipzig, 1900	ii, 82
Remarks : used in Sonata, 1900–05
Scherzo no.2, b	1900	Leipzig, 1900	ii, 21
Remarks : uses pt. of inc. scherzo for Octet, 1855–6, and pt. of 1st movt of Sonata op.5, 1855–6
Valse di bravura no.1, G	1900	Leipzig, 1900	ii, 141
Remarks : –
Valse mélancholique no.2, f	1900	Leipzig, 1900	ii, 161
Remarks : –
Sonata, b	1900–05	Leipzig, 1905	i/2, 3
Remarks : 2nd movt adapted from 2nd movt of Sonata op.5, 1855–6, and also pubd separately as Mazurka no.5, 1900
Berceuse, D	1901	Leipzig, 1901	i/1, 58
Remarks : –
Gondellied, a	1901	Leipzig, 1901	i/1, 49
Remarks : –
Nocturne no.2, b	1901	Leipzig, 1901	ii, 124
Remarks : –
Scherzo no.3, F	1901	Leipzig, 1901	ii, 39
Remarks : –
Valse-impromptu no.3, D	1901	Leipzig, 1901	ii, 170
Remarks : –
Tarantella, B	1901	Leipzig, 1901	i/1, 65
Remarks : –
Capriccio, D	1902	Leipzig, 1902	i/1, 83
Remarks : –
Mélodie espagnole	1902	Leipzig, 1902	iii/1, 30
Remarks : –
Sérénade espagnole	1902	Leipzig, 1902	iii/1, 37
Remarks : rev. of Fandango-étude, 1856
Mazurka no.6, A	1902	Leipzig, 1902	ii, 94
Remarks : –
Nocturne no.3, d	1902	Leipzig, 1902	i/1, 132
Remarks : –
Toccata, c	1902	Leipzig, 1902	i/1, 106
Remarks : –
Tyrolienne, F	1902	Leipzig, 1902	i/1, 118
Remarks : –
Waltz no.4, B	1902	Leipzig 1902	ii, 180
Remarks : –
Chant du pêcheur, b	1903	Leipzig, 1903	i/1, 129
Remarks : –
Humoresque, D	1903	Leipzig 1903	i/1, 134
Remarks : –
Phantasiestück, D	1903	Leipzig, 1903	i/1, 159
Remarks : –
Rêverie, F	1903	Leipzig, 1903	i/1, 149
Remarks : –
Waltz no.5, D	1903	Leipzig, 1903	ii, 197
Remarks : –
Waltz no.6, f	1903	Leipzig, 1903	ii, 213
Remarks : –
La fileuse, b	1906	Leipzig, 1906	i/2, 69
Remarks : –
Mazurka no.7, e	1906	Leipzig, 1906	ii, 106
Remarks : –
Novelette, A	1906	Leipzig, 1906	i/2, 57
Remarks : –
Waltz no.7, g	1906	Leipzig, 1906	ii, 223
Remarks : –
Impromptu	1907	Leipzig, 1907	iii/1, 47
Remarks : based on Chopin’s Preludes, e and B
Esquisses (Sonatina), G	1909	Leipzig, 1910	i/2, 81
Remarks : –
Suite, pf 4-hands:	1909	Leipzig, 1909	iii/1, 246
Remarks : orig. sketches c1850–60, Lsc
Polonaise, Chansonette sans paroles, Scherzo

songs

all for 1 voice with piano accompaniment; published in St Petersburg unless otherwise stated



Title	English version	Text	Composed	Publication; remarks

Tri zabïtïkh romansa [Three Forgotten Songs]:			1855	Leipzig, 1908
1 Tï plenitel'noy negi polna	Thou art so captivating	A. Golovinsky
2 Zveno	The Link	V. Tumansky
3 Ispanskaya pesnya	Spanish song	M. Mikhaylov
20 songs:
1 Pesnya razboynika	Brigand’s song	A. Kol'tsov	1858	1858
2 Oboymi, potseluy	Embrace, Kiss	Kol'tsov	1858	1858
3 Barkarola	Barcarolle	A. Arsen'yev, after H. Heine	1858	1858
4 Kolïbel'naya pesnya	Cradle song	Arsen'yev	1858	1858; arr. chorus, orch/pf, 1898
5 Vzoshol na nebo mesyats yasnïy	The Bright Moon	M. Yatsevich	1858	1859
6 Kogda bezzabotno, ditya, tï rezvish'sya	When thou Playest, Carefree Child	K. Vil'de	1858	1859
7 Rïtsar'	The Knight	Vil'de	1858	1859
8 Mne li, molodtsu razudalomu	I’m a fine fellow	Kol'tsov	1858	1859
9 Tak i rvyotsya dusha	My heart is torn	Kol'tsov	1858	1859
10 Pridi ko mne	Come to me	Kol'tsov	1858	1859
11 Pesnya Selima	Song of Selim	M. Lermontov	1858	1859
12 Vvedi menya, o noch', taykom	Lead me, o night	A. Maykov	1859	1859
13 Yevreyskaya melodiya	Hebrew melody	Lermontov, after Byron	1859	1861
14 Isstupleniye	Rapture	Kol'tsov	1859	1861
15 Otchego	Why	Lermontov	1860	1861
16 Pesnya zolotoy rïbki	Song of the Golden Fish	Lermontov	1860	1861
17 Pesnya starika	Old Man’s song	Kol'tsov	1865	1865
18 Slïshu li golos tvoy	When I Hear thy Voice	Lermontov	1863	1865
19 Gruzinskaya pesnya	Georgian song	A. Pushkin	1863	1865; orchd c1860–70 (Moscow, 1885)
20 Son	The Dream	Mikhaylov, after Heine	1864	1865; orchd 1906 (Moscow, 1907)
10 songs:			1895–6	Moscow, 1896
1 Nad ozerom	Over the Lake	A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov		–
2 Pustïnya	The Wilderness	A. Zhemchuzhnikov		arr. pf, 1898
3 Ne penitsya more	The sea does not foam	A.K. Tolstoy		–
4 Kogda volnuyetsya zhelteyushchaya niva	When the Yellow Cornfield Waves	Lermontov		–
5 Ya lyubila yego	I loved him	Kol'tsov		–
6 Sosna	The Pine Tree	Lermontov		orig. sketches, 1861, Lil
7 Nachtstück	–	A. Khomyakov		–
8 Kak naladili: durak	The Putting-Right	L. Mey		–
9 Sredi tsvetov porï osenney	’Mid Autumn Flowers	I. Aksakov		–
10 Dogorayet rumyanïy zakat	The rosy sunset fades	V. Kul'chinsky		–
10 songs:			1903–4	Leipzig, 1904
1 Zapevka	Prologue	Mey		orchd 1906, Leipzig, 1911
2 Son	The Dream	Lermontov		–
3 Bezzvezdnaya polnoch'	Starless midnight coldly breathed	Khomyakov		–
4 7 noyabrya	7th November	Khomyakov		–
5 Ya prishyol k tebe s privetom	I came to thee with greeting	A. Fet		–
6 Vzglyani, moy drug	Look, my friend	V. Krasov		–
7 Shepot, robkoye dïkhan'ye	A Whisper, a Timid Breath	Fet		–
8 Pesnya: Zholtïy list	Song: The yellow leaf trembles	Lermontov		orig. sketches for 3-vv chorus, c1860–70, Lsc
9 Iz-pod tainstvennoy kholodnoy polumaski	Under the Mysterious Cold Half-Mask	Lermontov		–
10 Spi!	Sleep!	Khomyakov		–
Zarya	Dawn	Khomyakov	1909	Leipzig, 1911
Utyos	The Rock	Lermontov	1909	Leipzig, 1911

choral transcriptions

all unaccompanied unless otherwise stated



Title	Text	Forces	Transcribed	Publication/MS

Kolïbel'naya pesnya [Cradle song]	N. Kukolnik	SAATTBB	c1887	Moscow, 1900
Remarks : arr. of Glinka’s song
Mazurka	A. Khomyakov	SATTBB	c1887	Moscow, 1898
Remarks : arr. of Chopin’s Mazurkas op.6 no.4, e and op.11 no.4, A
Venetsianskaya noch' [Venetian Night]	I. Kozlov	SATB	c1887	Moscow, 1897
Remarks : arr. of Glinka’s song
Kolïbel'naya pesnya	A. Arsen'yev	2 female or children’s vv, orch/pf	1898	Moscow, 1898
Remarks : arr. of no.4 of Balakirev’s 20 songs; arr. mixed chorus, orch/pf c1880–90, Lsc
Dve bïlinï [Two Legends]:	Folksongs	SATB	1902	Moscow, 1902
Remarks : nos.6 and 8 in Balakirev’s 30 russkikh narodnïkh pesen [30 Russian folksongs]
1 Nikita Romanovich
2 Korolevichi iz Krakova [The King’s Sons from Kraków]
Eko serdtse [Oh! My Heart]	Folksong	SATB	?1902	Lil
Remarks : No.27 in Balakirev’s 30 russkikh narodnïkh pesen

piano transcriptions

Edition: M.A. Balakirev: polnoye sobraniye sochineniy dlya fortepiano, ed. K.S. Sorokin (Moscow, 1951–4) [B]

for solo piano unless otherwise stated

Beethoven: Cavatina from Str Qt, op.130, 1859 (St Petersburg, 1859), B iii/1, 150

Beethoven: Allegretto from Str Qt, op.59 no.2, 1862 (Moscow, 1954), B iii/1, 153

Beethoven: Str Qt, op.95, 2 pf, 1862 (St Petersburg, 1875), B iii/2, 165

Berlioz: Introduction to La fuite en Egypte, 1864 (St Petersburg, 1864), B iii/1, 142

Berlioz: Harold en Italie, pf 4 hands, 1876 (Paris, 1879)

Chopin: Romance from Pf Conc. op.11, 1905 (Leipzig, 1905), B iii/1, 158

Dargomïzhsky: 2 excerpts from Rogdana, pf 4 hands, 1908 (St Petersburg, 1908)

Glinka: Kamarinskaya, pf 4 hands, 1863 (St Petersburg, 1863); 2nd version, solo pf, 1902 (Moscow, 1902), B iii/1, 87

Glinka: Jota aragonesa, solo pf and pf 4 hands, 1863–4 (St Petersburg, 1864), B iii/1, 291; rev. 1900 (Mainz, 1900), B iii/1, 64

Glinka: Knyaz' Kholmsky [Prince Kholmsky], pf 4 hands, 1864 (St Petersburg, ?1864)

Glinka: Noch' v Madride [Night in Madrid], solo pf and pf 4 hands, 1864 (St Petersburg, ?1864)

Glinka: Quartet, F, pf 4 hands, 1877 (Moscow, 1878)

Glinka: Chernomor’s march from Ruslan i Lyudmila, collab. Liszt, 1890 (Moscow 1890)

Glinka: Ne govori [Do not speak], 1903 (Leipzig, 1903), B iii/1, 102

L'vov: Ov. to Undina, pf 4 hands, 1900 (Leipzig, 1901)

Paganini: Vn Caprice op.1 no.3, c1872, Lsc

A.S. Taneyev: 2 Valse-caprices, A, C, 1900 (Leipzig, 1900), B iii/1, 121, 131

Zapol'sky: Rêverie, ?1890s (St Petersburg, c1900), B iii/1, 110

Chopin: Mazurka op.7 no.7, arr. str orch, ?1885 (Leipzig, 1904)

Chopin: Pf Conc. op.11, orchd and partly rewritten, 1910 (Leipzig, 1910)

Dargomïzhsky: Paladin [The Knight-Errant], arr. 1v, orch, c1860–70,Lil

Dargomïzhsty: 2 excerpts from Rogdana, arr. 1v, pf, c1870–72 (St Petersburg, 1872)

Glinka: Bolero: O deva chudnaya moya [O my beautiful maid], arr. 1v, orch,c1860–70, Lil

Glinka: Nochnoy smotr [Midnight review], arr. 1v, orch, 1860 (Moscow, 1906)

Glinka: Oriental dances from Ruslan i Lyudmila, arr. 1 orch, 1868 (Leipzig, 1878)

L'vov: Ov. to Undina, orchd 1900 (Leipzig, 1901)

Orchestrations of other short works and parts of works by Cui, Dargomïzhsky, Glinka, Gussakovsky and Liszt

other arrangements

folksong collections

Sbornik russkikh narodnïkh pesen [Collection of Russian Folksongs], 1865–6 (St Petersburg, 1866); ed. Ye. Gippius (Moscow, 4/1957)

30 pesen russkogo naroda [30 Russian Folksongs], 1898 (Leipzig, 1899); arr. pf 4 hands, 1898 (Moscow, 1898), nos.6, 8 and 27 also arr. chorus, 1902

editions

F. Chopin: Sonate pour piano et violoncelle, op.65 (Leipzig, 1907)

F. Chopin: Premier trio pour pianoforte, violon et violoncelle, op.8 (Leipzig, 1908)

I. Laskovsky: Oeuvres complètes pour piano (St Petersburg, 1858–9)

V. Odoyevsky: Berceuse (Moscow, 1895)

M. Wielhorski and F. Liszt: Lyubila ya [Loved I him) (Moscow, 1887)

Balakirev assisted with the preparation of Berlioz’s Te Deum for publication (Leipzig, 1901), edited a selection of Tausig’s piano compositions (Leipzig, 1903–4, 1907) and also produced editions of many of Glinka’s works, a list of which is contained in Garden (1967), 339ff.

(1) Meliton Balanchivadze

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.I. Timofeyev: ‘M.A. Balakirev v Prage: iz yego perepiski’ [Balakirev in Prague: from his correspondence], Sovremennïy mir (1911), no.6, pp.147–86

S.M. Lyapunov, ed.: Perepiska M.A. Balakireva s P.I. Chaykovskim [Balakirev’s correspondence with Tchaikovsky] (St Petersburg, 1912)

B. de Schloezer: ‘Balakireff et l’Ecole Nationale Russe’, ReM, iv/10 (1922–3), 11–19

G. Abraham: ‘Balakirev’s Symphonies’, ML, xiv (1933), 355–63; repr. inOn Russian Music (London, 1939), 179–92

G. Abraham: ‘Balakirev: a Flawed Genius’, Studies in Russian Music (London, 1935), 311–33

M.D. Calvocoressi: ‘Mily Balakiref’, Masters of Russian Music, ed. M.D. Calvocoressi and G. Abraham (London, 1936), 97–146

G. Abraham: ‘Balakirev’s Music to King Lear’, ‘Balakirev’s Piano Sonata’, On Russian Music (London, 1939), 193–204, 205–15

A. Kandinsky: Simfonicheskiye proizvedeniya M. Balakireva [Balakirev’s symphonic compositions] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950, Moscow, 2/1960)

A.S. Lyapunova: ‘Glinka i Balakirev’, SovM (1953), no.2, pp.75–81

M. Montagu-Nathan, ed.: ‘Balakirev’s Letters to Calvocoressi’, ML, xxxv (1954), 347–60

V.A. Kiselyov, ed.: M.A. Balakirev: perepiska s N.G. Rubinshteynom i s M.P. Belyayevïm[Balakirev’s correspondence with N. Rubinstein and Belyayev] (Moscow, 1956)

V.A. Kiselyov and A.S.Lyapunova, eds.: M.A. Balakirev: perepiska s notoizdatel'stvom P. Yurgenson [Balakirev’s correspondence with Jürgenson’s publishing house] (Moscow, 1958)

V.A. Kiselyov: Avtografï M.A. Balakireva i materialï, svyazannïye s yego deyatel'nost'yu v fondakh gosudarstvennogo tsentral'nogo muzeya muzïkal'noy kul'turï imeni M.I. Glinki [Balakirev’s autographs and other materials connected with his activities, contained in the archives of the Glinka Central Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow] (Moscow, 1959)

E.L. Frid: ‘Dva pis'ma M. Balakireva k Ėduardu Reysu’ [Two letters of Balakirev to Eduard Reiss], SovM (1960), no.5, pp.68–71

A.S. Lyapunova: Tvorcheskoye naslediye M.A. Balakireva: katalog proizvedeniy [The creative heritage of Balakirev: catalogue of works] (Leningrad, 1960)

D. Brown: ‘Balakirev, Tchaikovsky and Nationalism’, ML, xlii (1961), 227–41

Yu.A. Kremlyov and others, eds.: Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: issledovaniya i stat'i[Research and articles] (Leningrad, 1961) [incl. articles on an autograph song for The Firebird, the symphonic works, an unrealized opera project, Balakirev’s journeys to Warsaw, the piano music, the creative relationship between Balakirev and Lyapunov, the choral works and the ballads and songs]

Yu.A. Kremlyov and others, eds.: Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: vospominaniya i pis'ma[Reminiscences and letters] (Leningrad, 1962) [incl. letters to his father, Filippov, Timofeyev, Chernov, Zhemchuzhnikov, Bulich, Tchaikovsky, Bourgault-Ducoudray; list of pubd letters, reminiscences by Kul'chinsky, Lalayeva and others]

A.S. Lyapunova, ed.: ‘Perepiska M.A. Balakireva i N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova’ [Correspondence between Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov], N. Rimsky-Korsakov: literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, v (Moscow, 1963), 17–210

R. Davis: ‘Henselt, Balakirev and the Piano’, MR, xxviii (1967), 173–208

E. Garden: Balakirev: a Critical Study of his Life and Music (London, 1967)

I. Kunin: Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: zhizn' i tvorchestvo v pis'makh i dokumentakh [Life and works in letters and documents] (Moscow, 1967)

A.S. Lyapunova and E.E.Yazovitskaya: Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva [Chronicle of his life and works] (Leningrad, 1967)

E. Garden: ‘Balakirev’s Personality’, PRMA, xcvi (1969–70), 43–55

A.S. Lyapunova, ed.: M.A. Balakirev – V.V. Stasov: perepiska, i 1858–80, ii 1881–1906[Correspondence] (Moscow, 1970–71)

V. Gregor: ‘Neznámé kapitoly z česko-ruských hudebních styků’ [An unknown chapter in Czech-Russian musical relations], HRo, xxviii/10 (1975), 466–9

M.K. Černý: ‘Smetana a Balakirev (k interpretaci kulturně politických souvislostí ve Smetanově díle)’ [Smetana and Balakirev (concerning the interpretation of the cultural-political dimension in Smetana’s works)], HV, xiii/3 (1976), 239–56

B. Dobrokhotov, ed.: Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo [Musical heritage], iv (Moscow, 1976) [contains correspondence between Balakirev and Glazunov]

E. Garden: ‘The influence of Balakirev on Tchaikovsky’, PRMA, cvii (1981), 86–100

A. Lischké: ‘Un complément inédit à la correspondance de Balakirev: trente-quatre lettres à Alexandre Bernardi’, RdM, lxvii (1981), 35–60 [incl. bibl. of pubd letters by Balakirev]

R.C. Ridenour: Nationalism, Modernism and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor, 1981)

E. Garden: ‘Balakirev’s Influence on Musorgsky’, Musorgsky in Memoriam 1881–1981, ed. M.H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1982), 11–27

R. Taruskin: ‘How the Acorn took Root: a Tale of Russia’, 19CM, vi (1982–3), 189–212; repr. in R. Taruskin: Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, 1997), 113–51

E. Garden: ‘Russian Folksong and Balakirev’s 1866 Collection’, Soundings, xi (1983–4), 52–9

E. Garden: ‘Balakirev: the Years of Crisis (1867–1876)’, Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. M.H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1984), 147–55

E. Garden: ‘Sibelius and Balakirev’, Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham, ed. M.H. Brown and R.J. Wiley (Ann Arbor and Oxford, 1985), 215–18

S. Slonimsky: ‘Balakirev – pedagog’ [Balakirev as teacher], SovM (1990), no.3, pp.7–12

T. Zaytseva: ‘Balakirev i Lyadov: uchitel' i uchenik’ [Balakirev and Lyadov: teacher and pupil], Iz proshlogo i nastoyashchego otechestvennoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï [From the past and present of the Fatherland’s musical culture], ed. Ye.B. Dolinskaya (Moscow, 1993), 84–95

Yu.V. Keldïsh: ‘M.A. Balakirev’, Istoriya russkoy muzïki [History of Russian music], vii: 70–80e godï XIX veka [The 70s and 80s of the nineteenth century] (Moscow, 1994), 127–72

C.C. Ritchie: The Russian Court Chapel Choir: 1796–1917 (diss., U. of Glasgow, 1994) [considers Balakirev’s contribution as administrator, composer and teacher to the Kapella]

Balalaika.

A long-necked chordophone with a triangular body and three strings. The soundboard is usually constructed from four strips of Russian spruce or silver fir and the slightly arched belly of seven pieces of maple. The instrument has a small soundhole, a fretted neck and strings of gut or steel. The balalaika is related to the dömbra, a variant of the long-necked lute played by peoples of Central Asia. The earliest mention in literature appeared in 1688 and Peter the Great used balalaikas in his grand orchestral procession of 1715. The instrument may have been a new arrival or a natural development of the 17th-century domra. The skomorokhis (minstrels) gave it a primary role in accompanying dance.

A public performance in 1886 began the balalaika's elevation from a peasant’s instrument to one of artistic stature. The success of the balalaika is attributed to Vasily Vasil'yevich Andreyev (1861–1918) who, assisted by the instrument makers V. Ivanov, F. Paserbsky and S. Nalimov, produced a metal-fretted chromatic version in a family of sizes: prime (e'–e'–a'), second (a'–a'–d'), alto (e'–e'–a), bass (E–A–d) and double bass (E'–A'–D). Piccolo and descant sizes were developed but discarded. Andreyev's Society of Lovers of Balalaika Playing gave its first public performance in Russia in 1888 and in 1889 the Society performed at the Paris Exposition Universelle. The sound so impressed composers of art music that they began to include balalaikas in their orchestration. Tchaikovsky eulogized: ‘How lovely is the balalaika. How striking the effect it makes in the orchestra. Timbrally – this is an indispensable instrument’.

By 1896 Andreyev had reorganized his instrumentalists as the Grand Russian Orchestra, which between 1909 and 1912 toured Europe and America (1910–11). Balalaika orchestras were soon formed in Britain (the first was the Royal Balalaika Orchestra, formed at royal request by the balalaika player Prince Tschagadaeff), and the USA (formed largely by Russian emigrants and their descendants). The St Louis Russian Balalaika Orchestra was founded in 1911 by Lewis Spindler and balalaika orchestras were formed in New York City in 1912 by A. Ivanoff and A. Kirilloff. The Balalaika and Domra Society was founded in 1961 and in 1974 John Garvey organized a student balalaika orchestra at the University of Illinois. Many film soundtracks incorporated the instrument and Charlie Chaplin, an afficionado, often performed on the violin or mandolin alongside it. The resurgence of balalaika music, after the McCarthyite suppression of all things Russian in the 1950s, came with the success of the motion picture Dr Zhivago in 1969.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Rose: ‘The Balalaïka’, PMA, xxvii (1900–01), 73–84

F.V. Sokolov: Russkaya narodnaya balalaïka (Moscow, 1962)

K. Vertkov, G. Blagodatov and E. Yazovitskaya: Atlas of Musical Instruments of the Peoples Inhabiting the USSR (Moscow, 1963/R)

M. Kiszko: ‘The Balalaika: a Reappraisal’, GSJ, xlviii (1995), 130–55

MARTIN KISZKO

Bălan, George

(b Turnu-Măgurele, 11 March 1929). Romanian musicologist. He studied at the Bucharest Conservatory (1950–55) and took the doctorate at Moscow University in 1963 with a dissertation on the philosophic content of music. In 1960 he was appointed professor in musical aesthetics at the Bucharest Conservatory, and has focussed his attention on problems of aesthetics and philosophy. He was music critic for the Bucharest Contemporanul (1951–7, 1961–3) and has contributed criticism to numerous Romanian journals. Much of his recent writing has concerned his new listening method, Musicosophia.

WRITINGS

Innoirile muzicii [The renewals of music] (Bucharest, 1960)

George Enescu: mesajul-estetica (Bucharest, 1962)

O filosofskom soderzhanii muzïki [The philosophical content in music] (diss., U. of Moscow, 1963)

George Enescu: viaţa (Bucharest, 1963)

Gustav Mahler, sau cum exprimă muzica idei [Mahler, or how music expresses ideas] (Bucharest, 1964)

Eu, Richard Wagner: o autobiografie (Bucharest, 1966)

Noi şi clasicii, sau, De la muzica spre ‘autimuzica’? O istorie mai neobisnuita a muzicii (Bucharest, 1967)

Arta de a înţelege muzica [The art of understanding music] (Bucharest, 1970)

Meditaţii beethoveniene: lupta cu singuăratatea [Meditations concerning Beethoven: the struggle with solitude] (Bucharest, 1970)

Cazul Schœnberg (Bucharest, 1974)

Cu muzica prin veacuri [With music through the centuries] (Bucharest, 1974)

Muzica şi lumea ideilor [Music and the world of ideas] (Bucharest, 1973)

Mică filosofie a muzicii (Bucharest, 1975) [summaries in Fr., Ger.]

O istorie a muzicii europene (Bucharest, 1975)

Musicosophia (Neustadt, 1981–)

Von der Konservenmusik zur Sphärenmusik: eine Philosophie der Schalplatte (Bad Heilbrunn, 1982)

Nebănuitul Eminescu (Munich, 1984)

Manuale mozartiano di saggezza (St Peter, nr Freiburg, 1994)

Rätselhafter Bruckner (St Peter, nr Freiburg, 1996)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: Muzicieni români (Bucharest, 1970), 56–7

E.M. Cioran: George Bălan: în dialog (Bucharest, 1996)

VIOREL COSMA

Balanced action

(Fr. mécanique à balanciers/bascules; Ger. balancierte Traktur; It. meccanica/trasmissione a bilancia/bilanciere).

A form of mechanical (or tracker) action used in organ construction since the 17th century, in which the key-shanks are pivoted near their centres, the upwards motion of the rear end of the keys being transmitted to open the pallet by an action in which pairs of squares or at least one backfall are essential. See Organ, §II, 5.

Balancement

(Fr.: ‘wavering’; Ger. Bebung; It. tremolo).

A term used mainly for the tremolo obtainable on a clavichord, and also for the vibrato in vocal and string music. See Ornaments, §7(ii). See also Bebung; and Vibrato.

Balanchine, George.

See Balanchivadze family, (2).

Balanchivadze.

Georgian family of musicians.

(2) George Balanchine [Balanchivadze]

(3) Andria Balanchivadze [Andrey]

GULBAT TORADZE

Balanchivadze

(1) Meliton Balanchivadze

(b Banoja, nr Kutaisi, 12/24 Dec 1862; d Kutaisi, 21 Nov 1937). Composer. One of the pioneers of Georgian professional music, he is the father of the composer Andria Balanchivadze and the ballet master, George Balanchine. He studied music at the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary (1877–9), then singing in the choir of, and later taking solo roles at the Tbilisi Opera House. In 1882 he set up a folk choir of 12 singers; it was from this date that his musical and public duties began as a promulgator and a collector of Georgian folk songs. It was also during this period that he wrote his first compositions – the romances Rodesats gitsker (‘When I Look at You’), Shen ghetrpi marad (‘I am Eternally Drawn to You’) and Nana (‘Lullaby’) – which were early and successful examples of the genre in Georgian music.

In 1889 Balanchivadze enrolled at the St Petersburg Conservatory as a singer, but in 1891 he turned to the serious study of composition, and entered Rimsky-Korsakov’s class. Here Balanchivadze started work on his principal composition, the opera Tamar tsbieri (‘Tamara the Cunning’), fragments of which were heard in St Petersburg in 1897. While living in Russia he organized and appeared with choral groups which performed Georgian folk songs in many towns. In 1906 he was a jury member of the First All-Russian Exhibition of musical instruments and in 1907 he financed the publication of Glinka’s letters.

In 1917 Balanchivadze returned to Georgia. There he was actively engaged in musical and public duties, resolving matters of musical education and collecting and studying Georgian folk music. In 1918 he founded a music school (now bearing his name) in Kutaisi, the second largest town in Georgia, and at various times he was the director of the Kutaisi (1935), and Batumi (1929–31) music schools, as well as Chairman of the Board of the Georgian Music Society (1928). He completed Tamara the Cunning in 1926 and it was immediately staged in Tbilisi. Sometimes called the first Georgian opera (since it was partially composed and performed at the end of the 19th century) it is written on an historical subject in which patriotic and psychological dramatic lines are interwoven. In terms of its music, however, the opera is entirely sustained on a lyrical, small-scale level, and only acquires a dramatic colouring in places. Among the solo numbers of the opera, the following should be noted: King Georgi’s aria, the Jester’s Couplets, Tsira’s Lullaby, and especially Gocha’s aria.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Tamar tsbieri [Tamara the Cunning], extracts perf. 1897; rev. as Darejan tsbieri (V. Velichko, K. Potskhverashvili, after A. Tsereteli), 1937

Cantata: Dideba ZAHESs [Glory to ZAHES], for opening of first hydro-electric power station in the Caucasus

Songs, choral works, folksong arrs. etc.

Principal publishers: Muzgiz, Muzfond Gruzii (Tbilisi), Muzïka (Moscow and Leningrad)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Khuchua: M. Balanchivadze (Tbilisi, 1950) [in Georgian]

P. Khuchua: M. Balanchivadze (Tbilisi, 1964) [in Russ.]

S. Ginzburg: ‘M. Balanchivadze’, Muzïkal'naya literatura narodov SSSR [The musical literature of the peoples of the USSR] (Moscow, 1970)

V. Donadze: ‘M. Balanchivadze’, in G. Toradze, ed.: lstoriya gruzinskoy muzïki [History of Georgian muisc] (Tbilisi, 1998)

Balanchivadze

(2) George Balanchine [Balanchivadze]

(b St Petersburg, 10/22 Jan 1904; d New York, 30 April 1983). Georgian, later American, choreographer (see Balanchivadze family). See Ballet, §3(ii).

Balanchivadze

(3) Andria Balanchivadze [Andrey]

(b St Petersburg, 19 May/1 June 1906; d Tbilisi, 28 April 1992). Composer and teacher, son of (1) Meliton Balanchivadze and brother of the ballet-master George Balanchine. He graduated in 1927 from the Tbilisi Conservatory where he studied composition with Ippolitov-Ivanov, and the piano with I. Aysberg, later continuing his education in the Leningrad Conservatory with Zhitomirsky (composition) and Mariya Yudina (piano). From 1931 he lived in Tbilisi, being for a time artistic director of the Georgian State SO (1941–8). An outstanding teacher, he was on the staff of Tbilisi Conservatory from 1935, was appointed professor in 1942, and later headed the composition department (1962–8). He was secretary of the Georgian Composers’ Union more than once (1953–62 and 1968–73), and frequently appeared in performances of his own works as conductor and pianist. Balanchivadze was one of the founders of the modern Georgian school of composition both in terms of creative endeavour and through his teaching work. His most significant contributions lie in the fields of ballet, orchestral music and piano literature. His most successful works are distinguished by an individual musical language, an ability to translate into music the characteristics of the Georgian people and their national traditions, an optimistic attitude, a combination of the lyrical and the poetic with the manly and the epic, and an elegance in his use of form. His name became widely known in 1938 after the performance of his ballet Mtebis guli (‘The Heart of the Mountains’) (in its first version of 1936 as Mzechabuki) in Leningrad. It was staged by the great dancer V. Chabukiani who also took the leading role. Mtebis guli laid the foundations of Georgian ballet. Using folk material in the score, he blended the Georgian folk dancing tradition with the rigours of classical choreography. Lyrical, poetic and heroic themes predominate and the score is suffused with rich local colour. Mtebis guli was staged at many theatres of the former USSR.

Another important stage for Balanchivadze in becoming established as a composer, and indeed, one might say for the establishment of Georgian symphonic music as a whole, was his First Symphony (1944), in which he reacted to the terrible events of the war, recording the thoughts and feelings of his contemporaries. Whilst adhering to a Georgian style, Balanchivadze adopted and gave new life to classical traditions and to the Russian symphonism of that time. Another high point in his output is the Third Piano Concerto (1952), a popular work notable for its radiant lyricism, buoyancy, melodiousness and elegance of form. The work has established itself firmly in both pedagogical and professional repertories. Only the Second and Third Symphonies, the orchestral picture Ritsis tba (‘Lake Ritsa’), and the Fourth Piano Concerto come close to this in popularity.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Mzia (3, V. Pataraia), Tbilisi, 1949; Okros kortsili [Golden Wedding] (3), Tbilisi, 1969 Ganga (after Indian epic poetry), 1990

Ballets: Mzechabuki, Tbilisi, 1936, rev. as Mtebis guli [The Heart of the Mountains] (3, V. Chabukiani, G. Leonidze, N. Volkov), Leningrad, 1938; Stranitsï zhizni [Pages of Life], (2, L. Lavrovsky), Moscow, 1961; Mtsïri (after M.Yu. Lermontov), Tbilisi, 1964

6 syms.: 1944; 1959; 1979; 1984 ‘Lesnaya’ [Forest]; 1988 ‘Yunost'’ [Youth]; 1990

5 pf concs.: 1934, 1946, 1952, 1967, 1977

Other orch: Ritsis tba [Lake Ritsa], sym. picture, 1939; Krtsanisis brdzola [The Battle of Krtsanisi], sym. picture, 1943; Zgva [The Sea], 1952; Dnepr, 1955; Poėma, vn, orch, 1976

Pf pieces, incidental music, over 20 film scores etc.

Principal publishers: Muzgiz, Muzfond Gruzii, Muzïka, Sovetskii Kompozitor (Moscow and Leningrad)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Khuchua: ‘Sovetskaya opera i balet’, Gruzinskaya muzïkal'naya kul'tura (Moscow, 1957)

A. Tsulukidze: ‘Puti razvitiya simfonizma’ [Paths of development of symphonism], Gruzinskaya muzïkal'naya kul'tura (Moscow, 1957)

G. Orjonikidze: ‘A. Balanchivadzis pirveli simfoniya’ [Balanchivadze’s First Symphony], Sabchota khelovneba (1958), no.1

G. Orjonikidze: ‘Pirveli kartuli baleti’ [The first Georgian ballet], Sabchota khelovneba (1958), no.7

G. Orjonikidze: Andrey Balanchivadze (Moscow, 1959)

E. Balanchivadze: ‘Akhali kartul baletshi’ [Something new in Georgian ballet], Sabchota khelovneba (1965), no.5

G. Orjonikidze: ‘Kartuli simfoniya “gazapkhulidan” “gazapkhulamde”’ [The Georgian symphony from one ‘spring’ to another], Sabchota khelovneba (1965), no.5

G. Orjonikidze: Andrey Balanchivadze (Tbilisi, 1967)

V. Donadze: Ocherki po istorii gruzinskoy sovetskoy muzïki [Outline of the history of Soviet Georgian music] (Tbilisi, 1975)

Andrey Balanchivadze: sbornik [A collection] (Tbilisi, 1979)

‘A. Balanchivadze’ in G. Toradze, ed.: Istoriya gruzinskoy muzïki [History of Georgian music] (Tbilisi, 1998)

Balasanyan, Sergey Artem'yevich

(b Ashkhabad, 13/26 Aug 1902; d Moscow, 3 June 1982). Russian composer of Armenian extraction. After graduating from Kabalevsky’s composition class at the Moscow Conservatory (1935), he worked in Stalinabad (now Dushanbe) and took a large part in the development of professional music in the republics of central Asia. He made a serious study of Tajik folk music, recording and arranging a great number of songs. This work assisted him in creating the first Tajik works for the musical stage, among them the opera Vosstaniye Vose (‘Vose's Uprising’, 1939), which relates the story of a peasant revolt at the end of the 19th century and which uses many Tajik melodies in symphonic development. Balasanyan’s music gradually grew more complex as his technical mastery became sharper. The ballet Leyli i Medzhnun, which achieved particular renown, is based on a widely known eastern legend; its subtle lyricism, vividly characterized images and symphonic growth established it in the Soviet repertory, and a successful film version was produced. Balasanyan has also drawn on other folk musics: Armenian, Afghan, Indian and Latin American. Of his expressive and colourful orchestral works the most notable is the suite 7 armyanskikh pesen (‘7 Armenian Songs’). His chamber pieces show him as a delicate lyricist and a master of small forms. From 1948 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, heading the composition department there for many years. He was awarded the titles People’s Artist of the Tajik SSR (1970) and Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR (1964), and he was winner of the State Prize.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Vosstaniye Vose [Vose's Uprising] (op, 4, A. Dekhoti and M. Tursunzade), 1939, Stalinabad, Tajik Musical, 16 Oct 1939; rev. 1958, Stalinabad, Tajik Ayni, 13 Jan 1959

Kuznets Kova [Kova the Smith] (op, 4, A. Lakhuti, after A.K. Firdousi: Shakh-name); Moscow, Tajik Theatre, 15 April 1941, collab. Sh.N. Bobokalonov

Leyli i Medzhnun (ballet, S.A. Tsenin); Stalinabad, 1947, rev. 1964

Bakhtiyor i Nisso [Bakhtiyor and Niso] (op, 4, Tsenin, after P.N. Luknitsky: Nisso); Stalinabad, Tajik Ayni, 25 Oct 1954

Shakuntala (ballet, B. Sdanevich, after Kolidasa); Riga, 1963, rev. 1978

other

Orch: Afganskaya syuita; Tadzhikskaya syuita, 1943; Pamir, suite, 1944; Baletnaya syuita, 1946; 7 armyanskikh pesen [7 Armenian Songs], 1955; Ostrova Indonezii [The Islands of Indonesia], 1960; Rapsodiya na temï Rabindranata Tagora, 1961; 8 p'yes na armyanskiye narodnïye temï [8 Pieces on Armenian Themes], str, 1971; Sym., str, 1974; other pieces

Vocal: Moy kray [My Land] (Ye. Yondo), B, pf, 1962, orchd 1966; Sym. (E. Mezhelaytis), unacc. chorus, 1968; 10 rubayaitt Omara Khayyama [10 Ruba'i of Omar Khayyam], Bar, pf, 1974; Ametist [Amethyst], poem, Bar, chbr ens, 1977; Privet tebe, radost' [Greetings to you, my Joy] (G. Ermin), song cycle, 1v, pf, 1979; Polifonicheskiy kontsert [Polyphonic Conc.], unacc. chorus, 1980; Ayrenï [Ayrens] (A. Uchak), song cycle, 1v, pf, 1981; arrs., incl. Pesni Armenii [Songs of Armenia], 100 Armenian folksongs from Komitas's collection, 1969

Other inst: Sonatina, vn, pf, 1947; 2 pf sonatinas, 1947, 1948; Sonata, vc, 1976; P. Armenii [Around Armenia], 4 novellas, 2 pf, 1978; Sonata, cl, 1979

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Nikolayev: Leyli i Medzhnun Sergeya Balasanyana (Moscow, 1959)

V. Blok: ‘Afganskiye simfonicheskiye tsiklï S. Balasanyana’, SovM (1960), no.8, pp.73–6

V. Vinogradov: ‘Shakuntala’, SovM (1964), no.4, pp.41–4

Yu. Butsko: ‘ Zasluzhennoye priznaniye’ [Deserved recognition], SovM (1972), no.9, pp.23–7

N. Shakhanazarova and G. Golovinsky: S. Balasanyan (Moscow, 1972)

V. Lobanov: ‘ O S.A. Balasanyane’ [About Balasanyan], SovM (1977), no.10, pp.40–43

Obituary, SovM (1982), no.9, pp.34–8

GALINA GRIGOR'YEVA

Balasaraswati, Thanjavur

(b Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, 13 May 1918; d ? Madras, 1984). South Indian dancer and musician. Her family included many distinguished dancers and musicians since the 18th century; during the 19th century some of her forebears studied with Subbaraya Śāstri. Her formal training as a dancer started when she was four under the noted teacher Kandappan Pillai (1899–1942), himself the inheritor of a great tradition, and her mother taught her music. When she was seven her arankerram (formal début) took place at the Kāmāksi Amman temple, Kanchipuram, and her professional début was two years later in Madras. As a girl she was already an accomplished and mature dancer with a very large repertory, but she continued to study, notably the basis of abhinaya (dramatic expression) and its improvisation. She became a musician in her own right and a leading exponent of forms such as padam and jāvali.

She toured extensively throughout India and internationally. She also taught in the USA, notably at Wesleyan University with her brothers T. Viswanathan and T. Ranganathan. In 1973 she was the first dancer to preside over the annual conference of the Madras Academy of Music, and the first dancer to receive the title Sangita Kalanidhi. With Venkatarama Raghavan she wrote a book, Bharata nātya (1959). She received the presidential award for dancing and the Padma Vibhushan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Balasaraswati and V. Raghavan: Bharata nātya (1959)

V. Raghavan: ‘Her Infinite Variety’, Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, xxxiv (1963), 124–31

J.B. Higgins: ‘Padams and Balasaraswati’, The Music Academy Madras: Forty Seventh Conference 1973 [no page numbers] 1973

NARAYANA MENON/R

Balasios [Balasios the Priest and Nomophylax; Balasēs ho Hiereūs kai Nomophylax]

(b Constantinople, ?1615; d ?1700). Romaic (Greek) composer and patriarchal official. Born into a family of Peloponnesian origin, he received his general education at the Patriarchal Academy under Theophilos Korydalleus. Together with Kosmas Makedonos he was taught Byzantine chant by Germanos of New Patras, for whom he composed an acclamation. In a pre-1660 manuscript Balasios refers to himself as a domestikos, which therefore places him among the musicians of the patriarchal cathedral at the time Panagiotes the New Chrysaphes was prōtopsaltēs. After ordination to the priesthood he continued to serve the Ecumenical Patriarchate in an impressive series of liturgical and administrative posts (c1663–1700), but in musical manuscripts he is customarily described as ‘nomophylax’, a patriarchal title that he appears to have held from about 1680.

As a composer Balasios continued the renewal of the received medieval chant repertories pursued by Panagiotes and Germanos, complementing their ‘beautified’ stichēraria with a new edition of the Heirmologion and a complete series of 8 modally ordered Great Doxologies, the first such set ever written. Other chants for the Divine Office include a modally ordered series of eight kekragaria (Psalm cxl.1–2) for Hesperinos, and, for Orthros, eight Magnificat verses for the 9th ode of the kanon. He composed numerous works for the Byzantine eucharistic liturgies, including two sets of eight Cherubic Hymns, modally ordered series of 8 communion verses for Sundays, and two dynamis (codas to the Trisagia) for the feasts of the Holy Cross and of the Lord (the latter ed. Phōkaeus, 1834). He also contributed to the post-Byzantine repertories of kalophonic heirmoi and other paraliturgical chants. A number of his chants, transcribed by Gregorios the Protopsaltes, appear in Chrysanthine editions (see bibliography). A Turkish song attributed to Balasios in GR-ATSiviron 999 (f.389r) places him at the head of a distinguished series of Romaic church musicians who participated in the ‘external’ tradition of Ottoman secular music. (For a fuller list of works see Stathēs, 1995.)

Balasios was the first to produce realizations (exēgēseis) of pre-existing chants, featuring the transcription into intervallic neumes of melismas hitherto notated in shorthand with stereotyped melodic formulae (theseis). These exēgēseis, which mark the beginnings of a movement towards notational precision in florid repertories, also attest the existence in the later 17th century of a stenographic interpretation for Byzantine neumes. Arvanitis, however, has argued persuasively for a comparatively literal realization of Balasios's Heirmologion, an influential volume that remained in use until its replacement by that of Petros Peloponnesios.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

chrysanthine music editions

T. Phōkaeus, ed.: Tameion anthologias [Treasury of an anthology] (Constantinople, 1834), ii, 124–6 [transcr. Gregorios the Protopsaltes]

T. Phōkaeus: , ed. Heirmologion kalophōnikon (Constantinople, 1835), 3–18, 51–2, 59–64, 79–81, 109–10, 124–6, 141–2, 159–66 [transcr. Gregorios the Protopsaltes]

I. Lampadarios and Stephanos the First Domestikos, eds.: Pandektē (Constantinople, 1850–51), i, 149–83; iii, 21–33, 107–18, 152–77, 229–43, 283–93, 306–40; iv, 50–52 [transcr. Gregorios the Protopsaltes]

studies

S.I. Karas: ‘Hē orthē hermēneia kai metagraphē tōn byzantinōn mousikōn cheirographōn’ [The correct interpretation and transcription of Byzantine musical MSS], Hellēnika, ix (1955), 140–49 [repr., with an afterword, Athens, 1990]

G.T. Stathēs: Ta cheirographa byzantinēs mousikēs: Hagion Oros [The MSS of Byzantine Music: Holy Mountain] (Athens, 1975–93)

G.T. Stathēs: Hē dekapentasyllabos hymnographia en tē byzantinē melopoiïa [15-syllable hymnography in Byzantine composition] (Athens, 1977) [with Fr. summary]

M. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Cheirographa ekklēsiastikēs mousikēs (1453–1820) [MSS of ecclesiastical music] (Athens, 1980)

G.T. Stathis: ‘The “Abridgements” of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Compositions’, Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin, no.44 (1983), 16–38

A. Şirli: The Anastasimatarion: the Thematic Repertory of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Musical Manuscripts (the 14th-19th centuries), i (Bucharest, 1986)

D. Conomos: ‘Sacred Music in the Post-Byzantine Era’, The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe, ed. L. Clucas (Boulder, CO, 1988), 83–105 [based on Chatzēgiakoumēs, 1980]

I. Arvanitis: ‘A Way to the Transcription of Byzantine Chant by Means of Written and Oral Tradition’, Byzantine Chant: Athens 1993, 123–41

G.T. Stathēs: ‘Balasēs hiereūs kai nomophylax’ [Balasios the Priest and Nomophylax], Melourgoi tou iz aiōna [Composers of the 17th century], ed. E. Spanopoulou (Athens, 1995), 33–41

sound recording

Polychronismos to the Ecumenical Patriarch by Balasios the Priest, Greek Byzantine Choir, dir. L. Angelopoulos, CD ELBUC 33 (1997)

ALEXANDER LINGAS

Balassa, Sándor

(b Budapest, 20 Jan 1935). Hungarian composer. He was brought up in the country until 1951 when he returned to Budapest to work as a factory mechanic. His first experience of art music there made him decide to study at the Budapest Conservatory (1952–6), and after spending four further years teaching himself, he attended the Liszt Academy of Music (1960–65) as a composition pupil of Szervánszky. From 1964 to 1980 he was music director at Hungarian Radio. Awards made to him include the Erkel (1972), Kossuth (1983) and Bartók-Pásztory (1988, 1999) prizes. Also in 1972 his Requiem was voted the most distinguished composition of the year at the International Rostrum of Composers. In 1989 he was created Outstanding Artist of the Hungarian Republic.

Balassa’s early compositions are freely dodecaphonic, generally without a strict application of serial principles (his only thoroughly serial work is the Intermezzo). His melodic invention is predominantly vocal in character, although Antinomia (1968) is an exception to this, and his use of instruments is formally functional, sometimes dramatic. He is particularly fond of writing for a solo voice embedded in an orchestral texture, or for chorus, and it is in his choral music that the influence of the Kodály school may be detected. Each of the major instrumental works (opp.20, 22, 24 and 25) follows the same fundamental form: a slow, lyrical introduction leading to a scherzo-like section which reaches a climax, with sometimes a gradual lowering of intensity to conclude the piece. Such a plan may be presented in several movements (Xenia, Lupercalia, Tabulae) or in a single one (Iris), and sometimes sections are recapitulated or varied later in the work. Above all, Balassa’s work is lyrical: his vocal music reveals a strong feeling for the voice and a sensitive susceptibility to poetry.

In later works Balassa’s freely dodecaphonic idiom developed strong leanings towards diatonicism as a consequence of drawing upon other musical sources. Glarusi ének (‘Chant of Glarus’, 1978), commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, marked the beginnings of this change. Distancing himself from the stylistic aspirations of the first half of the 20th century, Balassa has sought inspiration from European classicism and the Hungarian folk tradition. With a new sense of freedom he has shaped the characteristics of his music with each new work. A return to tonality and recreating direct links with his audience and with the art of interpretation have become his priorities. Such goals were successfully realized in his three-act opera Karl és Anna (1987–92).

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Az ajtón kívül [The Man Outside] (op, 5 scenes, G. Fodor, after W. Borchert), op.27, 1986, Budapest, State Opera, 20 Oct 1978

A harmadik bolygó [The Third Planet] (op, 1, Balassa), op.39, 1987, unpubd, concert perf., Budapest, 1989

Karl és Anna (op, 3, Fodor, after L. Frank), op.41, 1987–92, Budapest, State Opera, 20 May 1995

instrumental

Orch: Vn Conc., op.3, 1964, unpubd; Irisz, op.22, 1971; Glarusi ének [Chant of Glarus], op.29, 1978; Az örök ifjúság szigete [The Island of Everlasting Youth], ov., op.32, 1979; Hívások és kiáltások [Calls and Cries], op.33, 1981; Egy álmodozó naplója [A Daydreamer’s Diary], orch/chbr orch, op.35, 1983; 3 fantázia, op.36, 1984; Szőlőcske és halacska [Little Grape, Little Fish], op.40, 1987, unpubd; Tündér Ilona [Fairy Helen], op.45, 1992, unpubd; Bölcskei concerto, op.49, str, 1993, unpubd; Csaba királyfi [Prince Csaba], op.46, str, 1993, unpubd; Mucsai táncok [Dances from Mucsa], op.50, 1994, unpubd; A nap fiai [The Sons of the Sun], op.54, 1995, unpubd; 4 arckép [4 Portraits], op.56, 1996, unpubd; 301-es parcella [The 301st Plot], op.58, 1996, unpubd; Pécsi concerto, op.61, ob, bn, vn, vc, hp, str, 1998, unpubd

Chbr: Divertimento, op.6, 2 cimb, 1961, unpubd; Kvartett, op.18, perc, 1969; Xenia, op.20, fl, cl, bn, pf, hp, perc, str trio, 1970; Lupercalia, op.24, wind, brass, 1971–2; Tabulae, op.25, chbr ens, 1972; Quintetto d’ottoni, brass, op.31, 1979; Fűzérke [Little Garland], op.51, fl, va, hp, 1994, unpubd; 3 intermezzo, op.23/1, fl, pf, 1996, unpubd; Nyírbátori harangok [The Bells of Nyírbátor], op.57, 12 brass, 1996, unpubd

Solo inst: Sonatina, op.23/5, pf, unpubd; Az utolsó pásztor [The Last Shepherd], op.30, vc, 1978; Hajta virágai [The Flowers of Hajta], op.38, cimb, 1984; Sonatina, op.47, hp, 1993, unpubd; Jánosnapi muzsika [Music for St John’s Day], op.52, vn, 1994; Prelude and Fantasia, op.59, org, 1997, unpubd

vocal

Choral: Kelet népe [The People of Orient] (Balassa, after trad.), op.44, children’s chorus, 1966–92, unpubd; 5 gyermekkar [5 Children’s Choruses] (S. Weöres, Balassa), op.11, 1967; Legenda, op.12, 1968; Requiem Kassák Lajosért, op.15, S, T, Bar, chorus, orch, 1969; Kyrie, op.34, female chorus, 1981; Bánatomtól szabadulnék [I would be free from my sorrow] (Balassa), op.42, female chorus, 1988; Madaras énekek [Songs of Birds] (Balassa), op.37, children’s chorus, 1988, unpubd; Oldott kéve [Loosened Sheaf] (Balassa), op.43, 1991, unpubd; Damjanich imája [The Prayer of Damjanich], op.48, 1993, unpubd; Az árvák éneke [The Song of Orphans] (I. Bella, I. Sinka), op.55, 1995, unpubd; Magyar ének [Hungarian Song] (Balassa), op.54a, 1995, unpubd; Tavaszi dal – Őszi dal [Song of Spring – Song of Autumn] (M. Simai, Balassa), op.60, female chorus, 1997, unpubd; Favágó [The Woodman] (A. József), op.62, male chorus, 1998, unpubd

1v (acc.): Dalok a Rottenbiller utcából [Songs from Rottenbiller Street] (Balassa), op.1, S, Mez, pf, 1954–7, unpubd; 2 dal [2 songs] (D. Kosztolányi), op.16, S, pf, 1957; 2 dal (A. József), op.7, Mez, pf, unpubd; Antinomia (I. Leckius, J. Dsida), op.14, S, cl, vc, 1968; Cantata Y (Z. Beney), op.21, S, orch, 1970

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Pándi: Hangversenykalauz [Concert guide] (Budapest, 1972)

G. Kroó: ‘Sándor Balassa’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.50 (1973), 215–21

A. Boros: Harminc év magyar operái 1948–1978 [30 years of Hungarian opera] (Budapest, 1979)

B.A. Varga, ed.: Contemporary Hungarian Composers (Budapest, 1970, 5/1989)

A. Horváth: ‘Draussen vor der Tür: Oper in fünf Sätzen von S. Balassa und G. Fodor’, Oper heute, vi (1983), 247–68

G. Staud, ed.: A budapesti operaház 100 éve [100 years of Hungarian opera] (Budapest, 1984)

S. Balassa: ‘Gondolatok a természet és az ember kapcsolatáról’ [Thoughts on the connection of man and nature], Műhely, no.1 (1990), 14–16

E. Terényi: ‘Hajta virágai: arcképvázlat Balassa Sándor zeneszerzőről’ [The flowers of Hajta: a portrait of the composer Balassa] (Budapest, 1995)

S. Balassa: ‘Gondolatok a nemzeti zenéről’ [Thoughts on national music], Névjegy a Magyar Művészeti Akadémia kincsestára életrajzok, dokumentumok, 1992–1994, ed. M. Berlász (Budapest, 1995), 12–16

GYÖRGY KROÓ/MELINDA BERLÁSZ

Balatka, Hans

(b Hoffnungsthal, nr Olmütz [now Olomouc, Czech Republic], ?26 Feb 1825; d Chicago, 17 April 1899). Moravian conductor and composer, active in the USA. He studied music at Hoffnungsthal and later at the gymnasium and university in Olomouc, where he was a choirboy at the cathedral. From 1845 he studied music (under Sechter and Proch) and law at the University of Vienna, where he worked as a music copyist and a tutor. During the 1848 revolution he sided with the Academic Legion, and following its defeat he fled Europe. He arrived in New York in 1849 and went via Chicago to Milwaukee, where he organized a male chorus (1849) and a string quartet (1850). From 1850 to 1860 he was musical director of the Milwaukee Musical Society (Musikverein) and conducted its first concert (May 1850) and its first oratorio, Haydn's The Creation (July 1851, in German), and directed and sang in its first opera, Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann (April 1853). He also founded a singing school and served as musical director of the German theatre (1855–60). Because of his reputation with the Milwaukee Musical Society he was asked to conduct music festivals in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Chicago. His performance of Mozart's Requiem for the Northwest Sängerfest (Chicago, 1860) led to his appointment as director of the Chicago Philharmonic Society (1860–69). His first concert on 19 November included Beethoven's second symphony and a chorus from Tannhäuser. While in Chicago he also conducted the Musical Union, the Oratorio Society and other singing groups. In 1871–2 he again conducted the Milwaukee Musical Society, but returned in 1876 to Chicago where he remained except for a short stay in St Louis (1877). In 1879 he founded the Balatka Academy of Musical Art, which was important to music education in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his later residence in Chicago he directed the Mozart Club and the Germania Society. He was also active as a journalist and regularly contributed columns on music to the Chicago newspaper Daheim.

Balatka wrote several orchestral fantasies, a piano quartet and other piano music; his vocal works include about 30 songs, pieces for chorus such as The Power of Song (1856) for double male chorus, and a Festival Cantata (1869) for soprano and orchestra. Balatka's significance nevertheless was in his conducting and educationist activities, and he was one of the first important figures for the development of music in the American Midwest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, x (New York, 1900), 197

J.J. Schlicher: ‘Hans Balatka and the Milwaukee Musical Society’, Wisconsin Magazine of History, xxvii (1943–4), 40–55

J.J. Schlicher: ‘The Milwaukee Musical Society in Times of Stress’, Wisconsin Magazine of History, xxvii (1943–4), 178–93

Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography (Madison, 1960), 23

T.H. Schleis: Opera in Milwaukee: 1850–1900 (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1974)

J. Deaville: ‘The Origins of Music Journalism in Chicago: Criticism as a Reflection of Musical Life’, American Musical Life in Context and Practice to 1865, ed. J.R. Heintze (New York, 1994), 301–66

THOMAS H. SCHLEIS

Balbastre [Balbâtre], Claude-Bénigne

(b Dijon, 22 Jan 1727; d Paris, 9 May 1799). French organist and composer. He probably received his first organ lessons from his father Bénigne Balbastre (d 1737), organist at St Médard, Dijon, from 1691 to 1705 and then at St Etienne until his death. Claude-Bénigne knew Claude Rameau (brother of Jean-Philippe) and may have studied with him; the extent of his other musical studies in Dijon is unknown, but by 1748 he had composed some rather insignificant fugues and other pieces for the harpsichord there.

At the age of 23 Balbastre went to Paris, arriving, according to La Borde, on 16 October 1750. There he befriended Jean-Philippe Rameau and studied composition with him, also receiving organ lessons from the organist Pierre Février. He returned briefly to Dijon, but established permanent residence in Paris. In March 1755 he performed an organ concerto of his own composition at the Concert Spirituel; his playing earned the praise of an anonymous reviewer in the Mercure de France (May 1755, pp.180–81):

M. Balbatre played an organ concerto of his own composition, that surprised and charmed the entire assemblage; his brilliant playing made this instrument sound in an authoritative manner and made the impression that he alone has the right to lead all others. One cannot praise too highly … the singular talent of M. Balbatre.

Thereafter he appeared frequently at the Concert Spirituel until 1782, usually playing his own concertos (none of which survives) or transcriptions of overtures and airs from current operas by Rameau or Mondonville (F-Pn Vm⁷ 2108). On 26 March 1756 he obtained the post of organist at St Roch, and on 1 October 1760 he was also engaged as organist at Notre Dame for three months a year. In 1776 he was appointed organist to Monsieur (brother of the king, later Louis XVIII), a position he retained until the Revolution. While employed at court, he taught the harpsichord to Marie-Antoinette and the Duke of Chartres and served as organist of the royal chapel. As organist of the Panthémont, he taught the daughters of prominent French and foreign dignitaries, including Thomas Jefferson. With the fall of the royalty, he lived in poverty for the rest of his life. One of his last performances was his own arrangement of the Marseillaise, played on the organ of the deconsecrated Notre Dame.

Balbastre’s performances were exceedingly popular, and his reputation was international. When he played his own noëls en variations at St Roch every year at Midnight Mass, the performance attracted such a crowd that in 1762 the archbishop finally forbade him to play. Rameau praised his performance of a transcription of the overture to Pygmalion at La Pouplinière’s home in Passy. Charles Burney, eager to meet Balbastre, went to hear him at St Roch in 1770 and entered a long account of the performance in his Present State of Music in France and Italy:

He performed in all styles in accompanying the choir. When the Magnificat was sung, he played likewise between each verse several minuets, fugues, imitations, and every species of music, even to hunting pieces and jigs, without surprising or offending the congregation, as far as I was able to discover.

Burney also visited Balbastre at home and described the instruments he saw there, including a large organ and

a fine Rucker harpsichord which he has had painted inside and out with as much delicacy as the finest coach or snuff-box I ever saw at Paris. … On the outside is the birth of Venus; and on the inside of the cover the story of Rameau’s most famous opera, Castor and Pollux; earth, hell and elysium are there represented; in elysium, sitting on a bank, with a lyre in his hand, is that celebrated composer himself [i.e. Rameau]; … The tone of this instrument is more delicate than powerful; one of the unisons is of buff, but very sweet and agreeable; the touch is very light, owing to the quilling, which in France is always weak.

The decoration Burney described survives, although it has been enlarged to serve as the lid for a 19th-century piano now in the private collection of Barbara Johnson in New Jersey. It includes details of scenery and costumes for two scenes of Rameau’s opera, probably taken from the 1764 production. The unison of buff (or peau de buffle) so casually mentioned by Burney was, according to La Borde, a new invention of Balbastre’s. Balbastre is also credited with the invention of the ‘fortepiano organisé’, a combination of the piano and organ at a single keyboard (F-Pn Vm⁷1941). An anonymous portrait (miniature on ivory, in the Dijon Museum), formerly thought to be of Balbastre, is of the singer Pierre de Jélyotte.

Balbastre’s keyboard pieces are extremely varied in character. Most of the best pieces in the 1759 book follow the grand tradition of François Couperin (‘La d’Héricourt’) or Rameau (‘La Lamarck’), though with a certain individuality. Others are more modern, such as the outstanding Scarlattian gigue ‘La Lugeac’, or the more simple-minded ‘La Courteille’ and ‘La Malesherbe’. His Quatuors (1779), a volume of quite charming keyboard sonatas accompanied by two violins and cello with two cors de chasse ad lib, seem to have been an unsuccessful effort to combat the competition of ‘les allemands’, such as Honauer and Schobert, the latter of whom, according to Grimm (Ière lettre, December 1765), ‘has completely destroyed the reputation of [A.-L.] Couperin, du Phly [Duphly], [and] Balbastre’. However, a romance from this collection became very popular, was parodied and has been ‘recorded’ (a remarkable example of contemporary performing practice) on the barrel organ. Another favourite composition must have been his Pastorale in A (F-Pn Vm⁷ 2108), for he had it painted on the nameboard of his harpsichord, where it is dated 6 August 1767. Among his other surviving compositions is an unmeasured prelude which must either be one of the last written for the harpsichord or the first (and possibly last) for the piano.

WORKS

Mes souvenirs, 1v, acc., Etrennes lyriques anacréontiques (Paris, 1786)

Chbr: Sonates en quatuor, hpd/pf, acc. 2 vn, b, 2 hn ad lib, op.3 (Paris, 1779); Sonates en quatuor, 1 movt, F-Pn

Kbd: Pièces de clavecin, 1er livre (Paris, 1759); Recueil de noëls formant 4 suittes, hpd/pf (Paris, 1770), nos.1–3 ed. in L’organiste liturgique, xlviii, lii, lv–lvi (Paris, 1968–9); Marche des marseillais et l’air Ça ira, arr. pf (Paris, 1793); pièces and fugues, by 1748, Pn; pièces, unmeasured prelude, La canonade, 1777, Pn; pièces, 1787, Pn; La d’Esclignac, pièce, hpd, 1787, Pc; Romance, Pa, Pn; 5 pieces, US-CHua: Marche guerrier, La canonade, Symphonie, La De Villiers, Rondo; other pieces and arrs. of operatic airs, F-Pn; parodies of airs in Amusements d’un convalescent dédiés à ses amis (1761) and Mercure de France (Sept 1767); parody of pastorale, Pn; org concs., ?lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetC

BurneyFI

FétisB

La BordeE

MGG1 (M. Frécot)

PierreH

Mercure de France (May 1755, May 1772, Feb 1779)

F. Bédos de Celles: L’art du facteur d’orgues, iv (Paris, 1778/R; Eng. trans., 1977); ed. C. Mahrenholz (Kassel, 1936, 2/1966)

M. Brenet: ‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790 d’après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

J. Gardien: L’orgue et les organistes en Bourgogne et en Franche-Comté au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1943)

M. Frécot: La vie et l’oeuvre de Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799) (diss., U. of Paris, Sorbonne, c1950)

H. Cripe: Thomas Jefferson and Music (Charlottesville, VA, 1974)

D. Fuller: ‘Accompanied Keyboard Music’, MQ, lx (1974), 222–45

D. Paquette and P.-M. Gueritey: ‘Etude de deux manuscrits de Mr Balbastre de Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 1770’, Revue international de musique française, xxiii (1987), 99–126

J. Erdman: ‘Romance de Mr Balbastre’, Pisma teoretyczne wydzialu kompozycji, dyrygentury i teorii muzyki [Theoretical papers of the composition, conducting and music theory department], i (Warsaw, 1992), 40–125

J. Erdman: ‘Romance de Mr Balbastre: niektóre kwestie zwiazane z tekstem muzycznym’ [Romance de Mr Balbastre: some problems regarding the musical text], Pisma teoretyczne wydzialu kompozycji, dyrygentury i teorii muzyki, ii (Warsaw, 1995), 15–53

ALAN CURTIS, MARY CYR

Balbi, Giovan Battista [Giambattista; ‘il Tasquino’]

(fl 1636–57). Italian choreographer, dancer, stage designer and impresario. He was involved with Venetian opera from its inception. Cited as ‘Veneziano Ballarino celebre’ in the libretto for Francesco Manelli’s L’Andromeda (1637), he continued to provide choreography for operas at Venice for the next seven years. Beginning in 1645, his affiliation with the travelling Febiarmonici introduced Venetian opera to other Italian cities. They produced Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza in Florence in 1645 and Cavalli’s La Deidamia (first performed Venice, 1644) there in 1650. In December 1652 Balbi and the Febiarmonici produced Veremonda l’Amazzone d’Aragona (?Cavalli) in Naples. Veremonda and La finta pazza, presented earlier that year, served to introduce Neapolitan audiences to the innovations of the Venetian stage machinery and dance. During Carnival 1653 Balbi created the set designs and choreography for the anonymous Le magie amorose and for Provenzale’s Il Ciro in Naples.

Balbi also played an important role in the introduction of Venetian opera to northern Europe. While in Florence in 1645, he was summoned to Paris by Anne of Austria. There he and Giacomo Torelli collaborated on a celebrated production of La finta pazza (14 December 1645). In 1647 Balbi created the choreography for the French production of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo and the following year he was called to Brussels. For the wedding of Philip IV and Maria Anna of Austria he created Le balet du monde, a grand ‘balet a entrées’ presented in Brussels on 24 February 1650, with Gioseffo Zamponi’s Ulisse nell’isola di Circe. By carnival 1651 he was once again in Venice, providing choreography and stage designs for Cesti’s Alessandro vincitor di se stesso. The following year he brought Ciro to Venice with new music by Cavalli; in the libretto Balbi noted that the opera had been adapted for Venetian taste. This libretto was reprinted in Palermo in 1657, and there is no further documentation of Balbi’s activities.

Balbi’s fanciful ballets incorporated animals and other ‘exotica’. His descriptions, with engravings by Valerio Spada, were published as Balletti d’invenzione nella Finta Pazza di Giovanbatta Balbi (n.p., c1658).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (F. Marotti)

ES (E. Povoledo)

OG (I. Alm, incl. illustration)

H. Prunières: L’opera italien en France avant Lulli (Paris, 1913)

G. Morelli and T. Walker: ‘Tre controversie intorno al San Cassiano’, Venezia e il melodramma nel seicento: Venice 1972, 97–120

L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454

R.L. and N.W. Weaver: A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater, 1590–1750 (Detroit, 1978)

G. Donato: ‘Su alcuni aspetti della vita musicale in Sicilia nel Seicento’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento: Naples 1985, 567–623

I. Alm: Theatrical Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera (Chicago, forthcoming)

IRENE ALM

Balbi, Ignazio

(fl 1720–73). Italian composer. The earliest documentation of him is the score of the Oratorio della Madonna de' sette dolori; this bears a dedication to Emperor Charles VI, in whose service he already was at the time, signed ‘Ignatio Balbi Dilettante’ and dated ‘Milan, 24 February 1720’. In 1724–5 Balbi contributed four arias to two oratorios performed in Milan, and according to Quadrio he also contributed to one given there in 1726; this was possibly Il martirio di S Giovanni Nepomuceno, whose published libretto does not bear any composer's name. The librettos of three other works performed in Milan name Balbi as composer: La verità confessatasi da un'anima dannata (1729), La Passione (1735) and Ritornando il giorno trentesimo d'agosto l'anno MDCCLII (1752). In the libretto of the last of these he is described as ‘Virtuoso Dilettante Signor Don Ignazio Balbi Milanese, Segretario di S[ua] M[aestà] I[mperial] R[egia]’. The title ‘Regio Segretario Imperiale’ also appears in some of Balbi's letters, including one dated 2 August 1752 sent to Gasparo Francesconi (now lost; see Succi), who took the title role in his opera Lucio Papirio at Turin. That Ciro in Armenia (1753), an opera hitherto attributed to Maria Teresa Agnesi, was also by Balbi is suggested in his letter to Padre Martini dated 11 November 1753, while a relationship between Balbi and J.C. Bach is documented in three letters written by Bach to Martini in 1757. Balbi's last surviving letter to Martini (I-Bc) is dated 14 April 1773 (not 1775, as previously thought). He has been erroneously confused with the tenor Gregorio Babbi.

WORKS

oratorios

Oratorio della Madonna de' sette dolori, 1720, A-Wn

La verità confessatasi da un' anima dannata, Milan, S Francesco, 21 June 1729, music lost, lib I-Bc, Vnm (see F.X. Haberl, KJb, xvi (1901), 45–64)

La Passione (componimento drammatico, G. Riviera), Milan, Teatini di S Antonio, 7 March 1735, music lost, lib Mb

Music in: La calunnia delusa, Milan, S Maria della Scala, 23 May 1724, music lost, lib Mb, Vnm; La necessità socorsa dal glorioso Santo di Padoa, Milan, S Francesco, 20 June 1725, music lost, lib Mb; Il martirio di S Giovanni Nepomuceno, Milan, 1726, doubtful, music lost, lib Mb

secular dramatic

Ritornando il giorno trentesimo d'agosto l'anno MDCCLII (componimento per musica, A. Perotti), Milan, Casa Litta, 30 Aug 1752, music lost, lib I-Mb

Lucio Papirio (3, ? A. Zeno), Turin, Regio, 26 Dec 1752, Act 1 Bborromeo, arrs. of ov. and excerpts Rsc, 1 aria D-ROu, 1 aria US-NYp, lib Wc

Ciro in Armenia (3), Milan, Regio Ducal, 26 Dec 1753, excerpts F-Pn, 1 aria US-BEm, lib I-Mb

other works

Vocal: duet, I-Bc; aria, F-Pn

Inst: ov., D, 1769, CZ-Pnm, D-Bsb, S-Skma (2 copies); 6 trios, 2 vn, b, A-Wgm; 14 trios, 2vn, b, I-CMbc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (H. Seifert)

SartoriL

StiegerO

F.S. Quadrio: Della storia e della ragione d'ogni poesia, iii/2 (Milan, 1744)

E.F. Succi: Catalogo con brevi cenni biografici e succinte descrizioni degli autografi e documenti di celebri o distinti musicisti posseduti da Emilia Succi accademica filarmonica di Bologna (Bologna, 1888)

M.-T. Bouquet: Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino, Il teatro di corte dalle origini al 1788 (Turin, 1976)

R. Allorto: Gli anni milanesi di Giovanni Cristiano Bach e le sue composizioni sacre (Milan, 1992)

M. Brusa and A. Rossi: ‘Sammartini e il suo tempo: fonti manoscritte e stampate della musica a Milano nel Settecento’, Fonti musicali italiane, i (1996), suppl.

MARCO BRUSA, HERBERT SEIFERT

Balbi, Lodovico [Ludovico]

(b Venice, c1545; d Venice, before 15 Dec 1604). Italian composer and friar. He entered the monastery of S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, as a member of the order of Minor Conventuals. From 1565 to 1567 he was a pupil in Padua of Costanzo Porta, who belonged to the same religious order. From 1570 to 1578 he was a singer at S Marco, Venice, at the time when Zarlino was maestro di cappella there, and at Verona Cathedral. In 1578 he was appointed maestro di cappella of S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, an appointment he probably held for four or five years. A document (in I-Ma, reproduced in Garbellotto) shows that in 1579 and again in 1582 Porta made great efforts to persuade Cardinal Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, to accept Balbi as maestro di cappella of Milan Cathedral. At first no decision came from Milan and only in 1582 did the officials of the cathedral chapter decide to call Balbi, who, however, declined to accept, for reasons which are not recorded. On 7 November 1580 he participated unsuccessfully in a competition for the directorship of the choir of Padua Cathedral. On 18 May 1585 he was appointed maestro di cappella of the Cappella Antoniana in Padua, a post he held for over six years. On 28 November 1591 he obtained exemption from his duties, and from 13 July 1593 held a similar post at Feltre Cathedral. He remained there until 5 August 1597 when he left to take the post of maestro di cappella at Treviso Cathedral. On 10 June 1596 the chapter of his religious order named him, together with Porta and Gerolamo Vespa, maestro dell’ordine, an honorary degree denoting particular skill exercised over a long period. He left Treviso in 1598 and returned to S Maria Gloriosa, Venice, where he died.

Balbi had a thorough mastery of contrapuntal writing, though unequal in artistry to his teacher Porta. The Psalmi ad vesperas (1596, I-FELc), in the usual homophonic and homorhythmic style, show simple melodic and rhythmic invention. The Musicale essercitio, in which Balbi added four voice parts of his own under the superius parts of well-known madrigals, is a curious piece of academicism. His output has yet to be studied fully, however, and perhaps the two books of madrigals for four voices may yield greater musical interest.

WORKS

all published in Venice

sacred

Ecclesiasticarum cantionum, 4vv (1578)

4 masses: ‘Ecce mitto angelum meum’, ‘Fuggite il sonno’, Missa duodecim toni, Missa alternatim canenda: 5vv (1580)

Ecclesiasticarum cantionum in sacris totius anni sanctorum sollemnitatibus, 4vv (1587)

Graduale et antiphonarium juxta ritum missalis et breviarii novi (1587) [collab. G. Gabrieli, Orazio Vecchi]

Missa defunctorum, 5vv (1595) [pubd with repr. of 1580 masses]

Messe et motetti con il Te Deum laudamus, 8vv (1605); bc pubd separately (1605)

1 psalm, 5vv, 1590⁷; 9 falsobordoni, 1601¹; 2 motets, 7, 8vv, 1611¹; 3 motets, 8vv, 1612³; 5 motets, 6–8vv, 1613²; 1 motet, 6vv, 1617¹; 4 concerti ecclesiastici, 1622²

Several motets, psalms, D-Z, I-Bc, FELc, PL-WRu, Legnica, Biblioteca Rudofina

secular

Il primo libro de madrigali, 4vv (1570)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 4vv (1576)

I capricci, 6vv (1586)

Musicale essercitio, 5vv (1589)

1 madrigal, 6vv, 1592¹¹; 1 madrigal, 6vv, 1594⁶; 1 madrigal, 5vv, 1598⁶; 1 madrigal, 4vv, 1598⁹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS

EinsteinIM

FétisB

GaspariC

SchmidlD

E.A. Cicogna: Delle inscrizioni veneziane, iii (Venice, 1830/R), 17ff

L. Busi: Il Padre G.B. Martini (Bologna, 1891/R)

G. Tebaldini: L’archivio musicale della Cappella Antoniana in Padova (Padua, 1895)

P.S. Mattei: ‘Serie dei maestri di cappilla Minori Conventuali’, Miscellanea Franciscana, xxi (1920)

D. Sporacio: ‘Municisti Minori Conventuali’, Miscellanea Franciscana, xxv (1925)

R. Casimiri: ‘Musicisti dell’ordine francescano dei minori conventuali dei secoli XVI–XVIII’, NA, xvi (1939), 186–99, 238–50, 274–5

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei secoli XIV, XV e XVI’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214; xix (1942), 49–92; pubd separately (Rome, 1942)

Cenni cronistorici intorno agli organi e organisti della Cattedrale di Feltre (Feltre, 1943)

G. d’Alessi: La cappella musicale del duomo di Treviso (1300–1633) (Vedelago, 1954), 138–9

A. Garbelotto: Il Padre Costanzo Porta da Cremona (Rome, 1955), 35ff

F. Degrada: ‘Dante e la musica nel Cinquecento’, Chigiana, new ser., ii (1965), 257–75

L. Bianconi: Preface to P.M. Marsolo: Secondo libro dei madrigali, MRS, iv (1973)

A. Sartori: Documenti per la storia della musica al santo e nel Veneto (Vicenza, 1977)

R. Spanò: Il Musicale esercitio (1589) di Ludovico Balbi: trascrizione della stampa e confronto (thesis, U. of Padua, 1991–2)

GIANCARLO ROSTIROLLA

Balbi, Luigi [Alviso, Alciso, Aluigi, Aloysius]

(b ?Venice; fl 1585–1621). Italian composer, organist and friar, nephew and pupil of Lodovico Balbi. He followed the same religious career as his uncle in the order of the Minor Conventuals. He was at first a singer in the choir of S Marco, Venice (1585), and in August 1585 entered the Cappella del Santo at the basilica of S Antonio, Padua. On 20 June 1586 he succeeded Bartolomeo Formenton as organist there. On 27 November 1587 he was appointed maestro di cappella at the church of the Carità in Venice. In 1590 he was in Zara, directing the local choir, after which he returned to Venice to serve in the choir of the Ca’ Grande. In April 1606 he competed, at first unsuccessfully, for the directorship of the Cappella del Santo, Padua, a post he obtained on 4 August 1615. He remained there until August 1621, with some interruptions owing to the temporary suppression of the choir because of the lack of discipline among the singers.

Balbi, Lodovico

WORKS

Ecclesiastici concentus … liber primus (Venice, 1606)

Completorium, 12vv (Venice, 1609)

Motets, sacri concerti and other pieces, 1590⁷, 1615³, 1622², 1623², 1627¹, 1627²

For bibliography see Balbi, lodovico.

GIANCARLO ROSTIROLLA

Balbiani-Vegezzi-Bossi.

See Bossi family.

Balbun, Noel [Noe].

See Bauldeweyn, Noel.

Baldan, Angelo

(b Venice, 1753; d Venice, 23 April 1803). Italian composer. He studied with G.F. Brusa, was a singer at S Marco and became director of music at the churches of S Leonardo, S Marcuola and at the convent of S Maria Celeste in Venice. Some of his scores are dated and marked for use at other Venetian churches (S Rocco, S Pietro di Castello and S Geremia). Assalone, performed in 1789 in the oratory of S Filippo Neri, Venice, was his only dramatic work; he did, however, write arias to be used in performances of operas by other composers.

Aristocratic families employed Baldan as teacher. At soirées in the Venier palace he performed with his pupil Teresa Venier, née Ventura (known before her marriage as a singer at the Ospizio di S Lazzaro dei Mendicanti), his ballettos, sonatas and ricercares for harpsichord and his songs. Some of these canzoni with Venetian dialect texts became popular in the 19th century and were mistaken for folksongs (e.g. Nina xe qua el to Nane, Per carità Bettina and Nella stagion dei boccoli). At Baldan’s funeral in S Geremia his Requiem for chorus and orchestra (1789) was performed.

WORKS

MSS in I-Vc, Vnm, Vs, Vsmc, Nc

Requiem, chorus, orch, 1789; 5 masses, 2–8vv; 12 mass movts, 2–5vv; 2 Mag, 3vv, 4vv; 2 TeD, 3vv, 4vv; 5 motets, S, orch; 26 ants, psalms etc.: mostly T, B, or 2T, B, with bc/orch

Assalone (orat), Venice, 1789

5 arie, 5 ariette, 5 canzoni, 11 duettini; mostly S, bc

Sei sinfonie, ob, hn, 2 vn, va, b (Venice, c1785)

Conc., hpd, orch; 6 ricercari, hpd; 7 sonate, hpd; numerous ballettos, hpd; 1 sonata, wind, 1795

Istruzione d’accompagnamento, 2 sets, Vnm [incl. 42 arias, B, bc]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Simonetti)

G.A. Moschini: Della letteratura veneziana del secolo XVIII, iii (Venice, 1806), 212

F. Caffi: Materiali e carteggi per la storia della musica teatrale (MS, I-Vnm)

G. Fantoni: ‘Angelo Baldan veneto musicista del passato secolo’, Ateneo veneto: rivista mensile di scienze, lettere ed arti, 9th ser., i (1885), 449–59

D. and E. Arnold: The Oratorio in Venice (London, 1986), 83

SVEN HANSELL

Baldassari, Benedetto [Benedetti]

(fl 1708–25). Italian soprano castrato. He was in the service of the Elector Palatine at Düsseldorf (c1708–14), where he sang a female part in Steffani’s Tassilone in 1709. In 1710–11 he was at the Berlin court as the agent of the elector and Steffani in an attempt to convert the King and Queen of Prussia to Catholicism. In 1712 he went to London and sang in revivals of Mancini’s Idaspe fedele and Gasparini’s Antioco at the Queen’s Theatre, playing a female part in the latter, and in the pasticcio Ercole. He was much applauded, again in a female role, in Gasparini’s Lucio Papirio in Rome in 1714, and sang in operas by C.F. Pollarolo and Orlandini in Venice in 1718. Returning to London in 1719, he sang as an original member of the Royal Academy company, in Porta’s Numitore, Handel’s Radamisto (where he demanded to be elevated from a captain of the guard to a princely lover) and Roseingrave’s adaptation of Domenico Scarlatti’s Narciso in 1720, and in original productions of Handel’s Floridante (1721) and Giovanni Bononcini’s Crispo and Griselda (1722). In the autumn of 1725 he was singing in Dublin.

The two parts Handel wrote for him, Fraarte in Radamisto and Timante in Floridante, show that he was a high soprano with a compass from e' to a'' but the two leading male roles in Radamisto were allotted to women, implying that Handel did not rate him as a front-rank castrato. His portrait was painted by Beluzzi and engraved by Vertue.

WINTON DEAN

Baldassari [Baldassare, Baldasari], Pietro

(b ?Brescia, c1683; d after 1768). Italian composer. Early historians name Rome as his birthplace, but some contemporary documents describe him as being from Brescia, where Baldassari was quite a common name. From his works it can be assumed that he was in Brescia in 1709, and in librettos he is named maestro di cappella of the Oratorio di S Filippo Neri (Congregazione della Pace) in Brescia. He held this post from 1714 until at least 1768 and until 1754 he was also maestro di cappella of S Clemente, Brescia. In December 1717 he competed, unsuccessfully, for the same post at the basilica of S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo. He took holy orders.

Apart from the componimento per musica, Il giudizio di Paride, written to celebrate the name day of the Empress Amalia Wilhelmina, little of Baldassari's music has survived. From that which has survived, his musical language can be said to bear traces of the canonic writing practised by members of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. A letter to Padre Martini dated 21 February 1768 (I-Bc) reveals his intention to dedicate a collection of 12 psalms to Farinelli.

WORKS

Il giudizio di Paride (componimento per musica, L.N. Cyni), Vienna, 10 July 1707, A-Wn

Oratorios, all lost, libs in I-Bc: Applausi eterni dell'amore, Brescia, 1709; La vera idea del ben chiedere mercede, Pavia, 1714; La fuga in Egitto, Bologna, 1721; Le sagre contese dell'amore e dell'umiltà, Bologna, 1721; La santità riconciliata col mondo, Bologna, 1722; S Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi, Bologna, 1723; L'umiltà coronata alla Santità di N.S. Benedetto XIII (G. Bianchi), Bologna, 6 Feb 1725; Per il novello Oratorio (F. Cappello), Brescia, 1747

Benedictus, 4vv, inst, BRs

Cantatas, all lost, libs in Mb, BRq: Cantata nella nascita di N. Signor Gesù Cristo, Brescia, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 1715; I Trionfi della Fede in Brescia, Brescia, 1715; Componimento musicale per la creazione di N.S. Benedetto XIII, Brescia, 1724

2 sonatas, cornett, str, bc, A-Wkm

1 sonata, hpd, in Raccolta musicale, i (Nuremberg, 1756)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Seifert)

RicciTB

F. Vatielli: ‘L'oratorio a Bologna negli ultimi decenni del Seicento’, NA, xv (1938), 26–35, 77–87

A. Schnoebelen: Padre Martini's Collections of Letters in the Civico Museo Bibliographico Musicale in Bologna: an Annotated Index (New York, 1979), 40

E. Citati: ‘La musica presso la congregazione di Santa Maria della Pace in Brescia, con riferimento all'attività esercitata dal compositore Pietro Baldassarri’, La cappella musicale nell'Italia della Controriforma, ed. O. Mischiati and P. Russo (Florence, 1993), 353–60

M. Bizzarini: ‘Una solenne accademia con musica nella chiesa di S. Pietro in Oliveto’, Civiltà Bresciana, ii/2 (1993), 39–40

E. Citati: ‘Alla ricerca di un nome: Pietro Baldassarri compositore italiano’, Civiltà Bresciana, ii/3 (1993), 56–8

P. Palermo: ‘La musica a S. Maria Maggiore nell'infanzia di Locatelli’, Intorno a Locatelli, ed. A. Dunning (Lucca, 1995), 653–748, esp. 727

R. Del Silenzio: ‘Celebrazioni per la festa annuale della Beata Vergine del Santo Rosario nella chiesa di S. Clemente in Brescia’, Civiltà Bresciana, iv/2 (1995), 69–72

JAMES L. JACKMAN/MARCO BIZZARINI

Baldi, Antonio

(fl 1714–35). Italian alto castrato. He came from Cortona and may have sung in three operas at Palermo in 1714–16. He appeared in 13 operas in Venice (1722–4, 1729 and 1733–5), including works by Gasparini, Orlandini, Giacomelli, Hasse and Leo, in Genoa (1723 and 1730), Milan (1723 and 1725), Florence and Turin (1730–31) and Rome (1731). He was engaged for three seasons (1725–8) by the Royal Academy in London, making his début in a revival of the Vinci-Orlandini Elpidia. He sang in ten operas by Handel (four of them revivals), the pasticcio Elisa, Ariosti’s Lucio Vero and Teuzzone and Giovanni Bononcini’s Astianatte. The six parts Handel composed for him, Scipio in Scipione, Taxiles in Alessandro, Trasimede in Admeto, Oronte in Riccardo Primo, Medarse in Siroe and Alessandro in Tolomeo, indicate a narrow compass (a to d'') and a tessitura similar to Senesino’s but with far less brilliance. Owen Swiney described him in 1725 as a tolerable actor and neither a good nor a bad singer. Burney called him ‘a singer of no great abilities’ and suggested, of one of his arias in Siroe, that Handel assigned ‘the chief part of the business to the instruments, which, so employed, were better worth hearing than the voice’; but Burney can never have heard Baldi sing. There is a caricature of him by A.M. Zanetti in the Cini collection (I-Vgc).

WINTON DEAN

Baldi, João José

(b Lisbon, 1770; d Lisbon, 18 May 1816). Portuguese composer. The son of Carlo Baldi (d Lisbon, 1779), a favoured court musician who had immigrated from Italy, he was admitted on 10 January 1781 to the Lisbon Seminário Patriarcal, where his music teachers were Sousa Carvalho, the Lima brothers and José Joaquim dos Santos. In September 1789, having completed his studies, he was named mestre de capela of Guarda Cathedral. From this year date his earliest surviving works, two orchestral masses. In 1794 he moved from Guarda to Faro Cathedral and in 1800 returned to Lisbon as second mestre de capela of the royal chapel of Bemposta.

From 1805 he wrote a series of spectacular polychoral masses, Vespers and Matins for the royal basilica at Mafra, celebrated for its six widely spaced organs and choirs in its four corners. As late as 1825 his Mafra music produced ‘a stupendous and admirable effect’. In 1801 he published his first modinha and in 1803 wrote the Grand Mass dedicated to the Conde de Borba that made him famous. In 1805 he began composing for the theatre and in 1806 became first mestre of Bemposta and of Lisbon Cathedral. In 1812, while a captain in the militia raised by Beresford, he wrote the music for a patriotic hymn dedicated to Wellington.

An extremely versatile artist who wrote in the reigning Italian manner, he composed a great amount of church music, piano works, songs and stage music, the latter for the Rua dos Condes and Salitre theatres. He ranks with Portugal and Moreira as one of the three best Portuguese composers of his generation.

WORKS

sacred

For 4vv, orch/org: masses: P-La, Em, 5 in EVc; 2, 1789, Lf; 1801, La; 1801, BR-Rem*; 1803, ded. Conde de Borba; 2 Mag, P-EVcn; Responsories: St Michael’s Matins, 1806, Sacred Heart Matins, 1808, Christmas Matins, 1811, Dec 8 Matins, all P-La, 52 in EVc; 2 TeD, 1808, 1811, La; 7 vesper ps, La; 7 vesper ps, EVc

Polychoral (male vv, acc. 4–6 org; all at MP): 4 masses, separate Credo, Mag, 1807; Matins, 1805; Vespers, 1806; 8 vespers ps

other works

Toccata, kbd, Ln; Sym., orch, La; songs, incl. modinha in Jornal de modinhas novas (1801); hymn ded. Wellington, 1803

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBP

M.A. Machado Santos, ed.: Biblioteca da Ajuda: catálogo de música manuscrita, i (Lisbon, 1958), 43–50; vii (Lisbon, 1964), 22–3

J.A. Alegria: Arquivo das músicas da Sé de Évora: catálogo (Lisbon, 1973), 19, 24–5, 29, 43–4, 57, 68, 82

J.M.B. Azevedo: Biblioteca do Palacio nacional de Mafra: catálogo dos Fundos Musicais (Lisbon, 1985), 10, 57–67, 187–8

ROBERT STEVENSON

Baldini, Vittorio

(b Venice; d Ferrara, 21 Feb 1618). Italian printer and engraver. He began to publish literary texts in 1578, setting up his printing works opposite the Castello Estense at Ferrara. He seems to have started music publishing in 1582 with a collection of madrigals for five voices by various authors entitled Il lauro secco, in which a representative group of madrigalists from Ferrara and other Italian cities paid homage to the beauty and virtuosity of Laura Peverara, a singer from Mantua and lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Ferrara. Baldini probably acquired the edition from the heirs of Francesco Rossi and Paolo Tortorino. He later printed many collections of madrigals, canzonettas, psalms and motets by such leading composers as Lodovico Agostini, Girolamo Belli and Bonfilio. Between 1594 and 1597 he published several of the most significant works of the seconda pratica madrigalists (Luzzaschi, Gesualdo, Fontanelli and Macque).

Baldini also published a number of books on the theory and art of music and the theatre, including F. Patrizi’s La deca istoriale (1586) and La deca disputata (1586); G.B. Aleotti’s Gli artifitiosi et curiosi moti spiritali di Herrone (1589, the Italian translation, with illustrations, of a basic handbook for stage machinists; see illustration); M.A. Ingegneri’s Della poesia rappresentativa (1598); and Ercole Bottrigari’s Il melone (1602/R, Monteverdi’s reply in his own defence to the attacks of Artusi). Among the most important poetic and theatrical texts that he printed are the descriptive scenarios for intermezzos, tournaments and mock battles staged in melodramatic style at Ferrara from 1600 onwards, for example Guidobaldo Bonarelli della Rovere’s Filli di Sciro (1607, with scenery and costumes by G.B. Aleotti, engraved by F. Vallegio) and Battista Guarini’s Intermezzi (various editions, with alterations, 1610, 1612 and 1614).

In contrast to contemporary Venetian publications, Baldini’s works show a deeply cultivated and élitist tendency through the beauty of their graphic lettering, engraved decorations and superb title-pages. He used both wood and metal on fine, azure-coloured paper; his musical publications are among the most interesting of the late 16th century as they include both text and music. Baldini used several different imprints: Ducal Printer until 1597, when the Este family lost the Duchy of Ferrara, thereafter Episcopal or State Printer and Printer to the Academy of the Intrepidi. He used a large number of typographical signs including a bell, a flying Daedalus (see illustration) and the sun. After his death, his daughter Vittoria carried on the printing works until 1622, under the imprint of ‘the heirs of Vittorio Baldini’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SartoriD

G.D. Cucchetti: La pazzia, favola pastorale (Ferrara, 1581, later edns to 1623)

ADRIANO CAVICCHI

Baldoni, Tomaso.

See Boldon, Tomaso.

Baldovino, Amadeo

(b Alexandria, 5 Feb 1916). Italian cellist. He spent two three-year periods at the conservatory in Bologna: from 1927 he studied the cello with Camillo Oblach, graduating in 1930, and he returned in 1937 as a composition pupil of Cesare Nordio. His début recital took place in Milan in 1930, and he started a series of international tours the following year with a concerto performance in Berlin: he was welcomed as a sensitive young artist as well as an accomplished technician. His international solo career expanded greatly after World War II, but he later devoted more time to chamber music. He was a founder-member in 1957 of the Italian String Trio; he left in 1962 to replace Libero Lana in the Trio di Trieste. Following Mainardi, he was from 1969 to 1972 professor of the master cello course at the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome, and subsequently continued to teach there. He played on the 1711 ‘Mara’ Stradivari, formerly the property of John Crosdill and Alessandro Pezze. (CampbellGC)

PIERO RATTALINO

Baldrati [Baldradi], Bartolomeo

(b Rimini, c1645). Italian ?composer. A Franciscan friar, he was maestro di cappella of S Francesco, Rimini, when Messe a 4 voci a capella op.1 (Bologna, 1678, 2/1694) was published under his name. A copy (in I-Bc) of the first edition, however, bears a manuscript note stating that this music is by Giuseppe da Bagnacavallo (see Giuseppe Tamburini). According to Eitner (Quellen-Lexikon) two masses by Baldrati (one for 24 voices) and a few five- and six-part motets survive (in F-Pn).

Balducci, Francesco

(b Palermo, bap. 1 April 1579; d Rome, 20 Nov – 31 Dec 1642). Italian poet. Having received a relatively limited education in Palermo, he went before he was 20 to Naples, where he found patronage for his poetry among the aristocracy. He also went to Rome and in 1601 was among the papal troops who opposed the Turks in Hungary. After the campaign he returned to Rome, where he began his period of most intensive literary activity: he worked under the protection of Giovanni Antonio and Paolo Girolamo II Orsini, Cardinals Ludovisi, Scipione Borghese, Orsi, and Antonio and Maffeo Barberini, among others. He travelled widely in Italy and became a member of various literary academies in Rome, Perugia, Bologna and Palermo. A man of restless and impulsive temperament, he lived an irregular life, which seems to have alternated between extremes of luxury and misery and included a prison term for insolvency. He took holy orders late in life and became a chaplain in the Roman hospital of S Sisto.

During his lifetime one volume of his Rime was published (Rome, 1630), and that and another volume of Rime appeared posthumously (Rome, 1645–6). Two oratorio texts, La fede and Il trionfo, were included in the second volume of Rime (edns of both in Alaleona: Storia, pp.289ff, and of La fede only in Pasquetti, 2/1914, pp.207ff, and Schering, appx, pp.viiff). These are the earliest printed works, either literary or musical, in which the term ‘oratorio’ is used to designate a genre. A modified version of Il trionfo was set to music, possibly by Carissimi, as Oratorio della Santissima Vergine (ed. in PIISM, 3rd ser., Oratori, viii). His many canzonettas, set to music by Orazio Michi and others, played a crucial role in the origins of the chamber cantata.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (E.N. Girardi)

ScheringGO

SmitherHO, i

G. Pasquetti: L'oratorio musicale in Italia (Florence, 1906, 2/1914)

D. Alaleona: Studi su la storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia (Turin, 1908, 2/1945 as Storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia)

R. Holzer: Music and Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Rome (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1990)

J.W. Hill: Roman Monody, Cantata and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford, 1997)

HOWARD E. SMITHER/R

Balducci, Giuseppe (Antonio Luigi Angelo)

(b Iesi, 2 May 1796; d Malaga, 1845). Italian composer. He received the best training available in the Marches, and at the age of 17 formed his own operatic troupe. He was, however, forced to flee after killing the nephew of the Papal Governor of Iesi in a duel. Reaching Naples, he became music master to the three daughters of a retired field marshal, Raimondo Capece Minutolo, and spent the rest of his life as a member of their household. He died on a business trip to Malaga in 1845.

As an operatic composer, Balducci made his début, after further training in Naples with Zingarelli, with Il sospetto funesto (Lent 1820, Fondo), an opera semiseria with, unusually, a tragic ending. He followed this with further works, but when Tazia (15 January 1826, S Carlo) was sabotaged by a disaffected orchestra for unknown reasons, he retired from the theatre. His only subsequent work performed in public was Bianca Turenga (11 August 1838, S Carlo). However he also composed five salon operas, beginning with Boabdil re di Granata (1827) and ending with Il conte di Marsico (26 February 1839) for the Capece Minutolo daughters and their friends. Unique in Italian opera, these works were composed for women’s voices only, generally with accompaniments for six hands at two pianos.

Though Balducci may have lacked the melodic gifts of Donizetti and Bellini, his music is well crafted. Whereas other composers complained of the difficulty of finding new ideas for cabalettas, his final movements are nearly always fresh, spontaneous and effective. The stage revival of his works has so far been confined to New Zealand, where Opera Waikato has staged I gelosi (1993), Il noce di Benevento (1995) and Scherzo (1996).

WORKS

operas

first performed in Naples and autograph MSS at I-Nc unless otherwise stated

For public perf.: Il sospetto funesto (? P. Giannone, ? A.L. Tottola), Fondo, Lent 1820; L’amante virtuoso (G. Schmidt), Fondo, 1 April 1823; Le nozze di Don Desiderio, Nuovo, 8 Nov 1823, no autograph, copy at Nc; Riccardo l’intrepido (J. Ferretti), Valle, Rome, 9 Sept 1824; Tazia (L. Ricciuti), S Carlo, 15 Jan 1826; Bianca Turenga (G. Bidera), S Carlo, 11 Aug 1838

For private perf.: Boabdil re di Granata, acc. 2 pf 4 hands, March 1827; I gelosi (G. Tarantino), acc. 2 pf 6 hands, April 1834; Il noce di Benevento, acc. 2 pf 6 hands, wint. 1836–7; Scherzo (G. Campagna), acc. 2 pf 6 hands, male chorus, 5-inst orchestrino in finale, 14 March 1837; Il conte di Marsico (A. Balducci, V. Salvagnoli), acc. 2 pf 6 hands, 26 Feb 1839 (Naples, n.d.), no autograph

other works

Vocal: L’Adamo (orat), inc.; Andromaca (cant.), I-Nc; Mass for 6 vv, Nc; Mass and Credo, D, Nc; Funeral Mass, Nc; Miserere, 4 vv, str, 1825, Nc; Salve regina a voci sole, Nc*; Gira, gira molinello, chorus, orch, Nc*; songs, duets, other pieces, Nc

Inst: 2 qts, hp, pf, hn, vc, Nc; Sonatina, G, hp, pf, Nc; 8 variations for pf on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nc*; other pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Capece Minutolo: Diary, 1855–9 (MS, I-Nc) [incl. account of her family and her early life in Naples]

J. Commons: ‘On Rediscovering a Forgotten Composer: Giuseppe Balducci’, Early Music New Zealand, ii/1 (1986), 3–9; enlarged, About the House, vii/7 (1986), 44–7

J. Commons: ‘Giuseppe Balducci: Tazia’, A Hundred Years of Italian Opera (1820–30), ORCH 104 (1995) [disc notes]

JEREMY COMMONS

Balduin, Noel [Noe].

See Bauldeweyn, Noel.

Baldwin.

American firm of instrument makers, predominantly of pianos and organs. It was founded in Cincinnati in 1862 by Dwight Hamilton Baldwin (1821–99). He attended the preparatory department of Oberlin College (1840–42) and was then a minister and school singing teacher in Kentucky and Ohio. Moving to Cincinnati in 1857 to teach music in schools, he also became in 1862 or 1863 a retailer of pianos and organs. D.H. Baldwin & Co. was formed in June 1873 when Lucien Wulsin (1845–1912), a clerk in Baldwin's firm since 1866, became partner. Robert A. Johnson (1838–84) opened a Louisville branch in 1877 and became a partner in 1880. Three more partners joined in 1884: Albert A. van Buren, George W. Armstrong jr (1857–1932), and Clarence Wulsin (1855–97), who ran an Indianapolis branch. Until the late 1880s the firm was one of the largest dealers in keyboard instruments in the Midwest as agent for such makers as Decker, Estey, J. & C. Fischer and Steinway.

In 1889, a subsidiary, the Hamilton Organ Co., Chicago, began to manufacture reed organs, and by 1891 the Baldwin Piano Co., a subsidiary in Cincinnati, was making upright pianos. The company acquired the Ellington Piano Co. (1893) and the Valley Gem (originally the Ohio Valley) Piano Co., founded in 1871 in Ripley, Ohio. John Warren Macy led in the early manufacture, developing a piano that won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. Baldwin's death caused some upheaval, ultimately solved when Lucien Wulsin and George Armstrong bought control in July 1903. Wulsin was president until 1912, Armstrong from 1912 to 1926, and Lucien Wulsin jr (1889–1964) from 1926 to 1964.

In the late 1920s, in collaboration with the physics department of the University of Cincinnati, the company began a research programme in electronics that resulted in the introduction of an electronic organ in 1947 (see Baldwin organ). Baldwin's director of electronic research, Dr Winston E. Kock, designed the original models, some of which were intended for use in churches. Most Baldwin organs are smaller instruments for the home, many of them ‘spinet’ organs with two staggered manuals.

In 1965 the firm introduced the model SD-10, a concert grand piano newly designed by Harold Conklin. By the 1970s the parent company, by then under the chairmanship of the founding partner's grandson, Lucien Wulsin (b 1916), had expanded into Baldwin United, a large corporation. The music subsidiary, Baldwin Piano & Organ Co., continued to manufacture pianos and electronic organs at factories in Mississippi and Arkansas. In 1963 Baldwin bought Bechstein of Berlin, which retained its own identity and continued to make pianos in its own style.

An experimental concert grand piano with electronically enhanced sound served as a prototype for later, more successful electronic and computerized instruments. After 1960 the company extended its range of electronic instruments to harpsichords, guitars and pianos. Several manufacturing operations, including Gretsch (guitars, drums and amplifiers) and Ode (banjos), were sold in 1980 to Charles Roy of Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1983 Baldwin United filed for bankruptcy after sustaining heavy losses in its insurance business. Baldwin Piano & Organ Co. was bought the following year by some of the company's executives, including Harold Smith, who became president, and R.S. Harrison, who became chairman. Baldwin sold Bechstein in 1987 and in the following year purchased the Wurlitzer Company, which owned the Chickering name. Baldwin's mid-range grands are now named Chickering, and the lower-priced instruments are named Wurlitzer. Most recently, the company has produced a digital reproducing player system, the ConcertMaster, housed in a grand piano, which has multimedia capacities and can download from the Internet. Baldwin is now the largest producer of pianos in the USA, producing 20,000 instruments annually.

CYNTHIA ADAMS HOOVER/EDWIN M. GOOD

Baldwin, Dalton

(b Summit, NY, 19 Dec 1931). American pianist. He began his formal musical training at the Juilliard School of Music, but gained the BM from the Oberlin College Conservatory. He continued his studies in Paris with Boulanger and Madeleine Lipatti and in 1954 began his long and successful partnership with the baritone Gérard Souzay. Concentrating primarily on the song repertory, Baldwin was coached by such composers as Poulenc, Sibelius, Martin and Barber. He has participated in a number of first performances (notably of Rorem’s War Scenes in 1969, with Souzay as soloist) and has accompanied such other eminent singers as Elly Ameling, Jessye Norman, Arleen Augér, Marilyn Horne and Frederica Von Stade. Perhaps his finest achievements have been his recordings of the complete songs of Debussy, Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel and Roussel. Baldwin’s playing is characterized by a softness of touch and superb legato, which allow him to phrase with the singer; he is supportive without being too subdued.

RICHARD LESUEUR

Baldwin [Baldwine, Baldwyn, Baudewyn, Bawdwine], John

(b before 1560; d London, 28 Aug 1615). English singer, composer and music copyist. He was appointed a tenor lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1575. He became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal on 20 August 1598, and appears to have left Windsor by 1600. He sang in the Chapel Royal at the funeral of Elizabeth I, the coronation of James I and the funeral of Prince Henry.

Baldwin was the copyist of several important music manuscripts. He preserved much pre-Reformation English church music in the partbooks GB-Och 979–83, copied about 1575–81 with later additions (the Tenor part is lacking). His so-called Commonplace Book (Lbl R.M.24.d.2; facs. in RMF, viii, 1987), begun about 1586 and largely complete by 25 July 1591 (with additions up to c1606), contains a wide variety of music. Baldwin had access to Marenzio’s Madrigali a quattro, cinque e sei voci (1588) no later than 1591, scoring 13 works from the collection; he also copied a number of three-voice sections from pre-Reformation antiphons as well as complex proportion and hexachord exercises, some of which he ascribed to the 15th-century composer Bedyngham and may well be authentic. Baldwin completed My Ladye Nevells Booke, a carefully arranged collection of Byrd’s keyboard music, on 11 September 1591, when he was resident in Windsor and Byrd lived nearby in Harlington. The manuscript was probably copied for Rachel, the wife of Sir Edward Nevell, MP for Windsor in 1588–9; it remains in the Neville family, in the collection of the Marquis of Abergavenny. Baldwin also recopied the damaged final section of the Sextus part of the Forrest-Heyther partbooks (Ob Arch.F.e.19–24, formerly Mus.Sch.e.376–81) and copied two pieces into Robert Dow’s partbooks (Och 984–8).

Baldwin’s 23 compositions are of indifferent quality, though his nine proportion exercises are of intellectual interest – one presents 28 proportional signatures. His consort music includes two In Nomines (one canonic) and a Browning, which presents the tune successively beginning on B, F, C, G and D (twice in canon). His song In the merry month of May, dated 1591 in his Commonplace Book, is probably the ‘pleasant song of Coridon and Phyllida, made in three parts of purpose’ for the visit of Elizabeth I to the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham on 22 September 1591.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDECM

E. Brennecke: ‘A Singing Man of Windsor’, ML, xxxiii (1952), 33–40

A. Brown: ‘ ‘‘My Lady Nevell’s Book” as a Source of Byrd’s Keyboard Music’, PRMA, xcv (1968–9), 29–39

R. Bray: ‘The Part-Books Oxford, Christ Church MSS. 979–83: an Index and Commentary’, MD, xxv (1971), 179–97

R. Bray: ‘British Museum MS Royal 24.d.2 (John Baldwin’s Commonplace Book): an Index and Commentary’, RMARC, no.12 (1974), 137–51

R. Bray: ‘John Baldwin’, ML, lvi (1975), 55–9

H. Gaskin: ‘Baldwin and the Nevell Hand’, Byrd Studies, ed. A. Brown and R. Turbet (Cambridge, 1992), 159–73

D. Hunter: ‘My Lady Nevells Booke and the Art of Gracing’, ibid., 174–93

ROGER BRAY

Baldwin organ.

An electronic organ, many models of which have been manufactured by the Baldwin Piano & Organ Co. since 1946. The original models were designed by Dr Winston E. Kock (1909–82), the company's director of electronic research from 1936. Baldwin organs normally have two manuals and pedals; the earlier models were mostly church, cinema and concert organs, but the company has subsequently manufactured a wide range of instruments, including many for home use, especially ‘spinet’ organs in which two shorter manuals are staggered by one octave. Advances in electronic technology around 1970 made possible several new devices that are now widespread: rhythm and ‘walking bass’ units, arpeggiators, memories and a choice of chord systems. Baldwin introduced microcomputer organs around 1981; current models, like Baldwin's Pianovelle digital pianos, are based on sampled timbres.

HUGH DAVIES

Baldwyn, ?John

(fl c1450–80). English composer. Two four-voice Magnificat settings, each with a compass of 22 notes, are attributed to ‘Baldwyn’ in the index of the Eton Choirbook (GB-WRec 178) and a even-voice Gaude by ‘M. Bawldwyn’ was copied at the College of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall in 1498–9, none of these works survive. A Dominus John Baudwyn was made BMus at Cambridge in 1470–71. A John Baldwyn of Cheshunt was scholar at Eton College (c1448–1452) and was admitted to King's College, Cambridge, on 7 December 1452, where he was a fellow in the later 1450s. Either or both of these may have been the composer, given the prevalence of compositions by old Etonians in the Eton Choirbook, and given the importance to Eton College of Cambridge as a source of polyphony. The composer may also have been the Sir John Baldwyn who was vicar-choral and chantrist at Wells Cathedral between c1486 and c1500.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HarrisonMMB

F.W. Weaver, ed.: Somerset Medieval Wills (1383–1500) (London, 1901), 297

W.P. Baildon, ed.: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Dean and Chapter of Wells (London, 1914), ii, 101–27, 158, 694

A.B. Emden: A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to ad 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), 33, 45

A. Wathey: ‘Lost Books of Polyphony in England: a List to 1500’, RMARC, no.21 (1988), 1–19, esp.11

MAGNUS WILLIAMSON

Bâle

(Fr.).

See Basle.

Balestra, Reimundo.

See Ballestra, Reimundo.

Balestrieri, Thomas

(fl Mantua, c1750–80). Italian violin maker. On his labels he called himself a Cremonese, but the surviving instruments were made in Mantua. The pattern and style of the best of his work draws much more from Cremona than from Mantua, and he may well have been trained in the first city before setting up on his own in the second. Some of his instruments show the influence of Camillus Camilli, his contemporary in Mantua. His best violins are of a flat Stradivarian model, giving a powerful sound that makes them sought after as solo instruments. He made a large number of violins and an occasional cello, but few, if any, violas. His varnish was often a dull red-brown colour and wore off easily, though sometimes he used an orange varnish of fine quality. (LütgendorffGL; VannesE)

CHARLES BEARE

Baley, Virko

(b Radekhov, 21 Oct 1938). Americn composer and conductor of Ukrainian birth. He studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Art (BA 1960, MM 1962; later the California Institute of the Arts), where his teachers included Earle Voorhies and Morris Ruger; he also studied the piano with Rosina Lhevine and composition with Donald Erb and Mario Davidovsky. He joined the music department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1970. He has also served as founder-conductor of the Nevada SO (1980–95), music director of the Las Vegas Opera Company (1983–8) and principal guest conductor and music advisor of the Kiev Camerata (from 1995). His scholarly work has established him as an authority on Soviet music.

Although Baley's music frequently refers to Ukrainian sources, his style became increasingly Americanized after 1980. The First Violin Concerto (1987) includes Ukrainian folk elements and exhibits a European polish and mood, but its unusual orchestral textures, rippling with celeste, vibraphone and harpsichord, seem American, as does the energetic drumming of the second movement ‘Dies irae’ and the muted jazz trumpet of the final ‘Agon’. His gradual move away from a mournful, Eastern European, somewhat neo-classical idiom climaxed in Dreamtime (1993–5), which includes a Ukrainian kolomïyka dance, but reflects new world styles in its ensemble unisons, tuned water goblets and dream-like suspension of time.

WORKS

Op: Hunger (1, B. Boychuk), 1985–97

Orch: Woodcuts, str, 1971, rev. 1997; Duma, soliloquy, 1985, rev. 1988; Sym. no.1 ‘Sacred Monuments’, 1985, rev. 1997–9; Vn Conc. no.1 ‘Quasi una fantasia’, 1987, arr. vn, chbr orch; Vn Conc. no.2 ‘Favola in musica’, 1988, rev. 1989; Pf Conc. no.1, 1990–93; Adam's Apple, prelude, 1991, arr. wind qnt, 1989, arr. str qt, 1997; Orpheus Singing, ob, str, 1994, arr. ob, pf/str qt; Partita, concerto grosso, tpt, trbn, violect [5-str elec vn], orch, elecs, 1995

Vocal: 2 Songs in Olden Style (W. Wordsworth, J. Joyce), S, pf, 1960; Edge (S. Plath), Mez, fl + a fl, tpt, vc, pf + synth, elecs, 1977, rev. 1997; Treny, S, 2 vc, 1996–7; Klytemnestra (O. Zabuzhko), Mez, cl, pf trio, 1998; A Journey after Loves (Boychuk), Bar, pf, 1999

Chbr and solo inst: Partita no.1, 3 trbn, 3 pf, 1970–76; Duo-Concertante, vc, pf, 1971, rev. 1990; Sculptured Birds, cl, pf, 1978–84; … Figments (Etudes tableaux, bk I), vn, 10 vn/tape, 1981–92; Partita no.2, bn, pf, 1991–2, rev. 1997; Dreamtime Suite no.1, cl, vn, pf, 1993–4; Dreamtime (masque), fl, cl, vn, vc, kbd, 2 perc, 1993–5; Stamping Dance, b cl, 1995 [from Dreamtime]; Dreamtime Suite no.2, vn, vc, pf, 1996; Lament I, bn, 1996 [from Treny]; Lament Ia, dbn, 1996 [from Treny]; Shadows, fl, pf, 1996; Persona I, ob, 1997; … à trois, ob, bn, pf, 1998; Persona II, cl, 1999

Pf: Nocturnal no.1 ‘Mirrors’, 1958; 2 Dumas, 1959; Nocturnal no.2 ‘Tears’, 1960; Nocturnal no.3, 3 pf, 1970; Nocturnal no.4, 1971–87; Nocturnal no.5, 1980; Nocturnal no.6, 1988

Principal publisher: Troppe Note (ASCAP)

KYLE GANN

Balfe, Michael William

(b Dublin, 15 May 1808; d Rowney Abbey, Herts., 20 Oct 1870). Irish composer and singer. The most successful composer of English operas in the 19th century, and the only one whose fame spread throughout Europe, he gained wide international recognition with The Bohemian Girl.

NIGEL BURTON (with IAN D. HALLIGAN)

1. Life.

Balfe received his earliest musical instruction from his father, a dancing-master and violinist, and the composer William Rooke. When his father died in January 1823, Balfe went to London and became the articled pupil of C.F. Horn, earning a living as deputy leader of the Drury Lane orchestra. He developed a fine baritone voice and made his stage début at Norwich as Caspar in a bowdlerized version of Der Freischütz. In 1825 he went to Rome, where he studied composition with Paer, and then to Milan to study counterpoint with Francesco Federici and singing with Filippo Galli. That autumn his first stage work, Il naufragio di La Pérouse, a ballo pantomimo serio designed by Alessandro Sanquirico, was given there at the Teatro della Cannobiana.

During the next four years Balfe pursued his career as an opera singer. He returned to Paris where Cherubini, whose good opinion he had already won en route to Rome, introduced him to Rossini. On hearing Balfe sing ‘Largo al factotum’, Rossini promised to recommend him to the Théâtre des Italiens, if he would first study for a year with Giulio Bordogni. Balfe agreed, and made his Paris début as Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Théâtre des Italiens in 1827. After two seasons there he returned to Italy, appearing as Valdeburgo in Bellini’s La straniera at the Teatro Carolino, Palermo, on 1 January 1830. Towards the end of the carnival season, a dispute between the chorus and the management resulted in his being commissioned to compose a short opera without chorus, I rivali di se stessi, which was written and produced in about 20 days. His singing engagements took him next to Piacenza and to Bergamo, where he met and shortly afterwards married the Hungarian singer Lina Roser.

In spring 1831 he was invited to write an opera for the Teatro Fraschini, Pavia, the farsa giocosa Un avvertimento ai gelosi. His third opera, the more ambitious Enrico Quarto al passo della Marna, was given at the Teatro Carcano, Milan (not La Scala, as is often stated) on 19 February 1833, with himself and his wife in leading roles. Later that year Balfe renewed his friendship with Maria Malibran, whom he had known in Paris. She persuaded the management at La Scala to engage him to sing there with her, and recommended that he return to England, which he did in 1835.

Balfe’s position as the most popular native composer in Britain was established overnight in London by the triumph of The Siege of Rochelle (1835, Drury Lane) which ran for 73 performances during its first season. Almost equal success attended The Maid of Artois (1836, Drury Lane), written for Malibran. Balfe continued his career as a singer, playing Papageno in the first English performance of Die Zauberflöte at Drury Lane on 10 March 1838. Later that year he was honoured by a commission for the Italian Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, which resulted in Falstaff, one of his best scores; it was sung there by a star cast which included Giulia Grisi, Emma Albertazzi, Giovanni Rubini, Antonio Tamburini and Luigi Lablache. After this he successfully toured Ireland and the west of England.

Balfe was now determined to become his own manager with a view to establishing English opera on a permanent footing. Even though his backers included Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, his venture was doomed to failure. He leased the Lyceum Theatre (English Opera House) and brought out his latest work, Këolanthé (1841), with his wife making her London début in the title role. This was successful, but receipts dwindled when subsequent works were performed, and eventually he was forced to abandon the project. He informed the audience that he would never again appear before them in the capacity of a manager, and he kept his word.

Disheartened by this reverse, Balfe decided to try his luck in Paris. He had nearly completed Elfrida for the Théâtre des Italiens when Grisi, who was to have taken a leading role, announced that she was pregnant and unable to take part. Balfe’s plans appear to have been frustrated, therefore, for the opera was never finished; but fortunately the librettist Scribe, who attended a concert of his works, offered to collaborate with him on a comic opera, Le puits d’amour (1843, Opéra-Comique), which was an instantaneous success. In the meantime Alfred Bunn, who had managed Balfe’s earlier successes at Drury Lane, had extricated himself from bankruptcy, and The Bohemian Girl, on which Balfe had been working for some years, was produced at Drury Lane on 27 November 1843 with Elizabeth Rainforth and William Harrison in the main roles. It was the greatest triumph of his career, and the only 19th-century British opera to enjoy a genuine international reputation. At Drury Lane it ran for over 100 nights, brought in vast profits for the management and produced a furore which J.W. Davison’s harsh review in the Musical World did nothing to mitigate.

In 1845 L’étoile de Séville was given at the Paris Opéra, where it ran for 15 performances. In 1846 Balfe took over from Michael Costa as conductor of the Italian Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, remaining until the theatre closed in 1852. During the 1850s he toured extensively abroad, visiting Berlin, Vienna (where Johann Strauss hailed him as the ‘King of Melody’), St Petersburg and Trieste (where his opera Pittore e duca was unsuccessfully produced in 1854). In 1857 the inception of the Pyne-Harrison Opera Company at the Lyceum provided the impetus for a final period of remarkable creativity. The Rose of Castille was the first of a series of operas produced for the company between 1857 and 1863, and probably the most popular, after which the company moved to Covent Garden.

In 1864 Balfe decided to retire to the country, and bought a small estate in Hertfordshire, Rowney Abbey, which his wife succeeded in running profitably. His congenital acute spasmodic asthma troubled him increasingly. He was unable to complete his last opera, The Knight of the Leopard (based on Scott’s novel The Talisman), on which he bestowed extraordinary care; it was produced posthumously by Costa as Il talismano at Drury Lane in 1874. Towards the end of the summer of 1870 he caught cold and his condition gradually deteriorated until he died on 20 October.

2. Works.

When attempting to evaluate Balfe’s works, it should be remembered that two distinct traditions of British opera existed during his lifetime, of which he was only too well aware. The English ballad opera was viewed by the public simply as entertainment, a genre set apart from the more elevated style of ‘highbrow’ opera. Of Balfe’s operas, only Falstaff and Il talismano belong to the latter category, though it is also notable that he took more trouble over the works for Paris and Italy than for those written for production in London. Throughout his life, Rossini was his mentor to an extent that has hitherto been underestimated: both men possessed the same shrewdness of artistic judgment, the same inexhaustible musical facility, and the same chameleon-like ability to adapt themselves to the situation in hand. In musical terms, the Rossinian influence is most pronounced in the early Italian works, in Falstaff and in the English operas written up to 1852. The second most prevalent idiom is French; derived principally from Auber, it finds its most natural expression in Le puits d’amour, Les quatre fils Aymon and L’étoile de Séville, though in this last work, as in some of the later Pyne-Harrison scores, a Meyerbeerian influence is present. Yet the music that made Balfe famous – the ballads which no one surpassed – remains indisputably his own. His operas, and his livelihood, relied on these ‘hit’ numbers in a manner similar to the 20th-century musical.

Balfe, however, was never less than thoroughly musically literate: the unusual key relationship between the appearances of the second subject in The Bohemian Girl overture demonstrates that. His feeling for local colour is especially remarkable in The Siege of Rochelle, The Sicilian Bride and The Rose of Castille. His knowledge of the voice was exceptional: the pyrotechnics of Elvira’s Scherzo in The Rose of Castille are the work of a composer who understood every aspect of vocal art. His music is never dull, if only because of its rhythmic vitality; when this quality is wedded to striking musical ideas the effect is intoxicating, as, for example, in the quintet ‘C’est dit, c’est entendu’ from Les quatre fils Aymon. The critic Henry Chorley considered this opera to be Balfe’s masterpiece, and he was right: of all Balfe’s unknown works, it most merits revival. The later operas, such as Bianca (1860) and The Puritan’s Daughter (1861), are more homogeneous in style, but although they are more through-composed, they lack the freshness of inspiration that characterizes their predecessors. In Il talismano, Balfe updated his vocabulary to reach a par with middle-period Verdi, but the price paid for stylistic consistency is melodic weakness.

Balfe was no master of characterization, and in his English operas he frequently abused the natural verbal accentuation of his texts, partly, no doubt, because of the speed at which he worked (Satanella, for instance, was written in seven weeks). But in his songs it was a different matter: although not averse to altering a poem’s shape and design in order to create an effective musical structure (as in Tennyson’s Come into the garden, Maud, 1857) he treated the words themselves with almost unfailing sensitivity. His melodic genius guaranteed a consistently high level of achievement in his prolific song output: few of his contemporaries could match the finely sculptured vocal line of Killarney (1864) or the gentle rhythmic enchantment of The Sands of Dee (1859). Best of all are the Seven Poems by Longfellow (c1855); here, as in the remarkably symphonic late Piano Trio in A major (a work of substance and integrity), he deliberately responded to his critics and proved himself far more than a mere entertainer.

Balfe’s music bespeaks his personality: he was the most honest, genial and charming of men. William Harrison recalled that when asked if he ever borrowed from other men’s works, he admitted, astonishingly, to stealing snatches of Beethoven: ‘“Ye can’t do better”, he said with a beaming face, “than to go to the fountain-head, and come away with a cupful! There are two composers I’ve never scrupled to borrow from – one’s Beethoven, the other’s meself!”’ (C. Harrison: Stray Records, i, London, 1892, p.108).

WORKS

unless otherwise stated, printed works published in London

stage

unless otherwise stated, first performed in London, autograph MSS in GB-Lbl and printed works published in vocal score

LDL	Drury Lane Theatre
LCG	Covent Garden Theatre

Il naufragio di La Pérouse (ballet pantomimo serio), Milan, Cannobiana, aut. 1825)

Atala (after F.R. de Chateaubriand), Paris, between 1826 and 1828, unfinished, lost

I rivali di se stessi (2, A. Alcazar, after C.A.G. Pigault-Lebrun: Les rivaux d’eux-mêmes), Palermo, Carolino, ?Feb 1830, lost

Un avvertimento ai gelosi (farsa giocosa, 1, G. Foppa), Pavia, Fraschini, spr. 1831, excerpts (Milan, n.d.), MS lost

Enrico Quarto al passo della Marna (op, 1), Milan, Carcano, 19 Feb 1833, excerpts (Milan, n.d.), MS lost

The Siege of Rochelle (grand op, 2, E. Fitzball, after Comtesse de Genlis:Le siège de La Rochelle), LDL, 29 Oct 1835 (1836)

The Maid of Artois (grand serious op, 3, A. Bunn, after A.-F. Prévost:L’histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut), LDL, 27 May 1836 (1837)

Adelwina, between 1836 and 1843, inc.

Catherine Grey (grand op, 3, G. Linley), LDL, 27 May 1837 (1837)

Caractacus (historical play, J.R. Planché), LDL, 6 Nov 1837, lost

Joan of Arc (grand op, 3, Fitzball, after R. Southey), LDL, 30 Nov 1837 (1839)

Diadesté, or The Veiled Lady (opéra bouffe, 2, Fitzball, after L. Pillet and Marquis de St Hilaire), LDL, 17 May 1838, 1 song (1838)

Falstaff (ob, 2, S.M. Maggioni), Her Majesty’s, 19 July 1838 (?1845)

Elfrida (Maggioni) begun 1840, inc.

Këolanthé, or The Unearthly Bride (romantic op, 2, Fitzball), 1840, English Opera House, 9 March 1841, selections (1840), MS lost

Le puits d’amour (oc, 3, E. Scribe and A. de Leuven), Paris, OC (Favart), 20 April 1843 (Paris, 1843); as Geraldine, or The Lover’s Well (G. Soane), Princess’s, 14 Aug 1843, selections (1843)

The Bohemian Girl (grand op, 3, Bunn, after J.-H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges:La gypsy, from M. de Cervantes: La gitanilla), 1840–43, LDL, 27 Nov 1843 (1844); as La bohèmienne, Paris, 1869

Les quatre fils Aymon (oc, 3, de Leuven and Brunswick [L. Lhérie]), Paris, OC (Favart), 15 July 1844 (Paris, 1844); as The Castle of Aymon, or The Four Brothers (Fitzball), Princess’s, 20 Nov 1844

The Daughter of St Mark (grand serious op, 3, Bunn, after Saint-Georges:La reine de Chypre), LDL, 27 Nov 1844 (1845)

The Enchantress (grand op, 3, Bunn, after Saint-Georges), LDL, 4 May 1845 (1845)

L’étoile de Séville (grand op, 4, H. Lucas, after F. Lope de Vega: La estrella de Sevilla), Paris, Opéra, 17 Dec 1845 (Paris, 1846), MS lost

Le jour de Noël (Scribe), Paris, ?1845, lost

The Bondman (grand op, 3, Bunn, after Mélesville [A.-H.-J. Duveyrier]: Le chevalier de Saint-George), LDL, 11 Dec 1846 (1847)

The Maid of Honour (grand op, 3, Fitzball), LDL, 20 Dec 1847 (1848)

[Le roi s’amuse], untitled (after V. Hugo: Le roi s’amuse), begun 1848, unfinished, lost

The Sicilian Bride (4, Bunn, after Saint-Georges), LDL, 6 March 1852, selections (1852)

The Devil’s in it (comic op, prol, 3, Bunn, after C. Coffey: The Devil to Pay), Surrey, 26 July 1852; as Letty, the Basket-Maker (prol, 3, J.P. Simpson), Gaiety, 14 June 1871 (1873)

Pittore e duca (op, prol, 3, F.M. Piave), Trieste, Comunale, 21 Nov 1854, lost; as Moro, or The Painter of Antwerp (grand op, prol, 3, W.A. Barrett), Her Majesty’s, 28 Jan 1882 (1882), MS lost

Lo scudiero (Piave), 1854, unperf., lost

The Rose of Castille (op, 3, A.G. Harris and E. Falconer, after A.P. d’Ennery and Clairville: Le muletier de Tolède), Lyceum, 29 Oct 1857 (1858)

Satanella, or The Power of Love (romantic op, 4, Harris and Falconer, after A.R. Lesage: Le diable boiteux), LCG, 20 Dec 1858 (1876)

Bianca, or The Bravo’s Bride (4, Simpson, after M.G. Lewis: Rugantino), LCG, 6 Dec 1860

The Puritan’s Daughter (op, 3, J.V. Bridgeman), LCG, 30 Nov 1861 (1861)

Blanche de Nevers (op, 4, J. Brougham, from his The Duke’s Motto, after M. Feval: Le bossu), LCG, 21 Nov 1862 (1864)

The Armourer of Nantes (grand romantic op, 3, Bridgeman, after Hugo: Marie Tudor), LCG, 12 Feb 1863 (1863)

The Sleeping Queen (operetta, 1, H.B. Farnie), Gallery of Illustration, 31 Aug 1864 (1874); 2-act version (1868)

The Knight of the Leopard (op, 3, A. Matthison, after W. Scott: The Talisman), inc.; arr. M. Costa as Il talismano (G. Zaffira), LDL, 11 June 1874 (1874); as The Talisman, New York, 10 Feb 1875; MS as The Talisman

Miscellaneous opera sketches

Addl nos. for Zingarelli: Giulietta e Romeo, between 1826 and 1828, lost

It. recits for Beethoven: Fidelio, 1851, lost

sacred

3 Sacred Pieces, 1846: Gratias ago, B; Kyrie eleison, 2 B; Sanctus, S, 2 B

Save me, O God (from Pss), motet, 1846; arr. SATB, org by W.A. Barrett (1882) [? from 3 Sacred Pieces]

secular choral, partsongs

International Ode, 1851, lost [for the Great Exhibition]

Cants.: Now doth the spring, soloists, 5vv, pf, before 1837; Mazeppa (J. Rankin), S, G, T, Bar, SATB, orch, vs (1862); sketches, 6 solo vv, c1842–3,GB-Lbl; 3 others, lost

Partsongs: Thou art with me everywhere (Rankin), SATB (1858); Hark! ‘Tis the hunter’s jovial horn

other vocal ensemble

Go not, happy day (A. Tennyson), S, A, T, B, pf (?1889)

Trios (probably for high vv, unless otherwise stated; all with pf acc.): Where the fairies hold their revel (1868); Autumn leaves are falling (1871); Hark! From the distant convent towers (1871); Now lightly we fays (1871); Sleep on, sleep on (1871); The Zingari (1872); Through the grassy fields (1872); Fairy May-Bells, ? S, S, C (1876); Haste thee boatman, ? S, S, C (1877); Through the golden valley, ? S, S, C (1877); The Gipsy’s Home, ? S, S, C (1878); The Breeze from the Moor (C.J. Rowe), high vv (1881); She came to the village church (Tennyson), S, Mez, C (?1889)

Duets (all with pf acc.): Three Duets (S. Rogers), S, C (?1845): 1 Twilight’s soft dews, 2 The beauteous maid, 3 Oh! she was good as she was fair; M’offrian cittadi e popli (M. Janetti), recit and duet, S, T (1847); The Alhambra (W.H. Bellamy), high vv (1853); Trust her not (H.W. Longfellow), 2 Mez (?1855), see also songs [(?1855): Seven Poems by Longfellow]; Excelsior (Longfellow), T, Bar (1857); Will spring return (W. Scott), S, C (1862); I leave thee mine own (A. Matthison), S, T (1863); The Shell Duet (Tennyson), S, C (1865); Folding Time (F. Enoch), S, C (1870); The sailor sighs, ? 2 female vv (1871); O’er shepherd pipe and rustic dell (E. Fitzball), 2 female vv/Mez, T (c1875); Brief is life’s bright summer morn, ? S, C (1878); Come where sleeps the dewy violet, ? S, C (1878); Sweetheart (A. Greville), S, C (1902)

songs

for 1 voice and piano unless otherwise stated

208 pubd singly, unless otherwise stated; † – conjectural date within inclusive years

(1824): Young Fanny, composed 1817, rev. as The Lover’s Mistake (T.H. Bayly) (pubd Dublin)

(1825): Oh do not look so bright and blest (T. Moore)

(?1835): Io sentii tremar (F. Romani), aria; The Blighted Flower (J. Hazlett) (pubd Dublin); Oh! suoni un di soavi … Ahi! che Alfredo in questo loco (Count Pepoli), recit and aria

(1837): They bind with costly pearls my brow (E. Fitzball) [for L. Ricci’s Un’avventura di Scaramuccia, 1834]

(?1840): A Home in the Heart (E. Cook); A Simple Rose (T.H. Bayly); Come, come from thy sparry cave; Despair (W.H. Bellamy); Il postiglione (Pepoli), with obbl hn; Kathleen dear, forget me not (Fitzball) (pubd Dublin); La speranza (N. di Santo Mango), aria; Le crépuscule (A. de Lamartine) (pubd Paris); Oh! shall we go a-sailing? (Bellamy); Oh! think what joy in roaming (Moore); Six Arietts, Romances, etc.: 1 Gondolier (S.M. Maggioni), 2 Pauvre Lucas (C. Pellecat), 3 La Monaca (Maggioni), 4 Non scordar le notte (Pepoli), 5 La Farfalla (Maggioni), 6 Bel mestier del gondoliere (Maggioni); The Fairy (Bellamy); There’s one heart unchanging (Moore); They tell me thou’rt the favoured guest (Moore); Una donna più felice, cavatina

(1842–5): I’ll do thy bidding, mother dear (D. Boucicault); In the Sweet May Time (G. Linley); List thy troubadour (Linley); Now hush thee (E. Pickering)†; The Beautiful Nun (Linley); The echoes of the heart (R. Taylor)†; To the land of my birth (Linley); When I am dead (Linley)

(1846–9): Ahi forse in tal momento (M. Janetti), scena and aria: He’ll be here tomorrow (Fitzball); Lord be my guide, sacred song; Maureen (B. Cornwall); My dwelling is no lordly hall (Pickering); Qual fior novello (Janetti); Sing, maiden, sing (Cornwall); The Prayer of the Nation (Hoy); When along the light ripple (R. Monckton Milnes); Zillah (Linley)

(1850): If I sing my love at morning (F.W.N. Bayley)†; I’m a merry Zingara (Fitzball), cavatina brillante†; My gentle child (F. Hemans)†; My heart returns to thee (Linley); The joy of tears (Fitzball); The Lonely Rose (Fitzball)†; ’Tis I that love her best (C. Hall); Un pensiero d’amore (G. Torre), arietta

(1851–4): Ah! would that I could love thee less (M.J. Andrews); Hopeful heart should banish care (A. Waymark); I once was happy (F. Judd); Oh I love the early morn; Oh smile again (Judd); Old Friends (Andrews); Poor Nelly (H.S.); Raise a song to the Lord (Linley), sacred song; The Canteeneer (Bellamy)

(?1855): How oft at night’s calm silent noon (H.J. St. Leger); Seven Poems by Longfellow: 1 The Reaper and the Flowers, 2 Good night! Good night! Beloved, 3 The green trees whispered low, 4 Annie of Tharaw, 5 This is the place, 6 The day is done, 7 Trust her not (duet)

(1856): By the rivulet side (W. Crossman); Five months ago, the stream did flow (E.B. Browning); I’ll wander when the twilight breaks (T. Newman); Lost and found (P. Simpson); Merry May (H.F. Chorley); On the banks of my own sunny river; Sweet words of Love (Fitzball); The arrow and the song (H.W. Longfellow); The First Kiss (D. Ryan); The Happiest Land (Longfellow); There is a name I never breathe (J.E. Carpenter); The Tomb of the Islander’s Daughter (Newman)

(1857): A merry little Savoyard; As the sunshine to the flower (J. Rankin); Come into the garden, Maud (A. Tennyson); Hark to the wind (W.M. Thackeray); Oh! boatman, haste (G.P. Morris); Once more (G. Hodder); Stars of the summer night (Longfellow); The Cymbalier (Bellamy); The Deserted Bride (Morris); The Lady Blanche (A. Smith); The Merry Little Gipsy (Fitzball); The Noble Foe (Hodder); The Rainy Day (Longfellow); The rose that opes at morn (Pickering); The Two Locks of Hair (Longfellow); The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow); Women’s Love (Newman)

(1858): Don’t let the roses listen (Rankin); I’m not in love (Rankin); Let me whisper in thine ear (Rankin); Norah darling, don’t believe them (Rankin); Oh take me to thy heart again (Rankin); The Angel of Prayer (Bellamy); The Ballroom Belle (Morris); The Heroes of the Ranks (A. Matthison); The Scenes of Home (Morris); We’ll meet again (Rankin)

(1859): Daybreak (Longfellow); Fail me not (V.P. Willis); I’m leavin’ hame, my Willie (Rankin); My old Song (J. Oxenford); Nelly Gray (Oxenford), with chorus; One smile from thee (Mrs H.J. St. Leger); So long as my darling loves (H. Fry); Sunset (J. Ellison); The light from loving eyes (Hodder); The Sands of Dee (C. Kingsley); The Spirit of Light (Ellison); The Sweet Guitar (C.W. Chapman); Threads of Gold (S.E. Young)

(1860): Fresh as a rose (Rankin); If I could change (Rankin); I love you (Morris)†; Margaretta (Morris)†; Merry and free (Carpenter)†; My fairest child I have no song (Kingsley); The Rose on the Heath (A. Baskerville, after J.W. von Goethe); Two little years ago (Carpenter)

(1861): Bird of the twilight (? Rankin or Carpenter); Mary (Morris); Mary don’t forget me (Rankin); Oh send me back to dreamland (Rankin); Sweetheart come back to me (Rankin); The Banner of St George (J. Brougham); Victoria and England for Ever (L.L. Ternan)

(1862): A pale, pale cheek (C. Swain); Flowers! Sweet flowers (Rankin); Music and Song; Sleep, my pretty one (Tennyson); The angels call me (? after J.L. Uhland); The Maid and her Moorish Knight (R. McMurray); The old house by the lindens (Longfellow); The Queen of the Spring (Carpenter); The sea hath its pearls (Longfellow, after H. Heine); Why should thy voice still follow me? (Swain)

(1863–9): Falling river; Fortune and her Wheel (Tennyson); Kathleen Machree; Killarney (E. Falconer); Lady Hildred; Maid of Athens (Byron); Mary mavourneen (A. Greville); Over mount, over lea (Linley); Rest, wand’rer rest (W. Sotheby)†; Si tu savais; The bard that on his harp expired (H. Costley); The Bells (E.A. Poe)†; The evening chime is sounding (Matthison); The Song of Love and Death (Tennyson)†; The Tender Time of May (L.H.F. du Terraux); Though age be like December (C. Clarke); Trust me not at all (Tennyson)†; Watching and Waiting (Swain)

(1870): Hidden Voices (Kingsley); I hear a voice you cannot hear (T. Tickell)†; I’ll go and gather flowers (F. Enoch); I love thee (O. Meredith); Phoebe the Fair (Rankin); She stood in the sunshine (Rankin); Sweet nightingale, oh! teach me; Three Ballads (Du Terraux): 1 The Underworld, 2 O Daisy pet, 3 That last light of sundown; When woman plights her troth (McMurray)

(1871–9): Eileen bawn (H.J. St. Leger); Farewell, dear home (Bellamy); Long Ago (J.P. Douglas); Long Live the Queen (C. Sheard); My native valley (W. Guernsey); Ognor costante t’amerò [for Donizetti’s Don Pasquale]; Oh! sing again that simple lay (Guernsey); Ruth and I; The Bride’s Father (Swain) (pubd Leeds); The Gipsy Queen; The Mariner’s Bride; The Rowan Tree (J.F. Waller); The Spanish Serenade (S. Lover)

(1881–1901): I saw a love (F.S. Clark); My love far away (M.X. Hayes)†; The Blind Girl’s Goodnight; The Dove and the Raven (H. Farnie); The Gipsy Band (A.J. Foxwell) [? for unison male vv]; There is a shadow

(pubn dates unknown): Anabel Lee; Beneath a Portrait; Bridal Ballad; Christmas comes but once a year (Oxenford); Come with the gipsy bride (Bunn); Go, lovely rose (A. Cowley); Maggie’s Ransom; Riflemen, form!; The moon is up (Peabody); Three Fishers (Kingsley); Wake, maiden, wake; What does little birdie say? (Tennyson)

unpubd, GB-Lbl: Bel’amie, or The Lay of the Troubadour, 1837; O’er the blue wave, 1838; Dodici fantasie, Bar, 1842, ded. in Paris; Let us haste (W.A. Barrett), 1847; 16 other songs, 1836–43

instrumental

Polacca, regimental band, 1815, lost

Orch: Country-Dance, Waltzes, Galop and Dance, F, 1836–43, GB-Lbl; Ov., G, 23 April – 8 May 1840, Lbl

Chbr: La curiosita, air and variation, fl, pf (1844); Pf Trio, A (?1875); Sonata, A, vc, pf (c1880)

Pf: Waltz, for Mrs Stone’s album, c1836, Lbl; Tendresse maternelle, nocturne (1864); Valse, E, c1869, Lbl

arrangements

Irish melody arr. as song: Talk not of pleasure (J.R. Planché) (1855)

Moore’s Irish Melodies, with new symphonies and accompaniments for the pianoforte, 1v, pf (1859)

Moore’s Irish Melodies: a Selection of Fifty, SATB, pf (1859)

The Young May Moon (Moore: Irish Melodies), high vv/SSAA (1889)

pedagogical works

The Italian School of Singing (3/?1850)

Indispensable Studies for a Soprano Voice (1851)

Indispensable Studies for a Bass Voice (1851)

A New Universal Method of Singing, without the use of Solfeggi (1857)

I. Folk and popular balladry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (‘Bohemian Girl, The’, ‘Siege of Rochelle, The’; N. Burton)

Musical World, xviii (1843), 395 only [on The Bohemian Girl]; xxiii (1848), 209–11

E. Fitzball: Thirty-five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life (London, 1859)

H. Phillips: Musical and Personal Recollections during Half a Century(London, 1864)

H. St Leger: Reminiscences of Balfe (London, 1871)

J.E. Cox: Musical Recollections of the Last Half-Century (London, 1872)

C.L. Kenney: A Memoir of Michael William Balfe (London, 1875/R)

W.A. Barrett: Balfe: his Life and Work (London, 1882)

C. Harrison: Stray Records (London, 1892, 2/1893), i, 95–108

E.W. White: The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951/R)

M.W. Disher: Victorian Song (London, 1955), 95–8, 100, 117

D. Arundell: The Critic at the Opera (London, 1957/R), 324, 326–8

B. Carr: ‘The First All-Sung English 19th-century Opera’, MT, cxv (1974), 125–6

N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914 (London, 1981/R)

E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983)

Bali (i).

See Indonesia, §§I-II and South-east Asia, §§I and II, 1–3 and 4(iii).

Bali (ii).

A dance form. See Sri lanka.

Baliani [Bagliani, Balliani, Basiliani], Carlo

(b ?Milan, c1680; d Milan, 16 Feb 1747). Italian composer. A Milan Cathedral document of 1714 discloses that he was 34 years old at the time and that he had served for an unspecified period as maestro di cappella of S Maria della Passione, Milan. His selection by the cathedral chapter followed a written examination on 7 April 1714 in which he competed against Francesco Scarlatti (Alessandro's brother), A.F. de Messi, a Milanese musician, and G.A. Costa, a Paduan priest active in Rome (whom the cathedral was pressed to appoint by the Austrian court); accepting the recommendations of seven judges (including A.M. Bononcini and G.A. Perti), the chapter appointed Baliani maestro di cappella on 13 December 1714.

Except for a single cantata (Solitudine amata) and an act of an opera (Ambletto, 1719), no secular music by Baliani has come to light. He wrote a considerable quantity of music for the Ambrosian liturgy during his 33 years at Milan Cathedral, now in the cathedral archive (I-Md). Most of it is for the Mass and for vesper services (including lucernarium, hymn, post-hymn, psalm, Magnificat, psallenda and completorium settings). While the vesper services are often in the concertato style (with orchestral accompaniment), the music for the Mass is generally marked ‘pieno’ (for choir with organ); Baliani's a cappella movements recall the conservative contrapuntal style of contemporaries like Lotti. He avoided the theatrical vocal style.

In a letter of 26 July 1724 to Benedetto Marcello, Baliani praised the contrapuntal art displayed in Marcello's psalm settings, ‘in which besides the nobility of the singular ideas by which the music is rendered more lovely, one sees the finest motifs, subjects, answers, imitations and inversions in madrigal style, as well as closing sections and duets both highly tasteful and impressive’, devices abundant in Baliani's own music.

Baliani was ill in the summer of 1742 and asked that the cathedral authorities grant him retirement with pay and lodging. Later, however, he resumed his duties as maestro, and at the end of 1743 he helped judge new singers for S Maria presso S Celso, a church for which he composed (music in I-Md). Although his successor at the cathedral, G.A. Fioroni, favoured more florid solo singing, Baliani's music continued to be performed, and as late as 1783 Francesco Bianchi prepared copies of his works for the choir's use.

WORKS

MSS in I-Md unless otherwise stated

La calunnia delusa (orat, G. Machio), Milan, Chiesa Scala, 23 May 1724, 2 arias extant

Masses: 9 for 4vv, mostly a cappella; 4 for 8vv; 8 copied 1731, vv; 1 for 5vv, orch, D-Dl according to Eitner; Requiem, 8vv, orch

Gls: 23 for 8vv, mostly concertata; 3 for 8vv, F-Pc

Crs: 1 for 8vv a cappella; 1 for 8vv, org; 1 for 8vv, 2 org; 1 for 8vv, Pc

5 Cr–Sanctus, 8vv, mostly with org; 1 Cr–Sanctus, Pc; 1 Sanctus–Benedictus, 8vv, org

c12 ints, 4vv, some with Post Epistolam and Confractorium; 59 short ints, 8vv, org

c10 ants, 4/8vv, 1 for double choir

23 hymns, 1 with lucernarium and post-hymn; 16 hymns, 4vv; 15 hymns, 8vv; 2 hymns, 5vv; 9 hymns, double choir

32 pss, some with Ecce nunc; 42 pss, 8vv, 1 ps, 4vv, most with org; 10 Ecce nunc, 2 for 1v, 5 for 2vv, 1 for 4vv, 2 for 8vv

60 motets: 1 for 1v, 30 for 2vv, 9 for 3vv, 3 for 4vv, 17 for 8vv

4 Lits, 4/8vv; 2 Pater noster, 8vv; 15 Mag, 8vv; miscellaneous Psallenda, Completorium and other vesper items for 2 choirs

Sacred duet, Celorum eia Spiritus, dialogo tra S Michele e Lucifero, S, B

secular vocal

Ambleto [Act 2] (op, 3, A. Zeno and P. Pariati), Milan, Regio Ducal, 28 Aug 1719 [Act 1 by G. Vignati, Act 3 by G. Cozzi]

Solitudine amata (cant.), S, bc, A-Wgm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

D. Muoni: Gli Antignati organari insigni e serie dei maestri di cappella del duomo di Milano (Milan, 1883/R)

G. Barblan: ‘Il teatro musicale in Milan nel secoli XVII e XVIII’, Storia di Milano, xii (Milan, 1959), 949–96, esp. 972 [ pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

C. Sartori: ‘Giovanni Battista Sammartini e la sua corte’, Musica d'oggi, new ser., iii (1960), 106–21

F. Mompellio: ‘La cappella del duomo dal 1714 ai primi decenni del '900’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 553–88 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

G. Ciliberti: ‘Il “mito” di Amleto nei libretti d'opera italiani del Settecento’, Europäische Mythen der Neuzeit: Faust und Don Juan, ed. P. Csobádi and others (Anif-Salzburg, 1993), 713–22

SVEN HANSELL

Baline, Israel.

See Berlin, Irving.

Balino.

See Fabri, Annibale Pio.

Balissat, Jean

(b Lausanne, 15 May 1936). Swiss composer and conductor. He attended Lausanne Conservatoire, where he studied harmony and counterpoint (Hans Haug), the piano (Denise Bidal) and the horn (Robert Faller); he also studied at the Geneva Conservatoire (composition and orchestration, André-François Marescotti; conducting, Samuel Baud-Bovy; percussion, Charles Peschier). He has taught composition and orchestration at the conservatories of Fribourg (1972–83), Lausanne (since 1979) and Geneva (since 1986), and between 1960 and 1983 he directed several wind ensembles, including La Landwehr, Fribourg (1972–83). In 1986–90 he was chairman of the Swiss Composers' Union.

His own work as a composer is deeply rooted in the tradition of western Switzerland: central to his output is the type of wind and brass music very popular in the Waadtland area, particularly with amateur performers. Balissat became known to a wider public through his choral and orchestral work Fête des vignerons (given its première in Vevey in 1977), which was written for a traditional winegrowers' festival. He is fundamentally opposed to experimentation and avant-garde trends; a number of different, traditional stylistic elements are ranged side by side or confront each other in his orchestral and chamber music, merging in the course of a clearly perceived, often polytonal musical structure. He was awarded the composition prize of the Lausanne Festival in 1982.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Pour un dix août, cant., 2 spkrs, T, Bar, choir, orch, 1971; Fête des vignerons, choir, orch, 1975–7

Orch: Sym., 1955; Ballade, 1958; Sym., 1959; Sinfonietta, str, 1960; Variations concertantes, 3 perc, orch, 1969; Rikblick, vn, orch, 1980; Bioméros, chbr orch, 1982; Intermezzo, chbr orch, 1987; Vn Conc., 1989; Ob Conc., 1990; Cantabile, cl, chbr orch, 1991

Chbr: 7 Variations, cl, hn, bn, str qnt, 1971; Statterostrob, pf, 1983; Rhapsodie, B-cl, 2 basset-hn, b cl, 1984; Les sept pohés capitaux, cl, bn, flugelhn, trbn, vn, db, perc, 1994; L'or perdu, str qt, spkr ad lib, 1995

Wind and brass: AGE, 1978; Incantation et sacrifice, 1981; Le premier jour, 1985; Ouverture, 1992; Saisons, 1993; Sym., 1994; Gli elementi, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Perrin: ‘Les variations concertantes de Jean Balissat’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxii (1979)

J. Stenzl: ‘Une affaire jadis clasée – à propos de “Statterostrob” de Jean Balissat’, Dissonanz/Dissonance, no.8 (1986), 12–19

PATRICK MÜLLER

Balius y Vila, Jaime

(d Córdoba, 3 Nov 1822). Spanish composer. He studied music as a choirboy in the Escolanía of Montserrat Abbey and was maestro de capilla of Urgel Cathedral by 1780, when he competed unsuccessfully for the same post at Toledo. In October that year he was offered the post of maestro de capilla at Burgo de Osma Cathedral; he did not however take it up, as in February 1781 he was appointed maestro de capilla in Gerona (possibly his native town), and in 1785 in Córdoba, after a public competition. In 1787 he obtained the same post at the Convento de la Encarnación in Madrid (one of the highest appointments to which a Spanish musician could then aspire), but in 1789 he returned to Córdoba, still as maestro de capilla, where he remained until his death.

Balius was one of the leading Spanish composers of his period; his works, comprising masses, psalms, motets, Lamentations, villancicos and other sacred pieces (principal sources: E-ALB, Bc, C, G, GRc, MA), although lacking in imitative counterpoint, are sound in construction and show elegant melody and interesting harmony. Two of his works have been edited by Paulino Capdepón in La música en el Real Monasterio de la Encarnación en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LaborD

F. Civil Castellvi: ‘La capilla de música de la catedral de Gerona (siglo XVIII)’, Anales del Instituto de estudios gerundenses, xix (1968–9), 131–88

JOSÉ LÓPEZ-CALO

Ball.

See Ballo (1).

Ball, Ernest R.

(b Cleveland, 21 July 1878; d Santa Ana, CA, 3 May 1927). American composer and singer. After studying at the Cleveland School of Music he went to New York, where he became a pianist in vaudeville theatres, and later staff pianist and composer for Witmark. His first success was the ballad Will you love me in December as you do in May?, written in 1905 to lyrics by Jimmy Walker. Many of his most popular songs thereafter were composed for the Irish tenors John McCormack and Chauncey Olcott, with whom he also collaborated. Ball composed some 400 songs, including such standards as Mother Machree (1910), When Irish Eyes are Smiling (1913), and A Little Bit of Heaven (1914). Much of the last decade of his life was spent performing in vaudeville. His work is discussed in J. Burton: ‘Honor Roll of Popular Songwriters: Ernest R. Ball’, The Billboard (14 May 1949).

DALE COCKRELL

Ball, George Thalben.

See Thalben-ball, george.

Ball, James

(b 1770; bur. London, 7 Oct 1833). English piano maker, music seller, publisher, printer and organ builder. He worked in Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, London, from 1787 until his death. Domenico Motta joined him briefly to form Motta & Ball about 1794; in 1818 the Post Office London Directory lists the firm as J. Ball and Son. The son must be the Edward Ball who is listed as a piano maker at Duke Street in an 1824 jury roll preserved at Westminster City Archives. James Ball is listed in the 1827 Post Office London Directory as ‘Grand cabinet & square Piano Forte maker to his Majesty’. Ball’s early five-octave square pianos with the English single action had two hand stops, one for raising the dampers and the other a ‘lute’ stop. He is best known for his square pianos, but also made cabinet pianos and grands, some of them for the Prince Regent. In 1790 he patented (no.1784) improvements for the square piano including a new under damper, an individual regulating screw for each key and a new music desk, as well as improvements to the English grand action in which the hammers could be removed singly by means of screws. None of these devices was generally adopted, but a five-and-a-half-octave square piano, serial number 120, with a beautifully painted case and a stand, has a most unusual damper mechanism. From 1789 he sometimes printed and sold publications for Tebaldo Monzani. He died intestate and his estate was administered by his sister. In 1834 it was valued at £5000 but in 1836 his estate was resworn to be under £7000, a large sum.

MARGARET CRANMER

Ball, Michael

(b Stratford-upon-Avon, 27 June 1963). English popular singer. He studied at the Guildford School of Acting before touring in Godspell, later gaining a leading role in the Manchester production of The New Pirates of Penzance. He created the role of Marius in the long-running Les misérables (1985) in London, introducing the song ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’, and took over Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera. He played Alex in Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love in London (1989) and on Broadway (1990), and so introduced ‘Love changes everything’, which was arranged to demonstrate Ball’s full-bodied top range. The popular success of the number enabled his expansion into the popular field and into concert tours. In 1991 he released his first solo album and the following year represented the UK in the Eurovision song contest with One Step Out of Time. His concert repertory has become increasingly wide, and he performed on his 1994 television series with such disparate singers as Tony Bennett, James Brown and Montserrat Caballé. He also played Giorgio in the first London production of Sondheim’s Passion (1996).

Ballabene [Bellabene], Gregorio

(b Rome, 1720; dRome, c1803). Italian composer. In 1746 he was a member of the Congregazione di S Cecilia, and assistant to the maestro di cappella Luigi Besci at the church of the Madonna dei Monti. In 1754 he became a member of the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica, having written a five-part fugue on Generatio haec as his test piece (in I-Baf). In September 1755 he was at Macerata, where he applied for a post. In the libretto to the oratorio S Francesco di Sales (1760) he is described as maestro di cappella at Gubbio.

As a composer Ballabene followed the tradition of Roman church music in the Palestrina style, differentiating between concertato and pieno styles. His fame rests on his mass for 12 four-part choruses, composed in 1774. This work brought him into correspondence with Martini (in I-Bc), who praised its contrapuntal mastery, supported its formal approval by the Accademia Filarmonica, and published a Descrizione e approvazione dei Chirie e Gloria a 48 voci (Bologna, 1774). It was also praised in a Lettera di Giuseppe Heiberger … ad una composizione musicale a 48 voci del Signor Gregorio Ballabene (Rome, 1774). However, according to Martini, when the mass was performed in Rome in 1777, it was ridiculed by some progressive Roman musicians, who seem to have regarded its colossal construction as outmoded. In 1778 Ballabene, who in these years had Cardinal Albani as his patron, was an unsuccessful candidate for the post of maestro di cappella at S Pietro, and in 1779 at Milan Cathedral and S Antonio in Padua. In 1780 he was an examiner of maestri di cappella for the Congregazione dei Musici.

WORKS

Masses: Ky, Gl, Cr, 5vv, org, 1769, D-MÜs; Ky, Gl, 48vv, org, 1774, Bsb, I-Bc, BGc, Fc, Rsc; 5vv, Rvat

Dixit Dominus: 8vv, org, 1777, D-MÜs; 16vv, GB-Ob

Orats: S Francesco di Sales, Gubbio, 1760

Other works: Il Marchese del Bisogno, Rome, 1752; Pastorale, Macerata, 1753; Generatio haec, fuga, 5vv, 1754, I-Baf; Catone in Utica (op, P. Metastasio), Macerata, 1755; L'eroe cinese (op, Metastasio), Fabriano, 1757; Cum invocarem, compline, 4vv, org, 1762, Bc*; Mag, 16vv, 1778, GB-Lcm*; Caro mea, 5vv, org, 1781, D-MÜs; Poesia per musica in onore di S Ubaldo, Gubbio, 1784; Le mie pene (cant.), 3vv, I-Bsf; Amen, 4vv, org, insts, D-MÜs; Ave Maria, 2vv, org, Bsb; Lit, 4vv, org, MÜs; Lumen mundi, seq, 4vv, org, MÜs; Oculi omnium, I-Rvat; Tantum ergo, 4vv, Rvat; Quartetti, Rc; Ov., 2 vn, va, db, D-Dl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli) [with detailed bibliography]

FellererP

FétisB

GerberNL

G. Heiberger: Lettera … ad una composizione musicale a 48 voci del Signor G.B. maestro di Cappella romano (Rome, 1774) [incl. G.B. Martini: Descrizione e approvazione dei Chirie e Gloria a 48 voci (Bologna, 1774)]

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e della opere di Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R), ii, 65 n.513; 316 n.636

P. Alfieri: Brevi notizie storiche sulla Congregazione ed Accademia de’ maestri e professori di musica di Roma, sotto l’invocazione di Santa Cecilia (Rome, 1845), 22

G. Tebaldini: L’archivio musicale della Cappella Antoniana in Padova (Padua, 1895)

L. Torri: ‘Una lettera inedita del Padre Giambattista Martini’, RMI, ii (1895), 262–86

J. Killing: Kirchenmusikalische Schätze der Bibliothek des Abbate Fortunato Santini (Düsseldorf, 1910), 167, 475

SIEGFRIED GMEINWIESER

Ballabile

(It.: ‘danceable’, ‘apt for dancing’).

A movement, usually in an opera, intended for dancing. In Act 3 of Macbeth Verdi termed the song and dance of the witches ballabile; the ‘Galop con cori’ that opens Act 2 of his Ernani is a coro ballabile; dance divertissements in Meyerbeer's operas are titled 1°, 2° ballabile etc. The term is also used for instrumental pieces of a dance character; the dances in Hans von Bülow's Carnevale di Milano are headed ‘Ballabili’.

ANDREW PORTER

Ballad

(from Lat. ballare: ‘to dance’).

Term used for a short popular song that may contain a narrative element. Scholars take it to signify a relatively concise composition known throughout Europe since the late Middle Ages: it combines narrative, dramatic dialogue and lyrical passages in stanzaic form sung to a rounded tune, and often includes a recurrent refrain. Originally the word referred to dance-songs such as the carole, but by the 14th century it had lost that connotation in English and had become a distinctive song type with a narrative core. The word has sometimes been used, mistakenly, as a translation for the medieval French forme fixe ballade (see Ballade (i)), and for the 18th- and 19th-century German ballade (see §II below); the latter was partly influenced by the narrative strophic folksong tradition of Britain and Scandinavia (see also Ballade (ii) for instrumental pieces bearing this often confused title, and Epics for a discussion of longer narrative song forms).

The ‘ballad opera’, a satirical form of theatrical entertainment based on spoken dialogue and popular tunes of the day, was fashionable for several decades during the early to mid-18th century. Literary ballads which imitated the traditional ballad marked a significant phase of influence during the Romantic period. In the 19th century ‘ballad’ came to denote a sentimental song cultivated by the middle classes in Britain and North America, while in 20th-century popular culture it has come to refer to a slow, personalized love song or one, such as the ‘blues ballad’ in North America, in which the narrative element is slender and subordinated to a lyrical mood.

II. The 19th- and 20th-century art form

JAMES PORTER (I, 1–6), JAMES PORTER, JEREMY BARLOW (I, 7), GRAHAM JOHNSON (with ERIC SAMS) (II, 1), NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY (II, 2)

Ballad

I. Folk and popular balladry

1. Concepts.

2. Origin and subject matter.

3. International aspects.

4. Narrative form and style.

5. Tunes.

6. Singers and contexts.

7. Broadside ballads.

1. Concepts.

Traditional ballads are studied by a variety of disciplines: area studies, ethnomusicology, folkloristics, anthropology, comparative literature and semiotics. Each of these has to some extent imposed its own modern perspective on the ballad which, as a heterogenous type of song with diverse origins and purpose, has seemed of interest and relevance to their field. Literary scholars have sought comparisons between the traditional, orally transmitted ballad and literary creation, or have traced its influence on individual poems (such as the pastiches by Coleridge, Keats, Wilde or Wordsworth). Folklorists and anthropologists have looked in balladry for signs of ‘primitive’ thought and communal practice, and semiologists for partially submerged cultural markers. Folk-music scholars and ethnomusicologists have dissected ballad tunes to understand the nature of popular song creation, or studied latterday traditional singers to gauge the role of memory, oral transmission, innovation and context in the performance and communication of ballads.

Generally speaking, the nature and structure of the genre have been the focus of literary analysis since the great 19th-century canonical compilations of traditional texts: scholars such as F.J. Child (1882–98) and Svend Grundtvig (1853–1920) were much preoccupied with identifying ballads by plot type and ordering them in terms of chronology and diffusion. Older ballads such as those they identified have few characters and concentrate on a single incident; they are cast in stanzas with or without a refrain and are sung to a repeated melody that corresponds to the strophic structure. The mood in these ballads is generally stoic and impersonal; the plot may be tragic, romantic, otherworldly, heroic or humorous, while in newer ballads and broadsides the tone becomes personal, partisan or polemical. They are occasionally based on historical events, though the incidents portrayed are often not verifiable. The tune, which raises and intensifies the communicative level of the song, influences the poetics of the line and stanza, as Bronson (1977) has shown, while the refrain, when present, suggests links to dance and, even in modern times, to audience participation.

In the 18th century, when the urban broadside type (which often couched sensational events of the day in ballad stanzas) was coming into its own, scholars began to adopt a new conception of the ballad. Although broadsheets had been a feature of urban life since the 16th century, they and the antiquarian enthusiasm for rural custom had by this time begun to influence scholarly notions of the ballad's social or political purpose. The idea of the ballad crystallized in writings of this period, and the stylistic reworking of ballads by editors and enthusiasts marked an important development in conceptions of the form. This was followed by the great compilations of the 19th century, from those by Walter Scott and William Motherwell to those by Grundtvig and Child, focussing on ballad poetry, while in the 20th century attention shifted to ballad tunes, singers and performance. In one sense this last phase marked a reaction against the idealism with which ballad study was often invested: scholars such as Child were strongly influenced by the idea of the ‘popular’ as conceived by Herder in the late 18th century, but Child, with some hindsight, saw the ballad evolving from a communal past into a more individualistic genre.

Theories of balladry thus depend to some extent on the collector's conception of the society that produced them. Bishop Percy's wholesale revisions of his manuscript sources, and Scott's and Peter Buchan's reworkings of ballads are familar examples of ‘adaptation’. The society from which they were culled was often seen, mistakenly, as rural and homogeneous; ballads did emerge from such a background, but they were also the result of urban poetasters and hacks cobbling together older and newer verse material (usually with the tag ‘to the tune of …’) in salesworthy ‘black-letter’ (c1550–c1700) or, later, ‘white-letter’ broadsheets that had woodcut illustrations and contained news of the day. This material found its way into rural districts through singers, broadsides and chapbooks, in turn influencing these communities. To later singers, though, these ballads were nothing more than the ‘old songs’ preferred by their community; the term ‘ballad’, when it signified anything, usually meant a commercial ballad sheet (or ‘ballet’).

After centuries of disputes over authorship and style, scholars today are less inclined to speculate on the origin, evolution or function of ballads without hard evidence. This caution has also made them less eager to classify definitive ‘ballad types’ in terms of plot or theme and more inclined to concentrate on elucidating topics that arise in the course of stanzaic narrative song, whether ‘ballads’ or not. From a musical point of view, the singing of ballads is a primary feature of the genre: folk-music scholars such as Cecil Sharp devoted much time and effort in pointing to melodic links between British ballad tunes and their counterparts in North America. The idea of ‘ballad performance’ in newer contexts, such as that of the Folk Revival, has broadened the concept of the genre and its uses still further, and assured it of cultural vitality in the contemporary world (see also Folk music).

2. Origin and subject matter.

The term ‘ballad’ has been used in the European literary tradition to refer to the popular or traditional song type that appeared from around the end of the 13th century and was at its height during the 16th and 17th centuries, when ballad singers plied their trade in cities and around village fairs. The ballad originated in the late Middle Ages, when epic and heroic songs served as entertainment, and appears to have flourished initially in conjunction with the rise of a merchant class and the decline of feudalism. Shorter narrative songs were also extant during the feudal period, but the appearance of the ballad as a genre seems to have been closely associated with the fashion for the French Carole, both courtly and popular, a dance that flourished from the mid-12th century to the mid-14th. The ballad's connection with dance is suggested by the Latin root ballare, and some traditions even today manifest a close association between dance and narrative song, as in the Faeroes or parts of Spain.

The ballad probably emerged as a narrative genre with a dramatic plot from France and the Low Countries at about the same time, spreading in different directions and taking on local characteristics as it evolved. The earliest surviving manuscript version of an English-language ballad is that of Judas (Child no.23), which dates from before 1300. There are analogues and parallels to many of the story lines in sagas, romances, lays and wonder tales, but the parallels are not always close or exact. The ‘singing bone’ motif, for example, is one that has generated both tales and songs in eastern and western Europe. Stanzaic songs probably fulfilled many functions, but became a primary vehicle for celebrating lapidary events such as bloody battles, legendary exploits, family confrontations and tragic love affairs, usually among the upper classes or yeoman class. With the growth of cities after 1500, the minstrel composer of the late medieval period and Renaissance, who entertained in both castle and lowly hostelry, was replaced by the ballad seller, broadside printer and street singer.

The features that mark out the ‘classic’ ballad – the impersonality of narrative, incremental repetition and recurrence of commonplaces – were noted by Motherwell in 1827. His observations influenced Grundtvig who, in turn, corresponded with Child on the subject matter of traditional ballads and how they might be arranged in an authoritative compilation that would ‘close the account’ of a genre they considered to be exhausted. Child eventually selected and published 305 ballads, taken mainly from earlier 18th- and 19th-century collections rather than from broadsides, ordered by plot type and printed with multiple variants in chronological sequence. His headnote to each ballad type (e.g. Edward, Child no.13) traces the origins and evolution of the song across cultural boundaries. Bronson followed this general scheme in his compendium of ballad airs (1959–72), but ordered the tunes by melodic type. Earlier, Child had gradually arrived at an awareness of the importance of the tunes, and included an appendix of tunes in his compilation.

Much debate has surrounded the Child corpus, and he was later attacked for his criteria of selection and exclusion. Nevertheless, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is still regarded as a central representation of older English-language ballad subject matter: apocryphal legends (Judas, St Stephen and Herod, The Cherry-Tree Carol, The Carnal and the Crane, Dives and Lazarus, The Maid and the Palmer), miracles (Brown Robyn's Confession, Sir Hugh), outlaw exploits (Robin Hood, Adam Bell, Rob Roy), folk history (Queen Eleanor's Confession, The Battle of Otterburn, The Battle of Harlaw, The Death of Queen Jane, Mary Hamilton), the feuds of Scottish clans (Edom o Gordon, The Bonny Earl of Murray, The Bonnie House of Airlie, The Death of Parcy Reed, The Baron of Brackley), border raids (Dick o the Cow, Jock o the Side), encounters at sea (Patrick Spens, John Dory, The Sweet Trinity, Henry Martin, Captain Ward and the Rainbow) and humorous domestic strife (Our Goodman, The Wife Wrapped in Wether's Skin, Get Up and Bar the Door). Love, death and sexual relationships predominate in these ballad stories, with a few exceptions such as Child Waters, which ends happily. Ballad plots deal frequently with elopement, bride-stealing, adultery and incest but never with homosexual love. Loyalty to a partner often transcends suffering and death, and the symbolic ‘rose and briar’ motif uniting the lovers in their grave (well known in the Middle Ages) appears in a number of ballads. Riddles, spells and the supernatural are common in the ballad narrative, and humans consort with otherwordly beings (Thomas Rhymer, Tam Lin, Hind Etin, Clerk Colvill, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, The Queen of Elfland's Nourice) or revenants (Sweet William's Ghost, The Unquiet Grave, Clerk Saunders, The Grey Cock, The Wife of Usher's Well). In these encounters, which tend to be more frequent in northern Europe than elsewhere, the ballad imagination is at its most evocative.

In the more pedestrian broadside ballads and later urban tradition, subject matter tends toward the political, satirical and personal. A long tradition, from the 17th century, of composing socially critical ballads exists in Britain and Ireland, and singers were frequently arrested for singing rebel songs. With emigration in the mid-19th century the Irish tradition found its way to the United States with ballads like Molly Bawn, in which the heroine, who transforms herself into a swan each evening, is mistakenly shot by her hunter-lover; these supernatural elements tend to be rationalized in North American variants. The ‘come-all-ye’ type of ballad grew in prominence around this time. Broadsides proliferated in the United States and were at their height between about 1840 and 1880, and these extended the range of topics to include sensational crime (Naomi Wise, Fuller and Warren, Pearl Bryan, Frankie and Johnny), criminals' farewells (Tom Dooley, Charles Guiteau), historical events (Brave Wolfe, Paul Jones, The Chesapeake and the Shannon), disasters (The Avondale Mine Disaster, Casey Jones, The Wreck of the Old 97, The Ballet of the Boll Weevil, The Titanic), heroes and outlaws (Brennan on the Moor, Captain Kidd, The Wild Colonial Boy, Sam Bass, Jesse James, John Henry, John Hardy) and cowboy topics (The Streets of Laredo, Joe Bowers, The Arkansas Traveller, The Dying Stockman). The Australian ballad tradition likewise tells of personal hardship through sentencing to transportation or outlawry (Jim Jones, Van Diemen's Land, The Convict Maid, Botany Bay, The Death of Ned Kelly).

3. International aspects.

The ballad has been known by different names outside the English-speaking world, such as the Scandinavian vise and the Hispanic romance (ballad) or romancero (balladry). In Gaelic-speaking regions of Britain and Ireland the equivalent narrative song tradition was the laoidh (‘lay’), which usually celebrated the exploits of the legendary Fianna (Fenian warriors) and their leader, Fionn Mac Cumhaill (see Bard and Ossian). Examples of Fenian lays, which lack the refrain common in other native song genres and did not accompany dance, have been recorded in recent times, mainly from Hebridean singers. With the plantation of Ireland, British ballads found their way there and a number of texts were translated into Gaelic equivalents (e.g. An Tighearna Randal). At another, broader remove, it has been suggested that Irish vision poetry (the aisling) influenced North American balladry, in part as a result of the huge emigration from Ireland to the United States in the mid-19th century.

The ballad corpus in France and Germany is markedly lyrical, and has links to the pastourelle and the Romanze respectively. The Danish ballad tradition, which flourished in the later Middle Ages and was written down from the 16th century, often parallels British balladry in subject matter. Northern European ballads in general tend to share elements such as supernatural lovers, whereas central European traditions such as that in Hungary rarely deal with magical practices or such topics as shape-shifting. Scholars (e.g. Liestøl, Nygard, Vargyas) have nevertheless posited generic and thematic links not only among British, Scandinavian and French balladry but also between Hungarian and French ballads, and suggested a further connection between Hungarian ballads, for example, and Siberian heroic epic. The roots of some ballad traditions thus lie far beyond western Europe. And while ballads and epics are constructed on quite different structural principles, there is clear thematic borrowing in many ballad traditions, especially in the Balkans and Spain.

Some ballad plots are widespread: the Low Countries ballad of Heer Halewijn, thought by some to derive ultimately from the tale of Judith and Holofernes, is known in English-language tradition as Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (Child no.4) and in Hungary, for example, as Anna Molnár; and the Scottish ballad of Clerk Colvill (Child no.42), which recounts the hero's luckless encounter with a mermaid, is rather rare in English-language tradition but the basic story appears in other countries under the titles Elveskud, Riddar Olaf, Seigneur Nann, Le roi renaud or La muerte occultada (‘Death concealed’). The last of these shows an unusual side of the Spanish romance tradition, which normally contains few fantastic elements and deals with concrete events with relatively little supernatural interference. Its main concerns are historical or quasi-historical: conflicts between Moors and Christians, for example, or the legendary exploits of warriors such as el Cid. Whether these analogous plots and motifs are direct borrowings or independent compositions has been the object of much research; while some paths of diffusion can be traced, scholars are now concerned less with the historical and geographical origins of ballads and more with their content, function and meaning.

Throughout the Mediterranean countries the division between elaborative epic style and concentrated ballad is normally well defined: the ballad flourishes mainly in northern Italy, for example, while in the south the cantastorie tradition, rather like epic singing in the Balkans, expands details of dress, armoury or battles and embellishes these into whole episodes. The dispersal of the Sephardim has resulted in a rich Judeo-Hispanic ballad tradition now found in widely separated areas of the diaspora. In eastern Europe, the subject matter of Slavonic ballad traditions combines fantastic and realistic elements. Pan-Slavonic themes sometimes emerge, such as the ballad of the bird-daughter: a mother marries off her daughter but she returns as a bird to tell of her misfortune in marriage. As in other east and south-east European traditions, the ballads of Russia and Ukraine should be distinguished from epic songs (bilini, dumy) on the one hand and historical songs on the other. In the subject matter of these ballads, as throughout the Slavic world, the individual is pitted against severe social constraints: the maltreated wife never kills her abusive spouse, for example, and matricide would be an impossible act of revenge. The fundamental conflict, as in most balladry, lies in the individual's choice between conforming to social norms or protesting and thereby suffering. The Ukrainian ballad tradition, like several European counterparts in the New World, has found change and renewal among Ukrainian emigrants in Canada.

The Spanish and Portuguese romance has similarly found its way through outposts such as the Azores or the Canary Islands to Latin America and as far as south-east Asia. The ballad of Hispanic tradition known as El raptor pordiosero (‘The begging abductor’), for instance, has become O Cego (‘The blind man’) in Brazil through Portuguese versions. A knock on the door provokes the question ‘Who is there?’; the knocker replies that he is a blind man, whereupon the unidentified speaker tells a woman to fetch him bread and wine, which the blind man refuses; all he wants is for the woman to show him the way, whereupon he reveals to her that he is not blind, and has disguised himself in order to abduct and marry her. Ballads with such themes spread widely and stimulated newer types of narrative song, occasionally under different names: the indita in New Mexico, for example, the corrido in Mexico, and the korido in the Philippines, which was transmitted from Spain and Mexico during the colonial period (1521–1898). The indita (‘little Indian girl’ or ‘song’) of the later 19th century in New Mexico is a narrative song on historical, burlesque or even spiritual topics. The corrido, found in both the USA and Mexico, has been a productive form for social and historical commentary in the 20th century.

4. Narrative form and style.

The older traditional ballads are marked by an essential distillation of plot, character and action or dialogue. Often no more than two people are involved, although a third or others may impinge fatefully on their relationship. Apart from battles or conflict between males the focus is usually on a man and a woman, with dialogue leading to decisive action. As a rule the story is not elaborated through explicit motivation or the description of personae or objects; rather, the singing pushes the story along relentlessly, leaping or lingering, sketching the story line economically and using the device of incremental repetition as, for example, in Lady Maisry (Child no.65B): ‘The first horse that he rode upon, He was a raven black … The next horse that he rode upon/He was a bonny brown … The next horse that he rode upon/He as the milk was white …’ and so on. The action and dialogue between them bring the ballad drama to a climax. Some ballads consist entirely of dialogue, such as Edward, Lord Randal and The Maid Freed from the Gallows. The impersonality of the narration is offset, to some extent, by the refrains, which underscore not only the archaisms of the form but its participatory nature.

Individual ballad plots are sometimes obliquely related, as in the case of Edward (Child no.13), The Twa Brothers (Child no.49) and Lizzie Wan (Child no.51), though this is rare. Characters are broadly imagined and without complexity. Often they engage each other through confrontation, accusation or challenge of some kind. They are deftly sketched to establish their place in the drama, and any motive is discernible only by means of their speech or actions. They are normally described in commonplaces, such as ‘fair lady’, ‘bonny bride’, ‘lady gay’ or ‘false truelove’, and their attributes are likewise couched in stereotyped phrases: ‘lilywhite breast’, ‘yellow hair’, ‘gay gold ring’, ‘a broad letter’. These commonplaces are not simply fillers, however, since they help to establish the mood and pace of the drama and to stabilize the rhythm and emphasis of the verse line. The verse patterns, usually iambic or trochaic, are also decisively influenced by the shape and rhythm of the tune.

Hispanic ballads are sung in 16-syllable assonant lines divided into hemistichs and Slavonic ballads draw on the decasyllabic line, while ‘ballad’ or ‘common’ metre in English-language tradition consists of a quatrain of alternating four-stress and three-stress lines (8.6.8.6), the second and fourth having end-rhymes. The stanza may be extended to five, six or eight lines, but it is unusual to find fewer than four lines. The stanza with four-stress lines throughout is also unusual since, in singing, the three-stress lines are lengthened by holding the final syllable as long as a fourth stress so that, melodically, at least, all ballad stanzas consist of four-beat lines. Each line corresponds to a distinct musical phrase. A ballad stanza usually comprises a single unit of meaning, thereby matching a complete statement of the tune. This self-contained structure is important, for syntax and melody combine to discourage the natural emphasis of the words when they are spoken rather than sung. Singing obliterates the accent and subordinates the nominal and adjectival to a broader, more universal telling of the ballad story. A profound ambiguity in the relationship of narrative direction and the singing of the ballad text thus results from the structural tension that emerges in performance.

5. Tunes.

Ballads are usually sung solo, though instruments (e.g. fiddle, harp, guitar, banjo or dulcimer) have also been used to accompany singers. The ballad tune, with just one or two notes to a syllable, helps to shape the versification though not the mood of the ballad text. The tune's character, in fact, is sometimes at variance with the tragic tone as in, for example, the lilting 6/8 rhythm and major mode of Lord Lovel (Child no.75; ex.1); this ballad has given rise to parodies in the USA where Abraham Lincoln takes the place of Lovel and is mocked for his military reverses. In general, though, the tune has a key role to play in the overall rhythm and style of the sung ballad. The main cadence points are at the end of the second and fourth lines, where the normal rhyme of the ballad stanza occurs, and these cadences often (though not always) correspond to a melodic shift from the tonic to the fifth above, as in an English tune for Barbara Allen (Child no.84; ex.2), the most widely sung of the British ballads. Some tunes of modal cast, however, are content to repeat the first two phrases, sometimes slightly modified, as in a Scottish tune version for The Lass of Roch Royal (Child no.76; ex.3).

The most common phrasal four-line pattern in British ballad tunes is ABCD, a non-recurrent form that provides not only the greatest variety of phrase but also the widest space between repetitions. This type accounts for almost half of the 3450 tunes analysed by Bronson (1969, p.153). Its closest rival, ABCDE, is not nearly as frequent. In a long ballad the scheme ABAB doubles not only the number of repetitions but also their frequency when sung. ABCA, on the other hand, returns to the opening phrase in cyclical fashion. The ‘come-all-ye’ type of tune, ABBA, juxtaposes inner as well as outer identities. Of tunes with a repeated phrase the pattern ABAC is the most often found. Refrains (e.g. ‘savoury, sage, rosemary and thyme’, ‘down a downe, hey downe’) force narrative to give way to melody; refrains can consist of a fifth repetitive line, a burden between stanzas, or intercalated lines within the stanza.

Because of the skill needed to notate music ballad melodies have been taken down relatively recently; no tune for a Child ballad exists before the 17th century, and a large proportion of notated melodies, whether recorded by phonograph or magnetic tape or transcribed from performance, date from the beginning of the 20th century. Like the editors of texts, ‘improving’ musical editors have sometimes, like William Christie (1881), tampered with tunes. But ballad tunes are often sturdy enough to have survived in outline for centuries. Some tunes fall into what some have called ‘tune families’ – that is, groups of tunes that are structurally analogous (e.g. the Dives and Lazarus family; see Bayard, 1950; Jackson, 1952; Bronson, 1969). These tunes are ‘related’ only in the sense of having a comparable tonal structure and not necessarily through direct transmission or borrowing. Although the overall shape of the tune is retained in variant realization, such relationships are based on melodic rather than rhythmic identity.

The modality of ballad tunes is a striking feature of their character since they often rely on structures from before the advent of common-practice harmony in the 17th century. Pentatonic and hexatonic modes are as frequent as heptatonic; the Appalachian and Scottish ballad tunes show a preference for the ‘gapped’ (pentatonic or hexatonic) forms, while English tradition inclines to the heptatonic forms with a sharp or flattened third and a flattened leading note (Bronson, 1969, pp.155–6). Metre can be two- or three-beat types: in England and Scotland 4/4 predominates, with 6/8 much more common in England, perhaps as a fitting counterpart for iambic metre. But the singer does not always stick rigidly to an isometric formula, and tunes can fall into patterns such as 5/4, or even irregular barring such as 3/2, 9/4, 3/2, 5/4, 4/4. The range of the tunes is usually an octave, but can sometimes extend to a 12th.

6. Singers and contexts.

Ballad singers have been the object of both scorn and admiration since at least the 17th century, when the diarist Samuel Pepys ‘in perfect pleasure’ heard Mrs Knipp sing ‘her little Scotch song of “Barbary Allen”’. Later, James Hogg's mother berated Scott for printing, in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3), the texts of ballads that she stressed were meant to be sung. Antiquarians had already shown interest in singers such as Anna Brown (1747–1810), a minister's wife from Aberdeen who from 1783 compiled traditional ballads, some of them with variant texts. The interpretation of these texts has been a matter of controversy, but it seems likely that Mrs Brown did not improvise variants each time she sang them but in fact had learned different versions of the same ballad from her mother and her aunt. Evidence of textual improvisation (as opposed to re-creation) is extremely rare, although examples of ballad tunes sung with free melodic variation have been found: Henry Larcombe, described by Sharp, and the Irish traveller John Reilly (c1926–69) both sang in this way.

The matter of ballad singing and repertory was broached in Motherwell's famous study (1827) of Agnes Lyle, a weaver's daughter from Kilbarchan in Ayrshire. While Mrs Brown preferred ballads of magic and romance, Agnes Lyle chose to sing tragic ballads with which she felt a strong sympathy (e.g. Sheath and Knife, Child no.16), and would sometimes weep while singing them. It can thus be difficult to separate a singer's choice of repertory or singing of particular ballad stories from their lived experience. In general, women have cultivated ballad singing to a greater degree than men because of their domestic situation. Ballads can overlap with other genres such as work songs, lullabies or laments; in Hungary, for example, women sang ballads in the context of collective weaving and spinning (see Lament and Lullaby. Ballads have also been a means for women to highlight their often subjugated role in society.

As a result of changes in the 20th century brought about mainly by technological developments, ballad singers and the ballad genre have again become a focus of interest. The advent of the phonograph in the late 19th century and of the magnetic tape recorder after World War II allowed scholars such as Percy Grainger to record the flowing graces and decorations in ballad singing: Grainger's transcriptions of English singers (1908) capture the nuances of performance. Since 1950, the performance of ballads has increasingly occurred in the context of folk clubs and folk festivals. New ballads continue to be composed and old ones to be reworked. The publication of ballad collections and of sound recordings made by outstanding singers since World War II has led to a fresh appreciation not only of the ballad form but also of the ballad singer's art.

7. Broadside ballads.

A special category of ballad was the ‘broadside’ or ‘broadside ballad’, originating in the 16th century and so called because in England the texts were customarily printed and circulated on large folio sheets called broadsides. The broadsheet, as a means of conveying news publicly, was also familiar on the continent, as the Flugblatt in Germany, skillingtryck (shilling print) in Sweden, marktlied in the Low Countries and pliego suelto in Hispanic countries. Some ballads were published in pamphlets of two or more leaves; these later became known as ‘chapbooks’. The European street singer (Bänkelsänger in Germany) set up a stall to sell broadsheets relating sensational events, sentimental relationships or socially important matters.

Except for a few years in the 1680s, music was hardly ever printed on a broadside along with a text; sometimes when it was, it was only a decorative pretence, like the notes sprinkled on some Christmas cards, without musical significance. At best, the printed notation served to jog the purchaser’s memory, enabling him to select from a body of tunes known principally through the oral tradition. Tunes would be adapted from popular usage of the day, or remodelled to fit newer verses. Ballad singers might have as many as 100 different melodies in their repertory. Familiar tunes could be harnessed for a ballad text by a broadside printer or a street singer; the evidence suggests, too, that the broadside ballad writer may have had a specific tune in mind as he framed his stanza pattern. Many of those tunes have survived only through this tradition or in notated instrumental music (as airs on which sets of variations were written, for example). Others were included in tutors and in such contemporary sources as Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651; numerous subsequent editions as The Dancing Master in the late 17th and early 18th centuries) and A Choice Collection of 180 Loyal Songs (1685). Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1699–1700), an anthology by Thomas D’Urfey that grew to six volumes in its final edition (1719–20), contains the words and music to about 1000 songs, many of them also printed as broadsides. Some of the tunes are by identifiable composers, while others are of earlier, anonymous and traditional. These tunes existed in England and parts of the USA in an oral tradition on which the authors of new topical broadside texts could draw. Other broadside tunes came from abroad, for isntance Chi passa, The Spanish Pavan and Farinel’s Ground.

Around the end of the 17th century the broadside ballad began to face competition in Britain from the single-sheet song, which contained an air engraved with a bass line, a version of the tune in a key suitable for recorder or flute, and a reduced song text. As a result, reprints of ballads no longer included directions of the tune, and new pieces did not specify a tune to which they should be sung. Since the late 18th century such ballads have been an important, if often unrecognized, element in American popular music. Although there is a quite sizable literature on the broadside as a printed literary form, close connecting musical documentation is mostly lacking.

See also Popular music, §I.

collections, compilations, reference works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

studies: british, north american

studies: european, comparative

Ballad: §I: Folk and popular balladry: Bibliography

collections, compilations, reference works

T. D'Urfey, ed.: Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (London, 1719–20/R)

A. Ramsay: The Tea-Table Miscellany (London, 1724–7, many other edns)

W. Thomson: Orpheus Caledonius (London, 1725, 2/1733/R)

T. Percy: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765, many other edns)

D. Herd, ed.: Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads (Edinburgh, 1769, 2/1776/R)

J. Ritson: A Select Collection of English Songs with their Original Airs (London, 1783, 2/1813)

J. Johnson: The Scots Musical Museum (Edinburgh, 1787–1803, rev. 3/1853/R by W. Stenhouse and D. Laing)

W. Scott: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Edinburgh, 1802–3; edn with tunes, 1833)

R. Jamieson: Popular Ballads and Songs: from Tradition, Manuscripts and Scarce Editions (Edinburgh, 1806)

E.G. Geijer and A.A. Afzelius, eds.: Svenska folkvisor [Swedish folksongs] (Stockholm, 1814–17, 3/1957–60)

G.R. Kinloch: Ancient Scottish Ballads, Recovered from Tradition (London, 1827/R)

W. Motherwell: Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (Glasgow, 1827/R)

P. Buchan: Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1828/R)

S. Grundtvig and A. Olrik: Danmarks gamle folkeviser (Copenhagen, 1853–1920; completed by H.G. Nielsen, K.-I. Hildeman, E. Dal, I. Piø, T. Knudsen, S. Nielsen and N. Schiørring, 1920–76/R)

W. Christie: Traditional Ballad Airs (Edinburgh, 1876–81)

J.C. Bruce and J. Stokoe: Northumbrian Minstrelsy (Newcastle, 1882/R)

F.J. Child: English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Cambridge, MA, 1882–98)

C. Nigra: Canti popolari del Piemonte (Turin, 1888, 2/1957)

F. Kidson, ed.: Traditional Tunes: a Collection of Ballad Airs (Oxford, 1891/R)

L. Erk and F.M. Böhme: Deutscher Liederhort (Leipzig, 1893/R)

C.J. Sharp and others, eds.: Songs of the West (London, 1905/R)

T. Braga: Romanceiro geral portuguez (Lisbon, 2/1906–9/R)

J.H. Combs: Folk-Songs du Midi des Etats-Unis (Paris, 1925; Eng. trans., 1967)

G. Greig and J.B. Duncan: Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs, ed. A. Keith (Aberdeen, 1925)

P. Barry, F.H. Eckstorm and M.W. Smyth, eds.: British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, CT, 1929) [musical transcrs. by G. Herzog]

A.K. Davis: Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, MA, 1929)

C.J. Sharp and M. Karpeles, eds.: English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London, 1932/R, 2/1952/R)

J. Meier and others: Deutsche Volkslieder, mit ihren Melodien (Berlin, 1935–96)

D. Castañeda: El corrido mexicano: su técnica literaria y musical (Mexico City, 1943)

G.G. Korson: Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (Philadelphia, 1949/R)

T.P. Coffin: The British Traditional Ballad in North America (Philadelphia, 1950, enlarged 3/1977)

J. Canteloube: Anthologie des chants populaires français, groupés et présentés par pays ou provinces (Paris, 1951)

H.M. Belden and A.P. Hudson, eds.: Folk Ballads from North Carolina, The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, ii (Durham, NC, 1952)

I. Csanádi and L. Vargyas, eds.: Röpülj páva röpülj: magyar népballadák és balladás dalok [Fly peacock fly: Hungarian ballads and ballad tunes] (Budapest, 1954)

A.B. Friedman, ed.: The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World (New York, 1956/R)

J.P. Schinhan, ed.: The Music of the Ballads, The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, iv (Durham, NC, 1957)

N.I. White and others, eds.: The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, iv: The Music of the Ballads (Durham, NC, 1957)

J. Künzig: Ehe sie verklingen … Alte deutsche Volksweisen vom Böhmerwald bis zur Wolga (Freiberg, 1958)

B.H. Bronson: The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts according to the Extant Records of Great Britain and America (Princeton, NJ, 1959–72)

A.K. Davis: More Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960)

M. Barbeau: Le rossignol y chante (Ottawa, 1962)

M.E. Simmons: A Bibliography of the Romance and Related Forms in Spanish America (Bloomington, IN, 1963)

A.I. Amzulescu, ed.: Balade populare româneşti (Bucharest, 1967)

E. Seemann, D. Stromback and B.R. Jonsson, eds.: European Folk Ballads (Copenhagen, 1967)

R.W. Brednich and W. Suppan: Gottscheer Volkslieder, i (Mainz, 1969)

Jahresbibliographie der Volksballadenforschung (Ljubjana, 1970–90)

J. Jagamas and J. Faragó: Romániai magyar népdalok [Hungarian folksongs from Romania] (Bucharest, 1974)

M. Karpeles, ed.: Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folksongs (London, 1974)

E.B. Lyle, ed.: Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs, i (Edinburgh, 1975)

R.L. Wright, ed.: Irish Emigrant Ballads and Songs (Bowling Green, OH, 1975)

P. Shuldham-Shaw and others, eds.: The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection (Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1976–99)

B.H. Bronson: The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (Princeton, NJ, 1977)

E. MacColl and P. Seeger, eds.: Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland (London and Knoxville, TN, 1977)

S.G. Armistead: ‘A Critical Bibliography of the Hispanic Ballad in Oral Tradition (1971–9)’, El romancero hoy: historia, comparatismo, bibliografia critica, ed. S.G. Armistead, A.S. Romeralo and D. Catalán (Madrid, 1979), 199–310

R. Palmer, ed.: Everyman's Book of British Ballads (London, 1980/R)

A.S. Romeralo, S.G. Armistead and S.H. Petersen, eds.: Bibliografia del romancero oral (Madrid, 1980–)

H. Shields: Shamrock, Rose, and Thistle: Folk Singing in North Derry (Belfast, 1981)

W.G. Day, ed.: The Pepys Ballads (Cambridge, 1987)

J. Porter: The Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland (New York, 1989)

G. Huntington, ed.: Sam Henry's Songs of the People (Athens, GA 1990)

N. Cohen: Traditional Anglo-American Folk Music: an Annotated Discography of Published Sound Recordings (New York, 1994)

Ballad: §I: Folk and popular balladry: Bibliography

studies: british, north american

W. Chappell: Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, 1855–9/R as The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, rev. 2/1893/R by H.E. Wooldridge as Old English Popular Music)

F.B. Gummere: The Popular Ballad (Cambridge, MA, 1907/R)

C.J. Sharp: English Folk-Song: some Conclusions (London, 1907, rev. 4/1965 by M. Karpeles)

P. Grainger: ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’, JFFS, iii (1908), 147–242

L. Pound: Poetic Origins and the Ballad (New York, 1921/R)

L.C. Wimberly: Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago, 1928)

A.G. Gilchrist: ‘A Note on the “Herb” and Other Refrains of Certain British Ballads’, JFFS, viii (1930), 237–50

A. Taylor: ‘Edward’ and ‘Sven i Rosengård’: a Study in the Dissemination of a Ballad (Chicago, 1931)

G.H. Gerould: The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932/R)

R.S. Lamson: English Broadside Ballad Tunes, 1550–1700 (diss., Harvard U., 1935)

A.J. Walker: Popular Songs and Broadsides in the English Drama 1559–1642 (Cambridge, MA, 1935)

J.W. Hendren: A Study of Ballad Rhythm, with Special Reference to Ballad Music (Princeton, NJ, 1936/R)

W.J. Entwistle: European Balladry (Oxford, 1939/R)

R. Harvey: ‘The Unquiet Grave’, JEFDSS, iv (1941), 49–66

S.P. Bayard: ‘Prolegomena to a Study of the Principal Melodic Families of British-American Folk Song’, Journal of American Folklore, lxiii (1950), 1–44

T.P. Coffin: The British Traditional Ballad in North America (Philadelphia, 1950, enlarged, 3/1977)

M.J.C. Hodgart: The Ballads (London, 1950, 2/1962)

G.M. Laws: Native American Balladry (Philadelphia, 1950/R)

G.P. Jackson, ed.: Another Sheaf of White Spirituals (Gainesville, FL, 1952/R)

G.M. Laws: American Balladry from British Broadsides (Philadelphia, 1957)

A. Paredes: ‘With His Pistol in His Hand’: a Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin, 1958)

D.K. Wilgus: Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1959/R)

A.B. Friedman: The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago, 1961)

J.H. Jones: ‘Commonplace and Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and Scottish Ballads’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxiv (1961), 97–112

MacE. Leach and T.P. Coffin: The Critics & the Ballad (Carbondale, IL, 1961) [incl. P. Barry: ‘The Part of the Folk Singer in the Making of Folk Balladry’, 59–76]

G.M. Laws: Anglo-Irish Balladry in North America (Philadelphia, 1962)

L. Shepard: The Broadside Ballad: a Study in Origins and Meaning (London, 1962)

C.M. Simpson: The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ, 1966)

A.L. Lloyd: Folk Song in England (London and New York, 1967)

J.B. Toelken: ‘An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, iv (1967), 75–101

J.Q. Wolf: ‘Folk Singers and the Re-Creation of Folksong’, Western Folklore, xxvi (1967), 101–11

B.H. Bronson: The Ballad as Song (Berkeley, 1969)

H. Glassie, E.D. Ives and J.F. Szwed: Folksongs and their Makers (Bowling Green, OH, 1970)

A. Munro: ‘Lizzie Higgins and the Oral Transmission of Ten Child Ballads’, Scottish Studies, xiv (1970), 155–88

A. Riddle: A Singer and Her Songs, ed. R.D. Abrahams (Baton Rouge, LA, 1970)

A.E. Green: ‘“McCaffery”: a Study in the Variation and Function of a Ballad’, Lore and Language, i (1970–71), no.3, pp.4–9; no.4, pp.3–12; no.5, pp.6–11

D. Buchan: The Ballad and the Folk (London, 1972)

H. Shields: ‘Old British Ballads in Ireland’, Folk Life, x (1972), 68–103

E. Long: ‘Ballad Singers, Ballad Makers, and Ballad Etiology’, Western Folklore, xxxii (1973), 225–36

J. Maguire: Come Day, Go Day, God Send Sunday, ed. R. Morton (London, 1973)

S. Smith: A Study of Lizzie Higgins as a Transitional Figure in the Oral Tradition of Northeast Scotland (diss., U. of Edinburgh, 1975)

A. Bruford: ‘The Grey Selkie’, Ballad Studies, ed. E.B. Lyle (Cambridge, 1976), 41–65

A. Gardner-Medwin: ‘Miss Reburn's Ballads: a Nineteenth Century Repertoire from England’, Ballad Studies, ed. E.B. Lyle (Cambridge, 1976), 93–116

A. Munro: ‘“Abbotsford Collection of Border Ballads”: Sophia Scott's Manuscript Book with Airs’, Scottish Studies, xx (1976), 91–108

J. Porter: ‘Jeannie Robertson's “My Son David”: a Conceptual Performance Model’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxxix (1976), 7–26

H.O. Nygard: ‘Mrs Brown's Recollected Ballads’, Ballad and Ballad Research: Seattle 1977, 68–87

C. Seeger: ‘Versions and Variants of “Barbara Allen”’, Studies in Musicology 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977), 273–320

T.G. and A.L. Burton: Some Ballad Folks (Johnson City, 1978)

F.G. Andersen and T. Pettitt: ‘Mrs Brown of Falkland: a Singer of Tales?’, Journal of American Folklore, xcii (1979), 1–24

R. Palmer: A Ballad History of England (London, 1979)

R. Wehse: Schwanklied und Flugblatt in Grossbritannien (Frankfurt, 1979)

G. Dunn: The Fellowship of Song: Popular Singing Traditions in East Suffolk (London, 1980)

L. Doucette and C. Quigley: ‘The Child Ballad in Canada: a Survey’, Canadian Folk Music Journal, ix (1981), 3–19

D.K. Wilgus: ‘Andrew Jenkins, Folk Composer: an Overview’, Lore and Language, iii (1981), 109–28

N. Würzbach: Die englische Strassenballade 1550–1660 (Munich, 1981; Eng. trans., 1990, as The Rise of the English Street Ballad)

G. Boyes: ‘Performance and Context: an Examination of the Effects of the English Folksong Revival on Song Repertoire and Style’, The Ballad Today: Sheffield 1982, 43–52

K.S. Goldstein: ‘The Impact of Recording Technology on the British Folksong Revival’, Folk Music and Modern Sound, ed. W. Ferris and M.L. Hart (Jackson, MS, 1982), 3–13

A. Bennett: ‘Sources of Popular Song in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems and Methods of Research’, Popular Music, ii (1983), 63–89

J. Porter, ed.: The Ballad Image: Essays Presented to Bertrand Harris Bronson (Los Angeles, 1983)

M. Pickering: ‘Popular Song at Juniper Hill’, Folk Music Journal, iv (1984), 481–503

F.G. Andersen: Commonplace and Creativity: the Role of Formulaic Diction in Anglo-Scottish Traditional Balladry (Odense, 1985)

A. Bruford: ‘The Singing of Fenian and Similar Lays in Scotland’, Ballad Research: Dublin 1985, 55–70

D. Harker: Fakesong: the Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Philadelphia, 1985)

D.K. Wilgus: ‘The “Aisling” and the Cowboy: some Unnoticed Influences of Irish Vision Poetry on Anglo-American Balladry’, Western Folklore, xliv (1985), 255–300

D.K. Wilgus and E.R. Long: ‘The Blues Ballad and the Genesis of Style in Traditional Narrative Song’, Narrative Folksong: New Directions: Essays in Appreciation of W. Edson Richmond, ed. C.L. Edwards and K.E.B. Manley (Boulder, CO, 1985), 435–82

L.J. Williamson: Narrative Singing Among the Scots Travellers: a Study of Strophic Variation in Ballad Performance (diss., U. of Edinburgh, 1985)

E. MacColl and P. Seeger: Till Doomsday in the Afternoon: the Folklore of Scots Travellers, the Stewarts of Blairgowrie (Manchester, 1986)

J. Porter: ‘Ballad Explanations, Ballad Reality, and the Singer's Epistemics’, Western Folklore, xlv (1986), 110–25

D.K. Wilgus and B. Toelken: The Ballad and the Scholars: Approaches to Ballad Study (Los Angeles, 1986)

M.J. Bell: ‘“No Borders to the Ballad Maker's Art”: Francis James Child and the Politics of the People’, Western Folklore, xlvii (1988), 285–307

D. Dugaw: Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1989, 2/1996)

J. Porter: The Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland (New York, 1989)

W.B. McCarthy: The Ballad Matrix: Personality, Milieu, and the Oral Tradition (Bloomington, IA, 1990)

H. Shields: ‘The History of “The Lass of Aughrim”’, Musicology in Ireland, ed. G. Gillen and H. White (Blackrock, 1990), 58–73

C.C. Livingston: British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth-Century: a Catalogue of the Extant Sheets and an Essay (London and New York, 1991)

Ballads and Boundaries: Los Angeles 1993 [incl. S. Douglas: ‘Ballad Singing and Boundaries’, 289–95; T. Mitsui: ‘How was “Judas” Sung?’, 241–50]

G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)

G. Porter: ‘Airs and Graces: Interpretation Based on the Musical Record’, ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, xlix (1993), 205–14

S. Rieuwerts: ‘Field-Collecting of English and Scottish Ballads: a Researcher's Point of View’, ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, xlix (1993), 237–46

H. Shields: Narrative Singing in Ireland: Lays, Ballads, Come-All-Yes and Other Songs (Dublin, 1993)

S. Smith: ‘The Categorization and Performance Aesthetics of Narrative Song among Scottish Folk Revival Singers’, ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, xlix (1993), 225–36

H. Shields: ‘The Words and Music of Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Irish Fieldwork’, Visions & Identities: Tórshavn 1994, 131–8

D. Dugaw, ed.: The Anglo-American Ballad: a Folklore Casebook (New York, 1995)

J. Porter and H. Gower: Jeannie Robertson: Emergent Singer, Transformative Voice (Knoxville, TN, 1995)

J.C. Bishop: ‘“The Most Valuable Collection of Child Ballads with Tunes Ever Published”: the Unfinished Works of James Madison Carpenter’, Ballads into Books: the Legacies of Francis James Child, ed. T. Cheesman and S. Rieuwerts (Berne, 1997), 81–94

D. Dugaw: ‘The Politics of Culture: John Gay and Popular Ballads’, Ballads into Books: the Legacies of Francis James Child, ed. T. Cheesman and S. Rieuwerts (Berne, 1997), 189–98

B.N. Smith: Jane Hicks Gentry: a Singer Among Singers (Lexington, KY, 1998)

P. Kinney: ‘Welsh Ballad Tunes’, Ballads in Wales, ed. M.-A. Constantine (London, 1999), 19–24

Broadside Index (London, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Cecil Sharp House; S. Roud) [database on 3 computer disks]

Ballad: §I: Folk and popular balladry: Bibliography

studies: european, comparative

A. Duran: Romancero general (Madrid, 1849–51, 2/1854)

G. Doncieux and J. Tiersot: Le romancéro populaire de la France (Paris, 1904)

R. Menéndez Pidal: Poesía popular y poesía tradicional en la léteratura española (Oxford, 1922)

S.B. Hustvedt: Ballad Books and Ballad Men: Raids and Rescues in Britain, America and the Scandinavian North Since 1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1930/R)

W. Danckert: Das europäische Volkslied (Berlin, 1939, 2/1970)

V.T. Mendoza: El romance español y el corrido mexicano (Mexico City, 1939, 2/1997)

K. Liestøl: Scottish and Norwegian Ballads (Oslo, 1946)

R. Menéndez Pidal: Romancero hispánico (Madrid, 1953, 2/1968)

E. Comisel: ‘The Rumanian Popular Ballad’, Studia Memoriae Belae Bartók Sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956, 3/1958), 31–54

H.O. Nygard: The Ballad of ‘Heer Halewijn’: its Forms and Variations in Western Europe (Helsinki, 1958)

P.V. Lintur: Narodnye ballady Zakarpattja i ix zapadnoslavjanskie svjazi [The Carpathian-Ukrainian folk ballad corpus and West Slavic tradition] (Kiev, 1963)

E. Gerson-Kiwi: ‘On the Musical Sources of the Judaeo-Hispanic “Romance”’, MQ, l (1964), 31–43

L. Vargyas: ‘Rapports internationaux de la ballade populaire hongroise’, Littérature hongroise, littérature europeénne: Budapest 1964, 69–104

B.N. Putilov: Slavjanskaja istoriceskaja ballada [The Slavic historical ballad] (Leningrad, 1965)

I.I. Zemtsovsky: ‘Ballads’, Sovetskaya muzyka, iv (1966), 89–95

N. Leader: Hungarian Classical Ballads and their Folklore (Cambridge, 1967)

P. Bénichou: Romancero judeo-español de Marruecos (Madrid, 1968)

R. Barros and M. Dannemann: El romancero chileno (Santiago, 1970)

M. Kosová: ‘Katálog evrópskych balád’, Slovenský národopis, xviii (1970), 647–61

H.A. Nud'ha: Ukrajins'ka balada (Z teoriji ta istoriji žanru) [The Ukrainian ballad (theory and history of the genre)] (Kyjov, 1970)

I.J. Katz: Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballads from Jerusalem: an Ethnomusicological Study (Brooklyn, NY, 1972–5)

L. Röhrich: ‘Rätsellied’, Handbuch des Volksliedes, ed. R.W. Brednich, L. Rohrich and W. Suppan, i (Munich, 1973), 101–56

W.H. Anders: Balladensänger und mundliche Komposition: Untersuchungen zur englischen Traditionsballade (Munich, 1974)

R.B. Klymasz and J. Porter: ‘Traditional Ukrainian Balladry in Canada’, Western Folklore, xxxiii (1974), 89–132

L. Vargyas: Magyar népballada es Europa [Hungarian ballads and the European ballad tradition] (Budapest, 1976; Eng. trans., 1983)

Ballads and Ballad Research: Seattle 1977

J. Faragó: Balladák földjén [Transylvanian ballads] (Bucharest, 1977)

S.G. Armistead and I.J. Katz: ‘The New Edition of “Danmarks gamle Folkeviser”’, YIFMC, ix (1978), 89–95

R. Benmayor: ‘A Greek tragoúdi in the Repertoire of a Judeo-Spanish Ballad Singer’, Hispanic Review, xlvi (1978), 475–9

P. Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1978/R)

R. Benmayor: Romances judeo-españoles de Oriente (Madrid, 1979)

I.J. Katz: ‘The Musical Legacy of the Judeo-Spanish “Romancero”’, Hispania Judaica, ed. J.M. Sola-Solé, S.G. Armistead and J.H. Silverman, ii (Barcelona, 1980–84), 45–58

Aspects of the European Broadside Ballad: Belgium 1981

J. Etzion: ‘The Polyphonic Ballad in 16th-Century Vihuela Publications’, MD, xxxv (1981), 179–97

Z. Kumer: ‘Singers' Repertories as a Consequence of their Biographies’, Lore and Language, iii (1981), 49–54

F.G. Andersen, O. Holzapfel and T. Pettitt: The Ballad as Narrative: Studies in the Ballad Traditions of England, Scotland, Germany and Denmark (Odense, 1982)

C. Jaremko: ‘Baltic Ballads of the “Singing Bone”: Prototype and Oicotype’, The Ballad Today: Sheffield 1982, 66–71

The Concept of Tradition in Ballad Research: Odense 1984

C. Merill-Mirsky: Judeo-Spanish Song from the Island of Rhodes: a Musical Tradition in Los Angeles (diss., UCLA, 1984)

A. Doornbosch: ‘Twentieth-Century “Halewijn” Recordings in the Netherlands: a Matter of Survival and Persistence’, Ballad Research: Dublin 1985, 287–97

S.G. Armistead and J.H. Silverman: Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition (Berkeley, 1986) [musical transcriptions, commentary by I.J. Katz]

J. Etzion and S. Weich-Shahak: ‘The Spanish and the Sephardic Romances: Musical Links’, EthM, xxxii (1988), 1–37

D. Colbert: The Birth of the Ballad: the Scandinavian Medieval Genre (Stockholm, 1989)

J. Seeger: ‘The Living Ballad in Brazil: Two Performances’, Hispanic Balladry Today, ed. R.H. Webber (New York, 1989), 175–217

A. Valenciano: ‘Survival of the Traditional “Romancero”: Field Expeditions’, Hispanic Balladry Today, ed. R.H. Webber (New York, 1989), 26–52

R.H. Webber, ed.: Hispanic Balladry Today (New York, 1989)

M. Herrera-Sobek: The Mexican Corrido: a Feminist Analysis (Bloomington, IN, 1990/R)

J. Seeger: Count Claros: Study of a Ballad Tradition (New York, 1990)

G. Nagy: ‘Song and Dance: Reflections on a Comparison of Faroese Ballad with Greek Choral Lyric’, The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. J. Harris (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 214–32

A. Caufriez: ‘The Ballad in Northeast Portugal’, Ballads and Boundaries: Los Angeles 1993, 251–64

J. Cohen: ‘Romancing the “Romance”: Perceptions (and Boundaries) of the Judeo-Spanish Ballad’, Ballads and Boundaries: Los Angeles 1993, 209–17

A.-M. Häggmann: ‘Ballad Singing in an Ostrobothnian Village’, ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, xlix (1993), 215–23

T. Cheesman: ‘Bänkelsang: Seeing, Hearing, Telling and Singing in the German Ballad Picture Show’, Lore and Language, xii (1994), 41–57

M. da Costa Fontes: O romanceiro portugês e brasileiro: indice temático e bibliográfico (Madison, WI, 1997) [incl. mus. exx. and commentary by I.J. Katz]

Ballad

II. The 19th- and 20th-century art form

1. German song.

2. The English sentimental ballad.

3. The ballad in opera.

1. German song.

Like the lied, the ballad in German song in its most sophisticated form was the result of changes and developments in literature. The poetic form goes back to the tradition of Bänkelsang, in which narrative ditties with primitive accompaniment were performed in public places from a wooden bench as a makeshift podium. The public could buy and take home with them crudely printed versions of the rhymed tales of crime or catastrophe. This vulgar tradition played little or no part in the lofty writings of the Enlightenment, but by the middle of the 18th century poets like Johann Gleim, Ludwig Hölty, the brothers Christian and Friedrich von Stollberg, and G.A. Bürger adopted a popular ballad-like tone in some of their poetry as an alternative to the dry literary conventions of the time. Usually ballad texts were secular or legendary (on national or supernatural themes); their tone was often tragic, and they tended to idealize primitive life and feeling.

English poetry and the English ballad tradition also played an important part in the development of the German ballad. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which received immediate critical attention in Germany, came to the notice of J.G. Herder in 1771. By 1779 he had published two volumes of Stimmen der Völker, which included 24 translations from Percy as well as Goethe’s Der Fischer and Heidenröslein. Schubert later made famous settings of both these poems. Other ballads from the collection which were given musical immortality were Herr Oluf (Loewe) and Edward (Loewe, Schubert and Brahms). Herder’s work was also to influence Bettina and Clemens Brentano, whose Des Knaben Wunderhorn was a treasure-trove of ballad material for a later generation of composers. Also of great importance was the influence of one of the greatest British literary controversies of the 18th century. The poeticized prose of ‘Ossian’ (James Macpherson), often ostensibly translated from Gaelic epic, and published between 1760 and 1765, was similarly disseminated in Germany. The two strains, traditional and literary, blended in the indigenous art ballads of Goethe and Schiller, which are elevated in style and verse form, moral or didactic in tone and have subjects freely derived from classical, oriental or medieval legends.

Although both J.F. Reichardt and C.F. Zelter of the so-called Second Berlin School were to compose extended cantatas for voice and piano, by far the most industrious and influential of ballad composers before Schubert was J.R. Zumsteeg of Stuttgart, who had been a schoolfriend of Schiller. His first published ballad was a setting of Bürger’s Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain (1791), issued by Breitkopf & Härtel; a setting of the celebrated ballad Lenore followed in 1798. The publisher, no doubt conscious of the fact that Zumsteeg had captured an aspect of the Zeitgeist and cornered the market, encouraged the composer to explore the medium further: seven volumes of Kleine Balladen und Lieder (1800–05) consolidated a reputation which remained unassailable until the 1830s. Zumsteeg’s achievement was to find a means of freely alternating between recitative and melody so as to heighten the dramatic narrative (often with cunning tempo and key changes) at the same time as giving the conception a sweep and unity that kept the listener’s attention over a relatively long time span. The piano writing was imaginative and often gripping by the standards of the contemporary accompanied song. Even more adventurous piano writing was to be found in the work of the Bohemian Václav Tomášek, an important ballad composer who set a number of the Goethe poems later immortalized by Schubert’s music; but his Lenore (1805), with its 210-bar piano introduction (which can almost stand alone as a piano piece), is his most impressive achievement in the field of the ballad.

Schubert’s friend Josef von Spaun related in his memoirs of the composer (1858) that Schubert had ‘wanted to modernize Zumsteeg’s song form, which appealed very much to him’ and that the young Schubert could ‘revel in these songs for days on end’. Like an apprentice painter who copies the work of a master, Schubert re-composed a number of Zumsteeg ballads (the first was Hagars Klage, 1811), clearly with the older man’s music in front of him. Such details as tonality, prosody and even general melodic shape are often similar, but the hand of genius showed itself at every turn, and Schubert out-composed his model to such an extent that the unjust effect of his well-meant homage was to consign Zumsteeg to a footnote in song history. Not that the ballads of Schubert have been sufficiently understood and valued for the remarkable works they often are; while it is true, for example, that the longest of them, Adelwold und Emma (1815), suffers from an intolerable text (and consequent musical weak patches), there are many highly imaginative and moving moments in these works. They show that the true nature of Schubert’s dramatic gift depended on a scenario with lightning changes of location and dramatic ellipses to be found only in the (as yet uninvented) realm of cinema, or the (as yet undeveloped) lied. The freedom of the best of these ballads suggests Brahms’s later image of Schubert as a young god playing with thunderbolts on Mount Olympus. They show how frustrating Schubert must have found it to labour within the conventions of opera; his mind is quicksilver, and when constrained by the discipline of the unities and the proscenium it becomes sluggish. This also suggests that the narrator of a ballad fulfils the same function as a film camera: impartial, ubiquitous, wide-ranging and responsible for the picture as a whole, unlike the personally involved lieder narrator, whose emotions are filtered and focussed in quite another way. It seems that in composing ballads Schubert enjoyed playing the somewhat distanced role of camera operator (also responsible for lighting, costumes and crowd scenes) as opposed to leading man, as in his own lieder productions (where the poet is of course co-director). In whatever style, Schubert is at his best with texts of high quality; in this case it is the Schiller settings that produce much of abiding interest – Der Taucher (1812), Die Bürgschaft (1815), Klage der Ceres (1815–1816) and Ritter Toggenburg (1816). Einstein (in Schubert, 1951, pp.49–51) was the first to notice that ‘the sheer boldness’ of the harmonic progressions in Der Taucher were far in advance of [Schubert’s] time. There is nothing like them until we reach the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring’. The linking of Schubert’s name with Wagner’s in this context seems all the more tenable in view of the fact that the ballads were mostly published as part of the Nachlass between 1830 and 1850, just at the time when Wagner was forming his mature style. He was himself a ballad composer, both in song (a French setting of Heine’s Die Grenadiere, 1840) and in opera (e.g. Senta’s ballad in Der fliegende Holländer), and time and again can be heard in Schubert’s music a prophecy of the Wagnerian narrative line – always on the point of flowering into melody, but rarely doing so in the interests of dramatic continuity. This is neither recitative nor aria, but arioso, poised between the two, which carries the story forward to its next highpoint and creates a genuine sense of tension and release. In this sense, the Wagner operas, some of them based in part on ancient ballad poetry, are perhaps the greatest manifestations of the German ballad tradition. If we hear in Wolf’s songs many of Wagner’s procedures without the longueurs, the same is surprisingly true of Schubert’s ballad writing (as well as a work like the oratorio Lazarus), which sometimes sounds at least 50 years ahead of its time. It is also certain that Schubert could never have written a late masterpiece like the Heine setting Der Doppelgänger (1828) without his many hours of ballad apprenticeship earlier in his career, much less earlier works in quasi-ballad style like the through-composed songs Erlkönig (1815) and Der Zwerg (1822/3).

Also influenced by Zumsteeg was Carl Loewe, who consciously modelled his work on that of the older master. Loewe, one of the very few composers to sing to a professional standard, remains the German ballad composer pur sang. Highly educated (he was a Goethe scholar and gifted astronomer), he was less fertile than Schubert by far in terms of musical invention, but was brimming with energy of a simpler, almost more physical kind. That he both sang and played the piano seems an apt combination of talents for this greatest of all-round balladeers. He achieved a highly workable synthesis of Zumsteeg’s two styles – either simply strophic and repetitive, or more complex scene- and mood-painting with recitative and arioso sections; this avoids overemphasis whether of verbal repetition or musical depiction. The story is related in direct melody and graphically, if naively, illustrated on the keyboard often with effective use of the higher register. (Despite a certain forthright quality, the piano writing is among the most demanding in the song repertory.) Loewe used what he learnt from Zumsteeg not only to set the poets known to the older composer (Goethe, Herder), but also for the next two generations of ballad poets, Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich Rückert and August von Platen, and their successors, Ferdinand Freiligrath and Theodor Fontane. Most of Loewe’s work was published between 1821 and 1868; it is a measure of both the power of his winning formula as a composer, and his limitations as an artist, that there is little sign of change or development in his work during the 50 or so years of his creative life (see also Song cycle, §3).

After Loewe the term ‘ballad’ seems to be far more loosely defined. Because Schubert had absorbed the ballad into the bloodstream of his lieder output, taking what he needed from it to create a hybrid form, later song composers felt able to regard as ballads a number of their lieder that would not have been counted so by singers of Loewe’s generation. For example, Schumann composed four sets of Romanzen und Balladen without making it clear which songs he considered ballads, and which romances (Brahms later used the same title with similar ambiguity). Of course works like Schumann’s Die Löwenbraut op.31 no.1 and Belsatzar op.57 have many of the characteristics of the true ballad; one is a fantastical animal tale, and the other an elaboration of a biblical story, both familiar areas for ballad poetry. But Schumann, as well as Brahms in songs like Verrat op.105 no.5, seems to have lost that element of objectivity and camera-like observation, the ‘erzählender Ton’ (narrative tone) that is at the heart of the true ballad. Instead the listener is invited to share in the composer’s reaction as if the latter were hearing the ballad for the first time, rather than presenting it as a story he already knows well. In terms of the resulting quality of the music, this may well be having the best of both worlds, but it represented the death of the real ballad tradition; indeed, Schilling (Encyklopädie) dates the demise of the form as early as 1835.

Those extended and complex narrative songs of Hugo Wolf which it might be tempting to call ballads (Der Feuerreiter, Die Geister am Mummelsee, both Mörike, and Ritter Kurts Brautfahrt, Goethe) show an encyclopedic knowledge of song history and styles; they bow to the shade of the composer’s predecessors – Loewe particularly, to whom Wolf listened with ‘höchster Begeisterung’ (greatest enthusiasm) – with a conscious sense of amused and ironic reverence. Loewe had included in Walpurgisnacht (1821) a quotation from Spohr’s Faust; in similar fashion, Wolf, in Ritter Kurts Brautfahrt (1888), quotes from the music of Karl Goldmark and Adalbert von Goldschmidt in a much less genial spirit of allusion and cross-cultural nodding and winking. One of the dangers of the ballad, with its historical connotations and connections with the ultra-German tradition of the Minnesinger, was that it should come to suggest a type of music-making that was somehow pan-Germanic because free of neurotic or introverted feeling, music-making to exclude foreigners and those from other backgrounds. Something of this revivalist spirit pervades the ballads of the now largely forgotten Martin Plüddemann, whose work was centred in Graz and who attempted to re-establish the hegemony of the ballad in the 1880s and 90s. This mirrored the rise of a new wave of patriotic ballad poetry in the 1890s which was not of the highest quality. Of more lasting significance were the two large ballads for (respectively) baritone and bass, and orchestra (Herr Oluf, 1891, and Die Heinzelmännchen) of Pfitzner. These looked back to Schumann’s cantatas on ballad texts by Uhland and Geibel (Des Sängers Fluch and Vom Pagen und der Königstochter, both 1852). For better or worse the genre had become orchestral and remained so in the last 19th-century examples (see Ballade (ii)). As a hopeful antidote to the ‘entartete Musik’ reviled by the Third Reich, there were continuing echoes of an aggressive unification of bad music and poetry to bring the grand old form of the ballad into disrepute; in the 1930s ballad singing was considered by the Nazi regime to be a manly and culturally sound occupation for German baritones (tenors seemed excused largely because Loewe’s tessituras favour the lower voices). The critic H.J. Moser at the time was confident of a renascence of German ballad composition which did not come about. But ballad evenings, particularly featuring the works of Loewe, were regularly to be found as a part of music-making in Germany at the end of the 20th century.

2. The English sentimental ballad.

Towards the end of the 18th century English composers began to characterize certain songs (whether published separately or as parts of operas) as ‘ballads’: they were generally strophic and narrative, like folk ballads, and were inclined to be nostalgic. One of the earliest so named, ‘I was, d’ye see, a waterman’, was from Charles Dibdin's The Waterman (1774). Ballads of this type were a feature of English opera for over a century and can still be traced in Sullivan’s Savoy operas. Their form is often stereotyped: each stanza has an introduction giving the first few bars of the main tune, and the tune is then sung, returning near the end of the stanza after an episode in a related key. A ballad was often the most popular number in an opera and was composed with a view to subsequent sale for domestic use; hence the derogatory terms ‘(music-)shop ballad’ and ‘drawing-room ballad’ came into use. Sometimes ballads were inserted into operas with which they had no connection, as when Mme Vestris introduced C.E. Horn’s ballad ‘I’ve been roaming’ into an English adaptation of Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden in 1828.

In the Victorian period the word began to be used far more loosely to describe almost any kind of sentimental popular song, and a great commercial development of the ballad took place in Britain and the USA. Publishers paid large sums, not to the author or composer of the song (who usually received only a small fee) but to the well-known performer who agreed to sing it at every public appearance for a specified period (hence the term ‘royalty ballad’). The singer’s name dwarfed the composer’s on the garish title-page. The ‘ballad concert’ became a common form of entertainment: the first was given by Mme Sainton-Dolby on 3 January 1867. The popularity of the ballad stretched far into the 20th century, and the BBC in its early years broadcast ballad concerts. There were many ballads whose sales went into millions, but none perhaps equalled the popularity of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, composed by Bishop for his opera Clari (1823) and publicized by Jenny Lind from 1850 onwards. Many of Stephen Foster's songs belong to the ballad genre.

Since World War II, the word ‘ballad’ has been used to refer to pop songs with sentimental or narrative texts and (usually) a slow tempo.

3. The ballad in opera.

In opera the interpolation of a ballad recounting events that have taken place beyond the action on stage was sometimes used as a means of clarifying the plot. The dramatic impetus afforded by this device drew an enthusiastic response from 19th-century librettists, who used it increasingly as a means of broadening their palette. Unlike the purely narrative romance as developed by Rousseau, the operatic ballad often contains an element of the supernatural – a sea monster in Nélusko's ‘Adamastor, roi des vagues profondes’ (L'Africaine), a faery in Mercutio's Queen Mab ballad (Gounod's Roméo et Juliette). The significance of its melodramatic content for the development of German romantic opera has not yet been fully charted, but it seems likely to owe much to what Manicke (preface to EDM, xlv, 1970) has called the ‘demonic spectre’ of Bürger's Lenore. The best-known opera ballad is Senta's in Der fliegende Holländer, in which Wagner claimed to have encapsulated unconsciously the thematic germ of the whole opera. Other notable examples are Raimbaut's ballad (Robert le diable), Finn's ballad (Ruslan and Lyudmila), Mrs Page's ‘Vom Jäger Herne’ (Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor) and Varlaam's ballad (Boris Godunov).

2. Origins, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Bach: The Art Ballad (Edinburgh and London, 1890, 3/1897)

P. Spitta: ‘Ballade’, Musikgeschichtliche Aufsätze (Berlin, 1894), 403–61

A. König: Die Ballade in der Musik (Langensalza, 1904)

H. Simpson: A Century of Ballads 1810–1910 (London, 1910)

H.J. Moser: Die Ballade (Berlin, 1930)

G.H. Gerould: The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932/R)

W.J. Entwistle: European Balladry (Oxford, 1939/R)

S. Northcote: The Ballad in Music (London, 1942/R)

M.J.C. Hodgart: The Ballads (London, 1950, 2/1962)

M.W. Disher: Victorian Song, from Dive to Drawing Room (London, 1955)

D.C. Ossenkop: The Earliest Settings of German Ballads for Voice and Clavier (diss., Columbia U., 1968)

M.R. Turner, ed.: The Parlour Song Book (London, 1972) [incl. preface]

J.S. Bratton: The Victorian Popular Ballad (London and Totowa, NJ, 1975)

H. Laufhütte: Die deutsche Kunstballade: Grundlegung einer Gattungsgeschichte (Heidelberg, 1979)

C. Dahlhaus, ed.: Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden and Laaber, 1980)

N. Temperley: ‘The Ballad’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981/R), 121–34

W. Dürr: Das deutsche Sololied im 19. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven, 1984)

C. Dahlhaus, ed.: Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1985)

Ballad, religious.

A type of 19th-century American revivalist music. See Shape-note hymnody and Spiritual, §I.

Ballade (i).

One of the three formes fixes (the others are the rondeau and the virelai) that dominated French song and poetry in the 14th and 15th centuries. In its standard late medieval shape the ballade text falls into three stanzas, sharing the same metrical and rhyme scheme and ending with the same refrain. The music for each stanza follows the overall pattern I–I–II. Approximations to this form can be found in monophonic song in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the distinction between the ballade and the virelai in particular was not completely clear. Indeed, even in the 14th century, Machaut called his virelais ‘chansons baladées’.

The word ‘ballade’ is derived from Provençal ballada, from balar, to dance; the ballade, rondeau and virelai were in their earliest phase songs for dancing, the most common dances being the carole and the tresche. One of the most attractive of the few surviving examples in Provençal is the spring song A l’entrada del temps clar (ex.1) contained in the 13th-century Chansonnier de St Germain-des-Prés (F-Pn fr.20050; see Sources, MS, fig.25), though it is more likely to be a learned imitation than a genuine piece of folksong. There are five stanzas altogether, each with the characteristic repetition of the first musical section including varied endings for the first- and second-time bars, followed by the second musical section (here occupied entirely by the refrain, though later this normally took up only the last line or so). The musical form I–I–II, it should be noted, is the commonest form underlying the most important of early medieval song types, the Provençal canso and French chanson d’amour. These, however, normally had five or more stanzas, no refrain and a final envoi of a few extra lines; they persisted into the 14th and 15th centuries as the chant royal, and during that period poets using the ballade form without musical setting frequently borrowed the envoi to close their piece.

The 13th-century French chanson à refrain is sometimes close to the ballade, and a few examples with three stanzas only are known, such as Li louseignolés avrillouz by the Arras trouvère Guillaume le Vinier, though the versification here is uncharacteristically complex. One source (GB-Ob Douce 308) gives 188 examples described as ballettes, though sadly they are divorced from their presumed musical setting. These display great flexibility in structure as regards the placing of the refrain, metre, rhyme and the number of stanzas. It is to be noted that the 14th-century Italian Ballata is akin to the 14th-century virelai in form, not to the ballade. The flexible ballette gave way, at the very close of the 13th century, to a more rigid classification, in which ballades retained refrains in the final position, whereas virelais placed them in the initial position.

The earliest known polyphonic settings, composed by Adam de la Halle in the late 13th century, reflect the ballette stage. Of his 16 rondes, as the sources call them, 14 are clearly in rondeau form, which had taken on its definitive shape much earlier; but two approximate either to the later ballade or to the virelai: no.4, Fines amouretes ai, and no.16, Dieus soit en cheste maison. If we ignore the initial refrain (C₇–C₇) of this latter piece, it then has ballade-like proportions, though there are only two stanzas. Starting at line 3, it can be represented thus: I(a₅–b₇) I(a₅–b₇) II(b₇–c₅–C₇–C₇).

With the Parisian Jehannot de l’Escurel (d 1304) we find that all three forms, ballade, virelai and rondeau, are completely distinct one from another. Jehannot left 32 settings of lyrics of which 15 are ballades, all monophonic. Amours, que vous ai meffait is fairly typical in its style and structure: I(a₇–b₇) I(a₇–b₇) II(b₇–c₇–B₇–C₇). The first musical section has the characteristic first-time (Ouvert) and second-time (clos) cadences, and the whole melody shows a greater rhythmic freedom than in the work of Adam de la Halle. This was largely due to the greater refinement of a notational system that already had many of the features of Ars Nova notation. Jehannot’s ballades display a flexible approach within the general framework. In some stanzas only one line takes up the whole of the first musical section; in others shorter lines come at almost any point in the setting; in others the refrain is two or more lines long. The early 14th-century taste for eight and three syllables to the line was superseded towards the middle of the century by a preference for ten and seven syllables, though many exceptions can be found.

In Guillaume de Machaut’s ballades the refrain is normally one line long; and the short line of text, if any, normally opens the second musical section, as in a typical example, De toutes flours (bars 1–8, ex.2): I(a₁₀–b₁₀) I(a₁₀–b₁₀) II(c₇–c₁₀–d₁₀–D₁₀). In this piece a number of important developments appear. The most notable are: elaborate melismas, especially on final syllables; frequent use of syncopation; setting for solo voice with accompanying parts that are clearly instrumental; and extension of the second musical section to give the refrain greater prominence, preceded and closed by a cadence and reiterating material from the finish of the first musical section. Machaut’s contribution was above all to standardize the formes fixes and to make them popular; however, among the 42 ballades that he set to music are a number that show a continued interest in experimentation. One of these, Dous amis, oy mon complaint, has a fairly elaborate metrical structure of a type more often found in the virelai: I(a₇–a₄–a₃–b₇) I(a₇–a₄–a₃–b₇) II(b₄–b₃–a₇) II(b₄–b₃–A₇). The most striking feature here is the repetition of the second musical section as well as of the first; this extension of the normal form is to be found in a number of 14th-century examples, sometimes described as baladelle. Machaut’s ‘double ballade’, Quant Theseus/Ne quier veoir, is notable for its application to ballade setting of the 13th- and 14th-century motet polytextual technique; here two voices simultaneously sing different texts, though on the same subject, with the same metre and the same refrain. This idea, too, was taken up in a number of 14th- and 15th-century settings of virelais and rondeaux as well.

The Ars Subtilior of the late 14th century brought no structural advance to the composition of the ballade. But the highly inventive poet-musicians who were fostered in the southern courts of Orthez, Navarre, Barcelona and Avignon – such as Cuvelier, Antonello da Caserta, Philippus de Caserta, Senleches, Trebor, Solage, Vaillant and Matteo da Perugia – as well as composers in Cyprus, introduced very intricate and subtle rhythmic ideas and often permitted passages of extreme dissonance, while maintaining the setting for the basic forces of voice (mostly in the tenor or countertenor range) and two or three accompanying instruments. Ex.3, bars 15–20 of Philippus de Caserta’s En remirant vo douce pourtraiture, is typical.

Late 14th-century ballade texts are often in praise of patrons or in celebration of historical events; in the main, however, the ballade was throughout its history the preferred form for the serious love song. Machaut wrote nearly 200 ballades contained in his La louange des dames with no musical setting, nearly all on the theme of courtly love. The increasing complexity of musical composition must have been the main contributing factor to the subsequent divorce between poets and musicians; after Machaut no major French poet set his own verses to music, though many, such as Froissart, Deschamps, Christine de Pisan, Chartier, Charles d’Orléans and Villon, continued to use the formes fixes, in particular the ballade and the rondeau. In the musical context the ballade receded from favour in the early 15th century when the rondeau became extremely popular. (For a more detailed discussion of the relative popularity of the three principal forms in the 14th and 15th centuries see Virelai.)

15th-century Burgundian composers nevertheless produced a number of pieces in ballade form. The main innovation, apart from the relative simplicity in style, which was itself a reaction against previous excesses, is the frequent use of a purely instrumental introduction before the entry of the singer(s). Composers such as Binchois and Du Fay were able to put their individual stamp on the ballade, as is amply demonstrated by the striking passage in ex.4, from Du Fay’s Resvelliés vous. This type of song was popular in Italy and was emulated in England, for instance by Walter Frye or Johannes Bedyngham. Later in the 15th century, Dutch and German examples are found, often in Florentine songbooks. Attempts to combine texts and melodies of different national origins generally resulted, however, in the breakdown of the traditional formes fixes.

For bibliography see Chanson.

NIGEL WILKINS

Ballade (ii).

A term applied to an instrumental (normally piano) piece in a narrative style. It was first used by Chopin (Ballade in G minor op.23, published in 1836 but begun in 1831). He composed four ballades, whose common features are compound metre (6/4 or 6/8) and a structure that is based on thematic metamorphosis governed not so much by formal musical procedures as by a programmatic or literary intention. Full of melodic beauty, harmonic richness and powerful climaxes, they are among his finest achievements. They were said to have been inspired by the ballad poetry of his compatriot Adam Mickiewicz, particularly by his Switeź and Switezianka, poems concerning a lake near Nowogródek and a nymph of the lake; but Chopin himself provided no evidence whatever for that belief and probably had no specific ballad or story in mind.

Franck’s Ballade op.9 (1844) and Liszt’s in D (1845–8) and B minor (1853) follow Chopin’s in not being associated with particular literary sources. The earliest such association is in the first of Brahms’s Four Ballades op.10 (1854), which bears the heading ‘After the Scottish ballad “Edward” in Herder’s “Stimmen der Völker”’ (Herder’s translation of Edward had previously been set to music by Loewe and Schubert); but, as Mies suggested, Brahms may have originally planned it as a vocal work in strophic form and converted it into a piano piece while he composed it. Brahms’s ballades, attractive examples of his early manner, are distinguishable from Chopin’s by their clearer form – usually three-part song form. A strophic form, that most naturally implied by the literary ballad, underlies Grieg’s Ballade in Form von Variationen über eine norwegische Melodie op.24 (1875–6).

Although instrumental ballades are usually for the piano, among those for other media are Vieuxtemps’ Ballade and Polonaise op.38 (c1860), for violin with orchestra or piano, Fauré’s Ballade op.19 (1881), for piano and orchestra, and several examples, both chamber and orchestral, by Frank Martin. Orchestral ballades (some designated ‘ballad’) have usually been inspired by literary sources, often well-known poems, for example Dukas’ L’apprenti sorcier (based on Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling), Somervell’s Helen of Kirkconnell and MacCunn’s The Ship o’ the Fiend. With the orchestral ballade in particular, the distinction between the ballade and its related forms, the rhapsody and the symphonic poem, appears slight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Mies: ‘Herders Edvard-Ballade bei Joh. Brahms’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 225–32

G. Axel: Die Klavier-Ballade (diss., U. of Vienna, 1934)

C. Engelbrecht: ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Chopinschen Klavierballade’, Chopin Congress: Warsaw 1960, 519–21

G. Wagner: Die Klavierballade um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1976)

P.V. Turrill: The Piano Ballade in the Romantic Era (diss., U. of Southern California, 1977)

D. Witten: ‘Ballads and Ballades’, Piano Quarterly, xxix/1 (1981), 33–7

J. Parakilas: Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR, 1992)

MAURICE J.E. BROWN

Ballad horn.

A tenor brass instrument with three valves, circular in shape and pitched in c (Trumpet family). It has a conical bore and a bell about 18 cm in diameter. An amateur's instrument, it was designed to play from songsheets or piano music without transposition.

The ballad horn was introduced by the London maker Henry Distin about 1856. Distin's instruments were made in ‘bell-down’ (french horn) form (see illustration), but Boosey & Co., who took over the Distin firm in 1868, added a ‘bell-up’ version and a version pitched an octave higher, which they called the liedhorn. Mouthpieces were funnel-shaped with an 18 mm inner rim diameter. Boosey supplied B crooks with their ballad horns to allow them to be played with other brass instruments in B and E, but there is no evidence that the instrument was ever used in brass bands. Similar instruments were made by several other makers, most notably Rudall, Carte & Co., whose ‘bell-forward’ model was called the ‘vocal horn’ (Boosey had registered the ballad horn name). Such instruments were very popular and many examples survive.

The Distin and Boosey instruments are very easy blowing and remarkably in tune, even with non-compensating valves. Their tone lies somewhere between that of the french horn and that of the baritone of the brass band, soft and flexible, mellow and lyrical. The last ballad horns were made in the mid-1920s, but their use was revived in the late 20th century in small ensembles of 19th-century brass instruments. Only a single piece published for the instrument has so far come to light: the Fantaisie originale (London, 1876) by Carnaud the younger, specified for euphonium, bassoon or ballad horn, with piano. An Instruction Book for the Concert or Vocal Horn by G. Tamplini was published c1882.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Webb: ‘Notes on the Ballad Horn’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 57–61

JOHN WEBB

Ballad opera.

A distinctively English form in which spoken dialogue alternates with songs set to traditional or popular melodies and sung by the actors themselves. A vogue for the form was sparked by the enormous popularity of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (January 1728) but faded out by the mid-1730s. Some 80 such works were written in these years, but only a handful remained in the repertory. The genre was invented by Gay as a complex vehicle for both harsh and subtle satire; for most of his successors it quickly became little more than a way of padding out farces with popular music.

1. Terminology.

3. Successors.

CURTIS PRICE, ROBERT D. HUME

1. Terminology.

The term ‘ballad opera’ is a misnomer. The works so described are plays (almost always comic, usually farcical) into which a variety of songs have been worked. Fewer than half the songs are actually popular ballads: the sources of the music vary widely, ranging from D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy to arias from Handel’s operas and movements of Italian concertos. Sources have been found in The English Dancing Master (1651 and its derivatives), traditional favourites such as Lilliburlero and Tweedside, and most of the popular composers of the time. Among the acknowledged sources are Thomas Arne, Giovanni Bononcini, Henry Carey, Corelli, Francesco Gasparini, Francesco Geminiani, J.B. Grano, Leveridge and Pepusch; among those identified by later scholars are Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Giovanni Battista Draghi, John Eccles, Galliard, J.F. Lampe, Locke, Henry Purcell and Weldon. In every instance, however, the music is fitted with new words, and the songs are integrated into the dramatic structure of the play, not simply interpolated as variety or entr’acte entertainment.

2. Origins, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’.

The sudden appearance of ballad opera in 1728 remains one of the mysteries of 18th-century theatre history. Late 17th-century English plays were heavily laden with music, and many works included integral songs sung by the actors themselves. But these roles were confined to a few specialists, such as Thomas Doggett and Anne Bracegirdle, and the music was freshly written by mainstream composers. Gay’s innovation was twofold: to have all the characters sing as much as they speak, and to use tunes well known to everyone. Such generic precursors as can be found are surprisingly remote in both date and kind – Thomas Duffett’s musical travesties of the 1670s and Richard Estcourt’s musical farce Prunella (1708), a crude satire on Giovanni Bononcini’s Italian opera Camilla (London première, 1706). Whether Gay was familiar with any of these works is uncertain. He may have known contemporaneous plays of the Théâtre Italien and the Théâtres de la Foire in Paris, which included popular tunes fitted with new verses. The immediate inspiration for The Beggar’s Opera seems to have been provided by Jonathan Swift, who suggested that Gay write ‘a Newgate [prison] Pastoral, among the Whores and Thieves there’. None of this detracts from Gay’s originality, for The Beggar’s Opera was radically new: ‘instead of cardboard heroes of antiquity, Gay offered very real modern Londoners; instead of noble sentiments, every crime in the calendar’ (Fiske). Today The Beggar’s Opera is usually performed as a charming period piece, but in 1728 it provoked denunciations for incitement to immorality. More to the point, it confronted the audience with an ironic exaltation of criminals and prostitutes that was in radical contrast to the usual decorum of the 18th-century theatre. This was an innovation in which Gay was not followed by his successors.

As Gay conceived it, ballad opera is a fast-moving satirical drama of low-life characters in which the actors frequently break into song. The Beggar’s Opera contains 69 songs; they are rarely separated by more than a page of spoken dialogue. The familiarity of the music renders it rich in extra-textual references which could either enhance the emotional impact of the dramatic situation or (more often) render it delightfully preposterous. Gay’s snide incongruities between his new words and the old ones are a particular pleasure of the piece. For example, in Act 1 scene ix, Peachum’s rather lame attack on the legal profession, ‘A fox may steal your hens, sir’, was set to Eccles’s ‘A soldier and a sailor’ (from Congreve’s Love for Love), whose notoriously rude original verses would have added an unspoken barb to Gay’s message. By no means all the songs in ballad operas were satirical; for sentimental scenes, Gay often chose similarly sentimental music. Many of his less gifted imitators were insensitive to musical reference and simply searched through the popular collections, especially the volumes of Scotch airs, for any tune that would suit a particular verse, regardless of the character of the music itself.

The Beggar’s Opera has often been said to be a savage satire on Italian opera as Handel was producing it at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in the 1720s; it has even been credited with the demise of the Royal Academy of Music in 1728. Neither claim is true. Gay certainly satirized some of the conventions of opera seria and its squabbling performers, but he was by no means hostile to Handel, and the troubles of the Italian opera were not caused by competition from popular English fare. Nonetheless, Gay’s allusions probably tickled opera fanciers. In the introduction to The Beggar’s Opera, the Beggar clearly alludes to the rivalry between the sopranos Faustina and Cuzzoni, for whom Handel in Alessandro (1726) had written parts of almost exactly equal weight. Gay’s improbable happy ending is also a parody of the perfunctory lieto fine of Italian opera. But not all reference was satirical. Macheath’s brilliantly dramatic soliloquy in ‘the Condemn’d Hold’ (Act 3 scene xiii), an unbroken chain of ten airs or snatches of tunes, while ultimately modelled on the mad-song concatenations of Purcell or Eccles, is remarkably similar in style to some of Handel’s big accompanied recitatives and uncannily anticipates the mad scene in Orlando (1733).

The Beggar’s Opera was originally produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by John Rich after it was refused at Drury Lane. In its first partial season it ran for 62 performances, a total far surpassing any play in the recorded history of the London theatre. As early as summer 1728 it was pirated at the Little Haymarket, and the rival Drury Lane company naturally hastened to commission and produce ballad operas. At first these were, like Gay’s original, ambitious three-act ‘mainpieces’: Charles Johnson’s The Village Opera (Drury Lane, 1729 – ultimately the basis for Isaac Bickerstaff’s pasticcio comic opera, Love in a Village, 1762), Ebenezer Forrest’s Momus Turn’d Fabulist (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1729), James Ralph’s The Fashionable Lady, or Harlequin’s Opera (Goodman’s Fields, 1730), Joseph Mitchell’s Highland Fair and The Jovial Crew (both Drury Lane, 1731). None of these expensive experiments entered the repertory. Polly, Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain in December 1728: Sir Robert Walpole did not fancy having himself impersonated as a pirate who meets a richly deserved end on the gallows and kept it off the boards, although Gay made a small fortune by publishing this rather heavy-handed satire.

3. Successors.

An enormous variety of ballad operas were produced between 1728 and about 1735. Historical subjects were tried, as in the anonymous Robin Hood (1730) and Walter Aston’s The Restauration of King Charles II (suppressed in 1732 on suspicion of Jacobite implications). John Mottley and Thomas Cooke’s Penelope (Little Haymarket, 1728) is a delightful little classical spoof: Sergeant Ulysses, who went off to Marlborough’s wars, is now living with Circe in Rotterdam, drinking gin; his faithful wife Penelope keeps a London pub and finds herself courted by the local tinker, tailor and butcher. Another such satire is John Breval’s The Rape of Helen (1733). The best known of this ‘classical’ group is Gay’s posthumous Achilles (1733), a rather sodden reprise of the hero-in-petticoats story. Gay never came close to recapturing the charm and bite of his first effort.

With the exception of The Beggar’s Opera, ballad operas which entered the repertory were all afterpieces, including some which started out as full-length mainpieces. Colley Cibber’s Love in a Riddle (Drury Lane, 1729) was probably the victim of audience hostility to the author; cut down as Damon and Phillida, and produced anonymously at the Little Haymarket the same year, it was long popular. It is a good example of the form’s penchant for sentimentalized country low-life and improbable romance plots. Charles Coffey’s The Devil to Pay (1731) had a disastrous first night in the off season; the songs were cut from 48 to 16 by Theophilus Cibber and the piece became one of the century’s most enduring entertainments. Ballad operas of the early 1730s could be as chastely pastoral and moral as George Lillo’s Sylvia (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1730) or as essentially lower-class sentimental as Carey’s The Honest Yorkshireman (Little Haymarket, 1735), but most tend towards the farcical.

The most important practitioner of ballad opera after Gay was Henry Fielding, now remembered largely as a novelist (Tom Jones). Yet Fielding was the foremost English dramatist of his time, and among his 30 plays are about ten that can be plausibly classified as ballad opera, though they vary considerably in the amount of music employed. Fielding’s first attempt at the form was The Author’s Farce (Little Haymarket, 1730, radically revised in 1734), a boisterous spoof on Grub Street life and a brazen attack on theatre managers at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The Welsh Opera (Little Haymarket, 1731) is an impudent political allegory that helped get the theatre suppressed: Fielding exhibits King George II, Queen Caroline, the Prince of Wales, Walpole and Pulteney as master, mistress, not-so-hopeful heir and principal servants in the disorganized household of Squire Ap-Shinken, an amiable Welshman whose only wish is peace and quiet in which to smoke and drink. Fielding expanded the work as The Grub-Street Opera (a much more dangerous satire), but the authorities closed the Little Haymarket and appear to have bribed Fielding to withdraw the play, although it received a pirate printing. Don Quixote in England (written 1728; staged at Drury Lane, 1734) was a failure, a scrappy farce with incidental music. Deborah, or A Wife for you All (Drury Lane, March 1733) survived just one night and was not printed. It appears to have been a satire on Handel’s oratorio Deborah.

Several of Fielding’s most lastingly successful plays were part of the series of ballad-opera farces concocted for the popular singer-actress Kitty Clive at Drury Lane: The Lottery (1732), The Mock Doctor (1732), The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), An Old Man Taught Wisdom (1735, usually performed as The Virgin Unmask’d), Eurydice (1737) and Miss Lucy in Town (1742). Except for the last two, all remained theatrical staples throughout the 18th century. The Lottery and The Intriguing Chambermaid are lightweight musical farce – the latter adapted from Jean François Regnard’s Le retour imprévu (1700), turning the clever valet into the maid Lettice as a vehicle for Clive. The Mock Doctor is a free translation of Molière with just nine songs worked in. The Virgin Unmask’d exemplifies Fielding’s comic skills: Old Goodwill decides to marry off his silly 15-year-old daughter; she listens to proposals from five boobies (an apothecary, a dancing-master, an Oxford student, a singing-master and a lawyer), accepts three of them – and then elopes with a footman whose fine clothes and elegant coiffure have gone to her head. The work offers more ridicule than satire, and Fielding quickly reduced his original 20 songs to 12. It was designed solely to display the talents of Kitty Clive, and both she and her successors found that it worked to perfection.

Fielding’s most interesting and ambitious ballad operas are his last two, both of which burlesque Italian opera. Unfortunately the music is lost and the arrangers are unknown. Eurydice died in one night, ruined by a footmen’s riot at Drury Lane. The piece travesties Orpheus (Stoppelaer) and Eurydice (Clive) as society wastrels from London. Pluto is henpecked; Eurydice tricks Orpheus in order to remain in hell; Orpheus becomes a swipe at Farinelli, the reigning castrato star of the Opera of the Nobility. Nine airs and a ‘Grand Dance’ and ‘Chorus’ are included, the airs preceded by ‘Recitativo’ in English. Miss Lucy in Town is a sequel to The Virgin Unmask’d. Lord Bawble satirizes Lord Middlesex as director of the opera. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that ‘Mrs Clive mimics the Muscovita [Lord Middlesex’s mistress] admirably, and Beard Amorevoli intolerably’. The piece proved quite popular for a season.

Ballad opera was short-lived. The Beggar’s Opera proved that there was a large, untapped audience in London, and contributed to the establishment of Goodman’s Fields Theatre, the increasing use of the Little Haymarket, and the construction of Covent Garden in 1732. Among Gay’s successors only Fielding really understood how to use the form to good advantage in several sorts of plays, and in the operatic travesties we find him moving into what must have been newly composed pieces that take us into the realm of burletta. A handful of influential ballad operas continued to be performed throughout the rest of the 18th century, but the later burlettas and English operas of Arne, Dibdin, Storace, the Linleys and others, though often including ballad tunes, bear little resemblance to true ballad opera.

One reason for the relatively brief popularity of the original form is that the quality of the musical performances cannot have been very high. Most of the actors were not trained singers, although the demands of the genre helped to produce a new generation of actors who possessed the necessary musical skills. The extent to which the singers were accompanied is unknown. The arrangements provided by Pepusch, Carey and Seedo are often crude in the extreme, even eschewing the original (and easily obtainable) basses of the pieces they were arranging. Nor was much care taken to preserve the integrity of ‘composed’ melodies of Purcell, Handel and others. Nevertheless, the theatres which produced ballad operas maintained fairly large orchestras (a dozen or so, mostly strings), and paylists show that the instrumentalists attended every night. Given the presence of the orchestra, we must presume that it was used.

Only The Beggar’s Opera is now performed, and just a handful of other ballad operas retain even much historical interest. The form is important, however, for its contribution to the musicalization of the British theatre which is one of its most conspicuous features in the second half of the 18th century.

(6) Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FiskeETM

NicollH

W.B. Squire: ‘An Index of Tunes in the Ballad Operas’, MA, ii (1910–11), 1–17

F. Kidson: The Beggar’s Opera: its Predecessors and Successors (Cambridge, 1922/R)

W.E. Schultz: Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: its Content, History, & Influence (New Haven, CT, 1923/R)

E.McA. Gagey: Ballad Opera (New York, 1937/R)

W.H. Rubsamen: ‘The Ballad Burlesques and Extravaganzas’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 551–61

E.V. Roberts: ‘Eighteenth-Century Ballad Opera: the Contribution of Henry Fielding’, Drama Survey, i (1961–2), 77–85

E.V. Roberts: ‘Mr Seedo’s London Career and his Work with Henry Fielding’, Philological Quarterly, xlv (1966), 179–90

H. Moss: Ballad-Opera Songs: a Record of the Ideas Set to Music, 1728–1733 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1970)

L.J. Morrissey: ‘Henry Fielding and the Ballad Opera’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, iv (1971), 386–402

W.H. Rubsamen, ed.: The Ballad Opera: a Collection of 171 Original Texts of Musical Plays Printed in Photo-Facsimile (New York, 1974)

R.D. Hume: Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford, 1988)

Ballantine, Edward

(b Oberlin, OH, 6 Aug 1886; d Oak Bluffs, MA, 2 July 1971). American composer. He studied at Harvard University (BA 1907) with Walter Spalding and Frederick Converse, then went to Berlin, where he was a student of Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Ganz and Philippe Rüfer (1907–9). In 1912 he was appointed to the music faculty of Harvard, and remained there until his retirement in 1947. His music, cast in a post-Romantic, tonal and accessible style, is often marked by humour, occasionally by a satirical eclecticism. These traits are most apparent in his best-known pieces, two sets of piano variations on Mary had a little lamb (1924, 1943), in which each variation is in the style of a different composer, and in the Four Lyrical Satires for voice and piano.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: The Lotus Eaters (masque, D.W. Streeter), 1907

Orch: Prelude to ‘The Delectable Forest’, 1914; The Eve of St Agnes, 1917; By a Lake in Russia, 1922; From the Garden of Hellas, 1923

Chbr and solo inst: Morning, pf, 1913; Sonata, vn, pf; Mary Had a Little Lamb, variations, pf: ser. 1, 1924; ser. 2, 1943

Vocal: Retrospect (Ballantine), 1913; Four Lyrical Satires, v, pf; Song for a Future (T. Spencer), mixed vv (New York, 1945); Lake Werna’s Water (E. Bronte), SSAA (New York, 1946); other choruses and songs

Principal publishers: O. Ditson, G. Schirmer, A.P. Schmidt

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Arzuni: ‘An American Jester’, Keyboard Classics, xiv/5 (1994), 54–6

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK/MICHAEL MECKNA

Ballard.

French family of music printers and composers. They were important for over 200 years.

(1) Robert Ballard (i)

(2) Pierre Ballard

(3) Robert Ballard (ii)

(4) Robert Ballard (iii)

(5) Christophe Ballard

(7) Christophe-Jean-François Ballard

SAMUEL F. POGUE/ JONATHAN LE COCQ (1, 2, 4–7), MONIQUE ROLLIN/DAVID LEDBETTER (3)

(1) Robert Ballard (i)

(b Montreuil-sur-Mer, ?1525–30; d Paris, bur. 8 July 1588). The son of Michel Ballard and Colassé Le Roy, he was the founder, along with his cousin Adrian Le Roy, of the printing firm of Le Roy & Ballard. The first document showing their association, by which Le Roy and Ballard received a privilege for printing music from Henri II, is dated 14 August 1551. On 16 February 1553 the partners received the title of music printers to the king (the title held by Attaingnant until his death in late 1551 or 1552). It was reaffirmed in 1568 under Charles IX and in 1594 under Henri IV and was to continue for other members of the family until the mid-18th century.

On 30 October 1559 Ballard married Lucrèce Dugué, who brought him and the firm valuable connections with the musical and political life of the court. Her father Jean Dugué was organist to the king, and Dugué’s nephew Pierre was attached to the retinue of the king’s brother. Through her mother Perrette Edinthon she was related to Charles Edinthon, lutenist in the king’s chamber from 1542 to 1572, and to Jacques Edinthon, lutenist and valet de chambre to the king from 1575 to 1590. Since Le Roy also had important connections with court circles and even with Charles IX himself, the influence of the firm at court was assured.

Le Roy, a composer and lutenist of note, was the artistic director of the firm while Ballard seems to have assumed the role of business manager. The two partners worked well together; most transactions, such as the buying of considerable properties outside Paris or contracting for shop repairs, were undertaken jointly. There was nevertheless some independence; for example, one of the rare non-musical works, Le siège et prinse de Thionville (1558), bears the name of Ballard alone.

After a three-year break in the firm’s production on Ballard’s death, Le Roy took up printing again in association with Ballard’s widow Lucrèce until his own death in 1598. Le Roy, whose wife had died some time before 1570, was childless, and he left all his share of the property to the widow and heirs of Ballard. Lucrèce carried on the business after Le Roy’s death with her son Pierre until 1607, when Pierre began publishing in his own name. Lucrèce was still living in 1611, when a document shows her to have been engaged in settling Le Roy’s legacy for her six children.

Its important connections at court, the knowledgeable choice of repertory, the skill in printing and the beauty of its editions gave Le Roy & Ballard a virtual monopoly on music printing in France during the second half of the 16th century. Other printers in Lyons and Paris (including Fezandat, Gorlier and Granjon) issued only occasional musical editions. The firm’s most important rival was Nicolas Du Chemin of Paris, who had begun to print music in 1549. Du Chemin was not a musician himself and depended on others to choose and edit the music that he printed. After his editor Claude Goudimel resigned in 1555, he was not able to maintain the brilliant pace established earlier. By about 1560 he was no longer a serious rival.

Between 1551 and 1598 Le Roy & Ballard published more than 3000 works in about 350 known editions. Tablature books for lute and guitar were prominent in the first few years of the firm’s production, where Le Roy’s expertise was undoubtedly a major asset. But secular vocal music accounts for most of his output, with some 1500 chansons printed and reprinted in a series of 25 Livres de chansons between 1552 and 1585 as well as in other collections, and a further 500 or so strophic airs (de cour) increasingly supplanting the chanson in more than 20 prints between 1571 and 1598. About 650 motets and 500 psalms and other sacred songs appeared in various collections from 1555 onwards, with 52 masses concentrated especially in the years 1557 to 1559. There were 17 books of instrumental music for lute, cistre, mandora and guitar, including four instruction books for these instruments by Le Roy; they contain music by Le Roy himself (see illustration), Pierre Brunet, Gregor Brayssing of Augsburg, Alberto da Ripa and Bálint Bakfark. Two treatises on music theory were published, one in 1582 written by Jean Yssandon and one in 1583 by Le Roy.

The firm also helped to disseminate Italian music in France, with over 200 Italian and some Spanish pieces mostly printed in the last two decades of the century. Many of these were by Lassus, who was a friend of Le Roy, and was the composer most frequently published by the firm. Le Roy & Ballard played an important part in disseminating his newest works in France and in Europe generally. Others frequently represented in the firm’s output were Arcadelt, Certon, Costeley, Goudimel, Janequin, Le Jeune, Maillard and Claudin de Sermisy.

The typographical material was particularly fine. The elaborate woodcut borders on the title-pages, the printer’s marks and the ‘lettres grises’ or historiated woodcut initials in several sizes in the style of Jean Cousin are superb examples of French Renaissance graphic art. At least three sets of punches of music were made by the famous typecutter Guillaume Le Bé (i). Autograph notes of Le Bé cite in 1554–5 a ‘musique grosse’, in 1559 a ‘petite tablature d’épinette sur la moyenne musique’ and at an unspecified date in the 1550s a ‘grosse tablature d’épinette pour imprimer à deux foys’ sold to Le Roy & Ballard (for illustration see Gando). One of the sets of punches for spinet tablature was a sample, according to the notes. No book of spinet music by Le Roy & Ballard is extant, nor is there any mention of any in contemporary sources. (4) Christophe Ballard used the small set in 1678 to print a book of Airs à 2 et 3 parties de feu monsieur le Camus, so Le Bé’s punches did not go to waste. Robert Granjon cut a set of type for lute tablature for some books he published himself in 1551 and 1552, and then it became the property of Le Roy & Ballard. Both the music types and the ‘lettres grises’ continued in use unchanged past the mid-18th century.

(2) Pierre Ballard

(b Paris, ?1575–80; d Paris, 4 Oct 1639). Music printer, son of (1) Robert Ballard (i). In partnership with his mother he carried on the business after the death of Le Roy. On 25 March 1607 letters-patent from Henri IV officially made him music printer to the king, and henceforth the editions appeared under his name alone. The privilege was renewed by Louis XIII in 1611 and 1633.

An example of one of the many challenges to the power of the house of Ballard over the years occurred after the musician Nicolas Métru had received a privilege to print music in 1633. Pierre Ballard brought a suit to stop him, and in 1635 the court removed Métru’s privilege in exchange for a commitment from Ballard to publish Métru's compositions. On 29 April 1637 Louis XIII issued a decree praising the beauty of the notes and characters of Ballard, which ‘far surpass those made in foreign kingdoms and provinces’, confirmed the title of royal music printer and stated that no further privileges to print music would be given without Ballard's consent. According to Fournier, Ballard must have granted his consent at times, because there is a record of his having sold matrices of music type called Cicero to Guillaume Le Bé (ii).

Pierre Ballard concentrated on printing airs de cour and similar small-scale vocal genres (such as psalms or, from 1627, chansons pour dancer et pour boire) by composers associated with the royal court such as Guédron and Antoine (de) Boësset, almost to the exclusion of other forms. He largely ignored instrumental music, such as that of the flourishing school of French lute composers, though he did publish collections by his brother, Robert Ballard (ii), and organ music by Titelouze, as well as providing the music examples for Mersenne's Harmonie universelle in 1636–7.

He had eight or ten children; on 8 January 1639 he officially named his son Robert as his heir, with a royal guarantee that the firm's monopoly of music printing would continue. An inventory dated 30 November 1639, mentioned by Gando in 1766, has not been found.

(3) Robert Ballard (ii)

(b ?Paris, c1575; d after 1649). Lutenist and composer, son of (1) Robert Ballard (i). He apparently never took part in the family business. His father's partner Adrian Le Roy was probably his first lute teacher; after Le Roy's death in 1598 he became a lutenist of some distinction, and by 1600 he was teaching the lute to his landlord's son in lieu of part of his rent. In 1611 he published his first lutebook, and in the following year the regent, Maria de' Medici, employed him as her maître de luth; in this capacity he became responsible in September 1612 for the tuition of the young King Louis XIII. In 1615 he was still in Maria's service and performed on the lute in the Ballet de Madame; but in the retrenchments of court expenditure of 1618 his salaried position was terminated and he was henceforth paid only as required. Under this arrangement he continued for 16 years to bear the title ‘musicien ordinaire du roi’ and, although a notarial act of 1640 mentioned him only as ‘joueur de luth’, he was again designated ‘musicien du Roy’ in 1650. After that date nothing further is known of him.

Most of his works are ballet music arranged for lute and, apart from their musical value, are important as the only extant portions of several court ballets. His sequences of two or three chants in the ballets of 1611 may be seen as early moves in the direction of suite formation, and employ a number of technical effects later to be particularly associated with the sarabande. Partly because he was in a position to ensure that his music survived in a form of which he approved, Robert Ballard may be seen as the outstanding French lutenist at the end of the Renaissance tradition, before the onset of the new style associated with René Mesangeau in the 1620s. His works are almost all in vieil ton tuning, with the robust four-part texture and clearly defined melodic contours of dance music. But, particularly in the doubles of his courantes, he exploits the low tessitura and unpredictably broken texture of the style brisé. His works are the defining model for this phase of French lute music, and the seven pieces published by his brother Pierre in the Tablature de luth de differents autheurs (Paris, 1631), among works by younger contemporaries, have a rather old-fashioned appearance in spite of being in a new tuning.

WORKS

all for lute

[Premier livre de luth] (Paris, 1611/R) [lacks title-page], ed. A. Souris, S. Spycket and M. Rollin (Paris, 1963, 2/1976)

Diverses piesces mises sur le luth (Paris, 1614), ed. A. Souris and others, Deuxième livre (1614), et pièces diverses (Paris, 1964, 2/1976)

Some works in 1603¹⁵, 1610²³, 1631⁶, L. de Moy: Le petit bouquet de frise orientale (n.p., 1631), M. Mersenne: Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636–7/R; Eng. trans., 1957)

Other works, CZ-Pu, D-Bsb, Ngm, W, GB-Cfm

(4) Robert Ballard (iii)

(b Paris, c1610; d Paris, before May 1673). Music printer, son of (2) Pierre Ballard. He received a privilege from Louis XIII dated 24 October 1639 naming him sole printer to the king for music, the first of the Ballards to have exclusivity specified in the title. Independently of his father he had started in business as a bookseller but apparently was not successful, since a judgment of 16 April 1638 allowed him to postpone paying his creditors for three years. The inheritance from his father immediately relieved him of his financial troubles, and the printing business continued to thrive under his direction.

Early in 1639 the two Jacques de Senlecque, father and son, received a privilege for a new method of printing plainsong. Like his father, Robert continued to guard the firm's music printing monopoly: on 11 February 1640 Robert Ballard brought a suit to prevent them from printing, but the Parlement ruled against him. Robert took the matter up with the king’s council, since he did not consider himself, as a member of the king’s household, bound by the decisions of the Parlement. A clear decision was never reached, possibly because Louis XIII died in 1643, leaving France to be governed by a regency for the five-year-old Louis XIV. When the younger de Senlecque died in 1660 Ballard offered to buy his punches and matrices from his widow, but the price she set was too high.

Ballard continued to favour secular vocal forms. He abandoned songs with tablature accompaniments after 1643, noting that they did not sell, and published the first French collection of songs with an exclusively continuo accompaniment, Constantijn Huygen's Pathodia sacra of 1647. He continued his father's series of chansons pour dancer et pour boire, and in 1658 initiated a series of Livres d'airs de differents autheurs à deux parties that continued for 30 years. He also expanded the firm's publication of masses, motets and music treatises. Composers prominent in his collections include Henri Du Mont, Bénigne de Bacilly, Mace, Parisot and Lully.

In 1664 the business maintained three presses and engaged three helpers. In 1666 Robert brought in his eldest son (5) Christophe Ballard as helper. On Robert's death the composer Estienne Droüaux wrote a five-voice De profundis and a six-voice Miserere in his memory.

(5) Christophe Ballard

(b Paris, 12 April 1641; d Paris, before 28 May 1715). Music printer, eldest son of (4) Robert Ballard (iii). On 11 May 1673 he was named sole music printer to the king. In anticipation of his own death his father had obtained letters-patent from the king dated 25 October 1672 to assure Christophe’s succeeding him in the title. Like his father, he had started independently in business as a bookseller, besides working as a helper in the family firm. His only brother Pierre (ii) (d 1703) also printed music for some time, but a court edict of 8 August 1696 ordered him to turn over his supply of music type to Christophe and denied Pierre or his widow the right to print any more music.

A highpoint in the firm’s success, equal to that of the 16th century, was reached in about 1700, when the house maintained four presses and employed nine helpers and two apprentices. Almost all the music of the time was printed by Ballard, including the works of Lully, Brossard, Campra, Charpentier, Collasse, the Couperins, Dandrieu, Hotteterre, Lalande, Lebègue, Marais and Montéclair. The Airs appeared in a new form as Airs sérieux et à boire with basso continuo, issued monthly up to 1715, and Christophe revised some of the firm's earlier chansons pour dancer et pour boire as a series of brunetes, adapted for contemporary tastes. For the first time since the 16th century the Ballard firm also began to print Italian songs in a series of Recueils des meilleurs airs italiens between 1699 and 1708.

The firm had to undergo many expensive suits in this period, among them one against Lully’s son, who had tried to reprint his father’s music without Ballard’s permission. But a more serious threat was the new method of printing music from engraved plates which had come increasingly into use since the last half of the 17th century. The Ballards continued to use the old movable type method invented in the 16th century and the antiquated lozenge-shaped notes that had been cast for Le Roy & Ballard in the 1550s, rarely investing in any new typographical material. In 1713 Leclair and several other musicians obtained privileges to print music from engraved plates. Ballard entered a suit against them but lost; he was considered to have the exclusive right only to print music in the old method.

(6) Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard

(b Paris, c1663; d Paris, May 1750). Music printer, son of (5) Christophe Ballard and Marie Lamielle. He was established as a master printer and bookseller in the rue Frementelle on 6 June 1694. On his father’s death he moved to the Ballard shop in the rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais and received his father's title as royal printer for music. He continued the monthly Airs sérieux et à boire and flooded the market with various ‘Tendresses’, ‘Parodies’, ‘Amusements’ and ‘Menuets chantants’, in an attempt to capture a wider audience. He produced monumental editions of the works of Lully, Destouches and Campra and was the publisher of Rameau’s Traité (1722) and Nouveau système (1726). During his later years, as more and more engraved music was issued by others, the prestige and influence of the house of Ballard began to decline.

(7) Christophe-Jean-François Ballard

(b Paris, c1701; d Paris, 5 Sept 1765). Music printer, son of (6) Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard. He received the royal privilege on the death of his father. He had been active as a bookseller since 1741 and as a printer since 1742. With him the fame and success of the firm ended. A police report described him as ‘lazy and untalented’. In the 18th century printing privileges had become less a matter of royal approval than a means to add to the royal treasury. In 1762 a royal decree restricted their period to 15 years and in 1790 they were abolished. The Ballards, equipped with increasingly meaningless privileges, still using lozenge-shaped notes and old-fashioned initial letters from the 16th century, were unwilling or unable to change with the times. A report from a Parlement commission in 1764 said ‘the public has been disgusted for a long time with the music of Sieur Ballard’.

After his death, his widow and then his son Pierre-Robert-Christophe (d 23 Nov 1812) carried on after a fashion, frequently moving to new locations. In 1800 Ballard was ‘printer to the theatres of the Republic and of the arts’. The last of the Ballards was Christophe-Jean-François’ grandson, Christophe-Jean-François Ballard (ii) (d 16 Oct 1825).

Over the years the Ballard family received many of the royal favours of the ancien régime, its members serving as syndics of the booksellers’ guild, royal councillors, commercial judges, administrators of charity hospitals and commissioners of artillery. As a special perquisite the Ballard servants were allowed to wear royal livery. Until the declining years of the firm the care in music printing and the beauty of the results were universally praised. The music books of the house of Ballard constitute in themselves a history of French musical taste over 200 years and with its tight control on the publication of music, the firm played no small part in regulating that taste.

3. 20th century: classical.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

MGG1 (V. Fédorov)

P.-S. Fournier: Traité historique et critique sur l’origine et les progrès des caractères de fonte pour l’impression de la musique (Berne, 1765/R)

N. and F. Gando: Observations sur le Traité historique et critique de Monsieur Fournier le Jeune (Paris, 1766/R)

M. Brenet: ‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, d’après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d’Adrian le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955); suppl., RdM, xl (1957), 166–72

D. Heartz: ‘Parisian Music Publishing under Henry II’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 448–67

M. Jurgens: Documents du minutier central concernant l’histoire de la musique 1600–1650, i (Paris, 1967), 853–5

J. Cain and P. Marot: Imprimeurs et libraires parisiens du XVIe siècle, d’après les manuscrits de Ph. Renouard, ii (Paris, 1969)

D. Heartz: Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley, 1969)

E. Poole: The Sources for Christophe Ballard's ‘Brunetes ou petits airs tendres’ and the Tradition of Seventeenth-Century French Song (diss., U. of Victoria, BC, 1984)

D. Ledbetter: Harpsichord and Lute Music in 17th-Century France (London, 1987)

G. Durosoir: L'air de cour en France 1571–1665 (Liège, 1991)

C. Massip: ‘Airs français et italiens dans l'édition française (1643–1710)’, RdM, lxxvii (1991), 179–85

§3 based on MGG1 (xv, 438–9) by permission of Bärenreiter

Ballard, Louis W(ayne) [Honganózhe]

(b Devil's Promenade, OK, 8 July 1931). American composer and music educator of Cherokee Indian, Quapaw Indian, French and Scottish descent. (Honganózhe is a Quapaw name that means ‘Grand Eagle’.) He studied at the University of Tulsa (BME 1954, BFA 1954, MM 1962) and had private composition lessons with Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Surinach and Labunski. After teaching in Oklahoma (1954–8), he was appointed director of music and performing arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (1962–9). Subsequently, as music programme director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1969–79), he developed a bicultural music education programme that earned him a Distinguished Service Award from the Central Office of Education and a citation in the Congressional Record (1975). Ballard has held numerous university appointments and has appeared internationally as a guest conductor and lecturer. Among his honours are National Indian Achievement Awards (1972, 1973, 1976), an honorary doctorate from the College of Santa Fe (1973), the first MacDowell Award for American chamber music (1969), and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (1969), Ford Foundation (1970) and NEA (1967, 1973, 1977, 1982, 1989). In 1997 he was awarded a Lifetime Musical Achievement Award by First Americans in the Arts.

Ballard's compositional style fuses 20th-century techniques with diverse Amerindian influences. An intimate knowledge of Amerindian culture enables him to create innovative works in many genres that sensitively and respectfully recreate tribal worlds. His compositions have been performed by such prominent organizations as the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Los Angeles PO, the Tulsa PO and the Harkness Ballet. In 1989 he became the first American composer to have an entire programme dedicated to his music in the newly constructed Beethovenhalle, Bonn.

WORKS

dramatic

Jijogweh, the WitchWater Gull (ballet, after Iroquois Indian myth), 1960, unperf.

Koshare (ballet, choreog. D. Sadler), 1964, Barcelona, 17 May 1966

The Four Moons (ballet, choreog. G. Skibine, R. Jasinski, M. Terekhov, R. Hightower), 1967, Tulsa, OK, 28 Oct 1967

Sacred Ground (film score, dir. R. Jacobs), 1976

The Maid of the Mist and the Thunderbeings (dance score, choreog. R. Trujillo, L. Smith), 1991, Buffalo, NY, 18 Oct 1991

Moontide (The Man who Hated Money) (rock op, 1, L. Ballard), 1992, Norden, 11 April 1994

instrumental

Orch: Fantasy Aborigine no.1 ‘Sipapu’, 1963; Scenes from Indian Life, 1963, arr. concert band, 1970; Why the Duck has a Short Tail (Ballard, R. Dore), nar, orch, 1968; Devil's Promenade, 1972; Incident at Wounded Knee, chbr orch, opt. perc, 1973; Ishi (America's Last Civilized Man), 1975; Fantasy Aborigine: no.2 ‘Tsiyako’, str, 1976, no.3 ‘Kokopelli’, 1977, no.4 ‘Xactee'oyan, Companion of Talking God’, 1982, no.5 ‘Naniwaya’, 1988, no.6 ‘Niagara’, 1991; Feast Day, sketch, 1994

Band: Siouxiana, ww, 1973; Wamus 77 (Indian Heroes, History and Heritage), marching band, 1977; Nighthawk Keetowah Dances, 1978; Ocotillo Festival Ov., 1978

Chbr: Str Trio, 1959; Perc Ego, perc, pf, 1962; Rhapsody, 4 bn, 1963; Cacega Ayuwipi, 5 perc, 1969; Katcina Dances, vc, pf, 1969; Ritmo Indio, ww qnt, 1969; Desert Trilogy, 8 insts, 1970; Midwinter Fires, Amerindian fl, cl, pf, 1970; Pan Indian Dance Rhythms, 4 perc, 1970; Rio Grande Sonata, vn, pf, 1976; Music for the Earth and the Sky, amp cel, 5 perc, 1986; Bellum atramentum, ob, vn, vc, 1988; Capientur a nullo, va, vc, db, 1988; The Lonely Sentinel, fl, ob, tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1993; The Fire Moon, str qt, 1997

Solo: 4 American Indian Pf Preludes, 1963; A City of Silver, pf, 1981; A City of Fire, pf, 1984; A City of Light, pf, 1986; Awakening of Love, org, 1992; Quetzalcoatl's Coattails, gui, 1992

vocal

Choral: Espiritu di Santiago (Ballard), SATB, fl, gui, pf, 1963; The Gods will Hear (L.H. New), SATB, (perc, pf)/orch, 1964; Mojave Bird Dance Song, SATB, 1964; Portrait of Will Rogers (Ballard, W. Rogers), nar, SATB, pf/orch, 1971; Thus Spake Abraham (cant., Ballard), solo vv, SATB, pf, 1977; Dialogue differentia (orat, Ballard), chorus, orch, 1989; 4 American Indian Christian Hymns, SATB, pf, 1990; Live on, Heart of My Nation (Ballard, M.C. Fry), nar, SATB, chbr orch/pf, 1990

Solo: The Spider Rock (J. Miami), T, pf, 1966 [composed under pseud. Joe Miami]; Gado Dajvyadvhneli Jisa (trad.), Bar, pf, 1990; Mi Cinski, Hec'ela T'ankalake K'uniyaye (Ballard), Mez, pf, 1997

editions and teaching materials

The American Indian Sings (Santa Fe, 1970)

Oklahoma Indian Chants for the Classroom (Santa Fe, 1972)

American Indian Music for the Classroom, Canyon C-3001 to 3004 (1973) [incl. teachers’ guide and other materials]

My Music Reaches to the Sky: Native American Indian Instruments (Santa Fe, 1973)

Music of North American Indians (Morristown, NJ, 1975)

Principal publishers: New Southwest, Bourne, Presser

WRITINGS

‘Cultural Differences: a Major Theme in Cultural Enrichment’, Indian Historian, ii/1 (1969), 4–7

‘Put American Indian Music in the Classroom’, Music Educators Journal, lvi/7 (1969–70), 38–44

Native American Music of the Western Hemisphere (Santa Fe, 1974)

‘Toward Another (Musical) Aesthetic’, Minority Voices, i/1 (1977), 29–34

‘Two Ogàxpa Sacred Robes Visit Home’, Public Historian, xviii/4 (1996), 193–7

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Katz, ed.: ‘Louis Ballard: Quapaw/Cherokee Composer’, This Song Remembers: Self Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts (Boston, 1980), 132–8

R. Dore: ‘Louis Ballard: Music for the Earth and the Sky’, Artspace, xii/4 (1988), 25–7

R. Luce: ‘Louis Ballard, Composer’, Santa Fean Magazine (1990), Jan–Feb, 24–5

CHARLOTTE J. FRISBIE

Ballarotti, Francesco

(b Bergamo, 1660; d Bergamo, April 1712). Italian composer. The son of Giuseppe ‘il Manzino’, a violinist and tenor at S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, from 1656, he attended the school of the Misericordia Maggiore free of charge from 1705. On 4 September 1691 he was appointed vicemaestro di cappella of S Maria Maggiore, and on 12 April 1692 maestro, replacing Teodoro Reggiani. He was treated with great respect by the consorzio of the Misericordia Maggiore, who granted him permission to be absent from service in S Maria Maggiore whenever necessary. The news of his death was reported in the resolutions of 16 April 1712.

As a composer, he was often called on to help with the composition of music to be performed in Turin, Milan and Cremona. In 1692 he was invited by the Governor of Lodi to stage two works, and in 1699 he was summoned by the Serenissimo of Modena to compose La caduta dei Decemviri. His moral operetta Il merito fortunato was first performed in honour of Agostino Nani, grande capitano of Bergamo. When the work was printed in the same year, the following sentence appeared below a list of the performers: ‘The defects of the poetry will be less obvious on stage because of the beauty of the music composed by virtue of Sig. Francesco Ballarotti’.

WORKS

stage

Enea in Italia (dramma per musica, 3, G.F. Bussani), Milan, Ducale, 1686, 3 arias I-MOe, pubd lib Bc, collab. C.A. Lonati and P. Magni

Dialogo musicale fra Nettuno e Bergamo, Bergamo, 1688, pubd lib BGc

Il merito fortunato (F. Roncalli), Bergamo, 1691

Ottaviano in Sicilia (dramma per musica, 3), Reggio nell'Emilia, 1692, MOe*

L'Aiace (dramma per musica, 3, P. d'Averara), Milan, Ducale, 1694, US-Cn, collab. Lonati and Magni

Ariovisto [part of Act 3] (dramma per musica, 3, d'Averara), Milan, 1699 [Act 1 by A. Perti, Act 2 and part of Act 3 by Magni]

La caduta dei Decemviri (dramma per musica, 3, S. Stampiglia), Reggio nell'Emilia, Comunità, May 1699

Esione (dramma per musica, 3, d'Averara), Turin, Regio, 1699

Alciade, ovvero L'eroico amore [La violenza d'amore; Act 3] (op tragicomica, 3, M.A. Gasparini), Bergamo, 1709 [Act 1 by F. Gasparini, Act 2 by C.F. Pollarolo]

Il cuor del leone, o sia La stella di prima grandezza (serenata, C. Benaglio), Milan, n.d.

other works

Balletti, arie, gighe, corrente, alemande, sarabande, capricci da camera, 2 vn, vle/spinet, op.1 (Milan, 1681) [1st vn only, and vn of Sonate per camera, a 3, presumably same work, I-Ms]

3 arias in Ariette a voce sola con e senza instrumenti e basso continuo, MOe

1 aria, 1692¹

Arias for Arione, Milan, 1694; Aetna festivo (introduttione di ballo), Milan, 1696

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

A. Geddo: Bergamo e la musica (Bergamo, 1958)

M. Donà: La stampa musicale a Milano fino all'anno 1700 (Florence, 1961)

F. Testi: La musica italiana nel Seicento (Busto Arsizio, 1970–85)

SERGIO LATTES/PAOLA PALERMO

Ballata.

Italian dance-song, and poetic and musical form, in use from the second half of the 13th century until the 15th century and beyond.

1. Etymology and form.

The word, which was synonymous with danza in earlier times, refers to the functional origin of the word ballare (‘to dance’). The first ballata texts survive without music from the second half of the 13th century in the so-called Bolognese Memoriali. Dante mentioned the ballata in De vulgari eloquentia (II, iii.5, 1304–5), stating that, in contrast to the canzone, it demands a singing dancer. The form is also indicative of the dance-song: it originally consisted of a choral refrain (ripresa) and several strophes (stanze) performed by a soloist. Moreover, even in the 13th century the oldest ballate were closely linked with the lauda. The numerous laude-contrafacta of the 14th and 15th centuries are evidence of this link (see Ghisi, 1953). It was in the lauda, and in the period of the dolce stil nuovo, that the development of the ballata into an artistic lyrical form was completed. The texts are love songs and also often moral aphorisms, in which the choral refrain yields to a solo ripresa and the strophes are reduced in length. However, alongside these, popular ballata types survived for a long time (these are still found in Boccaccio and Prudenzani, and are widespread in Quattrocento poetry).

The ballata consists of the following parts: ripresa, two (rarely more) symmetrical piedi or mutazioni, volta (equal in length to the ripresa) and ripresa. The terms ‘piedi’ and ‘volta’ were taken over from the canzone. One of the earliest ballate with music (I-Rvat 215) is given below. This is a three-strophe ballata piccola (i.e. with a one-line ripresa of 11 syllables), and its rhyme scheme is: A (ripresa), BB (two piedi), A (volta), A (ripresa):

Per tropo fede talor se perìgola!
Non è dolor, nè più mortale spàsemo
Come sença falir cader in biàsemo
El ben se tacie e lo mal pur se cìgola.

(Per tropo fede …)

Lasso colui che mai si fidò in fèmena,
Chè l'amor so veneno amaro sèmena,
Onde la morte speso se ne spìgola.
(Per tropo fede …)
Oimè, ch'Amor m'à posto in cotal àrcere
Onde convienne ognor làgreme spàrçere;
Sì che doglia lo mio cor formìgola.
Per tropo fede talor se perìgola!

In manuscripts only the ripresa and the first piede are each notated with music. The text of the second piede and the volta is distributed between the two musical sections (ex.1), or written below the staves as a residuum. The question of whether the ripresa is to be repeated after every strophe or only at the end cannot be answered with certainty. In contrast to the madrigal, changes of time signature within the ballata are rare.

Alongside the ballata piccola 14th-century theorists described the ballata minima (one-line ripresa with seven syllables), the ballata minore (two-line ripresa), the ballata mezzana (three-line ripresa) and the ballata grande (four-line ripresa). In rare cases both piedi of the ballata are provided with musical notation. Even more rarely new music is provided for the volta.

2. History.

Only the texts have reached us from the early history of the ballata. The music was evidently based on oral tradition. With the rise of the ballata to an art form the first monophonic ballate with music appear in a northern Italian manuscript (I-Rvat 215). Another manuscript (I-Fl 87) contains five monophonic ballate by Gherardello da Firenze, five by Lorenzo da Firenze and one monophonic piece by Niccolò da Perugia. The first polyphonic ballate appeared in Florence in the 1360s. It is with this development that the form finally reached artistic stature and from that time onward, especially in Florence, but soon also in the Veneto, it remained in the forefront of interest. Jacopo da Bologna's Nel mio parlar is the only surviving example of a polyphonic ballata from before 1360; however, judging from its text this piece is a lauda. The 141 ballate of Landini (composed between c1365 and 1397) offer a good cross-section of the various types of polyphonic ballate: the earlier examples still have many points in common with the madrigal (both voices with text, melismatic style) and the later examples resemble the French chanson (the upper voice only with text, a tendency towards syllabic style, ouvert and clos, and sometimes identical music at the end of the ripresa and piedi). The frequent occurrence of ballate with a single strophe of text is an indication of the central role of the music. The aphoristic short ballate of Niccolò da Perugia and Andreas de Florentia are characteristic of Florentine bourgeois culture. In northern Italy, along with the madrigal, the ballata was cultivated by Bartolino da Padova, Ciconia and Zacara da Teramo among others. A particular genre using the ballata's form, the siciliana, flourished in the Veneto at the end of the 14th century (see Pirrotta, 1982, 1984). Works by Du Fay and Arnold de Lantins can be reckoned among the last examples of this specifically Italian form. Only a few ballate by Italian composers from the first half of the 15th century have survived. By the time northern composers settled in Italy the ballata had lost its ancient charm and its distinctive characteristics. While ballate that survive without music can be traced until the end of that century and beyond, pre-eminence in the field of Italian song was passing to the frottola and the lauda, both formally related to the ballata.

See also Virelai and Lauda.

EDITIONS

N. Pirrotta, ed.: The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, CMM, viii (1954–64)

L. Schrade, W.T. Marrocco, M. Bent, A. Hallmark, eds.: Italian Secular Music, PMFC, iv–xi (1958–78); xxiv (1985)

THEORETICAL SOURCES

Giovanni del Virgilio: Diaffonus: Epistola III, ed. E. Carrara, Atti e Memorie R. Deputaz. St. Patria per le Romagne, xv (1925), 19–21

Dante Alighieri: De vulgari eloquentia, ed. P.V. Mengaldo (Padua, 1968/R), 156–60

Francesco da Barberino: Documenti d'Amore, ed. F. Egidi I (Rome, 1905–27/R), ii, 260–5, iii, 144–8 [see also O. Antognoni: ‘Le glosse ai Documenti d'Amore di M. Francesco da Barberino’, Giornale di Filologia Romanza, viii (1882), 78–98]

Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, ed. S. Debenedetti in ‘Un trattatello del secolo XIV sopra la poesia musicale’, Studi medievali, ii (1906–7), 59–82; repr. in S. Debenedetti: Il ‘Sollazzo’: contributi alla storia della novella, della poesia musicale e del costume nel Trecento (Turin, 1922), 179–84

Antonio da Tempo: Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis (1332), ed. R. Andrews (Bologna, 1977)

Gidino da Sommacampagna: Trattato dei ritmi volgari (1381–4), ed. G.B. Giuliari (Bologna, 1870/R); ed. G.P. Caprettini: Trattato e arte dei rithimi volgari (Verona, 1993)

F. Baratella: Compendio dell'arte ritmica (1447), A. da Tempo: Delle rime volgari: trattato di Antonio da Tempo … 1332, ed. G. Grion (Bologna, 1869/R), 177–240

Antonii de Tempo ars rithmorum vulgarium, ed. F.A. Gallo: ‘Sulla fortuna di Antonio da Tempo: un quarto volgarizzamento’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, v, ed. A. Ziino (Palermo, 1985), 149–57

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Li Gotti and N. Pirrotta: Il Sacchetti e la tecnica musicale (Florence, 1935)

N. Pirrotta: ‘Lirica monodica trecentesca’, RaM, ix (1936), 317–25; repr. in Poesia e Musica e altri saggi (Florence, 1994), 35–46

A. Caboni, ed.: Antiche rime italiane tratte dai Memoriali bolognesi (Modena, 1941)

F. Ghisi: ‘Strambotti e laude nel travestimento spirituale della poesia musicale del Quattrocento’, CHM, i (1953), 45–78

K. von Fischer: Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento (Berne, 1956), 39–73

W.T. Marrocco: ‘The Ballata: a Metamorphic Form’, AcM, xxxi (1959), 32–7

N. Pirrotta: ‘Ballate e “soni” secondo un grammatico del Trecento’, Saggi e ricerche in memoria di Ettore Li Gotti, iii (Palermo, 1962), 42–54; repr. in Musica tra medioevo e rinascimento (Turin, 1984), 90–102

A. Roncaglia: ‘Nella preistoria della lauda: ballata e strofa zagialesca’, Il movimento dei Disciplinati nel settimo centenario dal suo inizio (Perugia, 1962), 461–75; repr. in La metrica, ed. R. Cremante and M. Pazzaglia (Bologna, 1972), 309–17

F.A. Gallo: ‘Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova all'inizio del Quattrocento, ii: due “siciliane” del Trecento’, AnnM, vii (1964–77), 43–50

N. Pirrotta: ‘On Text Forms from Ciconia to Dufay’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday offering to Gustave Reese ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966), 673–82

A. Ziino: Strutture strofiche nel Laudario di Cortona (Palermo, 1968)

N. Pirrotta: ‘Tradizione orale e tradizione scritta nella musica’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento: Convegno II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 431–41; repr. in Musica tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Turin, 1984), 177–84; Eng. trans. in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 72–9

G. Reaney: ‘The Italian Contribution to the Manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 213’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento: Convegno II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 443–64

G. Corsi: Poesie musicali del Trecento (Bologna, 1970)

N. Pirrotta: ‘New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition’, Words and Music: the Scholar's View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 271–91; repr. in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 51–71

N. Pirrotta: ‘Ricercare e variazioni su O rosa bella’, Studi musicali, i (1972), 59–77; repr. in Musica tra medioevo e rinascimento (Turin, 1984), 195–212; Eng. trans. in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 145–58

B.R. Suchla: Studien zur Provenienz der Trecento-Ballata (Göttingen, 1976)

D. Baumann: ‘Some Extraordinary Forms in the Italian Secular Trecento Repertoire’, La musica al tempo del Boccaccio e i suoi rapporti con la letteratura: Siena and Certaldo 1975 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iv (Certaldo, 1978)], 45–63

G. Capovilla: ‘Note sulla tecnica della ballata trecentesca’, ibid., 107–47

H.M. Brown: ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Boccaccio’, EMc, v (1977), 324–39

G. Capovilla: ‘Le ballate del Petrarca e il codice metrico due-trecentesco’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, cliv (1977), 238–60; repr. in “Si vario stile”: studi sul Canzoniere del Petrarca (Padua, 1998), 13–46

G. Gorni: ‘Note sulla ballata’, Metrica, i (1978), 219–24; repr. in Metrica e analisi letteraria (Bologna, 1993), 243–9

D. Baumann: Die dreistimmige italienische Lied-Satztechnik im Trecento (Baden-Baden, 1979)

F.A. Gallo: ‘The Musical and Literary Tradition of Fourteenth-Century Poetry set to Music’, Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Wolfenbüttel 1980, 55–76

F.A. Gallo: ‘Ballata (Trecento)’ (1980), HMT [Incl. discussion of theoretical sources]

G. Gorni: ‘Altre note sulla ballata’, Metrica, ii (1981), 83–102; repr. in Metrica e analisi letteraria (Bologna, 1993), 219–42

N. Pirrotta: ‘La siciliana trecentesca’, Schede medievali, iii (1982), 297–308

M. Fabbri and J. Nádas: ‘A Newly Discovered Trecento Fragment’, EMH, iii (1983), 67–81

N. Pirrotta: ‘Rhapsodic Elements in North-Italian Polyphony of the 14th Century’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 83–99

F.A. D'Accone: ‘Una nuova fonte dell'Ars nova italiana: il codice di San Lorenzo, 2211’, Studi musicali, xiii (1984), 3–31

J. Nádas: ‘Manuscript San Lorenzo 2211: some Further Observations’, L'Europa e la musica del Trecento: Congresso IV: Certaldo 1984 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi (Certaldo, 1992)], 145–68

N. Pirrotta: ‘Echi di arie veneziane del primo Quattrocento?’, Interpretazioni veneziane, ed. D. Rosand (Venice, 1984), 99–108; repr. in Poesia e musica e altri saggi (Florence, 1994), 47–64

V. Russo: ‘Dante: Ballata i' voi (VN XII 10–15): Sive cum soni modulatione… sive non (VE II VIII 4)’, L’Europa e la musica del Trecento: Congresso IV: Certaldo 1984 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi (Certaldo, 1992)], 269–86

E. Diederichs: ‘Zwei Texte zu einer Ballata von Bartolino da Padova’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, v, ed. A. Ziino (Palermo, 1985), 113–22

A. Mazzantini: ‘Le ballate di Niccolò da Perugia’, ibid., 179–95

B. Brumana and G. Ciliberti: ‘Le ballate di Paolo da Firenze nel frammento “Cil”’, Esercizi: arte, musica e spettacolo, ix (1986), 5–37

A. Ziino: ‘“Cosa non è ch'a sé tanto mi tiri”: una ballata anonima nello stile di Landini’, La Toscana nel secolo XIV: caratteri di una civiltà regionale, ed. S. Gensini (Pisa, 1988), 519–38

G. Carsaniga: ‘I testi di Paolo tenorista’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, xl (1990), 5–22

R. Dittrich: ‘Textbezüge in den Ballata-Vertonungen von Antonio Zachara da Teramo: drei Beispiele’, Mf, xliii (1990), 15–30

K. von Fischer: ‘Text Underlay in Landini's Ballate for Three Voices’, CMc, nos. 45–7 (1990) [Festschrift E.H. Sanders, ed. P.M. Lefferts and L.L. Perkins], 179–97

P.G. Beltrami: La metrica italiana (Bologna, 1991), 100–01, 248–58

A. Leszczynska: ‘Slady trecenta w Poznaniu’ [The remnants of the Trecento in Poznan], Muzyka, xxxvi/3 (1991), 63–75

N. Pirrotta: Preface to Il Codice Rossi 215 (Lucca, 1992)

A. Ziino: ‘Rime per musica e per danza’, Storia della letteratura italiana, ii, ed. E. Malato (Rome, 1995), 455–529

G. D'Agostino: ‘Le ballate del Decameron’, Studi sul Boccaccio, xxiv (1996), 123–80

L. Pagnotta: Repertorio metrico della ballata italiana: secoli XIII e XIV (Milan, 1996)

KURT VON FISCHER/GIANLUCA D'AGOSTINO

Ballestra [Balestra, ?Armbruster], Reimundo [Raimundo, Raimundus]

(b 2nd half of the 16th century; d Zabern [now Saverne], Alsace, 11 Oct 1634). Composer, probably German (not Italian, as has sometimes been thought). His name may have been ‘Armbruster’ (which means ‘crossbow’: ‘balestra’ in Italian). Certainly all his surviving writing is in German. He himself said that he received a stipend from the Fuggers, and he studied in Italy and in Germany. He was an instrumentalist at the court of Archduke Ferdinand in Graz from 1602 until 1616, when Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Strasbourg and Passau, a brother of Archduke Ferdinand, appointed him Kapellmeister at his court at Zabern; in 1618 there were 19 singers and instrumentalists under him. He remained in Zabern until his death, although Archduke Leopold became Count of the Tyrol in 1619, took most of his musicians to Innsbruck and in 1625 resigned the see of Strasbourg. In that year Ballestra became organist at the Convent of Our Lady but still spent his last years in financial straits.

All Ballestra’s surviving music dates from his years in Graz. He said that his Sacrae symphoniae contain ‘the musical symphonies [concerted works] and harmonies [choral and polychoral works] composed by me, apart from some reservata’. He did not disclose which of his works he thought of as musica reservata. Palisca supposed them to be the pieces in which tutti sections are interspersed with solo sections. But since there are also solo parts in his 13-part parody Magnificat and in his Missa con le tronbe, a likelier candidate is the polytextual eight-part motet Dux Ferdinandus, written in homage to Archduke Ferdinand; it is marked as a work ‘reserved’ for the knowledgeable because of its use of crab canon and series of hexachords recurring ostinato-like in varying rhythms. Ballestra’s range embraces Venetian polychoral writing, concertatos for four or fewer solo voices and basso continuo, instrumental canzonas and elaborate counterpoint in the Netherlandish style. His music is sometimes similar in style to that of the Venetian-trained Georg Poss, who was a colleague at Graz.

WORKS

Sacrae symphoniae, liber I, 28 motets, 7, 8, 10, 12vv (Venice, 1611); Magnificat based on Viadana’s Judica, Domine, 13vv; 2 canzonas: 1 for 8 insts, 1 for 4 insts (‘secondo li Balli tedeschi’)

2 motets, solo vv, bc, in Parnassus musicus Ferdinandaeus, 1615¹³

Missa con le tronbe, 16vv, Missa sine nomine, 12vv, 2 Magnificat, 14vv, 20vv, A-Wn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SennMT, 205–6

H. Federhofer: ‘Eine neue Quelle der musica reservata’, AcM, xxiv (1952), 32–45

H. Federhofer: ‘Graz Court Musicians and their Contributions to the Parnassus musicus Ferdinandaeus (1615)’, MD, ix (1955), 167–244

C.V. Palisca: ‘A Clarification of “Musica Reservata” in Jean Taisnier’s “Astrologiae”, 1559’, AcM, xxxi (1959), 133–61, esp. 154

H. Federhofer: Musikpflege und Musiker am Grazer Habsburgerhof der Erzherzöge Karl und Ferdinand von Innerösterreich (1564–1619) (Mainz, 1967), 145–7

HELLMUT FEDERHOFER

Ballet.

A style of theatrical dancing that developed in France during the 17th century, achieved ‘classical’ status in the 19th century, and today maintains its roots in the past while continuing to evolve. The term also describes a theatrical spectacle, in which use it has a history stretching back to the Middle Ages (see Dance andBallet de cour); as a spectacle, ballet could, in various times and places, include singing as well as dancing. Ballet became institutionalized in Paris in 1672 with the formation of the first permanent professional dance troupe within the newly founded Académie Royale de Musique (known informally as the Opéra), which occurred during a time when the basic movement vocabulary was becoming codified. For much of its history ballet has been closely tied to opera, both in the types of works in which ballet has appeared and because of the institutional structures that supported it; a number of ballet companies are still attached to opera houses. Starting in the 18th century, however, ballet also began gradually to establish itself as an independent art, one through which a narrative could be communicated without sung texts; since the late 18th century ‘ballet’ as a genre has usually meant a spectacle accompanied by purely instrumental music, although many operas continued to include ballet. The 20th century saw a shift in emphasis away from story ballets set to newly composed scores towards more abstract works set to pre-existing music not necessarily composed for dancing. Although ballet is primarily a Western art, it is now practised in many parts of the world, where it is sometimes absorbed into local dance traditions.

1. 1670–1800.

2. 19th century.

4. Modern dance.

REBECCA HARRIS-WARRICK (1), NOËL GOODWIN (2, 3), JOHN PERCIVAL (4)

(i) The 17th century in France.

1. 1670–1800.

(ii) The 17th century outside France.

(iii) The 18th century.

Ballet, §1: 1670–1800

(i) The 17th century in France.

The founding of the Académie Royale de Danse by Louis XIV in 1661 marks an important landmark in the professionalization of dance, but the actual contributions made by this élite group of 13 dancing-masters to the development of ballet remain obscure. According to Pierre Rameau (Le maître à danser, 1725) it was Pierre Beauchamp, the principal choreographer at both the court and the Opéra, who codified the five positions of the feet and set the standard for the developing art; his tenure as ballet-master at the Académie Royale de Musique from its inception by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672 generated widespread admiration. Even François Raguenet, defender of Italian opera, admitted (Parallèle des Italiens et des François, 1702):

The Italians themselves will own that no dancers in Europe are equal to ours; the Combatants and Cyclops in Perseus, the Tremblers and Smiths in Isis, the Unlucky Dreams in Atys, and our other entries are originals in their kind, as well as in respect of the airs composed by Lully, as of the steps which Beauchamps has adapted to these airs … No theatre can represent a fight more lively than we see it sometimes expressed in our dances, and, in a word, everything is performed with an unexceptionable nicety.

No employment records survive from the early years of the Opéra's existence, but it is nonetheless known that there was at least some overlap between the professional dancers employed at the court and the members of the dance troupe in Paris, including such notables as Hilaire D'Olivet (who also sometimes choreographed for the Opéra), Louis L'Estang and Jean Favier l'aîné. Initially the troupe was entirely male; although a number of professional female dancers had appeared at court over the years, women did not dance on the public stage of the Opéra until 1681 when Lully's ballet Le triomphe de l'Amour opened in Paris, after receiving its première at court with a cast that had included both professionals and aristocrats. Even after women began joining the troupe, men continued to dance female roles for a number of years until the increasing number of women made that practice unnecessary. By 1704, the first year for which there are employment records for the Opéra, there were ten women and 11 men in the troupe, as well as Louis Guillaume Pécour, who had replaced Beauchamp as compositeur des ballets following Lully's death in 1687.

Several solo and duet choreographies that Pécour composed for the stage of the Opéra are preserved in Feuillet notation in two published collections (1704, 1713). These dances show that whereas a basic movement style was still shared by both theatrical and social dancers, the gap between the amateurs and the professionals was widening. Theatrical choreographies make use of a very large vocabulary of steps that are recombined in imaginative ways; they tend to involve many leaps and hops (‘la danse haute’), and also to use ornamental steps such as pas battus or ronds de jambe. When men and women danced together, either as a couple or in a group, they almost always performed the same steps in unison; similarly, both wore shoes with heels (whose heights seem to have varied) and made their rising steps onto partial toe. Theatrical choreographies for couples and for solo women are often quite demanding technically (surviving English choreographies for solo women even more so than the French), but the most virtuoso dances were designed for men alone. In the published collections these include entrées graves (in a slow duple metre with stately dotted rhythms), sarabandes, canaries, loures and chaconnes, with such virtuoso steps as entrechats or pirouettes on one foot with multiple beats that are rarely given to women during this period (fig.1). By way of contrast, the few group theatrical dances that have come down to us, most of them in Favier notation (see Harris-Warrick and Marsh, B1994), suggest that their choreographic interest derived less from the steps and more from the varied patterns the dancers traced on the floor. Both choreographic notations and period engravings reveal how symmetrical the dance figures were: when there is an even number of dancers, half are on each side of the stage; with an odd number, one dancer occupies the centre axis while the others are arranged symmetrically on either side (fig.2).

Within the basic technical parameters, different styles emerged by which choreographers characterized the varying types of dancing roles found in operatic divertissements. In Lully's tragédies en musique, the dominant genre on the stage of the Opéra in this period, his principal librettist, Phillippe Quinault, took great care to integrate the divertissement that appeared in each of the five acts into the fabric of the drama, a quality for which he was greatly praised by the 18th-century dance reformers Cahusac and Noverre. Although dancers in Quinault's librettos generally represent unnamed minor characters (‘un berger’ or ‘une magicienne’) who appear in only one act, they often serve as the moving bodies for the chorus members who, except when making entrances and exits, generally remain motionless around the perimeter of the stage. In this capacity they make visible through their movements the ideas expressed in the vocal numbers with which the instrumental dances are interleaved (fig.3). Even though dancing occurs primarily during instrumental numbers (and in some choruses, most frequently during the instrumental phrases that alternate with the singing), Lully made the connection between dance and sung text explicit by composing back-to-back pairs of dances and songs or choruses that share key, metre, tempo, and rhythmic and melodic figures. The divertissement from Act 2 of Thésée has a typical structure: an instrumental air, during which ‘Theseus appears, accompanied by the populace of Athens, celebrating his victory’; a musically related celebratory chorus; an instrumental dance for old men which is heard twice, before each verse of a musically similar duet for deux vieillards athéniens (‘Pour le peu de bon temps qui nous reste’); and finally a repetition of the celebratory chorus. Thus the audience is invited to view the dancing as one of several media of expression in the service of the divertissement as a whole, which in turn participates fully in the plot of the opera (the old men here serve as irreverent stand-ins for King Aegeus, who sees Theseus as a threat). Very little of the dancing in Lully's operas deserves to be dismissed as merely ‘decorative’; on the contrary, it is allied to fundamental concerns within the works.

The implicit connection between text and movement seen in Lully's operas finds support in 17th-century dance theorists such as Michel de Pure (Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux, 1668), who described ballet as ‘a mute representation, in which the gestures and movements signify what could be expressed through words’. Both he and Claude-François Menestrier (Des ballets anciens et modernes, 1682) insisted that the movements of the dancers, like the music to which they move, be appropriate to the characters they represent – that dances for shepherds be distinguishable from dances for kings or for sailors. The Abbé Dubos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719), who praised Lully for writing well-characterized music, said of choreography that ‘years ago, the fauns, shepherds, peasants, cyclops, and tritons danced pretty near in the same manner; but now the dance is divided into several characters. The artists, if I am not mistaken, reckon 16, and each of these characters has its proper steps, attitudes, and figures upon the stage’. Quinault himself even made distinctions as subtle as casting two types of shepherds, bergers and pâtres (see, for example, Alceste, Act 5), the latter probably more rustic and less idealized than the former (a convention found in later ballets as well). Distinctions are also implicit in Quinault's librettos between what Cahusac was later to call ‘la danse simple’, that is, dance that represents dance (such as in the joyful celebrations that conclude many operas), and Cahusac's ‘danse figurée’ or ‘composée’, which mimes an action (the trembleurs in Isis, the battling warriors in Cadmus et Hermione). Both types of dance could occur either on earth or in the realm of the merveilleux: demons, for example, could dance for joy or they could frighten people. In either case, choreographies for demons and other transgressive characters seem to have mined a vocabulary of grotesque gestures including false positions of the feet, extravagant leaps and distorted arm positions, whereas distinctions between beneficent character types such as shepherds and sailors seem to have relied on more subtle differences in step vocabulary, arm movements, figures and spatial orientation.

Most of Lully's operatic divertissements contain from one to three instrumental dances, although the prologue may include more. The music generally adheres to one of three structures: binary (the most numerous), rondeau (ABACA), or the extended variation forms of chaconne and passacaille. Most of his dance pieces make use of the full five-part orchestra, although some are set as trios or contain trio episodes. Wind instruments are often employed to enhance characterization: oboes in pastoral scenes, flutes for sacred rites, and trumpets for battles. The enriched orchestration generally extends to the choruses as well, thus giving the divertissements greater aural sumptuousness than the other portions of the opera, which are primarily accompanied by continuo alone. Although Lully included such titled dances as gavottes, minuets, sarabandes and canaries, many are simply called ‘entrée’ or ‘air’, followed by the category of characters dancing (e.g. ‘Entrée des bergers’); such pieces may or may not conform to an identifiable dance type. Much of Lully's dance music has irregular phrase structures; even dance types such as the minuet may have five- or seven-bar phrases. In fact, four- or eight-bar phrases, while not uncommon, are by no means the norm. Although in some instances the irregularities may be a function of dramatic characterization, they are so endemic to Lully's style in so many different dramatic contexts that they do not support facile generalizations about their restriction to comic or grotesque situations.

Ballet, §1: 1670–1800

(ii) The 17th century outside France.

Dance also figured prominently in Italian opera, especially in Venice, although it tended to have a looser connection to the plot than in France. In most mid- or late 17th-century Venetian three-act operas the dances were concentrated at the ends of Acts 1 and 2, where they often functioned in the manner of intermedi. Many dances were motivated by joyful occasions or by being set in the realm of the supernatural, although some had only tenuous connections with the sung portions of the opera. Many of the same character types appeared on both the French and the Italian stages – nymphs and shepherds, soldiers, demons, or allegorical characters such as dreams – but Venetian opera allowed for more comic roles such as buffoons, cripples or animals than did the French. (Comic roles had been common in the ballet de cour but were abandoned in the tragédie en musique.) Although the composer of the vocal music sometimes composed the dances, the practice of entrusting the dance music to the choreographer or to a secondary composer probably originated during this period and had become the norm by the 18th century. Only a few dance types are mentioned in Venetian librettos and scores, such as the corrento, passo e mezzo and canario; more often a dance is simply identified as a ‘ballo’. As in France, most of the dances have a binary structure. In the last two decades of the 17th century the French style of dancing began to make inroads into Italy, as can be seen not only from the appearance of dance types such as the minuet or borèa (bourrée) in opera scores, but also from the composition of scenes that interleave dances with musically related vocal pieces on the model of the French divertissement, as in Il pastore d'Anfriso (1695) by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo. With the introduction of the Arcadian reforms at the turn of the century, however, came an increased separation between danced episodes and vocal music; thereafter dancing was generally independent of the plot of the opera and relegated to appearing between the acts.

Apart from Giovanni Battista Balbi, who between 1636 and 1657 worked not only in Venice but in several European courts (including France; fig.4), few of the choreographers from Venetian theatres are known. No choreographic notations preserve the dances from this period, but Italian dancing is reported to have been more athletic than the French, with greater emphasis on dramatic leaps, speed and lightness and more opportunity for mimetic dancing, particularly (although not exclusively) in comic scenes. Gregorio Lambranzi's Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nuremberg, 1716), a book showing sequential illustrations from several different theatrical dances (for drunk peasants, commedia characters, animated statues and the like; fig.5), provides an idea of the movements – some of them quite acrobatic – available to comic and grotesque dancers. At the same time, the brief descriptions accompanying the engravings show that the French technical vocabulary (pas de bourrée, chassés, various contretemps etc.) had by then become international.

Following the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, a number of French dancers and musicians made their way across the Channel. Although Robert Cambert's attempt to establish a Royal Academy of Music on the French model failed, his production of two operas, Ariane and Pomone, as well as several other imported entertainments did expose the English to French dancing. Starting in 1673 Thomas Betterton's blending of Lullian balletic practices with English theatrical traditions produced the new genre of semi-opera in works such as Matthew Locke's Psyche (1675), Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen (1692) and The Island Princess (1699; music by R. Leveridge, D. Purcell and J. Clarke). Although semi-opera died out shortly thereafter, dancing continued to figure as entr'acte entertainment in playhouses such as Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, where French styles mingled with commedia dell'arte-inflected dancing coming from Italy. Prominent English dancers around the turn of the century included John Weaver, Thomas Caverley and Hester Santlow. The publication in 1706 of two translations of Feuillet's Chorégraphie (one by Weaver as Orchesography, the other by Paul Siris as The Art of Dancing) shows that a market had developed in England for French dancing, as does the publication of a substantial number of notated choreographies between the years 1706 and 1735.

French dancing also took root in northern and central European countries, particularly at courts, such as Dresden and Stockholm, that had political connections with France. Even in cities where Italian opera was established, French dancers and choreographers were often employed to embellish theatrical spectacles. In Hamburg Lully's Acis et Galatée was performed at the public opera house in 1689; operas composed there in the following decade by Johann Georg Conradi, Johann Sigismund Kusser and Reinhard Keiser reveal Lully's influence.

Ballet, §1: 1670–1800

(iii) The 18th century.

Following Lully's death in 1687, French opera began to change in ways that were to expand the place it accorded to ballet. L'Europe galante (1697) by Houdar de Lamotte and André Campra inaugurated a new genre, the opéra-ballet (called simply ‘ballet’ at the time), which gave a larger scope to divertissements than did the tragédie en musique, although the plots were still communicated through singing. (Related genres, all involving singing, were labelled variously ballet-héroïque, ballet comique and acte de ballet.) The prologue and three or four acts (usually called ‘entrées’) each had a separate action but were tied together by an overarching theme: Les fêtes vénitiennes (Danchet and Campra, 1710), for example, has acts revolving around love intrigues set in contemporary Venice among, by turns, gondoliers, gamblers, spectators at the opera, and guests at a ball (the order and inclusion of acts varied from performance to performance). Thus comic dancing characters such as Arlequin or fortune-telling gypsies, who in Lully's day had been restricted to a few pastiche works such as Le carnaval, mascarade (1675), began to make regular appearances on the stage of the Opéra.

At the same time that the opéra-ballet was expanding both the amount of dramatic time devoted to dance and the range of characters represented, the tragédies also began to increase the number of dances within the divertissements. This tendency can be seen not only in newly composed works (where the librettist Lamotte led the way), but even within operas by Lully, which, when they were revived, acquired more and more dance pieces as time went on. The interpolations, whose music was sometimes borrowed from Lully's ballets but more often newly composed, seem primarily aimed at affording solos or pas de deux for the emerging stars of the dance troupe. The enlargement of the divertissement occurred primarily in scenes that represented fêtes of various kinds (both on earth and in magical or mythical realms), and that thus favoured dance for dance's sake; the newly written librettos offered many fewer occasions for mimetic dancing than had Quinault's. This shift in emphasis towards more purely decorative kinds of dancing can be observed in the replacement in many librettos of scene descriptions for the divertissements in favour of the laconic ‘On danse’ or ‘Le divertissement commence’. In addition, purely danced works, such as the choreographed ‘symphonies’ of Jean-Féry Rebel, were sometimes used to round out an evening at the Opéra: in May 1726, for example, Rebel's Les caractères de la danse followed a performance of Lully's Atys. The growing profusion of dances did not please all spectators: Campra's tragédie Achille et Déidamie (1735) was accused of ‘completely drowning the subject in the divertissement’, and by 1749 Rémond de Saint-Mard (Réflexions sur l'opéra) was complaining that ‘too much scope is given to the dances … everything is to be danced’.

The number of dancers employed at the Opéra grew to accommodate the demands of the expanded divertissements. By 1738 the troupe included 18 men and 13 women, in 1750 18 men and 24 women. A dance school was established at the Opéra in 1713, with the purpose of training singers and dancers already in the troupe; a school for training children opened in 1779. Early in the century the leading dancers included Jean Balon, Marie-Thérèse Perdou de Subligny, the brothers Dumoulin, Françoise Prévost and Michel Blondi, who also served as choreographer at the Opéra from 1729 until his death in 1739. They were eclipsed in star power (and in salary) by the next generation: Louis Dupré (‘le dieu de la danse’), whose long (though interrupted) career at the Opéra spanned the years 1714–51; and two of Prévost's students, Marie Sallé (who made her début at the Opéra in 1727) and Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (début in 1726). The two were seen as representing different styles of dance: Sallé was noted for expressivity and finesse (fig.6), Camargo for technical brilliance and agility.

Although no theatrical choreographic notations survive from this period, it appears that ballet technique was growing more virtuoso, especially for women. Because of her adoption of male steps such as pas battus and entrechats, Voltaire described Camargo as ‘the first woman to dance like a man’; her technical innovations drew criticism as well as admiration. The stars of the dance troupe attracted devoted followers who expected to see their favourites prominently featured when they went to the Opéra; that the divertissements favoured solos and pas de deux can often be inferred from the ways the dancers' names and roles are listed in the librettos, although determining which dancers performed in each of the pieces in the score is often difficult. Iconography suggests that couple and group dances retained the symmetrical principles of the previous era, with the dancers doing the same steps in parallel with each other. New dance types – rigaudon, forlane (in Venetian scenes), musette, tambourin, contredanse – appeared on the stage, while traditional ones such as the gavotte, menuet, passepied, sarabande and chaconne remained current; as before, many of the dances simply bear the title of ‘entrée’ or ‘air’ in the scores. As dance styles began to crystallize into the three general categories of noble, grotesque and demi-caractère, dancers started to specialize; Louis Dupré was seen as the epitome of the danseur noble, although he also danced other types of role.

The emphasis on technical brilliance and dance for its own sake found itself at odds throughout this period with a growing desire in some quarters for greater expression, or even for a separation of dance from vocal music. In 1714 in a private performance sponsored by the Duchesse du Maine at her château at Sceaux, two dancers from the Opéra, Balon and Prévost, performed in pantomime the climactic scene from the fourth act of Corneille's tragedy Les Horaces in which the Roman Horace kills his sister Camilla. This experiment in representing genuine tragedy through dance remained isolated for many years, but pantomimic dancing had already been a feature of commedia dell'arte-inspired performances for some time. Following the example of the Italian comedians working in London, the English dancer and choreographer John Weaver had in 1703 mounted a short pantomimic work, The Tavern Bilkers, but in 1717, after having investigated ancient Roman pantomime, he produced at Drury Lane a much more ambitious work, The Loves of Mars and Venus. The three principal roles of Mars, Venus and Vulcan were all assigned to dancers – Dupré, Hester Santlow and Weaver himself – and the music (which has not survived) was entirely instrumental. The scenario alternates between two types of scene: those that would have been sung in an opera on the same subject, such as Vulcan's expressions of jealousy (for which Weaver prescribes arm and head gestures appropriate to the reigning emotion), and scenes that resemble operatic divertissements, such as the Pyrrhic dance for the followers of Mars, for which standard dance steps would have been used. Weaver's next such work, Orpheus and Euridice (1718), was even more serious, using the version of the myth that ends with Orpheus's dismemberment by the Bacchae, but his last pantomime, Perseus and Andromeda (1728), interspersed comic scenes with the mythological ones. Although Weaver's experiments had no immediate imitators in England, Marie Sallé furthered the cause of serious mimetic dancing through two danced entertainments performed in London in 1734, Bacchus and Ariadne and Pygmalion, in which she attracted notoriety by wearing only a simple muslin dress in the Greek manner with her hair loose, as she danced the story of the statue coming to life.

The competing demands of a dramatically expressive, wordless ballet on the one hand and the more technically driven dance for its own sake on the other, both find expression in the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau, the composer whose operas and ballets dominated the stage of the Paris Opéra in the middle of the century. The divertissements in his tragédies lyriques such as Hippolyte et Aricie (c1733) or Castor et Pollux (c1737) tend to adhere to the basic outlines of the Lullian model, in which many of the dances are intimately allied to vocal pieces, although several of the divertissements do contain more instrumental dances in a row than would have been found in Lully's works. Some of the opéras-ballets (and the shorter actes de ballet) include even more extensive danced scenes that approach independence from the surrounding vocal context. In the third entrée (‘Les fleurs’) of Les Indes galantes (c1736), the concluding divertissement is introduced as if it were to be a typical celebratory fête, but actually consists of an independent narrative in which the flowers in a garden are buffeted by a storm embodied by the North Wind, Borée, only to be rescued by Zéphire; this scene is built over nine consecutive dance pieces (most simply called ‘Airs’, but including two gavottes) without a single vocal number intervening. The central role, the personified Rose, was created by Marie Sallé, to great acclaim.

Rameau's openness to a more dramatic role for dance was perhaps promoted by his collaborations with Louis de Cahusac, whose book La danse ancienne et moderne (1754) reviewed the history of the art with a goal of promoting greater dramatic expressivity in the dance of his own day. Cahusac saw dance as falling into one of two categories: la danse simple, which represents only itself and is motivated by joy, and la danse composée, ‘which by itself forms continuous action’. He felt frustrated by the outstanding abilities of the dancers of his day, whose talents he saw as being wasted through the overuse of danse simple: ‘the costumes are different, the intentions are always the same’. Although his definition of danse composée seems to call for pantomime, his examples of dances he admired sometimes favour emotional expression over narrative content. In the librettos he wrote for several of Rameau's works (opéras-ballets, pastorales-héroïques and tragédies) Cahusac did not go as far towards integrating the dancing with the plot as his writings suggest he might have liked (he undoubtedly met resistance from the conservative institutional practices of the Opéra), but he did frequently build divertissements around what he called ‘ballets figurés’, whose movements he briefly described in the scene indications. These sometimes call for no more action than the weaving of garlands around the stage, but others have a narrative function. In Act 1 of the pastorale-héroïque Naïs (1749) an athletic contest goes through various stages of competition until an athlete arrives who challenges all the others twice; they refuse both times, he dances triumphantly and Naïs crowns him the victor. The entire scene is set to an extended chaconne that changes character frequently. In other ballets figurés Rameau is similarly responsive to the demands of the choreography, but even in the music he composed to accompany standard fêtes his inventiveness in characterizing the dancers' roles remains unsurpassed.

During the same period genuine pantomime ballets began to appear in the Parisian theatres that performed lighter works (see Paris, §IV, 3). According to Desboulmiers (Histoire du Théâtre de l'Opéra Comique, 1770), pantomime ballets were mounted at the Opéra-Comique starting in the 1720s, while at the Comédie-Italienne the prolific resident choreographer, Jean-Baptiste François Dehesse, composed not only divertissements for stage works of many types, but more than 50 pantomime ballets between 1738 and 1757 (fig.8). His best-known work, L'opérateur chinois (1748, music by Louis-Gabriel Guillemain), features a Chinese seller of patent medicine who has set up shop in the middle of a village fair; a succession of stock characters (an old philosopher, a simpleton with a sore tooth, a ridiculous German baron) involve him in a series of humorous incidents. The libretto, which describes the action scene by scene, divides the cast between dancers, who both mime and dance, and ‘performers in the pantomime’, who presumably only mime; as in Weaver's works there is a substantial amount of danse simple interspersed with the more narrative scenes. The work ends, as was standard in such ballets, with a contredanse générale. Dehesse's imaginative choreography was greatly admired in his day, but because he left no theoretical writings his contributions to the development of pantomime ballet have generally been undervalued by historians.

The only known document that preserves theatrical choreographies from this period, the Ferrère Manuscript, dating from 1782 (see Marsh, B1995), mixes various systems for communicating the dances of several comic pantomime ballets: Feuillet notation, sometimes augmented by written commentary; contredanse notation (floor patterns with no notated steps) for the group dances; and sketches with written instructions for the purely pantomimic scenes. The choreography blends dance steps familiar from earlier in the century with more gestural movements and puts rapid changes of movement style to comic effect. Many of Ferrère's solos and duets are technically demanding; the group dances, for six, eight or 12, also require considerable technique. While the ballets are clearly sectional (new movements being signalled by the dancers' entrances and exits as well as by changes in the music), Ferrère also seems interested in sustaining dramatic continuity by keeping the corps de ballet on stage when appropriate, and by his fluid transitions from dance to pantomime and back to dance within a movement.

In Italy, the independence of ballet from opera was rarely an issue. Because the already tenuous connections between ballet intermezzos and the acts of the opera that surrounded them had been severed by the start of the 18th century, it was common to find comic dances performed between the acts of an opera seria. Although there are isolated instances of Italian operas constructed on a French model, with the dances integrated, usually the ballet and the opera had nothing to do with each other. The separation did not, however, mean that Italian audiences had any less appreciation for ballet than did their French counterparts; they simply had different ideas about its role. In fact, the use of vocal intermezzos such as Pergolesi's famous La serva padrona, according to Hansell (B1988),

constituted but a short-lived historical parenthesis. For notwithstanding the importance according them in most studies of 18th-century Italian opera, the weight of the evidence proves overwhelmingly that they are properly regarded as the exception rather than the rule. The rule for 200 years, even during the period 1710 to 1735, was that entr'acte entertainments with Italian opera consisted of ballet.

Outside Italy, opera in the Italian manner also tended to reserve dancing for entr'actes, although several of Handel's operas for London (e.g. Admeto, 1727, and Ariodante, 1735) included dance related to the plot within the acts. Well into the middle of the century, Italian entr'acte ballets tended to present dramatically static vignettes that involved character dancing in rustic or exotic settings, such as Un villaggio nella Germania co' suoi abitatori occupati in varie opere contadinesche (1758, Milan) or La celebre Torre di Nanchino nella Cina (1757, Rome). Such subjects exploited Italian proclivities for mimetic dancing and allowed opportunities for the aerial, acrobatic styles in which Italian dancers excelled. Gennaro Magri's Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples, 1779), which focusses on the highly developed step vocabulary of the ballarino grottesco, is the best surviving source for technical information about this style. Magri, like many other Italian dancers of this period, spent a portion of his career abroad; other international stars included Barbara Campanini, known as ‘la Barbarina’, whose virtuoso technique and pantomimic abilities created a sensation throughout Europe, and the choreographer Giuseppe Salamoni père, generally noted as ‘di Vienna’ in Italian librettos. At the same time, a look at cast lists shows that a number of French dancers also worked regularly in Italy (Jean-Marie Leclair, ballet-master in Turin before he decided to concentrate on the violin, being one notable example). Before 1740 Italian dance companies tended to have only six or eight dancers, but by the 1760s their numbers increased to around a dozen, and even to 16–18 in Turin. This increase coincided with a shift in interest towards ballets with greater narrative content, such as La favola di Polifemo con Aci e Galatea (1748, Milan) or La scoperta dell'America da Cristoforo Colombo (1756, Turin). Ballets with mythological plots allowed the fantastic or magical elements that no longer figured in opera seria to find a place on Italian stages.

By the mid-century, several choreographers around Europe had become interested in creating pantomime ballets on serious subjects. Vienna, a meeting-ground for artistic trends from Italy, France and central Europe, was an important centre in this regard. Working at both the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater, Franz Hilverding (1710–68) turned away from the ‘indecent’ comic characters of the Italian theatre first towards ‘natural’ characters such as Tyroleans or Hungarians and then to mythological subjects. Psyché and Poliphème et Galatée, both from 1752, may be his earliest independent pantomime ballets. Although Hilverding did not publish scenarios of his ballets (because, Angiolini was to report later, he believed that the dance spoke for itself), eyewitness descriptions of many of them have been preserved. Music by Joseph Starzer survives for several dozen of his ballets (in Turin and Český Krumlov) and follows a general pattern: an opening sinfonia followed by 10 to 25 instrumental dances, mostly binary and usually untitled beyond the occasional tempo marking. Sometimes music is borrowed from other works, for example the chaconne from Rameau's Castor et Pollux. The dance pieces are sufficiently gestural as to allow reasonable hypotheses as to how they fit with the story line (see Brown, B1991), although such identifications are far from straightforward. Like Dehesse, Hilverding left no theoretical writings, but his pupil Angiolini later called his teacher ‘the true restorer of the pantomimic art’ (fig.9).

Gaspero Angiolini (1731–1803), an Italian dancer who had moved to Vienna in 1754 and inherited Hilverding's position at the Burgtheater when the latter accepted a post at the Russian court in St Petersburg in 1758, went further than his teacher by staging ‘a complete dramatic action, upon principles handed down by the ancients’ (Brown, B1991, p.288). In his role as choreographer for a repertory company he had to produce not only free-standing ballets but also divertissement dances for operas and plays, and whereas many of his pantomime ballets have mythological, pastoral subjects (Les amours de Flore et Zéphire, 1759), others are of a lighter variety (Le tuteur dupé, ou L'amant statue, 1761). In fact the three works that he himself saw as landmarks – Don Juan, ou Le festin de pierre (1761), Citera assediata (1762) and Sémiramis (1765) – are no less important for being anomalous in his overall output. (In a pattern that was to become familiar with subsequent pantomime ballets, all three were based on pre-existing works – in this case, two plays and an opéra comique that had been performed recently in Vienna; the choreographer could thus count on his audience's familiarity with the stories.) After taking on in Don Juan a subject that one spectator characterized as ‘extrêmement triste, lugubre et effroyable’ (the ballet ends with Don Juan being carried off to the torments of hell by the statue of the murdered Commander), Angiolini decided to move from what he called ‘comédie héroïque’ to genuine tragedy. ‘If there is something of the sublime in dance, it is without doubt a tragic event represented without words and made intelligible through gestures’, he wrote in his Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis (Vienna, 1765). After reviewing the precedents in the ancient world for this kind of spectacle, Angiolini turned to practical considerations: for proper effect a tragedy should involve only a few characters, but dancers cannot dance for nearly as long as actors can declaim. Thus a tragic pantomime ballet must be short and to the point; Sémiramis should last only 20 minutes. Angiolini did, in fact, reduce the story to its essential elements; although there is a divertissement-like scene in each of the three acts (in Act 3 a group of subjects brings offerings to the queen), the focus remains on Semiramis and her guilty conscience throughout. The balance between danse simple and pantomime thus tilts much more heavily towards the latter than in most other ballets.

The composer for all three ballets – and for many others performed in Vienna during this period – was Christoph Willibald Gluck. The collaboration was apparently a happy one: Angiolini said of Gluck's music for Don Juan, ‘he has perfectly realized the frightful essence of the action. He has undertaken to express the passions that are in play and the terror that governs the catastrophe. Music is essential to pantomimes; it is the music that speaks, we [dancers] only make gestures’. Gluck and other ballet composers did, in fact, find ways to suggest the words missing from pantomime ballets: a sacred procession in Sémiramis is set to a ‘cantique’ that has the simple melody and block chords of a hymn, and a mysterious inscription that appears on a wall is set to instrumental recitative. And although Gluck's scores are divided into separate numbers (Sémiramis has 15), many eschew binary or rondo forms in favour of more flexible (sometimes through-composed) structures that respond to the dramatic context through changes in tempo, level of rhythmic activity, and dynamics. Pieces not infrequently end on the dominant, as a means of making the music continuous. Dances in the divertissement sections of the ballets, on the other hand, still tend to adhere to traditional structures. Music for ballets from the court of Mannheim by composers such as Toeschi and Cannabich show a similar balance between the dramatic and the static.

During the same period, Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) was working towards a similar integration of tragedy and ballet. Given the realities of pursuing an international career in the theatre (he had positions at various times in Paris, Lyons, London, Stuttgart, Vienna and Milan), he had to compose many operatic divertissements of the type he was so eloquently to deplore in his famous Lettres sur la danse (1760) and thus was unable to pursue what he was to call ‘ballet d'action’ as assiduously as he would have liked. He staged his first serious pantomime ballet, Le jugement de Pâris, in Lyons in 1751, but found a much more supportive working environment for his theories at the Württemberg court at Stuttgart, where he moved in 1760, just after his book had been published. Of the 20 ballets he created there, Médée et Jason (with music by the court composer J.J. Rodolphe, first performed after Act 1 of Jommelli's Didone abbandonata in 1763) had the greatest success in generating performances abroad; in 1776, in a restaging by Gaetano Vestris, it became the first independent ballet pantomime to appear on the stage of the Paris Opéra.

Noverre argued that, in order to achieve the expressiveness he desired, dancers needed to remove their masks (generally still worn in Paris at that time) so that their faces could augment the expression of their gestures. In a score dating from the Paris revival of 1804 (in F-Po), the actions of one highly fraught confrontation between Medea, Jason and Creusa are cued to rapid and dramatic changes in the music, here an extensive passacaille: ‘[Médée et Créuse] se disputent’; ‘[Jason] s'efforce de leur faire faire la paix’; ‘Médée menace’; ‘elle montre son poignard’ (fig.10). In the absence of choreographies for any of the serious pantomime ballets it is difficult to gauge whether the mimed gestures replaced or supplemented dance steps. Grimm's reaction to Noverre's ballets (Correspondance littéraire, letter of January 1771) is tantalizing but ambiguous: ‘There is considerably more walking in them than dancing … there is dancing only in great movements of passion, at decisive moments; in the scenes, there is walking in time with the music, but without dancing’. In fact, however, Noverre did allow for dancing by building into his ballet pantomimes typical divertissements (Médée et Jason contains dances for the wedding festivities and an infernal scene in which Médée conjures up evil spirits) in which the key roles were assigned to noted soloists. He thus took as his model a structure analogous to sung, not spoken French tragedy – one that, like a tragédie lyrique, balanced narrative against moments of visual spectacle.

Noverre's fluency with the written word, demonstrated not only in his Lettres sur la danse, which went through several editions, but also in his pamphlet war with Angiolini, helped spread his reformist ideas all over Europe and has given him a place in dance history out of proportion to his actual accomplishments as a choreographer. Although it is true that dancers who had performed in his productions in Stuttgart and Vienna restaged many of his ballets in cities throughout Europe, Noverre was later to complain that these productions did not accurately represent his vision. In fact, he felt at the end of his life that his reach had exceeded his grasp; his most notable failure was in Paris, where his position as maître de ballet at the Opéra lasted only three years (1776–9, although his appointment did not officially end until 1781). Parisian audiences found his serious ballets such as Les Horaces unsuitable subjects for dancing, although they appreciated such lighter works as Les fêtes chinoises and Les petits riens (to a score composed partly by Mozart). His successor Maximilien Gardel generally preferred lighthearted subjects, such as La chercheuse d'esprit (1777) and Ninette à la cour (1778), or sentimental ones such as Le déserteur (1788); these three ballets, like many others, were based on well-known opéras comiques. Mythological subjects of the pastoral variety also remained in vogue (fig.11), even during the Revolutionary period, as witnessed by the popularity of such works as Psyché (1790) and Le jugement de Pâris(1794), both of which remained in the repertory of the Opéra for over three decades. (Dancers did participate in politically motivated works such as Gossec's L'offrande à la liberté (1792) and Le triomphe de la République, 1793.) La fille mal gardée, mounted by Jean Dauberval in Bordeaux only days before the fall of the Bastille in 1789, still receives occasional performances.

Whereas some of the music for pantomime ballets was newly composed, in Paris many ballet scores were cobbled together out of a wide variety of pre-existing pieces, both vocal and instrumental. Pierre Gardel's Télémaque, which received its première at the Paris Opéra in 1790, contains part of a violin concerto by Giornovichi, passages from Grétry's opéra comique Richard Coeur-de-Lion, symphonic excerpts from Haydn, and dances composed by Gossec for Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, in addition to pieces by Lully, Paisiello, Pleyel, Piccinni and others, all stitched together by the ostensible composer of the score, Ernest Louis Müller. Familiar vocal airs were often quoted instrumentally in order to suggest to the audience words otherwise absent from the mute ballet; the opening bars of Gluck's ‘Che farò senza Euridice’/‘J'ai perdu mon Euridice’ from Orfeo/Orphée appear in more than one pantomime ballet score. Furthermore, the surviving musical sources of French pantomime ballets often show radical differences as to what music was performed from one revival to the next, suggesting that the concept of the ‘work’ may have resided more in the scenario than in the score. Both in pantomime ballets and in ballets within operas from the second half of the century, fewer of the individual pieces bear generic dance designations than had been the case earlier; sometimes a familiar dance type is clearly discernible in the rhythmic and melodic contours, but often a piece is labelled only with a tempo marking because it does not adhere to the traditional binary or rondo structures of earlier dance music. Despite the loss of a substantial amount of the ballet music from the 18th century, a good deal has survived and awaits serious study.

By the last decades of the 18th century, the public's appetite for ballet had resulted in a dramatic growth in the dance troupes: Italian opera houses generally employed 35 to 40 dancers, Stockholm reached a height of 71 in 1786, while the Paris Opéra had 92 dancers in 1770. Dancers tended more and more towards specialized training; Italian librettos even categorized them as ballerini seri, di mezzo carattere or grotteschi. Despite the persistence of strong local and national traditions (the French and the Italian being the dominant schools), the end of the century saw a growing internationalization of ballet styles. The leading dancers and choreographers pursued their careers across Europe, taking with them not only works and dancing styles, but also theatrical practices borrowed from each other. In St Petersburg the dance troupe which had been led by the Italians Gasparo Angiolini (who had worked many years in Vienna) and Giuseppe Canziani was taken over by the French-trained Charles Le Picq in 1786. The Stockholm opera, like many others around Europe, employed both French and Italian dancers, in addition to locals. Costume reforms initiated in the 1790s by Salvatore Viganò featuring loose neo-classic dress and either open-toe sandals or flat, flexible slippers soon spread throughout Europe and helped open the way for the technical innovations of the 19th century. Even the Paris Opéra was not immune to influences from abroad: although the longstanding French practice of integrating dance into the plot of the opera remained in place, individual works sometimes edged towards Italian practices by replacing the traditional internal divertissement with a quasi-independent pantomime ballet at the end of an act. Another point of contact between the two traditions can be observed in the practice of using a long, celebratory fête to conclude many operas; in Italy this was the one danced scene that sometimes bore connections to the plot, whereas in France, where celebratory divertissements had traditionally involved both dancing and singing, the final chorus sometimes disappeared in favour of a purely danced conclusion.

Although by the end of the century pantomime ballet was firmly established as an independent genre, ballet still remained a fundamental part of opera, especially, but no means exclusively, in France. Opéra comique and other similar genres, not to mention much spoken theatre, routinely incorporated dance. Moreover, the same institutional structures supported both opera and ballet; audiences throughout Europe were to continue to encounter opera and ballet together, in the same houses and on the same evenings, for many decades to come.

(i) The transition to romantic ballet, 1800–1830.

2. 19th century.

In ballet the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are chronologically reversed from their musical usage, the romantic style in ballet having preceded the classical.

(ii) The romantic ballet and its influence.

(iii) Ballet in opera.

(iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900.

(i) The transition to romantic ballet, 1800–1830.

In composing his music for Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801) in the form of an overture and 16 numbers, Beethoven wrote for a ballet en action derived from Noverre’s principles, which in the 18th century had ended the ballet’s subservience to opera and made it an independent theatrical art. Prometheus was created for the Vienna court theatre (originally as Gli uomini di Prometeo) bySalvatore Viganò (1769–1821), a Neapolitan who often composed the music as well as the scenarios for his ballets; in place of static mime interspersed with dancing, he developed a type of expressive mime-dance based on individual character (fig.12), and the dramatic use of a corps de ballet, especially after he became ballet-master at La Scala in 1811. His achievements paved the way for Carlo Blasis (?1795–1878), whose treatises on the technique of dance (Traité élémentaire, 1820; Code of Terpsichore, 1828) first codified the methods on which the teaching of classical ballet is still based.

Beethoven’s ballet score was an exception to the usual musical practice at this time of a hurriedly assembled patchwork by a musician on the theatre staff (those at the Paris Opéra included Rodolphe Kreutzer, the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Sonata op.47). It was normal to incorporate melodies from well-known operas or songs whose words would relate to the stage action at a given point; and original music, mostly confined to the set dances, was written in a facile style to fit the choreographer’s preconception of rhythm and structure. Similar conditions prevailed in Russia, where Charles-Louis Didelot (1767–1837), a pupil of Dauberval and Noverre, spent two influential periods at St Petersburg, during 1801–12 and 1816–30. However, he is credited with having paid more attention to music than most choreographers of his time, and demanded a corresponding musicality from his dancers; he frequently worked with the composer Catterino Cavos, and Soviet research (by Gozenpud and Rabinovich; see Roslavleva, C1966) suggests that Cavos was musically more successful with his ballets than his operas precisely because they were composed to a preconceived structure supplied to him.

The prevailing situation was engagingly described in memoirs published by V.A. Duvernoy in 1903:

Once the plan of the piece and the dances were arranged, the musician was called in. The ballet-master indicated the rhythms he had laid down, the steps he had arranged, the number of bars which each variation must contain – in short, the music was arranged to fit the dances. And the musician docilely improvised, so to speak, and often in the ballet-master’s room, all that was asked of him. You can guess how alert his pen had to be, and how quick his imagination. No sooner was a scene written or a pas arranged than they were rehearsed with a violin, a single violin, as the only accompaniment … Even after having done all the ballet-master required, the composer had to pay heed to the advice of his principal interpreters. So he had to have much talent, or at least great facility, to satisfy so many exigencies, and, I would add, a certain amount of philosophy.

Nevertheless, attempts were made from about 1820 to compose more homogeneous scores for ballet, especially in the work of Jean Schneitzhöffer, the second chorus master at the Paris Opéra, and his superior Hérold, whose score for a new version of La fille mal gardée (1828) remains the musical basis for present-day productions. Hérold’s successor was Halévy, and his score (1830) for a Manon Lescaut ballet by Jean Aumer (1774–1833) is thought to have been the first to use melody to identify character; it earned the grudging admiration of Meyerbeer for its skilled use of musical allusions to suggest period. The function of the scenario writer began to be separated from that of choreographer from about 1827, when Scribe anonymously provided a scenario for Aumer’s La somnambule, with music by Hérold, while from her début at Vienna in 1822 Marie Taglioni was preparing to bring about the revolution in theatrical dance that became the romantic ballet.

(ii) The romantic ballet and its influence.

The ideal embodiment of the romantic image was Marie Taglioni (1804–84), who reflected in her dancing the spirit that infused the literature of Scott and Hugo and the music of Berlioz and Chopin. Her frail physique was schooled relentlessly by her father, the ballet-master Filippo Taglioni (1777–1871), to develop a style distinguished by lightness, grace and modesty, by the use of point-shoes for artistic effect, and by unusual elevation and delicacy on landing. Her freer, more graceful movement, enhanced by a new style of costume with a diaphanous, bell-shaped skirt and fitted bodice, gave a fresh purpose to the art of dance in the theatre (fig.13). It enabled it to become more poetic and imaginative, an art of illusion rather than illustration. The style was inaugurated by La sylphide, staged by Filippo Taglioni for his daughter at the Paris Opéra in 1832. This had a scenario credited to the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, with whom Marie had appeared the year before in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, when she led the ballet of spectral nuns which constituted one of the opera’s most novel expressive scenes. (see fig.17 below)

La sylphide reflected the romantic ideal in its theme of a tragically unattainable love, and its combination of the exotic and the supernatural: a Scottish setting and an ethereal being who appears and vanishes with the illusion of flight, which Taglioni was perfectly trained to suggest. Her style of dancing was a creative triumph which has haunted the art of ballet ever since; it not only displaced the male as the dominant figure and established the supremacy of the ballerina for almost a century, but it also required that composers should emphasize the lightness and grace of the ballerina more than the ballet’s drama and situation, which is partly why much of the century’s ballet music is essentially feminine in character. Taglioni’s production of La sylphide, with music by Schneitzhöffer, carried the seeds of romantic ballet to Russia when Taglioni first danced there in 1837, but a version choreographed by Auguste Bournonville (1805–79) at Copenhagen in 1836 – the version that has survived – had a new score by H.S. Løvenskjold.

The obverse of the romantic image in dance was personified by Fanny Elssler (1810–84), a Viennese of strong dramatic character and virtuoso technique. If Taglioni was a spirit of the air, Elssler was the child of the earth, excelling in colourful character dances in which a theatrical presentation was given to such folkdances as the Spanish cachucha (fig.14) and the Polish krakowiak. Elssler first triumphed in Paris in Jean Coralli’s (1779–1854) ballet Le diable boiteux (1836) with music by Casimir Gide, and while Taglioni continued to suggest ethereal illusion in other ballets by her father, such as La fille du Danube (1836) and L’ombre (1839), Elssler dazzled with her virtuosity in La gypsy and La tarentule (both 1839). From 1840 she toured the USA for two years and achieved an artistic and financial success then unparalleled in American theatrical history, although there European ballet remained a sterile import which failed to stimulate any native dance activity in the theatre until the 20th century.

While Elssler was in the USA and Taglioni was in Russia, the Paris Opéra was conquered by a new ballerina who arrived from Naples by way of Milan: Carlotta Grisi (1819–99), a cousin of the celebrated singers Giuditta and Giulia Grisi. Carlotta was the discovery of Jules Perrot (1810–92), who had partnered Taglioni and turned to choreography when the male dancer became virtually eclipsed. A combination of talents which came together at an opportune moment comprised Perrot and Coralli as choreographers, Théophile Gautier who brought poetry to the writing of a scenario, and Adolphe Adam who extended the expressive character of ballet music: the result was Giselle, which had its première at the Opéra in 1841 (fig.15). In its contrast between the realistic peasants of the first act and the disembodied spirits of the second, the need for the ballerina to unite the essential characteristics of each, and the skill of Adam in an incipient use of leitmotifs and musical reminiscence for dramatic effect, Giselle represents the romantic ballet at its peak.

Perrot first made London an important centre for ballet during the 1840s, when he worked for six years at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Benjamin Lumley’s management. Perrot staged Giselle for Grisi (whom he had married) and went on to create some of the finest romantic ballets in Ondine (1843), La Esmeralda (1844), Catarina and Lalla Rookh (both 1846). These united the dramatic, the supernatural and the exotic in true ballets d’action where the choreography created sympathetic characters and carried the narrative forward without superfluous virtuosity, even if the music composed for each of them by Cesare Pugni did little more than embroider the rhythm and reinforce the expressive mood. Perrot also staged divertissements to display the finest dancers of the time, culminating in Pas de quatre (1845; fig.16), in which Lumley succeeded in presenting four divas simultaneously: Taglioni, Grisi, the Italian Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909) and the Danish Lucile Grahn (1819–1907).

Grahn represented another important centre of romantic ballet in Copenhagen, where Auguste Bournonville returned in 1830 from his studies with Vestris in Paris to direct the Danish Court Ballet (later the Royal Danish Ballet) for the next 47 years. As well as his own version of La sylphide, which he staged in 1836 for Grahn on the model of Taglioni’s Paris version, Bournonville created more than 50 ballets of different types for his Danish company, which continued independently of theatrical fashion elsewhere; by maintaining the prestige of the male dancer on a par with the ballerina he distinguished the Danish school of ballet from all others in Europe. Bournonville’s musical interests (which included the operas of Mozart and Wagner) encouraged native composers to provide original and homogeneous scores for his ballets. Two days before his death in 1879 he witnessed the début of Hans Beck, a dancer who carried the Bournonville ballet style into the mid-20th century with a continuity of tradition unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.

In Russia the foundations laid by Didelot up to 1829 were receptive to the French romantic influences brought first by Taglioni in La sylphide to St Petersburg in 1837. She continued to appear there each year to 1842, and Elssler, Grisi, Cerrito and Grahn went there in her wake, dancing the ballets most closely associated with them. These included Giselle, which established Yelena Andreyanova (1819–57) as the first Russian romantic ballerina at St Petersburg; her Moscow counterpart was Yekaterina Sankovskaya (1816–78), who danced La sylphide and followed Andreyanova in Giselle, Elssler in La Esmeralda and Taglioni in La fille du Danube. Sankovskaya also choreographed her own production of Le diable à quatre in Moscow four years before Perrot staged it in St Petersburg; Perrot went there when London’s interest in ballet declined after Jenny Lind’s operatic successes, and remained as ballet-master until 1859, when he was succeeded by Arthur Saint-Léon, a virile dancer and Cerrito’s husband until they separated in 1851. Saint-Léon had only modest success in Russia except for The Little Hump-Backed Horse, one of the first ballets on a specifically Russian folk story which, in spite of the limited musical interest of Pugni’s score, supplemented by themes borrowed from Rossini (Tancredi in particular), remained in the repertory for many years after its 1864 première (20th-century productions by other choreographers continued to use the Pugni music until a new score was composed by Shchedrin for performance in 1960). The native Russian element in ballet was consolidated by The Fern (1867), with choreography by Sergey Sokolov, a pupil of Saint-Léon, and music by Yury Gelber, first violin and conductor of the Bol'shoy Theatre orchestra, and led directly to later balletic triumphs in association with Tchaikovsky.

(iii) Ballet in opera.

Throughout the 19th century ballet retained a connection with opera, chiefly when composers incorporated dance scenes to diversify weightier emotional matters. Weber anticipated some elements of La sylphide by more than 20 years in his early opera Silvana (1810), in which his mostly mute heroine embodies the romantic woodland spirit and expresses herself in dance. Weber evoked a strong flavour of Spanish dance in his music for Preciosa; he added a newly composed pas de cinq to Euryanthe in 1825 for its Berlin production, to please Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia; and Oberon has enchanting dances woven into the musical fabric. In Russia, Glinka was an admirer of ballet who took lessons in his youth, and whose knowledge of ballet and folkdance is reflected in dance scenes which grow out of the dramatic action, notably in A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). By the 1820s ballet had become a necessary element of all productions at the Paris Opéra, where Rossini, after interpolating dance movements from other sources in his earlier operas, provided two extensive dance sequences in Guillaume Tell (1829), in which Marie Taglioni first danced the well-known Tyrolean Dance.

Meyerbeer incorporated ballet to more than decorative purpose in Robert le diable (1831), his ballet of the spectral nuns serving to tempt the hero from the path of honour (fig.17), but in his later operas such as Les Huguenots, L’étoile du nord and L’Africaine his ballet sequences were more in the nature of divertissements, as were those Donizetti added to Les martyrs (the French version of Poliuto) or to La favorite and Dom Sébastien. Verdi’s adaptations for the Paris Opéra are particularly interesting in this respect; he added a ballet to I Lombardi when it was staged there as Jérusalem; he composed a ballet of the Four Seasons as an original element in Les vêpres siciliennes; he added Spanish-gypsy dances when Il trovatore became Le trouvère (including one based on the theme of the Anvil Chorus); he summoned Hecate and the witches to dance in Macbeth; and he equipped the Paris production of Don Carlos with ‘La Pérégrina: ballet de la reine’ (fig.18). He resisted blandishments to add a ballet to Rigoletto, but in 1894 provided a divertissement for Otello, his last music for the theatre.

With the decline of romantic ballet as an artistic entity after about 1850, ballets became more and more an excuse for vulgar display by individual performers or for varying degrees of elaborate spectacle. The entrenched position in Paris within ten years is illustrated by the episode of the ballet Wagner was required to add to Tannhäuser: he placed it at the start of Act 1 whereupon part of the audience, having arrived too late to witness it, created a disturbance that wrecked the opera’s prospects. French composers such as Berlioz, Gounod and Massenet took care to safeguard themselves by making due provision for ballet in their operas; others alternated between operas and ballets as complementary entertainments. When Grétry’s Zémire et Azor became a ballet in 1824, Schneitzhöffer retained much of the original music in his transcription, but when Auber turned his Marco Spada opera of 1852 into a ballet on the same subject five years later, he constructed a quite different score using themes from Fra Diavolo and his other operas.

Adam worked successfully in both genres, as did his pupil Delibes, who was responsible for two scores that raised the standard of ballet music at a time when the art itself was in decline in western Europe. The first of these was Coppélia (1870), originally choreographed in Paris by Saint-Léon, in which Delibes extended Adam’s device of associating themes with characters. The lack of difference in musical manner between the male and female dances in Coppélia is explained by the fact that the male had been so far relegated that his leading role was then, and for many years subsequently, danced by a female en travestie. Delibes further developed the leitmotif device in Sylvia (1876), and Tchaikovsky came to know and admire the music to fruitful purpose, but none of the original choreography, by Louis Mérante (1828–87), has survived.

(iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900.

Tchaikovsky once described his music for Swan Lake as ‘poor stuff compared with Sylvia’, but it was his score which, by treating ballet as a subject worthy of musical imagination, set new standards for the role of music in classical ballet and achieved one of its enduring masterworks. Swan Lake had its origins in a domestic entertainment by the children and friends of Tchaikovsky’s sister, performed at their home probably about 1871. It was extended to a four-act ballet on a commission in 1875–6 from the directorate of the Imperial Theatres, and was first performed at the Bol'shoy Theatre, Moscow, in 1877, with Pelagia Karpakova in the dual leading role of Odette-Odile. Nobody was credited with a scenario for Swan Lake in the original programme, but the folk story seems to have been given theatrical form by the Bol'shoy Theatre director Vladimir Begichev and the dancer Vasily Heltzor, in collaboration with Tchaikovsky and the ballet-master Julius Reisinger (who was responsible for the first choreography). The ballet achieved a modest success in spite of difficulties presented by the stronger and more organic musical element, and choreography that hardly matched the level of musical invention. A Russian dance at the first performance, and a full-scale pas de deux at the fifth, were added by Tchaikovsky at the request of the ballerinas concerned.

Nikolay Kashkin, who made the first piano transcription of Swan Lake, later recalled that the ballet ‘held its place on the stage until the scenery was worn out … Not only the décor became ragged, but the musical score suffered more and more until nearly a third was exchanged with music from other ballets, and not necessarily good ones’. In progressively more mutilated form the ballet continued in the Bol'shoy Theatre repertory through the new choreographic version made by Joseph Hansen in 1880 until it was eventually dropped in 1883. It then remained unperformed until after Tchaikovsky’s death when an entirely new version was mounted at St Petersburg in the wake of the greater successes of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892).

Meanwhile in 1869 the Russian imperial ballet had come under the despotic control of Marius Petipa (1818–1910), a French-born ballet-master and choreographer whose brother, Lucien, was premier danseur at the Paris Opéra, and whose father, Jean, had taught at the Russian Imperial Academy of Dancing. Building on the existing foundations, Petipa created 46 original ballets in Russia which raised the style to a peak of spectacular grandeur; the best of them continued to influence the course of classical ballet and its teaching throughout the 20th century. Petipa had already toured in France, Spain and the USA; he first went to St Petersburg in 1847 and was premier danseur until 1858 when he became second ballet-master under Saint-Léon. In this capacity he staged his first important ballet in 1862, the three-act Pharaoh’s Daughter, with music by the ubiquitous Pugni, who at that time had the official post of staff ballet composer to the Imperial Theatres. Petipa’s mixture of pas d’action stemming from Perrot’s dramatic principles, with exotic divertissements, fantastic processions and multiple apotheoses, not necessarily germane to the narrative, constituted the first ballet à grand spectacle, a type that dominated Russian ballet for the rest of the century. The Sleeping Beauty remains the most celebrated example, more of Petipa’s choreography having survived from this than from any other, but scenes and pas de deux by him have been handed down from the 1895 revision of Swan Lake, from Don Quixote (1869) and La bayadère (1877) with music by Minkus, and from the 1899 revision of Le corsaire.

The composition of The Sleeping Beauty, described by Stravinsky as ‘the convincing example of Tchaikovsky’s great creative power’, was brought about by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres, who abolished the post of staff ballet composer and engaged composers of more distinction. Vsevolozhsky prepared the scenario and designs, while Petipa mapped out in detail a sequence of dances which, far from being a hindrance to musical composition (as some commentaries have suggested), proved a practical help to Tchaikovsky, whose enthusiastic collaboration resulted in the supreme example of 19th-century classical ballet. It was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in 1890, and remains a cornerstone of the classical ballet repertory.

Two years later Vsevolozhsky brought Tchaikovsky and Petipa together again for The Nutcracker, which was to form part of a double bill with Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta, but Petipa had not progressed very far before illness compelled him to yield the choreography to his assistant, Lev Ivanov (1834–1901), who alone was named on the posters for the first production at St Petersburg in 1892 (fig.19). Ivanov was further responsible for a new version of Act 2 of Swan Lake, mounted as a memorial to Tchaikovsky after the composer’s death in 1893, which led to the full new production in 1895 by Petipa and Ivanov together, from which most later versions of the ballet have stemmed. The scenario for this was modified by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, and the alterations made in the musical sequence to meet Petipa’s requirements have continued to bedevil most productions of the ballet.

Ivanov worked so much in the shadow of Petipa, mostly revising older ballets, that the transitory nature of unrecorded choreography has denied him much posthumous fame, but he was a talented (though untrained) musician, and the known share of his contribution to Swan Lake, still preserved in the familiar Act 2, shows him to have been a much more musical choreographer than Petipa. Besides The Nutcracker, Soviet historians also single out Ivanov’s original choreography of the Polovtsian Dances in the first production (1890) of Borodin’s Prince Igor, but at the end of his life Ivanov had to petition the Imperial Theatres for financial assistance, on the strength of 50 years’ service, and he died in poverty. Petipa, however, recovered from his illness to collaborate fruitfully in Raymonda (1896–7) and The Seasons (1899) with Glazunov, whose symphonic aspirations sadly curtailed his evident talent for ballet. A change in the administration of the Imperial Theatres soon after and the failure of Koreschenko's The Magic Mirror brought about Petipa’s retirement. His legacy was a repertory and a style on which others could build, and an ensemble of dancers and a school of training which represented an investment for the future; Sergey Diaghilev was one of the first to profit from it.

(i) Diaghilev and the Russian exiles to 1930.

3. 20th century: classical.

In balletic usage the term ‘classical’ continues to define old and new works performed in a style derived from the Franco-Russian danse de l’école, in contrast with ‘modern dance’ (see §4) which commonly refers to the freer style derived in the USA from Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis and particularly Martha Graham, and in Europe from Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss.

(ii) Britain, the USA and elsewhere.

(iii) The USSR: a continuing tradition.

(iv) Main trends since 1945.

(i) Diaghilev and the Russian exiles to 1930.

Sergey Diaghilev (1872–1929), whose touch of genius changed the face and fortune of classical dance within five years and determined its 20th-century course in the West, could neither choreograph nor compose, but was originally concerned with disseminating Russian art in all its manifestations. He first organized exhibitions of visual art in Paris and then planned a production there of Borodin’s Prince Igor with a Russian company (1909); financial reasons caused this to be restricted to a presentation of Act 2 only, and consequently the Russian dancers in the scene of the Polovtsian Dances captured as much as if not more attention than the singers. Diaghilev realized that Russian ballet could be even more successful in the West than Russian opera.

His second Paris season (1909) accordingly presented for the first time the ‘Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev’ in a repertory almost entirely choreographed by Mikhail Fokine (1880–1942), including the Polovtsian Dances as a separate item. Prompted by what he had seen of the American modern dancer Isadora Duncan, Fokine’s other works in this and following years initiated a new trend in the use of pre-existing music, not necessarily composed with dancing in mind. At first he used such music in three different ways: as an anthology of works by one composer, of which the most famous example is the orchestrated Chopin anthology first made in 1909 for Les sylphides (originally Chopiniana, a title still retained in Russia), which was followed by similar Schumann anthologies for Le carnaval (1910) and Papillons (1914); a miscellany of works by different composers for the same ballet, as in Cleopatra (1909), which used music by Arensky, Glazunov, Glinka, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Taneyev and Tcherepnin; or the association of a new balletic narrative or theme with a single work, as in Sheherazade (1910), where Rimsky-Korsakov’s music was matched to a story different from that which prompted his composition. Diaghilev soon realized that musical integrity was no less important to dance than choreography and visual character, and the second of these categories was quickly discarded; the others have continued to furnish a wide variety of musical means for dance.

Diaghilev also continued the 19th-century practice of specially written music for dance and engaged composers of true promise or distinction, most notably Stravinsky, whose three pre-1914 Diaghilev commissions, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), first brought him international fame. In that period Diaghilev also engaged Debussy (L’après-midi d’un faune and Jeux), Ravel (Daphnis et Chloé), Florent Schmitt (La tragédie de Salomé) and Richard Strauss (Josephslegende). From 1917 until Diaghilev’s death these were supplemented by Satie (Parade), Falla (El sombrero de tres picos), Poulenc (Les biches), Auric (Les fâcheux), Milhaud (Le train bleu), Sauguet (La chatte), Prokofiev (The Steel Step and The Prodigal Son) and Constant Lambert (Romeo and Juliet), while the production of Apollon musagète (1928) initiated the partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky which had far-reaching consequences for classical dance in the following decades. Diaghilev’s policy towards composers confirmed his belief that music could and should have an organic and not merely decorative part in the theatrical conception.

The choreographic interest of Diaghilev’s company centred successively on Fokine, Leonid Massine (1896–1979) and George Balanchine (1904–83), and to a lesser extent on the dancer Vaclav Nizhinsky (1888–1950), who was responsible for the first choreography of L’après-midi d’un faune (fig.20), Jeux and The Rite of Spring in versions forgotten until the last named was reconstructed in 1988, and his sister Bronislava Nizhinska (1890–1972) who created, among other works, The Wedding and Les biches, which continue to be performed in her original choreography. A member of Diaghilev’s company at the outset was Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), who broke with him after his first Paris season, formed her own company (mostly English in origin) in 1914 and began the world tours that continued until her death. She spread the interest in classical ballet in many countries where it was a complete novelty, but her inferior taste in music (using that of Aphons Czibulka, Drigo, Paul Lincke and the slighter works of more distinguished names) was also responsible for a widespread and persistent belief that ‘ballet music’ was confined to works of a trivial nature.

With the sudden death of Diaghilev in 1929 and the disbandment of his company, the conditions became ripe for the establishment of a tradition of classical dance on a more permanent basis in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. Companies calling themselves ‘Ballets Russes’, or versions of that title, continued to be active and their confused identities are described in detail elsewhere (Lynham, D1947); the first of them, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, produced the so-called ‘symphonic ballets’ by Massine, of which Choreartium (1933), to Brahms’s Symphony no.4, occasioned something of a musical scandal but was much admired when revived by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 1991. (It was not, however, the first ballet to make use of a pre-composed symphony; Aleksandr Gorsky (see §iii below) had choreographed Glazunov’s Fifth Symphony at the Bol'shoy Theatre in 1915.)

(ii) Britain, the USA and elsewhere.

A direct outcome of the Diaghilev company’s activities, and of its first production in the West of Petipa’s St Petersburg classic The Sleeping Beauty (Alhambra Theatre, London, 1921), was the establishment of classical dance on a regular basis through resident companies in Britain and the USA. Diaghilev had recruited and trained the three women who laid the foundations of classical ballet in Britain: Marie Rambert (1888–1982), Ninette de Valois (b 1898) and Alicia Markova (b 1910). Marie Rambert began teaching in London in 1920, and in 1926 founded Ballet Rambert, renamed Rambert Dance Company in 1987. Ninette de Valois became associated with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic from 1926, and from 1931 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where the Vic-Wells Ballet formed by de Valois was the basis of the Royal Ballet. Alicia Markova was the first British prima ballerina and set the high professional standards that both the Rambert and the Vic-Wells companies aimed at from the outset; she later (1935–8) toured Britain with the Markova-Dolin Ballet.

Operating on Diaghilev’s principles as far as she could, de Valois staged classics from the notebooks of the Russian régisseur Nikolay Sergeyev (Giselle, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake in 1934 and The Sleeping Beauty in 1939), and supplemented these with works of her own and others by Frederick Ashton (1904–88), who became a resident choreographer in 1935. Where possible, a collaboration was sought with British composers, including Vaughan Williams (Job, 1931; fig.21), Walton (Façade, 1931), Geoffrey Toye (The Haunted Ballroom, 1935), Gavin Gordon (The Rake’s Progress, 1935), and Bliss (Checkmate, 1937), while Constant Lambert as musical director made arrangements of music by such composers as Auber, Liszt and Meyerbeer (for Ashton’s Les rendezvous, Apparitions and Les patineurs respectively), and of Boyce for de Valois’ The Prospect before Us. The company became known as Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the late 1930s, after Markova left in 1935 to form her own company with Anton Dolin; Margot Fonteyn (1919–91) succeeded Markova in the ballerina roles, having begun dancing with the company in 1934. During World War II it was based at the New Theatre, London; it reopened Covent Garden in 1946 with The Sleeping Beauty and became the resident company there, receiving the royal charter in 1956. A second company, Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (at first Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet), was formed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1946, and subsequently became the touring echelon of the Royal Ballet. In 1976 it returned to its former base and was officially renamed Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. From 1990 it was based in Birmingham (as Birmingham Royal Ballet) with its own director and administration.

Rambert’s sphere of operation was more circumscribed, her company never acquiring a regular base for performance, but it complemented that of de Valois by consistently acting as a forcing-house for choreographic talent. Having brought to light Frederick Ashton, whose first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, to music by Eugene Goossens, inaugurated the Rambert dancers’ first appearance (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1926), Rambert subsequently developed the talents of Antony Tudor (who became a significant influence on classical dance in the USA), Walter Gore, Andrée Howard and Frank Staff, followed in the postwar period by several more, notably Norman Morrice and Christopher Bruce. Rambert encouraged a broadminded and relatively adventurous approach to music which enabled Tudor to create The Planets (to part of Holst’s suite, 1934) and Dark Elegies (to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, 1937), and which also ranged from Schubert (Howard’s Death and the Maiden, 1937) to Poulenc, Honegger and Prokofiev before World War II.

Meanwhile Balanchine, who worked in Copenhagen, Paris and London for short periods after the Diaghilev company disbanded, was approached in 1933 with a plan to establish a base for classical dance in New York, to parallel developments in modern dance, and he opened the School of American Ballet there the next year. From it there appeared, as opportunity and funds allowed, a succession of companies including the American Ballet, Ballet Caravan and Ballet Society, and a growing team of dancers trained in Balanchine’s style (which he extended to numerous Broadway and film assignments in the 1930s and 40s). These activities brought about American subjects for dance and the participation of American composers; an example is Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid with music by Copland, first staged by Ballet Caravan in 1938. Ballet Society, formed in 1946, was in due course invited to make its home at New York City Center, where it became the foundation of the New York City Ballet in 1948 and where it continued to flourish until it was installed at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center in 1964.

Other major companies to establish the classical tradition in the USA include the San Francisco Ballet (from 1937) and the American Ballet Theatre, originally formed at New York City Center in 1940, with which Tudor became closely associated from the outset, and whose later notable choreographers include Jerome Robbins. From the 1950s classical companies of varying standards proliferated in large cities and regional areas. In Canada a modest ballet school opened at Winnipeg in 1938, became a professional company from 1949 and received a royal charter in 1953 as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It was followed by the National Ballet of Canada based in Toronto (1951) and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, based in Montreal (1952).

In Europe the once supreme Paris Opéra Ballet declined into the doldrums, from which it was partly lifted by a former Diaghilev principal Serge Lifar (1905–86); it regained much of its old prestige under the direction of Rudolf Nureyev (1938–93). However, the Paris-based company Les Ballets Suédois was influential in experimental work (1920–25), as was Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées in maintaining the Paris Opéra tradition in the period 1945–50. In Copenhagen the Royal Danish Ballet continued on its course undisturbed by the rest of the balletic world and unaffected by Diaghilev (except for brief visits from Fokine in 1925 and Balanchine in 1930), and was rediscovered internationally after 1945 as the repository of the Bournonville style and method, virtually unchanged for a century. More recently, under Flemming Flindt (b 1936), the Danish company has sought to maintain a balance between the Bournonville tradition and new developments in classical dance, notably commissioning original music from Maxwell Davies for Flindst’s two-act ballets Salome (1978) and Caroline Mathilde (1991). Flindt left in 1978 to form his own independent company and was succeeded by former principal dancer Hemming Kronstam, and then in 1996 by Maina Gielgud, the first woman to direct the company and the first non-Dane for 180 years. But she found the position untenable and left after one year.

(iii) The USSR: a continuing tradition.

Between the retirement of Petipa from St Petersburg in 1903 and the revolution of 1917, the focus of classical ballet moved to Moscow, where Aleksandr Gorsky (1871–1924) was appointed ballet-master at the Bol'shoy Theatre in 1900. He staged new versions of several Petipa ballets, including five progressive versions of Swan Lake, making them more dramatic and less formal; he was the first choreographer to make use of a pre-existing symphony for dance (Glazunov’s Symphony no.5, 1915); and he introduced The Nutcracker to Moscow in 1919. His style of dance-drama was found to accord with the new Soviet aims for classical dance after 1917 when, instead of being swept away as a symbol of imperial decadence (as many activists wanted), it was defended by the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatol Lunacharsky, as a national asset that deserved to be made worthy of the proletariat.

With the classical tradition preserved and nurtured by outstanding teachers such as Agrippina Vaganova in Leningrad and Vasily Tikhomirov in Moscow, the new Soviet ballet passed swiftly through a phase of post-Revolutionary experiment to cultivate a new harvest in the classical tradition. Tikhomirov was the joint choreographer with Lev Lashchilin of the first successful ‘socialist ballet’, Glier’s The Red Poppy (1927; fig.22), which established socialist realism as a balletic theme and which is still in the repertory. The Golden Age (1930) was a fiercer but more controversial satire on capitalist principles, with music that helped to make Shostakovich more widely known; one of its choreographers, Vasily Vainonen (1898–1964), went on to create in The Fire of Paris (to Asaf'yev’s pastiche of 18th-century French music, 1932) the emotional human drama against a revolutionary political background which continued to be a prominent theme in Soviet ballet.

Gorsky’s naturalistic style of dance-drama reached its peak in the work of Leonid Lavrovsky (1905–67), who began choreography in the 1930s at Leningrad where the former imperial company now took its name from the Kirov Theatre (formerly the Mariinsky Theatre). Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet in 1940 to Prokofiev’s score (the first version was by Vanya Psota at Brno in 1938) was his major achievement; he also choreographed The Stone Flower in 1954 to Prokofiev’s last ballet score, after the composer’s death. Lavrovsky’s counterpart and predecessor at Moscow was Rostislav Zakharov (1907–84), whose ballets The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1933, music by Asaf'yev) was the first of several on Pushkin subjects. He also choreographed the first version of Cinderella (1945) to Prokofiev’s other major ballet score, when the title role was taken by the most celebrated of Vaganova’s pupils and the outstanding Soviet ballerina of the mid-20th century, Galina Ulanova (1910–98).

A later version of Cinderella in 1964 had choreography by Konstantin Sergeyev (1910–92), another Leningrad dancer who had earlier made the first ballet on race relations in The Path of Thunder (1958), with music by Karayev and based on a novel by the South African writer Peter Abrahams. The classic tragedy of Spartacus, with music by Khachaturian, has furnished successive ballets by Igor Moyseyev (1958), Leonid Jacobsen (1966) and in 1968 by Yury Grigorovich, who became director of the Bol'shoy Ballet in 1964, remaining in the post until his resignation in 1995. His productions have modified naturalistic dance-drama by reasserting the supremacy of the classical style, but used with more freedom of imagination, as in his versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.

The Lavrovsky production of Romeo and Juliet, led by Ulanova and Yury Zhdanov, opened the Bol'shoy Ballet’s first season at Covent Garden in 1956 and initiated an influence on classical dance in the West which was continued in later tours by the Bol'shoy and Kirov companies (the latter first appeared at Covent Garden in 1961). Ulanova’s embodiment of a total commitment to a dramatic role, with musical phrasing to heighten emotional expression, and a technique that was broader in outline and more impassioned in character than that attempted by Western dancers, brought about a new focus of style in classical dance, as did Soviet dancers who left the USSR to settle and work in the West, notably Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Barïshnikov. The underlying conservatism of music in Soviet dance, however, has been less fruitful elsewhere.

With the advent of political and economic reform (perestroika) promoted from 1985 under the government leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to the disintegration of the USSR, the major state ballet companies found themselves confronted by artistic and economic problems. Subsidies were reduced, and the greater freedom of the individual allowed more dancers to seek lucrative engagements in the West, chiefly as guest artists for limited seasons. However, some obtained full-time contracts, such as Irek Mukhamedov from the Bol'shoy Ballet who joined London's Royal Ballet as a principal from 1990. A state of flux on the Russian ballet scene left standards in decline, and a season by the Bol'shoy Ballet in London in 1993 was so poorly received and adversely reviewed that a planned return the next year had to be cancelled for lack of public response. The company's artistic director of 30 years, the despotic Yury Nikolaiyevich Grigorovich (b 1927), described in some quarters as a ‘Soviet fossil’, was forced to resign in 1995, and was replaced by Vladimir Victorovich Vasiliyev (b 1940), a former dancer and a fierce critic of Grigorovich. From the company's summer season in London in 1999 it appeared that standards were improving, although the repertory and musical character were still stagnant. Similarly in St Petersburg, the Kirov Ballet director of 20 years, Oleg Mikhailovich Vinogradov (b 1937) resigned in 1997, and control was taken by the conductor Valery Gergiyev, artistic director of the Kirov Opera, assisted by a committee of ballet advisers including principal dancers.

(iv) Main trends since 1945.

From being concentrated in a few centres and touring companies, classical dance in the latter part of the 20th century became an element of national or civic cultural prestige throughout the world. Whether funded from government, commercial or private sources, full-time companies devoted wholly or mainly to classical dance are active in almost all European countries, Russia and neighbouring republics, the Middle East, North and South America, Cuba, China, Japan, Australasia and South Africa. In many countries two or more companies perform in direct or complementary competition, and it has become a regular practice for tours to be made from one country to another on a continuing basis of cultural exchange, a practice virtually initiated by the successful visit of Sadler’s Wells Ballet from Covent Garden to New York in 1949 and repeated for many successive years until costs became prohibitive.

Classical companies involve larger numbers of dancers than their modern-dance counterparts, and their success depends fundamentally on at least one resident choreographer or director whose works give the company a corporate personality, and on schools of ballet where teachers of distinction can provide, year by year, a flow of intensively trained young talent to the professional companies. Basic repertories generally include at least one of the five main ‘classics’: the three Tchaikovsky ballets, Giselle and Coppélia, to which a Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev) is often added. These are supplemented by the works of the resident choreographers and others, who may be invited to produce their more successful ballets in other countries. Some choreographers work in peripatetic fashion for any company wishing to engage them, and works from the Diaghilev repertory continue to be revived after more than 50 years. Forms of notation have enabled older works to be re-produced, and new systems of notation (‘choreology’) can provide a more lasting record of new works, although it is frequently felt that productions staged from notation alone lack the personality their creators would have given them.

The ‘dance explosion’ of the 1970s and 80s was a world phenomenon, helping in Britain to raise the profile of dance as an art and an entertainment in both professional and community contexts. The fragments of fallout from this explosion of activity have tended to coalesce into numerous small groups, usually of a modern or postmodern character, who come together in performance for a few days, weeks or months, at the behest of any self-styled choreographer who can obtain public funding, commercial sponsors or a mixture of both, and whose awareness of music is often limited to ‘staining the background’ with sound, usually on tape and sometimes electro-acoustic.

There are, of course, honourable exceptions, whose choreographic work has reflected an understanding of the creative contribution that music can make to a dance conception and has thus encouraged more composers to realize that new music for dance can bring, as well as artistic fulfilment, more financial reward through repeated performances than much concert work can offer. Financial constraints usually limit new work, whether in the classical or modern category, to single-act length of from 15 to 60 minutes. A large national company may stage four to eight such works a year, unless some special occasion enables the number to be increased; the most memorable example was New York City Ballet’s tribute to Stravinsky (1972), when 31 ballets to his music (of which 20 were entirely new works) were staged within a week by Balanchine and six other choreographers.

In postwar economic conditions the full-evening ballet with music specially composed, the most usual kind of work a century earlier, became very rare. The first three-act score by a British composer was Britten’s The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), created by John Cranko (1927–73) for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden; others of musical distinction have been Henze’s Undine (1958) for Ashton and the Royal Ballet, and three ballets by Peter Darrell (1929–87): Sun into Darkness (1966; music by Malcolm Williamson) for Western Theatre Ballet; and Beauty and the Beast (1969; music by Thea Musgrave) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1975; music by John McCabe), both for Scottish Ballet. Original scores for David Bintley’s Hobson’s Choice (Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, 1989) and Far from the Madding Crowd (Birmingham Royal Ballet, 1996) were composed by Paul Reade (1943–97).

Other full-length ballets have been staged to pre-existing music. Some have tried to remodel 19th-century prototypes with new arrangements of the music as well as new choreography, such as Don Quixote (Minkus, arranged by Lanchbery), La fille mal gardée (Hérold, arranged by Lanchbery; fig.23), and Beatrix (Adam, arranged by Horovitz). Various musical compromises have enabled operas and operettas to furnish balletic subjects: Cranko’s Onegin (1965) for the Stuttgart Ballet and Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon (1974) for the Royal Ballet use anthologies of smaller works by Tchaikovsky and Massenet respectively, unconnected with the operas of either, but Darrell’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1972), Cinderella (1979) and Carmen (1985) for Scottish Ballet, and Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow (1975) for the Australian Ballet, are based on transcriptions of the opera scores by Offenbach, Rossini, Bizet and Lehár. Music may occasionally be derived from more than one composer within the same ballet, as in MacMillan’s Anastasia (1971), where Martinů is preceded by Tchaikovsky to point up the difference in time between pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia, or the awkward and less justified juxtapositions of Haydn and Joseph Lamb’s ragtime in Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (1976), and of Ravel and Christopher Rouse in Lila York’s Sanctum (1997), both works by American choreographers.

Thus music for classical dance is a flexible matter. Most new ballets use pre-existing music, ranging from a single work to an anthology. Massine’s ‘symphonic’ ballets of the 1930s have had little direct influence, and Roland Petit’s matching of a dramatic narrative to Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor (three times repeated) in Le jeune homme et la mort (1946) was controversial, but it can reasonably be claimed that Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946, to César Franck) constitutes one of his choreographic masterworks, no less an achievement than his Enigma Variations (1968) or MacMillan’s The Song of the Earth (1965). Narrative associations have tended to become tenuous or have been discarded, not least in the later works of the long and fruitful association of Balanchine and Stravinsky from Apollon musagète (1928) to Duo concertant (1972); their collaboration includes in Agon (1957) and Movements (1963) what many regard as the deepest interpenetration of music and dance ever achieved. With or without new music, Stravinsky’s dictum holds good: ‘Choreography must realize its own form, one independent of the musical form though measured to the musical unit. Its construction will be based on whatever correspondences the choreographer may invent, but it must not seek merely to duplicate the line and beat of the music’ (Memories and Commentaries).

Where pre-existing music is used, the effect of the resulting ballet is governed by a single crucial principle: that the level of choreographic imagination should never be less than that of the music. A ballet (or a modern dance) can be better than its music, but it can never afford to be worse. Sometimes a ballet can legitimately and successfully change a musical conception, as was achieved by Fokine with Rimsky-Korsakov in Sheherazade (1910) and by Darrell in setting a digest of Othello (1973) to the first movement alone of Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Occasionally a musical work engages the attentions of several different choreographers independently, as happened in the 1960s with Berio’s Sinfonia and in the early 1970s with George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.

However, the plethora of small-scale, mostly modern or postmodern dance work found in most European countries and North America, and greatly fostered in Britain by the Arts Councils in a policy of encouraging the wider dissemination of dance in the community, unsupported by either the knowledge or the resources to involve a creative contribution from music, has served mainly to demonstrate the rarity of true choreographic talent. It is a remarkable generation that produces more than two or three new choreographers of distinction anywhere and, while dancers generally were becoming increasingly expert in technical proficiency, choreographers in the 1990s were finding more and more difficulty in keeping pace with them, much less inventing new ways to challenge them and entertain their audiences.

Three factors militate against the more frequent use of specially composed music for dance: the cost of commission fee, copying, extra rehearsal and performing rights; the time taken to compose a score, generally longer than it takes to compose choreography and often longer than production schedules can allow; and the contrasting approaches of the two forms of creative work: the choreographer creates in fragments, discarding and building, while the ballet composer, unlike his 19th-century counterpart, usually begins with a total concept and fills in the detail. Nevertheless, the responsive collaboration of choreographer and composer remains the best means to dance creation, as the ideal ‘perfect analogous concord between what we see and what we hear’ recommended by Blasis in the early 19th century.

4. Modern dance.

The term ‘modern’, or ‘contemporary’, dance is applied to any of the styles and techniques of theatrical dancing, intended for independent presentation, that grew up during the 20th century as an alternative to the strict disciplines of classical ballet. In America its pioneers were Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), who took ancient Greek art as her inspiration, and Ruth St Denis (1877–1968), who modelled her work primarily on Eastern sources. Duncan’s influence was worldwide as a result of her many tours, and the impression she made on Fokine during a visit to Russia particularly influenced the course of classical ballet. Her revealing costumes, flimsy draperies and bare feet were regarded as daring, but introduced a valuable reform of dance costumes in general (for illustration see Duncan, Isadora). Musically her great innovation was the use of any score that inspired her; she danced to symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, and appeared at the Bayreuth Festival in 1904 in some of her interpretations of Wagner’s music. Previously dancing had been largely confined to inferior music, and the greater freedom of choice she introduced gave the opportunity for many subsequent developments. Her personal qualities as a performer inspired in many others an interest in dance, but although she devoted much time to founding dance schools for children, the direct influence of her technique remains curiously limited.

In 1915 St Denis and her dance partner Ted Shawn (1891–1972) – a successful propagandist against the misconception that dancing was an effeminate career for men – formed a school, known from 1917 as Denishawn, which produced most of the next generation of American modern dancers. Prominent among them were Doris Humphrey, who devised means of teaching the art of choreography, Charles Weidman, who pioneered specifically American themes, and Martha Graham (1894–1991). It was Graham more than anyone else who successfully devised a technique of modern dance that could be taught as the basis for the dancer’s own personal use in different styles. The aim of modern dance has always been expression rather than display, with a consequent emphasis on innovation and a personal style, but the success of the Graham School in New York (founded 1941) prevented the ill-informed charge (analogous to attacks made on modern painters) that modern dancers’ style stemmed merely from lack of technique. Graham’s own ballets, often based on mythological or psychological subjects, have a theatrical power that established her internationally as the leading modern dancer of her generation and helped to popularize modern dance where it had formerly been resisted (fig.24).

Graham’s pupils and partners often went on to form their own companies and soon demonstrated that the technical training they had in common was no bar to strikingly individual development. Among them Merce Cunningham (b 1919), in collaboration with his musical director John Cage and artistic directors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, had the greatest influence, pioneering a dissociation of music and dance in which, though presented concurrently, each aimed at self-sufficiency instead of the dance taking its rhythms and structure from the music (see Cage, John, fig.2). Cage and some of his fellow musicians greatly affected the course of American modern dance, not only by their collaboration with Cunningham but also by their participation in the many and often completely anarchic dance experiments that took place in Judson Memorial Church, New York. In return, the musicians benefited through their scores having earlier and more frequent performances than if they had waited for concert presentation, and they were heard by an audience in sympathy with radical experiment.

In pre-war Europe modern dance was most successful in Germany, where Rudolf von Laban (1897–1958) and Mary Wigman (1886–1973) were the leading exponents. Laban’s pupil Kurt Jooss (1901–79, active in the 1920s in Münster and Essen) created the most successful single work of the German school, The Green Table (1932, Paris), with a specially written score for two pianos by F.A. Cohen; because of its perennially relevant theme of anger at political machinations leading to war, this has entered the repertories of several companies, including some based on classical ballet technique. Jooss fled from the Nazis and spent many years in England; he re-founded his school in Essen in 1949, but after the war the slightly heavy style with which he was associated became less popular in central Europe. In Britain it was the success of visiting companies from the USA that revived interest in modern dance and led to the foundation of new companies, of which the London Contemporary Dance Theatre became the most flourishing, under the direction of another of Graham’s former partners, Robert Cohan (fig.25).

In spite of increased interest among European dancers and audiences, most innovations in modern dance have continued to come from its American practitioners. Paul Taylor (b 1930) developed fresh qualities of humour and lyricism in a form previously tending to be a little dry, and Alwin Nikolais’s imaginative use of lighting won much admiration. Nikolais (b 1912) also composed his own music, with the aid of a synthesizer, and some other modern-dance choreographers have made their own accompaniments, generally using either percussion or magnetic tape; modern dance has been associated with the full spectrum of contemporary music of all qualities.

The many experimental approaches to both modern and classical dance among the youngest generation of choreographers calls into question the future of both forms. A considerable overlap has developed between the two styles, which at one time regarded each other with hostile caution. The Nederlands Dans Theater pioneered a style combining elements of both forms, and in Britain the established Ballet Rambert was reorganized on similar lines. Some of the best choreographers, led by Glen Tetley (b 1926) from the USA, who trained and performed in both styles, now work in a way that could lead to classical and modern dance becoming historical, joint precursors of a new kind of dance combining the brilliance of one, the expressiveness of the other and fresh elements inspired by new developments in theatre and music.

b: 17th and 18th centuries

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A General. B 17th and 18th centuries: (i) Writings: contemporary sources (ii) Later studies: France (iii) Later studies: outside France. C 19th century. D 20th century: classical: (i) Individual artists (ii) General studies. E Modern dance: (i) General studies (ii) Individual artists.

a: general

c: 19th century

d: 20th century: classical

e: modern dance

a: general

GroveO (‘Dance’; C.B. Schmidt, R.J. Wiley)

Les spectacles à travers les âges: musique, danse (Paris, 1932)

L. Kirstein: Dance: a Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (New York, 1935/R, 3/1969)

J. Gregor: Kulturgeschichte des Balletts (Vienna, 1946)

P. Nettl: The Story of Dance Music (New York, 1947/R)

B. Kochno: Le ballet en France du quinzième siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1954)

F. Reyna: Des origines du ballet (Paris, 1955; Eng. trans., 1965, as A Concise History of Ballet)

G.B.L. Wilson: A Dictionary of Ballet (Harmondsworth, 1957, 3/1974)

R. Fiske: Ballet Music (London, 1958)

H. Searle: Ballet Music: an Introduction (London, 1958, 2/1973)

J. Lawson: A History of Ballet and its Makers (London, 1964)

P. Brinson: Background to European Ballet (Leiden, 1966)

L. Kirstein: Movement & Metaphor (New York, 1970, repr. 1984 as Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks)

P. Migel: The Ballerinas: from the Court of Louis XIV to Pavlova (New York, 1972)

Dictionary Catalog of the Dance Collection of the Performing Arts Research Center of the New York Public Library (Boston, 1974; annual suppls., Bibliographic Guide to Dance, 1975–; CD-ROM cumulation, 1994, as Dance on Disc; available online 〈www.catnyp.nypl.org〉

S.J. Cohen, ed.: International Encylopedia of Dance (New York, 1998)

b: 17th and 18th centuries

(i) contemporary sources

for dance-specific writings see Schwartz and Schlundt (1987); for notated choreographies see Little and Narsh (1992) and Lancelot (1996)

F. Raguenet: Paralèle des italiens et des françois (Paris, 1702; Eng. trans., 1709/R; Eng. trans. also in MQ, xxxii (1946), 411–36)

J.L. Le Cerf de la Viéville: Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (Brussels, 1704–6/R)

J.B. Dubos: Réflexions critiques sur la poésie, la peinture et la musique (Paris, 1719, 6/1755/R; Eng. trans., 1748/R)

L. Riccoboni: Réflexions historiques et critiques sur les différens théâtres de l’Europe (Paris, 1738/R; Eng. trans., 1741, 2/1754/R, as A General History of the Stage, from its Origin)

C. and F. Parfaict: Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent (MS, c1740, F-Pn n.a.fr.6532)

A. de Léris: Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres (Paris, 1754)

C. and F. Parfaict: Le dictionnaire des théâtres de Paris (Paris, 1756)

J.B. Durey de Noinville andL. Travenol: Histoire du théâtre de l’Académie royale de musique en France (Paris, 2/1757/R)

G. Gallini: A Treatise on the Art of Dancing (London, 1762/R)

P.J.B. Nougaret: De l’art du théâtre (Paris, 1769/R)

(ii) later studies: France

AnthonyFB

T. de Lajarte: Bibliothèque musicale du théâtre de l’Opéra: catalogue historique, chronologique, anecdotique (Paris, 1878)

H. Abert: ‘J.G. Noverre und sein Einfluss auf die dramatische Ballettkomposition’, JbMP 1908, 29–95

P.-M. Masson: ‘Les “symphonies” de danse’, L’opéra de Rameau (Paris, 1930/R), 367–422

J.R. Anthony: ‘The French Opera-Ballet in the Early 18th Century: Problems of Definition and Classification’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 197–206

J.R. Anthony: ‘Some Uses of the Dance in the French Opéra-Ballet’, RMFC, ix (1969), 75–90

G. Seefrid: Die airs de danse in den Bühnenwerken von Jean-Philippe Rameau (Wiesbaden, 1969, 2/1971)

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Dijon 1983 [incl. G. Sadler: ‘The Paris Opéra Dancers in Rameau’s Day: a Little-Known Inventory of 1738’, 519–31; also 5 articles on dance in Rameau operas]

S. Pitou: The Paris Opéra: an Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers, i–ii (Westport, CT, 1983–5)

N. Lecomte: ‘Jean-Baptiste François Dehesse, chorégraphe à la Comédie Italienne’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 142–91

J.L. Schwartz and C.L. Schlundt: French Court Dance and Dance Music: a Guide to Primary Source Writings, 1643–1789, Dance and Music, i (Stuyvesant, NY, 1987) [incl. sources from across Europe pertaining to dance in the French manner]

J. Chazin-Bennahum: Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine (Carbondale, IL, 1988)

J. de La Gorce: ‘Guillaume-Louis Pécour: a Biographical Essay’, Dance Research, viii/2 (1990), 3–26

M.E. Little and C.G. Marsh: La danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (New York, 1992)

T. Betzwieser: Exotismus und ‘Türkenoper’ in der französischen Musik des Ancien Régime (Laaber, 1993)

R. Harris-Warrick and C.G. Marsh: Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: ‘Le mariage de la Grosse Cathos’ (Cambridge, 1994)

C.G. Marsh: ‘French Theatrical Dance in the Late 18th Century: Gypsies, Cloggers, and Drunken Soldiers’, Border Crossings: Dance and Boundaries in Society, Politics, Gender, Education and Technology: Toronto 1995 (Riverside, CA, 1995), 91–8

S.L. Foster: Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington, IN, 1996)

I. Guest: The Ballet of the Enlightenment: the Establishment of the Ballet d’Action in France, 1770–1793 (London, 1996)

F. Lancelot: La belle danse: catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1996)

R. Legrand: ‘Chaconnes et passacailles dansées dans l’opéra français’, Le mouvement en musique à l’époque baroque, ed. H. Lacombe (Metz, 1996), 157–70

S. McCleave, ed.: Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations (London, 1998)

M.K. Whaples: ‘Early Exoticism Revisited’, The Exotic in Western Music, ed. J. Bellman (Boston, 1998), 3–25

(iii) later studies: outside France

R. Haas: ‘Die Wiener Ballet-Pantomime im 18. Jahrhundert und Glucks Don Juan’, SMw, x (1923), 6–36

R.-A. Mooser: Opéras, intermezzos, ballets … joués en Russie durant le XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1945, 3/1964)

G. Croll: ‘Ballet und Pantomime um 1750’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 168–71

L. Tozzi: Il balletto pantomimo del Settecento: Gaspare Angiolini (L’Aquila, 1972)

M.H. Winter: The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London, 1974)

K.K. Hansell: Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, 1771–1776 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1980)

K.K. Hansell: ‘Ballet in Stockholm during the Later 18th Century and its Relationship to Contemporary Trends on the Continent’, STMf, lxvi (1984), 9–42

R. Ralph: The Life and Works of John Weaver (New York, 1985)

K.K. Hansell: ‘Il ballo teatrale e l’opera italiana’, SOI, v (1988), 175–306; Eng. trans. in The History of Italian Opera, ed. L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli (Chicago, 1998)

B.A. Brown: Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford and New York, 1991)

S. Dahms: ‘Das Repertoire des “ballet en action”: Noverre–Angiolini–Lauchery’, De editione musices: Festschrift Gerhard Croll, ed. W. Gratzer and A. Lindmayr (Laaber, 1992), 125–42

S. McCleave: Dance in Handel’s Italian Operas (diss., U. of London, 1993)

I. Alm: ‘Pantomime in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Theatrical Dance’, Creature di Prometeo: il ballo teatrale dal divertimento al dramma: studi offerti a Aurel M. Milloss, ed. G. Morelli (Florence, 1996), 87–102

I. Brainard: ‘The Speaking Body: Gaspero Angiolini’s rhétorique muette and the ballet d’action in the Eighteenth Century’, Critica musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard, ed. J. Knowles (Amsterdam, 1996), 15–56

S. Dahms: ‘Das Mannheimer Ballet im Zeichen der Ballettreform des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Mannheimer Hofkapelle im Zeitalter Carl Theodors (Mannheim, 1992), Ballet Music from the Mannheim Court, i, ed. F.K. Grave (Madison, WI, 1996), pp.ix–xxiii

S. Dahms and S. Schroedter, eds.: Tanz und Bewegung in der barocken Oper: Salzburg 1994 (Innsbruck, 1996)

C. Turocy: ‘Reflections on Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia and Dance Conventions of the Eighteenth Century’, Reflecting our Past, Reflecting our Future: New York 1997, ed. L.J. Tomko (Riverside, CA, 1997), 311–21

I. Alm: Theatrical Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera (Chicago, forthcoming)

c: 19th century

GroveO (‘Bournonville, Auguste’, M.N. Costonis; ‘Didelot, Charles-Louis’, R.J. Wiley; ‘Grahn, Lucile’, M.N. Costonis; ‘Ivanov, Lev Ivanovich’, R.J. Wiley; ‘Mérante, Louis’, I. Guest; ‘Taglioni, Filippo’, M.N. Costonis [incl. information on Marie Taglioni and illustration])

M. Steuer: Review of M.L. Becker: Der Tanz (Leipzig, 1901), Die Musik, ii/4 (1902–3), 122–3 [incl. reflections on the history of 19th-century dance]

C.W. Beaumont: The Romantic Ballet as seen by Théophile Gautier (London, 1932/R) [incl. trans. extracts from Gautier’s reviews]

N. Legat: The Story of the Russian School (London, 1932)

Yu. Slonimsky: Mastera baleta (Leningrad, 1937)

A.L. Haskell: Ballet (Harmondsworth, 1938/R and later rev. edns)

L. Moore: Artists of the Dance (New York, 1938/R)

S. Lifar: Carlotta Grisi (Paris, 1941; Eng. trans., 1947)

L. Vaillat: La Taglioni (Paris, 1942)

C.W. Beaumont: The Ballet called Giselle (London, 1944/R)

C.W. Beaumont: The Ballet called Swan Lake (London, 1952/R)

I. Guest: The Ballet of the Second Empire (London, 1953–5/R)

I. Guest: The Romantic Ballet in England (London, 1954/R)

I. Guest: Fanny Cerrito (London, 1956, 2/1974)

L. Moore, ed.: Russian Ballet Master: the Memoirs of Marius Petipa (New York, 1958/R)

Yu. Slonimsky: Didlo: vekhi tvorcheskoy biografii [Didelot: landmarks in a creative biography] (Leningrad, 1958)

Yu. Slonimsky: ‘Lebedinoye ozero’ P. Chaykovskogo [Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake] (Leningrad, 1962)

V. Krasovskaya: Russkiy baletnïy teatr vtoroy polovinï XIX veka [Russian ballet theatre from the second half of the 19th century] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1963)

R. Neiiendam: Lucile Grahn (Copenhagen, 1963)

I. Guest: A Gallery of Romantic Ballet (London, 1965)

I. Guest: The Romantic Ballet in Paris (London, 1966, 2/1980)

N. Roslavleva: Era of the Russian Ballet (London, 1966)

I. Guest: Fanny Elssler (London, 1970)

Teatervidenskab elige studier/Theatre Research Studies, ed. Institute for Theatre Research, U. of Copenhagen, no.2 (1972)

J. Warrack: Tchaikovsky (London, 1973)

R.J. Wiley: Tchaikovsky’s Ballets (London and New York, 1985)

M.E. Smith: Music for the Ballet-Pantomime at the Paris Opéra, 1825–1850 (diss., Yale U., 1988)

S. Pitou: The Paris Opéra: an Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers, iii (Westport, CT, 1990)

R.J. Wiley, ed. and trans.: A Century of Russian Ballet: Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810–1910 (London and New York, 1990)

M.E. Smith: Ballet-Pantomime and its Kinship with Opera in the Age of Giselle (forthcoming)

d: 20th century: classical

(i) individual artists

V. Svetloff: Anna Pavlova (Paris, 1922/R)

T. Karsavina: Theatre Street (London, 1930, rev. 1950)

P.D. Magriel, ed.: Nijinsky, Pavlova, Duncan: Three Lives in Dance (New York, 1946–7/R)

A. Dolin: Markova: her Life and Art (London, 1953/R)

C. Barnes: Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (Brooklyn, NY, 1961)

A.E. Kahn: Days with Ulanova (London, 1962)

Yu.I. Slonimsky, ed.: M. Fokine: Protiv techeniya: vospominaniya baletmeistera [Against the flow: reminiscences of a ballet-master] (Leningrad, 1962, 2/1981; Eng. trans., 1961, as Memoirs of a Ballet Master)

S. Cohen: Antony Tudor: the Years in America and After (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)

J. Percival: Antony Tudor: the Years in England (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)

B. Taper: Balanchine (New York, 1963, enlarged 1974)

L. Massine: My Life in Ballet, ed. P. Hartnoll and R. Rubens (London and New York, 1968)

Z. Dominic and J.S. Gilbert: Frederick Ashton: a Choreographer and his Ballets (London, 1971)

J. Percival: The World of Diaghilev (London, 1971, rev. 1979)

M. Rambert: Quicksilver (London and New York, 1972) [autobiography]

O. Kerensky: Anna Pavlova (London, 1973)

K. Money: Fonteyn: the Making of a Legend (London, 1973)

M. Fonteyn: Autobiography (London, 1975)

J. Percival: Nureyev: Aspects of the Dancer (New York, 1975)

D. Vaughan: Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (London, 1977)

R. Buckle: Diaghilev (London, 1979)

A. Testa: ‘Bartók nell'estetica del balletto moderno in generale e nell'opera di Milloss in particolare’, RMI, xv (1981), 227–40

A. von Milloss: ‘Bartóks Bedeutung für die Balletästhetik des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Béla Bartók: zu Leben und Werk, ed. F. Spangemacher (Bonn, 1982), 27–38

Choreography by George Balanchine: a Catalogue of Works (New York, 1983) [pubn of the Eakins Foundation]

E. Thorpe: Kenneth MacMillan: the Man and his Ballets (London, 1985)

(ii) general studies

A. Vaganova: Osnovi klassicheskogo tantsa (Leningrad, 1934, 4/1963; Eng. trans., 1946, as Fundamentals of the Classic Dance, 2/1969 as Basic Principles of Classical Ballet)

C. Lambert: ‘Music and Action’, Footnotes to the Ballet, ed. C. Brahms (London, 1936), 161–74

N. de Valois: Invitation to the Ballet (London, 1937/R)

C. Beaumont: The Diaghilev Ballet in London (London, 1940, 3/1951)

A. Benois: Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (London, 1941/R)

D. Lynham: Ballet Then and Now (London, 1947)

J. Slonimsky and others: The Soviet Ballet (New York, 1947/R)

G. Amberg: Ballet in America: the Emergence of an American Art (New York, 1949/R)

E. Denby: Looking at the Dance (New York, 1949, 1968)

M. Lederman, ed.: Stravinsky in the Theatre (New York, 1949/R)

P. Noble, ed.: British Ballet (London, 1949)

S.L. Grigor'yev: The Diaghilev Ballet 1909–29 (London, 1953/R)

M. Clarke: The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: a History and an Appreciation (London, 1955/R)

Yu. Slonimsky: The Bolshoi Theatre Ballet (London, 1956, 2/1960)

W. Terry: The Dance in America (New York, 1956, rev. 1971)

N. de Valois: Come Dance with me: a Memoir, 1898–1956 (London, 1957/R)

P. Brinson, ed.: The Ballet in Britain (London, 1962)

M. Clarke: Dancers of Mercury: the Story of Ballet Rambert (London, 1962)

H. Read and S.J. Cohen: Stravinsky and the Dance (New York, 1962)

E. Denby: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (New York, 1965)

N. Roslavleva: Era of the Russian Ballet [1770–1965] (London, 1966) [incl. Russ. bibliography]

E.W. White: Stravinsky: the Composer and his Works (Berkeley, 1966, 2/1979)

M.G. Swift: The Art of Dance in the USSR (Notre Dame, IN, 1968)

O. Kerensky: Ballet Scene (London, 1970)

V. Krasovskaya: Russkiy baletnïy teatr nachala XX veka [Russian ballet theatre of the early 20th century], i: Khoreografi [Choreographers] (Leningrad, 1971); ii: Tantsovshchiki [Dancers] (Leningrad, 1972)

L. Kirstein: The New York City Ballet (New York, 1973, enlarged 2/1978 as Thirty Years … the New York City Ballet)

R. Shead: Constant Lambert (London, 1973)

N. Goldner, ed.: The Stravinsky Festival of the New York City Ballet, 1972 (New York, 1974)

A. Croce: Afterimages (New York, 1977)

N. de Valois: Step by Step (London, 1977)

N. Goodwin: A Ballet for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979)

J. Warrack: Tchaikovsky Ballet Music (London, 1979)

P. Brinson and C. Crisp: Ballet and Dance: a Guide to the Repertory (Newton Abbot, 1980)

J. Anderson: The One and Only: the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (London, 1981)

A. Bland: The Royal Ballet: the First Fifty Years (London, 1981)

K. Sorley Walker: De Basil’s Ballets Russes (London, 1982)

L. Garafola: Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes (Oxford and New York, 1989)

M. Bremser, ed.: International Dictionary of Ballet (Detroit and London, 1993)

J. Pritchard, ed.: Rambert: a Celebration: a Survey of the Company’s First Seventy Years (London, 1996)

R. Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (London, 1996)

e: modern dance

(i) general studies

J.E. Crawford Flitch: Modern Dancing and Dancers (London and Philadelphia, 1913, 3/1921)

H. Brandenburg: Der moderne Tanz (Munich, 1917)

E. Blass: Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst (Weimar, 1921, enlarged 2/1922)

S. Enkelmann: Tänzer unserer Zeit (Munich, 1937)

J. Martin: ‘Dance as a Means of Communication’, The Dance (New York, 1946)

M. Lloyd: The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York, 1949)

W. Terry: ‘Modern Dance’, The Dance Encyclopedia, ed. A. Chujoy (New York, 1949, 2/1967)

W. Sorell, ed.: The Dance has Many Faces (New York, 1951, 3/1992)

D. Humphrey: The Art of Making Dances, ed. B. Pollack (New York, 1959)

L. Horst and C. Russell: Modern Dance Forms in Relation to the Other Modern Arts (San Francisco, 1961)

A.J. Pischl and S.J. Cohen, eds.: Composer/Choreographer (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)

S.J. Cohen, ed.: The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief (Middletown, CT, 1966)

J. Martin: ‘American Modern Dance’, The Dance Encyclopedia, ed. A. Chujoy (New York, 2/1967)

W. Sorell: The Dance through the Ages (New York, 1967)

J. Percival: Modern Ballet (London, 1970, rev. 1980)

D. McDonagh: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York, 1970, rev. 1990)

J. Percival: Experimental Dance (London, 1971)

T. Borek: The Connecticut College American Dance Festival, 1948–1972 (New York, 1972)

M.B. Siegel: Watching the Dance go by (Boston, 1977)

J. Murray: Dance Now (Harmondsworth, 1979)

O. Norlyng: ‘Ny dans: ny musik’, DMt, lviii (1983–4), 98–107

A. Robertson and D. Hutera: The Dance Handbook (Harlow, 1988)

M. Clarke and C. Crisp: London Contemporary Dance Theatre: the First 21 Years (London, 1989)

K. Teck: Music for the Dance: Reflections on a Collaborative Art (New York, 1989)

K. Teck: Movement to Music: Musicians in the Dance Studio (New York, 1990)

S. Jordan: Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (London, 1992)

H. Züllig: ‘Das Jooss-Ballett im englischen Exil’, Musiktradition im Exil: zurück aus dem Vergessen, ed. J. Allende-Blin (Cologne, 1993), 205–21

M. Gradinger: ‘Bewegungs-freiheit: Ausdruckstanz und Modern Dance: Wege zu einer emanzipierten Weiblichkeit’, NZM, Jg.155, no.4 (1994), 18–21

(ii) individual artists

M. Allan: My Life and Dancing (London, 1908)

L. Fuller: Quinze ans de ma vie (Paris, 1908; Eng. trans. 1913/R)

C. Stewart Richardson: Dancing, Beauty and Games (London, 1913)

M. Desti: The Untold Story: the Life of Isadora Duncan 1921–1927 (New York, 1929)

K.S. Dreier: Shawn the Dancer (New York, 1933)

R. St Denis: An Unfinished Life (New York, 1939)

B. Morgan: Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (New York, 1941, rev. 1980)

A.V. Coton: The New Dance: Kurt Jooss and his Work (London, 1946)

T. Shawn: Every Little Movement: a Book about François Delsarte (Pittsfield, MA, 1954, 2/1963)

W. Terry: The Legacy of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis (Brooklyn, NY, 1959)

J.J. Martin: Days of Divine Indiscipline (Brooklyn, NY, 1961)

C.L. Schlundt: The Professional Appearances of Ruth St Denis & Ted Shawn: a Chronology and an Index of Dances 1906–1932 (New York, 1962)

Irma Duncan: Follow Me! (Brooklyn, NY, 1965) [autobiography]

C. Tomkins: The Bride & the Bachelors: the Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (New York, 1965; London, 1968, as Ahead of the Game: Four Versions of Avant-Garde; enlarged 2/1968 as The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde)

D. Humphrey: New Dance: an Unfinished Autobiography (New York, 1966)

L. Leatherman: Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist (New York, 1966)

L. Warren and others: The Dance Theater of Lester Horton (New York, 1967)

S.J. Cohen, ed.: Time to Walk in Space: Essays, a Biography and a Chronology about Merce Cunningham (New York, 1968)

M. Cunningham: Changes: Notes on Choreography, ed. F. Starr (New York, 1968)

M.B. Siegel, ed.: Dancer’s Notes (New York, 1969)

C.L. Schlundt: Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth (New York, 1971)

M.B. Siegel, ed.: Nik: a Documentary (New York, 1971)

S.J. Cohen, ed.: Doris Humphrey: an Artist First (Middletown, CT, 1972)

Ballet de cour

(Fr.).

A type of ballet popular at the French court during the reigns of Henry III, Henry IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It borrowed elements from the earlier entremets (pantomimes accompanied by choruses and dances) in vogue at the courts of Burgundy, from the elaborate (though often chaotic) fêtes of the Valois kings and from the mascheratas and intermedi imported from Italy.

Its components were normally récits (see Récit), vers (rhymed verses found in the libretto), entrées (see Entrée) and a concluding grand ballet (a forerunner of the operatic finale) danced by the grands seigneurs and, at least once each year, by the king himself. All ballets resulted from the collaboration of a royal patron who determined the subject and the distribution of labour, poets for the vers and récits, at least two composers responsible for vocal and instrumental music and a machinist. Detailed descriptions of the mise en scène, the vers (often containing indiscreet references to royal dancers) and the identification of the dancers themselves were published in librettos (livrets) distributed to the spectators before the performance.

Early essays in the genre were the Paradis d’amour of 1572 (text by Ronsard) and the Ballet polonais of 1573 (commissioned from Balthasar de Beaujoyeux by Catherine de’ Medici to honour the Polish ambassadors; fig.1), which was described by Brantôme in his memoirs (Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1823) as ‘le plus beau ballet qui fust jamais faict au monde’. More important was Circé, ou le Balet comique de la Royne, performed at the Petit Bourbon palace on 15 October 1581 as part of the festivities celebrating the marriage of the Duke of Joyeuse and the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Vaudemont. This work has the distinction of being the first ballet de cour in which poetry (by La Chesnaye and possibly D’Aubigny), music (by Jacques Salmon and Lambert de Beaulieu), décor (by Jacques Patin) and dance combine to support a single dramatic action: the destruction of the power of the enchantress Circe in order to re-establish harmony, reason and order in the realm. Thus, at its inception, the ballet de cour was a political tool of the monarchy, a means of domesticating the nobility and of preserving the king’s centralized power and control.

By virtue of its dramatic unity, perhaps inspired by the humanistic precepts of Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et de Musique, Circé has long been considered the first French work to give ‘some idea of the musical theatre’ (d’Aquin de Château-Lyon). It stands first in the long list of precursors of the tragédie lyrique. Beaujoyeux, who had been chosen by Catherine de’ Medici to develop the ballet’s master plan, wrote in the preface to the Ballard score of 1582 that Circé was an ‘invention moderne’ in which the word ‘comique’ described a work with the dramatic unity of a comedy.

The structural significance of Circé apparently had little effect on the following generation of those responsible for the ballet de cour. Their works, based largely on ‘mascarades à l’italienne’, included unrelated entrées of colourful and grotesque characters. Titles such as Ballets des foux (1596), Ballet des barbiers (1598), Ballet des garçons de taverne (1603), Ballet des bouteilles et des dames (1607) and Ballet des paysans et des grenouilles (1607) show a preoccupation with burlesque elements at the turn of the century.

Not until 1609 with the Ballet de la reyne (vers by Malherbe) or 1610 with the Ballet d’Alcine was there a return to the unified dramatic action established 29 years before by Beaujoyeux. This type of ballet, labelled ‘ballet mélodramatique’, remained popular for about a decade. At its best in such works as the Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud (1617), the Ballet de l’aventure de Tancrède en la forêt enchantée (1619) and the Ballet de Psyché (1619), it was a convincing dramatic spectacle which could have led to French opera long before Lully’s Cadmus. About 1620 Michel Henry, a violinist of the Chambre du Roi, copied an important collection of ballet music. The music is not extant, but the list enumerates 117 ballets, 96 of which were performed between 1597 and 1618. M.-F. Christout (1992) has identified 392 court ballets performed between 1572 and 1671 by title, year, specific date and place, thereby documenting the popularity of the genre.

In 1621, with the death of the Duc de Luynes, Louis XIII’s favourite patron of the ballet, the ballet mélodramatique was superseded by the ballet à entrées which, under the aegis of the Duke of Nemours, was a choreographic spectacle of many parts, each with its own subject matter and characters, relating in only a general way to a collective idea expressed in the title. In the Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626), for example, the four corners of the world each send delegates to the ball (fig.2); each has its own ballet preceded by récits and including several entrées.

Saint-Hubert classified ballets de cour by their length in La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (1641): a ‘ballet royal’ ordinarily contained 30 entrées, a ‘beau ballet’ had at least 20 entrées and a ‘petit ballet’ had 10 to 12 entrées. The vocal music included choruses and polyphonic airs, as well as solo récits. These airs were provided by the most important composers of the genre, including Pierre Guédron, Antoine Boësset and Etienne Moulinié. Boësset, for example, contributed more than 70 polyphonic airs and solo récits to 25 different ballets de cour (Durosoir, 240–49). From the late 16th century to the death of Lully in 1687, court ballets were performed in Paris at the Grande Salle of the Louvre, the Grand Salon of the Palais des Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Hôtel de Ville, and, until its destruction in 1660, at the Salle du Petit Bourbon (between the church of St Germain-l’Auxerrois and the Louvre). Outside Paris, performances took place at the royal châteaux at Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Chantilly, Vincennes, Saint Germain-en-Laye and Chambord.

Louis XIV danced for the first time as a boy of 13 in the Ballet de Cassandre (1651), the ballet in which Isaac de Benserade made his début as a poet of superior literary talents. Two years later the young Florentine Lully found himself on stage dancing next to the king in the Ballet de la nuit. It was in the ballet de cour that Lully learnt to differentiate between the styles of his native and adopted lands. From 1654 to 1671 he provided music for 16 court ballets. His own private orchestra, the Petits Violons, made its first appearance in the Ballet de la galantérie du temps (1656, music lost). In 1657 Lully composed all the instrumental music for the Ballet de l’amour malade and in 1658 all the instrumental music and much of the vocal music for the Ballet d’Alcidiane. The overture to this ballet bears the classical stamp of all subsequent French overtures. In his dances Lully quickly assimilated the long heritage of French dances and introduced new dances (especially ‘airs de vitesse’). By degrees, purely musical features of the ballet began to usurp the position of the dance. The close liaison between the Ballet des muses (1666) and the later tragédie lyrique was recognized by Brossard, who wrote: ‘it is this ballet [Les muses] that gave the idea of composing operas in French’ (Catalogue des livres de musique, 1724). Brossard must have been referring here to the pre-eminence of vocal airs, ensembles and choruses in the Ballet des muses rather than to any organizational principle, because this ballet best illustrates the improvisatory nature of the ballet de cour. From its first performance on 2 December 1666 to its final one on 19 February 1667 it went through six stages of development. New material was constantly added, seemingly on a trial-and-error basis, to render this ballet ‘encore plus agréable’. By 14 February its boundaries had been stretched to include two of Molière’s comédies-ballets, La pastorale comique and Le Sicilien.

The ballet de cour afforded Lully a ten-year apprenticeship that helped prepare him for the creation of the tragédie en musique. According to Le Cerf de la Viéville, Lully modelled his operatic recitative on the intonation of Racine’s mistress, the actress Mme Champmeslé, who performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Yet even before her earliest triumphs, Lully had introduced into his court ballets the predominantly anapaestic rhythmic organization and the division of the alexandrine into hemistichs that characterize French recitative (e.g. ‘Arreste malheureux’, Ballet des muses). Although many of the airs in Lully’s ballets are clearly modelled on the contemporaneous French airs de cour, Lully introduced a type of binary air that was to assume pride of place in the tragédie lyrique. This is the so-called extended binary air (ABB') of Italian origin, an early example of which is found in the Ballet des arts of 1662 (‘Bel art qui retardez’).

Lully, who had assimilated the long tradition of French dances, introduced many new ‘airs de vitesse’ into court ballets. Bourrées and minuets became the most widely used dances; courantes and galliards became rare. The ‘Chaconne des Maures’, which concludes the Ballet d’Alcidiane, already assumed the grand proportions and structural significance of the chaconnes that were to be found in Lully’s operas. The choral finale to the prologue of the Ballet des muses expresses the same sentiments found in later operatic prologues: ‘Rien n’est si doux que de vivre à la cour de Louis, le plus parfait des rois’. The pompous music that Lully wrote for this text consolidated a tradition and remained the supreme gesture of official adoration throughout the grand siècle.

The ballet de cour suffered an eclipse when Louis XIV ceased dancing (1670) and when Lully moved it closer to opera with his Triomphe de l’amour (1681; fig.3) and his Temple de la paix (1685). The Parfaict brothers were hard pressed to find a proper category for so mixed a genre as Le triomphe de l’amour. In their manuscript Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique (c1741), they wrote: ‘Properly speaking, it is neither an opera nor a ballet but a collection of entrées mixed with récits’. The 20 entrées, in fact, contain 16 récits, which exceeds by far the number in any other ballet de cour. The Ballet de la jeunesse (1686) and the Palais de Flore (1689), both by Lalande, synthesize opera and ballet and resemble the Lully ballets of the 1680s in this respect.

The ballet de cour enjoyed a brief revival in the early 18th century when the young Louis XV and his seigneurs danced at the Tuileries in L’inconnu (1720, music by Lalande), Les folies de Cardenio (1720, music by Lalande) and Les élémens (1721, music by Destouches and Lalande) – works that owe as much to opera as the ballet de cour. In 1729 the Ballet du Parnasse (fragments from Collin de Blamont, Lully, Campra, Destouches and Mouret) was danced at Versailles to celebrate the birth of the dauphin. By 1754, however, Cahusac stated that it was a ‘genre which no longer exists’ (La danse ancienne et moderne). At the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, its form was maintained up to 1761 (when the Jesuits were expelled from France) as part of the ceremony marking the end of each scholastic year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AnthonyFB

MGG1 (D.P. Walter)

MGG2 (M.M. McGowan, C.J. Schlundt)

Saint-Hubert: La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (Paris, 1641/R)

C.-F. Ménestrier: ‘Remarques pour le conduite de ballet’, L’Autel de Lyon (Lyons, 1658), 50–56; ed. in Christout (1967)

M. de Pure: Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris, 1668/R)

C.-F. Ménestrier: Les ballets anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre (Paris, 1682/R)

P. Lacroix: Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652) (Geneva, 1868–70/R)

H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)

T. Gérold: L’art du chant en France au XVIIe siècle (Strasbourg, 1921/R)

L. de La Laurencie: Les créateurs de l’opéra français (Paris, 1921, 2/1930/R)

L. de La Laurencie: ‘Un musicien dramatique du XVIIe siècle, Pierre Guédron’, RMI, xxix (1922), 445–72

H. Prunières: ‘Ronsard et les fêtes de cour’, ReM, v/6 (1923–4), 27–45

W. Storz: Der Aufbau der Tänze in den Opern und Balletts Lullys vom musikalischen Standpunkte aus betrachtet (Göttingen, 1928)

C. Silin: Benserade and his Ballets de cour (Baltimore, 1940, 2/1970)

F.A. Yates: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947/R)

F. Lesure: ‘Le recueil de ballets de Michel Henry’, Les fêtes de la renaissance [I]: Royaumont 1955, 205–19

J. Rousset: ‘L’eau et les tritons dans les fêtes et ballets de cour (1580–1640)’, ibid., 235–45

N. Bridgman: ‘L’aristocratie française et le ballet de cour’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études français, ix (1957), 9–21

A. Verchaly: ‘Les ballets de cour d’après les recueils de musique vocale (1600–1643)’, ibid., 198–218

A. Verchaly: ‘Airs de cour et ballet de cour’, Histoire de la musique, i, ed. Roland-Manuel (Paris, 1960), 1529–60

M.M. McGowan: L’art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (Paris, 1963)

M.-F. Christout: Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672 (Paris, 1967)

H.M. Ellis: The Dances of J.B. Lully (1632–1687) (diss., Stanford U., 1967)

J. Jacquot, ed.: Dramaturgie et société … aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Nancy 1967 (Paris, 1968)

M. Ellis: ‘Inventory of the Dances of Jean-Baptiste Lully’, RMFC, ix (1969), 21–55

R.M. Isherwood: Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1973)

M.M. McGowan: ‘Les Jésuites à Avignon: les fêtes au service de la propagande politique et religieuse’, Les fêtes de la Renaissance III: Tours 1972, ed. J. Jacquot and E. Konigson (Paris, 1975), 153–71

M.M. McGowan: ‘The Origins of French Opera’, NOHM, v (1975), 169–205, esp. 170–80

D.J. Buch: ‘The Influence of the Ballet de cour in the Genesis of the French Baroque Dance Suite’, AcM, lvii (1985), 94–109

J.R. Anthony: ‘More Faces than Proteus: Lully’s Ballet des muses’, EMc, xv (1987), 336–44

J.R. Anthony: ‘Towards a Principal Source for Lully’s Court Ballets: Foucault vs Philidor’, RMFC, xxv (1987), 77–104

M.-F. Christout: Le ballet de cour au XVIIe siècle (Geneva, 1987)

D. Launay: ‘Les airs italiens et français dans les ballets et les comédies-ballets’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Saint Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg 1987, 31–49

J.L. Schwartz and C.J. Schlundt: French Court Dance and Dance Music: a Guide to Primary Source Writings (New York, 1987)

C.G. Marsh and R. Harris-Warrick: ‘A New Source for Seventeenth-Century Ballet: Le mariage de la Grosse Cathos’, Dance Chronicle, xi (1988), 398–428

L.E. Auld: ‘The Non-Dramatic Art of Ballet de cour: Early Theorists’, Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. B. Gillingham and P. Merkley (Ottawa, 1990), 360–93

G. Durosoir: L’air de cour en France 1571–1655 (Liège, 1991)

M.-F. Christout: ‘Ballet de cour’, Dictionaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. M. Benoit (Paris, 1992), 45–9

M. Little and C.G. Marsh: La danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, MA, 1992)

D.J. Buch: Dance Music from the Ballet de cour 1575–1651 (New York, 1994)

JAMES R. ANTHONY

Ballet du XXème Siècle.

Company founded in Brussels in 1960.

Ballet-héroïque

(Fr.).

A type of French Opéra-ballet during the reign of Louis XV, distinguished by having as its principal characters heroic, noble figures, often from antiquity, classical gods and goddesses, or exotic personages, rather than the comic bourgeois and tender heroines of other opéras-ballets. It also differs from the contemporary tragédie en musique in that the events portrayed are generally festive and gay, not dramatic and terrifying. While dance, of course, remains prominent, in some works there is greater use of vocal music than in other opéras-ballets.

The term is first used in the libretto of Fuzelier’s Les festes grecques et romaines, set by Collin de Blamont (1723). Among the most famous examples are those by Rameau, beginning with Les Indes galantes (1735). The last successful ballet-héroïque performed at the Paris Opéra was E.J. Floquet’s L’union de l’Amour et des arts (1773). The term was occasionally applied to a single entrée in an opéra-ballet (for example, to Euthyme et Lyris by L.-B. Desormery in 1776).

For bibliography see Opéra-ballet.

M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET

Ballet Lutebook

(IRL-Dtc D.1.21/ii). See Sources of lute music, §7.

Ballet(s) Russe(s).

Name adopted by various ballet companies in the early 20th century. See Ballet, §3(i).

Ballett.

See Balletto.

Balletti, Bernardino

(fl Piacenza, 1554). Italian lutenist and composer. He is known only from his lutebook Intabolatura de lauto … di varie sorte de balli … libro primo (Venice, 1554; ed. G. Lefkoff, Five Sixteenth Century Venetian Lute Books, Washington DC, 1960). The dedication to Conte Honorio Scotto was signed in Piacenza. Most of the 14 pieces in the volume are familiar Italian dance forms: there are two paduana and saltarello pairs, a work based on the romanesca (La favorita), and two pieces on the bergamasca harmonic formula (I–IV–V–I). The first of these, Il sgazzotte, is an independent work, but the second is a ‘represe’ for La moretta and is a striking piece of more than 50 virtuoso variations. Several dances (La rocha il fuso, Ciel turchino and Non ti partir da me) use popular song melodies; Non ti partir appeared later as Ti parti cor mio caro in a villotta by Filippo Azzaiola (RISM 1557¹⁸; both works ed. in L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611, diss., Harvard U., 1956). The pieces form three suites (nos.1–4, 5–9 and 10–14), the third with a short chordal tocata to test the tuning of the lute. (BrownI)

JEANETTE B. HOLLAND/ARTHUR J. NESS

Balletto

(It.; Fr. ballet; Eng. ballett).

An Italian dance of the 16th and 17th centuries, occasionally called ‘bal’ or ‘ballo’. There seem to be three periods of development, two instrumental and one vocal: for lute during the second half of the 16th century; for voice from 1591 to about 1623; and for chamber ensemble from about 1616 to the end of the 17th century.

The term ‘balletto’ was also applied at the same time in a more general sense. It was used as early as 1581 by Fabritio Caroso as a heading for some of the choreographies published in Il ballarino, and Cesare Negri (Le gratie d’amore, 1602) used it alongside the apparently similar ‘ballo’ and ‘brando’ as a title for his created social and theatrical dances (see Ballo). In Barbetta’s Intavolatura di liuto (1585) ‘balletto’ indicates a dance from a foreign country. Some late 16th-century references use the word ‘balletto’ for theatrical or dramatic dances that would have been called ‘ballets’ in France (see A. Solerti: Gli albori del melodramma, 1904–5/R, iii, 277ff; the commonest usage in modern Italian is as a translation for the French ‘ballet’). In the 17th century the word was sometimes used by musicians to mean simply ‘dance’, as in Montesardo’s Nuova inventione d’intavolatura per sonare li balletti (1606). This article, however, is concerned with the instrumental and vocal development of the specific dance called ‘balletto’ as it originated in Italy and spread to England and Germany.

1. Instrumental.

2. Vocal.

RICHARD HUDSON (1), SUZANNE G. CUSICK/R (2)

Balletto

1. Instrumental.

The Italian instrumental balletto appeared from about 1561 to 1599 (mainly for lute) and from 1616 to 1700 (for chamber ensemble). During the second half of the 16th century, ‘bal’, ‘ballo’ or ‘balletto’ was a generic name in Italy for various foreign dances, such as the bal boemo, ballo francese and baletto polaco. Barbetta in 1585 referred to them collectively as ‘baletti de diverse nationi’. The most numerous were those indicating Germanic origin: the bal todescho (in Gorzanis’s lutebooks of 1561, 1563 and 1564), the ‘todescha’ or ‘tedescha’ (Mainerio’s ensemble collection of 1578), balo todesco (Gorzanis, 1579), baletto todesco (Barbetta, 1585), ballo tedesco (Terzi, 1593) and finally ballo or balletto alemano (Terzi, 1599). Similar terminology continued in the guitar books of the first half of the 17th century. Some of the earlier chamber examples are also entitled ‘balletto alemano’ (Biagio Marini, 1617, 1626 and 1655, Farina, 1627, and Gandini, 1655). During the second half of the 17th century such pieces were called simply ‘balletto’ (or occasionally ‘ballo’), and the non-German types (for example, a balletto francese of 1692 by Corelli) occurred very rarely.

A balletto alemano in Terzi’s 1599 book is based on an earlier baletto todesco by Barbetta, thus suggesting that the sources from 1561 to 1599, in spite of changing terminology, represent a unified Italian development of the native German dance called ‘tantz’, ‘tanz’, or ‘dantz’ in 16th-century German lute and keyboard tablatures. Furthermore, the three pieces designated ‘tedescha’ or ‘todescha’ in Mainerio’s volume of 1578 were each called ‘almande’ in Phalèse’s collection of 1583, thus revealing some sort of connection between the Italian balletto and the Franco-Flemish allemande. It is difficult to assess the influence on the Italian instrumental balletto exerted by two other forms using the same name: first the French ballet, which began during the 1570s and later produced lute pieces entitled simply ‘ballet’ (Besard, 1603 and 1617, Ballard, 1611 and 1614, Vallet and Fuhrmann, 1615); and second, the vocal ballettos beginning with those of Gastoldi, whose 1594 book of three-voice examples also includes intabulations for lute.

Curiously, vocal ballettos seem to have appeared mainly between about 1591 and 1623, thus filling the gap, as it were, between the 16th-century lute and 17th-century chamber developments. Earlier, Mainerio’s balli (1578), though without text, were, according to the title-page of the book, ‘accommodati per cantar et sonar’. A number of sources from the early 17th century contain both vocal and instrumental examples. Antonio Brunelli’s Scherzi, arie, canzonette, e madrigali, libro terzo (1616) includes two vocal ballettos that are each followed by ‘il medesimo ballo per sonare solo senza cantare’, as well as an ‘altro ballo per sonare solo senza cantare’ for which no vocal version is given. Benedetto Sanseverino, in Il primo libro d’intavolatura per la chitarra alla spagnuola (1622), printed four chordal examples, one of which has a text. The Terzo scherzo delle ariose vaghezze of Carlo Milanuzzi (1623) contains 12 ballettos for solo voice and continuo, as well as seven for guitar alone. As late as 1639 Martino Pesenti presented ‘correnti, gagliarde, & balletti da cantar, & da sonar’.

A few instrumental ballettos appeared for keyboard, by Picchi (1621), Frescobaldi (1627 and 1637), Pesenti (1635, 1639, 1641 and 1645) and Bernardo Storace (1664) and by anonymous composers in manuscript sources (such as the I-Rvat Chigi MSS ed. in CEKM, xxxii/2 and US-LAum manuscripts, formerly 51/1); and for the five-course guitar, by Calvi (1646) and Granata (1646, 1659 and 1680). Most Italian instrumental ballettos of the 17th century, however, occur in some 70 publications for continuo chamber groups. The earliest are the books of Marini (1617, 1620 and 1626), Lorenzo Allegri (1618) and Farina (1626, 1627 and 1628). Marini was the first of them to use the word ‘balletti’ in the title of a book (in 1626). In a collection of 1667 G.B. Vitali made a distinction between balletti per ballare and balletti per camera. In 1666 he entitled a book Correnti e balletti da camera; Giuseppe Torelli in 1686 used the title Concerto da camera, B.G. Laurenti in 1691 Sonate per camera, Giorgio Buoni in 1693 Allettamenti per camera. The balletto thus became firmly established in Italy above all as a chamber-music form.

The balletto sometimes occurred, especially before 1675, as a separate dance, either singly or with as many as 12 in succession. It was occasionally coupled with another dance, usually a corrente; Marini in 1626 used the same musical material for each. Although generally the opening dance of a pair, the balletto occasionally appeared as the second movement (Gasparo Zanetti, 1645, and Cazzati, 1651 and 1660). It is associated with two or more dances in suites by Brunelli (1616), Allegri (1618) and Cazzati (1651) and in most sources from 1677 to the end of the century. Usually the balletto is the opening dance of a suite, followed by a corrente, sarabanda, giga or other dances. In suites from later in the century an introductory movement without dance associations precedes the opening balletto.

The balletto almost always consists of two repeated sections, each with a variable number of bars. Occasionally the initial statement of the music is followed by variations (Fantini, 1638, Marini, 1655, and the keyboard works of Frescobaldi, 1627, and Storace, 1664). Later examples also include a piano marking at the end to indicate a petite reprise, the exact repetition of several bars of music (Torelli, 1686, and G.B. Brevi, 1693); Domenico Gabrielli’s ballettos (1684) sometimes have such a repeat at the end of both sections. The balletto is usually in duple metre but may be in triple metre (as with Fantini, 1638, or Cazzati, 1660). The music has a simple, homophonic, tuneful quality, with short, animated rhythmic motifs, repeated notes and immediately appealing melodic patterns (as in ex.1, a brief ballo that follows an aria).

Tempo markings vary widely. Brunelli in 1616 marked a ballo grave; Marini in 1655 indicated allegro and Cazzati in 1660 adagio. Pirro Albergati (1682) marked two ballettos largo and three allegro or spiritoso. Gabrielli (1684) indicated largo for five, allegro for five, adagio for one and presto for one. Salvatore Mazzella (1689) included an example in which the opening section is largo and the second section presto and another such piece which returns to largo at the end. Laurenti (1691), Brevi (1693) and Buoni (1693) all indicated allegro or presto. Italian composers seem to have been far less concerned with uniformity of tempo than the French, for they also subjected other dances to wide tempo variation.

The allemanda, which is likewise largo or presto in these sources, bears a close relationship to the balletto. Each is in duple metre, and each occupies the position as first dance in a suite. Often, however, both dances appeared in the same collection, usually in different suites (Torelli, Laurenti, Brevi) but sometimes coupled together, as in Gabrielli’s balletto with sua alemanda. It is difficult to perceive any musical differences between the balletto and the allemanda as they appear in these late 17th-century suites.

Instrumental ballettos also occurred in other countries, especially Germany, where the earliest examples appeared in 1617 in the collections of the Englishmen Thomas Simpson and William Brade. These were followed by other examples, usually entitled ‘ballet’, by composers such as Widmann, Peuerl, Johann Schop (i), Hammerschmidt, Vierdanck, Nicolaus Bleyer, Drese, Rosenmüller, Rubert, J.R. Ahle, Lüder Knop, Hans Hake, Esaias Reusner (ii), Löwe von Eisenach, J.H. Schmelzer, Biber, Pezel, Meister and J.C.F. Fischer. Purely instrumental examples of the form had been preceded earlier in Germany by vocal pieces which, under the influence of Gastoldi, could often be played on instruments as well as sung.

Balletto

2. Vocal.

Both Morley and Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, iii, 1618, pp.18–19) considered the Mantuan composer G.G. Gastoldi to have invented the vocal balletto as a musical genre with his publication in 1591 of the Balletti a cinque voci con li suoi versi per cantare, sonare, & ballare (ed. in Le pupitre, x, 1968). These works enjoyed great popularity, being reprinted many times in Italy and northern Europe up to the mid-17th century. In most of his ballettos Gastoldi set strophic texts in a homophonic texture, with sections of nonsense syllables (‘fa-la’, ‘na-na’, ‘li-rum’) interpolated at the ends of couplets or tercets. Nearly all consist of two repeated strains (AABB) and the nonsense syllables, sometimes set contrapuntally, act as a refrain at the end of each section. The songs are syllabic and rather repetitious, the strophic form limiting the opportunities to depict the content of the verses, and all are highly rhythmic. It is likely that Gastoldi’s songs were originally part of a costumed dance, perhaps performed at the theatrically active Mantuan court or at an academy; the title-page states that they were for ‘singing, playing and dancing’. Each has a descriptive title (e.g. L’innamorato, Il premiato, Caccia d’Amore) on which the text (but not the music) elaborates, and several texts suggest the kind of costuming or dance that might have been used (as in Amor vittorioso: ‘Tutti venite armati, O forti miei soldata, fa-la-la’, etc.). The order of texts in the collection suggests that it follows that of a performance, opening with an Introduttione a i balletti exhorting the listener to enjoy the delights of the mythical ‘Cucagna’, ‘ove chi più lavora men guadagna’ (‘where the more one works the less one earns’) by dancing, singing and playing, and concluding in the dialogue-like Concerto de pastori for eight voices, with a conventional reference to the returning golden age. The six-voice Mascherata di cacciatori, more complex than the usual simple form and style of the ballettos, is the only piece that shows any musical reflection of the presumed spectacle.

Gastoldi’s later collection, Balletti a tre voci (1594), also opens with an exhortation to sing and dance, but it does not seem to represent the music of a particular event as the five-voice collection does. Neither the descriptive titles nor the texts present an obvious performing order. Like the five-voice ballettos, these consist of two or three repeated strains in a simple homophonic texture and a strongly rhythmic style; the phrasing of several immediately suggests particular dance types (e.g. La Cortegiana, ‘La mia amorosa bella’, has the characteristic three- and six-bar phrases of a branle). Only the last balletto in the set uses nonsense syllables, and then only at the end of the second strain.

Vocal ballettos continued to be written in Italy during the 17th century, often in madrigal comedies and particularly by Banchieri and Orazio Vecchi, usually retaining the villanella- or canzonetta-like style of Gastoldi. Some, notably those in Gioseffo Biffi’s Della ricreatione di Posilipo (1606), Francesco Lambardi’s Canzonette a tre … libro terzo (1616) and Sigismondo d’India’s Le musiche e balli a quatro (1621), can be traced to choreographed dances performed at court festivities. D’India’s multi-movement ballettos originated as entertainments at the wedding of the Duke of Savoy in 1621, when they were performed by a boy soprano soloist accompanied by ‘violino tiorba’, ‘basso di violone’ and ‘clavicembalo’. Like the ballettos of Gastoldi and Vecchi, they consist of two repeated strains of chordal, highly rhythmic music cast in regular phrases. Their original conception as music for one voice with instrumental accompaniment may be seen in the rhythmic independence of the upper part, and d’India’s habitual concern for detailed text setting occasionally enlivens the otherwise almost utilitarian style. The publication of d’India’s solo ballettos with texts to all parts, and with specific indications of passages to be rendered by one voice with instruments, testifies to the continuing Italian use of published ballettos as light vocal household music. His informative description of the appropriate performing practice for his pieces, printed at the end of the book, is justified with the remark that they represented an unusual style in Italy (‘si tratta di stile inusitato in Italia’), suggesting, in view of the book’s dedication to the Duke of Savoy’s mother-in-law, Maria de’ Medici, Queen of France, that the spectacle represented by the collection was related to the nascent ballet de cour.

Gastoldi’s first set of ballettos enjoyed enormous popularity north of the Alps, spawning imitations in Germany (H.L. Hassler’s Lustgarten neuer teutscher Gesäng, Balletti, 1601) and England, where the ballett as cultivated and transformed by Morley and Weelkes produced a small repertory of enduringly popular vocal music. Morley’s Balletts to Five Voyces (1595, published in both English and Italian) deliberately imitated the structure of Gastoldi’s five-voice collection, replacing the Introduttione with a madrigal and the concluding Concerto de pastori with an echo dialogue (the seven-voice Phillis, I faine wold die now), the only English work of its kind; each ballett is a free parody of an existing Italian balletto, canzonetta or villanella. Morley’s seven parodies of Gastoldi ballettos are fairly close to their models, as a comparison of Sing wee and chaunt it with A lieta vita clearly shows; the English version is metrically re-arranged and boasts a considerably more sophisticated texture, particularly in the inevitable ‘fa-la’ sections. More interesting are Morley’s adaptations into the ballett form of canzonettas by Croce, Ferretti, Marenzio and Vecchi; by inserting ‘fa-la’ sections at the ends of the two couplets of Marenzio’s Le rose fronde e fiori, Morley stretched his model to twice its length and regularized the phrasing, creating a quite new work in Those dainty daffadillies. Ex.2 compares the superius of Morley’s Now is the month of maying with that of its presumed model, a balletto by Vecchi (So ben mi c’ha bon tempo, Selva di varie ricreatione, 1595), and that accompanying a pavan-derived choreography for the tune published by Cesare Negri (Le gratie d’amore, 1602, pp.222–3), revealing how far afield Morley’s melodic inventiveness and clear harmonic thinking led him in even so simple a work.

Although Morley knew the tradition of dancing to such songs (to which he referred in A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke), it is now generally assumed that neither his balletts nor those of his English successors were intended for dancing, hence their greater attention to musical and textual refinements. Weelkes’s balletts (Balletts and Madrigals to Five Voyces, 1598) were clearly influenced more by Morley than by Gastoldi, for the often brilliant counterpoint and expressive text-setting owe little to the Italian form. Welcome sweet pleasure and To shorten winter’s sadness are straightforward enough to have accompanied a dance, but Hark all ye lovely saints and Lady, your eye my love enforceth, and also I love, and have my love regarded, are transformed into vocal chamber music by eliding contrapuntal phrases and, in particular, by madrigalian devices that render both rhythms and phrasing erratic. The six balletts Henry Youll included in his Canzonets to Three Voyces (1608) follow Weelkes’s and Morley’s example to some extent, for example in the use of strict canon in In the merry month of May and Now the country lasses hie them, but his balletts are more regular in form than those of the better-known composers. Other early 17th-century composers of the English ballett include Greaves, Pilkington, Tomkins and John Hilton (ii).

Balletto

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

EinsteinIM

KermanEM

MGG2 (‘Ballo, Balletto’; S. Dahms, J. Sutton)

SartoriB

VogelB

R. Schwartz: ‘Hans Leo Hassler unter dem Einfluss der italiänischen Madrigalisten’,VMw, ix (1893), 1–61

D. Arnold: ‘Gastoldi and the English Ballett’, MMR, lxxxvi (1956), 44–52

R. Rasch: ‘The Balletti of Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi and the Musical History of the Netherlands’,TVNM, xxiv (1974), 112–45

W.T. Marrocco: Inventory of 15th-Century Bassedanze, Balli & Balletti in Italian Dance Manuals (New York, 1981)

R. Hudson: The Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz (Cambridge, 1986)

D. Harrán: ‘Salomone Rossi as a Composer of Theater Music’, Studi musicali, xvi (1987), 96–131

S. Balestracci: ‘Influenze francesi sui balletti di Filippo D’Aglié (con particolare riguardo a Il gridelino)’, Studi musicali, xxv (1996), 329–44

Balliani, Carlo.

See Baliani, Carlo.

Ballière de Laisement [Delaisement], (Charles-Louis-) Denis

(b Paris, 9 May 1729; d Rouen, 8 Nov 1800). French composer and theorist. He combined the surnames of his father (Ballière) and mother (Delaisement) in an aristocratic form. After receiving the maître ès arts from the University of Paris in 1746, he settled in Rouen. A pharmacist and chemist by profession, he took an active scholarly interest in many subjects and was acquainted with Rousseau, Voltaire and other well-known contemporaries. In 1754 he was elected to the Rouen Academy, where he later became vice-president and wrote many works on literature, philology and various sciences. In the 1750s he wrote librettos for several light stage works produced in Rouen and Paris; most of the music (vaudevilles and melodies from serious operas) was unnotated, though the notated airs in Zéphire et Flore may be his. In his Théorie de la musique (Paris, 1764) he developed a system based on the harmonic series of the hunting-horn; a similar system, evidently unknown to him, had been presented by G.A. Sorge in 1741. The Théorie had some followers (notably Canon Jamard and Abbé Feytou) and won Rousseau's praise, but was harshly criticized by later theorists, in particular J.-B. de La Borde.

WORKS

unless otherwise stated, all are opéras comiques in 1 act, with libretto by Ballière de Laisement

Les fêtes de l'hymen, ou La rose (A. Piron), ?Rouen, ?c1746

Deucalion et Pyrrha (parodie), ?1751

Le rossignol, Rouen, 8 Oct 1751

Zéphire et Flore, Paris, Opéra-Comique (Foire St Germain), 14 Feb 1754 (Paris, ?1754)

Le retour de printemps (pastorale), Rouen, 13 March 1755

La guirlande, Rouen, 24 March 1757

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (M. Prevost)

La BordeE, iii

MGG1 (L. Maurice-Amor)

I. Bent: ‘Momigny's “Type de la Musique” and a Treatise in the Making’, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. C. Hatch and D.W. Bernstein (Chicago, 1993), 309–40

Balliett, Whitney (L.)

(b New York, 17 April 1926). American writer on jazz and broadcaster. After graduating from Cornell University (BA 1951) he joined the staff of the New Yorker. For the Saturday Review (1953–7) and then for the New Yorker he contributed reviews of jazz concerts, recordings and books, as well as interviews with jazz musicians; many of these articles have been reprinted in a continuing series of books. He has also published poetry. In 1957 he conceived the idea and was adviser for a television programme, ‘The Sound of Jazz’, broadcast live by CBS. Balliett’s writings are eloquent and highly stylized. His interviews portray his subjects with dignity, and his reviews often create effects that parallel those of the music being discussed. At his best, in an assessment of style or a description of an improvisation, Balliett has provided insights more penetrating than many formal musical analyses.

WRITINGS

all collections of previously published articles and reviews

The Sound of Surprise (New York, 1959/R)

Dinosaurs in the Morning (Philadelphia, 1962/R)

Such Sweet Thunder (Indianapolis, 1966)

Ecstasy at the Onion (Indianapolis, 1971/R)

Alec Wilder and his Friends (Boston, 1974/R)

American Singers (New York, 1979, enlarged 2/1988)

Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats (New York, 1983)

American Musicians (New York, 1986)

Barney, Bradley and Max (New York, 1989)

BARRY KERNFELD

Ballif, Claude (André François)

(b Paris, 22 May 1924). French composer and theorist. Born into an intellectual family (his uncle, Fr Festugière, was a Greek scholar and a member of the Institut), he decided at the age of 16 to make his career in music and entered the Bordeaux Conservatoire as a pupil of J.-F. Vaubourgoin; later he studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Noël Gallon, Aubin and Messiaen. In 1951 he went to Berlin where, as a pupil of Blacher and Rufer, he became familiar with the music of the Second Viennese School, and where he studied musicology with Stuckenschmidt. Ballif had already made a reputation as the composer of Cendres(1946) for percussion when, in 1953, he completed his theoretical work Introduction à la métatonalité, published in 1956 with a foreword by the aesthetician Etienne Souriau. In 1955 Ballif won the first prize for composition at the Geneva International Competition, and he lectured at the French Institutes of Berlin (1955–7) and Hamburg (1957–8). Returning to Paris in 1959, he joined the ORTF Groupe de Recherches Musicales; he was professor of analysis and of the history of music at the Ecole Normale de Musique, Paris (1963–4), and professor of music education, and later of analysis, at the Reims Conservatoire (from 1965). In 1968 he participated in the founding of the University of Paris VIII and directed its music department until the following year. Alongside this teaching activity, he has pursued fundamental research into the philosophy of music: a stimulating book on Berlioz was published in 1968, and a symposium on ‘ultrachromatic’ music, edited by Ballif, appeared in 1972. Ballif was appointed professor of analysis at the Paris Conservatoire in 1971. His class, which welcomed painters and architects as often as composers, soon grew famous at the same time as his music. A succession of honours and distinctions in the course of a few years underlined his success. He received the Honegger prize in 1974, the Florent Schmitt prize (awarded by the Institut) in 1975, the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1980. In 1979 his collection of Voyage de mon oreille, ten essays summarizing his ideas on the ethics and aesthetics of composition was published. He was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1982, and in 1984 the Paris Festival Estival was dedicated to his music. In the same year he was appointed to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, on the occasion of the première of his opera Dracoula, and he signed an exclusive contract with the publisher Durand. Another book, Economie musicale, appeared in 1988: it contains the essence of Ballif's ideas about the education and training of composers, developing a course of lectures he had given ten years earlier at McGill University. He retired in 1990, but further courses of lectures, more music and more honours followed: already an Officer of the Ordre du Mérite, he was appointed Commander in 1994.

The chief characteristic of Ballif's work is his avoidance of conventional musical systems in favour of his own ‘metatonality’, which he sees as an enlargement of tonality in contrast with the evasion of tonality represented by atonal music. Ballif's metatonality is founded on a scale of 11 notes, and his musical discourse avoids the tonal disorientation of atonality, since the missing pitch suffices to give the music suggestions of tonality, while at the same time implying the presence of the total chromatic. In this way Ballif hopes to have systematized the ‘free atonality’ of Schoenberg at the period of Erwartung. A sense of direction is achieved through the employment of a basic pitch to underpin each large section.

Ballif's metatonal procedures allow an extreme fluidity of detail, a tenuity of structure and great delicacy in the use of timbre. Sometimes the melody is quite simple, as in Phrases sur le souffle and Chapelet, and Ballif has always preferred straightforward forms, although small-scale dissymmetries may be deployed with subtle finesse (cf A cor et à cri and Ceci et cela). In the Imaginaires, a series of pieces each for seven instruments, the harmony is limited to a single interval within each work; in the vocal music this sobriety is allied with a contained violence, particularly in the slow vocalises or the heavy irregular tread of sound blocks, as at the close of Phrases sur le souffle. Although Ballif has allowed the operation of chance into his music, this has not compromised the characteristic directed development: his Passe-temps for piano consists of assortable sections, but the use of underlying pitches assures the perception of direction, and the piece has none of the fractured quality of Stockhausen's comparable Klavierstück XI.

In Ballif's orchestral works there is an attempt to incorporate the sounds of the environment, an attempt that may be seen as a development from Cage's work of the 1950s and a parallel of the latter's ensemble pieces of the early 1970s (e.g. Cheap Imitation), although the means are quite different. The incorporation proceeds through the orchestral mimicking of natural sounds, and these synthetic interruptions are perceived as affecting the progress of the work; the music is no longer opposed to nature but contains, and is illuminated by, the external, just as the experience of an architectural interior is dependent on light from the outside.

In the 1950s Ballif was at least as passionate as Cage in his admiration for Satie and Webern, but not for the same reasons. What fascinated Ballif were Satie's understatement and Webern's economy of means, and he immediately subjected them to analytical study. Taking their different courses, however, Cage and Ballif ran into the same problem: atonality. Ballif conceived metatonality while seeking to dissipate the ambiguities bestowed on atonality by early Schoenberg. In the preface to Michèle Tosi's 1996 monograph on Ballif, the composer Costin Miereanu describes Ballif as the ‘first of the pan-serialists’. In fact, like Schoenbergian ‘pantonality’, metatonality could be considered another name for Lou Harrison's ‘proto-tonality’, identified by Cage.

Ballif adopted an uncomfortable position as a composer, seeking a style of composition that would allow him to avoid the ‘weightlessnesses’ linked to the suspension of harmony; he found himself almost alone in the search, somewhere between tonality and atonality but above all not letting himself be deflected by the ‘neo-serial’ current predominant in the France of the time and it took fierce tenacity to stay on course and preserve his independence.

WORKS

stage

Mon Faust (incid music, P. Valéry), 1958; Vitrine (incid music), 1960; La musique d'Erich Zahn (incid music, H.P. Lovecraft), 1964; Alice aux pays des merveilles (incid music, L. Carroll), 1965; Les Troyennes (incid music, J.-P. Sartre), 1967; Dracoula (nocturne lyrique, 2, V. Stephan), op.58, 1982–4; Il suffit d'un peu d'air (farce lyrique, 4 tableaux, R. Tremblay), op.65, 1991

orchestral

La vie du monde qui vient, sym. mystique, op.11, 8 solo vv, 5 choirs, orch, 1953, rev. 1972–3; Lovecraft, op.13, 1955; Voyage de mon oreille, op.20, 1957; Fantasio, op.21, 1957; Ceci et cela, op.26, 1959, rev. 1965; Fantasio grandioso, op.21a, 1962; A cor et à cri, op.39, 1962; Conc. symphonique no.1, op.49 no.1, cl, orch, 1976; Conc. symphonique no.2, op.49 no.2, vn, orch, 1984; Conc. symphonique no.3 ‘Le jouet du jeu’, ob, orch, 1988; La transfiguration de l'univers, op.67, 1993; Praeludia for la transfiguration de l'univers, 2 Brass Qnt, org, 1997; Conc. symphonique no.4, op.49/4, fl, orch, 1999; Au Clair de la lune bleue, op.75, orch, 1999

chamber and solo instrumental

Cendres, op.1, perc ens, 1946; Trio, op.8, ob, cl, bn, 1952; Brass Qnt, op.9, 1952; Wind Qnt, op.10, 1953; Str Qt no.1, op.12a, 1955; 4 sonates, op.14, org, 1956; Str Trio no.1, op.16, 1956; Sonata, op.17, vn, pf, 1957; Str Qt no.2, op.22, 1958; Sonata, op.23, fl, pf, 1958; Qnt, op.24, fl, ob, str trio, 1958; Mouvements pour deux, op.27, fl, pf, 1959; Str Trio no.2, op.28, 1959; Str Qt no.3, op.30, 1959; Qnt, op.34, bn, str qt, 1960; Trio, op.35 no.1, fl, bn, hp, 1961; Trio, op.35 no.2, fl, ob, vc, 1961; Trio, op.35, no.3, vn, cl, hn, 1961; Solfeggietto no.1, op.36 no.1, fl, 1961; Solfeggietto no.2, op.36 no.2, eng hn, 1961; Sonata, op.40, vc, pf, 1962; Imaginaire no.1, op.41 no.1, vn, vc, hp, fl, cl, tpt, trbn, 1963; Cahier de violin, 5 pieces, op.42, vn, 1963; Solfeggietto no.3, vn, 1963; Imaginaire no.2, op.41 no.2, pic tpt, tpt, bugle, hn, 2 trbn, tuba, 1967; Solfeggietto no.4, op.36 no.4, ob, 1968; Solfeggietto no.5, op.36 no.5, cl, 1968; Imaginaire no.4, op.41 no.4, org, tpt, b tpt, trbn, bugle, hn, tuba, 1968; Imaginaire no.5, op.41 no.5, 2 pf, fl, ob, cl, cornet, hn, va, db, 1968, rev. 1978; Trio, op.43 no.1, fl, va, hp; Imaginaire no.3, op.41 no.3, 2 va, vc, db, cl, hn, bn, 1969; Str Trio no.3, op.43 no.2, 1969; Imaginaire no.6, op.41 no.6, 11 str, 1974; Qt, op.48, vn, va, vc, perc, 1975; Solfeggietto no.6, op.35 no.6, gui, 1976; Cant de l'innocent, fl, 1977; Chant de charme, ondes martenot, 1977; Timbres et postes, op.51, 6 perc, 1977; Sonata, op.52, cl, pf, 1978; L'habitant du labyrinthe, op.54, 2 perc, 1980; Rêveries, op.55, vn, cl, pf, 1980; Solfeggietto no.7, op.35 no.7, tuba, 1980; Apostrophes et jubilations, op.56, org, 1981; Solfeggietto no.8, op.35 no.8, sax, 1981; Solfeggietto no.9, op.35 no.9, hp, 1982; Solfeggietto no.10, op.35 no.10, hpd, 1982; Solfeggietto no.11, op.35 no.11, bn, 1984; Solfeggietto no.12, op.35 no.12, perc, 1984; Solfeggietto no.13, op.35 no.13, vc, 1985; Solfeggietto no.14, op.35 no.14, tpt, 1986; Un moment de printemps, op.60, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1987; Str Qt no.4, op.61, 1987; Solfeggietto no.15, op.35 no.15, hn, 1988; Str Qt no.5, op.63, 1989; Le taille lyre, op.64, 7 insts, 1990; Str Trio no.4, op.66, 1992; Qnt, op.70, 4 timp, bells, 1994; Chanson d'Anastasio, mar, 1995; La chanson du petit matin, cl, 1995; Sax Qt, op.71, 1995; Solfeggietto no.16, op.35 no.16, mar, 1995; Solfeggietto no.17, op.35 no.17, accdn, 1995; Battez sons pleins, op.73, 4 glock, 1996; Petits refrains de ménestrels, vn, 1996; Solfeggietto no.18, op.35/18, cl, 1997; Solfeggietto no.19, op.35/19, va, 1998

piano

Airs comprimés, op.5, 1953; Pièces détachées, op.6, 1953; Diableries, op.12b, pf, 1955; Pf Sonata no.1, op.18, 1957; Pf Sonata no.2, op.19, 1957; Pf Sonata no.3, op.29, 1959; Pf Sonata no.4, op.31, 1960; Pf Sonata no.5, op.32, 1960; Passe-temps, 6 pieces, op.38, 1962; Première ronde nocturne, op.62, 2 pf, 1988; Priamelnen, 8 pieces, op.68, pf 4 hands, 1993; Pf Sonata no.6, op.69, 1994; Notes et menottes, 4 vols, 1951–77, 1995

vocal

Le cortège d'Orphée, op.1a, 1v, pf, 1947–8; Apparitions (H. Michaux), op.2, Mez, pf, 1949; Chansons bas (S. Mallarmé), op.3, S, pf, 1949; Minuit pour géants (T. Tzara), op.4, Mez/Bar, pf, 1951; 4 antiennes à la Sainte Vierge, op.7, 6vv, 16 insts, 1952; Musik in Mirabel (G. Trakl), op.15, S, pf, 1956; Phrases sur le souffle, op.25, Mez, chorus, 8 insts, 1958, rev. 1968; Retrouver la parole (cant., R. Giroux), op.33, Ct/S, ens, 1960; Prière à la Sainte Vierge, op.44 no.1, chorus, 1971; Prière au Seigneur, op.45, chorus, tpt, trbn, 1972; Les battements du coeur de Jésus, op.46, chorus, tpt, trbn, 1971; Chapelet, op.44 no.2, chorus, 1972; Fragments d'une ode à la faim, op.47, 12vv, 1974; Poème de la félicité, op.50, 3 female vv, 2 perc, gui, 1977; Un coup de dés, op.53, chorus, 6 insts, elec, 1979; Poèmes lents (A. Brochu), op.57, 1v, pf, 1981; Le livre du serviteur, op.59, T, chorus, orch, 1984; Chansonnette no.1: 5 fables de La Fontaine, op.72, 1995; Moments donnés de mandarins (Li Tai Po), op.74, S, fl, cl, ob, 1998

tape

Etudes au ressort, 1961; Points, mouvements, 1962

arrangements

E Satie: Sports et divertissements, orchd 1950; A. Schoenberg: 6 petites pièces pour piano op.19, orchd 1953; G. Gabrieli: Canzone ottavi toni, orchd 1960; H. Berlioz: ‘Absence’ [Les nuits d'été], orchd 1984

Principal publishers: Durand, Transatlantiques

WRITINGS

Introduction à la métatonalité(Paris, 1956)

Berlioz (Paris, 1968)

‘Les trois Russes: Wychnegradsky, Obouhov et Scriabine’, ReM, nos.290–91 (1972) [whole issue]

Voyage de mon oreille (Paris, 1979)

‘Lettre à Daniel Charles’, Digraphe, no.28 (1982)

Economie musicale (Paris, 1988)

‘Les mouvements de l'azur mallarméen’, Six musiciens en quête d'auteurs, ed. A. Galliari (Paris,1991)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG I.Misch)

‘Claude Ballif’, ReM, no.263 (1968) [whole issue]

‘Claude Ballif: carnet critique’, ReM, no.264 (1968)

D. Charles: ‘De Ballif à Mallarmé’, Digraphe, no.28 (1982)

‘Claude Ballif’, ReM, nos.370–71 (1984) [whole issue]

‘Claude Ballif’, Cahiers de CIREM, nos.20–21 (1991) [whole issue]

S. Bouissou: ‘Au-delà de l'imaginaire et de la spéculation: la musique d'orchestre de Claude Ballif’, La musique: de la théorie au politique, ed. H. Dufourt and J.-M. Fauquet (Paris, 1991), 155–80

A. Galliari: L'habitant du labyrinthe: entretiens avec Claude Ballif (Paris, 1992)

M. Tosi: L'ouverture métatonale (Paris, 1992)

M. Tosi: Claude Ballif (Mercuès, 1996)

DANIEL CHARLES

Balling, Michael

(b Würzburg-Heidingsfeld, 28 Aug 1866; d Darmstadt, 1 Sept 1925). German conductor. He trained as a violist and played in the opera orchestras of Mainz and Schwerin. After touring Australia and New Zealand (1892–5) he went to England in 1895 as musical director of Frank Benson’s Shakespearean company. The following year he returned to Germany and played in the orchestra at the Bayreuth Festival. Here his conducting talents were discovered by Felix Mottl and Cosima Wagner and he acted as an assistant for the festivals of 1896, 1899, 1901 and 1902. After posts in Hamburg, Lübeck and Breslau, Balling succeeded Mottl in 1903 as musical director in Karlsruhe. He was a regular conductor at Bayreuth (1904–14, 1924–5), conducting the Ring, Parsifal and Tristan, and in 1905 gave the first performance in Barcelona of Die Meistersinger. In 1910 he conducted the first Ring performances in Scotland; and in 1911 he succeeded Hans Richter as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, with which he gave memorable performances of such large-scale works as Berlioz’s Te Deum, Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s First Symphony. He was in Bayreuth at the outbreak of war in August 1914 and never resumed his Manchester post. From 1912 he was editor for Breitkopf & Härtel of a projected critical Wagner edition. His final post was as musical director in Darmstadt (1919–25). In 1908 he married the widow of Hermann Levi.

CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Ballioni, Girolamo.

See Baglioni, Girolamo.

Ballis, Oliviero

(b ?Crema; d Ceneda, 24 March 1616). Italian composer, singer and priest. He had been appointed priest and contralto singer at Padua Cathedral on 5 May 1577 and he served there for more than 20 years in various capacities. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the post of maestro di cappella at the cathedral in 1580, but served as a substitute in the post, being the most senior member of the choir, after Costanzo Porta’s dismissal and until the election of G.B. Mosto (from May to December 1595), and again during the latter’s absence and after his death until the election of Lelio Bertani (from March 1596 to November 1598). He had various disputes with the new maestro in April 1600. The following year, on the recommendation of Bishop Leonardo Mocenigo, he was elected maestro di cappella of Ceneda Cathedral, a post which he held, despite new disputes with a local canon, until his death. During these final years he published his Sacri hymni, which are characterized by a solemn antiphonal style.

WORKS

Canzonette amorose spirituali, 3vv, libro primo (Venice, 1607)

Sacri hymni cantiones et litaniae deiparae Virginis Mariae, 8vv (Venice, 1609)

Madrigal: Se Giove, se Pluton, 5vv, in 1598⁷

Musiche, 3, 4vv, lost; see MischìatiI

2 masses, 5, 8vv, lost; cited in an inventory of 1602

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MischiatiI

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei sec. XIV, XV, XVI: contributo per una storia’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214; xix (1942), 49–92

E. Casagrande, M. Fontebasso Santorio and A. Ciciliot: La musica nel Cenedese: ricerche storiche e note musicologiche dal 1300 al 1900 (Vittorio Veneto, 1978), 43, 54

F. Colussi: ‘Vita musicale a Valvasone nel secolo di Erasmo’, Erasmo di Valvasone e il suo tempo, ed. F. Colussi (Pordenone, 1995), 145–93

F. Arpini: ‘Oliviero Ballis detto il Crema’, ‘Scientia musicae’ e musicisti a Crema tra ’500 e ’600 (Crema, 1996), 29–48

LELAND EARL BARTHOLOMEW/FRANCO COLUSSI

Ballo

(It.: ‘dance’, ‘ball’; Fr. bal; Sp. baile; Ger. Ball, Tanz).

(1) A generic term meaning a social gathering for the purpose of or with the emphasis on dancing.

Although the verb ‘ballare’, the noun ‘ballatio’ and related terms can be traced back to classical antiquity (for the complex etymology see Aeppli), the noun ‘ballo’ did not appear until the late Middle Ages. French narrators and chroniclers of the 12th and 13th centuries used it, together with ‘danserie’, to indicate a dance activity in the most general sense. Writers of the Italian Renaissance period from Boccaccio to Castiglione reported ‘gran balli’ for every festive occasion, and this meaning has remained unchanged throughout the history of social dancing at all levels (court, town and country), becoming more specific as time progressed and as distinctions were made according to occasions, places and dress: public dances (balli pubblici, bals publics); court balls (balli di corte, Hof-Ball, Grand bal du Roi) for invited guests of rank; balls at famous opera houses (Budapest, London, Milan, Paris, Vienna); and masked and costume balls.

(2) A choreography of varying elaborateness invented by a professional dancing-master and performed either at a social gathering or on the stage.

From the 13th century a distinction was made between the ballo (or bal) and other types of dance, indicating that the term had a specific choreographic meaning whose precise nature, known to the contemporaries, now eludes scholars (e.g. ‘Danses, baus et caroles veissiez commencier’, Adenès li Rois: li roumans de Berte aus grans piés, ed. A. Scheler, Brussels, 1874, p.12, l.302). Andrea da Tempo (Trattato delle rime volgari, 1332) testified to the existence of balli in the round (‘cantantur in rotunditate choreae sive balli’), while the Italian trescone (a rustic dance) ends with a pantomimic sequence called ‘il ballo’ (Ungarelli, 64ff). All types of entertainers (e.g. jongleurs, Spielleute) contributed to the invention and development of these balli, but it was not until the advent of the professional choreographers of the early 15th century that the ballo assumed a definite shape. On the basis of the extensive information given in the dance instruction books of Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, the 15th-century court ballo can be defined. It was a dance piece created by a professional artist for a specified number of performers, composed of a sequence of choreographic events (misure) based on the four common musical metres (bassadanza, saltarello, quadernaria and piva; see Saltarello), using all the movimenti naturali (particularly the various forms of salto – leaps, hops, jumps) and the embellishing movimenti accidentali, and ranging from purely ornamental dances to highly dramatic, narrative creations. (The three most explicitly pantomimic choreographies of the known 15th-century repertory are called ballettos; see Balletto, §1.)

Whether they are for couples, or alla fila, or in the round, all balli follow the same structural pattern: they begin with an intrada (usually a saltarello or a piva pattern, occasionally a quadernaria), followed by the ballo proper and ending with either a repeat of the entire dance or a reprise of the intrada during which one set of performers moves out of the centre of the ballroom to make room for the next. (The same sequence, called ‘Intrada’, ‘Figuren’, ‘Retrajecte’, was described by Michael Praetorius, 1618, p.19.) Where musical accompaniment is given, its single melodic line (labelled ‘in canto’ or ‘in canto da sonare’) follows and supports the choreographic configurations in the minutest detail.

During the next century of its history, culminating in the choreographic works of Fabritio Caroso (1581) and Cesare Negri (1602), the main characteristics of the social ballo remained essentially the same: it was a performance piece to be danced by well-trained amateurs; it still consisted of sections, although these had grown larger, lending the ballo as a whole a suite-like dimension. Pavans, pavaniglie and bassas replaced the old bassadanza and quadernaria metres; gagliarde, cascardas, tordiglioni and canaries replaced the piva and saltarello. In the 18th century minuets and contredanses were occasionally called balli (Gennaro Magri, Trattato del ballo nobile, 1779), but by this time the specific connotation of the term had been lost.

Outside the repertory for the courtly ballroom the ballo figured prominently in the theatrical entertainments of the 1600s; intermedi, early operas and even plays all featured at least one extensive dance-number of this name; Monteverdi’s Ballo delle ingrate is centred on a large dance-suite. As the professional performer replaced the courtly amateur, the term ‘ballo’ gradually gave way to ‘balletto’; both had been used interchangeably up to about 1600.

(3) A musical composition inspired by or directly related to the art of dancing.

Until the beginning of the 16th century compositions called ‘ballo’ rarely appeared in purely musical sources. Dance pieces, wherever they did occur, were either given their specific titles (e.g. ‘estampie’, ‘danse royale’, ‘ballata’, ‘moresca’) or text incipits, depending on whether they came from an instrumental or a vocal tradition. Collections of balli began to appear around 1520 and by the middle of the century most used the term in their title: Intabolatura nova di varie sorte de balli da sonare per arpichordi (1551), Bendusi’s Opera nova de balli (1553), Intavolatura de liuto di varie sorte di balli (1554) and Mainerio’s Primo libro de balli (1578). In all these collections the term ‘ballo’ covers a variety of fashionable dances: pavans, galliards, branles, saltarellos and canaries for instrumental performance or, less frequently, ‘da cantare e sonare’ (Bendusi). Balli also occur in more general collections of music such as the organ tablatures of Jakob Paix (1583). Most of these dances are short compositions with evenly balanced phrases, clear rhythmic patterns and comparatively simple harmonies. Frequently sections in contrasting metres were inserted or added at the end, apparently reflecting the suite-like structure of balli in contemporary dance manuals (e.g. those of Caroso and Negri).

Some 17th-century sources contain music for multi-movement balli that were actually presented as court entertainments (Lorenzo Allegri’s Il primo libro delle musiche, 1618, for example, contains eight complete balli performed at the Medici court between 1608 and 1615); the term ‘ballo’ was also often applied to the first dance in a group. Such opening dances were formal introductory numbers followed by a series of dances presented in much the same order as they would have had in the ballroom. Thus Antonio Brunelli’s ‘Balletto a cinque’ (in Scherzi, arie, canzonette, e madrigali, libro terzo, 1616) presents the dances in the order ballo grave, gagliarda, corrente; B.G. Laurenti’s 12 suonate per camera a violino, op.1 (1691) in the order introdutione, ballo, corrente, minuetto; and Cazzati’s Trattenimento per camera (1660) in the order aria, ballo, corrente. In 18th-century instrumental music the term ‘ballo’ was used only occasionally to indicate the dance-like character of a composition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

ES (G. Tani)

MGG2 (S. Dahms and J. Sutton; also ‘Suite’, §II, T. Feilen)

PirrottaDO

PraetoriusSM, iii

ReeseMR

SolertiMBD

G. Ungarelli: Le vecchie danze italiane (Rome, 1894/R)

F. Aeppli: Die wichtigsten Ausdrücke für das Tanzen in den romanischen Sprachen (Halle, 1925)

F. Blume: Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Orchestersuite im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1925/R)

W. Merian: Der Tanz in den deutschen Tabulaturbüchern (Leipzig, 1927/R)

C. Sachs: Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (Berlin, 1933; Eng. trans., 1937/R)

F. Ghisi: ‘Ballet Entertainments in Pitti Palace, Florence, 1608–1625’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 421–36

I. Brainard: Die Choreographie der Hoftänze in Burgund, Frankreich und Italien im 15. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1956)

L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)

H. Spohr: Studien zur italienischen Tanzkomposition um 1600 (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1956)

D. Heartz: Sources and Forms of the French Instrumental Dance in the Sixteenth Century (diss., Harvard U., 1957)

I. Herrmann-Bengen: Tempobezeichnungen, Ursprung: Wandel im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tutzing, 1959)

O. Kinkeldey: ‘Dance Tunes of the Fifteenth Century’, Instrumental Music, ed. D.G. Hughes (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 3–30, 89–152

K. Jeppesen: ‘Ein altvenetianisches Tanzbuch’, Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Regensburg, 1962), 245–63

K. Jeppesen: Preface to: Balli antichi veneziani per cembalo (Copenhagen, 1962)

H. Beck: Die Suite, Mw, xxvi (1964; Eng. trans., 1966)

P. Aldrich: Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody (New York, 1966), esp. 77ff

D. Heartz: ‘A 15th-Century Ballo: Rôti bouilli Joyeux’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 359–75

I. Brainard: ‘Bassedanse, Bassadanza and Ballo in the 15th Century’, Dance History Research: Perspectives from Related Arts and Disciplines, ed. J.W. Kealiinohamoku (New York, 1970), 64–79

F.A. Gallo: ‘Il “Ballare Lombardo” (circa 1435–1475)’, Studi musicali, viii (1979), 61–84

I. Brainard: The Art of Courtly Dancing in the Early Renaissance (West Newton, MA, 1981)

W.T. Marrocco: Inventory of 15th-Century Bassedanze, Balli & Balletti in Italian Dance Manuals (New York, 1981)

F.A. Gallo: ‘La danza negli spettacoli conviviali del secondo Quattrocento’, Spettacoli conviviali dall’antichità classica alle corti italiane del ’400: Viterbo 1982, 261–7

J.S. Applegate: ‘English Cavalier Dance-Songs: Henry Lawes and Robert Herrick’, Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars (1983), 71–83

I. Brainard: ‘The Art of Courtly Dancing in Transition: Nürnberg, Germ. Nat.Mus.MS 8842, a Hitherto Unknown German Dance Source’, Cross-roads of Medieval Civilization: the City of Regensburg and its Intellectual Milieu, ed. E.E. DuBruck and K.H. Goller (Detroit, 1984), 61–79

B. Sparti: ‘Music and Choreography in the Reconstruction of 15th-Century Balli: Another Look at Domenico's Verçepe’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, x (1984), 177–94

R. Hudson: The Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz (Cambridge, MA, 1986)

P. Jones: ‘Spectacle in Milan: Cesare Negri's Torch Dances’, EMc, xiv (1986), 182–96

I. Brainard: ‘Pattern, Imagery and Drama in the Choreographic Work of Domenico da Piacenza’, Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro e la danza nelle corti italiane del XV secolo: Pesaro 1987, ed. M. Padovan (Pisa, 1990), 85–96

A. Pontremoli and P. La Rocca: Il ballare lombardo: teoria e prassi coreutica nella festa di corte del XV secolo (Milan, 1987)

A. Uguccioni: ‘La danza nella pittura di cassone’, Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro e la danza nelle corti italiane del XV secolo: Pesaro 1987, ed. M. Padovan (Pisa, 1990), 235–50

L.M. Brooks: The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain’s Golden Age (Kassel, 1988)

P. Jones: The Relation between Music and Dance in Cesare Negri’s ‘Le Gratie d’Amore’ (1602) (diss., U. of London, 1989)

V. Daniels and E. Dombois: ‘Die Temporelationen im Ballo des Quattrocento’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis 1990, 181–247

A. Francalanci: ‘The “Copia di Mo Giorgio e del Giudeo di ballare basse danze e balletti” as found in the New York Public Library’, ibid., 87–179

Y. Kendall: ‘Rhythm, Meter and Tactus in 16th-Century Italian Court Dance: Reconstruction from a Theoretical Base’, Dance Research, viii (1990), 3–27

V. Daniels: ‘Tempo Relationships within the Italian balli of the XVth Century’, The Marriage of Music & Dance: London 1991 [13 unnumbered pages]

I. Gatiss: ‘Realizing the Music in the 15th-Century Italian Dance Manuals’, ibid. [9 unnumbered pages]

J. Sutton: ‘Musical Forms and Dance Forms in the Dance Manuals of Sixteenth-Century Italy: Plato and the Varieties of Variation’, ibid. [25 unnumbered pages]

M. Esses: Dance and Instrumental ‘Diferencias’ in Spain During the 17th and Early 18th Centuries, i, History and Background, Music and Dance (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992)

N. Monahin: ‘Leaping Nuns? Social Satire in a Fifteenth-Century Court Dance’, Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars (1993), 171–9

B. Sparti: ‘Antiquity as Inspiration in the Renaissance of Dance: the Classical Connection and Fifteenth-Century Italian Dance’, Dance Chronicle, xvi (1993), 373–90

D.R. Wilson: ‘“Finita: a larifaccino unaltra uolta dachapo”’, Historical Dance, iii (1993), 21–6

B. Sparti: Introduction to Ballo della Gagliarda: Lutio Compasso (1560) (Freiburg, 1995)

B. Sparti: ‘Rûti Bouilli: Take Two “El Gioioso Fiorito”’, Studi Musicali, xiv (1995), 231–61

For choreographic information see also Domenico da Piacenza; Antonio Cornazano; Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro; Fabritio Caroso; and cesare Negri.

INGRID BRAINARD

Ballou, Esther (Williamson)

(b Elmira, NY, 17 July 1915; d Chichester, England, 12 March 1973). American composer, pianist and educationist. She studied the piano and the organ as a child and graduated from Bennington College, Vermont (1937), Mills College (1938) and the Juilliard School (1943); at Bennington she took composition lessons from Otto Luening, and at Juilliard from Bernard Wagenaar and privately from Wallingford Riegger. While in California she composed ballets for Louise Kloepper and José Limón and toured nationally as a pianist with various dance companies. During the 1940s she taught at Juilliard and from 1955 at the American University, Washington, DC. During her subsequent career as an educationist she put forward experimental methods for theory teaching at college level. Her music, according to her own description, ‘tends towards classicism in that it stresses clarity of design and directness of expression’. Among a broad range of compositions are her Accompaniments for Modern Dance Technique (1933–7), which were used by such pioneers of the modern dance movement as Martha Hill, Doris Humphrey and Bessie Schoenberg. In 1963 she became the first American woman composer to have a work (the Capriccio for violin and piano) given its first performance at the White House, and in 1964 she received the honorary doctorate from Hood College, Maryland. Her manuscripts, which include a pedagogical text, Creative Explorations of Musical Elements (1971), are in the Special Collections Department of the American University Library, Washington, DC.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Suite, chbr orch, 1939; Blues, 1944; Pf Conc. no.1, 1945; Prelude and Allegro, pf, str, 1951; Concertino, ob, str, 1953; Adagio, bn, str, 1960; In memoriam, ob, str, 1960; Gui Conc., 1964; Pf Conc. no.2, 1964

Choral: Bag of Tricks (I. Orgel), SSAA, 1956; The Beatitudes, SATB, org, 1957; A babe is born (15th century), SATB, 1959; May the words of my mouth (Ps xix), SATB, 1965; I will lift up mine eyes (Ps cxxi), S, SATB, org, 1965; O the sun comes up-up-up in the opening sky (e.e. Cummings), SSA, 1966; Hear us!, SATB, brass, perc, 1967

Other vocal: 4 Songs (A.E. Housman), S, vc, pf, 1937; What if a much of a which of a wind (Cummings), S, Bar, B, wind qnt, 1959; Street Scenes (H. Champers), S, pf, 1960; 5–4–3 (Cummings), Mez, va, hp, 1966

Chbr: Impertinence, cl, pf, 1936; In Blues Tempo, cl, pf, 1937; Nocturne, str qt, 1937; Pf Trio, 1955, rev. 1957; Divertimento, str qt, 1958; Sonata, vn, pf, 1959; A Passing Word, fl, vc, pf, ob, 1960; Capriccio, vn, pf, 1963; Prism, str trio, 1969; Romanza, vn, pf, 1969

Kbd: Dance Suite, pf, 1937; Sonatina, pf, 1941; Sonata, 2 pf, 1943; Beguine, pf, 8 hands, 1950, arr. 2 pf, 1957, arr. orch, 1960; Music for the Theatre, 2 pf, 1952; Pf Sonata, 1955; Sonata no.2, 2 pf, 1958; Rondino, hpd, 1961; Sonatina [no.2], pf, 1964; Impromptu, org, 1968

Principal publisher: ACA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.W. Ballou: ‘Theory with a Thrust’, Music Educators Journal, lv (1968–9), no.1, pp.56–8; no.5, pp.55–7

J.R. Heintze: Esther Williamson Ballou: a Bio-Bibliography (New York, 1987)

L.A. Wallace: The Educational Experiences of American Composer Esther Williamson Ballou (diss., U. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1995)

JAMES R. HEINTZE

Balmer, Luc

(b Munich, 13 July 1898; d Berne, 1 March 1996). Swiss conductor and composer. Son of the painter Wilhelm Balmer, he studied from 1915 until 1919 at the Basle Conservatory with Hans Huber, Ernst Levy and Egon Petri. From 1921 to 1922 he studied composition with Busoni in Berlin. From 1924 he taught the piano and music theory at the Berne Conservatory. His career as a conductor began at the Lucerne Kursaal (1928–32); then for a short time he was with the Stadttheater in Berne (1934–5). He conducted the Berne symphony concerts (1935–41) and was conductor of the subscription concerts of the Bernische Musikgesellschaft (1941–64). In 1938 he became music advisor to Radio Berne. He was an exceptionally versatile conductor, but his performances of late Romantic works, particularly Bruckner and Reger, were specially notable. His compositions include an opera Die drei gefoppten Ehemänner (Berne, 1969), a concertino for piano (1960) and for cello (1962), three string quartets and vocal music.

JÜRG STENZL

Balmer & Weber Music House.

American firm of music publishers. Charles Balmer (b Mühlhausen, 21 Sept 1817; d St Louis, 15 Dec 1892) and Carl Heinrich Weber (b Koblenz, 3 March 1819; d Denver, 6 Sept 1892) left Germany for the USA in the 1830s; Balmer became an organist and conductor, Weber a cellist, and their early compositions were published in the eastern USA. In 1848 they entered into partnership and opened a shop in St Louis, publishing a variety of popular marches and various piano pieces including Balmer's own arrangements of popular titles. Charles Balmer was so prolific that he adopted a number of pseudonyms, including Charles Remlab, T. van Berg, Alphonse Leduc, Charles Lange, Henry Werner, August Schumann, T. Mayer and F.B. Ryder. Gradually the firm absorbed most of its competitors including Nathaniel Phillips, James & J.R. Phillips, H.A. Sherburne, H. Pilcher & Sons, W.M. Harlow, Cardella & Co. and Compton & Doan; by the end of the century it had an exceptionally large and flourishing business.

After the death of the partners, the business was managed by a company in which the Balmer family predominated. Lack of efficient direction and the rise of Kunkel Brothers, Shattinger and Thiebes-Stierlin caused the business to deteriorate, and in 1907 the catalogue was sold to Leo Feist of New York. He attempted to ship the sheet music to New York down the Mississippi, but the vessel foundered off the coast of New Jersey and its cargo sank.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.C. Krohn: A Century of Missouri Music (St Louis, 1924); repr. as Missouri Music (New York, 1971)

E.C. Krohn: Music Publishing in the Middle Western States before the Civil War (Detroit, 1972), 27–8

E.C. Krohn: Music Publishing in St. Louis (Warren, MI, 1988), 43

ERNST C. KROHN

Bal'mont, Konstantin Dmitriyevich

(b Gumnishchi, Ivanov district, 3/15 June 1867; d Noisy-le-grand, near Paris, 23 Dec 1942). Russian poet and translator. He was perhaps the most prominent poet of the symbolist movement in Russia. In the late 1890s he made translations into Russian of works by a number of poets, including Shelley, which were later used by many composers in the early years of the next century. For Bal'mont, Symbolism was primarily a poetry of hidden meaning transmitted by allusion, feeling, sound and musical aspects of verse. His works of the early 1900s see him concerned with pantheistic and mystical themes; his interest in theosophy stemmed from reading the writings of Madame Blavatsky, as did that of Skryabin, whose own poetic text which accompanied his Poème de l'extase is considered to be very reminiscent of Bal'mont's Budem kak solntse. It was probably Bal'mont's friendship with Skryabin which lead many Russian composers to pay attention to his work: the young Stravinsky, for a time infatuated with Skryabin's late works, set Bal'mont's words in his Zvezdoliki (Obukhov also used the same poem in 1913), while Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Roslavets and Myaskovsky were likewise attracted to Bal'mont's sensuous, exotic and often ecstatic verses. Bal'mont made specific allusion to Skryabin's work in his Svetozvuk v prirode i svetozvukaya simfoniya Skryabina (‘Light-sound in nature and Skryabin's light-sound symphony’) of 1917 in which he ponders the nature of synaesthesia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Markov: ‘Kommentar zu den Dichtungen von K.D. Bal'mont 1890–1909’, Bausteine zur Geschichte der Literatur bei den Slaven, xxxi/I–II (Vienna and Cologne, 1988, 1992).

A. Pyman: A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 56–66, 166–71, 385–8

JONATHAN POWELL

Balo [bala, balafou, balafon].

A gourd-resonated frame Xylophone of the Manding peoples of West Africa, found in the Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali and northern Côte d’Ivoire. Possibly the earliest reference to the instrument is that of Ibn Battūta, who visited the court of Mali in 1352 and saw an instrument ‘made from reeds, and provided with gourds below them’. In 1620, the British gold-prospector Richard Jobson described the ballards, the principal instrument of the Gambia, as having 17 keys with gourds suspended beneath them from iron rods. The player used a beater in each hand, the end of which was covered with ‘soft stuff’, and the instrument was played to accompany dancing. In the 1790s, Mungo Park described the Mandingo balafou as having 20 hardwood keys with ‘shells of gourds hung underneath to increase the sound’.

The contemporary instrument has 17 to 19 keys strung together on a frame with a gourd resonator beneath each. The keys are from 27·5 to 40 cm long, 2·5 to 4 cm wide and less than 2·5 cm deep; the undersides and ends are thinned for tuning. The instrument is tuned to an apparent equitonal heptatonic scale and has an approximate range of 2·5 octaves. It is played exclusively by professional male musicians and is used to accompany praisesongs; its repertory is almost identical to that of the kora, which has largely replaced the balo in Senegal and the Gambia (see Kora). Players use a rubber-tipped beater in each hand and sometimes have bells strapped to their wrists.

The balo may be played on its own or in pairs, in which case one instrument provides the basic melody (kumbengo) while the other incorporates melodic variation and ornamentation (birimintingo). This is especially common in the Guinea tradition. In Mali the balo is considered one of the most prestigious instruments of the professional musician and often accompanies the recitation of epic songs such as Sunjata. In the Gambia, the balo is played today by only a few families since it was overshadowed by the kora early in the 20th century. Nevertheless, much of the kora and konting repertory, as well as several playing techniques such as damping of notes, derive from the balo.

The term bala is used by the Kpelle people of Liberia for a free-key log xylophone with four to seven wooden keys resting on banana stems. The instrument is played with beaters of soft wood or raffia midriff and, like the cognate Mano balau and Gio blande, is used by boys on rice-farms for bird-scaring or signalling. Among the neighbouring Gbunde people it is known as kipelevelegu and among the Sapa as gbwilebo. The term balafon, used for the frame xylophone, was probably introduced by European travellers (from the Greek root ‘phono’), since its use is mainly confined to early European literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Park: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799)

H.G. Farmer: ‘Early References to Music in the Western Sudan’,Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1939), 569–79

G. Schwab: Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Cambridge, MA, 1947/R)

A.M. Jones: Africa and Indonesia (Leiden, 1971)

J.H.K. Nketia: The Music of Africa (New York, 1974)

K.A. GOURLAY, LUCY DURÁN

Balox, Johannes

(fl late 13th century). Theorist. Only the content of his treatise (CoussemakerS, i, pp.292–6 and CSM, xxxiv (1987), 11–21) and the character of the manuscript containing it (F-Pn lat.15128) point to the late 13th century. ‘Gaudent brevitate moderni’, the opening sentence, is a common beginning for treatises of the time, and the title Abbreviatio magistri Franconis a[uctore] Johanne dicto Baloce indicates a dependence on Franco of Cologne.

Johannes gave Franco’s new principles for notating rhythm, elucidating the note symbols and their plicas and the ligatures. Change in the basic duration of each symbol is achieved by its position in the perfection: in this context, Johannes made more of the divisio modi for preventing such changes. The rule concerning perfection of a long before a long is stated, although not found in Franco. Franco’s five – rather than six – rhythmic modes are reproduced; but unlike Franco, Johannes gave no real examples to illustrate them. Anonymous 2 and 3 (of CoussemakerS, i, pp.303–19, 319–27) were virtually identical but appended extra chapters on other topics.

ANDREW HUGHES

Balsach, Llorenç

(b Sabadell, 16 Apr 1953). Catalan composer. He began his musical education at the Barcelona Conservatory, studying harmony and composition with Carles Guinovart and Josep Soler Sardà, among others. While pursuing a degree in mathematics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he experimented with electronic music under the guidance of Brncic. He also attended Petrassi's composition seminars in Italy.

Balsach's musical output comprises two periods. In the first, under the influence of Cage's ideas, he attempted to break down the barrier between musical sounds and noise, explored unconventional means of playing standard instruments, used electronic instruments and mixed taped with live sounds. For example, his Suite gàstrica (1979) and El cant de les artèries (1979) use traditional instruments to mimic gastrointestinal sounds and the flow of arteries respectively.

Balsach's second creative period relied on more conventional musical procedures, including an unabashedly tonal language. For example, Visions grotesques (1992) is a succession of musical images or ‘visions’ exploring a wide range of orchestral colour, from full orchestra to string quartet. Each ‘vision’ is an independent and complete piece in itself, but a recurring chromatic motif stated each time by a different instrument creates a sense of prolonged structural unity.

Notwithstanding their variety, Balsach's works are always permeated by a detached, ironic attitude evident in his Satie-like titles, which furnish his music with specific images (visual, tactile and so forth), but privilege above all the concept of ‘play’. This playfulness gives his music its postmodern character.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Oh! Els bons dies (incid music, S. Beckett), 1980s; L'arlequí (ballet, Perejaume and M. Huerga), 1982; Música-màgica, 1992, magician, fl, cl, vn, vc, pn, perc

Orch: 2 distraccions, pf, perc, str, 1979; Gran Copa especial, 1979, arr. pf 4 hands, 1984, arr. chbr ens, 1983; Poema promiscu, 1981; Visions grotesques, 1992

Vocal: 6 cançons breus, solo v, 1982; Paralàlia de paralaues, Mez, pf, 1992; Música groga, chorus, 1980; 3 palíndroms, chorus, 1990; Cara cosa, chorus, 1991; Olis d'Olímpia, chorus, 1991

Chbr (4 or more insts): 2 contes, 6 perc, 1982; Música vironera, vn, va, vc, gui, pf, perc, 1977; Higiènica … ! (Estomacal i marxa), fl, cl, gui, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1978; Rondó, vn, va, vc, fl, ob, cl, tpt, pf, perc, 1983; Música per al llargmetratge (after M. Cussó: Entreacte), chbr ens, 1989; 4 Dibuixos, gui, str qt/str, 1995; 3 converses, 10 insts, 1997

Chbr (2–3 insts): Marina, fl, pf, 1977; I due ubriachi, vn/fl, vc, 1978; La negra, lliscosa, cl, pf, 1978; Variacions per a 20 dits, pf 4 hands, 1979; So d'oda, 2 gui, 1981; Ritmes d'ultramar, 2 pf, 1991, arr. 2 perc, 1993; De Caldetes a Moià, gui, pf, perc, 1978; Str Trio, 1992

Solo: Escarabat-piano, pf, 1975; Residus, gui, 1976; Peça gomosa, gui, 1977; Dental, hpd, 1978; Suite gàstrica, pf, 1979; Lleu, fl, 1980; 2 melodies distants, cl, 1982

El-ac: Carota i caramel, tape, 1976; L'assassí Bagliatti, nar, tape, 1977; El cant de les artèries, tape, 1979; Classes de música a la granja, 1993; El sueño de las olas, 1v, tenora, tape, 1994

Soundscapes: Espais sonors, 1975, exposició sonora, perf. Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sabadell, 1975; 14 poemes sonors (after J. Sala Sanahuja: 14 poemes visuals), gui, slides, 1975

Principal publisher: La Mà de Guido

Principal recording company: EDA

WRITINGS

La convergència harmònica (Barcelona, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Maderuelo: Una música para los 80 (Madrid, 1981), 33–69 passim

E. Casares: 14 compositores de hoy (Oviedo, 1982), 44–386 passim

68 compositors catalans, ed. Associacio Catalana de Compositors (Barcelona, 1989)

C. Lobo: ‘La tonalitat espontània en l'obra de Llorenç Balsach’, Revista musical catalana, no.121 (1994), 44 only

O. Abril: Els sons trobats: altres músiques natives (Barcelona, 1995), 46–7

ANTONI PIZÀ

Balsam, Artur

(b Warsaw, 8 Feb 1906; d New York, 1 Sept 1994). American pianist of Polish birth. He studied in Łódź, where he made his début at the age of 12, and at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. He received first prize in the International Piano Competition in Berlin in 1930, and then won the Mendelssohn Prize in 1931. He first toured North America in 1932 with Yehudi Menuhin, and settled there after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. He gave numerous recitals after 1918 and made many appearances with orchestras (including a series of six Mozart concertos for the BBC during the 1956 Mozart bicentenary); but he was most celebrated as an ensemble pianist who combined sensibility and a capacity for listening with strength of personality. Balsam recorded about 250 works in the solo and chamber literature, including all Haydn's and Mozart's music for solo piano, all Mozart's sonatas for violin and piano (with Oscar Shumsky), and all Beethoven's sonatas with violin and cello (with Joseph Fuchs and Zara Nelsova). His partners in concert, and often on recordings, also included Francescatti, Goldberg, Rostropovich, Szigeti, Totenberg, Milstein, David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan. In 1960 he joined the Albeneri Trio (which then became the Balsam-Krolf-Helfetz Trio) in place of Erich Itor Kahn. He was a distinguished teacher at the Eastman School of Music, Boston University, the Manhattan School of Music and the Philadelphia Academy of Music; he led summer courses from 1956 to 1992 at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine. Murray Perahia was one his pupils. Balsam also edited and composed cadenzas for Mozart's piano concertos k37, 39–41, 175 and 238.

MICHAEL STEINBERG/R

Balsamino, Simone

(b Urbino; fl 1591–6; d ?Venice, ?1607). Italian composer, poet and instrument inventor. A connection with Urbino is suggested by the dedications to the Della Rovere family of his two surviving publications; his book of madrigals further includes a preface addressed to ‘miei Signori & Patriotti’ of Urbino. He was maestro di cappella at Venice Cathedral (S Pietro di Castello) from 1591 until at least 1596. His whereabouts after 1596 are unknown; a notice in a necrology from S Maria Formosa, Venice, may refer to his death in 1607.

Balsamino is the author of a tragicomedy, La perla (Venice, 1596), which draws heavily on Tasso’s Aminta. He may have intended portions of the drama to be sung: one scene closes with a parody of the poem Ancor che col partir, famous for its setting by Rore. His only music publication, a book of six-part madrigals (Venice, 1594; ed. A. Chegai: Le ‘Novellette a sei voci’ di Simone Balsamino, Florence, 1993), also owes a debt to Tasso’s Aminta. The book consists of 20 madrigals, 17 of which are settings of excerpts from Tasso’s play. The first 16 are tonally unified and set a dialogue between Tirsi and Aminta (2.iii); the remaining, unrelated madrigal sets a long monologue of Satiro (2.i). These two excerpts are of different dramatic types, and this is reflected in their musical treatment: the dialogue divides the six voices into two three-voice groups, while Satiro’s monologue is set in a chordal recitative style, bearing the indication ‘Da cantarsi senza battute e pause’. In his preface, Balsamino asserted that his madrigals had been performed, like certain commedie armoniche, in the square in front of the ducal palace in Urbino. Balsamino’s work considerably influenced the Aminta musicale of Erasmo Marotta (Venice, 1600) which, in fact, includes direct musical quotations from Balsamino’s book.

The preface to the madrigal book also includes a reference to an instrument of Balsamino’s own design: the ‘cetarissima’, which he claimed combined the virtues of the lute and guitar in a single instrument.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

EinsteinIM

VogelB

A. Einstein: ‘Ein Madrigaldialog von 1594’, ZIMG, xv (1913–14), 202–14

B. Ligi: La cappella musicale del duomo d’Urbino, NA, ii (1925), 68, 87

N. Fortune: ‘An Italian Arch-Cittern’, GSJ, v (1952), 43 only

A. Chegai: ‘La musica in San Pietro in Castello, Duomo di Venezia, fra XVI e XVII secolo’, Recercare, iii (1991), 219–29

A. Chegai: ‘“La Perla”, commedia di Balsamino musico: citazione, autocitazione, echi musicali’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, vi (1992), 115–32

A. Chegai: ‘Musicalità vs musicabilità: l’ “Aminta” fra recezione madrigalistica e fortuna critica’, Saggiatore musicale, i (1994), 315–34

LORENZO BIANCONI/ANDREA CHEGAI/R

Balsys, Eduardas

(b Mykolaïv, Ukraine, 20 Dec 1919; d Drushininkai, Lithuania, 3 Nov 1984). Lithuanian composer. Balsys grew up in Klaipėda (Memel), completing in 1939 his studies at the Lithuanian Gymnasium, where he had his first musical education, played in a wind ensemble, and began composing. He served as a school teacher in Kretinga (1941–5) and then studied composition at the State Conservatory in Vilnius with Antanas Račiūnas (1945–50), later studying at the Leningrad Conservatory in Voloshinov's masterclass (1950–53). From 1953 until his death Balsys lectured in composition and orchestration at the Lithuanian State Conservatory, becoming head of the composition department in 1960 and professor in 1969. He was president of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union (1962–71). His pupils included Benjaminas Gorbulskis, Algirdas Martainaitis and Vidmantas Bartulis. He was awarded the Lithuanian State Prize in 1960 and 1974.

The style of Balsys is closely linked to the Romantic and folkloristic traditions in Lithuanian music; he was one of the first to extend and deepen these traditions. His work can be divided into three periods. Until 1958 he wrote within the context of the Soviet musical aesthetic of the time, quoting folk music, preferring traditional forms, giving melody a dominant role, and following the harmonic system of major and minor keys. With his Second Violin Concerto (1958), Balsys began to treat traditional material in a different way: motifs were freely reworked, achieving independence from the character of the original model; he attempted to synthesize contemporary means of expression. In harmony, Balsys then went beyond the traditional structure of thirds and used polytonal devices. In his final creative phase (1965–84), his music became polystylistic. Characteristics of the works of this period are expressionistic features and the use of the 12-tone technique; this Balsys often employed freely, sometimes interspersing tonal episodes.

WORKS

Stage: Eglė, žalčių karalienė [Eglė, the Queen of the Snakes] (ballet, 4, after S. Nėris and folk tales), Vilnius, 1960; Kelionė į Tilžę [The Journey to Tilzę] (op, 2, after H. Sudermann), Vilnius, 1980

Vocal: Nelieskite mėlyno gaublio [No Sign of Life on the Blue Globe] (orat, V. Palčinskaitė), solo vv, children's chorus, 2 pf, db, perc, 1969; Saulę nešantis [Sun Bearer] (cant., E. Mieželaitis), S, chorus, org, perc, 1972; 80 choruses; 13 songs, 1v, pf

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Sonata, 1948; Herojinė poema [Heroic Poem], orch, 1953; Str Qt, 1953; 2 vn concs., 1954, 1958; Dramatinės freskos, vn, pf, orch, 1965; Sym.-Conc., org, ww, gui, perc, 1977; Jūros atspindžiai [The Sparkling Sea], str, 1981; Portretai, orch, 1983; Conc., vn, 1984; incid music for 15 films and 10 plays

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Narbutinenė: Eduardas Balsys (Vilnius, 1971)

H. Gerlach: ‘Eduardas Balsys’, 50 sowjetische komponisten (Leipzig and Dresden, 1984)

A. Ruzgaitė: ‘Trečioji Eglė baleto scenoje’, Literatūra ir menas (1995), no.1, p.3

based on MGG2 (ii, 132–3), by permission of Bärenreiter

ONA NARBUTIENĖ

Baltazar, Johannes.

See Ninot le Petit.

Baltazarini.

See Beaujoyeux, Balthasar de.

Baltimore.

American city, the largest city in Maryland. Its musical history can be traced to the American Revolutionary period. First settled in 1662, Baltimore became a town in 1730. By 1800 its population of more than 26,000 was larger than that of the state’s capital, Annapolis. As early as 1784 concerts in the city were advertised in the press. These early programmes were of great diversity, including works by Bach, Dittersdorf, Haydn, Kocžwara, Pleyel, Viotti and Vanhal, as well as by immigrant musicians Alexander Reinagle and Raynor Taylor who were resident in Baltimore.

In 1794, a year after establishing a music shop in Philadelphia, Joseph Carr and his sons Thomas and Benjamin inaugurated a similar enterprise in Baltimore. The first publication of the Star Spangled Banner in sheet music form was by Thomas Carr in November 1814. Following the demise of Thomas Carr’s business in 1821, other publications, notably by the firms of Arthur Clifton (fl ?1823), George Willig (1823–1910), John Cole (1821–38), Frederick Benteen (1839–55), Miller and Beecham (1853–73), James Boswell (1835–59), Samuel Carusi (1839–44), W.C. Peters (1844–52) and G. Fred Kranz (1910–c1960), made Baltimore a major centre of music publishing. A significant factor in the success of a number of these firms was the presence in Baltimore of the early American lithography firm of A. Hoen & Co., who supplied illustrated covers for numerous Baltimore imprints. Several of the Baltimore music publishing firms were taken over by the Boston firm of Oliver Ditson in the late 19th century.

1. Orchestras.

The first orchestra of professional musicians in Baltimore was the Peabody Orchestra in 1866. Under the direction of James Monroe Deems, Lucian Southard and Asger Hamerik the orchestra gave the premières of works by American composers and the American premières of numerous European works, especially those from Hamerik’s native Denmark. The Peabody Orchestra ceased in 1896. Ross Jungnickel organized the first Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first season in 1890.

Following the demise of Jungnickel’s orchestra in 1899, the Florestan Club, an élite group of local musicians and music lovers (including H.L. Mencken), made plans to found the city’s first resident orchestra. In 1916 Baltimore became the first city in the USA to found an orchestra on a municipal appropriation. The first conductor of the new Baltimore SO, Gustav Strube, remained in the post until 1930. Subsequent directors of the orchestra were George Siemonn (1930–35), Ernest Schelling (1935–7), Werner Janssen (1937–9) and Howard Barlow (1939–42). This orchestra played its last concert in 1942. The same year Reginald Stewart, also director of the Peabody Conservatory, devised a plan for the reorganization of the Baltimore SO. Stewart attracted superior musicians by offering them faculty appointments at the Peabody Conservatory, an arrangement based on Mendelssohn’s direction of the Leipzig Conservatory and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Although Stewart was the only one to have held both positions, the relationship between the Baltimore SO and the Peabody Conservatory faculty remains strong. Subsequent conductors have included Massimo Freccia (1952–9), Peter Herman Adler (1959–68), Brian Priestman (1968–9), Sergiu Comissiona (1968–84), D.J. Zinman (1985–98) and Yury Temirkanov (since 1999).

Under the inspiration of A. Jack Thomas, the conductors Charles L. Harris and later W. Llewellyn Wilson led the Baltimore Colored SO and Chorus in concerts from 1929 until a bitter musicians’ strike in 1939 closed the orchestra. The Baltimore Women’s String SO played from 1936 to 1940 under the direction of Stephen Deak and Wolfgang Martin.

2. Educational institutions, libraries.

The Peabody Conservatory, founded on 12 February 1857, is technically the oldest conservatory in the USA, although it did not actually offer instruction until 1868. As part of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, the conservatory was endowed by George Peabody, one of America’s earliest philanthropists. The Institute included provision for an extensive library, well furnished in every department of knowledge, a gallery of art and an Academy of Music (which became the Peabody Conservatory of Music in 1872).

The conservatory’s first director was the New England educator Lucian Southard (1868–70) followed by the Danish-born composer and conductor and student of Berlioz, Asger Hamerik (1871–98), Harold Randolph (1898–1927), Otto Ortmann (1928–41), Reginald Stewart (1941–58), Peter Mennin (1958–62), Charles Kent (1963–7), Richard Franko Goldman (1968–77), Elliot Galkin (1977–82), Robert O. Pierce (1982–95) and Robert Sirota (since 1995). In 1977 the Peabody Conservatory was affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University and in 1983 became a school of the university. It is now known as the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.

There are about two dozen other institutions of higher education in Baltimore and its environs. Goucher College, Morgan State University and Towson State University are among those that offer not only music courses but also distinguished concert series. One local body, the Baltimore Chamber Music Society, sponsored a controversial series of concerts consisting almost entirely of 20th-century music. Founded in 1950 by composer Hugo Weisgall and philanthropist Randolph Rothschild, the society has also commissioned a number of important works. Two important adjuncts to Baltimore’s musical life are the Arthur Friedheim Library and the archives of the Peabody Institute at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Maryland Historical Society. Both collections offer extensive primary source materials for the study of Baltimore’s musical life. The Lester S. Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library includes one of the most important collections of American sheet music (approximately 40,000 items).

3. Opera.

Music theatre in Baltimore can trace its beginnings from 1772 with a performance of Milton’s Comus in a stable by Lewis Hallam’s travelling American Company. The first resident theatrical company, Thomas Wall and Adam Lindsay’s Maryland Company of Comedians, built Baltimore’s first theatre in 1781 and performed there until 1785. A resurgence of Hallam’s Old American Company and a series of local companies provided sporadic theatrical, musical and circus entertainment during the 1780s and early 1790s. Thomas Wignell and Alexander Reinagle’s Philadelphia Company dominated the last decade of the 18th century, offering substantial seasons of plays, interludes and afterpieces in their newly constructed Holliday Street Theater. From the turn of the century to the Civil War, Baltimore hosted a variety of resident and touring companies in both the Holliday Street Theater and the Front Street Theatre. After the Civil War, a new ‘theatre district’ sprang up in Baltimore and included the Concordia Opera House (1865–91), Ford’s Grand Opera House (1871–1964) and the Academy of Music (1875–1927). All featured a variety of theatrical entertainments, with Ford’s hosting at least 24 opera companies performing over 90 different works. With the rise of the New York Theatrical Syndicate around the turn of the century, Baltimore faded as a major stop for touring opera troupes. Local efforts to establish an opera company resulted in the creation of Eugene Martinet’s Baltimore Civic Opera Company in 1932. As early as the 1940–41 season, Martinet was able to enlist the help of the soprano Rosa Ponselle, who served as artistic director until 1979. In 1970 the company was renamed the Baltimore Opera Company.

4. Concert organizations, halls.

With many inhabitants of British and German extraction, Baltimore has enjoyed a rich choral tradition. 19th-century choral organizations included the Liederkranz (1836–1900), the Germania Männerchor (1856–1929) and the Baltimore Oratorio Society (1881–1900). In the 20th century the Bach Choir, the Handel Society, the Choral Arts Society and the Baltimore Symphony Chorus maintained this tradition. The latter three continue to give distinguished readings of the choral classics, and the Choral Arts Society encourages the creation of new choral works with an annual competition.

Baltimore has six outstanding concert halls, all aesthetically pleasing and acoustically effective. The Lyric, constructed in 1894, is modelled on the Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig. After extensive renovation in 1980–81, the theatre (cap. 2683) was reopened in 1982. In the same year, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (cap. 2467) was opened as the permanent home of the Baltimore SO. Designed by Pietro Belluschi, the hall is named after one of the city’s most generous philanthropists. A second hall named after Meyerhoff, the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Auditorium (cap. 363), opened in 1982 at the Baltimore Museum of Art and is the home of the Baltimore Chamber Music Society concerts. The Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher College, again designed by Belluschi, opened in 1962 (cap. 995). The Shriver Hall (cap. 1100) of the Johns Hopkins University is the site of a distinguished chamber music series. Opened in 1866, the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall (cap. 800) at the Peabody Institute is the oldest of the existing halls; it underwent extensive renovation in 1983.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O.G. Sonneck: Early Concert-Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig, 1907/R, 3/1959)

S.E. Lafferty: Names of Music Teachers, Musicians, Music Dealers, Engravers, Printers and Publishers of Music, Conservatories of Music, Music Academies, Manufacturers of Pianos, Organs, and other Musical Instruments appearing in the Baltimore City Directories from 1796–1900 (MS, US-BApi, 1937)

L. Keefer: Baltimore’s Music: the Haven of the American Composer (Baltimore, 1962)

R.A. Disharoon: A History of Municipal Music in Baltimore, 1914–1947 (diss., U. of Maryland, 1980)

D. Ritchey, ed.: A Guide to the Baltimore Stage in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, CT, 1982)

H. Weems: The History of the Women’s String Symphony Orchestra of Baltimore Inc (diss., Peabody Conservatory of Music, 1990)

E. Lawrence: Music at Ford’s Grand Opera House, 1871–1894 (diss., Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1991)

W. Spencer: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 1965–1982: the Meyerhoff Years (Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1993)

E. Schaaf and D. Hildebrand: Music in Maryland (forthcoming)

ELLIOTT W. GALKIN/N. QUIST

Baltin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

(b Moscow, 2 Jan 1931). Russian composer and pianist. He graduated from the Moscow State Conservatory in 1956 having studied composition under E. Messner and the piano under V. Belov. He was deputy chief editor of the journal Muzïka (1963–8), and was president of the council of experts of the Ministry of Culture (1990–92). He is a member of the Composers’ Union, and in 1984 he became an Honoured Artist of Russia. He works in a variety of genres. Among his most significant works are the opera Knyaz' Mïshkin (‘Prince Mïshkin’) based on Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, the oratorio Spustya stolet'ya (‘Centuries Later’) after Michelangelo, a scene from the Gospels entitled Magdalina for mezzo soprano and orchestra, four symphonies, numerous concertos (including three for piano), in addition to chamber works and song cycles.

The roots of Baltin’s style lie within the Russian tradition; he nonetheless maintains an individual approach to the genre in which he is working. In the oratorio Spustya stolet'ya a symphonic breadth is combined with detailed writing reminiscent of chamber music and a laconic mode of expression; within the Romantic framework of the Second Piano Concerto variety is obtained by fusing the principles of cantus firmus, Beethovenian contrast, and monothematism. Baltin is attracted to the concerto as a genre that combines real virtuosity and philosophical profundity. In his works, lyrical and dramatic materials are freely fused with the grotesque and scherzo elements. The composer is particularly restrained in his thematic construction and scoring; Baltin’s language – aligned to the so-called new simplicity – is set within a tonal framework.

Baltin’s music is heard regularly at the annual Moscow Autumn festival. From the 1950s to the 1970s Baltin regularly appeared as a concert pianist.

WORKS

Op: Knyaz' Mïshkin [Prince Mïshkin] (A. Baltin, after F. Dostoyevsky), 1984

Vocal-orch: Spustya stolet'ya [Centuries Later] (orat., M. Buonarroti), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1975; Magdalina (B. Pasternak), Mez, orch, 1990

4 syms.: Pro ėto (V. Mayakovsky), Bar, orch, 1968; 1989; 1993; 1997

Other orch: Hp conc., 1953; Vn conc., 1964; Vc conc., 1971; Conc., Mez, orch, 1973, arr. for a sax, orch., 1982; Letniy den' [Summer Day], poem, va, orch, 1986; Karnaval [Carnival], concert ov., 1992; Bïlina, hp, orch, 1994

3 pf concs.: 1959, 1981, 1991

Chbr: Qnt, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, 1976; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1978; Str qt, 1985; Pf trio, 1986; Zaklikaniya vesnï [The Call of Spring], concertino for fl, ob, bn, hn, 1990; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1994; Sonata, vc, pf, 1995

Pf: Sonatina, 1955; Pesenki bez slov [Songs Without Words], 1969; Muzïkal'nïye kartinï [Musical Pictures], 1969; Shkol'naya tetrad' [School Notebook], 1970; Sonata, 1988

Vocal: 4 songs (V. Mayakovsky), Bar, pf, 1962; Songs (A. Akhmatova), C, pf, 1987

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Stepanov: ‘Znakomstvo obnadezhivayet’ [Acquaintance reassures], SovM (1967), no.7

A. Ivashkin: ‘Raznoobraznïye resheniya (sochineniya A. Lokshina, K. Volkova, A. Baltina)’ [Various solutions: the works of A. Lokshin, K. Volkov and A. Baltin], SovM (1973), no.6, pp.43–7

L. Kokoreva: ‘Sozvuchniye sovremennosti’ [Consonant contemporaneities], Muzïka Rossii, 5 (1984), 196–211

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Baltsa, Agnes

(b Lefkas, 19 Nov 1944). Greek mezzo-soprano. She studied in Athens, Munich and Frankfurt, where she made her début in 1968 as Cherubino. In 1969 she sang Octavian at the Vienna Staatsoper and the following year appeared at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, and the Salzburg Festival. Baltsa made her American début in 1971 at Houston as Carmen, and first sang at La Scala in 1974 as Dorabella. She made her Covent Garden début in 1976 as Cherubino and first sang at the Metropolitan in 1979 as Octavian, returning as Carmen. Her repertory includes roles by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, as well as Orpheus, Sextus, Eboli, Azucena, Dido (Les Troyens), Herodias (Salome), Delilah and Charlotte. A powerful singing actress, Baltsa has sometimes sacrificed beauty of tone to dramatic effect; but she has brought a rare visceral excitement to a role like Carmen. She is also an admired interpreter of the mezzo part in Verdi's Requiem, which she recorded with both Karajan and Muti.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Goodwin: ‘Agnes Baltsa’, Opera, xxxvi (1985), 483–8

ELIZABETH FORBES

Baltzar, Thomas

(b Lübeck, ?1631; d London, 27 July 1663). German violinist and composer. He came from a family of Lübeck musicians: his father, David (d 1647), his grandfather, Hinrik Thomas, his great-grandfather, Hinrik, and his brothers Joachim and David were all musicians there. According to the English scientist Samuel Hartlib, Baltzar studied with Johann Schop (i), and he is recorded at the Swedish court in 1653. He probably returned home in summer 1654, after Queen Christina's abdication, and was briefly appointed a Lübeck Ratslutenist at the beginning of 1655. He travelled to England later in the year, where he remained until his death.

Baltzar caused a sensation in England. John Evelyn heard him at Roger L'Estrange's London house on 4 March 1656, and wrote that he ‘plaid on that single Instrument a full Consort, so as the rest, flung-downe their Instruments, as acknowledging a victory’. Baltzar was in London in September 1656 to play in Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes, though Anthony Wood wrote that he spent about two years with Sir Anthony Cope at Hanwell House near Banbury. Presumably he was living there when he made his famous visits to William Ellis's Oxford music meetings in summer 1658. Wood compared him several times with the English violinist Davis Mell, who ‘play'd farr sweeter than Baltsar, yet Baltsar's hand was more quick and could run it insensibly to the end of the finger-board’. Mell was also in Oxford in 1658, and their divisions on John, come kiss me now, printed in Playford's The Division Violin (1684/R), probably record some sort of playing contest. They show that Mell was no match for Baltzar, as a composer as well as a player.

Baltzar probably returned to London at the Restoration, and was given a new place in the King's Private Music by a warrant dated 23 December 1661, back-dated to Michaelmas at the high salary of £110 a year. His appointment brought the number of violins in the group to three, and it was surely for them that he wrote his C major suite, probably the earliest English piece for three violins. A painting at Nostell Priory appears to show him in the company of his Private Music colleagues, including John Banister (i) and the harpist Charles Evans (d 1687). According to Burney, Baltzar died on 24 July 1663; he was buried in Westminster Abbey three days later. At first, Wood thought he had died of ‘the french pox and other distempers’, but subsequently wrote that ‘being much admired by all lovers of musick, his company was therefore desired; and company, especially musicall company, delighting in drinking, made him drink more than ordinary which brought him to his grave’.

Unfortunately little of Baltzar's music survives. He introduced English violinists to high positions, elaborate chordal writing, and scordatura. Playford published three unaccompanied pieces in The Division Violin, and a number of others apparently by Baltzar are in manuscript (GB-Ob Mus. Sch. F.573). Some are arrangements of lyra viol pieces by Jenkins and others, which suggests that he based his chordal idiom on English viol music, rather than on German violin music. His suites for two violins and bass are fine examples of a conservative Anglo–German idiom, though his masterpiece is the grand, extended suite in C major, one of the finest pieces in the three-violin repertory.

WORKS

(for further details see Dodd I)

16 pieces, vn, in The Division Violin (London, 1684/R), GB-Lbl, Ob, Och

Divisions on John, come kiss me now, G, vn, b, in The Division Violin (London, 1684/R)

2 divisions, d, G, b viol, b, Ob, US-NYp

3 suites, D, c, G, 2 vn, b, GB-Ob

Suite, C, 3 vn, b, Ob; ed. I. Payne (Hereford, 1999)

Set of sonatas, lyra vn, tr vn, b, lost, listed in T. Britton's sale catalogue (London, 1714)

Solos, vn, b, lost, listed in C. Burney's sale catalogue (London, 1814)

Vn solos, pavans etc., lost, listed in J.B. Cramer's sale catalogue (London, 1816)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, v, viii

BDA

BDECM

BoydenH

HawkinsH

C. Stiehl: ‘Thomas Baltzar, ein Paganini seiner Zeit’, Mmg, xx (1888), 1–8

J. Hennings: Musikgeschichte Lübecks, i: Weltliche Musik (Kassel, 1951)

E.S. de Beer, ed.: The Diary of John Evelyn (London, 1955)

J.D. Shute: Anthony à Wood and his Manuscript Wood D 19(4) at the Bodleian (diss., International Institute of Advanced Studies, Clayton, MO, 1979)

G. Dodd: ‘Matters Arising from Examination of Lyra Viol Manuscripts’, Chelys, ix (1980), 23–7

P. Holman: ‘Thomas Baltzar (?1631–1663), the “Incomperable Lubicer on the Violin”’, Chelys, xiii (1984), 3–38

P. Walls: ‘The Influence of the Italian Violin School in 17th-Century England’, EMc, xviii (1990), 575–87

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

PETER HOLMAN

Bal y Gay, Jesús

(b Lugo, 23 June 1905; d Madrid, 3 March 1993). Spanish musicologist and composer. He had private piano lessons in Lugo (under the auspices of the Real Conservatorio of Madrid), and took his degree at the Instituto General y Técnico (Lugo, 1921). He was a founder (1924) of the arts journal Ronsel (published in Lugo), for which he wrote his early essays on music and poetry. While serving in the Spanish infantry at Compostela he participated in the Seminario de Estudios Gallegos (1926–8); on his return to Madrid he joined the musicology and folklore section of the Centro de Estudios Históricos under Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and undertook fieldwork in Extremadura and Galicia, the latter with Eduardo Martínez Torner. J.B. Trend invited him to serve as reader in Spanish literature at the University of Cambridge (1935–8), where he also studied privately with Edward Dent and J. Wolff. Owing to his strong Republican sympathies, he began his long voluntary exile in Mexico, where he pursued his own research supported by the Mexican Government (1938–40); he worked at the Casa de México (1940–42), and when it became the Colegio de México (1942) he was appointed lecturer in music there. After working as a freelance journalist, primarily for the British Propaganda Office in Mexico (1943–9), he joined and directed (1949–65) the musicology section of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes under Carlos Chávez. He served as music critic of the daily paper El universal (1940–51), taught music appreciation at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma (1958–64), also directing the music section of its radio station (1957–64), and was a founder-member of and a major contributor to Nuestra música (1945–50). Upon his return to Spain in 1965, he resumed his lecturing, writing and compositional activities. His published compositions include the Serenade for strings (1949), Clarinet Sonata (1953) and Concerto grosso (1965); his writings include studies and editions of Spanish folksongs.

In 1933 Bal y Gay married the pianist and composer Rosa García Ascot (b Madrid, 8 April 1908), a pupil of Granados (1914–16) and Falla (1916–31). Accompanied by Falla, she played the soloist's part in the first performance of the two-piano version of his Noches en los jardines de España (1921) at the Salle Gaveaux, Paris. She made a successful career as a concert pianist, specializing in Falla’s works in Spain and, after 1935, in England and Mexico. Her compositions include an orchestral suite and numerous chamber works.

WRITINGS

Hacia el ballet gallego (Lugo, 1924)

‘España: Bibliographie de la chanson populaire espagnole’, Folklore musical (Paris, 1929), 64–84

with E. Martínez Torner: ‘Folklore musical’, Terre de Melide (Compostela, 1933), 537–66

‘Fuenllana and the Transcription of Spanish Lute-Music’, AcM, xi (1939), 16–27

‘Rodolfo Halffter’, Nuestra música, i (1946), 141–6

‘Las “Escenas de Ballet” de Stravinsky’, Nuestra música, ii (1947), 199–209

‘Manual de Falla’, Nuestra música, ii (1947), 19–24

‘Felix Mendelssohn’, Nuestra música, iii (1948), 11–25

‘Música intramuros (la situación actual de la música en la U.S.S.R.)’, Nuestra música, iii (1948), 163–87

‘Chopin innovador’, Nuestra música, iv (1949), 267–85

‘El nacionalismo y la música mexicana de hoy’, Nuestra música, iv (1949), 107–13

‘“La hija de Colquide” de Carlos Chávez’, Nuestra música, v (1950), 207–16

‘La “Sinfonía de Antigona” de Carlos Chávez’, Nuestra música, v (1950), 5–17

‘La lección de André Gide’, Nuestra música, vi (1951), 75–99

Chopin (Mexico City, 1959, 2/1974)

Tientos (ensayos de estética musical) (Mexico City, 1960)

Debussy (Mexico City, 1962)

with E. Martinez Torner: Cancionero gallego (La Coruña, 1973)

with R. García Ascot: Nuestros trabajos y nuestros días, ed. A. Buxán (Madrid, 1990)

EDITIONS

Treinta canciones de Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1935)

Romances y villancicos españoles del siglo XVI (Mexico City, 1939)

Cancionero de Upsala (Mexico City, 1944)

Tesoro de la música polifónica en México (Mexico City, 1952)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Buxán: ‘Jesús Bal y Gay: el músico y el hombre’, Abrente, nos.13–15 (La Coruña, 1986), 203–35

J. Vellisco Amodia: ‘Apuntes biográficos sobre los músicos de la “Generación de la República”’, A tempo, no.40 (1986), 25–32

J.B. Varela de Vega: ‘Táboa redonda: Jesús Bal en el recuerdo (i–xiv)’, El progreso [Lugo] (June 30 – Nov 17, 1993)

X.M. Carreira: ‘Jesús Bal y Gay’, RdMc, xvii (1994), 477–80

ISRAEL J. KATZ

Balyozov, Rumen

(b Sofia, 6 Sept 1949). Bulgarian composer. He studied at the Bulgarian State Conservatory (1971–6), then worked as a cellist in the Symphony Orchestra of Bulgarian Radio and Television. Balyozov came to prominence as a composer in the 1970s and 80s. Drawing on the aesthetics of Cage and Kagel, he sought to embody the idea of music as the illumination of the intellect in his works, which include elements of self-irony, games, paradoxes and a sense of the absurd. Moral and ethical issues determine the themes of the stage works. In Kogato kublite ne spyat (‘When Dolls are not Asleep’) Balyozov imaginatively evokes the world of fairy tales. In Zelenata igra (‘The Green Game’) contemporary social issues are dealt with alongside more universal human questions; music is the medium by which the text and visual aspects of the work are linked.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Malkiyat Prints [The Little Prince], 1975 (TV op, R. Balyozov, after A. de Saint-Exupéry)

Kogato kuklite ne spyat [When Dolls are not Asleep] (children's op, L. Mileva), Blagoyevgrad, Nov 1980

Zelenata igra [The Green Game] (music theatre, I. Radoyev), Sofia, National Palace of Culture, 13 Oct 1987

other works

Orch: Siluyeti [Silhouette], 1973; Divertimento capricioso no.1, 1974; Conc. grosso no.1, str qt, orch, 1983; Divertimento capricioso no.2, 1985; Conc. grosso no.3, mar, str, 1988

Vocal-orch: Sym., S, B, orch, 1979; Starobalgarski stranitsi [Old Bulg. Pages], 1982; Vladeteli, Knizhovniki Yeretiki [Rulers, Writers, Heretics], 1982

Chbr and solo inst: 2 rapsodifeni improvizatsii, vc, 1971–9; Folklorni etyudi, str, perc, 1972; Izmeneniya [Changes], 2 pf, 1972; Pastorali, ob, 1976; Konflikti, fl, vn, hp, pf, tape, 1977; Memorial '78, vc, perc sextet, 1978; Khrabriyat oloven voynik [The Brave Lead Soldier], spkr, brass qt, 1979; Str Qt, 1979; Marsianski tantsi [Martians' Dances], perc sextet, 1981; 3 piesi [3 Pieces], cl, 1981; Str Qt no.2, 1982; Girlyandi [Garlands], wind qnt, 1983; Conc. grosso no.2, cl, pf, perc, str qt, 1987; Bestiarii [Madness], vc, pf, 1988; Divertimento capricioso no.4, 5–13 insts, 1989; Kontur [Contour], vc, db, 1989; La follia, vn, vc, db, 1992; Da capo, fl, tape, 1994; Kaleyidoskop, 11 insts, 1997; other duos, pf pieces

Principal publishers: Muzika (Sofia)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Manolova: Opus musicum (Brno, 1985)

V. Dicheva: ‘Rumen Balyozov’, Balgarska muzika, xl/8 (1989), 10–13

MAGDALENA MANOLOVA

Balzac, Honoré de

(b Tours, 20 May 1799; d Paris, 21 Aug 1850). French writer. Music is one of the subjects treated in La comédie humaine, especially in Gambara (1837) and Massimilla Doni (1839); but although the names of musicians abound in the novels (among them Cimarosa, Pergolesi, Bellini, Rossini, Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) there are many fewer reflections on music, Balzac having acknowledged his lack of musical competence in the preface to Massimilla Doni. Yet music had for him an importance greater than might be supposed, as is evident from his work and his correspondence: to his beloved étrangère he wrote ‘Beethoven is the only man who has made me feel jealousy. There is in that man a divine power’ (Lettres à l’étrangère, 14 November 1837). Clearly not only music but certain individual composers had for Balzac a sovereign importance. In distinguishing the sphere of creative sensibility (for a long time uncertain in Balzac) from the sphere of intelligence and culture, it may be suggested that he was less a man who chanced to discover music than a writer who gradually discovered his true way through music.

In Balzac’s relationship with music, the period 1833–7 is, after that of his youth, of the greatest importance. It was then that he wrote most about music, in both his correspondence and his musical novels; this was also the period when he acquired, from 1833 onwards through his contact with the ‘monde’, a certain musical culture. There was the ‘loge infernale’ at the Opéra and the concerts at the Austrian Embassy or the Conservatoire; there were the personal contacts with Berlioz, Auber, Jakob Strunz, Liszt and Rossini. For the most part, the effect on him seemed small, the attachment light. Beethoven, whose Fifth Symphony he heard on 27 April 1834, at that stage left him cold. Similarly, the Beethovenism of Berlioz and Liszt seems scarcely to have affected him.

Indeed, in his correspondence between 1833 and 1837, Balzac mentioned only Italians, while in his works music is introduced in the form of memoranda prepared by Strunz for use in Gambara and Massimilla Doni, with the works cited there matching public taste – Mosè, Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Il matrimonio segreto, I puritani, Pergolesi’s Stabat mater. Yet this taste for grand opera, Italian singing and virtuosity was not merely superficial. It is essential to recognize that the feeling for the absolute in Balzac led him to love Italian art in his own way, that Rossini and Mozart were related to a literary project that reached maturity only with his recognition of Beethoven. He took notice of music only to the extent that he found it passionate, what Hegel called the ‘symbol of the inward’. This explains his numerous allusions to Don Giovanni and his love of the passionate effect of ‘Mi manca la voce’ in Mosè. Rossini was for Balzac ‘the composer who has conveyed the greatest human passion in the art of music’: Eugénie Grandet and Raphaël (in La peau de chagrin, 1831) had Mozart for their confidant and pored over ‘les divines pages de Rossini, Cimarosa, Zingarelli’. The missing name is that of Beethoven, whom Balzac saw as his second self, in whom the absolute was wholly accepted and given worthy expression. Around 1834, at the time when Balzac was hesitating between the novel of manners and the philosophical novel, his taste for Rossini and Mozart as ‘passionate’ composers reflected the tendency of Romanticism to retain its connection with the gaudiness of worldly fashion. Yet in the period 1837–42, when his literary plans became fixed on the concept of the spiritual threatened by the material, and of the social explained by the philosophical, Mozart and Rossini were relegated to a purely decorative role or disappeared altogether in favour of Beethoven, the pure artist par excellence.

The concept of the artist plays a key role in his writing. The spirit which possesses the artist is conquered by money: for example, the two musicians Pons and Schmucke are tricked by speculators. These defeats of the spirit, this overthrowing of art by reality, form a kind of obsession with Balzac. His most precise formulation of it is in Gambara and Massimilla Doni, but it is also to be found in La peau de chagrin, Béatrix (1839), Birotteau (1837) and Le cousin Pons (1847), always in some manner connected to music. Balzac’s readings of E.T.A. Hoffmann between 1833 and 1839 persuaded him that music was the supreme region of the absolute; this in turn enabled him to discover in Beethoven, above all in the concept of a struggle waged against fate, an artistic project comparable to his own.

It is evident that although Balzac was friendly with musicians, and acquired a veneer of musical culture, these contacts affected him less than his relationship with music itself. The art was to play a revelatory part in his discovery of his own self; these concepts, German, Romantic and musical, played a crucial part in his thought and helped to shape the ideas which inform the entire Comédie humaine. Liszt told Balzac: ‘I need listeners like you, and in the absence of listeners, in the plural, I need you, in the singular’.

The most important settings of Balzac include five operas: Nouguès, L’auberge rouge (1910); Waltershausen, Oberst Chabert (or Le colonel Chabert) (1912); Levadé, La peau de chagrin (1929); Schoeck, Massimilla Doni (1937); Françaix, Apostrophe (musical comedy, 1940). Shostakovich wrote incidental music to a play based on La comédie humaine (1934), Milhaud to Le faiseur (1935). Rossini promised to set a poem inspired by Mme Hanska, but seems not to have done so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Baldensperger: Orientations étrangères chez Honoré de Balzac (Paris, 1927)

L. Guichard: La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955)

P. Citron: ‘Autour de Gambara’, Année balzacienne (1967), 165

M. Brozska: ‘Mahomet et Robert-le-diable: l'esthétique musicale dans Gambara’, Année balzacienne (1983), 51–78

P. Michot: ‘Le spectacle est dans la salle: Balzac et l'opéra’, Littérature et opéra: Cerisy-la-Salle 1985, 45–54

M. Brozska: ‘Mosè und Massimilla: Rossinis Mosè in Egitto und Balzacs politische Deutung’, Oper als Text: romantische Beiträge zur Libretto-Forschung (Heidelberg, 1986), 125–45

P. Brunel: ‘La tentation hoffmannesque chez Balzac’, E.T.A. Hoffmann et la musique, ed. A. Montandon (Berne, 1987), 315–24

F. Escal: ‘Balzac et Beethoven: le théâtre et la 5e symphonie dans César Birotteau’, Contrepoints (1988), 15–65

J.P. Barricelli: Balzac and Music: its Place and Meaning in his Life and Works (New York, 1990)

FRANCIS CLAUDON

Balzano [Balsano], Giuseppe

(b Valletta, 9 Sept 1616; d Mdina, 23 Feb 1700). Maltese composer. Ordained priest in Catania in 1640, he became maestro di cappella of Mdina Cathedral in 1661. He held the post until his retirement in 1699 except for two interruptions (1665–9 and 1673–4) when he might have travelled to Naples for further musical studies. His Beatus Vir of 1652 is the oldest dated extant composition by a named Maltese composer. He was a prolific composer: an inventory of about 1707 lists 180 sacred vocal compositions, including 18 masses, 64 psalms (some for vespers), 32 hymns, Responsorii dei morti, 2 dialogues and 32 motets. Most have parts for basso continuo, some have added violins, and one, unusually, uses timpani. The few works that survive reveal a high degree of technical competence, both in current practices and in 16th-century polyphony. Illustrative melismatic flourishes obtain strong textual images and the virtuoso exploitation of the solo voice reveals dramatic and enriching textures.

Balzano’s younger brother, Domenico (b Valletta, 24 Sept 1632; d Mdina, 9 Dec 1707), succeeded him at Mdina Cathedral, holding the post until his death.

WORKS

all autograph manuscripts preserved at Mdina Cathedral

Beatus Vir, TTB, bc, 1652

Dormi Dormi, TTB, 1652

Da pacem Domine, 2 SATB, bc

Det Tuba Xaverius a otto voci con sinfonia, 2 SATB, 2 vn, va, bc

Ecce Servus Dei, SSAT, 2 vn, bc

Ego Ille a otto con sinfonie, 2 SATB, 2 vn, bc

Jesu Redemptor Omnium, SATB

Te splendor et virtus, SATB, bc

Quis est hic? Dialogo per la Nativita di S. Giovanni Battista, SST, bc

Salmi a otto voci: Domine ad adjuvandum, Dixit Dominus, Magnificat, only bc extant

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Azzopardi: ‘La cappella musicale della cattedrale di Malta e i suoi rapporti con la Sicilia’, Musica sacra in Sicilia tra rinascimento e barocco, ed. D. Ficola (Palermo, 1988), 47–67

J. Azzopardi: ‘Il-Katidral ta' I-Imdina: Kappella, Mużika u Arkivju Mużikali’ [The Mdina Cathedral: chapel, music and music archives], Oqsma tal-Kultura Maltija, ed. T. Cortis (Malta, 1991), 101–19

N. Chircop: Scores Attributable to Giuseppe Balzano: a Critical Analysis (diss., U. of Malta, 1991)

JOSEPH VELLA BONDIN

Bambaataa, Afrika.

See Afrika Bambaataa.

Bamberg.

Town in Bavaria, Germany. From the early 11th century to the early 19th the bishop of Bamberg was entitled to the rank of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Although vocal music was mentioned in the earliest accounts of the cathedral (founded in 1012), the institution of a song school in 1192 by Bishop Otto II was the beginning of the town's musical significance, as indicated by the extant Bamberg Manuscript, which contains about 100 13th-century motets. A succession of Kantors – the best known being Leopold von Schweinschaupten (d 1357) – and chaplains superintended the musical life of the town and surrounding area. The 15th-century composers Heinrich Finck and Johannes Frosch were natives of Bamberg. The music theorist Ulrich Burchard, author of Hortulus musices (1514), was a court chaplain there. Conservative principles in church music were maintained during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation through such works as the Kurtzer Ausszug der Christlichen und Catholischen Geseng (1575) and the Catholische Gesangbuch (1628), and through the teaching in the seminary for priests (founded 1586) and the Jesuit Gymnasium (1613). The most influential musicians in Bamberg during the 17th century (during which the Stadtpfeiferei achieved greater recognition) were Johann Degen, court chaplain, and George Arnold, court organist.

In the 18th century a process of secularization began, encouraged by Prince-Bishop Adam Friedrich von Seinsheim, who ruled Bamberg from 1757 to 1779. He employed as music director Tartini's pupil Fracassini, who reinvigorated the court orchestra, produced operas at the Seehof palace and introduced symphony concerts. Operas and concerts took place from 1788 in the ‘Zum schwarzen Adler’, where Andreas Bäuml, successor to Fracassini, introduced the public and the court to the operas of Grétry, Paisiello and Mozart, as well as to popular Singspiele. In 1781 the court orchestra comprised 16 strings, two oboes, a bassoon and two horns; it was enlarged to symphonic proportions in 1796. Meanwhile church music had reached a low ebb and worshippers in the cathedral were regaled with symphonies, bravura operatic arias and the occasional Tusch (a Bamberg speciality – cheerful music for wind instruments). The subsequent restoration of standards in Catholic church music owed much to the Cecilian movement and the establishment in Bamberg in 1868 of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Cäcilienverein.

Between 1808 and 1813 E.T.A. Hoffmann was active at the theatre (built 1802) in various capacities: as composer of the melodrama Dirna, the opera Der Trunk der Unsterblichkeit (to a libretto by Count Julius von Soden, director of the theatre) and other works, as music director, and as scenery artist. One of his colleagues was Weber's stepbrother Edmund. Hoffmann's Aurora, although composed for Bamberg in 1811, had its first performance there only in 1933. His attempts to control the orchestra were rarely successful, and he made uncomplimentary references to Bamberg in his diaries and in Kreisleriana, saying that the time he spent there was ‘the worst of all bad times’. He was, nonetheless, commemorated by a statue and his house was preserved.

In 1820 the Bamberger Musikverein was founded, resulting in increased music-making; it was reconstituted in 1872 and still gives chamber music concerts. A number of other societies subsequently grew up including the Oratorienchor (founded 1835), also still active, and a town music school was established. At the end of the 19th century cathedral music was reorganized by Karl Cohen. After World War II the town's reputation was spread by the Bamberg SO, formed in 1946 from the Prague Deutsche Philharmonie, which had been founded in Prague in 1939 and left there in 1945. The orchestra's permanent conductors have been Keilberth (1940–45, 1949–68), Herbert Albert (1947–8) and G.L. Jochum (1948–9), Eugen Jochum (1968–73), James Loughrun (1978–83), Witold Rowicki (1983–5) and Horst Stein (from 1985). Concerts are frequently given in the cathedral and the Lutheran church of St Stephan. Musica Cantorey Bamberg, founded in 1969 and directed by Gerhard Weinzierl, cultivates the works of Bamberg composers including Georg Arnold (1621–76), Georg Mengel (c1600–67) and Johann Bach (1657–1701).

Among important organ builders in Bamberg were, in the 17th century, Johann Laubinger, in the 18th Johann Wilhelm Hoffmann and in the 19th Justus Karl Hansen, who were all responsible for alterations to the cathedral organ. The Neupert family were active piano and harpsichord makers in Bamberg from 1928.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. von Marschalk: Die Bamberger Hofmusik unter den drei letzten Fürstbischöfen (Bamberg, 1885)

E.T.A. Hoffmann: Musikalische Novellen und Aufsätze, ed. E. Istel (Stuttgart, 1907/R)

T. Leist: Geschichte des Theaters in Bamberg (Bamberg, 1908)

E.H. Farrenkopf: Breviarium Eberhardi cantoris: die mittelalterliche Gottesdienstordnung des Domes zu Bamberg mit einer historischen Einleitung (Würzburg, 1969)

PERCY M. YOUNG

Bambini, Felice

(b Bologna, c1743; d ?after 1787). French composer and harpsichordist of Italian origin. He was the son of the impressario Eustachio Bambini (b Pesaro, 1697; d Pesaro, 1770). He went to Paris in July 1752 at the same time as the company of Bouffons directed by his father. Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentioned him in the Lettre sur la musique française, drawing a favourable comparison between his light manner of playing the continuo (usually in two parts) and the stiff style of the Opéra’s harpsichordist. La Borde added that Bambini composed ‘several ariettes for addition to the intermèdes performed at the time’. He stayed in Paris after the departure of the Italian company and studied with André-Jean Rigade. The music of his principal opera, Nicaise, is relatively rudimentary and more reminiscent of the Italian intermezzos of the 1740s and 50s than the more elaborate opéras comiques of Duni, Monsigny and Philidor. After the failure of Nicaise no more of Bambini’s works were performed at the Comédie-ltalienne, and during the 1780s he had to be content with the modest Théâtre des Beaujolais.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

all first performed in Paris

Les amans de village (comédie mêlée de musique, 2, A.F. Riccoboni), Comédie-ltalienne (Bourgogne), 26 July 1764, 2 airs (1771)

Nicaise (oc, 1, J.-J. Vadé, rev. N.E. Framery, after La Fontaine), Comédie-ltalienne (Bourgogne), 15 July 1767, collab. Fridzeri (1767)

Les fourberies de Mathurin (opéra bouffon, l, Davesne), Beaujolais, 5 Aug 1786

L’amour l’emporte (opéra bouffon, 1, Mayeur de Saint-Paul), Beaujolais, 20 Oct 1787

other works

Suzanne (orat)

Symphonie périodique (1764); 6 sinfonie quattro, op.1 (1767); Trii, vn, va, b; 3 bks of sonatas, hpd/pf, vn (1771, 1777, 1788); 6 sonate, hpd, vn obbl, op.4 (c1775); 6 sonates, hpd, vn, op.5 (n.d.); 6 sonates, hpd (n.d.); 3 sonates, pf, vn (n.d.); 3 sonatas, hpd, D-Bsb; 12 petits airs, hpd/pf, vn (n.d.)

Didactic: Nouvelle méthode pour pianoforte suivie de doigtés, collab. V. Nicolai

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (‘Bambini, Eustachio’, E. Cook); La BordeE

M. Tourneux, ed.: Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. (Paris, 1877–82), vii, 372

C.D. Brewer: A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language, 1700–1789 (Ann Arbor, 1947)

MICHEL NOIRAY

Bambuco.

The national dance of Colombia. It is said to have been the favourite of Símon Bolívar, Colombia's independence leader (1824). Early references identify it with the Bunde, a dance of African origin. In the 19th century Colombian national composers wrote bambucos and pasillos, leading popular music into a ‘golden age’. Originally a serenading song for the solo voice, the modern bambuco is most often sung in duet or parallel 3rds, with strummed accompaniment on tiple (small 12-string guitar), guitar and bandola (flat-backed lute). A courting or pursuit dance, characterized by delicate toe-dancing by both male and female, it has a specific choreography with variations, involving eight possible basic steps: (i) invitación: invitation to the dance; (ii) ochos: dancing in a figure-of-eight pattern; (iii) codos: dancing with elbows touching; (iv) coquetos: ‘flirtatious’ steps when the man attempts to steal a kiss from the woman; (v) perseguida: dancing in a circle, the man pursues the woman; (vi) pañuelo: handkerchief waving while dancing; (vii) arrodillada: the woman dances in a circle around the kneeling man; (viii) abrazo: the man places his right hand on the woman's waist, dances her back to her original starting position. The song texts, often regarded as melancholy, use an octosyllabic décima verse or other poetic form, frequently with descending melodies and dramatic modulations through predominantly minor keys, oscillating hemiola rhythms 3/4, 6/8. Texts typically revolve around archetypal subjects often with a gendered chauvinistic viewpoint, including the extolling of a woman's beauty, her desirability, idyllic love, the pain of thwarted love, pride in being Colombian or coming from a particular region. Other texts comment on current events, make philosophical statements about everyday life and the struggles of the peasantry and people. Social change since the late 1940s has inspired certain bambucos de protesta. Examination of choreography, song texts, vocal styles, instrumentation and musical function shows a degree of inherent Hispanic influence. The urban bambuco has rural counterparts called the sanjuanero and the rajaleña which exhibit more pronounced African traits. It shares many features with the Chilean cueca and the Peruvian marinera.

WILLIAM GRADANTE/R

Bamert, Matthias

(b Ersigen, 5 July 1942). Swiss conductor and composer. He studied the oboe, chamber music and composition at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure in Paris, and attended masterclasses by Boulez and Maderna at the Darmstadt summer course in 1965. He was principal oboe in the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra (1965–9), and worked as assistant to Szell in Cleveland (1969–70) and Stokowski at the American SO (1970–71) before spending seven years as resident conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He was principal conductor of the Basle RSO (1977–83), principal guest conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra (1985–90) and artistic director of the London Mozart Players (1993–2000). Renowned for his wide repertory and command of contemporary scores, Bamert has conducted world premières of works by Takemitsu, Denisov, Erb, Casken, Rihm, Turnage and others. He has also done much to popularize music by Frank Martin, Parry, Korngold and Gerhard, both in concert and on disc, and with the London Mozart Players has recorded an enterprising series of little-known symphonies by contemporaries of Mozart. As artistic diretor of the Lucerne Festival (1992–8), he strengthened its thematic content while widening its appeal. His compositions, predominantly for orchestra, include a Concertino for english horn, string orchestra and piano (1966), Septuria Lunaris (1970), Rheology (1970), Mantrajana (1971), Once upon an Orchestra for narrator, 12 dancers and orchestra (1975), Ol-Okun (1976), Keepsake (1979) and Circus Parade for narrator and orchestra (1979).

ANDREW CLARK

Bamfi [Banfi, Banfo], Alfonso

(b ?Milan; fl 1641–55). Italian composer and organist. He may have come from a Milanese family whose members included a lutenist, Giulio Banfi. In 1641 he succeeded G.B. Cima as maestro di cappella of Como Cathedral, but he had to leave in 1643, when the cathedral ran into economic difficulties. Later he was maestro di cappella and organist of the collegiate church at Domodossola (not at Reggio nell'Emilia as stated by Fétis). He was there when he published his only known music, Selva de sacri, et ariosi concerti a 1–4 voci con una messa brevissima, Magnificat, Salve regina e Lettanie della BVM con il basso continuo (Milan, 1655). The concerti are concertato motets and are in fact called motets in a note at the end of the volume. They are well-wrought pieces, elaborately ornamented and with numerous time changes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GaspariC, ii

Libro mastro (MS, I-COd), ff.151ff

F. Picinelli: Ateneo de i letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670), 354

M. Longatti: ‘La cappella del duomo di Como nella prima metà del Seicento’, Quadrivium, xxiii (1982), 41–68

GIUSEPPE VECCHI

Bampton, Rose (Elizabeth)

(b Lakewood, nr Cleveland, OH, 28 Nov 1908). American mezzo-soprano, later soprano. She studied at the Curtis Institute, made her début in 1929 at Chatauqua as Siébel (Faust), and then sang secondary roles with the Philadelphia Grand Opera. She made her Metropolitan début in 1932 as Laura (La Gioconda), and sang as a mezzo until 1937, when she made her soprano début as Leonora (Il trovatore); other roles included Aida and Amneris (in the same season), Donna Anna, Alcestis, Elisabeth, Elsa, Sieglinde and Kundry. She appeared at Covent Garden (1937) as Amneris; in Chicago (1937–46), where her roles included Maddalena de Coigny; at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires (1942–8), where she sang the Marschallin, and Daphne in the South American première of Strauss’s opera; and in San Francisco (1949). Bampton had a strong, though not particularly individual, voice, and her sovereign musicianship was admired by Toscanini, for whom she recorded Leonore in Fidelio. Many of her Metropolitan broadcasts are preserved on disc, notably an exciting Donna Anna under Walter in 1942 (see P. Jackson: Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, New York, 1992), as is a performance of Gurrelieder with Stokowski.

MAX DE SCHAUENSEE/ALAN BLYTH

Ban, Joan Albert [Bannius, Joannes Albertus]

(b Haarlem, 1597 or 1598; d Haarlem, 27 July 1644). Dutch theorist and composer. He came from a patrician family, entered the priesthood in Haarlem and became a canon in 1628. As a musician he was entirely self-educated. He studied theoretical works from Pythagoras to Zarlino and, dissatisfied, turned to his prominent contemporaries – among them Constantijn Huygens, Mersenne, G.B. Doni and Descartes – for assistance. Although much is made of a song-writing competition between Ban and Antoine Boësset staged by Mersenne in 1640, in which it was a foregone conclusion that Boësset should win, Ban was unaffected by his loss (see Walker). In many of his letters he declared that music must be practised under strict and demonstrable rules and not left to individual arbitrary taste: it must not mask the natural delivery of a text but rather reinforce it. In this light his praise of, and familiarity with, contemporary Italian music is not remarkable; but it is typical of his ‘monodic approach’ that, although aware of the usefulness of modulation, he recognized neither the musical value nor the expressive power of dissonance.

Ban spent 20 years developing his system of musica flexanima (‘zielroerende zang’: ‘soul-moving singing’), wherein the text was expressed musically by means of specific intervals, harmonics and rhythms. The practical application of these theories is found in the ten three-part songs of his Zangh-bloemzel (Amsterdam, 1642). He did not complete his theoretical treatise Zangh-bericht, though he appended a short summary of it to the Zangh-bloemzel and issued a more developed version (Kort sangh-bericht) a year later. Ban was also interested in the problem of tuning: he even went so far as to publish a diagram of Mersenne’s 18-note clavier, calling it his ‘perfect clavier’ (‘volmaekte klaeuwier’; see illustration). However, neither this keyboard, with its adaption of Mersenne’s symbols for the various extra sharps and flats, nor his attempt at a wholly Dutch musical terminology, was accepted by his contemporaries.

THEORETICAL WORKS

Joannis Alberti Banni dissertatio epistolica de musicae natura, origine, progressu (Leiden, 1637)

Cort beduydsel vant zingen (MS, 1642, NL-Lu); ed. in Land

Kort sangh-bericht van Ioan Albert Ban … op zyne ziel-roerende zangen (Amsterdam, 1643); ed. F. Noske (Amsterdam, 1969)

Zangh-bericht, unfinished, lost

Letters and theoretical fragments, F-Pn, NL-Lu, many ed. within the correspondences of G.B. Doni, P.C. Hooft, Huygens and Mersenne

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MersenneHU

J.P.N. Land: ‘Joan Albert Ban en de theorie der toonkunst’, TVNM, i/2 (1883), 95–111; iii/4 (1891), 204–10

D.P. Walker: ‘Joan Albert Ban and Mersenne's Musical Competition of 1640’, ML, lvii (1976), 233–55; repr. in Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978), 81–110

R.A. Rasch: ‘Ban's Intonation’, TVNM, xxxiii (1983), 75–99

J.W.N. Valkestijn: ‘Een onbekend handschrift van Joan Albert Ban’, Liber amicorum Chris Maas, ed. R. Wegman and E. Vetter (Amsterdam, 1987), 131–54

RANDALL H. TOLLEFSEN

Banān, Qolāmhoseyn

(b Tehran, 1911; d Tehran, 1986). Persian singer. He came from an aristocratic background and was raised in a family circle frequented by literati and musicians. His father played the tār and his mother the piano; Banān learnt the rudiments of both instruments in childhood. He had voice lessons from his early teen years and by his mid-20s he had established a high reputation as a singer with a marked command of the radif and a sound knowledge of the Persian classical poetry on which Persian vocal music heavily relies.

In the 1930s Banān was drawn into the circle of progressive musicians led by Ali Naqi Vaziri, becoming closely associated with two of Vaziri’s leading disciples, Ruhollāh Khāleqi and Abolhasan Sabā. He participated in concerts organized by the Vaziri group as the lead singer, specializing in performances of new tasnif compositions. His fame spread after his radio engagements began in 1942.

By the 1950s Banān was the most highly regarded male singer in Persia. Recordings of his radio broadcasts and his published disc recordings are models of refinement in singing. His versatility in vocal renditions of the classical repertory of dastgāhs and particularly his tasteful presentation of modern compositions in Persian modes have been admired by connoisseurs and the general public alike. Contrary to the high vocal register cultivated by most male singers, Banān had a relatively low-pitched voice with a graceful, mellow and relaxed tone. He was also active as a voice teacher at the Conservatory of National Music in Tehran.

HORMOZ FARHAT

Banaster [Banastir, Banastre], Gilbert

(b ?London, c1430; d London, between 19 Aug and 10 Sept 1487). English composer. He may have been a choirboy with the Chapel Royal: his father Henry Banaster, who died in 1456, was a Yeoman of the Royal Household. He became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1468 and Master of the Choristers in 1478. His will dated 19 August 1487 shows evidence of substantial investment in land and property. His corrodies were distributed among the members of the Royal Household on 10 September in that year. Apart from his musical compositions a poem, The Miracles of St Thomas, has survived.

Banaster’s compositions consist of a setting of the hymn Exsultet caelum laudibus and a two-voice Mass respond, Alleluia: Laudate pueri (both in GB-Cmc Pepys 1236); a three-voice carol, My feerfull dreme in the Fayrfax manuscript (Lbl Add.5465); and the five-voice antiphon O Maria et Elizabeth in the Eton Choirbook. The carol is perhaps the most interesting piece because it displays a more modern syllabic style with much use of imitation (its refrain is in NOHM, iii, p.346). The syllabic element is also notable in O Maria et Elizabeth (MB, xi, no.28) and was probably used because the text is rather long and unfamiliar. The antiphon may have been composed to commemorate the pregnancy of Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII, who gave birth to Prince Arthur on 10 September 1486.

JOHN CALDWELL/JONATHAN HALL

Banchieri, Adriano [Tomaso]

(b Bologna, 3 Sept 1568; d Bologna, 1634). Italian composer, organist, theorist and writer. He was one of the most versatile figures in the Italian music of his day and is of particular interest as a theorist.

1. Life.

Banchieri entered the Olivetan order of Benedictine monks in 1587, officially becoming a novice and receiving the name Adriano in 1589; he completed his solemn vows in 1590. He was a pupil of Gioseffo Guami, under whom he certainly developed much of his skill as an organist and composer. During his first years as a monk he worked at various houses of his order: in 1592 he was at the monastery of SS Bartolomeo e Ponziano, Lucca, in 1593 at S Benedetto, Siena; in 1594 he returned to the vicinity of Bologna to the monastery of S Michele in Bosco, where in 1596 he assumed the duties of organist. From 1600 to 1604 he was organist of S Maria in Regola at Imola. In 1604 he was sent to the monastery of S Pietro at Gubbio, where he met Girolamo Diruta and heard one of the great organs of Italy (built by Quemar Vincenzo), which he described in his Conclusioni nel suono dell’organo (1609). In 1605 he was at S Elena, Venice, and in 1606 at S Maria in Organo, Verona. He dedicated a new organ at Monte Oliveto Maggiore Abbey, the mother house of the Olivetan order, in 1607. He was in Milan at the monastery of S Vittore in 1610 during the celebration of the canonization of S Carlo Borromeo. In 1609 he returned to S Michele in Bosco, where he remained until just before his death.

In 1615 he helped to found the Accademia dei Floridi, the first such society in Bologna; his name in it was ‘Il Dissonante’. The academy, which Monteverdi visited in 1620, met at S Michele in Bosco and was the immediate forerunner of the Accademia dei Filomusi. Banchieri received the honorary title of Abate Benemerito in 1618. Because of ill-health he moved to the monastery of S Bernardo, Bologna, in 1634 and in the same year he died there of apoplexy.

2. Works.

Banchieri’s sacred music includes psalms for the Offices (especially Vespers), masses and motets. The psalms are variously in relatively traditional polyphonic styles and in the more up-to-date concertato manner. His 12 extant masses all reveal an adherence to the principles of the Council of Trent. The texts are clearly presented with rather simple counterpoint and a great deal of chordal setting. Musically they demonstrate nearly all the styles of composition used in the early 17th century. There is some variation among the masses in the formal divisions of the Ordinary text, with most variety appearing in the Credo; all but three of the masses substitute a motet for the Benedictus. Banchieri’s other published motets appear not only under that designation but on the title-pages of later volumes in particular as ‘concerti’, ‘pensieri’ and ‘dialoghi’. They include polyphonic pieces for two four-part choirs (Concerti ecclesiastici, 1595, including one of the earliest appearances of a separate instrumental bass part), duets with continuo (Dialoghi, concerti, sinfonie, e canzoni) and monodic pieces (Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici, 1613). Organ masses and other liturgical and non-liturgical works for organ are found in various editions of L’organo suonarino (1605).

Although there is evidence that some early pieces are lost, Banchieri acknowledged in his own numbering of his works only the 12 secular volumes that survive. He seems to have written most of the texts himself and made some use of dialect in them. These volumes include six books of canzonettas for three voices, each containing some 20 textually related pieces which often employ the plots of the commedia dell’arte. Among these is his most famous, widely performed and frequently published work, La pazzia senile (1598), based on the amorous adventures of the commedia dell’arte character Pantaloon. This is a madrigal comedy in the Vecchi tradition, and two of the other three-voice books belong to this genre, Il metamorfosi musicale (1601) and Prudenza giovenile (1607) (called Saviezza giovenile in its second edition): see also Madrigal comedy. The other six books, which include comparable entertainment works, are basically for five voices (though they contain a few for smaller forces); the individual pieces in the earlier collections are called madrigals. The last three books include a continuo: the music becomes less polyphonic as groups of fewer than five voices are employed in conjunction with the bass, which takes on an individual role and displays melodic characteristics of its own. The subtitles of these last three books offer some clue to the changing character of the music; as well as vocal pieces Il virtuoso ritrovo academico (1626) contains canzonas specifically for violins. The subject matter of these 12 collections, especially those for five voices, also includes the pastoral stories of Greek mythology (Il zabaione musicale, 1604) and the presentation of a single idea (in Vivezze di flora e primavera, 1622, each madrigal adds to the general idea of nature reawakening in spring). Banchieri was also a pioneer in writing canzonas and fantasias for instrumental ensemble, which are evidently original works for the medium and not arrangements of vocal pieces.

Banchieri's writings about music deal almost exclusively with compositional and performing practice; the Conclusioni is exceptional in that it contains extended passages of theoretical speculation. It is also the only text which wholeheartedly embraces the 12- or even 14-mode systems of Glarean and Zarlino; his other writings, notably L'organo suonarino, discuss the traditional and more practical 8-mode system. In Cartella musicale (1614) Banchieri merged the 8 psalm tones and the 12 modes into a system of 8 ‘psalm tone keys’ that was widely adopted in 17th-century theory and compositions (see Mode, §III, 5 (ii)). In L'organo suonarino he described the realization of bass figures, gave instruction for accompanying liturgical chant and provided bass parts for many chants: in the second edition he gave specific organ registrations. He was one of the first to expand the solmization system from a hexachord by adding the variable seventh step ba (B) and bi (B). This process is outlined in Cartella musicale, a large and interesting work in several parts, each of which was evidently published separately, with separate title-pages. The work also includes descriptions of the metrical beat as implied by a bar-line, and of the modern tie (legatura moderna): examples of ties are found in the Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici. A short table of vocal ornaments is also given in Cartella musicale. Banchieri was one of the first composers to use dynamic marks; an example is found in the concerto Ego dormio in the Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici.

Banchieri also wrote extensively outside music, including several popular works that were often reprinted and translated. His earliest such work, La nobilità dell’asino, written under the pseudonym Attabalippa dal Peru, appeared in English as The Nobility of the Ass (London, 1595) three years after it first appeared in Italy. His usual pseudonym was Camillo Scaliggeri dalla Fratta, under which all his other literary works not identified by his own name appeared. He wrote several books on the dialects found in the vicinity of Bologna and edited and reprinted a book by Giovanni Zanti on the architecture of Bologna.

WORKS

Edition: A. Banchieri: Opera omnia, ed. I. Vecchi, AntMI, Monumenta bononiensa, xii (1963–) [V]

sacred

published in Venice unless otherwise stated

Concerti ecclesiastici, 8vv, bc (org) (1595); 2 in V

Salmi … i Vespri di tutte le feste, e solennità dell’anno, e nel fine 2 cantici della BVM, 5vv (1598)

Messa solenne, dentrovi variati concerti all’introito, graduale, offertorio, levatione e comunione, et nel fine l’hinno degli gloriosissimi SS Ambrogio et Agostino … libro III, 8vv (1599); 2 ed. in Wernli

Eclesiastiche sinfonie, dette canzoni in aria francese, per sonare, et cantare, 4vv, bc (org), op.16 (1607); ed. in Bowman

Gemelli armonici … parto 21, 2vv, bc (org) (1609, enlarged, rev. 2/1622)

Vezzo di perle musicali modernamente conteste alla regia sposa effigiata nella sacra cantica, 1–2vv/insts, bc (org), op.23 (1610); ed. M.G. Genesi (Piacenza, 1992)

Secondo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici, 2vv/insts (Milan, 1611), lost

Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici, 1–2vv, bc (hpd/theorbo/ arpichittarone/org), op.35 (Bologna, 1613⁵/R1969 in BMB, xl); 1 ed. in Kirkendale

Salmi da recitarsi à battuta larga, et nel fine 3 variate armonie sopra il Magnificat, 4vv, bc (org), op.33 (1613)

Due ripieni in applauso musicale, 8vv/insts, bc (org) (Bologna, 1614)

Sacra armonia, 4vv, bc (org), op.41 (1619)

Primo libro delle messe e motetti, 3vv, bc (org) (1620) [incl. inst pieces]; 1 mass and 1 sonata ed. in Kirkendale

Dialoghi, concerti, sinfonie, e canzoni, 2vv, bc (org), op.48 (1625, enlarged 2/1629); see Mischiati, 152

Other sacred works, 1616², 1617²⁴, 1620², 1622², 1623², 1624², 1626², 1626³, 1626⁴, 1627¹, 1627², 1628², 1628³ (according to Mischiati)

secular

Canzonette, novamente, sotto diversi capricci, composte … Hora prima di recreatione, 3vv (Venice, 1597); 2 ed. in Wernli

La pazzia senile: ragionamenti vaghi, et dilettevoli … libro II, 3vv (Venice, 1598, rev. 2/1599); ed. in AMI, iv (n.d.) and in Capolavori polifonici del secolo XVI, vi (Rome, 1955); 2 intermedii in V

Il studio dilettevole … con vaghi argomenti e spassevoli intermedii fioriti dal Amfiparnasso … del Horatio Vechi, 3vv (Milan, 1600) [title taken from 2/1603]

Il metamorfosi musicale: 4° libro delle canzonette … con spassevoli trattenimenti, diviso in epilogati, e vaghi discorsi, 3vv (Venice, 1601, rev. 2/1606); V

Il zabaione musicale: inventione boscareccia, et 1° libro di madrigali, 5vv (Milan, 1604); ed. P. Mecarelli (Florence, 1987)

Barca di Venetia per Padova … libro II de madrigali, 5vv, op.12 (Venice, 1605, rev. 2/1623 with bc (spinet/chit) ad lib); ed. in Capolavori polifonici del secolo XVI, ix (Rome, 1969)

Virtuoso ridotto tra signori, e dame … una nuova comedia detta Prudenza giovenile, 5° libro degli terzetti, op.15 (Milan, 1607, rev. 2/1628 as Saviezza giovenile, 3vv, bc (spinet), op.1); 2/1628 ed. R. Allorto (Milan, 1956)

Festino nella sera del giovedi grasso avanti cena, genio al 3° libro madrigalesco, 5vv, op.18 (Venice, 1608); ed. E. Enrico (Norman, OK, 1981)

Tirsi, Fili e Clori … il 6°, et ultimo libro delle canzonette, 3vv (Venice, 1614)

Vivezze di flora e primavera, 5vv, bc (spinet/chit), op.44 (Venice, 1622); ed. in Capolavori polifonici del secolo XVI, xii (Rome, 1971)

Il virtuoso ritrovo academico … 1–5vv/insts, bc, op.49 (Venice, 1626) [incl. canzonas, 2 vn]; see Mischiati, 152; 1 ed. in Kirkendale; 2 ed. in Wernli

Trattenimenti da villa … up to 5vv, bc (chit) (Venice, 1630); 1 ed. in Kirkendale

Works in 1607²⁰, 1609³³, 1615³; 3 works, 4vv, in A. Banchieri: La nobilissima anzi asinissima compagnia (Vicenza, 1597), ed. in Wernli; 4 works, 4vv, in A. Banchieri: Il donativo di 4 asinissimi personaggi, et insieme 6 servitori d’essi (Milan, 1598); 1 work, 6vv, in A. Banchieri: La nobiltà dell'asino (Venice, 3/1599), ed. in Wernli

instrumental

Canzoni alla francese, a 4 … in fine una battaglia, 8[vv] e 2 concerti fatti sopra Lieto godea … libro II (Venice, 1596); V

[21] Fantasie, overo Canzoni alla francese, a 4, bc (org, other insts) (Venice, 1603); incl. some works from Canzoni (1596); ed. in IIM, xviii (1995)

Moderna armonia di canzoni alla francese, a 1–2, bc (org/hpd), con l’aggiunta in fine di 2 fantasie, a 4, et uno Magnificat, 4vv, op.26 (Venice, 1612); 1 ed. in Venetian Instrumental Music c. 1600, xv (London, 1977)

Other vocal and inst works in A-Wm, B-Br, D-Bsb, Mbs, GB-Lbl, I-CARcc, PL-GD, WRu (all according to Mischiati)

theoretical works

only those on music

Cartella, overo Regole utilissime à quelli che desiderano imparare il canto figurato … divise in 2 parti (Venice, 1601; rev. 2/1610; rev. 3/1614 as Cartella musicale, Eng. trans., 1981; rev. 4/1615 as La cartellina musicale, op.35; rev. 5/1623 as La banchierina, overo Cartella picciola del canto figurato) [various subdivisions of 1 or more of the edns are: Brevi documenti musicali; Brevi et primi documenti musicali; Duo in contrapunto sopra ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la; Altri documenti musicali nel canto fermo; Duo spartiti al contrapunto; Canoni musicali, 4vv; Moderna practica musicale, op.37; Cartelle semplici; Indice delle opere musicali date in luce]; vocal ornaments repr. in Musica practica, sive Instructio pro Symphoniacis (Nuremberg, 1642); 1 work from rev. 5/1623 repr. in Synopsis musica, ed. E. Gruber (Regensburg, 1673); 1 work ed. in Wernli

L’organo suonarino, op.13 (Venice, 1605, Eng. trans., 1970; rev. 2/1611 as op.25; rev. 3/1622 as op.43) [contains music exx.; 9 ed. in AMI, iii (n.d.); 3 ed. in Venetian Instrumental Music c. 1600, xv (London, 1977); 1 ed. in Wernli]

Conclusioni nel suono dell’organo, op.20 (Bologna, 1609/R, 2/1626 as Armoniche conclusioni nel suono dell'organo; Eng. trans., 1982)

La mano, et documenti sicuri prodotti d’autori gravi, et cantici ecclesiastici, op.25 (Milan, 1611)

Cartellina del canto fermo gregoriano (Bologna, 1614)

Frutto salutifero alli … sacerdoti per prepararsi alla celebratione della SS messa privata e cantata (Bologna, 1614)

Prima parte del primo libro al direttorio monastico di canto fermo per uso particolare della congregatione olivetana (Bologna, 1615, partial repr. 1616 as Progressi, politici, e christiani)

Cantorino utile a novizzi, e cherici secolari, e regolari, principianti del canto fermo (Bologna, 1622)

Il principiante fanciullo, che … impara solfizare note e mutationi, e parole solo, 2vv, op.46 (Venice, 1625) [incl. music exx.]

La sampogna musicale … rappresentata sotto il di 14 novembre 1625 nel virtuoso ridotto (Venice, 1625) [incl. music exx.]

Conclusiones de musica in organo modulanda (Bologna, 1627)

Lettere armoniche (Bologna, 1628, 2/1630 as Lettere scrite a diversi patroni ed amici)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Scarpini: I monaci benedettini di Monte Oliveo, San Salvatore Monferrato (Ferrara, 1952), 238ff

H.-J. Wilbert: Die Messen des Adriano Banchieri (diss., Mainz U., 1969)

C.B. Bowman: The Ecclesiastiche sinfonie (opus 16) of Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634) (diss., New York U., 1971)

H.-J. Wilbert: ‘La messe polifoniche di Adriano Banchieri’, Annuario 1965–1970 del Conservatorio di Musica ‘G.B. Martini’ di Bologna (Bologna, 1971), 223–7

O. Mischiati: ‘Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634): profilo biografico e bibliografia dell'opere’, Annuario 1965–1970 del Conservatorio di Musica ‘G.B. Martini’ di Bologna (1971), 38–201

W. Kirkendale: L’Aria di Fiorenza, id est Il ballo di Gran Duca (Florence, 1972)

W.S. May: Adriano Banchieri: Late Sacred Motets: the ‘Seconda Prattica’ in Sacred Music (diss., Tulane U., 1975)

A. Wernli: Studien zum literarischen und musikalischen Werk Adriano Banchieris (1568–1634) (Berne and Stuttgart, 1981) [incl. list of Banchieri's lost and non-musical works]

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Adriano Banchieri und die kirchliche Orgelmusik’, Orgel, Orgelmusik und Orgelspiel: Festschrift Michael Schneider zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Christoph Wolff (Kassel, 1985), 87–96

R. Groth: ‘Italienische Musiktheorie im 17. Jahrhundert’, Italienische Musiktheorie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: Antikenrezeption und Satzlehre, ed. F. Zaminer (Darmstadt, 1989), 307–79

M. Farahat: Adriano Banchieri and the Madrigal Comedy (diss., U. of Chicago, 1991)

WILLIAM S. MAY (with FRANS WIERING)

Banci, Giovanni

(fl 1619). Italian composer. The only information about him – that he came from Argenta and worked in Bologna – appears on the title-page of his one extant publication: Il primo libro de sacri concerti … et … le litanie della BVM (Venice, 1619). He was typical of many modest church composers in northern Italy in the early 17th century who wrote competently in the new concertato style for smaller church choirs, using both up-to-date duet and trio textures and also more conventional four- and five-part ones. (J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi, Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE

Bancquart, Alain

(b Dieppe, 20 June 1934). French composer and viola player. He studied the viola, chamber music and composition (with Milhaud) at the Paris Conservatoire (1952–9). He became principal viola in the Orchestre National de France (1962–73), where he was later artistic director (1975–6). He was made principal music inspector at the Ministry of Culture and Communication (1977) and became responsible for producing the programmes Perspectives du XXème siècle on Radio France (1977–84). He was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1984. In 1986 he received the Grand Prix National de la Musique and the following year the Grand Prix de la Musique Symphonique awarded by SACEM.

From the start he adopted a rigorously serial, atonal language, later (from 1968) making systematic use of quarter tones, defective modes and non-octaves. His lyrical temperament expresses itself above all in chamber and orchestral forms, in concert works and in five symphonies of great breadth. His inspiration frequently comes from poetry, as in Les cinq dits de Jean-Claude Renard (1987), and a mystical impression is evident in his work, particularly his vast fifth symphony Partage de Midi (1992), after Paul Claudel’s play.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sève, 1961; Sym. in 3 movts, 1965; Va Conc., 1965; Passages, 1967; Jeux pour lumière, str trio, orch, 1969; Palimpsestes, 1969; Simple, 1973; Sym. no.1, 1981; Sym. no.2, 1981; Sym. no.3 ‘Fragments d’Apocalypse’, T, 2B, orch, 1983; Sym. no.4, 1987; Ma manière d’arbre 1: De l’étrange circulation de la sève, gui, 24 fl, 1990; Sym. no.5 ‘Partage du midi’ (P. Claudel), Bar, orch, 1992

Chbr: Explosante fixe, hp, str qnt, 1972; Rosace, str qt, 1973; Ma manière d’oiseau, fl, 9 insts, 1978; Chbr Sym., fl, vc, ens, 1980; Sonata, 2 pf, 1985; Nocturne, str trio, 16 wind insts, 1987; Diurne, fl, 11 str, version for fl, str qt, 1988; Ma manière d’arbre 2: Du lent sommeil des feuilles, va, 12 wind insts, 1992; Ricercare 1, str qt, 1992; Livre pour 2 orgues ‘Hommage à Olivier Messiaen’, 2 org, 1993; Ma manière d’arbre 3: Le grand calcul des arbres, vn, 15 insts, 1993; Ma manière de nuages, wind qnt, 1993

Principal publishers: Jobert, Ricordi

MICHEL RIGONI

Baniera, Antonio.

See Bagniera, Antonio.

Band (i)

(Fr. bande; Ger. Kapelle; It., Sp. banda).

An instrumental ensemble. This article deals exclusively with Western uses of the term ‘band’.

I. Introduction

II. History to 1800

III. Mixed wind bands

KEITH POLK (II, 1), JANET K. PAGE (II, 2(i–ii)), JANET K. PAGE, STEPHEN J. WESTON (II, 2(iii)), ARMIN SUPPAN, WOLFGANG SUPPAN (III, 1–3, 5), RAOUL F. CAMUS (III, 4; IV, 4), TREVOR HERBERT (IV, 1, 3, 5), ANTHONY C. BAINES/R (IV, 2), J. BRADFORD ROBINSON (V), ALLAN F. MOORE (VI)

I. Introduction

The word ‘band’ has many applications in music, more or less precise. In a general sense, it may refer to almost any ensemble of instruments. When used without qualification it commonly applies to a group of musicians playing combinations of brass and percussion instruments (a brass band; see §IV below) or woodwind, brass and percussion (e.g. a wind band, a circus band or a symphonic or concert band; see §III below). The ‘24 violons’ of Louis XIV were called ‘la grande bande’ to distinguish them from Lully's ‘petits violons’, and Charles II's similar ensemble was known as ‘the king's band’. By extension, ‘band’ came to mean orchestra in colloquial British usage: the two terms can also be used interchangeably. In Europe the wind and percussion band is descended from the ‘high’ or ‘loud’ groups (see Alta (i); and see §II(a) below) of the medieval period and from the civic waits or the Stadtpfeifer, who generally performed outdoors and therefore used predominantly loud brass and percussion instruments. Bands were often mobile, had a vernacular appeal (they usually performed lighter forms of music, often to a non-paying audience; as such they have also served as useful propaganda tools, or at least assisted in promoting nationalistic or patriotic fervour), and were often associated with specific military or civic duties and were thus uniformed. The Orchestra, on the other hand, is descended from the medieval ‘low’ or ‘soft’ instruments (strings and softer wind instruments), and usually plays indoors. It was originally associated with the church or the nobility, and later with formal concerts of more ‘serious’ and sophisticated music for which audiences paid.

‘Band’ is often qualified by the dominating instrument or family of instruments, as in brass band, Horn band, Steel band, accordion band (piano accordions of various sizes with percussion instruments), banjo band, pipe band (bagpipes and drums), fife and drum band, and flute band (a marching band of flutes and percussion found particularly in Northern Ireland). In a Jug band or a Washboard band the eponymous instrument plays an integrated part in the musical texture rather than a dominant role.

Bands may also be named according to their function rather than their constitution (although mixed wind bands are often misleadingly described as ‘military bands’ whether they have a military role or not), as in the dance band, the theatre band (or ‘pit band’, if it plays in the theatre pit), the marching band and the showband. The stage band is a group of musicians playing either on stage or behind the scenes; a familiar example is the band in Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787), and many instances may be found in French and Italian operas by Meyerbeer, Spontini, Verdi and his successors. In Italy it is called ‘banda’, as is also sometimes the brass section – or the brass and percussion together – of an orchestra.

Bands may also be named according to, or in a way that associates them with, the style of music that they play, as in jazz band and big band (related to the dance band; see §V below), pop, skiffle, rock and folk bands (see §VI below). During the 20th century the words ‘band’ and ‘group’ have often been used synonymously in popular culture.

See also March, and Military music.

Band (i), §II: History to 1800

II. History to 1800

1. Before 1600.

2. 1600–1800.

1. Before 1600.

The earliest wind bands in Europe were well established by the 13th century; they were similar to those of the Near East, consisting of shawms, trumpets and drums (see Naqqārakhāna). By about 1400 the trumpets and drums had split off into separate ceremonial ensembles (fig.1). Early in the 15th century a slide instrument was added to the shawms, and the ensemble, consisting of three or four musicians (one or two shawms, bombard and trombone), quickly developed (by 1475) a highly sophisticated performance tradition (fig.2). This was the group of choice for dancing, processions, banquets and other secular ritual occasions (see Alta (i)). By the late 15th century it was a preferred ensemble throughout Europe, as every major court and important city patronized one. Courtly ensembles were engaged from the beginning exclusively for their musical capabilities, as was also the case in many German cities where the musicians were known as Stadtpfeiferei (‘town pipers’; see Stadtpfeifer). In many regions, however, city bands initially combined a watchman function with their musical duties, which was reflected in such names as ‘waits’ in England and wachters in the Low Countries (see Wait. The watch function was dropped almost everywhere by the late 15th century, although the bands continued to perform from church and city towers. Soon after 1500 some shawm-based ensembles expanded to six or even eight performers, and at the same time these musicians were expected to command a wider range of instrumental doublings, including cornetti, crumhorns and recorders. Musical demands also expanded, as wind players increasingly joined singers in all manner of performances, including those within church services (see Performing practice, §I, 4). In the early 16th century the ensemble reached an artistic peak with musicians such as Tromboncino and Susato, whose careers were rooted in the wind band tradition. By about 1550 a new fashion for string instruments (especially the violin) began to mount a challenge, and by late in the 16th century the artistic position of winds began to decline. The decline was gradual, however, and until the early 17th century leading chapel masters and composers (such as Hans Leo Hassler) continued to be associated with wind bands.

See also Shawm.

Band (i), §II: History to 1800

2. 1600–1800.

(i) Military music.

(ii) Harmonie.

(iii) Civic and church bands.

Band (i), §II, 2: 1600–1800

(i) Military music.

Musicians in the army of the German Empire were usually supplied by a guild of trumpeters and kettledrummers which had certain privileges. Towards the end of the Thirty Years War (1646) the Brandenburg Dragoon Guards had a band of shawms (two treble and one tenor, with a dulcian for the bass) and drums. Under Louis XIV bands were organized in the French army after the model of those in the German regiments. With the development of the new French hautbois (oboe) around the middle of the century, the French bands, probably gradually, adopted the new instrument; by 1665 each company of Mousquetaires had three hautbois, and the number soon increased to four, including a tenor instrument (possibly at first a cromorne, later a taille de hautbois; see Oboe §III, 2(ii)) and a dulcian or bassoon. Many of the marches and airs written for them by Lully, Philidor l'aîné, Martin Hotteterre and others are preserved in the manuscripts of the Philidor Collection under the title Partition de plusieurs marches et batteries de tambour tant françoises qu'étrangères avec les airs de fifre et de hautbois a 3 et 4 parties (F-Pn Rés. F.671; see ex.1). The use in this period of the word ‘hautbois’ for both the shawm and the new instrument makes it sometimes difficult to determine which instruments were intended, and it is unclear how long shawms or transitional instruments remained in use in the French army and elsewhere. Many of the pieces in the Partition de plusieurs marchescould be played by either shawms or oboes. The bassoon appears to have replaced the one-piece dulcian by the end of the century.

The new hautbois soon spread, through military and diplomatic contact, across Europe. Johann Philipp Krieger's Lustige Feld-Music of 1704 is an early German example of music for the new ensemble of French hautbois. Krieger advised certain doublings of the four parts in the open air, and by the end of the 17th century such bands often had six members: a band of six young ‘Hautboisten’, led by a French musician who trained and directed them, played at Zeitz castle in 1698 and was sent to Vienna at the request of the Habsburg court in 1700. Hans Friedrich von Fleming noted in 1726 that bands of French hautbois consisted of six instruments – two trebles, two tailles and two bassoons – ‘because the [French] hautbois were not as loud, but sounded much sweeter, than the shawms' (Fleming, p.181). The combination of three treble hautbois, a tenor and two bassoons was also common. By 1720 the tenor instruments had been replaced by horns in many bands in central Europe: such ensembles are depicted in engravings from the period, including one from Leipzig dated 1720 (with three treble hautbois, two horns and a bassoon), and music for woodwinds and horns had begun to appear (the earliest dated work is a Marche by J.G.C. Störl for pairs of oboes, horns and bassoons, dated 1711). Some bands had a trumpet instead of horns; Fleming considered this combination characteristically English. In Prussia, a trumpet was added to the wind sextet. Bands of Hautboisten played for marching; they also played morning and evening before the residence of the commander and when the commander entertained (then they might sometimes play string instruments). As well, they provided music for processions and other public ceremonies (see Festival, §2). A collection of music assembled between about 1712 and 1725 with pieces scored for two or three oboes, taille and bassoon or for three oboes, trumpet and bassoon (most with two bassoon parts) survives as the Sonsfeldische Musikaliensammlung (D-HRD Fü3741a). The Douze grands hautbois of the French court still consisted solely of double-reed instruments in 1722, when they played for the coronation of Louis XV (see Oboe, fig.4). Elsewhere in Europe bands had become somewhat larger by the middle of the century with the doubling of the upper parts, and ensembles of eight or ten musicians were not unusual. Also about the middle of the century, clarinets began to be used in place of, or as a supplement to, the oboes. An engraving published in London in 1753 depicts a band of two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons preceding a company of grenadiers (fig.3) and in 1762 the Swiss Guards in France were authorized to have a band consisting of four each of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons. In 1763 Frederick the Great stipulated that Prussian army bands should consist of two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons. However, bands of six players in which the treble instruments were either oboes or clarinets remained common, and many musicians played both. There were also bands of other combinations: the grenadier company in Salzburg had a band of two clarinets, two fifes and two drums in 1766 (see also Feldmusik).

At the Restoration in England the band of the King's Life Guards consisted of trumpets and kettledrums, but the practice of using the ‘hautboy’ as a military instrument was soon imported from France: oboes were appointed to the Horse Grenadier Guards in 1678 and to the Foot Guards in 1684–5. The fife, use of which had been discontinued during the period of the Commonwealth, reappeared in the British army in the mid-18th century. The cavalry was still normally restricted to trumpets and kettledrums, although some regiments adopted fifes and drums for unmounted playing. Horns were usual in British army bands by mid-century. Handel wrote marches and other pieces for two oboes, two horns and basso (and also two marches for trumpet, two oboes and basso). His ‘Grand Overture of Warlike Instruments’, or Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) is scored for an expanded version of the ensemble, with the addition of kettledrums. Clarinets were in general use after the middle of the century; the common scoring for two clarinets, two horns and bassoon is exemplified by J.C. Bach's four Military Pieces (the bassoon part may often have been doubled). In 1762 an ensemble was brought from Germany to serve as the ‘Royal Artillery Band’: it consisted of ‘eight men, who must also be capable to play upon the violoncello, bass, violin and flute as other common instruments’ and was provided with two trumpets, two horns, two bassoons and ‘four hautbois or clarinets’ (Farmer, C(i)1904, p.36). A perhaps not uncommon arrangement was described by Richard Hind in The Discipline of the Light Horse (London, 1778, pp.206–7): ‘in the year 1764 … each troop [had] one trumpet, who when they are dismounted, form[ed] a band of music, consisting of two French horns, two clarinetts and two bassoons’.

European musical traditions, including bands, were taken to North America by colonists and military units. Bands took an important role in musical life there and distinct customs soon developed (see §III, 4 below).

An important development during the 18th century was the adoption by European military bands (and orchestras) of ‘Turkish’ or ‘janissary’ music (see Janissary music). In a miniature from the early 18th century (fig.4) a Turkish mehter (military band) is shown playing boru (trumpet), zil (cymbals), davul (cylindrical drum played on one side with a drumstick, on the other with a switch of twigs) and kös (large kettledrums). Such ensembles might also include the zurna (shawm) and nakkare (small kettledrums). The bands of the Sultan of Turkey's elite troops (the janissaries) made a great impression on the European armies during the wars of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th. The Sultan presented a band to Augustus II of Poland (reigned 1697–1733) and an imitation of Turkish music was performed at the Court of Empress Anne of Russia in 1739. A Turkish band had been added to the Austrian Commander Freiherr von Trenck's troop by 1741, and in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) the French Marshal de Saxe's Uhlans adopted this music too. Prussian regiments used janissary instruments and later engaged Turkish musicians to play them. Around the mid-18th century European bands began to add ‘Turkish’ instruments, first a large bass drum, later cymbals and triangle. The Turkish crescent was added at the end of the century. Some percussionists were Moors or black; they were dressed in an exotic manner and used extravagant gestures. By the 1780s a ‘Turkish band’ in Europe was usually one of European instruments with added percussion and a piccolo; a band reported in Vienna in 1796 included oboes, bassoons, horns and clarinets, a trumpet, a triangle, a piccolo, a very large drum, an ordinary drum and a pair of cymbals (Schönfeld, Jahrbuch der Tonkünst in Wien und Prag, Vienna, 1796, p.98). This band was not engaged in military duties, but rather played outdoor concerts in the summer. British bands often added a tambourine. The janissary influence remained visible at the end of the 20th century in the tiger- and leopard-skin aprons used by bass drummers and in their elaborate drumstick flourishes, while the shape of the marching band's bell-lyra recalled the Turkish crescent.

Towards the end of the 18th century military bands added more instruments, partly because the increase of percussion under the influence of janissary music made it necessary, for purposes of audibility, to increase the wind as well. More clarinets were added: there were six in the Grenadier Guards in 1794 and in the bands provided from 1795 in France by the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique (founded as the Ecole de Musique de la Garde Nationale by Bernard Sarrette in 1792 to supply the need for military musicians). New instruments came into use: a Divertimento written by Thomas Attwood in collaboration with Pleyel and Storace was scored for pairs of clarinets, basset-horns, horns and bassoons with serpent. An arrangement of J.C. Bach's Overture to Lucio Sillacopied by Henry Pick in about 1800 includes parts for two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two horns, two trumpets, two bassoons, serpent and alto and tenor trombones; some of his other arrangements include parts for side drum. French bands grew larger and more varied during the Revolution. Catel's Ouverture militaire, for example, includes parts for two petites flûtes, two flutes, two clarinets, two trumpets, two horns, three trombones, two bassoons, serpent and timpani. By about 1810 the larger European military bands had reached their present size (Table 1), having further increased the number of clarinets and added small clarinets and in Germany often basset-horns; the brass instruments regularly included trombones while extra pairs of horns and trumpets made different crookings simultaneously available. In England the serpent was supported by the bass horn and in the German lands by the double bassoon (ex.2). A typical French infantry band of 1809 consisted of piccolo, E clarinet, six to eight B clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, two or three trombones, one or two serpents, side drum, bass drum, cymbals and pavillon chinois (Turkish crescent).

Band (i), §II, 2: 1600–1800

(ii) Harmonie.

From the end of the 17th century bands of hautbois often did double duty, playing military music and for outdoor festivals as required, but also playing indoors for court events, either as an independent ensemble or as part of an orchestra. The eight hautbois of the Mousquetaires played for divertissements, water parties, balls and other events at the French court. Two horn players appointed to the Württemberg court in 1713 were expected to play both in the orchestra and in the regimental band. When the Treaty of Utrecht brought peace in 1713, the band was employed for baptisms, balls, church services and carnival, and accompanied members of the royal family on their travels. Later in the century, contracts for the wind players hired by the Esterházy court in 1761 indicate that they too performed both military and court duty. It was from such groups that the ‘Harmonien’ developed; the term was applied both to groups of wind instruments employed by the aristocracy (and others) and to small military bands. The size of Harmonie ensembles ranged from two instruments to above 20 (21 were required for a special piece by Georg Druschetzky, performed for the coronation ceremonies for Leopold II in Pressburg in 1790), but most had between five and nine instruments, most commonly in three or four groups – horns and bassoons, with either oboes or clarinets or both – and in pairs (sometimes there was a single bassoon part, played by two bassoons). Flutes, english horns and basset-horns were also occasionally used and a double bass or double bassoon was sometimes added (especially towards the end of the 18th century). Harmonie bands played at the Concert Spirituel in Paris in the 1760s and 1770s, and Mozart's Serenade in B k361/370a for 12 wind instruments and double bass was performed at a public concert in Vienna in 1784. Although Harmonien were supported primarily by aristocrats, similar ensembles played in the streets and for less exalted patrons. Mozart's Serenade in E k375 (1781), originally written for an ensemble of clarinets, horns and bassoons, was played in the street (the composer commended the players' performance); it was reworked the following year for pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, perhaps with one of the aristocratic ensembles in mind. The latter combination was popularized by Emperor Joseph II in Vienna in the 1780s. His ensemble was made up of the best wind players of the day, and played a repertory consisting primarily of opera transcriptions. Many Harmonien had been disbanded by the end of the 18th century, but some remained active well into the 19th (see Harmoniemusik).

Band (i), §II, 2: 1600–1800

(iii) Civic and church bands.

Bands of musicians continued to form part of the civic establishment throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and into the 19th. They performed civic duties, such as sounding Retreat, and played for celebrations, processions and church services, public and private balls, parties and concerts. To match the wide variety of duties assigned to him the town musician required skill on several instruments (including string instruments: see, for example, the account of a town musician's training in Quantz's Lebenslauf) and a wide repertory, including signal pieces, dance pieces, conversation music and, in the 18th century, sinfonias and concertos (see also Stadtpfeifer). Some town musicians were retired regimental musicians; others came from families in which the profession was traditional. In their competition with other musical organizations, such as the guild of trumpeters and kettledrummers, the town bands had acquired certain rights and privileges governing, for example, where and when they might play. By the end of the 18th century, however, the social structures that supported this order were disappearing and with them the bands of all-purpose musicians: most bands in Germany had disappeared by the 1790s, and in England many were dissolved at the time of the Napoleonic wars. In France new types of bands sprang up to fill in music the ideals of the new Revolutionary order. Gossec became conductor of the Corps de Musique de la Garde Nationale (with Sarrette) and wrote fervently Revolutionary music for it, beginning with a Te Deum performed on 14 July 1790 by a band of over 300 woodwind and brass instruments, serpents and violas, with 300 drums and a chorus of as many as 1000 (violas were not used in subsequent outdoor works). Similar works as well as purely instrumental pieces by Gossec, Méhul and Grétry were performed on state occasions by bands of between 30 and 70 wind players, together with drums.

In Russia a unique type of band was established in 1751 by J.A. Mareš: it consisted of an ensemble of hunting horns ranging from 30 cm to 2 metres in length, each able to play only one or two notes; horn bands of up to 22 players visited Western Europe in 1817 and 1833 and sets of the instruments were exhibited in Vienna as late as 1892 (see Horn band). Similar bands of about 13 players were known in Bohemia and Saxony.

In England by about 1740 the singing of the choir had begun to be accompanied in parish churches – which usually had no organ – by an instrument or two, such as a bassoon or bass viol on the bass part and occasionally an oboe to double the melody (the tenor part) an octave higher. By about 1770 ‘church bands’ included singers and two to five or six instrumentalists. Their music was sometimes known as Gallery music because they often performed from a specially built gallery. The instrumentalists were an integral part of the ensemble, supporting the vocal lines and leading the singers. Before the turn of the century double reeds predominated (bassoon, oboe and occasionally vox humana), but after about 1800 string instruments (bass viol, cello, violin) were more usual, supplemented by clarinets and, later, brass instruments such as keyed bugles, cornopeans and ophicleides. The instrumentation was never standardized, but depended on local resources. Some bands remained active into the 20th century, but most had been replaced by reed organs or barrel organs by the middle of the 19th (see also Psalmody (ii), §I and fig.2).

An ensemble of double-reed instruments, known as the Hautbois d'eglise, was used for a similar purpose – to accompany the singing of Lutheran chorales – in Protestant Switzerland between about 1760 and 1810. The instruments included two dessus de musette, oboes, recorders or flutes on the upper parts, a basse de musette to play the tenor and a basson d'amour.

III. Mixed wind bands

1. Terminology.

2. Military bands.

3. Civilian bands.

4. American wind bands.

5. Repertory.

1. Terminology.

The term ‘military band’ dates from the late 18th century and denoted at that time a regimental band consisting of woodwind, brass and percussion instruments. During the following century it came to be applied as well to civilian bands of similar constitution. With the growth of civilian wind bands for all sorts of activities (outdoor entertainment, marching etc.) the epithet ‘military’ became increasingly inappropriate; the more general ‘mixed wind band’ is accordingly used here to define the whole group of bands, ‘military band’ being reserved for a mixed wind band maintained by the armed forces. The words used in other languages as equivalents for ‘military band’ support a more general designation since many of them make no reference to a specific military function: Fr. bande, harmonie; Ger. Blaskapelle, Blasorchester, (Militär-)Musikkorps; It. banda, corpo di musica; Sp. banda. A wind ensemble is distinguished from a wind band in having one player to each part.

2. Military bands.

The band of the Garde Républicaine, among the first of the new, larger bands founded immediately after the French Revolution, set the pattern for the 19th century. A new concept, that of the symphonic wind band, in which groups of like instruments serve in sections analogous to those of the orchestra, began to gain prominence; the new ensemble is apparent in works such as Beethoven's March woo24 of 1816. The instrumentation of bands evolved separately in different regions, but all came to conform to the new concept (see Table 1). The development of valved brass instruments by both Stölzel and Blühmel early in the second decade of the 19th century was of overwhelming importance, allowing the entire range of brass instruments to play chromatically.

Infantry bandmasters in Germany and Britain have from the onset of the valve era, out of conservative feeling and practical consideration, generally kept to the well-balanced instrumentation advocated by military journals of the mid-19th century (exemplified in England by C. Boosé's Military Journal from c1845). As shown in ex.2, this consists of a contemporary orchestral wind and percussion group augmented to fulfil band requirements and filled out with a few extra instruments. Saxophones, invented for the band, were first used in French infantry bands about 1845. The treble is led by cornets, flugelhorns or trumpets and the bass is supplied by valved basses; a string bass is often added in concert performance. The only other instrument foreign to the orchestra is the euphonium, which helps with nearly everything prominent in the tenor and bass registers.

In Austria, the new style of military band, with choirs of woodwind instruments and brass, the clarinets predominating, is mentioned in documents from 1800 onwards. A report of the Hofkriegsrat to Emperor Franz I (20 September 1820) draws attention to the large size of some ensembles – 50 to 60 men – and their expensive and ‘unmilitary’ dress, all due to the officers' desire for prestige and magnificence. Two years later the emperor decreed that infantry bands be limited to 34 men apiece and regimental staff bands to ten. The combination was determined by individual bandmasters. Wind instruments with keys and brass instruments with valves were adopted early in Austria: the Allgemeine Schule für die Militärmusik(Vienna, 1845) confirms that trumpets, flugelhorns, horns and even trombones had changed to valves by this time. Table 2 shows the composition of Austrian military bands in 1820 and 1845. The band of Fahrbach's Organizzazione is a typical Austrian infantry band, with a large clarinet section, trumpets of different sizes, and the soft-sounding flugelhorns and euphonium. The army Kapellmeister Andreas Leonhardt (1800–66) introduced far-reaching reforms in Austro-Hungarian military music with his Systemisierung der Militär-Musikbanden of 1851. The strength of each band was increased to 60 men and the bands of the infantry, cavalry and jäger were made similar. These ensembles remained largely unchanged until World War I. Leonhardt's reforms were influential in the USA and Japan, and above all in Prussia.

In Prussia soon after 1800 different ensembles were assigned to different branches of the military: trumpet corps to the cavalry; horn bands to the jäger; and mixed wind bands to the infantry (ten ‘Hoboisten’, or military bandsmen), the grenadiers (18 men) and the guards (24 men). In 1816 line regiments were permitted to expand to 30 members, and Prussian bands developed in a similar way to the French and Austrian ensembles, with woodwind and chromatic brass instruments complemented by percussion instruments from janissary music. Wilhelm Wieprecht (1802–72), director of music of the corps of guards from 1838, was in contact with Leonhardt, and reformed the military bands of Prussia after the Austrian model. Wieprecht played a leading role in the development of new valved brass instruments including the Tenorhorn (Bass-Flügelhorn), the Tenorbasshorn in B, the Sopran- and Altkornett and the Bass-Tuba. He specialized in large-scale concerts: in Lüneburg in 1843 he conducted the entire musical corps of the 10th Deutsches Bundesarmeekorps, comprising over 1000 bandsmen. Wieprecht's ideal ensemble consisted of two flutes, two oboes, 11 clarinets, two Tenorhörner, euphonium, two tenor trombones, bass trombone, four Bombardons(tubas), two bassoons and two double bassoons, four trumpets, two soprano and two alto cornets, four horns, drums, cymbals, triangle and Turkish crescent. In Prussia, as elsewhere, military bands undertook a variety of musical and cultural tasks, bringing the army into contact with the civilian population. The repertory included music for military use, original works for military band and transcriptions of the latest music. Table 3 shows the instrumentation of European military bands in the mid-19th century.

The instrumentation of the military bands at a competition at the Paris Exposition of 1867 provides a useful survey of the state of European military bands of the time (Table 4). The Prussian band, however, consisted of the combined musical corps of the Prussian guards; the band of the Garde de Paris was made up of professional musicians recruited from the theatres. The first prize was shared by Austria (band of the 73rd Infantry Regiment), Prussia and the Garde de Paris. Table 5 shows the instruments used in late 19th-century bands.

In 1873 a course to train bandmasters was set up at the Musikhochschule in Berlin. In the following decades Berlin became a centre for the training of military bandmasters, not only for Prussia and other German states, but also for some non-European countries such as Japan. Around 1900 there were some 560 military bands in Germany with 23–40 musicians in each, but after World War I there remained only 140 military bands, each with 27–37 members: civil wind music had mostly disappeared also. Military bands frequently played concerts consisting of marches and arrangements by Wieprecht and others of his generation. With the rise of National Socialism military music came to be regarded as an important tool, and many new bands were formed. Between 1935 and 1945 the band of the Luftwaffe occupied a special position: it followed the band of the US Air Force in including a larger woodwind section than usual, and its Inspector of Music Hans-Felix Husadel (1897–1964) commissioned new works from leading German composers. With the founding of the two German states in 1949 there were two separate military music organizations. In the DDR the Ministry of Defense had a band of 72 and each corps had a band for marching and for concerts. The literature was restricted mostly to new works and arrangements of workers' songs. Each corps also had a big band for dancing. The Luftwaffe band became the model for the new Bundeswehr music corps of the Federal Republic of Germany after 1956. From the 1950s there were bands for the border guards (four), the army (13), the air force (four) and the navy (two); at first each band had about 50 members, but the number was increased to 60 in 1958. There were also specialized ensembles, including a ceremonial ensemble (founded 1959) and a big band (founded 1969). In 1998 the military music of Germany consisted of one staff band, 21 bands attached to various army, navy and air force divisions, a training band and a big band.

French military bands in the 19th century included orchestres d'harmonie of woodwind, brass and percussion instruments; fanfare bands of brass instruments, saxophones and percussion; and the cavalry trumpet corps of brass instruments and timpani. Instrumentation was strongly influenced by the many new wind instruments developed during the 19th century by makers such as Adolphe Sax. Infantry bands of the 1830s were organized on an extravagant scale: they included full woodwind and the classic brass, strengthened by cornets, keyed bugles, alto ophicleides or clavicors, and bass ophicleides (the first edition of Kastner's Cours d'instrumentation, 1839, includes an example in score). The addition of a ‘bande turque’ made a colourful effect. However, bands were soon ‘improved’ by the mass of very efficient saxhorns and flugelhorns with which Sax and others smothered the old nucleus, producing a densely homogenous, somewhat bland sonority; saxhorns were widely adopted by French bands following a reorganization in 1845. Leading bands were expanded for concert performance by adding every sort of woodwind instrument, and even in some cases two desks of cellos to warm the lower register. The French model, which grew to enormous proportions, was largely followed in Italy and Spain as well. A peculiarity of French marching music is the clairon march, in which horn calls alternate with the band. At the end of the 20th century the Musique de l'Air of Paris was one of the leading professional wind bands in Europe.

A ‘military music class’ was founded at Kneller Hall in Twickenham in 1857. In 1865 it became the Royal Military School of Music. Its influence on music may be traced in the growth and improvement of the Royal Artillery Band: in 1857 the band was doubled from 40 to 80 players, and in 1887, at 93 strong, it became the largest band in the service. British army musical directors were often civilians, and mostly foreigners. (It was the proliferation of non-military, foreign bandmasters, together with the need to regulate and standardize British service bands, that stimulated the setting up of Kneller Hall). From about 1860 bandmasters were ranked as First Class Staff Sergeants and from 1881 they were allowed to be promoted to Warrant Officers; later still they could be commissioned. By 1876 there remained only 35 civilian bandmasters in British army bands.

British military bands were standardized at a conference held at Kneller Hall in 1921: the tenor horn was abandoned and saxophones added, a trend already apparent somewhat earlier in works such as K.J. Alford's march Colonel Bogey (1914; ex.3). The instrumentation then established remained in force at the end of the century (for specifications of British bands in the 1980s, see GroveI, ‘Band (i)’, Table 4). The bagpipe tradition has been maintained by the Army School of Piping, founded in 1910. The RAF School of Music, whose first Organizing Director of Music Walford Davies composed the famous March Past, was founded in 1918. Bands have long been associated with services such as the fire brigade and the police in Britain; the band of the Metropolitan Police was formed in 1927. At the end of the 20th century the United Kingdom supported 16 military staff bands 35–50 musicians strong and 53 regimental bands with 21–35 musicians in each.

The problem of discrepancies in pitch between bands was overcome in Britain by the issue to all regiments in 1858 of a standard B tuning fork, which introduced the ‘high Philharmonic pitch’. European military bands adopted the recommendations of the Paris conference of tuning standards of 1885 (Habla, C1990).

In Switzerland, where many outstanding municipal bands were initially conducted by German military bandmasters, military music was confined to militia bands and Rekrutenspiele. Only with the founding of the Schweizer Armeespiel in 1960 did that country acquire a professional military wind band. The Netherlands and Belgium, at first influenced by France and Germany, went their own way from the 1950s and by the end of the century had begun to extend their influence outwards through their excellent music publishing firms (Molenaar, Tierolff, de Haske) and composers. Important bands have included the Grand orchestre d'harmonie des guides, founded in 1832 as the Belgian royal musical ensemble; the Royal Military Band of Belgium; the Marine Band of the Royal Navy of the Netherlands (founded 1864); and the Kapel van de Koninklijke Luchtmacht (founded 1945). The Musique militaire grand ducale of Luxembourg enjoys a high reputation. In the Irish Republic Wilhelm Fritz Brase, a former German military bandmaster, founded the army music school, serving as its director from 1932 to 1940. At the end of the century there were four military musical ensembles in Ireland with 33–44 musicians each. In Spain, military music in the 19th century was influenced by France; the Real Cuerpo de Alaberderos was regarded as the finest military band there between 1875 and 1931. At the end of the 20th century the music corps of the Royal Guard was considered the leading ensemble; like the municipal bands of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, it includes cellos and double basses. The Scandinavian countries developed variants on the Prussian, French and English models. Bands there are usually small: the band of the Royal Danish Lifeguards has 35 members and three further Danish bands have 16 members each. The largest band is that of the Norwegian Royal Guard, with 60 members; the staff band has 28 members and the six regional bands have 21 musicians each. The situation is much the same in Sweden (fig.5) and Finland, where there are semi-professional bands of national service personnel. Only the band of the Swedish Navy is entirely professional.

An independent Italian development began with Alessandro Vessella (1860–1929), director of the Banda municipale di Roma from 1885 to 1924. He standardized the scoring of small, medium and large bands and wrote a treatise on instrumentation, Studi di strumentazione per banda (Milan, 1954). From the 1920s most Italian wind bands followed his model in scoring and repertory.

With the exception of the Horn band, military music in 19th-century Russia was influenced by the Prussian model. In 1873 Rimsky-Korsakov was appointed Inspector of Naval Bands and worked to improve standards. After the Revolution of 1917 Russian military music broke away from the Western model. Semyon Aleksandrovich Chernetsky (1881–1950) was appointed Inspector of Music for Soviet bands in 1924; he reorganized the training of military bandsmen and encouraged the composition of new music. In 1935 he established the wind band of the Soviet Ministry of Defence to serve as an example for other military bands; it included tenor horns but had no bassoons or saxophones. Works written for this ensemble include Myaskovsky's Symphony no.19, op.46 (1939) and Dramatic Overture (1942), and marches by Prokofiev and Khachaturian. States formerly part of the Soviet Union (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan) or in the Soviet orbit paid particular attention to military music in the late 20th century. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria have preserved their own traditions while the Baltic states and Slovenia were, at the end of the century, striking out on new paths of their own.

In some countries financial concerns resulted in retrenchment during the final decades of the century. In Belgium, for example, a number of bands were decommissioned when it was decided that only a single band for each corps would be supported.

3. Civilian bands.

The 19th century saw a steady increase in large civic bands in continental Europe. French civilian music was divided into the brass band with saxophones (fanfare) and the wind, percussion and brass band (harmonie). In 1850 the Banda Municipal of Barcelona was dissolved, but later reformed with 40 players associated with the School of Music. The Banda Communale di Roma, founded with 40 members in 1871, doubled in size on the appointment of Alessandro Vessella as its director in 1885; it is typical of the ‘banda municipale’ of a major Italian city, with its brilliant tone colour, excellent players and repertory of orchestral and opera transcriptions. The following list of instruments specified in a ‘transcrizione libera’ (1927) of Puccini's Turandot illustrates the maximum instrumentation found in such bands: Ottavino; 2 Flauti; 2 Oboi; Corno inglese; 2 Clarinetti piccoli in La; 2 Clarinetti piccoli in Mi; Clarinetti soprani in Si I.; Clarinetti soprani in Si II.; Clarinetti contralti in Mi; Clarinetti bassi in Si; Sarrussofono baritono in Mi; Sarrusofono basso in Si; Saxofono soprano in Si; 2 Saxofoni contralti in Mi; Saxofoni tenori in Si; Saxofono baritono in Mi; Saxofono basso in Si; Sarrussofono contrabasso; Contrabasso ad ancia; Contrabassi a corda; 4 Corni in Fa; 2 Cornette in Si; 2 Trombe in Fa; 2 Trombe in Si basso; 2 Tromboni tenore; Trombone basso in Fa; Trombone contrabasso in Si; Timpani; Triangolo–Tamburo; G.C. Piatti–Tam-tam; Glockenspiel–Xilofono; Xilofono basso–Gong Chinesi; Celeste; 2 Flicorni sopranini in Mi; 2 Flicorni soprani in Si; 2 Flicorni contralti in Mi; 2 Flicorni tenori in Si; 2 Flicorni baritoni in Si; 2 Flicorni bassi in Si; 2 Flicorni bassi gravi in Fa-Mi; 2 Flicorni contrabassi in Si. (Contrabasso ad ancia; a double reed instrument of brass, different from the sarrusophones which in this example replace bassoons; Flicorni; generic title covering flugelhorns, alto and tenor horns, baritone and the brass basses; the deeper trombones are valved, sometimes the tenors as well; G.C. Piatti: one player, cymbal attached to the bass drum.)80 players became a common size for municipal bands in southern Europe and Latin America. The Portuguese Banda da Guarda Nacional had 60 members by 1901.

In many towns and cities of southern Europe the tendency towards the large ensemble continued. Until 1981 Venice maintained such a band, which played in the Piazza S Marco. Large bandas municipales were still thriving in Spain at the end of the 20th century, and in major cities these were made up of professional players; in addition there were many cultural societies that supported bands. An annual contest, which became international in 1982, has been held in Valencia since 1886 during the Gran Feria in July.

In the Benelux countries and Switzerland there are many amateur bands, mostly mixed wind bands, but also brass bands. There are also many in Scandinavia, in Germany, and in central and eastern Europe. Bands have tended not to have fixed instrumentation: Spanish bands often include cellos; in Scandinavia, Belgium and the Benelux countries bands follow the British model sometimes adding trumpets; in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe flugelhorns and Tenorhörner (Bass-Flügelhörner) are employed; in Italy, Austria and parts of central Europe the small E clarinet is often seen; in Eastern Europe and France saxhorns may be used.

In the final decade of the 20th century national pride in countries newly freed from Soviet domination led to the revival of popular local traditions, including bands. In Lithuania, for example, the Symphonic Wind Band of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which had been disbanded in 1944, was restored in 1989, and an Association of Lithuanian Wind Instrument Players was formed in 1993 to improve the skills of its members and to promote Lithuanian music.

4. American wind bands.

European musical customs and traditions were brought to North America by the colonists. In American military organizations, as in European ones, a distinction was made between ‘field music’ and the ‘band of music’. The former consisted primarily of a snare drum, with a fife, bagpipe or other instrument added wherever available to provide melody. It was used mainly for functional purposes – to set the cadence for marching men and to beat warnings, orders and signals – and normally provided the camp duty calls that regulated the field or garrison. The band of music, on the other hand, served ceremonial and social functions.

The earliest reference to a ‘band of musick’ in North America is a newspaper account of the celebrations for the accession of George I of England in New York in 1714 where it is stated that the governor and the regular forces marched ‘with Hoboys and Trumpets before them’. By the 1750s the term ‘band of musick’ appears frequently in connection with parades and civic ceremonies. British regimental bands (normally Harmoniemusik ensembles) gave concerts in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Canadian garrison towns before the American Revolution, and residents were quick to form bands of their own. Both British and American regiments supported bands during the Revolutionary War, and performances were frequent. The 3rd and 4th Continental artillery regiments had bands as early as 1777; both served until the end of the Revolution and achieved exceptional reputations. In post-Revolutionary USA, bands welcomed George Washington in almost every village and city that he visited on his grand tour in 1789. Taverns, coffeehouses, theatres, and pleasure gardens all featured bands performing medleys, selections from popular stage works, battle pieces, transcriptions of orchestral works, original compositions, marches and patriotic songs (for examples of the music, see Camus, C(ii)1992).

The Militia Act of 1792, by which every able-bodied adult white male was required to perform military service for at least two ‘muster days’ each year, greatly promoted the development of bands. A further impetus was supplied by the regular meetings, for drill and ceremonies, of élite organizations. No military, civic, festive or holiday occasion was complete without music, and bands were organized to provide it; these were usually attached to militia units, and, while retaining their civilian status, the bandsmen normally wore uniforms. Tutors such as Timothy Olmstead's Martial Music (1807) began to appear in print. Other Revolutionary War bandmasters active into the Federal period included Philip Roth and John Hiwell, the former Inspector of Music in the Continental Army. New leaders, such as Peter von Hagen, James Hewitt and Gottlieb Graupner, came from Europe.

Widespread interest in Turkish (janissary) music in America at the beginning of the 19th century brought the bass drum and cymbals into the band and the field music. Combined performances of the two groups became more frequent, and the snare drum soon became an integral part of the band. Further changes to Harmoniemusik in the Federal period included new keys on the woodwind instruments and the addition of the piccolo, bass clarinet, trombone, bass horn and serpent. William Webb's Grand Military Divertimentos were published for an ensemble including these newly-added instruments (Table 6, 1828). Another new instrument, the Keyed bugle, became popular in New York through the performances of Richard Willis, who within a year of his arrival from Dublin in 1816 became the first teacher of music and leader of the band at the US Military Academy at West Point. Other virtuosos on the keyed bugle included Frank [Francis] Johnson in Philadelphia and Edward [Ned] Kendall in Boston. Keyed bass horns and ophicleides were also added, and bands continued to increase in size. By 1832 US Army infantry regiments had bands consisting of 15 to 24 members, a size emulated by militia bands. In that year, however, infantry bands were limited to ten privates and a chief musician, a drastic reduction that led to the elimination of woodwind instruments in favour of the new and versatile valved brass instruments. Beginning in 1834, many, but not all, bands changed to all-brass combinations (see §IV, ii, below). The 7th Regiment Band, a 42-piece woodwind and brass ensemble led first by Joseph Noll, later by Claudio S. Grafulla, achieved a reputation for excellence surpassed only by that of the all-brass Dodworth Band.

Bands proliferated during the Civil War: Bufkin estimated conservatively that the Union Army had 500 bands and 9000 players besides the two field musicians assigned to each company. These bands provided music for military and civilian ceremonies and entertained the soldiers; bandsmen also served as medical corpsmen during battle. Many civilian and militia bands enlisted as a body in the new volunteer regiments. While most conformed to regulations, some (supported, as in the past, by the officers), exceeded their authorized strength and dressed in elaborate uniforms. The 24th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry had 20 drummers, 12 buglers, and a 36-piece mixed wind band led by Patrick S. Gilmore. Other prominent civilian bandmasters who, with their bands, served in the war included Grafulla, Harvey Dodworth, E.B. Flagg, Thomas Coates and Walter Dignam. Gustavus W. Ingalls enlisted a band of 22 men in the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment (fig.6), and their Port Royal Band Books are a primary source for instrumentation and repertory of the period (Table 6, 1863). Eight members of the Salem (North Carolina) Brass Band enlisted in the 26th North Carolina Regiment, and their story (Hall, C(ii)1963) is typical of the experiences of many bands serving on both sides of the conflict. In 1862 Congress ordered the discharge of the three or four regimental bands per brigade, and authorized instead a brigade band of 16 musicians, with a leader and an assistant.

Due mainly to the influence of Gilmore, brass bands gradually disappeared following the Civil War. Gilmore arrived in the USA from Ireland in 1849 and a few years later became leader of the Salem Brass Band. In 1859 he established Gilmore's Band. He later organized and trained all the bands of the state of Massachusetts and organized the music for large-scale events such as the National Peace Jubilee of 1869, and the even larger World Peace Jubilee of 1872, both in Boston. In 1873 he assumed the leadership of the band of the 22nd New York Regiment, and established it as the finest professional band in the country. A skilled promoter, he attracted large audiences by adept programming and by engaging such outstanding soloists as the cornettists Matthew Arbuckle, Alessandro Liberati, Herman Bellstedt and Jules Levy, the saxophonist E.A. Lefèbre, the trombonist Frederick Neil Innes, the euphonium player Joseph Raffayolo, and the sopranos Emma Thursby, Eugenie Pappenheim and Lillian Nordica. The 22nd Regiment Band normally had a complement of 66 musicians (Table 6, 1878), far exceeding the limits imposed by military regulations at the time. During the 1880s they worked year-round: in summer at Manhattan Beach, in winter at the 22nd Regiment armory and Gilmore's Garden (P.T. Barnum's Hippodrome) in New York, and in autumn and spring on tour. At this time there were only four major professional symphony orchestras in the USA, none of which had a full season; as a result the finest musicians sought employment with Gilmore. His band inspired others to reintroduce the woodwind instruments and to raise their level of performance and improve their repertory. Other bandmasters active at the time included Grafulla, Carlo Cappa, David Wallis Reeves, the former Gilmore's Band soloists Arbuckle, Innes and Liberati, the cornettist R.B. Hall and, in Canada, Ernest Lavigne and Joseph Vézina.

In 1889 Harper's Weekly estimated that there were more than 10,000 ‘military’ bands active in the USA. In many western communities the local military post band provided the only music available. Many bands were associated with local militia units but, though uniformed, retained their civilian status. Professional and amateur bands appeared at military and civilian ceremonies and parades, concerts, amusement parks, seaside resorts, county and state fairs, and national and international expositions. Their repertory ranged from the ever popular marches, songs, waltzes and novelties to the classical standards of the day. Many North Americans had their first, and usually only, exposure to the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Verdi, Liszt and Wagner through these bands. Opera selections and variations were performed by leading soloists, and even grand operas were staged.

While large bands were conducted, smaller ones were frequently led by their solo cornet player, as in the days of brass bands. Consequently the solo cornet part in printed arrangements usually served as the conductor's cue sheet. Carl Fischer of New York was one of the first firms to publish band music with printed parts for each instrument, and to include a two- or three-line conductor's score. The firm engaged many outstanding editors, among them Louis-Philippe Laurendeau, Frank H. Losey, Vincent F. Safranek, Theodore Moses Tobani and Mayhew Lester Lake, many of whose arrangements are still performed. Thomas H. Rollinson prepared many arrangements during his 40 years with Ditson. Later important publishers of band music included Charles L. Barnhouse, John Church, Harry Coleman, Henry Fillmore, George F. Briegel and several bandmasters who issued their own music, such as Jean Missud, Fred Jewell and Karl L. King.

The most important figure in the golden age of American band music was John Philip Sousa, who formed his own band in 1892. An astute showman, a fine composer and an excellent musician, he engaged the finest available players for each position, and attracted such outstanding soloists as the cornet player Herbert L. Clarke, the trombonist Arthur Pryor, euphonium players Simone Mantia and Joseph DeLuca, the violinist Maud Powell and the sopranos Estelle Liebling and Majorie Moody. He experimented with his band's instrumentation and gradually increased its membership (Table 6, 1900). From 1892 until his death in 1932 he made regular tours, including four in Europe (1900, 1901, 1903 and 1905), and a world tour (1910–11; fig.7). A typical Sousa programme listed about nine titles, ranging from his own suites and marches to novelties, solos, orchestral transcriptions and opera selections. After each scheduled work he normally added one or two encores, usually his own marches.

Other major figures of the period included such veterans as Cappa, Missud, Francesco Fanciulli, Thomas Brooke, Monroe Althouse and Victor Herbert; soloists from Sousa's band who went on to form bands of their own (Liberati, Clarke, Bohumir Kryl, Frank Simon, Pryor, Mantia, Herman Bellstedt and Eugene LaBarre); and bandmasters such as Giuseppe Creatore, Patrick Conway, Edwin Franko Goldman, Innes and Canadians Jean-Josaphat Gagnier and Charles O'Neill who organized new professional ensembles. Since women were not admitted to the professional bands except as violin, soprano or harp soloists, they formed bands of their own, such as Helen May Butler's Ladies Brass Band (fig.8).

Besides the professional bands there were thousands of amateur ensembles: civic bands, bands sponsored by fraternal and sororal organizations, industrial bands, the many brass bands of the Salvation Army and, after World War I, Legion and veterans' bands. A town band was a mark of social status: ‘a town without its brass band is as much in need of sympathy as a church without a choir. The spirit of a place is recognized in its band’ (Dana, C(ii)1878). Many civic bands still in existence date from pre-war times, including the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Band (founded 1828), the Repasz Band (Williamsport, Pennsylvania, 1831) and the Newmarket Band (Ontario, 1843). To train musicians for these bands, many schools were established, such as Hale A. VanderCook's College of Music (Chicago, 1909) and Innes's Correspondence School of Music (Denver, 1921, later Conn National School of Music, Chicago, 1923). There were also bands with specialized styles and repertories such as circus bands (which invariably played everything at much faster ‘circus’ tempos) and the New Orleans bands, which absorbed black American and Creole influences. Often associated with benevolent societies, these bands provided music for club functions and funerals. Since at least the 18th century bands traditionally played a solemn march on their way to the cemetery, but a brisk quickstep, usually ‘Merry Men Home from the Grave’ on their return. The New Orleans musicians began improvising on tunes (such as the spiritual ‘When the saints go marching in’), and developed an early form of jazz. There were many permanent black ensembles at the end of the 19th century, including the Excelsior, Onward, Eureka, Tuxedo and St Bernard brass bands, and many leading jazz instrumentalists gained their first experiences in these groups. As bandmaster of the 369th US Infantry Regiment Band serving in France during World War I, James Reese Europe brought jazz to European audiences for the first time.

Although Sousa continued to draw enthusiastic crowds, the popularity of bands declined after World War I, in the face of competition from radio, recordings and motion pictures. After his death in 1932 the focus shifted to education, a side of the movement that had been growing in the background since the second quarter of the 19th century. Music education in the schools in the 19th century had concentrated on vocal music, but there was a school band as early as 1836 in Canada, many in the USA by 1848, and there were bands all over the latter by the end of the century. Harvard and Yale had bands by about 1827, and other universities soon followed their example. After the Civil War there were bands based on the military model and attached to Officers Training Corps at nearly all educational institutions. Military ceremonies, political rallies, parades, dedications, outdoor festivities and sporting events were all enlivened by the music of these bands, which played popular overtures and medleys, spirited marches and school songs.

The participation of bands at sporting events became increasingly important, and by the end of the century pre-game and half-time football performances were common. With the addition of woodwind instruments, the bands increased in size and were organized more often like professional rather than military ensembles. Professional bandmasters, such as Conway at Cornell University (1895–1908) and Gustav Bruder at Ohio State University (1896–1929), soon replaced student directors. Albert Austin Harding sought to give the University of Illinois Band a symphonic sound by making greater use of woodwind instruments (and in greater variety) and using french horns instead of alto (tenor) horns. Since arrangements for such a band did not exist, he made almost 150 transcriptions of orchestral works for it. The artistic standard of the University of Illinois Band soon equalled that of the best professionals bands, and Harding's work was widely emulated.

World War I brought a renewed interest in military bands, and mobilization fostered an expanded musical instrument industry. American regimental bands compared unfavourably with their European counterparts in size and instrumentation until their membership was increased from 20 to 48 (Table 6, 1918) and greater emphasis placed on thorough musical training. Many members of army bands became band directors in public schools on their return to civilian life, class instruction in band and orchestral instruments having begun to receive support from school officials by the close of the war.

To stimulate demand musical instrument manufacturers organized the first national school band contest, in Chicago in June 1923. Response to such contests was so great that by 1937 the National School Band Association, organized in 1926 to administer the contests, had formed ten regional organizations. By 1941 there were 562 bands (33,398 students) participating, besides the many bands eliminated at district level. Canada had a similar growth, beginning in 1932 when Charles Frederick Thiele founded the Waterloo (Ontario) Band Festival.

Marching bands, now separated from the Officers Training Corps, benefited from the popularity of inter-collegiate football. Larger bands were needed to fill the huge stadiums built between the two worlds wars. The University of Illinois Band under Harding is generally credited with being the first to play opening fanfares from the goal line, and to form a block ‘I’ while marching down the field. Many others soon followed its example and began to form patterns on the field.

During this period measures were taken to raise the musicianship of symphonic and marching bands. As early as 1919 Harding had invited school band directors to observe his rehearsals at the University of Illinois and to discuss specific problems and repertory; in 1930 he began a series of influential band clinics. The American Bandmasters Association was organized in 1929, and the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) in 1941. The latter aimed to conduct acoustical and tonal research, improve the musicianship of college band directors, and develop a standard instrumentation (Table 6, 1960), a concept later rejected as too restrictive; it also commissioned original band music. The Canadian Bandmasters Association (later the Canadian Band Directors Association) was founded in 1931.

World War II curtailed the school band movement, but returning veterans inspired its revival in Canada and the USA. Many new works were commissioned by E.F. Goldman (from such composers as Thomson, Piston, Mennin, Persichetti, Creston, Morton Gould and Robert Russell Bennett) and through the League of Composers and the American Bandmasters Association. Marching bands emphasized brass and percussion more and more as football half-time shows developed into elaborate pageants with bands reaching immense proportions and marching with ever higher and faster steps. Symphonic bands also increased in size (Table 6, 1948). In reaction to such developments, Frederick Fennell formed the Eastman Symphonic Wind Ensemble in 1952 (Table 6, 1952). This ensemble originally provided a pool of 45–50 players for composers, and concerts have included works ranging from chamber-sized compositions to large scale works with one player per part, from Renaissance wind music to avant-garde compositions. From 1965 the ensemble was directed by Donald Hunsberger. Symphonic bands and wind ensembles continue to flourish in schools, colleges and universities (fig.9); a 1973 survey counted some 50,000 secondary-school bands in the USA, with 2000 at institutions of higher education. By 1990 Canada had more than 5000 band directors.

Professional bands of the postwar era included the Goldman Band (Table 6, 1946), which remained active until 1980 and commissioned new works from composers such as Bergsma, Giannini and Douglas Moore, and the Detroit Concert Band, founded by Leonard B. Smith in 1946 and still active at the beginning of the 21st century. In 1956 the Ostwald Uniform Company established an award for the best band composition submitted each year to a jury of the American Bandmasters Association; winners have included James Barnes, John Barnes Chance, James Curnow, David Holsinger, Anthony Iannaccone, Robert Jager, Karl Kroeger, Timothy Mahr, Martin Mailman, Ron Nelson, Roger Nixon, Fisher Tull, Clifton Williams and Dana Wilson.

In the military, reductions in the number and size of bands continued. The World War II division band of 56 players (Table 6, 1944) replaced as many as ten regimental bands; the division or post band of the 1980s was a 40-piece multipurpose musical unit (Table 6, 1986). Following reorganization in 1994, Canada maintained four Regular Force Professional Brass & Reed bands (Table 6, 1994) The special bands of the US armed services and the service academies (such as the US Army Band and the US Military Academy Band) may have more than 140 players, choristers and support personnel, and remain the country's leading professional wind ensembles. Community bands enjoyed a revival at the end of the 20th century and some of the 2000 and more adult bands in the USA have achieved a professional level of playing. Many bands have been in existence for more than a century, and some famous names of the past have been revived: the 26th North Carolina and 1st Wisconsin Brigade bands were resurrected in the early 1960s for the Civil War Centennial, and the 3rd and 4th Continental Artillery bands for the Bicentennial in 1976. The American Band of Providence and the Great Western Band of St Paul are only two of the many bands that have taken on new life, and are again entertaining the citizens of their communities in the traditional manner.

5. Repertory.

Outside the major centres, music in the 19th century was provided to a great extent by local bands, who played an important role in the dissemination of music of all kinds. Besides marches, much of the repertory of both military and civic bands throughout the century consisted of arrangements or transcriptions of overtures, symphonies, operas and oratorios by composers including Beethoven, Weber, Rossini, Liszt, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Bruckner. Arias were performed by solo instruments while the remainder of the band took the part of the orchestra (a style of arrangement used also by Harmonie bands of the late 18th century), and each melody was introduced by a cadenza from the instrument about to be heard as a soloist. Composers encouraged the practice of transcription as it helped to disseminate their works: Wagner, for example, appointed Artur Seidel to make wind band arrangements of his latest compositions, and Rossini and Liszt asked bandmasters to arrange their works. Notable works originally composed for band include Mendelssohn's Overture op.24, first written for the spa orchestra at Bad Doberan in 1824 (in 1838 the composer re-set the work for a larger band), Wagner's Trauermusik for the funeral of Weber (1844), Meyerbeer's Fackeltänze (1842–58), Grieg's Trauermarsch zum Andenken an Richard Nordaak (1866, rev. 1878; considered by Goldman to be ‘one of the grandest works composed for band’), Saint-Saëns's march Orient et occident 1869, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Concerto for trombone and military band (1877), Variations for oboe and military band (1878) and Conzertstück for clarinet and military band (1878). In France, celebrations of the anniversary of the Revolution have inspired leading composers to write for the large orchestre d'harmonie. Outstanding works have included Reicha's Musique pour célébrer la mémoire des grandes hommes (?1809–15), Berlioz's Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) and Florent Schmitt's Dionysiaques (1914–25). Saint-Saëns, Caplet, Ibert, Auric, Milhaud, Roussel, Koechlin, Honegger, Henry Lazarus, Ida Gotkovsky and Désiré Dondeyne have also contributed such works. A special development in Germany and Austria was music for male choir with wind band: works for this combination were written by Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn (An die Künstler op.68, 1846), Schumann, Liszt and Bruckner (see W. Suppan, C(i) 1983, and Kinder, C(i) 1995). There were also works in more popular styles such as waltzes and novelty pieces. In 1861 Queen Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘as we approached the Cavalry, they began to play one of dearest Mama's marches, which they did again in marching past.’ The Duchess of Kent was only one of several royal composers of marches.

To meet the growing demand for wind band music specialist publishing houses were founded, including Louis Oertel in Hanover (1861), Bellmann and Thümer in Dresden (1866) and Boosé in London (1845). Their publications began to replace the handwritten music previously used, also helping to standardize the make-up and instrumentation of the bands.

Percy Grainger's Hill-Song no.2 (1907), Irish Tune from County Derry (1917) and Lincolnshire Posy (1940), Holst's Suites in E (1909) and F (1911), and Gordon Jacob's William Byrd Suite (1924) set new standards in original music for mixed wind band, with Holst, especially, establishing a new idiomatic style of band writing. Much of the music of this ‘English group’, is marked by the use of melodic material derived from folk songs or inspired by traditional music, and pre-Romantic harmonic structures with polyphonic features. There is a perceptible tendency to give a greater melodic role to the brass instruments, liberating them from their old roles of supporting the woodwind in tutti sections and providing fanfare-like flourishes.

The works of the English group were certainly known to Hindemith when he invited composers to write wind band works for the Donaueschingen Festival of 1926. Hindemith composed his Konzertmusik op.41 for this festival and other works included Ernst Pepping's Kleine Serenade, Krenek's Drei lustige Märsche, Ernst Toch's Spiel and Hans Gál's Promenandenmusik. While the tonal language of these works is modern, Hindemith's piece is based on a folk song (Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter) and those by Toch and Gál achieve a folk-like effect. Hindemith's idea of Gebrauchsmusik (his own term) was not at first successful in central Europe, but the works by Hindemith, Toch and Krenek were taken up in the USA, to where the three composers had emigrated during World War II. After the war these works became popular in Europe as well.

American commissions for works for wind band were received by Schoenberg (Theme and Variations, 1943), Hindemith (Symphony in B, 1951) and Krenek (Dream Sequence, 1975). Other works popular in the USA have included Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) and Concerto for piano and wind (1924), Martinů's Concertino for cello and wind ensemble (1924), Weill's Concerto for violin and wind band (1924) and Milhaud's Suite française (1944).

After World War II American influence made itself felt in Europe in scoring and instrumentation, in serious and light music. The pioneering achievements of Grainger, Holst and Hindemith might thus be said to have returned to Europe by way of the USA. Composers have included Franz Kinzl, Herbert König, Armin Suppan, Sepp Tanzer and Sepp Thaler in Austria; Jacqueline Fonteyn and André Waignein in Belgium; Désiré Dondeyne, Ida Gotkovsky and Serge Lancen in France; Paul Kühmstedt, Edmund Löffler, Albert Loritz, Ernest Majo, Hans Mielenz, Gerbert Mutter, Hermann Regner, Peter Seeger and Willy Schneider in Germany; Adrian Cruft, Joseph Horovitz, Paul Patterson, Philip Wilby and Guy Woolfenden in Great Britain; Jean Balissat, Arpad Balázs, László Dubrovay, Frigyes Hidas, Kamilló Lendvay and Iván Patachich in Hungary; Masaru Kawasaki, Kiyoshige Koyama and Toshiro Mayuzumi in Japan; Hank Badings, Gerard Boedijn, Henk van Lijnschooten, Johan de Meij, Jan van der Roost and Kes Vlak in the Netherlands; Juan Vincente Mas Quiles in Spain; Zdenek Jonák, Jindřich Paveček and Evzen Zámecnîk in Slovakia and the Czech Republic; Georgy Salnikov in Russia; and Albert Benz, Robert Blum, Jean Daetwyler, Albert Haeberling, Paul Huber, Stephan Jaeggi and Franz Königshofer in Switzerland.

3. The British brass band movement.

IV. Brass bands

1. Introduction.

2. Cavalry bands.

4. American brass bands.

5. Other brass bands.

1. Introduction.

The brass band is an ensemble usually made up exclusively of brass instruments. In Britain the term signifies a specific genre which can be explained in terms of its history, instrumentation, repertory and performance idiom. This British model has been imitated in various parts of the world. A looser usage refers to any ensemble made up primarily of brass instruments, but the term is not synonymous with other commonly used terms such as ‘brass quintet’ or ‘brass ensemble’. Almost always this looser meaning also signifies music making that is amateur and linked with vernacular traditions. So, taking both meanings, it can be said that there are brass bands throughout the world, including many in non-Western countries and cultures. Because all brass bands use valved instruments it follows that none originate – in their present form – earlier than the 19th century.

2. Cavalry bands.

Though cavalry regiments in the 18th century occasionally employed a band of woodwind and horns, they did not forsake the traditional corps of trumpets and kettledrums, which has survived in many countries to this day. It also formed the nucleus of the true cavalry band, instituted in France under Napoleon but cultivated with greater enthusiasm in Germany and Austria. Natural trumpets in E dominated this Trompetenmusik, but the introduction of trombone or serpent supplied a diatonic bass and horns enriched the middle range. The Keyed bugle, patented by the Bandmaster of the Cavan Militia, Joseph Haliday, supplied a much-needed brass melody instrument; it became a virtuoso instrument in its own right and was favoured especially in the USA.

Stölzel's valve trumpets and valved Tenorhorn and Basshorn were regarded specifically as cavalry instruments in Prussia. Under Wilhelm Wieprecht the cavalry band grew into the type of combination illustrated in ex.4: the cornet in B (‘Cornett in B’) is the Berlin type, almost indistinguishable from the flugelhorn, and ‘piccolo cornet’ is the smaller size; the cornet in E (‘Cornett in Es’) is the bell-to-front alto horn and the euphonium (Tenorbass) is pitched a 4th lower; the trumpets (Trombe), the heart of the band, are all valved; and the basses would have consisted of the new Moritz tubas.

Cavalry bands elsewhere varied the pattern: in Austria, Italy and France trumpets were of special importance (a typical French cavalry band of the First Empire had 16 trumpets, six horns, three trombones and kettledrums); in England the cavalry band was constituted like that of the infantry.

3. The British brass band movement.

Brass bands, in the form by which they are recognized today, originated in the Victorian period. Some writers have sought to establish a continuous link between them and earlier types of communal, instrumental music making such as waits and church choir bands, but such links are tenuous. Though brass bands existed in Britain from at least the 1830s, most of these very early bands were private or professional. The earliest and most celebrated private brass band is probably the Cyfarthfa Band, which was founded in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, by the industrialist R.T. Crawshay, in 1838. Amateur, working-class brass bands became popular from the 1840s. The greater availability of piston-valve instruments was an important factor, and the acquisition of the British franchise for Adolphe Sax's design of instruments by the Distin family in 1844 may have been particularly influential in this respect. Valved instruments were easier to play than keyed instruments, and because of economies gained through the scale of production, the availability of hire-purchase schemes, and other favourable economic circumstances, they were affordable to sectors of the population that would previously have been unable to buy sophisticated musical instruments. By the middle of the century many working-class British people had, for the first time, a modest quantity of free time and some disposable income. They were encouraged to engage in music making activities, which were perceived by their social superiors as respectable, rational recreations.

Brass bands were founded in a number of different ways. Some were the recipients of direct industrial sponsorship, as was the Black Dyke Mills Band which was established in Queenshead (now Queensbury), Yorkshire, in 1855 by the textile manufacturer John Foster. Others were formed by public subscription or through an affiliation with a working-class organization, such as a mechanics' institute. From 1859 several bands became attached to the Volunteer Movement, but most of these associations were pragmatic rather than patriotic and were seldom permanent.

By the end of the 19th century most brass bands aspired to a single format and style. Magazines such as The British Bandsman (founded in 1887 and still the main specialist periodical) disseminated common musical values, and by this time the term ‘brass band movement’ was widely used. However, it was the proliferation of contests – the central, identifying feature of the movement – that was the most influential element in raising standards and creating a common idiom.

Contests of the modern type originated in the 1840s as professional entertainment promotions. The composer and entrepreneur Enderby Jackson is credited with being the most important figure in establishing these events. An ‘Open’ contest was held at the Belle Vue Gardens, Manchester, from 1853 and many national, regional and local contests developed. It was the instrumental line-ups favoured by the three most successful contest band conductors of the 19th century – John Gladney, Alexander Owen and Edwin Swift – that led to the adoption of a standard instrumental line-up which is still used today: soprano cornet in E, four solo or 1st cornets, repiano cornet, two 2nd cornets, two 3rd cornets, all in B; 1st, 2nd and 3rd tenor horns in E; 1st and 2nd baritones in B; 1st and 2nd euphoniums in B; 1st and 2nd tenor trombones; bass trombone; two basses in E and two basses in B. Percussion instruments have frequently been used in concerts and for marching but their use in contests has not always been permitted.

From the late 19th century a printed repertory for this instrumentation replaced local, bespoke arrangements made by bandmasters, and the simple, printed music which had been available as subscription ‘journals’ from the late 1830s. Arrangements and transcriptions have always been a central feature of brass band repertory but many original pieces have been written too. However, very few original works for brass band were written in the 19th century. The earliest surviving substantial work is probably Joseph Parry's Tydfil Overture (c1879), written for the Cyfarthfa Band, but other less ambitious pieces such as Enderby Jackson's Yorkshire Waltzes (1856) also survive. In the 20th century composers such as Elgar, Holst, Howells, Vaughan Williams, Bantock, Birtwistle and Henze have written for the brass band, but other more specialist composers such as Percy Fletcher, Cyril Jenkins, Eric Ball, Denis Wright, Gilbert Vinter and Edward Gregson have provided the central core of the repertory. Most of the major works for brass bands have either originated as, or become, test-pieces for national contests.

Though brass bands have been particularly strong in the north of England they are found throughout Britain and many receive commercial sponsorship. The most influential figure in the brass band movement in the 20th century was probably Harry Mortimer, a member of a dynasty of brass band musicians, who became a brilliant cornet soloist and an orchestral trumpeter before taking responsibility for the broadcasting of brass bands for the BBC. For the same reason that brass bands were popular with working-class people in the 19th century – the robustness and cheapness of the instruments, the ease with which they could be learned, the fact that when played together they easily produce a homogenous sonority – they have remained a popular and valuable form of music making in schools.

Since the earliest days of its foundation the Salvation Army has used brass bands. The Fry family from Salisbury formed the first Salvationist band in 1878, and since then Salvation Army bands have been formed throughout the world. For almost a century the Salvation Army produced its own instruments and music, but in the mid-1960s the instrument-manufacturing operation was wound up. At that time Salvationist bands, along with brass bands in general, relinquished the characteristic sharp pitch in favour of the standard a' = 440.

The high point of the brass band movement, as far as the number of bands and players is concerned, came in the late 19th century. But most of the major developments in the repertory have occurred since then. Despite the many alternative attractions posed by the 20th-century leisure industry, brass bands have retained an important and distinctive place in British musical life. In the 19th century they were an important agency for disseminating instrumental art music to working-class people. In the 20th they have tended to occupy a position somewhere between art and popular music, and some music colleges have incorporated brass band studies into their curricula. Contesting remains a fundamental part of their ethos and many of their musical values and practices are exclusive. It is likely that the vast majority of British professional orchestral brass players in the 20th century had their musical origins in brass bands.

4. American brass bands.

In the early 1830s many American bands, among them Thomas Dodworth's City Band of New York (later the Dodworth Band), the Boston Brass Band and the Providence Brass Band, changed to all-brass instrumentation. Such bands included keyed and valved instruments, posthorns, bugles, trombones and ophicleides. Over the next two decades manufacturers such as Thomas D. Paine, John F. Stratton, Isaac Fiske, Samuel Graves, J. Lathrop Allen and E.G. Wright produced a family of conical-bore valved bugles with deep-cupped mouthpieces similar to those developed by Sax in Paris; the new design permitted ease of execution and accurate intonation, and produced an even, mellow timbre throughout the range. This homogeneous brass family soon supplanted mixed woodwind and heterogeneous brass groups. The change to all-brass instrumentation was so swift and complete that by 1856 the editor of Dwight's Journal of Music complained that ‘all is brass now-a-days – nothing but brass’. The terms used to denote the new instruments were loosely applied; bands using them were called cornet, saxhorn or brass bands. Besides bell-front and bell-upward instruments, a valved over-the shoulder family was developed. Allen Dodworth claimed that these instruments were first introduced by his family in 1838; he explained that they were intended for military bands ‘as they throw all the tone to those who are marching to it’, but for general purposes those with their bells upward were ‘most convenient’. He also advised that ‘care should be taken to have all the bells one way’.

After the reduction of US Army infantry bands to ten privates and a chief musician in 1832 these bands became all-brass. In 1845 the regulations authorized an increase to 16 musicians, and since most civilian bands were associated with militia organizations patterned on army models, this change had a significant impact on the size of these bands as well.

Brass bands flourished in the 1850s: one writer estimated there were some 3000 bands with more than 60,000 members in existence in the years preceding the Civil War (Felts, C(ii)1966–7). While musicianship in amateur groups varied widely, many professional bands performed at the highest level. The Salem (Massachusetts) Brass Band, led in the 1850s by Kendall and later by Patrick S. Gilmore, the Boston Brass Band, led by Eben Flagg (fig.10), and the American Brass Band in Providence led by Joseph C. Greene, were highly reputed. Russel Munger's Great Western Band of St Paul and Christopher Bach's Band of Milwaukee were well known among the many bands organized in the newly settled Midwestern states.

Little printed band music from this period is extant; most bands played from manuscript copies. Published piano music frequently included the statement ‘as performed by [some famous band]’ to increase sales, and often a note stating that parts for military band – presumably manuscript – were available from the publisher. In 1844 Elias Howe added several brass band arrangements to his collection of dances and other light numbers. In 1846 E.K. Eaton published Twelve Pieces of Harmony for Military Brass Bands, an excellent compilation for 17-piece ensemble that demanded advanced technical facility not only from the player of the high E bugle but from the entire group (for instrumentation, see Table 6 above, 1846). To meet the ‘increasing demand for such a work, caused by the rapid advancement of the brass bands of our country’, Allen Dodworth published his Brass Band School in 1853. Besides the rudiments of music, he provided fingering charts, advice on rehearsing and choosing an instrument, and military regulations, tactics and camp duties; he also included 11 popular airs and marches arranged for a band of 12 players, with drums and cymbals (ex.5). The music may be played by as few as six, or, with doubling, as many as 21. In 1854 G.W.E. Friederich published his Brass Band Journal, a collection of 24 pieces with similar instrumentation, and in 1859 W.C. Peters & Sons published Peters' Sax-Horn Journal. These collections consisted principally of patriotic songs, popular airs, arrangements of songs by Stephen C. Foster, operatic excerpts, waltzes, polkas, schottisches and marches. The music was intended for a large audience and was therefore not technically difficult. The better professional bands relied on extensive manuscript collections.

At the beginning of the Civil War, infantry regiments were authorized to have bands of 26 musicians (18 for cavalry regiments), but in 1862 in the intersets of economy regimental bands were abolished and brigade bands of 16 musicians authorized. Enforcing regulations in so large an army was difficult, and some regimental, militia and post bands continued to serve until the end of the war. The band of the 107th US Colored Infantry (fig.11), typical in size and instrumentation of the many brigade bands in service, was a regimental unit.

Civilian brass bands proliferated after the Civil War. At a time when there were few orchestras, a band was seen as a status symbol: ‘it is a fact not to be denied that the existence of a good brass band in any town or community is at once an indication of enterprise among its people, and an evidence that a certain spirit of taste and refinement pervades the masses’ (Patton, D(i)1875). Some Indian brass bands were formed in British Columbia in the 1880s and 90s. In the USA, however, except for Salvation Army bands, the brass band period gradually drew to a close with the coming of Patrick S. Gilmore who, with the standards and instrumentation set by his mixed wind band, inspired other bands throughout the country to reintroduce the woodwind instruments (see §III, 4, above).

In 1982 Perry Watson spearheaded a movement to introduce British brass bands into North America. The North American Brass Band Association (NABBA) was formed in 1983 to ‘foster, promote, and otherwise encourage the establishment, growth, and development of amateur and professional British-style brass bands throughout the United States and Canada’. The NABBA holds yearly graded competitions (Youth through advanced Championship level). In 1996 there were more than 70 member bands in the USA and Canada and more than 1400 individual members. The NABBA publishes a journal-newsletter, Brass Band Bridge. Some contemporary American composers who have written for the British brass band are James Curnow, Bruce Broughton, Joseph Turrin and Stephen Bulla.

5. Other brass bands.

The British brass band idiom is imitated most strongly in those parts of the world, such as Australasia, where British colonization was strong in the 19th century. Many European countries have brass band traditions, and some have cloned the British model. In general, the instrumentation of other European bands is not predictable; they are sometimes less serious in their quest for virtuosity, less motivated by a contesting ethos, and individual bands tend to relate more to their own communities than to a broad national movement as in Britain. This does not, however, mean that these traditions are less robust, or less important in the musical life of their countries. Brass bands in central Europe, particularly Bulgaria, are extremely strong and well organized, and their repertories often expose strong ties with other forms of vernacular music. The brass bands of some Scandinavian countries have a strong tradition. This is especially true in Finland, where the form known as Torviseitsikko can be reliably traced to the 1870s. Torviseitsikko is, in its classic form, a brass septet made up of three cornets, tenor horn, baritone, euphonium and tuba.

In many countries brass bands have tended to reflect an alchemy of vernacular traditions and aspects of the received art music values imported with colonizing powers. In several Asian, African and Pacific regions instrumental line-ups are often similar to those of British bands, and marches, transcriptions and other music from the Western repertory may be performed. But Western playing styles are not always imitated. Often these bands have developed their own distinctive sound-aesthetic, and some include percussion instruments to provide accompanying rhythmic figurations that owe more to local traditions and customs than to a colonial inheritance. Brass bands are particularly popular in South Asia, though many of these include clarinets and saxophones. Indian bands – sometimes known locally as ‘band parties’ – are owned and run by entrepreneurs called māliks. They are employed for various functions, particularly weddings, and it has been estimated that there are 500,000–800,000 people in India involved in such bands. Here, as in other parts of the world, the use of Western brass instruments does not obscure more indigenous musical traditions and functions. Repertory in South Asia is almost entirely indigenous, often deriving from film music (see India, §VIII, 1(v)).

V. Jazz bands

Each successive style of jazz has produced its own characteristic instrumental formations to suit its musical demands. Hence there is no such thing as a standard jazz band, but rather a historical chain of different combinations with certain classical groupings emerging as paramount. However different their instrumentation, all these groupings have one common principle: the distinction between the rhythm section (consisting of piano, drums, bass and optional guitar or banjo), and the melody section (including not only the brass and reed instruments, but also the vibraphone, electric guitar, etc.). Despite the many changes in instrumentation over the years, and although the capability of ‘rhythm’ players to improvise full-scale solos has increased, this basic distinction between rhythm and melody sections is still valid. Since about 1935 a distinction has also been made between a ‘combo’ and a ‘band’. A combo is a small formation of up to seven or eight players (though usually no more than five), whereas the term ‘band’ is generally reserved for larger groups. (For further discussion and illustration, see Jazz.

1. The New Orleans or Dixieland band.

Recent research has discovered many regional variants and corresponding differences of instrumentation in early jazz. Jazz instrumentation was to a large extent dependent on the social circumstances surrounding the performance: violins might be appropriate for the indoor, social occasions of the white or Creole middle classes, but not for outdoor funerals or cane-cutting contests, where black brass bands predominated. By 1917, however, when the first jazz recordings were issued, white New Orleans musicians had settled on a certain standard combination consisting of three melody instruments (trumpet or cornet, clarinet and trombone) and two rhythm instruments (piano and drums). This combination was chosen by the first recorded jazz group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; their extraordinary popular success spawned an enormous number of imitators throughout the world, known collectively as ‘The Fives’. However, early photographs and recordings of black New Orleans groups sometimes reveal quite different forces: King Oliver’s 1923 recordings added a banjo and second cornet to the five-man Dixieland group; Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives of 1925 dispensed entirely with drums; and ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton’s widely varying ensembles of the 1920s almost always included a tuba or double bass. Although Morton sometimes called on as many as ten musicians, the polyphonic basis of New Orleans jazz made a small number of melody instruments of differing timbres desirable, and by the time this style was revived in the late 1930s a six-piece combination consisting of trumpet or cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano, drums and double bass had become standard.

2. Big band.

From the mid-1920s to about 1950 the jazz orchestra was continually enlarged. It was necessary to accommodate the many emerging soloists in an ensemble with written, or at least fixed, accompaniment. The number of instrumental combinations attempted were many and varied, but by 1928 both Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson in New York had established identical formations consisting of a four-piece rhythm section, three trumpets, two trombones and a multi-instrument reed section of three players, who could double on the clarinet and any member of the saxophone family. Although it had occasionally been used in New Orleans jazz, the saxophone was the most important permanent new addition to the jazz band. It gradually took over the ensemble function of the clarinet, which was reserved for solos or special colouristic effects; by about 1945 the clarinet had become a rarity in big band arrangements and the saxophone the most favoured instrument of younger jazz musicians.

Both the Ellington and Henderson bands clearly divided the melody instruments into brass and reed sections, and this distinction was even more evident in the South-West and Kansas City groups which began to dominate ensemble jazz from the mid-1930s. By 1935 most large jazz bands consisted of 14 players: a four-man rhythm section (with guitar instead of banjo, and double bass instead of the earlier brass or reed bass instruments), a brass section of three trumpets and three trombones, and a four-piece reed section. The instrumental soloists were drawn from the various sections of the band, and some groups regularly featured vocalists. The 14-piece big band has proved remarkably versatile, as is shown, for example, by the wide range of colours produced by the Ellington-Strayhorn groups. During the 1940s, and particularly in Stan Kenton’s ‘progressive’ bands, the numbers were expanded to five trumpets (one a high-note specialist), four trombones and five saxophones. This combination has served as the basis of most big band jazz ever since, as well as the many ‘stage bands’ found in North American high schools and colleges. Variations include the addition of horns and tuba to Claude Thornhill’s band, the use of bass trombone and tuba in Shorty Rogers’s groups and, since the advent of electronic amplification, the appearance of flutes in the ‘reed’ section. The oboe and bassoon, on the other hand, have never been incorporated comfortably into the big band setting; and although string sections appeared regularly in ‘sweet’ dance bands of the 1930s, their use in big bands is generally regarded by jazz musicians as a concession to popular taste.

3. Swing and bop combos.

As swing-band arrangements of the late 1930s became more commercialized and stereotyped it became customary for jazz musicians to perform in smaller group settings. These groups were generally drawn from larger bands: there are many recordings of Count Basie’s sidemen using his celebrated four-piece rhythm section, and similar Ellington sub-groups. Benny Goodman’s first chamber ensemble was a trio of piano, clarinet and drums, to which he later added vibraphone, electric guitar and double bass; and Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five sometimes featured a harpsichord instead of a piano. One especially enduring combination was the trio of piano, drums and guitar or double bass explored by Nat ‘King’ Cole from 1939; there was also some experimentation with duos, such as the Duke Ellington–Jimmy Blanton partnership in recordings made in 1940.

The bop style developed in the early 1940s from these smaller swing groups; since it was almost entirely an improvised art, there was no need for a large ensemble. Furthermore, the complex rhythmic interaction and harmonic explorations of the players rendered the rhythm guitar obsolete, and it was consequently dropped from the rhythm section, just as the clarinet and trombone largely disappeared from the melody instruments. The classic bop combo consisted of two ‘horns’ (usually trumpet and tenor or alto saxophone) and a rhythm section of piano, double bass and drums; any instrument might be called on to play solos. Innumerable bop and hard bop groups of the 1940s and 1950s followed this arrangement, and it has become the standard vehicle for jazz instruction at conservatories and universities. Attempts by musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie to transfer the bop style to a big band setting were singularly unsuccessful, possibly because a closer rapport between performers is necessary.

4. Cool and West Coast ensembles.

While bop relied on a standardized small group, the cool and West Coast styles of jazz thrived on unusual combinations of instruments, for example the various nonets and ‘tentettes’ of Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis and teddy Charles, the chamber groups of jimmy Giuffre, and Mulligan’s ‘pianoless’ quartets, which consisted of baritone saxophone, bass, drums, and trumpet or valve trombone. Perhaps the most important ‘cool’ arranger for jazz band was Gil Evans, who made full use of symphonic wind instruments such as the piccolo, tuba, bassoon and bass clarinet, and also employed instruments even more unusual to jazz, such as the harp. Evans’s and other cool groups produced music of high artistic value, yet their unusual instrumental combinations were seldom adopted by later musicians.

5. Free jazz.

Free-jazz musicians of the 1960s were largely content to explore further solo possibilities of familiar jazz instruments. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, they systematically expanded jazz instrumentation in several directions at once to include previously untried variants of conventional instruments (e.g. Don Cherry's ‘pocket trumpet’), new inventions or personal adaptations (e.g. Roland Kirk’s ‘stritch’ and ‘manzello’, both modifications of the saxophone) and a vast number of exotic instruments and noise-makers reminiscent of the novelty effects of the 1920s, ranging from kazoos and harmonicas to slide whistles and steer horns. Many of these were employed as much for theatrical effect as for their acoustical properties. At the same time, there was a large influx of instruments from non-American (especially African) cultures, signifying the increasing internationalization of this music. The size of the groups ranged widely from intimate duos to Sun Ra’s twenty-piece ensembles, and a new sub-genre emerged in the saxophone quartet. As a rule, however, free-jazz musicians distinctly avoided electric instruments and electronic distortion, and by the late 1980s they had returned to variants of more familiar combo formats.

6. Fusion groupings.

New instrumentation was a key feature of the jazz fusion music which arose after 1970, combining elements of jazz and rock. This was apparent in the electronic amplification of the entire ensemble and particularly in the use of electric bass guitar, electric piano or synthesizers, and distortion devices such as wah-wah pedals, fuzz bass and bend bars. Another instance of the influence of rock was the new solo importance accorded to the electric guitar, which supplanted the saxophone to some extent. Additional percussion instruments, especially Latin American instruments such as congas, claves, gourds and berimbaus, were quite frequently added for colouristic effect. The number of players in jazz fusion groups varied widely from the four regular members of Weather Report to the massed rhythm sections in Miles Davis’s groups of the early 1970s, which often called for two electric pianos, two drum kits, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, bass clarinet and much additional percussion to accompany a small number of improvising soloists.

7. Summary.

Today all the styles of jazz history are still being avidly cultivated, and with them their characteristic ensembles: the six-piece New Orleans ensemble among amateurs and semi-professionals, the big band at high school and jazz clinics, the bop combo at jazz clubs and concert circuits, and avant-garde groupings in the loft scene and European festivals. The timbral experiments of the 1970s have left a permanent mark on the jazz drum kit and the use of ancillary percussion, and the electric bass guitar and keyboard have replaced their acoustic counterparts in the big band. At the end of the 20th century, although the eclectic and international character of jazz makes the precise constitution of the modern jazz band difficult to define, offshoots of the standard bop combo, divided into two or three melody instruments and rhythm section, are still very much in evidence.

VI. Rock bands.

In structural terms, the foremost aim of a rock band's instrumentation is to enable the occupation of four distinct textural layers. These may identified as: the explicit ‘beat’ layer, the harmonic ‘bass’, the ‘tune’ and the harmonic ‘filler’. The first of these is the function of the drums or other unpitched percussion; the second is supplied by the bass guitar (or double bass or, very occasionally, a keyboard instrument); the third may be heard through a solo voice or through a melodic instrument such as a solo guitar, a keyboard, saxophone, violin or flute; while the fourth can be the preserve of one or more guitars or keyboards, sometimes supplemented with or substituted by an orchestration such as a horn or string section, or backing voices. Within this list can be found those instruments which dominate the rock ensemble: electric guitar, electric bass guitar, drum kit and keyboards (organ, piano or synthesizers). Occasionally, an unusual instrument (in a rock context) can help to define a band's sound, e.g. flute (Jethro Tull), violin (early King Crimson), or organ and piano combined (The Band).

As particular band formations have become established they have remained open to appropriation by other bands, often with very different stylistic goals. This article discusses the instruments that are played by members of rock bands and which are the basis of their sound in live performance. Once a band enters a recording studio there is limitless potential for adding the instruments or voices of session musicians who for economic or aesthetic reasons may not travel with the band on tour, or specially created sounds which, until the advent of sequencers, could not be recreated on stage. A live performance by a rock band and the creation of a recording of the same music by the same group may be approached as two completely different art forms (see Pop, §II).

The ways that the early rock and roll bands of the 1950s approached the layering in their instrumentation varied according to the influence of the musical tradition from which each band arose. Thus, Chuck Berry inherited the guitar-dominated line-up of Chicago rhythm and blues (solo voice, one or two amplified guitars, double bass, drums, and occasionally piano), making much use of ‘call and response’ phrases between his voice and his guitar. Fats Domino's New Orleans-rooted style combined a dominant piano (playing a rhythmically articulated ‘filler’) with a sizable horn section (tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpet), bass and drums. Bill Haley's band, the Comets, which came from the jive and western swing traditions, consisted of guitars, saxophone, double bass and drums. Although in this period the individual identities of sidemen were not considered to be particularly important, certain instrumentalists (such as Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's guitarist) played a crucial role in defining the singer's sound.

The skiffle bands of mid-1950s Britain emphasized the role of the guitar at the expense of the piano, partly out of a desire to imitate the ‘wild’ American rock and rollers, and partly out of a need (for aesthetic as well as economic reasons) for instruments that were both cheap and portable. The line-up of their successor, the ‘beat combo’ (short for ‘combination’; by the 1990s the term was used only derogatively), was formalized in the late 50s by the Shadows as two guitars, electric bass, guitar and drums. The roles of the two guitars were distinct: Bruce Welch played rhythm guitar, largely strumming conventional chord shapes with rhythmic definition, while Hank Marvin played lead, exploiting the instrument's upper register and its ability to sustain sound.

Early rock bands in the 1960s tended to organize their sound either around guitars (e.g. the Rolling Stones and the Beatles) or around keyboards (the Animals), depending on their principal American stylistic models. The difference in technique is crucial to the sound of the band: whereas a keyboard player can perform separable lines simultaneously (fulfilling both ‘filler’ and ‘tune’ functions) and many varieties of chord voicings, the guitar's strengths lie in picking patterns, repeatable chord ‘shapes’ and, following developments in amplification in the mid-60s, in the physical control of feedback by the guitarist as an expressive device. From this period onwards, in styles where the influence of rhythm and blues or soul was prominent, for example in the work of Van Morrison, the keyboard-dominated ensemble was supplemented by two to six ‘horns’ (various combinations of trumpets, saxophones and trombones).

In the early music of the Kinks (1965–6), the role of the rhythm guitar dwindled to the point where it simply provided riffs (very short, repeatable melodic ideas which minimally outline the song's harmonies). In the contemporaneous work of the Who the rhythm guitar was dispensed with altogether and Pete Townshend tended to cover both guitar roles, although he did not play many of the florid solos associated with other virtuoso lead guitarists of the day. Indeed, their song Substitute (1966) is notable in that the ‘guitar solo’ was taken by the bass player, John Entwistle. The use of controlled feedback on the guitar enhanced its power to fill out musical space, such that the Who's practice of using a single guitar, bass and drums was developed by the end of the 60s into the so-called ‘power trio’, defined by bands such as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in which one or more of the players also took up the vocal duties. This combination was subsequently employed by the Jam (in the late 1970s) and by Nirvana (in the late 80s), where it connoted a return to the ‘no frills’ raw essentials of music, allied with an aggressive, confrontational aesthetic. The unavailability of overdubbing facilities in live performance meant that some compromises had to be made: on record, Cream's Eric Clapton would often add a rhythm guitar part in addition to playing lead (hence the differences between the studio and live recordings on the album Wheels of Fire, 1969), while Led Zeppelin's bass player John Paul Jones would sometimes move over to the organ in live performance, requiring exceptional power from the drummer John Bonham to cover the lack of the bass layer.

There was a resurgence in the use of the keyboard in rock with the development of Progressive rock (also in the late 60s), with its stylistic references to European art music, too foreign to the blues-based guitar styles of the time. Keyboard players such as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman transplanted the visual spectacle of the guitar virtuosos to the keyboard. A concurrent trend was towards using two lead guitars (e.g. Derek and the Dominos, the Allman Brothers Band, and Wishbone Ash); this has survived as an aspect of ‘stadium rock’ (Big Country) and also in heavy metal (Saxon).

In the late 70s, a new guitar-based style flourished: Punk rock. Its nihilistic, audience-disdaining stagecraft was an antidote to the lavish spectacle and huge touring forces employed by groups such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer (who were accompanied on tour by three massive trucks, a revolving drum kit and even an entire orchestra of individually microphoned musicians). The second resurgence of the keyboard was due to the new generation of cheap and portable synthesizers and sequencers of the late 1970s, as bands such as the Human League went on stage with everything except the vocals pre-recorded (i.e. sequenced for live playback). Within the next two decades this approach to performance became dominant in the dance music of the nightclub scene.

One aspect of the use of synthesizers and sequencers, particularly since the invention of MIDI, has been the ability to reproduce during live performance a host of sounds originally created in the recording studio. A line-up of keyboard and guitar can be balanced in different ways: equally (early Yes), with the keyboard dominant (Elvis Costello and the Attractions) or with the guitar dominant (early Deep Purple).

The early 1980s tended to be overrun with bands made up entirely of synthesizers and sequencers (e.g. Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and Ultravox). Against this background, a space was left for a new generation of bands who paraded the ‘authenticity’ of their line-ups to create a sense that their emotional expression was to be trusted. For Bruce Springsteen's seven-piece touring band (including two keyboard players), the song lyrics and Springsteen's emotional intensity were crucial. Bands like U2 or, in the 1990s, the Manic Street Preachers, emphasized the idea that the guitarist is directly, physically in touch with his or her sound-producing source in a way that the synthesizer player is not. A similar desire or perceived need appears to have promoted the occasional return of established artists such as Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart to acoustic-only performances, most famously in MTV's ‘unplugged’ concert series.

Another line of development, exemplified by British ‘indie’ bands such as the Smiths in the early 80s and the Inspiral Carpets later in the decade, reinvestigated the classic guitar-led line-ups and used them in new musical contexts. Bands such as the Stone Roses adopted Hendrix-inspired guitar techniques, and guitar-work was prominent in the various waves of Britpop in the 1990s (The Verve, Oasis, Suede, etc.). The strong sense of recalling the 1960s has also led to a resurgence of the use of analogue keyboards (Pulp uses a Farfisa organ in its line-up) and even small string sections (Catatonia).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: general

G. Kastner: Manuel général de musique militaire (Paris, 1848/R)

A. Vessella: La banda dalle origini fino ai nostri giorni (Milan, 1935)

F. Fennell: Time and the Winds (Kenosha, WI, 1954)

A. Baines: Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967/R)

Journal of Band Research (1964–)

Brass Quarterly (Durnham, NH, 1957/8–1963/4); contd as Brass and Woodwind Quarterly (Durnham, NH, 1966/8–1969)

A.G. Wright and S. Newcomb: Bands of the World (Evanston, IL, 1970)

W. Suppan: Lexikon des Blasmusikwesens (Freiburg, 1973, 4/1994 with A. Suppan)

D. Whitwell: The History and Literature of the Wind Band and Wind Ensemble (Northridge, CA, 1982–4)

D. Whitwell: A Concise History of the Wind Band (Northridge, CA, 1985)

Journal of the Historic Brass Society (1988–)

A. Hofer: Blasmusikforschung: eine kritische Einführung (Darmstadt, 1992)

W. Suppan, ed.: Internationale Gesellschaft zur Erforschung und Förderung der Blasmusik: Kongress X: Felkirch 1992

M. Anesa: Dizionario della Musica Italiana per Banda (Bergamo, 1993)

F.J. Cipolla and D. Hunsberger, eds.: The Wind Ensemble and its Repertoire (Rochester, NY, 1994)

T. Herbert and J. Wallace, eds.: The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (Cambridge, 1997)

b: history before 1800

H.F. von Fleming: Der Vollkommene Teutsche Soldat (Leipzig, 1726)

J.C. Hinrichs: Entstehung, Fortgang und ietzige Beschaffenheit der russischen Iagdmusik (St. Petersburg, 1796/R)

E. Bowles: ‘Haut and Bas: the Grouping of Musical Instruments in the Middle Ages’, MD, viii (1954), 115–40

T. Volek: ‘Pražké muzikantské cechy, městší hudebníci a trubači v druhé polovině 18. století’, [Prague musicians’ guilds, town musicians and trumpeter players in the second half of the 18th century], MMC, no.6 (1958), 75–93

E. Bowles: ‘Musical Instruments in Civic Processions during the Middle Ages’, AcM, xxxiii (1961), 147–61

R. Rastall: ‘The Minstrels in the English Royal Households, 25 Edward I – 1 Henry VIII: an Inventory’, RMARC, iv (1964), 1–41

K. Polk: ‘Municipal Wind Music in Flanders in the Late Middle Ages’, BWQ, ii (1969), 1–15

W. Salmen, ed.: Der Sozialstatus des Berufsmusikers vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Kassel, 1971); Eng. trans., rev., 1983 as The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century [incl. H.W. Schwab: ‘Zur sozialen Stellung des Stadtmusikanten’, 9–25]

R. Hellyer: Harmoniemusik: Music for the Small Wind Band in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (diss., U. of Oxford, 1973)

S.M.G. Sandman: Wind Band Music under Louis XIV: the Philidor Collection, Music for the Military and the Court (diss., Stanford U., 1974)

D. Whitwell: Band Music of the French Revolution (Tutzing, 1979)

E. Croft-Murray: ‘The Wind-Band in England, 1540–1840’, Music and Civilisation, ed. T.C. Mitchell (London, 1980), 135–79

W.F. Prizer: ‘Bernardino Piffaro e I pifferi e tromboni di Mantova: strumenti a fiato in una corte italiana’, RIM xvi (1981), 151–84

H.W. Schwab: Die Anfänge des weltlichen Berufsmuikertums in der mittelalterlichen Stadt (Kassel, 1982)

W. Salmen: Der Spielmann im Mittelalter (Innsbruck, 1983)

R. Hellyer: ‘The Wind Ensembles of the Esterházy Princes, 1761–1813’, Haydn Yearbook 1984, 5–92

M.J. Lomas: Amateur Brass and Wind Bands in Southern England Between the Late 18th Century and circa 1900 (diss., Open U., 1990)

E. Preinsperger: ‘Verzeichnis der Noten für Harmonie-Musik und Blasorchester in der Festetics-Sammlung in Keszthely, Ungarn’, Musica pannonica, ii (1993), 1–159

S. Owens: The Württemberg Hofkapelle c.1680–1721 (diss., Victoria U. of Wellington, 1995)

F.A. D'Accone: The Civic Muse: Music and Musicians in Siena during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Chicago, 1997)

J. Pöschl: Jagdmusik: Kontinuität und Entwicklung in der europäischen Geschichte (Tutzing, 1997)

c: mixed wind bands

(i) General

C. Mandel: A Treatise on the Instrumentation of Military Bands (London, 1859)

A. Kalkbrenner: Wilhelm Wieprecht, Direktor: sein Leben und Wirken nebst einem Auszug seiner Schriften (Berlin, 1882)

A. Kalkbrenner: Die Organisation der Militärmusikchöre aller Länder (Hanover, 1884)

A. Vessella: Studi di strumentazione per banda (Milan, 1897)

H.G. Farmer: Memoires of the Royal Artillery Band (London, 1904)

G. Miller: The Miltary Band (London, 1912)

H.E. Adkins: Treatise on the Military Band (London, 1931, 3/1958)

H.G. Farmer: History of the Royal Artillery Band, 1726–1953 (London, 1954)

R. van Yperen: De Nederlandse militaire muziek (Bussum, 1966)

E. Rameis: Die österreichische Militärmusik von ihren Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1918, ed. E. Brixel (Tutzing, 1976)

J. Eckhardt: Zivil- und Militärmusiker im Wilhelminischen Reich (Regensburg, 1978)

A. Suppan: Repertorium der Märsche für Blasorchester (Tutzing, 1982–90)

W. Suppan, ed.: Bläserklang und Blasinstrumente im Schaffen Richard Wagners: Seggau 1983 [incl. W. Suppan: ‘Anton Bruckner und das Blasorchester’, 189–219]

B. Habla: Besetzung und Instrumentation des Blasorchesters seit der Erfindung der Ventile für Blechblasinstrumente bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg in Österreich und Deutschland (Tutzing, 1990)

T. Akiyama: Band Music Index 552 (Tokyo, 1992)

L. Marosi: Két évszázad katonazenéje Magyorországon, 1741–1945 [Two centuries of military music in Hungary, 1741–1945] (Budapest, 1994)

A. Carlini: ‘Le bande musicale nell' Italia dell'ottocento’, RIM, xxx (1995), 85–133

K.W. Kinder: ‘Franz Liszt's Music for Voices and Winds’, Journal of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, ii (1995) [whole issue]

W. Baethge and W. Suppan: ‘Military Musicians in Japan During the Early Meiji-Era (since 1868)’, Journal of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, iii (1996), 13–32

(ii) North America

EMC2 (H. Kallman and others)

W.H. Dana: J.W. Pepper's Practical Guide and Study to the Secret of Arranging Band Music (Philadelphia, 1878)

O. Comettant: La musique de la Garde republicaine en Amérique (Paris, 1894)

A.A. Clappé: The Wind-Band and its Instruments (New York, 1911/R)

J.P. Sousa: Marching Along (Boston, 1928, rev. 2/1994 by P.E. Bierley)

E.F. Goldman: Band Betterment (New York, 1934)

R.F. Dvorak: The Band on Parade (New York, 1937)

R.F. Goldman: The Band's Music (New York, 1938)

R.F. Goldman: The Concert Band (New York, 1946)

H.W. Schwartz: Bands of America (Garden City, NY, 1957/R)

H. Kallmann: A History of Music in Canada, 1534–1914 (Toronto, 1960/R)

R.F. Goldman: The Wind Band (Boston, 1961/R)

H.H. Hall: A Johnny Reb Band from Salem: the Pride of Tarheelia (Raleigh, NC, 1963/R)

J. Felts: ‘Some Aspects of the Rise and Development of the Wind Band during the Civil War’, Journal of Band Research, iii/2 (1966–7), 29–33

C. Bryant: And the Band Played On, 1776–1976 (Washington DC, 1975)

R.F. Camus: Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1976/R)

F.J. Cipolla: ‘Annotated Guide for the Study and Performance of Nineteenth Century Band Music in the United States’, Journal of Band Research, xiv/1 (1978–9), 22–40

F.J. Cipolla: ‘A Bibliography of Dissertations Relative to the Study of Bands and Band Music’, Journal of Band Research, xv (1979–80), no.1, pp.1–31; xvi (1980–81) no.1, pp.29–36

K.E. Olson: Music and Musket: Bands and Bandsmen of the American Civil War (Westport, CT, 1981)

R. Garofalo and M. Elrod: A Pictorial History of Civil War Era Musical Instruments & Military Bands (Charleston, WV, 1985)

S.T. Maloney: ‘A History of the Wind Band in Canada’, Journal of Band Research, xxiii/2 (1987–8), 10–29

K. Kreitner: Discoursing Sweet Music: Town Bands and Community Life in Turn-of-the-Century Pennsylvania (Urbana, IL, 1990)

W.H. Rehrig: The Heritage Encyclopedia of Band Music: Composers and Their Music, ed. P. Bierley (Westerville, OH, 1991–6)

R.F. Camus, ed.: American Wind and Percussian Music (Boston, 1992) [incl. ‘Index to Three Centuries of American Music’]

F. Battisti: 20th Century American Wind Band/Ensemble: History, Development and Literature (Fort Lauderdale, FL, 1995)

R.F. Camus: ‘Die Geschichte der Amerikanischen Blasmusik’, Pannonische Forschungsstelle Oberschützen, vi (1995), 3–114

A. Suppan: ‘Blasmusik-Dissertationen in den USA’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 181–226

d: brass bands

(i) General

G.F. Patton: A Practial Guide to the Arrangement of Band Music (Leipzig, 1875/R)

A.S. Rose: Talks with Bandsmen: a Popular Handbook for Brass Instrumentalists (London, 1895, rev. 1996 with introduction by A. Myers)

E. Jackson: ‘Origin and Promotion of Brass Band Contests’, MO, xix (1895–6), 392–3, 454–5, 538–9, 673, 814–15; xx (1896–7) (1896–7), 101–3

C.J. Vincent: The Brass Band and How to Write for it (London, 1908)

H.C. Hind: The Brass Band (London, 1934/R)

J.F. Russell and J.H. Elliott: The Brass Band Movement (London, 1936)

F. Wright, ed.: Brass Today (London, 1957)

B. Boon: Play the Music, Play! (London, 1966/R)

Sounding Brass and the Conductor (1972–80)

Directory of British Brass Bands, ed. British Federation of Brass Bands (York, 1975–)

V. and G. Brand, eds.: Brass Bands in the 20th Century (Letchworth, 1979)

A.R. Taylor: Brass Bands (London, 1979)

C. Bainbridge: Brass Triumphant (London, 1980)

H. Mortimer and A. Lynton: Harry Mortimer on Brass (Sherborne, 1981)

A.R. Taylor: Labour and Love: an Oral History of the Brass Band Movement (London, 1983)

A. Hailstone: The British Bandsman Centenary Book: a Social History of Brass Bands (Baldock, 1987)

D. Russell: Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: a Social History (Manchester, 1987, 2/1997)

G.D. Booth: ‘Brass Bands: Tradition, Change, and the Mass Media in Indian Wedding Music’, EthM, xxxiv (1990), 245–62

T. Herbert, ed.: Bands: the Brass Band Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Milton, Keynes, 1991)

R.B. Flaes: Bewogen koper (Amsterdam, 1993)

K. Karjalainen: Soumalainen torviseitsikko: Historia ja perinteen jatkuminen (Tampere, 1995)

T. Herbert, ed.: The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History (Oxford, 2000)

(ii) North America

E. Howe: First Part of the Musician's Companion (Boston, 1844)

A. Dodworth: Dodworth's Brass Band School (New York, 1853/R)

G.W.E. Friederich: Brass Band Journal (New York, 1853–4) [music; some pts repr. as American Brass Band Journal]

W.C. Peters & Sons: Peters' Sax-Horn Journal (Cincinnati, 1859)

W.J. Schafer and R.B. Allen: Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977)

J. Newsom: ‘The American Brass Band Movement’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, xxxvi (1979), 114–39

J.P. Watson: Starting a British Band (Grand Rapids, MI, 1984)

R.W. Holz: Heralds of Victory: a History Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the New York Staff Band & Male Chorus, 1887–1987 (New York, 1986)

P. Watson: The Care and Feeding of a Community British Brass Band (Farmingdale, NY 1986)

M.H. and R.M. Hazen: The Music Men: an Illustrated History of the Brass Bands in America, 1800–1920 (Washington DC, 1987)

N.M. Hosler: The Brass Band Movement in North America: a Survey of Brass Bands in the United States and Canada (diss., Ohio State U., 1992)

e: jazz and rock bands

A. Lange: Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra (New York, 1926)

G. Miller: Glen Miller's Method for Orchestral Arranging (New York, 1943)

L.G. Feather: The Book of Jazz: a Guide to the Entire Field (New York, 1957, 2/1965 as The Book of Jazz from Then till Now: a Guide to the Entire Field)

W. Russo: Composing for the Jazz Orchestra (Chicago, 1961)

W. Russo: Jazz Composition and Orchestration (Chicago, 1968/R)

D. Baker: Arranging and Composing for the Small Ensemble (Chicago, 1970/R)

W. Russo: Workbook for Composing for the Jazz Orchestra (Chicago, 1978)

G. Martin, ed.: Making Music: the Guide to Writing, Performing & Recording (New York, 1983)

A.M. Dauer: Tradition afrikanischer Blasorchester und Entstehung des Jazz (Graz, 1985)

O. Curth: ‘Untersuchungen zu Big Band Arrangements von Thad Jones für das Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra’, Jazzforschung, xxii (1990), 53–117

M. Michaels and J. Braider: The Billboard Book of Rock Arranging (New York, 1990)

N. York, ed.: The Rock File: Making it in the Music Business (Oxford, 1991)

M. Bayton: Frock Rock: Women Making Popular Music (Oxford, 1999)

For further bibliography see Military music and Signal (i).

Band (ii)

(Ger.).

See Fret.

Band, the.

Canadian rock group. It was led by (James) Robbie Robertson (b Toronto, 5 July 1944; guitar); its other members were Levon Helm (b Marvell, AR, 26 May 1942; drums), Richard Manuel (b Stratford, ON, 3 April 1945; d Winter Park, FL, 4 March 1986; keyboards), Rick Danko (b Simcoe, ON, 9 Dec 1943; d Hurley, NY, 10 Dec 1999; bass guitar, fiddle and mandolin), and Garth Hudson (b Eric Hudson; London, ON, 2 Aug 1942; organ, saxophone and euphonium). Except for Hudson, all members of the group also sang. They first played together as part of Ronnie Hawkins’ group in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Having left Hawkins in 1964, they were engaged the following year by Bob Dylan as his backing group; they took part in his world tour in 1965–6. They developed a style of songwriting that combined Dylan’s allusive lyrics with their own eclectic, stately and enigmatic brand of rock. They recorded a number of songs that showed an extraordinary attention to detail despite the rough quality of the recording; these were widely issued illegally before their commercial release in 1975 on the album The Basement Tapes.

In 1968 the Band recorded Music from Big Pink; this album is notable for the freedom with which the vocal lines intertwine and overlap with one another, in contrast to their later recordings. Before returning to live performances the group recorded its second album, The Band (1969). At this time they were briefly regarded as a country-rock group, but their arrangements, which were characterized by calm tempos, economical playing by Robertson and Helm, and the use of two keyboard instruments, also suggested hymns, parlour songs, Cajun music, brass bands, blues and other American styles.

Between 1971 and 1977 the Band continued to record original and other people’s material in studio and concert performances, and in 1974 they joined Dylan for his album Planet Waves and a tour of America. The group gave its final performance in 1976, which included guest appearances by Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Neil Young and others, and was documented in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978). During the 1980s the Band reunited a number of times for concert tours without Robertson, and in 1993 Danko, Helm and Hudson recorded the album Jericho.

The Band’s music drew on the basic vocabulary of rock, blues and country, and its restrained style can be seen as a reaction to the musical excesses of the psychedelic rock era. Their first two albums contain deeply felt, carefully crafted rock, but as Robertson’s productivity as a songwriter declined, the group’s music became increasingly formulaic and less consistently satisfying.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York, 1975, enlarged 2/1982)

D. Emblidge: ‘Down Home with the Band: Country-Western Music and Rock’, EthM, xx (1976), 541–52

B. Hoskyns: Across the Great Divide: the Band and America (New York and London, 1993)

JON PARELES

Banda

(It.).

See Military band. Also the brass or brass and percussion section of an orchestra; also the stage band used in 19th-century Italian opera; see Band (i), §I.

Banda turca

(It.).

See Janissary music.

Banderali, Davidde

(b Lodi, 12 Jan 1789; d Paris, 13 June 1849). Italian tenor and singing teacher. He made his début at the Teatro Carcano, Milan, in 1806, but after a few years as a singer, specializing in buffo roles, he turned to teaching. In 1814 he became director of the Teatro dei Filodrammatici, Milan, where in the following year the 18-year-old Giuditta Negri, later to be known as Pasta, made her début in Scappa’s Le tre Eleonore. In 1817 he sang Marco Orazio in two performances of Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi ed i Curiazi at La Scala, with Josephina Grassini as Orazia. He taught in Milan from 1821 to 1828, and then for 20 years in Paris. His pupils included Pasta, the sopranos Adelaide Comelli-Rubini and Henriette Méric-Lalande, and the baritone Paolo Barroilhet.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bandiera, Lodovico

(fl Rome, 1663). Italian composer. He was a Minorite, a doctor of theology and for a time maestro di cappella of the church of SS Apostoli, Rome. He published Psalmi vespertini dominicales una cum quatuor antiphonis, for four voices and continuo (Rome, 1663), as a thanksgiving to St Anthony for relief from difficulties. The psalms are concerted pieces in which sections for the full complement of voices alternate with solo episodes. As well as these and the antiphons, the volume contains a Magnificat, litanies and a responsory.

GIUSEPPE VECCHI

Bandmaster

(Fr. chef d'harmonie; Ger. Kapellmeister; It. capobanda).

The master, leader or director of a band (see Band (i)). Earlier titles included Music Master, Music Major and Leader of the Band. Bandmasters normally hold officer's rank in the armed forces; in the 18th century and the 19th they were often civilians. Army bandsmen in Britain have been formally trained as bandmasters since 1857 at Kneller Hall (Royal Military School of Music); see London, §VIII, 3 (ii). Some eminent bandmasters of the past are: Julius Fučík (1872–1916), Josef Gung'l (1809–89), Andreas Leonhardt (1800–66) and C.M. Ziehrer (1843–1922) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Carl Boosé (1815–68), Dan Godfrey (1831–1903), Charles Godfrey (ii) (1839–1919) and Ladislao Zavertal (1849–1942) in Britain; J.J. Gagnier (1885–1949), Charles O'Neill (1882–1964) and Joseph Vézina (1849–1924) in Canada; F.-J. Gossec (1734–1829), H.E. Klosé (1808–80), J.-G. Kastner (1810–67), Jean Paulus (1816–98), Gabriel Parès (1860–1934) and Bernard Sarrette (1765–1858) in France; Wilhelm Wieprecht (1802–72) in Germany; Alessandro Vessella (1860–1929) and Giovanni Orsomando (1895–1989) in Italy; and A.A. Clappé (1850–1920), Herbert L. Clarke (1867–1945), Merle Evans (1894–1987), Henry Fillmore (1881–1956), P.S. Gilmore (1829–92), E.F. Goldman (1878–1956), A.A. Harding (1880–1958), Frank Johnson (1792–1844), K.L. King (1891–1971), Arthur Pryor (1870–1942), W.D. Revelli (1902–94) and J.P. Sousa (1854–1932) in the USA (for information on early British history and many additional eminent bandmasters see Grove5; see also Military music, §3 and for bibliography see Band (i)).

H.G. FARMER/RAOUL F. CAMUS

Bandola.

A flat-backed lute of South and Central America, descended from the Bandurria (see also Mandore). The modern bandola of Colombia has a tear-drop shape, with a flat or concave back. It has six courses of strings, three steel strings in each of the four upper courses, and two copper-wound strings in each of the two lower courses, tuned f–b–e'–a'–d''–g''. It is played with a plectrum and, as in mandolin playing, a note may be sustained by a tremolo. In the Colombian Andes it plays in the murga ensemble to accompany dancing and the singing of coplas; the murga is sometimes augmented by a second bandola, the two playing in characteristic parallel 3rds and 6ths. The bandola is used in Chilean Andean music, where it accompanies solo shepherd songs, and in the Guatemalan zarabanda ensemble (see Guatemala, §II, 2). There are two types of Venezuelan bandola: the first, found in the western plains, has four single strings, tuned b–e'–b'–f''; the second, from north-eastern Venezuela, has four double courses, the lower pairs tuned in octaves and the higher strings in unison, as follows: A/a–e/e'–b'/b'–f''/f''.

Bandolim

(Port.).

See Mandolin.

Bandolin

(Sp.).

See Mandolin.

Bandoneon [bandoneón].

Square-built button accordion or Concertina developed in the 1840s by Heinrich Band of Krefeld, but similar to the ‘Chemnitz’ concertina of C.F. Uhlig, invented in the previous decade. All early models were diatonic: they produced different notes on the push and pull of the bellows (see illustration). In 1921 a chromatic model was introduced that produced the same note on the push and the pull: this instrument has almost totally eclipsed the diatonic variety. Most bandoneons have two reed banks and no shifts (register changes). Different models may have 64, 88, 104, 106, 128, 154, 176, and even 220 notes; the South American instrument usually has 38 keys or buttons for the high and medium registers and 33 for the lower register. The bandoneon has been used since about 1900 as a solo virtuoso instrument in tango orchestras of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Perhaps its most famous exponent was the Argentine Astor Piazzolla (1921–92). See also Accordion.

Bandora [pandora]

(Fr. pandore, bandore; Ger. Bandoer, Pandora).

A plucked chordophone (classified as a lute) of bass register with metal strings and a scalloped and festooned body outline, said to have been invented in London in 1562. Besides having a considerable solo repertory, it was required to accompany some of the earliest printed English songs, and was one of the six obligatory instruments of the mixed Consort. There are many references to its use in the theatre and in court entertainments through the late 16th century and the 17th, but by the 18th it was falling into disuse.

The bandora has a flat or slightly domed back and a flat soundboard into which is set a circular ornamental ‘rose’ soundhole. It is strung with iron and brass wires, the lowest of which are twisted from two or more strands, not overspun like modern ones. Bacon (Sylva Sylvarum, 1627) writes of ‘a Wreathed String such as are in the Base Strings of Bandoraes’. The strings run in double courses from the pegbox, usually ‘viol’ type with lateral pegs, over the fingerboard and soundboard to the bridge, which is glued in position, as on a lute. The bandora has a special method of string attachment at the bridge, that is, a fret-like strip of brass and a row of hitch-pins along its bottom edge. Although the bandora has been described as a kind of bass cittern, its fixed bridge and the lute-like system of bars under its flat soundboard make it acoustically quite distinct. Whereas the cittern was normally a plectrum instrument, the bandora was played with the fingers (although Roger North reported in the late 17th century that the ‘pandora’ was ‘struck with a quill’). The only features the two instruments have in common are the metal strings and sheet brass frets, secured in tapering slots in the fingerboard by hardwood wedges.

Praetorius (2/1619) stated that the bandora was an English invention, which is confirmed in the sixth edition of John Stowe’s Annales, or a General Chronicle Of England (1631);

In the fourth yere of Queen Elizabeth John Rose, dwelling in Bridewell, devised and made an instrument with wyer strings, commonly called the Bandora, and left a son, far excelling himselfe in making Bandoraes, Voyall de Gamboes and other instruments.

The undulating outline very probably had an allegorical or symbolical meaning, perhaps connected with the scallop shell (see Wells, 1982); the shape was also used on certain viols, at least one of which is attributed to Rose. The alternative spelling, pandora, may be an allusion to the legend of Pandora’s box. There seems to be no connection with the Spanish bandurria nor with the ‘pandora’ whose invention Alessandro Piccinini claimed in 1623; this was apparently a lute with extension bass strings and additional short metal strings in the treble, perhaps akin to the English Poliphant.

The earliest illustrations of both the bandora and its close relative, the orpharion, are in William Barley’s New Booke of Tabliture (1596). This was published in parts, containing instructions and music for the lute as well as for these two wire-strung instruments. At first glance, the two illustrations look remarkably similar, though the orpharion is shown with seven pairs of strings and the bandora has only six. Furthermore, whereas the bandora has its bridge and frets placed in the normal way, at right angles to the strings (fig.1), the orpharion has them set obliquely, to give a progressive increase in length from treble to bass (see Orpharion, fig.3). This innovation was probably crucial to the subsequent development of the two instruments, and seems to have taken place only a few years before Barley’s book was printed. In a letter from Francis Derrick in Antwerp to a friend in London, dated 9 October 1594, there is a postscript:

I am requested by Throck: to write unto you verie earnestly to buy him a bandora or orpheryo[n] of the new fashion w^ch hath the bridge and the stoppes slope and aswell the treble as the oth[er] stringes wyre. The best you can fynde wherin you must use the help of some [who] can skill in that instrument. and also to procure some principall les[sons] for the bandora of Ho[l]bornes makinge or other most conninge men i[n that instru]ment And whatsoever you lay out either for the instrument or the lessons he will repay you w^th great thankes …
(Cecil Papers 28/83)

Subsequent illustrations for the bandora, including those of Fludd (1617), Praetorius (2/1619; see fig.2), Mersenne (1636–7), Trichet (c1640) and others all show this feature, although some of the engravers have not understood the absurdity of a sloping bridge with straight frets, or vice versa. The measurements recorded by Talbot (c1695) also indicated the sloping arrangement.

Barley is the earliest source for the tunings of both bandora and orpharion, which he gives in tablature, indicating the intervals between the courses but not the nominal pitch. For a six-course bandora, starting from the bass, the intervals are 2nd, 4th, 4th, major 3rd, 4th (2–4–4–3–4). The double courses were tuned in unison; the first writer to indicate that the lower four pairs of strings were tuned in octaves was Talbot, a century later. Some of the solo pieces in Barley’s anthology of bandora music require a seven-course instrument, with the extra course a 4th below the sixth (4–2–4–4–3–4). The last part of Derrick’s first sentence above serves as a reminder that at the time (and indeed until about 1900) even the best steel wire was inferior to gut in tensile strength. It seems that, with parallel bridge and frets, the extension in range was at first only possible by using gut for the top course; the ‘new’ combination of sloping frets and bridge with ‘steel’ wire for the highest pair of strings allowed the use of metal throughout. Outside of the arrangements for consort and voices by Sir William Leighton, all of the extant parts for consort call for the six-course bandora. On the other hand, many pieces in the solo literature call for the seventh course.

The question of pitch is still unanswered. Praetorius (2/1619) states that the Bandora was tuned in ‘Chorton’, a step lower than ‘Cammerton’. However, there is reason to believe that, in the consort at least, the bandora was pitched at the higher level (Segerman, 1988). Ian Harwood (1981) has also suggested that there was a high-pitch bandora at a 4th above the larger size. Barley’s collection of music included four songs with accompaniment for six-course bandora which give clues to the nominal pitch. However, if the vocal pitch is taken at its face value, the result is somewhat confusing. In two songs the apparent bandora tuning is F–G–c–f–a–d'; in one it is a tone higher, and in another a fourth lower, C–D–G–c–e–a. These variant tunings are most probably a ‘transposition of convenience’, to avoid the singer’s having to read in key signatures that would be most improbable for the time. There are many other examples of this device in the English and continental lute-song repertory. The last of these tunings, with a as the top string, is the only acknowledged tuning for the instrument. It agrees with the nominal pitch of the bandora in the consort lessons of Morley (1599, 1611) and Rosseter (1609), as well as manuscript sources. This tuning is confirmed by writers such as Fludd (1617) and Praetorius (2/1619).

Almost from the date of its invention the bandora was associated with the theatre. In Gascoigne’s Jocasta (performed in London in 1566), it is named (as ‘bandurion’) among the instruments used for the dumb-show between the acts. In 1598, Philip Henslowe’s inventory of the properties of the Rose Theatre included a bandora among the instruments. On 18 September 1602, the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania wrote in his diary of the music in the indoor Blackfriars Playhouse: ‘For a whole hour before the play begins, one listens to a delightful instrumental consort’; he included a bandora in his list of instruments played. The actor Augustine Phillips bequeathed his bass viol, lute, cittern and bandora to two of his apprentices, and Edward Alleyn, actor, manager, and founder of Dulwich College, left a lute, bandora, cittern and six viols to the school in 1626. As Dart commented, ‘The pandora positively smells of greasepaint’ (Two Consort Lessons, London, 1957).

The bandora was by no means confined to the theatre, however. It enjoyed a great vogue in courtly circles, particularly as a member of the mixed consort. The ‘consorte of broken musicke’ seems to have been first heard at Kenilworth in 1575, during the lavish entertainment given for Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester; it was later called on to perform at almost every entertainment devised for her famous ‘progresses’. During the visit of the queen to Elvetham in Hampshire in 1591 there was a performance by ‘an exquisite consort; wherein was the lute, pandora, base violl, citterne, treble viol and flute’, the same instruments used in the ‘consort lessons’ published by Morley and Rosseter. In such music as this, the cittern and bandora play the upper and lower halves of what amounts to a plucked ‘continuo’ part. However, the bandora part fulfills a second role. It also serves a 16' double bass function as its lowest notes and melodies often sound and double an octave below that of the bass viol. The peculiarly ‘binding’ quality of the bandora in the mixed consort is most noticeable, and was remarked on by several writers. Trichet (c1640) stated: ‘this instrument can be of great use in consorts which are made of several kinds of instruments, for it seems that they become more harmonious by the conjunction and mixture of its sweet temperament’. Later Roger North, in his Essay, of Musical Ayre, wrote: ‘those pandoras, by way of the thro-base, had a better and more sonorous effect in the mixture, than now may be ascribed to harpsichords’.

The bandora was well known outside England. Trichet’s manuscript includes a good drawing of a seven-course example. However, there seems to have been some confusion between bandora and orpharion in continental references; Mersenne (1636–7) described and illustrated a ‘pandore’, but said that it was tuned like a lute. Other references occur in the inventories of Parisian instrument makers around 1600, including (in 1617) ‘une pandorre petite’, which may have been a bandora at high pitch or simply an orpharion. 17th-century Italian references hearken back ultimately to Mersenne.

The bandora seems to have lasted longest in Germany: the Berlin court orchestra owned one in 1667 and there is another in the frontispiece to Walther’s Lexicon (1732). It is mentioned as a possible continuo instrument in the Erster Theil allerhand Oden unnd Lieder, published by H. Krusen (Sohra, 1642, 1647, 1650, 1651, and 1664). While its North European acceptance as an accompaniment instrument is clear, it is curious that no bandora solo music has been found that distinctly derives from the continent. The sole surviving continental source, the Königsberg manuscript (Ness and Ward, 1989), contains only music of English derivation. The 2–4–4–3–4 tuning survived even longer, being used for the large German Mandore and gallichone (see Colascione). It is noteworthy that the two orpharions brought to light in the early 1980s are in German collections (see Orpharion).

Although we have the measured drawings of Praetorius and the dimensions noted by Talbot as well as several drawings, no specimens of early bandoras appear to have survived. Ian Harwood (1981) has suggested that the exquisite cymbalum decachordon (for illustration see Rose, John) made by John Rose in 1580, and belonging to the Tollemache family of Helmingham Hall, Suffolk, is an early high-pitch bandora. Though this speculation has some merit, there has been little other evidence to support this theory. It has been thought to be an orpharion, but it does not match known measurements or string disposition of that instrument either. Several collections contain instruments having bodies with three outcurving lobes that are listed as ‘bandora’, but they are examples of the later French pandore-en-luth, ‘Lutherie’ section of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751–80). One or two examples are modelled after this illustration in having no soundhole, and may perhaps be later reconstructions.

The main use of the bandora on the Continent seems to have been as a continuo instrument; its solo, consort and song repertory are found in English sources. The printed bandora partbook for Morley’s Consort Lessons (1599) survives, and there are other consort parts in a number of manuscripts. Also extant is William Leighton’s Teares or Lamentacions (1614), which includes sacred music for four voices with an accompaniment for the six instruments of the mixed consort. In total, there are 69 of these consort parts currently known. There are also six songs, most predating the publications of the lute ‘ayres’.

Although Barley published some of the best known music for the instrument, the greatest share of the bandora repertory is found in manuscripts of lute music, where it is often identifiable only by its different tuning. There are 93 known solo pieces, which include nearly every form of the late 16th and early 17th centuries: fantasias, dances, and settings of popular tunes and grounds. However, the bass quality of the instrument led composers to write more pavans and fantasias, where the sustaining quality of the instrument was put to greatest use. In contrast to the consort parts, which are on the whole technically undemanding, the technique required in the solo music is considerable. With a total of nineteen compositions, Antony Holborne was the most prolific composer (cf Francis Derrick’s letter quoted above); Alfonso Ferrabosco (i) composed six pieces, John Dowland five, and John Johnson (i) three. Emanuel Adriaenssen is the only continental composer found in these sources. However, this single piece seems to be an arrangement of a solo lute composition. As the music for solo bandora appears for the most part in manuscripts containing lute music, it is not surprising that there are many concordances between the two genres and it is usually difficult to ascertain whether the bandora version or the lute version is the original. With some of the music of Holborne it seems that the bandora version was the original.

After the second decade of the 17th century we find no more tablature music for this instrument. Judging by the comments of Roger North (see above) we can assume that the bandora was used as a continuo instrument well into the 17th century. However, it was probably gradually replaced in ensembles by the Theorbo, which covered the same range.

(1) Jafery [Jeffrey] Banister

IAN HARWOOD/LYLE NORDSTROM

Bandora

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MersenneHU

PraetoriusSM ii

W. Barley: A New Booke of Tabliture … to play on Sundry Instruments, as the Lute, Orpharion and Bandora (London, 1596); ed. W.W. Newcomb as Lute Music of Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia, 1966)

R. Fludd: Ultriusque cosmi … metaphysica, physica atque technica hisotories (Opperheim, 1617–24)

P. Trichet: Traité des instruments de musique (MS, c1640, F-Psg 1070); ed. F. Lesure (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1957/R; Eng. trans., 1973)

D. Gill: ‘An Orpharion by John Rose’, LSJ, ii (1960), 33–40

D. Gill: ‘The Orpharion and Bandora’, GSJ, xiii (1960), 14–25

D. Gill: ‘James Talbot’s Manuscript, v: Plucked Strings – the Wire-Strung Fretted Instruments and the Guitar’, GSJ, xv (1962), 60–69

D. Gill: ‘The Sources of English Solo Bandora Music’, LSJ, iv (1962), 23–7

J. Godwin: ‘Instuments in Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia’’, GSJ, xxvi (1973), 2–14

J. Godwin: ‘Robert Fludd on the Lute and Pandora’, LSJ, xv (1973), 11–19

D. Gill: Wire-strung Plucked Instruments Contemporary with the Lute, Lute Society Booklets, iii (London, 1977)

D. Gill: ‘Bandora, Orpharion and Guitar’, GSJ, xxxi (1978), 144 only

I. Harwood: ‘A Case of Double Standards? Instrumental Pitch in England c1600’, EMc, ix (1981), 470–81

R.H. Wells: ‘The Orpharion: Symbol of a Humanist Ideal’, EMc, x (1982), 427–40

E. Segerman: ‘On English Lute Sizes and Tunings c1600’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.51 (1988), 37–8

P. Forrester: ‘The Morley Consort Lesson and the English Cittern’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.56 (1989), 46–50

A.J. Ness and J.M. Ward: The Königsberg Manuscript: a Facsimile of Manuscript 285-MF-LXXIX … Central Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Science, Vilnius (Columbus, OH, 1989) [with introduction, inventory and index]

L. Nordstrom: The Bandora: its Music and Sources (Warren, MI, 1992)

Band organ.

See Fairground organ.

Bandoura.

See Bandura.

Bandrowski-Sas [Brandt; Barski], Aleksander

(b Lubaczów, 22 April 1860; d Kraków, 28 May 1913). Polish singer. He sang from 1881 in Lwów, Kraków, Łódź and Poznań as a baritone in operetta under the name Aleksander Barski. After studying in Milan and Vienna, he became one of the finest tenors of his time, excelling in Wagner (under the stage name Brandt). From 1887 to 1899 he sang in many of the principal west European houses, including La Scala; he had a permanent contract in Frankfurt (1889–1901). At Dresden in 1901 he created the title role in Paderewski’s Manru, which he later sang in Lwów, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and at the Metropolitan. Bandrowski-Sas wrote three opera librettos: Stara baśń, after J.I. Kraszewski (music by W. Żeleński, 1907), Bolesław Śmiaíy, after S. Wyspiański (L. Różycki, 1909) and Twardowski (Wallek-Walewski, 1911); he also translated into Polish various excerpts from Wagner’s librettos and the whole of Die Meistersinger, and published a thematic analysis of the Ring, Rozbiór tematyczny Ryszarda Wagnera trylogii z prologiem (Lwów, 1907).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PSB (Z. Jachimecki)

K. Michałowski: Opery polskie (Kraków, 1954)

Z. Raszewski, ed.: Słownik biograficzny teatru polskiego 1765–1965 (Warsaw, 1973)

IRENA PONIATOWSKA

Bandstand

(Fr. kiosque à musique; Ger. Musikpavillon).

A small, usually covered building to shelter brass bands, wind bands and military bands giving open-air concerts. It is usually polygonal, less frequently square, round or shell-shaped, and made sometimes of wood but more often of iron or cast iron, or (if built after 1920) of concrete. In form its origin was the Chinese pavilion as introduced into English landscape gardens early in the 18th century (for instance at Stowe and Kew), but in use from the 15th century in Turkey (the French kiosque comes from Turkish köşk). Its functional origin was in the London pleasure gardens. As a result bandstands were erected in public places (walks and promenades, squares and gardens) full of greenery and intended for relaxation.

Their first purpose was to provide wholesome, free entertainment for social classes with little previous interest in art music. Large family audiences met at the bandstand, made up of people ranging from labourers and artisans, nursemaids and soldiers, to small shopkeepers and the lower middle classes, and consequently it encouraged new kinds of social intercourse and new ways of listening to music; the audience could sit, stand, or continue strolling and talking. The rituals of the middle-class concert were abandoned for the behaviour of natural, everyday life. Another purpose of the bandstand was to educate this new public by inviting it to share the culture of the élite, as a way of breaking down social barriers, and here it had a pioneering role in the tradition of the French Revolution. The omnipresence of military bands shows that the bandstand was also an excellent means of reinforcing social cohesion by stirring up patriotic sentiments. As one of the first mass leisure forms, bandstand concerts may be seen as a concrete manifestation of the great movement towards democratizing music and amateur musical practice, encouraged by the inventions of Adolphe Sax. Consequently the proliferation of bandstands, which were soon being sold in kit form by foundries and metalwork construction companies, went hand in hand with the rise of choral societies in the second half of the 19th century. These societies were an exceptionally useful tool for rising in the social scale, and it is easy to explain their concentration in mining and industrial areas, particularly in the north of England (Lancashire, Yorkshire), France, Belgium, Luxembourg and western Germany. The phenomenon spread rapidly, and at the end of the 19th century almost every village had its bandstand. The fashion reached spas and seaside resorts, where bandstand concerts were popular as daily meeting-places.

In such fashionable towns the music might be played by an instrumental ensemble consisting of strings, a piano and some wind instruments, performing light music or café music, but the usual bandstand repertory was the same as that of wind bands and brass bands. It was tripartite, consisting of military music (marches, galops, quick marches), dance-tunes (quadrilles, polkas, mazurkas, schottisches and waltzes) and extracts from operas in the form of a potpourri or fantasia, with the arias arranged for solo instrumentalists. There were also transcriptions of symphonies (by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn), overtures (by Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz), and orchestral suites (by Massenet and Saint-Saëns). Wagner thought bandstands particularly suitable for his music, which was popular in such settings in France before his success at the Paris Opéra. In the 1920s the repertory opened up to include jazz.

In spite of the limitations of transcriptions, bandstands occupy a position central to the mass dissemination of musical culture. They can also be the scene of experimentation: much of the work of Charles Ives and his ventures into polytonality and polyrhythm cannot be understood without reference to them. Bandstands and brass bands play an important part in American festivities, generating a convivial atmosphere especially popular with young people, who can also hear rock music in bandstands. As a formal and cultural model the bandstand has spread far and wide beyond Europe, particularly in former European colonies (cf its social role in Latin America and South America). At present there is a renewal of interest in Europe too; more bandstands are being built, attempts are being made to revive older forms of convivial gatherings, and composers including Berio and Michel Decoust have contributed new works to the repertory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Les spectacles, le théâtre et le kiosque à musique, Pavillon du Canada, Expo 67, Montreal (Ottawa, 1967) [exhibition catalogue]

K. De Wolf: ‘De kiosk: stenen grammofoonplaat avant la lettre’, Adem, xxiii/1 (1987), 30–34 [summaries in Eng., Fr.]

M.-C. Le Moigne-Mussat: ‘Le kiosque: rôle et pratique d’un espace de diffusion sociale de la musique’, 1789–1989: musique, histoire, démocratie: Paris 1989, 595–604

G. Mott and S. Aall: Follies and Pleasure Pavilions (London, 1989)

G.-A. Langlois: Folies, tivolis et attractions: les premiers parcs de loisirs parisiens (Paris, 1991)

M.-C. Mussat: La belle époque des kiosques à musique (Paris, 1992)

M.-C. Mussat: ‘L’exotisme du kiosque à musique’, Les jardins du retour (Paris, 1994), 65–71

M.-C. Mussat: ‘Les kiosques à musique dans les villes d’eau: un mode de vie’, 2000 ans de thermalism: économie, patrimoine, rites et pratiques (Clermont-Ferrand, 1996), 231–51 [pubn of Institut d’Etudes du Massif Central]

MARIE-CLAIRE MUSSAT

Bandura [bandoura].

A hybrid instrument of the Ukraine combining elements of a lute and box zither, possibly derived from the 10th century Arabic and Persian pandura and the kobuz of the Kipchak and Polovtsian peoples. It has a short neck, a shallow oval wooden body and a resonating hole on the upper soundboard (see illustration). There may be a varying number of strings; four to eight bass (buntï) strings on the neck, plucked by the left hand, and between seven and thirty metal strings (pidstrunki, tuned chromatically) across the soundboard, plucked by the right hand. Older examples are tuned diatonically.

The bandura (also known as the kobza until the end of the 19th century) was widely used by the Cossacks during the 16th and 17th centuries. The performers, called banduristï or kobzari, were itinerant singer-instrumentalists who used the bandura to accompany the epic dumï, historical songs, ballads and other forms. The instrument was also adopted by the Polish gentry. The bandura was taught by traditional players, who were often blind. The instrument is now taught at state-run institutions and alto, bass and contrabass banduras have been developed for ensemble performances of ‘folkloric’ music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.S. Famintsïn: Domra i srodnïye yey muzïkal'nïye instrumentï russkogo naroda [The domra and related musical instruments of the Russian people] (St Petersburg, 1891/R)

A. Baines, ed.: Musical Instruments through the Ages (Harmondsworth, 1961/R, 2/1966/R)

A. Gumenyuk: Ukraïns'ki narodni muzichni instrumenti [Ukrainian folk instruments] (Kiev, 1967)

A. Buchner: Folk Music Instruments of the World (London, 1971)

SOFIA HRYTSA

Bandurichen

(Ger.).

See Mandore.

Bandurria [mandurria].

A plucked lute. A hybrid of the guitar and cittern families, it is found in Spain and parts of Latin America. It has a small, cittern-shaped body with comparatively deep ribs, flat back, short fretted neck, and large peg-holder with pegs projecting from the rear as on a guitar. The strings pass over a large central soundhole and are usually fixed to a string-holder. In Spain a púa (plectrum) is used to pick out melody.

The term ‘mandurria’ was mentioned in the 14th century by Juan Ruiz in his Libro de buen amor. In 1555 Juan Bermudo described the bandurria in his Comiença el libro llamado declaraciõ de instrumetos [sic] as a three-string instrument, but he also mentioned other types with four or even five strings. He said that the outer courses were tuned an octave apart, with the middle course either a 5th or a 4th above the lowest. Later, five- and six-course bandurrias were tuned in 4ths throughout, a tuning that is still used (see Bandola). The bandurria provided music at a child’s wake in Jijona, Alicante Province, in the early 1870s (see J.C. Davillier: L’Espagne, Paris, 1874, p.409). In Cuba before 1900 the bandurria, with other instruments, accompanied the zapateo, a dance derived from the Spanish zapateado and introduced by tobacco cultivators from the Canary Islands. It still accompanies Iberian-derived folksong in Cuba and is found also in central and north-eastern Guatemala and in the Andes of Colombia and Chile. The bandurria is said to have flourished about 1800 among the Peruvian blacks. In the early 20th century duos of harp and bandurria performed in Lima (see Peru, fig.4), where today the bandurria is still found in ensembles accompanying the popular vals peruano, or vals criollo.

See also Mandore.

JOHN M. SCHECHTER

Banerjee, Nikhil Ranjan

(b Calcutta, 14 Oct 1931; d Calcutta, 27 Jan 1986). Indian sitār player. He was trained initially by his father Jitendra Nath Banerjee, an amateur sitār player, showing such promise that he won the All-Bengal Sitar Competition at the age of nine. He studied briefly with a number of musicians including Jnan Prakash Ghosh (tablā, vocal) and Birendra Kishore Roy Choudhury. Choudhury introduced him to Ustad Allauddin Khan, with whom he stayed in Maihar from 1947 to 1954. Later he studied with Allauddin Khan’s son Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and daughter Annapurna Devi.

He pursued a highly successful career as a concert and recording artist, touring all over the world. He held a number of teaching posts including professor of music at the Ali Akbar College of Music, Calcutta, and visiting professor of music at the Californian Center for World Music (1970–78), the American Society for Eastern Arts, California (1970–78) and the University of Santiniketan (1977–8). Honours included the Padma Shri (1968) and a Padma Bhushan awarded shortly after his untimely death from a heart attack.

Banerjee was regarded as one of the most accomplished sitār players of his time, many connoisseurs judging him the equal of his contemporaries Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan. The tone of his instrument was quite distinctive, while he excelled in every aspect of the sitār player’s art; command of rāg and tāl allied to superb technique, including phenomenal speed as well as the most exquisite control, made him one of the most profoundly affecting performers in the Hindustani tradition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

A.D. Sharma: Musicians of India Past and Present (Calcutta, 1993)

recordings

HMV EALP/EASD 1318 (1967) [Raga Malkauns, raga Hem lalit, Dhun]; also released as The Sitar Genius of Nikhil Banerjee, Capitol International ST10502 (1967)

Le sitar de Nikhil Banerjee, N. Banerjee, A. Chartejee, R. Mukerjee perfs., Disques Esperance ESP 155 530 (1976) [Raga Monomanjari, raga Manj khamaj]

N. Banerjee and A.A. Khan perfs., Connoisseur Society CS 2055 (1973); reissued AMMP CD 9405 [Raga Manj khamaj, raga Misra mand]

Many others for HMV (India), T-Series (India), Sondisc (France), Chhanda Dhara (Germany), Amigo (Sweden), Disques Esperance (France), Audiorec (UK), Oriental (USA), Raga Records (USA)

MARTIN CLAYTON

Banevich, Sergey

(b Okhansk, 2 Dec 1941). Russian composer. He attended the N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov Music School until 1961 studying composition under Ustvol'skaya. He graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1966, and went on to complete postgraduate studies with Yevlakhov in 1969. In 1991 he became the organizer and artistic director of an international music festival for children, and in 1995 set up an international competition for children playing piano duets called Brat'ya i syostrï (‘Brothers and Sisters). Since 1992 he has been managing director of the music and educational publishers Severnïy Olen' (‘Reindeer’). Music for children is the main area of Banevich’s creative work. Banevich has stated that ‘children experience everything that adults do, only far more vividly and acutely’. He writes about children and for them; he also appeals to adults through the prism of a childlike perception of the world. He became an Honoured Representative of the Arts of Russia in 1982.

Banevich writes principally for the stage. He has worked in a variety of genres such as the musical, dramatic operetta, fairy tale operetta, opera-ballet and television opera. His style is lyrically Romantic: the harmony is reminiscent of Puccini and Saint-Saëns, but he also alludes to the language of the American musical, the French chanson and the hits of the Soviet variety stage. Dramatically, he relies on humour of the absurd and free association which he deems appropriate when dealing with children. Banevich is a master of attractive melody, inventive orchestration and operatic ensemble writing, and has the ability to unify material of various styles through the use of developing leitmotifs.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Beleyet parus odinokiy [White is the Lonely Sail] (op, 3, V. Roshchin, after V. Katsev), 1969, Odessa, Opera and Ballet Theatre, 1969

Priklucheniya Toma Soyera [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] (musical, 2, S. Dimant, N. Slepakova, after M. Twain, 1972, Leningrad, Musical Comedy, 1972

How the Night was Switched On (chbr op, 1, G. Dmitrenko, after R. Bradbury), 1973, Leningrad Radio, 1973

Ferdinand Velikolepnïy [Ferdinand the Magnificent] (op, 3, V. Dreyer, after L. Kern), 1974, Leningrad, Malïy, 1974, film version, 1975

Sud'ba barabanshchika [The Fate of the Drummer] (dramatic operetta, 2, T. Kalinina, after A. Gaydar, 1976, Leningrad, Musical Comedy, 1976

Istoriya Kaya i Gerdï [The Story of Kay and Gerda] (op, 2, with prologue and epilogue, T. Kalinina, after H.C. Andersen, 1979), Leningrad, Kirov, 1979

The Land of Children (musical performance, T. Kalinina), 1984, Leningrad, Bol'shoy kontsertnïy zal ‘Oktyabr'skiy’, 1984

Stoykiy olovyannïy soldatik [The Steadfast Tin Soldier] (musical fairy play, 2, N. Denisov, after H.C. Andersen), 1984, Leningrad, Leninskiy Komsomol'skiy, 1985

Gorodok v taberkerke [A Small Town in a Snuff Box] (fantastic op, 2, B. Khmel'nitsky after V. Odoyevsky), 1986, Leningrad, Musical Theatre for Children ‘Zazerkal'ye’, 1986

The Match-Girl (mini-op for children, A. Sokolov, after H.C. Andersen), 1991, collab. D. Smirnov, Łódź, Wielki, 1991

Peterburg [Petersburg] (ballet-fantasia, 2, V. Roshchin, after A. Belïy, choreog. N. Boyarchikov), 1991, St Petersburg, Malïy, 1992

Rusalochka [The Little Water Nymph] (op-ballet, 2, G. Dmitrenko and T. Kalinina, after H.C. Andersen), 1992, Sïktïvkar, Theatre of Opera and Ballet, 1994

Other: The Little Duck Called Grey Neck, fairy-tale suite, after D. Mamin-Sibiryak, chbr ens, 1990; Bless the Beasts and the Children (S. Chyornïy), conc., large children’s choir, 1995–6; A Chapter from Buddenbrooks: The Death of Little Hanno, fantasia, vc, pf, 1996

incid music for films, TV

Principal publishers: Sovetskiy Kompozitor (Kompozitor), Severnïy Olen'

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Schnittke: ‘ The Story of Kay and Gerde. A new opera for children’, Knigi i iskusstvo v SSSR, ii/33 (1982), 44–5

T. Chernova: ‘Sergey Banevich: The traits of the master’s portrait’ (Leningrad, 1986)

R. Neykov: ‘Sergey Banevich: “Sowing Seeds of Kindness …”’, Muzikalni horizonti (Sofia, 1990), no.10, pp.104–5

MARINA NEST'YEVA

Banfi [Banfo], Alfonso.

See Bamfi, Alfonso.

Banfield, Stephen (David)

(b Dulwich, 15 July 1951). English musicologist. He studied music at Cambridge (BA 1972) and Oxford (DPhil 1980), studying with Hugh Macdonald both as an undergraduate and postgraduate, and was Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, 1975–6. In 1978 he became a lecturer in music at Keele University, becoming senior lecturer in 1988. In 1992 he became Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham; he was head of the School of Performance Studies, 1992–7, and head of the Department of Music, 1995–9. His main areas of research are British music of the late 19th century to the 20th, and popular musical theatre and vernacular bourgeois music in both Britain and America during the same period.

Banfield’s work is characterized by seriousness of intellectual and artistic enquiry combined with a stylish and approachable literary style. His particular interest in music and the literary arts is reflected in his pioneering work on the English art song, which includes a useful catalogue with over 5000 entries. His book on the musicals of Stephen Sondheim uses primary source studies – an approach unprecedented in the literature of Broadway – to trace their compositional development and complex relationship with the European operatic tradition. His monograph on the life and work of Gerald Finzi is the first to assess the achievement of a relatively neglected British composer.

WRITINGS

‘The Artist and Society’, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley (Oxford, 1981), 11–28, 455–73

‘A Shropshire Lad in the Making: a Note on the Composition of George Butterworth’s Songs’, MR, xlii (1981), 261–7

Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century (Cambridge, 1985)

‘“Too Much of Albion?”: Mrs Coolidge and her British Connections’, American Music, iv/1 (1986), 59–88

‘Housman and the Composers’, Housman Society Journal, xiii (1987), 14–22

‘England, 1918–45’, Modern Times, ed. R.P. Morgan (Basingstoke, 1993), 180–205

Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor, 1993)

ed.: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995)

‘Sondheim and the Art that has no Name’, Approaches to the American Musical, ed. R. Lawson-Peebles (Exeter, 1996), 137–60

Gerald Finzi: an English Composer (London, 1997)

ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Banfield, Volker

(b Oberaudorf, Bavaria, 9 May 1944). German pianist. At the age of 14 he entered the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold, later travelling to the USA, where he studied with Adele Marcus at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and Leonard Shure at the University of Texas, from whom he acquired a deep-seated affinity with the Russian school of virtuosity and the German intellectual tradition exemplified by Schnabel. Since his return to Germany he has toured extensively, appearing regularly in the world’s major music centres. Banfield’s tastes and repertory are wide, but he has tended to focus on music of the later 19th century and the 20th, with special emphasis on Debussy, Skryabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Bartók and Messiaen. A number of contemporary composers, most notably Ligeti and Detlev Mueller-Siemens, have dedicated works to him. His playing combines an unflamboyant virtuoso technique with a keen analytical mind, a wide-ranging tonal palette and an emotional spontaneity which serves him particularly well in Schumann, of whom he has become an increasingly ardent champion. Among his recordings are the Schumann sonatas and concertos by Goetz, Busoni and Pfitzner.

JEREMY SIEPMANN

Banister [Bannester].

English family of musicians. (2) John (i) was said by Anthony Wood to have been the ‘Son of Banister, one of the musicians or public waits of S. Giles' Parish near London’. He was the father of (3) John (ii), and was probably (1) Jafery Banister's brother. James and Henrietta Banister may have been children of (1) Jafery Banister or (2) John (i). James joined the 24 Violins in May 1676 and served until the end of Charles II's reign, and Henrietta taught Princess Anne the harpsichord between 1679 and 1682. The son of (3) John (ii), also called John (b London, 27 Dec 1686), a recorder player, is mentioned in concert announcements between 1702 and 1704 in connection with his father. He was still alive on 5 September 1730, when his father made his will.

(2) John Banister (i)

(3) John Banister (ii)

PETER HOLMAN (1, 2), DAVID LASOCKI (3)

Banister

(1) Jafery [Jeffrey] Banister

(bur. London, 2 Sept 1684). Violinist, music copyist and composer. He was sworn in as an extraordinary member of the 24 Violins on 27 October 1662, and received a salaried place from Michaelmas 1663. The text of Thomas Duffett's masque Beauty's Triumph (London, 1676) shows that he and James Hart were running a ‘New Boarding-School for Young Ladies and Gentlewomen’ in Chelsea. He apparently left royal service in February 1684, when he was given a passport to travel abroad, but died that summer, probably before he could undertake the trip. He seems to have been the copyist of two violin books (GB-En 5777, and Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD 45/26/104) that originate respectively from Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian, and Panmure House, Angus, suggesting that he had worked for the Ker and Maule families in Scotland or London. The latter contains a suite signed ‘Jafery Bannester’.

Banister

(2) John Banister (i)

(b London, 1624/5; d London, 3 Oct 1679). Violinist, flageolet player and composer. He was a member of the ensemble that accompanied Davenant's opera The Siege of Rhodes (1656). He joined the 24 Violins at Christmas 1660, and was issued with a passport on 2 December 1661 ‘to goe into France upon Some speciall Service & returne with all possible expedition’; according to Anthony Wood he went ‘to see and learn the way of the French compositions’. On his return he was promoted as an English Lully. On 18 April 1662 he was given the authority to choose 12 violinists to accompany the king to Portsmouth to meet Catherine of Braganza, and the next month they were constituted as a ‘Select Band’ under his command, doubtless inspired by Lully's petits violons. He was also given Davis Mell's place as a violinist in the Private Music; a painting at Nostell Priory near Wakefield seems to show him with other members of the group. He was a leading member of the Corporation of Music in 1663–4.

Banister's prominent court position lasted only until winter 1666–7. Luis Grabu succeeded Nicholas Lanier as Master of the Music in spring 1666, rapidly exerting his authority over the 24 Violins and the Select Band. On 29 March 1667 the 24 Violins sent in a ‘remonstrance’ against Banister, listing occasions going back to 1663 when he had embezzled money due to them. Without Banister's side of the story it is impossible to judge the case, though it seems that the king bore him ill will for a moment of insubordination. Wood wrote that ‘for some saucy words spoken to His Majesty (viz. when he called for the Italian [?French] violins, he made answer that he had better have the English) he was turned out of his place’. Pepys wrote in his diary (20 February 1667) that ‘the King's viallin, Bannister, is mad that the King hath a Frenchman come to be chief of some part of the King's music’.

Banister retained his place in the 24 Violins, but turned increasingly to promoting public concerts. According to Pepys, he was already giving concerts in 1660 at the Mitre tavern in Fleet Street, though newspaper advertisements for them exist only from December 1672. He moved them from the George in Whitefriars to Chandos Street in 1675, to Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1676, and to Essex Buildings in 1678. Roger North gave the impression that they were cheap and cheerful, held in ‘an obscure room in a publik house’ and given by ‘most of the shack-performers in towne’, though the wordbook Musick, or A Parley of Instruments (London, 1676) shows that Banister was able to put on a large-scale semi-dramatic piece with an astonishing array of wind, bowed and plucked instruments, and that his concerts were just one aspect of the activities of a boy's school, the ‘Academy in Lincoln's Inn Fields’. According to North, one of the attractions of Banister's concerts was his flageolet playing ‘in consort, which was never heard before nor since, unless imitated by the high manner upon the violin’.

He is presumably the John Banister, a widower aged 46 of St Margaret's, Westminster, who married the widow Mary Wood on 14 January 1671. He is listed in 1677 as Princess Anne's music master, and Henrietta Banister received the post in 1679, the year of his death. He and his son John were given a passport to travel abroad on 28 July, but he died on 3 October and was buried in Westminster Abbey the next day.

Banister wrote a good deal of consort music in the genres associated with the 24 Violins, though much of it only survives in fragments. One suite, The Musick att the Bath (GB-Och Mus.1183), was apparently written for the queen's visit to Bath in September 1663, while another (En 5777) seems to come from a 1671 court masque; much of his other dance music was probably written for court balls or other entertainments. The 24 Violins also worked in the London theatres, and Banister wrote the earliest surviving theatre suite, for John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard's play The Indian Queen (1664; US-NYp). He contributed songs or other music to Sir Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours (1663), Katherine Phillips's Pompey (?1663), Dryden's Sir Martin Marall (1667), the Davenant-Dryden version of The Tempest (1667), Davenant's The Man's the Master (1668), Sir Charles Sedley's The Mulberry Garden (1668), Thomas Shadwell's The Royal Shepherdess (1669), a revival of Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (?1669), Aphra Behn's The Forc'd Marriage (1670), part i of Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1670), John Crowne's Juliana (1671), William Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672), Shadwell's Epsom Wells (1672) and Charles Davenant's Circe (1677). He also wrote music for Thomas Duffett's masque Beauty's Triumph (1676), put on at the Chelsea girl's school run by James Hart and (1) Jafery Banister. It is difficult to reconcile North's judgment that Banister had ‘a good theatricall vein, and in composition a lively style peculiar to himself’ with the evidence of his shortwinded songs, or the apparently incompetent part-writing of much of his consort music, though the latter may be partly the fault of corrupt sources.

WORKS

Consort suites, dances and grounds, 1662⁸, 1677⁴, 1678⁴, 1678⁵ (ed. P.J. Lord, Oxford, 1970), The Division Violin (London, 1684), IRL-Dtc, GB-CDp, Cu, En, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, Och, W, US-NH, NYp [incl. The Indian Queen, ed. M. Laurie, Henry Purcell: The Indian Queen, Purcell Society, xix (London, 1994), appx D]

30 songs, 1667⁶, 1673³, 1673⁴, The Ariels Songs in the Play Call'd the Tempest (London, 1675), 1675⁷, The Circle, or Conversations on Love and Gallantry (London, 1675), 1679⁷, 1686⁴, 1688⁶, GB-Lbl, Och

Inst and vocal music for The Slighted Maid (play, R. Stapylton), 1663, lost

Banister

(3) John Banister (ii)

(bap. London, 11 Sept 1662; d London, 9 Jan 1736). Violinist, recorder player, publisher and composer, son of (2) John (i). He was admitted to his father’s place among the 24 Violins on 6 November 1679 and continued to serve until his death. He has generally been taken to be the ‘J.B. gent’ who compiled The Most Pleasant Companion, or Choice New Lessons for the Recorder or Flute (London, 1681) and signed the preface of the first oboe tutor, The Sprightly Companion (RISM 1695¹⁴). In 1686 he and John Carr published from ‘his chambers in Essex Street the next door to the Clock’ a set of recorder duets by Raphael Couteville (i). The same year he married and then moved to Brownlow Street, off Drury Lane. In 1700 and 1702 he and Robert King were the agents for music by Corelli and Nicola Cosimi. For James Talbot’s manuscript he was to have provided material concerning the wait (shawm), kit and treble violin. By 1698 and probably earlier he was promoting concerts at York Buildings and Exeter Change, and by 1702 he was first violin in the Drury Lane Theatre band and regularly played in concerts there and at York Buildings with colleagues such as Jean Baptiste Loeillet (i), James Paisible and Gasparo Visconti. In 1708 he became one of the first violins in the opera orchestra at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, remaining there until at least December 1710; about 1715 he was associated with the new Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. His violin and recorder playing were praised by contemporaries; Roger North noted his skill at extempore ornamentation and said he was an excellent singing teacher. Hawkins (History), perhaps confusing him with Paisible, claimed he was famous ‘for playing on two flutes [i.e. recorders] at once’. His few surviving compositions consist of dance movements influenced by both French and Italian styles, and demonstrating some melodic and rhythmic imagination.

WORKS

3 tunes, for vn, 1687⁷, 1691⁵; 12 tunes for 2 rec, 1693⁸, 1694⁷, 1695⁶, 1696⁹

10 dances, 2 tr, t, b, A Collection of Musick in 2 Parts … to Which is Added a Sett of Ayres in 4 Parts, bk 1 (London, 1691)

A collection of choice Airs and Symphonys … out of the Most Celebrated Operas, 2 vn (London, 1717), lost

A Collection of the Most Celebrated Song Tunes, with their Symphonies Taken out of the Choicest Opera’s, vn (London, 1717), lost

A Second Collection of the Most Celebrated Song Tunes, with their Symphonies, Taken out of the choicest Opera’s, vn (London, 1717), lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, ii, v, viii

BDA

Day-MurrieESB

SpinkES

J. Wilson: Roger North on Music (London, 1959)

M. Tilmouth: Chamber Music in England, 1675–1720 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1960)

M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719)’, RMARC, i (1961/R)

A.A. Luhring: The Music of John Banister (diss., Stanford U., 1966)

C.A. Price: Music in the Restoration Theater (Ann Arbor, 1979)

J.D. Shute: Anthony à Wood and his Manuscript Wood D 19(4) at the Bodleian (diss., International Institute of Advanced Studies, Clayton, MO, 1979)

D. Lasocki: Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540–1740 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1983)

P. Daub: Music at the Court of George II (r. 1727–1760) (diss., Cornell U., 1985)

C. McCart: ‘The Panmure Manuscripts: a New Look at an Old Source of Christopher Simpson's Consort Music’, Chelys, xviii (1989), 18–29

I. Spink, ed.: Music in Britain: the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1992)

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

A. Ashbee and D. Lasocki: Biographical Dictionary of English Court Musicians, 1485–1714 (Aldershot, 1997)

Banister, Henry Charles

(b London, 13 June 1831; d London, 20 Nov 1897). English composer and teacher. His first studies were with his father, H.J. Banister, a well-known cellist in his day. In 1846 he won the King’s Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Cipriani Potter. He subsequently became a sub-professor at the RAM and, from 1853, professor of harmony. From 1880 he was professor at the Guildhall School of Music and he also taught at the Royal Normal College for the Blind. Banister was a prolific composer of songs, piano pieces and overtures, but most important was his contribution to the mid-19th-century British symphony. Today, however, he is remembered primarily as a theorist.

WRITINGS

Lectures on Musical Analysis (London, 1887, 3/1895)

Musical Art and Study (London, 1887)

George Alexander Macfarren (London, 1891)

The Harmonising of Melodies (London, 1897)

ed. S. Macpherson: Interludes (London, 1898) [seven lectures delivered between 1891 and 1897]

J.A. FULLER MAITLAND/JEREMY DIBBLE

Banister, Henry Joshua [John]

(b London, 1803; d Clerkenwell, London, 27 Sept 1847). English cellist. Son of the composer Charles William Banister (1768–1831), he was active in London as an orchestral player and chamber musician, and from 1835 participated frequently in chamber music concerts. His Quartet Parties, given at his residence in Burton Crescent in 1844, were the first West End chamber concerts to exclude vocal items. He wrote a number of didactic works for the cello and made arrangements of operatic overtures for small ensembles. In 1843 the Musical World published a series of Bannister's letters, which argued that music lovers among the English aristocracy should patronize music more extensively by employing groups of resident musicians; the correspondence was subsequently published at his own expense as Domestic Music for the Wealthy, or a Plea for the Art and its Professors (1843). His brother Joseph Banister (1812–90), a violinist, was a member of the Philharmonic Society and an active chamber musician; his son Henry Charles Banister was a composer and teacher.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.D. Brown and S.S. Stratton: British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897/R)

C. Bashford: Public Chamber-Music Concerts in London, 1835–50: Aspects of History, Repertory and Reception (diss., U. of London, 1996)

CHRISTINA BASHFORD

Banjeaurine.

A small banjo, pitched a 4th higher than the standard instrument, invented by samuel swain Stewart.

Banjo.

A plucked string instrument with a long guitar-like neck and a circular soundtable, usually called the ‘head’, of tautly stretched parchment or skin (now usually plastic), against which the bridge is pressed by the strings. The banjo and its variants have had long and widespread popularity as folk, parlour and professional entertainers' instruments. The name of the instrument probably derives from the Portuguese or Spanish bandore.

1. Structure.

2. History.

(iii) The 19th and 20th centuries.

JAY SCOTT ODELL, ROBERT B. WINANS

Banjo

1. Structure.

The modern five-string banjo is normally fitted with raised frets and strung with five steel wire strings, the lowest in pitch being overspun with fine copper alloy wire. It is tuned g'–c–g–b–d' (C tuning) or g'–d–g–b–d' (G tuning), but many other tuning patterns, e.g. g'–c–g–c'–d', g'–d–g–c'–d' and g'–d–g–a–d', are used to facilitate the playing of particular songs. There are usually 24 or more screw-tightening brackets (for adjusting the head tension) attached to the outer side of a tambourine-like rim of laminated wood about 28 cm in diameter. In banjos of high quality the upper edge over which the head is stretched is often of complicated design, as in an early (1920s) ‘Mastertone’ system of O.H. Gibson (fig.1a), which used a tubular metal ‘tone tube’ resting on spring-supported ball-bearings, or the ‘Electric’ design of a.c. Fairbanks. A pan-shaped wooden ‘resonator’ is often attached to the lower side of the otherwise open-backed body and serves to reflect outward the sound emitted by the underside of the head. The ‘thumb string’ (sometimes known in older literature as ‘chanterelle’), the short fifth string (fig.1), is placed adjacent to the lowest-pitched string and secured by a peg inserted into the side of the neck at the fifth fret position.

Until the early 20th century banjos were normally strung with gut strings, and these or nylon strings are still used by ‘classical’ banjoists. Raised frets were advocated by James Buckley in Buckley's New Banjo Method (New York, 1860) but did not become common until the 1880s. George C. Dobson's ‘Victor’ Banjo Manual (Boston, 1887) describes frets inlaid flush with the fingerboard as position markers but states that ‘the latest and most modern manner … is with raised frets’. Mid-19th-century commercial banjos were larger than modern ones and were tuned to the lower-pitched A tuning of e'–a–e–g–b. Smaller banjos and higher pitches later became increasingly popular, until by the 1880s most banjos were of modern proportions and commonly tuned to the modern C tuning (which maintains the same interval relationship). By 1890 in the USA the banjo was treated as a transposing instrument pitched in C with music still written in A, a situation that continued until 1909 when the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists, and Guitarists voted to abandon the old A notation and write the music in C or ‘English notation’. In England both the written and tuning pitch were fixed at the modern level by the 1880s.

A number of hybrid and specialized banjos were developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including cello and piccolo banjos (tuned an octave below and above the standard banjo); banjeurines; concert and ‘ladies’ banjos (tuned a whole tone above and below the standard banjo); guitar, mandolin and Ukulele banjos (strung and tuned like their parent instruments); and plectrum banjos (identical to the standard banjo but lacking the fifth string). The tenor banjo (tuned c–g–d'–a') is identical with the standard banjo but has a shorter neck and no fifth string. Like the plectrum banjo it was developed for use in jazz and dance orchestras and is played with a plectrum. It has been widely adopted by players of traditional music in Ireland and England.

In England and Australia banjos with six or more strings were common during the late 19th century, the additional strings serving to extend the compass downwards. Another English type, the ‘zither banjo’ (distinct from C.L. Steffen's ‘banjo zither’, invented in Stettin in 1879), had first, second and fifth strings made of wire (the others were gut or wire-covered silk), frets, and geared tuning machines instead of the more usual friction pegs. It had a closed back which reflected the sound outwards through spaces between the head and rim, functioning much like a modern resonator, as do two banjos now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, by the American makers Henry Dobson and George Teed of New York (US Patent 34,913, 8 April 1862).

Banjo

2. History.

The development of the modern banjo began in the second quarter of the 19th century as an increasingly commercial adaptation of an instrument used by West African slaves in the New World as early as the 17th century. The earliest known illustration of the instrument is in Sir Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands of Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica (London, 1707), written in 1688, which depicts two Jamaican negro ‘strum-strumps’ with long necks and skin-covered gourd bodies (fig.2). In the French colonies, where the instrument was usually known as the banza, it was often associated with the calinda, a dance unsuccessfully suppressed by acts of the Martinique government as early as 1654 and as late as 1772.

In the British colonies the instrument was usually known as banjer or banjar, pronunciations still common in the southern USA. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, describing life in Maryland and Virginia before he returned to England in 1775, wrote in Boucher's Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words (London, 1832): ‘The favorite and almost only instrument in use among the slaves there was a bandore; or, as they pronounced the word, banjer. Its body was a large hollow gourd, with a long handle attached to it, strung with catgut, and played on with the fingers’. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia (Paris, 1784, and Richmond, Virginia, 1853) stated of the negroes: ‘The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, … its chords [strings] being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar’. The common English guitar of the period was tuned C–e–g–c'–e'–g'; hence the banjar would have been tuned either C–e–g–c', if by ‘lower’ Jefferson meant ‘lower in pitch’, or else g–c'–e'–g', if he meant ‘lower in position when held by the player’. The former interpretation gives a traditional tuning pattern still sometimes used for the banjo’s four full-length strings; the latter gives the pattern of the modern G tuning.

Although long-necked instruments with skin soundtables are common in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the banjo almost certainly derived from one or more of those in Northwest Africa. Coolen (1991) and Conway (1995) favour the Senegalese xalam as the closest match in terms of structure and performance style. The xalam shares the banjo's characteristic short thumb string, but it and other banjo-like African instruments, such as the nkoni of the Manding peoples and tidīnīt of Mauritania all have round necks. The banza probably acquired its flat fingerboard after enslaved musicians in the New World became familiar with European and English plucked string instruments, all of which have flat fingerboards. A similar instrument, the Ramkie, has existed in South Africa since the early 18th century. Percival Kirby, whose Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1926) includes several ramkie illustrations, makes a good case for its being an adaptation of the Portuguese rabequinha or cavaquinho, possibly introduced by slaves from the Malabar Coast of India, long under Portuguese domination. Even if not directly related to the ramkie, the banza may have developed in a similar manner since Portuguese slave traders were active in West Africa as early as the 15th century.

The first depiction in the Americas of the modern banjo's distinctive short ‘thumb string’ appears in J. Stedman's book, Narrative of a Five-Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam from the Year 1772 to 1777 (1796, 2/1806/R). Pl.lxix illustrates a creole bania, and a very similar instrument, collected by Stedman about the same time, is now in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden. They both have one short and three long strings and a skin-headed gourd or calabash body. A watercolour entitled The Old Plantation (painted between 1777 and about 1800 in South Carolina; fig.3) shows a group of slaves dancing to the music of a gourd-bodied banjo which, like the Stedman instrument, has three full-length strings plus a short thumb string. An inaccurate drawing of this instrument, included in an article by A. Woodward, ‘Joel Sweeney and the First Banjo’, Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly, vii/3, 1949, p.7, omitted the thumb string and contributed to the incorrect popular legend that this feature of the modern banjo was invented by Joel Walker Sweeney (1810–60). Nevertheless, as the first well-known and widely travelled white banjoist, Sweeney played a major role in bringing the banjo to the attention of urban audiences in the USA and England and presumably in popularizing the type of banjo that he played. One owned and said to have been made by him is in the Los Angeles County Museum. Fretless and of light construction, it had screw-tightening brackets (now missing) for adjusting the head tension, four full length strings and a short fifth string. It is also similar to a modern banjo in having a body made of a thin bent-wood rim instead of a gourd, and is thus better suited to commercial mass-production.

Through the influence of Sweeney, Daniel Emmett and many other popular minstrel-show banjoists (for illustration see Emmett, Dan), many of whom had lived near and learned from black banjo players, the banjo was rapidly introduced to white urban culture. By the 1840s and 1850s banjos were being produced by the first commercial maker, William Boucher of Baltimore (see fig.1b above), whose banjos were almost identical with Sweeney's, and James Ashburn of Wolcottville, Connecticut. The latter applied an improved tuning-peg to a banjo in 1852 (US Patent 9268).

By the end of the Civil War the banjo had also taken root among traditional white musicians of the rural South, who, like Sweeney, had learned about it from direct contact with black musicians and, also, touring minstrel shows, medicine shows, and circuses. The banjo joined the fiddle to initiate a tradition of what is now called ‘old-time string band music,’ and was also played as a solo instrument and to accompany songs. The black tradition remained fairly strong in the rural South through the 1930s, but by the 1990s there were few black players (see Conway, 1995). Until the latter decades of the 20th century interplay between the black and white traditions was common.

Two general classes of playing styles, each with many variations, have developed. Apart from numerous accounts from the 17th century to the 19th of the banjo's use by black musicians to accompany singing and dancing, no detailed descriptions or notations are known before the 1850s, when the first minstrel banjo tutors were published. The ‘stroke’ style they teach produces a sound similar to that described in many of the earlier accounts. It is similar to the earliest style of rural southern white banjo players, today known as ‘clawhammer’ or ‘frailing’, in which patterns of downward strikes by the index or middle fingernail are combined with downward strokes of the thumb against the fifth string. More complex patterns may be produced by the thumb dropping further down to pick individual notes on the full length strings. The other major family of styles, ‘finger-picking’, combines upward plucking by the first, and sometimes second and third fingers, with downward plucks of the fifth string by the thumb. In both styles the fingers of the left hand pluck, hammer and slide on individual strings to contribute additional notes and rhythmic accents.

Finger-picking is first mentioned by Briggs (1855), as an alternate, guitar-like way to accompany songs, and is more fully described in an 1865 tutor by Frank B. Converse, who credited the Buckley family with being the first to play it. By the 1890s it had become the dominant style on the minstrel, vaudeville and concert stages and for amateur urban musicians, but the down-stroking styles remained popular in many rural areas until well into the 20th century. Finger-style playing became increasingly well-established about 1900 in the rural folk tradition, both black and white, apparently in imitation of classical guitar technique. At first, folk finger styles were primarily two-finger picking (i.e. using thumb and index finger), but a three-finger style (which added the middle finger) was popularized in the 1920s by the North Carolina banjo player Charlie Poole, and somewhat later by Dewitt ‘Snuffy’ Jenkins and others from the region. In the 1940s it was further developed by Earl Scruggs into ‘bluegrass picking’, the most widely heard style today.

After the 1850s the banjo was increasingly used in the USA and England as a genteel parlour instrument for the performance of popular music. During the last quarter of the century s.s. Stewart of Philadelphia, and other banjo popularizers, sought to upgrade the instrument's social standing by downplaying its black origins and disparaging the ‘old-fashioned’ stroke style in favour of the more ‘elevated’ finger-picking style. Their marketing campaigns were successful and from about 1890 to 1930 there was a vast expansion in the production of banjos and great elaboration in their design and decoration, by makers such as Stewart, the Dobsons (New York and Boston) and a.c. Fairbanks (Boston). Besides making regular banjos, these makers (primarily Stewart) created a set of banjo orchestra instruments, all with five strings but of different sizes and pitches. From about 1890 to 1920 there was a craze for banjo, mandolin, and guitar clubs and orchestras; by the turn of the century most good-sized cities and colleges had such organizations. In this period specialized journals and great quantities of marches, rags and transcriptions of popular and light classical music were published for banjo by Stewart, Little Walter of Boston, Clifford Essex of London, and others.

The banjo’s important relationship to popular music at that time is well illustrated in the case of Ragtime. Nathan (1962) finds in some minstrel-show banjo tunes the earliest examples of the kinds of syncopation that later appear in the genre. Banjo pieces such as George Lansing's The Darkie's Dream (1887) are among the precursors of ragtime; ragtime itself immediately entered the banjo repertory, and banjo compositions from the mid-1890s onwards were heavily influenced by ragtime. The recorded output of the greatest turn-of-the-century banjo recording artists, Vess L. Ossman and Fred Van Eps, includes many rags, and banjo recordings of ragtime (available long before ragtime piano recordings were issued) were influential in increasing its popularity. Other important concert banjo virtuosos of the time included Parke Hunter, Alfred A. Farland and Fred Bacon.

By the 1920s the popularity of the five-string banjo was rapidly declining among urban players. It was displaced by the four-string tenor and plectrum banjos, which were favoured as rhythm instruments in the jazz and dance orchestras of the day, largely because a pick-played banjo was louder and better suited to the music for the fast, rhythmic new dance steps. The first true tenor banjo was probably the ‘banjorine’ marketed by J.B. Schall of Chicago in 1907, which was advertised as ‘tuned like a mandolin and played with a pick.’ Such an instrument found ready acceptance among mandolinists and violinists, whose original instruments did not adapt well to the new music. Regular banjoists converted more easily to the plectrum banjo. Once introduced, these instruments did not long remain as mere accompanying rhythm instruments; solo styles developed, as did virtuoso soloists such as Eddie Peabody and Harry Reser. The ‘Jazz Age’ created a new society craze for the banjo, this time in its four-string versions. By the 1940s, however, the four-string banjo was being replaced by the guitar, especially the electric guitar, as the rhythm instrument of choice; and by then the five-string banjo had also been abandoned by many rural musicians, either in favour of the guitar, or because of the decline in home music-making.

The five-string banjo regained something of its former popularity after World War II, largely because of the influence of the American banjoists Pete Seeger (see Seeger family, (3)), who popularized traditional rural southern styles among urban players as one aspect of the folksong revival, and Earl Scruggs (see Flatt and Scruggs), who became famous as the developer of the ‘bluegrass’ style of banjo playing (see Bluegrass music). It has also regained some popularity as a jazz instrument through the virtuosity of such performers as Bela Fleck (fig.4).

In the southeast USA, many white and a few black traditional country musicians still play banjos, often homemade and fretless; their many tunings, playing techniques and repertory include survivals of 19th-century minstrel and black performing practice. The Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, has a good collection of field recordings of such music, as does the Southern Folk-Life Collection (Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC). In the USA the American Banjo Fraternity promotes classic banjo playing and holds biannual conventions. Among the few composers to score for the instrument are Weill (Mahagonny, 1927), Krenek (Kleine Sinfonie, op.58, 1928) and Davies (The Boy Friend, 1971).

Public instrument collections possessing banjos include the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Banjo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T.F. Briggs: Briggs' Banjo Instructor, Containing the Elementary Principles of Music (Boston, 1855/R)

The Cadenza (1894–1924)

The Crescendo (1908–33)

Pete Seeger: How to Play the 5-String Banjo (New York, 1948, 3/1962)

H. Nathan: Dan Emmet and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962, 2/1977)

D.J. Epstein: ‘Slave Music in the United States before 1860: a Survey of Sources’, Notes, xx (1962–3), 195–212, 377–90

B.C. Malone: Country Music U.S.A.: a Fifty-Year History (Austin, TX, 1968, 2/1985)

A. Rosenbaum: Old-Time Mountain Banjo: an Instruction Method (New York, 1968)

C.P. Heaton: ‘The Five-String Banjo in North Carolina’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, xxxv (1971), 62–82

T. Adler: ‘The Physical Development of the Banjo’, New York Folklore Quarterly, xxviii (1972), 187–208

D.J. Epstein: ‘African Music in British and French America’, MQ, lix (1973), 61–91

R.C. Toll: Blacking Up: the Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974)

D.J. Epstein: ‘The Folk Banjo: a Documentary History’, EthM, xix (1975/R), 347–71

R.L. Webb: ‘Banjos on their Saddle Horns’, American History Illustrated, xi/2 (1976), 11–20

R.D. Winans: ‘The Folk, the Stage, and the Five-String Banjo in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxxix (1976), 407–37

D.J. Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977)

R.B. Winans: ‘The Black Banjo-Playing Tradition in Virginia and West Virginia,’ Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society, i (1979), 7–30

R.B. Winans: ‘Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex-Slave Narratives’, Black Music Research Newsletter, v/2 (1982), 2–5

S. Cohen: ‘Banjo Makers and Manufacturers’, Mugwumps, vii (1983), 10–16

R.L. Webb: Ring the Banjar! The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory (Cambridge, MA, 1984)

U. Wegner: Afrikanische Saiteninstrumente (Berlin, 1984)

R.B. Winans: ‘Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852’, Musical Theatre in America, ed. G. Loney (Westport, CT, 1984), 71–97

N.V. Rosenberg: Bluegrass: a History (Urbana, 1985)

G. Kubik: ‘The Southern Periphery: Banjo Traditions in Zambia and Malawi’, World of Music, xxxi/1 (1989), 3–29

R.B. Winans: ‘Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex-Slave Narratives’, Black Music Research Journal, x (1990), 43–53

M.T. Coolen: ‘Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture’, Black Music Research Journal, xi (1991), 1–18

M. Hendler: Altweltiche Wurzeln eines neuweltlichen Musikinstruments: Verschuttete Spuren zur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte der Saiteninstrumente (Göttingen, 1991)

K.E. Linn: That Half-Barbaric Twang: the Banjo in American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, 1991)

G. Gruhn and W. Carter: Acoustic Guitars and Other Fretted Instruments: a Photographic History (San Francisco, 1993)

U. Heier and R.E. Lotz, eds: The Banjo on Record: a Bio-Discography (Westport, CT, 1993)

A. Tsumura, 1001 Banjos (New York, 1993)

P.F. Gura: ‘Manufacturing Guitars for the American Parlor: James Ashborn's Wolcottville, Connecticut, Factory, 1851–56’, Journal of the American Antiquarian Society (1994), 117–56

R.B. Winans and E. Kaufman: ‘Minstrel and Classic Banjo: American and English Connections’, American Music xii/1 (1994), 1–30

C. Conway: African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Knoxville, TN, 1995)

P.F. Gura and J.F. Bollman: America’s Instrument: the Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999)

Banjulele [banjo ukulele].

A hybrid instrument combining a banjo body with a Ukulele fingerboard, stringing and tuning.

Bankole, Ayo [Theophilus Ayeola]

(b Lagos, 1935; d Lagos, 6 Nov 1976). Nigerian composer. His parents, both music teachers, and the composers Fela Sowande and T.K. Ekundayo Phillips were his early musical influences. He pursued formal studies in composition, the organ and the piano at the GSM (1957) and read music at Cambridge (BA 1964); he became an FRCO in 1965. Bankole also studied ethnomusicology at UCLA. Although most of his early works do not emphasize African elements, his work at UCLA stimulated Bankole to incorporate traditional Yoruba musical elements into his choral pieces: Jona and Ethnophony are two works that employ African musical instruments exclusively. As exemplified in Festac Cantata, the tonal properties of the Yoruba language became a marked influence on his choral works. He was senior music producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (1966–9), and a lecturer in music at the University of Lagos (1969–76).

WORKS

(selective list)

Pf: Ya Orule, 1957; Nigerian Suite (1957); Christmas Sonata, 1959; English Winterbirds, 1961; The Passion Sonata (1977); Fugal Dance

Org: Toccata and Fugue (1960); 3 Toccatas, 1967

Choral: Cant. in Yoruba, female chorus, chbr orch, 1958; Choral Fugue, 1962; Ona Ara, solo vv, org, Yoruba insts, orch, 1970; 3-Part Songs, female vv (1975); Festac Cant. no.4, 1976; Jona, chorus, Yoruba insts; Ethnophony, chorus, Yoruba insts

Songs: 10 Yoruba Songs, 1v, pf, 1966; Adura fun Alafia, 1v, pf, 1969; 3 Yoruba Songs, Bar, pf (1977)

MSS in Iwalewa-Haus, U. of Bayreuth

DANIEL AVORGBEDOR

Banks, Benjamin

(b Salisbury, 14 July 1727; d Salisbury, 18 Feb 1795). English violin maker. He lived and worked in Salisbury and, with Forster, did much to raise the standard of English violin-making in the second half of the 18th century. In 1741 he began an apprenticeship under his uncle, William Huttoft. Although it was intended to last seven years, the apprenticeship terminated abruptly on Huttoft's death in 1747. Banks's earliest known instrument is an English guitar branded, signed and dated 1757, and his first advertisement appeared in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal on 28 March 1757.

Benjamin Banks has been described as the ‘English Amati’, and fine examples of his work exist to support this statement. He was the first English maker to recognize the importance of Stradivari's ‘long pattern’, and his cellos and violins were made to ‘Strad’ specifications. His violas invariably have a Stainer influence. They are always on the small side, being never more than 39.7 cm along the back. English sycamore and pine were the basic woods employed on all Banks instruments, and his varnish is of excellent quality, ranging in colour from brown, through orange-brown and orange-red to deep red. The claim that stain was first laid on as a filler is without foundation. Signatures and initials are to be found in a variety of places, although not all instruments carry labels.

The bows that Banks and most other 18th-century makers sold were made by the Dodd family. In Banks's case they varied in quality and were branded banks, sometimes over the Dodd name. This was common practice, and may be assumed to have been carried out with the Dodd family's permission. Banks never made trade instruments, although he did allow his agents, Longman & Broderip, to place their brand over his on the instruments they sold; only a few of these still exist.

Benjamin Banks married Ann Burtt in 1749; they had ten children, including a pair of twins. Their eldest child, Ann (1750–94), married the music publisher Thomas Cahusac (i) in 1780. Benjamin's sixth child, James (b Salisbury, 10 Aug 1758; d Liverpool, 15 June 1831), was already producing instruments of high quality at the age of 17. His ability and drive have been given less than the notice they deserve by previous writers. Under his direction the string section of the firm blossomed profusely until the business was sold in 1811. His younger brother Henry (b Salisbury, 15 Dec 1770; d Liverpool, 16 Oct 1830), whose name is always linked with James, served an apprenticeship in the piano department of Longman & Broderip. In 1795 (the year of his father's death), Henry proudly advertised his skills in tuning ‘stringed instruments of all kinds’ in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal. Benjamin Banks's third child, Benjamin (b Salisbury, 15 Sept 1754; d Liverpool, 22 Jan 1820), also made violins. He worked in London for a short time, but his work tends to be heavy and somewhat clumsy.

In 1785 a fire devastated workshops opposite Banks's house and main workshop in Catherine Street, Salisbury. Although £200 worth of stock was destroyed, it had little effect on production for that year. In 1811 the business was sold to Alexander Lucas, and Henry and James moved to Liverpool. It would seem that the few instruments dated after the move were remaining stock that was brought up from Salisbury and labelled in Liverpool.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.M. Morris: British Violin Makers (London, 1904, 2/1920)

W. Henley: Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (Brighton, 1959)

A.W. Cooper: Benjamin Banks, the Salisbury Violin Maker (Haslemere, 1989/R)

A.W. COOPER

Banks, Don(ald Oscar)

(b South Melbourne, 25 Oct 1923; d Sydney, 5 Sept 1980). Australian composer. The son of a professional jazz musician, Banks grew up in a house full of musical instruments, and learned to play several. He developed an early interest in jazz, sitting in as trombonist in Roger and Graeme Bell’s jazz band. Following wartime service, the army rehabilitation scheme enabled him to undertake musical studies at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (1947–9), where he studied composition with Nickson and Le Gallienne; his fellow students included the composer Keith Humble, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. During this period he became the founder and pianist of the Don Banks Boptet which was one of Australia’s first bebop groups.

In 1950 Banks went to London, where work as secretary to Edward Clark, the head of music at the BBC and a former Webern pupil, soon brought him into contact with the more progressive circles in London’s musical life. He studied composition with Seiber, and later, in 1953, with Dallapiccola in Florence. Neither composer taught 12-note composition per se – they were more concerned with broadly applicable disciplines – but the combination of serialism and canonic technique in Dallapiccola’s Goethe Lieder clearly impressed Banks, and is reflected in the sketches for works from this period. A course given by Babbitt in Salzburg in 1952 had already established Banks’s interest in serial thought and this was confirmed by his attendance in 1956 at Nono’s seminars in Gravesano, Switzerland.

Initially through Seiber, Banks gained substantial work as a commercial composer, beginning with cartoons and comedy films in the late 1950s, and then moving on to thrillers and horror movies, especially for Hammer Films. This was by no means just a money-spinner: in a musical climate generally hostile to modernism, it gave him instant access to an orchestra, and horror films in particular permitted him to try out all kinds of new resources. In the concert hall, on the other hand, there was a 12-year gap between the Four Pieces which were first performed by the LPO under Boult in 1953, and the fairly consistent stream of orchestral commissions that followed Divisions (1964–5). Jazz also proved to be an enduring passion in Banks’s life; in London, it led to friendship with John Dankworth and Cleo Laine for whom, in 1966, he wrote the Settings from Roget. This was the first of many works espousing the ‘third stream’ fusion of jazz and contemporary concert music pioneered during the 1950s by Schuller; they include three pieces entitled Equation, and reach a peak in Nexus.

Following a brief trip to Australia in 1970 while head of music at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (1969–71), a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra took Banks back again in 1972; following this he accepted a composition post at the Canberra School of Music. Ever altruistic, he immediately assumed a central role in the promotion of new music – just as he did in London through the Australian Musical Association, which he co-founded with Margaret Sutherland in the 1950s, and the SPNM – most notably as chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council, and as co-founder of the ACME Ensemble. In 1979 he became head of the school of composition studies at the NSW Conservatorium; by this stage, however, he was already suffering from cancer, compounded by a serious car accident, and he was able to complete only one more work, An Australian Entertainment, before his death.

Banks’s output covers a wide variety of genres, from major orchestral works to brief choral pieces for school use, and a wide variety of styles. Though essentially a 12-note composer with a preference for tautly argued motivic textures – his finest and most characteristic works are probably the Sonata da camera, the concertos for horn and violin, and Limbo – he was also fascinated by the more radical musical activities of the 1960s. Witness to this are his graphic score Form X and the later 4/5/7, hastily written on the back of a photocopy of Earle Brown’s December ’52, as well as the orchestral Assemblies and Intersections, both intended as ‘young person’s guides’ to new music. In England, while at Goldsmiths’, he had also taken a keen interest in electronic music, and especially in developments of the synthesizer, though his suspicion of the medium’s potential for pretentiousness is reflected in the droll tape part of Commentary. In Australia, he was an adviser to Tony Furse in the early development stages of the Fairlight CMI, and a late work like 4 x 2 x 1 suggests that had he lived longer, electro-acoustic music would have played an increasingly prominent role in his work. Banks’s continual openness and natural curiosity coupled with impeccable traditional craftsmanship was the key to his reputation as a composer and outstanding teacher.

WORKS

Orch: 4 Pieces, 1953; Episode, chbr orch, 1958; Divisions, 1964–5; Hn Conc., 1965; Assemblies, 1966; Vn Conc., 1968; Dramatic Music, youth orch, 1969; Fanfare, 1969; Music for Wind Band, 1971; Nexus, orch, jazz qt/qnt, 1971; Prospects, 1973; Trilogy, 1977: see El-ac [Intersections, 1969]

Vocal: 5 North Country Folk Songs, S/T, pf/str orch, 1954; Ps lxx, S, chbr orch, 1954; 3 North Country Folk Songs, S/T, pf, 1955; Settings from Roget, female jazz vocalist, a sax, pf, drums, db, 1966; Tirade (Porter), Mez/Bar, pf, hp, 3 perc, 1968; Findings Keepings, SATB, drums, db, 1968; 3 Short Songs, 1v, jazz qt, 1971; Aria from Limbo, 1v, pf, 1972; Walkabout, children’s vv, insts, 1972; An Australian Entertainment, 6vv, 1979: see El-ac [Limbo, 1971]

Chbr and solo inst: Divertimento, fl, str trio, 1951, rev. 1960; Duo, vn, vc, 1951–2; Sonata, vn, pf, 1953; 3 Studies, vc, pf, 1955; Pezzo dramatico, pf, 1956; Sonata da camera, fl, cl, b cl, pf, perc, str trio, 1961; Trio, hn, vn, pf, 1962; Equation 1, jazz group, ens, 1963–4; Form X, 2–10 players; 3 Episodes, fl, pf, 1964; Sequence, vc, 1967; Prologue, Night Piece and Blues, cl, pf, 1968; Equation 2, jazz group, ens, 1969; 4 Pieces, str qt, 1971; Take Eight, jazz qt, str qt, 1973; Str Qt, 1975; One for Murray, b cl, 1977

El-ac: Intersections, orch, tape, 1969; Commentary, pf, 2-track tape, 1970; Limbo, 3 solo vv, 8 insts, 2-track tape, 1971; Equation 3, jazz group, ens, elecs, 1972; Meeting Place, jazz group, ens, elecs, 1972; Shadows of Space, 4-track tape, 1978; 4 x 2 x 1, b cl, 2-track tape, 1978; Magician’s Castle, 2-track tape, 1978

Arr.: Elizabethan Miniatures, lute, b viol, str, 1962

Principal publishers: Chester, Schott

WRITINGS

‘Converging Streams’, MT, cxi (1970), 596–9

‘Third-Stream Music’, PRMA, xcvii (1970–71), 59–67

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Mann: ‘The Music of Don Banks’, MT, cix (1968), 719–21

P. Bracanin: ‘Don Banks’, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century, ed. F. Callaway and D. Tunley (Melbourne, 1978), 97–116

RICHARD TOOP

Bannester.

See Banister family.

Banniera, Antonio.

See Bagniera, Antonio.

Bannister, Henry(-Marriott)

(b Oxford, 18 March 1854; d Oxford, 16 Feb 1919). English musical palaeographer. After reading classics and theology at Pembroke College, Oxford (1873–7), he held a number of ecclesiastical appointments before devoting himself to musical palaeography. He travelled extensively and accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of library collections in his chosen field of the medieval liturgy and its music, in which he published numerous articles (in Rassegna gregoriana, English Historical Review and the Journal of Theological Studies). In 1917 he was appointed acting sub-librarian of the Bodleian Library.

EDITIONS

Analecta hymnica medii aevi, xl, xlii–xliv, xlvi, xlvii, xlix, li–liv (1902–15/R)

Monumenti vaticani di paleografia musicale latina (Leipzig, 1913/R)

Melodiae sequentiarum (MS, GB-Ob) [selection in A. Hughes, ed.: Anglo-French Sequelae, Edited from the Papers of the Late Dr. Henry Marriott Bannister (London, 1934/R)]

ANSELM HUGHES/MALCOLM TURNER

Bannius, Joannes Albertus.

See Ban, Joan Albert.

Banse, Juliane

(b Tettnang, 10 July 1969). German soprano. She studied at the training school of the Zürich Opera, then in Munich with Fassbaender and Daphne Evangelatos. She made her stage début at the Komische Oper, Berlin, in 1989 as Pamina, and followed that role with Ilia and Susanna at the same house. Since then she has appeared as Sophie at the Salzburg Festival, as Zerlina at Glyndebourne (the controversial Warner staging of 1994), at the Deutsche Oper Berlin as Pamina, Sophie and Manon, and at the Vienna Staatsoper as Susanna, Pamina, Marzelline, Sophie and Zdenka. In 1998 she was much praised for her assumption of the title part in the première of Holliger's opera Schneewittchen at Zürich. In 1999 she sang Ighino in a new production of Palestrina at the Vienna Staatsoper. She has a wide concert repertory ranging from Haydn (she has performed The Creation under Rattle with the Berlin PO and under Andrew Davis at the Proms) to Mahler and Berg, and is a leading exponent of lieder. Her recordings of, among others, Mozart, Schumann and Mahler have been much admired for her innate sincerity of purpose allied to a communicative manner, a pleasing timbre and a scrupulous care for the text.

ALAN BLYTH

Banshchikov, Gennady Ivanovich

(b Kazan', 9 Nov 1943). Russian composer. He studied composition with Balasanian at the Moscow Conservatory (1961–4) and then at the Leningrad Conservatory under Arapov (1965–6) with whom he also undertook postgraduate work (1966–9). He joined the Composers' Union in 1967 and in 1980 was appointed board member of the St Petersburg branch. He has taught at the St Petersburg Conservatory since 1974, was made senior lecturer in 1983 and professor of orchestration and composition in 1998. Any straightforward definition of Banshchikov's creative personality is precluded by his multifaceted nature: he eschews all aesthetic labels applied to his music. However, while descriptions such as Romantic, lyrical and conservative are in themselves inadequate, taken in aggregate they provide a general representation of his output. He combines the technical suavity, professional restraint and academic approach of the St Petersburg school with a certain impulsiveness and high emotional temperature. He also gives innovation due regard, so his particular link with German Romanticism does not prevent his language from being profoundly contemporary. He combines precise forms with Romantic angst; his kinship with Richard Strauss therefore comes as no surprise – the Opera o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem (‘Opera About how Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’) is dedicated to that composer's memory. Other works, such as the opera-parody Lyubov' i Silin, reveal Banshchikov's wit, sense of irony and comedy. The large scale of his designs is evident not only in his symphonies but also in his chamber and solo instrumental works, among which should be mentioned the first full-scale substantial sonatas for bayan.

WORKS

Stage: Ostalas' legenda [The Legend Remained] (radio op for children, F. Naftul'yev), 1967; Lyubov' i Silin (chbr op, 3, after Koz'ma Prutkov), 1968; Vestris (choreographic composition, L. Yakobson), 1969; Opera o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem [Opera About how Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich] (op, 1, M. Lobodin, after N. Gogol'), 1971, rev. for chbr forces, 1982; Smert' korneta Klyauzova [The Death of Klyauzov's Cornet] (op, 1, A. Kleyman, after A. Chekhov: Shvedskaya spichka [The Swedish Match]), 1976; Gore ot uma [Woe in Wisdom] (op, 2, Banshchikov, after A. Griboyedov), 1979–83; Optimiticheskaya tragediya [An Optimistic Tragedy] (ballet, 2, A. Dement'yev, after V. Vishnevsky), 1985; Dama Pik [Dame Pique] (ballet, 2, A. Polubentsev, after A.S. Pushkin), 1989; Sharman i Venera [The Shaman and Venus] (ballet, 1, A. Raskin, after V. Khlebnikov), 1993

Vocal-orch: Zodchiye [Architecture] (cant., D. Kedrin), B, male chorus, orch, 1964; Pamyati Garsia Lorki [In Memory of García Lorca) (cant., F. García Lorca), chorus, orch, 1965, rev. 1979; Pepel v ladonyakh [Ashes in the Palms] (cant., S. Val'yekho), S, small orch, 1979; Peterburgskiy noktyurn (cant., A. Blok), Mez, small orch, 1985; Oblaka [Clouds] (cant., I. Brodsky), S, small orch, 1995

Orch: Vc Conc. no.1, 1962; Pf Conc., 1963, rev. 1978; Tpt Conc., 1963; Vc Conc. no.2, 1964; Sym. no.1, 1967; Vc Conc. no.5, 1970; Sym. no.2, str, 1977; Vechniy ogon' [Eternal Fire], sym., 1985; Sym. no.3, 1988; Dama Pik, sym. in portraits and scenes, narr, orch, 1990; Shaman i Venera, sym.-dream, 1994

Chbr and solo inst: Chetïre mimoletnosti/4 Visions fugitives, vc, pf, 1963; Muzïka dlya fortepiano [Music for Piano], 1964; Malen'kiy duėt [Little Duet], vn, pf, 1965; Vc Conc. no.3, vc, 1965; Vc Conc. no.4 ‘Duodetsimet’, vc, 11 insts, 1966; 4 p'yesï [4 Pieces], cl, pf, 1968; Pf Sonata no.1, 1968; Sonata, cl, pf, 1972; Trio-Sonata, vn, va, vc, pf, 1972; Pf sonatas nos.2–3, 1973, 1974; Sonata, fl, pf, 1975; Bayan Sonata no.1, 1977; Str Qt, 1982; Bayan Sonata no.2, 1985; Sonata, hp, org, 1987; Bayan Sonata no.3, 1987; Pf Sonata no.4, 1988; Telefonnaya kniga: Kontsert dlya kamernogo orkestra i avtootvetvhika, posvyashchayetsya Rikhardu Shtrausu, moim druzyam i leningradskoy sluzhbe taksi [Telephone Book: A Concerto for Chamber Orchestra and Answering Machine Dedicated to Richard Strauss, my Friends and the Leningrad Taxi Service], 1990; Pf Sonata no.5, 1998

Other: vocal works for 1v, pf; incid music, film scores

WRITINGS

‘Orkestr v “Poėma ėkstaza” A. Skryabina’ [The orchestra in Skryabin's ‘Poem of Ecstasy’], Orkestrovïye stili v russkoy muzïke (Leningrad, 1987), 73–82

Zakonï funktsional'noy instrumentovki [The Laws of Functional Orchestration], 3 vols. (St Petersburg, 1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Rakhmanova: ‘Obryashchyonnaya k cheloveku’ [Addressed to the man], SovM (1968), no.9, pp.42–7

E. Finkel'shteyn: Gennadiy Banshchikov: monograficheskiy ocherk (Leningrad, 1983)

L. Raaben: ‘Gennadiy Banshchikov’, O dukhovnom renessanse v russkoy muzïke (St Petersburg, 1997), 131–45

IOSIF GENRIKHOVICH RAYSKIN

Banti, Brigida Giorgi

(b Monticelli d’Ongina, nr Crema, 1755; d Bologna, 18 Feb 1806). Italian soprano. Her father, a street singer and mandolin player, took her to Paris when she was about 20; there she met de Vismes, director of the Opéra, who arranged her début there (1 November 1776) singing a song between the second and third acts of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. She had some lessons from Sacchini, and in 1779 went to London, where she met the dancer Zaccaria Banti, whom she married in Amsterdam. She seems at this time to have been a very bad singer with a beautiful voice, and so lazy that she could not be taught. In 1780 she left England and travelled over Europe, singing in Vienna (1780), Venice (1782–3), most of the Italian cities, Warsaw (1789) and Madrid (1793–4) with increasing fame. In 1794 she returned to London, making her début in Bianchi’s Semiramide, in which she introduced an air with violin obbligato from Guglielmi’s Deborae Sisara; the song became a favourite with her audiences and was always encored. She was principal soprano at the King’s Theatre from 1794 until her retirement in 1802.

Banti’s fame was truly international, and she was particularly admired by Mount Edgcumbe, who called her ‘far the most delightful singer I ever heard’. He composed Zenobia for her in 1800, and wrote in his Musical Reminiscences:

Her voice was of most extensive compass, rich and even, and without a fault in its whole range – a true voce di petto throughout. In her youth it extended to the highest pitch and was so agile that she excelled most singers in the bravura style; but, losing a few of her upper notes, she modified her manner by practising the cantabile, to which she devoted herself and in which she had no equal. Her acting and recitative were excellent. Her spirits never flagged, nor did her admirers ever grow weary of her. They never wished for another singer.

After her death, Banti’s larynx was examined by physiologists, who reported it to be extraordinarily large. Her son, Giuseppe Banti SJ, published a short biography of her in 1869, a copy of which is in the Civico Museo at Bologna.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

R. Edgcumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences of an Old Amateur (London, 1824, 4/1834/R), 43, 79ff

W.T. Parke: Musical Memoirs (London, 1830/R), i, 183f, 254, 297–8

C. Lozzi: ‘Brigida Banti, regina del teatro lirico nel secolo XVIII’, RMI, xi (1904), 64–76

A. Kapłon: ‘Opera włoska w Warszawie 1784–1793’ [Italian opera in Warsaw], Acta universitatis wratislaviensis, xx (1979), 13–47

M.G. Genesi: ‘Il Teatro Nuovo di Codogno nel Settecento’, Archivio storico lodigiano, cx (1991), 37–83

M.G. Genesi: Una primadonna tardosettecentesca: Brigida Giorgi Banti (1755–1806) (Monticelli d’Ongina, 1991)

M.G. Genesi: ‘“E non m'involva a sì rea fatalità?” Il repertorio di una soprano d'opera seria Accademica Filarmonica “ad honorem” – Maria Brigida Giorgi-Banti di Monticelli d'Ongina: per una radiografia della vocalità belcantistica “di maniera” dal 1770 al 1790 circa’, Archivio storico per le province Parmensi, xliii (1991), 189–213

M.G. Genesi: ‘La soprano monticellese Brigida Giorgi-Banti, protagonista a Londra del Galá in onore della vittoria dell'Ammiraglio Howe a Lizard Point’, Strenna piacentina (1992), 156–65

BRUCE CARR/R

Bantock, Sir Granville

(b London, 7 Aug 1868; d London, 16 Oct 1946). English composer. The son of a doctor, and educated for the Indian civil service, which may explain some of his cultural interests, Bantock did not enter the Royal Academy of Music until 1888. There he studied with Corder, a permissive and comparatively progressive teacher who, no doubt, encouraged Bantock’s predilection for the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss. Bantock was the first winner of the Macfarren Scholarship, and several of his works were performed at concerts while he was still a student. These tended to be ambitious in scope, and some were inspired by Western concepts of oriental life. In 1890 the overture to his cantata The Fire Worshippers was publicly performed, and two years later he came to wider public attention with a concert version of his one-act opera Caedmar, already performed at the RAM, which was given at the Crystal Palace (conducted by August Manns), and subsequently produced at the Olympic Theatre. Bantock left the RAM in 1892, and from May of that year until February 1896 he edited the New Quarterly Musical Review. With this came an extensive period of conducting, which was useful experience. During 1894–5 he made a world tour with George Edwardes’ A Gaiety Girl and the latter year he toured England with the more stimulating Shamus O’Brien of Stanford.

A characteristic generosity and interest in his fellow English composers early manifested itself. On 15 December 1896 he gave a concert of orchestral music by living English composers, followed in May 1897 by a similar concert of chamber works. He conducted for a while at the Royalty Theatre, and in July of the same year his overture Saul was performed at the Chester Festival, shortly before his appointment as musical director of The Tower, New Brighton, in August. At New Brighton the musical fare consisted mainly of dance music played by a military band, and Bantock set about raising the musical standard, firstly by gradually introducing more serious items between the dances, and then by introducing concerts devoted to the works of one composer. The band was gradually increased to a symphony orchestra, and much English music was played, Elgar, Parry and Stanford being among the composers invited to conduct their own works. In 1898 Bantock married Helena von Schweitzer, who wrote verse and provided the texts for many of his numerous songs. The marriage lasted, in spite of some strains. Bantock had a flair for detecting genius in others; he was one of the first outside Finland to encourage Sibelius, and the two composers became firm friends, Sibelius dedicating his Third Symphony to Bantock.

On Elgar’s recommendation Bantock was appointed the first full-time salaried principal of the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music in 1900, an appointment that was to have a lasting effect on his career and on music in Birmingham. He succeeded Elgar as Peyton Professor at Birmingham University in 1908, and continued there until he left Birmingham in 1934. Bantock’s aim at Birmingham was to give his students a complete musical education, with institute and university interacting with each other. To this end he extended the repertory studied to include the music of the Elizabethans, English church music, folksong, and recent works of contemporary composers such as Richard Strauss and Rimsky-Korsakov, in all of which he was showing some interest himself. It was under Bantock’s direction that the first English performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie in Aulide was given, by students, at Birmingham. At this time he developed an interest in large-scale choral composition, an interlude in his lifelong concern with the symphony orchestra. The first fruit of this new interest was his setting of Fitzgerald’s very free translation of Omar Khayyám, the first part of which was first performed at the Birmingham Festival of 1906, the second at the Cardiff Festival of 1907, and the third at Birmingham in 1909. It was typical of Bantock to go to Fitzgerald rather than to a more authentic source, a tendency also indicated by his youthful plan to compose 24 symphonic scenes based on Southey’s The Curse of Kehama.

Gradually his interest returned to symphonic music, beginning with revisions of earlier works, among them the symphonic poems Dante and Beatrice (1910) and Fifine at the Fair (1911). Bantock’s output was prodigious, and between this time and his death he poured out, apparently effortlessly, orchestral and choral works, piano and chamber music, compositions for brass band, and hundreds of songs, mainly for children. On his retirement from his Birmingham posts he became associated with Trinity College of Music, for which he was already an examiner; he therefore moved house to London. Although a great home-lover, he also travelled widely, and even in old age his activities, including composition, spoke of inexhaustible energy. Admitted to hospital for a minor operation he fell and broke his femur; pneumonia set in and he died peacefully at the age of 78. He was a prominent figure in the early years of the English musical renaissance, evincing genuine and long-lasting interests in the choral festival and brass band movements. For a while his music was widely performed, and, although offered many honours, apart from his knighthood Bantock refused to accept them. His music has passed out of fashion, for reasons easily understood. He was strongly influenced by Wagner and Richard Strauss, but failed to find a consistently distinctive musical language of his own. He never adopted the advanced harmonic idiom of Tristan, let alone Salome or Elektra. His style, both in orchestration and harmony, suggests rather such works as Der fliegende Holländer and Guntram. It is based on common chords and diatonic discords; the complex chromatic suspensions of Tristan are outside its scope, as is the dissonant counterpoint of Strauss’s more advanced works. Bantock’s textures are solidly homophonic, and such chromaticisms that appear are usually found in semi-oriental arabesques. His obsession with pseudo-eastern subjects was also a handicap, since it was the theatrical east of magnificent processions, the gigantic and the gaudy that attracted him; and although he travelled to several Asian countries, the subtlety and restraint of oriental thought escaped him. Among his other abiding interests were Greek subjects, Scottish folk music and Celtic legends. More profitable was the Hebridean influence, since Bantock’s own attractive melodies to some extent resembled these folktunes even before he met the researches of Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser. He wrote a great many works, both large and small, on Hebridean themes, or using Hebridean melodies. The Hebridean Symphony (1915) itself is an evocative and imaginative piece which uses several Hebridean folktunes, as does The Seal Woman (1917–24). On the other hand, the Celtic Symphony (1940) is musically a much less ambitious work, despite demanding six harps to supplement the string orchestra. A slight French influence, not extending to the more radical complexities of Debussy’s harmony, produced The Pierrot of the Minute (1908), an atmospheric work which reveals Bantock’s orchestration in a more delicate, and less broad style than in some of his other works. The Pagan Symphony is a work of greater substance and power, and reveals more facets of his masterful handling of the orchestra.

Bantock felt that orchestral playing should be corporate and anonymous, and for this reason he refused to write concertos, although all other forms are represented in his output. His choral music is headed by the vast Omar Khayyám and the choral symphonies Atlanta in Calydon (1911) and The Vanity of Vanities (1913). These last two, intended ideally for several hundred amateur singers were, together with numerous shorter choral settings, the major outcome of his involvement with choral societies and the competitive festival movement. However, as with many of Bantock’s works, the length and the size of forces required is something of an obstacle to performance. Despite its initial success, The Seal Woman, too, no longer holds the stage, and, whereas the best of the songs, such as A Feast of Lanterns and The Lament of Isis have a definite merit, Bantock frequently set inferior verse with a matching banality of musical idiom. Although his music was popular until World War I, it gradually lost public attention, and towards the end of his life, despite a continuing output as well as revision of earlier compositions, relatively few of his new works were published. He was financially obliged at this time to write simple, often merely atmospheric, piano pieces, which he subsequently orchestrated for gramophone recordings. In addition he made easy piano arrangements of music by Johann Strauss, Chopin and others, sometimes with words provided by his wife. He wrote too much; there are too many works to sift through to separate the good from the mere note-spinners. However, although performances of his larger works are rare, the brass band music, most notably Prometheus (1933), and some of the smaller orchestral works are still performed.

WORKS

(selective list)

Principal publishers: Boosey, Breitkopf, Curwen, Elkin, Novello, Paxton, Swan, Joseph Williams

stage

Ramses II (incid music, Bantock), 1891

Aegypt, ballet, London, RAM, 1892, orchd 1899

Caedmar (op, 1, F. Corder), 1892, London, Olympic, 25 Oct 1892

The Pearl of Iran (op, 1, Bantock), 1893

Electra (incid music, Sophocles), ?1894, London, Court, 15 July 1909

Eugene Aram (op, 4 after E. Bulwer Lytton and T. Hood), unfinished, 1896

Hippolytus (incid music, Euripides, trans. G. Murray), 1908, Manchester, Gaiety, 6 Oct 1908

The Great God Pan, choral ballet, 1908–14, Glasgow, St. Andrew's Hall, 9 Dec 1919

Music for a Harlequinade (incid music, H.R. Barber: The Cortege), 1917, rev. 1920, London, Court, 11 March 1918

Salome (incid music, O. Wilde), 1918, London, Court, 19 April 1918

Judith (incid music, A. Bennet), Eastbourne, Devonshire Park 1919, orchd 1921, 7 April 1919

The Seal Woman (Celtic folk op, 2, Kennedy-Fraser), 1917–24, Birmingham Repertory, 27 Sept 1924

Macbeth (incid music, W. Shakespeare), 1926, London, Princes, 26 Dec 1926

Fairy Gold (incid music, A.L. Coburn), 1938, Huyton, Liverpool College for Girls, 15 July 1938

vocal orchestral

The Fire Worshippers (Moore), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1892; Wulstan, v, orch, 1892; The Blessed Damozel (D.G. Rossetti), reciter, orch, 1892; Thorvenda’s Dream, reciter, orch, 1892; Christus (Bible) [2 parts of projected 10], solo vv, chorus, orch, 1901; Ferishtah’s Fancies, v, orch, 1905; Sappho, v, orch, 1905; Sea Wanderers (H.F. Bantock), chorus, orch, 1906; The Time Spirit (H.F. Bantock), chorus, orch, 1906; Omar Khayyám (E. Fitzgerald), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1906–9

Song of Liberty (H.F. Bantock), chorus, orch, 1914; The March (J. Squire), v, orch, 1919; The Vale of Arden (A. Hayes), v, orch, 1921; The Song of Songs (Bible), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1922; Pagan Chants, v, orch, 1917–26; The Burden of Babylon (Bible), chorus, brass, drums, 1928; The Pilgrim’s Progress (J. Bunyan), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1928; King Solomon (Bible), nar, chorus, orch, 1937; The Sphinx, v, orch, 1941; Thomas the Rhymer, v, orch, 1946

orchestral

2 Orch Scenes from Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, 1894; 3 Dramatic Dances, 1894; Saul, ov., 1897; Elegiac Poem, vc, orch, 1898; Helena Variations, 1899; Russian Scenes, 1899; Tone Poem no.1 ‘Thalaba the Destroyer’, 1899; Tone Poem no.2 ‘Dante’, 1901, rev. as Dante and Beatrice, 1910; Tone Poem no.4 ‘Hudibras’, 1902; Tone Poem no.5 ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 1902; Tone Poem no.6 ‘Lalla Rookh’, 1902

Sapphic Poem, vc, orch, 1906; The Pierrot of the Minute, ov., 1908; Old Eng. Suite, small orch, 1909; Dante and Beatrice [rev. Tone Poem no.2], 1910; Fifine at the Fair, orch drama, 1911; Oedipus Coloneus, ov., 1911; In the Far West, serenade str, 1912 [based on Str Qt, 1900]; Scenes from the Scottish Highlands, suite, str, 1913; Celtic Poem, vc, orch, 1914

Hebridean Symphony, 1915; The Land of the Gael, suite, str, 1915; Coronach, str, hp, org, 1918; Hamabdil, vc, orch, 1919; The Sea Reivers, orch ballad, 1920; Caristiona: Hebridean Seascape, 1920; Pagan Sym., 1923–8; The Bacchae, ov., 1929, rev. 1945; The Frogs, ov., 1935

4 Chin. Landscapes, small orch, 1936; Aphrodite in Cyprus, sym. ode, 1939; Celtic Sym., str, 6 hp, 1940; Macbeth, ov. [arr. of incid music, 1926], 1940; Ov. to a Greek Comedy, 1941; Circus Life, ov., 1941; Dramatic Poem, vc, orch, 1941; 2 Heroic Ballads, 1944: Cuchullin’s Lament, Kishmul’s Gallery; Hebridean Poem: The Seagull of the Land-Under-Waves, 1944; The Birds, ov., 1946

choral

Mass, B, male chorus, 1903; Atlanta in Calydon, choral sym., 1911; Vanity of Vanities, choral sym. 1913; A Pageant of Human Life, choral sym., 1913; Choral Suite from the Chinese, male chorus, 1914; Choral Suite, male chorus, 1926; 7 Burdens from Isaiah, male chorus, 1927; 3 Choruses for male vv, (R. Browning), 1929; 5 Choral Songs and Dances from the Bacchae, female chorus, 1945; many other works for male, female, mixed and children’s choruses

chamber

Str Qt, c, 1900, arr. str orch as In the Far West, 1912; Sonata, vc, pf, 1900, rev. 1940; Pibroch, vc, hp, 1917; Sonata, va, pf, 1919; Sonata, vc, 1924; Salve Regina, str trio, 1924; Sonata, vn, pf, 1929; Sonata, vn, pf, 1930; Str Qt ‘In a Chinese Mirror’, 1933; Sonata, vn, pf, 1940; Sonata, vc, pf, 1945

Over 400 songs incl. 40 song cycles and numerous partsongs, over 100 pf works, works for brass band, several hundred arrs. of own works and of works by others

MSS in GB-Bu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.O. Anderton: Granville Bantock (London, 1915)

H. Antcliffe: ‘A Brief Survey of the Works of Granville Bantock’, MQ, iv (1918), 333–46

Granville Bantock, Chester Miniature Essays ser. (London, 1922)

R. Newmarch: Sibelius (London, 1944) [incl. Bantock–Sibelius correspondence]

H. Roberton: ‘Remembrance: Granville Bantock’, The Lute (1946) [special issue]; repr. in Fanfare [Birmingham], i/4 (1947), 3–5

W. Hayford Morris: ‘Thoughts on Granville Bantock’, Fanfare [Birmingham], i/9 (1948), 10 only

W. Hayford Morris: ‘The Choral Work of Granville Bantock’, Fanfare [Birmingham], iii/1 (1953), 9–12

W. Hayford Morris: ‘The Orchestral Works of Granville Bantock’, Fanfare [Birmingham], iii/4 (1954), 7–10

W. Hayford Morris: ‘The Chamber Works of Granville Bantock’, Fanfare [Birmingham], iii/5 (1955), 4–7

P.J. Pirie: ‘Bantock and his Generation’, MT, xcix (1968), 715–17

M. Bantock: Granville Bantock: a Personal Portrait (London, 1972)

T. Bray: Granville Bantock (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1972)

T. Bray: Music in the Midlands Before the First World War (London, 1973)

Bantock Society Newsletter (1984–7); new ser. Bantock Society Journal (1996–)

S. Banfield: Sensibility and English Song(Cambridge, 1985) [incl. list of songs]

J.A. O’Neill: The Symphonies of Granville Bantock (diss., Colchester Institute, 1986)

H.M. Banton: Bantock’s Settings of Browning’s ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ (diss., City of Birmingham Polytechnic, 1987)

V. Budd: ‘Granville Bantock: the Hebridean Connection’, An Canan (1996), no.62, p.2; no.63, p.1; rev. in Bantock Society Journal, i (1996), 5–18 [available online, Bantock Society homepage]

PETER J. PIRIE/DAVID BROCK

Banwart, Jakob [?Avia, Jacob]

(b Sigmaringen, 19 May 1609; d Konstanz, c1657). German composer. He came from a respected middle-class family from Sigmaringen, residence of the Hohenzollerns, and received his first tuition in music from the court organist, Daniel Bollius. From 1629 he studied at Dillingen University, the centre of the south German Counter-Reformation, where he took his master’s degree in 1631. He then went to Konstanz, where he was ordained in 1632 and first carried out mostly musical duties at the court of Prince-Bishop John VI, Lord High Steward of Waldburg-Wolfegg. From 1641 until his death he was Kapellmeister of the cathedral. The musical life of the Hohenzollern court and at the prince-bishop’s residences at Konstanz and Meersburg, where Hieronymus Bildstein, an important pioneer of the new music, worked, were equally important for his artistic development. Thus Schmid included him, together with Johann Stadlmayr and Johann Donfrid, among the ‘more prominent representatives of the south German church style’. His works were widely performed and are listed in inventories at Freising (1651), Würzburg (1694) and Feldkirch (1699), among others. Brossard praised the masses in his 1657 book as ‘graves, harmonieuses et de très bon goût’. The humorous dialogues, quodlibets and other spirited pieces in his secular collection of 1652 are in sharp contrast to these, and if Gerber was right in stating that Banwart had originally published the book in 1650 under a pseudonym, Jacob Avia, it may have been because he felt it would be thought incongruous coming from one hitherto known as a composer of church music. He consciously modelled it on the ‘new Italian manner’, and, like two works in Kindermann’s Intermedium musico-politicum (1643), some of the contents are based on pieces by Tarquinio Merula, from the second book of madrigals (1633).

WORKS

published in Konstanz

Liber primus sacrorum concentuum, 2–4vv, 2 vn, bc (1641)

Pars prima missarum brevium cantuque facilium, 4–5vv, 5 insts, chorus 4vv (ad lib), op.3 (1649)

Teutsche mit new componirten Stucken und Couranten gemehrte kurtzweilige Tafel Music von Gesprächen, Dialogen, Quodlibeten, 2–4vv (2/1652; Ulm, 3/1652) [possible earlier edn, 1650]

Pars secunda missarum, 4, 5vv, addita una 10/18vv, bc (org), op.1 posth., alias quintum (1657)

Motetae sacrae, selectae ex Thesauro musico Jacobi Banwart, 3–11vv, chorus 4vv (1661)

Missa unica, alias decima quinta, super motetam Congratulamini, 5vv, 2 vn, bc, chorus 4vv (ad lib) (1662)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

MGG1 (E.F. Schmid)

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Ein Musikalien-Inventar des fürstbischöflichen Hofes in Freising’, AMw, vi (1924), 471–83

W. Pass: ‘Das Musikalieninventar der Pfarrkirche St. Nikolaus in Feldkirch aus dem Jahre 1699’, Montfort, xx (1968), 185, 189

WALTER PASS

Baptie, David

(b Edinburgh, 30 Nov 1822; d Glasgow, 26 March 1906). Scottish musical biographer. He was inspired by the first publication of Grove’s Dictionary (1879) to write a series of musical biographical dictionaries, in order to document glee composers and Scottish composers whom he feared Grove would neglect. Although he was prone to inaccuracy and erratic judgment, his biographies contain much valuable material. A reviewer in the Scottish Musical Monthly corrected many errors in Musical Scotland Past and Present (1894), nowadays his most used work and in effect the first comprehensive history of Scottish music. Baptie also compiled from 1846 a manuscript catalogue of partsongs, composed glees, and is said to have edited several hymnbooks. His son Charles Robertson Baptie (b Glasgow, 29 May 1870) was a successful minor composer whose works include music-hall songs and an operetta for children.

WRITINGS

A Handbook of Musical Biography (London, 1883/R, 2/1887)

Musicians of All Times (London, 1889, rev. 1907 by W.G.W. Woodworth)

Musical Scotland Past and Present (Paisley, 1894/R)

Sketches of the English Glee Composers, Historical, Biographical and Critical, from about 1735–1866 (London, 1896)

A Descriptive Catalogue of upwards of 23,000 Secular Part-songs (MS, 1898, GB-Lbl)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘“Musical Scotland”: a Batch of Baptie Blunders’, Scottish Musical Monthly, i (1893–4), 156–7

T. Driffield Hawkin: ‘A Predecessor of Grove’, MO, lxxiv (1950–51), 637–41

DAVID JOHNSON

Baptista, Johann.

See Serranus, Johann Baptista.

Baptist church music.

Baptists are an evangelical Christian denomination whose name is derived from the distinctive doctrine of believers' baptism, usually administered by means of total immersion. Traditional Baptist beliefs also include the authority of the Bible, the soul-competency of the individual believer, a symbolic interpretation of the Lord's Supper, and the autonomy of the local church (although churches have often joined together in voluntary associations and conventions). In most other doctrines Baptists are similar to other mainstream evangelical groups. From modest beginnings in the 17th century Baptists have grown into one of the world's largest evangelical Christian denominations; in 1994 their numbers were estimated at over 37 million worldwide (Wardin, 1995, p.8).

DAVID W. MUSIC

1. Great Britain.

(i) The 17th century.

(ii) The 18th century.

Baptist church music, §1: Great Britain

(i) The 17th century.

The earliest English Baptist churches grew out of 17th-century Separatism. In 1607 John Smyth, the pastor of a Separatist congregation at Gainsborough, led his flock to Amsterdam to avoid persecution. Smyth came under the influence of continental Anabaptist ideas and, in about 1609, rebaptized himself and others of his congregation. Smyth died in 1612 and his followers Thomas Helwys and John Murton led many of his congregation back to England, where they formed the first Baptist church on English soil. While in Amsterdam these Baptists had adopted the Arminian belief in general atonement; thus they and their followers became known as General Baptists.

A second Baptist group arose about 1638 when several members of a London Separatist church – called the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church after its succession of early pastors – rejected infant baptism and formed their own congregation. The ‘mother church’ eventually became a ‘union’ church of mixed Congregationalist and Baptist sentiments. Because of their Calvinistic views of a limited atonement the Baptists originating out of this congregation became known as Particular Baptists. General and Particular Baptists maintained distinct organizational structures until 1891, when they merged to form the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland.

Like most 17th-century Separatists English Baptists rejected the use of choirs and musical instruments in the church, but some went even further and repudiated the practice of congregational song. In The Differences of the Churches of the Seperation (sic), published in Amsterdam in 1608, John Smyth claimed that ‘singing a psalme is a part of spirituall worship’ but that it must proceed from the spirit and not be read from a book. This was amplified in his Certayne Demaundes from the Auncyent Brethren of the Seperation (c1608/9), to suggest that ‘in a Psalme one onely must speak’ and that the use of ‘meter, Rithme, and tune’ quenched the Holy Spirit. Thus singing was to be allowed only if done by an individual through the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit without using preset forms. The impracticality of this was evident to Henry Ainsworth, who pointed out that if Smyth and his congregation truly believed that singing is ‘an ordinary part of worship, why perform they it not’ (A Defence of the Holy Scriptures, 1609). Smyth's views, which were further enlarged upon in Thomas Grantham's massive Christianismus primitivus (1678), seem to have held sway in most General Baptist churches until well into the 18th century, although there is evidence of singing by a few of these Baptists in the 17th century. In 1684, the General Baptist pastor John Reeve published Spiritual Hymns upon Solomon's Song (1684, 2/1693), which he suggested could be ‘sung in the ordinary tunes of the singing Psalms’. The matter of singing came before the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England in 1689. At this time some churches were evidently using William Barton's Book of Psalms in Metre (1644), but the general conclusion of the body was that the churches should not ‘admit to such Carnall formalities’ (Whitley, 1909–10). In 1695 the London General Baptist churches in Paul's Alley and Turner's Hall united, agreeing to sing at the conclusion of morning worship and the Lord's Supper. In the following year, Richard Allen, the pastor of the united church, wrote An Essay to Prove Singing of Psalms with Conjoined Voices a Christian Duty (1696), perhaps in reaction to criticism for instituting this practice of singing. However, these early singers appear to have had few immediate imitators among the General Baptists.

Particular Baptist views on singing during the 17th century represent a curious blend of conservatism and radical innovation. There is no evidence of singing in Particular Baptist churches before 1650, and some early Particular Baptists wrote against the practice (e.g. Francis Cornwell, Edward Drapes and Thomas Collier). However, by the mid-1650s Particular Baptist writings in support of singing began to appear (William Kaye and Vavasor Powell) and some congregations had evidently adopted the practice. Psalmody was certainly practised early in the history of Bristol's Broadmead Baptist Church, for in 1671 a former sheriff complained that ‘he could hear us Sing Psalmes from our meeting-place, at his house in Hallier's Lane’. The pastor of Horselydown church in London, Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), instituted singing about 1673–5 at the conclusion of the Lord's Supper. In 1680 Hercules Collins, a pastor at Wapping, called singing ‘a Gospel-Ordinance’ (in his Orthodox Catechism), thus placing it on the same plane as the other two ordinances generally recognized by Baptists – baptism and the Lord's Supper. By 1691 between 20 and 30 Particular Baptist congregations in London were singing.

This growing acceptance of singing by Particular Baptists was not universally approved, however. In 1690 Isaac Marlow attacked Keach's use of singing by publishing A Brief Discourse Concerning Singing in the Public Worship of God in which he reiterated some of the ideas of John Smyth and put forward the Zwinglian notion that ‘singing’ as used in New Testament passages such as Colossians iii:16 did not indicate a vocal utterance but a ‘speaking’ in the heart. Keach defended his use of singing in The Breach Repaired in God's Worship (1691). These publications touched off a pamphlet war between Marlow and the supporters of Keach's position. By 1692 the issue had become so rancorous that the General Assembly of Particular Baptist churches took up the matter and proposed that several of the most vehement books be dropped from circulation; both sides were urged to exhibit more charitable behaviour. This action seems to have created a temporary lull in the controversy, although 22 members of Keach's church withdrew in 1693 and formed the Maze Pond church because of his use of singing. In 1696 Marlow undertook a response to Richard Allen's An Essay to Prove Singing of Psalms by publishing The Controversie of Singing Brought to an End. The title of Marlow's essay was perhaps wishful thinking, and the pamphlet war was now pursued with renewed vigour on both sides. From 1690 to 1698 at least 19 essays dealing directly with singing were published by Baptist authors. However, by 1699 the controversy was beginning to lose momentum, in part because the large majority of Particular Baptist churches and ministers favoured singing.

Ironically, at a time when some Particular Baptists rejected congregational singing altogether, and most Anglicans and Separatists restricted it to the metrical psalms (see Psalms metrical, §III, 1–2), some Particular Baptists approved the use of ‘hymns of human composure’ and wrote such pieces for use in worship. In 1654 Anna Trapnell, a Fifth Monarchy Baptist, published a collection of prayers and ‘spiritual songs’, The Cry of a Stone, although if the texts were actually used in services they were probably sung as solos rather than congregational hymns. A collection of lyric poetry by Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of God's Free Grace, was published in Rotterdam in 1663. In the meantime, the Particular Baptist Thomas Tillam had published three hymns in The Seventh-Day Sabbath (1657), one each for the Lord's Supper, Pentecost and the Sabbath. Poems that might have been intended or used for congregational singing appeared in scattered sources by Baptist authors during the 1660s, 1670s and 1680s – particularly in children's books by Abraham Cheare, Benjamin Keach and John Bunyan – but the publication of real significance was Keach's Spiritual Melody (1691), a collection of 283 texts that probably reflects some of the hymnic repertory used at the compiler's own church. The book included hymns by non-Baptists such as John Patrick, William Barton and John Mason – often in considerably altered form – as well as original contributions by Keach. Keach published three more collections of hymns, but most of his poetry was doggerel, and his hymnals do not seem to have had much influence outside his personal circle. Nevertheless, these collections are significant for being among the earliest English hymnals to provide a well-rounded body of material that was expressly designed for congregational use. If Keach's poetic abilities were limited, the same cannot be said for Joseph Stennett (1663–1713), a Seventh-Day Baptist whose Hymns in Commemoration of the Sufferings of Our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ (1697) and Hymns Composed for the Celebration of the Holy Ordinance of Baptism (1712) were written for the two Baptist ordinances.

Baptist church music, §1: Great Britain

(ii) The 18th century.

Most General Baptist churches were still in a songless state at the dawn of the 18th century. The Virginia Street church in London began singing in 1722. A few other churches must have adopted singing soon after: a meeting of the General Assembly in 1733 agreed that ‘singing’ churches should not be disfellowshipped for this reason, but admonished such congregations to undertake ‘a serious Examination of the Scriptures’ on the subject (Whitley, 1909–10). The majority of General Baptist churches remained songless until after the middle of the century. In 1770 the New Connexion of General Baptists was formed under the influence of the Methodist revival and the first officially sanctioned General Baptist hymnal, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, was published in London in 1772. This was followed by Samuel Deacon's A New Composition of Hymns and Poems (1785, retitled Barton Hymns in its second edition of 1797), the General Baptist Association's Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1793), and John Deacon's A New and Large Collection of Hymns and Psalms (1800).

During the first third of the 18th century the majority of non-singing Particular Baptist churches began to admit the use of congregational song. Even the Maze Pond church introduced singing in 1733 when a prospective pastor insisted upon it as a condition of his acceptance of the post. A number of Baptists were active in the writing and publishing of hymns during the first half of the century; some of these and the dates of their collections were David Cully (1726), Anne Dutton (1734), Daniel Turner (1747), Benjamin Wallin (pastor at Maze Pond, 1750) and Edward Trivett (1755). The hymns of Isaac Watts were also popular among 18th-century English Baptists.

The ‘Golden Age’ of British Baptist hymnody began with the publication of Anne Steele's two-volume Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1760). Though intended for private rather than congregational use, Steele's texts were widely anthologized in subsequent hymnals. Among the better-known 18th-century English Baptist hymn writers who followed Steele's example were Edmund Jones, Benjamin Beddome, Robert Robinson, John Fawcett, Samuel Stennett, John Ryland, Samuel Medley, Joseph Swain, and the Welshmen David Williams and Benjamin Francis. The 18th-century Particular Baptist hymnals of greatest significance were John Ash and Caleb Evans's Collection of Hymns (1769) and John Rippon's Selection of Hymns (1787); these were eclectic collections that drew upon the works of both Baptist and non-Baptist authors. Rippon's hymnal, which was intended to be a supplement to Watts, achieved ten editions in 13 years and saw wide distribution in both England and America during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Rippon additionally published Psalms and Hymns of Dr. Watts Arranged by Dr. Rippon (1801), familiarly known as ‘Rippon's Watts’.

The 18th century also saw the beginnings of hymn writing and publishing among Welsh and Scottish Baptists. The most significant Welsh Baptist hymnal of this period was Benjamin Francis's Aleluia, which had editions in 1774 and 1786. William Sinclair's Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1751) was probably the first Scottish Baptist hymnal. The Scottish Baptist A Collection of Christian Hymns and Songs, initially published in 1786, was still in print in an enlarged edition as late as 1841.

All the Baptist hymnals mentioned to this point were words-only collections. The first British Baptist tune book, John Rippon's A Selection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1791), was important for its systematic provision of expression marks and tempo indications, its role as the largest musical companion to a particular hymnal, and its being one of the best examples of Dissenting psalmody of the period. Furthermore, the book proved to be widely popular, appearing in numerous editions through the early 19th century.

The music of most 18th-century Baptist churches was restricted to a cappella congregational singing, but in a few places Baptists formed choirs and instrumental ensembles. At St Mary's Church in Norwich, for example, a singing school was instituted that formed the nucleus of a church choir (1779–88). East Lancashire was the home of the Deighn Layrocks (Larks of Dean), a group of vocal and instrumental musicians and composers from the village of Dean, many of whom became Baptists in 1747. At various times these musicians formed the nucleus of a separate church (at Lumb) or sang in the choir at other churches. The Larks continued to be active until an organ purchased for the Lumb church in 1858 rendered their services unnecessary.

Baptist church music, §1: Great Britain

(iii) The 19th and 20th centuries.

By the beginning of the 19th century congregational singing was common in nearly all British Baptist churches. Ironically, the Maze Pond church, which had been formed in the 17th century by those opposed to Benjamin Keach's introduction of singing, was in the mid-19th century ‘famed for the excellence of its congregational singing’ (Price, 1941, p.205).

The most important 19th-century General Baptist hymnals were The Hymn-Book of the New Connexion of General Baptists (1830, a revision of John Deacon's 1800 hymnal), The New Hymnbook (1851, ed. J.B. and J.C. Pike) and The Baptist Hymnal (1879, ed. W.R. Stevenson). Rippon's Selection held sway among Particular Baptists until the 1828 publication of John Haddon's A New Selection, which was itself displaced by Psalms and Hymns (1858). A ‘Psalms and Hymns Trust’ was established in 1860 to promote sales of the latter book. C.H. Spurgeon's Our Own Hymn Book (1866), a collection issued primarily for use in the compiler's Metropolitan Tabernacle, was also widely used, and many Particular Baptists employed Stevenson's New Connexion Baptist Hymnal (1879). Strict Calvinistic Particular Baptists sang from John Stevens's New Selection of Hymns (1809), William Gadsby's Selection of Hymns (1814) and David Denham's The Saints' Melody (1837). The American Methodist I.D. Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos (1873, and later editions) became popular in many English Baptist churches. Special mention must be made of Daniel Sedgwick, a Baptist who was one of the first Englishmen to undertake the systematic collection of material on hymnody for scholarly study.

Significant Welsh Baptist hymnals of the 19th century were Joseph Harris's Casgliad o hymnau (1821) and J.H. Roberts's Llawlyfr moliant (1880), edited on behalf of the Caernarvonshire Baptist Association by R.M. Jones and Spinther James. Scottish Baptists continued to sing from A Collection of Christian Hymns and Songs as well as from Duncan M'Dougall's Gaelic Hymns (1841) and Oliver Flett's Christian Hymnal (1871).

During the course of the 19th century British Baptist objections to choirs and instruments broke down almost completely. Many churches introduced a choir and bass viol (violoncello) or instrumental ensemble during the first half of the century. East Leake Baptist Church in Nottinghamshire used a bass viol from at least 1823, while at Beeston a bass viol and ‘clarionet’ accompanied the singing from 1838 to 1854. Few Baptist churches employed an organ before mid-century; two that did were the Particular Baptist Stone Chapel at Leeds, which was using such an instrument as early as 1817, and the George Street church in Nottingham (installed 1847). During the second half of the century the bass viol and instrumental ensembles began giving way to harmoniums and organs, and by the end of the century it was a rare Baptist church that did not possess a keyboard instrument. At the East Leake church the bass viol was replaced by a harmonium in 1868, while the Beeston congregation purchased a harmonium in 1854. Despite this proliferation of choirs and instruments some churches did not give up the practice of lining-out the congregational songs until quite late (for example, it was not abandoned at Beeston until 1863).

After the formation of The Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1891 it was felt that a new hymnbook was needed as an expression of denominational unity. The Psalms and Hymns Trust that had been founded in 1860 was given the exclusive right to publish hymnals for the denomination, the profits of which were to go towards Baptist charitable causes. The Trust issued the Baptist Church Hymnal in London in 1900, followed by the Baptist Church Hymnal: Revised Edition (1933), and the Baptist Hymn Book (1962). Later, the Trust published a supplement of 104 hymns, Praise for Today (1974), and a full hymnal Baptist Praise and Worship (1991). The Baptist Union of Wales (formed in 1866) published its first hymnal in 1915 under the editorship of H.C. Williams. R.S. Rogers, E.C. Jones and T.E. Jones were responsible for the Union's Y llawlyfr moliant newydd (1956).

The music of British Baptist churches in the late 20th century generally followed either a traditional or a more charismatic approach. The traditonal churches have continued to use hymns, hymnals, and the organ; few of these churches maintain choirs, the music being almost entirely congregational and instrumental. Baptist churches that follow a more charismatic style of worship (though usually without the characteristic hallmark of tongue-speaking) employ worship choruses and use the piano as the basic accompanying instrument.

Baptist church music

2. North America.

(i) The 17th and 18th centuries.

(ii) The 19th and 20th centuries.

Baptist church music, §2: North America

(i) The 17th and 18th centuries.

The first Baptist church in America was founded in 1639 by Roger Williams at Providence, Rhode Island. In 1644 another church was formed at Newport, Rhode Island, and by 1700 there were 33 Baptist churches in the American colonies. While most British Baptist churches of the time were non-singing, there is evidence that several of the early Baptist churches in the colonies practised psalmody. In some cases singing was apparently abandoned when large numbers of non-singing English Baptists emigrated to the colonies and joined these churches. When objections to singing in Baptist worship began to die out in England during the early 18th century, many non-singing American churches adopted or reintroduced psalmody, while newly formed churches sang from their inception. According to Baptist historian Morgan Edwards, Delaware's Welsh Tract church ‘was the principal if not sole means of introducing singing’ into the Baptist churches of Middle Atlantic colonies.

British Baptists were not the only members of this communion to settle in the New World. In 1732 a German, Conrad Beissel, founded the Ephrata community, a Sabbatarian Baptist communal sect, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Unlike some of their British counterparts, the members of Beissel's group had no objections to singing, neither did they have any qualms about singing original hymns. Much of the music sung at Ephrata was written by Beissel himself in a rhythmically free, diatonic, chorale style that sometimes featured multiple choirs and antiphonal effects. The most important published hymnal of the Ephrata community was Das Gesäng der einsamen und verlassenen Turtel-Taube (1747).

The psalters and hymnals used by English-speaking Baptists in New England and the Middle Atlantic states during the 18th and early 19th centuries were mostly of British origin. Early Baptists probably used the Ainsworth or Sternhold and Hopkins psalters. After about 1740 many Baptists began singing from Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms. This was succeeded during the last third of the century by various editions of Isaac Watts's psalms and hymns, often supplemented by Rippon's Selection of Hymns (London, 1787, reprinted in New York and Elizabethtown, 1792). Earlier editions of Watts were replaced by ‘Rippon's Watts’, which was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1820. The ascendancy of Watts among New England Baptists was continued through James Winchell's An Arrangement of … Watts (1819). ‘Rippon's Watts’, continued in use in the Middle Atlantic states until the 1840s.

The earliest Baptist hymnal compiled in America, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, was published anonymously at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1766, but does not seem to have met with favour. Baron Stow and S.F. Smith's The Psalmist (1843) became the most widely used collection in the North, superseding both ‘Winchell's Watts’ and ‘Rippon's Watts’, and marking the turning away of Baptists from ‘Watts entire’, and from collections that were merely supplementary to Watts. Somewhat outside the mainstream of Baptist hymnody in the North was Joshua Smith's Divine Hymns (1791). This early collection of folk hymn texts had little impact on standard northern Baptist hymnals, but it did reach 12 editions. The collections noted above were words-only hymnals, but tunes for Baptist use were published in Morgan Edwards's The Customs of Primitive Churches (1768), Samuel Holyoke's The Christian Harmonist … for the Use of the Baptist Churches (1804), the anonymous Boston Collection of Sacred and Devotional Hymns (1808) and other scattered sources. Several New England psalmodists were associated with the denomination, including Oliver Holden, Oliver Brownson, J.C. Washburn and Oliver Shaw.

Baptist church music, §2: North America

(ii) The 19th and 20th centuries.

During the 18th century Baptist hymnody appears to have followed much the same course in the North and South. By the turn of the 19th century, however, Baptists of the South had begun to rely increasingly upon the folk hymn. The most popular southern collections – all of which incorporated numerous folk hymn texts – included J. Mercer's The Cluster (3/1810), Starke Dupuy's Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1811), William Dossey's The Choice (1820) and S.S. Burdett's Baptist Harmony (1834). Three widely used southern shape-note folk hymn tune collections, William Walker's Southern Harmony (1835), B.F. White and E.J. King's Sacred Harp (1844) and J.G. McCurry's Social Harp (1855), were compiled by Baptists (see also Shape-note hymnody, §2). Controversies among Baptists caused a division of the denomination into Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions in 1845. A special edition of The Psalmist (1847) with a supplement by two Southern Baptist pastors, Richard Fuller and J.B. Jeter, saw some use in the South. The Baptist Psalmody (1850) of Basil Manly and Basil Manly jr gained immediate acceptance among Southern Baptists, holding much the same place that The Psalmist did among their Northern brethren.

The most important influence on late 19th-century Baptist hymnody was the emergence of the gospel song. Many prominent gospel songwriters were Northern Baptists (e.g. W.B. Bradbury, Robert Lowry and W.H. Doane). A few Northern collections such as E.H. Johnson's Sursum corda (1898) attempted to introduce hymnody of the English Oxford Movement. More widely accepted were books such as The Baptist Hymnal (1883) that attempted to balance liturgical hymnody with the gospel song. The New Baptist Hymnal, produced jointly by Northern and Southern Baptists in 1926, became popular in the North but did not find favour in the South. Two later hymnals of Northern Baptists (renamed the American Baptist Convention in 1950 and the American Baptist Churches in the USA in 1972), Christian Worship (1941) and Hymnbook for Christian Worship (1970), were jointly compiled with the Disciples of Christ.

Late 19th-century Southern Baptists wholeheartedly embraced the gospel song, which almost entirely replaced the folk hymn as the basis of their congregational singing. This emphasis on the gospel song continued well into the 20th century in such books as R.H. Coleman's The Modern Hymnal (1926) and The American Hymnal (1933), B.B. McKinney's The Broadman Hymnal (1940) and numerous informal songbooks. Later Southern Baptist hymnals, such as Baptist Hymnal (1956), Baptist Hymnal (1975) and The Baptist Hymnal (1991) have drawn from a wider range of hymnic styles and traditions. However, Baptist churches are free to use any hymnal they choose, and some employ collections from independent publishers or no hymnal at all. The strong status of hymnological scholarship among Southern Baptists is evident from the fact that the two most widely used college and seminary hymnology textbooks, W.J. Reynolds's A Survey of Christian Hymnody (1963, rev. 4/1999 by D.W. Music and M. Price) and Harry Eskew and H.T. McElrath's Sing with Understanding (1980, 2/1995), were written by members of this denomination. Companions for the 1956 and 1975 Baptist Hymnals were written by W.J. Reynolds (1964, 2/1967; and 1976), while a Handbook to The Baptist Hymnal was compiled by a group of writers and published in 1992.

Early hymnals published by and for Canadian Baptists included John Bowser's Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1807), John Buzzell's Free Will Baptist Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1823), The Canadian Baptist Hymn Book (1873) and The Canadian Baptist Hymnal (1888). In about 1902 The [Canadian] Baptist Church Hymnal (‘Canadian’ appears on the cover but not on the title page) was published in London; this was a reprint of the 1900 English Baptist Church Hymnal with a ‘Canadian Supplement’ of 26 hymns, a few of which had tunes by Canadian Baptist composers. In 1936 the Hymnary for Use in Baptist Churches, a slightly revised edition of the United Church of Canada's Hymnary (1930), was published in Toronto. Carol M Giesbrecht edited The Hymnal for the Baptist Federation of Canada in 1973.

Choirs were generally rejected in Baptist churches of the colonies until after 1770. The earliest record of Baptist choral singing in America dates from the year 1771, when a choir was formed at the First Baptist Church of Boston. Other urban churches in the North soon imitated this practice, and by 1820 most of the larger churches had instituted choirs. A few urban churches in the South formed choirs in the early 19th century, but even as late as 1868 some Southern Baptist churches were struggling with the propriety of admitting such ensembles. Early Baptist choirs were generally composed of volunteers who sat in the balcony facing the pulpit. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the influence of the English Oxford Movement prompted many Baptist churches to vest their choirs and place them in full view of the congregation. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of children's, youth and senior adult choirs in Baptist churches.

Even more controversial than the use of choirs was the introduction of musical instruments. Despite considerable opposition, the bass viol began appearing in Baptist churches of the North shortly after 1800. In about 1819 an organ was installed in the Baptist church at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and the older, better-established New England Baptist churches soon began to acquire organs. Lingering objections to instruments prevented most Southern Baptist churches from acquiring organs until after 1850. Many churches made use of the melodeon as their first instrument, since these were generally cheaper to install and maintain than a pipe organ. Except for some conservative groups, most late 20th-century Baptist churches in the USA used some sort of instrument – usually organ and/or piano, sometimes an orchestra or pop ensemble, or sometimes pre-recorded tape or compact disc – in their services.

After World War I a few Baptist churches began to appoint staff members with some responsibility for music. Since the 1950s many of the larger Baptist churches have hired full-time ministers of music who are responsible for a church's entire music programme. The minister of music typically conducts or supervises choirs for different age groups, various types of instrumental ensemble, and the congregational singing. In smaller churches the minister of music is frequently a part-time or volunteer worker with more limited responsibilities.

Two important factors in the development of Southern Baptist church music during the 20th century were the establishment of the Church Music Department of the Baptist Sunday School Board in 1941 and the influence of music schools in several of the seminaries operated by the Southern Baptist Convention. The Church Music Department provides literature, music and training opportunities for church musicians, while the seminaries offer graduate-level instruction in sacred music.

From the 1970s onwards Baptist church music in America has been characterized by great variety. Some churches rely primarily on standard hymnody and choral or instrumental music of an artistic nature. Others, especially in the South, continue to emphasize the gospel song. Still others have dispensed with hymnals, choirs and organs in favour of ‘worship’ or ‘praise’ choruses printed on songsheets or displayed by overhead projectors. These are typically led by a ‘worship team’ of between four and eight singers and accompanied by a rhythm section with occasional participation by other instrumentalists. The worship team also provides ‘special music’, generally a ‘contemporary Christian’ song in pop style.

As is true of many denominations since the 1960s, the dichotomy between the ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ in Baptist church music of North America, Great Britain and other English-speaking lands has led to much conflict within and between congregations, with those that prefer to remain rooted in traditional musical materials being accused of ‘cultural irrelevancy’ and those that employ pop music styles in their efforts to win converts being charged with ‘cultural accommodationism’. Throughout their history, Baptists have been a populist denomination with a zeal for numerical growth and no authoritative hierarchy to set standards, and they have often relied upon unsophisticated cultural materials (e.g. the gospel song) to carry their evangelistic message. On the other hand, they have also been a largely conservative group – both theologically and in other ways – that typically places little value on change (as evidenced by their continued use of of the gospel song long after it had ceased to be a popular style in the culture as a whole). Many Baptist churches attempt to reconcile this difficulty by blending the traditional and contemporary, with varying degrees of balance and success.

Historically, the American Baptist Churches in the USA and the Southern Baptist Convention have contained the largest numbers of Baptists in America, but there are also numerous smaller bodies. Many of these groups follow essentially the same music patterns as churches that are affiliated with the larger denominational organizations, but a few have maintained distinctive musical practices. Among these are the Primitive Baptists, who originated in the 1830s as a predestinarian reaction against the increasing Arminianism of the major bodies, and some congregations of Regular Baptists, particularly in Appalachia. These Baptists reject the use of choirs and musical instruments, relying exclusively on a cappella congregational singing which often consists of folk hymns that are lined-out and sung in the ‘old way’. The singing in Primitive Baptist churches typically begins about half an hour before the stated service time, with the songs chosen spontaneously at the time of singing. The two most widely used Primitive hymnals, Benjamin Lloyd's Primitive Hymns (1841/R) and D.H. Goble's Primitive Baptist Hymn Book (1887), are words-only collections. Some Primitive Baptist churches have adopted books with musical notation, particularly the Old School Hymnal (1920, 11/1983), which includes traditional Protestant hymns, tunes of the Mason/Hastings/Bradbury school, folk hymns and gospel songs.

Before the Civil War most black Baptists attended the same churches as whites and presumably sang the same congregational songs. After 1865 the number of African-American Baptist churches grew dramatically. In urban areas black Baptists relied primarily upon Northern Baptist hymnbooks such as The Baptist Hymnal (1883), while in rural congregations ‘Dr Watts singing’ – an unaccompanied style characterized by lining-out, slow tempos, embellishment of the melody and ‘surge’ singing – held sway. In 1895 black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention, USA (NBCUSA), which began publishing songbooks in 1897 and issued its first major hymnal, the National Baptist Hymnal, in Nashville in 1903. While this contained a few hymns by African-Americans, the book was modelled largely on the 1883 Baptist Hymnal. Schisms in the Convention in 1916 and 1961 resulted in the formation of the National Baptist Convention of America (NBCA) and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, respectively. The former immediately began publishing songbooks, one of the most significant being National Jubilee Melodies (1916), a major collection of black spirituals. After founding a new publishing board, the NBCUSA issued Gospel Pearls (1921) – an important songbook containing a variety of standard hymns, spirituals and gospel songs by both white and black writers – and its first (and only) major hymnal, the Baptist Standard Hymnal (1924). The latter collection was reprinted in 1985 and remains in use in many churches. In 1977 the NBCA published the New National Baptist Hymnal, the volume now found most often in African-American Baptist churches. The Progressive National Baptist Convention has issued two hymnals, the Progressive Baptist Hymnal (1976) and the New Progressive Baptist Hymnal (1982), which were ‘special editions’ of the Southern Baptist Broadman Hymnal and NBCA's New National Baptist Hymnal, respectively.

By 1906 choirs were such a common feature in African-American Baptist churches that the NBCUSA published a National Anthem Series of 14 choral pieces by African-American composers, all of whom were ‘choristers’ in Baptist churches. Black Baptist churches were heavily influenced by gospel music during the 1920s and 30s and this has continued to be a dominant style for choral and congregational music in the churches. Some rural African-American Baptist churches continue to sing exclusively in ‘Dr Watts’ style, while ‘upscale’ urban congregations employ mainly music from the European-American and black spiritual traditions accompanied by pipe organ or piano. Many churches use both of these styles in addition to black gospel music with Hammond organ and piano or instrumental ensemble accompaniment.

Baptist church music

3. Other countries.

English and American Baptists were in the forefront of the modern missions movement. The earliest British Baptist missionary, William Carey (1761–1834), arrived in India in 1793; Adoniram Judson, the first Baptist missionary from America, began work in Burma in 1813. During the 19th century Baptists established congregations and institutions on several continents, particularly Asia, Africa and South America, but most of the numerical and musical growth in these areas has come since World War II.

Throughout much of the history of this missionary activity Baptists, like other denominations, translated Anglo-American hymns and transplanted these and Western musical styles to the lands in which they worked. Since the period of greatest missionary expansion coincided with extensive use of the gospel song in British and American Baptist churches, this type of music became standard for churches in other countries as well. The approach to church music in these countries is often similar to that of Baptist churches in England and the USA, although the musical style may be different: congregations sing hymns and/or choruses; ‘special music’ is presented by choirs, small ensembles, or soloists; and pianos, organs, guitars or indigenous instruments accompany or play independently. Baptist seminary and combined church choirs in these lands occasionally present larger works of the Western choral repertory such as Handel's Messiah and Théodore Dubois' Les sept paroles du Christ; these are often seen in the host country as significant cultural events. However, in recent years more emphasis has been placed by missionaries and nationals alike on the cultivation of indigenous church music.

A significant development in Baptist church music in many countries has been the appointment of music missionaries by the Foreign Mission Board (renamed the International Mission Board in 1997) of the Southern Baptist Convention. The first music missionaries, Don and Violet Orr, were sent to Colombia in 1951. Subsequently, music missionaries have been appointed to other Latin American countries, Africa, Asia and Europe. The main responsibility of music missionaries is usually to promote music in the churches or to teach in seminaries, but their work often features a variety of activities, including the formation of choirs and ensembles, giving concerts, leading conferences, and composing, editing and publishing music.

(i) Mexico, Central and South America.

(ii) Africa.

(iii) Asia.

(iv) Europe and Russia.

(v) Australia.

(i) Mexico, Central and South America.

Since Spanish is the dominant language in Mexico, Central and South America, Baptist congregations in these areas often make use of the same hymnals, especially those published by the Spanish Baptist Publishing House in El Paso, Texas, including Himnos favoritos (1951), El nuevo himnario popular (1955) and Himnario bautista (1978). However, many Latin-American Baptist churches cannot afford to purchase a hymnal and rely instead on locally produced words-only collections or no hymnal at all. The publishing house also provides Spanish-language choral music and other resources for use by Latin-American Baptist choirs, instrumentalists and music leaders.

The most important Brazilian Baptist hymnal, Cantor cristão, was initially compiled by the missionary Solomon Ginsberg in 1891. This went through 36 editions (the last revision in 1971) and grew from 16 to 581 selections, 387 of which were from I.D. Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos. In 1991 Brazilian Baptists issued a new hymnal, Hinário para o culto cristão, under the general editorship of music missionary Joan Sutton. Among the 440 hymns were many adapted from or written in the style of Brazilian folk music. In 1957 a Church Music Department was organized by the Brazilian Baptist Convention under the direction of music missionary W.H. Ichter. One of the first publications of the department was a collection of anthems, Antemas corais, for use by Brazilian Baptist church choirs. These and similar publications have generally consisted of English-language works translated into Portuguese.

(ii) Africa.

Baptist churches in Africa use a wide variety of materials, in part because of the many different language groups and the strong social contrasts between city and country dwellers. Urban churches are likely to use ‘book music’, that is, hymnals containing translations of songs in the Western tradition. Examples of this ‘book music’ that have been produced by Baptists in Africa are Nyimbo za chigonjetso (Lilongwe, Malawi, 1970), Emo na, eja suine (Nigeria, n.d.), Sauti zetu mbinguni (Nairobi, 1983), and Baptist asore nnwom (Kumasi, Ghana, n.d., rev. 1980). These books are usually produced and priced inexpensively and contain words only. In rural areas Baptist congregations are more likely to sing ‘body music’, which is unwritten and features call and response patterns, hand-clapping, dancing, and accompaniment by traditional instruments such as the tambourine, kayamba and drum. Even when these congregations sing a Western hymn they are likely to adapt it to indigenous performing practice.

(iii) Asia.

The use and publication of hymnals varies considerably in the Baptist churches of Asia. Early Chinese Baptist hymnals were mainly published under the auspices of British Baptist missions. Gospel Hymns (Canton, 1903), a words-only collection to which tunes were added in 1907, was reprinted with many variations and minor revisions until 1935. Hymns of Praise (Shantung, words 1901, music 1910) was the most important Mandarin hymnal before Baptist Hymns of Praise (1932), which in turn gave way to New Hymns of Praise (1941). The formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 closed the mainland to missionary and overtly Christian activity, but Baptist hymnological developments continued in Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong. A significant Chinese Baptist hymnal, New Songs of Praise, was issued in Hong Kong in 1973 under the editorship of G. Chi and Southern Baptist music missionary L.G. McKinney. Intended to serve Mandarin, Cantonese and Swatow constituencies, the hymnal was published in an English edition in 1976, a Taiwanese version in 1978, and a combined Chinese-English edition in 1988. The hymnal includes many indigenous productions from Chinese and other Asian sources.

Elsewhere in Asia, Baptist churches often rely on ‘union’ hymnals, such as the Korean Chansonggah (1983), published by a consortium of denominations. A significant Baptist hymnal from Indonesia, Nyanyian Pujian, was published at Bandung in 1982.

(iv) Europe and Russia.

Although Baptist work began during the 19th century in most countries of Europe, numerical growth has been slow, particularly in areas dominated by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. While almost all churches have traditionally employed instruments, and many of the larger ones have maintained choirs (some of them quite accomplished), hymnody continues to be the most important form of Baptist church music in Europe, as in other areas of the world. Germany – the source for the spread of Baptist principles into many other areas of Europe and the seat of one of the largest Baptist groups on the Continent – may be taken as an example. Early German Baptists sang Lutheran and Moravian chorales, in addition to hymns written by their own people, from collections such as Julius Köbner's Glaubenstimme (1849). A German edition of Bliss and Sankey's Gospel Hymns translated by the American Walter Rauschenbusch, Evangeliums-Lieder 1 und 2 (New York, 1897), became very popular and in the late 20th century was still being used in some German-speaking European congregations. An ‘official’ Baptist hymnal, Gemeindelieder, appeared in Wuppertal in 1978, supplemented by a collection of Neue Gemeindelieder in 1993.

In the Russian Empire, Baptist work was particularly difficult owing to repression by the tsarist regime. The Revolution of 1917 initially brought about more favourable treatment of Baptists and other evangelical Christians as the government sought to counteract the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, but during the 1930s the Stalin government closed most of the churches and banished or imprisoned many of their ministers. Overt persecution eased during World War II, and after the war Baptist churches were allowed to exist in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries, although they were subject to various limitations, including the printing of religious literature such as hymnals. Because of the scarcity of such books, congregational song was generally done from memory or with the aid of lining-out. Most churches featured an organ and choir, the latter often singing as many as four or five anthems (sometimes from manuscript) during the two-hour service. Since before the break up of the Soviet Union the typical musical style of Baptists in Russia and other Commonwealth of Independent States countries has been the gospel song accompanied by piano or organ and occasionally guitar; but the churches generally rejected rock-based music and the use of instruments such as saxophones and drums because they were considered to be inappropriate to the seriousness of worship. However, as contact with English-speaking Baptists has increased, Russian Baptist youth have discovered Christian rock, some of which is likely to make its way eventually into the churches.

(v) Australia.

Baptists in Australia have typically relied upon British Baptist hymnals such as the Baptist Church Hymnal: Revised Edition (1933) and Baptist Hymn Book (1962). I.D. Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos was widely used, especially for the more informal evening services. Donald Crowhurst published an Australian Hymnal in 1967 which continues to be widely used in the churches. Australian Baptist congregations of the late 20th century have been greatly influenced by musical practices in Britain and America, and their music ranges from vested choirs singing traditional Western choral music with organ/piano accompaniment to pop ensembles leading charismatic-style choruses.

(1) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (i)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

general

H.S. Burrage: Baptist Hymn Writers and their Hymns (Portland, ME, 1888)

J. Julian: A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892, 2/1907/R)

L.F. Benson: The English Hymn: its Development and Use in Worship (New York, 1915/R)

R.E. Keighton: ‘Baptist Hymnody’, The Chronicle, x (1947), 75–86, 97–102

W.J. Reynolds: A Survey of Christian Hymnody (New York, 1963, rev. 4/1999 by D.W. Music and M. Price)

H. Eskew and H.T. McElrath: Sing with Understanding (Nashville, TN, 1980, 2/1995)

A.W. Wardin, ed.: Baptists Around the World: a Comprehensive Handbook (Nashville, TN, 1995)

great britain

T. Crosby: The History of the English Baptists (London, 1740/R), iii, 266–71; iv, 298–301

J.J. Goadby: Bye-Paths in Baptist History (London, 1871/R), 317–49

J.S. Curwen: Studies in Worship Music (First Series) (London, 1880, 2/1888), 93–107, 426–30

W.T. Whitley, ed.: Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England (London, 1909–10), i, 27; ii, 18

A. Buckley: ‘The Deighn Layrocks’, Baptist Quarterly, iv (1928–9), 43–8

L.F. Benson: The Hymns of John Bunyan (New York, 1930)

F.W. Beckwith: ‘The Early Church at Leeds’, Baptist Quarterly, vi (1932–3), 116–24

W.T. Whitley: Congregational Hymn-Singing (London, 1933), 119–30

C. Bonner and W.T. Whitley, eds.: A Handbook to the Baptist Church Hymnal Revised (London, 1935)

O.A. Mansfield: ‘Rippon's Tunes’, Baptist Quarterly, viii (1936–7), 36–43

C. Bonner: Some Baptist Hymnists from the Seventeenth Century to Modern Times (London, 1937)

A.A. Reid: ‘The Tercentenary of Benjamin Keach, Baptist Preacher, London, England. I: Benjamin Keach, 1640’, The Chronicle, iii (1940), 147–60

G.W. Hughes: ‘The Tercentenary of Benjamin Keach, Baptist Preacher, London, England, II: He Taught us to Sing: the Story of Benjamin Keach’, The Chronicle, iii (1940), 160–63

C.B. Jewson: ‘St Mary's, Norwich. IV: The Church Takes Root, 1743–1788’, Baptist Quarterly, x (1941), 282–8

S.J. Price: ‘Maze Pond and the Matterhorn’, Baptist Quarterly, x (1941), 202–8

W.T. Whitley: ‘The First Hymnbook in Use’, Baptist Quarterly, x (1941), 369–75

W.T. Whitley: ‘The Tune Book of 1791’, Baptist Quarterly, x (1941), 434–43

H. Martin, ed.: A Companion to the Baptist Church Hymnal [Revised Edition] (London, 1953)

J.O. Barrett: ‘Hymns among the Baptists’, Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland Bulletin, iii (1954), 164–6

H. Wamble: ‘Benjamin Keach, Churchman’, Quarterly Review: a Survey of Southern Baptist Progress, xvi/2 (1956), 47–53

E.A. Payne: ‘Thomas Tillam’, Baptist Quarterly, xvii (1957), 61–6

R.H. Young: The History of Baptist Hymnody in England from 1612 to 1800 (diss., U. of S. California, 1959)

E.P. Winter: ‘The Administration of the Lord's Supper among the Baptists of the Seventeenth Century’, Baptist Quarterly, xviii (1960), 196–204

H. Martin: ‘The Baptist Contribution to Early English Hymnody’, Baptist Quarterly, xix (1962), 195–208

I. Mallard: ‘The Hymns of Katherine Sutton’, Baptist Quarterly, xx (1963), 23–33

H. Martin: ‘Daniel Sedgwick: a Baptist Pioneer of Hymnology’, Baptist Quarterly, xx (1964), 362–4

C.E. Spann: The Seventeenth Century English Baptist Controversy Concerning Singing (thesis, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1965)

R.W. Thomson: ‘Anne Steele, 1716–1778’, Baptist Quarterly, xxi (1966), 368–71

K.R. Manley: John Rippon, D.D. (1751–1836) and the Particular Baptists (diss., Regents' Park College, London, 1967)

H. Martin, ed.: The Baptist Hymn Book Companion (London, 1962, rev. 2/1967 by R.W. Thomson)

H. Martin: ‘Benjamin Keach (1640–1704): Pioneer of Congregational Hymn Singing’, Church Musician, xviii/6 (1967), 8–11; xviii/7 (1967), 8–11

F.M.W. Harrison: ‘The Nottinghamshire Baptists: Mission, Worship & Training’, Baptist Quarterly, xxv (1974), 309–28

R.W. Thomson: ‘The Psalms and Hymns Trust and Praise for Today’, Baptist Quarterly, xxv (1974), 380–83

D.W. Music: ‘Psalmody and Hymnody in the Broadmead Baptist Church of Bristol, England’, Quarterly Review: a Survey of Southern Baptist Progress, xxxvii/4 (1976), 66–71

S.J. Rogal: ‘John Bunyan and English Congregational Song’, The Hymn, xxviii (1977), 118–25

E. Sharpe: ‘Bristol Baptist College and the Church's Hymnody’, Baptist Quarterly, xxviii (1979), 7–16

D.W. Music: ‘The Hymns of Benjamin Keach: an Introductory Study’, The Hymn, xxxiv (1983), 147–54

D.W. Music: ‘Congregational Singing in English Baptist Churches of the Seventeenth Century’, Quarterly Review: a Survey of Southern Baptist Progress, l/1 (1990), 72–8

D.W. Music: ‘John Bunyan and Baptist Hymnody’, Baptist History and Heritage, xxvii/2 (1992), 3–11

N. Clark: ‘Baptist Praise and Worship’, Baptist Quarterly, xxxv (1993), 95–100

J.H.Y. Briggs: The English Baptists of the Nineteenth Century (Didcot, 1994), 35–42

P. Westermeyer: ‘The Breach Repair'd’, The Hymn, xlvii/1 (1996), 10–16

north america

M. Edwards: ‘History of the Baptists in Delaware’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, ix (1885), 52

J.F. Sachse: The Music of the Ephrata Cloister (Lancaster, PA, 1903/R)

A.L. Stevenson: The Story of Southern Hymnology (Salem, VA, 1931/R), 1–15

G.P. Jackson: White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, NC, 1933/R)

H.W. Foote: Three Centuries of American Hymnody (Cambridge, MA, 1940/R)

G.P. Jackson: White and Negro Spirituals (New York, 1943/R)

W. Dinneen: Music at the Meeting House, 1775–1958 (Providence, RI, 1958)

W.L. Hooper: Church Music in Transition (Nashville, TN, 1963), 102–34

‘Our Baptist Heritage in Church Music’, Church Musician, xiv/10 (1963), 14

H. Eskew: ‘Hymnody of our Forefathers’, Church Musician, xv/5 (1964), 5–8

H. Eskew: ‘Music of our Forefathers’, Church Musician, xv/6 (1964), 16–19

W.J. Reynolds: Hymns of our Faith: a Handbook for the Baptist Hymnal (Nashville, TN, 1964, 2/1967)

H. Eskew: ‘Music in the Baptist Tradition’, Review and Expositor, lxix (1972), 161–75

W.H. Tallmadge: ‘Baptist Monophonic and Heterophonic Hymnody in Southern Appalachia’, Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research, xi (1975), 106–36

W.J. Reynolds: ‘Our Heritage of Baptist Hymnody in America’, Baptist History and Heritage, xi (1976), 204–17

W.J. Reynolds: Companion to Baptist Hymnal (Nashville, TN, 1976)

P.D. Hartman: ‘The Hymn Tradition of the Primitive Baptists’, Music Ministry, x/3 (1977), 2–5, 27

C.D. Duncan: A Historical Survey of the Development of the Black Baptist Church in the United States and a Study of Performance Practices Associated with Dr. Watts Hymn Singing: a Source Book for Teachers (diss., Washington U., 1979)

D.W. Music: ‘The Introduction of Musical Instruments into Baptist Churches in America’, Quarterly Review: a Survey of Southern Baptist Progress, xl/4 (1979), 55–62

H.T. McElrath: ‘Hymnody among Southern Baptists’, American Organist, xiv/5 (1980), 19

E.M. Huntley: ‘Hymnody in the National Baptist Convention’, American Organist, xiv/11 (1980), 20

B. Sutton: ‘Shape-Note Tune Books and Primitive Hymns’, EthM, xxvi (1982), 11–26

C.R. Brewster: The Cluster of Jesse Mercer (Macon, GA, 1983)

‘Church Music in Baptist History’, Baptist History and Heritage, xix/1 (1984) [complete issue]

I.H. Murrell: An Examination of Southern Ante-Bellum Baptist Hymnals and Tunebooks as Indicators of the Congregational Hymn and Tune Repertories of the Period with an Analysis of Representative Tunes (diss., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1984)

J.T. Titon: ‘Stance, Role, and Identity in Fieldwork among Folk Baptists and Pentecostals’, American Music, iii/1 (1985), 16–24

D.C. Measels: A Catalog of Source Readings in Southern Baptist Music: 1828–1890 (diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY, 1986)

Y. Robinson: The Ephrata Cloister and the Lititz Moravian Settlement, 1732–1820, and a Comparative Study of their Musical Cultures (diss., Juilliard School of Music, New York, 1986)

J.D. Baklanoff: ‘The Celebration of a Feast: Music, Dance, and Possession Trance in the Black Primitive Baptist Footwashing Ritual’, EthM, xxxi (1987), 381–94

D.W. Music: ‘Early Baptist Composers and Tunebooks in America’, Quarterly Review: a Survey of Southern Baptist Progress, xlvii/1 (1987), 68–75

J. Beckwith: ‘Tunebooks and Hymnals in Canada, 1801–1939’, American Music, vi (1988), 193–234

J.T. Titon: Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Austin, TX, 1988)

R.P. Drummond: A Portion for the Singers: a History of Music among Primitive Baptists since 1800 (Atwood, TN, 1989)

P.G.A. Griffin-Allwood, G.A. Rawlyk, and J.K. Zeman: Baptists in Canada, 1760–1990: a Bibliography of Selected Printed Resources in English (Hantsport, NS, 1989), 208–11

T.J. Studstill: The Life of Robert H. Coleman and his Influence on Southern Baptist Hymnody (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1991)

R.W. Rose: The Psalmist: a Significant Hymnal for Baptists in America during the Nineteenth Century (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1991)

J.V. Adams, ed.: Handbook to The Baptist Hymnal (Nashville, TN, 1992)

J.M. Spencer: Black Hymnody: a Hymnological History of the African-American Church (Knoxville, TN, 1992), 74–97

‘Shaping Influences on Baptist Church Music’, Baptist History and Heritage, xxvii/2 (1992) [complete issue]

H. Eskew, D.W. Music and P.A. Richardson: Singing Baptists: Studies in Baptist Hymnody in America (Nashville, TN, 1994)

B.B. Patterson: The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches (Urbana, IL, 1995)

L.G. Davenport: Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier: Maine's Sacred Tunebooks, 1800–1830 (Lanham, MD, 1996), 110–11, 115–17, 124

other countries

H. Eskew: ‘Music in a Mexican Baptist Church’, Church Musician, xiv/9 (1963), 12–13

K.G. Greenlaw: Traditions of Protestant Hymnody and the Use of Music in the Methodist and Baptist Churches of Mexico (diss., U. of S. California, 1967)

J. Nordenhaug: ‘A Visit with Russian Baptists’, Baptist World, xiv/2 (1967), 4–6

M.F. Ellerbe: The Music Missionary of the Southern Baptist Convention: his Preparation and his Work (diss., Catholic U. of America, Washington DC, 1970)

T.W. Hunt: ‘Music in Missions’, Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, iii (Nashville, TN, 1971), 1859–60; iv (1982), 2361–2

N. Corbitt: The History and Development of Music Used in the Baptist Churches on the Coast of Kenya: the Development of an Indigenous Church Music 1953–1984 (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1985)

I.L. de Paula: Early Hymnody in Brazilian Baptist Churches: its Sources and Development (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1985)

J.H. Barker: The Use of Indigenous Chinese Hymnody in Baptist Churches of Taiwan (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, 1992)

A.W. Barrett: A Study of the Choral Music Tradition in Hungarian Baptist Churches (diss., U. of Iowa, 1992)

C.E. Spann: ‘A Tale of Two Hymnals: the Brazilian Baptist Cantor cristão (1891) and Hinário para o culto cristão (1991)’, The Hymn, xliii/4 (1992), 15–21

P.W. Blycker: A Critical Analysis of Selected Spanish-Language Hymnals Used by Evangelical Churches in Mesoamerica, 1952–1992 (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, 1997)

Baptiste [Anet, Jean-Jacques-Baptiste]

(b Paris, 2 Jan 1676; d Lunéville, 14 Aug 1755). French violinist and composer. His father was Jean-Baptiste Anet. About 1695–6 he travelled to Rome and studied under Corelli who, according to contemporary reports, was so pleased with Baptiste’s performance of his music that he ‘embraced him tenderly and made him a present of his bow’, and subsequently regarded him as an adopted son. During 1699 and 1700 Baptiste travelled through Germany to Poland. On his return he entered the service of the Duke of Orléans, a position he abandoned after about a year to enter that of the Elector Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria who, having lost his throne, was living in exile in France.

His début at the French court on 23 October 1701 attracted the notice of the Parisian newspaper Le mercure galant:

After his supper, the king heard in his study an exquisite concert of Italian airs, performed by Messrs Forqueray on the viol, Couperin at the harpsichord, and the young Baptiste (who is in the service of the Duke of Orléans) on the violin. The king appeared surprised at the excellence of the latter whom he had not yet heard.

During the first three decades of the 18th century Baptiste appeared frequently in and around Paris – at court, at the homes of the nobility and after 1725 at the Concert Spirituel. During 1709 he was in Schwerin, where he was appointed musical director and concert master of the Hofkapelle; he returned to Paris in 1710. In 1715 Maximilian Emanuel regained his throne and returned to Bavaria; Baptiste left his service and soon entered that of Louis XIV. In 1724 he was granted a privilège général to publish ‘several sonatas and other pieces of instrumental music’; between 1724 and 1734 he published six volumes. Two of them contain sonatas for violin and continuo, undoubtedly originally for his own use, while the others contain suites for the then popular musette (French bagpipes), and were dedicated to his friend, the musette virtuoso Colin Charpentier.

Baptiste’s first appearance at the Concert Spirituel was as noteworthy an occasion as had been his first appearance at court. During Easter week 1725, reported Le mercure de France, those attending the Concert Spirituel heard:

a species of duel between Messrs Baptiste, Frenchman, and [Jean-Pierre] Guignon, Piedmontese, who are regarded as the two best violinists in the world. They played by turns some instrumental pieces accompanied only by a bassoon and a bass viol, and they were both extraordinarily applauded. Mr Baptiste played without any accompaniment some preludes [i.e. improvisations] which were also extremely applauded.

The two violinists were heard together again in May and June of the same year. Abbé Pluche (1746) described Baptiste’s playing:

Mr Baptiste … does not approve the ambition to devour all sorts of difficulties … He gives no advantage to a piece whose performance appears prodigious, and he gives his highest esteem to that which pleases the listener surely. He looks for, he often says, not what makes the musician perspire, not what dazzles the apprentice by swiftness or deafens him by noise, but what possesses the ability to touch him, to ravish him … This point of view requires that the instrumental sound be connected, sustained, mellow, impassioned, and conforming to the human voice, of which it is only the imitation and support … German, Italian, English – to him it is all the same. If he finds nobility and graciousness there, he plays it and gives it its due by the purity of his intonation and the singular energy of his expressiveness. But he constantly refuses his ministrations to all that which has no other merit than to be difficult, bizarre or rough. The freedom and perseverance of his choice have often drawn him reproaches, sometimes as a too obstinate or even capricious man who yields to nothing, sometimes as a musician ignorant of frightening difficulties. He suffered a sort of persecution and exiled himself voluntarily before the honourable retreat which he enjoyed at the court of the King of Poland.

Baptiste left the 24 Violons du Roi in about 1735, undoubtedly for the reasons stated by Pluche but perhaps also due to his rivalry with Guignon, who only a year or so later also drove Leclair from the king’s service. The self-exiled violinist remained in Paris until 1737 or 1738, when he became a violinist in the orchestra of Stanislaus Leszczynski, ex-king of Poland, at the court of Lorraine at Lunéville. Here he spent the rest of his days, playing the violin, hunting and fishing, and died poor after a lengthy illness, leaving no heirs.

The two major figures of the French violin school in the first quarter of the 18th century were Baptiste and Senaillé. Contemporary opinion held that the former was the superior performer, the latter the superior composer; this judgment appears to have been just. Baptiste was a moving performer, famed for his abilities as an improviser. He was the best French violinist before Leclair. His music is graceful and often interesting without being original: the first book of sonatas is strongly influenced by Corelli, while the second book is more French in character. The compositions for musette clearly constitute an attempt to please the popular French taste of the time. By the 1730s his style was already old-fashioned, and this may have hastened the decline of his career.

WORKS

all published in Paris

Premier livre de sonates, vn, bc (1724)

Deuxième oeuvre de M. Baptiste, contenant deux suites de pieces à deux musettes, qui conviennent à 2 fl/ob/vn/hurdy-gurdy (1726)

[10] Sonates, vn, bc, op.3 (1729)

Premier oeuvre de musettes (before 1730), same as Deuzième oeuvre, with addl piece in each suite

Second oeuvre de musettes (1730)

3e oeuvre de musettes, vns, fls, hurdy-gurdy (1734)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LabordeMP

La LaurencieEF

J.L. Le Cerf de la Viéville: Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (Brussels, 1704–6/R)

N.A. Pluche: Le spectacle de la nature (Paris, 1732–50; Eng. trans., 1740–48; many later edns)

M. Antoine: ‘Naissance et mort de Jean-Baptiste Anet (1676–1755)’, RdM, xli (1958), 99–102

M. Antoine: ‘Note sur les violonistes Anet’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 81–93

H. Erdmann: Schwerin als Stadt der Musik (Lübeck, 1967)

NEAL ZASLAW

Baptiste, Ludwig Albert Friedrich [Battista, Luigi Alberto Federigo]

(b Oettingen, 8 Aug 1700; d Kassel, c1764). German composer, probably of French descent. He was a son of the dancing-master Johann Baptiste, who was at the Darmstadt court from 1703, and was taught dancing by his father. After 1718 he travelled to Paris, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and in 1726 he was employed as a dancing-master in Kassel. The title-pages of his published works show that he must have been employed after the death of Count Carl (1730) by Carl's son Friedrich, who was at the same time King of Sweden, and his successor, Wilhelm VIII. Baptiste was considered an ‘excellent violinist and composer for his instrument’; at the same time he was also praised on his travels as a ‘musician and dancer’. Yet, with the exception of 24 minuets, only his chamber works are known. They are typical of the galant style around 1735, with uncomplicated melodies, simple counterpoint, and the contrast of major and minor or tonic and relative minor between sonata movements. There is scarcely any specifically virtuoso solo passage-work. Some works are wrongly attributed to Baptiste by Eitner; those in Christ Church, Oxford, are by Jean-Baptiste Lully, as is the Branle de Mons. Baptiste (S-Uu). Three sonatas in a manuscript belonging to Andreas Düben (ii) in 1692 are also not by him.

WORKS

[6] Sonate da camera, vn, bc/vc, op.1 (Kassel, before 1730), nos.4, 6 for vn/fl: ?MS formerly in D-Kl now lost, see Israel

6 sonate da camera, fl/vn, hpd/vc, op.2 (Augsburg, c1736)

24 menuets, 2 vn, 2 hn, bc, op.1 (Nuremberg, 1752)

Concerto à 4, fl, 2 vn, hpd, SWl

2 pieces, vn, 1728, ROu

Lost works: 12 concs., b viol, orch; 6 solos, vc; 6 trios, 2 ob, bc; more than 36 solos, b viol: all cited by Gerber; 12 solos, vn, cited by Lipowsky

Doubtful works: 6 concs., 2 vn, va, bc, Kl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberNL

LipowskyB

MGG1 (C. Bernsdorff-Engelbrecht)

SchillingE

K. Israel: Frankfurter Concert-Chronik von 1713–1780 (Frankfurt, 1876, rev. 2/1986 by P. Cahn)

H. Mendel and A. Reissmann: Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1870–80, 3/1890–91/R)

E. Noack: Musikgeschichte Darmstadts vom Mittelalter bis zur Goethezeit (Mainz, 1967)

CHRISTIANE BERNSDORFF-ENGELBRECHT

Baquedano, José de.

See Vaquedano, José de.

Baqueiro Fóster, Gerónimo

(b Hopelchén, 7 Jan 1898; d Mexico City, 29 May 1967). Mexican musicologist and composer. After learning to play the flute and the oboe in Mérida and working in several military and popular bands, he entered the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City (1922), where he was a pupil of Julián Carrillo. He led the most enthusiastic supporters of Carrillo’s microtonal system ‘sonido 13’, organizing several concerts and giving talks about it. He worked as a music critic until his appointment in 1929 as professor of acoustics, solfège and music history at the National Conservatory, a post he occupied until his retirement in 1965. Concurrently he undertook research on folk music in the states of Veracruz, Nayarit and Yucatán, the isthmus of Tehuantepec, the northern and southern states of Mexico, and the Middle East (Egypt, Israel, Iran, Turkey). In 1938 he founded the Unión Mexicana de Cronistas de Teatro y Música and in 1942 the Revista musical mexicana, which he edited until 1946. Besides his numerous pieces of music criticism on Mexican musical life, his most important work deals with the study of Mexican folk music and music history. He owned one of the most extensive and valuable music libraries in the country. Now at CENIDIM, the library contains a significant collection of 19th-century Mexican compositions and writings on music.

WRITINGS

‘Los Xtoles: canción al sol de los guerreros mayas’, Mexican Folkways, viii (1933), 83

Curso completo de solfeo (Mexico City, 1939, 6/1955)

‘Aportación musical de México para la formación de la biblioteca americana de Caracas, 1882–1883’, Revista musical mexicana, ii (1942), 27

‘El huapango’, Revista musical mexicana, i (1942), 174

‘El secreto armónico y modal do un antiguo aire maya’, Revista musical mexicana, i (1942), 11

‘Hernández Moncada, el compositor en turno’, Revista musical mexicana, ii (1942), 87

‘Por el mundo de la música: Juan José Castro’, Revista musical mexicana, i (1942), 157

‘Por el mundo de la música: tres directores en el cuarto concierto de la sinfónica de Mexico’, Revista musical mexicana, ii (1942), 16

‘Quinceava temporada, a pesar de todo’, Revista musical mexicana, i (1942), 243

‘Aspectos de la música popular yucateca en tres siglos’, Revista musical mexicana, iv (1944), 3

‘El pasado y el presente del Conservatorio Nacional’, Numen, i/3 (1946), 11

Antología folklórica y musical de Tabasco (Villahermosa, 1952)

Esencias de la canción popular (Mexico City, 1952)

‘La música’, México: cincuenta años de revolución (Mexico City, 1962), 439

Historia de la música en México, i (Mexico City, 1964)

‘La Revolución y sus cantos’, Revista del Conservatorio (1964), no.8, p.10

‘Augusto Novaro, revolucionario mexicano del arte de la violería’, Revista del Conservatorio (1965), no.9, p.6; no.10, p.6; no.11, p.5

La canción popular de Yucatán (Mexico City, 1970)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.C. Taboada: ‘Apuntes para la historia de la música en México (selección bibliográfica de Gerónimo Baqueiro Fóster)’, Boletín bibliográfico de la secretaría de hacienda y crédito público, no.387 (1968), suppl. [pp.2–22]

G. Pareyón: Diccionario de música en México (Guadalajara, 1995)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Bar.

In Western notation a vertical line drawn through the staff to mark off metrical units. Hence also the metrical unit thus indicated, which in American usage is called ‘measure’. English usage often relies on context alone to make the distinction clear (e.g. ‘up to the double bar’, ‘the end of the bar’), but ‘bar-line’ is also common.

Vertical lines were occasionally used in early polyphonic music, written in score to help align the voices and text (e.g. GB-Lbl 36881; Cu Ff.1.17; the Codex Calixtinus, E-SC; facs. of E-SC f.187v in Besseler and Gülke). But most of the ‘classical’ repertories of the 13th (Notre Dame or Parisian, Ars Antiqua), 14th (Ars Nova, Ars Subtilior etc.), 15th and 16th centuries, though written in regular metres, did not use bars. Only the earliest of these repertories, however, regularly used score notation.

The earliest repertories to employ bar-lines at regular metric intervals – keyboard and lute (vihuela) music – were written in Tablature. Tablature never used ternary divisions of note values, and was in other respects less ambiguous than staff notation; possibly the fact that it usually represented polyphonic textures made further clarification desirable. Bar-lines are found in, for example, the Faenza Codex (I-FZc 117, written 1400–20, facs. in MD, xiii–xv, 1959–61), Conrad Paumann’s Fundamentum organisandi (1452) and the Buxheim Organbook (D-Mbs mus.3752, written 1450–70, facs. in DM, 2nd ser., i, 1955). In England bars of irregular length are found in keyboard sources as late as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (GB-Cfm 32.g.29, written 1609–19).

Polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance was not notated in bars, except when set out in keyboard Partitura (‘score’) at the end of the 16th century. Cipriano de Rore’s Madrigali … a quattro voci spartiti et accommodati per sonar d’ogni sorte d’istromento perfetto et per qualunque studioso di contrapunti is the first such score (facs. in Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer, 1962, p.144). Solo parts and partbooks did not use bars until the beginning of the 17th century. (Besseler and Gülke, p.147, shows an opening from John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Foure Partes, 1597: the lute and cantus parts on the one page are barred, but not the other three parts on the opposite page.)

Bar-lines did not always immediately precede the main accented beat; in other words, first beat of the bar and strong beat did not always coincide, particularly in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. This might result in bars of shorter length than would be usual today, in other words with a bar-line after each beat rather than after each bar of modern transcription. There was often a preference for bars in duple or quadruple rather than ternary metre. Ex.1 shows a passage in Altri canti di Marte from Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals: (a) gives the original barring, (b) a barring according to accent. Another well-known instance is the beginning of the Partite sopra l’aria della Romanesca from Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Toccate … partite … corrente … libro primo (1637; see illustration). Frescobaldi’s barring does not recognize an upbeat, and simply divides the beats into arithmetical groups. Ex.2 gives a barring according to accent. (For many other such examples, from early operas, see H. Riemann: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ii/2, ed. A. Einstein, 1912, 3/1921, p.195.)

The illustration also shows accidentals repeated later in the bar if other notes intervene, a practice that persisted up to the mid-18th century (it is found in most Bach and Handel autographs). Subsequent practice allowed that an accidental be effective throughout the bar where it appeared, but not after it.

After the mid-17th century it became the rule to precede main beats with bar-lines; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) is a classic example of a score barred irregularly for this reason.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Wolf: Handbuch der Notationskunde (Leipzig, 1913–19)

W. Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600 (Cambridge, MA, 1942, 5/1953)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Zur Entstehung des modernen Taktsystems im 17. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xviii (1961), 223–40

H. Besseler and P. Gülke: Schriftbild der mehrstimmigen Musik, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, iii/5 (Leipzig, 1972)

DAVID HILEY

Bär, Joseph.

See Beer, Joseph.

Bär, Olaf

(b Dresden, 19 Dec 1957). German baritone. At the age of ten he joined the Dresden Kreuzchor and thereafter studied at the Musikhochschule in his native city. After winning the Walter Grüner Lieder Competition in London, he embarked on a career as a recitalist, quickly achieving a reputation for intelligence and sensitivity in his readings of lieder. In 1985 he joined the Dresden Staatsoper, singing Kilian in Der Freischütz at the reopening of the Semper Oper. The same year he made his Covent Garden début as Harlequin in Ariadne auf Naxos. In 1986 he sang Papageno, probably his best role, at both the Vienna Staatsoper and La Scala, subsequently recording the part with Marriner. Bär made his Glyndebourne début as the Count in Capriccio (1987) and returned as Don Giovanni (1991). His US opera début came in 1996, when he sang Papageno in Chicago. As a recitalist he has appeared at all the major festivals in Europe, including Salzburg and Hohenems, and has been a regular visitor to London's Wigmore Hall since the outset of his career. His other recordings include several choral works (notably Brahms's German Requiem), the major song cycles of Schubert and Schumann, and many of the songs of Hugo Wolf, all of which reveal his attractive soft-grained tone (occasionally lacking an ideal body) and sympathy for the shaping of music and text.

ALAN BLYTH

Baraka, Amiri [Jones, (Everett) LeRoi]

(b Newark, NJ, 7 Oct 1934). American writer on music. He studied piano, drums, and trumpet privately and attended Howard University (BA 1954). In the early 1960s he achieved wide recognition for his poetry and plays and for his writings about jazz, which included articles for Down Beat, Jazz and Jazz Review; a selection of his writings, many from Down Beat, was published in 1967 as Black Music. His book Blues People (1963), the first full-length study of jazz by a black writer, is both a sociological enquiry, using blues and jazz as a means of understanding how blacks became assimilated into American culture, and a superb discussion of the cultural context of the music in the USA. Besides his activities as a writer, Baraka has been involved in many black cultural and community projects. He was a founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theater-School, which was in existence from 1964 to 1965, and has also taught African studies at SUNY since 1980.

Baraka has had a profound influence on jazz criticism, ranging beyond its conventional boundaries to examine such topics as the relationship to jazz and the blues of black nationalism and Marxism. In addition to his works on jazz his published writings include more than 20 plays (of which the best-known is Dutchman, New York, 1964) and 12 volumes of poetry.

WRITINGS

Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963/R)

Black Music (New York, 1967/R)

The Autobiography of Leroi Jones (New York, 1984, 2/1997)

with Amina Baraka: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York, 1987)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K.W. Benston: Baraka: the Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT, 1976)

K.W. Benston, ed.: Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): a Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978)

L.W. Brown: Amiri Baraka (Boston, 1980)

L. Thomas: ‘Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement’, Jazz among the Discourses, ed. K. Gabbard (Durham, NC, 1995), 256

DANIEL ZAGER

Bar-Am, Benjamin [Berman, Bernhardt]

(b Wiesbaden, 20 July 1923). Israeli critic, composer and musicologist. He moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1936. After studying composition with Paul Ben-Haim, his most influential teacher, Bar-Am attended the Ecole Normale de Paris (1949–51). He studied musicology at Tel-Aviv University (BA 1977), where he became the principal lecturer for courses on Jewish music and Israeli contemporary music (1973–96) and the first director of the Archive of Israeli Music. The secretary general of the Israeli League of Composers (1960–76, 1976–8), he became chair of the organizing committee of the ISCM in Israel in 1980. Though most influential as the music critic of the Jerusalem Post between 1958 and 1995, Bar-Am also wrote many essays on Israeli music in Hebrew, English and German, notably ‘A Musical Gateway between East and West’ (Jerusalem Post, 20 April 1988). He ceased composing in the early 1970s but resumed in 1988. His music, mostly songs, song cycles and chamber music with voice, is influenced by the conservative style of Ben-Haim. In his Symphony (1992) he integrates aspects of the ‘Mediterranean style’ that was in vogue in the 1950s, particularly the evocation of a traditional Jewish melos.

RONIT SETER

Barandello

(Old Fr.).

See Farandole.

Baranović, Krešimir

(b Šibenik, 25 July 1894; d Belgrade, 17 Sept 1975). Croatian composer and conductor. He studied the piano and theory with Kaiser in Zagreb, the horn with Lhotka at the Croatian Institute of Music, and composition at the Vienna Music Academy (1912–14) and in Berlin (1921–2). As conductor (1915–43) and artistic director (1929–40) of the Zagreb Opera, he presided over a notable period in the company's history. He enriched its repertory, with the works to Russian composers especially, and paid particular attention to the performance of modern ballets. As well as the first Croatian performances of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov (1918), Shostakovich's Katerina Izmaylova (1937) and ballets by Stravinsky, he conducted the first performance of Smetana's Libuše outside Czech lands (1933). His tenure at the opera was interrupted when Anna Pavlova engaged him as the conductor for a European tour by her troupe (1927–8). He was also conductor for many years of the Lisinski choir in Zagreb. For three years he lived in Bratislava, first as the conductor of the Radio Orchestra (1943) and then as the artistic director of the opera company (1945–6). On his return to Yugoslavia, he became professor of conducting and orchestration at the Belgrade Academy of Music (1946–64) and from 1951 to 1961 the conductor and artistic director of the Belgrade PO. In 1954 he was elected to the membership of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.

Better than any other Croatian composer of the time, Baranović combined the Slavonic expressionism inherited from Janáček and late 19th-century Russian composers with a more cosmopolitan music style. In his most powerful works – the ballet Licitarsko srce, the vocal cycle Z mojih bregov and the comic opera Striženo-košeno – he found inspiration in the folklore of Hrvatsko Zagorje. With his exceptional instrumental skill (Simfonijski scherzo, Sinfonietta in E), his feeling for refined rhythmic structures, and a particular sense of humour and the grotesque (Imbrek z nosom), Baranović avoided neo-classicism, broadening his harmonic language with parallel chords of 4ths and 7ths which support a fundamentally diatonic fabric, often rooted in modality. His works written after 1943 (such as the orchestral songs Iz osame and Oblaci) were free from dissonant harmonies, and his large-scale vocal-instrumental works from the 1960s and 1970s were marked by greater stylistic simplicity and the aesthetics of realism.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Licitarsko srce [Gingerbread Heart] (ballet, 3 scenes) Zagreb, 17 June 1924; (Cvijeće male Ide [Little Ida's Flowers] (ballet, 3 scenes), Zagreb, 29 March 1925; Striženo-košeno [Shorn-head] (comic op, 3, G. Krklec), Zagreb, 4 May 1932; Imbrek z nosom [Imbrek with the Big Nose] (ballet, 4 scenes), 1934, Zagreb, 19 Jan 1935; Nevjesta od Cetingrada [The Bride from Cetingrad] (comic op, 3, M. Fotez), Belgrade, 12 May 1951; Kineska priča [Chinese Story] (ballet, 5 scenes, D. Parlić, after Klabund), Belgrade, 30 April 1955

Vocal: Z mojih bregov [From my Hills] (F. Galović), Bar, orch, 1927; Moj grad [My Town], 9 (V. Nikolić), female v, orch, 1941; Iz osame [In Loneliness] (Baranović), female v, orch, 1944; Pan (cant., M. Krleža), 1958; Goran (cant., I.G. Kovačić), 1960; Oblaci [The Clouds] (D. Cesarić), female v, orch, 1963; Šume, šume [Forests, forests], 1967; Titov naprijed (cant., V. Nazor), 1971; Balada o Titu (cant., B. Karakaš), 1972; Na moru [At the Sea] (G. Krklec) Bar, orch, 1973; choruses, songs

Orch: Koncertna predigra, ov., 1916; Simfonijski scherzo, 1921; Poème balcanique (1927); Sinfonietta, E (1939); Pjesma guslara [Fiddler's songs], rhapsody, 1945; Conc., hn, orch, 1974

Over 20 Film scores

Principal publisher: IZOD, Hrvatska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Kovačević: Hrvatski kompozitori i njihova djela [Croatian Composers and their Works] (Zagreb, 1960), 17–31

I. Supičić: ‘Estetski pogledi u novijoj hrvatskoj muzici: pregled temeljnih gledanja četrnaestorice kompozitora’ [Aesthetic Approaches in Contemporary Croatian Music: a Survey of the Basic Views of 14 Composers], Arti musices, i (1969), 23–61

J. Andreis: Music in Croatia (Zagreb, 1974); 283–8

K. Kovačević: ‘Krešimir Baranović (1894–1975)’, Arti musices, vii (1976), 5–17

M. Veselinović: Krešimir Baranović: Stvaralački uspon [Krešimir Baranović: His Creative Development] (Zagreb, 1979)

EVA SEDAK

Bararipton.

Designation attached to a three-voice Gloria in manuscript F-APT 16bis; the piece is also transmitted in I-IV 115. The Apt manuscript is now thought to contain music from the court of the antipopes at Avignon in the late 14th century. It is not clear whether the word refers to the name of a composer or to something else; it is now known that ‘Bararipton’ was a mnemonic used in medieval logic for one of the categories of syllogisms. However, any possible musical meaning of the word remains a mystery.

The Gloria seems to be in discant style, with text underlay following the typical French pronunciation of Latin. The lower parts are rhythmically linked and run both in parallel and in contrary motion. The preponderance of 8-5 and 5-3 chords is interrupted, sometimes at closing cadences, by 6-3 chords. Likewise, the sequence of 8-5–6-3–8-5 chords often gives way to parallel 5ths between cantus and contratenor. (The Gloria is ed. in PSFM, 1st ser., x, 1936, p.131; CMM, xxix, 1962, p.45 [commentary in MSD, vii, 1962, pp.43–4]; PMFC, xxiiia, 1989, p.108 [commentary in PMFC, xxiiib, 1991, pp.477–8]).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Tomasello: Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon 1309–1403 (Ann Arbor, 1983), 123–53

A. Tomasello: ‘Notes biographiques sur quelques musiciens?’, Aspects de la musique liturgique au Moyen Age: Royaumont 1986, 1987 and 1988, 261–79

GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO

Barat, Jean [Jehan].

See Barra, Hotinet.

Barba, Daniel dal.

See Dal Barba, Daniel.

Bārbad [Barbad].

(fl late 6th–early 7th century ce). Persian lutenist, music theorist and composer. He was active during the reign of Khosrow II (ruled 591–628 ce); see Iran, §I, 5 and III, 1(i) and fig. 11.

Barbaia [Barbaja], Domenico

(b Milan, ?1778; d Posillipo, 19 Oct 1841). Italian impresario. He first earned his living as a scullion in local cafés and bars. In 1806 he obtained the lease of the gambling tables in the foyer of La Scala, Milan, and on 7 October 1809 was appointed manager of the royal opera houses in Naples (originally the S Carlo and Nuovo theatres, to which were later added the Fondo and Fiorentini). After the S Carlo burnt down in 1816, he obtained the contract for rebuilding it. Through the Austrian ambassador, Count Gallenberg, he also secured the management of the Viennese Kärntnertortheater and the Theater an der Wien from 1821 to 1828. For several years from 1826 he ran La Scala and the Cannobiana in Milan.

The most famous impresario of his day, Barbaia played an important role in early 19th-century opera. His Neapolitan seasons were of an unparalleled brilliance, with stars such as the tenors Giovanni Davide, Nozzari, García and, later, Rubini; the contralto Benedetta Rosmunda Pisaroni and the soprano Isabella Colbran. His operatic tastes ranged widely. He introduced Spontini’s La vestale (1811) and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1812), so inaugurating the new tradition of Italian opera seria in which all recitative was orchestrally accompanied (early examples include Mayr’s Medea in Corinto in 1813 and the Rossinian canon beginning with Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra in 1815). He was among the first to recognize Rossini’s genius and in 1815 engaged him at Naples with a six-year contract with the obligation to compose two operas a year and to direct revivals of older works, all for the yearly sum of 12,000 francs and part of the proceeds of the gambling tables. It was to Rossini that Barbaia lost his mistress, Isabella Colbran (later Colbran-Rossini), though relations between the two men remained cordial. In 1822 he produced Rossini in Vienna with great success and the following year mounted Weber’s Euryanthe at the Kärntnertor. Throughout his life he showed a flair for discovering young talent. Mercadante, Pacini, Carafa and Generali all owed to him many of their earliest opportunities. Through him Bellini first gained a footing at the S Carlo and La Scala. In 1827 Barbaia signed Donizetti to a three-year contract that obliged him to write four operas a year for Naples.

Rough in his manners and poorly educated, Barbaia was held in high esteem by both singers and composers (his word, said Pacini, was as good as a written contract), and his death was mourned throughout Italy. His personality inspired Emil Lucka’s novel Der Impresario (Vienna, 1937), and he figures as a character in Auber’s opera La sirène (1844).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

Stendhal: Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (Paris, 1817, 3/1826; Eng. trans., 1959)

P. Fiorentino: Comédie et comédiens (Paris, 1866)

G. Monaldi: Impresari celebri del secolo XIX (Rocca S Casciano, 1918)

G. Radiciotti: ‘Il Barbaia nella leggenda e quello della storia’, L’arte pianistica, vii/3 (1920), 5–6

A. Curti: ‘Impresari d’altri tempi’, Città di Milano, xl (1943), 17–20

J. Rosselli: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge, 1984)

F. Hadamowsky: Wien: Theater Geschichte (Vienna, 1988/R)

B. Cagli and S. Ragni eds.: Gioachino Rossini: lettere e documenti, i: 1792–1822 (Pesaro, 1992)

JULIAN BUDDEN

Barbaja, Domenico.

See Barbaia, Domenico.

Barbandt [Barband, Barbant, Barbault], Charles [Stephan Carl Philipp]

(bap. Hanover, 30 April 1716; d ?London, after 1775). German composer and instrumentalist. He was the only son and eldest child of Bartholomäus Barbandt (b Hanover, 3 July 1687; d Hanover, 6 May 1764), a musician of the court orchestra at Hanover, and Maria Catharina Barbandt (née Caligari). The first member of the Barbandt family to settle in Hanover seems to have been Joseph, Bartholomäus's father, who, according to records of the parish of St Clemens, Hanover, had come from Modena. Charles followed the example of his grandfather and father and became a member of the Hanoverian court orchestra. Although records do not indicate which instruments he played there, it is likely that he was employed mainly as a woodwind player, as later he often appeared as an oboist, flautist and clarinettist. The exact date of his entry into the orchestra is unknown, but he is listed in its payrolls until 1752 as ‘Barbandt junior’. His father remained with the orchestra until his death in 1764, but Charles left for London in the early 1750s.

Barbandt's name first appears in a London concert programme on 14 January 1752, when a benefit concert was given for him at Hickford's Room in Brewer Street. On 4 January 1753 he married Anne Casanova at the Portuguese Embassy chapel and from about the same time appeared as an oboist and flautist in London theatres. In the 1754–5 season he was organist at Covent Garden Theatre and in 1756 embarked on his most ambitious project, a small-scale oratorio series, financed by subscription, at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. A second series ran during January and February 1761. Barbandt's own concertos and solos were performed during the intervals. Mr Barbandt's Yearly Subscription of New Music appeared in monthly instalments between 10 March 1759 and 10 February 1760; it included symphonies (i.e. overtures), chamber music, Italian and English airs and duets, and sonatas. In 1764 he became organist of the Bavarian Embassy chapel in Warwick Street, Golden Square; his Hymni sacri was composed for use there. The Bavarian ambassador, Count Haslang, subscribed to some of Barbandt's works – as did a few of the composer's former Hanoverian colleagues – and was godfather to Barbandt's son Franz Xaver Ludwig (b 1753). Later Barbandt was also organist at the Portuguese Embassy chapel, but in 1776 he relinquished this post to a former pupil, Samuel Webbe (i).

According to the playbills, Barbandt's four oratorios each had a bipartite, rather than the more usual Handelian tripartite, structure. Barbandt's surviving works, with their even phrases, simple harmonic progressions and predominance of melodic line, show his awareness of the galant idiom, which, even in his sacred works, he preferred to a more solemn, contrapuntal style.

WORKS

oratorios

lost; all first performed London, Little Theatre, Haymarket

Universal Prayer (A. Pope), 13 Feb 1755; 1 air in Mr Barbandt's Yearly Subscription, Dec 1759

Paradise Regained (J. Milton), 25 March 1756

On the Divine Veracity (E. Rowe), 9 March 1758

David and Jonathan, 28 Jan 1761

other works

6 Sonatas, 2vn/fl/ob, bc (vc/hpd), op.1 (London, 1752)

6 Sonatas or Duetts, 2 fl/vn, with 6 Lessons, 2 hn, op.2 (n.p., n.d.)

Conc., ?str, cls, hns, timp, lost, perf. in interval of Paradise Regained, 25 March 1756

4 Favourite Italian Songs, 1v, str, fl, ob, with 2 Sonatas, hpd, op.3 (London, ?1760)

Short and Easy Rules for the Thorough Bass, with minuet and 13 variations, hpd, op.4 (London, c1760), minuet also pubd as Lady Powis's Minuet with Variations (London, c1760)

6 Sonatas, hpd, op.5 (London, ?1760)

6 Symphonies, 2 hn, str, bc, op.6 (London, ?1760)

Sonata, hpd (London, 1764) [ded. George III]

Hymni sacri, antiphonae & versiculi, 2–4vv (London, 1766)

Quartetto, 3 vn/fl/ob, bc (vc/hpd) (London, n.d.)

God Save Great George the Third our King, vv, with Sonata, hpd, 1761, GB-Lbl

Miscellaneous works pubd in Mr Barbandt's Yearly Subscription of New Music (London, March 1759–Feb 1760): Sonata, A, hpd (March 1759); The glorious Restoration (Mr Redmond), ode, bound with April 1759 issue but probably later addn; Verra un di che la mia bella fugitiva pastorella, aria, S (April 1759); Sonata, C, 2 vn, 2 ob, 2 fl (May 1759); Lesson, C, cittera/gui (June 1759); Now the bright morning star, recit, Hail, bounteous May, aria, S (June 1759); Sinfonie, D, str, hns, bc (July 1759); Se l'idolo che adoro, S, S (Aug 1759); Sonata, G, hpd, vn/fl (Sept 1759); Occhi vezzosi, aria, S (Oct 1759); Sonata, G, 2 vn, 2 ob, 2 fl, bc (Nov 1759); 2 Lessons, C, gui/cittern (Dec 1759); Teach me to feel, air, S (Dec 1759); Sinfonie, E, str, hns, bc (Jan 1760); Per novo amor de lira, S, S (Feb 1760)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA; FétisB; GerberNL; LS

J.R. Parker: A Musical Biography (Boston, 1825)

O.E. Deutsch: Handel: a Documentary Biography (London, 1955)

J. Gillow: Literary and Biographical History or Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (New York, 1961)

R. Darby: The Music of the Roman Catholic Embassy Chapels in London, 1765 to 1825 (thesis, U. of Manchester, 1984)

J.K. Page: ‘The Hautboy in London's Musical Life, 1730–1770’, EMc, xvi (1988), 358–71

E. Zöllner: English Oratorio after Handel, 1750–1800 (diss., U. of Hamburg, 1998)

EVA ZÖLLNER

Barbarini Lupus, Manfred

(b Correggio, nr Reggio Emilia; fl 1557–61). Swiss composer of Italian birth. He was Kantor at Locarno in 1557 and then made a journey to south Germany to visit certain scholars, among them the brothers Johann (Hans) Jakob and Georg Fugger at Augsburg. At Freiburg he probably also met Glarean, and at Augsburg may have met Andreas Schillen, tutor to the Fugger children. In 1561 Abbot Diethelm Blarer commissioned him to make four-part arrangements of chorales for the Wartensee monastery at St Gall, which makes it likely that he was there at that time. He is not heard of again. But he may be identifiable with the Martin Lupus (also known as Lupi or Wolf) from Correggio, who was organist at Chur Cathedral until 1572 and then (though he was a layman) at the convent church of St Leodegar, Lucerne, until 1576 and who was also an accomplished organ repairer.

The extant works of Barbarini Lupus are in varying styles. While those in the Symphoniae unfold through regular, freely imitative five-part polyphony, those in the Cantiones sacrae are more discontinuous, now imitative, now homorhythmic, and include short duet and trio sections. The St Gall chorale arrangements are cantus firmus pieces in the old style, in which the chant, mainly in the tenor, moves in regular semibreves and the other three voices, which at times imitate each other, are rather neutral in character. The settings are of interest because they are partly for choir and partly for organ, a layout possibly, attributable to the copyist of the manuscripts, the organist Heinrich Keller.

WORKS

Symphoniae, seu insigniores aliquot … super D. Henrici Glareani panegyrico de Helvetiarum tredecim urbium laudibus, 5vv (Basle, 1558)

Cantiones sacrae, 4vv (Augsburg, 1560)

Antiphonarium, 4vv, incl.: 3 masses, 14 introits, 14 graduals, tract, 15 sequences, 12 offertories, 13 communions, 44 antiphons, Te Deum, motet, 3 Passions, chorale arrangements, CH-SGs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

R. Schlecht: ‘Manfredus Barbarinus Lupus Corregiensis Italus’, MMg, iii (1871), 12–14, 17–24

O. Marxer: Zur spätmittelalterlichen Choralgeschichte St. Gallens: der Cod.546 der St. Galler Stiftsbibliothek (St Gall, 1908), 225ff

G. Eisenring: Zur Geschichte des mehrstimmigen Proprium Missae bis um 1560 (Düsseldorf, 1912), 188

K. Nef: ‘Schweizerische Passionsmusiken’, Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, v (1931), 113–26

A. Geering: ‘Homer Herpol und Manfred Barbarini Lupus’, Festschrift Karl Nef zum 60. Geburtstag (Zürich and Leipzig, 1933), 48–71

A. Geering: ‘Glareans panegyrische Gedichte in den “Symphonien” des Manfred Barbarini Lupus (1558)’, in H. Glarean: Helvetiae descriptio: Panegyrico pro iustissimo Helvetiorum foedere, ed. and trans. W. Näf (St Gallen, 1948), 99–102

ARNOLD GEERING

Barbarino, Bartolomeo [‘Il Pesarino’]

(b Fabriano, nr Ancona; d ?Venice, after 1640). Italian composer. He is first heard of as an alto at the Santa Casa, Loreto, in 1593 and 1594. From then until 1602 he was in the service of Monsignor Giuliano della Rovere at Urbino, and it was probably during these years that he also served the Duke of Urbino, as he mentioned in the dedication of his madrigal book of 1614 (Giuliano was a relative of the duke). He was organist of Pesaro Cathedral – hence his nickname – from 1602 to 1605, when he became a musician of the Bishop of Padua. Between 1608 and 1624 he pursued a freelance career in Venice as a singer, chitarrone player and composer, performing frequently as soloist or member of a hired group in the cappella of S Marco and for the feast day celebration at the confraternity of S Rocco. Between 1625 and 1639 nothing is known of his whereabouts, but on 30 May 1639 and 29 Dec 1640 he received payments for performing as an instrumentalist in S Marco, Venice, where his son, Francesco Pesarin, had recently become a member of the cappella choir.

Barbarino was one of the first monodists, and one of the most enthusiastic, for nearly everything he wrote, sacred as well as secular, is for solo voice and continuo. Most of his 120 or so secular monodies are madrigals; some respond expressively to the more pathetic type of text, others include a good deal of lighter aria-like writing. Unusually he named the poets he set, and he wrote some of the poems himself. In his collection of 1617 there are as many monodies as three-part madrigals; many of these multi-part madrigals (and others from a manuscript in D-W) exist in similar solo versions by the composer. In addition, Barbarino suggested in the preface to the 1617 collection that each voice be accompanied by its own chitarrone; to this effect he supplied a separate continuo line in each of the partbooks. Misero e mesto is a particularly good example of the fragmentary texture used in the trios, the three voices coming together only at cadences; and the very free use of chromatic inflection produces a wayward harmonic sense and abrupt modulations. Some of the canzonettas of 1616 are also wayward, though their tunes are predictably more catchy.

Barbarino's first book of solo motets contains the earliest surviving examples of sacred monodies sung in liturgical contexts: according to the dedication, the composer wrote much of the music in the 1590s and sang it ‘at mass, with [his] raucous voice’. The inclusion of numerous Marian motets, especially the four Marian antiphons, in his second book of solo motets suggests the relevance of this collection to his freelance career in Venice, a city particularly noted for its reverence of the Virgin. He was as concerned as any of Giulio Caccini’s followers about the quality of ornamentation to be applied to monodic music, and in his second book of solo motets he gave two versions of the vocal line, one simple, one ornamented, from which much can be deduced about contemporary taste in the embellishment of church (and other) music. In a prefatory note he explained how some singers had found difficulty with the divisions in his first book of motets and that the simplified versions were for them, as well as being a basic outline which experienced singers could embellish as they wished. The ornamented versions, he said, were for those who could sing ornaments but could not improvise them. Barbarino used embellishments to strengthen and diversify the melodic outline: he reserved florid passage-work for 4/4 time and lilting melismas and delightful hemiolas for triple time. As well as a fine use of sequence for the building of climaxes, some of his motets show a surer grasp of tonality than do many of his secular songs.

WORKS

sacred

Il primo libro de mottetti … da cantarsi da una voce sola, S/T (Venice, 1610)

Il secondo libro delli motetti … da cantarsi a una voce sola, S/T (Venice, 1614)

7 motets, 1615¹³, G. Puliti: Pungenti dardi spirituali (Venice, 1618), 1624², 1624³, 1625²

6 sacred Italian pieces, 1613³; 1 dialogue ed. in Racek, 246ff

secular

Madrigali, 1–2vv, chit/hpd/other inst (Venice, 1606); ed. in ISS, v (1986)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 1v, chit/theorbo/hpd/other inst … con un dialogo di Anima e Caronte (Venice, 1607)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 1v, chit/theorbo/hpd/other inst … con alcune canzonette nel fine (Venice, 1610)

Il quarto libro de madrigali, 1v, chit/theorbo/hpd/other inst … con un dialogo fra Tirsi & Aminta (Venice, 1614)

Canzonette, 1v (S/T), 2vv, chit/other inst (Venice, 1616)

Madrigali, 3vv, chit/hpd, con alcuni madrigali, 1v, chit/hpd (Venice, 1617)

1 madrigal, 1624¹¹; 52 madrigals, 1–3vv, D-W

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Radiciotti: ‘Aggiunte e correzioni ai dizionari biografici dei musicisti’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 551–74

E. Schmitz: Geschichte der weltlichen Solokantate (Leipzig, 1914, rev. 2/1955)

N. Fortune: Italian Secular Song from 1600 to 1635: the Origins and Development of Accompanied Monody (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1954)

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)

N. Hockley: I due primi libri monodici di Bartolomeo Barbarino (1606 e 1607) (diss., U. of Parma, 1969–70) [incl. edns of both books]

N. Hockley: ‘Bartolomeo Barbarino e i primordi della monodia’, RIM, vii (1972), 82–102

D. Arnold: Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance (London, 1979)

J.L.A. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

R. Miller: The Composers of San Marco and Santo Stefano and the Development of Venetian Monody (to 1630) (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993)

R. Miller: ‘Bartolomeo Barbarino and the Allure of Venice’, Studi musicali, xxiii (1994), 263–98

JEROME ROCHE/ROARK MILLER

Barbat [barbat].

Sassanian short-necked lute. See Iran, §II, 5.

Barbato, Angelo

(fl Padua, 1583–7). Italian amateur music editor and composer. He lived at Padua, where the only definite reference to him concerns his loan of a portative organ to the cathedral cappella on 6 December 1583. He edited the important anthology De floridi virtuosi d’Italia (Venice, 1583¹¹), for five voices, which includes works by Marenzio and Giovanni Gabrieli. The dedication, which he addressed to Prince Albert Radziwiłł, provides interesting evidence about musical relations between Italy and Poland. He also published an anthology of pieces by musicians who worked at, or had contact with, Padua, Canzonette di diversi eccellentissimi musici, libro primo (Venice, 1587⁷), for three voices. Alongside pieces by G.B. Mosto, Annibale Padovano, M.A. da Pordenon and Giulio Renaldi appear two canzonettas of his own composition, which with their homophonic textures and simple harmony are typical of canzonettas of the period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

MGG1 (P. Petrobelli)

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei secoli XIV, XV, XVI’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214; xix (1942), 49–92; repr. in book form (Rome, 1943), 63, 168

F. Piperno: ‘Musicisti e mercato editoriale nel 500: le antologie d'ambiente di polifonia profana’, Musica/Realtà, v/15 (1984), 129–52, esp. 134–5, 145

F. Piperno: Gli ‘eccellentissimi musici della città di Bologna’: con uno studio sull’antologia madrigalistica del Cinquecento (Florence, 1985), 10, 24

PIER PAOLO SCATTOLIN

Barbay, Guillaume.

See Barbey, Guillaume.

Barbe [Barbé].

Flemish family of musicians.

(2) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (ii)

(3) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (iii)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

L. de Burbure and L. Theunissens: ‘La musique à Anvers aux 14e, 15e et 16e siècles’, Annales de l'Académie royale d'archéalogie de Belgique, lviii (1906), 159–256, esp. 243

J.A. Stellfeld: Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Antwerpsche clavicembel en orgelbouwers in de XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen (Antwerp, 1942)

F. Dobbins: The Chanson at Lyons in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Oxford, 1972)

FRANK DOBBINS

Barbe

(1) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (i)

(d Antwerp, 2 Dec 1564). Composer. He was maître de chapelle of St Jacob, Bruges, before his appointment (1528) as maître de musique of the choir school of Antwerp Cathedral, where he remained until 1562. After his wife's death in about 1547 he was ordained; he first officiated as a priest on 11 January 1548. In 1562 he retired and was succeeded in 1563 by Geert van Turnhout. He was buried in the cathedral in 1564. In his mass, a light and mainly imitative parody of the popular late 15th-century chanson Vecy la danse de Barberie, he exploited the veiled reference to his own name in his use of the chanson's thematic material. The six-voice chanson Alligiés moy doulce plaisante brunette, attributed to him in a German collection of 1540 (RISM 1540⁷), is ascribed in other sources to Josquin (ed. A. Smijers, Werken, v/14), Le Brung and Willaert. His four-voice chanson On doibt bien aymer le bon vin, a four-in-one canon for male voices published in Lyons (1540¹⁷), provides an example of what has been called the ‘secret chromatic art of the Netherlands’: it requires considerable modulation flatwards for a satisfactory resolution. Another four-voice chanson, Ung capitaine de Pillars, is an anecdotal piece in gay syllabic counterpoint. Barbe's two five-voice chansons, like his two-voice motets, were copied in manuscripts owned by Johann Herwart of Augsburg.

WORKS

sacred

Missa ‘Vecy la danse de Barberie’, 4vv, 1545¹

3 motets: Qui sunt isti, 4vv, 1542⁷; Summa regis, Inter spinas, 2vv, D-Mbs 260; ed. in RRMR, xvi–xvii (1974)

secular

Alligiés moy doulce plaisante brunette, 6vv, 1540⁷, ed. in Collectio operum musicorum batavorum saeculi XVI, xii (Berlin, 1858); On doibt bien aymer le bon vin, 4vv, 1540¹⁷, ed. in SCC, xxvii (1993); Ung capitaine de Pillars, 4vv, 1544¹², ed. in SCC, xxix (1994)

Och hoort doch ons bediet, 4vv, 1551¹⁸; ed. in RRMR, cviii (1997)

Ha je ne l'ose dire, J'ay bien cause d'avoir melancolie, 5vv, D-Mbs Mus.ms.1508

Barbe

(2) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (ii)

(b Antwerp, before 1547; d Antwerp, 13 Feb 1604). Composer and organist, son of (1) Antoine Barbe (i). He probably studied music with his father and served as a chorister at Antwerp Cathedral. According to Fétis he composed some pavanes and courantes which were included in Petit trésor des danses et branles à quatre et cinq parties des meilleurs autheurs propres à jouer sur tous les estrumentz (Leuven, 1573), an anthology of instrumental ensemble music, now lost. In 1601 he was organist at St Walburga, Oudenaard, but he died at Antwerp and was buried in the cathedral.

Barbe

(3) Antoine [Anthonis] Barbe (iii)

(b Antwerp, after 1573; d Antwerp, 10 June 1636). Theorist, organist and teacher, son of (2) Antoine Barbe (ii). On 23 February 1596 he was appointed organist of St Jacobskerk, Antwerp, and later acted as repairer and tuner of organs in other churches in the city. In 1597 he married a teacher in a girls' school where he taught music. His didactic interests are reflected in his treatise Exemplaire des douze tons de la musique, et de leur nature (Antwerp, 1599).

Barbe, Helmut

(b Halle, 28 Dec 1927). German composer. After studying at the Berlin Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik (1946–52) with Ernst Pepping and Gottfried Grote, among others, he served as Kantor of the St Nikolai-Kirche in Berlin-Spandau (1952–75) and director of church music for West Berlin (1972–85). He founded the Kammerchor Helmut Barbe in 1977. His teaching appointments included posts at the Berlin Kirchenmusikschule (1955–75) and the Berlin Hochschule der Künste (professor 1975–95). His particular gift lies in his ability to write sacred music that adopts the musical methods of his time (he began to employ 12-note techniques in 1957), while remaining comprehensible to his audience. The expressive intensity of his compositions results from his use of harmonies, rhythms and timbres (often created by highly individual instrumental ensembles) to break up the otherwise static foundations of the music. In Golgatha (1972), a characteristic work, dissonant harmonies are combined with 16th-century choral settings, vocalises, glissandos, passages for solo percussion and the spoken word. A tendency towards homophony and transparency in the vocal music ensures the centrality of the text.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Magnificat, 4vv, wind, timp, org, low str, 1956; Canticum Simeonis, T, 4vv, cel, perc, org, str, 1958; Die Auferweckung des Lazarus (cant.), A, T, 8vv, orch, org, 1959; Missa brevis, chorus, 2 fl, ob, eng hn, bn, vc, 1961; Ostergeschichte, A, Bar, 4vv, orch, elec gui, 1961; Chinesische Impressionen (Li Bai [Li Tai Po], trans. Klabund), 6vv, 1964; 2 Choralkonzerte, 2–4vv, org, 1967; Ye shall have a Song (cant.), female 4vv, ob, hn, hp, 1967; Bekenntnis (cant., M. Bollinger), 4vv, ob, str qnt, 1969; Inconstantia (cant., Bollinger), S, 4vv, gui, hpd, str, 1971; Magnalia D (Bible), Bar, chorus, org, tape, 1971; Golgatha, Bar, 3vv, str, perc, 1972; Ursuliner Messe, 4vv, fl, ob, cl, b cl, bn, tpt, 1972; TeD, Bar, 3 choruses, orch, 1976; Laudes 78, Bar, 4vv, org, perc, 1977; 3 Nachtstücke (Li Bai [Li Tai Po], trans. Klabund), 8vv, 1980; Verleih uns Frieden (cant.), 3 choruses, wind, org, perc, 1983; Wir wollen singn ein Lobgesang (cant.), 4vv, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, org, 1985; Magnificat, S, 6vv, 1986; Chorstücke zum 19. Sonntag nach Trinitatis, 1987; Herbst (G. von der Vring), 3 lieder, chorus, hp, 1988; Der du die Zeit in Händen hast (cant.), 2 choruses, congregation, (brass, perc)/org, 1989; Wir sind doch Pilger alle hier, 5 men’s vv, 1990; Potsdamer TeD, Mez, 2 choruses, orch, org, 1992; An die Sterne (A. Gryphius), chorus, fl, hp, 1995–6; 1648 (chbr orat, Bible, M. Opitz, Gryphius), Bar, 2 choruses, chbr orch, 1997–8; Lichte Nacht (Gryphius), chorus, str sextet, 1997; Canti di Ungaretti, chorus, hp, accdn, 1998 [after Vivaldi]; motets, psalm settings, folksong arrs., other choral works

Other vocal: Musikantengruss (J. von Eichendorff), lieder, 1v, pf, 1953; Gesang der Abgeschiedenen (G. Trakl), 5 lieder, Bar, pf, 1957; Horoskop gefällig (M. Kaleko), 1v/chorus, cl, gui, db, pf, 1960; Requiem, S, fl, ob, bn, va, vc, db, 1965; Jeruschalajim (C. Heuser), high v, org, 1969; 5 Lieder (M.L. Kaschnitz, von der Vring, R.A. Schröder, P. Ludwig), S, pf, 1969; Ps xlii, high v, org, 1970; Preisungen (M. Buber), S, hp, org, 1974; Gott wohnt in einem Lichte (J. Klepper), T, org, 1992; folksong arrs.

Inst: Org Sonata, 1964; Vn Conc., 1966; Pf Trio, 1969; Hovs Hallar, chbr orch, 1970; Dialog mit J.S.B., org, 1977; 2 pièces, ob, vc, pf, 1979; Suite, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, 1979 [after von Eichendorff]; Nordische Bläsersuite, 3 tpt, 2 trbn, 1981; Die vier Jahreszeiten, wind, perc, 1981; Preces, org, 1990; 4 Choralvorspiele, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, 1995; Praeludien/Postludien für die Festzeiten des Kirchenjahres, org, 1995; choral fantasies, org; other org works, incid music

Principal publishers: Hänsler, Strube

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Schönian: ‘Helmut Barbe’, Gottesdienst und Kirchenmusik (1960), 85–6

S. Günther: ‘Jüngstes kirchenmusikalisches Schaffen: Helmut Barbe’, Gottesdienst und Kirchenmusik (1962), 87–91

D. Krickeberg: ‘Helmut Barbe: Porträt eines Komponisten’, Gottesdienst und Kirchenmusik (1992), 95–7

DIETER KRICKEBERG

Barbe, Jean-Baptiste

(b Montferrand, nr Clermont-Ferrand, Oct 1675; d Clermont, Aug 1759). French amateur lutenist. He compiled an important late source of French Baroque lute music. During the final decade of the 17th century, following his law studies in Orléans, he was in Paris, where he probably received lute lessons. He was back in Clermont by 1703, the date of his nomination to the Cour des Aydes. Like Vaudry de Saizenay's manuscripts, Barbe's lutebook is a large retrospective anthology containing a wide assortment of 17th-century masterworks. Representative composers include Bocquet, Du But (père and fils), Du Fault, Hémond, Mouton and Pinel. It was formerly in the possession of Henri Prunières, and is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Rés.Vmb.7; facs. (Geneva, 1985), see Chauvel).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Tessier: ‘Quelques sources de l'école française de luth au XVIIe siècle’, IMSCR I: Liège 1930, 217–24

W.J. Rave: Some Manuscripts of French Lute Music 1630–1700: an Introductory Study (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1972)

C. Chauvel: Introduction to Manuscrit Barbe, pièces de luth de différents auteurs en tablature française (Geneva, 1985) [facs.]

W.J. Rave: ‘Remarks on Gallot Sources: How Tablatures Differ’, JLSA, xx–xxi (1987–8), 87–107

BRUCE K. BURCHMORE

Barbeau, (Charles) Marius

(b Ste Marie-de-la-Beauce, PQ, 5 March 1883; d Ottawa, 27 Feb 1969). Canadian anthropologist and ethnologist. He studied humanities at the Collège de Ste-Anne-de-la-Procatière (1897–1903) and after completing the course in law at Laval University (1907) he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he took the BSc in anthropology (1910). Encouraged by M. Marett, M. Mauss and Raoul and Marguerite d'Harcourt, he decided to study the Amerindians. On his return to Canada in 1911 to head the department of anthropology at the National Museum, he began intensive fieldwork among the Huron, Salish, Wyandote, Iroquois and Tsimshian Indians; he became deeply interested in French-Canadian folklore, having encountered much in the oral traditions of several Amerindian tribes that was retained from contacts with the early French settlers. His investigation of French-Canadian folksongs superseded the earlier work of Ernest Gagnon.

Barbeau taught at the universities of Ottawa (lecturer 1942), Laval (lecturer 1942–5, professor agrégé from 1945) and Montreal (occasional lecturer). In 1946, with Luc Lacourcière, he established the folklore archives at Laval University. He retired from the National Museum in 1948, but continued to work independently. In 1957 he founded the Canadian Folk Music Society, serving as its president until 1963. He was elected president of the American Folklore Society in 1918 and also served as co-editor of its journal. In 1916 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Two honorary doctorates were conferred on him by the universities of Montreal (1938) and Oxford (1952). He served as a vice-president of the IFMC (1957–69), and received the Canada Council Medal in 1961.

Barbeau's ethnomusicological contributions lay primarily in the area of field techniques and collecting. His thousands of recorded folksongs and melodies, representing a unique cross-section of Canadian folk traditions, are housed at the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, National Museum of Man, Ottawa.

WRITINGS

‘Les traditions orales français au Canada’, Le bulletin du parler français au Canada, xv (1917), 300–18

‘The Field of European Folklore in America’, Journal of American Folklore, xxxii (1919), 185–97

with E.Z. Massicotte: ‘Chants populaires de Canada’, Journal of American Folklore, xxxii (1919), 1–89

‘French and Indian Motifs in Our Music’, Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928–1929 (Toronto, 1929), 125–32

‘Folk Songs of French Canada’, ML, xiii (1932), 168–82

‘Songs of the Northwest’, MQ, xix (1933), 101–11

‘Asiatic Survivals in Indian Songs’, MQ, xx (1934), 107–16

‘How Folk-Songs Travelled’, ML, xv (1934), 306–23

‘La chanson populaire française en Amérique du Nord’, Journal of International Folklore, v (London, 1936), 318–33; see also JIFMC, vi (1954), 7–10

Quebec: where Ancient France Lingers (Quebec and Toronto, 1936)

‘French Canadian Folk-Songs’, MQ, xxix (1943), 122–37

‘Modalité dans nos mélodies populaires’, Mémoires de la Société Royale du Canada, 3rd ser., xxxviii (1944), 15–25

‘The Ermatinger Collection of Voyageur Songs’, Journal of American Folklore, lxvii (1954), 147–61

‘Folk Music: Canadian’, Grove5

‘How the Folk Songs of French Canada Were Discovered’, Canadian Geographical Journal, xlix (1954), 58–65

‘Folk Song’, Music in Canada, ed. E. Macmillan (Toronto, 1955), 32–54

‘Folk Songs of French Louisiana’, Canadian Music Journal, i/2 (1956–7), 10–16

‘Indian Songs of the Northwest’, Canadian Music Journal, ii/1 (1957–8), 16–25

‘Buddhist Dirges of the North Pacific Coast’, JIFMC, xiv (1962), 16–21

En roulant ma boule: deuxième partie du répertoire de la chanson folklorique française au Canada, ed. L. Ouellet (Ottawa, 1982)

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

with E. Sapir: Folk Songs of French Canada (New Haven, CT, 1925)

with H. Boulton and A. Somerwell: Twelve Ancient French Canadian Folk-Songs (London, 1927)

Folk-Songs of Old Quebec (Ottawa, 1935)

Romancero du Canada (Montreal, 1937)

Chansons populaires du vieux Québec (Paris, 1938)

Jongleur Songs of Old Quebec (New Brunswick, NJ, 1962)

Le rossignol y chante (Ottawa, 1962)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Cardin: ‘Bio-bibliographie de Marius Barbeau’, Archives de folklore, ii (Quebec, 1947), 17–26

E. Fowke: ‘Marius Barbeau (1883–1969)’, Journal of American Folklore, 1xxxii (1969), 264–7

G. George: ‘In Memoriam: Marius Barbeau’, YIFMC, i (1969), 10–13

I.J. Katz: ‘Marius Barbeau 1883–1969’, EthM, xiv (1970), 129–42

F. Brassard: ‘French-Canadian Folk Music Studies: a Survey’, EthM, xvi (1972), 351–9

ISRAEL J. KATZ

Barbella, Emanuele

(b Naples, 14 April 1718; d Naples, 1 Jan 1777). Italian violinist and composer. His first teacher was his father, Francesco Barbella, composer and maestro di violino at the Conservatorio di S Maria di Loreto. He was later instructed by Angelo Zaga and by Pasqualino Bini, a noted pupil of Tartini. In theory and composition he was the pupil of Michele Cabbalone until the latter's death in 1740 and subsequently, until 1744, he studied with Leonardo Leo. The story that Leo thought him stupid resulted from a misinterpretation of Barbella's humorous modesty in the autobiographical sketch he provided for Burney's History. In 1753 Barbella became first violinist at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, and three years later he entered the royal chapel there. From 1761 until his death he was a member of the orchestra at S Carlo. It is possible that he visited England during the 1760s, for his op.1 was printed in London by Oswald ‘for the author’.

Although there is no evidence that Barbella ranked among the finest Italian violinists, he was respected as a performer and admired as a teacher and composer. Burney, who became his friend and relied on his knowledge, confessed to some disappointment in his playing, complaining of lack of variety, ‘drowsiness of tone’, and ‘want of animation’. Yet he found much to praise also, especially when hearing Barbella in a small room, and spoke of his ‘taste and expression’ and of his ‘marvellously sweet tone’. Barbella’s compositions, which evidently achieved a modest success in London and Paris, reflect his position as a disciple (through Bini) of Tartini. The craftsmanship is sure, but what seemed to Burney as ‘a good deal of fancy’ appears as no more than graceful imitation of Tartini's style. Occasional harmonic surprises (according to Burney, ‘a tincture of not disagreeable madness’), may represent Barbella's interpretation of Tartini's harmonic theories. The humorous side of this attractive musician's personality is sometimes seen in bizarre programmatic titles and unusual tempo indications. His good temper and stable character probably contributed to his effectiveness as a teacher and to the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries. Ignazio Raimondi was his most famous pupil.

WORKS

Elmira generosa (op, P. Trinchera), Naples, Nuovo, carn. 1753; collab. Logroscino

Tinna nonna, lullaby, vn, b, in BurneyH, ii, 452–3

2 concs., I-Gl; 12 trios (2 vn, b)/(vn, violetta, b), US-BEm; 6 Trios, 2 vn, vc (London, 1772); 6 Solos (vn, b)/2 vn (London, 1765/R); A Second Sett of 6 Solos, vn, b (London, c1770)

Duos (for 2 vn, unless otherwise stated): 6 duetti (Paris, c1765); 6 for 2 vn/mand, b (va) ad lib (Paris, c1770/R); 6 (London, c1770), as op.3 (Paris, c1774); 6 duos … très faciles, op.1 (Paris, c1771); 6 as op.2 (Paris, c1773), ?lost; 3, I-Gl, US-Wc

Sonatas: 6 for 2 vn, vc, bc (hpd), op.1 (London, 1762); 6 for vn, vc, op.4 (Paris, c1774); 1 for vn, b, in J.B. Cartier: L'art du violon (Paris, 1798); 3 for 2 vn, b, I-Mc, MOe, US-BEm; 7 for vn, b, I-Gl, US-Wc; 3 for 2 vn, I-Gl; 3 for vn, b, S-Uu; 6 for vn, b, I-MOe; 4 for 2 mand, S-Uu; 1 for 2 mand, b, Uu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyFI

BurneyH

FétisB

FlorimoN

GiacomoC

NewmanSCE

CHAPPELL WHITE

Barber (Donald), Chris(topher)

(b Welwyn Garden City, 17 April 1930). English jazz trombonist, arranger and bandleader. He studied the trombone and the double bass at the GSM in London, and formed his first traditional jazz band in 1949. In 1953 he helped to organize a band that was led by Ken Colyer, at that time the most ardent British propagandist for traditional New Orleans music. The following year Barber took over the band; Colyer was replaced by Pat Halcox, and the ensemble soon became one of the most popular and technically accomplished groups of its kind. From the mid-1950s Barber helped foster British interest in blues by bringing over such American musicians as Muddy Waters, the harmonica player Sonny Terry and the guitarist and singer Brownie McGhee. He made several tours of the USA beginning in 1959, and also recorded two albums with his American Jazz Band, which included Sidney De Paris, Edmond Hall and Hank Duncan. Barber expanded his interests, recording classic rags (scored for his band) long before the popular rediscovery of Scott Joplin, and working with musicians from other areas of jazz (notably the Jamaican saxophonists Bertie King and Joe Harriott). Renewed interest in traditional jazz in the early 1960s brought wide success to Barber and his group, which included as its singer his wife, Ottilie Patterson. After rhythm-and-blues achieved general popularity in the early 1960s he re-formed his group as Chris Barber’s Jazz and Blues Band, and, while retaining his roots in New Orleans jazz, engaged rock and blues musicians guitarist John Slaughter and the drummer Pete York. During the 1970s the band toured frequently in Europe. In 1976 Barber made a tour of Britain entitled ‘Echoes of Ellington’. In 1981–2 he collaborated with the rock singer and keyboard player Dr John in the show Take me back to New Orleans, which was performed widely in Britain, Europe and the USA.

Barber is a skilful trombonist and a highly original arranger, and the identity he has achieved for his band has been imitated throughout Europe

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Gladwell: ‘Barber Approved’, Jazz Journal, xii/8 (1959), 25, 36

E. Souchon: ‘Chris Barber’s Band in New Orleans’, Jazz Journal, xiii/2 (1960), 1–2

G. Bielderman: Chris Barber Discography, 1949–1975 (Zwolle, 1976; loose leaf suppl. c1978; 2/1992 as Chris Barber: 40 Years in Music)

D. Fairweather: ‘Barber, Chris’, in I. Carr, D. Fairweather and B. Priestley: Jazz: the Essential Companion (London, 1987), 25

CHARLES FOX/DIGBY FAIRWEATHER

Barber, Llorenç

(b Alelo de Malferit, Valencia, 1948). Spanish composer. He studied piano, composition and art history at the universities of Valencia and Madrid, and was in charge of the University of Madrid computer music centre, 1979–84. From 1990 he taught at the Institute of Aesthetics and in 1992 he planned and supervised a series of concerts of ‘alternative music’ at the Circulo de Bellas Artes.

Since 1980 Barber has been engaged internationally as an improviser on his own personally constructed ‘bell towers’. In addition he has fulfilled commissions from all over the world to write ‘symphonies of bells’, each specifically designed for individual towns and cities; in Spain he has composed one such work for bell towers situated at various points on a mountain range. A performance in Oaxaca, Mexico, in June 1991, was timed to coincide with a total eclipse; another was the closing event of the 1993 ISCM Festival.

A ‘symphony of bells’ involves making use of all the available bells and bell ringers in any locality, the performance being co-ordinated by stopwatches on each site. Most of these symphonies last 50 minutes and are exact in their contrasts of quiet episodes and great tumults of bell sounds. The same improvisatory and rhythmic processes were utilized to brilliant effect in an outdoor work for multiple school brass bands, Alberomundo, played in the Bull Ring at Alicante on 24 September 1995 as part of the annual contemporary music festival there. Barber has also collaborated with the singer Fatima Miranda and with the Fiatus Vocis Trio, exploring new relationships between phonetics and instrumental music; in this he has been influenced by the work of Robert Ashley.

WRITINGS

John Cage (Madrid, 1985)

‘Juan Hidalgo’, Ritmo, no.566 (1986), 112–13

Mauricio Kagel (Madrid, 1987)

‘Une musique pneumatique: la linguopharyngocampanologie’, Revue d'esthétique, nos.13–15 (1987–8), 67–71

‘Sobre las ciudades y las campanas españolas’, Ritmo, no.594 (1988), 140–42

‘Bells, a Music from the Space’, Glasba v tehnicnem světu: Musica ex machina/Die Musik in der technischen Welt (Ljubljana, 1994), 219–26

‘Like an Avalanche: Conlon Nancarrow and Spain’, MusikTexte, nos.73–4 (1998), 49–50

MEIRION BOWEN

Barber, Robert (i)

(fl Castleton, Derbys., 1723–53). English psalmodist and ?composer. In 1723 he published the first edition of A Book of Psalmody in conjunction with John Barber. A second edition, by Robert Barber alone, followed in 1733, and a third, entitled David’s Harp Well Tuned, in 1753. He also published The Psalm Singer’s Choice Companion in 1727. A Book of Psalmody enjoyed a good deal of popularity in the north Midlands. It was similar to other parochial collections, and most of its contents were derivative. The second edition, however, had a remarkable feature: it included, as well as chants for the canticles, a complete musical setting of Morning Prayer, litany and ante-communion on cathedral lines, but for alto, tenor and bass only. Barber made it clear on the title-page that this was designed for ‘our Country Churches’. He thus brought to its logical conclusion the trend begun by Henry Playford, who published anthems for parish church use in The Divine Companion (1701), and John Chetham, who printed chants in his Book of Psalmody (1718). The anthem By the rivers of Babylon, attributed to Barber and first printed in his 1723 collection, is one of the finest examples of country church music of the period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), i, 193; ii, exx.31, 34

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Barber, Robert (ii)

(b Newcastle upon Tyne, c1750; d ?London). English composer and organist. His biography is obscure. He went to Aberdeen in autumn 1774 to take up the post of organist at St Paul's Episcopal Chapel, which he held until autumn 1783, being succeeded (probably at his own wish) by John Ross, also a native of Newcastle. During that time Barber played the harpsichord continuo for the Aberdeen Musical Society's weekly concerts, published several compositions, and performed further unpublished works. After 1783 he seems to have lived in London.

In 1788 Barber's cantata Thomson's Hymn to the Seasons was published in London. In about 20 movements, scored for chorus, soloists and large orchestra, on a text adapted from James Thomson, it is his outstanding surviving composition; the choral writing is Handelian, but the arias and stromentato recitatives are more modern, and may have been influenced by Gluck. Though written ten years earlier than Haydn's Seasons, it contains a duet ‘Bleat out afresh’ whose theme is identical to that of Haydn's chorus ‘Come gentle spring’; it is at least possible that Haydn heard a performance of Barber's work during one of his two visits to London.

WORKS

published in London unless otherwise stated

6 Sonatas, pf/hpd, vn, vc, op.1 (c1775)

6 Trios, hpd, vn, vc, op.2 (c1780)

A Favorite Sonata, pf/hpd, vn, vc (c1780)

A Collection of Songs, Cantatas, Elegies, Catches and Glees, op.3 (1782)

A Favorite Concerto, hpd/pf (c1785)

Thomson's Hymn to the Seasons, soloists, chorus, orch, op.4 (1788)

24 Favourite Scots Songs for v, pf (Liverpool, c1795)

Org conc., advertised in Aberdeen Journal (8 May 1778), lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Johnson: Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972), 55–6

DAVID JOHNSON

Barber, Samuel (Osmond)

(b West Chester, PA, 9 March 1910; d New York, 23 Jan 1981). American composer. One of the most honoured and most frequently performed American composers in Europe and the Americas during the mid-20th century, Barber pursued, throughout his career, a path marked by a vocally inspired lyricism and a commitment to the tonal language and many of the forms of late 19th-century music. Almost all of his published works – including at least one composition in nearly every genre – entered the repertory soon after he wrote them and many continue to be widely performed today.

BARBARA B. HEYMAN

1. Life.

From the age of seven, he displayed a prodigious talent for composing both vocal and instrumental music, writing an operetta, The Rose Tree, when he was ten to a libretto by the family's Irish cook. His musical studies were encouraged by his aunt and uncle – the contralto Louise Homer and the composer Sidney Homer, who, as his nephew's mentor for more than 25 years, profoundly influenced Barber's aesthetic principles. Early piano lessons were with William Hatton Green. At 14 he entered the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied the piano with George Boyle and then with Vengerova, singing with Gogorza and composition with Scalero. Also at the institute in 1928, he met Menotti, an encounter which led to a lifelong personal and professional relationship. In 1934, shortly before his graduation, the founder of the Curtis Institute, Mary Curtis Bok, began to take a special interest in Barber; beyond providing financial help, she actively promoted his career.

Early travels and extended stays in Europe, Italy in particular, solidified his affinity with European culture and intensified his Romantic orientation. In Vienna in 1934, he studied conducting and singing with John Braun. After his graduation from Curtis he had a brief career as a baritone, performing on the NBC Music Guild series; in 1935 he won a contract for a series of weekly song broadcasts. His recording of his own setting of Arnold's Dover Beach was hailed as having ‘singular charm and beauty’, ‘intelligently sung by a naturally beautiful voice’. First-hand experience as a singer and an intuitive empathy with the voice would find expression in the large legacy of songs that occupy some two-thirds of his output.

Barber gained early recognition as a composer, winning two Bearns awards – for a violin sonata (1928, lost) and for the overture to The School for Scandal (1931), his first published large-scale orchestral work. A Rome Prize enabled him to spend two years at the American Academy (1935–7), where he completed the Symphony in One Movement (1936), which received immediate performances in Rome, Cleveland and New York. Rodzinski conducted it at the opening concert of the Salzburg Festival in 1937, the first performance at the festival of a symphonic work by an American composer. His international stature was confirmed in 1938, when Toscanini and the NBC SO broadcast his Essay (no.1) and the Adagio for Strings (an arrangement of the second movement of the String Quartet). After that point, nearly all of Barber's works were composed on commission for prominent performers or ensembles.

He returned to the Curtis Institute in 1939 where he taught composition until 1942, though he was not really attracted to teaching and did not accept another position. In 1943 Mary Bok enabled Barber and Menotti to purchase ‘Capricorn’, the house in Mount Kisco, New York, which (until 1972) was the hermitage of Barber's most productive years, as well as a gathering place for many artists and intellectuals. In the same year he completed his Second Symphony, a commission from the US Army Airforce (in which he served from 1942 to 1945). The work was given its première by the Boston SO, as was the Cello Concerto, written for Garbousova, and the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, commissioned by the soprano Eleanor Steber. His ballet score Medea (1946) was composed for Martha Graham; it was subsequently reworked both as an orchestral suite and as a separate orchestral tone poem, Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance. The Piano Sonata (1949), commissioned by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the League of Composers, was first performed by Horowitz. Its instant critical success was followed by numerous performances in America and Europe within the first year of its première; it retains a secure place in the repertory.

Barber had studied conducting with Reiner at the Curtis Institute and later with Szell, and in 1951 he was coached by Malko in preparation for the recordings of the Second Symphony, the Cello Concerto and the Medea ballet suite. Later that year he also conducted concerts of his Violin Concerto, the Second Symphony and Medea in Berlin and Frankfurt. But though he had ambitions as a conductor in the 1950s, these were to be short-lived.

While few think of Barber as a prominent standard-bearer for American music, he was more than once chosen to represent the USA: at an international music festival in Prague in 1946, as vice-president of the International Music Council in 1952, and as the first American composer to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers in Moscow in 1962. He won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for Vanessa, staged initially by the Metropolitan Opera (1958) and later that year as the first American opera produced at the Salzburg Festival. Among the many other awards he received were the Henry Hadley Medal (1958) for his exceptional services to American music, nomination to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1958), and the Gold Medal for Music at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1976).

At the peak of his career, Barber was commissioned to write three works for the opening of Lincoln Center: the Piano Concerto, commissioned for the inaugural week of Philharmonic Hall (1962), which won him the Pulitzer Prize; Andromache's Farewell (1962), a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides; and the opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966), written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House. But the third commission, in principle one of the greatest tributes to his work, turned out to be his nemesis. Prompted by a conviction that, in spite of the vitriolic reviews, the opera contained some of his best work, Barber directed much of his energy towards its revision over the following decade.

After 1966 he divided his time between Santa Cristina in Italy and New York. He struggled with depression, alcoholism and creative blocks that profoundly affected his productivity. Yet he continued to concentrate on what had always been for him the gratifying task of writing vocal music in short forms, as well as fulfilling a few commissions for larger works, including the cantata The Lovers. From 1978 to the end of his life, Barber was intermittently hospitalized for the treatment of cancer. His last composition, an oboe concerto of which only the second movement was completed, was published posthumously as Canzone for oboe and string orchestra.

Barber, Samuel

2. Works and style.

Unlike many of his contemporaries whose careers came to maturity between the two world wars, Barber rarely responded to the experimental trends that infiltrated music in the 1920s and again after World War II. Instead he continued to write expressive, lyrical music, using conventional formal models and the tonal language of the 19th century. Nine years of rigorous training in composition under Scalero, a student of Eusebius Mandyczewski, helped to preserve Barber's connection to the 19th-century tradition. That classical heritage was also reinforced by the personal guidance he received from Sidney Homer, who held up the European masters of the 19th century as role models, while at the same time directing Barber to trust the validity of his ‘inner voice’.

Elements of modernism incorporated into his work after 1940 – increased dissonance and chromaticism (Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance and the Cello Concerto), tonal ambiguity and a limited use of serialism (movements 1, 2 and 3 of the Piano Sonata, the Nocturne and Prayers of Kierkegaard) – were only of use in so far as they allowed him to pursue without compromise principles of tonality and lyrical expression. The 12-note rows in the Piano Sonata, for example, are not used as part of a rigid technique of organization. Their presence in melodic lines or accompaniment is rarely in conflict with – indeed often reinforces – the tonal structure. Barber’s propensity for writing elegiac, long-lined melodies is exemplified by two of his best-known works, the justifiably admired Adagio for Strings and the Violin Concerto. These and such large-scale orchestral works as the three Essays from the early, middle and late stages of his career employ a rich orchestral palette and are characterized by well-crafted formal design, fluent counterpoint, and haunting themes – often assigned to solo woodwind instruments – that reflect a strong vocal orientation. The finale of the Violin Concerto and subsequent works from the 1940s, in particular the Second Symphony, Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, Capricorn Concerto (a 20th-century concerto grosso), and the Cello Concerto, show an increasing use of dissonance and syncopated rhythms, displaying some influence of Stravinsky.

A prolific composer of songs that are grateful to the voice as well as the ear, Barber favoured lyrical and nostalgic texts by European, often Celtic, poets. He set Joyce, Stephens, Graves, Spender and Rilke (in French) as well as the American poets Agee, Rothke and Dickinson. Arroyo, Bampton, Fischer-Dieskau and Steber, among others, have introduced his vocal works. Sure on this shining night op.13 no.3 – with its long, seamlessly lyrical canonic lines – is one of the most frequently performed of his songs. The cycle Hermit Songs op.29, commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and first sung by Leontyne Price, is a major work. The ten songs, based on comments written on the margins of medieval manuscripts by Irish monks, are infused with a modal harmonic language of great stylistic integrity; they led Schuman to hail Barber as an unmatched art-song composer. The intellectually and vocally challenging late cycle Despite and Still op.41, written for Price, has profound biographical significance, probing themes of loneliness, lost love and isolation – themes which call for a more dissonant harmonic language characterized by tonal ambiguity, tritones, a frequent use of the complete chromatic, conflicting triads, and whole-tone segments directed towards vivid expression of textual imagery.

Unaccompanied choral works written between 1930 and 1940 include a setting of Emily Dickinson's ‘Let down the bars, O Death’, a precursor of the sensitivity to textual expression that would come to characterize Barber's later choral compositions. His settings of three poems from Reincarnations reflect the exuberance, wit and melancholy of James Stephens's reinterpreted Gaelic texts through a wide variety of musical nuance, ranging from the rapid parlando rhythms of Mary Hynes to the chilling dirge Anthony O'Daly, its theme intensified by archaic-sounding open 5ths over an E pedal. The large-scale Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), composed at the peak of Barber's maturity, fuses 20th-century, Baroque and medieval musical practice and stands unequivocally as one of the great spiritual works of the contemporary genre.

Barber's long-awaited first opera, Vanessa (1956), with a libretto by Menotti inspired by Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, is in the grand operatic tradition. Eleanor Steber, in one of the great challenges of her career, took the title role. With set-piece arias, love duets, a glimpsed ball scene requiring a waltz, a folkdance ballet (reminiscent of Yevgeny Onegin) and a coloratura skating aria (cut from the revised version), it was described by Paul Henry Lang as ‘remarkable and second to none on the Salzburg–Milan axis’; Sargeant extolled it as ‘by far the finest and most truly “operatic” opera ever written by an American, as well as one of the most impressive things of its sort to appear anywhere since Richard Strauss's more vigorous days’. Predominantly neo-Romantic, the music highlights many of Barber's compositional strengths: metric flexibility that supports the natural rhythms of the text, a fluid use of harmonic colour to underscore the bittersweet poetry, and an abundance of accessible melody.

His second opera, Antony and Cleopatra, contains some of Barber's most dramatic vocal writing, but initial appreciation was eclipsed by the inflated Zeffirelli production with its problematic technical apparatus and gaudy costumes, and a press preoccupied with the social glitter of the occasion. Some of the most sensuous and soaring lyrical passages were composed especially with the voice of Price in mind, who created the role of Cleopatra. Revised by Barber and restaged by Menotti, the work subsequently received critical accolade with performances at the American Opera Center at the Juilliard School in New York in 1975 and at the Spoleto festivals in Charleston and Italy in 1984.

While he shared the concern of his generation for writing music accessible to a broadly based audience, unlike Copland, Harris, Blitzstein and Thomson, who searched for a music with national identity, Barber rarely incorporated popular, jazz and folk idioms into his compositions. Of his works that do include native elements, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is considered the most American. A reverie of childhood in a small Southern town, on a text by James Agee, it is a palpable evocation of folklore in a quasi-pastoral style, with frequent word-painting, hints of the blues, rich orchestral colour and freely varied metre. Diamond claimed Knoxville was ‘the pinnacle beyond which many a composer will find it impossible to go’. Barber’s few instrumental works that draw on the vernacular include Excursions (1941–2), a set of stylized piano pieces based on American idioms (a boogie woogie, a blues, a barn dance and a Latin American popular dance), the Piano Sonata (1949), with its paradigmatic contemporary fugue, and the Piano Concerto (1962), which makes use of motoric jazz rhythms.

Though deemed conservative by contemporary critics, Barber's lasting strength comes precisely from his conservation of a post-Straussian chromaticism along with a typically American directness and simplicity. The international recognition accorded him throughout most of his life and the new significance his works have gained since the arrival of the ‘new romanticism’ is testimony to the vitality and enduring viability of his extended tonal language and melodic invention.

Barber, Samuel

WORKS

all published unless otherwise stated

stage

op.

—	The Rose Tree (op, A.S. Brosius), 1920, inc., unpubd; West Chester, PA
—	One Day of Spring (incid music, M. Kennedy), 1v, str, 1935, lost, upubd; Winter Park, FL, 24 Jan 1935
23	Medea (Serpent Heart) (ballet, M. Graham), 1946, New York, 10 May 1946; rev. as The Cave of the Heart, New York, 27 Feb 1947; arr. as orch suite, 1947, Philadelphia, 5 Dec 1947, Philadelphia Orchestra, cond. E. Ormandy; Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, op.23a, 1953, New York, 2 Feb 1956, New York PO, cond. D. Mitropoulos
28	Souvenirs (ballet, T. Bolender), 1952, New York, 15 Nov 1955; arr. as suite, pf 4 hands, 1952, NBC TV, July 1952; suite, orch, 1952, Chicago, 12 Nov 1953, Chicago SO, cond. F. Reiner; suite, solo pf, 1954
32	Vanessa (op, 4, G.C. Menotti), 1956–7, New York, Met, 15 Jan 1958, cond. Mitropoulos; rev. 1964
35	A Hand of Bridge (op, 1, Menotti), 4 solo vv, chbr orch, 1953, Spoleto, 17 June 1959
40	Antony and Cleopatra (op, 3, F. Zeffirelli, after W. Shakespeare), 1966, New York, Met, 16 Sept 1966, cond. T. Schippers; rev. 1974, New York, 6 Feb 1975, cond. Conlon

orchestral

5	The School for Scandal, ov., 1931
7	Music for a Scene from Shelley, 1933
9	Symphony no.1, 1936
11	Adagio for Strings, 1936 [arr. of 2nd movt of Str Qt]
12	[First] Essay for Orchestra, 1937
14	Violin Concerto, 1939
17	Second Essay, 1942
—	Funeral March, 1943 [based on Army Air Corps Song], unpubd
—	Commando March, band, 1943
19	Symphony no.2, 1944, rev. 1947; 2nd movt rev. as Night Flight, op.19a, 1964
21	Capricorn Concerto, fl, ob, tpt, str, 1944
22	Cello Concerto, 1945
—	Horizon, c1945, unpubd
—	Adventure, fl, cl, hn, hp, ‘exotic’ insts, 1954, unpubd
36	Toccata festiva, org, orch, 1960
37	Die natali, chorale preludes for Christmas, 1960
38	Piano Concerto, 1962, 2nd movt transcr., fl, pf, 1961
—	Mutations from Bach, brass choir, timp, 1967
44	Fadograph of a Yestern Scene (after J. Joyce: Finnegans Wake), 1971
47	Third Essay, 1978
48 posth.	Canzonetta, ob, str, orchd C. Turner, 1977–8

choral

XIII	Christmas Eve: a Trio with Solos, 2 solo vv, SAA, org, c1924, unpubd
8/1–2	The Virgin Martyrs (Siegebert of Gembloux, trans. H. Waddell), SSAA, 1935; Let down the bars, O Death (E. Dickinson), SATB, 1936
—	God's Grandeur (G.M. Hopkins), SATB, 1938, pubd posth.
—	Motetto (Bible: Job), 4vv, 8vv, c1938, unpubd
—	Peggy Mitchell (J. Stephens), 4vv, c1939, unpubd
15	A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map (S. Spender), male vv, 3 kettle-drums, 1940
16	Reincarnations (Stephens), 4vv, 1937–40: Mary Hynes, Anthony O'Daly, The Coolin
—	Ave Maria (after Josquin Des Prez), 4vv, c1940, unpubd
—	Ad ‘bibinem’ cum me regaret ad cenam (V. Fortunatus), 4vv unacc., 1943
—	Long Live Louise and Sidney Homer, canon, 1944, unpubd
30	Prayers of Kierkegaard (S. Kierkegaard), S, A ad lib, T ad lib, chorus, orch, 1954
—	Under the Willow Tree, 1v, SATB, pf, 1956 [from Vanessa]
—	Heaven-Haven (A Nun Takes the Veil), SATB/SSAA, 1961 [from op.13 no.1]
—	Sure on this shining night, SATB, pf, 1961 [from op.13, no.3]
—	Chorale for Ascension Day (Easter Chroale) (P. Browning), chorus, brass, timp, org ad lib, 1964
11	Agnus Dei, chorus, org/pf, 1967 [arr. of 2nd movt of Str Qt]
—	The Monk and his Cat, SATB, pf, 1967 [from Hermit Songs op.29]
—	Two Choruses: On the Death of Antony, SSA, pf; On the Death of Cleopatra, SATB, pf, 1968 [from Antony and Cleopatra]
42	Twelfth Night (L. Lee), To be Sung on the Water (L. Bogan), 4vv unacc., 1968
43	The Lovers (P. Neruda), Bar, chorus, orch, 1971

chamber

—	Fantasie, 2 pf, 1924, unpubd
XVI	Sonata in Modern Form, 2 pf, c1925, unpubd
1	Serenade, str qt/str orch, 1928
4	Violin Sonata, f, 1928, lost, unpubd
6	Cello Sonata, 1932
11	String Quartet, 1936 [arrs. for str and chorus, org, see op.11, orchestral and choral]
—	Commemorative March, vn, vc, pf, unpubd
31	Summer Music, wind qnt, 1955
38a	Canzone (Elegy), fl, pf, 1961 [transcr. of 2nd movt of Pf Conc.]

solo instrumental

I/3	Melody in F, pf, 1917, unpubd
—	Sadness, pf, 1917, unpubd
I/4	Largo, pf, 1918, unpubd
I/5	War Song, pf, 1918, unpubd
III/1	At Twilight, pf, 1919, unpubd
III/2	Lullaby, pf, 1919, unpubd
X/2	Themes, pf, c1923, movts 2–3 unpubd [movt 1 = Three Sketches no.3]
—	3 Sketches, pf, 1923–4: Love Song (to Mother), To my Steinway (to Number 220601), Minuet (to Sara) [= Themes: movt 1]
—	[Untitled work] (‘Laughingly and briskly’), pf, c1924, unpubd
—	Petite berceuse (to Jean), pf, c1924, unpubd
—	Prelude to a Tragic Drama, pf, 1925, unpubd
—	To Longwood Gardens, org, 1925, unpubd
—	Fresh from West Chester (Some Jazzings): Poison Ivy, a Country Dance, 1925; Let's Sit it out, I'd rather watch (I Sam Barber did it with my little hatchet, a walls [sic]), 1926; unpubd
—	3 Essays, pf, 1926, unpubd
—	4 Chorale Preludes, kbd, 1927, unpubd
—	4 Partitas, kbd, 1927, unpubd
—	Prelude and Fugue, b, org, 1927, unpubd
—	Pieces for Carillon: Round, Allegro, Legend, 1930–31, unpubd
—	Suite for Carillon, 4 pieces, 1932
—	2 Interludes (Intermezzi), pf, 1931–2, no.1 pubd posth., no.2 unpubd
20	Excursions, pf, 1942–4
26	Sonata, pf, 1949
34	Wondrous Love, variations on a shape-note hymn, org, 1958
33	Nocturne (Homage to John Field), pf, 1959
—	Variations on Happy Birthday, 1970, unpubd [to Eugene Ormandy]
46	Ballade, pf, 1977

songs

1v, pf, unless otherwise stated

—	Sometime (to Mother), Mez, 1917, unpubd
—	Why Not (K. Parsons), 1917, unpubd
II/3	In the Firelight, 1918, unpubd
II/4	Isabel (J.G. Whittier), 1919, unpubd
—	An Old Song (C. Kingsley), 1921, unpubd
—	Hunting Song (J. Bennett), Bar, pf, cornet, c1921, unpubd
V/2	Thy Will be Done (3 verses from The Wanderer), c1921, unpubd
VII	7 Nursery Songs (to Sara), S, 1920–23, unpubd
—	October Weather (Barber), S, c1923, unpubd
—	Dere Two Fella Joe, high v, 1924, unpubd
—	Minuet, S, A, pf, c1924, unpubd
XIV	My Fairyland (R.T. Kerlin), 1924, unpubd
—	Summer is Coming (after A. Tennyson), 2 solo vv, pf, c1924, unpubd
—	2 Poems of the Wind (F. MacCleod), 1924, unpubd: Little Children of the Wind, Longing
—	A Slumber Song of the Madonna (A. Noyes), 1v, org, 1925, pubd in Ten Early Songs, 1v, pf (1995)
—	Fantasy in Purple (L. Hughes), 1925, unpubd
—	Lady when I Behold the Roses (anon.), 1925 unpubd
—	La nuit (A. Meurath), 1925, unpubd
—	2 Songs of Youth, 1925, unpubd: I Never Thought that Youth would Go (J.B. Rittenhouse), Invocation to Youth (L. Binyon)
—	An Earnest Suit to his Unkind Mistress not to Forsake him (Sir T. Wyatt), 1926, unpubd
—	Ask me to Rest (E.H.S. Terry), 1926, unpubd
—	Au clair de la lune, 1926, unpubd
—	Hey Nonny No (Christ Church MS), 1926, unpubd
—	Man (H. Wolfe), 1926, unpubd
—	Music, when soft voices die (P.B. Shelley), c1926, unpubd
—	Thy Love (E. Browning), 1926, unpubd
—	Watchers (D. Cornwell), 1926, unpubd
—	Dance (J. Stephens), 1927, lost, unpubd
—	Mother I cannot mind my wheel (W.S. Landor), 1927, unpubd
—	Only of Thee and Me (L. Untermeyer), c1927, lost, unpubd
—	Rounds, 3vv, pf, 1927, unpubd: A Lament (Shelley); To Electra (R. Herrick); Dirge: Weep for the World's Wrong; Farewell; Not I (R.L. Stevenson); Of a Rose is al myn Song (anon., 1350); Sunset (Stevenson); The Moon (Shelley); Sun of the Sleepless (Byron); The Throstle (Tennyson); When Day is Gone (R. Burns); Late, Late, so Late (Tennyson: Guinevere)
—	There's Nae Lark (A. Swinburne), 1927 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
2	3 Songs: The Daisies (Stephens), 1927, With Rue my Heart is Laden (A.E. Housman), 1928, Bessie Bobtail (Stephens), 1934
—	The Shepherd to his Love and the Nymph's Reply, 1928, unpubd
3	Dover Beach (M. Arnold), Mez/Bar, str qt, 1931
—	Addio di Orfeo (C. Monteverdi), 1934, arr. 1v, str, hpd, unpubd
—	Love at the Door (from Meleager, trans. J.A. Symonds), 1934 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	Serenader (G. Dillon), 1934 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	Love's Caution (W.H. Davies), 1935 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	Night Wanderers (Davies), 1935 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	Of that so sweet imprisonment (J. Joyce), 1935 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	Peace (from Bhartirihari, trans. P.E. More), 1935 unpubd
—	Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (R. Frost), 1935, unpubd
—	Strings in the earth and air (Joyce), 1935 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
10	3 Songs (Joyce: Chamber Music), 1936, arr. 1v, orch: Rain has fallen, Sleep now, 1935; I hear an army, 1936
—	The Beggar's Song (Davies), 1936 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
—	In the dark pinewood (Joyce), 1937 [pubd in Ten Early Songs (1995)]
13	4 Songs: A Nun Takes the Veil (G.M. Hopkins), 1937, arr. SATB/SSAA; The Secrets of the Old (W.B. Yeats), 1938; Sure on this shining night (J. Agee), 1938, arr. 1v, orch, and chorus, pf; Nocturne (F. Prokosch), 1940, arr. 1v, orch
—	Song for a New House (Shakespeare), 1v, fl, pf, 1940, unpubd
—	Between Dark and Dark (K. Chapin), 1942, lost, unpubd
18	2 Songs: The Queen's Face on a Summery Coin (R. Horan), 1942; Monks and Raisins (J.G. Villa), 1943
24	Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Agee), high v, orch, 1947, unpubd, rev. 1v, chbr orch, 1950
25	Nuvoletta (from Joyce: Finnegans Wake), 1947
27	Mélodies passagères (R.M. Rilke), 1950–51: Puisque tout passe, Un cygne, Tombeau dans un parc, Le clocher chante, Départ
29	Hermit Songs (Irish texts of 8th–13th centuries), 1952–3: At Saint Patrick's Purgatory (trans. S. O'Faolain); Church Bells at Night (trans. H. Mumford Jones); Saint Ita's Vision (trans. C. Kallman); The Heavenly Banquet (trans. O'Faolain); The Crucifixion (anon., from The Speckled Book, trans. Mumford Jones); Sea-Snatch (trans. W.H. Auden), arr. SATB, pf (1954); Promiscuity (trans. Auden); The Monk and his Cat (trans. Auden); The Praises of God (trans. Auden); The Desire for Hermitage (trans. O'Faolain)
39	Andromache's Farewell (from Euripides: The Trojan Women, trans. J.P. Creagh), S, orch, 1962
41	Despite and Still: A Last Song (R. Graves), My Lizard (T. Rilke), In the Wilderness (Graves), Solitary Hotel (from Joyce: Ulysses), Despite and Still (Graves), 1968–9
45	3 Songs, 1972: Now have I fed and eaten up the rose (G. Keller, trans. Joyce), A Green Lowland of Pianos (J. Harsymowicz, trans. C. Milosz), O Boundless, Boundless Evening (G. Heym, trans. C. Middleton)
MSS in US-Wcg
Principal publisher: G. Schirmer

Barber, Samuel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Copland: ‘From the ’20's to the ’40's and Beyond’, MM, xx (1942–3), 78–82

R. Horan: ‘Samuel Barber’, MM, xx (1942–3), 161–9

‘Barber, Samuel’, CBY 1944

N. Broder: ‘The Music of Samuel Barber’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 325–35

H. Dexter: ‘Samuel Barber and his Music’, MO, lxxii (1948–9), 285–7

N. Broder: ‘Current Chronicle: New York’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 276–82

H. Tischler: ‘Barber's Piano Sonata opus 26’, ML, xxxiii (1952), 352–4

N. Broder: Samuel Barber (New York, 1954/R)

R. Friedewald: A Formal and Stylistic Analysis of the Published Music of Samuel Barber (diss., U. of Iowa, 1957)

C. Turner: ‘The Music of Samuel Barber’, ON, xxii/13 (1957–8), 7, 32–3

‘Classified Chronological Catalog of Works by the United States Composer Samuel Barber’, Inter-American Music Bulletin, no.13 (1959), 22–8

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, v (Washington DC, 1959), 14–21 [pubn of the Pan American Union]

L.S. Wathen: Dissonance Treatment in the Instrumental Music of Samuel Barber (diss., Northwestern U., 1960)

B. Rands: ‘Samuel Barber: a Belief in Tradition’, MO, lxxxiv (1960–61), 353 only

J. Briggs: ‘Samuel Barber’, International Musician, lx/6 (1961–2), 20–23

‘Barber, Samuel’, CBY 1963

W.A. Dailey: Techniques of Composition Used in Contemporary Works for Chorus and Orchestra on Religious Texts as Important Representative Works of the Period from 1952 through 1962 (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1965)

E. Salzman: ‘Samuel Barber’, Hi Fi/Stereo Review, xvii/4 (1966), 77–89

J.E. Albertson: A Study of Stylistic Elements of Samuel Barber's ‘Hermit Songs’ and Franz Schubert's ‘Die Winterreise’ (DMA diss., U. of Missouri, Kansas City, 1969)

R.L. Larsen: A Study and Comparison of Samuel Barber's ‘Vanessa’, Robert Ward's ‘The Crucible’, and Gunther Schuller's ‘The Visitation’ (DMA diss., Indiana U., 1971)

L.L. Rhoades: Theme and Variation in Twentieth-Century Organ Literature: Analyses of Variations by Alain, Barber, Distler, Dupré, Duruflé, and Sowerby (diss., Ohio State U., 1973)

S.L. Carter: The Piano Music of Samuel Barber (diss., Texas Tech U., 1980)

H. Heinsheimer: ‘Samuel Barber: Maverick Composer’, Keynote, iv/1 (1980), 7

H. Gleason and W. Becker: ‘Samuel Barber’, 20th-Century American Composers, Music Literature Outlines, iv (Bloomington, IN, rev. 2/1980) [incl. further bibliography]

J. Sifferman: Samuel Barber's Works for Solo Piano (DMA diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1982)

D.A. Hennessee: Samuel Barber: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1985)

J.L. Kreiling: The Songs of Samuel Barber: a Study in Literary Taste and Text-Setting (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1986)

B.B. Heyman: Samuel Barber: a Documentary Study of his Works (diss., CUNY, 1989)

B.B. Heyman: ‘The Second Time Around: Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra’, ON, lvi/6 (1991–2), 56–7

B.B. Heyman: Samuel Barber: the Composer and his Music (New York, 1992)

Barberá, José

(b Barcelona, 27 Jan 1876; d Barcelona, 19 Feb 1947). Catalan composer and teacher. In 1887 he entered the Barcelona Conservatory, to study the piano, harmony and composition, and later he was a pupil of Pedrell. He gave much of his time to teaching, collaborating in 1919 with María Montessori in studying music educational methods for primary schoolchildren. In his position at the Conservatory, he taught harmony, counterpoint, composition and orchestration, and was director until March 1938. He instructed many notable musicians, and was one of the driving forces behind Catalan musical life.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sym., a; Sinfonia sintética; Sinfonietta; Alfeu y Aretusa; Claro de luna; Crepúsculo de invierno; Danza fantástica; Els ballaires; Entierro de la bruja; El fumador de opio; Nenia; Paisaje nevado

Choral: Mass, 4vv

Pf pieces; many songs

Principal publisher: Boileau

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Marco: Historia de la música española: siglo XX (Madrid, 1983; Eng. trans., 1993)

CARLOS GÓMEZ AMAT

Barberiis, Melchiore de

(fl Padua, c1545–50). Italian priest, composer, lutenist and guitarist. He composed or intabulated books 4, 5, 6, 9 and 10 in Girolamo Scotto’s ten volume series of lute tablatures (Venice, 1546–9), which also included tablatures by Francesco da Milano, Rotta, Giovanni Maria da Crema and Borrono. Barberiis’s name is absent from lists of prominent Paduan musicians of the time, and only two of his pieces were reprinted in later collections. At best, his five books preserve the practical repertory of a ‘sonatore eccellentissimo di lautto’ who had little or no formal musical training.

Barberiis’s ricercares, fantasias and canzonas, some of which are in two or three sections, are usually constructed from a succession of chords (often drawn from madrigals or dances) filled out and linked by ornamental passage work. One fantasia is a simple gloss upon a composition by Francesco da Milano. Book 4 (1546) is dominated by an intabulation of the entire Missa ‘Ave Maria’ of Antoine de Févin with fantasias (called ‘ricercari accomodati sopra il tuono di ditta messa’ on the title-page) intended to serve as interludes between sections. Books 5 and 6 (1546) contain intabulations of four-part motets by Josquin, Andreas De Silva, Gombert and others of that generation, and intabulations of madrigals and chansons (one by Leo X). Book 9 (1549), dedicated to Torquato Bembo, son of the poet and papal secretary, consists largely of dances – passamezzos, pavans, saltarellos, galliards and pivas, some loosely grouped in suites in which paired dances share similar thematic material. The last book (1549) includes two lute duets and four short pieces for seven-string (four-course) guitar. The latter pieces, euphemistically called ‘fantasias’, are notable for their popular character; one uses the bergamasca and another employs a drone bass. Several ‘discordate’ fantasias require the tunings F–B–f–a–d'–g', a tuning also used by Dalza, G–d–g–a–d'–g' and G–c–f–a–e'–a'. The canzona Pas de mi bon compagni from this volume is based on Passe tyme with good companye (in GB-Lbl Roy.App.58) attributed to Henry VIII, suggesting that this macaronic text was known in Italy, reversing the usual commerce of lute music from Italy outwards. All of the 1546 volumes contain a detailed instruction for tuning the instrument.

WORKS

Intabulatura di lauto, libro quarto, de la messa di Antonio Fevino sopra Ave Maria (Venice, 1546²²)

Intabulatura de lautto, libro quinto, de madrigali et canzon francese (Venice, 1546)

Intabulatura de lautto, libro sesto, di diversi motetti (Venice, 1546²³)

Intabolatura di lauto, libro nono, intitulato Il Bembo (Venice, 1549); 5 dances ed. in Chilesotti (1902)

Opera intitolata contina … Intabolatura di lauto … libro decimo (Venice, 1549³⁹); incl. 4 fantasias for guitar, ed. in Koczirz (1921)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

O. Chilesotti: ‘Note circa alcuni liutisti italiani della prima metà del Cinquecento’, RMI, ix (1902), 36–61, 233–63, esp. 241–5

A. Koczirz: ‘Die Fantasien des Melchior de Barberiis für die siebensaitige Gitarre (1549)’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 11–17

J. Ward: ‘The Lute Music of MS Royal Appendix 58’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 117–25

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy, ca. 1500–1550, with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1961)

J.A. Echols: Melchiore de Barberiis’s Lute Intabulations of Sacred Music (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1973)

C. Wolzien: ‘Early Guitar Literature’, Soundboard, xviii (1991), 69–71

ARTHUR J. NESS

Barberini.

Italian family of patrons. Of Tuscan origin, the Barberini gained their fortune in Rome beginning with the ecclesiastical career of Maffeo (1568–1644), who became a cardinal in 1606 and then Pope Urban VIII (1623–44). His literary and musical interests must be traced from dedications in musical scores, settings of his poetry, his participation in the Florentine Accademia degli Alterati and his sponsorship of such figures as the castrato Loreto Vittori and the poet Giovanni Ciampoli. In the spirit of humanistic textual criticism, the pope himself undertook the revision of the Latin hymns of the breviary (Rome, 1629), which engendered new, competing musical settings by A.M. Abbatini, Filippo Vitali and Gregorio Allegri, of which the last gained formal approval.

Urban VIII raised two of his nephews to the purple, Francesco (1597–1679) and Antonio (1607–71); a third nephew, Taddeo (1603–47), headed the line of the princes of Palestrina, followed by his son Maffeo (1631–85) and grandson Urbano (1664–1722). They were all active patrons of opera, oratorio and chamber music. The two cardinals sponsored numerous musical activities in their several ecclesiastical capacities, for celebrations at their titular churches and as protectors at various times of the Collegio Romano, Seminario Vaticano, Collegio Germanico, Collegio Inglese and several other institutions. Francesco also served as archpriest of the basilica of S Pietro from 1633 to 1667 and Antonio as archpriest of S Maria Maggiore and protector of the choir of the Cappella Sistina (from 1638). Taddeo not only sponsored operas at home and perhaps one of the first narrative ballets (in 1638), but as general of the papal armies he occasioned operas and other types of musical entertainments wherever he sojourned, most notably in Ferrara. Jules Mazarin’s association with Barberini diplomacy and Cardinal Antonio’s exile in Paris (1645–53) prompted the export of Italian opera to France, marked especially by Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo (1647, Paris). These and other members of the family, including later cardinals, nuns and Barberini princesses married into other noble families after 1722, received dedications of musical prints and opera librettos from the 17th century on. Copying Florentine tradition, the Barberini subsidized publication of commemorative scores of their productions of Sant’Alessio (Rome, 1634; music by Stefano Landi), Erminia sul Giordano (Rome 1637; music by Michelangelo Rossi) and La Vita humana (Rome, 1658; music by Marco Marazzoli), all of which included scenographic engravings. What was significant about their patronage of opera in Rome, however, was its establishment as an annual dramatic entertainment for the carnival season, not tied to specific diplomatic or dynastic occasions. Various members of the family supported subscription opera in Rome, once it became established in the late 17th century. Cardinal Francesco the younger (1662–1738), for example, held a box at the Teatro Tordinona in 1690, while his brother Prince Urbano held one at the Capranica and paid one of his regular aiutanti di camera, Giovanni Antonio Haym, to play the violin there that season.

The musicians, poets and librettists that the family supported included one future pope, Clement IX (Rospigliosi) and numerous singers, composers and instrumentalists. Singers who joined the households of Cardinals Francesco and Antonio became virtually family members, often entering as young castratos and being retained well past the age for singing. Angelo Ferrotti, who served Francesco from the late 1620s and retired from the Cappella Sistina in 1654, continued to appear on the cardinal’s salary lists in the 1660s.

116 volumes of the family’s musical holdings were donated to the Vatican library in 1902, consisting largely of collections of secular vocal music of the 17th century and devotional music in Italian, along with some early works for oratories and books of lessons for the lute, guitar and keyboard used by the Barberini children. 11 anthologies of Roman and Venetian opera arias bear the arms of Prince Urbano. The additional 200 liturgical volumes have been catalogued (see Salmon).

The first Cardinal Francesco expressed academic as well as practical interest in music. Study of the drama and music of antiquity undertaken by G.B. Doni, one of his secretaries, influenced the first operas that Francesco commissioned, beginning in the 1630s, and also led to the reconstruction of Seneca’s Troades in 1640 with music by Virgilio Mazzocchi (now lost). Francesco also maintained an interest in music of the immediate past, and under Mazzocchi maintained a viol ensemble to perform Italian madrigals. Theoretical treatises, both printed and manuscript, are included in the Barberini collection, including a 14th-century copy of the Ars nova of Philippe de Vitry and a manuscript presentation copy for Urban VIII of Doni’s Lyra Barberina amphichordos (not published until 1763), seven treatises by Pier Francesco Valentini and the Antiquae musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam, 1652) of Marcus Meibom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Tetio: Aedes Barberinae (Rome, 1642)

A.F. Gori, ed.: De’ trattati di musica di Gio. Batista Doni (Florence, 1763)

L. von Pastor: Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (Freiburg, 1886–9); Eng. trans. as History of the Popes (London, 1923–53), xxix, chap. 6

P. Salmon: Les manuscrits liturgiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane (Vatican City, 1968–72)

M. Fumaroli: ‘Cicero pontifex romanus: la tradition rhétorique du Collège Romain et les principes inspirateurs de mécénat des Barberini’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, xc (1978), 797–835

F. Hammond: ‘Girolamo Frescobaldi and a Decade of Music at Casa Barberini, 1634–1643’, AnMc, no.19 (1979), 94–124

M. Murata: Operas for the Papal Court, 1631–1668 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

M. Murata: ‘Classical Tragedy in the History of Early Opera in Rome’, EMH, iv (1984), 101–34

F. Hammond: ‘More on Music in Casa Barberini’, Studi musicali, xiv (1985), 235–61

V. Kapp: ‘Das Barberini-Theater und die Bedeutung der römischen Kultur unter Urban VIII’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jb, new ser., xxvi (1985), 75–100

M. Murata: ‘Roman Cantata Scores as Traces of Musical Culture and Signs of its Place in Society’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 272–84

F. Hammond: Music & Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT, 1994) [with full bibliography]

MARGARET MURATA

Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Birmingham arts centre opened in 1939, part of the University of Birmingham. See Birmingham, §2.

Barberis, Mansi (Clemansa)

(b Iaşi, 12 March 1899; d Bucharest, 10 Oct 1986). Romanian composer. She studied music intermittently up to the age of 40 in Iaşi, Berlin, Paris and Vienna. She played the violin and the viola in the George Enescu Orchestra, Iaşi (1918–22), the Filarmonica Moldova, Iaşi (1942–4) and the Femina String Quartet, which she founded in 1944. She was also active as a singer, choral conductor and teacher of singing at the conservatories in Iaşi and Bucharest. She came into conflict with the communist authorities for several years and her activities were restricted for a time. She was later rehabilitated and concentrated her energies on the teaching of singing and composition. Her first composition was the song La lune blanche (1916, to a poem by Verlaine), and she followed this with over 100 works, including several for orchestra, of which the First Symphony (1941) and the Piano Concerto (1954) were among the most significant.

The post-Romantic style characteristic of her earlier works was maintained throughout her life, but from the late 1950s she moved away from large-scale instrumental forms and towards the theatre. She composed several full-length operas in the last three decades of her career, beginning with Apus de soare (‘Sunset’) in 1958 and including Domniţa din depărtări (‘The Maiden from Afar’), first performed on Romanian Television in 1970.

WORKS

Stage: Apus de soare [Sunset] (musical drama, 3, G. Teodorescu after Barbu St Delavrancea), 1958, rev. 1968, Bucharest, Opera Română, 30 Dec 1967; Kera Duduca (op, 3, A. Ionescu Arbore), 1963, rev. 1969, Romanian TV, 26 July 1970; Domniţa din depărtări [The Maiden from Afar] (op 3, after E. Rostand), 1971, Iaşi Opera Română, 9 May 1976; Caruta cu paiate [A Cartful of Clowns] (op, 3, A. Ionesco Arbore after M. Stefănescu), 1981, Iaşi, Opera Română, 10 May 1982

Orch: Viziuni, sym. poem, 1934; Suite no.1 ‘Pastorală’ 1937, Sym. no.1, 1941; Pf Conc., 1954

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Popovici: ‘Mansi Barberis’, Muzica, xxvi/6 (1976), 22–3

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Barbershop.

A style of unaccompanied singing that originated in the USA in the late 19th century. It is characterized by four-part harmony using chords that contain tritones. Dominant and diminished 7th chords, as well as half-diminished 7th and augmented 6th chords, are used, but major 7ths, flattened 9ths and chords of the 13th are considered stylistically inappropriate, as are non-chord notes. The melody is carried by the ‘lead’ (second) tenor, while the first tenor harmonizes above; the bass provides the foundation, and the baritone completes the harmony, frequently crossing above the melody. Chord progressions known as ‘swipes’ often compensate for the lack of instrumental accompaniment (ex.1).

The barbershop quartet movement, which flourished between about 1895 and 1930, was given impetus by the fledgling recording industry. Performances by such professional groups as the Manhansett, Haydn, American and Peerless quartets became widely available and gave rise to the formation of thousands of amateur groups throughout the country during the movement’s peak years (1910–25). A fundamental change in the American popular song also contributed to the development of barbershop harmony. Many tunes in the earlier decades of the 19th century were constructed around the tonic octave of the scale, but by about 1895 melodies with a dominant-to-dominant range had evolved. This meant that the bass part was less likely to double low melody notes, and it also allowed the upper tenor part to flow in a smooth line above the lead, mostly in 3rds and 6ths. The words of barbershop songs speak of commonplace ideas: home, spouse, children, love (both joyful and sad) and fond memories of earlier times. Interpretative liberties are taken in performance using rubato, and extended song endings known as tags are also used.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s the increasing popularity of jazz, sound films, records, cars and radio had led to a decline in the number of active quartets. In 1938, however, the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America was founded. By the end of the 20th century there were affiliated clubs with quartets and choruses in Britain, Scandinavia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Two organizations for women barbershop singers, Harmony Incorporated and Sweet Adelines, were also formed, both with affiliated societies overseas. From the 1940s on, barbershop harmony was sung either by male or by female quartets and choruses, but in the later 20th century mixed-voice groups gained increasing popularity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.W. Johnson: ‘The Origin of the “Barber Chord”’, The Mentor, xvii/1 (1929), 53

S. Spaeth: Barbershop Ballads (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1940)

D.K. Antrim: ‘The Barbershop Brotherhood’, The Etude, lxxii/11 (1954), 11

D. Martin: ‘Three Eras of Barbershop Harmony’, The Harmonizer, xv/2 (1955), 20

J.L. McClelland: Of, By, and For the People: a History of Barbershop Harmony (thesis, College of Wooster, PA, 1959)

D. Martin: ‘The Evolution of Barbershop Harmony’, Music Journal Annual (1965), 40

V. Hicks, ed.: Heritage of Harmony (Kenosha, WI, 1988)

V. HICKS

Barbetta, Giulio Cesare

(b ?Padua c1540; d after 1603). Italian lutenist and composer. Title-pages of his publications refer to him as ‘Padoano’. Padua was one of the centres of lute building and teaching. Barbetta's surviving lute books are among the most important Italian sources for the old six-course (‘second l'uso antico’) and new seven-course lute. The dedications of some of his publications to German aristocrats suggests connections with Germany (through German students at the University of Padua). His music was well known in northern Europe: ten gagliardas and two of the passamezzos from his first book (1569) were reprinted in Theatrum musicum (RISM 1571¹⁶) without attribution to Barbetta.

His compositions show the traditional Italian preference for lute fantasias, dance forms of all kinds and vocal intabulations. The first book of intabulations contains only pieces for solo lute: paduanas, gagliardas, passamezzos and fantasias. His 1582 book was issued in two versions, one with a Latin title and German text and another with Italian title and text. The collection contains original lute pieces (preambles, fantasies, dances) and intabulations of vocal works – madrigals and motets by Janequin, Wert, Lassus and Mouton. The Intavolatura of 1585 consists entirely of instrumental compositions for solo lute with the exception of six Arie – formulae to be used for singing ‘Stanze e versi d'ogni sorte, secondo l’uso di Venetia’. The latter are similar to those in the Bottegari Lutebook. In addition to the traditional paduanas and gagliardas, three new dance types are added: the moresca, balletto and saltarello ‘to be danced à la gagliarda in modern style’. Each of the ‘Baletti di diverse nationi’ has a title, Baletto Francese, Baletto Polaco, and so on. They are thematically related to the gagliardas.

Barbetta's final volume, printed in 1603, reflects the contemporary vogue for canzonettas, villanellas and napolitane for voice with lute accompaniment.

WORKS

Il primo libro dell' intavolatura de liuto (Venice, 1569); 8 pieces ed. O. Chilesotti: Lautenspieler des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1891/R)

Libro secondo, intavolatura de liuto (Venice, 1575), lost

Novae tabulae musicae testudinariae hexachordae et heptachordae (Strasbourg, 1582) [also issued as Il terctio libro de intavolatura de liuto (Strasbourg, 1582/R)]

Intavolatura di liuto … si contiene padoane, arie, baletti, pass'e mezi, saltarelli per ballar à la Italiana (Venice, 1585)

Intavolature di liuto delle canzonette, 1v, lute (Venice, 1603)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Zacco: Cenni biografici di illustri scrittori e compositori di musica padovani (Padua, 1850)

O. Chilesotti: Note circa alcuni liustisti italiani della prima metà del Cinquecento (Turin, 1902)

W. Boetticher: Studien zur solistischen Lautenpraxis des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1943)

E. Pohlmann: Laute, Theorbe, Chitarrone: die Instrumente, ihre Musik und Literatur von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart (Bremen, 1968, enlarged 5/1982)

CAROL MacCLINTOCK/DINKO FABRIS

Barbey [Barbay, Barbet], Guillaume

(fl Paris, c1716–42). French string instrument maker. He was particularly well known as a maker of viols and his instruments are highly valued as examples of French craftsmanship. The viol virtuoso Marin Marais is known to have owned an instrument by him. A lengthy description of his talent and skill survives in the correspondence of Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699–1782). Writing in 1767 or 1768, approximately 25 years after Barbey’s death, Forqueray praised him as ‘the greatest builder we had for the shape, thickness and correct dimensions’ of the viol, and also commended his choice of English wood. Forqueray stated that his father, Antoine, had owned two instruments by Barbey, one for solo playing and the other for accompaniment; he played them for 25 years until his death in 1745, when the younger Forqueray took them over and praised their continuing improvement with age.

At least four bass viols by Barbey survive, all dating from about 1720, two with seven strings and two with six. A six-string pardessus de viole of 1742 is in the Paris Conservatoire.

Another Barbey (first name unknown) was active as a string instrument maker in the second half of the 18th century and may have been Guillaume Barbey’s son.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VannesE

F. Lesure: ‘Marin Marais: sa carrière – sa famille’, RBM, vii (1953), 129–36

F. Lesure: ‘Une querelle sur le jeu de la viole en 1688: J. Rousseau contre Demachy’, RdM, xlvi (1960), 181–99

Y. Gérard: ‘Notes sur la fabrication de la viole de gambe et la manière d’en jouer, d’après une correspondance inédite de Jean-Baptiste Forqueray au Prince Frédéric-Guillaume de Prusse’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 165–72

H. Bol: La basse de viole du temps de Marin Marais et d’Antoine Forqueray (Bilthoven, 1973)

J. Rutledge: ‘A Letter of J.B.A. Forqueray’, JVdGSA, xiii (1976), 12–16

P. Tourin: Viol List: a Comprehensive Catalogue of Historical Viole da Gamba in Public and Private Collections (Duxbury, 1979)

MARY CYR

Barbier, Jane

(? b London, bap. 8 Dec 1695; d London, will proved 9 Dec 1757). English contralto. She first appeared in Almahide (November 1711) and the Spectator commented on her becoming shyness and her ‘agreeable Voice, and just Performance’. She had three seasons with the Italian opera, generally taking male roles, singing in Handel’s Rinaldo, Il pastor fido and Teseo. She was Telemachus in Galliard’s Calypso and Telemachus, which had an English libretto by John Hughes, whose poem The Hue and Cry described her dark good looks and headstrong nature. She appeared in masques by Pepusch, usually as the heroine, with Margherita de L’Epine as the hero, and from 1717 she sang with John Rich’s company in musical afterpieces, pantomimes and English operas. After appearing in Dublin in the winter of 1731–2, she was in two new operas by J.C. Smith and played King Henry in Arne’s Rosamond. Her career petered out after this; in 1737 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported the death of ‘Mrs Barbier, formerly a Noted Singer in the Opera’s’, but she sang twice in December 1740, when she was hissed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

FiskeETM

HawkinsH

W. Dean and J. Knapp: Handel’s Operas 1704–1726 (Oxford, 1987)

B. Boydell: A Dublin Musical Calender 1700–1760 (Dublin, 1988)

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Barbier, René (Auguste Ernest)

(b Namur, 12 July 1890; d Brussels, 24 Dec 1981). Belgian composer and conductor. He studied at the conservatories of Brussels (with Gilson) and Liège (with Sylvain Dupuis) and won the Belgian Prix de Rome with the cantata La légende de Béatrice in 1920. A professor of harmony at Liège (1920–49) and Brussels (1949–55), he also directed the Namur Conservatory (1923–55). In 1968 he was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy. He was prepared to tackle any genre, but had a preference for orchestral music, often of a descriptive character. His music is notable for the richness of its orchestration, recalling Dukas and Wagner.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Yvette (comédie lyrique, 2 tableaux, E. Grésini), op.1, 1910, Namur, Royal, 4 Jan 1912; La fête du vieux tilleul (conte lyrique, 2), op.3, 1912, Namur, July, 1913; Les pierres magiques (ballet), op.94, 1957; incid music

Orch: Pièce concertante, op.95, vn/sax, orch, 1959; Gui Conc., op.98, 1960; 3 mouvements symphoniques, op.104, str, 1962; Tableau symphonique, op.105, 1963; Hn Conc., op.106, 1964; Concertino, op.109, ww qt, str, 1964; Sinfonietta, op.111, chbr orch, 1966; Introduction et allegro symphonique, op.112, 1967; Conc., op.113, org, str, timp, 1967; Concertino, op.116, 2 gui, str, 1971; other concertante pieces, 6 sym. poems

Choral: La tour de Babel (orat, M. Henrion), op.39, 1933; Lamentation de la neuvième heure (orat), op.100, 1961; 2 masses, motets

Chbr: Sonata, op.12, hn/va, pf, 1916; Poème, op.14, vc, pf, 1916; Str Qt, op.65, 1939; Hn Qt, op.93, 1956; Sax Qt, op.99, 1961; Divertissement, 4 cl, op.101, 1962; 2 suites, opp.110 and 115, 2 gui, 1965, 1969; Trio, op.117, fl, vc, pf, 1971; Prélude and Barcarolle, op.118, gui, 1973

Pf and org music, songs

Principal publishers: Bosworth (Brussels), CeBeDeM, Metropolis, Schott (Brussels)

MSS in B-Bcdm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

S. Vouillemin: ‘Notice sur René Barbier’, Annuaire de l'Académie royale de Belgique, cxlix (1984), 231–41

HENRI VANHULST

Barbieri, Antonio

(b Reggio nell'Emilia; fl 1720–43). Italian tenor. From 1720 to 1731 (at least) he was in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua, where he made his earliest known appearance, in the première of Vivaldi's Candace (1720). The composer seems then to have engaged him for Venice, where he sang in 23 operas from 1720 to 1738. He became well known throughout Italy, appearing in Reggio (1720), Rome (from 1724), Parma and Florence (both 1725 and 1734–5), Naples (1727–9) and Turin (1739–40). In 1731 he sang at Pavia in Vivaldi's Farnace alongside his wife, Livia Bassi Barbieri, who also performed at Venice and Florence, 1734–5; it is not known whether he was related to the contralto Santi Barbieri, who appeared in eight operas at Florence from 1730 to 1743. Later he was maestro di maniera at the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, Venice, from 1736 until (apparently) 1767 and at the Derelitti, 1741–3.

COLIN TIMMS

Barbieri [de Barbieri], Carlo Emanuele

(b Genoa, 22 Oct 1822; d Pest, 28 Sept 1867). Italian conductor and composer. He received his musical training at the Naples Conservatory, studying singing with Crescentini and composition with Mercadante. Although he wrote operas and vaudevilles and some sacred music, he was known principally as a theatre conductor in central and northern Europe. From 1844 he conducted at the Carltheater in Vienna for two years, also serving as vocal coach at the Kärntnertortheater and composing music for several vaudevilles and pantomimes. He travelled extensively as an opera conductor: to Berlin, for the Königstädtisches Theater, in 1847–8, Dresden in 1849, Hamburg in 1850, Bremen in 1853, and Rio de Janeiro in 1854. From 1856 to 1862 he lived in Vienna, conducting in various Austrian cities, and from 1862 to 1867 he was conductor at the National Theatre in Buda. Barbieri’s most important opera, Perdita (1865), is a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Its musical structure is continuous (without separable numbers) in the Wagnerian manner but the music itself is old-fashioned: for example, the large orchestra usually accompanies or doubles the voices. The overture is a potpourri of tunes from the opera and the mostly diatonic melodies are frequently in lilting 6/8. The choruses are simple and squarely homophonic.

WORKS

for full list of 16 operas see GroveO (M. Tartak)

La casa dei matti (op, 2), Vienna, Kärntnertor, 16 Sept 1843

Finette, das Gärtnermädchen, oder Mit dem Feuer spielen ist gefährlich (vaudeville, 3, I.F. Castelli, after E. Scribe), Vienna, An der Wien, 15 Feb 1845

Cristoforo Colombo (op, 4, F. Romani), Berlin, Königstädtisches, 20 Dec 1848

Arabella (op, 3, A. de Lauzières), Turin, Angennes, 20 May 1857

Perdita, oder Ein Wintermärchen (op, 4, K. Gross, after W. Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale), Prague, Deutsches Theater, 11 Jan 1865

Die Federschlange (operetta, 1, F. Zell), Pest, Deutsches, 16 Feb 1867

10 other operas

Choral works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

GroveO (M. Tartak) [incl. complete list of operas]

MARVIN TARTAK

Barbieri, Fedora

(b Trieste, 4 June 1920). Italian mezzo-soprano. She studied at Trieste with Luigi Toffolo and at the school of the Teatro Comunale, Florence, with Giulia Tess. She made her début at Florence in 1940 as Fidalma in Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto. In 1941 she created Dariola in Alfano’s Don Juan de Mañara at the Florence Maggio Musicale, and also appeared in Monteverdi revivals. She sang regularly at La Scala from 1942, and at the Metropolitan from 1950 until the 1970s, making her début there as Eboli in Don Carlos on the opening night of Sir Rudolf Bing’s régime. She first visited England with the Scala company in 1950 when she was heard as Mistress Quickly and in Verdi’s Requiem; she returned to Covent Garden in 1957–8 and in 1964. She later appeared in a number of comprimario roles, singing until she was well into her sixties. Her voice, of fine quality and considerable power, was well suited to the dramatic mezzo-soprano parts of Verdi and also capable of majestic calm in the works of Monteverdi, Pergolesi and Gluck. Among many recorded roles, Amneris, Ulrica, Azucena and Mistress Quickly represent her at her appreciate best.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (E. Gara; R. Vegeto)

A. Natan: ‘Barbieri, Fedora’, Primadonna: Lob der Stimmen (Basle, 1962) [incl. LP discography]

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/ALAN BLYTHE

Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo

(b Madrid, 3 Aug 1823; d Madrid, 17 Feb 1894). Spanish composer, musicologist, conductor and critic. Barbieri’s father died in 1823 and the composer used his matronym throughout his life although, in the heated polemic wars of the period, that was sometimes held against him as an Italianate pretence.

JOHN EDWIN HENKEN

1. Life and works.

Barbieri received his early music training from his maternal grandfather and entered the fledgling Royal Conservatory in 1837, studying the clarinet with Ramón Broca, the piano with Albéniz y Basanta, singing with Saldoni and composition with Carnicer. In 1841 his family moved to Lucena, but Barbieri remained in Madrid, eking out a living as a clarinettist, pianist, teacher and copyist. His earliest compositions were songs and dances, and a paso doble for a militia band in which he played. He also sang baritone roles in Italian operas at the Conservatory and the Teatro del Circo. He wrote the libretto for a one-act zarzuela but did not complete the music in time for its scheduled première in February 1843. Later that year he was hired as chorus master and prompter by a touring company performing Italian opera and the following year he served as director of a similar company. In April 1845 Barbieri became maestro de música at the school of San Eloy in Salamanca and director of the Liceo Salmantino. A manuscript volume of his orchestrations from this period contains his earliest surviving compositions, an orchestral Introdución y gran vals and the Himno a la música for soloists, chorus and orchestra. He returned to Madrid in July 1846, and in the following year completed a three-act opera buffa, only excerpts of which were performed. He joined a group of progressive musicians agitating for a national opera under the name La España Musical and in the following year joined the Madrid Liceo, for which he sang and composed. He began writing music reviews for La ilustración in 1849 and worked as a prompter in Italian operas at the royal palace.

Although his first zarzuela to reach the stage, Gloria y peluca, had been completed the previous summer, it opened behind schedule on 9 March 1850, on a typically mixed bill at the Teatro de Variedades. It was a great critical and popular triumph, as was ¡Tramoya! in June. These successes secured Barbieri a place as one of the seven founding directors and shareholders of a new company formed in June 1851 to present zarzuelas at the Teatro del Circo. The new society’s struggling first season was rescued when Barbieri’s Jugar con fuego opened in October: the first zarzuela in three acts, it both saved the new theatre company and defined the future path of the genre. Generally the aristocracy had scorned native music theatre, preferring Italian opera, but so great was the popularity of Jugar con fuego that the queen mother, María Cristina, asked Barbieri to compose a group of rigadones on its themes for a palace ball. In 1856 the company launched a semi-official house paper, La zarzuela, which led its opening issues with an erudite yet skilfully polemical two-part article by Barbieri, defending the genre. Distressed by the excessive rent required for the dilapidated Circo, that year the company also purchased land and built the Teatro de la Zarzuela. It opened on 10 October with a mixed bill that included a large one-movement sinfonía composed by Barbieri on themes from the most popular zarzuelas of the time. In 1859 Barbieri initiated a concert series, featuring a large chorus and orchestra, held at the Teatro de la Zarzuela on the six Fridays of Lent. Nothing like this had been done in recent Spanish history and the concerts were artistic and financial successes. Nonetheless, the personal bickering and none-too-scrupulous insider dealing of the company had become too much for Barbieri and in the December of that year he sold his share to the composer Gaztambide and the baritone Francisco Salas, the only remaining partners of the original seven.

The following decade was dominated by the première of Pan y toros, one of the pinnacles of Spanish music theatre, in December 1864. That summer Barbieri became the artistic director of the Campos Eliseos, presenting Madrid’s first open-air concerts in the gardens and a season of Italian and French opera in the new theatre there. In 1866 he organized his own orchestral concerts, conducting the first performances of a complete Beethoven symphony in Spain and establishing the durable and influential Sociedad de Conciertos. His only full season as conductor at the Teatro Real was that of 1869–70. Barbieri proved able to ride the ever-changing tides of theatre fashions in Madrid contributing another monument of the zarzuela, El barberillo de Lavapiés in 1874. He also composed the most artistically compelling works for the Bufos Madrileños, instituted by Francisco Arderius in imitation of the Parisian model, and for the género chico repertory. He continued composing until his death, with his last great success being El Sr. Luis el tumbón in 1891. A life-long book collector with a solid classical education, Barbieri published numerous scholarly papers on music and literature, culminating in the groundbreaking Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (1890). His artistic and scholarly honours were legion, including being the first musician seated in the Real Academia Española. The materials he bequeathed the Biblioteca Nacional form the foundation of its music holdings: after his name in the index of the published catalogue is the single word ‘passim’.

2. Style.

The range of Barbieri’s scholarly curiosity is apparent in his music. He knew the music of Wagner, Verdi and Gounod intimately, to name only his leading foreign contemporaries in dramatic music, and it was he who established German symphonic compositions in Spain. But more than any other composer of his generation, he was critically and popularly identified with Spanish traditional and ethnic music, and where his harmonic usage differed significantly from that of his coevals in other countries was in the influence of that music. His chord progressions often suggest modality rather than tonal practice, with modulations commonly to 3rd-related keys and often accomplished by a single common tone rather than secondary dominants. He frequently raises or lowers the basic tonal level by a step and changes to minor mode, particularly in switching to the minor subdominant. Harmonic dissonance was usually functional for Barbieri, while melodic dissonance was used for colour. Special compositional techniques or unusual instrumentation were inevitably inspired by the dramatic situation, although occasionally he used imitative counterpoint simply for modulation. Barbieri was a master of combining seemingly disparate melodies to stunning dramatic effect. A justly famous example of this is in Act II of Pan y toros (1864), where the five principal protagonists sing a poignant prayer outside the palace of one of the villains, where a dance is taking place. The instrumental gavotte from the palace combines with the vocal supplication outside, and the union of these opposed elements strengthens both dramatically and musically.

His scoring employs important solo obbligatos and cadenzas for many instruments, as well as a predictably wide range of percussion instruments. It is most distinctive, however, in its use of onstage ensembles. Barbieri began his career as a chorister and chorus master, and he made greater and more effective use of the chorus than any other zarzuela composer, ranging from the convincingly antiquarian four-part Pavana of Juan de Urbina (1876) to the Seguidillas of El secreto de una dama (1862), in which the men’s voices imitate the sound of a plucked guitar while the women hum, all accompanying a tenor solo. Whenever resources and libretto permitted, Barbieri used rondallas (a traditional group of strolling musicians), consisting of bandurrias and guitars in various sizes, onstage throughout his career. He also pioneered the use of actual military bands onstage, some quite large.

For his contemporaries, the use of characteristically Spanish materials was a distinguishing feature of Barbieri’s work. His repertory is filled with examples of boleros, caleseras, fandangos, habaneras, jácaras, jaleos, jotas, muñeiras, paso dobles, seguidillas, sevillanas, tangos, tiranas, villancicos, vitos and zapateados. Occasionally, motivated by a reference in the libretto, Barbieri might quote traditional thematic material but more often it was the distilled essence of the form that he presented. So definitive was his handling of traditional materials that a piece such as ‘Te levaré a Puerto Rico’ could be lifted virtually intact from El hombre es débil (1871) and reappear, in instrumental form and uncredited, as Sarasate’s Habanera, op.21 no.2.

In most of his small-scale construction Barbieri relied on stringent, folkloric economy of materials: the repetition, ornamentation, development and expansion of the simplest basic motifs. This can be clearly heard in perhaps his most famous single number, Paloma’s now oft-recorded canción from El barberillo de Lavapié (1874), but it is also quite apparent in more ostensibly ‘art’ music, such as the romanza ‘Un tiempo fue’ from Jugar con fuego (1851). In broad outline, Barbieri’s ensemble numbers generally begin with an expository section, moving to a cantabile centre and ending with a dramatically important cabaletta. His largest ensemble structures are second-act finales, the point of dramatic crisis in his three-act zarzuelas. The greatest of these is undoubtedly also the most unusual, the second-act finale of Pan y toros. Although the structure is much larger than usual and the conflict is a serious political struggle rather than the usual lover’s tiff, in gross form and character it seems to conform to Barbieri’s conventions. But the exultant cabaletta, with its soaring vocal roulades, does not bring down the curtain; instead, a tense melodrama with the shocking onstage murder of the Santero follows, with the orchestra defining the psychology of the scene through a seething swirl of leitmotifs.

All of Barbieri’s theatre works, even the slightest género chico pieces, are tightly organized harmonically and motivically, and this organization invariably reflects and enhances the drama. In Chorizos y polacos (1876) for example, the feuding theatre claques and the levels of the play-within-a-play action are defined by symmetrical, contrasting blocks of sharp and flat keys. El barberillo de Lavapiés is another meticulously planned zarzuela, harmonically closed in G major but with a marked katabasis at the centre of the work. In it, however, motivic relationships, play a more prominent part in unifying the work musically, and in characterization. Barbieri also changes identifying motifs to reflect changes in character, such as the Santero in Pan y toros. A hypocritical character, the Santero’s identifying music is always at harmonic odds with its musical surroundings, and as the character breaks down, the motif also dissolves into barely coherent stammering.

Barbieri’s music has survived both mythologizing adulation and dismissive condescension. In an era when the boundaries between classical and vernacular, national and international art are not as fiercely guarded as they were, the flexible music theatre synthesis that is the zarzuela has found new respect. New editions of Barbieri’s writing and music appear regularly, as do fresh productions and recordings, revealing a rare genius for dramatic music of great formal sophistication and emotional immediacy.

WORKS

(selective list)

zarzuelas

all first performed and published in Madrid; complete lists in Henken and Casares; see also GroveO

Gloria y peluca (1, Villa del Valle), Variedades, 9 March 1850, vs (?1850)

¡Tramoya! (1, J. Olona), Supernumario de la Comedia, 27 June 1850; vs (1850)

Jugar con fuego (3, V. de la Vega), Circo, 6 Oct 1851; vs (?1851), fs ed. E. Cortizo, MH, lxiv (1992)

Los diamantes de la corona (3, F. Camprodón, after Scribe), Circo, 15 Sept 1854; vs (?1854)

Los dos ciegos (1, L. Olona), Circo, 25 Oct 1855; vs (?1856)

El vizconde (1, Camprodón), Circo, 1 Dec 1855; vs (?1856)

Un caballero particular (1, Frontaura), Zarzuela, 28 June 1858; vs (?1860)

El niño (1, Pina), Zarzuela, 15 June 1859; vs (?1859)

Entre mi mujer y el negro (2, Olona), Zarzuela, 14 Oct 1859; vs (?1870)

El secreto de una dama (3, L. Rivera), Zarzuela, 20 Dec 1862; vs (?1870)

Pan y toros (3, Picón), Zarzuela, 22 Dec 1864; vs (?1864)

Robinsón Crusoe (3, García Santisteban), Circo, 18 March 1870; vs (?1870)

El hombre es débil (1, Pina), Zarzuela, 14 Oct 1871; vs (?1871)

El tributo de las cien doncellas (3, García Santisteban), Zarzuela, 7 Nov 1872; vs (?1880)

El barberillo de Lavapiés (3, Larra), Zarzuela, 19 Dec 1874; vs (?1874); fs ed. E. Cortizo and R. Sobrino, MH, lvii (1994) excerpts, arr. band (1953)

Chorizos y polacos (3, Larra), Circo del Príncipe Alfonso, 24 May 1876; vs (?1876)

Juan de Urbina (3, Larra), Zarzuela, 6 Oct 1876; vs (?1876)

El loro y la lechuza (1, M. Fernández), Español, 23 Dec 1877; vs (?1877)

Los chichones (1, Pina), Comedia, 23 Dec 1879; vs (?1879)

De Getafe al paraíso (2, R. de la Vega), Variedades, 5 Jan 1883; vs (1883)

El Sr. Luis el tumbón (1, R. de la Vega), Apolo, 6 May 1891; vs (?1891)

Contribs. to collaborative zars with Chueca, Gaztambide, Hernando, Inzenga and Oudrid

other works

Vocal: Himno a la música, 5vv, orch, 1845; La jota del Regateo, chorus, band, 1861; La despidida, B, orch, 1874; ¡Visca la pau!, cant., male vv, orch, 1876; Salve Valenciana, solo vv, 4vv, orch, 1882; 3 choral motets; 10 songs

Inst: Pasodoble, band, ?1842; Introdución y gran vals, orch, 1845; Fantasía con variaciones, cornet, orch, 1848; Tarantela, orch, 1848; Ovt, orch, 1848; Sinfonía sobre motivos de zarzs, orch, 1856 (Madrid, 1873); Marcha triunful, band, 1866 (Madrid, ?1866); Marcha funebre, band, 1884; numerous dances for orch and pf

WRITINGS

‘Lope de Vega, músico, y algunos músicos españoles de su tiempo’, La gaceta musical barcelonesa, iii (1863), no.118, p.6; iv (1864), nos.119–29

Contestación al Maestro D. Rafael Hernando (Madrid, 1864)

La música y la mujer: conferencia leída [el] 25 de abril de 1869 (Madrid, 1869)

‘Estudio bibliografáfico musical’, Revista de España, xix (1871), 351–60

ed.: A. Eximeno: Don Lazarillo Vizcardi (Madrid, 1872)

La unión de las bellas artes: discurso leído en la Academia de bellas artes de San Fernando … para solemnizar la agregación de la sección de música (Madrid, 1874)

Últimos amores de Lope de Vega Carpio (Madrid, 1876)

‘Danzas y bailes en España en los siglos XVI y XVII’, La ilustración española y americana, xxi (1877), nos.44–5, suppl.

El Teatro real y el Teatro de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1877)

Las castañuelas (Madrid, 1878, 2/1879/R)

‘Más sobre las danzas y bailes en España en los siglos XVI y XVII’, La ilustración española y americana, xxii (1878), nos.13–14, suppl.

Preface to L. Carmena y Millan: Crónica de la ópera italiana en Madrid desde el año 1738 hasta nuestros días (Madrid, 1878)

El Canto de Ultreja (Madrid, 1883)

‘Don Félix Máximo López’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, v (1885), 395–408

La zarzuela: carta á D. Pascual Millán (Madrid, 1887)

La música religiosa: discurso leído en la sesión séptima de congreso católico nacional el día 2 de mayo de 1889 (Madrid, 1889)

ed.: Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, 1890/R1987 with commentary and inventory by E. Casares)

La música de la lengua castellana: discursos leídos ante la Real Academia española en la recepción pública del excmo. Sr. d. F.A.B. el día 13 de marzo de 1892 (Madrid, 1892)

La Zarzuela (Madrid, 1985) [anthology of facsimiles]

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986)

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Documentos sobre música española y epistolario, Legado Barbieri, ii (Madrid, 1988)

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Escritos (Madrid, n.d.)

2. Medieval and post-medieval Wales and Cornwall.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Peña y Goñi: La ópera española y la música dramática en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1881), 407ff, 529ff; (rev., abridged, 1967 as España desde la ópera a la zarzuela)

L. Carmena y Millán: ‘Barbierí: en el 5.° aniversario de su muerte’, Cosas del pasado: música, literatura y tauromaquia (Madrid, 1904), 65 [contains list of writings]

A.S. Salcedo: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: su vida y sus obras (Madrid, 1912/R)

E. Cotarelo y Mori: Historia de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1934)

A. Martínez Olmedilla: El maestro Barbieri y su tiempo (Madrid, 1941)

J. Subirá: ‘Barbieri ante la novísima sección musical de la Academia’, Academia (1971), 11–48

X. Aviñoa: El barberillo de Lavapiés: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, estudio y comentarios (Barcelona, 1985)

J. López-Calo: ‘Barbieri y la historiografía de la música española’, Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles (Madrid, 1986), pp.xxi–xxviii

R. Stevenson: ‘Francisco Asenjo Barbieri’, Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles (Madrid, 1986), pp.vii–xix

J.E. Henken: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri and the Nineteenth-Century Revival in Spanish National Music (diss., UCLA, 1987)

R. Sobrino: El sinfonismo español en el siglo XIX: la sociedad de conciertos de Madrid (diss., U. of Oviedo, 1992)

M. Encina Cortizo: La restauración de la zarzuela en el Madrid del XIX (diss., UCM, 1993)

E. Casares: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: El hombre y el creador (Madrid, c1994)

M. Encina Cortizo and R. Sobrino: ‘El barberillo de Lavapiés, cumbre de la zarzuela grande’, El barberillo de Lavapiés, Auvidis Valois V 4731 (1994) [disc notes]

C. Gómez Amat: ‘Letra y música de Madrid’, El barberillo de Lavapiés, Auvidis Valois V 4731 (1994) [disc notes]

Barbieri, Lucio [Luzio]

(b Bologna, 24 July 1586; d Bologna, mid-Nov 1659). Italian composer, organist and teacher. He was organist at S Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna, where he presumably received his musical training, when, on 6 October 1610, he was appointed organist at Bologna Cathedral, succeeding Manfredi Miglioli. Adriano Banchieri had declined the post. While working at the cathedral he also deputized from April 1612 for the ailing G.B. Mecchi at the second organ of S Petronio. On 16 December 1613, after Mecchi's death, he resigned from the cathedral and took up the S Petronio post permanently, drawing a monthly salary of 17 lire until November 1649, when he was appointed first organist and received 21 lire. On 26 February 1646, when he had been blind for several years, his salary increased to 30 lire and he obtained P.M. Alessandri as a deputy; on 6 September 1658 Alessandri was replaced by G.P. Colonna, who succeeded Barbieri after his death. In about 1654 Barbieri wrote a petition (now in I-Bsp) to the S Petronio authorities to restore a room there to be used for teaching.

Barbieri was known as a teacher of organ and composition; among his pupils was Pietro Paolo Banchieri, Adriano Banchieri's nephew, who in the dedication of his uncle's La cartellina musicale described Barbieri as ‘virtuosissimo mio maestro in canto figurato e suono dell'organo’. His principal extant work, Il primo libro de motetti (Venice, 1620), for five to eight voices and continuo, comprises 21 pieces that show his skill in counterpoint. Some have a narrow vocal range and use a strict polyphonic style, while others, for double choir, have colourful and lively antiphonal scoring. Essential words are often stressed by homophonic declamatory passages or by vigorous, well-measured polyphonic climaxes. Barbieri contributed a concerto for two voices and continuo to Banchieri's Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici (RISM 1613⁵). There is an eight-voice Dixit Dominus by him (in I-Bc), and a four-voice ‘Amen’ (also in Bc) ascribed to ‘Barbieri’ may also be by him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (O. Mischiati)

EitnerQ

GaspariC, i–ii

A. Banchieri: Lettere armoniche (Bologna, 1628/R), 144

G. Gaspari: Miscellanea musicale (MS, I-Bc UU.12), iv, 91ff, 127–8, 130, 186, 193, 196–7, 200, 211

G. Gaspari: ‘Dei musicisti bolognesi al XVII secolo e delle loro opere a stampa’, Atti e memorie delle RR. Deputazione di storia patria per le provincie dell'Emilia, new ser., iv/1 (1879), 223–43

G. Gasparia: Musica e musicisti a Bologna (Bologna, 1969), 411, 493–7 [reprint of various articles pubd between 1858 and 1878]

JUDITH NAGLEY/SUSAN WEISS

Barbieri-Nini, Marianna

(b Florence, 18 Feb 1818; d Florence, 27 Nov 1887). Italian soprano. After study with Luigi Barbieri, Pasta and Vaccai, in 1840 she made a disastrous first appearance at La Scala in Donizetti’s Belisario. Shortly afterwards she broke her contract with the impresario Merelli and joined Lanari’s troupe in Florence. Here she made a second, and this time triumphant, début in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. For the next 15 years she sang with great success throughout Italy and in Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. She was a highly dramatic singer with a powerful voice, particularly effective in the title roles of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Rossini’s Semiramide. She appeared in the first performances of three Verdi operas, singing Lucrezia in I due Foscari (1844, Rome), Lady Macbeth (1847, Florence), and Gulnara in Il corsaro (1848, Trieste). She retired in 1856.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Barbingant [Barbinguant, Berbigant]

(fl c1445–60). French composer. Until 1960, he was widely confused with the later composer Jacobus Barbireau (see Fox), partly because there is no known documentation for anybody named Barbingant; he may also have been confused in his own time with Bedyngham, whose gently sweet style his work reflects. He must have been active in central France, to judge from the sources of his music and from the musicians who drew on his work. He was twice cited by Tinctoris and was named among groups of distinguished composers by both Eloy d'Amerval and Guillaume Crétin (1497). If Au travail suis is by him, as seems likely, he may have been an important influence on Ockeghem, who drew on it in two masses and in his Ma maistresse; the song was also paraphrased by Compère. The contrary ascription for L'omme banny seems to resolve in favour of Barbingant (rather than Fedé), partly because it was cited as his by Tinctoris, Gaffurius and Giovanni del Lago; it appears in eight surviving sources and was much paraphrased. Strohm has suggested that Der Pfauenschwanz (which is found in six sources, all east European, two ascribed ‘Berbigant’) may have initiated the genre of German abstract pieces with similar titles; it was used for masses by Martini and Obrecht. Both Barbingant's masses show a sovereign control of large-scale form; that on Terriblement suis is perhaps the earliest known example of full parody, considerably expanding the techniques of Bedyngham's Mass Dueil angoisseux.

WORKS

Edition: Jacobi Barbireau: Opera omnia, ed. B. Meier, CMM, vii/1–2 (1954–7) [M i–ii]

masses

Missa sine nomine, 3vv, attrib. in Hamm on the basis of Tinctoris's comment and of style, ed. in L.E. Gottlieb, The Cyclic Masses of Trent Codex 89 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1958)

Missa ‘Terriblement’, 3vv (on anon. virelai Terriblement suis fortunée, conceivably also by Barbingant; see Thibault and Fallows), M i

secular

Au travail suis que peu de gens croiroient, rondeau, 3vv (also attrib. Ockeghem), M ii

Der Pfauenschwanz, 4vv, M ii

Esperant que mon bien vendra, rondeau, 3vv, M ii

L'omme banny de sa plaisance, rondeau, 3vv (also attrib. Fedé; text possibly by Meschinot), M ii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SpataroC

StrohmR

J. Daniskas: ‘Een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der parodie-techniek’, TVNM, xvii (1948–55), 21–43

C.W. Fox: ‘Barbireau and Barbingant: a Review’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 79–101

C. Hamm: ‘Another Barbingant Mass’, Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. G. Reese and R.J. Snow (Pittsburgh, 1969/R), 83–90

L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)

D. Fallows: ‘Johannes Ockeghem: the Changing Image, the Songs and a New Source’, EMc, xii (1984), 218–30

G. Montagna: ‘Caron, Hayne, Compère: a Transmission Reassessment’, EMH, vii (1987), 107–57

G. Thibault and D. Fallows, eds.: Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Paris, 1991)

DAVID FALLOWS

Barbion, Eustachius

(d Kortrijk, before 9 July 1556). South Netherlandish composer and choirmaster. He became maître de chapelle at the Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk in Kortrijk (Notre Dame, Courtrai) on 12 April 1543, succeeding Pieter Maessens. Barbion took charge of a musical establishment consisting of a singing school, an organist and a choir of six men and four (later six) choirboys, including for a time his own sons Peter and Wilhelm. Jacobus Vaet studied with Barbion from 1543 to 1546; he paid tribute to his teacher in his parody motet based on Barbion’s setting of Justus germanibit.

Barbion’s surviving compositions include 14 motets and three chansons, which appear in partbooks printed between 1550 and 1570 in Germany and the Low Countries, and in such manuscripts as Codex D of the famous Leiden Choirbooks (c1565). The provenance of these sources suggests that Barbion’s reputation was confined essentially to northern Europe. His music shows his versatility and skill as a contrapuntist, combining both strict and free imitation within rich, homogeneous textures for five and six voices in the grand northern manner; the multi-voice motets generally reflect the active and sometimes dense imitative polyphony that is often found in compositions of the post-Josquin generation. The two compositions for four voices, however, betray a French influence: Vous avez grace forces a lightly imitative fabric into the concise formal structure of the Parisian chanson. Gallis hostibus, one of a few pieces with Latin text to be included in early editions of Phalèse’s Septiesme livre des chansons, is a short, homorhythmic composition. A state motet, it may celebrate the heroic fall of Adrien de Croy, a prominent courtier of Emperor Charles V in the war against the forces of Henri II during the 1550s.

WORKS

13 motets, 4–6vv, 1553¹¹, 1553¹³, 1555⁴, 1556⁶, 1557³, 1558⁴, 1559¹, A-Wn 15613, 19189, D-MÜp 1525, 2968, CZ-HKm 29, 1441 Sl Mus.fol.I 2, NL-L (olim D); 1 ed. in SCMot, xv (1995), 2 ed. in SCMot, xviii (1997)

State motet, 4vv, 1562³

3 chansons, 4–5vv, 1550¹³, 1556¹⁷, GB-Lbl Add.34071; 1 ed. in SCC, i (1992), 2 ed. in SCC, xxix (1994)

Je prens en gré, a 6, 1589¹⁷ (kbd intabulation by Jakob Paix; vocal model lost)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.P.N. Land: ‘De koorboeken van de St. Pieterkerk te Leiden’, Bouwsteenen: JVNM, iii (1874–81), 37–48

G. Caullet: Musiciens de la collégiale Notre-Dame à Courtrai d’après leurs testaments (Kortrijk, 1911)

J. Schmidt-Görg: ‘Die Acta capitularia der Notre-Dame Kirche zu Kortrijk als musikgeschichtliche Quelle’, Vlaamsch Jb voor muziekgeschiedenis, i (1939), 21–80

M. Veldhuysen: ‘De muziek in de Koorboeken van St. Pieterskerk’, Jb voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde van Leiden en omstreken, lvii (1965), 95–9

A. Versprille: ‘De geschiedenis van de Leidse Motetboeken’, Jb voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde van Leiden en omstreken, lvii (1965), 100–05

A. Dunning: Die Staatsmotette 1480–1555 (Utrecht, 1970)

LAWRENCE F. BERNSTEIN

Barbireau [Barbirianus], Jacobus

(b 1455, d Antwerp, 7 Aug 1491). South Netherlandish composer. His parents, Johannes Barbireau and Johanna van Saintpol, were both apparently citizens of Antwerp. He must have attended university (probably in the early to mid-1470s), since he is mentioned with the title of Master of Arts in the earliest document to refer to him, dated 1482. He later sought to study with Rudolph Agricola, the famous humanist and musician who had served as organist at the court of Duke Ercole d'Este at Ferrara in 1475. Three letters to Barbireau from Agricola have survived, the third of which, written at Heidelberg, reveals that the addressee was active as a composer by 1484: ‘Please send me something of your composition to sing, something composed with care, that you would like to have performed to praise’. Yet Barbireau's musical reputation does not appear to have been widespread at the time, since Agricola continues: ‘We have singers here, too, and I often mention your name to them’.

In the end the young composer was unable to study with Agricola, possibly because by 1484 he had succeeded Antoine de Vigne as choirmaster at the church of Our Lady, Antwerp. He was to keep this position until his death seven years later. Records from the church mention Barbireau's name only in connection with routine duties and payments. There is evidence, however, that he was held in considerable esteem by Maximilian I, King of the Romans, who rewarded him in January 1488 for having housed, maintained and instructed the son of one of his equerries for two years, and had a latter of recommendation written in January 1490 for his visit to the Hungarian court at Buda. During this visit Barbireau was spoken of by his host Queen Beatrix as musicus prestantissimus and familiaris of Maximilian. The composer's death inspired the humanist Judocus Beyssel to write three epitaphs, in which he is described as modulator notabilissimus. Beyssel expressed a sense of tragedy over the death of so gifted a ‘youth’; it may well be, however, that Barbireau had never anticipated a long life, perhaps because of poor health, since the earliest surviving document to mention him records financial provisions for daily readings and prayers to be said over his grave – an arrangement established at an age, 27, that was unusual even by the standards of the late 15th century. The composer left a daughter, Jacomyne Barbireau, who survived him by at least 20 years.

Barbireau's oeuvre is small, yet its quality is outstanding. His sacred musical style recalls that of Heinrich Isaac in particular: the material is handled with impressive assurance, and Barbireau shows a degree of contrapuntal polish and melodic-harmonic resourcefulness that puts him firmly on a par with such composers as Isaac and Obrecht. These qualities are evident in the fine Kyrie Paschale (of which the top part freely paraphrases the plainchant melody, with occasional imitations in the lower parts), and particularly in the Missa ‘Virgo parens Christi’ (based on a responsory for the Blessed Virgin), which fully exploits the opportunities for textural variety and sonorous luxuriance offered by its five-part scoring. Divisi passages at textual key points suggest that the minimum number of singers required for this mass was 10, distributed from top to bottom as follows: 2–2–1–3–2. The writing here is varied, and rich in alternating textural combinations, motivic filigree around slow-moving parts, imitations, chordal passages and texturally differentiated restatements of two-voice units. Yet these devices are handled with discretion in an effortless flow of counterpoint, in which regular cadences on the final C establish a constant focus of tonal reference.

The four-part Missa ‘Faulx perverse’ shows the same characteristics, save that the lucid and serene quality of Missa ‘Virgo parens Christi’ has given way to a much more darkly resonant atmosphere, not only on account of the low scoring (the bass regularly goes down to D), but also because the lower parts are more closely spaced, frequently combining to form thirds and triads. Apart from these differences, however, the mass shows the same assurance, resourcefulness and polish of the other works. The model for the mass has not been identified, but patterns of melodic and motivic recurrence suggest that it may have been treated in loose parody fashion. The four-part motet Osculetur me, though scored not quite as low as Missa ‘Faulx perverse’, shares with that mass the persistent exploration of darker sonorities, and seems close to the world of Ockeghem in this respect and in its Phrygian modality. True to the tradition of Song of Songs settings, Barbireau adds light dramatic touches here and there to underline the emotional intensity of the text (general rests, chordal passages, motifs based on the rhythmic scansion of words and phrases), yet these do not diminish the overall lyrical quality of the setting.

Three songs by Barbireau are extant, and it seems significant that all provided cantus firmi for masses by Isaac and Obrecht. In Gracioulx et biaulx and Scoen lief he developed a penchant for extended sequence in all parts that is not pursued to similar lengths in his sacred music.

WORKS

Edition:J. Barbireau: Opera omnia, ed. B. Meier, CMM, vii/1–2 (1954–7) [complete edn]

Missa ‘Faulx perverse’, 4vv

Missa ‘Virgo parens Christi’ [Missa de venerabili sacramento], 5vv (c.f. responsory to the BVM)

Kyrie Paschale, 4vv (c.f. Gregorian Kyrie Paschale)

Osculetur me, 4vv

Een vroylic wesen, 3vv (text: incipit only)

Gracuuly et biaulx, 3vv (text: incipit only)

Scon lief, 3vv (text: incipit only)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. du Saar: Het leven en de composities van Jacobus Barbireau (Utrecht, 1946)

B. Murray: ‘Jacob Obrecht's Connection with the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp’, RBM, xi (1957), 125–33

C.W. Fox: ‘Barbireau and Barbingant: a Review’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 79–101

J. van den Nieuwenhuizen: ‘De koralen, de zangers en de zangmeesters van de Antwerpse O.-L.-Vrouwekerk tijdens de 15e eeuw’, Gouden jubileum gedenkboek van de viering van 50 jaar heropgericht Knapenkoor van de Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkatedraal te Antwerpen, ed. P. Schrooten (Antwerp, 1978), 29–72

P. Kooiman: ‘The Letters of Rodolphus Agricola to Jacobus Barbirianus’, Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius 1444–1485 [Groningen 1985], ed. F. Akkerman and A.J. Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1988), 136–46

K.K. Forney: ‘Music, Ritual and Patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, EMH, vii (1987), 1–57

E. Kooiman: ‘The Biography of Jacob Barbireau (1455–1491) Reviewed’, TVNM, xxxviii (1988), 36–58

R.C. Wegman: Born for the Muses: the Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994)

ROB C. WEGMAN

Barbirianus.

See Barbireau, Jacobus.

Barbirolli, Evelyn.

See Rothwell, Evelyn.

Barbirolli, Sir John [Giovanni Battista]

(b London, 2 Dec 1899; d London, 29 July 1970). English conductor and cellist. He was the son and grandson of Italian musicians settled in London, and his mother was French. As a youth he won scholarships to Trinity College of Music, then to the RAM. In 1916 he became the youngest member of the Queen's Hall Orchestra, and he gave his first solo recital, at the Aeolian Hall, in 1917. The next two years were spent in the army, where he had his first experience of conducting, with a voluntary orchestra. After 1919 he returned to orchestral playing in London, and twice appeared as soloist with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra. In 1924 he joined the Music Society (later International) and Kutcher string quartets, and formed a string orchestra, which he often conducted. He was invited to conduct the British National Opera Company on tour and later (1928) in London. From 1929 to 1933 Barbirolli was guest conductor for the Covent Garden international and English seasons. He conducted opera at Sadler's Wells in 1934, and returned to Covent Garden for the coronation season of 1937.

Meanwhile Barbirolli was also active in the concert hall. In 1927 he deputized for Beecham at an LSO concert. Guest appearances with the Scottish Orchestra in 1931 led to the permanent conductorship for three seasons. During this period he also took charge of the Northern PO in Leeds, conducted other provincial orchestras including the Hallé and was invited abroad. His growing reputation brought him the offer of ten weeks as guest conductor of the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York in the 1936–7 season. Initial success was followed by his appointment for three years as permanent conductor, in succession to Toscanini. The contract was renewed for two years to 1941–2, the orchestra's centenary season, when the conducting was shared with eminent colleagues including Toscanini. In 1942 he made a courageous wartime crossing to Britain for concerts with the LSO, BBC SO and LPO, before resuming work in the USA, and in 1943 he returned to rebuild the Hallé Orchestra. He stayed with the Hallé until 1958 when he became conductor-in-chief with a less onerous schedule. In 1968 he was made conductor laureate for life. From 1961 to 1967 he was also principal conductor of the Houston (Texas) SO and in 1961 he began an association with the Berlin PO, whose guest conductor he was until his death. These last years, crammed with work in spite of deteriorating health, included tours with the Philharmonia (Latin America, 1963), BBC SO (USSR, 1967) and Hallé (Latin America and West Indies, 1968), and numerous guest appearances at home and abroad.

Barbirolli's musical tastes were conventional with a leaning towards the late Romantics. He had little sympathy with contemporary music beyond certain works of Britten, of whose Violin Concerto and Sinfonia da requiem he gave the first performances, in New York. He had a passion for Elgar's music, and was a notable interpreter of Delius and of Vaughan Williams, who dedicated his Eighth Symphony to Barbirolli; he became increasingly attached to Mahler and Bruckner. As a technician he understood the orchestra from the inside. As an interpreter he could persuade audiences to share his enthusiasms – sometimes with a loving exhibition of minutely prepared detail that singled out trees at the expense of the wood. The measure of success with which he met the challenge of New York may be disputed, but to survive there for five consecutive seasons, with Toscanini remaining in the city with the NBC SO, and to be invited several times to return as guest conductor, does not look like failure. His subsequent acceptance by an orchestra of equal standing, the Berlin PO, must have healed any lingering wounds. The musical love of Barbirolli's life, however, was the Hallé Orchestra, which he restored to high excellence; his single-minded devotion to it became a legend.

Up to 1937 Barbirolli had seemed set to become the leading British opera conductor after Beecham, but Beecham became enraged when his junior by 20 years got the job in New York, and did much to undermine Barbirolli's subsequent career. Barbirolli's sole revenge was to keep Beecham away from the postwar Hallé; but he only appeared at Covent Garden, as a guest conductor, for three seasons between 1951 and 1954. In his last years, when he recorded Madama Butterfly and Otello, and conducted Aida in 1969 at the Rome Opera, he appeared to be picking up the threads of his frustrated operatic career. His recording career, on the other hand, extended from the pre-electric days of 1911 to the month of his death and included famous readings of Elgar's symphonies, The Dream of Gerontius and the Cello Concerto (with Jacqueline du Pré). His orchestral arrangements include a Suite for Strings from Purcell, an Elizabethan Suite from works of virginal composers, and oboe concertos from Corelli and Pergolesi. Barbirolli was made a Companion of Honour in 1969, was knighted in 1949, and received the Gold Medal of the RPS in 1950 and the Freedom of the City of Manchester in 1958. He was twice married, in 1932 to Marjorie Parry, the singer, and in 1939 to Evelyn Rothwell, the oboist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Shore: The Orchestra Speaks (London, 1938)

M. Kennedy: The Hallé Tradition (Manchester, 1960)

D. Bicknell and K. Anderson: ‘Sir John Barbirolli, C.H.’, Gramophone, xlviii (1970–71), 401–02

M. Kennedy: Barbirolli, Conductor Laureate (London, 1971) [with discography by M. Walker]

C. Reid: John Barbirolli (London, 1971)

M. Kennedy: The Hallé, 1858–1983: a History of the Orchestra (Manchester, 1982)

RONALD CRICHTON/JOSÉ BOWEN

Barbitonsoris

(fl late 14th century). Italian ?composer. One three-voice Sanctus, with a partly isorhythmic tenor, is transmitted with this ascription in the Paduan fragment GB-Ob Can.pat.lat.229 (‘PadA’, f.37v; ed. in PMFC, xii, 1976, p.88). The word may refer to the Greek instrument shaped like a lyre, called a ‘barbitos’. That the work comes from northern Italy seems to be confirmed by the additional label ‘ambrosius’ written next to the second voice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Besseler: ‘Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters’, AMw, viii (1926), 137–258, esp.235

B.J. Layton: Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass 1300–1450 (diss., Harvard U., 1960), 129ff

F. Facchin: ‘Una nuova fonte musicale trecentesca nell' Archivio di Stato di Padova’, Contributi per la storia della musica sacra a Padova, ed. G. Cattin and A. Lovato (Padua, 1993), 115–39

GIANLUCA D'AGOSTINO

Barbitos

(late Gk. barbiton).

Greek instrument of the Lyre family (a Chordophone). In Greek literature and vase painting it is generally associated with the Eastern Greek poets (including Terpander, Sappho, Alcaeus and Anacreon) of the Archaic period (7th and 6th centuries bce), and with drinking parties. The name of the instrument, probably of non-Greek derivation, occurs only once in the fragments of these early poets (in Alcaeus, ed. E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta, 1971, frag.70.4, in the dialect form barmos), but it is frequently mentioned by later Greek writers, who attribute the instrument's ‘invention’ variously to Terpander or Anacreon. The arrival of Anacreon in Athens as a court poet in the late 6th century coincides with the sudden appearance of the barbitos in Athenian vase paintings, many of which show him as a player. As the chief string instrument used to accompany Dionysiac revelry, it is only occasionally depicted in the hands of Muses or of women entertaining themselves at home.

The barbitos is usually portrayed as having a tortoise-shell soundbox, long curved arms (probably made of wood) joined together by a crossbar at the top, and five to seven strings supported by a bridge and sounded with a plectrum attached to the instrument by a cord. The strings are attached at the crossbar by means of tuning devices called kollopes (pegs). The arms, which diverge as they leave the soundbox, curve towards each other near the top of the instrument, forming a distinctive shape. Rare profile views indicate that the arms curved forwards as well as outwards. The longer string length as compared to the schoolboy's tortoise-shell lyre suggests a relatively lower pitch.

The barbitos is generally shown held against the body of the player, who is often standing; a sling around the left wrist helps to support the instrument, which is tipped out at an angle of roughly 45 degrees from the vertical (see illustration). The left-hand fingers are probably used both to pluck and to dampen the strings. The right hand strums the strings with the plectrum.

After its heyday in Attic vase painting of the late 6th and early 5th centuries, the barbitos was less and less frequently depicted, and was almost never shown after the 5th century. Aristotle condemned it as an instrument inappropriate for education (Politics, 1341 a–b), but it continued to be mentioned in Greek literature, especially in drinking songs. In later times the barbitos as a literary symbol remained firmly associated with Lesbos, the homeland of Terpander, Sappho and Alcaeus (see Horace, Odes, 1.i.34).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Abert: ‘Saiteninstrumente’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 2nd ser., i (Stuttgart, 1920), 1760–67

M. Wegner: Griechenland, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/4 (Leipzig, 1963/R)

J. Snyder: ‘The Barbitos in the Classical Period’, Classical Journal, lxvii (1972), 331–40

M. Maas and J.M.Snyder: Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT, 1987)

JANE McINTOSH SNYDER

Barbizet, Pierre

(b Arica, Chile, 20 Sept 1922; d Marseilles, 18 Jan 1990). French pianist. After early training in Santiago he studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won a premier prix in 1944 in the class of Armand Ferté. He won first prize in the 1948 international competition at Scheveningen and fifth prize in the 1949 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition. He was director of the Marseilles Conservatoire from 1963 to 1990 and also taught for a time at the Paris Conservatoire; among his students were Hélène Grimaud and Bernard d'Ascoli. He performed frequently as a soloist and chamber musician, especially with the violinist Christian Ferras and the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal. His recordings with Ferras include notable accounts of the complete sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms, as well as major French works. As a soloist, Barbizet made distinguished recordings of the complete piano works of Chabrier and several sonatas of Beethoven. (C. Timbrell: French Pianism, White Plains, NY, and London, 1992, 2/1999)

CHARLES TIMBRELL

Barblan, Guglielmo

(b Siena, 27 May 1906; d Milan, 24 March 1978). Italian musicologist of Swiss origin. He studied law, then the cello with Forino and Becker at Rome Conservatory (diploma 1929) and composition at Bolzano Conservatory (diploma 1932); he also attended lectures on musicology by Liuzzi in Rome and by Sandberger in Munich. While still a student he was music critic of various Rome newspapers (1926–32) and showed particular interest in contemporary musical life (Casella, Pizzetti, jazz, futurism). Subsequently he was music critic of La provincia di Bolzano (1932–50), concurrently (until 1949) holding an appointment as professor of cello and music history at the Bolzano Conservatory, and was active as a concert cellist. At the Milan Conservatory he was head librarian (1949) and professor of music history (1965); at the university (where he took the libera docenza in 1959) he became professor of music history in 1961. He maintained his involvement in journalism with frequent contributions to Sicilia del popolo, Rassegna dorica and Alto adige, and as foreign correspondent for the Basler Nachrichten (1958–62); he was editor of Verdiana (1950–51) and of the Milan Conservatory Annuario (from 1962), to which he contributed several articles on the library.

Barblan's distinguished career was matched by his catholic interests and thorough research. He was first attracted to the 17th and 18th centuries; his discussion of F.A. Bonporti's life and works, initially published in Rassegna musicale, was later enlarged into a book. He next extended his studies to include 19th-century opera and then the Renaissance, his practical musicianship leading him to make editions of the music. His research in the Milan archives and analyses of Milanese music resulted in what many consider his most important works; they were published as independent chapters in Storia di Milano, covering several centuries and various musical genres. The discussion of 16th-century musical life at the Sforza court and elsewhere in Milan is based on archival documentation; a complete bibliography, naming instrumentalists and singers and providing analyses of the music and indications of performing practice, is included (vol.ix). A broad but detailed account of chamber music is given for the 17th century, which saw the rise of the violin and its repertory (vol.xvi). Barblan also discussed the Milanese symphonists of the next century, such as Sammartini, and their music (vol.xvi). His survey of opera and other forms of musical theatre discusses works, composers and styles from the 17th century (vol.xii) and continues throughout history to conclude with an assessment of 20th-century musical life in Milan (vol.xvi); these chapters not only describe the city's musical life but are also basic to a study of Italian music in general.

Barblan also contributed numerous articles to music dictionaries (MGG1 and Grove5) and wrote extensively for Italian radio, notably the series ‘La cantata dal Barocco all'Arcadia’ and ‘Bach e il Clavicembalo ben temperato’. In recognition of his singular role in Italian musicology he was elected president of the Società Italiana di Musicologia (1964–8), a member of the Accademia di S Cecilia (1964) and vice-president of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana (1965).

WRITINGS

‘Francesco Antonio Bonporti “gentilhuomo di Trento, dilettante di musica”’, RaM, xii (1939), 313–46, 380–403, 433–57

Un musicista trentino: Bonporti (1672–1749): la vita e le opere (Florence, 1940)

‘Francesco Antonio Bonporti’, La scuola veneziana (secoli XVI–XVIII): note e documenti, Chigiana, iii (1941), 81–5

‘L'opera di Giuseppe Verdi e il dramma romantico’, RMI, xlv (1941), 93–107

Musiche e strumenti musicali dell'Africa orientale italiana (Naples, 1941)

‘Quo vadis musice? Appunti sul Festival musicale veneziano’, RMI, xlviii (1946), 489–98

L'opera di Donizetti nell'età romantica (Bergamo, 1948)

‘Di alcuni aspetti del “comico” in Orazio Vecchi’, Orazio Vecchi precursore del melodramma (Modena, 1950), 105–14

‘Strawinski 1951’, in A. Casella: Strawinski (Brescia, 2/1951, 3/1961), 193–231

‘Nel V centenario di un musico umanista: Franchino Gaffurio’, RaM, xxii (1952), 1–10

‘Angelo Mariani e la sua “Scala esatonale”’, CHM, i (1953), 171–4

‘Presagio di gloria e ombre di mestizia ne “La falce” di Alfredo Catalani’, Musicisti toscani, i, Chigiana, xi (1954), 65–71

‘Agostino Agazzari’, Musicisti toscani, ii, Chigiana, xii (1955), 43–9

‘Contributo a una biografia critica di Agostino Agazzari’, CHM, ii (1956–7), 33–63

ed. with A. Della Corte: Mozart in Italia: i viaggi e le lettere (Milan, 1956)

Un prezioso spartito del Falstaff (Milan, 1957)

‘Aspetti e figure del Cinquecento musicale veneziano’, La civiltà veneziana del Rinascimento (Florence, 1958), 59–80

‘Sulle tracce di un’espressione musicale “Padana”’, ‘Sammartini e la scuolo sinfonica milanese’, ‘Franchino Gaffurio musico-umanista’, Musicisti lombardi ed emiliani, Chigiana, xv (1958), 9–17, 21–40, 41–9

‘Il teatro musicale in Milano nei secc. XVII e XVIII’, Storia di Milano, xii (1958), 947–96 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

‘Il termine “Barocco” e la musica’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), 93–109

‘Ansia preromantica in Gaetano Pugnani’, ‘Il “Giovedi grasso” e gli svaghi “farsaioli” di Donizetti’, Musicisti piemontesi e liguri, Chigiana, xvi (1959), 17–26, 109–14

‘Boccheriniana’, RaM, xxix (1959), 123–8, 322–31; xxx (1960), 33–44

‘Malipiero e Monteverdi’, Approdo musicale, iii/9 (1960), 122–33

Guida al ‘Clavicembalo ben temperato’ di J.S. Bach (Milan, 1961)

‘La vita musicale in Milano nella prima metà del Cinquecento’, Storia di Milano, ix (Milan, 1961), 853–95

‘Vita musicale alla corte sforzesca’, Storia di Milano, ix (Milan, 1961), 787–852

‘Contributo alla biografia di G.B. Sammartini alla luce dei documenti’, SMw, xxv (1962), 15–27

‘I “Rognoni” musicisti milanesi tra il 1500 e il 1600’, Anthony van Hoboken: Festschrift, ed. J. Schmidt-Görg (Mainz, 1962), 19–28

‘La musica strumentale e cameristica a Milano dalla seconda metà del '500 alla fine del '700: l'Ottocento e gli inizi del secolo XX’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 589–711

‘Un po' di luce sulla prima rappresentazione della “Forza del destino” a Pietroburgo’, Verdi: Bollettino dell'Istituto di studi verdiani, ii (1964), 831–79

‘Spunti rivelatori nella genesi del “Falstaff”’, Situazione e prospettive degli studi verdiani nel mondo: Venice 1966, 16–21

with C. Gallico and G. Pannain: Claudio Monteverdi nel quarto centenario della nascita (Turin, 1967)

‘Lettura di un'opera dimenticata “Pia de' Tolomei” di Donizetti (1836)’, Chigiana, new ser., iv (1967), 221–43

‘Claudio Monteverdi: musicista padano fra Rinascimento e Barocco’, L'opera, iii/6 (1967), 4–10

‘Un ignoto “Lamento d'Arianna mantovano”’, RIM, ii (1967), 217–28

‘Sui rapporti italo-tedeschi nella musica strumentale del Settecento’, AnMc, iv (1967), 1–12

‘Donizetti a Napoli’, Rassegna musicale Curci, xxi (1968), 81–7; Eng. trans. in Journal of the Donizetti Society, i (1974), 105–20

‘Rossini e il suo tempo’, Chigiana, new ser., v (1968), 143–80

I quaderni di conversazione di Beethoven (Turin, 1968) [trans. of G. Schünemann: Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte (Berlin, 1941–3)]

‘Il personaggio dell'Infante nel “Don Carlos” verdiano’, Studi verdiani II: Verona, Parma and Busseto 1969, 412–29

‘Michel’ Angelo Grancini a 300 anni dalla morte’, Chigiana, new ser., vi–vii (1971), 3–34

‘Giuseppe Maria Cambini e i suoi scritti sulla musica’, Quadrivium, xii/2 (1971), 295–310

‘Beethoven in Lombardia nell'Ottocento’, NRMI, vi (1972), 3–63

ed.: Conservatorio di musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’, Milano: catalogo della biblioteca, fondi speciali, i: Musiche della cappella di Santa Barbara in Mantova (Florence, 1972)

‘Il sentimento dell'onore nella drammaturgia verdiana (Prolusione)’, Studi verdiani III: Milan 1972, 2–13

‘Un Cimador che divenne Cimarosa’, Quadrivium, xiv/2 (1973), 197–206

with A. Zecca-Laterza: ‘The Tarasconi Codex in the Library of the Milan Conservatory’, MQ, lx (1974), 195–221

‘Maria di Rohan’, Journal of the Donizetti Society, ii (1975), 14–33

‘Gaetano Donizetti mancato direttore dei conservatori di Napoli e di Milano’, Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 403–11

ed., with A. Basso: Storia dell'opera, i–iii (Turin, 1977) [incl. ‘Il grande Ottocento’, i/2, 169–212]

with B. Zanolini: Gaetano Donizetti: vita e opere di un musicista romantico (Florence, 1983)

EDITIONS

F.A. Bonporti: Concerto in Si bemolle op.XI n.4, per violino, archi e cembalo di ripieno, Antica musica strumentale italiana, i/7 (Milan, 1959); Concerto in Si bemolle op.XI n.3, per violino, archi e cembalo di ripieno, ibid., i/6 (Milan, 1961)

G.G. Cambini: Concerto in Sol op.XV n.3, per pianoforte e archi, Antica musica strumentale italiana, i/8 (1959); Concerto in Si bemolle op.XV n.I, per pianoforte e archi, con oboi e corni ad libitum, ibid., iii (Milan, 1964)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Studi di musicologia in onore di Guglielmo Barblan in occasione del LX compleanno’, CHM, iv (1966), 1–316 [incl. F. Mompellio: ‘Guglielmo Barblan e la musicologia “umana”’, 1–6; A. Zecca Laterza: ‘Guglielmo Barblan: note bibliografiche’, 7–16]

CAROLYN GIANTURCO/TERESA M. GIALDRONI

Barblan, Otto

(b S-chanf, 22 March 1860; d Geneva, 19 Dec 1943). Swiss organist and composer. From 1878 to 1885 he studied the organ, the piano and composition at Stuttgart Conservatory. In 1885 he went to Chur as a music teacher, and in 1887 became organist of St Peter’s Cathedral in Geneva, where he stayed until 1942; from 1892 he also taught the organ and composition. As conductor of the Société de Chant Sacré (1892–1938) he introduced to Geneva important works by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Franck and many other composers. Together with Ernest Ansermet, Barblan had a decisive influence on the musical life of Geneva. He composed in a late Romantic neo-Baroque style, with particular success in his works for organ and choir for patriotic occasions, notably the Chaconne über B–A–C–H (1901), Fantasie (1907) and Toccata (1911) for organ, and Calvenfeier (1899) for choir. In 1925 he was made an honorary member of the Swiss Musicians Association, and in 1927 was awarded honorary citizenship of Geneva and an honorary doctorate by Geneva University. He published two articles of reminiscences in Bündner Monatsblatt (1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Chaix: ‘L’oeuvre d’orgue d’Otto Barblan’, Vie musicale [Lausanne], iv (1910–11), 197

E. Chaponnière: Otto Barblan: directeur de la Société de chant sacré de Genève (Geneva, 1917)

E. Perini: ‘Das kompositorische Schaffen Otto Barblans’, Bündner Monatsblatt (1949), 113–34 [with list of compositions]

E. Perini: Otto Barblan 1860–1943: ed. commemorativa (Chur, 1960)

C. Tappolet: La vie musicale à Genève au 20ème siècle, i: 1918–1968 (Geneva, 1979)

JÜRG STENZL

Barbosa-Lima, Carlos

(b São Paulo, 17 Dec 1944). Brazilian guitarist and arranger. He began studying the guitar at the age of seven. At nine he began having lessons with Isaias Savio, one of the foremost teachers in South America, who predicted Barbosa-Lima’s success. His concert début was in São Paulo in 1957, immediately followed by his début in Rio de Janeiro. At this time, aged 13, he embarked on his first series of recordings. From 1958 he performed regularly on Brazilian television and continued to give concerts throughout Brazil. In 1960 he gave a series of concerts in Montevideo – a major centre for the guitar in South America. His growing international success led many noted composers, among them Guido Santórsola, Francisco Mignone and Alberto Ginastera, to dedicate works to him. In 1967 he made his first US concert tour. On the strength of the tour’s success he won a full scholarship from the Spanish and Brazilian governments to participate in Segovia’s masterclasses in Santiago de Compostela in 1968, where he received high praise from Segovia. His London début followed in 1971. Barbosa-Lima’s numerous guitar arrangements of works by composers as diverse as Scarlatti, Debussy, Gershwin and Scott Joplin are widely known for their fidelity to the original work. A number of his arrangements feature among his recordings. He has also written articles on guitarists and guitar music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.M. Appleby: ‘Carlos Barbosa-Lima’, Guitar News, no.42 (1958), 45 only; no.48 (1959), 78 only; no.99 (1968), 104 only

P. Danner: ‘How I Came to the Guitar’, Soundboard, xxi/1 (1994), 5–10

RONALD C. PURCELL

Barbosa Machado, Diogo

(b Lisbon, 31 March 1682; d Lisbon, 9 Aug 1772). Portuguese bibliographer. He matriculated in 1708 as a student of canon law at Coimbra University and on 2 July 1724 he was ordained a priest. On 4 November 1728 he became abad of the church of S Adrião at Cever in the diocese of Lamego. His life work was a four-volume bibliography of Portuguese authors, Bibliotheca lusitana, historica, critica, e cronologica (Lisbon, 1741–59/R), which is especially valuable to the music historian because he included 127 composers and theorists. Insofar as he could find them, he listed not only their published works but also their manuscripts, noting in which library they were located. Since he had access to the royal music library before its destruction in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, he listed numerous works now lost. In vol.iv, pp.593–6, he indexed musicians under ‘Musica’, thus making it simple for later writers to plagiarize his musical entries. Foreign reference works still copy Vasconcellos's Os musicos portuguezes (Oporto, 1870) without recognizing Barbosa Machado's work as the source of everything that he wrote on biographies. Barbosa Machado omitted Ayres Fernandes, Luis Moram, Pedro de Cristo, Pedro Esperança and several others connected with the priory of Santa Cruz at Coimbra. His most substantial error was listing Francisco Guerrero as a native of Beja, a mistake into which he was trapped by a pseudonymously issued forgery of 1734.

Barbosa Machado donated his superb library to King José I. João VI took the bulk of it to Brazil, where it formed the nucleus of the national library; it includes 13 important volumes of villancicos sung at Lisbon between 1640 and 1722. In 1825 Dibdin rightly classed Barbosa Machado's four volumes as ‘a work beyond all competition and beyond all praise … the great Oracle’, a judgment still valid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T.F. Dibdin: The Library Companion, i (London, 2/1824), 323f

B.F. Ramiz Galvão: ‘Diogo Barbosa Machado’, Annaes da Bibliotheca nacional do Rio de Janeiro, i (1876–7), 1–43, 248

J. Emerenciano: Três instrumentos de trabalho (fontes básicas para estudos portuguêses) (Recife, 1965), 19–67

R.E. Horch: Vilancicos da Coleção Barbosa Machado (Rio de Janeiro, 1969)

R.V. Nery, ed.: A música no ciclo da ‘Bibliotheca lusitana’ (Lisbon, 1984)

ROBERT STEVENSON

Barboteu, Georges

(b Algiers, 1 April 1924). French horn player. He studied with his father in Algeria and with Jean Devémy at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1948 he joined the Orchestre National, and in 1951 won first prize in the international competition in Geneva. He was principal horn for the Concerts Lamoureux and in 1969 became principal of the Orchestre de Paris. Barboteu was the leading French player of his generation, setting a new standard of technical accomplishment and steering the country’s school of horn playing away from the continuous vibrato that had dogged it for decades. In this he was influenced by his teacher Devémy, who saw a minimal vibrato as a permissable result of the temperament and sensitivity of the player, but did not deliberately teach it, in contrast to the school headed by Lucien Thévet. Barboteu himself was appointed to the Conservatoire as successor to Devémy in 1969. His recordings include Schumann’s Conzertstück, which established his international reputation, and the Mozart concertos. He has composed many studies for his instrument and written chamber works, some for the wind quintet Ars Nova which he founded in 1964.

OLIVER BROCKWAY

Barbour, J(ames) Murray

(b Chambersburg, PA, 31 March 1897; d Homestead, PA, 4 Jan 1970). American acoustician, musicologist and composer. He taught himself the piano and the organ and studied at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania (1914–18); after graduating he worked as organist and mathematics teacher at the Haverford School in Pennsylvania (1919–21, 1922–6) while continuing his studies at Dickinson College (MA 1920) and Temple University (MusB 1924). He subsequently taught music theory as assistant professor at Wells College, New York (1926–9), leaving with a fellowship to the universities of Cologne and Berlin. After studies at Cornell University under Kinkeldey (1931–2) he gained the doctorate in 1932 with a dissertation on the history of equal temperament from Ramis de Pareia to Rameau. He taught at Ithaca College, New York (1932–9), while working for the MusD of the University of Toronto (1936). The rest of his career (1939–64) was spent teaching at Michigan State College (later University), as professor from 1954. He was president of the American Musicological Society in 1957–8, and Temple University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1965.

His book Tuning and Temperament: a Historical Survey is widely accepted as the most authoritative study of the history and theory of temperaments, to which he applied his talents as mathematician, historian and musician. His scholarly articles appeared in mathematical as well as musical journals and were marked by precision, clarity and conciseness. With Fritz A. Kuttner he issued three gramophone records concerning the history of tuning systems. His compositions include a Requiem, the symphonic poem Childe Rowland, solo and choral songs, works for the organ and piano and some chamber music.

WRITINGS

Equal Temperament: its History from Ramis (1482) to Rameau (1737) (diss., Cornell U., 1932)

‘Nierop’s Hackebort’, MQ, xx (1934), 312–19

‘Just Intonation Confuted’, ML, xix (1938), 48–60

‘Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: Prototype of Contemporary Music Journalism’, Notes, v (1947–8), 325–37

‘Musical Scales and their Classification’, JASA, xxi (1949), 586–9

Tuning and Temperament: a Historical Survey (East Lansing, MI, 1951/R, 2/1953)

‘Franz Krommer and his Writing for Brass’, Brass Quarterly, i (1957–8), 1–9

‘Unusual Brass Notation in the Eighteenth Century’, Brass Quarterly, ii (1958–9), 139–46

‘The Principles of Greek Notation’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 1–17

The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing, MI, 1960)

‘Pokorny Vindicated’, MQ, xlix (1963), 38–58

‘Missverständnisse über die Stimmung des Javanischen Gamelans’, Mf, xvi (1963), 315–23

Trumpets, Horns and Music (East Lansing, MI, 1964)

ed.: R. Smith: Harmonica, or the Philosophy of Musical Sounds (1749) (New York, 1966)

‘The “Unpartheyisches Gesang-Buch”’, Cantors at the Crossroads: Essays on Church Music in Honor of Walter E. Buszin, ed. J. Riedel (St Louis, 1967), 87–94

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.A. Kuttner: ‘J. Murray Barbour (1897–1970)’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 542–3

JON NEWSOM

Barbu, Filaret

(b Lugoj, 16 April 1903; d Timişoara, 31 May 1984). Romanian composer. He started his musical education in his native town with loan Vidu, a composer and conductor of works of a folkloristic character. He went on to attend the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied composition with Edmund Eysler (1929–39). As a conductor, he worked with choirs singing music from the Banat region, a part of south-west Romania particularly rich in folk songs and dances. He founded (in 1927) and directed the Revista Corurilor si Fanfarelor Române (‘The Romanian Choir and Fanfare Magazine’). He served in the Ministry of Arts in Bucharest during the turbulent period from 1947 to 1949. He spent his last years in the town of Timişoara.

Barbu composed choral, orchestral and chamber music, but it was with his operettas that he enjoyed his greatest success. He adapted the conventions of the genre to include Romanian folk music, using plots which are usually of a strongly nationalist character.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Armonii bănăţene [Harmonies from Banat] (operetta, 3, I. Titel), Lugoj, 14 Dec 1933; Ana Lugojana [Anna from Lugoj] (operetta, 3, V. Timuş, P. Andreescu and A. Şahinian), Bucharest, Teatrul de Operetă, 7 Nov 1951; Plutaşul de pe Bistriţa [The Boatman on the Bistrita] (operetta, 3, T. Ianuc and I. Dacian), Bucharest, Teatrul de Operetă, 21 Nov 1958; Târgul de fete [The Maidens' Fair] (operetta, 3, T. Iancu), Bucharest, Teatrul de Operetă, 21 Aug 1964

Choral: Omul [Man] (orat, C.M. Lerca), 1942; Liturghia [Liturgy], mixed chorus

Orch and chbr works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Barbu: Partitura unei vieţi [The Score of a Life] (Bucharest, 1976)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Barca, Alessandro

(b Bergamo, 26 Nov 1741; d Bergamo, 13 June 1814). Italian theorist. Having entered the religious order of the Somaschi fathers, in 1761 he was invited to teach philosophy and mathematics in the college of Santa Croce in Padua. There he came into contact with the composer and theorist F.A. Vallotti, to whom he later became technical adviser on the mathematical aspect of harmonic theory; for example, he assisted in the calculations for Vallotti's system of temperament. From 1771 to 1812 he was professor of canon law at the University of Padua; he was also active as a chemist and as a theoretician of architecture. Barca's Nuova teoria di musica, a work in six sections (of which only four were published), aimed to explain the harmonic identity between a chord and its inversions; this identity (already established before Rameau by F.A. Calegari) was at the heart of the rules of composition in the Paduan school, which was known as the ‘scuola dei rivolti’ (because its composers were the first to use certain inverted dissonant chords). Barca made a graduated list of harmonic intervals in order of consonance, according to a mathematical criterion similar in some ways to that put forward by Leonhard Euler in 1739. Much more satisfactory is his explanation of the origin of musical scales, where he concludes that the ascending major scale is the most ‘natural’, followed by the descending minor scale (50 years later Helmholtz, who did not know Barca's work, confirmed this assertion). Barca also applied his theory of consonances to the calculation of tempered systems, arriving at the regular temperament which reduced each 5th by 5/29 (roughly 1/6) of the syntonic comma. He was expert in practical music, and in a Rapporto sullo stato della musica nel Regno d'Italia of 1810 (repr. in Alessandri) he pointed to weaknesses of Italian music of the period, wishing to ‘stem the tide of German music which was already ruining Italian taste, and threatening ever greater damage’.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

further details in Barbieri (1987); MSS in the Biblioteca Mons. G.M. Radini Tedeschi, Bergamo

Nuovi teoremi per la divisione delle ragioni (Bergamo, 1781)

Nuova teoria di musica: [1] ‘Introduzione … memoria prima’, Saggi scientifici e letterari dell'Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti in Padova, i (1786), 365–418; [2] ‘Introduzione … memoria seconda’, ibid., ii (1789), 329–62; [3] ‘Memoria prima’, ibid., iii/2 (1794), 71–87; [4] ‘Memoria seconda: de' suoni aggiunti, ossia delle dissonanze e dell'armonia dissonante’, Memorie dell'Accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti di Padova, iv (1809), 184–221; [5] ‘Memoria terza: dei sistemi e delle scale’ (MS, c1800–05), repr. in Barbieri (1987); [6] ‘Memoria sesta: del canto e della modulazione’ (MS draft, inc., c1810–14), repr. in Barbieri (1987)

Rapporto sulla stato della musica nel Regno d'Italia diretto al Ministero della pubblica istruzione (MS, 1810); repr. in A. Alessandri: Biografie di scrittori e artisti bergamaschi (Bergamo, 1875)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Riccati: Riflessioni sulle Memorie prima e seconda del Ch. P.D. Alessandro Barca che servono d'“introduzione a una nuova Teoria di musica”, e si leggono nel tomo i e ii dell'Accademia di Padova (MS, c1786–90); repr. in Barbieri (1990)

P. Barbieri: Acustica, accordatura e temperamento dell'Illuminismo veneto: con scritti inditi di Alessandro Barca (Rome, 1987) [incl. complete list of writings]

P. Barbieri: ‘Gli armonisti padovani del Santo nel Settecento’, Storia della musica al Santo di Padova, ed. S. Durante and P. Petrobelli (Vicenza, 1990), 199–221

P. Barbieri: ‘La “Nuova teoria di musica” di Alessandro Barca in un inedito esame di Giordano Riccati (1786–90)’, Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, ed. F. Luisi (Rome, 1990), 159–76

PATRIZIO BARBIERI

Barcarolle

(Fr.; It. barcarola).

Title given to pieces that imitate or suggest the songs (barcarole) sung by Venetian gondoliers as they propel their boats through the water. These songs were already widely known in the 18th century: in The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771), Burney reported that they were ‘so celebrated that every musical collector of taste in Europe is well furnished with them’. A basic feature of the barcarolle is the time signature, 6/8, with a marked lilting rhythm depicting the movement of the boat.

The barcarolle has been much used in Romantic opera, where it has a sentimental, even melancholy atmosphere: the most famous example is that by Offenbach in Act 2 of Les contes d’Hoffmann. Schubert frequently used the barcarolle lilt in his songs: though neither given the name nor associated with Venice, Auf dem Wasser zu singen (d774) and Des Fischers Liebesglück (d933) are perfect examples. Schubert also set Mayrhofer’s Der Gondelfahrer, as a solo song and as a male-voice quartet (d808–9), and both are typical barcarolles of great lyrical beauty.

The most famous example for piano solo is Chopin’s superb Barcarolle in F op.60 (1845–6); it is in 12/8 instead of the customary 6/8. Further examples in Chopin are the early Souvenir de Paganini (1829; a barcarolle in A based on the well-known theme Le carneval de Venise) and the Variations in D for piano duet, based on the same theme. There are three pieces entitled Venetianisches Gondellied among Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte: op.19 no.6 in G minor, op.30 no.6 in F minor and op.62 no.5 in A minor (he actually composed the first in Venice); he also wrote an isolated Gondellied in A in 1837. The most important series of barcarolles, however, are the 13 that Fauré composed between about 1880 and 1921; he also wrote a song called Barcarolle (op.7 no.3, 1873). Anton Rubinstein, Balakirev, S.M. Lyapunov, Glazunov, Vítezslav Novák and MacDowell are others who wrote barcarolles for piano.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (‘Barkarole’; H. Schneider)

H. Schneider: ‘Die Barkarole und Venedig’, L’opera fra Parigi, ed. M.T. Muraro (Florence, 1988), 11–56

MAURICE J.E. BROWN/KENNETH L. HAMILTON

Barce (Benito), Ramón

(b Madrid, 16 March 1928). Spanish composer and critic. He studied in Madrid at the conservatory and at the university, where he received the doctorate (1956). Although he followed courses under Messiaen and Ligeti, he is fundamentally a self-taught composer. He was a founder member of the Grupo Nueva Música (1958) and of ‘Zaj’ (1964–6), a musical theatre group. In 1967 he launched the Sonda magazine and the associated series of new music concerts. He was also music critic of the Madrid newspaper Ya (1971–8) and deputy director of Ritmo (1982–93). He has translated into Spanish numerous books, including works by Reger, Schoenberg, Schenker and Piston. He has been awarded various distinctions, such as the National Prize for Music (1973), the City of Madrid Prize for Musical Creation (1992) and the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts (1996).

His earliest compositions, from the end of the 1950s, dispense with the neo-populist elements fashionable in Spain at that time and show a strong Expressionist leaning. In the early 1960s structural organization and flexible tempo come to the fore. It was during this experimental period that he invented the system of levels, which subsequently shaped his musical production. This involved the construction of chromatic scales in which the higher and lower 5ths (the dominant and subdominant of the traditional system) are suppressed. By avoiding hierarchical functions the harmonies can oscillate between atonal and pseudo-tonal sounds in the same way that tonal music can be tonal to varying degrees within the same work. Barce first used the system in the Nueve pequeños preludios (1965). It occurred subsequently in Períodos en nivel Re (1967) and received its most systematic exposition in the 48 Preludes for piano (1973–83).

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic and vocal

Op: Los bárbaros (Barce), 1965–73

Music theatre: Abgrund, Hintergrund, 1964; Estudio de impulsos, 1964; Translaciones, 1965; Coral hablado, 1966

Film score: Espectro 7 (Barce, dir. J. Aguirre), 1970

Vocal: Residencias (D. García Bacca), chorus, 1974; 2 aforismos de Juan de Mairena (A. Machado), vocal qt, chorus, 1975; Canciones de la ciudad, S, inst ens, 1961; Tal com’as nubes, S, pf, 1964; Cant. I (E. Andrés), S, inst ens, 1966; Lamentación de Jerusalén (G. Miro), S, pf, 1973; Eterna (Barce), S, cl, pf, perc, 1975; Desierto sibilino (T. Mann), Mez, ob, tpt, 1978; Oleada (melodrama, Barce, after Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica), S/Mez, 1982; Hacia mañana, hacia hoy (melodrama, Barce), 1v, cl, pf, 1987

instrumental

Syms.: no.1, 1975; no.2, 1982; no.3, 1983; no.4, 1984; no.5, 1992; no.6, 1998

Other orch: Alfa, str, 1965; Las cuatro estaciones, 1967; Pf Conc., 1974; 4 piezas, 1975

5 or more insts: Quinteto, fl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1960; Objetos sonoros, 1963; Parábola, wind qnt, 1963; Obertura fonética, 1968; Concierto de Lizara I, 1969; Música funébra, 1969; Nuevas polifonías (Libro 1), 1971; Concierto de Lizara III, 1973; Concierto de Lizara IV, 1976; Nuevas polifonías (Libro 2), 1985

4 insts: Str qts: no.1, 1958; no.2, 1965; no.3 ‘Cuarteto Gauss’, 1973; no.4, 1975; no.5, 1978; no.6, 1978; no.7, 1978; no.8, 1983; Serenata, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1978

2–3 insts: Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1959; Sonata, fl, pf, 1962; Siala, cl, pf, 1964; Canadá-Trio, fl, pf, perc, 1968; Métrica I, vc, pf, 1969; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1969; Métrica II, tpt, pf, perc, 1970; Kampa, vn, vc, pf, 1978; Dúo, db, pf, 1980; 12 trios, 2 vn, perc, 1990

Pf: Estudio de sonoridades, 1962; Estudio de densidades, 1965; 9 pequeños preludios, 1965; Estudio de valores, 1967; Períodos en nivel Re, 1967; 48 preludios, 1973–83; Tango para Ivar, 1984

WRITINGS

Fronteras de la música (Madrid, 1985)

‘Autoanálisis’, 12 compositores espanoles de hoy (Oviedo, 1982), 77–113

‘La ópera y la zarzuela en el siglo XIX’, España en la música de occidente: Salamanca 1985, 145–53

‘Convención e inovación’, El pasado en la música de nuestro tiempo (Madrid, 1988)

‘Sistema y elección en la composición musical’, Composición musical I: Valencia 1988 (Valencia, 1989), 37–50

‘L’avangarda i jo’, Revista musical catalana, no.59 (1989), 23–6

Boccherini en Madrid: primeros años 1768–1779 (Madrid, 1992)

Tiempo de tinieblas y algunas sonrisas (Madrid, 1992)

‘Profilo ideologico de Manuel de Falla’, Musica/Realtà, no.42 (1993)

ed.: Actualidad y futuro de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1994)

‘Sintesi di folklore professionali in Isaac Albéniz’, Musica/Realtà, no.51 (1996)

‘Materia sonora y campo simbólico’, Revista de Occidente, no.191 (1997), 23–38

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Medina: Ramón Barce en la vanguardia musical española (Oviedo, 1983)

A. Medina: ‘Intrivista a R. Barce: una voce riflessiva nella musica spagnuola’, Musica/Realtà, no.33 (1990), 133–46

A. Charles: ‘Ramón Barce, un compositor entre la vanguardia y un lenguaje personalizado’, AnM, lii (1997)

TOMÁS MARCO/ANGEL MEDINA

Barcelona.

Capital city of Catalonia, Spain. In the 4th century one of its bishops, St Pacian, condemned the citizens' custom of celebrating the New Year with masquerades, music and dance. In 540 the first ecumenical Council of Barcelona, one of whose canons was concerned with regulating the Laudes chant, took place. The earliest known Barcelona composer is St Quiricus (bishop ? 656–66), who wrote a hymn to St Eulalia and possibly another to St Cugat, Barchinone laete Cucufate vernans (E-Tc 35). The rite and chants used in Catalonia at that time were those of the Visigothic Church, based in Toledo. After a short occupation by the Moors, Barcelona became the capital of the Marca Hispánica and transferred its allegiance to the Roman rite. By the mid-12th century the city had become the commercial centre of the Kingdom of Aragón. From the 10th century to the 13th Barcelona's musical life centred on its cathedral, whose first organ was built about 1259. An early 14th century treatise (Bc 23.1) shows that polyphony was well known in the area, as were the latest innovations in mensural notation. The transfer of the papacy to Avignon in 1309 made it easy for foreign musicians to enter the Kingdom of Aragón, at whose court, based in Barcelona, the most famous Franco-Flemish woodwind players were heard. The royal chapel employed composers of the stature of Steve de Sort and Gacian Reyneau, who contributed to the renewal of the kingdom's musical life. The transfer of the royal residence to Naples in 1433, in the reign of Alfonso V, interrupted this process.

Renaissance composers in Barcelona, some of them active in the cathedral, included the organist Pere Alberch i Ferrament alias Vila and the choirmasters Guillermo de Podio, Pedro Juan Aldomar and Juan Ferrer. In the second half of the 16th century, when the basse danse Barcelonne (B-Br 9085) was composed, the cathedral had 14 choristers. The principal music publisher of the period was Humbert Gotard.

Distinguished 17th-century composers working at the cathedral included Juan Pujol, Marcián Albareda, Luis Vicente Gargallo and the noted theorist Francisco Valls. José Pujol and José Durán, who introduced the Italian style to Catalan religious music, succeeded Valls as maestros de capilla. In the 18th century the principal organist was Carlos Baguer; José Elías was organist at the church of SS Justo y Pastor. The first opera performances, organized for the court, were in 1708–9 and included Caldara's Il più bel nome. At the end of the 1720s zarzuela companies began arriving from Madrid. In 1750 the first Italian opera company was established in the city, based at the Teatro de la S Cruz (Teatre de la S Creu); its repertory was chiefly Neapolitan or Venetian and occasionally Viennese. Works by such Catalans as D.M.B. Terradellas, Josep Durán, Fernando Sor and Baguer were also heard; French opera was unpopular. Later, Rossini met with particular success.

The first Sociedad Filarmónica Barcelonesa began its activities between 1844 and 1854, and promoted a recital by Liszt in the Salón de la Lonja in 1845. It was succeeded from 1866 by the Sociedad de Conciertos de Barcelona, established by Joan Casamitjana, and later by the Sociedad Catalana de Conciertos, founded by Antoni Nicolau in 1892, and the Sociedad Filarmónica, founded in 1897. The Orfeó Català, founded by Lluis Millet in 1891, was successor to the popular movement promoted by the choirs of Anselmo Clavé; the Palau de la Música, still the city's main concert hall, was built between 1905 and 1908 at Millet's initiative (see illustration). The Gran Teatro del Liceo (Gran Teatre del Liceu) opened in April 1847 with Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and from then on was the centre of Barcelona's operatic activities. Lohengrin, performed in 1882 in the Teatro de la S Cruz, was the first Wagner opera to be heard in Barcelona; an Asociación Wagneriana was formed in 1901. The Liceo Filarmońico Dramático Barcelonés de S.M. Doña Isabel II (later the Conservatorio Superior del Liceo) began its work in 1838, and the Escuela Municipal de Música in 1886; these are still the main centres of musical education.

Among Barcelona composers born at the end of the 19th century, Amadeo Vives is pre-eminent; notable among those with nationalistic tendencies were Frederic Mompou and Eduardo Toldrá, founder in 1912 of the Cuarteto Renacimiento (Quartet Renaixement). In 1944 Toldrá also founded the Orquesta Municipal de Barcelona; this succeeded the Orquesta Pablo Casals, founded in 1919 and active until the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). The most influential composer and teacher of this generation was Cristòfor Taltabull. The ‘Generación del 27’, a group of composers born around 1900, formed the Grupo de los Ocho in 1930; its principal representative was Roberto Gerhard, Schoenberg's only Spanish follower. The group disintegrated with the Civil War and traces of its aims are found only in one of Gerhard’s disciples, Joaquim Homs. After Spain's post-Civil War isolation, a group of reforming composers, the ‘Generación del 51’, emerged; notable members are Josep Mestres-Quadreny, Xavier Benguerel, Juan Guinjoán and Josep Soler.

Important 20th-century performers born or trained in Barcelona include the singers Victoria de los Angeles, Montserrat Caballé, Francisco Viñas, Giacomo Aragall and José Carreras, the pianist Alicia de Larrocha and the viol player Jordi Savall, founder and director of Hespèrion XX and the Capella Reial de Catalunya (1987), groups specializing in early music. An early music festival was founded in 1977.

The Instituto Español de Musicología was established in 1943 by Higinio Anglès, who was also director of the music department of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, founded by Felipe Pedrell, which holds the largest collection of music in Barcelona, including manuscripts of works by Catalan composers of the 20th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Lamaña: Barcelona filarmónica (Barcelona, 1927)

H. Anglès: La música a Catalunya fins al segle XIII (Barcelona, 1935/R)

J. Lamote de Grignon: Musique et musiciens français à Barcelone (Barcelona, 1935)

F. Baldelló: La música en Barcelona (Barcelona, 1943)

F. Baldelló: ‘Organos y organeros en Barcelona (siglos XIII–XIX)’, AnM, i (1946), 195–237

J. Subirá: La ópera en los teatros de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1946/R)

J. Madurell: ‘Documentos para la historia de maestros de capilla, infantes de coro, maestros de música y danza y ministriles en Barcelona (siglos XIV–XVIII)’, AnM, iii (1948), 213–34

F. Baldelló: ‘La música en la Basílica Parroquial de Santa María del Mar, de Barcelona’, AnM, xvii (1962), 209–41

M.C. Gómez: Le música en la casa real catalano-aragonesa durante los años 1336–1432 (Barcelona, 1979)

T. Marco: Historia de la música española, vi: Siglo XX, ed. P. López de Osaba (Madrid, 1983; Eng. trans., 1993)

X. Aviñoa: La música i el modernisme (Barcelona, 1985)

J. Pavía: La música a la catedral de Barcelona durant el segle XVII (Barcelona, 1985)

R. Alier: L'opera a Barcelona (Barcelona, 1990)

K.R. Kreitner: Music and Civic Ceremony in Late Fifteenth-Century Barcelona (diss., Duke U., 1990)

M. Comellas: L'activitat concertística a Barcelona durant la primera meitat del segle XIX (diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1997)

MARICARMEN GÓMEZ

Barcelona Mass.

A cycle of the ordinary of the Mass belonging to the Avignon school found in the manuscript E-Bc M971 (ff.1r–8r) that almost certainly belonged to the chapel of King Martin I of Aragon (1396–1410). It is made up of five fragments, written, with the exception of the four-part Agnus Dei, for three parts.

The compositional techniques vary from movement to movement. The Kyrie is written in simultaneous style and has no concordances. The Gloria is in discant style and has certain similarities with the melody of a Gloria by Depansis in a contemporary source (F-APT 16bis, no.12): either one melody provided a model for the other, or both are by the same composer (Stäblein-Harder). There are two other versions of this Gloria (E-Boc 2, no.1 and F-APT 16bis, no.34) which have different countertenors, and another (F-Sm 222, no.82) which is lost.

The Credo, in contrast to the Gloria, is in discant style and is less ornamented. Judging from the large number of known concordances (E-Sa 109, no.4; F-APT 16bis, no.46; F-CA, no.6; F-Pn 23190, no.103 (index); F-TLm 94, no.1; I-CF 98, no.2; I-IV, no.60; NL-Lu, 2515, no.3; US-R 44, no.3) it is the most famous liturgical fragment of the Ars Nova. Its inclusion in the index of one of these manuscripts (F-Pn 23190) suggests that it must have been composed before 1376. The version in the Barcelona manuscript contains notable errors, and the most reliable source is the Apt Codex.

The Sanctus is a motet for three voices with troped text. This fragment has no known concordances, although the Sanctus in the Apt Codex (F-APT 16bis, no.15) uses the same troped texts. The Agnus Dei is difficult to classify, despite the fact that its basic style is simultaneous. The outer voices are texted, while the inner voices are not. The contra I offers a complementary counterpoint to the quadruplum and tenor, which implies that it was sung. The only known concordance of this composition appears in a wall painting in Notre Dame, Kernascléden, Brittany. Unlike other known 14th-century cycles of the Ordinary of the Mass the Barcelona Mass does not include an Ite missa est or a Benedictus.

The Agnus Dei and the Kyrie are, in a way, related. They are the only fragments of the work written in imperfect time and minor prolation; the other three fragments are in imperfect time and major prolation. They use similar rhythmic motifs, although these are more complex in the Agnus Dei than in the Kyrie. In both movements the highest voice begins with a similar descending motif. The Gloria and Sanctus offer a contrast to the first and the last fragments of the Mass, in terms of their style and mensuration and of their text, which in both cases is troped. Unlike the Kyrie and, partly, the Sanctus, both fragments are related to the Avignon repertory by virtue of their concordances. The Credo is written in the 4th mode, while the others are mainly in the 1st mode. It is also included in the Toulouse Mass, where it is integrated into the mass as a whole, whereas in the Barcelona Mass it acts as an element of contrast. It is the only one of the five fragments to mention what may be the name of the composer, Sortes or Sortis. This might be the organist Steve de Sort, who was in the service of the royal chapel of Aragon between 1394 and 1407 (but see Sortes). In the Ivrea Codex this composition appears with the subtitle ‘de rege’. In general terms, there is less internal cohesion in the Barcelona Mass than in other 14th-century cycles of the Ordinary of the Mass. The mass is edited in PMFC, i (1956), pp.13–64; in CMM, xxix (1962), nos.19, 25, 47, 56, 72; and in M.C. Gómez: El manuscrito M971 de la Biblioteca de Catalunya (Misa de Barcelona) (Barcelona, 1989).

See also Tournai Mass and Mass, §II, 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Ludwig, ed.: Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, ii (Leipzig, 1928/R), 22

H. Anglés: La música española desde la Edad Media hasta nuestros días (Barcelona, 1941), 26

H. Harder: ‘Die Messe von Toulouse’, MD, vii (1953), 105–28

L. Schrade: ‘The Mass of Toulouse’, RBM, viii (1954), 84–96

H. Stäblein-Harder: Fourteenth-Century Mass Music in France, MSD, vii (1962), nos.19, 25, 47, 56, 72

G. Reaney, ed.: Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music (c1320–1400), RISM, B/IV/2 (1969), 90–92

U. Günther: ‘Les anges musiciens et la messe de Kernascléden’, Les sources en musicologie: Paris 1979, 109–36

M.C. Gómez: ‘Quelques remarques sur le répertoire sacré de l'Ars nova provenant de l'ancien royaume d'Aragon’, AcM, lvii (1985), 166–79

I. Godt: ‘The Mass of Barcelona: How many Hands? How much Mass?’, Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. B. Gillingham and P. Merkley (Ottawa,1990), 195–216

MARICARMEN GÓMEZ

Barcewicz, Stanisław

(b Warsaw, 16 April 1858; d Warsaw, 1 Sept 1929). Polish violinist, conductor and teacher. He was a pupil of Apolinary Kątski at the Warsaw Music Institute (c1871) and then studied the violin at the Moscow Conservatory with Ferdinand Laub and Jan Hřímalý; on completing his studies in 1876 he was awarded a gold medal. From 1877 he played frequently in Poland and also in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Norway and Russia. He taught the violin and the viola at the Warsaw Music Institute (1886–1918), where he also directed the chamber music class and conducted the student orchestra; he was a member of the governing Pedagogical Council (1888–1901) and later was appointed director (1910–18). He was leader of the Warsaw Opera House orchestra, and from 1886 was conductor there. In 1892 he established his own string quartet. Barcewicz was one of the finest Polish violinists. He won great recognition for his beautiful, deep, full tone, excellent technique and individuality of interpretation. He had a large repertory, comprising chiefly the works of Classical and Romantic composers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PSB (M. Gliński)

SMP

J. Kleczyński: ‘Stanisław Barcewicz’, Echo muyczne i teatralne, i (1883–4), 308–9; x (1894), 598–9

ELŻBIETA DZIĘBOWSKA

Bard.

Among the Celts, a composer of praise poetry (and, on occasion, its counterpart of dispraise or satire). The word is almost certainly of Indo-European origin but has no obvious cognates outside the group of Celtic languages: from a common Celtic bardos are derived the Gaelic, Manx and Irish bard, Welsh bardd, Cornish barth and Breton barz. The basic meaning appears to be ‘praise singer’, even if the professional and social status of such figures varied from age to age and from culture to culture. In Scots Gaelic ‘bard’ became the generic term for poet. (The development of ‘bard’ in English to indicate a poet of lofty imagination, inspired by mysterious powers, is largely a product of Romanticism.)

For an extended use of the term to refer to epic singers of non-Celtic peoples see Aoidos; Epics; Mongol music, §§1(iii–iv), 4(ii), 6(v); and Central Asia, §2.

1. Antiquity.

3. Medieval and post-medieval Ireland and Scotland.

4. Music and performing practice.

PETER CROSSLEY–HOLLAND (1–2), JOHN MACINNES (3), JAMES PORTER (4)

1. Antiquity.

Knowledge of the functions of the bards of ancient Gaul derives from passages in Greek and Roman authors. Some of their most valuable evidence depends on material, now lost, by Posidonius of Apamea (c135–c51 bce). Strabo’s version may be taken as representative: ‘The bards [bardoi] are singers and poets, the vates [ouateis] interpreters of sacrifice and natural philosophers, while the druids [druïdai] in addition to the science of nature study moral philosophy’ (Geography, iv.4.4). The distinction between these castes may derive from Posidonius, and the idea of a caste system agrees with later Celtic evidence (see below, §§2–3); there is no reason to doubt that the bards were poets whose function included the singing of panegyrics. Tierney has shown, however, that Posidonius’s ascription to these groups of philosophical studies cannot be taken at its face value. The ancient authorities – several of them apparently dependent on Posidonius – include, besides Strabo quoted above, Diodorus Siculus (v.31), who mentioned the bards’ use of ‘instruments similar to lyres’, Athenaeus (246c–d), Lucan (Civil War, i.442–9) and Caesar (Gallic War, vi.13).

Some centuries before the Christian era, the Celts had become dominant in the British Isles: the Goidelic Celts in Ireland, who later colonized Scotland and the Isle of Man, and the Brythonic Celts in England and Wales, who colonized Brittany during the 5th and 6th centuries ce. No contemporary records survive, but the bards of the British Isles before the introduction of Christianity may have been essentially similar to those of the European Continent, and, at the rise of Christianity, may have preserved some of the lore of the druids.

The greater part of what is now England lost some of its Celtic character at the Roman occupation (43–410 ce), although this character persisted in Cornwall until modern times and in Strathclyde (i.e. parts of north-eastern England and southern Scotland) until the 6th century. The bards of antiquity may have used the crwth, a relative of the lyre, said by Venantius Fortunatus (c530/40–c600) to be played in Britain (F. Leo, ed.: Venanti Honori Clementiani Fortunati presbyteri italici opera poetica, MGH, Auctorum antiquissimorum, iv/1, 1881/R, 64).

2. Medieval and post-medieval Wales and Cornwall.

Throughout the British Isles local kings, princes and chieftains maintained bards, bestowing gifts upon them for their services. The bards played the harp and sang elegies and eulogies on famous men, composed proverbs and recited sagas. Monasteries also sometimes maintained bards as historians and genealogists, as at Aberconway and Strata Florida in Wales.

The high esteem in which the class was held is evident in the early legal codes of both Ireland and Wales. The Laws of Hywel Dda (Howel the Good), surviving in Welsh manuscripts from the 12th century but representing in essence a 10th-century codification of customs rather more ancient, distinguish two classes of bard: the bardd teulu, who was a permanent official of the king’s household, and the pencerdd (‘chief of song’), or head of the bardic fraternity in the district (this term still survives; for details of original sources, see Gwynn Jones, 1913–14). These classes of resident and itinerant bards, also found in Ireland and Scotland, are reminiscent of classes found generally among Indo-European ethnic groups, for example, in Anglo-Saxon England, although they cannot be precisely equated with the Scop and gleeman respectively. These latter, like the Scandinavian skald and other poet-musicians of early nations, have sometimes been termed ‘bards’ in English literature.

During the 12th and 13th centuries in Wales bards no longer came to be appointed to the king’s household, and their position changed greatly after the ending of native rule. They increased in number, and just as in France some of the nobility became troubadours and trouvères, so some Welsh princes became bards. (The poetic forms of the troubadours and trouvères, moreover, influenced those of 14th-century Welsh bards.)

The bards were highly organized into various grades and were required to serve a long apprenticeship and to acquire much skill and learning before they were allowed to serve professionally. This is revealed by a Welsh bardic statute, originating in its present form in the 15th century but representing the progressive customs of three centuries or more (for the earliest surviving version, see Parry, 1929). The Laws of Hywel Dda reveal that the bardic instrument was the harp; to this the statute mentioned above adds the Crwth.

The bards had always encouraged their peoples in the face of hardship, but under the growing influence of the English monarchs their incitements to liberty came to be regarded as incitements to rebellion. In consequence, numerous laws were enacted to put them down. The alleged massacre of Welsh bards by Edward I (whose conquest of Wales virtually brought native rule to an end in 1282) is only a fable; but later laws represented the bards as degenerate (e.g. a statute of Henry IV dated 1402), and a royal proclamation known as the Commission of the Caerwys Eisteddfod, issued by Elizabeth I, complained of ‘vagraunt and idle persons naming theim selfes mynstrelles Rithmers and Barthes’ who were seditious and went into competition with the skilled bards (see J.G. Evans: Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, i/1: The Welsh Manuscripts of Lord Mostyn, at Mostyn Hall, co. Flint, HMC, no.48, 1898, pp.291–2). In Cornwall, ‘bard’ came to mean ‘mimic’ and ‘buffoon’; and in other Celtic areas the loan-word ‘bard’ in English writings often carried a pejorative meaning. Nevertheless, in all the Celtic countries the household bard continued in function – and often in name – until quite recent times: harpists were still active in some large houses up to the 19th century.

The poet-musician of early times had, however, virtually vanished. Although poetry and music long remained undivided, a partial separation between them occurred at an early period (varying from country to country) and even in the Middle Ages musical and poetical bards were to some extent recognized as separate classes. Latterly, the term ‘bard’, especially in compound words, occasionally denoted a musician as distinct from a poet, as in the Welsh and Cornish bardd (barth) hirgorn, or trumpet major, found as early as the 18th century. More usually, however, the term has meant a poet alone, not only in the Celtic areas but also in England.

Today the term ‘bard’ in Wales means the victor at an eisteddfod, whether in poetry or music. Although the bardic rites and customs of the modern Welsh eisteddfod and of the Cornish gorseth, established in 1928 with the cultural revival, cannot claim historical continuity with those of the medieval bards, an antiquarian precedent for these customs is not lacking.

Examples of bardic poetry survive, often in critical editions; but the question of bardic music is problematical (see §4 below). The Robert ap Huw Manuscript (GB-Lbl Add.14905), which was claimed even in the 20th century to contain ‘bardic’ harp music from about 1100, is an early 17th-century document, part of which appears to be copied from a manuscript of William Penllyn (fl 1550–70). The origins of the music can be traced back to named musicians of the 15th century and earlier; the compositional principles are based on the 24 measures of cerdd dant (‘the craft of the string’), ostensibly formulated in about 1100 according to the document known as the Cadwedigaeth Cerdd Dannau (‘The Conservation of Cerdd Dant’).

See also Wales, §II.

3. Medieval and post-medieval Ireland and Scotland.

In medieval Gaelic society in Ireland and Scotland, professional men of learning were organized in a caste system, under various descriptions: draoi (the Gaelic equivalent of ‘druid’), fili, later file (poet-seer), breitheamh (‘brehon’, or lawgiver) and seanchaidh (historian-antiquarian). These terms appear to denote various offices, or perhaps duties, of the highest orders in the professional hierarchy.

The bard occupied a lower position. Until the Norman Conquest, the filidh (plural of fili) specialized in a form of poetry called seanchas that drew on the high learning, historical and mythological, of the Gaels; and the filidh appear to have maintained some vestiges of pagan religion (the word fili derives from a root ‘to see’). But the bard, according to 10th-century Irish juristic tradition, had an honour price only half that of a fili; and, according to another medieval juristic tradition, a bard might claim nothing on the grounds of his status as a man of learning but should rest satisfied with whatever his native wit might win him.

Both filidh and baird (plural of bard) were divided into classes by the jurists. The two main bardic classes, sóerbaird (free, privileged bards) and dóerbaird (base bards), were each subdivided into eight further grades. It would seem likely that a general distinction was observed between bards of good family, or of special genius, and others less respected, but the precision of the grades may have been little more than theoretical.

The original function of the bard was to compose eulogy, his craft – bairdne (bardic verse) – contrasting with the filidecht (seanchas poetry) of the fili. With the social changes after the Norman invasion of Ireland, however, patronage for the filidh disappeared, since there was no longer an audience for the ancient high learning; but bardic praise-poetry, with its obverse of dispraise, continued to exist where Gaelic kings or petty rulers succeeded in saving some part of their ancient lordships from the general ruin. Before this time (the late 12th century), filidh had occasionally composed panegyric, but now this seems to have become their primary function.

From about 1200 to 1650, these composers used a highly elaborate and subtle metric system and a standard language (classical Gaelic), perhaps somewhat conservative in pronunciation but very progressive in form. Poets were taught in schools: much didactic material survives – discussions of grammatical and metrical usage – to show that the academic discipline was severe; it is said, but on uncertain evidence, that the period of training was seven years. Much of the poetry survives, particularly from Ireland but also from Scotland (classical Gaelic was common to the two countries); it consists not only of panegyric but also of religious, love and Ossianic verse (see Ossian). It is known in English as ‘bardic’ verse, although its composers called themselves filidh not baird: they knew that the word bard had connotations of low rank. To the present day, indeed, the Irish word for ‘poet’ is not bard but file (plural filí).

The bard was mentioned in the context of this poetry in Ireland and Scotland in the 17th century, but in a subordinate role. He might be a kind of literary retainer in the household of a file, he might be assigned to recite the poem, or he might also be placed in charge of the musical accompaniment: his exact functions probably varied from place to place. The Irish Clanricarde Memoirs (quoted in Bergin, 1913, pp.158–9) relate, in a probably reliable account:

The Action and Pronunciation of the Poem … was perform’d with a great deal of Ceremony in a Consort of Vocal and Instrumental Musick. The Poet himself said nothing, but directed and took care that every body else did his Part right. The Bards having first had the Composition from him, got it well by Heart, and now pronounc’d it orderly, keeping even Pace with a Harp, touch’d upon that Occasion; no other Instrument being allowed for the said Purpose than this alone.

This highly literate tradition of classical Gaelic ‘bardic poetry’, cultivated by the filí, ceased in Ireland in the 17th century; there are fewer survivals in Scotland despite its persistence in that country to the mid-18th century.

With the social changes that followed the introduction of the feudal system to Scotland, during which the court language changed from Gaelic to Norman-French and later to Scots, the classical tradition began to disappear, but the status of the panegyrist bard improved, though doubtless not in an identical manner in every place. The Scots Gaelic term for a poet is bard to the present day; and by the 17th century, Scottish bardic poetry was dominated not by the strict metres of classical Gaelic but by vernacular Scots Gaelic. Unlike their classical counterparts, the vernacular poets were mostly illiterate until the 18th century, although some earlier bards who recited for poets may have been partially literate. Literacy was unusual, however, until the 19th century, for vernacular Gaelic verse developed in a predominantly oral tradition. Some of these vernacular bards had patrons, some did not; but Gaelic makers of verse have always enjoyed both honour and a kind of diplomatic immunity. From the earliest times the poet (file or bard) held the power to redress grievances in society and, in popular belief to the present day, to wound or even kill by means of aer (later aoir), usually translated ‘satire’.

The essential rhetorical structure of the poetry derives from panegyric, although its subject matter is very varied. As a result of the 20th-century revival of Scots Gaelic literature, contemporary literary poets may be distinguished from the semi-literate or (now rarely) non-literate ‘bards’ of the Gaelic-speaking areas of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The latter continue to bring traditional attitudes to bear upon topical events at local or national level, with praise, rebuke, humour etc.; they also compose more personal poetry such as love poetry or elegy, and there is a continuing output of religious verse. Like the vast bulk of traditional Gaelic poetry, these compositions are all designed for singing or chanting, and the melodies are drawn from the still considerable mass of orally transmitted traditional song.

4. Music and performing practice.

It is impossible to tell with certainty how much or how little of bardic music survives. By the 18th century, when antiquarians in Britain and Ireland became aware of the social function of ‘ancient’ music (i.e. ‘Celtic’ music), it was already too late to record in reliable form an authentic bardic style of singing, chanting or reciting poetry to the accompaniment of a harp. It is important, furthermore, to separate the concept of ‘bard’ from that of ‘instrumental musician’, for they were distinct in the Middle Ages. The bard would often have with him a harper and a person (datgeiniaid) to sing or declaim his songs, but no description of how the songs were performed survives. In Ireland, a parallel class, namely the recairi, sang or recited the praises of their leaders, again to the accompaniment provided by a harper. The main part of the verse may have been chanted in a monotone, with cadential melodic inflections as in psalmody, and supported by harp chords; such a method of performance is described in Mayo as late as the 18th century.

The earliest competitive festival in Wales, that held under the patronage of Lord Rhys ap Gruffudd at Cardigan at Christmas 1176, instituted two contests: between the bards and poets, and among harpers, crowthers and pipers. But by the time of the Carmarthen Eisteddfod of 1451, music and poetry were coming into looser association. Later, after 1600, with the decline of patronage, the functions became confused or had merged, although the term lived on: Edward Jones (1752–1824), for example, harper and author of Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784), came to be known as ‘Bardd y Brenin’ (King's Bard), and John Parry of Denbigh (1776–1851), who published Welsh harp music and popularized the term ‘penillion singing’ (improvised song with harp accompaniment) in about 1830, was known as ‘Bardd Alaw’ (Master of Song).

The nine or so Welsh composers represented in the Robert ap Huw harp manuscript (c1613), have been dated between approximately 1340 and 1485, and among the compositions are some that suggest accompaniment for sung poems (caniad; seeRobert ap Huw). By the 18th century, however, blind John Parry (c1710–82), the Welsh harper, was already being influenced by the Italian Baroque style, as was his counterpart in Ireland, Turlough Carolan (1670–1738), famously described by Goldsmith as ‘the last Irish bard’. Carolan composed hundreds of songs in honour of his Irish patrons, singing them to the accompaniment of his harp. By 1792 Edward Bunting was attempting to note down the tunes played at the famous Belfast Harp Festival of that year, and these later formed the basis for his three-volume The Ancient Music of Ireland (1796, 1809, 1840). In Scotland the Rev. Patrick Macdonald can be found complaining, in his Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784), of the foreign influence on clàrsach performance. Carolan's contemporary there, Roderick Morison (c1656–1713/14), known as ‘An Clarsair Dall’ (The Blind Harper), has similarly been termed ‘Gaelic Scotland's last minstrel’. Born in Lewis, he completed his musical training in Ireland. Like Carolan, he was itinerant from time to time and dependent on the gentry for his livelihood. Combining the skills of poet, musician and performer, he composed a number of songs to his patrons the MacLeods: for example, his Féill nan crann (‘Harp-Key Fair’), the words and music of which survive, reflects a satirical, self-mocking strain.

Another noted Highland satirist, Iain Lom (c1625–c1707) created a famous song, still sung, on the Battle of Inverlochy (1645) in which the MacDonalds overcame the Campbells. The female poet, Sileas na Ceapaich (c1660–c1729), who possibly used trance-like states induced by starvation as a source for inspiration, left a notable lament for the harper Lachlann Dall, who died in the 1720s. Possibly the last remnants of the bardic profession (in the original sense of that term) to have survived were the MacMhuirich family, hereditary bards to the MacDonalds of Clanranald: the last practising MacMhuirich classical bard was Domhnall (fl 1710). A forbear, Niall Mór (c1550 – after 1613) may well be the composer of a satire on the bagpipes, which had begun to rival the harp as a basis for extended composition. But although both writing and singing were creative activities among such bards as the MacMhuirichs, there is little evidence of a musical notation. Joseph Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786, 2/1818) includes airs by Carolan and an essay by William Beauford that purports to prove that a system of musical notation was used in Ireland in the 11th and 12th centuries. In 1980 another scholar put forward the theory of a secret notation contained in the early Irish linear script ogam.

Current knowledge of bardic practice in its original environment is largely circumstantial or inadequate to a full description of performing style. The Fenian lays of Ireland and Scotland were composed by bards in the medieval syllabic metres known as dán, with a set number of syllables to the line (see Ossian). Evidence in the 20th century for the singing style of heroic ballads in modern stressed metres includes a tendency, among the few vernacular singers recorded in South Uist, to regularize the tempo, a fact that may suggest a break with the traditional stress patterns of Gaelic. Certainly, the few examples of heroic lays from the Hebrides and Ireland may, however, also be suggestive of the range and limits of an older style: the melodic shape of an essentially word-orientated style of sung declamation usually falls within the octave, although one notable example (the melody of Laoidh Fhraoich) covers the span of a 10th (ex.1).

The term ‘bard’ has now come, in any case, to mean simply ‘poet’. It can have a local connotation in the Highlands and is used in such phrases as bard baile (‘township poet’), that is, a poet-composer in the Gaelic vernacular idiom. Some of these latterday ‘bards’ in the Hebrides look to the great songmakers of the 18th century as their ideal if not their actual models for composition: masters such as Alexander MacDonald (c1695–c1770), a fervent Jacobite who composed his poems to Lowland and English airs, his unschooled friend John MacCodrum (1710–96), family bard to Sir James MacDonald of Sleat, or the untutored Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812), who, though politically a Hanoverian, forged elaborate songs like In Praise of Ben Doran, a composition based on the musical structure of ceol mor (i.e. air and variations). In 1789 MacIntyre competed unsuccessfully with Donald Shaw for the post of ‘Gaelic Bard’ to the Highland and Agricultural Society. More of MacIntyre's songs survive in oral tradition than those of his contemporaries. His reputation, like that of Mary MacLeod (c1615–c1707), the similarly unschooled Rob Donn Mackay (1714–78), and William Ross (1762–?1791), has carried over, firmly enhanced, into the 20th century and bears testimony to the strength of Gaelic oral tradition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

texts, editions

E. Jones: Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (London, 1784/R, enlarged 2/1794; music only, 1800–05, enlarged 3/1808 [as Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, i], 4/1825) [most melodies incl. in The Welsh Harper, ed. J. Parry (ii) (London, 1839–48)]

P. MacDonald: A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (Edinburgh, 1784)

E. Jones: The Bardic Museum (London, 1802) [as Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, ii], 2/1825) [most melodies incl. in The Welsh Harper, ed. J. Parry (ii), i (London, 1839), ii (London, 1848)]

E. Bunting: The Ancient Music of Ireland, iii (Dublin, 1840) [incl. 150 airs and a diss. on the history of music in Ireland]

J.L. Campbell, ed.: Highland Songs of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh, 1933/R)

J.C. Watson, ed.: The Gaelic Songs of Mary MacLeod (London and Glasgow, 1934/R) [in Eng. and Gaelic]

A. MacLeod, ed.: The Songs of Duncan Ban MacIntyre (Edinburgh, 1952)

W.J. Watson, ed.: Bardachd ghaidhlig: Specimens of Gaelic Poetry, 1550–1900 (Stirling, 3/1959)

W.S. Gwynn Williams: Ceinciau telyn cymru/Harp Tunes of Wales (Penygroes, 1962)

A.M MacKenzie, ed.: Orain Iain Luim/Songs of John MacDonald, Bard of Keppoch (Edinburgh, 1964) [in Gaelic and Eng.]

W. Matheson, ed.: The Blind Harper (An Clarsair Dall): the Songs of Roderick Morison and his Music (Edinburgh, 1970)

C.O. Baoill, ed.: Sileas MacDonald: Poems and Songs (Edinburgh, 1972) [in Eng. and Gaelic]

studies

antiquity

A. Holder, ed.: Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz, i (Leipzig, 1896/R), 347

W. Dinan, ed.: Monumenta historica celtica, i (London, 1911), 321–3, 331–3, 345

I. Zwicker, ed.: Fontes historiae religionis celticae (Berlin, 1934)

T.G.E. Powell: ‘Religion, Celtic’, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1948, 2/1970)

J.J. Tierney: ‘The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section C, lx (1960), 189–275

Wales

W.F. Skene: The Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868), i, 29–32, 522ff; ii, 324

T. Gwynn Jones: ‘Bardism and Romance’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1913–14), 208–310

T. Roberts: Gwaith Dafydd ab Edmwnd (Bangor, 1914)

J. Morris-Jones: ‘Taliesin’, Y Cymmrodor, xxviii (London, 1918)

T. Parry: ‘Statud Gruffudd ap Cynan’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, v (1929), 25–33

I. Williams and T. Roberts: Cywyddau Dafydd ap Gwilym a‘i Gyfoeswyr (Cardiff, 1935)

I. Williams, ed.: Canu Llywarch Hên (Cardiff, 1935)

P. Crossley-Holland: ‘Secular Homophonic Music in Wales in the Middle Ages’, ML, xxiii (1942), 135–62; rev. and repr. in Secular Medieval Music in Wales (Cardiff, 1942)

I. Williams: Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944/R), 9

I. Williams: Canu Taliesin (Cardiff, 1960)

T. Parry: A History of Welsh Literature (Oxford, 1962/R), 43–66, 69, 84, 128, 133–6, 159

G. Thomas: The Caerwys Eisteddfodau of 1523 and 1567 (Cardiff, 1968)

I. Williams: Canu Aneirin (Cardiff, 1968)

I. Williams: The Poems of Taliesin (Dublin, 1975) [incl. Eng. trans. by J.E. Caerwyn Williams

J.E. Caerwyn Williams: The Poets of the Welsh Princes (Cardiff, 1978)

A.O.H. Jarman: The Cynfeirdd: Early Welsh Poets and Poetry (Cardiff, 1981)

A.O.H. Jarman, ed. and trans.: Y Gododdin: Britain's Oldest Heroic Poem (Llandysul, 1988)

C. Lofmark: Bards and Heroes (Felinfach, 1989)

O. Ellis: The Story of the Harp in Wales (Cardiff, 1991)

P. Crossley-Holland: The Composers in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript: the Evidence for Identity, Dating and Locality (Bangor, 1998)

M. Stephens, ed.: ‘Bardic, Order, The’, Companion to the Literature of Wales (Cardiff, 1998)

Ireland and Scotland

M. Martin: A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London,1703, 4/1934)

J.C. Walker: Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (Dublin and London, 1786/R, 2/1818)

E. O'Curry: On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (London, 1873/R)

G. Sigerson, ed.: Bards of the Gael and Gall (London, 1897, 3/1925/R)

P.W. Joyce: A Social History of Ancient Ireland (London, 1903, 2/1913/R), i, 417–22, 448–9

O.J. Bergin: ‘Bardic Poetry’, Ivernian Journal, v (1913), 153–203

D. Corkery: The Hidden Ireland: a Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1925), 58–9, 122–3

E. Curtis: A History of Ireland (London, 1936, 6/1950), 113

G. Murphy: ‘Bards and Filidh’, Éigse: a Journal of Irish Studies, ii (1940), 200–07

G. Murphy: Early Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1961), 26–7

J.L. Campbell and D.S. Thomson, eds.: Edward Lhuyd in the Scottish Highlands, 1699–1700 (Oxford, 1963), esp. 33–4

F. Collinson: The Traditional and National Music of Scotland (London,1966), 39, 48, 50–51

E. Knott: ‘Irish Classical Poetry’, Early Irish Literature, ed. E. Knott and G. Murphy (London, 1966), 21–93

D.S. Thomson: ‘The MacMhuirich Bardic Family’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, xliii (1966), 276–304

J. MacInnes: ‘The Oral Tradition in Scottish Gaelic Poetry’, Scottish Studies, xii (1968), 29–43

W. Matheson, ed.: The Blind Harper (An Clasair Dall): the Songs of Roderick Morison and his Music (Edinburgh, 1970)

T. Knudsen: ‘Calum Ruadh, Bard of Skye’, DFS information, no.1 (1969)

D.S. Thomson: ‘Niall Mór MacMhuirich’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, xlix (1977) [whole issue]

E. Cregeen and D.W. MacKenzie: Tiree Bards and their Bardachd: the Poets in a Hebridean Community (Isle of Coll, 1978)

S.O. Boyle: Ogam: the Poet's Secret (Dublin, 1980)

T.P. McCaughey: ‘The Performing of Dán’, Eriu, xxxv (1984), 39–57

A. Bruford: ‘The Singing of Fenian and Similar Lays in Scotland’, Ballad Research: Dublin 1985, 55–70

J. MacInnes: ‘Recordings of Scottish Gaelic Heroic Ballads’, The Heroic Process, ed. B. Almqvist and others (Dun Laoghaire, 1987), 101–30

H. Shields: Narrative Singing in Ireland (Dublin, 1993)

T.A. McKean: Hebridean Song-Maker: Iain MacNeacail of the Isle of Skye (Edinburgh, 1997) [incl. disc]

recordings

Gaelic Bards & Minstrels, perf. W. Matheson, Greentrax CTRAX9016D (1993) [2 cassettes, with notes ]

Bardaisan [Bardesanes]

(b Edessa [now Urfa], 11 July 154; d Edessa, 222). Syrian hymnographer, astrologer and philosopher. Born into a pagan priestly family, he was educated by a pagan priest but baptized as a Christian, and in 179 he was ordained deacon and priest. Later denounced as a heretic and excommunicated (c216), he fled to Armenia and there taught a kind of astrological fatalism. Bardaisan has been erroneously regarded as a leader of the oriental school of gnosticism founded by Valentinus. His theology, which in fact combined Christian doctrine with astrological and philosophical speculation, is known from the works of later Christian writers such as Eusebius and Ephrem Syrus, who strongly denounced it, and from Bardaisan’s own Dialogue with Antonius concerning Destiny (or Book of the Laws of the Lands), which is the oldest surviving document in Syriac.

Bardaisan wrote many hymns (madrāshe) in Syriac, which his disciples translated into Greek. They included 150 psalms in pentasyllabic metre, reportedly modelled on those of David, through which he popularized his heretical doctrines (Bardaisan’s son Harmonius is said to have written the tunes). The stanzas of the madrāshe, probably sung by soloists, were followed by a fixed choral response; they were constructed on isosyllabic principles, the patterns ranging from the very simple (e.g. five four-syllable lines to each stanza) to the highly complex and diffuse. There is, however, no reason to suppose that in Bardaisan’s time isosyllabic poetry was an altogether novel phenomenon. His madrāshe were very successful and continued to be sung in Edessa probably until the first half of the 5th century; they earned him the title ‘Father of Syriac Poetry’. By way of retribution, Ephrem composed other (orthodox) madrāshe based on the same metre and with equivalent verse structure. None of Bardaisan’s hymns survives, except for some excerpts cited by Ephrem, although there is a hymn that may be his in the 3rd-century apocryphal Acts of Thomas ascribed to circles under Bardaisan’s influence. His historical works on India and Armenia are also lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Bardenhewer: Geschichte der altkirchlichen Litteratur (Freiburg, 1902–32/R), i, 337ff

F.C. Burkitt: Early Eastern Christianity (London, 1904), 155–227

H.J.W. Drijvers: Bardaisan of Edessa (Assen, 1966)

S.P. Brock: ‘Syrian and Greek Hymnography: Problems of Origin’, Studia patristica, xvi (1985), 77–81

DIMITRI CONOMOS

Bardanashvili, Ioseb

(b Batumi, 23 Nov 1948). Georgian composer. He studied composition with A. Shaverzashvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory (1968–76) and taught at the College of Batumi Music (1973–95). In 1987 he was awarded the Z. Paliashvili State Prize and in 1995 he emigrated to Israel.

Bardanashvili came to notice in the 1970s when, in his first serious experiments in composition dating from his student years, he set himself complex creative tasks and constantly endeavoured to find uncommon ways of solving them. His creative thinking was formed by a synthesis of national traditions – Georgian and Jewish – and contemporary methods such as dodecaphony, in addition to aleatory and sonoristic techniques, all applied in a non-dogmatic manner.

He seeks to reveal the complex, multi-faceted aspects of the human soul, and the rich spectrum of its emotional world; the varied literary sources of his inspiration include, in particular, Jewish medieval poetry and the work of Marcus Aurelius and Michelangelo. His Symphony (1980) marks an important stage in his artistic career: the dramatic integrity of this three-movement work is achieved by unity in its contemplative material which grows out of the brief sounding of a semitone, an interval generically associated with ancient Jewish melody and which is heard at times in a sharply individualized form (mainly in the wordless voice part), later to dissolve into polylinear, aleatory and sonoristic structures. Depth of thought, vivid emotional response, a fine sense of timbre and clear constructional thinking are all displayed in this work.

Attracted to rock music, Bardanashvili composed one of the first Georgian rock operas in collaboration with R. Sturua and the band ‘75’; during the 1980s and 90s he has shown an interest in theatrical genres.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Balada kalze [Ballad about a Woman] (ballet, 1, Bardanashvili, after Ye. Yevtushenko: Ballada o sterve [Ballad about a Harridan]), 1972; Al'ternativa [The Alternative] (rock op, 2, R. Sturua, after N. Ergemlidze, R. Bardzimashvili), 1976; Mokhetiale varskvlavebi [Comets] (op, 2, J. Ajiashvili, after Sh. Aleichem: Roman v pis'makh [A Novel in Letters]), 1982; Mokhetiale suli [A Wandering Soul] (ballet, 2, scenario Bardanashvili, G. Aleksidze), 1991–2

Vocal: Bedistsera [Fate] (I. Ezra), sym. poem, chorus, orch, 1973; Pikrebi [Reflections] (M. Aurelius, I. Gebiroli), sym. mystery-poem, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1975; Mtsukhris lotsvani [Evening Prayers] (cant., Lao-Dzi), chorus, orch, 1986; 2 lotsva [2 Prayers] (Bible: Psalms 32 and 122), chorus, chbr orch

Orch: Adamiani da zgra [Man and the Sea], sym. poem, 1971; Vechernïye molitvï [Evening Prayers], chbr orch, 1975; Conc, gui, str, 1978; Sym., 1980; Conc, pf, vc, brass insts, 1981; Serenada-kontserti [Concerto Serenade], vn, str, 1983; Mokhetiale suli, 1994 [suite from ballet]; Conc, pf, str, 1995, Ėlegiya, str

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Qnt, 1973; Pf Sonata no.1, 1974; Poėma-dialogi, 4 hn, pf, gui, vc, 1975; Pf Trio no.1 ‘Bizes khsovnas’ [In Memory of Bizet], 1976; Pf Sonata no.2, 1984; Str Qt no.1, 1984; Pf Trio no.2 ‘Romantikuli’, 1989; Str Qt no.2, 1992

Incid music for films and theatre

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Zeyfas: ‘Iosif Bardanashvili’, Kompozitorï soyuznïkh respublik [Composers of the Soviet republics], v (Moscow, 1986)

L. Seturidze: ‘Iosif Bardanashvili’, Byulleten' Gruzmuzinforma (Tbilisi, 1989)

KETEVAN BOLASHVILI

Bardd y Brenin.

(Welsh: ‘The King’s Bard’).

Title adopted by edward Jones (ii).

Bardella, Il.

See Naldi, Antonio.

Bardi, Giovanni de', Count of Vernio

(b Florence, 5 Feb 1534; d Sept 1612). Italian literary critic, poet, playwright and composer. As host to the Camerata and patron of Vincenzo Galilei and Giulio Caccini he gave the main impetus to the movement that led to the first experiments in lyrical and dramatic monody.

1. Life.

Bardi evidently received a good literary education, since he knew both Greek and Latin. His youth, however, is notable mostly for military exploits. In 1553 he served in the war against Siena under Grand Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany and in 1565 under the command of Chiappino Vitelli in the defence of Malta against the Ottoman Empire. He was one of the captains who commanded the infantry sent by Duke Cosimo to help the Emperor Maximilian II defeat the Turks in Hungary. In 1562 he married Lucrezia Salviati, daughter of Piero Salviati. He enjoyed the favour of Grand Duke Francesco I, who depended on him particularly for the organization of court festivities. But when Francesco's brother became grand duke as Ferdinando I in 1587, Bardi, who had endorsed Francesco's marriage to Bianca Capello (of whom Ferdinando disapproved), was replaced in this role by Cavalieri. He nevertheless remained active at court until he was invited to Rome by Pope Clement VIII to become maestro di camera and lieutenant-general of the pontifical guard in 1592. He also maintained cordial links with the court of Duke Alfonso II d'Este in Ferrara, where he was entertained lavishly on several visits in 1583, 1584 and 1590. Bardi's pontifical appointment was renewed by Leo XI, but it was terminated in 1605 by Pope Paul V.

2. Works.

Bardi began to patronize musicians quite early: in about 1563 he sent Vincenzo Galilei, then a lutenist probably in his employ, to study with Zarlino in Venice. Giulio Caccini also enjoyed his sponsorship at an early age. There is evidence that by 1573 noblemen and musicians were coming to his house to make music and probably to talk about it. According to Bardi's son Pietro, his house was always full of the most celebrated men of Florence, and the youth of the city gathered there to be instructed in poetry, music, astrology and other sciences. Caccini later referred to this group as Bardi's Camerata.

A turning-point in the thinking of this circle was marked by the letters to Galilei and Bardi from Girolamo Mei, who had studied every known source about Greek music and whom Galilei had approached in 1572 for help in solving numerous problems in Greek theory. The letters, besides informing them about Greek music, raised questions about the efficacy of modern polyphonic music that radically changed the aesthetic philosophy of the Bardi group. About 1578 Bardi, stirred by Mei's ideas, addressed to Caccini a discourse on ancient music and singing that probably summed up the group's thinking. The first part of the discourse is a compendium of what he had learnt about Greek music from Mei and Galilei; it explains the 27 tunings, the species of octave and the tonoi. With this system and its rich variety he compared the modern modal system of essentially only two species of octave and no variety of pitch. He was critical of imitative contrapuntal music, not only because it juxtaposed several melodies at once but because it disregarded the rhythms of the texts. He wanted all the parts to sing homorhythmically and counselled Caccini to declaim the words as clearly as he could, never altering the natural length of syllables or including excessive passaggi. He urged composers to imitate the Greek poet-singers and limit the range of their melodies to the area of the voice most suitable to an affection and to stay as much as possible around the mese.

Galilei dedicated his Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (Florence, 1581) to Bardi and cast him in the role of preceptor in the conversations that are developed in it between him and Piero Strozzi. These imaginary conversations were a vehicle, as Galilei explained later, for instructing the members of Bardi's circle in the theory of music, particularly concerning tuning systems and the Greek tonoi, which had been misunderstood by Gaffurius and Glarean. The Dialogo went well beyond Bardi's views in its condemnation of polyphony and in the advocacy of monody on the model of the Greeks.

Only a few compositions by Bardi survive: four printed madrigals (one incomplete) and the first soprano part of another in manuscript, though other compositions are mentioned in letters and documents. An oration proposing membership in the Accademia degli Alterati in 1574 testifies that by then he had proved himself in music ‘with artful compositions to such a degree that he surpassed many who practise it as their particular profession’. Bardi's characteristic method is one he described in a letter to Duke Alfonso II d'Este: ‘keeping the line intact’ and ‘attending to the expression of the words and the conceit’ while limiting text repetition to the minimum. Miseri habitator del ciec'averno, in the fourth of the 1589 intermedi, is a distinct attempt to build a piece around the Greek mese in a blend of the ancient diatonic and chromatic Dorian, as well as to exploit cross-relations for expressive purposes.

More than as a composer Bardi made his mark in Florence as a creator of intermedi and other court entertainments. In February 1573 he presented a costly and elaborate work, Mascherata del Piacere e del Pentimento, with a text by Antonio degli Albizzi. He also had a share in the intermedi for the wedding of Vincenzo Gonzaga and Eleonora de' Medici in 1584 as the composer of a madrigal (which is lost) to a text by Giovanni Battista Strozzi the younger, Mentre gli acuti dardi. He was the author of L'amico fido, the central play, and the composer of the fifth intermedio for the marriage of Virginia, daughter of Cosimo de' Medici, and Cesare d'Este in 1586. He directed and apparently conceived the allegorical theme around the powers of music for the intermedi in honour of the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinando and Christine of Lorraine in May 1589 and even planned the protocol for the ceremony and processions. He also wrote the poetry for the opening song, by Harmony, in the first intermedio and for the madrigal E noi con questa bella nostra diva Anfitrite in the fifth. A prose comedy in five acts, L'Idropico, written for an unknown occasion, also survives. After his return to Florence from Rome he resumed his activities at court: in 1608 he made arrangements for singers and musicians to perform for the entertainments prepared for the wedding of Prince Cosimo de' Medici.

Bardi participated in several academies and their literary debates. In 1574 he was admitted to the Alterati as ‘Il Puro’, with the motto ‘Alterato, io raffino’. He delivered a lecture, In difesa dell'Ariosto, in that academy on 24 February 1583, and his Parere in difesa dell'Ariosto, which he read at the Alterati on 7 February 1585, prompted Francesco Patrizi to enter the quarrel concerning Ariosto and Tasso. Tasso personally answered Bardi in a Discorso (Ferrara, 1595). Bardi was also a member of the Accademia della Crusca; he was admitted on 12 March 1585 and soon became one of its councillors and, on 13 September 1588, the archconsul.

Bardi had at least four sons: Filippo, who became Bishop of Cortona; Cosimo, who became nunzio to Pope Urban VIII and Archbishop of Florence; Alfonso; and Pietro, who addressed a letter to Giovanni Battista Doni in 1634 concerning his father's Camerata and who was four times archconsul of the Accademia della Crusca. In a letter to the Duke of Modena of 24 February 1601 Bardi mentioned a son Fra Anolfo who had then been a friar for 18 years. Another son may have been the Giovanni Bardi who wrote Eorum quae vehuntur in aquis experimenta (Rome, 1614), a commentary on Galileo's discourse on floating bodies (Florence, 1612) usually attributed to the Bardi who is the subject of this article; in it the author claimed to have been a pupil of Galileo.

WORKS

1 madrigal each, 1582⁵ (ed. NewcombMF); 1586²⁰; 1591⁷ (ed. in D.P. Walker: Les fêtes du mariage de Ferdinand de Medicis et de Christine de Lorraine: Florence, 1589, Paris, 1963); Girolamo Montesardo: L'Allegre notti di Fiorenza (Venice, 1608, inc); I-Rvat Vat.Mus.11 (inc.)

1 madrigal, text by G.B. Strozzi the younger, and 5th intermedio for marriage of Virginia de' Medici and Cesare d'Este, 1586, lost

WRITINGS

Discourse addressed to G. Caccini (MS, c1578), I-Rvat; ed. A.F. Gori (with numerous errors) as ‘Discorso mandato a Caccini sopra la musica antica e ’l cantar bene’ in G.B. Doni: Lyra Barberina amphichordos (Florence, 1763), ii, 233–4; ed. and Eng. trans. in Palisca, 1989)

[Discourse on how tragedy should be performed] (MS, c1582, anon., in I-Fn, VII.398, continued in XIX.42; attrib. Bardi and ed., with Eng. trans., in Palisca, 1989, 132–51)

In difesa dell'Ariosto (lecture to Accademia degli Alterati, 24 Feb 1583), I-Fn, VI.168, 50–75v

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Cantagalli and L. Pannella)

NewcombMF

PirottaDO

Anon.: [Oration introducing Bardi to the Accademia degli Alterati, c1574] (MS, I-Fl Ashburnham 559, no.24)

B. de' Rossi: Descrizione del magnificentissimo apparato e de' maravigliosi intermedi (Florence, 1585)

B. de' Rossi: Descrizione dell'apparato, e degl'intermedi fatti per la commedia (Florence, 1589)

P. de’ Bardi: [Letter to G.B. Doni, 16 Dec 1634], ed. in A.M. Bandini: Commentariorum de vita et scriptis J.B. Doni … libri quinque (Florence, 1755), 117–20; repr. in A. Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R), 143–7; Eng. trans. in StrunkSR2, iv, 15–17

N. Pirrotta: ‘Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata’, MQ, xl (1954), 169–89

C.V. Palisca: Girolamo Mei (1519–1594): Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi, MSD, iii (1960, 2/1977)

C.V. Palisca: ‘Musical Asides in the Diplomatic Correspondence of Emilio de' Cavalieri’, MQ, xlix (1963), 339–55; repr. with prefatory note and orig. It. text in C.V. Palisca Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994)

C.V. Palisca: ‘The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory of Dramatic Music’, New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, ed. W.W. Austin (Ithaca, NY, 1968), 9–38; repr. in C.V. Palisca: Studies in the History of Italian Music Theory (Oxford, 1994)

C.V. Palisca: ‘The “Camerata Fiorentina”: a Reappraisal’, Studi musicali, i (1972), 203–36

J.W. Hill: ‘Oratory Music in Florence, I: Recitar Cantando, 1583–1655’, AcM, xlv (1979), 108–36

C.V. Palisca: ‘The Musical Humanism of Giovanni Bardi’, Poesia e musica nell'estetica del xvi e xvii secolo, ed. H. Meyvalian (Florence, 1979), 45–72

T. Carter: ‘L'Allegre noti di Fiorenza (1608)’, Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. A. Morrogh and others (Florence, 1985), 569–79

C.V. Palisca: Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, CT, 1985)

Z. Szweykowski: ‘Pózny renesans w poszukiwaniu idealu muzycznego’, Muzyka, xxx/1 (1985), 3–36; appendix, text of Bardi's discourse to Caccini with Polish trans., 1–38

R. Katz: Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera (New York, 1986)

C.V. Palisca: The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, CT, 1989)

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)

CLAUDE V. PALISCA

Bárdos, Kornél

(b Felsőmindszent, 1 Nov 1921; d Budapest, 8 Nov 1993). Hungarian musicologist. Having attended the Zirc Cistercian Theological College (1940–45) he studied at Budapest University (1945–9), where he took the doctorate with a dissertation on Hungarian literature (1948), and at the Liszt Academy of Music with Kodály, Szabolcsi, Bartha and Lajos Bárdos (1946–50). After teaching at the Miskolc State Music School (1951–5) he was professor at the Budapest State Music School (1955–79). In 1979 he became a research fellow at the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1967 he took the kandidátus degree in musicology with a dissertation on Passion singing in Hungary, which he subsequently enlarged (1975) with the results of new research in Transylvania. His main area of research was Hungarian music of the 15th century to the 18th, especially Protestant vernacular settings; he wrote extensively on the 17th- and 18th-century musical life of Transdanubian cities and residences.

WRITINGS

with K. Csomasz Tóth: ‘Az Eperjesi Graduál: gregorián kapcsolatok’ [The gradual of Eperjes: Gregorian connections], ZT, vi (1957), 165–98 [with Ger. summary]

‘Die Variation in den ungarischen Passionen des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts’, SMH, iv (1963), 289–323

Népzenei jellegű variálásmód a 15–18. századi magyar passiókban [Folklike variation methods in Hungarian Passions of the 15th to 18th centuries] (diss., Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1967); extracts in ‘Harcok a passió éneklése körül Magyarországon’ [Difficulties with Passion singing in Hungary], Theológiai szemle, xiv (1971), 296–303; Ger. trans., enlarged in Volksmusikartige Variierungstechnik in den ungarischen Passionen, 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Budapest, 1975)

with K. Csomasz Tóth: ‘A magyar protestáns graduálok himnuszai’ [The hymns of the Hungarian Protestant graduals], Népzene és zenetörténet, ed. L. Vargyas, iii (Budapest, 1976), 134–256

Pécs zenéje a 18. században [The music of Pécs in the 18th century] (Budapest, 1976) [with Ger. summary]

A tatai Esterházyak zenéje 1727–1846 [The music of the Esterházy court in Tata, 1727–1846] (Budapest, 1978)

Győr zenéje a 17.–18. százabdan [The music of Győr in the 17th and 18th centuries] (Budapest, 1980) [with Ger. summary]

Sopron zenéje a 16.–18. százabdan [The music of Sopron from the 16th century to the 18th] (Budapest, 1984) [with Ger. summary]

Eger zenéje 1687–1787 [The music of Eger, 1687–1887] (Budapest, 1987) [with Ger. summary]

ed.: Magyarország zenetörténete, ii: 1541–1686 [The history of music in Hungary] (Budapest, 1990)

Székesfehérvár zenéje 1688–1892 [The music of Székesfehérvár, 1688–1892] (Budapest, 1993) [with Ger. summary]

VERA LAMPERT

Bárdos, Lajos

(b Budapest, 1 Oct 1899; d Budapest, 18 Nov 1986). Hungarian composer, musicologist and conductor. Together with Kodály, he laid the foundations of 20th-century Hungarian choral music-making. He studied the violin and the viola as a boy. After a year (1918–19) at the technical university he entered the Budapest Academy of Music, where he studied composition with Siklós and then Kodály (1921–5). In 1925 he was engaged as choral conductor and music teacher in a secondary school and a teacher-training college; from 1928 to 1967 he was a professor at the academy, where he reformed the syllabus, emphasizing the training of choral conductors, the teaching of church music history and instruction in music theory and prosody. In 1931 he co-founded the publishing company Magyar Kórus, and served as editor of the music periodical of that name from then until 1950, when it was banned. From 1934 he organized the Enekio Ifúsag (‘Singing Youth’) movement for the music education of the young.

Through his work as a conductor Bárdos raised the standards of Hungarian choral singing to an international level within a few decades. He directed the Cecilia (1926–41), the Palestrina Kórus (1929–33), the Budapesti Kórus (1941–7) and the choir of St Mátyás, Budapest (1942–62), as well as encouraging the development of choral activity in remote areas. His repertory was pioneering: he included choral music from before Palestrina, especially that of Josquin, and promoted new music (he introduced, for example, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms into Hungary). On his tours abroad his purposefulness, vitality and interpretative powers won him considerable acclaim. His compositions, too, were directed towards cultivating Hungarian choral life: they draw on Renaissance polyphony and Hungarian folk music, following in the tradition of Bartók and Kodály. His works, which are models of choral writing, deal sensitively with Hungarian prosody and radiate an inner harmony and vigour.

Bárdos's work as a musicologist began to develop in the 1950s. He had a gift for systematization, which he applied to major studies of Gregorian melody, modal and Romantic harmony, and the analysis of works by Liszt, Bartók and Kodály. Underlying his multifarious activities lay the programme initiated by Bartók and Kodály for the regeneration of Hungarian musical life. In recognition of his work he received the Erkel Prize (1953), the Kossuth Prize (1955), the Bartók-Pásztory Prize (1984) and the titles Merited, and Eminent Artist of the Hungarian People's Republic (1954 and 1970, respectively). He was awarded the Order of the Banner with Laurels in 1984 and the doctorate in musicology in 1985.

WORKS

(selective list)

mystery plays

Nyolc boldogság [The 8 Beatitudes] (V. Dienes), 1926; Hajnalvárás [Waiting for Dawn] (Dienes), 1927; Advent (S. Sík), 1928; Magyar végzet [Hungarian Fate] (Dienes), 1931; Rózsák szentje [The Saint of Roses] (Dienes), 1932; A gyermek útja [The Way of the Child] (Dienes), 1935; Az anya [The Mother] (Dienes), 1937; Szent Imre (Dienes), 1938; Árpádházi Szent Margit [St Margaret of the House of Árpád] (G. Ujházy), 1938; Mi lesz velünk? [What will become of us?] (Dienes), 1938; Alexius (Sík), 1946

choral

With insts: A nyúl éneke [Song of the Rabbit] (F. Jankovich), double chorus, 3 timp, 1946; Körtánc [Roundelay] (E. Rossa), chorus, orch, 1952

Mixed vv: Népdalkórusok [Folk Song Choruses], 4 vols., 1933; Széles a Duna [Wide is the Danube], 1937; Szeged felől [From Szeged], 1938; A földhez [To Earth] (F. Kölcsey), 1951; Tilinkós [The Shepherd's Pipe], 1951; Ungaresca, 1951; 70 év [70 Years] (S. Weöres), 1952; Elmúlt a tél [Winter is Gone] (Weöres), 1953; Kossuth Suite, 1953; Az nem lehet [It Cannot Be] (J. Arany), 1955; Jeremiás siralma [Jeremiah's Lament], 1956

Ének a dalról [Song about Singing] (G. Juhász), 1956; A madár fiaihoz [The Bird to his Sons] (M. Tompa), 1957; A munka [Work] (Juhász), 1962; Tűz-szivárvány [Fire-Rainbow] (L. Nagy), 1963; Óda az igazsághoz [Ode to Justice] (D. Kosztolányi), 1965; Énekeljetek [Sing!] (I. Pákolitz), 1967; Ezekiel látomása [Ezekiel’s Vision] (I. Jobbágy), 1967; A dal titka [Secret of Song] (M. Babits), 1972; Zrínyi-ének [Zrínyi's Song], 1972; Bartók (L. Bóka), 1975; Új Vazul éneke [New Vazul Song] (E. Ady), 1975; Az úr érkezése [The Arrival of the Lord] (Ady), 1977; Cantemus (Bárdos, L. Lukin), 1977; Zrínyi harmadik éneke [Zrínyi's 3rd Song] (S. Sík), 1978; Mandulafa [Almond Tree] (J. Pannonius, S. Weöres), 1983; Erkel szózata [Erkel's Hymn] (M. Vörösmarty), 1985

Equal vv: Kicsinyek kórusa [Choruses for Little Ones], i–iii, 1934–52; Megütik a dobot [The Drum is Sounded], 1936; Liszt Ferenchez [To Ferenc Liszt], 1936; Dana-dana [Sing-Song], 1940; Magos a rutafa [The Rue Tree is Full of Seeds], 1941; 20 Choruses, 1963; Négy földrész [4 Continents] (L. Lukin), 1963; Tavunga, 1964; Bartók emlékére [To the Memory of Bartók] (L. Bóka), 1965; Ne félj! [Don't Be Afraid] (S. Weöres), 1967; Nyári vasárnap [Summer Sunday] (M. Radnóti), 1978; Kifehérszik az ég [The Sky Turns White] (É. Finta), 1981; Szeresd hazádat! [Love your Country!] (B. Reviczky), 1985; other choruses, songs, canons, folksong arrs.

Sacred: Missa prima, 1925, Missa secunda, 1934; Missa, 1937, Missa, a, 1938; Missa tertia, 1944; Szent Adalbert miséje Missa quarta, 1962; Magyar Népmise [Hung. Folk Mass], 1985; other works incl. motets and psalms

other works

Str Qt, 1925; pieces for vn, vc, pf etc, songs, folksong arrs., vocal exercises

Principal publishers: Editio Musica, Magyar Kórus

WRITINGS

‘Natürliche Tonsysteme’, Studia memoriae Belae Bartók sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956; Eng. trans. 1959), 209–48

Modális harmóniák (Budapest, 1961)

Harminc írás 1929–1969 [30 writings] (Budapest, 1969)

Bartók dallamvilágából [On Bartók's melodic world] (Budapest, 1970)

A Bartók-zene stíluselemei az egyneműkarok és a Mikrokozmosz alapján [Elements of Bartók's musical style in the choral works for equal voices and Mikrokosmos] (Budapest, 1972)

Tíz ujabb írás 1969–1974 [Ten new writings] (Budapest, 1974)

Liszt Ferenc, a jövő zenésze [Liszt, the renewer of music] (Budapest, 1976)

Zenei prozódia [Musical prosody] (Budapest, 1976)

Bartók-dallamok és a népzene [Bartók's melodies and folk music] (Budapest, 1977)

‘Modalen Harmonien in den Werken von Franz Liszt’, Franz Liszt: Beiträge von ungarischen Autoren, ed. K. Hamburger (Budapest, 1978), 133–66

‘Die volkmusikalische Tonleitern bei Liszt’, ibid., 168–96

Selected Writings on Music, trans. A. Farkas and K. Ittzés (Budapest, 1984)

Írások népzenénkrôl [Writings on Hungarian folk music] (Budapest, 1988)

Elemzô írások a zenérôl I, ed. M. Mohay (Budapest, 1994) [musical analyses]

Other publications, incl. folksong edns.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Sárközy: ‘Néhány szó Bárdos Lajos művészetéről’ [A few words on Bárdos's music], Új zenei szemle, iv/10 (1953), 3–6

Z. Kodály: ‘Dreizehn junge Komponisten’, A zene mindenkié, ed. A. Szőllősy (Budapest, 1956)

I. Fábián: ‘Bárdos Lajos, a zenetudós’ [Bárdos the musicologist], Muzsika, xii/9 (1969), 14 only

J. Mátyás: ‘Bárdos Lajos: pályámról, munkámról’ [Bárdos: on my career, on my work], Magyar zene, xv (1974), 364–72

I. Raics: ‘Bárdos Lajos zeneszerzői világa’ [The compositions of Bárdos], Muzsika, xvii/10 (1974), 1–3

L. Somfai: ‘A tudós köszöntése’ [Congratulations to the musicologist], Muzsika, xvii/10 (1974) 4–6

M. Szabó: ‘Bárdos Lajos, a karmester’ [Bárdos the conductor], Muzsika, xvii/10 (1974), 6–8

Kóta, no.8 (1989) [Bárdos issue]

J. Mátyás, ed.: Hány színe van az életnek? [How many colours does life have?] (Budapest, 1996) [interviews with Bárdos]

Bárdos Lajos emlékkonferencia: Budapest 1996 [Bárdos memorial conference],

MELINDA BERLÁSZ

Bareia

[bareiai diplai]. Sign used in pairs in Byzantine Ekphonetic notation.

Barenboim, Daniel

(b Buenos Aires, 15 Nov 1942). Israeli pianist and conductor. He was first taught by his parents and made his début as a pianist in Buenos Aires when he was seven. In 1951 the family moved to Europe where he played at the Salzburg Mozarteum, and thence to Israel. Back in Salzburg in 1954, he met Edwin Fischer and Furtwängler, both major influences on his future career. Studies at the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome and with Boulanger completed his education.

Barenboim made his British début as a soloist in 1955 and his American début two years later, and first conducted, in Israel, in 1962. From 1964 he worked for some years with the English Chamber Orchestra as conductor and pianist, recording with them symphonies by Mozart and Haydn, and a series of Mozart piano concertos. Meanwhile he began an international career as a conductor. He directed the South Bank Summer Festival in London (1968–70) in company with a group of musicians that included Zukerman, Perlman and Jacqueline Du Pré, whom he had married in 1967. At this period he played much chamber music and accompanied Janet Baker and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (with whom he made many illuminating recordings of Schubert and Wolf). He was chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris from 1975 to 1989, was appointed music director of the Chicago SO (succeeding Solti) in 1991 and has become a regular guest conductor with the Berlin PO. While concentrating on the central Classical and Romantic repertory, he has also been a firm advocate of new music, giving premières of works by Berio, Boulez, Carter, Goehr and Henze, among others.

Barenboim’s experience as an opera conductor began at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973 with Don Giovanni, a performance subsequently recorded, followed by Le nozze di Figaro there in 1975. In 1978 he undertook Samson et Dalila at the Orange Festival, also recording the work. In 1981 he was invited to the Bayeuth Festival for Tristan und Isolde, followed by Parsifal in 1987. He conducted Harry Kupfer’s new staging of the Ring in 1988 and continued to conduct at Bayreuth throughout the 1990s. His acclaimed Ring there has been recorded live, while studio recordings of Tristan and Parsifal have been widely praised for their nobility and masterly control of pacing. After his engagement to become music director of the new Opéra Bastille in Paris proved abortive for political reasons, he was appointed director of the Berlin Staatsoper in 1993. In that post he has conducted a wide repertory, most notably of German works, of which his Wozzeck, Elektra (both recorded), Doktor Faust and Die Zauberflöte have been particularly admired. He conducted the première of Carter's What Next in 1999, and of Birtwistle's The Last Supper in 2000.

His interpretations of both opera and the orchestral repertory lay emphasis on freedom of expression, allowing for many changes in tempo and a careful disclosure of detail. His conducting of Mozart, eschewing period instruments, is warm and vital, if slightly Romantic by late 20th-century standards. He is a searching, intensely dramatic interpreter of Bruckner, whose later symphonies he has recorded. Barenboim’s recordings, as a pianist, of the Mozart and Beethoven concertos (the latter with Klemperer) and the complete Beethoven sonatas, all made when he was young, are distinguished by their flexibility, spontaneity and quick sensitivity, as are more recent discs of the Mozart concertos and the keyboard works of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. His autobiography, A Life in Music, was published in London in 1991. (A. Blyth: ‘Daniel Barenboim’, Opera , xlv (1994), 905–10)

ALAN BLYTH

Barenboym, Lev Aronovich

(b Odessa, 18/31 Jan 1906; d Leningrad, 25 June 1985). Russian musicologist, pianist and teacher. He studied the piano with G.M. Biber and composition with V.A. Zolotaryov at the Odessa Conservatory (1920–25) and mathematics at Odessa University (1922–5). He later completed his musical studies with F. Blumenfel'd at the Moscow Conservatory (1925–30). He taught in a music school in Odessa (1923–5), and worked at the Moscow Central School of Music from 1930 and in the Moscow Music Department of the Commissariat for Public Education (1930–31). Concurrently he was deputy chairman of the piano and methodology section of the State Institute for Musical Sciences in Moscow. From 1931 to 1939 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where he ran a class for the piano and the methodology of piano teaching. He was appointed senior scientific officer at the Science Research Institute for Music attached to the Moscow Conservatory in 1933 and was a senior lecturer at the Moscow Institute for Raising the Professional Skills of Teachers (1934–9). In 1940 he gained the Kandidat degree with a dissertation entitled Vospitaniye muzïkanta-ispolnitelya v svete problem, postavlennïkh sistemoy K.S. Stanislavskogo (The education of the musician-performer in the light of the problems posed by the Stanislavsky system).

During World War II, Barenboym was evacuated to Tashkent with the Leningrad Conservatory (1941), where he worked as head of the education section. After returning to Leningrad in 1944, he continued teaching at the conservatory as senior lecturer and was instrumental in forming a department for the history and theory of piano playing and teaching, of which he was head from 1949 to 1973. He gained the doctorate in 1956 with a dissertation on the life, work and public duties of Anton Rubinstein, and in 1958 was appointed professor at the Leningrad Conservatory.

Barenboym was a major figure in Russian musical culture, a fine musician with a keen and sensitive ear and an erudite scholar. He was one of the founders of the trend in Russian musicology that was devoted to the history and theory of performing. A prolific writer, he worked productively in the area of general musical education and training, piano teaching and methodology, and as a critic of performance practice. His book on piano methodology (1937) and the anthology on the history of Russian piano music (1949) are important works on these subjects. For decades he regularly published analytical articles and creative portraits of performers in the journal Sovetskaya muzïka (many of these are included in collections of Barenboym's articles). He also co-edited a collection of piano pieces for beginners (1969–70), which embodies his teaching principles and has become part of the standard training repertory for children. In addition, with B.S. Dimentman, Barenboym initiated the publication by the Soviet section of the ISME of the series Muzïkal'noye vospitaniye v XX veke (Music education in the 20th century). He also advocated the introduction of the creative methods of Orff and Kodály into Russian music education.

WRITINGS

Fortepiannaya pedagogika [Piano teaching] (Moscow, 1937)

ed., with V.I. Muzalevsky: Khrestomatiya po istorii fortepiannoi muzïki v Rossii [An anthology on the history of piano music in Russia] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949)

ed.: Anton Grigor'yevich Rubinshteyn: izbrannïye pis'ma [A.G. Rubinstein: selected letters] (Moscow, 1954)

Anton Grigor'yevich Rubinshteyn: zhizn', artisticheskiy put', tvorchestvo i muzïkal'no-obshchestvennaya deyatel'nost' s 1829 po 1867 g. [A.G. Rubinstein: his life, artistic career, creative work and public duties in music from 1829 to 1867] (diss., 1956; Leningrad, 1957–62)

Fortepianno-pedagogicheskye printsipï F.M. Blumenfel'da [F.M. Blumefel'd’s pedagogic principles for the piano] (Moscow, 1964)

Na urokakh Antona Rubinshteyna [At A. Rubinstein's lessons] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964)

Voprosï fortepiannoy pedagogiki i ispolnitel'stva [Questions of piano teaching and performance] (Leningrad, 1969)

ed., with S.S. Lyakhovitskaya: Sbornik fortepiannïkh p'yes, ėtyudov i ansambley, dlya nachinayushchikh [Anthology of piano pieces, exercises and harmonies for beginners] (Leningrad, 1969–70)

Put' k muzitsirovaniyu [The path towards making music] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1973, 2/1979)

Muzïkal'naya pedagogika i ispolnitel'stvo [Music teaching and performance] (Leningrad, 1974)

ed.: Ėlementarnoye vospitaniye po sisteme K. Orfa [Elementary training according to the Orff system] (Moscow, 1978)

ed.: Muzïkal'noye vospitaniye v SSSR [Music education in the USSR] (Moscow, 1978–85)

ed., with N. Fishman: L.V. Nikolayev: stat'i i vospominaniya sovremennikov: pis'ma k 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya [Articles and reminiscences of his contemporaries: letters for the 100th anniversary of his birth] (Leningrad, 1979)

Nikolay Grigor'yevich Rubinshteyn: istoriya zhizni i deyatel'nosti [N.G. Rubinstein: the history of his life and work] (Moscow, 1982)

ed.: Muzïkal'noye vospitaniye v Vengrii [Music education in Hungary] (Moscow, 1983)

ed.: A.G. Rubinshteyn: literaturnoye naslediye v tryokh tomakh [A.G. Rubinstein: literary heritage] (Moscow, 1983–6)

Ėmil' Gilel's: tvorcheskiy portret [Gilels: a creative portrait] (Moscow, 1986, 2/1990)

Za polveka: ocherki, stat'i, materialï [For a half century: essays, articles and materials] (Leningrad, 1989)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Gakkel': :‘Muzïkant-uchyonïy’ [The musician-scholar], SovM (1977), no.4, pp.84–6

‘Pamyati ushedshikh (nekrolog)’ [To the memory of the departed (obituary)], SovM (1985), no.12, pp.132–3

G. Kimelis: ‘Pianistu veka – posmertno’ [For the pianist of the century – posthumously], MAk (1992), no.2, pp.213–14 [review of Barenboym's book about Gilels]

ADA BENEDIKTOVNA SCHNITTKE

Bärenreiter.

German firm of music publishers. It was founded in 1924 in Augsburg by Karl Vötterle, a bookshop assistant, then only 21 years old. Vötterle named the firm after the star Alkor (‘Bärenreiter’ or ‘Reiterlein’) in the constellation of the Great Bear. The firm’s beginnings are closely associated with the musical youth movement then current in Germany. Vötterle’s interest in folksong and his collaboration with the folksong researcher and singer Walther Hensel (an alias for Dr Julius Janiczek, 1887–1956), whose Finkensteiner Blätter was the firm’s first publication, formed the basis of much of Bärenreiter’s early work. The first years were characterized by the rapid growth of the Singbewegung, organized into the Finkensteiner Bund and developed by Vötterle; the movement was intended to revive musical interest and provide musical education for amateurs. The publication of folksong editions, beginning with the Finkensteiner Blätter, and later larger anthologies such as the Bruder Singer, characterized the early policy of the young firm. There also appeared song settings by composers such as Dowland, Hans Leo Hassler and Lechner. The firm’s first music periodical was Singgemeinde, edited by Konrad Ameln. Already at that time Bärenreiter sought an involvement in the revival movement in German musicology, which during the 1920s was closely linked to the youth movement. An annotated edition of J.N. Forkel’s 1802 biography, Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke (1924), was one of the firm’s first musicological publications.

An important step forward was made when Wilibald Gurlitt entrusted the firm with the publication of the report on the first Freiburg organ conference in 1926. As a result of this publication and of the association of Christhard Mahrenholz with the firm, Bärenreiter quickly grew to become the leading publisher of the Orgelbewegung and a specialist publisher of organ music and research material in the form of books by Klotz, Mahrenholz and others. In 1926, as its first purely musicological enterprise, Bärenreiter took over the publication of the series produced by the Königsberg and Tübingen musical institutes, followed later by those of Erlangen, Greifswald, Heidelberg, Jena and Münster. In 1927 the firm moved to Kassel; at that time its output comprised about 200 publications covering many aspects of music and music literature. The following five years brought further rapid growth and an extension in its publishing activity; in 1929 Vötterle founded the periodical Musik und Kirche. The rediscovery by the choirs of the musical youth movement of the works of Heinrich Schütz, with the corresponding new editions published by Bärenreiter, the discussions in Musik und Kirche, and the subsequent founding of the active Neue Schütz-Gesellschaft in 1930 by Vötterle, Ludwig, Mahrenholz and H.J. Moser, gave a decisive impetus to the revival of Protestant church music.

In the Nazi period Bärenreiter’s development was interrupted as Vötterle and his colleagues were not allowed to follow their original ideals. The Finkensteiner Bund was dissolved in 1933, and in its place Vötterle, together with Richard Baum, founded the Arbeitskreis für Hausmusik. In 1935 the firm was threatened with complete closure when Vötterle was excluded from the Reichspressekammer. As a result all religious printing had to be suspended: it was continued by the Johannes Stauda publishing firm under the direction of Paul Gümbel. Stauda became the publishers of the Evangelische Michaelsbruderschaft, which aimed at a church revival; to the Reichspressekammer church music did not count as religious printing and was therefore able to make relatively undisturbed progress in spite of the anti-Christian tendencies of the time. In 1932 Bärenreiter began to publish works by Hugo Distler, beginning with his op.5. Distler’s church music opened up for Bärenreiter the new category of modern church music, which it particularly cultivated in the following years.

In the spheres of secular choral music, songbooks, domestic music and chamber music, the firm’s output also increased, with many publications in the period 1933–44. The practical revival of early music led to the reintroduction of early instruments, and Bärenreiter encouraged such developments with literature on the instruments and their technique, sometimes actually making instruments (notably recorders). It also began publishing orchestral and wind music, and an opera section was initiated with some works by early composers, predominantly Handel. Facsimile reprints and works of original research of all kinds appeared. Bärenreiter participated in Reichsdenkmäler, with the series Einstimmige Werke and Mittelalter, and in Landschaftsdenkmäler, devoted to various constituent states of Germany. Complete editions of the works of Gluck, Monteverdi, Pergolesi, Schein, Spohr and Walter, and selected editions of Telemann and Handel were prepared and begun, mostly in collaboration with the Staatliche Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung.

In March 1945 the firm’s buildings, all of its departments and nearly all of its stock were destroyed by fire. Vötterle and most of his closer colleagues survived the war, and gradually the firm was reorganized. In 1946 the Arbeitskreis für Hausmusik organized its first postwar Werkwoche. This organization was renamed Arbeitskreis für Haus- und Jugendmusik in 1952 and in 1969 became the Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Musik, which is now responsible for over 70 annual courses of musical instruction and the Kasseler Musiktage (to 1974). Also in 1946 Vötterle opened the Bärenreiter second-hand bookshop which specialized in music and musicology. In 1947 he took part in the founding of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, whose works were published by the firm in the periodical Die Musikforschung and in the book series Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten. In the same year the periodical Musik und Kirche restarted (with volume xviii), together with the independent Der Kirchenchor and the new Musica, covering all aspects of music. In 1948 appeared Die neue Schau, a cultural family periodical, and Hausmusik. In June 1949 the first fascicle of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) appeared, edited by Friedrich Blume, having been in preparation since 1942. In 1968 the alphabetical sequence was completed, in 14 volumes, and supplementary fascicles (in two volumes) subsequently appeared up to 1979, followed by an index (1986). A second revised edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher, was begun in 1994.

During the early 1950s the firm began to publish a number of important complete or collected editions, music series and a considerable amount of important musicological literature, notably Acta musicologica and Fontes artis musicae, both from 1954 on. Their postwar publications have included volumes of RISM (series A and C), the series Documenta Musicologica and Catalogus Musicus, complete and collected editions of numerous composers (often in conjunction with various music institutions) including Johann Walter (i), Telemann, Gluck, Bach, Gade, Lechner, Handel, Mozart, Rhau, Berlioz, Berwald, Lassus, Schein, Schubert, Schütz and Janáček. Important series of musical editions include volumes of Das Erbe Deutscher Musik (1936–), Schweizerische Musikdenkmäler (1955) and Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi (1956). The firm has also published collections of letters, iconography, yearbooks, congress reports, treatises on instrumental technique and manufacture, as well as works by contemporary composers, including Heinrich Kaminski, Ernst Krenek, Karl Marx, Siegfried Reda, Ernst Pepping and Johannes Driessler. To these may be added members of the younger generation of composers who have been influenced by the Second Viennese School and the avant garde, such as Jean Barraqué, Günter Bialas, Klaus and N.A. Huber, Erhard Karkoschka, Rudolf Kelterborn, Giselher Klebe, George Lopez, Dicter Mack, Matthias Pintscher, Charlotte Seither, Ulrich Streuz, Dimitris Terzakis, Manfred Trojahn, Gerhard Wimberger, Heinz Winbeck and many others. In 1950 the new Protestant hymnbook appeared, after years in preparation, and a new series of early domestic and chamber music, Hortus Musicus, was started. The Nagels Musik-Archiv series was taken over from the Nagel firm and continued in 1952, followed by Chor-Archiv (1953), Flötenmusik (1956), miniature scores (1959), Violoncello (1960), Musica Sacra Nova (1964), Das 19. Jahrhundert (1969), Concerto Vocale (1971), Urtext editions, study scores and a new series of Hausmusik (1986). More recently, pedagogical works have also become an important part of the firm’s output.

Today Bärenreiter, following large-scale postwar expansion, is international in organization and repute. It now owns not only Nagel but also, since 1950, the Hinnenthal. The Alkor-Edition was founded in Kassel in 1955, as an offshoot of the Bruckner publishing firm in Wiesbaden; it is now mainly concerned with theatre music publishing, especially opera. Bärenreiter was also the first great German publishing house to produce its own gramophone records (Musicaphon, 1959). Independent affiliates have been set up in Basle (1944), London (1957, independent since 1963; removed to Hitchin, 1977), New York (1957) and Prague (1990).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Vötterle: Haus unterm Stern: ein Verleger erzählt (Kassel, 1949, 4/1969)

Bärenreiter im Bild (Kassel, 2/1968)

R. Baum and W. Rehm, eds.: Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag (Kassel, 1968)

H.-M. Plesske: ‘Bibliographie des Schrifttums zur Geschichte deutscher und österreichischer Musikverlage’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, iii (1968), 135–222

A.M. Gottschick, ed.: Bärenreiter-Chronik: die ersten 50 Jahre, 1923–1973 (Kassel, 1973)

H. Bennwitz and others, eds.: Musikalisches Erbe und Gegenwart: Musiker-Gesamtausgaben in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Kassel, 1975)

RICHARD BAUM, DIETRICH BERKE

Barera [Barrera], Rodiano [Ahrodiano]

(b Cremona, mid 16th century; d Cremona, 25 Sept 1623). Italian composer, active in Cremona. His first known employment was as maestro di cappella in the collegiate church of S Agata, Cremona. In 1592 he became maestro di cappella at Cremona Cathedral, and four years later his duties at the cathedral were extended with his appointment as ‘maestro di cappella for the Saturday devotions’ or laudi. He remained in these posts until 1622.

Barera’s madrigals are characterized by traditional 16th-century procedures, with limited use of innovatory techniques. Particular emphasis is laid on clarity of the text. Settings are syllabic and largely homorhythmic and there is frequent use of antiphonal dialogue between groups of voices. Barera’s church music perhaps reflects his specific duties at Cremona cathedral. His Laudes in honorem B. V. Mariae were probably conceived for use during the Saturday devotions. The psalms are intended for the principal feasts of the liturgical year; they, too, are essentially syllabic and homorhythmic.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1596)

Laudes in honorem BVM, 8vv, org (Venice, 1620), inc.

Sacra omnium solemnitatum vespertina psalmodia cum BVM cantico, 4vv (Venice, 1622)

Madrigals in 1588¹⁷, ed. H.B. Lincoln, L’amorosa Ero (New York, 1968); 1591¹²; 1596¹¹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Pontiroli: ‘Notizie di musicisti cremonesi dei secoli XVI e XVII’, Bolletino storico cremonese, xxii (1961–4), 149–92

A. Sgaria: Rodiano Barera e la vita musicale a Cremona intorno al 1600 (thesis, Scuola di paleografia e filologia musicale, Cremona, 1990–91)

G. Sommi-Picenardi: Dizionario biografico dei musicisti e fabbricatori di strumenti musicali, ed. C. Zambelloni (Turnhout, 1997)

SERENA DAL BELIN PERUFFO

Barere [Barer], Simon

(b Odessa, 20 Aug/1 Sept 1896; d New York, 2 April 1951). American pianist of Ukrainian birth. The 11th of 13 children, he received his early musical instruction at the hands of two of his elder brothers and later under the supervision of a neighbour. By the age of 11, after the death of his father, he was able to help support his family by playing for silent films, night-clubs and restaurants.

At 16 he played for Glazunov in St Petersburg and was accepted at the conservatory there, studying first with Anna Yesipova and later with Blumenfeld. Barere graduated in 1919 and was awarded the Rubinstein Prize. The remarkable development of his natural gifts during this period was to lead Glazunov to observe that ‘Barere is Franz Liszt in one hand and Anton Rubinstein in the other’. Barere’s progress was all the more remarkable in that his personal circumstances (he still supported his family by playing in restaurants) permitted him relatively little time for practice.

After graduation he combined the career of a travelling virtuoso with that of professor of piano at the Kiev Conservatory. The political climate at the time prevented him from touring outside the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1928, when he was sent as a cultural ambassador to the Baltic republics and Scandinavia, that he was able to move to Riga. Four years later he moved with his young son and his wife, fellow St Petersburg student Helen Vlashek whom he had married in 1920, to Berlin. After initial successes the growing persecution of the Jewish community forced him to flee from there to Sweden. Following his successful British début at the Aeolian Hall, London, in 1934, Barere signed a recording contract with HMV, for whom he recorded many of the works with which his name was to become closely associated: Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan and Rhapsodie espagnole, Balakirev’s Islamey, Blumenfeld’s Etude for the Left Hand and other virtuoso items by Glazunov, Skryabin, Liszt and Godowsky. As well as demonstrating Barere’s astonishing virtuosity, these recordings also testify to his extraordinary delicacy and the consistent tonal beauty of his playing throughout a wide dynamic range. Equally, his playing of works by Chopin evidences breathtaking technical command together with rare poetic nobility.

After an acclaimed American début in November 1936, Barere and his family moved to the USA, which was to remain his base. Tours of Australia, New Zealand and South America, as well as his successes in the USA, served to consolidate his reputation as one of the foremost artists of the day. He died suddenly as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage during his first performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto in a concert at Carnegie Hall.

CHARLES HOPKINS

Baretti, Giuseppe (Marc’Antonio)

(b Turin, 25 April 1719; d Marylebone, London, 5 May 1789). Italian man of letters. His Fetonte sulle rive del Po was set by G.A. Giai (1750, Turin). In January 1751 he left Italy, where he had a considerable literary reputation, for an appointment at the Italian Opera in London. Shortly after his arrival he wrote two facetious pamphlets relating to a dispute between the actors and the lessee of the Opera. He adapted selected odes of Horace as a sort of Masonic oratorio. Seeking a composer able to avoid the vocal clichés and long ritornellos of Italian opera and ‘to temper alternately the solemnity of church music with the brilliancy of the theatrical’, Baretti chose Philidor, with whom he discussed ‘every syllable … with respect to the best way of expressing musically the meaning of Horace’. Carmen saeculare was performed in London in 1779 and in Paris the year after. Baretti wrote in his copy of Johnson’s Letters that it ‘brought me a hundred and fifty pounds in three nights, and three times as much to Philidor. … It would have benefited us both (if Philidor had not proved a scoundrel) greatly more than those sums’.

WRITINGS

Projet pour avoir un Opéra Italien à Londres dans un goût tout nouveau (London, 1753)

La voix de la discorde, ou La bataille des violons (London, 1753)

Katarinae Aug. Piae Felici Ottomannicae Tauricae Musagetae Q. Horatii Flacci Carmen saeculare lyricis concentibus restitutum A.D. Philidor D.D.D. (London, 1778)

The Introduction to the Carmen Seculare (London, 1779)

MS notes in a copy of H.L. Piozzi, ed.: Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (London, 1788), GB-Lbl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (M. Fubini)

L.C. Morley: Giuseppe Baretti: with an Account of his Literary Friendships and Feuds in Italy and in England in the Days of Dr. Johnson (London, 1909)

G.C. Rossi: ‘Un “don Chisciotte in Venezia” de Giuseppe Baretti’, Anales cervatinos, xviii (1979–80), 211–17

IAIN FENLON

Bar form

(Ger. Barform).

A term denoting in musicology the three-part form AAB. The sections are called first Stollen (pes; A), second Stollen (pes; A), together forming the Aufgesang (frons), and Abgesang (cauda; B). German terms are normally retained because the concept of bar form was first introduced into musical terminology through Lorenz’s investigations into the form of Wagner's works. It is based on an incorrect use of the word ‘Bar’ in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In Act 3 scene ii Walther von Stolzing sings the first stanza of his Prize Song, which has AAB form. Hans Sachs then sings: ‘Das nenn’ ich mir einen Abgesang! Seht, wie der ganze Bar gelang! … Jetzt richtet mir noch einen zweiten Bar’. Bar here means ‘a tripartite stanza’. In this Wagner was not in full accord with the terminology of the German Meistersinger of the 15th to 18th centuries from whom the word comes.

In the work of the Meistersinger, a Bar is not a single stanza – that was called Liet or (from the 16th century) Gesätz – but the whole song. The most important formal characteristics of a Bar in the Meistersinger tradition were: (1) it always had an uneven number of stanzas, at least three; (2) the stanzas had to be written according to a previously determined model, one of the Töne (see Ton (i)) allowed by the Meistersinger guilds. The Töne of the Meistersinger were always constructed, both musically and metrically, according to the AAB scheme or some version of this scheme (see below: see also Meistergesang for Hans Folz's Veilchenweise). The concepts Stollen, Aufgesang and Abgesang also come from the terminology of the Meistersinger.

The word ‘Bar’ is probably a shortened form of Barat, a word taken from the language of fencing and denoting a skilful thrust. The Meistersinger used the word to designate a particularly artful song. The short form Bar (in the sense of Meisterlied) was perhaps intended to distinguish the artistry of the Meistersinger from the artless songs of those who were not Meistersinger. The modern concept of bar form is therefore, etymologically considered, an error; but it can scarcely be erased from musicological terminology. Literary historians have not adopted the concept: they normally designate the AAB form with the (equally questionable) term ‘canzona form’ (Kanzonenform).

AAB form can exist in various ways. The most important possibilities are as follows: (1) AA/B, (2) ABAB/CB, (3) AA/BA, (4) AA/BB/A, (5) AA/BB/C, (6) AA/BB. These forms are taken from medieval German song, but are also more generally applicable. The following designations may be suggested: (1) Kanzone (canzona), (2) Rundkanzone (rounded canzona), (3) Kanzone with non-repeated bridge and a third Stollen (bridge – Steg – being the term used by Meistersinger for the section joining the Aufgesang either to the repeated Stollen at the end of the Abgesang, which is in turn called third Stollen, or to a new final section), (4) Kanzone with repeated bridge and third Stollen, (5) Kanzone with repeated bridge, (6) Kanzone with repeated Abgesang.

It can be shown that, in medieval song, forms (2) to (6) are unquestionably variants of the basic AAB form. This statement contradicts the (unconvincing) attempt by Gennrich to derive forms (1) and (2) from the hymn, but forms (3) to (6) from the sequence, the lai and the Leich. Gennrich thereby arrived at the terms: (1) Kanzone, (2) Rundkanzone (as above), (3) reduzierter Strophenlai (reduced stanzaic lai), (5) Lai-Ende, (6) Lai-Ausschnitt (lai section). He gave no name to (4). Other names suggested include: for (3) Reprisenbarform (bar form with reprise; Gudewill) and da capo form without Schwellenrepetition (non-repeated bridge; Pickerodt-Uthleb); for (4) da capo form with Schwellenrepetition (repeated bridge; Pickerodt-Uthleb); for (5) potenzierte Barform (the Abgesang is itself built in bar form; Gudewill); for (6) Repetitionsform (repeating form; Pickerodt-Uthleb).

The AAB form – one of the most common of all musical form genres – can be documented from the time of the classical Greek ode with its strophe, antistrophe and epode. In the early Middle Ages it can be found in the Gregorian chant repertories and later in many hymns. In a more expanded form it became particularly important in the songs of the Provençal troubadours, the northern French trouvères and the German Minnesinger, Sangspruchdichter and Meistersinger. In Germany it was moreover of paramount importance in the Tenorlied of the 16th century and for the Protestant Kirchenlied. In the more recent history of German song it receded in importance in relation to other form schemes, but saw a significant revival in the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. The importance of bar form for Wagner has been shown exhaustively by Lorenz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (K. Gudewill/J. Rettelbach)

HDM3

A. Lorenz: Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (Berlin, 1924–33/R)

F. Gennrich: Grundriss einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes als Grundlage einer musikalischen Formenlehre des Liedes (Halle, 1932/R)

C. Petzsch: ‘Parat-(Barant-)Weise, Bar und Barform’, AMw, xxviii (1971), 33–43

H. van der Werf: The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: a Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972)

H. Brunner: Die alten Meister: Studien zu Überlieferung und Rezeption der mittelhochdeutschen Sangspruchdichter im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1975)

E. Pickerodt-Uthleb: Die Jenaer Liederhandschrift: metrische und musikalische Untersuchungen (Göppingen, 1975)

J. Rettelbach: Variation – Derivation – Imitation: Untersuchungen zu den Tönen der Sangspruchdichter und Meistersinger (Tübingen, 1993)

HORST BRUNNER

Bargas, Urbán de.

See Vargas, Urbán de.

Barges [Bargues], Antonino [Antonio]

(b Barges; fl 1547–65). Netherlandish composer, active in Italy. In 1550 he was maestro di cappella of the Ca’ Grande, Venice. About 1555 he moved to Treviso, where he took holy orders and lived at the convent of S Francesco. From 1562 to March 1565 he served as choirmaster at Treviso Cathedral. He was a close friend of Willaert, whom he described as ‘the sole inventor of true and good music, who was not only a most diligent teacher but the very best father to me’. He was a witness to Willaert’s last will and testament in 1562.

Although said on the title-page to consist mainly of villottas, Barges’s publication of 1550 in fact contains only six of them. Two in Paduan dialect are specifically described as villotte alla padoana. The remaining four, La manza mia, Facciate alla finestra, La canzon della gallina and Tanto fui tardo, all have dance-like passages in triple metre or patter declamation of nonsense syllables. The collection also includes 12 canzoni villanesche and four four-part madrigals by Andrea Patricio. In his dedication, to the poet Girolamo Fenarolo, Barges asked him to ‘sing these little canzonettas now and then’ with colleagues in Domenico Venier’s literary academy in Venice. Fenarolo had addressed a sonnet to Barges in 1546, expressing gratitude for a gift of some of the composer’s villottas and alluding to his Canzon della gallina with its imitation of a cackling hen.

All Barges’s villanesche are settings of single stanzas in madrigalesque textures: systematic points of imitation built from motives of the borrowed tune and paired voices are hallmarks of his style. When a borrowed tune is quoted literally, it often migrates between the cantus and tenor. Barges’s three ricercars are based on plainchant tenors laid out uniformly in semibreves with no rests. The counterpoint is not imitative and bears no relation to the chant.

WORKS

Il primo libro de villotte, 4vv (Venice, 1550), ded. repr. in Feldman

3 ricercares, 3vv, in 1551¹⁶, ed. in IIM, ii (1994)

2 motets, 4vv, 1563⁴

Requiem, 4vv, and Alleluia Concussum est mare, 4vv, I-TVd

Various works in D-Mbs, GB-Lbl, I-Bc, Fm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

Vander StraetenMPB, vi

G. d’Alessi: La cappella musicale del duomo di Treviso (1300–1633) (Vedelago, 1954)

R. Giazotto: Harmonici concenti in aere veneto (Rome, 1954)

D.G. Cardamone: The ‘Canzone villanesca alla napolitana’ and Related Forms, 1537 to 1570 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

M. Feldman: ‘The Academy of Domenico Venier, Music’s Literary Muse in Mid-Cinquecento Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, xliv (1991), 476–512

DONNA G. CARDAMONE

Bargiel, Woldemar

(b Berlin, 3 Oct 1828; d Berlin, 23 Feb 1897). German composer and conductor. He was the son of Adolph Bargiel, a Berlin music teacher, and his wife Mariane (née Tromlitz) Wieck, who had divorced Friedrich Wieck in 1824 and was the mother of Clara Wieck (Schumann). He learnt the piano, violin and harmony from his father, and was a chorister and solo alto of what was later the cathedral choir. From 1846 to 1850 he studied, on the advice of his brother-in-law Schumann, at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his teachers included Moscheles and Plaidy (piano), David and Joachim (violin), Hauptmann, Richter, Rietz and Gade (theory and composition). Returning to Berlin he developed a reputation as a teacher and composer, and in 1859 became teacher of theory at the Cologne Conservatory. He was Kapellmeister and director of the institute of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst at Rotterdam from 1865 to 1874, when Joachim appointed him teacher of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. In 1875 he became a senator, and in 1876 professor, of the Akademie der Künste, retaining both positions until his death.

As a composer Bargiel was rather an admirer, but not an epigone or imitator, of Schumann. His works were much performed during his lifetime. His pupils included Ernst Rudorff, Paul Juon, Leo Blech, Leopold Godowsky, Peter Raabe and Johannes Wolf. He served, partly in collaboration with Brahms, on the editorial boards of the first Schumann and Chopin editions, and his eight-volume edition of Bach's chorales Johann Sebastian Bach's vierstimmige Kirchengesänge (Berlin, 1891–3) was used well into the 20th century.

WORKS

almost all published, c1850–80

Orch: Sym., C, op.30; Ov. to Prometheus. op.16; Ov. zu einem Trauerspiel (on Romeo and Juliet), op.18; Ov. to Medea, op.22; Intermezzo, op.46; 3 danses allemandes, op.24; Adagio, G, vc, orch, op.38

Chbr: Str Octet, op.15a; 4 str qts, incl. no.3, a, op.15b, no.4, op.47; 3 pf trios, F, op.6, E, op.20, B, op.37; Sonata, f, vn, pf, op.10; Suite, D, pf, vn, op.17

Choral, with orch unless otherwise stated: Ps xcvi, 8vv, op.33; Ps lxi, Bar, 4vv, 1878, op.43; Ps xiii, 4vv, op.25; Ps xxiii, 3 female vv, op.26; 3 Frühlingslieder, 3 female vv, pf, opp.35, 39

Pf 4 hands: Sonata, G, op.23; Suite, C, op.7; Gigue, op.29

Pf solo: Sonata, C, op.34; 3 fantasies, b, op.5, D, op.12, c, op.19; Fantasiestücke, opp.9, 15, 27; 2 suites, opp.21, 31; other characteristic pieces and studies, opp.1–4, 8, 11, 13, 28, 32, 36, 41, 44–5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Deiters: ‘Woldemar Bargiel’, AMZ, new ser., ii (1864), 441–7, 457–65

B. Litzmann: Clara Schumann: ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen (Leipzig, 1902–8/R; Eng. trans., abridged, 1913/R)

J. Joachim and A. Moser, eds.: Briefe von und an Joseph Joachim (Berlin, 1911–13; Eng. trans., abridged, 1913/R)

R. Sietz: ‘Bargiel, Woldemar’, Rheinische Musiker, ii, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1962), 4–7

G. Puchelt: Verlorene Klänge: Studien zur deutschen Klaviermusik 1830–80 (Berlin, 1969)

EDWARD DANNREUTHER/ELISABETH SCHMIEDEL

Bargielski, Zbigniew

(b Łomiża, 21 Jan 1937). Polish composer. He studied the piano in Lublin and composition with Szeligowski at the Warsaw Conservatory (1958–62), with Szabelski at the Katowice Conservatory (1963–4) and with Boulanger in Paris (1966–7).

He served for several years as secretary of the Polish Composers' Union. In 1977 he moved to Austria, and was appointed to teach at the music school at Bruck an der Mur. His awards include the Austrian State Prize for Composition (1986) and the UNESCO Prize (1995).

Bargielski's works of the 1960s show the influence of Polish contemporaries such as Lutosławaki and Górecki in their treatment of orchestral sound-masses. Around 1970 he developed his own method of articulating specific pitch centres within a given section of music. These ‘focal structures’ (Zentrumsstrukturen) – which he regards as a means of guiding the listener's perception – can also be created out of intervals, chords or instrumental timbres. He has made a notable contribution to the accordion repertory. (GroveO, A. Thomas; LZMÖ)

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops (librettos by the composer): Mały książę [The Little Prince] (musical tale, 1, after A. de Saint-Exupéry), 1966, Warsaw, 1970; Alicja w krainie czarów [Alice in Wonderland] (youth op, after L. Carroll), 1971–2, Lublin, 1972; Widma nie kłamia [Phantoms Do Not Lie] (comic op, 3, after S.I. Witkiewicz), 1971–2, rev. 1979 as W małym dworku [In a Little Manor], Wroclaw, 1981

Orch: Sinfonia, 1956; Parady, 1965, rev. as Parady 1970, 1969–70; Conc., perc, orch, 1975; Vn Conc., 1976; Rondo alla polacca, 1983; CHA-ORD, 1990; Requiem für Orchester, 1992; Tpt Conc., 1992; Concertino, pf, chbr orch, 1995; Slapstick, chbr orch, 1997

Works with accdn (solo unless otherwise stated): Nilpferde, 2 accdn, 1979, rev. 1988; Zapferstreich, 3 accdn, perc, 1979, rev. 1988; Traumvogel, accdn, perc, 1980; Gespräch mit einem Schatten, 2 accdn, 1982; Gemalte Wolken, 1982; Abschiednacht, accdn, str qt, 1984, rev. 1995; Schwarzer Spiegel, gui, accdn, 1984; Drei polnische Suiten, 1984; Versunkene Flamme, vn, vc, accdn, 1985; Garten der Leidenschaften, S, b cl/a sax, perc, accdn, 1986; Suite der Tänze und Lieder, 1986; Labyrinth, vc, accdn, 1987; Grazer-Variationen, accdn orch, 1987; Kaleidoskop, 1988; Klangmühle, accdn orch, 1991

Other chbr and solo inst: Neosonatine, vn/va/cl/fl, pf, 1956; Servert, vn/va/vc, pf, perc, 1966; Ein Zimmer, cl, trbn, vc, pf, perc, 1972; Str Qt no.1 ‘Alpejski’, 1976; Schmetterlingskäfig, wind qnt, 1978; Str Qt no.2 ‘Primaverile’, 1980; Vienna G'schichten, 2 pf, 1981; Ikarus, b cl/a sax, perc, 1981; Vier zu eins (Wind Qnt no.2), 1982; Stilleben mit Geschrei (Str Qt no.3), 1985–6; Beethovens Wanderweg zum Fürst Lichnowsky, pf, 1992; Le temps ardent (Str Qt no.4), 1994; Landscape of Remembrance, pf, trio, 1996; Forgotten–Regained, vn, 1996

Vocal: Im Kreis (A. Patey-Grobowska), S, A, Bar, B, Chbr ens, 1969; Es ist noch Nacht, noch ein Laut (abstract text), Mez, orch, 1981; Alptraum (K. Wierzynski), T/Bar, pf, 1982; Sonnelieder (M. Jaroschka), Mez, Bar, B, Chorus, chbr ens, 1983; In Niemansland (orat., Jaroschka, Pss xxiii, cxxxvii), Mez, Bar, mixed chorus, orch, 1989

Principal publisher: Polskie wydawnictwo muzyczne

MIECZYZŁAWA HANUSZEWSKA/R

Bargnani, Ottavio

(b Brescia, ?c1570; d Mantua, after 1627). Italian composer and organist. According to a notice in Canale’s Canzoni da sonare a quattro … libro primo (1600), he was the pupil of Canale, an organist at Brescia. The reference in Canale’s publication indicates that Bargnani’s first book of instrumental canzoni (now lost) predated the Canale volume, although Bargnani had quoted some of Canale’s themes ‘to honour in this way the writings of his master’. Bargnani was still in Brescia in 1599 when he signed the dedication to his book of canzonets, arias and madrigals for three and four voices. In this earliest surviving publication, he included two compositions by Luca Marenzio, probably simply in tribute to the great Brescian composer, although it is possible that he met Marenzio when the latter passed through northern Italy on his return from Poland to Rome in 1597 or 1598. Bargnani served as organist at Salò Cathedral, in Treviso (1605–7), and later in the S Barbara chapel in Mantua (1607–27). On 1 May 1611 he dedicated to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga his second book of instrumental canzoni, on the title-page of which he referred to himself as organist to the duke. He contributed two motets, Domine ne in furore and Domine dominus noster, to a collection published in 1618 containing works by composers in the duke’s service (RISM 1618⁴). On 26 March 1627 he obtained from the duke a pension of 60 scudi.

WORKS

sacred

Motetti, 1–4vv (Venice, 1597); lost, cited in Cozzando

Motets in 1618⁴, 1622²

secular

Canzonette, 4, 8vv (Venice, 1595); lost, cited in Cozzando

Canzonette, arie et madrigali, 3, 4vv (Venice, 1599¹²)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1601)

Secondo libro delle canzoni da suonare a 4, 5, 8 (Milan, 1611)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

SartoriB

L. Cozzando: Libreria bresciana (Brescia, 1694)

P. Guerrini: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Salò’, RMI, xxix (1922), 81–112

STEVEN LEDBETTER

Bargues, Antonino.

See Barges, Antonino.

Bargy, Roy F(rederick)

(b Newaygo, MI, 31 July 1894; d Vista, CA, 16 Jan 1974). American composer and pianist. He began to study piano at the age of five in Toledo, Ohio. By the time he was 17 he had discarded his ambitions to become a concert pianist, having become fascinated with ragtime pianists in Toledo’s red-light district, including the famous exponent of eastern ragtime Luckey Roberts. After playing professionally in cinemas and organizing a dance band, he was engaged in 1919 by the ragtime composer Charley Straight to edit, play, arrange and compose for Imperial Player Rolls. Bargy’s association with Straight led to his acquaintance with the agent Edgar Benson, who assembled a band directed by Bargy to record for Victor. Bargy later joined Isham Jones’s orchestra for two years and, in 1928, began a 12-year association with Paul Whiteman’s band, for which he is best remembered today. Later he served as conductor and arranger for Larry Ross’s radio show, and from 1943 he was music director for Jimmy Durante, a position he held until his retirement 20 years later.

Bargy is noted for his contribution to the ragtime-based style of novelty piano. Like the work of his contemporary Zez Confrey, his compositions may be viewed as advanced rags: he routinely employed 10ths in the bass (a feature more readily associated with early jazz than ragtime), but favoured right-hand patterns found in ragtime of the 1910s, recalling at times the work of Straight and the classic ragtime composer James Scott. Although Bargy’s works are not as ambitious or imaginative as Confrey’s, they represent a charming recasting of the language of midwestern ragtime in the more vivacious mode of the late 1910s and the 1920s.

WORKS

(selective list)

unless otherwise stated, all are printed works for pf published in Cleveland

Rufenreddy (collab. C. Straight) (1921); Slipova (1921); Knice and Knifty (collab. Straight) (1922); Sunshine Caper (1922); Behave Yourself (1922); Jim Jams (1922); Justin-tyme (1922); Pianoflage (1922); Sweet and Tender (Chicago, 1923); A Blue Streak; Omeomy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.A. Jasen: Recorded Ragtime, 1897–1958 (Hamden, CT, 1973)

D.A. Jasen and T.J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978)

DAVID THOMAS ROBERTS

Bari.

Main city of the Apulia region in southern Italy. The first records of musical activity there date from the 11th and 12th centuries, when the Cathedral of S Nicola founded its schola cantorum, still active in training choristers and providing music at the services. There are also records of dramatic performances of the Easter sequence during High Mass; laude and sacre rappresentazioni were performed during the 14th and 15th centuries, following Neapolitan practice and probably imported as a result of the Aragonese domination of the area. The schola cantorum had its finest period between the late 15th century and the early 17th. Music flourished under Isabella of Aragon, who ruled Bari from 1501; she had been brought up at the courts of Aragon and Milan, where music had a prominent place, and she encouraged local musicians, probably also inviting others from Milan and Naples. She was succeeded by her daughter Bona, who ruled until 1557 and offered the city similarly favourable conditions for musical development.

Among prominent maestri di cappella at S Nicola were G.G. de Antiquis (c1574), Stefano Felis (1585), Giovanni de Marinis (1593) and Giuseppe Colaianni (1603). Antiquis published two volumes of Villanelle alla napolitana (Venice, 1574) which contain, besides 13 of his own villanellas, works by 16 other composers employed in Bari, including Felis, Colaianni, Marinis, Simon de Baldis, G.F. Capuano, G.P. Gallo, Pomponio Nenna, C.M. de Pizzolis and Cola Nardo de Monte; the collection testifies to the vitality of the local madrigal school.

At the beginning of the 17th century Bari came under Spanish rule within the jurisdiction of a Neapolitan viceroy; this was detrimental to the musical life of Apulia, and most of the composers born there transferred their activity to the Naples Conservatory, including Giacomo Insanguine, Tommaso Traetta, Niccolò Piccinni, Giacomo Tritto, Giuseppe Millico and Francesco Rossi. Among Apulia’s many distinguished performers Caffarelli and Farinelli were prominent; famous 19th-century composers from the region included Saverio Mercadante and Mauro Giuliani.

Although many musicians left Bari, either by choice or from necessity, the city remained musically active, as indicated by the large number of theatres established there from the 17th century onwards; their history, however, is poorly documented. The privately run Teatro del Torrione di S Scolastica became active in the 17th century, performing ‘comedies in music and in recitative style’. The Teatro del Sedile (references to which date back to the 15th century) presented opera from the beginning of the 19th century, but was declared unsafe and closed in 1835. A new, larger theatre was planned to replace it; until this was officially inaugurated as the Teatro Comunale Piccinni with a performance of Donizetti’s Poliuto in 1854, operas were performed in a circus tent, known because of its shape as the Teatro della Zuppiera (‘soup tureen theatre’). With Italian unification and the ascendancy of the Teatro S Carlo in Naples, the role of the Teatro Comunale Piccinni diminished; the repertory was traditional and the performers mediocre. Popular demand for a new and larger theatre led to the construction of the Politeama Petruzzelli (cap. 4000), the fourth largest theatre in the country, which was inaugurated in 1903 with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. After the death of its first impresario, Antonio Quaranta, in 1928, the quality of performances dropped. From the late 1970s, however, the theatre saw some courageous new ventures, especially in dance. In 1986 it gave Piccinni's Iphigénie en Tauride and revived the original 1835 version of Bellini's I puritani. The following year the company performed a memorable Aida in Egypt, at the foot of the pyramids. On 27 October 1991 a fire completely destroyed the Politeama Petruzzelli.

Bari’s leading musical associations are the Accademia Polifonica Barese (founded 1926), the Antica e Nuova Musica ensemble, the Fondazione Piccinni and the Conservatorio di Musica Niccolò Piccinni (founded 1925).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (G. Bozzo, V. Raeli)

GroveO (P. Moliterni)

RicordiE

G. Petroni: Del Gran Teatro di Bari (Bari, 1854)

M.A. Bellucci: ‘I musicisti Baresi’, Rassegna pugliese di scienze, lettere ed arti, ii (1885), 196

I. Ludovisi: Le accademie di Bari dal secolo 14. al sec. 18. (Bari, 1903)

A. Vinaccia: ‘Il nuovo Politeama Petruzzellis’, Rassegna tecnica pugliese, ii (1903), 65, 81

Accademia polifonica barese … nel 25. annuale della sua fondazione (Bari, 1951)

N. Cosmo: ‘Il Liceo Piccinni di Bari’, S. Carlo, ii/2 (1960), 26

V. Melchiorre and L. Zingarelli: Il Teatro Piccinni di Bari (Bari, 1983)

P. Moliterni, V. Attolini and E. Persichella: Vissi d'arte: gli 80 anni del Petruzzelli: il mito e le vicende (Bari, 1983)

F. Picca: Bari ‘capitale’ a teatro: il Politeama Petruzzelli 1877–1914 (Bari, 1987)

RENATO BOSSA

Baricanor [bariclamans].

See Baritone (i).

Barié, Augustin (Charles)

(b Paris, 15 Nov 1883; d Antony, nr Paris, 22 Aug 1915). French organist and composer. Blind from birth, he studied with Marty at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, with Vierne, and then with Guilmant at the Paris Conservatoire, gaining a premier prix in 1906. He became organist at St Germain-des-Prés in Paris and professor of organ at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles. He began a brilliant career, and was noted for his virtuosity and talent for free improvisation, but he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 31. His works, mostly for organ, include a symphony and Trois pièces; they show the influence of Guilmant in their counterpoint, and of Vierne in their harmonic refinement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Dufourcq: La musique d'orgue française (Paris, 1941/R)

F. Sabatier: ‘Augustin Barié’, Guide de la musique d'orgue, ed. G. Cantagrel (Paris, 1991)

GILLES CANTAGREL

Bariera.

See Barriera.

Barili, Alfredo

(b Florence, 2 Aug 1854; d Atlanta, GA, 17 Nov 1935). American pianist, conductor and teacher. He was born into one of the leading musical families in 19th-century America, which included Adelina Patti, and made his début as a pianist on 7 April 1865 in New York. His family soon moved to Philadelphia, where he studied the piano with Carl Wolfsohn before embarking for the Cologne Conservatory in 1872. Barili settled in Atlanta in 1880 and became the city's first professional musician, introducing many standard works, including Beethoven sonatas and later Gounod's Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile. In 1883 he planned the first Atlanta Music Festival, which included a chorus of 300 accompanied by Carl Sentz's orchestra from Philadelphia. During that one weekend Barili introduced symphonies by Schubert (no.8), Haydn and Beethoven, as well as a number of Mendelssohn and Verdi overtures. That same year he conducted the chorus for Theodore Thomas and his orchestra. Barili developed a reputation as one of the finest teachers in the South, and many of his pupils achieved successful musical careers. His pioneering work in Atlanta laid the foundation for many of the city's musical institutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N.L. Orr: Alfredo Barili and the Rise of Classical Music in Atlanta (Atlanta, GA, 1996)

N. LEE ORR

Baring-Gould, Sabine

(b Exeter, 28 Jan 1834; d Lewtrenchard, Devon, 2 Jan 1924). English clergyman, folksong collector, novelist and writer. He was educated at Cambridge (MA, 1856), ordained in 1864, and on his father’s death in 1872 he inherited the family estates at Lewtrenchard, where he became rector in 1881 and served as a Justice of the Peace. He travelled extensively and wrote voluminously on theological and general topics; he was also a pioneer in the collection of English folksong. Between 1888 and 1891 he published 110 examples, transcribed from performances by singers in Devon and Cornwall, as Songs and Ballads of the West. The collection was made jointly with the Rev. H.F. Sheppard, sub-dean of the Savoy Chapel, with whom Baring-Gould also collaborated to produce A Garland of Country Song (1895) and English Minstrelsie (1895–6). Their first joint publications in the field preceded by several years the folksong collections of W.A. Barrett, Frank Kidson, John Stokoe and J.A. Fuller Maitland, and were themselves preceded only by John and Lucy Broadwood’s Sussex Songs (1843, 1888). Cecil Sharp’s revision of Songs and Ballads of the West (1905) reflects the influence of Baring-Gould’s early work on Sharp’s own choice of location. Baring-Gould was the author of the words of many well-known hymns of which the most celebrated is Onward, Christian Soldiers, first published in the Church Times in 1865 and later popularized by Sullivan’s tune. Understandably less well known is the collection in which he deliberately imitated the idiom of Sankey and Moody, Church Songs (1884), also produced jointly with H.F. Sheppard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)

H. Orel, ed.: Gilbert and Sullivan: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke, 1994)

B. Pegg: Folk: a Portrait of English Traditional Music, Musicians and Customs (London, 1976)

BERNARR RAINBOW

Bariolage

(Fr.: ‘odd mixture of colours’).

A 19th-century term used in bowed instruments to describe several slightly unorthodox ways of mixing open strings with stopped notes for special effect. This may merely be a matter of using open strings in passages otherwise played in upper positions. In L’art du violon (1834) Baillot (who explains the name of the device by saying that it seems ‘disordered or bizarre’) cites Haydn’s fingering indications in the trio of his G major Quartet op.64 no.4 (ex.1). The term is most frequently applied to the special effect in which the same note is played alternately on two strings – one stopped and one open – resulting in the juxtaposition of contrasting tone-colours (a kind of Klangfarbenmelodie). Bariolage may be produced either by slurred bowing or by individual bowstrokes. Well-known examples occur in the prelude of Bach’s Partita in E for solo violin (ex.2). The device is similar to Ondulé or ondeggiando (though this does not necessarily involve the use of open strings). See Bow, §II, 2(viii).

DAVID D. BOYDEN/PETER WALLS

Bariolla [Bariola, Barioli, Bariolus], Ottavio

(fl Milan, 1573–96). Italian organist and composer. The archives of Milan Cathedral for 25 June 1573 indicate that the authorities directed ‘Octavius Bariolus, organist of the new organ of the aforementioned major church … to enter into the first position or accept the second position’. From at least 1588 he was organist at S Maria presso S Celso, Milan. However, it seems unlikely that he continued his activities there beyond 1594; in the following year the chapel organist was Giovanni Paolo Cima. Antegnati ranked Bariolla among the best players and composers of the time and Borsieri praised him particularly for his ensemble canzonas.

Bariolla published at least two collections of instrumental music, Ricercate per suonar l’organo and Capricci overo canzoni a quattro, both of which survive virtually intact in a 17th-century tablature. Two other pieces appear in collections of the time. The 12 ricercares in four parts make full use of imitation and other conventional contrapuntal devices; melodic inversion, trills, turns and syncopation occur frequently. The Capricci appeared originally in four partbooks; only the two treble parts now survive. In construction they resemble the ricercares and other canzone alla francese of the time, but in contrast to the ricercares they employ sprightly, brief subjects in short note values. They exhibit most conventional contrapuntal devices and demonstrate Bariolla’s mastery of polyphony.

WORKS

Editions:Ottavio Bariolla: Keyboard Compositions, ed. C.W. Young, CEKM, xliv (1986)Ottavio Bariolla: Canzone prima, ed. W. Young, Early Music Series, xxvi (Oxford, 1976)

Ricercate per suonar l’organo (Milan, 1585); lost, tablature in I-Tn

Capricci overo canzoni a quattro … libro terzo (Milan, 1594); ed. in IIM, xii (1995)

1 piece, 5vv, 1596¹; 1, 5vv, 1596¹¹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Antegnati: L’arte organica (Brescia, 1608/R); ed. R. Lunelli (Mainz, 1938, 2/1958)

P. Morigi: La nobiltà di Milano (Milan, 1595, 2/1619), 304

G. Borsieri: Il supplemento della nobiltà di Milano (Milan, 1619), 56

CLYDE WILLIAM YOUNG

Baripsaltes [barisonans, baritonans].

See Baritone (i).

Bariton.

See Baryton (i).

Baritone (i)

(from Gk. barytonos: ‘deep-sounding’; Fr. baryton; Ger. Bariton; It. baritono).

A male voice, usually written for within the compass A to f', which may be extended at either end.

OWEN JANDER, J.B. STEANE, ELIZABETH FORBES/ELLEN T. HARRIS (with GERALD WALDMAN)

1. Early history.

The term ‘baritonans’ was first used in Western music towards the end of the 15th century, principally in French sacred polyphony, where it may signify a voice lower in pitch than the bassus. In several five-voice masses of Pierre de La Rue and Nicolas Champion, for example, the voice one from lowest is designated ‘bassus’ with the ‘baritonans’ lying lower. Gaffurius (Practica musice, 1496) uses the term instead of ‘bassus’ for the lowest of the four regular voices (‘cantus’, ‘contratenor acutus’, ‘tenor’ and ‘baritonans’). In John Dowland's translation (1609) of Ornithoparcus's Musicae activae micrologus (1517), the definition ‘the Bassus (or rather Basis) is the lowest part of each Song’ is qualified with the statement ‘Or it is an Harmony to be sung with a deep voice which is called Baritonus’. A partbook in Lodovico Viadana's Salmi per cantare e concertare (1612) is marked ‘baritono’.

In 17th-century Italy, the term ‘baritono’ takes up its modern position between the tenor and bass parts. According to Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, iii, 1618, p.133), ‘by this term the Italians mean the tenor or quintum … when the F clef is written on the third line. In one of the earliest references to a solo baritone, Monteverdi, looking for a good bass for his La finta pazza Licori (1627, Mantua: lost), gave qualified approval to Don Iacomo Papalino, who, he said, sang with feeling, had a fairly competent trillo and gorgia, but ‘is a baritone and not a bass’ (letter to Alessandro Striggio, 1627).

The French counterpart to ‘baritono’ is Basse-taille, the lowest of three tenor ranges. Brossard (Dictionaire de musique, 1703) defined ‘baritono’ as ‘what we call the basse-taille or concordant’, ranges he distinguished by their lower extension, the basse-taille to B and the concordant to G. Rousseau (Dictionnaire, 1768) placed the basse-taille between the tenor and bass and equated the term with both ‘baryton’ and ‘concordant’ (he limited the latter to sacred music). Although a separate constituent of the five-part chorus in sacred music, the basse-taille had no specific line in the four-part opera chorus; singers in this range joined either with the tailles or the basses. Rousseau, however, equated the ‘concordant’ with the ‘part that in Italy is called tenor’, not with the bass, but allowed that ‘basse-taille’ was sometimes used to identify the true bass. Confusion as to whether the baritone is closer to the tenor or the bass has persisted. Walther (Musicalisches Lexicon, 1732) split the difference, writing that a baritone ‘must have the high range of the tenor as well as some depth in the bass’.

The term did not enter normal operatic parlance until the 19th century, although many 18th-century roles call for what is now considered a baritone. These include the ‘bass’ parts written by Handel for G.M. Boschi. Lully wrote several important roles, such as Cadmus, Alcides (Alceste) and Aegeus (Thésée) in the baritone clef (the F clef on the middle line or the C on the top line), but their ranges do not go beyond G to e' although some have a high tessitura. Rameau's operas include several such roles, extending from F or G to f' or f', such as Teucer and Ismenor in Dardanus and Jupiter in Castor et Pollux. The most notable basse-taille of Rameau's day was Claude Chassé, who was admired more for his acting than his singing but was sufficiently versatile to take the haute-taille role of Medusa in a revival of Lully's Persée in 1738. Gluck's only notable baritone roles are Agamemnon (Iphigénie en Aulide) and Orestes (Iphigénie en Tauride).

Mozart's leading roles for baritone and bass-baritone derive from the basso buffo tradition, in which no clear distinction is drawn between bass and baritone. The first Count Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Stefano Mandini, described as a ‘primo buffo mezzo carattere’, had a voice that would now be considered a baritone. He specialized in opera buffa and had earlier played Almaviva in Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia. Mozart's first Figaro was the comic bass Francesco Benucci. Luigi Bassi created the title role at the Prague première of Don Giovanni (1787); he had sung the Count in Figaro shortly before. His range was described in 1800 as lying between tenor and bass. A basso buffo, Francesco Albertarelli, sang Don Giovanni at the Vienna première.

2. 19th century.

Baritone roles arrived late in opera chiefly because so much emphasis had previously been laid on florid singing, for which the lower male voice was not well suited. The baritone was slow to be accepted for principal roles. Castil-Blaze (De l'opéra en France, i, 1820, pp.280ff) explained that ‘the Italians dearly love high voices, the French seem to prefer the middle range, and the Germans deep voices’. He found it extraordinary that in Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni there should be four important roles for ‘basses’ and that the principal male should be a ‘bass’ (like others of the time, he did not distinguish between bass and baritone). That Mozart's prominent roles for basses and baritones were found daringly innovatory in England is indicated by Mount Edgcumbe's remark, ‘They take the lead in operas with as much propriety as if the double bass were to do so in the orchestra’ (Musical Reminiscences, 1824).

The acceptance of the baritone voice widened the range of male character types beyond those traditionally associated with the castrato or the tenor (the hero and the lover) and the bass (the king, the soldier, the high priest, the aged man). The baritone came to be used for new manifestations of virility: the wooer in competition with the lover (Don Carlo, Ernani), the trusty friend (Posa, Don Carlos), the brother figure (Valentin, Faust), the less-than-sage father figure (Germont, La traviata), the swashbuckler (Escamillo, Carmen), the lascivious villain (Scarpia, Tosca), the mature young man (Wolfram, Tannhäuser) or the youthful older man (the Flying Dutchman).

Leading Italian baritones of this period include Antonio Tamburini, who created several Donizetti and Bellini roles; Giorgio Ronconi, who sang for Donizetti but scored his greatest triumphs in early Verdi operas; and Felice Varesi, Verdi's first Macbeth, Rigoletto and Germont. Verdi's finest baritone however was the French singer Victor Maurel, a noted interpreter of Posa and Amonasro and creator of Iago and Falstaff as well as Leoncavallo's Tonio (Pagliacci). Another outstanding French baritone was Jean-Baptiste Faure, who created Posa, Thomas's Hamlet and several Meyerbeer roles; his successor Jean Lassalle was also admired for the beauty of his timbre. High baritone roles, calling on the head voice, were a French speciality: their leading exponent was Jean-Blaise Martin whose long career at the Opéra-Comique gave rise to the voice-type known as the ‘baryton Martin’. In Germany, the heavier ‘Heldenbariton’ voice, a counterpart to the Verdi baritone, developed, especially with the operas of Wagner, typified by Anton Mitterwurzer, the first Wolfram and Kurwenal. But the principal development was that of the ‘Hoher Bass’, the voice-type of Wotan and Hans Sachs (and typified by Franz Betz); this is a bass-baritone rather than a baritone proper.

The burgeoning song and oratorio repertory of the 19th century particularly suited the more lyric type of baritone. Johann Michael Vogl, who began his career in opera performing such roles as Orestes and Count Almaviva and creating Pizarro in the 1814 version of Fidelio, is best remembered as the singer Schubert most admired in the performance of his songs. Julius Stockhausen, who gave the first public performance of Die schöne Müllerin, was one of the first lieder singers to carry the German song repertory abroad; he made his career as a concert artist in such works as Haydn's Creation, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Mendelssohn's Elijah, and Brahms wrote the baritone part in the German Requiem for him. Early recordings have captured the voices of a number of concert baritones, including Charles Santley, highly praised by Eduard Hanslick and George Bernard Shaw for his refined singing; George Henschel, who sang in Bach's St Matthew Passion under Brahms's direction; and Plunket Greene, who made his début in Messiah and for whom Stanford wrote the Songs of the Fleet.

Operetta became a strong repertory for light baritones. The comic baritone part, replete with patter song, dates back at least to Mozart and Rossini's characterizations of Figaro; it also became a staple of Gilbert and Sullivan. George Grossmith created the principal comedy baritone roles, including the Major-General (The Pirates of Penzance), Koko (The Mikado) and the Lord Chancellor (Iolanthe); his successor, Henry Lytton, also created roles in musical comedies, such as The Rose of Persia (1899). In Paris, the Théâtre des Variétés company included a number of baritones. Eugène Grenier and Henri Couder sang in the premières of Offenbach's La belle Hélène (1864), Barbe-bleue (1866) and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867). At the Opéra-Comique, the lyric baritone Alexandre Taskin sang from 1878 to 1894, creating the three villains of Les contes d'Hoffman (1881) and also Lescaut in Massenet's Manon (1884).

3. 20th century.

The early 20th century witnessed an outpouring of new baritone roles in French, Italian and German opera. At the Opéra-Comique in 1902, the two baritones in the première of Pelléas et Mélisande were of dissimilar types, Jean Périer (Pelleas) a typical ‘baryton Martin’ with a comparatively light, high-lying voice, the Belgian Hector Dufranne (Golaud), heavier though still lyrical. In the same year, the baritone Giuseppe De Luca created Michonnet (Adriana Lecouvreur) at the Teatro Lirico in Milan; he also sang Sharpless (Madama Butterfly, 1904). His repertory ranged from Figaro (Mozart and Rossini) to Rigoletto. Among his contemporaries were Mario Sammarco, a vital singer and actor who created Gérard (Andrea Chénier, 1896) and whose roles included Sachs, and Titta Ruffo, a powerful, high baritone, often compared with Caruso, who sang a wide range of other parts including Italian, French and Russian repertory. Strauss's baritone roles began with Kunrad (Feuersnot), sung at the Dresden première by Karl Scheidemantel, who also created Faninal in Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and sang Amfortas (Parsifal) and Hans Sachs at Bayreuth. Karl Perron, the bass-baritone who created John the Baptist (Salome, 1905), Orestes (Elektra, 1909) and Baron Ochs (Der Rosenkavalier), sang Amfortas and Wotan at Bayreuth as well as King Mark and Daland, more usually bass roles. Anton van Rooy, Stockhausen's most famous student, sang in the American première of Parsifal (1903) and took all Wagner's leading bass-baritone roles at Bayreuth; he was also a fine lieder singer. The title role of Wozzeck was created by Leo Schützendorf, a bass-baritone whose roles also included Ochs, Boris Godunov, Beckmesser, Faninal and Gounod's Mephistopheles; he was one of four brothers, all professional basses or baritones.

Mid-20th-century Wagner baritones include Friedrich Schorr and Rudolf Bockelmann, both especially admired in their performances of Wotan and Sachs between the wars. Hans Hotter, in a career lasting over 60 years, began as a high baritone and progressed through bass-baritone to bass; he created the Comandant in Strauss's Friedenstag (1938) and Olivier in Capriccio (1942) and during the 1950s became the leading Wagner bass-baritone, unrivalled as Wotan, Kurwenal, Amfortas, Sachs and the Dutchman, and was also a fine singer of lieder. Paul Schöffler began his career, like Hotter, as a lyric baritone before progressing to heavier bass-baritone roles.

An outstanding Verdi baritone was Mariano Stabile, chosen by Toscanini to sing Falstaff at La Scala (1921–2); he also sang the role at Covent Garden, as well as Iago, Rigoletto and Scarpia, and appeared at Glyndebourne. His mantle descended in certain respects on Tito Gobbi, a magnificent comic actor as well as a powerful tragedian. The first Italian Wozzeck, Gobbi had over 100 roles in his repertory, but excelled in Verdi and Puccini; his Posa, Iago, Macbeth, Boccanegra and Falstaff were notable for their dramatic effectiveness, while as Scarpia, opposite Callas's Tosca, he was unrivalled. Noted Verdi interpreters include three distinguished Americans, Lawrence Tibbett, Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill. Tibbett, a powerful actor, also created roles in several American operas; Warren, larger and more lustrous in voice, concentrated on Verdi, singing Rigoletto, Iago, Amonasro, Luna, Macbeth and Boccanegra; and Merrill, a lyric baritone, was outstanding as Germont (La traviata) with a secure technique that enabled him also to sing Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini.

Geraint Evans, the Welsh baritone who often sang Figaro and Leporello to Gobbi's Count and Don Giovanni, became an excellent Falstaff, a role he first sang at Glyndebourne; he created Mr Flint (Billy Budd, 1951) and Mountjoy (Gloriana, 1953) and also sang Britten's Balstrode, Bottom and Claggart, though his finest 20th-century role was Wozzeck. His natural successor, in the 1990s, was Bryn Terfel, a rich-toned Welsh baritone outstanding in both buffo and heroic roles.

Sherril Milnes, the American baritone who succeeded to the Verdi roles once sung by his compatriots Tibbett, Warren and Merrill, was also successful in such French roles as Thomas's Hamlet, Alphonse XI (La favorite) and Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII.

In the 1970s and 80s Piero Cappuccilli was regarded as the leading Italian Verdi baritone; other Italians eminent in the Verdi and Donizetti repertories have included Giuseppe Taddei and Renato Bruson. In Britain, Thomas Allen became the most versatile baritone of his generation, especially noted for his Mozart roles (above all Don Giovanni), his accomplishment in Verdi and French music, his sombre Onegin and his stirring Billy Budd. The opening up of central eastern Europe and the former USSR revealed a formidable number of talented Verdi baritones, including Vladimir Chernov.

French operatic roles have been stylishly sung by the Australian John Brownlee, especially Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande, and, more recently, by Russian-born Sergey Leiferkus, whose roles include Escamillo and Zurga (Les pêcheurs de perles). An outstanding French lyric baritone was Gérard Souzay, whose French operatic roles ranged from Lully to Poulenc and Ravel; his signature role was Golaud. Souzay's mellifluous voice and subtle musicianship made him also a great singer of French song and German lieder. Other lyric baritones who have excelled in the song repertory include Pierre Bernac, Souzay's teacher, who formed a duo with Poulenc and gave first performances of many of Poulenc's songs.

Important lieder singers from early in the century include the German baritones Heinrich Schlusnus, also well known as a Verdi interpreter, Gerhard Hüsch (admired in such roles as Papageno, Wolfram and Falke) and Herbert Janssen, also a noted Wagnerian.

Two great lieder singers active after World War II were the German baritones Hermann Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Prey, admired in Mozart, sang in a wide range of opera, including works by Verdi, Strauss and Wagner. Fischer-Dieskau, regarded as the most subtle, refined and expressive lieder singer of his era, sang similar operatic roles, but also made the creation of new roles a speciality: Mittenhofer in Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and the title role of Reimann's Lear (1978) were both composed for him. Younger German and Austrian lieder singers include Olaf Bär, Matthias Goerne, Wolfgang Holzman and Stephan Genz.

The warm, relaxed sound of the lyric baritone has continued to make it the most sought-after voice in operetta, musical comedy and popular music. Nelson Eddy, along with soprano Jeanette McDonald, starred in a long series of filmed operetta, including Rose-Marie, Naughty Marietta and The Chocolate Soldier. Two of the great baritones of musical comedy were Alfred Drake (Kismet, Kiss me Kate and Oklahoma) and Robert Goulet (notable as Lancelot in Camelot). In popular music and ballads, baritones dominate the field: such singers as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Nat ‘King’ Cole, John Raitt and Harry Belafonte indicate the richness of this tradition.

(1) Adriana [Adreana] Baroni.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.-B. Faure: La voix et le chant: traité pratique (Paris, 1866)

M. Kunath: ‘Die Charakterologie der stimmlichen Einheiten in der Oper’, ZMw, viii (1925–6), 403

R. Celletti: ‘La voce di baritono’, Musica d'oggi, new ser., iii (1960), 452

H. Matheopoulos: Bravo: Today's Great Tenors, Baritones and Basses Discuss their Roles (London, 1986)

R.M. Knight: The Development of the Baritone Voice in Operas of Selected Composers from 1750–1830 (DMA diss., Northwestern U., 1988)

J.B. Steane: Voices: Singers and Critics (London, 1992)

G. and R. Edwards: The Verdi Baritone: Studies in the Development of Dramatic Character (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

J.B. Steane: Singers of the Century (London, 1996)

Baritone (ii) [Baritone horn]

(Ger. Tenorhorn; It. flicorno tenore, tenore).

A valved brass instrument in B, pitched as the trombone, in Britain having a narrower bore than the similarly pitched Euphonium. Two are used in British brass bands to fill the harmony rather than as solo instruments. The usual compass sounds from E to b', and its music is written in the treble clef a 9th higher. The instrument is the final version of Sax's ‘saxhorn baryton’, known in France as ‘baryton en si’, the euphonium being ‘basse en si’. In American band music, no consistent musical distinction is made between two B instruments of contrasted bore and timbre, and ‘baritone’ is the normal term for the valved instrument of this pitch, save insofar as makers offer a variety of bore widths to the customer's choice, and sometimes designate the models of largest bore ‘euphonium’. In Germany two B band instruments are distinguished in bore and function as in France and Britain, but have been evolved independently; ‘Bariton’ describes the large-bore form and ‘Tenorhorn’ the narrower.

See also Saxhorn; Althorn; Tenor horn.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

A. Baines: Brass Instruments: their History and Development (London, 1976/R)

C. Bevan: The Tuba Family (London, 1978)

H. Heyde: Trompeten, Posaunen, Tuben (Leipzig, 1980) [museum catalogue]

ANTHONY C. BAINES/TREVOR HERBERT

Baritone oboe.

The bass oboe. See Oboe, §III, 5(i).

Baritono [flicorno baritono, bombardino]

(It.).

See Flicorno and Euphonium.

Barizon, Philippe.

See Basiron, Philippe.

Bark, Jan (Helge Guttorm)

(b Härnösand, 19 April 1934). Swedish composer. He studied at the Borgarskolan and at the Musikhögskolan in Stockholm. For 15 years he played jazz trombone, and during the 1960s he was a music teacher and for nine years an instructor of film editors and cameramen for Swedish broadcasting. Influenced by Varèse and K. Dewey, and more pronouncedly by worldwide folk cultures, his compositions often feature music theatre. In 1963 he co-founded Kulturkvartetten, a group of four trombonists who perform their own theatrical compositions. From the 1960s he has been largely active in collaborative events; a later interest was in films and videotapes attempting to register cultural undercurrents in social change.

WORKS

(selective list)

Other inst: Metakronismer, orch, 1961; Pyknos, orch, 1962; Missa bassa, orch, 1964; IRK-ORK 1970, orch, 1970; 2 str qts

Trbn qts: Bolos, 1962, collab. F. Rabe; Polonaise, 1965, collab. F. Rabe; Pipe Lines, 1968, collab. Kulturkvartetten; Zug, 1968, collab. Kulturkvartetten; Crane Step, 1971, collab. Kulturkvartetten; No Hambones on the Moon, 1971, collab. Kulturkvartetten; Narrskeppet [The Fool's Ship], 1983, collab. Nya kulturkvartetten; Fyrbåk [Beacon], 1996, collab. Nya kulturkvartetten

Choral: Nota, 1964; Mansbot, 1965; Thank Heavens for Semantic Veils of Mist, Cried Woe the Fairest Bryde thou hast not Kissed (after A.Z. Robertson), 1968; Light Music, 1969

Tape: Ost funk, 1963; Ach Chamberlain, 1965; Fuzzyfonier, 1967, collab. J.W. Pedersen; Bar, 1971

Semantic music: Kulturen och vi, 1965; The Transparent Egg, 1973

Films and videotapes: Pipa när saven stiger, 1973; … innan öronen faller av (Die Insel der Klänge oder Der unheimliche Ausflug des Audionauten), 1973; Den gamla grottesången, 1974; Härifrån till verkligheten, 1974

Principal publisher: Nordiska musikförlaget

WRITINGS

with F. Rabe: ‘Blåsinstrumentens nya möjligheter’, Nutida musik, v/2 (1961–2), 20–21

‘Pyknos’, Nutida musik, vi/8 (1962–3), 4–12

with F. Rabe: ‘Pajasso och Ost funk’, Nutida musik, vii/4 (1963–4), 18 only

with J.W. Morthenson: ‘Två spår’, Rondo: Musiikkelehti (1964), no.1, p.6

with F. Rabe: ‘Bolos’, Nutida musik, viii (1964–5), 114–15

‘Eclaircissement par camouflet’, Nutida musik, x/2 (1966–7), 16–19

‘Musik och bild’, Nutida musik, x/6–7 (1966–7), 8–14

Musik och bild (Stockholm, 1967)

with F. Rabe: ‘Sanning’, Nutida musik, xi (1967–8), 30–33

with F. Rabe: ‘Musikpedagogiskt alternativ’, Tonfallet (1969), no.17, p.3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Linder: ‘Fern unga ton sättare’, Nutida musik, iv/6 (1960–61), 4–7, esp. 4–5

K.-E. Andersson: ‘Jan Barks körverk Nota’, Musiklivet – Vår sång, xxxviii (1965), 40

T. Åhs: ‘Bark-musik är inte bara hambo’, Tonfallet (1971), no.18, p.1

G. Bergendal: 33 svenska komponister (Stockholm, 1972)

R. Haglund: ‘Bark, Jan’, Sohlmans musiklexikon, ed. H. Åsh and (Stockholm, 2/1975–9) [incl. worklist]

R. Haglund: ‘Kulturkvartetten och Nya Kulturkvartetten’, Nutida musik, xxix/4 (1985–6) 29–34

ROLF HAGLUND

Barkauskas, Vytautas

(b Kaunas, 25 March 1931). Lithuanian composer. He studied the piano at the J. Tallat-Kelpša Music College in Vilnius (1949–53), at the same time studying mathematics at the Pedagogic Institute in that city. He then studied with Račiunas at the Lithuanian State Conservatory, graduating in 1959. In 1961, after a brief period as a teacher at the Čiurlionis Art School, Barkauskas began to teach theory at the Lithuanian Music Academy (he was appointed a lecturer in the department of music theory in 1974, and professor of composition in 1989). In 1972 he was awarded the Lithuanian State Prize, and in 1981 he won the title of Honoured Artist of Lithuania. In 1997 he was awarded the State Stipend of Lithuania.

Barkauskas is one of the most productive of modern Lithuanian composers in the field of instrumental music. In his early work (1954–64) he strove to achieve free atonality. The beginning of his second creative period (1964–81) is marked by his interest in the theories of such musicians as Schaeffer and Krenek. In technique, Barkauskas took his guidelines principally from Lutosławski, Penderecki and Ligeti. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, he was one of the most consistent exponents of modern techniques of composition in Lithuania, but at the same time he avoided using them in an orthodox, undiluted manner, instead interpreting them in his own way and seeking natural interactions. This approach is already evident in the composer's first modern works, for instance Poezija (‘Poetry’, 1964, employing a free interpretation of 12-tone technique) and Intymi kompozicija (‘Intimate Composition’, 1968, an interpretation of serialism in terms of aleatory sound). The end of this period in his career is marked by the Viola Concerto (1981), in which the semantic process of confrontations and monologues leads from the clash of soloist and orchestra to a quiet, cathartic culmination. His third creative period, beginning in 1981, which may be described with some qualifications as post avant-garde, is distinguished by more conventional and pluralistic tendencies, a more intuitive method of composition, the search for natural sonic beauty, and by a certain inner intensity, often expressed within traditional genres and forms. In his work of the 1990s his tonal language was simplified, melody and tone colour are more prominent, and a latent tonality is perceptible. Narrative drama is alien to Barkauskas's compositions, which are more inclined to pursue a concertante course.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Legenda apie meilę [The Legend of Love] (op, V. Mikštaitė, after N. Hikmet), 1975

Vocal: Präludium und Fuge, chorus, 1970; La vostra nominanza è color d'erba (after D. Alighieri: La divina commedia), mirage-poem, chbr chorus, str qnt, 1970, rev. 1977; Atviri langai [Open Windows] (P. Eluard), 5 essays, Mez, fl, hpd, vn, vc, db, 1978; 7 Omaro Chajamo minatiūros, chbr chorus, 1980; Viltis [The Hope] (orat, J. Mačiulis-Maironis), 2 T, Bar, B, 2 female choruses, org, 1988–90; oratorios, song cycles, choruses

Orch: Trys aspektai [Three Aspects], 1969; Gloria urbi, org conc., 1972; Toccamento, chbr conc., 1978; Sym. no.3, 1978–9; Conc., va, chbr orch, 1981; Sym. no.4, 1984–5; Sym. no.5, 1986; Saule [The Sun], sym. poem, 1986, rev. 1995; Concerto piccolo, chbr orch, 1988, rev. 1995; Pf Conc., 1992; Cia ir dabar [Here and Now], 1998

Chbr and solo inst: Poezija, cycle, pf, 1964; Partita, vn, 1967; Variations, 2 pf, 1967; Intymi kompozicija, ob, 12 str, 1968; Kontrastine muzika, fl, vc, perc, 1969; Pro memoria, 5 perc, fl, b cl, pf, 1970; Str Qt no.1, 1972; Trys legendos apie Čiurlionį [Three Čiurlionis Legends], pf, 1972–93; Sonata subita, vn, pf, 1974; Pf Qnt, 1980; Str Qt no.2, 1983; Sextet, pf, str qt, db, 1985; Sonntagsmusik, 2 pf 8 hands, 1985; Vizija, pf, 1986–8; Trio, vn, cl, pf, 1990; Konzertische Suite, vc, pf, 1993; Allegro brillante, 2 pf, 1996; Modus vivendi, pf trio, 1996; Duo, gui, pf, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Rzavinskaya: ‘Kamernaya muzïka V. Barkauskasa’ [Barkauskas's Chamber Music], Kompozitorï soyuznïkh respublik, ii (Moscow, 1977), 3–34

A. Bajarūnaitė: Vytauto Barkausko kūrybinio proceso ypatumai [The Peculiarities of Barkauskas's Creative Process] (diss., Vilnius, 1982)

L. Lesle: ‘Vytautas Barkauskas: Trio for violin, clarinet and piano’, Das Orchester (1998), no.11, p.69

based on MGG2 (ii, 252–4), by permission of Bärenreiter

GRAŽINA DAUNORAVIČIENĖ

Barker, Charles Spackman

(b Bath, 10 Oct 1804; d Maidstone, 26 Nov 1879). English inventor and organ builder. He was the eldest son of Joseph Barker and nephew of Thomas Barker (‘Barker of Bath’), both of whom were artists. Originally an apothecary’s assistant in Bath, he worked briefly with an unnamed organ builder in London before returning to Bath about 1830 and setting up on his own account. After seeing a hydraulic press, he became interested in pneumatic actions, an elementary form of which had been used by Joseph Booth in 1827 at Attercliffe near Sheffield. In 1833 he was in correspondence with Matthew Camidge, the organist of York Minster, concerning his experimental apparatus, which at this stage seems to have consisted of a piston working in a small cylinder. He also offered it for use in the large organ at Birmingham Town Hall; it was not adopted (except possibly to operate the Carillon) but the organ builder William Hill assisted Barker to refine his device.

In 1835 David Hamilton used pneumatic action in his organ in St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh. Barker meanwhile was in correspondence with Cavaillé-Coll, who invited him to Paris with a view to applying his own pneumatic lever in the construction of the St Denis organ. A French patent was taken out in 1839 and the success of the St Denis organ was followed by the application of Barker’s lever to other large Cavaillé-Coll instruments. After working for a time with Cavaillé-Coll, Barker became manager (contre-maître) of Daublaine–Callinet; this firm passed in 1845 to Ducroquet, for whom Barker supervised the building of the prize-winning instrument for the Great Exhibition (1851) and a new organ for St Eustache (1854) following the destruction by fire, accidently started by Barker himself, of the organ reconstructed by Daublaine–Callinet (1844).

Barker exhibited on his own account at the Paris Exposition (1855). Shortly after this the Ducroquet firm was acquired by Merklin, and in 1860 Barker went into partnership with Charles Verschneider (d 1865). About this time he became interested in the experiments with electric action performed by Albert Peschard (1836–1903) of Caen. In 1866 Barker completed the first successful electric action at Salon using the system patented by Peschard in 1864. Barker took out his own English patent in 1868 and granted Bryceson a sole concession to use it.

At the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War in 1870, Barker emigrated to Dublin. There, he was comissioned to build a new organ for the Roman Catholic Cathedral, Marlborough Street, but despite the assistance of the American organ builder, Hilborne Roosevelt, it was not a success, and Barker died in 1879 in reduced circumstances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hopkinson-RimbaultO, 59

W. Pole: Musical Instruments in the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1851), 74–7

‘The Electric Organ’, Musical Standard (9 Jan 1869)

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique (Paris, 1893/R), 225

J.W. Hinton: Story of the Electric Organ (London, 1909)

R.M. Roberts: ‘Charles Spackman Barker’, The Organ, xiii (1933–4), 186–9

J.I. Wedgwood: ‘Was Barker the Inventor of the Pneumatic Lever?’, The Organ, xiv (1934–5), 49–52

N.J. Thistlethwaite: The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990)

GUY OLDHAM, NICHOLAS THISTLETHWAITE

Barkhudarian, Sarkis [Sergey Vasilyevich]

(b Tbilisi, Georgia, 26 Aug/8 Sept 1887; d Tbilisi, 29 Oct 1972). Georgian composer and teacher. He began his music studies with the pianist Karakhovna in 1898; he then studied the piano with Stakhovsky and Truskovsky, and theory and solfège with Paliashvili at the Tbilisi Music Institute (1900–07). He won by competition a place at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1907–9) and later studied with Kalafati, Steinberg and Vītols at the St Petersburg Conservatory (1910–15). Subsequently, as a teacher at the conservatories of Tbilisi (1923–54) and Yerevan (1934–37, professor 1941), he instructed many of the leading composers of Armenia and Georgia including Aleksandr Arutyunian and Muradeli. He also appeared as a pianist in Moscow, Leningrad and Caucasian republics. His honours included the titles People’s Artist of the Armenian SSR, Honoured Artist of the Georgian SSR, and the Order of Lenin.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Narine (ballet, S. Lisitsian), 1938; Strana rodnaya [Native Land] (ballet, V.N. Ajamian), 1941; Keri Kuchi (musical comedy for children, G. Beilerian, after O. Tumanian), 1945; incid music, film scores

Orch: Anush, sym. poem, 1916; Zakfederatsiya, suite, 1930; 1942, ov., 1943, 3 suites from the ballet Narine (1957, 1969)

Vocal: 6 Armenian Folksongs, 1v, pf (1958); songs (A. Isaakian), arrs.

Pf: Vostochniye plyaski [Eastern Dances], 1913; Sonata, 1915; many other pieces

Principal publisher: Sovetskiy Kompozitor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SKM

M. Ter-Simonian: Sarkis Barkhudaryan (Yerevan, 1968)

N. Magakian: Ocherk o tvorchestve S.V. Barkhudaryana [A sketch of Barkhudarian’s work] (Yerevan, 1973)

DETLEF GOJOWY

Barkin [née Radoff], Elaine

(b Bronx, NY, 15 Dec 1932). American composer, writer and performer. After gaining the BA (1954) from Queens College, CUNY, she studied composition with Fine, Shapero and Arthur Berger at Brandeis University (MFA 1956, PhD 1971) and with Blacher at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1956–7). She taught at various colleges and universities before joining the composition and theory faculty at UCLA (1974), where she remained until 1994. For three decades she was a major contributor and adviser to Perspectives of New Music; she has also written extensively on 20th-century music for other journals. In her compositions as well as her writings and presentations she has given attention to women and gender issues.

In about 1978 Barkin turned from using 12-note and serial techniques to explore compositional processes involving collaboration, interactive performance and improvisation. In notes written about her 1989 piece for basset-horn and tape, … out of the air … , she outlined her aesthetic: ‘to foster the potentials of collaborative participation; to enable possibilities for the performer, ranging from the most traditional to the most far-out liberated; to relinquish authority albeit not responsibility; and to minimize my role as proprietary instruction-giver … ’. Her search for non-competitive and non-hierarchical socio-musical environments has led to her interest in Javanese and Balinese gamelan. She has been involved with gamelan as a player and composer since 1987 and during four study trips to Bali compiled interviews, led improvisation workshops and produced audio and video tapes about new music in Bali.

Barkin’s ‘texts’ – whether for print medium, live performance or tape collage – often blur the distinction between text and music or between essay and poetry. Some works also merge theoretical commentary with the creative process in the form of poetic-graphic explications of music by other composers. Her compositions invoke extensive verbal and gestural interplay, and later works integrate timbral and conceptual influences from gamelan.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage (incl. text-pieces and tape collages): De amore (chbr mini-op, after A. Capellanus and 12th–20th-century love texts), 8vv, va, gui, hp, db, slide projection, 1980; Media Speak, 9 spkrs, sax, slide projection, 1981; … to piety more prone … , 4 female spkrs, tape collage of spkrs and singers, 1983, rev. 1985; Anonymous was a Woman (tape collage for dancers), 1984; on the way to becoming (tape collage, Barkin), 1985; Past is Part of (tape collage, Barkin), 1985; To whom it may Concern no.2 (tape collage, B. Boretz and others), 1989; (Continuous), minimum 5 players, 1991

Orch: Essay, 1957; Plus ça change, str, 3 perc (incl. mar, vib, xyl), 1971 [also version for tape, arr. S. Beck, 1987]

Chbr and solo inst: Refrains, fl, cl, cel, str trio, 1967; 6 Compositions, pf, 1968; Str Qt, 1969; Inward & Outward Bound, fl + pic, cl + b cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, tuba, vn, va, vc, db, 2 perc (incl. vib, mar, timp), 1975; Mixed Modes, b cl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1975; Plein chant, a fl, 1977; … in its surrendering … , tuba, 1980; Rhapsodies, pic + fl, cl + a fl, 1986; [Be]Coming Together Apart, vn, mar, 1987; Encore, Javanese gamelan, 1988; … out of the air … , basset-hn, tape, 1989; Legong Dreams, ob, 1990; exploring the rigors of in between, fl, hn, vn, va, vc, 1991; Gamelange, hp, mixed gamelan, 1992; touching all bases/di mana-mana, elec db, perc, Balinese gamelan, 1997, collab. I. Nyoman Wenten

Vocal: 2 Dickinson Choruses, SATB, 1977; … the supple suitor … (E. Dickinson), Mez, fl, ob, vc, vib + bells, hpd + pf, 1978; … the sky … (e.e. cummings), SSA, pf, 1978; … for my friends’ pleasure … (Sappho and others), S, hp, 1995

Principal publishers: ACA, Association for the Promotion of New Music, Mobart, Open Space

Principal recording companies: CRI, Open Space

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Barkin: ‘Questionnaire [about being a woman composer in the US]’, PNM, xix/2 (1980–81), 460–62; continued as ‘In Response’, xx/2 (1981–2), 288–329

J. Rahn: ‘New Research Paradigms’, Music Theory Spectrum, xi/1 (1989), 84–94

J.M. Edwards: ‘North America since 1920’, Women and Music: a History, ed. K. Pendle (Bloomington, IN, 1991), 211–57, esp. 241

S. McClary: ‘A Response to Elaine Barkin’, PNM, xxx/2 (1992), 234–8

E. Barkin: e: an anthology: music texts & graphics (1975–1995) (Red Hook, NY, 1997)

E. Barkin and L. Hannessley, eds.: Audible Traces: Gender, Identity and Music (Zürich, forthcoming)

J. MICHELE EDWARDS

Barlaam [Bernard]

(d 1350). Monk and Bishop of Gerace. Barlaam was his religious name. He was educated in Byzantine monasteries of southern Italy, and visited Constantinople in the 1330s. In 1339 the eastern emperor made him envoy to Pope Benedict XII at Avignon. He taught Greek to Petrarch, and under Petrarch’s influence became a convert to Latin Catholicism in 1342. He wrote commentaries on three chapters of Ptolemy’s Harmonics; these chapters deal with the relation between the simple numbers of the Greek Perfect System and the heavenly spheres, how musical consonances and the movement of the planets are to be found through number, and how the qualities of the spheres agree with those of musical sounds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FasquelleE

FétisB

J. Franz: De musicis graecis commentatio (Berlin, 1840)

H.D. Hunter: ‘Barlaam’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967)

ANDREW HUGHES

Barley, Willlam

(b ?1565; d 1614). English music publisher. His position in the history of music printing in Elizabethan London is a contentious one. In 1596 he produced The Pathway to Musicke and A New Booke of Tabliture, the latter thought to be the book that John Dowland complained of in his The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597), declaring that the versions of his lute pieces were ‘falce and unperfect’. Barley was acquainted with Thomas Morley, and, when Morley acquired a music printing monopoly in 1598, six volumes appeared bearing the imprint ‘imprinted at London, in Little St. Helen's by William Barley, the assigne of Thomas Morley’. An examination of these six works, however, makes it clear that they cannot all have been printed by the same man or on the same press. The most significant of this group are Antony Holborne's Pavans, Galliards, Almains, the first appearance in print in England of music for instruments rather than voices, and Thomas Morley's The First Booke of Consort Lessons, the first appearance in print in England of music for a prescribed instrumentation. Morley’s The First Booke of Ayres was published with Barley's imprint in 1600, but after that Barley evidently abandoned music publishing for some years. In 1606, however, he laid claim to the same music printing monopoly, which had a further 13 years to run. On Morley's death in 1602 the monopoly had fallen into disuse, but Barley managed to convince the Company of Stationers that, as Morley's business associate, he still possessed certain rights under its terms. Accordingly, Barley was made free of the Company on 25 June 1606, and on that day the Company's court settled an action which Barley had brought against Thomas East concerning copyrights to music books East had registered with the Company. The settlement included the stipulation that East should pay to Barley 20 shillings for each edition of a music book he printed, together with six free copies of the finished volume. In addition, East and other music printers often styled themselves ‘the assigne of William Barley’ until Barley's death in 1614. A similar dispute with Thomas Adams was settled later.

William Barley's interest in music printing was clearly a pecuniary one. There is no evidence that he was actually a printer who had served the necessary apprenticeship. He owed his membership of the Stationers' Company to a special set of circumstances, and the six volumes published in 1599 show every sign of having been farmed out to different presses. Further, in his New Booke of Tabliture, he declared ‘I am myself a publisher and seller of books’, and it was in this capacity that he kept his shop in Gracechurch Street, London. The exact circumstances of the disposal of his business are not clear, but there is some evidence that his music copyrights were acquired by Thomas Snodham and his partners.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

KrummelEMP

R.B. McKerrow, ed.: A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland … 1557–1640 (London, 1910/R)

J. Lievsay: ‘William Barley, Elizabethan Printer and Bookseller’, Studies in Bibliography, viii (1956), 218–25

R. Illing: ‘Barley's Pocket Edition of Est's “Metrical Psalter”’, ML, xlix (1968), 219–23

J.A. Lavin: ‘William Barley, Draper and Stationer’, Studies in Bibliography, xxii (1969), 214–23

G.D. Johnson: ‘William Barley, “Publisher & Seller of Bookes”, 1591–1614’, The Library, 6th ser., xi (1989), 10–49

MIRIAM MILLER/JEREMY L. SMITH

Bar-line.

In Western notation a vertical line drawn through the staff to mark off a metrical unit. See Bar.

Barlow, Fred

(b Mulhouse, 2 Oct 1881; d Boulogne, 3 Jan 1951). French composer of English and Alsatian origin. He spent his youth in Switzerland and, though attracted to music from his earliest childhood, gained a diploma in engineering at the Zürich Polytechnic. He soon abandoned this career, however, and in 1908 moved to Paris to complete his musical studies. There he became a pupil of Jean Huré and then of his cousin Koechlin. In 1911 his Violin Sonata and his Cello Sonata were played at the Société Musicale Indépendante, the former by Enescu. He met Les Six, was an acquaintance of Satie and won Ravel’s admiration for his Ave Maria (1914). An encounter with the actor Pierre Bertin led to the composition of the musical comedy Sylvie (1919–21), a sensitive, poetic treatment of juvenile love. A further result of their collaboration was the ballet La grande Jatte (1936–8), set in the popular Parisian resort of La Jatte in the 1880s; the score is a masterpiece of delicacy and gaiety suggestive of Chabrier, for whom Barlow felt a special respect. His other notable stage work was Mam’zelle Prudhomme, an opérette in the best Messager tradition. Barlow was a conscientious artist, a craftsman who strove to be sincere to himself and to his expressive aims: a recapturing of childhood innocence, and a painful effort towards an ideal beyond human capacity. The fact that he became a Quaker in 1926 had some influence on his music. His work, particularly the instrumental chamber music, is notable both for distinction of thought and formal perfection.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Gladys, ou La légère incartade (ballet, J. de Fleury), 1915–16, Mulhouse, 7 Jan 1956; Sylvie (musical comedy, P. Bertin, after G. de Nerval), 1919–21, Paris, Trianon-Lyrique, 2 March 1923; Mam’zelle Prudhomme, ou Monsieur Pickwick à Paris (opérette, C. Gével), Monte Carlo, Opéra, 22 Dec 1932; La grande Jatte (ballet, Bertin), 1936–8, Paris, Opéra, 12 July 1950

Orch: Menuet, 1910 [orch of pf work]; Capriccioso, pf, orch, 1928 [version of Polichinelle et Colombine, pf]; 5 enfantines, 1948 [orch of pf work, 1927]; Sinfonietta, str orch, timp, 1950 [version of Str Qt ‘Les saisons’]

Choral: Pater noster, T/S, chorus, org, 1911–12; 4 préludes pour un drame (R. Fauchois), female chorus, orch, 1918

Solo vocal: Rondel (Charles d’Orléans), 1911, unpubd; Ave Maria, S, org/pf, 1914; 3 poèmes chinois, 1915, orchd 1948; Confiance (E. Verhaeren), 1925–7, unpubd; Droite dans la candeur des voiles (T. Derême), 1928, unpubd; 3 chansons du Poitou, 1940, unpubd, 2 orchd 1946; 4 poèmes d’Hortus clausus (H. Michel), 1942–3, orchd twice (orch; str orch)

Chbr: Sonata, vn, pf, 1909; Sonata ‘La basilique’, vc, pf, 1910, rev. 1943; Str Qt ‘Les saisons’, 1946–7; Sonatina, 2 vn, pf, 1948, arr. fl, vn, pf, 1950

Pf: Menuet, orchd 1910; 5 enfantines, 1927, orchd 1948; Polichinelle et Colombine, sketch de ballet, 1928 [to a scenario by Barlow]; Sonata, 1940–41, rev. 1950; La flûte de cristal, c1950

Principal publishers: Eschig, Lemoine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Pierné: Hommage à Fred Barlow 1881–1951 (Mulhouse, c1951)

Roland-Manuel and others: Fred Barlow, 1881-1951 (Paris, c1951)

M. Poupet: ‘Un compositeur français contemporain trop peu connu: Fred Barlow (1881–1951) I – L’homme’, Guitare et musique, new ser., no.8 (1974)

MICHEL POUPET/JEREMY DRAKE

Barlow, Klarenz [Clarence]

(b Calcutta, 27 Dec 1945). German composer and theorist of Indian birth. He completed a degree in natural sciences at Calcutta University (1965) and a piano diploma at Trinity College of Music, London (1965). From 1966 to 1968 he taught music theory and directed a madrigal choir and youth orchestra in Calcutta. He went on to study composition and electronic music at the Cologne Musikhochschule (1968–73) and in 1986 founded the Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln (GIMIK). He has taught computer music at the Darmstadt summer courses (1982–94), the Cologne Musikhochschule (from 1984), and the Royal Conservatory, The Hague (from 1994), where he also served as artistic director of the Institute of Sonology (1990–94). His awards include the Kranichstein prize of the Darmstadt summer course (1980) and the Förderpreis of the city of Cologne (1981).

Although Barlow rarely uses digital sounds in his compositions (most works are written for traditional instruments), the computer plays a central role in generating the structures of his works. His comprehensive theory of tonality and metrics, later developed as the basis of computer programmes for the ‘real-time’ control of musical parameters, was first tested in the piano work Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi (1975–9). He has also explored the spectral analysis and instrumental re-synthesis of human speech. A playful treatment of musical traditions and a satirical posture towards the postwar avant garde are also characteristic of Barlow’s style.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Reidosklopädi? Enzykloskoport? (Hörspiel), 1972–6; Tatsachen, (5 Musiktheaterstücke), 1982

Ens: Verhältnisse, melodic insts, 1974; 1981, vn, va, vc, 1981; Im Januar am Nil, 11 players, 1981–4; ‘Spright the Diner’ by Nib Wryter, pf trio, 1984–6; Orchideae ordinariae (The Twelfth Root of Truth), orch, 1989

Kbd (pf, unless otherwise stated): Textmusik, 1971; fantasia quasi una sonata con ‘Mantra’ di Stockhausen, 1973; Ludus ragalis (12 Preludes and Fugues), kbd, 1974; Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi, 1975–9; 4 identische Stücke, 1995; 36 skandierte Gesichtspunkte, 1997

El-ac: Sinophonie II, 8-track tape, 1969–72; Fruitti d’amore, vc, elec, 1988; Talkmaster’s Choice, cptr installation, spkr, cptr, 1992; Farting Quietly in Church (Vortrag über Haiku), Bar, player pf, elec, 1994

WRITINGS

‘Bus Journey to Parametron’, Feedback Papers, nos. 21–3 (1980) [whole issue]

‘Über die zwei Arten von Computermusik’, MusikTexte, no.6 (1984) 27–28

‘Two Essays on Theory’, Computer Music Journal, xi/1 (1987) 44–60

‘On the Spectral Analysis of Speech for Subsequent Resynthesis by Acoustic Instruments’, Analyse en musique electroacoustique: Bourges 1996, 276–83

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (P.N. Wilson)

S. Kaske: ‘A Conversation with Clarence Barlow’, Computer Music Journal, ix/1 (1985), 19–28

M. Supper: “‘… eine Maschine, um die Arbeit abzunehmen …”’, Positionen, xi (1992), 5–7 [interview]

PETER NIKLAS WILSON

Barlow, Samuel L(atham) M(itchell)

(b New York, 1 June 1892; d Wyndmoor, PA, 19 Sept 1982). American composer and administrator. He studied at Harvard University (BA 1914), then in New York with Percy Goetschius and Franklin Robinson, in Paris with Philipp, and in Rome with Respighi (orchestration, 1923). Before World War I, and for two decades thereafter, he was active in New York civic and professional groups formed to promote music, and in liberal political action groups. He was the first chairman of the New York Community Chorus, chairman of the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, governor of the ACA, chairman of the American Committee for the Arts, director of the China Aid Council, and vice-president of the American Committee for Spanish Freedom. In addition, he taught in various settlement schools and was a frequent contributor to Modern Music.

Barlow’s opera Mon ami Pierrot, to a libretto by Sacha Guitry on the life of Lully and purporting to show the origin of the French children’s song ‘Au clair de la lune’, was the first by an American to be performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris (11 January 1935); his ‘symphonic concerto for magic lantern’, Babar (after Brunoff’s picture books), uses slide projections. Despite such novelties, Barlow’s style was relatively conservative: he admitted that ‘tunes which wouldn’t shock Papa Brahms keep sticking their necks out’.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Ballo sardo, ballet, 1928; Mon ami Pierrot (op, S. Guitry), 1934; Amanda, op, 1936; Amphitryon 38 (incid music, J. Giraudoux), 12 orch pieces, 1937

Orch: Vocalise, 1926; Alba, sym. poem, orch/chbr orch, 1927; Circus Ov., 1930; Pf Conc., 1931; Biedermeier Waltzes, 1935; Babar, sym. conc., slide projection, 1936; Leda, 1939; Sousa ad Parnassum, 1939

Chbr and solo inst.: Ballad, Scherzo, str qt, 1933; Spanish Quarter, pf suite, 1933; Conversation with Tchekhov, pf trio, 1940; Jardin de Le Nôtre, pf suite

Vocal: choruses and songs, incl. 3 Songs from the Chinese, T, 7 insts, 1924

Principal publishers: Choudens, Joubert, G. Schirmer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S.L.M. Barlow: The Astonished Muse (New York, 1961) [autobiography]

Obituary, New York Times (21 Sept 1982)

M. Lederman: The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music, 1924–1946) (Brooklyn, NY, 1983)

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK

Barlow, Wayne (Brewster)

(b Elyria, OH, 6 Sept 1912; d Rochester, NY, 17 Dec 1996). American composer and teacher. He studied composition with Edward Royce, Bernard Rogers, and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School (1930–37), where he received the MMus and the PhD degrees, and with Schoenberg at the University of Southern California (1935). In 1937 he joined the faculty of the Eastman School, eventually becoming chairman of the composition department, director of the electronic music studio (1968), and dean of graduate studies (1973); in 1978 he was named professor emeritus. He received two Fulbright scholarships (1955–6, 1964–5) and numerous commissions, and travelled widely as lecturer, guest composer and conductor of his own works. He also served as organist and choirmaster at two churches in Rochester, St Thomas Episcopal (1946–76) and Christ Episcopal (1976–8). He was a prolific composer in an eclectic, tonal, free 12-note style.

WORKS

Dramatic: 3 Moods for Dancing (ballet), 1940

Orch: De Profundis, prelude, 1934; False Faces, ballet suite, 1935; Sinfonietta, C, 1936; The Winter's Passed, rhapsody, ob, str/pf, 1938; Lyrical Piece, cl, str/pf, 1943; Nocturne, chbr orch, 1946; Rondo-Ov., 1947; Sinfonietta, C, 1950; Lento and Allegro, 1955; Night Song, 1957; Intrada, Fugue and Postlude, brass ens, 1959; Rota, chbr orch, 1959; Images, hp, orch, 1961; Sinfonia da Camera, chbr orch, 1962; Vistas, 1963; Conc., sax, band, 1970; Hampton Beach, ov., 1971; Soundscapes, orch, tape, 1972; Divertissement, fl, chbr orch, 1980; Frontiers, band, 1982

Vocal: Zion in Exile (cant.), S, A, T, B, chorus, orch, 1937; Songs from The Silence of Amor, S, orch, 1939; Madrigal for a Bright Morning (J.R. Slater), chorus, 1942; Ps xxiii, chorus, org/orch, 1944; 3 Songs (W. Shakespeare), 1948; Mass, G, chorus, orch, 1951; Poems for Music (R. Hillyer, Shakespeare), S, orch, 1958; Missa Sancti Thomae, chorus, org, 1959; Diversify the Abyss (H. Plutzik), male chorus, 1964; We all Believe in One True God, chorus, brass qt, org, 1965; Wait for the Promise of the Father, T, Bar, chorus, small orch, 1968; Voices of Faith (cant.), spkr, S, chorus, orch, 1974; Voices of Darkness, spkr, pf, perc, tape, 1975; What Wondrous Love, chorus, org, gui, 1976; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, T, chorus, cl, va, pf, tape, 1978; 7 Seals of Revelation (cant.), S, A, T, B, chorus, orch, 1989

Chbr: Prelude, Air and Variation, bn, str qt, pf, 1949; Pf Qnt, 1951; Triptych, str qt, 1953; Trio, ob, va, pf, 1964; Elegy, va, pf/orch, 1968; Duo, hp, tape, 1969; Vocalise and Canon, tuba, pf, 1976; Intermezzo, va, hp, 1980; Sonatina for 4, fl, cl, vc, hp, 1984

Kbd: Pf Sonata, 1948; Hymn Voluntaries for the Church Year, org, 1963–81; Dynamisms, 2 pf, 1966; 2 Inventions, pf, 1968; 3 Voluntaries, org, 1970; 4 Chorale Voluntaries, org, 1979–80; Pange lingua, org, 1980; Preludes on Darwell's 148th, Gott sei Dank, Knickerbocker, Austria, org, 1983

Tape: Study in Electronic Sound, 1965; Moonflight, 1970; Soundprints in Concrete, 1975

Principal publishers: Concordia, C. Fischer, J. Fischer, Gray, Presser

WRITINGS

‘Contemporary Music: an Orientation’, Music Journal, xi/6 (1953), 26–7, 33–5

Foundations of Music (New York, 1953)

‘Crisis!’, Music Journal, xx/2 (1962), 26–7, 74

‘Of Choral Music for the Church’, Choral Journal, no.6 (1963–4), 13–14

‘Electronic Music and Music Education’, Electronic Music Review (1968), no.6, pp.40–43; repr. as ‘Electronic Music: Challenge to Music Education’, Music Educators Journal, lv/3 (1968), 66–9

W. THOMAS MARROCCO/MARY WALLACE DAVIDSON

Barmen.

Town in Germany. It was united with Elberfeld in 1929 to form Wuppertal.

Barmherzige Brüder.

See Hospitallers of St John of God.

Bärmig, Johann Gotthilf

(b Werdau, 13 May 1815; d Werdau, 26 Oct 1899). German builder of organs and mechanical organs, and also of physharmonikas and harmoniums. He learnt organ building from Urban Kreutzbach in Borna and afterwards worked as an assistant in Salzburg where he is also said to have first become involved with the physharmonika. In about 1846 he opened a workshop in Werdau, which he ran (possibly at first with Ramming) until 1887 when Emil Müller succeeded him. Bärmig’s work extended over the whole of Saxony and east Thuringia. He was awarded a silver medal for the three physharmonikas he displayed at the Leipzig Art and Industry Exhibition in 1854. Favouring classical 18th-century measurements, he built about 50 first-rate one- and two-manual mechanical organs with slider-chests and, usually, chamber bellows, but occasionally concertina bellows. His Great organs have a faultless upper-partial structure, and the large instruments (especially those in Schöneck, Kittlitz and Klingenthal) show a good balance between the two manuals. Terz 13/5' and Quint 22/3' or Cornet are standard features of the specification; the rich texture of the mixtures is especially attractive. The Pedal, which in Schöneck and Kittlitz includes a 32' stop, is often enriched by a soft Posaune bass. Solid workmanship and a clear full tone distinguish Bärmig’s work, which recalls the splendour of old Saxon organ building. Among his oldest surviving instruments are the organ in the village church at Königswalde bei Werdau (1852) and a beautifully-toned pedal-harmonium in the old school at Gottesgrün bei Greiz. Under the control of Emil Müller, Bärmig's firm developed into the largest harmonium factory in Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (W. Hüttel)

F. Oehme: Handbuch über ältere und neuere berühmte Orgelwerke im Königreich Sachsen, i–ii (Dresden, n.d.); iii (Dresden, 1897)

R. Fritzsche: Werdau und seine Industrie (Werdau, 1936), 117, 141

W. Hüttel: Musikgeschichte von Glauchau und Umgebung (Glauchau, 1995), 95, 105, 107

WALTER HÜTTEL

Barnabei.

See Bernabei family.

Barnard [née Pye], Charlotte Alington [Claribel]

(b Louth, Lincs., 23 Dec 1830; d Dover, 30 Jan 1869). English ballad composer. She published two volumes of verse and some 100 songs, using the pseudonym ‘Claribel’. Forced by her father to break off a long engagement to another, she married Rev. Charles Cary Barnard in 1854; thus her success with such ‘jilt songs’ as Won't you tell me why, Robin? (1861) and Oh Mother! Take the wheel away (1865), was ironic. In 1857, moving to London, she studied with the pianist W.H. Holmes and leading singers such as Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, for whom Janet's Choice (1859), her first success, was written. Its verse and refrain form contrasted with the more usual strophic settings of that time. Writing her own words allowed formal flexibility. The most commercially successful composer in Boosey's ballad catalogue, she was the first to enjoy a royalty arrangement. Her melodic dexterity is evident in Five O'Clock in the Morning (1862), together with an expanding harmonic vocabulary in Mountain Mabel (1864), and a growing attention to form in Come back to Erin (1866). In 1868, losing £30,000 through her father's fraudulent dealings and bankruptcy, she left for the Continent, but died shortly after returning. Admiration for her songs in North America, especially her waltz song Take back the heart (words by Mrs Gifford), equalled British esteem, and her work was well represented in vocal collections long after her death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown-StrattonBMB [incl. summary list of works]

DNB (W.B. Squire)

FétisBS

D.B. Scott: The Singing Bourgeois (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1989), esp. 72–7 [incl. music exx.]

P. Smith and M. Godsmark: The Story of Claribel (Charlotte Alington Barnard) (Lincoln, 1965)

DEREK B. SCOTT

Barnard, John

(b ?1591; fl c1641). English music editor and composer. He may well have been the John Barnard who was a lay clerk at Canterbury Cathedral between 1618 and 1622, and whose age at the time of his marriage in 1619 was given as ‘about 28’. Barnard, who was a minor canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London, in the early 17th century, was the compiler of The First Book of Selected Church Musick (London, 1641/R). This anthology of church music by 19 leading composers of the late 16th and early 17th centuries was the only printed collection of English liturgical music to appear between Day's Certaine notes (London, 1565) and the Civil War. It comprised ten partbooks – Medius, Primus and Secundus Contratenor, Tenor and Bassus, for each side of the choir, Decani and Cantoris. Only 38 partbooks are now extant, of which 33 are imperfect. No printed organbook exists, and it seems most unlikely that one was ever published, though it may be that the ‘Batten’ Organbook would have served as a source for one. A much larger collection of English liturgical music which Barnard assembled in manuscript between about 1625 and 1638 has also survived (GB-Lcm 1045–51); it consisted originally of ten partbooks. The manuscripts clearly served as printer's copy for some of the pieces which later appeared in Barnard's 1641 publication. The collection contains 174 compositions, of which 50 are otherwise unknown. The settings are by 45 identifiable composers, six of whom (including Barnard himself) are not represented in any other pre-Restoration liturgical source. There are also six anonymous pieces. Barnard's two known compositions (settings of the Preces and of the Responses) are included in this collection. A catch by a ‘Mr Barnard’ is included in Hilton's Catch that Catch Can, published by Playford in 1663. The contents of Barnard's printed collection are listed in Grove 1–4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le HurayMR

J.B. Clark: ‘Adrian Batten and John Barnard: Colleagues and Collaborators’, MD, xxii (1968), 207–29

J. Morehen: The Sources of English Cathedral Music, c.1617–c.1644 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1969), 244–305

R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music, 1549–1660, EECM, suppl.i (London, 1972)

JOHN MOREHEN

Barnby, Sir Joseph

(b York, 12 Aug 1838; d London, 28 Jan 1896). English conductor and composer. He was the son of Thomas Barnby, an organist, and became a chorister at York Minster at the age of seven. In 1854 he went to London and entered the RAM. After holding positions as organist at various London and York churches, he received his first important appointment in 1863 as organist of St Andrew’s, Wells Street, under its prominent Tractarian rector Benjamin Webb. Responding perhaps to pressure from their affluent and fashionable congregation, Webb and Barnby developed a type of music far removed from the austerity desired by the early Tractarians. A large, paid, surpliced choir adorned the chancel, and performed ‘fully choral’ services. The music for these services from 1866 onwards included adaptations of Roman Catholic masses and motets, principally those of Gounod, with the words translated by Webb and the music adapted by Barnby. At the performance of Gounod’s Messe solennelle on 30 November 1866, a harp was for the first time introduced into an Anglican service. These lavish choral services, which were really in the nature of sacred concerts, were continued by Barnby on a still more ambitious scale when he moved to St Anne’s, Soho, in 1871. The services at this church soon gained the popular nickname of ‘The Sunday Opera’. From 1873 onwards Barnby conducted an annual performance of Bach’s St John Passion with orchestra in the church.

Meanwhile Barnby had been extremely active elsewhere in the cause of choral music. He had been musical adviser to Novello & Co. since 1861, and in 1867 the company established ‘Mr Joseph Barnby’s Choir’ to perform then little-known works published by Novello, including Handel’s Jephtha, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Bach's St Matthew Passion; Barnby repeated this work at Westminster Abbey on 6 April 1871 with a combined choir from the abbey and other leading churches. This, the first church performance of the work in England, launched it as a profound influence on Victorian society. Barnby was an indefatigable conductor of oratorios and church music for the rest of his life, and was a popular director of provincial festivals. At the end of 1872 he amalgamated his choir with the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (also under Novello's patronage) and continued to conduct it until his death; in 1888 it became the Royal Choral Society. He performed Dvořák’s Stabat mater on 10 March 1883, and on 10 November 1884 gave the first performance in England of Parsifal. His conducting was accurate and forceful, and he raised choral standards by insisting on greater efforts from the singers; he was progressive in his choice of music, though his interpretations of Handel and Bach were apt to be dull and ponderous.

In 1875 he was appointed precentor of Eton College. Instead of treating this position as largely concerned with the chapel services, he embarked on a programme of choral performances and concerts for the benefit of the boys, becoming Eton’s first real director of music. He raised the school's Musical Society to a high standard of precision by means of a quasi-military drill. He also directed a Sunday Evening Musical Society in which masters, boys and chapel choristers sang through the major choral repertory. In 1886 he resigned his position at St Anne’s, and in 1892 that at Eton; in the latter year he was knighted, and was also appointed principal of the Guildhall School of Music. He continued to serve in this position until his death four years later.

As a composer Barnby was very active, writing almost entirely choral and vocal music, in which he was clearly the heir of Gounod. He wrote a large number of cathedral services, anthems, chants and hymn tunes, and one oratorio, Rebekah (1870). The services and anthems were popular for many years, especially at St Paul’s Cathedral, but they were later singled out by such writers as Walker and Fellowes as particularly deplorable examples of Victorian sentimentality, and are now virtually obsolete. They represented an opposite type of high churchmanship to that of the ‘Gregorian’ school, in that they adapted for the church whatever methods had recently been found effective in theatre or concert music. Barnby’s chants and hymn tunes are still heard: ‘Cloisters’ in particular, sung to Pusey’s hymn Lord of our life, has an easy emotionalism and a melodic sweep that has ensured it a long-lived popularity. His tune ‘For all the saints’ long maintained its hold even against one of the greatest modern hymn tunes, Vaughan Williams’s ‘Sine nomine’. To many generations of Etonians his music to two of the three school songs has seemed to embody much of their Victorian legacy; while many an amateur choral society has revelled in the blue harmonies of his Tennyson setting Sweet and Low. Barnby also edited four hymnbooks, the most important being The Hymnary (1872).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (F.G. Edwards)

J.S. Curwen: ‘St Anne’s, Soho’, Studies in Worship Music, i (London,1880, 3/1901), 179–83

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 199–200

J. Bennett: Obituary, MT, xxxvii (1896), 80, 153–5

J.D. Brown and S.S. Stratton: British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897/R)

M.B. Foster: Anthems and Anthem Composers (London, 1901/R), 162–3

A. Mellor: A Record of the Music and Musicians of Eton College (Windsor, 1932), 43–8

E.H. Fellowes: English Cathedral Music (London, 1941, rev. 5/1969 by J.A. Westrup)

B. Rainbow: The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church 1839–1872 (London, 1970), 276–82

E. Routley: The Music of Christian Hymns (Chicago, 1981), 101–2

W.J. Gatens: ‘John Stainer (1840–1901) and Joseph Barnby (1838–96): the High Victorian Idiom’, Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 1986), 170–201

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Barn dance.

(1) Known in the USA in association with celebrations to mark the building of a new barn and derived from the schottische, it became popular in England around the late 1880s originally in conjunction with the tune Dancing in the Barn and later with the Pas de quatre by Meyer Lutz, and by the 1920s had become a progressive dance. By the 1960s the term had been adopted as a general description of social country dancing which, by this stage, also included elements of the ‘old time’ dance repertory.

(2) Originally an American rural meeting for dancing, held in a barn or similar large building. After 1920 the term designated variety radio programmes of folk-like entertainment; the first programme so described was broadcast on radio station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas (1923), though many southern radio stations had presented programmes of country music in previous years. By 1949 some 650 radio stations were broadcasting live performances of country music, the most famous of which were the ‘National Barn Dance’ (on WLS, Chicago, 1924–70) and the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ (on WSM, Nashville, 1925–). By the mid-1950s most of these shows had disappeared, although a few, most notably the ‘Grand Ole Opry’, benefited from the growth of country music as an industry in Nashville.

See also Country music, §§1–2, and Nashville sound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA

G.C. Biggar: ‘The WLS National Barn Dance Story: the Early Years’, JEMF Quarterly, vii/23 (1971), 105–12

T.A. Patterson: ‘Hillbilly Music among the Flatlanders: Early Midwestern Radio Barn Dances’, Journal of Country Music, vi/1 (1975), 12

C. Hagan: Grand Ole Opry (New York, 1989)

Barnekow, Christian

(b Saint Sauveur, Hautes-Pyrénées, 28 July 1837; d Frederiksberg, 20 March 1913). Danish composer. He studied with Niels Ravnkilde and Edvard Helsted in Copenhagen and became a skilful pianist and organist. A man of independent means, he had time to contribute to the administration of several Danish musical institutions. He was president of the Society for the Publication of Danish Music from 1871, a committee member of that society from 1880, later chairman of the Music Society, a member of the committee of the Ancker Foundation and founder of a series of subscription concerts in Copenhagen from 1861. He was nominated titular professor in the University of Copenhagen (1891).

Barnekow's compositions are in the romantic style of J.P.E. Hartmann and Gade and include cantatas and choral and solo songs, chamber music and piano works. Many of his hymns are regularly used in the Danish church. As an authority on sacred choral singing, he was responsible for the editing of tunes for the Danish hymnbook (1878), which was augmented by a supplement (1892) and several later editions. He also edited collections of spiritual songs by J.A.P. Schulz, F.L.A. Kunzen and Hartmann, and a selection of pieces by Buxtehude, who was almost unknown at that time. Barnekow was an enthusiastic collector of paintings, books and music, and his collections of original editions of Danish music and books now belong to the Musikhistorisk Museum in Copenhagen.

WORKS

printed works published in Copenhagen unless otherwise stated

MSS mainly in DK-Kk

instrumental

Pf trio, f, op.1, 1857 (1867); Humoresker, pf 4 hands, op.3 (n.d.); sextet, 2 vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1862, MS; pf qt, D, op.12 (n.d.); qnt, g, 2 vn, va, 2 vc, op.20 (Leipzig, n.d.); sonata, F, vn, pf, op.23 (1907); pf sonata, d, op.24 (?1908); Idyller, str orch, op.29 (1910)

vocal

Songs (C. Richardt, A. Langsted, B.S. Ingemann), opp.4, 7, 11, 13, 19, 27; Aandelige sange [Spiritual Songs]: i (1863); ii (1870); iii (1874); iv (1903)

Secular cantatas, MS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBL (E. Abrahamsen)

G. Lynge: Danske komponister i det 20. aarhundredes begyndelse (Århus, 1916/17, 2/1917), 17–27

G. Skjerne: ‘Christian Barnekow’, Dansk biografisk haandleksikon, ed. S. Dahl and P. Engelstoft (Copenhagen, 1920), 92–3

K.A. Bruun: Dansk musiks histoire fra Holberg-tiden til Carl Nielsen, ii (Copenhagen, 1969), 204–6

SIGURD BERG/GORM BUSK

Barnes, John (Robert)

(b Windsor, 11 Oct 1928; d Edinburgh, 9 March 1998). English organologist, instrument maker and restorer. He studied physics at the University of London and began his career with an English firm making sound-recording tape. In 1962 he began to make and restore early keyboard instruments as a full time occupation. His early work included restorations for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the museum of the Royal College of Music, London, as well as building new historically-based instruments. In 1968 he became curator of the Russell Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments at the University of Edinburgh, a position he held until his retirement in 1983. Through his early work he formulated a number of theories about the stringing and pitch of Italian keyboard instruments; he also wrote an important article about the alterations found in some Italian harpsichords and several important articles about instrument restoration. His restorations were carried out with high technical skill, a solid scientific approach and a respect for the original instruments, resulting in working methods which have set the standard for later restorers. Although his output of instruments was limited, he influenced many modern makers through his work at the Russell Collection, the publication of drawings and a book on traditional spinet construction, and by his association in the mid-1970s with the US firm of instrument kit manufacturers Zuckermann, and with the Early Music Shop, Bradford, in the 1990s. After his retirement from the Russell Collection he continued to build and restore instruments, and to publish research on early keyboard instruments and clavichords in particular. His small collection of instruments includes a number of important harpsichords, a spinet and a clavichord as well as pianos of the English, French and Viennese schools.

G. GRANT O'BRIEN/DARRYL MARTIN

Barnet, Charlie [Daly, Charles]

(b New York, 26 Oct 1913; d San Diego, 4 Sept 1991). American jazz bandleader and saxophonist. He was born into a wealthy family, but rebelled in his teens to become a musician. Although he was never a major jazz improviser, he led a popular dance band during the swing period which was also admired for its jazz playing. Barnet was one of the first white bandleaders to employ black musicians, usually as solo stars, among them Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers, Benny Carter and Frankie Newton (who joined the band as early as 1937). Barnet was especially influenced by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and played many arrangements which frankly imitated Ellington’s. In 1939 his hit recording for Bluebird of Billy May’s arrangement of Cherokee made him one of the most popular swing bandleaders. However, with the decline of the big bands in the late 1940s he was forced to disband his orchestra, which thereafter regrouped only for special occasions. Although at various times he dabbled in music publishing and the restaurant business, Barnet continued to play occasionally into the 1970s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Edwards, G. Hall and B. Korst: Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra (Whittier, CA, 1965, 2/1970) [discography]

J. Burns: ‘Charlie Barnet’, Jazz Monthly, no.183 (1970), 9–12

I. Crosbie: ‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie’, Jazz Journal, xxvi (1973), no.5, 10–12; no.7, 25–8

C. Garrod: Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra (Spotswood, NJ, 1973, 2/1984) [discography]

C. Barnet and S. Dance: Those Swinging Years: the Autobiography of Charlie Barnet (Baton Rouge, LA, 1984/R) [incl. discography]

Oral history material in US-NEij

JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER

Barnett, Alice (Ray)

(b Lewiston, IL, 26 May 1886; d San Diego, 28 Aug 1975). American composer, teacher and patron. She studied with Rudolf Ganz and Felix Borowski at the Chicago Musical College (BM 1906) and with Heniot Levy and Adolf Weidig at the American Conservatory, Chicago; she also studied composition in Chicago with Wilhelm Middleschulte and in Berlin with Hugo Kaun (1909–10). From 1917 to 1926 she taught music at the San Diego High School. A respected and influential leader of musical life in San Diego, she helped to found the San Diego Opera Guild and the San Diego Civic SO (of which she was chairwoman for 14 years). Barnett wrote some 60 art songs, 49 of which were published by G. Schirmer and Summy between 1906 and 1932. They display a lyrical gift, sure tonal sense and, despite her German training, strong French harmonic influence. They are often exotic and colourful, especially Chanson of the Bells of Oseney (1924) and the Browning cycle In a Gondola (1920), which is also dramatic; others of her songs are Panels from a Chinese Screen (1924), Harbor Lights (1927) and Nirvana (1932). She also wrote instrumental music, including a piano trio (1920) and Effective Violin Solos (1924). Although Barnett stopped composing in the late 1930s, she maintained her musical activities in San Diego. Her manuscripts and papers are at the San Diego Historical Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.T. Upton: ‘Some Recent Representative American Song-Composers’, MQ, xi (1925), 383–417, esp. 398–417

W.T. Upton: Art-Song in America (Boston, 1930), 214–24

A.F. Block and C. Neuls-Bates: Women in American Music: a Bibliography of Music and Literature (Westport, CT, 1979)

C.K. Smith: The Art Songs of Alice Barnett (diss., U. of Northern Colorado, 1996)

ADRIENNE FRIED BLOCK

Barnett, Carol E(dith Anderson)

(b Dubuque, IA, 23 May 1949). American composer. As a child she studied the piano, the violin and the flute, and performed in various choral and instrumental ensembles. At the University of Minnesota (BA 1972, MA 1976) she studied composition with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler, the piano with Bernhard Weiser and the flute with Emil Niosi. In 1992 she became composer-in-residence for the Dale Warland Singers. Her works have also been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Barnett's harmonic idiom is flexibly chromatic and freely dissonant within a context that includes references to tonality. She tends to work with small, striking musical ideas, repeating them within various textures and timbres that shift effortlessly from one to the next, as in her Overture to a Greek Drama (1994). Her choral cycle An Elizabethan Garland (1994) features deftly managed textures that range from imitation and dialogue among the voices to streams of closely positioned chords over a deep bass. Her lyricism is wide-ranging, creating a singing quality in even disjunct melodic lines.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal (SATB, unless otherwise stated): 5 poemas de Becquer (G.A. Bécquer), 1979; Requiem (liturgical texts), SSA, 1981; Voices (N. Cox), S, gui, 1983; Epigrams, Epitaphs (M. Prior, J. Gay, S. Wesley, H. Walpole, B. Jonson), 1986; Elegy (S. Johnson), 1988; 2 canti meridionali (M. Ferraguti), S, pf, 1989; Valediction (J. Donne), TTBB, vc, pf, 1989; Christmas Eve, Bells, 1991; Let it Go (M. Estok), S, pf, 1992; The King of Yellow Butterflies (V. Lindsay), 1993; An Elizabethan Garland (J. Fletcher, S. Daniel, 2 anon. texts), 1994; Children Songs (E.St.V. Millay, L. Carroll, C. Sandburg, W. Welles), SA, cl, pf, 1996; Franklin Credo (B. Franklin), 1996; Three Faces of Love, 1996; A Spiritual Journey (trad. spirituals), 1997; The Mystic Trumpeter (W. Whitman), 1997

Orch: Adon Olam Variations, 1976; Hn Conc., 1985; Carnival, 2 pf, orch, 1990; Ov. to a Greek Drama, 1994; Remembering Khachaturian, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, hn, pf, 1973; 4 Chorale Meditations, vn, 1982; Str Qt no.1 ‘Jewish Folk Fantasies’, 1986; The Mysterious Brass Band, brass qnt, 1990; Mythical Journeys, fl, gui, 1991

MSS in US-PHf

Principal publishers: Plymouth, Boosey & Hawkes, Walton, Thompson

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Berg: ‘Composer Profile’, Minnesota Women's Press (28 Dec 1994 – 10 Jan 1995)

K. Pendle: ‘For the Theatre: Opera, Dance and Theatre Piece’, CMR, xvi (1997), 69–80

KARIN PENDLE

Barnett, Clara Kathleen.

See Rogers, Clara Kathleen.

Barnett, John

(b Bedford, 1/15 July 1802; d Leckhampton, 16 April 1890). English composer. E.F. Rimbault (Obituary, MT, xxxi, 1890, p.285) is alone in giving his date of birth as 1 July 1802. Barnett's father, Bernhard Beer, was a Prussian diamond merchant of Jewish extraction who is said to have been a cousin of Meyerbeer; on settling in England he changed his surname to Barnett. His mother, a Hungarian, died while he was a child. As a small boy John ‘sang like a bird’; in later childhood his fine alto voice attracted much attention. At the age of 11 he was articled to S.J. Arnold, proprietor of the Lyceum Theatre, London, making his first stage appearance in The Shipwreck on 22 July 1813, and he continued to sing on the stage until 1818. He studied the piano with Ries, Pérez and Kalkbrenner, and composition with William Horsley and C.E. Horn.

Before 1818 Barnett had already begun his long and immensely prolific career as a composer. His early works include piano sonatas, songs, masses, a sacred cantata, and a grand scena, The Groves of Pomona, sung by Braham. Some of these early works were well received by critics, and Barnett was urged to cultivate the higher branches of his art. Between 1826 and 1833, however, much of his energy was spent in providing incidental music for farces, melodramas and burlesques. Though some of these were highly successful, particularly The Pet of the Petticoats (1832), and others contained songs that soon became popular favourites, for instance ‘Rise, gentle moon’ in Charles XII (1828), the music in general was not of a high standard. Meanwhile Barnett had opened a music shop in Regent Street (1828) with the dramatist W.T. Moncrieff (1794–1857). In 1832 Lucia Vestris appointed him musical director at the Olympic Theatre.

Barnett's serious interest in music was soon given an unusual opportunity: on 14 July 1834 Arnold reopened the Lyceum Theatre as the English Opera House and began to produce full-length English operas of a kind that had become almost obsolete, the only recent representatives being Bishop's Aladdin (1826), Weber's Oberon (1826) and Ries's The Sorceress (1831). Loder's Nourjahad was the first (21 July 1834); Barnett's The Mountain Sylph which followed (25 August) went even further than Loder's work in the use of continuous music, with a minimum of spoken dialogue. It was thus one of the first true English operas since Arne's Artaxerxes (1762), a work for which Barnett had unbounded admiration. Barnett had written some of the music for a play at the Victoria Theatre, but he now ‘heightened’ it into a ‘romantic grand opera’. He dedicated the published vocal score to Arnold ‘for the spirit, zeal, and enthusiasm which he has shewn in the production of Native Operas, and in cherishing native talent’. However, Arnold's primary effort was towards the establishment of serious opera in the English language; he did not feel that either plot or music need be drawn from English traditions. The story of The Mountain Sylph was accordingly taken from French sources, and the music was a good deal less ‘English’ than most of Bishop's. But its success proved that audiences were now prepared to listen to dramatic music with an English text. It had an initial run of about 100 nights, and held its own on the stage for the rest of the century.

Barnett unfortunately quarrelled with Arnold, and publicly accused him of breaking a financial agreement. He had already been at odds with Alfred Bunn, another leading figure in the world of the theatre; later he was to add Mapleson to his mounting list of theatrical adversaries. His next two serious operas, Fair Rosamond and Farinelli, were produced at Drury Lane. Neither was through-composed, and both show a tendency to return to the older conception of English opera as a mere string of independent songs and ballads – some of which, however, are of good quality. In 1838 he joined with the dramatist Morris Barnett (unrelated to him) in an effort to set up a permanent English Opera House at St James's Theatre, but it closed after a week. From about this time Barnett's letters to the press were increasingly bitter. He accused theatre managers, concert promoters and the committee of the Philharmonic Society of conspiring to defeat the cause of English music. After one more attempt to establish English opera, this time at the Prince's Theatre (1840), he abandoned the London stage. In 1841 he went to live in Cheltenham, where he became a highly successful singing teacher; soon afterwards he published two books about learning to sing.

He lived nearly 50 years longer but never again attempted to produce an opera, to the disappointment of many admirers. In about 1870 he bought a substantial country house, Cotteswold, Leckhampton, near Cheltenham. He had become an advanced ‘free-thinker’, supporting evolution and homeopathy, and an inveterate controversialist, constantly writing trenchant letters of protest to The Times to put down some musical upstart. In the course of a prolonged attack on the methods of Mainzer and Hullah he produced the astonishing theory that ‘singing cannot be taught in classes’. He also engaged in a great battle with Leigh Hunt in the pages of The Tatler over the merits of English opera, when he claimed among other things that some of Bishop's music was worthy of Mozart. He continued to compose songs, but many of them remained in manuscript; ‘it is much to be regretted’, wrote Rimbault in 1876, ‘that he has withheld his later works from the public’. His position was an eminent one, but was based largely on one work, The Mountain Sylph. Macfarren wrote of this opera that ‘its production opened a new period for music in this country, from which is to be dated the establishment of an English dramatic school, which, if not yet accomplished, has made many notable advances’. Barnett's failure to follow up this one great success must be attributed in great part to an irascible disposition verging on paranoia.

The importance of The Mountain Sylph does not lie in the mere fact of its being largely through-composed; the recitatives are, indeed, quite conventional. What makes it a real opera is the cumulative dramatic effect of the successive musical scenes. The story (to be satirized later in Iolanthe) is of a love affair between a mortal, Donald, and a sylph, Aeolia; despite difficulties and stratagems, the pair are eventually united by a special act of the Sylphid Queen. The characters have little human reality and no subtlety, yet Barnett's richly scored music succeeds in creating strong emotion and dramatic tension. Inevitably Weber was his chief inspiration: the fairy choruses recall Oberon as much as the invocation scene suggests Der Freischütz. But Barnett was the only English composer at the time who could master this new and difficult idiom. He abandoned most traditional forms: there are few strophic songs or rondos, and no binary or sonata form arias; he created forms according to the demands of the various scenes, though he usually concluded each scene with a conventional cabaletta or stretta. There is rather too much dependence on the diminished 7th and other chromatic chords, but the themes used to evoke the supernatural, many of which recur as motifs at various points in the opera, are distinctly original in style (ex.1).

In amorous scenes, such as ‘Oh no! 'twas no deceptive spell’ and ‘Art thou a form?’, the disarming warmth and passion of Barnett's music can still move the listener, despite the absurdity of the verses and all the scorn and satire that has been lavished upon sentimental melodrama.

Of the vast quantity of Barnett's songs, many are ‘potboilers’ (his own term for them), but a proportion have distinction and would bear revival: most of these were originally associated with a dramatic production. His sacred music is sometimes grotesque, but his instrumental music, though it never had wide currency, is not to be despised. A string quartet in C, unashamedly Mozartian in general style, is full of interest and invention and shows a surprising flair for vigorous and witty counterpoint. The other major influence on his musical style is Spohr, as is seen, for instance, in his oratorio The Omnipresence of the Deity (1829), a work that clearly foreshadowed Pierson's Jerusalem.

Barnett was married on 9 May 1837 at St George's, Hanover Square, to Eliza Emily Lindley (1814–99), youngest daughter of the cellist Robert Lindley. Among their children were two daughters who became well-known singers, Rosamond (Mrs Robert Francillon) and Clara (Mrs Henry Rogers) (1844–1931). Many of Barnett's autographs were acquired by the Boston (Massachusetts) Public Library from Clara Rogers in 1921. A son, Domenico (1846–1911), taught the piano at Cheltenham Ladies' College until his death. One of Barnett's brothers, Joseph (d 1898), was a singing teacher and the father of John Francis Barnett; the other, Zaraeh, was a dramatic writer and provided librettos for some of his operas. There seems to be no connection with James George Barnett (1823–85), a London-born composer and conductor active in Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut, whose papers (including many manuscript compositions) are in US-NH 58.

For a further music example see Concertina, ex.1.

WORKS

all printed works published in London

stage

all first performed in London

printed works are vocal scores unless otherwise stated

MS librettos are in GB-Lbl

LCG	Covent Garden
LDL	Drury Lane
†	partly adapted

Before Breakfast (musical farce, R.B. Peake), 31 Aug 1826, US-Bp

Two Seconds (operatic farce, Peake), English Opera House, 28 Aug 1827, GB-Eu

Rienzi (historical tragedy, 5, M.R. Mitford, after E. Gibbon), LDL, 9 Oct 1828, US-Bp, 1 song (1828)

Charles XII, or The Siege of Stralsund (historical drama, 2, J.R. Planché), LDL, 11 Dec 1828, 1 song

Monsieur Mallet, or My Daughter's Letter (burletta, 3, W.T. Moncrieff), Adelphi, 22 Jan 1829, Bp, selections (?1830)

The Partizans, or The War of Paris in 1649 (drama, Planché, after Mélesville: La maison du rempart), LDL, 21 May 1829, 1 song (Mrs C.B. Wilson) (1830)

†Robert the Devil (musical drama), 1829, LCG, 2 Feb 1830, Bp [adapted from Meyerbeer]

The Deuce is in Her (operetta, 1, R.J. Raymond), Adelphi, 28 Aug 1830, 1 song (1830)

Baron Trenck, or The Fortress of Magdeburg (drama, S.J. Arnold), Surrey, 11 Oct 1830

†The Carnival at Naples (musical play, 5, W. Dimond), LCG, 30 Oct 1830, Bp, selections (1830)

Harlequin Pat and Harlequin Bat, or The Giant's Causeway (pantomime, C. Farley), LCG, 27 Dec 1830, Bp

Olympic Revels, or Prometheus and Pandora (burlesque, Planché and C. Dance, after G. Colman (ii): The Sun Poker), Olympic, 3 Jan 1831

Married Lovers (musical farce, 2, T. Power), LCG, 2 Feb 1831, Bp, 1 song (1831)

The Picturesque (operetta, T.H. Bayly), Adelphi, 25 Aug 1831, Bp, 1 song (?1840)

Country Quarters (musical farce, I. Pocock), LCG, 6 Dec 1831, Bp

The Convent, or The Pet of the Petticoats (operetta, J.B. Buckstone), Sadler's Wells, 9 July 1832, Bp

The Court of Queen's Bench (burletta), Olympic, 22 Oct 1832, Bp, 1 song (?1840)

The Conquering Game (comedy, W.B. Bernard), Olympic, 28 Nov 1832, 1 song (1833)

Win Her and Wear Her (comic op, 3, S. Beazley, after S. Centlivre: A Bold Stroke for a Wife), LDL, 18 Dec 1832, Bp

The Paphian Bower, or Venus and Adonis (mythological burletta, 1, Planché and Dance), Olympic, 26 Dec 1832

Nell Gwynne, or The Prologue (comedy, D. Jerrold), LCG, 9 Jan 1833, 2 songs, march, Bp

Promotion, or A Morning at Versailles in 1750 (burletta, 1, Planché), Olympic, 18 Feb 1833, Bp

A Match in the Dark (farce, Dance), Olympic, 21 Feb 1833, 1 song (Planché) (1833)

The Soldier's Widow, or The Ruins of the Mill (musical drama, E. Fitzball), Adelphi, 4 May 1833, Bp

The Mountain Sylph (romantic grand op, 2, J.T. Thackeray), English Opera House, 25 Aug 1834, Bp (1834)

Monsieur Jacques (burletta, M. Barnett), St James's, 13 Jan 1836, 1 song (1836)

Fair Rosamond (historical op, 4, C.Z. Barnett, F. Shannon), LDL, 28 Feb 1837, Bp (1837)

Blanche of Jersey (musical romance, 2, Peake), English Opera House, 9 Aug 1837, Bp, selections (1837–40)

The Little Laundress (musical entertainment, Peake, after Fr.), English Opera House, 21 Aug 1837

Farinelli (serio-comic op, 2, Barnett), LDL, 8 Feb 1839, Bp, selections (1839)

Kathleen (op, J.S. Knowles), 1840, Bp, unperf.

†The Beggar's Opera, unperf., Bp (undated) (c1840) [adapted from Pepusch]

Queen Mab (op), 1841, unperf., Bp

Marie (op), 1845, unfinished

sacred vocal

2 Grand Masses, SATB, orch: g, 1823; c, before 1827: US-Bp

Abraham on the Altar of his Son (cant.), 1823, Bp

The Omnipotence of the Deity (orat, R. Montgomery), Bp, vs (1829)

Daniel in the Den of Lions (orat), 1841, Bp

12 Collects in Verse (W.H. Bellamy) (1849–51)

2 anthems, 1 sacred duet, 5 sacred songs

secular vocal

The Groves of Pomona (F. Thomson: The Seasons), grand scena (1820)

70 glees, madrigals and partsongs, incl. 24 listed in Baptie; 9 trios; 48 duets, incl. 6 Vocal Duets (J.E. Carpenter, R. Ryan) (1845)

Songs, said to number 2000, incl. 9 collections: 12 Russian Melodies (H.S. van Dyk) (?1821); 24 Songs in Imitation of the Music of Various Nations (van Dyk, L. Lee) (1824); 12 Songs from Fairyland (Bayly) (1827); Songs of the Minstrels, 2vv (van Dyk) (?1830); Songs of the Slavonians (J. Bowring) (?1830); Lyric Illustrations of the Modern Poets (1834), 2 ed. in MB, xliii (1979); Amusement for Leisure Hours (?1835); Dreams of a Persian Maiden (R.M. Daniel) (1842); 5 Songs (T. Moore) (1885)

instrumental

L'ipocondria, characteristic symphonia, E/B, 1839, US-Bp; 2 ovs.: C, 1826, Bp, A, before 1827; Adagio and allegro, brass band, E, c1828, Bp

Chbr: Fuga per 4 instrumenti: C, c1818, Bp; 3 str qts: C, 1835, Bp; D, 1836, Bp; A, 1837, GB-Lbl; Sonata, vn, pf, g, before 1827; Spare Moments, 3 sketches, concertina, pf (1859)

Solo: 2 sonatas, pf: c, c1820, US-Bp; E, before 1827; Introduction on a Favourite Air from The Beggar's Opera, pf (1824)

editions

Edns/arrs. for various vv/insts, incl. works by T.A. Arne (Artaxerxes), W.A. Mozart (Don Giovanni), J.L. Dussek (Pf Sonata, E, op.18); excerpts from operas by D. Auber, G. Meyerbeer, G. Rossini, C.M. von Weber, P. Winter; songs

WRITINGS

Systems and Singing Masters: an Analytic Comment upon the Wilhem Method … with … Critical Remarks upon Mr. John Hullah's Manual (London, 1842)

School for the Voice (London, ?1845), ed. J.A. Wade: The Handbook to the Pianoforte (London, 2/1850)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown-StrattonBMB

DNB

Grove1 (E.F. Rimbault)

GroveO (‘Mountain Sylph, The’; N. Burton, N. Temperley)

LoewenbergA

NicollH

PEM (N. Temperley)

SainsburyD

StiegerO

‘Theatrical Journal’, European Magazine and London Review, lxiv/July (1813), 46–7

Monthly Supplement to the Musical Library, i (1834), 70, 84

Musical World, ii (1836), 139–40; iv (1837), 172–3, 188–9; xiv (1840), 349–52, 365–7, 393

A. Bunn: The Stage (London, 1840), i, 138–40

G.A. Macfarren: ‘Barnett, John’, The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, ed. J.F. Waller (London, 1857–63)

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 132

J.F. Barnett: Musical Reminiscences and Impressions (London, 1906)

C.K. Rogers: Memories of a Musical Career (Boston, 1919)

H.M. Rogers: ‘John Barnett, Musician’, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, xxxiii (1924–5), 595; pubd separately (Cambridge, MA, 1925)

P.A. Scholes, ed.: The Mirror of Music 1844–1944 (London, 1947/R), 7–8

A.C. Sprague and B. Shuttleworth, eds.: Charles Rice: the London Theatre in the Eighteen-Thirties (London, 1950), 16–17

E.W. White: The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951/R)

E.D. Mackerness: ‘Leigh Hunt's Musical Journalism’, MMR, lxxxvi (1956), 212–22, esp. 217

B. Carr: ‘The First All-Sung English 19th-Century Opera’, MT, cxv (1974), 125–6

G. Balanchine and F. Mason: Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (New York, 1977), 603–4

N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age 1800–1914 (London, 1981/R)

E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983)

E.W. White: A Register of First Perfomances of English Operas and Semi-Operas (London, 1983)

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY, NIGEL BURTON

Barnett, John Francis

(b London, 16 Oct 1837; d London, 24 Nov 1916). English composer and pianist. His father was Joseph Alfred Barnett (d 29 April 1898), a professor of music, his uncle the composer John Barnett. Barnett began to study the piano at the age of six with his mother, took lessons from Wylde at 11 and at 13 gained the King's Scholarship at the RAM. In 1853 he made a very successful début with Mendelssohn's D minor Piano Concerto under Spohr at the New Philharmonic Society, and after studying with Hauptmann, Rietz and Moscheles at Leipzig he performed at the Gewandhaus in 1860. On his return to London he played at both the Philharmonic and New Philharmonic Societies with great success. In later years he was better known as a piano teacher. He became a Fellow of the RAM and taught at The National Training School for Music, the RCM and GSM. In 1871 he conducted at the Novello Albert Hall Concerts, and subsequently made occasional appearances as a conductor.

As a composer Barnett first achieved prominence with his Symphony in A (1864), written for the Musical Society of London. It was however as a popular composer of cantatas and oratorios that he achieved some resounding successes, from The Ancient Mariner (1867) and Paradise and the Peri (1870), both written for the Birmingham Festival, to The Eve of St Agnes (1913), produced by the London Choral Society. Although some of the later choral works were considered to be ‘modern’ and ‘Wagnerian’, mainly because of Barnett's use of leitmotifs, a critic wrote in the Musical Times (1891) that ‘The composer's sympathies were always with the clear, refined and gracious art of Mendelssohn, and there they remain’. Barnett devoted much of his time to teaching, but continued to compose and found time to produce several large-scale orchestral works, such as the Ouverture Symphonique, the Piano Concerto in D minor and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which won some critical acclaim. Like many of his English contemporaries, however, he never realized where his strength as a composer lay. His talents were essentially those of a miniaturist, for he lacked the originality and consistency of musical thought necessary for success in larger forms. The conservatism of his musical language, which depended principally on the legacy of Mozart and Mendelssohn, is shown by a comparison of his oratorio The Raising of Lazarus (1873) with the more vigorous contemporary style of such works as Stanford's God is our Hope and Strength (1877) and Parry's Prometheus Unbound (1880). Many of Barnett's smaller, descriptive piano pieces, which had a great vogue in 19th-century drawing-rooms (where they provided relief for young ladies from the works of Czerny and Hummel), achieve a simple charm.

In 1883 Barnett completed Schubert's Symphony in E major from autograph sketches in the possession of Sir George Grove (now in GB-Lcm). It was performed at the Crystal Palace in the same year.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in London, unless otherwise stated

vocal

The Ancient Mariner (cant., S.T. Coleridge), Birmingham Festival, 1867 (1867)

Paradise and the Peri (cant., T. Moore), Birmingham Festival, 1870 (1870)

The Raising of Lazarus (orat), London, 1873, vs (1874)

The Good Shepherd, op.26 (orat, J. Barnett), Brighton Festival, 1876, vs (1876), rev. 1897 (J. Bennett), vs (1897)

The Building of the Ship, op.35 (cant., H.W. Longfellow), Leeds Festival, 1880, vs (1880)

The Golden Gate (scena), A, orch, 1880

The Triumph of Labour (ode), London, Crystal Palace, 1888

The Wishing-bell (cant.), Norwich Festival, 1893, vs (1893)

The Eve of St Agnes (cant., J. Keats), London, 1913, vs (1913)

Tantum ergo, 8vv (1874)

17 partsongs mentioned in Baptie (1895); many separate songs

instrumental

Symphony, a, London, 1864

Ouverture symphonique, London, Philharmonic Society, 1868, rev. 1891

Piano Concerto, d, op.25, 1869, pf part (Leipzig, c1885)

Overture, The Winter's Tale, 1873

The Lay of the Last Minstrel, sym. poem (after W. Scott), Liverpool, 1874 (1874)

The Harvest Festival, suite, Norwich, 1881, rev. 1892 as Pastoral Suite

2 Sketches: Ebbing Tide and Elfland, London, Crystal Palace, 1883

2 Sketches: Flowing Tide and Fairyland, London, Crystal Palace, 1891

Liebeslied and Im alten Styl, London, Crystal Palace, 1895

Pensée mélodique and Gavotte, London, 1899 (Leipzig, 1899)

Concerto pastorale, fl, orch

Fantasia, F, org (n.d.); Offertory, G, org (n.d.)

Pf music, chamber music

EDITIONS

F. Schubert: Symphonie (Skizze) in E (Leipzig, 1884) [pf transcr.]

WRITINGS

‘Schubert's Unfinished Symphony in E’, Musical Review, i (1883), 289

‘Some Details concerning the Completion and Instrumentation of Schubert’s Sketch Symphony … as performed … May 5, 1883’, PMA, xvii (1890–91), 177–90

Musical Reminiscences and Impressions (London, 1906)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Philharmonic Society’, MT, xxxii (1891), 407 [review of Ouverture symphonique]

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 196f

P.A. Scholes, ed.: The Mirror of Music 1844–1944 (London, 1947/R)

M.J.E. Brown: Schubert: a Critical Biography (London, 1958/R), 110ff

N. Burton: ‘Oratorios and Cantatas’, The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981), 221

JENNIFER SPENCER/JEREMY DIBBLE

Barns, Ethel

(b 1874; d Maidenhead, 31 Dec 1948). English violinist and composer. At the RAM (1887–95) she studied the violin with Prosper Sainton and Emile Sauret, the piano with Frederick Westlake and harmony with Prout. Her first published composition, a Romance for violin and piano, appeared in 1891, and she was soon performing her own works at various concerts in London. In 1899 she married the singer Charles Phillips, with whom she had established the successful Barns-Phillips Chamber Concerts at Bechstein Hall. The series provided an important platform for her own violin music, which began to be taken up by others: Joachim added her Sonata no.2, Sauret her Fantasie and Elman her L’escarpolette to their repertories. In 1907 she was the soloist in her own Concertstück for violin and orchestra at the Promenade Concerts. A highly regarded violinist, Barns served on the first council of the Society of Women Musicians (founded 1911), and accompanied Adelina Patti on her later tours.

Most of Barns’s music was written for the violin, ranging from her many short, inventive pieces for violin and piano through the often complex but always violinistic sonatas to her two large-scale works for violin and orchestra. Of the two surviving sonatas, the second (1904) is a richly lyrical work in contrast with the sparser fourth (1910). Her songs can be disappointingly bland but her piano pieces are often dramatic and always well-constructed. (FullerPG)

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Concertstück, op.19, vn, orch, arr. vn, pf (1908); Conc., d, vn, orch

Chbr (for vn, pf, unless otherwise stated): Romance (1891); Polonaise (1893); Mazurka (1894); Valse caprice (1894); Tarantella (1895); Sonata no.1, d, perf. 1900; Sonata no.2, A, op.9 (1904); Chanson gracieuse (1904); Pf Trio, f, 1904; Sonata no.3, perf. 1906; Chant élégiaque (1907); Danse caracteristique (1907); L’escarpolette (Swing Song) (1907); Hindoo Lament (Chanson indienne) (1907); Légende (1907); Moto perpetuo (1907); Suite, op.21, perf. 1908; Adagio appassionato (1909); Andante for the 4th String (1909); Canzonetta (1909); Danse nègre (Scherzo) (1909); Humoresque (1909); Idylle pastorale (1909); Lullaby (1909); Petite valse (1909); Serenade (1909); 8 Pieces (1910); Sonata no.4, g, op.24, perf. 1910; Andante espressivo (1911); Andante grazioso (1911); Fantasie, op.26, 2 vn, pf, 1911; Petite pastorale (1911); Bagatelle (1912); Berceuse (1912); Nachtgesang (Notturno) (1912); 2 Compositions (1913); Crépuscule (Twilight) (1913); Idylle, vc, pf (1913); Aubade (1917); Carina (1917); Pierette (1917); Sonata no.5, 1927; La Chasse (1928); Poème (1928); A Vision (1928); Pf Trio no.2

Pf: 4 Sketches (1899); 2 Dances (1907); Nocturne, perf. 1908; Prelude (1908); Scherzo, perf. 1908; Toccata, perf. 1908; Valse gracieuse (1908); Humoreske (1910); Scenes villageoises (1911); An Impression (1912); Cri du coeur (1916); Monkey Land (Scherzo) (1916); Landscapes (1919); Petite caprice (c 1919); Valse Slave (c1919)

24 songs, 16 pubd (1892–1918)

MSS in GB-Lbl

SOPHIE FULLER

Barnum, P(hineas) T(aylor)

(b Bethel, CT, 5 July 1810; d Bridgeport, CT, 7 April 1891). American impresario. After an early success exhibiting Joyce Heth (advertised as George Washington's 160-year-old nurse), Barnum purchased a moribund collection of curiosities, and by relentless promotion made Barnum's Museum one of New York's central attractions. By 1850 his management of such novelties as the celebrated midget Tom Thumb had established him as America's leading showman, and the lecture hall at the Museum became an early venue for ‘family’ minstrelsy and variety. In 1844 Barnum capitalized on the enthusiasm for Tyrolean acts by introducing the often parodied ‘Swiss Bell Ringers’ (who actually came from England). He sponsored the Irish soprano Catherine Hayes on a tour of California (1852), and as president of the New York Crystal Palace he played an important role in Jullien's ‘Grand Musical Congress’ (1854).

Barnum's greatest triumph, however, was a tour by Jenny Lind (1850–51); under his management she gave 95 concerts in 19 cities, attracting unprecedented receipts of $712,161·34. Barnum travelled with the troupe and, with inspired publicity and an eye for sensation, promoted Lind much like an exhibit; though Lind eventually broke with him, they remained on good terms. This was the first major tour in the USA to be managed by a non-performer, and it marked the rise of a separate class of agents and promoters. Barnum's methods influenced popular entertainers as well as impresarios such as Max Maretzek and the Strakosch brothers; his impact on America's music industry was lasting and profound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.T. Barnum: The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York, 1855; rev. 1869 as Struggles and Triumphs); ed. G.S. Bryan as Struggles and Triumphs, or The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York, 1927)

N. Harris: Humbug: the Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston, 1973)

W.P. Ware and T.C. Lockard, jr: P.T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: the American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980)

A.H. Saxon, ed.: Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum (New York, 1983)

WILLIAM BROOKS

Barodekar, Hirabai

(b Miraj, 1905; d 1979). Indian singer. She was the daughter of Abdul Karim Khan of the Kirana gharānā and studied with her father’s cousin, Abdul Wahid Khan. Her first important opportunity as a vocalist came when Vishnu Digambar Paluskar invited her to sing in public in 1923. After the Maharashtrian revival of theatre broke the ban on women appearing on the professional stage in that region, Barodekar performed in plays with mixed casts. When live theatre waned in the face of the new film industry, she joined artists who were introducing art music to the non-court world in North India. In 1949 she performed in Africa, and in 1953 travelled to China under government auspices. In 1965 she received the President’s Award for Hindustani Vocal Music from the Sangeet Natak Akademi, then in 1970 she was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India. She taught at the Sangeet Research Academy in Calcutta where she trained students in the style of the Kirana gharānā.

Barodekar specialized in vilambit khayāl, but also sang tarānā, thumrī, bhajan and Marathi songs (pad). Typical of the Kirana style, she did not accelerate the speed of the tāla counts as the improvisation proceeded; rather, the impression of acceleration was achieved through increasing rhythmic density. Her slow improvisations were punctuated with vocal pauses that permitted brief solos by the tablā player; in her fast khayālsthe role of the drummer was also highlighted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Multani, Raga Yaman, perf. H. Barodekar, HMV ECLP2275 (1962)

Hirabai Barodekar: HMV ECLP2356 (1968) Khyāls in Ragas Basant Bahar, Chandrakauns (with her sister, Saraswati Rane)

B.C. Wade: Khyāl: Creativity within North India’s Classical Music Tradition (Cambridge, 1984/R)

BONNIE C. WADE

Baroffio, Bonifacio Giacomo

(b Novara, 5 Dec 1940). Italian musicologist and liturgist. He studied the violin with Ricciardi (1948–59) and musicology, first in Cologne with Gustav Fellerer, Heinrich Hüschen and Marius Schneider, and later in Erlangen with Bruno Stäblein (1959–63). He obtained the doctorate in 1964 from Cologne University with a dissertation on Offertories in the Ambrosian liturgy. He was a Benedictine monk until 1996 and was Abbot at the Noci Abbey, Bari. He has taught theology in seminaries in Genoa (1976–7) and Novara (1979–80), history of liturgy and codicology at the Institute of Pastoral Liturgy in Padua (1973–81) and Gregorian chant and liturgical codicology at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome (1982–95), where he also became dean in 1988. He teaches the history of liturgy at the School of Musical Palaeography and Philology, University of Pavia, and liturgical codicology at the University of Cassino. His main fields of research are Gregorian chant, palaeography and musical semiology, liturgy and codicology.

WRITINGS

‘Il messale di Boccioletto’, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia, xx (1966), 34–43

‘Un antico graduale novarese’, Bollettino storico per la provincia di Novara, lvii (1967), 45–58

‘Die mailändische Überlieferung des Offertoriums Sanctificavit’, Festschrift Bruno Stäblein, ed. M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1967), 1–8

‘Osservazioni sui versetti degli Offertori ambrosiani’, Ricerche storiche sulla chiesa ambrosiana, iii (1972), 54–8

‘Repertorio bibliografico ambrosiano di studi pubblicati in Germania’, Ricerche storiche sulla chiesa ambrosiana, iii (1972), 127–43

‘Kyriakon: omaggio a J. Quasten’, Rivista liturgica, lx (1973), 254–74

‘L’“Ordo Missae” del vescovo Warmondo d’Ivrea’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., xvi (1975), 795–823

‘Verso una storia dell’antica eucologia ambrosiana: Judith Frei e l’edizione del Sacramentario di S. Simpliciano’, Ricerche storiche sulla chiesa ambrosiana, vii (1977), 5–25

ed., with R. Leydi: Le musiche liturgiche tradizionali (Venice, 1984) [incl. ‘Le origini del canto liturgico nella Chiesa latina e la formazione dei repertori italici’]

‘I canti per l’assemblea nel repertorio gregoriano’, Christus in ecclesia cantat: Rome 1985, 202–10

‘Liturgia e musica nella vita monastica verso il Mille con particolare riguardo alla Valsusa’, Benedictina, xxxii (1985), 389–99

‘Palestrina e il canto gregoriano: l’innodia’, Studi palestriniani II: Palestrina 1986, 23–6

with C. Antonelli: ‘La passione nella liturgia della chiesa cattolica fino all’epoca di Johann Sebastian Bach’, Ritorno a Bach: dramma e ritualità delle passioni, ed. E. Povellato (Venice, 1986), 11–33

‘Repertori liturgico-musicali nell’Italia meridionale e fonti beneventane’, Tradizione manoscritta e pratica musicale: i codici di Puglia: Bari 1986, 1–21

with C. Antonelli: ‘Impegno liturgico e pedagogico nella vita musicale dei monasteri’, Dall’eremo al cenobio, ed. G. Pugliese Carratelli (Milan, 1987), 728–40

‘I manoscritti liturgici italiani: ricerche, studi, catalogazione’, Le fonti musicali in Italia, i (1987), 65–126; ii (1988), 89–134; iii (1989), 91–118; v (1991), 7–129

‘I manoscritti liturgici: loro individuazione e descrizione’, Documentare il manoscritto: Rome 1987, 67–85

‘Die Musica sacra nach dem II. Vaticanum: aspekte eines noch ungelösten Problems’, Lebendiges Zeugnis, xli (1987), 69–78

ed., with S. Chierici: Il canto delle pietre: musiche sacre e spirituali del Medioevo nei monumenti dell’architettura romanica lombarda (Como, 1988) [incl. ‘Musica e drammaturgia nella liturgia pasquale’, 13–39]

‘L’Ordo Missae del rituale messale vallicelliano E 62’, Traditio et progressio, ed. G. Farnedi (Rome, 1988), 45–79

‘Appunti per un trattato di codicologia liturgica’, Ecclesia orans, vi (1989), 69–88

‘Il canto gregoriano nel secolo VIII’, Lateinische Kultur im VIII. Jahrhundert: Traube-Gedenkschrift, ed. A. Lhener and W. Berschin (St Ottilien, 1989), 9–23

ed., with V. Jemolo and others: Guida a una descrizione uniforme dei manoscritti e al loro censimento (Rome, 1990) [incl. ‘I manoscritti liturgici’, 143–92]

‘San Bernardo e la “lectio divina”’, La Scala, no.44 (1990), 175–87

‘San Bernardo e la musica’, La Scala, no.44 (1990), 113–16

‘La tradizione eucologica nella liturgia delle ore: il Breviario beneventano: Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, XVI.A.7’, Ecclesia orans, vii (1990), 113–30

‘I tropi d’introito e i canti pasquali in un graduale italiano del sec. XIII (Monza, Bibl. Capit. K 11)’, Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, ed. F. Luisi (Rome, 1990), 3–14

ed., with S. Chierici: Il canto delle pietre: musiche sacre e spirituali del Medioevo nei monumenti dell’architettura romanica lombarda (Como, 1991) [incl. ‘La musica Medievale tra calcolo Matematico e fantas Simbolica’, 15–22]

‘I codici liturgici: specchio della cultura italiana nel medioevo: punti fenni, appunti di lettura, spunti di ricerca’, Ecclesia orans, ix (1992), 233–76

‘A proposito di esecuzioni filologiche’, NRMI, xxvii (1993), 221–6

‘The Musical Repertories of the Liturgy of Southern Italy and Beneventan Sources’, Songs of the Dove and the Nightingale: Sacred and Secular music c900–c1600, ed. O.M. Hair and R.E. Smith (Sydney, 1994), 1–32

TERESA M. GIALDRONI

Baron, Ernst Gottlieb [Theofil]

(b Breslau, 17 Feb 1696; d Berlin, 12 April 1760). German lutenist, composer and writer on music. Neither Baron’s life nor his works have as yet been fully explored by scholars. His father Michael was a maker of gold lace and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. The younger Baron showed an inclination towards music in his youth, however, and later made it his profession. He first studied the lute from about 1710 with a Bohemian named Kohott (not to be confused with the later Karl von Kahaut). In Breslau he attended the Elisabeth Gymnasium, and from there went in 1715 to Leipzig, where he studied philosophy and law at the university for four years.

Much of the period from 1719 to 1728 was spent in travels from one small court to another. He first visited Halle for a short period, then in quick succession Cöthen, Schleiz, Saalfeld and Rudolstadt. He arrived in Jena in 1720 and remained for two years. Thereafter he travelled to Kassel, Fulda, Würzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg, returning in 1727 to Nuremberg where his Historisch-theoretische und practische Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten, the work for which he is principally remembered, was published the same year. In 1728 he replaced the lutenist Meusel, who had recently died, at Gotha and held the post for four years. With the death of the Duke of Gotha he moved on to Eisenach. In 1737, after visits to Merseburg, Cöthen and Zerbst, Baron joined the musical ensemble of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia. He was immediately granted permission to go to Dresden to purchase a theorbo, and there met the highly esteemed lutenists S.L. Weiss and Hofer. When Frederick became king in 1740, Baron continued to serve as theorbist in the much expanded royal musical establishment. He remained at this post until his death.

Baron’s Untersuchung is a valuable though not always reliable source of information about lutenists and lute playing in the late Baroque era, when the instrument was still widely cultivated in solo and ensemble performance in Germany. The work is divided into two main parts. The first deals with the history of the lute, and contains important references to contemporary players. The second is devoted to the practice of the instrument. Baron’s other writings, as yet incompletely studied, supplement the Untersuchung, and explore several other subjects.

The few accessible examples of Baron’s compositions suggest that he cultivated a characteristic late Baroque idiom in his suites, but moved in the direction of the galant style in his concertos. The latter are in fact trio sonatas in texture, cast in the three-movement form of the concerto.

WORKS

Suite, D, lute, in G. Telemann: Der getreue Musikmeister (Hamburg, 1728)

Fantasie, lute, in F. Seidel: 12 Menuette für die Laute von Herrn F. Seidel, samt einer Fantasie von Herrn Baron (Leipzig, 1757/R1969)

2 concertos, C, lute, vn, bc; duet, G, lute, fl: B-Bc

6 partitas, lute; 6 trios, lute, va, vc; sonata, 2 lutes: D-LEbh; ed. L. Sayce (n.p., 1998)

Partie, A, lute, Bsb

Sonata, 2 lutes, fl, LEm

Suite movements, lute, Dl, ROu, RUS-KA

WRITINGS

Historisch-theoretische und practische Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten (Nuremberg, 1727/R; Eng. trans., 1976, as Study of the Lute)

‘Herrn Barons Fortsetzung seiner in dem Waltherischen Lexico befindlichen Lebensumstände’, in F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, i (Berlin, 1755/R), 544–6

‘Herrn Ernst Gottlieb Barons Beytrag zur historisch- theoretisch- und practischen Untersuchung der Laute’, ibid., ii (Berlin, 1756/R), 65–83

‘Herrn Barons Abhandlung von dem Notensystem der Laute und der Theorbe’, ibid., 119–23

‘Herrn Barons zufällige Gedanken über verschiedene musikalische Materien’, ibid., 124–44

Abriss einer Abhandlung von der Melodie: eine Materie der Zeit (Berlin, 1756)

Versuch über das Schöne (Altenburg, 1757) [trans. of Y.M. André: Essai sur le beau (1741)]; suppl. Des Herrn Gresset … Rede von dem uralten Adel und Nutzen der Musik im Jahr 1751 gehalten [trans. of Gresset: Discours sur l’harmonie], also pubd separately (Berlin, 1757)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

GerberNL

MGG1 (Boetticher)

WaltherML

J. Mattheson: Der neue göttingische, aber viel schlechter, als die alten lacedämonischen urtheilende Ephorus (Hamburg, 1727), 109–27

F.W. Marpurg: Legende einiger Musikheiligen (Cologne [recte Breslau], 1786), 158–64

A. Koczirz: ‘Verschollene neudeutsche Lautenisten’, AMw, iii (1921), 270–84

H. Neemann: ‘Philipp Martin, ein vergessener Lautenist’, ZMw, ix (1926–7), 545–65

H.-P. Kosack: Geschichte der Laute und Lautenmusik in Preussen (Kassel, 1935)

D.A. Smith: ‘Baron and Weiss contra Mattheson: in Defence of the Lute’, JLSA, vi (1973), 48–62

J. Klima: Ernst Gottlieb Baron, 1696–1760: Partiten aus den verschollenen Handschriften Berlin Mus. ms. 40633 und Königsberg 3026: Themenverzeichnis (Enzersdorf, 1976)

EDWARD R. REILLY

Baroness, The.

See Lindelheim, Joanna Maria.

Baroni.

Italian family of singers and instrumentalists.

(2) Leonora [Eleanora, Lionora] Baroni

(3) Caterina Baroni

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella)

ES (E. Zanetti)

A. Maugars: Response faite à un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique d'Italie, escrite à Rome le premier octobre 1639 (Paris, c1640/R with Eng. trans., Geneva, 1993; ed. E. Thoinan, Paris, 1865/R; Eng. trans. in J.S. Shedlock: ‘André Maugars’, Studies in Music, ed. R. Grey, London, 1901; ed. J. Heuillon, Paris, 1991)

P. Della Valle: Della musica dell'età nostra (MS, 1640); pr. in G.B. Doni: Lyra Barberina amphicordos, ed. A.F. Gori and G.B. Passeri, ii (Florence, 1763/R); repr. in A. Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R), 164–6

A. Ademollo: La Leonora di Milton e di Clemente IX (Milan, 1885)

A. Ademollo: La bell'Adriana ed altre virtuose del suo tempo alla corte di Mantova (Città di Castello, 1888)

J. Lionnet: ‘André Maugars: Risposta data a un curioso sul sentimento della musica d'Italia’, NRMI, xix (1985), 681–707

S. Parisi: Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: an Archival Study (diss., U. of Illinois, 1989)

F. Hammond: Music & Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT, 1994), 86–8, 302

K. Montford: Music in the Convents of Counter-Reformation Rome (diss., Rutgers U., 1999)

ARGIA BERTINI/SUSAN PARISI

Baroni

(1) Adriana [Adreana] Baroni.

See Basile family, (§3).

Baroni

(2) Leonora [Eleanora, Lionora] Baroni

(b Mantua, Dec 1611; d Rome, 6 April 1670). Singer and instrumentalist, daughter of (1) Adriana Baroni; she was sometimes known as ‘L’Adrianella’ or ‘L’Adrianetta’. She spent her childhood at the Gonzaga court at Mantua, where her mother was a leading singer, and was named after the late Duchess of Mantua. She presumably began her musical training with her mother. Gifted with a splendid voice, she specialized as a singer, soon achieved great fame and put even her mother in the shade. She was admired not only for the beauty, artistry and style of her singing but also for her refined manners. She was able to speak several languages and wrote verse as well as music. No compositions attributed to her are known, but the French viol player André Maugars, who knew her in Rome, stated unequivocally that she composed. When still very young she accompanied her mother on her musical journeys, together with her sister (3) Caterina Baroni. At the age of only 16 she received her first enthusiastic acclaim in the aristocratic circles of Naples, where the family resided from 1624 to 1633. In spring 1630, again with her mother, she appeared at Genoa and immediately afterwards at Florence. She was everywhere the object of admiration and gallantries, as is proved by the numerous poems addressed to her by prominent poets such as Fulvio Testi and Francesco Bracciolini, and by influential nobles such as Cardinals Annibale Bentivoglio and Giulio Rospigliosi, and Prince Camillo Colonna, protector of the Accademia degli Umoristi; these were published as Applausi poetici alle glorie della Signora Leonora Baroni (ed. F. Ronconi, Bracciano, 1639, 2/1641).

After her family had moved to Rome in 1633, Leonora was declared superior to all other Italian chamber singers of the age. She enjoyed one success after another in the musical entertainments held at her home, accompanying herself on theorbo or viol (both of which she played perfectly according to Maugars) or performing alongside her mother (playing the lira) and sister (playing the harp). Milton heard and admired her and in 1639 paid homage to her in three Latin epigrams (Ad Leonoram Romae canentem). Her voice, Maugars noted, was ‘of a high compass’, and ‘she mellows it or swells it easily’. On her countenance, he added:

Her [vocal] leaps and her sighs are not at all lascivious, her glances have nothing of lewdness and her gestures have the correctness of a proper young lady. Sometimes, in passing from one note to another, she lets the intervals of the enharmonic and chromatic genera sound with such skill and charm that no one remains unmoved by this beautiful and difficult type of singing.

The only female member of the Accademia degli Umoristi, she frequently attended salons at the Palazzo Barberini, where she was always enthusiastically received in the circle around Cardinal Antonio Barberini. It was there that she met Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s secretary, Giulio Cesare Castellani, whom she married on 27 May 1640.

In February 1644, through the mediation of Cardinal Mazarin (who had known her in Rome and was to a great extent indebted to her for the advantageous favour of Cardinal Antonio Barberini), Leonora Baroni was offered by the Queen Regent of France, Anne of Austria, a favourable contract inviting her and her husband to the French court. This she accepted. At first she was not admired in Paris, perhaps because the Italian style of singing did not appeal to French taste. That she nevertheless achieved a measure of success was largely due to the queen regent’s benevolent protection. Even so, her stay in Paris was clouded by envy and professional jealousy. She therefore departed for Italy on 10 April 1645, taking with her several precious jewels bestowed on her by the queen regent, who also granted her a large pension for life. She might later have returned to France had not the state of her health prevented it.

In Rome she resumed her active life in the aristocratic society that frequented the salons held at her home. There, even after her husband’s death on 4 January 1662, she continued to perform, accompanying herself on the lute or theorbo. She maintained her notable artistic reputation, particularly after the election of Pope Clement IX, who as Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi had once dedicated one of his best sonnets to her; she enjoyed to the end of her life the patronage and affectionate friendship of the Rospigliosi family. She was buried with her husband in S Maria della Scala.

Baroni

(3) Caterina Baroni

(b Naples, 1619; d ?Rome, c1670). Singer, harpist and poet, daughter of (1) Adriana Baroni. She lived in Mantua until 1624, in Naples from 1624 to 1633 and thereafter in Rome, where her family enjoyed the protection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini. Caterina became a singer and harpist and often appeared with her mother and sister (2) Leonora when musical entertainments were held in their house. Maugars heard them in 1639 and reported that their ‘three fine voices and three different instruments so took my senses by surprise … I forgot my mortality and thought I was already among the angels’. Similarly captivated, Della Valle professed the impossiblity of judging one sister musically superior to the other.

In 1640 her mother retired to Naples and Caterina entered the convent of S Lucia in Selci, although the next year she continued to receive a monthly allowance from Cardinal Barberini. It is thought she probably took the name of Sister Costanza as a tribute to Barberini's mother, who was called Costanza. S Lucia was considered a focal point for intellectual life in Rome, and the music-making of its nuns among the finest in the convents. In 1641 Caterina Baroni was bequeathed three harps by Orazio Michi. She was still at S Lucia in February 1662, when she signed a receipt for a bronze crucifix, a gift from her recently deceased brother-in-law. Of her poetry, only a sonnet in memory of Niccolo Fabri Peresio (I-Rvat Barberini lat.1996) is known.

Baroni, Antonio.

See Boroni, Antonio.

Baroque.

A term used generally to designate a period or style of European music covering roughly the years between 1600 and 1750.

1. Etymology and early usage.

2. Chronological limits.

3. Critique of the concept.

4. Technical features of Baroque music.

CLAUDE V. PALISCA

1. Etymology and early usage.

Although used in art and music criticism as far back as the mid-18th century, the term ‘Baroque’ has only relatively recently been adopted for a historical period. It is derived from the French baroque, which comes from the Portuguese barroco, meaning a pearl of irregular or bulbous shape. It is often found in texts having to do with the manufacture of jewellery from the 16th century onwards, in Spanish (berrueco, barrueco), French (barroque, barrocque, baroque) and later Italian (baroco, barocco).

It has been generally assumed that the word was first applied to the fine arts in reference to architecture. Charles de Brosses in Lettres familières écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740 (Paris, c1755; ed. R. Colomb, Paris, 1855) criticized the architect of a Roman palace for transferring to a large scale the style of baroque ornamentation that better suited small objects like gold cases or dinnerware. But it has been shown that these ‘letters’ were not drafted until about 1755, long after de Brosses’ return to Paris. The earliest application to the fine arts appears to have been, rather, in reference to music. This occurs in a satirical letter prompted by the première of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie in Paris in October 1733, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734 (‘Lettre de M*** à Mlle*** sur l’origine de la musique’, pp.868–70). The anonymous author covertly implied that what was new in the opera was ‘du barocque’ and complained that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing in dissonances, constantly changed key and metre, and speedily ran through every compositional device. Rameau was also the target of a poem by J.B. Rousseau (in a letter to Louis Racine, 17 November 1739, in Lettres sur differents sujets de la littérature, Geneva, 1750) that called him and his kind ‘distillers of baroque chords’ (distillateurs d’accords baroques).

Noel Antoine Pluche was the most illuminating of the early users of the term. He not only attached it to a category or style of music but he implied an etymology. In Spectacle de la nature (vii, Paris, 1746) he maintained that the comparison of French and Italian music no longer divided critics; that the issue now was between the partisans of musique chantante (songful or tuneful music) and musique barroque (translated as ‘rough’ in the English version, Spectacle de la nature: or Nature Display’d, London, 1748):

One takes its melody from the natural sounds of our throat and from the accents of the human voice, which speaks to concern others with what touches us, always without grimace, always without effort, almost without art. We shall call this songful music [la musique chantante]. The other aims to surprise by the boldness of its sounds and passes for song while pulsating with speed and noise [veut surprendre par la hardiesse des sons & passer pour chanter en mesurant des vitesses & du bruit]; we call it Baroque music [la musique Barroque].

Pluche had earlier contrasted the concerts directed by Jean-Pierre Guignon (1702–74), who amused and surprised with the admirable lightness and agility of his playing and of the ensembles he directed, and Jean-Baptiste Anet, who did not approve of Guignon’s pretence at overcoming all difficulties, of his tendency to ‘wrest laboriously from the bottom of the sea some baroque pearls, when diamonds can be found on the surface of the earth’ (p.103). To Anet, achieving surprise by brilliant vivacity was a small accomplishment; greatness in art was to please the multitude by sweet and varied emotions. He preferred an instrumental sound ‘that was connected, sustained, velvety, passionate, and conforming to the accents of the human voice’ (p.104). Pluche’s favourite composer was Mondonville, who excelled in both the singing and the Baroque genres. Essentially, however, Baroque music was to Pluche pure instrumental music which, lacking a text, had no significance, not even that which it might acquire through imitating the human voice. For Pluche, as for de Brosses, baroque had a pejorative connotation.

Although Guignon was a composer in his own right, Pluche probably thought of him rather as the most famous interpreter of Italian concertos, such as those of Vivaldi and Albinoni, at the Concert Spirituel in the 1720s. Marpurg also contrasted his playing with Anet’s: ‘Guignon and Battiste were two fine violinists; the first played in the Italian taste, the second in the French taste’ (Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, i, Berlin, 1754, p.238). The brilliant and bold virtuosity that Pluche associated with Guignon probably reflected the music of Vivaldi’s ‘high Baroque’ period and similar works unknown in Paris before the first years of the Concert Spirituel (which began in 1725). Pluche’s use of the term ‘barroque’, while not entirely inconsistent with its present usage, thus had much narrower scope.

Other 18th-century writers tended to call upon the word ‘baroque’ to evoke impressions of strangeness and distortion. De Brosses, who applied the term to the pseudo-Gothic ornamentation of the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome, was amazed that Italian recitative ‘could be at one time so baroque and so monotonous’ (Lettres, ed. R. Colomb, 4/1885, ii, 330). J.-J. Rousseau ventured a definition in his Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768): ‘A baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonances, the melody is harsh and little natural, the intonation difficult, and the movement constrained’; he thought the term came from the baroco of logicians. Rousseau’s definition was paraphrased by, among others, Castil-Blaze (Dictionnaire de musique moderne, Paris, 1821), Heinrich Koch (Musikalisches Lexikon, Frankfurt, 1802), Gustav Schilling (Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, i, Stuttgart, 1835) and Hermann Mendel (Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon, Berlin, 1870).

Rousseau’s etymology, now largely discredited, was vigorously supported by Benedetto Croce (1929) and later René Wellek (1946). Baroco was indeed a word coined by medieval logicians along with Celarent, Baralipton, Darapti, Felapto etc. as mnemonic aids to recall the various types of syllogism; the fourth mode of the second figure was called baroco. The vowel ‘a’ indicated the universal affirmative character of the major premise, and the two vowels ‘o’ indicated that the minor premises and conclusion were negative, as in ‘Every A is B; some C are not B; hence some C are not A’. Baroco, however, was not used in Italy as an art-critical term; when Italians eventually wrote about Baroque qualities in art, the French word was borrowed, and it became barocco.

Baroque in the sense of bizarre, irregular and extravagant continued to occur sporadically in criticism of art and music in the rest of the 18th century and most of the 19th without acquiring a more generalized stylistic significance. It was Jacob Burckhardt who gave the post-Michelangelo style this name in his Der Cicerone (Leipzig, 2/1839), where he dedicated a substantial chapter to the Barockstyl. Whereas for Burckhardt it marked the decadent phase of the high Renaissance, Heinrich Wölfflin (Renaissance und Barock, 1888) treated the style and its development in a positive way and suggested the term might also be applied to literature (Tasso) and music (Palestrina). Cornelius Gurlitt’s Geschichte des Barokstiles in Italien (Stuttgart, 1887) also accepted the style as a legitimate expression of its time. Wölfflin later expanded the concept of Baroque to include a number of principles that could be applied to any period, though his examples were mainly 17th century (see below; Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Munich, 1915).

Meanwhile the concept of Baroque was not immediately adopted by writers on music history. Ambros (1882) mentioned the rampant barrocco of painting and architecture in the 17th century (Geschichte der Musik, iv, rev. 3/1909, p.286) but not as a musical category. Riemann avoided the term, calling the period ‘Generalbass-Zeitalter’ (Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ii, 1912), and Guido Adler referred to it simply as the ‘Third Style Period’ (Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 1924).

Curt Sachs was the first to apply Wölfflin’s theory of the Baroque systematically to music. He took the five characteristics that Wölfflin had isolated in the visual arts and explained how each fitted musical developments in this period: (i) the suppression of line in favour of the painterly (malerisch) was paralleled by the overwhelming of melody by ornamentation and variation; (ii) the penchant of Baroque painters for placing figures in both foreground and recessed positions as opposed to the single plane of the Renaissance was compared by Sachs to the depth achieved by placing a soprano against a bass and its harmony; and (iii) the drift from the closed form of the Renaissance to the open form of Baroque art was analogous to the replacement of the rhythmics dominated by arsis and thesis by the natural declamation of speech. Similarly, the tendencies of Baroque art (iv) to replace multiplicity by unity and (v) to obscure rather than make clear were shown to operate also in music.

Sachs’s belief in the synchronism of the arts and his rather strained transplantation of Wölfflin’s categories were almost immediately challenged. Andrea Della Corte (1933), a follower of Croce, argued that the term ‘Baroque’ could not transcend its meaning of extravagant, and thus only certain aspects of 17th-century music could be characterized by it – the ‘marvellous’ monumental polychoral style of Benevoli, which ‘Barochized’ Renaissance polyphony, the tortuous turns of the late madrigal, or the over-schematization of opera after 1650. Moreover, Della Corte pointed out, Wölfflin’s poles for the Renaissance and Baroque could be turned round completely and the concept of linear applied with no strain to monody and that of closed form to the da capo aria.

Robert Haas (1928) saw merits in Wölfflin’s principles but doubted whether all five points could be applied to music; he was also less concerned with paralleling the chronology of the visual arts. Whereas art historians pushed the beginnings of the Baroque back to the middle or even the beginning of the 16th century, Haas could not justify a date earlier than 1594, the year Palestrina and Lassus died. He did recognize, however, a certain spiritual unity in the period, and defended it on sociological, intellectual and cultural as well as musical grounds.

It was Lang (1941) and Bukofzer (1940, 1947) who gave the term ‘Baroque’ currency in English. Lang did not discuss the concept or the word in themselves but elaborated with a wealth of detail the forces at work culturally, intellectually and socially that led to the ‘fading’ of the Renaissance and rise of the Baroque style in art and music. Bukofzer used the terms ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’ ‘as convenient labels for periods which apply equally well to music history and other fields of civilization’ (1947, p.2). He recognized the dangers of transposing the terminology of art history to music: ‘The concepts of Wölfflin, the linear, closed form, etc., are abstractions distilled from the live development of art, indeed very useful abstractions, but so general in nature that they can be applied to all periods indiscriminately, although they were originally found in the comparison of renaissance and baroque’. For Bukofzer the value of the term lay in the observation that it ‘essentially denotes the inner stylistic unity of the period. By technical analysis rather than comparative abstractions it is possible to show that the development of baroque music runs parallel with that of baroque art, but there are undercurrents that do not conform to the “spirit of the time”’.

Independently of Bukofzer, Clercx (1948) arrived at an autonomously musical analysis of the Baroque in music. She too doubted that theories based on the plastic arts and literature could necessarily be adapted to music, ‘which has its own laws and its independent development. A study of the Baroque in music, bringing with it new facts, could be of such a nature as to modify the conception that has generally been held of the phenomenon’ (p.39). Through a careful analysis of the characteristics of melody, harmony, rhythm and genres of the repertory of the period from the middle of the 16th century, she developed the aesthetic principles on which the variety of works of the period could be said to have been founded. By ‘esthétique’ Clercx meant not the body of aesthetic philosophy generated by the period itself but the principles that could be induced from an analysis of its products and then be referred back to that period.

Scholars in France and Britain were long reluctant to accept the term ‘Baroque’ or concepts associated with it. Dufourcq (1961) pointed out that the concept of Baroque as common in German musicology did not fit the development of music and culture in France, where Classicism occupied the first half of the 17th century. Chailley (1958) rejected the term as failing to correspond to any reality. In Britain, Capell (Grove5) found no justification beyond mere convenience for calling such a variety of styles as those of Peri and Bach by the same term. The Histoire de la musique of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris, 1960) called the period ‘L’ère du style concertant’.

The idea of a Baroque style gained some acceptance in France, however, as shown by the studious attention given to it by V.L. Tapié (1957) and Rémy Stricker (1968). In Britain the term appeared in a book title, The Baroque Concerto (London, 1961) by Arthur Hutchings, although the concept hardly figures in the text, which merely accepts the notion of a Baroque style and period.

2. Chronological limits.

There has been appreciable disagreement concerning the starting date of the period, less about the terminal date. Wölfflin recognized in art history an early phase from 1570, a high phase from 1680, and a late phase extending from about 1700 until the rise of the ‘Sturm und Drang’. Haas divided his book into three parts, each covering about half a century, and framing the achievement of the main components of the Baroque style: the conquest over the musical Renaissance (the monodic and concertato style); the melodic structuring of the musical Baroque (the cantata and bel canto style); and the musical high Baroque (the formation of the ‘proud’ contrapuntal style, kontrapunktischer Prunkstil).

Bukofzer distinguished three major periods, though he acknowledged that they did not coincide in different countries: 1580–1630, early Baroque; 1630–80, middle Baroque; 1680–1730, late Baroque. Clercx pushed the beginning of the period back to the middle of the 16th century, where she located a phase of ‘primitive Baroque’. The second period, ‘full Baroque’ (plein baroque), occupied the entire 17th century. Finally after the style was achieved there was a ‘tardy Baroque’ (baroque tardif), which extended from 1700 to about 1740 or 1765.

3. Critique of the concept.

It is evident that the earliest usages of ‘Baroque’ in the arts, though suggestive, cannot be a guide to its meaning as a historical category. Nor should the fact that it originally had negative connotations deter us from assigning to it a positive meaning. For, if its pejorative taint stands against it, the critical vocabulary would have to be impoverished by banning also terms such as ‘Gothic’, ‘impressionism’, ‘mannerism’ and ‘galant’. But unless the period designated ‘Baroque’ can be shown to have some stylistic or spiritual unity, the term is ineligible even as a convenient label. The question, therefore, is whether within a sizable period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 18th century a quality or qualities can be identified that strongly dominated musical style.

Various traits have been suggested: dynamism, open form, degree of ornamentation, sharp contrast, co-existence of diverse styles, individualism, affective representation and numerous others. Most of these qualities, while they may contrast with the Renaissance, do not hold for any extended period. Although the style of Gesualdo is dynamic and open-formed, that of Alessandro Scarlatti is not. While Caccini’s music is ornamented, Corelli’s fundamentally is not (although it sometimes invited ornamentation); besides, the style of the 1740s or 1770s was also ornamented. The sharp contrasts observed in the late sacred concertos of Gabrieli are less striking or at least appear normal in an opera of Cesti. Diverse styles have co-existed in many periods, if perhaps less in the Renaissance. Individualism became even more pronounced in the later 18th century than it was in the 17th. These qualities have served mainly to distinguish from the Renaissance the style that immediately succeeded it. They are less useful to delimit the Baroque or to distinguish it from subsequent styles.

Only one of the general characteristics mentioned survives an analysis of 17th- and 18th-century music and musical thought: the attitude towards affective expression. From the 1540s to at least the 1720s composers in a preponderant share of their music strove for the expression of affective states, whether or not inspired by a text. It is this striving that led to the extravagances that were first deplored as ‘Baroque’. Irregularity, amplification, strangeness and grotesqueness, qualities inherent in the word, were often the very products of the search for expression. Anyone who did not understand the motivation behind these manners (like a Frenchman listening to Italian recitative or Vivaldi’s violin concertos) could well have found a work embodying them bizarre.

The movement to express the affections was based on the recognition of the existence of distinguishable states of mind or feeling, such as sorrow, admiration, gladness, fear, anger, hope, joy or calm. These were thought to be accompanied by physical conditions that reached a certain stability in the person seized by the passion. This preoccupation with the passions was stimulated by several factors: the revival in the 16th century of the rhetorical treatises of Aristotle, Quintilian and Cicero, which not only described the passions but urged the orator’s obligation to stir them; by the renewed reading of the Poetics of Aristotle, which emphasized the arousal of pity and fear and the imitation of human actions and passions; and by the general atmosphere of tolerance of the passions, which earlier had been seen as weaknesses of the flesh, and appreciation for the innate value of deep feeling.

Although the urge for expression of the affections persisted throughout the period under consideration, the means by which it was achieved were continually changing. Poets first set the example by paying more attention to emotional expression, and musicians adopted the moving of the passions as their principal objective. This is already evident in the school of Willaert; his own Musica nova, compiled in the early 1540s though published in 1559, may be considered the watershed that parts the Renaissance from the beginning of a new stylistic era, the Baroque, if one so wishes to call it. Side by side with works that are exemplary of Renaissance classicism are a few pieces, like Aspro core, that point in new directions. Several pupils of Willaert, particularly Cipriano de Rore and Nicola Vicentino, became the fountainheads of the new idiom. Monteverdi gave to the new style a name, seconda pratica. Certain more recent critics have called the 16th-century phase ‘mannerism’, but that term is better reserved for the rhetorical style of for example Marenzio in the madrigal and Lassus in the motet, a style often more concerned with illusionistic images than with affective expression.

Better understanding of physiology, particularly the circulation of the blood and the action of the nerves, spelt the downfall of the affections in the 18th century. At the same time musical artists became disillusioned with the mechanization that the process of affective expression underwent in Italian opera. A new conception of the emotions as fleeting, constantly shifting and conflicting reactions of the mind and body to internal, external and imaginary stimuli, as exemplified by the association psychology of David Hume and David Hartley, took the place of the Affektenlehre (see Rhetoric and music, §I, 4). The shift is reflected in the practice of Italian composers from about 1730 and can also be documented in the attitudes of critics. Daniel Webb (Observations in the Correspondence between Poetry and Music, London, 1769, p.47) observed that the arousal of feelings by music is ‘not, as some have imagined, the results of any fixed or permanent condition of the nerves and spirits, but springs from a succession of impressions, and is greatly augmented by sudden or gradual transitions from one kind of strain of vibrations to another’. The music of the 1730s and 1740s by Pergolesi, Hasse and Jommelli, for example, no longer relied on the static passions of the preceding decades but exploited the possibilities of dynamic flux and transition of sentiment. The advent of the sentimental style, which Pluche heralded as the ‘musique chantante’, marked the end of the period under consideration.

Thus the two centuries between roughly 1540 and 1730 can legitimately be considered an artistic era united by a common ideal, and, if one must find a word for it, ‘Baroque’ is defensible as a designation. Adoption of the term should not obscure the fact that there is no unity of either idiom or creative directions in this period. Not only do Renaissance practices (and in that sense the Renaissance) continue through much of the 16th century, but the ideals that can be embraced in the concept of Baroque reigned in parts of Europe as late as 1750, while elsewhere a counter-Baroque reaction had set in.

Whether the chronological limits and spirit of the Baroque in music coincide with those in other arts – painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre, literature, dance – can best be determined not by searching for analogies or parallels but by investigating the motivation for certain artistic directions. Perhaps even more important is to recognize the forces that led these arts in common directions. To define these for all the arts is beyond the scope of this article; but some of the forces that shaped Baroque music may be outlined.

The most important stimulus for a new style in the 16th century was Humanism. The new knowledge and aspirations that emanated from the revival of ancient learning affected music in numerous ways. The poetry of Petrarch, itself inspired by that of antiquity, became the model for modern poetry and prompted an intense search for new expressive means for setting it to music. The overthrow of the Boethian theory through the fresh insights offered by Ptolemy and Aristoxenus opened up the recognition of chromatic resources and the possibilities of tonal organization outside the modes. Ancient memories of a music that powerfully affected the feelings and morals of men inspired composers to seek similar effects through polyphonic and, later, monodic music, which was thought to correspond more closely to the ancient. Greek tragedy, which by the interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics and other recently studied texts could be shown to have been sung throughout, became a model for a style of music that could be sung on the stage for not just certain lyrical moments, as in Renaissance theatre, but for the entire drama.

Experimental science, closely linked with humanism in that it began as a testing of the doctrines found in ancient texts, was another important source of new trends. Discovery of the true cause and nature of sound, pitch and pitch relations liberated musical thought from the numerology that had preserved certain myths (such as the sanctity of the number six as the determinant of consonance). This paved the way for equal temperament and intermodulation among a wide circle of keys. The scientific movement also stimulated Rameau to develop a theory that replaced the purely pragmatic chordal systems of thoroughbass figuring.

The influence of the counter-Reformation on the direction music took in the late 16th century has probably been overestimated. But it surely hastened the secularization of church styles through the introduction of motets for solo or few voices and vernacular oratorios that were essentially in the style of the theatre. These styles eventually spread to the Protestant churches of Germany, England and France.

The patronage of music as an instrument of diplomacy intensified during the second half of the 16th century, particularly among the cardinals in Rome and in the Italian principalities of the Medici, Este and Gonzaga families. Meanwhile in mercantile centres such as Venice, Naples, Hamburg and London, opera theatres that depended upon subscribers or leasers of boxes catered for a new middle class. Taste shifted at these centres from the mythological plots favoured at the princely courts to more realistic or historical subjects. Eventually commercial pressure led to the introduction of comic episodes and eventually comic intermezzos, leading to a counter-Baroque idiom that soon spread to instrumental and sacred genres. The growth of the bourgeois class also led to the establishment of musical academies, such as the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, or in Germany of cadres of musicians hired by town councils to function both in the church and in the secular community and even in the university through a collegium musicum.

Insofar as these and similar underlying conditions for music-making were part of the intellectual and social substratum of artistic activity in general, music shares with the other arts a common source for stylistic change and continuity. It is not surprising, then, that the music of this period reveals certain superficial features that parallel those of artistic products in other media. The similarity of appearances should not, however, be attributed to a ‘spirit of the time’ – a Baroque Zeitgeist – but rather to the common underlying conditions that sometimes express themselves in uncanny resemblances.

A music historian can contribute more to the understanding of the Baroque as a cultural phenomenon by describing faithfully, as Bukofzer and Clercx have done, the technical features of the music of the period than by pursuing abstractions such as linear versus painterly and picturesque, or closed versus open forms.

(1) Christian Samuel Barth

4. Technical features of Baroque music.

The thoroughbass, which began as a shorthand to indicate the harmony implied by two outer voices, soon became a constructive device, a means of achieving continuity while leaving the upper voice or voices free to express a text or soar in instrumental fantasies. To define the scope of the Baroque period on the basis of the persistence of the thoroughbass has been challenged on the grounds that the basso continuo persists well into the 1770s, by which time a new style had crystallized. This is not a serious objection, however, because by 1722, when Rameau published his Traité de l’harmonie, it was evident that a more complex set of considerations ruled the practice of composers than the counterpoint of the outer parts and its chordal filling. A system of relations between triads in a given key and between those and certain supporting triads from outside the key was implicit in the music being written towards the end of the Baroque period. The thoroughbass after the 1740s was an accompanimental convention, and ceased to have much effect on orchestral or choral texture; indeed, it became a sorely inadequate means of notating the accompaniment to solo voices or instruments.

The wish to prolong the rather manneristic and fleeting expressions of particular passions for longer spans than could be achieved through the recitative or even the arioso passages of the early monodies led to the adoption of the strophic variation and of various extended harmonic patterns, such as the aria della romanesca, Ruggiero, ballo del gran duca, the descending tetrachord and similar ostinatos. These permitted both the prolongation of a reigning affection and the constant renewal of melodic invention and ornamentation. That practice too faded out about the 1740s, to be replaced by variations on closed forms, such as minuets, operatic arias and the like, which find their beginnings but not their ultimate flowering in the doubles of Baroque dance suites.

A consequence of the thoroughbass practice was to throw the high-pitched voices into relief: and this produced a texture that persisted from the first decade of the 17th century to the 1740s. One or a pair of treble voices elaborated their lines, often through canonic and imitative or other motivic interplay, over a bass that determined or defined the harmonic motion, while other parts or chordal instruments occupied a subordinate filler role. Such a texture may involve non-treble voices, and several such ensembles may be found to proceed simultaneously with more or less interaction.

A specialization of functions resulted from this texture, some instruments fulfilling a function of harmonic ‘stuffing’ or ripieno, others a solo role. This division of labour, and not the polychoral medium, was the true source of the vocal and instrumental concerto. The 16th-century polychoral idiom and its amplification in the 17th century, which Della Corte identified as a genuine Baroque strain in Italian music, was actually a late survival of the coro spezzato technique popular in the Veneto from about 1520. Its true significance for the Baroque is that the polychoral texture served as a model for the earliest attempts at writing church music for few solo voices. The division of ripieno and solo functions together with the antiphonal contrasts inspired by polychoral music produced new combinations of solo and tutti vocal and instrumental ensembles. These combinations result in what is sometimes called the ‘concertato style’ but is really a concertato medium that lent itself to a variety of styles.

Patterns of stylistic decorum emerged, were consolidated and eventually dissolved during this period. Marco Scacchi recognized that, whereas in the earlier music one style and practice dominated, in his age there were three styles, church, chamber and theatre, and two practices, the ancient and modern, later called strict and free (Breve discorso sopra la musica moderna, Warsaw, 1649). Particular styles and practices were thought fitting for particular recreational, entertainment or devotional functions. Stylistic decorum did not prevent the borrowing of styles, however, as when the theatre style was introduced into the chamber or church. But when these styles were borrowed, they were subjected to a process of abstraction and conventionalization that purified them of offensive or distracting connotations, as when recitative or aria was admitted into the church, or dances into a chamber sonata. These distinctions tended to dissolve towards the end of the period, and by the mid-18th century a common style emerged that passed freely from genre to genre and from one social usage to another.

The rhythmic practices of Baroque music reflected the conventions of stylistic decorum. The principal schemes of rhythmic organization were founded on the dance and on speech. To these must be added the alla breve of the stile antico, continued from an earlier age for the sake of religious propriety. While the rhythm of speech ruled the recitative and arioso, the rhythm of dance governed the aria and chorus. Even keyboard genres and violin sonatas were permeated by this dichotomy. The different dances and their metres became the models for characteristic music that evoked certain affections through association and through mysterious affinities that were perceived between feelings and movement.

Most Baroque composers navigated the uncharted waters of pre-tonality. Some, to be sure, continued to be guided by the church modes, but Vincenzo Galilei was probably more observant than prophetic when he celebrated their demise in 1589 (Il primo libro della prattica del contrapunto intorno all’uso delle consonanze, ed. F. Rempp, Cologne, 1980). The dissolution of the modal system was in fact well under way by the 1530s. The return to a key pitch within a discrete piece replaced the unity of mode, and excursions into closely related keys replaced the admissible cadences of modal polyphony. On the other hand, the constraints that tonal writing began to acquire in the middle of the 18th century did not yet hamper composers in the period. The continuous modulation of the recitatives, the innocence with which keys fluctuated in an opera or mass, the inconsistency of modulatory schemes in the concertos: these are evidences of a free exploration of the resources that the new tunings offered.

200 years are a long time in the quickly paced culture of the West. Even the very general characteristics proposed above for the Baroque had to be couched in developmental terms. It is useful, therefore, to divide the period into more homogeneous sub-periods, with the understanding that no border formalities were invoked in passing from one to the other.

The late 16th and early 17th centuries were times of exploration of new resources, such as chromaticism, dissonance, tonality, monody, recitative, and new vocal and instrumental combinations. No consistent approach to composition emerged until about 1640, by which time the new resources were tamed, and a fairly homogeneous style arose in Italy that was to spread everywhere in Europe in the next generation. The period between 1640 and 1690 was a relatively stable one in which genres such as the trio sonata and da capo aria enjoyed a sureness, yet freshness, that has led some to call this a classical phase. From 1690 to 1730 genres such as the aria, concerto and sonata reached an almost overripe elaborateness, and the once spontaneous expression of the affections became formalized, at its worst mechanized. A reaction became inevitable. A new style began to manifest itself in the comic intermezzos to the opera seria, more natural in its melody, more varied in its rhythms, simpler yet more moving in its harmonies and, most important, truer to the flow of human sensibilities.

Generalizations of this kind are charged with oversimplifications and admit of abundant exceptions. But there is enough truth to them to make an observer from the vantage point of the 21st century comfortable with the proposition that the period from the late 16th century to 1730 knew some continuity and homogeneity, and that the period might for practical purposes be summed up in a word, ‘Baroque’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (S. Leopold)

C. Sachs: ‘Barokmusik’, JbMP 1919, 7–15

H.J. Moser: ‘Die Zeitgrenzen des Musik: Barock’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 579–603

E. Wellesz: Der Beginn des musikalischen Barocks und die Anfänge der Oper in Wien (Vienna and Leipzig, 1922; Eng. trans. in Essays on Opera, London, 1950, pp.13ff)

E. Katz: Die musikalischen Stilbegriffe des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1926)

T. Kroyer: ‘Zwischen Renaissance und Barock’, JbMP 1927, 45–54

R. Haas: Die Musik des Barocks (Potsdam, 1928)

B. Croce: Storia della età barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929)

A. Della Corte: ‘Il barocco e la musica’, RaM, vi (1933), 253–66

E. Schenk: ‘Über Begriff und Wesen des musikalischen Barock’, ZMw, xvii (1935), 377–91

M.F. Bukofzer: ‘Allegory in Baroque Music’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, iii (1940), 1–21

P.H. Lang: ‘The Baroque’, ‘The Late Baroque’, Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941/R), 314–429, 430–529

R. Wellek: ‘The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, v (1946–7), 77–106; repr. with ‘Postscript 1962’ in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), 69–127

M.F. Bukofzer: Music in the Baroque Era, from Monteverdi to Bach (New York, 1947)

S. Clercx: Le Baroque et la musique: essai d’esthétique musicale (Brussels, 1948/R)

C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii (1953), 172–81

W. Gerstenberg: ‘Die Krise der Barockmusik’, AMw, x (1953), 81–94

J.H. Mueller: ‘Baroque: is it Datum, Hypothesis, or Tautology?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xii (1953–4), 421–37

L. Schrade: ‘Sulla natura del ritmo barocco’, RMI, lvi (1954), 3–27

M. Bukofzer: ‘The Baroque in Music History’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xiv (1955), 152–6

R. Stamm, ed.: Die Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters (Munich, 1956)

Le ‘Baroque’ musical: Wégimont IV 1957

H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Barock als musikgeschichtliche Epoche’, Aus der Welt des Barock (Stuttgart, 1957), 168–91

V.L. Tapié: Baroque et classicisme (Paris, 1957, 2/1972; Eng. trans., 1960 as The Age of Grandeur: Baroque Art and Architecture)

R.E. Wolf: ‘Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque: Three Styles, Three Periods’, Le ‘Baroque’ musical: Wégimont IV 1957, 35–80

G. Barblan: ‘Il termine Barocco e la musica’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higino Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), i, 93–108

J. Chailley, ed.: Précis de musicologie (Paris, 1958, 2/1984)

A. Harman and A. Milner: Late Renaissance and Baroque Music (c.1525–c.1750) (London, 1959, 2/1962/R)

L. Ronga: ‘La musica’, La civiltà veneziana nell’età barocca: Venice 1958 (Florence, 1959), 123–44

O. Kurtz: ‘Barocco: storia di una parola’, Lettere italiane, xii (1960), 414–44

A. Milner: The Musical Aesthetic of the Baroque (Oxford, 1960)

L. Ronga: ‘Un problema culturale di moda: il barocco e la musica’, L’esperienza storica della musica (Bari, 1960), 144–216

F. Blume: ‘Begriff und Grenze des Barock in der Musik’, STMf, xliii (1961), 77–87

N. Dufourcq: ‘Terminologia organistica’, L’organo, ii (1961), 43–52

V.L. Tapié: Le Baroque (Paris, 1961)

Manierismo, barocco, rococò: concetti e termini: Rome 1960 (Rome, 1962)

F. Blume: Renaissance and Baroque Music (New York, 1967) [Eng. trans. of articles from MGG1]

C.V. Palisca: Baroque Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968, 3/1991)

A. Salop: ‘On Stylistic Unity in Renaissance–Baroque Distinctions’, Essays in Musicology: a Birthday Offering for Willi Apel, ed. H. Tischler (Bloomington, IN, 1968), 107–21

R. Stricker: Musique du Baroque (Paris, 1968)

G. Stefani: Musica e religione nell’Italia barocca (Palermo, 1975)

G. Cowart: The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music, 1600–1750 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

L. Bianconi: Il Seicento (Turin, 1982; Eng. trans. 1987)

R. Donington: Baroque Music: Style and Performance (London, 1982)

C. Palisca: ‘Barock’, HMT (1987)

C. Palisca: ‘“Baroque” as a Music-Critical Term’, French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. G. Cowart (Ann Arbor, 1989), 7–21

J.A. Sadie, ed.: Companion to Baroque Music (London, 1990)

T. Carter: Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (London, 1992)

J.H. Baron: Baroque Music: a Research and Information Guide (New York, 1993)

N. Anderson: Baroque Music: from Monteverdi to Handel (London, 1994)

Baroxyton.

A bass brass instrument invented by Václav František Červený.

Bärpfeife

(?Ger., ?Dut.).

See under Organ stop.

Barra [Barat], Hotinet [Hottinet, Houtinet, Hutinet, Jehan, Jean]

(b ?Montigny-le-Roi; fl 1510–23). French composer and singer. Under the name of ‘Jehan Barat’ he was an haut-contre at the Ste Chapelle, Paris, in 1510–12. As ‘Jean Barat dit Hottinet’ he was maître de chapelle of Langres Cathedral from 1512 to at least July 1514, and as ‘Hanotin Barra’ he returned to the Ste Chapelle in October 1523. In musical sources he is always ‘Hotinet’ or ‘Hotinet Barra’. Although some of his music is preserved in Italian sources, there is no reason to suppose he travelled to Italy. He must not be confused with Johannes Lomont [Zanin Lumon], called ‘Ottinet’, a singer from the diocese of Cambrai and member of the ducal chapel in Milan from 1473 until his death in 1493, who applied unsuccessfully for a transfer to the ducal chapel of Ferrara in 1479 and was provost of St Géry, Cambrai, from 1480 to 1489–91, residing there briefly in 1482.

Like many of his French contemporaries, Barra favoured a style built predominantly on short, frequently imitative duets, often overlapped to produce a full-voiced texture. He used fewer melismas and less homophony than Mouton and Févin, his obvious models, but he maintained the clear structural articulation typical of their work. The most widely disseminated composition ascribed to Barra, Nuptiae factae sunt, also appears with an ascription to Elimot, a composer known otherwise by a single motet (Ascendens Christus in altum, 4vv, I-Bc Q20); neither the sources nor stylistic considerations seem to provide adequate grounds for resolving the conflict. Two of Barra’s motets published by Attaingnant form part of a Parisian cycle of ‘O’ antiphon settings (see Wright for the distinctive chant melody employed); O radix Jesse in particular is distinguished by its reliance on cantus-firmus construction. The rather widely distributed mass ‘Ecce panis angelorum’ paraphrases the plainsong of part of the Corpus Christi sequence Lauda Sion in its tenor. Imitation moves motifs of the chant into the other voices, and other chant melodies are quoted from time to time, notably ‘Bone pastor’ (another section of Lauda Sion) and ‘O salutaris hostia’ (a eucharistic strophe of the hymn Verbum supernum).

WORKS

all for 4vv

Edition:Treize livres de motets parus chez Pierre Attaingnant en 1534 et 1535, ed. A. Smijers and A.T. Merritt (Paris and Monaco, 1934–64) [S]

Missa ‘Ecce panis angelorum’, B-Br IV.922, D-Bsb 40091, F-CA 4, I-Rvat C.S.26

Missa, CMac L(B)

Magnificat secundi toni (i), 1534⁷, Pc; S v

Magnificat secundi toni (ii), 1534⁷, Pc, NL-’sH; S v

Nuptiae factae sunt, 1521³, CH-SGs 463, ed. in MRM, iv (1968) (attrib. Elimot in I-Fl acq.e.doni 666; anon. in 10 other sources); O radix Jesse, 1534⁹, S vii; O Rex gentium, 1534⁹, S vii; Peccantem me quotidie, Bc Q19, ed. in SCMot, vi (19??; Salve regina, 1535⁴, S xii; Verbum iniquum et dolosum, 1539¹⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Brenet: Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais (Paris, 1910/R)

F. Lesure: ‘La maîtrise de Langres au XVIe siècle’, RdM, lii (1966), 202–3

E.E. Lowinsky: The Medici Codex of 1518 … Historical Introduction and Commentary, MRM, iii (1968)

D. Crawford: Sixteenth-Century Choirbooks in the Archivio Capitolare at Casale Monferrato, RMS, ii (1975)

L. Lockwood: Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505 (Oxford, 1984), 174–6

C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1550 (Cambridge, 1989), 106

L. Matthews: ‘Reconstruction of the Personnel of the Ducal Choir in Milan, 1480–1499’, Musica e storia, vi (1998), 297–311

P. Merkley: ‘Trading Lombardy for Picardy: Milanese Ducal Musicians and the Cathedral of Saint-Géry’, Musica e storia, vi (1998), 313–26

JOSHUA RIFKIN/RICHARD SHERR

Barrachina, Clemente

(b Teruel, c1650; d Albarracín, 1727). Spanish composer. He was a choirboy at Teruel Cathedral in 1664 and later studied theology and music in Madrid. In 1675 he succeeded Ortells as maestro de capilla of Albarracín Cathedral, where he remained for over 50 years. He composed a large number of polychoral works in five to eight parts for the cathedral services, as well as villancicos (now lost) each year for Christmas and Corpus Christi. The surviving works (all in the archives of Albarracín Cathedral) are mostly for two choirs, contrasting a contrapuntal texture for the first choir (typically in two parts) and a more homophonic style for the fuller second choir. They show an able command of structure and sonority.

WORKS

Edition:Clemente Barrachina: Opera omnia, ed. J.M. Muneta (Teruel, 1992–5) [M i–ii]

with instruments unless otherwise stated

Vespers music: Beatus vir, 6vv; Crédidi, 6vv; Deus in adjutorium, 6vv; Dixit Dominus, 6vv; Dixit Dominus, 8vv; Laetatus sum, 7vv; Lauda Jerusalem, 6vv; Laudate Dominum, 6vv; Laudate Dominum, 7vv; Mag, 6vv; Mag, 8vv: all ed. in M i

Other works: Cum invocarem (Ps iv), ST, SATB; Mirabilia (Ps cxviii.9), S, S, SATB; Principes (Ps cxviii.11), ST, SATB; Qui habitat (Ps xc), SS, SATB; Salve regina, S, S, T, B, SATB; Salve regina, S, SATB, 1726; Verbum caro (responsory for Christmas), S, S, SATB, unacc.: all ed. in M ii

Doubtful: Cogitavit Dominus (Lamentation for Maundy Thursday), S, T, SATB; Veni Sancte Spiritus, S, SATB, SATB: both ed. in M ii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.M. Muneta: ‘Apuntes para la historia de la música en la catedral de Albarracín (Teruel): los maestros de capilla y organistas’, RdMc, vi (1983), 329–71

J.M. Muneta: Catálogo del Archivo de música de la catedral de Albarracín (Teruel, 1984)

JESUS M. MUNETA MARTÍNEZ

Barradas [Pérez-Barradas], (María del) Carmen

(b Montevideo, 18 March 1888; d Montevideo, 12 May 1963). Uruguayan composer and pianist. She began composing in her childhood and studied with Antonio Franck. Later she entered the Conservatorio Musical La Lira to study with Aurora, Vicente Pablo and Martín López. In 1914 she settled in Spain and began to develop a new and revolutionary system of musical notation, based on graphic designs similar to those that came into use 50 years later, shocking Spanish and French musicians and critics. Using that system she composed Fabricación (1922), a piano work that reproduced the sound of a factory working full blast. This work, Aserradero, along with Taller mecánico, which she performed in Madrid and Barcelona, established her as a pioneer of modern music, giving her immediate success in Spain and France, where music and art critics, such as André Clavier in Paris and Adolfo Salazar and Eugenio d’Ors in Madrid, praised her works. All her scores have covers featuring the drawings of her brother, the painter Rafael Barradas. In about 1928 she returned to Montevideo, where she began teaching choral singing at the Instituto Normal and continued her career as a composer. She gave her last piano recital in Montevideo in 1934.

WORKS

Chbr: Pf Trio

Vocal: Children songs (several series); Eterno romance (triptych; homage to A. Storni)

Pf: Aserradero; En el molino; Mar Tragédia Misterio, triptych; Procesión; Taller mecánico; Ensayos (cycle), 1919; Fabricación, 1922; Oración a Santos Vega, 1933; Estudios tonales, 1940

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Salgado: Breve historia de la música culta en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1971, 2/1980)

M. Ficher, M. Furman Schleifer and J.M. Furman: Latin American Composers: a Biographical Dictionary (Lanham, MD, and London, 1996)

SUSANA SALGADO

Barrae, Leonardo.

See Barré, Leonardo.

Barraine, Elsa (Jacqueline)

(b Paris, 13 Feb 1910). French composer. She studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire with Dukas, who instilled in her a strong sense of colour and a classical spirit. She took premiers prix in harmony in 1925 and in fugue and accompaniment in 1927. In 1929 she received the Prix de Rome for her sacred trilogy La vierge guerrière. She then worked at French Radio, first as a pianist, sound recordist and as head of singing (1936–40) then after the war as a sound mixer. From 1944 to 1947 she was musical director of the recording firm Chant du Monde. In 1953 she became professor of sight-reading and analysis at the Conservatoire, a post she held until 1974.

Barraine’s compositions exhibit rigorous technique alongside naturalness and finesse. The work which made her name as a composer, the symphonic variations Harald Harfagard (1930), after Heinrich Heine, was the first of many to draw on a literary inspiration: notable later examples include the Eluard settings Avis and L’homme sur terre. Her works, while disciplined in form, are characterized by expressive intensity as well as a passionate feeling for the human condition and a sensitivity to the social and political disruptions of our time. Her music is essentially tonal, with the exception of the serial Musique rituelle (1966–7), inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Barraine may be considered one of the outstanding French composers of the mid-20th century.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Le mur (ballet, R. de Jouvenal), 1947; Pattes blanches (film score, dir. J. Grémillon), 1948; Printemps de la liberté (incid music, J. Grémillon), 1948; La chanson du mal-aimé (ballet, after G. Apollinaire), 1950; Claudine à l’école (ballet, Colette), 1950; Le sabotier du Val de Loire (film score, dir. J. Demy), 1956

Orch: Harald Harfagard, sym. variations after H. Heine, 1930; Sym. [no.1], 1931; Pogromes, 1933; Sym. [no.2], 1938; Suite astrologique, small orch, 1945; Variations sur ‘Le fleuve rouge’, 1945; Hommage à Prokofiev, hpd, orch, 1953; 3 ridicules, 1955; Les jongleurs, 1959; Les tziganes, 1959

Vocal: Avis (P. Eluard), chorus, orch, 1944; Poésie ininterrompue (cant., Eluard), 3 solo vv, orch, 1948; L’homme sur terre (Eluard), chorus, orch, 1949; La nativité (L. Masson), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1951; Les cinq plaies (M. Manoll), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1952; Les paysans (A. Frenaud), 4 solo vv, chbr orch, 1958; De premier mai en premier mai (Eluard), 4 mixed vv, chorus, unacc., 1977

Chbr: Wind Qnt, 1931; Improvisation, sax, pf, 1947; Variations, perc, pf, 1950; Atmosphère, ob, 10 str, 1966; Musique rituelle (Bardo Thödol), org, gongs, xylorimba, 1966–7

Kbd: Hommage à Paul Dukas, 1936; Marche du printemps sans amour, 1946; Fantaisie, hpd, 1961

Principal publishers: Costallat, Durand, Salabert, Schott

FRANÇOISE ANDRIEUX/JAMES R. BRISCOE

Barraqué, Jean (Henri Alphonse)

(b Puteaux, Seine, 17 Jan 1928; d Paris, 17 Aug 1973). French composer. His family moved to Paris when he was a small child, but the place that mattered most to him was the Breton coast, where he was taken on visits by his nanny, to stay with her family in Trelevern. In 1940 he entered the Notre Dame choir school, and there underwent a total conversion to music when he heard a recording of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony in a teacher’s study. His education continued at the Lycée Condorcet (1943–7), with Langlais (around 1947) and in Messiaen’s class (1948–51).

Though he was composing abundantly during this period, he salvaged nothing before three songs of 1950, to words from the Song of Songs, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, out of which Séquence emerged in 1955. His intellectual development during the interim – the period also of his Piano Sonata – was powerfully influenced by his relationship with Michel Foucault: Séquence, with its texts now from Nietzsche, and the Sonata both embrace a lyrical violence and accept the responsiblity of greatness. No longer guaranteed either by metaphysical or linguistic certainties, for Barraqúe the musical work had to be a Promethean act of creation from out of the void. Like Boulez, he accepted the inevitability of serialism, but more on philosophical grounds (as a symptom of the abeyance of authority) than as a necessity of musical history, and he departed far from Boulez in his music’s dynamism: his published works, numbering only six, are all substantial, continuous and urgent. (The only minor work he produced after 1950 is a study in musique concrète, which came out of the time he spent, between 1951 and 1954, in the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète.) In this insistence on forward movement, Beethoven was not merely his model but his ideal, and his high view of the artist’s vocation was of a piece with that ideal.

His realization of a Beethovenian dialectic was based on various polarities, in particular between perceptions of notes as either autonomous sounds or elements within the unfolding of a serial form, between freedom and fixity in the registral placing of notes, between pulsed and pulseless rhythm, and between sound and silence. The Piano Sonata exerts itself across all these axes, and across another, which the composer describes in the sonata’s preface: the opposition between a ‘free style’ of motifs and chords in easy flow and a ‘strict style’ of intensive, quasi-automatic process acknowledging the ‘total’ serialism of the time. Elements of compulsion are spurs to protest, but protest is compromised by having to be voiced in the same language, based on the same series. Barraqué found this a limitation. In Séquence he tried to moderate what he called ‘serial tonality’ by using two series – separately in the first two songs, together in the last – and in later works he developed a technique of ‘proliferating series’, similar to Messiaen’s practice of rhythmic interversion, but with a quite different intention, to make possible a music of continuous change. However, the musical chains in the Sonata provide it with the means to an artistic success in speaking with the vehemence of despair. The 40-minute work is in two large sections, the first generally fast and the second generally slow, seeming to undermine all that had been promised.

While writing the Sonata and Séquence, and for several years thereafter, Barraqué earned a living from educational broadcasts, lectures, programme notes and classes; then from 1961 to 1970 he held a research post at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques to do work on Debussy, though he continued to give private classes in analysis and composition. Séquence received its first performance at a Domaine Musical concert in 1956, and the recording was released on disc in 1958 with Yvonne Loriod’s account of the Sonata. This LP, backed by André Hodeir’s acclamation of the composer in his 1961 book, assured Barraqué an international reputation, and his works, starting with Séquence in 1963, began to be published by Aldo Bruzzichelli, a Florentine businessman.

By this time Barraqué had embarked on a massive project. At Foucault’s instigation he read Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil in 1955; almost at once he began making plans to devote the rest of his life to a vast system of musical settings and commentaries. Of these, Le temps restitué was drafted in 1956–7 and … au-delà du hasard completed in 1959 for a Domaine Musical concert early the next year. But copious problems – alcoholism, desperation, a car accident in 1964 – got in the way of composition, and La mort de Virgile had to wait until 1966 before receiving its third instalment, Chant après chant, which was also its last. In 1968 Barraqué completed two old enterprises, Le temps restitué and a concerto he had planned for Hubert Rostaing, the principal clarinettist in the first performance of … au-delà du hasard. In both cases there was the prompt of an immediate performance, at the Royan Festival in the case of Le temps restitué and by the BBC in that of the Concerto. Other parts of La mort de Virgile were begun or restarted, but nothing much else was accomplished.

However, the Broch cycle was surely meant to be incomplete and to speak of incompletion. Barraqué based all his endeavours on the second part of the novel, which treats Virgil’s night of anguish and hopelessness in the face of what he sees as the failure of his epic; the music is magniloquent, furious and constantly mobile, responding at once to the poetic subject, to the wild Breton sea that Barraqué loved, and to his sense of himself as a descendant not only of Beethoven but of Debussy. In each of the three finished sections of La mort de Virgile there is a soprano soloist, but she seems to be speaking directly to the poet rather than of or for him, as if Barraqué had made his works to enter into dialogue with himself as creator. Typical, too, is the cascading of alternative voices, whether from choruses, from solo piano (a main player in all four works in which it appears, though Barraqué himself was not a performer), or from groupings of instruments. Such doubt about the expressive centre is a feature also of the Concerto, in which the clarinet takes some time to arrive (and the secondary vibraphone soloist even longer), and in which the orchestration may be aligned with or against the division of the ensemble into six trios.

Barraqué’s final years saw some public successes. He was present at two recordings of the Sonata, by Claude Helffer (1969, for Valois) and Roger Woodward (1972, for EMI), and at one each of Séquence and Chant après chant (both 1969, again for Valois). He also made a rare appearance to speak at the Royan Festival, just four months before his death. He was buried at Trelevern. His music, after some years of neglect, began to excite conspicuous attention again in the late 1990s, when the complete published works appeared on the CPO label.

WORKS

Séquence (F. Nietzsche, trans. H. Albert), S, vn, vc, hp, pf, cel + glock, xyl + vib, 3 perc, 1950–55

Piano Sonata, 1950–52

Etude, tape, 1954

Le temps restitué (H. Broch, trans. A. Kohn), S, 12-pt chorus, 31 insts, 1956–7, completed 1968

… au-delà du hasard (Broch, trans. Kohn; Barraqué), S, SA, 20 insts in 4 groups incl. pf and cl soloists, 1957–9

Concerto, cl, vib, 6 trios, 1962–8

Chant après chant (Broch, trans. Kohn; Barraqué), S, pf, 6 perc, 1966

Unfinished works: Discours, S, A, 5 T, 4 B, pf, orch, 1961; Lysanias, 1966–73; Portiques du feu, 18vv; Hymnes à Plotia, str qt; L’homme couché (op), 1969–72; Affranchi du hasard, chorus, cls, 1970

Principal publishers: Bruzzichelli, Bärenreiter

WRITINGS

‘Résonances privilégiées: leur justification’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, no.3 (1954), 32–45

‘Des goûts et des couleurs … et où l’on en discute’, Domaine musical, no.1 (1954), 14–23

‘Rythme et développement’, Polyphonie, no.9–10 (1954), 47–73

Debussy (Paris, 1962/R, 2/1994)

‘Debussy ou l’approche d’une organisation autogène de la composition’, Debussy et l‘évolution de la musique au XXe siècle: Paris 1962, 83–95

‘Propos impromptu’, Courrier musical de France, no.26 (1969), 75–80

‘La Mer de Debussy ou la naissance des formes ouvertes’, Analyse musicale, no.12 (1988), 15–62

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (H. Henrich)

A. Hodeir: La musique depuis Debussy (Paris, 1961; Eng. trans., New York, 1961)

G.W. Hopkins: ‘Strasbourg: Barraqué’s “Chant après chant”’, MT, cvii (1966), 701

G.W. Hopkins: ‘Jean Barraqué’, MT, cvii (1966), 952–4

T. Souster: ‘Who’s Exhausted?’, Tempo, no.87 (1968–9), 23–6

T. Souster: ‘A Composer’s Life-Work’, MT, cx (1969), 66 only [review of Chant après chant and … au-delà du hasard]

G.W. Hopkins: ‘Record Guide’, Tempo, no.95 (1970–71), 37–40 [Sonata, Séquence, Chant après chant]

B. Hopkins: ‘Barraqué’s Piano Sonata’, The Listener (27 Jan 1972)

A. Jack: ‘Jean Barraqué’, Music and Musicians, xxi/4 (1972–3), 6–7 [interview]

A. Jack: “‘A Contract with Death”’, Music and Musicians, xxii/2 (1973–4), 6–7

R. Lyon, ed.: ‘Portrait de Jean Barraqué’, Courrier musical de France, no.44 (1973), 130–32

R. Toop: disc notes, Sonata, EMI EMSP 551 (1973)

B. Hopkins: ‘Barraqué’s Sonata’, Tempo no.110 (1974), 48–50 [review of Woodward recording]

Dossier Barraqué (Champigny sur Marne, 1974)

R. Black: ‘“…and each harmonical has a point of its own …”’, PNM, xvii (1978–9), 126–30

B. Hopkins: disc notes, Sonata, Unicorn UNS 263 (1978)

B. Hopkins: ‘Barraqué and the Serial Idea’, PRMA, cv (1978–9), 13–24

R. Black: ‘Contemporary Notation and Performance Practice: Three Difficulties’, PNM, xxii (1983–4), 117–46

A. Riotte: ‘From Traditional to Formalized Analysis; in memoriam Jean Barraqué: some Examples Drawn from his Unpublished Analysis of Anton Webern’s Piano Variations op.27’, Musical Grammars and Computer Analysis: Modena 1982, 131–53

Entretemps, no.5 (1987) [Barraqué issue]

A. Poirier: ‘L’histoire “toujours recommencée” …: introduction à la pensée analytique de Jean Barraqué’, Analyse musicale, no.12 (1988), 9–13

R.-M. Janzen: ‘A Biographical Chronology of Jean Barraqué’, PNM, xxvii (1989), 234–45

P. Ozzard-Low: ‘Barraqué – Broch – Heidegger: a Philosophical Introduction to the Music of Jean Barraqué’, Cahiers d’Etudes Germaniques, no.16 (1989), 93–106

M. Mesnage and A. Riotte: ‘Les Variations pour piano opus 27 d’ Anton Webern: approche cellulaire barraquéenne et analyse assistée par ordinateur’, Analyse musicale, no.14 (1989), 41–67

H. Pfaffenzeller: Review of recording of Concerto and Le temps restitué, NZM, Jg.152, nos.7–8 (1991), 89 only

Jean Barraqué, Musik-Konzepte, no.82 (1993)

H. Henrich: Das Werk Jean Barraqués: Genese und Faktur (Kassel, 1997)

PAUL GRIFFITHS

Barrat, Jean.

See Barra, jehan de.

Barraud, Henry

(b Bordeaux, 23 April 1900; d Paris, 28 Dec 1997). French composer. He began to compose at the age of 16 when he was studying harmony and counterpoint in Bordeaux, but his parents intended him for the wine trade, and he trained for this in London. However, he decided on a musical career, and entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1926 to study composition with Dukas, fugue with Caussade and, on the advice of Schmitt, composition and orchestration with Louis Aubert. He was soon expelled from the Conservatoire for having written a string quartet (now lost) that was considered outrageously innovatory. With Rivier he founded the Triton concerts in 1933, and in the same year Monteux conducted a symphonic finale, following this in 1934 with his Poème. He helped to organize Resistance broadcasting in occupied France; after the war he was made head of music for Radiodiffusion Française, becoming director of the Programme National in 1948. Besides raising French standards of orchestral playing and choral singing, he gained for French radio a reputation for welcoming music of all types, particularly new music. He continued to compose, but much of his finest work was done after his retirement in 1965.

Barraud combined a reserved demeanour and a critical spirit with deep and imaginative religious conviction and a great sensitivity to people as also to the arts. This dualism is to be found in his music. In some works, felicities of scoring and elegant solutions of formal problems follow too smoothly, adding up to an effect that can seem academic. At the other extreme there are pieces like the Mystère des Saints Innocents, the Te Deum, the Trois études and Une saison en enfer (for Barraud, as for Claudel, Rimbaud had a place alongside the Bible and the saints), works that make an immediate and profoundly moving impression. Between these poles there are pieces – such as the concertos for piano and for flute – which delight by continual grace and invention. Barraud was always a seeker, but he refused to employ avant-garde methods for reasons of effect or fashion. His lucid and illuminating book, Pour comprendre les musiques d’aujourd’hui, indicates the eagerness and critical alertness with which he followed new developments. In the 1960s he stopped composing for about two years in order ‘to weigh the new contributions of the young generation, and see what in them could help me to enrich my own musical language without ceasing to remain faithful to myself’. After this period of reflection, his music took an altogether more adventurous path. His later works such as the Variations à treize use a more advanced style, breaking free of the traditional rhythmic and tonal constraints of much of his earlier music, and employ a vast array of percussion including prominent roles for tuned instruments.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

La farce de maître Pathelin (op, 1, G. Cohen, after medieval drama), 1938; Petits métiers (film score), 1942, arr. as sym. suite, 1942; La kermesse (ballet), 1, 1943; L’astrologue dans le puits (ballet, 1), 1948; Rimbaud (radio score), 1950; Numance (op, 2, S. de Madariaga, after Cervantes), 1950–52, ov. and interludes arr. as Symphonie de Numance, 1950; Lavinia (comic op, 3, F. Marceau), 1959; La fée aux miettes (radio score, after C. Nodier), 1968; Le roi Gordogane (chbr op, 3, R. Ivsic), 1974; Tête d’or (tragédie lyrique, 2, after P. Claudel), 1980

orchestral

Finale of a Symphony, 1932; Poème, 1933; Conc. da camera, 1934; 4 préludes, str, 1935–7; Suite pour une comédie de Musset, str, 1937; Pf Conc., 1939; Offrande à une ombre, 1942; Images pour un poète maudit, after A. Rimbaud, 1954; Sym., str, 1955–6; Sym. no.3, 1957; Rapsodie cartésienne, 1959; Fl Conc., 1962; Rapsodie dionysienne, 1962; Divertimento, 1962; Sym. concertante, tpt, orch, 1966; 3 études, 1967; Une saison en enfer, after Rimbaud, 1968–9; Conc., str, 1971; Ouverture pour un opéra interdit, 1971

vocal

3 poèmes (P. Reverdy), 1v, pf, 1933; 2 choeurs, 2vv, pf/orch, 1933; 3 chansons de Gramedoch (V. Hugo: Cromwell), 1v, orch, 1935; Le feu (Old Testament), chorus, orch, 1937; 3 lettres de Mme de Sévigné, 1v, pf, 1938, orchd 1944; 4 poèmes de Lanza del Vasto, 1v, pf, 1942; Le testament de François Villon, 1v, chorus, hpd, 1945; Le mystère des Saints Innocents (C. Péguy), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1946–7; 8 chantefables pour les enfants sages (R. Desnos), 1v, pf, 1947; Cantate pour l’avènement du prince de Monaco, chorus, 1950; TeD, chorus, 16 winds, 1955; Pange lingua, S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1964; La divine comédie (Dante), 5 solo vv, orch, 1972; Enfance à Combourg (cant. after F.R. de Chateaubriand), children’s chorus, 1976

chamber and solo instrumental

Histoires pour enfants, pf, 1933; Premiers pas, pf, 1933; Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1935; Str Trio, 1936, rev. 1943; Str Qt, 1940; Sonatine, vn, pf, 1941; 10 impromptus, pf, 1941; Musiques pour petites mains, pf, 1949; Concertino, pf, fl, cl, bn, hn, 1954; Variations à 13, 1969; Sax Qt, 1972

WRITINGS

Berlioz (Paris, 1955, 2/1966)

La France et la musique occidentale (Paris, 1956)

Pour comprendre les musiques d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1968)

Les cinq grands opéras (Paris, 1972)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.Y. Bril, ed.: Henry Barraud (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1982)

D. Pistone and P. de Prat: ‘Henri Barraud et le théâtre lyrique’, Le théâtre lyrique français, 1945–1985, ed. D. Pistone (Paris, 1987), 203–8

JONATHAN GRIFFIN/RICHARD LANGHAM SMITH

Barre (i)

(Fr.). See

Bass-bar.

Barre (ii)

(Fr.).

The stopping of several or all the strings of a fretted string instrument at the same point, by the fingers (see Barré) or artificially (see Capo tasto).

Barré [jeu barré]

(Fr.: ‘barred’, ‘stopped’; Ger. Quergriff; It. capo tasto; Sp. cejuela).

In the playing of certain fretted plucked string instruments, particularly the lute, guitar and banjo, the term used to describe the technique of stopping all or several of the strings at the same point by holding a finger across them. Although the form of the word is adjectival the term is also used in writings in English as a noun; some English-speaking writers use ‘bar’ or ‘barring’, but the French forms barré or jeu barré are more frequently found. (In the music of the late 17th-century viol masters – particularly that of Marin Marais – the term doigt couché is used; see Fingering, §II, 1.) The earliest references to the barré seem to date from the second half of the 17th century; Francisco Guerau’s introduction to his Poema harmónico (1694), for example, advises the player to become accustomed to using the ‘cejuela … putting the index finger of the left hand over more or less all the strings, depending on your requirements, which is very necessary in order to play certain passages’.

The essential characteristic of the barré is that it is executed with the flat of the finger, whereas the tips of the fingers are used for other fingering. The barré is usually executed with the forefinger, but other fingers are also used, particularly by jazz guitarists for the half-barré (that is, the stopping of two or more, but not all the strings). The purpose of the barré technique is to permit the fingering configurations used on the open strings to be transposed to any position on the fingerboard, the forefinger acting as a moveable nut. The fret at which the barré is applied may be indicated in written music: ‘2^e barré’ is a short form of ‘2^e position barré’, and similarly ‘C II’ stands for ‘cejuela 2’; both indicate a barré at the second fret. If, for ease of execution, the player wishes to use open-string fingering for an entire piece, the strings may be artificially stopped with a Capo tasto (by setting the capo tasto across the first fret, the player can finger a piece in C as if it were in C).

Barrè, Antonio

(b Langres; fl Rome, 1551–72). French printer. He was a singer in the Cappella Giulia intermittently from March 1552 until at least the end of 1554, and was also active as a composer: in 1552 his Madrigali a quattro voci were printed in Rome by Valerio and Luigi Dorico.

In 1555 he began to print music, publishing a series of collections entitled ‘delle muse’, Vicentino’s L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna pratica (1555; in 1551 Barrè had been a witness at the famous debate between Vicentino and Lusitano in Rome) and a few volumes devoted to single composers. His first publication, Il primo libro delle muse a cinque (1555), set a high standard, with canzone settings by Barrè himself, Berchem, Vincenzo Ruffo and Arcadelt, including Arcadelt’s superb setting of Petrarch’s Chiare, fresch’e dolci acque. Barrè’s Primo libro delle muse a quattro voci (1555) includes his own setting of four stanzas from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, in a suitably declamatory and homophonic style. He coined the term ‘madrigali ariosi’ to describe the pieces in this collection as well as in the second and third books for four voices. It is believed to refer to madrigals in which the upper-voice melody is based on a pattern used by popular singers of stanzas from Orlando furioso but it may refer to melodies over bass patterns. The collection was reprinted several times (by Gardano, Rampazetto and Vincenti & Amadino), contributing to the popularity of ‘delle muse’ collections among Venetian printers; parts of the series remained in print for up to 30 years. The Secondo libro delle muse a tre voci: canzoni moresche di diversi(1555) contains the first known examples of moresche as partsongs. The Primo libro … a tre voci has not survived except as Scotto’s Primo libro delle muse a tre of 1562, which contains five pieces by Barrè and other works by composers better known in Rome than in Venice.

After 1558 Barrè began printing, or at least publishing, with Blado’s music type (e.g., madrigals by Menta, 1560, and by Lasso, 1563), or with Dorico’s, as in Brassart’s Primo libro delli soi madrigali a quattro (1564). A contract of 1564 shows Barrè and Valerio Dorico to have been partners in the publication of Eliseo Ghibel’s (or Gibellino’s) De festis introitus missarum (1565), of which they promised to deliver 30 copies to Ghibel’s agent (see Masetti Zannini, 226). This suggests that similar partnerships with Dorico or Blado, or, in Venice, with Scotto or Rampazetto, were behind Barrè’s other editions of the 1560s. In 1563 Rampazetto printed Liber primus musarum cum quattuor vocibus sacrarum cantionum que vulgo mottetta vocantur, naming Barrè as editor and compiler. Perhaps Barrè had lost his shop and had commissioned other publishers to print his books. Temporary partnerships for one or more books were common in Rome, but most are documented too sketchily to allow confirmation of the exact role of each partner. Barrè also printed a few non-musical books which appear to have been special commissions with Barrè serving only as printer. These include a collection of poems, Rime … in vita e in morte dell’Ill. Sig. Livia Columna (1555) and Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorose (1555/R), the first work on imprese. No publications by him are known from later than 1565, but documents place him in Rome as late as 1572.

Barrè’s music books, some 20 in number (including six or seven presumably commissioned from others), are mostly in oblong quarto format, although two are in upright quarto and a few others are in folio. One of these, the Vincentino treatise, contains the first use of the printed natural sign. These well-executed publications, including first editions of important music by Arcadelt, Palestrina and, notably, Lassus, demonstrate Barrè’s taste and initiative as well as his skill. His printer’s mark was, appropriately, Apollo surrounded by a chorus of the muses; he also used a device with Orpheus playing a lira da braccio. This mark was not used by him after the probable loss of his own music font in 1558.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Simonetti)

EinsteinIM

MGG1 (J. Schmidt-Görg)

PitoniN

SartoriD

SchmidlD

C.F. Becker: Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts oder Systematisch-Chronologisch Zusammenstellung der in diesen zwei jahrhunderten gedruckten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1855/R)

A. Bertolotti: Artisti belgi et olandesi a Roma nei secoli XVI e XVII (Florence, 1880)

G. Fumagalli: Antonio Blado, tipografo romano del secolo XVI: memoria storico-bibliografica (Milan, 1893)

G. Haydon: ‘The First Edition of Kerle’s Hymns: 1558 or 1560?’, AcM, xxxviii (1966), 179–84

H.W. Kaufmann: The Life and Works of Nicola Vicentino (1511–c.1576), MSD, xi (1966), 22–3, 33

G. Rostirolla: ‘La Cappella Giulia in S. Pietro negli anni del magistero di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’, Studi palestriniani [I]: Palestrina 1975, 101–325

G.L. Masetti Zannini: Stampatori e librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: documenti inediti (Rome, 1980), 15, 186, 195, 226

S.G. Cusick: Valerio Dorico: Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor, 1981)

J. Haar: ‘The “Madrigale Arioso”: a Mid-Century Development in the Cinquecento Madrigal’, Studi musicali, xii (1983), 203–19

M. Buja: Antonio Barrè and Music Printing in Rome in the Mid-Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1996)

THOMAS W. BRIDGES/MAUREEN BUJA

Barré [Barrae, Barri, Barret], Leonardo

(b diocese of Limoges; fl Rome, 1537–after 1555). French composer and singer active in Italy. On 13 July 1537 ‘Leonardus Barre Lemovicensis dioec.’ was made a singer of the papal chapel. He remained there until 1555, when, together with Palestrina, he was expelled for being married. He then became maestro di cappella of S Lorenzo in Damaso, Rome. Barré was probably unrelated to Antonio Barrè, but he may have been the father of ‘Alexandro Bare, sopranus, putto’, who served in the Cappella Giulia in 1560 and 1561 and possibly from 1564 to May 1566. His nine surviving madrigals and six published motets appeared in various collections from 1539 to 1544. In a collection of 1540 for five voices he is described as a disciple of Willaert and two of his madrigals, Oime’l bel viso and Lachrime meste, were attributed to Willaert in the latter’s posthumous Madrigali a quatro voci (Venice, 1563). If Barré was a pupil of Willaert, it must have been between 1527, when Willaert moved to Venice, and 1537, when Barré joined the Cappella Sistina.

Barré’s style is not remarkably different from that of his contemporaries, but his texture is somewhat distinctive in its relative lack of contrast. Clearly defined points of imitation are infrequent, as are passages in chordal style, with uniform declamation in all voices. More often, imitation is masked by the continuous accompaniment of other voices or by the use of paired entries. Word-painting, although not frequent and not very bold, nonetheless enhances the music by providing needed contrast and colour.

Barré’s music contains many concealed parallel 5ths and octaves, and too often the rhythmic motion is provided by the voices exchanging tones of the same chord. Nonetheless, his music moves forward smoothly and has many passages of great charm, some enhanced by decorative melismas.

WORKS

Come potro fidarmi di te, 5vv, 1540¹⁸; Come potro fidarmi, 4vv, 1544¹⁶; Cosi di ben amar, 5vv, 1542¹⁶; I sospiri amorosi, 5vv, 1540¹⁸; Lachrime meste, 4vv, 1544¹⁶; Oime’l bel viso, 4vv, 1540²⁰; Se l’alto duol m’ancide, 5vv, 1540¹⁸; Se sovra ogn’uso humano, 5vv, 1540¹⁸; Tengan dunque, 4vv, 1539²⁴ (attrib. Barré only in 1545¹⁸ ed. in CMM xxxi/5)

4 motets, 4vv, 1543⁴; 2 motets, 5vv, 1544⁶; further motets, D-Mbs, Wa

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM

EinsteinIM

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R), i, 52

R. Casimiri: ‘I diarii sistini’, NA, iii (1926), 1–16, esp.10; xiv (1937), 19–33, esp.26

A. Ducrot: ‘Histoire de la Cappella Giulia au XVIe siècle depuis sa fondation par Jules II (1513) jusqu’à sa restoration par Grégoire XIII (1578)’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, lxxv (1963), 179–240, 467–599, esp. 227

THOMAS W. BRIDGES

Barrelhouse.

A style of piano playing that originated among black American blues musicians in the early 20th century. It was first practised in the makeshift saloons of lumber camps in the South and is related to Boogie-woogie, which it may have preceded as a blues piano style (see Blues, §4). Barrelhouse was played in regular 4/4 metre, whereas boogie developed as fast music largely of eight beats to the bar. Ragtime bass figures or the heavy left-hand vamp known as ‘stomping’ were often employed with occasional walking bass variations. Characteristic early recordings are Barrel House Man (1927, Para.) by the Texas pianist Will Ezell, The Dirty Dozen by Speckled Red (Rufus Perryman) (1929, Bruns.) and Soon This Morning by Charlie Spand (1929, Para.); Perryman and Spand worked in Detroit after leaving the South. Diggin’ My Potatoes (1939, Bb), by Washboard Sam with Joshua Altheimer on piano, and Shack Bully Stomp (1938, Decca), by Peetie Wheatstraw, are examples of the persistence of the style. Many barrelhouse themes became standards, and were played by blues pianists after other styles had superseded the form. The term barrelhouse was also used to mean rough or crude, as in ‘Mooch’ Richardson’s Low Down Barrel House Blues (1928, OK), and several blues singers, among them Nolan Welch, Buck McFarland and Bukka White, were known by this nickname.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Calt, J. Epstein and N. Perls: disc notes, Barrelhouse Blues 1927–1936, Yazoo 1028 (1971)

E. Kriss: Barrelhouse and Boogie Piano (New York, 1974)

P. Oliver: ‘Piano Blues and Barrelhouse’, Blues off the Record (Tunbridge Wells and New York, 1984)

PAUL OLIVER

Barrel organ [hand organ, cylinder organ, box organ, street organ, grinder organ, Low Countries organ]

(Fr. orgue à manivelle, orgue de Barbarie; Ger. Drehorgel, Leierkasten, Walzenorgel; It. organetto a manovella, organo tedesco).

A mechanical instrument in which the musical programme is represented by projections on the surface of a slowly rotating barrel or cylinder.

In its common form, the barrel organ comprises a small pipe-organ offering 14 notes or more in a non-chromatic scale and represented on between one and four stops or registers controlled by drawstops. To save pipes and space as well as expense, tunes were frequently pinned in only two or three keys, G and D being usual. The music is provided by a pinned wooden barrel arranged horizontally within the organ case and rotated by a worm gear on a cross-shaft extending outside the case and terminating in a crankhandle. This cross-shaft also carries one or (more usually) two offset bearings like a crankshaft and to these are attached reciprocators which pass to the lower part of the organ where a simple air bellows and reservoir is provided. Turning the crankhandle thus fulfils two purposes: it pumps wind into the organ chest and it turns the barrel. As the barrel is rotated, its circumference passes beneath a simple frame containing pivoted metal levers or ‘keys’. These keys engage with the barrel pins and are lifted by them. The lifting motion causes the rear end of the key to be depressed, pushing down a slender wooden sticker which enters the wind-chest and controls the pallet to allow wind from the bellows reservoir to enter a particular pipe and produce a sound. In all respects, other than the replacement of a manual keyboard by the mechanical keyframe and the barrel, the barrel organ mechanism is merely a simplification of the conventional pipe organ. Besides pipework, some instruments also included percussion in the form of a drum with two beaters, and a triangle. Rarely, an abbreviated octave of bells would also be added. The mechanism is one of simplicity and extreme effectiveness. That some instruments are still in playing order after 150 or 200 years, with little or no repair work or restoration, is evidence of the practical design and durability of the basic organ component assemblies. The mechanism of the barrel organ is illustrated in fig.1; for the cylinder mechanism itself, see Mechanical instrument, fig.1.

There can be few musical instruments whose nature and construction have given rise to so much confusion in terminology as the barrel organ. The term barrel organ has often been used indiscriminately to describe what is in fact a Barrel piano or the small street organ whose music programme is represented on perforated card or paper (see Organette and Player organ). While it is certainly true that small barrel organs were very popular on the streets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (makers such as Bruder in Germany, White & Langshaw in London and Gavioli in Paris made some extremely fine portable street organs), they were in general replaced by the barrel piano in the mid-19th century.

Although descriptions of automatic and hand-operated water organs go back to the 3rd century bc (see Hydraulis; Organ, §IV, 1; and Water organ), the first description of an automatic organ using a pinned cylinder appears in the 9th-century Arabic text by the Banū Mūsā of Baghdad, which discusses in detail an improvement to the hydraulic flutes originally described by Archimedes (d c212 bce) and Apollonius of Perga (3rd century bce). These early sources are discussed by Farmer (1931); see also Mechanical instrument, §2.

The oldest surviving barrel organ in playing condition is that built into the wall of the fortress of Hohensalzburg, built by an unknown maker in 1502, restored many times and still played daily. It is currently being restored again to play its original musical programme. The barrel organ had been perfected by 1597 when the Levant Company, with the approval of Queen Elizabeth I, ordered an elaborate mechanical organ to be sent as a gift to Sultan Mehmed III of Turkey, and Thomas Dallam was entrusted with making and assembling it as well as delivering and erecting it (1599–1600) in the sultan’s palace. Dallam’s remarkable diary, reproduced by Mayes, gives full details of the organ.

In 1615 Salomon de Caus described and illustrated an instrument in which the barrel was divided into musical bars and each bar into eight beats for the quavers. The whole drum was pierced with holes at the intersecting points so that the pins could be moved and reset to produce another tune. De Caus did not claim to have invented the instrument, only the adaptation of hydraulic power to rotate the drum. He admitted that he had derived inspiration from the writings of Vitruvius (1st century ce) and Hero of Alexandria (1st century ce). The organ was bellows-blown.

Robert Fludd (Ultriusque cosmi, 1617–24) depicted very inaccurately a barrel organ activated by hydraulic air compression. Similar drawings and descriptions were given at this period by others including Kircher (1650) and Caspar Schott (1664). In his Gabinetto armonico (1722) Filippo Bonanni depicted an ‘organo portile’: a small barrel organ shown resting on the player’s left hip, supported by a sling over the right shoulder; the player turns the handle with his right hand.

In 1752 Leonhard Euler (1707–83) and a Berlin mechanic, Hohlfeld, produced a device, called the Melograph, for recording keyboard performances so that they could be converted into pinned barrels. Similar experiments were made by several other makers (e.g. John Joseph Merlin), but without much success until the invention of the Reproducing piano at the beginning of the 10th century.

Details of the construction of the barrel organ in the 18th century were given by Marie Dominique Joseph Engramelle and by François Bédos de Celles. The former's account is of special importance as it describes the method of arranging the music while the latter giving great detail regarding pinning the barrels to give a particular tune.

Instruments were made for both secular and church use and frequently used the same style case; these are referred to as ‘church and chamber’ barrel organs. Normally each barrel might contain eight or ten tunes, so with four barrels the repertory could be quite large. Secular instruments were often provided with barrels of jigs and reels for dancing and popular airs from the operas and national songs, while for Sundays there would be a barrel of hymn tunes. Such instruments might be 70 cm wide and 180 cm high. The smallest chamber barrel organ was the serinette or bird organ (see Bird instruments, §1), typically measuring some 34 cm wide by 20 cm deep and standing 18 cm high.

While English and French instruments of this type are invariably hand-turned and fully automatic, clockwork-driven instruments were also made, especially in Austria, powered with descending weights. The heavy weight, sometimes in excess of 60 kg, would be wound up to the top of the case using an internal hand-winch. When set to play, the thrust of the descending weight would be regulated by the clockwork mechanism which also turned the barrel and pumped the bellows. Clockwork barrel organs of a very high quality, both weight-and spring-driven, were also made in southern Germany, Black Forest and Bohemian makers being among the best in the world. Some of these very large instruments were fully chromatic. From them the barrel organ developed in three directions: the miniature barrel organ as used in the Musical clock, the large automatic Orchestrion, and the Fairground organ.

The barrel organ has enjoyed a particularly rich history in England. It has been said that the barrel organ was first introduced into an English church about 1700, that one was installed in that year in the church of King Charles the Martyr, Peak Forest, Derbyshire, and that the instrument was still there in 1870. It has also been asserted that early in the 18th century a certain Wright of London built a barrel organ for All Saints, Fulham. Unfortunately, none of these stories can be corroborated. Instruments were certainly in use around the middle of the 18th century as replacements for church bands or, where churches had ordinary organs for incompetent organists. The peak period of the church barrel organ may be regarded as c1760–1840; during that time hundreds were made by over 130 makers, principally in London. Among the earliest makers were John Tax of St Martin’s Lane (known to have been active in 1753) and E. Rostrand of Orange Court, Leicester Fields, who made ‘all sorts of Chamber-Organs to play with fingers or barrels’. A small chamber barrel organ of his has four stops and two barrels of eight tunes. It is dated 1764 and is still in working order. During the height of the barrel organ’s popularity, virtually every organ builder also made mechanical instruments. Such was the skill of these makers and their barrel-pinners that Burney, commenting on the general use of barrel organs, added that, ‘the recent improvements of some English Artists have rendered the barrel capable of an effect equal to the fingers of the first-rate performers’.

Chamber barrel organs were often enclosed in very handsome cases which reflect the high standard of cabinet making of the period. Church barrel organs, too, were set in elegant cases but varied greatly in size. Some were placed in a gallery or loft as at Brightling, East Sussex; Hampton Gay, Oxfordshire; Woodrising, Norfolk; Raithby, Lincolnshire; Avington, Hampshire; Sutton, Bedfordshire; and Muchelney, Somerset. Others, usually of small dimensions, stood on the floor of the church. The music played is itself of great interest because an analysis of both the church and secular repertory reveals the popularity of certain tunes. The titles of some 1300 such tunes have been listed by Langwill and Boston.

In the early 19th century several important developments took place. The first was the design of a ‘revolver’ system to make barrel-changing simpler. Three or more barrels were mounted between circular hoops in a pivoted frame, and the whole mechanism could be unlocked and rotated in a matter of seconds to bring a fresh barrel into play. A large barrel organ with a revolver mechanism for four barrels was built for Northallerton Church by Bishop in 1819. Forster & Andrews of Hull advertised a barrel organ with ‘three barrels in a frame’ in 1845, and in the following year offered to install improved instruments with three, four or five barrels.

The larger instruments for use in church were also provided with separate mechanisms for blowing and for turning the barrel. The bellows were operated either by a blowing lever or by a foot pedal so the player could continue to blow while holding the barrel on a particular note or chord. This improvement allowed ‘pointing’ for psalm-singing.

For those churches already equipped with an ordinary organ, yet desirous of the benefits of the mechanical player, the ‘dumb organist’ was introduced in about 1800 to enable a barrel mechanism to be applied to a normal manual organ. It consisted of an oblong box which was fitted on top of the organ keyboard and which contained virtually all of the programme parts of a normal barrel organ save the pipes and bellows. The keyframe stickers projected from the bottom of the box and rested on the keyboard keys so that as the operator turned the crank handle, the stickers moved up and down to play the organ. A number of dumb organists survive.

By the end of the 18th century, barrel mechanisms attached to or built into organs were so common that contemporary records reveal quite specific terminology. Instruments are described variously as ‘finger organs’ (i.e. played with the fingers) or as ‘barrel-and-finger organs’. In the latter the barrel-playing mechanism was built into ordinary organs; this offered the best of both worlds for both home and church. A number of these survive despite the ruthless age when so many such mechanisms were considered redundant and scrapped. The largest barrel-and-finger organ in the world was the Apollonicon which could reproduce orchestral music: each work in its repertory was represented on a set of three very large wooden barrels.

As the 19th century entered its second half, the barrel organ began losing ground. An indication of the end of the barrel organ period may be gained from the last advertisement of Bates and Son who, in 1864, were selling off secular organs from £2 2s and church organs at £10.

See alsoReed organ

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. de Caus: Les raisons des forces mouvantes (Frankfurt, 1615, 2/1624)

A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650/R)

G. Schott: Technica curiosa (Nuremberg, 1664, 2/1687)

F. Bonanni: Gabinetto armonico (Rome, 1722/R, rev. and enlarged 2/1776/R by G. Ceruti with plates by A. van Westerhout; Eng. trans., 1969)

V. Trichter: Curiöses … Tantz … Exercitien-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1742)

F. Bédos de Celles: L’art du facteur d’orgues, iv (Paris, 1766–78/R; Eng. trans., 1977); ed. C. Mahrenholz (Kassel, 1934–6, 2/1963–6)

J. Adlung: Musica mechanica organoedi, ed. J.L. Albrecht (Berlin, 1768/R); ed. C. Mahrenholtz (Kassel, 1931)

M.D.J. Engramelle: La tonotechnie, ou L’art de noter les cylindres … dans les instruments de concerts méchaniques (Paris, 1775/R)

H. Mendel: Musikalisches/Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1878, 3/1890–91/R)

H.G. Farmer: The Organ of the Ancients from Eastern Sources, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic (London, 1931)

A. Protz: Mechanische Musikinstrumente (Kassel, 1939)

H.G. Farmer: The Sources of Arabian Music (Bearsden, 1940, 2/1965)

S. Mayes: An Organ for the Sultan (London, 1956)

A. Buchner: Hudebni automaty (Prague, 1959; Eng. trans., 1959)

R. Quoika: Altösterreichische Hornwerke (Berlin, 1959)

E. Simon: Mechanische Musikinstrumente früherer Zeiten und ihre Musik (Wiesbaden, 1960/R)

L.G. Langwill and N. Boston: Church and Chamber Barrel-organs, their Origin, Makers, Music and Location: a Chapter in English Church Music (Edinburgh, 1967, 2/1970)

K. Bormann: Orgel- und Spieluhrenbau (Zürich, 1968)

M. Wilson: The English Chamber Organ: History and Development 1650–1850 (Oxford, 1968) [with biographical notes on makers, incl. many barrel organ makers]

H. Zeraschi: Das Buch der Drehorgel (Zürich, 1971)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Clockwork Music: an Illustrated Musical History of Mechanical Musical Instruments (London, 1973)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music: the Arrangement of Music for Automatic Instruments (London, 1973)

H. Zeraschi: Drehorgel in der Kirche (Zürich, 1973)

L. Elvin: Forster & Andrews, their Barrel, Chamber and Small Church Organs (Lincoln, 1976)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ: the Story of the Mechanical Organ and its Repair (London, 1978)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Joseph Haydn and the Mechanical Organ (Cardiff, 1982)

W. Malloch: ‘The Earl of Bute’s Machine Organ: a Touchstone of Taste’, EMc, xi (1983), 172–83

H. Rambach and O. Wernet: Waldkircher orgelbauer (Waldkirch, 1984)

H. Jüttemann: Schwarzwälder Flötenuhren (Waldkirch, 1991)

LYNDESAY G. LANGWILL/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Barrel piano [cylinder piano, self-acting piano, street piano, café piano; sometimes inaccurately called barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy].

A piano played automatically by a pinned barrel or cylinder. In the form made in London by William Rolfe (from 1829) and others, an ordinary piano was augmented by a pinned wooden cylinder placed inside the case under the keyboard. This barrel was provided with a mechanical keyframe and a series of linkages or stickers which extend behind the soundboard to the top of the piano and operate an additional set of hammers which strike the strings through a gap in the soundboard. The barrel is turned by a clockwork motor driven by a heavy weight which is wound up to the top of the case. (For an illustration see Mechanical instrument, fig.4.)

About 1804 John Longman introduced a drawing-room barrel piano with no keyboard which was also weight-driven and included effects such as drum, triangle and buff stop. Around 1860 the Black Forest makers Imhof & Mukle introduced spring-driven clockwork barrel pianos, also for drawing-room use and without manual keyboard. In other types of barrel piano, the mechanism is operated by turning a hand crank. The domestic automatic piano dispensed with the cumbersome barrel in favour, first, of Debain's Antiphonel studded wooden strip piano player, then the perforated roll of the piano player and later the Player piano.

The keyboardless hand-turned barrel piano enjoyed one and a half centuries of popularity as a street instrument. The street barrel piano is thought to have emanated from Italy around 1800. By 1805 the Hicks family of Bristol was making small portable barrel pianos, sometimes inaccurately called ‘portable dulcimers’, which could be carried by itinerant musicians. Joseph Hicks excelled in making these, and George Hicks, who worked for a time in London, took the craft to New York. The large street piano mounted on a handcart was also developed in Italy, and migrant craftsmen took their skills all over Europe and North America. These open-air instruments underwent a variety of improvements; some models, known as ‘mandolin’ pianos, were made with mechanically driven repeating actions, while others included percussion in the form of drum, triangle and xylophone or wood-block. Some were augmented by a mechanism designed to show advertisements in a travelling picture display built into the vertical fall. Early in the 20th century an instrument with a coin-operated, spring-driven clockwork motor was introduced; these were widely used in public places, particularly public bars. In France and Belgium such instruments developed into large and decorative barrel-playing café pianos, often with elaborately carved cases embellished with mirrors. In the 1950s both Portugal and Spain produced a large number of small novelty barrel pianos on miniature handcarts for performing popular dance music and variety songs. An unusual barrel piano built in the form of a shallow living-room table, the Swedish pianoharpa, was invented in 1889 by I.F. Nilsson of Österkorsberga, near Lemnhult, patented and developed by the brothers Anders Gustaf and Jones Wilhelm Andersson of Näshult, near Vetlanda.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Player Piano (London, 1970)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music (London, 1973)

B. Lindwall: ‘The Andersson Pianoharpa’, Music Box, viii (1977–8), 330–34

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano (London, 1984)

ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Barrera, Rodiano.

See Barera, Rodiano.

Barrera Gómez, Enrique

(b Valladolid, 26 April 1844; d Valladolid, 3 July 1922). Spanish composer. He studied solfège and the piano in Valladolid, learning so rapidly that by the age of nine he was giving piano recitals. He also began to compose salon pieces – waltzes, polkas and mazurkas – and religious music. Some of these compositions are extant, dating from as early as 1854. In 1859 he moved to Madrid to attend the conservatory, where for eight years he studied the piano with José Miró and composition with Hilarión Eslava. At the same time, he made his living by playing the piano in cafés and salons and by giving lessons. Meanwhile he developed an interest in opera and attended performances at the Teatro Real.

On 22 January 1867 Barrera Gómez won by competition the post of choirmaster at Burgos Cathedral, which he held until his death, although in 1897 he was given dispensation from some of his duties because of ill-health. In 1869 the music publisher Antonio Romero announced a national opera competition, which Barrera won with Atahualpa, a Spanish opera based on an episode in the conquest of Peru. Another opera, Saul, was never staged. Most of his numerous works were written for Burgos Cathedral, and include masses, psalms and motets. (The autograph scores of many of them are extant there.) Of those published, the best is a collection of organ sonatas. Barrera Gómez is one of the best Spanish composers of the second half of the 19th century. His melodies have great elegance and nobility of line. Notable also is the technical aspect of his compositions, the harmony, accompaniments and the richness of his orchestration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Saldoni: Diccionario biográfico-bibliográfico de efemérides de músicos españoles, ii (Madrid, 1880/R), 336–8

‘Enrique Barrera’, Ilustración musical hispano-americana, ii (1888–9), 129–34

J. López-Calo: La música en la Catedral de Burgos (Burgos, 1995–7)

J.B. Varela de Vega: ‘El vallisoletano Enrique Barrera, maestro de capilla de la metropolitana de Burgos’, Boletín de la Real academia de bellas artes de la Purísma Concepción de Valladolid, no.30 (1995), 131–50

JOSÉ LÓPEZ-CALO

Barrère, Georges

(b Bordeaux, 31 Oct 1876; d New York, 14 June 1944). French flautist. Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, first with Altès under whom he made slow progress, then under Taffanel, Barrère was one of the most brilliant pupils to win a premier prix. His studies completed, he filled a number of important posts leading to the Opéra and Colonne orchestras. In 1895 he formed the Société Moderne des Instruments à Vent which replaced Taffanel's group, disbanded in 1893; during this period Barrère contributed a flute section to Widor's continuation of Berlioz's treatise on orchestration. In 1905 Damrosch invited Barrère to join the New York SO, with which he played, with only one break, for the rest of his life. As an exponent of the French style of flute playing, Barrère's influence was profound, and it is sad to realize that, in spite of his kindly and generous nature, his success led to the eclipse of Carl Wehner, Boehm’s pupil and the doyen of flute teachers in New York. In the USA, as in France, Barrère founded small instrumental groups: in 1910 the Barrère Ensemble of Wind Instruments, and in 1915 the Little Symphony chamber orchestra. These activities continued until his death.

PHILIP BATE

Barret, Apollon(-Marie-Rose)

(b Saint Brieuc, 15 Nov 1804; d Paris, 7/8 March 1879). French oboist and oboe designer. In 1823 Barret joined the class of Vogt at the Paris Conservatoire, and the following year was awarded the premier prix. His first appointment was with the orchestra of the Théâtre de l'Odéon; in 1827 he transferred to the Opéra-Comique. Two years later he was named first oboist at the Italian Opera in London, a position he held until 1874, concurrent with his activities as principal oboist in the Philharmonic Society and oboe teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. Barret is known primarily for his improvements to the design of the oboe described in the second edition of his Complete Method for the Oboe (1862). His design prioritized simplifying the fingering and perfecting the intonation of trills throughout the range of the oboe. The means by which he achieved these results have had a lasting effect on the physical characteristics and mechanism of the modern French oboe, and in particular the key system still favoured by English players (notably the thumb plate). Despite remaining in England for much of his career, Barret maintained active contact with his homeland, and in particular with Triébert, the Parisian firm of oboe manufacturers who made instruments that incorporate his design features. The list of subscribers printed in the first edition of the Method (1850) also testifies to his international connections. As well as his pedagogic works, Barret composed a considerable array of virtuosic salon music for oboe.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ob, pf: Fantasie on La dernière rose d'été, from Flotow's Martha (1873); [3] Fantasies on Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (London, 1874); L'absense, romance sans paroles (London, 1874), arr. cornet, orch (London, 1874); Cantilène, romance sans paroles (London, 1874), arr. eng hn, pf (1882); Elégie à la mémoire de Charles Triébert (c1870); Mélange sur un motif d'Onslow (n.d.); Air languedocien varié (n.d.)

Pf: Fleur de Marie, valse (London, 1845), arr. military band (1847); La fin du bal, galop (London, 1846); La corbeille fleurie, valse (London, 1850), arr. military band (London, 1850); La fuchsia, valse (London, 1850), arr. military band (London, 1849)

Other: Memory's Tears (Oh! 'tis not easy) (J.W. Lake), song (London, ?1845)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

Waterhouse-LangwillI

C.D. Lehrer: ‘How Barret Accompanied his Forty Progressive Melodies’, Journal [International Double Reed Society], xxii (1994), 77–85

GEOFFREY BURGESS

Barrett, John

(b c1676; d London, ?Dec 1719). English composer, organist and music master. From about 1686 to 1691 he was a chorister in the Chapel Royal under John Blow. He became organist of St Mary-at-Hill on 25 August 1693 and was appointed music master at Christ’s Hospital on 28 September 1697. He held both these posts until his death. He contributed a poem in homage to Blow to Amphion Anglicus (London, 1700) and was elected to the Amicable Society of Blues in about 1704. It is possible that he married Mary Saunders on 9 March 1711 in St Mary-at-Hill.

Like many of his contemporaries, such as Jeremiah Clarke, John Eccles and Daniel Purcell, Barrett composed mainly for the theatre, and his many songs, mostly of the double-barrelled art song variety, are both tuneful and attractive, as are the several little keyboard pieces published in the first three books of The Harpsicord Master (1697–1702) and various other early 18th-century anthologies. The style is essentially Purcellian, but the use of motto openings in almost all the extended songs reveals an awareness of rather more up-to-date Italian vocal practice, and in one case (Begone, begone, thou too propitious light, n.d.) Barrett actually produces what must be one of the very first English recitative–aria–recitative–aria cantatas as such (though the term ‘cantata’ is not used). His incidental music for Shadwell’s The Lancashire Witches was popular, and no fewer than 30 performances at Drury Lane between 1713 and 1729 are recorded; like that of several other plays to which he also contributed, however, it is no longer extant.

WORKS

all printed works published in London

incidental music

The Pilgrim (J. Vanbrugh), ?1702 revival, act music in Harmonia Anglicana (1702), song (1702)

All for the Better, or The Infallible Cure (F. Manning), 1703, song (1703)

The Generous Conqueror, or The Timely Discovery (B. Higgons), 1702, act music in Harmonia Anglicana (1702)

Tunbridge Walks, or The Yeoman of Kent (T. Baker), 1703, act music in Harmonia Anglicana (1703)

The Albion Queens, or The Death of Mary, Queen of Scotland (J. Banks), 1704, act music in Harmonia Anglicana (1704)

The Tender Husband, or The Accomplish’d Fools (R. Steele), 1705, music lost, advertised in The Post Man (5–8 May 1705)

Hampstead Heath (T. Baker), 1706, music lost, advertised in The Post Man (20–22 Dec 1705)

The Fine Lady’s Airs, or An Equipage of Lovers (T. Baker), 1708, act music, vns, obs (1709), song (1709)

The Fair Quaker of Deal, or The Humours of the Navy (C. Shadwell), 1710, music, vns, obs, lost, advertised in The Tatler (28–30 March 1710)

The City Ramble, or A Playhouse Wedding (E. Settle), 1711, song (1711)

The Wife’s Relief, or The Husband’s Cure (C. Johnson), 1712, music, vns, obs, lost, advertised in The Post Man (11–13 Dec 1711)

The Perplex’d Lovers (S. Centlivre), 1712, music, vns, obs, lost, advertised in The Post Man (19–21 Feb 1712)

The Lancashire Witches (T. Shadwell), 1713, music lost

The Wife of Bath (J. Gay), 1713, 3 songs (1713)

The Custom of the Manor (C. Johnson), 1715, 2 songs (1715)

Love’s Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion (C. Cibber), 1696, 7 pieces, GB-Lcm, 3 of which, Cmc; possibly the act music for The Relapse (Vanbrugh), 1697

Esquire Brainless, or Trick upon Trick, song (n.d.)

other works

O Sing unto the Lord, verse anthem, GB-Ctc (org pt only)

An Ode performed at the Anniversary Feast of the Gentlemen … of Kent, London, Merchant Taylors Hall, 21 Nov 1700, lost

A Psalm of Thanksgiving to be Sung by the Children of Christ’s-Hospital … in Easter Week, 1698 [also (1704), (1706), 1709, 1712, 1713, 1716, 1718], Christ’s Hospital Office

Numerous songs pubd singly and in 18th-century anthologies. Several tunes in D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719), three of which were included in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, London, 1728

Sonata, tpt, ob, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl; compressed version, as ov. to Tunbridge Walks, str (London, 1703)

2 voluntaries, org, Ldc, Mp, J-Tn

Pieces, hpd, GB-Cfm, Lbl, Ob, Och, several pubd in early 18th-century anthologies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Jeans: ‘The Easter Psalms of Christ's Hospital’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 45–60

P. Holman: ‘The Trumpet Sonata in England’, EMc, iv (1976), 424–9

C. Price: Music in the Restoration Theatre (Ann Arbor, 1979)

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983)

R. Harrison: ‘The Magdalene College Partbooks: Origins and Contents’, RMARC, no.29 (1996), 47–95

CHRISTOPHER POWELL/H. DIACK JOHNSTONE

Barrett, Richard

(b 7 Nov 1959, Swansea, South Wales). British composer. He only began to study music seriously after graduating in genetics and microbiology at UCL (1980). His principal composition teacher was Wiegold, with whom he studied privately, but under the influence of Xenakis, Hespos and Ferneyhough he became associated with the so-called New Complexity group of British composers, who broadly identified themselves with a radical European aesthetic. He became a member of the Composers' Forum at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, in 1984, winning the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis there in 1986. He was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize in 1989. From 1989 to 1992, Barrett was composition tutor at Middlesex University, and in 1996 was appointed professor of electronic composition at the Institute of Sonology of the Hague Royal Conservatory. Between 1984 and 1993 he was co-director of Ensemble Exposé; he has also performed improvised music using live electronics, in particular with Paul Obermeyer, with whom he formed the duo Furt in 1987.

Most of Barrett's works are grouped into series with extra-musical connotations. These include the 11 scores collectively entitled Fictions – reflecting his long-standing preoccupation with the writings of Beckett, culminating in Ruin for six spatially disposed instrumental trios – and the four works of After Matta, inspired by the Mexican painter, Roberto Matta. Other compositions comprise several movements, which can also be performed independently: both negatives and Opening of the Mouth contain five. The latter was conceived as a performance environment in collaboration with the artist Crow; while the movement titles, which come from the work of Paul Celan, are indicative of Barrett's interest in a wide range of modern poetry. Barrett's creative methods are usually associated with a good deal of mathematical elaboration, often carried out with computer assistance. He has developed a program capable of developing pitch and other material, which is then subjected to a series of selection procedures; he does, however, retain ultimate responsibility for all creative decisions.

WORKS

dramatic

Opening of the Mouth (P. Celan), 2 female vv, insts, tapes, live elecs, 1992–7; incl. knospend-gespaltener, air, CHARON, inward, Von Hinter dem Schmerz, abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben: seeinstrumental

Unter Wasser (op, M. Kreidl), Mez, 13 insts, 1995–8

vocal

Principia (A.L. Jones, after I. Newton), Bar, pf, 1982–4; Coïgitum, Mez, a, fl, ob d'amore, pf, perc, 1983–5; lieder vom wasser (E. Borchers), S, b, cl, db, perc, 1989–90

instrumental

Orch: Vanity, 1991–4

4 or more insts: Essay in Radiance, pic + b fl, s + t sax, E cl + b cl, elec org/synth, 1 perc, vn + va, vc, 1981–3; I Open and Close, str qt (opt. amp), 1983–8; Illuminer le temps, pic/fl, b cl/ B cl, 1 perc, hp, 2 elec gui, vn, dbn, (amp), 1984–90; Anatomy, fl, eng hn, b cl, bn, hn, perc, 2 vn, va, vc, db, (amp), 1985–6; Ruin, 6 spatially separated inst groups: 2 fl (amp), s sax, cl, b cl, hn, 2 trbn, tuba, 3 perc (amp), 2 vn, va, 2 vc, db, 1985–95; Temptation, a sax + bar sax, cb cl, tpt + pic tpt + cornet + slide tpt, vc, synth, perc, live elecs, 1986; Colloid-E, fl, trbn, mand, db, perc (amp), solo 10 str gui (amp), 1988–92; negatives, 9 players, (amp), 1988–93 (incl. delta, Colloid-E (incorporating Colloid), Archipelago, Basalt-E (incorporating Basalt), Entstellt); Archipelago, b fl + a rec, trbn, perc, 10 str gui, vn, va, vc, db, mand (amp) + retuned mand, 1990–92; Basalt-E, 1 perc, vn, va, vc, db, solo trbn, 1990–92; Delta, a fl, trbn, anklung, sitar (amp), 10 str gui (amp), vn, va, vc, db, 1990–93; Entstellt, pic, trbn, anklung, sitar (amp), 12 str gui (amp), vn, va, vc, db, 1990–93; Trawl, 5 players, 1994–7; Stress, str qt, 1995–7

1–3 insts: Invention VI, pf, 1982; heard, pf (amp), 1985; Ne Songe Plus A Fuir, vc (amp), 1985–6; Alba, bn, live elec, (amp), 1986–7; nothing elsewhere, va, 1987; EARTH, trbn, 1 perc, 1987–8; Dark Ages, vc (2 bows), 1987–90; Reticule, vn, 1988; Colloid, 10 str gui, 1988–91; Another Heavenly Day, E cl, elec gui, db, (amp), 1989–90; Tract, pf, (opt. amp), 1984–96; incl. A Light Gleams an Instant, 1989–96; basalt, trbn, 1990–91; what remains, fl, b cl, pf, 1990–91; Praha, vc (2 bows), 1991; knospend-gespaltener, C cl, 1992–3; abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben, perc, 1992–6; Von Hinter dem Schmerz, vc (amp), 1992–6

air, vn, 1993; trace, 2 diatonic music boxes, 1994; CHARON, b cl, 1994–5; inward, fl, perc, (amp), 1994–5; transmission, elec gui, live elecs, 1995–7; binary, 2 fl, 1996

electro-acoustic

works from 1992 in collaboration with Paul Obermeyer

The Unthinkable, tape, 1988–9; intruders, 1992; The Flesh of Experience, 1992; Hospital of the Soul, 1993; Johannes-Passion, 1993; Terminal V, 1994; Unstern, 1994; modern, 1994–6; the insect class, 1994–6; angel, 1995; irregular, 1996

work-series

After Matta: Coïgitum, Le songe plus à fuir, Illuminer le temps, The Unthinkable

Fictions: Anatomy, Temptation, Alba, nothing elsewhere, EARTH, I Open and Close, Another Heavenly Day, Tract, Dark Ages, lieder vom wasser, Ruin

Addenda: What remains, Trawl [in progress]

Hermetica: Transmission [in progress]

WRITINGS

‘To answer …’, Complexity?, ed. J. Bons (Amsterdam, 1990)

‘Beröring som blir till ljud’ [Touch Becoming Sound: Notes on Composition/Improvisation], Nutida musik, xxxv/2 (1992), 24–5

‘Standpoint and Sightlines’, Diskurse zur gegenwärtigen Musikkultur [Giessen 1994], ed. N. Polaschegg (Regensburg, 1996), 21–32

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Toop: ‘Four Facets of the “New Complexity”’, Contact, no.32 (1988), 4–8

‘Richard Barrett in Interview’, Sounds Australian, no.29 (1991), 27–31

K. Cross: ‘Sound/Form and the Traditions of Hearing’, Resonance [London] (Oct 1992), Oct, 1–8

R. Freeman: ‘Richard Barrett, compositeur maudit manqué’, Tempo, no.190 (1994), 41–6

I. Hewitt: ‘Fail Worse, Fail Better’, MT, cxxxv (1994), 148–51

C. Fox: ‘Music as Fiction: a Consideration of the Work of Richard Barrett’, Contemporary Music Review, no.13 (1995), 147–57

JOHN WARNABY

Barrett, Thomas Augustine.

See Stuart, Leslie.

Barrett, William Alexander

(b London, 15 Oct 1834; d London, 17 Oct 1891). English church musician, writer and musical educationist. He was trained as a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral between 1846 and 1849, and worked first as a commercial artist and journalist; but in 1859 he became a professional lay clerk, and was appointed to the choir of St Paul's Cathedral in 1866. In the same year he was made music critic of the Morning Post and he subsequently became editor of the Monthly Musical Record (1877), The Orchestra (1881) and the Musical Times (1887). Barrett graduated BMus at Oxford in 1871 and was appointed assistant Inspector of Music in the same year, working first with Hullah, then with Stainer, until his death. He was joint editor with Stainer of the Dictionary of Musical Terms (1876); and also published English Glee and Madrigal Writers (1877), English Church Composers (1877), Balfe: his Life and Work (1882) and other works, including the collection English Folksongs (1890), one of the first products of the revival of interest in English folksong. Barrett's historical interests were supported by his own important collection of madrigals, glees and scarce musical literature. His son F.E.H.J. Barrett later became music editor of the Morning Post.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, MT, xxxii (1891), 659–60

A.H. King: Some British Collectors of Music (Cambridge, 1963)

BERNARR RAINBOW

Barri, Leonardo.

See Barré, Leonardo.

Barrientos, Maria

(b Barcelona, 10 March 1884; d Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, 8 Aug 1946). Spanish soprano. After a short course of singing lessons at the Barcelona Conservatory, she made her début at the age of 14 at the Teatro Lirico in La sonnambula, followed by several other leading roles there and at the Teatro de Novidades. After further studies, she sang at Covent Garden (in Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1903), at La Scala (in Meyerbeer’s Dinorah and in Barbiere, 1904–5), and at many leading theatres throughout the world. On 31 January 1916 she made her Metropolitan début in Lucia di Lammermoor and she appeared there regularly in the standard coloratura roles during the next four seasons. In later years Barrientos became an admired interpreter of French and Spanish songs, and made a valuable set of records, including Falla’s Siete canciones populares españolas and Soneto a Córdoba with the composer at the piano. These complement many fascinating discs documenting her stage roles and displaying the charm of her airy soprano leggero.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

C. Williams: ‘Maria Barrientos’, Record Collector, xxviii (1983), 71–95 [incl. discography]

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/R

Barriera [bariera, sbara].

A 16th- and early 17th-century dance found in lute and guitar tablatures. As described in Caroso’s dance manuals Il ballarino (1581) and Nobiltà di dame (1600) and in Cesare Negri’s dance treatise Le gratie d’amore (1602), it is representative of a battle. The music is based on the second part of Janequin’s La guerre, which begins ‘Fan frere le le lan fan’. This is a parody of a trumpet call, and it may be the trumpet call rather than Janequin’s music that recurs so often in the barriera dance. A sbara was performed at the wedding of Francesco de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello in 1579 and another at the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589. The guitar tablatures of the early 17th century reduce Janequin's original music to the standard chord-strumming technique of the rasgueado style of guitar playing of the period, but, unusually, adding one melodic note.

ELAINE L. BEARER

Barrière, Etienne-Bernard-Joseph

(b Valenciennes, 7 Oct 1748; d ?Paris, 1816 or 1818). French composer and violinist. He went to Paris at the age of 12 (according to Choron), where he studied composition with Philidor and the violin with André-Noël Pagin. At his début at the Concert Spirituel on 20 April 1767 in a concerto for violin, his playing was praised for ‘la netteté, la justesse, la délicatesse et la sensibilité’ (Mercure de France, May 1767). According to Hécart, he soon returned to Valenciennes where he taught the violin, composed more violin concertos, and had his opera Le baille bienfaisant (now lost) performed in 1775. The following year he went again to Paris and played at the Concert Spirituel. In 1778 he performed two of his own violin concertos. He is mentioned in the Almanach musical as ‘Maître de violon’, and probably lived in Paris from 1776 to 1782. In 1778 he married Marie Geneviève Dombey. They had four children between 1779 and 1789, during which time they lived in Valenciennes and Paris. In 1801 he played a symphonie concertante with Lafont at a concert in the Salle Olympique, and also in 1801 (or 1802), according to Hécart, he was first violinist in Napoleon's chapel, a position which he did not hold long.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

op.

1	Six quatuors concertans, 2 vn, va, b (1776)
2	Deux simphonies concertantes (1776); no.1 for 4 vn, 2 va, 2 b, with 2 ob, 2 hn ad lib, ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. D, v (New York, 1983): no.2 for 2 ob, 4 vn, va, b, with 2 hn ad lib
3	Second oeuvre de six quatuors concertants, 2 vn, va, b (1778)
4	Six airs variés (c1777); 3 for 2 vn, 3 for vn, bc
5	Concerto, A, vn, orch (1778)
6	Sei duetti, 2 vn (c1780); lost, cited in GerberNL
[?7]	Concerto, D, vn, orch (1780)
8	3me oeuvre de six quatuors concertans, 2 vn, va, b (1782)
9	Six duos (?1783); 3 for 2 vn, 3 for vn, va
10	Trois symphonies à 8 parties, 2 fl, 2 hn, 2 vn, va, b (1785); lost, ?identical with 3 symphonies, CH-Bu
12	Trois grands duos concertans, 2 vn (c1790)
14	Premier air varié, vn, orch (?1805)
18	Trois trios concertans, 2 vn, va/b (?1805)
24	Trois grands duos concertans, 2 vn, bk 6 (c1809)
opp.11, 13, 15–17 not known; [?opp.19–23], Grands duos concertans, 2 vn, bks 1–5 (c1805–9), lost; cited in Choron-FayolleD
Rondeau, 2 vn, in Journal de violon dédié aux amateurs (1785), no.9; another piece for 2 vn, ibid. (1786), no.3, lost
Concerto, F, vn, orch, GB-Lbl
Le baille bienfaisant (op, E.T.B. Barrière), Valenciennes, 1775, lost; cited in Hécart, Brenner

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

Choron-FayolleD

G.A.J. Hécart: Recherches historiques, bibliographiques, critiques, et littéraires, sur le Théâtre Valenciennes (Paris, 1816)

C.D. Brenner: A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language 1700–1789 (Berkeley, 1947, 2/1979)

C. White: From Vivaldi to Viotti: a History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Philadelphia, 1992)

MARY CYR

Barrière, Françoise

(b Paris, 12 June 1944). French composer. She studied the piano at the Versailles Conservatoire and composition at the Paris Conservatoire; she also studied at the Service de la Recherche of the ORTF and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (ethnomusicology). She is committed to the development and dissemination of electroacoustic music, and to discussion of this music and its place in contemporary artistic creation. In 1970 she founded with Christian Clozier the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges (GMEB), which is known for its creation of electroacoustic instruments for broadcasting or performance (‘Gmebaphone’), and for beginners (‘Gmebogosse’). Her works have been played widely and broadcast since 1970, when her Ode à la terre marine for tape was composed. Barrière writes for both electroacoustic and mixed media. Her music combines technological development, as for example the mixing techniques of Aujourd-hui (1975), which are placed at the service of the compositional process, with a deep humanity, evident in the personal reminiscences of Musique pour le temps de Noël and Par temps calme et ensoleillé. Of Aujourd’hui she wrote that she was inspired by the ‘overwhelming solitude of the individual in our modern society’.

WORKS

(selective list)

for tape unless otherwise stated

Ode à la terre marine, 1970; Cordes-ci, cordes-ça, vn, hurdy-gurdy, tape, 1971; Variations hydrophilusiennes, 1971; Java Rosa, 1972; Au paradis des assassins, 1973; Ritratto di Giovane, pf, tape, 1972–3; Aujourd’hui, 1975; Chant à la mémoire des Aurignaciens, 1977; Musique pour le temps de Noël, sax, va, vc, perc, tape, 1979; Mémoires enfuies, 1980

Scènes des voyages d’Ulysse, 1981; Par temps calme et ensoleillé I, pf, tape, 1983; Par temps calme et ensoleillé II, vc, tape, 1985–9; Chant de consonnes, 1987; Le tombeau de Robespierre, 1989; L’envers des mots, 1990; Conversations enfantines, 1991; Nos petits monstres musiciens, child actor-musician, tape, 1992

PIERRE SABY

Barrière, Jean

(b Bordeaux, 2 May 1707; d Paris, 6 June 1747). French composer and cellist. He probably lived in Bordeaux since at his death he was cited as a ‘négociant de la ville de Bordeaux’, and after his death a privilege was granted to a ‘S^r Francois Barrière, prestre prébendier de l'église de Bordeaux, pour des Sonates et autres ouvrages de musique instrumentale du feu Jean Barrière’. In 1730 he lived in Paris as a Musicien ordinaire de notre Académie Royale de Musique. In 1733 he was granted a privilege for six years to publish ‘plusieurs Sonates et autres ouvrages de musique instrumentale’. According to Fétis, he went to Rome in 1736 to study with the famous Italian cellist Francesco Alborea, called Francischello. He remained in Italy for three years, but probably did not study with Francischello, who was employed by the court in Vienna from 1726 until his death in 1739. Barrière returned to Paris in 1739 and continued composing for the cello: ‘Le Sieur Barrière, de retour d'Italie à Paris, vient de faire graver son troisième livre de Sonates pour le Violoncelle’ (Mercure de France, November 1739). In 1739 his privilege was renewed for 12 years, and during that time he published his last three books – one each for cello, pardessus de viole and harpsichord.

The cello sonatas include a variety of technical problems – passages in double 3rds, arpeggiated chords and multiple stops, and brilliant virtuoso passages extending into the upper range. Each sonata has four or five movements, beginning with a slow movement and ending with a quick one. Several Allegros are titled Allemanda and book 2 no.3 includes a Sarabanda and Minuetto after the Allemande. The final movement of book 2 no.6 is marked ‘Giga’. Several sonatas include an ‘aria’ or simple songlike piece in 6/8 or 6/4 marked either ‘amorosa’ or ‘gratioso’. In the variations on the aria of book 3 no.6 brilliant arpeggios run throughout the entire range (C to a') while the aria melody is heard above (this sonata and possibly others may have been written for the cello piccolo). That the sonatas were meant to be accompanied by a second cello and a keyboard instrument is apparent from the Adagio of book 2 no.4, which includes an independent part for the second cello. Book 3 no.2 is for two cellos throughout with continuo (three cellos in all).

Books 3 and 4, published after Barrière's Italian journey, are technically more advanced and reflect his absorption of the Italian style. Many of the sonatas of book 3 include Italianate suite movements such as Giga and Corrente. These sonatas range from three to five movements, and several have transitional Adagios between movements. Some passages in his work suggest the use of the thumb of the left hand in the upper register (e'' in book 5 no.6), a technique which he probably introduced in France.

The first five sonatas for the pardessus de viole (book 5) appear, rewritten with additional ornamentation, elaboration and idiomatic runs, as the first five sonatas in book 6 for the harpsichord. Following the six sonatas are five pièces, each named for a musician or acquaintance. Like Duphly and Rameau, Barrière entitled one of his pieces ‘La Boucon’ for Anne-Jeanne Boucon, who later married Mondonville.

Barrière, like Martin Berteau, was one of the finest cello virtuosos in France during the first half of the 18th century, and the first to write thoroughly idiomatic music for the cello. Although his playing was highly regarded, there are few extant specific descriptions of it. At a Concert Spirituel he played with ‘grande précision’ (8 September 1738, Mercure de France), and P.-L. d'Aquin wrote of him with highest praise: ‘Le fameux Barrière, mort depuis peu, possedoit tout ce que l'on peut désirer … il n'y avoit guère d'exécution comme la sienne’.

WORKS

[6] Sonates, vc, bc, bks 1–4 (Paris, 1733–9); bk 3, no.2 for 2 vc, bc; bk 3 and bk 4 nos.1, 2, 4–6 ed. M. Chaigneau and W.M. Rummel as 12 [sic] sonates pour violoncelle et piano, bks 1, 2 (Paris, 1920–25); bks 2, 4 ed. J. Adas: Mid Eighteenth-Century Cello Sonatas, xix (New York, 1991)

[6] Sonates, pardessus de viole, bc, bk 5 (Paris, 1739)

[6] Sonates et [5] pièces, hpd, bk 6 (Paris, 1739); sonatas 1–5 same as bk 5, nos.1–5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

P.-L. d'Aquin: Lettres sur les hommes célèbres … sous le règne de Louis XV (Paris, 1752, 2/1753/R as Siècle littéraire de Louis XV ou lettres sur les hommes célèbres

A. Vidal: Les instruments à archet, ii (Paris, 1877), 330

M. Brenet: ‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790 d'après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

J. Adas: ‘Le célèbre Berteau’, EMc, xvii (1989), 368–80

M. Benoit: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

MARY CYR

Barring (i).

The drawing of vertical lines called ‘bars’ through a staff, system or score, in order to mark off metrical units by their horizontal spacing, and instrumental or vocal groupings by their vertical continuity or discontinuity; see Bar and Notation, §III, 4(iii). The term is commonly used for the scheme itself whereby such bars are drawn.

IAN HARWOOD

Barring (ii).

The system of strips or bars of wood glued under the soundboard (or belly) of many string instruments, such as lute, guitar, violin, cello, harpsichord and piano. Since the number, position, size and method of fixing these bars affect the mode of vibration of the soundboard when excited by the strings, they are crucial to the tone of the instrument, more so, in fact than the materials and method of construction of the soundbox itself (see Ribs). The barring does also have a role in strengthening and supporting the belly under stress, but it is most importantly an essentially integral part of the resonating system.

Many modern string instruments are derived from forebears whose resonating surface was made of skin. To vibrate as responsively as skin, wood clearly has to be thin (little more than a millimetre on some lute bellies). Barring differentially loads the vibrating surface: to enhance tonal contrasts transverse bars on lutes are generally heavier towards the bass side of the soundboard, feathering away towards the treble. Soundboards of keyboard instruments are necessarily much heavier, and to optimize responses to low and high frequencies the wood of the board itself can be made thicker towards the bass strings, and thinner towards the treble.

The complexity of barring varies. Violins and cellos have a single Bass-bar positioned parallel to the lowest string and close to the left foot of the bridge. Lutes characteristically have a number of transverse bars (see Lute, §2). Guitars can have more complex arrays (see Guitar, §1, and especially fig.1), often with radial barring (‘fan-strutting’) which distributes the energy localized at the bridge, as well as transverse bars. The latter, in order to avoid damping the vibration, may not be attached to the sides, a feature known also in lutes, where bars may be feathered away short of the edges of the belly. Approaches vary not only between different families of instruments, but also between different models of the same instrument, according to the function for which they are designed: thus flamenco guitars require different dynamics to those designed for the solo concert performance. Individual instruments may even be rebuilt with their barring modified to adjust tonal balance.

IAN MORRISON

Barring (iii).

A left-hand technique used by players of many plucked instruments (and a few bowed instruments such as the viol) to facilitate the playing of chords (Fr. jeu barré). The first finger is laid flat across all the strings (whole barré), or some of them (half barré), behind a fret, leaving the other fingers free to stop the remaining notes of the chord (see Barré). This technique increases the number of chords that can be played on plucked instruments, particularly those with more than four courses, such as the lute and the guitar.

IAN HARWOOD

Barrington, Daines

(b London, 1727; d London, 14 March 1800). English lawyer and writer on music. The fourth son of John Shute, 1st Viscount Barrington, he was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple and held public offices between 1751 and 1785. His eldest sister, Sarah, married the amateur musician and music theorist Robert Price. Barrington’s writings on music are remarkable for their observations on two relatively new topics: child music prodigies and animal communication. The former contains valuable firsthand accounts of five ‘infant’ musicians (Mozart, Charles and Samuel Wesley, William Crotch and Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington), and the latter includes an article on birdsong that was cited by Charles Darwin some hundred years later.

WRITINGS

‘Account of a Very Remarkable Musician [W.A. Mozart]. In a Letter from the Honourable Daines Barrington, F.R.S. to Mathew Maty, M.D. Sec. R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lx (1770), 54–64

‘Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lxiii (1773), 249–58

‘Some Account of Two Musical Instruments Used in Wales’, Archaeologia, iii (1775), 30–34

Miscellanies (London, 1781), 279–325 [contains accounts of William Crotch, Samuel and Charles Wesley and the Earl of Mornington]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (G.P. Macdonell)

Obituary, Gentleman’s Magazine, lxx (1800), 291–4

C. Darwin: The Descent of Man (London, 1871, 2/1879), 368, 370–71

J.C. Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830 (New York, 1979), i, 52–4

JAMIE C. KASSLER

Barrios (Fernandez), Angel

(b Granada, 4 Jan 1882; d Madrid, 17 Nov 1964). Spanish composer, guitarist and violinist. The son of a flamenco guitarist, he studied harmony, the violin and the guitar in Granada, giving most of his attention to the latter instrument. Later he studied in Madrid with del Campo and in Paris with Gédalge. In 1900 he founded the Trio Iberia (lute, bandurria, guitar), for which he wrote many arrangements and with which he toured Europe. Though productive in his youth, he wrote very little after the civil war.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: La culpa (op, 3, G. Martínez Sierra), Madrid, 1914 [collab. del Campo]; La romería (zar, 2, L.L. Dominguez), Madrid, 1917 [collab. del Campo]; El avapiés (op, 3, T. Borrás), Madrid, Real, 18 March 1919 [collab. del Campo]; Granada mía (sainete granadino, 2, A. López Monís), Madrid, 1919; La suerte (sainete lírico, 1, S. and J. Alvarez Quintero), Madrid, 1926; La Lola se va a los puertos (zar, 32, A. and M. Macado), Madrid, 1951 [also op, 2, G. and R. Fernández Shaw, after A. and M. Machado, perf Madrid, 1955]; incid music

Orch: Impresiones de Granada (Zambra en el Albaycín), sym. poem, 1917; Una copla en la fuente del Avellano, sym. poem, 1918; Danzas gitanas, 1923; Copla de soleá

Pf and gui pieces

Principal publisher: Unión Musical Española

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (C.Heine)

A. Fernandez-Cid: Cien años de teatro musical en España (Madrid, 1975)

T. Marco: Historia de la música espanõla: siglo XX (Madrid, 1983)

CARLOS GÓMEZ AMAT

Barrios Mangoré, Agustín (Pío) [Barrios, Agustín Pío]

(b San Juan Bautista de las Misiones, 5 May 1885; d San Salvador, 7 Aug 1944). Paraguayan guitarist and composer. In his youth in Asunción he studied the guitar with Gustavo Sosa Escalada and composition with Nicolo Pellegrini, and practised his compositional skills by transcribing works by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. In 1910 he left Paraguay intending to give a week of concerts in Argentina, but such was his success that he was away for 14 years, playing in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay (where he studied with Antonio Giménez Manjón). He found a patron in the diplomat Tomás Salomini, who arranged recitals for him in Mexico and Cuba. His first real successes date from about 1919, when he played for the President of Brazil. In 1930 he adopted the pseudonym Mangoré (after a legendary Guaraní chieftain), and in 1934 he went to Europe with Salomini, living in Berlin and visiting Belgium and Spain. In 1936 he returned to Latin America, and taught at the conservatory in San Salvador from 1939 to 1944. Critics compared Barrios Mangoré with Segovia as an interpreter and with Paganini as a virtuoso. He was the first Latin-American guitarist of stature to be heard in Europe, and made numerous recordings between 1913 and 1929.

Although he lacked a formal musical education, Barrios Mangoré wrote guitar music of high quality that combined many of the characteristics of his predecessors, Sor and Tárrega. He reputedly composed about 300 works for solo guitar, of which over a third have been located either in manuscripts or from his recordings. These include La catedral, Danza paraguaya, Un sueño en la floresta, Preludio, op.5 no.1, Julia Florida, Una limosna por el amor de dios, Mazurka apasionata, Vals, op.8 nos.3 and 4, and Variations on a Theme of Tárrega, all of which have become part of the repertory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Stover: Six Silver Moonbeams: the Life and Times of Agustín Barrios Mangoré (Clovis, CA, 1992)

PETER SENSIER/RICHARD D. STOVER

Barron, Bebe [née Charlotte Wind]

(b Minneapolis, 16 June 1927). American composer. She and her husband Louis Barron were pioneers in the field of electro-acoustic music. She received the MA in political science from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Cordero, and she also spent a year studying composition at the University of Mexico. In 1947 she moved to New York and, while working as a researcher for Time-Life, studied composition with Riegger and Cowell. Married that year, the Barrons began their experiments with taped electronic sounds; in 1948 in New York they established one of the earliest electro-acoustic music studios. It contained both disc and tape equipment with sine- and square-wave oscillators, mixers and filters, and four synchronous projectors used for the manipulation of sound on optical tracks. Their experiments led the Barrons to use and develop characteristics of individual circuits to create different types of sound events, each of which was considered a Gestalt, and they eventually constructed a large collection of cybernetic circuits for compositional use. When they collaborated on a composition, Louis designed and built the electronic circuits for sound generation while Bebe searched the taped material for its musical potential and proposed the application of particular processing and compositional techniques.

Their first fully realized work was Heavenly Menagerie (1951–2). During 1952 and 1953 their studio was used by Cage for the preparation of his first tape works. In 1956 they composed the music for Forbidden Planet, one of the first electronic scores written for a commercial film, and an influential work in the development of electronic music. In 1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles, where, although divorced in 1970, they continued to collaborate on compositional projects. Bebe became the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States in 1985 and also served on the Board of Directors. In 1997 she was presented with an award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States for the Barrons' joint lifetime achievement in electro-acoustic music.

WORKS

all electro-acoustic, composed with Louis Barron

Dramatic: Legend (American Mime Theatre), 1955; Ballet (P. Feigay), 1958; incid music for 4 plays, 1957–62

Tape: Heavenly Menagerie, 1951–2; For an Electronic Nervous System, 1954; Music of Tomorrow, 1960; Spaceboy, 1971; Thc Circe Circuit, 1982; Elegy for a Dying Planet, 1982

Film scores: Bells of Atlantis (I. Hugo), 1952; Miramagic (W. Lewisohn), 1954; Forbidden Planet (F.M. Wilcox), 1956; Jazz of Lights (Hugo), 1956; Bridges (S. Clarke), 1959; Crystal Growing (Western Electric), 1959; The Computer Age (IBM), 1968; Spaceboy (R. Druks), 1973 [arr. of 1971 tape piece]; More than Human (A. Singer), 1974; Cannabis (Computer Graphics), 1975

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveW (B. Schrader) [incl. further bibliography]

L. Barron and B. Barron: ‘Forbidden Planet’, Film Music, xv/5 (1956), 18

S. Rubin: ‘Retrospect: Forbidden Planet’, Cinefantastique, iv/1 (1975), 4–13

J. Brockman: ‘The First Electronic Filmscore: Forbidden Planet’, The Score, vii/3 (1992), 5–13

V. Vale and A. Juno: Incredibly Strange Music No.2 (San Francisco, 1994), 194–202

M. Burman: ‘Making Music for Forbidden Planet’, Projections 7, ed. J. Boorman and W. Donohue (London, 1997), 252–63

BARRY SCHRADER

Barron, Louis

(b Minneapolis, 23 April 1920; d Los Angeles, 1 Nov 1989). American composer. He and his wife Bebe wrote pioneering works in the field of electro-acoustic music. He studied the piano and wrote jazz criticism while a student at the University of Minnesota. He then worked for the Gallup organization as a social psychologist. Married in 1947, the Barrons established one of the earliest electro-acoustic music studios, in which Louis’s knowledge of electronics allowed him to design and build so-called behavioural circuits, based on Norbert Wiener's science of cybernetics.

A fuller discussion of the Barrons' compositional techniques, with a list of their collaborative works and a bibliography, can be found under Bebe Barron.

BARRY SCHRADER

Barrón, Ramón González.

See González Barrón, Ramón.

Barroso, Ari (Evangelista)

(b Ubá, 7 Nov 1903; d Rio de Janeiro, 9 Feb 1964). Brazilian composer and conductor. In 1920 he moved to Rio de Janeiro where he developed his career, first as a pianist in dance bands and cinemas, then as a composer of pieces for musical theatre, as a radio programmer and announcer, and later as a television programmer. He also composed the sound tracks for various films, especially Walt Disney’s The Three Caballeros (‘Você já foi à Bahia?’), for which he received a diploma from the Hollywood Academy of Cinematographic Sciences and Arts. In 1955, the Brazilian government bestowed upon him, together with Villa-Lobos, the National Order of Merit.

Barroso greatly contributed to the establishment of the classic urban samba in the 1930s. Among the over 160 sambas that he wrote, those of the 1930s and 40s have remained the most popular. Such pieces as Faceira (1931), No tabuleiro da baiana (1937), Na Baixa do Sapateiro (1938), Morena boca de ouro (1941), Os quindins de Iaiá (1941), among many others, won him prestige and reputation. None, however, had the national and international impact and recognition of his Aquarela do Brasil, recorded in the USA as Brazil. A 1939 ‘samba de exaltação’, it exalted the beauty and patriotic values of the country in strongly nationalistic terms, and virtually became Brazil’s popular ‘national anthem’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Rangel: Sambistas e chorões (São Paulo, 1962)

D. Luciana: Ari Barroso, um turbilhão! (Rio de Janeiro, 1970)

J. Efegê: Figuras e coisas da música popular brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1978–80)

M. de Morais: Recordações de Ary Barroso (Rio de Janeiro, 1979)

S. Cabral: No tempo de Ari Barroso (Rio de Janeiro, c1993)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Barroso Neto, Joaquim Antônio

(b Rio de Janeiro, 30 Jan 1881; d Rio de Janeiro, 1 Sept 1941). Brazilian composer and pianist. He began his piano studies at an early age and later attended the then Instituto Nacional de Música, under Bevilacqua, Braga, Nascimento and Nepomuceno. He was appointed a professor of piano at the same institution in 1906, becoming in a few years one of Brazil’s most celebrated piano teachers. For some time he was a member of the Barroso-Milano-Gomes Trio. In the early 1920s he took over the artistic directorship of the Sociedade de Cultura Musical. His consistent interest in choral music resulted in the foundation of the Côro Barroso Neto in 1936. Barroso Neto wrote only piano music, solo songs and choral works. His extensive piano output includes many pieces in a typical Romantic virtuoso style; and others, such as Minha terra and Chôro, with more national features. He also produced educational piano music, including Estudos de agilidade, Coleção de estudos and his editions of Clementi, Czerny and Cramer-Bülow. His best-known solo songs are Canção da felicidade, Adeus, Olhos tristes and Felicidade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Gomes: Barroso Neto (Rio de Janeiro, 1939)

G. Béhague: Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979)

V. Mariz: História da música no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1981, 4/1994)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Barrta, Josef.

See Bárta, Josef.

Barrueco, Manuel

(b Santiago de Cuba, 16 Dec 1952). American guitarist of Cuban birth. He studied at the Esteban Salas Conservatory in Satiago de Cuba and with Aaron Shearer at the Peabody Conservatory. He won first prize in the Concert Artists Guild Competition in 1974, and that year made his début at Carnegie Hall. In 1986 he gave the first American performance of Takemitsu's concerto To the Edge of Dream with the Tulse PO under Bernard Rubenstein. He was also soloist in the world première of Takemitsu's Spectral Canticle, a double concerto for guitar, violin and orchestra, with violinist Franz Peter Zimmerman at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Kiel, in 1995. Barrueco has made several recordings, notably of Albéniz and Granados, and has arranged works for the guitar including transcriptions of J.S. Bach's Three Violin Sonatas. He helped establish the guitar department at the Manhattan School of Music, and also teaches at the Peabody Conservatory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Cosentino: ‘A Conversation with Manuel Barrueco’, Guitar Review, no.104 (1996), 21–7

J. Ferguson: ‘Manuel Barrueco and David Tanenbaum’, Guitar Player, xxix/6 (1996), 35–9

THOMAS F. HECK

Barry, Gerald

(b Clarecastle, Co. Clare, 28 April 1952). Irish composer. He graduated from University College, Dublin (BMus 1973) and went to Amsterdam on a Dutch scholarship to study with Piet Kee (organ) and Schat (composition). After returning to University College to complete the MA in 1975, he studied composition in Cologne with Stockhausen and Kagel and in Vienna with Cerha. He worked for a period as a pianist and organist in Cologne before being appointed in 1982 to a lectureship in music at University College, Cork. In 1986, election to Aosdána (the state-sponsored academy of creative artists) and increasing international recognition enabled him to devote himself to full-time composition. His music gained much critical acclaim in the late 1980s with major performances in London: the orchestral Chevaux-de-frise was commissioned for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in the Royal Albert Hall in 1988 and his opera The Intelligence Park was staged at the Almeida Festival in 1990. In 1995 a second opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, was broadcast on Channel 4 TV.

The influence of Kagel is evident in Barry’s use of quotation techniques and his predilection for music theatre. Much of his quotation material is derived from sources from the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular Bach and Handel. Handel’s sense of theatre and vocal line provides much of the inspiration for the three-act The Intelligence Park. Set in Dublin in 1753, it deals with an opera composer whose love for a castrato restores his creativity; it is, in essence, an opera within an opera. The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit for five male voices and chamber ensemble is a reworking of Handel’s last oratorio, The Triumph of Time and Truth, and exemplifies well Barry’s preoccupation with melody and linearity. The Baroque influence is also evident in the way in which instrumental colour is rendered subservient to line. Indeed, many of his pieces can be played by any instruments: the graphically entitled ‘_____’ for chamber ensemble appears in extended form as Au milieu (1981) for piano solo, while “Ø” (1979) for two pianos was arranged for various different instruments as Sur les pointes.

Barry’s pitch material is often derived by means of aleatory processes from such abstract sources as a chart showing the locations of John Jenkins’s manuscripts (as in ‘_____’), the words of the BBC Radio 4 shipping forecast and dissonant harmonies formed by selective use of the passing notes in Bach chorales (as in The Intelligence Park), or, in the case of “Ø”, by the addition and use of inessential contiguous pitches in the Irish melody Bonny Kate. Structurally, his pieces appear to start suddenly in mid-flow and end just as abruptly; elaboration of material is more important than any developmental progression and prolonged pauses can punctuate the course of the music unexpectedly. Episodic sections within pieces shift unpredictably and are accompanied by abrupt dynamic and tempo changes. The momentum generated by the relentless rhythmic energy and extreme virtuoso demands made on the performer results, perhaps, from the fact that he composes at the keyboard and improvizes constantly. Barry has withdrawn all his works before 1977; the first work that he acknowledges is the piece of music theatre Things That Gain By Being Painted (1977), a setting of The Pillow Book by the 10th-century Japanese lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Things that gain by being painted (music theatre, Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book), 1v, spkr, vc, pf, 1977; The Intelligence Park (op, 3, V. Deane), 1981–8; The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (op, M. Oakes), 1991–2

Orch: Diner, 1980; Of Queens’ Gardens, 1986; Chevaux-de-frise, 1988; Children Aged 10–17, 1989; Flamboys, 1991; Le jalouise taciturne, str, 1996; The Road, 1997

Vocal: Carol, high and low vv, org/pf/hpd, 1986; Water Parted, Ct, pf, 1988 [from op The Intelligence Park, 1982–9]; The Conquest of Ireland (G. Cambrensis), B, orch, 1995; The Ring, SATB, orch, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: ‘_____’, chbr ens, 1979, rev. 1987; “Ø”, 2 pf, 1979; Au milieu, pf, 1981 [based on ‘_____’, 1979]; Handel’s Favourite Song, cl, fl, tpt, trbn, pf, gui, db, 1981; Sur les pointes, pf/hpd/org/chbr orch, 1981 [version of “Ø”, 1979]; 5 Chorales, 2 pf, 1984 [from op The Intelligence Park, 1982–9]; Swinging tripes and trillibubkins, pf, 1986; Ob Qt, 1988; Bob, cl, cl + b cl, vn, vc, mar, pf, 1989; Triorchic Blues, pf, 1990; Low, cl, pf, 1991; Pf Qt no.1, 1992; Hard D, chbr ens, 1992; Sextet, cl + b cl, tpt, 2 mar, pf, db, 1992–3; Str Qt, 1994; The Chair, org, 1994; Qnt, eng hn, cl + b cl, vc, db, pf, 1995; Octet, 2 cl, vn, vc, pf, mar, 1995; Pf Qt no.2, 1996

Principal publisher: OUP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC1 (M. Blake)

KdG (A. Klein)

V. Deane: ‘The Music of Gerald Barry’, Soundpost, no.2 (1981), 14–17

K. Volans and H. Bracefield: ‘A Constant State of Surprise: Gerald Barry and ‘The Intelligence Park’, Contact, no.31 (1987), 9–19

A. Jack: ‘Introducing Gerald Barry’, MT, cxxix (1988), 389–93

A Bye: ‘Gay Days Spent in Gladness’, MT, cxxxiv (1993), 496–500

A. Klein: Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1996)

G. Cox: ‘The Music of Gerald Barry as an Introduction to Contemporary Irish Art-music’, Explorations, ed. L. Irwin (Limerick, 1998), 61–72

GARETH COX

Barry, John [Prendergast, John Barry]

(b York, 3 Nov 1933). English composer. He left school at 15 and gained early film experience as a projectionist in his father's cinemas in York. Through hearing film scores by established Hollywood composers such as Steiner, Korngold, Waxman, Newman and North, he determined upon a career as a film composer. He played the trumpet in a local band, and later in the army during his National Service (1952–5). He studied with Francis Jackson, organist of York Minster, and by correspondence with Joseph Schillinger and William Russo, gaining experience by arranging for several bands. In 1957 he formed John Barry and the Seven (later becoming the John Barry Seven, which toured until early 1966), and was musical director for Adam Faith on several hit songs, including What do you want (1959). The Seven's own Hit and Miss (1960) was taken up as the theme to the BBC's popular show ‘Juke Box Jury’. During this period Barry wrote, performed and recorded pop music, making his first BBC television broadcast (on ‘Six-Five Special’) in 1957. He then worked in managerial capacities with various record companies, including EMI and the independent Ember International. Following his first jazz inflected rock and roll film score for Beat Girl (1959), featuring Adam Faith, he quickly became established, notably for his fusion of rock, pop and jazz in the numerous James Bond films, beginning with his arrangement of the Bond theme for Dr No (1962; score composed by Monty Norman) and concluding with his score for The Living Daylights (1987).

In between these overtly commercial films he frequently worked with the British director Bryan Forbes, contributing jazz numbers to The L-Shaped Room (1962), followed by collaborations on Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), King Rat (1965), The Wrong Box (1966), The Whisperers (1967) and Deadfall (1968), in which Barry himself appears conducting the LPO in a guitar concerto (Romance for guitar and orchestra), written to accompany a robbery sequence. Over many years he has built a song-writing partnership with the lyricist Don Black, with whom he collaborated on the musical Billy, after the novel Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse. Its fantasy sequences gave full range to Barry's stylistic versatility and the show ran successfully at Drury Lane from May 1974 with Michael Crawford in the title role. When not orchestrating his own music, Barry has worked with several orchestrators including Bobby Richards, Al Woodbury and Greig McRitchie. He moved to America in 1975, first to Los Angeles and then New York (1980).

His stylistic versatility has enabled him to write for every genre of feature film – adventure, action, comedy, drama, romance and thriller – as well as for television. Although finding many commissions artistically rewarding, he has expressed candid views on some of his work, characterizing the James Bond scores as big-budget ‘Mickey-Mouse’ music that gives the public what it wants, and, despite being the recipient of two Academy Awards for Born Free (1966), admitting that he scored it as a satire on a sentimental Disney picture. Some commentators have identified stylistic fingerprints in whatever Barry writes, citing the recurrent use of typical instrumental textures (for example, xylophone with strings and high flute in his ‘Bond’ movies), even of individual instruments. His skill, however, equips him to assume specific classical and popular styles, as in his imitation of Duke Ellington for The Cotton Club (1984), or the traditional ‘western’ symphonic score for Dances with Wolves (1990). Barry has won five Academy Awards: Born Free (1966; Best Score and Best Song), The Lion in Winter (1968), Out of Africa (1985) and Dances with Wolves (1990).

WORKS

film and television

Film scores: Beat Girl, 1959; Never Let Go, 1960; Mix Me a Person, 1962; The L-Shaped Room, 1962; The Amorous Prawn, 1962; Dr No, 1962; They All Died Laughing, 1963; The Party's Over, 1963; From Russia With Love, 1963; Zulu, 1963; Goldfinger, 1964; A Jolly Bad Fellow, 1964; Séance on a Wet Afternoon, 1964; Man in the Middle, 1964; The Ipcress File, 1965; King Rat, 1965; Thunderball, 1965; Mister Moses, 1965; The Knack … and How to Get It, 1965; The Quiller Memorandum, 1966; Born Free, 1966; Four in the Morning, 1966; Dutchman, 1966; The Chase, 1966; The Wrong Box, 1966; The Whisperers, 1967; You Only Live Twice, 1967; Petulia, 1968; The Lion in Winter, 1968; Deadfall, 1968; Boom!, 1968; Midnight Cowboy, 1969; On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969; The Appointment, 1969

Monte Walsh, 1970; The Last Valley, 1971; Walkabout, 1971; They Might Be Giants, 1971; Murphy's War, 1971; Mary, Queen of Scots, 1971; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1972; Follow Me, 1972; Diamonds Are Forever, 1972; The Tamarind Seed, 1973; A Doll's House, 1973; The Man with the Golden Gun, 1975; The Dove, 1975; The Day of the Locust, 1975; King Kong, 1976; Robin and Marian, 1976; The Deep, 1977; The White Buffalo, 1977; First Love, 1977; The Betsy, 1978; Game of Death, 1978; Moonraker, 1979; The Black Hole, 1979; Starcrash, 1979; Hanover Street, 1979

Raise the Titanic!, 1980; Somewhere in Time, 1980; Night Games, 1980; Murder by Phone, 1980; Inside Moves, 1980; Superman 2, 1980; Touched By Love, 1980; Body Heat, 1981; The Legend of the Lone Ranger, 1981; Hammett, 1982; Frances, 1982; Octopussy, 1983; High Road to China, 1983; The Golden Seal, 1983; Until September, 1984; Mike's Murder, 1984; The Cotton Club, 1984; Jagged Edge, 1985; A View to a Kill, 1985; Out of Africa, 1985; Howard the Duck, 1986; Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986; The Golden Child, 1986; My Sister's Keeper, 1986; The Living Daylights, 1987; Hearts of Fire, 1987; Masquerade, 1988; A Killing Affair, 1988

Dances with Wolves, 1990; John Barry – Moviola, 1992; Chaplin, 1992; Indecent Proposal, 1993; My Life, 1993; Ruby Cairo, 1993; The Specialist, 1994; The Scarlet Letter, 1995; Cry the Beloved Country, 1995; Across the Sea of Time, 1995; Swept from the Sea, 1997; Mercury Rising, 1998

Television scores: Elizabeth Taylor in London, 1963; The Persuaders!, 1971; The Glass Menagerie, 1973; Love Among the Ruins, 1975; Eleanor and Franklin, 1976; Eleanor and Franklin: the White House Years, 1977; The Gathering, 1977; The War Between the Tates, 1977; Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy, 1977; Willa, 1979; The Corn is Green, 1979; Svengali, 1983; The Witness, 1992

Other works incl. individual songs for films, television and radio signature tunes, music for television shows, short films and commercials

other works

Stage: Passion Flower Hotel (musical, 2, T. Peacock; W. Mankowitz, after ‘Rosalind Erskine’), London, Prince of Wales', 24 Aug 1965; Lolita My Love, 1968; Billy (musical, 2, D. Black; I. La Frenais and D. Clements after K. Waterhouse and W. Hall: Billy Liar), London, Drury Lane, 1 May 1974 [incl. Some of us belong to the stars]

Orch: Americans (1976); The Beyondness of Things (1997) [music from rejected score to The Horse Whisperer, 1998]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘John Barry: the Early Years’, From Silents to Satellite, no.15 (1992), 20–40

J. Burlingame: ‘John Barry's Television Scores: an Overview’, From Silents to Satellite, no.16 (1993), 34–8

R.S. Brown: ‘Barry’, Overtones and Undertones (Berkeley, 1994), 322–33 [interview]

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘John Barry: into the Sixties’, Music from the Movies, no.5 (1994), 8–12

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘John Barry: into the Seventies’, Music from the Movies, no.6 (1994), 60–62

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘John Barry: the Seventies Part Two’, Music from the Movies, no.8 (1995), 84–6

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘John Barry: Into the Eighties’, Music from the Movies, no.12 (1996), 30–32

G. Leonard and P. Walker: ‘The Essential Musical Guide to James Bond’, Music from the Movies, no.18 (1997), 42–5

G. Leonard, P. Walker and G. Bramley: John Barry: a Life in Music (Bristol, 1998)

DAVID KERSHAW

Barry, Margaret [Maggie]

(b Cork City, Ireland, 1 June 1917; d County Down, N. Ireland, 1989). Irish singer and banjo player. Born into a family of musical semi-settled travellers, Barry left home to become a street singer when she was 15 years old. She began by busking the queues outside Cork’s Coliseum cinema, then travelled throughout Ireland by bicycle and horse-drawn bow-top wagon, performing at markets, country fairs, football matches and house ceilidhs. After recording her at Dundalk Fair, Co. Louth, in 1951, the American folk music collector Alan Lomax (see Lomax, (2)) introduced Barry to London where she performed on the BBC television programme Song Hunter and in Irish public houses. She formed a duo with Sligo fiddler Michael Gorman and played in small dance halls in Ireland and America with him, before returning to London during the 1960s in reduced circumstances. Following Gorman’s death, she went home to Ireland and continued as a solo performer. Barry’s powerful street-singing vocal style together with her sparse yet appropriate five-string banjo accompaniments captured the imaginations of folk revivalists and guaranteed her a place in the history of traditional Irish music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

recordings

Songs of an Irish Tinker Lady, Riverside RLP 12-602 (?1956)

Her Mantle So Green, perf. M. Barry and M. Gorman, Topic CD474 (1994)

I Sang through the Fairs, coll. A. Lomax, Rounder Records 011661–177420 (1998)

DAVE ARTHUR

Barry, Phillips

(b Boston, 1880; d Framingham, MA, 1937). American ballad scholar. He studied folklore, theology and classical and medieval literature at Harvard, and was probably self-taught in music. He founded the Folk-Song Society of the North-East and edited its Bulletin from 1930 until his death. His academic training combined with his later fieldwork allowed him to develop a broad yet penetrating view of ballad creation, and he was the first North American scholar to investigate folksong in terms of text, tune, performance and transmission. His idea of ‘individual invention plus communal re-creation’, which was similar to Cecil Sharp’s theory, proposed that a folksong was creatively re-made within the community each time it was sung; this view replaced prevailing theories of a communal origin of the folksong by means of group improvisation. He collected mainly in New England and collaborated with scholars in Vermont and Maine. Through his efforts, research methods used in ballad studies changed from scholarship based on library sources, as in the work of Child and Kittredge, to the study of traditional performers and a more complete analysis of folksong as a genre. His essay ‘The Part of the Folksinger’ (1961) was particularly influential.

WRITINGS

‘Irish Come-All-Ye’s’, Journal of American Folklore, xxii (1909), 374–88; see also ‘Irish Folk-Song’, Journal of American Folklore, xxiv (1911), 332–43

‘The Origin of Folk-Melodies’, ‘A Garland of Ballads’, Journal of American Folklore, xxiii (1910), 440–45, 446–54

‘Some Aspects of Folk-Song’, Journal of American Folklore, xxv (1912), 274–83

with F.H. Eckstorm and M.W.Smyth: ‘The Music of the Ballads’, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, CT, 1929), xxi–xxxvii

‘Notes on the Songs and Music of the Shakers’, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the North-East, no.1 (1930), 5–7

‘Communal Recreation’, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the North-East, no.5 (1933), 4–6; see also ‘On the Psychopathology of Ballad-Singing’, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the North-East, no.11 (1936), 16–18

‘American Folk Music’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, i/2 (1937), 29–47

‘Notes on the Ways of Folk-Singers with Folk-Tunes’, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the North-East, no.12 (1937), 2–6

Folk Music in America (New York, 1939)

‘The Part of the Folk Singer in the Making of Folk Balladry’, The Critics and the Ballad, ed. M. Leach and T.P. Coffin (Carbondale, IL, 1961), 59–76

EDITIONS

The Maine Woods Songster: Fifty Songs for Singing (Cambridge, MA, 1939)

with others: The New Green Mountain Songster (New Haven, CT, 1939)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Herzog: ‘Phillips Barry’, Journal of American Folklore, li (1938), 439–41

R.G. Alvey: ‘Phillips Barry and Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, x (1973), 67–95

JAMES PORTER

Barsanti, Francesco

(b Lucca, 1690; d London, late 1772). Italian composer. He studied scientific subjects at the University of Padua, and then devoted himself to music. In 1714 he went to London with Francesco Geminiani (also a native of Lucca); there he played the flute and oboe in the orchestra at the Italian opera, and published three sets of solo sonatas. According to Bonaccorsi, he was back in Lucca in 1735, taking part in festivities at S Croce; but that seems unlikely, as by the second half of 1735 he was resident in Edinburgh. He spent eight years in Scotland, where he married a Scots woman, was much patronized by the aristocracy and published his finest compositions, ten concerti grossi (1742) and nine overtures (c1743). He also brought out arrangements of 30 Scots songs with continuo in Edinburgh in 1742 (not 1719, as stated by Bonaccorsi and Praetorius).

In 1743 Barsanti returned to London. By this time he had lost his place in London musical society and was forced to take a job as an orchestral viola player. Six Latin motets (c1750) were rather wistfully dedicated to a member of the Scottish aristocratic Wemyss family ‘in recompense for many obligations’. His daughter Jenny, trained in singing by Charles Burney, later achieved success as a London opera singer and actress.

Barsanti's compositions are accomplished and original. His op.1 recorder sonatas are among the finest in the instrument's repertory. The op.3 concerti grossi have a contrapuntal glitter not unlike those of J.S. Bach; the main movements are constructed in semi-improvised forms, from themes which are stated once and then broken down into smaller imitative units. His Scots-tune arrangements are far more than a foreigner's temporary flirtation with local music-making: Fiske noted Barsanti's sympathetic understanding of Scots-tune structures, and his willingness to end a setting on an ‘unfinished’ dominant chord if the tune demanded it. Italian virtuosity and Scottish sympathy join forces in the op.4 overtures; the main movement of no.9 introduces the jig Babbity Bowster as a fugal countersubject, while the finale of no.2 is a country-dance, suggesting the ringing open strings of Scots fiddling. Much of Barsanti's work still awaits revival.

WORKS

[6] Sonate, rec/vn, b/bc [op.1] (London, 1724 and 1727); nos.3 and 5 ed. W. Bergmann (London, 1949, 1956); nos.1–6 ed. H. Ruf (Kassel, 1965)

6 sonate, fl, b/bc, op.2 (London, 1728) [reprinted as op.3 in 1732]

[10] Concerti grossi, op.3; nos.1–5 2 hn, timp, str; nos.6–10 2 ob, tpt, timp, str (Edinburgh, 1742); nos.4 and 10 ed. E. Praetorius (London, 1953)

9 ov, 2 vn, va, b, op.4 (Edinburgh, c1743); no.2 ed. D. Johnson (Mainz, 1978); nos.4 and 6 ed. S. Kirakowska, no.9 ed. D. Johnson, The Symphony 1720–1840, E1 (New York, 1984)

6 ant, 5vv, op.5 (London, c1750)

6 sonatas, 2 vn, b, op.6 (London, 1769)

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, canon, 4vv, GB-Lbl

12 unknown vn concs. are listed by Praetorius and Bonaccorsi

arrangements

[6] Sonatas, 2 vn, vc, bc (London, c1735) [orig. F. Geminiani: Sonate, vn, op.1 nos.7–12]

12 sonate, 2 rec/vn, bc (London, c1740) [orig. G. Sammartini]

A Collection of Old Scots Tunes, fl/ob/v, b/bc (Edinburgh, 1742); 1 ed. in Johnson (1984)

[6] Concerti grossi, 2 vn, va, vc soli, 2 vn, bc (London, 1757) [orig. G.B. Sammartini: 6 sonate notturni, op.6]

Some unknown arrs. of Corelli, probably in MS, are listed in the Edinburgh Musical Society's 1765 library catalogue (GB-Eu La.III.761)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Praetorius: Forword to F. Barsanti: Concerto grosso, op.3 nos.4 and 10 (London, 1953)

W. Bergmann: ‘Francesco Barsanti’, The Consort, no.18 (1961), 67–77

A. Bonaccorsi: Maestri di Lucca (Florence, 1967), 44

D. Johnson: Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972), 54, 64

R. Fiske: Scotland in Music (Cambridge, 1983), 18–20, 191–5

D. Johnson: Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th Century (Edinburgh, 1984), 35–6, 41, 63

DAVID JOHNSON

Barshay [Barshai], Rudol'f (Borisovich)

(b Krasnodarsk, 1 Oct 1924). Russian viola player and conductor. He studied the violin with Lev Zeitlin and the viola with Borisovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, and began his career in 1946 as an ensemble and solo player, gaining a high reputation and founding the Philharmonic Quartet of Moscow (now the Borodin Quartet) in which he played the viola. He then played in the even more outstanding Tchaikovsky Quartet led by Yulian Sitkovetsky, and took part in some of Leonid Kogan's all-star chamber ensembles. He also studied conducting with Ilya Musin in Leningrad. In 1955 he formed and conducted the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, whose programmes of Classical and contemporary music for small orchestra marked a new development in concerts in the USSR. Under his direction the orchestra became an outstanding ensemble, and toured widely abroad, first appearing in Britain in 1962; their first records in the West were issued in the same year. Barshay’s performances were much admired for the exemplary unity of attack and phrasing and the sweetness of tone in the ensemble, but less so for his exaggerated range of dynamics. An outstanding recorded Mozart symphony cycle, the first to observe all the repeats, was free of this fault. A Beethoven cycle was marginally less successful. In 1967 he began to conduct major orchestras in the USSR and in 1969 he conducted the première of Shostakovich's 14th Symphony with Galina Vishnevskaya, Mark Reshetin and the MCO. His numerous transcriptions for small orchestra, notably of Prokofiev’s piano suite, Visions fugitives, and of Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet, are highly esteemed. In 1976 Barshay left the USSR and emigrated to Israel, where he directed the Israel Chamber Orchestra until 1981 and the New Israel Orchestra from 1977 to 1979. He served as artistic adviser to the Bournemouth SO (1982–8) and endured an unsuccessful tenure as music director of the Vancouver SO (1985–8), and from 1987–8 was principal guest conductor at the Orchestre Nationale de France. Barshay returned to Russia in 1993, after an absence of 17 years, to conduct Mahler's 9th Symphony with the Russian National Orchestra. He has also appeared as guest conductor with the Moscow Radio Orchestra and the St Petersburg PO.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Besedï s masterami: Rudol'f Barshay’ [Conversations with the masters], Muzïkal'naya zhizn', no.18 (1968), 10

I.M. YAMPOL'SKY/JOSÉ BOWEN

Barski, Aleksander.

See Bandrowski-Sas, Aleksander.

Barsova, Inna Alekseyevna

(b Smolensk, 10 Sept 1927). Russian musicologist. She graduated from the Moscow State Conservatory in 1951, and completed her postgraduate studies in 1954, having studied with Igor' Sposobin, Viktor Zuckermann and Vladimir Protopopov. She took the Kandidat degree in 1970 with a dissertation on the early symphonies of Mahler, and was awarded the doctorate in 1980 for her monograph Simfonii Gustava Malera. She joined the department of orchestration at the Conservatory (1954), rising to senior lecturer (1973) and professor (1981). She was also professor at the conservatories in Nizhniy Novgorod (1979–92) and Minsk (1993–6).

Barsova's main area of research is the music of Mahler, and she has made a comprehensive examination of the creative and epistolatory legacy of the composer. She has addressed Mahler's relationship to Russia, and has written on Mahler and Dostoyevsky, his concert tours to St Petersburg, and the reception history of his music in Russia. She has also studied 20th-century composers such as Skryabin, Hindemith and Kancheli, and written on the Russian avant garde (the music of Mosolov and Shostakovich in the 1920s). Other areas of study include 19th-century Austrian and German music and history, aesthetics and the theory of music and musical analysis. Her work on score notation has approached the subject as a phenomenon of written culture manifesting itself in the context of the spatial discoveries of the Renaissance, along with the upheavals in the natural sciences, mathematics, cartography, architecture and fine art. Her work is characterized by its culturological direction, and its reference to psychological and linguistic data (an attempt has been made to provide an etymological analysis of musical language).

WRITINGS

‘Skryabin i russkiy simfonizm’ [Skryabin and Russian symphonism], SovM (1958), no.5, pp.65–71

Simfonicheskiy orkestr i yego instrumentï [The symphony orchestra and its instruments] (Moscow, 1962)

ed.: Gustav Maler: pis'ma, vospominaniya [Mahler: letters, reminiscences] (Moscow, 1964, 2/1968) [incl. ‘Gustav Maler: lichnost', mirovozzreniye, tvorchestvo’ [Mahler: personality, world outlook, creative work], 3–88]

with Yu.A. Fortunatov: Prakticheskoye rukovodstvo po chteniyu simfonicheskikh partitur [A practical guide to reading symphonic scores] (Moscow, 1966)

Kniga ob orkestre [A book on the orchestra] (Moscow, 1969, 2/1978; Ukr. trans., 1981, 2/1988)

‘Problema formï v rannikh simfoniyakh Gustava Malera’ [The problem of form in the early symphonies of Mahler], Voprosï muzïkal'noy formï, ii (1972), 202–60

‘Maler v kontekste vremeni’ [Mahler in the context of his time], SovM (1973) no.3, pp.69–77

‘Kamernïy orkestr Paulya Khindemita’ [The chamber orchestra of Hindemith], Muzïka i sovremennost', ix (1975), 226–61 [on Kammermusiken nos.1–17]

Simfonii Gustava Malera [The symphonies of Mahler] (diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1980; Moscow, 1975)

‘Aleksandr Mosolov: dvadtsatïye godï’ [Mosolov: the 1920s], SovM (1976), no.12, pp.77–87; Cz. trans. in HRo, xxx (1977), 509–10, 568–70; xxxi (1978), 85–8

ed., with S.A. Osherov: Rikhard Vagner: izbrannïye rabotï [Wagner: selected works] (Moscow, 1978)

‘Das Frühwerk von Aleksandr Mosolov’, Jb Peters 1979, 117–69; repr. in Aleksandr Skrjabin und die Skrjabinisten, ii, Musik-Konzepte, nos.39–40 (1984), 122–67; Hung. trans. in Magyar zene, xxviii (1987), 244–81

‘Mahler und Dostojewski’, Gustav Mahler: Vienna 1979, 65–75

‘Iz istorii partiturnoy notatsii: zvukovaya plotnost' i prostranstvo v mnogokhornoy muzïke XVII veka’ [The history of score notation: the density of sound and the space in the 17th century for many choirs], Istoriya i sovremennost', ed. A.I. Klimovitsky, L.G. Kovnatskaya and M.D. Sabinina (Leningrad, 1981), 6–33

‘Sto let spustya’ [100 years on], SovM (1983), no.11, pp.112–20 [on the centenary of Wagner's death]

‘Muzïkal'naya dramaturgiya Chetvyortoy simfonii Gii Kancheli’ [The dramatic plan of the music of Kancheli's Fourth Symphony], Muzïkal'nïy sovremennik, v (1984), 108–34; Georgian trans. in Sabchota Khelovneba (1992), 100–07

‘Muzïka romantizma’ [The music of Romanticism], Mir romantizma (zhivopis', risunok) (Moscow, 1985), 7–18 [exhibition catalogue]

‘Opït ėtimologicheskogo analiza: k postanovke voprosa’ [An attempt at etymological analysis: formulating the question], SovM (1985), no.9, pp.59–66

‘Probleme der Mahler-Forschung der achtziger Jahre’, Gustav Mahler: Leipzig 1985, 130–34; Russ. version in SovM (1987), no.2, pp.86–93

‘Zum Formproblem bei Gustav Mahler’, Gustav Mahler: Vienna 1985, 53–7

ed., with N.K. Meshko: A.V. Mosolov: stat'i i vospominaniya [Mosolov: articles and reminiscences] (Moscow, 1986) [incl. ‘Ranneye tvorchestvo Aleksandra Mosolova’ [The early works of Mosolov], 44–122 and a worklist]

‘Spetsifika yazïka muzïki v sozdanii khudozhestvennoy kartinï mira’ [The specifics of the language of music in creating an artistic picture of the world], Khudozhestvennoye tvorchestvo: voprosï kompleksnogo izucheniya (Leningrad, 1986), 98–116

‘Mifologicheskaya semantika vertikal'nogo prostranstva v orkestre Rikharda Vagnera’ [The mythological significance of the vertical space in Wagner's orchestra], Problemï muzïkal'nogo romantizma, ed. A.L. Porfir'yeva (Leningrad, 1987), 59–74

‘Inter'yer Sobora Sv. Marka kak prostranstvennïy proobraz mnogokhornïkh kompozitsiy v venetsianskoy i nemetskoy muzïke XVI – nachala XVII vekov’ [The interior of S Marco as a spatial prototype for Venetian and German polychoral works of the 16th and early 17th centuries], Iskusstvo Venetsii i Venetsiya v iskusstve (Moscow, 1988), 212–39

‘Legenda o khudozhnike’ [The legend of an artist], Muzïka – kul'tura – chelovek, ed. M.L. Muginshteyn (Sverdlovsk, 1988)

‘Samopoznaniye i samoopredeleniye istorii muzïki segodnya’ [Self-knowledge and self-determination in the history of music today], SovM (1988), no.9, pp.66–73

‘Iz neopublikovannogo arkhiva A. Mosolova’ [From the unpublished papers of Mosolov], SovM (1989), no.7, pp.80–92; no.8, pp.69–75

‘Das Schaffen Gustav Mahler in Spiegel der russischen Kritik und Musikwissenschaft in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Gustav Mahler: Hamburg 1989, 267–77

‘Novoye v russkoy maleriane’ [New discoveries in Russian studies on Mahler], SovM (1990), no.3, pp.98–102

‘Russkaya prem'yera Vos'moy simfonii Malera’ [The Russian première of Mahler's Eighth Symphony], SovM (1990), no.4, pp.55–60

‘… Samïye pateticheskiye kompozitorï yevropeyskoy muzïki: Chaykovsky i Maler’ [Two composers manifesting the greatest pathos in European music: Tchaikovsky and Mahler], SovM (1990), no.6, pp.125–32

‘Alexander Mosolow: sein Leben und sein Schicksal’, Verfemte Musik: Dresden 1993, 177–82

‘Mahler: ein “Schüler” Čajkovskijs?’, Čajkovskij-Symposium: Tübingen 1993, 51–6

‘Organ v zerkale romanticheskogo orkestra: avstro-nemetskaya traditsiya’ [The organ in the mirror of the Romantic orchestra: the Austro-German tradition], MAk (1993), no.2, pp.91–7

‘Rossiyskaya kar'yera Gustava Franka’ [The Russian career of Gustav Franck], MAk (1994), no.1, pp.80–92

‘Trizhdï lishyonnïy rodinï: arkhetip yevreystva v lichnosti i tvorchestve Gustava Malera’ [Thrice deprived of a homeland: the archetype of Jewishness in the personality and creative work of Mahler], MAk (1994), no.1, pp.177–81

‘Verdrängte Moderne: russische Avangardemusik in den zwanziger Jahren’, Berlin–Moskau, 1920–1950, ed. I. Antonowa and J. Merkert (Munich, 1995), 167–71 [in Ger., Russ.]

‘Mahler und Russland’, Muziek & wetenschap, v (1995–6), 287–301

‘Mezhdu “sotsial'nïm zakazom” i “muzïkoy bol'shikh strastey”: 1934–1937 godï v zhizni Dmitriya Shostakovicha’ [Between the ‘social commission’ and the music of ‘high passions’: the years 1934–7 in the life of Shostakovich], D.D. Shostakovich: sbornik statey k 90-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, ed. L. Kovnatskaya (St Petersburg, 1996), 121–40

Ocherki po istorii partiturnoy notatsii [Essays on the history of score notation] (Moscow, 1997)

‘Svetlïy ruchey: k istorii sozdaniya’ [The Limpid Stream: on the history of its composition], MAk (1997), no.4, pp.51–8

‘Sotrudnichestvo i perepiska dvukh izdatel'stv: Universal Edition i Muzsektora Gosizdata v 20–30-e godï: vzglyad iz Venï’ [The cooperation and correspondence between two publishing houses: Universal Edition and the State Publishers Music Section in the 1920s and 30s: the view from Vienna], Muzïkal'noye prinosheniye (St Petersburg, 1998), 240–58

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.I. Klimovitsky: ‘Muzïkal'nïy tekst, istoricheskiy kontekst i problemï analiza muzïki’ [Musical text, the historical context and problems of musical analysis], SovM (1984), pp.70–81, esp. 71–4

ABRAHAM I. KLIMOVITSKY

Barsova [née Vladimirova], Valeriya (Vladimirovna)

(b Astrakhan', 1/13 June 1892; d Sochi, 13 Dec 1967). Russian soprano. She studied with her sister, Mariya Vladimirova, then in Umberto Mazetti’s class at the Moscow Conservatory. She made her début with the Zimin Private Opera, Moscow, in 1919, later becoming a soloist at the Bol'shoy (1920–48). She also sang at Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s opera studios. To a light, silvery tone and an agile technique she added warmth and depth of feeling. She sang Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov roles; Gilda, Violetta and Leonora (Il trovatore); Butterfly and Musetta, Lakmé and Manon. After 1929 she toured in Germany, Britain, Turkey, Poland, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. (G. Polyanovsky: V.V. Barsova, Moscow, 1975)

I.M. YAMPOL'SKY

Barstow, Dame Josephine (Clare)

(b Sheffield, 27 Sept 1940). English soprano. She studied in Birmingham and London, then sang with Opera for All. In 1967 she joined Sadler’s Wells, singing the Second Lady, Cherubino, Gluck’s Eurydice and Violetta, her début role with the WNO, for whom she sang Countess Almaviva, Fiordiligi, Mimì, Amelia (Boccanegra), Elisabeth de Valois, Lisa, Jenůfa, Ellen Orford and Tatyana. Having made her Covent Garden début in 1969 as a Niece (Peter Grimes), she created Denise in The Knot Garden (1970), Young Woman in We Come to the River (1976) and Gayle in The Ice Break (1977), also singing Mrs Ford, Santuzza, Odabella (Attila) and Lady Macbeth, which she recorded on video for Glyndebourne. She has appeared in Paris, Berlin, Munich, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and at the Metropolitan, where she made her début in 1977 as Musetta. For Sadler’s Wells, later the ENO, she created Marguerite in The Story of Vasco (1974); she sang Jeanne with them in The Devils of Loudun (1973) and Autonoe with the New Opera Company in The Bassarids (1974), both British stage premières. Her repertory at the ENO includes Natasha, Leonore, Salome, Octavian, the Marschallin, Arabella, Leonora (La forza del destino), Aida, Sieglinde, Emilia Marty, Katerina Izmaylova, Kostelnička, the Old Prioress (Dialogues des Carmélites) and Ellen Orford. Her roles for Opera North include Cherubini’s Medea and a much-acclaimed Gloriana. In 1986 at Salzburg she created Benigna in Penderecki’s Schwarze Maske, then sang Tosca and Amelia (Ballo in maschera), recording the latter role with Karajan. An unusually intense actress with a vibrant, flexible voice of highly individual timbre, capable of expressing the strongest emotions, she excels in portraying troubled and distraught characters. She was made a CBE in 1985 and DBE in 1996.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Forbes: ‘Josephine Barstow’, Opera, xxv (1974), 859–64

ALAN BLYTH

Bart [Begleiter], Lionel

(b London, 1 Aug 1930; d Hammersmith, 3 April 1999). English composer, lyricist and librettist of Austrian-Jewish descent. He studied at St Martin's School of Art and then became a graphic artist and scene painter. In the mid-1950s, as a member of the skiffle group the Cavemen, he wrote songs for its lead singer Tommy Steele, and also for Cliff Richard and Billy Fury. His subsequent songs for films starring Steele and Richard produced several hit numbers including Living Doll and Little White Bull. He worked on musicals for Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East, from where Fings Ain't Wot They Used t' Be, with lyrics inspired by cast improvisations, transferred to become his first West End success. In Oliver! (1960) he combined a Jewish modality (‘Who will buy?’, ‘You've got to pick a pocket or two’ and ‘Reviewing the Situation’), music hall (‘Consider Yourself’), overt sentiment (‘Where is love?’, ‘As long as he needs me’) and comic word play (‘That's your funeral’) to produce one of the most successful of all British musicals. The spectacular Blitz! (1962) was based on his own experiences in London during World War II, again with Bart's use of contained working-class communities as his main dramatic source. Twang!! (1965), which burlesqued the legend of Robin Hood, has become a famous West End disaster, and marked the start of both a personal and artistic decline; his musical La strada, after the film by Fellini, survived one performance on Broadway in 1969. His connection with Stratford East continued when he contributed songs to The Londoners and Costa Packet (both 1972). A resurgence of interest in his work followed the success in 1989 of his award-winning song Happy Endings, written for an advertising campaign, and there were major London revivals of Blitz! (1990), Maggie May (1992) and Oliver! (1994). Self-taught, his harmony and word underlay were sometimes idiosyncratic, and he relied on assistants to transcribe his melodies and harmonic indications.

WORKS

(selective list)

unless otherwise stated, music and lyrics by Bart and dates for stage works those of first London performance

Musicals (book authors shown in parentheses): Wally Pone, King of the Underworld (after B. Johnson: Volpone), Unity Theatre, 18 July 1958; Fings Ain't Wot They Used t' Be (2, F. Norman), Stratford East, Theatre Royal, 17 Feb 1959; Lock Up Your Daughters (2, B. Miles after H. Fielding: Rape upon Rape), Mermaid, 28 May 1959, music L. Johnson, film 1969; Oliver! (2, Bart after C. Dickens: Oliver Twist), New Theatre, orchd E. Rogers, 30 June 1960, film 1968 [incl. Food, Glorious Food; As long as he needs me, Consider Yourself, Where is love?]; Blitz! (2, Bart and J. Maitland), Adelphi, orchd B. Sharples, 8 May 1962 [incl. Who's this geezer Hitler, Mums and Dads, The Day After Tomorrow, Be what you wanna be]; Maggie May (2, A. Owen), Adelphi, orchd R. Jones, 22 Sept 1964 [incl. Maggie, Maggie May; Dey don't do dat t'day, The Ballad of the Liver Bird]; Twang!! (musical, 2, H. Orkin), Shaftesbury, orchd K. Moule, 20 Dec 1965; La strada (musical, 2, after F. Fellini), New York, Lunt-Fontanne, 14 Dec 1969, collab. M. Charnin and E. Elliott

Song contribs. to The Wages of Eve, Unity Theatre, 1953; Turn It Up, Unity Theatre, 1953; The Londoners, Stratford East, Theatre Royal, 27 March 1972; Costa Packet, Stratford East, Theatre Royal, 5 Oct 1972

Film (songs and themes): The Tommy Steele Story, 1957; The Duke Wore Jeans, 1958; In the Nick, 1959; Serious Change, 1959 [incl. Living Doll]; Tommy the Toreador, 1959 [incl. Little White Bull]; Let's Get Married, 1960; From Russia with Love, 1963; Sparrows Can't Sing, 1963; Man in the Middle, 1964; The Optimists of Nine Elms, 1973; Scalawag, 1973

Many pop songs, incl. A Handful of Songs; Rock with the Cavemen; Water, Water

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GänzlBMT

GänzlEMT

S. Morley: Spread a Little Happiness: the First Hundred Years of the British Musical (London, 1987)

D. Roper: Bart (London, 1994)

JOHN SNELSON

Bárta [Barrta, Bartha, Bartta], Josef

(b Prague, c1746; d Vienna, 13 June 1787). Czech composer. Before 1772 Bárta was active as organist in two Prague monastic churches. Then he evidently moved to Vienna, where his first Singspiel La diavolessa was performed on 18 July 1772 at the court theatre. His last dramma giocoso, Il mercato di Malmantile, was performed there in 1784. Several years before Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail and at the same time as Umlauf, Benda, Ordonez, Asplmayr and others, Bárta contributed his German comic operas to the project of the Viennese National-Singspiel project founded by Emperor Joseph II. The fact that arias from his Singspiele were arranged for instrumental chamber ensembles gives evidence of their popularity.

Of Bárta's instrumental music, the symphonies seem to be most important. An exact chronology cannot be established, but all of them seem to date from his years in Prague, and five are listed as manuscripts in the Breitkopf catalogues of 1774 and 1776–7. For the most part they consist of three movements, Allegro–Andante–Allegro; works in a minor key sometimes have a slow introduction. The first and last movements are generally in sonata form with contrasting theme groups, elaborate development sections and effective modulatory shifts. Slow movements are scored for strings only. The best of Bárta's symphonic output is marked by pregnant and pathetic themes characteristic of the expressive style of the Sturm und Drang period in Austria and Germany in the early 1770s.

WORKS

stage

all first performed in Vienna

La diavolessa (Spl, 3, C. Goldoni), Burgtheater, 18 July 1772; music and text lost

Da ist nicht gut zu rathen (comische Oper, 2, G. Stephanie), Burgtheater, 8 Aug 1778; inst, arrs., CZ-Pnm

Der adeliche Taglöhner (komisches Originalsingspiel, 3, J. Weidmann), Burgtheater, 28 March 1780; 1 scene and duet, A-Wn, 3 inst arrs., CZ-Pnm

Die donnernde Legion (Originaloratorium, 2, P. Weidmann), Vienna, ?Burgtheater, 1781; H. Federhofer's private collection, Mainz, lib (Vienna, 1781)

Il mercato di Malmantile (dg, 3, F. Bussani, after Goldoni), Burgtheater, 26 Jan 1784; A-Wn, I-Fc

Son regina e son amante, aria, S, A-Wgm

instrumental

Orch: 13 syms., CZ-Pnm, 5 listed in Breitkopf catalogues, 1774–7, 2 ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. C, xiii (New York, 1984)

Chbr: 6 quartetti, str qt, op.1 (Lyons, c1778); 6 sonate, pf/hpd, op.2 (Lyons, c1778); Parthia ex C, 2 ob, 2 hn, 2 bn, Pnm; 12 str qts, A-Wgm; sonata, pf/hpd, Wgm; 2 sonatas, pf/hpd, D-Bsb

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

DlabacžKL

SchillingE

G.J. Dlabacz: ‘Versuch eines Verzeichnisses der vorzüglichern Tonkünstler in oder aus Böhmen’, Materialen zur alten und neuen Statistik von Böhmen, ed. J.A. Riegger, vii (Leipzig and Prague, 1788), 133–62, esp. 138

J.G. Meusel: Teutsches Künstlerlexikon oder Verzeichnis der jetzt lebenden teutschen Künstler, i (Lemgo, 1778, 2/1808–14/R)

C. Schoenbaum: ‘Die böhmischen Musiker in der Musikgeschichte Wiens vom Barock zur Romantik’, SMw, xxv (1962), 475–95

J. Havlík: Symfonie Antonína Laubeho a Josefa Bárty (diss., U. of Prague, 1975)

H. Federhofer: ‘Die donnernde Legion von Joseph Barta’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums seit Händel: Festschrift Günther Massenkeil, ed. R. Cadenbach and H. Loos (Bonn, 1986), 135–50

MILAN POŠTOLKA

Bárta, Lubor

(b Lubná, nr Litomyšl, 8 Aug 1928; d Prague, 5 Nov 1972). Czech composer. After matriculating in Vysoké Mýto he studied musicology and aesthetics at Prague University (1946–8) and composition at the Prague Academy of Music (1948–52) under Řídký. He then worked as a choral accompanist until about 1956, and was organizing secretary of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers in Prague. Bárta’s style developed through three distinct periods. Such works as the Piano Concerto (1959) show an initial indebtedness to Stravinsky and Bartók in their spontaneity, rhythmic vibrancy and use of folk melody, but Bárta later reacted against 20th-century developments, other than those in harmony. In a final phase he brought about a synthesis of his earlier attitudes.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Vn Conc. no.1, 1952; Sym. no.1, 1955; Conc., chbr orch, 1956; Va Conc., 1957; Dramatická suita, 1958; Pf Conc., 1959; Ludi [People], chbr orch, 1964; Sym. no.2, 1969; Vn Conc., no.2, 1970; Musica romantica, str, 1971; Sym. no.3, 1972

Chbr and solo inst: Brass Qnt, 1956; Pf Trio, C, 1956; Str Qt no.2, 1957; Ballad and Burlesque, vc, pf, 1963; Concertino, trbn, pf, 1964; 4 Compositions, ob, cl, pf, 1965; Sonata, fl, pf, 1966; Hpd Sonata, 1967; Str Qt no.3, 1967; Sonata, vn, pf, 1969; Sonata, vc, pf, 1972

Vocal: 3 mužské sbory [Male Choruses] (M. Florian, P. Verlaine, F. Hrubín), 1963; 4 dětské sbory [Children’s Choruses] (Z. Kriebl), 1965; 4 písně [Songs], children’s chorus, pf, 1965; Rhymes (V. Šiktanc), children’s chorus, pf, 1965

Pf: 3 sonatas, 1956, 1961, 1971; 8 Compositions, 1965

Principal publishers: Panton, Supraphon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Štraus: ‘Památce Lubora Bárty’ [In memory of Lubor Bárta], HRo, xxv (1972), 560–62

MILAN KUNA

Bartalani, Orindio.

See Bartolini, Orindio.

Bartali, Antonio.

See Bertali, Antonio.

Bartalus, István

(b Bálványos-Váralja, 23 Nov 1821; d Budapest, 9 Feb 1899). Hungarian musicologist, teacher and composer. He studied theology and law, and the piano, horn, and music theory at the conservatory in Kolozsvar, starting his musical career in 1846 as a piano teacher in provincial towns. In 1851 he settled in Pest as a teacher and concert pianist, and began to work as a musicologist and journalist (late 1850s); with Kornél Ábrányi and Mihály Mosonyi he was co-editor (1860–63) of the first Hungarian musical weekly, Zenészeti lapok. Subsequently he made two study trips to monasteries in Upper Austria and compiled a catalogue of their manuscripts and prints which related to Hungary. In 1869 he was appointed professor of music at the Pest teacher-training college. A member of the Kisfaludy Society of Literature and Science (1867) and a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1875), he edited the seven-volume Magyar népdalok egyetemes gyűjteménye (1873–96) commissioned by the Kisfaludy Society, the largest such publication of the 19th century. With Mátray, Bartalus was the founder of Hungarian musicology; he was one of the first writers to draw attention to the most significant documents of Hungarian music history, and his extensive collection of Hungarian folksongs, despite its errors and deficiencies, provided the basis for the work of Bartók and Kodály. Although the practical value of his publications has diminished in the light of modern research, his achievements as a pioneer are undisputed.

WRITINGS

A magyar egyházak szertartásos énekei a XVI. és XVII. században [Liturgical song in the Hungarian church of the 16th and 17th centuries] (Pest, 1869)

Jelentés felsőaustriai kolostoroknak Magyarországot illető kéziratairól és nyomtatványairól a Magyar tudományos akadémiához [The Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ report on the manuscripts and prints in Upper Austrian monasteries and their connection with Hungary] (Pest, 1870)

A művészet és a nemzetiség [Art and nationalism] (Budapest, 1876)

Emlékbeszéd Mátray Gábor I. tag felett [Memorial address on the corresponding member G. Mátray] (Budapest, 1877)

Vázlatok a zene történelméből [Outline of the history of music] (Budapest, 1877, 2/1889)

Adalékok a magyar zene történelméhez: Bakfark Bálint, lantivirtuóz és zeneköltő és Eszterházy Pál egyházi zenekölteményei [Contribution to the history of Hungarian music: the lutenist and composer Bakfark and Pál Esterházy’s sacred works] (Budapest, 1882)

Újabb adalékok a magyar zene történelméhez [New contributions to the history of Hungarian music] (Budapest, 1882)

‘Musik und Musiker der Ungarn’, Das moderne Ungarn, ed. A. Neményi (Berlin, 1883), 194–217

‘Az egyházi zene’ [Church music in Hungary], Az Osztrák-Magyar monarchia irásban es képben, iv/3 (Budapest, 1893), 379–91

EDITIONS

101 magyar népdal [101 Hungarian folksongs] (Pest, 1861)

Magyar Orpheus: vegyes tartalmú zenegyűjtemény a XVII.–XIX. századból [Hungarian Orpheus: collection of musical works from the 17th century to the 19th] (Pest, 1869)

Magyar népdalok egyetemes gyűjteménye [Universal collection of Hungarian folksongs] (Budapest, 1873–96)

with I. Gyertyánffy: Négyesdalok zsebkönyve: férfi énekkarok antológiája [A pocket anthology of male voice quartets] (Budapest, 1878)

with I. Gyertyánffy: Női karénekek gyűjteménye: két, három es négyszolamú karénekek nok vagy gyermekek számára [Collection of 2-, 3- and 4-part choral works for female and children’s voices] (Budapest, 1879)

Arany János dalai Petőfi, Amadé és saját verseire [János Arany’s songs: settings of Petőfi, Amadé and his own poems] (Budapest, 1884)

Magyar zeneköltők kiállitási albuma [Exhibition album of Hungarian composers] (Budapest, 1885)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Bónis) [incl. list of writings, edns and works]

J. Ságh: ‘Bartalus, István’, Magyar zenészeti lexicon (Budapest, 1879)

J. Szinnyei: ‘Bartalus, István’, Magyar irók élete és munkái [Life and works of Hungarian writers], i (Budapest, 1891)

B. Bartók: Das ungarische Volkslied (Berlin and Leipzig, 1925)

P. Gulyás: ‘Bartalus, István’, Magyar irók élete és munkái [Life and works of Hungarian writers], i (Budapest, 1940)

B. Hódossy: ‘Bartalus mint népdalgyűjtő’ [Bartalus as collector of folksongs], Zeneközlöny, xiv (1940), 73–4

B. Szabolcsi: A XIX. század magyar romantikus zenéje [Hungarian Romantic music of the 19th century] (Budapest, 1951)

Z. Kodály and Á. Gyulai: Arany János népdalgyűjteménye [János Arany’s folksong collection] (Budapest, 1952)

F. Bónis: ‘A Nagy Iván-féle kézirat’ [The Iván Nagy manuscript], Muzsika, ii (1959), 42–4

F. Bónis: Mosonyi Mihály (Budapest, 1960)

B. Szabolcsi: ‘Bertha Sándor levelei Bartalus Istvánhoz’ [Sándor Bertha’s letters to Bartalus], Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok (1973), 129

FERENC BÓNIS

Bartay, András

(b Széplak, 7 April 1799; d Mainz, 4 Oct 1854). Hungarian composer, theatre director and collector of folksongs. He came from a Hungarian noble family and embarked on a career in the civil service; it was not until 1829 that he first appeared on the musical scene, when he and Lajos Menner founded and became directors of the first Pest singing school. Bartay was one of the first to publish Hungarian folksongs: in 1833–4 he published a two-volume collection Eredeti nép-dalok klavir-kísérettel (‘Original folksongs with piano accompaniment’), and in 1834 he brought out one of the earliest Hungarian books on music theory, Magyar Apollo.

In 1837 his comic opera Aurelia, oder Das Weib am Konradstein had its première at the Pest Town Theatre, and in 1839 his comic opera Csel (‘Ruse’) was first performed at the Pest Hungarian Theatre as Ferenc Erkel's benefit performance (Erkel later composed variations on themes from this opera). Bartay was director of the National Theatre in 1843–5 and it was during this short period that the most popular Hungarian theatrical genre of the 19th century, the so-called ‘folk play’, including both folksongs and folkdances, began to flourish. Bartay devised a competition to set M. Vörösmarty's poem Szózat (‘Appeal’) to music in 1843, and F. Kölcsey's Hymnus (‘Anthem’) in 1844. The winning work for the latter, composed by Erkel, was subsequently accepted by the Hungarian people as the national anthem. The winner of the first competition was Erkel's librettist Béni Egressy, whose song, used as a second national anthem, was quoted by several composers including Liszt, Erkel, Mosonyi, Dohnányi, Kodály and Járdányi. In 1848 Bartay also composed a patriotic song Nemzeti dal (‘National song’) after S. Petőfi. After the collapse of the Hungarian struggle for independence, in 1849 Bartay emigrated, first to France and then to Germany.

Bartay’s significance for the development of Hungarian music did not lie principally in his compositions. His works, which include three operas, two masses, sacred and secular oratorios, a melodrama, songs and piano pieces, show him as a cultivated creator, with good taste but little originality. He did, however, perceive the cultural demands and possibilities of his time and country, and was enterprising as a teacher and organizer, as a collector and publisher of folksongs, as a theatre director and as the author of books on music theory; the initiative which he took in all these fields helped form the basis for progressive musical life in Hungary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Bónis) [incl. list of works]

G. Mátray: ‘A muzsikának közönséges története’ [A general history of music’], Tudományos Gyűjtemény, xii–xvi (Pest, 1828–32)

B. Szabolcsi: A XIX. század magyar romantikus zenéje [Hungarian Romantic music of the 19th century] (Budapest, 1951)

G. Papp: ‘Die Quellen der “Verbunkos-Musik”: ein bibliographischer Versuch’, SM, xxvi (1984), 59–133

I. Mona: Magyar zeneműkiadók és tevékenységük 1774–1867 [Hungarian music publishers and their activities, 1774–1867] (Budapest, 1989)

I. Kassai: ‘Néhány szó Bartay Endréről’ [A few words on A. Bartay], Magyar zene, xxxii (1991), 328–32

F. Bónis, ed.: A Himnusz születése és másfél százada [Birth of the Hungarian anthem and its 150 years] (Budapest, 1995)

FERENC BÓNIS

Bartay, Ede

(b Pest, 6 Oct 1825; d Budapest, 31 Aug 1901). Hungarian musical administrator, composer and teacher. The fourth son of the composer and theatre director András Bartay, he read law and also studied the piano and music theory with his brother András (b ?1822; d St Petersburg, 1 July 1846). He worked in the independent Hungarian Ministry of Transport (1848–9) but was forced to earn a living as a piano teacher after the defeat of the Hungarian struggle for independence. About 1850 he completed his musical studies on his own, and a few years later he was a sought-after teacher and a popular composer of piano music. From the 1860s, Bartay played an increasingly important role in Hungarian musical life. He set up an organization to aid musicians living in Hungary (1863), and was its president until his death. As a qualified lawyer, he was responsible for drawing up and presenting to the Hungarian parliament a plan for the organization of the new state music academy (1872). He succeeded Gábor Mátray as director of the National Conservatory in Budapest (1876–1901), and was vice-president (1874–80) and later president (1880–91) of the Hungarian National Choral Society.

In order to uphold the traditions of earlier Hungarian instrumental music Bartay published collections of verbunkos and csárdás dances. More significant, however, than his own compositions are his editions of these types of dances, which are still important sources for research. Bartay also wrote a symphony, an overture and two symphonic poems for orchestra as well as other pieces for piano.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Bónis) [with selective list of works and editions]

E. Vajdafy: A Nemzeti Zenede tőrténete [The history of the National Conservatory] (Budapest, 1890)

B. Szabolcsi: A XIX. század magyar romantikus zenéje [Hungarian Romantic music of the 19th century] (Budapest, 1951)

FERENC BÓNIS

Bartei, Girolamo

(b Arezzo, c1565; d after 1617). Italian composer and organist. He joined the Augustinian order at an early age. On 22 September 1592 he was appointed maestro di cappella of Arezzo Cathedral but was dismissed on 23 May 1594. Reinstated on 5 June 1595, he was forced to resign, probably because of his frequent absences, on 24 January 1597. He was reappointed on 18 May 1598 but gave up the post for the last time barely a month later. He probably went to live in Florence, from where he addressed a letter on 23 September 1601. From 4 February 1604 to 4 January 1607 he was maestro di cappella of Volterra Cathedral. On 14 June 1608 he was summoned to Rome by the head of the Augustinian order and took up residence at the monastery of S Agostino, of which he became sub-prior. On the title-page of his 1608 book of masses he is described as ‘capituli generalis Romae musices moderatoris’, which Coradini (1923) interpreted as meaning that he was director of music at the general chapter held by the Augustinian order in Rome at Whitsuntide 1608. He next held a similar appointment at the church of S Agostino, Rome, and probably remained there until 1610. It is apparent from the dedication of his op.11 (1618), as well as from other documents, that in 1616 he was living in Orvieto at the monastery of S Agostino, where he was sub-prior, organist and a teacher. From 28 April 1617 until some time in 1618 he was at the Augustinian monastery of Marino, near Rome. Dedicating his op.12 (1618) to a citizen of Orvieto, he mentioned his ‘absence from the place’, presumably meaning that he was away from Orvieto at the time. Nothing is known of him after 1618.

Bartei is considered one of the best musicians of the Augustinian order. His large and varied output, extending to at least op.13, includes sacred, secular and instrumental works and ranges from the richest, most complex polyphony (as in the 1608 masses for double choir), in which he shows his contrapuntal skill, through simpler polyphonic forms (as in the 1609 print and op.11) to some examples of monody. One of these is Ave gratia plena in op.11, for soprano, tenor and continuo. This is a true dramatic dialogue (actually headed ‘In dialogo’), a setting of the appearance of the angel to Mary in Luke i (of which there are also settings in G.F. Capello’s op.1, 1610, and in RISM 1618³), which shows Bartei’s readiness to adopt the new styles and techniques of the early 17th century. There is further evidence for this elsewhere in op.11 and in the 1609 volume, as well as in the two-part ricercares op.12, which break away from the strictly contrapuntal style typical of the form and are notable, as Torchi pointed out, for their freer and more flowing and sinuous movement.

Bartei’s nephew Raffaele (b Arezzo, 29 June 1592; d ?Rome, in or shortly before 1618) became a treble at S Maria della Pieve, Arezzo, on 16 November 1602. He eventually joined his uncle in Rome and on 12 April 1609 was appointed a contralto at S Giovanni in Laterano. He had died by 1618, since a motet composed in his memory appeared in that year in the op.11 of his uncle, who had earlier included two motets by him (not four as stated in MGG) in his Liber primus sacrarum modulationum.

WORKS

sacred vocal

Responsoria omnia, quintae ac sextae feriae, sabbatique maiores hebdomadae … iuxta breviarij romani formam, una cum Zachariae cantico, ac Davidis psalmo, ipsis ferijs accomodata, equal vv (Venice, 1607)

Missae, liber primus, 8vv (Rome, 1608) [incl. Messa de’ morti mentioned as separate work in Pitoni, c1690]

Liber primus sacrarum modulationum, 2vv, bc (org) (Rome, 1609⁴) [incl. 2 works by R. Bartei]

Il secondo libro delli concerti, 2vv, bc (org), op.11 (Rome, 1618), ed. M. Giuliani (Trent, 1993)

Litaniarum liber cum motectis nonnullis, ut aiunt concertatis et non concertatis, vv, bc (org), op.13 (Rome, 1618)

2 Mag settings, 4, 5vv, 1600¹

Salmi, 2vv, lost, cited in Pitoni, c1725

secular vocal

Il primo libro di madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1592)

Libro dei madrigali, 6vv (Venice, n.d.)

Balletti, 3vv, lost, cited in Pitoni, c1725

instrumental

Il primo libro de ricercari, a 2, op.12 (Rome, 1618), ed. M. Giuliani (Trent, 1995)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

EitnerQ

MGG1 (A. Ziino)

PitoniN

G.O. Pitoni: Guida armonica … libro primo (Rome, c1690), 86

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R), i, 117, n.192

L. Torchi: ‘La musica strumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’, iv, RMI, v (1898), 455–89, esp. 482; repr. in book form (Turin, 1901/R)

F. Coradini: Il musicista aretino P. Girolamo Bartei (Arezzo, 1923)

S.L. Astengo: Musici agostiniani anteriori al secolo XIX (Florence, 1929), 19–20

F. Coradini: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Arezzo dal secolo XV a tutto il secolo XIX’, NA, xv (1938), 248–57, esp. 251

E. Hilmar: ‘Ergänzungen zu Emil Vogels “Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens, aus den Jahren 1500–1700”’, AnMc, no.4 (1967), 154–206, esp. 163–4

H.E. Smither: ‘The Latin Dramatic Dialogue and the Nascent Oratorio’, JAMS, xx (1967), 403–33

G. Dixon: Liturgical Music in Rome 1605–45 (diss., U. of Durham, 1982), 146–7

G. Dixon: ‘Tradition and Progress in Roman Mass Setting after Palestrina’, Studi palestriniani II: Palestrina 1986, 309–24

AGOSTINO ZIINO (with NOEL O’REGAN)

Bartei, Raffaele.

Italian composer and singer, nephew of Girolamo Bartei.

Bartelink, Bernard (Gerard Maria)

(b Enschede, 24 Nov 1929). Dutch organist. He studied the organ with Albert de Klerk at the Church Music Institute in Urecht (1948–50), and the organ with Anthon van der Horst (1950–54) and composition with Léon Orthel (1952–55) at the Amsterdam Conservatory, where he gained the prix d'excellence (1954). In 1961 he won the International Improvisation Competition in Haarlem, and has since served on the jury of this and other competitions. He taught at the Church Music Institute in Haarlem (1965–77) and at the Amsterdam Conservatory (1973–89), and in 1971 was appointed organist of the Roman Catholic St Bavokathedraal, Haarlem. A noted interpreter of the German Baroque and French 19th- and 20th-century repertories and a skilled improviser, Bartelink has performed throughout Europe, toured the USA, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, and given the premières of contemporary works by Daan Manneke, Léon Orthel and Bjorne Sløgedal; he has also keenly promoted the music of Charles Tournemire. His own compositions include church, organ and chamber music, and a cycle of songs for low voice and organ, De Zaligsprekingen, commissioned by the city of Amsterdam.

GERT OOST

Barth.

Danish family of musicians of German descent.

(2) (Frederik) Philip (Carl August) Barth

(3) Christian Frederik Barth

BO MARSCHNER

Barth

(1) Christian Samuel Barth

(b Glauchau, Saxony, 11 Jan 1735; d Copenhagen, 8 July 1809). Oboist. He was educated at the Thomasschule in Leipzig under J.S. Bach. After serving in court orchestras in Rudolstadt (from 1753), Weimar (1762), Hanover (1768) and Kassel (1769), he was engaged in 1786 as first oboist of the royal orchestra in Copenhagen; Gerber encountered him in Kassel as late as 1785. At this time he was recognized as one of the greatest oboe virtuosos in Europe, particularly for his outstanding tone. He also composed, but because of the frequent misattribution of works among the Barth family the extent of his compositional activity is uncertain. It is likely that a Potpourri concertant for piano and oboe or flute (DK-Kk) and Six écossaises for piano (Copenhagen, n.d.) were by him. He retired in 1797.

Barth

(2) (Frederik) Philip (Carl August) Barth

(b Kassel, 21 Oct 1774; d Copenhagen, 22 Dec 1804). Oboist and composer, son of (1) Christian Samuel Barth. Though not as eminent a player as his father and his brother (3) Christian Frederik, he was skilful enough to be admitted to the royal orchestra by 1793. Oboe concertos by him (now lost) were performed by his brother with great success in Berlin (1804–5). His other works include concertos for oboe, flute and two horns, a published flute concerto in E minor and two volumes of songs (1793). Barth was also a conductor of the royal Harmonie in Copenhagen (1794–7).

Barth

(3) Christian Frederik Barth

(b Copenhagen, 24 Feb 1787; d Middelfart, Fyn, 17 July 1861). Oboist and composer, son of (1) Christian Samuel Barth. He was a pupil of his father, and at the age of 15, a year after his début as an oboist, he joined the royal orchestra in Copenhagen. In 1804 a scholarship enabled him to go to Berlin, where he gave concerts with great success. On his return to Copenhagen Barth, then 18 years old, was appointed principal oboist, and on frequent concert tours in Europe soon won international fame as one of the greatest artists on his instrument. In Denmark his oboe technique had lasting influence (his most important pupil was the court oboist Christian Schiemann), but in his own time he also won renown as a composer. Of his published works special mention may be made of the five oboe concertos, the Rondeau suisse for oboe and orchestra in E, the divertissement for oboe and string quartet, the sonata for oboe and piano, the Grande sinfonie for wind instruments, and the overture in E for orchestra. Barth retired from the royal orchestra in 1841 and was not involved with music for the last 20 years of his life. (DBL (S.A.E. Hagne); GerberL; MGG1 (W. Hüttel); SchillingE)

Barth, Karl-Heinrich

(b Pillau [now Baltiysk], nr Königsberg [now Kaliningrad], 12 July 1847; d Berlin, 23 Dec 1922). German pianist and teacher. Following early lessons from his father, a music teacher, Barth became a pupil of Ludwig Steinmann in Postdam. He remained with him for six years from 1856. Further teachers were von Bülow, Bronsart von Schellendorf and, for a short time, Tausig. He also took lessons in composition from Adolf Marx and Carl Weitzmann. In 1868 Barth was appointed a teacher at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin; he moved to the Hochschule für Musik in 1871, and was head of the piano department there from 1910 until his retirement in 1921. The Barth Trio, which he formed with Heinrich Karl de Ahna and Robert Hausmann, was highly esteemed. Barth's reputation as a thoughtful pianist with an especially wide repertory is reflected in his early advocacy of Brahms's music. A successful teacher, his pupils included Howard Brockway, Katherine Ruth Heyman, Wilhelm Kempff, Artur Rubinstein and Aline van Barentzen, the latter three of whom were particularly acclaimed as interpreters of Beethoven.

JAMES METHUEN-CAMPBELL

Barth, Richard

(b Grosswanzleben, Saxony, 5 June 1850; d Magdeburg, 25 Dec 1923). German violinist, conductor and composer. He began his violin studies in 1856 with Franz Beck and continued with Joachim in Hanover (1863–7). A childhood accident forced him to bow left-handed. He had a series of appointments as leader of string quartets or orchestras in Münster at J.O. Grimm's invitation (1867), Krefeld (1882) and Marburg, where he was also music director of the university (1887–94). At Marburg he joined the close circle of friends around Brahms, of whom he wrote a two-volume biography. He moved to Hamburg in 1895 as Vernuth's successor to direct the Philharmonic Concerts as well as the Singakademie and, from 1908, the Hamburg Conservatory. Until 1913 he toured frequently with the Hamburg Lehrergesangverein. He appeared at St James's Hall in London on 4 June 1896, playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata and in Brahms's Piano Trio op.87. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Marburg University in 1905.

WRITINGS

Johannes Brahms und seine Musik (Hamburg, 1904)

ed.: Johannes Brahms: Briefwechsel, iv (Berlin, 1908, 2/1915) [correspondence with J.O. Grimm]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (W. Bollert)

E.T. Deggeller-Engelke: Zur Brahmsfolge: Richard Barth (1850–1923): Leben, Wirken und Werk (Marburg, 1949)

H. Engel: Die Musikpflege der Philipps-Universität zu Marburg seit 1527 (Marburg, 1957)

GAYNOR G. JONES/CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bartha, Dénes (Richard)

(b Budapest, 2 Oct 1908; d Budapest, 7 Sept 1993). Hungarian musicologist. He studied musicology at the University of Berlin (1926–30) with Abert, Wolf, Blume, Schering, Sachs and Hornbostel. His postgraduate years were devoted to medieval and Renaissance topics; he took the doctorate at Berlin in 1930 with a dissertation on Benedictus Ducis and Appenzeller. From 1935 he turned to problems of Hungarian music and folksong. At the same time he worked as a librarian at the music division of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest (1930–42), and from 1935 was lecturer (later professor) at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and Privatdozent at the University of Budapest. With Szabolcsi he inaugurated a musicology section at the Academy in 1951, responsible for the training of a new generation of Hungarian musicologists. With Szabolcsi, too, he was co-editor of Magyar zenetudományi tanulmányok (‘Musicological studies’) (1953–61) and Studia musicologica (1961–). He held teaching appointments at several universities in the USA: Smith College (1964), Harvard (summers of 1964 and 1965), Cornell (1965–6) and Pittsburgh (1966–7) where, from 1969 to 1978, he was A.W. Mellon Professor.

In 1937 Bartha inaugurated a series of recordings of Hungarian folk music; he was also editor of an accompanying volume of transcriptions by Bartók and Kodály, Magyar népzenei gramofonvételek (1937). In 1956 he began work on Haydn sources in the Esterházy Archives; his study Haydn als Opernkapellmeister (1960) has achieved an international reputation. In his later work he concentrated on structural and source problems in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. In recognition of his Haydn research he was awarded the Dent Medal in 1963. In 1969 he was awarded the Erkel National Prize by the Hungarian government.

WRITINGS

Benedictus Ducis und Appenzeller (diss., U. of Berlin, 1930; Berlin, 1930)

‘Probleme der Chansongeschichte im 16. Jahrhundert’, ZMw, xiii (1930–31), 507–30

Szalkai érsek zenei jegyzetei monostor-iskolai diák korából (1490) Das Musiklehrbuch einer ungarischen Klosterschule aus 1490 (Budapest, 1934)

A Jánoscludai avarkori ketősíp Die avarische Doppelschalmei von Jánoshida (Budapest, 1934)

Erdély zenetörténete [History of Transylvanian music] (Budapest, 1936)

‘Studien zum musikalischen Schrifttum des 15. Jahrhunderts’, AMf, i (1936), 59–82, 176–99

‘Neue ungarische Literatur zur vergleichenden Melodieforschung’, AcM, viii (1936), 38–49

‘Untersuchungen zur ungarischen Volksmusik’, AMf, vi (1941), 1–22, 193–212

with Z. Kodály: Die ungarische Musik (Budapest, 1943)

Pelléas és Mélisande (Budapest, 1944, 2/1964)

‘Mozart et le folklore musical de l'Europe Centrale’, Les influences étrangères dans l'oeuvre de W.A. Mozart: Paris 1956, 157–81

Johann Sebastian Bach (Budapest, 1956, 3/1967)

Beethoven kilenc szimfóniája [Beethoven’s nine symphonies] (Budapest, 1956, 5/1975)

‘A “Sieben Worte” változatainak keletkezése az Esterházy-gyüjtemény kéziratainak tükrében’ [The origin of the ‘Seven Last Words’ as revealed by the Haydn collection in Budapest], ZT, viii (1960), 107–46 [with Ger. summary, 146–86]

with L. Somfai: Haydn als Opernkapellmeister: die Haydn-Dokumente der Eszterházy-Opernsammlung (Budapest, 1960)

with D. Révész: Haydn élete dokumentumokban [Haydn's life in documents] (Budapest, 1961)

‘Haydn the Opera Conductor’, MR, xxiv (1963), 313–21

‘Zur Identifikation des “Strassburger Konzerts” bei Mozart’, Festschrift Friedrich Blume, ed. A.A. Abert and W. Pfannkuch (Kassel, 1963), 30–33

ed.: Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel, 1965)

ed.: Zenei lexikon (Budapest, 2/1965–6)

‘Volkstanz-Stilisierung in Joseph Haydns Finale-Themen’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 375–84

‘Haydn's Italian opera Repertoire at Esterháza Palace’, New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, ed. W.W. Austin (Ithaca, NY, 1968), 172–219

‘Thematic Profile and Character in the Quartet Finales of Joseph Haydn’, SMH, xi (1969), 35–62

‘On Beethoven's Thematic Structure’, MQ, lvi (1970), 759–78

‘Drei Finale-Themen von Beethoven’, Symbolae historiae musicae: Hellmut Federhofer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. F.W. Riedel and H. Unverricht (Mainz, 1971), 210–16

‘Liedform-Probleme’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 317

‘Das Quatrain-Modell in Mozarts Perioden- und Liedform-Strukturen’, Mozart und seine Umwelt: Salzburg 1976 [MJb 1978–9], 30–44

EDITIONS

A XVIII. század magyar dallamai [Hungarian melodies of the 18th century] (Budapest, 1935)

A zenetörténet antológiája [Historical anthology of music] (Budapest, 1948, 2/1974)

with J. Kiss: Ötödfélszáz énekek (1813) [Song collection of Adám Horváth] (Budapest, 1953)

J. Haydn: La canterina, Werke, xxv/2 (Munich, 1959); L'infedeltà delusa, ibid., xxv/5 (Munich, 1964) [with J. Vécsey]; Le pescatrici, ibid., xxv/4 (Munich, 1972) [with J. Vécsey and M. Eckhardt]

MARVIN TARTAK

Bartha [Bartta], Josef.

See Bárta, Josef.

Barthélemon, Cecilia Maria

(b 1769/70; d after 1840). English composer and singer, daughter of François-Hippolyte and Maria Barthélemon. She went with her parents on their continental tour (1776–7) and sang before the King of Naples and Marie Antoinette. She repeated the scena which she had performed for them at her mother’s benefit concert in London in March 1778 and continued to appear with her parents as a singer, often in duets with her mother, and later as a pianist. She does not appear to have had an independent performing career or to have composed after her marriage to Captain E.P. Henslowe (not W.H. Henslowe; see the memoir Francis Barthélemon, 1896). Haydn was a friend of the Barthélemons and Cecilia treasured memories of his visits to them during his London years. She dedicated her keyboard sonata op.3 to Haydn and was a subscriber (listed as ‘Mrs Ed. Henslow’) to The Creation.

WORKS

all published in London

Inst: 3 Sonatas, pf/hpd, op.1 (1791), no.2 with vn acc.; 2 Sonatas, pf/hpd, vn/fl, vc acc., op.2 (1792); Sonata, pf/hpd, op.3 (1794); Sonata, pf/hpd, vn acc., op.4 (1795)

Vocal: The Capture of the Cape of Good Hope, pf/hpd, S (1795)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

F.H. Barthélemon: Jefte in Masfa [incl. a memoir by C.M. Barthélemon] (London, 1827)

C. Higham: Francis Barthélemon (London, 1896)

H.C.R. Landon, ed.: The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn (London, 1959)

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn in England 1791–1795 (London, 1976)

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Barthélemon, François-Hippolyte

(b Bordeaux, 27 July 1741; d Christ Church, Surrey, 20 July 1808). French violinist and composer. He was the oldest of 16 children of the wig-maker Emmanuel Barthélemon and Françoise Laroche. Accounts of his career as a military officer may be apocryphal. He may have studied in Paris, where in 1755 he played the violin in the orchestra of the Comédie-Italienne and where about 1761 he had as patron the Countess of Genlis. He moved to London in 1764, at the instigation of Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kelly (himself a skilled musical dilettante). One of Barthélemon's earliest appearances in London was on 5 June 1764 ‘at the Great Room in Spring Garden near St. James's Park’ at a benefit concert for the eight-year-old Mozart and his sister. For the next four decades he was a leading figure in London's musical life, appearing as a composer, violin and viola d'amore soloist, and leader of the orchestra – at the King's Theatre, the London playhouses, Marylebone and Vauxhall Gardens, as well as for the Academy of Ancient Music, the New Musical Fund and the Society of French Emigrants. In 1766 he married the outstanding English singer Mary (Polly) Young (a relative of Thomas Arne), and they frequently performed together in plays, operas, oratorios and concerts. After 1778 they were sometimes joined by their daughter Cecilia Maria, a singer, pianist and composer.

Barthélemon's serious opera Pelopida was produced at the King's Theatre in 1766 with only moderate success, in spite of the support given to it by J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel. The following year, however, his burletta Orpheus, written for insertion into Garrick's farce A Peep Behind the Curtain, was warmly received, leading Barthélemon into a series of such works over the ensuing decades. In the same period he visited Paris more than once, appearing with acclaim at the Concert Spirituel on seven occasions between 1767 and 1769, producing an unsuccessful opera, La fleuve Scamandre, at the Comédie-Italienne, publishing his op.3, and issuing French editions of two sets of sonatas earlier published in London.

For the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 Barthélemon and Charles Dibdin collaborated in writing the music for a theatrical miscellany. This elaborate and costly pageant was a financial failure when mounted at Stratford-on-Avon, but it enjoyed great success when subsequently moved to London. During the winter of 1771–2 the Barthélemons were in Dublin for several months where they had a stage erected in the Rotunda, temporarily transforming it into a burletta theatre.

In the years 1776 and 1777 the couple travelled on the Continent, performing in France, Germany and Italy. They visited Bordeaux, where the ten-year-old Pelopida was given in French, one of five of Barthélemon's works that reached the stage of his native city. While in Florence Barthélemon was commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to compose the music for Semplici's oratorio Jefte in Masfa, which was performed then in Florence and Rome, and later in London. Excerpts from this work were published 20 years after Barthélemon's death by his daughter, Cecilia Maria Henslowe, along with an account of her father's life.

Perhaps as a result of his marriage, Barthélemon showed a predilection for English and ‘ancient’ music; he directed oratorio series at the Haymarket Theatre in 1774, 1779 and 1784 (the last in collaboration with Michael Arne). During the early 1780s he led the ballet orchestra at the King's Theatre, contributing several scores of his own. Increasingly, however, his interest turned to religious matters, and to the newly founded Swedenborg Society in particular. The most important musical fruit of his religious interests was the celebrated morning hymn Awake my soul. During Haydn's two visits to London in the 1790s, he and Barthélemon became good friends, and the two men corresponded after Haydn's return to Vienna. It may have been Barthélemon who suggested to Haydn the subject for The Creation. After the death of his wife, in 1799 Barthelémon remarried and the couple had two children, George and Angelica. The singer James Bartleman, however, was probably not a child of either of Barthélemon's marriages. Burdened by poor health, Barthélemon spent the final few years of his life in seclusion.

The acclaim which Barthélemon generally received may be judged from a characteristically enthusiastic report from London in the Parisian Journal de musique:

On the 19th [May 1770] there was a concert of vocal and instrumental music in the hall of Marylebone Garden. Mr. Barthélemon performed a violin concerto of his composition. The exquisite taste, the pleasing sound, and the noble expression of this artist are generally known. One would say that his soul breathes and moves right under his fingers. The charming music that he composes adds further to the pleasure that one has at hearing him. Mr. Barthélemon is French: his talents should have been devoted to us, but we do not know how to engage for ourselves the great men whom we know how to produce.

He was clearly one of the best violinists of his time. Burney commented on Barthélemon's ‘powerful hand and truly vocal adagio’. He was famed for his interpretations of Corelli's sonatas, and when he died Salomon is said to have exclaimed ‘We have lost our Corelli! There is nobody left now to play those sublime solos’.

Barthélemon's compositions exhibit considerable charm, but lack originality or a clearly developed personal style. His songs are perhaps his best efforts. In the longer instrumental movements, despite their undeniable energy, there is a tendency towards incoherence of melodic structure and harmonic direction – a lack of control of the métier about which Grimm had complained as early as 1767. In 1770 Barthélemon was credited by the Journal de musique with having introduced to Paris the fashion of rondo finales for concertos. His style never evolved much beyond the mid-century style of which his colleague J.C. Bach was perhaps the most celebrated proponent.

WORKS

stage

first performed in London unless otherwise stated

LCG	Covent Garden
LDL	Drury Lane
LLH	Little Theatre, Haymarket
LKH	King's Theatre, Haymarket
LMG	Marylebone Gardens

Pelopida (op, 3, ? G. Roccaforte), LKH, 22 May 1766, excerpts (London, 1766); as Pélopidas, Bordeaux, Théâtre de Bordeaux, 1776

The Country Girl (incid music, D. Garrick, after Wycherly), LDL, 25 Oct 1766; song (London, 1766)

Love in the City (ballad op, C. Dibdin, I. Bickerstaff), LCG, 21 Feb 1767, incl. music by M. Vento, G. Cocchi, Galuppi, Jommelli, Pergolesi, Piccinni; song (Dublin, n.d.)

Orpheus (burletta, 2, Garrick), LDL, 23 Oct 1767, in A Peep behind the Curtain, or The New Rehearsal (farcical afterpiece), vs (London, 1768)

Oithona (dramatic poem, 3, after J. Macpherson's Ossianic epic), LLH, 3 March 1768 [only 2 acts perf., no further perf.]

The Judgment of Paris (burletta, 2, R. Schomberg), LLH, 24 Aug 1768; as Le jugement de Paris, Bordeaux, Théâtre de Bordeaux, 1768

Le fleuve Scamandre (comic op, J. Renout, after J. de La Fontaine), Paris, Comédie-Italienne, 22 Dec 1768

Shakespeare's Garland (pageant, Garrick), Stratford-on-Avon, 23 April 1769, collab. Dibdin, T.A. Arne, Aylward

The Magic Girdle (burletta, 2 pts, G.S. Carey, after J.B. Rousseau), LMG, 17 July 1770; as La ceinture enchantée, Bordeaux, Théâtre de Bordeaux, 1769

The Noble Pedlar, or The Fortune Hunter (burletta, 2 pts, Carey), LMG, 21 Aug 1770

Le vicende della sorte, or The Turns of Fortune (pasticcio, G. Petrosellini, after Goldoni), LKH, 6 Nov 1770; excerpts (London, 1770); incl. music by Piccinni, Sacchini, T. Giordani

The Portrait (burletta, 2 pts, ? G. Colman), Dublin, Rotunda, c1771 (Dublin, 1772)

A Pasticcio (pasticcio, T.A. Arne), LCG, 19 March 1773, lost, incl. music by Arne, J.C. Bach, Giordani

The Wedding Day (burletta, 2 pts, H. Fielding), LMG, 15 July 1773

La zingara, or The Gipsey (burletta, 2 pts), LMG, 25 Aug 1773

The Heroine of the Cave (incid music, H. Jones, S. Reddish, P. Hiffernan), LDL, 19 March 1774

The Election (musical interlude, 1, M.P. Andrews), LDL, 19 Oct 1774, selections, vs (London, 1774)

The Maid of the Oaks (masque within a comedy, 5, J. Burgoyne, after J.F. Marmontel: Sylvian), LDL, 5 Nov 1774, vs (London, c1775); masque in Act 5 incl. music orig. for fête champêtre, Epsom, The Oaks, 9 June 1774; as La fille des chênes, Bordeaux, Théâtre de Bordeaux, 1772

Tit for Tat (‘entertainment’, ? H. Woodward), Sadler's Wells, 14 Aug 1775, collab. H. Carey

Old City Manners (incid music, C. Lennox, after G. Chapman), LDL, 9 Nov 1775, song (London, 1775)

The Duenna, or The Double Elopement (ballad op, R.B. Sheridan), LCG, 21 Nov 1775 [music partly by Barthélemon], song (London, 1775)

Jefte in Masfa (orat, Abbate Semplici), Florence, Cocomero, aut. 1776, Us-Wc, GB-Lbl; London, Hanover Square Rooms, 3 May 1782, excerpts (London, 1827)

Belphegor, or The Wishes (comic op afterpiece, 2, Andrews, after J.F. Guichard and N. Castet: Le bûcheron, ou Les trois souhaits), LDL, 16 March 1778; vs (London, 1778)

Victory Ode to Admiral Keppel (dramatic cant, W. Tasker), LLH, 17 March 1779

A Sea Storm (dramatic cant.), LLH, 17 March 1779

Les petits riens (ballet, J.G. Noverre), LKH, 11 Dec 1781 [? music partly by Mozart, k299b]

The Amours of Alexander and Roxana (ballet, ? C. Lepicq), LKH, 10 April 1783

The Pastimes of Terpsycore (ballet, Dauberval), LKH, 6 Dec 1783

The Slaves of Conquering Bacchus (ballet, Dauberval), LKH, 17 Jan 1784

Le réveil de bonheur (ballet, Dauberval), LKH, 3 Feb 1784

Divertissement (ballet, Dauberval), LKH, 7 Feb 1784

Orpheo (ballet, Dauberval), LKH, 6 March 1784

Le tuteur trompé (ballet, Lepicq), LKH, 1 Jan 1785 [music partly by Barthélemon]

The Deserter (ballet, ?Lepicq), LKH, 11 Jan 1785 [music partly by Barthélemon]

Il convito degli dei (ballet, Lepicq), LKH, 5 Feb 1785

Le jugement de Paris (ballet, Lepicq), LKH, 12 Feb 1785

Le bonheur est d'aimer (ballet, Dauberval), Bordeaux, Grand, 28 Feb 1785

New Divertissement (ballet, Nivelon), LKH, 3 March 1785 [music partly by Barthélemon]

Macbeth (ballet, Lepicq, after W. Shakespeare), LKH, 17 March 1785 [music partly by Barthélemon]

Robin Gray (ballet, ?Lepicq), LKH, 14 April 1785

Psyché (ballet, Dauberval), Bordeaux, Grand, 15 Feb 1788 [music by c15 composers]

The Nativity, or The Birth of the Messiah (orat), per. advertised but postponed, 1803; pt 1, Hanover Square Rooms, 19 June 1807

Doubtful: Ezio (op, P. Metastasio), LKH, 13 Jan 1770, collab. T. Giordani, Sacchini, P. Guglielmi

other works

op.

1	Six Sonatas, 2 vn/fl, bc (London, 1765)
2	Six sonates, vn, bc (London, c1765)
3	Six sinfonies, 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, bc (Paris, 1769)
3	Six Concertos, vn, str, bc (London, 1771)
4	Six Duetts, 2 vn (London, 1773)
4	Vn Conc. (Paris, 1775), lost
5	Six Lessons with a Favourite Rondo, hpd/pf, vn ad lib (London, 1773)
6	Six Overtures, 2 ob/fl, 2 hn, str, bc (London, 1773)
8	Six Duettos, 2 for 2 vn, 2 for vn, va, 2 for vn, vc (London, c1778)
9	Six Quartettos, str qt (London, c1783)
10	Six Solos, vn, bc (London, 1784)
11	Six Voluntaries or Easy Sonatas, org (London, 1787)
12	Six Quartetts, 4 for str qt, 1 for orch, 1 for ob, vn, va, vc (London, c1790)
Other inst: numerous single works and groups of works pubd, no op.; many other works in anthologies; additional works extant in MS, D-Bsb, F-Ppincherle, GB-Lbl
Other vocal: many songs, hymns, glees, ballads, canons etc., some pubd
Pedagogical: A New Tutor for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte (London, n.d.); A New Tutor for the Violin (London, n.d.); The Principles of Thorough Bass (London, n.d.); Tutor for the Harp in which are introduced Progressive Examples of Arpeggios and Sonatas with Favourite Airs and Scotch Songs (London, 1787)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

FiskeETM

La LaurencieEF

MGG1 (J. Gribenski)

PierreH

C.M. Henslowe: ‘Memoir of the Late F.H. Barthélemon, Esq.’, Selections from the Oratorio of Jefte in Masfa (London, 1827)

C.F. Pohl: Mozart und Haydn in London (Vienna, 1867/R)

M. Pincherle: ‘Sur François Barthélémon’, Mélanges de musicologie offerts à M. Lionel de La Laurencie (Paris, 1933), 235–45

E. Olleson: ‘The Origin and Libretto of Haydn's Creation’, Haydn Yearbook 1968, 148–68

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn: Chronicle and Works, iii: Haydn in England 1791–1795 (London, 1976)

S. Lincoln: ‘Barthélemon's Setting of Garrick's Orpheus’, The Stage and the Page: London's ‘Whole Show’ in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre, ed. G.W. Stone (Berkeley, 1981), 148–59

M. Sands: The Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone 1737–1777 (London, 1987)

S. McVeigh: The Violinist in London's Concert Life 1750–1784 (New York, 1989)

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995)

NEAL ZASLAW/SIMON McVEIGH

Barthélemon, Mrs [Maria].

English soprano and composer. See Young family, (8).

Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques

(b Cassis, 20 Jan 1716; d Paris, 30 Jan 1795). French archaeologist and man of letters. Having entered the Lazarists, Barthélemy conceived an early passion for Oriental antiquities. On leaving the seminary he decided not to take holy orders and returned to his family before settling in Paris in June 1744. Gros de Boze, curator of the Médailles du roi, took him on as an assistant in 1745. Barthélemy specialized in the study of medals and succeeded Gros de Boze in 1753. As a protégé of Choiseul-Stainville, whom he accompanied on a long tour of Italy, he was offered the privilege of the Mercure de France, which he reassigned to Marmontel. Barthélemy enjoyed the company of such lovers of antiquity and music as Caylus and Chabanon. As a writer who was regularly published in the Journal des savants, and the author of dissertations both scholarly and popular, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1789. His Voyages du jeune anacharsis en Grèce vers le milieu du IVe siècle avant l'ère vulgaire, an extensive introduction to Greek civilization, had considerable influence on his generation. His comments on Greek music were the subject of a separate publication: Entretiens sur l'état de la musique grecque, vers le milieu du quatrième siècle, avant l'ère vulgaire (Amsterdam and Paris, 1777). In this work Barthélemy defends a concept of music comprising melody, rhythm, poetry, dance, gesture, all the sciences and most of the arts. (P. Vendrix: Aux origines d'une discipline historique: la musique et son histoire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Geneva, 1993)

PHILIPPE VENDRIX

Barthélemy, Maurice(-Ghislain-Louis)

(b Gembloux, 9 April 1925). Belgian musicologist. He studied under Suzanne Clercx-Lejeune in Liège (1946–53), where in 1953 he took the doctorate in the history of art and archaeology; this included a dissertation on Campra. After a year’s studies with Dufourcq in Paris (1953–4), he was attached to the Fonds National (Belge) de la Recherche Scientifique (1954–61), investigating Italian influences on late Baroque French music. He became artistic adviser to the fine arts department of the Liège city council (1959), assistant curator of museums (1967) and librarian of the conservatory (1970) and retired in 1990. He has specialized in the history of French music between 1660 and 1760, particularly the relationship of vocal music to literature and the history of ideas.

WRITINGS

Campra et ses contemporains (diss., U. of Liège, 1953)

‘Les divertissements de J.J. Mouret pour les comédies de Dancourt’, RBM, vii (1953), 47–51

‘Les opéras de Marin Marais’, RBM, vii (1953), 136–46

André Campra: sa vie et son oeuvre (1660–1744) (Paris, 1957, 2/1995 as André Campra (1660–1744): étude biographique et musicologique)

‘Un foyer musical en France au début du XVIIIe siècle: le Palais-Royal’, Cahiers musicaux, no.14 (1957), 27–35

‘La critique et l’actualité musicales dans le “Théâtre italien” de Gherardi’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, lix (1959), 481–90

‘Les cantates de Jean-Baptiste Stuck’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 125–37

‘Les règlements de 1776 et l’Académie royale de musique’, RMFC, iv (1964), 239–48

‘Essai sur la position de d’Alembert dans la Querelle des Bouffons’, RMFC, vi (1966), 159–75

‘Les deux interventions de Jacques Cazotte dans la “Querelle des Bouffons”’, RMFC, viii (1968), 191–206

‘Marc-Antoine Laugier contre Jean-Jacques Rousseau: un épisode de la Querelle des Bouffons’, Provence historique, lxxiii (1968), 323–9

‘Theobaldo di Gatti et la tragédie en musique Scylla’, RMFC, ix (1969), 56–66

‘L’actualité musicale dans les publications périodiques de Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines (1735–1746)’, RMFC, x (1970), 107–16

‘L’affaire des pages de la Chapelle Royale en 1741’, RMFC, xiii (1973), 157–61

‘Une oeuvre inconnue d’Anne Danican Philidor, au Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège’, RMFC, xv (1975), 91–5

Inventaire général des manuscrits anciens du Conservatoire royal de musique de Liège (Liège, 1977)

De Léopold à Constance: Wolfgang Amadeus (Paris, 1987)

ed.: H. Hamal: Annales de la musique et du théâtre à Liège de 1738 à 1806 (Liège, 1989)

Métamorphoses de l’opéra français au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1990)

‘Alexis Piron et l’opéra-comique’, Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique: Liège 1991, 191–200

Catalogue des imprimés musicaux anciens du Conservatoire royal de musique de Liège (Liège, 1992)

‘Les oeuvres de Racine pour Saint-Cyr et le contexte musical contemporain’, Athalie: Racine et la tragédie biblique, ed. M. Couvreur (Brussels, 1992), 107–16

‘L’opéra-comique des origines à la Querelle des Bouffons’, L’opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. P. Vendrix (Liège, 1992), 10–78

GUY BOURLIGUEUX

Bartholomaeus Comes.

See Le Conte, Bartholomeus.

Bartholomée, Pierre

(b Brussels, 5 Aug 1937). Belgian composer and conductor. Drawn to composition at an early age, he studied at the Brussels Conservatory (1953–8), and received further piano tuition from Wilhelm Kempff. While beginning a career as a pianist he taught himself composition, an activity that received special impetus from his encounter with Pousseur in 1961. From 1960 to 1970 he worked as a sound engineer and later producer for the Third Programme on Belgian Radio, then for television; during this period, he wrote a good deal of incidental music, notably for film. A founder-member of the Liège-based Ensemble Musique Nouvelle in 1962, he began his conducting activities with the group in 1964; these became increasingly extensive and in 1977 he was appointed conductor of the Liège PO. From 1972 he taught music analysis at the Brussels Conservatory and from 1984 musical communication at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve. As a conductor he has been responsible for numerous premières (including music by Berio, Boesmans, Messiaen, Pousseur and Xenakis) and for rediscovering works by Lekeu and Tournemire among others. From his earliest works, such as the serial Chansons (1964) and Cantate aux alentours (1966), his conception of musical form has been based on the variation and repetition of recognizable structural elements (themes, harmonies, instrumental combinations, etc.). From the percussive articulation and chordal writing characteristic of his works of the 1970s, notably the harp piece Fancy and the compositions derived from it, he moved in Mezza Voce to a more open, heterophonic style, full of characteristic figurations and sonic gestures.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Harmonique, 1970; Politophonie, 1984; Pavane pour une ondine du Levant, 1987; Rumeur, 1989; Humoresque, 1994; Fredons et tarabusts, 1997

Vocal: La ténèbre souveraine, 4 vv, 2 choruses, 2 small orch, 1967; Deuxième alentour ‘Cueillir’, A, perc, pf, 1969–70; Brasier de neige (S. Meurant), Mez, str qt, 1986, enlarged as Le point nocturne, 1993; Accent, 1v, pf, 1992

Chbr: Mouvements, pf, 11 insts, 1963; Tombeau de Marin Marais, baroque vn, 2 b viol, hpd, 1967 [microintervallic piece written in tablature]; Premier alentour, a fl, 2 b viol, 1967; Romance, 1 trad. inst, hp, pf, any insts, 1972; Ricercar, sax qt, 1973; Fancy II, hp, small orch, 1975; Sonata quasi una fantasia, hp, 4 groups of any insts, 1976; Mezza voce, cl, vn, pf, perc, 1980; Fancy as a ground, 17 pfmrs, 1981; 3 pôles entrelacés (Polyphonie à 7), cl/b cl, bn, eng hn, 2 hn, vn, hp, 1985; Adieu, cl, pf, 1987; Studie, small ens, 1994; Fin de séries, 2 vn, 1995; Presque rien, trbn, vn, 1997

Solo inst: Nocturnes, chromatic hp, 1962; Chanson, vc, 1964; Récit ‘Troisième alentour’, org, 1970; Mémoires, pf, 1972; Fancy, hp, 1974; Pastorale, diatonic/chromatic hp, 1981; Variations, pf, 1997–8

El-ac: Cantate aux alentours (Bible: Genesis, Revelation), Mez, B, 4 inst groups, live elecs, 1966; Mémoires d'un gueux (H. Claus), live elec qt, 1987

Principal publishers: Documenta Musicae Novae, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Pousseur: ‘Pierre Bartholomée: Le tombeau de Marin Marais’, WER 60039 (1970) [disc notes]

H. Sabbe: Introduction to P. Bartholomée: ‘Cantate aux alentours’, Documenta musicae novae, iii (1970–71) [whole issue]

P. Bartholomée: ‘Les aventures de “Musique Nouvelle”’, Le centre de recherches musicales de Wallonie (Brussels, 1976), 39–50

M.-I. Collart: ‘Pierre Bartholomée, le temps de l'écriture’, Ars musica 1993, 160–63

C. Ledoux: ‘Pierre Bartholomée, la face cachée du sensible’, Courant d'airs [Liège], no.87 (1997), 18–21

PASCAL DECROUPET

Bartholomeus, Frater.

See Bartolino da Padova.

Bartholomeus Anglicus

(b ?before 1200; d Saxony, ?1272). English Franciscan theologian. He has been falsely identified with Bartholomeus de Glanvilla (fl late 13th century). He studied at Oxford and later at Paris, where he was incepted as a regent master; he joined the Franciscans about 1225. He taught as a lector in Magdeburg, and was subsequently elected Provincial in Austria (1247), then Bohemia (c1255); he became bishop of Łuków (1257) and was appointed papal legate. Some ten years before his death he was elected minister provincial in Saxony. While at Magdeburg he completed his De proprietatibus rerum (c1245), of which well over 100 copies in manuscript survive; the editio princeps appeared in Cologne in 1472/3 (see Bartholomaei Anglici de genuinis rerum … proprietatibus, Frankfurt, 1601/R). The text was well known in university circles, and also appeared in several vernacular translations (that of John Trevisa into English, from 1398, is ed. M.C. Seymour and others, Oxford, 1975–88).

Chapters 132–46 of book 19 concern music. Some have questioned Bartholomeus’s authorship of this section and, indeed, chapter 132 ‘De musica sive modulacione cantus’ is largely a recapitulation of Isidore of Seville; the final section relies heavily on Boethius. The material drawn from Isidore describes the three kinds of music, harmoniaca, rhythmica and metrica, and the way in which pitches move and sounds are transmitted, as well as the different kinds of voice, such as clara, dura, aspera. As in Isidore, the vox perfecta is described as ‘alta, suavis, fortis et clara’. The passages from Boethius deal mainly with the mathematical proportions underlying musical intervals.

Chapters 133–46 describe musical instruments and other musical terms, with much quotation from classical authors and attempts at etymology. A large proportion of this material is probably drawn from earlier glossaries – Isidore is quoted frequently – and it is repeated almost verbatim later in the century in the treatise of Egidius de Zamora. Certain descriptions are extremely brief: e.g. ‘sambuca is a kind of delicate wood, whose branches are curved, hollow and even, from which tibie and some kinds of symphonie are made, as Isidore says’. Instruments themselves are generally described at greater length, and with some allegorical and symbolic interpretation. The chapters deal with the tuba, buccina, tibia, calamo, sambuca, symphonia, armonia, tympano, cithara, psalterio, lira, cymbalis, cistro and tintinabulo. Although Bartholomeus’s chief aim was biblical exegesis, his work is nonetheless useful for the investigation of 13th-century organology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Müller: ‘Der Musiktraktat in dem Werke des Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum’, Riemann-Festschrift (Leipzig, 1909/R), 241–55

G.W. Pietzsch: Die Klassifikation der Musik von Boetius bis Ugolino von Orvieto (Halle, 1929/R)

M.C. Seymour and others: Bartholomaeus Anglicus and his Encyclopedia (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1992)

ANDREW HUGHES/RANDALL ROSENFELD

Bartholus (de Florentia)

(fl Florence, c1330–60). Italian composer. In Filippo Villani’s chronicle Bartholus (and not Giovanni da Cascia, as given in Galletti; the chronicle is also ed. G. Tanturli, Padua, 1997) is mentioned together with Lorenzo da Firenze. Villani wrote that Bartholus had introduced in Florence Cathedral a Credo which was performed with voices (vivis vocibus). This type is perhaps represented by his sole surviving composition, a two-voice Credo in F-Pn 568 (no.194; ed. in De Van erroneously under the name of Bartolino da Padora, also ed. in CMM, viii/1, 1954, and in PMFC, xii, 1976) which combines elements of earlier organal style with madrigalesque melismas. Bartholus is not to be confused with Bartolino da Padova.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Villani: De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, ed. G.C. Galletti (Florence, 1847); ed. G. Tanturli (Padua, 1997) [see also E. Li Gotti, Italica, xxiv (1947), 196–200]

G. De Van, ed.: Les monuments de l’Ars Nova (Paris, 1938), 5ff [under ‘Bartolino da Padova’]

B.J. Layton: Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass 1300–1450 (diss., Harvard U., 1960), 77ff

K. von Fischer: ‘Paolo da Firenze und der Squarcialupi-Kodex (I-Fl 87)’, Quadrivium, ix (1968), 5–24, esp. 19

K. von Fischer: ‘Musica e la societa del Trecento italiano’, L’ars nova italiana del Trecento II: Certaldo and Florence 1969, 11–28 [L’ars nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)]

K. von Fischer: ‘The Mass Cycle of the Trecento Manuscript F-Pn 568 (Pit)’, Essays on Music for Charles Warren Fox, ed. J.C. Graue (Rochester, NY, 1979), 1–13

KURT VON FISCHER

Bartleman, James

(b Westminster, London, 19 Sept 1769; d London, 15 April 1821). English bass. Educated under Benjamin Cooke (ii) at Westminster Abbey, he became the leading bass of his generation. In 1788, his name first appears as a chorister at the Concert of Ancient Music, but in 1791 he left to become the first solo bass at the newly established Vocal Concerts at Willis's Rooms. He returned to the Ancient Concerts in 1795 as the principal bass singer, and later he was one of the proprietors and conductors of the Vocal Concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms. Ill health forced him to retire from singing by 1819. Bartleman was noted for his wide range (E to at least g') and his capacity to hold g' in chest voice with a tone that did not grate on the ears. William Crotch and John Callcott wrote music which took advantage of his range, but he was best known for his skill in singing Purcell and Handel. He is credited with transforming the heavy, ponderous style of bass singing to one that was polished and graceful. His ability to personify the characters he represented, especially in songs like Handel's ‘O ruddier than the cherry’ (Acis and Galatea) and Purcell's ‘Let the dreadful engines’ (King Arthur), allowed bass singing to become what Richard Bacon described as ‘truly theatrical’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Bacon: ‘Mr. Bartleman’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, i (1818), 325–33

‘Memoir of James Bartleman’, The Harmonicon, viii (1830), 182–3

W. Gardiner: The Music of Nature (London, 1832), 109–16

ROBERT TOFT

Bartlet, John

(fl 1606–10). English composer. Bartlet titled himself ‘gentleman’, indicating a claim to a coat of arms. He was ‘servant’ to a noted patron of music, Sir Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (1539–1621), accompanying him as musician on his embassy to Brussels in 1605. Hertford is the dedicatee of Bartlet's only publication, the Booke of Ayres with a Triplicitie of Musicke (London, 1606/R; ed. in EL, 2nd ser., iii, 1925 and in MB, liii, 1987). In September 1609 a ‘Mr Bartlet’ was employed as a musician in the household of Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (1553–1616); John Bartlet of Magdalen College, Oxford, was admitted to the BMus degree on 11 July 1610. A ‘John Bartlett, gent.’ was given 500 marks ‘as of his Majesty’s free gift’ in August 1613.

Despite criticism of his ayres by Warlock and Poulton, many are very effective in performance, though he attempted nothing in Dowland’s passionate style. The homophonic settings of Of all the birds and When from my love work particularly well in the four-voice versions, and the latter has a splendid lute accompaniment sometimes independent of the lower voices. Bartlet’s songs enjoyed widespread popularity, appearing in a number of later manuscripts and prints. A pavan, The Earl of Hartford’s Muse, exists in both consort and keyboard versions (ed. in CEKM, xliv, 1982). The treble part of another pavan is attributed to ‘Joh Bar:’ (US-CLwr).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SpinkES

A. Wood: Athenae Oxonienses (Oxford, 1691)

P. Warlock: The English Ayre (London, 1926)

E.H. Fellowes: English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632 (Oxford, 1920, rev., enlarged 3/1967 by F.W. Sternfeld and D. Greer)

E. Doughtie: Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622 (Cambridge, MA, 1970)

D.C. Price: Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 1981)

ROBERT SPENCER

Bartlett, Homer N(ewton)

(b Olive, NY, 28 Dec 1846; d Hoboken, NJ, 3 April 1920 ). American composer and organist. He studied the piano, the organ and composition in New York, where he began a career as a church organist at the age of 14. He spent 12 years at the Marble Collegiate Church, New York, and over 30 years at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, retiring in 1912. A founding member of the American Guild of Organists, he was also active in the rival National Association of Organists (president 1910–11) and in the New York Manuscript Society. Bartlett was a prolific composer: his published opus numbers reached 271. Some of his early salon pieces, for example the Grande polka de concert (1867), achieved great popularity and were published in several editions. Other works include La vallière (opera, 1887), Magic Hours (operetta, 1910), an oratorio, Samuel, church music, violin and cello concertos, and the symphonic poem Apollo (1911). He also composed chamber music, organ works, character pieces for piano, over 80 solo songs, and partsongs. Late in his career he became fascinated with Japanese themes. The piano pieces Kuma saka (1907) and Dondon-bushi (1918) display this preoccupation with the ‘exotic’; they are not based on any real understanding of Japanese music. His manuscripts are held in the Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (S. Salter)

R. Hughes: Contemporary American Composers (Boston, 1900), 317–23

J. Gillespie: ‘Nineteenth-Century American Piano Music’, Sonneck Society Newsletter, xii/3 (1986), 81–4

WILLIAM OSBORNE

Bartók, Béla

(b Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary [now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania], 25 March 1881; d New York, 26 Sept 1945). Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist. Although he earned his living mainly from teaching and playing the piano and was a relentless collector and analyst of folk music, Bartók is recognized today principally as a composer. His mature works were, however, highly influenced by his ethnomusicological studies, particularly those of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak peasant musics. Throughout his life he was also receptive to a wide variety of Western musical influences, both contemporary (notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg) and historic; he acknowledged a change from a more Beethovenian to a more Bachian aesthetic stance in his works from 1926 onwards. He is now considered, along with Liszt, to be his country’s greatest composer, and, with Kodály and Dohnányi, a founding figure of 20th-century Hungarian musical culture.

9. Interpretation and analysis.

EDITIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS BY BARTÓK

MALCOLM GILLIES

1. 1881–1903.

At the time of Bartók’s birth, Nagyszentmiklós was part of the northern end of the ethnically diverse southern Hungarian province of Torontál. There, his father, also Béla Bartók (1855–88), was headmaster of an agricultural school; his mother, Paula Voit (1857–1939), was a teacher. Both parents were keen amateur musicians, and early encouraged the young Béla’s musical development with dance pieces, and then with drumming. By the age of four he was able to play some 40 songs on the piano, and at five he started piano lessons with his mother. Impressions of a summer visit to Radegund, Austria, in 1887 led to one of his first compositions, Radegundi visszhang (‘Echo of Radegund’, 1891). At the age of seven Bartók was tested as having perfect pitch.

The earlier years of Bartók’s schooling were unsettled. Not only was he very shy, the supposed result of confinement because of a persistent rash during his first five years, but the premature death of his father in 1888 also caused the family to move frequently in the following six years. Paula Bartók sought teaching positions in provincial towns which were suitably equipped for the broader education of her son and daughter, Elza (1885–1955). A move to Nagyszöllős (now Vinogradov, Ukraine) in 1889 was followed by time in Nagyvárad (now Oradea, Romania) during 1891–2, and in the larger city of Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) during 1892–3. Finally, after eight months in Beszterce (now Bistriţa, Romania), where Bartók attended a German-language grammar school, the family was in April 1894 able to settle in Pozsony.

Despite these many moves and the periodic disruptions to Bartók’s general education, his musical talents were rapidly developing. His first compositions, from the early 1890s, were frequently dance pieces – waltzes, ländlers, mazurkas, and, especially, polkas which he often named after friends or family members. Also among his first band of 31 piano compositions (1890–94) were occasional programmatic works, such as the ten-part A Duna folyása (‘The Course of the Danube’, 1890–94) or A budapesti tornaverseny (‘Gymnastic Contest in Budapest’, 1890), and some early attempts in sonatina and theme-and-variation forms. Bartók’s pianistic dexterity rapidly increased during the early 1890s, and on 1 May 1892 he made his first public appearance, in Nagyszöllős, presenting a programme of works by Grünfeld, Raff and Beethoven, and his own The Course of the Danube.

At the Catholic Gymnasium in Pozsony, Bartók was soon appointed chapel organist, as successor to Ernő Dohnányi, and gained more specialized musical tuition from László Erkel and later Anton Hyrtl. During the school’s celebrations of the Hungarian millennium in 1896 Bartók provided the piano accompaniment to Kornél Ábrányi’s melodrama Rákóczi, and also played the piano in the school orchestra’s rendition of the ‘Rákóczi’ March. In Pozsony he became increasingly involved in the playing and composing of chamber music, with a first attempt, in 1895, at a sonata for violin and piano, in C minor (bb6); a string quartet (now lost) in C minor in 1896; and a piano quintet in C (also lost) in 1897. During these years, as he experienced the city’s concerts and occasional operas, his compositional style and harmonic vocabulary broadened from Classical to early Romantic models. By 1898, with two remarkably mature chamber works, the Piano Quartet in C minor bb13 and String Quartet in F major bb17, the imprints of Brahms and Schumann are strongly felt.

Bartók’s health was never robust; a long list of childhood diseases culminated in February 1899 with the start of serious lung problems, which caused him to devote many months to recuperation over the coming two years. During December 1898 and January 1899, nonetheless, he undertook auditions at the Vienna Conservatory and the Budapest Academy of Music, both of which were keen to admit him. Despite his fragile condition, Bartók also managed to matriculate in June 1899 with three excellent results (probably in mathematics, physics, scripture) and four good ones (Hungarian, Latin, Greek, German).

Since the ‘Compromise’ of 1867, which had established the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Budapest had grown rapidly. By the turn of the century it had become a vibrant centre of Hungarian culture, and, with a population of three-quarters of a million, the sixth largest city in Europe. In 1875 an Academy of Music had been established there, with Liszt as its first president. Notwithstanding Vienna’s illustrious musical reputation, an offered scholarship and Pozsony’s proximity to the Austrian capital, Bartók decided to study in Budapest with the same professors who had taught Dohnányi: Thomán, a pupil of Liszt, for piano; Koessler, a pupil of Rheinberger, for composition. On entering the Academy in September 1899, he was granted advanced standing in both subjects.

In Budapest Bartók keenly attended the Opera and the Philharmonic, and started to look beyond chamber music models in his compositions. Earlier in 1899, while still living in Pozsony, he had composed a song for soprano and orchestra, Tiefblaue Veilchen bb18. Now, along with his Academy studies in harmony and counterpoint, he engaged in orchestration exercises and wrote short pieces for orchestra. During 1900–1 these included a Valcer (bb19/3) and a Scherzo in B (bb19/4). From 1899 until early 1902, however, Bartók’s compositional zeal ebbed. He found Koessler a thorough and traditional if uninspiring teacher, who only raised a compositional block in him. Bartók’s composition exercises of this time were dutiful but unremarkable, with little suggestion of his later genius. His growing knowledge of the works of Wagner and Liszt did not yet provide a strong stimulus for his own writing.

‘From this stagnation I was roused as by a lightning stroke by the first performance in Budapest of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902’, Bartók wrote in his autobiography of 1921. Richard Strauss’s music offered to Bartók some interim compositional solutions. In 1902 he drafted in piano short score a four-movement Symphony in E (bb25), which merged a Straussian thematic and motivic technique with stylistic gestures of Liszt and popular nationalist rhythmic and melodic turns. He was still dissatisfied with this new amalgam of elements, and only fully orchestrated the third movement, a Scherzo. His only other substantial work of 1902, the Four Songs bb24, set texts of folk-like poetry by Lajos Pósa in a style drawn substantially from the clichés of popular art-song.

While Bartók’s compositional development had been sluggish, he had been attracting attention as a pianist. At his first public Academy concert, on 21 October 1901, he performed Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor. A critic from the Budapesti Napló reported that Bartók ‘thunders around on the piano like a little Jupiter. In fact, no piano student at the Academy today has a greater chance of following in Dohnányi’s tracks than he’. That was, indeed, Bartók’s aim. He remained close to his elder townsman through his later years at the Academy, and during the summer of 1903 took masterclasses with Dohnányi in Gmunden. Bartók gained further pianistic notice in late 1902, with private performances of his own piano transcription of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, followed by its successful performance at a Tonkünstlerverein concert in Vienna during January 1903. This encouraged Hanslick to comment: ‘So, he must be a genius of a musician at any rate, but it is a pity that he goes in for Strauss’, a sentiment echoed by Koessler. Bartók’s reputation as a pianist was further enhanced by a brilliant final Academy examination performance of Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole on 25 May 1903.

2. 1903–8.

Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben provided Bartók with both the style and the structure for his next composition, Kossuth bb31, a ten-section symphonic poem which glorified Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the abortive Hungarian War of Independence from Austria in 1848–9. Bartók wrote Kossuth between April and August 1903, another period of nationalistic fervour concerned with the degree of independence of the Hungarian army. An irony, not lost on Bartók himself, was that this intensely patriotic work relied so heavily upon Strauss’s Germanic idiom.

Kossuth and Bartók’s rendition of Ein Heldenleben were central to the launching of his career as a pianist-composer. Hans Richter, an early promoter also of Dohnányi, scheduled the work with his Hallé Orchestra in Manchester during February 1904, and provided opportunities for Bartók as a pianist. Meanwhile, during 1903 Bartók had been invited back to Vienna as soloist in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, while the sizeable audience at Bartók’s Berlin début on 14 December 1903, including Busoni and, at rehearsal, Nikisch, owed much to Godowsky’s reports of Bartók’s performing and compositional feats that year.

From 1903 until 1906 Bartók pursued an itinerant life, following performing or compositional opportunities as they presented themselves. There were substantial residencies in Vienna, Berlin and Pozsony, as well as Budapest, and he spent August and September 1905 in Paris, where he participated unsuccessfully in the Rubinstein competition both as composer (where no award was made) and pianist (where Backhaus gained the prize). However, despite a two-month tour of Spain and Portugal in 1906 with the Hungarian violinist Ferenc Vecsey, Bartók’s international performing career had effectively stalled by this point, and it was fortuitous that he was invited to replace Thomán on the piano staff of the Budapest Academy late the same year. He became tenured in 1909 and remained at the Academy (which in 1925 was renamed the Liszt Academy) until 1934. During 1907–9 Bartók all but gave up performing, although he played very occasionally in Academy concerts. One exception was his only appearance as a conductor, with the Berlin PO on 2 January 1909, when he directed a movement of his Second Suite.

Meanwhile, Bartók had begun to develop an enduring interest in peasant music. He realized that his compositional style still lacked originality and unity. His first two opus-numbered works, the Rhapsody for piano and Scherzo for piano and orchestra, for example, are ungainly stylistic and structural amalgams of Brahms, Strauss and Liszt, together with Hungarian identifiers, drawn either from patriotic compositions of Liszt, Mihály Mosonyi and Ferenc Erkel, or from stylized verbunkos and csárdás dances, popular art-songs or gypsy embellishing figures. Bartók was, however, yearning for a style which was autochthonously Hungarian – to its core, not just in its accoutrements. During May to November 1904 (except for some weeks at Bayreuth) he had stayed at the northern Hungarian resort of Gerlice Puszta (now Ratkó, Slovakia), where he split his time between piano practice and composition, finishing his Piano Quintet bb33, and writing the Rhapsody and Scherzo (originally titled Burlesque), both intended as showpieces for his forthcoming concerts. There he heard a Transylvanian-born maid, Lidi Dósa, singing in an adjacent room, and he noted down her songs. He did not yet appreciate the exact boundary between folksong and popular art-song, nor the different classes of Hungarian peasant music, but Dósa’s songs had inspired a new direction in Bartók’s thinking, as he wrote to his sister in December 1904: ‘Now I have a new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them, adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.’ The first, tentative fruits of this intention were his publication in February 1905 of his setting of a Székely (Transylvanian) song, Piros alma (‘Red Apple’) bb34, and a collection of settings of four folksongs (bb37), the second of which Bartók performed as a piano solo in the Rubinstein competition. In these earliest settings Bartók’s piano accompaniments still retain many Romantic flourishes, but already show a tendency towards writing in simple block chords and a use of rhythm which shadows rather than complements the melody. Yet Bartók was still some way from appreciating the full potential of folk music for creating a new home-grown style in his compositions. His Suite no.1 op.3 for orchestra (1905), despite his claim regarding its ‘Hungarianness’, self-consciously uses four-square ‘international’ thematic material within a five-movement cyclic structure, with frequent resort to Strauss in its orchestration. The Second Suite op.4 for small orchestra (originally Serenade), starts to show a way forward. While its first three movements, written in 1905, cling to national Romantic tenets, with a strong Lisztian influence in the second movement, its fourth and final movement, composed in 1907, commences with a short, pentatonic tune, and unveils a stark, spare texture, which he would develop in succeeding compositions.

On 18 March 1905 Bartók met Kodály, one year his junior, at the Budapest home of Emma Gruber (later Kodály’s wife). Like Bartók, Kodály had studied composition under Koessler; he was also taking a teaching diploma, and a year later completed a doctoral dissertation on the stanzaic structure of Hungarian folksong. So began an enduring artistic, scholarly and personal relationship, which sometimes rivalled that of the Schoenberg–Webern–Berg school in intensity but lacked its master-student characteristics. Kodály held the ethnological knowledge, which Bartók for all his enthusiasm then lacked. Bartók had more practical musical skills and phenomenal aural capacities. They soon found themselves teaching colleagues at the Academy of Music, collaborators in many ethnomusicological projects, and the frankest critics of each other’s compositions.

In March 1906 Bartók and Kodály issued a joint ‘appeal to the Hungarian people’ to support ‘a complete collection of folksongs, gathered with scholarly exactitude’, so setting a goal which remained far from realized even at Kodály’s death in 1967. Their appeal warned that the influx of ‘light music’ and many ‘imitation folksongs’ would render Hungarian traditional music extinct within a few decades. They called for subscribers to a collection of simple settings for voice and piano of 20 songs (bb42), collected by Béla Vikár and themselves, with the first ten arranged by Bartók and the remainder by Kodály. This collection appeared in December 1906, but drew a scant response from the Hungarian public. Bartók, already feeling alienated from the ‘rootless’ Germans and Jews so prominent in Budapest’s musical life, also now strongly resented the apeing of Western popular culture by the ethnic Hungarian aristocracy and middle class, as well as the undying urban popularity of the gypsy bands. The rural peasants, however, he came to idealize as the conveyors of the pure musical instincts of the nation. Their song was an unauthored ‘natural phenomenon’, with the potential of reforming the nation’s musical life, and also of reforming his own musical approach. While Kodály allowed his attention to encompass broader literary and historical aspects of Hungarian musical folklore, Bartók’s interests tended to be more strictly musical and class-related. Hence, he soon found himself becoming interested in the characteristics of the peasant music of the many ethnic minorities living within the Hungarian section of the Empire. As early as 1906 he started to collect Slovak folk music, followed in 1908 by Romanian, and he later collected much smaller numbers of Ruthenian, Serbian and Bulgarian tunes. His interest in the origins of the Hungarians even led him to plan trips further east, to the Csángó people in Moldavia and to the Chuvash and Tartar peoples living along the Volga River, although World War I banished all hope of such trips. He became fascinated not just with the transcription, analysis and classification of the many tunes he collected, but also with the comparisons between these different peasant musics and their dialects.

Ever since hearing Lidi Dósa’s singing in 1904 Bartók had wanted to travel to her homeland, Transylvania, the heartland of the Székely people in the far east of the Empire. His collecting trip to the Transylvanian province of Csík during July and August 1907, with a local assistant and two phonographs, proved a revelation. There, among the older people, he found many examples of anhemitonic (lacking semitones) pentatonic tunes and came to realize the pentatonic basis of much of the oldest stratum of Hungarian folk music. As Bartók collected and analyzed more Hungarian tunes he started to distinguish old-style and new-style melodies: the old most characterized by a parlando, poco rubato performance style, in ecclesiastical (commonly Aeolian or Dorian) or pentatonic modes, and tending to non-architectonic forms (ABCD, ABBC, for instance); the new performed tempo giusto, favouring Aeolian or major modes, and generally with architectonic forms (ABBA, AABA, for instance). Finally, he came to recognize a large class of ‘heterogeneous’ songs, showing some degree of foreign influence. In a dictionary article on Hungarian music of 1935 (Révai nagy lexicona) Bartók determined the percentages of these three classes of Hungarian peasant music as 9% old, 30% new and 61% heterogeneous.

Bartók’s Transylvanian tour of 1907 provided him with final proof that the renewal of his own style could be based on folk music. Folk music was not just a fertile field for arrangements, but also introduced a wealth of melodic, rhythmic, textural and formal models which might creatively be transformed, or transcended, in original composition. While still travelling in Transylvania he worked on the fourth movement of his Second Suite, with its pentatonic melody. Before the year was out he completed settings of three Csík folksongs, Gyergyóból (‘From Gyergyó’) bb45a for recorder and piano, and the first five of his Nyolc magyar népdal (‘Eight Hungarian Folksongs’) bb47 for voice and piano. Of these latter, three are parlando rubato with tales of sadness – the betrayed lover, the unhappily married woman, farewell – while the two tempo giusto songs are humorous.

When in Transylvania Bartók had also been working upon his own work of love, the Violin Concerto bb48a, written for and about his new infatuation, the violinist Stefi Geyer. Between passionate outpourings to her in a series of intimate letters about the meaning of life, religion and love, he was drafting a work of three movements, with the first depicting the ‘idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial and inward’, the second as ‘cheerful, witty, amusing’, and the third as ‘indifferent, cool and silent’. One ascending line of 3rds, D–F–A–C, the so-called ‘Geyer’ (or ‘Stefi’) motif, dominates the first movement, while a jagged permutation of descending direction characterizes the second. Bartók decided not to develop the ‘hateful’ third movement, leaving an unconventional two-movement fantasy-like composition, completed on 5 February 1908, just one week before Geyer terminated the relationship. When she chose not to play it, and other violinists showed little interest, Bartók combined the first movement with an orchestrated version of the last of his Fourteen Bagatelles, also based on the ‘Geyer’ motif, to create the Két portré (‘Two Portraits’) op.5. The two movements were titled ‘one ideal’ and ‘one grotesque’.

3. 1908–14.

The many piano pieces of 1908–11 show Bartók’s increasing confidence in using folk materials, as well as a growing emphasis upon grotesquerie, often in association with the ‘Geyer’ motif. Indeed, after this early Violin Concerto none of his works escapes a strong folk influence. In his later lecture ‘The Relation between Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music’ (1941, in Béla Bartók Essays, 348–53), Bartók exemplified three types of arrangement: where the folk melody is mounted like a jewel (ex.1), where melody and accompaniment are almost equal in importance, and where the folk melody is a kind of inspirational ‘motto’ to be creatively developed (ex.2). In original compositions folk elements can be found either in the general spirit of the style, or in specific imitational features; Bartók gave Este a székelyeknél (‘Evening in Transylvania’) from his Ten Easy Pieces as an example which uses such imitation (ex.3).

The Fourteen Bagatelles op.6 (1908) drew from Busoni the comment ‘at last something truly new’. In these short pieces, of varying programmatic and abstract qualities, Bartók pioneered his new style of piano writing, devoid of the unessential embellishments and rippling excesses of late-Romantic piano figuration. The interval of the 7th, first found as a consonance in Bartók’s music at the conclusion of the Second Suite’s third movement, now assumed a role more equal to the 3rd and 5th, akin to its significance in pentatonic structures. Any sense of functional harmony is persistently undermined by the use of ostinato figures (nos.2, 3, 5, 10, 13), quasi-bitonal writing (nos.1, 13), streams of parallel 5ths and 7ths (no.4), of 4ths (no.11), of tritones (no.8), or of piled-up 3rds (nos.7, 9, 10). In pieces where dominant–tonic relations are invoked, they are soon subverted by dissonance (no.10) or mocked, as in the final Valse ‘Ma mie qui danse’ (no.14). Two of the pieces directly quote folksongs, an old Hungarian tune (no.4) and a Slovak song (no.5). ‘Elle est morte’ (no.13), written on the day Bartók received Geyer’s letter ending their relationship, mercilessly distorts features of her motif, until near the close it emerges in ‘pure’ form, at which point Bartók has written in the score ‘meghalt’ (‘she is dead’). The influence of Debussy, about whose works Bartók had recently learnt from Kodály, also lies behind several of the pieces, notably in the use of parallel chords, and in no.3, with its unchanging semitonal ostinato. Some other features, such as the use of 4th chords, could have been spurred either by Bartók’s recent folk-music experiences or by his knowledge of the latest trends of his Western contemporaries. As a whole the Fourteen Bagatelles laid down a blueprint both for Bartók’s new musical language and his new, leaner approach to keyboard writing.

Although Breitkopf & Härtel rejected Busoni’s recommendation of Bartók’s op.6 for publication, on the grounds that they were ‘too difficult and too modern for the public’, the pieces were soon accepted by the Budapest firm Károly Rozsnyai, which had already in March 1908 contracted Bartók to provide an educational edition of J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier – the first of many historic editions which Bartók produced – and agreed to publish his next composition, the Ten Easy Pieces bb51 (1908). Rozsnyai also published Bartók’s first large collection of folksong arrangements, Gyermekeknek (‘For Children’) bb53 (1908–10), which comprised 42 Slovak and 43 Hungarian tunes. (Two of the Hungarian settings were actually by Emma Gruber, and were omitted, along with four other settings, in Bartók’s revision of 1943.) Bartók’s aim in the series was to acquaint young pianists with ‘the simple and non-Romantic beauties of folk music’. In other piano works of the 1908–11 period, such as the Két elégia (‘Two Elegies’) op.8b, he did sometimes return to the elaboration and stylized emotion of his earlier music. The Három burleszk (‘Three Burlesques’) op.8c unite both old and new aspects of Bartók’s piano writing with that capricious programmaticism seen in earlier compositions dedicated to his female friends. For the first Burlesque, dedicated to his student and soon-to-be wife Márta Ziegler, he explained in one of its drafts: ‘Please choose one of the titles: “Anger because of an interrupted visit” or “Rondoletto à capriccio” or “Vengeance is sweet” or “Play it if you can” or “November 27 [1908]”’. Another work dedicated to her, the first of the Vázlatok (‘Seven Sketches’) op.9b, is entitled ‘Leányi arckép’ (‘Portrait of a Girl’) and calls again on the ‘Geyer’ motif. In November 1909 Bartók married Márta Ziegler, and a son, Béla, was born in August 1910. Over the following 15 years she proved his worthy assistant as a copyist, translator and occasional folksong-collecting companion.

The First String Quartet op.7 (1908–9) is an exceptional work of stylistic transition. Although it betrays many disparate influences it is remarkably coherent. The Lento first movement, conceived as a funeral dirge, takes as its main theme the boisterous, jagged transformation of the ‘Geyer’ motif yet within a contrapuntal, Tristanesque mood of yearning; other late-Romantic influences are evident – those of Reger, about whose works Bartók and Geyer had been enthusiastic, and of Strauss. Yet Bartók’s quartet unfolds, in Kodály’s words, a ‘return to life’, with increasingly fast second and finale movements, which are more in keeping with his new, sparer style. The finale establishes the brusque, folk-like style used in the concluding movements of many later chamber works. It twice calls upon pentatonic phrases and in its introduction the cello parodies the opening of a popular Hungarian song, Csak egy szép lány (‘Just a Fair Girl’) by Elemér Szentirmai. The quartet was first performed on 19 March 1910, at one of the earliest concerts of the youthful Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which would also provide the premières of his Second and Fourth Quartets (fig.5).

In the first half of 1910 Bartók’s recognition as a composer appeared to be growing, and with it requests for him to perform. At a ‘Hungarian festival’ concert in Paris on 12 March 1910 he played several of his own works, as well as pieces by Szendy and Kodály. A press comment about these ‘young barbarians’ from Hungary probably prompted Bartók to write one of his most popular piano pieces, the Allegro barbaro bb63, in the following year. In other works of 1910–12 French influences are at their most apparent, with Debussy’s mark perhaps being too readily identified, notably in the orchestral Két kép (‘Two Pictures’) op.10 and the Four Orchestral Pieces op.12. The intervening op.11, the one-act opera A Kékszakállú herceg vára (‘Bluebeard’s Castle’) (1911) is, however, a masterful Hungarian emulation of the realism of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Written to an expressionistic libretto by Béla Balázs about the ‘mystery of the soul’, the action of Bluebeard’s Castle is negligible, involving just two singing protagonists, Bluebeard and his new wife Judith, who progress through the opening of the eponymous castle’s seven doors, drawn by the woman’s curiosity. The opera’s climactic turning-point comes at the fifth door, to Bluebeard’s kingdom, after which Judith’s jealousy becomes obsessive, leading to her eventual entombment, along with all Bluebeard’s previous wives, and eternal darkness. Bartók’s work changed the course of Hungarian opera by successfully developing a fluid form of Hungarian declamation of Balázs’s ballad-like text, based largely upon the inflections of parlando rubato folksong. He also managed to characterize the protagonists modally: Bluebeard through smooth, pentatonic lines; Judith through more chromatic and angular writing. Bartók’s operatic conception owed much to Wagner, particularly in his use of a recurring minor-2nd ‘blood’ motif, while the orchestration is still indebted to Strauss, whose influence in other compositional respects had waned. The adjudicators of two Budapest opera competitions of 1911–12 nonetheless found little merit in this ‘unperformable’ work, and it was assigned to Bartók’s drawer.

The year 1912 signalled Bartók’s withdrawal from public musical life. He was increasingly seen as a radical, out of sympathy with the ruling musical clique led by such figures as the violinist Jenő Hubay. His efforts in 1911 to assist the formation of a New Hungarian Musical Society had, he felt, been futile, and he resigned from it in February 1912. He did not engage in serious composition in 1913, and saw no point in orchestrating his four op.12 pieces until there was some chance of their performance, which only occurred after the war. As a teacher, he was not generating a distinctive ‘school’, as did Hubay, Szendy or, later, Kodály, for he was fundamentally disinterested in questions of piano technique or didactic method. He did, however, in 1913 contribute nearly 50 easy pieces to the Zongoraiskola (‘Piano Method’) bb66, co-authored with Sándor Reschofsky, from which 18 were later selected for Kezdők zongoramuzsikája (‘The First Term at the Piano’, 1929). In one field, folk music, Bartók’s enthusiasms remained undiminished, and he was making reasonable professional progress. These ethnomusicological studies became his life’s mainstay during the following six years of isolation.

Since 1906 Bartók had engaged in many folk-music collecting tours, some in collaboration with Kodály, but many undertaken independently. As well as informing his composition – the first Slovak folksong settings (bb46) date from 1907, and the first Romanian-influenced work, Ket román tánc (‘Two Romanian Dances’) bb56 from 1909–10 – these tours had led to Bartók’s first ethnomusicological articles in 1908 and 1909. These were simple collections of transcriptions of melodies and texts of Transylvanian (Székely) and Transdanubian ballads. By the immediately pre-war years Bartók had developed more theoretical and speculative interests. His first essay on ‘Comparative Musical Folklore’ dates from 1912, and his first published book, about Romanian folksongs from the Hungarian county of Bihor (Bihár) which he had collected in 1909–10, appeared from the Romanian Academy in Bucharest in 1913. As a principle of grouping Bartók early came to adopt the system of the Finnish musicologist Ilmari Krohn, which had been endorsed in 1902–3 after a competition of the International Music Society. In Krohn’s system all songs were transposed so that their final note was G. Songs were then ordered according to the cadence patterns of each verse. Further differentiation was possible according to cadence types and song ranges. With a growing number of modifications, this strongly structural scheme remained the model for Bartók’s many later folk-music editions.

The richness of Romanian folk traditions, which in Bartók’s opinion surpassed the Hungarian because of the greater primitivism and isolation of the Romanian population within the Empire, led him in 1913 to collect folk music of the Romanians of the Hungarian province of Máramaros (Maramureş). Bartók’s excitement about this Máramaros material rivalled that surrounding his pentatonic discovery of 1907. It concerned his identification of an ancient cântec lung, or horă lungă. This ‘long melody’, or ‘long dance’, which he later identified in Arabic, Ukrainian and Persian musics, was strongly instrumental in character, improvisational, highly ornamented, and of indeterminate structure. Until 1913 virtually all of Bartók’s collecting had taken place within Hungary. During June 1913, however, his comparative ethnomusicological interests drew him to north Africa, where among the Berber people around the oasis town of Biskra (now in Algeria) he experienced a folk music strikingly different from that of eastern Europe, in the narrower range and changeability of its scales and the almost constant drumming which accompanied most strict-time melodies. Both his Máramaros and north-African collections were prepared by 1914, but were, because of the war, delayed in publication.

4. 1914–26.

Holidaying in France during July 1914, Bartók was almost caught unawares by the rush into World War I. For several months, as the Russians made incursions into the eastern provinces of Hungary, there were fears that even Budapest would be attacked; folk-music collecting became impossible. Bartók himself fearfully undertook several medical examinations, which however confirmed that he was unfit for service. Later, in lieu of military service, Kodály and Bartók were entrusted with the collection of folksongs from soldiers, which in January 1918 resulted in a patriotic concert in Vienna attended by Empress Zita. From Easter 1915, with the military situation stabilized, Bartók again resumed song collecting, mainly in Slovak regions fairly close to the capital, although in 1916 he ventured out into Transylvania on his task with the military. Romania’s sudden attack on Transylvania in August 1916 ensured, however, that his further collecting did not venture too far from the Hungarian plain.

Although Bartók hardly performed at all during the war, its years were bounteous in folk-music arrangements. While 1914 had seen the start of work on two Hungarian piano sets – Tizenöt magyar parasztdal (‘15 Hungarian Peasant Songs’) bb79 and Three Hungarian Folk Tunes bb80b – both of which were completed in 1918, 1915 was a ‘Romanian’ year: piano settings of Romanian Christmas Songs (Colinde) bb67, the Sonatina bb69 (in 1931 transcribed for orchestra as Erdélyi táncok, ‘Transylvanian Dances’); and one of Bartók’s most popular works, the Román nepi táncok (‘Romanian Folk Dances’) bb68. The period 1916–17, by turn, was fruitful with three sets of Slovak folksongs for a variety of vocal resources (bb73, 77, 78).

Bartók’s rate of composing original works was not impaired by his wartime conditions. Indeed, his isolation led to a more unified and concentrated compositional approach. With his three-movement Second String Quartet op.17 (1914–17) he maintained something of the nervous introspection of the First Quartet’s opening in the outer movements, but for the central Allegro molto capriccioso movement (with which he experienced the most difficulty in composition) he drew on inspiration from north Africa, in the limited range of its harsh tune, in the drumming accompaniment and in the exaggerated embellishments. The Piano Suite op.14 (1916) similarly shows in its third movement a north-African influence, with its urgent ostinato and limited scalar patterns. This suite, originally in five movements with the symmetrical pattern of movement tonalities B–F–B–D–B, was later reduced to four movements with the removal of the second-movement Andante, yet still retains a strong interest in pitch symmetries, above all in its Scherzo. In a radio interview of 1944 Bartók described his intention in this work of refining piano technique to achieve ‘a style more of bone and muscle’.

Also in 1916 Bartók deviated from his established pattern of vocal settings of folksongs to compose his only mature Lieder: two sets of Öt dal (‘Five Songs’), opp.15 and 16. The quality of the poetry differs greatly between the works. Op.15 is a setting in parlando declamatory style of four love poems by a young woman, Klára Gombossy, with whom Bartók was involved during his 1915–16 collecting tours in Slovakia, with an extra poem by another adolescent friend. Bartók soon realized the folly of his musical (and personal) ways, and ensured that these songs were neither published nor performed during his lifetime. The op.16 songs are settings of poems by Hungary’s leading progressive poet, Endre Ady. They exhibit a characteristic melancholy, with autumnal themes of isolation, loss and despair. Bartók’s style of setting is less folk-influenced in these songs, but rather reflects a continuation of German Lieder traditions, especially in the complementary rhythmic relationships between voice and piano. This work also pays stylistic homage to the composer Béla Reinitz, well known for his Ady settings, to whom Bartók dedicated the set in 1920.

Most significant professionally among Bartók’s wartime compositions was his one-act ballet A fából faragott királyfi (‘The Wooden Prince’) op.17, written to a scenario again by Balázs. The idea of this ballet had grown out of the visit of the Ballets Russes to Budapest in 1912. By March 1913 the Budapest Opera had requested a work from Bartók, but its composition and following orchestration had taken him until early 1917. In the journal Magyar színpad at the time of the ballet’s production Balázs described how the work reflects ‘that very common and profound tragedy when the creation becomes the rival of the creator, and of the pain and glory of the situation in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the picture to the painter’. Bartók crafted the work as a symmetrical tripartite symphonic poem, with the final part recalling materials from the first part in reverse order. Its music, as its plot, portrays the constant tension between the ideal prince and the grotesque puppet, who share the same thematic material.

Given Bartók’s fatalistic attitude towards his own compositions, he was surprised by the ballet’s highly successful première on 12 May 1917 under Egisto Tango (to whom he later dedicated the work). Not only did this success lead to many repeat performances of the work, but it also encouraged the Opera in Budapest to arrange for the première of Bluebeard’s Castle, which took place on 24 May 1918. Importantly for the future, the enterprising Viennese publisher Universal Edition now contracted to publish Bartók’s compositions, an event which he considered his ‘greatest success as a composer, so far’ and a sure road to greater international exposure. Universal worked hard to clear the backlog of the composer’s many unpublished pieces, and, despite Bartók’s frequent criticisms, remained his main publisher for the next two decades.

The last years of the 1910s witnessed widespread political and social dislocation in Hungary. Bartók and his family, living at Rákoskeresztúr, some kilometres east of Budapest, found transportation to the city increasingly difficult; food and fuel supplies became scarce; they had no electricity or running water. Medical help had to be brought from Budapest when in October 1918 Bartók succumbed to Spanish influenza during the pandemic. Finally in 1920 he was obliged to move to Budapest, where for two years his family took rooms in the apartment of the banker József Lukács. Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed. The new national boundaries, based on principles of majority ethnic self-determination and ratified by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, saw Hungary stripped of those very areas of Transylvania and the northern, Slovak territories which Bartók had found ethnologically most interesting. For some years national tensions in the region ensured the unviability of collecting expeditions. Apart from a brief expedition to Turkey in November 1936 Bartók never again engaged in fieldwork, even within post-Trianon Hungary (as Kodály, for instance, continued to do). The remainder of his life was largely devoted to analyzing and categorizing his existing collection, which by 1918 numbered about 10,000 melodies (including 3,404 Romanian, 3,223 Slovak and 2,771 Hungarian), or to comparative studies involving knowledge of a large number of mainly eastern European collections.

With the succession of Hungarian governments during 1918–19 Bartók found himself courted for many positions, including director of the Opera, and head of a planned music department at the National Museum, although neither came to pass. In late October 1918 he was appointed by the liberal Károlyi government to be a member of the National Council, and under the short-lived communist government of Béla Kun in 1919 served on its music directorate, along with Kodály, Dohnányi and Reinitz. Bartók bore these rapidly changing events with apparent nonchalance, as he did the establishment of the right-wing rule of Miklós Horthy in the autumn of 1919. Yet he did think of settling abroad, with a first preference for Transylvania (by then part of Romania), followed by Austria or Germany. Of greater day-to-day significance to him was the continuation of sabbatical leave from the Academy of Music and of his attachment to the ethnographic department of the National Museum, both of which ceased in mid-1920. In 1920 he also had to fend off the first of several challenges in the press from the Hungarian right wing that, through his recent folk-music work, he was a supporter of the Romanian national cause and a traitor to Hungary. (This did not stop him in later years being accused by the Romanian authorities of being a Hungarian revisionist.)

Amid this turbulence Bartók succeeded in writing his iconoclastic pantomime A csodálatos mandarin (‘The Miraculous Mandarin’) op.19. He drafted the work in short score to a scenario by Menyhért (Melchior) Lengyel between October 1918 and May 1919, but only orchestrated it in 1924. Lengyel’s is a superficially sordid plot about a prostitute, her ‘minders’ and clients, with a deeper message, conveyed by her last client, the Mandarin, about the powers of human love. The unsavoury aspect of the work caused it to be withdrawn immediately after its November 1926 première in Cologne, and contributed to the continual postponement of its Budapest première until December 1945, after the composer’s death. Bartók approached the narrative in a mosaic-like way, using brief intervallically-determined ‘tone patches’ of variable tonal clarity and density of texture, which parallel the fluctuating sense of tension. The Miraculous Mandarin is, however, much more than graphic ‘mime music’. Through various revisions up until 1931 Bartók refined a truly symphonic concept based upon his musical symbols of desire and love. It was a continual frustration to him, then, that this work, which he considered one of his finest compositions, so languished, while The Wooden Prince, a work he soon came to dislike, was staged more frequently.

With Mandarin and its immediate predecessor, the Three Studies op.18 for piano, Bartók launched into his most radical, Expressionist phase (1918–22), during which he believed he was approaching some kind of atonal goal. In his essay ‘Das Problem der neuen Musik’ (Melos, i/5, 1920, pp.107–10) he referred four times to Schoenberg, and recognized the need ‘for the equality of rights of the individual 12 tones’; he drew examples of the ‘previously undreamt-of wealth of transitory nuances [now] at our disposal’ from his own opp.18 and 19. The following Improvizációk magyar parasztdalokra (‘Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs’) op.20 (his last work to receive an opus number) also showed a bold linking of innovative techniques of folksong arrangement and atonal direction. In ‘The Relation of Folk-Song to the Development of the Art Music of Our Time’ (The Sackbut, ii/1, 1921, pp.5–11) Bartók explained that ‘the opposition of the two tendencies reveals all the more clearly the individual properties of each, while the effect of the whole becomes all the more powerful’; he further wrote of the peasant tunes saving such works as op.20 from a ‘wearying or surfeiting extreme’. Yet towards the end of the 1920s Bartók claimed, in apparent contradiction to such statements, that atonality was incompatible with a style based on (necessarily tonal) folk music. In an interview in 1929 he even suggested that tonality in his early postwar works was not lacking ‘but at times is more-or-less veiled either by idiosyncrasies of the harmonic texture or by temporary deviations in the melodic curves’; the Violin Sonatas nos.1 and 2 (bb84 and 85) for example, are, he maintained, in C minor and C respectively. However, though these works of 1921–2 show further merging of folk-derived ideas and atonality, it is difficult to consider them in a key. Moreover, despite their titles, they only pay lip-service to traditional sonata principles. The first movement of the three-movement First Sonata adopts such a strongly variational approach to thematic materials that the point of recapitulation loses its traditional force. The two-movement Second Sonata, with its slower-faster progression is indebted to a rhapsodic model, while in long-term function the tritonal relationship F–C is of primary importance.

During the first half of the 1920s Bartók’s compositional output slackened, not least because of his intense ethnomusicological work. Already in an essay of January 1918 he had articulated his old–new stylistic distinction in Hungarian folk music; by 1921 Kodály and Bartók had finalized a modest collection of Hungarian folksongs from Transylvania, published two years later; in 1924 Bartók’s transcription and analysis of over 320 Hungarian songs was unveiled in his A magyar népdal. It appeared in German the following year, and in 1931 in English with the title Hungarian Folk Music. Bartók was also engaged during 1921–3 in compiling a two-volume study of some 1,800 Slovak peasant melodies, which he sent for publication in Czechoslovakia. (A third Slovak volume was completed in 1928, although all three remained unpublished during Bartók’s lifetime.) He then immediately moved to prepare a volume of Romanian Christmas songs, which occupied much of his time from late 1923 until April 1926. (After many trials, only the musical part of this study appeared in a self-funded edition in 1935.)

The other draw on Bartók’s time in the postwar years was his revitalized performing career. Amid the revolutionary atmosphere of 1918–19 he had unexpectedly re-emerged onto the concert platform, after seven years of virtual absence, with a willingness to perform in chamber, orchestral soloist and recitalist roles. One of his first Budapest concerts, on 21 April 1919, introduced his wartime compositions opp.14, 16 and 18 along with one of the earliest performances of the Second Quartet op.17. With the war over and Universal rapidly publishing his scores, Bartók was keen to grasp every opportunity for promoting his works through his own playing. Over the next 12 years he took part in over 300 concerts in 15 different countries. He also quickly took advantage of the promotional, as well as much-needed monetary, opportunities in writing for the international press, for which during 1920–21 he contributed over 20 scholarly or journalistic essays. Already by February 1920 he had re-established a performing connection with Berlin, where the conductor Hermann Scherchen and the theatrical entrepreneur Max Reinhardt sought to aid his cause. Further Hungarian performances and a concert tour of Romania (Transylvania) in February 1922 preceded a series of major performances during March to May of 1922 in Britain, France and Germany, which culminated in the German premières of Bluebeard’s Castle and The Wooden Prince on 13 May in Frankfurt. Bartók’s frequent partner in these concerts and further western European concerts in 1923 was the Hungarian-born violinist Jelly Arányi, to whom he dedicated both violin sonatas. Bartók was impressed by how seriously these sonatas were received, although his avowedly percussive approach to the keyboard was deemed unfortunate by many British critics, brought up on Matthay’s views about relaxation and use of weight. The critics also had difficulties comprehending the frequent thematic segregation which exists between the instruments’ parts in these two sonatas. Bartók’s higher profile soon led to his inclusion in an international chamber music festival in Salzburg in August 1922, after which the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) was founded. He became a staunch supporter of the ISCM; during the 1920s and 30s many of his pieces were performed, some for the first time, at its annual festivals. He served on its first festival jury in 1924, and was nominated to convene the aborted 1940 Budapest Festival.

Despite Bartók’s growing opportunities for performing internationally, which extended during 1923–5 to include Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, he did not immediately start to compose new works for this audience. His only composition of 1923, the orchestral Táncszvit (‘Dance Suite’) bb86a, was commissioned as a companion to Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus and Dohnányi’s Ünnepi nyitány (‘Festival Overture’) for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the union of Budapest. The style of the suite marked a retreat from his recent expressive radicality, not least through Bartók’s re-acceptance of an accommodating rather than oppositional relationship between tune and accompaniment. It employs idealized peasant musics in its six movements, which are played without a break and connected by a ritornello theme in a serene Hungarian style. Its first movement, for instance, recalls the chromatic ‘Arabic’ inflections, the second, a brash, minor-3rd-based Hungarian idiom, while the third movement introduces an imitation of Hungarian bagpipe music followed by a section suggesting Romanian folk violins. The later movements reflect a growing stylistic internationalism, culminating in the colourful medley of the sixth movement. Bartók had also drafted a Slovak-styled movement, but omitted this from the final version of the piece. His next composition, Falun (Dedinské scény) (‘Village Scenes’) bb87a was, however, a setting in five movements of old Slovak ceremonial melodies. These mainly Lydian or Mixolydian tunes were given inventive ‘motto’-like settings for female voice and piano; in 1926 the final three movements were arranged for female voices and chamber orchestra (bb87b) to a commission from the American League of Composers. The Village Scenes, with their themes of love, marriage and babies, are dedicated to Ditta Pásztory, whom Bartók had married in August 1923 following a sudden divorce from Márta Ziegler. Pásztory bore Bartók a son, Péter, in July 1924.

Apart from Village Scenes Bartók did not compose between August 1923 and June 1926, and by February 1925, as earlier in 1913–14, he was writing himself off as an ‘ex-composer’. Nevertheless, he did devote much time in 1924 to orchestrating The Miraculous Mandarin, when there were early hopes of a first performance in Germany. His Dance Suite, however, gained a highly publicized performance, under Václav Talich, at the Prague ISCM orchestral festival in May 1925, which catapulted Bartók’s work onto the international stage. Over the following two years it received over 60 performances in major European and American centres.

5. 1926–34.

Between March 1925 and March 1926 Bartók visited Italy at least four times. There his long-standing interest in Baroque music, previously centred upon Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin, was roused by the keyboard music of such Italian Baroque composers as Benedetto Marcello, Michelangelo Rossi, Della Ciaia, Frescobaldi and Zipoli. From October 1926 he started to perform his own piano transcriptions of their works and those of their contemporaries, 11 of which he later refined for publication. This new Baroque passion, coupled with the stimuli of rhythmic discoveries in Romanian Christmas songs, the additional performance opportunities which radio now afforded, and the hearing of Stravinsky’s latest piano works (notably the Concerto for piano and wind), pushed Bartók into an almost frenzied phase of composition of piano works for his own performance. With these works of 1926 he initiated, in his own analysis, a fundamental creative shift from a Beethovenian ideal of artistic profundity to one more orientated towards the ultimate musical craftsman, Bach. In compositional process, however, he remained still a composer of essentially Romantic habit, a believer in inspired genius, whose music was ‘determined by instinct and sensibility’ rather than by theory, and who physically composed, as he explained in a 1925 interview, ‘between the desk and the piano’.

While Bartók’s international status had grown, his only available work for piano and orchestra remained the 1905 arrangement of the Rhapsody op.1 bb36b. By 1926, it was not only a stylistic anachronism, but also – as with the early Piano Quintet and First Suite – an occasional embarrassment for Bartók, when audiences took a liking to these early works over his more recent and dissonant compositions. From June to November 1926 he set about equipping himself with a new piano repertory: a three-movement Sonata (bb88), two collections of piano pieces, Szabadban (‘Out of Doors’) bb89 and Kilenc kis zongoradarab (‘Nine Little Piano Pieces’) bb90, and for his orchestral engagements the First Piano Concerto bb91. Three further short piano pieces later found a home within the Mikrokosmos collection. In these works of Bartók’s ‘piano year’, he provided a preview of so many of the qualities which were to come to fullest maturity in the works of his ‘golden age’, 1934–40. ‘Az éjszaka zenéje’ (‘The Night’s Music’) from Out of Doors, in depicting the nocturnal sounds of the Hungarian plain, introduced a genre of stylized representation of nature which would be repeatedly invoked up to his Third Piano Concerto of 1945. The ‘Menuetto’ from bb90 presented a pioneering example of Bartók’s principle of expansion and contraction of scalar intervals – in this case notably a major 2nd into a perfect 4th (see ex.4) – which would come to its most magisterial expression ten years later in the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. The finale of the Sonata revealed Bartók’s skilful imitation of traditional styles in the service of his concept of unity through variation. The movement’s ritornello theme also provided the basis for the three intervening episodes, the first in imitation of vigorous peasant chanting, the second, of the peasant flute, and the third, of village fiddlers. Bartók drafted another longer episode, in bagpipe style, which developed a separate life as ‘Musettes’ (in bb89).

Straddling the borderline between Baroque and barbarism is the hammering rhythmic impulse which underlies the First Piano Concerto. From this impulse spring the main themes of all three movements. In the commencement of the slow, middle movement that impulse also provides the mechanism for the integration of piano and percussion, which Bartók explored further a decade later in the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. The sharp-edged timbral world of Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and wind is often alluded to in Bartók’s, but it is especially evident in the middle movement, from which the strings have been banished entirely. Bartók’s concerto, played first under Furtwängler at the 1927 ISCM Festival in Frankfurt, proved only moderately successful as a new carte-de-visite. Its first edition was so studded with errors that it had to be replaced, and Bartók also confessed in 1939 that ‘its writing is a bit difficult – one might even say very difficult! – as much for orchestra as for audience’. Even he found its solo part taxing, and with these experiences in mind he ensured that his Second Piano Concerto was more tuneful and less bristling with difficulties.

Having updated his piano repertory Bartók turned his attention in 1927–8 to chamber music, starting with the Third String Quartet (bb93), composed during the summer of 1927. In this quartet he attained the ultimate compression of his formal, pitch and rhythmic materials. Adorno (1929) wrote: ‘What is decisive is the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original tectonics. The traditional four movements are here fused into a single movement of about 17 minutes’ duration. A new colouristic approach to string sonority is displayed, partly inspired by Berg’s Lyrische Suite, which Bartók had recently heard. The score bristles with ‘special effects’ – glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul tasto, ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating vibrato, strumming, and their combinations – all of which give the piece its startling piquancy. In October 1928 it was awarded joint first prize, with Casella’s Serenata, in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, where it was given its first performance on 30 December of the same year.

Meanwhile, during the summer of 1928, Bartók had composed his Fourth String Quartet bb95. While taking over the expanded palette of string sonorities of no.3, the Fourth is formally very different. Originally conceived in only four movements, Bartók then added another (the published fourth movement) to provide a symmetrical five-movement structure. The slow, third movement, in a style reminiscent of ‘The Night’s Music’ from Out of Doors, is the work’s kernel. The second movement’s tight thematic material is reflected, in more open guise, in the fourth, entirely pizzicato movement. The first movement’s themes are also loosely mirrored in the finale, which ends with a coda that borrows liberally from the first movement’s conclusion. Such symmetrical thinking about form had been evident in Bartók’s works since the 1910s, but had never been expressed by him as clearly, either in the music or in his own analysis. The pitch relations of the quartet operate at a high level of abstraction, with much interplay between contracted and expanded expressions of short cells, yet in rhythm certain folk models are more apparent. In the first movement, for instance, Bulgarian-type irregular rhythms are used; the third movement involves rhythmic elements of both ‘old’ Hungarian and Romanian horă lungă precedent.

Two further chamber works, the Violin Rhapsodies (bb94, 96), originate from 1928. They were intended for Bartók’s many performances with Hungarian violinists, as milder alternatives or adjuncts to his violin sonatas; but he also arranged them for violin and orchestra, as well as the first for cello and piano, on a request from Casals. Both pieces follow the traditional lassú–friss (slow–fast) rhapsodic pattern which Bartók knew so well from his scholarly work during the 1910s on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies for that composer’s complete edition. Bartók’s Rhapsodies are cunningly devised concatenations of predominantly Romanian melodies, although Hungarian and Ruthenian tunes are represented. The First Rhapsody was dedicated to Szigeti, who had recently made a violin and piano arrangement of seven For Children pieces, and the Second to Székely (fig.8), who had similarly arranged Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances.

The concerts for which Bartók had intended his many compositions of 1926–8 found willing entrepreneurs. The late 1920s were Bartók’s heyday as a pianist, with good offerings of concert opportunities, increasing radio work and, from 1928, contracts for producing gramophone records. By this time he often had the chance to specialize in playing his own works. When Bartók was granted a sabbatical from the Budapest Academy for 1927–8 he was finally able to realize a plan he had nurtured ever since graduating, of a concert tour of the USA. Notwithstanding the débâcle of the first two concerts on 22 and 23 December 1928, when the New York PO, under Mengelberg, proved unable to perform the First Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody op.1 had to be substituted at the last minute, Bartók’s two-month coast-to-coast tour, with its mixture of small lecture-recitals and large concert events, was a successful musical and promotional undertaking as well as a personally eye-opening experience. In America he performed especially with Szigeti and his former student Reiner, under whose baton the First Piano Concerto did eventually have its American première on 13 February 1928. By 1929 Bartók was starting to live the life of the itinerant performer. During that year’s first four months he undertook a three-week tour of the Soviet Union, followed by concerts in Switzerland, Denmark, Britain, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, where on 20 March he heard both his recent string quartets in sympathetically received performances from the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet. Even the pessimistic Bartók had good reason to be ‘relaxed and happy’, as his son reported of him on his 48th birthday.

Vocal music absorbed Bartók’s compositional energies during 1929–30. Kodály’s increasing list of Hungarian folksong arrangements jogged Bartók into contributing one last substantial set of voice and piano arrangements: Húsz magyar népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’) bb98. He grouped these songs thematically – four sad, four dancing, seven diverse and five new-style – but with no intention that they be performed in order. Bartók’s settings mostly fall within his creative, ‘motto’ approach. In publication it was not the music but the German song translations which caused the most acute problems, as had often been the case with previous vocal works, notably his settings of Ady in the Five Songs bb72. Unlike Kodály, Bartók was insistent upon an idiomatic German translation which faithfully maintained the east European musical rhythms but also adhered as far as possible to natural German word accentuation. With Twenty Hungarian Folksongs a publishing compromise was finally reached, with both poetic and literal translations being provided for some songs. During early 1930 Bartók also arranged his four-movement Magyar népdalok (‘Hungarian Folksongs’) bb99 for mixed chorus.

For the Cantata profana ‘A kilenc csodaszarvas’ (‘The Nine Enchanted Stags’) bb100, written during the summer of 1930, Bartók set his own poetic working of an ancient Romanian epic ballad for tenor and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra. However, before making the score’s final copy, he replaced the text with a skilful Hungarian translation, of which he was particularly fond and later independently recorded. A three-movement work running without a break and anchored firmly in D, the cantata marked an important stage in Bartók’s long-term reversion to more overtly tonal writing and longer thematic statements. His strengthening interest in symmetries can be clearly illustrated by comparing the mirrored nature of the modes with which the work begins (D–E–F–G–A–B–C–D) and ends (D–E–F–G–A–B–C–D). This latter, Slovak-influenced ‘acoustic’ form (so-called because of its congruence with the lower degrees of the harmonic series), through its association with the cantata’s closing words ‘From clear and cooling mountain springs’, came to be recognized as Bartók’s symbol for the purity of nature. Of all Bartók’s compositions, the Cantata profana has elicited perhaps the greatest variety of interpretations of its overall musical form – implied four-movement structure (Ujfalussy), ‘large sonata form’ (Somfai), five-act classical dramatic form (Szabolcsi), to list but three – as well as of its textual message, with its components of initiation–transformation–purification, naturalistic freedom and pantheistic integration. Particularly in its aspects of generational conflict, the cantata has been seen as emblematic of Bartók’s response to the rising fascism of its time.

As Bartók approached his 50th birthday he attracted the accolades of international fame, and became more overtly committed to internationalist goals. In late 1930 he received news of awards, namely the French Légion d’Honneur and the Hungarian Corvin wreath. He was honoured again in 1932 with a Romanian cultural award. While his interests in national folk musics remained intense, he was tending to write more generally and more comparatively about folk music, culminating in his study Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje (‘Our [Hungarian] Folk Music and the Folk Music of Neighbouring Peoples’) which first appeared in 1934. As a composer Bartók harboured, even into the early 1940s, the aim of adding two or three further ‘national’ parts to his Cantata profana, as a musical tribute to the increasingly tenuous brotherhood of Danube-basin peoples. As a performer, too, he more sought international than national acclaim, having decided in 1930 no longer to perform his own works in unresponsive Budapest. He maintained this ban until late 1936, although he still sometimes played his own works in other Hungarian towns and occasionally other composers’ music in the capital. None of Bartók’s major works of the 1930s or 1940s received its première in Budapest.

On 13 January 1931 Bartók’s internationalism took more concrete form in his acceptance of an invitation to join the Permanent Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nations’ Commission for Intellectual Co-operation, where his colleagues included Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray and Karel Čapek. Over the next five years he occasionally introduced proposals about musical issues requiring international collaboration – gramophone records, Urtext and facsimile editions – but in 1934 also framed a proposal about artistic and scientific freedom. His joining of the Permanent Committee coincided with his much-quoted statement of compositional internationalism, in a letter of 10 January 1931 to the Romanian diplomat and music historian, Octavian Beu. While recognizing the three sources of his creative work as Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak, with the strongest influence being Hungarian, Bartók expressed his belief in

the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts. I try – to the best of my ability – to serve this idea in my music; therefore I don’t reject any influence, be it Slovak, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source. The source must only be clean, fresh and healthy!

Bartók’s consolidation of a more thematic and less rhythmically reiterative style continued in his next major work, the Second Piano Concerto bb101, completed in October 1931. Symmetries abound at many pitch and rhythmic levels, as also in its overall five-part ‘bridge’ (ABCBA) structure, with the third movement being a free variation of the first, and the second movement of an Adagio–Scherzo–Adagio construction. Stravinsky is again a decided influence upon Bartók’s use of instruments – the strings are not used until the second movement – and upon his thematic material, which occasionally alludes to the early Parisian ballets, notably The Firebird and Petrushka. Apart from this concerto Bartók composed no substantial new works during 1931–4.

During these fallow years, coinciding with the worst years of the Depression, Bartók was occupied with several arrangements of existing compositions and series of miniature ‘educational’ pieces. His publishers, anxious to counter falling sales by promoting his more popular piano or vocal compositions in new quarters, encouraged him to engage in four orchestral arrangements: of his Sonatina (via Gertler’s violin and piano transcription) as Erdélyi táncok (‘Transylvanian Dances’) bb102b in 1931; of five of his piano pieces from 1908–11 in Magyar képek (‘Hungarian Sketches’) bb103 in 1931; of nine of his Tizenöt magyar parasztdal (‘Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs’) bb79 as Magyar parasztdalok (‘Hungarian Peasant Songs’) bb107 in 1933; and, in 1933, of five of his Húsz magyar népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’) (1929) as Magyar népdalok (‘Hungarian Folksongs’) bb108 for voice and orchestra. Bartók did not manage to complete other planned orchestrations of selected pieces from Out of Doors and Nine Little Piano Pieces; nor did he embark upon a planned ‘string symphony’ based on the Fourth String Quartet.

Apart from this relatively mechanical work of arrangement, Bartók composed the Forty-four Duos bb104 for violins during 1931. These pieces arose through a request from the German violin pedagogue Erich Doflein for permission to set some of Bartók’s For Children pieces in Doflein’s Geigenschulwerk. Bartók was excited by Doflein’s project and offered to write new pieces which would introduce simple folk music (or, in two numbers, imitations) from a much greater range of cultures: Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and ‘Arabic’, as well as Slovak and Hungarian. When in 1932 Bartók saw many of these pieces within the context of Doflein’s five-volume progressive ‘violin school’, he formed a broader plan of his own: a series of piano pieces, graded from very easy to recital standard, which he later called Mikrokosmos (bb105). During the summer of 1932 he composed some 35 pieces, ranging in difficulty from ‘In Dorian Mode’ (no.32) to ‘Chromatic Invention III’ (no.145). When his young son, Péter, began piano lessons with his father in 1933, Bartók had an immediate incentive to compose many simple pieces; the same year he composed a further 30 pieces, including seven which eventually found their way into the first volume, comprising the easiest pieces, and nearly half of the sixth volume, the most difficult. Another 20 pieces were added to the collection in 1934, after which Bartók produced only occasional items until a second phase of intense activity in 1937–9.

6. 1934–40.

In the summer of 1934 Bartók achieved a professional goal he had desired for over two decades: a full-time position as an ethnomusicologist. Within weeks of Dohnányi being appointed director of the Budapest Academy of Music Bartók received permission to transfer to the Academy of Sciences, where for the following six years, in conjunction with Kodály, he led a small team of folk-music researchers in an omnibus Hungarian folk-music project. Bartók was overjoyed at the release from institutional teaching, although he still maintained a small number of private piano pupils to supplement his income. The Academy of Sciences’ project was based upon a proposal which Bartók and Kodály had originally made to the Kisfaludy Society in 1913 for a ‘complete, rigorously critical and exact publication’ of Hungarian folk music. The number of items, estimated at nearly 6,000 in 1913, had grown to about 14,000 by the time Bartók closed the collection in 1938. Of these about one fifth had been collected by Bartók himself. By 1940 he had succeeded in refining a complex, closed classification system for the melodies, which paid particular attention to rhythmic characteristics, and his team had transcribed or revised existing transcriptions of the tunes, yet he had managed neither to draft a justificatory introduction nor to address important editorial questions. More seriously, his classification system had diverged considerably from that which Kodály had understood would be used. (Over the years of their acquaintance Bartók and Kodály had come to differ on many fundamental questions on music, for instance on the relative melodic versus rhythmic importance in categorization, and even on how differentiated or normalized the ideal transcription should be.) Although both Bartók and Kodály are recognized as the general editors of the Academy’s A magyar népzene tára series, the first volume of which appeared in 1951, it was neither Bartók’s nor Kodály’s ‘system’ of classification which would ultimately prevail, but rather a principally genre-based one to which Pál Járdányi was a principal contributor. The first volume of the re-assembled Bartók system only appeared in 1991.

Bartók’s transfer to the Academy of Sciences gave him greater flexibility in engaging his interests in other folk musics. He made final revisions to his Slovak study in 1935–6 and continued to work on his Romanian collections, leading to an expensive, failed attempt at self-publication in 1940. The draft of another study, posthumously published as Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor (Princeton, NJ, 1976), resulted from Bartók’s fieldwork in Anatolia during 1936, as part of his assignment to advise the Turkish authorities on the collecting of national folksong and other educational questions. He also further indulged his passion for east European folk music, in which he paid particular attention to south Slavic and Bulgarian musics. The irregular Bulgarian rhythms and metres, awareness of which had caused him considerably to revise his notations of Romanian folk music in the early 1930s, came to exert an important force upon his own compositions, and he developed but did not follow through plans to visit Bulgaria in 1935 to pursue these interests.

As a pianist Bartók started to claw back engagements from the depressed levels of 1932–4, and during 1934–40 he performed approximately equally at home and abroad. Engagements abroad were often hard to secure, due to the widespread popularity of ‘home preference’ schemes to assist local artists, to increasing tensions with Romania, and also to lack of opportunities for Bartók in Nazi Germany. Since 1933 German radio stations had not offered him engagements; after two years of negotiations to arrange an orchestral performance in Berlin, he finally in mid-1937 decided no longer to seek engagements in Germany. Accordingly, in the final years of the 1930s he performed more in Hungary, although he also developed some new touring circuits in Switzerland, the Low Countries and Italy, where he gave his last European performances abroad in December 1939. As a soloist during these years Bartók highlighted his Piano Concerto no.2, which was gaining a considerably better press than no.1. As a chamber player he forged an important new partnership, with his wife, Ditta (fig.11). Their concert début took place on 16 January 1938, as the two pianists in the première of Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Over the following five years she was his frequent stage companion.

The years 1934–40 constituted, notwithstanding the slide towards war, the pinnacle of Bartók the composer; he produced masterpieces in each of his major genres: chamber, orchestral, vocal and piano music. The few works of his final American years are, despite their concert popularity, probably best seen as compositional addenda to these powerfully integrated creative statements. Apart from an arrangement for piano of several of the Forty-four Duos, entitled Petite suite (bb113), all pieces of this period are original compositions, nearly all written to commission. They exhibit a greater distance from any models of Bartók’s contemporaries than do the works of preceding or following periods, and are also less immediately reflective of his recent folk-music findings than hitherto. Their homogeneity of style is unparalleled in Bartók’s output, and reflects the full flowering of that Bachian aesthetic to which he had been gravitating since 1926. Technically, this achievement was partly the result of the advanced state of evolution of Bartók’s contrapuntal and chromatic writing, and also of his handling of variation. In his later Harvard lectures (1943) Bartók identified polymodal chromaticism as a main ingredient of his idiom. By this he meant a kind of chromaticism which draws its elements from strands of different modes based upon a single fundamental note; ex.5 shows a typical, Lydian-Phrygian polymodal construction. From this Bartók further developed a structural (that is, non-embellishing) type of ‘melodic new chromaticism’ in which earlier modal obligations are dispensed with, even though allegiance to one focal note is retained. The opening ‘Arabic’ melody in the Dance Suite was identified by Bartók as his first ‘new chromatic’ melody, while he also referred, in his lectures, to examples in a majority of the works of 1934–40, of which the twisting A-based fugal theme in the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is perhaps the most famous. The 12-note ‘row’ theme found in the outer movements of the Violin Concerto (bb117) of 1937–8 (Bartók’s second concerto for the instrument, though never numbered by the composer) is another instance of such chromaticism, with which, as reported by Yehudi Menuhin, Bartók ‘wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all 12 tones and still remain tonal’.

Bartók’s fascination with documenting the ever-changing variants of folk music had by the mid-to-late 1930s also become an ingrained aspect of his compositional strategy. In 1937 he declared to the Belgian scholar Denijs Dille that ‘I do not like to repeat a musical thought unchanged, and I never repeat a detail unchanged …. The extreme variety that characterizes our folk music is, at the same time, a manifestation of my own nature’. That variational orientation is seen in Bartók’s very occasional theme-and-variation movements, such as the second movement of the Violin Concerto ‘no.2’; but much more in his frequent writing of finales as variants of opening movements, his incessant variation (often involving inversion) of exposition material in recapitulations, and his bar-by-bar evolving variation of thematic and motivic materials. It is not by chance that in over 30 statements of Bartók’s 12-note theme in the opening movement of the Violin Concerto no two statements are identical.

Most representative of the 1934–40 period, although each is of a very different construction, are four chamber works. Bartók’s last two string quartets, the Fifth (bb110) of 1934 and the Sixth (bb119) of 1939, frame the period’s output. Written to a commission from Elizabeth Sprague-Coolidge, the Fifth, like its predecessor, has five movements arranged symmetrically around the central, third movement, in this case a Scherzo and Trio in Bulgarian metres. Bartók’s variational play is seen nowhere better than in a banal ‘barrel-organ’ interlude near the end of the finale, which turns out to be an inverted, diatonic relative of that movement’s opening chromatic theme. By contrast, the Sixth String Quartet is in four movements, and stylistically retrospective, even nostalgic. Its mesto, solo viola ritornello theme recalls the opening dirge of the First Quartet, while the slow finale looks back to the grim ending of the Quartet no.2. Bartók originally intended to have a fast, dance-like finale, but the brooding ritornello came so to grow through the work – in duration, complexity and instrumental involvement – that it eventually consumed the entire role of finale.

Between these two quartets Bartók composed two chamber works for very different ensembles; in 1937 the Sonata for two pianos and percussion bb115, his only chamber work to involve percussion, and in 1938 Contrasts bb116, the only one to involve a wind instrument. The three orchestral works which Bartók had written since 1926 which used piano and percussion had convinced him that one piano could not provide sufficient balance to the sharp sounds of the percussion section – hence the Sonata’s instrumentation. Bartók demanded intricate coordination from the two percussionists (although six were used in one early Italian performance), not just in the virtuoso playing of their seven instruments but also in achieving subtle distinctions of sound quality through using different wooden or metal beaters, and even the blade of a pocket-knife. The three-movement structure, as with the immediately preceding Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, moves from a ‘closed’, twisting opening chromaticism to the open, ‘acoustic’ scale forms of the finale. Moreover, the larger and smaller sections of these two works were early identified to have an uncanny sense of proportion, which the Hungarian analyst Ernő Lendvai from the late 1940s onwards claimed as manifestations of golden section principles (See Fibonacci series, and Golden number). Although Bartók appears not to have known about such proportions, and many of Lendvai’s calculations have since been discredited, it is undeniable that a fine sense of proportion and of chromatic–diatonic balance was articulated in these two works. Altogether different in form and intention was Bartók’s Contrasts, commissioned by Benny Goodman as a light two-movement piece of about six minutes’ duration, with each movement to fit on one record side. Bartók, however, exceeded both duration and movement expectations by producing a three-movement work which lasts some 15 minutes. Within the original slow–fast rhapsodic frame, he inserted a ‘Relaxation’ movement in which the slowly moving clarinet and violin simultaneously mirror each other’s lines. In Contrasts Bartók formally acknowledged with the first movement’s title ‘Verbunkos’ the resurrection of that kind of stylized national dance which had characterized some of his earliest works, had then been rejected under the sway of peasant music, but had slowly been re-emerging since the violin rhapsodies of the late 1920s.

The most significant of his chamber-orchestral works of the period is Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta bb114, written for Paul Sacher and the Basle Chamber Orchestra during the summer of 1936. The piece shows great originality at all levels of its construction and seamlessly integrates the broadest range of Bartók’s folk-music and art-music sources. Formal and pitch symmetries are plentiful, as in the A–C–F–A tonal pattern of the four movements, the forward and reverse cycles of 5ths of the opening fugue, and the ABCBA ‘bridge’ form of the third-movement Adagio. Bartók’s variation of materials is constant, with a particularly poignant example in the finale, where, following the model of his Fifth Quartet, a calmo, rhythmically uniform version of the movement’s snappy opening theme momentarily halts the concluding rush. A sense of monothematicism is achieved through the reintroduction of the opening movement’s chromatic fugue theme in each succeeding movement: as a contour model for the second’s main subject, as the cement between each block of the third’s bridge form, and, using scalar expansion (ex.6), as a grand ‘acoustic’ transformation at the culmination of the finale. Less technically demanding and profound, but even more in keeping with Bartók’s Baroque aesthetic is the Divertimento bb118 of 1939, also composed for Sacher, which Bartók described as a cross between a concerto grosso and a concertino.

The only work for full orchestra during the latter 1930s is the three-movement Violin Concerto ‘no.2’, written to a commission from Zoltán Székely. Not having written a violin concerto in three decades and never having heard a full performance of the earlier one, Bartók was nervous about the balance between soloist and orchestra. However, when he finally heard the work performed, in 1943, he was delighted that ‘nothing had to be changed’. The concerto is probably Bartók’s most diverse study in variation, not just in the theme and variations of the second movement, which is a virtual catalogue of his techniques, or in the ever-changing forms of his 12-note theme in the outer movements, but also in the way in which the third movement is derived entirely from first-movement material. To Székely, who had requested a traditional concerto, he confided: ‘so I managed to outwit you. I wrote variations after all’. Even within the first movement, thematic interrelationships and textural transformations are most ingenious: the placid solo violin melody in the development section, for instance, reveals itself to be a literal quotation of the movement’s opening pizzicato bass line. A verbunkos character is again present in the concerto’s opening, with its suggestion of Transylvanian fiddlers. As in several of Bartók’s later compositions, the ending was reworked to give a more expansive peroration in which the solo violin continues playing to the end.

During 1935–6 Bartók composed his last choral pieces, the Twenty-Seven Two- and Three-part Choruses bb111 for children’s and women’s choruses, and Elmúlt időkből (‘From Olden Times’) bb112, three songs for male chorus. Both works present Bartók’s own fashionings of folk texts, the short choruses dealing with the domestic world of childhood and adolescence, the longer male chorus songs with the joys and sorrows of peasant life. Kodály, for whose growing choral movement the Twenty-Seven Choruses were written, later wrote that Bartók’s recent studies of Palestrina might have been a source of inspiration for the heightened polyphonic plasticity and imitational resourcefulness found in these pieces. Despite the quality of Bartók’s writing these two works have not gained the level of international attention accorded to Bartók’s late instrumental works, partly because of their educational associations and partly because of the intractably Hungarian nature of their prosody.

At the same time as Bartók was writing this string of masterworks, his collection of Mikrokosmos piano pieces continued to grow. Already on 9 February 1937 he had given the public première of 27 of them at an ISCM concert in London, and he continued to unveil such selections in following years. During 1937 he composed ten, mainly more advanced pieces, including five of the ‘Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm’; these brought what became the sixth volume almost to completion. He added some 50 further pieces in the following two years, including much of the first volume, and also the 33 exercises. In the preface which Bartók sent with the completed collection of 153 pieces to his new publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, in November 1939, he drew attention to the versatility of the series. He had included a second piano part in four pieces, to encourage early ensemble playing, and another four pieces were songs (‘All instrumental study or training should really commence with the student singing’). Ten other pieces were recommended for playing on the harpsichord. Bartók stressed that his collection did not present a complete ‘progressive method’, but rather a base to which works by other composers, such as Bach and Czerny, should be added. In a letter to Boosey & Hawkes of 13 February 1940, he explained that he saw Mikrokosmos as a bridge leading from his own 20th-century shore to an older one, either through ‘centuries-old folk music’ or through such typical devices of older art music as canon and imitation. With the completion of both Mikrokosmos and the Sixth String Quartet in November 1939 Bartók entered his longest compositionally unproductive period, which lasted until 1943.

From his vantage point as a committee member of the League of Nations, Bartók was a direct witness to the deterioration in human rights and growing nationalistic intolerance which swept so many parts of Europe during the 1930s. His ethnomusicological work was still occasionally attacked by nationalists in both Hungary and Romania, and the publication of his Slovak collection was finally ruled out in early 1939, the victim of other nationalist tensions. Bartók was acutely distressed at Germany’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938–9, but it was Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 which had the most immediate effect upon him. Bartók’s then publisher, Universal, was rapidly Nazified, and his main royalty agencies, AKM and Austromechana, were merged with the corresponding German organizations. Bartók quickly sought to secure publication through Boosey & Hawkes, and to join the British PRS. His worries about when Hungary, too, might succumb to Nazi domination caused him in late 1937 to start thinking about a safe haven for his more valuable manuscripts, and in April 1938 to start their despatch, first to Switzerland, and then, via London, to the United States, where they later became the basis of the New York Bartók Archives. In 1988 they entered the private collection of Péter Bartók in Homosassa, Florida. During the first half of 1939 Bartók seriously investigated the possibility of emigrating to Turkey, before deciding that the USA was the most desirable personal refuge. However, on 13 April 1938 Bartók had written ‘I have my mother here: shall I abandon her altogether in her last years? – No, I cannot do that!’; and only on her death in December 1939 did he feel morally free to leave. Despite the precarious times – with the period of ‘phoney war’ drawing to a close – Bartók undertook a successful concert tour of the USA during April–May 1940. Noteworthy were a sonata recital with Szigeti at the Library of Congress in Washington and a Columbia recording session of Contrasts in New York with Szigeti and Goodman. His confidence in a move of indefinite duration was immeasurably strengthened when he came to know of a large collection of Serbo-Croat field recordings undertaken by a Harvard professor, Milman Parry, and his associate, Albert B. Lord, in 1933–5.

Back in Budapest by late May of 1940, Bartók started to plan for his permanent return to the USA with his wife in October 1940. Bureaucratic complications associated with indefinitely leaving Hungary before the pensionable age of 60, when he would also become exempt from military service, as well as visa, travel and currency difficulties, were compounded by persistent pains in Bartók’s right shoulder, which required daily hydrotherapy. These pains were later interpreted as the first signs of his eventually fatal blood disorders. A final orchestral concert for both husband and wife was held at the Budapest Academy of Music on 8 October 1940, before they travelled to New York, via Lisbon.

7. 1940–45.

Bartók lived in the USA for the remainder of his life. After the trials of the first few months, with the couple’s early two-piano concerts gaining less than enthusiastic receptions and insecurities over accommodation, finances, passports and their temporarily mislaid Hungarian luggage, Bartók settled into the familiar routine of regular ethnomusicological work and occasional concert tours. During his American years he declined several offers of composition-teaching positions, although he did privately teach a few students piano or composition. In November 1940 Columbia University awarded him an honorary doctorate, and during 1941–2 he held a research appointment there, working on Parry’s Serbo-Croatian collection, which was on loan from Harvard. That work eventually resulted in the volume Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951), of which Bartók completed the musical parts and Lord the textual. Probably Bartók’s greatest discovery among this Serbo-Croat material lay with Dalmatian chromatic folk tunes. There he came upon a form of melodic chromaticism very similar to the ‘new chromaticism’ found in his own compositions since the Dance Suite. Moreover, he found that his compositional technique of melodic transformation through expansion or contraction of scalar intervals (exx.4 and 6) occurred naturally among the Dalmatians. Their chromatic melodies were none other than compressed diatonic melodies of surrounding areas. Another Dalmatian effect, which Bartók later compositionally imitated, involved the playing or singing of chromatic tunes in two parallel parts, separated by intervals such as major 2nds or minor 7ths. Mainly in his private time, Bartók also worked on the final forms of his volumes of Romanian instrumental and vocal melodies, which were essentially complete by December 1942, and of Romanian folk texts, which took until late 1944. He also revised and polished his Turkish volume, which was finished in late 1943. Without prospect of publication for either, Bartók deposited them in the music library at Columbia, to be available ‘to those few persons (very few indeed) who may be interested in them’. These Romanian volumes were published in 1967, the Turkish in 1976. A further ethnomusicological appointment, for work on Amerindian music, was periodically offered by the University of Washington, Seattle, but never taken up.

The ‘magnificent possibilities’ to which Bartók’s New York agent had made reference in 1940 soon turned out to be illusory. Twice during 1941 he ventured on tours across the continent, presenting numerous solo or two-piano recitals in universities or colleges. More prestigious engagements were few. His last solo concerto performances took place in Chicago on 20 and 21 November 1941, and his last public appearances were with his wife on 21 and 22 January 1943, when Reiner conducted the American première of his Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra bb121, an arrangement of the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. After January 1943 Bartók did still seek performing engagements, and though in January 1945 he played for a New Jersey radio broadcast, for a variety of health and logistical reasons no further public performances followed. As a composer, too, his American output was initially meagre. The orchestral version of the Sonata was made in 1940 and the arrangement of his Second Suite, as the Suite for Two Pianos op.4b bb122, in 1941. But he did not engage in any original composition until the spring of 1942, when some ideas emerged perhaps for a suggested concerto for ‘combinations of solo instruments and string orchestra’. From April 1942, however, chronic illness intervened and Bartók put this work aside.

Although suffering more acutely, Bartók decided to go ahead with a visiting appointment at Harvard for the spring semester of 1943. There his duties were to present one recital and two lecture series on recent Hungarian music, principally his own and that of Kodály, and on folksong and ethnomusicological procedure. While Bartók only managed to present three of the first series’ lectures and to draft a fourth, these Harvard lectures provide Bartók’s most candid and detailed explanation of his compositional techniques. He was then hospitalized, with a tentative diagnosis of blood (polycythemia) and lung (tuberculosis) disorders. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which Bartók was not a member, decided to underwrite the costs of his medical treatment and recuperation. For the following three summers recovery took him to Saranac Lake in New York State, and for the 1943–4 winter to a sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina. It was while on these rest cures away from New York that Bartók’s final compositions were written.

The Concerto for Orchestra bb123 was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in May 1943. Probably drawing on some of his fleeting ideas from 1942, Bartók started in August 1943 to draft the work in five movements, less overtly symmetrical, however, than Bartók’s other recent five-movement compositions. The various folk-music and art-music components of its style are also less integrated than in his music of the 1930s. In a programme note Bartók depicted the work’s mood as gradually progressing from the ‘sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one’. The exception to this progression, as Bartók noted, was the jesting ‘game of pairs’ second movement, in which he imitated the two-part parallel Dalmatian style found in Parry’s collection. The fourth movement, ‘Intermezzo interrotto’, is uncharacteristically cheeky in mood, with its parody of a tune from Shostakovich’s then-popular Seventh Symphony, and nostalgic quotation of a popular song, Szep vagy, gyönyörű vagy Magyarország (‘You are lovely, you are beautiful, Hungary’) by Zsigmond Vincze. Another strong, nostalgic influence upon the first and third movements is Bartók’s own style from the 1908–11 period, in particular that of Bluebeard’s Castle. The life-asserting finale is, however, a boisterous roll-call of some of Bartók’s favourite folk styles. It attempts, if with limited success, to combine aspects of sonata form with the loose ‘chain’ forms which Bartók had invoked in the second and third movements. First performed in Boston on 1 December 1944, the Concerto for Orchestra proved immediately attractive to the American public, although Bartók was soon persuaded to write a second, less abrupt ending to the finale. Whether, or how much, Bartók’s new accessibility betrayed his longer-term creative directions became a frequent point of debate after his death.

During October 1943 Bartók heard excellent multiple performances of his Violin Concerto (‘no.2’) in the hands of Tossy Spivakovsky, and in November inspired performances of his First Violin Sonata from Menuhin. On Menuhin’s suggestion of a commission, Bartók had by 14 March 1944 written the four-movement Sonata for solo violin bb124, a work of overt homage to Bach, in particular Bach’s solo Sonata in C, which Bartók had heard Menuhin perform. Of his four major American works this astringent sonata could, however, least be accused of stylistic compromise. Its use of Baroque imitative techniques is sustained in the first movement, marked Tempo di ciaccona, and also in the second movement, an ambitious four-voiced fugue whose chromatic subject is characterized by competing major and minor 3rds. The Presto finale is significant in introducing long passages of quarter-tone writing, and some reference to third-tones. However, only Bartók’s semitonal alternatives were included in Menuhin’s posthumous edition of the work.

While writing the sonata Bartók’s health again declined. The first definite signs of leukaemia were detected in the spring of 1944, although through the use of blood transfusions and drugs, including penicillin, Bartók’s condition was able to be held reasonably stable until the late summer of 1945. During the summer of 1944 ethnomusicological demands largely took over from composition, but Bartók also regained his enthusiasm for performance, even to the extent of wanting to make new recordings of his own works. His financial circumstances, which had been particularly exacerbated since 1941 because of double taxation on his British-derived royalty income, were now somewhat more secure. The successful premières of his first two American works within a week in late 1944 further reinforced his confidence, and led to several offers of commissions during the first half of 1945.

Bartók’s final two substantial compositions were both concertos. While in Saranac during July–August 1945 he worked intensively on the Third Piano Concerto bb127, intended for his wife to perform, in tandem with the Viola Concerto bb128, commissioned by William Primrose. The idea of a new piano concerto grew from Bartók’s realization that his wife could not master some of the more challenging sections of his previous one. In the Third, consequently, he wanted something texturally lighter and is reported to have examined Greig’s concerto as one possible model for this new lucidity. Bartók’s folk-, art- and nature-derived inspirations in the work are relatively undisguised. The second movement, for instance, begins with an extended imitation of Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ (from the String Quartet in A minor op.132), while its middle, ‘Night Music’ section makes explicit reference to the call of the rufous-sided towhee bird, which Bartók had noted down while in North Carolina.

Bartók died in New York on 26 September 1945, after a month-long relapse in health. During his final weeks he managed to complete the Third Piano Concerto, except for the scoring of the final 17 bars, which his colleague Tibor Serly quickly accomplished. His Viola Concerto, however, only remained in sketch, the solo part suggesting a work of comparable ludidity and harmonic restraint to the piano concerto, but with incomplete and less conclusive detail about instrumentation, texture and even the final form. In early August 1945 Bartók had written to Primrose about his concept of a four-movement work with joining ritornello passages, but the evidence of the manuscript suggests only three movements with interconnecting, non-ritornello passages. Since 1945 several attempts have been made to complete the concerto, either for viola or cello. Two of the viola versions have ‘authorized’ status: that undertaken by Tibor Serly with additional input by Primrose, which was published in 1950 shortly after the première, and a ‘revised version’ of 1995 prepared by Péter Bartók and Nelson Dellamaggiore.

8. Legacy.

Dying within weeks of the end of World War II, Bartók narrowly missed the wave of popularity which greeted his music in the first postwar decade. A Hungarian diaspora of conductors (Reiner, Doráti), violinists (Székely, Szigeti) and pianists (Kentner, Sándor) energetically spread his music around the world, as did recent commissioners of his works (Sacher, Koussevitzky, Menuhin and Primrose).

His later works, particularly the orchestral and chamber music, gained increasing access to mainstream concerts, sometimes to the chagrin of the postwar avant garde. Within Hungary itself, Bartók’s compositions were during the late 1940s and early 1950s subjected to investigation for their socialist-realist qualities, with approval being accorded to his folksong settings, lighter piano works, and such orchestral works as the Dance Suite, and disapproval to what one Hungarian critic called ‘formalist, modernist works written in an abstract language’, such as The Miraculous Mandarin, the first two piano concertos, the Fourth String Quartet and the Cantata profana. The excesses of this phase passed with the early 1950s, however, and by the mid-1950s Bartók’s works were in official favour with the communist authorities, just as his life was now interpreted as a socialist symbol of resistance both to European fascists and to American capitalists. In the 1950s, however, a complex dispute arose concerning the estates which Bartók had left, by different wills, in Hungary and America. Lasting into the 1980s, this dispute perpetuated a ‘cold war’ attitude of musical and scholarly non-cooperation between the two countries of his residence, and resulted in retarded dissemination of many important primary-source materials as well as distinctly different research traditions and repertory focusses.

Bartók’s influence upon other composers certainly lacked the intensity and dogmatic hold of Schoenberg, or the widespread impact of the neo-classical Stravinsky. Always averse to teaching composition, Bartók did not leave behind any loyal ‘school’. The composer most directly influenced by Bartók, and Bartók in turn by him, was undoubtedly Kodály. So closely did the two collaborate, especially in their earlier years, that the extent of their interdependence cannot be fully known. Leading composers of following generations on whose works Bartók exerted some measure of direct influence include Messiaen, Lutosławski, Britten, Ginastera, Copland and Crumb. Among Hungarians, György Kroó (in Ránki, B1987) has noted that Bartók provided a powerful model particularly for composers emerging between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, not so much in terms of specific techniques (although there had since 1945 been much superficial imitation of his distinctive string and percussion sounds, and of a narrow band of formal and folksong models) as in the human and professional ideals which he offered, as Hungarian music sought to throw off its postwar isolation and to re-establish a pan-European significance.

For a naturally reluctant teacher Bartók left a surprisingly powerful pedagogic legacy. That legacy lies, to a minor extent, in the students of his Academy and private piano lessons, who included the conductor Fritz Reiner, the pianists Lajos Heimlich (Hernádi), Ernő Balogh, Ditta Pásztory and Andor Földes, the ethnomusicologist Jenő Deutsch, and, briefly, the conductor Georg Solti. More significant, however, for broader musical education were Bartók’s publications: the many, early instructive editions of piano ‘classics’ and studies which he produced between 1907 and the mid-1920s, as well as the Bartók-Reschofsky Piano Method, but, above all, his compositions for young pianists (For Children, Mikrokosmos), violinists (Forty-four Duos) and singers (Twenty-seven Choruses and many simpler folksong arrangements). That Bartók produced the most significant of these works in the 1930s, at the height of his maturity, attests to the importance which he placed on educating a new generation in contemporary styles.

As a performer, Bartók’s personal legacy was not great. With his dour personality and diffident platform manners he did not manage to thrill the great public; within the Hungarian context he was overshadowed by his better-known contemporary Ernő Dohnányi. An outstanding corner of his pianistic legacy is, nonetheless, the collection of gramophone, piano-roll and live recordings, dating from his last quarter-century. These performances, with their wealth of tonal shadings, tempo fluctuations and occasional deviations from the published scores, remind present-day interpreters of the essentially Romantic underpinning to Bartók’s performing art.

The ethnomusicological legacy of Bartók has been varied. Within the international history of that discipline, his stature is more that of a precursor than of a seminal figure. His significance outside Hungary is now largely historic, as an early proponent of transcriptional exactitude rather than as a founder of enduring disciplinary principles. Had he lived to complete his envisaged comparative study of eastern European folk musics his international significance might well have been more profound. Within Hungary his ethnomusicological legacy is perpetuated in the Academy of Sciences’ long-term projects for a complete edition of Hungarian folk music and a complete collection of Bartók’s own systematization of Hungarian folksong, both of which remain substantially unpublished. The greatest legacy of Bartók’s folk-music studies, however, undoubtedly lies in his own compositions. It was exactly those ethnomusicological fascinations with musical detail and subtle observations of variant forms (which have led to periodic accusations from latter-day ethnomusicologists that he was not ‘seeing the wood for the trees’) which fed his greatest creative strengths. What contemporaries such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky could not well appreciate was that Bartók’s folk-music studies provided him with a limitless arsenal for creative transformation. His approach to art-music sources was similarly transformational, as his Romanian colleague Constantin Brăiloiu once observed: ‘Impressionism, polytonality, atonality, motorism: Bartók has passionately lived through all these revolutions and reshaped, as it were, for his own use, with his own rich resources, all systems’ (in Moreux, E1949).

9. Interpretation and analysis.

Bartók’s highly synthetic process of composition has elicited diverse interpretations of his works. These interpretations have often plotted his achievement as a composer against such generalized coordinates as East and West, Romanticism and Modernism, nationalism and internationalism. More conservative studies of his art have tended to emphasize the first coordinate of these pairs, while more progressive studies, the second. In aesthetic terms Bartók plotted himself as moving along a spectrum from Beethoven (artist and harmonist) towards Bach (craftsman and contrapuntalist), with a decisive point of change around 1926. Between the frequently claimed modernist poles of Schoenberg (Expressionist or emancipator of pitch) and Stravinsky (neoclassicist or emancipator of rhythm), Bartók has sometimes been interpreted as a figure of compromise, and therefore of a lesser creative significance. János Kárpáti (in Crow, B1976), however, views Bartók’s position among modernists as one of synthesizing greatness:

in Bartók’s art there is not a simple association between these two differing musical conceptions [Schoenberg and Stravinsky] but an organic synthesis of them. Far from wishing to reconcile the two extremes, Bartók merely used them in forming his own creative system … he found a point upon which the heritage of the past and the revolution of the present – in Adorno’s words, restoration and progress – were converging.

Few commentators agree on the precise balance of Bartók’s syntheses, for his approach to composition was highly eclectic. He progressed pragmatically through life, ever fascinated by new folk- or art-music experiences and contemptuous of theorizing about music. Most noticeably after his several fallow periods of compositional incubation – 1905–7, 1912–14, 1923–6, 1931–4, 1940–3 – Bartók launched into fresh creative phases with varying degrees of stylistic continuity. The most marked changes in compositional direction could be considered to have taken place in 1907–8 and 1926. Probably the most significant speculative deviation in his output occurred during 1918–22, when, under the influence of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bartók seemed to be approaching an atonal goal. The 1934–40 period, with its many major works in chamber, orchestral, vocal and solo piano genres, shows a more regular transcendence of inspirational sources than does any other; accordingly, these pieces are often deemed his most mature. Bartók himself was indifferent to charges of eclecticism or ‘borrowing’. He considered the concept of artistic originality an outworn Romantic-era obsession, and openly acknowledged his liberal attitude to the use of materials by quoting Molière’s defence to a charge of plagiarism, ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve’.

Bartók’s transformational approach to such a wide body of sources has generated a huge variety of analyses of his music. Depending upon the sources, theories or dialectical poles from which analyses are initiated, starkly different results can be educed. It is perhaps a measure of greatness that Bartók’s music can accommodate so many different approaches yet ultimately defies them all. No one all-embracing theory for his music is, therefore, likely to emerge. Rather, reflecting Bartók’s own eclecticism and relatively untheorized attitude to composition, an appropriate range of differing analytical approaches usually produces the best overall understanding of individual works or, indeed, the entire output.

Many analysts of Bartók’s music have based their approaches upon the composer’s own primary-source materials, as revealed in such documents as essays, analyses, recordings and the very notations of his works. Those interested in the music’s pitch, rhythmic or variational components of folk origin have used Bartók’s ethnomusicological treatises, with their own detailed analyses, as a profitable starting point (see Kárpáti, G1956; Burlas, E1971; Lenoir, E1986; László, E1995). Analysts of form (such as Hunkemöller, G1982, G1983) have drawn productively on Bartók’s work analyses, particularly those of his later chamber pieces with their evidence of large-scale symmetrical thinking. Bartók’s descriptions of the phases of his modal and tonal practice, most valuably in his Harvard lectures of 1943, have strongly influenced pitch analyses of his later compositions (see Oramo, F1977, F1980; Kárpáti, G1967, enlarged 1994); his terms ‘polymodal chromaticism’ and ‘new chromaticism’ have thereby entered the broader analytical literature. As compositional sketches and drafts have become increasingly available, they have led to notationally-based forms of semiotic analysis (see Gillies, F1989, F1993). Even Bartók’s recordings have inspired close observation, not just of his performing style but also of his ‘live’ variational tendencies (see Somfai in Documenta bartókiana, 1977).

Nevertheless, the majority of analytical studies have sought their illumination through approaches less beholden to the composer’s own documentary legacy. Among traditional formal analysts, Halsey Stevens (D1953) established enduring conclusions, particularly about the string quartets. Detailed motivic or thematic analyses have proven most analytically fruitful with such later works as the Violin Concerto ‘no.2’ (see Michael, G1976; Somfai, G1977; Weiss-Aigner, G1993–4), while Schenkerian approaches have been applied to the Fourth String Quartet (Travis, G1970) and the Mikrokosmos pieces (Waldbauer, G1982, G1987). Antokoletz (F1984), through concentration on the interaction of intervallic cells, scalar constructions, interval cycles and axes of symmetries, has demonstrated how Bartók progressively transformed folk-music sources into the more abstract principles of his compositions. Forte’s pitch-class set theory has been usefully drawn upon in analyses of both tonal and atonal works (see Cohn, F1988, F1991; Wilson, F1992) while Forte (F1993) has also contributed to the relatively neglected field of analysis of Bartókian rhythm. ‘Functional’ analyses using aspects of sol-fa solmization have been carried out by several Hungarian scholars, notably Lendvai (F1983) and Bárdos (F1972). Lendvai’s contribution to the analysis of proportions, particularly golden sections, in Bartók’s music has generated one of the more long-lived debates in the field (see Lendvai, F1971, F1983; Bachmann, F1979; Howat, F1983).

Of increasing importance to Bartók studies during the 1980s and 1990s have been ‘genetic’ and contextual studies, which investigate the circumstances of the creation of Bartók’s works. These studies have included technical documentation of work stages of compositions and resultant analytical conclusions (see Beach, G1988; Vikárius, G1993–4, Móricz, G1995), as well as speculative investigations of specific art-music influences upon Bartók compositions (see Suchoff, ‘The Impact of Italian Baroque Music on Bartók’s Music’, in Ránki, B1987; Gillies, E1992; Schneider, G1997; Vikárius, E1999), or of cultural or natural phenomena believed to have influenced Bartók in composing particular works (Harley, G1994; Leafstedt, G1999).

The history of Bartók analysis has been one of slow changes in trend: from early, postwar concerns with style analysis, mainly in the pitch domain, through to the more structural concerns of the 1950s to 70s. Lendvai, whatever the virtues of his proportional interpretations, was most important during these decades in placing a solid emphasis on non-traditional, large-scale aspects of construction. During the 1980s and 90s, despite an apparently ever-growing divergence of methods, the tendency has again been to concentrate on more ‘micro’ levels of composition. Over the second half of the 20th century eastern European commentators have been somewhat more concerned with looking to Bartók himself for analytical inspiration, while scholars from elsewhere have been more prominent in other categories of analysis. By the 1990s, with the increasing internationalization of scholarship, these distinctions were becoming tenuous.

Despite the richness and variety of approaches to Bartók’s music, only parts of his output have been thoroughly investigated. As with performances and recordings (see Lampert, E1995), Bartók’s instrumental music is much more exposed than his vocal. This is more for reasons of language and of score accessibility than for reasons of quality. The range of his vocal music is substantially known only in Hungary; its wider propagation remains a challenge for the 21st century.

arrangements of bartók’s works by or involving others

WORKS

Catalogues: L. Somfai: ‘List of Works and Primary Sources’, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley, 1996), 297–320 [BB]D. Dille: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Jugendwerke Béla Bartóks, 1890–1904 (Budapest, 1974) [DD]Publishers: Boosey & Hawkes [B], Dover [Do], Magyar Kórus [M], Rozsnyai Károly [R], Rószavölgyi [Rv], Universal [U], Zeneműkiadó (Editio Musica) [Z]Editions [facsimile]: Hungarian Folksongs, with Z. Kodály, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1970) [BB42]Két román tánc/Two Romanian Dances, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1974) [BB56]Andante, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1980) [BB26b]Zongoraszonáta/Sonata, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1980) [BB88]Béla Bartók fekete zsebkönyve: vázlatok, 1907–1922/Béla Bartók’s Black Pocket-Book: Sketches, 1907–1922, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1987)Viola Concerto: Facsimile Edition of the Autograph Draft, ed. L. Somfai and N. Dellamaggiore (Homosassa, FL, 1995) [BB128]

stage



BB	op.	Title	Genre (acts, librettist)	Composition	First performance

62	11	A Kékszakállú herceg vára [Bluebeard’s Castle]	opera (1, B. Balázs)	1911, rev. 1912, 1917–18	cond. E. Tango, Budapest, Opera, 24 May 1918
Original publication; remarks : vs U 1922; fs U 1922
74	13	A fából faragott királyfi [The Wooden Prince]	ballet (1, Balázs)	1914–16, orchd 1916–17	cond. E. Tango, Budapest, Opera, 12 May 1917
Original publication; remarks : Pf score U 1921; fs U 1924; shorter orch suite, c1925; longer orch suite, 1932; see also orchestral
82	19	A csodálatos mandarin [The Miraculous Mandarin]	pantomime (1, M. Lengyel)	1918–19, orchd 1924, rev. 1926–31	cond. E. Szenkár, Cologne, Stadt, 27 Nov 1926
Original publication; remarks : fs U 1924, rev. 1936; pf 4 hands score U 1925; scenes, orch, 1924; rev. as suite, 1927; see also orchestral

orchestral



BB	op.	Title, scoring	Composition	Original publication

19/3	–	Valcer	c1900
Remarks : dd60b; arr. of pf work, dd60a/1–2
19/4	–	Scherzo, B	c1901
Remarks : dd65
25	–	Symphony, E	1902, orchd 1903
First performance : Scherzo, cond. I. Kerner, Budapest, 29 Feb 1904
Remarks : dd68; Scherzo, C, orchd; other movts in sketch
31	–	Kossuth, sym. poem	1903	Z 1963
First performance : cond. Kerner, Budapest, 13 Jan 1904
Remarks : dd75a; tableau 10 arr. pf, dd75b
35	2	Scherzo, pf, orch [orig. titled Burlesque]	1904	Z 1961
First performance : E. Tusa, cond. G. Lehel, Budapest, 28 Sept 1961
Remarks : arr. 2 pf, unpubd
36b	1	Rhapsody, pf, orch	1905	Rv 1910
First performance : Bartók, cond. C. Chevillard, Paris, early Aug 1905
Remarks : arr. of pf work, bb36a
39	3	Suite no.1, full orch	1905, rev. c1920	Rv 1912, rev. Z 1956
First performance : movts 1, 3–5, Vienna, 29 Nov 1905; complete, cond. J. Hubay, Budapest, 1 Mar 1909
40	4	Suite no.2, small orch [orig. titled Serenade]	movts 1–3, 1905, movt 4, 1907; rev. 1920, 1943	Bartók 1907, rev. U 1921, rev. B 1948
First performance : movt 2, cond. Bartók, Berlin, 2 Jan 1909; complete, cond. Kerner, Budapest, 22 Nov 1909
Remarks : freely arr. 2 pf, bb122
48a	–	Violin Concerto (no.1) [orig. op.5]	1907–8	B 1959
First performance : H.-H. Schneeberger, cond. P. Sacher, Basle, 30 May 1958
Remarks : 1st movt rev. as no.1 of bb48b; 2nd movt, arr. vn, pf, 1907–8, unpubd
48b	5	Két portré [Two Portraits]: 1 Egy ideális [One Ideal], 2 Egy torz [One Grotesque]	no.1, 1907; no.2, 1908, orchd 1910	R 1911
First performance : no.1, I. Waldbauer, cond. L. Kun, 12 Feb 1911; complete, E. Baré, cond. I. Strasser, Budapest, 20 April 1916
Remarks : no.1 from 1st movt of Vn Conc., bb48a; no.2, arr. of pf work, bb50/14
59	10	Két kép [Two Pictures]: 1 Virágzás [In Full Flower], 2 A falu tánca [Village Dance]	1910	Rv 1912
First performance : cond. Kerner, Budapest, 26 Feb 1913
Remarks : arr. pf, 1910–11 (Rv 1912)
61	–	Román tánc [Romanian Dance]	1909–10, orchd 1911	Z 1965
First performance : cond. Kun, Budapest, 12 Feb 1911
Remarks : arr. of pf work, bb56/1
64	12	Four Orchestral Pieces: 1 Preludio, 2 Scherzo, 3 Intermezzo, 4 Marcia funebre	1912, orchd 1921	U 1923
First performance : cond. E. Dohnányi, Budapest, 9 Jan 1922
74	13	A fából faragott királyfi [The Wooden Prince], shorter orch suite	c1925	U 1967
First performance : cond. Dohnányi, Budapest, 23 Nov 1931
Remarks : 3 dances from ballet
74	13	A fából faragott királyfi, longer orch suite	1932
Remarks : rev. and expanded version of above
76	–	Román népi táncok [Romanian Folk Dances], small orch	1917	U 1922, rev. edn U 1991
First performance : cond. E. Lichtenberg, Budapest, 11 Feb 1918
Remarks : arr. of pf work, bb68
82	19	A csodálatos mandarin [The Miraculous Mandarin], scenes	1924	U 1927
First performance : cond. F. Reiner, Cincinnati, 1 April 1927
Remarks : From pantomime; rev. as orch suite, 1927
82	19	A csodálatos mandarin, suite	1927	U 1929
First performance : cond. Dohnányi, Budapest, 15 Oct 1928
86a	–	Táncszvit [Dance Suite]	1923	U 1924
First performance : cond. Dohnányi, Budapest, 19 Nov 1923
Remarks : 1 no. omitted in draft; arr. pf, bb86b (U 1925)
91	–	Piano Concerto no.1	1926	U 1927
First performance : Bartók, cond. Furtwängler, Frankfurt, 1 July 1927
Remarks : arr. 2 pf (U 1927, rev. edn U 1992)
94b	–	Rhapsody no.1, vn, orch	1928–9	U 1929
First performance : J. Szigeti, cond. H. Scherchen, Königsberg, 1 Nov 1929
Remarks : arr. of vn, pf work, bb94a
96b	–	Rhapsody no.2, vn, orch	1928, rev. 1935	U 1929, rev. B 1949
First performance : Z. Székely, cond. Dohnányi, Budapest, 25 Nov. 1929
Remarks : arr. of vn, pf work, bb96a
101	–	Piano Concerto no.2	1930–31	U 1932, rev. edn U 1994
First performance : Bartók, cond. H. Rosbaud, Frankfurt, 23 Jan 1933
Remarks : arr. 2 pf (U 1941, rev. edn U 1993)
102b	–	Erdélyi táncok [Transylvanian Dances]	1931	Rv 1932
First performance : cond. M. Freccia, Budapest, 25 Jan 1932
Remarks : arr. of vn, pf work, bb102a
103	–	Magyar képek [Hungarian Sketches]	1931	R, Rv 1932
First performance : nos.1–3, 5, cond. M. Freccia, Budapest, 25 Jan 1932; complete, cond. H. Laber, Budapest, 26 Nov 1934
Remarks : arr. of pf works, bb51/5, 10, bb58/2, bb55/2, bb53 ii/42
107	–	Magyar parasztdalok [Hungarian Peasant Songs]	1933	U 1933
First performance : cond. E. Flipse, Rotterdam, 8 Nov 1933
Remarks : arr. of pf works, bb79/6–12, 14, 15
114	–	Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta	1936	U 1936–7
First performance : cond. P. Sacher, Basle, 21 Jan 1937
117	–	Violin Concerto (‘no.2’)	1937–8	B 1946
First performance : Székely, cond. Mengelberg, Amsterdam, 23 March 1939
Remarks : arr. vn, pf (B 1941)
118	–	Divertimento, str	1939	B 1940
First performance : cond. Sacher, Basle, 11 June 1940
121	–	Concerto, 2 pf, perc, orch	1940	B 1970
First performance : L. Kentner, I. Kabos, cond. A. Boult, London, 14 Nov 1942
Remarks : arr. of Sonata, 2 pf, perc, bb115
123	–	Concerto for Orchestra	1943, rev. 1945	B 1946, rev. edn B 1993
First performance : cond. S. Koussevitzky, Boston, 1 Dec 1944
Remarks : arr. pf, 1944, unpubd
127	–	Piano Concerto no.3	1945	B 1947, ed. T. Serly and others, rev. edn B 1994
First performance : G. Sándor, cond. E. Ormandy, Philadelphia, 8 Feb 1946
Remarks : last 17 bars scored by Serly
128	–	Viola Concerto	1945, inc.	B 1950, ed. T. Serly, rev. edn B 1995
First performance : W. Primrose, cond. A. Doráti, Minneapolis, 2 Dec 1949
Remarks : completed from inc. draft by Serly; vc version (B 1956)

vocal-orchestral



BB	Title	Text	Scoring	Composition	First performance

18	Tiefblaue Veilchen	C. Schoenaich-Carolath	S, orch	1899
Original publication, remarks : dd57
87b	Falun (Tri dedinské scény) [Three Village Scenes]	Slovak trad.	4/8 female vv, chbr orch	1926	cond. S. Koussevitzky, New York, 27 Nov 1926
Original publication, remarks : fs, U 1927; vs, U 1927, rev. edn U 1996; arr. of songs, bb87a/3–5
100	Cantata profana ‘A kilenc csodaszarvas’ [The Nine Enchanted Stags]	Rom. colindă, arr. and Hung. trans. Bartók	T, Bar, double chorus, orch	1930	cond. A. Buesst, London, 25 May 1934
Original publication, remarks : fs and vs, U 1934
108	Magyar népdalok [(Five) Hungarian Folksongs]	Hung. trad.	1v, orch	1933	cond. Dohnányi, Budapest, 23 Oct 1933
Original publication, remarks : arr. of songs, bb98/1, 2, 11, 14, 12

other choral works

30	Est [Evening], dd74 (K. Harsányi), 8 male vv, 1903 (Z 1965)
57	Two Romanian Folksongs, female vv, c1909, completed from draft by B. Suchoff, unpubd: Nu te supăra mireasă [On her wedding day]; Măi badiţă prostule [Fickle lover, silly man]
60	Négy régi magyar népdal [Four Old Hungarian Folksongs], 4 male vv, 1910, rev. 1912, c1926 (U 1928): Rég megmondtam bús gerlice [Long ago I told you]; Jaj Istenem, kire várok [O God, why am I waiting?]; Ángyomasszony kertje [In my sister-in-law’s garden]; Béreslegény, jól megrakd a szekeret [Farmboy, load the cart well]
77	Tót népdalok (Slovácké ľudové piesne) [Slovak Folksongs], 4 male vv, 1917 (U 1918): Ej, posluchajte málo [Ah, listen now my comrades]; Ked’ja smutny pojdem [Back to fight]; Kamarádi mojí [War is in our land]; Ej, a ked’mna zabiju [Ah, if I fall in battle]; Ked’som šiou na vojnu [Time went on]
78	Négy tót népdal (Štyri slovenské piesne) [Four Slovak Folksongs], 4vv, pf, c1916 (U 1924): Zadala mamka [Wedding song]; Na holi, na holi [Song of the Hay-Harvesters]; Rada pila, rada jedla [Song from Medzibrod]; Gajdujte, gajdence [Dancing Song]
99	Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], mixed vv, 1930 (U 1932): A rab [The Prisoner]; A bujdosó [The Wanderer]; Az eladó lány [Finding a husband]; Dal [Lovesong]
106	Székely népdalok [Székely Folksongs], 6 male vv, 1932 (M 1938): 1 Hej, de sokszor megbántottál [How often I’ve grieved for you]; 2 Istenem, életem [My God, my life]; 3 Vékony cérna, kemény mag [Slender thread, hard seed]; 4 Kilyénfalvi közeptizbe [In the middle of Kilyénfalva]; 5 Vékony cérna, kemény mag; 6 Járjad pap a táncot [Do a dance, priest]
111	Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses (Hung. trad.), children’s vv (vols.i–vi), female vv (vols.vii–viii), 1935–6 (M 1937, Z 1953) vol.i: Tavasz [Spring]; Ne hagyj itt! [Don’t leave here!]; Jószág-igéző [Enchanting Song] vol.ii: Levél az otthoniakhoz [Letter to Those at Home]; Játék [Play Song]; Leánynéző [Courting]; Héjja, héjja, karahéjja! [Hey, you hawk!] vol.iii: Ne menj el! [Don’t leave me!]; Van egy gyűrűm [I have a ring]; Senkim a világon [I’ve no-one in the world]; Cipósütés [Bread-baking] vol.iv: Huszárnóta [Hussar]; Resteknek nótája [Loafers’ Song]; Bolyongás [Wandering]; Lánycsúfoló [Girls’ Teasing Song] vol.v: Legénycsúfoló [Boys’ Teasing Song]; Mihálynapi köszöntő [Michaelmas Greeting]; Leánykérő [Suitor] vol.vi: Keserves [Grief]; Madárdal [Bird Song]; Csujogató [Jeering] vol.vii: Bánat [Regret]; Ne láttalak volna! [Had I not seen you!]; Elment a madárka [The bird flew away] vol.viii: Párnás táncdal [Pillow Dance]; Kánon: Isten veled! [God be with you!] nos.iv/1, iii/1, iv/2, iv/3, iii/4 arr. with school orch (M 1937); nos.i/2, v/1 arr. with small orch (B 1942)
112	Elmúlt időkből [From Olden Times] (Hung. trad.), 3 male vv, 1935 (M 1937): Nincs boldogtalanabb parasztembernél [No-one’s more unhappy than the peasant]; Egy, kettő, három, négy [One, two, three, four]; Nincsen szerencsésebb parasztembernél [No-one is happier than the peasant]

chamber

1/20b	A Duna folyása [The Course of the Danube], dd20b, vn, pf, 1894, pf part lost [arr. of pf work, bb1/20a]
6	Sonata, c, dd37, vn, pf, 1895
7/2–4	Violin pieces, dd39, 1895, lost; 2 fantasias, dd40–41, 1896, lost
7/5	String Quartet no.1, B, dd42, 1896, lost
7/6	String Quartet no.2, c, dd43, 1896, lost
9/1	Piano Quintet, C, dd46, 1897, lost
10	Sonata, A, dd49, vn, pf, 1897 [pf part of 2nd movt only sketched]
13	Piano Quartet, c, dd52, 1898
17	String Quartet, F, dd56, 1898
19/1	Scherzo in Sonatenform, f, dd58, str qt, 1899–1900
26a	Duo (Canon), G, dd69, 2 vn, 1902 (in Dille: Thematisches Verzeichnis)
26b	Andante (Albumblatt), A, dd70, vn, pf, 1902 (Z 1980)
28	Sonata, e, dd72, vn, pf, 1903 (Documenta bartókiana, i–ii, 1964–5; Z 1968)
33	Piano Quintet, dd77, 1903–4, rev. to 1920 (Z 1970)
45a	Gyergyóból [From Gyergyó], rec, pf, 1907 (Z 1961); arr. pf, bb45b
52	String Quartet no.1, op.7, 1908–9 (Rv 1909)
75	String Quartet no.2, op.17, 1914–17 (U 1920, rev. edn U 1994)
84	Sonata no.1 [MS: op.21], vn, pf, 1921 (U 1923, rev. edn U 1991)
85	Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1922 (U 1923, rev. edn U 1997)
93	String Quartet no.3, 1927 (U 1929, rev. edn U 1992)
94a	Rhapsody no.1., vn, pf, 1928, rev. 1929 (U 1929); orchd, bb94b; arr. vc, pf, bb94c
94c	Rhapsody, vc, pf, 1928–9 (U 1930)
95	String Quartet no.4, 1928 (U 1929, rev. edn U 1995)
96a	Rhapsody no.2, vn, pf, 1928 (U 1929), rev. 1945 (B 1947); orchd, bb96b
104	Forty-four Duos, 2 vn, 1931 (32 nos. Schott 1932, complete U 1933, iii–iv rev. edn U 1992) vol.i: 1 Párositó [Teasing Song]; 2 Kalamajkó [Dance]; 3 Menuetto; 4 Szentivánéji [Midsummer Night Song]; 5 Tót nóta I [Slovak Song I]; 6 Magyar nóta I [Hungarian song I]; 7 Oláh nóta [Romanian Song]; 8 Tót nóta II [Slovak Song II]; 9 Játék [Play]; 10 Rutén nóta [Ruthenian Song]; 11 Gyermekrengetéskor [Lullaby]; 12 Szénagyűjtéskor [Hay-Harvesting Song]; 13 Lakodalmas [Wedding Song]; 14 Párnás-tánc [Cushion Dance] vol.ii: 15 Katonanóta [Soldier’s Song]; 16 Burleszk [Burlesque]; 17 Menetelő nóta I [Marching Song]; 18 Menetelő nóta II; 19 Mese [Fairy Tale]; 20 Dal [Song]; 21 Újévköszöntő I [New Year’s Greeting I]; 22 Szúnyogtánc [Mosquito Dance]; 23 Menyasszony-búcsúztató [Wedding Song]; 24 Tréfás nóta [Gay Song]; 25 Magyar nóta II vol.iii: 26 ‘Ugyan édes komámasszony …’ [Teasing Song]; 27 Sánta-tánc [Limping Dance]; 28 Bánkódás [Sorrow]; 29 Újévköszöntő II; 30 Újévköszöntő III; 31 Újévköszöntő IV; 32 Máramarosi tánc [Dance from Máramaros]; 33 Aratáskor [Harvest Song]; 34 Számláló nóta [Counting Song]; 35 Rutén kolomejka [Ruthenian kolomejka]; 36 Szól a duda [Bagpipes], with variant form vol.iv: 37 Preludium és kánon; 38 Forgatós [Romanian Whirling Dance]; 39 Szerb tánc [Serbian Dance]; 40 Oláh tánc [Romanian Dance]; 41 Scherzo; 42 Arab dal [Arabian Song]; 43 Pizzicato; 44 ‘Erdélyi’ tánc [‘Transylvanian’ Dance] nos.28, 38, 43, 16, 36, 32 arr. pf, bb113
110	String Quartet no.5, 1934 (U 1936, rev. edn U 1992)
115	Sonata, 2 pf, 2 perc, 1937 (B 1942), arr. 2 pf, perc, orch, bb121
116	Contrasts, vn, cl, pf, 1938 (B 1942)
119	String Quartet no.6, 1939 (B 1941)
124	Sonata, vn, 1944 (ed. Y. Menuhin B 1947, rev. edn with quarter-tone variants B 1994)

piano

1/1–31	Walczer, dd1, 1890; Változó darab [Changeable Piece], dd2, 1890; Mazurka, dd3, 1890; A budapesti tornaverseny [Gymnastic Contest in Budapest], dd4, 1890; Sonatina no.1, dd5, 1890; Oláh darab [Wallachian Piece], dd6, 1890; Gyorspolka [Fast Polka], dd7, 1891; ‘Béla’ polka, dd8, 1891; ‘Katinka’ polka, dd9, 1891; Tavaszi hangok [Sounds of Spring], dd10, 1891; ‘Jolán’ polka, dd11, 1891; ‘Gabi’ polka, dd12, 1891; Nefelejts [Forget-me-not], dd13, 1891; Ländler no.1, dd14, 1891; ‘Irma’ polka, dd15, 1891; Radegundi visszhang [Echo of Radegund], dd16, 1891; Induló [March], dd17, 1891; Ländler no.2, dd18, 1891; Cirkusz polka, dd19, 1891; A Duna folyása [The Course of the Danube], dd20a, 1890–94, arr. vn, pf, bb1/20b; Sonatina no.2, dd21, 1891; Ländler no.3, dd22, 1892, lost; Tavaszi dal [Song of Spring], dd23, 1892; Szőllősi darab [Piece of (Nagy) szőllős], dd24, 1892, lost; ‘Margit’ polka, dd25, 1893; ‘Ilona’ mazurka, dd26, 1893; ‘Loli’ mazurka, dd27, 1893; ‘Lajos’ valczer, dd28, 1893; ‘Elza’ polka, dd29, 1894; Andante con variazioni, dd30, 1894; Allegro, dd31, 1894, lost; all nos. unpubd
2/1	Sonata no.1, g, dd32, 1894, unpubd
2/2	Scherzo, g, dd33, 1894, unpubd
3	Fantasie, a, dd34, 1895, unpubd
4	Sonata no.2, F, dd35, 1895, unpubd
5	Capriccio, b, dd36, 1895, unpubd
7/1	Sonata no.3, C, dd38, 1895, lost
7/7	Andante, Scherzo and Finale, dd44, 1897, lost
8	Drei Klavierstücke, b, C, a, dd45, 1897 (no.1 Z 1965)
9/2	Two Pieces, dd47, 1897, lost
9/3	Grosse Fantasie, dd48, 1897, lost
11	Scherzo (Fantasie), B, dd50, 1897 (Z 1965)
12	Sonata, dd51, 1898, lost
14	Drei Klavierstücke, c, g, E, dd53 (nos. 1–2 Z 1965)
16	Scherzo, b, dd55, 1898, unpubd
19/2	Scherzo, b, dd59, c1900, unpubd
19/3	Six Dances, dd60a, c1900, facs. of no.1 pubd as Danse orientale (Pressburger Zeitung, 1913); nos. 1–2 orchd, dd60b
21	Scherzo, b, dd63, 1900, unpubd
22	Változatok [Twelve Variations], dd64, 1900–01 (Z 1965)
23	Tempo di Minuetto, dd66, 1901, unpubd
27	Four Pieces, dd71, 1903 (Bárd, 1904; nos.1–3 B 1950; Z 1956, 1965): Study for the Left Hand; Fantasy I; Fantasy II; Scherzo
31	Marche funèbre, dd75b, 1903 (Budapest, 1905, R 1910) [arr. of Kossuth, tableau 10]
36a	Rhapsody, op.1, 1904 (Adagio mesto Rv 1908; complete Rv 1923), arr. pf, orch, bb36b, arr. 2 pf, 1905 (Rv 1910)
38	Petits morceaux, 1905 (Z 1965) [free arr. of songs bb37/2, bb24/1]
45b	Három Csík megyei népdal [Three Hungarian Folksongs from Csík], 1907 (R 1910) [arr. of rec, pf work, bb45a]: Rubato, L’istesso tempo, Poco vivo
49	Két elégia [Two Elegies], op.8b, 1908–9 (R 1910): Grave, Molto adagio sempre rubato (quasi improvisando)
50	Fourteen Bagatelles, op.6, 1908 (R 1909): 1 Molto sostenuto; 2 Allegro giocoso; 3 Andante; 4 Grave [arr. of folksong Mikor gulyásbojtár voltam]; 5 Vivo [arr. of folksong Ej! po pred naš, po pred naš]; 6 Lento; 7 Allegretto molto capriccioso; 8 Andante sostenuto; 9 Allegretto grazioso; 10 Allegro; 11 Allegretto molto rubato; 12 Rubato; 13 Elle est morte (Lento funèbre); 14 Valse: ma mie qui danse (Presto); no.14 orchd as no.2 of bb48b
51	Tíz könnyű zongoradarab [Ten Easy Pieces], 1908 (R 1908), with Ajánlás [Dedication]: 1 Paraszti nóta [Peasant Song]; 2 Lassú vergődés [Frustration]; 3 Tót legények tánca [Slovak Boys’ Dance]; 4 Sostenuto; 5 Este a székelyeknél [Evening in Transylvania (Evening with the Széklers)]; 6 Gödöllei piactéren leesett a hó [Hungarian Folksong]; 7 Hajnal [Dawn]; 8 Azt mondják, nem adnak [Slovakian Folksong]; 9 Ujjgyakorlat [Five-Finger Exercise]; 10 Medvetánc [Bear Dance]; nos.5, 10 orchd, bb103/1–2
53	Gyermekeknek/Pro dêti [For Children], 85 pieces, i–iv, 1908–10 (R 1910, R 1912) [i–ii after Hung., iii–iv after Slovak folksongs], rev. 1943, 79 pieces, i–ii (B 1947); orig. ii/42 orchd, bb103/5; orig. i/16 arr. 1v, pf, 1937
54	Vázlatok [Seven Sketches], op.9b, 1908–10 (R 1911): 1 Leányi arckép [Portrait of a Girl]; 2 Hinta palinta [See-Saw, Dickory-Daw]; 3 Lento; 4 Non troppo lento; 5 Román népdal [Romanian Folksong]; 6 Oláhos [In Wallachian Style]; 7 Poco lento
55	Három burleszk [Three Burlesques], op.8c, 1908–11 (Rv 1912): Perpatvar [Quarrel], Kicsit ázottan [A Bit Drunk], Molto vivo capriccioso; no.2 orchd, bb103/4
56	Ket román tánc [Two Romanian Dances], op.8a, 1909–10 (Rv 1910; with rev. no.2, Do 1981): Allegro vivace, Poco allegro; no.1 orchd, bb61
58	Négy siratóének [Four Dirges], op.9a, 1909–10 (Rv 1912): Adagio; Andante; Poco lento; Assai andante; no.2 orchd, bb103/3
63	Allegro barbaro, 1911 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1992)
66	Kezdők zongoramuzsikája [First Term at the Piano], 18 pieces, 1913 (Rv 1929) [from c50 pieces in Zongoraiskola [Piano Method] of Bartók and S. Reschofsky (Rv 1913)]
67	Román kolinda-dallamok [Romanian Christmas Songs], 20 pieces in 2 sers., 1915 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1995)
68	Román népi táncok [Romanian Folk Dances], 1915 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1993): 1 Joc cu bâtă [Stick Dance]; 2 Brâul; 3 Pe loc [In One Spot]; 4 Buciumeana [Dance of Buchum]; 5 Poargă românească [Romanian Polka]; 6 Mărunţel [Fast Dance]; orchd, bb76
69	Sonatina, 1915 (Rv 1919), rev. after 1930 (B 1950); authorized arr. vn, pf, by Z. Székely, bb102a; orchd Bartók, bb102b
70	Suite, op.14, 1916 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1992; omitted movt in Új zenei szemle, v, 1955)
79	Tizenöt magyar parasztdal [Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs], 1914, 1918 (U 1920): 1–4 Négy régi keserves ének [Four Old Tunes]; 5 Scherzo; 6 Ballade (Tema con variazioni); 7–15 Régi táncdalok [Old Dance Tunes]; nos.6–12, 14–15 orchd, bb107
80b	Three Hungarian Folk Tunes, 1914, 1918 (no.1 in early version, bb80a, in Periszkóp (1925), June–July; complete B 1942): Leszállott a páva [The Peacock]; Jánoshidi vásártéren [At the Jánoshida Fairground]; Fehér liliomszál [White Lily]
81	Etűdök [(Three) Studies], op.18, 1918 (U 1920)
83	Improvizációk magyar parasztdalokra [(Eight) Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs], op.20, 1920 (nos.2, 8 in Grotesken Album, ed. C. Seelig, U 1921; complete U 1922)
86b	Táncszvit [Dance Suite], 1925 (U 1925, rev. edn U 1991) [arr. of orch suite bb86a]
88	Sonata, 1926 (U 1927, rev. edn U 1992)
89	Szabadban [Out of Doors], i–ii, 1926 (U 1927 rev. edns U 1990, 1996): i/1 Síppal, dobbal [With Drums and Pipes]; i/2 Barcarolla; i/3 Musettes; ii/4 Az éjszaka zenéje [The Night’s Music]; ii/5 Hajsza [The Chase]
90	Kilenc kis zongoradarab [Nine Little Piano Pieces], i–iii, 1926 (U 1927, rev. edn U 1995): i/1–4 Négy párbeszéd [Four Dialogues]; ii/5 Menuetto; ii/6 Dal [Air]; ii/7 Marcia delle bestie; ii/8 Csörgő-tánc [Tambourine]; iii/9 Preludio – All’ungherese
92	Három rondó népi dallamokkal [Three Rondos on (Slovak) Folktunes]: no.1 1916, nos.2–3 1927 (U 1930, rev. edn U 1995)
105	Mikrokosmos, i–vi, 1926, 1932–9 (B 1940, rev. edn B 1987) vol.i: 1–6 Six Unison Melodies; 7 Dotted Notes; 8 Repetition I; 9 Syncopation I; 10 With Alternate Hands; 11 Parallel Motion; 12 Reflection; 13 Change of Position; 14 Question and Answer; 15 Village Song; 16 Parallel Motion and Change of Position; 17 Contrary Motion I; 18–21 Four Unison Melodies; 22 Imitation and Counterpoint; 23 Imitation and Inversion I; 24 Pastorale; 25 Imitation and Inversion II; 26 Repetition II; 27 Syncopation II; 28 Canon at the Octave; 29 Imitation Reflected; 30 Canon at the Lower Fifth; 31 Dance in Canon Form; 32 In Dorian Mode; 33 Slow Dance; 34 In Phrygian Mode; 35 Chorale; 36 Free Canon; Appendix: Exercises 1–4 vol.ii: 37 In Lydian Mode; 38 Staccato and Legato I; 39 Staccato and Legato (Canon); 40 In Yugoslav Style; 41 Melody with Accompaniment; 42 Accompaniment in Broken Triads; 43 In Hungarian Style, 2 pf; 44 Contrary Motion II, 2 pf; 45 Méditation; 46 Increasing–Diminishing; 47 Country Fair; 48 In Mixolydian Mode; 49 Crescendo–Diminuendo; 50 Minuetto; 51 Waves; 52 Unison Divided; 53 In Transylvanian Style; 54 Chromatics; 55 Triplets in Lydian Mode, 2 pf; 56 Melody in Tenths; 57 Accents; 58 In Oriental Style; 59 Major and Minor; 60 Canon with Sustained Notes; 61 Pentatonic Melody; 62 Minor Sixths in Parallel Motion; 63 Buzzing; 64 Line against Point; 65 Dialogue, 1v, pf; 66 Melody Divided; Appendix: Exercises 5–18 vol.iii: 67 Thirds against a Single Voice; 68 Hungarian Dance, 2 pf; 69 Study in Chords; 70 Melody against Double Notes; 71 Thirds; 72 Dragons’ Dance; 73 Sixths and Triads; 74 Hungarian Matchmaking Song, also version for 1v, pf; 75 Triplets; 76 In Three Parts; 77 Little Study; 78 Five-Tone Scale; 79 Hommage à J.S.B.; 80 Hommage à R. Sch.; 81 Wandering; 82 Scherzo; 83 Melody with Interruptions; 84 Merriment; 85 Broken Chords; 86 Two Major Pentachords; 87 Variations; 88 Duet for Pipes; 89 In Four Parts I; 90 In Russian Style; 91 Chromatic Invention I; 92 Chromatic Invention II; 93 In Four Parts II; 94 Once Upon a Time …; 95 Fox Song, also version for 1v, pf; 96 Jolts; Appendix: Exercises 19–30 vol.iv: 97 Notturno; 98 Thumbs Under; 99 Hands Crossing; 100 In Folksong Style; 101 Diminished Fifth; 102 Harmonics; 103 Minor and Major; 104 Wandering Through the Keys; 105 Game; 106 Children’s Song; 107 Melody in the Mist; 108 Wrestling; 109 From the Island of Bali; 110 And the Sounds Clash and Clang …; 111 Intermezzo; 112 Variations on a Folktune; 113 Bulgarian Rhythm I; 114 Theme and Inversion; 115 Bulgarian Rhythm II; 116 Song; 117 Bourrée; 118 Triplets in 9/8 Time; 119 Dance in 3/4 Time; 120 Triads; 121 Two-part Study; Appendix: Exercises 31–3 vol.v: 122 Chords Together and in Opposition; 123 Staccato and Legato II; 124 Staccato; 125 Boating; 126 Change of Time; 127 New Hungarian Folksong, 1v, pf; 128 Stamping Dance; 129 Alternating Thirds; 130 Village Joke; 131 Fourths; 132 Major Seconds Broken and Together; 133 Syncopation III; 134 Three Studies in Double Notes; 135 Perpetuum mobile; 136 Whole-tone Scale; 137 Unison; 138 Bagpipe Music; 139 Jack-in-the-Box vol.vi: 140 Free Variations; 141 Subject and Reflection; 142 From the Diary of a Fly; 143 Divided Arpeggios; 144 Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths; 145 Chromatic Invention III; 146 Ostinato; 147 March; 148–53 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm
113	Petite suite [arr. of vn duos, bb104/28, 38, 43, 16, 36], 1936 (U 1938, rev. edn 1995); omitted movt [arr. of bb104/32], unpubd
120	Seven Pieces from Mikrokosmos, 2 pf, 1939–40 (B 1947) [arr. of pf pieces bb105/113, 69, 135, 123, 127, 145, 146]
122	Suite, op.4b, 2 pf, 1941 (B 1958) [free arr. of orch work, bb40]

songs

15	Drei Lieder, dd54, 1898: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai (H. Heine); Nacht am Rheine (K. Siebel); Die Gletscher leuchten im Mondenlicht
20	Liebeslieder, dd62, 1900 (nos.2, 4 Z 1963): 1 Du meine Liebe, du mein Herz (F. Rückert); 2 Diese Rose pflück ich hier (N. Lenau); 3 Du geleitest mich zum Grabe; 4 Ich fühle deinen Odem (Lenau); 5 Wie herrlich leuchtet (J.W. von Goethe); Herr! der du alles wohl gemacht
24	Four songs (L. Pósa), dd67, 1902 (Bárd 1904): 1 Őszi szellő [Autumn Breeze]; 2 Még azt vetik a szememre [They are accusing me]; 3 Nincs olyan bú [There is no greater sorrow]; 4 Ejnye! ejnye! [Alas! alas!]; no.1 arr. pf, bb38/2
29	Est [Evening] (K. Harsányi), dd73, 1903 (Z 1963)
32	Four Songs, dd76, 1903, lost
34	Székely Folksong: Piros alma leesett a sárba [The red apple has fallen in the mud], dd C8, 1904 (Budapest, 1905)
37	Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], planned 1st ser., c1904–5 (no.1 Z 1963), inc.: 1 Lekaszálták már a rétet [They have mowed the pasture already]; 2 Add reám csókodat, el kell mennem [Kiss me, for I have to leave]; 3 Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér stole a horse]; 4 Az egri ménes mind szürke [The horses of Eger are all grey]; no.2 arr. pf, bb38/1
41	A kicsi ‘tót’-nak [For the Little ‘Tót’] (Hung. children’s songs), 1905 (no.3 in J. Demény: Bartók Béla: levelek, Budapest, 1948): 1 Álmos vagyok [I am sleepy]; 2 Ejnye, ejnye, nézz csak ide [Oh, oh, look there]; 3 Puha meleg tolla van a kismadárnak [The little bird]; 4 Bim bam zúg a harang [Bim bam, ring the bells]; 5 Esik eső esdegél [The rain is falling]
42	Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], 1906 (R 1906), rev. 1938 (Rv 1938): 1 Elindultam szép hazámbul [I left my fair homeland]; 2 Által mennék én a Tiszán ladikon [I would cross the Tisza in a boat]; 3a–b Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér stole a horse]; 4a (4 in rev.) A gyulai kert alatt [Behind the garden of Gyula]; 4b (5 in rev.) A kertmegi kert alatt [Behind the garden of Kertmeg]; 5 (not in rev.) Ucca, ucca, ég az ucca [The street is on fire]; 6 Ablakomba, ablakomba, besütött a holdvilág [In my window shone the moonlight]; 7 Száraz ágtól messze virít a rózsa [From the withered branch no rose blooms]; 8 Végigmentem a tárkányi, sej, haj, nagy uccán [I walked to the end of the great street in Tárkány]; 9 Nem messze van ide Kis Margitta [Not far from here is little Margitta]; 10 Szánt a babám [My sweetheart is ploughing]; also nos. 11–20 by Kodály; nos.1, 2, 4, 9, 8 rev. 1928 as Five Hungarian Folksongs, bb97
43	Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], 2nd ser., 1906–7 (nos.4, 6, 7, 8, Z 1963): 1 Tiszán innen, Tiszán túl [On this side of the Tisza, on that side of the Tisza]; 2 Erdők, völgyek, szűk ligetek [Woods, valleys, narrow parks]; 3 Olvad a hó [The snow is melting]; 4 Ha bemegyek a csárdába [Down at the tavern]; 5 Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér stole a horse]; 6 Megittam a piros bort [My glass is empty]; 7 Ez a kislány gyöngyöt fűz [This maiden threading]; 8 Sej, mikor engem katonának visznek [The young soldier]; 9 Még azt mondják [And they still say]; 10 Kis kece lányom [My dear daughter]; nos.5, 10 arr. pf, bb53/ii/28, 53/i/17
44	Two Hungarian Folksongs, 1907 (no.1 Z 1963, no.2 in Documenta bartókiana, iv, 1970): Édesanyám rózsafája [My mother’s rose tree]; Túl vagy rózsám, túl vagy a Málnás erdején [My sweetheart, you are beyond the Málnás woods]
46	Four Slovakian Folksongs (nos.1, 3, 4 Z 1963): 1 V tej bystrickej bráne [Roses in the Fields], 1907; 2 Pod lipko nad lipko, 1907; 3 Pohřebni písen [Dirge], 1907; 4 Pritelel pták [The Message], 1916; no.2 lost
47	Nyolc magyar népdal [Eight Hungarian Folksongs], nos.1–5 1907, nos.6–8 1917 (U 1922): 1 Fekete főd [Black is the earth]; 2 Istenem, Istenem [My God, my God]; 3 Asszonyok, asszonyok, had’ legyek társatok [Wives, wives, let me be one of your company]; 4 Annyi bánat [So much sorrow]; 5 Ha kimegyek [If I climb]; 6 Töltik a nagyerdő útját [They are mending the great forest highway]; 7 Eddig való dolgom [Up to now my work]; 8 Olvad a hó [The snow is melting]
65	Nine Romanian Folksongs, c1912 [completed from draft by B. Suchoff, unpubd]: 1 I went off to church one day; 2 Ev’ry lad wants me to perish; 3 Woe is me; 4 See the verdant silken tassel; 5 In the village hall; 6 While I still lived with my mother; 7 You are far away from me; 8 Many thoughts have come into mind; 9 Those who have bad luck
71	Öt dal [Five Songs], op.15, 1916 (U 1961, rev. edn U 1991): 1 Tavasz [Spring] (K. Gombossy); 2 Nyár [Summer] (Gombossy); 3 A vágyak éjjele [Night of Desire] (W. Gleiman); 4 Tél [Winter] (Gombossy); 5 Ősz [Autumn] (Gombossy)
72	Öt dal [Five Songs] (E. Ady), op.16, 1916 (U 1923): 1 Három őszi könnycsepp [Autumn Tears]; 2 Az őszi lárma [Autumn Echoes]; 3 Az ágyam hivogat [Lost Content]; 4 Egyedül a tengerrel [Alone with the Sea]; 5 Nem mehetek hozzád [I cannot come to you]
73	Krutí Tono vretena [Tony Whirls the Spindle], 1916 (Z 1963)
87a	Falun (Dedinské scény) [Village Scenes] (Slovak trad.), female v, pf, 1924 (U 1927, rev. edn U 1994): 1 Szénagyűjtéskor (Pri hrabaní) [Haymaking]; 2 A menyasszonynál (Pri neveste) [At the Bride’s]; 3 Lakodalom (Svatba) [Wedding]; 4 Bölcsődal (Ukoliebavka) [Lullaby]; 5 Legénytánc (Tanec mládencov) [Lads’ Dance]; nos. 3–5 arr. female vv, chbr orch, bb87b
97	Five Hungarian Folksongs, 1928 (Z 1970) [rev. of bb42, nos1, 2, 4, 9, 8]
98	Húsz magyar népdal [Twenty Hungarian Folksongs], i–iv, 1929 (U 1932) vol.i, Szomorú nóták [Sad Songs]: 1 A tömlöcben [In Prison]; 2 Régi keserves [Old Lament]; 3 Bujdosó ének [The Fugitive]; 4 Pásztornóta [Herdsman’s Song] vol.ii, Táncdalok [Dancing Songs]: 5 Székely lassú [Slow Dance]; 6 Székely friss [Fast Dance]; 7 Kanásztanc [Swineherd’s Dance]; 8 ‘Hatforintos’ nóta [‘Six-Florin’ Dance] vol.iii, Vegyes dalok [Diverse Songs]: 9 Juhászcsúfoló, [The Shepherd]; 10 Tréfás nóta [Joking Song]; 11 Párosító I [Nuptial Serenade]; 12 Párosító II [Humorous Song]; 13 Pár-ének [Dialogue Song]; 14 Panasz [Complaint]; 15 Bordal [Drinking Song] vol.iv, Új dalok [New-Style Songs]: 16 (i) Allegro: Hej, édesanyám [Oh, my dear mother]; (ii) Più allegro: Érik a ropogós cseresznye [Ripening Cherries]; (iii) Moderato: Már Dobozon [Long ago at Doboz]; (iv) Allegretto: Sárga kukoricaszár [Yellow Cornstalk]; (v) Allegro non troppo: Búza, búza, búza [Wheat, wheat, wheat] nos.1, 2, 11, 14, 12 orchd, bb108
109	Hungarian Folksong: Debrecennek van egy vize [arr. of pf work, bb53/i/16], ?1937 (in B. Paulini: Gyöngyösbokréta, Budapest, 1937, p.10)
125	Ukrainian Folksong: A férj keserve [The Husband’s Grief], 1945 (facs. in J. Demény, ed.: Bartók Béla levelei, Budapest, 1951)
126	Ukrainian Folksongs, cycle, c1945, inc.: 1 Ta ne sa mam [I was not alone]; 2 Ne budu ja vodu piti [I shall not drink the water]; 3 Če my chlopci nekopalci [Not in a ditch, lads]
See also piano [Mikrokosmos, bb105/65, 74b, 95b, 127]

arrangements of bartók’s works by or involving others

—	Romanian Folk Dances, vn, pf, arr. Z. Székely, 1925–6 (U 1926) [arr. of pf work bb68]
—	Hungarian Folk Tunes, vn, pf, arr. J. Szigeti with Bartók’s advice, 1926–7 (U 1927) [arr. of pf work bb53, orig. nos.ii/28, i/18, ii/42, ii/33, i/6, i/13, ii/38]
102a	Sonatina, vn, pf, arr. E. Gertler with Bartók, c1930 (Rv 1931) [arr. of pf work bb69; used by Bartók as basis for orch version bb102b]
109	Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], vn, pf, i–ii, arr. T. Országh with Bartók, 1931 (R 1934) [arr. of pf work bb53, orig. nos.ii/34, ii/36, i/17, ii/31, i/16, i/14, i/19, i/8, i/21]
—	Five Pieces from Mikrokosmos, str qt, arr. T. Serly, 1941–2 (B 1942) [arr. of pf pieces bb105/139, 102, 108, 116, 142]
—	Mikrokosmos Suite, orch, arr. T. Serly, c1942 (B 1943) [arr. of pf pieces bb105/139, 137, 117, 142, 102, 151, 153, prefaced by orch of material from piano work bb80b (1942 version)]

EDITIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS BY BARTÓK

concert arrangements for piano

Italian kbd music, 1–11, BB A4a–k, 1926–8 (New York, 1930): 1 B. Marcello: Sonata, B; 2 M. Rossi: Toccata no.1, C; 3 M. Rossi: Toccata no.2, a; 4 M. Rossi: Tre correnti; 5–8 A.B. Della Ciaia: Sonata, G: Toccata, Canzone, Primo tempo, Secondo tempo; 9 G. Frescobaldi: Toccata, G; 10 G. Frescobaldi: Fuga, g [misattrib.; by G. Muffat]; 11 D. Zipoli: Pastorale, C

J.S. Bach: Sonata VI, bwv530, org; BB A5, c1929 (Rv 1930)

H. Purcell: Two Preludes, BB A6, c1929 (Los Angeles, 1947)

educational editions of piano works

J.S. Bach: Das wohltemperierte Klavier, i–iv (R 1907–8, rev. i–ii R 1913); 12 Easy Piano Pieces (Rv 1916; rev. with extra no., Rv 1924)

L. van Beethoven: 25 Sonatas (Rv 1909–12; opp.101, 111, unpubd); 7 Bagatelles, op.33; Variations, op.34; ‘Eroica’ Variations and Fugue, op.35; Polonaise, op.89; 11 neue Bagatellen, op.119 (all R 1910); Ecossaises (Budapest, 1920)

F.F. Chopin: 14 Valses (Budapest, 1920); F. Couperin: 18 Pieces (R 1924); J. Haydn: 19 Sonatas, nos.1–17 (R 1911–13); nos.18–19 (R 1920); W.A. Mozart: 20 Sonatas (R 1910–12); Fantasy k397/k385g (R 1910); D. Scarlatti: 10 Sonatas (R 1921, 1926); F. Schubert: 2 Scherzi (R 1911); R. Schumann: Jugendalbum (R 1911); Studies by J.B. Duvernoy, S. Heller, L. Köhler (Budapest, 1917–20)

critical editions

F. Liszt: Hungaria, rev. 1911; in Musikalische Werke, i/5 (Leipzig, 1907–36/R)

F. Liszt: Ungarischer Marsch, Ungarischer Sturmmarsch, orch, 1916; in Musikalische Werke, i/12 (Leipzig, 1907–36/R)

F. Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies, pf, 1911–17, incl. in Musikalische Werke, ii/2, ed. P. Raabe (Leipzig, 1926/R)

miscellanea

Cadenza: L. van Beethoven: Pf Conc. no.3, 1st movt, BB A2, 1900, unpubd

Cadenzas: W.A. Mozart: 2 Pf Conc., k365/316a; BB A7, c1939, unpubd

Arr. ‘Rákóczi’ March, BB A1, pf 4 hands, 1896, unpubd

Arr. L. van Beethoven: Erlkönig, WoO131; BB A3, orchd c1905, unpubd

Unpubd frags., see DD appendices B–E (juvenilia) and main text of BB

WRITINGS

books and collected writings only

for listing of individual articles see Grove6

Cântece poporale româneşti din comitatul Bihor (Ungaria)/Chansons populaires roumaines du département Bihar (Hongrie) (Bucharest, 1913); repr. as Ethnomusikologische Schriften, iii, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1967); Eng. trans. of preface in Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 1–23

ed., with Z. Kodály: Erdélyi magyar népdalok [Hungarian folksongs from Transylvania] (Budapest, 1923/R); Eng. trans. of preface in Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 77–134

Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramureş (Munich, 1923); repr. as Ethnomusikologische Schriften, ii, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1966); Eng. edn as Rumanian Folk Music, v, ed. B. Suchoff (The Hague, 1975)

A magyar népdal [The Hungarian folksong] (Budapest, 1924); Eng. trans., 1931/R; repr. in Hung. and Ger. in Ethnomusikologische Schriften, i, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1965–8), 341–432; rev. Hung. version in Bartók Béla írásai, v, ed. D. Révész (Budapest, 1990)

Melodien der rumänischen Colinde (Weihnachtslieder) (Vienna, 1935), repr. with unpubd pt. 2 as Ethnomusikologische Schriften, iv, ed. D. Dille (Budapest, 1968); Eng. edn as Rumanian Folk Music, iv, ed. B. Suchoff (The Hague, 1975)

ed. B. Szabolcsi and A. Szőllősy: Bartók Béla válogatott zenei írásai [Selected musical writings of Béla Bartók] (Budapest, 1948, 2/1956)

with A. Lord: Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951); repr. as Yugoslav Folk Music, i, ed. B. Suchoff (Albany, NY, 1978)

ed., with Z. Kodály: A magyar népzene tára [Corpus of Hungarian music] (Budapest, 1951–)

ed. D. Carpitella: Béla Bartók: scritti sulla musica popolare (Turin, 1955)

ed. Z. Vancea: Béla Bartók: Însemnări asupra cîntecului popular [Béla Bartók: notes on folksong] (Bucharest, 1956)

ed. A. Elscheková, O. Elschek and J. Kresánek: Slovenské lľudové piesne/Slowakische Volkslieder, i (Bratislava, 1959); ii (1970), iii (forthcoming); Eng. trans. of preface in Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1997)

ed. E. Hykischová: Béla Bartók: Postřehy a názory [Béla Bartók: observations and opinions] (Bratislava, 1965)

ed. D. Dille: Ethnomusikologische Schriften (Budapest, 1965–8)

ed. A. Szőllősy: Bartók Béla összegyűjtött írásai [Collected writings of Béla Bartók], i (Budapest, 1966)

ed. B. Suchoff: Rumanian Folk Music (The Hague, 1967–75)

ed. D. Dille: Documenta bartókiana, iv (Budapest, 1970) [incl. essay drafts and variants]

ed. B. Szabolcsi: Musiksprachen, Aufsätze und Vorträge (Leipzig, 1972)

ed. L. Vikár: Béla Bartók’s Folk Music Research in Turkey (Budapest, 1976)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók: Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor (Princeton, NJ, 1976)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók Essays (London, 1976)

ed. L. Somfai: Documenta bartókiana, v (1977) [incl. essay drafts and variants]

ed. B. Suchoff: Yugoslav Folk Music (Albany, NY, 1978)

‘Bartók és a szavak’ [Bartók and words], Arion, no.13 (1982) [whole issue, incl. essay drafts and variants]

ed. T. Tallián: Bartók Béla írásai, i: Bartók Béla önmagáról, műveiről, az új magyar zenéről, műzene és népzene viszonyáról [Béla Bartók’s writings, i: on himself, his music, new Hungarian music, and the connection between art and folk music] (Budapest, 1989)

ed. S. Kovács and F. Sebő: Magyar népdalok, egyetemes gyűjtemény, i [Hungarian folksongs, complete collection, i] (Budapest, 1991; Eng. trans., 1993)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology (Lincoln, NE, 1997)

recordings

coll., with Z. Kodály: Magyar népzenei gramofonfelvételek, i [Hungarian Folk-Music Gramophone Recordings, i], rec. 1937

coll., with J. Deutsch and S. Veress: A Magyar rádió és a néprajzi múzeum gyűjteménye [Collection of the Hungarian Radio and Ethnographic Museum], rec. 1937–9; reissued as Hungarian Folk Music: Gramophone Records with Bartók’s Transcriptions, Hungaroton, LPX 18058–60 (1981) [ed. L. Somfai]

Centenary Edition of Bartók’s Records (Complete), i: Bartók at the Piano, 1920–1945; ii. Bartók Record Archives: Bartók Plays and Talks, 1912–1944, Hungaroton, LPX 12326–38 (1981) [ed. L. Somfai, Z. Kocsis, J. Sebestyén, with notes by L. Somfai] (Budapest, 1981, i: rev. 2/1991, ii: rev. 2/1995)

a: documents, catalogues and source information

BIBLIOGRAPHY

b: symposia, collections of essays

c: periodical issues

d: life and works

e: general biographical and critical studies

f: general analytical studies

g: individual works and genres

h: ethnomusicological research

a: documents, catalogues and source information

J. Demény, ed.: Bartók Béla levelei [Letters] (Budapest, 1948–71, enlarged 2/1976; Eng. trans., 1971)

J. Demény: ‘Bartók Béla tanuló évei és romantikus korszaka’ [Bartók’s years of study and his romantic period], ZT, ii (1954), 323–487 [documents of 1899–1905]

J. Demény: ‘Bartók művészi kibontakozásának évei: találkozás a népzenével’ [Bartók’s years of artistic development: contact with folk music], ZT, iii (1955), 286–459 [documents of 1906–14]

B. Szabolcsi, ed.: Bartók: sa vie et son oeuvre (Budapest, 1956, 2/1968)

V. Juhász, ed.: Bartók Béla amerikai évei [Bela Bartók’s American years] (New York, 1956; Eng. trans., 1981)

F. Bónis, ed.: Bartók Béla élete képekben [Béla Bartók’s life in pictures] (Budapest, 1956, 2/1958)

J. Ujfalussy, ed.: Bartók breviárium (Budapest, 1958, 3/1980) [letters, essays and documents]

W. Reich, ed.: Béla Bartók: eigene Schriften und Erinnerungen der Freunde (Basle, 1958)

J. Demény, ed.: ‘Bartók Béla megjelenése az európai zeneéletben’ [Bartók’s appearance in European musical life], ZT, vii (1959), 5–425 [documents of 1914–26]

J. Demény, ed.: ‘Bartók Béla pályája delelőjén’ [The zenith of Bartók’s career], ZT, x (1962), 189–787 [documents of 1926–40]

V. Bator: The Béla Bartók Archives: History and Catalogue (New York, 1963)

F. Bónis: Béla Bartóks Leben in Bildern (Budapest, 1964, enlarged 2/1972 in Hung. and Ger.; Eng. trans., 1972, 2/1981)

D. Dille, ed.: Documenta bartókiana, i–iv (Budapest, 1964–70)

E. Helm: Béla Bartók in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1965)

V. Čížik, ed.: Bartóks Briefe in die Slowakei (Bratislava, 1971)

D. Dille: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Jugendwerke Béla Bartóks, 1890–1904 (Kassel, 1974)

F. László, ed.: 99 Bartók-levél [99 Bartók letters] (Bucharest, 1974)

F. László, ed.: Béla Bartók scrisori [Béla Bartók letters] (Bucharest, 1976)

L. Somfai, ed.: Documenta bartókiana, v–vi (Budapest, 1977-81)

V. Lampert: Bartók népdalfeldolgozásainak forrásjegyzéke [Catalogue of sources of Bartók’s folksong arrangements] (Budapest, 1980); Ger. trans. in Documenta bartókiana, vi (Budapest, 1981), 15–149

P. Autexier, ed.: Béla Bartók: musique de la vie (Paris, 1981)

L. Somfai: ‘Manuscript versus Urtext: the Primary Sources of Bartók’s Works’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 2–66

B. Suchoff: ‘The New York Bartók Archives’, MT, cxxii (1981), 156–9

A. Wilheim: ‘A Bartók Bibliography, 1970–1980’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 477–92

B. Bartók, jr and A. Gombocz, eds.: Bartók Béla családi levelei [Letters of the Béla Bartók family] (Budapest, 1981)

B. Bartók, jr: Apám életének krónikája [Chronicle of my father’s life] (Budapest, 1981)

F. Bónis, ed.: Így láttuk Bartókot: harminchat emlékezés [So saw we Bartók: thirty-six recollections] (Budapest, 1981, 2/1995)

B. Bartók, jr: Bartók Béla műhelyében [In Béla Bartók’s workshop] (Budapest, 1982)

L. Somfai: ‘The Budapest Bartók Archives’, FAM, xxix (1982), 59–65

H. Lindlar: Lübbes Bartók-Lexikon (Bergisch Gladbach, 1984)

E. Antokoletz: Béla Bartók: a Guide to Research (New York, 1988, 2/1997)

T. Tallián: Bartók fogadtatása Amerikában, 1940–1945 [Bartók’s Reception in America, 1940–1945] (Budapest, 1988)

M. Gillies: Bartók Remembered (London, 1990)

L. Somfai: ‘Problems of the Chronological Organization of the Béla Bartók Thematic Index in Preparation’, SMH, xxxiv (1992), 345–66

G. Kiss: ‘A Bartók Bibliography, 1980–1989’, SMH, xxxv (1993–4), 435–53

J. Gergely, ed.: Béla Bartók: eléments d’un autoportrait (Paris, 1995)

G. Kroó, ed.: Bartók Béla, 1881–1945 (Budapest, 1995; Eng. trans., 1997) [CD-ROM]

b: symposia, collections of essays

Béla Bartók: a Memorial Review (New York, 1950)

Musik der Zeit, Ungarische Komponisten, no.9 (1954) [Hungary issue]

Z. Kodály, B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas, eds.: Studia memoriae Belae Bartók sacra (Budapest, 1956)

Liszt–Bartók: Budapest 1961

Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971

F. László, ed.: Bartók-dolgozatok [Bartók studies] (Bucharest, 1974)

T. Crow, ed.: Bartók Studies (Detroit, 1976)

F. László: Bartók Béla: tanulmányok és tanúságok [Béla Bartók: essays and testimonies] (Bucharest, 1980)

International Music Council Congress: Budapest 1981 [SMH, xxiv/3–4 (1982)]

F. László, ed.: Bartók-dolgozatok, 1981 [Bartók studies, 1981] (Bucharest, 1982)

F. Spangemacher, ed.: Béla Bartók zu Leben und Werk (Bonn, 1982)

J. Gergely, ed.: Béla Bartók vivant (Paris, 1985)

G. Ránki, ed.: Bartók and Kodály Revisited (Budapest, 1987)

M. Gillies, ed.: The Bartók Companion (London, 1993)

P. Laki, ed.: Bartók and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

Bartók Colloquium: Szombathely 1995 [SMH, xxxvi/3–4 (1995); xxxvii/1 (1996)]

c: periodical issues

Musikblätter des Anbruch, iii/5 (1921)

Musikblätter des Anbruch, viii/5 (1926)

Melos, v–vi (1949)

Új zenei szemle, i/4–5 (1950)

Musik der Zeit, Béla Bartók, no.3 (1953)

Long Player, ii/10 (1953)

ReM, no.224 (1953–4)

ReM, nos.328–35 (1980)

Igaz Szó, xxix/2 (1981)

SMH, xxiii (1981)

SMH, xxiv (1982), suppl.

Musik-Konzepte, no.22 (1981)

Jb Peters, iv (1981–2)

‘Bartók és a szavak’ [Bartók and words], Arion, no.13 (1982)

Melos [Stockholm], nos.12–13 (1995)

d: life and works

E. Haraszti: Bartók Béla élete és művei [Béla Bartók’s life and works] (Budapest, 1930; Eng. trans., 1938)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1939)

J. Demény: Bartók élete és művei [Bartók’s life and works] (Budapest, 1948)

A. Molnár: Bartók művészete, emlékezésekkel a művész életére [Bartók’s art, with recollections of the artist’s life] (Budapest, 1948)

H. and J. Geraedts: Béla Bartók (Haarlem, 1952, 2/1961)

H. Stevens: The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York, 1953, rev. 3/1993 by M. Gillies)

I. Martïnov: Béla Bartók (Moscow, 1956, 2/1968)

J. Uhde: Béla Bartók (Berlin, 1959)

L. Lesznai: Béla Bartók: sein Leben, seine Werke (Leipzig, 1961; Eng. trans., 1973)

P. Citron: Bartók (Paris, 1963, 3/1994)

G. Berger: Béla Bartók (Wolfenbüttel, 1963)

Z. Pálová-Vrbová: Béla Bartók, 1881–1945: život a dílo [Béla Bartók: life and works] (Prague, 1963)

J. Ujfalussy: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1965, 3/1976; Eng. trans., 1972)

I. Nest’yev: Béla Bartók, 1881–1945: zhizn' i tvorchestvo [Bartók: life and works] (Moscow, 1969)

T. Zieliński: Bartók (Kraków, 1969; Ger. trans., 1973)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1974)

V. Lampert: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1976)

S. Arvidsson: Béla Bartók (Göteborg, 1981)

Y. Queffélec: Béla Bartók (Paris, 1981)

T. Tallián: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1981; Eng. trans., 1988)

P. Griffiths: Bartók (London, 1984)

J. de Waard: Bartók (Haarlem, 1993)

A. Castronuovo: Bartók (Sannicandro Garganico, 1995)

K. Chalmers: Béla Bartók (London, 1995)

e: general biographical and critical studies

A. Cserna: ‘Bartók Béla és művei’ [Béla Bartók and his works], Zeneközlöny, xv (1917)

C. Gray: ‘Béla Bartók’, Sackbut, i (1920), 301–12

E. Wellesz: ‘Ungarische Musik, i: Béla Bartók’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii (1920), 225–8

Z. Kodály: ‘Béla Bartók’, ReM, ii/5 (1921), 205–17

M.-D. Calvocoressi: ‘Musicisti contemporanei: Béla Bartók’, Il Pianoforte, iii (1922), 113–17

C. Gray: ‘Béla Bartók’, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London, 1924), 194–209

E. von der Nüll: ‘Zur Kompositionstechnik Bartóks’, Anbruch, x (1928), 278–82

H. Leichtentritt: ‘On the Art of Béla Bartók’, MM, vi/3 (1928–9), 3–11

E. von der Nüll: Béla Bartók: ein Beitrag zur Morphologie der neuen Musik (Halle, 1930)

L. Pollatsek: ‘Béla Bartók and his Work’, MT, lxxii (1931), 411–13, 506–10, 600–602, 697–9

H. Leichtentritt: ‘Bartók and Hungarian Folksong’, MM, x (1933), 130–39

E. Ormándy: ‘Modern Hungarian Music’, Hungarian Quarterly, iii (1937), 164–8

E. Blom: ‘Bartók’s Third Period’, Tempo, no.5 (1941), 2–4

B. Kiss: Bartók Béla művészete [Béla Bartók’s art] (Cluj, 1946)

J. Weissmann: ‘Béla Bartók: an Estimate’, MR, vii (1946), 221–41

R. Leibowitz: ‘Béla Bartók ou la possibilité de compromis dans la musique contemporaine’, Temps modernes, iii (1947–8), 705–34

S. Moreux: Béla Bartók: sa vie, ses oeuvres, son langage (Paris, 1949; Eng. trans., 1953)

C. Mason: ‘Bartók and Folksong’, MR, xi (1950), 292–302

E. Balogh, ‘Bartók’s Last Years’, Tempo, no.36 (1955), 14–16

J. Székely: Bartók tanár úr (Pécs, 1957, 2/1978; Ger. rev. 1995)

A. Fassett: The Naked Face of Genius: Béla Bartók’s American Years (Boston, 1958; R/1970 as Béla Bartók: the American Years) [a novel]

F. Fricsay: Über Mozart und Bartók (Copenhagen, 1962)

F. Bónis: ‘Quotations in Bartók’s Music’, SMH, v (1963), 355–82

W. Rudziński: Warsztat kompozytorski Béli Bartóka [Béla Bartók’s compositional workshop] (Kraków, 1964)

J. Downey: La musique populaire dans l’oeuvre de Béla Bartók (diss., U. of Paris, 1966)

A. Cross: ‘Debussy and Bartók’, MT, cviii (1967), 125–31

J. Demény: Bartók Béla: a zongoraművész [Béla Bartók: the pianist] (Budapest, 1968, 2/1973)

G. Kroó: ‘Bartók Béla megvalósulatlan kompoziciós terveiről’ [Unrealized plans and ideas for projects by Béla Bartók], Magyar zene, x (1969), 251–63; Eng. trans., SMH, xii (1970), 11–27

A. Benkő: Bartók Béla romániai hangversenyei, 1922–1936 [Béla Bartók’s concerts in Romania, 1922–36] (Bucharest, 1970)

G. Weiss: Die Frühe Schaffensentwicklung Béla Bartóks im Lichte westlicher und östlicher Traditionen (diss., U. of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 1970)

G. Kroó: Bartók kalauz [A guide to Bartók] (Budapest, 1971; Eng. trans., 1974)

L. Burlas: ‘The Influence of Slovakian Folk Music on Bartók’s Musical Idiom’, Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971, 181–7

E. Lendvai: Bartók költői világa [Bartók’s poetic world] (Budapest, 1971)

G. Lukács: ‘Béla Bartók: on the 25th Anniversary of his Death’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.41 (1971), 42–55

O. Nordwall: Béla Bartók: Traditionalist-Modernist (Stockholm, 1972)

M. Rogers and Z. Oválry: ‘Bartók in the USSR in 1929’, Notes, xxix (1972–3), 416–25

F. Bónis, ed.: Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok [Hungarian studies in music history], iii (Budapest, 1973)

W. Fuchss: Béla Bartók und die Schweiz: eine Dokumentensammlung (Berne, 1973)

M. Carner: ‘Béla Bartók’, NOHM, x (1974), 274–99

Y. Lenoir: Vie et oeuvre de Béla Bartók aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique, 1940–1945 (diss., U. of Leuven, 1976)

D. Zoltai: ‘Bartók nem alkuszik’ [Bartók does not compromise], Bartók nem alkuszik (Budapest, 1976), 136–53

D. Dille: Généalogie sommaire de la famille Bartók (Antwerp, 1977)

J. Breuer: Bartók és Kodály (Budapest, 1978)

D. Dille: Het werk van Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1977)

A. Wilheim: ‘Bartók találkozása Debussy művészetével’ [Bartók’s encounter with Debussy’s art], Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1978 (Budapest, 1978), 107–11

T. Tallián: ‘Bartók-marginália’, Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1979 (Budapest, 1979), 35–46

B. Bartók, jr: ‘Bartók and the Visual Arts’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.81 (1981), 44–9

F. Bónis: ‘Bartók und Wagner’, ÖMz, xxxvi (1981), 134–47

J. Breuer: ‘Adorno’s Image of Bartók’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.82 (1981), 29–35

R. Schlötterer-Traimer: ‘Béla Bartók und die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss’, ÖMz, xxxvi (1981), 311–18

L. Somfai: Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány [Eighteen Bartók essays] (Budapest, 1981)

B. Bartók, jr: ‘Kodály und Bartók’, Kodály Conference: Budapest 1982, 12–17

J. Takács: Erinnerungen an Béla Bartók (Vienna, 1982)

W. Frobenius: ‘Bartók und Bach’, AMw, xli (1984), 54–67

B. Pethő: Bartók rejtekútja [Bartók’s secret path] (Budapest, 1984)

I. Volly: ‘Bartókné Pásztory Ditta’, Életünk, nos.7–8 (1984), 807–23, 873–84

J. Hunkemöller: ‘Bartóks Urteil über den Jazz’, Mf, xxxviii (1985), 27–36

Y. Lenoir: Folklore et transcendance dans l’oeuvre américaine de Béla Bartók (1940–1945) (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986)

L. Somfai: ‘Liszt’s Influence on Bartók Reconsidered’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.102 (1986), 210–19

B. Suchoff: ‘Ethnomusicological Roots of Béla Bartók’s Musical Language’, World of Music, xxix/1 (1987), 43–65

B. Szabolcsi: Kodályról és Bartókról [About Kodály and Bartók], ed. F. Bónis (Budapest, 1987)

L. Somfai: ‘Bartók Comes Home’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.112 (1988), 185–9

J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Hungarian Nationalism (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1989)

M. Gillies: Bartók in Britain (Oxford, 1989)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók: regard sur le passé, ed. Y. Lenoir (Namur and Louvain-la-Neuve, 1990)

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók as Pedagogue’, SMA, xxiv (1990), 64–86

F. Bónis: Hódolat Bartóknak és Kodálynak [Homage to Bartók and Kodály] (Budapest, 1992)

M. Gillies: ‘Stylistic Integrity and Influence in Bartók’s Works: the Case of Szymanowski’, International Journal of Musicology, i (1992), 139–60

A. Surrans: Bartók és Franciaország/Bartók et la France (Budapest, 1993)

J. Frigyesi: ‘Béla Bartók and the Concept of Nation and Volk in Modern Hungary’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 255–87

C. Kenneson: Székely and Bartók: the Story of a Friendship (Portland, OR, 1994)

Z. Kocsis: ‘Dohnányi and Bartók as Performers’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.134 (1994), 149–53

C. Pesavento: Musik von Béla Bartók als pädagogisches Programm (Frankfurt, 1994)

J. Bényei, ed.: A mindenzég zenéje: Magyar költők versei Bartók Béláról [Music of the universe: Hungarian poetry about Béla Bartók] (Debrecen, 1995)

J. Breuer: ‘Bartók and the Third Reich’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.140 (1995), 134–40

V. Lampert: ‘Bartók’s Music on Record: an Index of Popularity’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 393–412

F. László: ‘Rumänische Stilelemente in Bartóks Musik: Fakten und Deutungen’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 413–28

V. Verspeurt: ‘Een status quaestionis van het Bartók-onderzoek’, RBM, xlix (1995), 251–8

L. Somfai: Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley, 1996)

J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley, 1998)

L. Vikárius: Modell és inspiráció Bartók zenei gondolkodásában [Model and inspiration in Bartók’s musical thought] (Pécs, 1999)

f: general analytical studies

E. Lendvai: Bartók stílusa [Bartók’s style] (Budapest, 1955)

E. Kapst: Die ‘polymodale Chromatik’ Béla Bartóks (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1969)

L. Somfai: “‘Per finire”: Some Aspects of the Finale in Bartók’s Cyclic Form’, SMH, xi (1969), 391–408

L. Hartzell: Contrapuntal-Harmonic Factors in Selected Works of Béla Bartók (diss., U. of Kansas, 1970)

E. Kapst: ‘Stilkriterien der polymodal-kromatischen Gestaltungsweise im Werk Béla Bartóks’, BMw, xii (1970), 1–28

P. Petersen: Die Tonalität im Instrumentalschaffen von Béla Bartók (Hamburg, 1971)

E. Lendvai: Béla Bartók: an Analysis of his Music (London, 1971)

L. Somfai: ‘A Characteristic Culmination Point in Bartók’s Instrumental Forms’, Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971, 53–64

L. Bárdos: A Bartók-zene stílus-elemei [Style elements of Bartók’s music] (Budapest, 1972; Eng. trans., 1984)

J. Breuer: ‘Kolinda-ritmika Bartók zenéjében’ [Colindă rhythms in Bartók’s music], Zeneelmélet, stíluselemzés (Budapest, 1977), 84–102

I. Oramo: Modaalinen symmetria: tutkimus Bartókin kromatiikasta (Helsinki, 1977)

A. Szentkirályi: ‘Some Aspects of Béla Bartók’s Compositional Techniques’, SMH, xx (1978), 157–82

T. and P.J. Bachmann: ‘An Analysis of Béla Bartók’s Music through Fibonaccian Numbers and the Golden Mean’, MQ, lxv (1979), 72–82

I. Oramo: ‘Modale Symmetrie bei Bartók’, Mf, xxxiii (1980), 450–64

M. Radice: ‘Bartók’s Parodies of Beethoven’, MR, xlii (1981), 252–60

C. Vauclain: ‘Bartók: Beyond Bi-Modality’, MR, xlii (1981), 243–51

E. Antokoletz: ‘The Music of Bartók: Some Theoretical Approaches in the USA’, SMH, xxiv (1982), suppl. pp.67–74

P. Dinkel: ‘La tentation atonale de Béla Bartók’, Revue musicale de la Suisse Romande, xxxv (1982), 119–26

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók’s Last Works: a Theory of Tonality and Modality’, Musicology, vii (1982), 120–30

E. Lendvai: The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály (Budapest, 1983)

E. Antokoletz: The Music of Béla Bartók (Berkeley, 1984)

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók’s Notation: Tonality and Modality’, Tempo, no.145 (1983), 4–9

R. Howat: ‘Bartók, Lendvai and the Principles of Proportional Analysis’, MAn, ii (1983), 69–95; see also response by E. Lendvai, MAn, iii (1984), 255–64

L. Starr: ‘Melody-Accompaniment Textures in the Music of Bartók’, JM, iv (1985–6), 91–104

J. Bernard: ‘Space and Symmetry in Bartók’, JMT, xxx (1986), 185–201

R. Howat: ‘Debussy, Bartók et les formes de la nature’, Revue musicale de la Suisse Romande, xxxix (1986), 128–41

L. Somfai: ‘Nineteenth-Century Ideas Developed in Bartók’s Piano Notation in the Years 1907–14’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 73–91

R. Cohn: ‘Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional Combination in Bartók’, Music Theory Spectrum, x (1988), 19–42

M. Gillies: Notation and Tonal Structure in Bartók’s Later Works (New York, 1989)

R. Cohn: ‘Bartók’s Octatonic Strategies: a Motivic Approach’, JAMS, xliv (1991), 262–300

C. Morrison: ‘Fifth Progressions in Bartók: Structural Determinants or Mimicry?’, SMH, xxxiv (1992), 125–52

P. Wilson: The Music of Béla Bartók (New Haven, 1992)

E. Antokoletz: ‘Transformations of a Special Non-Diatonic Mode in Twentieth-Century Music: Bartók, Stravinsky, Scriabin and Albrecht’, MAn, xii (1993), 25–45

A. Forte: ‘Foreground Rhythm in Early Twentieth-Century Music’, Models of Musical Analysis: Early Twentieth-Century Music, ed. J. Dunsby (Oxford, 1993), 133–45

M. Gillies: ‘Pitch Notations and Tonality (Bartók)’, ibid., 42–55

M. Russ: ‘Functions, Scales, Abstract Systems and Contextual Hierarchies in the Music of Bartók’, ML, lxxv (1994), 401–25

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók Analysis and Authenticity’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 319–27

D. Schneider: ‘Towards Bridging the Gap: the Culmination Point as a Fulcrum between Analysis and Interpretation’, SMH, xxxvii (1996), 21–36

D. Walker: Bartók Analysis: a Critical Examination and Application (diss., McMaster U., 1996)

F. Hentschel: Funktion und Bedeutung der Symmetrie in den Werken Béla Bartóks (Lucca, 1997)

D. Cooper: ‘The Unfolding of Tonality in the Music of Béla Bartók’, MAn, xvii (1998), 21–38

g: individual works and genres

stage

E. von der Nüll: ‘Stilelemente in Bartóks Oper Herzog Blaubarts Burg’, Melos, viii (1929), 226–31

G. Kroó: ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, SMH, i (1961), 251–340

B. Szabolcsi: ‘Le mandarin miraculeux’, SMH, i (1961), 341–61

E. Lendvai: ‘Der wunderbare Mandarin’, SMH, i (1961), 363–429

G. Kroó: Bartók Béla színpadi művei [Béla Bartók’s stage works] (Budapest, 1962)

E. Lendvai: Bartók dramaturgiája [Bartók’s dramaturgy] (Budapest, 1964/R)

J. Chailley: ‘Essai d’analyse du Mandarin merveilleux’, SMH, viii (1966), 11–39

G. Kroó: ‘Data on the Genesis of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 79–123

A. von Wangenheim: Béla Bartók: ‘Der wunderbare Mandarin’ (Overath, 1985)

E. Antokoletz: ‘Bartók’s Bluebeard: the Sources of its “Modernism”’, College Music Symposium, xxx/1 (1990), 75–95

C. Leafstedt: ‘Structure in the Fifth Door Scene of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: an Alternative Viewpoint’, ibid., 96–102

N. John, ed.: The Stage Works of Béla Bartók (London, 1991)

C.S. Leafstedt: Inside Bluebeard’s Castle (New York, 1999)

orchestral

H. Cowell: ‘Bartók and his Violin Concerto’, Tempo, no.8 (1944), 4–6

G. French: ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra”’, MR, xxviii (1967), 122–34

J. McCabe: Bartók Orchestral Music (London, 1974)

T. Serly: ‘A Belated Account of the Reconstruction of a 20th-Century Masterpiece’, College Music Symposium, xv (1975), 7–25 [on Viola Concerto]

D. Dalton: ‘The Genesis of Bartók’s Viola Concerto’, ML, lvii (1976), 117–29

F. Michael: Béla Bartóks Variationstechnik dargestellt im Rahmen einer Analyse seines 2. Violinkonzert (Regensburg, 1976)

L. Somfai: ‘Strategies of Variation in the Second Movement of Bartók’s Violin Concerto 1937–8’, SMH, xix (1977), 161–202

S. Kovács: ‘Re-examining the Bartók/Serly Viola Concerto’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 295–322

E. Lendvai: ‘The Quadrophonic Stage of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.84 (1981), 70–85

J. Hunkemöller: Béla Bartók: Musik für Saiteninstrumente (Munich, 1982)

J. Hunkemöller: ‘Bartók analysiert seine “Musik für Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und Celesta”’, AMw, xl (1983), 147–63

B. Parker: ‘Parallels between Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Kübler-Ross’s Theory about the Dying’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 532–56

K. Móricz: Bartók Béla: Concerto zenekarra [Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra] (diss., Liszt Academy, Budapest, 1992)

A. Rizzuti: ‘Le geometrie imperfette della Musica per strumenti a corde, percussioni e celesta di Béla Bartók’, NRMI, xxvi (1992), 37–51

P. Bartók: ‘The Principal Theme of Bartók’s Viola Concerto’, SMH, xxxv (1993–4), 45–50

K. Móricz: ‘New Aspects of the Genesis of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra’, SMH, xxxv (1993–4), 181–219

G. Weiss-Aigner: ‘Das zweite Violinkonzert von Béla Bartók im Spektrum der gattungsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung’, ibid., 303–39

M.A. Harley: ‘Birds in Concert: North-American Birdsong in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3’, Tempo, no.189 (1994), 8–16

K. Móricz: ‘Operating on a Fetus: Sketch Studies and their Relevance to the Interpretation of the Finale of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 461–76

B. Suchoff: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (New York, 1995)

P. Bartók: ‘Commentary on the Revision of Béla Bartók’s Viola Concerto’, Journal of the American Viola Society, xii/1 (1996), 11–33

D. Cooper: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge, 1996)

D. Maurice and others: ‘Panel Discussion: the Bartók Viola Concerto’, Journal of the American Viola Society, xiv/1 (1998), 15–49

D. Maurice: Bartók’s Viola Concerto: an Investigation of its Genesis, Reconstruction, Reception, Revision and Future Possibilities (diss., Otago U., 1997)

D. Schneider: Expression in the Time of Objectivity: Nationality and Modernity in Five Concertos by Béla Bartók (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1997)

chamber

T. Adorno: ‘Béla Bartóks Drittes Streichquartett’, Anbruch, xi/9–10 (1929), 358–60

G. Abraham: ‘The Bartók of the Quartets’, ML, xxvi (1945), 185–94

M. Seiber: The String Quartets of Béla Bartók (London, 1945)

M. Babbitt: ‘The String Quartets of Bartók’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 377–85

G. Perle: ‘Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók’, MR, xvi (1955), 300–312

J. Kárpáti: ‘Az arab népzene hatásának nyomai Bartók II. vonósnégyesében’ [Traces of the influence of Arabic folk music in Bartók’s Second String Quartet], Új Zenei Szemle, vii (1956), 8–15

R. Traimer: Béla Bartóks Kompositionstechnik dargestellt an seinen sechs Streichquartetten (Regensburg, 1956)

C. Mason: ‘An Essay in Analysis: Tonality, Symmetry and Latent Serialism in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet’, MR, xviii (1957), 189–201

L. Treitler: ‘Harmonic Procedures in the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók’, JMT, iii (1959), 292–8

A. Forte: ‘Bartók’s Serial Composition’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 233–45 [on Fourth String Quartet]

J. Kárpáti: Bartók vonósnégyesei [Bartók’s string quartets] (Budapest, 1967, 2/1976 as Bartók kamarazenéje [Bartók’s chamber music]); Eng. trans., 1975, enlarged as Bartók’s Chamber Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1994)

B. Suchoff: ‘Structure and Concept in Bartók’s Sixth String Quartet’, Tempo, no.83 (1967–8), 2–11

K. Stockhausen: ‘Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.40 (1970), 49–53

R. Travis: ‘Tonal Coherence in the First Movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet’, Music Forum, ii (1970), 298–371

V. Lampert: ‘Vázlat Bartók II. vonósnégyesének utolsó tételéhez’ [Sketch for the last movement of Bartók’s Second String Quartet], Magyar zene, xiii (1972), 252–63

S. Veress: ‘Béla Bartóks 44 Duos für zwei Violinen’, Erich Doflein: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. L.U. Abraham (Mainz, 1972), 31–57

H. Fladt: Zur Problematik traditioneller Formtypen in der Musik des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, dargestellt an Sonatensätzen in den Streichquartetten Béla Bartóks (Munich, 1974)

E. Antokoletz: Principles of Pitch Organization in Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet (diss., City U. of New York, 1975)

G. Perle: ‘The String Quartets of Béla Bartók’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 193–210

W. Berry: ‘Symmetrical Interval Sets and Derivative Pitch Materials in Bartók’s Quartet No.3’, PNM, xviii (1979–80), 287–380

Y. Lenoir: ‘Contributions à l’étude de la Sonate pour violon solo de Béla Bartók’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 209–60

S. Walsh: Bartók’s Chamber Music (London, 1982)

D. Locke: ‘Numerical Aspects of Bartók’s String Quartets’, MT, cxxviii (1987), 322–5

M. Beach: Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet: Studies in Genesis and Structure (diss., U. of Rochester, 1988)

C. Morrison: ‘Prolongation in the Final Movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No.4’, Music Theory Spectrum, xiii (1991), 179–96

P. Petersen: ‘Rhythmik und Metrik in Bartóks Sonate für zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug und die Kritik des jungen Stockhausen an Bartók’, Musiktheorie, ix (1994), 39–48

piano

A. Molnár: Bartók Két elégiájának elemzése [An analysis of Bartók’s Two Elegies] (Budapest, 1921)

E. Lendvai: ‘Bartók: Az éjszaka zenéje’ [Bartók: The Night’s Music], Zenei szemle, i (1947), 216

H.U. Engelmann: Bela Bartoks Mikrokosmos: Versuch einer Typologie ‘Neuer Musik’ (Würzburg, 1953/R)

J. Uhde: Bartóks Mikrokosmos: Spielanweisungen und Erläuterungen (Regensburg, 1954, 2/1988)

B. Suchoff: Guide to Bartók’s ‘Mikrokosmos’ (London, 1957, 2/1971)

D. Bratuz: The Folk Element in the Piano Music of Béla Bartók (diss., Indiana U., 1965)

J. Vinton: ‘Toward a Chronology of the Mikrokosmos’, SMH, viii (1966), 41–69

T. Hundt: Bartóks Satztechnik in den Klavierwerken (Regensburg, 1971)

D. Bratuz: ‘On Bartók’s Improvisations and the Pippa Principle’, Studies in Music [Ontario], ii (1977), 8–14

E. Antokoletz: ‘The Musical Language of Bartók’s 14 Bagatelles for Piano’, Tempo, no.137 (1981), 8–16

I. Waldbauer: ‘Intellectual Construct and Tonal Direction in Bartók’s “Divided Arpeggios”’, SMH, xxiv (1982), 527–36

K. Agawu: ‘Analytical Issues Raised by Bartók’s Improvisations for Piano, Op.20’, JMR, v (1984), 131–63

L. Somfai: ‘Analytical Notes on Bartók’s Piano Year of 1926’, SMH, xxvi (1984), 5–58

P. Wilson: ‘Concepts of Prolongation and Bartók’s Opus 20’, Music Theory Spectrum, vi (1984), 79–89

I. Waldbauer: ‘Conflict of Tonal and Non-Tonal Elements in Bartók’s “Free Variations”’, Bartók and Kodály Revisited, ed. G. Ranki (Budapest, 1987), 199–209

D. Yeomans: Bartók for Piano (Bloomington, IN, 1988)

V. Fischer: Béla Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles op.6: Determining Performance Authenticity (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1989)

I. Waldbauer: ‘Polymodal Chromaticism and Tonal Plan in the First of Bartók’s Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm’, SMH, xxxii (1990), 241–62

L. Somfai: ‘The Influence of Peasant Music on the Finale of Bartók’s Piano Sonata’, Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. E. Wolf and E. Roesner (Madison, WI, 1990), 535–55

J. Parakilas: ‘Folksong as Musical Wet Nurse: the Prehistory of Bartók’s For Children’, MQ, lxxxi (1995), 476–500

vocal

P. Meyer: Béla Bartóks ‘Ady-Lieder’ op.16 (Winterthur, 1965)

M. Szabó: Bartók Béla kórusművei [Béla Bartók’s choral works] (Budapest, 1985)

L. Vikárius: ‘Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930): a Reading of the Sources’, SMH, xxxv (1993–4), 249–301

I. Arauco: ‘Methods of Translation in Bartók’s Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’, JMR, xii (1992), 189–211

T. Tallián: ‘Let this cup pass from me …: the Cantata Profana and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.139 (1995),

h: ethnomusicological research

C. Brăiloiu: ‘Béla Bartók folkloriste’, SMz, lxxxviii (1948), 92–4

J. Szegő: Bartók Béla, a népdalkutató [Béla Bartók, the folksong researcher] (Bucharest, 1956)

J. Downey: La musique populaire dans l’oeuvre de Béla Bartók (diss., U. of Paris, 1966)

J. Kuckertz: Gestaltvariation in den von Bartók gesammelten rumänischen Colinden (Regensburg, 1963)

B. Suchoff: ‘Bartók and Serbo-Croatian Folk Music’, MQ, lviii (1972), 557–71

P.P. Domokos: Bartók Béla kapcsolata a moldvai csángómagyarokkal [Béla Bartók’s connection with the csángós of Moldavia] (Budapest, 1981)

S. Kovács: ‘Bartók’s System of Folksong Classification’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.83 (1981), 71–8

L. Vargyas, ‘Bartók and Folk Music Research’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.83 (1981), 58–70

S. Erdely: ‘Folk-Music Research in Hungary until 1950: the Legacy of Bartók and Kodály’, CMc, no.43 (1987), 51–61

Y. Lenoir: ‘Le destin des recherches ethnomusicologiques de Béla Bartók à la vielle de son séjour aux Etats-Unis’, RBM, lxii (1988), 273–83

N. Ito: Barutoku: Minyou o ‘hakken’ sita henkyou no sakkyoukuka [Bartók’s activities as a folk-music researcher] (Tokyo, 1997)

Bartók Quartet.

Hungarian string quartet. It was founded in 1960 by Péter Komlós (b Budapest, 25 Oct 1935), Sándor Devich (b Szeged, 19 Jan 1935), Géza Németh (b Beregszász [now Beregovo, Ukraine], 23 July 1936) and László Mező, all students in Leó Weiner's chamber music class at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. At first they performed as the Komlós Quartet – making their Budapest début in 1958 – and played in orchestras, the leader and viola player as principals of the State Opera Orchestra and the second violinist in the Hungarian State Orchestra. In 1960 Károly Botvay (b Sopron, 29 Dec 1932) replaced Mező and in 1963 they were given permission by Bartók's family to use his name. The following year they won the international competition in Liège and commenced the tours which have taken them all over the world. In 1970 they performed in the United Nations General Assembly Hall; in 1973 they gave three concerts in the festival marking the opening of the Sydney Opera House; and in 1981 they were awarded the UNESCO Prize. In 1977 Mező reclaimed the cello chair and in 1982 Devich withdrew, to be replaced first by Bela Bánfalvi and then in 1985 by Géza Hargitai. The ensemble is chiefly famed for performances of the Bartók and Kodály quartets but has championed such contemporary Hungarian composers as Bozay, Durkó, Farkas, Kadosa, Lang, Soproni and Szabó. Its cultured tonal qualities are also heard to advantage in Beethoven, whose late quartets it plays with impressive intensity. Its recordings include works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (a complete cycle), Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms (all the chamber music for strings), Dvořák, Debussy, Ravel and Bartók (a complete cycle). Its instruments are a 1736 violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, a 1774 violin by Giovanni Baptista Guadagnini, a 1787 viola by Lorenzo Storioni and a 1730 cello by Domenico Montagnana.

TULLY POTTER

Bartoletti, Bruno

(b Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, 10 June 1926). Italian conductor. He entered the Florence Conservatory, where his studies included the flute with Bruscalupi and the piano with Nardi. After a brief period as flautist in the Maggio Musicale Orchestra he became pianist at the centre for lyric training attached to the Florence Teatro Comunale. He worked as assistant to many leading conductors including Rodzinski, Mitropoulos, Gui and Serafin, who encouraged him to take up conducting. Bartoletti made his conducting début at the Teatro Comunale in December 1953 with a production of Rigoletto prepared by Gui; he soon demonstrated the interpretative insight and versatility that enabled him to conduct contemporary works as well as the Italian opera repertory from Rossini to Dallapiccola to which his career has mainly been devoted. He was appointed resident conductor of the Teatro Comunale, 1957–64, and conducted the premières of Rocca's Antiche iscrizioni (1955) and Malipiero's Il figliuol prodigo and Venere prigioniera (1957) at Florence, Mortari's La scuola delle mogli (1959) at La Scala, and Ginastera's Don Rodrigo (1964) at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. During this time he also introduced Egk's Der Revisor, Krenek's Jonny spielt auf and Shostakovich's The Nose to the Italian stage, and conducted the Italian repertory at the Royal Opera, Copenhagen, 1957–60. He made his American début at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1956, and was appointed principal conductor there in 1964. He was conductor at the Rome Opera and artistic director of the Teatro Verdi, Pisa, 1965–73. In 1985 he was appointed artistic director at Chicago and musical adviser at the Teatro Comunale and Maggio Musicale in Florence (and subsequently artistic director, 1988–91). In 1992 he became principal guest conductor of the Orchestra della Toscana. He also teaches conducting at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. His recordings include Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Suor Angelica, and Verdi's Un ballo in maschera; the Puccini performances were much admired for their dramatic excitement as well as sympathetic interpretation.

LEONARDO PINZAUTI

Bartoli, Cecilia

(b Rome, 4 June 1966). Italian mezzo-soprano. She sang the Shepherd-Boy in Tosca as a child, and studied in Rome at the Accademia di S Cecilia. She made her professional opera début at Verona in 1987 and in 1988 undertook Rosina at Cologne, the Schwetzingen Festival and the Zürich Opera, an interpretation that delighted all who saw it. Following her La Scala début as Isolier (Le Comte Ory) in 1991, she quickly acquired a reputation as one of the world's leading Rossini singers, acclaimed both for her vocal accomplishments and her lively, quick-witted stage personality. She has also been admired in several Mozartian roles, including Cherubino (the role of her début at the Opéra Bastille in 1990), Zerlina, Susanna, Dorabella and Despina (the role of her Metropolitan début in 1996). Much of her reputation has, however, been built on her recording career, nurtured by the producer Christopher Raeburn. In addition to notable recitals of Mozart and Rossini arias and Italian and French song, Bartoli has been the central attraction in sets of Rinaldo, Haydn's L'anima del filosofo, Il barbiere di Siviglia, La Cenerentola and Il turco in Italia. These all reveal her warm, rounded tone, her extreme flexibility in fioriture (although she is inclined to aspirate runs) and above all, her infectious zest in projecting character.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Loppert: ‘Cecilia Bartoli’, Opera , xlviii (1997) 1152–60

K. Chernin and R. Stendhal: Cecilia Bartoli: the Passion of Song (London, 1998)

M. Hoelterhoff: Backstage with Cecilia Bartoli (London, 1998)

ALAN BLYTH

Bartoli, Cosimo

(b Florence, 20 Dec 1503; d Florence, 25 Oct 1572). Italian diplomat, philologist, mathematician and humanist. After studies in Rome and Florence he took minor orders and was attached to the baptistery in Florence, where he was also active in the literary academy. In 1560 he became secretary to Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and two years later became the Venetian diplomatic agent of Duke Cosimo I (Grand Duke from 1569), a post he held until his return to Florence in 1572. Bartoli’s importance for music lies in his Ragionamenti accademici (Venice, 1567). Although the book is devoted to the criticism of Dante, its third chapter concerns Renaissance musicians living before about 1545. Ockeghem and Josquin are likened to Donatello and Michelangelo, as the originators and perfecters of their respective arts. Bartoli extolled the musicians of the court of Pope Leo X (1513–21). The great number of instrumentalists treated is particularly significant. Francesco da Milano, Alfonso dalla Viola and Alessandro Striggio are a few of the many performers cited. Bartoli’s brother Giorgio was also knowledgeable in music, and translated Boethius’s De musica into Italian (I-Fn Magl.XIX.75).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Cantagalli, N. de Blasi)

EinsteinIM

G. Benvenuti, ed.: Andrea e Giovanni Gabrieli e la musica strumentale in San Marco, i, IMii (Milan, 1931), 54ff [incl. chap.3 of Ragionamenti accademici]

D. Kämper: Studien zur instrumentalen Ensemblemusik des 16. Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.10 (1970)

J. Haar: ‘Cosimo Bartoli on Music’, EMH, viii (1988), 37–79

CLEMENT A. MILLER

Bartoli, Daniello

(b Ferrara, 12 Feb 1608; d Rome, 13 Jan 1685). Italian scholar. He was a Jesuit and spent much of his later life in Rome (for a summary of his life and works see DBI). One of his publications is an extensive work on acoustics, Del suono, de’ tremori armonici e dell’udito (Rome, 1679, 2/1680).

Bartoli [De Bartolo], Erasmo [‘Padre Raimo’]

(b Gaeta, 1606; d Naples, 15 July 1656). Italian composer and singer. His teacher was probably G.B. de Bellis. On 19 December 1626 he joined the royal chapel at Naples as a bass and remained there until 1636. In March of that year he was admitted to the Congregazione dell'Oratorio with a salary for life for himself and his mother. He was music prefect in 1642 and from 1652 to 1656. He played some part in the posthumous publication of Scipione Dentice's Madrigali spirituali, libro secondo (Naples, 1640) which he dedicated to Cardinal Buoncompagno. He died of the plague. He was a prolific composer of church music, which the fathers of the oratory valued so highly that in 1713 one of them, Scipione Narni, arranged for the copying of the most often performed works. The motets for four choirs (in I-Nc and Nf) are mainly homophonic, and the few contrapuntal passages are rather weak.

WORKS

Introit, mass and vespers for S Filippo Neri, 16vv (4 choirs), insts; 2 masses, 8, 10vv; 2 responsories, vesper hymns, 16vv (4 choirs), vc, db, org; litany, 4 choirs; psalms, 2 choirs; cantatas, 4vv; over 30 motets, 4 choirs; 26 motets, 2 choirs; mottetti pastorali, 4–6vv; c500 other motets; canzoni del P. Raimo; c250 other sacred works: GB-Lbl, I-Nc, Nf

Motets, 4 choirs, Nc, Nf (dated 1786)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Franco: Biographical note (in I-Nc)

G. Pannain: Le origini della scuola musicale napoletana (Naples, 1914)

U. Prota-Giurleo: ‘La musica a Napoli nel Seicento (dal Gesualdo allo Scarlatti)’, Samnium, i/4 (1928), 67–90; ii/2 (1929), 30–49 [incl. Franco item above]

RENATO BOSSA

Bartoli, Giovan Battista

(fl 1617). Italian composer. He is known by one publication, Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Florence, 1617). Dedicated to Lorenzo Bonei, the book opens with a seven-part cycle O primavera. This is mostly written in the lighter manner, though its third section, O dolcezza amarissime, is a brief if concentrated essay in the pathetic style, making much use of suspensions, dissonances and chromaticism. The printing of the volume, one of Zanobi Pignoni's small number of music editions, is rather rough in appearance.

IAIN FENLON

Bartolini [Bartalani, Bertolini], Orindio

(b Arcidosso, nr Siena, c1580; d 1640). Italian composer. He spent most of his working life, from 1609 to 1635, as one of a line of distinguished maestri di cappella of Udine Cathedral. For ten years before this he had been a singer at S Marco, Venice. His madrigals are conservative for their date (1606) and handicapped by undistinguished musical ideas and amorphous textures, but his canzonettas and arias are more modern. His three collections of large-scale church music form his main output. Two appeared in the 1630s after the great Venetian plague, which suggests that the choir at Udine was still a fair size if, as must be supposed, they were written for it. The requiem mass and Te Deum (both unusual forms) in the 1633 volume may indeed have been composed for the burying of the victims of the plague and thanksgiving for its end. The style of the earlier compline music for double choir (1613) is fairly conservative, but Bartolini shows a fine ear for sonority, a developed sense of form and a varied and imaginative approach to word-setting in the refrain structure of Regina caeli.

WORKS

all published in Venice

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1606)

Canzonette e arie alla romana, 3vv, libro primo (1606)

Compietà con le littanie della B. Vergine, 8vv, bc (org) (1613)

Messe concertate, 8vv, e messa per li morti con un motetto, et il Te deum, con bc (org), op.4 (1633)

Messe concertate, 5, 8-9vv, e motetti, 1-3, 8vv, bc (org), op.5 (1634)

1 canzona, 8vv in 1608²⁴

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Vale: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Udine’, NA , vii (1930), 87–201, esp. 133

J. Roche: ‘Musica diversa di Compietà: Compline and its Music in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, PRMA, cix (1982-3), 60–79

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE

Bartolino da Padova [Magister Frater Bartolinus de Padua, Frater carmelitus, Frater Bartholomeus; erroneously: Dactalus de Padua]

(fl Padua and ?Florence, c1365–1405). Italian composer, about whom no certain facts are known. As can be seen from I-MOe α.M.5.24 (I bei sembianti, ascribed to ‘Frater carmelitus’) and from the portrait of him in I-Fl87 (f.101v; see illustration), he belonged to the Carmelite Order. He is possibly to be identified with one or other of the friars named Bartholomeus who are attested at the Carmelite monastery in Paduain 1376 and 1380 (see Petrobelli, DBI and 1968). It has been assumed, from the texts of some works (Imperial sedendo, ?1401, for Francesco Novello, Ladouce çere, perhaps also Quel sole che nutrica) that probably allude to the Carrara family, lords of Padua, that Bartolino was in their service from 1365 to 1405. It is still an open question whether he lived only in Padua or stayed also in Florence between 1388 and 1390 (as a companion of Francesco Novello who had fled from Padua). However, other pieces seem to contain references to the motto and emblem of the Visconti family (La fieratesta; Alba colomba, probably for Gian Galeazzo Visconti’s entry into Padua, 1388; Nel sommo grado; Quel digno de memoria; perhaps also Le aurate chiome, ?1380), even though some of them could equally well refer to the Carraresi, and be interpreted as directed not in support of but against the campaigns of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the 1390s. This is probably the case for the poem La fiera testa, which was also set to music by Niccolò da Perugia, and was transcribed into the Novelliere of Giovanni Sercambi da Lucca (ed. Rossi) in a different reading. It is interesting that a ballata by Paolo da Firenze quotes the same, well known, Visconti motto (‘Sofrir m’estuet’), which also appears in poems by Franco Sacchetti and in a piece by Philippus de Caserta.

Evidence for Bartolino’s reputation in Tuscany is strengthened by the inclusion of his ballata Ama chi t’ama into both the Chronicles and the Novelliere of Sercambi, and by the mention of madrigals ‘fattia Padova per Frate Bartolino’ in Giovanni Gherardi’s Paradiso degli Alberti (ed. A.Wesselofsky, Bologna, 1867/R, i, 62; iii, 170).

The 38 works that can with certainty be attributed to Bartolino have come down to us complete in the Florentine manuscript I-Fl 87; the one exception to this is Serva çiascuno (in I-La 184). A group of works are also contained in the Florentine Codex I-Fl 2211. In the other Tuscan manuscripts his works occur only in isolation, whilst they are numerous in the northern Italian manuscript F-Pn n.a.fr.6771 (26 works) and in I-La 184 (12 works). Three pieces are intabulated for a keyboard instrument in I-FZc 117. Along with the ‘Rondel franceschi’, no longer surviving, five or six works are named in Prodenzani’s Liber saporecti.

Bartolino’s style was influenced by Jacopo da Bologna. The monophonic link passages between the lines of his madrigals, and the change in metre which occurs only in the ritornellos of the madrigals (and not always even there), provide evidence of this. It is also striking that Bartolino supplied text for both voices not only in the two-voice madrigals but also in the two-voice ballatas. The Italian tradition is emphasized by the avoidance of ouvert and clos endings in the ballatas and by the frequent extended melismas– not only in the madrigals – on the first and penultimate syllables of the line. The notation of his works is also strictly Italian. The three-voice pieces Non cor(r)er troppo, Per un verde boschetto and I bei sembianti conform partly with Jacopo’s style with two upper voices set against a tenor part; however, elsewhere they show influence from the French style in that countertenor and tenor provide a supporting duet for the upper voice (El no me giova, Sempre, donna, Alba colomba and La douce çere). In these last-mentioned pieces, in accordance with the Italian fashion, only the top voice and the tenor are texted; the one exception is no.32 in I-Fl 87.

WORKS

Editions: Der Squarcialupi-Codex Pal.87 der Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana zuFlorenz, ed. J. Wolf (Lippstadt, 1955) [W]Italian Secular Music, ed. W.T. Marrocco, PMFC, ix (1975) [M]

ballatas

Ama chi t’ama, 2vv, W 190, M 8 (see Bongi, ii, p.242, and Rossi, ii, p.36)

Amor, che nel pensier, 2vv, W 173, M 10 (text incipit: cf Petrarch’s sonnet cxl; same music used for L’invido per lo ben: see Diederichs)

Chi può servir, 2vv, W 181, M 12

Chi tempo à (Matteo Griffoni), 2vv, W 178, M 14

El no me giova (çova), 3vv, W 183, M 18 (in I-MOe α.M.5.24, a different Ct, probably by Matteo da Perugia)

Gioia di novi odori, 2vv, W 193, M 20

La sacrosanta carità (Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio), 2vv, W162, M 34 (Debenedetti, no.29)

L’invido per lo ben, 2vv, W 187, M 38 (see Amor, che nel pensier)

Madonna bench’i’ miri, 2vv, W 175, M 40

Miracolosa tua sembianza, 2vv, W 177, M 42

Nel sommo grado, 2vv, W 189, M 44

Non cor(r)er troppo, 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 186, M 46, 48

Perché cançato è il mondo, 2vv, W 184, M 51

Per figura del cielo, 2vv, W 165, M 53

Per subito comando, 2vv, W 163, M 54

Per un verde boschetto, 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 194, M 56, 58 (in GB-Lbl Add.29987 wrongly termed a madrigal; Debenedetti, no.25; ?lauda contrafactum, see Ghisi, p.78)

Qual novità cor duro, 2vv, W 176, M 64

Quando necessità, 2vv, W 171, M 70 (text inc.; in W incorrectly treated as a continuation of Le aurate chiome)

Quel digno de memoria, 2vv, W 182, M 72

Recordate de me (Recorditi di me), 2vv, W 188, M 77 (Ct in I-La 184 may be by another composer)

Sempre, donna, t’amai, 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 179, M 79

Sempre se trova, 2vv, W 162, M 78

Serva chi può, 2vv, W 184, M 86

Serva çiascuno, 2vv, M 88

Strinçe la man, 2vv, W 167, M 89

Tanto de mio cor, 2vv, W 189, M 90

Tuo gentil cortesia, 2vv, W 191, M 92

madrigals

Alba colomba, 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 166, M 1, 5 (Debenedetti, no.29)

Donna liçadra, 2vv, W 172, M 16 (M does not consider the version from I-La 184)

I bei sembianti, 3vv, W 160, M 22 (attrib. ‘Frater carmelitus’ in I-MOe α.M.5.24)

Imperial sedendo, 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 174, M 25 (inst version in I-FZc 117; Debenedetti, no.25; wrongly attrib. or misspelled Dactalus de Padua in I-MOe α.M.5.24; current attribution doubted by Fallows)

La douce çere (çiere), 2 versions: 2vv, 3vv, W 159, M 28 (French text italianized as La dolce cerra in GB-Lbl Add.29987; inst version in I-FZc 117; Debenedetti, no.25; wrongly attrib. ‘Fra Bartolino da Perugia’ in I-Fn 26)

La fiera testa, 2vv, W 164, M 31 (Italian-Latin-French text, ?Petrarch; see also Rossi, ii, p.203)

Le aurate chiome, 2vv, W 170, M 36 (text inc.; Senhal: ‘Catarina’; Debenedetti, no.29)

Qual lege move, 2vv, W 192, M 60 (inst version in I-FZc 117)

Quando la terra, 2vv, W 169, M 66, 68 (text inc.)

Quel sole che nutrica, 2vv, W 168, M 74 (Senhal: ‘Orsolina’)

Se premio de virtù, 2vv, W 180, M 83 (ritornello after stanzas 1 and3; see Corsi, p.243)

doubtful works

La bianca selva, 2vv, madrigal (see Fischer, 1958–61, p.277)

lost works

Rondel franceschi (see Debenedetti, no.47)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (P. Petrobelli)

S. Bongi, ed.: Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese (Lucca, 1892)

S. Debenedetti, ed.: ‘Il “Sollazzo” e il “Saporetto” con altre rime di Simone Prodenzani’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, suppl.xv (Turin, 1913)

D. Plamenac: ‘Keyboard Music of the Fourteenth Century in Codex Faenza 117’, JAMS, iv (1951), 179–201

F. Ghisi: ‘Strambottie laude nel travestimento spirituale della poesia musicale del Quattrocento’, CHM, i (1953), 45–78

K. von Fischer: ‘Drei unbekannte Werke von Jacopo da Bologna und Bartolino da Padua?’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), 265–81; repr. in Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 3–14

N. Goldine: ‘ Fra Bartolino da Padova, Musicien de Court’, AcM, xxxiv (1962), 142–55

P. Petrobelli: ‘Some Dates for Bartolino da Padova’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H.S. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 85–112

G. Thibault: ‘Emblèmes et devises des Visconti dans les oeuvres musicales du Trecento’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento: Convegno II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 131–60

G. Corsi, ed.: Poesie musicali del Trecento (Bologna, 1970), xliii–xlvii, 239–65

U. Günther: ‘Das Manuskript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (olim lat.568 = Mod)’, MD, xxiv (1970), 17–67, esp. 34

L. Rossi, ed.: Giovanni Sercambi: Novelliere (Rome, 1974)

A. Hallmark: ‘Some Evidence for French Influence in Northern Italy, c.1400’, Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, ed. S. Boorman (Cambridge, 1983) 193–225

N. Pirrotta: ‘ Rhapsodic Elements in North-Italian Polyphony of the 14th Century’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 83–99, esp. 84–5

E. Diederichs: ‘Zwei Texte zu einer Ballata von Bartolino da Padova’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, v, ed. A. Ziino (Palermo, 1985), 113–22

M. Plant: ‘Patronage in the Circle of the Carrara Family: Padua, 1337–1405’, Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F.W. Kent, P. Simons and J.C. Eade (Canberra and Oxford, 1987), 177–99

G. Cattin: ‘ L'Ars Nova musicale a Padova’, Padua sidus preclarum: I Dondi dall’Orologio e la Padova dei Carraresi, Padua, July–Nov 1989 (Padua, 1989), 107–22 [exhibition catalogue]

J. Nádas and A.Ziino: Introduction to The Lucca Codex: Codex Mancini (Lucca, 1990), 11–99, esp. 40–41

F.A. Gallo: ‘ La biblioteca dei Visconti’, Musica nel castello: trovatori, libri, oratori nelle corti italiane dal XIII al XV secolo (Bologna, 1992), 59–94, esp. 62–3; Eng. trans. (Chicago, 1995), 47–67

F.A. Gallo, ed.: Il codice Squarcialupi (Florence, 1992) [incl. J. Nádas: ‘The Squarcialupi Codex: an Edition of Trecento Songs, ca. 1410–1415’,i, 19–86; K. von Fischer: ‘Le biografie’, i, 127–44; N. Pirrotta: ‘Le musiche del codice Squarcialupi’, i, 193–222]

J. Nádas: ‘The Lucca Codex and MS San Lorenzo 2211: Some Further Observations’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi (Certaldo, 1992), 145–68

D. Fallows: ‘Ciconia's Late Songs and their Milieu’, Johannes Ciconia: Liège 1998 [forthcoming]

T. Sucato: ‘La tradizione notazionale delle opere di Bartolino da Padova e il codice di Lucca (codice Mancini)’, Problemi e metodi della filologia musicale, ed. S. Campagnolo (Lucca, forthcoming)

KURT VON FISCHER/GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO

Bartolo, Erasmo de.

See Bartoli, erasmo.

Bartolomeo da Bologna [Bartholomeus de Bononia]

(fl c1405–27). Italian composer. In the fourth fascicle of I-MOe α.M.5.24 (c1410), he was described as a Benedictine brother; in the tenth fascicle of GB-Ob Can.misc.213 (c1425), he was described as ‘dominus … prior’. Pirrotta (in MGG1) has suggested that he was the prior of S Nicolò in Ferrara, who was also the cathedral organist in that town in 1407 and present no later than 1405; he is last documented at the cathedral on 5 January 1427 (for further discussion and documentation see Cavicchi, 1975, 1976). In Que pena maior Bartolomeo described himself as ‘musa resonantem’ and took a stand against critics. The Latin ballade Arte psalentes was addressed to singers in the papal choir – probably that of John XXIII, elected pope at Bologna in 1410. Both these works are in their formal structure and complex rhythm typical of the Ars Subtilior. In the rondeau Mersi chiamando (where the name Galeazzo – probably Malatesta – occurs) and in the two Italian ballate there is word repetition, typical of early 15th century Italian secular works. The rhythm is simpler than in the two earlier works in I-MOe α.M.5.24; accidentals (C and G) are frequently added to leading notes.

The two mass movements are paired: both employ parody technique, although their modality and style differ, with the Credo set Aversi. The Gloria incorporates the music of Vince con lena, from ‘Gracias agimus’ to ‘deprecacionem’, and thus resembles a contrafactum. In the Credo, however, only short sections of Morir desio are used, and these not in their original order. This pair of mass movements constitutes an early example of the linking of movements by parody technique; their composition was almost certainly influenced by the mass music of Zacara (who spent some time in the chapel of John XXIII in Bologna in 1412–13). In GB-Ob 213 the secular models were copied in juxtaposition with the mass movements based on them – a unique procedure, but nonetheless somewhat reminiscent of the ‘parallel’ transmission of Zacara’s songs and the mass movements based on them.

WORKS

all 3vv

Edition: Early Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. G. Reaney, CMM, xi/5 (1975) [complete]

Gloria [parody of Vince con lena]

Credo [parody of Morir desio]

Arte psalentes (ballade), also ed. in PMFC, xx (1982), p.21

Mersi chiamando (rondeau), also ed. in CMM, xxxvii (1966), p.21

Que pena maior (virelai), also ed. in PMFC, xxi (1987), p.4

Morir desio (ballata)

Vince con lena (ballata)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (N. Pirrotta)

W. Korte: Studien zur Geschichte der Musik in Italien im ersten Viertel des 15. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1933)

W. Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 1942, rev. 5/1961; Ger. trans., rev., 1970)

F. Fano: Le origini e il primo maestro di cappella: Matteo da Perugia, La cappella musicale del duomo di Milano, ed. G. Cesari, i, IMi, new ser., i (Milan, 1956)

K. von Fischer: ‘Kontrafakturen und Parodien italienischer Werke des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento’, AnnM, v (1957), 43–59

G. Reaney: ‘The Italian Contribution to the Manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon Misc. 213’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 443–64

U. Günther: ‘Das Manuskript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5,24 (olim lat.568 = Mod)’, MD, xxiv (1970), 17–67

H. Schoop: Entstehung und Verwendung der Handschrift Oxford, Bodleian Library, Can. misc. 213 (Berne, 1971)

A. Cavicchi: ‘Sacro e profano: documenti e note su Bartolomeo da Bologna e gli organisti della cattedrale di Ferrara nel primo quattrocento’, RIM, x (1975), 46–71

A. Cavicchi: ‘Altri documenti per Bartolomeo da Bologna’, RIM, xi (1976), 178–81

R. Strohm: ‘Magister Egardus and other Italo-Flemish Contacts’, L’Europa e la musica del Trecento: Congresso IV: Certaldo 1984 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi (Certaldo, 1992)], 41–68

D. Fallows: Introduction to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Misc. 213 (Chicago, 1995)

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999)

HANS SCHOOP/R

Bartolomeo degli Organi [Baccio Fiorentino]

(b Florence, 24 Dec 1474; d Florence, 12 Dec 1539). Italian composer, organist and singer. He acquired the nickname ‘degli Organi’ because of his profession; it was later adopted by his children. His musical career began shortly after his 13th birthday, when he was appointed a singer at the Ss Annunziata. In later life he also sang in the baptistry’s chapel, an appointment he received at the behest of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, in whose personal service he remained for a number of years. He was employed as an organist at several Florentine churches, among them the SS Annunziata and S Maria Novella, before becoming principal organist at the cathedral on 21 December 1509, a position that he held until his death.

Bartolomeo’s influence in Florentine musical circles of the time was considerable; one of his contemporaries referred to him as ‘the prince of musicians of our city’. Among his pupils were Guido Machiavelli, son of the famous statesman, and the composer Francesco de Layolle. He was a friend of the poets Lorenzo Strozzi, three of whose poems he set to music, and Benedetto Varchi, who wrote a sonnet commemorating his death.

Bartolomeo’s extant compositions include ten Italian secular works, four instrumental pieces and a lauda. The Italian works (comprising eight ballatas, one strambotto and one canto carnascialesco) are cast in traditional strophic forms and are characterized by clearly articulated phrases, logical harmonic progression within well-defined key areas and simple rhythms that unfailingly follow the accents of the texts. In several of the ballatas he composed new music for all of the ripresa and reduced the amount of repetition within the setting of the strophe. Two ballatas have new music for the entire stanza, a novel feature in Italian music at the time and one which was to be adopted by the earliest madrigal composers. The lauda, published in Razzi’s 1563 collection, is doubtless an adaptation of a secular work, as is another piece in the same collection which Bartolomeo originally set as a carnival song. The instrumental pieces share similar motifs with works by Isaac and Agricola, with whom he may have studied in Florence.

Three of Bartolomeo’s children became musicians: two of his sons, Antonio and Lorenzo, were organists and served in several of the principal Florentine churches; the youngest, Piero, who was also known as Pierino Fiorentino (b Florence, 8 Dec 1523; d Rome, 1552), gained fame in the mid-16th century as the outstanding pupil of Francesco da Milano and as a composer in his own right. The musician called ‘Baccio degli Organi’, who appeared on Medici court rolls as a music teacher in 1574, was probably his grandson.

WORKS

Edition:Music of the Florentine Renaissance, ed. F.A. D’Accone, CMM, xxxii/2 (1967) [D]

sacred

Sguardate il Salvatore (laude), I-Fd Musica Vol. 21 (inc.); Signore, soccorr’et aita, 4vv, D 119; S’i’ pensassi a’ piacer del paradiso [= Donne, per electione]

secular

Amore, paura et sdegnio, 3vv, D 20; Donna, s’i’ fu’ già degnio, 3vv, D 22; Donne, come redete, I-Fn B.R. 337 (inc.); Donne, per electione, 4vv, D 23; Pietà, pietà, 4vv, D 27; Quando e begli occhi, 4vv, D 28; Quell’amor che mi legò, 4vv, D 30; Questo mostrarsi adirata, 4vv, D 31; Questo mostrarsi lieta, 4vv, D 34; Se talor questo o quella, 3vv, D 36; Un di lieto già mai, 3vv, D 37

instrumental

Alles, regres, a 3, I-Bc Q17; De tous biens, a 3, Bc Q15 (Hayne’s T in middle voice); Je vous anpri, Bc Q17 [= Meyor d’este non ày]; Je pren congieu de vous mes amours, a 3, Bc Q17; Meyor d’este non ày, a 3, D 25

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.A. D’Accone: ‘Alessandro Coppini and Bartolomeo degli Organi: Two Florentine Composers of the Renaissance’, AnMc, no.4 (1967), 38–76

R. Wexler: ‘Newly Identified Works by Bartolomeo degli Organi in the MS Bologna Q 17’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 107–18

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 107

FRANK A. D’ACCONE

Bartolomeus de Bruollis.

See Brollo, Bartolomeo.

Bartolotti, Angelo Michele

(b Bologna, early 17th century; d ?Paris, after 1668). Italian composer, guitarist and theorbo player. After publishing two books of his guitar music in Italy, Bartolotti moved to Paris. On the title-page of a treatise on continuo accompaniment for the theorbo, the author is described as ‘Angelo Michele Bartolomi Bolognese’, but there is little question that ‘Bartolomi’ is simply a misspelling of Bartolotti. In France Bartolotti was admired principally as a theorbo player: Ouvrard praised him as ‘without doubt the most skilful theorbo player in France and Italy’, and Constantijn Huygens also mentioned him as a virtuoso on that instrument.

Bartolotti’s first book for the five-course guitar contains a cycle of passacaglias in all the major and minor keys, combining the battute and pizzicato styles seen earlier in the music of Foscarini. His second book shows a more pronounced French influence, with an emphasis on pizzicato textures. These two books are among the most carefully notated Italian guitar tablatures of the period, with indications for various types of strum, arpeggios and left-hand ornaments, and contain some of the most advanced guitar music of the day. Bartolotti’s treatise ranks, with those of Fleury (1660) and Delair (1690), among the most noteworthy essays on accompaniment for the theorbo.

WORKS

Libro primo di chitarra spagnola (Florence, 1640/R); 7 ed. in Hudson

Secondo libro di chitarra (Rome, c1655/R with libro primo)

Allemande and Sarabande, by ‘Angelo Mikielo’, gui, F-Pn Vm⁷ 675

Allemande, by ‘Angelus Michiele’, lute, A-Wn 17706

Table pour apprendre facilement à toucher le théorbe sur la basse-continuë (Paris, 1669)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BenoitMC

R. Ouvrard: Letter to C. Nicaise (16 July 1666), F-Pn fr.9360

A. Rosenthal: ‘Two Unknown 17th Century Music Editions by Bolognese Composers’, CHM, ii (1957), 373–400, esp. 373–8

R. Hudson: The Folia, the Saraband, the Passacaglia, and the Chaconne, MSD, xxxv (1982)

G.R. Boye: Giovanni Battista Granata and the Development of Printed Guitar Music in Seventeenth-Century Italy (diss., Duke U., 1995), 98–9, 140–42

G.R. Boye: ‘Performing Seventeenth-Century Italian Guitar Music: the Question of an Appropriate Stringing’, Performance on Lute, Guitar and Vihuela: Historical Practice and Modern Interpretation, ed. V.A. Coelho (Cambridge, 1997), 180–94

ROBERT STRIZICH/GARY R. BOYE

Bartolozzi, Bruno

(b Florence, 8 June 1911; d Florence, 12 Dec 1980). Italian composer and violinist. He studied music at the Florence Conservatory, taking his diploma in violin playing with Gino Nucci (1930) and in composition with Paolo Fragapane (1944). His association with Dallapiccola, whom he met at the conservatory, was of enormous importance for his work as a composer. Bartolozzi also studied conducting with Galliera at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena and from 1964 was himself a lecturer in conducting at the Florence Conservatory. From 1944 to 1965 he played the violin in the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

Bartolozzi's first compositions, such as the Concerto for Orchestra (1952), the Divertimento for chamber orchestra (1956) and the Concerto for violin, strings and harpsichord (1957), adhere to 12-note technique, following Dallapiccola's influence. In the 1960s he began to experiment with new woodwind sonorities, thanks to his partnership with the bassoonist Sergio Penazzi, well-known for his dedication to contemporary music. This exploration of materials (microtones, multiphonics, etc.) later described in the volume New Sounds for Woodwind (London, New York and Toronto, 1967) had a creative outlet in such works as Concertazioni for bassoon, strings and percussion (1963), written for Penazzi, Concertazioni for oboe and four instruments (1965), for the oboist Lawrence Singer, and Concertazioni a quattro for woodwind quartet (1969). Bartolozzi assimilated other avant-garde compositional techniques of the 1960s, adopting aleatory procedures in the Collage pieces – for oboe (1968), bassoon (1969) and clarinet (1973) – and microtonality in Tres recuerdos del cielo for soprano and ten instruments (1967).

Bartolozzi's stylistic characteristics attain synthesis in his ‘dramatic play’ Tutto ciò che accade ti riguarda (1965–70). Written to the composer's own libretto after Günter Eich's radio play Träume, the work centres upon five people on a railway journey, none of whom knows where the train is going. The existential problem facing the characters is emphasized by the anguished, unanswered question posed by the chorus: who will save us? Bartolozzi represents the characters’ tragic sense of loneliness and isolation by contrasting electronic and acoustic sounds, and different vocal techniques which, in the case of the chorus, involve not only singing, but also whispering, shouting and speaking. The work thus belongs in a line of avant-garde music-theatre works (which includes Nono's Intolleranza 1960 and Manzoni's Atomtod) concerned with social themes and with the alienation of the individual in the modern industrialized world.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tutto ciò che accade ti riguarda (dramatic play, prol., 1, after G. Eich: Traüme), 1965–70, Florence, Teatro della Pergola, 30 May 1972

Orch: Conc. for Orch, 1952; Divertimento, chbr orch, 1956; Conc., vn, str, hpd, 1957; Concertazioni, bn, str, perc, 1963; Memorie, 3 gui, orch, 1975; Risonanze, 18 perc, 1978; Vn Conc. no.2, 1979

Vocal: Sentimento del sogno (G. Ungaretti), S, orch, 1952; Immagine (R.M. Rilke), S, 17 insts, 1959; 3 recuerdos del cielo (R. Alberti), S, 10 insts, 1967

Chbr: Musica a 5, bn, tpt, gui, vn, va, 1953; Serenata, vn, gui, 1955; Str Qt no.1, 1960; Concertazioni, ob, gui, perc, va, db, 1965; The Hollow Man, any ww, spkr, 1968; Concertazioni a 4, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1969; Sinaulodia, 4 fl, 1969; Musica per Piero, 2 va, 1971; Auser, ob, gui, 1972; Concertazioni, cl, 7 insts, perc, 1973; Repitu, fl, gui, perc, va, 1974; The Solitary, eng hn, perc, 1976; Atma, perc ens, 1978; Str Qt no.2, 1979

Solo inst: 3 Pieces, gui, 1952; 2 studi, vn, 1952; Variations, vn, 1957; Estri del fa diesis, pf, 1959; Andamenti, va, 1967; Collage, ob, 1968; Collage, bn, 1969; Cantilena, a fl, 1970; Omaggio a Azzolina, gui, 1971; Collage, cl, 1973; Madrigale di Gesualdo, accdn, 1976; Per Olga, fl, 1976; Adles, gui, 1977

Principal publishers: Bruzzichelli, Suvini Zerboni

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Smith Brindle: ‘Current Chronicle: Italy’, MQ, xlix (1963), 98–101; lii (1966), 106–9

M. Pinzauti: ‘Il sogni di Bartolozzi’, La nazione (31 May 1972)

F. D'Amico: ‘Spogliatevi compagni’, L'espresso (11 June 1972)

RAFFAELE POZZI

Bartolozzi, Therese.

See Jansen, Therese.

Bartolucci, Ruffino.

See Ruffino d’Assisi.

Bartolus, Abraham

(b Meissen, nr Dresden; fl 1614). German theorist. He was a teacher at Beuten. His Musica mathematica was published at Altenburg in 1614 as the second part (pp.89–175) of Heinrich Zeising's Theatri machinarum. Bartolus's treatise is basically speculative in nature. He relied heavily on the horoscope in his interpretation of the effects of music, suggesting that the composer's choice of tonalities, as well as their effect on the listener, could be determined astrologically. Although the monochord tuning which he propounded had been devised by Andreas Reinhard in his Monochordum (Leipzig, 1604), Bartolus did suggest an interesting mechanical improvement to the instrument's movable bridge. The monochord also served as the foundation of his earth-centred interpretation of the cosmos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.D. Adkins: The Theory and Practice of the Monochord (diss., U. of Iowa, 1963)

R. Dammann: ‘Die Musica mathematica von Bartolus (1614)’, AMw, xxvi (1969), 140–62

CECIL ADKINS

Barton, Marmaduke (Miller)

(b Manchester, 29 Dec 1865; d London, 24 July 1938). English pianist and teacher. Barton was an original scholar (1883) at the RCM. He studied under J.F. Barnett and C.V. Stanford and was the first student ever to play at a pupils’ concert (1884). In 1887 he played at Queen Victoria’s jubilee concert in Windsor Castle. On leaving the RCM he was granted a further year’s study abroad, which he spent at Weimar, under Liszt’s pupil Bernhard Stavenhagen. In 1889 he returned to the college to teach. As a student he had been rather impetuous and intolerant, but he fell now under the beneficent influence of another original scholar, Anna Russell, a pupil of Jenny Lind and a devout Catholic. He adopted her faith, and in 1891 they were married. Barton was much in demand for playing concertos with the principal London and provincial orchestras and also for recitals, but teaching, both at the RCM and, from 1911, the GSM, was perhaps his main work. He made recital tours in South Africa (1911) and the Netherlands (1912). Two of his pupils have given complementary summaries of his teaching: ‘[He was] a stickler for hard work, good manners and punctuality’ and ‘A great artist who conveyed beauty by deeds, not words’. (G. Warrack: ‘Royal College of Music: the First Eighty-Five Years, 1883–1968, and After’, typescript, GB-Lcm, 203–4)

GUY WARRACK/ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Bartoš, František (i)

(b Mladcová, nr Gottwaldov, 16 March 1837; d Mladcová, 11 June 1906). Moravian folksong collector and dialectologist. He was educated at the Gymnasium in Olomouc and at the University of Vienna and became a schoolteacher in Strážnice (1864), Olomouc, Těšín and in 1869 at the first Czech Gymnasium in Brno. From 1888 he directed the second Czech Gymnasium in Old Brno, where he was in contact with Janáček. In collaboration with other schoolteachers and organists, he organized the collecting, categorizing and editing of Moravian folksongs, and through his four published collections and about 4000 other folksongs which appeared in ethnographic monographs he became recognized as the successor to Sušil, the pioneer of Moravian ethnomusicology.

Like many other early scholars in European folk music, Bartoš sometimes changed the song texts, thereby reducing the documentary value of his collections; from a musical point of view, only part of his third collection (1901), a collaboration with Janáček, fulfilled the requirements of modern notational technique. Perhaps of more lasting significance is the comprehensive theoretical treatise written as an introduction to his second collection (1889), in which he worked out a classification of songs according to text and function. He declared that the tunes of some groups of Moravian folksongs follow the metrical, rhythmical and intonational features of the texts, rather than those of instrumental melodies, as is the case, for example, with folksongs from Bohemia. He thus revealed a basic structural feature of the repertory, one which became a subject of great interest to Janáček.

FOLKSONG COLLECTIONS

Nové národní písně moravské s nápěvy do textu vřaděnými [New Moravian folksongs with the tunes fitted to the texts] (Brno, 1882)

Národní písně moravské v nově nasbírané [Newly collected Moravian folksongs] (Brno, 1889)

with L. Janáček: Kytice z národních písní moravských [Bouquet of Moravian folksongs] (Telč, 1890, rev. 4/1953 by A. Gregor and B. Štědroň)

with L. Janáček: Národní písně moravské v nově nasbírané (Prague, 1901)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Straková, ed.: František Bartoš a Leoš Janáček: vzájemná korespondence (Gottwaldov, 1957)

J. Vysloužil: ‘Nad folkloristickým dílem Františka Bartoše’ [On Bartoš’s folkloristic studies], Ze života a díla Františka Bartoše: sborník studii [From the life and works of Bartoš: journal of studies] (Gottwaldov, 1957), 71–80

A. Geck: Das Volksliedmaterial Leoš Janáčeks: Analysen der Struckturen unter Einbeziehung von Janáčeks Randbemerkungen und Volkstudien (Regensburg, 1975)

J. Ondrusz: ‘Frantisek Bartos, 1837–1906: zycie i dzielo’ [Life and works], Z zagadnien polskiej Kultury muzycznej: studia folklorystyczne [On the problems of Polish music culture: studies of folklore], ed. A. Dygacz and J. Bauman-Szulakowska (Katowice, 1994), 84–92

J. Sehnal and J. Vysloužil: Hudba na Morarě [Music in Moravia] (Brno, 2000)

JIŘÍ VYSLOUŽIL

Bartoš, František (ii)

(b Brněnec, 13 June 1905; d Prague, 21 May 1973). Czech composer and writer. He studied composition at the Prague Conservatory under Jirák and Křička (1921–5) and in Foerster's master classes (1925–8). In 1932, together with Bořkovec, Holzknecht, Ježek and Krejčí, he founded in Prague the Mánes group, whose interests focussed on modern French music. Bartoš was a competent critic for the daily press and co-editor of Tempo of Prague (1935–8, 1946–8); in later life he gave more of his attention to musicology. As a composer he had begun under the influence of late Romanticism, but subsequently, following the trends of the day, he sought clarity of form, precision and a tender expressivity, qualities which resulted in a cultivated balance, most particularly in the chamber compositions. The suite Měšťák šlechticem (‘Le bourgeois gentilhomme’) for wind quintet, an exquisite piece of neo-classicism, was adapted from Lully's original score. Other works of note include the String Quartet no.2, Rozhlasová hudba (‘Radio Music’) for orchestra (performed at the 1938 ISCM Festival), and the songs and choruses, which indicate his discriminating literary taste. The song cycle Černý … (‘Black … ’) is a rare essay on a social theme.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Suita, op.6, 1928; Rozhlasová hudba [Radio Music], op.12, 1936; Skizzy ke Gogolovu Revizoru [Sketches for Gogol's Government Inspector], op.17

Choral: Klid [Peace] (A. Sova), op.1b, 1923; Přišel jsem k své milé [I Came to My Beloved] (F. Šrámek), op.3a, 1925; Hudba na náměstí [Music in the Square] (J. Hořejší), op.3b, 1927; 1917, op.9 (J. Hora), 1930; Láska [Love] (K. Toman), op.14, 1939; 2 ženské sbory [2 Female Choruses] (J. Neruda), op.15, 1942

Melodrama: Jaro [Spring] (Šrámek), op.2, 1925

Chbr and solo inst: Str Sextet, op.4, 1926; Str Qt no.1, op.5, 1928; Scherzo, wind qnt, 1932; Str Qt no.2, op.10, 1933–5; Měšťák šlechticem [Le bourgeois gentilhomme], wind qnt, 1934 [from ballet by Lully], Duo, op.13, vn, va, 1937; Polka rusticana, wind trio, 1952; pf pieces

Songs: Bouquet de l'amour (J. Neruda), op.1a, 1923–4; 3 písně [3 Songs] (J. Cocteau, I. Goll, F. Mauriac), op.7, 1928; V. Burlesky (M. Jacob, Nezval), op.11, 1933–4; Deštivé obrazy [Rainy Pictures] (Nezval), op.16, 1945; Černý … [Black …] (L. Hughes), 1959

Music for the theatre and cinema, folksong arrs.

Prinicipal publisher: Hudební Matice

WRITINGS

Smetana ve vzpomínkách a dopisech [Smetana in reminiscences and letters] (Prague, 1939, 9/1954; Ger. trans., 1954; Eng. trans., 1955)

Studentské vánoce Bedřicha Smetany [Smetana's student Christmasses] (Prague, 1939)

W.A. Mozart v dopisech [Mozart in letters] (Prague, 2/1937, 3/1956)

Bedřich Smetana (Prague, 1940)

with Z. Němec: Z dopisů Bedřicha Smetany [From Smetana's letters] (Prague, 1947)

Many articles on Smetana and other Czech composers in HRo, Rytmus, Tempo, etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Bartoš: ‘Skladatelé o sobě’ [Composers about themselves], Rytmus, vii/3 (1941–2), 29

J. Bachtík: ‘Padesát let Františka Bartoše’ [Bartoš's 50 years], HRo, viii (1955), 538–9

V. Holzknecht: Hudební skupina Mánesa [The Mánes music group] (Prague, 1968)

V. Holzknecht: ‘In memoriam František Bartoš’, HRo, xxvi (1973), 329

M. Ladmanová: ‘Odešel František Bartoš’, HV, x (1973), 361

M. Ladmanová: František Bartoš: svědek čtvrtstoletí [F. Bartoš: witness of a quarter-century] (Prague, 1980)

JOSEF BEK

Bartoš, Josef

(b Vysoké Mýto, Bohemia, 4 March 1887; d Prague, 27 Oct 1952). Czech musicologist. He studied under Stecker at the Prague Conservatory (1905–7), under Hostinský and Nejedlý at Prague University (1905–9) and for a year at the Sorbonne. On his return he taught French and Czech at training colleges. He translated Bergson, Carrière and Croce into Czech and many of their ideas influenced his own philosophical attitude to music. His articles and books are concerned mainly with Czech music of the 19th and early 20th century, including a valuable study of opera at the Prague Provisional Theatre. For many years he was music critic of the daily papers Prager Presse, Národni práce and Právo lidu.

WRITINGS

Antonín Dvořák: kritické studie (Prague, 1913)

Zdeněk Fibich (Prague, 1914)

Jak naslouchati hudbě [How to listen to music] (Prague, 1916, 2/1920)

Umění: úvod do estetiky [The arts: an introduction to aesthetics] (Prague, 1922)

Josef Bohuslav Foerster (Prague, 1923)

O proudech v soudobé hudbě [Tendencies in contemporary music] (Gdynia, 1924)

‘Otakar Jeremiáš’, Tempo [Prague], viii (1928–9), 4–16

‘Stendhal hudebník’ [Stendhal as a musician], Sborník prací k padesátým narozeninám Profesora Dra Zdeňka Nejedlého, ed. A.J. Patzaková and M. Očadlík (Prague, 1929), 30–68

Karel Burian (Rakovník, 1934)

Dějiny Pražského Hlaholu 1911–36 [History of the Prague Hlahol (Choral society)] (Prague, 1936)

Otakar Ostrčil (Prague, 1936)

Prozatímní divadlo a jeho opera [The Provisional Theatre and its opera] (Prague, 1938)

Z deníku B. Smetany [From Smetana’s diary] (Prague, 1938)

ed., with P. Pražák and J. Plavec: J.B. Foerster: jeho životní pouť a tvorba, 1859–1949 [Foerster: his life and works] (Prague, 1949) [incl. ‘Foerstrova životní pouť’ [Foerster's journey through life], 39–80; ‘Foerstrova píseň’ [Foerster's songs], 207–40]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS [incl. list of writings]

R. Pečman: ‘Umělecká metoda Dvořákova skončila fiaskem: Bartošova syntéza’ [Dvořák's artistic method ended in a fiasco: Bartoš's synthesis], Útok na Antonína Dvořáka [The attack on Antonín Dvořák] (Brno, 1992), 135–59

JOHN TYRRELL

Bartsch, Franz Xaver.

See Partsch, Franz Xaver.

Bartulis, Vidmantas

(b Kaunas, Lithuania, 3 April 1954). Lithuanian composer. In 1980 he graduated from the Lithuanian State Conservatory where he had studied with Balsys. From 1980 to 1983 he taught at the J. Gruodis Music College in Kaunas. He has been director of the music department of the Kaunas Theatre since 1983, and a member of the Union of the Arts group since 1990. Bartulis received the Lithuanian National Prize in 1998.

Generically, the music of Bartulis displays extreme polarity, ranging from a mass setting to happenings, from chamber music to electronic works. Typical of his early work are chamber compositions which sound like the manifesto of a new generation of Romantics and which are clearly influenced by oriental philosophy. In later works this minimalist world of Romantic beauty is replaced by the search for a sacred dimension (Aurora lucis, the Mass) and the way in which that dimension relates to the present day is taken as a theme (the Requiem). Bartulis later rejected the harmony and transparency of this music and, through experimentation with alternative genres, came to write the only opera of the absurd in Lithuanian musical history, parodying stage conventions.

Confrontation with his musical heritage runs like a guideline through the whole body of Bartulis's work. Sometimes this confrontation is merely a case of allusion, or a few bars resembling quotation (Hommage à Čiurlionis), while the group of I Like ... works represents his attitude to a particular style. Strict rationality is foreign to Bartulis, who sets particular store by organic elements. However, there is almost always a tragic note concealed behind the playful and ironic quality of his music.

WORKS

Stage: Pamoka [One Hour] (op, Bartulis, E. Ionesco), 1993, Kaunas, 1996; incid music for more than 100 plays

Vocal: Sutemų giesmės [Song of the Twilight] (cant., S. Geda), S, org, 1986; Mass, chorus, org, 1987; Requiem, 3 solo vv, choruses, orch, 1989; Auge der Zeit (P. Celan), 2 B, 2 cl, 2 pf, perc, 1991; Nativitas Domini (cant., R. Mikutavičius), choruses, 2 vn, org 1991; Amen (D. Alighieri, Bartulis, Celan, J. Mekas, G. Patackas), S, trbn, db, pf, tape, 1992; Ant kalno [From the Mountain] (Celan, M. Claudius, H. Heine), 3 elegies, 1v, cl, pf, str qt, 1996; Enfance (P. Handke, A. Rimbaud), 1v, pf, db, trbn, perc, 1996; Aušrinė [A Legend], S, T, chorus, elec keyboard insts, 1998; Kukutis [Idylls] (M. Martinaitis], 1v, pf, trbn, db, perc, 1998; 30 choruses

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1980; Sym. no.2 ‘Mėlynasis angelas’ [The Blue Angel] (S. Geda), chorus, orch, 1985; Pf Conc., 1994; Regensspiele, chbr orch, 1995; I Like F. Chopin (Sonata in B Major), 2 pf, orch, 1997; I Like F. Schubert (Quintet in C, Adagio), str, 1998

Chbr: Vakaryštei dienai [Yesterday], ob, cl, bn, 1981; Ateinanti [The Commands], pf trio, 1982; Keturios paguodos liūdnai violončelei ir daina be žodžių [Four Words of Comfort for a Mournful Cello and a Song With no Text], vn, vc, 1985; Aurora lucis, 2 vn, org, 1985; De profundis, cl, pf qt, 1988; O, brangioji [Oh, my Love], str qt, 1994; Hommage à Čiurlionis, sax, b cl, elec insts, kanklės, 1995; I Like J.S. Bach (Prelude in C Major), pf, perc, 1995; Reti susitikimai, kurių metu mes šokame aistringus šokius, mename mirusius draugus ir mus užplūsta sentimentalūs prisiminimai, cl, pf trio, 1997

Other: pf works, org pieces and music for computer, electronics and multimedia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Gerulaitis: ‘Tyloje ateinantis’ [The Style of the Future], Nemunas (1986), no.1, pp.29–32

R. Goštautiene: ‘Requiem’, Krantai (1989), no.10, pp.2–5

R. Gaidamvičiūtė: ‘Žvilgsnis į vidmanto Bartulio kūrybą’ [An overview of Bartulis's work], Kultūros barai (1998), no.11, pp.28–31

based on MGG2 (ii, 418–20), by permission of Bärenreiter

RŪTA GAIDAMAVIČIŪTĖ

Barvyns'ky, Vasyl' Oleksandrovych

(b Tarnopol', 8/20 Feb 1888; d L'viv, 9 June 1963). Ukrainian composer, musicologist, pianist and teacher. He took piano lessons first at the K. Mikuli Music School (1895–1905) and with W. Kurtz (1905–06) at the conservatory in L'viv. During the same period he studied jurisprudence at Lemberg University, and from 1907, philosophy at the University of Prague. In Prague Barvyns'ky studied musicology with Z. Nejedly and O. Hostinsky, the piano with I. Holfeld and composition with Vítězsláv Novák (1908–14), who exerted a powerful influence on him. From 1915 to 1939 Barvyns'ky taught at, and was director of, the Lysenko Music Institute in L'viv, and also taught at the conservatory there (1939–41 and 1944–8). A prolific organizer, he initiated and took part in many musical activities in L'viv and became a member of the editorial board of the journal Ukrains'ka muzyka. In 1934 he helped organize, and later presided over (1936–9) the Union of Ukrainian Professional Musicians, SUPROM. During the purges of 1948, the Soviet authorities sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment in Mordovian labour camps. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1964. After the period of exile he returned to L'viv and resumed his teaching until his death. In characterizing the L'viv school of composers (and by extension that of Western Ukraine), Barvyns'ky wrote: ‘the musical output of the Galician composers, who were brought up in the same Slavic musical centre and in the same cultural atmosphere (Prague), relies to a significant extent on folksong, which inspires each of them in a different way’. Together with Stanislav Lyudkevych, he formed the professional Western Ukrainian school of composition, centered in L'viv. Three major influences formed Barvyns'ky's musical style: the national school as epitomized by Mykola Lysenko, whom he first met in 1967, French Impressionism and the Czech school of Novák. Essentially a traditionalist, Barvyns'ky's talent was lyrical and in essence contrapuntal with a refined harmonic sense influenced by a subtle use of impressionistic techniques (especially in his piano preludes). Barvyns'ky's main contribution was in the area of chamber music, a genre relatively unexplored in Ukrainian music in the early 20th century. His refined ear and an improvisatory manner influenced by folk music and clearly defined structures characterize these works. He was also the first Western Ukrainian composer to write a purely orchestral work, the Ukrainian Rhapsody (1911).

WORKS

Vocal: Vecherom v khati [Evening at Home] (B. Lepky), 1v, pf, 1910; V lisi [In the Forest] (Lepky), 1v, pf, 1910; Ukraïns'ke vesillya [Ukrainian Wedding], solo vv, chorus, orch, 1914; Zapovit [Testament] (cant., T. Shevchenko), vv, orch, 1917; Psalom Davyda [Psalm of David] (P. Kulish), 1v, pf, 1918; Pisnya pisen' [Song of Songs] (V. Maslova-Stokiz), S, vn, pf, 1924; Nasha pisnya, nasha tuha [Our Song, our Grief] (M. Cherkasenko), vv, orch, 1933; Nadiya [Hope] (L. Ukrainka), 1v, pf, 1956

Inst: 8 Preludes, pf, 1908; Pf Sonata, 1910; 2 Pf Trios, 1911; Pisnya, serenada, improvizatsiya [Song, Serenade, Improvisation], pf, 1911; Ukraïns'ka rapsodiya [Ukrainian Rhapsody], orch, 1911; Sextet, variations, 2 vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1915; Ukrainskaya syuita, pf, 1915; Pf Conc., 1917–37, recently discovered; Variations on Ukrainian Folk Themes, vc, pf, 1918; 6 miniatyuri, pf, 1920; Variations and Fughetta on Ukrainian Folk Theme, pf, 1920; Sonata, vc, pf, 1926; Ov.-Poem, orch, 1930, lost; Works on Ukrainian folk themes, vn, pf, 1934–5; 20 Children's Pieces on Ukrainian themes, pf, 1935; Str Qt ‘Molodizhniy’ [Youth], 1935; Qnt, str qt, pf, 1953–63; Conc., vc, pf, 1956

Songs, choral works, folksong arrs., edns of Ukrainian art music

WRITINGS

Ukraïns'ka narodna pisnya i ukraïns'ki kompozytory [Ukrainian folksong and Ukrainian composers] (Prague, 1914)

Pisni Kholmshchyny i Pidlyassya [Songs of Kholm and Pidlyassya] (Lemberg, 1917)

Tvorchist' V. Novaka [Novak's work] (Lwów, 1930)

Ukraïns'ka muzyka (Lwów, 1936)

Yozef Suk (Lwów, 1936)

‘Ohlyad istoriï ukraïns'koï muzyky’ [A survey of the history of Ukrainian music], L. Arkhymovych, ed.: Istoriya ukraïns'koï kultury (Lwów, 1937)

Viktor Kosenko (Lwów, 1938)

‘Kavkaz’ S. Lyudkevycha [The ‘Kavkaz’ of Lyudkevych] (Lwów, 1939)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Pavlyshyn: ‘Vasyl' Oleksandrovich Barvyns'ky’, Ukraïns'ke muzykoznavstvo, iii (1968)

L. Mazepa: ‘Tahichna dolya mytstya’ [Tragic fate of an artist], Muzyka [Kiev] (1988), no.5, pp.24–6

M. Kucher: ‘Pibtora roku z Vasylem Barvins'kym’ [A year and a half with Barvins'ky], Ukraïna (1990), no.3

S. Pavlyshyn: Vasyl' Barvyns'ky (Kiev, 1990)

S. Pavlyshyn: ‘Kompozytor-eksperymentator’ [Composer-experimentalist], Muzyka [Kiev] (1996), no.3, pp.27–8

VIRKO BALEY

Barwell, Mrs John.

See under Bacon, Richard Mackenzie.

Baryphonus, Henricus [Pipegrop, Pipgrop, Pipgroppe, Heinrich]

(b Wernigerode, Harz, 17 Sept 1581; d Quedlinburg, Saxe-Anhalt, 13 Jan 1655). German theorist and composer. Jacobs established that his German family name was Pipegrop, not Grobstimme as stated in some earlier biographical accounts. He attended the Lateinschule at Wernigerode, where he probably first studied music with the Kantor Johann Krüger as well as with the organist of the Oberpfarrkirche, Paul Becker. He entered the university at Helmstedt in April 1603. In 1605 he went to Quedlinburg as Kantor of St Benedikti and as a teacher at the Gymnasium, whose Subkonrector he became in 1606. He remained in these positions for almost half a century until his death. He seems to have been admired as a composer, but all but two of his pieces are lost, as apparently are all but one of his many treatises. Michael Praetorius, who supported him enthusiastically, announced in the third volume of Syntagma musicum (1618) that in the next volume he would publish Baryphonus’s De melopoeia. He also listed 16 other treatises by him that he expected to finance for publication, but his death both put an end to this project and prevented the continuation of Syntagma musicum. His list of Baryphonus’s treatises, which also appears in Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon (1732), contains only one extant work, Pleiades musicae. At least one other treatise not listed by Praetorius may also be lost. Baryphonus is known to have corresponded with Heinrich Schütz and Scheidt: Werckmeister printed a fragment of a letter to Schütz (also in Moser) and Scheidt’s reply to a letter from Baryphonus (also in VMw, vii, 1891, p.192, and in Serauky). The first edition of Pleiades musicae (1615) shows Baryphonus’s debt to the theoretical concepts of Zarlino and Calvisius. The second edition (1630), which was significantly expanded, influenced many subsequent theorists, including Werckmeister, J.G. Ahle and Walther (especially in his Praecepta). It includes a new section on the triad, which Baryphonus adopted without acknowledgment from Johannes Lippius’s Synopsis musicae novae (1612). With Lippius, he was the first writer to organize compositional theory on the basis of harmonic rather than contrapuntal principles. Within the concept of the triad, which he called ‘triga harmonica’, he established a specially influential doctrine of intervals and intervallic progression, though curiously only for consonances, not dissonances. As might be expected from his emphasis on triadic structure, he was an advocate – one of the earliest in Germany – of composing from the bass part, a view that reflected the growing strength of the practice of thoroughbass that had originated in Italy some 30 years earlier.

WORKS

theoretical works

Pleiades musicae, quae in certas sectiones distributae praecipuas quaestiones musicas discutiunt (Halberstadt, 1615, rev. 2/1630 by H. Grimm as Pleiades musicae, quae fundamenta musicae theoricae ex principiis mathematicis eruta, together with S. Calvisius: Melopoeia)

The following listed by M. Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, iii (Wolfenbüttel, 1618, 2/1619/R), 223, 227–8; all lost

De melopoeia, intended for pubn in Syntagma musicum, iv

Exercitationes harmonicae, quibus omnia tam ad theoriam, quam ad praxin musicam necessaria per aphorismos, theoremata & problemata nervose & dilucide expediuntur

Diatribe musica artusia, ex tabulis Joan. Mariae Artusii collecta, latine reddita, exemplis illustrata

Dissertatio de modis musicis e veterum & recentiorum tam graecorum quam latinorum & italorum monumentis excerpta

Isagoge musica Euclidis cum notis Henrici Baryphoni; probably identical with Isagoge musica (Magdeburg, 1609)

Isagoge musico-theorica ex fundamento mathematico coram ratione & sensu judicium proportione; probably identical with Institutiones musico-theoricae (Leipzig, 1620)

Logistica musica, in qua usus proportionum in addendis, subtrahendis, copulandis, comparandis, aequiparandis intervallis synoptice ob oculos ponitur

Arithmologia harmonica, in qua scheseis tam numerorum harmonicorum primorum & radicalium, quam inter se compositorum & secundariorum & tertiariorum tabellares in constituendis intervallis simplicibus, compositis, prohibitis, diminutis & superfluis ob oculos ponuntur

Consonantiarum progressiones, quae ad quosvis animi affectus exprimendos accommodae

Ars canendi, aphorismis succinctis descripta & notis philosophicis, mathematicis, physicis et historicis illustrata (Leipzig, 1620)

Progymnasma melopoëticum in paideian & propaideian tributum

Catalogus musicorum tam priscorum quam recentium

Historia veterum instrumentorum musicorum 25. literis graecis & latinis monumentis atque philosophorum, philologorum, musicorum & historicorum

Exercitationes quatuor: de musica vocali; de musica instrumentali; de musices inventoribus; de musices usu

Monochordi in diatonico, chromatico & enharmonico genere descriptio

Spicilegium musicum, in quo quaestiones musicorum praecipuae per theoremata & problemata succincte & nervose discutiuntur

other

Melos genethliacum oder Weihenacht Gesang: Ein Engel schon vons Himmels Thron, zur neuen Jahrsgabe verehret, 6vv (Magdeburg, 1609); ed. in VMw, ix (1893), 383

Wir gläuben an einen Gott, 1v, bc, 1638⁵ and A-Wn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WaltherML

A. Werckmeister: Cribrum musicum, oder Musicalisches Sieb (Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1700/R, 2/1783)

J.G. Walther: Praecepta der musicalischen Composition (MS, D-WRtl, 1708); ed. P. Benary (Leipzig, 1955)

E. Jacobs: ‘Zwei harzische Musiktheoretiker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, ii: Heinrich Baryphonus, 1581–1655’, VMw, vi (1890), 111–22

E. Jacobs: ‘Heinrich Pipegrop (Baryphonus)’, VMw, vii (1891), 459–63

E. Jacobs: ‘Noch einmal Pipegrop–Baryphonus’, VMw, viii (1892), 145–7

P. Spitta: ‘Ein Weihnachts-Gesang des Heinrich Baryphonus’, VMw, ix (1893), 381–92

D.-R. Moser: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Quedlinburg von Reformation bis zur Auflösung des Stiftes (1539–1802): Beiträge zu einer Musikgeschichte des Harzraumes (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1967)

B.V. Rivera: German Music Theory in the Early 17th Century: the Treatises of Johannes Lippius (Ann Arbor, 1980)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Baryton [bariton, barydon, paradon, paridon, pariton, viola di bardone, viola di bordone] (i).

A bass string instrument that is simultaneously bowed from above and plucked from behind. (The term ‘lyra bastarda’ is occasionally – although incorrectly – applied to the baryton.) The baryton is a hybrid instrument based on the Baroque bass viol and incorporating features of the Lyra viol and the Bandora, a metal-strung plucked bass instrument. There are three basic forms: Baroque, Classical and revival. The Baroque baryton was played ‘lyra-way’ as a solo instrument from tablature. It had six gut bowed strings attached and adjusted like those of a bass viol, but tuned in a range of scordatura tunings (the upper manual), and nine metal bass strings (C–d), hitched at the fingerboard nut and tuned by wrest pins in a separate bridge (the lower manual). The metal strings lay parallel to the fingerboard on the bass side and were plucked from behind the neck with the left thumb. They provided the instrument with the capability for self-accompaniment and enhanced the sound by sympathetic resonance (see Sympathetic strings).

The number and pitch range of the metal plucked strings was later increased and sometimes a third manual, with gut strings, was added. J.G. Krause, who composed the only known published collection for baryton (IX Partien, auf die Viola Paradon, before 1704), suggested 18 strings as the ideal for the lower manual. Daniel Speer (Grund-richter … Unterricht der musikalischen Kunst, 1687, p.91) described how a set of gut drone strings might be attached on top, to be plucked by the right little finger; music for such a baryton is found in a German mid-17th-century manuscript (D-Kl). Speer’s instrument bore six upper, 19 lower and nine drone strings.

The Classical baryton was associated especially with Joseph Haydn and the Esterházy court during the 1760s and 70s. It was a modification of the earlier instrument, with the lower manual tuned to the same pitch range as the upper four strings of the bowed manual (c–d'). Other features included a seventh bowed string and either diatonic or chromatic stringing in a lower manual of 15 or more metal strings. Sympathetic (lower manual) strings were now hitched to individual bridges and tuned with pegs from the head of the instrument. At the end of the Esterházy period, which lasted little more than a decade, barytons with up to 44 lower-manual strings were reported; these instruments had both the bass-register strings of the Baroque instrument and the higher-octave strings of the Esterházy tuning. The 1750 instrument by J.J. Stadlmann owned by Prince Nicolaus Esterházy has seven strings on top and ten below (see illustration). The Austrian virtuoso, Andreas Lidl, was said by C.L. Junker (Musikalischer Almanach, 1782, p.105) to have played an instrument with 27 underlying strings.

The modern or revival instrument is essentially a reproduction of the Esterházy instrument. Initially a range of heavier modern barytons more appropriately called cellitons was built, but, due to advances in research, light sonorous instruments are now being made again.

Barytons from all periods survive. Important 17th-century instruments may be seen in London (3), Linz (2), Vienna, Berlin and Nuremberg. 14 are known from the 18th century, three from the 19th and at least 30 from the 20th. As befits the ‘instrument of kings’, almost all barytons are finely decorated with carved heads (painted or plain), purfling, inlay and herring-bone edging, in materials such as ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl.

From the beginning, the instrument was played as a lyraviol-cum-bandora. While the bowed strings carried the tune, the plucked strings accompanied. The earliest works – an anonymous collection of dances (Swan baryton MS, c1640; now in RUS-SPan), manuscripts at Kassel (bearing the dates 1653, 1669 and 1670) and the Krause publication – are notated in modified French lute tablature. Instruction on playing the instrument is best gleaned from Krause’s preface (facs. in Liebner) and the music itself. Later, in the 18th century, Haydn and his followers notated their baryton parts in the treble clef, sounding an octave below; the plucked notes were indicated by numbers below the treble staff, the strings numbered from lowest to highest (the reverse of earlier practice). Bass viol solos of the period, for example those by C.F. Abel, were also written in the treble clef. It is rare in the later chamber repertory for the baryton player to be called upon to play the upper and lower sets of strings simultaneously; in fact, they are usually played in alternation, signalling different roles in the musical texture. The most skilled players were renowned for their ability to accompany themselves throughout, following the original baroque practice.

Mersenne (Cogitata physico-mathematica, 1644) was one of the first to describe the instrument, but the addition of wire strings to viols for ‘bettering the sound’ was described in England in the patent application of Edney and Gill in 1608 (Lasocki) and in Germany by Praetorius in 1618 (Syntagma musicum). Mersenne’s claim that the baryton was much admired by King James I of England (d 1625) – and also that Daniel Farrant invented it – remains unsubstantiated. However, the theory that the baryton was introduced to the Continent from England is supported by the reference to Walter Rowe playing the baryton to Peter Mundy in Königsberg in 1641 (Temple). Rowe was an important viol teacher and most probably influential in the creation of the Swan baryton manuscript. That the baryton was little known in France is indicated by Brossard’s quaint reference to it (Dictionaire, 1703) as a ‘viola di bardone’ possessing up to 44 strings, and by an article in the Almanach musical claiming that it had been heard in Paris for the first time when Lidl toured there in 1775 (Prince Nicolaus Esterházy had, in fact, taken his baryton with him to Paris in 1767). The rest of the instrument’s commentators, except for Burney, wrote in German: Majer (Museum musicum, 1732), Stoessel and David (Lexicon, 1737), Baron (Abriss, 1756), L. Mozart (Versuch, 1756), F.A. Weber (Charakteristik der … Instrumente, 1788), Albrechtsberger (Anweisung, 1790) and Koch (Lexikon, 1802).

It was in Austria that the baryton was most beloved and cultivated. Schenk (1972) cited accompanied arias in Ariosto’s Marte placato (1707) and Fux’s Il fonte della salute, aperto dalla grazia nel Calvario (1716) as evidence of the occasional use of the baryton in Viennese operas and oratorios. By the middle of the century, however, the Baroque bass viol repertory was decidedly out of fashion; had Prince Nicolaus not taken up the viol and later the baryton, these instruments and their repertories would have suffered neglect earlier. While most of the manuscript music for baryton is in Austrian and German libraries (Dresden and Kassel), some has found its way into the far-flung libraries of St Petersburg, Stockholm, London, Paris, New York and Washington, DC.

Prince Nicolaus may have acquired his first baryton as late as 1765 when, on a trip to Innsbruck, he purchased the Stadlmann. While there he received the first pieces for ‘paridon’ from his Kapellmeister, Joseph Haydn. His enthusiasm for the baryton continued for more than a decade. Meanwhile, to satisfy the prince’s voracious appetite for new chamber music, Haydn was required to compose dozens of trios as well as solos, duos, quintets, octets, concertos and a cantata with obbligato baryton; Haydn also enlisted his colleagues and pupils to compose chamber works using the instrument.

Haydn’s own works for baryton were composed between 1765 and 1778. His pupils and colleagues in the Esterházy band, A.L. Tomasini (from 1761, first violinist of the Esterházy Hofkapelle and ultimately Konzertmeister), Joseph Purksteiner (or Burgksteiner; from 1766, a court violinist and violist) and Anton Neumann (Kappelmeister at Olmütz [now Olomouc] Cathedral, who presented the prince with music for the baryton in the hope of gaining special favour) composed trios in a similar style. Tomasini and Purksteiner (1768) each composed at least 24 divertimentos for baryton, violin or viola, and cello, and Neumann composed 24 divertimentos (trios with baryton, 1767), followed by a set of duets (1769). According to the biographies by Griesinger (1809) and Dies (1810), Haydn himself had, in 1769, been upbraided for imprudently surpassing his patron in skill, having secretly learnt to play the baryton. Nevertheless, in that same year the prince sought the professional barytonist Lidl as a member of his band and, more particularly, as a partner for chamber music. Lidl remained until 1774, when he embarked on a tour of France and England. During his time at Eszterháza he composed pieces for the prince; in London he published trios (without baryton) in 1776 and 1778 which are likely to have been conceived with baryton (the Hamburg manuscripts may be compared with the London publications). As a soloist, Lidl was praised for his skill at self-accompaniment. Burney, however, was not impressed, and grumbled that ‘it seems with Music as with agriculture, the more barren and ungrateful the soil, the more art is necessary in its cultivation’ (BurneyH).

In 1769 two Esterházy musicians, both of whom belonged to the coterie of barytonists, resigned their posts: Haydn’s friend, the cellist Joseph Weigl, who may have composed music for baryton (see Liebner), and Carl Franz, a virtuoso horn player, barytonist and cellist for whom in 1786 Haydn is said (by Pohl) to have composed the baryton part in his cantata, Deutschlands Klage auf den Tod Friedrichs des Grossen (hXXVIb:1). According to Pohl, Franz’s playing was at once affectingly melancholic and like ‘the sweetness of the pineapple’. Weber dwelt on Franz’s superb intonation and the skill with which he provided a plucked accompaniment for his music.

The character of the Esterházy works for baryton was determined by Haydn – a compromise between the idiomatic possibilities of the instrument and the capabilities of its keenest patron. Nicolaus, it must be said, had no pretensions to being a soloist. Judging from the music composed for him, he preferred a few ‘safe keys’ (D, G and A), related to the instrument’s tuning, and a limited use of plucked strings. The only duos for baryton and cello (hXII) accordingly make no use of the underlying strings. Among the trios (hXI:1–126), fewer than half call upon the barytonist to pluck with the left thumb. However, in the duet for two barytons (hXII:4) both parts include plucked notes. Nothing is known of the technical demands of the lost chamber concertos (hXIII:1–3), the lost sonatas for baryton and cello, and the missing baryton part to the Frederick the Great cantata.

Almost all of Haydn’s trios were cast in three short movements; this was, perhaps, a reflection of the limited time and attention the prince had to devote to his art. Half of the trios begin with a slow movement; nearly all include a minuet and trio. Variations on the prince’s favourite contemporary tunes (mostly from works by Haydn) and fugues frequently make up the remaining movement. Some scholars have seen the fugal movements in particular as experimental essays leading to the op.20 string quartets (see Kirkendale and Wollenberg).

The most common baryton trio texture – baryton, viola and cello – was devised particularly for Nicolaus and, while born of exigency, it proved a stroke of genius. The bowed strings of the baryton blend with the viola and the cello, and the plucked strings provide a contrasting timbre. The overtones produced by the baryton’s many strings compensate for the absence of a treble instrument, although Tomasini did compose trios with violin instead of viola. The overall effect mystifies the listener because the individual instruments are often impossible to differentiate. Haydn was, of course, a master of this artful subterfuge, conceding nothing in musical integrity and detail even when composing domestic music. Within the textures of the divertimentos (hX:1–12) – a quartet, quintets and octets – the pair of virtuoso horns is inevitably more prominent than the pair of barytons, making it likely that they were composed for occasions at which the prince was not playing.

The true extent of the repertory, 17th- as well as 18th-century, remains to be determined. A manuscript collection (discovered in the early 1960s, in A-SCH) contains further works from the late 18th century: divertimentos for unaccompanied baryton by F.A. Deleschin and the Viennese father and son, Francesco and Giuseppe di Fauner; a sonata for ‘viole paridon o viola da gamba’, violin and cello by Joseph Fiala, the Czech oboist and viol player who was an intimate of the Mozart family in Salzburg; and a Parthia per il baritono e violino by the cathedral musician, J.P. Ziegler (d 1767). Similar repositories may exist elsewhere in Austria and Hungary.

Around the turn of the century the baryton still had a few exponents. Vincenz Hauschka, by profession a Viennese court official and member of the board of directors of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, was, according to Pohl, an accomplished player. He contributed two collections of songs with baryton accompaniment (Cinque notturni for three solo voices, baryton and guitar, and Sei canzonetti italiani for solo voice and baryton); Fétis further attributed five quintets (baryton and string quartet) and five duets for baryton and cello to Hauschka. S.L. Friedl was a cellist, barytonist and composer attached to the Prussian Royal Chapel in Berlin from 1793 to 1826. According to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, xiii (1811), he performed a potpourri (after Lefèvre) of his own arrangement on the baryton. He may have left manuscript works for the instrument. During the 1846–7 Paris concert season, Félix Battachon attempted to generate fresh interest in the baryton. The more successful late 20th-century revival was led by players such as José Vázquez, K.M. Schwamberger, A. Lessing, Janos Liebner, Riki Gerardy, John Hsu and Jörg Eggebrecht. Over 20 composers have written new works for baryton since 1960, including Ferenc Farkas and Stephen Dodgson (Gartrell, 1983). All compositions to date in the 20th century have used the Esterházy lower-manual tuning. The International Baryton Society was formed in 1993 to coordinate and promote baryton research and performance.

(1) Giovanni Battista [Giambattista] Basile

JULIE ANNE SADIE, TERENCE M. PAMPLIN

Baryton (i)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Greilsamer: ‘Le baryton du Prince Esterházy’, Revue musicale mensuelle, i (1910), 45

R.C. Temple: The Travels of Peter Mundy, in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., lvi (London, 1925/R), 104–5

W.O. Strunk: ‘Haydn’s Divertimenti for Baryton, Viola, Bass’, MQ, xviii (1932), 216–51

B. Csuka: ‘Haydn és a baryton’, Zenetudományi tanulmányok, vi (1957), 669–728

E. Fruchtman: The Baryton Trios of Tomasini, Burgksteiner, and Neumann (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1960)

K.M. Schwamberger: ‘Das Baryton: ein vergessenes Instrument aus der Barockzeit’, NZM, 122 (1961), 439–42

E. Fruchtman: ‘The Baryton: its History and its Music Re-examined’, AcM, xxxiv (1962), 2–17

J. Liebner: ‘The Baryton’, The Consort, xxiii (1966), 109–28

H. Walter and M. Härtig: Preface and critical commentary to J. Haydn: Barytontrios, Werke, xiv/5 (1968–9)

S. Gerlach: Preface and critical commentary to J. Haydn: Werke mit Baryton, Werke, xiii (1969–70)

H. Unverricht: ‘Zur Chronologie der Barytontrios’, Symbolae historiae musicae: Hellmut Federhofer zum 60. Geburtstag (Mainz, 1971), 180–89

A Lessing: ‘Zur Geschichte des Barytons’, Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, i/2 (1971), 143–53

E. Schenk: Preface toL. Tomasini: Ausgewählte Instrumentalwerke, DTÖ, cxxiv (1972)

S. Wollenberg: ‘Haydn’s Baryton Trios and the “Gradus”’, ML, liv (1973), 170–78

J. Webster: ‘Towards a History of Viennese Chamber Music in the Early Classical Period’, JAMS, xxvii (1974), 212–47

E. Zimmermann: ‘Theorbierte Lauten und die Viola di baritone: frühe Saiteninstrumente von Erich Zimmermann beschrieben’, Instrumentenbau, xxxi (1977), 366

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766–1790 (London, 1978)

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn: the Early Years, 1732–1765 (London, 1980)

J. Braun and S. Gerlach: Preface and critical commentary to J. Haydn: Barytontrios, Werke, xiv/1 (1980)

S. Gerlach: ‘The Reconstructed Original Version of Haydn’s Baryton Trio Hob. XI:2’, Haydn Studies [Washington DC 1975], ed. J.P. Larsen, H. Serwer and J. Webster (New York, 1981), 84–7

C. Gartrell: ‘The Origins and Development of the Baryton’, Chelys, xi (1982), 4–7

C. Gartrell: The Baryton: its History and Music (diss., U. of Surrey, 1983)

T. Crawford: ‘Constantijn Hughgens and the “Engelsche Viool”’, Chelys, xviii (1989), 41–61

P. Holman: ‘An Addicion of Wyer Stringes Beside the Ordenary Stringes: the Origin of the Baryton?’, Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ii (London, 1992), 1098–1115

T. Crawford and F.-P. Goy, eds.: The St. Petersburg ‘Swan’ Manuscript: a Facsimile of Manuscript O No. 124, Library of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Columbus, OH, 1994)

T.M. Pamplin: ‘A Baryton Discography’, International Baryton Society (London, 1994)

T.M. Pamplin: The Baryton in the Seventeenth Century, from its Origins at the English Court of James I (diss., Kingston University, in preparation)

Baryton (ii)

(1) (Fr.).

A valved brass instrument in B, the same as the English baritone. See Baritone (ii).

(2) (Ger.) The tenor tuba in B. See Tuba (i) and Euphonium.

Baryton (iii)

(Fr.).

See Baritone (i).

Barzelletta

(It.: ‘jest’).

Of the different verse forms set by frottola composers, the barzelletta appears to have been the most popular, especially in earlier publications (until about 1510). Whereas the term ‘frottola’ is generic, referring to a variety of prosodic types, in its specific meaning it is usually synonymous with the barzelletta, as suggested by Petrucci’s fourth book, Strambotti, ode, frottole [= barzellette], sonetti (RISM 1505⁵), or Antico’s third book, Canzoni, sonetti, strambotti et frottole [= barzellette] (1513¹). The barzelletta normally scans in trochaic metre, with eight syllables per line (trochaic ottonario), and consists of two sections: ripresa, four lines that rhyme as abba or abab; and stanza, six or eight lines in the order of two mutazioni or piedi (pairs of lines with identical rhymes) and a volta (a couplet or quatrain, whose last line generally rhymes with the first of the ripresa). A six-line stanza is likely to rhyme as cdcdda and an eight-line one as cdcddeea. Anticipated in the connecting rhyme or concatenazione, the ripresa as a whole or, more often, in part (two lines) recurs before successive stanzas (which number anywhere from two to five or more) and after the last one. Some barzellette are sung to two musical units (AB), others to four (ABCD) or more, depending on how many phrases of the ripresa are incorporated into the stanza. A two-unit structure may consist of AB for the ripresa, AA for the piedi, B for the volta and A for the ripresa. When new material appears in the stanza, it may be arranged as CC for the piedi and D for the volta. Musical phrases are often equal in length, grouping symmetrically into units of three or four measures. With its trochaic metre, the barzelletta tends to be lively and dance-like, with heavy downbeats and accents at the cadence (since Italian usually has stresses on the penultimate, the result is a sequence of strong–weak beats, leading to the so-called ‘feminine’ cadence, corresponding to a verso piano). In this respect it differs from the more languid strambotto, with 11 syllables in iambic verse (and the last syllable falling on a downbeat). The barzelletta relates, in prosody, to the ballata (and the French virelai), the lauda (of which many examples were barzellette supplied with sacred texts) and the Spanish cantiga or villancico. An etymological connection with the bergerette (a monostrophic virelai) may be assumed. See Frottola.

DON HARRÁN

Barzin, Leon (Eugene)

(b Brussels, 27 Nov 1900; d Naples, FL, 29 April 1999). American conductor and educator of Belgian birth. Taken to America in 1902 and naturalized in 1924, he studied the violin and viola first with his father, who was principal viola in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and then with Edouard Deru, Pierre Henrotte, Eugène Meergerhin and Eugène Ysaÿe. He also studied composition with Lilienthal before joining the salon orchestra at the Hotel Astor in New York in 1917. By 1919 Barzin had moved to the second violin section of the National SO, shortly before it merged with the New York Philharmonic SO; he became first viola in the New York PO (1925–9). On Toscanini's advice he left this post to become assistant conductor of the American Orchestral Society, which he reorganized in 1930 as the National Orchestral Association with himself as music director (1930–59 and 1969–76). He had other appointments: music director of the Ballet Society, which became the New York City Ballet (1948–58), conductor of the Hartford (Connecticut) SO (1938–40) and guest conductor with the New York PO; however, he was primarily a teacher and a great trainer of young orchestras. His National Orchestral Association was a semi-professional training group for young musicians and he had great success broadcasting with them on local radio stations. The association became the training ground for thousands of musicians who went on to play in professional orchestras. While in Paris conducting the Orchestre Pasdeloup (1958–60), he was also an instructor at the Schola Cantorum and was made a member of the Légion d'Honneur. He also received the Columbia University Ditson Award and the Gold Medal of Lebanon.

JOSÉ BOWEN

Barzun, Jacques

(b Créteil, 30 Nov 1907). American cultural historian and critic of French origin. He went to the USA in 1920 and was a pupil of Carlton J.H. Hayes at Columbia University (BA 1927), where he took the doctorate in 1932 with a dissertation on the origins of the French race while working as lecturer (from 1927); he was then appointed assistant professor (1937), professor (1945), Seth Low Professor of History (1955) and university professor (1967). He also served as dean and provost (1955–67) and president of the American Academy of Arts (1972–5; 1977–8), and was made extraordinary Fellow of Cambridge University in 1960.

His writings have been mainly concerned with 19th-century European and 20th-century American culture. His work in music, which represents only part of his entire output, has centred on Berlioz, the subject of his large and exhaustively documented Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950), a pioneering reappraisal of Berlioz's standing and achievement approached from a cultural rather than musicological standpoint. Its influence on postwar Berlioz appreciation has been profound. He has also edited a volume of Berlioz's letters (1954) and translated Les soirées de l'orchestre (1956). As a critic Barzun's work is wide-ranging, with a special understanding of the Romantic movement and its belief that music begins to speak at the point where words stop. He has consistently propounded the chief Romantic virtues of energy, sincerity, diversity and imagination as antidotes to the sicknesses of 20th-century society.

WRITINGS

The French Race: Theories of its Origins and their Social and Political Implications Prior to the Revolution (diss., Columbia U., 1932; New York, 1932)

Darwin, Marx and Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Boston, 1941/R, 2/1958/R)

Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950, rev., abridged 2/1956/R as Berlioz and his Century, rev. 3/1969 under orig. title)

ed.: The Pleasures of Music (New York, 1951, 2/1977)

Music into Words (Washington DC, 1953); repr. in Lectures on the History and Art of Music: the Louis Charles Elson Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress, 1946–1963 (New York, 1968), 65–93

ed. and trans.: New Letters of Berlioz, 1830–1868 (New York, 1954/R)

Evenings with the Orchestra (New York, 1956) [trans. of H. Berlioz: Les soirées de l’orchestre (Paris, 1852)]

Music in American Life (Garden City, NY, 1956)

The Energies of Art (New York, 1956/R)

‘Berlioz in 1969: a Fantasia for Friends Overseas’, Adam International Review, nos.331–3 (1969), 33–108

‘Berlioz a Hundred Years After’, MQ, lvi (1970), 1–13

‘Biography and Criticism: a Misalliance Disputed’, Critical Inquiry, i (1975), 479–96

ed. B. Friedland: Critical Questions on Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940–1980 (Chicago, 1982)

‘Paris in 1830’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, ed. P. Bloom (Stuyvesant, NY, 1987), 1–22

The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT, 1989)

‘Overheard at Glimmerglass (“Famous last words”)’, Berlioz Studies, ed. P. Bloom (Cambridge, 1992), 254–71

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.B. Weiner and W.R. Keylor, eds.: From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun (New York, 1976) [incl. L. Trilling: ‘A Personal Memoir’, xv–xxii; B. Clarke: ‘The Impact of a Personality’, 337–41; C.C. Brown: ‘The Scholar as Adminstrator’, 342–9; list of writings, 353–76]

HUGH MACDONALD

Baschny, Józef.

See Baszny, Józef.

Bas-dessus

(Fr.: ‘low treble’).

Term used, especially in French sources, to denote a female voice below the soprano or haut-dessus – in effect a second soprano or Mezzo-soprano. Rousseau (Dictionnaire, 1768) specifically identifies these as vocal terms, as opposed to the instrumental first and second treble (premier dessus and second dessus).

Until the mid-18th century the vocal term was associated only with part-singing. Brossard (Dictionaire, 1703) defines it as a second treble part; as early as 1597 Morley describes a bass descant as ‘that kinde of descanting, where your sight of taking and using your cordes must be under the plainsong’. However, Rousseau points to the solo use of this voice in Italy and writes that the ‘beautiful bas-dessus, full and sonorous, is no less esteemed in Italy than the soprano’. Although he says that France pays ‘no regard’ to these voices, he cites a Mlle Gondré (whose name appears on a ‘Second Dessus’ part for an 18th-century performance of Lully’s Armide) for her ‘very beautiful bas-dessus’ that was ‘very much applauded’ at the Paris Opéra.

Choral writing in French operas from Lully onwards frequently made use of a three-part high-voice petit choeur, where the middle part was for bas-dessus and the lowest for the male Haute-contre. In Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829), both upper voices in four-part choruses were labelled ‘dessus’, the lower voice corresponding to the bas-dessus. Berlioz (Grande traité d’instrumentation, 1844) drew attention to Gluck’s choruses of priestesses in Iphigénie en Tauride, which are for dessus and bas-dessus only, and observed that ‘it cannot be denied that, in France, [Nature] is very sparing of [contraltos]’. See also Alto (i).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Rosow: ‘Performing a Choral Dialogue by Lully’, EMc, xv (1987), 325–35

LIONEL SAWKINS, ELLEN T. HARRIS

Baseggio [Basseggio], Lorenzo

(b c1660; d before 1719). Italian composer. He wrote the opera L’Adimiro (text, B. Pisani) for Treviso in 1687 and his oratorio, Il re pentito (Padua, 1710), was performed at the home of Count Antonio Alberto De Conti. One of his masses was sung at SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, on 29 December 1712 to celebrate the canonization of Pius V. Two of Baseggio’s settings of texts by Francesco Passarini also appeared in that year: the favola boschereccia, Gli equivoci del caso was performed at Dolo, near Venice, in June (AllacciD), and Amor e fortuna was performed at the Teatro Campagnella, Rovigo, in the autumn. His opera Laomedonte (text, G.B. Guizzardi or G.B. Ruperti) was performed at the Teatro S Moisè, Venice, in 1715. Baseggio was a member of the Venetian instrumentalists’ guild from at least 1694 to about 1715. A motet, Pulchra Sum suavis, for soprano, two violins and continuo, survives (in D-Bsb).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

SartoriL

SchmidlD

C. Bonlini: Le glorie della poesia e della musica (Venice, 1730)

E. Selfridge-Field: ‘Annotated Membership Lists of the Venetian Instrumentalists’ Guild, 1672–1727’, RMARC, no.9 (1971), 1–52; no.12 (1974), 152–5

M. Talbot: Benedetto Vinaccesi: a Musician in Brescia and Venice in the Age of Corelli (Oxford, 1994)

THOMAS WALKER/BETH L. GLIXON

Basel

(Ger.).

See Basle.

Baselli [Boselli, Bosello], Constantino

(fl Vicenza, 1600–40). Italian composer and singer. He apparently spent his career at Vicenza. He was probably a pupil of Leone Leoni, maestro di cappella at Vicenza Cathedral from 1588 to 1607, and certainly had connections at Vicenza by 1600, since his second book of canzonettas, dedicated from there, includes pieces by Leoni and his circle. The dedication of the first to Lorenzo Beccaria suggests that Baselli may have been in his service before 1600. He evidently took holy orders between 1600, when the title-pages of his works refer to him in secular terms, and 8 November 1605, when he is first listed in the Libri dei processi of the cathedral as a priest and singer. Eitner claimed that he was maestro di cappella there, but this is not supported by the Libri, which consistently list him as a singer up to the last reference, on 19 February 1631. Nothing more is known of him until the appearance in 1640 of the Grati, gratiosi, giocondi, gioiosi et graditi canti, dedicated to Count G.B. Porta of Vicenza. The forward matter of this publication is unusually elaborate: Porta’s coat-of-arms (f.2) is followed by a portrait of Baselli, and the 17 pieces in the book are preceded by verses addressed to Baselli and his letter to the readers. Most of the music is for three voices and one work, Poi che l’humil capanna, is strophic.

WORKS

published in Venice

Il primo libro delle canzonette, 3vv (1600)

Il secondo libro delle canzonette, 3vv (1600¹²)

Il primo libro de sacri concerti, 2–4vv, bc (1614), lost, MischiatiI

Sacrarum modulationum … liber secundus, 2–4vv, bc (1618), lost, MischiatiI

Grati, gratiosi, giocondi, gioiosi et graditi canti … libro primo, 1–4vv, bc, op.5 (1640)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

MischiatiI

G. Mantese: Storia musicale vicentina (Vicenza, 1956)

IAIN FENLON

Baselt, Bernd

(b Halle, 13 Sept 1934; d Hanover, 18 Oct 1993). German musicologist. He studied with Max Schneider and Walther Siegmund-Schultze at the University of Halle and took the doctorate in 1963 with a dissertation on P.H. Erlebach; he completed the Habilitation in 1974 with a thematic catalogue of Handel's stage works. In 1983 he succeeded Siegmund-Schultze as professor at the University and as director of its Musikwissenschaftliches Institut. As a member of the board of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft in Halle, Baselt was made a vice-president in 1987, secretary in 1990 and president in 1991, a position he held until his death. In 1991 he also became chief editor of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, on whose editorial board he had served for many years; at the same time he took over the editorship of the Händel-Jahrbuch.

Baselt was the leading German Handel scholar of his generation: his major contribution to Handel studies is the comprehensive thematic catalogue of the composer's works (HWV) published in three volumes as a supplement to the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe. His achievement is the more remarkable in that the work was done while Baselt was living in the German Democratic Republic, when opportunities for travel to England to consult the sources located there were limited. He played a major part both in raising the standard of the Händel-Ausgabe and introducing authentic performing practice of Handel's works, particularly the operas, to the annual festival in Halle. Although Handel became his main interest, Baselt was also an authority on other music of the Baroque period in Middle Germany; he edited works by Telemann and other composers, and his many writings contributed to a greater understanding of the German background in which Handel was brought up.

WRITINGS

‘Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow und die protestantische Kirchenkantate’, Festschrift der II Händelfestspiele Halle (Saale) (Halle, 1962), 45–54

‘Georg Philipp Telemann und die protestantische Kirchenmusik’, Musik und Kirche, xxxvii (1967), 196–207

Die Bühnenwerke Georg Friedrich Händels: Quellenstudien und thematisches Verzeichnis (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Halle, 1974) [2 vols.]

‘Händel und Bach: zur Frage der Passionen’, Johann Sebastian Bach und Georg Friedrich Händel: Halle 1975, 58–66

‘Zum Parodieverfahren in Händels frühen Opern’, Zur Wort-Ton Problematik bei Händel: Halle 1974 [HJb 1975–6], 19–39

ed.: J.A. Hiller: Anweisung zum musikalisch-zierlichen Gesange (Leipzig, 1976)

‘Miscellanea Haendeliana’, Der Komponist und sein Adressat: Halle 1976, 60–88 [on Handel and Muffat]

‘Georg Philipp Telemann und die Opernlibrettistik seiner Zeit’, Telemann und seine Dichter: Magdeburg 1977, 31–51

‘Georg Philipp Telemanns Serenade Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho: Beiträge zur Entstehungsgeschichte’, HJbMw, iii (1978), 255–269

‘Händel auf dem Wege nach Italien’, G.F. Händel und seine italienischen Zeitgenossen: Halle 1978, 10–21

G.F. Handel: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis, i: Bühnenwerke; ii: Oratorische Werke, vokale Kammermusik, Kirchenmusik; iii: Instrumentalmusik, Pasticci und Fragmente, Händel-Handbuch, i–iii (Leipzig and Kassel, 1978–86)

‘Wiederentdeckung von Fragmenten aus Händels verschollenen Hamburger Opern’, HJb 1983, 7–24

‘Muffat and Handel: a Two-Way Exchange’, MT, cxx (1979), 904–7

‘Vorbemekung zum Libretto von Händels verschollener Oper Der beglückte Florindo’, HJb 1984, 21–73 [incl. facs. of libretto]

ed., with W. Siegmund-Schulze: Händel-Festspiele XXXV: Halle 1986 [HJb 1987] [incl. ‘Georg Friedrich Händels Pasticcio Jupiter in Argos und seine quellenmässige Überlieferung,’ 57–71]

ed., with S. Flesch: Aufklärerische Tendenzen in der Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihre Rezeption: Walther Siegmund-Schultze zum 70. Geburtstag (Halle, 1987) [incl. ‘Der spanische Erbfolgekrieg, Italien und Händel’, 10–31]

‘Handel and his Central German Background’, Handel, Tercentenary Collection: London 1987, 43–60

ed., with W. Siegmund-Schultze: Das mitteldeutsche Musikleben vor Händel; Christoph Willibald Gluck: Halle 1988 [incl. ‘Die hallesche Musikkultur im Zeitalter des jungen Händel’, 58–75]

Georg Friedrich Händel (Leipzig, 1988)

‘Georg Friedrich Händels Messias’, Zwischen Bach und Mozart: Stuttgart 1988, 150–65

‘Parodie oder Pasticcio? Zu Händels Schaffensmethode’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, iii (1989), 264–8

ed.: Musikalisches Füllhorn: Günter Fleischhauer zum 60. Geburtstag (Halle, 1990) [incl. ‘Händels englische Oratorien und ihre Anfänge’, 5–11]

‘Die Oper um 1700 im mitteldeutschen Raum’, HJb 1990, 17–31

‘Zu einigen gattungstypologischen Besonderheiten in Händels Opern nach antiken Vorlagen’, Gattungskonventionen der Händel-Oper: Karlsruhe 1990 and 1991, 63–74

‘Die frühdeutsche Oper am Schwarzburg-Rudolstädtischen Hofe unter Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657–1714)’, Musiktheatralische Formen in kleinen Residenzen: Arolsen 1992, 32–51

‘Brandenburg-Prussia and the Central German Courts’, Man & Music/Music and Society: The Late Baroque Era, ed. J.G. Buelow (London, 1993), 230–53

‘Early German Handel Editions during the Classical Period’, Handel Collections and their History: London 1993, 238–48

‘Händel und die Londoner “Royal Academy of Music”’, Akademie und Musik: Erscheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des Akademiegedankens in Kultur- und Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Werner Braun, ed. W. Frobenius and others (Saarbrücken, 1993), 147–56

‘Georg Friedrich Händels Gestalt und äusseres Wesen’, HJb 1994–5, 13–22

EDITIONS

Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, xx: Der geduldige Sokrates (Kassel, 1967); xxi: Der neumodische Liebhaber Damon, oder Die Satyrn in Arkadien, (Kassel, 1969)

C.W. Gluck: Il Parnasso confuso, Sämtliche Werke, iii/25 (Kassel, 1970)

G.F. Handel: Oreste, Hallische Händel–Ausgabe, ii/suppl.1 (Kassel, 1991)

G.P. Telemann: Don Qichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho, RRMBA, lxiv–lxv (1991)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Hortschansky and K. Musketa, eds.: Georg Friedrich Händel: ein Lebensinhalt: Gedenkschrift für Bernd Baselt (Halle, 1995) [incl. list of writings, 537–49]

TERENCE BEST

Baseo, Francesco Antonio

(b Lecce; fl 1573–82). Italian composer. Of the 28 compositions in his earliest recorded publication, Il primo libro delle canzoni villanesche alla napolitana a quattro voci (Venice, 1573¹⁷), only 18 are by Baseo himself, the rest being the work of seven other composers, unknown except for these pieces, together with some anonymous works. This, together with the tone of the dedication to Baseo’s patron Antonio Mettula, suggests that the book represents the activities of a small musical academy that gathered at Mettula’s house in Lecce and which included other members of Mettula’s family. According to the title-page of the Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, composti da diversi eccell. autori (Venice, 1573¹⁶), Baseo had been appointed maestro di cappella at Lecce Cathedral by this date. The publication, which was assembled by Baseo, contains five of his own compositions together with pieces by Felis, Le Roy, Monte, Nola, Ortiz and Palestrina.

IAIN FENLON

Basevi, Abramo

(b Livorno, 29 Nov 1818; d Florence, 25 Nov 1885). Italian music critic. Brought up in a wealthy Jewish family, he embarked simultaneously on classical and musical studies. He graduated in medicine from Pisa University and studied composition under Pietro Romani, having an opera performed in Florence in 1840 and another in 1847. Both were unsuccessful with the general public, although praised by some connoisseurs. Giving up composition, he soon became a prominent figure in Florentine cultural life as a critic and organizer. He founded and edited the journal L'armonia (1856–9). Through him began the Mattinate Beethoveniane, a series of concerts from which derived the Società del Quartetto di Firenze (1861), whose journal Boccherini (1862–82) he also edited, as well as a cycle of concerts of dramatic music (1865) dedicated to classic Italian opera composers such as Sacchini and Spontini, then largely forgotten. In 1861 he instituted an annual competition for string quartet composition and in 1863 organized the Concerti Popolari a Grande Orchestra. He was also from 1855 a member of the Istituto Musicale of the Accademia di Belle Arti, a consigliere censore of the Florence Liceo Musicale from its founding in 1859 and a corresponding member of the Brussels Academy of Music.

Basevi was one of the most important and influential figures in Italian criticism in the middle of the 19th century, especially in the movement to reform the Italian musical scene by bringing in new influences. He sought to re-establish a sense of Italy's own musical tradition by creating interest in its older, forgotten composers and collaborated with the publisher G.G. Guidi in bringing out cheap editions of classic Italian works. The concerts he set up were intended to awaken Italians to the German instrumental tradition, then little known. He was an early supporter of Wagner, but did not advocate the wholesale adoption by Italians of the Wagnerian system. Verdi he recognized as a skilful, sometimes inspired, musician, and his articles on the earlier Verdi operas (up to Aroldo), collected into a book in 1859, are still one of the most valuable and perceptive works of Verdi criticism. However, Basevi saw Verdi as one who followed the taste of the time rather than moulding and improving it. For him the most significant contemporary figure was Meyerbeer, whose work, seen as a synthesis of German learning and Italian melody, provided the most appropriate model for Italians to follow.

Basevi published numerous journal articles, some of which are collected in books. In his later years he gave most of his attention to philosophy, on which he also published several works. His valuable library was left to the Istituto Musicale, forming one of its most important holdings.

WRITINGS

Memoria relativa al progetta di riordinamento delle scuole musicali di Firenze (MS, 1855–60, I-Fc)

Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859)

Introduzione ad un nuovo sistema d'armonia (Florence, 1862)

Studi sull'armonia (Florence, 1865)

Compendio della storia della musica (Florence, 1865–6)

Beethoven op.18 con analisi dei sei quartetti (Florence, 1874)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

ES (E. Zanetti)

FétisB

RicordiE

SchmidlD

A. Parenti: ‘Il problema della critica verdiana’, RaM, vi (1933), 197–218

A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961), 481ff

S. Martinotti: ‘Cronache dell'Ottocento sulla musica strumentale in Italia’, Convegno musicale, i (1964), 211

L. Pinzauti: ‘Prospettive per uno studio sulla musica a Firenze nell'Ottocento’, NRMI, ii (1968), 255–73

B. Friedland: ‘Italy's Ottocento: Notes from the Musical Underground’, MQ, lvi (1970), 27–53

A. Roccatagliati: ‘Le forme dell'opera ottocentesca: il caso Basevi’, Le parole della musica: studi sulla lingua della letteratura musicale in onore di Gianfranco Folena, ed. F. Nicolodi and P. Trovato (Florence, 1994), 311–34

A.M. Trivisonno: ‘The Basevi Collection in the Library of Cherubini Conservatory, Florence (Italy)’, FAM, xxxii (1985), 114–17

LEONARDO PINZAUTI

Baseya, Joan

(b Mataró, nr Barcelona; fl 1679). Spanish composer and organist. As organist and choirmaster of Vich Cathedral he participated in a jury formed in October 1679 to choose an organist for S María del Mar, Barcelona. When the post again became vacant in 1687 one ‘Joan Basseya’, described as a priest and organist of Ripoll, competed for it without success; he is unlikely to have been the same person as the distinguished organist of Vich, but doubt is cast on the authorship of the surviving compositions. Baseya’s reputation rests chiefly on three organ tientos (E-Bc 729; ed. H. Anglés, Antología de organistas españoles del siglo XVII, ii and iv, Barcelona, 1966 and 1968) which stand out in the 17th-century Spanish keyboard repertory for their sparkling counterpoint and skilful construction: they suggest the variation canzona infused with typically Spanish figuration. Two are for divided register, calling for the Gaitilla or Bagpipe stop in the right hand; the third is for undivided keyboard (lleno). A nine-part mass with instruments and two four-part villancicos attributed to Baseya are also extant (in E-Bc). José Elías may have studied with him as well as with Cabanilles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FrotscherG

F. Pedrell: Catàlech de la Biblioteca musical de la Diputació de Barcelona, ii (Barcelona, 1909)

J. Soler i Palet: ‘La música a Catalunya: a Santa María del Mar’, Revista musical catalana, xviii (1921), 19–27

H. Anglés: ‘Els organistes i la música d’orgue a Catalunya en els segles XVIIè i XVIIIè’, Revista catalana de música, i (1923), 29

ALMONTE HOWELL/LOUIS JAMBOU

Bashir, Djamil

(b Al Mawsil, 1921; d Baghdad, 1977). Iraqi ‘ūd and violin player. He was born into a musical family and received his first musical education from his father, who played the ‘ūd and was a famous constructor of the instrument in Al Mawsil. Djamil studied the ‘ūd with al-Sharif Muhieddin Haidar and the violin with the Romanian Sando Albo at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. He became one of the best representatives of the Baghdad lute school which aimed to give the ‘ūd the status of a solo concert instrument. His musical activities were manifold. He accompanied important singers of the Iraqi maqām, thus acquiring knowledge of the Iraqi classical traditions; later he used this material in his ‘ūd and violin improvisations. His training in both European and Arab-Ottoman music helped him to create a new technique and a specific style for violin playing in Iraq. He also produced instrumental arrangements of Iraqi folksongs. He composed more than 20 pieces in various instrumental forms (bashraf, samā'i, lunga), some dance compositions and a concerto for ‘ūd, violin and symphony orchestra. In 1949 he published a collection of national anthems for schoolteachers. He used his knowledge of the Iraqi tradition and the instrumental technique he acquired from al-Sharif Muhieddin to write the first ‘ūd tutor in Iraq; published in 1961, it contains six levels of exercises based on Ottoman, Arab and Iraqi compositions. Unlike his younger brother Munir Bashir, he was not widely known in the West.

SCHEHERAZADE QASSIM HASSAN

Bashir, Munir

(b Mosul, 1930; d Budapest, 1997). Iraqi ‘ūd player, brother of Djamil Bashir. He studied with al-Sharif Muhieddin Haidar at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and was also influenced by his elder brother . They both earned a living accompanying singers of the Iraqi maqām. From 1966 to 1973 he worked in Beirut as a producer, an arranger of folksongs and a musician in the ensemble of the Lebanese singer Fayrūz. During the 1970s Bashir's career took a new direction; under the influence of the musicologists Simon Jargy and Poul Rovsing Olsen, he limited his playing to solo improvisations (taqsīm), which brought him international recognition. In 1973 he became an artistic consultant to the Iraqi government, and was appointed head of the newly constituted Department of Music of the Ministry of Culture and Information. He regrouped the existing musical institutions within the department and centralized the process of making decisions, and also created some official troupes. His position helped to bring him worldwide contacts and the possibility of an international career; he gave recitals in about 50 countries and received numerous honorary positions, degrees and state medals. Bashir's music depends extensively on the melodic material of the Iraqi maqām; by treating this material through improvisations and using the techniques of the Sharif school, he initiated a new trend in ‘ūd playing, achieving al-Sharif Muhieddin's goal of developing a new role for the instrument beyond its use in vocal art. Bashir's music has been diffused through numerous recordings).

SCHEHERAZADE QASSIM HASSAN

Bashkirov, Dmitry (Aleksandrovich)

(b Tbilisi, 1 Nov 1931). Russian pianist. He was introduced to music by his grandmother and studied with Anastasia Virsaladze at the Tbilisi Conservatory from 1938 to 1949 and subsequently from 1950 to 1955 with Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory, where he began to teach in 1957. Bashkirov's best-known pupils, Dmitry Alekseyev and Nikolay Demidenko, share his intensity of temperament, which borders on wildness. After winning a prize at the 1955 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris, Bashkirov rapidly developed his performing career both in Russia and the West, making some 30 recordings for Melodiya and, more recently, also recording for Harmonia Mundi and Erato. He formed a well-known trio with violinist Igor' Bezrodny and cellist Mikhail Komnitzer. Between 1980 and 1988 he was forbidden to tour outside the Eastern bloc, and in 1991 he made a second home in Madrid, teaching at the Queen Sofia High School for Music.

WRITINGS

‘Tol'ko li ėtim putyom idti v mastera?’ [Is this the only path to artistic perfection?], SovM (1983), no.9, pp.61–3

‘Bezgranichnost' oshchushcheniya muzïki’ [The infinitude of musical awareness], SovM (1985), no.6, pp.41–2

‘Bït' dostoynïm pamyati uchitelya’ [To be worthy of the memory of a teacher], SovM, (1990), no.1, pp.80–84

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Yuzefovich: ‘Besedï s masterami’ [Conversations with the masters], SovM (1981), no.3, pp.61–9 [interview with Bashkirov]

M. Zilberquit: Russia's Great Modern Pianists (Neptune, NJ, 1983), 441–73 [interview with Bashkirov]

G. Tsïpin: Portretï sovetskikh pianistov (Moscow, 1990), 198–208

D. Elder: ‘Great Russian Pianists’, Clavier, xxxi (1991/2), 34–6

DAVID FANNING

Bashmakov, Leonid

(b Terijoki [now Zelengorsk, Russia], 1 April 1927). Finnish composer and conductor. He studied the piano, orchestral conducting and composition (with Merikanto) at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (1947–54). He taught at the music college in Kotka before being appointed theory teacher at the Tampere Conservatory in 1959, and rector in 1979. He was conductor of the TTT-Theatre of Tampere between 1960 and 1984.

As a composer his stylistic roots lie in neo-classicism. In his works of the 1960s in particular, his use of melodies based on 2nds and 4ths, and his handling of rhythm and the orchestra, point to Bartók and to his teacher Merikanto. Bashmakov abandoned 12-note technique after his First Symphony (1963) in favour of free chromatic tonality and motivic techniques. The Stravinskian characteristics typical of Bashmakov’s generation do not, however, emerge until his ballet Tumma (‘Dark’, 1976) and the closely related Fourth Symphony and Passacaglia. These are dramatically and colourfully orchestrated works marked by the sharp contrasting of characters. The textures are for the most part linear and contrapuntal in construction, and occasionally fugal. His Cello Concerto (1972) is typical in that the most expressive melodies are entrusted to the tenor register. He is a predominantly instrumental composer, with even his Canzona I (for mixed choir and orchestra) and Canzona II (for soprano and orchestra) being in effect instrumental vocalises. Major exceptions in this respect are Jumalan elektronit (‘The Electrons of God’) and the Requiem to texts by Lassi Nummi.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tumma [Dark] (ballet, H. Värtsi and Bashmakov, after poem by E. Leino), 1976; incid music for several plays

Syms.: 1963, 1965, 1977, 1979, 1982

Other orch: Vn Conc., 1966; Etappeja [Stages], wind orch, 1968; Conc. for Orch, 1969; Divertimento no.1, ob, str, 1971; Sinfonietta, 1971; Vc Conc., 1972; Prelude and Scherzo, wind orch, 1973; Divertimento no.2, 3 wind, str, 1974; Fl Conc., 1974; Org Conc., 1975; Ballata, 1976; Passacaglia, 1977; Vn Conc., 1983; Cl Conc., 1990; Aubades and Serenades, 1991; Conc., pic, tpt, str, 1992; Bn Conc., 1993; The Three Tolls, 1993

Chbr: 7 Duos, 2 vn, 1969; Octet, 1970; Sonata, perc, 1970; Sonata, va, vc, pf, 1971; 4 Bagatelles, fl, perc, 1971; Dialogues, org, perc, 1971; Conc. da camera no.1, fl, str qt, 1972; Str Qt, 1972; Sonatina, vc, pf, 1973; Str Qt, 1974; Visions and Revelations, wind qnt, perc, 1977; 5 Improvisations, vn, pf, 1977, rev. 1985; Conc. da camera no.2, hp, str qt, 1978; Sonatina, a fl, pf, 1979; 7 Inventions, accdn, hpd, 1985; Qt, kantele, str trio, 1988; Kolminpeli, 2 accdn, perc, 1990; Conc., hpd, 2 str qt, perc, 1991; Nelinpeli, 4 kantele, 1991; Sonata, tpt, pf, 1992; Reflections, 3 bn, 1992; Impetuoso e tenero, vc, accdn, 1993; Terpsikhoren jalanjäljillä [In the Footsteps of Terpsichor], 2 tpt, 2 trbn, 1993; Die Offenbarung des Johannes, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1994; Sestetto, chbr ens, 1994

Solo inst: Fantasia, fl, 1972; 6 Preludes, pf, 1974; Cassazione, tuba, 1976; Sonata, bn, 1976; La parade des insectes, mar, 1979; 6 études, kantele, 1986

Vocal: Canzona I, mixed chorus, orch, 1969; Canzona II, S, orch, 1971; Tiitiäisen lauluja [Bird Songs] (K. Kunnas), female vv, 1979; Jumalan elektronit [The Electrons of God] (cant., L. Nummi), 1981; Muutamat kevään päivät [A Few Spring Days] (Nummi), male vv, 1985; Requiem (Nummi), 1988

Principal publishers: Jasemusiikki, Fazer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Salmenhaara, ed.: Suomalaisia säveltäjiä [Finnish composers] (Helsinki, 1994)

M. Heiniö: Aikamme musiikki [Contemporary music], Suomen musiikin historia [The history of Finnish music], iv (Helsinki, 1995)

K. Korhonen: Finnish Orchestral Music (Jyväskylä, 1995)

K. Korhonen: Finnish Concertos (Jyväskylä, 1995)

K. Aho and others: Finnish Music (Helsinki, 1996)

MIKKO HEINIÖ

Bashmet, Yuri (Abramovich)

(b Rostov-na-Donu, 24 Jan 1953). Ukrainian viola player. He grew up in L'viv and played the piano as a boy but at eight took up the violin under the tutelage of Zoya Zertsalova, who remained his teacher when he changed to the viola at 14; in his teens he also played the guitar and the piano in a rock band. At 18 he entered the Moscow Conservatory to study with Vadim Borisovsky and then – after Borisovsky's death – with Fedor Druzhinin. He was also influenced by the playing of David Oistrakh, Viktor Tretyakov, Vladimir Spivakov, Gidon Kremer, Natalya Gutman and Rostropovich. In 1976 he won the Munich International Competition but for a decade his international appearances were strictly rationed by the Soviet authorities; he was usually allowed out only to play Mozart's Sinfonia concertante with Spivakov. However his recordings alerted many in the West to his qualities. Meanwhile he formed close ties with such colleagues as Richter, Oleg Kagan, Gutman and Alexey Lyubimov. In 1986 he founded the Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra and began to tour more frequently. That year he also gave the première of the concerto by Schnittke, one of the best works written for the viola in the 20th century, and since then he has enjoyed an international career. In 1988 he founded an annual festival in the Rhineland. In 1995 he took part (with Kremer and Rostropovich) in the first performance of Schnittke's Concerto for Three. Although as a virtuoso he is not quite in the class of Michael Kugel – who defeated him in the 1975 Budapest International Competition – Bashmet has a formidable technique, and in the right repertory is as charismatic a performer as any today. His performances of Shostakovich's Sonata with Mikhail Muntyan, his regular piano partner, have generally been spellbinding, as have his interpretations of works by Hindemith and Britten. However he has been criticized for cancelling engagements, changing programmes arbitrarily and arriving ill-prepared for important premières. The Danish State RSO took the unprecedented step of announcing that it would not book him again, after he had gone to Copenhagen to receive an award and give the first performance of the concerto by Poul Ruders. In 1992 he came into conflict with the members of his orchestra, by then based at Montpellier in France, and was forced to form a new group with the same name.

Bashmet remains the most powerful advocate of his underrated instrument. He has taught for many years at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, he is president of the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition on the Isle of Man and he runs his own competition in Moscow, where he has established a foundation to present an annual prize in memory of Shostakovich. In addition to the two concertos, Schnittke dedicated Monologue to him; and works introduced by him include concertos by Edison Denisov and Allan Pettersson, Vom Winde beweint by Giya Kancheli and pieces by Andrey Tchaikovsky, Aleksandr Raskatov and Andrey Golovin. His recordings include two each of Berlioz's Harold en Italie, Britten's Lachrymae and the concertos by Schnittke and Walton, as well as Schnittke's Concerto for Three and Monologue, Bruch's Double Concerto (with Tretyakov), Mozart's Sinfonia concertante (with Spivakov), Reger's G minor Suite (in both solo form and an orchestral arrangement), Druzhinin's solo Sonata and much chamber music. He plays a 1790 Carlo Giuseppe Testore viola of only moderate size but produces a virile, opulent and flexible tone from it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Potter: ‘Rock Solid’, The Strad, c (1989), 42–5

TULLY POTTER

Basie, Count [Bill; William]

(b Red Bank, NJ, 21 Aug 1904; d Hollywood, CA, 26 April 1984). American jazz bandleader and pianist. He was a leading figure of the swing era in jazz and, alongside Duke Ellington, an outstanding representative of big-band style.

1. Life.

After studying the piano with his mother, as a young man he went to New York, where he met James P. Johnson, Fats Waller (with whom he studied informally) and other black pianists of the Harlem stride school. Before he was 20 he toured extensively on the Keith and Theatre Owners' Booking Association vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist and musical director for blues singers, dancers and comedians, an early training which was to prove significant in his later career. From 1923 to 1926 he performed with various bands in New York. Stranded in Kansas City in 1927 while accompanying a touring group, he remained there, playing in silent-film theatres. In July 1928 he joined Walter Page's Blue Devils which, in addition to Page, included Jimmy Rushing; both later figured prominently in Basie's own band. Basie left the Blue Devils early in 1929; later that year he joined Benny Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, as did the other key members of the Blue Devils shortly afterwards. He led members of Moten's band, independent of Moten, from 1933 to 1935, then rejoined Moten. When Moten died suddenly in 1935, the band continued under Buster Moten, but Basie left soon thereafter. The same year, with Buster Smith and several other former members of Moten's orchestra, Basie organized a new, smaller group of nine musicians, which included Jo Jones and later Lester Young; as the Barons of Rhythm it began a long engagement at the Reno Club in Kansas City. The group's radio broadcasts led in 1936 to contracts with a national booking agency and the Decca Record Company; it expanded and within a year the Count Basie Orchestra, as it had become known, was one of the leading big bands of the swing era. By the end of the 1930s the band had acquired international fame with such pieces as One o'Clock Jump (1937, Decca), Jumpin' at the Woodside (1938, Decca) and Taxi War Dance (1939, Voc.), but gradual recourse to written arrangements began to lead it towards stylization and conformity, and to subdue its personality to the personalities of its arrangers.

In 1950 financial considerations forced Basie to disband, and for the next two years he led a six- to nine-piece group. After reorganizing a big band in 1952, he undertook a long series of tours and recording sessions that eventually led to his becoming an elder statesman of jazz, while his band was established as a permanent jazz institution and training ground for young musicians. He made the first of many tours of Europe in 1954, visited Japan in 1963, and issued a large number of recordings both under his own name and under the leadership of various singers, most notably Frank Sinatra. In the mid-1970s a serious illness hampered his career, and in the 1980s he sometimes had to perform from a wheelchair; he devoted time increasingly to his autobiography. After Basie's death, the band continued under the direction of Thad Jones (1985–6) and Frank Foster (from 1986).

2. Ensemble style.

Like all bands in the Kansas City tradition, the Count Basie Orchestra was organized about its rhythm section, which supported the interplay of brass and reeds and served as a backdrop for the unfolding of solos. Using an elliptical style of melodic leads and cues, Basie was able to control his band firmly from the keyboard while blending perfectly with his rhythm section. This celebrated group, consisting of Basie, Page, Jones and, from 1937, Freddie Green, altered the ideal of jazz accompaniment, making it more supple and responsive to the wind instruments and helping to establish four-beat jazz (with four almost identically stressed beats to a bar) as the norm for jazz performance. Of particularly far-reaching significance was Jones's technique of placing the constant pulse on the hi-hat cymbal instead of the bass drum, thereby immeasurably lightening the timbre of jazz drumming. Another important factor was the accuracy and solidity of Page's walking bass technique, which obviated the need for left-hand patterns in the piano and imparted a buoyant swing to the ensemble. Basie's rhythm section was supreme in its day, and its innovations served as models for the even more spare and flexible rhythm sections of the bop school.

During the band's heyday in the late 1930s Basie preferred light, readily expandable arrangements which were particularly notable for their use of riffs, a legacy of the Moten band and of Southwest ensemble jazz generally. Ex.1 shows a typical riff pattern, which might easily have been developed in rehearsal and played from memory. This simple approach to ensemble accompaniment, which contrasts with the more elaborate group writing of Duke Ellington, Don Redman and Sy Oliver, gave full freedom to Basie's outstanding soloists. These included the trumpeters Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and Buck Clayton, the trombonists Dicky Wells and Benny Morton, the singer Jimmy Rushing, and two excellent tenor saxophonists, Herschel Evans and Lester Young, whose widely differing styles and artistic personalities gave added breadth and tension to the group's performances. All of these soloists are prominently featured on the band's recordings between 1937 and 1941. Basie also recorded masterpieces with his band's rhythm section and soloists (notably Young), for example, Lady Be Good(1936, Voc.) and Lester Leaps in (1939, Voc.).

In his bands of the 1950s and 60s Basie retained his swing-style rhythm section but chose soloists with more modern learnings, particularly the trumpeter Thad Jones and the saxophonists Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Frank Foster and Frank Wess. Although the band's sound tended to change with its current arrangers (most notably Neal Hefti, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones and Thad Jones), it was unequalled for its relaxed precision and control of dynamics, as may be heard on the album April in Paris (1955–6, Verve). Basie's later bands, though musically less satisfying, never lost their large popular following. In the end, the Count Basie Orchestra proved the most long-lived and enduring in jazz.

3. Solo style.

Basie's eminence as a bandleader tended to overshadow his considerable achievements as a jazz pianist. Early recordings with Moten, such as the introduction to Moten Swing (1932, Vic.), reveal his mastery of the ragtime and stride idioms. By the mid-1930s, however, Basie had adopted a highly personal, laconic, blues-orientated style, compounded of short melodic phrases – often nothing more than jazz clichés – expertly placed and accented with wit and ingenuity. These seemingly fragmentary and disjunct solos, of which ex.2 is typical, were nevertheless capable of generating great forward momentum and cumulative energy, and of leading in the next soloist, a gift for which Basie was justly famed. Although sometimes wrongly attributed to laziness, Basie's ‘minimal’ style, with its avoidance of the ornate mannerisms to which other pianists of the time were prone, was in fact deliberately abstracted from the more elaborate jazz piano styles of his day to meet the demands of large-ensemble improvisation. It was of seminal importance to John Lewis and the cool pianists of the West Coast school in the early 1950s. Jazz pianists as diverse as Oscar Peterson and Mary Lou Williams have freely acknowledged their debt to Basie.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Harding: Count Basie's Boogie Woogie Styles (New York, 1944)

J. Hammond: ‘Count Basie Marks 20th Anniversary’, Down Beat, xxii/22 (1955), 11–12; repr. in Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz, ed. E. Condon and R. Gehman (New York, 1956/R), 266–73

R. Horricks: Count Basie and his Orchestra: its Music and its Musicians (London, 1957)

N. Shapiro: ‘William “Count” Basie’, The Jazz Makers, ed. N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff (New York, 1957/R), 232–43

E. Towler: ‘Vintage Basie’, Jazz Monthly, iii/6 (1957), 2

N. Hentoff: ‘Count Basie’, The Jazz Life (New York, 1961/R), 143–56

B. Schiozzi: Count Basie (Milan, 1961)

R. Russell: Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley, 1971/R, 2/1973)

A. McCarthy: Big Band Jazz (London, 1974)

S. Dance: The World of Count Basie (New York, 1980) [collection of previously pubd interviews]

A. Morgan: Count Basie (Tunbridge Wells, 1984)

C. Basie and A.Murray: Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (New York, 1985)

B. Clayton and N.M. Elliott: Buck Clayton's Jazz World (London, 1986)

C. Sheridan: Count Basie: a Bio-discography (Westport, CT, 1986)

G. Schuller: ‘The Quintessence of Swing: Count Basie’, The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York, 1989), 222–62

Oral history material in US-KCm and US-NEij

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Basile.

Italian family of poets and musicians.

(2) Lelio Basile

(3) Adriana [Andreana] Basile [Baroni]

ARGIA BERTINI/DINKO FABRIS (1), KEITH A. LARSON (2), SUSAN PARISI (3)

Basile

(1) Giovanni Battista [Giambattista] Basile

(b Giugliano, nr Naples, 25 Feb 1566; d Giugliano, 23 Feb 1632). Poet,writer and librettist. He was educated in Naples but left at an early age, travelling around Italy until he arrived in Venice in 1604. He became a soldier and was deployed with the Venetian army to defend Crete, where he joined the literary Accademia degli Stravaganti, taking the name ‘Il Pigro’ (‘the lazy one’). In 1608 he abandoned his military career and returned to Naples, where he began work as a writer and published his first poetry in Neapolitan dialect. He became a member of the Accademia degli Oziosi in 1608 and of the Accademia degli Incauti in 1621. The support of his famous sister, (3) Adriana Basile, no doubt helped his career: after she moved to the Gonzaga court, Mantua, in 1610, Giovanni Battista joined her for a year and was awarded the titles of Cavaliere and Conte palatino. He returned to Naples in 1613, where he married Flora Santora and entered the entourage of Prince Caracciolo di Avellino, in whose service he was appointed to various administrative posts as governor of Montemarano, Zungoli, Lagonegro, Aversa (1626) and finally Giugliano (1631), where he died of a contagious disease.

Basile’s patron in Naples was Luigi Carafa, Prince of Stigliano, in whose service (3) Adriana already worked. Basile dedicated his first dramatic works in pastoral style to Carafa, including Le avventurose disavventure (1611), set in Carafa’s villa in Posillipo, and the five-act dramma per musica Venere addolorata (1612), probably the first libretto used in a Neapolitan opera. In October 1630, for a visit by the Queen of Hungary, Maria of Austria, Basile carried out his first major assignment as theatre manager and librettist at the viceroy’s court. However, only Basile’s libretto and descriptions of the elaborate dances of the masquerade entitled Monte Parnaso (set to music by Giacinto Lambardi) have survived. Basile was able to display his considerable prowess in the musical dramas of his time, which can be seen in the last of nine eclogues in Neapolitan dialect making up Le muse napolitane (Naples, 1635). It was in his dialect works, which are undeniably superior to those in literary Italian, that he found himself as a writer. His masterpiece is Lo cunto delli cunti, a collection of 50 popular tales written in Neapolitan dialect under the anagrammatical pseudonym Gian Alesio Abbattutis (Naples, 1634–6) and subsequently translated into Italian and other languages. 15 of his villanellas were edited and set to music by his brother Donato and published in his Primo libro di Villanelle (Naples, 1610, dedicated to Prince Carafa). Two villanellas by their older brother (2) Lelio Basile also appear in the collection. Seven Spanish canzonettas by Giovanni Battista appear in a Neapolitan guitar manuscript (I-Nn, dated 1622–9), which may have belonged to (3) Adriana. Two poems on the eruption of Vesuvius at the end of 1631 were the last of Basile’s works to be set to music. One of these, Mentre d’ampia voragine tonante, was set by Michelangelo Rossi. After Basile’s death, (3) Adriana moved permanently to Rome where she oversaw a posthumous edition of all his work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ademollo: I Basile alla corte di Mantova (Genoa, 1885)

M. Petrini: ‘La musa napoletana di Giambattista Basile’, Belfagor, xvii (1962), 405–31

E. Ferrari Barassi: ‘Costume e pratica musicale in Napoli al tempo di Giambattista Basile’, RIM, ii (1967), 74–110

M. Rak: La maschera della fortuna: letture del Basile ‘toscano’ (Naples, 1975)

G. Fulco: ‘Verifiche per il Basile’, Filologia e critica, x (1985)

M. Rak: Napoli città gentile (Bologna, 1995)

Basile

(2) Lelio Basile

(b Naples, ?1575–85; d ?Mantua, after 1623). Composer and poet, brother of (1) Giovanni Battista Basile. In May and June 1610 he accompanied (3) Adriana Basile to Rome and Florence en route for Mantua, where Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga took him into his service, making him governor of several territories. He probably also accompanied Adriana to Milan in August 1611. On 30 June 1615 Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga assigned to him an income derived from the sale of silk and wheat. He had now been assigned the rank of nobleman. He published Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1619), of which only the alto part now survives. The 22 madrigals in this volume include settings of texts by Petrarch, Guarini, Marino and Rinuccini. The penultimate madrigal, Canto in un tempo e piango, is canonic (possibly in all five voices), as probably is the final madrigal, Se lontana voi sete. There are several poems by Lelio Basile in the volume of poems dedicated to Adriana Basile, Il teatro delle glorie (Venice, 1623).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ademollo: La bell’Adriana ed altre virtuose del suo tempo alla corte di Mantova (Città di Castello, 1888), 121, 178, 213

E. Hilmar: ‘Ergänzungen zu Emil Vogels “Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens, aus den Jahren 1500–1700”’, AnMc, no.4 (1967), 154–206, esp. 165

Basile

(3) Adriana [Andreana] Basile [Baroni]

(b Posillipo, nr Naples, c1580–83; d probably Naples, after 1642). Italian singer and instrumentalist, sister of (1) Giovanni Battista Basile and (2) Lelio Basile. She was the mother of Leonora Baroni (see Baroni family, (2)). Little is known about her early life. She may have been the singer in the household of Luigi Carafa; Duke of Traetto, whom Cardinal Montalto considered trying to obtain for his sister, the Duchess of Bracciano, in 1590. Between 1609 and 1610, when Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and his wife negotiated to bring her to Mantua, her husband, Mutio Baroni, a nobleman, was in Carafa’s service and she was in the employ of Carafa’s wife, Isabella Gonzaga. Adriana and her family travelled to Mantua via Rome, Bracciano, Bagnaia (the country residence of Cardinal Montalto) and Florence, where her singing won her considerable acclaim (she was lodged in the house of Giulio Caccini and performed with Jacopo Peri, among others). Adriana worked from June 1610 at the Mantuan court with other members of her family: Giovanni Battista and Lelio; her sisters Margherita and Vittoria, both singers; and her husband and their children Camillo, Leonora and Caterina. It was reported that Adriana’s repertory comprised over 300 songs in Italian and Spanish, which she sang from memory, accompanying herself on the harp or guitar. Within a few months of her arrival, poets were sending verses to her and Monteverdi had declared her more gifted than Cardinal Montalto’s singer Ippolita Recupito and the Medici singer Francesca Caccini. She and her husband were awarded a barony by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and the family enjoyed further privileges under his son Ferdinando. She visited Florence, Rome, Naples and Modena between 1618 and 1620, performing at court and in cardinals’ residences. In Mantua in March 1621 she performed in Alessandro Guarini’s Licori, ovvero L’incanto d’amore, and she probably also had a role in Monteverdi’s intermedi to Le tre costanti, staged the following January for the marriage of Duke Ferdinando’s sister Eleonora to Emperor Ferdinand II. In May 1623 Adriana accompanied Duke Ferdinando and Duchess Caterina to Venice. Six months later she took part in musical gatherings in Rome, where she sang the Lamento d’Arianna to harpsichord accompaniment and on another evening improvised musical settings to stanzas from Marino’s L’Adone (an exercise Marino also requested of Francesca Caccini in a separate audience). Having been granted a leave of absence from Mantua, Adriana and her husband continued on to Naples to settle personal affairs. In the succeeding period she found favour with the Viceroy of Naples and contemplated, then decided against, entering the service of King Sigismund III of Poland, who had also tried to recruit Monteverdi. Preparing to return to Mantua in 1626 after an absence of more than two years, she found that the Gonzagas no longer wanted her.

The next few years were spent mainly in Naples, where Adriana continued to be favoured by Don Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba and Viceroy of Naples. In May 1630 she visited Florence and Genoa. Then, in 1633, the Baroni family settled in Rome, where Adriana and her daughters Leonora and Caterina gave musical performances in their house and enjoyed generous support from Cardinal Antonio Barberini (seeBaroni family). She was still performing in October 1639 when André Maugars reported hearing the trio sing, Adriana accompanying on the lira, Leonora on theorbo and Caterina on harp. Until recently it was thought that Adriana died in Rome a short while later, but documents show that she left for Naples in November 1640 and was still living there in August 1642.

Adriana also composed: in 1616 Monteverdi recommended that she and her sisters write solos for the parts they were to sing in a dramatic entertainment. Her singing was extolled by several poets in Teatro della glorie della signora Adriana Basile (1623, 2/1628) and L’idea della veglia (1640), by Francesco Rasi in La cetra di sette corde (1619), and by Marino in L’Adone, canto vii (1623) and Rime, ii (edn. of 1629).

Her sister Margherita (d after 1639) was at Mantua from 1615 and in 1617 sang in Santi Orlandi’s Gli amori di Aci e Galatea, staged on Ferdinando Gonzaga’s marriage; she became the principal singer at the court in the 1620s. In 1630 she was among several Mantuan musicians in Vienna, and by January 1631 until apparently at least 1639 she held a position at the Imperial court. However, she may have returned provisionally to Mantua: she is listed on the Mantuan court roster of 1632 and four years later she was the recipient of a gift of land there. Margherita accompanied one of Emperor Ferdinand II’s daughters to Poland in 1637.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella)

SolertiMBD

P. Della Valle: Della musica dell’età nostra (1640), in A. Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R), 164–5

A. Ademollo: La bell’Adriana ed altre virtuose del suo tempo alla corte di Mantova(Città di Castello, 1888)

J. Lionnet: ‘André Maugars: risposta data a un curioso sul sentimento della musica d'Italia’,NRMI, xix (1985), 697–9

S. Parisi: ‘Licenza alla Mantovana: Frescobaldi and the Recruitment of Musicians for Mantua, 1612–15’, Frescobaldi Studies, ed. A. Silbiger (Durham, NC, 1987), 55–91

S. Parisi: Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: an Archival Study (diss., U. of Illinois, 1989)

J. Whenham: ‘The Gonzagas visit Venice’, EMc, xxi (1993), 525–8

S. Parisi: ‘Musicians at the Court of Mantua during Monteverdi's Time: evidence from the Payrolls’, Musicologia Humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 200–7

S. Saunders: Cross, Sword, and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg (1619–1637) (Oxford, 1995), 181–2

B. Glixon: ‘Scenes from the Life of Silvia Gailarti Manni, a Seventeenth-Century Virtuosa’, EMH, xv (1996), 97–146, esp. 102–3

J.W. Hill: Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford, 1997), 42–3

S. Parisi: ‘New Documents concerning Monteverdi's Relations with the Gonzagas’, Monteverdi: studi e prospettive, ed. P. Besutti, T. Gialdroni and R. Baroncini (Florence, 1998), 501–7

D. Fabris: Mecenati e musicisti: documenti sul patronato artistico dei Bentivoglio di Ferrara nell’epoca di Monteverdi (1585–1645) (Lucca, 1999)

Basili.

Italian family of composers.

(1) Andrea Basili

(2) Francesco Basili

(3) Basilio Basili

MICHAEL TALBOT/ENRICO CARERI (1), LEOPOLD M. KANTNER/R (2), ROLAND J. VÁZQUEZ (3)

Basili, Andrea

(1) Andrea Basili

(b Città della Pieve, Perugia, 16 Dec 1705; d Loreto, 28 Aug 1777). Composer and theorist. After taking minor orders he studied in Rome with Bernardo Caffi. From May to December 1729 he was maestro di cappella of Tivoli Cathedral; in 1732 he was a member of the chapter musicians, described as a ‘trombonist-organist’. In 1738 he was listed as a member of the Roman Congregazione di S Cecilia. From 10 March 1740 until his death from apoplexy he was maestro di cappella of the Santa Casa of Loreto. Among his contemporaries Basili had the reputation of a skilled contrapuntist and learned theorist. Several of his letters are among Padre Martini's surviving correspondence (I-Bc).

WORKS

vocal

Il martirio di S Sinforosa e dei sette santi suoi figliuoli nobili Tiburtini (orat, Lisippo Imacheo [F.A. Lolli]), Tivoli, 1737, music lost, lib pubd (Rome, 1737)

La Passione di Gesù Cristo (orat), Recanati, 1743, lost

Psalms with Italian paraphrased text (n.p., n.d.), copy in I-Nc [no title-page]

Christus factus est, 4vv; Christus factus est, 5vv; 3 Miserere, 8vv; Miserere, 10vv; Missa breve, 4vv: all A-Wn

In omnem terram, formerly in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

Beatus vir, 4vv; Confitebor, 4vv; Laetatus, 4vv; Nisi Dominus, 4vv: all lost, formerly Dl

Ave Maria, 4vv; Iustorum animae, 5vv; Ky-Gl, 4vv; Salve regina, 4vv: all GB-Lbl

Fuga in ottava tono plagale … sopra l'antifono Veni Sponsa Christi, 1740, 8vv; Iustorum animae, 5vv [? identical to that in Lbl]: both I-Bc

Litanie, 3vv; Miserere, double chorus a 8: both Mc

c150 other sacred works, many autograph, in LT (complete list in Tebaldini, 1921), Rvat, cathedral archives, Città della Pieve

Liberty regain'd (ode), to Daphne, imitated from ye Italian (London, c1750)

instrumental and didactic

Musica universale armonico-pratica … opera utile per i studiosi di contrapunto e per i suonatori di grave cembalo ed organo esposta in 24 esercizi (Venice, 1776)

Sonata, fugina di culcano, hpd, A-Wgm

Canon ad unisonum 16 vocibus; canone a 2, 3 e 4 parti; Fuga in ottavo tono plagale; 15 fughe, org/hpd; Solfeggi, B, 1761, S, 1772 [autograph]: all I-Bc

WRITINGS

La musica è un'arte di ben modulare (MS, 1748, lost, formerly in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

G. Tebaldini: L'archivio musicale della Cappella Lauretana (Loreto, 1921)

A. Cametti: I musici di Campidoglio ossia il concerto di tromboni e cornetti del senato e inclinato popolo romano (1524–1818) (Rome, 1925)

Basili, Andrea

(2) Francesco Basili

(b Loreto, 31 Jan 1767; d Rome, 25 March 1850). Composer and conductor, son of (1) Andrea Basili. He studied music first with his father, then with Giovanni Battista Borghi and finally with Giuseppe Jannaconi at the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome. After successfully passing his examinations in 1783 he was accepted as a member of the academy (16 October), and for the next 30 years worked as maestro di cappella at Foligno (1786–9), Macerata (1789–1803) and Loreto (1809–27); during this time his 13 operas, of which Gl'Illinesi (Milan, 1819) was the most successful, were composed and produced. He turned down the nomination for maestro di cappella at S Maria Maggiore in Rome to become censor of the Milan Conservatory in 1827, where he was responsible for Verdi's failure to be admitted to the conservatory (1832). Basili succeeded Fioravanti as maestro di cappella of St Pietro in Rome in 1837, a post which he held until his death. Inspired by Spontini, he and Giuseppe Baini sought to raise the musical standards of St Pietro, but their efforts were in vain.

Although now forgotten, Basili was well known in his day, particularly for his church music. The last decades of his life were devoted primarily to revising earlier works, especially sacred pieces. His style is similar to Spontini's, and is characterized by march-like rhythms and by melodies that are reminiscent of the Viennese Classical composers and of Schubert. In his earliest works, however, he anticipated Rossini, and in that respect his style contrasts markedly with that of his contemporaries.

WORKS

operas

La bella incognita (farce, 2), Rome, Valle, Feb 1788

La locandiera (farce, 2), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1789

Achille all'assedio di Troia (dramma, 2), Florence, Pergola, 26 Dec 1797

Il ritorno di Ulisse (dramma, 3, G.B. Moniglia), Florence, Pergola, 1 Sept 1798

Antigona (dramma serio, 2, G. Rossi), Venice, Fenice, 5 Dec 1799

Conviene adattarsi (farce, 1), Venice, S Moisè, Nov 1801

L'unione mal pensata (dramma, 1), Venice, S Benedetto, 27 Dec 1801

Lo stravagante e il dissipatore (dg, 2, G.M. Foppa), Venice, Fenice, 25 May 1805

L'ira di Achille (dramma serio, 3, P. Pola), Venice, Fenice, 30 Jan 1817

L'orfana egiziana (dramma, 3), Venice, Fenice, 28 Jan 1818

Gl'Illinesi (melodramma, 2, F. Romani), Milan, Scala, 26 Jan 1819

Il califfo e la schiava (melodramma, 2, F. Romani), Milan, Scala, 21 Aug 1819

Isaura e Ricciardo (os, 2, C. Sterbini), Rome, Valle, 29 Jan 1820

other works

Arianna e Teseo (cant.), c1787; Il Sansone in Tamnata (orat, A.L. Tottola), 1824; La sconfitta degli Assiri (orat), D-Dlb

Sacred choral (most with org acc.): 25 masses, 4 requiems, 6 Mag, 36 ps, 9 hymns, 3 litanies, 9 motets, 14 grads, 31 responsories, 19 antiphons, 31 offs, 27 settings of Tantum ergo

Instrumental: syms., pf conc., str qts, pf sonatas, other works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GaspariC, i, 151; ii, 36, 175, 377; iii, 8; iv, 4

MGG1 (R. Meloncelli)

Opera manoscritte autografe di musica di chiesa, di teatro, e di camera del celebre Francesco Basili Romano (Rome, n.d.) [list of works]

G. Tebaldini: L'archivio musicale della Cappella lauretana (Loreto, 1921)

F. Abbiati: Giuseppe Verdi, i (Milan, 1959)

M. Marx-Weber: ‘Römische Vertonungen des Psalms “Miserere” im 18. und früher 19. Jahrhundert’, HJbMw, viii (1985), 7–43

Basili, Andrea

(3) Basilio Basili

(b Macerata, 1803; d ?New York, ?c1895). Composer, active in Spain, son of (2) Francesco Basili. He started his career as an operatic tenor but turned to composition soon after arriving in Spain in 1827. In a musical climate monopolized by Italian opera, he tried to revitalize the tradition of Spanish musical theatre, composing several stage works in Spanish, with spoken dialogue. The dichotomy between Spanish and Italian music is presented allegorically in El novio y el concierto, in which the young hero’s choice of bride symbolizes a choice between Italian opera and Spanish folksong. Basili conducted several seasons of Italian opera in Madrid during the late 1840s. In 1847 Basili, Hilarión Eslava and others formed España Musical, a group that promoted the cause of national music. Though none of Basili’s dramatic works gained lasting fame, they paved the way for the successful revival of the zarzuela around 1849.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (R.J. Vázquez) [incl. list of stage works]

E. Cotarelo y Mori: Ensayo histórico sobre la zarzuela (Madrid, 1937)

R.J. Vázquez: The Quest for National Opera and the Re-invention of the Zarzuela in Nineteenth-Century Spain (diss., Cornell U., 1992)

Basiliani, Carlo.

See Baliani, Carlo.

Basilicus, Ciprianus.

See Bazylik, Cyprian.

Basilides, Mária

(b Jolsva, 11 Nov 1886; d Budapest, 26 Sept 1946). Hungarian contralto. She studied at the Budapest Academy of Music under József Sík. In 1911, at the opening of the Budapest City Theatre, she made her début in Jean Nouguès’s Quo vadis?, and until 1915 played there in such roles as Azucena, Mignon, Carmen and Ulrica. She then joined the Royal Hungarian Opera, appearing there until her death. Her repertory was wide: specially admired in Verdi and Wagner, she also sang Gluck’s Orpheus and Clytemnestra and Sylvia in Monteverdi’s Orfeo; she created the Housewife in Kodály’s The Spinning Room. She made frequent guest appearances abroad. An innate musicality, a voice of velvety beauty (at its peak), and avoidance of vocal artifice endeared her to Budapest audiences. In addition she was one of Hungary’s most eminent concert singers and an enthusiastic supporter of Bartók and Kodály, whose folksong arrangements she recorded (with Bartók at the piano). The second and eighth books of Kodály’s Magyar népzene were dedicated to her.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.A. Molnár: Basilides Mária (Budapest, 1967)

PÉTER P. VÁRNAI

Basilj [Basily], Andrea.

See Basili, andrea.

Basilly, Bénigne de.

See Bacilly, Bénigne de.

Basin, Adrien

(d after 1498). Franco-Flemish composer. In 1457 he was in the household chapel of Isabelle de Bourbon, wife of Charles the Bold (F-Pn fr.5904, f.32). When Charles became Duke of Burgundy in 1467, Basin was listed together with Busnoys and Hayne van Ghizeghem as ‘chantre et valet de chambre’ (Brussels, Archives générales du royaume, CC 1923, f.69v); he was still there in 1475 and 1476 (CC 1796, f.99). He seems thereafter to have been resident in Bruges, where he was involved in diplomatic activity in 1482 and 1488 (Strohm, 1979, p.35), later acting as heir to his brother, Pierre, in December 1498 (Wegman, p.154).

Basin's unusually short three-voice rondeau Nos amys vous vous abusés (ascribed ‘A. Basin’ in the Mellon Chansonnier) had considerable success: apart from its five musical sources, it was used for at least three masses (including a lost mass by Tinctoris) and cited as far away as Portugal and Poland; it seems moreover to have been the central piece in a group of songs with similar titles and similar musical materials composed in the court of Charles the Bold shortly before he became duke. The other two songs, Ma dame faytes moy savoir and Vien'avante morte dolente, are both ascribed simply ‘Basin’ (in I-Rc 2856). Both have contrary ascriptions elsewhere: for Ma dame faytes moy the other ascription is cropped and unreadable, but its music is very much that of the Burgundian court; for Vien'avante, which must have begun life with a French rondeau cinquain text, the other ascription is implausibly to Robert Morton. All three songs are edited in StrohmM.

These last two pieces may possibly be by Adrien's brother, Pierre (or Pierquin) Basin (d Bruges, 19 April 1497), who was a singer and, according to his tombstone (now destroyed), councillor to the Duke of Burgundy. He sang in the chapel of Queen Marie d'Anjou from 1455 to June 1460 (Perkins); at St Donatian, Bruges, from 1460, becoming succentor in 1465–6; and in the Burgundian ducal chapel from 1467 to 1485. He held the 14th prebend at St Donatian from 1467 until his death and was briefly succentor again in 1491 after the sudden dismissal of Obrecht. He seems also to have endowed Obrecht's Missa de Sancto Martino on 14 March 1486 (using the profits from properties in Ghent), and, along with Gilles Joye, auditioned candidates for the position of organist at St Donatian in 1482. Given that Ma dame faytes moy was quoted in Obrecht's Missa Plurimorum carminum I, there seems a good chance that it was indeed by Pierre, who had such close contacts with the younger composer.

A third brother, Jean, is documented from 1460 in Bruges, where he became dean of the barbers' guild and in 1488 endowed an altar at the church of Our Lady.

Simon Basin, also known as Fassion, was a minstrel in the household of the Dauphin Louis, Duke of Guyenne, 1414–16. The basse danse La Basine (Michel de Toulouse, c1490) may possibly be connected with him, just as another dance, La Verdelete, is normally connected with his colleague Jean Boisard, known as Verdelet. Three minstrels named Jehan Facien (or Fassion) are recorded in the years 1415–40. Some or all of the Basins and Faciens may be related.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmM

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg, 1939/R)

D. Fallows: Robert Morton's Songs: a Study of Styles in the Mid-Fifteenth Century (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1978), chaps. 10–11

L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)

R. Strohm: ‘Die Missa super “Nos amis” von Johannes Tinctoris’, Mf, xxxii (1979), 34–51

L.L. Perkins: ‘Musical Patronage at the Royal Court of France under Charles VII and Louis XI (1422–83)’, JAMS, lxxvii (1984), 507–66, esp. 548

P. Higgins: ‘In hydraulis Revisited: New Light on the Career of Antoine Busnois’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 36–86, esp. 47

R.C. Wegman: Born for the Muses: the Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994)

DAVID FALLOWS

Basiola, Mario

(b Annico, nr Cremona, 12 July 1892; d Annico, 3 Jan 1965). Italian baritone. He studied with Antonio Cotogni in Rome, where he made his début in 1918. Appearances in Florence and Barcelona led to an engagement with the S Carlo company which toured America in 1923, and this in turn brought him to the Metropolitan in 1925. His roles there included Amonasro, Escamillo and Count di Luna. In 1930 he appeared in the American première of Felice Lattuada’s Le preziose ridicole and in that of Montemezzi’s La notte di Zoraima the following year. He was also the Venetian in the first Metropolitan production of Sadko (1930). In 1933 he returned to Italy where for many years he was a leading baritone in Milan and Rome. The enthusiastic reports of his work there were not entirely borne out when, after a serious illness, he came to Covent Garden (as Iago, Amonasro and Germont) in 1939; nor are they well supported by the recordings he made of Pagliacci and Madama Butterfly with Gigli. In 1946 he joined a company touring Australia, and in 1951 he returned there as a teacher. His earlier recordings show the full-bodied tone and flowing style which earned him a high reputation among the singers of his time. His son, Mario Basiola jr (b Highland Park, IL, 1 Sept 1935), was also a successful baritone, singing in many leading houses including La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper; his repertory included the title role in Wozzeck.

J.B. STEANE

Basiron [Barizon, Baziron, Bazison], Philippe [Philippon, Phelippon]

(b ?Bourges, c1449; d ?Bourges, shortly before 31 May 1491). French composer. He entered the Ste Chapelle of the royal palace in Bourges as a chorister in October 1458. He demonstrated exceptional musical ability: a clavichord was purchased for his use in late 1462 or early 1463 (when Guillaume Faugues was briefly Master of the Children), and in May 1464 he was deputed to ‘instruct the other boys in singing and in the art of music’. He passed to the status of a vicar-choral between 1466 and 1467. On 5 February 1469 he was elected Master of the Children; his successor was appointed on 11 January 1474, when Basiron left the Ste Chapelle. Documents from Bourges are lacking from 1476 to 1486, and his return cannot be dated precisely, but about 1490 he is recorded as vicar of an altar in a church in Bourges under the jurisdiction of the Ste Chapelle, and on 31 May 1491 this benefice, last held by ‘deffunctus magister Philippus Barizon clericus dicte capelle’ was requested for ‘Johannes Barizon’, probably a brother (see Higgins).

Brief laudatory references by Crétin, Eloy d’Amerval and Moulu, and citations by Gaffurius and Spataro, show that Basiron was highly regarded by his contemporaries. His works were copied as far afield as Spain and Bohemia and reprinted as late as 1520. He was a precocious composer: the four three-voice chansons, which display a distinctive personal style, were composed before Basiron was out of his teens. Most of the surviving works probably date from before he left the Ste Chapelle in 1474 (Ercole d’Este’s reference to the Missa ‘L’homme armé’ as ‘new’ in 1484 means no more than that the mass was new to Ercole). Though his style more resembles that of Busnoys and Ockeghem than that of contemporaries Josquin and Obrecht, he was remarkably innovatory in technique. Long chains of repetitions or sequences were a favourite device of his that was much refined by Josquin. His Regina celi is by far the earliest composition in which pervasive imitation in all voices is the sole structural technique. The peculiar method of partitioning the plainchant melody into points of imitation, otherwise unique, links this motet with an anonymous setting of O sacrum convivium which was recopied in the early 1530s. The Messa de Franza, the most widely distributed of Basiron’s works, uses a kaleidoscopic technique of chaining together freely composed sections in many different textures to create long movements. This distinctive procedure is shared with an anonymous Missa ‘D’ung aultre amer’. In all his texted music, Basiron showed an attention to his words that is similar to Ockeghem’s (an evident preoccupation with the chanson D’ung aultre amer may point to an association with the older composer). He was a master of pacing, who could effortlessly control wide spans of time.

Vanneus lists ‘Johannes Basiron’ in the company of much younger musicians headed by Willaert, Festa and Conseil. ‘Johannes’ may be a mistake for ‘Philippus’, or may refer to the Jean Basiron who inherited Philippe’s benefice and who died in 1495. Another brother, Pierre, entered the Ste Chapelle at the same time as Philippe and lived until 1529. Jean or Pierre may be the composer of Mary de par sa mère, which seems to have been composed after 1491.

WORKS

Edition in preparation by J. Dean

Messa de Franza, 4vv, CZ-HKm II.A.7, I-Rvat C.S.51, Sc K.I.2 (inc.), 1509¹; extract ed. in OHM, ii (1905, 2/1932), 194

Missa ‘L’homme armé, 4vv, Rvat C.S.35; ed. in Monumenta Polyphoniae Liturgicae Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae, 1st ser., i (Rome, 1948)

Missa ‘Regina celi’, 4vv, Rvat C.S.51, VEcap DCCLXI

Missa tetradi plagis [sic], lost, attested by F. Gaffurius, Tractatus practicabilium proportionum (MS, c1480, Bc A69), f.22

Inviolata, integra et casta es, 4vv, 1505²; Rvat C.S.15 (with added 5th v)

Regina celi, 4vv, Rvat C.S.42

Salve regina, 4vv, Rvat C.S.46, 1520¹; ed. in MRM, viii (1987)

De m’esjouir, 3vv, D-W 287 extrav., I-Fr 2794, US-Wc M2.1 L25 Case [Laborde]; ed. M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff, Der Wolfenbütteler Chansonnier (Mainz, 1988)

D’ung aultre amer, 4vv, textless, I-Bc Q17

D’ung aultre amer/L’homme armé, 4vv, textless, Bc Q17, Rvat C.G.XIII.27; ed. A. Smijers, Van Ockeghem tot Sweelinck, i (Amsterdam, 1939)

Je le sçay bien, 3vv, D-W 287 extrav., US-Wc Laborde; ed. Gutiérrez-Denhoff, Der Wolfenbütteler Chansonnier

Nul ne l’a telle, 3vv, D-W 287 extrav., DK-Kk Thott 291 8^o, US-Wc Laborde; D-Bkk Kupferstichkabinett 78.B.17 [Rohan] (text only); ed. K. Jeppesen, Der Kopenhagener Chansonnier (Copenhagen, 1927, 2/1965), Gutiérrez-Denhoff, Der Wolfenbütteler Chansonnier

Tant fort me tarde, 3vv, F-Pn n.a.fr.4379/IV, I-Rc 2856, US-Wc Laborde

possible works (anon. in sources)

Missa ‘D’ung aultre amer’, 4vv, I-Rvat C.S.51, San Pietro B80, VEcap DCCLV; excerpts ed. in Wegman

O sacrum convivium, 4vv, Rvat C.S.42, Pal.lat.1976–9

doubtful works

Mary de par sa mère, 4vv, textless, CH-SGs 461, D-Rp C120, F-Pn fr.1597 (attrib. ‘Basseron’ in D-Rp C120 only; style probably too late for Philippe Basiron, too early for Johannes Bonnevin alias Beausseron; perhaps by Jean or Pierre Basiron); ed. F.J. Giesbert, Ein altes Spielbuch: Liber Fridolini Sichery (Mainz, 1936), 80–81

Rose playsante, 3vv, attrib. ‘Philippon’ in 1504³ (with added 4th v), ‘Caron’ in I-Fn B.R.229, ‘Jo. Dusart’ in Rc 2856 (3-v orig. probably not by Basiron); ed. in MRM, vii (1983)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LockwoodMRF

F. Gaffurius: Practica musice (Milan, 1496), sig. gg 3v

G. Crétin: Déploration sur le trépas de Jean Ockeghem (MS, 1497); ed. E. Thoinan (Paris, 1864/R), 33

E. d’Amerval: Livre de la Déablerie (Paris, 1508); ed. C.F. Ward (Iowa City, 1923), f.225v

P. Moulu: motet Mater floreat (?1517), ed. in MRM, iv (1968), 125–32

S. Vanneus: Recanetum de musica aurea (Rome, 1531), f.93

G. Spataro: Tractato di musica (Venice, 1531), sigs. c7v-dr

A. Atlas: The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier: Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, C.G. XIII.27 (Brooklyn, NY, 1976–7), i, 218–21

P. Higgins: ‘Tracing the Careers of Late Medieval Composers: the Case of Philippe Basiron of Bourges’, AcM, lxii (1990), 1–28

R.C. Wegman: ‘The Anonymous Mass D’ung aultre amer: a Late Fifteenth-Century Experiment’, MQ, lxxiv (1990), 566–94

JEFFREY DEAN

Basis

(Gk.).

In the late Renaissance, a name sometimes given to the bass Part (see Part (ii)) of a polyphonic composition; in some theoretical writings, including Glarean's Dodecachordon (1547) and Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), a designation for the bass line of a passage, and even the bass note of a chord. By a humanistic conceit, the four human voice ranges were compared with the four elements, the basis being appropriately likened to the element of earth.

Basle

(Ger. Basel; Fr. Bâle).

City in Switzerland. Its musical life probably differed little from that of other episcopal sees during the Middle Ages, but with the Great Council (1431–49), the foundation of the university (1460), the establishment of printing houses and the emergence of humanism, the city, located on the Rhine in northern Switzerland, developed an active cultural life. Sacred polyphony was performed, and instrument makers established workshops in the city. Those that took up residence in Basle included Erasmus and his student Glarean. Bourgeois families (among them the Ammerbachs, Iselins and Hagenbachs) cultivated domestic music-making and composing, collected instruments and commissioned portraits and paintings with music as the subject matter. The surviving tablatures show that intabulations were worked out both from written models and from popular tunes. Partbooks reveal a repertory of polyphonic secular music following the latest international trends. The printer Michael Furter published Virdung’s Musica getutscht in 1511; Johann Froben brought out works of Glarean, including his Isagoge in musicen. Glarean's Dodecachordon was published in Basle in 1547 by Heinrich Petri. In contrast to the rest of Protestant Switzerland, which came under the reforms of Ulrich Zwingli, Basle was reformed by Johannes Oekolampadius (Husschyn), who had ties with Lutherans in nearby cities. As a consequence the organs were not destroyed, and playing them was soon allowed again. However, plainsong remained predominant, despite the printing of a four-part psalter (1606) by Samuel Mareschall, who taught at the university; only in 1854 did a four-part hymnbook, published jointly by the city and region of Basle for use in all parishes, gain acceptance.

The tradition of drumming and fifing, particularly common among the Swiss mercenary armies but once also widespread in Europe, has continued in Basle since the 15th century, and is maintained by many groups. Since the 19th century the repertory has included foreign marches, and new compositions have been added since the 1960s. In 1692 the collegium musicum was founded, a small group of aristocratic amateurs who played together once a week. A choir of Gymnasium pupils and other students was attached to them, and the combined forces were directed by the university or cathedral organist, who was also the head music teacher. The collegium musicum received subsidies, performed at church and university functions and advised on such matters as musical education and the appointment of organists. Towards the mid-18th century it developed into a concert society, with a board of directors composed of performing members fulfilling their former advisory role, and a circle of subscribers. The latter, necessary for financial reasons, prepared the way for concerts open to the general public. There was also a private Kapelle in the house of the wealthy merchant Lucas Sarasin. His music catalogue and a third of his collection have survived, and show a lively interest in the instrumental repertory of such centres as Paris, Mannheim, Vienna and northern Italy.

As the number of cultured citizens in Basle increased in the 19th century, the cultivation of music also spread. Under German musical directors, especially Ernst Reiter (1839–75) and Alfred Volkland (1875–1905), the orchestra expanded and improved. In 1876 the concert society and the orchestra formed the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft (AMG). Programmes included relatively early performances of Bach and Handel, as well as contemporary works. Spohr, Weber, Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt, Bülow, Brahms and Joachim often gave concerts in Basle, and also frequented private musical circles. Choral singing also became widespread in the 19th century. The largest choir was the Basler Gesangverein, founded in 1824–5 and followed in 1852 by a male-voice choir, the Basler Liedertafel; both remain active. In 1867 the Musikschule was set up by a charitable society, the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Guten und Gemeinnützigen in Basel (founded 1777). The school was later supported mainly by the state, and its director was often also the conductor of the concert societies.

Theatrical and operatic performances took place in a ballroom until 1834, when the Theater auf dem Blömlein was built by Melchior Berri. In 1875 it was replaced by the Theater am Steinenberg, whose architect, Johann Jacob Staehelin, also designed the adjacent Casino with its three concert halls (still extant). The theatre burnt down and was reconstructed in 1909 as the Stadttheater.

About 1900 the musical life of Basle became dominated by native Swiss performers, who were often also accomplished teachers and composers. Under Hans Huber a conservatory affiliated to the Musikschule was founded (1905), and the teaching curriculum was extended to cover a number of academic disciplines. In concert life contemporary music assumed a new importance under the leadership of Hermann Suter, and greater attention was paid to pre-Classical music. Another influential figure was the musicologist Karl Nef, the first lecturer in the general history of music in Switzerland and the organizer of the international musicological congresses in Basle in 1906 and 1924. In recognition of his services, Basle was chosen as the headquarters of the International Musicological Society in 1927.

After World War I musical life expanded further. The Busch Quartet took up residence, followed in the 1950s by the Vegh Quartet. The AMG gave up its chamber music concerts and established itself as an organization separate from its orchestra, which from then on formed its own state-subsidized society, the Basler Orchester Gesellschaft. This development and the appointment of Weingartner, a conductor who specialized in the Classical and Romantic repertory, led to a number of new organizations. The Walter Sterk’sche Privatchor (1920) was active in promoting both early and contemporary music, and the local section of the International Society for Contemporary Music was founded in 1928. One of the most fruitful contributions to Basle’s musical life was made by the patron and conductor Paul Sacher. With his Basler Kammerorchester (founded 1926) he commissioned and performed many works of Swiss and non-Swiss composers, including Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Divertimento for Strings; Stravinsky’s Concerto in D and A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer; and important works of Conrad Beck, Willy Burkhard, Fortner, Honegger, Frank Martin, Martinů, Moeschinger and others. With so much emphasis on contemporary music, the city attracted many Swiss composers, including Beck, Robert Suter, Wildberger, Klaus Huber, Kelterborn, Wyttenbach, H.U. Lehmann and Holliger.

In the early 1930s Sacher intensified the efforts of his predecessors to revive early music, not only with the Kammerorchester but by setting up a private teaching and research institute, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. From 1934 August Wenzinger and his concert group, the Freunde Alter Musik in Basel, earned the institute a worldwide reputation. After World War II the institute was combined with the conservatory and the Musikschule to form the Musikakademie (directed by Friedhelm Döhl, 1974–82, and Kelterborn, 1983–94). Martin Linde, Eugen M. Dombois, Jaap Schröder, Thomas Binkley with his Studio der Frühen Musik, Dominique Vellard, René Jacobs and others took up residence there, the curriculum was expanded and a journal founded (Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis). In the 1970s the conservatory established studios for electronic music and musical theatre, and courses in non-Western music.

In 1909 Karl Nef established musicology at the university. It reached prominence under Jacques Handschin (1930–55) and Leo Schrade (1958–64). Hans Oesch became the institute’s director in 1967; he was succeeded by Wulf Arlt.

In 1964 the Radio Corporation of German-speaking Switzerland made Basle its centre for music programming; Kelterborn was its director in the 1970s. Premières of contemporary music, as well as the early music concerts of the Schola Cantorum, were broadcast. In 1975 the old Stadttheater, long considered inadequate, was replaced by a new building with two stages designed by Schwarz & Gutmann, where about six new productions and two revivals are produced each season. During the 1960s, 70s and 80s the Stadttheater was well known for its ballet productions, choreographed by Wazlaw Orlikowsky and his student Heinz Spoerli and based on a wide range of music from Orazio Vecchi’s Amfiparnaso to works by Luigi Nono and Philip Glass.

The largest music collection, going back 800 years, is in the University Library. The Paul Sacher Stiftung research centre holds important 20th-century works. The city owns two notable collections of musical instruments, both begun in the 19th century. That of the Historische Museum contains more than 800 items (mostly European, including a few folk instruments), while the Museum für Völkerkunde holds more than 2000, most gathered from fieldwork in South-east Asia, New Guinea, Oceania and Africa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (J. Kmetz)

C.J. Riggenbach: Der Kirchengesang in Basel seit der Reformation (Basle, 1870)

K. Nef: ‘Die Musik in Basel von den Anfängen im 9. Jahrhundert bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, ‘Die Stadtpfeifereien und die Instrumentalmusiker in Basel (1385–1814)’, SIMG, x (1908–9), 532–63, 395–9

W. Merian: Basels Musikleben im XIX. Jahrhundert (Basle, 1920)

E. Refardt: ‘Biographische Beiträge zur Basler Musikgeschichte’, Basler Jb, i (1920), 57; ii (1921), 144; iii (1922), 52

W. Mörikofer: Die Konzerte der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft Basel (Basle,1926)

M.F. Schneider: Alte Musik in der bildenden Kunst Basels (Basle, 1941)

M.F. Schneider: Musik der Neuzeit in der bildenden Kunst Basels (Basle, 1944)

Alte und neue Musik: das Basler Kammerorchester 1926–1976 (Zürich, 1952–77)

P.H Boerlin: ‘Die Orgelflügel-Entwürfe von Hans Holbein d. Ä’, Jahresberichte der Öffentlichen Kunstsammlung Basel (1959–60), 141–64

M. Jenny: Geschichte des deutsch-schweizerischen evangelischen Gesangbuchs im 16. Jahrhundert (Basle, 1962)

H. Oesch: Die Musikakademie der Stadt Basel (Basle, 1967)

Stadttheater einst und jetzt 1807–1975 (Berne, 1975)

T. Seebass, ed.: Musikhandschriften in Basel aus verschiedenen Sammlungen, Basle Kunstmuseum, 31 May – 13 July 1975 (Basle, 1975) [exhibition catalogue]

E. Lichtenhahn and T.Seebass, eds.: Musikhandschriften aus der Sammlung Paul Sacher: Festschrift zu Paul Sachers 70. Geburtstag (Basle, 1976)

T. Seebass: Die Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft Basel 1876–1976 (Basle,1976)

T. Seebass: ‘Some Remarks about 16th-Century Music Book Illustration’, RIdIM Newsletter, iv/2 (1979), 2–3

P. Reidemeister: ‘50 Jahre Schola Cantorum Basiliensis’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, vii (1983), 7–18

Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basle Kunstmuseum, 25 April – 20 June 1986 (Basle, 1986) [exhibition catalogue]

Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basle, 1988–)

I. Fenlon: ‘Heinrich Glarean’s Books’, Music in the German Renaissance, ed. J. Kmetz (Cambridge, 1994), 74–102

J. Kmetz: ‘The Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks: Six Months of Music Lessons in Renaissance Basle’, Music in the German Renaissance, ed. J. Kmetz (Cambridge, 1994), 215–34

TILMAN SEEBASS

Basner, Veniamin Yefimovich

(b Yaroslavl', 1 Jan 1925; d Repino, St Petersburg province, 3 March 1996). Russian composer. His musical gifts – absolute pitch and a phenomenal memory – became apparent from an early age. He studied the violin at the music school in Yaroslavl'; it was here that he became interested in the work of Schoenberg. It was also in Yaroslavl' that in 1938, he heard Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, an event which became greatly significant to his creative development. Upon leaving the music school in 1942 he was invited to join the Yaroslavl' Philharmonia and also the Estonian State Philharmonia, evacuated to the town. Called up in 1943, he was transferred to a musicians' section where he mastered wind and brass instruments and acquired arranging skills. He entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1944, studying the violin with Belyakov; after graduating in 1949 he worked both as soloist and orchestral player. He became a board member of the Leningrad section of the Composers' Union in 1955 and also directed its youth commission which auditioned works by would-be members of the organization. In 1994 he fulfilled a lifelong ambition by setting up and opening a Jewish music theatre in St Petersburg; called Simkha (‘Joy’); the theatre functioned until his death in 1996. Throughout his career he received a number of awards and honours including People's Artist of the RSFSR (1982) and the Order of Friendship (1994).

Basner's relationship with Shostakovich both as composer and individual was crucial to his own creative personality. While Basner worshipped Shostakovich, the latter regarded Basner as one of his most dependable friends and had high regard for his compositions; the two friends frequently met to show each other their latest work. Basner's symphony Katerina Izmaylova is a tribute to his idol, constructed from material found in the notorious opera. He shared with Shostakovich an admiration for Mahler and also Jewish music, even though for Basner the latter originated from personal recollection from his childhood. In his musical Yevreyskoye schast'ye (‘Jewish Happiness’) Basner played the extensive and symbolic solo violin part at its production at the Simkha theatre.

Basner was invited to work as a composer of film music on Shostakovich's recommendation; each of his scores contain a song which subsequently had an independent existence. Na bezïmyannoy vïsote (‘In the Nameless Heights’) from Tishina (‘Silence’) of 1946 and S chego nachinayetsya rodina? (‘From What Does the Homeland Originate’) from Shchit i mech' (‘The Shield and the Sword’) of 1968 both enjoyed popularity throughout Russia, as did his songs about World War II. Although in these and many other songs Basner conveyed the feelings of a wide spectrum of society through the lyrical use of everyday turns of phrase, in the same songs he made use of complex intervallic relationships which bear comparison with those of Mahler.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Ops: Veshniye vodï [Spring Waters] (Ye. Gal'perina, after I. Turgenev), 1975; Otel' Tanatos [Hotel Tanatos] (A. Pochikovsky, after A. Maurois), 1991, unfinished

Ballet: Tri mushketyora [The Three Musketeers] (A. Vanin, after A. Dumas), 1964

Operettas and musicals: Polyarnaya zvezda [The Polar Star] (Gal'perina and Yu. Annenkov), 1966; Trebuyetsya geroinya [A Heroine is Needed] (Gal'perina and Annenkov), 1968; Yuzhnïy krest [The Southern Cross] (Gal'perina and Annenkov), 1971; God golubogo zaytsa/Belïy tanets [The Year of the Blue Hare/The White Dance] (Gal'perina), 1978; Mezhdu nebom i zemlyoy [Between Heaven and Earth] (V. Konstantinov and B. Ratser), 1980; Blistayushchiye oblaka [Glittering Clouds] (N. Denisov and Ė. Nakhamis), 1982; Moya khata s krayu [It's No Business of Mine] (Gal'perina and Annenkov), 1985; Mï iz Odessï, zdras'te! [We're from Odessa, Hello!] (A. Belinsky, after Ė. Bagritsky), 1988, unfinished; Tï: velikaya aktrisa [You are a Great Actress] (Gal'perina and Annenkov, after Maurois), 1990; Yevreyskoye schast'ye [Jewish Happiness] (Ratser, after D. Friedman), 1994

other works

Vocal: Parabola (A. Voznesensky), Bar, pf, 1962; Vesna, pesni, volneniya [Spring, Songs, Excitement] (L. Martïnov), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1963; Goya (monologue, Voznesensky), B, eng hn, bn, pf, 1965; Vechnïy ogon' [Eternal Flame] (M. Matusovsky and Gal'perina), B, children's chorus, orch, 1971; 8 Poems (A. Akhmatova), Mez, gui/pf, 1977; 5 stikhotvoreniy M.Yu. Lermontova [5 Lermontov Settings], B, orch, 1979, also version for B, pf, 1979; In Memory of Vladimir Vïsotsky, 6 ballads, 1v, inst ens, 1981; Suite (O. Mandel'shtam and others), B, ob, eng hn, 2 bn, pf, 1983; Sym. no.2 ‘Blokada’ [The Blockade] (Matusovsky), B, chorus, orch, 1983; Sym. no.3 ‘Lyubov'’ [Love] (E. Verhaeren), T, orch, 1988; many romances and songs (A.S. Pushkin and others), 1948–90

Inst: Str Qt no.1, 1948; Str Qt no.2, 1953; Poėma ob osazhdyonnom Leningrade [A Poem about Leningrad in the Blockade], orch, 1957; Sym. no.1, orch, 1958; Str Qt no.3, 1960; Vn Conc., 1966; Vc Conc. ‘Tsar' David’ [King David], 1967–80; Str Qt no.4, 1969; Sinfonietta, fl, str, 1972; Str Qt no.5, 1975; Sonata, vn, pf, 1982; Katerina Izmaylova, sym., orch, 1993 [after op. by Shostakovich]

Over 100 film scores

WRITINGS

‘Moskovskiye prem'yerï leningradtsev’ [Premières in Moscow by Leningraders], SovM (1971), no.6, pp.18–20

‘Prazdnik otkrïtiy: avtorskiy vecher A. Petrova’ [A festival of discoveries: an evening of works by Petrov), Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1986), no.10, p.10 only

‘Kak otrazit' mgnoveniye muzïki’ [How to reflect a moment of music], Sovetskiy ėkran (1987), no.4, p.16 only

‘Schast'ye tvorcheskogo obshcheniya’ [The joy of a creative exchange of views], in A. Yansons: Vospominaniya o muzïkante i cheloveke (St Petersburg, 1994), 102–6

‘Yaroslavskiye rebyata v pesne ochen' khoroshi’ [The lads from Yaroslavl' are very good in song], Rossiya (18–24 Jan 1995) [conversation with Yu. Svetov]

‘Yesli ne verish' v budushcheye: stoit li zhit'?’ [If you cannot believe in the future is it worth living?], MAK (1995), nos.4–5, pp.57–60

‘V mire Shostakovicha’ [In the world of Shostakovich], Zapis' besed o kompozitore, ed. S.M. Khentova (Moscow, 1996), 189–192 [conversation with D. Shostakovich]

‘Pomogaya molodyozhi’ [Helping young people], in V.P. Solov'yov-Sedoy: Vospominaniya, stat'i, materialï (St Petersburg, 1998), 158–60

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Ziv: ‘Zametki o strunnom kvartete Basnera’ [A note about Basner's string quartet], SovM (1955), no.11, pp.72–5

A. Sokhor: ‘Vtoroy kvartet Basnera’ [Basner's second quartet], Sovetskaya muzïka, i (Moscow, 1956), 255–7; repr. in A. Sokhor: Stat'i o sovetskoy muzïke (Leningrad, 1972), 162–4

G. Golovinsky: ‘O muzïke v kino’ [On music in the cinema], SovM (1958), no.7, pp.49–58

A. Leman: ‘Zhizn': istochnik khudozhestvennoy pravdï’ [Life is the source of artistic truth], SovM (1959), no.3, pp.65–70

S. Katonova: ‘Dva tsikla: dva resheniya’ [Two song cycles: two solutions], SovM (1965), no.2, pp.10–13 [on Parabola]

I.V. Beletsky: Veniamin Basner: monograficheskiy ocherk [Basner: an essay in monograph form] (Leningrad and Moscow, 1972)

T. Kopïlova: ‘Vstrechi s novoy muzïkoy’ [Encounters with recent music], SovM (1978), no.9, pp.28–30

B. Tishchenko: ‘Veniamin Yefimovich Basner’, Muzïkal'noye obozreniye (1996), no.9, p.141 only

LYUDMILA KOVNATSKAYA

Basque, André de.

See Ketèlbey, albert w(illiam).

Basque music.

If the term ‘Basque music’ exists today, it is because it enables us to describe various forms of musical performance. The provinces inhabited by the Basque people are divided politically in a stateless nation between north-eastern Spain and southern France. The sections that follow will outline what has been and what still is signified by the term. Basque music emerged in the 19th century at a time when Europe was being formed into large national entities, and the very idea of a Basque or Euskarian society assumed significance. Basque music assumes a position alongside the Basque language and Basque customs which constitute the identity of one of the oldest European communities.

1. Principal characteristics.

2. Instruments.

3. Recent developments.

DENIS LABORDE

Basque music

1. Principal characteristics.

In northern Basque country, at Izturitz in Laburdi, a 22,000-year-old three-hole flute made from the bone of a bird was discovered; it is regarded as an ancestor of the modern txirula or txistu duct flutes. In the south, at Atxeta near Guernica in Biscay, José Miguel de Barandiaran found a trumpet dating from the Azilian period, suggesting that musical performance goes a long way back in this mountainous area. The studies of Resurreccion Maria de Azkue, Francisco Madina, José Antonio de Donostia and José Antonio Arana Martija attempt to trace Basque music’s line of descent. Latin books of plainchant show that there was undoubtedly ritual performance of ecclesiastical chant in the Middle Ages, and the Linguae vasconum primitiae, published by B. Dechepare in 1545, as well as older songs such as Alostorrea, Urtsoak zazpi leio and Bereterretxen kantoria show that poems intended to be sung existed. However, people at that time did not consider them ‘Basque music’. The outlines of a form of Basque music can be traced during the 19th century. A multiplicity of diffracted practices defined as Basque occurred at the very moment the consolidation of the European states threatened these practices, thus legitimizing preservation campaigns such as the publication in 1826 of Juan Ignacio de Iztueta’s Euscaldun anciña anciñaco. Basque music was paradoxically born as a result of such partimonial efforts.

Iztueta intended his collection as a monument, in that future generations ‘must receive the inheritance of their ancestors intact, and must act to preserve the inviolability of their country’ (preface, p.i). Documenting a repertory fixes it, thus constructing an inheritance. In Iztueta’s collection as in others that were to follow, song texts are given without systematic musical transcription. It was not until 1870, when J.D.J. Sallaberry published his Chants populaires du pays basque, that words, music and harmonization are given.

With developments in printing, an enthusiastic desire to publish seized Basque musicians. José Manterola published his Cancionero vasco, a nine-volume series, beginning in 1877. Between 1883 and 1898 the Lasserre publishing house of Bayonne printed four successive editions of A. Goyeneche’s Eskualdun kantaria. In 1894 Iztueta’s Euscaldun ancina ancinaco was reissued in Bordeaux, and Basque institutions soon followed the lead of collectors.

In 1912, a few years before the Euskaltzaindia (the Academy of the Basque Language) was established in Bilbao in 1918, the four districts of southern Basque country organized a competition with the aim of awarding prizes to collections of traditional Basque songs. Two eminent musicologists took part, Don Resureccion Maria de Azkue and Father Donostia, who published, respectively, a Vox populi containing 1810 vocal and instrumental tunes (edited as Cancionero popular vasco, 1920) and a Gure abendaren ereserkiak (in Obras completas, 1983) containing 523 melodies. These two collections mark the climax of a dynamic effort of writing and publication which allowed Basque music to be recorded and made available to a general public. Basque music came to be defined by four criteria: melodic scale, metre, formal structure and song.

The majority of the documented melodies are tonal, most of them in a major key, less frequently in a minor key. Nearly 25% of them, however, are modal. Although defective modes are seldom used, we can at least conclude that the Basques were familiar with modal scales. Most of the melodies are transcribed in single metres. As result, these transcriptions cannot take account of the constant displacement of agogic accent. However, no metres are mentioned in transcriptions of the wordless songs from the province of Soule. Why not extend that principle to the repertory as a whole? This unresolved methodological difficulty is evidence of the complexity of Basque rhythmical structures, as in the zortziko.

Zortziko refers to the eight steps of the dances to which the zortziko provides an accompaniment. This rhythm is in a double compound metre, the result of combining two single heterogeneous metres: binary (ex.1a) and ternary (ex.1b). The asymmetry of the two basic durations makes this ostinato an irregular bichrome measure, which Constantin Brăiloiu would have classified as an aksak rhythm. The zortziko is regarded as peculiarly Basque. The Basque national anthem, Gernikako arbola (1853), composed by Iparraguirre, is sung to a zortziko.

The third characteristic of Basque music is that the strophic form of the melodies adheres to a tripartite structure, ABA, often transmuted to AABA. On the other hand, although the couplet-refrain form is common in France and Spain, it remains rare in the Basque country. The isomorphic syllabic character of the songs with one note of the melody corresponding to each syllable of the text, makes a great deal of borrowing possible. The same text can be sung to different tunes, and the same melody may be adjusted to fit different texts. Such an adaptation of a new text in rhyming verse to a tune that already exists may even take the form of an improvised poem, the special province of the bertsulari.

The bertsulari may improvise alone or, more often, contests are held in which bertsulari dispute among themselves. The process involves four formal structures, depending on whether the strophes consist of four or five lines (eight half-lines in the zortziko, ten in the hammareko), and on whether the lines consist of 13 or 18 syllables. There is the ttiki (small) form for 13-syllable lines (7/6), and the haundi (large) form for 18-syllable lines (10/8). The bederatzi puntuko for is also common with nine monorhymed and non-isometric lines: (7/6), 12 (7/5), 13 (7/6), 13 (7/6), 6, 6, 6, 6, and 12 (7/5). Subtle mnemonic devices are worked out for improvising on these tunes. The bertsulari value the art of sung improvisation, and they like to improvise on complex existing tunes.

This long-practised improvisatory art became especially popular in 1935 when Manuel de Lekuona published his Aozko literatura, the first work devoted to the art of the bertsulari, and Aitzol organized the first Basque bertsulari championship. The plan was for the competition to be held annually, but Aitzol was shot by Francoist soldiers in 1936 after extracting only a short-lived statute of independence from Spain, still Republican at that time. The Basque language, Euskara, was forbidden, and with it all Basque culture. The performance of Basque music thus became synonymous with resistance. The choral group Eresoinka sang all over the world; at home, the Dindirri dancers defied the cultural ban, and the singer Xabier Lete, among others, challenged censorship. During 24 years of silence, the bertsulari continued improvising in secret in remote villages. It was not until 1960 that a third championship was held. The bertsulari phenomenon thus surfaced again in the context of fervent claims for a Basque identity. Championships were held in 1962, 1965 and 1967. In 1968 the first violent confrontations between the Spanish Civil Guard and ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, the Basque Country and Liberty), led to severe repression, and for another 13 years there was silence from the bertsulari who were unable to organize a national competition. From 1980 onwards, the championship has been held every four years. The final round at Anoeta in Gipuzkoa receives wide media coverage, and gives the audience of 12,000 a symbolic satisfaction to counterbalance the feeling that they are not free.

Basque music

2. Instruments.

The txistu is a three-hole flute made of ebony or other wood (and today sometimes of plastic), encircled by rings and with a metal mouthpiece. Usually in F, the txistu is played with the left hand by the txistulari, while the right hand beats a drum hanging from the elbow, using a stick. The txistulari plays dance music solo; txistularis also play in ensembles. In Soule, the txirula (txülüla)–ttun-ttun duo is regarded as a predecessor of the txistu and drum ensemble. The txirula is a small wooden flute in C, with a very shrill tessitura, and the ttun-ttun is a carved wooden box over which are stretched six strings that vibrate when struck with a wooden stick. Today, trikititxa ensembles, consisting of diatonic accordion, Basque drum and singer, are extraordinarily popular throughout the country. Such ensembles are used to accompany dances such as jotas, fandangos and arin arin danced in street parades.

The gaita of Arab origin is still found in Alaba in Navarre, and is played together with a drum. It is in the shawm family, with a double reed and eight holes; the txanbela is an additional variant from Soule. The alboka played in Biscay is an unusual instrument consisting of a double wooden pipe that connects two ends made of horn. One of the horns has two tongues, in the manner of a bagpipe, so that the instrumentalist can play using the continuous breathing technique. The albokari is usually accompanied by a pandero, a Basque drum. Finally, the txalaparta is a percussion instrument consisting of three wooden boards approximately 1·5 metres long. They are arranged horizontally and are struck by two instrumentalists using wooden sticks held vertically.

Basque music

3. Recent developments.

Like the bertsulari tradition, which has its own training colleges where the best improvisers teach, the playing of traditional instruments is well on the way to becoming a professional occupation. Traditional instruments are taught more and more in conservatories, but their performance is still the province of associations, grouped into federations, which organize annual competitions to choose a champion and promote social mobilization. Youth championships are also a great attraction. A Trikitilari gazteen txapelketa [‘Young trikitilari championship’], for instance, brings young players of the trikititxa together, and hundreds of children hear each other singing on the occasion of the Haur kantu txapelketa [‘Children's song championship’] festival.

Traditional musicians are in great demand to play at carnivals, masquerades, pastorales and village festivals. Joaldunak, symbolic carnival figures of Ituren and Zubieta (in Navarre) that are dressed in sheepskins sewn with bells that ring in time to their steps, now figure in many street parades. Traditional instruments are played at the annual demonstration in support of Basque independence. These instruments are also featured in demonstrations supporting the Basque language and the schools that teach it. The bertsulari regularly pay tribute to Basque political prisoners held in French and Spanish jails. The gaita is played in the Baigorri valley at the funerals of any militant belonging to Iparretarrak (the armed separatist movement operating inside France), and the txalaparta is played at the funerals of ETA militants.

The Basque choral movement is one of the strongest in Europe. It includes a unique oxote ensemble, consisting of eight male voices singing a cappella. In Gipuzkoa in Biscay there are a number of wind bands with a great many instrumentalists. In Soule, a different village every year works on the production of a pastorale, a play in the tradition of medieval mystery plays, rendered in a declamatory style to the accompaniment of singing and dancing; it can be traced back to the 16th century. Nearly 5000 people go to the narrow valleys of Soule in summer to watch these open-air performances, which last for over three hours.

The enormous expansion of the modern distribution network for recordings allows singers such as Peio Serbielle and Benat Achiary, or groups like Oskorri, to draw on the traditional repertory. The same network also distributes the hard rock, trash, funk or ragamuffin music of groups such as Negu Gorriak and Ertzainak, which frequently quote traditional music. For instance, the Bersto hop performed by Negu Gorriak, takes up a bertsu improvised at a championship contest, one which everyone will remember, while some pairs of trikititxa players make use of a synthesizer in their performances. The widespread use of imitative forms continues to nourish Basque music, keeping it in an ongoing state of development. Basque music exists in multiple situations involving moments when, at a given moment and in an emotional context, a musician interprets a musical sequence for an audience who can identify it. Basque music is created in the complicity of this partnership, where shared knowledge fashions a common culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

FasquelleE

B. Dechepare: Linguae vasconum primitiae (Bilbao, 1545, 2/1980)

J.I. de Iztueta: Guipuzcoaco dantza gogoangarrien condaira edo historia (San Sebastián, 1824, 3/1968 in Basque and Sp.) [texts]; (San Sebastián, 1826, 3/1973) [melodies]

J.I. de Iztueta: Euscaldun anciña anciñaco (San Sebastián, 1826)

J.A. Santesteban: Colección de aires vascongados para canto y piano (San Sebastián, 1862–70)

J.D.J. Sallaberry: Chants populaires du pays basque (Bayonne, 1870/R, 2/1930)

J. Manterola, ed.: Cancionero vasco (San Sebastián, 1877–80)

A. Goyeneche: Eskualdun kantaria (Bayonne, 1883)

C. Bordes: Cent chansons populaires basques (Paris, 1894)

C. Bordes: Douze noëls basques anciens (Paris, 1897)

La tradition au pays-basque (Paris, 1899/R) [pubn of the Société d'ethnographie nationale et d'art populaire]

C. Bordes: Douze chansons amoureuses du pays basque française (Paris, 1910)

F. Gáscue: Origen de la música popular vascongada (Paris, 1913)

F. Gáscue: El aurresku en Guipúzcoa a finales del sigio XVIII según Iztueta (San Sebastian, 1916)

F. Gáscue: Materiales para el estudio del folklore músico vasco (San Sebastián, 1917)

R.M. de Azkue: Musica popular vasca: conferencias (Bilbao, 1919)

R.M. de Azkue, ed.: Cancionero popular vasco (Barcelona, 1920/R)

G. Hérelle: ‘Les charivaris nocturnes dans le pays basque français’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xv (1924), 505

G. de [W. von] Humboldt: ‘Bocetos de un viaje a través del país vasco’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xv (1924), 448

H. Olazarán de Estella: Mutil dantza del Baztán [Dance of the young men of the Baztán valley] (Pamplona, 1925)

M. van Eys: ‘Second voyage au pays basque, 1868’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xviii (1927), 527

R.A. Gallop: Vingt-cinq chansons populaires d’Eskual-herria (Bayonne, 1928)

B. Estornés Lasa: ‘De arte popular’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xxi (1930), 206

W. Giese: ‘Txiribita = violin’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xxiv (1933), 616

W. Giese: ‘Vasc. bilarrausi’, Revista internacional de los estudios vascos, xxiv (1933), 71

M. de Lekuona: Aozko literatura [Oral poetry] (Tolosa, 1935; 1978 in Basque and Sp.)

J.A. de Donostia and F. de Madina: De música vasca (Buenos Aires, 1943)

I. Fagoaga: La musique représentative basque (Bayonne, 1944)

L. de Hoyos Sáinz and N. de Hoyos Sancho: Manual de folklore (Madrid, 1947)

H. Olazarán de Estella: Danzas de Baztán (Viña del Mar, 1957)

J.A. de Donostia: Obras musicales del padre Donostia, ed. J. de Riezu (Navarra, 1960–75)

M. García Matos: disc notes, Antología del folklore musical de España, Hispavox HH 10 107 to 110 (1960)

A. Zavala: Auspoa (Tolosa, 1961–) [Basque folksongs]

G. de Barandiaran: Danzas de Euskalerri, i–iii (San Sebastián, 1963–9)

G. de Barandiaran: ‘Gizon-dantza: liturgia y sentido’ [Men’s dance: ritual and significance], Revue de l’association des danseurs du pays basque (1968), no.11, p.13; no.12, p.3

J.L. de Echevarría: Danzas de Vizcaya (Bilbao, 1969)

J. Orúe Matia, ed.: Cancionero del país vasco (Madrid, 1970, 2/1971)

F. Escudero: ‘El txistu y el silbote’, Estudios de deusto (Bilbao, 1972), no.45, p.37

F. Escudero: ‘Peculiaridades morfológicas de la canción popular y de la música vasca’, Txistulari, lxix (1972), 34

H. Olzarán de Estella: Tratado de txistu y gaita (Pamplona, 1972)

M.A. Sagaseta: ‘Estudio de los bailes de Valcarlos’, Cuadernos de etnologia y etnografia de Navarra, vii/20 (Pamplona, 1975)

J.M. Barrenechea: Alboka: entorno folklórico (Lecároz, 1976)

X. Amuriza: Zu ere bertsulari (Donostia, 1982)

J.A. de Donostia: Obras completas, 1917–56 (Bilbao, 1983)

J.-M. Guilcher: La tradition de danse en Béarn et pays basque français (Paris, 1984)

J. Haritschelhar, ed.: Etre basque (Toulouse, 1984)

J.A. Arana Martija: Musica vasca (Bilbao, 1985)

Euskal herriko folklorea, Ikerfolk ELK 142 to 143 (1987); ELK 200 to 201 (1989) [incl. disc notes]

J. Bagües Erriondo: La musica en la Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País (Donostia, 1990)

J. Goyheneche: Les basques et leur histoire: mythes et réalités (Donostia, 1993)

A. Artal, I. Zunzunegi and I. Zorrilla: Bizkaiko dultzaina (Bilbao, 1994)

G. Aulestia: Improvisational Poetry from the Basque Country (Reno, NV, 1995)

J. Garmendia Azzuabarrena: Juan Ignacio Iztueta (Zaldibia, 1995)

J.L. Antsonrema Mizanda: Txistua eta txistulariak (San Sebastián, 1996)

D. Laborde, ed.: Tout un monde de musiques (Paris, 1996)

E. López Aguirre: Del txitu a la telecaster: crónica del rock vasco (Oñati, 1996)

D. Laborde: Musiques à l'école (Paris, 1998)

C. Sánchez Equiza: Del danbolin al silbo: txistu tambozil y danza vasca en la época de la Ilustración (Pamplona, 1999)

Bass (i)

(Fr. basse; Ger. Bass; It. basso).

The lower part of the musical system, as distinguished from the treble, specifically: that part or voice in a composition executed by the lowest-range performers (‘bass part’); the lowest pitch in a sonority; hence the succession of lowest notes in a passage or composition (‘bass line’); the lowest segment of an instrument’s range, or the lowest octave or octaves articulated in a composition (‘bass register’); and those notes which ‘support’ the other parts, which determine the harmonic identity of sonorities and which are in the main responsible for harmonic progressions, cadences, modulations and large-scale tonal relationships (‘harmonic’, ‘functional’ or ‘musical’ bass). These distinct but overlapping meanings are all usually simply called ‘bass’. They share the original modifying sense ‘low’, as in Bass (ii) and (iii); ‘bass’ is cognate with the adjective ‘base’ (‘low’, ‘unrefined’), both deriving from Late Latin ‘bassus’ (‘low’, ‘thick’, ‘fat’).

The term first appeared in music about the middle of the 15th century: in expanding from three- to four-part texture, composers wrote two contratenor parts, the lower of which was distinguished by the title ‘contratenor bassus’. By 1500 ‘Bassus’ alone was used as a noun, meaning the lowest part in a composition. In this new sense it rapidly acquired two cognates, one material, the other figurative: the nouns ‘base’ (‘lowest or supporting part’) and ‘basis’ (‘main constituent’, ‘fundamental principle’). Thus Glarean’s confusion in the Dodecachordon of 1547 (MSD, vi, 1965): ‘The lowest voice is called ‘bass’ (Basis) … because all voices lean on it as a support’ (i, 122); ‘From this the common name ‘bass’ (Bassus) has by chance come into use’ (ii, 247). Soon afterwards the term acquired philosophical legitimacy through the humanistic conceit of comparing the four human voice ranges with the four elements, as in Zarlino’s Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558 (trans. Marco and Palisca, 179):

As the earth is the foundation of the other elements, the bass (Basso) … is the foundation of the harmony, … as if to say the base (Basa) and sustenance of the other parts. If … the element of earth were lacking, what ruin and waste would result! Similarly a composition without a bass would be full of confusion and dissonance.

These conflated meanings ‘bass’, ‘base’ and ‘basis’ have persisted to the present.

Zarlino’s usage ‘foundation’ became more common in the Baroque era, where the basso continuo assumed ‘fundamental’ importance. The continuo instruments were often called ‘foundation instruments’, and ‘Fundamento’ was a common title on bass parts. Thus Walther in the Musicalisches Lexicon (1732), 268: ‘“Fundamento” is, in general, any bass part; in particular, a basso continuo; also the harmony which the latter expresses’. Although ‘Fundamento’ rarely occurred after 1750, the generic term ‘Basso’ designated the bass in soloistic chamber music as late as Haydn's string quartets op.20 (1772), and in orchestral music and informal chamber music until 1800. Haydn discussed scorings of the bass part in a letter of 1768 as follows: ‘I prefer just three basses [Bässe] – that is, one cello, one bassoon, and one double bass’; here ‘bass’ is still the generic term for any and all bass instruments. The modern practice of identifying every bass instrument by name in musical sources was not fully established until the 19th century.

The history of musical basses forms part of the history of Tonality. Features that are taken to be characteristic appeared from the 14th century on: movement of the lowest part primarily by leap (Ciconia), articulation of the final at cadences by leap from the 5th above (Du Fay, Binchois), expansion of the tessitura downwards to encompass the full range of the bass voice (Ockeghem, Josquin), and homophonic style ‘leaning’ on the bass (the frottola). Besseler and Lowinsky argued that these features functioned in Renaissance polyphony as they have in major–minor tonality since 1700. More recently, however, it has been shown that this music was still based on the earlier ‘discant theory’. The tenor was still the ‘basis’; the ‘skeleton’ was the note-against-note counterpoint between tenor and soprano, and the bass was an ‘added’ part not only in compositional practice (as is believed), but in theory. Thus Aaron, in his Thoscanello de la musica (1529/R), described ex.1 as a cadence on E, governed by the suspension–resolution configuration 8–7–6–8 (see also Cadence). But in tonality the ‘outer parts’, that is an expressive melody and a supporting bass, are the ‘skeleton’ of the music. The distinction is especially clear in early Baroque monody, where these two parts make up the entire notated texture.

Furthermore, Renaissance theorists still thought in terms of intervals. For Zarlino the triad was merely the most complex and perfect collection of intervals; he did not invoke the concept of chordal inversion, which, along with that of root, was first adumbrated just after 1600 in England and especially Germany. The ‘basis’ of tonality is the triad as a unified entity built on its bass: ‘the lowest of the three notes which constitute a triad is called the bass [Basis] or fundamental note’ (Brossard, Dictionaire, 2/1705/R, 169).

Finally, coherence in tonal music depends on the bass, which governs harmonic progressions, cadences (hence phrases and periods) and large-scale tonal relationships (hence form). Especially for large-scale relationships, no ‘basis’ of this kind has been shown for Renaissance polyphony.

The Baroque basso continuo incorporated every aspect of ‘bass’, being the bass part ‘by definition’. It occupied the lowest register and was virtually always the lowest-sounding part; it was often a true line of melodic and contrapuntal interest; even more often it was the ‘basis’ of the form, as in the ostinato, the passacaglia and other variations, and numerous dance-related patterns; and it not only supported the other parts but, through the figures supplied, determined the entire harmonic contents. As late as C.P.E. Bach the theory and practice of composition itself were, for most practical purposes, synonymous with mastery of the continuo. Hence Mattheson’s apotheosis (in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 1739/R, 104) is less extravagant than may at first appear: ‘Musical composition could not exist without the continuo; the one assumes the other; and the continuo was born at the same time as harmony itself’. Furthermore the continuo was articulated more strongly than any other part: in performance, by timbral and often by registral doubling between a keyboard instrument (organ, harpsichord, clavichord) and a melody instrument (cello, double bass, viola da gamba, bassoon etc.); in register, by separation from the melodic parts above it, as in solo sonata and trio sonata scoring; and often in musical structure, by its independent musical material and specifically bass-like character and progressions (ex.2). Continuo parts often assumed one of a number of definite types, such as ostinato, figural, walking or stationary basses. Finally, tonality itself was one prerequisite for the rise of autonomous instrumental art music, one of the signal achievements of the Baroque age; but as has been seen, tonality is dependent on the bass.

In the Classical and Romantic periods the hegemony of the continuo was broken in both theory and practice. Rameau’s distinction between the ‘actual’ bass (the lowest pitch) and an ‘ideal’ bass (the root) once again split ‘base’ and ‘basis’ into separate entities. The succession of roots, or Fundamental bass, determined the nature of the harmonies, by its restriction to the ‘functions’ I, IV and V, and of harmonic progressions, by its preference for movement by 5ths and 3rds. This basis for tonal music lived on in the ‘functional harmony’ of Riemann and his followers.

Meanwhile a number of independently scored instruments began to share the continuo’s old function of ‘base’. By late Haydn and Beethoven, there were separate cello, double bass and bassoon parts. Often the horn functioned on its own as the bass; occasionally the timpani and, in exceptional cases, the contrabassoon and trombone assumed this role. In the 19th century the last two instruments became standard, and tubas, the bass clarinet and bass trumpet were added, as well as other inventions most of which have since disappeared. Each of these bass instruments was now a separate ‘part’, with its own name, staff in the score and musical substance; each could at any time be the bass, the others resting or playing above it. Hence the musical bass was no longer correlated with any single part; rather it became identified, by and large, with the ‘bass line’ – the succession of lowest-sounding pitches – the chief denotative sense it retains.

Under these conditions the parts could ‘cross’ in a meaningful way. Koch noted this new resource, so characteristic of chamber music, as early as 1782 in his Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (i, 245–6): ‘When in a trio or quartet with obbligato cello [as opposed to continuo], the latter has solo passages, and the viola or second violin takes over the bass, … there is an exchange of bass function among the participating instruments’; this exchange is illustrated in ex.3. Haydn’s basses are transitional in this respect: in these ‘part-crossing’ passages the nominal bass often functions as the musical bass, as a continuo would have done. Mozart and Beethoven almost always took the view that the lowest part must be the bass.

The bass retained all its harmonic, tonal and structural importance in Classical and Romantic music. In the hands of composers like Mozart or Chopin, even the much-maligned Alberti, ‘murky’ and ‘oompah’ basses were fully compatible with the highest art (see exx.4–5). Tovey wrote: ‘A composer [Schubert] whose basses are magnificent is a great contrapuntist, even if (like Wagner) he never published a fugue in his life’ (Essays and Lectures on Music, London, 1949, p.112). By the same token Brahms did not return to the ‘values’ of the Baroque era so much as he integrated his basses, at once melodic and structural, into complex textures and widely ranging harmonies.

In the 20th century tonally based art music developed no new general principles in its basses. Composers like Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartók partly replaced harmonic progressions of the traditional type with repetitive patterns such as the ostinato. In 12-note and other rigorously non-tonal music, it may be doubted whether the bass any longer functions as a ‘base’ or ‘basis’ at all. On the other hand, jazz and popular music maintain strongly articulated bass lines as the foundation of their subdominant-orientated tonality.

Schenker’s theoretical writings of the 1920s and 30s reinterpreted the bass as a synthesis of harmonic and contrapuntal forces: a line developed by prolongation of the triad in the form I–V–I. At the same time, in conjunction with the Schenkerian Urlinie, the bass retained its old importance as one of the two elements of the Ursatz or Aussensatz, the ‘outer parts’ in a structural as well as auditory sense. The marriage of bass and tonality remains indissoluble.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Shirlaw: The Theory of Harmony (London, 1917/R)

M. Schneider: Die Anfänge des Basso Continuo und seiner Bezifferung (Leipzig, 1918/R)

F.T. Arnold: The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass (London, 1931/R)

F. Oberdörffer: Der Generalbass in der Instrumentalmusik des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1939)

H. Besseler: Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (Leipzig, 1950)

H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Studien zur musikalischen Terminologie (Mainz, 1955), 62ff.

C. Bär: ‘Zum Begriff des “Basso” in Mozarts Serenaden’, MJb 1960–61, 133–55

E. Lowinsky: Tonality and Atonality in 16th Century Music (Berkeley, 1961)

C. Dahlhaus: Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Kassel, 1967; Eng. trans., 1990)

E.T. Cone: ‘Beyond Analysis’, PNM, vi (1967–8), 33–51

H. Haack: Anfänge des Generalbass-Satzes: die ‘Cento concerti ecclesiastici’ (1602) von Ludovico Viadana (Tutzing, 1974)

S. Bonta: ‘From Violone to Violoncello: a Question of Strings?’, JAMIS, iii (1977), 64–99

J. Webster: ‘The Bass Part in Haydn’s Early String Quartets’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 390–424

R.J. Hoyt: The Bassline in Atonal Music: its Relationship to Melodic and Harmonic Structure (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1979)

M. Cyr: ‘Basses and basse continue in the Orchestra of the Paris Opéra, 1700–1764’, EMc, x (1982), 155–70

W. Salmen, ed.: Kontrabass und Bassfunktion (Innsbruck, 1986)

L. Dreyfus: Bach's Continuo Group: Players and Practices in his Vocal Works (Cambridge, MA, 1987)

C.-H. Mahling: ‘Con o senza fagotto? Bemerkungen zur Besetzung der “Bassi” (1740 bis ca.1780)’, ibid., 197–208

S.A. Edgerton: The Bass Part in Haydn's Early Symphonies: a Documentary and Analytical Study (diss., Cornell U., 1989)

J. Lester: Between Modes and Keys: German Theory, 1592–1802 (Stuyvesant, NY, 1989)

JAMES WEBSTER

Bass (ii).

The lowest male voice, normally written for within the range F to e', which may be extended at either end, particularly in solo writing. Over time the bass voice has been subdivided into a number of distinct categories: the Basso profondo or Basse noble refers to a particularly low bass, the Basse chantante (or basso cantate) a higher, lyrical voice, and the basso buffo a comic bass. By the 19th century the baritone split off from the bass, to be regarded as a separate category, although some overlap (and confusion) remains in the terminological distinction, especially between bass and bass-baritone (see Baritone (i) and Bass-baritone).

OWEN JANDER, LIONEL SAWKINS, J.B. STEANE, ELIZABETH FORBES/ELLEN T. HARRIS (with GERALD WALDMAN)

1. Before 1600.

Although the bass voice has no doubt existed since time immemorial, Western art music made no specific use of it for centuries, and early writers had therefore little to say about it. Isidore of Seville (c559–636) commented that ‘in fat voices, as those of men, much breath is emitted at once’, and he asserted that ‘the perfect voice is high, sweet and loud’ (Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx). In 9th-century parallel organum, as described in the Scolica enchiriadis, several dispositions of the parts called for the addition of apparently quite low voices an octave or 5th below the vox principalis ‘for the sake of the symphony’ (i.e. the sonority; GS, i, 186). Resonant bass voices must have created an imposing sound in such a ‘symphony’.

Until the second half of the 14th century, upper voice parts in polyphony were composed above a bottom line which, if not always a tenor in function (i.e. holding a cantus firmus), was at any rate written in the tenor range. In the early 15th century Tenor and Contratenor, overlapping in the same range, shared the function of providing a harmonic foundation. After about 1450, however, the role of supporting the harmony was assigned to a single line by the creation of the contratenor bassus. Some theorists showed their understanding of the essential function of this line by referring to it not as bassus (the medieval Latin word for ‘low’) but by the Greek word basis (‘foundation’). The unprecedented sonority created by these low-pitched contratenor bassus lines became in itself a source of fascination, as is evident in descriptive terminology of the age that played with the Greek prefix bari- (‘low’; see Baritone (i)). In the works of such composers as Busnoys, Ockeghem and La Rue there are not only bass lines ranging between D and d but also two or even three parts in what would now be described as the bass or baritone range. Tinctoris (De inventione et usu musicae, 1481–3) singled out Ockeghem as the finest bass he had ever heard. Polyphonic sonorities emphasizing the bass voice, although originating in the chapels of the Burgundian and French courts, soon spread elsewhere.

During the 16th century composers became increasingly sensitive to the bass's function of defining the harmony. Nicola Vicentino (L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica; 1555, f.55v) remarked that ‘it is the bass which governs, and gives the grace of beautiful progressions and variety of harmony to all the parts’. In this period there developed a tendency for bass lines to use wide intervals more than other voices did, to be more angular, and to span a wider range in general. Despite the relative angularity of bass lines, bass singers, like those with high voices, became increasingly preoccupied with the art of improvised ornamentation during the 16th century. Giovanni Bassano (Ricercate, passaggi et cadentie, 1585) illustrated how the bass part of a Palestrina motet might be sumptuously ornamented (ex.1), but such elaborate ornamentation of bass parts was attacked by Pietro Cerone (El melopeo y maestro, 1613), who complained that through such practice the whole fabric of polyphony ‘falls to the ground’.

In spite of such resistance, virtuoso basses attracted much attention in the period 1575–1625 and were in great demand. The Neapolitan bass Giulio Cesare Brancaccio was the highest paid singer in the élite corps of virtuosos assembled in Ferrara by Alfonso d'Este, and the availability of such skilled basses was essential to the development of the luxuriant style of madrigal composition cultivated at Ferrara by Giaches de Wert and others, in whose works the bass line is often as florid as any of the upper voices (ex.2).

2. 1600–1800.

The Italian fashion for highly ornate bass music was extended into the monodies of the first decades of the 17th century, as can be seen in ex.3 from Stefano Landi’s madrigal Superbe colli (Aria a una voce, 1620). Giulio Caccini, similarly, wrote virtuoso bass arias for Melchior Palontrotti and published one aria, ‘Muove si dolce’, in his Le nuove musiche (1601–2) with the divisions Palontrotti sang. In Italian opera during the 17th century, ornate writing for the bass voice was, in contrast, quite rare. In the surviving operas of Monteverdi the bass already appears in some of its most important historical role types: as a god (particularly the god of the underworld: Pluto in Orfeo, Neptune in Il ritorno d'Ulisse) or as a sepulchral figure (Charon in Orfeo). His most impressive use of the bass was in the tragic role of Seneca in L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643).

The comic potential of the bass voice was best realized in the tradition of the basso buffo, whose spiritual ancestor was the commedia dell'arte character Pantalone. Already in late Renaissance madrigal comedies (e.g. Orazzio Vecchi's L'Amfiparnaso, 1597, and Banchieri's La pazzia senile, 1598), the blustering, the stammering and the bathetic self-pitying of the classic old fool were given eloquent musical depiction. In the early history of opera similar comic male characters, usually basses, appeared occasionally on the fringe of plots (e.g. Penelope's wooer, Antinous, in Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse, 1640) and were called upon to perform exaggeratedly wide-spanning phrases that plummet to the depths of the singer's range. In 17th-century Italian opera, the basso buffo was frequently aligned with the comic contralto role (see Contralto). As a central figure, the comic bass began to appear only in the last quarter of the century (e.g. in Stradella's Il Trespolo tutore, 1679).

The diminishing importance of the bass voice in opera seria is reflected in the cantata: of Alessandro Scarlatti's solo cantatas, more than 600 are for soprano and five are for bass. However, the earlier tradition of the virtuoso bass continued to find expression in serenatas which include numerous representations of such characters as Belisarius, Nero and Seneca, usually in a mood of defiance or rage. These vehement emotions are expressed in angular, wide-leaping lines that show the influence of instrumental styles in the developing concerto. Handel inherited this tradition through such predecessors as Stradella and Scarlatti and during his Italian years wrote remarkable parts for bass in his Italian oratorios, serenatas and cantatas, such as Lucifer (La resurrezione), Polyphemus (Aci, Galatea e Polifemo), and in the cantata Nell'africane selve. Vivaldi's vocal music for the Venetian ospedali is normally written so that the bass parts can be performed an octave higher by the girls when bass singers were unavailable (Talbot, 1994); as a result the bass is rarely highlighted.

Most Handel operas include a role for bass who, though usually a secondary character, is of sufficient importance to be assigned an aria in each of the three acts. These roles are most often kings or generals, whose noble arias declare pride in rank; sometimes a villain (Achillas in Giulio Cesare, 1724, or Garibaldo in Rodelinda, 1725, for example) may be cast as a bass. A favourite type of aria is that of rage or defiance, often with huge leaps; James Miller wrote of Handel's Royal Academy bass G.M. Boschi, ‘And Boschi-like, be always in a rage’. Boschi's parts are high-lying, in what would now be called a baritone range; some of Handel's finest bass parts were for Montagnana, who sang down to F in the remarkable role of the magician Zoroastro in Orlando (1733). The ‘rage aria’ was cultivated even in the oratorio; the most famous of all is ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together?’ in Messiah.

In French opera, with no castratos for male roles, the bass retained more importance than it did in opera seria. Cavalli's only opera for Paris, Ercole amante (1662), has a bass title role. The importance of the bass in French opera was remarked on in François Raguenet's Paralèle des italiens et des françois (1702; Eng. trans., 1709): ‘When the Persons of Gods or Kings, a Jupiter, Neptune, Priam, or Agamemnon, are brought on the Stage, our Actors, with their deep Voices, give ’em an air of Majesty, quite different from that of the feign'd Bases among the Italians, which have neither Depth nor Strength’. Lully's bass roles are often gods (Jupiter in Cadmus et Hermione, 1673, and Isis, 1677), especially those of the underworld (Pluto in Alceste, 1674, and Proserpine, 1680; Neptune in Isis and Acis et Galatée, 1686), but also include roles with comic elements (Charon in Alceste, Polyphemus in Acis). Only in Roland (1685) did he use the bass voice in a title role. Some of the most imposing roles for the bass voice in French Baroque opera are by Rameau, for example Theseus in Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) and Pollux in Castor et Pollux (1737), both were first sung by C.L.D. de Chassé (1699–1786). This French tradition is further evident in the late operas that Gluck wrote for Paris, which include such roles as Calchas in Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Hercules in Alceste (1776) and Thoas in Iphigénie en Tauride (1779).

In Germany, the bass was prized for depicting seriousness and wisdom, both in opera and sacred music. In Buxtehude's cantata Jesu, meine Freude, for example, the bass sings ‘Trotz dem alten Drachen’ in which the lowest range of the bass (down to D) is explored for the word ‘abyss’. J.S. Bach's works are full of remarkable solo parts for bass. In Jesu, der du meine Seele (bwv78, 1724), the bass (G–d') represents the dying soul expressing trust in the Lord in an elaborate concerto aria (‘Nun, du wirst mein Gewissen stillen’). In the St Matthew Passion, the bass arias towards the end are among the most beautiful and affecting in the entire work (especially ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’). In his secular music, Bach used the bass for Aeolus, god of the wind, in Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan and the old, conservative father in the Coffee Cantata. Extensive passage-work in the music written for bass in Germany demanded a virtuoso technique, but J.F. Agricola (Anleitung zur Singekunst, 1757) complained that many German basses, by inserting a ‘ga, ga, ga’ before each note and gulping for breath every half-bar, created an unpleasing effect.

In England, following the Italian tradition of virtuoso basses, Purcell wrote remarkable arias for John Gostling (‘They that go down to the sea in ships’) and Richard Leveridge (‘Ye twice ten hundred deities’), who had deep and agile bass voices with very wide ranges. Leveridge went on to perform in opera but made his name in such parts as Charon, Merlin and Pluto in the English theatrical pantomime, notably the witch Hecate in Macbeth.

In 1781 Mozart expressed a wish to recast Idomeneo ‘in the French style’ and change the title role from tenor to bass: ‘I would have altered Idomeneus's role completely and made it a bass part for [Ludwig] Fischer’. Mozart's typical bass roles are more characteristic: Osmin, the comically savage overseer in Die Entführung (1782, written for Fischer) and Sarastro, a high priest, in Die Zauberflöte (1791, sung by Franz Gerl). Most of his roles nominally for bass in his mature Italian operas are now regarded equally as baritone roles. Figaro and Leporello are often sung by basses and are essentially basso buffo roles, the former designed for (and both sung by) the outstanding Viennese exponent Francesco Benucci; another such role is Bartolo in Figaro. The tradition to which these and many other roles belong is in fact the hallmark of opera buffa; it goes back to the 17th century, appears in numerous intermezzo-type works, such as Pergolesi's La serva padrona (1733), is central to the entire repertory of operas to Goldoni's librettos and the principal works of Paisiello and Cimarosa, and continues in the operas of Rossini and Donizetti.

3. 19th century.

Rossini expected his basses to have voices as flexible as the tenors, or indeed the sopranos and mezzos. Nicola de Grecis, a comic bass who had sung in operas by Guglielmi and others, was the first to inspire Rossini's basso buffo roles; he created roles in La scala di seta (1812) and Signor Bruschino (1813). Rossini wrote eight roles, serious and comic, for Filippo Galli, among them Mustafa in L'italiana in Algeri (1813), the title role of Maometto II (1820) and Assur in Semiramide (1823); Galli's noble, flexible voice later inspired Donizetti to write the part of Henry VIII in Anna Bolena (1830). Michele Benedetti, a more dramatic singer, created bass roles in seven of Rossini's serious operas for Naples, including Elmiro in Otello (1816) and the title role of Mosè in Egitto (1818).

The illustrious Neapolitan bass Luigi Lablache, who made his début as Dandini (Rossini's La Cenerentola), created roles in seven Donizetti operas in Naples (1826–32) and later sang the title roles in two Donizetti premières in Paris, Marino Faliero (1835) and Don Pasquale (1843). Also in Paris, he created Giorgio in Bellini's I puritani, and in London his performance of the title role in Balfe's Falstaff (1838) drew the remark that he was ‘such a protagonist as would have made Shakespeare's heart leap for joy’ (H.F. Chorley). At the Paris Opéra, Henri-Etienne Dérivis, a singer in the classical French tradition with an excellent coloratura technique, created roles in three Spontini operas; he also created Mahomet II in Rossini's Le siège de Corinthe (1826). His successor at the Opéra, Nicholas Levasseur, who had a voice of enormous range, sang Don Alvaro in Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims at the Théâtre-Italien (1825) and created many roles at the Opéra, including Walter Furst in Guillaume Tell (1829) and Zacharie in Meyerbeer's Le prophète (1849).

With the rise of the ‘Verdi baritone’, the bass voice played a smaller role in Italian opera of the second half of the century. Among the singers of Verdi's early bass roles, Lablache created Massimiliano (I masnadieri, 1847). Both Jean Procida (Les vêpres siciliennes, 1855) and Philip II (Don Carlos, 1867) were created by the French bass Louis-Henri Obin. With the role of Jacopo Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra, 1857), Verdi largely turned to a style of writing that allowed for a marked distinction between his baritone and bass roles. Based on the talents of the Italian bass Giuseppe Etcheverria, this style, found in practically all his main bass roles after 1860, generally avoided lyrical phrases (Philip II is an exception here), emphasized declamation and made full use of the lowest register (Budden, 1994–5). Verdi's bass roles, adhering to tradition, are chiefly old men, including priests, counts, squires and the like, villains and servants; he also contributed to the tradition of ghosts as basses, with Banquo (Macbeth, 1847), like Nino's ghost in Rossini's Semiramide and the Commendatore in Don Giovanni.

Among Wagnerian basses, Carl Risse created Daland (Der fliegende Holländer, 1843) and Wilhelm Dettmer sang the Landgrave (Tannhäuser, 1845). Ludwig Zottmayr, the first King Mark in Tristan und Isolde (1865), was probably a bass-baritone: his roles in Munich included Count di Luna and Hans Heiling. Kaspar Bausewein – Pogner in Die Meistersinger (1868), Fafner in Das Rheingold (1869) and Hunding in Die Walküre (1870) – was a true bass who also sang Leporello, Caspar and Rossini's Don Basilio. Hagen (Götterdämmerung) was created at Bayreuth (1876) by Gustav Siehr, who later alternated as Gurnemanz in Parsifal with Emil Scaria, the bass who created the role (1882); Scaria, Escamillo at Vienna in the first performance of Carmen outside France, sang Wotan in the first complete Vienna, Berlin and London Ring cycles.

Some of the finest basses in German opera were French. Léon Gresse, who created Phanuel in Hérodiade (1881) at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, was the first Hunding in Die Walküre at the Paris Opéra. Pol Plançon, an effective actor as well as a most stylish singer, created Massenet's Count of Gormas in Le Cid at the Opéra (1885) and Garrido in La Navarraise at Covent Garden (1894). One of the greatest 19th-century basses, he made numerous recordings. Don Diègue in Le Cid was created by the Polish-born Edouard de Reszke, an equally fine interpreter of Italian, French and German opera. His prowess as a Wagner singer was legendary: at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan he excelled as King Henry, King Mark, Pogner, the Wanderer and Hunding.

From its beginnings in works by Verstovsky and Glinka, 19th-century Russian opera included important bass roles. The title role in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836) was entrusted to Osip Petrov, who went on to create bass roles in many operas by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. Fyodor Stravinsky, father of the composer, who created many bass roles in Tchaikovsky's operas, was equally gifted in comic and dramatic roles. Ivan Mel'nikov created several bass roles in operas by Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky (including the title role in Boris Godunov, 1874) and others. Later, Fyodor Chaliapin virtually took over the role of Boris and transformed the role of the bass voice in opera by making it the equal in dramatic power (and market value) of the higher voices. His interpretations are as legendary for their vital characterization as for the beauty of his tone and the clarity of his declamation. His roles included Ivan the Terrible (Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov), Dosifey (Musorgsky's Khovanshchina), and both Prince Galitsky and Khan Konchak in Prince Igor, as well as Boito's Mefistopheles, Philip II and Don Basilio.

Outside opera, basses found significant parts in sacred music and oratorio. From Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1824) to many requiems, including the collaborative mass for Rossini (1869) and works by Brahms (1868), Verdi (1874) and Dvořák (1890), most concerted choral music included important bass or bass-baritone solos, often sung by opera singers. Ormondo Maini, the bass in the première of Verdi's Requiem, was esteemed not only for his Mephistopheles (both Boito and Gounod, in Faust) and Ramfis (Aida) but also for his Leporello and Don Basilio.

In operetta, the bass rarely played as important a role as the leading tenor or baritone. August Zschiesche, however, engaged for 50 years at the Berlin Hofoper, created Falstaff in Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849); a genuine bass, he also sang Rocco (Fidelio), Osmin and Bertram (Robert le diable, 1831). Karl Formes, Plunkett in the première of Flotow's Martha (1847), also sang for many years at Covent Garden, notably as Tsar Peter. In Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the leading bass was Richard Temple, who had made his début as Rodolfo (La sonnambula); he was particularly praised for his Mikado.

The bass best known for his performance of song at the turn of the century was Chaliapin, who not only performed works by Glinka, Dargomïzhsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rubinstein but was highly esteemed as a singer of Schubert and Schumann lieder. He was renowned for his performances of Musorgsky's Song of the Flea and Russian folksongs. Songs written specifically for low voice include Rubinstein's op.72 (1864, for alto or bass and piano) and Wolf's Michelangelo settings (1898, for bass).

4. 20th century.

The bass roles in Puccini's operas are mainly character parts. Adam Didur, the Polish-born bass who sang for 25 seasons at the Metropolitan, created Ashby (La fanciulla del West, 1910) and sang several central roles in Russian operas. French opera, however, continued to contain important roles for bass. Félix Vieuille was the original Arkel in Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and also created roles in Charpentier's Louise (1900) and Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907). In Strauss's operas, the role of Baron Ochs (Der Rosenkavalier, 1911), with its sustained low E at the end of Act 2, has always been cherished by basses although its first exponent was a baritone, Karl Perron. A famous early exponent of the role was Richard Mayr, who sang the role at the Viennese première; he also sang Figaro, Leporello and Sarastro at Salzburg and Hagen and Gurnemanz at Bayreuth. In Strauss he was unrivalled: he created Barak in Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) and sang Count Waldner in the Viennese première of Arabella.

Strong basses have flourished in Wagner roles. Alexander Kipnis sang Gurnemanz, King Mark and Pogner at Bayreuth, as well as Sarastro at Salzburg and Glyndebourne. After World War II, Ludwig Weber, the finest Gurnemanz of his generation, was also admired as Rocco, Ochs and Barak. Gottlob Frick, a superb Hagen, was another notable Gurnemanz. Kurt Böhme, who sang Pogner, Fafner and Titurel at Bayreuth, was best known as Ochs. Martti Talvela brought a large, resonant voice to such roles as Fasolt, King Mark and Daland, and was an impressive Sarastro. At the end of the century Wagner's bass roles were sung by the British bass John Tomlinson (an admired Wotan at Bayreuth), the Americans James Morris (notable as Wotan and the Dutchman), and Paul Plishka (also renowned for his interpretations of Mozart and Verdi and of Boris Godunov) and the German Hans Sotin, voluminous of voice not only in Wagner but also Beethoven (Ninth Symphony) and Mozart (Sarastro).

Outside Wagner roles, Boris Godunov and Philip II (Don Carlos) provide particular challenges, realized in different ways by several distinguished basses: the Bulgarian Boris Christoff, a voluminous, intensely dramatic artist; Nicolai Ghiaurov, also Bulgarian, with a voice of great depth; Cesare Siepi, a noted Don Giovanni, a more introspective Philip; and Ruggero Raimondi, also an admired Don Giovanni, whose Philip belongs among a gallery of powerful Verdi characterizations.

Britten's operas contain many rewarding bass roles. Owen Brannigan, who created Swallow in Peter Grimes (1945), Collatinus in The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Noye in Noye's Fludde (1958) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), was a comic actor of great charm. Frederick Dalberg, creator of the evil Claggart in Billy Budd (1951) and Raleigh in Gloriana (1953), was darker in voice and a more forbidding personality. Michael Langdon, who took lesser roles but created the He-Ancient in Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (1955), was also a stylish Ochs and a sound Wagnerian. Forbes Robinson, who created the title role of Tippett's King Priam (1962) and was a powerfully evil Claggart, sang Moses in the British stage première of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.

The Rossini revival has called for basses with agile voices and a good coloratura technique; Justino Díaz, who created Antony in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra (which inaugurated the new Metropolitan opera in 1966), sang Mahomet in Le siège de Corinthe. Samuel Ramey has also sung Mahomet, as well as Moses, Mustafà, the Podestà (La gazza ladra) and Douglas (La donna del lago); his flexible but powerful voice can encompass a repertory that runs from Handel roles such as Garibaldo in Rodelinda and the Rossini roles written for Galli or Beneditti to Gounod's and Boito's Mephistopheles, Attila and the four villains in Les contes d'Hoffmann.

The early music revival has required voices that are not only flexible but light in tone. The English bass David Thomas has sung with distinction a 17th- and 18th-century repertory ranging from Monteverdi to Mozart; he has specialized in Handel (notably Polyphemus) and recorded arias written for Montagnana. The American Simon Estes has also made early music repertory a speciality, singing for example Jupiter in Cavalli's Calisto at Glyndebourne, but has also sung the title roles in Verdi's Oberto and Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer as well as presenting much contemporary music (such as the American première of Shostakovich's Symphony no.14).

Relatively few basses have excelled in the song repertory. Kipnis's unusually wide repertory included Mozart and Wagner operas, as well as Russian songs and lieder; he was a particularly fine interpreter of Brahms and Schubert. Christoff was a fine interpretator of Musorgsky's songs. The Belgian bass-baritone José Van Dam is a notable lieder singer with an operatic and concert repertory covering a broad range both chronologically and vocally, from Mozart to Wagner and Stravinsky, with an emphasis on French music.

Classical basses who have crossed over into the popular repertory include Ezio Pinza, whose enormous repertory was chiefly in Italian (including such Wagner roles as Pogner, King Mark and Gurnemanz); he created roles in Pizzetti's Debora e Jaele (1922) and Boito's Nerone (1924). At the Metropolitan this velvet-toned bass dominated the stage dramatically and vocally for 22 seasons; late in his career he made a stunning success in musical theatre, creating Emile de Becque in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (1949). No discussion of the bass voice would be complete without mention of Paul Robeson, the great black actor and singer who gave up the legal profession for the stage, where he was particularly esteemed for his performance of Shakespeare's Othello. In musical theatre he created the role of Crown in Porgy and Bess and Joe in Show Boat, whose song ‘Ol' man river’ became Robeson's signature piece.

(1) Augustine [Agustino] Bassano

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Kuhn: Die Verzierungs-Kunst in der Gesangs-Musik des 16.–17. Jahrhunderts, 1535–1650 (Leipzig, 1902/R)

M. Kunath: ‘Die Charakterologie der stimmlichen Einheiten in der Oper’, ZMw, viii (1925–6), 403

R. Celletti: ‘Il buffo e la tradizione melodrammatica’, Musica d'oggi, new ser., ii (1959), 61

H. Pleasants: The Great Singers (New York, 1966)

H. Matheopoulos: Bravo: Today's Great Tenors, Baritones and Basses Discuss their Roles (London, 1986)

O. Termini: ‘From a God to a Servant: the Bass Voice in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera’, CMc, no.44 (1990), 38–60

J.B. Steane: Voices: Singers and Critics (London, 1992)

M. Talbot: ‘Tenors and Basses at the Venetian ospedali’, AcM, lxvi (1994), 123–38

J. Budden: ‘The Vocal and Dramatic Characterisation of Jacopo Fiesco’, Studi verdiani, x (1994–5), 67–75

J.B. Steane: Singers of the Century (London, 1996)

Bass (iii)

(Fr. contrebasse; Ger. Bass [E], Kontrabass [B]).

In military and brass bands, the valved instrument in E or low B corresponding to the orchestral tuba.

The term is also used with other instruments, e.g. bass flute.

Bass (iv).

A contraction of Double bass or Electric bass guitar.

Bassadanza.

See Basse danse.

Bassanelli.

A family of late 16th century double-reed, conically bored wind instruments, softer in tone than shawms or curtals. No example survives, although bassanelli were described and illustrated by Praetorius (2/1619). They had seven finger-holes, the lowest controlled by a key, the lower part of which was covered by an elaborate fontanelle. A reed was fitted to a bassoon-like crook. Uniquely among Renaissance wind instruments bassanelli possessed a remarkable amount of decorative turnery. It has been suggested (Foster, 1992) that the bassanelli illustrated by Praetorius were of five-part jointed construction, the joints being strengthened and disguised with bulbous collars or bracelets; by extending or contracting these joints, a tuning variation of a semitone may have been obtainable. Praetorius listed three sizes capable of playing a range of about an octave and a 4th above C (bass), G (tenor/alto) and d (cantus).

Although Praetorius attributed the invention of the instrument to Giovanni Bassano, it seems most likely that the inventor was his father, Santo Bassano, who was awarded a patent for a new instrument on 13 June 1582 (Ongaro, p.412). Others have argued that the inventor was Jeronimo Bassano (i), perhaps in 1503 (Ruffatti). Instruments identifiable as bassanelli appear in three published inventories: Graz, between 1577 and 1590 (Schlosser, p.20); Verona, 1593 (Castellani, p.16); and Cassel, 1613 (Baines, p.30).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PraetoriusSM

J. von Schlosser: Die Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente (Vienna, 1920/R)

A. Baines: ‘Two Cassel Inventories’, GSJ, iv (1951), 30–38

M. Castellani: ‘A 1593 Veronese Inventory’, GSJ, xxvi (1973), 15–24

G.M. Ongaro: ‘New Documents on the Bassano Family’, EMc, xx (1992), 409–13

C. Foster: ‘The Bassanelli Reconstructed: a Radical Solution to an Enigma’, EMc, xx (1992), 417–25

A. Ruffatti: ‘La famiglia Piva-Bassano nei documenti degli archivi di Bassano del Grappa’, Musica e storia, vi (1998), 349–67

CHARLES FOSTER

Bassani.

See Bassano family.

Bassani, Giovanni Battista

(b Padua, c1650; d Bergamo, 1 Oct 1716). Italian composer, violinist and organist. He is traditionally said to have studied in Venice with Daniele Castrovillari and in Ferrara with Giovanni Legrenzi, maestro di cappella of the Accademia dello Spirito Santo there from 1657 to 1670. The suggestion made by Hawkins, Burney and others that Bassani was Corelli's violin teacher is without foundation although he is likely to have been in touch with Bolognese musicians between early 1675 and 1677. From 1667 he was associated with the Accademia della Morte, Ferrara, where he acted as organist and composed his first oratorios. The libretto of L'Esaltazione di S Croce, performed at the accademy on 7 April 1675, refers to him as ‘già organista della medesima Chiesa’, suggesting that he had already left the position of organist by then. On 3 June 1677 he became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica at Bologna and in the same year he published his op.1, in which he is called ‘maestro di musica e organista’ of the Confraternità della Morte in Finale Emilia, near Modena. In 1680 he was maestro di cappella at the court of Duke Alessandro II della Mirandola, a position he probably accepted shortly after the performance of his oratorio L'Amore ingeniero in S Maria Maddalena there in 1678. On 9 April 1682 he was elected principe of the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna. Also in 1682 he started participating in the annual celebration of the Accademia Filarmonica in S Giovanni in Monte, contributing several compositions up to 1694. At the end of 1683, probably his most productive year as a composer, he was elected maestro di cappella of the Accademia della Morte, Ferrara, succeeding G.F. Tosi. In 1686 he was appointed maestro di cappella of Ferrara Cathedral; because of his contribution to the musical life of that city he became known as ‘Bassani of Ferrara’. Between 1710 and 1712 he composed 76 services in several cycles for use at Ferrara Cathedral. On 9 May 1712 he was called to Bergamo to direct the music at S Maria Maggiore. He also taught at the music school of the Congregazione di Carità, Bergamo, and continued in both posts until his death.

Bassani's music was prominent in the middle Baroque period in Italy, when the concertato style predominated. His sacred works in this style are typical of those of the Bolognese school of composers in the last quarter of the 17th century, such as G.P. Colonna, G.B. Vitali and G.A. Perti. Perhaps above all he should be recognized for his solo cantatas, both sacred and secular. Yet although he was a prolific composer of other types of vocal music too, his fame has rested chiefly on his trio sonatas for strings. During his lifetime he was celebrated as a violinist. Some even considered his playing superior to Corelli's, a reputation probably enhanced by Burney, who also claimed that no one before him had written quite so idiomatically for the violin.

A sharp contrast between chamber and church sonatas, previously made by Legrenzi, is maintained by Bassani in his two known sets of trio sonatas. His op.1 contains 12 chamber sonatas, in each of which the four dance movements announced on the title-page follow the order given there. However, the number and character of the movements in the 12 church sonatas of op.5 are variable, and they often have polyphonic textures. According to Newman, Bassani's sonatas differ somewhat from Corelli's in that he preferred long unfolding lines to short balanced phrases, and the overall form, especially of the church sonatas, is less well integrated.

Of 13 known oratorios by Bassani to Italian texts the music of only four has survived, and his 13 operas seem to be entirely lost except for 10 arias from Gli amori alla moda. The secular solo cantatas are normally accompanied only by continuo and present a variety of structures, with a preference for da capo and AAB forms. Most of the solo motets are ‘concerted’ with the addition of two violins except in the recitatives, and each begins with a sinfonia. In his masses and psalm settings Bassani was an important exponent of the stile concertato; he worked in the style of Cazzati and Vitali (e.g. the latter's Salmi concertati op.6, 1677).

Bassani often designed sections and movements on a larger time scale than did his immediate predecessors but was less able than Corelli to build convincing forms. His harmonic range, well within the conventions of his time, is narrow, and he seems to have been unable in his use of clichés to avoid a certain monotony, which is accentuated by a lack of strong harmonic drive towards cadences. His choruses, in four or five parts, combine homophony and simple, weighty polyphonic writing that frequently includes telling use of suspensions; as in his sonatas, the orchestral accompaniments to these movements display his natural feeling for the violin. The figurations are based on, but emancipated from, the vocal lines, as in similar works by G.P. Colonna, and the voices are thus given a sonorous halo without the competition of counter-melodies. The writing for solo voices in these works is characteristic of the ‘instrumental’ approach of the period: the precise mechanical patterns, usually in semiquavers, demand vocal agility and brilliance but lack the elegant contours found in, for example, Neapolitan opera.

WORKS

operas

dm	drama per musica

L'amorosa preda di Paride (dm, 3), Bologna, Publico, 1683

Falarido tiranno d'Agrigento (dm, 3, A. Morselli), Venice, S Angelo, 1685

L'Alarico Rè de' Goti (dm, 3), Ferrara, Conte Pinamonte Bonacossi, Feb 1685

Vitige [Rè de'Vandali] (dm, 3), Ferrara, Feb 1686

Agrippina in Baia (scherzo drammatico, G. Contri), Ferrara, 1687

Gli amori alla moda (scherzo melodrammatico, 3), Ferrara, Bonacossi, 1688, 10 arias in I-MOe

Il trionfo di Venere in Ida (melodramma), Ferrara, 1688

La Ginerva, infanta di Scozia (dm, 3, G.C. Grazzini, after L. Ariosto), Ferrara, Bonacossi, 1690

Le vicende di Cocceio Nerva (dm, 3), Ferrara, Bonacossi, 1691

Gl'amori tra gl'odii, o sia Il Ramiro in Norvegia (dm, 3, M.A. Rimena), Verona, 1693

Roderico, Ferrara, 1696

L'Alarico (F. Silvani), Padua, 1709

Armida al campo, Ferrara, 1711

oratorios

L'Esaltazione di S Croce (F. Berni), Ferrara, 7 April 1675

L'Epulone, Modena, 1675

La tromba della divina misericordia (G.B. Rosselli), 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, insts, Modena, 1676; MOe Mus.G.14

L'amore ingeniero, Mirandola, 1678

Il mistico Roveto (L. Lotti), Mirandola, 1681

Il Davide punito overo La pestilente strage d'Israele (G.V. Snodelli), Bologna, 10 Dec 1682

La morte delusa dal pietoso suffragio (A. Ambrosini), 5 solo vv, chorus 4vv, insts, Ferrara, 1686; MOe; perf. as Nella luna eclissata dal Cristiano valore, Codigoro, 1687, and as La Pietà trionfante della morte, Ferrara 1692 and 1697

Il Giona (Ambrosini), 5vv, vns, va ad lib, Modena, 1689; MOe

Mosè risorto dalle acque, Ferrara, 1694; FEc Cl.I.n.675 (1696 version)

Il conte di Bacheville (F. Frosini), Pistoia, 1696

Susanna, Ferrara, 1697

Gl'impegni del divino amore nel transito della Beata Caterina Vegri detta di Bologna, Ferrara, 1703

Il trionfo della Fede, Ferrara, 1704

La morte delusa, ?orat, Milan, 1703; collab. G.B. Brevi, G.A. Perti, G. Bononcini, A. Scarlatti

masses

op.

18	[3] Messe concertate, 5 solo vv, chorus 5vv, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, org (Bologna, 1698)
20	Messa per li defonti concertata, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 va, vle/ theorbo, org (Bologna, 1698)
—	Acroama missale, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, va, 3 trbn, org, bc (Augsburg, 1709); 6 masses, 3 of these in op.32 without trbn pts.
32	[4] Messe concertate, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, va, org, bc (Bologna, 1710)
—	4 other masses and fragments, GB-Lcm; D-Bsb, Dmb, listed in EitnerQ

other sacred works

—	Il trionfo dell'amor divino (Rosselli), sacra rappresentazione, Bologna, 1682 [same lib as the orat La tromba della divina misericordia]
8	Metri sacri resi armonici, in [12] motetti, 1v, 2 vn, bc (Bologna, 1690)
9	Armonici entusiasmi di Davide overo salmi concertati, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, va, bc (org) (Venice, 1690)
10	[6] Salmi di compieta, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, va/vle, bc (org) (Venice, 1691)
11	Concerti sacri, [12] motetti, 1–4vv, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, bc (org) (Bologna, 1692)
12	[12] Motetti, 1v, 2 vn ad lib, bc (org) (Venice, 1692)
13	Armonie festive o siano [6] motetti, 1v, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, bc (org) (Bologna, 1693)
—	Motetti per concerti ecclesiastici, 5–12vv (Venice, 1698); listed by Eitner
21	Salmi concertati, 3–5 solo vv, chorus 3–5vv, 2 vn, bc (org) (Bologna, 1699)
22	Lagrime armoniche ò sià Il Vespro de defonti, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, va/vle, bc (org) (Venice, 1699)
23	Le note lugubri, Concertate ne Responsorij dell'Ufficio de Morti, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 va, va/vle, bc (org) (Venice, 1700)
24	Davidde armonico, espresso ne' [6] salmi, 2–4vv, 2 vn, bc (org) (Venice, 1700)
25	[8] Completorij concenti, 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, bc (org) (Bologna, 1701)
26	[4] Antifone sacre … e 2 Tantum ergo, 1v, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, bc (org) (Bologna, 1701)
27	[8] Motetti sacri, 1v, 2 vn, vle/theorbo, bc (org) (Bologna, 1701)
30	Salmi per tutti l'anno, 8vv, vle/theorbo, 2 org (Bologna, 1704)
—	Cantata pastorale (F. della Volpe), 2 vv, insts, Imola ?(Ferrara, 1707)
—	76 services, most 4 solo vv, chorus 4vv, bc (vle), some with 4 vn, va, 1710–12, I-FEd (8 vols., 3 lost); listed in Cavicchi
—	Several sacred works in Bc, MOe, PAc, US-Wc

secular vocal

2	L'armonia delle sirene, [10] cantate amorose, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1680)
3	Il cigno canoro, [10] cantate amorose, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1682)
—	Promoteo liberato (introduzione alla Festa popolare, G.A. Bergamori), Bologna, 24 Aug 1683
4	La moralità armonica, [12] cantate, 2–3vv, vle, bc (Bologna, 1683)
6	Affetti canori, [6] cantate et [6] ariette, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1684)
—	Tributi dell'Eridano, cant, 4vv, insts, Ferrara, 1687
7	Eco armonica delle muse, [12] cantate amorose, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1688)
—	Tributi de Parnaso (macchina musicale, G.C. Grazzini), Ferrara, 1688
—	L'Immortalità trionfante, et il Tevere inconsolabile (intramezzo musicale, A.F. Antonini), Ferrara, 1689
14	Amorosi sentimenti, 1v, bc (Venice, 1693)
15	Armoniche fantasie di [6] cantate amorose, 1v, bc (Venice, 1694)
16	La musa armonica, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1695)
17	La sirena amorosa, 1v, 2 vn, vle, bc (org) (Venice, 1699)
19	Languidezze amorose, [12] cantate, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1698)
28	Cantate amorose, 1v, bc (Bologna, 1701)
29	Corona di fiori musicali, tessuta d' [24] ariette, 1v, 2 vn, vc (Bologna, 1702)
31	[12] Cantate et arie amorose, 1v, 2 vn, bc (Bologna, 1703)

instrumental

1	[12] Balletti, correnti, gighe e sarabande, vn, vn ad lib, vle/spinet (Bologna, 1677)
5	[12] Sinfonie, 2 vn, vc, bc (org) (Bologna, 1683), autograph score in US-Wc
—	Sonata, 2 vn, bc (org) 1680⁷
—	Several sonatas and organ works in later anthologies listed in Haselbach and DBI (A. Cavicchi)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

DBI (A. Cavicchi)

EitnerQ

FétisB

HawkinsH

MGG1 (H. Engel)

NewmanSBE

RicciTB

SartoriB

SchmidlD

Documents and letters, I-Bc, FEc, FEd, FEanotarile

G.B. Martini: ‘Serie cronologica de'principi dell'Accademia de' filarmonici de Bologna’, Diario bolognese (Bologna, 1776)

F. Pasini: ‘Notes sur la vie de Giovanni Battista Bassani’, SIMG, vii (1905–6), 581–6

U. Rolandi: ‘Opere e oratori di G.B. Bassani’, La scuola veneziana (secoli XVI–XVIII): noti e documenti, Chigiana, iii (1941), 32–4

R. Haselbach: Giovanni Battista Bassani (Kassel, 1955)

A. Cavicchi: ‘L'attività ferrarese di Giovanni Battista Bassani’, Chigiana, xxiii, new ser. iii (1966), 43–58

P. Allsop: The Italian ‘Trio’ Sonata From its Origins Until Corelli (Oxford, 1992), 15, 52

V. Crowther: The Oratorio in Modena (Oxford, 1992)

J. Riepe: ‘Überlegungen zur Funktion des italienischen Oratoriums im letzten drittel des 17. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Giovanni Legrenzis Sedecia und La caduta di Gerusalemme von Giovanni Paolo Colonna’, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi su G. Legrenzi [Venice and Clusone 1990], ed. F. Passadore and F. Rossi (Florence, 1994), 605–42

PETER SMITH/MARC VANSCHEEUWIJCK

Bassani, Orazio [Orazio della Viola]

(b Cento, c1550; d 8 Nov 1615). Italian instrumentalist and composer. Bassani was a renowned virtuoso of the viola bastarda. He entered the service of the Farnese court at Parma as a viola player on 1 November 1574. His service there was interrupted by a brief period with Cardinal Farnese in Rome in 1583. During the 1580s and 90s the courts of Mantua and Ferrara tried vigorously but unsuccessfully to lure Bassani to their own music establishments. Upon the death of Ottario Farnese in October 1586, Bassani was called to the service of Alessandro Farnese in Brussels, with an annual pension of 300 gold scudi. Upon the death of Alessandro Farnese in 1592, he returned to Parma and the service of Duke Ranuccio Farnese, who commissioned Agostino Caracci to paint the portrait of Bassani now in the Museo nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples. After returning to Rome again in 1599, Bassani returned a final time to Parma, where he remained until his death. A brother, Cesare, and a nephew, Francesco Maria, were also musicians in Parma. Bassani, a charter member of the Accademia degli Intrepidi at Ferrara (founded in 1601), was particularly admired for his ornamented versions of famous madrigals for solo viola bastarda. His place in the history of late 16th-century diminution, and particularly his relationship to Merulo, Luzzaschi and Monteverdi (who came to Mantua as a viol player), may be significant.

WORKS

Several pieces, va bastarda, 1626¹⁴; authorship questionable, attrib. in Sartori

Madrigal, 5vv, 1591¹⁰, 1605⁹

Arr. madrigals, toccatas, GB-Lbl, I-Bc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Cavicchi)

GaspariC

NewcombMF

SartoriB

E.T. Ferand: Die Improvisation in Beispielen aus neun Jahrhunderten abendlandischer Musik (Cologne, 1956, 2/1961; Eng. trans., 1961)

V. Gutmann: ‘Viola bastarda: Instrument oder Diminutionspraxis?’, AMw, xxxv (1978), 178–209

J. Paras: The Music for Viola Bastarda (Bloomington, IN, 1986)

O. Fabris: Andrea Falconieri napoletano (Rome, 1987)

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

Bassano [Bassani, Piva].

Italian family of musicians, instrument makers and composers, active in England. The family (see illustration) originated in Bassano del Grappa, about 65 km north-west of Venice, where they were known as Piva. Jeronimo [Gieronymo, Hieronymus] (i) (d ?Venice, ?1546–50), the founder of the musical dynasty, is first recorded in a contract of his father's dated 24 March 1481; in February 1502 he and his eldest son Jacomo [Jacopo] (b ? Bassano, before 1488; d Venice, 1559–66) were engaged to tune the organs in the churches of Bassano. They seem to have made the move from Bassano to Venice shortly afterwards. Jeronimo was apparently the ‘Ser Jheronimo trombon’ who worked in the trombe e piffari of the Doge of Venice around 1506–12. Numerous documents call him ‘maestro’, probably indicating the leader of an ensemble or an instrument maker. Lorenzo Marucini (1577) describes him as ‘inventor of a new bass wind instrument’ and ‘most excellent pifaro’. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that Jeronimo was a Jew. Although he and his descendants passed for Christians, they retained some Jewish consciousness into the early 17th century and may well have been practising Judaism in secret. The family coat of arms, on which are displayed three silkworm moths and a mulberry tree, implies that the family had at some time been engaged in silk farming, a trade which the Jews introduced into Italy.

Jeronimo had six sons. At least five were wind players; most or all were also instrument makers. Alvise (d London, 15–31 Aug 1554) worked for the Scuola di San Marco, Venice, in 1515, and the Concerto Palatino in Bologna between 1519 and 1521. He and his brothers Jasper [Gasparo] (bur. London, 8 May 1577), John [Zuane] (d Venice, Sept–Dec 1570) and Anthony [Antonio] (i) (bur. London, 19 Oct 1574) served in the sackbut consort at the English court in 1531 but soon went back to Venice. Anthony returned to England in 1538 and was appointed ‘maker of divers instruments’ to the court. His brother Jacomo came with him but was not appointed to the court and apparently went back to Venice between 1542 and 1545. His descendants formed the Venetian branch of the family; (4) Giovanni Bassano was his grandson. Alvise, Jasper and John emigrated to England in 1539–40 with Baptista (bur. London, 11 April 1576); they and Anthony were appointed ‘brothers in the art or science of music’ to the court, and Anthony gave up his position as instrument maker. In 1531 the brothers had used the surname ‘de Jeronimo’; on their return to England they adopted Bassani or Bassano, and later generations used Bassano exclusively.

The five brothers in England formed a consort of ‘recorders’, which may have played other instruments including an early version of the mixed consort of Elizabethan times. Seven of their descendants also served in the recorder consort: Alvise's sons (1) Augustine and (2) Lodovico, Anthony's sons Arthur (b London, 31 Oct 1547; bur. London, 10 Sept 1624), Edward (i) (b London, 19 Oct 1551; bur. London, 25 May 1615) and (3) Jeronimo (ii), Arthur's son Anthony (ii) (b London, 15 Oct 1579; bur. London, 22 Apr 1658) and Jeronimo (ii)'s son Henry (bap. London, 8 April 1597; bur. London, 29 Aug 1665). Henry also served in the sackbut consort, as did three other Bassanos: Anthony (i)'s sons Mark Anthony (b London, 10 Jan 1546/7; d London, 11 Sep 1599) and Andrea (b London, 12 Aug 1554; bur. Horne, Surrey, 3 Aug 1626) and Jeronimo (ii)'s son Edward (ii) (bap. London, 28 Dec 1588; d London, 22 Oct 1638). Andrea's probable son Thomas (?bap. London, 27 Feb 1589; bur. London, 29 Sept 1617) apparently served in the flute consort, and Anthony (ii) deputized in it. Jeronimo (ii)'s son Scipio (bap. London, 11 Dec 1586; d London, 26 Nov 1613) probably served in the viol consort.

Besides Anthony (i), Alvise also made instruments, and John had a ‘fraterna Compagnia’ (brotherly company) with his instrument-making brother Jacomo in Venice and perhaps Anthony and Jasper. An inventory made about 1571 by Johann Jakob Fugger, superintendent of the music at the Bavarian court, of a chest of ‘beautiful and good’ instruments ‘made by the Bassani brothers’ in London lists 45 wind instruments: six unidentified (perhaps bombards, quiet shawms or bassanelli), seven Pfeiffen (perhaps flutes), ten cornetts and a fife considered as a set, twelve crumhorns and nine recorders, all tuned to organ pitch; an accompanying letter mentions a chest of six large viols and a chest of three lutes. The Bassanos presumably also made some of the instruments in the inventories of Henry VIII's collection (1542 and 1547). Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, bought shawms from Anthony in 1539. Another Fugger, Raimund, an Augsburg banker, listed a case of 27 recorders ‘made in England’, presumably by the Bassanos, in 1566.

The making, and particularly the repairing, of instruments was continued by the next generation. It was probably Arthur, who bequeathed instruments and tools to Anthony (ii) in his will, who sold ‘rare wind instruments’ (apparently cornetts) to Brussels. Andrea jointly held (with Robert Henlake, then Edward Norgate) the office of keeper and repairer of keyboard and wind instruments at the court from 1603 until his death in 1626. Only Anthony (ii) of the succeeding generation seems to have made instruments. It was probably he who made the famous large recorders depicted in Marin Mersenne's Harmonie universelle (1636) which ‘have been sent from England to one of our kings’; Mersenne also apparently knew the Bassanos' crumhorns.

Jacomo's daughter Orsetta married a wind-instrument maker named Santo Griti; Ongaro (1985, 1992) plausibly speculates that he changed his name to Santo Bassano (d Venice, 3 Dec 1586). Santo and Jacomo entered into a business partnership with three musicians of the Doge in 1559, in which the latter became in effect their salesmen in return for a large loan; the agreement mentions cornetts, crumhorns, curtals, flutes, recorders and shawms. Santo took out a patent in 1582 to make and sell a new wind instrument, almost certainly the Bassanelli (although it may well have been invented by Jeronimo (i)).

The maker's mark of the Bassanos has been the subject of much speculation. Lasocki (1983, 1985, 1995) surmised that it was what has hitherto been called the ‘rabbit's foot’ mark found on more than 120 surviving woodwind instruments (cornetts, crumhorns, curtals, flutes, recorders and shawms), and that this mark in fact represents silkworm moths, as found on the family coat of arms. Kirk, building on this theory, suggests that the single mark was used by Jeronimo (i), the double mark by his Venetian descendants (Jacomo and Santo), and the triple mark by the English branch, especially Arthur and Anthony (ii). The HIER.S mark, found on 31 instruments may also belong to the family.

Through instrument-making and business connections the English branch kept up with Venice and made several documented visits there, presumably acting as one of the conduits through which Italian music came to England. Bassano daughters married other court musicians: Ambrosio Grasso, Joseph Lupo, Alphonso Lanier and Nicholas Lanier (i). There is no evidence that the family was related to the Venetian painter Jacopo Bassano (also known as Jacopo or Giacomo da Ponte).

(2) Lodovico [Lodouick] Bassano [Bassany]

(3) Jeronimo [Jerome] Bassano (ii)

(4) Giovanni [Zanetto, Zuane] Bassano [Bassani]

DAVID LASOCKI (introduction, 1–3); DENIS ARNOLD/FABIO FERRACCIOLI (4)

(1) Augustine [Agustino] Bassano

(bur. London, 24 Oct 1604). Wind player and composer. He was appointed to the recorder consort on 18 April 1551 with effect from 25 March 1550. He became a denizen of England on 17 March 1545, presumably having been born in Venice before 1530. In his will he made a bequest of four lutes, but the evidence that he played the instrument at court, as some authors have suggested, is equivocal. A pavan and galliard, probably written as consort music as early as 1550, survive in arrangements for keyboard (GB-Rro Trumbull Add.6), bandora (Cu Dd.2.11) and lute (Lbl Add.29485). Some other pieces are in the style of the third quarter of the 16th century: two six-part pavans by ‘A.B.’, probably Augustine (US-NH Filmer A16/a–c, GB-Cfm 734); and two pavans and two galliards for five-part consort as well as a ‘galliard’ (more likely a corant) headed ‘Aug Bassano set by P.P.’, presumably arranged by Peter Philips from a lute piece (Lbl Eg.3665). Three allmandes for six-part consort by ‘A.B.’ (Cfm 734) are probably late works of Augustine's.

(2) Lodovico [Lodouick] Bassano [Bassany]

(bur. London, 18 July 1593). Wind player and composer, brother of (1) Augustine Bassano. He was appointed to the recorder consort on 22 July 1569 with effect from the previous 29 September, although he had been serving unofficially since his father's death in August 1554. He married ‘Elizabeth Damon’ (probably a daughter of William Daman) on 13 November 1592. Lodovico may be the composer of three surviving lute pieces. A ‘Pavan Helena. Lo[dovico?]’ is found in Cu Dd.2.11. ‘A pavan … mr Lodwick’ is in Lbl Add.31392 and also anonymously in Lbl Add.38539 and in Cu Dd.2.11 with the instruction ‘4 leaves turn back for the galliard’. In the plague year 1593 he died of ‘a thought’, apparently serious depression.

(3) Jeronimo [Jerome] Bassano (ii)

(b London, 11 March 1559; bur. Waltham Abbey, Essex, 22 Aug 1635). Wind and viol player and composer, cousin of (1) Augustine Bassano and (2) Lodovico Bassano. He was appointed to the recorder consort on 29 January 1579 with effect from the previous 25 March. He served actively until at least 1630, when he was described as ‘the ancientist musition the King hath’. In 1609–13 he also received three payments (one as ‘Musycon for the vyoll de Gambo’) for viol strings provided for court service; therefore he was probably serving unofficially in the newly developed viol consort. He acquired considerable property – enough to merit the title ‘Esquire’ – in Hoxton and Waltham Abbey, Essex. Two six-part galliards (US-NH Filmer A16/a-c), four skilful five-part fantasias (GB-Och 716–720, Lcm 1145), and a six-part fantasia and two wordless madrigals (Cfm 734) probably all date from the third quarter of the 16th century. Three six-part almandes by ‘J.B.’ (Cfm 734) are probably Jeronimo's works from around 1600.

(4) Giovanni [Zanetto, Zuane] Bassano [Bassani]

(b ?Venice, 1560/61; d Venice, 16 Aug 1617). Wind player and composer, second cousin of (3) Jeronimo Bassano (ii). In May 1576 he was appointed one of the six ‘pifferi del doge’, a group of instrumentalists placed directly under the authority of the Venetian doge; he was then ‘a very young man’ of 15 or 16, which explains his appearance under the diminutive ‘Zanetto’ in the earliest documents. Indeed, he may well have been the Zanetto who was appointed a boy chorister at S Marco in early 1572; this would help explain his appointment in 1583 as singing teacher to the seminary of S Marco, a post normally reserved for singers. He published his manual of ornamentation two years later. In 1586 he was nominated by the Augustinian friars of S Stefano to provide instrumentalists when required for the convent church. He succeeded Girolamo Dalla Casa as head of the instrumental ensemble at the basilica in 1601; he remained in this post until his death. He was mentioned in 1612 as leader of one of the many companies of instrumentalists who were periodically engaged to play during major festivities in the various parish and monastic churches of Venice. His age at the time of his death (in the parish of S Maurizio) is stated in the necrology as 56.

Bassano is today largely known for his instruction book (1585) and for his examples of embellished motets, madrigals and chansons by Willaert, Clemens non Papa, Crecquillon, Lasso, Rore, Striggio, Palestrina and Marenzio (1591), several examples of which are published in Erig. His method was to decorate continuously a contrapuntal line, which thus stands out from its fellows to form an unequal relationship, obviously akin to that of solo and accompaniment. The actual ornaments are, however, much more rigid than those of the monodists of the following decades, since the music must still obey the criteria of polyphony, and the rhythms of the various figures are thus quite regular. Although Bassano’s collections contain no compositions by his Venetian contemporaries, the similarities between his embellishments and the highly florid works later published by Giovanni Gabrieli suggest that the latter was applying a practice well known in virtuoso circles since the 1580s and probably earlier. Gabrieli’s Canzona in echo (Sacrae symphoniae, i, 1597), probably written for Bassano to play, shows the application of his virtuoso ornamental lines to concertante music in a most forward-looking manner.

Bassano was also a composer of some talent. Some of his charming canzonettas were known (probably through his London cousins) to Morley, who printed them in his Canzonets or Little Short Songs to Foure Voyces (London, 1597). The first volume of his motets was dedicated to the governing body of S Marco, and the music doubtless partly reflects his activities there, but it is also likely that some of the motets were conceived for performance on the major feast days in the other churches of Venice. The works are for cori spezzati, less intense than those of Giovanni Gabrieli but brighter in sonority in the manner of Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli. Dic, Maria, nobis (1599) is especially attractive with strong rhythms and lively use of the upper voices, much as in the early works of Schütz (who probably knew his music).

WORKS

all published in Venice

sacred

Motetti per concerti ecclesiastici, 5–8, 12vv (1598; b (org) pubd separately, 1599)

Concerti ecclesiastici, libro secondo, 5–8, 12vv (1599)

secular

Fantasie per cantar et sonar con ogni sorte d’istrumenti (1585)

Canzonette, 4vv (1587)

Il fiore dei capricci musicali per sonar con ogni sorte di stromenti, 4vv (1588)

Madrigali et canzonette concertate per potersi cantare con il basso & soprano nel liuto & istrumento da pena, con passaggi a ciascuna parte … libro primo (1602)

instruction manual and arrangements

Ricercate, passaggi et cadentie per potersi esercitar nel diminuir terminatamente con ogni sorte d’istrumento (1585)

Motetti, madrigali et canzone francese di diversi eccellenti autori, 4–6vv (1591)

1. The modern instrument and reed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, iii, iv, vi-viii

BDECM

M. Kuhn: Die Verzierungs-Kunst in der Gesangs-Musik des 16.–17. Jahrhunderts (1535–1650) (Leipzig, 1902)

B. Wallner: ‘Ein Instrumentenverzeichnis aus dem 16. Jh.’, Festschrift zum 50. Geburtstag Adolf Sandberger (Munich, 1918), 275–86

I. Horsley: ‘Improvised Embellishments in the Performance of Renaissance Polyphonic Music’, JAMS, iv (1951), 3–19

T. Dart: ‘The Repertory of the Royal Wind Music’, GSJ, xi (1958), 70–77

J. Izon: ‘Italian Musicians at the Tudor Court’, MQ, xliv (1958), 329–37

H.M. Brown: Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music (London, 1975)

E. Selfridge-Field: ‘Bassano and the Orchestra of St Mark's’, EMc, iv (1976), 152–8

R. Erig: Italienische Diminutionen (Zürich, 1979)

J. Glixon: Music at the Venetian ‘Scuole Grandi’, 1440–1540 (diss., Princeton U., 1979)

E. Selfridge-Field: ‘Venetian Instrumentalists in England: a Bassano Chronicle’, Studi musicali, viii (1979), 173–221

D. Bryant: Liturgy, Ceremonial and Sacred Music in Venice at the Time of the Counter-Reformation (diss., U. of London, 1981)

D. Lasocki: Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540–1740 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1983)

R. Prior: ‘Jewish Musicians in Tudor England’, MQ, lxix (1983), 253–65

D. Lasocki: ‘The Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family as Instrument Makers and Repairers’, GSJ, xxxviii (1985), 112–32

G. Ongaro: ‘16th-Century Venetian Wind Instrument Makers and their Clients’, EMc, xiii (1985), 391–7

D. Kirk: ‘Cornetti and Renaissance Pitch Standards in Italy and Germany’, Journal de musique ancienne, x/4 (1989), 16–22

G. Ongaro: ‘Gli inizi della musica strumentale a San Marco’, Giovanni Legrenzi e la cappella ducale di San Marco: Venice and Clusone 1990, 215–26

G. Ongaro: ‘New Documents on the Bassano Family’, EMc, xx (1992), 409–13

D. Lasocki with R. Prior: The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (Aldershot, 1995)

E. Quaranta: Oltre San Marco: organizzazione e prassi della musica nelle chiese di Venezia nel Rinascimento (Florence, 1998), 83, 179, 382

A. Ruffatti: ‘La famiglia Piva-Bassano nei documenti degli archivi di Bassano del Grappa’, Musica e storia, vi (1998), 349–67

Bassany, Lodovico.

See Bassano family, (2).

Bass-bar

(Fr. barre; Ger. Bassbalken; It. catena).

In bowed string instruments, a strip of wood glued to the underside of the belly beneath the bass foot of the bridge. It is of vital importance to the acoustical function of the instrument, and is complemented by the soundpost which is placed close to the treble bridge-foot. In modern practice, the bass-bar runs for three-quarters of the length of the belly, and is made from spruce carefully matched to that of the belly. It is fitted slightly within the outer edge of the bridge foot, and set at a slight angle to the centre line of the instrument, determined by the proportions of the upper and lower bouts. It is deepest at the centre, generally about 12 mm in a violin, and tapers towards the ends, being on average 265 mm long and 6 mm wide. The glued surface is fitted to the curves of the belly, although some luthiers shape it to a slightly tighter radius than the belly itself, known as ‘springing’, providing a certain amount of stress within the structure when glued in place. An undersized or badly positioned bar cannot provide sufficient stiffness to the front of the instrument and results in a dull, unfocussed sound (particularly in the bass register) and, in extreme cases, deformation and eventual collapse of the arching. Conversely, an oversized bar can stifle the sound, making the instrument unresponsive.

The bass-bar developed as a way of making bowed instruments more responsive by allowing the belly to be made thinner yet still be strong enough where it is needed to withstand the downward pressure of the strings. A painting by Raphael (Allegory of St Cecilia, c1514–16; see Viol, fig.7) shows an early viol with an enormously thick belly, which would presumably have had a rather limited sound. Early instruments were made with the bass-bar carved integrally with the belly rather than glued in separately, often in a central position. This practice continued in some areas outside the classical Italian tradition well into the 18th century, although with the bar closer to the modern position near the bass foot of the bridge. At what point the bass-bar migrated away from the centre is not clear. A bass viol from the late 16th century with a central bar is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, ascribed to Gasparo da Salò of Brescia, but the earliest violin bass-bar recorded is from 1621, made by the brothers Antonio and Girolamo Amati in Cremona, and was separately fitted in the offset position.

Early bass-bars were fairly small. The 1621 example is some 5 mm lower than modern practice and 1·5 mm narrower, although it is slightly longer than a modern bar. Bass-bars from early 18th-century violins are shorter than the 1621 model, but with the same height and width and are generally flat along the length. By the late 18th century the bar acquired more mass and a ‘hump-backed’ shape, and this tendency continued into the 20th century, following the increased demands for projection and depth of sound in modern concert performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.H., A.F., and A.E. Hill: Antonio Stradivari: His Life and Work (London, 1902/R, 2/1909/R)

D.D. Boyden: Catalogue of the Hill Collection of Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1969)

J. Beamont: The Violin Explained: Components, Mechanism, Sound (Oxford, 1997)

JOHN DILWORTH

Bass-baritone

(Ger. Bassbariton, Hoher Bass).

A male voice combining the compass and attributes of the bass and the baritone (see Bass (ii) and Baritone (i)). The term follows the German Bassbariton, and the voice itself is particularly associated with the German 19th-century upward development of the bass range. Wagner called the bass-baritone ‘Hoher Bass’ and first used the term to designate the roles of Wotan, Alberich, Donner and Fasolt in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. These, as well as Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger) and the Dutchman, require a powerful upper register for phrases in the baritone range e to f', but also numerous phrases in the range A to a requiring the resonance of a bass. The special attribute of this voice type, however, lies less in its range than in the full and powerful sound required at the extremes of the tessitura. Basses with even wider ranges are well known from much earlier periods (for example, John Gostling and Antonio Montagnana), but these used falsetto in the highest registers. Although associated primarily with Wagnerian and later roles, earlier operatic precedents with similar demands include Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni, Pizarro in Fidelio and Caspar in Der Freischütz. Another bass-baritone part is that of Elijah in Mendelssohn’s oratorio.

OWEN JANDER/ELLEN T. HARRIS

Bassbrechung

(Ger.).

In Schenkerian analysis, the Arpeggiation (ii) of the bass; the lower part of the Ursatz.

Bass clarinet

(Fr. clarinette basse; Ger. Bassklarinette; It. clarone).

A member of the clarinet family (see Clarinet), generally pitched in B, an octave below the soprano clarinet (it is classified as an Aerophone). Its range is usually extended to E (usually written e; sounding D) on French and English instruments, D (written d; sounding C) on German instruments, and there is a growing tendency to use instruments extended to C (written c; sounding B') in the manner of the basset-horn. The upward extension of the range is even less well standardized; the composers who established the instrument’s position in the modern orchestra were more interested in exploiting its full and fruity chalumeau register than in its upper reaches.

Many late 19th-century orchestral parts use only about two and a half octaves of the range; many bass clarinets are constructed on the premise that this limited range is expected. However, as a solo instrument the bass clarinet has as great a range as the soprano; many of the compositions dedicated to the Czech virtuoso Josef Horák cover four octaves or more.

Technically, the instrument has similar characteristics to the soprano clarinet. In the lower register, the attack is not so effective, for which reason its use in combination with the harp, favoured by the Second Viennese School (as at the opening of Berg’s Violin Concerto), is very successful. Particularly striking is the ease with which a wide dynamic range is achieved; in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (the end of the exposition of the first movement, bar 160) a passage for the bassoon, marked pppppp (following a downward clarinet arpeggio), is in practice often given over to the bass clarinet, which achieves this dynamic with ease.

1. History.

Apart from the instruments discussed under Chalumeau, the earliest extant bass clarinet is probably that by Anton and Michael Mayrhofer of Passau (Musikinstrumentenmuseum in Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, 52.50; see Young (1980), pl.244). This remarkable instrument is curved in the manner of the better known basset-horns by the same makers, but with an additional 360° section at the lower end. Like contemporary basset-horns, it possesses a key for c (sounding B'), but not for d (sounding C). It seems possible that the 360° section at the bottom, which carries the lowest tone hole, was replaceable by a shorter section to give d (sounding C) instead.

Better known is the bass clarinet by Heinrich Grenser, dated 1793 (see illustration), and the similar example dated 1795 by his uncle August Grenser (i) (Darmstadt, Kg 67:133). These finely made instruments are pitched in B, with nine keys, and descend to written B (sounding A'). The keywork is diatonic from e down and there are two thumb-holes, in the manner of the bassoon of that period. It seems not unlikely that the instrument was intended to replace the bassoon in military bands. Several other 19th-century bass clarinets may have been devised for the same purpose: some, like the Grenser example, were built in a doubled-up form like the bassoon, and several had a compass to c or B. Among the early models were the straight bass clarinet of Desfontanelles of Lisieux (Musée de la Musique, Paris, no.1136); the basse guerrière of Dumas, Paris, 1807; the basse-orgue of Sautermeister, Lyons, 1812; the bassoon-shaped ‘patent clarion’ by George Catlin of Hartford, Connecticut, c1810; the bass clarinet of J.H.G. Streitwolf, Göttingen, 1828, and the bassoon-shaped Glicibarifono of Catterini, Padua. The modern instrument owes a great deal both to Adolphe Sax and to Buffet jeune (see Clarinet, §II, 4(iii)). Musically, the history of the bass clarinet may be said to start with the important part assigned to it in Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836); the Act 5 solo employs a range from e to g'''. In the same year Neukomm composed a setting of verses from Psalm lxx for ‘a counter-tenor-Lady’s voice, with the bass clarionet concertant’. The part for bass clarinet in C, which descends to written c, was played in its first performance by Thomas Lindsay Willman, very likely on an instrument by George Wood; although no specimen of Wood’s bass clarinet is known, his published fingering chart for the instrument shows it to have been a bassoon-shaped model with a claimed chromatic range of four octaves and a whole tone.

From the later 19th century the bass clarinet figured frequently in orchestral scores; Mahler, Wagner, Schoenberg and Stravinsky used it regularly. In smaller combinations it was used particularly extensively by Webern, in preference to the bassoon. Occasionally two were specified (Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring).

2. Notation.

Many of the early bass clarinets were pitched in C, as they were intended as replacements for bassoons rather than as additional members of the wind section. With the instrument’s increased acceptance in the orchestra, bass clarinets in B and A became more popular, although instruments in C were made into the 20th century. Many 19th-century composers assumed that the bass clarinet player would alternate between instruments in B and A according to the key of the music. The long bass clarinet solo in Bartók’s Suite for Orchestra op.4 was originally scored for an instrument pitched in A. With the widespread lowering of pitch standards to a' = 440, very few players or opera houses saw the need to retain the instrument in A, which may now be said to be extinct along with its companion in C.

There are several current conventions regarding notation for the bass clarinet. The so-called ‘French system’ is generally preferred by players: in this the part is written entirely in the treble clef, to sound a 9th lower than written. As players are accustomed to handling a number of different-sized clarinets with similar key layout (Mahler, in his Fifth Symphony, expects one player to play six different instruments), this system is the most convenient, as no adjustment of fingering relative to notation is needed.

The so-called ‘German system’ (used by Wagner and Janáček, for example) uses both clefs, but mainly the bass clef, the notes sounding (for the B instrument) a whole tone lower than written. In the treble clef this runs counter to the player’s instincts; in an attempt to avoid confusion, some composers change to a 9th transposition when using the treble clef. This may be compared with Mozart’s practice (e.g. ka91/516c and ka581) of writing for the lower notes of the basset clarinet in the bass clef, to sound a 7th above the written notes, and with his notation for the horn and basset-horn. Schoenberg notated a few bass clarinet parts in C, perhaps feeling that to specify an instrument in B (or A) carried undesirable implications of tonality. More recently this practice has been revived, possibly because of the chromaticism of present-day music, or simply to avoid the trouble and expense of copying parts in the proper manner.

3. Mechanism.

The size of the bass clarinet has always necessitated some difference in keywork from that of its smaller companions. Thus the instrument by Desfontanelles of Lisieux was built with 13 keys in 1807, before the soprano instrument was built with this number. Today the Boehm-system bass clarinet differs in a few respects from the soprano. In part, this is due to the necessity for large tone holes, so that all are covered by plates rather than directly by the fingers, and for a hole spacing wider than can be directly reached by the fingers. In part, it is that the instrument is large enough to accommodate improvements that are applied with less ease to the smaller instrument (and moreover the weight of additional keywork is of little significance since a spike or a sling is always used). Thus several bass clarinets incorporate superior venting in the lower joint. Possibly the most ingenious attempt to apply to a clarinet Boehm’s principles of perfect venting for every note is the bass clarinet by Buffet-Crampon (Galpin Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1968, no.201; Bate Collection, Oxford) which incorporates keywork similar to the Dorus key of the flute, on both the c'/g'' key and the a/e'' key.

The third and most noticeable distinction in bass clarinet keywork concerns the speaker key. The compromise represented by this key, which is required both to define the speaking length of the tube for b' and to remain open for all higher notes in the instrument’s range, becomes more and more unsatisfactory in lower-pitched instruments. It was Sax who first lessened the compromise by providing two speaker keys. One opens a larger hole lower down the instrument, giving a good b' and being satisfactory for several notes above; the second is smaller and closer to the mouthpiece, and serves for all higher notes. Today most bass and alto clarinets, some basset-horns and very few soprano clarinets incorporate this feature. Because of the inconvenience of moving the thumb rapidly from one key to the other while continuing to cover a hole at the same time, various mechanisms have been devised whereby only one touchpiece is used. When the touchpiece is depressed, one hole or another is opened, as determined by some other key. For example, one popular model is so designed that if either the a' key is opened, or the plate controlled by the right-hand third finger is depressed, the lower hole is opened, controlling the notes from b' to e''. The slightly more complex mechanism required by automatic speaker keys is regarded with mistrust by a few players, so that some bass clarinets are still made with two separate touchpieces.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.E. Eliason: ‘George Catlin, Hartford Musical Instrument Maker II’, JAMIS, ix (1983), 21–52

J.H. van der Meer: ‘The Typology and History of the Bass Clarinet’, JAMIS, xiii (1987), 65–88

For further bibliography see Clarinet.

NICHOLAS SHACKLETON

Bass drum.

See Drum, §II, 1.

Basse

(Fr.).

See Bass (ii). See also Euphonium.

Basse chantante

(Fr.: ‘singing bass’).

In the Baroque era a term used to distinguish a vocal bass from an instrumental bass or basso continuo (Brossard, 1703; Walther, 1732; Rousseau, 1768). In the 19th century it came to mean a bass singer with a particularly high or light voice as distinct from a deeper, heavier bass (see Basso profondo and Basse noble). Operatic roles demanding this voice type include Max in Adam’s Le chalet (1834), Lothario in Thomas’s Mignon (1866) and Escamillo in Bizet’s Carmen (1875). The Italian equivalent of this later usage is Basso cantante; see also Baritone (i) and Bass (ii).

OWEN JANDER/ELLEN T. HARRIS

Basse chiffrée

(Fr.).

See Figured bass.

Basse-contre

(Fr.).

A term derived from the Latin ‘contratenor bassus’ (see Contratenor altus), found in 16th-century French sources for the lowest-pitched member of the viol family. In this sense it is synonymous with ‘contrebasse’ and equivalent to the English Double bass. The term has been used also for a bass voice of exceptionally low tessitura.

Basse danse

(Fr.; It. bassadanza).

The principal court dance during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It reached a height of cultivation during the 15th century and disappeared after the middle of the 16th century. The musical practice that grew up around it served as a proving ground for many early instrumental techniques such as improvisations over a ground, variations and the forming of suite-like combinations.

1. Choreography.

While no pre-15th-century documents describing steps and music have been found, the name of the dance was cited as early as 1340 by the troubadour Raimond de Cornet, who wrote of ‘cansos e bassas dansas’. In a poem of about 1415 Alain Chartier described

Ses fais comme la dance basse,
Puis va avant, et puis rapasse,
Puis retourne, puis oultrepasse.

The character of the dance is implicit in its name, which betokened a dance low to the ground, generally lacking the more rapid movements and leaps characteristic of the ‘alta dansa’ or ‘saltarello’. Combination of these two types to form a varied pair can be documented throughout Europe during the late Middle Ages. The classic phase of the form corresponds to the heyday of the Burgundian court under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. The main source preserving the Burgundian repertory is the Brussels Basse Danse manuscript (B-Br 9085), an anonymous treatise with steps and music copied in the late 15th century as a retrospect of several decades. Closely related to it is another version of the same treatise, containing many of the same dances, printed at Paris by Michel de Toulouse in or before 1496 and surviving now by the thread of a single copy in the Royal College of Physicians, London. As presented in these and other French, English and Spanish sources, the dance was performed by couples and employed only five different step-units: R (révérence); b (branle); s (simple, usually found in pairs); d (double) and r (reprise or des marche). These five steps were combined into codified patterns called mesures. Several mesures made up a complete dance, some dances being of six mesures (a total of 62 step-units, as in Le doulz espoir). A typical choreographical structure involved alternation of one mesure with another of different length. The Italian variety, called ‘bassadanza’, was recorded by Italian dancing-masters such as Domenico da Piacenza, Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro and Antonio Cornazano. Their choreographies allowed more freedom in the variety and sequence of steps, and in the number of participants. In these respects the bassadanza approached a still freer form, the ballo, in which various steps and metres were combined (see Ballo, (2)). All sources, northern and southern, laid great stress on lightness and grace of motion, a quality achieved particularly by raising and lowering the body. The resulting effect was wavelike, described by Cornazano as ‘ondegiarre’. During the 16th century the variety of step sequences disappeared from published and manuscript versions of the dance. The choreography gradually ossified into a single pattern with no more than 20 step sequences, called the basse danse commune, to which could be added a final 12 step sequences, called ‘moitié’ by Antonius de Arena, ‘retour’ by Thoinot Arbeau, and ‘recoupe’ in a musical source, Attaingnant’s Dixhuit basses dances of 1530. The French afterdance most commonly appended to the basse danse during the 16th century was called ‘tourdion’, and was characterized by quicker motions such as little leaps.

2. Mensuration.

Only three 15th-century Italian bassadanza ‘tunes’ have been found in the extant treatises, although bassadanza sections exist in many balli. The lack of mensural sigla in the three Italian treatises and in the more than 50 15th-century Burgundian basse danse ‘tunes’ with dance steps generated considerable controversy among musicologists in the first half of the 20th century. Many dance historians have chosen to perform basse danses and bassadanzas in a triple (6/2) metre, using the ‘tune’ as a tenor, around which other musical parts are improvised (see Bukofzer, 1950); this can, however, cause an interesting hemiola effect when the number of dance movements in a step sequence does not correspond with the 6/2 metrical pulses. For example, if the accompaniment consists of six beats, divided usually into 3 + 3, the dancers would have to move in two against the music’s three, a rhythmic skill that may help explain the quaint speech in Domenico’s treatise: ‘I am the bassadanza, queen of measures, and I deserve to wear the crown; few succeed in my employ and those who dance or play me well must perforce be gifted of heaven’. The advent of the basse danse commune brought an end to more than one challenging feature. The sextuple division of the long was changed to a quadruple one, i.e. from six semibreves to four dotted ones. The 15th-century afterdance, called ‘pas de Brabant’ in the north, stood in the relationship of diminution by one half to the main dance, i.e. from 6/1 to 3/1 = 6/2. Cornazano explained the proportions in reverse, saying that the saltarello had three beats, while in the bassadanza ‘every note is doubled, and the three are worth six and the six, twelve’. Italian theory taught two other diminutions: quaternaria in 4/1, called also ‘saltarello tedesco’ and said by Cornazano to be ‘used more by Germans’; and piva, an expression meaning bagpipe, in 12/4 = 6/4 + 6/4. The latter was little used at court, to believe its speech in Domenico’s treatise: ‘I am called piva, and am the saddest of the measures because the peasants employ me’. Cornazano described it as ‘low and vulgar, unsuitable for magnificent persons and dancers of good standing’. Yet it must have had its proponents even so. J.A. Dalza’s variation suites for lute printed at Venice by Petrucci in 1508 consisted of pavana–saltarello–piva. They testify to the practical consequences of the old measure-theory even as the original dance, the ‘queen of the measures’, was passing out of existence in Italy.

Marrocco (1981), however, claimed that the nota senza valore was purposeful, encouraging the dancers and/or musicians to choose a duple or triple metre at will. To be sure, basse danse music published in the 16th century is predominantly in duple metre, and the 16th-century Italian dancing-masters’ choreographies that include ‘bassa’ in their title begin with duple-metre sections and subsequently include a sciolta or gagliarda triple-metre afterdance section.

3. Musical realization.

The cardinal principle of the 15th-century form was that one note of the basse danse tenor corresponded to one complete step-unit. Since every step-unit was of equal duration, lasting three or four seconds in reconstructions by dance historians, there resulted a string of long isometric tones, a cantus firmus constructed to the length of the choreography, which served in performance as the basis for improvised elaborations. Cornazano included three cantus firmi which he labelled ‘Tenori da basse danze et saltarelli’: Re di Spagna (46 notes in length), Cançon de’ pifari dicto el ferrarese (46) and Collinetto (73). They are notated in semibreves. More than 50 different tenors are preserved in the Brussels manuscript and Toulouse’s print ranging in length from 24 to 62 notes. Toulouse contains the sole concordance with Cornazano, its Casulle la novelle (46) corresponding to the famous Spagna tenor. The northern manner of notation was in breves, the blackening of which hinted at the augmentation to longs that players had to make for the basse danse proper. French chansons were a favourite source from which to fashion dance tenors in both Italy and north Europe. The oldest known example of this is Je suis pauvre de liesse (Brussels no.46, 42 notes in length), which was inscribed as a tenor by Noël de Fleurus in some notarial records at Namur dating from 1421–3. The tenors of polyphonic chansons yielded the material for several dance tenors. Much of the vast modern literature on the subject is taken up with such correspondences. Although the source of many dance tenors was in vocal music, their use as dance music was exclusively instrumental. This was made abundantly clear by the Italian masters. Guglielmo counselled the dancers to listen attentively when the instruments begin in order to ascertain which of the two keys, ‘B molle’ (minor) or ‘B quadro’ (major), they employ; and the Italians taught that all performances should begin with preparatory upbeats to lead the dancers into the first step. The most popular dances towards the end of the 15th century were Filles à marier (32 notes in length) and Le petit Rouen (40). This pair inaugurated the Toulouse incunabulum and probably the Brussels manuscript as well, before it was wrongly reassembled in the 19th century. They found their way to England, where their choreographies were written out in the Salisbury Basse Danse manuscript (in Salisbury Cathedral Library) of about 1500 and printed in the Robert Coplande treatise There followeth the manner of dancing base dances (London, 1521). Filles à marier also reached Spain, while Le petit Rouen lived on far into the 16th century as a German Hoftanz. Unlike most tenors in the repertory, these two were built symmetrically in phrases of eight notes. Their periodic nature may provide a clue to their wide dissemination – they were easy to remember. The symmetrical grounds of the 16th-century passamezzo family may be viewed as one offshoot. Signs that the old cantus firmus practice was giving way about 1500 are evident even in the Brussels manuscript. La franchoise nouvelle (24), for instance, takes the form of a melody using a variety of rhythmic values, constructed in short phrases of two longs, each with varied repeat; still reminiscent of the past is the notation in a low register and the division of the long into six semibreves. Tuneful melodies in many small sections with abundant repetitions became the normal accompaniment to the 16th-century form. French chansons remained the favourite model for imitation, especially those of Claudin de Sermisy. The final stage is illustrated in Arbeau’s treatise of 1588: a basse danse commune arranged from Claudin’s Jouyssance vous donneray.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (I. Brainard)

E. Closson, ed.: Le manuscrit dit des basses danses de la Bibliothèque de Bourgogne (Brussels, 1912/R)

O. Kinkeldey: ‘A Jewish Dancing Master of the Renaissance (Guglielmo Ebreo)’, Studies in Jewish Bibliography … in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus (New York, 1929), 329–72 [repr. with suppl., Brooklyn, 1966]

V. Scholderer: Introduction to facs. of L’art et instruction de bien dancer (Michel Toulouze, Paris) (London, 1936)

A. Michel: ‘The Earliest Dance Manuals’, Medievalia et humanistica, iii (1945), 117–31

M.F. Bukofzer: ‘A Polyphonic Basse Dance of the Renaissance’, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New York, 1950), 190–216

O. Gombosi: ‘The Cantus Firmus Dances’, Compositione di Meser Vincenzo Capirola (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1955), pp.xxxvi–lxiii

I. Brainard: Die Choreographie der Hoftänze in Burgund, Frankreich und Italien im 15. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1956)

D. Heartz: ‘The Basse Dance: its Evolution circa 1450 to 1550’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 287–340

O. Kinkeldey: ‘Dance Tunes of the Fifteenth Century’, Instrumental Music: Cambridge, MA, 1957, 3–30, 89–152

E. Southern: ‘Some Keyboard Basse Dances of the Fifteenth Century’, AcM, xxxv (1963), 114–24

D. Heartz: ‘Basse Dances’, Preludes, Chansons and Dances for Lute Published by Pierre Attaingnant (1529–1530) (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1964), pp.xxxi–lxxxvii

J.L. Jackman, ed.: Fifteenth Century Basse Dances, WE, vi (1964)

F. Crane: ‘The Derivation of Some Fifteenth-Century Basse-Danse Tunes’, AcM, xxxvii (1965), 179–88

J.P. Cunningham: Dancing in the Inns of Court (London, 1965)

D. Heartz: ‘A 15th-Century Ballo: Rôti bouilli joyeux’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 359–75

E. Southern: ‘Basse-Dance Music in some German Manuscripts of the 15th Century’, ibid., 738–55

D. Heartz: ‘Hoftanz and Basse Dance’, JAMS, xix (1966), 13–36

F. Crane: Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse (New York, 1968) [incl. extensive bibliography]

R. Meylan: L’énigme de la musique des basses danses du quinzième siècle (Berne, 1968) [incl. extensive bibliography, classified according to primary and secondary sources]

I. Brainard: The Art of Courtly Dancing in the Early Renaissance, ii: The Practice of Courtly Dancing (West Newton, MA, 1981)

W. Marrocco: Inventory of 15th Century Bassedanze, Balli & Balletti in Italian Dance Manuals (New York, 1981)

Y. Guilcher: ‘Les différentes lectures de l'Orchésographie de Thoinot Arbeau’, Le recherche en danse, i (1982), 39–49

F. Garavini: ‘Le traité de danse d'un étudiant provençal autour de 1520: Antonius Arena’, Le recherche en danse, iii (1984), 5–14

M. Franko: ‘Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse: the Kinesis of Bonne Grace’, Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. R.C. Trexler (Binghamton, NY, 1985), 55–66

M. Padovan: ‘Da Dante a Leonardo: la danza italiana attraverso le fonti storiche’, La danza italiana, iii/aut. (1985), 5–37

B. Sparti: ‘The 15th-Century Balli Tunes: a New Look’, EMc, xiv (1986), 346–57

J. Sutton and F.M. Walker, eds.: F. Caroso: Nobiltà di dame (Oxford, 1986, 2/1995)

J. Ward: ‘The English Measure’, EMc, xiv (1986), 15–21

A. Pontremoli and P. La Rocca: Il ballare Lombardo: teoria e prassi coreutica nella festa di corte del XV secolo (Milan, 1987)

T.J. McGee: Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Performer’s Guide (Toronto, 1988)

A. Francalanci: ‘The “Copia de Mo. Giorgio del guido di ballare basse danze e balletti” as found in the New York Public Library’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xiv (1990), 87–179

M. Padovan, ed.: Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro e la danza nelle corti italiane del XV secolo: Pesaro 1987 (Pisa, 1990)

A. Feves: ‘Fabritio Caroso and the Changing Shape of the Dance, 1550–1660’, Dance Chronicle, xiv (1991), 159–74

D.R. Wilson: ‘A Further Look at the Nancy Basse Dances’, Historical Dance, iii/3 (1994), 24–8 [on the dances in F-Pn fonds fr.5699, formerly 10279]

DANIEL HEARTZ (with PATRICIA RADER)

Basse de Flandre

(Fr.).

See Bumbass.

Basse de musette.

A type of tenor shawm used in Swiss Protestant churches between about 1760 and 1810. See Hautbois d'église.

Basse de violon

(Fr.).

See Bass violin. See also Violoncello.

Basse d’harmonie

(Fr.).

See Ophicleide.

Bassée, Adam de la.

See Adam de la Bassée.

Basse fondamentale.

See Fundamental bass.

Basseggio, Lorenzo.

See Baseggio, Lorenzo.

Bassengius [Bassengo; Passenger], Aegidius

(b Liège; fl 1588–94). Flemish composer. In 1588 he was a chorister at Salzburg Cathedral; a year later he was unsuccessful in securing a permanent position in the imperial court chapel in Prague, but was engaged there on a temporary basis and received fees amounting to 65 gulden. His Motectorum quinque, sex, octo vocum, liber primus was published in Vienna in 1591. At that time he was Kapellmeister to Archduke Maximilian, as he was until 1594. If Bassengius was identical with ‘Eg. Bassange’, then he was the town organist of Wiener Neustadt in 1595. (SennMT, 187)

JOHN CLAPHAM

Basse noble

(Fr.: ‘noble bass’).

A term first used in the late 19th century as a French equivalent to the Italian Basso profondo. The higher and more flexible Basse chantante is clearly distinguished (in EMDC, II/ii, 1926, p.920) from ‘the bass without a qualifying adjective [that] is the lowest bass voice, also called basse taille, basse noble, basse profonde’. Although the basse noble has been distinguished from the basso profondo in terms of its greater flexibility and lighter tone, qualities it shares with the basse chantante, comparison of the basse noble with the basse chantante in range should be avoided.

ELLEN T. HARRIS

Bassere, Jo.

(fl c1450). ?French composer. He is known through a three-voice mass (in I-TRmp 89). Reference to this composition (EitnerQ) as a Missa super Christus surrexit seems incorrect and apparently arose from a confusion of the work with a mass using Christus surrexit which occurs later in the same source. The mass is unified by a head-motif, a pattern of mensurations and the use of F as the cadence pitch of all major sections.

TOM R. WARD

Basse-taille

(Fr.: ‘low tenor’).

In the Baroque, a term for the lowest male tenor voice of three: haute-taille, taille and basse-taille, which correspond to the three parties intermédiares of the string orchestra, all played by instruments of the viola type: haute-contre de violon, taille de violon and quinte de violon. Brossard (Dictionaire de musique, 1703) uses it to define the Italian word baritono, for which he provides the additional synonym concordans. However, he distinguishes their ranges, giving the range of the basse-taille as B to f ', whereas the range of the concordans extends to G. Rousseau (Dictionnaire de musique, 1768) places the basse-taille between the tenor and the bass, but allows that true basses are sometimes ‘distinguished properly by that name alone, to which custom has given the name basse-taille’. This meaning persisted into the 19th century. Manuel García (Traité complet de l’art du chant, 1840–47/R), however, gives basse-taille as the lowest male voice and writes that this ‘sonorous and powerful’ voice extends from E to d' with a lower extension to D and an upper extension to e'.

ELLEN T. HARRIS

Basset clarinet.

A soprano clarinet (see Clarinet, §II, 1) whose range is extended downwards to written c, in the manner of the basset-horn (it is classified as an Aerophone). The instrument was probably devised by Anton Stadler in collaboration with the Viennese instrument maker T. Lotz. Several of Mozart’s compositions were intended for a basset clarinet rather than for an instrument of conventional range: the Concerto k622 and the Quintet k581 required a basset clarinet in A, while the clarinet obbligato in La clemenza di Tito required a basset clarinet in B. Manuscript cadenzas to a concerto by Leopold Kozeluch [A-Wn 5853) are written for a basset clarinet, but little is known of the history of the instrument other than in Stadler’s hands. A basset clarinet dating from about 1840 (16 keys) by J.G.K. Bischoff is in the collection at Darmstadt (Kg61:116) and a later 19th-century example (with contemporary ‘simple-system’ keywork) can be found in the Bate Collection, Oxford (for a list of surviving instruments, see Lawson). The basset clarinet was revived (with modern keywork) in Prague in 1951 by Jiří Kratochvíl in order to perform Mozart’s concerto as the composer intended; since that date a number have been made, notably in England by E. Planus. Richard Rodney Bennett (Crosstalk, c1966) and Anthony Gilbert (Spell Respell, 1968) have composed for the instrument.

The term ‘basset clarinet’ has been preferred for the late 20th-century revival of the historical instrument because the term ‘bass clarinet’, used originally by Stadler for his extended soprano instrument, is now used to describe the instrument pitched an octave lower.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(see also Clarinet)

C. Lawson: Mozart Clarinet Concerto (Cambridge, 1996)

P.L. Poulin: ‘Anton Stadler’s Basset Clarinet: Recent Discoveries in Riga’, JAMIS, xxii (1996), 110–27

NICHOLAS SHACKLETON

Bassetgen

(Ger.).

See Bassett (i).

Basset-horn

(Fr. cor de basset; Ger. Bassetthorn; It. corno di bassetto).

Woodwind instrument; a member of the clarinet family (see Clarinet, §II, 1, fig.2f), normally now pitched in F (it is classified as an Aerophone). A distinctive feature is the extension of its compass downwards to written c (sounding F), a major 3rd below the lowest note of the conventional clarinet. In most early examples, this is achieved without inconvenience by the curious ‘book’ or ‘box’ in which the extra length of tube makes three excursions before emerging into a rather flamboyant metal bell. A straight form of basset-horn was invented around the beginning of the 19th century, and a crook for it first appears in the last decade of the 18th (see Clarinette d’amour).

The origin of the basset-horn, like that of the clarinet itself, is not as clear as is widely believed; it is generally thought to be established by a few instruments (see illustration) which bear on the ‘book’ the inscription ‘ANT et MICH MAYRHOFER INVEN. & ELABOR. PASSAVII’, and which are thought to have been made in Passau in the 1760s by the Mayrhofers (similar instruments were made by others). The simplest sickle-shaped basset-horn (which may predate the Mayrhofer instruments) has a mere five keys: thumb-keys for e and c (no d was possible), a fish-tail key for f/c'' (playable with either hand uppermost) and the two obligatory keys on the upper joint. Thus the state of development is equivalent to that of the three-key clarinet.

The basset-horn in G, a late 18th-century instrument, is the equivalent in the clarinet family of the C bass chalumeau, the lowest of the three instruments for which the trios for three chalumeaux by Christoph Graupner were written; that is to say, there was probably a direct link from the bass chalumeau to the basset-horn. The question as to whether a lower-pitched clarinet was made and then extended in range by the invention of the ‘book’, or whether a chalumeau of downwards extended range had already been devised, is certainly not answered by the well-known claim of Mayrhofer, particularly as so many makers have made exaggerated claims as to their innovatory achievements. In short, the history of the lower-pitched clarinets and chalumeaux in relation to the basset-horn is an open question.

Scarcely less secure is the position of higher- and lower-pitched instruments of extended compass. The term Basset clarinet is reserved for soprano clarinets of extended range, but the fact that Mozart first drafted the first movement of his concerto k622 for an instrument in G, and then rewrote it for one in A, is a reminder that the line between basset-horn and clarinet is indistinct. The obbligato to Parto, parto in La clemenza di Tito is for a B instrument of extended range; at the other end of the scale, the distinction between the basset-horn in D specified by Druschetzky and the bass clarinet in C extended to (written) c by means of thumb-keys is again an arbitrary one.

Mozart was especially enamoured of the basset-horn, using it particularly in masonic pieces; when writing for three instruments, he often used the treble clef for the upper two (the instruments sounding a 5th lower than written) and the bass clef for the lowest (sounding a 4th higher than written). The Serenade in B k361/370a, the Requiem k626 and four of the notturnos for two sopranos and baritone accompanied by a trio of basset-horns use the basset-horn in F; the notturno k437 (incomplete) specifies a basset-horn in G together with two clarinets in A. It seems that only the instrument in F was made in the 19th century. A number of basset-horns survive, although the fact that many are in good condition suggests that they were never extensively used, as one may also judge from the comparative scarcity of music written for the instrument. Beethoven specified the basset-horn once only (Prometheus); Mendelssohn composed (for Heinrich and Carl Baermann) two concert pieces for clarinet, basset-horn and piano. Otherwise, the basset-horn’s use was as an alternative recital instrument and in the abundant wind bands of the period.

The manufacture of the instrument diminished greatly during the mid-19th century, although it cannot be said to have become extinct. Henry Lazarus (1815–95) played one, and it was in a sense revived by V.-C. Mahillon at the end of the century. Richard Strauss used it to great effect in several of his operas (e.g. at the opening of Daphne) and in his wind Sonatinas av139 and 143.

It is generally recognized that the particular timbre of the classical basset-horn was due to the fact that its bore was scarcely larger than that of the contemporary clarinet, whereas the alto clarinet in F, which was developed in the early part of the 19th century, had a substantially wider bore. This has left modern makers in something of a quandary as to the ideal towards which they should aim, namely whether a basset-horn can be made to balance the forces of the modern orchestra without losing the special character that distinguishes it.

Some modern examples are made with a clarinet bore, others with a slightly wider bore, and yet others with an alto clarinet bore. The keywork is that of today’s clarinet, with the added complexity of an extra four semitones to be coped with. Either control may be exercised entirely by the right thumb, as in all early examples, or the burden may be shared with the already overworked fourth finger of either hand. Most German instruments take the former course, most French the latter. In order to free the thumb, the weight of the instrument is always taken on a sling or a spike. French instruments have an upturned bell like that of the alto and bass clarinets, but many German makers favour a straight wooden bell like that of the soprano clarinet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Saam: Das Bassetthorn (Mainz, 1971)

J.P. Newhill: The Basset-Horn and its Music (Sale, Cheshire, 1983, 2/1986)

J. Eppelsheim: ‘Bassethorn-Studien’, Studia Organologica: Festschrift für John Henry van der Meer, ed. F. Hellwig (Tutzing, 1987), 69–125

N. Shackleton: ‘The Earliest Basset Horns’, GSJ, xl (1987), 2–23

For further bibliography see Clarinet, II.

NICHOLAS SHACKLETON

Basset: Nicolo.

Term used by Praetorius for a type of wind-cap instrument. See Crumhorn.

Basse-trompette [trombe].

As distinct from trompette basse (bass trumpet), a type of upright Serpent patented by Louis Alexandre Frichot of Paris in 1810. It was evidently an improvement on the so-called ‘English’ Bass-horn which Frichot had invented during the 1790s. The basse-trompette was provided with six finger-holes in two groups of three, and four or five keys. Unlike that of the bass-horn, which was sharply mitred and had a large looped crook, the body tube of the basse-trompette was bent upon itself three times, forming one large and one smaller loop with a short mouthpipe to carry the mouthpiece. According to the patent specification (see illustration) the lower curve of the smaller loop was formed by interchangeable bows of different length for pitch adjustment (pièces de rechange); this idea may have influenced Coëffet’s design for his ophimonocleide, which incorporated a double slide (pompe) for altering the pitch.

There is a basse-trompette in the Musée de la Musique, Paris (no.651). It was described in detail and much praised by Choron (1815), who mentioned that it could be played with a mouthpiece of either serpent or trumpet proportions, yielding different and characteristic tone qualities. However, it is unlikely that a trumpet mouthpiece would be effective on a bass instrument with a large conical bore. Sachs suggested that the basse-trompette was the same instrument as Frichot’s basse-cor of 1806. This view was held by Langwill, who also noted an alternative, later name (trombe) and mentioned the announcement of Frichot’s invention by the Académie of Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1812. Pierre (1893) gave the basse-trompette as dating from 1806 to 1810, thereby corroborating Sach’s opinion. Pierre also referred to the tromba of 1812, but did not associate it with the earlier instrument.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

Brevet français, no.404 (31 Dec 1810)

L.-J. Francoeur and A.-E. Choron: Traité général des voix et des instruments d’orchestre et principalement des instruments à vent (Paris, 1815)

G. Chouquet: Le musée de Conservatoire national de musique: catalogue raisonné (Paris, 2/1884)

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique (Paris, 1893/R)

C. Sachs: Real-Lexicon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R)

PHILIP BATE/STEPHEN J. WESTON

Bassett [basset] (i)

(Ger. Bassett, Bassetgen; It. bassetto).

Diminutive of Bass (i). The lowest part of a passage or composition lacking a bass part and which executes the musical bass in higher register. It was defined by Praetorius in the Syntagma musicum, iii (1618), 121–2:

the lowest voice in a high-register chorus, which executes the fundament and whose structure resembles a true bass; … any lowest-sounding part in a high register … in both concertos and motets [i.e. in both stile moderno and stile antico], whether soprano, alto, or tenor, as we see most often in fugues.

This usage, peculiar to the Baroque era, frequently appeared in discussions of basso continuo, where it denoted a passage notated in a C clef or G clef rather than the usual F clef. ‘Bassetto’ also denoted the lowest part of each separate chorus in a polychoral composition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.T. Arnold: The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-bass (London, 1931/R), 373ff

JAMES WEBSTER

Bassett (ii)

(Ger., also Bassl, Bassetl).

A diminutive of Bass in the sense of ‘double bass’, hence analogous to the Italian violoncello, which is a diminutive of Violone. ‘Bassetl’ was the common designation for the cello in Austria and south Germany during the 18th century; Leopold Mozart, in his Violinschule (1756), wrote: ‘The Bassel or Bassette … also goes under the name Violoncell’. The term did not designate a small, short-necked or other type of ‘miniature’ double bass.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Marx: Die Entwicklung des Violoncells und seiner Spieltechnik bis J.L. Duport (1520–1820) (Regensburg, 1963), 62ff

J. Webster: ‘Violoncello and Double Bass in the Chamber Music of Haydn and his Viennese Contemporaries, 1750–1780’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 413–38

JAMES WEBSTER

Bassett (iii).

A term specifying instruments in baritone, tenor or alto range, for example the Basset-horn and Basset clarinet. Praetorius called the tenor shawm ‘Bassett’ or ‘Tenor Pommer’, and the lowest (bass) recorder in F ‘Bassett’.

Bassett (iv).

An organ stop with flue pipes.

Bassett, Leslie (Raymond)

(b Hanford, CA, 22 Jan 1923). American composer. He studied at the University of Michigan with Finney, by whose teaching he was particularly influenced, and also had lessons with Boulanger and Honegger (1950–51), Gerhard (1960) and Davidovsky (electronic music, 1964). In 1952 he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, becoming head of the composition department in 1970 and Albert A. Stanley Professor in 1977; he was also a founder-member of the university’s electronic studio and directed the Contemporary Directions Performance Project until he retired in 1991. Among the awards he has received are the Rome Prize (which took him to the American Academy in Rome, 1961–3), a Pulitzer Prize (1966, for the Variations for orchestra), Guggenheim Fellowships (1973–4, 1980–81), a Naumburg Foundation recording award for the Sextet for piano and strings (1974) and a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1988); his Echoes from an Invisible World was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra for the Bicentennial. In 1976 he was elected a member of the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bassett’s music is carefully structured, its formal processes clear; conventional pitch materials are frequently deployed in an original manner. Even his writing for voices is instrumental in character, a quality he uses to advantage in the choral works, where voices and instruments are cohesively combined.

WORKS

orchestral

5 Movts, 1961; Variations, 1963; Designs, Images and Textures, band, 1964; Colloquy, 1969; Forces, vn, vc, pf, orch, 1972; Echoes from an Invisible World, 1975; Conc., 2 pf, orch, 1976; Sounds, Shapes and Symbols, band, 1977; Conc. grosso, brass qnt, wind, perc, 1982; Conc. lirico, trbn, orch, 1983; Colors and Contours, band, 1984; Lullaby, band, 1985; From a Source Evolving, 1985; Fantasy, cl, wind ens, 1986; Conc. for Orch, 1991; Thoughts that Sing, Breathe and Burn, 1995

chamber

Trbn Qt, 1949; Sonata, hn, pf, 1952; Brass Trio, tpt, hn, trbn, 1953; Trio, va, cl, pf, 1953; Qnt, str qt, db, 1954; Sonata, trbn, pf, 1954; Cl Duets, 1955; Sonata, va, pf, 1956; 5 Pieces, str qt, 1957; Suite, trbn, 1957; Ww Qnt, 1958; Sonata, vn, pf, 1959; Vc Duets, 1959; Pf Qnt, 1962; Str Qt no.3, 1962; Music for Vc and Pf, 1966; Nonet, wind qnt, tpt, trbn, tuba, pf, 1967; Music for Sax and Pf, 1968; Sextet, pf, 2 vn, 2 va, vc, 1971

Sounds Remembered, vn, pf, 1972; Music for 4 Hns, 1974; 12 Duos, 2/4 trbn, 1974; Wind Music, fl, ob, cl, a sax, bn, hn, 1975; Soliloquies, cl, 1976; Str Qt no.4, 1978; Sextet, fl, a fl, cl, b cl, vc, db, 1979; Temperaments, gui, 1979–83; A Masque of Bells, carillon, 1980; Trio, vn, cl, pf, 1980; Conc. da camera, fl, cl, tpt, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1981; Duo Concertante, a sax, pf, 1984; Salute, 5 tpt, 1985; Dialogues, ob, pf, 1987; Duo-Inventions, 2 vc, 1988; Brass Qnt, 1988, Illuminations, fl, pf, 1989; Metamorphoses, bn, 1990; Arias, cl, pf, 1992; Narratives, 4 gui, 1993; Song and Dance, tuba, pf, 1993; 3 Equale, 4 trbn, 1996; Trio-Inventions, 3 vc, 1996

choral

The Lamb (W. Blake), SATB, pf, 1952; Out of the Depths (Ps cxxx), SATB, org, 1957; For City, Nation, World (cant.), T, SATB, children’s chorus ad lib, congregation, 4 trbn, org, 1959; Moonrise (D.H. Lawrence), SSA, 9 insts, 1960; Remembrance (H. Rupert), SATB, org, 1960; Eclogue, Encomium and Evocation (Bible: Song of Solomon), SSA, pf, hp, 2 perc, 1962; Follow Now that Bright Star (carol), SATB, 1962; Prayers for Divine Service (Lat.), TTBB, org, 1965; Hear my Prayer, O Lord (Ps lxiv), SA, org, 1965; Notes in the Silence (D. Hammarskjöld), SATB, pf, 1966

Collect, SATB, tape, 1969; Moon Canticle, S, amp nar, SATB, vc, 1969; Celebration: in Praise of Earth, amp nar, SATB, orch, 1970; Of Wind and Earth (P.B. Shelley, W.C. Bryant, St Francis), SATB, pf, 1973; A Ring of Emeralds (Irish poets), SATB, pf, 1979; Sing to the Lord (Ps xcv), SATB, org, 1981; Lord, who hast formed me (G. Herbert), SATB, org, 1981; Whoe’er She Be (R. Crashaw), SSA, pf, 1986; Almighty, Eternal (Bassett), SATB, org, 1990; Maker of Our Being (Bassett), SATB, org, 1993

other works

Kbd: 6 Pf Pieces, 1951; Toccata, org, 1955; Voluntaries, org, 1958; Mobile, pf, 1961; 4 Statements, org, 1964; Elaborations, pf, 1966; Liturgies, org, 1980; 7 Preludes, pf, 1984; Configurations, pf, 1987

Solo vocal: 4 Songs (W. Blake, G. Herbert, E.A. Robinson), S, pf, 1953; Easter Triptych (Bible), T, wind ens, 1958; To Music (B. Jonson, R. Herrick, W. Billings), 3 songs, S/T, pf, 1962; The Jade Garden (oriental), S, pf, 1973; Time and Beyond (R.W. Emerson, R. Tagore, M. Van Doren), B, cl, vc, pf, 1973; Love Songs (Gk. anon., W.S. Landor, A. Brodstreet, Emerson, H. Harrington), S, pf, 1975; Pierrot Songs (A. Giraud, Ger. trans. O. Hartleben), S, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1988

Elec: 3 Studies in Elec Sound, 1965; Triform, 1966

c20 works now withdrawn, incl. 2 syms., 1949, 1956, 2 str qts, 1949, 1951

Principal publishers: ACA, King, Merion, Peters

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

A. Brown: ‘Leslie Bassett’, Asterisk, ii/2 (1976), 8–15 [incl. list of works]

E.S. Johnson: Leslie Bassett: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1994)

EDITH BORROFF/MICHAEL MECKNA

Bassey, Shirley

(b Cardiff, 8 Jan 1937). Welsh pop singer. With a booming yet imperious contralto and an arresting stage presence, Shirley Bassey was one of Britain’s most popular singers of show tunes and pop ballads during the 1950s and 60s. Her forte was the melodramatic ballad, usually taken from a successful musical play or popular film. Thus, early in her career Bassey made hit recordings of ‘As long as he needs me’ (from Bart’s Oliver!) and ‘Climb ev’ry mountain’ (from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music). One of the songs most associated with her was a contrasting showstopper, the brassy, up-tempo ‘Big Spender’ from Coleman’s 1966 musical Sweet Charity. In the cinema, Bassey was chosen to perform three of John Barry’s themes from the James Bond film series: Goldfinger (1964; lyrics by L. Bricusse and A. Newley), Diamonds Are Forever (1972; lyrics by D. Black) and Moonraker (1979; lyrics by H. David).

Bassey’s best-known British recordings were arranged and conducted by Johnny Franz and Norman Newell, but she worked in a more jazz-orientated setting when she recorded the album Let’s Face The Music in 1962 with leading American bandleader Nelson Riddle. The most unusual of her performances were the collaborations with Yello on The Rhythm Divine (1989) and with the Propellerheads on History Repeating (1997). By the early 1990’s Bassey was semi-retired and her contribution to British show business was recognised by the award of a CBE in 1993 and a DBE in 2000.

DAVE LAING

Bass flute (i).

A term occasionally used to denote the alto flute in G, although more properly reserved for the flute in C an octave below the concert flute. See Flute, §II, 3(v).

Bass flute (ii).

See under Organ stop (Bassflute).

Bass guitar.

See Electric bass guitar.

Bass-horn.

An early variety of upright Serpent invented by Louis Alexandre Frichot in the 1790s. It is classified as a trumpet. The instrument consists of a conical tube about 230 cm long and generally made of copper. The larger end terminates in a widely flared bell and the smaller in a graceful swan-neck crook, this last accounting for nearly one-third of the instrument’s total length. The tube is cut at a distance of about 81 cm from the bell and the two straight sections are set at a very acute angle into a short butt which ensures the continuity of the air column (see illustration).

The bass-horn has six finger-holes and usually either three or four keys. It was always considered to have C as its true fundamental. Compass, fingering and manner of blowing are the same as for the serpent, but its tone was said to be more powerful. With its more convenient playing position, it probably lent itself more readily than the serpent to the display of virtuosity.

The instrument enjoyed considerable popularity in England for more than 30 years but, just as the more conventional types of upright serpent and Russian bassoon never found favour in Britain, so the bass-horn was never taken up on the Continent, though the word is sometimes met in Germany to denote one of these other instruments, as in russisches Basshorn (It. corno di basso, for Russian bassoon), and Johann Streitwolf’s chromatisches Basshorn of c1820.

Its natural place was, of course, the wind band, but it was also occasionally found in the large festival orchestras. There were actually four in the orchestras of the 1825 and 1828 York festivals, but by 1835 they had given place to ophicleides with, however, one exception, a sort of contrabass bass-horn called the Hibernicon. As late as 1840 there was still one London maker who described himself as a ‘bass-horn and serpent maker’, but by that time the bass-horn had become obsolete. It is likely that the ophicleide part in the overture to Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was initially played in England on the bass-horn.

There are only two other instruments that can be considered as structurally allied to the bass-horn: Frichot’s Basse-trompette, a truly remarkable instrument, and Joseph Cotter’s hibernicon mentioned above.

REGINALD MORLEY-PEGGE/ANTHONY C. BAINES/R

Bassi, Amedeo

(b Montespertoli, nr Florence, 29 July 1874; d Florence, 15 Jan 1949). Italian tenor. He trained in Florence, making his début at Castelfiorentino in Filippo Marchetti’s Ruy Blas in 1897. After travelling widely in Italy he sang with great success in South America, where he performed regularly until 1912. He joined the Manhattan Opera Company in 1906 and made his Covent Garden début the following year; he returned in 1911 for the British première of La fanciulla del West, in which he also sang at the first performances in Rome and Chicago. At Monte Carlo in 1905 he participated in the première of Mascagni’s Amica and in Naples the following year that of Frédéric d’Erlanger’s Tess; he was also in the first American performance of Wolf-Ferrari’s I gioielli della Madonna (1912). In the 1920s at La Scala he began a second career, as an admired Wagnerian tenor. He taught in Florence where Ferruccio Tagliavini was among his pupils. Early recordings show a powerful voice produced in the typical verismo style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, i (London, 1977), 136

J.B. STEANE

Bassi, Luigi

(b Pesaro, 4 Sept 1766; d ?Dresden, 1825). Italian baritone. He studied in Senigallia with Pietro Morandi and appeared on the stage at the age of 13. He completed his studies with Laschi in Florence, where he appeared at the Pergola Theatre. In 1784 he joined Bondini’s company in Prague and in 1786 sang Count Almaviva in the first Prague performance of Le nozze di Figaro; the next year he created the name part in Don Giovanni (1787). He is said to have asked Mozart to write him another air in place of ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’ and to have induced Mozart to rewrite ‘Là ci darem’ five times. In later years he stressed that no two performances were the same and that Mozart had specifically wished that he should improvise as long as he paid attention to the orchestra.

Bassi was praised in the Gothaer Taschenkalendar (1793):

This rewarding singer was from the start the ornament of the company and he still is. His voice is as melodious as his acting is masterly. Immediately he comes on, joy and cheerfulness pervade the whole audience and he never leaves the theatre without unequivocal and loud applause.

In 1793 Bassi sang Papageno in Italian at Leipzig. But by 1800 his voice had deteriorated, although his histrionic ability remained unimpaired. According to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1800):

Bassi was an excellent singer before he lost his voice, and he still knows very well how to use what remains. It lies between tenor and bass, and though it sounds somewhat hollow, it is still very flexible, full and pleasant. Herr Bassi is furthermore a very skilled actor in tragedy with no trace of burlesque, and with no vulgarity or tastelessness in comedy. In his truly artful and droll way he can parody the faults of the other singers so subtly that only the audience notices and they themselves are unaware of it. His best roles are Axur, Don Giovanni, Teodoro, the Notary in La molinara, the Count in Figaro and others.

In 1806 Bassi left Prague because of the war and relied on the patronage of Prince Lobkowitz, making occasional appearances in Vienna. In 1814 he returned to Prague, where Weber consulted him about Don Giovanni. In the autumn he was engaged for the Italian company in Dresden; and in 1815 he was made director. He still appeared in Mozart’s operas; in 1816 he sang Count Almaviva, although he could no longer encompass the role vocally, but in 1817 he was well received as Guglielmo. He no longer performed Don Giovanni but sang Masetto, for which he was criticized because his figure was unsuited to the part. His contract with the Dresden company continued until his death; in his last years he also appeared in Florence, but only to sing in oratorio.

CHRISTOPHER RAEBURN

Bassilly, Bénigne de.

See Bacilly, bénigne de.

Bassklarinette

(Ger.).

See Bass clarinet.

Bass line.

The succession of the lowest notes in a passage (or composition) which ‘support’ the other parts and are mainly responsible for the harmonic progression. See Bass (i).

Basso

(It.).

See Bass (ii).

Basso, Alberto

(b Turin, 21 Aug 1931). Italian musicologist. He took a degree in law at Turin University (1956) and though he had no formal training in music he was appointed in 1961 to teach music history at the Turin Conservatory; he became librarian in 1975. For UTET he edited La musica: enciclopedia storica, i–iv and La musica: dizionario, i–ii (with Gatti), a three-volume Storia dell’opera (with Barblan) and the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, all major contributions to Italian musicology. He is also editor of Opera, a series of music guides (1973–5), and director of the editorial committee of Monumenti di Musica Piemontese (1976–), a special series of Monumenti Musicali Italiani. His research interests centre on Bach, organ literature and music in Piedmont. He has been active in various organizations, as vice-president (1968–70) and president (1973–9, 1995–7) of the Società Italiana di Musicologia and co-editor of its Rivista italiana di musicologia (1970–74), as an administrative council member of the Teatro Regio, Turin, as a frequent contributor (from 1956) to Italian radio, and as a member (1982) and later vice-president (1996) of the Accademia Nazionale di S Cecilia. In 1984 he was awarded a prize for his monograph, Frau Musika: la vita e le opere di J.S. Bach.

WRITINGS

L’Amfiparnaso di O. Vecchi (Turin, 1960)

G. Verdi: autografi esposti per l’esecuzione del Simon Boccanegra (Turin, 1961)

‘Il corale organistico di J.S. Bach’, Approdo musicale, nos.14–15 (1961), 5–263

Autografi di musicisti e stampati di interesse musicale (Turin, 1962)

ed., with G.M. Gatti: La musica: enciclopedia storica, i–iv (Turin, 1966)

ed., with G.M. Gatti: La musica: dizionario, i–ii (Turin, 1968–71)

Il Conservatorio di musica Giuseppe Verdi di Torino: storia e documenti dalle origini al 1970 (Turin, 1971)

‘Repertorio generale dei “Monumenta Musicae”, delle antologie, raccolte e pubblicazioni di musica antica sino a tutto il 1970’, RIM, vi (1971), 1–135

‘La rappresentazione a Torino (1804) dell’ “Armida” di Haydn’, Quadrivium, xiv (1973), 235–47

L’età di Bach e di Haendel (Turin, 1976, 2/1991)

Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino, ii: Il teatro della Città dal 1788 al 1936 (Turin, 1976)

Introduction to Monumenti di Musica Piemontese, i (Milan, 1976)

ed., with G. Barblan: Storia dell’opera (Turin, 1977)

Frau Musika: la vita e le opere di J.S. Bach (Turin, 1979–83)

‘La musica massonica: rassegna storica con particolare riferimento al secolo XVIII’, La massoneria nella storia d’Italia, ed. A.A. Mola (Turin, 1980), 183–213

‘Bach: la persistance de l'image’, Silences, ii (1985), 159–65

‘Osservazioni sulla scuola strumentale piemontese del Settecento’, Studi musicali, xiv (1985), 135–56

‘Perché Bach? Il mito di Bach nella seconda metà dell'Ottocento’, La trascrizione: Bach e Busoni: Empoli 1985, 47–57

Sui sentieri della musica (Milan, 1985)

Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (Turin, 1985–1990)

‘Bach e Palestrina’, Studi palestriniani II: Palestrina 1986, 409–19

‘Monumentalità delle esecuzioni Ottocentesche’, Ritorno a Bach: dramma e ritualità delle passioni, ed. E. Povellato (Venice, 1986), 169–84

‘Bach tra “Ars” e “Scientia”’, Atti e memorie (Accademia nazionale virgiliana), new ser., lv (1987), 53–72

‘Il '700: J.S. Bach e la corte di Federico II’, Musica e dossier, iii (1987), 1–66

Introduction to Raccolta Mauro Foà, Raccolta Renzo Giordano, ed. I.F. Data and A. Colturato (Rome, 1987), i–lxxvi

‘La musica di concezione massonica e il mito della fratellanza universale’, La musica come linguaggio universale: Latina 1987, 65–76

‘I codici vivaldiani di Torino, ovvero fatti e misfatti, avventure e disavventure del collezionismo musicale’, Chigiana, new ser., xxi (1989), 161–84

‘Bach e Haendel-Renaissance alla luce dell'illuminismo’, Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, ed. F. Luisi (Rome, 1990), 145–57

‘Considerazioni sul concetto di sacro in musica’, De musica hispana et aliis: miscelánea en honor al Prof. Dr. José López-Calo, ed. E. Casares and C. Villanueva (Santiago de Compostela, 1990), 467–81

L’invenzione della gioia: musica e massoneria nell’età dei Lumi (Milan, 1994)

ed.: Musica in scena: storia dello spettacolo musicale (Turin, 1995–7)

CAROLYN GIANTURCO/TERESA M. GIALDRONI

Bass oboe.

See Oboe, §III, 5(i).

Basso cantante

(It.: ‘singing bass’).

A light, legato bass voice as distinct from a deeper, more powerful bass (see Basso profondo). Its early meaning sometimes took on a pejorative tone as when the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe referred to ‘these new singers [who] are called by the novel appellation of basso-cantante (which by-the-bye is a kind of apology, and an acknowledgment that they ought not to sing)’ (Musical Reminiscences, London, 1824). Although more closely associated with vocal tone than range (see Basse chantante), the term has also been used in modern commentary to identify the lyrical baritone and bass-baritone roles of the period of Bellini and Donizetti.

ELLEN T. HARRIS

Basso continuo.

See Continuo.

Basson (i)

(Fr.).

See Bassoon.

Basson (ii)

(Fr.).

See Organ stop (Fagotto).

Basson d'amour.

A type of bassoon with a spherical brass bell, used in Swiss Protestant churches between about 1760 and 1810. See Hautbois d'église; see also Bassoon, §3.

Basson quinte

(Fr.).

See Tenoroon.

Basson russe

(Fr.).

See Russian bassoon.

Basso numerato

(It.).

See Figured bass.

Bassoon

(Fr. basson; Ger. Fagott; It. fagotto).

A wooden conical wind instrument, sounded with a double reed, which forms the tenor and bass to the woodwind section. In the modern orchestra, the family exists in two different sizes: the bassoon and the double bassoon or contrabassoon, sounding one octave lower. Built in four joints, its precursor the dulcian was of one-piece construction. Because of its wide compass and its range of characteristic tone-colours, from richly sonorous at the bottom to expressively plaintive at the top, it is one of the most versatile and useful members of the orchestra. Certain design features are peculiar to it: the doubling back on itself of the bore, like a hairpin; the ‘extension bore’ beyond the sixth finger-hole; and local wall thickness allowing for finger-hole chimneys. These features give the instrument its essential tone qualities and condition its complex acoustics. The standard compass of the present-day bassoon is from B' to f'' or g''. It is a non-transposing instrument and its music is notated in the bass and tenor clefs; occasionally the treble clef is also used.

In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification it is classified as an oboe.

See also Organ stop.

2. The dulcian and other precursors.

3. The early bassoon (to 1800).

4. Development of the modern bassoon.

5. The early reed.

6. Charts and tutors.

7. Repertory and use.

8. Performers and teachers.

9. The double bassoon.

10. Other sizes.

WILLIAM WATERHOUSE

1. The modern instrument and reed.

The modern bassoon exists in two versions: the German or ‘Heckel’ system, and the French or ‘Buffet’ system of differing keywork and slightly modified bore (fig.1). As the German type is more commonly used today, it provides the frame of reference for general statements here about the construction of the modern bassoon.

While early bassoons (like dulcians: see §2) were sometimes made of harder varieties of wood, maple has been the wood traditionally used. Carl Almenraeder (see §4) favoured North American dark maple (acer nigrum), considering harder varieties to be unsuitable because they produced a duller tone, while softer varieties, although giving a better tone, were less durable. Most German makers preferred the medium-hard flamed or curly ring maple to the harder and heavier grenadilla or palissander (Brazilian rosewood) more often used by the French. The last serious attempt to make the body out of metal was by Lecomte, and was exhibited in Paris in 1889. However, ebonite has since been used in England for military instruments destined for the tropics. German bassoons today are made of sycamore maple (acer pseudoplatanus; Ger. Bergahorn). In America they are also made of local sugar maple (acer saccharum), though plastics such as polypropylene are successfully used as an alternative to wood. Before World War II the wood was customarily seasoned for up to 12 years, and machined only in gradual stages; now modern drying processes are used and the wood is often impregnated under pressure to stabilize its inner structure.

The machining of the bore and tone holes needs to be done with the utmost precision to achieve a good instrument. Final tuning has to be done by hand and calls for considerable time and skill. The crook is a crucially important element which needs to be carefully matched with its instrument. These factors make the bassoon traditionally more expensive than other wind instruments.

The bassoon stands about 134 cm tall and consists of four wooden joints together with a metal crook and reed (fig.2a). The total length of the bore is about 254 cm, flaring from a width of 4 mm at the narrow end of the crook to 39 mm at the bell. The components are:

(a) The tenor or wing joint, named after the projecting ‘épaule’ (a part of the wall thickened to accommodate three obliquely drilled finger-holes); this joint has a protective lining of hard rubber or plastic.

(b) The double or butt (boot) joint, which contains two continuously flaring bores connected at the bottom by a metal U-bend bow, which is screwed on to the body and protected by a metal cap. The narrower of these two bores is also lined for protection against water. A ‘crutch’ or hand rest to support the right hand is usually fitted to this joint.

(c) The long joint or bass joint, which lies adjacent to the wing joint.

(d) The bell joint, usually with a decorative outer profile and often tipped with an ornamental rim of ivory or plastic. A longer bell for the A' was first demanded by Wagner in Tristan und Isolde (1865); followed by Liszt, Strauss, Mahler, Delius, Nielsen, Schoenberg and Stravinsky among others. It is generally found to have a detrimental effect on playing characteristics.

(e) The crook or bocal which is inserted into the upper end of the wing: a tapering metal tube with a nipple perforated by a pinhole near the wider end; the reed is placed at the other end. The crook is usually bent into a characteristically curved ‘S’, but this shape is sometimes altered to suit individual players. Crooks are built in different lengths to assist tuning.

When played, the bassoon is held obliquely across the body. Its considerable weight is supported by means of a neck strap or shoulder harness attached to a ring on the butt, a seat strap or adjustable spike attached to the bottom of the butt, or a leg support fitted to the top of the butt. The left hand is held uppermost: raising the three middle fingers of each hand produces a basic scale of G to f. With the help of the crook- and other register-holes these overblow an octave higher. The other fingers control keys which extend the range down to B'. This considerable extra length of ‘resonator’ is an important factor in the acoustics of the bassoon, as are the wall thickness, which produces chimneys of significant length on the wing joint, and the relatively small size of finger-holes. (For a fuller discussion of acoustics see Benade (1976) and Krüger (MGG2); see also Acoustics, §IV, 6.)

The fingerings of the upper register are complicated: above c'' the notes become somewhat more difficult to produce, requiring a progressive increase of wind pressure. While the French instrument with its slightly narrower bore and different layout of tone holes is able to reach e'' and f'' without undue difficulty, these notes are less easy on the German bassoon, though extra keys are now available to facilitate them.

Response and intonation is greatly affected by comparatively minute deviations in the conicity of the bore. In recent years makers have devoted great efforts to designing a more evenly-scaled instrument. Luckily the degree of pitch alteration available to the player through regulating air support and embouchure is comparatively great, and players often use individual fingerings to ‘humour’ certain notes. A new bassoon requires ‘playing in’ and thus players are hesitant to change their instruments. The problem of playing softly is sometimes assisted by the use of a mute; this can take the form either of a piece of cloth stuffed in the bell (e.g. as demanded by Ligeti) or of a short sleeve-like metal cylinder (see Mute). Many players (especially in the USA) take great pains to seal every trace of porosity in pads and body to facilitate response.

In London there have been two efforts made in the late 20th century to reform the instrument. The ‘Logical Bassoon’ of Giles Brindley employed an electronic circuit to open and close the tone holes, thereby simplifying the fingering whilst making possible ideal combinations of holes for each note (Brindley, 1968). Edgar Brown's promising experimental bassoon, developed in collaboration with the bassoonist Zoltan Lukacs (1936–91), is built to a design by the distinguished acoustician Arthur Benade (1925–87); in the interests of greater tonal homogeneity, ‘the hole proportions are such as to give a uniform tone-holes lattice cut-off frequency’ (Brown, 1998).

The French bassoon differs from the German in bore, disposition of tone holes and system of keywork (see fig.1). In general it has retained the basic design of the early bassoon, in contrast to the reformed Almenraeder instrument with its low-register open holes enlarged, increased in number and placed further down the bore. Formerly in common use throughout the non-German-speaking world, it has since the 1930s been replaced by the German model. There is controversy over their respective merits – the light, free tone quality of the French contrasts with the dark homogeneousness of the German. However, much depends on the style of playing and of the reed chosen by the individual player. In general the German instrument may be considered ‘safer’ and easier to control for the player.

Like the oboe, the bassoon uses a double reed (see fig.11d below) made of a type of bamboo cane (arundo donax), of which the most suitable quality grows in the Var district of southern France. Cane from Italy, America, southern Russia and China is also used by local players. The modern method of manufacture is as follows: a piece of tube 12 to 14 cm long and about 2·5 cm in diameter is split vertically into three or four pieces and the inside of each planed to the desired thickness by a gouging machine; on the outside the ‘bark’, except on the top and bottom quarters of the length, is removed to a contoured bevel by a ‘profiler’. The piece is then folded to half its length, cut to size in a metal ‘shaper’, formed on a mandrel and bound with three wires and thread; lastly the tip of the fold is cut off. The final thinning of the reed blades may be done with a tip profiling machine, or with a file and scraping knife. The reed is very fragile and sensitive (the blade tip is only some 0·1 mm thick) and plays a crucial role in the tone and response of the instrument. Both the quality of the cane and the contour of blade thickness are very important. Recent research by Heinrich (1987), subjecting reed cane to analysis under laboratory conditions, has yielded new insights into the behaviour of what he defines as a bilâme hydrique (bilaminate reacting variously to water), and the interaction of the banding wires with cane density. Reeds for the German instrument differ from those traditionally used on the French in the way they are finished; ‘French’ reeds are usually bevelled evenly like a chisel while the ‘German’ scrape leaves a thicker spine down the centre. There is considerable divergence of style and scrape between players. Formerly made exclusively by hand, nowadays reed manufacture has become increasingly mechanized. Various experiments have been made with plastic reeds, but so far they have not proved suitable for professional use.

At times the bassoon has been played with a clarinet-type mouthpiece. According to GerberL the clarinettist J.W. Hesse attempted to do this in 1786, and in England small bassoon mouthpieces from the early 19th century have survived. They have never been used seriously because of the way they denature the tone, although they were formerly used for tuning instruments. They are still marketed in the USA.

2. The dulcian and other precursors.

The early history of the bassoon is obscure: few early specimens survive and it is not possible to be sure when and where these were made. Iconographic evidence, though sparse, is more trustworthy than that from written documents, which, because of ambiguities of nomenclature, must be interpreted with caution. In general, two successive versions of the instrument may be distinguished: the earlier, in use up to the beginning of the 18th century (though later in Spain), was essentially in one piece and is best labelled ‘dulcian’ (fig.2c) to distinguish it from the later ‘bassoon’ proper (i.e. in four joints). Although one early specimen in Vienna (a 16th-century Italian instrument by HIER.S, refurbished during the Baroque era) is inscribed ‘DER. DULCIN. BIN. ICH. GENANT …’ the names given to the instrument in early times were, unfortunately, seldom consistent or unambiguous. Derivatives of at least four different names have been in use since early times, ‘Fagott’ and ‘curtal’ as well as ‘dulcian’ and ‘bassoon’ (also ‘tarot’ and ‘sztort’). Since, of all the derivatives of these names, ‘dulcian’ has arguably been the least ambiguous, this is the preferred terminology.

The first term originated in 14th-century France as ‘fagot’, meaning a bundle of sticks, a faggot. While also used as the name of a dance by Phalèse (i) (1549) and Susato (1551), it was first used to denote a musical instrument in the early 16th century in Italy. ‘Choristfagott’ was an early name for the dulcian, and the name ‘Fagott’ was applied in the 17th century to the bass pommer as well, in spite of the fact that neither resembled a bundle of sticks. From the mid-18th century onwards Fagott and fagotto have been respectively the German and Italian names for the bassoon. The name ‘dulcian’ is commonly used today for the original version of the instrument in one piece (as opposed to the later type in joints). Deriving from the Latin root dulc (soft, sweet), it has traditionally been held to refer to the instrument’s more subdued tone quality than that of the louder shawms and pommers. However, Klitz (1971) showed that forms like dulzan can refer to the pommer as well as to an earlier type of shawm called the ‘dolzaina’ (douçaine). In England the earliest name for the dulcian was ‘curtall’, which was used well into the 18th century for the bassoon as well, and is related to other wind instrument names such as the French courtaud and the German Kortholt, which all derive from the Latin curtus (short), referring to instruments shortened because of their folded bore. ‘Basson’ meant originally the bass-register version of an instrument (e.g. basson de hautbois, basson-flûte). In 18th-century Germany it became the name of the new jointed version of the dulcian, which had been developed in France. In England, Talbot’s manuscript made a similar distinction: ‘Basson has 4 Joynts, Fagot entire’. Purcell’s Dioclesian score of 1690 specified ‘bassoon’ and this anglicized version of the word has been used ever since.

With the rise of instrumental playing in the 16th century, the desire to extend the range of instruments into the lower register caused them to be developed in families: larger versions of the shawm and recorder were made possible by an improved technology which enabled makers to bore longer tubes and to control widely spaced extension holes with the aid of keys. As Kolneder (MGG1) showed, there must have been a demand in the 16th century for a deep instrument to form a bass to the wind band that would surpass the trombone in agility, the bass recorder in loudness, and the bass pommer in ease of handling. Early in the 16th century all the constructional elements of the dulcian would have been available: the double reed of the shawm, the curved crook of the bass recorder and bass shawm, and the doubling back on itself of the bore (within a single block of wood) of the phagotus.

The shawm had already been built in large versions which were known as ‘bomharten’ or ‘pommers’: it may be assumed that the largest of those made in Nuremberg by Sigmund Schnitzer the elder and described by Johannes Apel in a letter of 1535 as ‘vill höher und lenger den ich’ (i.e. ‘much taller than I’) was already like the largest pommer illustrated by Praetorius in 1620. It must have been a cumbersome instrument to manage, especially out of doors.

The first mention of the dulcian in a reference work is in Zacconi’s Prattica di musica (1592); Virdung (1511), Agricola (1529, 5/1545) and Luscinius (1536) made no reference to it. Zacconi wrote that ‘the Fagotto chorista has a range C-b. It is so called because there is another kind which is not of its pitch but either a little higher or lower’. Sachs derived ‘chorista’ from the instrument’s usual function of supporting the bass in choral music; however this term was applied to other instruments as well to mean a certain register or Pitch level, for example ‘Dui corneti, uno di ton chorista, et uno più basso’ (Accademia Filarmonica inventory, Verona, 1562).

Of these different types, the Choristfagott soon established itself as the most useful member of the family. It consisted of a single shaft of wood (maple or fruit), oval in section, nearly a metre tall, drilled with two bores connected at the bottom so as to form one continuous, conical tube. At the top a curved brass crook was inserted into the narrow end of the bore, and the other end was slightly extended to form a flared bell. This bell sometimes took the form of a perforated cap, thus making the instrument gedackt (i.e. covered) as opposed to offen, and doubtless affecting both the tone quality and pitch. The thickness of the walls enabled the finger-holes to be drilled obliquely to accommodate the span of the fingers. There were eight finger-holes and two open keys protected by perforated brass boxes: six fingers gave G, and by adding the keys and using the player’s thumbs, notes down to C could be played. The basic scale overblew the octave, giving a range up to about g'. The ‘swallow-tail’ end of the little-finger key allowed the player to hold the instrument on either side of his body with right or left hand uppermost. Sometimes, especially in the larger sizes, the body of the instrument was made in two half-lengths, or even in three sections, which were joined together under an ornamental band, as in figs.4 and 5 below.

Over 50 dulcians of various sizes datable to the 16th and 17th centuries are in museums at Vienna (10); Berlin, Brussels (7); Augsburg, Linz (6); Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Salzburg (4); Brunswick, Leipzig, Merano, Sondershausen (2); Barcelona, Dresden, Hamburg, Paris, Prague (1). Of those in Vienna, eight come from the famous collections of Catajo and Ambras and include several of the earliest dulcians known. The four signed by J.C. Denner (d 1707) may be presumed to be among the last non-Spanish examples made. Sachs was the first to dispute the traditional view that the dulcian was a development of the pommer. That the two instruments coexisted for some time is shown in the paintings of a wind band by Alsloot (in the Prado, Madrid; see Shawm, §3, fig.9) and Sallaert (in Galleria Sabauda, Turin). The Nuremberg Stadtpfeifer dropped the pommer in 1643 in favour of the dulcian, but in some places the bass pommer survived into the 18th century.

Where, when and how the dulcian evolved is unknown, there being insufficient evidence to allow tidy conclusions to be drawn. The sparse evidence available shows different forms appearing in different places and at different times. Lockwood’s researches (1985) into the Ferrara guardaroba archives of Willaert’s patron Cardinal Ippolito I d’Este reveal that as early as 1516 the musician Gerardo francese, in the cardinal’s service since 1504, was paid for ‘uno faghotto da sonare cum le chiave d’argento’ and identified that year as a ‘sonator de fagoth’. There is a further reference to payments in 1517 ‘per fagotto che sona Janes de pre Michele’, evidently a colleague. The following year we find the lutenist Giovanni Angelo Testagrossa in a letter to Isabella d’Este at Mantua offering instruments and referring to ‘un altro instrumento quale se chiama un fagot’ (Bertolotti, 1890). The phagotum, demonstrated in 1532 at the court of Mantua by its inventor Afranio degli Albonesi and described in 1539 by his nephew Teseo Ambrosio, was traditionally considered to have been the earliest ancestor of the bassoon on the strength of its name; however, with its bellows-blown pair of twin cylindrical bores (each called a fagoto) sounded by single metal reeds, it is rather a type of bagpipe. The next earliest Italian citation is from the Verona Accademia Filarmonica Libro degli atti of 1546 which mentions ‘il 9 maggio furono comperati da Alvise soldato un Fagotto ed una Dolzana’.

Of all the signatures known on early wind instruments, variants of hier.s (25; see HIER.S) and of the so-called ‘rabbits foot’ (about 143) by far predominate. An attractive theory links both to the Bassano workshop. Significant research by Lasocki and others has revealed much concerning the activities in both Venice and London by members of this remarkable family. He has identified three generations of makers and players descended from Jeronimo (i) (d ?1539), a native of Bassano, some 65 km north-west of Venice. By 1531 four of his sons had visited London in their capacity as sackbut players, where they settled by about 1538. Both they and two subsequent generations were active there and in Venice making and repairing instruments. It is most likely that the eight surviving dulcians signed ‘hier.s’ and ‘hiero.s’ may be products of the Bassano workshop – the instrument depicted by Castiglione (fig.4) shows a two-section dulcian made in a similar style – as are also the eight others bearing the ‘rabbit’s foot’ mark.

In Germanic countries references appear somewhat later. A Graz inventory of 1577 lists ‘a set of old, bad [or plain] fagati, 2 bass, 2 tenor and 1 descant’ and ‘1 good fagat in daily use’; from this, Kolneder deduced that they were at least 40 to 50 years old, setting the time of their introduction in Graz at about 1530. In Augsburg, where a unique set of six (made in Italy) survive (fig.5), they were first listed in 1566.

Nickel argued that in Nuremberg the instrument did not make an appearance until 1575, when a dulzin (here meaning dulcian) was procured from Antwerp: earlier references elsewhere to dulzana, doltzana and the like refer to the dolzaina, an instrument in common use since the 15th century; and the fagati of Augsburg and Graz, he suggested, were pommers. Neudörfer (1547) praised the Nuremburg maker Sigmund Schnitzer the younger (d 1578) for his ability to turn, tune and perform on large oversized Pfeiffen, which Doppelmayr (1730) called Fagotte. That this might refer to a Grossbasspommer, rather than a dulcian, is supported by the fact that the player Rosenkron who was engraved holding one in 1679 is called fagotist. In view of these verbal ambiguities, pictorial sources are more reliable. A relief carved in Antwerp by Antonius von Zerun for the Moritz monument erected in 1563 in Freiberg Cathedral (Lower Saxony) shows a dulcian among a group of wind instruments (see fig.3); the instrument is portrayed again in an engraved frontispiece by Collaert of about 1590 (reproduced in Fraenkel, no.39). These and other sources suggest that it appeared early in Flanders. Venice was also supplying instruments to courts in Germany and Austria in the late 16th century (in 1588 the Munich Hofkapelle acquired ‘ein Vagott von Venedig’); in Nuremberg, the leading centre of wind instrument making of the period, the first dulcian was made in 1595.

By the time of Praetorius, the family had reached its maximum extent: in Syntagma musicum, ii (2/1619) he described a complete consort of Fagotten or Dolcianen consisting of eight instruments of varying size – the Discantfagott (g to c''), the Fagott Piccolo or Singel Corthol (G to g'), the Choristfagott or Doppel Corthol (C to g'), and two varieties of Doppelfagott, a Quartfagott (G' to a) and a Quintfagott (F' to g). In his Theatrum instrumentorum (1620) he showed in addition an Altfagott (presumably c to f'). A hitherto unknown source was discovered in 1994 in Edinburgh (GB-Eu Dc.6.100). The Instrumentälischer Bettlermantl by ‘A.S.’, a south German manuscript datable to the mid-17th century (Campbell, 1995) describes and illustrates four sizes of Vagött – Discant, Alt, Tenor and Bass; the accompanying instructions for reed making (see §5 below) are the earliest known. How long the use of the dulcian persisted is hard to ascertain. Eisel’s treatise (1738) dismisses the Teutscher Basson as outmoded, but still supplies a chart. Its use by the Pfeifergericht at the ceremonial opening of the Frankfurt fair persisted well into the 18th century.

In Spain the dulcian (Sp. bajón) enjoyed a long and well-documented period of use, which, according to the researches of B. Kenyon de Pascual, extended from the early 16th until the early 20th century. The earliest reference dates from 1530, when Juan de la Rosa of Pamplona was paid two ducats for repairing bajones. The 1616 workshop inventory of the court maker Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde included small and large dulcians. The four Spanish dulcians preserved in Brussels comprise a tenor, two altos, and one descant, indicating that such smaller models were also in use. Surviving music and inventory records show that they were frequently used through to the 18th century. The fact that all known iconographic sources have an ecclesiastical setting indicates that they were primarily played in church, though there is some evidence of secular use. They were still made and played after the jointed bassoon (fagot) was introduced; a 1739 Royal Chapel report specified that ‘the fagoto – which is an instrument of the same family, though its voice is not so full as that of the bajón – will also play’. An early 19th-century listing of ‘bajón’ with choristers and two ‘fagots’ with orchestra shows the different functions discharged by each instrument. As late as 1902, a cathedral chapter record mentions a bajonista. A painting by the Italian Bernardo Bitti on an organ from a Peruvian convent datable to 1590–95 shows early evidence of a kind of longitudinally sectioned dulcian. Several early 19th-century examples of a five-keyed jointed bajón in three or four sections survive.

Evidence for the dulcian’s early use in Flanders is the fact that it was there in 1563 that the earliest known represention was carved (see fig.3), while in 1566 some bajones were ordered for Valladolid. A print from Philipp Galle’s Encomium musices(Antwerp, c1590) shows another longitudinally sectioned dulcian. In the following century it was portrayed by such painters as Denis van Alsloot, Jan Breughel the younger, Theodoor Rombouts and Anthonis Sallaert, among others. Evidence from other countries (Poland, Denmark etc.) also shows considerable use of the instrument.

In England it is likely that members of the aforementioned Bassano family were making and repairing dulcians from about 1538 onwards. A Suffolk account book of 1574 records payment ‘for an instrument called a curtall’. In 1575 the Waits Band of Exeter was using a ‘Double Curtall’, and in 1597 the chamberlain of the Corporation of London was ordered to provide a curtall for the musicians at the charge of the City. About 1582, Stephen Batman referred to ‘the common bleting music in ye Drone, Hobius and Curtall’ (i.e. bagpipe, shawm and dulcian). The Talbot manuscript, which was probably written between 1690 and 1700 (GB-Och Music MS 1187), while describing fully the ‘Basson’ (jointed bassoon) still sees fit to describe fully the ‘Double Courtaut’ (dulcian). The ‘Tenor & Treble Courtaut’ and ‘Fagot’ are briefly mentioned; he tells us that the ‘Fagot’, which is ‘entire’ and thus evidently also of dulcian construction, is ‘unused’, while the ‘Double Courtaut’ is ‘not used in Consort’.

Evidence of the dulcian in France is mysteriously lacking. The fact that it does not figure in Cellier’s manuscript of c1585 (F-Pn fonds fr.9152) suggests that at that time it was still unknown. It is however in France that evidence regarding other precursors of the bassoon may be found. Predecessors other than the dulcian, such as the ‘fagotted’ bass shawm and the sectioned dulcian, were evidently also filling the gap before the emergence of the jointed bassoon. Mersenne described and illustrated instruments which may loosely be considered transitional, and recent researches by Kopp and White have yielded fresh insights. Comparing closely Mersenne’s Latin version Harmonicorum libri (1635–6) with the French Harmonie universelle (1636–7), Kopp (JAMIS, 1991) has been able to resolve confusing inconsistencies of nomenclature. White (‘The Bass Hautboy in the Seventeenth Century’, 1994, 167–82) challenges the conventional assumption of a straight development from bass shawm to dulcian to bassoon, arguing that of these the dulcian, far from being more primitive, requires tooling capable of greater accuracy; none of the instruments illustrated show one-piece construction, but rather two discrete tubes wrapped externally (the illustration of the bass hautbois de Poitou showing just such a construction). Mersenne wrote that they were ‘different from the preceeding bass [shawm] only in that they break into two parts to be able to be managed and carried more easily; that is why they are called Fagots because they resemble two pieces of wood which are bound and faggotted together’. White surmises: that ‘the bassoon may not have evolved directly out of the dulcian, but rather out of an interim “fagotted” version of the bass shawm early in the sixteenth century’; and that the dulcian’s simplified ‘modern’ design allowing for oblique chimneys represented an improvement over the sectioned instrument that must have preceded and then co-existed with it. Trichet appeared to corroborate his contemporary Mersenne in his treatise (c1640) by describing, in addition to a small conventional dulcian, a three-piece ‘basson’ constructed of two discrete tubes, ‘deux tuiaux joincts ensemble’, the larger of which ‘pour la commodité se peuvent desmonter et se briser en deux parts’. Only one sectioned model of dulcian survives, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Sammlung Alter Musikinstrumente no.201); unsigned, but of Italian provenance and datable to about 1600, its upper part is divided into two halves.

3. The early bassoon (to 1800).

It is not clear when or where the precursors of the bassoon evolved into the four-jointed instrument of today, descending one extra tone below the C of the dulcian. The gradual abandonment and replacement of the dulcian was doubtless brought about by such factors as the need for an instrument to match the range of the contemporary ‘basse de violon’ which descended to B', and to replace the old high church-pitch instruments that were incompatible with new instruments built at French flat pitch. There was an evident demand for such an instrument with this extended range. Selma y Salaverde had already called for it (see §7 below) and the compass of one of Mersenne’s instruments had also been extended to B' with the aid of a third key. The impulse for this development can be identified as emanating from Amsterdam, Nuremberg and Paris.

An important early iconographic source for the new bassoon is the Dutch painting Der Fagottspieler in the Suermondt Museum, Aachen. Unsigned, its attribution to Harmen Hals (1611–69) is dubious, White dating it to nearer the end of the century. The instrument has turned mouldings on the upper joints that served both as decoration and mounts for the keys. The wing joint has the characteristic ‘épaule’ or thickening of the wall necessary to retain the oblique bore of the finger-holes. The extra length afforded by the bell, which has a bulb-like cavity at the end, enabled the range to be extended a whole tone downwards to B' with the aid of an extra key, and the longer bore and lighter construction made the instrument more free and flexible in the upper register as well. A well-preserved three-keyed bassoon by Richard Haka (Schlossmuseum, Sondershausen), datable to a terminus ante quem of 1699, provides significant evidence. Its Baroque profile resembles that of the instrument portrayed in Der Fagottspieler. His contemporaries Jan Juriansz van Heerde (fl 1670–91) and Jan Juriansz de Jager (fl c1684–1694) also made bassoons. The additional G key for the right little finger, shown on the trade card of the Amsterdam maker Coenraad Rijkel (c1705), stabilized the position of the player’s hands; formerly the swallow-tail design of the F key had permitted interchangeable hand position. Rijkel’s contemporaries, Abraham van Aardenberg, Thomas Boekhout, Michiel Parent and Hendrik Richters, among other notable Dutch woodwind makers, also made bassoons.

The bassoons from J.C. Denner’s Nuremberg workshop (fig.6a) resemble Richard Haka’s model. It is known that by 1684 Denner was copying the new French recorders and oboes, and his bassoons may have been built to a French pattern. An engraving by Weigel of a bassoon maker – possibly Denner – at work shows both the two-key dulcian and three-key Basson being made (fig.7), but soon the new instrument with its greater potentialities was to dominate. Some 33 three-key bassoons survive.

The traditional view is that the bassoon, along with other Baroque woodwinds, was developed in the time of Louis XIV in France by members of the Hotteterre family, working as wind players and makers in Paris. Nicolas Hotteterre (i) (c1637–1694), a bassoonist for the royal chapel from 1668 and the first identifiable bassoon maker of the family, was possibly foreshadowed by other earlier relations. However, both the dulcian and bassoon are conspicuously absent among the woodwind instruments represented in the Gobelin tapestries of 1669, which show instead the cromorne, which appears to have functioned as bass to the reed group in France at this time (see Haynes, 1997). Borjon de Scellery’s Traité de la musette (1672) mentions the use of musette with ‘cromornes, flûtes & bassons’. Haynes concludes that ‘since bassoons played with cromornes and musettes, and hautboys did as well, hautboys and bassoons were probably able to play together by 1672. Thus some new model of bassoon would have been in existence by that date’. By the 1680s there are references to bassoons of the new type, i.e. designed to play at flat pitch like the other new Hotteterre woodwind instruments. In 1680 Lully scored for basson in his opera Proserpine and regularly thereafter (with a range of B' to f). In 1686 the Darmstadt court appointed the bassoonist Maillard, presumably from France.

It was in England that the new instrument was first described and illustrated. Here James Talbot gathered detailed information from London professional players, both native and French: White tentatively dates his inquiries to 1685–8. Talbot confirmed that the ‘French Basson’ in ‘4 Joynts’ had three keys and a compass extending down to B'. According to his brass authority William Bull, it had been the ‘Fr. Basson’ that had replaced the trombone after it had been ‘left off’ towards the end of the reign of King Charles II (d 1685). Around this time, Randle Holme (before 1688) described and illustrated what he called a ‘double curtaile’, which however appears to be a three-jointed bassoon. The employment of Jacques Hotteterre, brother of Jean (1648–1732), in London as an oboist is documented in 1675 (Giannini, 1993); doubtless he helped introduce the family products. Both the tenor oboe and bassoon had arrived from France by 1687 (see Lasocki, 1988). This traffic is documented later in a letter of 1711 by Louis Rousselet, another French oboist employed in London, who ordered two bassoons, one right-handed and one left-handed, from the well-known Parisian maker Jean-Jacques Rippert (Giannini, 1987). The earliest French illustration of the new bassoon is on the title page to Marais’ Pièces en trio (1692). The plain severity of its bell, free of Baroque turnery, resembles that of Stanesby.

Two unique double-reed instruments – the basse de musette and basson d’amour – built in the 1760s in a French-speaking Swiss valley colonized by Huguenot refugees, were possibly derived from lost French models. The four-jointed, three-keyed basson d’amour, 14 examples of which survive, displays unique features; these include a globular brass bell, which augments the tone like a Helmholtz resonator, and a pirouette at the crook end to facilitate playing (see Hautbois d’eglise). Designed for church use, many lack the left-hand keys deemed unnecessary for psalm accompaniment (see Staehelin, 1969–70).

The four-key instrument was to remain the model in standard use for the rest of the century. Halle (1764) reported that the best were made of boxwood: examples by J.H. Eichentopf, Poerschmann and Scherer survive. The Baroque mouldings of the upper three joints disappeared, the keys being mounted instead on projecting bosses or on saddles. The bore of the bell was changed to an inverted taper and sometimes a small resonance hole was added. The earliest extra keys to be added were for those low notes for which the standard ‘forked’ fingerings were less satisfactory: a chart by Hotteterre and Bailleux (c1765) first shows the fifth E key for left thumb (later moved by Grenser to left little finger), and a right-thumb key (for a'; also F) followed later. A more significant advance was the addition of a ‘harmonic key’ on the wing joint to obtain high-register notes, sometimes even being added to existing instruments (fig.6c). This was first reported in France in 1787 (according to Ozi, it was ‘in almost universal use’) and 1786–7 in Germany (a six-keyed instrument, complete with hand rest, is depicted on the seal attached to the will of Franz Anton Pfeiffer, court bassoonist at Ludwigslust). From Ozi (1787) we also learn that French makers had by this time already shifted the G key-hole away from its traditional site on the narrow butt bore to just below the F key-hole; other makers were not to follow suit for at least a generation. Ozi used an instrument by Keller of Strasbourg; the best-known Paris makers of this period were Bizey, Lot, Porthaux and Prudent. In Germany, the Dresden Fagot was considered the best; most notable were those made by the Grensers and their contemporaries Grundmann and Floth. A portrait of Felix Rheiner, painted in 1774 by Horemans (fig.8), shows the earliest recorded use of a pinhole in the crook, here operated by a key. Cugnier also advocated the pinhole in 1780, but it was not to come into general use until the 19th century. Almenraeder considered that it might be dispensed with on a broken-in, but not on a new, instrument. Extra keys of any sort were slow in becoming standard: Koch’s lexicon of 1802 describes the five-key instrument with two octave keys ‘found on recent instruments’.

In England, bassoons were made in considerable quantities throughout the 18th century; John Ashbury (fl London, 1698), Peter Bressan (1663–1731) and Thomas Stanesby (i) are the earliest recorded makers. However, only two English bassoons have survived from before 1750 (one each by Stanesby (i) and (ii); see fig.6b). The Milhouses of Newark and London later became the most notable makers. The bell of these earlier English instruments has a characteristic baluster contour and a pronounced inverted taper. The widespread use of church bands, in some places having up to seven instruments, as well as the demands of professional and military music making, gave work to numerous makers in London and the provinces. The tone-colour of the bassoon became more mellow and expressive throughout the 18th century. In Germany, Mattheson’s ‘stoltze Basson’ (1713) became the ‘Instrument der Liebe’ of Koch (1802), while French writers stressed its powers of expression, comparing it to the human voice. The early Sonata by Telemann (1728) already makes considerable technical demands, and the works written by Mozart in 1774 (k191/186e and 292/196c) indicate the expressive range expected from the instrument by then.

4. Development of the modern bassoon.

In the 19th century, several factors helped to bring about developments in instrument making. These included the increasing demands of composers regarding technique, expression and extension of the range upward; the rise of the solo virtuoso-composer; larger orchestras and concert halls demanding louder-toned instruments; international trade exhibitions encouraging competition and experiment; instrument makers who had backgrounds as excellent performers (including Savary jeune and Almenraeder); and technical advice from acoustic experts such as Gottfried Weber.

While Cugnier’s exceptional chart of 1780 showed fingerings up to f'' apparently possible on a five-key instrument without octave keys, the gradual introduction of up to three such keys on the wing undoubtedly facilitated notes from a' upwards, even if composers were still reluctant to write above g' in the orchestra. Simiot of Lyons, an important innovator, provided, in addition to these, closed keys for B' and C, notes hitherto unobtainable except by ‘faking’; other refinements included bushing finger-holes with metal tubes against water, and (in 1817) replacing the cork plug with a metal U-bend bow, an improvement later adopted in Germany.

Improvements made by the leading Paris makers Savary jeune and Adler included key-rollers (introduced in 1823) and one or two tuning-slides on the wing to obviate the need for several corps de rechange. Attempts were made to obtain the greater volume desired for the military band by widening the end of the bore with a broad flaring bell, or even widening the bore of the entire instrument (Winnen’s ‘Bassonore’ of 1834), and by making the instrument in metal. Both Charles-Joseph and Adolphe Sax experimented with brass instruments with covered keys; Sax fils patented in 1851 a 24-key metal bassoon with regularly spaced holes which was demonstrated at the London Exhibition that year. The instrument favourably impressed Boehm, who subsequently calculated his ‘Schema’ of hole dimensions for a bassoon bore which Triébert and Marzoli of Paris used for their model of 1855, together with many of Boehm’s innovations for the uniquely intricate keywork (shown in fig.6d). Another system comparable to that of Sax was worked out in London by Ward and Tamplini and patented in 1853. However, altering the traditional relationships between size and position of holes and wall thicknesses caused the instrument to lose its characteristic tone quality. The complexity and expense also militated against the ‘Boehm bassoon’, and it failed to catch on. Meanwhile, however, the efforts of the player and teacher Jancourt, working with Triébert, Gautrot aîné and Buffet-Crampon, led to the development in 1879 of the 22-key model which has with minor modifications since established itself as the standard French-system bassoon (see fig.1b).

In spite of the achievements of the Dresden makers, the bassoon in Germany was still far from satisfactory, especially as compared to the other woodwinds. Fröhlich (1810–11), who praised its qualities – the majesty of its bass and the grace of its middle and high registers – described the situation at this time: to adjust to different pitches, instruments were sold with a set of three wing joints of differing lengths, and with as many crooks. Standard bassoons had six keys, the more recent ones with two extra ‘octave’ keys on the wing for a' and c''; but many instruments still had only five or even four keys. Because of the lack of standardization of keywork or bore, no given set of fingerings would suit everyone; different notes were always out of tune, needing correction with special fingerings. On French bassoons of the period many fingerings were different; those given in the 1805 and 1806 translations of Ozi’s 1787 tutor were impracticable on German-built instruments.

This state of affairs was to be remedied by Carl Almenraeder (1786–1843), the ‘Boehm of the bassoon’ (Sachs, Reallexikon, 1913). Though some of his innovations can be traced to others, he nevertheless remains the most important figure in the history of the instrument. With the advantage, like Boehm and Savary, of a virtuoso ability on his instrument, he had experience as bandmaster, teacher, player and composer. In 1817, while playing in the Mainz orchestra, he met Gottfried Weber, who had recently published valuable articles on woodwind acoustics, and started working in the Schott factory at those experiments to improve and reform the bassoon which were to occupy him almost up until his death in 1843. His treatise of 1823 and subsequent articles describe how, by adding certain keys and relocating others, he improved the intonation and response of certain notes, extended the range up to g'' and facilitated passages in extreme keys. While leaving the bore as far as the fifth finger-hole essentially unaltered, he enlarged the tone holes sounding from A downwards and moved them further down towards the bell. Highly significant too was the replacing of the old resonance hole in the bell with an open key for B'. Reports of these improvements appearing in Schott’s house journal Caecilia attracted the attention of Beethoven, who closely questioned the local Viennese player Mittag about them and even asked Schott (letter of 25 November 1825) to send him one of the new instruments. An important discovery was that the intonation and response of certain notes could be improved by opening a second vent hole into the large bore of the double joint; other innovations included fitting a metal U-bend bow at the end of the butt, using stuffed pads and connecting keys with a pin through the inner wall of the double joint.

Almenraeder’s monumental tutor (completed 1836, but not published until 1843) is for his improved 17-key model with a complete chromatic range of four octaves (B' to b''), and gives many interesting data on technique, reeds and instrument construction. In 1831 he had founded his own factory in Biebrich with J.A. Heckel (1812–77). After Almenraeder’s death in 1843 Heckel (and his descendants for two generations) continued the manufacture and gradual refinement of what has since become known as the Heckelfagott, the model gradually adopted by the other German makers. Wagner, who in 1862 was living nearby and took an interest in these developments, persuaded Heckel to build a longer bell to reach A', and later endorsed Wilhelm Heckel’s improved double bassoon of 1879, which he subsequently employed in Parsifal.

By 1887, when Weissenborn's tutor for the Heckel bassoon appeared, this model of the instrument was starting to predominate throughout Germany and also in Austria, where the traditional ‘Wiener Fagott’ of Ziegler and Uhlmann (which retained the traditional venting of the bell by having a closed B' key like the instruments of the French makers) had hitherto held its own against the reformed instrument. As early as 1825 C.-J. Sax exhibited a model entirely key-operated, while his son Adolphe patented a similar 23-key model in metal in 1851. Elements derived from Boehm’s 1832 and 1847 flute models were soon adopted by such makers as Ward-Tamplini, Triébert-Marzoli and Haseneier. The latest and most promising of such ‘reform’ models was that of F.W. Kruspe (patented 1893), a radical new design that offered logical and simple fingering patterns, though it failed to catch on. Heckel’s achievement had been to recapture the good singing qualities of the old Dresden bassoons, which the earlier Almenraeder instruments with their harder tone quality had forfeited, while retaining the technical advantages developed by Almenraeder. Further improvements by Heckel, who in 1898 claimed to have made over 4000 bassoons, included minor alterations to bore and tone-hole placement, especially on the butt; lining the wing, an idea first adopted by Morton (London, c1870), with hard rubber (1889); and fitting a key for the crook-hole (1905).

In England the local production of instruments had dropped considerably by Victorian times owing to the disappearance of the church bands and the preference of professional players, many of them foreigners, for French instruments. Ward’s ‘Boehm’ model, patented in 1853, failed to raise any further interest. The foremost maker, Morton, trained in Vienna, made instruments on the French pattern. From about 1900, while English bassoons remained in military use, the requirements of low-pitch orchestras were met by instruments from abroad.

In the 20th century the use of the German bassoon gradually became more universal. In England the importing by Hans Richter of a pair of Viennese players to Manchester in 1899 subsequently established there a cell of ‘German’ players which, as Baines related, later spread to London. Cecil James, who retired in about 1980, was the last English protagonist of the ‘Buffet’ model. In the USA, the takeover occurred even earlier, and Italy and Spain have now followed suit. This process has been brought about by the ever-increasing demands of conductors and record producers for power of sound, homogeneity and balance, but has not always met with approval. In 1934 the English composer and conductor John Foulds remarked that:

it was the common practice of Schubert (and his contemporaries) to eke out his two horns with two bassoons in four-part harmony. Now the bassoon is the bass instrument of the oboe family. But so intent have been both players and conductors upon producing instruments capable of fulfilling the duties of deputy horns, so to say, that German bassoons of today, forsaking their true family, have become a sort of wooden horn and have, to really sensitive ears, lost more than they have gained.

He went on to say that ‘French, Belgian, and some English bassoons retain the true, slightly more reedy, certainly more sympatheitc quality which allies the instrument to its true double-reed family’ (Music To-Day, London, 1934). The dying-out of the French instrument would indisputably be a deplorable loss, and there are continuing efforts to improve the instrument and to safeguard its future. At the Paris Conservatoire both systems are currently taught in separate classes.

Among players of German bassoons, the instruments by Heckel maintained a unique status for many years. The production of instruments from other factories, however, has steadily increased. Before World War II the makers Adler, Hüller, Kohlert and Mönnig were notable. Current makers include: Adler-Sonora, Amati, Heckel, Mollenhauer, Mönnig, Moosmann, Püchner, Schreiber, Soulsby, Walter, Wolf (Europe); Bell (Canada); Fox, Linton (USA); and Yamaha (Japan). There are others in China and Brazil. ‘Buffet’-model instruments, formerly produced not only in France (Paris and La Couture) but in Belgium (Mahillon) and London (Boosey, Hawkes, Morton), are now made only in Paris (Buffet-Crampon, Selmer). Current makers of replica models include: Olivier Cottet, Laurent, Vergeat (France); Moeck, Rainer Weber, Guntram Wolf (Germany); Matthew Dart, John Hanchet, Graham Lyndon-Jones, Barbara Stanley (UK); Peter de Robinson and Koningh (the Netherlands); Robert Cronin, Robinson and Ross (USA).

5. The early reed.

In view of the relative importance of the reed, which is continually stressed by the writers on the instrument, it is unfortunate that so little is known about what they were like until comparatively recent times. As an ephemeral accessory in constant need of replacement, surviving specimens (and their reed cases) are relatively rare. Of these, pitifully few can be tentatively assigned to the 18th century.

The earliest iconographic source for a dulcian reed is the painting by Bernardo Bitti in Cuzco, Peru (1590–95); reeds are also illustrated in Praetorius (1620), Mersenne (1636–7) and by Jan de Reyn (c1670; fig.9); all are shaped somewhat like a straight-sided isosceles triangle. A still life by Franz Friedrich Franck (Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Augsburg) shows a dulcian with reed attached of a longer bassoon-like model with a long ‘V’ scrape extending to the thread wrapping. The earliest reed-making instructions are those in the Instrumentälischer Bettlermantl (mid-17th century); though tantalizingly vague, they offer some valuable data – the reed is to be bound with either wire or resined thread – that is not otherwise available at this early date. Otherwise, the sole evidence available is offered by the 21 reeds in Madrid that accompany the late-18th-century bajones there (Kenyon de Pascual, 1984; White, 1992). Most are shorter (55–6 mm), flatter and wider (19–20 mm) than bassoon reeds: like these, they are wired.

With regard to the historical bassoon reed, White’s ground-breaking research (1992, 1993, 1994) has shed light on many aspects of this hitherto neglected area, while raising many intriguing questions that have yet to be answered. He has subjected the available written sources, together with some 22 reeds for bajón and 91 for bassoon, to close scrutiny. His methodology delineates scrape patterns topographically, distinguishing between cane stratae – bark, dermis, dense and broad parenchyme (fig.10). He is able to show that 17th-century reeds were built on staples, were relatively long and narrow, bound with waxed thread rather than metal bands, and scraped to a V or U shape. Several stapled reed-forms co-existed: a conventional oboe-type staple; a cane section inserted into an external staple; or direct reed insertion into a wide-mouthed crook. The transition from stapled to ‘cane only’ construction occurred towards the end of the era of the four-key bassoon (although persisting locally well into the 19th century). Thread binding was replaced by metal banding. Pre-formed bands were pressed into position to tune the reed, like the rasette (tuning-wire) of an organ reed-pipe, a system persisting longest in England. Continental reeds mostly conformed to Ozi and Almenraeder models well into the late 19th century. The gouge, scrape, banding, size and proportions of early reeds differ markedly from their modern counterparts. Early reeds were hand-gouged, often internally tapered towards the tip, allowing blade material to be of denser cane quality. External scraping was shallow, resulting in a V or U shape stopping well short of the front banding. The adjustment capability of the ‘positional’ pre-formed band differed both from the continuous support of the earlier thread-wrap and the re-distribution of fulcrum forces through the fixed-position, double-wire banding of today’s reed. Tensional difference between these systems may have required compensational alterations in scrape, gouge thickness and embouchure support. White’s findings raise uncomfortable questions regarding how certain anachronistic practices employed today relate to ‘authenticity’.

Early bassoon reeds were considerably longer than modern ones (fig.11). In Der Fagottspieler, the bassoon player’s reed is approximately the length of his middle finger and has a wide flare. An engraving (1760) of the virtuoso Felix Rheiner shows him holding a broad reed of similar length with a horseshoe-shaped area of bark removed as in some modern oboe reeds. De Garsault (1761) illustrated a narrow reed 7·5 cm long and 1 cm wide at the tip (fig.11a), while Cugnier (1780) recommended a length of 28 or 29 to 32 lignes (6·5–7 cm). Ozi (1803), Fröhlich (1810–11), Neukirchner (1840) and Almenraeder (1843) all gave detailed accounts of reed making which broadly correspond, although Almenraeder’s reed is narrower and longer than that of Fröhlich (fig.11c). All agree on one significant point: the piece of cane was placed in a wooden mould for gouging by hand with a scoop-shaped chisel in order to leave it thinner at the middle, so that when made up little thinning at the blade was required once the bark was removed. The cane at the tip of the blade was thus of finer texture and more durable: Almenraeder achieved a life of up to two years for a reed in daily use. However, the subsequent universal adoption of the gouging machine (invented by the oboist Henri Brod 1834, later developed by Triébert c1845) which gives a rigidly vertical gouge to the piece of cane means that with most modern reeds this rind-wood is removed towards the tip, exposing coarser-grained pith-wood. Flament (Exercises techniques, op.40, 1919) recommended storing reeds for four years to avoid spongy cane, but still expected them to last only about a week. It cannot be said that modern machinery and precision techniques have done much to alleviate these perennial problems.

6. Charts and tutors.

Early fingering charts and tutors constitute a valuable reference source that documents the history and development of every woodwind instrument. With the bassoon, given the virtual non-availablity of surviving historical reeds, authentic matched crooks and even ‘uncorrupted’ instruments, fingering charts alone are able to offer unimpeachable evidence. White (1990) states that ‘by applying these fingering patterns to surviving original bassoons, or modern copies of these instruments, one can determine how close the modern player/maker is coming to an original concept of sound, reed style, temperament, pitch standard, and tuning’. Likewise, guidance on questions of performing practice may be derived from tutors of the period.

Fingering charts are found in many treatises and encyclopedia articles, as well as in tutors and independently published flysheets. They are usually presented in the form of a table: they are especially useful when also accompanied by written annotations regarding individual notes. Apart from the fingerings themselves, other significant information can be gleaned by the way in which they are differentiated, how some distinguish between d' and e', the compass selected, and the illustrations of contemporary models that usually accompany them. Table 1 lists a selection of works containing dulcian and early bassoon charts.

Early tutors can offer information unavailable elsewhere on such significant topics as ornamentation and reed making, as well as playing techniques. The mid-17th-century German treatise Instrumentälischer Bettlermantl is an important early source regarding reed making (see §5 above); J.S. Halle’s Werkstätte der heutigen Künste, iii (c1779) also includes brief but significant information on the subject (p.368). The earliest known monograph dedicated to the bassoon is the anonymous Compleat Instructions for the Bassoon or Fagotto (London, c1770). However the informative 20-page article in La Borde's Essai (pp.323–43) by the player Pierre Cugnier constitutes the first real tutor for the instrument. Two significant methods were published by Etienne Ozi: his Méthode nouvelle et raisonée pour le basson (1787) has seven pages of material relating to playing position, model of instrument, embouchure, choice of reed and tone production. Ozi’s later work, Nouvelle méthode de basson, first published in 1803, is the earliest comprehensive tutor for bassoon and has remained in print ever since. It includes information on reed making, with illustrations of tools, and is an entirely different work from his 1787 tutor. The earliest original tutor published in German is Wenzel Neukirchner’s Theoretisch practische Anleitung zum Fagottspiel (1840); the significant works of Carl Almenraeder have already been discussed (see §4 above). Julius Weissenborn’s Praktische Fagott-Schule (1887) relates specifically to the Heckel bassoon; it remained in use for a century. More recent examples are by Seltmann and Angerhöfer (based on the German system), Maurice Allard (French system) and Sergio Penazzi (for avant-garde techniques). Additional pedagogical sources are cited in the bibliography.

7. Repertory and use.

While the earliest use of the dulcian was as a strengthening element to the bass, it began in the early 17th century to assume a more independent role; Schütz in his Psalm xxiv (swv476) used a consort of five dulcians of different pitches (total range A' to a'') as a self-contained group. The instrument also began to be used with just one or two other instruments and continuo, for example by Mikolai Zielenski (Fantasia, 1611), Biagio Marini (Affetti musicali, op.1, 1617; Sonate, op.8, 1629, ded. 1626), Gabriele Usper (Compositioni armoniche, 1619), Giovanni Battisti Riccio (Terzo libro delle divine lodi musicali, 1620), Stefano Bernadi (Madrigaletti, 1621), Giovanni Picchi (Canzoni da sonar, 1625), Dario Castello (Sonate concertante: libro primo, 1621, libro secondo, 1629), Mathias Spiegler (Olor Solymaeus nascenti Jesu, 1631), Giovanni Battista Buonamente (Sonate et canzoni, 1636) and Giovanni Battista Fontana (Sonata, 1641). (For an extensive listing of 17th-century dulcian music see Wagner, 1976.) The first solo composition was a Fantasia per fagotto solo in the Canzoni, fantasie et correnti by Selma y Salaverde (Venice, 1638), who was descended from a family of Madrid instrument makers. In a dedicatory sonnet he is praised for his skill on the instrument; exceptionally, the piece descends to B'. The nine sonatas comprising the Compositioni musicali (1645) by the player Bertoli, the earliest set of sonatas for any one instrument, were written for the two-key dulcian (range C to d'), as was the Sonata sopra La Monica (from Sacra partitura, 1651) by the Darmstadt Fagottist P.F. Böddecker, a tour de force of technical virtuosity for its time. A sonata by ‘M.G.’ (c1686, I-MOe) remains unpublished. Daniel Speer’s tutor (1687) contains two sonatas for three dulcians designed to exemplify writing for the two-keyed instrument. Its use in ensemble is documented as early as 1589, when tromboni, cornetti, dolcaina e fagotti took part in the intermedi composed for La Pellegrina in Florence by Christofano Malvezzi (Elsner, 1935, p.58). The earliest known use of the instrument in opera is in Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro (performed 1668), where it is grouped with cornetts and trombones.

The late 17th century was a point of transition when the dulcian still co-existed with the new jointed instrument; therefore it is hard in certain circumstances to know which instrument may have been intended. However, the advent of the new jointed bassoon, with its increased range of tone and expression, gave new impetus to composers, and orchestras increasingly began to include the instrument. In Hamburg, where up to five were available, Keiser’s Atlanta (1698) and Octavia (1705) each included an aria accompanied by five Fagotte. With the operas of Lully the instrument assumed a new function of bass to a wind trio consisting of two hautbois and basson, which are used as a contrasting group to the strings (e.g. Psyché, 1678); the same pattern was followed by Purcell in Dioclesian (1690). Mattheson (1713) perceived the role of the ‘Proud Bassoon’ as forming ‘the usual bass, Fundament or Accompagnement to the oboe’. He went on to say that ‘it is reckoned easier to play, not calling for the same Finesse or ornamenting (but perhaps other skills instead); however anyone wishing to distinguish himself on it in the upper register with delicacy and speed has a considerable task’. In 1728 Telemann published his Sonata in F minor, with its pathetic echo effects and tenor cantilena. Two sonatinas followed in 1731. From this period there are also sonatas by Carlo Besozzi, J.F. Fasch, J.D. Heinichen and Christoph Schaffrath. Vivaldi’s 39 concertos for fagotto (preserved at I-Tn), outnumbering those he wrote for any other instrument save the violin, represent a unique legacy. While rv502 was dedicated to a local player Gioseppino Biancardi, and rv496 to his Bohemian patron Count Wenzel von Morzin, the others were presumably written for the girls of the Pietà orphanage where the composer taught from 1703. Fertonani (1998) dates their composition to between 1720 and 1740. The remarkable solo writing pre-empts many of the characteristics of later bassoon style, including rapid leaping between registers, lyrical tenor passages, and the occasional use of dynamic and expression marks. While the a' in rv487 and the B' in rv495 would appear to demand bassoon, the somewhat restricted compass of C to g' employed in the other concertos suggests dulcian, raising doubt as to the instrument intended. Other concertos are by J.G. Graun, Graupner, Müthel, J.F. Fasch and J.C. Bach. Chamber works include trio sonatas by Telemann, Handel and C.P.E. Bach and a remarkable set of sonatas with two oboes by Zelenka. J.S. Bach in his cantatas gave the bassoon several important obbligatos; his use of the instrument was limited by the players at his disposal, but for players like Torlle at Cöthen he was able to make considerable demands: movements like the second Bourrée in the fourth suite require fluency in an extreme key, and the ‘Quoniam’ of the B minor Mass is written up to a'. C.P.E. Bach gave the bassoon an obbligato in his oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (1769), while ‘Non m’alletta’ from Temistocle (1772) by J.C. Bach resembles a concerto in miniature.

In England in 1733 Galliard published his six sonatas, which display characteristic writing for the instrument: no.4 descends to B', a note obtained by ‘pinching’. Merci’s six sonatas followed in about 1735. The use of the bassoon in English orchestras was also increasing. Galliard’s ‘New Concerto grosso [for] 24 Bassoons, accompanied by Caporale on the Violoncello’, performed on 11 December 1744 in London, has not survived. Concertos with string accompaniment were written by Capel Bond (1766) as well as Henry Hargrave (1762). Boyce’s Solomon (1743) contains the once well-known aria ‘Softly rise’ with bassoon obbligato: a reported concerto is lost.

In France Boismortier published, from 1726 onwards, several sets of duets for two bassoons; his were the earliest of a considerable quantity subsequently written for teaching purposes. Corrette wrote a charming work, Le Phénix, for four bassoons as well as Les délìces de la solitude (c1739) with continuo. In Germany the bassoon was considered indispensable in the orchestra (even if not always given an independent part) as a means of consolidating and clarifying the bass line. Writing in 1784–5, C.F.D. Schubart asserted that the bassoon was able to ‘assume every role: accompany martial music with masculine dignity, be heard majestically in church, support the opera, discourse wisely in the concert hall, lend lilt to the dance, and be everything that it wants to be’ (Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Vienna, 1806/R). For orchestral playing Quantz in 1789 recommended the proportion of one bassoon to nine strings, two bassoons to 13 strings and three bassoons to 21 strings. A pair were to become the regular complement of the Classical orchestra, although in France two pairs were usual. There the demand for players was so great that for a period at the end of the century the Conservatoire was employing four professors to teach the bassoon.

Mozart’s use of the instrument shows a great understanding of its nature and potentialities; his early Concerto in B k191/186e (1774) remains the most significant in the bassoonist’s repertory. It is not known who commissioned the 18-year-old composer to write it; the amateur Baron Dürnitz, a composer of bassoon music himself for whom the sonata with cello k292/196c was probably written, can be discounted. Jahn’s supposition that he wrote three further concertos for Dürnitz is unfortunately not supported by any other evidence. A second concerto (ka230/196d), first published by Max Seiffert in 1934, was attributed by Hess (MJb, 1957) to Devienne, although Montgomery (1975) convincingly disproved this. Chamber works for bassoon and strings, a combination unlikely to entail problems of balance, were written in considerable quantities in the Classical period. G.W. Ritter’s lead (1778) was followed by Carl Stamitz, Devienne, Krommer, Danzi, Johann Brandl, Reicha and many others.

Works for bassoon with orchestra from this time fall into two categories. The first consists of concertos written by professional composers, usually with specific players in mind. Among these are notable works by Danzi, David, Michael Haydn (that by Joseph Haydn, c1803/4, is lost), J.N. Hummel, J.W. Kalliwoda, Kozeluch and Berwald. Efforts to identify definitively a reported Concerto da Esperienza (c1845) by Rossini have not so far proved convincing, although more than one work has been proposed. A Pezzo da Concerto (1813) for bassoon and horn by Paganini has recently vome to light (as has also his youthful set of three Duetti concertanti for violin and bassoon commissioned in 1800 by a Swedish amateur). Weber composed two works of capital importance to the repertory: the concerto written in 1811 for Brandt of Munich, in which the alternation of brilliant passage-work and lyrical melody shows off well the bassoon’s capacity for both wit and pathos, and the Andante and Hungarian Rondo, a successful reworking of a piece originally for viola. A recently discovered Capriccio by Verdi for bass clef instrument and orchestra, datable to the early 1830s, was probably intended for bassoon. In the second category are works written as display pieces by performers (usually for their own use), for example Gebauer, Jacobi and Almenraeder. According to the fashion of the time, these often took the form of pot-pourris and variations. Among the many concertante symphonies, the one ascribed to Mozart (for oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon) and that by Haydn (for oboe, bassoon, violin and cello) are notable. Works for two bassoons and orchestra by Dieter, Johnsen, Schacht and Vanhal survive; one by Danzi is lost.

Sonatas with piano were comparatively rare at this period. The substantial sonata by Liste (1807) may be considered the most important for any woodwind instrument prior to Weber. Others were composed by Reicha, Krufft, Amon, Moscheles and Theuss; there are some smaller pieces by Spohr, Christian Rummel and Jacobi. Almenraeder’s solo pieces, with their unique exploitation of the highest register up to g', mark the end of an era in which solo music for wind was fashionable. In France, the virtuoso Jancourt assembled for his repertory a large number of transcriptions as well as his own compositions. Notable examples of ‘morceaux de concours’ were written by Pierné, Bourdeau and Büsser.

Concerning its role within the orchestra, the bassoon was criticized by 19th-century writers as being ‘a weak-sounding instrument that gets lost among loud forces’ (Fétis, Revue musicale, viii, 1834, pp.148 and 326). Fétis recommended that ‘in a well-equipped wind orchestra, there should never be less than eight bassoons’; he even recorded an occasion where he used as many as 30. Berlioz too noted the bassoon’s lack of volume and remarked that ‘its timbre, totally lacking in éclat and nobility, has a propensity for the grotesque which must be borne in mind when giving it prominence’. However, he also said that ‘the character of its high notes has about it something painful, complaining, almost wretched, which can sometimes be surprisingly effective in a high register melody or an accompanimental pattern’ (Grand traité d’instrumentation, 1843).

Among the vast output of the 20th century, the following works are noteworthy: concertos and other concert works by Elgar, Wolf-Ferrari, Villa-Lobos, Jolivet, Françaix, Jacob and Maconchy; recent British works by John Addison, Judith Bingham, Stephen Dodgson, Robin Holloway, John Joubert and Peter Maxwell Davies, and in North America by Elliott Schwartz, Gunther Schuller, John T. Williams and E.T. Zwilich; a concerto by the Russian composer S.A. Gubaydulina (along with two other significant works for bassoon); concertante works by Strauss (clarinet and bassoon) and Hindemith (trumpet and bassoon); sonatas and other works by Tadeusz Baird, Roger Boutry, Eugène Bozza, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Dutilleux, Hindemith, Hurlstone, Longo, Nussio, Saint-Saëns, Skalkottas – his Sonata Concertante (1943) is the outstanding sonata of the century – and Tansman (a sonata by Poulenc, 1957, remained unfinished at his death and is lost); unaccompanied solo pieces by Apostel, Arnold, Bruno Bartolozzi, Jørgen Bentzon, Berio, Boulez, Jacob, Stockhausen and Isang Yun; bassoon ensembles by Bozza, Victor Bruns, Alois Hába, Jacob, Prokofiev, William Schuman and Peter Schickele; and bassoon and string works by Kalevi Aho, Bax, Françaix and Jacob. The increased prominence given to the bassoon in many 20th-century orchestral scores is exemplified by the opening of The Rite of Spring, a solo in the upper register. During the century various new techniques were demanded of the instrument, among them double- and triple-tonguing, flutter-tonguing, multiphonics, pitch bending, quarter tones, and vocalizing while playing. Many of these are exploited in Bartolozzi’s Concertazioni for bassoon, strings and percussion and Stockhausen’s Adieu for wind quintet (see Penazzi, 1982, and Ouzounoff, 1986). More recent is its use with contact microphones and live electronics.

8. Performers and teachers.

The earliest performers known by name are the composers Bertoli, Selma y Salaverde and Böddecker, whose florid writing indicates the existence of a high level of dulcian technique in the 17th century. Vivaldi’s concertos suggest that standards in Italy were particularly high; the playing of Paolo Girolamo Besozzi (1704–78) of Parma was praised by several writers, and the earliest German virtuoso of note, Felix Rheiner (1732–82) of Munich, of whom two interesting portraits survive (see fig.8), was sent to Turin to study with him. His pupil Franz Anton Pfeiffer (1752–87) was praised, among other things, for his double-tonguing; his use of ‘three-part harmony’ in a solo cadenza was doubtless a multiphonic effect. Georg Wenzel Ritter (1748–1808), ‘the finest bassoon player I ever heard’ (Kelly, 1826), of Berlin started his career in the Mannheim orchestra, making Mozart’s acquaintance there; while in Paris in 1778 he published a pioneering set of bassoon quartets. The bassoon part in the Sinfonia concertante Mozart said he wrote in Paris was for him. Among Ritter’s pupils were Carl Baermann (1782–1842), who succeeded him in the Berlin orchestra and became well known as a soloist, and Georg Friedrich Brandt (1773–1836) of Munich, for whom Weber wrote his concerto and Hungarian Rondo. Other German virtuosos included Carl Almenraeder, the Bohemian Wenzel Neukirchner (1805–89) of Stuttgart, who like Almenraeder wrote a tutor and solos as well as attempting practical improvements to his instrument, and Carl Jacobi (1791–1852) of Coburg, who published a number of interesting bravura pieces. Julius Weissenborn (1837–88) of Leipzig and Ludwig Milde (1849–1913) of Prague left teaching material which is still widely used today.

In France the best-known players have traditionally taught and written tutors as well. The treatise of Pierre Cugnier (b 1740) appeared in La Borde’s Essai of 1780; Cugnier wrote that the bassoon ‘might imitate the sound of the recorder, were it possible for that instrument to play as low. But its tone must never be denuded of that kind of “bite” (mordant) proper to it which lends it the necessary timbre; otherwise it will resemble that of the serpent, which would be disagreeable’. The tutors of Etienne Ozi (1754–1813), who was appointed to the Conservatoire in 1795, have already been discussed (see §6 above). Tutors were also written by his successors Berr, Willent-Bordogny, Jancourt, Cokken and Bourdeau (see §6 above, esp. Table 1); Eugène Jancourt (1815–1901) had a notable career as a soloist as well, and wrote and arranged an extensive repertory of solo pieces; this corpus of 116 works forms a valuable contribution to the repertory. His tutor includes information on tone vibrato, which was not to be confused with embellishment. Jancourt wrote that ‘this is not an ornament dictated by taste, but the result of deep feeling expressed on the instrument’ and that it was obtained ‘by shaking the right hand over the finger-holes’. Writing over 100 years later, the English bassoonist Archie Camden expressed his opinion that ‘the wide, throbbing kind of vibrato – wow-wow, wow-wow – is in bad taste … whether it is vocal or instrumental, and can easily make a bassoon sound like a badly played saxophone’.

In England, early players of note included Kennedy, for whom Galliard in 1733 wrote a set of sonatas; Miller, who was to Burney ‘the best Bassoon I can remember’; and James Holmes (d 1820), who played in the première of Haydn’s Concertante. John Parry (ii) (1830) wrote of Holmes that his ‘tone resembled the most perfect human voice’ and that his ‘execution was as accurate as rapid’. In the 19th century the renowned James Mackintosh (1767–1844) was followed by the Paris-trained Belgian Friedrich Baumann (1801–56), who was brought over by the conductor Jullien. William Wotton (1832–1912) and his brother Thomas (1852–1918) were succeeded as the leading players by another notable pair, E.F. James (1861–1921), for whom Elgar (himself an amateur bassoonist) wrote his Romance of 1909, and his brother Wilfred (1872–1941). Writing in 1836, George Hogarth noted that ‘English performers, in general, use stronger reeds than foreigners, with a corresponding difference in the quality of their tone’ (Musical World, iii/38, 1836, p.180). He differentiated between a ‘strong, thick reed’ which ‘produces a great volume of tone; but the pressure of the lips which it requires prevents the attainment of smoothness and flexibility’ and a ‘weak reed’ which ‘is easily blown into; but the tone is feeble, and defective in roundness’. Hanslick (Welt Ausstellung: Paris 1867) also observed that the English (along with the French and Belgians) preferred very wide reeds, which in his opinion promoted ‘strength of tone at the cost of beauty’. The establishment of the German bassoon in England owes much to Archie Camden (1888–1979), who as a soloist helped popularize the instrument and trained a whole generation of players. Other influential teachers have included Karl Öhlberger (Austria), Karel Pivonka (Czech Republic), Maurice Allard (France), Albert Hennige (Germany), Mordechai Rechtman (Israel), Enzo Muccetti (Italy), Gwydion Brooke (UK), Simon Kovar and Sol Schoenbach (USA), and Roman Terëkhin (Russia).

Notable performers and teachers of our time include: Milan Turkovic (Austria), Gilbert Audin, Pascal Gallois (France), Sergio Azzolini, Dag Jensen and Klaus Thunemann (Germany), Masahito Tanaka (Japan), Valery Popov (Russia), and Norman Herzberg and Stephen Maxym (USA). ‘Period’ performers include Danny Bond, Michael McCraw, Milan Turkovic and Marc Vallon. Jazz bassoonists include Paul Hanson and Michael Rabinowitz.

9. The double bassoon.

The modern double or contrabassoon (fig.12) is basically similar in construction to the bassoon. The normal compass extends from B'' to c'. Modern instruments, mostly of the ‘compact’ model, stand about 122 cm tall with a bore length of 5·5 m. Earlier models have a tall down-turning metal bell, for which a short bassoon-shaped wooden ‘C’ bell may be substituted when the lowest notes are not required. There are also models descending to A'' (or even A'') which require an even taller extension bell. The reed, somewhat larger than that of the bassoon, can vary more than the latter in its dimensions; while some players use inflated bassoon reed dimensions, others alter the ratio of blade to shaft (as required by the model of instrument). The crook fits into a metal shank incorporating a tuning-slide and water-key. The contrabassoon is a transposing instrument, notated one octave higher than it sounds; in a few scores (Wagner, Debussy) its part is written at pitch. As with the bassoon, the crook is crucial as regards response, intonation and tone. The basic problem for the player is to produce a sound of good quality which will nevertheless ‘tell’ in a tutti passage. While the upper register is weak, it is in the lower register that the contrabassoon sounds at its best, lending a rich organ-like sonority to the full wind section. Brahms specified its use in his Requiem op.45, should no organ be available (letter to Hermann Levi, spring 1869). From the turn of the century, its orchestral role became more independent (works by Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Britten, etc.). Works such as Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie op.9, no.1 and Berg’s Kammerkonzert set new standards for the player. Modern scores often demand the player to double between bassoon and contra, a manoeuvre often requiring considerable dexterity. During the era of acoustic recording, the instrument proved an indispensable reinforcement for the string bass. Rarely, a pair is called for; Schoenberg in his Gurrelieder allowed the first player to appear in the unusual role of inner voice. Its use in a solo context is only a recent development. As early as 1922 Ervín Schulhoff scored his Bassnachtigal for unaccompanied double bassoon, partly for extra-musical reasons; more recently concert works have been written by Henk Badings, Victor Bruns, Ruth Gipps, Roger Smalley and Gunther Schuller. There are compositions for double bassoon and piano by Victor Bruns and Vítězslav Novák.

If the folding of 8' register pommers in the interests of commodity made sense, this was even more the case for 16' models. Larger members of the bassoon family have existed from the earliest period of its history; Zacconi (1592) referred to more than one size of dulcian and Praetorius (2/1619) listed an entire consort whose deepest members were two ‘Doppelfagotte’, the Quartfagott (G' to f, g) and Quintfagott (F' to e, g). The two larger dulcians in the Vienna collection correspond to the former. Praetorius also referred to a projected Fagotcontra by Hans Schreiber of Berlin which would be pitched one octave below the Choristfagott size of dulcian. The consort of dulcians in Augsburg (see fig.5) contains one such instrument, of Italian origin, dating from the second half of the 16th century (see §2 above). The instrument is constructed of five sections, the glued tenons strengthened with ornamental bands. Of the four keys, the E and D thumb-keys are mounted one over the other. A flush pepper-pot lid similar to that of the gedackt dulcian is inserted in the bell (see Weber, 1991). Another early period Oktavbass instrument is at Dresden (Museum für Kunsthandwerke, Schloss Pillnitz). The other instruments known are two that are slightly later, now in the Schlossmuseum, Sondershausen (one is dated 1681; both are ascribed to Johann Bohlmann) which, aside from detachable bell are of one-piece construction. Four early octave bassoon models survive. One in Leipzig is signed A. Eichentopf, dated 1714. Another in Sondershausen is unsigned but attributed by Heyde to the same maker and tentatively dated to ante 1711 (Heyde, 1987). These are like a large version of one of Denner’s bassoons and descend to B''. An interesting example in the Museum Carolino Augusteum, Salzburg, by the Milanese maker Anciuti, is dated 1732. In England Talbot (c1695) mentioned a ‘Pedal or Double Basson’ descending to F', which would appear to be a jointed version of the ‘Quintfagott’ of Praetorius. The famous London maker Thomas Stanesby (i) is reported to have made a double bassoon in 1727; a fine specimen in Dublin by his son (dated 1739) descends to B'', is built like a large bassoon of the period with four keys, and stands 253 cm high. A contemporary advertisement refers to ‘Two Grand or Double Bassoons, made by Mr Stanesby jun. the greatness of whose sound surpasses that of any other Bass Instrument whatsoever’. The double bassoon is not referred to in England for several decades after 1803, and it is unlikely that any other such English instruments were made until the late 19th century.

In Germany the Quartfagott was more common than the true Kontrafagott pitched one octave below the normal bassoon. Bach used the former in the cantata Der Himmel lacht! die Erde Jubilieret bwv31 (1715), and in his St John Passion a ‘continuo pro Bassono grosso’ part is mentioned. Some works (e.g. the cantata Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich bwv150) which contain passages descending to written A' were transposed so as to enable old Chorton instruments (bassoon, organ) to play with newer low-pitch woodwinds. Kontrafagotte were included in German and Austrian military bands towards the end of the 18th century and were used occasionally in the orchestra when available. Mozart wrote a part for gran fagotto descending to C' in his Maurerische Trauermusik k477/479a (however, his Serenade for 13 wind instruments k361/370a specifies contrabasso, i.e. string bass). By 1807 the Vienna court orchestra included a double bassoon, and Haydn and Beethoven made use of it in their larger works.

During the 19th century, experiments were made by many different makers to develop a satisfactory double bassoon, mainly to satisfy the need for a powerful contrabass-register instrument in the military band. One type developed was of metal, with a closed key for each note; the earliest maker was Stehle of Vienna, who exhibited his ‘Harmonie-Bass’ there in 1839. It measured 169 cm and its 15 keys were operated singly like those of the ophicleide giving a range of two and a quarter octaves from E'' to g. Six of these instruments survive, of which two are in Budapest, and one each in Leipzig, Nuremberg, Paris and Toronto. Later models were more compact: these included Červený’s ‘Tritonicon’ of 1856 and Moritz’s ‘Claviatur-Contrafagott’, which was fitted with a keyboard like that of a piano-accordion. A version by Mahillon from 1868 was called ‘contrebasse à anche’, and later on similar instruments of this name (Eng. reed contrabass; Ger. Rohrkontrabass; It. contrabbasso ad ancia) were produced for military bands in France and Italy. The deepest of all was Červený’s ‘Subkontrafagott’ of 1867 which descended to B''. Another solution was to widen the bore. Haseneier’s wooden ‘Contrabassophon’ of 1847 had a bore which flared from 6 mm to over 10 cm and tone holes of exceptionally large diameter. It had 19 keys covering all holes and its range extended down to C'. Since the tube was in four sections, the overall length of the instrument was only 140 cm; it was considered a success and was copied by several makers. Some models, such as that of Berthold in 1875, were made in papier-mâché to lessen the weight; W.H. Stone brought one such to England, where it was copied by Morton. However, the open and not easily controlled tone of all these instruments, while acceptable in the military band, was not suitable for the orchestra. The contrabass sarrusophone which later replaced them in France is still found occasionally and appears in some scores by Ravel, Debussy and Delius.

However, it was the achievement of the Heckel factory to bring about the development of the modern instrument. For the preceding years the double bassoons outwardly resembled a large bassoon with a long looped metal crook; their range descended to D' or C'. In 1875–6 J.A. Heckel redesigned the instrument, retaining its narrow bore but disposing it into three separate wooden tubes; it was held on the left of the player’s body and its range descended to C' (it was patented in 1877 by Heckel’s foreman Friedrich Stritter). In 1879 an improved model was made which was held and fingered conventionally; Wagner praised its new-found ability to play smoothly, and subsequently employed it in Parsifal. For the first time the instrument was comparable to the bassoon in tone and general response. Later a down-turned metal bell was added, extending the range to B'', and after 1900 to A''. All subsequent instruments have been based on these Heckel models, including a version by Buffet-Crampon with French-system keywork introduced in 1906.

(3) Gaudenzio [Girolamo Gaudenzio] Battistini

10. Other sizes.

The family of dulcians as described by Praetorius included three progressively smaller sizes which he called Diskantfagott, Altfagott and Fagott Piccolo or Singel Corthol. A set of four small dulcians, of Spanish provenance and listed as bajoncilli, is now in Brussels. An early incidence of scoring for such an instrument is by Flaccomio (Liber primus concentus, Venice, 1611), marked ‘con basoncico alias fagotto piccolo’. Ever since the appearance of the jointed bassoon, smaller-sized instruments have continued to be built by every bassoon maker of note; their survival in surprising numbers is perhaps explained by their lack of serious use. They can be divided into two categories. The more usual type of tenor bassoon pitched in F (a 5th higher than normal) or occasionally in G or E, was also known as the ‘tenoroon’. This name, presumably a contraction of ‘tenor bassoon’, appears to have been originally applied to the alto oboe, and Stone in Grove1 misleadingly confused the two instruments. The French name for this type, basson quinte, should not be confused with the Quintfagott of Praetorius, the large dulcian which descended to F'. The second type, pitched one octave higher than normal, is named ‘octave bassoon’ or ‘fagottino’. A fine early specimen, 63·6 cm tall, by J.C. Denner, is in Boston.

The only known early works for small bassoon are a mid-18th-century wind parthia by J.G.M. Frost, which includes parts for two fagotti-octavo and two fagotti-quarto, and a cantata by F.W. Zachow, which includes bassonetti. In France a small bassoon was reportedly used about 1833 at the Bordeaux opera to replace the english horn; Larousse (1865), comparing the two instruments, considered that the tone of the basson quinte had greater force and penetration. Later it was used occasionally in the military band; Buffet-Crampon exhibited three new models in 1889 and Morton made some in London.

As a solo instrument, the small bassoon had long been used by such recitalists as Eugène Jancourt and E.F. James. In 1992 Guntram Wolf (Kronach) built the first tenor bassoon in modern times for the English player Richard Moore, who subsequently commissioned Victor Bruns to write for it. Another significant use has been as an instrument for young beginners: Almenraeder recommended starting ten-year-olds this way – the age at which Bärmann began his studies with Ritter. The same practice was reported in the Foundling Hospital of London and more recently in the band of a Sicilian orphanage. Since 1992 Wolf, followed by Moosmann and Howarth, has developed successful models for the seven- to ten-year-old age group.

The name ‘Caledonica’ was given to a modified version of the octave bassoon invented about 1825 by the Scottish bandmaster William Meikle; it had a wider flaring bore and was played with a small clarinet mouthpiece. An improved model was subsequently developed by the London maker George Wood which he called the ‘alto fagotto’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Pedagogical. B General. C Early history (to 1800). D Construction and makers. E Repertory and performers.

a: pedagogical.

LaBordeE, 323–43

Compleat Instructions for the Bassoon or Fagotto (London, c1770)

E. Ozi: Méthode nouvelle et raisonnée pour le basson (Paris, 1787/R)

E. Ozi: Nouvelle méthode de basson adoptée par le Conservatoire (Paris, 1803/R)

J. Fröhlich: Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Musikschule für alle beym Orchester gebräuchliche wichtigere Instrumente (Bonn, 1810–11)

W. Neukirchner: Theoretisch practische Anleitung zum Fagottspiel (Leipzig, 1840)

C. Almenraeder: Fagottschule/Méthode complète de basson (Mainz, 1843)

E. Jancourt: Méthode théorique et pratique de basson (Paris, 1847/R)

J. Weissenborn: Praktische Fagott-Schule/Practical Bassoon-School (Leipzig, 1887, rev. 3/1929/R by C. Schaefer)

J. Satzenhofer: Neue praktische Fagott-Schule (Leipzig, 1900)

C. Stadio: Grand metodo per fagotto (Naples, 1908)

F. Oubradous: Enseignement complet du basson, i–iv (Paris, 1938–44)

M. Allard: Méthode de basson (Paris, 1975)

W. Seltmann and G.Angerhöfer: Das Fagott/The Bassoon, i–vi (Leipzig, 1976–84)

C.A. Biggers: The Contra-Bassoon: a Guide to Performance (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1977)

S. Penazzi: Il fagotto: altre techniche/The Bassoon: other Techniques (Milan, 1982)

S.J. Jooste: The Technique of Bassoon Playing (Potchefstroom, 1984)

A. Ouzounoff: Actuellement le basson: traité pratique des nouvelles techniques au basson (Paris, 1986)

P. Lescat and J. Saint-Arroman, eds.: Méthodes et traités: France 1600–1800, iv: Basson (Courlay, 1999)

b: general.

MGG1 (W. Kolneder)

MGG2 (G. Angerhöfer and W. Krüger)

C. Baermann: ‘Ueber die Natur und Eigenthümlichkeit des Fagotts’, AMZ, xxii (1820), 601–7

M. Kelly: Reminiscences (London, 1826, 2/1826/R with introduction by A.H. King); ed. R. Fiske (London, 1975)

W. Heckel: Der Fagott (Biebrich, 1899, 2/1931)

L. Letellier and E. Flamant: ‘Le basson’, EMDC, II/iii (1927), 1556–96

A. Baines: Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967/R)

L.G. Langwill: The Bassoon and Contrabassoon (London, 1965)

G.S. Fraenkel, ed.: Decorative Music Title Pages (New York, 1968)

C.J. Nederveen: Acoustical Aspects of Woodwind Instruments (Amsterdam, 1969, 2/1998)

J. Eppelsheim: ‘Das “Subkontrafagott”’, Fachtagung zur Erforschung der Blasmusik I: Graz 1974, 233–72

W. Voigt: Untersuchungen zur Formantbildung in Klängen von Fagott und Dulzianen (Regensburg, 1975) [with Eng. summary]

A.H. Benade: Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics (New York, 1976, 2/1990)

J. Kergomard and J. Heinrich: ‘Le basson’, Bulletin du Groupe d’acoustique musicale, nos.82–3 (1976), 116

W. Jansen: The Bassoon: its History, Construction, Makers, Players and Music (Buren, 1978–81)

J. Eppelsheim: ‘More Facts about the “Subkontrafagott”’, GSJ, xxxii (1979), 104–14

G. Joppig: Oboe und Fagott: ihre Geschichte, ihre Nebeninstrumente und ihre Musik (Berne and Stuttgart, 1981; Eng. trans., 1988)

W.H. Sallagar and M. Nagy, eds: Fagott Forever: eine Festgabe für Karl Öhlberger (Wilhering, 1992)

W. Waterhouse: ‘Die historische Entwicklung des Fagottklangs’, Festschrift 10 Jahre Berliner Fagottquartett, ed. U. Liedtke and H. Bartholomäus (Berlin,1996), 29–44

c: early history (to 1800)

BertolottiM

GerberL

MersenneHU

PraetoriusSM, ii

PraetoriusTI

T. Albonesi: Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam (Pavia, 1539)

L. Zacconi: Prattica di musica (Venice, 1592/R)

H. de Garsault: Notionaire (Paris, 1761)

E. Eslner: Untersuchung der instrumentalen Besetzungspraxis der weltlichen Musik im 16. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Basle, 1935)

F.W. Galpin: ‘The Romance of the Phagotum’, PMA, lxvii (1940–41), 57–72

A. Baines: ‘James Talbot's Manuscript, I: Wind Instruments’, GSJ, i (1948), 9–26

F. Lesure: ‘Le traité des instruments de musique de Pierre Trichet: les instruments à vent’, AnnM, iii (1955), 283–387; pubd separately (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1957; Eng. trans., 1973)

A. Reimann: Studien zur Geschichte des Fagotts (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1956)

E. Halfpenny: ‘The Evolution of the Bassoon in England, 1750–1800’, GSJ, x (1957), 30–39

J. Eppelsheim: Das Orchester in den Werken Jean-Baptiste Lullys (Tutzing, 1961)

M. Staehelin: ‘Der sogenannte Musettenbass: Forschungen zur schweizerischen Instrumenten- und Musikgeschichte des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts’, Jb des Bernischen historischen Museums in Bern, xlix–l (Bern,1969–70), 93–121

B. Klitz: ‘A Composition for dolzaina’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 113–18

K. Wagner: Die Fagott-Instrumente des 17. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Basle, 1976)

B. Kenyon de Pascual: ‘A Brief Survey of the Late Spanish Bajón’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 72–9

R. Semmens: ‘The Bassoons in Marin Mersenne's Harmonie universelle (1636)’, JAMIS, (1984), 22–31

L. Lockwood: ‘Adrian Willaert and Cardinal Ippolito I d'Este’, EMH, v (1985), 85–112

A. Roberts: Studien zur Bauweise und zur Spieltechnik des Dulzian (diss., U. of Köln, 1986)

T. Giannini: ‘A Letter from Louis Rousselet, 18th Century French Oboist at the Royal Opera in England’, AMIS Newsletter, xvi/2 (1987), 10–11

J.-M. Heinrich: Contribution à l'étude de l'anche du basson (diss., U. of Paris,1987)

H. Heyde: ‘Contrabassoons in the 17th and early 18th Century’, GSJ, xl (1987), 24–36

W. Köhler: Die Blasinstrumente aus der ‘Harmonie universelle’ des Marin Mersenne (Celle, 1987)

B. Haynes: ‘Lully and the Rise of the Oboe as Seen in Works of Art’, EMc, xvi (1988), 324–38

D. Lasocki: ‘The French Hautboy in England, 1673–1730’, EMc, xvi (1988), 339–57

W. Waterhouse: ‘A Newly Discovered 17th-Century Bassoon by Haka’, EMc, xvi (1988), 407–10

B. Kenyon de Pascual: ‘A Late Sixteenth-Century Portrayal of the Jointed Dulcian’, GSJ, xliii (1990), 150–53

P. White: ‘Early Bassoon Fingering Charts’, GSJ, xliii (1990), 68–111

J. Kopp: ‘Notes on the Bassoon in Seventeenth-Century France’, JAMIS, xvii (1991), 85–115

R. Weber: ‘Kontrabass-Dulciane, die Vorläufer des Kontrafagottes’, Oboe, Klarinette, Fagott, vi (1991), 97–105

P. White: ‘Bajón Reeds’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.67 (1992), 10–30

T. Giannini: ‘Jacques Hotteterre le Romain and his Father, Martin’, EMc, xxi (1993), 377–95

P. White: The Early Bassoon Reed in Relation to the Development of the Bassoon from 1636 (diss., U. of Oxford, 1993)

B. Kenyon de Pascual: ‘The Dulcians (Bajón and Bajoncillo) in Spain: an updated Review’, A Time of Questioning: Utrecht 1994, 25–52

P. White: ‘Early Reed Design’, A Time of Questioning: Utrecht 1994, 189–203

P. White: ‘The Bass Hautboy in the Seventeenth Century’, A Time of Questioning: Utrecht 1994, 167–82

J.P. Campbell: ‘Musical Instruments in the Instrumentälischer Bettlermantl: a Seventeenth-Century Musical Compendium’, GSJ, xlviii (1995), 156–67

B. Haynes: ‘New Light on Some French Relatives of the Hautboy in the 17th and Early 18th Centuries’, Sine musica nulla vita: Festschrift Hermann Moeck, ed. N. Delius (Celle, 1997), 257–70

J.B. Kopp: ‘The Emergence of the Late-Baroque Bassoon’, Double Reed, xxii/4 (1999), 73–87

d: construction and makers.

Waterhouse-LangwillI

C. Almenraeder: Abhandlung über die Verbesserung des Fagotts (Mainz, 1823)

G. Weber: ‘Wesentliche Verbesserungen des Fagottes’, Caecilia [Mainz], ii (1825), 123–40 [incl. illustration]

G. Weber: ‘C. Almenräders weitere Fagott-Verbesserung’, Caecilia [Mainz], ix (1828), 128

C. Almenraeder: ‘Bemerkungen über Blasinstrumente mit Tonlöchern, insbesondere die Doppellöcher am Fagott’, Caecilia [Mainz], xix (1837), 77–87

G. Brindley: ‘The Logical Bassoon’, GSJ, xxi (1968), 152–61

M. Popkin and L.Glickman: Bassoon Reed Making (Evanston, IL,1969, 2/1987)

E. Nickel: Der Holzblasinstrumentenbau in der Freien Reichsstadt Nürnberg (Munich,1971)

H. Heyde: ‘Carl Almenräders Verdienst um das Fagott’, BMw, xiv (1972), 225–30

J.L. Burton: Bassoon Bore Dimensions (diss., U. of Rochester, 1975)

K. Ventzke: ‘Boehm-System-Fagotte im 19. Jahrhundert’, Tibia, i/1 (1976), 13–18

W. Waterhouse: The Proud Bassoon, Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Instruments, 17 Aug – 31 Aug 1983 (Edinburgh, 1983) [exhibition catalogue]

G. Joppig: ‘Zur Entwicklung des deutschen Fagotts’, Studia organologica: Festschrift John Henry van der Meer, ed. F. Hellwig (Tutzing, 1987), 253–76

D. Lasocki and R.Prior: The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (Aldershot, 1995)

M. Lyndon-Jones: ‘Who was HIE.S/HIER.S/HIERO.S?’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.83 (1996), 10–18

E. Brown: ‘Another Look at the Bassoon’, Double Reed News, no.42 (1998), 8–10

e: repertory and performers.

E. Hess: ‘Ist das Fagottkonzert KV. Anhang 230a von Mozart?’, MJb 1957, 223–32

W. Montgomery: The Life and Works of François Devienne, 1759–1803 (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1975)

H.E. Griswold: Etienne Ozi (1754–1813): Bassoonist, Teacher, and Composer (diss., Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1979)

W.J. Hodges: A Biographical Dictionary of Bassoonists born berfore 1825 (diss., U. Iowa,1980)

B. Klitz: ‘The Bassoon in Chamber Music of the Seventeenth Century’, JAMIS, ix (1983), 5–20

D.J. Rhodes: ‘Franz Anton Pfeiffer and the Bassoon’, GSJ, xxxvi (1983), 97–103

B. Bulling: Fagott Bibliographie (Wilhelmshaven, 1989)

J.P. Beebe: Music for Unaccompanied Solo Bassoon (Jefferson, NC, 1990)

H. Bartholomäus: Das Fagottensemble: kleines Handbuch zur Musikpraxis (Berlin, 1992)

B. Koenigsbeck: Basson Bibliography/Bibliographie du basson/Fagott Bibliographie (Monteux,1994)

C. Fertonani: La musica strumentale di Antonio Vivaldi (Firenze, 1998)

Bassoon stop.

Name given to a strip of parchment or silk which is made to buzz against the bass strings of the piano by means of a handstop, knee lever or pedal. It was first used towards the end of the 18th century and continued to be popular on the Continent until about 1840.

DAVID ROWLAND

Basso ostinato.

See Ground and Ostinato.

Basso profondo

(It.: ‘deep bass’).

A term first used in the late 19th century to describe a particularly deep, resonant bass voice, often associated with Russian basses and choral singing (see Bass (ii)). Earlier identifications of this voice type appear especially in France. Brossard (Dictionaire de musique, 1703) writes that this deep voice is called bassista, or ‘more commonly, basse-contre’. Rousseau (Dictionnaire de musique, 1768) states that the basse-contre ‘sings the bass under the bass itself, and should not be confused with the contre-basse, which is an instrument’. Raguenet (Paralèle, 1702; Eng. trans., 1709) specifically cites the low bass as a particular strength of French opera as opposed to Italian:

Our operas have a farther advantage over the Italian in respect of the voice, and that is the bass, which is so frequent among us and so rarely to be met with in Italy. For every man that has an ear will witness with me that nothing can be more charming than a good bass; the simple sound of these basses, which sometimes seems to sink into a profound abyss, has something wonderfully charming in it…When the persons of gods or kings, a Jupiter, Neptune, Priam, or Agamemnon, are brought on the stage, our actors, with their deep voices, give ’em an air of majesty, quite different from that of the feign'd basses among the Italians, which have neither depth nor strength

In opera, the deep bass solo voice has so often been associated with roles of great authority or majesty that today ‘profondo’ sometimes is taken to mean ‘profound’ as well as ‘low’. Examples from Mozart operas include Sarastro from Die Zauberflöte and Osmin from Die Entführung aus dem Serail; later roles include the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi’s Don Carlos (1867). The Russian school of singers has produced notable deep basses although the most famous exponents (Chaliapin, Regzen) have not been remarkable for their depth and the great Russian roles do not make heavy demands on the lowest register. The basso profondo is distinguished from the Basso cantante by its lower range extension and especially its power (see also Basse noble).

J.B. STEANE, ELLEN T. HARRIS

Basso seguente.

A term used by Adriano Banchieri in Ecclesiastiche sinfonie … per sonare et cantare et sopra un basso seguente op.16 (Venice, 1607) to describe the work’s Continuo bass part, which was drawn from whichever part in the ensemble was the lowest at any one moment. In the third edition of Cartella (Venice, 1614 as Cartella musicale), Banchieri offered the term barittono as an equivalent, thereby pinpointing the wide range of such a bass part. The Cartella also suggests that a basso seguente part is by definition unbarred (? i.e. unbroken or seguente) and therefore less useful to an organist directing an ensemble than a barred bass part or bassi continui spartiti. The use of the term in a restricted sense is essentially a theorist’s, and such a composer as G. Piccioni does not appear to have intended any strict distinction between it and basso continuo when he published his Concerti ecclesiastici for voices con il suo basso seguito (Venice, 1610). However, the notion of a ‘bass’ line played by one or other continuo instrument and incorporating whatever notes or phrases in the ensemble happened to be lowest – for instance, the opening treble theme of a fugue – was one to live well into the second half of the 18th century, especially in Italian and italianate music. Theorists from Praetorius to Quantz and later generally called it the bassetto or bassetgen part, and it is one of the unsolved questions in figured bass playing – to know when composers no longer expected continuo players to double themes and answers in a fugal exposition.

PETER WILLIAMS/DAVID LEDBETTER

Bass tuba.

See Tuba (i). The first instrument to be designated ‘tuba’, introduced in Germany in 1835, was called Bass-Tuba.

Bassus

(medieval Lat.: ‘low’).

The lowest voice in a polyphonic composition. In the second half of the 15th century, as four-part writing became increasingly common, composers invented various designations for the lowest voice: tenor secundus (?Du Fay, Missa ‘Caput’), theumatenor (Busnoys, Regina caeli laetare), basistenor (Busnoys, Victimae paschali laudes), baritonans (Gaffurius, Practica musicae, 1496) and contratenor bassus (extremely common in this period). Basis, the classical Latin word derived from Greek and meaning ‘foundation’, was used by various scholars (Glarean, Dodecachordon, 1547), while Ornithoparchus (Musicae activae micrologus, 1517) used both basis and bassus. The latter became the generally accepted term in the high Renaissance.

OWEN JANDER

Bass viol.

A bowed string instrument. Although in modern usage the term refers to a six- or seven-string instrument of the Viol family often called Viola da gamba, in the 18th and 19th centuries in the USA and occasionally in Britain ‘bass viol’ meant a four-string instrument tuned in 5ths like a cello. It was probably a shortened version of the term ‘bass violin’. Such instruments were of two kinds: the first like a cello except for certain local constructional details, the second of larger body size but with the same string length and fingerboard as a cello, with a short neck (accommodating playing only up to the second position without recourse to thumb positions). Instruments of both kinds were occasionally made with five strings, but no contemporary instruction book refers to the practice or indicates the tuning. The large-sized instruments are called ‘church basses’. Certain archaisms in construction reflect earlier European building techniques, the commonest being an f-hole in which small connecting bridges of wood are left at the turns, a groove or channel routed in the wood of the back and belly into which the ribs were fitted and glued, and the use of a foot-like extension of the neck block (almost always integral with the neck itself) projecting into the body and fixed to the wood of the back by a butted glue joint and a screw. A peculiarly American feature is the use of plank-sawn wood in the belly and back, giving the instruments a curious florid appearance; but the best makers used quarter-sawn wood according to traditional European practice.

From the late 18th century up to the mid-19th there was an active American industry in the manufacture of these instruments, probably created partly by the demand for bass instruments to accompany the church choirs which had been relieved of their Puritan obligation to perform unaccompanied. By the 1830s there were makers specializing in the production of bass viols; over 35 are known to have been working in New England in this period. The earliest known maker was Crehore of Boston, who is reported to have made his first bass for a local music master in 1785; he made basses of both sizes. The most prominent and prolific was Abraham Prescott, who made his first instrument in 1809. The popularity of the instrument declined around the time of the Civil War, partly because the pipe or reed organ had superseded it in church music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.R. Selch: ‘Some Moravian Makers of Bowed Stringed Instruments’, JAMIS, xix (1993), 38–64

FREDERICK R. SELCH

Bass violin

(Fr. basse de violon; It. basso viola da braccio, violone).

The bass of the violin family in the 16th and 17th centuries. It originally had three gut strings tuned F–c–g. By constructing large bass violins with a string length of about 74 cm, it became possible to obtain lower notes, and in the mid-16th century a fourth string was added at the bottom, producing the B'–F–c–g tuning found in many 16th- and 17th-century treatises. Such instruments were often pictured supported by a stool or resting on the ground. However, bass violins were also made small enough to be played standing or walking, supported, in the words of Jambe de Fer (1556), ‘with a little hook in an iron ring, or other thing, which is attached to the back of the said instrument’. They were probably tuned F–c–g–d' (PraetoriusSM) or G–d–a–e' (Banchieri, 1609, 1611, 1628), though Zacconi (Prattica di musica, 1592) assigned F–c–g–d' to the tenor viola da braccio – the origin of the modern notion of the ‘tenor violin’. The violoncino, called for in collections by G.B. Fontana (1641), Cavalli (Musiche sacre, 1656) and others, was presumably also a type of small bass violin, though the lowest notes written for it could only have been obtained by using strings that were thick and unwieldy.

This situation was changed by the invention of thin covered or wire-wound strings dense enough to produce good low notes with a short string length. Bonta has argued that covered strings were first developed in Bologna around 1660, and that they were exploited first on the violoncello, a small variant of the bass violin. Bolognese composers soon developed a solo repertory for the cello, and it rapidly superseded the bass violin in Italy, despite the fact that it lacked the weight of tone of the larger instrument. For this reason, it became necessary to double violoncellos at the octave in orchestras, producing the standard bass scoring of later times.

Italian cellists popularized their instrument in northern Europe in the years around 1700, though the bass violin remained in use in London and Paris until the second decade of the 18th century. According to the Privilège … pour l'Académie Royale … pour l'année 1712–13, two basses de violon were played in the petit choeur and eight basses in the grand choeur, and despite contemporary references describing the basse de violon as a crude instrument strung with thick strings that did not speak easily, Saint-Lambert listed it as a continuo string bass. Although the basse de violon was probably never used as a solo instrument, Theobaldo di Gatti (c1650–1727) became a virtuoso on it. Large bass violins were often subsequently cut down to serve as cellos, and relatively few survive in original condition.

For further discussion of terminology for bass instruments of the violin family see Violoncello and Violone; see also Viol.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoydenH

M. Corrette: Méthode … pour appendre … le violoncelle (Paris, 1741, 2/1783)

D. Boyden: ‘The Tenor Violin: Myth, Mystery, or Misnomer?’, Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. W. Gerstenberg, J. La Rue and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1963), 273–9

S. Milliot: ‘Réflexions et recherches sur la viole de gambe et le violoncelle en France’, RMFC, iv (1964), 179–238

D. Abbott and E.Segerman: ‘Strings in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, GSJ, xxvii (1974), 48–73

S. Bonta: ‘Further Thoughts on the History of Strings’, The Catgut Acoustical Society Newsletter, xxvi, Nov (1976), 21–6

S. Bonta: ‘From Violone to Violoncello: a Question of Strings?’, JAMIS, iii (1977), 64–99

S. Bonta: ‘Terminology for the Bass Violin in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, JAMIS, iv (1978), 5–42

M. Cyr: ‘Basses and Basse Continue in the Orchestra of the Paris Opéra, 1700–1764’, EMc, x (1982), 155–70

S. Bonta: ‘Corelli's Heritage: the Early Bass Violin in Italy’, Studi Corelliani, iv (1990), 217–31

J. de La Gorce: ‘L'orchestre de l'Opéra et son évolution de Campra à Rameau’, RdM, lxxvi (1990), 23–43

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

LUCY ROBINSON, PETER HOLMAN

Bastaini, Vincentio.

See Bastini, Vincentio.

Bastard [Bastart], Jean

(fl 1536–52). French composer. He succeeded Jean le Bouteillier as maître des enfants at the Ste Chapelle, Bourges, between 1 April 1536 and 13 February 1552. In Le temple de chasteté (Paris, 1549, f.6v) François Habert praised him as a musician and a poet. Two of his four-part chansons were printed in anthologies in Paris: Soyez seur que la repentence (ed. in RRMR, xxxviii, 1981; RISM 1547¹²) and Si ton plus grand désir in 1550 (RISM 1550⁷). The five-voice motet Ambulans Jesus juxta mare Galileae was published with ascription to ‘Bastart’ in a German collection of works by internationally famous composers (RISM 1550²).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Lesure: ‘Some Minor French Composers of the 16th Century’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 538–44

FRANK DOBBINS

Bastiaans, Johannes Gijsbertus

(b Wilp, nr Deventer, 31 Oct 1812; d Haarlem, 16 Feb 1875). Dutch organist, composer and writer on music. After early musical studies in Deventer, he moved in 1832 to Rotterdam as a watchmaker. There he studied counterpoint with C.F. Hommert (1834–6), becoming acquainted with the ‘48’; in 1836 he attended J.C.F. Schneider’s Musikschule in Dessau. In Leipzig in 1837–8 he took composition lessons from Mendelssohn, studied the organ and hymnology with C.F. Becker and played the double bass in the orchestra of the Musikverein Euterpe.

After Bastiaans’s return to the Netherlands in 1838, some of his compositions attracted the attention of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst. He was organist of the Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam (1840–58), and played the double bass in several orchestras. From 1842 to 1844 he also taught singing at the Institute for the Blind. He founded his own music theory school in 1850, adding organ lessons to the curriculum the next year; in 1853 these courses were integrated in the new music school of the Amsterdam section of Toonkunst. In 1858 Bastiaans settled in Haarlem, where he was appointed city organist and carillonneur and played on the celebrated Christian Müller organ of the Grote Kerk until his death. An acknowledged authority on the organ, he was often asked to examine newly built instruments, and in 1867 he studied pneumatic mechanics in Paris. He published several books of harmonized chorales for the Dutch Reformed Church and wrote for the monthly Caecilia from 1855. As a hymnologist he was on the board of the Nederlandsche Koraalvereeniging from 1864 and adviser for the Vereeniging voor Nederlandsche Muziekgeschiedenis from 1869.

Bastiaans’s main importance lies in his propagation of the music of J.S. Bach in the Netherlands. In 1850 he founded a Bach society in Amsterdam and gave a Bach recital in the Westerkerk. He was a co-founder of the Bach Society in Haarlem (1867) and the national Algemeene Bachvereeniging in Rotterdam (1870). Both Bastiaans and J.A. van Eijken featured Bach’s organ works in their programmes, and the Bach societies and Toonkunst began to perform his chamber and vocal music. Bastiaans also set about removing vocal items from organ concerts, evidence of a purist tendency that may be seen in his own four-part chorale harmonizations. These consist almost entirely of simple triads, in his opinion more fitting for church use than the ‘worldly’ 7th chords, which were best reserved for chorale preludes; in this he was influenced by Renaissance chorale settings, to which Becker had introduced him. He advocated the formation of choirs in the Reformed churches, to perform his chorales in alternation with the congregational singing. His treatise on harmony also stresses the supremacy of the triad in a manner that owes much to the theories of Moritz Hauptmann. Bastiaans’s compositions reveal an indebtedness to Bach filtered through the influence of Mendelssohn and A.F. Hesse, though with more chromatic harmony. After 1850 his works became more sober in style.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in Amsterdam unless otherwise stated

most MSS in NL-At

Org: 6 orgelstukken, 1838 (1841), 2 repr. (Hilversum, 1978); Variations on Ps lxxxiv, 1841, ed. (1984); 4 sonatas, 1847–56; Fantasie-sonate Wien Neêrlands bloed, 1849, ed. J. ten Bokum (1967); Variations on Ps xxiv, 1866, ed. (1982); preludes, fughettas, fugues, fantasias

Pf: 6 liederen zonder woorden, op.4, 1839–40 (1843–66); introduction and arr. of ricercare from J.S. Bach: Musikalisches Opfer

Chbr: Harmonie der Spheren, fuga canonica a 4, 1850; Melodisch offer aan den geest van J.S. Bach, vn, vc, hmn, pf

Choral: motet, SATB, 1838; 4 cants., 5 choruses male vv, 10 choruses children’s vv, 1845–51

Chorale bks (all SATB): 12 koraalgezangen, acc. pf ad lib., op.6 (1843); Vierstemmig koraalboek, acc. org/pf (Arnhem, 1852); Vierstemmig psalmboek, acc. org/pf (1855); Rhythmische koralen (1869); Vervolgbundel op de Evangelische gezangen, acc. org (Haarlem, 1870), 7 repr. (Hilversum, 1978)

writings

De zangkunst (Amsterdam, 1864)

Harmonia (Rotterdam, 1867)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.G.A. ten Bokum: Johannes Gijsbertus Bastiaans (1812–1875) (Utrecht, 1971) [with Eng. summary and full list of works]

H. van Nieuwkoop: Haarlemse orgelkunst van 1400 tot heden: orgels, organisten en orgelgebruik in de Grote of St.- Bavokerk te Haarlem (Utrecht, 1988), 244–63, 412–18

JAN TEN BOKUM

Bastianelli, Giannotto

(b San Domenico di Fiesole, Florence, 20 June 1883; d Tunis, 22 Sept 1927). Italian critic, composer and pianist. Largely self-taught, he became music critic of the newspapers La nazione (Florence) from 1915 to 1918 and Il resto del Carlino (Bologna) during 1919–23. He also taught composition and music history at the Nuova Scuola di Musica, Florence (1917). From 1909 to 1915 he regularly contributed to the influential Florentine cultural periodical La voce. His books, notably La crisi musicale europea (1912) in which he explored in depth the idea of decadence, are among the most thought-provoking written by any Italian musician of the time; and he had a knowledge and understanding of current trends (Skryabin, Schoenberg, etc.) which was then rare. His ideas exerted an important influence on progressive Italian musical opinion, and particularly on other composers: in 1911 he was the chief spokesman for a short-lived pressure group known as La Lega dei Cinque or ‘I “Cinque” Italiani’, whose other members were Pizzetti, G. F. Malipiero, Respighi and Renzo Bossi. Bastianelli’s propaganda advocated ‘the risorgimento of Italian music … which from the end of the golden 18th century till today has been, with very few exceptions, depressed and circumscribed by commercialism and philistinism’ (Bastianelli, 1911). Parallels have been drawn between his philosophical ideas and those of some of the literary contributors to La voce, who showed a similar spirit of restless search and of a moral commitment more deeply felt than systematic. At the end of his life he turned increasingly towards the ideal of a new classicism, as his posthumous book Il nuovo dio della musica reveals clearly. Bastianelli was an imaginative but usually rather undisciplined composer; and he wrote very little music after his early 30s. This was regrettable, for such works as Sul Bisarno (1914) seem to presage a new assurance without losing the wayward evocativeness, sometimes strangely Slavonic in character, found in all his best pieces; while Natura morta (written in memory of Skryabin and clearly influenced by that composer’s later music) and Umoresca both show a continuing search for new musical means. He committed suicide.

WORKS

(selective list)

unpublished unless otherwise stated

Stage: La scala (opera, Bastianelli), after 1918, inc., ?lost; ballet, inc., existence uncertain

Chbr: Poema, str qt, c1910; Pf Qt, c1910; Sonata, vn, pf, 1912 (1914); Sul Bisarno, 2 vn, pf, 1914; Sonata, vc, pf, 1920

Pf: Sonatas nos.1–2, 1907–8 (1910), no.3, begun 1907 (1914), no.4, inc., no.5, formed in 1917 from Umoresca and Natura morta; Piccola suite fiorentina, 1912; Conc., 2 pf, 1912–13; Umoresca (Burlesca), ?c1913; Natura morta, ?1915, pubd in Paragone (Florence, 1972), no.270, pp.25–37; Suite in omaggio alle maschere italiane, 1920

Self-published works printed by Mignani (in periodical Dissonanza, Florence, 1914), Officina Grafica per l’Incisione e Stampa della Musica (Florence)

For fuller lists see De Angelis (1970–71), iii, 153–4 and De Angelis: ‘Sintesi …’ (1971)

WRITINGS

Pietro Mascagni (Naples, 1910)

‘I “cinque” italiani’, Nuova musica, xvi (Florence, 1911), 71–2

‘Per un nuovo risorgimento’, Le Cronache letterarie, no.63 (1911), 3

La crisi musicale europea (Pistoia, 1912, 2/1976)

Musicisti d’oggi e di ieri (Milan, 1914)

Il Parsifal di Wagner (Florence, 1914)

L’opera e altri saggi di teoria musicale (Florence, 1921)

Il nuovo dio della musica, begun 1925, ed. M. de Angelis (Turin, 1978)

ed. M. Omodeo Donadoni: La musica pura commentari musicali e altri scritti (Florence, 1974)

For full list see De Angelis (1970–71), iii, 156–74

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM (M. de Angelis)

I. Pizzetti: ‘La musica di Giannotto Bastianelli’, Nuova musica, xvii (1912), 36

R. Franchi: ‘Giannotto Bastianelli, in memoriam’, Solaria, ii/7–10 (1927), 35–40

L. Parigi: ‘Giannotto Bastianelli’, Il pianoforte, viii (Turin, 1927), 344–6

D. Petrini: ‘L’opera nel pensiero di Giannotto Bastianelli’, RaM, ii (1929), 137–44

E. Cecchi: ‘Fiorentini del primo Novecento’, Nuova antologia, cc (1955), 439–50

L. Ronga: L’esperienza storica della musica (Bari, 1960), 52, 55–7

L. Pestalozza: Introduction, RaM: antologia (Milan, 1966)

M. de Angelis: Giannotto Bastianelli nella vita musicale e nella cultura del suo tempo (diss., U. of Florence, 1970–71 ) [incl. fuller bibliography, iii, 175–82]

M. Omodeo Donadoni: ‘Scritti inediti di Giannotto Bastianelli’, NRMI, v (1971), 469–81

Chigiana, xxviii (1971) [special number incl. discussion by M. Mila, F. d’Amico, L. Pinzauti and L. Baldacci chaired by L. Alberti; essays by L. Alberti, G. Prezzolini, M. Omodeo Donadoni and M. de Angelis: ‘Introduzione a uno studio critico sul Nuovo dio della musica’, 105–22 and ‘Sintesi cronologica della vita di Giannotto Bastianelli’, 123–8; and writings by Bastianelli, ed. M. Omodeo Donadoni]

M. de Angelis: ‘Giannotto Bastianelli e la critica italiana nel primo Novecento’, Spettatore musicale, vii/l (1972), 28–35

M. de Angelis: ‘Componenti metodologiche nella critica italiana del primo Novecento’, Spettatore musicale, vii/6 (1972), 26

M. Omodeo Donadoni: ‘Bastianelli e Scriabin’, Paragone (Florence, 1972), no.270, pp.4–7

M. de Angelis: ‘Contro il “grazioso” in musica: note e documenti sul futurismo fiorentino’, Il ponte, xxix (Florence, 1973), 109–16

L. Baldacci: ‘La mente critica di Giannotto Bastianelli’, Libretti d'opera e altri saggi (Florence, 1974), 130–47

M. de Angelis: ‘Note sul melodramma, la musica pura e l'Europa in Giannotto Bastianelli’, Musica italiana del primo Novecento: Florence 1980, 261–77

F. Nicolodi: Musica italiana del primo Novecento: la generazione dell'80, Palazzo Strozzi, 9 May–14 June 1980 (Florence, 1980) [exhibition catalogue]

M. de Angelis: ‘Giannotto Bastianelli, ultimo acto (1925–1927)’, Antologia vieusseux, nos. 73–4 (Florence, 1984), 22–54

F. Nicolodi: Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole, 1984), esp. 127–30

M. Donadoni Omedeo: Giannotto Bastianelli: lettere e documenti editi e inediti (1883–1915) (Florence, 1989)

M. de Angelis, ed.: Giannotto Bastianelli: gli scherzi di Saturno, carteggio 1907–1927 (Lucca, 1992)

JOHN C.G. WATERHOUSE

Bastianini, Ettore

(b Siena, 24 Sept 1922; d Sirmione, 25 Jan 1967). Italian baritone. He studied with Flamio Contini in Florence and made his début in 1945, as a bass, singing Colline at Ravenna. He also sang Tiresias (Oedipus rex) at La Scala in 1948. After further study he made a second début in 1951, as a baritone, at Bologna as Germont. In 1953 he sang Andrey in the Western première of War and Peace at Florence and made his Metropolitan début as Germont, later singing Gérard, Marcello, Posa, Enrico Ashton, Scarpia and Amonasro. He returned to La Scala in 1954 as Yevgeny Onegin and continued to sing there until 1964. His only Covent Garden appearance was in 1962 as Renato. He was specially distinguished in Verdi roles, many of which he recorded; he sang Posa and Luna in Vienna and Salzburg under Karajan. At the peak of his short career his voice was rich and warm, his phrasing both musical and aristocratic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (F. Serpa; R. Vegeto)

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Bastin, Jules

(b Brussels, 18 March 1933; d Brussels, 2 Dec 1996). Belgian bass. He studied in Brussels, making his début there at La Monnaie in 1960 as Charon in Monteverdi's Orfeo. He sang throughout Europe and in North and South America, in a repertory ranging from Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, through Mozart (notably Osmin and Dr Bartolo) and Rossini, to roles such as Titurel, Varlaam, Graumann (Der ferne Klang), Würfl (The Excursions of Mr Brouček), the King of Clubs and the Cook (The Love for Three Oranges) and the Theatre Director and the Banker (Lulu). In 1993 he took part in the first performance of Debussy's Rodrigue et Chimène at Lyons. Bastin's ample, sonorous voice, jovial presence and gift for comedy made him a memorable Baron Ochs; but he was perhaps at his finest in French repertory, as can be heard in his vivid recordings of such roles as Méphistophélès (La damnation de Faust), Balducci (Benvenuto Cellini), Somarone (Béatrice et Bénédict) and Pandolfe (Cendrillon).

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bastini [Bastaini], Vincentio [Vincenzo di Pasquino]

(b Lucca, c1529; d Lucca, 1591). Italian cornettist and composer. He appears to have spent his entire life in Lucca, employed by the city as a cornettist; many other members of his family were similarly employed in the 16th and 17th centuries. His service began on 27 December 1543, when he was engaged at a monthly salary of three scudi. At the same time four other players were taken on at much higher salaries: Bastini was probably paid less because he was both young and local (the accounts show a consistent tendency to pay more to musicians from outside Lucca). He published two books of madrigals, the Primo libro de madrigali a cinque et a sei voci (Venice, 1567) and Secondo libro de madrigali a cinque et a sei voci (Venice, 1578, inc.). They contain respectively 29 and 34 pieces; the first volume also includes four- and seven-part pieces, the second an eight-part dialogue for two four-part choirs, as well as pieces for four voices. In his choice of texts Bastini exhibited a highly developed taste for Petrarch: the first book includes a complete setting of the sestina L’aer gravato, the second book the 11-stanza canzone Vergine bella, likewise set complete.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

NericiS

D.A. Cerù: Cenni storici dell’insegnamento della musica in Lucca (Lucca, 1871), 103

PATRICIA ANN MYERS

Baston, John

(fl 1708–39). English composer, recorder player and cellist. From 1708 to 1714 he and his brother Thomas (fl 1708–27), a violinist and probably also a recorder player, played in concerts at Stationers' Hall and Coachmakers' Hall, London, and at Greenwich. When the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre opened in 1714, they probably became members of its orchestra; they performed there regularly in the interval ‘entertainments’, often in Baston's own recorder concertos, which have prominent solo violin parts. By 1722 he had moved to the rival Drury Lane Theatre, where he played in the interval music (and occasionally within the plays) until 1733, always in a concerto or solo for the ‘little flute’ (recorder); the concertos are twice named in advertisements as being by Dieupart and Robert Woodcock. In 1727 he (cello) and his brother (violin) were among the orchestra that played in the Lord Mayor's Day Royal Entertainments. Baston was one of the original subscribers to the Society of Musicians in 1739.

His Six Concertos in Six Parts for Violins and Flutes, viz. a Fifth, Sixth and Consort Flute (London, 1729) are all showpieces for the soloist, who in nos.1 and 3 has a part for the normal treble recorder, in nos.2, 4 and 5 for the sixth flute (descant recorder in d''), and in no.6 for a fifth flute (descant recorder). Years of theatre experience showed Baston how to write lively, robust opening themes by balancing short phrases; they are, however, melodically undistinguished. The fast movements mostly provide busy chord-pattern work for the solo line, the simple harmonic style being unrelieved by any contrapuntal interest. Nos.3 and 6 (fast–slow) and 4 (slow–fast) have only two movements each; the others follow the Venetian three-movement model.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

HawkinsH

D. Lasocki: Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540–1740 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1983)

D. Burrows: ‘Handel's London Theatre Orchestra’, EMc, xiii (1985), 349–57

OWAIN EDWARDS/DAVID LASOCKI

Baston, Josquin

(fl 1542–63). ?Netherlandish composer. He probably worked in the Netherlands, as some of his earliest works were published by Phalèse and Susato, and some of his songs have Dutch texts. An elegy for Johannes Lupi was attributed to him, apparently without grounds, by Van Maldeghem (Trésor musical, Musique profane, xii, Brussels, 1876); if the ascription is correct it may indicate that he was Lupi's pupil. He may be the musician named Johann (or Josquin) Baston (Basten or Paston) who was active at the courts of Austria, Denmark, Poland, Saxony and Sweden in the mid-16th century. He used a wide range of contrapuntal techniques in his chansons; his motets show features of the declamatory style that came into fashion in the mid-16th century.

WORKS

12 Lat. motets, 4–6vv, 1542⁷, 1545², 1549⁸, 1553¹⁰, 1553¹², 1553¹⁵, 1555⁵, 1556⁶, 1557³, 1563³, Novi prorus et elegantis libri musici in quo continentur … motecta … latinae, 4–6vv (Düsseldorf, 1561), lost

29 chansons, 3–6vv, 1543¹⁵, 1543¹⁶, 1544¹², 1544¹³, 1545¹⁶, 1549²⁹, 1550¹³, 1552⁸, 1552¹⁰, 1552¹², 1552¹³, 1552¹⁴, 1552¹⁵, 1553²⁴, 1553²⁵, 1554²², 1556¹⁷, 1562³

6 Dutch songs, 4vv, 1551¹⁸, 1551¹⁹

3 motets; chanson, 3vv: B-LVu, D-Mbs, NL-Lml

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (C.L. de Burbure)

EitnerQ

FétisB

MGG1 (A. Dunning)

D. von Bartha: ‘Probleme der Chansongeschichte im 16. Jahrhundert’, ZMw, xiii (1930–31), 507–30

R.B. Lenaerts: Foreword to Het Nederlands polifonies lied in de zestiende eeuw (Mechelen and Amsterdam, 1933)

U. Meissner: Der Antwerpener Notendrucker Tylman Susato (Berlin, 1967)

E. Zwolinska: ‘Joannes Baston: flämischer compositor cantus am Hofe des Jagiellonen-Königs Zygmunt August’, From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders, ed. A. Clement and E. Jas (Amsterdam, 1994), 215–19

ALBERT DUNNING

Bastos, Rafael José de Menezes

(b Salvador, Bahia, 26 Dec 1945). Brazilian ethnomusicologist. He took the BA in music (1968) and the MA in social anthropology (1976) at the University of Brasília, and completed the doctorate in human sciences (social anthropology) at the University of São Paulo (1990). His research work for his graduate studies was carried out in the High Xingu Indian reservation and dealt with the musical culture of the Kamayurá Indians. His doctoral dissertation, A festa da Jaguatirica: uma partitura crítico-interpretativa, deals with the complex relationship of Kamayurá music and ritual. He has been an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, teaching and researching the ethnology and ethnomusicology of South American lowland Indian cultures. He is a researcher for the Federal National Council for Research, coordinating various projects on music, culture and society, and a member of the Committee on Indigenous Affairs of the Brazilian Anthropological Association. From 1992 to 1994 he was a post-doctoral visiting scholar in anthropology at MIT, working on the project Musical Cognition and Structure: the Case of the Yawari of the Kamayurá Indians of Central Brazil, and he also worked at the Smithsonian Institution in 1994 as a research fellow. He has served in various professional national and international organizations, such as the Associação Brasileira de Antropologia, the Centro de Aperfeiçoamento do Pessoal de Nível Superior and the ICTM. Bastos has published extensively in the area of Brazilian Indian ethnomusicology and on Brazilian popular music. His scholarly approach is holistic and integrative.

WRITINGS

‘Las músicas tradicionales de Brasil’, RMC, no.125 (1974), 21–77

‘Situación del músico en la sociedad’, América Latina en su música, ed. I. Aretz (Mexico City, 1977), 103–38

A musicológica Kamayurá: para uma antropologia da comunicação no Alto-Xingu (Brasília, 1978)

‘Manipulação étnica e música entre os Indios Kiriri de Mirandela, Estado da Bahia, Brasil’, Portugal e o mundo: Lisbon 1986, 495–506

‘Esboço de uma teoria da música: para além de uma antropologia sem música e de uma musicologia sem homem’, Anuário antropológico, no.93 (1995), 9–73

‘Indagação sobre os Kamayurá, o Alto-Xingu e outros nomes e coisas: uma etnologia da sociedade Xinguara’, Anuário antropológico, no.94 (1995), 227–69

‘A origem do samba como invenção do Brasil: sobre o feitio do oração de Vadico e Noel Rosa (por que as canções têm música?)’, Cadernos de estudo de análise musical, nos.8–9 (1995–6), 1–29

‘Musicalidade e ambientalismo na redescoberta do Eldorado e do Caraíba: uma antropologia do encontro Raoni-Sting’, Revista de antropologia, xxxix/1 (1996), 145–89

‘Música nas Terras Baixas da América do Sul: ensaio a partir da escuta de um disco de Mésica Xikrín’, Anuário antropológico, no.95 (1996), 251–63

‘Ritual music of the Kayapó-Xikrin, Brazil’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, xxviii (1996), 231–2

‘O estrangeiro: em torno da “Farra do Boi”’, Plural, no.9 (1997), 86–9

‘Music in Lowland South America: a Review Essay’, World of Music, xxxix (1997), 143–51

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Baszny [Baschny], Józef

(d Lemberg [now L'viv], after 1862). Polish composer, teacher and flautist, probably of Czech descent. He was choirmaster at Lemberg Cathedral, and from 1838 to 1844 vice-director of the music society in Lemberg. Later he taught singing and the flute in Kiev. He composed a three-act vaudeville Skalmierzanki, to a libretto by J.N. Kamiński (1828, manuscript in PL-Wn), and three operas: Syn i córka (‘Son and Daughter’), Więzienie Jana Kazimierza we Francji (‘The Imprisonment of Jan Kazimierz in France’) and Twardowski na Krzemionkach, a five-act comic opera to another libretto by Kamiński. He also wrote sacred music, including a setting of the Salve regina (Lemberg, 1858), and some piano works, notably Collection de polonaises (1826) and L'aurora boreale (Lemberg, 1839).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SMP

R. Bohdan [K. Estreicher]: ‘Raptularzyk podrożny’ [Travel diary], Ruch muzyczny (1857), 319

K. Estreicher: ‘Podrożnik raptowny’ [Travel diary], Ruch muzyczny (1858), 244

‘Towarzystwo muzyczne w Lwowie’ [The music society in Lwów], Ruch muzyczny (1858), 161

A. Sowiński: Les musiciens polonais et slaves (Paris, 1857/R; Pol. trans., 1874/R as Słownik muzyków polskich dawnych i nowoczesnych)

K. Michałowski: Opery polskie (Kraków, 1954)

ELŻBIETA DZIĘBOWSKA

Bataille, Gabriel

(b ?Brie, c1575; d Paris, 17 Dec 1630). French composer and lutenist. Allusions to Brie in his poetry suggest that he may have come from that province. When he married on 12 February 1600 he was already in Paris. He had not at first been a professional musician: in his marriage contract he stated that he was a clerk to Germain Regnault, a member of parliament. By 1608, however, when Pierre Ballard published the first volume of Bataille’s Airs de différents autheurs, mis en tablature de luth, he was actively engaged in music. In 1614 he was listed as a maître de musique. From 1619 until his death he was a member of the musical establishment of the queen, alternating the directorship each half-year with Antoine Boësset. His close friendship with Ballard, who had launched his career in music, is further shown by his having been a godfather to one of Ballard’s children. When he died, both his sons, Gabriel (c1614–76) and Pierre, were musicians in the service of the queen.

Bataille’s importance lies largely in his arrangements for solo voice and lute of polyphonic airs de cour by some of the leading court composers. Between 1608 and 1615, with Ballard’s assistance, he published a popular series of six collections of such airs, which was later continued by Antoine Boësset, the leading court composer of the next generation. Most of the airs were originally composed by Pierre Guédron. Bataille did not change the vocal line and kept the setting very simple. Many of the sacred poems in La pieuse alouette (Valenciennes, 1619–21) are to be sung to the music in his collections.

Bataille also wrote his own songs. He set as musique mesurée ten psalms of Desportes in vers mesuré but mostly composed secular airs. A few, such as Bacchus droit, are typical chansons pour boire. He originally composed others for ballets de cour – Ballet du roi (c1616), La délivrance de Renaud (1617), Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince (1620), Ballet des favoris (c1626) and Ballet des proverbes (c1626) – but he never gained an important enough position at court to be able to compose as often for this major genre as did Guédron and Boësset. The remainder of his songs are simple airs, for four voices alone, for one voice accompanied by lute or for one voice unaccompanied. Depuis que le flambeau (1618) is unusual in its chromaticism and C’en est fait ma belle Amarante (1614) in having several fast ornaments.

WORKS

Edition:Airs de cour pour voix et luth (1607–43), ed. A. Verchaly (Paris, 1961) [incl. 9 airs by Bataille]

Airs de différents autheurs, mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille (1608¹⁰, 1609¹³, 1611¹⁰, 1613⁹, 1614⁸, 1615¹¹: all R); ed. P. Warlock (London, 1926)

15 airs, 4vv, 1613⁸

34 airs, 1v: 21 in 1615¹², 5 in 1617⁹, 1 in 1619¹⁰, 3 in 1620¹¹, 4 in 1626¹¹

9 airs, 1v, lute: 5 in 1617⁸/R, 1 in 1618⁹/R, 3 in 1620¹¹/R

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LabordeMP

A. Verchaly: ‘Gabriel Bataille et son oeuvre personnelle pour chant et luth’, RdM, xxvi (1947), 1–24, 72–88

M. Jurgens: Documents du minutier central concernant l’histoire de la musique, 1600–1650 (Paris, 1967–74)

D. Tunley: ‘Ballard’s Publications Airs de differents autheurs (1608–1632): Some Reflections’, MMA, xv (1988), 100–13

JOHN H. BARON

Batardi, Antonio.

See Patart, Antonio.

Batchelar [Batchilar], Daniel.

See Bacheler, Daniel.

Bate, Jennifer

(b London, 11 Nov 1944). English organist. She studied the piano and organ with her father, H.A. Bate, and composition with Eric Thimann, and took a degree in music at Bristol University. She made her professional début in Birmingham Town Hall in 1967, her official London début in Westminster Abbey in 1969 and her Proms début, with music by Liszt, in 1974. In the same period she began to broadcast regularly for the BBC and developed an international career, with performances in several European countries and, in 1974, a tour of Australia, New Zealand and South America. She has subsequently performed frequently in duo recitals with the trumpeters Bram Wiggins and David Mason, and given concerts with the tenor Ian Partridge. Bate made her first recording, of works by Liszt, in 1977, and has since recorded prolifically, including the complete organ works of Messiaen (with whom she often performed), a series of 18th-century British music on organs of the period, and the complete organ music of Lennox Berkeley. She has taken part in many important London or British premières, among them Flor Peeters's Organ Concerto (1973), Fricker's Fifth Symphony (at the 1976 Proms), Panufnik's Metasinfonia (1984, making a subsequent première recording) and Messiaen's Livre du saint sacrement (1986, again followed by a première recording). In 1985 she gave the world première, in New York, of Peter Dickinson's Blue Rose Variations, a work dedicated to her. Bate has also acted as a consultant in organ restoration and construction, and has composed a number of works for the organ, all of which she has recorded.

RICHARD WIGMORE

Bate, Philip (Argall Turner)

(b Glasgow, 26 March 1909; d London, 3 Nov 1999). British organologist. He was educated in Aberdeen, where his father was museum curator, and where he also took clarinet lessons. At the University of Aberdeen he studied pure science (BSc 1932) and did postgraduate research in geology. His main career was spent in the music department of the BBC, first as a balance and control assistant (1934–7), then as a studio manager and television producer (1937–9, 1946–56) and later (1956–68) in senior training positions. With the encouragement of Galpin he developed his interest in the history and physics of woodwind instruments and assembled an important collection of some 300 wind instruments and associated material which in 1968 he presented to the University of Oxford. The following year the Bate Collection of Historical Instruments was established at the Faculty of Music as a teaching assembly of historic instruments accessible to students. In 1946 he became founder-chairman and, from 1977 until his death, president of the Galpin Society. He was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1979. In 1988 he won the Curt Sachs Award of the American Musical Instrument Society. His main work was a valuable series of monographs on a wide range of wind instruments, together with entries for this dictionary. These have made him an acknowledged authority in the field.

WRITINGS

The Oboe: an Outline of its History, Development and Construction (London, 1956, 3/1975)

The Trumpet and Trombone: an Outline of their History, Development and Construction (London, 1966, 2/1972)

The Flute: a Study of its History, Development and Construction (London, 1969, 2/1979)

ed.: F.G. Rendall: The Clarinet (London, 3/1971)

‘The Alex Murray Flute’, GSJ, xxvi (1973), 47–54

‘Spurious Marks on Brass’, GSJ, xxvii (1974), 160

‘A Serpent d'Englise I: Notes on Some Structural Details’, GSJ, xxix (1976), 47–50

‘Instruments for the Disabled’, GSJ, xxix (1976), 124

‘Horn Lore’, GSJ, xxxi (1978), 150–51

‘Some Further Notes on Serpent Technology’, GSJ, xxxii (1979), 124–9

WILLIAM WATERHOUSE

Bate, Stanley

(b Plymouth, 12 Dec 1911; d London, 19 Oct 1959). English composer and pianist. His musical talents were recognized early, and by 1931 he had composed two operas. Between 1932 and 1936 he studied at the RCM with Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob and Arthur Benjamin, one of his fellow students being Peggy Glanville-Hicks, whom he was later to marry. He won various prizes, went on to study with Boulanger in Paris and Hindemith in Berlin. Bate’s Piano Concertino, first performed at the Eastbourne Festival in 1937, brought his name before a wider audience, and he became closely associated with the London stage, writing music for several plays and working as musical director for the ballet company Les Trois Arts at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. As well as composing prolifically, Bate also made his name as a pianist, and in the early 1940s he toured Australia as a lecturer and soloist, before spending a few years in the USA, where his music was well received. He returned to London in 1949. He became depressed at the lack of recognition his music received in the UK, and this led to his suicide.

Performances of Bate’s music have been rare since the première of the Third Symphony at the Cheltenham Festival in 1965. Despite its overt indebtedness to Hindemith, Vaughan Williams and Walton, the symphony is his finest work, notable especially for its orchestration. Bate was highly prolific, but his music, with a few exceptions, lacks enduring quality.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in GB-Lmic, Lbl, Lcm

Principal publishers: Lengnick, Schott, AMP

dramatic

Ops: The Forest Enchanted, 1928, staged Plymouth; All for the Queen, 1929–30, Plymouth, Globe, 30 Nov 1931

Ballets: Eros, 1935; Goyescas, 1937; Juanita (mime-ballet), 1938; Cap over Mill, op.27, 1939; Perseus, op.26, 1939; Dance Variations, op.49, 1944–6; Highland Fling, 1946; Troilus and Cressida, op.60, 1948

Incid music: Electra (Sophocles), 1938; Bodas de Sangre (F. García Lorca), c1938; The Cherry Orchard (A.P. Chekhov), c1938; Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare), c1938; The White Guard, c1938; The Patriots (S. Kingsley), 1944

Music for films: The Fifth Year, 1944; Jean Helion, 1946; The Pleasure Garden, 1952–3; Light through the Ages, 1953

instrumental

Orch: Concertante, op.24, pf, str, 1936–8; Concertino, op.21, pf, chbr orch, 1937; Sym. no.2, op.20, 1937–9; Sinfonietta no.1, op.22, 1938; Pf Conc. no.2, C, op.28, 1940; Sym. no.3, op.29, 1940; Vn Conc. no.2, op.42, 1943; Sinfonietta no.2, op.39, 1944; Va Conc., op.46, 1944–6; Haneen, op.50, fl, gong, str, 1944; Pastorale, op.48a, military band, c1946; Vn Conc. no.3, op.58, 1947–50; Pf Conc. no.3, op.66, 1951–2; Conc. grosso, pf, str, 1952; Hpd Conc., 1952–5; Vc Conc., 1953; Sym. no.4, 1954–5; Pf Conc. no.4, c1955; Pf Conc. no.5, 1958

Chbr: Sonata, op.11, fl, pf, 1937; 5 Pieces, op.23, str qt, c1937; Sonatina, op.12, rec, pf, 1938; Str Qt no.2, op.41, 1942; Sonata no.1, op.47, vn, pf, 1946; Sonata, op.52, ob, pf, 1946; Fantasy, op.56, vc, pf, 1946–7; Recitative, op.52a, vc, pf, 1946–7; Pastorale, op.57, va, pf, c1947; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1950

Pf: 6 Pieces for an Infant Prodigy, op.13, c1938; 2 Sonatinas, op.19, 1939–41; Romance and Toccata, op.25, 1941; Sonatinas nos.3–9, opp.30–6, 1942–3; Ov. to a Russian War Relief Concert, op.37, 2 pf, c1943; 3 Pieces, op.38, 2 pf, 1943; Sonata no.1, op.45, 1943; Suite, op.44, 1943; 3 Mazurkas, op.38a, 1944; Sonata no.2, op.59, 1947; Sonata no.3, op.62, 1949; 17 Preludes, op.64, 1949; Prelude, Rondo and Toccata, 1953

vocal

for voice and piano unless otherwise stated

Incantations (E. Jolas), op.48, S/T, orch; 4 Songs (A.E. Housman), op.51, 1945; Pomes Penyeach (J. Joyce), op.53, 1946; 3 Songs (C. Day-Lewis, E. Sitwell, Joyce), op.55, 1946; 3 Songs (H. Belloc), op.61, 1947–8; 6 Songs (S. Smith), 1952

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, MT, c (1959), 680

M. Barlow and R. Barnett: ‘Stanley Bate: Forgotten International Composer’, British Music, xiii (1991), 16–36

MICHAEL BARLOW

Bateman, Robert

(fl 1609; d London, 11 Feb 1618). English composer. The details of his life which are known have all been deduced from his will. He was a member of the Company of Musicians and apparently played the violin and viol. Evidently a man of some means, Bateman bequeathed over £300 to relations and friends, with the residue of his estate going to his wife Joan. It is possible that he was one of the many Englishmen who worked for a time on the Continent, though no direct evidence for this has come to light. Works by him were published in Hamburg in 1609, 1617 and 1621, and it is interesting to note that his ‘late servant Valentine Fludd’, to whom he bequeathed ‘his best treble violyn, his bass viall and his tenor’, was engaged at the court of Brandenburg in Berlin in 1627. Bateman left two more violins to his servant (?apprentice) John Bolles. He was buried in the church of St Alphage on 12 February 1618.

Bateman's music was certainly ideal for the troupes of English comedians and actors to use either at home or abroad; they may have been responsible for taking it to the Continent. All his surviving pieces are short dances, light in style and very attractive. Their concise, simple forms and textures show no originality or personal characteristics beyond a marked fondness for sequential repetition; in any case it cannot be assumed that Bateman was himself responsible for the five-part versions of his pieces published in Germany. A collection of masque music compiled by Sir Nicholas L'Estrange in the 1620s is the principal manuscript source for Bateman's music (GB-Lbl Add.10444), though only treble and bass are given.

WORKS

2 galliards, 5 viols/other insts, 1609³⁰

Volta, Almain, Näglein Blumen, 5 viols/other insts, 1617²⁵ [the Almain is attributed to the London wait Stephen Thomas in GB-Lbl Add.10444]

Aria I, 4 insts, bc, 1621¹⁹; Aria ‘The Cadua’, Lbl Add.10444

3 two-part dances: Almain, C, Masque, a, Masque, g, Lbl Add.10444; Masque, g (‘The Fates Masque’) arr. for kbd, US-NYp Drexel 5612

ANDREW ASHBEE

Batement

(Fr.).

See Ornaments, §7.

Bates, Django (Leon)

(b Beckenham, 2 Oct 1960). English composer, keyboard player and tenor horn player. He studied at the RCM (1979) for only two weeks, then worked freelance in the early 1980s in bands led by the saxophonists Tim Whitehead and Dudu Pukwana; he also performed with Bill Bruford's Earthworks. He was a founder member in 1983 of the influential 21-piece big band Loose Tubes, which in 1987 became the first jazz ensemble to appear at the BBC Promenade Concerts. In 1991 he formed the jazz orchestra Delightful Precipice around his quartet Human Chain, initially to provide music for the Snapdragon Circus. In 1997, Human Chain joined with the Swedish vocalist Josefine Crønholm for Quiet Nights, commemorating the award to Bates of the Jazzpar Prize, Denmark.

Bates's prodigious talents have been reflected in resourceful reworkings of both contemporary and traditional jazz idioms: his compositions for Loose Tubes and Delightful Precipice, in particular, won acclaim for their unpredictable mixture of elements from sources as diverse as jazz, rock, Caribbean, ethnic and classical music. In the 1990s his output widened to include substantial concert works revealing the influence of pre-serial Stravinsky and American music, and characterized by considerable technical virtuosity, imaginative flair and sardonic humour; representative examples were recorded by the London Sinfonietta (Good Evening … Here is the News, 1996). The album Quiet Nights (1998), by the quintet of the same name, juxtaposed pop and jazz standards by Arlen, Ellington and Jobim with music by Bates featuring a sensitive application of electronic sonorities.

WORKS

(selective list)

Concert works: Tentle Morments, orch, 1989; Candles Still Flicker in Romania's Dark, orch, 1991; Three English Scenes: Good Evening … Here is the News, Abandoned Railway Station, Forms of Escape, orch, 1992; Bird Tableau (Feasibility Studies), 3 fl, 1999; Circus Umbilicus, ens, 1999; A Fine Frenzy, dance project, sax qt, 1999; The Gogmagogs (P. Barlow), ens, 1999; They Think It's All Over, kbd conc., 2000

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

GroveJ (D. Fairweather)

R. Cook: ‘Django Bates: the Brilliant Spark’, The Wire, no.32 (1986), 27 only

I. Carr: ‘Django Bates’, Jazz: the Rough Guide, ed. I. Carr and others (London, 1995), 39–40

recordings

Delightful Precipice (1986, Loose Tubes LTLP003)

Music for the Third Policeman (1988, AH UM003)

Open Letter (1988, Editions EG EGED 55)

summer fruits (and unrest) (1993, jmt 514008-2)

autumn fires (and green shoots) (1994, jmt 514014-2)

winter truce (and homes blaze) (1996, jmt 514023-2)

Like Life (1998, Storeyville 4221)

quiet nights (1998, Screwgun Sc 70007)

MERVYN COOKE

Bates, Joah

(b Halifax, bap. 19 March 1741; d London, 8 June 1799). English organist and concert organizer. He studied music with Hartley, organist at Rochdale, and later, when he was at Manchester Grammar School, with John Wainwright, deputy organist of the collegiate church. A distinguished academic career took him to Eton (1756), where he studied with Edward Webb, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow in 1770 and later appointed a tutor. He tutored the second son of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, and is thought to have written a treatise on harmony about this time. Later he held various civil service posts, as commissioner of the Victualling Office, commissioner of the Customs and as director of various hospitals. He invested the whole of his and his wife’s (see Bates, Sarah) fortunes in the Albion Mills project, and was nearly ruined when the mills were destroyed by fire in 1791.

Bates was a fierce champion of Baroque music and particularly of Handel’s work in the face of strong competition in the form of the galant music of J.C. Bach’s generation. In this he was inspired by his father, Henry Bates, who presented Handel festivals in Halifax with London singers during the 1760s. Joah Bates’s enthusiasm was given substantial support when he was taken on as private secretary by the Earl of Sandwich, 1st Lord of the Admiralty, also an avid Handelian. Sandwich, Bates and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn were prime movers in establishing the Concert of Ancient (Antient) Music in 1776, of which Bates was the energetic director of music until he was succeeded by Greatorex in 1793. In company with Sir Watkin and Lord Fitzwilliam, Bates also planned the Westminster Abbey music festival in London to mark the centenary of Handel’s birth. Miscalculation brought it forward a year to 1784, but it was a huge success and the commemoration concerts, which were held under the patronage of George III and involved all the leading singers and instrumentalists who could come (525 performers were named, and Burney gave a total of 828), were directed by Bates playing a harpsichord coupled to an organ by keys extending ‘nineteen feet from the body of the organ, and twenty feet seven inches below the perpendicular of the set of keys by which it is usually played’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

DNB (J.A. Fuller Maitland)

SainsburyD

A Plain and True Narrative of the Differences Between Messrs. B–S and also Members of the Musical Club … in Halifax (?London, 1767)

C. Burney: An Account of the Musical Performances … in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785/R)

Obituary, Gentleman’s Magazine, lxix (London, 1799), 532–3

T. Busby: Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient and Modern (London, 1825)

‘Mr and Mrs Joah Bates, a Distinguished Amateur and a Notable Singer’, MT, xlvi (1905), 13–20 [see also ‘Batesiana’, MT, xlvi (1905), 99]

B. Matthews: ‘Joah Bates: a Remarkable Amateur’, MT, cxxvi (1985), 749–51

W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: a Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford, 1992), 151–5, 169–71

OWAIN EDWARDS, WILLIAM WEBER

Bates [née Harrop], Sarah

(b Lancs., c1755; d London, 11 Dec 1811). English singer, wife of Joah Bates. She came from a poor family and worked in a factory in Halifax. As a girl she sang in choirs, and in 1772 was in the contingent of singers from the north at the Gloucester Music Meeting. She had the good fortune when singing at Halifax to attract the attention of Dr Howard of Leicester who is said to have introduced her to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. She was able to devote herself to music in London, studying with Lord Sandwich’s private secretary Joah Bates, whom in 1780 she married, and with Antonio Sacchini, then a popular singer. In the four years between her London début (in Judas Maccabaeus, Covent Garden, 14 February 1777) and her marriage she came to be in such demand as an oratorio soloist that she reputedly saved a dowry variously estimated between £6000 and £9000 (later lost when the Albion Mills burnt down in 1791). She was admired particularly for her sympathetic interpretation of Handel, and for many years was soloist at the Concert of Ancient Music which her husband directed. She was less apt to add extemporary embellishment than other singers, but her flexibility and control were effectively shown in expressive arias requiring depth of feeling. Some commentators felt they had heard nothing comparable since Mrs Cibber and considered her the finest soprano of her day, comparing her favourably with Mme Mara and Mrs Billington.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

DNB (J.A. Fuller Maitland)

R. Twining, ed.: Recreations and Studies of a Country Clergyman of the 18th Century (London, 1882)

‘Mr and Mrs Joah Bates, a Distinguished Amateur and a Notable Singer’, MT, xlvi (1905), 13–20 [see also ‘Batesiana’, MT, xlvi (1905), 99]

W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1992)

OWAIN EDWARDS

Bates, Thomas

(bur. Westminster, London, 18 Aug 1679). English viol player, teacher and composer. The earliest reference to Bates is by John Playford, who, in his Musicall Banquet (1651), listed him among the ‘excellent and able Masters’ of the voice and viol in London. Bates probably served the royalist cause during the Civil War: as ‘Captain’ Bates he petitioned unsuccessfully for a place among the vicars-choral at St Paul's Cathedral when the choir was reconstituted in 1660–61, stating that he had formerly been in the choir of St John's College, Oxford. He was sworn as one of Charles II's musicians on 19 June 1660, receiving two posts. One was as viol player and the other as teacher of the royal children, with salaries of £40 and £50 a year respectively. Bates also served as bass viol player in the Chapel Royal; a warrant dated 30 August 1662 orders him to attend on Sundays and holy days. In spite of this potential income, payments were sparse and records show that Bates faced continual financial difficulties (AshbeeR, i, v, viii). He was admitted as a lay-vicar at Westminster Abbey on 23 June 1666, apparently serving until his death. Some time before February 1674 he married a widow, Abigail Hudgebut, perhaps mother of John, the publisher. They lived in the parish of St Margaret's, Westminster. Bates was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Playford included two ayres, three corants, two sarabands, a country dance, an almain and a jig by Bates in Musick’s Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-way (1669). The manuscript GB-Mp MS BrM 832 has a saraband (attributed elsewhere to Simon Ives (ii)) and a corant by ‘John Bates’. All these pieces are in tablature. A thematic index of Bates's music can be found in G. Dodd, ed.: A Thematic Index of Music for Viols (London, 1980–).

ANDREW ASHBEE

Bates, William [Jack Catch]

(fl London c1750–c1780). English composer and singing teacher. In a court case in 1763, he was accused, probably unjustly, of attempting to sell his pupil, the singer Ann Catley, to Sir Francis Blake Delavel for immoral purposes. He wrote much music for the theatres and pleasure gardens of London and was evidently in considerable demand, judging by the number of his publications, though he was not mentioned by any contemporary writer on music. The quality of his works is generally mediocre, with much facile writing in parallel 3rds. They range in style from the Baroque idioms still present in the early Six Sonatas to the deliberate imitation of the Mannheim orchestral style in the overtures to Pharnaces and The Theatrical Candidates.

WORKS

all first performed and published in London

theatrical

all published in vocal score unless otherwise stated

The Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars (revived ballad op, R. Brome), CG, 14 Feb 1760, fs (1760); revived as The Ladies' Frolick (J. Love), Drury Lane, 7 May 1770, collab. T.A. Arne (1770)

Pharnaces (Eng. op, T. Hull, after Lucchini), Drury Lane, 15 Feb 1765 (1765)

Flora, or Hob in the Well (revived ballad op, after J. Hippisley), CG, 25 April 1770 (1770)

The Gamester (burlesque, after E. Moore), Grotto-Gardens, 1771, lost

The Theatrical Candidates (prelude, D. Garrick), Drury Lane, 23 Sept 1775 (1775)

The Device, or The Marriage-Office (afterpiece, Richards), CG, 5 May 1777, lost

Second Thought is Best (afterpiece, J. Hough), Drury Lane, 30 March 1778, lost

1 song each for revivals of Theobald: The Rape of Proserpina (1763) and O'Hara: The Golden Pippin (1773)

vocal and instrumental

Collections of songs for Ranelagh, Vauxhall and the Grotto-Gardens; single songs, glees, catches, canons: see RISM; also GB-Lbl, US-Bp

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, bc (c1750); 6 Concs. in 10 parts, op.2 (c1765); 12 Duets, 2 fl/vn (c1770); 18 Duettinos, 2 gui/hn/cl (c1770); 12 Duettos, 2 hn (c1775)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA (‘Catley, Ann’)

FiskeETM

Miss Ambross: The Life and Memoirs of the Late Miss Ann Catley (London, c1790)

PETER WARD JONES

Bateson, Thomas

(b ?1570–75; d Dublin, March 1630). English composer. It is possible that he came from the Wirral of Cheshire; he may well have been born before 1575, since he evidently had a son in 1592. Bateson was appointed organist of Chester Cathedral in 1599, and the various payments made to him between 1601 and 1608 include one for ‘mending the organs’. By 24 March 1609 he had moved to Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, where he was organist and a vicar-choral. In 1612 (some sources give 1615) he received the BMus degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and was admitted MA in 1622. He made his will on 2 March 1630, and died a fortnight before the quarterly rent was due on his house (presumably this would have been payable on 25 March). On 30 April a new lease on his house was granted to his widow. Three of Bateson's children were baptized at Chester between 1603 and 1607.

Of Bateson's church music only one anthem survives. A service by him was sung at Chester until the early years of the 19th century, but this has since disappeared. He composed a madrigal for The Triumphes of Oriana (RISM 1601¹⁶), but it arrived too late for inclusion in that collection, appearing instead at the beginning of Bateson's own first madrigal volume (1604). In his madrigals Bateson shows himself to be an accomplished, if not a faultless, craftsman. His style is rooted in that of Morley, but he also reveals more serious intentions that bring his work closer to that of Wilbye. It may have been from the conclusions of certain of Weelkes's madrigals that Bateson caught the idea of using, in an imitative paragraph, the thematic point in augmentation in the bass as the determinant of the harmonic structure; like Weelkes, he used brief fragmented textures, especially for setting exclamations. Bateson's best madrigals in this first collection are those more elaborately scored ones in which the lyric permits passages of serious expression, and most of his five- and six-voice madrigals are of good quality. Two reset lyrics from Italian madrigal anthologies already published in England, while Hark, heare you not, entitled ‘Orianaes farewell’, is a posthumous tribute to Queen Elizabeth, with the Oriana refrain suitably rephrased.

Although there is a rather larger quantity of more serious verse in Bateson's second madrigal collection (1618), the passages of touching pathos that had provided many of the most striking moments in the earlier volume are in general less arresting than before. One piece, If floods of teares, is a viol-accompanied song recalling the pre-madrigalian English tradition. Of the lighter pieces in Bateson's second volume, some are prim and rather lifeless, but others, like Camilla faire and Cupid in a bed of roses, are admirable. Bateson's second collection confirms the impression given by his earlier volume of a good composer whose best work is distinctive without being in any way original.

WORKS

sacred

Holie, Lord God allmightie, 7vv, GB-Lbl, US-NYp

secular

The First Set of English Madrigales, 3–6vv (London, 1604); ed. in EM, xxi (1922, 2/1958)

The Second Set of Madrigales, 3–6vv/viols (London, 1618); ed. in EM, xxii (1922, 2/1960)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Bridge: ‘The Organists of Chester Cathedral’, Journal of the Chester and North Wales Architectural … Society [Chester], xix/2 (1913), 63–124

E.H. Fellowes: English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632 (Oxford, 1920, enlarged 3/1967 by F.W. Sternfeld and D. Greer)

E.H. Fellowes: The English Madrigal Composers (Oxford, 1921, 2/1948/R)

DAVID BROWN

Bath.

English city.

1. History.

The musical history of Bath goes back no further than the early 18th century when from about 1704 the celebrated ‘Beau’ Nash first established the city as a fashionable resort. Nash soon promoted a subscription for a band of five or six musicians who were paid a guinea a week and who at first played under some large trees in a grove until the physicians persuaded Nash to permit them to play in the Pump Room itself. Eventually the little band was enlarged to seven players whose engagement at two guineas a week covered performances at the Pump Room in the mornings and at balls in the Assembly Rooms in the evenings. As early as 1747 ‘breakfast’ concerts were announced.

It was in Bath that William Croft died in 1727, and shortly before Handel died it was announced that he intended to visit Bath for his health, though in fact he was unable to do so. J.C. Smith, who was the son of Handel's amanuensis and who eventually inherited the greater part of Handel's manuscripts, lived in retirement there from 1774 until his death. The earliest musician of note to work in Bath was Thomas Chilcot, a competent composer and organist of Bath Abbey from 1728; he also organized concerts and introduced the music of Handel to Bath audiences, and he is the reputed teacher of Thomas Linley senior. Linley was the leading professional musician of his day in Bath and responsible for the regular series of subscription concerts until he undertook the London oratorios from 1774. All his six children were born in Bath, including Thomas Linley junior, who as a boy enjoyed the friendship of Mozart, and Elizabeth Ann, the famous singer who married Sheridan. William Herschel was organist of the Octagon Chapel from 1766 to 1782, a time when his astronomical pursuits were beginning to dominate his interests in music. Benjamin Milgrove, from at least the 1760s until his death in 1810, was precentor of the Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel, for which he published 16 hymns in 1769; he was also at one time a member of the Pump Room band. A knowledgeable amateur of music who settled in Bath in the 18th century was Henry Harington, a physician by profession who also enjoyed a reputation as a glee composer. He was associated with the beginnings of the Bath Catch Club and the Harmonic Society of Bath.

The famous male soprano Venanzio Rauzzini settled in Bath in about 1777 and joined with the violinist Franz Lamotte in managing the subscription concerts, which Lamotte appears to have continued in succession to Linley. Rauzzini took over sole responsibility in 1780. W.T. Parke in his Musical Memoirs stated that at these concerts he brought forward ‘a succession of singers of the first eminence, at a subscription amounting to no more than about two shillings and ninepence per night, being less than a third of those at the concerts in London’. Parke implied that Rauzzini lost money by this, but was defeated by opposition when he sought to increase the subscription. Haydn, on his visit to Bath in 1794, stayed with Rauzzini, in celebration of whose dog ‘Turk’ he wrote a round. Michael Kelly in his Reminiscences described musical evenings in Bath at Rauzzini's private residence. In 1807 Rauzzini engaged the soprano Catalani, who was a favourite in the city during the next 20 years. Following Rauzzini's death in 1810 the flautist Andrew Ashe (d 1838) continued the subscription concerts.

Despite the decline of Bath as a fashionable resort in the 19th century, it remained an important treatment centre, and continued to attract international musicians until the end of the century and beyond. The ‘Pump Room’ orchestra grew slowly until it was disbanded in 1939. From 1822 to 1827 the subscription concerts were administered and conducted by Sir George Smart; his own copies of the programmes for nine of these concerts are now in the British Library. The French conductor Jullien directed many concerts in the city with his Grand Orchestra between 1845 and 1859. Paganini played three times in 1831–2, and the violinist Joachim, the cellist Piatti and Bottesini, the double-bass virtuoso, performed frequently in Bath during the last half of the century. Jenny Lind gave four acclaimed recitals between 1847 and 1862, while the period 1827–65 witnessed many concerts of music from Italian operas given by leading singers of days, including Malibran, Viardot-Garcia, Mario, Grisi, Pasta, Lablache, Tamburini, Rubini and Donzelli. Liszt played three times in Bath in September 1840, Charles Hallé gave frequent piano recitals between 1855 and 1894, Clara Schumann made six appearances between 1867 and 1873 and Hans von Bülow gave four piano recitals in the period 1874–80. Other pianists to appear in the city during the last quarter of the century incuded Anton Rubinstein, Paderewski, Rosenthal, D'Albert and Dohnányi.

John David Loder, writer of the well-known violin tutor, General and Comprehensive Instruction Book for the Violin (1814), was for a time (c1820–35) in business as a music publisher in Milsom Street, Bath. Andrew Loder, probably the uncle of John David Loder, published music from 4 Orange Grove, Bath, between about 1820 and 1826. Two distinguished organists were born in Bath – James Kendrick Pyne (b 1852, son of J.K. Pyne senior, organist of Bath Abbey, 1840–90) and T. Tertius Noble (b 1867).

The earliest Assembly Rooms in Bath, known as ‘Simpson's Rooms’, on the Terrace Walks, were opened in 1708 and burnt in 1820. In 1728 the New Assembly Rooms (‘Wiltshire's Rooms’) were opened on the opposite side of the Terrace Walks, and afterwards became the Bath Literary and Scientific Institution. For many years both were used for concerts, but were superseded when the present Assembly Rooms in Bennett Street (known as ‘The Upper Rooms’) were built in 1771.

2. Festival.

A series of international classical and jazz concerts, supplemented by occasional opera, dance, world music and non-musical events. It lasts for 17 days in May–June, and is organized by the Bath Festivals Trust with funds from Bath City Council, South West Arts, sponsors, charitable trusts and other donations. The Festivals Trust succeeded the former Festival Society in 1993, and is also responsible for other kinds of festival at different times of the year (literature, film etc.).

The 18th-century architecture of Bath’s principal buildings, dating from its social heyday as a spa, has both influenced and circumscribed the nature of the music festival, which seeks to turn its surroundings to artistic advantage. The lack of any large auditorium other than Bath Abbey has led on occasion to additional concerts within the festival scheme in the neighbouring cities of Bristol and Wells.

The festival was instituted in 1948 as ‘The Bath Assembly’ under the artistic direction of Ian Hunter. It featured musicians of international repute in association with visiting orchestras and ensembles, in programmes almost entirely devoted to music of the 18th century. Thomas Beecham associated himself with the festival in 1955 (and conducted a production of Grétry’s rarely heard Zémire et Azor), but mounting financial deficits forced a reconsideration of festival policy.

After being suspended in 1956–7, it was resumed on a broader musical basis under the management of Ian Hunter, at whose invitation Yehudi Menuhin became involved and was appointed artistic director from 1959. An orchestra Menuhin had formed in London to conduct for recording purposes became the Bath Festival Orchestra, and served as the nucleus for most of the concerts (it was renamed the Menuhin Festival Orchestra after his and Hunter's connection with Bath ceased in 1968). Michael Tippett was associated in 1969 and was the sole artistic director for five festivals, 1970–74, aiming to change the 18th-century bias to achieve a wider appeal and to focus attention on new music.

Tippett’s successor was William Glock (1975–84), who in 1979 obtained Arts Council support to extend the festival from ten to 17 days, introduced more artists of international distinction and obtained festival commissions for new music to balance the concerts of early music he also favoured. William Mann was artistic director in 1984, and brought a strong Hungarian flavour to the programmes; he was succeeded by Amelia Freedman, who in successive years featured music from different European countries and from the USA in turn. She also incorporated jazz (which first appeared in the Menuhin era via John Dankworth) as a regular element in festival programmes.

After a year with two programme directors, Nicholas Kraemer and Jolyon Laycock, Tim Joss was appointed artistic director and chief executive in 1995, pursuing a programme policy that embraces early, 18th- and 19th-century and contemporary music, jazz, world and folk. The commitment to contemporary music and new commissions is being reaffirmed, and an education programme, linked to the main concert programme, has been set up.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Barbeau: Life and Letters at Bath in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1904)

L. Melville: Bath under Beau Nash and after (London, 1907)

‘Dotted Crotchet’ [F.G. Edwards]: ‘Bath: its Musical Associations’, MT, xlix (1908), 695–704

C. Black: The Linleys of Bath (London, 1911)

WATKINS SHAW/FRANK BROWN (1), NOËL GOODWIN (2)

Bath, Hubert

(b Barnstaple, 6 Nov 1883; d Harefield, 24 April 1945). English conductor and composer. He studied piano and composition at the RAM from 1901, winning the Goring Thomas Scholarship in 1904 for his opera The Spanish Student. Much of his work was for film and he is best remembered for A Cornish Rhapsody, his miniature piano concerto for the film Love Story (1944). For the concert hall he composed rousing marches, light concert suites and single genre movements. He was well known in the theatre and his other works include The Visions of Hannele, a symphonic poem based on incidental music for the stage. His operas, after Longfellow, Hardy, Gerald du Maurier and others, were less popular than the patriotic operetta Young England, written with Clutsam and Basil Hood, and first produced during World War I.

Bath's cantatas, especially The Wedding of Shon Maclean and The Wake of O'Connor, were taken up by choral societies all over Britain; mostly early compositions, they are no longer performed. His greatest popularity after A Cornish Rhapsody was to be found in his pioneering and original music for brass band contests: Freedom, first used in 1922, and Honour and Glory are technically testing and still played. Although he composed much of serious intent, it is Bath's lighter music that has endured.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

The Spanish Student (op, after H.W. Longfellow), London, 1904; Young England (operetta, B. Hood), Birmingham, Prince of Wales, 20 Nov 1916 [musical collab. G.H. Clutsam]; Bubbles (op, 1, after A. Gregory: Spreading the News), Belfast, 1923; The Sire de Maletroit's Door (op, 1); The Three Strangers (op, 1, after T. Hardy), inc.; Trilby (op, 3, after G. du Maurier)

vocal

Cants: The Legend of Nerbudda, dramatic cant. (F.J. Fraser) 1908; The Wedding of Shon Maclean, a Scottish rhapsody (R. Buchanan), 1909 [for the Leeds Festival]; The Wake of O'Connor, an Irish rhapsody (Buchanan), 1913; The Jackdaw of Reims; Look at the Clock; The Men on the Line; Orpheus and the Sirens; Psyche's Departure

Many partsongs, solo songs and recitations with music

instrumental

Music for films, incl. The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1935 [musical collab. J. Beaver]; Rhodes of Africa, 1936; Love Story, 1944 [incl. A Cornish Rhapsody]

Orch: The Visions of Hannele, sym. poem, 1913, rev. 1920; African Suite, 1915; Devonia; Egyptian Suite; Norwegian Suite; Petite suite romantique; Pierrette by the Stream; Scenes from the Prophets; 2 Troubadour suites; Woodland Scenes

Many individual orch. movts., incl. Summer Nights, waltz, 1901; 2 Sea Pictures, 1909; Princess Mary, waltz, 1923; Midshipman Easy, ov.; 2 Japanese Sketches

Marches: Out of the Blue, 1931; Admirals All; Atlantic Charter; Empire Builders; The Nelson Touch

Brass band: Freedom, 1922; Honour and Glory, 1931

Org solos, incl. Toccatina, 1914; Heroic Prelude, 1928

Pf solos, incl. Coquette; Sonatina in F; Song of Autumn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Shenton: ‘From A to B: Kenneth Alford and Hubert Bath’, British Music, xvii (1995), 49–60

P.L. Scowcroft: British Light Music: a Personal Gallery of Twentieth-Century Composers (London, 1997)

PHILIP L. SCOWCROFT

Bathe, William

(b Dublin, 2 April 1564; d Madrid, 17 June 1614). Irish teacher and writer. He was the son of Judge John Bathe. Anthony Wood wrote that he studied at Oxford and constructed a ‘harp of a new device’ which he presented in 1584 to Queen Elizabeth, to whom he taught mnemonics. By January 1585 he was in the service of Sir John Perrott, and shortly afterwards took possession of family estates in Ireland, including Drumcondra Castle. In October 1591 he left England for Spain; in August 1595 he entered the novitiate at Tournai, and studied successively at Saint Omer and Padua, where he was ordained priest in the order of Jesuits in 1599. In 1601 he was attached to the papal nuncio at the Spanish court, and three years later was appointed director of the Irish college in Lisbon. In 1606 he settled in Salamanca, where he published a language tutor, the Janua linguarum (1611), which was subsequently translated into many languages.

Bathe's treatise on music is first listed in Maunsell's 1595 catalogue as an ‘Introduction to the true arte of Musicke, wherein are set downe, exact and easie rules, with Arguments, and their Solutions, for such as seeke to knowe the reason of the truth, which Rules, be meanes, whereby any by his owne industrie, may shortly, easily, and regulerly attaine to all such things, as to this Arte doe belong. by William Bathe, Student in Oxforde, Pr. by Abell Jeffes. 1584’. Arber recorded that in 1597 Jeffes made over the publication rights to Thomas East. No original of this, the first music textbook to appear in the English language, is known to exist, but a 17th-century manuscript copy is held in Aberdeen University; this formed the basis for an edition of the treatise (ed. C. Hill, Colorado Springs, CO, 1979). Bathe later produced a largely rewritten version under the title A Briefe Introduction to the skill of Song: Concerning the practise, set forth by William Bathe, Gentleman. In which work is set downe X. sundry wayes of 2. parts in one upon the plainesong. Also a Table newly added of the comparisons of Cleves, how one followeth another for the naming of Notes: with other necessarie examples, to further the learner (ed. B. Rainbow, Kilkenny, 1982). This undated revision, which has survived, is presumably that referred to in the registers of the Stationers' Company for 1596 (see Arber). In it the author roundly criticized current methods of music teaching, with their ‘crabbed confused tedious rules’, and claimed that using his own method he had ‘in a month or less instructed a child about the age of eight years to sing … at the first sight’.

Although Hawkins devoted most of chapter 101 of his General History to a discussion of Bathe's two works, he failed to recognize their historic position in English musical literature and the important innovation that they contained. Cursory inspection suggests that both books are wholly traditional; however, more careful reading shows that while the gamut is described, Bathe immediately contrasts its complexities with a more straightforward method of assigning fixed names to the notes of a scale, using the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. The system is shown in a simple diagram using the Mixolydian scale, but as Bathe did not elaborate further on his innovation, its essential significance was not emphasized. As a result Hawkins overlooked the books' central feature – the replacement of hexachordal solmization with a system of movable sol-fa – and later writers accepted his inaccurate account without challenge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB

HawkinsH

A. Maunsell: The Seconde Parte of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (London, 1595/R)

A. Wood: Athenae oxonienses (London, 1691–2, rev., enlarged 3/1813–20/R by P. Bliss)

E. Arber, ed.: A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 (London and Birmingham, 1875–94/R)

B. Rainbow: ‘Bathe and his Introductions to Musicke’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 243–7

PETER LE HURAY/BERNARR RAINBOW

Bathenius, Jacob.

See Baethen, Jacob.

Bathori, Jane [Berthier, Jeanne-Marie]

(b Paris, 14 June 1877; d Paris, 25 Jan 1970). French mezzo-soprano and producer. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Hortense Parent (piano) and the Belgian tenor Emile Engel, whom she married in 1908, and made her début at Nantes in 1900. Toscanini engaged her for the first La Scala performance of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1902), and in Brussels she appeared in opera with her husband. Soon, however, she decided to devote herself to concert work. Her sympathetic and authentic interpretations of works by many French composers of her time – Debussy, Ravel, Chabrier, Satie, Roussel, Milhaud and others – was very important. With Ravel’s Shéhérazade she achieved wide acclaim. She gave the première of his Histoires naturelles (dedicated to her) and of his Chansons madécasses, both occasions creating a sensation.

During World War I Bathori managed the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, producing such works as Chabrier’s Une éducation manquée, Debussy’s La demoiselle élue and Honegger’s Le dit des jeux du monde. The Paris group of Les Six owed much to her efforts in promoting their music and, in turn, her work as a singer influenced composers. In recitals she often accompanied herself, achieving a unity of style in a wide range of songs. She made many important recordings, particularly in the 1930s, of works by French and other composers. Her two books on singing are of great interest to interpreters of French song.

In 1926 Bathori visited Argentina on a recital tour. Each year thereafter she visited Buenos Aires, taking part in the first Latin American performances of many important works (e.g. Honegger’s Le roi David and Judith), and even taking some stage roles at the Teatro Colón, where in 1933 she sang Concepción in Ravel’s L’heure espagnole. In 1935 she was awarded the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur for her services to French music. During World War II she lived and taught in Buenos Aires, and in 1942 she became organizer there of the music section of the French institute of higher studies. At the end of the war she returned to Paris, taught singing, and gave many talks on French radio.

WRITINGS

Conseils sur le chant (Paris, 1928)

Sur l’interprétation des mélodies de Claude Debussy (Paris, 1953)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Jean-Aubry: ‘Jane Bathori’, Recorded Sound, i (1961–2), 102–10 [with biographical note, and discography by H.M. Barnes]

DAVID COX

Bati, Luca

(b Florence, 1546; d Florence, 17 Oct 1608). Italian composer. He was a pupil of Francesco Corteccia. In 1571 he applied unsuccessfully for the post of maestro di cappella in the church of the Cavalieri di S Stefano, Pisa. Between November 1579 and June 1582 he was maestro di cappella and organist of Amelia Cathedral, Umbria: an inventory of music (1615) at the cathedral lists a Lamentationi and Vesperi, both for 5 voices and both lost. He was maestro di cappella at Pisa Cathedral from 6 March to 15 November 1596 when the post lapsed owing to a fire in the cathedral. On 1 February 1599 he was appointed maestro di cappella of the Medici court and of Florence Cathedral, which included overseeing the music for the baptistry of S Giovanni. On 6 May 1600 he was given a benefice as a canon in the Medici church of S Lorenzo with the title ‘SS Vitale and Agricola’. He held all these appointments until his death. Towards the end of his life he was probably a member of the Accademia degli Elevati, which was founded by his former pupil Marco da Gagliano in June 1607. Another notable pupil was Jacopo Corsi. An inscription on Bati’s portrait, still in the canons’ chapter room at S Lorenzo, gives the year of his death and honours him as much for having taught Gagliano as for his positions at the Medici court and S Lorenzo.

In 1589 Bati composed music (now lost) for the intermedi of L’esaltazione della croce (text by Cecchi), a sacra rappresentazione performed by boys of the Compagnia di S Giovanni Evangelista, a lay religious confraternity, for the festivities attendant on the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinand I and Christine of Lorraine. He also wrote music (also lost) for Le fiamme d’amore (text by Gino Ginori), a mascherata presented on 26 February 1595 on a float that toured the streets of Florence during Carnival. He also composed the third and fourth choruses, now also lost, for Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo (text by Chiabrera) given in Florence on 9 October 1600 as one of the festival entertainments for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV of France. His surviving madrigals and sacred works show him to have been a highly skilled composer. Modern features of his style include careful declamation, use of concertato-like contrast, and incorporation of the canzonetta style into a five-part madrigal ensemble. Not involved in the new monodic experiments, his works reveal elements of the polyphonic tradition of the florentine school. Standing between the composers Corteccia and Marcoda Gagliano, Bati's contribution was to sustain and reinforce authorative stylistic dignity.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1594¹¹)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1598¹¹), ed. in Gargiulo, 1991

Works in 1601⁵, 1602⁶, 1602⁹, 1604¹⁷, 1605¹³, 1605¹⁴, 1606¹¹

Sacred works, incl. masses, Mag, TeD, motets, hymns: I-Fd, S Lorenzo Archivo del Capitolo, Florence

Intermedi for L’esaltazione della croce (G. Cecchi), sacra rappresentazione, Florence, 1589, lost

Le fiamme d’amore (G. Ginori), mascherata, Florence, 26 Feb 1595, lost

2 choruses for G. Caccini: Il rapimento di Cefalo (Chiabrera), Florence, 9 Oct 1600, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella)

EinsteinIM

SolertiMBD

E. Vogel: ‘Marco da Gagliano: zur Geschichte des Florentiner Musiklebens von 1570–1650’, VMw, v (1889), 396–442, 509–68, esp. 409, 412f, 418, 442

A. Solerti: Gli albori del melodramma (Milan, 1904/R), i, 42–3; ii, 56

F. Ghisi: ‘Luca Bati maestro della cappella granducale di Firenze’, RBM, viii (1954), 106–8

F. Testi: Storia della musica italiana da Sant’Ambrogio a noi (Milan, 1970), iii, 383, 385

T. Carter: ‘Music and Patronage in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence: the Case of Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602)’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, i (1985), 57–104, esp. 70

F. D’Accone: ‘The Sources of Luca Bati’s Sacred Music at the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore’, Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. R. Charteris (Sydney, 1990), 159–77

P. Gargiulo: ‘Rinascimento fiorentino e cultura “instrumentalis”: le “collectiones” medicee tra committenza, destinazione e pregio artistico’, Transmissione e recezione della forme di cultura musicale, ed. A. Pompilio, D. Restani, L. Biariconi and F.A. Gallo (Turin, 1990), iii, 745–9

P. Gargiulo: Luca Bati, madrigalista fiorentino (Florence, 1991)

P. Gargiulo: ‘“Così d'arno sul lido”: Madrigali e autori fiorentini ospiti nelle sillogi di area medicea (1594–1629)’, Revista de musicologia, xvi (1993), 2521–30

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 114, 182, 185–6, 249, 644–6

EDMOND STRAINCHAMPS/PIERO GARGIULO

Batimientos

(Sp.).

See Beats.

Batius, Jacob.

See Baethen, Jacob.

Bátiz, Enrique

(b Mexico City, 4 May 1942). Mexican conductor and pianist. He began piano studies in 1950 with Francisco Agea, and continued from 1960 with György Sandor. Bátiz attended the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, but in 1962 moved to the Juilliard School of Music for piano studies with Adele Marcus, graduating there in 1965. In the same year he was a semi-finalist in the Marguerite Long Piano Competition. He then moved to Poland where from 1967 to 1970 he studied the piano with Zbigniew Drzewiecke and conducting with Stanisław Wisłocki. In 1969 he made his conducting début with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa in Mexico. Two years later he made his most important contribution to Mexican music, the founding of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico, an ensemble he conducted until 1983, and again from 1990. He also served (1983–9) as music director of the Mexico City PO, and from 1984 has been a principal guest conductor with the RPO in London. In these various capacities Bátiz has made more than 150 recordings, including cycles of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies. He has also appeared as guest conductor with major orchestras in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and is particularly esteemed for his performances of Latin music in which colour and rhythm predominate.

CHARLES BARBER

Baton

(Fr. baguette; Ger. Taktstock; It. bacchetta).

The stick with which the conductor of an orchestra or similar ensemble beats the time. An approximation of the modern baton, a thin, tapered stick, perhaps half a metre long, was evidently first used in the late 18th century, but the use of a roll of paper or violin bow for this purpose continued into the 19th century. A more distant predecessor of the baton was the precentor's staff mentioned by various writers from the 15th century to the 17th. For further historical information see Conducting.

Bâton

(Fr.).

Endpin.

Bâton, Charles [le jeune]

(b Versailles, early 18th century; d Paris, after 1754). French composer and virtuoso on the hurdy-gurdy, son of Henri Bâton, who revolutionized the construction of the instrument. The jurist Antoine Terrasson, a contemporary of Bâton le jeune, an amateur player of the veille, and author of a history of the vielle, recounted his progress:

Mr Bâton … had laboured to make the most of his father's work, and having improved himself in performance on the hurdy-gurdy, as in the composition of music, he earned himself a reputation which procured for him the honour of instructing several princesses to play that instrument. Mr Bâton, after having for a long time performed with success music written for the musette and for the hurdy-gurdy, was the first to set about composing pieces expressly for the hurdy-gurdy – that is, pieces wrought in accordance with the hand positions and the characters befitting that instrument. It was in this style that Mr Bâton produced, to begin with, a first volume which he dedicated to the late Mademoiselle [the King's niece]; some years after that he produced a second one which he dedicated to Madame la Duchesse [of Orleans]; finally, he has just produced a third volume composed of six sonatas which suffice to show that the hurdy-gurdy is capable of all the beauty and of all the expression of the other instruments.

Bâton was considered, along with Danguy, one of the foremost players of his time. His music consists almost exclusively of suites and dance movements and character pieces. These works reveal refinement combined with virtuosity consisting of rapid scales and arpeggios easily executed on the hurdy-gurdy. Many articulation markings provide a useful source for the study of performing practice related to the instrument. The suites for two hurdy-gurdies are constructed on the basis of equality, and establish a dialogue and interchange between the two instruments. His sonatas, while by no means the most technically demanding works for the hurdy-gurdy, fully exploit the capabilities of the instrument. They reveal an awareness for the galant style in their harmonic rhythms and melodies. In these works, Bâton sometimes pushes the harmonic limits for the hurdy-gurdy: in the concluding movement of the second sonata, for example, he explores dissonance by introducing neapolitan harmonies (Ds) against the C–G drones.

Bâton continued the work of his father by searching for ways to improve the hurdy-gurdy to make it more acceptable as an instrument for chamber music. A detailed notice entitled ‘Trois touches augmentées à la vielle, & une autre changée de place’ appeared in the Mercure de France in September 1750. It described Bâton's new design for the hurdy-gurdy, executed by François Feury, which extended the instrument's range and offered a more convenient layout of its keyboard. A second, briefer notice in the Mercure de France, June 1752, headed ‘Vielle nouvelle’, and a lengthy essay entitled ‘Memoir sur la vielle en D-la-ré’ in the same journal (143–57) in October of that year, revealed that Bâton and Feury had created an instrument with a range of almost three octaves (d'–c''''). The introduction of a D–A tuning, as opposed to the standard C–G tuning, made possible the execution of many pieces written for flute or violin. Further, Bâton eliminated the trompette, the vibrating bridge which creates a sharp articulation at the beginning of each note, in favour of the articulation which results from the keys themselves when depressed by the fingers of the left hand, resulting in a more legato execution. In conclusion, he says that after Marie Leczynska, Louis XV's queen and an avid player of the hurdy-gurdy, had examined the essay, he gave her a demonstration at Compiègne on 20 July 1752, repeating the demonstration the next day for Madame la Dauphine (Marie-Josèphe) and that they were all pleased with the new instrument. In spite of this initial success the new instrument never received the public approbation for which Bâton had hoped.

In 1753 Bâton entered the Querelle des Bouffons with a pamphlet Examen de la ‘Lettre de M. Rousseau, sur la musique françois’ dans lequel on expose le plan d'une musique propre à notre langue (Paris, 1954). A reviewer wrote: ‘here is an adversary who limits himself to talking sense, a man who does not attack M Rousseau because his name is Jean-Jacques or because he was born in Geneva’ (Journal de trévoux). In his pamphlet Bâton agreed with Rousseau that the Italian language had advantages over the French for lyric poetry and singability, but disagreed that French music was largely worthless and strongly refuted Rousseau's notion that fugues, counterpoint and complex harmony were (in Rousseau's term) ‘une sottise’. Perhaps because the pamphlet was so well written, another disputant accused Diderot of having written it and Bâton of merely having posed as its author, but there is no evidence of that. Later French writers accused Bâton of having pretended to dispute with Rousseau only in order to agree with him; this unjust charge may have arisen from Bâton's reasonableness and his careful avoidance of the polemical tone and character assasination used so freely by many of Rousseau's opponents.

WORKS

all published in Paris

op.

1	[6] Suites, 3 for 2 hurdy-gurdies/musettes/fl/rec/ob, 3 for hurdy-gurdy/musette fl/rec/ob (1733)
–	Recueil de pièces, 2 musettes/hurdy-gurdies/other insts (1733)
2	La vielle amusante: divertissement en 6 suites, 1 hurdy-gurdy/musette/fl/rec/ob, bc (c1734)
3	6 sonates, hurdy-gurdy/musette, bc (1741), 2 for 2 hurdy-gurdies
4	Les amusements d'une heure, 2 suites, 2 hurdy-gurdies/musettes (1748/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetC

FétisB

GerberL

[? A. Terrasson]: Dissertation historique sur la vielle (Paris, 1741/R, 2/1768)

M. Brenet: ‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

E. de Bricqueville: Notice sur la vielle (Paris, 2/1911/R)

D. Launay, ed.: La Querelle des Bouffons (Geneva, 1973) [ a repr., with introduction and index, of 61 pamphlets pubd Paris, 1752–4]

P. Goldstein: ‘Charles Bâton's Memoir on the Hurdy-Gurdy in D-a-d’, A Modest Manual for the Hurdy-Gurdy, ed. J. Ralyea (Chicago, 1981), 17–34

R.A. Green: ‘Eighteenth-Century French Chamber Music for Vielle’, EMe, xv (1987), 469–79

R.A. Green: The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France (Bloomington, IN, 1995)

NEAL ZASLAW/ROBERT A. GREEN

Bâton, Henri [l'aîné]

(b late 17th century; d Versailles, ?1728). French luthier and player on the musette and hurdy-gurdy. As early as 1672 Borjon de Scellery remarked upon the popularity of the musette among the French noblemen and the hurdy-gurdy among noble ladies. Bâton l'aîné took advantage of the continuing fashion for rustic instruments, and worked at transforming the musette and hurdy-gurdy from folk instruments into art ones. His younger contemporary Terrasson wrote:

Mr Bâton, luthier at Versailles, was the first who worked at perfecting the hurdy-gurdy [vielle]: he had in his place several old guitars which had not been used for a long time. In 1716 the idea struck him to turn them into hurdy-gurdies, and he carried off this invention with such a great success that people wished to have only hurdy-gurdies mounted on the bodies of guitars; and these sorts of hurdy-gurdies effectively have a stronger and at the same time sweeter sound than that of the old hurdy-gurdies. Mr Bâton also added to that instrument’s keyboard the low e' and the high f'''; he ornamented his hurdy-gurdies with ivory purfling; he gave the neck a form more beautiful and closely resembling the necks of bass viols – so that then all the ladies wished to play the hurdy-gurdy, and soon the preference for this instrument became general…Mr Bâton imagined that, since the hurdy-gurdies mounted on the bodies of guitars had had so much success, that instrument would take on yet more mellow sounds by mounting it on the bodies of lutes and of theorboes. Accordingly, in 1720 he carried out this new idea, and the hurdy-gurdies in the form of a lute had an even greater success than the others. It was then that the hurdy-gurdy began to face up to the other instruments and to be admitted into concerts: Messrs Baptiste [Anet] and Boismortier even composed duets and trios for the hurdy-gurdy and the musette, and all the pieces which had previously been composed for the musette also became hurdy-gurdy pieces.

The success of Bâton's ideas can be gauged in many ways: by the number of paintings and engravings of the period in which members of the nobility were portrayed playing musettes or hurdy-gurdies, by the number of stage works of the period which featured the instrument, by the many title-pages which suggested that their music was suited for these instruments, by the several instruction books published, by the number of makers who turned out these instruments, and by the number of virtuosos on them. The instruments were heard at the Concert Spirituel at Christmas 1731, 1732 and 1733, and were praised by those glad to hear simple tunes but criticized by those who regarded rustic instruments as too primitive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetC

[? A. Terrasson]: Dissertation historique sur la vielle (Paris, 1741/R, 2/1768)

E. de Bricqueville: ‘Les instruments de musique champêtres au XVII^eet au XVIII^esiècle’, Un coin de la curiosité: les anciens instruments de musique (Paris, 1894), 39–51

E. de Bricqueville: Notice sur la vielle (Paris, 2/1911/R)

C. Flagel: ‘La vielle parisienne sous Louis XV: un modèle pour deux siècles’, Instrumentistes et Luthiers parisiens XVII^e–XIX^esiècles, ed. F. Gétreau (Paris, 1988), 116–33

R.A. Green: The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France (Bloomington, IN, 1995)

NEAL ZASLAW

Batrachus, Johannes.

See Frosch, Johannes.

Batsh, ‘Umar al-

(b Aleppo, 1885; d Aleppo, 11 Dec 1950). Syrian composer and mūwashshah expert. He learned classical muwashshah songs and their accompanying samah dances in Aleppo, memorizing thousands of pieces. He quickly excelled in composing new muwashshah and extended the individual performer's role. He was extremely knowledgeable about rare modes (maqāmāt) in Arab music, and composed muwashshah within any given maqām to demonstrate its particular modal characteristics. Once he composed a muwashshah based on 14 consecutive maqāmāt, with the maqām names in the lyrics. He also invented the samah cross-dance technique (dancers cross paths to different rhythms and melodic sections of the muwashshah).

In 1947 he began teaching muwashshah and samah at the Oriental Musical Institute in Damascus (Al-ma‘had al-mūsīqī al-sharqī); he taught many future masters including Sabāh Fakhrī. He instructed the girls of the Damascus Dawhet al-‘adab School in samah; their performance at the university theatre was the first instance of socially acceptable public female dance. In 1949 he returned to Aleppo, where he taught at Fu'ād Rajāī's Music Institute and instructed the radio station's male professional chorus.

SAADALLA AGHA AL-KALAA

Battaglia

(It.: ‘battle’).

A piece of music descriptive of a battle. See Battle music.

Battaille, Charles (Amable)

(b Nantes, 30 Sept 1822; d Paris, 2 May 1872). French bass. At first he was trained as a doctor, like his father, and subsequently practised as such in Caen, but he moved to Paris and from 1845 to 1847 studied at the Conservatoire with the younger Garcia. He made his début at the Opéra-Comique as Sulpice in La fille du régiment (22 June 1848). A versatile actor, capable of florid singing and possessing an extensive range, he was soon entrusted with principal roles in new operas by Halévy, Adam, Thomas and others, one of his best being that of Peter the Great in Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord (16 February 1854). His career was interrupted by a serious throat ailment in 1857, but in 1860 he appeared at the Théâtre Lyrique as Jacques Sincère in Halévy’s Val d’Andorre (a role he had created 12 years earlier) and in the première of Gounod’s Philémon et Baucis (2 February). In the following year he sang both at the Théâtre Lyrique and the Opéra-Comique (in a revival of L’étoile du nord), but, after a final appearance at the Théâtre Lyrique early in 1863, he retired from the stage. Battaille taught singing at the Conservatoire from 1851, and published work on the pedagogy of singing based on his medical expertise. Between 1865 and 1867 he gave lectures in several large venues in Paris; these included a talk on the French version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Towards the end of his life, he was elected sous-préfet of Ancenis (Loire-Inférieure) and, when the area was attacked by smallpox during the Franco-Prussian War, he practised as a doctor again.

WRITINGS

De l’enseignement du chant, i: Nouvelles recherches sur la phonation: mémoire présenté et lu à l’Académie des sciences le 15 avril 1861 (Paris, 1861); ii: De la physiologie appliquée à l’étude du mécanisme vocal (Paris, 1863)

[lecture, title unknown, in] Conférences de l’Association philotechnique, année 1865 (Paris, 1866)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GSL

Marquis de Granges de Surgères: Iconographie bretonne (Rennes and Paris, 1888–9)

J. Joiner: ‘The Garcia Legacy: Charles Amable Battaille’, NATS, xxxix/5 (1982–3), 7–12

PHILIP ROBINSON/CORMAC NEWARK

Battement [batement, battements]

(Fr.).

A term used to denote particular ornaments. See Ornaments, §7.

Battements

(Fr.).

See Beats.

Batten.

Composer, possibly identifiable with Batty.

Batten [Battin, Battyn], Adrian

(b Salisbury, bap. 1 March 1591; d London, 1637). English composer. According to the registers of St Thomas's, Salisbury, he was one of the seven children of Richard Batten and Elizabeth Nowell. Richard Batten's will, proved in 1619, states that he was a joiner. Evidence of Adrian Batten's early musical training is scanty; a note on the manuscript GB-Ob Tenbury 791 f.400 reads: ‘These songs of Mr John Holmes were prickt from his own pricking in the year 1635 by Mr Adrian Batten, one of the Vicars Choral of St Paul's in London who some times was his scoller’. John Holmes was a lay vicar of Winchester Cathedral from 1599 to 1622, and it is probable that Batten was a chorister there and stayed on after his voice had changed. The relevant records are unfortunately missing from the cathedral, but on the outside of the east wall of Bishop Gardiner's chantry is carved ‘Adrian Battin: 1608:’. Perhaps this marked the end of his time as a chorister. Further evidence of his stay at Winchester can be found in the registers of the church of St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate, for on 14 March 1614, Adrian, son of Adrian ‘Battin’ was baptized.

In the following month Batten moved to London and became a lay vicar of Westminster Abbey with a yearly salary of £8. While at the abbey he was a parishioner of St Margaret's, Westminster, and the registers there record the baptisms of Thomas Batten, ‘son of Adryan’ on 5 June 1616, and Richard on 8 September 1621. The death of a daughter Susan is recorded on 22 May 1623, and those of his two sons Thomas and Richard on 16 July and 31 August 1625. The year 1625 also saw the death of James I; Adrian Batten is mentioned in the Lord Chamberlain's accounts as one of the singers at his funeral. During his time at Westminster Abbey Batten occasionally augmented his income by copying music. The abbey muniments record in 1622: ‘Item paied to Mr Batten for pricking Mr Weekes his service and Mr Talles his Magnificat & nunc dimittis as alsoe Mr Tomkins service xxxs’. Batten's name appears in the Westminster Abbey treasurer's accounts as a lay vicar until the end of October 1626. It would therefore seem that in that year, and not 1624 as is usually stated, he moved to St Paul's Cathedral. His name first appears in the indenture book of Dean Donne on 22 December 1628, when he is named as one of the six vicars-choral. His name continues to appear in similar documents up to 3 December 1635, and in that same year he is mentioned as a vicar-choral there in the Bishop of London's Visitation. In the indentures book of Dean Wynyffe on 13 May 1637 only five vicars-choral are named, Batten's name being absent. On 22 July 1637 letters of administration of the estate of Adrian Batten, late of the parish of St Sepulchre, Newgate Street, London, were granted to John Gilbert, a clothier of the city of Salisbury, with the consent of Edward, John and William Batten, his brothers.

Batten composed a large number of services and anthems, but apparently no secular or instrumental music. It is thought, though sometimes questioned, that he was the copyist of the most extensive source for English church music of the period, the so-called ‘Batten Organbook’ (GB-Ob Ten. 791). He was a competent craftsman, writing in a style which was devotional and restrained. Burney said he was ‘a good harmonist of the old school, without adding anything to the common stock of ideas, both in melody and harmony, with which the art was furnished long before he was born’. Most of the criticisms which are levelled at Batten could be applied to almost any of his contemporaries, but Batten makes a convenient ‘whipping boy’. It is true that he was no innovator; he displayed a certain reluctance to stray from the home key and his melodic invention could not match that of Gibbons and Tomkins, his more distinguished contemporaries. Nevertheless, there is a certain naive charm about much of his work; the verse anthems, Hear my prayer O Lord, Out of the deep and O Lord thou hast searched me out are excellent examples. The last named contains a quaint and not altogether unsuccessful attempt at word-painting. The five-part full anthems Hear the prayers, O our God and We beseech thee display a depth of feeling which is at least equal to that found in Gibbons's music, and the eight-part O clap your hands, while not reaching the heights of Gibbons's setting of the same words, makes telling use of massive homophonic passages alternating with polyphony. His ‘Full’ service, which is similar in scope to the ‘Great’ services of Byrd and Tomkins, is worthy of attention, though in general it would be true to say that he was more successful in simpler forms.

WORKS

services

Full Service (TeD, Jub, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), 7/8vv, GB-Lcm, Och

Short Service (otherwise called Dorian Mode Service; Ven, TeD, Jub, Bs, Ky, Cr, San, Gl, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, DRc, GL, Lbl, Lcm, Lsp, Ob, Och, Ojc, WB, Y

Short Service for men (Lit, Bte, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, Lcm, Ob

First Verse Service (Ven, TeD, Jub, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), inc., DRc, Lcm

Second Verse Service (Ven, Preces and Psalms, TeD, Jub, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), inc., DRc, Lbl

Third Verse Service (Mag, Nunc), 7/8vv, DRc, GL

Fourth Verse Service (Mag, Nunc), 5/4vv, Cp, DRc, GL

Service in E fa (Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), inc., DRc

Litany, 4vv, Cp, Ob

Preces and Psalms (6 sets), B only extant, Och

Creed for men, Ct only extant, Lbl

anthems

Almighty God, which in thy wrath, inc., 5/5vv, GB-DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Y

Behold I bring you glad tidings, inc., 2/4vv, Ob

Blessed are those, inc., 1/5vv, Cp, DRc, Lbl, Y (probably correctly attrib. W. Deane in Och, US-NYp)

Christ our Paschal Lamb, 4vv, GB-Lcm

Christ rising (2 p. Christ is risen), 7/5vv, Cp, Y

Deliver us, O Lord our God, 4vv, Cp, DRc, Lbl, Lsp, Och, Y, US-BEm

Godliness is great riches, 5vv, GB-DRc, Lcm, Ojc, US-BEm

Haste thee, O God (2p. But let all those), 4vv, 1641⁵

Haste thee, O God (2p. But let all those), 4vv, GB-Lcm

Have mercy upon me, O God, inc., 5vv, Lcm

Have mercy upon me, O God, inc., 6/5vv, Cp

Hear my prayer, O God, 5vv, Cfm, Lbl, Lcm, Lsp, Ob, Och, WRch, Y, US-BEm

Hear my prayer, O God, 7/5vv, GB-Cp, DRc, GL, Lbl, Y

Hear my prayer, O Lord, 1/4vv, Cp, Cu, DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Y

Hear the prayers, O our God, 5vv, Lcm, Ojc

Hide not thou thy face, 4vv, 1641⁵

Holy, holy, holy Lord God, 6/5vv, GB-Cp, DRc, Lbl, Y

I heard a voice, 6/6vv (short section for double 5-part choir), Cp, DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Y

I will always give thanks, inc. verse anthem, B cantoris only extant, Lcm

Jesus said unto his disciples, inc. verse anthem, Cp

Let my complaint come before thee, 4vv, Lsp, Y

Lord, I am not high minded, inc., 5vv, Lcm

Lord, we beseech thee, 4vv, 1641⁵

Lord, we beseech thee, 4vv, Lcm

Lord, who shall dwell, 6vv, Lcm, Y, US-BEm, SM

My soul truly waiteth, 4vv, GB-DRc, Lsp, Y

O clap your hands together, 8vv, DRc, Lcm, Y

O God, my heart is ready, inc., 1/4vv, Ob

O God that art my righteousness, inc. verse anthem, B cantoris only extant, Lcm

O God the king of glory, inc. verse anthem, B cantoris only extant, Lcm

O how happy a thing it is, inc. verse anthem, chorus parts differ in sources, Cp, Lcm, Y

O Lord our governor, inc. verse anthem, Y

O Lord, thou hast searched me out, 2/4vv, Cp, DRc, GL, Lbl, LF, Ob, Och, Y, US-NYp (also incorrectly attrib. N. Giles)

O praise God in his holiness, inc. verse anthem, B cantoris only extant, GB-Lcm

O praise the Lord, 4vv, Lcm

O praise the Lord, 4vv, 1641⁵

O sing joyfully, 4vv, Y

Out of the deep, 1/4vv, 1641⁵

Out of the deep, 2/5vv, Cp, DRc, Y

Out of the deep, inc., DRc, Lbl, Och, US-BEm (also attrib. Hutchinson)

Ponder my words, O Lord, inc., 6/5vv, GB-Cp, DRc, Lbl, Y

Praise the Lord, O my soul, 6vv, Lcm, Och, US-BEm

Praise the Lord, O my soul (2p. Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem), inc., 6/5vv, GB-Cp, DRc, Lbl, Y

Sing we merrily unto God, inc., 7vv, Lcm

Turn thou us, O good Lord, 5/5vv, Cp, DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Y

We beseech thee, almighty God, 5vv, Lcm, Ojc, Y, US-BEm

When the Lord turned again, 4vv, 1641⁵

Clifford's The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 1664) preserves the texts for the following anthems, though no music survives: Almighty God, which madest Thy blessed Son; Almighty God, whose praise this day; Behold now praise the Lord; Bow down thine ear; I am the resurrection; If ye love me; In Bethlehem town; Not unto us, O Lord; O sing unto the Lord; Save us, good Lord, waking; So God loved the world; The Lord is my shepheard.

The anthem, O Lord let me know mine end, attrib. Batten in GB-Cp, is by Solomon Tozer, a lay clerk of Exeter.

The Preces for Trebles in Lcm 1045–1051, listed in the Daniel and le Huray catalogue, is by J. Barnard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le HurayMR

P. le Huray: ‘Towards a Definitive Study of Pre-Restoration Anglican Service Music’, MD, xiv (1960), 167–95, esp. 172–76

J.B. Clark: ‘Adrian Batten and John Barnard: Colleagues and Collaborators’, MD, xxii (1968), 207–29

J.B. Clark and M. Bevan: ‘New Biographical Facts about Adrian Batten’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 331–3

R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music, 1549–1660, EECM, suppl. i (London, 1972)

P. Phillips: English Sacred Music 1549–1649 (Oxford, 1991), 260–68, 415–16, 433, 450

MAURICE BEVAN

Batterie (i)

(Fr.).

A signal or short march sounded by drums. See Sonnerie, §(i).

Batterie (ii)

(Fr.).

See Battery.

Batterie (iii)

(Fr.).

See Rasgueado.

Batterie (iv)

(Fr.).

See Percussion.

Battery

(Fr. batterie; Ger. Brechung; It. battimento).

A term used in Baroque music for the practice of arpeggiating passages notated as chords. See Ornaments, §6.

See also Bow, §II, 2(ix) and 3(xi).

Batteux, Abbé Charles

(b Alland’huy, Ardennes, 6 May 1713; d Paris, 14 July 1780). French aesthetician. He was professor of rhetoric at the universities of Reims and Paris, the Collège de Lisieux and the Collège de Navarre, and then of Greek and Roman philosophy at the Collège Royal, Paris. It was his Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe (Paris, 1746/R; ed. J.-R. Mantion, Paris, 1989) that made him famous, and Diderot drew upon his Lettres sur l’inversion et sur la traduction (published in Cours de belles-lettres distribué par exercices, Paris, 1747–8) when writing his own Lettre sur les sourds et muets. Batteux was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1754 and became a member of the Académie Française in 1761. In 1777 he coordinated the 45 volumes of the Cours d’études for the pupils of the Ecole Royale Militaire.

His works on aesthetics, the most important being Les beaux-arts and Principes de la littérature (Paris, 1764; Eng. trans., 1761) are principally devoted to the exposition and elucidation of the classical doctrines of which he was a late exponent. His aesthetics are based on the theory of imitation, which he connects with the concept of the beauty of nature: art does not reproduce nature as it is, but seeks to attain an invisible truth by picking out ‘characteristics’ and ‘features’ and recombining them into a fictive entity which is truer than reality. While poetry sets out to imitate actions, ‘the principal object of music and dance must be to imitate sentiments and passions’. He rejects the idea that its combinations of sound make music sufficient unto itself; it must always be linked to meaning and ‘make up a picture’. This very classical concept, in which music is subjected to a significant model, depends largely on a frequently mentioned analogy with painting, the separation of colour (a material with calculable relationships) from design (which gives painting life and meaning), and had already formed the basis of arguments levelled against Rameau at the time of the Querelle des Lullystes in 1733. Rousseau was to take the theme up again in his Essai sur l’origine des langues, but giving it a different direction by propounding the hypothesis of an original, non-articulated language.

On the level of morphological poetics, Batteux adopts the Aristotelian model, modernizing it and making it systematic. There are two important modifications. First, lyric poetry, a subject on which Aristotle says nothing, is introduced into the ‘arts of imitation’ and justified by the idea of fiction possible, whereas its existence had simply been affirmed in earlier theoretical works on poetry. This hypothesis was the subject of a debate with J.A. Schlegel (father of the famous Romantic theorist), the German translator of Les beaux-arts (1751), to whom Batteux replied in his Principes de la littérature. Secondly, lyric drama (opera) is introduced into the dramatic system, particularly in connection with the concept of the merveilleux vraisemblable. On this point Batteux’s theory, like that of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably in his Lettres sur l’opera of 1741, allots lyric tragedy a position parallel to that of its dramatic homologue (lyric tragedy is conceived of on the model of classical tragedy, the general laws of the latter still applying while the particular rules, objects and methods are modified), thus allowing it full validity in the system of the classical French theatre. In the theories he puts forward for making these innovations, Batteux takes up the structural and transformational spirit of Aristotelian poetics: his system can be represented as a table in which the various positions are articulated with each other, and not merely juxtaposed. He breaks with the strongly normative tone, more anxious to specify advice on production than to provide an explanation of texts through ordered analysis, which had been characteristic of works on poetics from Horace to Nicolas Boileau.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Dupuy: Eloge de Batteux: mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions (Paris, 1780)

R. Naves: ‘L’abbé Batteux et la catharsis’, Mélanges, [Société toulousaine d'études classiques], i (1946), 285–300

F.C. Tubach: ‘ Die Naturnachahmungstheorie: Batteux und die Berliner Rationalisten’, Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, xiii (1963), 262–80

J.H. Davis: ‘ Batteux’, Tragic Theory and the Eighteenth-Century French Critics (Chapel Hill, NC, 1967), 44–50

F. Bollino: Teoria e sistema delle belle arti: Batteux e gli esthéticiens del sec. XVIII (Bologna, 1976)

I. von der Lühe: Natur und Nachahmung in der ästhetischen Theorie zwischen Sturm und Drang: Untersuchungen zur Batteux-Rezeption in Deutschland (Bonn, 1979)

M. Fontius: ‘Batteux’s Kodofizierung des Systems der schönen Künste’, Literatur im Epochenumbruch: Funktionen europäischer Literaturen im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert, ed. G. Klotz, W. Schröder and P. Weber (Berlin, 1977)

A. Becq: Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne: De la raison classique à l’imagination créatrice, 1680–1815 (Pisa, 1984)

F. Torrigiani: Lo specchio dei sistemi: Batteux e Condillac (Palermo, 1984)

M. Modica: Il sistema delle arti: Batteux e Diderot (Palermo, 1987)

S. Branca-Rosoff: Introduction and notes to C. Batteux: Le leçon de leture: textes de l’abbé Batteux (Paris, c1990)

C. Kintzler: Poétique de l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris, 1991)

J.-N. Pascal: ‘ Le statut de l’histoire littéraire dans l’enseignement secondaire à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe: note sur les abrégés de Batteux et de La Harpe’, L’école des lettres, lxxxv/7 (1992), 19–26

CATHERINE KINTZLER

Battiferri, Luigi

(b Sassocorvaro, nr Urbino, 1600–10; d 1682 or later). Italian composer and organist. He studied under Frescobaldi and became a priest. He was a leading musician at Ferrara for a number of years and was also prominent at Urbino: he held a succession of posts as maestro di cappella at both these places and elsewhere, but he held no official positions as an organist. In 1642 he was at S Angelo in Vado in his native region, and from 5 July 1650 to 5 May 1653 he was at Spoleto Cathedral. From 1 October 1653 he was employed at Ferrara, first at the Accademia della Morte and then, in 1657–8, at the Accademia dello Spirito Santo. He was at Urbino Cathedral from 1658 until he returned to Ferrara in the summer of 1660, where he served the Accademia della Morte until 1662 and then the Accademia dello Spirito Santo. In 1665 he was maestro of Pesaro Cathedral. From 1666 he lived principally at Urbino, though he was for a third time at the Accademia dello Spirito Santo, Ferrara, in 1669 and 1670. He was still living in 1682, when he endowed a chapel in the principal church at his birthplace; he probably died shortly afterwards. All but the first of his five extant volumes of music appeared in a single year, 1669, when he was probably over 60, and he may well have regarded them as representative of the music he had written during his active years as a musician. His impressive ricercares marked the end of the school of organ music associated with Ferrara; they were copied by Fux and Zelenka and were probably known to Bach. The numerous solo motets that form his opp.4–6 are cantata-like pieces and were doubtless composed for performance in the academies at Ferrara with which he was connected.

WORKS

Messa et salmi concertati, 3vv, bc, con motetti, letanie, & Salve regina, 2–3vv, bc, op.2 (Venice, 1642)

Ricercari, a 4–6, org, op.3 (Bologna, 1669); 1 ed. A.G. Ritter: Zur Geschichte des Orgelspiels, vornehmlich des deutschen (Leipzig, 1884), 46

Il primo libro de motetti, 1v, bc, op.4 (Bologna, 1669)

Il secondo libro de’ motetti, 1v, bc, op.5 (Bologna, 1669)

Il terzo libro de motetti, 1v, bc, op.6 (Bologna, 1669)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

DBI (P. Veronese)

MGG1 (A. Cavicchi)

Various documents (archive of the Accademia della Morte, Ferrara)

L. Torchi: ‘La musica istrumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’, RMI, v (1898), 455–89; pubd separately (Turin, 1901)

B. Ligi: La cappella musicale del duomo di Urbino, NA, ii (1925), 1–369, esp. 111

F.W. Riedel: ‘Der Einfluss der italienischen Klaviermusik des 17. Jahrhunderts auf die Entwicklung der Musik für Tasteninstrumente in Deutschland während der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, AnMc, no.5 (1968), 18–33

F.W. Riedel: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Kunst der Fuge und die Fugenbücher der italienischen und österreichischen Organisten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, Von Isaac bis Bach: Festschrift Martin Just, ed. F. Heidlberger, W. Ostoff and R. Wiesend (Kassel, 1991), 327–33

ADRIANO CAVICCHI

Battimenti

(It.).

See Beats.

Battimento

(It.).

See Battery.

Battin, Adrian.

See Batten, Adrian.

Battishill, Jonathan

(b London, May 1738; d Islington, London, 10 Dec 1801). English organist and composer. In 1747 he became a chorister of St Paul’s, where he made rapid progress in his musical studies under William Savage, almoner and master of the choristers, whose articled pupil he became after his voice broke. His proficiency on the organ, especially his extempore playing, soon attracted attention, and he acted as William Boyce’s deputy at the Chapel Royal for some time. He also developed a fine tenor voice and frequently appeared as a soloist in London concerts, one of his early engagements being in a performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast at the Great Room, Dean Street, on 16 March 1756, where he was described as ‘Mr Batichel’. About this time he was appointed conductor at Covent Garden, directing from the harpsichord, and he also began to compose songs for Drury Lane Theatre. On 11 June 1758 he became a member of the Madrigal Society, and on 2 August 1761 a member of the Society of Musicians. He was also a ‘priviledged member’ of the Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch Club from c1762, but twice forfeited his membership for non-attendance at meetings. In 1771 he gained the club’s gold medal with his glee Come bind my hair, ye wood nymphs fair.

In 1764 Battishill was appointed organist of the united parishes of St Clement Eastcheap and St Martin Orgar, and in 1767 of Christ Church, Newgate Street, holding both posts until his death. On 19 December 1765 he married Elizabeth Davies, a singing actress at Covent Garden Theatre and the original Margery in Love in a Village. The marriage was not a success, and his wife eventually lived openly with the actor Anthony Webster, with whom she went to Ireland in 1776; she died in Cork in October 1777. From about 1775 Battishill himself apparently lived with a woman who, on his death, called herself Ann Battishill. From the mid-1770s Battishill’s compositional activity declined and he took increasingly to over-indulgence in drink, for which he had always had a propensity. This was undoubtedly a factor in his failure to exploit his talents more fully, and resulted in his not being appointed organist of St Paul’s on the death of John Jones in 1796. From childhood he had been a keen reader, and his later years were spent mostly among his books, of which he had amassed some 6000 to 7000 volumes, consisting chiefly of theology and classical authors. In accordance with his own wishes he was buried in St Paul’s, near the grave of William Boyce, after a funeral service that included his own anthem Call to Remembrance.

Most of Battishill’s compositions date from the period 1760–75, and reflect his many-sided activities during this time. His main operatic venture, Almena, proved a theatrical failure, but that was attributed to dramatic faults on the part of the librettist Rolt, rather than to deficiencies in the music, composed jointly with Michael Arne. Of his many songs, Kate of Aberdeen was highly popular, as was the catch I Loved Thee Beautiful and Kind. It was, however, for his seven-part anthem Call to Remembrance, with its fine command of the old full style of writing and effective suspensions, that he was most widely admired, and the work long survived in cathedral repertories.

In addition to his extempore playing, his performances of Handel’s keyboard works were highly regarded, and his memory, both musical and otherwise, was reputed to have been exceptional, as shown by the occasion on which he played and sang from memory to Samuel Arnold several airs from the latter’s oratorio The Prodigal Son, which he had not heard for 20 years.

WORKS

all first performed and published in London

stage

The Rites of Hecate (pantomime, J. Love), Drury Lane, 26 Dec 1763, collab. J. Potter, GB-Lbl

Almena (Eng. op, 3, R. Rolt), Drury Lane, 2 Nov 1764, collab. M. Arne; songs pubd (1765)

2 songs in Garrick’s revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 23 Nov 1763; 1 song each in Townley’s High Life below Stairs, 31 Oct 1759, and revivals of Moore’s The Foundling, 3 Oct 1765, and The Gamester (?1771)

sacred vocal

12 Hymns, The Words by Revd. Mr Charles Wesley (c1765)

2 Anthems as they are Sung at St Paul’s Cathedral (1767): Call to Remembrance, 3–7vv, org; How long wilt Thou Forget me, 1–5vv, org

Call to Remembrance (Ps xxv.6), 3–7vv, org (1797); rev. by author

6 Anthems and 10 Chants, ed. J. Page (1804); anthems: Behold how Good and Joyful, 1–5vv, org; I Waited Patiently for the Lord, 1–5vv, org; O Lord look down from Heaven, 7vv, org; Save me, O God, 5vv, org; The Heavens Declare the Glory of God, 1–5vv, org; Unto Thee lift I up mine Eyes, 3–4vv, org

5 anthems in Harmonia Sacra, ed. J. Page, i–iii (1800): Behold how Good and Joyful, 1–5vv, org; Call to Remembrance, rev. version, 3–7vv, org; Deliver us, O Lord our God, 5vv, org; How long wilt Thou Forget me, 1–5vv, org; I will Magnify Thee, O God, 3–6vv, org

2 pieces in A Collection of Hymns, ed. J. Page (1804): O Lord, how Beauteous are Thy Courts, sacred ode, SATTB, org, 1764; Jesus Lord we Look to Thee (C. Wesley), hymn, unison vv, org

Hymns and chants pubd in 18th- and 19th-century anthologies, and in GB-Lbl

other works

The Shepherd and Shepherdess, a Favourite Cantata (1764)

A Collection of Favourite Songs sung at the Publick Gardens and Theatres (c1765)

A Collection of Songs, 3–4vv, 2 vols. (c1776)

Select Pieces, ed. J. Page, org/pf (c1805)

Songs, glees and catches pubd singly and in 18th-century anthologies; also GB-Bu, Lbl, US-Cn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

FiskeETM

T. Busby: ‘Original Memoirs of the late Mr. Jonathan Battishill’, Monthly Magazine, xiii (1802), 36–9; rev. as preface to Six Anthems and Ten Chants, ed. J. Page (London, 1804)

T. Busby: Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes (London, 1825), iii, 69–76

S. Wesley: Reminiscences (MS, c1836, GB-Lbl, Add.27593)

W.A. Barrett: English Church Composers (London, 1882/R), 140–43

J.B. Trend: ‘Jonathan Battishill’, ML, xiii (1932), 264–71

E.H. Fellowes: English Cathedral Music (London, 1941, rev. 5/1969/R by J.A. Westrup)

G. Pont: ‘French Overtures at the Keyboard: “How Handel rendered the Playing of Them”’, Musicology, vi (1980), 29–50

M.C. Nelson: The Church Anthems of Jonathan Battishill (diss., U. of Southern California, 1984)

G. Pont: ‘Battishill’s Arrangements of Handel’s Keyboard Overtures’, Gedenkschrift für Jens Peter Larsen, ed. H.J. Marx (Kassel, 1989), 139–53

B. Matthews: ‘The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Battishill’, MT, cxxxiii (1992), 477–9

PETER WARD JONES

Battista, Luigi Alberto Federigo.

See Baptiste, Ludwig Albert Friedrich.

Battistelli, Giorgio

(b Albano Laziale, 25 April 1953). Italian composer. He studied composition with Giancarlo Bizzi at the L'Aquila Conservatory, and in 1974 he co-founded the Gruppo di Ricerca e Sperimentazione Musicale ‘Edgard Varèse’, and the Gruppo Sperimentale ‘Beat 72’ in Rome. An invitation from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst brought him to Berlin (1985–6) and after being appointed artistic director of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano (1993) he took on the artistic direction of the Orchestra Regionale Toscana in 1996. From the outset, his interests have lain principally in theatrical experimentation and formal exploration – aspects which he places above work on the musical material – with some tendency towards minimalism. He has written various works for the stage and since 1987 has also written the texts, which are sometimes inspired by personal responses to films or historical facts; these include the monodrama Aphrodite (1983), the chamber fantasy Jules Verne (1987), Le combat d'Hector et d'Achille (1989), a ‘representation of bodies and of memory for speaking musicians’ entitled Keplers Traum (1989–90, and winner of the 1992 SIAE Prize for a world première outside Italy), Frau Frankenstein (1992), Prova d'orchestra (1995) and The Cenci (1997). The sense of drama is implicit in his purely instrumental works, in which various transformations or restatements of motifs, timbres and intervals can be read acoustically as the development of imaginary characters. The very titles of his orchestral and chamber compositions seem to emphasize this connection with symbolic scenarios: Il racconto di Monsieur B. (1980), La fattoria del vento (1988) and Tre voci (1996). In all his work a rhythmic noise element sometimes assumes a central aesthetic position, often verging on mere effect (Experimentum mundi, 1981).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Experimentum mundi (opera di musica immaginistica, 1, after M.Diderot, J.-J. Rousseau, Voltaire and others: Encyclopédie), 1981, Rome, 1981; Aphrodite (monodramma di costumi antichi, P. Louÿs), 1983, Rome, 1988; Jules Verne (fantasia da camera in forma di spettacolo, Battistelli), 1987, Strasbourg, 1987; Le combat d'Hector et d'Achille (représentation de corps et de mémoire, Homer and others), 1989, Strasbourg, 1989; Keplers Traum (chbr op, Battistelli), 1989–90, Linz, 1990; Globe Theatre (ballet), 1990, Bielefeld, 1990; Frau Frankenstein (monodramma del Prometeo moderno, after M.W. Shelley), 1992, Berlin, 1993; Teorema (parabola in musica, 2, after P.P. Pasolini), 1992, Florence, 1992; Prova d'orchestra (6 scene musicali di fine secolo, Battistelli, after F. Fellini), 1995, Strasbourg, 2 Nov 1995; Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (music-theatre, 5 scenes, M. Klögl), 1997, Bremen, 1997; The Cenci (music-theatre, Battistelli and N. Ward, after A. Artaud), 1997, London, 11 July 1997

Inst: Comme un opéra fabuleux, perc, 1979; Il racconto di Monsieur B., orch, 1980; Anima, perc, 1988; La fattoria del vento, orch, 1988; Onde a terra se acaba e o mar comeca, orch, 1988; Psychopompos, perc, 1988; Anarca ‘Hommage à Ernst Jünger’, orch, 1988–9; Album di famiglia, 6 insts, 1992; Heliopolis, perc, 1992; Paz Music ‘Omaggio a Octavio Paz’, orch, 1993–4; Begleitmusik zu einer Dichtspielszene, 12 insts, 1994; Orazi e Curiazi, perc, 1996; 3 voci (G. van Straten), spkr, str, perc, tape, 1996

Vocal: Il canto del drago (concerto scenico, B. Bassiri), 1v, 2 pf, cel, synth, 3 perc, 1990; Ascolto di Rembrandt (G. Ceronetti), 1v, small orch, tape, 1991

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. De la Motte-Haber: ‘“In die Tiefe der Psyche”: Magie und Rationalität im Werk von Giorgio Battistelli’, MusikTexte, no.30 (1989), 17–19

M. Gamba: Conversazione con Giorgio Battistelli (Milan, 1992)

I. Stoianova: All'ascolto dell'esperienza: i ‘teatri-globo’ di Giorgio Battistelli (Florence, 1992)

H. De la Motte-Haber: Die Reise in Innere der Zeit (Bremen, 1997)

ANGELA IDA DE BENEDICTIS

Battistini.

Italian family of musicians. They were active in Novara in the 18th century.

(1) Giacomo Battistini

(2) Giuseppe Battistini

Battistini

(1) Giacomo Battistini

(b c1665; d Novara, 5 Feb 1719). Composer. He was probably born in northern Italy. From 14 April 1694 he was maestro di cappella of Novara Cathedral, and provided the cathedral with a completely new and varied repertory; he was also active in the theatre (1694–5). For financial reasons he left the cathedral on 1 April 1706, becoming maestro di cappella of S Gaudenzio on 27 June; he held the post for the remainder of his life and reorganized the music there. Battistini's best-known works are the Motetti sacri (1698), the Armonie sagre (1700) and his pieces in the concertato style; these show a secure technique and a light though expressive style.

WORKS

Motetti sacri, 2–3vv, op.1 (Bologna, 1698)

Armonie sagre, 1–3vv, some with insts, op.2 (Bologna, 1700)

3 missae breves, 8vv, bc; 2 Mag, 8vv; Stabat mater, 4vv, 1704; Regina coeli, 4vv, org; Regina coeli, 8vv, org; Alma Redemptoris mater, 4vv, vn, org; Alma Redemptoris mater, 8vv, vn, org; Ave regina coelorum, 8vv, vn, org; Gaudeamus omnes, 4vv; O sacrum convivium, 4vv; several inc. compositions: all I-NOVg

Quasi rosa in Aprile ridens, motet, S, 2 vn, bc, GB-Lbl

Lost sacred works, incl.: Mass, 4vv, 4vv, 2 org, 2 orch, and 2 vesper settings, all perf. for the transfer of the relics of St Gaudentius, June 1711; Il trionfo della Pietà (orat, M.A. Porta), Novara, Chiesa di S Quirico, 20 Nov 1712; Mosé ricercato figura di S Gaudenzio (orat, G.A. Prina), Novara, n.d.

Lost stage works: Antemio in Roma, act 3 (dramma, 3, A.R.B. Villa), Novara, Nuovo, carn. 1695, collab. A. Besozzi and D. Erba; Antioco (melodramma, 3, N. Minato), Novara, Nuovo, carn. 1698

Battistini

(2) Giuseppe Battistini

(b Novara, c1695; d Novara, 13 April 1747). Organist and composer, son of (1) Giacomo Battistini. He became first organist of S Gaudenzio at an early age, and succeeded his father as maestro di cappella on 27 November 1719, remaining there until 1745. None of his compositions is known to survive. His brother Francesco (b c1708) was also a musician.

Battistini

(3) Gaudenzio [Girolamo Gaudenzio] Battistini

(b Novara, 30 June 1722; d Novara, 25 Feb 1800). Organist and composer, son of (2) Giuseppe Battistini. After abandoning an ecclesiastical career, he studied music with his father and uncle. In 1747 he succeeded his father as maestro di cappella of S Gaudenzio, having substituted for several years. After spending some time in Milan (perhaps 1748) studying harmony and counterpoint, he remained at S Gaudenzio for 53 years. In 1779 he directed Sarti's opera Medonte re d'Epiro, which opened the Teatro Nuovo; his engagement as maestro concertatore was renewed in 1780, 1783 and 1785. Battistini sometimes incorporated concertato techniques into his basically polyphonic style, but his music maintains an uncommon standard of solidity and dignity.

WORKS

all in I-NOVg

Passio secundum Lucam; Passio secundum Marcum

Ky-Gl, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1779; Requiem, 4vv, 1785, with fugal Cum Sancto, 4vv, org, orch

12 Salve regina, 4–8vv; Regina coeli, 4vv, 4vv, str, org; Statuit ei Dominus, 4vv; Dixit, 4vv, orch, org

15 motets, 4vv, vc; collection of grad, off and comm for Advent, Lent and Holy Week; masses, Mag and other liturgical works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. di Genova)

MGG1 (R. Meloncelli)

G. Bustico: Il teatro antico di Novara (1695–1873) (Novara, 1922), 2–3, 22, 24

V. Fedeli, ed.: Le cappelle musicali di Novara dal secolo XVI a' primordi dell'Ottocento, IMi, iii (1933), 1–79 [incl. music by Battistinis, 91–347]

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974)

Battistini, Mattia

(b Rome, 27 Feb 1856; d Colle Baccaro, nr Rieti, 7 Nov 1928). Italian baritone. After a brief period of study with Venceslao Persichini and Eugenio Terziana, Battistini seized a sudden chance to sing the leading role of Alfonso XI in Donizetti’s La favorite at the Teatro Argentina in Rome on 11 December 1878, when his immediate success inaugurated a career of nearly 50 years. His early London appearances, in 1883 and 1887, attracted no special attention; his major English triumphs came at Covent Garden in 1905 and 1906, when he was heard in several of his leading roles, including Rigoletto, Germont, Amonasro and Yevgeny Onegin.

By that time Battistini had established himself throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, as a baritone almost without rival in the older repertory and scarcely less famous in later and widely varied roles. The Russian aristocracy and imperial family treated him as an equal; the tsar loaded him with honours; on one occasion his personal intervention is said to have secured the release of a man condemned to death. In Germany and Austria, Poland and Spain, he was equally idolized; and his adoring compatriots saluted him with such fanciful titles as ‘Il re dei baritoni’ and ‘La gloria d’Italia’. After an early engagement at Buenos Aires he never again visited America, and was doubtless the most important singer of his day to have resisted the pull of the Metropolitan – owing, it is said, to his dread of the Atlantic crossing. His vocal powers were almost undimmed by age. When, after a lapse of 16 years, he made a series of concert appearances at the Queen’s Hall, London, in 1922 and the two following years, his unimpaired tone and technique astonished his audiences.

Battistini’s voice was an unusually high baritone, verging on the range of a tenor, with some corresponding weakness in the lowest register. The quality was noble: clear, strong, vibrant, capable also of a deliberately ‘villainous’ harshness when required, even of a kind of scornful snarl that could prove dramatically telling; then suddenly melting into the extremes of tenderness and delicacy. He had fabulous agility and breath control, and could spin out long phrases in the smoothest legato or execute the most flamboyant of flourishes, all with a natural instinct for the grand manner. His Mozart singing, as recorded, seems too wilful for modern taste; but his majestic style is clearly perceptible even in the delivery of a single line of recitative, such as the simple and lapidary ‘Povero Lionello!’ which precedes Plunkett’s ‘Il mio Lionel’ in Flotow’s Marta. This is one of the best of some 100 records that he made between 1903 and 1924. Noteworthy, too, is a group of 1907 recordings from Ernani, including a ‘Vieni meco, sol di rose’ of surpassing delicacy and a finely modulated ‘Eri tu’ from Un ballo in maschera made during the same recording session.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

F. Palmegiani: Mattia Battistini, il re dei baritoni (Milan, 1949, 2/1977) [with discography by W.R. Moran]

J. Dennis: ‘Mattia Battistini’, Record Collector, viii (1953), 245–65 [with discography]

D. Shawe-Taylor: ‘Mattia Battistini’, Opera, viii (1957), 283–9

A. Kelly, J.F. Perkins and J. Ward: ‘Mattia Battistini (1856–1928): a Discography’, Recorded Sound, no.65 (1977), 652–6

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/R

Battle, Kathleen

(b Portsmouth, OH, 13 Aug 1948). American soprano. She studied with Franklin Bens at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory, and in the early 1970s she was engaged by James Levine for both the Ravinia Festival and the Metropolitan Opera. She made her début in 1976 as Susanna with New York City Opera. In 1977 she sang Oscar at San Francisco, then made her Metropolitan début as the Shepherd in Tannhäuser, subsequently singing Rosina, Despina, Zerlina, Blonde, Pamina, Zdenka, Strauss’s and Massenet’s Sophie and Handel’s Cleopatra. She made her British début in 1979 at Glyndebourne as Nerina (Haydn’s La fedeltà premiata) and sang Adina at Zürich in 1980. At Salzburg she has sung Despina, Susanna and Zerlina. She made her Covent Garden début in 1985 as Zerbinetta, returning as Norina in 1990. In 1993 she sang Marie (La fille du régiment) at San Francisco. A notoriously temperamental artist (she has been banned from appearing at the Metropolitan), Battle is gifted with a high, sweet soprano of considerable charm, which she governs with technical finesse; she also has an attractive and vivacious stage presence, and her work is skilful and stylish, if not always highly individual. Her numerous recordings include Zerlina, Blonde and Zerbinetta, Fauré’s Requiem and Brahms’s German Requiem, and an admired interpretation of Handel’s Semele.

RICHARD DYER, ELIZABETH FORBES

Battle music.

Compositions descriptive of battles form a minor but distinctive category of 16th-century music, both vocal and instrumental, with a sporadic continuation, mainly instrumental, down to the early 19th century. The Italian term ‘battaglia’ has sometimes been applied to the whole of this repertory, but the composers themselves generally used titles in their own languages (Fr. guerre, bataille; Ger. Schlacht; Sp. batalla). This article deals with musical representations of battles, rather than the music that might have accompanied actual battles (for which see Military calls). Battle-pieces do, however, incorporate fragments of military music from time to time, such as the ‘tan-ta-ra, tan-ta-ra’ motif in Byrd's keyboard work The Battle; the words are written in the manuscript (My Ladye Nevells Booke, 1591) just before ‘the battels be joyned’.

Some of the typical devices of battle music – rallying-cries, imitations of fanfares – are anticipated in 14th-century cacce (see HAM, i, no.52), and in chansons such as the four-part A l'arme, a l'arme by Grimace and the three-part Alla bataglia in the Pixérécourt Chansonnier (F-Pn fr.15123). Isaac's four-part A la battaglia (likely to have been performed in 1485) makes modest use of ostinato figures and has several alternations of duple and triple time (a regular feature later). It lacks words in its only complete source but elsewhere is associated with a text exhorting the soldiers of Florence to take arms against the Genoese.

The most famous and influential of 16th-century battle-pieces was Janequin's four-part chanson La guerre, written to commemorate the Battle of Marignano (1515), at which François I secured a victory over Swiss mercenaries employed by Duke Ercole Sforza of Milan. First published by Attaingnant in 1528, it was frequently reprinted, once (by Susato in 1545) with an optional fifth voice added by Verdelot. Janequin's own five-part version of the work (1555) is a substantial revision. The prima pars, preliminary to the battle itself, is set in fairly straightforward chanson style; the longer secunda pars is a vivid portrayal of the course of the battle, with a largely onomatopoeic text, triadic motifs, and lively rhythms set against a relatively static harmonic background. La guerre depended for much of its effect upon the text; nevertheless, Francesco Canova da Milano made a lute arrangement of the whole work (1536 and many reprints). No doubt more amenable to instrumentalists was a ‘reduced version’ in the form of a pavan of four strains, the first three being derived from the prima pars; like its model this enjoyed long popularity. What is perhaps the earliest version, for four-part consort, was printed in Jacques Moderne's Musicque de joye (c1544). In Hans Neusidler's Ein new künstlich Lautten Buch (1544) the pavan is entitled Sula bataglia and the fourth strain is separately labelled ‘Der hupff auff’ (ed. in DTÖ, xxxvii, Jg.xviii/2, 1911/R, p.56). At Castell'Arquato is a keyboard arrangement of the pavan from c1600, followed by a saltarello and La tedeschina, the latter based on a single chord (like the lute piece La guerre in Attaingnant's Introduction of 1529).

One of many pieces written in imitation of the chanson La guerre is La bataglia taliana by Matthias Hermann Werrecore, a riposte to Janequin's piece in that it describes a victory of Francesco Sforza, most probably the Battle of Pavia (1525), at which François I was taken prisoner. Werrecore set his piece a 4 and in the same F Ionian mode as Janequin and, like him, made extensive use of onomatopoeic syllables. The distinctive musical motif at the start of Janequin's secunda pars, to the words ‘Fan frere le le lan fan fan’, is quoted within the first of Werrecore's three partes. Whereas La guerre had a fragment of German at the end (1528 version: ‘toute frelore bigot’ – all is lost, by God), La bataglia taliana has text in Italian, French, German and Spanish. The work was first published in Vienna in 1544 (RISM 1544¹⁹) and reprinted in Venice in 1549 and 1552 with considerable variant readings. It seems that Neusidler lost little time in making his lute arrangement (1544²³: ed. in DTÖ, xxxvii, p.46).

The influence of La guerre (both text and music) is still apparent in Andrea Gabrieli's eight-part madrigal Sento un rumor/Alla battaglia, published posthumously in 1587 (RRMR, li, 1984, nos.10–11). The battle concerned (if there was one) cannot be identified from the text. Gabrieli and Annibale Padovano also each wrote an Aria della battaglia for wind instruments in eight parts, published in Dialoghi musicali (1590¹¹). Banchieri's La battaglia (in his Canzoni alla francese, 1596; ed. in RRMR, xx, 1975) is once again unspecific as to the event. It is in a single section, within which the same music (with the two four-part choirs reversed) is used to portray trumpets (to the syllables ‘Ta ra ra tun ta ra’) and drums (‘Tra pa ta pa ta pa’). According to the title-page, the music could be either sung or played.

Janequin appears to have been the starting-point too for the substantial repertory of keyboard battle-pieces by 17th-century Spanish and Portuguese composers. Among the earliest examples, Correa de Arauxo's Tiento de 6^o tono (MME, vi, 1948, no.23; said to be based on the first part of a batalla by Morales) and two Batallas del 6^o tono by José Ximénez (CEKM, xxxi, 1975, nos.14–15) all adopt Janequin's mode and reflect his opening gesture. Later examples by Cabanilles and others were no doubt intended to exploit the trumpets en chamade and echo effects of the Iberian organ, but they remain essentially grounded in Renaissance techniques.

Byrd's The Battle owes no particular debt to Janequin; the earliest English example of the genre, it still appears in sources of the mid-17th century. Nevertheless, the item that follows it in the Nevell book, The Barley Break, with its characteristic battle-piece scenario (the marshalling of forces, the contest, the retreat from the field) is an altogether more engaging work. Other examples for virginals are the strange A Battle, and No Battle attributed to Bull and The Batell of Pavie set by William Kinloch (GB-En 9447); the latter betrays only the most tenuous links with La bataglia taliana. English lute sources contain a number of battle-pieces, including one for two lutes (in GB-Lbl Eg.2046).

Battle music of the Baroque period is only occasionally linked to recent events. Rather, composers cultivated the genre for its expressive potential, or for dramatic or allegorical purposes. The allegorical usage, already seen in Vecchi's ten-part vocal Battaglia d'amor e dispetto of 1587, is evident in Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) and the other canti guerrieri of his eighth book of madrigals (1638). The stile concitato developed by Monteverdi proved a valuable resource in opera and in instrumental compositions such as Biber's Battalia of 1673 for strings in nine parts and continuo. This employs special effects including rebounding pizzicato in the double basses as well as the expected rapid note repetitions; the suite ends on a subdued note with the descending semitones of Lamento der vernundten Musquetirer. A comparable English work (referring to an actual event) is Jenkins's Newark Siege (MB, xxvi, 1969, 2/1975, no.23), the minor-key ending reflecting the royalist composer's view of the outcome. Battle music was quite often used as religious allegory. Banchieri, in L'organo suonarino (1605), recommended the performance of a battaglia at Easter to symbolize Christ's victory over death; and, where his text called for it, Bach drew on the conventions of battle music, most wonderfully perhaps in the St John Passion aria ‘Es ist vollbracht’, at the words ‘Der Held aus Juda siegt mit Macht’.

A final spate of battle-pieces describing recent events occurred between about 1780 and 1815. Examples are František Kocžwara’s The Battle of Prague, a sonata for piano or harpsichord with optional violin, cello and drums (c1788), and J.B. Vanhal's programmatic keyboard sonata Le combat naval de Trafalgar et la mort de Nelson (c1806). Other conflicts of the Napoleonic era are depicted in Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg, oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria (op.91, 1813); in Peter Winter's Schlachtsymphonie with chorus and J.F. Reichardt's Schlachtsymphonie (both 1814); and Weber's cantata Kampf und Sieg (1815), celebrating the Battle of Waterloo. But Beethoven's piece caused some embarrassment even among his own circle, and more familiar to modern listeners are the trumpets and drums whose use underlines the prayer for peace in his Mass in D. A musical battle from the Romantic period is Liszt's symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht (1857), inspired not directly by the event (which supposedly took place in the year 451) but by a painting by Wilhelm Kaulbach. As far as battle music is concerned, the 20th century has lost its naivety, and unquestioning portrayals in music of military conquests are hardly to be expected. Kodály's Háry János suite (1927) includes a movement entitled ‘The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon’ in which march tunes and trumpet calls are treated in a spirit of caricature. On another plane are the unforgettable evocations of battle sounds in Britten's War Requiem (1961), the true nature of what they represent being starkly revealed in the poems of Wilfred Owen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

MGG2 (‘Battaglia’; W. Braun)

ReeseMR

M. Brenet: ‘Essai sur les origines de la musique descriptive’, RMI, xiv (1907), 725–51; xv (1908), 457–87

M.E. Sutton: A Study of the 17th-Century Iberian Organ Batalla: Historical Development, Musical Characteristics, and Performance Considerations (diss., U. of Kansas, 1975)

O.W. Neighbour: The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London, 1978)

T.J. McGee: ‘“Alla battaglia”: Music and Ceremony in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 287–302

K. Schulin: Musikalische Schlachtgemälde in der Zeit von 1756–1815 (Tutzing, 1986)

D. Nutter: Preface to Orazio Vecchi: Battaglia and Mascherata, RRMR, lxxii (1987)

H.C. Slim: ‘Commentary to Keyboard Music at Castell' Arqunto’, CEKM, xxxvii (1991)

A. Silbiger, ed.: Keyboard Music before 1700 (New York, 1995)

ALAN BROWN

Batton, Désiré-Alexandre

(b Paris, 2 Jan 1798; d Versailles, 15 Oct 1855). French composer. He was a pupil at the Paris Conservatoire from 1806 to 1817; he won the Prix de Rome in 1817 with the cantata La mort d’Adonis. Before he left for Italy his most successful comic opera, La fenêtre secrète, was given at the Opéra-Comique on 17 November 1818, and during the following year it was performed at Brussels and Copenhagen. In Rome Batton wrote both sacred and secular vocal music, including an unperformed opera, Vellèda (from Chateaubriand’s Les martyrs). Moving to Germany, he then composed several orchestral works for the Munich concert society.

After his return to Paris his theatrical compositions met with little success, except for his part in the nine-man collaboration opera, La marquise de Brinvilliers (1831). Although the music in his other opéras comiques often received critical praise, the works suffered from poor librettos; Le camp du drap d’or was whistled so loudly that the music could not be heard. The aspects of Batton’s music that received criticism (such as exaggerated orchestration and ambitious formal planning) look impressively resourceful today, and in combination with his melodic grace they reveal a gifted composer forced into premature retirement by the lack of musical opportunities in Restoration Paris. In 1851, Batton was made inspector of the branch schools of the Conservatoire. (J.-M. Bailbé and others: La musique en France à l’Epoque romantique: 1830–1870, Paris, 1991.

WORKS

theatrical

opéras comiques, first performed in Paris unless otherwise stated

La fenêtre secrète, ou Une soirée à Madrid (3, Des Essarts d’Ambreville), OC (Feydeau), 17 Nov 1818, selections, vs (Paris, c1819)

Vellèda (1, after Chateaubriand: Les martyrs), 1820, unperf., F-Pc

Ethelwina, ou L’exilé (3, P, de Kock and Mme Lemaignan), OC (Feydeau), 31 March 1827

Le prisonnier d’état (1, Mélesville [A.-H.-J. Duveyrier]), OC (Feydeau), 6 Feb 1828, Pc

Le camp du drap d’or (3, de Kock), OC (Feydeau), 23 Feb 1828, collab. L.V.E. Rifaut and Leborne

La marquise de Brinvilliers (drame lyrique, 3, E. Scribe and Castil-Blaze [F.-H.-J. Blaze]), OC (Ventadour), 31 Oct 1831 (Paris, 1831), collab. Auber, H.-M. Berton, Blangini, A. Boieldieu, Carafa, Cherubini, Hérold and Paer

Le remplaçant (3, Scribe and J. Bayard), OC (Nouveautés), 11 Aug 1837

other works

La mort du Tasse (cant., E. de Jouy), 1816, F-Pc

La mort d’Adonis (cant., J.-A. Vinaty), 1817, Pc

Berenice (lyric scena), Rome, 1820, Pc

Ciro (lyric scena), Rome, c1819–23, Pc

Triste hiver, 3vv (Paris, 1855)

L’attente, 1v, pf acc., 1839, Pc

Overture, D, Munich, 1821, Pc (parts)

Symphony, other orch pieces, Munich, 1819–23, lost, mentioned by Fétis

M.C. CARR/MARIE LOUISE PEREYRA/DAVID CHARLTON/BENJAMIN WALTON

Battre, H.

(fl c1430–40). Composer. Nothing is known of his life, though two of the texts he set provide possible clues to his place of origin or employment: Gaudens exulta is in praise of Ciney, a town in the province of Namur (now in south-east Belgium); and Chomos condrosi is thought to refer to the region around Ciney known as the Condroz. The exclusive association of his works with a source in which he is the only named composer (the so-called ‘Battre fascicle’ of I-TRmp 87) may indicate that he was its compiler. It seems unlikely on stylistic grounds that he is the later 15th-century composer Batty (or Batten).

Battre’s small yet varied output shows considerable originality; his music often unfolds in unpredictable ways. Gaude virgo is especially unusual in that it exploits the effects of contrasted vocal groupings (based on a distinction between ‘pueri’ and ‘mutate voces’), while Chomos condrosi, a two-part canon with a freely composed third voice, is remarkable for its setting of a macaronic text (in Latin and Greek) which actually describes the compositional technique being employed. Although this is his only canonic work, several others use imitation as a structural rather than a decorative device. If Battre’s music shows a tendency towards complexity of line and texture (with occasionally clumsy results), he is also capable of a simpler, more declamatory style, as can be seen for example in the hymn Stirps regia.

WORKS

all unique in I-TRmp 87

Edition: Sieben Trienter Codices, ed. R. Ficker, DTÖ, lxxvi, Jg.xl (1933/R) [F]

Gloria, 3vv; ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi (1924/R)

Agnus Dei, 3vv; ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi (1924/R)

Chomos condrosi, 3vv, canonic motet; F; also ed. in Loyan

De qua natus, 3vv, motet with text from the Genealogy of Christ; F

Dulcissime frater, 3vv, motet; F

Gaude virgo mater Christi, 3vv, sequence-motet; F

Gaudens exulta, 4vv, motet in praise of Ciney; F

Stirps regia, 3vv, hymn; F

Veni Creator Spiritus, 4vv, hymn; ed. in DTÖ, liii, Jg.xxvii (1920)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmR

G. Adler and O. Koller, eds.: Sechs Trienter Codices: geistliche und weltliche Kompositionen des XV. Jahrhunderts, DTÖ, xiv–xv, Jg.vii (1900/R)

R. Loyan: Canons in the Trent Codices, CMM, xxxviii (1967)

R.J. White: The Battre Fascicle of the Trent Codex 87 (diss., Indiana U., 1975) [includes edns of all Battre’s works]

D. Fallows: ‘Specific Information on the Ensembles for Composed Polyphony 1400–1474’, Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music, ed. S. Boorman (Cambridge, 1983), 109–59, esp. 122–3

PETER WRIGHT

Battuta

(It.: ‘beat’, ‘bar’, ‘measure’).

A battuta, like a tempo, means a return to the strict beat. In the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ritmo di tre battute and ritmo di quattro battute designate that the one-in-a-bar beats should be grouped in threes and fours respectively. Vivaldi used the performance instruction battute (‘beaten’) for repeated semiquavers (p410/rv163) and Kolneder (Aufführungspraxis bei Vivaldi, Leipzig, 1955) raised the possibility that this was an instruction to play col legno.

For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks; see also Beat (i).

DAVID FALLOWS

Battuto [battute]

(It.).

Term used in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe the technique of strumming the strings of the guitar. See Rasgueado.

Batty

(fl c1450–80). Composer. Nothing is known of his life. His only two known compositions (both in CZ-Ps D.G.IV.47) are respectively three- and four-voice settings of the compline antiphon Regina celi. Both paraphrase the plainchant elaborately in the superius, and both make occasional use of imitation. Batty may be identifiable with Batten, whose sole surviving piece (in CZ-HKm II A 7) is a three-voice Sanctus whose superius either paraphrases an unidentified chant or merely cites fragments of plainchant melodies. All three works are indebted to the English idiom.

Both ‘Batty’ and ‘Batten’ may be misnomers, and it is not impossible that one or both of these names are central European ‘misspellings’; in this case they may perhaps be identifiable with Ludovicus Patier (who was at the Savoy court in 1454–5) or Luisot Patin (documented at Naples in 1480). However, both of the latter could equally well have been homonyms. A connection with the earlier composer H. Battre (represented in I-TRmp 87) seems less likely on the grounds of stylistic differences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Bouquet: ‘La cappella musicale dei duchi di Savoia, dal 1450 al 1500’, RIM, iii (1968), 233–85

R.J. Snow: The Manuscript Strahov D.G.IV.47 (diss., U. of Illinois, 1968)

A. Atlas: Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples (Cambridge, 1985)

BOB MITCHELL

Battyn, Adrian.

See Batten, Adrian.

Bätz

[Baetz, Baitz, Beets, Beetz, Betz].

Firm of organ builders of German origin, active in the Netherlands. The first organ builder of the family was Johann Heinrich Hartmann Bätz (b Frankenroda, nr Eisenach, 1 January, 1709; d Utrecht, 13 December 1770). Having learned cabinet making, Johann Heinrich was apprenticed to the organ builder J.C. Thielemann in Gotha for four years starting in 1729. In 1733 he joined the organ workshop of Christiaan Müller in the Dutch Republic and helped to build the organ in the Bavokerk of Haarlem. In 1739 he settled in Utrecht as an independent organ builder. His work shows many similarities with the work of Müller in its cases, pipes and mechanisms. He built at least 16 new organs, many of them quite large, with two to three manuals. The most significant instruments are: Grote Kerk, Gorinchem (1760; rebuilt by Witte), Evangelische Lutherse Kerk, The Hague (1761–2), Hoorn, Oosterkerk, (1762; only the case is extant), Petruskerk, Woerden (1766–8), Zierikzee (1768–70). This last was his opus magnum, having three manuals, pedal and 46 stops, and being similar to Müller’s organ in Haarlem, but it was destroyed in a fire in 1832.

Gideon Thomas Bätz (bap. Utrecht, 8 June 1751; d Utrecht, 30 Jan 1820) inherited the workshop after his father’s death. Although a very able organ builder he was not a good businessman, and initially the firm was run with his younger brother Christoffel (bap. 15 August, 1755; d nr Breukelen, 1 May 1800) under the leadership of his uncle Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Bätz. Gideon Thomas took over the leadership at the age of 21. Following a dispute over the inheritance Christoffel left to start his own organ building workshop in 1778. He built the rugwerk of the Medemblik organ, as well as the organ of Loenen aan de Vecht. Gideon Thomas and Christoffel built at least 22 new organs. The organs are smaller than those of their father, reflecting the changing musical requirements and the economic situation of the time; many have one manual and several divided stops. However, the external forms and specifications are more varied than those of their father. They also built a number of cabinet organs. The most significant organs by Gideon Thomas were at Heukelum (1779), Breukelen (1787) Lutheran church, Edam, (1809), Vleuten (1812), Franciscus Xavieriuskerk, Amersfoort (1819), and Weesp (1822).

Under the brothers Jonathan (b Utrecht, 5 Feb 1787; d Utrecht, 18 July 1849) and Johan Martin Willem (bap. Utrecht, 15 March 1789; d Utrecht, 19 Nov 1836), sons of Christoffel, great growth took place. Jonathan was the most important of the two, and Aristide Cavaille-Coll paid him a visit on 16–17 October 1844. Johan Martin Willem lived in Amsterdam between 1812 and 1818 and was a piano maker. He returned to Utrecht to work for his brother until 1831. By then Christiaan Gottlieb Friedrich Witte (b Rothenburg, nr Hanover, 12 Jan 1802; d Utrecht, 1873) had become the star worker of Jonathan’s company. Witte had learned his trade with Bethmann in Hannover and joined the Bätz workshop in 1826. He was the foreman during the building of the organ of the Ronde Lutherse Kerk, Amsterdam. In 1839 Witte married a granddaughter of Gideon Thomas Bätz, and took over the business after Jonathan’s death. The sons of Johan Martin Willem (Johan Christiaan, Jonathan (ii) and Johan Martin Willem (ii)) remained active in the workshop. Witte’s son Johan Frederik (1840–1902) succeeded his father in 1873. With the death of the latter, the Bätz-Witte dynasty came to an end.

Between 1820 and 1849, when Jonathan Bätz had the leadership, 22 new organs were built. Most of them are extant. As well as the charming, small organs in Nieuwenhoorn, Weesp, ‘s-Gravenland, Harderwijk, Mijdrecht, the Amstelkerk in Amsterdam, the Lutheran church in Woerden, and the Gothic Room of the Palace of King Willem II at The Hague, he built a number of significant larger organs, such as the three-manual organs in the Domkerk, Utrecht (in a neo-Gothic case with many pipes from the 1571 organ by Peter Janszoon De Swart), the Ronde Lutherse Kerk, Amsterdam and the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft. Organs by the Wittes can be found in Gorinchem, Buren, Tiel, Delft (Oude Kerk), Bunschoten, Naarden, Kapelle, Geervliet, Rijswijk, Utrecht, Oldenzaal, West-Terschelling, De Rijp, Culemborg, Delfshaven, Dordrecht, Ophemert, Puttershoek and Rotterdam. The organs in Naarden and Delft have 16' Principals in the rugwerk. The J.F. Witte organ in St Jacobskerk, The Hague (1882; demolished), was the largest organ built in the Netherlands in the 19th century. A large organ by him in the Oude Lutherse Kerk, Amsterdam (1885), survives.

Bätz organs are distinguished by their traditional Dutch style, having a very solid construction using the best materials, a very musical sound and great reliability. After Jonathan Bätz’s death Witte in many ways broke with the 18th-century Bätz tradition in favour of a fuller, more monumental sound. Also, Witte introduced novelties such as three manual-divisions in one case, keyboards to the side of the organ, accentuation of the treble stops, the importance of the treble labial Cornet, and the introduction of tuning expressions. Some of Witte’s cases are in neo-Gothic or neo-Romanesque style while others follow the more traditional Bätz look.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Oost: De orgelmakers Bätz: een eeuw orgelbouw in Nederland (1739–1849) (Alphen aan den Rijn, 3/1975)

G. Oost, ed.: Gebroeders Bätz, Orgelmakers Utrecht (Utrecht, 1975)

J. Jongepier: Langs Nederlandse orgels: Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Utrecht (Utrecht, 1977)

J. Jongepier and T. den Toon: ‘Orgels van Witte gerestaureerd’, Het Orgel, lxxxv (1989), 290–305, 329–346, 357, 377–83, 403–13

T. den Toon: De orgelmakers Witte (Rotterdam, 1997)

BARBARA OWEN, ADRI DE GROOT

Bauchspiess, Severus.

See Gastorius, Severus.

Bauckholt, Carola

(b Krefeld, 21 Aug 1959). German composer. She studied at the Cologne Academy of Music (1978–84) with Kagel, among others. After working with the TAM (Theater am Marienplatz) in Krefeld-Fischeln (1976–84), she co-founded the Thürmchen publishing imprint (1985) and Thürmchen Ensemble (1991), both of which specialize in experimental music and music theatre. As a composer, she has taken the process of listening to her immediate surroundings as a point of departure, subtly imitating and transforming the sounds of everyday life in her compositions. Many of her works (until the mid-1980s) incorporate elements of music theatre (i.e. slides, videos, objects, semantic associations etc.). In In gewohnter Umgebung I–III (1991–4) and other works, ordinary sounds are imitated by instruments which assume activities connected with the production of these sounds, such as rubbing or striking. Geräusche (1992) uses new instrumental sounds to particularly good effect. Later compositions, such as Doina (1996) and Kurbel und Wolke (1997), link signifiers (gestural, semantic or associative) to vocal and instrumental sound with increasing diversity. Her many honours include prizes from the international competition of WDR (1989), the Carl Maria von Weber Competition, Dresden (1993) and the Gedok Competition (1994), the Swiss Stiftung Boswil Award (1995) and the Dresden Blaue Brücke Award (1996).

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Stage: Like a Rolling Stone, objects, 1978–9; Lau & Tau (H.C. Artmann), 2 spkrs, ocarina, b harmonica, 1980; Eure Zeichen, 6 players, tape, 1981–2; con espressione, 1982–3: allegretto, 5vv; amoroso, 10 light sources, objects (incl. a glass); furioso, tpt, 5 noise makers; calmato, 5 pfmrs, 2 va; grave, S, tape; grave (G. Rühm, Bible: Matthew), S, tape, 1982; Im inneren Ohr, pfmr, tape, 1983; Der sechste Sinn (K. Bayer), 1v, 1 player, insts, 1983; Der gefaltete Blick (scenic cant.), 2vv, vc, 1984; Das klagende Lied, 5 bandoneons, vn, va, vc, db, tuba, tape, 1985; Geräusche, 2 players, 1992; In gewohnter Umgebung II, 5 pfmrs, cl, vc, pf, light, objects, 1993; Lauschangriff, fl, cl, vn, va, 2 vc, db, perc, 1994–5, collab. C.J. Walther, T. Stiegler and S. Walter; Stachel der Empfindlichkeit, Ct, Mez, 3 vc, 4 perc, 1997–8; Es wird sich zeigen, 3vv, str qt, perc, 1998

Other dramatic: erinnern vergessen, fl, bn, vc, db, perc, objects, slide projections, 1990–91 [arr. concert version]; langsamer als ich dachte, vc, perc, slide projections, 1990; In gewohnter Umgebung I, 2 perc, objects, slide projections, 1991; In gewohnter Umgebung III, vc, espérou/prep pf/cymbalon, video, 1994; Pumpe, 1v, accdn, pf, light, 1994; Vertraute Rätsel, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, db, perc, pf, video, 1995–6

other works

Inst: zwei Trichter, fl, bn, tpt, tuba, va, elec gui, 4 perc, 1978–88; Polizeitrieb, 2 perc, 1985; Hornduo, 2 hn, 1986–7; sottovoce, 2 vc, 1988; Trio, 2 vc, pf, 1988–9; Polsch, pf, 1989; Qnt, variable insts, 1989; 3 Sätze, wind qnt, 1989; Balsam, str orch, 1990; mehr oder weniger, fl, ob, cl, vn, va, vc, db, pf, perc, 1991; offen und beweglich, orch, 1992; Zopf, fl, ob, cl, 1992; Luftwurzeln, fl, cl, va, vc, 1993; Maulwurf, 2 bn, dbn, 1993; Str Trio, 1994; Treibstoff, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, db, perc, pf, 1995; Galopp, fl, sax, vc, elec gui, perc, 1996; Kurbel und Wolke, orch, 1997

Vocal: Die faule Vernunft, 2vv, 2 hn, db, 4 perc, 1986–7; Wortanfall, spkr, Ct, 2 hn, xyl, viol, db, hp, timp, 1986; Schraubdichtung, spkr, vc, dbn, perc, 1989–90; Doina, 1v, str orch, 1996

Principal publisher: Thürmchen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Bauckholt: ‘Identitätsfetzen’, Positionen (1993), no.16, p.16 only

C. Naujocks: ‘“Aus gewohnter Umgebung”: Carola Bauckholts Musik aus Bildern, Licht und Klang’, Positionen, no.32 (1997), 23–6

F. Hilberg: ‘Krümel des Alltags. Carola Bauckholts Musiktheater “Es wird sich zeigen”’, Musik Texte, no.79 (1999), 54–6

R. Schulz: ‘Hellhörig. Porträt der Komponistin Carola Bauckholt’, ibid., 42–6

MARTINA HOMMA

Baud-Bovy, Samuel

(b Geneva, 27 Nov 1906; d Geneva, 2 Nov 1986). Swiss musicologist and conductor. In Geneva he took an arts degree at the university and was a violin pupil of Fernand Closset at the conservatory. He then studied conducting with Nilius and music history with Adler in Vienna (1926–7), composition with Dukas and musicology with Pirro in Paris (1928–9) and conducting with Weingartner at Basle and Scherchen at Geneva; in 1936 he took the doctorat ès lettres at Geneva University.

After a visit to Greece (1929–31), where he studied sacred music and folksong, he returned to Geneva Conservatoire as orchestral instructor (1933–73) and conductor (1942–73), also serving as co-principal (1947), principal (1957) and honorary principal (1970). Concurrently at the university he was director of studies (1931), assistant professor (1942) and honorary professor (1958) of modern Greek. In 1938 he became director of the Société de Chant Sacré; he was also president of the Association des Musiciens Suisses (1955–60) and of the International Society for Music Education (1961–3). In 1975 he was awarded the Prix de la Ville de Genève and in 1977 he became a member of the executive board of the International Council for Traditional Music.

Baud-Bovy’s main area of research was Greek traditional music, in particular Kleftic ballad from mainland Greece, and the music of Crete and the Dodecanese islands. He was among the first scholars of Greek traditional music to make a systematic collection of the music as well as the texts from one area (the Dodecanese). Consistent aspects of his research were his preoccupation with the 15-syllable text line (its origins, evolution and relationship to the melodic strophe), and the comparison of melodic variants as a means of determining their possible origin. His work constitutes the most substantial contribution by any one author to the study of Greek traditional music.

WRITINGS

La chanson populaire grecque du Dodécanèse (diss., U. of Geneva; Paris, 1936)

‘Sur la strophe de la chanson cleftique’, Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves, ii (1950), 53–78

‘Sur la chanson grecque antique et moderne’, SMz, xciii (1953), 418–23

‘La strophe de distiques rimés dans la chanson grecque’, Studia memoriae Belae Bartók sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Varygas (Budapest, 1956; Eng. trans., 1959), 365–83

Etudes sur la chanson cleftique (Athens, 1958)

with others: Jean Jacques Rousseau (Neuchâtel, 1962) [incl. ‘Rousseau musicien’, 51–66]

‘La place des rizitika tragoudia dans la chanson populaire de la Grèce moderne’, Kritika chronika, xv–xvi (1963), 97–105

‘La systématisation des chansons populaires’, IFMC Conference: Budapest 1964 [SMH, vii (1965)], 213–29

‘L’accord de la lyre antique et la musique populaire de la Grèce moderne’, RdM, liii (1967), 3–20

‘Equivalences métriques dans la musique vocale grecque antique et moderne’, RdM, liv (1968), 3–15

‘L’évolution d’une chanson grecque’, JIFMC, xx (1968), 39–47

with B. Bouvier: Preface and epilogue to Mousikē ermēneia tōn demotikōn tragoudiōn tes monēs Iberōn [A transcription of the demotic songs of the convent of Ivira], ed. D. Mazaraki (Athens, 1968)

‘Chansons d’Epire du nord et du Pont’, YIFMC, iii (1971), 120–27

‘Sur une chanson de danse balkanique’, RdM, lviii (1972), 153–61

‘I epikratisi toy dekapentasyllavou sto elliniko dimotiko tragoydi’ [The supremacy of the 15-syllable line in popular Greek song], Hellenika, xxvi (1973), 301–13

‘Rousseau as a Musician’, Times Literary Supplement (20 July 1973)

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la musique française’, RdM, lx (1974), 212–16

‘Les chansons populaires grecques harmonisées par Maurice Ravel’, Maurice Ravel au XXe siècle, ed. D. Pistone (Paris, 1975), 24–32

‘Rameau, Voltaire et Rousseau’, Revue musicale suisse, cxvi (1976), 152–7

‘Sur quelques mirologues de Grèce continentale’, Neue ethnomusikologische Forschungen: Festschrift Felix Hoerburger, ed. P. Baumann, R.M. Brandl and K. Reinhard (Laaber, 1977), 141–52

‘Le dorien etait-il un mode pentatonique?’, RdM, lxiv (1978), 153–80

‘L'ornementation dans le chant de l'église grecque et la chanson populaire grecque moderne’, SMH, xxi (1979), 281–93

‘Chansons populaires de la Grèce ancienne’, RdM, lxix (1983), 5–20; lxx (1984), 259–60

Essai sur la chanson populaire grecque (Návpilon, 1983)

‘Ein lasisches Lied’, ‘Weine, meine Laute … ’: Gedenkschrift Kurt Reinhard, ed. C. Ahrens and others (Laaber, 1984), 47–56

‘Sur le chromatisme dans la musique grecque’, Musica e liturgia nella cultura mediterranea: Venice 1985, 169–75

‘Le “genre enharmonique”: a-t-il existé?’, RdM, lxxii (1986), 5–21

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

Chansons populaires du Dodécanèse (Athens, 1935–8)

Chansons populaires grecques du Dodécanèse, recueillies et harmonisées pour chant et piano (Geneva, 1946)

Chansons populaires de Crète occidentale (Geneva, 1972)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Gagnebin: ‘Hommage à Samuel Baud-Bovy’, SMz, cviii (1968), 334–5

G. Amargianakis: ‘Hommage à Samuel Baud-Bovy’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xl/1 (1987), 13–28

J.-J. Eigeldinger: ‘Travaux de Samuel Baud-Bovy: essai de bibliographie’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xl/1 (1987), 31–5

R.M. Brandl and E. Konstantinou, eds.: Griechische Musik und Europa (Aachen, 1988) [memorial volume]

LUCY DURÁN

Baude de Rains [Baude Fresnel]

(b Reims, mid-14th century; d 1397–8). French harpist and organist. He was musician to Philip the Bold of Burgundy and may be identifiable with Baude Cordier.

Baudelaire, Charles (Pierre)

(b Paris, 9 April 1821; d Paris, 31 Aug 1867). French poet. In 1921 Proust could call him the ‘greatest poet of 19th century’, but during his own lifetime the praise was more reserved. An 1852 caricature by his friend the photographer Nadar lampooned him as a ‘nervous, testy and irritable young poet’, who was still ‘probably the best’ of his generation. Ten years later, a condescending Sainte-Beuve would portray the now 41-year-old Baudelaire as a ‘nice, refined boy’.

By that time Baudelaire’s reputation had been well established not only as a poet and art critic – with important essays on Delacroix and Constantin Guys – but also as a translator of the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Published continuously over nearly two decades, Baudelaire’s Poe translations represented the most stable part of a troubled literary career, becoming so popular that in France the names of the two authors, as Théophile Gautier later remarked, were practically inseparable.

The reputation spawned by his poetry was quite another matter. The publication of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 thrust Baudelaire into the public eye not only as an artist but as the victim of an obscenity trial, leading to the censoring of the edition and the subsequent bankruptcy of his Parisian publisher. While such negative publicity made Baudelaire infamous, he nonetheless managed to win admiration from established poets such as Alfred de Vigny, whom Baudelaire met in 1861 during a misguided attempt to gain entrance into the Académie Française, as well as from the much younger Verlaine and Mallarmé, who wrote enthusiastically about his work in 1865.

It was in fact the generation of Verlaine and Mallarmé that embraced Baudelaire’s oeuvre most passionately. In the salons of the Third Republic the heavy scent of his evil flowers was to hang over a whole community of modern artists, affecting writers no less than musicians. Commenting on this influence in 1921, Koechlin went so far as to assert that if Baudelaire had not existed, it would have been necessary for modern French music ‘to invent him’. His poems (brought out in complete edition by 1870) were treated to memorable settings by Duparc, Fauré, Chabrier, d’Indy; Debussy completed the extraordinary Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire in 1889 and left among his many unfinished theatre works an opera based on Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.

Baudelaire’s only other contribution to the world of music comes in the form of a long essay on Wagner (published in 1861 after the Paris performance of Tannhäuser), in which his attempt to describe the experience of Wagner’s music leads him to speculate on the vast system of ‘reciprocal analogy’ governing all creation. While this theory of correspondence may not transform our understanding of Romantic art, the essay on the whole offers a remarkable opportunity for us to rehear Wagner through the ears of one of the century’s most imaginative listeners.

WRITINGS

only those on music

‘Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris’, L’art romantique, ed. J. Crépet (Paris, 1925), 199–252 [orig. 2 pts, 1st pubd together in Revue européenne (4 May 1861), suppl.]; Eng. trans. in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. J. Mayne (London, 1964), 111–46

SETTINGS

(selective list)

for 1v, pf unless otherwise indicated

R.R. Bennett: Nightpiece, S, tape, 1972 [Les bienfaits de la lune]

A. Berg: Der Wein, S, orch, 1929 [trans. S. George: L’âme du vin, Le vin des amants, Le vin du solitaire]

E. Blackwood: Un voyage à Cythère, S, wind, 1966

E. Bondeville: La cloche fêlée, 1879–88

P. de Bréville: Harmonie du soir, 1879, La cloche fêlée, 1926 [also arr. orch]

H. Büsser: A celle qui est trop gaie, 1943

M. Canal: Bien loin d’ici, Madrigal triste, Recueillement, 1940

A. Caplet: La cloche fêlée, La mort des pauvres, 1922

E. Chabrier: L’invitation au voyage, 1870

G. Charpentier: La cloche fêlée, 1890, L’invitation au voyage, Le jet d’eau [also arr. orch], La mort des amants, Parfum exotique, 1893, La musique, 1894, Les yeux de Berthe, 1895

J. Cras: Correspondances, 1901 [also arr. 1v, str qt]

J. Corigliano: L’invitation au voyage [trans. R. Wilbur], SATB, 1971

C. Debussy: 5 poèmes de Baudelaire: [Le balcon, Harmonie du soir, Le jet d’eau, Recueillement, La mort des amants], 1887–9

E. Denisov: Chant d’automne, S, orch, 1971

A. Diepenbrock: 3 poèmes de Charles Baudelaire [Recueillement [also arr. orch], Les chats [also arr. orch], L’invitation au voyage], 1906–13

H. Duparc: L’invitation au voyage, 1870 [also arr. orch], La vie antérieure, 1884

G. Fauré: Chant d’automne, Hymne, La rançon, 1879

I. Gotkovsky: Poème lyrique: petit opéra, S, B, chbr orch [after Harmonie du soir], 1986

A. Grechaninov: Tsvetïzia [Hymne, L’invitation au voyage, Je t’adore, Harmonie du soir, La mort joyeux], 1909

J. Harvey: Correspondances, 1975

V. d’Indy: L’amour et le crâne, 1884

R. Laparra: La mort joyeux, 1924, Les aveugles, Bien loin d’ici, 1v, fl, pf/hpd, 1902, Maison tranquille [Je n’ai pas oublié], Parfum exotique, Le vin de l’assassin, 1926

C. Loeffler: Harmonie du soir, 1v, va d'amore, pf, c1893, La cloche fêlée, 1v, orch, Le flambeau vivant, c1902, lost

C. Matthews: Un colloque sentimental [Le jet d’eau], 1971–8

M. Powell: Little Companion Pieces, S, str qt [Méditation], 1980

A. Powers: Souvenirs du voyage [L’invitation au voyage, La vie antérieure, Elévation, Spleen, Recueillement], 1979–80

J.G. Ropartz: Chant d’automne, 1905

N. Rorem: 3 Poems of Baudelaire [trans. Howard: L’invitation au voyage, Le chat, Les litanies de Satan], SATB, 1986

H. Sauguet: Le chat I, II [Dans ma cervelle se promène …], 1938

D. de Séverac: Les hiboux, 1898

K. Stockhausen: 3 Lieder, A, orch [trans. Robinson: La rebelle], 1950

L. Vierne: La cloche fêlée, Le flambeau vivant, Les hiboux, Recueillement, Réversibilité, 1919

R. White: Flowers of Evil, musique concrète [trans. White: La cloche fêlée, Harmonie du soir, Le vin des amants, Les hiboux, Brunes et pluies, L’irrémédiable, Le chat, Spleen, Les litanies de Satan], 1969

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (L. Beckett)

MGG2 (C. Reynaud))

C. Koechlin: ‘Les tendances de la musique moderne française’, EMDC, II/i (1925), 56–145

L. Maurice-Amour: ‘Musiques inspirées par Les fleurs du mal’, Revue des sciences humaines (1958), 167–80

C. Pichois: Baudelaire (Paris, 1987; Eng. trans., 1989)

KATHERINE BERGERON

Baudewyn, John.

See Baldwin, John.

Baudiot, (Charles-)Nicolas

(b Nancy, 29 March 1773; d Paris, 26 Sept 1849). French cellist, teacher and composer. He and Lamare joined Baillot in Paris in 1792 to play Boccherini quintets. He was a pupil of the elder Janson and became a cello professor (second class) at the newly founded Paris Conservatoire in 1795. His appointment was suspended in 1802 but he resumed office from 1805 until 1827 when he retired to undertake a number of tours. During the Empire he continued to perform chamber music with Baillot and other faculty members, and joined the Opéra orchestra. He became principal cello in the imperial chapel and retained the post during the Restoration. In 1818 he became a member of the Société Academique des Enfants d’Apollon. Although he was much esteemed in France, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of April 1820 described his playing as cold. Fétis, too, inclined to that view, though he praised his pure tone and fine intonation. Baudiot played a Stradivari cello of 1725.

Baudiot’s compositions are almost entirely for the cello, including numerous duos, variations and fantasias on popular melodies. He wrote two concertinos and two concertos for the cello, three string quintets and collaborated on works with Pleyel, Herz and Pixis. Late in life he published a number of songs and romances. His treatises include a cello method in collaboration with Baillot, Levasseur and Catel (1805/R) and a treatise on transposition (1837–8) with transposition exercises for piano, violin and viola. His Méthode de violoncelle, published in two parts (1826 and 1828), continues the tradition of J.L. Duport, but also integrates aspects of B.H. Romberg’s technique, including use of the lower strings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (R. Cotte and F. Cossarte-Cotte)

E. van der Straeten: History of the Violoncello (London, 1915/R)

J.-M. Fauquet: Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la restauration à 1870 (Paris, 1986)

R. Benton: Pleyel as Music Publisher: a Documentary Sourcebook of Early 19th-Century Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1990) [incl. list of Baudiot’s pubd works]

V. Walden: One Hundred Years of Violoncello: a History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840 (Cambridge, 1998)

HUGH MACDONALD/VALERIE WALDEN

Baudo, Serge

(b Marseilles, 16 July 1927). French conductor. He was the son of an oboe teacher and studied at the Paris Conservatoire, winning premiers prix in conducting and other subjects, and making his début in 1950 at the Concerts Lamoureux. He conducted frequently in Paris, toured for the Jeunesses Musicales de France until 1958 and in 1959 was appointed conductor of the Nice-Côte d’Azur RO. From 1962 to 1965 he was resident conductor at the Paris Opéra, and he was invited by Karajan to conduct Pelléas et Mélisande at La Scala in 1962. He made his début at the Metropolitan in Les contes d’Hoffmann in 1971, returning in the following three seasons. Baudo has conducted many notable premières, including Menotti’s L’ultimo selvaggio (as Le dernier sauvage, 1963, Paris), Milhaud’s La mère coupable (1966, Geneva), Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1965, Chartres) and La Transfiguration (1969, Lisbon) and works by Daniel-Lesur, Dutilleux, Nigg and Ohana. He was appointed principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris in 1967 and music director of the Lyons Opera, 1969–71. After becoming music director (1971–87) of the Rhône-Alpes PO (from 1972 the Lyons National Orchestra), he founded and directed an annual Berlioz Festival to include the composer’s operas, but resigned in 1989 when a curtailment of funds put an end to the operatic performances. Baudo has specialized in French and Russian music, giving performances imbued with subtlety and passion, and has composed a number of works including film scores. Among his most impressive recordings are orchestral works by Debussy, Dutilleux, Ravel and Poulenc, Pelléas et Mélisande and the symphonies and choral works of Honegger. He has been created a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and awarded the Ordre National de Mérite and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.L Holmes: Conductors: a Record Collector's Guide (London, 1988), 30–31

NOËL GOODWIN

Baudouin des Auteus

(fl 1st half of the 13th century). Trouvère. The two works attributed to him are both of disputed authorship. Two settings of M’ame et mon cors doing a celi (R.1033) are extant, one in F-Pa 5198 and related manuscripts, the other in the Chansonnier du Roi and Noailles Chansonnier (F-Pn fr.844 and 12615). The latter unexpectedly couples an isometric poem of pedes-plus-cauda construction with a non-repetitive melody. The other song attributed to him is Avril ne mai, froidure ne let tans (R.283). The early suggestion that this poet was the Baudouin who appears in jeux-partis with Thibaut IV is now regarded with scepticism.

For general bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

THEODORE KARP

Baudrexel, Philipp Jakob

(b Füssen, Swabia, 2 May 1627; d Mainz, 23 March 1691). German composer and priest. He studied first with Johann Rudolph von Rechberg, Dean of Eichstätt and a canon of Augsburg Cathedral, who in the early 1640s sent him to Rome, where in 1644 he entered the Collegio Germanico. He studied composition with Carissimi, the director of music there. Baudrexel entered the priesthood in 1651, and three years later became parish priest of Kaufbeuren, Swabia, and a canon and director of the choir at Augsburg Cathedral. He retained these appointments until 1672, when he became court chaplain to Margrave Bernhard Gustav of Baden-Durlach at Fulda. After the margrave's death in 1679 Baudrexel went to Mainz as court chaplain to the Elector Karl Heinrich von Metternich. In the autumn of 1679 the elector died, but Baudrexel stayed in Mainz, first as court Kapellmeister and then from 1684 as director of music at the cathedral. Ill-health made the last two years of his life comparatively inactive.

It was for the choir at Augsburg Cathedral that Baudrexel published two collections of church music, the only publications of his about whose authenticity there can be no doubt. They are Primitiae Deo et Agno coelestis hierarchiae cantatae (Innsbruck, 1664) and Psalmi vespertini de Dominica … cum hymnis de communi (Cologne, 1668). They contain settings of the canticles, antiphons and motets for four, five and eight voices (Te lucis ante terminum from the second volume in A. Gottron, ed.: Dreihundert Jahre Mainzer Kirchenmusik, Mainz, 1943).

It has been suggested that Baudrexel may have been the translator of the German version of Carissimi's Ars cantandi that was published as an appendix to a musical tutor in 1692 by J. Koppmayer; unfortunately no copy of the original tutor seems to survive. (The attribution to Baudrexel of some organ pieces in F. Commer, ed.: Collection des compositions pour l'orgue des XVI, XVII, XVIII siècles, i, iii, Leipzig, 1866, seems unconvincing.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.C. Printz: Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (Dresden, 1690/R)

A. Steinhuber: Geschichte des Collegium Germanicum-Hungaricum in Rom (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1895, 2/1906)

J. Sieber: ‘Die Pfarrer von St. Martin in Kaufbeuren’, Die Glocken von St. Martin (Kaufbeuren, 1930)

E.F. Schmid: ‘Philipp Jakob Baudrexel, ein Füssener Komponist des 17. Jahrhundert’, Festschrift zum 1200-jährigen Jubiläum des heiligen Magnus (Füssen, 1950), esp. 89–99

T.D. Culley: Jesuits and Music, i: A Study of the Musicians connected with the German College in Rome during the 17th Century and of their Activities in Northern Europe (Rome, 1970), esp. 207–8

GWILYM BEECHEY

Baudrier, Yves (Marie)

(b Paris, 11 Feb 1906; d Paris, 9 Nov 1988). French composer. Essentially self-taught, he turned seriously to composition relatively late, having trained for law. Between 1929 and 1933 he took lessons with Georges Loth, organist of the Sacré-Coeur, and he received advice from Messiaen after their meeting in 1935. The next year he was a co-founder with Messiaen, Jolivet and Daniel-Lesur of the group La Jeune France, formed in opposition to the neo-classical tendencies prevailing in French music; he was the author of the group’s manifesto. At about this time he had lessons in counterpoint with Daniel-Lesur at the Schola Cantorum. His subsequent career was associated largely with music for the cinema: he taught at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (1945–60) and composed a number of film scores. In later years persistent ill-health curtailed his composing and other activities.

The association with Messiaen is rather misleading: Baudrier’s music has a great deal more in common with that of Honegger. One of his most important works is Le musicien dans la cité (1937), an orchestral piece composed for an imaginary film. Its ‘scenario’ concerns a composer who wanders the streets of Paris at night, encountering 12 situations illustrated in the continuous movements of the suite. The plan has something in common with that of the Pictures at an Exhibition, though Baudrier’s gift for the picturesque is not so sharp as Musorgsky’s, and his orchestration is rather plainer than Ravel’s. The most distinctive feature of the score is its slightly bitter grotesque quality. In 1964 it was revised to accompany a television film.

WORKS

Dramatic: Treize histoires liées par un fil de flûte (ballet radiophonique, L. Masson), 1967; film scores incl. Bataille du rail (dir. R. Clément), 1945, Les maudits (dir. Clément), 1947, Château de verre (dir. Clément), 1950, Le monde du silence (dir. J.Y. Cousteau and L. Malle), 1956; music for theatre and TV

Orch: Raz de Sein, sym. poem, 1936; Le musicien dans la cité, poème cinématographique, 1937, rev. 1947, rev. 1964; Eleonora, sym. suite, after E.A. Poe, ondes martenot, small orch, 1938; Le grand voilier, sym. poem, 1939; Sym., 1945; Prélude à quelque sortilège, 1953

Other works: Str Qt no.1, 1944; 2 poèmes de Tristan Corbière, Bar, pf, 1944; 2 poèmes de Jean Noir (J. Cassou), 1v, pf/str, 1946; Cantate de la Pentecôte, pt 3, 1952, other pts by M. Constant and M. Rosenthal; Adjuva Domine – credo, solo vv, boys’ chorus, chorus, orch, 1960; Str Qt no.2 ‘Autour de Mallarmé’, 1961

Principal publishers: Amphion, Choudens, Editions Françaises de Musique, Eschig

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Gut: Le groupe Jeune France (Paris, 1977)

PAUL GRIFFITHS

Baudron, Antoine Laurent

(b Amiens, 15 May 1742; d Paris, 1834). French composer and violinist. After attending the Jesuit college in Amiens, he studied violin in Paris with Pierre Gaviniés. He joined the orchestra of the Comédie-Française in 1763 and became its leader and conductor in 1766; in this position he was responsible for the composition (or arrangement) of stage music for both old and new plays. He collaborated with Beaumarchais from 1770 and probably wrote the famous air ‘Je suis Lindor’ (from Le barbier de Séville) which Mozart later used as the theme of his 12 Variations k354/299a. At the request of the actor Larive, he composed new music for Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1780), the Divertissement in Le roi de Cocagne (1781) and the airs in Le mariage de Figaro (1784), with the exception of the final vaudeville, which is Tissier’s tune for La fauvette. He composed little after the Revolution but was greatly revered at the Comédie-Française and retired in 1822 on a pension equal to his full salary.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

first performed at Paris, Comédie-Française, unless otherwise stated

Les amazones modernes (3, M.-A. Legrand and L. Fuzelier), 18 Aug 1770, lost

Le barbier de Séville, ou La précaution inutile (4, P.-A. Beaumarchais), 23 Feb 1775 (1775), many arrs. of excerpts pubd

Pygmalion (scène lyrique, J.-J. Rousseau), 11 Sept 1780, lost [with some of Rousseau’s original music]

Le roi de Cocagne (3, Legrand), 19 Feb 1781

Pyrame et Thisbé (scène lyrique, Larive), 2 June 1783, lost

La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais), 27 April 1784, excerpts pubd (1785), collab. Beaumarchais

Les trois cousins (G.-D.-T. Levrier-Champ-Rion), Paris, République, 18 June 1792 (1792)

Andante, orch introduction to Les deux amis, ou Le négociant de Lyon (5, Beaumarchais), 13 Jan 1770 (1770)

Other stage works, some lost

other works

Vocal: L’amant mécontent (P.-L. Moline), ariette, S, 2 vn, va, bn, bc (1763); Les plaintes inutiles, ariette (1764); Le portrait de Lise, ariette (c1770); Vaudeville d’Epiménide à Paris, gui acc. (n.d.); 6 ariettes, 1v, 2 vn, va, bc, ad lib obs, hns, op.5 (1773), lost; other works, many lost

Inst: Symphonie (1765), lost; 3 symphonies, op.1 (1766); 6 trios, 2 vn, b, ?op.2 (1767), lost; 6 quartetti, ?op.3 (1768), lost; 6 duetti, 2 vn, op.4 (1769), lost; 6 duetti, 2 vn (1770), lost; 6 duo d’amateurs (1776), lost; other works, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

Choron-FayolleD

FétisB

E.H. Mueller von Asow: ‘Der Komponist des “Je suis Lindor”: Themas’, Wiener Figaro, xii/Aug (1942), 11

F. Lesure: ‘A propos de Beaumarchais’, RdM, liii (1967), 175–8

P. Robinson: Beaumarchais et la chanson: musique et dramaturgie des comédies de Figaro (Oxford, 1999)

PHILIP E.J. ROBINSON

Bauer, Harold

(b Kingston-upon-Thames, 28 April 1873; d Miami, 12 March 1951). American pianist of English birth. Born into a musical family, he began to study the violin at the age of six with his father and subsequently with Adolf Politzer, giving his first concerts by the time he was ten. At 15 he appeared in recital playing both the violin and the piano; he was compared unfavourably with Josef Hofmann, who had recently made his London début, and was advised to concentrate on only one instrument. He continued to study the violin and moved to Paris with the intention of establishing himself as a soloist. Again, he found himself at a disadvantage in that both Kreisler and Thibaud had recently made impressive début appearances, and had to turn to mundane accompaniment work to support himself. Having been introduced by the English pianist Graham Moore to Paderewski in London, Bauer renewed his acquaintance and was asked to play the second piano part for him while he was preparing a number of concertos. Paderewski secured other work for him, arranged for him to play in Russia and advised him to study intensively in order to pursue a career as a pianist. Bauer felt that it was too late for him to study in a conventional sense, and accordingly developed a highly personal method based on a quasi-balletic approach in which technical problems were resolved in terms of gestural responses to musical considerations. This method served Bauer so well that he soon became acknowledged as a player of formidable powers. In 1899 he made highly successful appearances in Scandinavia and the Netherlands and played with the Vienna PO under Richter, and in 1900 he made his American début with the Boston SO in the Brahms D minor concerto. Over the following years he became especially associated with the works of Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, and in addition to his tours of the USA and Europe he also visited Australia and Asia, becoming highly respected for the seriousness of his approach and his lack of mannerism.

Bauer was also drawn to the music of the French school, giving the Paris première of Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite and introducing Ravel’s G major Concerto in New York (he had previously received the dedication of the same composer’s Ondine). In addition he played virtuoso music by Alkan and Saint-Saëns, and was a champion of the avant garde of the day, featuring the works of Schoenberg, Skryabin, Laparra and others on his programmes. Equally, he maintained an affection for 17th- and early 18th-century keyboard composers. He was also active as a chamber musician, performing in trios with Thibaud and Casals and forming a piano duo partnership with Gabrilowitsch.

In 1917 Bauer took American citizenship, and in 1919 he founded the Beethoven Society of New York. He later became president of the Friends of Music of the Library of Congress and was associated with various educational establishments, most notably the Manhattan School of Music, where he was head of the piano department, continuing on its advisory board until his death. In the intellectuality of his approach and his lack of egocentricity, Bauer represented a more modern outlook than that of many of his contemporaries; yet his self-effacement did not preclude a degree of personal vision, as reflected in his transcriptions and editions of works by Franck, Schumann and Musorgsky. He was also highly inventive in his use of colouristic pedal effects, which he developed through his study of French music. He wrote Harold Bauer, his Book (New York, 1948).

CHARLES HOPKINS

Bauer, Joseph Anton

(b Elbogen [now Loket], Bohemia, 17 June 1725; d ?Würzburg, 30 Aug 1808). Bohemian composer, trumpeter and keyboard player. He received his earliest trumpet tuition from his father, a tailor and town musician, and at the age of 23 he became court trumpeter to the Bishop of Augsburg. After further study, and after an impressive performance at the archbishop's court in Würzburg, he was appointed court trumpeter with a handsome salary; he also gained a reputation there as a good keyboard teacher. Bauer was only a dilettante composer. His published works, which appeared between 1770 and 1776, are quartets for keyboard, flute, violin and cello. They all exhibit the same four-movement scheme: fast (sonata allegro)–slow–minuet and trio–fast. The keyboard is treated largely as a solo instrument; the flute is of secondary importance and the strings are almost exclusively handled as accompanimental components of the ensemble.

Bauer's daughter Catharina (b Würzburg, 1785), a noted keyboard player and composer in Würzburg, studied with her father and later with F.X. Sterkel; at the age of 13, she published a set of 12 keyboard variations op.1. This was followed by 12 Variationen über ‘Wenn Lieschen nur wollt’ (op.2, 1799) and 12 Variationen über ‘A Schisserl und a Reindl’ (op.3, c1799); Fétis also mentioned two collections of German dances and waltzes by a C. Bauer published in Munich, but these are likely to be by Charlotte Bauer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

MCL

SchillingE

O. Kaul: Geschichte der Würzburger Hofmusik im 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1924)

J. Saam: Zur Geschichte des Klavierquartetts bis in die Romantik (Strasbourg, 1933, 2/1977)

ELLWOOD DERR

Bauer, Marion Eugénie

(b Walla Walla, WA, 15 Aug 1882; d South Hadley, MA, 9 Aug 1955). American composer, teacher and writer on music. She studied in Portland, Oregon, and in Paris and Berlin, her teachers including Boulanger, Gédalge, Huss and Pugno. During twelve Summers between 1919 and 1944 she visited the MacDowell Colony where she produced many of her compositions and met other important women composers including Amy Beach, Mabel Daniels, Miriam Gideon and Ruth Crawford. Bauer taught music history and composition at New York University (1926–51), was affiliated with the Juilliard School of Music from 1940 until her death and lectured widely. Open to various styles, she was a champion of American music and modern composers, as evidenced by her participation in many organizations, e.g. founding member of the American Music Guild (1921), the Society of American Women Composers, the ACA and the AMC. She was secretary for the Society for the Publications of American Music, and a board member for the League of Composers and the ACA. Frequently she was the only woman in a position of leadership in these associations.

Like many women of her generation, she focussed her initial compositional activity on songs and piano solos. Her works of the 1930s and 40s were larger and more significant. Despite brief experiments with 12-note writing in the 1940s and 1950s, her music rarely ventured beyond extended tonality, emphasizing colouristic harmony and diatonic dissonance. Her compositions remained melodic in focus and grounded in 3rd-based harmony and periodic rhythm even when functional tonality was blurred. On occasion energetic rhythm propelled her works. In the 1920s her music had been seen as that of a left-wing modernist, but by the 1940s it was deemed conservative yet well-crafted. During her lifetime her music received many performances, including the 1947 première of Sun Splendor by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Stokowski and a 1951 Town Hall concert devoted to her music. Also recognized were her influence as a music critic and her intellectual approach to new music, demonstrated in writings such as Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1933, 2/1947). Addressing general readers as well as music specialists, her writings were widely published in journals; she also wrote a number of other books, and was editor of the Musical Leader.

WORKS

(selective list)

instrumental

Orch: A Lament on an African Theme, op.20a, str, 1927; Sun Splendor, ?1936; Sym. Suite, op.34, str, 1940; Pf Conc. ‘American Youth’, op.36, 1943, arr. 2 pf (1946); Sym. no.1, op.45, 1947–50; Prelude and Fugue, op.43, fl, str, 1948, rev. 1949

Chbr: Up the Ocklawaha, op.6, vn, pf (1913); Sonata no.1, op.14, vn, pf, 1921, rev. 1922; Str Qt, op.20, 1925; Fantasia quasi una sonata, op.18, vn, pf, 1925; Suite (Duo), op.25, ob, cl, 1932; Sonata, op.22, va/cl, pf, 1932; Concertino, op.32b, ob, cl, str qt/str orch, 1939, rev. 1943; Trio Sonata no.1, op.40, fl, vc, pf (1944); 5 Pieces (Patterns), op.41, str qt, 1946–9, no.2 arr. double ww qnt, db, 1948; Aquarelle, op.39/2a, double ww qnt, 2 db, 1948; Trio Sonata no.2, op.47, fl, vc, pf, 1951; Ww Qnt, op.48, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn (1956)

Kbd (pf solo unless otherwise stated): From the New Hampshire Woods, op.12, 1921; 3 Preludettes, 1921; 6 Preludes, op.15, 1922; Turbulence, op.17/2, 1924; A Fancy, 1927; Sun Splendor, ?1929, arr. 2 pf, ?1930; 4 Pf Pieces, op.21, 1930; Dance Sonata, op.24, 1932; Moods (3 Moods for Dance), op.46, 1950; Anagrams, op.48, 1950; Meditation and Toccata, org, 1951

Other inst: Prometheus Bound (incid music, Aeschylus), 2 fl, 2 pf, 1930; Pan and Syrinx [choreog. sketch for film], op.31, fl, ob, cl, pf, vn, va, vc (1937)

vocal

Choral: Wenn ich rufe an dich, Herr, mein Gott (Ps xxviii), op.3, S, women’s chorus, org/pf, 1903; Fair Daffodils (R. Herrick), women’s chorus, kbd (1914); Orientale (E. Arnold), S, orch, 1914, orchd 1932, rev. 1934; The Lay of the Four Winds (C.Y. Rice), op.8, male chorus, pf (1915); 3 Noëls (L.I. Guiney, trad.), op.22 nos.1–3, women’s chorus, pf (1930); Here at High Morning (M. Lewis), op.27, male chorus, 1931; The Thinker, op.35, mixed chorus, 1938; China (B. Todrin), op.38, mixed chorus, orch/pf, 1943; At the New Year (K. Patchen), op.42, mixed chorus, pf, 1947; Death Spreads his Gentle Wings (E.P. Crain), mixed chorus, 1949, rev. 1951; A Foreigner Comes to Earth on Boston Common (H. Gregory), op.49, S, T, mixed chorus, pf, 1953

Other vocal: Coyote Song (J.S. Reed), Bar, pf (1912); Send Me a Dream (Intuition) (E.F. Bauer), 1v, pf, 1912; The Red Man’s Requiem (E.F. Bauer), 1v, pf (1912); Phillis (C.R. Defresny), medium v, pf (1914); By the Indus (Rice), 1v, pf, 1917; My Faun (O. Wilde), 1v, pf, 1919; Night in the Woods (E.R. Sill), medium v, pf (1921); The Epitaph of a Butterfly (T. Walsh), 1v, pf (1921); A Parable (The Blade of Grass) (S. Crane), 1v, pf (1922); 4 Poems (J.G. Fletcher), op.16, high v, pf (1924); Faun Song, A, chbr orch, 1934; 4 Songs (Suite), S, str qt, 1935, rev. 1936; Songs in the Night (M.M.H. Ayers), 1v, pf (1943); The Harp (E.C. Bailey), 1v, pf (1947); Swan (Bailey), 1v, pf (1947)

MSS in US-NYamc, US-NYgo, US-NYp, US-Wc, American Composers Alliance, Mount Holyoke College

Principal publishers: Composers Facsmilie Edition/ACA, G. Schirmer, A.P. Schmidt

WRITINGS

with E. Peyser: How Music Grew: from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day (New York, 1925, rev. 1939)

with E. Peyser: Music through the Ages: a Narrative for Student and Layman (New York, 1932, enlarged 3/1967 by E. Rogers as Music through the Ages: an Introduction to Music History)

Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1933/R; 2/1947)

Musical Questions and Quizzes: a Digest of Information about Music (New York, 1941)

with E. Peyser: How Opera Grew: from Ancient Greece to the Present Day (New York, 1956)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

GroveA (B.H. Renton)

GroveW (J.M. Edwards)

M. Goss: Modern Music Makers (New York, 1952)

Obituaries: New York Times (11 August 1955), Musical Leader, lxxxvii/9 (September 1955), 14, 18

A.F. Block and C. Neuls-Bates: Women in American Music: a Bibliography of Music and Literature (Westport, CT, 1979)

A.F. Block: ‘Arthur P. Schmidt, Music Publisher and Champion of American Women Composers’, The Musical Woman: an International Perspective, ii, ed. J.L. Zaimont and others (New York, 1987)

P.A. Horrocks: The Solo Vocal Repertoire of Marion Bauer (diss., U. of Nebraska, 1994)

E.M. Hisama: Gender, Politics and Modernist Music: Analyses of Five Compositions by Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) and Marion Bauer (1887–1955) (diss., City U. of New York, 1996)

J.M. Edwards: ‘Bauer, Marion Eugénie’, Jewish Women in America: an Historical Encyclopedia, ed. P.E. Hyman and D.D. Moore (New York, 1997), 128–30

J. MICHELE EDWARDS

Bauer, Ross

(b Ithaca, NY, 19 Dec 1951). American composer and conductor. He studied at the New England Conservatory (BM 1975) with John Heiss and Ernst Oster and at Brandeis University (PhD 1984) with Martin Boykan, Arthur Berger and Seymour Shifrin. During the summer of 1982 he was a fellow at Tanglewood, where he worked with Berio. He has taught at Brandeis University (1981–5), Stanford University (1986–8), where he directed the ensemble Alea II, and the University of California, Davis (1988–), where he has founded and directed the Empyrean Ensemble. He also served as a founding member and chair of the Griffin Music Ensemble, Boston (1985–92). His honours include the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Walter Hinrichsen Award (1984), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988), a prize in the ISCM National Composers Competition (1989) and commissions from the Fromm and Koussevitzky foundations (1991, 1994). He was a MacDowell Colony fellow in 1996.

Bauer’s music derives its structure, pitch succession and pitch centricity from relationships between hexachords and the collections of intervals and chords they comprise. An inventive and subtle manipulation of timbre is also characteristic of his work.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Pf Conc., 1990; Halcyon Birds, chbr orch, 1993; Romanza, vn, orch, 1996; Icons, bn, orch, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: Hang Time, cl, vn, pf, 1984; Chimera, fl, cl, hn, vn, va, vc, perc, hp, pf, 1987; Chin Music, va, pf, 1989; Birthday Bagatelles, pf, 1990–93; Anaphora, fl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1991; Tributaries, vc, perf, pf, 1992; Aplomb, vn, pf, 1993; Octet, cl, bn, hn, str qt, db, 1994; Stone Soup, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1995; Motion, vn, vc, pf, 1998; Pulse, cl, va, vc, 1999

Vocal: 4 Honig Songs (E. Honig), S, pf, 1989; Eskimo Songs (trans. J. Houston and L. Millman), Mez, fl, vc, pf, 1992–6; Ritual Frags. (Amerindian), S, fl, cl, vn, vc, perc, pf, 1995

Principal publisher: Peters

RICHARD SWIFT

Bäuerl, Paul.

See Peuerl, Paul.

Bauernflöte

(Ger.).

See under Organ stop.

Bauernleier

(Ger.).

See Hurdy-gurdy.

Baugé, André

(b Toulouse, 4 Jan 1892; d Paris, 22 May 1966). French baritone. His mother was the soprano Anna Tariol-Baugé and his father, Alphonse, was a teacher of singing. His studies with them led to his début with the Opéra-Comique in 1917 as Frédéric in Lakmé. Other roles with the company included Don Giovanni and Pelléas, with the Rossini Figaro as his tour de force. At the Opéra in 1925 he sang Germont in La traviata and the title role in Rabaud’s Mârouf. He appeared at Monte Carlo as Escamillo in 1924. His career took a new turn when at the Marigny Theatre in Paris he sang the title role in the French première of Messager’s Monsieur Beaucaire in 1925, and from then onwards he became increasingly associated with operetta, enjoying a special success in Lehár’s Paganini. He also appeared in some early French musical films and after World War II taught at the Ecole Normale. His recordings show a light, high baritone, firmly placed if somewhat dry-toned, better suited to Messager than to Rossini.

J.B. STEANE

Bauld, Alison (Margaret)

(b Sydney, 7 May 1944). Australian composer. After studying at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney (1961–2) and working as a stage and television actress, she took a music degree at the University of Sydney in 1967. She moved to England in 1969, studying with Lutyens and Hans Keller and taking a PhD at the University of York in 1974. She won first prize at the Paris Rostrum in 1974 and was music director at the Laban Centre, London (1975–8), then composer-in-residence at the NSW State Conservatorium, Sydney, from 1978; since then she has taught at Hollins College, London. Many of her works have been heard in Europe, including at the Aldeburgh, York and Edinburgh Festivals.

Bauld’s output focusses on works with a vocal or dramatic element, such as her ballad opera Nell (1988) which, like its antecedents, seeks to find a voice for the harshness of life in early colonial Australia. ‘I consciously seek literary, aural and visual stimuli,’ she has written. ‘When the text is complete I know where I am going.’ More recently, she has produced a series of keyboard tutors Play your Way (3 vols., 1992) and a novel, Mozart’s Sisters (1997).

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal and theatrical: On the Afternoon of the Pigsty (Bauld), female spkr, a melodica, pf, perc, 1971; Humpty Dumpty (Bauld), T, fl, gui, 1972; In a Dead Brown Land, S, Bar, SATB, 2 actors, vn, vc, fl, pipe, a melodica, 1972; Dear Emily (Bauld), S, hp/kbd, 1973; Mad Moll (Bauld), S, 1973; One Pearl (Bauld), S/Ct, str qt, 1973; One Pearl II (Bauld), S, a fl, str, 1973–6; Van Diemen’s Land (Bauld), SATB, 1976; I Loved Miss Watson, S, pf, tape, 1977; Banquo’s Buried (W. Shakespeare), S, pf, 1982; Richard III (after Shakespeare), v, str qt, 1985; Once upon a Time (Bauld), 5vv, 3 opt. children’s vv, chbr orch, 1986; Nell (ballad op, Bauld), 1988; Cry, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, S, pf, 1989; Exult, children’s chorus, org, opt. brass qt, 1990; The Witches’ Song, S, 1990; Farewell Already (after Shakespeare), S, ens, 1993; In memoriam Uncle Ken, Bar, pf (1997)

Chbr and solo inst: Concert, (pf, tape)/2 pf, 1974; The Busker’s Story, a sax, bn, tpt, vn, db, 1978; Monody, fl, 1985, rev. as Copy Cats, vn, vc, pf, 1985; My Own Island, cl, pf, 1989

Principal publisher: Novello

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Griffiths: ‘Alison Bauld’, MT, cxvii (1976), 903–4

N. Amadio: ‘Alison Bauld: a Modern Woman Composer’, Hi-Fi and Music (1979), Feb, 72–7

A. Bauld: ‘Sounding a Personal Note’, MT, cxxxix (1988), 339–40

S. Fuller and N. LeFanu: Reclaiming the Muse, CMR, xi (1994)

WARREN BEBBINGTON

Bauldeweyn [Balbun, Balduin, Bauldewijn, Baulduin, Baulduvin, Valdovin], Noel [Noe, Natalis]

(b c1480; fl 1509–13). Netherlandish composer. His works combine aspects of the obsolete Netherlandish style of the late 15th century and the newer style of Josquin des Prez and his immediate successors. Bauldeweyn succeeded Jean Richafort as magister cantorum of St Rombouts, Mechelen, in 1509 and was in turn succeeded in 1513 by Jacques Champion. The position at St Rombouts was a prestigious one, and the church itself was frequently used by the Burgundian court chapel. No further record of his life or career is known; the documents formerly interpreted as showing his activity at Antwerp Cathedral in 1512–17 and his death in 1529/30 have been shown to refer to two entirely different men, the choirmaster Noel Grant (or Brant) and the canon Nicolaus Bauldini (see Forney). The wide dissemination of his music in Bohemian, Spanish, German, Italian and Netherlandish sources dating from about 1510 to about 1575 is indicative of his high reputation. Seven masses are transmitted with ascriptions to Bauldeweyn, and the vihuelist Valderrábano composed a fantasia on ‘un Pleni de una Missa de Bauldoin’ otherwise unknown. There are 13 motets ascribed to him, though one of these, Ave caro Christi cara, has recently been attributed to Josquin. Contrafacta of two sections of Missa ‘En douleur en tristesse’ circulated as motets also. Of the two secular works ascribed to Bauldeweyn, only the chanson En douleur en tristesse (also transmitted with German words) is thought to be by him. Whereas most of Bauldeweyn’s motets and one song are preserved in printed sources, none of his Masses reached publication with the possible exception of the Missa ‘Da pacem’ which was printed in 1539 as a work of Josquin

Bauldeweyn was a very skilful and individual contrapuntist and canonic writing in the manner of Josquin and his predecessors formed an important textual role in his music. Characteristic of his generation, more than half his compositions are for five or six voices, and much of his music had a strong harmonic sense and rhythmic drive. None of Bauldeweyn’s works can be dated precisely, but differences in style make it possible to trace a tentative chronology; many of these differences also reflect Bauldeweyn’s response to the character of the various modes. Early works, such as the six-voice Missa sine nomine or the Stabat virgo, both in the phrygian mode, show the occasionally harsh dissonance, low ranges and loose relation of text to music characteristic of late 15th and early 16th century northern style. The tendancy towards full scoring and the use of canon in two or three voices throughout most of Missa sine nomine, bring to mind the work of Ockeghem and others and, like the early Missa ‘Myn liefkens bruyn oghen’, it is characterised both by independence in the contrapuntal lines as well as by imitative textures. Characteristic also of Bauldeweyn’s early masses, including the four-voice Missa sine nomine, thematic repetition and ostinato are frequently employed as devices for structural expansion and coherence; where these occur at the end of sections they perform crucial elements in drivers to the cadence featuring complex sequences of cambiata and other motifs rather similar to that of mature compositions of Obrecht and Isaac, and works by Josquin. Comparable features characterize the later Missa ‘Da pacem’ and the five-voice Missa Inviolata which is the only one of his Masses structured on the old-fashioned cantus firmus principle. By way of contrast the Missa ‘En douleur, en tristesse’ which, like his chanson, is almost entirely canonic in conception, is more florid in style, consisting of long interweaving contrapuntal lines. The latest of the masses is probably the Missa ‘Quam pulchra es’, a work in which dissonance treatment is thoroughly refined and scoring notably varied; the musical texture is frequently divided in antiphonal fashion, with full six-part writing reserved for important cadences. The recently-discovered motet Sancta Maria virgo virginum, in the same mode (Ionian on F) and for the same number of voices, has many features in common with the mass. The psalm motets Exaltabo te and Benedicam Dominum (possibly by Stoltzer) are also apparently very late works, and these show an interest in correct text declamation and in appropriate musical expression of the mood, reflecting the influence of Josquin and his followers. Bauldeweyn’s music as a whole exhibits a strongly personal style and his best works compare favourably with those of his contemporaries.

WORKS

editionin preparation by B. Nelson

for full source information see Sparks, Nelson

Missa ‘Da pacem Domine’, 4vv (also attrib. Josquin, Mouton); ed. A. Smijers, Werken van Josquin des Près: Missen, iv, fasc.34 (Amsterdam, 1953)

Missa ‘En douleur en tristesse’ [‘Ach Gott wem soll ich’s klagen’], 5vv, ed. in MMBel, ix (1963) (on his own chanson)

Missa ‘Inviolata’, 5vv, D-Ju 2

Missa ‘Myn liefkens bruyn oghen’, 4vv, Ky ed. in Mw, xxii (1962; Eng. trans., 1964) (on popular melody)

Missa ‘Quam pulchra es’, 6vv (on his own motet), D-Mbs 6

Missa sine nomine (‘a voce mutata’), 4vv, I-MOd Mus.x

Missa sine nomine, 6vv, I-Rvat

A fantasia on a Pleni sunt caeli from an otherwise unknown mass was intabulated for lute by Valderrábano, ed. in MME, xxiii (1965)

Ad Dominum cum tribularer, ?5vv (Sup only extant), I-Bc A27

Benedicam Dominum, 5vv (also attrib. Stoltzer), ed. in EDM, 1st ser., lxvi (1969) Bauldeweyn

Exaltabo te Deus meus, 4vv, 1519³

Gaude Dei genetrix, 4vv, CZ-HK II.A.7 (not listed in Sparks)

Gloriosus Dei apostolus Bartholomeus, 4vv, 1519³

Quam pulchra es, 4vv, 1519³

Qui diligitis Dominum [contrafactum of Bs of Missa ‘En douleur en tristesse’], 3vv, 1542⁸

Salve regina, 6vv, D-Mbs 34 ( Sup of Ockeghem’s chanson Je n’ay dueil in Sup)

Sancta Maria, Virgo virginum, 6vv, E-Bc M.1967 (not listed in Sparks)

Si vos manseritis [contrafactum of Et ascendit from Missa ‘En douleur en tristesse’], 2vv, 1545⁷

Art. 401 Stabat Virgo iuxta crucem, 6vv 2, D-MÜu (ant Tota pulchra es in T II; quinta vox missing)

Sum tuus in vita, 5vv, 1540⁷

Tu Domine universorum, 6vv, 1545³

En douleur en tristesse [ = Ach Gott wem soll ich’s klagen], 5vv (also attrib. Grefinger), ed. H.M. Brown, Theatrical Chansons of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1963), ed. in DTÖ, lxxii, Jg.xxxvii/2 (1930/R)

doubtful and misattributed works

Ach hülff mich layd, 4vv, attrib. Bauldeweyn, Buchner, Josquin, Pirson

Ave caro Christi cara [= Ave Christe immolate], 4vv, Josquin; ed. A. Smijers, Werken van Josquin des Près: Motetten, v, fasc.46 (Amsterdam, 1957)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. van Doorslaer: ‘Noël Baudoin, maître de chapelle-compositeur, 1480 (?)–1529’, Gulden passer, viii (1930), 167–80

E.H. Sparks: The Music of Noel Bauldeweyn (New York, 1972) [incl. investigation of conflicting attributions, list of works and sources]

H.C. Slim: ‘Music in and out of Egypt: a Little-Studied Iconographical Tradition’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 289–326

K. Forney: ‘Music, Ritual and Patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, EMH, vii (1987), 1–57, esp. 44–5

B. Nelson: ‘Pie memorie’, MT, cxxxvi (1995), 338–45 [incl. discussion of new sources]

EDGAR H. SPARKS/BERNADETTE NELSON

Baulduin, Noel.

See Bauldeweyn, Noel.

Bauman, Thomas (Allen)

(b Marinette, WI, 10 March 1948). American musicologist. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley under Daniel Heartz and others, gaining the PhD in 1977 with a dissertation on music and drama. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1977–84), Stanford University (1984–9) and the University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently coordinator of the musicology programme in the Northwestern University School of Music. He has also been an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include German opera in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, cultural studies and Mahler.

WRITINGS

Music and Drama in Germany: a Traveling Company and its Repertory, 1767–1781 (diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1977)

‘The Music Reviews in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek’, AcM, xlix (1977), 69–85

‘Benda, the Germans, and Simple Recitative’, JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 119–31

North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge, 1985)

‘The Society of La Fenice and its First Impresarios’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 332–54

‘Alessandro Pepoli's Renewal of the Tragedia per Musica’, I vicini di Mozart: il teatro musicale tra sette e ottocento: Venice 1987, 211–20

W.A. Mozart: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Cambridge, 1987)

‘Courts and Municipalities in North Germany’, Man and Music: the Classical Era, ed. N. Zaslaw (London, 1989), 240–67

ed., with contributing essays, D. Heartz: Mozart's Operas (Berkeley, CA, 1990)

‘Musicians in the Marketplace: the Venetian Guild of Instrumentalists in the Later 18th Century’, EMc, xix (1991), 344–55

‘Requiem, but no Piece’, 19CM, xv (1991), 151–61

‘The Three Trials of Don Giovanni’, The Pleasures and Perils of Genius: Mostly Mozart, ed. P. Ostwald and L.S. Zegans (Madison, CT, 1993), 133–44

ed., with M. McClymonds: Opera and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995) [includes ‘Moralizing at the Tomb: Poussins' Arcadian Shepherds in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany’, 23–42]

PAULA MORGAN

Baumann, Hermann (Rudolf Konrad)

(b Hamburg, 1 Aug 1934). German horn player. After studying with Fritz Huth in Hamburg, he was appointed first horn in the Dortmund PO (1957–61) and in the Stuttgart RSO (1961–7). He won the ARD Competition in Munich in 1964, and made his début in 1967 in Strauss's Second Horn Concerto with the Vienna SO under Karl Richter. A turning-point in his career was the decision to give up orchestral playing in 1966 to accept a position as a teacher in the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, where he became a professor in 1969. He remained there until 1996, with an interlude (1980–83) at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart. Baumann has toured widely as a soloist and made many recordings, most notably the concertos of Mozart, which he was the first to record on the natural horn (1972, under Harnoncourt), and later recorded on modern horn (under Zukerman). He also recorded concertos by Weber, Strauss and Glier. He has given the first performances of Ligeti's Trio for violin, horn and piano, as well as Hans Georg Pflüger's Horn Concerto, dedicated to him.

EDWARD H. TARR

Baumann, Max Georg

(b Kronach, upper Franconia, 20 Nov 1917; d 18 July 1999). German composer. He studied composition and conducting under Noetel, Blacher and Distler at the Berlin Musikhochschule (1939–43), where he returned as lecturer in 1946, remaining there except for a period as Kapellmeister in Stralsund (1947–9). In 1953 he was appointed professor and from 1963 to 1979 he was in charge of the school music department; he also conducted the Collegium Musicum. He received the arts prize of the city of Berlin in 1953. As a composer he continued the line of Reger and Hindemith, though he introduced new techniques and his cantata Libertas cruciata (1963), on letters from Resistance fighters, was the first German composition for stereo radio. Sacred music and organ works stand at the centre of his output; the Passion combines dramatic and liturgical forms, with structural austerity and colourful sonorities. A strong dramatic accentuation is present in the ballet Pelleas und Melisande and the oratorio Der Venus süss und herbe Früchte, which was composed in homage to Lucas Cranach the elder, photographs of whose paintings are projected during the performance.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Conc. grosso no.1, op.22, str, 1950; Variations, op.29; Suite moderne, op.30, no.1, chbr orch; Pf Conc., op.36, 1952; Petite suite, op.38, 1953; Perspektiven 1, op.55, 1957; II, 1967; Sinfonia piccola, op.65, 1960; Conc., org, str, timp, 1964; Crucifixus, Meditation, 1973

Choral: 4 masses, motets (Ger. and Lat.); Passion, op.63, solo vv, chorus, speaking chorus, orch, 1959; Deutsche Vesper, op.64, 1v, spkr, chorus, orch, 1964; Ankunft des Herrn, op.66, 1960; Geburt des Herrn, op.66, no.1, 1966; Libertas cruciata, dramatic cant., S, spkr, chorus, speaking chorus, orch, 1963; Der Venus süss und herbe Früchte (orat, H. Sachs and others), solo vv, spkr, chorus, orch, 1972; Auferstehung, orat, S, Bar, B, spkr, chorus, speaking chorus, orch, 1980

Stage: Pelleas und Melisande, ballet, op.44, 1954; Das Glockenspiel, op.52, school op, 1956; Die Elixire des Teufels (op, 3, after E.T.A. Hoffmann)

Org: Orgelsuite, op.67 no.1; Psalmi, op.67 no.2, 1962; Sonatine, 1963; 3 Pieces, 1965; Fasciculus pro organo, 1967

Music for amateurs

Principal publishers: Heinrichshofen, Merseburger

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Tinz: ‘Max Baumann’, Musica sacra [Regensburg], lxxxiii (1963), 327

K. Kremer: ‘Max Baumann: Passion op.63’, Musica sacra [Regensburg], lxxxvii (1967), 203

E. Weber: ‘Max Baumann zum 65. Geburtstag’, Musica sacra [Regensburg], cii (1982), 375 [with list of sacred works]

E. Weber: ‘Prof. Max Baumann zum 70. Geburtstag’, Musica sacra [Regensburg], cvii (1987), 426

WOLFRAM SCHWINGER/KLAUS KIRCHBERG

Baumbach, Friedrich August

(b Gotha, bap. 12 Sept 1753; d Leipzig, 30 Nov 1813). German composer and writer on music. Between 1777 and 1789 he was intermittently active in the Hamburg theatre, first as a singer and later as a violinist and music director. He also visited St Petersburg (c1780), was music director of the newly established theatre in Riga in 1782–3 and appeared in Moscow in 1785. In 1790 he moved to Leipzig, where he wrote the articles on music for J.G. Grohmann's Kurzgefasstes Handwörterbuch über die schönen Künste (1794). At the beginning of his career he composed mainly instrumental chamber works, but in Leipzig he published many songs and small instrumental pieces for amateurs. His song Die Forelle has been cited as a source of inspiration for Schubert's setting. According to Schilling, he was also a respected piano and mandolin player.

WORKS

all published in Leipzig unless otherwise stated

Vocal: Choix d'airs et de chansons (1792); Lyrische Gedichte vermischten Inhalts, kbd acc. (1792); [3] Duetti notturni, i, pf acc. (1798); Gesänge am Clavier oder Pianoforte, i–ii (Gotha, c1798); 3 canzonette, pf acc. (Gotha, n.d.); at least 10 pubd songs, duets, ballads; Komm und hülle mich in deine Schatten, 4vv, D-Bsb; aria, S, inst acc., A-Wn; 4 thanksgiving cants., D-GOl [no 1st name indicated]

Kbd: 6 sonate, acc. vn obbl, vc (1780); 6 sonates, op.1 (Berlin and Amsterdam, 1781); Air des 3 notes par J.J. Rousseau … et 24 variations, acc. vn obbl, vc (Berlin, 1792); Russisches Volkslied mit [50] Veränderungen (Gotha, 1793); 3 rondeaux (1798); 3 sonates, acc. vn obbl, vc, op.3 (Bonn, 1805); 6 sonatas, acc. vn, vc, Bsb; others mentioned in GerberNL, MGG1 suppl., lost

Other inst: 6 sonates, 2 vn (Dessau, ?1782); Variations sur un allegretto, vn, b (Hamburg, 1799); 3 sonates, vn, b, op.22 (Bonn, 1804); works for gui, mentioned in MGG1 suppl., lost

Several pieces in contemporary anthologies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL

SchillingE

F. Goebels: ‘“Die Forelle del Sig. Baumbach”: eine Anregungsquelle für Schubert?’, Musica, xxxii (1978), 152–3

B. Rottermund: ‘XVIII-wieczne rosyjskie wariacje fortepianowe kompozytorów profesjonalnych’ [18th-century Russian fortepiano variations by professional composers], Zeszyty naukowe: Akademia muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki w Gdańsku, xxviii (1989), 155–79 [with Eng. summary]

GUNTER HEMPEL

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb

(b Berlin, 17 June 1714; d Frankfurt an der Oder, 26 May 1762). German philosopher. The founder of aesthetics as a subdiscipline of philosophy, he was the son of a military chaplain in Berlin who had been assistant to the Pietist theologian and pedagogue A.H. Francke. He studied first at the Grauen Kloster school in Berlin, but in 1722 was sent to Francke’s well-known school for orphans in Halle. In 1730 he entered Halle University as a student of theology and philosophy, but during this period he frequently went to Jena to attend lectures by the celebrated rationalist philosopher J.C. Wolff, who later, together with Leibniz, became the major influences on Baumgarten’s own philosophical theories. In 1735 he received a master’s degree with his first major work, the thesis Meditationes philosophicae. In 1737 he was appointed professor of philosophy and theology at the university of Frankfurt an der Oder. His several Latin works on metaphysics, ethics and practical philosophy widely influenced the teaching of these disciplines in German universities. Kant thought him one of the greatest philosophers of his time.

Baumgarten’s most important contributions were the result of a systematic study of what he was the first to call aesthetics, a subject he introduced into the university curriculum as a branch of philosophy. In his usage, aesthetics treated only in part the problems of beauty. Rather, he created aesthetics as an aspect of empirical psychology concerned with the inferior faculty, that is the faculty of sensible knowledge. For him aesthetics together with logic (superior faculty) constituted a science he labelled ‘gnoseology’, or a theory of knowledge. He was most concerned with poetic aesthetics; and despite his purpose to give all the arts a place in a total scientific scheme of philosophy, he made little application of his new ideas to music and the other fine arts. However, his student and biographer Georg F. Meier developed these relationships in his Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (1757); this work influenced the growth of music aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century, for example in the philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn and J.G. Sulzer.

WRITINGS

Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle, 1735/R; Eng. trans., 1954, as Reflections on Poetry)

Metaphysica (Halle, 1739)

Ethica philosophica (Halle, 1740, 3/1763/R)

Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750–58/R)

Initia philosophiae practicae primae acroamatice (Halle, 1760)

Acroasis logica, aucta et in systema redacta a Joanne Gottlieb Toellnero (Halle, 1761)

Jus naturae (Halle, 1763)

ed. J.C. Förster: Sciagraphia encyclopaediae philosophicae (Halle, 1769)

ed. J.C. Förster: Philosophia generalis (Halle, 1770/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Riemann: Die Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens (Halle, 1928)

W. Serauky: Die musikalische Nachahmungsästhetik im Zeitraum von 1700 bis 1850 (Münster, 1929/R)

H.G. Peters: Die Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens und ihre Beziehungen zum Ethischen (Berlin, 1934)

H.J. Kaiser: ‘Musikvermittlung als Vermittlung sinnlicher Erkenntnis’, Musikpädagogische Forschung, ii (1981), 210–32

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Baumgarten, Karl [Carl] Friedrich

(b Lübeck, c1740; d London, 1824). German composer, violinist and organist, active in England. He had organ lessons with J.P. Kunzen at Lübeck before he settled in London, at about the age of 18, as organist of the Lutheran Chapel in the Savoy. In addition to serving as an organist, he worked as a teacher, composer and violinist. The imputation made by Haydn, who heard him in London in 1792, that his violin playing lacked energy would seem to be contradicted by the fact that he was a well-known orchestral leader, for example at the Haymarket Theatre in 1763, at Dublin the following year, and for a long period at Covent Garden (1780–94); he was also a violinist in the Duke of Cumberland’s band. Burney wrote that Baumgarten had then (1789) ‘been so long in England that his merit [was] unknown to his countrymen on the Continent’; and Baumgarten had apparently forgotten his continental connections, for when he met Haydn he could hardly converse in German.

His music for the stage was only moderately successful. Burney wrote that Baumgarten deserved notice ‘as an instrumental composer and profound harmonist’. Judging by what was published, this was a generous verdict. His chamber music is written in the style current during the late 18th century in England, in imitation of J.C. Bach, but it is undistinguished and technically undemanding. His organ fugues are archaically ‘learned’ by comparison with his other work, and rather dull. As an extemporizer at the organ, however, Baumgarten was highly admired; he was respected as a knowledgeable musician and a cultured person of wide interests including astronomy and mathematics. He also had an interest in music theory and wrote an unpublished treatise (GB-Lbl Add.36681).

WORKS

all printed works published in London unless otherwise stated

stage works

all performed in London

William and Nanny, or The Cottagers (comic op), Covent Garden, 1779

Bluebeard, or The Flight of Harlequin (pantomime), Covent Garden, 1791; Grand March, arr. pf (Dublin, c1795)

Ov. to works by W. Shield: Harlequin junior, 1784; Robin Hood, 1784

Songs in pasticcios: Netley Abbey (W. Pearce), 1794, favorite songs (1794); Hercules and Omphale, 1794; Mago and Dago, 1794

other vocal

Martin Luther’s Hymn sung by Mr Incledon, 1v, bc (before 1800)

The Sailor’s Ballad sung by Mr Legar in Perseus and Andromeda, 1v, bc (before 1800)

Charity, an Air … sung by Mr Incledon (M. Prior), 1v, bc (c1800)

instrumental

6 Solos, vn, bc (c1778)

Concertante, ob, vn, va, vc, perf. 23 April 1779

Qt, ob d’amore, vn, va, vc, perf. 27 April 1781

6 Quartettos, op.2 (1781); 3 for vn, ob/fl, va, vc; 3 for 2 vn, ob/fl, vc

6 Quartettos, op.3 (c1783); 3 for vn, 2 va, vc; 3 for 2 vn, va, vc

A Celebrated Fugue or Voluntary, hpd/org, no.1(–5) (c1784)

A Periodical Quartetto, fl/ob, vn, va, vc, no.1(–6) (c1785); also for vn, 2 va, vc

3 Capricios, pf/hpd (c1790)

A Grand Concerto, ob/fl/cl, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 fl, 2 bn, 2 hn, vc (c1790)

3 Fugues … each of which has an introductory Prelude, org/hpd/pf (c1798)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

W.T. Parke: Musical Memoirs (London, 1830/R)

OWAIN EDWARDS

Baumgarten, Samuel Christian [Christopher Frederick]

(b c1729; d London, will proved 3 Aug 1798). English bassoonist and teacher, probably of German birth. He was in England at least as early as 1750, when he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Musicians. In 1754 and 1758 he took part in the Foundling Hospital performances of Messiah. He played at the Three Choirs festivals in Gloucester in 1763, Worcester in 1764 and Hereford in 1765 and was among the four principal bassoonists at the Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1784 and in subsequent years; he was also bassoonist at the King’s Theatre between 1760 and 1785. He appeared in concert at the Pantheon as late as 1790–91. Baumgarten’s name occurs for the last time in the membership book of the Royal Society of Musicians in 1792, after which he retired to Hampstead. The fourth of his 12 children, Charlotte, was the mother of Cipriani Potter; there is no evidence that he was related to Karl Friedrich Baumgarten.

PHILIP H. PETER

Baumgartner [Baumgärtner], Johann Baptist [Jean Baptiste]

(b Augsburg, 1723; d Eichstätt, 18 May 1782). German cellist and composer. The son of a flautist at the Augsburg court, he worked in the service of the prince-bishop and at the seminary of St Moritz in Augsburg (1742 and 1749). After the prince’s death in 1768 he undertook a series of concert tours in England, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. For some time he lived in Amsterdam, and about 1774 published a cello tutor in The Hague entitled Instructions de musique, théorique et pratique, à l’usage du violoncelle. In 1775 he was appointed to the royal orchestra in Stockholm but never took up the post. He was nevertheless elected to the Swedish Academy of Music the following year. He then undertook further concert tours, including one to Hamburg. In 1777 he played with the flautist Ludwig Gering first in Augsburg and then in Salzburg, where he visited Leopold Mozart. He then travelled to Vienna to play before the Imperial Court. In December 1778 he joined the Hofkapelle of the Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt as a chamber musician with the high salary of 400 gilders.

WORKS

Fugue, vc (Vienna, 1797); Lieder für die Guitarre eingerichtet (Mainz, n.d.)

Arrs. of Fr. op airs, 2 vc, S-Skma; Capriccio, vc, Skma; Fantasies, vc, A-Wgm, D-DO; 2 sonatas, vc, b, S-Skma; 35 cadenzas, vc, A-HE

Lost: 4 concs., vc, orch, [cited by Gerber; 1 listed in Breitkopf catalogue for 1773]; Duo, 2 vc; arrs. of arias, vc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

R. Schaal: ‘Zur Musikpflege im Kollegiatstift St. Moritz zu Augsburg’, Mf, vii (1954), 14–15

K.W. Littger: ‘Die Eichstätter Hofkapelle bis 1802’, Johann Anton Fils: ein Eichstätter Komponist der Mannheimer Klassik (1733–1760) (Tutzing, 1983), 70–73

H. Unverricht: ‘Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte der Eichstätter Hofkapelle im 18. Jahrhundert’, Sammelblatt des Historischen Vereins Eichstätt, lxxx (1988), 64–6

HERBERT SEIFERT

Baumgartner, Paul

(b Altstätten, canton of St Gallen, 21 July 1903; d Locarno, 19 Oct 1976). Swiss pianist. He studied with Paul Müller in St Gallen, then with Walter Braunfels in Munich and (from 1925) Cologne, and finally with Eduard Erdmann. From 1927 to 1935 he taught in Cologne, and in 1937 was appointed head of the piano department at the Musikakademie in Basle, where in 1960 he started a series of master classes. From 1953 to 1962 he also taught at the Hanover Akademie für Musik und Theater. Baumgartner gave many concert tours, and played chamber music with, among others, Casals, Pierre Fournier and Végh. Although his repertory was based on the 19th century, he remained a champion of contemporary music; his performances of the complete Beethoven sonatas were also much admired. In 1962 he received the St Gallen Prize for Culture. His recordings included works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and Bach sonatas with Casals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Lindlar); SML [incl. discography]

J. Kaiser: Grosse Pianisten in unserer Zeit (Munich, 1965, 5/1982; Eng. trans., 1971, with enlarged discography), 99

JÜRG STENZL

Baumgartner, Rudolf

(b Zürich, 14 Sept 1917). Swiss violinist, conductor and teacher. He studied music at Zürich University and under Stefi Geyer and Paul Müller at the conservatory there, and continued his violin studies in Paris with Flesch and in Vienna with Schneiderhan. He then embarked on a concert career that took him to most European countries as a soloist, and in chamber music as a member of the Stefi Geyer Quartet and later of the Zürich String Trio and the Zürich Chamber Trio. He was also leader of various chamber orchestras. In 1956, with Schneiderhan, he founded the Lucerne Festival Strings, an ensemble of soloists which he continued to direct. With it he toured widely and made numerous successful recordings, many in association with leading soloists, including Fournier, Haskil, Holliger and David Oistrakh. He made arrangements for the ensemble of Bach's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering, among other works, and directed premières of works by Conrad Beck, Françaix, Krenek, Rafael Kubelík, Ligeti, Martin, Martinů, Ohana, Penderecki, Xenakis and others. Baumgartner taught the violin from 1954 at the Lucerne Conservatory, of which he was appointed director in 1960. From 1969 to 1980 he was also artistic director of the Lucerne Festival.

RUDOLF LÜCK

Baumgartner, Wilhelm

(b Rorschach, 15 Nov 1820; dZürich, 17 March 1867). Swiss pianist, teacher and composer. His father died when he was young, but his exceptional intelligence assured him of a place at his school and the continuing of his education. In 1833 he was adopted by Joseph Waldmann, a clergyman from Messkirch, Baden, who educated him further. At the age of 14 he was composing and giving music lessons. He attended the Gymnasium in Zürich from 1836 to 1838, and then studied at Zürich University. Resolving to become a professional musician, he studied the piano and theory with Alexander Müller, the director of a number of choirs; Baumgartner was occasionally asked to conduct in his master’s absence. Having concluded his apprenticeship after three years, he moved in 1842 to St Gallen, where he taught the piano, gave recitals and composed songs. During this period he was in close contact with Friedrich Kücken, with whom he frequently discussed his compositions; he also became interested in German literature and theology.

On 7 October 1844 Baumgartner gave a farewell recital in St Gallen and moved to Berlin. Here he sought out Mendelssohn, who advised him to study the piano and composition with Taubert. At the same time he gained entry into élite artistic circles, and he often accompanied Jenny Lind in song recitals; his activity as a composer diminished somewhat as he became more receptive to new influences. He followed the news of the political struggles in Switzerland with keen interest, and with a sense of patriotism awakening, he decided to return home to devote himself to the idea of freedom in his capacity as a musician. On 26 February 1845 he left Berlin and made his way back to Switzerland, stopping en route in Leipzig, Dresden and Munich; he arrived in Zürich on 26 April and remained there the rest of his life.

In Zürich, Baumgartner occupied himself chiefly with piano teaching. He gave no recitals (he hated virtuosity for its own sake) and played only in small artistic circles. He was also active as a choirmaster, often taking charge of the so-called Müller Choral Society, directing the city choral society (1851–62) and founding and directing his own male chorus (1862–6), which was later named the Zürich Male Chorus. He also directed the choral society of the canton of Zürich, and from 1849 until 1866 he led the student choral society, for which he was named music director of the university. He contracted tuberculosis in 1866 and died a year later.

Baumgartner’s compositions are almost exclusively for the voice and the piano. More than half of his 170 vocal works are solo songs with piano accompaniment; about a quarter are for four-part male chorus, the best-known of which are O mein Heimatland op.11 no.1 and Heisst ein Haus zum Schweizerdegen, both of which are to texts by Gottfried Keller. His best-known solo song is Mignon, a setting of Goethe’s Kennst du das Land. The subjects of his songs are freedom and the fatherland, love, nature and companionship. Expressive of personal moods and experiences, they are wholly Romantic, though not overly refined or sentimental. His compositions for piano solo consist mostly of dance pieces, character-pieces and songs without words.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Widmer: Wilhelm Baumgartner: ein Lebensbild (Zürich, 1868)

K. Nef: ‘Die Freunde G. Keller und W. Baumgartner’, SMz, xlv (1905), 1

L. Gross: Wilhelm Baumgartner: sein Leben und sein Schaffen (diss., U. of Munich, 1930)

W. Keller, ed.: Richard Wagner: Briefe an Wilhelm Baumsgartner 1850–1861 (Zürich, 1976)

LUISE MARRETTA–SCHÄR

Bäumker, Wilhelm

(b Elberfeld, 25 Oct 1842; d Rurich, nr Erkelenz, 3 March 1905). German music historian. After studying philosophy and theology at the University of Bonn, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. His chief work is Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied, still the basic study of its topic. The second volume of the work (1883) was originally the completion of a work of the same title begun by K.S. Meister, of which only the first volume had been published (1862); in 1886 Bäumker published an edition of Meister's volume so revised and enlarged with fresh material as to make it quite a new work. In addition to discussing both tunes and texts of the hymns, the study includes a full bibliography of the various collections in which they are found. A third, supplementary volume (1891) brings the subject through the 18th century, and a final volume, edited from Bäumker's papers after his death by Joseph Gotzer, extends the coverage as far as 1909. Bäumker's other works include small monographs on Palestrina, Lassus and the Dance of Death, as well as Zur Geschichte der Tonkunst in Deutschland, an account of the German medieval theorists, their treatises, and the beginnings of German vernacular church song.

WRITINGS

Palestrina: ein Beitrag zur kirchenmusikalischen Reform des 16. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg, 1877)

Orlandus de Lassus, der letzte grosse Meister der niederländischen Tonschule (Freiburg, 1878)

‘Der Todtentanz: Studie’, Frankfurter zeitgemässe Broschüren, ii (1881), 175–205

Zur Geschichte der Tonkunst in Deutschland von den ersten Anfängen bis zur Reformation: eine Reihe verschiedener Abhandlungen (Freiburg, 1881)

Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied, i–iv (Freiburg, 1883–1911/R)

‘Niederländische geistliche Lieder nebst ihren Singweisen aus Handschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts’, VMw, iv (1888), 287–350

Ein deutsches geistliches Liederbuch mit Melodien aus dem XV. Jahrhundert nach einer Handschrift des Stiftes Hohenfurt (Leipzig, 1895)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Haberl)

R. von Liliencron: Review of Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied, VMw, ix (1893), 333–53

J. Gotzen: Foreword to Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied, iv (Freiburg, 1911/R)

J.R. MILNE/BRUCE CARR

Baur.

French family of musicians.

(1) Jean Baur

(2) Barthélemy Baur [le fils]

(3) Charles-Alexis Baur

ALICE LAWSON ABER-COUNT

Baur

(1) Jean Baur

(b Bouzonville, Moselle, 1719; d ?Paris, after 1773). Composer and harpist. He settled in Paris in 1745, four years before Goepfert introduced the pedal harp there. He used the pedal harp in his chamber works, and his sonatas with clavecin or fortepiano accompaniment mark him as the earliest known composer to differentiate between the harp and keyboard instruments. His daughter Marie-Marguerite Baur (b Paris, 1748; d Paris, after 1790) was also a harpist; she made her début at the Concert Spirituel in 1762.

WORKS

all published in Paris between 1763 and c1773

6 sonates, vc, b, op.1; 6 sonates, avec plusieurs pièces en sons harmoniques, vc, op.2; Sonates, fl/vn, bc, 2 sets (1761); Qt, fl, vn, b, hp (1769); Premier recueil d’ariettes de différents auteurs, acc. hp, op.4; Deuxième recueil d’airs connus, avec quelques préludes et caprices propres à exercer les mains, hp, op.5 (c1770); 4 sonates, 2 for hp, clavecin/pf, 2 for hp, vn ad lib, op.6 (?1773); 4 sonates: 2 for hp, clavecin/pf, 2 for hp, vn ad lib, op.7; 4 sonates: 2 for hp, clavecin/pf, 2 for harp, vn ad lib, op.8; Premier recueil d’airs, ariettes, menuets et gavottes, avec plusieurs caprices, hp; 6 sonates: 4 for 2 vn, 2 for vn, b

Baur

(2) Barthélemy Baur [le fils]

(b Paris, 1751; d Tours, 1823). Harpist and composer, son of (1) Jean Baur. He settled in Tours, where he and his wife taught the harp, the piano and singing. His two known works, both published in Paris, are a Recueil d’ouvertures op.1 (c1771) arranged for harp, and Trois sonates for harp op.2, both with ad lib accompaniment for violin and cello.

Baur

(3) Charles-Alexis Baur

(b Tours, 1789; d London, after 1820). Harpist, pianist, teacher and composer, son of (2) Barthélemy Baur. From 1805 he studied with his parents and then with F.-J. Naderman in Paris. In 1820 he settled in London as a teacher. His compositions, all for harp, include six sonatas opp.1–2, duets with piano and flute, a collection of ariettes and an arrangement of Grétry’s La caravane du Caire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

HoneggerD

MCL, i

SainsburyD

J.D. Champlin and W.F. Apthorp, eds.: Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, i (New York, 1888), 134

F. Vernillat: ‘La littérature de la harpe en France au XVIIIe siècle’, RMFC, ix (1969), 162–86

H. Charnassé and F. Vernillat: Les instruments à cordes pincées (Paris, 1970), 43

Baur, Jürg

(b Düsseldorf, 11 Nov 1918). German composer and teacher. He rose to prominence at the age of 18 when his first string quartet was given its première by a professional quartet at the Düsseldorf Hindenburg secondary school. Between 1937 and 1948 he attended the Cologne Musikhochschule as a pupil of Jarnach (composition), Karl Hermann Pillney (piano) and Michael Schneider (organ and sacred music), though his studies were interrupted by the war; he later studied musicology at Cologne University (1948–51). In 1946 he was appointed lecturer in music theory at the Düsseldorf Conservatory and from 1952 to 1960 he was choirmaster and organist at St Paulus, also in Düsseldorf. During 1960 Baur held a scholarship from the Federal German government to study at the Villa Massimo in Rome for six months; he returned to Rome for a second stay in 1968 and was guest of honour there in 1980. He was director of the Düsseldorf Conservatory (1965–71) and was appointed professor in 1969. In 1971 he succeeded B.A. Zimmermann as teacher of composition at the Cologne Musikhochschule, remaining there until 1990. Baur’s many distinctions include the Recklinghausen Young Generation Prize (1956), the Robert Schumann Prize of the city of Düsseldorf (1957), the Federal Cross of Merit (first class, 1970), and honorary membership of the German Music Council (1988), the North Rhine-Westphalia Service Award and the City of Duisburg Music Prize (1994).

Born in the generation between Blacher and Henze, Baur achieved widespread recognition as a composer fairly late in his career. Under the influence of Jarnach, he had already encountered the music of Bartók, Stravinsky and Hindemith in the late 1930s, but after the war he heeded Jarnach’s advice in avoiding the more extreme manifestations of the musical avant garde. The works of the early 1950s maintain Jarnach’s principles of economy of means and formal clarity, with Bartók as the most obvious stylistic model. Baur only gradually turned his attention to dodecaphonic techniques, studying the music of Webern with particular intensity. However, although serial structures influenced his musical thinking, especially in the String Quartet no.3 (1952), the Quintetto sereno (1958), also notable for its use of aleatory effects, the Sonata for two pianos (1957) and the Ballata romana (1960), Baur’s sound world seems far removed from the Expressionism of the Second Viennese School. During the early 1960s Baur strove to achieve an accessible yet modern style that remained independent of the avant garde. His most successful works at this time include the exhilarating Concerto romano for oboe and orchestra (1960–61) and Romeo und Julia (1962–3), in which the tragic elements of Shakespeare’s play are distilled into a powerful and cohesive entity. In accordance with his desire to maintain links with past traditions, Baur then developed a strong predilection for the quotation of earlier music in his work, though without the ironic, dissociative tone of many of the collage compositions of this period. The range of musical inspiration is surprisingly wide, encompassing such composers as Schumann, Dvořák, Bartók, Johann Strauss, Gesualdo, Mozart and Schubert. Primarily a composer of orchestral and instrumental music, Baur has produced some radical works for less mainstream instruments such as the recorder and the accordion. Although he has rarely written for the theatre, his vocal music demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to poetic texts, the extended choral work Perchè (1967–8, after Ungaretti) numbering among his most powerful compositions.

WORKS

orchestral

Conc., str, 1941–8; Overture, 1946–50; Partita über ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’, tpt, str, 1946–91; Carmen Variations, 1947; Va Conc., 1951–2; Musik, str, 1952; Sinfonia montana, 1953; Concertante Music, pf, orch, 1958; Concertino, fl, ob, cl, str, timp, 1959; Conc. romano, ob, orch, 1960–61; Romeo und Julia, 1962–3; Piccolo mondo, 1963; Lo specchio, 2 cycles, 1965–6; Sym. Prologue, 1966; Pentagramm, wind qnt, orch, 1966; Abbreviaturen, 13 str, 1969; Conc. ticino, cl, orch, 1970, arr. a sax, orch, 1995; Giorno per giorno, in memoriam B.A. Zimmermann, 1971; Musik mit Robert Schumann, 1972; 4 Portraits, vc, orch, 1972; Sinfonia breve, 1974; Triton-Sinfonietta, chbr orch, 1974; Conc. da camera ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit’, rec, orch, 1975; Conc. no.1 ‘Ich sage ade’, vn, orch, 1976; Conc. no.2, vn, orch, 1978; Sentimento del tempo, wind trio, orch, 1980; Sinfonische Metamorphosen über Gesualdo, 1981; Sinfonie einer Stadt (Patetica), 1983; Fresken, 1984; Konzertante Fantasie, org, str, 1984–5; Sym. no.2 ‘Aus dem Tagebuch des Alten’, 1987; Sinfonietta Sentieri musicali (Auf Mozarts Spuren), 1990; Frammenti-Erinnerungen an Schubert, 1995/6; Sinfonia sine nomine, 1998

instrumental

3 str qts: 1938, 1942–6, 1952

Other chbr: Choralsuite über ‘Erhalt uns Herr bei deinen Wort’, brass, 1950; Reminiszenen, Ostinato und Trio, wind qnt, 1950–80; Conc. trautonium, str qt, 1955–6, rev. accdn, str qt, 1987; Quintetto sereno, wind qnt, 1958; Metamorphosen, pf, vn, vc, 1959; Kontraste, str trio, 1964; Movimenti, trio, 1969–70; Cinque impressioni, str qt, 1970; Tre studi per quattro, rec qt, 1972; Nonett-Skizzen, 1973; Skizzen, wind qnt, 1974; Kontrapunkte 77 über das Thema des Musikalischen Opfers von J.S. Bach, fl, eng hn, bn, 1978; Pour rien: ostinato senza fine, wind sextet, 1980; Echoi, 2 ob, eng hn, 1980; Festliche Musik, brass, 1982; Ricordi, 3 rec, 1983; Ritratti, perc ens, cel, bass, 1984; Salutio und Jubilus, brass, 1985–6; Cinque fogli, sax qt, 1986; Quintetto pittoresco – passeggiata con M. Ravel, wind qnt, 1986; Passacaglia, 4 tpt, 4 trbn, 1989; Str Qt ‘et respice finem’, 1992; Petite Suite, 4 fl, 1992; Improvisation und Ostinato, bn qt, 1996

1–2 insts: Erinnerungen, vc, pf, 1941/2, rev. 1985; Sonata in A, vn, pf, 1948; Music, vc, pf, 1950; Fantasy, ob, pf, 1954, rev. eng hn, org, 1994; Suite, hpd, 1956; Ballata romana, cl, pf, 1960, rev. a sax, pf, 1987; Incontri, fl/rec, pf, 1960; Divertimento, hpd, perc, 1961/2, rev. accdn, perc, 1995; Sonata, vn, 1961–2; Dialoge, vc, pf, 1962; Mutazioni, a rec/fl, 1962; 3 Fantasies, gui, 1963; 6 Bagatelles, cl/b cl, 1964; Pezzi uccelli, rec, 1964; Sonata, va, 1969, rev. vc, 1995; Moments musicaux, vn, pf, 1976; 3 Landschaftsbilder, accdn, 1985; 3 Toccatas, accdn, 1985–6; Arabesken, Girlanden, Figuren, double bn, 1990; Marginalien über Mozart, gui, 1991; Reflexionen, gui, org, 1991, arr. gui, accdn, 1992

keyboard

Org: Fantasy B–A–C–H, 1935; 4 Chorale Preludes, 1948; Orgelmusik in E (Toccata, Trio and Passacaglia), 1950; 4 Chorale Preludes, 1954–9; 5 Chorale Preludes, 1959–61; Partita ‘Aus tiefer Not’, 1965; Choral-Triptychon (‘Christ ist erstanden’), 1970; 3 Ricercare über das Thema des Musikalischen Opfers von J.S. Bach, 1977; 2 free org movts and 2 chorale preludes, 1977; Meditazione sopra Gesualdo, 1977; Chorale Prelude ‘Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich’, 1980; Fantasia nuova, 1984; 3 Toccatas, 1985/6; Kaleidoskop, 1989; 2 Chorale Preludes on ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’, 1990; Fragment mit Frescobaldi, 1992

Pf: Ostpreussensuite, 1939; 3 Pieces in the Olden Style, 1941–3; Aphorisms, 1942–6; Sonata, 2 pf, 1952–7; Capriccio, 1953; Variations, 1956; Heptameron, 7 pieces, 1964–5

Hpd: Suite, 1956

vocal

Choral (mixed chorus unless otherwise stated): 2 Humoresques (C. Morgenstern, W. Busch), 1948; Triptychon (R.M. Rilke, C.F. Meyer), chorus, orch, 1948–9; 2 Kinderlieder, 1949; 2 Choralsätze, 1950; Wir glauben all an einen Gott, 1950; O süsser Herre Jesu Christ, 1950; 2 Volksliedsätze, 1952; Pfingstmotette ‘Wer mich liebt’, Bar, chorus, 1955; Abschied, 1955; 2 Männerchöre (Meyer), male chorus, 1957; Du selber bist das Rad (A. Silesius), 1958; Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich, chorus, insts, 1965, rev. 1980; Perchè (G. Ungaretti), S, T, chorus, orch, 1967–8; Perchè (Ungaretti), 6 Fragments, S, T, chorus, 1969; Die Blume des Scharon, 3 motets, SATB, 1979; Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich, SATB, 1980

Other vocal: 12 einsame Lieder (various texts), S, pf, 1942–3; Im Waldesschatten, 5 songs (J.F. von Eichendorff), Bar, pf, 1952, rev. Bar, str qt, 1980; Vom tiefinnern Sang, 4 Songs (F.G. Lorca), S, pf, 1957, rev. 1v, cl, str qt, 1989; Herz, stirb oder singe (J.R. Jiménez), 4 songs, S/T, fl, pf, 1960, rev. S, fl, str orch, 1965, rev. S, fl, str qt, 1984; Mit wechselndem Schlüssel, song cycle (P. Celan), Bar, pf, 1967; Senza speranza (M.A. Bustos, Ungaretti), 1v, pf, 1982

incidental music

Anna, Königin für 1000 Tage, 1949; Das Haus der Angst (B. von Heiseler), chorus, orch, 1950; Die Räuber (F. Schiller), 2 songs, 1v, hpd, 1951; Morgen kommt ein neuer Tag (P. Calderón de la Barca), 1952; Audhumla (Segen der Herde), film score, 1952

Principal publishers: Breitkopf & Härtel, Leuckart, Littolf, Peters, Schott, Tonger

WRITINGS

‘Wir unterhalten uns über moderne Musik’, Der helle Morgen, ed. H. Mentzel (Essen, 1950), 230–39

‘Tonsatzlehren auf neuen Wegen’, Melos, xx (1953), 43–5

‘Anton Weberns Bagatellen für Streichquartett’, Neue Wege der musikalischen Analyse, ed. R. Stephan (1967), 62–8

‘Das Finale in der Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts: eigenwillige Gedanken zu Wagners “Götterdämmerung”’, Götterdämmerung (Düsseldorf, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, 1991), 1–7 [programme notes]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Krellmann: ‘Kalkulierte Vision’, Musica, xxii (1968), 432–5

H. Krellmann: Ich war nie Avantgardist: Gespräche mit dem Komponisten Jürg Baur (Wiesbaden, 1968)

J. Baur: ‘Baur, Jürg’, Rheinische Musiker, vi, ed. D. Kämper (Cologne, 1969)

J. Alf: ‘Zwischen den Generationen: Jürg Baur’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des Rheinländes (Cologne, 1978), 55–71

W. Falcke: ‘Zum Chorschaffen von Jürg Baur’, Lied und Chor, lxxix/8 (1987), 170 only

K. Lang: ‘Gespräch mit Jürg Baur’, NZfM, cxliv/10 (1983), 18–20

A. Rössler: ‘Über die Orgelwerke von Jürg Baur’, Kirchenmusiker, xl/1 (1991), 11–18

L.-W. Hesse, A. Klaes and A. Richter, eds.: Jürg Baur: Aspekte seines Schaffens (Wiesbaden, 1993)

ERIK LEVI

Bausewein, Kaspar

(b Aub, nr Ochsenfurt, 15 Nov 1838; d Munich, 18 Nov 1903). German bass. He studied in Munich, making his début there in 1854 at the Hofoper, where he was engaged for 46 years. A fine actor, equally gifted for comic and serious opera, he had a wide repertory ranging from Mozart’s Figaro and Leporello and Rossini’s Don Basilio to Caspar (Der Freischütz) and the three Wagner roles that he created: Pogner in Die Meistersinger (1868), Fafner in Das Rheingold (1869) and Hunding in Die Walküre (1870). He retired in 1900 after a farewell performance as Lord Cockburn in Fra Diavolo.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Baussnern [Bausznern], Waldemar von

(b Berlin, 29 Nov 1866; d Potsdam, 20 Aug 1931). German composer. He studied at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik under Friedrich Kiel (1882–5) and completed his studies in Bargiel’s masterclass at the Preussische Akademie der Künste, Berlin (1885–8). He briefly served as the conductor of the Mannheim Musikverein in 1891, before becoming conductor of the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen Lehrergesangverein (1891–4). In 1894 he moved to Dresden, where he held the posts of Liedermeister of the Dresdner Liedertafel (until 1901) and director of the Dresdner Bachverein (1896–7). In 1902 he founded the Dresdner Chorverein. He taught composition, instrumentation and score-reading at the Cologne conservatory (1903–8), was the director of the Ducal Orchestral School in Weimar (1908–16), becoming professor there in 1910, and was later director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt (1916–23). He was appointed Second Permanent Secretary at the Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1923 and combined the post with teaching composition at the Berlin Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik.

True to his classicist teachers, Kiel and Bargiel, Baussnern was committed to the German Classical-Romantic expressive ideal. His works unite contrapuntal formal principles and chromatic polyphony with an exploration of sound characteristic of the New German School. They reveal a particular affinity for the philosophical and suggest a preoccupation with questions surrounding the meaning of existence.

WORKS

(selective list)

operas

Dichter und Welt (J. Petri), 1894, Weimar, 4 June 1897; Dürer in Venedig (3, A. Bartels, after A. Stern), 1897, Weimar, 3 March 1901; Herbort und Hilde (2, E. König), 1901, Mannheim, Hof-und National, 15 Feb 1902; Der Bundschuh (3, O. Erler), 1903, Frankfurt, Stadt, 27 May 1904; Guniöd (P. Cornelius), 1906, Cologne, 15 Dec 1906 [completion of op by Cornelius]; Satyros (2, Baussnern, after J.W. von Goethe), 1922, Basel, 1923

instrumental

Orch: Champagner, ov., 1899; Sym. no.1 ‘Jugend’, 1899; Sym. no.2 ‘Dem Andenken von Johannes Brahms’, 1899; Sym. no.3 ‘Leben’ (Goethe), SATB, orch, 1908; Grussan Wien, waltzes, 1911; Sym. no.4, chbr orch, 1914; Sym. no.6 ‘Psalm der Liebe’ (E.B. Browning, R.M. Rilke), S, orch, 1921; Sym. no.5 ‘Es ist ein Schnitter, heisst der Tod’ (folksong), SATB, orch, 1922; Hymnische Stunden, str, 1925; Sym. no. 7 ‘Die Ungarische’, 1926; Dem Lande meiner Kindheit, 1929; Passacaglia und Fuge, 1930; Sym. no. 8, 1930

Chbr: Str Qt no.1, 1893; Qnt, cl, hn, vn, vc, pf, 1898; Serenade, cl, vn, pf, 1898; Elegie, v/vc, pf, 1911; Dem Lande meiner Kindheit, fl, cl, 3 vn, vc, db, pf, 1914; Sonata, vn, pf, 1917; Str Qt no.2, 1918; Pf Trio ‘Weimarer’, 1921; Str Qt no.3, 1923; 4 Instrumentalsuiten, 1924: [1] vn, pf, [2] fl, pf, [3] cl, pf, [4] vc, pf, 1924; 6 Choralinventionen, 2 vn, vc, org, 1925; 3 Fantasiestücke, vn, pf, 1925; O bellissima Italia, vn, vc, pf, 1925; Terpsichore, vc, pf, 1925; 3 ernste Stücke, 1927: [1] vn, org, [2] va, org, [3] vc, org

Kbd: Slawische Noveletten, pf, 1895; Sonata eroica, pf, 1906; Thema mit 8 Variationen, 2 pf, 1915; 3 kleine Sonaten, pf, 1916; 2 Präludien und Fugen, pf, 1916; Nächtliche Visionen, pf, 1926; Duo, 2 pf, 1927; Orgelwerke 1–3, Phantasie, Passacaglia, Sonate, org, 1927; 26 Choralvorspiele, org, 1929

vocal

Choral: 3 Lieder für gemischten Chor (R. Hamerling, H. Heine, F. Rückert), 4-part chorus, 1888; Die Geburt Jesu (Bible: Luke), Christmotette, S, A, chbr chorus, chbr orch, org, 1911; 2 Chöre (E. von Wildenbruch, Goethe), 4-part chorus, 1911; Das Hohe Lied vom Leben und Sterben (orat, Goethe, F. Hebbel, J. von Eichendorff, F. Schiller, C.F. Meyer, A. Ritter, E. Mörike, Petri, W. von Polenz, F. Nietzsche, M.R. von Stern, G. Keller), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1913; Das Göttliche (Goethe), SATB, orch, 1927; Steigt hinan zu höherm Kreise (Goethe, Arndt, F. von Münchhausen, F. Hölderlin, Meyer, R.G. Binding), 1927; Hafis (cant., Goethe), S, T, B, SATB, orch, org, 1929; 35 men's choruses; folksong and chorale arrs.

Solo vocal: 100 Lieder und Gesange, 1v, pf, 1887; Das klagende Lied (M. Greif), 6 ballads, 1v, pf, 1897; 2 Gesänge (N. Lenau, A. Ritter), S/T, orch, 1900; 3 Gedichte aus Paul Heyses italienischem Liederbuch, v, pf, 1905; Die himmlische Orgel (R. von Volkmann), A/Bar, chbr orch, 1924; 12 Gesänge aus dem Buch der Freundin (Binding), v, pf, 1925; 3 Qnt, female vv; 3 duets, A, Bar; other songs, for 1v, pf; folksong arrs.

Principal publishers: G. Braun, Breitkopf & Härtel, Elwertsche, Gehann, Karl Hochstein, Friedrich Hofmeister, Willy Müller, Ries & Erler, Simrock, Friedrich Vieweg

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Keller: ‘Waldemar von Baussnern’, AMz, l (1923), 635–7

F. Ohrmann: ‘Waldemar von Baussnern’, Anregungen [Berlin], special issue no.2 (1926), 1–17

G. Wehle: ‘Die Chorkompositionen Waldemar von Baussnerns, Die Tonkunst, xxx/31 (1926)

Siebenbürgisches Baussnern-Fest (Hermannstadt, 1926)

P. Bovermann: ‘Waldemar von Baussnern als Orgelkomponist’, Zeitschrift für Kirchenmusiker (1929), 97–100

L. Hess: ‘Waldemar von Baussnern als Künstler und Mensch’, Jb der Staatlichen Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik, v (1931–2), 7–12

G. Wehle: Waldemar von Baussnerns Orchesterwerke (Karlsruhe, 1931)

T. Ernst: ‘Waldemar von Baussnern und sein Einfluss auf das Musizieren der Jugendbewegung’, Pro musica (1965), 39–43

G. Wehle: ‘Zum 100. Geburtstag Waldemar von Bausznerns’, Musica, xx (1966), 296

V. Grützner: Waldemar von Baussnern (1866–1931) (Potsdam, 1999)

VERA GRÜTZNER

Bautista, Julián

(b Madrid, 21 April 1901; d Buenos Aires, 8 July 1961). Argentine composer of Spanish origin. He started his piano studies very young with Pilar Fernández de la Mora and at the age of 14 began his composition training with the composer Conrado del Campo. Later he taught harmony at the faculty of the Madrid Conservatory. In 1930, together with prominent young composers such as the Halffter brothers, as a member of the Generation of ’27, he co-founded in Madrid the Grupo de los ocho (Group of Eight), whose works were characterized by a colourful style with some neo-classical nuances. Bautista’s Spanish works (some of which were destroyed when his house was bombarded during the Spanish Civil War) are concise, with diatonic harmony and frequent modulations. The ballet Juerga (1921) was first performed in Paris in 1929, and the Obertura para una ópera grotesca (1932) won first prize in an international contest sponsored by Union Radio de Madrid. He won two more prizes in 1923 and 1926 with his String Quartets nos.1 and 2 respectively. At the end of the Spanish Civil War he settled in Buenos Aires, his first few years there being largely occupied in the composition of film scores. The output of his Argentine years is low but significant. The Catro poemas galegos, which have been compared with Falla’s El retablo and his Harpsichord Concerto, present a very simple, archaic and rustic melodic line above pseudo-primitive, harsh harmonies, with great economy of means. This work was performed at the 1948 Amsterdam ISCM Festival. His later style is primarily contrapuntal, using advanced harmonies while maintaining a traditional form. His Second Symphony (1957) is the culmination of his orchestral production. This well constructed cyclical work is based on a melodic cell formed by two minor thirds, one ascending and the other descending, forming a chromatic progression. His last work, the Third String Quartet, represents the culmination of his chamber music. Written in 1958, it was the winner of a chamber music competition in Buenos Aires; formally it is close to Bartók’s last quartets and shows the composer in his maturity.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Interior (drama lírico, 1), 1920, destroyed; Juerga (ballet-pantomima, 1), 1921

Orch: All’antica, suite, 1932; Obertura para una ópera grotesca, 1932; Sinfonía breve, 1956; Sym. no.2 ‘Ricordiana’, 1957

Vocal: Flûte de jade, 1v, pf, 1921; 3 ciudades (F. García-Lorca), S, orch, 1937; Cantar del Mío Cid (cant., R. Alberti, after El Cid Campeador), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1947; 4 poemas galegos (L. Varela), 1v, fl, ob, cl, va, vc, hp, 1948; Romance del Rey Rodrigo, chorus, 1956

Chbr: 3 str qts, 1922–3, 1926, 1958; Sonata concertata a 4 no.2, pf, str, 1938; several gui pieces

Pf: Colores, suite, 1921; 3 preludios japoneses, 1927

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARS [Buenos Aires] (1961) [Bautista issue]

J. Vinton, ed.: Dictionary of Contemporary Music (New York, 1971)

R. García Morillo: Estudios sobre música argentina (Buenos Aires, 1984)

M. Ficher, M. Furman Schleifer and J.M. Furman: Latin American Classical Composers: a Biographical Dictionary (Lanham, MD, and London, 1996)

SUSANA SALGADO

Bauyn Manuscript

(F-Pn Vm⁷ 674–5). See Sources of keyboard music to 1660, §2(ii).

Bawdwine, John.

See Baldwin, John.

Bawr, (Alexandrine-)Sophie (Goury de Champgrand), Mme de [Comtesse de Saint-Simon, Baronne de Bawr; M. François]

(bParis, 8 Oct 1773; d Paris, 31 Dec 1860). French composer and author. Though born out of wedlock to a marquis and an opera singer, she was recognized and reared by both parents. In her early years she took lessons from the singer Pierre Garat and the composers Grétry and Nicolas Roze and sang her own songs in salons (she was also an accomplished pianist). She was encouraged in composition by Adrien Boieldieu and the singer Jean Elleviou and may have been friendly with the singer-composer Sophie Gail. During her long life she published, mainly as Mme de Bawr, a number of touching and harmonically expert songs, wrote history books, novels, stories, one-act plays, mélodrames, as well as an opera. Some of her writings were translated into German or Spanish. An early feminist, she argued in her writings that the position of women in the arts needed to be improved.

She was briefly married (1801–2) to the social theorist Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825); Grétry was a witness at the wedding. She ran a salon for Saint-Simon so that he might meet prominent musicians and writers. She illegally retained the title ‘Comtesse’ after marrying the young Russian Baron de Bawr in about 1809; however, de Bawr soon died (in about 1810). Left penniless, Mme de Bawr turned to a more systematic professional musical career that lasted decades. During the Bourbon Restoration, she was granted a pension by Louis XVIII.

For the Encyclopédie des dames she wrote an Histoire de la musique (Paris, 1823) and she published her memoirs, Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1853).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Les chevaliers du lion (mélodrame, 3, Bawr), lib (Paris, 1804), ?music lost; Léon, ou Le château de Montaldi (op, 3, Bawr), Paris, Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, 22 Oct 1811, lost; Un quart d’heure de dépit (oc, 1), 1813–22, music lost, lib in F-Pan

Songs (romances, for 1v, pf, hp or gui): D’aimer besoin puissant (Viot), after 1800; J’étais heureux (Paris, after 1800); A la mémoire d’un être chéri (O, toi qui ne peux plus m’entendre) (Bawr), in Le souvenir des ménestrels, no.20 (1814), 78–9

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

FétisBS

DBF

MGG1 suppl. (R. Cotte)

SchmidlD

C. Gardeton: Annales de la musique … pour l’an 1819 (Paris, 1819), 11 only

C. Gardeton: Bibliographie musicale de la France et de l’étranger (Paris, 1822)

J.C.F. Hoefer: Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1859)

E. Gagne [E. Moreau]: Mme de Bawr: étude sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1861)

J. Janin: Obituary, Journal des débats (14 Jan 1861)

H. Gougelot: Catalogue des romances parues sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Melun, 1937–43), i, 174 only

H. Gougelot: La romance française sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Melun, 1938–43), i, 147 only

R.P. Locke: Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago and London, 1986), 25–6

RALPH P. LOCKE

Bax, Sir Arnold (Edward Trevor)

(b Streatham, 8 Nov 1883; d Cork, 3 Oct 1953). English composer. Recognized between the wars as one of England's leading young symphonic composers, he wrote evocative, sometimes challenging scores that retained the impulse of a Romantic style.

3. Critical and public acceptance.

2. Works.

LEWIS FOREMAN

1. Life.

Bax attended the RAM (1900–05), where he studied composition with Corder; he won a Macfarren Scholarship after two years, but did not attract as much recognition as his contemporaries Benjamin Dale and York Bowen. Though he developed a commanding piano technique, he had no inclination to pursue a career as a performer. He did appear from time to time, however, as an accompanist at the London Music Club, where he was heard by Debussy and Schoenberg. It was his brother Clifford, a writer and playwright, who introduced him to poetry and to Ireland. Influenced by W.B. Yeats's poem The Wanderings of Oisin, Bax visited the west coast of the country in 1902, an experience he described (1943) with the proclamation: ‘the Celt within me stood revealed’. Fortunate to have a private income, he was able to travel extensively as a young man. Ireland was a favourite destination; for many years he returned to the remote Donegal village of Glencolumbkille for weeks at a time. In his autobiography, he also describes extended visits to Dresden in 1906 (during which he heard an early performance of Strauss's Salome) and 1907, and to Russia in 1910. Following his marriage to Elsita Sobrino, the daughter of soprano Luisa and pianist Carlos Sobrino, he moved to Dublin, where he and his wife lived until the spring of 1914. In Ireland he adopted the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne, under which he published poetry, short stories and three of his four plays, two of which may have been intended as opera librettos.

Between 1911 and the outbreak of World War I, Bax attended all six London seasons of the Ballets Russes. He had already written the Russian ballet score King Kojata (1911), which, although never orchestrated, provided musical material for a number of other works. A heart condition made him unfit for military service and although he acted as a special constable at one point, the war seems to have had remarkably little effect on his life or music. A far more profound impact came from the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and the subsequent execution of its leaders, some of whom he knew. He documented these events in his poetry, which, when printed in 1918 as A Dublin Ballad and Other Poems, was banned by the British censor.

During the war, Bax had a passionate love affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen and in 1918 he left his wife and two children for her. In the mid-1920s he met Mary Gleaves and for over 20 years maintained relationships with both women. With peace he became one of the leading younger composers of the day, a position reinforced by performances of the significant new works he had written during the war. On the return of the Ballets Russes, he became acquainted with the ballerina Tamara Karsavina, for whom he wrote The Truth About the Russian Dancers (1920, rev. 1926), borrowing some of the music from his aborted ballet King Kojata. During the 1920s, at the height of his success, he completed his first three symphonies, some choral works, a variety of shorter pieces and chamber music. Although he was briefly considered the leading British symphonist, the première of his Fifth Symphony (15 January 1934) was shortly followed by premières of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony (10 April 1935) and Walton's First Symphony (incomplete, 3 December 1934; complete, 6 November 1935).

In the late 1930s Bax wrote less and less, remarking that he wanted to ‘retire, like a grocer’. His knighthood in 1937 came as a surprise to him, as did the post of Master of the King's Music in 1942. At the beginning of World War II he concentrated on his autobiography, Farewell, My Youth (London, 1943), a witty sequence of vignettes of people he had met and places he had visited before 1914. He moved to Sussex and for the rest of his life lived in a room above the bar at The White Horse, Storrington. Among his late works are scores for the films Malta GC (1942) and Oliver Twist (1948), both of which became popular in the concert hall. When Cohen damaged her right hand in 1948, he composed a Left-Hand Concertante (1949) for her. By the end of his life much of his earlier music had been forgotten. He was represented to the public by his late and, on the whole, less demanding output, resulting in a somewhat negative critical assessment followed by a long-term neglect of his works after his death. His full output, however, has since been performed and recorded.

2. Works.

Bax's early works consist mainly of songs and piano music, but also include the short tone poem Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan (1903–5) and a few other compositions performed while he was a student. Early songs, such as his setting of William Allingham's The Fairies (1905), are notable for their complex piano parts, doubtless reflecting his activity as an accompanist at the time. With The White Peace (‘Fiona Macleod’, 1907), one of his most popular songs, this tendency became less pronounced. Attempts to write an opera on the story of Deirdre produced a five-act libretto and some musical sketches, but these resulted in the tone poems Into the Twilight (1908) and Roscatha (1910) rather than an operatic work.

Influenced by the orchestral technique of Wagner, Strauss, Glazunov, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, Bax developed a vivid orchestral style. His first popular success came with the impressionistic tone poem In the Faery Hills (1909, rev. 1921), conducted by Henry Wood at the 1910 Proms. This succinct and attractive piece is full of characteristic features and its programme, culled from Celtic folklore, indicates the importance of literature in spurring Bax's creativity. Increasingly complex orchestral music followed, not all of which was performed; the technically difficult tone poem Spring Fire (1913), for example, was not heard until long after his death. During World War I, Bax wrote the tone poems The Garden of Fand (1913–16), November Woods (1917) and Tintagel (1917–19), all of which sublimate personal emotion in favour of a musical evocation of nature. In the latter two, the sonata matrix which was to dominate many of his symphonic movements can be discerned, but in each case the poetic programme changes the formal emphasis, resulting in individual structures. At first considered challenging and new, these works quickly found a ready public. Tintagel remained in the repertory when much of Bax's music was no longer heard. In memoriam (1917), on the other hand, written in memory of Patrick Pearse who was executed with the leaders of the Dublin Easter Rising, was not performed until it was recorded by Handley and the BBC PO in 1998.

Irish events are also reflected in a succession of chamber works and in some of Bax's most striking Irish songs. The First String Quartet (1918), which brings a classical clarity of texture and form to its Celtic inspiration, includes a particularly beguiling folksong-like third movement; the Second Quartet (1925), written in a much grittier and more demanding idiom, features some of Bax's most determined contrapuntal writing. The Viola Sonata (1922), the Phantasy Sonata for viola and harp (1927) and the Sonata for Flute and Harp (1928), later arranged as Concerto for Seven Instruments (1936), are typical examples of Bax's tributes to friends such as Lionel Tertis, Raymond Jeremy, May Harrison, Maria Korchinska and Leon Goossens.

Bax produced a romantic Skryabinesque piano sonata as early as 1910. During World War I he wrote a second, an introspective single movement like the first, and in 1921 a third in three movements. The last of these, orchestrated and given a new slow movement that combines eerie stillness with sudden crises, became the First Symphony (1922). The score is both fiercely new, and still romantic in impulse. Contemporary commentators saw the music as Bax's reaction to the war; Bax was ambivalent, however, and it seems more likely that the work reflected his reaction to the Irish events of Easter 1916. This supposition is reinforced by the subjective and passionate Second Symphony (1924, orchestrated 1926), the slow movement of which quotes from and extends the climactic running string motif of In memoriam.

During the late 1920s, Bax's attempts to take his orchestral music forward led to a number of false starts. Eventually, after the lightweight Overture, Elegy and Rondo (1927), he completed the Third Symphony (1929). This became a pivotal work which, thanks to Wood, enjoyed a short-lived but wide public success. Winter Legends (1930) for piano and orchestra followed. Both of these works are in three movements and include extended reflective closing sections (‘epilogues’), one of the most distinctive features of Bax's style. During the 1930s Bax wrote four more symphonies, broadly similar in form and language to the first three. In the Fourth (1931), associations between music and nature create a serene emotional character. The Fifth (1932), overtly influenced by Sibelius, includes a popular finale and epilogue in which a grandly reiterated chorale theme builds to a brilliant climax. The Sixth (1934), tautly realized and full of memorable invention and colourful, idiosyncratic orchestration, represents the pinnacle of Bax's symphonic writing. In both the ternary slow movement and tripartite finale, Bax evolves a form that reconciles the competing elements of orchestral tone poem and symphonic development. The final climax and haunting epilogue suggest a passing of worlds; only at the very end of the work is the serenity for which Bax had been searching for 30 years finally achieved.

In the late 1930s Bax worked on the Violin Concerto (1937–8) and the Seventh Symphony (1938–9), both of which are in a more relaxed idiom than the earlier music. In his last years he composed comparatively little, though as Master of the King's Music he wrote Morning Song (1946), a short piece for piano and orchestra for Princess Elizabeth's 21st birthday, obligatory fanfares for the 1947 royal wedding and a Coronation March (1953).

3. Critical and public acceptance.

During his lifetime, Bax saw his works widely performed; only a small proportion of his output achieved popularity, however, and certainly until the 1930s his music was considered new and difficult. Nevertheless, his works were championed by many artists. He began to be promoted for his later music during World War II, and in the late 1940s a limited repertory of relatively undemanding compositions – the Seventh Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the two film scores Malta GC and Oliver Twist, the Morning Song and the Left-Hand Concertante – kept his name in the public eye. These works did little to affirm his critical acceptance among a new generation of critics, however. Only The Garden of Fand and Tintagel remained in circulation from his earlier output.

The BBC broadcast of Bax's symphonies during 1954–5 and Cohen's broadcast of Winter Legends in 1954 introduced a new generation to Bax's music. The Third Symphony was recorded under the auspices of the British Council during World War II, and smaller record companies recorded the Fourth in 1964 and the Sixth in 1967. During the 1970s pioneering revivals of Bax's early orchestral music by the Kensington SO under Leslie Head led the BBC to schedule a number of Bax centenary programmes. These in turn led to further recordings, particularly by Chandos, of Bax's music supported by the Arnold Bax Charitable Trust (established 1985).

WORKS

dramatic

King Kojata (Tamara) (ballet), pf, 1911; Between Dusk and Dawn (ballet), 1917; The Frog Skin (ballet), 1918, lost; The Truth about the Russian Dancers (incid music, J.M. Barrie), 1920, rev. 1926; Malta GC (film score), 1942, orch suite, 1943; Golden Eagel (incid music, C. Bax), 1945; Oliver Twist (film score), 1948, orch suite, 1948; Journey into History (film score), 1952

orchestral

Tone poems: Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan, small orch, 1903–5; A Song of Life and Love, 1905, lost; A Song of War and Victory, 1905; Into the Twilight, 1908; In the Faery Hills, 1909, rev. 1921; Roscatha, 1910; Christmas Eve on the Mountains, 1911, rev. c1921; Nympholept, 1912–15; The Garden of Fand, 1913–16; The Happy Forest, 1914–21; November Woods, 1917; Tintagel, 1917–19; The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew, 1931; A Legend, 1944

Syms.: Sym., F-f, op.8, 1907 [not orchd]; Spring Fire, sym., 1913; Sym. no.1, E, 1922; Sym. no.2, e and C, 1924–6; Sym. no.3, 1929; Sym. no.4, 1931; Sym. no.5, 1932; Sym. no.6, 1934; Sym. no.7, 1938–9

With solo inst(s): Sym. Variations, E, pf, orch, 1918; Phantasy (Conc.), d, va, orch, 1920; Winter Legends, sinfonia concertante, pf, orch, 1930; Vc Conc., 1932; Saga Fragment, tpt, str, pf, perc [arr. of pf qt]; Vn Conc., 1937–8; Concertino, pf, orch, 1939, unfinished; Morning Song (Maytime in Sussex), pf, orch, 1946; Concertante, eng hn, cl, hn, orch, 1948–9; Concertante (Conc.), pf LH, orch, 1949; Variations on the Name Gabriel Fauré, hp, str, 1949 [also for pf]

Other works: Variations (Improvisations), 1904; A Connemara Revel, 1905; An Irish Ov., 1906; Festival Ov., 1911, rev. 1918; Symphonietta, 1911, unfinished; 4 Pieces (4 Sketches, 4 Irish Pieces), 1912–13, rev. as 3 Pieces, 1928; Prelude to Adonais, 1912, lost; Summer Music, 1917–20, rev. 1932; Sym. Scherzo, 1917, rev. 1933 [arr. of pf work]; Russian Suite, 1919 [arr. of 1912–15 pf works for Diaghilev]; Mediterranean, 1922 [arr. of 1920 pf work]; Cortège, 1925; Romantic Ov., chbr orch, 1926; Northern Ballad no.1, 1927–31; Ov., Elegy and Rondo, 1927; Prelude for a Solemn Occasion (Northen Ballad no.3), 1927–33; Ov. to a Picaresque Comedy, 1930; Sinfonietta, 1932; Northern Ballad no.2, 1933–4; Ov. to Adventure, 1936; Rogue's Comedy Ov., 1936; London Pageant, march and trio, 1937; Paean, 1938 [arr. of 1920 pf work]; Work in Progress, ov., 1943; Victory March, 1945 [based on film score Malta GC]; Coronation March, 1952; 9 fanfares

chamber and solo instrumental

Str Qt, A, 1902; Str Qt, E, 1903; Concert Piece (Fantasy), vn/va, pf, 1904; Trio, vn, va/cl, pf, 1906; Str Qnt, G, 1908; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1910, rev. 1915, 1920, 1945; 4 Pieces, fl, pf, 1912 [from ballet King Kojata]; Legend, vn, pf, 1915; Pf Qnt, g, 1915; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1915, rev. 1921; Ballad, vn, pf, 1916; Elegiac Trio, fl, va, hp, 1916; In memoriam, eng hn, hp, str qt, 1917; Str Qt no.1, 1918; Folk Tale, vc, pf, 1918; Hp Qnt, 1919; Lyrical Interlude, str qnt 1922 [arr. of Str Qnt, 1908, slow movt]; Ob Qnt, 1922; Pf Qt, 1922; Sonata, va, pf, 1922; Sonata, E, vc, pf, 1923; Str Qt no.2, 1925; Phantasy Sonata, va, hp, 1927; Sonata no.3, vn, pf, 1927; Sonata, fl, hp, 1928; Sonata, F, vn, pf, 1928; Legend, va, pf, 1929; Nonet, fl, ob, cl, hp, str qt, db, 1930 [arr. of Sonata, F, 1928]; Valse, hp, 1931; Sonatina, vc, pf, 1933; Str Qnt, 1933; Octet, hn, pf, str sextet, 1934; Sonata, cl, pf, 1934; Conc., fl, ob, hp, str qt, 1936 [arr. of Fl Sonata, 1928]; Str Qt no.3, 1936; Threnody and Scherzo, bn, hp, str sextet, 1936 [arr. bn, hp, str orch]; Rhapsodic Ballad, vc, 1939; Legend-Sonata, vc, pf, 1943; Pf Trio, B, 1946

choral

Fatherland (J.L. Runeberg, trans. C. Bax), T, chorus, orch, 1907, rev. 1934; Enchanted Summer (P.B. Shelley: Prometheus), 2 S, chorus, orch, 1910; Of a Rose I Sing a Song (15th century), chorus, hp, vc, db, 1920; Mater ora Filium (Balliol College MS), SSAATTBB, 1921; Now is the Time of Christymas (15th century), male vv, fl, pf, 1921; This Worldes Joie (c1300), chorus, 1922; The Boar's Head (15th century), male chorus, 1923; I sing of a Maiden that is Makeless (15th century), SAATB, 1923; St Patrick's Breastplate, chorus, orch, 1923; To the Name above every Name (R. Crashaw), S, chorus, orch, 1923; Walsinghame (16th century, attrib. W. Raleigh), T, chorus, orch, 1926; Wonder, hymn, 1930; The Morning Watch (H. Vaughan), chorus, orch, 1935; 5 Fantasies on Polish Christmas Carols, unison Tr, str, 1942; 5 Greek Folksongs, chorus, 1942; To Russia (J. Masefield), Bar, chorus, orch, 1944; Gloria, chorus, org, 1945; Nunc dimittis, chorus, org, 1945; Te Deum, chorus, org, 1945; Epithalamium (E. Spenser), chorus, org, 1947; St George, Bar, chorus, org, 1947–8, unfinished; Magnificat, chorus, org; 1948 [arr. of 1906 song]; What is it like to be young and fair (C. Bax), SSAAT, 1953 [composed for A Garland for the Queen]

songs

A Celtic Song Cycle (F. Macleod), 1904, rev. 1922: Eilidh my Fawn, Closing Doors, Thy dark eyes to mine, A Celtic Lullaby, At the last; The Fairies (W. Allingham), 1905; Golden Guendolen (W. Morris), 1905; The Song in the Twilight (F. Bax), 1905; When We are Lost (D. O'Byrne [Bax]), 1905; Magnificat (Bible: Luke), 1906; A Milking Sean (Macleod), 1907; The Enchanted Fiddle (B. Bax), 1907; The Flute [Ideala] (B. Bjørnson, trans. E. Gosse), 1907; The White Peacock (Macleod), 1907; A Lyke-Wake (Border Ballad), 1908; Shieling Song (Macleod), 1908; A Christmas Carol (15th century), 1909; Lullaby (S. McCarthy), 1910; To Eire (J. Cousins), 1910; Roundel (G. Chaucer), 1914; Parting (A.E.), 1916; The Splendour Falls (A. Tennyson), 1917

Green grow the rashes O! (R. Burns), 1918; I have house and land in Kent (trad.), 1918; The Maid and the Miller (trad.), 1918; O dear! what can the matter be? (trad.), 1918; Variations sur Cadet Rousselle (trad.), 1918 [with Bridge, Goossens and Ireland]; When I was one and twenty (A.E. Housman), 1918; Youth (C. Bax), 1918; Le chant d'Isabeau (Fr. Can. trad.), 1920; Traditional Songs of France, 1920: Sarabande, Langueo d'amours, Me suis mise en danse, Femmes, battez vos marys, La targo; 5 Irish Songs, 1921: The Pigeons (P. Colum), As I came over the grey, grey hills (J. Campbell), I heard a piper piping (Campbell), Across the door (Colum), Beg-Innish (J.M. Synge)

3 Irish Songs (Colum), 1922: Cradle Song, Rann of Exile, Rann of Wandering; The Market Girl (T. Hardy), 1922; I heard a Soldier (H. Trench), 1924; Wild Almond (Trench), 1924; Carrey Clavel (Hardy), 1925; Eternity (R. Herrick), 1925; In the Morning (Housman), 1926; On the Bridge (Hardy), 1926; Out and away (J. Stephens), 1926; Watching the Needleboats (J. Joyce), 1932; Dream Child (V. Newton) (1957); 75 unpubd songs

other vocal

Rune of Age (Macleod), 1v, orch, 1905 [orch score lost]; Viking Battle Song (Macleod), 1v, pf, 1905 [orch score lost]; Nocturnes (R. Dehmel, O.E. Hartleben), 1911; 3 Orch Songs, 1914: A Celtic Lullaby (Macleod) [arr. of 1904 song], A Christmas Carol (15th century) [arr. of 1909 song], Slumber-Song (McCarthy) [arr. of 1910 song]; The Bard of the Dimbovitz (Rom. trad.), Mez, orch, 1914, rev. 1946; The Song of the Dagger, Bar, orch, 1914; Glamour (D. O'Byrne [Bax], R. Newton), 1921; 3 Songs, 1v, orch, 1934: A Lyke-Wake [arr. of 1908 song], Wild Almond (Trench) [arr. of 1924 song], The Splendour Falls (Tennyson) [arr. of 1917 song]; Eternity (Herrick), S, orch, 1934 [arr. 1925 song]

piano

Fantasia, a, duo, 1900; Concert Valse, E, 1910; Sonata no.1, 1910, rev. 1917–21; 2 Russian Tone Pictures, 1912: May Night in the Ukraine, Gopak; Scherzo, 1913; In the Night, 1914; A Mountain Mood, 1915; Apple-Blossom-Time, 1915; In a Vodka Shop, 1915; The Maiden with the Daffodil, 1915; The Princess's Rose Garden, 1915; Sleepy Head, 1915; Winter Waters, 1915; Dream in Exile, 1916; Nereid, 1916; Moy Mell (The Pleasant Plain: an Irish Tone Poem), duo, 1917; A Romance, 1918; On a May Evening, 1918; The Slave Girl, 1919; Sonata no.2, 1919, rev. 1920; What the Minstrel told us, 1919; Whirligig, 1919; A Hill Tune, 1920; Burlesque, 1920; Country-Tune, 1920; Lullaby, 1920; Mediterranean, 1920; Paean, 1920; Lento con molto espressione, 1921; Sonata no.3, 1926; Hardanger, duo, 1927; The Poisoned Fountain, duo, 1928; Ceremonial Dance, 1929; The Devil that Tempted St Anthony, duo, 1929; Serpent Dance, 1929; Sonata, duo, 1929; Water Music, 1929; Red Autumn, duo, 1931; Sonata no.4, 1932; Legend, 1935; O Dame get up and bake your pies, 1945; Suite for Fauré, 1945 [orchd 1949]; 4 Pieces, 1947; 2 Lyrical Pieces, 1948 [from film score Oliver Twist]; juvenilia, incl. 3 sonatas

arrangements

Campion: Jack and Jone, 1v, pf, 1918; Lyadov: Dance Prelude, Lament of the Swan Princesses, orch, 1919, lost; Chopin: Ballad, A, orch, 1921, lost; Vivaldi: Conc., rv 540, hp, str qt, 1927; J.S. Bach: Fantasia, bwv 572, pf (1932)

Principal publisher: Chappell

Principal recording companies: Chandos, Lyrita, Naxos

1. Church music and concert life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Evans: ‘Arnold Bax’, MT, lx (1919), 103–5, 154–6

J. and W. Chester: Arnold Bax (London, 1921)

E. Evans: ‘Arnold Bax’, Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (London, 1929–30; enlarged 2/1963/R by C. Mason)

R.H. Hull: A Handbook on Arnold Bax's Symphonies (London, 1932)

R.H. Hull: ‘Approach to Bax's Symphonies’, ML, xxiii (1942), 101–15

A. Bax: Farewell, my Youth (London, 1943/R) [autobiography]

J. Herbage: ‘Sir Arnold Bax’, British Music of our Time, ed. A.L. Bacharach (Harmondsworth, 1946, R/1951), 113–29

N. Demuth: ‘Arnold Bax’, Musical Trends in the 20th Century (London, 1952/R), 155–67

D. Cox: ‘Arnold Bax’, The Symphony, ii, ed. R. Simpson (Harmondsworth, 2/1972), 153–65

Bax Society Bulletin (London, 1968–73)

R.L.E. Foreman: ‘Bibliography of Writings on Arnold Bax’, CMc, x (1970), 124–40

L. Foreman: ‘The Musical Development of Arnold Bax’, ML, lii (1971), 59–68

P.J. Pirie: ‘More than a Brazen Romantic’, Music and Musicians, xix/5 (1971–2), 32–40

C. Scott-Sutherland: Arnold Bax (London, 1973)

L. Foreman: ‘Bax and the Ballet’, PRMA, civ (1977–8), 11–19

L. Foreman: Dermot O’Byrne: Poems by Arnold Bax (London, 1979)

D. Puffett: ‘In the Garden of Fand: Arnold Bax and the “Celtic Twilight”’, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil und Musik, ed. J. Stenzl (Zürich, 1980), 193–210

J.C. Hoffpauir: Three Tone-Poems by Arnold Bax (diss., U. of Missouri, Kansas City, 1981)

J.L. Rivers: Formal Determinants in the Symphonies of Arnold Bax (diss., U. of Arizona, 1982)

L. Foreman: ‘Arnold Bax at the RAM’, RAM Magazine, no.233 (1983), 11–17

A. Payne: ‘Bax: a Centenary Assessment’, Tempo, no.180 (1984), 29–32

S. Banfield: ‘The Celtic Twilight’, Sensibility and English Song, i (Cambridge, 1985), 248–74

L. Foreman: Bax: a Composer and His Times (Aldershot, 2/1988)

C.E. Mayfield: The Structural Function of Motives in the Piano Sonatas of Arnold Bax (diss., U. of Kansas, 1993)

D. Andrews, ed.: Cuchulan Among the Guns (Cumnor, 1998) [letters from Bax to C. Whelen; Whelen’s writings on Bax]

G. Parlett: A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax (Oxford, 1999)

Baxter, J(esse) R(andall, jr)

(b Lebanon, AL, 8 Dec 1887; d Dallas, 21 Jan 1960). American music publisher and composer of gospel songs. He studied with some of the foremost gospel-hymn writers, including James Rowe and Charles Gabriel, and became proficient in writing both words and music; he probably wrote more convention songs than any other gospel-music composer of his time (a compilation of his songs, Precious Abiding Peace, was published in 1960). He was also an outstanding singing-school teacher and conducted his own schools until 1922, when the publisher A.J. Showalter asked him to manage one of his offices, in Texarkana, Texas. In 1926 Baxter joined V.O. Stamps in the foundation of the Stamps-Baxter Music Company at Jacksonville, Texas. When the company moved to Dallas in 1929, Baxter opened a branch office in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The business was extremely successful, becoming one of the foremost publishers of gospel music in seven-shape notation (see Shape-note hymnody, §5). The company promoted gospel music further by its sponsorship of vocal quartets. After Stamps’s death in 1940, Baxter moved to Dallas and became president of the firm. In 1949 an article in Time likened the company to a gospel Tin Pan Alley: at that time the firm employed 50 people; its journal, Gospel Music News, had a circulation of 20,000. Stamps-Baxter was sold to Zandervan in 1972.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Baxter and V. Polk: Biographies of Gospel Song Writers (Dallas, 1971)

S. Beary: The Stamps-Baxter Music and Printing Company: a Continuing Tradition, 1926–1976 (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1977)

SHIRLEY BEARY

Bayan

(Russ.).

See Accordion; see also Russian federation, §I, 5.

Bayard, Samuel Preston

(b Pittsburgh, 10 April 1908; d Pittsburgh, 10 Jan 1997). American ethnomusicologist. He studied folklore and comparative literature with Kittredge at Harvard (MA 1936) and in 1945 was appointed instructor at Pennsylvania State University, where he was later professor of English and comparative literature; he also served as president of the American Folklore Society, 1965–6. He collected folksongs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia between 1928 and 1963, usually in the summer months, and documented fiddle and fife melodies in his editions Hill Country Tunes: Instrumental Folk Music of Southwestern Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1944) and Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife: Instrumental Folk Tunes in Pennsylvania (University Park, PA and London, 1982). He also made an important contribution to the theory of tune relationships, identifying three central factors in such relationships: contour, important scale degrees and stereotypical motifs. Building on the work of G.P. Jackson he identified a number of ‘tune families’ (varying from 35 to 55) in British-American folk tradition; his findings resulted in a series of articles begun in 1939, of which the best-known were published in 1950.

WRITINGS

‘Aspects of Melodic Kinship and Variation in British-American Folk-Tunes’, PAMS 1939, 122–9

‘Prolegomena to a Study of the Principal Melodic Families of Folksong’, Journal of American Folklore, lxiii (1950), 1–44

‘Principal Versions of an International Folk Tune’, JIFMC, iii (1951), 44–50

‘American Folksongs and their Music’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, xvii (1953), 122–39

‘Two Representative Tune Families of British Tradition’, Midwest Folklore, iv (1953), 13–34

‘A Miscellany of Tune Notes’, Studies in Folklore: in Honor of Distinguished Service Professor Stith Thompson, ed. W.E. Richmond (Bloomington, IN, 1957), 151–76

‘Decline and “Revival” of Anglo-American Folk Music’, Folklore in Action and Essays for Discussion in Honor of MacEdward Leach, ed. H.P. Beck (Philadelphia, 1962), 21–9

‘Scales and Ranges in Anglo-American Fiddle Tunes: Report on a Desultory Experiment’, Two Penny Ballads and Four Dollar Whisky: a Pennsylvania Folklore Miscellany, ed. K.S. Goldstein and R.E. Byington (Hatboro, PA, 1966), 51–60

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Blaustein: ‘Samuel Preston Bayard’, Journal of American Folklore, cx (1997), 415–17

JAMES PORTER

Bayer [Beyer, Peyer], Andreas

(b Geisenheim, nr Würzburg, 1710; d Würzburg, 1749). German organist and composer. He had some lessons from his father, headmaster of the school at Geisenheim, and seems to have had a natural musical talent, as well as a good voice which secured a place for him at the Hospitalsschule in Würzburg. He became organist of Würzburg Cathedral and later studied and practised law. In October 1745 he attended the coronation at Frankfurt of Francis I, Maria Theresa's consort, and met Wagenseil, her keyboard teacher, who, on his way back to Vienna, heard Bayer play the organ in Würzburg and acknowledged his mastery. His reputation brought him many pupils and lucrative offers from Mergentheim and Kassel, but he remained in Würzburg. Gerber deplored the loss of Bayer's compositions; his only known works are a prelude and 11 fugues (in D-Bsb 1220; for questions of attribution and authenticity, see Peyer, Johann Baptist). The fugues are in the fugato style associated with the south German school of organ composers, and generally have short, predictable subjects. Heinichen's thoroughbass treatise of 1711 may have inspired the example in C which moves through the circle of 5ths. An attractive concerto in G for organ and strings (Bsb 1221) may also be his.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FrotscherG

GerberL

J.G. Meusel, ed.: Miscellaneen artistichen Inhalts (Erfurt, 1779–87), vi

C.R. Arnold: Organ Literature: a Comprehensive Survey (Metuchen, NJ, 1973, 3/1995)

S. Wollenberg: ‘The Jupiter Theme: New Light on its Creation’, MT, cxvi (1975), 781–3

HUGH J. McLEAN

Bayer, Johann Baptist.

See Peyer, Johann Baptist.

Bayer, Joseph

(b Vienna, 6 March 1852; d Vienna, 12 March 1913). Austrian violinist, conductor and composer. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Georg and Joseph Hellmesberger (violin), Dachs (piano) and Bruckner (theory). He later played the violin in the Vienna Hofoper orchestra and, from 1885 to his retirement in 1898, was director of the ballet at that theatre. He travelled throughout Europe as a conductor and visited America in 1881 to conduct his operetta Der Chevalier von San Marco in New York. His other operettas include Menelaus (1892), Fräulein Hexe (1898) and Der Polizeichef (1904), while he also wrote two comic operas, Alien Fata and Der Goldasoka. It was, however, as a composer of some 22 ballets that he made his reputation; many of them were produced in Vienna or Berlin, the best-known being Die Puppenfee (1888).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (W. Boetticher)

A. Bauer: Opern und Operetten in Wien (Graz, 1955)

ERIC BLOM/CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bayle, François

(b Tamatave, Madagascar, 27 April 1932). French composer. He studied in Bordeaux (1946–54), at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Messiaen (1958–9), and at the Darmstadt summer courses (1960–62) with Stockhausen, among others. In 1960 he joined the Service de la Recherche of ORTF, recently established by Pierre Schaeffer, and took part in the musique concrète course. That same year he composed his first work, Points critiques, which won the Paris Biennale prize. Further instrumental compositions were followed by compositions for instruments and tape; in 1967 he wrote his first important work for tape alone, Espaces inhabitables, influenced by Georges Bataille and Jules Verne. In its determinedly ‘morphological’ style, Espaces inhabitables showed both great inventive power and discreet lyricism. After 1969 Bayle turned entirely to tape composition.

In 1966 Schaeffer put Bayle in charge of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). From then on he remained active as a composer, an administrator and a music theorist. In 1975, after the integration of the GRM and the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), he became department head of INA-GRM, serving as its director until 1997. During these years he organized concerts, radio broadcasts, seminars and events celebrating individual composers, supported technological developments (Syter, GRM Tools, Midi Formers, Acousmographe) and was behind major innovations, such as the Acousmonium (an orchestra of loudspeakers) and the Collection INA-GRM recordings label. In 1992 he founded the Acousmathèque with a repertory of 2000 works composed after 1948. After leaving GRM in 1997, he founded his own audio-numerical and multiphonic studio, the Studio Magison, where he has devoted himself to research, writing and composition.

Bayle's oeuvre is notable for its masterly craftsmanship and rhetoric, its agile discourse and its sophisticated thought. His music's elegance of form and transparency of sound locates it in the tradition of Debussy and Ravel. The general tone of each composition is suggested by its poetic title. Bayle has described the successive stages of his musical development as ‘Utopias exploring the genesis of movements in sound, the grammar of their formation, and their relation to events in the physical and psychic world’. His most experimental work, L'expérience acoustique, investigates over several hours the relationship between sound and its effect on its audience. Other large-scale forms include long developmental sections shot through with recycled mutations of various ‘proto-elements’ (Toupie dans le ciel, Son vitesse-lumière, Bâton de pluie) and vast sequences of contrasting, but complementary movements that give rise to variations on certain initial propositions (Jeîta, Grande polyphonie, Les couleurs de la nuit, Tremblement de terre très doux). Additional style characteristics include intertwining textural variations, filigree-like sound, sequential proliferations and reactions, distinctive tone colours and syntactical articulation (‘montages-catastrophes’).

Bayle's work as a theorist has always accompanied and elucidated his activities as a composer. His most important articles have been revised and collected in his book Musique acousmatique, propositions … positions (Paris, 1993). As early as 1974 he suggested the phrase ‘acousmatic music’ to designate ‘music “shot” and developed in the studio and then projected into the concert hall, as happens in the cinema’, and said it should be distinguished from electro-instrumental music produced in an actual place in real time. Starting out from this basic idea, he developed the concept of ‘images of sound’, or the marks left on a medium by sound energy (as in recording). These physical images, he suggested, give rise to three kinds of mental images: iconic, diagrammatic and metaphorical.

WORKS

(selective list)

With insts: 3 portraits d'un-oiseau-qui-n'existe-pas; L'archipel, str qt, 1960; Pluriel, 17 insts, tape, 1963; Lignes et points, 1966

Tape: Espaces inhabitables, 1967; L'expérience acoustique, 1970–72: L'aventure du cri, Le langage des fleurs, La preuve par le sens, L'épreuve par le son, La philosophie du non; Jeîta, 1970; Vibrations composées, 1973; Grande polyphonie, 1974; Camera oscura: 7 préludes et labyrinthe, 1976; Erosphère, 1980: La fin du bruit, Tremblement de terre très doux, Toupie dans le ciel; Son vitesse-lumière, 1980–83: 1 Grandeur nature, 2 Paysage, personnage, nuage, 3 Voyage au centre de la tête, 4 Le sommeil d'Euclide, 5 Lumière ralentie; Les couleurs de la nuit, 1982; Aéroformes, 1983–6; Motion-Emotion, 1985; Théâtre d'ombres, 1988: … derrière l'image, … ombres blanches; Fabulae, 1990–91: Fabula, Onoma, Nota, Sonora; La main vide, 1994; Morceaux de ciels, 1997; Si loin, si proche … , 1998

WRITINGS

with G. Mâche and A. Vande Gorne: Répertoire acousmatique 1948–1980 (Paris, 1980)

‘L'odyssée de l'espace’, L'espace du son I, ed. F. Dhomont (Ohain, 1988), 23–30

‘L'image de son, ou “i-son”’, La musique et les sciences cognitives, ed. S. McAdams and I. Deliège (Brussels, 1989)

‘La musique acousmatique ou l'art des sons projetés’, Encyclopaedia Universalis, Symposium: les enjeux, ed. Encyclopedia universalis France, i (Paris, 1990), 535–44

‘Original, auteur et création’, Dossiers de l'audiovisuel, no.45 (Paris, 1992), 51–5

Musique acousmatique, propositions … positions (Paris, 1993)

‘La musique la plus générale qui soit’, Dossiers de l'audiovisuel, no.53 (Paris, 1993), 22–4

Réel-Virtuel, ou cinq questions d'acousmatique (Paris, 1994)

‘Musique acousmatique, Diabolus in musica?’, Esthétique des arts médiatique, ed. L. Pouissant (Quebec, 1995), 111–24

‘L'espace des sons et ses “défauts”’, L'espace: Musique/Philosophie (Paris, 1998), 365–71, 373–89

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Chion: La musique électroacoustique (Paris, 1982), 108–9

J.C. Thomas: Corpus selon onze thèmes-tiroirs (Paris, 1983)

J.Y. Bosseur: Vocabulaire de la musique contemporaine (Paris, 1992)

J.C. Thomas: ‘Vu de l'image’, in F. Bayle: Musique acousmatique, propositions …positions (Paris, 1993), 157–74

M. Chion, ed.: François Bayle: parcours d'un compositeur (Ohain, 1994)

FRANCIS DHOMONT

Bayley, Daniel

(b Rowley, MA, 27 June 1729; d Newburyport, MA, 29 Feb 1792). American tune book compiler and publisher. He worked as a potter and shopkeeper, and served as a clerk and possibly chorister at St Paul’s, Newburyport; his son Daniel, with whom he has been confused, played the organ at St Paul’s from 1776. Bayley began a prolific career as a compiler by bringing out A New and Complete Introduction (5 edns, Newburyport, 1764–8), a composite drawn from successful works by other compilers. In 1768 he published Tans’ur’s Royal Melody Compleat (London, 1754–5 and later edns; 2 edns, Boston, 1767–8), then combined it with Aaron Williams’s Universal Psalmodist (London, 1763 and later edns), and under the title The American Harmony issued four editions between 1769 and 1774. Towards the end of the American Revolution, Bayley pirated the title and partial contents of another popular work, Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, CT, 1779), despite Law’s vigorous protest. Bayley compiled five other tune books as well as two tune supplements for metrical psalters, and he published John Stickney’s Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion (Newburyport, 1774). His chief contribution was to circulate in New England a large repertory of mid-century British sacred music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.J. Metcalf: American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (New York, 1925/R), 23–9

I. Lowens and A.P.Britton: ‘Daniel Bayley’s The American Harmony: a Bibliographical Study’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, xlix (1955), 339–54

I. Lowens: Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964), 58–72

R. Crawford: Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston, IL, 1968/R), 19–22, 23n.

I.F. Auger: Music in Newburyport: Daniel Bayley (thesis, Brown U., 1970)

A.P. Britton, I.Lowens and R. Crawford: American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698–1810: a Bibliography (Worcester, MA, 1990), 115–54

RICHARD CRAWFORD/NYM COOKE

Baylou, Luigi de.

See Baillou, Luigi de.

Bayly [Baily], Anselm

(b c1719; d Nov 1794). English clergyman and writer. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 4 November 1740; and on 22 and 29 January 1741 he was appointed lay vicar of Westminster Abbey and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He resigned the latter post on 13 March 1744, when he was admitted a priest of the chapel. On 12 June 1749 he took the degree of BCL and on 10 July 1764 the degree of DCL from Christ Church, Oxford. In the latter year he was appointed sub-dean of the Chapel Royal; he was also a minor canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. Like many clergymen of his day, he studied medicine and on 20 July 1787 patented an elastic girdle, bandage or roller to relieve ruptures, fractures and swellings.

Bayly wrote on religion, the study of language and the study of music. He supervised the compilation of, and wrote the preface to, A Collection of Anthems Used in His Majesty’s Chapel Royal (London, 1769). He wrote two treatises on music: The Sacred Singer (London, 1771, republished in the same year as A Practical Treatise on Singing and Playing); and The Alliance of Musick, Poetry and Oratory (London, 1789). In seeking to establish general guidelines for regulating the prosody of the musician, orator and poet, Bayly defined prosody as the ‘art of metrical numbers, or versification, comprehending more especially … Accent, Quantity and Feet, to which may be added Rythm’. But he embraced certain contradictory facets of both the syllabic and the accentual systems of prosody, without realizing the fundamental impossibility of reconciling the wholly different aesthetic bases of the two systems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Review of The Alliance, Critical Review, lxvii (1789), 273–5

B. Woodcroft: Alphabetical Index of Patentees of Inventions 1615–1852 (London 1854/R)

P. Fussell: Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London, CT, 1954/R)

JAMIE C. KASSLER

Baynes, Sydney

(b Sudbury, Middlesex, 1 or 3 Feb 1879; d Willesden, 9 March 1938). English composer and conductor. He was a church organist at the age of 13, and while still a youth was accompanist to Edward Lloyd and Ben Davies. Later he was chorus master under James Glover at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and from 1910 to 1914 he was music director to John Tiller. It was at this time that he achieved international fame as the composer of waltzes such as Destiny (1912), Ecstasy (1913), Mystery (1914) and Modesty (1914). His compositions also included religious music, songs, piano pieces and other orchestral works including an overture Endure to Conquer played at the victory thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey in 1919. Baynes conducted and composed for revue and other productions at various London theatres, and from 1924 to 1929 he was music editor to Boosey & Hawkes. From 1928 until his death he conducted his own orchestra for broadcasts, using his own arrangements, and he also made records for HMV and Columbia.

ANDREW LAMB

Bayo, Maria

(b Fitero, 28 May 1962). Spanish soprano. She studied at the Conservatorio Pablo Sarasate in Pamplona and the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold. After winning a series of international competitions, she quickly established herself in the major European opera houses, making débuts at La Scala, Milan, in 1991 as Musetta, at the Opéra Bastille, Paris, the same year as Mozart’s Susanna and at Covent Garden in 1994 as L’Ensoleillad in Massenet’s Chérubin. With her pure, finely focussed soprano and versatile musicianship, Bayo is equally adept at conveying the minx-like qualities of Handel’s Cleopatra and the innocent charm of Mélisande. Her other roles include Ilia (Idomeneo), Adina, Cavalli’s Calisto and Oscar in Un ballo in maschera, the last two of which she has recorded.

ANDREW CLARK

Bayon Louis [née Bayon], Marie Emmanuelle

(b Marcei, Orne, 1746; d Aubevoye, Eure, 19 March 1825). French pianist and composer. She published six keyboard sonatas, three with violin accompaniment (1769); a two-act opéra comique, Fleur d’épine (1776); an arrangement of the overture; and airs and ariettes, almost all of them from Fleur d’épine (for complete list, see Jackson). Her unpublished works, discussed during her lifetime but now lost, include further instrumental chamber music and opéras-comiques, and a divertissement La fête de Saint Pierre to a text by Antoine-François Quétant (performed in 1771). Her playing, singing and composing were recognized from the 1760s in Parisian intellectual and artistic circles. She was a member of the salon of Mme de Genlis, who discusses Bayon’s music in her Mémoires (Paris, 1825), and music teacher to the daughter of Dénis Diderot, who refers to Bayon in his Leçons de clavecin, et principes d’harmonie (Paris, 1771). She married the architect Victor Louis in 1770, presided over distinguished salons in Bordeaux and Paris, and is credited with bringing the fortepiano into vogue in France.

Her musical style combines traditional French and new German and Italian expressive techniques in a melodious, Italianate texture. Diderot found ‘facility, expression, grace, melody’ in her music as in that of Alberti, J.C. Bach, Eckard and Schobert. Her music reflects the virtuosity of skilled amateurs like herself and of the internationally known French and foreign professional musicians of the Paris salons and other concerts. In her accompanied sonatas, the violin part is truly obligé. Fleur d’épine is a tale of love and magic with 20 musical numbers including airs, duos and ensembles.

WORKS

(selective list)

6 sonates, hpd/pf, 3 with vn obbl, op.1 (Paris, 1769/R)

Fleur d’épine (oc, 2, C.H. Fusée de Voisenon), Théâtre Italien, 22 Aug 1776 (Paris, 1776), partially ed. D. Hayes in Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, iv, v (New York, 1998)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD (‘Bayon’, ‘Louis’)

GerberL (‘Bayon’, ‘Louis’)

GerberNL (‘Bayon’, ‘Louis’)

SainsburyD

D. Hayes: Introduction to M.E. Bayon: Six sonates (New York, 1990)

D. Hayes: ‘Marie-Emmanuelle Bayon, later Madame Louis, and Music in Late Eighteenth-Century France’, College Music Symposium, xxx (1990), 14–33

B. Jackson: ‘Say Can You Deny Me’: a Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries (Fayetteville, AR, 1994)

D. Hayes: Introduction to Fleur d’épine, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, ed. M.F. Schleifer and S. Glickman (New York, 1998), iv, v [partial edn]

DEBORAH HAYES

Bayreuth.

Town in Bavaria in southern Germany. It is internationally famous as the site of Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus (opened 1876). The town, dating back to 1231 and in the 17th and 18th centuries the seat of an independent margravate, is now the capital of Upper Franconia and since 1975 has had a university.

2. Markgräfliches Opernhaus.

3. Wagner’s Festspielhaus.

4. Wagner’s successors.

5. Richard Wagner Foundation.

GEOFFREY SKELTON

1. Church music and concert life.

During the 15th century church and school music in Bayreuth followed the model of Nuremberg; three churches (St Nikolaus, St Linhard and the Stadtkirche) acquired permanent organists. After the Reformation, church repertory included music by Jacob Meiland, Erasmus Rotenbucher and Georg Schmalzing. The margrave’s residence moved to Bayreuth in the 17th century, and Margrave Christian (1603–55) appointed Johann Staden as court organist. The court musical establishment suffered during the 30 Years War but was revived with the accession as margravine of Frederick the Great’s sister Wilhelmine (1709–58) in 1735. Her main interest was opera (see §2 below); with her death in 1758 music at court languished again and in 1769 the court moved to Ansbach. The town maintained some musical life: works by Handel and others were heard at public concerts from 1779, and oratorios by Rolle, C.H. Graun and Hasse were given. In the 19th century concerts were sponsored by various organizations, culminating in the Musik-Dilettantenverein (founded 1860).

The Stadthalle in Jean-Paul-Platz, which stands on the site of the former margrave’s Reithalle (built 1747–8), was converted into a theatre in 1935–6. It was destroyed in an air attack in 1945, but the front wall remained intact and was incorporated in the new Stadthalle, opened in 1965. An all-purpose building used for plays, concerts, opera performances, congresses and balls, it contains two halls with seating capacity of 930 (Grosses Haus) and 300 (Kleines Haus). Occasional concerts are also given in the Markgräfliches Opernhaus (see §2 below).

2. Markgräfliches Opernhaus.

As elsewhere in Germany before 1918, the cultivation of opera was an important part of court life in Bayreuth. The first opera performed there (in 1661) was Sophia, by an unknown composer, and in the next 55 years about four to six works by German and Italian composers (among them G.H. Stölzel, G.P. Telemann, C.F. Hurlebusch, Attilio Ariosti and Antonio Lotti) were staged each year, either in the Schlosssaal or in a theatre built within the palace grounds. However, it was not until the accession of Wilhelmine, the consort of Margrave Friedrich, in 1735 that opera in Bayreuth became something beyond the ordinary. Wilhelmine was a skilled composer herself (her opera Argenore, performed in 1740, is lost, but some chamber works remain), and her excellent relations with her brother and the Prussian court ensured that eminent composers and musicians were willing to place themselves at her disposal.

Among the works known to have been performed in Bayreuth under the Kapellmeister Johann Pfeiffer (served 1734–61) were Hasse’s operas Ezio and Artaserse and Andrea Bernasconi’s festa teatrale L’huomo. These were staged in the new Markgräfliches Opernhaus, built in the street now known as Opernstrasse, close to the margrave’s palace. One of the finest late Baroque theatres still in existence, this three-storey building was erected by the French architect Joseph Saint-Pierre in 1745–8, and the interior decoration was entrusted to the Italian theatre designer Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena and his son Carlo. The richly decorated auditorium is dominated by the large margrave’s box at the back, with three tiers of boxes on either side, the stalls area being separated from the stage by an ornamental balustrade. The elaborate proscenium stage (14 metres wide, 15 metres high), which is slightly raised, is unusually deep (30 metres); it was this feature that first attracted Wagner to Bayreuth in the hope that it might prove suitable for the production of his Ring cycle. He at once saw, after inspecting it, that it would not do for his work.

Following Wilhelmine’s death in 1758 and Friedrich’s in 1763, the court moved to Ansbach, and Bayreuth reverted to the status of a provincial town. The Markgräfliches Opernhaus continued, however, to be used by travelling companies from neighbouring towns, mainly Bamberg and Coburg, until 1935, when, after a restoration that carefully preserved its original character, it became little more than a museum. It was brought into use again in 1948 (its bicentenary) as a venue for the Fränkische Festwoche, a week of performances of early operas and ballets in productions by the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, that takes place annually in May or June.

3. Wagner’s Festspielhaus.

The Markgräfliches Opernhaus may have been the factor that first drew Wagner to Bayreuth, but it was by no means the beginning of his vision of a theatre of his own. That was closely connected with the composition of Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he early recognized as unsuitable for presentation within the traditional operatic framework. In the preface to the full text of the Ring in 1863 he outlined the ideal theatre he had in mind:

I would have to aim at one of the less large towns in Germany, favourably sited and capable of accommodating an unusual number of guests, and in particular a town in which there would be no danger of clashing with a large existing theatre and thus having to compete with large-city audiences and their established customs. Here a temporary theatre would be created, as simple as possible, perhaps merely of wood, its sole criterion being the artistic suitability of its inner parts. I had already worked out in discussions with an intelligent and experienced architect a plan with an auditorium in the shape of an amphitheatre and with the great advantage of an orchestra invisible to the audience. To this theatre singers from German opera houses, chosen for their outstanding acting skills, would be summoned, probably in early spring, to rehearse the several parts of my work, uninterrupted by any other artistic activity.

Three performances of the complete cycle, Wagner went on to say, would be given at the height of summer on four successive evenings for ‘art-lovers from near and far’.

Bayreuth met in all respects the conditions he had laid down in his Ring preface for the site of his festival performances. It had the additional advantages of being within the territories of his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and of having civic authorities (in particular the mayor, Theodor Muncker, and the banker, Friedrich Feustel) eager to serve Wagner in the realization of his ambition. They offered him, free of charge, a site on a hill on the northern outskirts of the town (the Grünes Hügel) for the theatre, and he bought at his own expense a plot of land backing on to the grounds of the Neues Schloss (the margrave’s former residence, by now the property of King Ludwig) for a family home. (Called Wahnfried, in Richard Wagner Strasse, it was the home of the Wagner family up to the death of Wieland Wagner in 1966, and is now the Richard Wagner Museum.)

After laying the foundation stone of the theatre on 22 May 1872 (a ceremony that included a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Markgräfliches Opernhaus, conducted by Wagner himself), he set out to raise funds for it by conducting concerts and selling certificates of patronage. The response was disappointing, and he was obliged to construct the building with the simplest and cheapest materials. This, as his Ring preface shows, is what he had always intended his Festspielhaus to be: a ‘sketch of an ideal’, a temporary structure that the German nation, if it chose, could eventually turn into a monumental building. It incorporated all his theatrical ideas, which (as mentioned in the Ring preface) had been translated into practical terms by the architect Gottfried Semper. Now, working with the architect Otto Brückwald and the stage machinist Karl Brandt, Wagner realized them.

The auditorium (originally 1460 seats with boxes, including a royal box, behind) is on a single raked level, converging fan-shaped on a stage 32 metres wide and 23 metres deep (40 metres including the backstage area). A particular feature is the duplication of the stage proscenium arch (13 metres wide, 11.8 metres high) by a wider one just beyond the orchestra and the continuation of this line by ‘false’ wooden pillars projecting from the side walls to the back of the auditorium (fig.2). The orchestra is positioned in a deep well obscured from the audience’s sight. Wagner wrote: ‘We called this the “mystic chasm”, because its task was to separate the real from the ideal’, and the result of this arrangement, together with the extended proscenium, was that ‘the spectator has the feeling of being at a far distance from the events on stage, yet perceives them with the clarity of near proximity; in consequence, the stage figures give the illusion of being enlarged and superhuman’. The hood over the orchestra serves the additional function of throwing the orchestral sound on to the stage to blend with the vocal sound before being projected back to the auditorium. All these features, combined with the theatre’s wooden ceiling covered with painted canvas, give the performances in the Festspielhaus a visual and acoustical flavour that is unique.

With the aid of a loan from King Ludwig, Wagner was at last able, in August 1876, to produce the Ring for the first time in its entirety. Three complete cycles were given, the first attended by Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany and the last by King Ludwig. But Wagner’s triumph was clouded by dissatisfaction with the production itself and dismay at the huge financial deficit remaining. Six years passed before he could afford to stage another festival, this time (1882) devoted exclusively to Parsifal, his only work written expressly for the completed Festspielhaus (a fact reflected in its orchestration) and intended by Wagner to be performed nowhere else. In all, 16 performances were given. At the last, Wagner took the baton for the final scene – his only conducting appearance in his own theatre. He died in the following year.

4. Wagner’s successors.

The task of running the festival devolved on Wagner’s widow Cosima, who dedicated herself to carrying out the composer’s wishes exactly as she understood them. Wagner had intended that all his works from Der fliegende Holländer onwards should eventually be staged in his theatre, and Cosima’s first production (1886) was Tristan und Isolde, followed by Die Meistersinger in 1888, Tannhäuser in 1891, Lohengrin in 1894, a new production of the Ring in 1896, and Der fliegende Holländer in 1901. Her achievement was laudable, but her priestess-like devotion to the voice of the master and her refusal to consider new ideas (such as those of the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia) threatened to turn the Festspielhaus into a museum. She did, however, move with the times to the extent of installing electric lighting in 1888 in place of the original gas. Cosima’s choice of artists, though widened to include foreign singers, was based not on their star quality (the Bayreuth Festival prides itself on making reputations rather than profiting from them), but on the artists’ willingness to submit to her rigid production style, in which prescribed movements were tied closely to musical phrases and clear diction was of paramount importance.

Cosima was assisted by her daughters Daniela and Isolde (for costumes and so on) and by her son Siegfried, who first conducted in the Festspielhaus in 1896 (the Ring). After the festival of 1906 Cosima, in failing health, relinquished control in favour of Siegfried, but remained in Wahnfried.

Siegfried made no radical changes in the years before 1914, continuing the pattern established by his mother: festivals were held in two consecutive summers, followed by a rest year; Parsifal and the Ring were presented at all festivals, together with one other work. His impact was more marked after 1924, when the festival was resumed after a ten-year break. While not abandoning the basically realistic productions of his father and mother, he gradually replaced painted backcloths with solid sets, extended the stage depth, improved the lighting system and allowed his singers more freedom of movement. His production of Tannhäuser in 1930 was the first decisive move away from the conception of the Bayreuth Festival as a museum religiously preserving Wagner’s own production style.

Both Cosima and Siegfried died in 1930. Siegfried’s successor, his British-born widow Winifred (née Williams, 1897–1980), had no pretensions as a producer, and she appointed the Intendant of the Berlin Staatsoper, Heinz Tietjen, as artistic director. Tietjen’s productions, with scenic designs by Emil Preetorius (except Parsifal, redesigned in 1934 by Alfred Roller and in 1937 by Wieland Wagner), were lavish. If this period of the Bayreuth Festival’s history is to some extent viewed with disapproval, the fault lies not in the productions or the stylized modified realism of Preetorius’s sets, but in Winifred Wagner’s personal association with Hitler, a frequent visitor to Bayreuth. At his command the festival became a yearly event from 1936 to 1944 (when war events closed it down), and at his request Parsifal was dropped from the programme from 1940. Winifred’s contribution to the building itself was the erection of an administrative block on the north-west side and (in 1932) a new line of boxes at the back of the auditorium above the royal box.

The fact that Winifred Wagner, politically compromised, was still by the terms of her husband’s will the sole owner of the festival’s assets delayed the reopening after World War II, but eventually her two sons Wieland (1917–66) and Wolfgang (b 1919) were permitted to assume control as lessees. Wieland Wagner’s Parsifal, with which the festival reopened in July 1951, made a sensational impact, as did his production of the Ring. The realism, modified or otherwise, of the previous festivals had disappeared; what little stage scenery there was came mainly from light projections; costumes were simple and stylized; choruses, uniformly dressed, moved in precise formations; and the soloists matched their movements to the words rather than the music.

The ‘new Bayreuth style’, as it came to be called, may have owed something of its origin to the need to change the festival’s image after its Nazi associations, but it soon established an artistic validity, and before long directors everywhere were copying Wieland Wagner’s methods. Wieland, whose production experience had been gained outside Bayreuth (in Nuremberg and Altenburg), acknowledged no masters, but his conception of the stage as an ‘illuminated space’ owes something to Appia as well as to Gordon Craig. In the years 1951–66, during which the festival was again an annual event, he used the Festspielhaus as an ‘experimental workshop’, bringing out new productions or modifying older ones in a constant search for new aspects. Like Cosima, he chose singers who were willing to follow his ideas: casts, which had been predominantly German under Winifred Wagner, again became international.

Wolfgang Wagner, who served his apprenticeship under Tietjen in Berlin, concentrated mainly on administrative duties until 1966. These included the restoration of the theatre itself. Although Richard Wagner, regarding it as a temporary structure, had set little store on its outward appearance, Wolfgang Wagner decided, in the interests of its unique visual and acoustic qualities, to retain the original form of the building both inwardly and outwardly, and simply to replace weak parts with more solid materials (steel, concrete, brick). He extended the stage still further, modernized technical equipment, increased the seating capacity (now 1925) and built new offices, dressing rooms and rehearsal stages.

During the period of joint control with his brother, Wolfgang Wagner staged his own productions of some of the works. These, though less radical than Wieland Wagner’s, adhered in the main to the principles of the new Bayreuth style. Following Wieland Wagner’s death in 1966, Wolfgang Wagner, while continuing to stage operas occasionally himself, adopted from 1969 a policy of inviting directors from outside the family to stage one of the works in turn, each production remaining in the repertory for a number of years (usually five). Guest directors up to 1998 were August Everding, Götz Friedrich, Harry Kupfer, Patrice Chéreau, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Peter Hall, Werner Herzog, Dieter Dorn, Heiner Müller and Alfred Kirchner. The result of this policy was the disappearance of a recognizable Bayreuth style. Guest directors have been allowed the freedom to interpret the works each in his own way, untrammelled by any pious regard to the composer’s expressed intentions. The tendency of most (though not all) of them has been to place a direct stress (through the use of modern clothing or alienation techniques, for instance) on the moral, sociological and political implications of the works rather than on the mythological guise in which Wagner chose more indirectly to present them.

The annual festivals run from the last week of July to the end of August; Parsifal and the Ring are usually given, together with two of the other works, and each festival normally contains one new production.

5. Richard Wagner Foundation.

The festival was financially self-supporting until World War II, but after its postwar reopening it relied to some extent on public subsidies. In May 1973 exclusive family ownership of the festival ended with the creation of the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth which assumed responsibility in perpetuity for the festival and took over its assets, including the Wagner archives in Wahnfried. The trustees of the foundation include members of the Wagner family and representatives of the German government, the Bavarian Land, the town of Bayreuth and the voluntary organization Die Freunde von Bayreuth. The foundation does not finance the festival, which continues to receive public subsidies, and sole artistic control remains in the hands of the appointed festival director (Wolfgang Wagner was appointed in 1973). In the choice of future directors the trustees undertake to give preference to members of the Wagner family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (O. Kaul, G. Skelton)

R. Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften, vi, ix–x (1872–83)

L. Schiedermair: Bayreuther Festspiele im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Leipzig, 1908)

A. von Puttkamer: 50 Jahre Bayreuth (Berlin, 1927)

G. Skelton: Wagner at Bayreuth: Experiment and Tradition (London, 1965, 2/1976/R)

Z. von Kraft: Der Sohn: Siegfried Wagners Leben und Umwelt (Graz, 1969)

W.E. Schäfer: Wieland Wagner: Persönlichkeit und Leistung (Tübingen, 1970)

G. Skelton: Wieland Wagner: the Positive Sceptic (London, 1971)

Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘100 Jahre Bayreuther Festspiele’ (Regensburg and Munich, 1972–6)

H. Barth, ed.: Der Festspielhügel (Munich, 1973, 2/1976)

H. Barth, D. Mack and E. Voss, eds.: Wagner: sein Leben und sein Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna, 1975; Eng. trans., 1975)

C. Wagner: Die Tagebücher 1869–1883 (Munich, 1976–7; Eng. trans., 1978–80)

S. Grossmann-Vendrey, F. Schneider and P. Fiebig: Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse: Beiträge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele (Regensburg, 1977–83)

P. Burbidge and R. Sutton, eds.: The Wagner Companion (London, 1979)

H.-J. Bauer: Barockoper in Bayreuth (Laaber, 1982)

O.G. Bauer: Richard Wagner: die Bühnenwerke von des Uraufführung bis heute (Fribourg, 1982)

G. Skelton: Richard and Cosima Wagner: Biography of a Marriage (London, 1982)

S. Spencer and B. Millington, eds.: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (London, 1987)

F. Spotts: Bayreuth: a History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, CT, 1994)

W. Wagner: Lebens-Akte (Munich, 1994; Eng. trans., 1994)

Bazelon, Irwin (Allen)

(b Evanston, IL, 4 June 1922; d New York, 2 Aug 1995). American composer. After graduating from DePaul University (BA 1944, MA 1945), he studied with Milhaud at Mills College (1946–8) and then settled in New York in 1948, where he received numerous fellowships, honours and commissions. His music is in the tradition of urban American expressionism, with audible antecedents in the works of Varèse and Ruggles but with a distinctive angular simplicity, characterized by dramatic alternations between violence and tenderness. Bazelon’s language, while influenced by serialism, borrows the jabbing brass and percussion chords and the propulsive rhythms of big-band jazz. This driving energy is contrasted with moments of relative repose in which orchestral colours are subtly varied.

Bazelon’s ten symphonies (1962–92) form the heart of his musical output. The immediacy of these works derives from their spare textures, which often feature one or two contrapuntal lines presented in striking instrumental combinations; characteristic passages are harmonically and timbrally static, treating sound as a sculptural object. A free use of serial techniques combined with an undercurrent of jazz creates a dark sense of New York City, reminiscent of film noir. The influence of a lighter jazz style, reflecting the manic side of life in New York, dominates such works as the chamber concerto Churchill Downs (1971). Named after the racetrack near the city, it features electronic instruments more typically employed in rock and pop music.

Bazelon’s vocal works set texts from the modernist tradition of American poetry (i.e. Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, etc.) in a highly charged, chromatic style, more dramatic than lyrical, with striking and uncluttered accompaniments. Also notable are percussion works such as Propulsions (1974), with their emphasis on rhythmic invention, dramatic structure and the exploration of timbre. Several film scores, as well as music for television, number among his other compositions. He is the author of Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York, 1975).

WORKS

(selective list)

orchestral

10 syms.: no.1, 1961; no.2 ‘Testament to a Big City’, 1961; no.3, brass, str sextet, perc, pf, 1962; no.4, 1965; no.5, 1967; no.6, 1969; no.7 (ballet), 1980; no.8, str, 1986; no.8 1/2, 1988; no.9 ‘Sunday Silence’, 1992

Other: Adagio and Fugue, str, 1947; Concert Ov., 1951, rev. 1961; Suite, small orch, 1953, rev. 1960; Centauri 17 (ballet), 1959; Ov. to Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 1960; Suite from Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, 1960; Dramatic Movt, 1965; Excursion, 1965; Sym. concertante, cl, tpt, mar, orch, 1968; Dramatic Fanfare, brass, perc, 1970; A Quiet Piece for a Violent Time, chbr orch, 1975; De-Tonations, brass qnt, orch, 1976; Spirits of the Night, 1976; Memories of a Winter Childhood, 1981; Spires, tpt, small orch, 1981; For Tuba with Str Attached, tuba, str/str qt, 1982; Tides, cl, orch, 1982; Fusions, chbr orch, 1983; Pf Conc., 1983; Trajectories, pf conc., 1985; Motivations, trbn, orch, 1986; Fourscore + 2, perc qt, orch, 1987; Midnight Music, wind, 1990; Prelude to Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, str, 1991; Entre nous, vc, orch, 1992; Fire and Smoke, timp, winds, 1994

chamber

4 or more insts: Str Qt no.2, 1946; Movimento da camera, fl, bn, hn, hpd, 1954, rev. 1960; Chbr Conc. no.1, pic + fl, E cl + cl, tpt, tuba, vn, pf, perc, 1957; Brass Qnt, 1963; Early American Suite, ww qnt, hpd, 1965; Churchill Downs (Chbr Conc. no.2), brass, str septet, perc, 1971; Propulsions, perc ens, 1974; Ww qnt, 1975; Concatenations, va, perc qt, 1976; Sound Dreams, fl, cl, va, vc, pf, perc, 1977; Triple Play, 2 trbn, perc, 1977; Cross Currents, brass qnt, perc, 1978; Fusions, chbr ens, 1983; Quintessentials, fl, cl, mar, perc, db, 1983; Fourscore, perc qt, 1985; Fairy Tale, va, chbr ens, 1989

1–3 inst: Suite, cl, vc, pf, 1947; 5 Pieces, vc, pf, 1950; Duo, va, pf, 1963, rev. 1970; Double Crossings, tpt, perc, 1976; 3 Men on a Dis-Course, cl, vc, perc, 1979; Partnership, timp, mar, 1980; Suite, mar, 1983; Alliances, vc, pf, 1989; Bazz Ma Tazz, trbn, perc, 1992

keyboard

for piano unless otherwise stated

Sonata no.1, 1947, rev. 1952; Sonata no.2, 1949, rev. 1952; Suite for Young People, 1950; 5 Pieces, 1952; Sonatina, 1952; Sonata no.3, 1953; Vignette, hpd, 1975; Imprints … on Ivory and Strings, 1978; Re-Percussions, 2 pf, 1982; Sunday Silence, 1989

vocal

Phenomena (syllabic text), S, chbr ens, 1972; Junctures (syllabic text), S, orch, 1979; Legends and Love Letters (H. Crane), S, chbr ens, 1987; Four … Parts of the World (W. Stevens), S, pf, 1991

Principal publishers: Presser, Boosey & Hawkes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC1 (R.R. Bennett)

D.H. Cox: ‘A World of Violent Silence: a Note on Irwin Bazelon’, MT, cxxiii/Oct (1982), 683–5

D.H. Cox: Irwin Bazelon (Westport, CT, forthcoming)

SCOTT WHEELER

Bazin, François-Emmanuel-Victor

(b Marseilles, 4 Sept 1816; d Paris, 2 July 1878). French composer, teacher and conductor. He became a student at the Paris Conservatoire in 1834, and studied composition with Henri-Montan Berton and Halévy. He won premiers prix for harmony and accompaniment (1836), counterpoint and fugue (1836) and for organ playing (1839). The jury of the Prix de Rome awarded him a second prize on 30 April 1839, and the first prize on 23 May 1840. His cantata written for the competition, Loÿse de Montfort, was performed at the Opéra on 7 October 1840.

On completing his studies he divided his time mainly between teaching and composition, and worked occasionally as a conductor. He held an unsalaried post as teacher of harmony and accompaniment at the Conservatoire from 1838 to 1 April 1841 and was appointed accompanist to the opera class on 1 December 1839. He became (unsalaried) assistant professor of harmony and accompaniment on 1 October 1843 and professor of harmony and accompaniment on 1 January 1849. Finally, on 1 October 1871, he succeeded Ambroise Thomas as professor of composition.

Some of Bazin’s choral works may have been performed by the Accademia Filarmonica Romana while he was at the Villa Medici. When he returned to Paris he soon became highly regarded as a teacher and as a composer. In 1846 his one-act Le trompette de Monsieur le Prince proved to be the first of a series of successful stage works up to 1870, all performed by the Opéra-Comique. The most popular, judging by the many transcriptions, must have been the three-act Le voyage en Chine, to a libretto by Eugène Labiche (1865).

Vocal music was another of Bazin’s main interests. He composed for and conducted choirs in Paris. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the male-voice choir movement there, and when the Orphéon was divided into two sections in 1860 he was appointed conductor for the Left Bank of the Seine.

His theoretical works, which include Cours d’harmonie théorique et pratique (Paris, 4/1857) and Traité de contrepoint (Paris, n.d.), are strongly rooted in the traditions of the Conservatoire; after 1844 Bazin was one of their most intransigent defenders. With Massé and Reber, he represented conservatism against the more modern and liberal tendencies of César Franck. No doubt this aspect of Bazin’s character was more marked after 1871, with the appointment of Ambroise Thomas (well known for his conservative ideas) as director of the Conservatoire. Bazin’s fortunes as an opera composer, however, declined beside the increasing success of Massenet, whom he had refused to accept as a student in his composition class at the Conservatoire. Ironically, Massenet succeeded him at the Conservatoire and the Institut de France when he retired.

Bazin received several honours besides his official appointments. Although an attempt to succeed Adam as a member of the Institut failed on 21 June 1856, he was eventually elected on 5 April 1873 (in succession to Carafa). He became vice-president of the composition section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1877 and president in 1878. He was made an Officier de L’Instruction Publique in 1875 and an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1876.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in Paris

stage

all opéras comiques, first performed in Paris, Salle Favart

Le trompette de Monsieur le Prince (1, Mélesville [A.-H.-J. Duveyrier]), 15 May 1846, excerpts, vs (1846), fs (1851)

Le malheur d’être jolie (I, C. Desnoyers), 18 May 1847, excerpts, vs (1847)

La nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre (3, Mélesville and M. Masson, after J.H. Zschokke), 7 July 1849, vs (1849) [pubd as La Saint-Sylvestre]

Madelon (2, T. Sauvage), 26 March 1852, excerpts, vs (1852), fs (c1854)

Maître Pathelin (1, A. de Leuven and J.A.F. Langlé), 12 Dec 1856, vs (1857), fs (n.d.)

Les désespérés (1, de Leuven and J. Moinaux), 26 Jan 1858, vs (1858)

Marianne (1, A. Challamel) (1861–2), unperf.

Le voyage en Chine (3, E.M. Labiche and A. Delacour), 9 Dec 1865 (1866)

L’ours et le pacha (1, Scribe and Saintine [J.X. Boniface]), 21 Feb 1870, vs (1870)

Unperf.: La belle au bois dormant; Mascarille

other works

Loÿse de Montfort (cant., 3, E. Dechamps and E. Pacini), Paris, Opéra, 7 Oct 1840 (1840)

Missa solemnis, Rome, 1842 (1865)

Ste Geneviève de Paris (hymn, G. Chouquet), male chorus, 4vv (1862)

Other sacred and secular works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (J.W. Klein)

J. Massenet: Notice sur François Bazin (Paris, 1879)

C. Le Senne: ‘François Bazin’, EMDC, I/iii (1913), 1759–61

J. Harding: Massenet (London, 1970)

J.-M. Bailbé and others: La musique en France à l’époque romantique (1830–1870) (Paris, 1991)

H. Lacombe: Les voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1997)

GÉRARD STRELETSKI

Bazino, Francesco.

See Bazzini, Francesco.

Baziron [Bazison], Philippe.

See Basiron, Philippe.

Bázlik, Miro(slav)

(b Partizánska L’upča, 12 April 1931). Slovak composer and pianist. He began his music education at the Bratislava State Conservatory, where he studied the piano with Anna Kafendová (1946–51). He then read mathematics at Prague University (until 1956) and studied privately with Jiři Eliáš (composition), Rauch and Moravec (piano). After returning to Bratislava he studied with Cikker at the College of Performing Arts (1956–62) and taught mathematics at Bratislava University. In 1963 he embarked on a career as a freelance composer, pianist and lecturer.

From an early age Bázlik displayed a talent towards both mathematics and music. His interest in composition stemmed from his insight as a skilled performer inspired by masterpieces from the classical piano repertory. His experience of mathematical analysis provided the basis for a rational approach to compositional technique and the move towards serialism, which he arrived at in Hudba (‘Music’, 1961) for violin and orchestra and Tri kusy (‘Three Pieces, 1964’). His view that music is essentially a dramatic art form gave rise to the opera Peter a Lucia (1963–6); here he combines the qualities of large-scale symphonic music with a synthesis of dodecaphony and tonal counterpoint. His research into algebraic topology has been a further source of inspiration together with the affiliation he feels for Xenakis. From here it was only a short distance to composing in the electro-acoustic medium, which became his dominant interest in the early 1970s. Of these works Triptych (1971) and the cycle Spektrá (1970–74) are based on electro-acoustic transformations of historic styles, forming a synthesis of traditional compositional ideals and an accompanying modern commentary. His vocal-orchestral work Canticum 43 combines counterpoint from the Renaissance and Baroque periods with serialism and controlled movement of sound masses. In Simple Electronic Symphony (1975) he applies the Golden Section within the framework of sonata form. These ideas remained a constant feature of works composed during the 1980s and are coupled later with a stronger desire to incorporate elements from the European classical tradition.

Among his several awards are first prize at the Maria-José competition in Geneva in 1974 (for Canticum 43) and the Ján Levoslav Bella Prize in 1977 (for Dvanást' ‘The Twelve’). Bázlik’s repertory as a performer includes the complete solo keyboard works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven (all performed from memory).

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Peter a Lucia (7 scenes, M. Horňák, after R. Rolland), 1963–6

Orch: Baroková suita, wind, str, 1960; Hudba [Music], vn, orch, 1961; Pochod, malá koncertantná hudba [March, a Little Concert Music], str, timp, 1966; 5 malých elégií [5 small Elegies], str, 1975; Sonata, str, hpd, 1980; Epoché I, vc, orch, 1983, arr. as Epoché III, vc, orch, tape, 1984; Ballad-Conc., va, orch, 1984; Koncertantá hudba, 1985; Diptych (Introdukcia a Adieu), 1986; Partita, variations after Bach, 1988

Vocal: 5 piesní [5 Songs] (Chin. poetry), A, fl, vc, pf, 1960; Dvanást' [The Twelve] (orat, A. Blok), spkr, SATB, orch, 1967; Kantáta v starom slohu [Cant. in Old Style], SATB, chbr orch, 1967; Baladická suita v starom slohu [Ballad Suite in Old Style], S, fl, ob, cl, hn, bn, 2 vn, va, vc, perc, 1969; Canticum 43 (Ps xliii), S, SATB, orch, 1968–71; Canticum Jeremiae (chbr orat, Bible), S, B-Bar, SATB, vn, str, 1987; De profundis (St John Perse), S, opt. SATB, orch 1990

Chbr: 3 kusy [3 Pieces], 14 insts, 1964; Str Qt no.1 ‘v starom slohu’ [In Old Style], 1965; Hudba k poézii [Music to Poetry], fl, ob, cl, hn, bn, hp, vib, str qt, 1966; Pastorále, fl, ob, cl, bn, hpd, 1968; Str Qt no.2, 1973; Wind Qnt no.1, 1977; Str Qt no.3, 1978; Wind Qnt no.2, 1978

Pf: Variácie a fúga 1950 [after Paganini Vn Conc.]; Sonata, b, 1954; Paleta, 1956; Hudba k básnikovi a žene [Music to Poet and Woman], 1969; 24 prelúdií, 1981–4; 6 epigramov, 1986

El-ac: Spektrá (metamorfózy a komentáre k prvému dielu Temperovaného klavíra J.S. Bacha) [Metamorphoses of and Comments on Volume I of Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier], 6 pieces, 1970–74; Triptych, 1971; Simple Electronic Sym., tape, 1975; Pastierska balada [Pastoral Ballad], 1977; Ergodická kompozícia, 1980 Bačovská elégia [Shepherd’s Elegy], 1983; Epoché II, vc, tape, 1984, rev. 1994; Balada o dreve [Ballad about Wood], tape, 1987

Principal publishers: Slovak Music Fund, OPUS

Principal recording companies: OPUS, Supraphon, Slovak Records

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Hrčková: ‘Hudba a dobro’, [Music and goodness], SH, xv (1971), 229–33

N. Földváriová: ‘Čas pre drámu: s Mirom Bázlikom, skladatel'om, interpretom a vyznávačom algebraickej topológie’ [Time for drama: [interview] with Bázlik, composer, performer and follower of algebraic topology], Slovenské divadlo (1994), no.1, pp.80–87

M. Bázlik: ‘Goldbergove variácie J.S. Bacha’, SH, xxi (1995), 10–12

L. Zajicek: An Oral History of Electro-Acoustic Music of the Czech and Slovak Republics (diss., San José State U., 1995), 102–9

M. Bázlik, J. Ďuriš and V. Godár: ‘Tri stretnutia’ [3 meetings], SH, xxii (1996), 215–46

VLADIMÍR GODÁR

Bazuin

(Dut.).

See under Organ stop (Posaune).

Bazylik, Cyprian [Basilicus, Ciprianus; Cyprian z Sieradza; Ciprianus Sieradensis]

(b Sieradz, c1535; d in or after 1600). Polish writer, poet, composer and printer. In printed volumes of music he was referred to as ‘C. B.’ and ‘C.S.’; on 1 September 1557 he was knighted and admitted to the family of Heraklides Jakub Basilikos. He studied at Kraków Academy in 1550–51 and then worked for a while in the chancellery of King Sigismund II August. In 1558 he moved to Lithuania and worked at Wilno (now Vilnius) and Brześć Litewski (now Brest) as a member of the court of Duke Mikołaj Radziwiłł. He was engaged mainly as musician, but later he worked as a writer and as a translator of Calvinist publications. In 1569–70 he owned a printing house at Brześć Litewski and was a member of the household of Albrecht Łaski, the Voivode of Sieradz. Subsequently with financial assistance from the king, he continued his work as a translator, mainly of Latin works on history and politics; he also wrote a number of occasional poems. His writings are notable for the distinction of their language. He published his last literary work in 1600. His known music was all published in the late 1550s and consists mainly of four-part polyphonic works. They were written for the use of Polish Reformers, and the mostly simple, note-against-note textures show that they were intended for popular performance. The few that are elaborately contrapuntal suggest that Bazylik may have composed other, more ambitious works of this kind (now lost), which would help justify his contemporary reputation as a highly skilled musician.

WORKS

Edition:Cyprian Bazylik: Pieśni [Songs], ed. Z.M. Szweykowski, WDMP, xxxiv (1958) [incl. all extant vocal works]

Pieśń z ewanjeliej [Evangelical songs], 4vv (Kraków, 1557)

5 songs, 4vv: Dobrotliwość pańska [The goodness of the Lord]; Nabożna piosnka [Holy song]; Pieśń nowa krześcijańska [A new Christian song]; Pieśń nowa w której jest dziękowanie [A new song of thanksgiving]; Pieśń o niebezpieczeństwie żywota człowieczego [Song of the dangers of man’s life]: all in Kancjonał zamojski [Zamość hymnbook] (Kraków, c1558)

5 psalms, 4vv, in Kancjonał zamojski (Kraków, c1558)

3 hymns, 1v, in Pieśni chrześcijańskie, dawniejsze i nowe [Christian songs, old and new], ed. J. Seklucjan (Królewiec, 1559)

Hymns, in J. Zaremba: Pieśni chwał boskich [Spiritual songs of praise] (Brześć Litewski, 1558), ed. in MMP, ser. B, ii (1989)

Works composed for Duke Albrecht of Prussia, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SMP

PSB (S. Kot)

S. Kot: ‘Kancjonał brzeski Jana Zaręby z 1558 r.’ [The Brest hymnbook of Jan Zaremba (1558)], Reformacja w Polsce, ix–x (1937–9), 443

Z.M. Szweykowski: Introduction to WDMP, xxxvi (1958)

K. Hławiczka: ‘Pieśni Cypriana z Sieradza’ [The songs of Cyprian z Sieradza], Muzyka, iv/3 (1959) [with Eng. summary]

A. Kawecka-Gryczowa and others, eds.: Drukarze dawnej Polski [Early Polish printers], v (Wrocław, 1959), 45ff

K. Budzyk, ed.: Bibliografia literatury polskiej ‘Nowy Korbut’, ii (Warsaw, 1964)

R. Mazurkiewicz: O melodiach kancjonałów Jana Seklucjana z 1547 i 1559 roku [The melodies in the hymnbooks of Jan Seklucjan from 1547 to 1559] (Kraków, 1967)

K. Hławiczka: ‘Melodie Wacława z Szamotuł, Cypriana Bazylika i Mikołaja Gomółki w kancjonale brzeskim’ [Melodies of Wacław of Szamotuły, Cyprian Bazylik and Mikołaj Gomółka in the Cantionale of Brzeg], Muzyka, xiii (1968), no.1, pp.95–100; no.2, pp.83–92 [with Eng. summary]

P. Poźniak: ‘Dwunasta pieśń czteroglíosowa Cypriana Bazylika’ [The twelfth four-voice song by Cyprian Bazylik], Muzyka, xli/1 (1996), 55–70 [with Eng. summary]

ZYGMUNT M. SZWEYKOWSKI

Bazzani, Francesco Maria

(b ?Parma, c1650; d Piacenza, c1700). Italian composer and teacher. He was the son of one of Duke Ranuccio Farnese’s servants. On the duke’s recommendation he was elected maestro di cappella of Piacenza Cathedral on 16 June 1679 and held the post until at least 1693. From 1684 to 1686 he was also maestro di cappella of S Giovanni in Canale, Piacenza. He was a respected teacher; his nephew Fortunato Chelleri was one of his pupils. Of his music only that of his oratorio La caduta del Gerico (1693) survives (in I-MOe). His other works (of which some librettos survive) included the operas L’inganno trionfante (Parma, 1673), Ottone in Italia (Parma, 1679) and Il pedante di Tarsia (Bologna, 1680); the oratorios Il bacio della giustizia e della pace (Piacenza, 1697), Mose in Egitto and Passione di Nostro Signore; I trionfi dell’Eridano in cielo, an azione drammatica (Piacenza, 1679), and La pace scesa in terra, an ‘omaggio in versi e musica a Gesu bambino’ (1683).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. de Giovanni: La cappella giovannea (Piacenza, 1922), 14

F. Bussi: Alcuni maestri di cappella e organisti della cattedrale di Piacenza (Piacenza, 1956), 8ff

JULIA ANN GRIFFIN

Bazzini, Antonio

(b Brescia, 11 March 1818; d Milan, 10 Feb 1897). Italian violinist, composer and teacher. He was a pupil of a Brescian violinist, Faustino Camisani (Camesani); encouraged by Paganini, he began his concert career at an early age and became one of the most highly regarded artists of his time. From 1841 to 1845 he lived in Germany, where he was much admired by Schumann both as a violinist and a composer, as well as by Mendelssohn (Bazzini gave the first private performance of his Violin Concerto). After a short stay in Denmark he returned to Brescia to teach and compose. In 1846 he played in Naples and Palermo. In 1849–50 he toured Spain and from 1852 to 1863 lived in Paris. He ended his concert career with a tour of the Netherlands in 1864. Returning once more to Brescia, he devoted himself to composition, gradually abandoning the virtuoso opera fantasias and character-pieces (such as the well-known La ronde des lutins, Elégie and Le muletier), which had formed a large part of his earlier work. He attempted an opera (Turanda, 1867), dramatic cantatas, sacred music, concert overtures and symphonic poems, as well as chamber music, the genre in which he achieved his greatest success. Written in the classic forms of the German school Bazzini's chamber works earned him a central place in the Italian instrumental renaissance of the 19th century. In 1868 he became president of the Società dei Concerti in Brescia, and was active in promoting and composing for quartet societies in Italy. In 1873 he became composition professor at the Milan Conservatory and in 1882 its director. Among his pupils there were Catalani, Mascagni and Puccini.

WORKS

Vocal: Il silfo e l'innamorato, scena, 1v, vn obbl, pf, op.39 (Milan, 1865); Turanda (op, 5, A. Gozzoletti, after C. Gozzi), Milan, Scala, 13 Jan 1867; Sennacheribbo (sinfonia cant., V. Meini), S, Bar, vv, orch, vs (Milan, ?1875); sacred works, incl. masses, lits, cants., ps; songs

Orch: Ov. to Alfieri's Saul, 1866 (Florence, 1869); Re Lear, ov., op.68, 1868 (Florence, ?1874); Francesca da Rimini, sym. poem, op.77 (Berlin, 1889/90)

Vn, orch: Concertino, E, op.14, arr, vn, pf (Milan and Leipzig, 1843); Grand allegro de concert, op.15 (Milan, 1845); Vn Conc. no.3 (Hymne triomphal), B, op.29 (Milan and Mainz, 1855); Vn Conc. (Conc. militare), D, op.42 (Milan, 1863); Vn Conc., no.4, a, op.38 (Milan, 1865); Allegro drammatico, op.51 (Mainz, n.d.)

Chbr: Str Qt, op.7, unpubd; Str Qt, C (Milan, 1864); Str Qnt, F, 1865, unpubd; Str Qr, E, op.76 (Milan, 1879); Str Qnt, A, 1866 (Milan, 1884); Str Qt, G, op.79 (London, ?1892); Str Qt, c, op.80 (Milan, 1892); Str Qt, d, op.75 (Leipzig, 1893)

Vn, pf: Gran duo concertante (Milan, 1840); La ronde des lutins, scherzo fantastique, op.25 (Milan, 1852); Elégie, op.35 no.1 (Milan, 1860); Le muletier, op.35 no.3 (Milan, 1860); 3 morceaux en forme de sonate, op.44 (Milan, ?1863); Sonata, e, op.55 (Milan, 1872); numerous salon pieces, opera fantasias etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

R. Schumann: ‘Antonio Bazzini’, NZM, xviii (1843), 169–70

E. De Guarini: ‘Antonio Bazzini’, RMI, iv (1897), 340–44

C. Sartori: ‘Antonio Bazzini negli ultimi anni’, Brescia, ix (1936), 17–20

A. Toni: Antonio Bazzini (Milan, 1946)

G. Barblan: ‘Le due vite artistiche di Antonio Bazzini’, I grandi anniversari del 1960 e la musica sinfonica e da camera nell'Ottocento in Italia, Chigiana, xvii (1960), 45–50

B. Friedland: ‘Italy's Ottocento: Notes from the Musical Underground’, MQ, lvi (1970), 27–53, esp. 39–42

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972), 374ff

C. Sartori: ‘Antonio Bazzini e il teatro lirico’, Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977)

C. Sartori: ‘Antonio Bazzini e i suoi maestri’, NRMI, xi (1977), 606–21

C. Sartori: L'avventura del violino: L'Italia musicale dell'Ottocento nella biografia e nei carteggi di Antonio Bazzini (Turin, 1978) [with extensive work-list]

M. Girardi: ‘I compositori della “Messa” per Rossini’, Messa per Rossini: la storia, il testo, la musica, ed. M. Girardi and P. Petrobelli (Parma, 1988), 151–60

GIOVANNI CARLI BALLOLA/ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN

Bazzini [Bazzino, Bazino], Francesco

(b Lovere, 1593; d Bergamo, 15 April 1660). Italian singer, theorbo player, organist and composer, younger brother of Natale Bazzini. He studied at the seminary and at the Accademia della Mia at Bergamo, where he gained a reputation as an excellent singer. He studied composition with Giovanni Cavaccio and in 1614 began teaching at the academy. He served as organist of S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, and also sang in the choir there, until he was summoned to serve the Este court at Modena. He was prominent as a singer and theorbo player in performances at the court and in the city itself, and he was given leave to perform at the court in Vienna and at Venice, Florence and Parma (1628). In 1636 he returned to the Bergamo area where he remained until his death. He was living at Zanica, very close to Bergamo, in 1637, when he was paid considerably more than any other visiting singer to take part in elaborate performances of Assumptiontide music at S Maria Maggiore. According to Calvi he published canzonettas, theorbo sonatas and an oratorio, La rappresentazione di S Orsola, all of which seem to be lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

D. Calvi: Scena letteraria de gli scrittori bergamaschi, i (Bergamo, 1664), 155ff

A. Valentini: I musicisti bresciani e il Teatro Grande (Brescia, 1894), 17f

A. Geddo: Bergamo e la musica (Bergamo, 1958), 107–8

J. Roche: ‘Music at S. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, 1614–1643’, ML, xlvii (1966), 296–312, esp. 300, 310–11

JULIA ANN GRIFFIN

Bazzini [Bazzino], Natale

(b Lovere; d Bergamo, 1639). Composer, organist and singer. He became a chaplain at S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, in 1610 and sang in the choir until 1611. He was an organist at nearby Desio in 1628. In that year he published at Venice a volume of Messe, motetti et dialogi a 5, concertati, the dialogues of which are important in the history of the oratorio. According to Calvi he published four other volumes – two books of motets, Messe e salmi a 3, concertati and Arie nuove e diverse – but all seem to be lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Calvi: Scena letteraria de gli scrittori bergamaschi, i (Bergamo, 1664), 155ff

H.E. Smither: ‘The Latin Dramatic Dialogue and the Nascent Oratorio’, JAMS, xx (1967), 403–33

B durum.

See B mi and Accidental, §1.

Be

(Ger.).

SeeFlat.

Beach [née Cheney], Amy Marcy [Mrs H.H.A. Beach]

(b Henniker, NH, 5 Sept 1867; d New York, 27 Dec 1944). American composer and pianist. She was the first American woman to succeed as a composer of large-scale art music and was celebrated during her lifetime as the foremost woman composer of the USA. A descendant of a distinguished New England family, she was the only child of Charles Abbott Cheney, a paper manufacturer and importer, and Clara Imogene (Marcy) Cheney, a talented amateur singer and pianist. At the age of one she could sing 40 tunes accurately and always in the same key; before the age of two she improvised alto lines against her mother's soprano melodies; at three she taught herself to read; and at four she mentally composed her first piano pieces and later played them, and could play by ear whatever music she heard, including hymns in four-part harmony. The Cheneys moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, about 1871. Amy's mother agreed to teach her the piano when she was six, and at seven she gave her first public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven and Chopin, and her own pieces. In 1875 the family moved to Boston, where her parents were advised that she could enter a European conservatory; but they decided on local training, engaging Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann as piano teachers. Her development as a pianist was monitored by a circle including Louis C. Elson, Percy Goetschius, H.W. Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Mason and Henry Harris Aubrey Beach (1843–1910), a physician who lectured on anatomy at Harvard and was an amateur singer; she was to marry him in 1885.

At her successful début in Boston (24 October 1883) she played Chopin's Rondo in E and Moscheles's G minor Concerto, conducted by Adolf Neuendorff; at her début with the Boston SO (28 March 1885), the first of several appearances with that orchestra, she played Chopin's F minor Concerto with Wilhelm Gericke conducting. After her marriage to Dr Beach, and in respect of his wishes, she curtailed her performances, giving only annual recitals, with proceeds donated to charity. Most significantly, following her husband's wishes, her focus changed to composition.

Her training in composition was limited to one year of harmony and counterpoint with Junius W. Hill. In 1884 she sought a composition teacher, consulting Gericke, who prescribed a course of independent study using the masters as models. Following his advice, and for the next ten years, she taught herself fugue, double fugue, composition and orchestration, using a range of theory texts, and translating treatises by Berlioz and Gevaert. During that time, she also produced a substantial body of work including her Mass in E op.5, an 85-minute work for large performing forces. Almost all of her compositions were performed (in particular her songs and choral pieces), and were published by Arthur P. Schmidt, her exclusive publisher from 1885 to 1910.

Beach's first published work was The Rainy Day, a setting of Longfellow's poem, composed in 1880 and issued in 1883. Her major works during the period 1885–1910 include the Mass, the Symphony op.32, the Violin Sonata op.34, the Piano Concerto op.45, the Variations on Balkan Themes op.60 and the Piano Quintet op.67 – introduced by such ensembles as the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, the Kneisel Quartet and the Boston SO. Eminent singers of the time, such as Emma Eames and Marcella Sembrich, presented her songs on recital programmes. Two of her many songs, Ecstasy op.19 no.2 and The Year's at the Spring op.44 no.1, sold many thousands of copies. Among her commissioned works were the Festival Jubilate op.17, written for the dedication (1 May 1893) of the Women's Building of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Eilende Wolken op.18, given its première by the Symphony Society of New York (2 December 1892) and the Song of Welcome op.42, for the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, Omaha (1898); others were the Panama Hymn op.74, for the international Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1915), and the Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet op.80, for the San Francisco Chamber Music Society.

After her husband's death in 1910 and her mother's in 1911, Beach went to Europe (sailing on 5 September 1911), determined to establish a reputation there as both performer and composer and to promote the sale of her own works. Beginning in autumn 1912 she gave recitals in German cities, playing her sonata and quintet and accompanying her songs; her symphony was given in Leipzig and Hauburg, and her concerto in those two cities and in Berlin. The reviews were favourable: one journal stated that Beach was the leading American composer and the critic Pfohl called Beach a ‘virtuoso pianist’ who had, as a composer, ‘a musical nature tinged with genius’.

At the outbreak of World War I Beach returned to the USA, with 30 concerts already scheduled in the East and Midwest, and in 1915 moved briefly to New York and San Francisco, settling in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, in 1916. Thereafter she spent winters on tour and summers practising and composing in Hillsborough; in Centerville on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she owned land purchased with the proceeds of her song Ecstasy; and, from 1921, as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony where almost all her later works were composed. Outstanding among them are the String Quartet op.89, the two Hermit Thrush pieces op.92, From Grandmother's Garden op.97, Rendezvous op.120, The Canticle of the Sun op.123, Three Piano Pieces op.128, and the chamber opera Cabildo op.149. She made several trips abroad, including one to Rome (1929), where she finished her String Quartet. In 1942, to celebrate Beach's 75th birthday, Elena de Sayn, a violinist and critic from Washington, DC, organized two retrospective concerts of her music.

A highly disciplined composer, capable of producing large-scale works in a few days, Beach was also energetic in the promotion of her compositions, arranging for performances as soon as works were completed. As a pianist, she had a virtuoso technique and an extraordinary memory. She was interested in philosophy and science, and was fluent in German and French. Deeply religious, she later became virtual composer-in-residence at St Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, New York. She was generous, using her status as dean of American women composers to further the careers of many young musicians. She served as leader of several organizations, including the Music Teachers National Association and the Music Educators National Conference, and was co-founder in 1925 and the first president of the Society of American Women Composers. Heart disease caused her retirement in 1940 and her death in 1944. Her will assigned her royalties to the MacDowell Colony.

Beach's earliest works demonstrate her ability to create a long line and her sensitivity to relationships between music and text. Song is at the core of her style – she used some of her songs as themes in her instrumental works (e.g. the Symphony, the Piano Concerto op.45 and the Piano Trio op.150) – but her remarkable ear for harmony and harmonic colour is also apparent from the beginning. Like the early Romantics, Beach emphasized modal degrees and used mixed modes. Her perfect pitch and association of keys with colours and by extension with moods resulted in the expressive use of modulation (e.g. the song Die vier Brüder from op.1).

Her mature style, characterized by increasing chromaticism, use of long-held and overlapping appoggiaturas, 7th and augmented-6th chords, modulation by 3rds and avoidance of the dominant, shows her debt to the late Romantics, as well to the use of Scottish, Irish, American and European folk music in some 30 compositions. However, she was acutely aware of the stylistic changes in music from the 1910s, and a significant number of her late works depart from the previously lush harmonies. The String Quartet (1929), for example, which quotes three simple Inuit melodies, displays lean textures and contrapuntally driven, unresolved dissonances, while From Grandmother's Garden, whose title may suggest a retrospective style, moves further away from tonality. Her most adventurous pieces verge on atonality itself: the first of the op.128 set of three pieces for piano, ‘Scherzino: a Peterborough Chipmunk’, begins with a series of arpeggiated seventh chords without tonal implications, while the Improvisation, op.148 no.1, employs whole-tone arpeggios arranged in chromatic wedges.

Beach first made her reputation as a composer of art songs. But it was her large-scale works beginning with the Mass and the Symphony that won her acceptance first by her Boston colleagues then nationally and internationally. Her most popular works in addition to the songs were the Symphony, which had dozens of performances by leading orchestras, the Violin Sonata, the Piano Quintet, the Theme and Variations for flute quintet, the Hermit Thrush pieces for piano and, among the secular choral works, The Chambered Nautilus. Her sacred works, in particular the anthem Let this mind be in you and the Expressionist The Canticle of the Sun, remained in the repertory of church choirs for years after her death when her other works were no longer heard. Many of her works have returned to the concert stage and about two-thirds of a total of 300 have been recorded.

ADRIENNE FRIED BLOCK

WORKS

printed works published in Boston unless otherwise stated

fs	full score
os	organ score
ps	piano score

For index to vocal works see GroveA

opera

op.

149	Cabildo (1, N.B. Stephens), solo vv, chorus, spkr, vn, vc, pf, 1932; Athens, GA, 27 Feb 1945

orchestral, vocal-orchestral

18	Eilende Wolken, Segler die Lüfte (F. von Schiller), A, orch, 1892, vs (1892)
22	Bal masque, perf. 1893, version for pf (1894)
32	‘Gaelic’ Symphony, e, 1894–6, fs (1897)
45	Piano Concerto, c, 1899, arr. 2 pf (1900)
53	Jephthah's Daughter (Mollevaut, after Bible: Judges xi.38, It. trans., I. Martinez, Eng. trans., A.M. Beach), S, orch, vs (1903)

chamber

23	Romance, vn, pf (1893)
34	Vn Sonata, a, 1896 (1899), transcr. va, pf, transcr. fl, pf
40/1–3	Three Compositions, vn, pf (1898), arr. vc (1903): La captive, Berceuse, Mazurka
55	Invocation, vn, pf/org, vc obbl (1904)
67	Piano Quintet, f, 1907
80	Theme and Variations, fl, str qt, 1916 (1920), ed. J. Graziano, American Chamber Music, Three Centuries of American Music, viii (1991)
—	Caprice, The Water Sprites, fl, vc, pf, 1921, The Water Sprites arr. pf
89	String Quartet, 1 movt, 1929, ed. A.F. Block, Music of the United States of America, iii (Madison, WI, 1994)
90	Pastorale, fl, vc, pf, 1921, arr. vc, org, arr. vc, pf
—	Prelude, vn, vc, pf, 1931 [frag.]
125	Lento espressivo, vn, pf
150	Piano Trio, 1938 (1939)
151	Pastorale, ww qnt (1942)

keyboard

piano unless otherwise stated

3	Cadenza to Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3, op.37, 1st movt (1888)
4	Valse-caprice (1889)
6	Ballad (1894), G
15/1–4	Four Sketches (1892): In Autumn, Phantoms, Dreaming, arr. vc, pf, Fireflies
—	Untitled, 3 movts, pf 4 hands, before 1893
22	Bal masque (1894)
25	Children's Carnival (1894)
28/1–3	Trois morceaux caractéristiques (1894): Barcarolle, rev. 1937, arr. vn, pf, 1937; Minuet italien; Danse des fleurs
36/1–5	Children's Album (1897): Minuet, Gavotte, Waltz, March, Polka
47	Summer Dreams, pf 4 hands (1901)
54/1–2	Scottish Legend, Gavotte fantastique (1903)
60	Variations on Balkan Themes, 1904 (1906), orchd 1906, rev. (1936), arr. 2 pf (1937)
64/1–4	Eskimos: Four Characteristic Pieces (1907), rev. (1943): Arctic Night, The Returning Hunter, Exiles, With Dog Teams
65/1–5	Suite française (1907): Les rêves de Columbine, La fée de la fontaine, Le prince gracieux, Valse étoiles, Danse d'Arlequin
70	Iverniana, 2 pf, 1910, lost
81	Prelude and Fugue, 1917 (1918)
83	From Blackbird Hills (1922)
87	Fantasia fugata (1923)
91	The Fair Hills of Eire, pf/org (1922), rev. as Prelude on an Old Folk Tune, org (1943)
92/1–2	Hermit Thrush at Eve, Hermit Thrush at Morn, 1921 (1922)
97/1–5	From Grandmother's Garden (1922) Morning Glories, Heartsease, Mignonette, Rosemary and Rue, Honeysuckle
102/1–2	Piano Compositions (1924): Farewell Summer, Dancing Leaves
104	Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies (1924)
106	Old Chapel by Moonlight (1924)
107	Nocturne (1924)
108	A Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother (1924)
111	From Olden Times
114	By the Still Waters (1925)
116	Tyrolean Valse-fantaisie (1926)
119	From Six to Twelve (1927)
—	A Bit of Cairo (1928)
—	A September Forest, 1930
128/1–3	Three Pf Pieces (1932): Scherzino: a Peterborough Chipmunk, Young Birches, A Humming Bird
130	Out of the Depths (1932)
148	Five Improvisations, 1934 (1938)

sacred choral

4 voices and organ, unless otherwise stated

5	Mass, E, 4vv, orch, 1890, os (1890)
—	Graduale (Thou Glory of Jerusalem), T, orch, ps (1892) [addition to Mass, op.5]
7	O praise the Lord, all ye nations (Ps cxvii) (1891)
8/1–3	Choral Responses (1891): Nunc dimittis (Bible: Luke ii.29), With prayer and supplication (Bible: Philippians iv.6–7), Peace I leave with you (Bible: John iv.27)
17	Festival Jubilate (Ps c), D, 7vv, orch, 1891, ps (1892)
24	Bethlehem (G.C. Hugg) (1893)
27	Alleluia, Christ is risen (after M. Weisse, C.F. Gellert, T. Scott, T. Gibbons) (1895), arr. with vn obbl (1904)
33	Teach me thy way (Ps lxxxvi.11–12), 1895
38	Peace on earth (E.H. Sears) (1897)
50	Help us, O God (Pss lxxix.9, 5; xlv.6; xliv.26), 5vv (1903)
52	A Hymn of Freedom: America (S.F. Smith), 4vv, org/pf (1903), rev. with text O Lord our God arise (1944)
63	Service in A, S, A, T, B, 4vv, org: Te Deum, Benedictus (1905), rev. omitting Gloria, 1934; Jubilate Deo; Magnificat; Nunc dimittis (1906)
74	All hail the power of Jesus' name (E. Perronet), 4vv, org/pf, 1914 (1915)
76	Thou knowest, Lord (J. Borthwick), T, B, 4vv, org (1915)
78/1–4	Canticles (1916): Bonum est, confiteri (Ps xcii. 1–4), S, 4vv, org; Deus misereatur (Ps lxvii); Cantate Domino (Ps xcviii); Benedic, anima mea (Ps ciii)
84	Te Deum, f, T, male chorus 3vv, org, 1921 (1922)
95	Constant Christmas (P. Brooks), S, A, 4vv, org (1922)
96	The Lord is my shepherd (Ps xxiii), female chorus 3vv, org (1923)
98	I will lift up mine eyes (Ps cxxi), 4vv (1923)
103/1–2	Benedictus es, Domine, Benedictus (Bible: Luke i.67–81), B, 4vv, org (1924)
105	Let this mind be in you (Bible: Philippians ii.5–11), S, B, 4vv, org (1924)
109	Lord of the worlds above (I. Watts), S, T, B, 4vv, org (1925)
115	Around the Manger (R. Davis), 4vv, org/pf (1925), version for 1v, pf/org (1925); rev. female chorus 3vv, org/pf (1925), rev. female chorus 4vv, org/pf (1929)
121	Benedicite omnia opera Domini (Bible: Daniel iii.56–8) (1928)
122	Communion Responses: Kyrie, Gloria tibi, Sursum corda, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Gloria, S, A, T, B, 4vv, org (1928)
—	Agnus Dei, SA, chorus, org/pf (1936) [suppl. to op.122]
123	The Canticle of the Sun (St Francis), S, Mez, T, B, 4vv, orch, 1924, os (1928)
125/2	Evening Hymn: The shadows of the evening hours (A. Procter), S, A, 4vv, 1934 (1936)
132	Christ in the universe (A. Meynell), A, T, 4vv, orch, os (1931)
133	Four Choral Responses (J. Fischer) (1932)
134	God is our stronghold (E. Wordsworth), S, 4vv, org
139	Hearken unto me (Bible: Isaiah li.1, 3; xliii.1–3; xl.28, 31), S, A, T, B, 4vv, orch, os (1934)
141	O Lord, God of Israel (Bible: 1 Kings viii.23, 27–30, 34), S, A, B, 4vv, 1935
146	Lord of all being (O.W. Holmes) (1938)
147	I will give thanks (Ps cxi), S, 4vv, org (1939)
—	Hymn: O God of love, O King of peace (H.W. Baker), 4vv, 1941 (1942)
—	Pax nobiscum (E. Marlatt), (female chorus 3vv)/(male chorus 3vv/4vv), org (1944)

secular choral

9	The Little Brown Bee (M. Eytinge), female chorus 4vv (1891)
—	Singing Joyfully (J.W. Chadwick), children's chorus 2vv, pf
16	The Minstrel and the King: Rudolph von Hapsburg (F. von Schiller), T, B, male chorus 4vv, orch, ps (1890)
26/4	Wouldn't that be queer (E.J. Cooley), female chorus 3vv, pf (1919) [arr. of song]
—	An Indian Lullaby (anon.), female chorus 4vv (1895)
30	The Rose of Avon-Town (C. Mischka), S, A, female chorus 4vv, orch, ps (1896)
31/1–3	Three Flower Songs (M. Deland), female chorus 4vv, pf (1896): The Clover, The Yellow Daisy, The Bluebell
37/3	Fairy Lullaby (W. Shakespeare), female chorus 4vv (1907)
39/1–3	Three Shakespeare Choruses, female chorus 4vv, pf (1897): Over hill, over dale, Come unto these yellow sands, Through the house give glimmering light
42	Song of Welcome (H.M. Blossom), 4vv, orch, os (1898)
43/4	Far Awa' (R. Burns), female chorus 3vv, pf (1918) [arr. of song]
44/1–2	The year's at the spring (R. Browning), female chorus 4vv, pf (1909); Ah, love, but a day (Browning), female chorus 4vv, pf (1927)
46	Sylvania: a Wedding Cantata (F.W. Bancroft, after W. Bloem), S, S, A, T, B, 8vv, orch, ps (1901)
49	A Song of Liberty (F.L. Stanton), 4vv, orch, 1902, ps (1902), arr. male chorus 4vv, pf (1917)
51/3	Juni (E. Jensen), 4vv, pf (1931), version for female chorus 3vv (1931) [arr. of song]
56/4	Shena Van (W. Black), female chorus 3vv/male chorus 4vv (1917) [arr. of song]
57/1–3	Only a Song (A.L. Hughes), One Summer Day (Hughes), female chorus 4vv (1904)
59	The Sea-Fairies (A. Tennyson), S, A, female chorus 2vv, orch, org ad lib, 1904, ps (1904), acc. arr. hp, pf
66	The Chambered Nautilus (Holmes), S, A, female chorus 4vv, orch, org ad lib, ps (1907), ed. A.F. Block (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1994)
74	Panama Hymn (W.P. Stafford), 4vv, orch, arr. 4vv, org/pf (1915)
75/1, 3	The Candy Lion (A.F. Brown), Dolladine (W.B. Rands), female chorus 4vv (1915) [arrs. of songs]
—	Friends (Brown), children's chorus 2vv (1917)
—	Balloons (L.A. Garnett) children's chorus (1916)
82	Dusk in June (S. Teasdale), female chorus 4vv (1917)
86	May Eve, 4vv, pf, 1921 (1933)
94	Three School Songs, 4vv (1933)
101	Peter Pan (J. Andrews), female chorus 3vv, pf (1923)
110	The Greenwood (W.L. Bowles), 4vv (1925)
118/1–2	The Moonboat (E.D. Watkins), children's chorus (1938), Who has seen the wind (C. Rossetti), children's chorus 2vv (1938)
126/1–2	Sea Fever (J. Masefield), The Last Prayer, male chorus 4vv, pf (1931)
127	When the last sea is sailed (Masefield), male chorus 4vv (1931)
129	Drowsy Dream Town (R. Norwood), S, female chorus 3vv, pf (1932)
140	We who sing have walked in glory (A.S. Bridgman), 1934 (1934)
144	This morning very early (P.L. Hills), female chorus 3vv, pf, 1935 (1937)
—	The Ballad of the P.E.O. (R.C. Mitchell) female chorus, 1944

songs

1 voice, piano, unless otherwise stated

1/1–4	Four Songs: With violets (K. Vannah) (1885), Die vier Brüder (F. von Schiller) (1887), Jeune fille et jeune fleur (F.R. Chateaubriand) (1887), Ariette (P.B. Shelley) (1886)
2/1–3	Three Songs: Twilight (A.M. Beach) (1887), When far from her (H.H.A. Beach) (1889), Empress of night (H.H.A. Beach) (1891)
10/1–3	Songs of the Sea (1890): A Canadian Boat Song (T. Moore), S, B, pf; The Night Sea (H.P. Spofford), S, S, pf; Sea Song (W.E. Channing), S, S, pf
11/1–3	Three Songs (W.E. Henley): Dark is the night (1890), The Western Wind (1889), The Blackbird (1889)
12/1–3	Three Songs (R. Burns): Wilt thou be my dearie? (1889) Ye banks and braes o' bonnie doon (1891), My luve is like a red, red rose, 1887 (1889)
13	Hymn of Trust (O.W. Holmes) (1891), rev. with vn obbl (1901)
14/1–4	Four Songs, 1890 (1891): The Summer Wind (W. Learned), Le secret (J. de Resseguier), Sweetheart, sigh no more (T.B. Aldrich), The Thrush (E.R. Sill); nos.2–3 rev. (1901)
19/1–3	Three Songs (1893): For me the jasmine buds unfold (F.E. Coates), Ecstasy (A.M. Beach), 1v, pf, vn obbl, Golden Gates
20	(Villanelle) Across the World (E.M. Thomas) (1894), arr. 1v, vc obbl
21/1–3	Three Songs (1893): Chanson d'amour (V. Hugo), arr. 1v, orch, arr. 1v, vc obbl (1899), Extase (Hugo), Elle et moi (F. Bovet)
26/1–4	Four Songs (1894): My Star (C. Fabbri), Just for this (Fabbri), Spring (Fabbri), Wouldn't that be queer (E.J. Cooley); no.4 arr. chorus (1919)
29/1–4	Four Songs, 1894 (1895): Within thy heart (A.M. Beach), The Wandering Knight (anon., Eng. trans., J.G. Lockhart), Sleep, little darling (Spofford), Haste, O beloved (W.A. Sparrow)
35/1–4	Four Songs, 1896 (1897): Nachts (C.F. Scherenberg), Allein! (H. Heine), Nähe des Geliebten (J.W. von Goethe), Forget-me-not (H.H.A. Beach)
37/1–3	Three Shakespeare Songs (1897): O mistress mine, Take, O take those lips away, Fairy Lullaby; no.3 arr. chorus (1907)
41/1–3	Three Songs (1898): Anita (Fabbri), Thy beauty (Spofford), Forgotten (Fabbri)
43/1–5	Five Burns Songs (1899): Dearie, Scottish Cradle Song, Oh were my love yon lilac fair!, Far awa', My lassie; no.3 arr. 2 S, pf (1918); no.4 arr. chorus (1918), arr. 2vv (1918), arr. female vv (1918), arr. org, 1936, arr. pf, 1936
44/1–3	Three [R.] Browning Songs (1900): The year's at the spring, Ah, love but a day, I send my heart up to thee; no.1 arr. S, A, pf (1900), arr. chorus (1928), arr. female vv (1928), arr. 1v, pf, vn (1900), arr. male chorus, pf (1933); no.2 arr. A, B, pf (1917), arr. S, T, pf (1917), arr. 1v, pf, vn (1920), arr. chorus by H. Norden (1949), nos.1–2 arr. chorus (1927)
48/1–4	Four Songs (1902): Come, ah come (H.H.A. Beach), Good Morning (A.H. Lockhart), Good Night (Lockhart), Canzonetta (A. Sylvestre)
51/1–4	Four Songs (1903): Ich sagete nicht (E. Wissman); Wir drei (H. Eschelbach), Juni (E. Jansen), Je demande à l'oiseau (Sylvestre); no.3 arr. v, pf, vn (1903), arr. 1v, orch, arr. chorus (1931)
56/1–4	Four Songs, 1903–4 (1904): Autumn Song (H.H.A. Beach), Go not too far (F.E. Coates), I know not how to find the spring (Coates), Shena Van (W. Black); no.4 arr. chorus (1917), arr. with vn obbl (1919)
61	Give me not love (Coates), S, T, pf (1905)
62	When soul is joined to soul (E.B. Browning) (1905)
68	After (Coates) (1909), arr. vn, vc, arr. A, chorus, 1936, arr. S, A, chorus, org, 1936
69/1–2	Two Mother Songs (1908): Baby (G. MacDonald), Hush, baby dear (A.L. Hughes)
71/1–3	Three Songs (1910): A Prelude (A.M. Beach), O sweet content (T. Dekker), An Old Love-Story (B.L. Stathem)
72/1–2	Two Songs (1914): Ein altes Gebet, perf. 1914, Deine Blumen (L. Zacharias)
73/1–2	Two Songs (Zacharias) (1914): Grossmütterchen, Der Totenkranz
75/1–4	The Candy Lion (A.F. Brown), A Thanksgiving Fable (D. Herford), Dolladine (W.B. Rands), Prayer of a Tired Child (Brown) (1914); nos.1, 3 arr. female chorus (1915)
76/1–2	Two Songs (1914): Separation (J.L. Stoddard), The Lotos Isles (Tennyson)
77/1–2	Two Songs (1916): I (C. Fanning), Wind o' the Westland (D. Burnett)
78/1–3	Three Songs (1917): Meadowlarks (I. Coolbrith), Night Song at Amalfi (Teasdale), In Blossom Time (Coolbrith)
—	A Song for Little May (E.H. Miller), 1922
—	The Arrow and the Song (H.W. Longfellow), 1922
—	Clouds (F.D. Sherman), 1922
85	In the Twilight (Longfellow) (1922)
88	Spirit Divine (A. Read), S, T, org (1922)
93	Message (Teasdale) (1922)
99/1–4	Four Songs (1923): When Mama Sings (A.M. Beach), Little Brown-Eyed Laddie (A.D.O. Greenwood), The Moonpath (K. Adams), The Artless Maid (L. Barili)
100/1–2	Two Songs (1924): A Mirage (B. Ochsner); Stella viatoris (J.H. Nettleton), S, vn, vc, pf
112	Jesus my Saviour (A. Elliott) (1925)
113	Mine be the lips (L. Speyer) (1921)
115	Around the Manger (Davis), 1v, pf/org (1925), also version for chorus
117/1–3	Three Songs (M. Lee) (1925): The Singer, The Host, Song in the Hills
—	Birth (E.L. Knowles), 1926
120	Rendezvous (Speyer), 1v, vn obbl (1928)
—	Mignonnette (1929)
124	Springtime (S.M. Heywood) (1929)
125/1–2	Two Sacred Songs: Spirit of Mercy (anon.) (1930), Evening Hymn: The shadows of the evening hours (A. Procter) (1934); no.2 arr. chorus (1936)
131	Dark Garden (Speyer) (1932)
135	To one I love (1932)
136	Fire and Flame (A.A. Moody), 1932 (1933)
137/1–2	Baby (S.R. Quick); May Flowers (Moody); 1932 (1933)
—	Evening song, 1934
—	April Dreams (K.W. Harding), 1935
—	The Deep Sea Pearl (E.M. Thomas), 1935
142	I sought the Lord (anon.), 1v, org, 1936 (1937)
143	I shall be brave (Adams) (1932)
145	Dreams
152	Though I Take the Wings of Morning (R.N. Spencer), 1v, org/pf (1941)
—	The heart that melts
—	The Icicle Lesson
—	If women will not be inclined
—	Time has wings and swiftly flies
—	Whither (W. Müller) [after Chopin: Trois nouvelles études, no.3]
—	Du sieh'st, B, pf [frag.]

other works

—	Arr.: Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.1, 2nd movt, pf 4 hands, 1887
—	St John the Baptist (Bible: Matthew, Luke), lib, 1889
—	Arr.: Berlioz: Les Troyens, Act 1 scene iii, 1v, pf, 1896
—	Serenade, pf (1902) [transcr. of R. Strauss: Ständchen]
—	Arr.: On a hill: Negro melody (trad.), 1v, pf (1929)

juvenilia

Air and Variations, pf, 1877; Mamma's Waltz, pf, 1877; Menuetto, pf, 1877; Romanza, pf, 1877; Petite valse, pf, 1878; The Rainy Day (H. Longfellow), 1v, pf, 1880 (1883); Allegro appassionata, Moderato, Allegro con fuoco, pf 4 hands, pubd as Three Movements for Piano Four-Hands (1998)

4 Chorales: Come ye faithful (J. Hupton); Come to me (C. Elliott); O Lord, how happy should we be (J. Anstice); To heav'n I lift my waiting eyes, 4vv, 1882

The Rainy Day (Longfellow), 1v, pf, 1880

MSS and other sources in University of New Hampshire, Durham; US-Bc, KC, PHf, Wc

Principal publishers: A-R Editions, Classical Vocal Reprint, Ditson, Hildegard, Masters Music, Presser, Recital, G. Schirmer, Schmidt, Walton

Beach, Amy Marcy

WRITINGS

‘Cristofori redivivus’, Music, xvi/May (1899), 1–5

‘Why I Chose my Profession: the Autobiography of a Woman Composer’, Mother's Magazine, xi/Feb (1914), 7–8

‘The Outlook for the Young American Composer’, The Etude, xxxiii (1915), 13–14

‘Music's Ten Commandments as given for Young Composers’, Los Angeles Examiner (28 June 1915)

‘Common Sense in Pianoforte Touch and Technic’, The Etude, xxxiv (1916), 701–2

‘To the Girl who Wants to Compose’, The Etude, xxxv (1918), 695

‘Work out your own Salvation’, The Etude, xxxvi (1918), 11–12

‘Emotion Versus Intellect in Music’, Studies in Musical Education, History, and Aesthetics, xxvi (1932), 17–19

‘The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of a Vision’, Studies in Musical Education, History, and Aesthetics, xxvii (1933), 45–8

‘A Plea for Mercy’, Studies in Musical Education, History, and Aesthetics, xxx (1936), 163–5

‘The Mission of the Present Day Composer’, Triangle of Mu Phi Epsilon, xxxvi/Feb (1942), 71–2

‘How Music is Made’, Keyboard, iv (1942), 11, 38

‘The “How” of Creative Composition’, The Etude, lxi (1943), 151, 206, 208–9

‘The World Cries out for Harmony’, The Etude, lxvii (1944), 11

‘Los Angeles “Fairyland” Marks an Epoch in American Music’, in H. Parker: “Fairyland” Scrapbook, US-NH

Beach, Amy Marcy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

NAW

SchmidlD

‘Mrs H.H.A. Beach’, Musikliterarische Blätter, i (Vienna, 1904), 1

L.C. Elson: The History of American Music (New York, 1904, 2/1915, enlarged 3/1925 by A. Elson), 294–305

P. Goetschius: Mrs H.H.A. Beach (Boston, 1906) [incl. analytical sketch of Sym. op.32 and list of works]

G. Cowen: ‘Mrs H.H.A. Beach, the Celebrated Composer’, Musical Courier (8 June 1910)

‘Mrs. Beach's Compositions’, Musical Courier (24 March 1915)

H. Brower: Piano Mastery (New York, 1917), 179–87

B.C. Tuthill: ‘Mrs H.H.A. Beach’, MQ, xxvi (1940), 297–310

E.L. Merrill: Mrs H.H.A. Beach: her Life and Music (diss., U. of Rochester, 1963)

M.G. Eden: Anna Hyatt Huntington, Sculptor, and Mrs H.H.A. Beach, Composer (diss., Syracuse U., 1977) [incl. list of works]

A.F. Block: Introduction to Amy Beach: Quintet in f op.67 (New York, 1979)

C. Ammer: Unsung: a History of Women in American Music (Westport, CT, 1980)

B. Sicherman and others, eds.: Notable American Women, iv (Cambridge, MA, 1980)

A.F. Block: ‘Why Amy Beach Succeeded as a Composer: the Early Years’, CMc, no.36 (1983), 41–59

M.S. Miles: The Solo Piano Works of Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (DMA diss., Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1985)

A.F. Block: ‘Arthur P. Schmidt, Publisher and Champion of Women Composers’, Musical Woman, ii (1984–5), 145–76

L. Petteys: ‘Cahildo by Amy Marcy Beach’, Opera Journal, xxii/1 (1989), 10–19

A.F. Block: ‘Amy Beach's Music on Native American Themes’, American Music, viii/sum. (1990), 141–66

A.F. Block: ‘Dvořák, Beach and American Music’, A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock, ed. R. Crawford, R. Allen Lott and C.J. Oja (Ann Arbor, 1990), 256–80

M.K. Kelton: The Songs of Mrs H.H.A. Beach (DMA diss., U. of Texas, 1992)

E.D. Bomberger: ‘Motivic Development in Amy Beach’s Variations on Balkan Themes, op.60’, American Music, x/3 (1992), 326–47

A.F. Block: ‘Communications: on Beach's Variations on Balkan Themes, op.60’, American Music, xi/3 (1993) 368–71

A.F. Block: ‘Amy Beach's Quartet on Inuit Themes: toward a Modernist Style’, preface to Amy Beach: Quartet for Strings (in One Movement) opus 89 (Madison, WI, 1994), pp.xi–xxxi

A.F. Block: ‘A “Veritable Autobiography”? Amy Beach's Piano Concerto in C-Sharp Minor, op.45’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 394–416

W.S. Jenkins: The Remarkable Mrs. Beach: American Composer, ed. J.H. Baron (Warren, MI, 1994)

A.F. Block: Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: an American Composer's Life and Work (New York, 1998)

Beach Boys, the.

American rock band. It was formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California, by the Wilson brothers Brian (b 1941; vocals, piano and bass guitar), Dennis (1944–83; vocals and drums) and Carl (1946–98; vocals and guitar), their cousin Mike Love (b 1941; vocals and drums) and additional members Al(an) Jardine (b 1942; vocals and guitar) and, from 1965, Bruce Johnston (b 1944). For most of the 1960s they were the most successful and important American band, turning out an impressive series of hit singles, addressing mostly teenage and youth culture sensibilities and albums of increasing musical and technical sophistication, culminating in their most celebrated effort, Pet Sounds (Cap., 1966).

Until his nervous breakdown in 1967, Brian Wilson was the creative force behind the group. He had ceased touring with the band in 1964, and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing, arranging, recording and producing the songs and albums that secured the Beach Boys' international success. Though his style had a unique quality and evolved rapidly in response to fierce competition from other bands (particularly those associated with the ‘British invasion’), several early influences left a lasting impact on his work: the vocal harmonies of the Four Freshmen (which he had learned and internalized from records as a teenager), the light-spirited, high energy style of Southern California surf music (including Jan and Dean, with whom Brian had regularly collaborated in the early 1960s), and the famous ‘wall of sound’ style of instrumental arrangement developed by Phil Spector, as well as the latter's artistic vision as a studio producer.

Brian Wilson assimilated these influences, and soon transformed them into a wholly new idiom. Even in the early songs – which celebrate male teenage lifestyle preoccupied with surfing, cars and girls – several of the features for which the band was to become famous are recognizable: unconventional and arresting harmonic progressions (as in the 1964 single The Warmth of the Sun), a tendency to experiment with new sounds and recording techniques (including vocal overdubbing, by which the group's vocal timbre acquired an almost luminescent brilliance, as in the 1963 hit Surfin' USA), and a disarming and soulful quality of intimacy, vulnerability and introspection (notably in She knows me too well and Please let me wonder, from 1964 and 1965 respectively). These trends culminated, first, in the superb polished and sophisticated album The Beach Boys Today! (Cap., 1965) and then in the masterpiece Pet Sounds, an album whose exquisitely colourful orchestration, breathtaking original harmonies and intense poignancy of expression have won the acclaim of critics since it was released. Brian Wilson's attempt to surpass the album with an even more innovative effort, to be entitled Smile (in collaboration with the lyricist Van Dyke Parks), ran aground in 1967, due mainly to a combination of psychological trauma and internal tensions within the band. Of the 12 tracks planned for Smile, eight were finished or nearly finished, yet with three exceptions were not officially released until 1991.

After his breakdown Brian Wilson continued to be involved only on an irregular basis, allowing other band members (especially Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston) to develop their talents in composition, arrangement and production. Although there are several fine later albums, including Friends (Cap., 1968) and Surf's Up (Brother, 1971), and although the band kept touring until the late 1990s, their position in the history of rock is based chiefly on their influential contributions during 1962–7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Golden: The Beach Boys: Southern California Pastoral (San Bernadino, CA, 1976)

D. Leaf: The Beach Boys and the California Myth (New York, 1979)

B. Elliott: Surf's Up! The Beach Boys on Record, 1961–1981 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984)

T. White: The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience (New York, 1994)

K. Abbott, ed.: Back to the Beach: a Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys Reader (London, 1997)

P. Williams: Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys: How Deep is the Ocean? (London, 1997)

ROB C. WEGMAN

Bealand, Ambrose.

See Beeland, Ambrose.

Beale, William

(b Landrake, 1 Jan 1784; d London, 3 May 1854). English organist and composer. He was brought up in London as a chorister of Westminster Abbey under Samuel Arnold and Robert Cooke. After his voice broke he served as a midshipman. In 1813 he gained the prize cup given by the Madrigal Society for his madrigal Awake, sweet Muse. From 30 January 1816 to 13 December 1820 he was one of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. In November 1820 he was appointed organist of Trinity College, Cambridge, but in December 1821 he returned to London and became successively organist of Wandsworth Parish Church and St John's, Clapham Rise. He gained a prize at the Adelphi Glee Club in 1840. His best-known works are Awake, sweet Muse and Come let us join the roundelay.

WORKS

Vocal: A First Book of Madrigals, Glees, etc, 3–5vv (London, 1815); A Collection of Glees and Madrigals (London, 1820); A Collection of 13 Glees, ed. E. Plater (London, ?c1875); Bow down thine Ear, anthem (London, 1897)

Inst: 2 sonatas, vn, pf (London, [1813], [1815]); La Caspienne, pf [1866]; Verloren, pf [1876]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 101–2

W.H. HUSK, WILLIAM BARCLAY SQUIRE/R

Beamish, Sally

(b London, 26 Aug 1956). English composer and viola player, active in Scotland. Though drawn to composition, she studied the violin and the viola at the RNCM and worked for around ten years as a viola player with several London ensembles. In 1986 she received her first professional commission, for Dances and Nocturnes; in 1989 she moved to Scotland where, aided by an Arts Council bursary, she began to concentrate on composition. She founded the Chamber Group of Scotland with James MacMillan and her husband Robert Irvine. Her distinctive music draws on many different sources. Motherhood has been an important inspiration, reflected in works such as Tuscan Lullaby (1989) or Magnificat (1992), in which the traditional Latin text is interspersed with poems by Elizabeth Jennings. A particularly Scottish influence can be heard in her use of pibroch in the piano trio Piobaireachd (1991) and her First Symphony (1992), commissioned by the City of Reykjavik. Her dramatic oboe concerto Tam Lin (1992) is based on the Border ballad of the same name; other concertos are for violin (1994), inspired by E.M. Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, for viola (1995), a lyrical work based on Peter’s realisation that he has denied Christ and the ultimate redemption of all human beings, and River (1997), a delicately colourful work for cello.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Ease (music theatre, E. Kemp), 3 S, fl, cl, va, 1993; Winter Journey (nativity musical for children), 1996

Orch: The Lost Pibroch, hp, str, 5 school groups (bagpipes, tin whistles, wind, fiddles, perc), 1991; Sym. no.1, 1992; Tam Lin, ob, orch, 1992; Conc. grosso, str, 1993; Vn Conc., 1994; Walking Back, 1994; Va Conc., 1995; The Caledonian Road, 1997; The Day Dawn, str, 1997; River, vc, orch, 1997; Sym. no.2, 1998; The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone, s sax, orch, 1999

4–12 insts: Mr and Mrs Discobollus (E. Lear), nar, cl, pf, vn, va, vc/db, 1983; No, I’m Not Afraid (I. Ratushinskaya), spkr, ob, hp, str ens, 1988; Commedia, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1990; Songs and Blessings, ob, bn, vn, va, pf, 1991; The Wedding at Cana, str sextet, 1991; 5 Changing Pictures, vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1993; Into the Furnace, cl, hn, bn, str qt, db, 1993; A Book of Seasons, vn/fl, ob, cl, hn, tpt, trbn, 2 perc, pf, va, vc, db, 1995; The Secret Dancer, pf qt, 1995; Black, White, Blue, hpd, str qt, 1997

1–3 insts: Sonata, vn, pf, 1976; Sonatina, vn, 1977; Dances and Nocturnes, vn, db, pf, 1986; Winter Trees, vn, pf, 1990; Piobaireachd, pf trio, 1991; Madrigal, gui, 1992; Iasg, vc, pf, 1993; Kyle Song, pf, 1993; Gala Water, vc, 1994; Sule Skerrie, va, pf, 1995; Between Earth and Sea, fl, va, hp, 1996; Duel, 2 vc, 1996; Pf Sonata, 1996; Words for my Daughter, fl, pf, 1996; St Andrew’s Bones, vn, hn, pf, 1997; Awuya, hp, 1998; The Seafarer, vn, 1998

Vocal: I see his blood upon the rose (J. Plunkett), hymn tune, 1982; Sonnet (W. Shakespeare), S, fl, ob d’amore, pf, 1986; 7 Songs (E. Dickinson), girls’ vv, 1990; Oracle Beach (D. Pownall), Mez, pf trio, 1991; Magnificat (trad., E. Jennings), S, Mez, hn, tpt, trbn, 3 perc, vn, va, vc, 1992; in dreaming (Shakespeare), T, viol consort, 1994; Madrigali (C. Gesualdo), T, fl + pic, ob, cl + b cl, hn, hp, db, 1994; Clara (J. Galloway), S, pf, 1995; Shadow and Silver (F. García Lorca), SATB, 1995; Ae Fond Kiss (R. Burns), S, pf, 1996; 2 Burns Songs, Mez, str qt, 1996; Monster (J. Galloway), S, actor, orch, 1996; 4 Findrinny Songs (D.G. Saunders), S, rec, 1998

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Calam: ‘Sally Beamish’, CMR, xi (1994), 23–5

L. Walker: ‘Sally Beamish’, BBC Music Magazine, iv/9 (1995–6), 34–6

SOPHIE FULLER

Bean.

Nickname of Coleman Hawkins.

Bean, Hugh (Cecil)

(b Beckenham, 22 Sept 1929). English violinist. After lessons from his father, he became a pupil of Albert Sammons when nine years old, later also attending the RCM. A further year’s study with André Gertler at the Brussels Conservatory on a Boise Foundation travelling award brought him a double first prize for solo and chamber music playing, and with two other prizewinners he formed the Boise Trio. He joined the RCM teaching staff in 1953 and became a freelance London orchestral player, until he was made sub-leader (1956), then leader (1957–67) of the Philharmonia Orchestra. He was co-leader of the BBC SO from 1967 to 1969, when he resigned to concentrate on an independent career, but retained his membership (1966–76) of the Music Group of London, a chamber ensemble. His qualities as an orchestral leader were reflected in the sustained level of ensemble maintained under him, notably through the Philharmonia’s difficult transition to the self-governing New Philharmonia in 1964. He rejoined the orchestra as co-leader in 1991. As a soloist his playing was distinguished by lyrical feeling and warmth of expression in addition to technical command; he was particularly admired for his performance of Elgar’s Concerto and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, both of which he recorded. He plays a violin by Pietro Guarneri (Venice 1734), on extended loan from Amy Haswell-Wilson, and owns one by Carlo Tononi dated 1716. He was made a CBE in 1970.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Creighton: Discopaedia of the Violin, 1889–1971 (Toronto, 1974, 2/1994)

NOËL GOODWIN

Bearbeitung

(Ger.).

Arrangement, transcription. In the compound, Choralbearbeitung, German usage allows for a much broader range of meaning than the English equivalents would suggest, and has embraced any cantus-firmus composition based on either plainchant or a hymn tune (both are Choral in German), whether it be medieval organum or a Bach chorale prelude for organ. More recently, however, there has been a tendency to restrict the term choralbearbeitung specifically to multi-voiced arrangements of Lutheran chorales from the 16th century on.

DAVID FULLER

Beard, John

(b c1717; d Hampton, 5 Feb 1791). English tenor. Trained by Bernard Gates at the Chapel Royal, he sang while still a boy in Handel’s Esther (staged at the crown and Anchor in February 1732). He won immediate success on his operatic début as Silvio in Il pastor fido with Handel’s Covent Garden company (1734) and began a long association with the composer from the late 1730s up to the 1750s. He sang more Handel parts under the composer than any other singer, appearing in ten operas, and created roles in Ariodante (Lurcanio, 1735), Alcina (Oronte, 1735), Atalanta (Amintas, 1736), Arminio (Varus, 1737), Giustino (Vitalian, 1737), Berenice (Fabio, 1737). He was most known as an operatic singer, taking a leading role in every one of Handel's English oratorios, odes and musical dramas except The Choice of Hercules (which has no tenor part), including many first performances. He sang regularly in Handel's Messiah performances at the Foundling Hospital (refusing a fee), for Musicians Fund benefits and other charities, and at provincial festivals (Oxford, Birmingham, Three Choirs).

Beard was not exclusively a Handel singer; from 1736, when he sang in Galliard’s The Royal Chace at Covent Garden, he appeared in numerous ballad operas, pantomimes, burlesques and more serious pieces, and was a member of the Drury Lane company (1737–43, 1748–59) and at Covent Garden (1743–8, 1759–67). From 1737 he was a popular Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera and appeared in J.C. Smith’s Rosalinda (1740), The Fairies (1755) and The Tempest (1756). He also sang in many works by Lampe, Boyce and especially Arne, including Comus, Rosamond, The Judgment of Paris, Alfred, Artaxerxes and Love in a Village, in which he made his last appearance in 1767 (see Arne, Thomas Augustine, fig.2).

In 1739 Beard married Lady Henrietta Herbert – a union which met with obloquy from the bride’s family and scatalogical comment from the aristocracy. After his first wife’s death in 1753, Beard in 1759 married Charlotte Rich, daughter of the proprietor of Covent Garden, whom Beard succeeded in the management from 1761 until his retirement with the onset of deafness in 1767, when he sold the Covent Garden patent for £60,000. For many years, before and after his retirement from the theatre, he held the post of ‘vocal performer to his Majesty’ with a salary of £100 a year, and he sang occasionally at the Chapel Royal. Burney said he ‘constantly possessed the favour of the public by his superior conduct, knowledge of Music, and intelligence as an actor’. Dibdin considered him the finest English singer of the age. The heroic parts Handel composed for him, especially Samson, Judas (from Judas Maccabeus) and Jeptha, established the importance of the tenor voice at a time when leading male roles were still often taken by castratos or women, but many of the finest airs call for expressiveness and a firm mezza voce rather than agility. The extreme compass of his Handel parts is B to a', but they seldom go below d. (BDA; SartoriL).

WINTON DEAN

Beardmore & Birchall.

See Birchall, Robert.

Beare.

English family of violin dealers and restorers. John Beare (1847–1928) became an instrument dealer in 1865. He was a friend of Elgar and published some of his early music in the 1880s. In 1892 he divided his business into two parts: Beare & Son, with his elder son Walter, at 32 Rathbone Place, London, and Beare, Goodwin & Co. at 186 Wardour Street. Beare & Son, later came under the direction of Walter’s son Richard Barrington Beare (b 20 July 1908), and moved to Dunstable. They are wholesalers of new instruments and accessories. Beare, Goodwin & Co. specialized in early instruments of the violin family, becoming John & Arthur Beare shortly after the turn of the century.

Arthur Beare (b Norbury, 14 Feb 1875; d Watford, 23 Aug 1945), the younger son of John Beare, trained as a violinist in Leipzig before joining the business (c1890). He earned an excellent reputation both as a craftsman and as a connoisseur of violins. He made a speciality of tonal adjustments, fitting bridges and soundposts to the instruments of many of the best performers of his time. He was also well trusted as a dealer, handling a large number of fine instruments. The firm moved a short distance to 164 Wardour Street during World War I, to no.179 in 1929, and to 7 Broadwick Street in 1979.

William Arthur Beare (b Streatham, 25 April 1910), son of Arthur Beare, joined the firm in 1929; he took over the firm on his father’s death and became chairman and managing director in 1954, when the business was incorporated as J. and A. Beare Ltd. From 1927 to 1929 he trained as a violin maker under Marc Laberte in Mirecourt, France, becoming an excellent craftsman. On his return he made more than 30 violins, also carrying out repairs and adjustments. He upheld the firm’s reputation for reliability in dealing and in craftsmanship, and also developed a worldwide reputation of his own as an authority on early instruments.

Charles Beare (b London, 22 May 1937), stepson of William Beare, trained at the State Violin Making School at Mittenwald, Bavaria, and under Rembert Wurlitzer and Fernando Sacconi in New York. He joined the firm in 1961 and specializes in the restoration of fine instruments. He has contributed scholarly articles to music journals and published Antonio Stradivari: The Cremona Exhibition of 1987 (London, 1993).

CHARLES BEARE/MARGARET CAMPBELL

Beaser, Robert

(b Boston, 29 May 1954). American composer. A percussionist with the Greater Boston Youth SO, he conducted the orchestra in the première performance of his first orchestral work, Antigone (1972). He studied composition with Arnold Franchetti before entering Yale University, where his teachers included Jacob Druckman, Toru Takemitsu, Earle Brown and Yehudi Wyner (BA 1976, MMA 1981, DMA 1985). He also studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome and Betsy Jolas at Tanglewood. His conducting teachers included Otto-Werner Mueller, Arthur Weisburg and William Steinberg. He served as co-director of the New York ensemble, Contemporary Elements (1978–89), and composer-in-residence of the American Composers Orchestra (1988–93) before joining the composition department at the Juilliard School (1993). Among his awards are the Prix de Rome (1977), Guggenheim and Fulbright foundation fellowships, a 1988 Grammy nomination (Mountain Songs, 1985) and an award from the American Academy in Rome (1995). His works have been commissioned by the St Paul Chamber Orchestra (Song of the Bells, 1987), St Louis SO (Piano Concerto, 1989), Chicago SO (Double Chorus, 1990), Baltimore SO (The Heavenly Feast, 1994) and the New York PO.

Beaser's music from the late 1970s onwards embraces the tenets of Romanticism in its epic scale, use of programmatic elements and tonal foundation. His melodic gift and finely developed sense of irony, however, elevate his compositions above mere exercises in nostalgia. Thematic variation and transformation is central to the structure of many of his works, particularly the set of variations that forms the second movement of the Piano Concerto. While the concerto quotes material from Beethoven to Bernstein, a subtle reflection of musical influence is more characteristic of Beaser's style.

WORKS

Orch: Song of the Bells, fl, orch, 1987; Pf Conc., 1989–90; Double Chorus, 1990; Chorale Variations, 1992; Sexigessimal Chorus, 1996

Vocal-orch: Sym. (e.e. cummings, W.B. Yeats, J. Fowles), S, orch, 1976–7; The Seven Deadly Sins (A. Hecht), B/T, orch, 1984; The Heavenly Feast (G. Schnackenberg), S, orch, 1994

Other vocal: Silently Spring (Cummings), S, chbr ens, 1973; Quicksilver (D.M. Epstein), T, pf, 1978; The Seven Deadly Sins (Hecht), B/T, pf, 1979; Teach Me, O Lord (Ps cxix), S, A, T, B, SSAATTBB, brass qnt ad lib, 1983; Songs from ‘The Occasions’ (E. Montale), T, chbr ens, 1985; The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water (Yeats), 1v, pf, 1986 [also version for fl, pf]; A Martial Law Carol (J. Brodsky), 1v, pf, 1994; I Dwell in Possibility (E. Dickenson), 1v, pf, 1994; Ps, cl, SATB, pf/org, 1995; Prayer for Peace (R. Beaser), 1v, children’s chorus, pf, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Trasparenza, vc, 1971; Canti notturni, gui, 1974; Str Qt, 1975–6; Shadow and Light, ww qnt, 1978–80; Notes on the Southern Sky, gui, 1980; Variations, fl, pf, 1981–2; Il est ne le divin enfant, fl, gui, 1982; Mountain Songs, fl, gui, 1985; Landscape with Bells, pf, 1986; Minimal Waltz, fl, pf, 1986; Shenandoah, gui, 1995; Brass Qnt, 1996

Recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publisher: Helicon

JAMES CHUTE

Beastie Boys, the.

American rap group. Originally formed as a hardcore punk band at New York University, the Beastie Boys recorded singles in a variety of styles before signing to Def Jam Recordings, who in turn had signed a distribution deal with CBS Records. With a group comprising MCA (Adam Yauch; b Brooklyn, NY, 15 Aug 1967), D (Mike Diamond; b New York, 20 Nov 1965) and Ad Rock (Adam Horowitz; b Manhattan, NY, 31 Oct 1966), their album Licence to Kill (1986) became CBS’s fastest-selling début album. Hit singles such as Fight for your right to party crossed the racial divisions within popular music, appealing to the fans of both black rap and white rock. Controversy also followed the band in the wake of its riotous live performances.

Disagreements between the Beastie Boys and Def Jam led to a three-year hiatus which ended with the excellent though commercially unsuccessful album, Paul’s Boutique (Cap., 1989). Relocated in California, the band launched a record label, studio and magazine under the name Grand Royal. Freed from their image of rebellious youth, albums such as Check Your Head (Cap., 1992) and Ill Communication (Cap., 1994) were self-assured, stylish mergers of hip hop, jazz and rock. They remain one of the few white groups to have achieved success and credibility within hip hop.

DAVID TOOP

Beat (i)

(Fr. temps; Ger. Zählzeit, Schlag; It. battuta).

The basic pulse underlying mensural music, that is, the temporal unit of a composition; also the movement of the hand or baton by which the conductor indicates that unit. The grouping of strong and weak beats into larger units constitutes Metre; see also Downbeat, Upbeat and Off-beat.

Beat (ii).

A 17th-century English term for one of several Ornaments: a lower appoggiatura (indicated by an ascending oblique line placed before or over the main note), an inverted trill (indicated by a wavy line over the main note), or a mordent (called ‘beat’ only in the 18th century).

Beat (iii).

An acoustical phenomenon. See Beats.

Beat, Janet (Eveline)

(b Streetly, Staffs, 17 Dec 1937). British composer and teacher. She studied at Birmingham University between 1956 and 1964 (BMus 1960, MA 1968) and with Alexander Goehr. During the 1960s she worked as a freelance horn player and as a music lecturer at colleges of education; in 1972 she was appointed lecturer at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She was a founder member of the Scottish Society of Composers and the Scottish Electro-Acoustic Music Society and in 1988 formed the contemporary music ensemble Soundstrata. During 1992 she was visiting composer at the Meistersinger-Konservatorium in Nuremberg; in 1996 she was appointed lecturer in music technology at the University of Glasgow. As a composer, she has acknowledged the influence of Bartók, Stockhausen and oriental music, and she was a pioneer of British electronic music. She combines natural and artificially generated or mediated sound, often using tape, as in Fêtes pour Claude, and also creates purely electronic works such as Dancing on Moonbeams (1980), and A Vision of the Unseen no.2 (1988). Electronic music has greatly affected her attitudes to timbre, rhythm and the use of montage effects. For example, even in a non-electronic work such as Mestra, she is concerned with exploring timbre to the utmost possible degree, involving not only the flute’s sound, but also the noise made by the instrument’s mechanism and the player’s breathing.

She has written about her Cross Currents and Reflections in Stretto (iv/1, 1984, pp.1–4), and has also worked on Baroque music, with an essay on Monteverdi’s opera orchestra (The Monteverdi Companion, 1968) and editions of works by Giacomo Carissimi, Handel and M.-A. Charpentier.

WORKS

(selective list)

Elec: Apollo and Marsyas, cl, tape, 1973; The Gossamer Web (dance drama), S, pf, perc, tape, 1975; Hunting Horns are Memories, hn, tape, 1977; Piangam, pf, tape, 1978–9; Dancing on Moonbeams, tape, 1980; Dreamscapes, bn, tape, 1980; Ongaku, hpd, tape, 1981; Cross Currents and Reflections, vol.1, pf, vol.2 [to be played with vol.1], pf, elec pf, synth, tape, 1981–2; A Willow Swept by Rain, gui, tape, 1982; Journey of a Letter (ballet), tape, 1986; Echoes from Bali, cptr, synth, 1987; A Vision of the Unseen, 1988: no.1, inst trio, tape, no.2, tape; Aztec Myth, Mez, tape, 1988; Puspawarna, Mez, tape, 1989–90; A Springtime Pillow Book, Mez, fl + a fl, synth (DX7), cptr-controlled synths/tape, 1989–90; Mandala, cptr-controlled synths, fl, synth (WX7), Tibetan monastery bells, 1990; The Song of the Silkie, vc, elec kbd, 1991; Fêtes pour Claude: 3 Homages to Debussy, Mez, fl, pf, tape, 1992; Der Regenpalast, Mez, fl, tape, 1993

Chbr and solo inst: Le tombeau de Claude, fl, ob, hp, 1973; Circe, va, 1974; 5 Projects for Joan, vc, 1974; After Reading ‘Lessons of the War’, vn, pf, 1976; Landscapes, T, ob, 1976–7; Premiers Désirs, S, pf, 1978; Seascape with Clouds, cl, 1978; ‘Vincent’ Sonata, vn, 1979–80; Mestra, fl + pic + a fl + b fl, 1980–81; Mitylene Mosaics, S, 3 cl, 1984; Pf Sonata no.1, 1985–7; Fireworks in Steel, tpt, 1987; Cat’s Cradle for the Nemuri-Neko, female v, clàrsach, 1991; Scherzo notturno, str qt, 1992; Convergencies, gui, db, 1992; Joie de Vivre, 3 gui, b gui, perc, 1994; Equinox Rituals: Autumn, va, pf, 1996

Choral: Two Caprices: Dialogue and Krishna’s Hymn to the Dawn, SATB (1998)

Some material in GB-Lmic, GB-Gsma

Principal publishers: Bastet, Furore

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC (K. Mathieson)

N.J. Pearce: ‘Janet Beat: a Renaissance Woman’, CMR, xi (1994), 27–9

V. Olive: ‘Werkanalyse – Janet Beat: “Scherzo Notturno” für Streichquartett (To my family pictured within)’, Vivavoce, xxxviii (1996), 24–7

J. Beat: ‘The Composer Speaks: Janet Beat on “Cross Currents and Reflections”’, Stretto, iv/1 (1984), 1–4

MARIE FITZPATRICK

Beater.

See Mallet.

Beatles, the.

English pop group. Ringo Starr [Richard Starkey] (b Liverpool, 7 July 1940), drums, voice; John Lennon (b Liverpool, 9 Oct 1940; d New York, 8 Dec 1980), rhythm guitar, keyboards, harmonica, voice; paul McCartney (b Liverpool, 18 June 1942), bass guitar, keyboards, lead guitar, drums, voice; George Harrison (b Liverpool, 25 Feb 1943), lead guitar, sitār, keyboards, voice.

IAN MACDONALD

1. Career.

Originating in Liverpool, the Beatles evolved from an amateur teenage skiffle group, the Quarry Men, formed by Lennon in 1956 and named after his school, Quarry Bank High. McCartney joined the Quarry Men in July 1957, Harrison in March 1958. In August 1960, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison – together with Stuart Sutcliffe (b Edinburgh, 23 June 1940; d Hamburg, 10 April 1962), bass guitar, and Pete Best (b Madras, 24 Nov 1941), drums – became the Beatles. Between then and November 1962 the group played many one-off gigs in and around Liverpool, and also, with decisive effect on their development as performers, four extended residencies at various clubs in Hamburg's red-light Reeperbahn district. Sutcliffe, a talented painter, left in December 1961, being replaced on bass by McCartney, who until then had played guitar and piano. In November 1961 a Liverpool music shop owner, Brian Epstein (b Liverpool, 19 Sept 1934; d London, 26/7 Aug 1967), heard the Beatles at the Cavern, a local ‘beat’ club in which they played the greatest number of their pre-1963 British gigs. Becoming their manager, he set about securing the group a recording contract, at which he succeeded in June 1962 with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the EMI label run by the producer george Martin.

The rawness of the Beatles’ performing talent, which six months earlier had made Decca reject them, appealed to Martin, although he was then doubtful of their song-writing. Replacing Best with Starr on drums, he encouraged Lennon and McCartney, the group’s chief composers, to write with more concentration, pointing out to them simple structural devices such as commencing with the chorus (the main selling-point of most pop songs). The Beatles responded by developing at remarkable speed. Their second release, Please please me, rose to number one in the British singles chart and their commercial success thereafter was continuous. The group’s tours of Britain in 1963 created an unprecedented excitement (‘Beatlemania’) which was reproduced in the USA when, on 9 February 1964, they appeared on national television singing their fifth single I want to hold your hand to an estimated audience of 70 million, an event unanimously identified by social commentators as a turning-point in postwar American culture. In the months after this breakthrough, the Beatles dominated the American singles charts, at one stage occupying the top five positions, a feat unheard of before and since. There were around three and a half million advance orders in Britain and America for the group’s sixth single Can't buy me love (1964).

During 1964–5 the Beatles built on their success with a sequence of bestselling singles and LPs and two feature films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). However, by the end of 1965, owing about equally to the visionary influence of Bob Dylan and the accelerating popularity among pop musicians of marijuana, the international pop scene began to advance from the straightforward energy and good humour of ‘beat music’ towards a greater formal and emotional complexity. Aware that they needed to regenerate themselves stylistically, the Beatles toyed uncertainly with ‘comedy songs’ and idiosyncratic variations on soul music in their transitional LP Rubber Soul (Parlophone, 1965). Only in early 1966, with the appearance of the counterculture and its associated drug the powerful hallucinogen LSD, did they identify their way forward: a new type of pop music which exploited the techniques of the recording studio to create unprecedented forms and textures in the service of an imaginative exploration of consciousness and childhood memories. With their groundbreaking LPs Revolver (Parlophone, 1966) and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967), the Beatles eclipsed even their most gifted rivals, achieving an eminence in contemporary popular culture which has endured and seems unlikely to diminish to any great extent in the foreseeable future. This work, together with the best of their 1962–5 output and liberal selections from their later releases, such as Magical Mystery Tour (Parlophone, 1967), The Beatles (Apple, 1968), and Abbey Road (Apple, 1969), constitutes the Beatles’ claim on posterity: this claim has to date provoked a literature of over 400 books.

After Epstein’s death in August 1967, the group gradually lost direction, the underlying conflicts between its otherwise intensely cohesive members souring the atmosphere in EMI’s Abbey Road studio and the tone of much of the work they did there during 1968–70. Despite this, they carried on, recording around 80 more tracks, albeit that these were increasingly individual efforts, written and sometimes even recorded solo. During this period Harrison emerged alongside Lennon and McCartney as a writer of worthy songs, one of which, Something (Apple, 1969) became the Beatles’ second most recorded number after McCartney's Yesterday (Parlophone, 1965). Divisiveness, caused largely by the process of growing up and getting married, eventually broke the group, a process painfully visible in their final film Let It Be (1970). After rallying with their last LP, Abbey Road, the Beatles, to the chagrin of their tens of millions of fans around the world, split up, each of them from then on continuing as a soloist.

Little the ex-Beatles did (amounting to around 60 LPs) compares with the music they recorded together during the 1960s. Two ‘reunion’ records, made in 1994–5 by matching McCartney, Harrison and Starr to demo tracks informally taped by Lennon during the late 1970s, failed to rise to the standards attained by the Beatles in their original guise. Notwithstanding this, their Anthology video and compact disc series (the latter comprising 145 previously unissued out-takes and alternative mixes) achieved massive commercial success during 1995–6, when, without playing concerts or recording more than a handful of new notes, the Beatles registered among the world's highest-selling popular artists, earning around £100 million.

Beatles

2. Works.

Since none of the Beatles could read music, arrangements beyond the basic four-piece were supplied by Martin, a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music. He has painstakingly refuted the suggestion, made by some classical critics, that he was the real creative genius behind the Beatles; on the contrary, he insists, he worked only to their original designs and to their specific requests, even to details of arrangements which they sang to him and which he often transcribed on the spot in the studio. Where Martin was important to the Beatles was in suggesting improvements in the form of their early songs (improvements they quickly came to incorporate independently into their writing) and later in guiding them in the selection of instrumental and electronic textures hitherto unused in pop music. Benign and self-effacing, his mode of cultivation was that of a man schooled in orthodox musicianship who delighted in, and was occasionally awed by, the untutored novelties with which the Beatles’ music naturally abounded. Together with his innovative engineer Geoff Emerick, Martin endeavoured to give the Beatles a productive base within the primitive and often exasperating restrictions of the studio technology of the time and of Abbey Road in particular.

Although Starr contributed one or two songs to the Beatles’ canon, they are negligible, the main source of the group’s original material being the Lennon-McCartney partnership, supplemented, to the tune of something around a tenth of the Beatles’ output, by Harrison. Unlike orthodox songwriting partnerships, in which one writes the music and the other the words, ‘Lennon-McCartney’ was a trademark for a pair of independent songwriters who happened to work similarly enough to collaborate, when the occasion arose, in several ways – ranging from bar-by-bar co-composition to supplying sections or lines for otherwise finished songs which each brought to their regular formal three-hour ‘writing sessions’.

Musicologists, rarely acquainted with the musical context in which the Beatles arose and developed, often misconstrue the structural attributes of their music, invoking inapposite parallels with, for example, Schubert and Mahler. Certainly it is true, as William Mann pointed out in The Times in 1963, that an early song by Lennon contains Aeolian cadences, yet these were not wittingly, let alone purposefully, put there by their author. They are thus, at best, of secondary significance in diagnosing the traits of the Beatles’ style (if such a homogeneous entity may be deemed to exist). While more than a little of the group’s music has a modal flavour, this was never consciously cultivated as it was, for instance, in a more serious context by Vaughan Williams; rather, it points to that part of the Beatles’ inheritance which derives from Anglo-Celtic folk music, a source which also prompted Lennon and McCartney’s taste for harmonizing in 4ths and 5ths (thereby to some extent guiding their choice of chords during collaborative composition, with a knock-on impact on their separate writing). Exceedingly eclectic, the Beatles were ‘folk musicians’ who, via the media of radio and gramophone, were inspired to music, and thence to songwriting, by a dense complex of vernacular influences. These included the show music of Broadway and Hollywood, British music hall and variety, blues, folk-blues, rhythm-and-blues, skiffle, rock and roll, gospel, doo-wop, soul music, the teenage pop genre created by British and American writer-producer teams during 1957–64, and, later in their career, the linear rāga forms of Hindustani classical music and the musique concrète of Schaeffer and Stockhausen. Perhaps the most influential of any discretely identifiable idiom on the Beatles as songwriters was the prolific output of the black Detroit pop label Tamla Motown, which gave them many early hints as to harmonic schemes, song lay-outs, arrangements (particularly rhythm-section parts), and formulae for lyric and melodic expression. (The group, it should be said, were candid in conceding to such borrowings, giving general credit where it was due, although, for obvious reasons, never being absolutely specific as to bars or phrases.)

Beyond these influences, the Beatles were adept and unusually exacting in the ways in which they shaped and elaborated their musical ideas. Self-taught by ear and schooled in the memory-intensive genre of jobbing pop, they were alive to the virtues of the unexpected and composed their songs with scant regard for harmonic orthodoxy. Always on the lookout for unusual changes, they frequently created these by moving their hands speculatively around piano or guitar, or by exploiting the scale- and arpeggio-generating possibilities of retuning the latter. Each, moreover, had a different personal style. McCartney, a natural melodist, voiced his romantic-sentimental optimism in wide-ranging tunes, capable of being sung or whistled without chordal support. Coincidentally, his harmonic designs are the most elegant in the Beatles’ repertory, often evincing a classical cadential grace and formal poise. A realist by temperament, Lennon preferred lines close to the narrow span of speech-inflections, relying on harmonic context to give these colour and emotional power. If not the most melodic, then certainly the most original of the songwriting Beatles, he wrote almost as many hit records as McCartney, in many cases succeeding through sheer immediacy of feeling. Harrison, too, depended on harmonic rather than melodic inspiration, working from chord-sequence to melody, although later (e.g. Something), emancipating himself, through the influence of rāga scales, into a more melodic, McCartneyesque, style. Together these three writers amounted to a formidable body of creative talent no rival pop group has come close to matching.

It is difficult to overestimate the Beatles’ impact and influence. Purely in terms of pop, they invented the idiom as later generations came to know it, revolutionizing pop songwriting, studio production, video promotion, general presentation and instrumental styles. As one of the two or three most influential bass-players in his field, a fluent pianist, an inventive drummer, and the performer of a handful of the genre’s most striking guitar solos, McCartney remains pop’s leading multi-instrumentalist; Starr’s direct and propulsive style, distinctively unorthodox fills and novel drum sounds have made him a significant influence on modern rock drumming. Beyond these accomplishments, the Beatles dominated and defined their time, reflecting every culturally significant shift in their kaleidoscopic decade in ways so acute, and at times prescient, that it occasionally seemed to their contemporaries that the group themselves caused some of the major social changes of the 1960s. In fact this was not so, but it is a testament to the scale of their real achievements that a quartet of popular musicians should be credited with so fundamental a contribution to late 20th-century culture.

Beatles

WORKS

Edition: The Beatles Complete, ed. Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo and Goro Sato (Milwaukee, 1993) [transcr. of recordings]

[songs, in order of commencement of work in the recording studio]

Lennon and McCartney: You’ll be mine (1960); Like Dreamers Do (1962); Hello little girl (1962); Love me do (1962); P.S. I love you (1962); Please please me (1963); Ask me why (1963); There’s a place (1963); I saw her standing there (1963); Do you want to know a secret (1963); Misery (1963); Hold me tight (1963); From Me to You (1963); Thank you girl (1963); I’ll be on my way (1963); She loves you (1963); I’ll get you (1963); Little Child (1963); All I’ve got to do (1963); Not a Second Time (1963); I want to hold your hand (1963); This Boy (1963); Can’t buy me love (1964); You can’t do that (1964); And I love her (1964); I should have known better (1964); Tell me why (1964); If I Fell (1964); I’m happy just to dance with you (1964); I call your name (1964); Any Time at All (1964); Things We Said Today (1964); When I get Home (1964); Baby’s in black (1964); I’m a loser (1964); Every Little Thing (1964); I don’t want to spoil the party (1964); What you’re doing (1964); No Reply (1964); Eight Days a Week (1964); She’s a woman (1964); I feel fine (1964); I’ll follow the sun (1964)

Ticket to Ride (1965); Another Girl (1965); The Night Before (1965); You’ve got to hide your love away (1965); If You’ve got Trouble (1965); Tell me what you see (1965); You’re going to lose that girl (1965); That means a lot (1965); Help! (1965); I’ve just seen a face (1965); Yesterday (1965); It’s only love (1965); Wait (1965); Run for your life (1965); Norwegian Wood (This bird has flown) (1965); Drive my car (1965); Day Tripper (1965); In My Life (1965); We can work it out (1965); Nowhere Man (1965); I’m looking through you (1965); Michelle (1965); The Word (1965); You won’t see me (1965); Girl (1965); Tomorrow never knows (1965); Got to get you into my life (1966); Paperback Writer (1966); Rain (1966); Doctor Robert (1966); And your bird can sing (1966); I’m only sleeping (1966); Eleanor Rigby (1966); For No One (1966); Yellow Submarine (1966); Good Day Sunshine (1966); Here, There and Everywhere (1966); She said she said (1966); Strawberry Fields forever (1966); When I’m Sixty-Four (1966); Penny Lane (1966)

A Day in the Life (1967); Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967); Good morning good morning (1967); Fixing a Hole (1967); Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite (1967); Lovely Rita (1967); Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967); Getting Better (1967); She’s leaving home (1967); With a Little Help from my Friends (1967); Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (1967); Magical Mystery Tour (1967); Baby you’re a rich man (1967); All Together Now (1967); Your mother should know (1967); I am the walrus (1967); The Fool on the Hill (1967); Hello, Goodbye (1967)

Lady Madonna (1968); Across the Universe (1968); Hey Bulldog (1968); Revolution 1 (1968); Revolution 9 (1968); Blackbird (1968); Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey (1968); Good Night (1968); Ob-la-di, ob-la-da (1968); Revolution (1968); Cry baby cry (1968); Helter Skelter (1968); Sexy Sadie (1968); Hey Jude (1968); Mother Nature’s Son (1968); Yer Blues (1968); Rocky Racoon (1968); What’s the new Mary Jane (1968); Wild Honey Pie (1968); Dear Prudence (1968); Back in the USSR (1968); Glass Onion (1968); I will (1968); Step inside love (1968); Birthday (1968); Happiness is a warm gun (1968); Honey Pie (1968); Martha my Dear (1968); I'm so tired (1968); The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (1968); Why don’t we do it in the road? (1968); Julia (1968)

Dig a Pony (1969); I’ve got a feeling (1969); Don’t let me down (1969); Get back (1969); Two of Us (1969); Let it be (1969); The Long and Winding Road (1969); One After 909 (1969); I want you (She’s so heavy) (1969); The Ballad of John and Yoko (1969); Oh! Darling (1969); You never give me your money (1969); Her Majesty (1969); Golden Slumbers (1969); Carry that weight (1969); Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (1969); Come Together (1969); the End (1969); Sun King (1969); Mean Mr Mustard (1969); Polythene Pam (1969); She came in through the bathroom window (1969); Because (1969)

Harrison: Don’t bother me (1963); You know what to do (1964); You like me too much (1965); If I needed someone (1965); Think for yourself (1965); Love You To (1966); Taxman (1966); I want to tell you (1966); Only a Northern Song (1967); Within You Without You (1967); It’s all too much (1967); Blue Jay Way (1967); The Inner Light (1968); While my Guitar Gently Weeps (1968); Not Guilty (1968); Piggies (1968); Savoy Truffle (1968); Long, Long, Long (1968); For You Blue (1969); All things must pass (1969); Old Brown Shoe (1969); Something (1969); Here comes the sun (1969); I Me Mine (1970)

Other: Don’t pass me by (1968); Octopus’s Garden (1969) [Starkey]

What Goes On (1965) [Lennon, McCartney, Starkey]

12-bar Original (1965); Flying (1967); Christmas Time (is here again) (1967); Los Paranoias (1968); Dig it (1969) [Harrison, Lennon, McCartney, Starkey]

In Spite of All the Danger (1958) [Harrison, McCartney]

Cry for a shadow (1961) [Harrison, Lennon]

Cayenne (1960); Junk (1968); Teddy Boy (1969); Come and get it (1969) [McCartney]

Free as a Bird (1994); Real Love (1995) [Lennon]

Films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964); Help! (1965); Magical Mystery Tour (1967); Yellow Submarine (1969); Let It Be (1970)

Beatles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Braun: Love Me Do: the Beatles’ Progress (Harmondsworth, 1962/R)

B. Epstein with D. Taylor: A Cellarful of Noise (Garden City, NY, 1964, 2/1965)

D. Cooke: ‘The Lennon-McCartney Songs’, The Listener (1 Feb 1968)

H. Davies: The Beatles: the Authorised Biography (London, 1968, 3/1992)

N. Rorem: ‘The Music of the Beatles’, New York Review of Books (18 Jan 1968)

P. McCabe and R.D. Schonfield: Apple to the Core: the Unmaking of the Beatles (London, 1972)

W. Mellers: Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in Retrospect (London, 1973)

J. Wenner: Lennon Remembers: the Rolling Stone Interviews (London, 1973)

D. Sheff and G.B. Golson: The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (New York, 1981)

P. Norman: Shout! The Beatles in their Generation (London, 1982)

R. DiLello: The Longest Cocktail Party: an Insider’s View of the Beatles (Detroit, 1983)

R. Coleman: John Winston Lennon, 1940–1966 (London, 1984)

R. Coleman: John Ono Lennon, 1967–1980 (London, 1984)

P. Shotton with N. Schaffner: John Lennon in my Life (London, 1984)

J. Wiener: Come Together: John Lennon in his Time (London, 1984)

P. Best and P. Doncaster: Beatle! The Pete Best Story (London, 1985)

C. Salewicz: McCartney (New York, 1986)

D. Taylor: It was Twenty Years Ago Today (London, 1987)

M. Lewisohn: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (London, 1988)

W. McKeen: The Beatles: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1989)

M. Lewisohn: The Complete Beatles Chronicle (London, 1992)

I. MacDonald: Revolution in the Head: the Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London, 1994, 2/1997)

G. Martin with W. Pearson: Summer of Love: the Making of Sgt. Pepper (London, 1994)

B. Miles: Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (London, 1997)

A.F. Moore: The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Cambridge, 1997)

Beat Music.

A style of British pop music developed in the early 1960s; it was significant as the first time musicians of that country had created their own sound, rather than imitating the US originals. In Liverpool, Merseybeat was spearheaded by the Beatles, whose early style grafted onto a skiffle base the instrumental and vocal textures, melodic structures, syncopated rhythms and responsorial vocal styles of early rock and roll, the modality and verse–refrain form of Anglo-Celtic folk song, and some ornamental chromaticisms and triadic parallelisms from late 19th-century European harmony. Other leading exponents included Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers. The Beatles’ insistence on writing their own material was a novel redivision of labour which has had lasting consequences. In London an alternative approach was dominated by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who, in which a narrower amalgam was found, with the skiffle and rock and roll foundation partly replaced by a harder-edged rhythm and blues sound, in a selfconscious attempt at authenticity. In the USA the term ‘British invasion’ is preferred to ‘beat’, calling attention to the flood of such bands as these into the US market during the period 1964–5. However this term fails to distinguish stylistically between beat music and the simpler pop music purveyed by Peter and Gordon, the Dave Clark Five or the Hollies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Melly: ‘British Pop Music’, Revolt into Style (London, 1970), 23–124

C. May and T. Phillips: British Beat (London, 1974)

M. Houghton: ‘British Beat’, The Rock Primer, ed. J. Collis (London, 1980), 149–78

N. Schaffner: The British Invasion (New York, 1982)

D. McAleer: Beatboom (London, 1994)

A. Clayson: Beat Merchants (Poole, 1995)

ALLAN F. MOORE

Beatritz de Dia.

Name formerly assumed to be that of the Comtessa de Dia.

Beats

(Fr. battements; Ger. Schwebungen; It. battimenti; Sp. batimientos).

An acoustical phenomenon, useful in tuning instruments, resulting from the interference of two sound waves of slightly different frequencies. The number of beats per second equals the difference in frequency between the two notes: a pitch of 440 Hz will make four beats per second with one of 444 (or 436); three with one of 443 (or 437); two with 442 (or 438); one with 441 (or 439); and the beats will disappear if the two notes are in perfect unison. See Acoustics.

CLIVE GREATED

Beattie, James

(b Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire, 25 Oct 1735; d Aberdeen, 18 Aug 1803). Scottish philosopher and writer on musical aesthetics. He was the son of a farmer, and became professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and entered polite London society on the strength of his Essays and his universally acclaimed poem The Minstrel. He was also a member of the Aberdeen Musical Society and a keen amateur cellist; he continued to play the cello with three fingers after the tendon of his left-hand middle finger was severed in an accident.

His philosophical writings are unusual for their time in including an intelligent and penetrating essay On Poetry and Music (written 1762, published 1776), which considers the questions ‘Is music an imitative art?’ and ‘How are the pleasures we derive from music to be accounted for?’ along with ‘Conjectures on some peculiarities of National Music’; the essay was reprinted several times and was translated into French in 1798. A further interesting, if slight, open letter On the Improvement of Psalmody in Scotland was printed for private circulation in 1778.

Large collections of Beattie’s letters, with copious references to musical matters, are in Aberdeen University Library and the National Library of Scotland. His poem The Hermit was set in 1778 by Tommaso Giordani.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (A.H. Bullen)

H.G. Farmer: Music Making in Olden Days: the Story of the Aberdeen Concerts, 1748–1801 (London, 1950), 96–100

K. Kloth: James Beatties Ästhetische Theorien: ihre Zusammenhänge mit der Aberdeener Schulphilosophie (Munich, 1974)

K. Fujie: ‘18 seiki eikoku ni okeru ongakushisô: mimesis o meguru tayutai’ [The British view of music in the 18th century: changing implications of music of mimesis], Bigaku, xxxi/3 (1980), 1–15

N. de Palézieux: Die Lehre vom Ausdruck in der englischen Musikästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1981)

DAVID JOHNSON

Beatty, Josephine.

See Hunter, Alberta.

Beauchamps [Beauchamp], Pierre

(b Paris, 30 Oct 1631; d Paris, early Feb 1705). French dancer, choreographer, composer and conductor. He has been wrongly identified with Charles-Louis Beauchamps. Called the father of all ballet-masters, he codified the five positions of feet and arms, and developed a rational system of dance notation which is now called after Raoul-Auger Feuillet, who published it (in his Chorégraphie, ou L’art de décrire la dance) in 1700.

Beauchamps was Louis XIV’s personal dancing-master and favourite partner in ballets de cour in the 1650s and 60s. Throughout his career he collaborated with Lully, whom he first met as comic dancer in, and later as composer of, ballets de cour. Beauchamps choreographed intermèdes and dances for Molière’s comédies-ballets, beginning with Les fâcheux (1661), for which he also composed the music and conducted the orchestra. He choreographed entrées for Le mariage forcé (1664), Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1669), Les amants magnifiques (1670, with Dolivet), Psyche (1671) and Le malade imaginaire (1673), and danced in others. He was the ballet-master of Pierre Perrin’s Académies d’Opéra, creating dances for Cambert’s Pomone (1671). As ballet-master for Lully’s Opéra during the 1670s and 80s, he choreographed dances for the premières of Lully’s L’impatience (1661), La naissance de Vénus (1665), Alceste (1674), Atys (1676), Isis (1677), Le triomphe de l’Amour (1681, with Pécour) and Ballet de la Jeunesse (1686). After Lully’s death (1687) Beauchamps left the Opéra to choreograph and compose music for ballets at the Jesuit colleges (1669–97), although he continued to choreograph and dance in the King’s court ballets. Louis XIV bestowed many honours upon him: he was appointed Intendant des ballets du roi in 1661 and director of the Académie Royale de Danse in 1680 (although he was not, as many have assumed, a founder-member).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Derra de Moroda: ‘Choreographie: the Dance Notation of the 18th Century: Beauchamps or Feuillet?’, Book Collector, xvi (1967), 450–76

R. Kunzle: ‘Pierre Beauchamp: the Illustrious Unknown Choreographer’, Dance Scope, viii/2 (1974), 32–42; ix/1 (1974), 30–45

R. Astier: ‘Pierre Beauchamps and the Ballets de Collège’, Dance Chronicle, vi/2 (1983), 138–63

G. Houle, ed.: Le Ballet de Facheux: Beauchamp’s Music for Molière’s Comedy (Bloomington, 1991) [incl. H.W. Myers: ‘Orchestral bowing technique’, pp.11–24]

J.S. Powell: ‘Choreographer to Molière’s Troupe du Roy’, ML, lxxvi (1995), 168–86

MAUREEN NEEDHAM

Beauchamps, Pierre-François Godard de

(b Paris, 1689; d Paris, 22 March 1781). French dramatist and literary historian. A prolific writer of ballets, comedies, harlequinades and licentious tales disguised in the garb of classical antiquity, Beauchamps seems to have begun his career in 1714 when he wrote the words for the divertissement Le comte de Gabalis et les peuples élémentaires, performed at the Château de Sceaux (music by Bourgeois, lost). He continued along the same lines with the Ballet de la jeunesse, first performed at the Tuileries in 1718 (music by Matho and Alarius, mostly lost). The rest of his theatrical career was spent at the Théâtre Italien, where he had ten comedies produced between 1722 and 1731, three of which contained musical intermèdes. The Chefs d’oeuvre de M. Beauchamps (1787) contained only three works, all without intermèdes; another 11 plays, never performed, are listed in his Recherches sur les théâtres de France, five of them with musical intermèdes.

Beauchamps is remembered above all for his meticulous Recherches sur les théâtres de France, depuis l’année onze cens soixante-un jusques à présent (Paris, 1735/R), which remains a valuable source of information on many aspects of French theatre from the troubadours up to the early 18th century. It is often more informative and accurate than the better-known writings on theatre music by his predecessor Ménestrier. The Bibliothèque des théâtres (Paris, 1733/R) sometimes attributed to Beauchamps is the work of Maupoint.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (F. Lesure)

J.-J. Mouret: Recueil de divertissements du Nouveau Théâtre Italien, iii (Paris, c1737)

J.A.J. Desboulmiers: Histoire anecdotique et raisonnée du Théâtre Italien depuis son rétablissement en France jusqu ’à l’année 1769 (Paris, 1769)

Introduction to Chefs d’oeuvre de M. Beauchamps, Petite bibliothèque des théâtres: Théâtre-Italien, Comédies (Paris, 1787)

C. Brenner: The Théâtre Italien (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961)

ROBERT FAJON

Beaufils, Marcel

(b Beauvais, Oise, 30 Dec 1899; d Paris, 11 Jan 1985). French aesthetician. He studied in Paris (1917) and, after the war, in Strasbourg (1921–4), where he prepared his agrégation in German (1925). While holding a musicological post (1925–9) at the Centre Français d'Etudes Supérieures in Vienna (now the Institut Français) he gave a series of lecture-recitals in Vienna and Budapest on contemporary music and French folk music, and made contact with the Second Viennese School. On his return to France he taught in the Lycée Pasteur (1931–65) while also working on his doctorate (1942) and writing his first literary essays. In 1947 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until 1971; he succeeded Claude Rostand as vice-president of the Académie Charles Cros in 1970.

Beaufils specialized in German studies, particularly in German poetry and music. He was a philosopher rather than a musicologist, his approach to music being an aesthetic one: going beyond a strictly literary, musical, historical or sociological point of view, he attempted, for instance, to discover the basic meaning of drama (notably in Mozart and Wagner), and the essential difference in origin between the German lied and the French mélodie. He wrote several plays and novels (Innocent, Le mystère de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, Poids d'une vie and Le pont du diable) as well as two volumes of poetry (Christ noir and Cathédrales intérieures).

WRITINGS

Schumann (Paris, 1932)

‘Schumann et l'opéra national allemand’, ReM, no.161 (1935), 110–22 [Schumann issue]

Par la musique vers l'obscur (Marseilles, 1942, enlarged 2/1982 as Comment l'Allemagne est devenue musicienne)

Parsifal (Paris, 1944/R) [translation and study]

‘Vers un classicisme musical’, ReM, nos.198–202 (1946), 90–95

Wagner et le wagnérisme (Paris, 1947, 2/1980)

‘Die französische Musik seit 1944’, Jb der Musikwissenschaft, i (1949–50), 6–13

‘Bach dans son temps’, Revue internationale de musique, no.8 (1950), 17–24

La musique de piano de Schumann (Paris, 1951, 2/1979)

Musique du son, musique du verbe (Paris, 1954, 2/1994)

Le lied romantique allemand (Paris, 2/1956)

‘Richard Wagner’, Histoire de la musique, ii, ed. Roland-Manuel (Paris, 1963), 579–619

Villa-Lobos, musicien et poète du Brésil (Rio de Janeiro, 1967, 2/1988)

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER

Beauharnais, Hortense Eugénie de.

See Hortense.

Beaujoyeux [Beaujoyeulx], Balthasar de [Belgioioso, Baldassare de; ‘Baltazarini’]

(b Piedmont, before c1535; d c1587). Italian ballet-master and violinist. He went to France in about 1555 as leader of a band of violinists sent by the Maréchal de Brissac to Catherine de' Medici; soon he adopted French nationality and changed his name to Balthasar de Beaujoyeux. Beaujoyeux was not only a good musician and a competent violinist, but also a tactful and successful courtier who rapidly found favour with his French masters, serving successively as valet de chambre to the sovereign, to Queen Catherine, Mary Stuart, Charles IX and Henri III of Valois. His principal duties at court were those of ballet-master and ‘master of the revels’, devising and superintending a variety of court entertainments, including masquerades, pastorals and intermedi. Influenced on the one hand by the performances of the Italian travelling troupe, the Compagnia dei Gelosi, then in Paris, and on the other by the aesthetics of the Pléiade, Beaujoyeux' choreographic skills found full expression in the luxurious and costly Magnificences of 1581, a series of extravagant productions given by Henri III on the occasion of the marriage of the Duc de Joyeuse to Queen Louise's half-sister, Marguérite de Vaudemont.

One of these, the Balet comique de la Royne, presented on 15 October 1581, was largely Beaujoyeux' creation and is his only extant work (ed. and Eng. trans., MSD, xxv, 1971). It was the result of collaboration by various artists connected with the court: the story was by Agrippa d'Aubigny, the text by La Chesnaye, the king's almoner, the music by Lambert de Beaulieu and Jacques Salmon and the scenery by Jacques Patin. Beaujoyeux was the stage manager and choreographer. The result was an important forerunner of the ballet de cour and through the strong dynastic links between the Valois and the Medici was to have an impact on the development of staged dance in Italy, beginning with the final choreographed intermedio for La Pellegrina, performed at the 1589 Florentine wedding festivities. The music applied the technique of musique mesurée in the choral sections, while several of the solo airs are in the new monodic recitative style of the time and some sections of the ballet are in five parts for instruments alone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AnthonyFB

BurneyH

FenlonMM

H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserard et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)

F.A. Yates: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947/R)

F.A. Yates: ‘Poésie et musique dans les “Magnificences” au mariage du duc de Joyeuse, Paris, 1581’, Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle: Paris 1953, 241–64

F.A. Yates: The Valois Tapestries (London, 1959, rev. 2/1975)

M.M. McGowan: L'art du ballet de cour en France 1581–1643 (Paris, 1963/R)

P. Bonniffet: ‘Esquisses du ballet humaniste’, Cahiers de l'IRHMES, i (1992), 15–51

CAROL MacCLINTOCK/IAIN FENLON

Beaulaigue [Beaulègue], Barthélemy

(b c1543; fl Marseilles, 1555–8). French composer and poet. In December 1557 Robert Granjon and Guillaume Guéroult of Lyons announced that they intended to publish ‘new music by a child from Marseilles’; the dedication of the ensuing Chansons nouvelles … à quatre parties (Lyons, 1558–9; ed. in Auda and Goosse) to Diane de Poitiers describes him as a choirboy at Marseilles Cathedral, and begs indulgence for the first efforts of a 15-year-old student, promising something more worthy in the future. The first two of the 13 chansons are addressed to Diane, with three more dedicated to Leon Strozzi, a naval commander based at Marseilles from 1549 to 1551 who died in 1554; this suggests that the chansons were written before Beaulaigue was even 12 years old. The superius partbook contains a portrait of the composer (see illustration). According to the title-page he also wrote the poems, all of them extended épigrammes with decasyllabic lines using conventional courtly language. The clearcut form of the music and its generally homophonic style are typical of the mid-century French chanson.

The 14 motets of his Mottetz nouvellement mis en musique (Lyons, 1559; ed. in Auda and Goosse), for four to eight voices, are more varied in construction and more polyphonic than the chansons; the text Vidi turbam magnam is set twice, the second time with a canon by inversion in the top part. Three of the pieces show connections with Marseilles: the first, Surgite omnes gentes, for five voices, is dedicated to the Cardinal of Lorraine (Charles de Guise), who was ‘passing through Marseilles on his way to Rome’, and two others praise the patron saints of Marseilles; one of these, Videas Dominus, together with another eight-voice motet from the same volume, Vidi turbam magnam, was reprinted at Nuremberg in Thesaurus musicus (RISM 1564¹). The literary expertise of the chansons, the musical maturity of both collections, the absence of later compositions and the complete lack of archival material documenting Beaulaigue's activity raise doubts that the child prodigy ever existed; the possibility that the publishers engaged in fraud is discussed by Durand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Lesure)

A. Auda and A. Goosse, eds.: Barthélemy Beaulaigue, poète et musicien prodige (1544–?) (Brussels, ?1957); see also review by H.-A. Durand, Provence historique, viii (1957–8), 176

F. Dobbins: Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992), 231–51

FRANK DOBBINS

Beaulieu, André Rosiers, Sieur de.

See Rosiers, andré de.

Beaulieu [Martin, Martin-Beaulieu], (Marie) Désiré

(b Paris, 11 April 1791; d Niort, Deux Sèvres, 21 Dec 1863). French composer, folk music collector, musical philanthropist and writer on music. He studied the violin with Rodolphe Kreutzer and composition with Benincori before entering the Paris Conservatoire in Méhul’s class. In 1810 he won the Prix de Rome, but instead of going to Italy as the prize required, he settled at Niort and became engaged to Françoise Caroline Rouget de Gourcez, whom he married in 1816. He nonetheless continued to meet the other requirements of the prize, including the submission of both sacred and secular compositions which show him to have been a well-trained though conservative musician. In 1818, the year after Méhul’s death, Beaulieu wrote his most ambitious work, a Requiem in his teacher’s memory.

Beaulieu’s contributions to musical life in Western France were substantial. In 1827 he founded a philharmonic society in Niort to perform vocal music from the 16th century to the 18th, as well as modern works. Eight years later he established a more serious organization, the Association Musicale de l’Ouest; it sponsored annual concert series in Niort, Poitiers, La Rochelle and elsewhere that involved regional professionals and amateurs in large-scale choral works, as well as chamber and orchestral repertory. Under its aegis Mendelssohn’s St Paul and Elijah and Handel’s Alexander’s Feast were presented in France for the first time. Also important were Beaulieu’s activities as a collector of folk music in his region. He participated in civic life, and was acting mayor in 1844; he was president of the local academic society and founded the charitable Société de Secours Mutuels.

Several of Beaulieu’s works were performed in Paris during the 1840s, 50s and 60s, and in 1860 he founded there the Société de Chant Classique whose aims were to promote choral music in Paris and to raise funds for the charitable Association des Artistes Musiciens (which was later renamed the Fondation Beaulieu). In part subventioned by Beaulieu’s estate, it continued until 1912. The other beneficiaries after his widow’s death were the Association Musicale de l’Ouest and the library in Niort. Beaulieu was not the author of romances and other short pieces published in Paris in the 1840s under the name Désiré Martin, as some catalogues indicate.

WORKS

for additional sources see Beaulieu collection, Bibliothèque Médiathèque Régionale de la Ville de Niort

Liturgical: Miserere, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, 1812, F-Pn*; Laudate Dominum, 2 choruses, 2 orch, 1813, Pn*; Domine salvum, 4 solo vv, 5vv, orch, 1814, Pn*; Messe de requiem, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, 1818 (Paris, 1866), Pn*; Messe solennelle, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, 1845 (Paris, 1866); Messe à trois voix, org. 1853 (Paris, 1867); Salve regina, s, org, 1859

Other sacred: O Dieu, qui par un choix propice (J.-B. Rousseau), 4 solo vv, vv, orch, 1828, Pn*; J’ai vu mes tristes journées (Rousseau), 1v, orch, 1828; Prière des matelots, solo vv, 5vv, vc, b, tpt, 1831; Hymne pour la première communion (E. Deschamps), S, girls' choir, 1840; Où donc es-tu, Seigneur? (A. de Lamartine), op.1, 5vv, vc, b, tpt (Niort, 1845); Cantique pour la fête de Sainte Anne, 1845; La charité (J.A. Vinaty), hymne, 1852; Dieu de lumière, hymne, 2 solo vv, 5vv; O rives du Jourdain! (after J. Racine), S, 4vv, orch, 1860; Jehovah, de la terre, a consacré les cimes, choir, 2 tpt (?Niort, n.d.)

Ops and op excerpts: Anacréon (1, Gentil-Bernard [P.J. Bernard]), 1818–19; Tout mortel doit ici paraître (P. Quinault), 1830; Ninette à la cour (oc, C.S. Favart), 1929, inc.; Philadelphie (1), 1855

Other vocal: Alcyone (A.V. Arnault), scène dramatique, 1808; Céphale (J.-B. Rousseau), cant., 1808; Cupidon pleurant Psyché (Arnault), scène dramatique, 1809; Circé (Rousseau), cant., 1809; Agar dans le désert (V.J.E. de Jouy), scène lyrique, 1809, Pn*; Marie Stuart (Jouy) monologue lyrique, S, orch, 1810; Héro (J.M.B.B. de Saint-Victor), cant., 1810, Pn*; Sapho à Leucade (Vinaty), scène lyrique, 1813, Pn*; Scène lyrique adressée à Mme la duchesse d’Angoulême, 1815; Jeanne d’Arc (Vinaty), cant., 1817; Ode sur la naissance de Louis XV (?Niort, 1820); Fantaisie sur des airs des Pyrénées, solo vv, vv, orch, 1828; Psyché et l’Amour (J.-B.P. Molière and P. Corneille), scène lyrique, 1833; Fête bachique (Rousseau), 2 T, choir, orch, 1835; Sombre océan (E. Deschamps), 1841; Hymne du matin (Lamartine), orat, 1843 (Paris, n.d.); Dithyrambe sur l’immortalité de l’âme (J. Delille), orat, 1850; L’hymne de la nuit (Lamartine), orat, 1851; Jeanne d’Arc, grande scène lyrique, 1853; others

c50 shorter vocal works (romances, couplets, nocturnes etc.)

Orch, chbr works, folk music transcrs.

WRITINGS

‘Associations musicales’, Revue littéraire de l'Ouest, 1st ser., i (1836–7), 47–59

Du rhythme, des effets qu’il produit et de leurs causes (Niort, 1853)

Conseils sur les moyens d’améliorer l’exécution des chants religieux (Niort, 1856)

Mémoire sur ce qui reste de la musique de l’ancienne Grèce dans les premiers chants de l’église (Niort, 1858)

‘Mémoire sur le caractère que doit avoir la musique d’église’, RGMP, xxv (1858), 191–2, 198–9; pubd separately (Paris, 1858)

Mémoire sur quelques airs nationaux qui sont dans la tonalité grégorienne (Niort, [1860]) [also pubd without music exx. in RGMP, xxv (1858), 317–18, 328–9, 335–6]

Mémoire sur l’origine de la musique (Niort, 1863); repr. in RGMP, xxx (1863), 403–4; xxxi (1864), 28–9, 36–7, 237–8, 260–61

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (D. Paladilhe)

FétisB

FétisBS

‘Nécrologie’, RGMP, xxx (1863), 412

Notices sur Dés.-Martin Beaulieu et Pierre-Th. Segrétain (Niort, 1865)

P. Galteaux: Un musicien niortais, Martin-Beaulieu, grand prix de Rome, fondateur de la Société de Concerts de Chant Classique, 1791–1863 (Niort, 1912) [incl. list of works and writings]

M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET

Beaulieu, Eustorg [Hector] de

(b Beaulieu-sur-Ménoire, Bas-Limousin, c1495; d Basle, 8 Jan 1552). French poet and composer. He was organist at Lectoure Cathedral (Gers) in 1522 and from 1524 taught music at Tulle. About this time he entered the priesthood. He moved to Lyons in 1534 (probably at the instigation of Charles d'Estaing, one of the canons at St Jean Cathedral), where he entered the service of the governor of Lyons, Pomponio Trivulzi. His Les divers rapportz (Lyons, 1537; ed. M.A. Pegg, Geneva, 1964) includes some biographical details and the texts of 12 chansons which he claimed to have set for three and four voices, but only three of the pieces survive with music; a further setting, ascribed to Jean Caulery, was published by Phalèse in 1552. Beaulieu also frequented the town's literary and musical salons, making the acquaintance of Maurice Scève and Jean Pérreal and the composer Francesco de Layolle. The evangelical philosophy of Margaret of Navarre and her circle may have influenced Beaulieu's conversion to Protestantism. He left for Geneva at the end of April 1537, but soon moved on to Lausanne, where he studied theology. On 12 May 1540 the consistory of Berne appointed him pastor of Thierrens and Moudon. A few months later he married but his young wife left him soon afterwards, accusing him of homosexuality. By August 1540 he had completed a collection of psalms but was apparently unable to secure Calvin's permission for their publication. However, the texts of 160 chansons spirituelles were printed on 12 August 1546 with the title Chrestienne resjouyssance. Beaulieu promised to publish three- or four-voice settings of 39 of the pieces together with a number of Latin motets, but as far as is known these never appeared; four of the poems, set for four voices by Caulery, were published in Antwerp (RISM 1556¹⁸). After another unsuccessful marriage he resigned his pastorate, moving first to Biel (near Berne) and then to Basle, where he matriculated at the university in 1548 and enjoyed the support of Bonifacius Amerbach, then rector of Basle University.

WORKS

Bon jour, bon an et bonne estraine, 4vv, ed. in Bridgman

Mondain séjour j'ay perdu ta présence, 4vv, ed. in Becker

Voicy le non temps que chascun s'apreste, 4vv, ed. in Cw, lxi (1956)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (N. Bridgman)

G. Colletet: Vie d’Eustorg de Beaulieu, ed. P. Tamizey de Laroque (Paris, 1878/R)

G. Becker: Eustorg de Beaulieu, poète et musicien (Paris, 1880)

E. Fage: Eustorg de Beaulieu: poète et musicien du seizième siècle (Tulle, 1880)

H. Harvitt: Eustorg de Beaulieu, a Disciple of Marot, 1495(?)–1552 (Lancaster, PA, 1918/R)

N. Bridgman: ‘Eustorg de Beaulieu, Musician’, MQ, xxxvii (1951), 61–70

P. Pidoux, ed.: Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle, ii: Documents et bibliographie (Basle, 1962)

J. Burdet: La musique dans le pays de Vaud sous le régime bernois, 1536–1798 (Lausanne, 1963)

F. Dobbins: Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992)

FRANK DOBBINS

Beaulieu, Girard de.

French music teacher and possibly a composer, who may have been related to Lambert de Beaulieu.

Beaulieu, Lambert de

(fl 1559–90). French ?composer and singer. His voice was praised in an ode by Olivier de Magny published in 1559. Fétis claimed that he composed the vocal music to Beaujoyeux’s Balet comique de la Royne (Paris, 1582/R; ed. in MSD, xxv, 1971), though Mersenne attributed it to Girard de Beaulieu. Beaujoyeux’s preface to the work explained that the queen, Louise de Lorraine, commissioned the music from ‘Sieur de Beaulieu’ who was in her service, and that he in turn sought assistance from the king’s chamber musicians, notably Jacques Salmon. Lambert was probably also the singer who took the virtuoso bass part of Glaucus in the ballet, and who, according to Fétis, was a chamber musician to Henri III in 1583–4. In 1590 Emperor Rudolf II wrote to his ambassador at Paris requesting that inquiries be made about engaging Lambert de Beaulieu whom he described as ‘a celebrated bass singer of rare voice who accompanied himself on the lyre’ and who had previously been in the service of Henri III. Fabrice Marin Caietain’s first book of airs (RISM 1576³) contains three settings of courtly poems by Desportes attributed to ‘De Beaulieu’; the similarity between these and the vocal music of the Balet comique suggests that the same composer was responsible for both. In the dedication Caietain described Beaulieu as the ‘Arion’ of France and acknowledged him, together with Joachim Thibault de Courville, as his models for quantitatively measured music ‘for they not only excel in lyrical recitation but are learned in the art of music and perfect in the composition of airs which the Greeks call melopoeia’.

Two rustic songs in popular style attributed to ‘Beaulieu’ in Le Roy & Ballard’s fourth book of chansons for four voices (RISM 1553²³; both songs ed. in SCC, ix, 1995) are stylistically unlike the airs of 1576 and the Balet comique. It is not known whether any of the musicians named Beaulieu in late 16th-century France were related. Girard de Beaulieu, mentioned above, was described in a document of 25 May 1590 as music master to the Chevalier d’Aumale. Others named Beaulieu include Mathurin, who was employed at St Merry, Paris, in May 1574, and Pierre le Proust, Sieur de Beaulieu, a nobleman who witnessed Beaujoyeux’s wedding in 1595.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MersenneHU

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d’Adrian le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955); suppl., RdM, xl (1957), 166–72

FRANK DOBBINS

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin [Caron de]

(b Paris, 24 Jan 1732; d Paris, 18 May 1799). French writer. The son of a clockmaker, he defended his invention of a watch escapement mechanism against theft by the royal clockmaker Lepaute, whom he replaced at court in 1755. He subsequently became harp teacher to the daughters of Louis XV and, thanks to contact with the homme d’affaires Pâris-Duverney, was ultimately able to buy himself into the nobility. In his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767), the preface to his Eugénie, he took up the ideas of Diderot in favour of a distinct genre of drame, different from both French classical tragedy and comedy. His works in this genre outnumber his Figaro comedies, and even these show its influence: he returned to it fully in the third Figaro play, La mère coupable (1792). His racy parades, playlets written for the high-society private stage, served as an apprenticeship in comic musical theatre, particularly in the use of vaudevilles (well-known tunes sung, as part of the dramatic text, to new words). Le barbier de Séville was first conceived as a more substantial musical play in this form, but was refused by the Théâtre Italien (which had absorbed the Opéra-Comique) in 1772. Song remained an important structural element in the final dialogue comedy version, successful at the Comédie-Française in 1775. Having attempted to make dramatic use of entr’acte music in Eugénie, he successfully included Baudron’s storm music as a prelude to Act 4 of Le barbier, and, alongside continued use of vaudeville tunes in Le mariage de Figaro (1784), stretched Comédie-Française conventions by introducing a whole scene of dance, song and mime for the ‘coronation’ of Suzanne with the bride’s head-dress (4.x). The tune of the vaudeville final of this famous comedy, originally by Tissier for Madame d’Antremont’s anacreontic poem La fauvette (Bazile sings its first verse in Act 4 scene x), was immensely popular during the Revolution, as indeed was that for Chérubin’s burlesque romance: ‘Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre’ (2.iv). As if to vindicate Beaumarchais’s musical instinct, Le barbier de Séville attracted settings by Benda, Paisiello, Isouard and Rossini, while the Mozart-Da Ponte collaboration in Le nozze di Figaro proved just how much of the original play was translatable into music. Beaumarchais also collaborated with Salieri, and held views on the role of music at variance with Mozart’s operatic practice. He set forth his theories on opera in the foreword to his libretto Tarare – ‘Aux abonnés de l’Opéra qui voudraient aimer l’opéra’ (1787) – which called for a closer collaboration of composer and librettist, the subordination of music to text and the choice of great philosophical ideas as subjects. Seeking a confusion des genres, a genre mixte, he strove to renew the language of librettos by eliminating classical vocabulary while allowing bizarre and familiar expressions, archaisms, neologisms and words hitherto offensive to propriety. Tarare (1787), set by Salieri, remains a landmark for 19th-century opera. Contemporary sources refer to Beaumarchais as a composer, but no work by him survives. The stage music for his Figaro comedies was by Antoine Laurent Baudron, and although it survives in an original engraving for Le barbier, the music for Le mariage is now lost and only reliably traceable in counterfeit editions of the play (1785).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Cordier: Bibliographie des oeuvres de Beaumarchais (Paris, 1883)

H. Kling: ‘Caron de Beaumarchais et la musique’, RMI, vii (1900), 672–97

M. Rouff: ‘Un opéra politique de Beaumarchais’, Révolution française, lix (1910), 212–29, 333–58

G. Roulleaux-Dugage: ‘Beaumarchais musicien’, Revue hebdomadaire (11 March 1911)

C.D. Brenner: ‘The Eighteenth-Century Vogue of “Malbrough” and Marlborough’, Modern Language Review, xlv (1950), 177–80

E.J. Arnould: ‘Beaumarchais and the Opera’, Hermathena, lxxix (1952), 75–88

B. Shteynpress: ‘“Bezumnïy den', ili Zhenit'ba Figaro”: Bomarshe kak istochnik operï Motsarta’ [Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro as the source of Mozart’s opera], Voprosï muzïkoznaniya, iii (1960), 652–79

C. Cox: The Real Figaro: the Extraordinary Career of Caron de Beaumarchais (London, 1962)

A. Livermore: ‘Rousseau and Cherubino’, ML, xliii (1962), 218–23

J. Warrack: ‘The Original Figaro’, Opera, xiv (1963), 297–303

F. Lesure: ‘A propos de Beaumarchais’, RdM, liii (1967), 175–8

S. Popper: Beaumarchais and Music (diss., Columbia U., 1969)

R. Angermüller: ‘Beaumarchais und Salieri’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 325–7

A. Livermore: ‘Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Figaro’, MQ, lvii (1971), 466–90

J. Proust: ‘Beaumarchais et Mozart: une mise au point’, Studi francesi, xlvi (1972), 34–45

R. Landy: ‘Le “Mariage” et les “Noçes”: notes pour Figaro’, Information littéraire, xxvi (1974), 76–9

R. Angermüller: ‘Reformideen von Du Roullet und Beaumarchais als Opernlibrettisten’, AcM, xlviii (1976), 227–53

P. Larthomas: ‘“Le mariage de Figaro”: quelques remarques sur l'établissement du texte et les contrefaçons’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, lxxxiv (1984), 734–40

R. Angermüller: Figaro (Salzburg and Munich, 1986)

B.A. Brown: ‘Beaumarchais, Mozart and the vaudeville’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 261–5

R. Pomeau: Beaumarchais, ou La bizarre destinée (Paris, 1987)

G. Barber: ‘“Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre” or, How History Reaches the Nursery’, Children and their Books: a Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. G. Avery and J. Briggs (Oxford, 1989), 135–63

P. Robinson: Beaumarchais et la chanson: musique et dramaturgie des comédies de Figaro (Oxford, 1999)

RUDOLPH ANGERMÜLLER/PHILIP ROBINSON

Beaumesnil, Henriette Adélaïde Villard de

(b Paris, 30 or 31 Aug 1748; d Paris, 1813). French singer and composer. Having specialized from the age of seven in soubrette roles in comedies, she made a successful début at the Paris Opéra on 27 November 1766, replacing Sophie Arnould in the title role of Silvie (P.-M. Berton and J.-C. Trial). She sang in many premières and revivals until her retirement in 1781, creating with Rosalie Levasseur the role of Iphigenia in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), and although her talents were overshadowed by those of Arnould and Levasseur, she was considered an enchanting singer, actress and dancer.

Anacréon, a one-act opera and her first composition, received a private performance at the Brunoy residence of the Comte de Provence on 5 December 1781. Beaumesnil then achieved public success with her acte de ballet Tibulle et Délie, ou Les Saturnales (after L. Fuzelier: Les fêtes grecques et romaines), which was given at the Paris Opéra on 15 March 1784 (and published) after a court première the previous month, and with the two-act opéra comique Plaire, c’est commander (libretto by Marquis de La Salle), performed at the Théâtre Montansier, Paris, on 12 May 1792. Her operas were light and galant in style; an oratorio, Les Israëlites poursuivis par Pharaon, showed her more serious vein and was heard at the Concert Spirituel (where, during the 1760s, she had performed as a soloist) on 8 December 1784. She is further remembered for her part in a ‘duel au pistolet’ with the dancer Mlle Théodore, described in detail by Campardon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD; FétisB; GerberL; PierreH; SainsburyD; SchillingE

H. Audiffret: ‘Beaumesnil, Henrietta-Adélaïde Villard’, Biographie universelle, ed. L. Michaud (Paris, 1843–65), iii, 407–8

V. Fournel: Curiosités théâtrales anciennes et modernes (Paris, 1859), 259

F.M. Grimm: Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (Paris, 1813); complete edn, ed. M. Tourneux (Paris, 1877–82), vii, 200–01

E. Campardon: L ’Académie royale de musique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1884), i, 49–57

D.H. Foster: ‘The Oratorio in Paris in the 18th Century’, AcM, xlvii (1975), 67–133

J. Gourret: Dictionnaire des cantatrices de l’Opéra de Paris (Paris, 1987), 23–4

ELISABETH COOK

Beausseron [Beausiron], Johannes Bonnevin alias

(b Chenou, Château-Landon, between ?1475 and 1490; d Rome, 22 May 1542). French composer. His sobriquet, which appears with his music to the exclusion of his family name, reflects his origin in the region of Beauce. He became a member of the Ste Chapelle, Paris, in February 1511. In June 1514 or shortly before, he entered the papal chapel and remained there until his sudden death. He received several benefices from Leo X, who appointed him an apostolic notary; towards the end of his life he appears to have belonged to the private chapel of Paul III. Beausseron was one of the French composers at the Vatican who helped establish the smooth, polished style typical of Roman music from the mid-16th century onwards. His vocal lines, mostly based on chant melodies, unfold in flowing, predominantly conjunct motion without marked rhythmic impetus. He preferred full textures with relatively little systematic imitation. His treatment of dissonance, although sometimes awkward, reveals a concern for harmonic clarity.

WORKS

Edition: Early Sixteenth-Century Sacred Music from the Papal Chapel, ed. N.S. Josephson, CMM, xcv/1 (1982) [J]

Missa de beata Maria, 4–5vv, J 40

Missa de feria, 4vv, J 82

Credo ‘Inviolata, integra et casta es’, 5vv, J 289 (? earlier version of Cr in Missa de beata Maria; inserted in Missa de nostra domina of Josquin Dor)

Domine non secundum peccata nostra, 4vv, J 94; Regina celi, 4vv, J 102; Regina celi, 5vv, J 107; Salve regina, 4vv, J 113; Salve regina, 5vv, I-RMassimo, VI.C.6.23–4 (Sup and T only)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.X. Haberl: Die römische ‘Schola cantorum’ und die päpstlichen Kapellsänger bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts, Bausteine für Musikgeschichte, iii (Leipzig, 1888/R), esp. 81

H.-W. Frey: ‘Regesten zur päpstlichen Kapelle unter Leo X. und zu seiner Privatkapelle’, Mf, viii (1955), 58–73, esp. 71, 178–99, esp. 179–80; ix (1956), 411–19, esp. 415

N.S. Josephson: The Missa de Beata Virgine of the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1970)

J.M. Llorens Cisteró: ‘Cantores pontifícios colegas de Cristóbal de Morales’, Inter-American Music Review, x/2 (1989), 3–18

JOSHUA RIFKIN/R

Beauvais.

City in France. It is the diocesan seat in the archdiocese of Reims. It was the capital of the Bellovaci Gauls until Julius Caesar’s conquest in 57 bce; the Normans overran it in 851 and 861. The last reference to a lay Count of Beauvais occurs in 1035, and by the 12th century the bishops were powerful feudal lords. From the early 13th century royal authority was entrenched in the town, but it retained some independence until the time of the Hundred Years War. It is now the seat of the prefecture of the Oise département. The present Cathedral of St Pierre was begun in about 1240; older foundations include Notre Dame de la Basse-Oeuvre and St Etienne, whose present building dates mainly from the 12th century.

A manuscript compiled in Beauvais between 1227 and 1234 (now GB-Lbl Eg.2615) contains a complete liturgy for 1 January, the Feast of Circumcision (First Vespers, Procession to the Rood, Compline, Matins, Lauds, Mass, Sext, None and Second Vespers; edition and extensive discussion by Arlt). Its rich repertory of Benedicamus tropes and conductus is comparable with festal liturgies of this period from Sens and Laon, and it is of particular interest for its inclusion of polyphonic music showing the influence on an older tradition of the new early 13th-century Parisian style associated with the name of Perotinus, which is assimilated to varying degrees. Concordances among the numerous conductus occur in Norman-Sicilian and Aquitanian manuscripts. The well-known Song of the Ass, Orientis partibus, appears in two forms, in three-part music and in a monophonic version headed ‘Conductus as the ass is led in’. Later sections of this manuscript contain polyphonic compositions from Paris and also pieces in a style which may be described as ‘peripheral’ in comparison with the ‘central’ Notre Dame repertory (facsimiles and discussion by Everist). These pieces are in different hands and are less perfectly suited to the requirements of the Beauvais Circumcision Office, though presumbly collected with that purpose in mind and eventually bound together with the rest. Yet another section contains the famous Ludus Danielis, apparently written by scholars of the cathedral school for performances at the close of Matins on New Year’s Day. The tradition of the mystery play continued at Beauvais Cathedral at least until 1452, when a Mystère de St Pierre was performed.

Beauvais has produced only one composer of importance, Eustache Du Caurroy (1549–1609), baptized in Notre Dame de la Basse-Oeuvre and probably educated at the cathedral choir school. There are brief records of several 16th-century musicians: Nicolle des Celliers de Hesdin (d 1538), maître of the choir school; the cathedral organists Jean Doublet (1532), Robert Godard (1540), Jean le Roux or Ruffi (1560) and Jean Mollet (1575); and Berthaud Turquet, choirboy at the cathedral and maître at Senlis, appointed to St Sauveur in 1559.

An organ was built for the cathedral in 1531 by François and Alexandre des Oliviers of Paris, and inspected by a Canon Mouton of Paris on 6 September 1532; the present organ was constructed by the Belgian builder Cosyn (1826–8). Jean de Bavencourt worked on the organ of St Martin in 1488 and on that of St Etienne in 1511. The organ of St Sauveur was worked on in 1509 by Georges Fleury and in 1584 by Denis de Journy, who also built an organ for Notre Dame, La Neuville en Hez, in 1559.

The names of some Beauvais minstrels are known: Eude (12th century), Robert and Selet (13th century). There was an annual convention in the 14th and 15th centuries, and in 1563 a ménestrandie was established.

In 1766 a Société de Musique was formed of professionals and amateurs and gave concerts patterned on those of the Concert Spirituel. From 1773, when a theatre was constructed, it also performed opéras comiques. The Société Philharmonique was founded in 1825 under the direction of Louis Graves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Desjardins: Histoire de la cathédrale de Beauvais (Beauvais, 1865)

V. Leblond: L’art et les artistes en Ile-de-France au XVIe siècle (Beauvais et Beauvaisis) (Beauvais and Paris, 1921)

K. Young: The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933/R, 2/1962)

E. Wellesz: Eastern Elements in Western Chant, MMB, Subsidia, ii (1947/R)

D.G. Hughes: ‘Liturgical Polyphony at Beauvais in the 13th Century’, Speculum, xxxiv (1959), 184–200

W.L. Smoldon, ed.: The Play of Daniel (London, 1960)

D.G. Hughes: ‘The Sources of Christus manens’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 423–34

W. Arlt: Ein Festoffizium des Mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung (Cologne, 1970)

M. Everist: French 13th-Century Polyphony in the British Library: a Fascimile Edition of the Manuscripts Additional 30091 and Eerton 2615 (folios 79–94v) (London, 1988)

DAVID HILEY

Beauvais, Vincent de.

See Vincent de Beauvais.

Beauvarlet, Henricus

(b Lille, before 1575; d Veurne, West Flanders, between 26 Feb and 27 June 1623). Franco-Flemish composer and priest. On 28 May 1593 he became phonascus at the St Walburga, Veurne; he also had to attend a number of services each day and to conduct Mass four times a week. At the yearly renewals of his post he was frequently reprimanded for negligence and later for drunkenness also. From 9 August 1602 to 27 June 1603 he was even suspended and in 1609 spent four days in the chapter prison. On 2 July 1612 he was replaced, and from this time he remained attached to the church only as a vicar. On 27 January 1598 he had been appointed chaplain of the altar of St Peter and St Paul; in November 1612 he resigned this prebend probably in exchange for that of the altar of St Catharine, of which he was chaplain at the time of his death. After 1612 he substituted occasionally for the new phonascus and was paid for doing so; this arrangement seems to have terminated about 1619.

Shortly before his death he published Missae octo, V., VI. et VIII. vocum (Douai, 1622; 4 ed. in MMBel, xi, 1974); in the dedication, to the magistrate of Veurne (who gave him six bottles of wine and 200 guilders to meet the cost of printing), he remarked that he had collected together his earlier mass compositions for the use of churches, in particular the St Walburga. These parody masses show a sound if somewhat uninspired craftsmanship and may be considered stylistically as a local outcrop of 16th-century Netherlandish polyphony.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (J. Robijns)

Vander StraetenMP, viii (Brussels)

R. Bragard: Histoire de la musique belge, ii (Brussels, 1949), 32

M. Boereboom: ‘Henricus Beauvarlet: onbekend Rijsels musicus, werkzaam te Veurne, in ’t begin van de XVIIde eeuw’, West-Vlaanderen (1955), no.4, 179 only

C. Denorme: ‘Henricus Beauvarlet, zangmeester en kapelaan in de collegiaalkerk van St. Walburga te Veurne’, Biekorf, lvii (1956), 83–6

J. Robijns: ‘Henricus Beauvarlet, zangmeester te Veurne, componist van een bundel missen’, RBM, xviii (1964), 32–49

M. Maertens: ‘Hendrik Beauvarlet, zangmeester en componist’, De Sint-Walburgakerk van Veurne, ed. J. van Acker (Furnes, 1992), 37–8, 92

GODELIEVE SPIESSENS

Beauvarlet-Charpentier, Jacques-Marie

(b Lyons, 3 July 1766; d Paris, 7 Sept 1834). French composer and organist, son of Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier . Unlike his father, he published under the name ‘Beauvarlet-charpentier’, although in official documents he was known as ‘Beauvarlet, dit Charpentier’. Survivancier of his father at St Paul in the Marais before the Revolution, he rode comfortably through the political upheavals, serving as organist of the Théophilanthropes and at the Temple de la Reconnaissance (1799, 1800), and composing pieces adapted to the times: Le réveil du peuple (1795), Cérémonie du couronnement de sa majesté l’empereur (1804), Louis le désiré à Paris (c1814) and finally Plus de politique. When religious observances were restored, he obtained successively organist’s posts at St Germain-l’Auxerrois, St Germain-des-Prés, St Eustache, St Paul-St Louis and the Chapelle des Missions Etrangères. When he became organist at St Eustache in 1831 he stipulated that his son, Charles-Emile (b Paris, 9 June 1816), be allowed to substitute for him on occasion. Although he himself was later celebrated as one of the best organists the church ever had (Ply), his son's theatrically playing almost lost him the post. He also worked as a music publisher and dealer in instruments; this activity slowed in 1815 and ceased in 1821. The catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale list some 50 songs and romances, ten large programmatic pieces for piano celebrating battles and other events, two republican hymns, variations and arrangements for piano, and organ music including masses, Magnificat settings, hymns and noëls. A one-act opera, Gervais ou Le jeune Aveugle, was in the repertory of the Théâtre des Jeunes Artistes for seven months in 1802. What success it enjoyed was despite the weakness of the libretto and music, according to the Courrier des spectacles (16 June 1802).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

H.J. Ply: La facteur moderne étudiè à l’orgue de St-Eustache (Lyons, 1878/R)

F. Raugel: Les grandes orgues des églises de Paris (Paris, 1927)

H. Gougelot: Catalogue des romances françaises parues sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Melun, 1937–43)

A. de Place: Le piano-forte à Paris entre 1760 et 1822 (Paris, 1986)

For further bibliography see Beauvarlet-Charpentier, Jean-Jacques.

DAVID FULLER/BRUCE GUSTAFSON

Beauvarlet-Charpentier, Jean-Jacques

(b Abbeville, 28 June 1734; d Paris, 6 May 1794). French composer and organist. He was one of the most celebrated organists of the late 18th century. His father was Jean-Baptiste Beauvarlet (d Lyons, 1763), merchant dyer according to the baptismal certificate (Servières) and organist and instrument maker (Vallas). It is not known why he added the name Charpentier, but it was under that name alone that most of his compositions were published. He succeeded his father as organist of the Hospice de la Charité in Lyons and married Marie Birol, a singer who became known in Lyons and Paris under her husband’s name; they had a daughter (1764) and a son, Jacques-Marie. Jean-Jacques was heard on the organ of the Concert Spirituel of Paris as early as 1759 (Pierre), but he continued living in Lyons until 1771, where he played the organ at the Académie des Beaux Arts from 1763, performing two of his own concertos in December 1765. Towards the end of his stay in Lyons the programmes grew increasingly trivial, and Jean-Jacques played chiefly comic-opera tunes and overtures.

In 1771, he became organist of the royal abbey of St Victor in Paris, probably on the initiative of Mgr de Montazet, archbishop of Lyons and abbot of St Victor (Fétis). In the same year he made a second appearance at the Concert Spirituel and in the next he succeeded Daquin at St Paul in the Marais, adding later on the posts at the chapel of St Eloi des Orfèvres (by 1777) and Notre Dame (1783; shared by trimesters with three others).

Beauvarlet-Charpentier’s strongest music is to be found in his sonatas for harpsichord or piano with violin accompaniment, opp.2, 3 and 4 (1772–5), in which Saint-Foix detected the influence of Schobert. The idiom is early Classical with a tendency, especially in op.3, to imitate orchestral styles and textures. Some of the sonatas of opp.3 and 4, and all of op.8, are ‘dans le goût de simphonie concertante’. Although thematically unimaginative and narrow in their range of expression, these works show that Beauvarlet-Charpentier had a surprising ability (for a French organist of the period) to sustain ample curves of tension by delaying cadences and maintaining rhythmic energy. His organ music is weakened by the failure to reconcile style and medium, by a feeble grasp of counterpoint and by a hasty, improvisatory approach to form.

WORKS

printed works pubd in Paris unless otherwise stated

op.

—	6 sonates, hpd (1764), lost
—	2 concertos, org, 1765; lost, reported by Vallas
—	Ier (IIe) Recueil d’ariettes d’opéras bouffons, hpd, vn obbl, 2 hn ad lib (after 1768)
2	6 sonates, hpd/pf, vn (1772)
3	6 sonates, hpd/pf, vn (1774); 2 ‘dans le goût de simphonie concertante’
4	3 sonates, hpd/pf, vn (1775); no.3 ‘dans le goût de simphonie concertante’
5	Airs choisis variés, hpd/pf (1776)
6	6 fugues, org/hpd (1777)
7	3 Magnificat, org (c1777)
8	3 sonates … dans le goût de la simphonie concertante, hpd, vn (1777)
9	Second recueil de six airs choisis variés, hpd/pf/hp (c1778); nos.4–6 with vn obbl
10	2 concertos, hpd/pf (1778)
11	IIIe recueil de petits airs choisis et variés, hp/hpd/pf (1779)
12	6 airs choisis et variés, quatrième recueil, hpd/pf, 2 sont en duo (1782)
13	12 noëls variés, org, avec un carillon des morts (1782)
14	Airs variés, hpd/pf, 4 hands (1782)
16	Ier recueil d’airs tirés de l’opéra de Renaud, arr. hpd/pf, vn ad lib (1783)
17	IIe recueil d’airs tirés de l’opéra de Blaise et Babet, arr. hpd/pf (1784)
17	Recueil contenant douze noëls en pot-pourri, 6 filii et 5 airs variés, suivis de 7 préludes, arr. hpd/pf (1784), also issued with only the noëls and preludes
18	Recueil contenant l’ouverture d’Iphigénie de M. Gluck et six air variés (1786)
19	Collection of airs variés, lost, listed in a catalogue of 1786 op.15 unknown
20	Ouverture d’Iphigénie [Gluck], arrangé et varié, pf (1788), lost
21	Recueil d’airs conus et variés pour deux pianos (1788), lost
—	Journal d’orgue à l’usage des paroisses et communautés réligieuses (12 issues, June 1784–March 1785)
Airs and arrangements in Feuilles de Terpsichore, Journal hébdomadaire, etc (1782–93)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetC

FétisB

PierreH

A. Jal: Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d’histoire (Paris, 1867)

G. de Saint-Foix: ‘Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel’, ReM, iv/4–6 (1922–3), 193–205

G. Servières: Documents inédits sur les organistes français (Paris, 1924)

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et de théâtre à Lyon 1688–1789 (Lyons,1932/R)

G. Favre: ‘Les organistes parisiens à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Petite Maîtrise (April, 1936), 61

E. Reeser: De klaviersonate met vioolbegeleiding (Rotterdam, 1939)

G. Favre: La musique françise de piano avant 1830 (Paris, 1953)

B. Gustafson and D.Fuller: A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780 (Oxford, 1990)

DAVID FULLER/BRUCE GUSTAFSON

Beaux Arts Trio.

American piano trio. It was formed in New York in 1955 by the pianist Menahem Pressler (b Magdeburg, 16 Dec 1923), the violinist Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse. Encouraged by Robert Casadesus, in whose house they rehearsed, the three made a sensational début at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood; and in autumn 1955 they made their first nationwide tour. Guilet (under his original name Guilevitch) had been a member of the Calvet Quartet of Paris for a decade before the war and had led the Opéra-Comique Orchestra; after emigrating to the USA in 1941, he had led his own quartet and Toscanini's NBC SO. His style of playing, grounded in Franco-Belgian traditions, strongly coloured the trio's early performances and recordings, the latter including works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Dvořák, Fauré and Ravel, as well as outstanding Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert cycles. His younger colleagues, who counted Egon Petri and Pablo Casals among their teachers, played with refulgent tone and deep musicality but – under his influence – always with a light touch. For a time all three taught at the University of Indiana School of Music. When Guilet retired in 1969 he was replaced by Isidore Cohen, a former member of the Schneider and Juilliard Quartets.

This formation of the ensemble toured indefatigably and recorded a vast range of music, including all the trios of Haydn and the Mozart and Brahms piano quartets (with Bruno Giuranna and Walter Trampler respectively). The Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert trios were re-recorded, confirming the impression gained in the concert hall that the group's style had broadened and deepened, but also coarsened to a degree. Its saving grace was the wit it brought to many of its performances, for instance in Charles Ives's Trio. In 1987, on Greenhouse's retirement, Peter Wiley came into the group. In 1990 George Rochberg's Summer 1990 received its première by the Beaux Arts Trio, followed in 1991 by Ned Rorem's Spring Music and then by David Baker’s Roots II. In 1992 Cohen retired, his replacement being Ida Kavafian. This formation proved to have a more combustible chemistry; in the recording studio, it was commemorated by an excellent disc of trios by Hummel. In 1998 both string players withdrew and Pressler was joined by the violinist Young Uck Kim and the cellist Antonio Meneses. The Beaux Arts Trio's ability to renew itself across several generations has owed much to Pressler's sparkling technique, wholehearted involvement and sense of style. The group has been vastly influential and has raised the profile of the piano trio as a form but has left the repertory more or less as it found it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Delbanco: The Beaux Arts Trio: a Portrait (New York, 1985)

B.L. Sand: ‘The Beautiful Art of the Trio’, The Strad, cvi (1995), 686–91

TULLY POTTER

Beber, Ambrosius

(fl 1610–20). German composer. All that is known of Beber, who described himself as a ‘musician of Naumburg’, is that he worked there in the first quarter of the 17th century. He is important for a St Mark Passion that he sent to the town council of Delitzsch in 1610 and to the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony in 1620. A Historia Johannis des Täufers is known only from an entry in the catalogue of the Delitzsch Kantorei. The title of the St Mark Passion reads: Historia des Leidens Christi nach dem Evangelisten S. Marco auf zween Chor componirt (solo parts in D-Bsb, choruses in F-Pn, fonds du Conservatoire; ed. in Cw, lxvi, 1958; ed. K. Beckmann, Wiesbaden, 1971). The peculiarity of this work lies in its departure from the normal Passion tone of the Lydian mode; like Heinrich Schütz's St Matthew Passion, but antedating it by some 50 years, it uses the Hypodorian mode. No Passion in the intervening years is known to do so, but there are indications that Beber's work is not unique at the time but belongs to a particular tradition about which little detail is known (see Ameln, Mahrenholz and Thomas). Moreover, the work belongs to the mixed type of Passion introduced into Germany by Antonio Scandello and standing midway between the responsorial Passion and the motet Passion, only the Evangelist's part being set as solo recitative. Beber set the exordium and the words of the various characters for two to four voices, the ‘gratiarum actio’ for five. The expression ‘for two choirs’ in the title therefore signifies not a double choir in the sense of cori spezzati but rather – following the early Baroque use of the expression – the juxtaposition of different bodies of sound, not necessarily choral (cf the preface to Schütz's Auferstehungshistorie).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Kade: Die ältere Passionskomposition bis zum Jahre 1631 (Gütersloh, 1893/R)

A. Werner: ‘Zur Musikgeschichte von Delitzsch’, AMw, i (1918–19), 535–64, esp. 537

P. Epstein: ‘Zur Geschichte der deutschen Choralpassion’, JbMP 1929, xxxvi (1929), 35–50

K. Ameln, C. Mahrenholz and W. Thomas, eds.: Handbuch der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenmusik, i/1 (Göttingen, 1941), 322

W. Braun: ‘Zur Passionspflege in Delitzsch unter Christoph Schultze’, AMw, x (1953), 158–64

S. Wallon: ‘Un manuscrit d'Ambrosius Beber à la Bibliothèque du Conservatoire de Paris’, RdM, xxxvi (1954), 148–53

B. Smallman: The Background of Passion Music: J.S. Bach and his Predecessors (London, 1957, enlarged 2/1970)

K. von Fischer: Review of S. Wallon, ed.: A. Beber: St Mark Passion, Mf, xii (1959), 118–20

W. Braun: Die mitteldeutsche Choralpassion im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1960)

WALTER BLANKENBURG

Bebey, Francis

(b Douala, Cameroon, 16 July 1929). Cameroonian composer, writer and musician. He studied mathematics in Douala and continued to study English at the Sorbonne, Paris, and is perhaps best known for his comprehensive guide to African music, first published in French as Musique de l’Afrique (1969), later translated into English (1975). He assumed a post in the Department of Information at UNESCO in 1972. In addition to his writing, Bebey is also known as a guitarist and a composer. His solo recital tours (USA, Canada, Africa and Europe) typically included arrangements of African-influenced materials, as well as his own compositions. His best-known compositions are perhaps Le Christ est né à Bomba (1963), Black Tears (1963), Concert for an Old Mask (1965), The Ashanti Doll is Sleeping (1967) and The Poet’s Virile Prayer (1973). Bebey’s guitar-playing style, classical rather than the typical African two-finger playing style, demonstrates the difficult artistic position he has adopted, neither ‘African’ nor ‘European’. At times rejected by African communities at home, he has tenaciously pursued an individual career.

WORKS

(selective list)

Black Tears (1963); The Poet’s Virile Prayer (1973); Concert pour un vieux masque: poème (Paris, 1980); Clémentina de Jésus: musique pour guitare (Paris, 1983)

WRITINGS

‘The Vibrant Intensity of Traditional African Music’, The Black Perspective in Music, ii (1974), 117–21

African Music: a People’s Art (Westport, CT, 1975)

‘Traditional Music from the Ivory Coast’, Balafon, xxxxvi (1980), 20–23

‘La musique dans la vie traditionnelle africaine’, in Les musiques guadeloupéennes: Dans le champ culturel afro-américain, au sein des musiques du monde (Paris, 1988), 209–22

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

D. Hoyet: Francis Bebey: ecrivain et musicien camerounais (Paris, 1979)

recordings

Pièces pour guitare seule, OCORA OCR 27 (1965)

Supplement à Musique de l’Afrique, Horizons de France HF 1001 (1969) (accompanies the book, Musique de l’Afrique)

Guitaire d’une autre rime, Ozileka 301 (1975)

Une guitare pour Vence: musique et interprétation à la guitare, Ozileka Ozil 3305 (1977)

Priere aux masques, Ozileka OZIL 3308 (1979) (setting of poem by Leopold Senghor)

Africa Sanza, Ozileka 3312 (1982)

Pygmy Love Song, Editions Makossa EM 2334 (1982)

Akwaaba, Original Music OMCD 005 (1984)

Heavy Ghetto, Ozileka 3316 (1985)

Amaya, Ozileka CD 13902 (1991)

La condition masculine, Ozileka CD13 903 (1991) (music, lyrics and text by Bebey)

Lambarene Schweitzer, Ceddia CED001 (1993) (subject: Albert Schweitzer)

Mwana o, Ozileka CD 13905 (1994)

Nandolo: With Love, Original Music OMCD 027 (1995) (Bebey: vocals, Pygmy flute and acoustic guitar)

GREGORY F. BARZ

Bebization.

A short-lived seven-step Solmization system published by Daniel Hitzler in Extract aus der Neuen Musica oder Singkunst (Nuremberg, 1623). Permanently related to the octave on A, the vocables ran la–be–ce–de–me–fe–ge, each pitch name incorporating an alphabetical note name. The chromatic scale was notated as shown in ex.1. The system took its name from the two forms of B.

BERNARR RAINBOW

Bebop.

See Bop.

Bebung

(Ger., from beben: ‘to tremble’; Fr. balancement).

(1) A vibrato obtained on the clavichord by alternately increasing and decreasing the pressure of the finger on the key. The effect is described by a number of mid-18th-century writers, notably Mattheson (‘tremolo’), F.W. Marpurg and C.P.E. Bach. Bach (1753) wrote that it should be used on long affettuoso notes, and added (in the 1787 edition) that the vibrato should be delayed until the second half of the note. Bebung is indicated by a slur and dots over the note to which it is to be applied (as in ex.1) and Marpurg (1755, 2/1765) suggested that the number of dots indicates the number of pulses one should employ, although this is difficult to accept and there is no mention of this point in either his Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen (1762) or the French translation of the Anleitung (1756).

Although Bebung is possible on clavichords of the 16th and 17th centuries, the 18th-century writings suggest that the effect was then new and that its use was confined to long notes and pieces of a tragic character.

(2) Generic term used in Germany during the 18th century to denote a vibrato on a single note; it is synonymous with Schwebung. It was first mentioned by E.G. Baron (1727) as an ornament used in lute playing, and was common from at least 1750. It is mentioned in connection with singing and clavichord playing (Marpurg, 1750, Agricola, Hiller and Lasser), violin playing (Quantz, Mozart (as synonym of Tremolo), Petri and Löhlein), flute playing (Quantz, Tromlitz) and trumpet playing (Altenburg). It was to be used occasionally, according to the character of the piece. The Bebung was indicated in clavichord music and also in Altenburg's trumpet tutor by slurred dots (see above); Baron used a double cross and, on the lower strings only, a single slanting cross (X and X) (see Lute, §6). Other sources merely describe the use of the ornament. During the latter half of the 18th century there was a strong tendency towards the use of vibrato on most long notes, although this was not advocated by all theorists.

See also Vibrato and Ornaments, §8.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.G. Baron: Historisch-theoretisch und practische Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten (Nuremberg, 1727/R; Eng. trans., 1976, as Study of the Lute)

J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R)

F.W. Marpurg: Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 1750, enlarged 4/1762/R; Fr. trans., 1756, as Principes du clavecin, 2/1760)

J.J. Quantz: Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen (Berlin, 1752, 3/1789/R; Eng. trans., 1966, as On Playing the Flute)

C.P.E. Bach: Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, i (Berlin, 1753/R, 2/1787; Eng. trans., 1949)

F.W. Marpurg: Anleitung zum Clavierspielen (Berlin, 1755, 2/1765/R)

L. Mozart: Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756/R, enlarged 3/1787/R, 4/1800; Eng. trans., 1934, 2/1951)

J.F. Agricola: Anleitung zur Singekunst (Berlin, 1757/R)

J.S. Petri: Anleitung zur practischen Musik (Lauban, 1767, enlarged 2/1782/R)

G.S. Löhlein: Anweisung zum Violinspielen (Leipzig, 1774)

J.A. Hiller: Anweisung zum musikalisch-zierlichen Gesange (Leipzig, 1780)

J.G. Tromlitz: Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flüte zu spielen (Leipzig, 1791/R; Eng. trans., ed. A. Powell, 1991, as The Virtuoso Flute Player

J.E. Altenburg: Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroish-musikalischen Trompeter- und Pauker-Kunst(Halle, 1795/R; Eng. trans., 1974)

J.B. Lasser: Vollständige Anleitung zur Singkunst (Munich, 1798)

EDWIN M. RIPIN/G. MOENS-HAENEN

Bec

(Fr.).

See Mouthpiece.

Bécarre

(Fr.).

See Natural.

Bécaud, Gilbert [Silly, François]

(b Toulon, 24 Oct 1927). French composer and singer. He studied at the Nice and Toulon conservatories and during World War II was active in the Résistance (Maquis) in Savoie. He began composing songs in 1948, which were taken up by popular singers including Marie Bizet and Edith Piaf, who sang his Je t’ai dans la peau. The poet Louis Amade encouraged him and became one of Bécaud’s regular lyricists, with Pierre Delanoë and Maurice Vidalin. Bécaud performed at the re-opening of the Olympia music hall in Paris (1954) to immediate success, becoming known as ‘Monsieur 100,000 Volts’. His songs were performed around the world in translations: Et maintenant, for example, was recorded by Frank Sinatra as What now, my love?. He attempted large-scale works, such as the cantata L’enfant à l’étoile (1961) with words by Amade. His opera L’opéra d’Aran (1962), to a libretto by Jacques Emmanuel and with lyrics by Amade and Delanoë, was first performed at the Paris Opéra and recorded complete with the original cast including Bécaud himself, Suzanne Sarroca, André Turp, Jacques Mars and Roger Soyer; the operatic voices jar with Bécaud’s pop-style rhythms and melodies, but the piece retains a powerful mixture of lyricism and urgent drama.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic works: L’enfant à l’étoile (cant., L. Amade), 1961; L’opéra d’Aran (op, J. Emmanuel; L. Amade and P. Delanoë), 1962

Songs, lyricist in parentheses: L’absent (Amade); Alors, raconte (Broussolle); La ballade des baladins (Amade); Le bateau blanc (Vidalin); Les cerisiers sont blans (Vidalin); C’était mon copain (Amade); Les croix (Amade); Dimanche à Orly (Delanoë); Et maintenant (Delanoë); L’importance c’est la rose (Amade); L’indifference (Vidalin); Je crois en toi; Je reviens de te chercher (Delanoë); Je t’ai dans la peau (Pills); Je t’appartiens (Amade); Le jour où la pluie viendra (Delanoë); Les marches de Provence (Amade)

Le mur (Vidalin); L’orange (Delanoë); Mes main (Delanoë); Nathalie (Delanoë); Pilou-Pilouhé (Amade); Quand il est mort le poète (Amade); Le rideau rouge (Amade); Tu le regretteras (Delanoë); Seul sur son étoile (Vidalin); La solitude, ça n’existe pas (Amade); L’un entre eux inventa la mort (Delanoë); Un peu d’amour et d’amitié (Amade)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Brunschwig, L.-J. Calvet and J.-C. Klein: 100 ans de chanson française (Paris, 1972)

L. Amade: Et ce sera ta passion de vivre: Amade raconte Bécaud (Paris, 1982)

‘Gilbert Bécaud (1927–)’, Chorus: Les cahiers de la chanson, no.3 (1993), 137–56 [incl. discography]

P. Saka, ed.: Alors, raconte (Paris, 1995) [complete lyrics of Bécaud, 1965–95]

PATRICK O’CONNOR

Beccatelli, Giovanni Francesco

(b Florence, 8 Nov 1679; d ?Prato, 1734). Italian theorist and composer. Beccatelli's early musical studies were under Virgilio Cionchi and G.M. Casini in Florence. By order of Grand Duke Cosimo III, he was made maestro di cappella and organist of Prato Cathedral in 1704 where he remained until his death. Although he composed a quantity of church music, Beccatelli was best known as a speculative writer on music theory and its history. As one of the Florentine neo-Pythagoreans of the late Baroque (cf Nigetti and Casini), Beccatelli treated problems of temperament and relied heavily on mathematical reasoning. Of particular interest is his contention that the 4th is a consonance (see Lustig). His supporting arguments include the construction of an hypothetical modo obbliquo in which all the intervals of the normal modo retto are reckoned from the highest rather than the lowest sounding note. The result is a recognition of triadic inversions as unstable analogues to the stable root position triads. In their novel accommodation of current practice to older theory, Beccatelli's theories reveal the problems of a transitional period.

THEORETICAL WORKS

MSS in I-Bc unless otherwise indicated

Annotazioni sull'opera del P. Gio: d'Avella, intitolata ‘Regole di musica’ etc. Roma, 1657

Appendice o sia confutazione di due principali parti dell'antica musica

Della cognitione della commune tastatura de' cimbali

Divisione del monocordo antico secondo Pitagora e Tolomeo dei generi diatonico, cromatico, ed enarmonico

Documenti, e regole per imparare à suonare il basso continuo, estratte delle speculative musiche

Instituzione dell'organo

Osservazioni musiche … colle quali chiaramente si dimostra, la quarta, dagli antichi detta dia-tessaron, non altrimenti, come vogliono i moderni, esser dissonanza, ma bensì consonanza perfetta, in I-Fm

Spiegazione sopra alcune cose che si trovano nella Lettera critico-musica del medesimo autore, stampata nel terzo tomo de' supplementi al Giornale dei letterati d'Italia

Sposizione … delle musiche dottrine degli antichi musici greci e latini, also Fc

‘Parere sopra il problema armonico: fare un concerto con più strumenti diversamente accordate e spostare la composizione per qualsivoglia intervallo’, Giornale de' letterati d'Italia, xxxiii, 435

‘Lettera critico-musica ad un suo amico sopra due difficultà nella facultà musica, da un moderno autore praticata’, Giornale de' letterati d'Italia, suppl.3 (1726), 1–55

‘Risposta al parere del Sign. N.N.’, ibid., suppl.3 (1726), 67

‘Parere sopra il moderno uso di praticar nella musica questo segno detto B quadro’, ibid., suppl.3 (1726), 492

OTHER WORKS

Messa, 3vv, I-PAc; 3 sonate fugate; 2 versets, d, F, org; 1 movt, C, org: all Bc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GaspariC

R. Lustig: ‘Giovanni Francesco Beccatelli (1679–1734) e una sua dissertazione inedita’, NA, xi (1934), 235–47

JOHN WALTER HILL

Becce, Giuseppe

(b Lonigo, 3 Feb 1877; d Berlin, 5 Oct 1973). Italian composer. He studied classical philology and geography at the University of Padua and, at the same time, studied the flute and cello at the conservatory there. In 1900 he moved to Berlin, where he may have studied composition with Leopold Schmidt and conducting with Nikisch. His first contact with the cinema was in 1913, in which year he both arranged the score and played the title role in Carl Froelich’s film Richard Wagner; and he retained his connections with the medium throughout his life, also writing much light music and incidental music. Until the advent of sound film he conducted orchestras in the most important cinemas in Berlin, where he was responsible for the musical accompaniment for hundreds of films. Initially he prepared compilations of works from the best-known repertory; later he wrote a series of pieces that could be adapted to situations that recurred most often in the majority of films (‘nocturnal atmosphere ’, ‘love scene’ etc.). He published these works in the Kinothek (Berlin, 1919–29), a collection of about 90 pieces that covered virtually every situation in the accompaniment of silent films. At the same time Becce also wrote several totally or partly original scores, including Der letzte Mann (1924) and Tartüff (1925). In 1927, with Hans Erdmann and Ludwig Braf, he published the Allegemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik, a synthesis of the theory and practice of music for silent film. Becce also worked with sound film, writing music for more than a 100 films of every kind, notable among which are the mountain films directed by Luis Trenker.

During the era of the silent film Becce made an important contribution to the development of a musical language specifically for the cinema. Although the quality of his music, stylistically linked to the 19th century, is often modest, it is extremely well suited to the demands of the screen. As early as the 1920s he had defined topoi which would become norms even in many sound films. His output for the latter, though well crafted and of honest professionalism, is highly conventional.

WORKS

(selective list)

Film scores: Richard Wagner (dir. C. Froelich), 1913; Comtesse Ursel, 1913; Schuldig, 1914; Der letzte Mann (dir. F.W. Murnau), 1924; Tartüff (dir. F.W. Murnau), 1925; Das blaue Licht (dir. L. Riefenstahl), 1932; Der Rebell (dir. L. Trenker), 1932; Ekstase: Symphonie der Liebe (dir. G. Machaly), 1932; Der verlorene Sohn (dir. Trenker), 1934; Der ewige Traum (dir. A. Fanck), 1934; Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (dir. Trenker), 1936; Condottieri (dir. L. Trenker), 1937; Der Berg Ruft (dir. Trenker), 1937; Liebesbriefe aus dem Engadin (dir. L. Trenker), 1938; Der Feuerteufel (dir. Trenker), 1940; La cena delle beffe (dir. A. Blasetti), 1941; Im Banne des Monte Miracolo (dir. L. Trenker), 1948; Der König der Berge

General purpose silent film music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Becce, H. Erdmann and L. Braf: Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik (Berlin, 1927)

E. Simeon: ‘La nascita di una drammaturgia della musica per film: il ruolo di Giuseppe Becce’, Musica/Realtà, viii (1987), 103–19

ENNIO SIMEON

Becchi, (Marc’)Antonio di

(b Parma, 19 Dec 1522; d after 1566). Italian lutenist and composer. The baptismal records at Parma indicate his place and date of birth (see N. Pelicelli, NA, ix, 1932, pp.112–29, esp.123). His one surviving publication, Libro primo d’intabulatura da leuto … con alcuni balli, napolitane, madrigali, canzon francese, fantasie, recercari (Venice, 1568, ed. G. Lefkoff: Five Sixteenth Century Venetian Lute Books, Washington DC, 1960), may have first appeared earlier; it divides into three parts by genre: dances, intablulations, and fantasias and ricercares. The four passamezzos ‘alla millanesa’ and their saltarello pairs, the romanesca and the favorita, each consist of three variations; the final dance Madama mi domanda, the title of which refers to a vocal piece, consists of two. Some of the pieces in the second part of the volume seem to be Becchi’s own compositions based on popular tunes. This section also includes an intabulation of Rore’s Anchor che col partire, printed in 1547, and of more recent pieces by Nola and Celano (printed in 1566). The third section of the volume contains anonymous fantasias and some early ricercares: three are by Spinacino, and another, transposed a tone lower, is by Francesco da Milano (in RISM 1546³⁰). One piece called ‘fantasia’ is a literal intabulation of the chanson L'aultre jour je vis par ung matin (in 1530³).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

J.M. Ward: ‘The Use of Borrowed Material in 16th-Century Instrumental Music’, JAMS, v (1952), 88–98

L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)

I. Horsley: ‘The 16th-Century Variation: a New Historical Survey’, JAMS, xii (1959), 118–32

E.T. Ferand: ‘Anchor che col partire: die Schicksale eines berühmten Madrigals’, Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Regensburg, 1962), 137–54

JEANETTE B. HOLLAND/ARTHUR J. NESS

Becerra(-Schmidt), Gustavo

(b Temuco, 26 Aug 1925). Chilean composer. He attended the Temuco Conservatory, studied with Pedro Humberto Allende and Domingo Santa Cruz (composition), Carvajal (conducting) and Salas Viú (musicology) at the Santiago National Conservatory (1936–48) and graduated from the University of Chile (1949), to which he returned in 1952 as professor of analysis and composition. From 1954 to 1956 he was in Europe, composing and researching music education. Subsequently he held appointments as director of the Instituto de Extensión Musical (1958–61) and secretary-general to the University of Chile faculty of music (1968–70), and was appointed cultural attaché to the Chilean Embassy in West Germany in 1971. Upon the advent of the Pinochet regime in Chile in 1973, he was granted asylum in Germany, where he combined his activities as composer and teacher at the University of Oldenburg. Among the honours he has received are membership of the Chilean Academy of Arts (1969), two Honour Prizes (1958 and 1962), the Olga Cohen Prize (1958), the National Music Prize (1971) and a medal from Spain's Ministry of Culture (1994).

Becerra's extensive output includes works in almost all media and in a great variety of styles including neo-classical, serial, electronic, mixed-media, aleatory and graphic features. He has been concerned with the relationship of music with society and political power, with the need to develop musical participation in all social strata, and with importance of the composer's communication with the public. Becerra's output is a direct application of these ideas. He has rigorously studied all musical styles as signs of society, and has conciously used them as grammar for specific signification. In this context he synthesizes elements from popular and art music, historical styles and cross-cultural influences. As a researcher he has contributed articles to the Revista musical chilena and several other publications.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: La muerte de Don Rodrigo (op), 1958; Parsifae (op, T. Barros Alfonso), ?1971; Historia de una provocación (radio op, L. Bocaz), 1972; Das Schweigen (Monodrama, G. Meyer), 1987; 22 film scores, over 12 incid scores for the theatre

Orch: Vn Conc., 1950; Divertimento, 1955; Sym. no.1, 1955; Fl Conc., 1957; Sym. no.2, 1957; Pf Conc., 1958; Gui Conc. [no.1], 1963–4; Sym. no.3, 1965; Homogramas I, 1966; Gui Conc. no.3, gui, jazz orch, 1968; Conc., ob, cl, bn, str, 1970; Conc., 2 gui, orch, 1978; Transvisions fugitives, pf, orch, 1982; El nacimiento del día, gui, orch, 1984; Perc Conc., 1984; Vc Conc., 1984; Concierto de cámara, 1993; Qué! Variaciones, 1993; Temucana, vc, orch, 1995; Kinderkreuzzug (B. Brecht), spkr, chbr, orch; Gui Conc. no.2

Choral: Missa brevis, SSA, 1958; La Araucana (orat, A. de Ercilla, y Zúñiga), spkr, SATB, mapuche insts, orch, 1965; Llanto por el hermano solo (F. González Urízar), SATB, 1965; Macchu Picchu (orat, P. Neruda), 1966; Lord Cochrane of Chile (orat, Neruda), spkr, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, tape, 1967; Elegía a la muerte de Lenin (V. Huidobro), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1969; Gui Conc. no.3, gui, 12 solo vv, 1970; Oda al alambre de púas (Neruda), spkr, S, A, prepared pf, orch, tape, 1971; Revolución, TTBB/TBB, 1980; Que despierte el leñador (Neruda), SATB, 1981; Carl von Ossietzky (orat), 2S, 2A, 2T, 2Bar, B, SATB, perc, orch, elec, 1983; Musikalischen Reisen, children's chorus, orch, 1986; 7 canciones de Pessaj en el año 5750, vv, pf, 1990

Solo vocal: Responso para José Miguel Carrera (A. Cruchaga Santa María), 1v, ens, 1967; Spij, spij, 1v, gui, 1969; Emilio Gómez, 1v, pf, 1978; Allende (E. Carrasco), 2T, 2B, ens, 1980; Memento (F. García Lorca), 2T, 2B, folk ens, 1980; Oratorio menor para Silvestre Revueltas, Bar, amp ens, 1980; Triptychon (Brecht), Bar/T, pf, 1981; Decretos (T. de Mello), Bar, pf, 1984, arr. Bar, orch as Die Statuten des Menschen, 1990; Die Ursachen des Krieges (A. Bahá), T, gui, 1985; Willkommen auf der Welt (G. Kültur), A, gui, 1988; Kinderkreuzzug (Brecht), 1v, pf, 1989; Das neue Wort (Schöfer), 1v, pf, 1989; Salomos Sprüche (Bible: Proverbs), spkr, Bar, fl, cl, va, vc, db, perc, org, 1989; Die Statuten des Menschen (Mello), Bar, orch, 1990; Überwindung, 1v, orch, 1995

7 str qts: 1950, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958–9, 1960, 1961

Other chbr and solo inst: Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1948; Sonata no.1, vc, pf, 1950; Sonata no.1, gui, 1954; Sonata no.2, vc, pf, 1954; Sonata no.1, db, pf, 1956; Sonata no.2, gui, 1956; Partita no.1, vc, 1957; Partita no.2, vc, 1957; Sax Qt, 1957; Sonata no.3, vc, pf, 1957; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1958; Sonata no.2, db, pf, 1963; Sonata no.3, vn, pf, 1972; Trio, vn, hn, pf, 1978; Charivari, ens, 1979; Sonata no.3, gui, 1979; Que despierte el leñador, ens, 1981; Cueca variationen, 3 gui, 1983; Partita no.3, vc, 1983; Trio, fl, va, gui, 1984; Homenaje a Liszt, pf, 1986; Duo, b cl, mar, vib, 1987; Sonata no.4, vc, pf, 1990; 3 Stücke, congas, pf, 1990; Fantasia on Themes by Mozart, vn, pf, 1991; Black Hole, ens, 1994; Trio Q-7, vn, vc, pf, 1996

El-ac: Exposición concertante, 11 interactive synths, 1980; Oda al mar (Neruda), spkr, cptr, 1986; Interior, cptr, 1987

Mixed media: Juegos, pf, ping-pong balls, brick, tape, 1966; 10 trozos, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, perc, elecs, 1975; Progresiones, multimedia, 1976; Preludio y balistoccata, pf, cptr, 1981; Nicaragua aeterna, 1985; Dialog (W. Mehring), gui, tape, 1988, arr. gui, fl, tape, 1989; Nächtlicher Rat, 3 actors, MIDI gui, vib, tape, 1988; Warum sind Sie geblieben? (K. Tuchasky, C. von Ossietzky, E. Suhr), 3 actors, MIDI gui, vib, tape, 1988

Principal publishers: Peer International

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Merino: ‘Los cuartetos de Gustavo Becerra’, RMC, no.92 (1965), 44–78

RMC, nos.119–20 (1972) [Becerra issue]

L. Bocaz: ‘Música chilena e identidad cultural: entrevista con Gustavo Becerra’, Araucaria de Chile, nos.1–2 (1978), 97–109

E. González-Greenhill: ‘Entrevistra a Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt’, RMC, no.164 (1985), 3–11 [interview]

R. Torres: ‘Catálogo musical de la obra de Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt’, RMC, no.164 (1985), 16–51

M. Vicuña: ‘El Ossietzky Oratorium de Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt’, RMC, no.164 (1985), 12–15

E. Caceres: ‘Homenaje a Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt en la Universidad Alemana de Oldenburgo’, RMC, no.177 (1991), 9–16

JUAN A. ORREGO-SALAS

Becerra Casanovas, Roger

(b Trinidad, Beni, 9 Aug 1924). Bolivian composer and researcher. He studied at the Escuela Normal in Sucre and at the La Paz Conservatory with Eisner. He studied the music of the indigenous peoples of Beni and established the origins of their folkdances, especially the taquirari, the machetero and the torito. He was the first to examine the manuscripts, preserved in the mission of San Ignacio de Moxos, of music used by the Jesuits until their expulsion in 1767 and still used in the local chapel. He invited Samuel Claro of the University of Chile to study the repertory. As a composer he has produced several works for orchestra such as Suite moxena and written numerous songs and dances in popular forms such as the taquirari (Misterios del Corazon and Viva Trinidad), carnaval (Vaca vieja, No pienso olvidar, Soledad) and waltz (Ilusión, Perdóname). (O. Rojas Rojas: Creadores de la música boliviana, La Paz, 1995)

CARLOS SEOANE

Becher, Alfred Julius

(b Manchester, 27 April 1803; d Vienna, 23 Nov 1848). German critic, composer and teacher. The son of a Hanau merchant who had settled in Manchester, he was taken as a child to Germany. He studied law in Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg and Leiden, taking a doctorate despite his prosecution for ‘demagogic activities’; his first compositions date from this time. Already an ardent revolutionary, in whom Wagner detected ‘a certain wildness and vehemence’ (Mein Leben), he held various posts in rapid succession, including those of lawyer in Elberfeld (c1830), editor of a Cologne commercial newspaper founded by his father, the Handelsblatt (1834), and critic for the Kölner Zeitung and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. On the failure of the Handelsblatt, he devoted himself entirely to music. After the death of his father and his wife he moved to The Hague to teach theory and aesthetics at the Royal Music School (1837–40). In 1840 he went to London to teach theory at the RAM, but, sent by a rich Englishman on a legal mission to Vienna at the end of the year, he remained there. He became a successful music critic, writing for the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung and (from 1842) the Sonntagsblätter, encouraged in this by his friend of Cologne days, Mendelssohn, and supported by new friends including Castelli, Lenau, Nicolai and Vesque von Püttlingen (though opposed by Grillparzer and Laube). In 1848, on the outbreak of the March Revolution, he founded with some colleagues the extremist Der Radikale, whose staff included Hebbel; in this he was financially supported by Karoline von Perin (a niece of Beethoven’s banker friend Pasqualati), with whom he lived. The paper’s policies, which included the independence of Italy and Hungary and the dissolution of the monarchy, led to Becher’s being placed high on Windischgrätz’s blacklist. He went into hiding when Vienna fell, but was discovered, court-martialled for treason, and shot.

Not only Mendelssohn admired Becher: he was respected by Schumann, while Wagner, who was himself involved in the 1848 revolutionary activities, thought him ‘a passionate and exceedingly cultured man’ (Mein Leben), and Berlioz described him as ‘a dreamy, introspective spirit, whose harmonic boldness surpasses anything hitherto attempted, whose aim is to enlarge the form of the quartet and give it novel appeal’ (Mémoires). Becher in turn greatly admired Berlioz, inscribing on a photograph of himself: ‘Remember from time to time, my dear Berlioz, one of your sincerest admirers. 27 February 1846’ (Berlioz’s subsequent comment on the photograph is: ‘Shot down in Vienna by Windischgrätz … Poor Becher!’). His songs and piano pieces achieved some popularity, but he had little success in Vienna with his chamber music, his Symphony in D minor or his Fantaisie élégiaque for violin (or cello) and orchestra, though the last was given at a Jenny Lind concert (some of his works were published; others remain in manuscript in A-Ws, Wn and Wgm). His writings include a book on the Lower Rhine Music Festival (Cologne, 1836), a biography of Jenny Lind (Vienna, 1846, 2/1847) and translations of English opera librettos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

I.F. Castelli: Memoiren meines Lebens (Vienna, 1861); ed. J. Bindtner (Munich, 1913)

E. Hanslick: Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna, 1869–70/R)

E.V. Zenker: Geschichte der Wiener Journalistik, ii: Während des Jahres 1848 (Vienna, 1893)

B. Frankl-Hochwart: ‘Aus Bechers letzten Tagen’, Die Zeit [Vienna], xvi (1898), nos. 201–4

L.A. Frankl: Erinnerungen, ed. S. Hock (Prague, 1910)

M. Gregor-Dellin, ed.: Richard Wagner: Mein Leben (Munich, 1963)

H. Ullrich: Alfred Julius Becher: der Spielmann der Wiener Revolution (Regensburg, 1974)

R. Federhofer-Königs: ‘Der unveröffentlichte Briefwechsel Alfred Julius Becher (1803–1848) – Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1947)’, SMw, xli (1992), 7–94

JOHN WARRACK

Bechet, Sidney (Joseph)

(b New Orleans, 14 May 1897; d Paris, 14 May 1959). American jazz soprano saxophonist and clarinettist. He took up the clarinet as a young boy and studied sporadically with the older clarinettists Lorenzo Tio jr, Big Eye Nelson and George Baquet, but was principally self-taught. By about 1910 he was working with some of the incipient black jazz bands in New Orleans, but around 1916 he left the city to wander (a habit which stayed with him into middle age), playing in touring shows and carnivals throughout the South and Midwest. He arrived in Chicago in 1917 and played with bands led by the New Orleans pioneers Freddie Keppard, King Oliver and Lawrence Duhé.

In 1919 Bechet was discovered by Will Marion Cook, who was about to take his large concert band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, to Europe. The orchestra played mainly concert music in fixed arrangements with little improvising, but featured Bechet (who could not read music) in blues specialities. In London the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet heard the band, and in an article that has been widely reprinted referred to Bechet as ‘an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso’ and an ‘artist of genius’.

Bechet first discovered the curved soprano saxophone in Chicago; while in London he purchased a straight model and taught himself to play it. It became his primary instrument for the rest of his life, though he continued to play the clarinet frequently. The soprano, although difficult to play in tune, has a powerful, commanding voice, and with it Bechet was able to dominate jazz ensembles.

In 1919 Bechet broke away from the Southern Syncopated Orchestra to work in England and France with a small ragtime band led by Benny Peyton. Crucially, in 1924, he played for two or three months in New York with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In 1923 the band had acquired the trumpeter Bubber Miley, who awakened Ellington’s musicians to the new jazz music. Bechet had by this time acquired a capacity to swing that was matched only by that of Louis Armstrong, and his example led the band further towards jazz.

In 1924 and 1925 Bechet made a group of recordings with Armstrong which were variously issued under the names Clarence Williams’s Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies, among them Texas Moaner Blues (1924, OK), Cake Walking Babies (1924, Gen.) and Cake-walking Babies from Home (1925, OK). These constitute one of the most important bodies of New Orleans jazz. Through the next few years Bechet continued to wander, travelling in Europe and the USA; he even toured the USSR with a jazz band. In the 1930s, as hot dance music lost its popularity to more sentimental styles, Bechet dropped into obscurity, playing when he could find work, though he was frequently a member of Noble Sissle’s band between 1931 and 1938. He organized the New Orleans Feetwarmers in 1932 with Tommy Ladnier, but owing largely to the group’s musical style it was short-lived, and the following year the two men briefly managed a tailor’s shop. However, with the New Orleans revival, from about 1939 Bechet was extolled by critics as one of the greatest jazz pioneers; his fortunes improved and he made many recordings. In 1949 he returned to Europe for the first time in almost 20 years. He was received there with adulation and reverence, and in 1951 he settled permanently in France, where he lived out his final years as a show-business star.

Bechet was one of the best of the New Orleans jazz pioneers who spread out from the city in the years around World War I, giving the music its first national popularity. Because he travelled so much, especially abroad, he never developed the large popular following that he might have had if he had chosen to emulate Armstrong or Ellington in leading a large dance band. He was frequently bristly and difficult, with the amour-propre of a star even in obscurity. His passions were free: he was expelled from both England and France for fighting, and spent almost a year in jail in Paris. He was certainly not temperamentally suited to the kinds of compromise that Armstrong and Ellington made to achieve popular success. But this same barely controlled passion is one of the hallmarks of his playing, which is everywhere filled with feeling, from the wild exuberance of Sweetie Dear (1932, Vic.) to the brooding melancholy of Blue Horizon (1944, BN). Bechet mastered the soprano saxophone to such a degree that few other jazz musicians were willing to challenge him, and until John Coltrane renewed the popularity of the instrument in the 1960s he had the field virtually to himself.

Like most of the New Orleans pioneers, Bechet tended to work out his figures in advance, and once he had arrived at a way of playing a tune he seldom changed it. But his playing was nonetheless passionate: his music was filled with movement, at fast tempos dashing headlong through the melody, at slow tempos swirling up and down the full range of the instrument in free-floating arpeggiated figures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SchullerEJ

E. Ansermet: ‘Bechet and Jazz Visit Europe, 1919’, Frontiers of Jazz, ed. R. de Toledano (New York, 1947, 2/1962)

S. Bechet: Treat it Gentle: an Autobiography, ed. D. Flower (New York, 1960/R)

H.J. Mauerer: A Discography of Sidney Bechet (Copenhagen, 1969)

R. Blesh: ‘Creole Sidney’, Combo, USA: Eight Lives in Jazz (Philadelphia, 1971/R), 33–57

H. Lyttelton: The Best of Jazz, i: Basin Street to Harlem: Jazz Masters and Masterpieces, 1917–1930 (London, 1978)

W. Balliett: ‘Le grand Bechet’, Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats: 19 Portraits in Jazz (New York and Oxford, 1983), 31–41

J. Chilton: Sidney Bechet: the Wizard of Jazz (London, 1987)

B. Wilber and D. Webster: Music was not Enough (London, 1987)

F. Zammarchi: Sidney Bechet (Paris, 1989)

Material relating to life and work in Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock

Oral history material in US–NORtu

JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER

Bechi, Gino

(b Florence, 16 Oct 1913; d Florence, 2 Feb 1993). Italian baritone. He studied in Florence with Raul Frazzi and Di Giorgi and made his début at Empoli in 1936 as Germont. He sang regularly in Rome (1938–52), and at La Scala (1939–53), where he sang the title role of Nabucco at the reopening of the theatre in 1946. He established himself as the leading Italian dramatic baritone of the day, especially in the Verdi repertory; his roles also included Gérard, Scarpia, Jack Rance, Tonio and Thomas’ Hamlet. In London he appeared with the Scala company at Covent Garden in 1950 as Iago and Falstaff, and at Drury Lane as William Tell in 1958. He sang in the premières of Rocca’s Monte Ivnor (1939, Rome) and Alfano’s Don Juan de Manara (1941, Florence). Bechi continued to sing until 1961, when he appeared as Salieri’s Falstaff at Siena and in Il barbiere di Siviglia at Adria. As his recordings confirm, he possessed a voice of striking individuality, incisive in both tone and diction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Blyth: Obituary, Opera, xliv (1993), 425 only

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Bechler, Johann Christian

(b 1784; d 1857). American Moravian composer. See Moravians, music of the, §3.

Bechstein.

German firm of piano makers. Friedrich Wilhelm Carl Bechstein (d Gotha, 1 June 1826; d Berlin, 6 March 1900), who founded the firm in 1853 in Berlin, served his apprenticeship with the Perau firm in Berlin, becoming foreman at the age of 22. He left in 1852 to work under Pape and Kriegelstein in Paris, and returned to Berlin the next year to start his own small business. Three years later he attracted considerable attention with his first grand, which was inaugurated by Bülow with a performance of the Liszt Sonata. Success at the 1862 London exhibition and the more important 1867 Paris exhibition consolidated a fast-growing reputation. Output was expanded vigorously, from 300 instruments a year during the 1860s to 1000 a decade later, 3000 during the 1890s and 5000 in the years preceding World War I.

Large-scale production and extensive use of machinery did not preclude the maintenance of consistently high standards. Bechstein’s concert grands were preferred by most leading pianists in Europe, and the firm’s smaller grands (notably the c 2 metre model B) and uprights (including the superb model 8 and smaller model 9) are acknowledged as among the finest ever made. After 1870 all were iron-framed and overstrung, owing much to the examples of Steinway, but with a less brilliant tone, ‘velvety’ and somewhat ‘thinner’ in the bass. The firm’s close association with German music was demonstrated at the opening of Bechstein Hall in 1892 with recitals by Bülow, Brahms and Joachim. In 1901 a concert room in London, later known as the Wigmore Hall, was opened, exemplifying Bechstein’s secure hold on the English market, which regularly absorbed about half of the firm’s annual output. Following the founder’s death, his sons Edwin Bechstein and Carl Bechstein assumed control and later Carl’s son, also Carl, joined the firm.

Between the wars, while maintaining its reputation for the finest instruments, Bechstein made a bold but unsuccessful attempt to transform the piano by introducing the ‘neo-Bechstein’ in 1933. The touch and hammer-action were normal, but only one or two strings were used for each note, and the soundboard was replaced by electrical amplification and reproduction. In addition to the normal sustaining pedal a second pedal acted as a volume control. Despite its excellent workmanship, practical advantages and serious intent, this revolutionary instrument failed to win support and was withdrawn.

Bechstein’s factory was almost completely destroyed during World War II, but production of grands began again in 1951 and annual production soon rose to approximately 1000 instruments. In 1963 the company was bought by Baldwin, who sold it again in 1987. Bechstein took over production of Zimmerman pianos in 1992. Among current Bechstein models the model 8 upright, model B grand and the concert grand maintain the firm’s high reputation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bechstein-Chronik 1925: ein Ausschnitt aus der Geschichte des Hauses Bechstein (Berlin, 1926)

K.H. Profé, ed.: Bechstein-Bilderbuch/Bechstein-Picture-Book/Bechstein illustré (Berlin, 1927)

R. du Moulin-Eckart, ed.: Neue Briefe von Hans von Bülow (Munich, 1927; Eng. trans., 1931)

‘100 Jahre Bechstein’, IZ, viii (1953–4), 1–2

C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976, 2/1990)

CYRIL EHRLICH

Bechstein Hall.

London concert hall built next to the premises of the Bechstein firm in 1901 and renamed the Wigmore Hall in 1917. See London(i), §VI, 2.

Becilli, Giovanni.

See Bicilli, Giovanni.

Beck.

German family of organ builders. Hans Beck (fl Grossenhain, 1514–57) built organs in Halle (1514–17, 1539), Delitzsch (1520) and Oschatz (1555). No organs by by his eldest son, Anton Beck (d Halle, 1563), are known to survive. Esaias Beck (d Halle, 8 April 1587), Hans Beck's second son, built instruments in Löbejün (1564), Naumburg (1568; praised by Adlung), Halle (1569, 1573), Bitterfeld (1579) and Greiffenberg. Anton Beck's son David Beck (fl Halberstadt, 1587–1601) also built in Halle (1587), Löbejün (1588–91), Halberstadt (1590) and Gröningen (1592–6; praised by Mattheson). No organs built by Georg Beck (fl Halberstadt, 1592) are known to survive; he is mentioned in conjunction with David, but the nature of their relationship is unkown.

The most famous member of the family was Esaias Beck, whose organs contained a complete diapason chorus and one or two foundation stops in the Great organ, and a full range of foundations and mutations and an open diapason in the second manual, while the Pedal controlled stops both low (16' Open Diapason, 16' Untersatz) and high (Zimbel, 2' Nachthorn, 1' Bauernflöte). In addition there were reed stops for Great organ and Pedal, as well as those in the second manual. This idea was probably developed by the Beck family and is first found in the organ built by Esaias Beck for Naumburg Cathedral in 1568 (two manuals, 22 stops). David Beck developed a wide range of foundation stops and reeds on all his organs. The Becks created the great central German Baroque organ, to which even the Compenius family added nothing new in principle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (P. Rubardt)

GerberNL

PraetoriusSM, ii

WaltherML

A. Werckmeister: J.N.J. Organum Gruningense redivivum (Quedlinburg and Aschersleben, 1705/R)

F. Hamann: ‘Ein Orgelbauvertrag vom Jahre 1582’, Musik und Kirche, iii (1931), 187–9

W. Serauky: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Halle (Halle and Berlin, 1935–43/R)

W. Haacke: ‘Orgelbauten im Zeitzer und Naumburger Dom’, AMf, vii (1942), 209–17

W. Stüven: Orgeln und Orgelbauer im halleschen Land vor 1800 (Wiesbaden, 1964)

HANS KLOTZ

Beck, Anthony

(bur. Norwich, 29 Jan 1674). English composer. He was appointed a lay clerk of Norwich Cathedral in 1639, but was subsequently admonished in the Chapter Acts for neglecting his duties (17 June 1642). After the Restoration he resumed his place, and was promoted to minor canon in 1663. He also took his turn as precentor in 1663 and 1668. His anthem Behold how good and joyful survives in a Restoration set of partbooks from Norwich (GB-Ckc) and creates a favourable impression. He also wrote the anthem Who can tell how oft he offendeth (Cp). (I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford, 1995)

IAN SPINK

Beck, Conrad

(b Lohn, canton of Schaffhausen, 16 June 1901; d Basle, 31 Oct 1989). Swiss composer and radio producer. After studying mechanical engineering for a short time at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, and taking private music lessons from Müller-Zürich, he attended the Zürich Conservatory, where his teachers included Volkmar Andreae (composition), Reinhold Laquai (counterpoint) and Carl Baldegger (piano). In 1924 he moved to Paris, where he studied orchestration with Ibert and mingled with the circle surrounding Arthur Honegger, Albert Roussel and Nadia Boulanger, although he was not a pupil. This period proved very stimulating for Beck, awakening in him a life-long affinity for French culture. At the suggestion of Sacher, who promoted his career more than that of any other composer, he relocated to Basle in 1934. During a period of over 50 years, Sacher commissioned his works and conducted their premières with the Basle Chamber Orchestra and the Collegium Musicum, Zürich. From 1939 to 1966 Beck served as music director of Swiss Radio in Basle, a position that enabled him to do a great deal to promote contemporary music. His honours include the composition prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (1954), the Ludwig Spohr Prize of the city of Brunswick (1956) and the Basle arts prize (1964).

In terms of form, thematic construction and compositional technique, most of Beck’s works incline towards Classical and Baroque models. Even in his earliest works he rejected a late Romantic style, favouring instead linear and often strictly polyphonic writing. The compositions of his Paris period invoke bitonality (such as the third movement of the Violin Sonatina no.1, 1928) and tend towards dissonant formations, tonal stridency and complex textures. The Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1929), winner of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize, is remarkable in this respect. Works from his middle years combine Expressionistic elements with a neo-classical approach; an elegiac tone and a certain pathos are perceptible. Although his works move between tonality and atonality, they frequently conclude on triadic chords containing the fifth and octave, but not necessarily the third. 12-note melodies, such as the one that appears in the second movement of the Duo for Two Violins (1960), are exceptional, as Beck did not pursue serialism consistently. In later works metaphorical titles such as Facettes (1974), Cercles (1978–9), Centres mobiles (1980) and Lichter und Schatten (1982) replaced the generic descriptions of earlier compositions, but his musical language did not change substantially.

Beck was able to create an extensive body of works, comprising all genres except opera, even though for much of his life he did not compose full-time. Some of his compositions are inspired by local topics. These include the Festspiel for the 500th anniversary of the battle of St Jakob an der Birs (1943–4) and the cantata Der Tod zu Basel (1950–52), on the Basle earthquake of 1356. His Symphony no.7 ‘Aeneas Silvius’ (1955–7) is a tribute to the founder of Basle University and thus to the humanistic tradition of the city. He also made many folksong arrangements and conducted research for radio broadcasts into traditional Swiss music. Although his works received frequent performances in Switzerland until the 1960s, they have appeared only rarely since that time.

WORKS

MSS in CH-Bps

Principal publisher: Schott

stage

La grande ourse (ballet, 5 scenes, after L. Chauveau), 1935–6; St Jakob an der Birs (Festspiel, E.F. Knuchel), 1943–4; Pandora (incid music, J.W. von Goethe), 1945

instrumental

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1925; Sym. no.2 ‘Sinfonietta’, 1926; Vc Conc., 1926–7; Sym. no.3, str, 1927; Concertino no.1, pf, orch, 1928; Sym. no.4 ‘Conc. for Orch’, 1928; Conc., str qt, orch, 1929; Sym. no.5, 1929–30; Kleine Suite, str, 1930; Innominata, 1931; Konzertmusik, ob, str, 1932; Pf Conc., 1932–3; Serenade, fl, cl, str, 1935–6; Ostinato, 1936; Rhapsodie, cl, bn, hn, tpt, pf, str, 1936; Prelude, 1940; Vn Conc. (Chbr Conc.), 1940; Fl Conc., 1941; Conc., hpd, str, 1942; Suite no.2, str, 1945; Suite, 1947; Va Conc., 1949; Sym. no.6, 1950; Hymn, 1952; Concertino, cl, bn, orch, 1953–4; Mouvement, 1953; Sym. no.7 ‘Aeneas Silvius’, 1955–7; Sonatina, 1957–8; Suite concertante, wind, db, perc, 1961; Concertino, ob, orch, 1962–3; Concertato, 1963–4; 2 hommages, 1965; Cl Con., 1968; Fantasie, 1968–9; Chbr Conc., 1970–71; Mouvements lyriques, vc, chbr orch, 1970; Conc., fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, orch, 1975–6; 3 Aspekte, chbr orch, 1976; Cercles, 1978–9; Lichter und Schatten, 2 hn, perc, str, 1982; Nachklänge, 1983–4

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1922; Sonata, e, vc, pf, 1923; Sonata, vn, pf, 1924; Str Qt no.2, b, 1924; Suite, vc, 1924; Duo, 2 vc, 1925; Sonatina, vc, pf, 1925–6; Suite, 2 vc, 1925; Suite, vn, 1925; Str Qt no.3, 1926; Str Trio no.1, 1926; Sonatina, fl, vn, 1927; Sonatina no.1, vn, pf, 1928; 3 Bilder aus dem Struwelpeter, fl, cl, bn, perc, pf, ?1934 [after H. Hoffmann]; Duo, vn, va, 1934–5; Str Qt no.4, 1934–5; Sonata, viol, org, 1938; Sonatina, ob, pf, 1941, rev. 1953; Duo, 2 vn, 1960; Facettes, tpt, pf, 1974; Centres mobiles, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, timp, 1980; arrs. popular songs, wind, str qt, db, 1945–6, 1955–7; other chamber pieces

Kbd (pf, unless otherwise stated): Sonata, 1923; Sonatina, org, 1927; Sonatina no.1, 1928; 2 Tanzstücke, 1928; Klavierstücke I–II, 1929–30; 2 Preludes, org, 1938; Sonatina no.2, 1941; 10 Klavierstücke für den Hausgebrauch, 1945; other works

vocal

Choral: Der Tod des Oedipus (cant., R. Morax), S, T, B, chorus, brass, org, timp, 1928; Oratorium (A. Silesius), S, A, B, chorus, org, orch, 1933–4; Lyrische Kantate (R.M. Rilke), S, A, female vv, orch, 1932; Sommerlied (P. Gerhardt), female vv, orch, 1946; Der Tod zu Basel (Beck), spkr, S, B, chorus, orch, 1950–52; other small works

Solo: 6 Songs (W. Wolfensberger), A, pf, 1923; 3 Herbstgesänge (Rilke), A, pf/org, 1926; Vocalise-Étude, 1v, pf, 1931; Chbr Cant. (L. Labé), S, fl, pf, str, 1937–8; Gedulden (P. Valéry, trans. Rilke), 1v, vn, va, 2 vc, 1944; Herbstfeuer (R. Huch), A, chbr orch, 1956; 2 Psalms (after A. d’Aubigné), 1v, pf, 1958–9; Die Sonnenfinsternis (cant., A. Stifter), A, chbr orch, 1966–7; Elegie (F. Hölderlin), S, orch, 1971–2; other songs, 1v, pf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Bruyr: L’écran des musiciens, ii (Paris, 1933), 51–57

W. Schuh: Schweizer Musik der Gegenwart (Zürich, 1948), 230ff

E. Mohr: ‘Zum Kompositionsstil von Conrad Beck’, SMz, ci (1961), 6–12

D. Larese and W. Schuh: Conrad Beck: eine Lebensskizze (Amriswil, 1971)

A. Müry: ‘Conrad Beck’, Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basle, 1986), 229–35

R. Piencikowski, ed.: Conrad Beck: Musikmanuskripte, Inventare der Paul Sacher Stiftung, xiii (Winterthur, 1992)

CHRISTOPH KELLER

Beck, Franz [François] Ignaz

(b Mannheim, 20 Feb 1734; d Bordeaux, 31 Dec 1809). German composer, conductor, violinist and organist, active in France. He received violin lessons from his father Johann Aloys Beck (d 27 May 1742), an oboist and choir school Rektor at the Palatine court whose name is listed in the calendars of 1723 and 1734. He also learnt the double bass, among other instruments, and eventually came under the tutelage of Johann Stamitz, who arrived in Mannheim in 1741. The Palatine court, under Carl Theodor, recognized Beck’s talent and undertook responsibility for his education.

Several sources maintain that Beck left the Palatinate at an early age to study composition with Galuppi in Venice. According to his pupil Blanchard (1845), however, Beck was the object of a jealous intrigue that involved him in a duel during which his opponent was supposedly killed (many years later Beck met his former opponent, who had only feigned death); Beck then presumably fled and travelled in Italy, giving concerts in principal cities. In any event, he spent several years in Venice before eloping to Naples with Anna Oniga, the daughter of his employer.

After Beck’s stay in Italy (probably in the 1750s), he moved to Marseilles and became the leader of a theatre orchestra. It is not certain whether he arrived in France before about 1760, but in the late 1750s Parisian firms published more than 20 of Beck’s symphonies in fairly rapid succession. In 1757 a symphony by ‘Signor Beck’ was listed in two Concert Spirituel programmes. The title-pages of his op.1 (1758) and op.3 (1762) describe him as ‘chamber virtuoso to the Elector Palatine’ but add ‘and presently first violin of the Concert in Marseilles’. At least seven performances of his symphonies were given at Marseilles in 1760–61.

Beck soon moved from Marseilles to Bordeaux, where he continued his interest in the theatre, subsequently becoming the conductor of the elegant Grand Théâtre. By 1764, when his first child was born, he was active as a teacher; his students included Pierre Gaveaux, Henri-Louis Blanchard and Bochsa. Beck was appointed organist at St Seurin, Bordeaux, on 24 October 1774 and his exceptional improvisatory skill drew considerable admiration from the congregation. Several sets of his keyboard pieces were printed in Paris and Dresden as well as Bordeaux. In 1783 he travelled to Paris for the first performance of his Stabat mater at Versailles and in 1789 the overture and incidental music to Pandore were performed in Paris at the Théâtre de Monsieur. He also directed concerts of the Société du Musée in Bordeaux. During the Revolution he composed patriotic music, including a Hymne à l’être suprême. In 1803 the new government honoured Beck by naming him correspondent of music composition for the Institut de France.

In the early 20th century the research of Riemann and, particularly, Sondheimer focussed new attention on Beck’s symphonies, most of which date from his earliest period (c1757–66), and raised them to considerable prominence. Sondheimer regarded Beck as a highly individual and progressive ‘Sturm und Drang’ composer who grasped the full implications of symphonic style and whose works have a dramatic intensity resulting from ‘dualistic’ thematic material (well delineated by contrast in instrumentation and dynamics), remarkably bold harmonic progressions and flexible rhythms. Beck’s independent part-writing and his emphasis on thematic development led Sondheimer to consider him the predecessor of Haydn, Boccherini and Beethoven. Brook (1962) described Beck’s symphonies as ‘among the most original and striking of the pre-Classical period’. Progressive traits in the symphonies include the use of wind instruments (usually oboes and horns in pairs) in most works written after 1760 and the expansion from three movements to four. Beck’s choice of minor mode for no fewer than four of these works is exceptional.

Beck’s published keyboard works, mostly one-movement pieces entitled ‘sonata’ or ‘fantasy’, are relatively modest in scope. Two manuscript collections in Paris include many of these pieces, some of them bearing descriptive titles; in addition a small collection of unpublished keyboard music in Bordeaux contains several multi-movement sonatas. Beck also wrote vocal compositions and stage works. His Stabat mater, the crowning achievement of his maturity, is in 12 sections (including an extended choral finale) for soloists, chorus and orchestra. He composed a considerable amount of music for the Bordeaux theatre and for St Seurin, much of which is lost.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris, unless otherwise stated

Edition:Foreign Composers in France 1750–1790, ed. R.J. Viano, The Symphony 1720–1840, ser.D, ii (New York, 1984) [S]

stage

first performed in Bordeaux unless otherwise stated

Le combat des Muses (prol., L.-C. Leclerc), 1762, ?lost

Le nouvel an, ou Les étrennes de Colette (oc, S. Mamin), 1765, ?lost

La belle jardinière (bouquet, Caprez), 24 Aug 1767, pubd lib F-BO

Athalie (tragédie, J. Racine), 11 Sept 1775, 1 choral part BO

L’isle déserte (oc, C.-P.-H. Comte d’Ossun, after P. Metastasio), 14 Jan 1779, Pn, ov. ed. in S

Le jugement d’Apollon (épisode, Blincourt), Grand, 7 April 1780

La mort d’Orphée (ballet héroïque pantomime, A. Hus), Grand, 27 Oct 1784, ov. Pn, ed. in S

Le coq du village (ballet-pantomime, E. Hus), Grand, 1784, ?lost

Les trois sultanes, ou Soliman second (comédie, 3, C.-S. Favart, after J.-F. Marmontel), Grand, 1784, 5 ariettes Pn

Les plaisirs du printemps (ballet), c1784–90, ?lost

La fête d’Astrée (cantate allégorique, P.-H. Duvigneau), 28 Aug 1786, pubd lib BO

Esther (tragédie, Racine), Grand, 23 Oct 1788, music lost

Belphégor, ou La descente d’Arlequin aux enfers (comédie, 3, ?J. Le Grand), Grand, 9 Feb 1789, parts BO

La loterie d’amour (oc, Vallier), Grand, 4 June 1789

Pandore (mélodrame, d’Aumale de Corsenville), Paris, Monsieur, 2 July 1789, pubd parts BO

Sargines, ou L’élève de l’amour (opéra buffon, 4, Mlle Renaud, after F.-T.-M. de Baculard d’Arnaud), Grand, 5 Dec 1789

Le comte de Comminges, ou Les amans malheureux (drama, 3, F.-T.-M. de Baculard d’Arnaud, after Mme de Tencin: Mémoires du comte de Comminges), Grand, 19/20 Dec 1790, parts BO

Les peuples et les rois (oc), Grand, 1793, parts BO

other works

Sacred: Stabat mater, solo vv, chorus, orch, Paris, Concert Spirituel, April 1783, Pn (20th-century copy); Hymne à l’être suprême (M.J. Chénier), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1794, Pn; Hymme, 1793, BO; TeD, mass movements, other works, lost

Orch: 6 ovs., str orch, op.1 (1758), 1 ed. in S; 6 syms., op.2 (1760); 6 sinfonie, op.3 (1762), 1 ed. in S; 6 sinfonies, op.4 (1766); no.2 of 6 syms. … de différents auteurs, op.1 (c1760); no.2 of 6 sinfonie … da vari autori, op.10 (1760); no.17 of Simphonie périodique (1761); no.1 of 6 sinfonie … da vari autori, op.13 (1762), and as no.7 of Simphonie périodique, ed. in S; unpubd syms., CH-Bu, 1 ed. in S; CZ-KRa; DK-Sa; F-Pn; I-Gl; no.1 of 6 sinfonie … da vari autori, op.9 (1757), doubtful

Kbd: [18] sonates, hpd/pf, op.5 (c1772/R); 6 sonates, pf/hpd, op.5 (Bordeaux, c1774–85); [4] fantesies, hpd/pf (Dresden, c1774), nos.1, 3 also pubd Paris; other works in contemporary anthologies and in F-BO, Pn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

GerberNL

NewmanSCE

H. Blanchard: ‘Essais biographiques, I: Francesco Beck’, RGMP, xii (1845), 212, 219, 225, 241

R. Sondheimer: ‘Die formale Entwicklung der vorklassischen Sinfonie’, AMw, iv (1922), 85–99, 123–39

R. Sondheimer: ‘Die Sinfonien Franz Becks’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 323–51, 449–84

B.S. Carrow: The Relationship between the Mannheim School and the Music of Franz Beck, Henri Blanchard, and Pierre Gaveaux (diss., New York U., 1956)

D.H. Foster: ‘Franz Beck’s Compositions for the Theater in Bordeaux’, CMc, no.33 (1982), 7–35

ANNELIESE DOWNS/PHILIPPE VENDRIX

Beck, Frederick

(b ?Württemberg, bap. 30 May 1738; d ?London, c1798). German piano maker, active in England. He left Germany for England some time after 1756, and married Mary Coles on 23 September 1770. The rate books of St James, Westminster, show that he lived at a house in Broad Street, London, from midsummer 1771 until the end of 1798. During the early 1780s the numbers in the street were changed, giving the false impression that Beck changed addresses.

Beck is only known to have made square pianos. Several of his instruments, including one dated 1774, were confiscated by the state during the French Revolution (see Bruni). There is a 1775 Beck square piano in the Paris Conservatoire. Up to 1780 at least, Beck’s square pianos were not numbered, a typical early nameboard being ‘Fredericus Beck Londini fecit 1775/No.4 Broad Street Golden Square’, then ‘Fredericus Beck Londini fecit 1780/No.4 Broad Street Soho’. This changed to ‘No.1941 Fredericus Beck Londini fecit 1788/No.10 Broad Street Soho’, the numbers apparently indicating a prolific output in his early years.

The quality of Beck’s pianos ranges from rushed cabinet-work, poor key-carving, and even in one case an adze-mark on the wrestplank, to the fine craftsmanship especially noticeable in his early instruments. The 1775 square piano illustrated in James may have been intended more as a beautiful piece of furniture than a piano, for the elaborately inlaid case into which the piano is built has no recess for the player’s legs. Another attractive square piano on four legs but with a music cabinet beneath the keyboard is illustrated by Macquoid and Edwards. Beck’s surviving square pianos have a compass of five octaves or slightly less, single action, two or three handstops and very rounded hammer heads covered with doeskin or buckskin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Bruni: Un inventaire sous la Terreur: état des instruments de musique relevé chez les émigrés et condamnés, ed. J. Gallay (Paris, 1890/R)

P. James: Early Keyboard Instruments from their Beginnings to the Year 1820 (London, 1930/R)

P. Macquoid and R. Edwards: A Dictionary of English Furniture, ii (London, 1954)

H. Heyde: Historische Musikinstrumente im Bachhaus Eisenach (Eisenach, 1976)

MARGARET CRANMER

Beck, Jean [Johann Baptist]

(b Gebweiler, Alsace, 14 Aug 1881; d Philadelphia, 23 June 1943). Alsatian philologist and musicologist. Beck studied in Paris and later in Strasbourg, where he took the doctorate in 1907. His dissertation formed the first part of his Die Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvères (1908), in which he proposed the application of modal rhythm to medieval secular song. In 1907 the French scholar Pierre Aubry became convinced of the validity of modal theory for secular song, and there ensued a bitter dispute between the two men as to who had conceived the idea. In 1909 a judicial tribunal of scholars upheld Beck’s claim. The lamentable outcome of this affair was Aubry’s death in 1910 while fencing with foils, apparently in preparation for a duel with Beck. In the face of unpopularity, Beck emigrated to the USA, where he held positions at the University of Illinois (1911–14), Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia (1914–20), and the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia (from 1920). In 1934 he was made a member of the executive board of the AMS at its inauguration.

Beck originally planned a collected edition, with facsimiles, transcriptions and commentary, of all troubadour and trouvère songs surviving with melodies. He aimed to publish in 52 volumes, under the title Corpus cantilenarum medii aevi, ‘tout se qui se chantait dans le monde chrétien pendant le XIIe et le XIIIe siècles, à l’exception de la musique liturgique’. The series ran to only two publications, the second edited jointly with his wife Louise Beck.

Beck’s theory of modal rhythm, first set out in the second part of Die Melodien, rested firmly on the conviction that the few melodies which have survived in mensurally notated form should provide the clues for reconstructing the rhythms of the remaining melodies. He accepted Runge’s and Riemann’s contention that the poetic metre of a text should influence the rhythm of its melody, but rejected Riemann’s ‘Vierhebigkeit’ in favour of medieval modal theory. By 1927, when he regarded his methods as fully developed, he admitted duple transcription for certain contexts, and occasionally assigned equal values to all syllables in a line.

WRITINGS

Die Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvères (Strasbourg, 1908/R)

‘Der Takt in den Musikaufzeichnungen des XII. und XIII. Jahrhunderts, vornehmlich in den Liedern der Troubadours und Trouvères’, Riemann-Festschrift (Leipzig, 1909/R), 166–84

La musique des troubadours (Paris, 1910/R)

‘Zur Aufstellung der modalen Interpretation der Troubadourmelodien’, SIMG, xii (1910–11), 316–24 [contains full text of judicial tribunal, and response by J. Wolf]

EDITIONS

Chansonnier Cangé, Corpus cantilenarum medii aevi, 1st ser., i (Paris and Philadelphia, 1927)

A. de la Halle: The Play of Robin and Marion (Boston, 1928)

with L. Beck: Le manuscrit du roi, Corpus cantilenarum medii aevi, 1st ser., ii (Philadelphia, 1938)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Gennrich: ‘Wer ist der Initiator der “Modaltheorie”? Suum cuique’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), 315–30

J. Haines: ‘The “Modal Theory”, Fencing, and the Death of Aubry’, PMM, vi (1997), 143–50

IAN D. BENT

Beck, Jeff

(b Wallington, Surrey, 24 June 1944). English blues-rock guitarist. Along with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, he pioneered hard-rock and heavy-metal guitar playing. He played with the Yardbirds (1965–7), then created the Jeff Beck Group, which went through several personnel changes, the earliest including Rod Stewart (vocals) and Ron Wood (bass). The album Truth (1968), made with this line-up, is important as an extension of the heavy-rock sound formulated by Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and taken further by Led Zeppelin, to whose first album, released in the following year, it has often been compared. In 1973, Beck also formed a trio with drummer Carmine Appice and Tim Bogert and produced two instrumental albums, Blow By Blow (Epic, 1975) and Wired (Epic, 1976), in which his solo playing was the focus. They were commercial successes despite there being no vocalist, a rarity in rock records. Both albums were produced by George Martin and with them, and his subsequent collaboration with Jan Hammer, Beck moved into a jazz-rock style.

Beck was influenced by Les Paul's experiments with guitar sound in the 1950s as well as the influx of blues and early rock and roll into Britain in the early 1960s; these styles, among others, are combined in his guitar-playing. He is capable of playing blues with great expression, but is better known for his pioneering exploration of unconventional guitar timbres and approaches to solo playing: this was already apparent in Nursery Rhyme, recorded in 1964 with the Tridents and released on Beckology (Epic, 1991). On this Beck plays an extraordinary solo, largely outside the key and occasionally abandoning distinct pitches for a percussive sound. He uses microtonal inflections in his string bends for the riff to the Yardbirds' Over, Under, Sideways, Down, anticipates Hendrix in his use of feedback in Shapes of Things and numerous other pieces, employs scratch-picking in I'm a Man, quotation, harmonics, hammer-ons and pull-offs in Jeff's Boogie, and wah-wah and various noise effects in You Shook Me on the Truth album. While Eric Clapton has been hailed as the consummate British rock guitar virtuoso of this era, his style is based largely on a relatively conservative blues style; Beck, however, used the blues as only one of several springboards in his creation of a highly innovatory and influential style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Walley and P. Kennely: ‘Jeff Beck’, Jazz & Pop (1969), June, 21–5 [interview]

S. Rosen: ‘Jeff Beck’, Guitar Player, vii/8 (1973), 22–4 [interview]

L. Rohter: ‘Jeff Beck: the Progression of a True Progressive’, Down Beat, xl iv/12 (1977), 13–14

J. Obrecht: ‘Beck on Beck’, Guitar Player, xix/11 (1985), 84–7

J.D. Considine: ‘Clapton, Page, Beck’, Musician (1987), Feb, 82

G. Santoro: disc notes, Beckology, Sony (1991)

SUSAN FAST

Beck, Johann H(einrich)

(b Cleveland, OH, 12 Sept 1856; d Cleveland, 26 May 1924). American conductor, composer and violinist. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1879 to 1882, and made his European début as a violinist at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in his own String Quartet in C minor. On his return to Cleveland he continued activity with the Schubert String Quartet, which he organized in 1877, and the Beck String Quartet, giving frequent concerts during the 1880s and 1890s. After 1878 he was active as a conductor. He directed the Detroit SO (1895–6) and local Cleveland orchestras during the early years of the 20th century, and appeared frequently with major orchestras in other cities. He conducted his own works with much success and numerous contemporary articles and reviews give him high praise. Only his Elegiac Song op.4 no.1 seems to have been published. Beck was active in the Music Teachers National Association and the Ohio Music Teachers' Association. An extensive collection of his manuscripts and memorabilia is in the Cleveland (Ohio) Public Library.

WORKS

Stage: Salammbo (J.H. Beck), begun 1887, inc.

Vocal: 6 sym. poems, 1v, orch, 1877–89, incl. Elegiac Song, arr. 1v, vn, pf, op.4 no.1 (Cleveland, 1877), 2 inc.; Deukalion (B. Taylor), 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, ?1877, inc.; Wie schön bist du, T, orch; Meeresabend (M. Strachwitz, trans. Beck), Mez/T, orch, ?1908; Salvum fac regem, 4vv, pf; partsongs; songs

Orch: Sym. (‘Sindbad’), op.1, c1875–7, inc.; 4 ovs., 1875–85; Skirnismael, cycle of 5 sym. poems, c1887–93, 3 inc.; 2 scherzos, 1885–95, 1889; Aus meinem Leben, sym. poem, 1917

Chbr: 4 str qts, 1877–80; Str Sextet, 1885–6; Sonata, vn, pf, inc.; piece for fl, pf; other works

Pf: Sonata, inc.; Canone all’ottave, 1875; variations; other works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (W.T. Upton)

‘Biographies of Noted American Musicians: Johann H. Beck’, Brainard's Musical World, xxiv (1887), 364; xxviii (1891), 174

‘American Composers: Johann H. Beck’, The Musician, ii (1897), 1

R. Hughes: Contemporary American Composers (Boston, 1900), 406–411

M.H. Osburn: Ohio Composers and Musical Authors (Columbus, OH, 1942) 28–9

J.H. Alexander: It Must be Heard: a Survey of the Musical Life of Cleveland, 1836–1918 (Cleveland, 1981)

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 84–5

J.H. ALEXANDER

Beck, Johann Hector

(fl 1650–70). German composer, editor and musician. He is known to have been the principal musicus ordinarius in Frankfurt. He was nominated in 1650 but was expelled a few years later for indecent behaviour; he returned to the position in 1670. His name is connected with two collections of dance music for four-part string ensemble and basso continuo. Continuatio exercitii musici (Frankfurt, 1666), includes 50 dance pieces bearing his name, presumably as composer, arranged into suites and according to the title pages he arranged and edited the anonymous pieces of this volume and of its successor, Continuatio exercitii musici secunda (1670). The 1666 volume was the second edition of Exercitium musicum (1660); this publication makes no mention of Beck, although it is possible that he had an editorial role here too. It includes pieces in scordatura and features a wider range of genres than its successor volumes. The latter, however, contain information on the optional deletion of parts, apparently to accommodate varying levels of skill in the performers. Indeed, the idea of bringing together performers with differing levels of ability in an instructional setting may well have had some bearing on the titles of the collections. (Å. Davidsson: Catalogue critique et descriptif des imprimés de musique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles conservés à la Bibliothèque de l’Université royale d’Upsala, Uppsala, 1951)

ERIK KJELLBERG/PAUL WHITEHEAD

Beck, Sydney

(b New York, 2 Sept 1906). American music scholar and librarian. He was educated at the College of the City of New York, New York University, the Institute of Musical Art and the Mannes College of Music; his studies included the violin and chamber music with Louis Sveçenski, composition with Bernard Wagenaar and Hans Weisse, and musicology with Sachs and Reese. From 1931 to 1968 he worked in the music division of the New York Public Library as head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, editor of music publications and curator of the Toscanini Memorial Archives; from 1950 to 1968 he taught at the Mannes College of Music. In 1968 he became director of libraries and a member of the faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He retired in 1976.

Beck’s principal fields of study were early string techniques and performing practice, textual analyses and criticism (see his Music in Prints, New York, 1965, with E. Roth), and instrumental teaching and study, with an emphasis on English Renaissance music. He appeared as director and performer with various concert groups. During the 1930s and 40s Beck edited many music publications issued by the New York Public Library from manuscript and printed materials; this was reproduced by the Federal Music Project and included composers from the 16th to the 20th centuries, such as Coprario, Locke, Bach, Grétry, Gossec and John Knowles Paine.

PAULA MORGAN

Becken

(Ger.).

See Cymbals.

Becker (i).

Russian firm of piano makers. Jakob Becker (Yakov Davidovich Bekker) (b Neustadt an der Haardt; d St Petersburg, 1879) founded a small workshop in St Petersburg in 1841, which was taken over by his brother Franz Davidovich 20 years later. The Russian piano industry developed later and on a smaller scale than the European, and several Germans played a large part in establishing the industry at St Petersburg. Becker became one of the best and most successful piano manufacturers, although its output was lower than that of contemporary English, American or German firms, producing 200 pianos in 1868, 400 in 1878, and 900 annually in the 1880s when 240 workmen were employed. The firm made 11,400 pianos between 1841 and 1891; the concert grands were used by leading virtuosos, including Anton Rubinstein, whose piano (no.4009) is still in his country home. It had been the custom until that time for foreign artists to take their own instruments with them on Russian tours, but the quality of Becker’s grand pianos made this unnecessary. Becker adopted the principal improvements introduced by European and American makers, including the American system of cross-stringing; in 1865 Franz became the first Russian maker to adopt Erard’s repetition action, and he was awarded a prestigious State Emblem at the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896. When Franz retired in 1871 he was succeeded by M.A. Bitepash [Bietepage], on whose retirement (1903) K.K. Schröder, one of the co-owners, took over the business. In 1918 the factory was nationalized and renamed Piano Factory No.2. It was used as the basis for the ‘Red October’ (Krasnïy Oktyabr') Piano Factory, founded in 1924, which became the largest piano manufacturer in the USSR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (L. Hackel)

A. Dolge: Pianos and their Makers (Covina, CA, 1911–13/R)

MARGARET CRANMER

Becker (ii).

American family of violin makers. Carl G. Becker (b Chicago, 20 Sept 1887; d Chicago, 6 Aug 1975) was the son of a prominent violinist and teacher, and his maternal grandfather, Herman Macklett, had been a violin maker. He began as a craftsman in 1901, and a year later joined the firm of Lyon & Healy, where he worked under John Hornsteiner until 1908. When Hornsteiner left to start his own business Becker went with him, staying as an assistant until 1923. By 1924 he had become an outstanding violin maker, repairer and connoisseur, and he took a position with William Lewis & Son, another Chicago firm; before 1924 he had already made about 100 violins in his spare time. After he joined Lewis he spent at least three summer months doing new work at Pickerel, Wisconsin; from 1925 to 1947 he made 389 new violins, violas and cellos, each with its serial number (100–488). For the rest of each year he supervised the repair workshop of Lewis & Son, or accompanied the president of the firm on his journeys in search of old instruments.

His son, Carl F. Becker (b Chicago, 16 Dec 1919) inherited his father's great ability, and worked with him from 1936. Between them they developed the art of violin restoration to a high level, introducing a number of important innovations and technical improvements. Carl F. Becker's particular speciality is varnish restoration. From 1948 to 1967 new instruments (489–726) were produced by father and son in Wisconsin in association with Lewis & Son. By 1968 the Beckers' rare understanding of their craft and their perfectionism had become incompatible with the increasing pace of big business, and they left Lewis & Son to work on their own account. Both new work (now over 750 instruments) and restoration continue to the same very high standard. In the years before the elder Becker's death they each made a few instruments individually.

Carl F. Becker's children have also become violin makers and restorers. Jennifer Becker Jurewicz (b Chicago, 14 Aug 1955), his daughter, began working with her father at the age of 11, finishing her first violin in 1970. She began to work full time at the age of 16. Following her marriage she moved to Minneapolis in 1978, maintaining her association with the family business; in 1986 she opened her own shop in that city. Her brother Paul Becker (b Chicago, 21 Dec 1958) began making violins in 1974, working full time after 1976. He later opened his own business in cabinet making, in which he also excelled, pursuing this craft from 1988 to 1992 while simultaneously working in the family business.

CHARLES BEARE/PHILIP J. KASS

Becker, Albert (Ernst Anton)

(b Quedlinburg, 13 June 1834; d Berlin, 10 Jan 1899). German composer. He studied in Quedlinburg with Hermann Bönicke and then in Berlin with S.W. Dehn (1853–6). From 1858 to 1869 he worked in Potsdam and Ohlau (now Oława), Silesia, before settling permanently in Berlin where in 1881 he became a teacher of composition at the Schwarwenka Conservatory. In 1891 he was appointed director of the choir of Berlin Cathedral. The following year he was offered the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, but declined in deference to Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1892 he was appointed to the Prussian Royal Academy of Arts.

Becker published primarily vocal music during his lifetime. His G minor symphony (1859, the second of three) shared a prize in a Vienna competition of 1861. His published large-scale instrumental works are the Piano Quartet in D minor op.19, the Piano Sonata in F minor op.40 and Piano Quintet in E flat op.49. His first successes were his songs to texts from Julius Wolff’s Rattenfänger and Wilder Jäger (1877). His Mass in B flat minor won Liszt’s admiration and is generally considered his best work. The oratorio Selig aus Gnade op.61 (1890) and Reformationskantate op.28 (1882) were also much admired. His shorter liturgical works are still performed in Germany. Becker grew from early influences of Schumann to become a conservatively eclectic harmonist. His best work exhibits skillful counterpoint and keen sensitivity to text.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BlumeEK

EitnerQ

MGG1 suppl. (A. Adrio) [with list of works]

‘Albert Becker’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, xv (1884), 593–5

P.O. Davidson: The Extra-Liturgical Geistliches Lied, 1880–1915 (diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989)

ALAN H. KRUECK

Becker, Carl Ferdinand

(b Leipzig, 17 July 1804; d Leipzig, 26 Oct 1877). German organist, musicologist, music collector and bibliographer. He was educated at the Thomasschule under Johann Gottfried Schicht, and also studied with the organists Friedrich Schneider and Johann Andreas Dröbs. He played the violin in the Gewandhaus Orchestra (1820–33) and in the theatre orchestra (1821–4). He was organist at the Peterskirche (1825–37) and later at the Nikolaikirche (1837–54). When the Leipzig Conservatory was founded in 1843, Mendelssohn invited Becker to become its first organ professor; among his pupils was William Rockstro. He also gave organ recitals in Leipzig and other German cities.

In his twenties Becker began to collect early printed music and manuscripts as well as musical literature. Based on his important library he published bibliographies, editions of older music and many articles in such periodicals as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Of his various publications, the Systematisch-chronologische Darstellung der musikalischen Literatur is perhaps the most notable, being a remarkable attempt to produce a classified list of older publications. It is clear and concise, and is still used. Becker was interested in various fields of music. One of his special interests was J.S. Bach; he was a founder-member of the Bach-Gesellschaft. He also championed in his writings the late works of Beethoven and the music of Schumann. His compositions (motets, songs, piano music) are of minor importance, although his organ pieces were valued for study purposes. In 1854 Becker retired from his offices. Two years later he transferred his library (3277 volumes) to the city of Leipzig, which still owns it (D-LEm).

WRITINGS

Systematisch-chronologische Darstellung der musikalischen Literatur von der frühesten bis auf die neueste Zeit (Leipzig, 1836/R, suppl. 1839/R)

Die Hausmusik in Deutschland in dem 16., 17. und 18. Jahrhunderte (Leipzig, 1840/R)

Alphabetisch und chronologisch geordnetes Verzeichnis einer Sammlung musikalischen Schriften (Leipzig, 1843, 2/1846)

Die Choralsammlungen der verschiedenen christlichen Kirchen (Leipzig, 1845/R)

Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, oder systematisch-chronologische Zusammenstellung der in diesen zwei Jahrhunderten gedruckten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1847, 2/1855/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Krause: ‘Von der privaten Musiksammlung zur Fachbibliothek: zur Vorgeschichte der Musikbibliothek der Stadt Leipzig’, Studien zum Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, ii (1982), 45–57

P. Krause: ‘Carl Ferdinand Beckers Wirken für das Werk Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Beiträge zur Bachforschung, i (Leipzig, 1982), 85–95

A. Rosenmüller: Carl Ferdinand Becker (1804–1877): Studien zu Leben und Werk (thesis, Leipzig U., 1994)

ALEC HYATT KING/PETER KRAUSE

Becker, Constantin Julius

(b Freiberg, Lower Saxony, 3 Feb 1811; d Oberlössnitz, nr Dresden, 26 Feb 1859). German writer, teacher and composer. He began his studies with August Anacker before going to Leipzig in 1835 where he studied further with C.F. Becker. He then assisted Schumann as an editor on the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. His essays continued to appear until 1846 despite his move to Dresden in 1843 to teach singing and composition. In 1846 he retired to Oberlössnitz, where he died after a long illness. His works include a rhapsody Das Zigeunerleben, a symphony (1843, Leipzig) and the opera Die Entstürmung von Belgrad (1848, Leipzig). He also wrote a noted Männergesang-Schule (Leipzig, c1845) and translated Berlioz's Voyage musical into German.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Velimirović: ‘Belgrade as Subject of Musical Compositions’, MZ, xvii (1981), 147–65

U. Konrad: ‘Der Beitrag evangelischer Komponisten zur Messenkomposition im 19ten Jahrhundert’, KJb, lxxi (1987), 65–92

FRANZ GEHRING/CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Becker, Cornelius

(b Leipzig, 21 Oct 1561; d Leipzig, 25 May 1604). German theologian and poet. He lived in Leipzig for the whole of his life except for six months' service in 1592 as a deacon in Rochlitz in Saxony. After his education and several years' employment at the Thomasschule he became pastor of the Nikolaikirche in 1594. He was elected a professor at the university in 1599 after gaining his doctorate. As a staunch Lutheran he was an ardent opponent of crypto-Calvinism; this led to his temporary suspension in 1601. In the following year in Leipzig he published his Der Psalter Davids Gesangweis auff die in Lutherischen Kirchen gewöhnliche Melodeyen zugerichtet with an introduction by Polykarp Leyser. The Becker Psalter was intended as a Lutheran counterpart to the Calvinist Lobwasser Psalter; in it he attacked not only the Lobwasser text, but also specifically ‘the outlandish French melodies, which sound lovely to worldly (weltlusternen) ears’. The psalter went through 25 editions by 1712.

Becker's writings have little literary merit and the psalter is no exception; its importance lies in the fact that several musical editions were subsequently published. The first was by Calvisius (Leipzig, 1605), which by 1621 had gone through at least five editions and the second was by Heinrich Grimm (Magdeburg, 1624); both Calvisius and Grimm set the Becker melodies in four-part note-against-note counterpoint. The most important, by Heinrich Schütz, was published in Freiberg in 1628 and later reprinted in Güstrow in 1640 (ed. in Heinrich Schütz: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Kassel, 1936, 2/1957, vol.vi). An extended and partly revised version with a figured bass by Schütz appeared at Dresden in 1661, and was republished a further three times with only the melodies and figured bass: it was included in Johann Olearius's Geistliche Singkunst (Leipzig, 1671), in the Geistliche Gesangbuch (Dresden, 1676), and in the Sachsen-Weissenfelsische … Gesangbuch of 1712. Individual psalms also appeared in many hymnbooks. The Becker Psalter was officially recognized in 1661 as the standard psalter for use in Saxony. Calvisius based his Tricinia teutsche Lieder (Leipzig, 1603) on 22 Becker texts: 16 are versifications of the psalms and six are completely original. A portrait of Becker is in the Leipzig Universitäts-bibliothek.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (B. Klaus)

G. Müller: Geschichte des deutschen Liedes vom Zeitalter des Barock (Munich, 1925/R)

P. Gabriel: Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied (Leipzig, 1935, 3/1956)

WALTER BLANKENBURG

Becker [Bekker, Bäkker], Dietrich [Diederich, Diedrich, Dierich]

(b ?Hamburg, ?26 Feb 1623; d Hamburg, 12 May 1679). German composer, organist and violinist.

1. Life.

According to the dedication of his Musicalische Frühlings-Früchte (1668), Becker was born in Hamburg, and he has therefore been identified as the ‘Dirik’ Becker who was baptized in the Nikolaikirche there on 26 February 1623, but another source names him as the son of the organist Paul Becker from Wernigerode. In 1642 he was appointed organist to Count Rantzau at the Schlosskirche in Ahrensburg, where an organ by Friedrich Stellwagen had been installed two years earlier. On 25 November 1644, he married Maria, daughter of the Hamburg gunsmith Hans de Koning, to whom he dedicated a wedding poem, Das Orgelwerk (lost, formerly in D-Hs). Between 1654 and 1655 Becker worked as a violinist at the court of Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies near Stockholm, and after another period in Ahrensburg he was appointed violinist to Duke Christian Ludwig of Celle in April 1656. On 23 September 1658 he was married for a second time, this time to Clara Catharina, daughter of the court violinist Christian Reinwald.

Becker was granted leave of absence from Celle in 1662 to visit Lübeck and Hamburg ‘to improve his skill in his profession’, but instead of returning to Celle he became a citizen of Hamburg on 11 April 1662 and worked there as a simple Musicant. That he was employed as a town musician by 29 December 1664 is evident from his appointment, with Hans Hake, as director of the 14-tägigen Music at Hamburg Cathedral, but it was not until 22 July 1667 that he received a salaried appointment, in succession to Johann Schop. The following year he was made sole director of the Hamburg town musicians, having at first shared the duties with Samuel Peter. As a town musician, he played at civic festivities and weddings and in the main churches in Hamburg, and as chief musician had the additional task of ‘playing a duet on solo violin’ with various organists (Weckmann, Scheidemann, Reincken and others). In addition he was a member of the collegium musicum founded by Matthias Weckmann, which met weekly in Hamburg Cathedral and which he is said to have led for a while. He was probably also involved in the Hamburg opera orchestra during the last two years of his life. A Trauergedicht on Becker's death by the opera librettist Christian Richter refers to this.

After Christoph Bernhard's departure for Dresden in 1674, Becker temporarily took over the town choirs in the main churches and the ‘kleine Canonicat’ at Hamburg Cathedral, which he was allowed to retain after the appointment of Joachim Gerstenbüttel as Hauptkantor, despite Gerstenbüttel's repeated complaints. After Becker's death this division between town and cathedral choirs was retained. In his position as cathedral Kantor Becker composed various sacred concertos and a St John Passion (libretto in D-Hs), which was performed many times after his death.

2. Works.

Although Becker began his career as an organist, not a single organ piece by him survives, which perhaps indicates that he gave up the organ in order to devote himself principally to violin playing. He became one of the most prominent north German violinists of the second half of the 17th century but, surprisingly, no solo violin works by him survive either. However, the short solo passages in some of his ensemble sonatas are extremely rewarding. These are italianate works in several sections contrasted in metre and tempo with, at their centre, a fast fugue in 4/4 or 12/8 time. Some of the sonatas are separate compositions, but most appear along with a suite, which in one case (no.17 in the 1674 set) is even thematically linked to the sonata in a way normally found only in a sequence of dance movements. In Becker's suites the usual 18th-century sequence of allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue predominates; recent research suggests that Becker was the first to use this sequence in ensemble suites.

That Becker was also known beyond the Hamburg area as a composer of vocal music is shown by his two surviving funeral works for Glückstadt in Schleswig-Holstein. When he wrote most of his sacred concertos is not known, but the dating of Schaff in mir, Gott (1664) and Amor Jesu (1670) suggests these works were performed during the 14-tägigen Music in Hamburg Cathedral or at the collegium musicum; some of the other works may date from Becker's time as Kantor (1674 onwards). Becker was also known as a lieder composer. Through contacts with Philipp von Zesen's Teutschgesinnte Genossenschaft, Becker's songs were included in two of Zesen's printed collections. Burkhardt reckoned his Scheidelied and the Schattenlied from Zesen's Rosen- und Lilienthal to be among the most important lied compositions of the period. His hymn Warum sollt ich mich denn grämen from the Auszug et licher geistlichen Lieder was still sung in Hamburg churches as late as 1890.

WORKS

instrumental

Musicalische Frühlings-Früchte, 3–5 insts, bc (Hamburg, 1688, 2/1673 as Musicalische Lendt-Fruchten); ed. in EDM, 1st ser., cx (1995)

Erster Theil … Sonaten und Suiten, 2 vn, bc, or vn, va da gamba, bc (Hamburg, 1674); no.6 ed. in Mw, xxxv (1970), no.9 ed. A. Einstein (Leipzig, 1905)

Ander Theil … Sonaten und Suiten, 2 vn, bc (Hamburg, 1679), some for vn, va da gamba, bc

5 sonatas etc., 3 vn, bn, bc (no. 1), 2 vn, 2 va da gamba, bc (nos.2–5), D-Hs; ed. in EDM, 1st ser., cx (1995)

23 dances, 2 vn, bc (inc.), Dl

Sonatas etc., 2 vn, bc (inc.), attrib. ‘Sieterich Beckron’, GB-Lgc

vocal

Ehren Gedächtniss oder Begräbniss-Music, S, S/T, A, B, 3 va da braccio, bc (Glückstadt, 1677)

Traur- und Bergräbnüss-Music, 3 va da braccio, ‘violino fagotto’, bc (Glückstadt, 1678)

2 songs in 1668⁸

13 songs in 1670⁶

7 hymns in Auszug etlicher geistlichen Lieder für das Zucht-Haus (Hamburg, 1677)

Das Leiden und Sterben unsers Herrn Jesu Christi nach dem H. Johanne, 1678, lost, see Seiffert (1907–8)

Sacred concs.: Ach Herr wie ist meiner Feinde so viel, B, 2 vn, 4 va/tbn, lost, see Seiffert (1907–8); Amor Jesu, S, vn, bc, 1670, S-Uu (inc.); Der Herr is mein Hirt, S, 2 vn, bc, D-W (inc.); Herr Gott du bist unser Zuflucht, B, 4 va, bn, lost, see Seiffert (1907–8); Laeta nobis refulget, 2 S, 2 vn, va, bc, S-Uu; O hilf Christe, Gottes Sohn, S, B, 3 vn, va, bn, bc, D-Bsb; Schaff in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz, A, 2 vn, 2 va da gamba, vle/bn, bc, 1664, S-Uu; Wer unter dem Schirm des Höchsten sitzt, 2 S, 2 vn, va, bn, bc, D-Bsb; Wie der Hirsch schreiet, S, B, 2 vn, lost, see Seiffert (1907–8)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WaltherML

J. Sittard: Geschichte des Musik- und Concertwesens in Hamburg (Leipzig, 1890)

M. Burkhardt: Beiträge zum Studium des deutschen Liedes und seiner Anfänge im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Leipxig, 1897)

M. Seiffert: ‘Matthias Weckmann und das Collegium Musicum in Hamburg’, SIMG, ii (1900–01), 76–102

M. Seiffert: ‘Die Chorbibliothek der Michaelisschule in Lüneburg zu Sebastian Bach's Zeit’, SIMG, ix (1907–8), 593–621

L. Krüger: Die Hamburger Musikorganisation im 17. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1933/R)

G. Linnemann: Celler Musikgeschichte (Celle, 1935)

H. Müller: ‘Die Celler Jahre des Komponisten Dietrich Becker’, Der Sachsenspiegel, xxxviii (1979) [unpaginated]

U. Grapenthin: Unbekannte Sonaten des Hamburger Ratsmusikanten Dietrich Becker (thesis, U. of Hamburg, 1987)

F. van Ingen: ‘Philipp von Zesen und die Komponisten seiner Lieder’, Studien zum deutschen weltlichen Kunstlied des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. G. Busch and A.J. Harper (Amsterdam, 1992), 53–82

G. Jaacks: Hamburg zu Lust und Nutz: Bürgerliches Musikverständnis zwischen Barock und Aufklarung (1660–1760) (Hamburg, 1997)

ULF GRAPENTHIN

Becker, Günther

(b Forbach in Baden, 1 April 1924). German composer. He fought with the German army in the Soviet Union during World War II and was a prisoner when the war ended. On his release he attended the Badische Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe, studying to become a Kapellmeister. Two years later he met Fortner, who became his mentor for the next eight years; in 1953 Becker followed him to the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold. He completed his studies in 1955–6, passing examinations in choral conducting, music theory and composition. He then moved to Greece to become the music teacher to Crown Prince Constantine. He stayed in Greece for 12 years, first at the Greek National School Anavryta and then at the German Dörpfeld Gymnasium. He was music adviser and choirmaster at the Goethe Institute in Athens and founded a Studio for Contemporary Music. He maintained his ties with Germany, however, several times attending the Darmstadt courses, where his Vier Epigramme, Diaglyphen, Moirologi and two string quartets had their premières between 1962 and 1967; he also lectured there in 1967, 1968 and 1970. Meanwhile two successful radio commissions, for Nacht- und Traumgesänge (1964) and stabil – instabil (1965) made his name and brought sufficient commissions for him to return to Germany as a freelance composer. In 1969 his interest in the combination of traditional instruments and electronic sound led him to found the live electronic music group MHz in Wuppertal. He also held a series of administrative posts including the presidency of the ISCM (1971–4). In 1973 he was appointed lecturer at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf, becoming professor of composition and live electronic music there one year later. During his teaching career (he retired in 1989) he attracted a body of pupils from around the world. He is the editor of the two-volume collection Neue griechische Klaviermusik (Cologne, 1967).

Becker no longer acknowledges his youthful works, dismissing them as reminiscent of Hindemith and Schmitt. He distances himself from the earliest of his published works, the Four Bagatelles for piano, whose 12-note writing is derived from the dodecaphonic classicism of Schoenberg and the epigrammatic style of Webern. The new style he adopted shortly after 1960, which emphasizes, colours and surfaces, is exemplified by the First String Quartet, which was given its première by the Parrenin Quartet at the Darmstadt courses in 1964. Uncompromising and highly expressive, the work experiments with tonal extremes and changing degrees of density, directions of movement, layers and intensities. Becker’s use of alienating instrumental noise led naturally to the creation of tape pieces (Meteoron, 1969; Epiklesis Alpha, 1976; Magnum Mysterium, 1978–9) and, more significantly, live electronic music, which he employs to defamiliarize the sound of the orchestra (Transformationen, 1970), a solo instrument (Oboe Concerto, 1973) or choral groups distributed around the performance area (Apeiron, 1972). His natural seriousness and interest in metaphysical ideas is counterbalanced by a liking for Dadaism and nonsense, and an objective attitude that has allowed him to produce a composition with ironic overtones on the subject of a severe illness which has shadowed his later years.

WORKS

(selective list)

acoustic

Inventiones, chbr ens, 1959–60; 4 Epigramme, Bar, chbr ens, 1961; Diaglyphen alpha-beta-gamma, chbr orch, 1962; Str Qt no.1, 1963; Moirologi, high female v, 2 cl, b cl, hp, 1964; Nacht- und Traumgesänge (O. Elytis), mixed choir, orch, 1964; stabil – instabil, large orch, 1965; Correspondences I, 2 cl, b cl, a sax, chbr orch, 1966; Griechische Tanzsuite, plucked str orch, 1967; Aphierosis, vc, pf, 1968; Caprices concertants, mand, mandola, gui, plucked str orch, 1968; Serpentinata, wind qnt, 1968; Attitude, orch, 1972–3; à la mémoire de Josquin’, org, 1974; Fragmente aus ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’ von Novalis, Ct, T, B-Bar, 1979; Quasi una fantasmagoria, scenes after Schumann’s ‘Sphinxes’, wind sextet, 1980; Linie, Zirkel, Kreis, 5 solo vv, 1982–3; Un poco giocoso, concertante scenes, b tuba, chbr ens, 1983; Reverenz 1985, Musik zu Heinrich Heine, 2 players, 1985; Stravaganza, vn, 1986; Zeitspuren, 2 pf, 1987–8; In modo greco, concertante scenes, gui, plucked str orch, 1992; Damals … nach dem Grauen, Reflexionen eines Zeitzeugen, spkr, chbr ens, 1994–5; Befindlichkeiten, a sax, vc, pf, 1997

electro-acoustic

Rigolo, high v, 5 insts, tape, 1966; Meteoron, elec sounds, org, perc, 1969; Scanning, wind qnt, 2-track tape, 1969–70; Transformationen, orch, live elec ens, tape, 1970; Aktionen für Tänzer, ballet, live elec ens, 1971; Apeiron, 10 choruses, mics, live elec ens, 4-track tape, 1972; Ferrophonie, elec steel sounds, 1973; Konzert, mod ob, orch, 1973; Passagen, speech sounds, kbds, perc, elec, 1975–6; Epiklesis Alpha, chbr ens, 2-track tape, 1976; Ihre Bosheit wird die ganze Erde zu einer Wüste machen, sacred conc., 4 pts, spkr, A, mixed chorus, org, inst ens, tape, 1978; Magnum Mysterium – Zeugenaussagen zur Auferstehung, spkr, mixed chorus, chbr choir, org, wind, str, tape, 1978–9; Hommage à Joseph Haydn (Str Qt no.3), str qt, flexatone obbl, 1988; Hard Times, Multi-Sounds for Bn and 17 Insts, 1989–90; Oh, Mr Dolby, What a Terrible Noise, b cl, tape, 1991

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (R. Peters)

RiemannL12

VintonD

R. Lück, ed.: Das Komponistenportrait (Cologne, 1970)

U. Stürzbecher: Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne, 1971)

J.K. Glauber: ‘Günther Becker – Komponist im technischen Zeit’, Kultur-Information Ruhr (1971), no.7

H. Krellmann: ‘Hinweis auf Günther Becker’, Fono-Forum, xix (1974), 196 only

U. Gondorf: ‘Die neue Musik auf dem Vormarsch? Günther Becker’, Magazin R, v/3 (1983), 24–5

O.G. Blarr: ‘Günther Beckers Ostermusik “Magnum Mysterium”’, Musik und Kirche, liv (1984), 179–84

RAINER PETERS

Becker, Heinz

(b Berlin, 26 June 1922). German musicologist. From 1946 he studied conducting, composition, the piano and the clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where in 1949 he passed his final examination in the clarinet; during this time he was a private student of Hermann Grabner. In 1948 he began studies in musicology at the Humboldt University in Berlin under Walther Vetter, Dräger and Ernst Hermann Meyer, with art history and philosophy as secondary subjects; he took the doctorate there in 1951 with a dissertation on the problems and techniques of cadences. After serving as an instructor at a Volkshochschule (1951–5) and as director of the department of private music teaching at the Petersen Conservatory in Berlin (1952–5), he became assistant lecturer at the musicology institute of Hamburg University in 1956, where he completed his Habilitation in musicology in 1961 with a study of the development of ancient and medieval reed instruments. He then taught as an external lecturer at Hamburg University before his appointment as professor of musicology at the Ruhr University in Bochum in 1966. In 1975 he founded the monument series Die Oper, which has made important works once again available. From 1975 to 1987 he served on the advisory committees of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and the Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt. In 1987 he retired and since then he has contributed to the forthcoming edition of Meyerbeer's correspondence (ed. S. Henze-Döhring) and the critical edition of Meyerbeer's stage works, published under the auspices of the International Meyerbeer Institute.

Becker first became known for his research on the history of instruments and his work provided the impetus for further investigation of the history of reed instruments. His chief contribution has been the reintroduction of 19th-century French opera into the scholarly debate brought about by his detailed archival research. Although he focussed on the works of Meyerbeer, his research has inspired the rediscovery and staging of many works from the grand opéra repertory. The two Festschriften dedicated to him pay tribute to his position as a doyen of opera research.

WRITINGS

Zur Problematik und Technik der musikalischen Schlussgestaltung (diss., Humboldt U., 1951; extracts in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, ii, 1952–3, 85–118)

ed.: J. Majer: Museum musicum, DM, viii (1954)

‘Meyerbeers Ergänzungsarbeit an Webers nachgelassener Oper “Die drei Pintos”’, Mf, vii (1954), 300–12

‘Zur Geschichte der Klarinette im 18. Jahrhundert’, Mf, viii (1955), 271–92

‘Die Hamburgische Tagespresse als musikgeschichtliche Quelle’, Beiträge zur hamburgischen Musikgeschichte, ed. H. Husmann (Hamburg, 1956), 22–45

Der Fall Heine-Meyerbeer: neue Dokumente revidieren ein Geschichts urteil (Berlin, 1958)

ed.: Giacomo Meyerbeer: Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, i–iv (Berlin, 1960–85) [iii–iv with G. Becker]

Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstrumente (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Hamburg, 1961; Hamburg, 1966)

Geschichte der Instrumentation, Mw, xxiv (1964; Eng. trans., 1964)

ed.: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikkritik (Regensburg, 1965)

‘Das Chalumeau bei Telemann’, Georg Philipp Telemann: Magdeburg 1967, ii, 68–76

‘Zur Frage des Stilverfalls, dargestellt an der französischen Oper’, Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1967), 111

ed.: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper (Regensburg, 1969) [incl. ‘Richard Strauss als Dramatiker’, 165–81]

‘Historische und systematische Aspekte der Instrumentenkunde’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis II: Stockholm 1969, 184–96

‘Das Chalumeau im 18. Jahrhundert’, Speculum musicae artis: Festgabe für Heinrich Husmann, ed. H. Becker and R. Gerlach (Munich, 1970), 23–46

‘Giacomo Meyerbeers Mitarbeit an den Libretti seiner Opern’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 155–62

‘Opern-Pasticcio und Parodie-Oper’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 40–46

‘Das Volkmusikinstrument in der Rezeption des Musikhistorikers’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis IV: Balatonalmádi 1973, 30–39

ed.: Die Couleur locale in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976) [incl. ‘Die Couleur locale als Stilkategorie der Oper’, 23–45]

‘Giacomo Meyerbeer und seine Vaterstadt Berlin’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte Berlins im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1980), 429–50

‘Berlin’, ‘Brahms, Johannes’, ‘Hamburg’, ‘Meyerbeer, Giacomo’, Grove6

‘Die Aufschlagzunge als instrumentenhistorisches Problem’, Tibia, i (1980), 9–18

‘Das Duett in der Oper’, Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. M. Bente (Munich, 1980), 82–99

Giacomo Meyerbeer in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek, 1980; Cz. trans., 1996)

‘“ … Der Marcel von Meyerbeer”: Anmerkungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Hugenotten’, Jb des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, xvi (1980), 79–100

‘Massenets “Werther”: Oper oder vertonter Roman?’, Ars musica, musica scientia: Festschrift Heinrich Hüschen, ed. D. Altenberg (Cologne, 1980), 30–48

ed., with G. Becker: Giacomo Meyerbeer: ein Leben in Briefen (Wilhelmshaven, 1983, enlarged 2/1987; Eng. trans., 1989)

‘Zwischen Oper und Drama: zu Meyerbeers Konzeption der dramatischen Szene’, Wagnerliteratur-Wagnerforschung: Munich 1983, 86–94

‘All'Unisono’, ‘Weine, meine Laute … ’: Gedenkschrift Kurt Reinhard, ed. C. Ahrens and others (Laaber, 1984), 57–87

‘“Tout être a le droit d'être libre”: Gedanken zu Charpentiers Roman musical “Louise”’, Festschrift Arno Forchert, ed. G. Allroggen and D. Altenburg (Kassel, 1987), 271–81

‘Reflexionen über Meyerbeers Mélodies’, Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. M. Just and R. Wiesand (Tutzing, 1989), 335–46

‘“Wonnig weidet mein Blick”: Blick und Augensprache bei Wagner’, NZM Jg.150 (1989), 4–10

‘“Ach wenn wir nur auch Klarinetten hätten”: zur Entwicklung des Holzbläsersatzes im Orchester’, Ein Orchester feiert Geburtstag: Düsseldorfer Symphoniker 1864–1989, ed. P. Girth (Düsseldorf, 1989), 167–81

‘Katastrophe und Colpo di scena bei Richard Wagner’, Musikkulturgeschichte: Festschrift für Constantin Floros, ed. P. Petersen (Wiesbaden, 1990), 105–314

‘Freundschaftliche Indiskretionen: Alexander von Humboldt und Giacomo Meyerbeer’, Jb des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, xxvii (1991), 477–513

ed., with G. Becker: Giacomo Meyerbeer: Weltbürger der Musik: Ausstellungskatalog der Staatsbibliothek Berlin zum 200. Geburtstag 1991 (Wiesbaden, 1991) [incl. ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer: Mittler zwischen Berlin und Paris’, 13–25]

‘Grand Opéra und französische Gesellschaft’, Der schöne Abglanz, ed. U. Bermbach (Berlin, 1992), 155–80

Brahms (Stuttgart, 1993)

EDITIONS

Klarinetten-Duette aus der Frühzeit des Instruments, Collegium musicum, cvi (Wiesbaden, 1954)

Klarinetten-Konzerte des 18. Jahrhunderts, EDM, 1st ser., xli (1957)

ed., with G. Allroggen: Die Oper (Munich, 1975–)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Festschrift Heinz Becker zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J. Schläder and R. Quandt (Laaber, 1982) [incl. list of writings, 963–7]

Giacomo Meyerbeer: Musik als Welterfahrung: eine Festschrift, Heinz Becker zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. S. Döhring and J. Schläder (Munich, 1995)

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/MATTHIAS BRZOSKA

Becker, (Jean Otto Eric) Hugo

(b Strasbourg, 13 Feb 1863; d Geiselgasteig, nr Munich, 30 July 1941). German cellist, son of Jean Becker. He studied with his father and with Kanut Kündinger, Grützmacher, de Swert and Piatti. After his solo début at Leipzig and quartet tours with his father and siblings, he became solo cellist of the Frankfurt Opera (1884–6), taught at the Hoch Konservatorium in Frankfurt from 1894, and was cellist of the Heermann Quartet (1890–96). He succeeded Hausmann as professor at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1909–29). Becker was highly regarded as a teacher. His pupils included Eisenberg, Arnold Földesy, Grümmer, Boris Hambourg, Beatrice Harrison, Ludwig Hoelscher, Mainardi, Rudolf Metzmacher, Piatigorsky, Arnold Trowell, Herbert Walenn and Herbert Withers. His trio performances with Flesch and Carl Friedberg in Berlin were highly praised, as were those with Ysaÿe and Busoni in London, with Marteau and Dohnányi, and with Joachim and Bülow; he was also greatly esteemed as a soloist until illness forced him to give up his solo career in about 1910. According to Cobbett (Grove5), the features of Becker’s playing were the production of a tone of remarkable richness and sonority, and a fine left-hand technique. For a time he experimented (unnecessarily) with a wooden soundbox to improve resonance. A number of works by established composers, including Reger, were written for him; of his own compositions, including a concerto and solo pieces, only the studies remain in use. He published a number of editions of chamber music and solo works, all of lasting value, and with Dago Rynar he wrote Mechanik und Ästhetik des Violoncellspiels (Vienna, 1929, 2/1971). He owned two fine Stradivari cellos: the ‘Cristiani’ of 1700, acquired in 1884 (but sold in 1894), and later the 1719 instrument now known as the ‘Becker’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (K. Stephenson)

C. Flesch: Memoirs (London, 1957/R; Ger. orig., Freiburg, 1960, 2/1961), 296ff

LYNDA MacGREGOR

Becker, Jakob.

See under Becker (i).

Becker, Jean

(b Mannheim, 11 May 1833; d Mannheim, 10 Oct 1884). German violinist. He studied with his father, Carl Becker, and with Hugo Hillebrandt, but credited Aloys Kettenus (1823–96), a graduate of the Liège Conservatory, with his principal musical education. From 1855 to 1865 he was Kettenus’s successor, leading the orchestra of the Nationaltheater in Mannheim. In 1859 he began his career as a virtuoso, giving concerts in Paris and London. He appeared at the Monday Popular Concerts, was leader of the Philharmonic Society in 1860 and, in the same year, played at both Windsor and Buckingham Palace. During the next few years he toured successfully throughout Europe, earning the nickname ‘the German Paganini’. He showed an early interest in chamber music, leading a quartet in London in 1860 and playing the music of Brahms and Schumann with Clara Schumann at Baden in 1863.

On a visit to Florence in 1865 he met Abramo Basevi, founder of the Società del Quartetto, and this acquaintance led to the formation of the Quartetto Fiorentino with Enrico Masi, Luigi Chiostri and Friedrich Hilpert (after 1875, Louis Spitzer-Hegyesi). Unlike ensembles of orchestral musicians or groups dominated by personalities (like those led by Joachim and Hellmesberger), the Quartetto Fiorentino devoted itself exclusively to quartet playing. It was recognized as the outstanding quartet of its time, setting standards of ensemble, musicianship and repertory that signalled the beginning of professional quartet playing; equally important was its role in developing audiences for chamber music and inspiring interest in amateur quartet playing.

Becker’s three children all became string players, and for a brief period, after the Quartetto Fiorentino was disbanded in 1880, they played with their father as a quartet. The most illustrious of them, Hugo Becker (1864–1941), was a cellist. (E. van der Straeten: The History of the Violin, London, 1933/R)

ALBERT MELL

Becker, John J(oseph)

(b Henderson, KY, 22 Jan 1886; d Wilmette, IL, 21 Jan 1961). American composer. He belongs, together with Ives, Ruggles, Cowell and Riegger, to the group named the ‘American Five’ of avant-garde music. Over several decades he served as the group’s militant crusader for new music in the American Midwest, seeking to establish a national music with experimental tendencies drawn from the American experience rather than from Europe.

Becker graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory in 1905 and received the doctorate in composition from the Wisconsin Conservatory in 1923. His principal teachers were Alexander von Fielitz, Carl Busch and the noted contrapuntist Wilhelm Middelschulte. He taught the piano and theory at the North Texas College Kidd-Key Conservatory in Sherman, Texas, from 1906 until about 1914, an otherwise obscure period in his life. In 1917 he began a long career of teaching and administration in Midwestern Catholic institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame (1917–27), the College of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota (1929–33) and Barat College, Lake Forest, Illinois (1943–57). After meeting Cowell in 1928, he became an energetic member of the newly organized Pan American Association of Composers. In addition to lecturing and writing (his writings include articles on 20th-century composers, the aesthetics of music and music education), he conducted Midwestern premières of works by Ives, Ruggles and Riegger in the early 1930s. His warm friendship with Ives, documented in a remarkable correspondence between the two men (1931–54), resulted in his orchestration of Ives’s General William Booth Enters into Heaven for baritone, male chorus and small orchestra (1934). From 1935 to 1941 he was the controversial director of the Federal Music Project in Minnesota and was associate editor of the New Music Quarterly. A devout Catholic, he was chosen as the American musical representative to the First International Congress of Catholic Artists in Rome in 1950. His musical activity slackened somewhat in his later years because of declining health and the continual neglect of his music.

Becker’s early symphonies and songs reveal the influence of German Romanticism and, to a lesser extent, French Impressionism. In the late 1920s his musical style underwent a radical change, leading to the highly dissonant yet lyrical Symphonia brevis of 1929. His creativity culminated in the 1930s in such works as Abongo, the Horn Concerto, Concertino pastorale and a unique series of ‘Soundpieces’, abstract chamber works of diversified instrumentation. His most significant contributions were large-scale stage works fusing dance, colour, mime, stage design and music into shapes prophetic of ‘mixed-media’ theatre. He considered his masterpiece to be his Stagework no.3: A Marriage with Space (1935), written in collaboration with the Chicago poet Mark Turbyfill. Becker favoured such contrapuntal forms and procedures as chorale, fugue and canon and preferred a dissonant, atonal counterpoint reminiscent of 16th-century polyphony in its even flow. His music employs rhythmic polytonal patterns and large chordal outbursts featuring overtones calculated to blend with and transform the basic sonority. An unusually clear orchestration is characterized by strongly contrasting colours and much use of percussion. The swift change of moods, from violent to darkly tragic, is most clearly revealed in the brilliant Violin Concerto (1948), Becker’s last completed orchestral composition. His work, although occasionally gentle and serene, is frequently satirical and forcefully expressive of social protest. At a time when neo-classicism and a return to folk sources dominated American music, Becker insisted on the responsibility of the composer to ‘add new resources, evolve new techniques, develop new sound patterns’.

WORKS

unpubd unless otherwise stated

list excludes most lost and unfinished works; for details see GroveA

stage

The Season of Pan (ballet suite), small ens, c1910

Dance Figure: Stagework no.1 (ballet, E. Pound), S, orch, 1932 [incl. music from unfinished cinema op Salome]

Abongo, a Primitive Dance: Stagework no.2 (ballet), wordless vv, 29 perc, 1933, pubd, New York, 16 May 1963

A Marriage with Space: Stagework no.3 (ballet, after M. Turbyfill), speaking chorus, orch, 1935, pubd [incl. music from Sym. no.3], arr. as Sym. no.4 ‘Dramatic Episodes’, 1940

Nostalgic Songs of Earth (ballet), pf, 1938, Northfield, MN, 12 Dec 1938

Vigilante 1938 (ballet), pf, perc, 1938, Northfield, MN, 12 Dec 1938

Privilege and Privation: Stagework no.5c (op, 1, A. Kreymborg), 1939, pubd, Amsterdam, 22 June 1982

Rain down Death: Stagework no.5a (incid music, Kreymborg), chbr orch, 1939, earlier orch version, A Prelude to Shakespeare, 1937, rev. as Orch Suite no.1, 1939

When the Willow Nods: Stagework no.5b (incid music, Kreymborg), spkr, chbr orch, 1940 [incl. music from 4 Dances, pf, and Nostalgic Songs of Earth], rev. as Orch Suite no.2, 1940, pubd

Antigone (incid music, Sophocles), orch, 1940–44

Deirdre: Stagework no.6 (op, 1, Becker, after J.M. Synge), 1945, unorchd

Julius Caesar (film score, W. Shakespeare), brass, perc, 1949

Faust (TV op, J.W. von Goethe, trans. B. Taylor), T, pf, 1951, pubd, Los Angeles, 8 April 1985

Madeleine et Judas (incid music, R.L. Bruckberger), orch, 1958, Paris radio broadcast, 25 March 1959

orchestral

A Tartar Song, c1912; 2 Orch Sketches (Cossack Sketches), 1912, 2nd movt arr. of The Mountains; Sym. no.1 ‘Etude primitive’, 1912, last movt arr. as Sym. Movt ‘Americana’, pf, c1912 arr. as Sonate American, vn, pf, c1925; Sym. no.2 ‘Fantasia tragica’, 1920, lost, rev. c1937 [incl. music from Pf Sonata]; Sym. no.3 ‘Symphonia brevis’, 1929, arr. pf, 1929, both pubd

Conc. arabesque, pf, 12 insts/small orch, 1930, pubd; Concertino pastorale: a Forest Rhapsodie, 2 fl, orch, 1933; Hn Conc., 1933, pubd; Mockery, scherzo, pf, dance orch, 1933; A Prelude to Shakespeare, 1937 [arr. of pt of Rain down Death]; Va Conc., 1937; Pf Conc. no.2 ‘Satirico’, 1938 [incl. music from Mockery]; Orch Suite no.1, 1939 [from incid music from Rain down Death]; Orch Suite no.2, 1940, pubd [from incid music from When the Willow Nods]; Sym. no.5 ‘Homage to Mozart’, 1942; Victory March, 1942 [from Sym. no.6]; The Snow Goose: a Legend of the Second World War, after P. Gallico, 1944; Vn Conc., 1948, pubd

Orch of Ives: General William Booth Enters into Heaven, B, male vv, chbr orch, 1934–5, pubd

For Sym. no.4 see understage, for syms. nos.6–7 see underchoral

choral

Rouge bouquet (J. Kilmer), T, male vv, tpt, pf, 1917; Jesu dulcis memoria (offertory), male vv, org ad lib, 1919; Martin of Tours (C.L. O’Donnell), T/B, male vv, org, pf, 1919; The Pool (H. Doolittle), 1923, arr. female vv, pf, c1947; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (cant., W. Whitman), spkr, S, T, chorus, orch, 1929

Missa symphonica, male vv, 1933; Pater noster, unacc., 1935; Sym. no.6 ‘Out of Bondage’ (A. Kreymborg, A. Lincoln), spkr, chorus, orch, 1942; Mass in Honor of the Sacred Heart, 3 equal vv, 1943; A Little Easter Cycle (J.B. Tabb), S, female vv, 1944; Mater admirabilis (offertory), female vv, 1944; Song of the Cedar Tree (anon.), female vv/(unison chorus, pf), 1944

Moments from the Passion (cant., Goday, trans. McLaren), solo vv, chorus, org, 1945, pubd; Nunc sancte nobis spiritus (St Ambrose), c1945; Morning Song (H.P. Horne), double chorus, 1946; Tantum ergo, female vv, 1946; Unison Mass in Honor of St Madeleine Sophie Barat, female vv, pf, 1946; Ecce sacerdos, female vv, 1947

O domina mea, female vv, 1947; The Seven Last Words, female vv/male vv, 1947; Moments from the Liturgical Year (G. von Le Fort, trans. M. Chanler), spkr, speaking chorus, 1v, chorus of 3 equal vv, 1948; Mass in Honor of St Viator, (unison chorus, org)/2vv, 1949; Sym. no.7 (Becker, Bible: Beatitudes, Dante), speaking chorus, female vv, orch, 1954, unfinished

chamber

Pf Sonata ‘The Modern Man I Sing’, c1910; The Mountains, pf, c1912; 2 Architectural Impressions, pf, 1924; My Little Son, 18 Months Old: Studies in Child Psychology, pf, 1924; 2 Chinese Miniatures, pf, 1925, pubd [arr. R.F. Kraner, orch, 1928]; Soundpiece [no.1], pf, str qt, 1932, arr. as no.1a, pf, str qnt, 1935; arr. as no.1b, pf, str, 1935; Soundpiece no.2a ‘Homage to Haydn’: Str Qt no.1, 1936, arr. as no.2b, str, 1936, both pubd, Soundpiece no.3: Vn Sonata, 1936, pubd; Soundpiece no.4: Str Qt no.2, 1937, pubd; Soundpiece no.5: Pf Sonata, 1937, pubd; 4 Dances, pf, 1938; Soundpiece no.6: Sonata, fl, cl, 1942, pubd; Soundpiece no.7, 2 pf, 1949; Soundpiece no.8: Str Qt no.3, 1959, unfinished; Improvisation, org, 1960; kbd arrs. of orch works, incl. Fantasia tragica, org, 1920, pubd

songs

for solo voice and piano

John Becker’s Songbook (A. Austin, F. Stanton, A. Upson, M.F. Robinson, H. Heine), 1907–09; 2 Simple Songs (H.A. Waithman, M. O’Neil), c1917; 4 Songs (C. Doris, J. Keats, P.B. Shelley, H. Cook), 1918–20, nos.2–3 arr. S, str qt, 1919; Little Sleeper (Hāfiz, trans. P. le Gallienne), S , str qt, 1919; 2 Songs (G. O’Neil), 1921; 2 Songs (C.P. Baudelaire, trans. Symons, G.B. Hallowell), 1923; 2 Songs from H.D., 1923; 2 Songs (J. Joyce, E.W. McCourt), 1923; A Heine Songs Cycle (Heine, trans. J. Thompson), 1924–5; 2 Poem of Departure (Rihaku, trans. E. Pound), 1927; 4 Songs from the Japanese (Matsuo Bashō, trans. C.H. Page), 1933; The Lark (Schubert) (A. Kreymborg), 1934; Psalms of Love (P. Baum, trans. J. Bitchell), 1935; 3 Songs to Poems by Mary Cecilia Becker, 1935; The Stars about the Lovely Moon (Sappho, trans. E. Arnold), 1943; At Dieppe (A. Symons), 1959

MSS in US-NYp

Principal publishers: Peters, Presser

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (D.C. Gillespie) [incl. further bibliography]

H. Cowell: ‘John Becker’, American Composers on American Music (Stanford, CA, 1933/R1962), 82–4

E.M. Becker: John J. Becker: American Composer (MS, US-Wc, 1958)

W. Riegger: ‘John J. Becker’, American Composers Alliance Bulletin, ix/1 (1959), 2–7

D.C. Gillespie: John Becker: Midwestern Musical Crusader (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1977)

D.C. Gillespie: ‘John Becker’s Correspondence with Ezra Pound: the Origins of a Musical Crusader’,Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, lxxxiii (1980), 163–71

K. Gann: ‘The Percussion Music of John J. Becker’, Percussive Notes, xxii/3 (1984), 26–41

L. Crawford: Harmonic and Melodic Organization in the Later Works of John J. Becker (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1988)

DON C. GILLESPIE

Becker, Judith O.

(b Bay City, MI, 3 Sept 1932). American ethnomusicologist. She took the doctorate in South-east Asian studies at the University of Michigan in 1972 under William Malm. After working as assistant (1972–8) and associate professor at Michigan, she was appointed professor there in 1985. She has directed the university's Javanese gamelan programme since its inception. She is one of the few ethnomusicologists to have conducted field work in a number of South-east Asian countries and her contributions have been recognized with awards from the University of Michigan and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her publications include four books on the music of Indonesia as well as articles on mode in Burmese harp music, Javanese gamelan music, music and ritual, music and trance, and the relations between music and general culture. Although her early work was musicological in orientation, her later work has emphasized anthropological issues. Of special note are several studies of ‘iconicity’ or the replication of general cultural patterns within musical ones.

WRITINGS

‘Music of the Pwo Karen of Northern Thailand’, EthM, vii (1964), 137–53

‘The Migration of the Arched Harp from India to Burma’, GSJ, xx (1967), 17–23

‘Percussive Patterns in Southeast Asia’, EthM, xii (1968), 173–91

‘The Anatomy of a Mode’, EthM, xii (1969), 267–79

Traditional Music in Modern Java (diss., U. of Michigan, 1972; Honolulu, 1980)

‘Time and Tune in Java’, The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems: Ann Arbor 1974, ed. A.L. Becker and A.A. Yengoyan (Norwood, NJ, 1979), 197–210

ed., with E.M. Bruner : Arts, Ritual and Society in Indonesia (Athens, OH, 1979)

with A.L. Becker: ‘The Grammar of a Musical Genre, Srepegan’, JMT, xxiii (1979), 1–43

‘A Southeast Asian Music Process: Thai thaw and Javanese irama’, EthM, xxiv (1980), 453–64

‘Hindu-Buddhist Time in Javanese Gamelan Music’, The Study of Time IV: Oberwolfach 1979, ed. J.F. Fraser, F.C. Hober and G.H. Muller (New York, 1981), 161–72

with A.L. Becker: ‘A Musical Icon: Power and Meaning in Javanese Gamelan Music’, The Sign in Music and Literature, ed. W. Steiner (Austin, 1981), 169–83

‘Aesthetics in Late 20th-Century Scholarship’, The World of Music, xxv/3 (1983), 65–77

ed., with A. Feinstein: Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, i–iii (Ann Arbor, 1984–8)

‘Is Western Art Music Superior?’, MQ, lxxii (1986), 341–59

‘Earth, Fire, shakti and the Javanese gamelan’, EthM, xxxii (1988), 385–91

‘Kalau bahasa dapat diterjamahkan, mengapa musik tidak?’ [If language can be translated, why is it that music cannot?], Seni pertunjukan Indonesia, i/1 (1990), 14–25

‘The Javanese Court Bedhaya Dance as a Tantric Metaphor’, Metaphor: a Musical Dimension, ed. J. Kassler (Sydney, 1991), 109–20

Gamelan Stories: Tantrism, Islam and Aesthetics in Central Java (Tempe, AZ, 1993)

‘Southeast Asia’, Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, ed. H. Meyers (London, 1993), 377–91

‘“Aesthetics” and the “Artist”: Universalism and the Court Arts of Central Java Fourteenth Century – Twentieth Century A.D.’, Europe and the Orient, ed. D. Gerstle and A. Milner (Canberra, 1994), 1–17

‘Music and Trance’, Leonardo Music , iv (1994), 41–51

‘Tantrism, Rasa, and Javanese Gamelan Music’, Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions, ed. L.E. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 15–59

TERRY E. MILLER

Becker, Rudolph Zacharias

(b Erfurt, 9 April 1752; d Gotha, 28 March 1822). German writer and publisher. The son of a schoolteacher, he graduated in theology from Jena University, and then taught at a school in Klettenberg am Harze for a short time before returning to Erfurt as a tutor. In 1782 he took a teaching position in Dessau, but in 1784 moved to Gotha to help found a teachers’ institute. There he continued his career as a writer, established several periodicals and in 1795 founded his own publishing house.

Becker is best known for his literary works, particularly the Versuch über die Aufklärung des Landsmanns (1784) and the remarkably popular Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute (1787), both of which deal with his imaginary utopian village of Mildheim. His importance to music rests in the songbook he compiled for the village – the Mildheimisches Liederbuch von 518 lustigen und ernsthaften Gesängen über alle Dinge in der Welt und alle Umstände des menschlichen Lebens, die man besingen kann, gesammelt für Freunde erlaubter Fröhlichkeit und echer Tugend, die den Kopf nicht hängt (1799) – and its companion volume of 359 melodies published in the same year. These two works, in their several editions, contain examples of the work of most major poets and lied composers of the pre-Schubert era. The poets include Walther von der Vogelweide, Bürger, Claudius, Dach, Gleim, Goethe, Matthison and Schiller; many of the melodies are by Reichardt, Schulz and Hiller, and other composers represented include Georg Benda, Neefe, André and Mozart. Becker contributed both poetry and music to the collections, which by the time of the 1822 editions included 800 poems and as many melodies. The volume of melodies also appeared in an instrumental arrangement for two violins and bass (1799). Becker edited the Allgemeine Choral-Buch (in four-part settings, 1811) by the organist K.G. Umbreit, who may have advised Becker in compiling the melodies to the Mildheimisches Liederbuch.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Burbach: Rudolph Zacharias Becker: ein Beitrag zur Bildungsgeschichte unsres Volkes (Gotha, 1895)

M. Kohl: Die Nationalzeitung der Deutschen (1784–1830): Leben und Werk des Publizisten R.Z. Becker (Brackenheim, 1936)

G. Weissert: Das Mildheimsche Liederbuch (Tübingen, 1966) [incl. list of songs and bibliography]

R.W. Brednich: ‘Lieder als Lebensschule: Gesang als Vermittler von Volksbildung an der Wende von 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert’, Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Suppan, ed. B. Habla (Tutzing, 1993), 221–38

RAYMOND A. BARR

Becker, Wilhelmine Ambrosch.

Married name of the singer Wilhelmine Ambrosch, daughter of Joseph Karl Ambrosch.

Beckerath, Rudolf von

(b Munich, 19 Feb 1907; d Hamburg, 20 Nov 1976). German organ builder. He was the son of Willy von Beckerath, a well-known painter, and his mother Louise was a pianist and harpischordist. The family moved to Hamburg, where Beckerath was educated. Under the influence of Gottlieb Harms and H.H. Jahnn, and having heard the Arp Schnitger organ at the Jacobikirche, Hamburg, he gave up his engineering studies in order to take up organ building. He first undertook an apprenticeship in cabinetmaking at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Hamburg (1925–8), and in 1926 he began building a house organ. To widen his knowledge and gain practical experience he worked with Victor Gonzalez in Châtillon-sous-Bagneux, near Paris (1929–30) and in 1931 with Theodor Frobenius in Lyngby, Denmark, where he specialized as a voicer and made a study of the pipe measurements of Baroque organs. During this time his relations with Jahnn cooled. He then returned to Gonzalez (Victor and his son Fernand), where he took over the pipe-making and voicing (1932–6). In 1936 he began to work as an organ consultant in Hamburg and in November 1938 he became consultant on organs to the Reichs- und Preussische Ministerium für kirchliche Angelegenheiten in Berlin.

During the war Beckerath served for four years in the army and was an American prisoner of war in 1945. On his return to Germany in 1946 he made an inventory of the organs in churches of the Hannoversche Landeskirche. In 1949 he passed his Meisterprüfung and set up an organ workshop in Hamburg. From the beginning he made all his own reeds. His organs (all with tracker action) soon gained a worldwide reputation, especially because of their fine voicing. He built 143 organs in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia. His most important organs are those in the Johanneskirche, Düsseldorf (1954); the Petrikirche, Hamburg (1955); Trinity Lutheran Church, Cleveland, Ohio (1957); Oratoire St Joseph-du-Mont-Royal, Montreal (1960); St Paul's Cathedral, Pittsburgh (1962); Dwight Chapel, Yale University (1971); Great Hall, University of Sydney (1970); and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hanover (1973). The last organ he planned (op.148) was for the University of Cape Town. Beckerath also restored historic organs in northern Germany, Denmark and Sweden. In his last two restorations, at Neuhaus an der Oste (1972) and Neuenkirchen (1973), both near Cuxhaven, he retuned the organs to meantone temperament.

After Beckerath's death three members of staff carried on the workshop. Timm Sckopp was manager from 1990, superseded in 1996 by Holger Redlich and Rolf Miehl. Since 1977 the firm has built, among others, organs for the Cultural Hall, Narashinō, near Tokyo (1978); the American Church, Paris (1988); the Concert Hall, Krasnodar, Russia (1994) and Immanuel Methodist Church, Seoul, Korea (1996). Restoration work has included organs in Mariana, near Ponte Nova, Brazil (1984); the abbey church at Bassum, near Bremen (1985), and at Steinkirchen, near Stade (1987).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HoneggerD

K. Grebe: ‘Innenarchitekt der Klänge’, Die Welt (31 Jan 1969)

R. von Beckerath: ‘Die Orgelbaukunst aus europäischer Sicht’, Europäische Hefte, (1975), no.1, p.36

K.J. Raudsepp: ‘The Organ of the Basilica of Saint Joseph's Oratory, Montreal’, American Organist, xix/5 (1985), 63–5

A. Carkeek: ‘Rudolf von Beckerath’, American Organist, xxix (1995), no.9, pp.58–63; no.12, pp.54–8; xxx (1996), no.3, pp.54–7; no.8, pp.56–9

SUSI JEANS/ALFRED REICHLING

Beckett [Becket], Philip

(d ? London, May 1679). English violinist, cornett player and composer. He is perhaps the Philip Beckett recorded in the London parish of St Olave Hart Street between 1654 and 1661. He was sworn in as a member of the Twenty-Four Violins on 19 June 1660, was given a place as a wind musician by a warrant dated 3 January 1661, and was paid £18 on 2 September 1661 for ‘a Vyolin to be used in the Chamber of Vyolins and for a Cornett to be used in his Majesties Chappell Royall’. He was evidently well thought of, for John Banister chose him for his ‘select band’ in April 1662, and he directed members of the Twenty-Four Violins on at least one occasion: on 31 October 1666 nine members were ordered ‘to meet and practise with Mr. Becket, his lessons’. The first violin part of a 12-movement suite in B by Beckett survives (GB-Och Mus.1066), and it could be the work in question, as it is the sort of music the Twenty-Four Violins would have played on duty at court. The only other surviving music attributed to him is the bass part of an air (Ob Mus.Sch.D.220), though there are divisions on a ground by ‘M^r. P.B.’ in Playford's The Division Violin (London 1684/R). Beckett surrendered his place in the Twenty-Four Violins in August 1674, though he kept his place as a wind player until at least May 1678, perhaps as a sinecure. His successor, Richard Robinson, was sworn in on 17 May 1679, and Beckett was described as ‘late musician’ on 3 September 1679.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, v, viii

BDA

BDECM

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

PETER HOLMAN

Beckett, Walter Koehler

(b Dublin, 27 July 1914; d Dublin, 3 April 1996). Irish composer and organist. Born to a musical family, he was a student of George Hewson and John Larchet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and completed the MusD (1947) at Trinity College, Dublin. He began his varied career as the organist at St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny, and later taught in Dublin, London and Venice. Beckett's output, though small, is both lyrical and accessible. Early works show the influence of Vaughan Williams and Delius, while later works, such as the String Quartet no.1 (1980) attest to the composer's high regard for chamber music. A fondness for things Irish is also apparent in a number of his works. The Irish Rhapsody (1957) is based on traditional melodies. The song cycle Goldenhair (1980) sets texts by James Joyce, while the Dublin Symphony (1990), one of the composer's largest undertakings, is based on texts by Joyce and Rhoda Coghill. The composer's particular literary sensitivity may have been a family trait he shared with his distant relation, Samuel Beckett.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

Suite, orch, 1945; 4 Higgins Songs (F.R. Higgins), 1946; Irish Rhapsody, orch, 1957 [trad. airs]; Falaingin Dances, orch, 1958; Goldenhair (J. Joyce), 1v, pf, 1980; Str Qt no.1, 1980; Dublin Sym. (R. Coghill, Joyce), nar, chbr chorus, orch, 1990

JOSEPH J. RYAN

Beckford, William

(b Fonthill, 29 Sept 1760; d Bath, 2 May 1844). English writer, patron and amateur composer. He is chiefly remembered as author of the oriental tale Vathek (1786). Although he was an accomplished performer on the harpsichord and pianoforte, it is unlikely that, as he later claimed, Beckford studied with Mozart when both were children. Beckford met Pacchierotti in Italy in 1780; he encouraged the castrato to return to England to sing at the Italian opera and became one of his most important patrons. For Beckford’s coming-of-age party at his Fonthill estate the following year a cantata (Il tributo) composed by Rauzzini was performed by the composer together with Pacchierotti and Tenducci. Beckford provided music for Elizabeth, Lady Craven’s opera The Arcadian Pastoral (1782), which was written for private performance at Queensberry House in London; his other compositions include an Overture du Ballet de Phaeton (1784/1788–91) and over 30 short works including songs, keyboard sketches and pieces for small orchestra. After a scandal in 1784 Beckford travelled (his published journal comments on musical performances in Lisbon) and then lived a reclusive life in England, devoting himself to the creation of Fonthill Abbey. His papers including musical manuscripts are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. White: ‘Two Eighteenth Century Composers of Opera’, The Listener (10 Feb 1955), 265 only

B. Alexander: England’s Wealthiest Son: a Study of William Beckford (London, 1962)

C. Oldman: ‘Beckford and Mozart’, ML, xlvii (1966), 110–15

S. Rosenfeld: Temples of Thespis (London, 1978)

E. Darton: ‘William Beckford and Music’, Beckford Tower Trust Newsletter (1983–1998) [serialized article]

T. Mowl: William Beckford (London, 1998)

M. Steer, ed.:: The Beckford Edition (Tisbury, 1999)

LINDA TROOST

Becking, Gustav (Wilhelm)

(b Bremen, 4 March 1894; d Prague, 8 May 1945). German musicologist. He studied in Berlin with Wolf and in Leipzig with Riemann. He became Riemann's assistant and took the doctorate in 1920. From 1922 he was successively lecturer at the University of Erlangen (where he completed the Habilitation with a work on rhythm and was promoted to reader in 1928), professor at Utrecht (1929) and professor at the German University of Prague (1930, in succession to Heinrich Rietsch), where he remained until his death. Becking’s earliest researches were devoted to rhythm, and led to the so-called ‘Becking curves’ – graphic representations of what he conceived to be the constant element in each composer’s musical personality. He also did valuable work on Bohemian art music and Balkan folk music, as well as editing several series of studies by his pupils. Against the rising tides of nationalism, Becking pointed out the futility of pinpointing national characteristics in music, but he later championed the cause of Sudeten-German culture in Czechoslovakia as the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 approached.

See also Analysis, §II, 4 and fig.15.

WRITINGS

‘“Hören und “Analysieren”’, ZMw, i (1918), 587–603

‘Die Musikgeschichte in Spenglers Untergang des Abendlandes’, Logos, ix (1920), 260–95

‘Das Problem der nationalen Musikgeschichte’, Logos, xii (1923–4), 281–91

Studien zu Beethovens Personalstil: das Scherzothema (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1920; Leipzig, 1921)

‘Zur musikalischen Romantik’, DVLG, ii (1924), 581–615

Der musikalische Rhythmus als Erkenntnisquelle (Habilitationschrift, U. of Erlangen, 1922; Augsburg, 1928)

‘Der musikalische Bau des montenegrischen Volksepos’, Archives néerlandaises de phonétique expérimentale, viii–ix (1933), 144–53

‘Die Lage der sudetendeutschen Musik’, Sudetendeutschtum im Kampf (1936); ZfM, cv (1938), 574–6

‘Kleiner Beitrag zur musikalischen Kultur- und Stammeskunde der Sudentendeutschen’, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, vi (1938), 457–64

Gustav Becking zum Gedächtnis: eine Auswahl seiner Schriften und Beiträge seiner Schüler, ed. W. Kramolisch (Tutzing, 1976) [incl. facs.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (K. Stangl)

K. Stangl: ‘In memoriam Gustav Becking’, Mf, ii (1949), 126–31

W. Seidel: Über Rhythmustheorien der Neuzeit (Berne and Munich, 1975)

KARL GEIRINGER/ MALCOLM TURNER/PAMELA M. POTTER

Beckman, Bror

(b Kristinehamn, 10 Feb 1866; d Ljungskile, 22 July 1929). Swedish composer and administrator. He studied counterpoint with Lindegren; the award of a state grant (1894–5) enabled him to study abroad, principally with F. Würst in Berlin. After working in music shops he earned a living in insurance during the period 1888–1909. In 1910 he was appointed director of the Stockholm Conservatory, where he introduced the Jaques-Dalcroze method of aural training and instituted a class in conducting. He became a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1904 and a professor in 1911. His compositions reveal a skilled handling of form, together with an imaginative, if sometimes reserved, temperament. The later works show Nielsen’s influence.

WORKS

I sommarnätter, str orch, op.3 (1890); Sonata, a, op.1, vn, pf (1893); Sym., F, op.6 (1895); Flodsånger [River Songs], 1v, orch (1897); En lyckoriddare (incid music, H. Molander) (1900); Om lyckan, sym. poem (1905); Gambla gastar, 1v, orch, op.7 (1906)

Pf and hmn pieces, songs

Principal publishers: Lundquist, Nordiska

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SBL (J. Rabe)

S. Karg-Elert: ‘Bror Beckmann als Harmonium-Komponist’, Das Harmonium, vii (1909), 105–8

W. Seymer: ‘Fyra nyromantiker’, STMf, xxiii (1941), 56–61

W. Seymer: ‘En Bach i svensk vadmalsdräkt jämte andra tonsättarminnen’, Musikmänniskor, ed. F.H. Törnblom, Hågkomster och livsintryck, xxiv (Uppsala, 1943), 299–318

AXEL HELMER

Beckmann, Johann Friedrich Gottlieb

(b Celle, bap. 6 Oct 1737; d Celle, 25 April 1792). German composer. He was organist at the Neuenhäuser Kirche in Celle by 1757, and at the Stadtkirche there from 1784 until his death. He also gave lessons in singing and keyboard playing and conducted the town’s orchestra in subscription concerts. This orchestra was supplied with recent music by the Hamburg publisher Westphal, through whom some connection with C.P.E. Bach may have been established, as Beckmann distributed Bach’s works on commission in Celle. He was held by his contemporaries Gerber and Cramer to be one of the greatest keyboard players of his age, with an extraordinary gift for improvisation. His works show an open-minded acceptance of 18th-century forms and styles, and a distinctive warmth of melody. An opera Lukas und Hannchen (1768) was performed in Brunswick, Hanover, Hamburg and Cologne by the Ackermann troupe.

WORKS

Lukas und Hannchen (op, J.J. Eschenburg), Brunswick, 1768, kbd score, Herrenhofmuseum Valdemars Slot, Svendborg, Denmark

Songs: In dem rosafarbnen Kleide, Die weissen Rosen, An die Erde, in E. von Berlepsch: Sammlung kleiner Schriften und Poesien, i (Göttingen, 1787), ed. Müller (Celler Chronik, iii, 1987); Stets sey es Frühling um dich, 1v, pf, 1790, D-CEbm*; Elegie an Dorinde (J.J. Eschenburg), D-FRva

Inst: 6 Kbd Sonatas, i–ii (Hamburg, 1769–70); 2 syms., hpd, vn, 2 hn, op.1 (Lyons, before 1777), lost; 6 Hpd Concs., opp.1–2 (Berlin and Amsterdam, 1779–80); 6 Sonatas, hpd/pf, acc. fl/vn, vc, op.3 (Berlin and Amsterdam, 1790); Solo, hpd/pf (Hamburg, 1797)

Other works mentioned in Beckmann’s will, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

C.F. Cramer, ed.: Magazin der Musik (Hamburg, 1783–6/R)

H. Müller, ed.: Das Testament des Celler Stadtorganisten Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Beckmann (Celle, 1972)

H. Müller: Johann Joachim Eschenburgs ‘Elegie an Dorinde’ in der Vertonung Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Beckmanns und anderer Komponisten (Celle, 1987)

H. Müller: ‘Drei neu aufgefundene Lieder von Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Beckmann’, Celler Chronik, iii (1987), 93–111

H. Müller: Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Beckmann (1737–1792): Leben und Werk mit thematischen Verzeichnis seiner Werke, Schriftenreihe des Bomann-Museums und des Stadtarchivs Celle, xv (Celle, 1987)

HARALD MÜLLER

Beckwith, John

(b Victoria, BC, 9 March 1927). Canadian composer, writer and pianist. He studied the piano with Alberto Guerrero at the Toronto Conservatory (1945–50), took the MusB at the University of Toronto (1947) and continued his studies with Boulanger in Paris (1950–52). He joined the University of Toronto music department in 1952, broadcast regularly on CBC radio (1956–65) and was music critic for the Toronto Star (1959–62, 1963–5). In 1961 he received the MMus from the University of Toronto, where he later served as the dean of music (1970–77), Jean A. Chalmers Professor in Canadian Music and director of the Institute for Canadian Music (1984–90). A founding member of the Canadian League of Composers (1951), he has served on the boards and committees of innumerable artistic organizations. He was a co-founder of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society, for which he edited two volumes, and has produced transcriptions, arrangements and reconstructions of much early Canadian music. His honorary include the Annual Medal (1972) and Composer of the Year award (1985) from the Canadian Music Council, the diplôme d’honneur of the Canadian Conference of the Arts (1996) and a number of honorary doctorates. In 1987 he was appointed a member of the Order of Canada.

Beckwith’s commitment to Canada and Canadian culture has been the thread running through his various musical pursuits. As a composer he has frequently explored Canadian subjects, as a writer he has been a staunch supporter of Canadian music, and as a scholar he has helped to uncover and restore a wealth of Canadian vernacular and art music. While his early works are neo-classical, the radio collages of the 1960s, co-produced with James Reaney (an Ontario writer), experiment with musical textures layered into complex mosaics, a technique used extensively in his later instrumental and choral works, especially Circle with Tangents (1967), the String Quartet (1977) and Keyboard Practice (1979). The last of these quotes from a number of well-known keyboard pieces; other compositions use material borrowed from a wide spectrum of styles. Beckwith and Reaney have also collaborated on four operas, Night Blooming Cereus (1958), The Shivaree (1978), Crazy to Kill (1988) and Taptoo! (1993–4), all of which are based on southern Ontario stories. Beckwith’s fascination with the activities of The Children of Peace (a 19th-century Ontario religious community) has produced such compositions as Sharon Fragments (1966), the Upper Canadian Hymn Preludes (1977) and Three Motets (1981), as well as historical and restorative work.

Beckwith’s outlook and compositions also explore horizons beyond Canadian borders. His theatrical interests have influenced instrumental works such as Taking a Stand (1972), which requires players to use their performing space in a dramatic manner. A puckish sense of humour, encapsulated in the children’s story All the Bees and All the Keys (1973), surfaces repeatedly, especially in his vocal works, which include settings of highway signs (Gas!, 1969) and animal calls (Mating Time, 1981), as well as texts by Margaret Atwood, e.e. cummings and B.P. Nichol. The Etudes for piano (1983) are a fine example of his approach to serialism, while the flute concerto, A Concert of Myths (1983), is based upon three Greek stories of metamorphosis.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Stage: Night Blooming Cereus (chbr op, 1, J. Reaney), 1958, CBC radio, 4 March 1959, staged, Toronto, 5 April 1960; The Shivaree (chbr op, 2, Reaney), 1978, Toronto, 3 April 1982; Crazy to Kill (detective op, Reaney, after A. Cardwell), 1988, Guelph, ON, 11 May 1989; Lucas et Cécile (op), 1989–91 [restoration of op by J. Quesnel, c1808]; Taptoo! (op, Reaney), 1993–4; Montreal, 13 Mar 1999

Radio collages (texts by Reaney, unless otherwise stated): A Message to Winnipeg, 3 spkrs, cl, vn, pf, perc, 1960; 12 Letters to a Small Town, 4 spkrs, fl, ob, gui, pf + hmn, 1961; Wednesday’s Child, 3 spkrs, S, T, fl, va, pf, perc, 1962; Canada Dash, Canada Dot, 4 spkrs, 5 solo vv, 10 insts: I The Line Across, 1965, II The Line Up and Down, 1966, III Canada Dot, 1967; The Journals of Susanna Moodie (M. Atwood), 2 kbd, perc, 1972, rev. 1990

vocal

Choral: Jonah (Bible, 16th-century hymn, J. Macpherson), 4 solo vv, SATB, cl, hn, str, timp, 1963; The Tpts of Summer (M. Atwood), nar, 4 solo vv, SATB, fl, bn, tpt, vc, hp, perc, 1964; Sharon Frags. (D. Willson), SATB, 1966; Place of Meeting (D. Lee), spkr, T, blues singer, SATB, orch, 1966–7; Gas! (Ontario street and traffic signs), 20 spkrs, 1969; The Sun Dance (various), spkr, 6 solo vv, SATB, org, perc, 1969; Mating Time (B.P. Nichol), SATB, perc, elec kbd, 1981; 3 Motets on Susan's ‘China’ (Esdras, Willson, J. Brown, I. Watts), SATB, 1981; A Little Org Concert (vocables), SATB, brass qnt, org, 1982; The Harp of David (Book of Common Prayer), SATB, 1985; beep (Nichol), 2 solo vv, SATB, perc, 1990; Basic Music (vocables), children's chorus, youth chorus, orch, 1998; Lady Wisdom (Bible: Ecclesiastes, Proverbs), SATB, 2000

Other: The Great Lakes Suite (Reaney), S, Bar, cl, vc, pf, 1949; 4 Songs (e.e. cummings), S, pf, 1950; 4 Love Songs (Can. trad.), Bar, pf, 1970; 5 Songs (Can. trad.), A, pf, 1971; All the Bees and all the Keys (Reaney), nar, orch, 1973; 6 Songs (Cummings), Bar, pf, 1982; Avowals (Nichol), T, pf, cel, hpd, 1985; Les premiers hivernements (S. Champlain, M. Lescarbot), S, T, 2 rec, lute, viol, perc, 1986; Synthetic Trios (vocables), S, cl, pf, 1988; Stacey (M. Laurence), S, pf, 1997

instrumental

Orch: Montage, 1953, reorchd 1955; Fall Scene and Fair Dance, vn, cl, str, 1956; Conc. Fantasy, pf, orch, 1958–9; Flower Variations and Wheels, 1962; Hn Concertino, hn, orch, 1963; Elastic Band Studies, concert band, 1969, reorchd 1975; A Concert of Myths, fl, orch, 1983; Peregrine, va, perc, orch, 1990; Round and Round, 1992

Chbr: Ww Qt, fl, ob, eng hn, bn, 1951; Circle with Tangents, hpd, 13 str, 1967; Taking a Stand, brass qnt, 1972; Musical Chairs, str qt, db, 1973; Str Qt, 1977; Case Study, any 5 str/ww/brass, 1980; Sonatina in 2 Movts, tpt, pf, 1981; Arctic Dances, ob, pf, 1984; Scene, cl, tpt, pf, 2 perc, db, 1991; After-Images, after Webern, gui, vc, 1994; Blue Continuum, tpt, pf qt, 1994; Lines Overlapping, banjo, hpd, 1996–7; Blurred Lines, vn, hpd, 1997; Ringaround, non-pedal hp, hpd, 1998

Kbd: Music for Dancing, pf duet, 1948, orchd 1949, reorchd 1959; Novelette, pf, 1951; Upper Canadian Hymn Preludes, org, tape, 1977; Kbd Practice, 10 kbd (4 pfmrs), 1979; Etudes, pf, 1983; On the Other Hand …, hpd, 1997

EDITIONS

Canadian Musical Heritage, v: Hymn Tunes/Cantiques (Ottawa, 1986)

Canadian Musical Heritage, xviii: Oratorio and Cantata Excerpts (Ottawa, 1995)

Principal publishers: Berandol, Frederick Harris, Jaymar, Waterloo

WRITINGS

ed., with U. Kasemets: The Modern Composer and his World (Toronto, 1961)

ed., with K. MacMillan: Contemporary Canadian Composers (Toronto, 1975)

ed.: Sing Out the Glad News: Hymn Tunes in Canada (Toronto, 1987)

ed., with D. Cooper: Hello Out There! Canada’s New Music in the World (Toronto, 1988)

ed., with F. Hall: Musical Canada: Words and Music Honouring Helmut Kallman (Toronto, 1988)

ed., with P. Hatch: The Fifth Stream (Toronto, 1991)

Music Papers: Articles and Talks by a Canadian Composer, 1961–1994 (Ottawa, 1997)

Other articles and reviews in: Canadian Forum, Canadian Music Journal, Canadian University Music Review, University of Toronto Quarterly, Grove6, VintonD, EMC1/2

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMC2 (I. Anhalt)

VintonD

P. Such: Soundprints (Toronto, 1972)

J. Mayo: ‘Expectations and Compacts in the Beckwith-Reaney Operas: a Case Study’, University of Toronto Quarterly, lx (1990–91), 305–18

T. McGee, ed.: Taking a Stand: Essays in Honour of John Beckwith (Toronto, 1995)

JOHN MAYO

Beckwith, John ‘Christmas’

(b Norwich, 25 Dec 1759; d Norwich, 3 June 1809). English organist and composer. He was the son of the Norwich organist Edward Beckwith. His published works name him simply as John; the name ‘Christmas’, though used at his burial, seems to have been no more than a nickname. In 1775 he was placed under William Hayes, whom he assisted at Magdalen College, Oxford, continuing afterwards under Philip Hayes. After returning to Norwich in 1784, initially as a teacher of singing and harpsichord, he took an active part in local concert life. By 1785 he had succeeded his father as assistant organist at Norwich Cathedral, and in April that year he married Mary Elizabeth Cox of Oxford. They had three children; the youngest, John Charles (1788–1819) served the cathedral as lay clerk and ultimately, organist. In 1788 and 1790 John the elder joined the oboist Michael Sharp in organizing the ambitious Norwich music festivals. In January 1794 he succeeded his father as organist of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, and as master of the cathedral choristers. His interest in church and congregational singing had encouraged him to introduce the first sung service at St Peter Mancroft in late 1792, and he was in some demand to ‘open’ new organs in country towns around Norwich. In 1803 he took the Oxford degree of DMus, and finally became organist of Norwich Cathedral in August 1808, retaining his post at St Peter Mancroft.

His Six Anthems in Score appeared in 1785. The anthems are innocently melodious, though The Lord is very great, by which he was long best known, attempts the dramatic and picturesque albeit somewhat naively. He also published some harpsichord and organ music. He enjoyed a great reputation as an extemporizer, and in an exceptionally long obituary notice, the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1809 extolled ‘the genius with which he conceived … and … the style in which he performed his inimitable voluntaries’ (p.589). His publication The First Verse of every Psalm of David, with an Ancient or Modern Chant (London, 1808) contains a historical preface on church singing and a germ of the idea of a pointed psalter. It also contains his admission that almost every day he was occupied for up to 14 hours ‘in the most slavish part of my profession’.

WORKS

printed works published in London

vocal

6 Anthems in Score, 1–5vv (1785)

The Chimney Sweepers, glee, 3vv (1795)

The First Verse of every Psalm of David, with an Ancient or Modern Chant (1808)

My Soul is Weary of Life, anthem, vv, org, orch (n.d., repr. 1848)

Anthems, unpubd, Norwich, Cathedral Library, all inc.: Bow Down; Hear O Thou Shepherd; I cried unto the Lord; O All Ye Works; O Lord My God; O Praise God in His Holiness; O Praise the Lord; O Sing to Thee, O God

2 chants, GB-Lcm

instrumental

6 Voluntaries, org/hpd (1785)

A Favourite Concerto, org/hpd/pf (1795)

A Favourite Sonata, hpd/pf, op.3 (1795)

5 Lessons, hpd/pf, 1779, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

T. Fawcett: Music in Eighteenth-Century Norwich and Norfolk (Norwich, 1979)

WATKINS SHAW/JONATHAN BAXENDALE

Béclard d'Harcourt [née Béclard], Marguerite

(b Paris, 24 Feb 1884; d Paris, 2 Aug 1964). French composer and ethnomusicologist. She studied the organ with Abel Decaux, composition with d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum, and, later, counterpoint with Maurice Emmanuel, and developed a deep interest in modes and folksong. From 1912, interrupted briefly by the war, she and her husband, the anthropologist Raoul d'Harcourt, carried out fieldwork in the Andes, which resulted in various publications from 1922, including the first notated collection of Quechua songs (1923). La musique des Incas et ses survivances (1925) contains descriptions of musical instruments, festivals, dances and folklore as well as analyses and transcriptions of 200 melodies with words and popular urban harmonizations. Their research was not confined to South America, as the comprehensive study Chansons folkloriques françaises au Canada (1956) testifies.

Béclard d'Harcourt's compositions are strikingly modal in character. Imitative and fugal writing alternates with block harmony in the syllabic setting of Charles d'Orléans’ Au printemps (1956), while L'Amour par terre (1905) evokes a fin-de-siècle atmosphere with its static vocal line, abrupt changes of mood and repetitive pianistic figurations. (HoneggerD; MGG1, G. Rouget)

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Raïmi ou la fête du soleil (ballet), 1925; Dierdane (op, after J.M. Synge: Deirdre of the Sorrows), 1937–41

Orch: 3 mouvements symphoniques, 1932; Chant d'espérance, sym. poem, perf. 1946; Sym. no.2 ‘Les saisons’, 1951; Conc. grosso, str, 1956

Choral and solo vocal: L'amour par terre (P. Verlaine), 1v, pf, 1905; Le sentier (M. Bouchoi), 1v, pf (Paris, 1907); Péristèris, 1v, pf, 1908; Beuvons fort, 4-pt female chorus, 1910; La flûte de jade, poèmes chinois (F. Toussaint), 1v, pf, 1924; 2 poèmes (P. Valéry), 1927; 3 sonnets de la renaissance française, 1930; Les enfants de l'enclos, 1934; 2 pièces (J. du Bellay), 1v, vn, 1936; Madrigal (P. de Ronsard), 1940; A nos morts héroïques, chorus, orch, 1944; A la gloire du mot patrie (H. Ghéon) (Paris, 1948); A la mer (J. Supervielle), 1v, pf, 1948; Au printemps (Charles d'Orléans), unacc. 4-pt female chorus, 1956; A la mémoire du Père Donostia, Agnus Dei, children's chorus, 1v, 1957

Chbr: Str Qt, 1930; Sonata, 3 str, 1938; Sonatine, fl, pf, 1946; Chants péruviens, fl, pf/hp

Many arrs., incl. Chanson de mendiant, A l'ombre d'un buissonet, Chanson et vieux cantiques français de Louisiane

editions

50 mélodies populaires indiennes, 1v, fl, hp (Paris, 1923)

24 chansons populaires du vieux Québec, v, pf (Paris, 1936)

Chansons folkloriques françaises au Canada (Paris, 1956)

WRITINGS

‘La musique Indienne chez les anciens civilisés d'Amérique: II Le folklore musical de la région andine équateur, Pérou, Bolivie’, EMDC, I/v (1922), 3353–71

with R. d'Harcourt: ‘Chants populaires de Pérou’, ReM, vi/6–8 (1924–5), 144–51

with R. d'Harcourt: La musique des Incas et ses survivances (Paris, 1925, rev. 2/1957 by S.L. Moreno as La música de los Incas)

‘L'oeuvre musical de Maurice Emmanuel’, ReM, nos.152–6 (1935), 22–33

‘Analyse des versions musicales canadiennes des “Trois beaux canards”’, Archives de folklore, no.4 (Quebec, 1949), 129–36

Chansons populaires françaises du Canada: leur langue musicale (Paris, >1956)

‘Cantiques folkloriques français retrouvés en Louisiane’, Congrès international de musique sacrée III: Paris 1957, 509–14

BARBARA L. KELLY

Becuadro

(Sp.).

See Natural.

Bečvařovský [Beczwarzowsky, Betschwarzowski, Betzwarzofsky], Antonín František [Anton Franz; Franz Anton]

(b Mladá Boleslav, Bohemia, 9 April 1754; d Berlin, 15 May 1823). Czech composer, pianist and teacher, grandfather of Carl Ferdinand Pohl. He attended the Piarist college at Kosmonosy (1767–74) where he probably received his first musical education. Later he studied music in Prague with Kuchař and became organist at the Minorite church of St Jakub (c1777). Having left for Germany, he worked in Brunswick (c1779–96) as organist of the Hauptkirche and Kapellmeister to the duke. Thereafter he spent several years in Bamberg as a piano teacher. About 1799 he settled in Berlin, again as a private music teacher, and remained there until his death. The Berlin newspapers (Königlich privilegierte Berlinische Zeitung, later Vossische Zeitung, and Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und Gelehrten Sachen, later Spenersche Zeitung, 1799–1823) provide some evidence that he was also active in public music-making. In 1804 and 1805, for example, he conducted Haydn’s The Creation and The Seasons at the Königliches Nationaltheater; in 1814 he was referred to as ‘Kapellmeister’ in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

Bečvařovský’s output, most of which was published in his lifetime, reflects the stylistic transition from the Classical to the early Romantic idiom of Schubert and Weber. In his vocal compositions the romantic traits are most obvious in several large-scale songs shaped as dramatic scenes, with introduction, interludes, declamatory and arioso sections; some other songs are in strophic form and many of them have the character of canzonettas. The piano part is diversified and plays an important role in depicting the meaning of the poetry. Romantic elements of melodic inspiration also appear in Bečvařovský’s chamber works. The concertos opp.1 and 2, intended for dilettante keyboard players, show a marked difference from those of opp.5 and 6, which tend to more virtuoso and specifically pianistic stylization. In the sonata form of the first movements of his instrumental works the ‘singing-allegro’ type often appears, whereas the rondo finales make great use of folklike dance rhythms. Bečvařovský was a prominent piano teacher. Most of his piano compositions were written as teaching material and some of them are still used and reissued for that purpose. The progressive orientation of his teaching can be seen from the fact that by about 1803 he was assigning works of Beethoven (piano concertos and sonatas), Cramer and Dussek to his more advanced pupils.

WORKS

thematic catalogue in Kadlec (1971), 240–86, [ka]

vocal

for 1 voice and piano unless otherwise stated

[6] Gesänge beim Klavier, kaiv:I (J.G. Jacobi, J.W. von Goethe and others) (Offenbach, c1799), arr. B.J. Mäurer as 6 Lieder, gui (Bonn, 1802)

[7] Gesänge beim Klavier, ii, kaiv:2/5 (S.A. Mahlmann, S. Albrecht and others) (Offenbach, c1800)

Leyer und Schwerdt (T. Körner), i–ii, kaiv:8, 9/7 (Berlin, c1814–15), arr. C. Klage for gui (Berlin, 1815); iii, ka:10 (Berlin, 1819)

Single songs: Die Würde der Frauen, kaiv:3 (F. Schiller) (Brunswick, c1800); Zur Einweihungsfeier des Neuen Locals der Grossen National-Mutterloge zu den Drei Weltkugeln im Orient zu Berlin, kaiv:4 (Berlin, 1800); Der Zauberbann, kaiv:6 (A.F.E. Langbein), before 1803; An den Abendstern, kaiv:6, before 1803; Preussisches Trinklied (Der Elfer), kaiv:11 (Sismar), pf/gui acc. (Berlin, c1815); Wenn wir so im trauten Kreise (Gesellschaftslied), kaiv:12 (F.W.J. Kralowsky), pf/gui acc. (Berlin, n.d.)

Masonic and other songs pubd in contemporary anthologies

instrumental

Kbd concs.: F, kaii:1, op.1 (Offenbach, 1793); Concerto en rondo, C, kaii:2, op.2 (Offenbach, 1794); E, kaii:3, op.5 (Offenbach, 1800); F, kaii:4, op.6 (Brunswick, n.d.)

Chamber: 3 sonates, kaiii:1–3, pf, vn, vc obbl, op.3 (Offenbach, 1798); Divertissement, G, kaiii:4, pf, vn obbl (Berlin, 1811/12); Grande sonate, C, kaiii:5, pf, fl/vn obbl, op.47 (Berlin, 1819); Rondoletto, E, kaiii:6, pf, vc/vn obbl, op.48 (Berlin, 1819)

Pf sonatas: G, kai:1 (Berlin, 1797); Nouvelle sonatine, G, kai:2, 4 hands (Berlin, ?1812); Sonate facile, G, kai:10 (Mainz, ?1813); [4] Sonates faciles, agréables et progressives, kai:11 (Hamburg, c1816), no.3 lost; Sonata facile, F, kai:12, ed. K. Hůlka, Album starších českých mistrů, viii (Prague, 1892); 4 leichte Sonaten, kai:17, 4 hands, (Brunswick, n.d.), no.4 lost; 4 leichte Sonatinen (Brunswick, n.d.); F, kai:15, op.40 (Berlin, 1819); no.11, kai:19 (Vienna, n.d.); Sonate nouvelle, kai:20 (Vienna, n.d.); F, kai:21 (Offenbach, n.d.) [? same as op.40]; E, kai:22 (Bonn, n.d.); kai:23 (Mainz, n.d.), Sonates périodiques (Rotterdam, n.d.)

Pf exercises: 5 pieces, kai:3–7, in Kleine practische Klavierschule, ed. F. Lauska (Berlin, c1812, 2/1815 as Instructive Übungsstücke), incl. Andantino with Variations, B, ed. in MVH, xv (1966); Elementar-Hefte für das Pianoforte, enthaltend … Übungsstücke … für die allerersten Anfänger, kai:16 (Berlin, 1819); Kleine Handstücke für das Pianoforte, kai:27 (Berlin, 1819); 2 thèmes agréables variés à l’usage des amateurs (Rotterdam, n.d.)

Other pf works: Rondeau agréable, C, kai:18 (Berlin, c1811); 3 Sieges-Märsche der Verbündeten Truppen nach der Völkerschlacht bey Leipzig, kai:9 (Berlin, 1813/14); Prelude with 5 variations, F, kai:25 (Berlin, c1815); Polonoise, C, kai:13 (Berlin, c1815), ed. in MAB, xiv (1953, 3/1973); Rondeau, E (Berlin, 1819); Neueste Berliner Hof- und Favorit- Tänze, 4 vols. (Berlin, c1819), vols.1–2 ?lost; 2 polonaises, E, C, kai:14 (Leipzig, 1819/20); Polonaise favorite, F, kai:24 (Hamburg, n.d.); Saxe-Coburg, rondo (Philadelphia, n.d.)

Org: Präludium und 5 Variationen (Vienna, n.d.), ?lost; other works, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

DlabacžKL, i

GerberL

GerberNL

LedeburTLB

MCL, i

G.J. Dlabacž: ‘Versuch eines Verzeichnisses der vorzüglichern Tonkünstler in oder aus Böhmen’, Materialien zur alten und neuen Statistik von Böhmen, ed. J.A. Riegger, vii (Leipzig and Prague, 1788), 133–62, esp. 145

AMZ, i–xxv (1798–1823)

H. Engel: Die Entwicklung des deutschen Klavierkonzertes von Mozart bis Liszt (Leipzig, 1927/R), 90

J. Němeček: Nástin české hudby 18.století [Outline of 18th-century Czech music] (Prague, 1955), 217

J. Racek: Česká hudba [Czech music] (Prague, 1949, 2/1958), 169, 257

O. Kadlec: A.F. Bečvařovský: český hudební emigrant [Czech musical emigrant] (diss., U. of Prague, 1971) [with bibliography, thematic catalogue, Ger. summary]

U. Wagner: Das Wirken böhmischer Komponisten im Raum Berlin/Potsdam: ein Beitrag zum Problem der sogenannten böhmischen Musiker-Emigration im 18. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Halle, 1988), esp. chaps. 3 and 4; work-list in appx 3)

MILAN POŠTOLKA/UNDINE WAGNER

Bédard, Hubert (François)

(b Ottawa, 28 Dec 1933; d Brignoles, France, 16 June 1989). Canadian harpsichord maker and harpsichordist. After classical studies he entered the Conservatoire de Musique in Montreal (1956), where he studied organ with Bernard Lagacé and harpsichord with Kenneth Gilbert. In 1959–60 at the Vienna Music Academy he studied harpsichord with Eta Harich-Schneider and had private lessons with Isolde Ahlgrimm (1959–60); he also studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Gustav Leonhardt (1960–61). After resuming his career as organist in Montreal, he served as musician-in-residence at the Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario (1962–3), and then entered the workshop of Frank Hubbard in Waltham, Massachusetts, to learn the craft of instrument making. In 1968 he moved to Paris as chief restorer in the Conservatoire workshop then being established under Frank Hubbard's direction. At the same time Bédard set up his own workshop with a small staff where he undertook restorations for other collections and produced harpsichords modelled on historical prototypes.

During the following 20 years over 40 early keyboard instruments were restored under his direction, both for private collectors and for a number of museums, including the Vleeshuis (Antwerp), the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Lyons), the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Chartres), the Horniman Museum (London) and the Musée de la musique (Paris). Bédard's approach to restoration was both conservative and intuitive. He held that any intervention on historical instruments should be reversible, in case new elements were one day to come to light; at the same time he believed that the instruments should be both played and heard. During his years in Paris he taught a number of younger makers who subsequently established their own workshops. He also developed several harpsichord kits which are marketed by the Heugel-Leduc publishing firm in Paris.

Bédard made a recording (1964) of Froberger and Louis Couperin on the 1646 harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers held in the Vleeshuis, and prepared editions of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie and Les Fêtes d'Hébé for a perfomance on Radio-Canada Television (1964). He also published French translations (with Félia Bastet) of Frank Hubbard's Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA, 1965; Fr. trans., 1981), and of Andreas Streicher’s Kurze Bemerkungen über das Spielen, Stimmen und Erhalten der Forte-piano (Vienna, 1801/R; Fr. trans., 1982).

WRITINGS

‘Report on the Restoration of the Virginal by J. Couchet, 1650’, Restauratieproblemen van Antwerpse Klavecimbels [Antwerp 1970] (Antwerp, 1971), 41–3

‘Harpsichord of 1644 by Andreas Ruckers: on Putting it in Playing Condition’, Ruckers klavecimbels en copieën [Antwerp 1977], ed. J. Lambrechts-Douillez (Antwerp, 1978), 109–18

HOWARD SCHOTT, KENNETH GILBERT

Bede [Beda venerabilis]

(b Northumbria, 673; d Jarrow, 735). Anglo-Saxon monk, writer and historian. His works, particularly the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), provide important evidence for the practice of music in the Anglo-Saxon Church during the 6th, 7th and early 8th centuries. At the age of seven, he was placed under the care of Benedict Biscop (628–90), abbot and founder of the Northumbrian monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth. When Biscop founded the brother abbey of St Paul at Jarrow in 682 Bede was sent there to join its abbot Ceolfrith (642–716). Bede spent the rest of his life at Jarrow, where he became a dedicated teacher, never travelling outside Northumbria. Biscop and Ceolfrith acquired many books on their frequent journeys to Rome and Gaul and were largely responsible for the substantial collection of manuscripts owned by the abbeys; they also created one of the most important scriptoria in Anglo-Saxon England. Wearmouth became a major centre for the teaching of liturgical music in Northumbria when in 680 Biscop acquired the services of John, archcantor of St Peter’s basilica and abbot of St Martin’s in Rome, to teach his monks how to celebrate the liturgy and to chant according to the practice of the Roman churches.

Bede’s writings were intended to aid his work as a teacher and include a number of commentaries on the scriptures, hagiographical texts, a book of hymns, a history of the abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow and treatises on orthography and metrics; a list of his writings (to which should be added De locis sanctis) may be found at the end of his most important work, the Ecclesiastical History. Many spurious texts have also been attributed to Bede, including a Musica theorica and a Musica quadrata seu mensurata (PL, xc, 909ff); the former is an anonymous commentary on Boethius’s De institutione musica and the latter is the treatise on mensural theory by Magister Lambertus. Music as a theoretical discipline was practically unknown to Bede and his contemporaries in the Anglo-Saxon Church; he was not acquainted with the works of Boethius, Martianus Capella or Cassiodorus’s Institutiones and, according to his biographer Cuthbert, he remained distrustful of Isidores of Seville's ‘falsehoods’.

Although none of his works discusses music directly Bede’s writings nevertheless constitute some of the most important and informative evidence for liturgical music in the Anglo-Saxon Church. De orthographia contains definitions of several musical terms, for example, bucina, cantator and rhythmos; and De arte metrica includes a discussion of the definition and difference between rhythm and metre, a passage later quoted by Aurelian of Réôme. His biblical commentaries refer to the singing of the Gloria in excelsis and Agnus Dei in the Mass, the omission of the alleluia from the Mass during Lent and its reinstatement at Easter.

The Ecclesiastical History was completed in 731, a few years before Bede’s death, and traces the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church from the arrival in Kent in 597 of the Roman missionary St Augustine. Bede’s view of this history was coloured by a strongly pro-Roman bias that led him to present much of the work in terms of the gradual spread of Roman traditions, including chant, throughout the English Church (see Celtic chant, §1). In particular, he mentions several times that there was a tradition of Roman chant practised in Kent that had been transmitted by ‘the disciples of Pope Gregory’ (Ecclesiastical History, v.20). Although Bede never stated that he thought Gregory I was the original creator of the repertory, the emphasis he and other Anglo-Saxon writers placed on Gregory I’s role in introducing Roman chant, as well as Christianity, to England is thought to have laid the foundations for the later legend of Gregory I’s authorship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

editions

J. Hervagius, ed.: Opera Bedae venerabilis (Basle, 1563); repr. in PL, xc–xcv

H. Keil, ed.: Grammatici latini, vii (Leipzig, 1880/R), 227–60 [edn of De arte metrica]; 261–94 [edn of De orthographia]

C. Plummer, ed.: Venerabilis Baedae opera historica (Oxford, 1896)

C.W. Jones, ed.: Bedae opera de temporibus (Cambridge, MA, 1943)

D. Hurst and J. Fraipont, eds.: Bedae venerabilis opera, iii–iv: Opera homiletica, opera rhythmica, homeliarum evangelii libri ii (Turnhout, 1955)

D. Hurst and others, eds.: Bedae venerabilis opera, ii: Opera exegetica (Turnhout, 1960–83)

B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. and trans.: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969/R)

C.W. Jones and C.B. Kendall, eds.: Bedae venerabilis opera, i: Opera didascalia (Turnhout, 1975–80)

studies

A.H. Thompson, ed.: Bede: his Life, Times and Writings: Essays in Commemoration of the 12th Centenary of his Death (Oxford, 1935/R)

C.W. Jones: Bedae pseudepigrapha: Scientific Writings Falsely Attributed to Bede (Ithaca, NY, 1939)

P. Meyvaert: Bede and Gregory the Great (Jarrow, 1964/R)

P.H. Blair: The World of Bede (London, 1970)

H. Mayr-Harting: The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972, 3/1991)

G. Bonner, ed.: Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede (London, 1976)

S. Rankin: ‘The Liturgical Background of the Old English Advent Lyrics: a Reappraisal’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), 317–40

C. Cubitt: ‘Unity and Diversity in the Early Anglo-Saxon Liturgy’, Unity and Diversity in the Church: Nottingham 1994 and London 1995, ed. R.N. Swanson (Oxford, 1996), 45–57

CALVIN BOWER/JANE BELLINGHAM

Bedeckher, Philipp Friedrich.

See Böddecker, philipp freidrich.

Bedford, Arthur

(b Tiddenham, Glos., 8 Sept 1668; d Hoxton, London, 13 Aug 1745). English clergyman, scholar and writer. He held clerical positions in Bristol from 1693, in Newton St Loo, near Bath, from 1713, and at the Haberdashers’ Hospital, Hoxton, from 1724. He supposedly was chaplain to the first two dukes of Bedford, and in his later years to Frederick, Prince of Wales, but does not seem to have served actively in their households. He was a major figure in the campaign against the theatres, publishing The Evil and Danger of Stage Plays (Bristol, 1706) and a sermon (London, 1730) given in 1729 at St Botoph Aldgate, against the building of Goodman’s Fields Theatre. In doing so he and the Nonjuror Jeremy Collier (1650–1726) prepared the way for the Licensing Act of 1737 that instituted the first censorship of plays. He also exerted an important influence on writings on musical taste, especially on 16th-century music, or ‘ancient music’, as it became called around 1700. In The Great Abuse of Music (London, 1711) he condemned the increasing commercialization of music for the home and the theatre and championed the works of the Elizabethan masters as models of good taste and morality. As a scholar he published works on issues of astronomical chronology raised by Isaac Newton and contributed to an Arabic psalter and an edition of the New Testament for Asians. His Excellency of Divine Musick (1733) includes at least three hymns composed by him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (A. Goodwin)

Gentleman’s Magazine’, xv (1745), 502 only

W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in 18th-Century England: a Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford, 1992), 47–56

WILLIAM WEBER

Bedford, David (Vickerman)

(b London, 4 Aug 1937). English composer. He studied at the RAM between 1958 and 1961, where he was taught composition by Berkeley; he was later appointed FRAM. In 1962 he was a pupil of Nono in Venice and also worked at the RAI electronic music studio in Milan. Since 1963 he has spent some of his time as a schoolteacher, in particular at Queen's College, London (1968–80), where he was also composer-in-residence in 1981; between 1983 and 1987 he was associate visiting composer at Gordonstoun School, Scotland. He became youth music director of the English Sinfonia in 1986, and from 1994 also the orchestra’s composer-in-association.

In 1963–6, in particular, Bedford reaped the fruits of an obsession with the American poet Kenneth Patchen, whose texts he set to powerful effect in the dense but evocative textures of the Two Poems for unaccompanied chorus (1963), his first work to receive international recognition. Subsequently one of the most individual aspects of his output became his deployment of experimental techniques of the time in music designed for performance by children. An enthusiastic contributor to Universal Edition’s groundbreaking Music for Young Players series, Bedford drew on graphic scoring methods, space-time (or proportional) notations, extended instrumental and vocal techniques, and the chance-determined procedures of such composers as Cage, Earle Brown and his for-a-time close colleague Cornelius Cardew, to produce pieces which elegantly combine simplicity of realization and directness of effect; the ensemble composition An Exciting New Game for Children of All Ages (1969) is a good example. Another dimension of his ability to transcend the common barriers between different fields of musical endeavour is demonstrated in The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (1969) for tenor and eight strings – commissioned and first performed by Peter Pears – which sets prose from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke with an urgent lyricism amid its instrumental glissandos and quarter-tones.

From 1969 onwards, Bedford was involved with Kevin Ayers, whose group The Whole World took part in Bedford's Star's End for rock group and orchestra (1974). This work is probably the best of his pieces to combine elements from cultivated and vernacular traditions during a period of particular optimism for such concerns.

Since those years of maximum exposure, Bedford has been active in popular, commercial and film music (for instance, producing, in 1973, a live instrumental version of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells) as well as composing for both the concert hall and the operatic stage, and for professional and amateur forces. His prolific output has continued to reflect the changing values and conditions of its time; Twelve Hours of Sunset for chorus and orchestra (1974), for example, sets words by Roy Harper to shimmering sounds typical of 1960s ‘texture’ music with greater consonance than many at the time would have dared. His Symphony no.1 (1984) initially suggests a less flamboyant demeanour, yet as a whole is an excellent example of the composer's skills as an orchestrator as well as of the more symphonic, less static approach that characterises his later output. Bedford's work for children has continued with the composition of eight operas for schools and several innovative large-scale projects, such as A Charm of Blessings for vocal soloists, children’s choir, chorus and orchestra (1997).

WORKS

(selective list)

instrumental

Orch: Star's End, rock group, orch, 1974; The Valley Sleeper, the Children, the Snakes and the Giant, 1983; Sym. no.1, 1984; The Transfiguration: a Meditation, 1988; In Plymouth Town, chbr orch, 1992; The Goddess of Mahi River, sitār, tablā, fl, vc, chbr orch, 1994; Rec Conc., 1994; At the Sign of the Crumhorn, 1998; Ob Conc., ob/eng hn, str, 1998; The Sultan’s Turret, 1998; Like a Strand of Scarlet, baroque chbr orch, 1999; Perc Conc., perc, chbr orch, 1999; works for sym. wind, brass band, youth orch, amateur orch

Chbr and solo inst: Piece for Mo, perc, vib, accdn, 3 vn, vc, db, 1963; Pf Piece 1, 1966; 18 Bricks Left on April 21st, 2 elec gui, 1967; Pentomino, wind qnt, 1968; You asked for it, gui, 1969; The Sword of Orion, fl, cl, vn, vc, 2 perc, 4 metronomes, 1970; With 100 Kazoos, ens, 100 kazoos played by audience, 1971; A Horse, his Name was Hunry Fencewaver Walkins, gui, ens, 1973; Pancakes with Butter Maple Syrup and Bacon, and the TV Weatherman, brass qnt, 1973; Variations on a Rhythm by Mike Oldfield, 84 perc (3 players), 1973

Circe Variations, cl, pf, vn, vc, 1976; The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, ww qt, elec gui, elec b gui, timp, str qt, 1976; Fridiof Kennings, sax qt, 1980; Sonata in 1 Movt, pf, 1981; Str Qt, a, 1981; Sym. for 12 Musicians, ens, 1981; Toccata, d, pf, 1981; Wind Sextet, wind qnt, pf, 1981; = 120, b cl, tape delay, 1984; Pentaquin, fl/pic, cl, va, hp, perc, 1985; Diafone, fl, vib, 1986; In memoriam, pf, 1986; Verses and Choruses, 2 gui, 1986; Hoketus David, 2 pf, 1987; Memories of Ullapool, fl, gui/hp, 1987; Erkenne Mich, fl/a fl, ob/eng hn, b cl, vib, 1988; Backings, s sax, tape, 1991; Cadenzas and Interludes, 2 cl, va, vc, db, 1992; Str Qt no.2, 1998

vocal

Choral: 2 Poems (K. Patchen), SATB, 1963; A Dream of the Seven Lost Stars (Patchen), SSATBB, ens, 1964; Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places in Devon (Bedford), SSAATTBB, brass, 1971; Twelve Hours of Sunset (R. Harper), chorus, orch, 1974; Of Beares, Foxes and Many, Many Wonders (R. Hakluyt), SSAATTBB, ens, 1978; The Way of Truth (Parmenides, trans. K. Popper), SATB, elecs, 1978; Of Stars, Dreams and Cymbals (T. Browne), SATB, 1982; An Island in the Moon (W. Blake), SATB, 1986; A Charm of Joy (Carmina Gadelica), SATB, str, 1996; A Charm of Blessings (Carmina Gadelica), SATB, 1997; The City and the Stars (A.C. Clarke), SATB, orch, 2000

Solo vocal: Music for Albion Moonlight (Patchen), S, fl, cl, pf, vn, vc, a melodica, 1965; O Now the Drenched Land Wakes (Patchen), Bar, pf duet, 1965; That White and Radiant Legend (Patchen), S, spkr, fl, ob, cl, bn, vn, va, vc, db, 1966; Come in Here, Child (Patchen), S, amp pf, 1968; The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (Clark), T, 8 str, 1969; The Garden of Love (Blake), fl, cl, hn, tp, db, rock group, 6 dancers, 1970

Some Stars above Magnitude 2.9 (Bedford), S, pf, 1971; When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (W. Whitman, C. Flammarion), T, wind ens, 1972; Because he Liked to be at Home (Patchen), T, s rec, hp, 1974; The Golden Wine is Drunk (E. Dowson), 16vv, 1974; On the Beach at Night (Whitman), 2 T, pf, org, 1977; The Juniper Tree (T. Bragg), S, rec, hpd, 1982; Be Music Night (Patchen), S, pf, 1986; The OCD Band and the Minotaur (Gorla), S, fl, cl, vn, vc, gui, pf, 1990; Touristen Dachau (M. White), S, male vv, fl, ob, cl, vn, va, perc, 1992; I am Going Home With Thee (Carmina Gadelica), 6 female vv, str, 1993; My Mother, my Sister and I (A. Powell), 3 S, tape, 1994

works for children

Ops: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (S. Coleridge), 1975–6; The Return of Odysseus (Bedford, after Homer), 1976; The Death of Baldur (Bragg, after S. Sturluson), 1979; Fridiof's Saga (Bragg, after Icelandic saga), 1980; The Ragnarok (Bragg, after Sturluson), 1982; The Camlann Game (Williams), 1987; Anna (Powell and C. Phillips), 1993

Other works: Whitefield Music 1, 12 bell bars, 12 milk bottles, 4 drums, 1966; Whitefield Music 2, ens (6–36 players), 1967; An Exciting New Game for Children of All Ages, ens, 1969; Some Bright Stars for Queen's College, chorus, 2 melodicas, pf, 3 rec, 1970; Balloon Music 1, 2–1000 balloons, 1973; The Song of the White Horse (G. Chesterton), boy's chorus, ens, tape, 1977; Seascapes (E. Bedford, C. Jackson, trad.), vv, str qnt, 1986; Into Thy Wondrous House (Bible: Isaiah, Patchen), S, children's chorus, SATB, orch, 1991; From Clocks to Stars (Milton and others), Ct, TTB, children’s chorus, SATB, perc, org, 2000

Principal publishers: Novello, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘A Conversation between David Bedford and Cornelius Cardew’, MT, cvii (1966), 198–202

C. Stokoe: ‘David Bedford’, British Music Now: a Guide to the Work of Younger Composers, ed. L. Foreman (London, 1975), 133–44

D. Bedford: ‘She Had to Go to the Orthodontist, Mr Bedford’, Composer, no.73 (1981), 1–7 [on his operas for children]

D. Bedford: ‘Der Einfluss von Rock und Pop auf die Musik der Gegenwart’, Europäische Gegenwartsmusik: Mainz 1983, 53–5

KEITH POTTER

Bedford, Steuart (John Rudolf)

(b London, 31 July 1939). English conductor, brother of David Bedford. He studied at the RAM and was an organ scholar at Worcester College, Oxford (where he conducted university productions of Britten’s Albert Herring and Menotti’s The Consul). In 1965–6 he joined the Glyndebourne music staff, and in 1967 the English Opera Group, with which he made his conducting début that year in The Beggar’s Opera at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. In 1965 he became a professor at the RAM and conductor of the opera class, with which he conducted his own version of L’incoronazione di Poppea in 1969 (which he discussed in Opera, xx, 1969, pp.94–100) and gave the first modern British performances of Donizetti’s Belisario as an RAM centenary production (1972). He conducted the première of Gardner’s The Visitors (1972, Aldeburgh Festival), the first stage performances of Britten’s Owen Wingrave (1973, Covent Garden), and was widely praised for his preparation, conducting and recording of Britten’s Death in Venice (1973, Aldeburgh). He conducted many later performances of that work at Covent Garden and on tour abroad; also the US première at the Metropolitan Opera in 1974 (his American début). He returned to the Metropolitan for Le nozze di Figaro in 1975 and Billy Budd in 1997. In December 1973 he was appointed an artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, and in 1975 joint artistic director of the English Music Theatre Company, for which he conducted the première of Stephen Oliver’s Tom Jones in 1976, the first British production of Britten’s Paul Bunyan also 1976, and the première of Minoru Miki’s Ada (1979). He also conducted the première of Britten’s cantata Phaedra op.93 at the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, the revised version of Oliver’s Duchess of Malfi at Santa Fe (1978), and in 1995 the première of Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at Monte Carlo. Bedford was appointed principal conductor of the English Sinfonia in 1982, and has appeared as guest conductor throughout the world. Among his recordings are Holst’s The Wandering Scholar and vital, idiomatic readings of many works by Britten.

NOËL GOODWIN

Bedient, Gene R.

(b Alliance, NE, 23 Aug 1944). American organ builder. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, he was apprenticed to Charles McManis of Kansas City and in 1969 established his own firm in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1971 he received the master’s degree from the same university; one of his first organs was built for the Wesley Foundation there in 1975. Bedient’s earlier organs were strongly influenced by historic north German models and were usually tuned in non-equal temperaments. By the 1980s Bedient was also building organs in the French classic style (St Mark’s Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985) and the French romantic style (Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee, 1989) as well as more ecletic organs. Other notable organs include those at Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin (1982) and Queen’s College, New York (1991). The firm also builds a line of pre-designed one- and two-manual organs for small churches.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Pape: The Tracker Organ Revival in America/Die Orgelbewegung in Amerika (Berlin, 1978)

M. Beech and C. Cramer: ‘Bedient Company Celebrates 20 Years’, American Organist, xxiv/4 (1990), 74–80

BARBARA OWEN

Bedingham, John.

1. Family background and childhood.

Bedini, Domenico

(b ?Fossombrone, c1745; d after 1795). Italian soprano castrato. His career began intermittently in comic opera at Pesaro (1762) and Rome (1764), and as secondo uomo in opera seria at Venice (1768). In 1770–71 he was secondo uomo in five Italian houses and then entered the service of the Munich court, resuming his career in Italy in 1776 and soon becoming primo uomo in leading houses. He is mostly remembered as the first Sextus in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (1791, Prague). He retired after singing at Florence in Carnival 1792 and by 1795 was in the cappella of the Santa Casa of Loreto in his native region.

DENNIS LIBBY

Bédos [Bedos] de Celles, François

(b Caux, nr Béziers, 24 Jan 1709; d St Denis, Paris, 25 Nov 1779). French organ builder and writer on organs and organ construction. He entered the Benedictine Congregation of St Maur at La Daurade, Toulouse, on 7 June 1726. On 30 October 1745 he became secretary of Sainte-Croix abbey at Bordeaux, where in 1748 he built an organ in the monastery church; after the Revolution it was transferred to St André, Bordeaux, and much original pipework survives. In 1759 he was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences, Bordeaux, and was subsequently elected a corresponding member of that of Paris. In 1761–2 he built an organ at St Vincent, Le Mans; he was also consultant for many other new organs. Bédos de Celles is best known for his writings, particularly his L'art du facteur d'orgues. This work is among the earliest to describe in detail the design and physical construction of the pipe organ and provides a valuable description of classical French organ building. His extensive and highly detailed plates, charts and diagrams deal with aspects of organ design, mixture compositions, pipe scales, pipes and pipe making, and tools and their use. Working from the writings of Marie Dominique Joseph Engramelle, he gave exhaustive instructions on the transfer of musical scores to organ barrels for mechanical playing and provided two complete pieces in the form of pinning charts. This aspect of his work inspired the makers of mechanical organs from his time forward. Bédos de Celles also described a mechanism for a square piano combined with an organ, a claviorgan and a vielle organisée and included a detailed discussion of ornamentation, articulation and principles of organ registration. He contributed reports on new organs to the Mercure de France.

WRITINGS

La gnomonique pratique, ou L'art de tracer les cadrans solaires avec la plus grande précision (Paris, 1760/R, 2/1774)

‘Lettre à l'auteur du Mercure, sur les nouvelles orgues de Saint Martin de Tours’, Mercure de France, i (1762), 133

L'art du facteur d'orgues (Paris, 1766–78/R; Eng. trans., 1977); ed. C. Mahrenholz (Kassel, 1934–6, 2/1963–6)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.S. Halle: ‘Orgelbau’, Werkstätte der heutigen Künste, vi (Brandenburg and Leipzig, 1779)

C. Vollbeding: Kurzgefasste Geschichte der Orgel aus dem Französischen des Dom Bédos de Celles (Berlin, 1793)

M.-P. Hamel: Nouveau manuel complet du facteur d'orgues (Paris, 1849, 2/1903)

J.G. Töpfer: Lehrbuch der Orgelbaukunst (Weimar, 1855, rev. 2/1888 by M. Allihn as Die Theorie und Praxis des Orgelbaus, rev. 3/1936 by P. Smets)

F. Raugel: Les Lépine et Dom François Bédos de Celles (Paris, 1917)

F. Raugel: Recherches sur quelques maîtres de l'ancienne facture d'orgue françaises (Paris, 1924)

C. Mahrenholz: Die Orgelregister: ihre Geschichte und ihr Bau (Kassel, 1930, 2/1944/R)

H. Klotz: Über die Orgelkunst der Gotik, der Renaissance und des Barock (Kassel, 1934, 3/1986)

C. Mahrenholz: Die Berechnung der Orgelpfeifenmensuren vom Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1938/R)

W.L. Sumner: The Organ: its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use (London, 1952, rev., enlarged, 4/1973/R)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music (London, 1973)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ (London, 1978)

GUY OLDHAM/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Bedouin music.

‘Bedouin’, derived from the Arabic badū, refers to tribal peoples found in the Arab world and Israel. The Bedouin are nomadic desert pastoralists found in the deserts of West Asia, the Arabian peninsula and the North African Sahara. Through changing circumstances many Bedouin have now become sedentarized. Organized within the tribe (qabīla), clan (‘ashīra) and extended family, these peoples lead an independent way of life. Since antiquity they have had close associations with date palm trees and camels, which also adapted to the harsh nature of the desert.

Bedouin music developed slowly and internally, through long periods of semi-isolation. But trade contact with villages and towns at the edge of the desert also had an impact, especially recently, with Bedouin sedentarization. Radio and television have entered Bedouin tents and houses, bringing many new impulses. Outside influences on Bedouin music include the use of certain tetrachords, ornamentation and musical instruments. Today, although the nomadic way of life is disappearing, Bedouin cultural values and music have assumed symbolic importance within some Arab nation-states such as Jordan and Oman.

1. General musical characteristics.

(i) Melody.

Bedouin melodies are short and usually fall within the ambitus of a 4th (extension to a 5th occurs, but is rare). The melodic line is mostly formed of stepwise intervals. Intervals of 3rds and 4ths are found, but a 5th is rare. Melodies are resistant to change, usually following a melodic formula. When small nuances of variation in rhythm or melody occur, they are perceived as highly significant. There is much melodic repetition: sometimes the whole poem is sung to a one-line melody. The melody of the first hemistich is either repeated exactly or with some alteration in the second hemistich, and if the same words are repeated, they take the same melody.

(ii) Mode.

Bedouin songs are based on the tonic (qarār). The melody moves around it and leads to it, and most songs begin with it. Various characteristic cadences (qafl) are used; see ex.1 (d as tonic). The Bedouin use a special tetrachord (jins): d–eb–f–g. The interval eb–f is approximately a whole tone, and it gives Bedouin singing its special character. Other tetrachords that are used probably derive from urban music: Sabā, Hijāz and Bayātī (Table 1).

(iii) Vocal style.

Most types of song are interpreted in an alternating or antiphonal manner, although some are performed by a solo poet-singer accompanying himself on the rabāba (one-string fiddle). Singing is in a high-pitched nasal voice, especially when sung solo. The declamatory style is almost always syllabic, except during cadences.

(iv) Text.

Verses usually consist of two hemistiches. Songs are performed in a Bedouin poetic dialect (shi‘r al-badawi or shi‘r al-malhūn) which differs from everyday speech. New words are improvised to existing melodies. Themes usually relate to Bedouin values and experience (nomadism, heroism and life-cycle events). Some urban influences occur, especially among sedentarized Bedouin. Religious or Sufi themes appear within North African Bedouin songs, for instance the ‘aiyāī singing of the Algerian Bedouin.

2. Genres.

The main features of many Bedouin genres are consistent throughout the Arab world, although genres may be known by different names. Variation, due to contact with local townspeople over a long period, reflects the specialities and tastes of different regions. Some genres are performed with dancing.

(i) Hudā‘ and hjenī (camel songs).

Hudā‘ was an Arab vocal genre used from the pre-Islamic period in connection with camels: to pasture them, gather them when dispersed, and on journeys to ease their fatigue and increase their pace as well as entertaining human travellers. Today Bedouin camel-related songs with the same functions are known as hjenī or frāqī. The hjenī melody consists of three measures in a four-beat metre (totalling 12 beats). A melodic leap (sometimes of a 3rd) may precede the cadence. Ex.2 shows three variants: 2a and 2b from nomad sources, and 2c from the city. 2b, with only 11 beats as opposed to 12, shows the possible changes which could affect a Bedouin type in the process of internal development. 2c shows the influence of urban singing, containing some melismatic figures.

(ii) Hidā (battle and work songs).

Before, during or after battle Bedouin warriors used to sing short plain melodies in a rhythmic declamatory style in a three-beat metre (ex.3). The contemporary poet-singer (hādī) usually improvises new verses, singing them alternately with the other participants. (Agricultural labourers also sing another form of hidā as work songs in a two-beat metre.) In Palestine the hidā is an open-air song accompanying the sahja dance (see Palestinian music, §2).

(iii) Uhzūja (heroic songs).

From ancient times to the Abbasid period a related term, hazaja, meant to dance and sing in joy. In pre-Islamic Arabia women encouraged warriors by singing and playing the frame drum (duff); Bedouin women still sing songs of this type, known in some regions as uhzūja. In modern folk music this category contains sung poems dealing with war, battle and heroism. There are no special forms or melodies; usually new words are set to a well-known and lively folksong, which then becomes an uhzūja. These songs are mostly sung in processions and at some national festivities (see Jordan (i), ex.2).

(iv) Qasīd (poetic ode).

From the earliest period of Arab history poetry has been connected with singing or recitation, sometimes with instrumental accompaniment. The Bedouin qasīd is related to the qasīda, an old form of monorhyme poetry consisting of many two-line verses (bayt) (ex.4). Bedouin singers prefer to be called ‘poet’ (shā‘ir) rather than ‘singer’; some use rabāba accompaniment. The Bedouin qasīd is performed with the sāmer dance (see below).

(v) Sāmer, sahja and dahhiyya (dances with female soloist).

The sāmer (‘entertainment’) or sahja is performed by a circle of male dancers on happy occasions (ex.5). A leader sings the qasīd verses and participants either repeat them or sing the verse ‘Halā halā…’ (‘Hallelujah, hallelujah …’). After some time the leader asks a female member of the tribe to join the dance; in Jordan she is known as al-hāshī (‘defender’) because she defends herself with a sword from the surrounding male dancers who try to touch her. This last part of the dance is called dahhiyya, a wild and active performance with aspects of mystical eroticism. (For the dahhiyya dance of the Negev desert Bedouin see Palestinian music, §2; see also Arab music, §II, 4(ii).) Habīsh is another Bedouin dance with a female soloist (seeYemen, §I, 1(ii)).

The sāmer is believed to be an antecedent of the Jewish and Christian ‘hallelujah’, and may originate from the tahlīl (song of joy) performed by pilgrims circumambulating the Ka‘ba at Mecca prior to the advent of Islam.

(vi) ‘Arda and razfah (combat dances).

In the Arabian peninsula a dance named ‘arda (‘exposition’; see Saudi arabia, §II, 2(i)) recalls pre-Islamic tribal battles (ex.6). Two rows of men face one another, clapping, singing and dancing in a lively manner, accompanied by large frame drums (tār). At the peak of the dance two swordsmen perform a duel between the rows of dancers. This dance may be related to the ancient rakbānī (‘riders' singing’) or rajaz (improvised verses performed during battles or work). In the extreme south of Iraq the ‘arda and samrī dances are both performed (see Iraq, §II, 1). Dances of Bedouin origin which use weapons (often known as razfah or ayyala) have achieved significance and popularity in the Arab Gulf states (fig.1) and Oman (see Arabian Gulf and Oman, §§2 and 3).

(vii) Fārida (bridal and pilgrim songs).

The term fārida denotes both the group of women accompanying the bride from her parental home, and their singing performed within this ritual journey. They sing in slow tempo, insistently prolonging one particular note (ex.7; see also Jordan (i), ex.1). There is no ornamentation; the sound is empty and dry like the wide desert that they cross, enlivening the journey as they sing and improvise new texts.

Certain fāridas accompany the departure of pilgrims (ex.8). They may be related to pre-Islamic and early Islamic songs called talbia which pilgrims sang while travelling to Mecca. Muslim pilgrims still recite talbias, but without any melody; it is possible that original talbia melodies are preserved in fāridas.

(viii) Ma‘īd or ‘adīd (lamentations).

Women perform funeral lamentations (also known as nwāh). During such performances they used to beat their cheeks and breasts, tear their clothes and put ashes on their faces and hair. In some areas they perform a mourning dance in a semicircle, holding hands and moving slowly as they sing and cry.

(ix) Tarwīda (women's songs).

Various songs are included within this category. Some deal with stages in the marriage process: the bride's bath, ritual application of henna (see Jordan (i), ex.3), or her farewell to her girlfriends. Lullabies are also known as tarwīdah.

(x) Hilālī epic.

This is a well-known folk epic describing incidents occurring during the Banī Hilāl tribe’s migration to North Africa. It originated in Bedouin culture and was adapted by non-Bedouin performers and taken into a wider repertory. Banū Hilāl bin ‘Āmir bin Sa ‘sa‘a is a branch of Hawāzin, a large Arabian tribe who lived in al-Shām (Greater Syria) and then moved to al-Hijaz (on the upper Red Sea coast of Arabia). Abū Zayd is the main figure of the story.

Hilālī epic performances usually occur during the evening (especially in winter) in many varied settings such as a tent, house, dīwān (family meeting-house), or coffee-house. The narrator, who should have a beautiful voice, might be Bedouin or non-Bedouin. He recites the story in a dramatic style, using special vocal effects, facial expression and body movements. According to region, he may accompany himself on the rabāba (one-string fiddle) or frame drum (tār). During the performance he adds improvised poetic commentary on the various incidents or characters within the story.

3. Musical instruments.

The most common instrument of Bedouin music is the rabāba, a monochord fiddle with a rectangular frame covered on both sides with skin and played in an upright position. It is unclear when this instrument entered the Arab world, but it is mentioned in the 10th-century ‘Great Book of Songs’ by al-Farābī. It is not exclusive to the Bedouin.

The mihbāsh, a carved wooden mortar and pestle used to grind coffee, is originally associated with Bedouin culture and hospitality; rhythms are created by striking the base and walls of the hollow body with a stick inserted through the top (fig.2). The Bedouin also use the qussāba or shibbāba, short oblique six-holed flutes. In North Africa the qussāba (known locally as the qasba) varies in size and pitch. Frame drums (tār, bandīr) of different sizes are used in some Bedouin music.

See also Arab music, §III; Algeria, §2(ii); Arabian Gulf; Egypt, §II; Iraq, §III, 1(i); Jordan (i); Lebanon, §III, 2; Libya; Oman; Palestinian music, §2; Saudi arabia; Syria, §3; Tunisia, §2 and Yemen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Assad: Al-qiyān wal-ghinā’ [Singing girls] (Beirut, 1960)

Y. Shwēhāt: Al-‘arab wa turāthihum [The Arabs and their traditions] (Amman, 1971)

T. Nimrī: ‘Al-mūsīqā wal-ghinā’ [Music and singing], Thaqāfatunā fī khamsīna ‘āman [Fifty years of our culture] (Amman, 1972)

Ibn Rashīq: Al-‘umda(Beirut, 1972)

‘A.-G. Attār: Qāmūs al-hajj wal-‘umra [Pilgrims' dictionary] (Beirut, 1979)

R. Hāshimī: Āthār ul-khalīj al-‘arabī wal-jazīra al-‘arabiyya [Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf and Peninsula] (Baghdad, 1984)

A.-H. Hamam: Asālat al-qawālib al-ghinā‘iyya al-badawiyya’ [The originality of Bedouin singing forms], Majallat al-turāth al-Sha‘bī [Journal of folk traditions] (1988), 17–40

A.-H. Ben-Mūsā: L'aspect musicale du chant bedouin aiyāi de l'atlas saharien algérien (diss., U. of Berlin, 1989)

A.-H. Hamam: Mu‘āradalu al-‘arūd [New musical interpretation of Arabian metrics] (Amman, 1991)

M. Ghawānmeh: Al-uhzūja al-urduniyya [Jordanian national song] (Irbid, 1997)

ABDEL-HAMID HAMAM

Bedyngham [Bedyngeham, Bedingham, Bodigham, Bellingan, Benigun; perhaps also Boddenham, Bodenham, Bodneham and Bodnam], Johannes

(d ?Westminster, London, reported between 3 May 1459 and 22 May 1460). English composer. The unusually wide distribution of works ascribed to him and the existence of contrary ascriptions to Du Fay, Dunstaple (two works) and Frye suggest that he was a composer of some stature. In 1453–4 Johannes Bedyngham was paid for his robes as one of the four singing-men in the Lady Chapel choir at Westminster Abbey (Bowers). In 1456 he wrote to the king requesting the freedom of his cousin Thomas Bedyngham, wrongly imprisoned in the jail of Ilchester (GB-Lpro C 81/1478/25); the pardon was granted on 31 May. On 15 January 1456/7 he made over all his property by letters-patent to David Selly and John Rudolf, gentlemen, and to John Bristowe and Henry Stoneham, clerics; he confirmed this in person at the Westminster Royal Chancery on 30 March 1457/8 (GB-Lpro C 54 308, m.21d). These documents describe him as verger at the collegiate chapel of St Stephen, Westminster. The same position was later held by Nicholas Ludford; and further documentation corroborates the theory that it was a position for a composer of distinction. Bedyngham was a member of the London Gild of Parish Clerks when its first known membership list was compiled in February 1448/9; in the same source (GB-Lgc 4889) his death was registered during the year Ascensio Domini 1459 to Ascensio Domini 1460.

It is possible that he was the same man as John Bodenham who was born in Oxford in 1422, was a chorister and scholar of Winchester College and then proceeded to New College, Oxford, where he was a scholar and a fellow, taking degrees in civil law (1449) and canon law (1455); Bodenham also cannot be traced beyond 1459. One of the beneficiaries of Bedyngham’s letters-patent, John Bristowe, cleric, may be the man of that name who was five years younger than Bodenham, born in the same Oxford parish, and also went to Winchester and New College, later becoming a priest-vicar of St Stephen’s, Westminster, where Bedyngham had been verger. Neither Bedyngham nor Bodenham seems ever to have been ordained priest.

It is possible, though unlikely, that the Ferrara court musician ‘Johannes de arpa de Anglia’, recorded in 1449–50, or the Ferrara cathedral singer ‘Johannes quondam alterius Johannis presbiter Londini’, 1448, might be Bedyngham. However, Bedyngham’s name does not appear in any continental theory treatise of the time – and Hothby, for instance, would probably have mentioned him had he been in Italy. The theory that he remained in England is supported by this and by the relative sparseness of ascriptions to him in the musical sources on the Continent.

Both his mass cycles are unusually free in form. The Dueil angoisseux cycle parodies all three voices of its model but in a loose manner that often leaves doubts as to the precise relationship (see analysis in Sparks, 457–8). No models have been found for the other mass music. The two cycles are similar in scope and style; Strohm has drawn attention to similarities in the mass of Johannes Pullois and the Mass sine nomine of Benet, and it might be appropriate to see in them the roots of the style Du Fay used in his mass for St Anthony of Padua. The other mass movements, if they are his, are later, to judge from their more expansive style.

His motets are classified as such only because of their Latin text incipits. They are intricate and florid pieces of the utmost rhythmical and notational complexity. If anything in 15th-century music may be termed unvocal, it is these pieces. They bear witness to a composer of a profoundly intellectual bent, and indeed the ascription ‘Mr: Jo: bedyngeham’ suggests that he had a university degree. They appear only in a manuscript from the very end of the 16th century; but their style is firmly that of the mid-15th century, their context is a group of similar early pieces (perhaps the other four are his too), and their scribe, John Baldwin, showed a marked interest for earlier music in both the scope and the compilation of this manuscript.

The correct attribution of some of the songs will always be open to discussion. However, authorities on Dunstaple and Du Fay have been unanimous in regarding Durer ne puis and Mon seul plaisir as of doubtful authenticity, and therefore probably by Bedyngham. These two pieces and O rosa bella (original version, no.14) seem authentic, since they are ascribed to Bedyngham in P-Pm 714, where the compiler showed a strong interest and understanding for English music. So ys emprentid is ascribed in one source to Bedyngham and in one to Walter Frye; it is perhaps more in doubt than any of the other works. Because of its similarity of style to So ys emprentid, Myn hertis lust has also been attributed to Frye in much modern literature, although there is no ascription other than to Bedyngham.

The list of 26 different texts in four languages underlaid or applicable to songs ascribed to Bedyngham speaks for itself. Evidently the transmission of his works was circuitous, but their distribution wide. It is unwise to be too dogmatic in attempting to establish the original form of these works. The Italian lauda texts are not in music manuscripts but in collections of poems expressly written for known music; and the Latin contrafacta are merely part of the common practice of writing new texts so as to make secular music acceptable in a sacred context. But most of the other texts listed are possible. The poem of Mon seul plaisir is by Charles d’Orléans, except that the first three words are changed in all its musical appearances; the only explanation for this would seem to be that the music was originally written for the contemporary English version of Charles’ poem (considered by some authorities on the poet to have been the original) and that the French version needed a little juggling to match the music as well as the English poem had done. Gentil madona and O rosa bella both show curious tensions between musical form and the poetic form of their Italian texts: either the composer did not fully understand the Italian poems or the music was originally written for some other text, possibly in English. The ‘rhyming cadences’ normally associated with ballade form and with English song in the later 15th century are found in Gentil madona, Le serviteur, Myn hertis lust, So ys emprentid and in Vide Domine.

The number of sources for some of the songs is impressive. Mon seul plaisir, with a contrary ascription to Du Fay, appears in 14 mensural sources, which is more than any authenticated piece by Du Fay; O rosa bella, in its original form in 18 sources, has more than any other work of Dunstaple, to whom it is normally attributed; So ys emprentid in ten sources is found more often than any other piece by Frye except the ubiquitous Ave regina celorum; in addition, Gentil madona has 15 sources, which is unusually many for any song written before the 1470s.

The influence of Bedyngham’s music was equally great. O rosa bella served as a model and a basis for numerous works, including three mass cycles. The anonymous rondeau Puisque je vis is apparently modelled on Mon seul plaisir, which is several times cited in the literature of the time. Gentil madona and So ys emprentid each gave rise to a mass cycle and various other pieces. If, as seems likely, all these works are really his, Bedyngham must be accounted one of the more important composers of the mid-15th century.

WORKS

sources listed in editions

mass ordinary settings

1	Mass ‘Dueil angoisseux’ (on Binchois’ ballade), 3vv; ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi (1924/R). In I-TRmp 88 it appears without Kyrie but with a Benedicamus Domino (not in edn); Kyrie immediately preceding cycle is in a different style but possibly by Bedyngham. TRmp 90 contains Gloria and Credo only, but Gloria carries the only ascription for cycle, and Credo has an additional voice.
2	Mass sine nomine, 3vv, TRmp 88, ff.46v–54; TRcap 93 contains 4 movts only. GB-Ob Add.c.87 contains Sanctus, ascribed; Sanctus ed. in Apfel, ii, 139
3	Sanctus and Agnus, 3vv, I-TRmp 90, ff.389v–395 (anon.), ed. in Gozzi. An annotation on TRmp 90, f.73, implies that they are part of no.1; they are not, but they may be by Bedyngham.

motets

4	Manus Dei, 2vv, GB-Lbl R.M.24.d.2 (John Baldwin’s Commonplace Book), ff.105v–106
5	Salva Jesu, 3vv, Lbl R.M.24.d.2, ff.106v–107
6	Vide Domine, 2vv, Lbl R.M.24.d.2, ff.104v–105, ed. in Fallows, 1996

ballades

7	Myn hertis lust, 3vv; ed. in CMM, xix (1960), and in Perkins and Garey
8	So ys emprentid, 3vv (also ascribed Frye); ed. in CMM, xix (1960), and in Perkins and Garey

rondeaux

9	Durer ne puis, 3vv (also ascribed Dunstaple); ed. in MB, viii (1953, 2/1970)
10	Mon seul plaisir, 3vv (also ascribed Du Fay); ed. in CMM, i/6 (1964, 2/1995)
11	Se belle, 3vv, I-TRmp 90, ff.290v–291, TRcap 93, f.370v (both ascribed ‘Benigun’); intabulated in Buxheimer Orgelbuch (D-Mbs Cim 352b), f.91v, as Sebelle anglicum, ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xxxviii (1958)

songs of doubtful form

12	Gentil madona, 3vv, ed. in Perkins and Garey and in Thibault and Fallows
13	Le serviteur, 3vv; ed. in DTÖ, xiv–xv, Jg.vii/1–2 (1900/R)
14	O rosa bella, 3vv (also ascribed Dunstaple); ed. in MB, viii (1953, 2/1970)

added voices

O rosa bella, 3 additional voices to no.14 in I-TRmp 89 with annotation ‘concordancie O rosa bella cum aliis tribus ut posuit bedingham et sine hiis non concordant’; ed. in MB, viii (1953, 2/1970). The Latin could mean that Bedyngham wrote either the original voices (no.14) or the 3 new ones (no.15); Bukofzer, in MB, viii, accepted the latter interpretation. On account of their style (which must be after 1460), these voices are probably not by Bedyngham.

texts

including alternative texts for nos.4–14 of work-list

english

Fortune alas, alas what have I gylt (possible orig. Eng. rhyme-royal text for no.12), GB-Lbl Harl.7333, Harl.2251, Add.34360; ed. in Hammond

Mi verry ioy and most parfit plesere (possible orig. Eng. version of no.10), Lbl Harl.682, f.67v (Charles d’Orléans poetry MS); ed. in Steele and Day

Myn hertis lust, sterre of my confort (no.7); ed. in Menner and in Perkins and Garey

So ys emprentid in my remembrance (no.8); ed. in Menner and in Perkins and Garey (2nd half of stanza also in GB-Ob Rawl.C.813, f.2; ed. in Padelford)

french

Durer ne puis se ie ne vous voy belle (no.9)

Fortune elas (text incipit for no.12 in several MSS; possibly Fr. but probably Eng.; no subsequent Fr. text has been found in any 15th-century source

Grant temps ai eu et desiree (no.7 in most MSS)

Le serviteur (no.13, text incipit only, but possibly continuing like the poem set by Dufay, ed. in Droz and Piaget, and in Löpelmann)

Ma seule plaisant doulce joye (opening of Charles d’Orléans’ poem, otherwise identical to no.10); ed. in Löpelmann, and in Champion

Mon seul plaisir, ma doulce joye (no.10); ed. in Löpelmann

Pour une suis desconfortee (no.8 in several sources)

Se belle (no.11; no further text survives)

Soyez aprentiz en amours (no.8, presumably an adaptation of the Eng. text opening; no further Fr. text survives)

italian

Gentil madonna de non m’abbandonare (no.12)

Humil madonna non mi abandonnare (lauda by Francesco d’Albizo for no.12); ed. in Galletti

Madre che festi colui che ti fece (lauda for no.10); ed. in Galletti

Nessun piacere ho sanza te Iesu (lauda by Feo Belcari for no.10); ed. in Galletti

O diva stella, o vergine Maria (lauda for no.14); ed. in Galletti

O rosa bella, o dolze anima mia (no.14; text probably by Leonardo Giustiniani)

Vergine bella non mi abbandonare (lauda by Feo Belcari for no.10 and no.12); ed. in Galletti

latin

Ave verum gaudium (no.7), D-Mbs 5023

Beata es virgo Maria (no.7), I-TRmp 90

[F]esto isti servi (no.12), CZ-HKm II A 7 (Speciálník)

Fortune Domine miserere (no.12), D-Mbs 5023

Manus Dei (no.4)

Salva Jesu (no.5)

Sancta Maria succurre miseris (no.8), I-TRmp 90

Superno nunc emittitur (no.13), TRmp 90 (also used as contrafactum for Du Fay’s Le serviteur in same MS)

Vide Domine (no.6)

text editions

G.C. Galletti: Laude spirituali di Feo Belcari … e di altri (Florence, 1864)

F.M. Padelford: ‘The Songs in MS Rawlinson C.813’, Anglia, xxxi (1908), 309–97

E.P. Hammond: ‘Lament of a Prisoner against Fortune’, Anglia, xxxii (1909), 481–90

E. Droz and A. Piaget, eds.: Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique (Paris, 1910–25/R)

P. Champion: Charles d’Orléans: poésies (Paris, 1923–7/R)

M. Löpelmann: Die Liederhandschrift des Cardinals de Rohan (Göttingen, 1923)

R. Steele and M. Day: The English Poems of Charles of Orleans (London, 1941–6, 2/1970)

R.J. Menner: ‘Three Fragmentary English Ballades in the Mellon Chansonnier’, Modern Language Quarterly, vi (1945), 381–7

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Besseler)

StrohmR

R. Ficker: ‘Die frühen Messenkompositionen der Trienter Codices’, SMw, xi (1924), 3–58

N. Pirrotta: ‘Considerazioni sui primi esempi di missa parodia’, Congresso internazionale di musica sacra [I]: Rome 1950, 315–18

A.B. Emden: A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford, 1957–9)

E. Apfel: Studien zur Satztechnik der mittelalterlichen englischen Musik (Heidelberg, 1959)

E.H. Sparks: Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963/R)

S.W. Kenney: Walter Frye and the ‘Contenance Angloise’ (New Haven, CT, 1964/R)

N. Pirrotta: ‘Ricercare e variazioni su O rosa bella’, Studi musicali, i (1972), 59–77

D. Fallows: ‘English Song Repertories of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, PRMA, ciii (1976–7), 61–79

D. Fallows: ‘Words and Music in Two English Songs of the Mid-15th Century: Charles d’Orléans and John Lydgate’, EMc, v (1977), 38–43 [on Eng. version of Mon seul plaisir]

L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)

D. Fallows: ‘Robertus de Anglia and the Oporto Song Collection’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 99–128

L. Lockwood: Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505 (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, 1984)

G. Thibault and D. Fallows, eds.: Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, PSFM, 1st ser., xxiii (1991)

M. Gozzi: Il manoscritto Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, cod. 1377 (Tr 90) (Cremona, 1992)

G. Curtis and A.B. Wathey: ‘Fifteenth-Century English Liturgical Music: a List of the Surviving Repertory’, RMARC, no.27 (1994), 1–69

A. Kirkman: ‘Innovation, Stylistic Patterns and the Writing of History: the Case of Bedyngham's Mass Dueil angoisseux’, I codici musicali trentini: Trent 1994, 149–75

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999)

R. Bowers: ‘The Music and Musical Establishment of St George's’, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the 15th Century, ed. E. Scarff (Gloucester, forthcoming)

DAVID FALLOWS

Beecham, Sir Thomas

(b St Helens, Lancs., 29 April 1879; d London, 8 March 1961). English conductor. Educated at Rossall School and (briefly) Wadham College, Oxford, he studied composition privately with Charles Wood in London and Moszkowski in Paris. As a conductor he was self-taught, making the most of easy circumstances (his father, Sir Joseph Beecham, was a successful manufacturing chemist with a fondness for music) to attend opera and concerts at home and abroad, forming an orchestra at St Helens, and deputizing there for Richter at a concert by the Hallé Orchestra for a civic function when his father was mayor. His professional début as a conductor came in 1902, when, at the Shakespeare Theatre, Clapham, he opened a tour of the ramshackle but impressively named Imperial Grand Opera Company with The Bohemian Girl. In 1906 Beecham was invited to become conductor of the New Symphony Orchestra; originally a chamber orchestra, its strength was increased in the following year to 70 players. Delius attended one of its concerts at Queen’s Hall and, impressed by what he had heard, introduced himself to Beecham. It was to prove an auspicious meeting for both men. In 1909 Beecham founded his own orchestra, the Beecham Symphony Orchestra, a band of adventurous young players who included Albert Sammons, Lionel Tertis and Eric Coates; in June of that year Beecham gave with it the first complete performance of Delius’s A Mass of Life. In 1910, with his father’s financial backing, he embarked on a five-year period of glittering operatic activity as both conductor and impresario, with seasons at Covent Garden, His Majesty’s Theatre and Drury Lane. In the course of them he mounted a festival of Mozart operas, during which he reintroduced to London the almost completely forgotten Così fan tutte, and conducted the British premières of five operas by Strauss: Elektra, Feuersnot and Salome in 1910, Der Rosenkavalier and the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos in 1913. The Beechams also brought Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London, thus giving British audiences their first opportunity to see and hear The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Jeux and Daphnis et Chloé (all conducted by Monteux). In addition, there were the British premières (1913–14, Drury Lane) of key Russian operas, among them Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov and Borodin’s Prince Igor, all with Chaliapin, as well as Stravinsky’s The Nightingale.

The war did not reduce Beecham’s activities. He conducted for, and gave financial support to, three institutions with which he was connected at various times: the Hallé Orchestra, the LSO and the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1915 he formed the Beecham Opera Company, with mainly British singers, performing in London and the provinces, which (Manchester especially) owed to Beecham a significant widening of their operatic experience. After the war there were joint Covent Garden seasons with the Grand Opera Syndicate in 1919 and 1920, but by now Beecham’s financial affairs were in a condition that demanded temporary withdrawal from musical life to put them in order. In 1923 he emerged, more or less solvent, from a long series of hearings in the Court of Chancery. He was no longer in a position to underwrite his own schemes – in future they would by financed by others – but his enthusiasm and energy were undimmed. He stumped the country, making hundreds of speeches in support of a scheme to establish an Imperial League of Opera, to be paid for by subscriptions. After it failed for lack of public support, he consolidated his international reputation by conducting the New York PO, Boston SO and Philadelphia Orchestra (1928), the Concerts du Conservatoire and Lamoureux orchestras in Paris (also 1928), the Berlin PO (two visits in 1930; seven years later he was to make his celebrated recording of Die Zauberflöte with the orchestra), and the Vienna PO (1931, Salzburg Festival).

In 1932, dissatisfied as usual with orchestral conditions in Britain and goaded by the inception of the BBC SO, Beecham formed the London Philharmonic and brought it swiftly to the front rank, a position confirmed by visits to Brussels (1935), Germany (1936) and Paris (1937). Once again he showed his flair for choosing the finest players. The year 1932 also saw Beecham’s return to Covent Garden, as artistic director. By 1935 he was in sole control, and it is a measure of his confidence in his own abilities as conductor that he had no qualms about inviting guests of the calibre of Furtwängler, Reiner, Knappertsbusch, Erich Kleiber and Weingartner to join him. Live recordings of Beecham conducting at Covent Garden during this period – notably a spine-chilling Act 2 of Götterdämmerung with Leider and Melchior – demonstrate that he indeed had nothing to fear by way of comparisons with such colleagues. In 1939 Covent Garden was closed for opera for the duration of World War II, and in 1940 Beecham went first to Australia for a concert tour and then to the USA, where he was conductor of the Seattle SO (1941–3) and of opera at the Metropolitan, New York (1942–4).

When Beecham returned to Britain in September 1944 he was welcomed back by the British public and by his old orchestra; but the LPO was now a self-governing body, neither able nor willing to offer any conductor the autocratic power Beecham had previously enjoyed. The result was the creation in 1946 of yet another orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic. With it he maintained his supremacy at home, increased his celebrity abroad (touring the USA and Canada in 1950), and made a large number of recordings. He returned to Covent Garden as guest conductor for Die Meistersinger and The Bohemian Girl in 1951. His last operatic performances were given at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1958, and his last concert was with the RPO at the Guildhall, Portsmouth, on 7 May 1960.

This dynamic, many-sided, restless founder of orchestras and planner of opera seasons was first and foremost, in the words of the critic Richard Capell, ‘the most gifted executive musician England has ever produced’, a verdict that arguably still stands. In any assessment of his gifts the state of music in England during his formative years must be taken into account. Much energy had to be devoted to creating conditions (reliable orchestras, regular opera seasons) which leading conductors on the Continent could take for granted. Experience and temperament inclined him to regard music neither as a sacred calling nor a job to be done, but as an immense, essential pleasure to be shared with his audiences. His repertory, in orchestral music as in opera, was enormous. He cultivated the byways as assiduously as the highways. Bach meant little to him, but Handel he refreshed with a zest and brilliance far removed from the old massiveness (although his arrangements of ballet or concert suites would fail any ‘authenticity’ test, they revealed in their day some of the unsuspected riches lying beyond the popular oratorios). In later years Beecham’s Mozart tended to mannerism, but he had long before done more than any other English conductor to demonstrate Mozart’s greatness. He loved Grétry, Méhul and other minor French and Italian masters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although in Beecham’s lifetime his Beethoven was criticized for a lack of Teutonic gravitas, his best recordings of the composer sound surprisingly convincing and undated: a Fourth Symphony from 1945 with the LPO is particularly notable for its fierce attack and rhythmic energy. His Berlioz was masterly, as can be heard in his recording, also from 1945, of the Royal Hunt and Storm from Les Troyens, where his evocation of the dramatic details so carefully delineated by the composer is heightened by a matchless response to the romantic ache in the music. (Behind the extrovert public persona Beecham cultivated so assiduously there lurked a strong streak of melancholy.) He performed Haydn, Mendelssohn, Bizet and Dvořák with particular grace and affection, and was the most effective British exponent of both Richard Strauss and Sibelius. Although in 1916 he made the first recording of excerpts from The Firebird (and a year earlier had introduced its composer’s Tri stikhotvoreniya iz yaponskoy liriki (‘Three Japanese lyrics’) to Britain), he was wary of most 20th-century music after early Stravinsky. In his younger days he played a great amount of British music, although there were composers (Vaughan Williams for one) not wholly congenial to him. An outstanding exception was the cosmopolitan Delius, who became a close friend, and whose music Beecham edited, propagated and interpreted with tireless, unique understanding. In 1929 he organized and conducted a Delius Festival in London in the presence of the blind composer.

Beecham’s mastery of the orchestra depended not only on unusually strong gifts of communication with players, but on firm rhythm, singing melody and shapely phrasing. He was meticulous over the marking of parts, and conducted mostly from memory, sometimes without a stick. He could give ill-prepared or downright bad performances of scores he did not care for, but he was rarely pedestrian. To many of those fortunate enough to hear him often, he gave greater satisfaction and more sheer enjoyment than any other conductor. Beecham’s appearance and personality were as unforgettable as his music-making: the stately, ceremonious walk, the pointed beard, the flashing eye and equally flashing wit, the oracular pronouncements. In his last years he developed a streak of demagogy, the teasing or trouncing of audiences turning into everlasting railing against institutions whose help or hospitality he would subsequently have no compunction in accepting. He could be cruel, preposterous or wildly inconsistent; yet there remained a bigness, and a fund of warm and genuine geniality: ‘We are nationally and individually a more musically aware people because of him and what he gave us’ (Cairns). He was knighted in 1916, and succeeded to the baronetcy on his father’s death in the same year. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1957.

WRITINGS

A Mingled Chime: Leaves from an Autobiography (London, 1944/R)

Frederick Delius (London, 1959, 2/1975)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Smyth: Beecham and Pharaoh (London, 1935)

T. Russell: ‘Sir Thomas Beecham: from an Orchestral Player’s Point of View’, MO, lxi (1937–8), 115–17; repr. in Grand baton, ix/4 (1972), 3–5

B. Shore: The Orchestra Speaks (London, 1938/R)

B. Geissmar: The Baton and the Jackboot (London, 1944/R)

‘List of Operas Conducted and/or Produced by Sir Thomas Beecham in England, 1910–1953’, Opera, x (1959), 285–7

R. Capell: Obituary, MT, cii (1961), 283–6

N. Cardus: Sir Thomas Beecham: a Memoir (London, 1961)

C. Reid: Beecham: an Independent Biography (London, 1961)

H. Procter-Gregg and others: Sir Thomas Beecham, Conductor and Impresario (Windermere, 1972, 2/1976 as Beecham Remembered)

D. Cairns: Responses (London, 1973)

M. Gray: Beecham: a Centenary Discography (London, 1979)

A. Jefferson: Sir Thomas Beecham: a Centenary Tribute (London, 1979)

J.D. Gilmour, ed.: Sir Thomas Beecham: 50 Years in the New York Times (London, 1988)

A. Blackwood: Sir Thomas Beecham: the Man and the Music (London, 1994)

J. Lucas: Sir Thomas Beecham: a Biography (forthcoming)

RONALD CRICHTON/JOHN LUCAS

Beecham Opera Company.

Company organized in London by Thomas Beecham during World War I. See London, §VI, 1(i). In 1920 it became the British National Opera Company.

Beecke, (Notger) Ignaz (Franz) von

(b Wimpfen-im-Tal, 28 Oct 1733; d Wallerstein, 2 Jan 1803). German composer and pianist. He served as a military officer early in the Seven Years War, joining the Zollern Dragoons of the Bavarian Electorate in 1756 and, according to his own account, going on campaigns with Field Marshall Joseph Friedrich, Prince of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, who was also Dittersdorf’s patron. Late in 1759 or early in 1760 Beecke, now a first lieutenant, arrived in Wallerstein, near Nördlingen, to join a contingent of Prince Friedrich Eugen of Württemberg’s regiment of dragoons. Prince Philipp Karl of Oettingen-Wallerstein, who maintained a small court Kapelle, took him up as a courtier. Promoted to captain in 1763, Beecke acquired increasing respect at Wallerstein, both as a pianist (he was self-taught) and, at least from the 1770s, as a music director (Intendant). He was personal adjutant to the young Count Kraft Ernst, and when the count assumed the control of government in 1773 and became prince in 1774, Beecke’s influence grew further. He remained single, and in 1792 was promoted to major, also being granted a pension; he was promoted again in 1797. Although likeable and witty, he led a dissipated life and was heavily in debt on his death.

Beecke travelled extensively. In the early part of his career he spent much time in Paris (1766, 1769, 1772–3) and in 1766 secured a privilege to publish his own music there. Several years later a Parisian première of his opera Roland, which Gluck and Hasse had encouraged him to complete in Vienna in 1770, was thwarted by intrigues between Louis XV’s mistress Mme du Barry and Marie-Antoinette. Beecke later returned to Vienna several times; he wrote Claudine von Villa Bella (1780) for the German company at the Burgtheater, but it was unsuccessful. In Mannheim in 1782 the Intendant Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg had Beecke’s Die Jubelhochzeit and Die Weinlese performed. Beecke was also a regular visitor to the Thurn und Taxis court at Regensburg. He played a four-hand piano concerto with Mozart when in Frankfurt for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in 1790, and in 1791 was a guest at the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia in Berlin, performing in a concert that included his own ‘Sinfonia di caccia’ and Sonata for three pianos. The many manuscripts of Beecke’s works preserved in Berlin suggest that he was successful there. Six copies of string quartets (now in D-Bsb) seem to comprise a presentation set, one of them including a prominent cello theme that was perhaps meant for the king himself to play.

Beecke’s journeys brought far-reaching contacts and valuable stimuli to the musical life of the Wallerstein court. Among the musicians recruited under his leadership were Rosetti, Josef Reicha, P.A. Wineberger and Friedrich Witt. He established a wide musical repertory at Wallerstein, much of which survives in the court library (now in D-HR); string quartets were especially popular. A particular influence on his own style was Haydn, who eventually visited Wallerstein in 1790.

As a pianist Beecke developed an expressive style of his own. One of his pupils was the celebrated pianist Nanette von Schaden (who visited the young Beethoven in Augsburg in 1787). The poet and composer Schubart, who dedicated to Beecke a poem and a volume of his Musikalische Rhapsodien (Stuttgart, 1786), numbered him among those ‘blessed of the gentle piano’; Mozart and his admirers, however, found his playing shallow and undisciplined.

Beecke’s music reveals a composer of considerable versatility and skill. While he was quite at home in the tuneful idioms of Singspiel and song, many of the instrumental works composed for court and domestic use are more intricate and serious, sometimes at the expense of a sense of harmonic direction, and the 12 string quartets have some strikingly ambitious devices. Most of Beecke’s mature (unpublished) symphonies have four movements, often starting with a slow introduction, and include motivic textures. Their divisi viola parts are typical of Wallerstein works, as are their prominent wind parts, which were no doubt intended for members of the court Harmonie. However, Beecke seems to have composed little Harmoniemusik as such. His output for keyboard originally included as many as 24 concertos (Munter); the few surviving works seem more substantial than the sonatas. Although most of the manuscripts specify ‘cembalo’ (harpsichord), it seems likely that the piano was often used, at least for the later works. Mozart wrote a cadenza (k624/626a II, K, now lost) for the slow movement of one of these concertos.

Among the most celebrated of Beecke’s vocal works was Auf den Todt des Ritter Gluck, composed on the death of Gluck in 1787 and notable for its expressive chromaticism. He also wrote a piece on the untimely death of Gluck’s adopted niece Marianne (‘Nanette’) (1776). An oratorio, Die Auferstehung Jesu (1794), and several cantatas and song collections were also published.

WORKS

Thematic catalogues: Scheck (1961) [vocal works]; Munter (1921) [instrumental works]; The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. C, vi (New York, 1981) [symphonies]

stage

Roland (op, after L. Ariosto), Paris, after 1770, march D-Rtt

Claudine von Villa Bella (Schauspiel mit Gesang, 1, J.W. von Goethe), Vienna, Burg, 13 June 1780, A-Wn, D-HR

Die Jubelhochzeit (komische Oper, 3, C.F. Weisse), Mannheim, National, 9 June 1782, duet HR

Die Weinlese (Spl, 2, W.C.D. Meyer, after Weisse), Mannheim, National, 10 Dec 1782, HR* (inc.)

Pastorale (Spl, 3), Aschaffenburg, 8 June 1784, HR* [? = Die zerstörte Hirtenfeier]

Don Quixote (Spl, 3, H. Soden), 1784

Ov., choruses and death march to Hermannsschlacht (F.G. Klopstock), 1784, unperf., HR*

List gegen List (Die Glocke hat zwölf geschlagen) (Spl, Soden), ?c1785, ov. and Act 1 finale HR, ov. Rtt

Das Herz behält seine Rechte (Spl), Mainz, 1790

Nina (Spl, H. Spaur), Aschaffenburg, Hof, 1790, ov. HR, parthia Rtt

Die zerstörte Hirtenfeier (Pastorale, Spaur), Aschaffenburg, Hof, 1790

sacred vocal

all with orchestra

3 Tantum ergo: C, c1785, D-HR*; D, 1786, HR; C, 1792, HR

Alma redemptoris mater, 1792, HR*

Die Auferstehung Jesu (orat, 3, K.F.B. Zinkernagel), 1794, HR* (Vienna, 1794)

Lytaniae lauretanae, 1794, HR*

A solis ortus cardine, motet, c1795, HR*

Requiem, E, 1798, HR*

Erbarme dich o Gott, c1798, HR* [based on Haydn: Sym. no.97, 2nd movt]

Mass, D, 1800, HR*

other vocal

for voices and orchestra unless otherwise stated

Klagen über den Tod der grosen Saengerinn Nanette von Gluck (Frau von Pernett), S, str, kbd (Augsburg, 1776)

Tra lyrum larum, S, orch, c1783, D-HR; for S, str, kbd (Mannheim, c1783)

Der brave Mann (cant., G.A. Bürger), 1784, HR* (Mainz, 1784)

Auf den Todt des Ritter Gluck (C.F.D. Schubart), 1787, HR*; as Musikalische Apotheose des Ritters Gluck, 1v, orch (Mainz, 1788)

Cantata des Friedens, 1797, HR*, Rtt; as Friedenscantate (Augsburg, n.d.)

Ein Herz das Treu und Liebe nährt (cant., Zinkernagel), 1800, HR*, Rtt*

Wiegenlied (cant.), c1800, HR, Rtt

Wohl blühen der Blumen (melodrama, Zinkernagel), speaker, chorus, orch, 1802, HR*

Other occasional cants., HR*

Scenas, arias, HR

Songs with kbd: 6 airs françois (Berlin and Amsterdam, 1792); 24 Lieder, 4 vols. (Augsburg, 1798–1801); songs, duets, terzets, HR, Dl, A-Wgm, some pubd

instrumental

Syms.: 6 simphonies à grande orchestre (Paris, 1767); 6 symphonies à 6 (Paris, n.d.), lost; 21 other syms., c1772–1797, D-BAR, Bsb, HR, Mbs, Rtt, 1 ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. C, vi (New York, 1981)

Concertante syms. (only solo insts listed): B, vn, vc, ob, c1770, HR*; C, 2 vn, va, 2 vc, c1785, HR; D, vn, vc, 1789, HR

Kbd concs.: D, before 1773, lost; A, E, E, by 1778, Dl; D, ?c1790, Bsb; B, ?after 1792, HR; 18 others, lost

Other orch: Serenade, D, c1795, HR; Serenade, D, 1802, HR*; March, D, 1792, HR, Rtt; Wiegenlied, c1793, HR*; Romance, 1799, HR

Wind: Parthia, E, c1780, HR; Parthia, C, HR [? based on P. Wranitzky’s lost ballet Das Waldmädchen]

Str qts: 12, c1770–c1790, Bsb, HR [some autograph], all ed. in Little (1989); E, G, c1790, Rtt, doubtful; others, lost

Other chbr: [6] Quartetti, fl, vn, va, b (Speyer, 1791) [no.5 for ob, str]; Qnt, a, 2 vn, va, vc, hpd, c1770, HR*; Sonata, D, 2 vn, 2 hn, vc, hpd, c1780, HR, Rtt; Qnt, G, fl, ob, vn, va, vc, c1790, HR*, ed. A. Gottron (Heidelberg, 1961); 6 Trios (3 for fl/vn, vn, vc; 3 for 2 vn, vc), Bsb; Trio, C, vn, vc, pf, 1793, HR*

Vn, kbd: 4 duos, op.3 (Paris, 1767); Sonata, D, by 1778, Mbs; Sonata, B, c1780, HR*; Sonata, C, c1785, HR*; 4 sonatas, F, C, G, D, by 1778, lost; Sonata, g, ?lost

Kbd: 6 sonates, hpd, op.2 (Paris, 1767); 28 sonatas, A-Wgm, D-Dl, HR [some autograph]; ?Sonate, A, HR*; Sonata, C, ?lost; 2 sonatinas, D, C, HR; 2 sonatas, F, B, pf 4 hands, HR*; Sonata, G, pf 4 hands, ?lost; Sonata, C, 3 pf, 1785, HR*; [10] Pièces de clavecin (Paris, 1767); Ariette avec 15 variations (Heilbronn, 1797); Air avec 10 variations (Augsburg, 1798), Duetto pastorale, C, 1772, HR; Contredanse figurée, A, c1780, HR*; pieces in H.P. Bossler, ed.: Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber (Speyer, 1782–3)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

GerberL

GerberNL

LipowskyBL

C.F.D. Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806/R)

L. Schiedermair: ‘Die Blütezeit der Öttingen-Wallerstein’schen Hofkapelle’, SIMG, ix (1907–8), 83–130, esp. 107ff

A. Diemand: ‘Josef Haydn und der Wallersteiner Hof’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben und Neuburg, xlv (1920–22), 1–40, esp. 4ff

F. Munter: Ignaz von Beecke (1733–1803) und seine Instrumentalkompositionen (diss., U. of Munich, 1921); extract in ZMw, iv (1921–2), 586–603

E.F. Schmid: ‘Ignaz von Beecke’, Lebensbilder aus dem bayerischen Schwaben, i, ed. G.F. von Pölnitz and others, i (Munich, 1952), 343–64

H. Scheck: Die Vokalkompositionen von Ignaz von Beecke (diss., Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Munich, 1961)

V. von Volckamer: ‘Geschichte des Musikalienbestandes’, in G. Haberkamp: Thematischer Katalog der Musikhandschriften der Fürstlich Oettingen-Wallerstein’schen Bibliothek Schloss Harburg (Munich, 1976), pp.ix–xxxii

F. Little: The String Quartet at the Oettingen-Wallerstein Court: Ignaz von Beecke and his Contemporaries (New York, 1989)

M. Danckwardt: ‘Die Klopstock-Lieder Ignaz von Beeckes’, Studien zum deutschen weltlichen Kunstlied des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts: Wolfenbüttel 1990, 287–308

ADOLF LAYER/FIONA LITTLE

Beecroft, Norma (Marian)

(b Oshawa, ON, 11 April 1934). Canadian composer and radio producer. She studied composition with Weinzweig in Toronto, Foss and Copland at Tanglewood, and Maderna and Petrassi in Europe. Her early compositions tend towards neo-classicism, but, a pioneer in Canadian electro-acoustic music, she went on to compose post-serial, improvisational and collage works. Both her attention to timbre and her formal structures demonstrate the influence of Debussy and Xenakis.

Beecroft’s broadcasting career began in television (1954–9). She became a radio producer in 1963, originating numerous CBC-FM music series. In 1969 she began to produce freelance documentaries on Canadian composers and music technologies. Her programme The Computer in Music won the Major Armstrong Award for excellence in FM broadcasting (1976). From 1984 to 1987 she taught electronic music and composition at York University (Toronto), which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1996. She has served as the president of Canadian Music Associates and Ten Centuries Concerts, and co-founded, with Robert Aiken, the New Music Concerts. Her numerous composition prizes include two Lynch-Staunton Awards from the Canada Council.

WORKS

(selective list)

traditional media

Orch: Improvvisazioni concertanti no.1, fl, orch, 1961; Pièce concertante no.1, 1966; Improvvisazioni concertanti no.2, 1971; Improvvisazioni concertanti no.3, fl, timp, orch, 1973; Hemispherics, fl, + sax, cl, tpt, trbn, gui, pf + synth, 2 perc, str, 1990; Jeu IV, fortepiano, 2 cel, orch, 1991

Choral: The Living Flame of Love (St John of the Cross, trans. Beecroft), SATB, 1967; 3 Impressions from ‘Sweetgrass’ (W. Keon), SATB, 2 perc, pf, 1973

Chbr: Contrasts for 6 Pfmrs, ob, va, hp, 3 perc, 1961; 3 pezzi brevi, fl, hp/gui/pf, 1961; Rasas I, fl, vn, va, vc, hp, perc, pf, 1968; Images, ww qnt, 1986; Accdn Play, accdn, 2 perc, 1989

electro-acoustic

Tape and inst: 11 & 7 for 5+, brass qnt, 2-track tape, 1975; Piece for Bob, fl, 2-track tape, 1975; Collage ’76, 2 fl, ob, hn, vc, db, hp, 3 perc, pf, 2-track tape, 1976; Collage ’78, bn, 2 perc, pf, 2-track tape, 1978; Quaprice, hn, perc, el-ac tape, 1979; Cantorum Vitae, fl, vc, perc, 2 pf, 4-track tape, 1980; Troissonts, va, 2 perc, el-ac tape, 1982; Hedda, multimedia, orch, el-ac tape, 1983; Jeu de Bach, ob, pic, tpt, str, el-ac tape, 1985; Jeu II, amp fl, va, tape, live elecs, 1985; Jeu III, va, 2-track tape, 1987; Amp Str Qt with Tape, 1992

Synth: Evocations: Images of Canada, MIDI-controlled synth, 1991

Tape and vv: From Dreams of Brass (J. Beecroft), nar, S, vv, orch, el-ac tape, 1963–4; Elegy and Two went to Sleep (L. Cohen), S, fl, perc, 2-track tape, 1967; Rasas II, (C, fl, gui, hp, 2 perc, elec org, 2-track tape)/(C, fl, 2 perc, pf, elec org, 2-track tape), 1973; Rasas III, S, fl, trbn, perc, pf, el-ac tape, 1974; The Dissipation of Purely Sound (radiophonic op, S. O'Huigin), tape, time delay, 1988

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMC2 (K. Winters)

P. Such: ‘The Suspended Sounds of Norma Beecroft’, Soundprints: Contemporary Composers (Toronto, 1972), 80–100

N. Beecroft: ‘Norma Beecroft: a Portrait’, Musicanada (1979), May, 10–11

ANDRA McCARTNEY

Beeland [Bealand, Beland, Biland, Byland], Ambrose

(b c1597; d London, c1674). English composer, violinist and wind player. He was apprenticed to a musician in the London Drapers' Company, became a freeman on 3 September 1619 and married the first of his three wives the next day. He was apparently already connected with the King's theatre company, and was certainly a member in 1624. He joined the London Waits in 1631 and the court violin band in 1640, resuming both places at the Restoration. He retired from court in 1672, though he continued to pay fees to the Drapers' Company until 1674. He seems to have played the viola in the Twenty-Four Violins, and 14 fragmentary dances by him survive (GB-Ob Mus.Sch.D.220, US-NH Filmer 3).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, iii, v, viii

BDA

BDECM

G.E. Bentley: The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, ii (Oxford, 1941), 362–3

D. Lasocki: Professional Recorder Players in England 1540–1740 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1983), ii, 755–9

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

PETER HOLMAN

Beer, Friedrich.

See Berr, Friedrich.

Beer [Bähr, Baer, Behr, Ursus, Ursinus], Johann

(b St Georg, Upper Austria, 28 Feb 1655; d Weissenfels, 6 Aug 1700). Austrian-German composer, singer, violinist, keyboard player, music theorist and novelist. At seven his father sent him to the Benedictine monastery at Lambach, a short distance north-east of St Georg, where he began his musical education. Beer pursued further general and music studies at Reichersberg, south of Passau, as well as in Passau itself. In 1670 his parents took him to Regensburg, where they had moved to preserve their Protestant faith. As a student at the Gymnasium Poeticum Beer became a friend of his fellow student Pachelbel. He continued to study music, including composition, and he wrote the score for a school play, Mauritius imperator. At the end of his studies at the gymnasium, the city of Regensburg awarded him a scholarship to enter the university at Leipzig in 1676 as a student of theology. He soon became acquainted with the musicians there, including the Thomas Kantor Sebastian Knüpfer, and Werner Fabricius, organist at the Nikolaikirche.

Mattheson, who published an autobiographical sketch by Beer in Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, praised his musical talent as a fine tenor, violinist and keyboard player. Beer remained at the university for only six months before moving to Halle as a singer in the court chapel of Duke August of Saxe-Weissenfels. It was here that he married on 17 June 1679. On 4 June 1680 Duke August died, and his successor, Duke Johann Adolph I, took the court to Weissenfels, where Beer also moved on 6 December. In Weissenfels, Beer rapidly gained fame as a performing musician, actor, teacher and composer. His patron clearly appreciated these talents, and Beer's wealth grew proportionately with his musical successes. He turned down a financially attractive position as Kapellmeister at Coburg in 1684, and on the Saturday before Easter 1685 he was named Konzertmeister of the court orchestra at Weissenfels. Later he also became librarian of the ducal library.

Beer was a close confidant and frequent travelling companion of the Duke of Weissenfels; he was also constantly in demand as an opera and concert singer. In addition to his numerous musical responsibilities and achievements he wrote a number of books on music as well as satirical novels. In the autumn of 1691 he declined the offer of a position at the Danish court in Copenhagen. His distinguished career was ended prematurely by his accidental death when, watching a shooting contest, he was struck by a stray bullet. (For additional details about Beer's life, taken from his autobiographical sketch, see Schmiedecke.)

Beer was a greatly talented, versatile figure in late 17th-century German music. As a composer he is not important; he is known to have written three operas, and a few instrumental and sacred vocal pieces survive (in D-Bsb, GMl, SWl, Bibliothek Stolberg Grimma). His reputation as a gifted singer and instrumentalist is well documented. As a writer he deserves continuing attention. His little-known satirical novels, in which music and musicians play an important role, tell us much about the social and cultural status of 17th-century musicians. His exceptional sense of humour also enlivens his several music treatises. In Ursus murmurat he attacked traditional music values and the educational methods of church musicians as embodied in Gottfried Vockerodt's treatise Missbrauch der freyen Künste insonderheit (1697). His Musicalische Discurse is particularly valuable in its wide-ranging comments on music and musicians as well as on the philosophy and aesthetics of his art. No-one writing on music in 17th-century Germany should fail to consult Beer's extensive writings, but unfortunately no comprehensive study of his works exists to make them accessible in English.

WRITINGS

novels

Der Symplicianische Welt-Kucker oder abentheuerliche Jan Rebhu (Halle, 1677–9)

Der abentheuerliche, wunderbare und unerhörte Ritter Hopffensack … von einem lebendigen Menschen (Halle, 1678)

Die vollkommene comische Geschicht des Corylo. Der neue Ehemann (Nuremberg, 1679–80)

Jucundi jucundissimi, wunderliche Lebensbeschreibung (Nuremberg, 1680)

Des berühmten Spaniers Francisci Sambelle wolausgepolirte Weiber-Hächel … ins Hochdeutsche übersetzet durch den allenthalben bekannten Jan Rebhu (n.p., 1680)

Die mit kurtzen Umständen entworffene Bestia civitatis … ins Teutsche übersetzet durch den jungen Simplicium Simplicissimum (n.p., 1681)

Der berühmte Narren-Spital … herausgegeben durch Hanss guck in die Welt (n.p., 1681)

Der politische Feuermäuer-Kehrer … entworffen von Antonino Caminero (Leipzig, 1682)

Der politische Bratenwender … von Amando de Bratimero (Leipzig, 1682)

Der verliebte Europeer … zusammen getragen durch … Amandus de Amanto (Gotha, 1682)

Zendorii à Zendoriis teutsche Winternächte (Nuremberg, 1682)

Die kurtzweiligen Sommer-Täge … an der Tag gegeben durch Wolffgang von Willenhag (n.p., 1683)

Die andere Ausfertigung neugefangener politischer Maul-Affen … vor Augen gestellet durch Florianum de Francomente (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1683)

Der deutsche Kleider-Affe … von Alamodo Pickelhering (Leipzig, 1685)

Der verkehrte Staats-Mann oder Nasen-weise Secretarius (Cölln, 1700)

Der verliebte Oesterreicher … durch Jan Rebhu (n.p., 1704)

books on music

Ursus murmurat, das ist: klar und deutlicher Beweis, welcher gestalten Herr Gottfried Vockerod … in seinem den 10. Aug. den abgewichenen 1696ten Jahres herausgegebenen … Programmate der Music … zu viel getan (Weissenfels, 1697, 2/1697)

Ursus vulpinatur. List wider List oder musicalische Fuchs-Jagd, darinnen … Vockerodens … Apologie der Balg abgejagt wird (Weissenfels, 1697)

Bellum musicam oder musicalischer Krieg (n.p., 1701)

Musicalische Discurse durch die Principia der Philosophie deducirt … nebst einem Anhang … genannt der musicalische Krieg zwischen der Composition und der Harmonie (Nuremberg, 1719)

Schola phonologica sive tractatus doctrinalis de compositione harmonica, dass ist aussführliche Lehrstücke, welche zu der musicalischen Composition nöthig erfordert werden (MS, D-LEm)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MatthesonGEP

R. Alewyn: Johann Beer: Studien zum Roman des 17. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1932)

H. Krause: Johann Beer: zur Musikauffassung im 17. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1935)

A. Schmiedecke: ‘Johann Beer und die Musik’, Mf, xviii (1965), 4–11

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Beer [Baehr, Baer, Baher, Bähr, Bär, Beere, Behr, Paer, Pär, Pehr], (Johann) Joseph [Jan Josef]

(b Grünwald, [now Pastviny], 18 May 1744; d Berlin, 28 Oct 1812). Bohemian clarinettist and composer. After moving to Paris at the age of 16 he was employed as a clarinettist by the Duke of Orléans (1767–77) and by the Prince of Lambesc (1778–9, 1781–2). He made his first solo appearance at the Concert Spirituel playing a concerto by Carl Stamitz on 24 December 1771 and subsequently performed there on 27 occasions until 1779, playing his own concertos and others by Stamitz. Most of Stamitz's solo concertos were written for him and on the manuscript of one (published in 1793) Beer is named as joint composer. Fétis credited Beer with the addition of a fifth key to the clarinet, but it seems more likely that in the 1770s Beer played his solo performances in Paris on a five-key clarinet made in Germany or Bohemia; this was at a time when other professional players in Paris were still using four-key clarinets.

During the 1770s Beer travelled extensively. For example, in 1774 he took part in the earliest performances of J.C. Bach's cantata Amor vincitore, in London; he also performed in Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and his native Bohemia. Late in 1779 he left Paris to perform in Frankfurt, St Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw. From 1783 Beer was employed as a clarinettist in the orchestra of the imperial theatre in Moscow and as a soloist, but he continued to travel and performed in Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Pressburg. By 1792 he had been called to Potsdam and engaged to direct concerts for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, though during the next four years he also visited Copenhagen, Weimar, Gotha, Vienna and Prague. In 1809, at the age of 65, he performed in a concert at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and was overwhelmingly praised.

Beer was important not only because he was the earliest well-known virtuoso clarinettist but because he popularized the German style of playing, which incorporates a soft expressive tone quality with a brilliant technique. He taught several influential clarinettists including Michel Yost (1754–86), Etienne Solère (1753–1817) and Heinrich Baermann (1784–1847).

WORKS

Orch: Cl Conc. (Leipzig, 1785), ed. J. Madden (London, 1978); Cl Conc. (Leipzig, 1787), attrib. L. Kozeluch, ed. G. Balassa (Budapest, 1975); Conc. no.11 cl, collab C. Stamitz (Berlin, 1793), ed. A.H. Christmann (New York, 1968)

Chbr: Sonata, cl, bn (Paris, 1775); 6 duos concertantes, 2 cl (Paris, 1802)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

ČSHS

DlabacžKL

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

MooserA

PierreH

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971)

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977)

A.R. Rice: ‘ Clarinet Fingering Charts, 1732–1816’, GSJ, xxxvii ( 1984), 16–41

M. Jacob: Die Klarinettenkonzerte von Carl Stamitz (Wiesbaden, 1991)

ALBERT R. RICE

Beer-Walbrunn, Anton

(b Kohlberg, nr Weiden in der Oberpfalz, 29 June 1864; d Munich, 22 March 1929). German composer and teacher. He came from a family of schoolteachers and received his first musical instruction from his father; he continued his studies at Regensburg (1877–80) and Amberg (1880–83). His father wanted him to become a teacher and refused to let him make his career as a musician, so Anton taught in Amberg (1883–6) and Eichstätt (1886), where he was also cathedral organist, and qualified as a teacher in 1886. When his father died in 1886, the Eichstätt Cathedral Kapellmeister Wilhelm Widmann enabled him to study at the Königliche Musikschule, Munich (1888–91), where he was a pupil of Joseph Rheinberger for composition, W.H. Riehl for music history and H. Bussmeyer for the piano. On completion of his studies, he was active as a freelance composer for a decade at Munich, where Count Schack enabled him to have his music performed. He was appointed teacher of the piano, theory and composition at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst in 1901, and was named professor in 1908; his pupils there included Furtwängler, Orff and Einstein.

Although Beer-Walbrunn was open to new ideas, his basic attitude was more conservative and rooted more firmly in Romanticism than that of the Munich school around Ludwig Thuille, to which he is often erroneously supposed to have belonged. His works never achieved widespread acclaim. He was at his best in his chamber music and settings of Shakespeare's sonnets. Of his other works, the most successful were the tragicomedy Don Quijote (given its première by Mottl, although he did not think highly of the opera) and the three preludes to Wolkenkuckucksheim.

WORKS

stage

Die Sühne (tragische Oper, 2, Beer-Walbrunn, after T. Körner: Liebe), Lübeck, 16 Feb 1894, vs (Berlin, 1896); rev. 1916–18 (Volksoper, 1)

Don Quijote (musikalische Tragikomödie, 3, G. Fuchs, after M. de Cervantes), Munich, National, 1 Jan 1908, vs (Munich, 1911)

Hamlet (incid music, W. Shakespeare), Berlin, 1909

Das Ungeheuer (musikalisches Lustspiel, 1, after A. Chekhov), Karlsruhe, Hof, 25 April 1914

Der Sturm (incid music, 2, after Shakespeare), Munich, Künstler, 1914

other works

Vocal: Der Luftgeister Gesang, chorus, orch, 1890; Mahomets Gesang (J.W. von Goethe), solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1895; Der Polenflüchtling, 1v, orch, 1905; Cyclus lyrisch-dramatischer Gesänge nach Shakespeares Sonetten, 1v, pf, 1906, orch, 1920; partsongs; more than 20 solo songs

Orch: 2 syms., 1891, 1906–9; Concert Ov., 1890; Konzertallegro, pf, 1893; Deutsche Suite, 1900; Wolkenkuckucksheim, 3 burlesques, 1908; Vn Conc., 1913–17; Lustspiel-Ov., 1921

Chbr: 5 str qts, 1891, 1892, 1895, 1899, 1901; Kleine Phantasie, vn, pf, 1891; Pf Qt, 1892; Sonata, vc, pf, 1895; Ode, vc, pf, 1899; Humoreske, str qt, pf, 1901; Sonata, vn, pf, 1905; Pf Qnt, 1927

Kbd: Reisebilder, pf, 1899; arr. of Deutsche Suite, pf 4 hands, 1900; Passacaglia and Fugue, org, 1906; In Memoriam, pf, 1915; Fantasie-sonate, pf, 1915; fugues and other pieces, pf 2 and 4 hands, org

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O.G. Sonneck: ‘Anton Beer-Walbrunn’, Suum cuique: Essays in Music (New York, 1916/R), 155–74 [with complete list of works]

A. Beer-Walbrunn: ‘Selbstbiographie’,Neue Musik-Zeitung, xxxviii (1917), 20–22, 38–9

W. Zentner: ‘Anton Beer-Walbrunn’, ZfM, cviii (1941), 154–8

K. Dorfmüller: ‘Dur und moll, und etwas darüber hinaus: zum Münchener Konzertleben der 20er Jahre’, Festschrift Albi Rosenthal, ed. R. Elvers (Tutzing, 1984), 105–29

R. Münster, R. Wagner and H. Hell (eds.): Jugendstil-Musik? Münchner Musikleben 1890–1918, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 19 May–31 July 1987 (Wiesbaden, 1987) [exhibition catalogue]

E. Otto: ‘Der professor aus Kohlberg: vor siebzig Jahren starb Anton beer-Walbrunn’, Musik in bayern, lvii (1999), 93–6

GAYNOR G. JONES/STEPHAN HÖRNER

Beesly, Michael

(bap. Sunningwell, Oxon., 23 June 1700; d after 1758). English psalmodist and singing teacher. He was a farmer's son. One of the first itinerant singing teachers to engrave and print his own music, he was arguably the ‘father’ of the fuging-tune, which became popular in England and America during the late 18th century. A psalmody book, apparently produced in the mid-1720s, has not survived, but four later publications, all undated, make a substantial contribution to our knowledge of country psalmody. The different editions had identical titles, but the use of separate engraving plates meant that contents could vary according to the purchaser's requirements. The music, which Beesly collected but may not have composed, exemplifies the bare harmony and unresolved dissonance of much early Gallery music. Although a few previous examples exist, his claim that the 20 new psalm tunes were ‘Compos'd with veriety of Fuges after a different manner to any yet extant’ is fully justified; his tune to Psalm viii was widely reprinted.

WORKS

Psalmody book (mid-1720s), lost, mentioned in Salter

A Book of Psalmody, Containing Instructions for Young Beginners … to Which is Added a Collection of Psalm-Tunes and Anthems, 3–4vv, (n.p., c1740)

A Collection of 20 New Psalm Tunes Compos'd with Veriety of Fuges After a Different Manner to Any Yet Extant (n.p., c1746, 2/c1750)

A Collection of 10 Psalm-Tunes and 10 Anthems (Upton, Berks., c1755) [only copy in Local Studies Library, Reading]

An Introduction to Psalmody … to Which is Added a Collection of Psalm-Tunes and Anthems (Oxford, c1756)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.E. Salter, ed.: T. Hearne: Remarks and Collections, ix, Oxford Historical Society Publications, lxv (Oxford, 1914), 321 [diary entry for 29 June 1727]

N. Temperley: ‘The Origins of the Fuging Tune’, RMARC, no.17 (1981), 1–32

D. Hunter: ‘English Country Psalmodists and their Publications’, JRMA, cxv (1990), 220–39

SALLY DRAGE

Beeson, Jack (Hamilton)

(b Muncie, IN, 15 July 1921). American composer and teacher. He attended the Eastman School (BM 1942, MM 1943) as a pupil of Phillips, Rogers and Hanson, and had private lessons with Bartók in New York (1944–5). From 1945 to 1948 he did graduate work in conducting and musicology at Columbia University, where he was an accompanist and conductor for the opera workshop; this apprenticeship strengthened the leaning towards opera which he had had from childhood. In 1945 he began to teach at Columbia, becoming MacDowell Professor of Music in 1967 and serving as chairman of the music department (1968–72); meanwhile he also taught at the Juilliard School (1961–3) and lectured at various universities in the USA. Among the awards he has received are a Rome Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Marc Blitzstein Award for the Musical Theater and the Gold Medal of the National Arts Club. He has held office in many music organizations, including the AMC, the American Composers Forum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP.

Beeson's operas may be considered to continue some of the qualities of those of Douglas Moore, one of his predecessors at Columbia. Though his style is of a later generation, it shares with Moore's a feeling for lyrical line, occasionally suggesting an American folk idiom; and Beeson, like Moore, has shaped successful opera subjects from American life and literature. In Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1975) he exploits the period charm of traditional operatic forms, as he did earlier with that of evangelical hymns and flapper dances in The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956). Beeson borrows from a variety of sources (popular songs, European Expressionism, folksong and dance, jazz and Italian opera) to enrich the musical dramatic background; any theatrical work that lasts for two hours, Beeson has said, should have a range of styles (Johns). Beeson's symphonic music is notable for its expert orchestration and effective use of polyphony.

WORKS

all published unless otherwise stated

operas

Jonah (2 or 3, Beeson, after P. Goodman), 1950

Hello out There (chbr op, 1, Beeson, after W. Saroyan), 1954, New York, Brander Matthews, 27 May 1954

The Sweet Bye and Bye (2, K. Elmslie), 1956, New York, Juilliard Concert Hall, 21 Nov 1957

Lizzie Borden (family portrait, 3, Elmslie), 1965, New York, City Center of Music and Drama, 25 March 1965

My Heart's in the Highlands (chbr op, 2 or 3, Beeson, after Saroyan), 1969; NET, 17 March 1970

Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (romantic comedy, 3, S. Harnick, after C. Fitch), 1975, Kansas City, Lyric, 20 Sept 1975

Dr. Heidegger's Fountain of Youth (chbr op, 1, Harnick, after N. Hawthorne), 1978, New York, National Arts Club, 17 Nov 1978

Cyrano (heroic comedy, 3, Harnick, after E. Rostand), 1990, Hagen, 10 Sept 1994

Sorry, Wrong Number (chbr op, 1, Beeson, after L. Fletcher), 1996, New York, Kaye Playhouse, 25 May 1999

Practice in the Art of Elocution (chbr operina, 1, Beeson), 1998, New York, Merkin Hall, 12 May 1998

choral

Knots: Jack and Jill for Grown-ups (R.D. Laing), 1979; Hinx, Minx (trad. nursery rhyme), 1980; Magicke Pieces (R. Herrick and others), chorus, 3 wind, 2 bells, 1991; Epitaphs (anon.), 1993; 60 shorter choral pieces

solo vocal

4 Crazy Jane Songs (W.B. Yeats), A, pf, 1944, rev. 1959, 1992; 3 Songs (W. Blake), T, pf, 1945, rev. 1951, 1995; 5 Songs (F. Quarles), S, pf, 1946, rev. 1950; Piazza Piece (J.C. Ransom), S, T, pf, 1951; 2 Songs (J. Betjeman), Bar, pf, 1952; 6 Lyrics (Eng. and Amer. poets), high v, pf, 1952, rev. 1959, 1995

2 Concert Arias, S, orch: The Elephant (D.H. Lawrence), 1953, The Hippopotamus (T.S. Eliot), orig. for S, pf, 1951, rev. and orchd, 1952, 1995; Leda (A. Huxley), spkr, pf, 1957, rev. 1995

A Creole Mystery (Beeson, after L. Hearn), Mez/Bar, str qt, 1970; The Day's no Rounder than its Angles Are (Viereck), Mez/Bar, str qt, 1971; From a Watchtower (W. Wordsworth, W.H. Auden, G.M. Hopkins, W. De la Mare), 5 songs, high v, pf, 1976; Cat (J. Keats), S, pf, 1979; Cowboy Song (C. Causley), Bar, pf, 1979; In the Public Gardens (J. Betjeman), T, pf, 1991; Inerludes and Arias from Cyrano, Bar, orch, 1997; The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (G. Leybourne and Beeson), ct, chbr orch/pf, 1999; many other songs

instrumental

Orch: Hymns and Dances, 1958 [from The Sweet Bye and Bye], arr. band, 1966; Sym. no.1, A, 1959; Transformations, 1959; Commemoration, band, chorus ad lib, 1960; Fanfare, brass, wind, perc, 1963

Chbr and solo inst: Song, fl, pf, 1945; Interlude, vn, pf, 1945, rev. 1951; Pf Sonata no.4, 1945, rev. 1951; Pf Sonata no.5, 1946, rev. 1951; Sonata, va, pf, 1953; 2 Diversions, pf, 1953, rev. of Pf Sonata no.3, 1944; Sketches in Black and White, pf, 1958; Round and Round, pf 4 hands, 1959; Sonata canonica, 2 a rec, 1966; Old Hundredth: Prelude and Doxology, org, 1972; Fantasy, Ditty and Fughettas, 2 Baroque/modern fl, 1992

45 works written before 1950

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Presser

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

Q. Eaton: Opera Production: a Handbook (St Paul, MN, 1961–74) [entries on Hello out There, The Sweet Bye and Bye, Lizzie Borden and My Heart's in the Highlands]

D. Johns: ‘Connections: an Interview with Jack Beeson’, Music Educators Journal, lxvi/2 (1979–80), 44–9

J. Beeson: ‘The Autobiography of Lizzie Borden’, OQ, iv/1 (1986–7), 15–42

HOWARD SHANET

Beethoven, Ludwig van

(b Bonn, bap. 17 Dec 1770; d Vienna, 26 March 1827).German composer. His early achievements, as composer and performer, show him to be extending the Viennese Classical tradition that he had inherited from Mozart and Haydn. As personal affliction – deafness, and the inability to enter into happy personal relationships – loomed larger, he began to compose in an increasingly individual musical style, and at the end of his life he wrote his most sublime and profound works. From his success at combining tradition and exploration and personal expression, he came to be regarded as the dominant musical figure of the 19th century, and scarcely any significant composer since his time has escaped his influence or failed to acknowledge it. For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music.

11. The ‘three periods’.

12. Music of the Bonn period.

13. Music of the early Vienna period.

14. The symphonic ideal.

15. Middle-period works.

16. Late-period style.

17. Late-period works.

18. Personal characteristics.

19. Posthumous influence and reception.

JOSEPH KERMAN, ALAN TYSON (with SCOTT G. BURNHAM) (§§1–18), SCOTT G. BURNHAM (§19), DOUGLAS JOHNSON/ SCOTT G. BURNHAM (work-list), WILLIAM DRABKIN/SCOTT G. BURNHAM (bibliography)

1. Family background and childhood.

Three generations of the Beethoven family found employment as musicians at the court of the Electorate of Cologne, which had its seat at Bonn. The composer’s grandfather, Ludwig (Louis) van Beethoven (1712–73), the son of an enterprising burgher of Mechelen (Belgium), was a trained musician with a fine bass voice, and after positions at Mechelen, Leuven and Liège accepted in 1733 an appointment as bass in the electoral chapel at Bonn. In 1761 he was appointed Kapellmeister, a position which – although he seems not to have been a composer, unlike other occupants of such a post – carried with it the responsibility of supervising the musical establishment of the court.

With his wife Maria Josepha Poll, whom he had married in 1733, and who later took to drink, he had only one child that survived. Johann van Beethoven (c1740–1792) was a lesser man than his father. He, too, entered the elector’s service, first as a boy soprano in 1752, and continuing after adolescence as a tenor. He was also proficient enough on the piano and the violin to be able to supplement his income by giving lessons on those instruments as well as in singing. In November 1767 he married Maria Magdalena (1745–87), daughter of Heinrich Keverich, ‘overseer of cooking’ at the electoral summer palace of Ehrenbreitstein, and already the widow of Johann Leym, valet to the Elector of Trier; she was not yet 21. The couple took lodgings in Bonn at 515 Bonngasse. Their first child Ludwig Maria (bap. 2 April 1769) lived only six days; their second, also called Ludwig and the subject of this narrative, was baptized on 17 December 1770. Of five children subsequently born to the couple only two survived infancy: Caspar Anton Carl (bap. 8 April 1774) and Nikolaus Johann (bap. 2 October 1776). Both brothers were to play important parts in Beethoven’s life.

Inevitably the early years of the son of an obscure musician in a small provincial town are themselves sunk in obscurity, and though speculation and myth-making have both been productive, facts are rather scarce. It is clear that at a very early age he received instruction from his father on the piano and the violin. Tradition adds that the child, made to stand at the keyboard, was often in tears. Beethoven’s first appearance in public was at a concert given with another of his father’s pupils (a contralto) on 26 March 1778, at which (according to the advertisement) he played ‘various clavier concertos and trios’. A little later, when he was eight, his father is said to have sent him to the old court organist van den Eeden, from whom he may have received some grounding in music theory as well as keyboard instruction. He appears also to have had piano lessons from Tobias Friedrich Pfeiffer, who lodged for a while with the family, and informal tuition from several local organists. A relative, Franz Rovantini, gave the boy lessons on the violin and viola. His general education was not continued beyond the elementary school, but this was in accordance with the usual custom in Bonn at that time, only a few children going on to a Gymnasium (high school). The comparative brevity of Beethoven’s formal education, combined with the fact that most of his out-of-school hours must have been devoted to music, explains some of the gaps in his academic equipment, such as his blindness to orthography and punctuation and his inability to carry out the simplest multiplication sum.

In 1779 a musician arrived in Bonn who was to be Beethoven’s first important teacher. This was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who came as the musical director of a theatrical company that the elector took into his establishment. The point at which he began instructing Beethoven is not known. But in February 1781 Neefe succeeded to the post of court organist, a position that evidently required an assistant, and by June 1782, when Neefe left Bonn for a short period, Beethoven was acting as deputy in his absence; he was then 11½. Neefe’s estimate of his pupil is contained in a communication to Cramer’s Magazin der Musik dated 2 March 1783 – the first printed notice of Beethoven:

Louis van Beethoven, son of the tenor singer already mentioned, a boy of 11 years and of most promising talent. He plays the piano very skilfully and with power, reads at sight very well, and I need say no more than that the chief piece he plays is Das wohltemperirte Clavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe put into his hands … So far as his other duties permitted, Herr Neefe has also given him instruction in thoroughbass. He is now training him in composition and for his encouragement has had nine variations for the piano, written by him on a march [by Ernst Christoph Dressler], engraved at Mannheim. This youthful genius is deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he has begun.

The reference to Mozart was presumably to the child prodigy and not to the mature composer whose years of fame in Vienna were yet to come; but Neefe’s affection for his young pupil and confidence in his ability are plain. The variations on Dressler’s march (woo63), published by Götz of Mannheim, were Beethoven’s first published work.

Further experience came to Beethoven via Neefe in 1783 when his teacher, overburdened with the work of the temporarily absent Kapellmeister Lucchesi, employed him as ‘cembalist in the orchestra’, not only a position of some responsibility but also one that will have enabled him to hear all the popular operas of the day. The autumn saw the publication of his first significant composition, the three piano sonatas dedicated to the Elector Maximilian Friedrich (woo47). Towards the close of the year Beethoven undertook a trip to Holland, where he is reported to have performed on numerous occasions, notably including an orchestral concert at The Hague (at which he probably played his Concerto in E, woo4).

2. Youth.

Although Beethoven by now enjoyed a sturdy reputation as a virtuoso in the regions surrounding Bonn, he still drew no salary from the court for his duties as Neefe's assistant. His petition (in February 1784) for an official position as assistant to the court organist was granted, but the elector died before his salary, if any, could be fixed. But the new elector, Maximilian Franz, brother of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, instituted economies on his accession in 1784 that transferred some of Neefe's salary to his pupil. Beethoven’s salary as organist was thus fixed at 150 florins. Increased attention to his activities as a performer may have been a factor in his diminished output as a composer in the years from 1785 to 1789. Apart from a set of three piano quartets from 1785 (woo36), possibly intended for dedication to the new elector but not published until after Beethoven’s death, there exists little evidence of compositional activity during these years. About this time, too, he seems to have had violin lessons from Franz Ries, a good friend of the family, and to have begun giving piano lessons himself.

Neefe, as quoted above, had declared that the young genius should be given the chance to travel, and in the spring of 1787 Beethoven visited Vienna. In the absence of documents much remains uncertain about the precise aims of the journey and the extent to which they were realized; but there seems little doubt that he met Mozart and perhaps had a few lessons from him. It seems equally clear that he did not remain in Vienna for longer than about two weeks. The news of his mother’s deteriorating health precipitated his sudden journey back. He returned to Bonn to find his mother dying of tuberculosis, and his first surviving letter, to a member of a family in Augsburg that had befriended him on his way, describes the melancholy events of that summer and hints at his own ill-health, depression and lack of financial resources.

For the fortunes of the Beethoven family were in decline. This was not always the case. It is now known that Beethoven did not spend his early childhood in great poverty, as most biographers have assumed. Johann van Beethoven managed to support his family in reasonably moderate circumstances until the mid-1780s, when a series of misadventures severely reduced his capacity as breadwinner.

This is perhaps the place for a word or two about Beethoven’s parents. The personality of the mother whom he now mourned (she had died on 17 July 1787) does not emerge in very distinctive terms; the accounts speak in conventional phrases of her piety, gentleness and kindness, and of her gravity of manner. This is contrasted, again somewhat conventionally, with Johann van Beethoven’s harsher and perhaps even violent temperament. In these years the talents on which he relied to support his family, at no time outstanding, seem to have been observed to decline. An official report of 1784 described his voice as ‘very stale’, and for some time before his wife’s death he had begun to drink heavily, as his mother had done. In 1789, therefore, Beethoven – who was not yet 19 – took the extraordinary step of placing himself at the head of the family by petitioning for half his father’s salary to enable him to support his brothers; this was granted, and the old tenor’s services were dispensed with. The psychological significance of this act of self-assertion has not escaped his biographers.

The next four years, the last that Beethoven spent in Bonn, can be portrayed in a sunnier light. From 1789, when the musical life of the town under the new elector was fully resumed, Beethoven played the viola in the orchestras both of the court chapel and of the theatre, alongside such fine musicians as Franz Ries and Andreas Romberg (violins), Bernhard Romberg (cello), Nikolaus Simrock (horn) and Antoine Reicha (flute); some of these were to remain almost lifelong friends. He also began to be active again as a composer, producing, among other works, the most impressive composition of the Bonn years, the cantata on the death of the Emperor Joseph II (woo87).

Joseph II was not merely the elector’s elder brother but a powerful symbol of those intellectual, social and political ideas of the 18th century known as the Enlightenment (Aufklärung). His reformist ideas found a ready welcome in Bonn among Beethoven’s contemporaries and immediate superiors in age, so that the grief caused by the emperor’s death in Vienna on 20 February 1790 was no doubt more than merely formal. On hearing the news four days later the literary society (Lesegesellschaft) of Bonn at once planned a memorial celebration for 19 March. Beethoven was commissioned to produce a cantata, but for unknown reasons the work was not performed. It may be that there was insufficient time to rehearse it; that it was found unimpressive seems unlikely, since in the autumn a second cantata ‘On the Accession of Leopold II to the Imperial Dignity’ (woo88) was commissioned and completed – though that too seems not to have reached performance.

One further commission was undertaken to please Beethoven’s talented and powerful friend Count Ferdinand Waldstein: on 6 March 1791 the count produced a ballet in old German costume, performed by the local nobility, and the music for this Ritterballett (woo1) was by Beethoven, though his name was not made public. The dedication to the Countess von Hatzfeld of 24 variations for piano on the theme of Righini’s arietta ‘Venni amore’ (woo65), published in the summer of 1791, indicates another aristocratic connection.

But for Beethoven the chief excitements of this year may have been outside Bonn itself. As Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, the elector had to preside for many weeks over its sessions at Mergentheim, and he saw to it that he had his orchestra with him. The players’ journey up the Rhine was accompanied by much revelry and clowning; in later years Beethoven retained many happy memories of this, as well as one curious memento (a mock diploma). An ambitious series of concerts was given at Mergentheim, and Beethoven also seized the opportunity of going with friends to Aschaffenburg, a summer palace of the Electors of Mainz, to visit the famous pianist Sterkel. It is said that Sterkel’s light touch and graceful, fastidious style were a revelation to Beethoven. But when Sterkel challenged him to play his own Righini variations, doubting his ability to do so, it was Beethoven’s turn to cause amazement, particularly since he improvised extra variations in a style that imitated Sterkel’s.

By this time, it is clear, it was not only other professional musicians who recognized his worth or valued his friendship. He had formed a considerable circle of friends, drawn from some of the most discerning, progressive and respected families in Bonn. A few at least deserve mention here. Count Waldstein, eight years older than Beethoven, had come to Bonn from Vienna in 1788. A close associate of the elector and highly musical himself, he proved a devoted friend and patron of Beethoven, whom he came to know in the cultivated circle of the von Breuning family. Frau von Breuning, whose husband had died in a fire in 1777, had four children, all slightly younger than Beethoven: Eleonore, later to marry another friend of Beethoven’s Bonn and early Vienna years, Franz Gerhard Wegeler; Christoph; Stephan, a lifelong friend; and Lorenz, who died young. The young widow herself became something of a second mother to Beethoven and seems to have had a keen insight into his character. She used her authority to dissuade him from neglecting duties that he found tedious, while evidently recognizing his tendency to self-absorption, since she would often remark: ‘He has his raptus again’. She exercised some control, too, over his friendships; of the less suitable ones he remarked in later years: ‘She understood how to keep insects off the flowers’. This kindly supervision, and the provision of what became almost a second home, meant much to Beethoven, who in spite of his many admirers remained in some ways a solitary youth, and on occasion a painfully shy one.

There were other opportunities for agreeable social life in Bonn. The elector was often absent, leaving Beethoven free for musical activities unconnected with the court. He spent much of his time in a circle of aristocratic friends and prosperous citizens such as the Westerholts, the Eichhoffs and the Kochs. The Kochs ran a kind of social and political club, the Zehrgarten, that was a centre for intellectual life in Bonn, and a number of Beethoven’s early compositions were written for members of this circle.

It may have been Waldstein whose voice was decisive in the proposal that Beethoven should now go to Vienna to study with Haydn. When Haydn had passed through Bonn on his way to England in December 1790 he had met some of ‘the most capable musicians’, but it is not known whether Beethoven was among them. (Neefe, Beethoven's enthusiastic mentor, must surely have been.) But in July 1792, according to Wegeler, the electoral orchestra assembled at Godesberg to give a breakfast for Haydn, now on his journey back to Vienna, and Wegeler adds that on this occasion Beethoven showed him a cantata (doubtless woo87 or 88) and received Haydn’s commendation. More probably that had happened earlier, on Haydn’s outward journey. But it was now that the matter of Beethoven becoming Haydn’s pupil was no doubt raised; the elector, to whom it fell to pay for the journey and the living expenses in Vienna, in due course sanctioned the arrangement. Beethoven’s departure was fixed for the beginning of November. An album amicorum from this time records the good wishes of a large number of his friends, who had no reason to expect that he would be leaving Bonn for ever. None of the entries was more prophetic than that of Waldstein:

Dear Beethoven: You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is still mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes once more to form a union with another. With the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands. Your true friend, Waldstein.

3. 1792–5.

Beethoven arrived in Vienna, the city that was to be his home for the rest of his life, in the second week of November 1792. He was not quite 22. His entry into Viennese circles was unobtrusive, and the sporadic entries in the little diary that he had started on his journey and kept at least until 1794 are the best guide to his immediate preoccupations. They show him looking for a piano and for a wig-maker, buying clothes, noting the address of a dancing-master, and the like. Later entries are concerned with the renting of some lodgings. And on the same page that records ‘on Wednesday, 12 December [1792], I have 15 ducats’, there is a variety of small sums of money set against the name of ‘Haidn’. Within weeks of his arrival, therefore, the instruction from Haydn which had been the purpose of his journey had already begun. Of another event of the same month, the death of his father in Bonn on 18 December, there is no mention in the diary.

Haydn’s tuition lasted for no longer than about a year; in January 1794 he left Vienna for his second London visit. The arrangement proved a disappointment to Beethoven, but he concealed this at the time from Haydn, and throughout 1793 the relations between pupil and teacher were outwardly cordial. Haydn appears to have had no corresponding misgivings – at any rate until later, when Beethoven had some very harsh things to say about him. Temperamentally, however, they were set for conflict. The childless Haydn no doubt wished for affection and even love from his most brilliant pupil – but that was the one thing that Beethoven was too mistrustful to give. Though he could write to the only moderately gifted (and no longer present) Neefe, ‘If ever I become a great man, yours will be some of the credit’, he was almost bound to feel the genius of ‘Papa’ Haydn standing in his way, one more father to be defied or circumvented. Beethoven’s unease crystallized into the groundless suspicion that his teacher ‘was not well minded towards him’ and was neglecting or perhaps even sabotaging his tuition. (The formal side of the instruction can be seen from the surviving exercises, which consist of strict species counterpoint; they are in Beethoven’s handwriting, with somewhat intermittent corrections by Haydn.) The lack of thoroughness on Haydn’s part formed one of Beethoven’s grievances. According to the composer Johann Schenk (whose testimony has, however, been contested), Beethoven secretly enlisted Schenk's help with these exercises.

It is not clear whether Haydn also instructed him in free composition. A clue here is provided by an episode that seems to reflect better on Haydn than on his pupil. Since leaving Bonn Beethoven had found himself with insufficient money for his living expenses. He continued, it is true, to receive his Bonn salary each quarter, and after his father’s death he had successfully petitioned the elector to double it; but some part of this must have gone to support his brothers, who were still in Bonn. For his subsistence in Vienna he had only 100 ducats (nearly 500 florins) per annum. He had hoped to receive the whole of it on his arrival in Vienna, at which time he had to make considerable outlays, but it seems to have been paid quarterly. The result was that he had to borrow. On 23 November 1793 Haydn wrote on his behalf to the elector, enclosing five pieces of music, ‘compositions of my dear pupil Beethoven’, whom he predicted would ‘in time fill the position of one of Europe’s greatest composers’. He added (with characteristic generosity): ‘I shall be proud to call myself his teacher; I only wish that he might remain with me a little while longer’. Haydn’s letter next turned to the question of Beethoven’s subsidy; it described the elector’s 100 ducats as a sum quite inadequate to Beethoven’s needs, pointed out that he himself had had to lend him 500 florins, and ended by suggesting that the elector might do well to increase the subsidy to 1000 florins in the coming year. The elector’s reply was both accurate and icy. Four of the five submitted works had been composed and performed in Bonn long before the move to Vienna, and were therefore no evidence of progress. Moreover Beethoven was being paid not only the 100 ducats but also his ordinary salary of 400 florins, so had no reason to be in particular difficulty. The elector concluded:

I am wondering if he would not do better to begin his return journey, in order to resume his duties here; for I very much doubt whether he will have made any important progress in composition and taste during his present stay, and I fear he will only bring back debts from his journey, just as he did from his first trip to Vienna.

It looks as though Beethoven had misled Haydn in respect of his total income, and thus exposed Haydn to the elector’s withering reply. He may also have misled Haydn as to the dates of the works the latter submitted to the elector, although it is hard to know whether Haydn actually thought that they were new works or knowingly submitted them as newly revised works. In any event, this suggests that Beethoven completed hardly anything new under Haydn’s immediate supervision, though he seems to have revised and polished several of the later Bonn works.

When Haydn left for England in 1794, he passed Beethoven on to another tutor, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, the Kapellmeister at the Stephansdom and the best-known teacher of counterpoint in Vienna. The lessons, three times a week, started after Haydn’s departure and continued throughout 1794 to the spring of 1795. They were more thorough-going than Haydn’s had been, and covered not only simple counterpoint but contrapuntal exercises in free writing, in imitation, in two-, three- and four-part fugue, choral fugue, double counterpoint at the different intervals, double fugue, triple counterpoint and canon – at which point they were broken off. Albrechtsberger proved a most conscientious, though at the same time very dry, teacher.

A third name is often linked with Haydn’s and Albrechtsberger’s: that of the imperial Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri. It was Salieri’s genial custom to offer free tuition to impecunious musicians, especially in the setting of Italian words to music; and it is usually stated that Beethoven availed himself of this informal help soon after his arrival in Vienna. The only surviving evidence of any serious study with Salieri, however, dates from the years 1801–2, when he set a large number of unaccompanied partsongs with Italian words and a scena and aria for soprano and string orchestra (woo92a). These were followed in 1802 by two final pieces scored for orchestra, the terzetto Tremate, empi, tremate (op.116) and the duet Ne’ giorni tuoi felici (woo93). They are more than exercises and may have been intended for a concert. In spite of Salieri’s help Beethoven never fully mastered Italian prosody, though something had no doubt been gained in the skill of setting words by the time that he turned in the direction of opera.

But that is to jump far ahead. Aside from his studies, Beethoven’s first task in Vienna was to establish himself as a pianist and composer. This was something that he achieved both rapidly and with remarkable success. His gifts apart, there were at least two reasons for this, and they not only helped to launch him but continued to sustain him after he had gained an ascendant position. The first was his immediate contacts with aristocratic circles. He had arrived from Bonn as the court organist and pianist to the Emperor Franz’s uncle, and with a reputation already spread by high-born Viennese who had heard him while visiting the elector; he was a protégé of Count Waldstein, who was connected by birth or by marriage with several of the greatest houses of the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian nobility; and he was the pupil of Haydn. Thus he was in the strongest possible position to be introduced into the best aristocratic circles.

The second reason had to do with the character of the circles themselves. The aristocracy based on the Austrian capital surpassed all others of Europe in its devotion to music, and much of its time and a considerable part of its fortunes – a ruinous amount in some cases – was spent in the conspicuous indulgence of this taste. Not only did these aristocrats welcome virtuosos to their town palaces and country estates, but some of them, such as Prince Lobkowitz, kept private orchestras and even – like the Esterházys – opera companies as well. If their support was not on quite so lavish a scale, at least they employed a wind band or, like Prince Karl Lichnowsky and the Russian Count Rasumovsky, a quartet of string players. The Court Councillor von Kees was among the many who organized private concerts; a large library of music was assembled by the Baron van Swieten, a patriarch whose distinction it was to cultivate the music of Bach and Handel and introduce it to Viennese audiences. The names of van Swieten and some of these others are found in the records of Mozart’s and Haydn’s lives; and they now gave a welcome to Beethoven.

He certainly needed more than their mere approval. His salary from Bonn was paid only until March 1794, and in a list of the elector’s musicians from the autumn of the year he was entered as ‘Beethoven, without salary in Vienna, until recalled’. (The elector now had his own difficulties as a result of the military victories of the neighbouring French. He had visited Vienna in January 1794, and Beethoven may have called on him and discussed his position.) Since many of the aristocracy had spacious accommodation or several houses, it was natural for them to provide Beethoven with lodging. One of the first houses in Vienna (if not the very first) in which he had rooms was owned by Prince Lichnowsky, who soon established himself as a leading patron of the composer. Both he and his wife Princess Christiane (née Thun) were intensely musical, and lavished a steady stream of kindnesses on him. But others were scarcely less generous or hospitable, so that it is no surprise to find Beethoven setting off in June 1793 for Eisenstadt, where Haydn was staying; doubtless the Esterházys looked after him. Another early supporter who became a lifelong friend was the Hungarian Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. A capable amateur cellist and composer of quartets, he ardently promoted performances of Beethoven’s music and continually rendered him small services, including the provision of quill pens, which Beethoven could never cut properly himself.

Beethoven’s instant and striking successes as a virtuoso were at first confined to performances in private houses. Regular public concerts of the sort given throughout the season in London and Paris were not then a feature of Viennese musical life; there were only a few annual charity concerts and an occasional subscription concert of a virtuoso or Kapellmeister. But in the salons the stunning effect of Beethoven’s solo playing, and particularly perhaps of his improvising, was immediately recognized. A glimpse of what this aspect of his life was like to Beethoven is to be found in one of his letters to Eleonore von Breuning in Bonn, to whom – because of a quarrel before his departure from there – he did not write until he had been in Vienna for almost a year. He had dedicated to her the first of his works to be published in Vienna (composed in part in Bonn), his variations for violin and piano on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ (woo40), and in alluding to the difficult trills in the coda confessed to her:

I should never have written down this kind of piece, had I not already noticed fairly often how some people in Vienna after hearing me extemporize one evening would next day note down several peculiarities of my style and palm them off with pride as their own. Well, as I foresaw that their pieces would soon be published, I resolved to forestall those people. But there was another reason, too; my desire to embarrass those Viennese pianists, some of whom are my sworn enemies. I wanted to revenge myself on them in this way, because I knew beforehand that my variations would here and there be put before the said gentlemen and that they would cut a sorry figure with them.

The pugnaciousness of the virtuoso is characteristic, and it was not long before he displayed his powers before wider audiences.

An early opportunity came at a charity concert in the Burgtheater on 29 March 1795. Beethoven appeared as composer as well as virtuoso, for he played a piano concerto of his own, probably the work in B, later published as the Second Concerto (op.19). His old friend from Bonn, Franz Gerhard Wegeler, who was in Vienna from October 1794 to the summer of 1796, witnessed the preparations for this concert – or it may have been the one nine months later in December and the concerto may have been the First (op.15) in C – and relates how Beethoven completed the finale only at the very last moment while suffering from severe abdominal pains. At a second charity concert the next day Beethoven again appeared on the platform; this time he gave an improvisation. And on 31 March he played for the third time in three days at a performance of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito organized by his widow; this time the concerto was one of Mozart’s.

Apart from the variations dedicated to Eleonore von Breuning he had not yet published anything in Vienna. The decision was deliberate, for his op.1 was intended to be an event. He chose a set of three piano trios, a genre dear to aristocratic devotees of chamber music, and he dedicated it to Prince Lichnowsky. The trios had already been heard and admired, possibly in earlier versions. There is a well-known story of what purports to have been their first performance at a soirée of Lichnowsky’s at which Haydn was present; although he praised them, he is said to have advised Beethoven not to publish the third of them, in C minor. If this story is true down to the details, the soirée must have taken place before Haydn’s departure for England in January 1794, for when he returned to Vienna in August 1795 op.1 had just been published. But it seems more likely that he heard the trios only on his return, and expressed regret about the inclusion of the C minor one. Since the third trio ultimately proved the most successful, Beethoven suspected malice on Haydn’s part; years later Haydn confirmed that he had had misgivings about its publication, adding that he had not believed it would be understood and received so well. Beethoven published his op.1 by subscription, the edition being produced by the publisher Artaria. The subscription list contained 123 names (many of them recruited by Lichnowsky), and the subscriptions amounted to 241 copies at one ducat (roughly four and a half florins) each; since Beethoven paid the publisher only a florin per copy he made a handsome profit.

According to Wegeler, Haydn’s return to Vienna was marked by the performance at Lichnowsky’s of another substantial composition by Beethoven: the three piano sonatas that he subsequently published in March 1796 as his op.2 and dedicated to Haydn. It is said that Haydn had hoped Beethoven would append to his name on the title-pages of his earliest works the words ‘pupil of Haydn’ – a common enough custom – and that Beethoven declined to do so, privately declaring that although he had had some lessons from Haydn he had never learnt anything from him. At all events the sonatas (like the trios before them) were published without any acknowledgment of pupillage.

Outwardly, however, relations between the two did not appear to be strained. On 18 December 1795 Beethoven made his second public appearance in Vienna as a composer-virtuoso, playing a piano concerto at a concert which Haydn organized and which included three of his latest symphonies, written for London. It is probable that this was the first performance of the C major concerto. Another sign of Beethoven’s growing popularity was the invitation this year to write the minuets and German dances for the November ball held in the Redoutensaal by the Pensionsgesellschaft Bildender Künstler.

4. 1796–1800.

Beethoven’s sights were now set on still wider audiences. His youngest brother Nikolaus Johann had arrived from Bonn at the very end of 1795 and had found employment in an apothecary’s shop; and Caspar Carl, the other brother, had been in Vienna from the middle of 1794, apparently supporting himself by giving music lessons. With his brothers thus established in Vienna, Beethoven now felt able to embark on a concert tour. In February 1796 he set out for Prague, travelling (as Mozart had done seven years earlier) with Prince Lichnowsky. Writing from Prague to his brother Johann in Vienna he announced his intentions of visiting Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin, and added: ‘I am well, very well. My art is winning me friends and respect, and what more do I want? And this time I shall make a good deal of money’. On 11 March he gave a concert in Prague; on 29 April he played before the Elector of Saxony in Dresden. On reaching Berlin, he appeared several times before the King of Prussia (Friedrich Wilhelm II), and with the king’s first cellist, Jean Louis Duport, he played the two op.5 cello sonatas, written for this performance. Another pièce d’occasion was the set of 12 variations for cello and piano on a theme of Handel; the cello was of course the king’s instrument, and the choice of theme (‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’) may have contained a courteous nod towards the throne. The king gave Beethoven a gold snuffbox filled with louis d’ors: ‘no ordinary snuffbox’, Beethoven later declared with pride, ‘but such a one as it might have been customary to give to an ambassador’. He seems to have stayed for about a month in Berlin, making the acquaintance of the Kapellmeister, Himmel, as well as of Zelter and Fasch, and twice giving improvisations before the Singakademie.

By the time that Beethoven returned to Vienna his friend Wegeler had gone back to Bonn, together with Christoph von Breuning, though Christoph’s brother Lorenz remained in Vienna. Beethoven and Wegeler – who completed his studies in medicine, married Eleonore von Breuning in 1802, and set up practice in Koblenz – never met again, but they remained friends and exchanged letters from time to time. Wegeler’s contribution to the Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven that he compiled with Ferdinand Ries after Beethoven’s death and published in 1838 (with a supplement, 1845) is a valuable source of information on Beethoven’s childhood and adolescence in Bonn and on his life in Vienna up to 1796.

At the end of 1796 Beethoven again travelled. He played at a concert at Pressburg (now Bratislava) on 23 November. The next year, 1797, is almost devoid of incidents that have left any record. At the end of May he wrote to Wegeler that he was doing well – in fact, better and better; on 1 October he penned some warm lines in the album of Lorenz von Breuning, who was leaving Vienna to return to Bonn. Between those dates nothing is known, and it is even possible that he was seriously ill at that time. One source assigns such an illness to the second half of the previous year, where there is also a gap in the records (from July to November). The year 1797 saw the publication of several compositions: his opp.5–8, the most important of which were the E Piano Sonata (op.7) and the cello sonatas written for Berlin (op.5), as well as the song Adelaide (op.46), dedicated to the author of its words, the poet Matthisson. The publications of 1798 were even more assured, including the three op.9 string trios, his most impressive chamber works to date, and the three op.10 piano sonatas. The trios were dedicated to Count Johann Georg von Browne, a patron whom Beethoven described in the dedication as the ‘first Maecenas of his Muse’, while op.10 was dedicated to Browne’s wife.

Early in 1798 considerable interest was aroused by the arrival in Vienna of the emissary of the French Directoire, General Bernadotte; in his retinue was the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Both were only a few years older than Beethoven, whose acquaintance they made. Bernadotte’s sojourn in Vienna was brief, but he is said to have suggested to Beethoven the idea of writing a ‘heroic’ symphony on the theme of the young General Bonaparte.

Later in the year (the exact date is unknown) Beethoven visited Prague and gave two public concerts, as well as a private recital. They were attended and described in some detail by the Bohemian composer Václav Tomášek (Wenzel Tomaschek). He heard Beethoven play the Adagio and Rondo from the Piano Sonata in A op.2 no.2, improvisations on ‘Ah perdona’ from Mozart’s Tito and on ‘Ah vous dirai-je maman’, and both the B and C major piano concertos (Tomášek described the former as having just been written for Prague, so it was probably a revised version that was performed). For Tomášek, who by the end of his life had heard all the outstanding virtuosos from the age of Mozart to the 1840s, Beethoven remained the greatest pianist of all – though Beethoven the composer came in for more criticism. Only in 1798–9, in fact, did Beethoven’s virtuosity, which seems until then to have had no serious rivals in Vienna, come under challenge from the Salzburg-born pianist Joseph Wölfl (with whom Beethoven directly engaged in a piano duel) and from Johann Baptist Cramer of London; both were about his age. The stimulus of competition from two such excellent players, whose strengths were nevertheless rather different from his own, could only have had a salutary effect on his playing, which he was to describe in 1801 (to a correspondent who had not heard him for two years) as having ‘considerably improved’.

It was probably a living composer whose challenge Beethoven was finding more dispiriting. In 1795–6 he had reacted to the brilliant symphonies that Haydn had brought back from London by attempting to write a symphony of his own in C major, but although he worked at it vigorously it remained unfinished and was abandoned. Now, in April 1798, Haydn gave private performances of his new oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation), and Beethoven might well be excused for believing his old teacher’s confession that the inspiration for some passages was more than human. Furthermore, Haydn continued to produce masterly string quartets with unabated vigour: six had been written in 1793 and six more in 1797. Although all the works with opus numbers that Beethoven had so far published in Vienna, apart from the piano sonatas, could loosely be called chamber works, the particular genre that was most closely associated with Haydn, and indeed with Mozart as well – the string quartet – was noticeably unrepresented. That Beethoven was only too aware of their formidable example there can be no doubt, and he copied out movements from several of their quartets in score for closer study. Still, the challenge was one for which he now felt himself ready, and in the second half of 1798 and through the winter and spring he worked on a set of quartets.

It is tempting to draw a connection between the selfconsciousness of this undertaking and a change in his working methods which coincided with it. Beethoven had always made sketches of the compositions that he was engaged in writing, and as time went on they became more voluminous. But hitherto they had been written on loose single leaves or bifolia of music paper. From the middle of 1798 he began to make his sketches in books of music paper. The first two of the sketchbooks contain sketches for four of the quartets that he was now writing, as well as for a considerable number of other works that he completed, revised or attempted to write in the same months. (The completed works include a song, La tiranna woo125, which he wrote to English words, working in part from a phonetic transcription.) The sketchbooks evidently retained some value for him long after they had been filled up, for he kept them by him and preserved most of them in a growing pile for the rest of his life. Some aspects of their importance, a particular preoccupation of Beethoven scholarship in recent years, are discussed below in §19.

In 1798 Karl Amenda, a student of theology and a competent violinist, arrived in Vienna from his native Courland (Latvia), and became tutor to Prince Lobkowitz’s children and music teacher at the home of Mozart’s widow. He and Beethoven soon became fast friends; indeed they were almost inseparable. But in the late summer of 1799 Amenda was obliged to depart again for Courland, and on 25 June 1799 Beethoven gave him a copy of a quartet ‘as a small memorial of our friendship’. This quartet was later published in a somewhat altered form as the first of the op.18 quartets. It is not clear how many of the six quartets had been completed by the end of 1799; but the ones written first were in any case revised later before being sent to the publisher.

Other friendships formed around this time were ultimately more fateful for Beethoven. In May 1799 the Countesses Therese and Josephine von Brunsvik, then 24 and 20, came to Vienna from Hungary on a short visit with their widowed mother, who wished them to take lessons from Beethoven. He was charmed by them, proved a very attentive teacher, and for their album composed a ‘musical offering’ consisting of a song with some variations for piano duet (woo74). Through them he became friends with the other members of the family, their brother Franz and their youngest sister Charlotte; Julie (Giulietta) Guicciardi, who came to Vienna from Trieste with her parents in 1800, was their very young cousin. Beethoven was soon a welcome guest on visits to their estates in Hungary. But the short trip to Vienna had unhappy consequences for Josephine. The family made the acquaintance of Count Joseph Deym (or Herr Müller; he had been exiled after a duel and returned under a pseudonym); Deym was the proprietor of a famous museum of waxworks, and although he was almost 30 years older than Josephine, her mother pressed his claim as a suitable husband for her, partly no doubt in an attempt to redeem the family fortunes. Josephine reluctantly assented, and they were quickly married; but Deym was in fact badly in debt, so that even financially the match had nothing to be said for it. The visits of Beethoven to the wing of the 80-room museum house in Vienna in which the Deyms lived must have afforded some consolation to the unhappy young countess.

On 2 April 1800 Beethoven gave his first concert for his own benefit, in the Burgtheater. The music included, besides a Mozart symphony and numbers from Haydn’s Creation, two new works by Beethoven, the Septet (op.20) and the First Symphony. The former soon became one of his most popular works; the reception of the latter was appreciative, although the heavy scoring for the wind was remarked on. His piano playing was on display in an improvisation and a piano concerto – probably the C major. No doubt he had planned to produce a new concerto, the Third, in C minor, written around this time but not performed until the spring of 1803 (the score, with a heavily revised solo part, is dated ‘1803’). Perhaps, then, the C minor concerto could not be completed in time for the concert. For his appearance later in the same month with the Bohemian horn player Johann Wenzel Stich (or ‘Giovanni Punto’, the name that Stich preferred to use) he very rapidly wrote a horn sonata (op.17); they gave a second concert three weeks later in Pest. Beethoven may have spent part of the summer of 1800 with the Brunsvik family in Hungary.

The second half of 1800 was outwardly uneventful; it doubtless saw the final revision of the op.18 string quartets, and the writing of the B Piano Sonata (op.22) and of the A minor and F major violin sonatas (opp.23, 24). There was less inducement to prepare new works for a possible concert in the following spring, since he had received an important commission for the court stage: he was to write the music for a ballet designed by the celebrated ballet-master Salvatore Viganò, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (op.43). This was given its first performance at the Burgtheater on 28 March 1801 and was successful enough to be repeated more than 20 times. Only a sketch of the scenario survives. In the finale Beethoven used a melody that evidently came to assume a certain emotional importance for him, perhaps even embodying something of his spirit of determination and heroism in battling against difficulties, for he used it again as the theme for two important and challenging sets of variations completed in 1802 and 1803: the op.35 piano variations and the variation-finale of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.

By this time several publishers were competing for Beethoven’s newest works, and though a number of important compositions had lately appeared – the highly individual Sonate pathétique (op.13), for instance, dedicated to Prince Lichnowsky, at the very end of 1799 – others had not yet found a buyer. An entertaining correspondence with the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister, who had lately moved from Vienna to Leipzig, dates from around this time. Hoffmeister finally bought several works beginning with the First Symphony, the Second Piano Concerto, the Septet and the B Piano Sonata.

It comes as a surprise to find that Beethoven was intending to dedicate the symphony to his former overlord and employer, the Elector of Cologne. The preceding years had been harsh to Maximilian Franz. After being forced by French military successes to leave Bonn in October 1794, and having stayed for a while in various cities, he had finally returned to Vienna in April 1800 and settled in Hetzendorf just outside the city. Beethoven is believed to have spent some time in summer 1801 in and around Hetzendorf, and may well have called on the elector and paid his homage or made his peace with him, for the instructions for the symphony’s dedication are contained in a letter to Hoffmeister written about 21 June 1801. Beethoven’s wishes were not to be carried out, for the elector died on 26 July and the symphony was subsequently dedicated to Baron van Swieten.

5. 1801–2: deafness.

At a time of personal crisis it was natural for Beethoven’s thoughts to turn to his last years in Bonn and to the friends he still had there. One of these – his friend of longest standing, trained in medicine, discreet, remote from Vienna – was particularly suited to be the first recipient of a secret that Beethoven had kept to himself for some years and that had not yet been guessed by his circle of friends in the capital: the appalling discovery that he was going deaf. These tidings were now conveyed to Wegeler in Bonn in a letter of 29 June 1801, and to another absent friend, Karl Amenda in Courland, two days later.

Exactly when Beethoven first detected some impairment in his hearing cannot be determined. Perhaps he did not quite know himself, for no doubt its onset was insidious, and he probably did not regard any temporary periods of deafness or diminished hearing as sinister, especially since he had long become used to spells of fever, abdominal pain and episodes of ill-health. A young man does not expect to go deaf, and although in one account he implied that he had noticed the first symptoms in 1796, other statements set the date somewhat later, and the crisis came only with the growing realization that his deafness was progressive and probably incurable. From the descriptions of his symptoms there is general agreement among modern otologists that his deafness was caused by otosclerosis of the ‘mixed’ type, that is, the degeneration of the auditory nerve as well – by no means a rare condition.

At this time Beethoven had not yet given up hope that his doctors could do something for his hearing, but he could already foresee incalculable troubles both for his professional life and – what it is easy to forget was equally important to him – for his social life. As he wrote to Wegeler:

I must confess that I am living a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a terrible handicap. As for my enemies, of whom I have a fair number, what would they say?

To Amenda he wrote in similar terms: ‘Your Beethoven is leading a very unhappy life, and is at variance with Nature and his Creator’, but he added that when he was playing and composing his affliction still hampered him least – it affected him most when he was in company. A curious feature of these letters, in fact, is that each includes not only a melancholy account of the despair which his deafness had brought about but also an almost lyrical portrait of his professional and financial successes. Lichnowsky had agreed to pay him an annuity of 600 florins for some years; six or seven publishers were competing for each new work; he was often producing three or four works at the same time; his piano playing had considerably improved: ‘why, at the moment I feel equal to anything’.

Four and a half months later Beethoven again wrote at length to Wegeler: his doctors had been unable to help his hearing, but he was leading a slightly more pleasant life.

You can scarcely believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the last two years. My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I avoided all human society. I was forced to seem a misanthrope, and yet I am far from being one. This change has been brought about by a dear charming girl who loves me and whom I love … and for the first time I feel that marriage might bring me happiness. Unfortunately she is not of my class.

This letter is similar to the earlier ones in containing phrases that are very exalted in tone: ‘I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely – Oh it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives’. Such passages, and their more gloomy counterparts, are characteristic of his conflicting moods as he faced the prospect of permanent deafness and the quite unexpected threat to what had hitherto been a triumphant career. An attitude of pious resignation, with which he tried to master such unruly feelings, did not come easily to him but found expression in the six hymn-like settings of sacred poems by Gellert (op.48), which he completed at about this time.

The ‘dear charming girl’ who was brightening Beethoven’s days was no doubt the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. She was now not quite 17: too young, and perhaps too spoilt, to take Beethoven’s devotion very seriously, though no doubt she was flattered for a time by the attentions of a famous composer, a man much admired by her cousins. Much, probably too much, has been made of the fact that it was to her that he dedicated the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata (op.27 no.2), written in 1801. But it is clear that for a time he was under her spell – she even boasted of this – and he must have had mixed feelings when in November 1803 she married Count Wenzel Robert Gallenberg, a prolific composer of ballet music, who was only a year older than herself.

By the end of 1801 Ferdinand Ries, the son of Franz Anton Ries who had befriended the Beethoven family in Bonn, was living in Vienna, and Beethoven agreed to take him as his piano pupil. Ries was then just 17 and he remained with Beethoven until the autumn of 1805, when he had to return to Bonn for military service. During those four years he had unrivalled opportunities for observing Beethoven at his work, on his walks in the countryside, with his brothers and his friends, or at the social functions of the aristocracy. His recollections of this time, set down somewhat artlessly in the Biographische Notizen which he compiled in collaboration with Wegeler in the 1830s, form a valuably unsentimental picture of Beethoven. A recurring theme in Ries’s account is Beethoven’s unwillingness, or inability, to conform to the normal conventions of social punctilio, and especially to play the courtier and to oblige by performing to a private audience when requested to do so. These last attitudes, indeed, hardened in later life into a stance in which he felt himself a prince of art and entitled to behave as one.

One particular aspect of Beethoven’s behaviour that obviously baffled Ries was his relations with his brothers: he was appalled to see grown men come to blows in the street in the middle of an argument. In ascribing to the scheming of his brothers many of the difficulties that Beethoven was experiencing both in his relations with friends and in his practical arrangements, Ries may have been loyally taking his teacher’s side. There is no doubt, however, that Caspar Carl in particular then played an important part in Beethoven’s business affairs. For several years, starting in 1802, he was entrusted with the offer of new compositions to publishers, and with the subsequent negotiations. But on 25 May 1806 he married Johanna Reiss, the daughter of a well-to-do upholsterer; their only child, Karl, was born on 4 September. After that Beethoven largely dispensed with his brother’s help, but his nephew later assumed a position of great importance in his life.

The summer of 1802 was spent just outside Vienna in the village of Heiligenstadt. It was there, no doubt, that Beethoven put the finishing touches to the Second Symphony and completed several other works of this prolific year: the three op.30 violin sonatas, the op.33 bagatelles, and perhaps the first two of the op.31 piano sonatas. He had gone to Heiligenstadt in the spring, perhaps with the thought of spending longer in the country than usual for the sake of his health and hearing. Now in October, as he prepared to return to the city, he wrote out a strange document with carefully crafted rhetoric, addressed to his two brothers (though wherever his brother Johann’s name was implied there was a blank space). Found among his papers after his death and known as the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, it is dated 6 October 1802 at the beginning and 10 October at the end, and its contents mark it as representing a trough of despondency in his fluctuating moods. His hearing had shown no improvement in the country, and he recognized that his infirmity might be permanent; he defended himself against the charge of misanthropy, and taking leave of his brothers declared that though he had now rejected the notion of suicide, he was ready for death whenever it might come. The Testament has always been recognized as a poignant witness to the despair that often overwhelmed Beethoven at this time.

6. 1803–8.

From that nadir of despondency Beethoven seems to have recovered quickly, and probably by his usual means: hard work. His next activities certainly indicate a firm repudiation of the notion that his deafness would handicap him professionally. Caspar Carl wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel on 12 February 1803:

You will have heard by now that my brother has been engaged by the Wiedener Theater [i.e. Theater an der Wien], he is writing an opera, is in charge of the orchestra, can conduct if necessary, seeing that there is a director already available there every day. He has assumed the chief direction mostly so as to have a chorus for his music.

Although Beethoven had already gained a reputation throughout Europe as a composer of instrumental music, opera was still the royal road to fame. At the time there was something of a dearth of local talent in opera at Vienna, but from the spring of 1802 the importation of operas from Paris had more than compensated for this. Those of Cherubini and to a lesser extent of Méhul became extremely popular; so great indeed was the clamour for Cherubini’s music that one of his operas (Les deux journées) was staged at rival theatres on successive nights. Like the other Viennese, Beethoven responded enthusiastically to these operas from revolutionary France, with their contemporary realism and heroic plots (copied in some cases from recent political history). Thus he eagerly took up the invitation to write an opera for Schikaneder’s theatre and moved his lodgings to the Theater an der Wien.

An immediate bonus for this appointment was the opportunity to give a concert. He quickly wrote his oratorio Christus am Oelberge, and it was performed on 5 April 1803 together with the First and Second Symphonies and the Third Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist), all but the First Symphony being new to the audience. The oratorio, which tells of the Agony in the Garden (and is known in English-speaking countries as The Mount of Olives), marked Beethoven’s first appearance in Vienna as a dramatic vocal composer. Another rapidly written piece was occasioned by the arrival in Vienna of the young violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower: the Kreutzer Violin Sonata (op.47) was played by Bridgetower and the composer on 24 May. He may also have started to look at the opera, Vestas Feuer, with a libretto by Schikaneder.

But something else was evidently pressing: the inner demand to complete a great instrumental work. The writing of the Third Symphony, the Sinfonia eroica, was the major effort of the summer of 1803, which was spent in Oberdöbling. The symphony was originally entitled simply ‘Bonaparte’, in tribute to the young hero of revolutionary France, who was almost exactly Beethoven’s age. But this idealization of Napoleon as a heroic leader gave way to disillusionment when the First Consul proclaimed himself Emperor in May 1804. The story of Beethoven’s rage when the news of this reached Vienna is well known: he went to the table where the completed score lay, took hold of the title-page and tore it in two. On its publication in 1806 the symphony was given its present title of ‘heroic symphony’, and was described as having been ‘composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’. The ‘great man’ may well have been Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, who was an esteemed friend of the symphony's dedicatee, Prince Lobkowitz, and who in fact died a hero's death in 1806.

The ‘Eroica’ Symphony was not the only work by Beethoven from these years that appears to reflect or embody extra-musical ideas of heroism. A similar spirit pervades the so-called Waldstein Sonata (op.53), for instance, composed immediately after the symphony in the last months of 1803, and the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata (op.57), begun in the following year. Even the string quartets of this period, the three of op.59 completed in the summer of 1806 and dedicated to Count Rasumovsky, are cast in the same mould.

In comparison with the exhilarating work on these instrumental pieces, the opera dragged: by the end of 1803 Beethoven had completed less than two scenes of Vestas Feuer, and he abandoned it. For a more attractive operatic libretto had come his way, and was to capture his imagination to a profound extent. This was J.-N. Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal. The plot – the tale of a political prisoner’s rescue from a Spanish Bastille, engineered by his wife disguised as a man – is said to have been based on a real incident in the French Revolution. At first, no doubt, Beethoven was drawn by the opportunity that it afforded of writing a grand ‘rescue’ opera similar to those of the admired Cherubini, and on 4 January 1804 he informed the Leipzig critic Rochlitz that he was beginning to work on it. But the profounder implications that the story held for his own psychology will have emerged as the labour progressed; oppressed and isolated by his undeserved deafness, it was easy for him to identify with the unjustly imprisoned Florestan who lay alone in the dark with no apparent hope of rescue. (In the same way Christ’s ‘cup of sorrow’ in the oratorio of 1803 seems to have been linked in Beethoven’s mind with his own affliction.) And it was surely another side of his nature that could feel empathy with the spirited and ever-devoted Leonore; sustained by her vision of hope and longing, and following her ‘inner drive’, she is in some ways an even more Beethovenian figure than Florestan.

A change in the ownership of the Theater an der Wien in February 1804 rendered void Beethoven’s contract to write an opera for the house. It may also have obliged him in due course to find new lodgings; at all events he arranged to share rooms with Stephan von Breuning, but a serious quarrel – induced mainly by Beethoven, it seems – broke out between the two friends, and by July Beethoven had moved for some weeks to Baden, a resort some 16 miles south of Vienna. Breuning reacted philosophically and with forbearance, and in November wrote to Wegeler, who knew them both well: ‘You cannot conceive what an indescribable, I might say fearful, effect the gradual loss of his hearing has had on him’. The breach was made up, but in spite of some invigorating events, such as the first (private) performance of the ‘Eroica’, this was not a happy summer for Beethoven, and for a time he may have thought of leaving Vienna altogether – perhaps for Paris. But towards the end of the year his contract for the opera was renewed, and he set to work on it again.

Apart from the opera there was another reason for Beethoven to remain in Vienna. In January 1804 Count Deym, the husband of Josephine von Brunsvik, had died; the young widow, who now had four small children, continued to spend much of her time in Vienna, and by the autumn Beethoven, who had remained in touch with the family, became a frequent visitor to the house. He gave Josephine piano lessons. An intense relationship soon developed between them, the nature and course of which must be inferred from the contents of 13 letters that Beethoven wrote to Josephine between the autumn of 1804 and the autumn of 1807, and from drafts of some of her replies (these documents were first published in 1957). Beethoven, it is clear, was passionately in love; Josephine, though moved by his devotion and keenly concerned with his happiness, his ideals and his art, retained a certain reserve throughout and rejected any intimacy closer than that of warm friendship. It would not be hard to find reasons why, after one unhappy marriage and with a young family now claiming her concern, she should be reluctant to throw in her lot with someone of Beethoven’s uncontrolled nature, his want of much that passed for conventional good manners, and his unimpressive social standing. In the view of her sentimental unmarried sister Therese (writing many years after these events) it was consideration for her children that proved the decisive factor with Josephine. But a social barrier surely worked to keep the pair apart as well; it is noteworthy both that they were anxious to conceal the extent of their intimacy from the Brunsvik relatives, and that in addressing each other they used the formal ‘Sie’, not the more intimate ‘du’, which he kept for her brother, Count Franz Brunsvik.

The most intense period of the relationship was at the end of 1804 and in the first months of 1805: close to the time at which Beethoven was composing the triumphant finale of his opera, a paean to the accomplishments of a virtuous wife and to ‘married love’. It came to an end by the autumn of 1807, with rueful scenes and misunderstandings, and with Beethoven still asking for closer contact than Josephine was prepared to concede. The following summer she left Vienna, and in 1810 married a Baron von Stackelberg; her second marriage, like her first, was not a happy one. She died in 1821.

By the summer of 1805 the opera was complete, but censorship difficulties postponed its first performance until 20 November. This had unfortunate consequences for its success, for in the preceding weeks the conquering French armies were advancing on Vienna. On 9 November the empress departed, and four days later Napoleon’s troops entered the city. Thus the audience for the opera’s first night consisted not of the Austrian nobility and moneyed classes, Beethoven’s natural supporters and admirers, who had mostly fled from the capital, but of a miscellaneous crowd that included a sprinkling of French officers. Its reception was not enthusiastic, and after the third performance it was dropped. But with the return of Beethoven’s friends to Vienna and the resumption of normal conditions there was pressure for the opera’s revival, though also a general agreement that it had failed in part from its excessive length and in particular from the slowness of some of the earlier scenes. Beethoven was persuaded to make drastic cuts, which he did only with the greatest reluctance, for while some of these undoubtedly speeded the dramatic pace, others were mutilating. For the new version he provided an overture, Leonore no.3, which was itself a revision of the first production’s overture (Leonore no.2). In its altered form the opera was now given two performances (29 March and 10 April 1806); then Beethoven was involved in a dispute with the director of the theatre, Baron Braun, and withdrew his score. It was not for another eight years that the opera was again seen on the stage. It had always been Beethoven’s intention for the opera to be known as Leonore; but in both 1805 and 1806 it was billed as Fidelio, and for the 1814 production (see below) he acquiesced in that name. (The title Leonore is nowadays often used to distinguish the 1805 and 1806 versions from the more familiar 1814 one.)

The twin distractions of his opera and of his love for Josephine, and perhaps (at a deeper level) his slow adjustment to the fact of his deafness, may have led to some falling off in the quantity of new compositions during 1804 and 1805. But the period from the spring of 1806 to the end of 1808 must be regarded as one of prodigious fertility, with a steady stream of completed works, many of them on the largest scale. A comment that he wrote down among the sketches that date from the summer of 1806, some of which was spent in Silesia at the country seats of Prince Lichnowsky and Count Oppersdorff, reveals something of his optimistic and resolute mood: ‘Just as you plunge yourself here into the whirlpool of society, so in spite of all social obstacles it is possible for you to write operas. Your deafness shall be a secret no more, even where art is involved!’.

Among the works completed before the end of the year were the three string quartets dedicated to the Russian ambassador Count Rasumovsky, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, some at least of which had been composed earlier, the Fourth Symphony, the Violin Concerto (op.61), and in all essentials the Fourth Piano Concerto. They were quickly introduced to the public. The Violin Concerto, a work completed very rapidly, was performed by Franz Clement on 23 December 1806, and the Fourth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto were included at two concerts given at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz in March 1807, together with a new overture, to Collin’s tragedy Coriolan. A further overture, apparently written for a planned production of his opera at Prague, was also composed around this time but never performed in public; it came to light only after Beethoven’s death and is now known by the illogical title of ‘Leonore no.1’ (op.138).

With the exception of the first two Rasumovsky quartets, which were at first found ‘difficult’, these great works delighted the discerning Viennese audiences and enhanced Beethoven’s fame throughout Europe. There were many signs of this. In April 1807 Muzio Clementi, then head of a prominent London firm of music publishers and piano makers, called on Beethoven in Vienna and secured the exclusive English rights to some of his newest compositions. And, nearer home, he received an invitation from Prince Nicolaus Esterházy II, Haydn’s last patron, to produce a mass in celebration of his wife’s name day in September 1807. This was a commission that made Beethoven unusually nervous. The type of composition required was not merely one in which he was inexperienced; it was one that had been mastered with special excellence by Haydn, who in the years up to 1802 had written six such masses for the princess’s name day. Comparisons between Haydn’s works and that of his one-time pupil were therefore inevitable. And in the event the Mass in C (op.86) was not well received, though Beethoven himself regarded it highly. After passing the summer in Baden working on the mass, he went to Eisenstadt for its first performance, on 13 September; later he spent some time at Heiligenstadt, no doubt completing the Fifth Symphony and his A major Cello Sonata (op.69) in the next few months. Some of the ideas for the symphony had been jotted down as early as the first months of 1804, but 1807 was the year that the main writing was done – and probably not before the mass was out of the way. Nor was there any slackening in the pace of composition in the next year, 1808. In fact that summer (which he again spent at Heiligenstadt) saw the writing of one of his largest and most characteristic works, the Sixth Symphony, called Sinfonia pastorale. He followed this directly with the two op.70 piano trios.

Yet behind all this flurry of creative activity there was one problem to which Beethoven had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He had no regular or dependable source of income. He could of course count on the generosity of the aristocratic circles that continued to admire him, on the fees payable for dedications, and on the sales of his music to publishers. Yet this was little enough to rely on; he was, after all, living in the city in which Mozart had died in poverty a decade and a half earlier, partly no doubt from having no adequately paid position. It was not easy for him to arrange a concert from which he could secure the receipts, since most concerts were private aristocratic affairs, or they were given for charity – at which Beethoven usually offered his services. There was occasionally the opportunity of obtaining one of the theatres for a benefit performance at a time when they were otherwise closed (Holy Week or around Christmas), but this often led to disappointments – in 1802, for instance, and again in 1807. In the latter year, therefore, he petitioned the Directors of the Imperial Theatres for a commission to compose an opera every year, for an income of 2400 florins; and he urged strongly his claim, whether this petition was granted or not, for an annual benefit day at one of the theatres. The petition contained a hint that otherwise he might have to leave Vienna. The reply (if any) of the Directors has not survived. No operatic commission followed, but after several postponements the Theater an der Wien was finally put at his disposal for the night of 22 December 1808, partly in just recognition of his services to charity; so he arranged to give an enormous benefit concert.

The working out of that evening contained many features characteristic of Beethoven. The programme was injudicious, consisting as it did of four hours of music, virtually all of it unfamiliar: first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and first public performances in Vienna of the Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist) and portions of the Mass in C, as well as a piece written in Prague 12 years before, the scena and aria Ah! perfido (op.65); in addition Beethoven was to improvise. As if that were not enough for the audience, he decided the evening needed a finale; and since a chorus was already available, he rapidly threw together the work now known as the ‘Choral Fantasy’ (op.80). This consisted of an introduction for piano solo (extemporized by Beethoven at the first performance), several variations for piano and orchestra on a simple song melody that he had written in the 1790s, and a short choral conclusion.

Written at the last minute, the work was under-rehearsed; the orchestra, already on bad terms with Beethoven after a dispute in rehearsals for an earlier charity concert, broke down in the middle of the Fantasy and had to be restarted; Beethoven had quarrelled with the original soprano for the aria and her very young replacement was inadequate; and the theatre was bitterly cold. Thus the success of the evening was very mixed. The financial results are not known.

7. 1809–12.

Even before the concert took place Beethoven had received the offer of a regular position: that of Kapellmeister at Kassel, where Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome Bonaparte, a youth in his early 20s, had been installed as ‘King of Westphalia’. But although Beethoven usually had some sharp words for the Viennese, and continued to criticize them for the rest of his life, it is plain that he had no intentions of leaving Vienna if that could possibly be avoided. The Kassel appointment, with few obligations attached, was worth 600 ducats, plus 150 ducats travelling expenses: a total corresponding to about 3400 florins annually; moreover it was for life, or at any rate for as long as the ‘king’ retained his throne. Beethoven now used it to obtain a matching offer from Vienna. Although his initial conditions for remaining there included the guarantee of an annual concert and contained a strong desire for the title of Imperial Kapellmeister, their essence was a yearly salary of 4000 florins. And this after a month or two of negotiation he was able to obtain. A document dated 1 March 1809 guaranteed that its three signatories would provide Beethoven with an annuity for as long as he remained domiciled in Vienna; since it covered accidents and old age it also amounted to an insurance policy and a pension. The signatories were the Archduke Rudolph (1500 florins) and the Princes Lobkowitz (700 florins) and Kinsky (1800 florins). There were, as will be seen, difficulties in ensuring the regularity and the full value of the payments, but once those problems were overcome Beethoven was relieved from any rational grounds for financial worry.

Something must be said here about the Archduke Rudolph, the Emperor Franz’s youngest brother, and not only the highest born but the most devoted of Beethoven’s patrons. Born in 1788, he was destined for the church. As a boy he showed an aptitude for music, and at some time in his teens – perhaps in the winter of 1803–4, when he became 16 – he chose Beethoven as his piano teacher. Later he became Beethoven’s only pupil in composition. The relationship, which lasted without interruption until Beethoven’s death (Rudolph himself died four years later at the age of 43), was characterized by genuine respect on both sides. Rudolph treated Beethoven with consideration and humorous understanding; and Beethoven, though irked and sometimes provoked into ill-behaviour by the inevitable court protocol that surrounded a royal archduke, showed an almost childlike devotion to Rudolph, to whom he dedicated several of his greatest works. There are, it is true, many letters that show him begging off giving a lesson because of particularly pressing business or ‘illness’; most of those pleas were accepted by the benevolent Rudolph as polite fictions.

The warmth of this relationship was to be highlighted by several incidents in the months that followed the signing of the annuity. For the second time within four years a French army bore down on Vienna, causing the imperial family, including Rudolph, to leave the city. Nevertheless it was decided that Vienna should be defended. As a result the city was bombarded by French howitzers throughout the night of 11 May and the following morning. Beethoven is said to have taken refuge in the cellar of Caspar Carl’s house, and to have covered his head with pillows. On the afternoon of 12 May the city surrendered, and there was a second French occupation; it lasted for two months and proved a heavy drain on the inhabitants’ pockets.

The summer of 1809 was a miserable one for Beethoven. Almost all his friends had, like the court, fled from the city, and communication with the outside world was greatly restricted. Nor could he search for inspiration and recreation in the countryside. He spent some weeks therefore in copying extracts from the theoretical works of C.P.E. Bach, Türk, Kirnberger, Fux and Albrechtsberger, as part of a course of instruction that he was preparing for the Archduke Rudolph. But his thoughts about his absent patron were expressed more touchingly in the programmatic ‘Lebewohl’ or ‘Les adieux’ Sonata (op.81a), the three movements of which depict his sorrowful farewell (‘Das Lebewohl’) to Rudolph on his departure from Vienna on 4 May 1809, his sadness at Rudolph’s absence (‘Abwesenheit’), and his rejoicing at seeing him again (‘Wiedersehn’) on his return on 30 January 1810. (Beethoven intended not only the titles but the dates to be inserted in the published work.) The sonata seems to have been completed in 1809 in anticipation of Rudolph’s return, and was dedicated to him. Earlier in the year, before the French invasion, Beethoven finished the greater part of the Fifth Piano Concerto, also dedicated to Rudolph. The third important work of the year – like the concerto and the ‘Lebewohl’ Sonata in E – was the so-called ‘Harp’ String Quartet (op.74). Several other smaller pieces were also completed before the end of the year: not only the F major Piano Sonata (op.78), a work of which he himself thought very highly, but also the Sonata in G (op.79), the Piano Fantasia (op.77) and a number of songs. Beethoven’s productivity even in one of his less productive years could be formidable.

Towards the end of the year a highly congenial commission came Beethoven’s way, since it brought him in touch with the theatre once more, and since the play in question was by Goethe, whom he admired above all writers then living. It had been decided to furnish Goethe’s Egmont with incidental music, and Beethoven was invited to supply it; he completed it by June 1810 and it was immediately performed. Apart from the excitement of the plot itself, in which Count Egmont foresees the liberation of the Netherlands from Spanish rule but dies as a result of his own brave stand, it is possible to suggest a deeper reason behind Beethoven’s heartfelt response to it: it may represent his own delayed reaction to the conquest and occupation of his adopted city by the French, and his hopes of being delivered from them. In the spring or summer of 1810 he also wrote three songs (op.83) to words by Goethe, and he learnt about the poet’s character through the friendship that he now formed with the very young, talented and seductive Bettina Brentano, a friend of Goethe – whom in turn she kept informed by letter about Beethoven.

Bettina obviously charmed Beethoven; rather less is known about another woman with whom he had been more seriously involved only a little earlier. For it seems clear that in the spring of 1810 Beethoven was more or less solemnly considering marriage. Not only did he turn his attention to his wardrobe and personal appearance; he even wrote to his old friend Wegeler in Bonn for a copy of his baptismal certificate, necessary evidence of his exact age. The woman who was the object of these concerns was a certain Therese Malfatti, the niece of Dr Johann Malfatti who had become his physician for a short while after the death of the trusted Dr Schmidt in 1808 (his doctor since about 1801). It looks as though Beethoven made a proposal of marriage and it was turned down. No doubt it was radically misconceived; there is no evidence that the family of Therese, who was not yet 20, would have found Beethoven, then in his 40th year, an acceptable suitor, and the one surviving letter from him to her, though warm enough, is not particularly intimate. Beethoven’s disappointment is hard to gauge. He was urged to travel, perhaps because of his distracted state, but instead he merely moved to Baden for two months. The compositions on which he worked that summer include the String Quartet in F minor (op.95) – the ‘quartetto serioso’ – and the so-called ‘Archduke’ Piano Trio in B (op.97); although their autograph scores bear dates of October 1810 and March 1811 respectively, it is possible that both works were completed later than the dates suggest. The earlier months of 1811 seem to have been a time of comparative inactivity in composing, though a number of larger works, including the Choral Fantasy and the oratorio written several years earlier, had to be seen through the press.

Beethoven’s health was still not satisfactory, and in the summer of 1811, on Dr Malfatti’s orders, he visited the Bohemian spa Teplitz (now Tepliče) to take the cure. While there he wrote the incidental music to two stage works by Kotzebue, König Stephan (op.117) and Die Ruinen von Athen (op.113), designed as prologue and epilogue to the ceremonial opening of the new theatre at Pest. He evidently returned to Vienna refreshed and began work on the Seventh Symphony, which he completed in the spring of 1812, going on without a break to the Eighth Symphony. (To judge from the sketchbook used for work on these symphonies, he at one time considered following them with a third, probably in D minor.) For the second year running Beethoven decided to visit Teplitz, travelling via Prague and arriving there on 5 July. Next morning he started to write a love-letter to an unknown woman, which – since it has been discussed almost as much as any music he ever wrote – will be considered shortly. Because of the international situation (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was just getting under way), Teplitz, which was neutral territory, became the meeting-place of many imperial personages and diplomats. But what was even more interesting to Beethoven was the presence there of Goethe, and the long-awaited meeting between them finally took place. The contact was a cordial one, the reactions of the two men predictable. To his friend Zelter, Goethe confided:

His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable but surely does not make it any the more enjoyable either for himself or for others by his attitude. He is easily excused, on the other hand, and much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which perhaps mars the musical part of his nature less than the social.

Beethoven’s somewhat more censorious comment in a letter to Breitkopf & Härtel was: ‘Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming in a poet’. In fact Beethoven’s admiration for his fellow men usually flourished best at a distance.

From Teplitz he went, allegedly on a new doctor’s advice, to Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), and from there to Franzensbrunn, where he participated in a charity concert held for the victims of a fire at Baden that had destroyed a large part of the resort. He then revisited Karlsbad, and finally returned once more to Teplitz, still apparently in search of improved health. At the beginning of October he was in Linz, where he started the score of the Eighth Symphony; he stayed with his brother Johann, who had bought an apothecary’s shop there in 1808. But this was less of a visit than a visitation, for the principal purpose of his journey to Linz was to interfere in his brother’s private life. Johann had let part of his house to a physician from Vienna, whose wife’s unmarried sister, one Therese Obermeyer, later joined them. Subsequently Therese became Johann’s mistress, and Beethoven now descended to expostulate with his brother and to attempt to end the relationship. He applied both to the bishop and to the civil authorities, and ultimately obtained a police order to have the girl expelled from Linz. But before it could be effective Johann played a trump card by marrying Therese, on 8 November. Beethoven’s extravagantly high-handed behaviour had ended in defeat, and he retired angrily to Vienna. Nothing more is heard of him that year apart from the preparations for a concert with the French violinist Pierre Rode on 29 December, for which he completed the G major Violin Sonata (op.96).

The rebuff by his brother was the second emotional crisis of 1812, a year that represented some sort of watershed for Beethoven. To return to the letter of 6–7 July: usually known as the letter to the ‘Immortal Beloved’ (‘unsterbliche Geliebte’), it was found among Beethoven’s papers after his death, and first published in 1840. There is no direct indication to whom this passionate love-letter, the only one of his to a woman that uses the intimate ‘du’ throughout, was addressed. Even the year in which it was written (it refers only to ‘Monday, 6 July’) was for long uncertain. Thus the names of many women known to have been admired by Beethoven were proposed by his early biographers; but nearly all of them have had to be ruled out, since 1812 is now established as the correct date of the letter, Teplitz as its place of origin and Karlsbad (‘K’ in the letter) as its addressee’s temporary residence.

Maynard Solomon showed in the 1970s that she was Antonie Brentano, an aristocratic Viennese lady ten years younger than Beethoven who at 18 had married a Frankfurt businessman, Franz Brentano, Bettina Brentano’s half-brother (As there are no explicit letters from Antoine Brentano to Beethoven, some do not accept that the case is closed; but no plausible alternative has been presented.). The Brentanos were in Vienna in the years 1809–12, so that Antonie could be with her dying father and subsequently wind up his estate. It is clear not merely that she disliked the idea of returning to Frankfurt, where she was most unhappy, but that she did everything possible to postpone it, delaying the event until the last months of 1812. Beethoven had been introduced to the family by Bettina in 1810, and became a warm friend not only of Antonie but of her husband Franz and their ten-year-old daughter Maximiliane – for whom in June 1812 he wrote an easy piano trio in one movement (woo39). Since the Brentanos had not only been in close contact with Beethoven in Vienna shortly before his departure at the end of June, but were also in Prague while he was there (2–4 July) and moved on to Karlsbad on 5 July, Antonie Brentano fulfils all the chronological and topographical requirements for being the addressee of the famous letter.

Although in many ways a dutiful wife, Antoine's admiration of Beethoven was profound, and she may have become emotionally dependent on him, especially when the return to Frankfurt seemed inevitable. And there is no doubt that Beethoven, though vociferous in his condemnation of adulterous relations, was especially attracted to women who were married or who were in some other way already involved with a man. Beethoven's letter is not only passionate but also confused, agitated and more than a little ambiguous. Beethoven describes his harrowing trip to Teplitz from Prague, where the relationship reached a crisis; Antoine may have known or suspected that she was pregnant (she gave birth on 8 March 1813). Mingled with the ardently expressed desire for complete union with the beloved (‘I will arrange it with you and me that I can live with you’) there are many phrases expressing resignation or acceptance of the lack of fulfilment, and it is possible to read it as a cautious rejection of a shared domesticity: ‘At my age I need a steady, quiet life – can it be so in our connection?’. Doubtless the ambiguities were clarified when, later in the month, Beethoven joined the Brentanos at Karlsbad. The family duly returned to Frankfurt in the autumn; Beethoven never saw them again, though he remained in touch with them, calling on Franz’s services as a businessman in 1820 and dedicating important works to Antonie (op.120, in 1823) and Maximiliane (op.109, in 1821).

8. 1813–21.

However the turmoil of the summer of 1812 is to be understood, it proved to be a profound turning-point in Beethoven’s emotional life. It initiated a long period of markedly reduced creativity, and there is evidence that he became deeply depressed. Henceforth Beethoven accepted the impossibility of achieving a sustained relationship with a woman and entering into a shared domestic routine, though he was scarcely reconciled to it; even in 1816, as will be seen, he had by no means overcome his longing. Some of the hints contained in the letter are stated more baldly in diary entries made about this time. As in past crises, a dedication to art was evidently to replace a commitment to a human being: ‘Thou mayst no longer be a man, not for thyself, only for others, for thee there is no longer happiness except in thyself, in thy art – O God, give me strength to conquer myself, nothing must fetter me to life’. ‘13 May 1813. To forgo a great act which might be and might remain so … O God, God, look down on the unhappy B., do not let it continue like this any longer’.

But by a stroke of irony that may contain an inner truth, at this very time he pledged himself to a responsibility that was increasingly to encroach on the exercise of his art and indeed to dominate his emotional outlook in the last 12 years of his life. Caspar Carl became seriously ill with tuberculosis, and on 12 April 1813 he signed a declaration appointing Beethoven guardian of his son Karl, then aged six, in the event of his death. This, it will emerge, came ultimately to involve Beethoven profoundly; but for the moment Caspar Carl’s health improved, though Beethoven was obliged to help him to borrow money.

At this time Beethoven too was financially embarrassed. The severe depreciation of the Austrian currency as a result of the war, leading to an official devaluation in February 1811, had reduced the value of his annuity of 4000 florins to little more than 1600 florins. It was open to the princes to restore the intended income, and they were prepared to do so; but unfortunately Prince Kinsky was killed by a fall from his horse at the end of 1812 before he could leave clear instructions, and Prince Lobkowitz’s payments were suspended for four years from 1811 owing to the mismanagement of his affairs. So although Beethoven was ultimately to receive the full amount from Kinsky’s heirs, from Lobkowitz and from the Archduke Rudolph, it was only the last-named whose subventions continued without interruption or depreciation.

This may be one reason why Beethoven, even though he was still nursing secret sorrows, nevertheless became more of a public and social figure in the next year or so, reaching for popular acclaim by way of the concert hall and the theatre. He not only engaged a servant, but appears to have kept him for three years. And he entered with some zest into the proposal of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the inventor of a mechanical organ called the ‘panharmonicon’ (and later, inventor of a metronome), for the two of them to collaborate on a piece that both celebrated and depicted Wellington’s military victory at Vittoria on 21 June 1813. This bombastic piece of programme music, with its fanfares, cannonades, and fugal treatment of God Save the King, was thunderously acclaimed at two charity concerts on 8 and 12 December 1813 – together with the Seventh Symphony, which had not been heard before. The ‘Battle Symphony’ had to be repeated three weeks later, and again on 24 February 1814. On that occasion the Eighth Symphony was one of its companion pieces.

The most gratifying (and unexpected) consequence of this sudden popularity was a request from the Kärntnertortheater for permission to revive the opera Fidelio. Beethoven agreed but stipulated that there would have to be a good many changes. The poet G.F. Treitschke was then stage manager at the theatre, and he undertook to make the necessary alterations in the libretto. Some weak numbers were omitted, the two finales were rewritten, Leonore’s aria was supplied with a new recitative (‘Abscheulicher!’) and Florestan’s with a new final section, and there were many smaller changes throughout. Beethoven also furnished the revival with a new overture in E major, called today the ‘Overture to Fidelio’. Although he grumbled at the labour and claimed in a letter to Treitschke that the opera would win him a martyr’s crown, the revision was effective, and the work’s success dates from this production, first given on 23 May 1814 (fig.6). The new overture, not ready for the opening night, was given at the second performance, on 26 May.

The vocal score of the opera was prepared by the young pianist Ignaz Moscheles, then just 20. Since he worked under Beethoven’s supervision, the task brought him for a time into regular contact with someone he had for long ardently admired. And March 1814 was the date at which another enthusiastic follower of Beethoven later said he had first been introduced to him: this was the 18-year-old Anton Schindler, at the time a law student and a good violinist. For Schindler the claims of music proved stronger than those of the law, and by 1822 he was leader of the orchestra at the Theater in der Josefstadt. From about that time he began to spend many of his leisure hours in Beethoven’s company, and for a while he virtually became his unpaid secretary and servant. Beethoven found his ‘factotum’ useful in practical matters, though Schindler’s obsequiousness used to irritate him. Some years after Beethoven’s death, in 1840, Schindler published a hastily written biography – translated into English a year later, with notes by Moscheles – in which uncritical devotion to ‘the master’ was combined with polemics against many of the others who had been close to him. Thus it is unfortunately unreliable even in its account of the years after 1821 during which Schindler was often in very close contact with the composer; the material of value that it contains is hard to distinguish from his fabrications. A later (1860) edition of his biography, although greatly expanded and indeed largely rewritten, was no more accurate.

In the summer of 1814 excitement began to mount in Vienna as preparations were made to welcome the crowned heads of Europe for the Congress of Vienna. This gave Beethoven the opportunity for producing more ‘occasional pieces’. But before starting work on anything of that nature, he quickly completed a piano sonata (op.90), his first in four years. The earliest of the congress works was a short chorus of welcome to the visiting sovereigns, Ihr weisen Gründer (woo95). Next, he made a strenuous attempt to complete an overture in C that he had taken up and worked on at various times in the previous five years; it was planned for the celebration of the emperor’s name day on 4 October and is now known as the Namensfeier Overture (op.115). But the score could not be completed in time, and Beethoven put it aside until the spring of 1815, setting to work instead on a cantata celebrating the present ‘glorious moment’ in the destiny of Europe. The fawningly inflated text of Der glorreiche Augenblick (op.136) was by a distinguished surgeon from Salzburg, Alois Weissenbach, who had come to the capital for the festivities. Beethoven could not have had a more enthusiastic admirer than Weissenbach; when the two men met, they took a great liking to each other, and the cantata was a result of their collaboration. They had more than music in common, for Weissenbach too was deaf. The cantata was announced for a concert on 20 November, but it was postponed three times and finally given before the assembled royalty on 29 November, with the ‘Battle Symphony’ and Seventh Symphony forming the rest of the programme.

From the point of view of Viennese popular acclaim and fame the year 1814 must be regarded as the high-water mark in Beethoven’s life. Not only were his compositions applauded by large audiences, but he also received in person the commendations of royal dignitaries. This last aspect is typified in one final congress piece, the little Polonaise (op.89) that he wrote in December 1814 in honour of the Empress of Russia, who was especially generous to him. And 1814 was also a more sombre turning-point for Beethoven, for two performances of the ‘Archduke’ Trio in April and May marked his last appearance in public as a pianist (except as accompanist). His deafness had latterly become much more severe.

Beethoven now found himself possessed not only of fame but of a good deal of money, which he invested in bank shares. Moreover, as a result of a settlement reached with the Kinsky family and the goodwill of Prince Lobkowitz, most of the original value of the annuity had now been restored and the arrears made up. In spite of this, his worries about his financial situation continued to be voiced in letters to publishers and friends abroad (such as his former pupil Ries, now resident in London), whom he was trying to interest in the large number of his more recent works that were still unpublished. But towards the end of 1815 an unhappy event occurred that immediately focussed all his concerns and anxieties. His brother Caspar Carl’s health suddenly deteriorated; the tuberculosis had evidently made inconspicuous but rapid progress, and he collapsed and died on 15 November. The will, dated 14 November, appointed Beethoven sole guardian of his only child, the nine-year-old Karl, but a codicil of the same day cancelled this and made the boy’s mother co-guardian:

Having learnt that my brother ... desires after my death to take wholly to himself my son Karl, and wholly to withdraw him from the supervision and training of his mother, and inasmuch as the best of harmony does not exist between my brother and my wife, I have found it necessary to add to my will that I by no means desire that my son be taken away from his mother, but that he shall always and so long as his future career permits remain with his mother, to which end the guardianship of him is to be exercised by her as well as by my brother ... for the welfare of my child I recommend compliance to my wife and more moderation to my brother. God permit them to be harmonious for the sake of my child’s welfare. This is the last wish of the dying husband and brother.

The dying man’s anxieties were all too prophetic. It proved a tragedy for Beethoven that he could not do what his brother asked. It was not simply that he was unable to achieve any ‘harmony’ with his sister-in-law Johanna. The situation in which he found himself was one that aroused deep passions and longings that he doubtless did not fully understand. Frustrated in his several attempts – however ambiguously conceived and executed – to marry and have a family of his own, he began to feel that if he had sole responsibility for Karl he could combine the discharge of a sacred duty to his brother with some of the satisfactions and fulfilments of parenthood. But for that to be possible, he had first to convince himself and others that Johanna was quite unfit to have the custody of Karl and should be excluded from the guardianship. The struggle for possession of the nephew lasted some four and a half years, to be followed by another six in which his care and upbringing weighed heavily upon Beethoven. As will be seen, the burdensome intensity of the relationship between uncle and nephew – or as Beethoven preferred to see it, between father and son – led to something near disaster in the summer of 1826. Before then an incalculable number of hours had been spent by Beethoven in litigation, letter-writing, quarrels, reconciliations and private agony of mind.

On 22 November 1815 the Imperial and Royal Landrechte of Lower Austria appointed Johanna guardian and Beethoven ‘co-guardian’. Six days later Beethoven appealed to the court requesting the guardianship to be transferred to himself. In a later court appearance he claimed he could produce ‘weighty reasons’ for the total exclusion of the widow from the guardianship: four years earlier Johanna had been convicted and jailed on a charge of embezzlement. The result of Beethoven’s submissions was that on 9 January 1816 he was assigned sole guardianship by the court. He took vows for the performance of his duties on 19 January. On 2 February Karl was taken from his mother and entered the private school of a certain Cajetan Giannatasio del Rio as a boarder.

Beethoven seems to have had little difficulty in persuading himself that Johanna was morally quite unfit to have charge of Karl, and he was ready to denounce her character and her way of life on every possible occasion, calling her the ‘Queen of Night’ and insinuating that her allegedly deviant behaviour included prostitution and theft. She was certainly no moral exemplar, and some time after her husband’s death she took a lover and gave birth in 1820 to an illegitimate daughter. But Viennese society was permissive in sexual matters. Few of her contemporaries saw her in the same lurid light as her brother-in-law, in spite of the forceful and relentless way that he marshalled the case against her.

Although convinced of Johanna’s unsuitability for bringing up the child, Beethoven felt rather guilty about restricting them from seeing each other. Yet that is what he now asked the Landrechte to put in his control, and the court agreed that Johanna should visit her son only at hours and places that Beethoven sanctioned – which at times was liable to mean once a month, or even less frequently. An uneasy truce was maintained between Beethoven and Johanna through 1816 and 1817, although he suspected her of making clandestine visits to Karl’s school. At the end of January 1818 he withdrew Karl from Giannatasio’s care and took him into his own home, engaging a private tutor; then in May he moved with Karl to Mödling and placed him in a class taught by the village priest, named Fröhlich. But after a month, to Beethoven’s indignation, Fröhlich expelled Karl for his bad behaviour. This seems to have consisted of a series of minor offences against discipline, but Karl particularly shocked the priest by speaking of his mother in abusive terms – a breach of the Fifth Commandment in which, it was later noted, Beethoven had gleefully encouraged him.

It was at this point in the summer of 1818, when Beethoven was taking preparatory steps to enter Karl in the Vienna Gymnasium, that Johanna made a further effort to gain some control of her son’s education and welfare. With the help of a relative with legal training, Jacob Hotschevar, she presented a series of petitions to the Landrechte. The first two were rejected, but after Karl had run away from Beethoven’s lodgings to his mother on 3 December – he was returned later by the police – she used the incident as the basis of a third appeal, supporting it by a careful summary of the whole situation from Hotschevar and appending a statement from Father Fröhlich on the boy’s neglected physical state and moral lapses. In the course of giving evidence in court on 11 December Beethoven incautiously let slip the fact that Karl was not of noble birth. He was then forced to concede that neither he nor his late brother had ever had documents to prove their own nobility; ‘van’ was a Dutch prefix that was not restricted to those of noble birth. Thereupon the Landrechte, which were courts confined to the nobility, woke up to the fact that the case should never have come before them and transferred the whole matter to the Vienna Magistracy or commoners’ courts.

How severe a blow this was to Beethoven’s pride has been debated; but even from a practical point of view it was very inconvenient. From the start the Magistracy seems to have been more sympathetic to Johanna than to Beethoven. Its first action was to suspend him temporarily from the guardianship. Karl returned for a time to his mother, being instructed by a tutor and also being taught at an institute run by one Johann Kudlich. From March to July Beethoven resigned the guardianship in favour of a Councillor Tuscher, and applied for a passport to enable Karl to be educated in Bavaria. This was refused, and his right to resume the guardianship in July was also challenged; on 17 September the court decided, reasonably enough, that Karl (who had meanwhile been moved to yet another school, one run by a Pestalozzi disciple, Joseph Blöchlinger) had been ‘tossed back and forth like a ball from one educational institution to another’. The mother, therefore, should remain as legal guardian in collaboration with a certain Leopold Nussböck, the municipal sequestrator.

This was of course a defeat for Beethoven. His first move was to protest at the decision; this was rejected by the Magistracy on 4 November. Next, with the help of a legally qualified friend, Johann Baptist Bach, he proposed as a substitute for Nussböck his friend Karl Peters, who was tutor to the children of Prince Lobkowitz. This application too was rejected. He now had recourse to the Court of Appeal, for whose benefit he prepared a 48-page draft memorandum (the longest extant document in his handwriting). This denounced in turn Johanna, a certain Herr Piuk who was a member of the Magistracy, and Father Fröhlich, and defended his own conduct and educational policies in great detail. It is unlikely that the memorandum was ever submitted in the form in which it survives. Beethoven’s case was shrewdly and discreetly presented by Dr Bach; less discreet were Beethoven's attempts to influence the Court by making known his connection to the Archduke Rudolph. Demanding the guardianship of Karl and requesting Karl Peters as associate guardian, Beethoven asked at the same time for Johanna and Nussböck to be deposed. After further scrutiny these claims were upheld by the Court of Appeal on 8 April 1820; a petition by Johanna to the emperor against the decision was rejected three months later. Thus in July 1820 Beethoven found that he had finally won in a struggle that had lasted for over four years.

Beethoven’s preoccupation with the care of his nephew – especially in the period from the end of 1815 to the beginning of 1818 – can be regarded as a continuation, and in some ways as an attempted solution, of the unresolved matrimonial crisis of 1812. At that time he had decided, however confusedly and irresolutely, that his creative activity was incompatible with having a wife; now he was testing whether it could be reconciled with caring for a child. The cost of those years to Beethoven is reflected in the paucity of valuable music completed in them. Productively the years 1813–15 were lean; apart from two cello sonatas (op.102) written in the second half of 1815, most of the compositions were ‘occasional pieces’ such as the ‘Battle Symphony’ and the works written for the Congress of Vienna. This trend was continued in the following years. 1816 at least brought two important compositions, the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (op.98, April) and the Piano Sonata in A (op.101, November), but 1817 was completely barren in respect of completed major works. Instead, Beethoven during these years contented himself with elegant trivia, such as the polished march that he wrote in June 1816 for the Vienna artillery corps (woo24), as well as continuing to compose the instrumental and vocal settings of Scottish airs that he provided for George Thomson of Edinburgh (from the years 1809 to 1820 he worked intermittently on close to 200 such settings). He also refurbished some variations for piano trio that he had written many years earlier on a theme from one of Wenzel Müller’s Singspiele, and he revised and to some extent rewrote an arrangement for string quintet made by someone else of his youthful C minor trio from op.1 (these were subsequently published as his op.121a and his op.104). And, even more significantly, he toiled hard on a number of new compositions without managing to complete them; they included a piano concerto in D, a piano trio in F minor, and a string quintet in D minor. Scores of these three works were in fact begun.

These were indeed unhappy years for Beethoven. He was now thoroughly out of sympathy with the kind of music being written and being applauded in Vienna. The aristocratic milieu that had welcomed and sheltered him in his earlier years in Vienna had been shattered by the military, political and financial upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, with the result that he had lost or broken with almost all his high-born friends apart from the Archduke Rudolph. In spite of his popular successes in 1813 and 1814, his general acceptance as the greatest living composer, and a resurgence of Viennese performances of his works from 1816 onwards (testifying to their growing status as part of the standard repertory), Beethoven found no wide public in Vienna that he could respect, and daydreams of journeys abroad – to England, even to Italy – filled his mind. Nor should it be supposed that the attachment to Antonie Brentano, though he had not seen her for some years, was forgotten. The best informant here is Fanny, one of Giannatasio’s daughters, who observed Beethoven at this time with a sensitivity sharpened by her own unavowed devotion to him. In September 1816 she recorded in her diary a confession of Beethoven to her father that she had overheard. Five years before, he had wanted a more intimate union with a woman, but it was ‘not to be thought of, almost impossible, a chimera. Nevertheless, it is now as on the first day, I have not been able to get it out of my mind’. Some months earlier, on 8 May 1816, Beethoven had ended a letter to Ries in London with the words: ‘My best greetings to your wife. Unfortunately, I have no wife. I found only one whom I shall doubtless never possess’. This nostalgic retrospection forms the background to the song cycle on the subject of the ‘distant beloved’ that he wrote in April 1816.

There were also difficulties of a more practical kind. Beethoven was consumed with misgivings as to his ability to look after his nephew and to run an orderly household. The year 1817, in particular, is marked by an immense number of letters to the kindly Nannette Streicher, a pianist and wife of the piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher, on the minutiae of domestic administration, the cost of household commodities, the employment of servants, and the like. Deeper doubts about the decisions that he was taking on Karl’s behalf and about his treatment of Johanna were committed to his diary:

God, God, my refuge, my rock, my all. Thou seest my inmost heart and knowest how it pains me to be obliged to compel another to suffer by my good labours for my precious Karl!!! O hear me always, thou Ineffable One, hear me – thy unhappy, most unhappy of all mortals.

Further problems were created by his slowly but unmistakably deteriorating health and especially by one aspect of it, his deepening deafness. By 1818 he was virtually stone deaf, so conversation had to be carried on with pencil and paper. This was the start of the ‘conversation books’, nearly 140 of which have survived. In the main they are a record of only one side of each discussion; they show what Beethoven’s friends and visitors wanted to say to him, but not his own observations, since those were normally spoken. Unfortunately Schindler, who took possession of the conversation books after Beethoven’s death, saw fit not only to destroy some of them but to make false entries in the remainder, so that as documents they must be treated with some caution.

Beethoven’s recovery from his compositional stagnation seems to have begun in the autumn of 1817. It was at first very slow. At that time he decided to accept an offer made earlier in the year by the Philharmonic Society of London. This invited him to write two grand symphonies for the Society, and to appear in person in London for the winter season of 1817–18. But he made no start on a symphony, or plans for a journey to London, afterwards explaining that his health had not allowed it. Instead, he set to work on a gigantic four-movement piano sonata in B, known today as the Hammerklavier Sonata (op.106). Its first two movements were probably ready by April 1818, and the remaining two were worked on during his summer stay at Mödling, the whole being completed by the autumn. Thus its composition, carried out (as he said) ‘in distressful circumstances’, had taken the best part of a year. Beethoven dedicated it to the Archduke Rudolph, for whom he was now planning a work on an even grander scale. For the archduke was being made the recipient of ecclesiastical honours. He was created a cardinal on 24 April 1819, and on 4 June he was appointed Archbishop of Olmütz (now Olomouc) in Moravia. ‘The day’, wrote Beethoven in offering his congratulations on the latter elevation, ‘on which a High Mass composed by me will be performed during the ceremonies solemnized for Your Imperial Highness will be the most glorious day of my life’, and it looks as though by then he had already been at work for some time on the composition now known as the Missa solemnis (op.123). Evidently the news that the archduke was to be elevated had been known to friends in advance.

Since the installation of the archbishop was set for 9 March 1820, some way ahead, Beethoven must have felt that he could afford to proceed at a measured pace. In the first half of 1819, he even interrupted work on the Mass to write down some 20 variations on a theme of Anton Diabelli’s before tackling the Gloria and Credo. But he had not allowed for the time about to be lost in litigation in 1819 and the first months of 1820, or for the tendency of each section of the work to expand to a vast scale. Beethoven had to abandon any hope of the mass’s being ready for the installation. But he persevered with it, making substantial progress in the summer and autumn of 1820. He even took on new commitments at this time, undertaking at the end of May 1820 to produce three piano sonatas within three months for the Berlin publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger. Although nothing like that optimistic pace was achieved, the first sonata was apparently completed and a start made on the other two shortly after his return to Vienna from Mödling in the autumn of 1820. The sonata that was now ready was the one in E, published as op.109. But in 1821 illnesses both at the start of the year and in July – this time an attack of jaundice – as well as continued work on the mass resulted in the other two sonatas not coming near to completion until the end of the year. The autograph of the second, in A, is dated 25 December 1821, that of the third, in C minor, 13 January 1822; but revisions to both postponed their completion for a little longer. Unlike op.109, published in Berlin, the other two (opp.110 and 111) first appeared in Paris from the firm that Adolf Martin Schlesinger’s son Maurice had started there.

9. 1822–4.

There was no longer any question of checks on Beethoven’s creativity. 1822 saw not only the finishing touches on the two sonatas, the last he was to write, but the virtual completion of the Mass by the autumn, and an almost immediate start on another very large composition that he was impatient to get to grips with. This was the work now known as the Ninth Symphony. Before that he had also assembled a set of 11 bagatelles for the piano (op.119), five of which had been written by the beginning of 1821 for an instructional book of studies (most of the others were based on much earlier material); and he resumed work on the set of piano variations on Diabelli’s theme that he had broken off in 1819. He found time, too, to compose a fine overture (op.124) and a chorus (woo98) for the opening of the new theatre in the Josefstadt on 3 October 1822. The overture, Die Weihe des Hauses (‘The Consecration of the House’), takes its title from the inaugural drama at the theatre.

The piano variations need a word of explanation. In 1819 Diabelli, no doubt responding to post-Congress patriotic fervour and in search of attractive publishing material for the new firm of Cappi & Diabelli, conceived the idea of inviting a large number of eminent or popular composers from the Austrian states to submit a single variation on a simple theme of his own that he circulated; the intention was to make an album. Such an album was indeed published by Diabelli, though not until 1824, with variations from 50 composers including Schubert and the 11-year-old Liszt. But from the start Beethoven had decided to contribute not one variation but a set of them. In time these reached the number of 33, and Diabelli decided to publish Beethoven’s variations (op.120) as a separate album; in fact it came out before the other one.

The nature of the symphony to which Beethoven now turned his attention can be understood as the coalescence of several diverse elements that had been stirring in his imagination, in some cases over many years. The notion of composing a vocal setting of Schiller’s An die Freude (‘Ode to Joy’) goes back to his last days in Bonn, as a letter of January 1793, from the Bonn professor of jurisprudence Fischenich to Schiller’s wife, makes clear: ‘He proposes to compose Schiller’s Freude, strophe by strophe. I expect something perfect, since he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime’. This was an intention to which he returned a number of times – in 1798 for instance, and in 1812, in connection with sketches for an overture that later became the Namensfeier. Another element was the desire to complete at least one symphony for the Philharmonic Society, and possibly the promised two. For a time it seems that he conceived of one of these symphonies as containing a choral section – a ‘pious song in a symphony in the ancient modes’ – and the other as being in D minor without any such special feature. Only in 1822 were these diverse concepts united in the plan for a D minor symphony with a setting of Schiller’s Ode as its finale: this he now intended to conclude with Turkish music and a full choir.

1823 was the year in which the main work on the Ninth Symphony was done, though the last details were not completed until the following March. It was also a year of great concern with copyists and publishers. Beethoven made the mistake of offering manuscript copies of his mass on a subscription basis – at a price of 50 ducats – to the crowned heads of Europe; this involved him first in a tedious correspondence with the courts, and then in a no less irksome scrutiny of the handwritten scores (a task for which Schindler was put to use). The difficulties were increased by the illness and death on 6 August 1823 of Wenzel Schlemmer, who had been Beethoven’s chief copyist for a quarter of a century and on whom he relied greatly. This year also saw the publication of the op.111 piano sonata and the Diabelli Variations. The mass formed the centre of an immensely complicated series of negotiations with publishers in Vienna and abroad, in which other works completed and uncompleted, such as the op.124 overture and the Ninth Symphony, also featured. It must be remembered that he regarded the mass as his greatest work, the result of some two years’ labour and not lightly to be disposed of; if anything was outrageous it was not the size of the fee demanded but the fact that by the end no fewer than seven publishers had been involved. The final result was satisfactory: a firm that he could trust, Schott of Mainz, agreed to publish several of his important works, including the mass and the Ninth Symphony.

With the symphony completed Beethoven allowed himself some relaxation; according to Schindler, ‘he could again be seen strolling through the streets, using his black-ribboned lorgnette to examine attractive window displays, and greeting many acquaintances or friends after his long seclusion’. But as he had long been unhappy with the Viennese reception of serious art, he was reluctant to risk a concert, and made an inquiry of Berlin whether a performance of the mass and the symphony might be given there. News of this fact became known in Vienna and led to a touching document being presented to him by a number of his friends and admirers. This was an eloquent declaration of their confidence in him, and a plea for him to allow his latest works to be heard in Vienna. Beethoven responded by agreeing to give a concert. It took place in the Kärntnertortheater on 7 May 1824 and consisted of the op.124 overture, the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei from the mass, and the Ninth Symphony. The theatre was crowded and the reception enthusiastic. Many years later the pianist Thalberg, who was among those present, recalled that after the scherzo had ended Beethoven stood turning over the leaves of the score, quite unaware of the thunderous applause, until the contralto Caroline Unger pulled him by the sleeve and pointed to the audience behind him, to whom he then turned and bowed (Schindler and Mme Unger also remembered the moving incident, though they placed it at the end of the concert). A second performance of the symphony and the Kyrie of the mass (with some other pieces) 16 days later was much less successful.

Around the time of the symphony’s first performance in May 1824, Beethoven turned once more to the piano and wrote a ‘cycle of bagatelles’. Unlike the earlier ones he had written (opp.33, 119), the six bagatelles of op.126 were conceived not as separate pieces but as forming a set. At the end of the year he returned to a poem that he had come to value highly. This was Matthisson’s Opferlied, which he seems to have regarded (in Nottebohm’s phrase) as ‘a prayer for all seasons’. He had set it in 1795 and again in 1822; now he produced his final version, a setting for soprano, chorus and orchestra (op.121b). In these years, when Beethoven was hoping that his smaller pieces at any rate would prove easy to sell, he was no doubt tempted to refurbish drafts of songs written many years earlier and to put them on the market. But with the Opferlied, as with the much better-known instance of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, one may detect some elements of a desire in Beethoven around this time to gather up the unfinished business of the past and attend to ideas that had waited long for definitive expression. He was already beginning to suspect that not much time was left to him.

10. 1824–7.

It seems unlikely that anyone could have predicted that the remaining years of Beethoven’s life would be devoted to works in a single medium – that of the string quartet. Since 1810 he had composed no quartets. In the miraculously fertile year of 1822, however, he had written to the publisher Peters on 5 June quoting his price (50 ducats) for a string quartet ‘which you could have very soon’. A letter of a month later explained that the quartet was ‘not yet quite finished, because something else intervened’. It is unlikely, however, that by then he had even started to work on the Quartet in E (op.127). The impetus to complete it and to compose others was provided by a commission from Prince Nikolay Golitsïn, a music lover and cellist of St Petersburg. In a letter of 9 November 1822 Golitsïn invited Beethoven to compose ‘one, two or three new quartets’ for whatever fee was thought proper; they were to be dedicated to the prince. In his reply of 25 January 1823 Beethoven accepted the invitation, fixing his honorarium at 50 ducats per quartet and promising to complete the first by the end of February or by the middle of March at latest. But he had not allowed for the claims of the mass and the symphony; not until after the concerts of May 1824 was the work resumed in earnest. The quartet was finished in February 1825, nearly two years after it had been promised, and was privately rehearsed before being sent to Golitsïn. In the meantime Golitsïn, who had been among the princely subscribers to the manuscript copies of the mass that Beethoven had advertised in 1823, gave the first performance of that work at St Petersburg on 7 April (26 March, Old Style) 1824 – a whole month before the partial performance in Vienna.

The E Quartet was performed by the Schuppanzigh Quartet on 6 March 1825, but did not please the Viennese audience. Later performances, however, in which Joseph Boehm led instead of Schuppanzigh, were well received. Beethoven at once turned his attention to the second quartet for Golitsïn, in A minor (op.132). Some progress had already been made when a sharp illness in April sent him to his bed. He was ill for about a month, but felt well enough by 7 May to move to Baden, and there the quartet was completed in July. Its slow movement contains allusions to his illness; the initial melody is inscribed ‘Hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity, from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode’, and the contrasting section in 3/8 time is entitled ‘Feeling new strength’. This work received two private performances from the Schuppanzigh Quartet on 9 and 11 September 1825; among the audience was the publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who agreed to buy it, as well as another quartet not yet written, at the price of 80 ducats per quartet (the one in E had already gone to Schott). The first public performance of the A minor Quartet was on 6 November, again by the Schuppanzigh Quartet.

Without any break Beethoven started work on Golitsïn’s third quartet, which occupied him from July to December 1825. The Schuppanzigh Quartet gave its première on 21 March 1826. This work, in B (op.130), consisted of six movements, the last of which, an immense fugue, proved something of a stumbling-block to players and listeners. No doubt this work too should have gone to Schlesinger to publish, but in the end Beethoven gave it to the Viennese firm of Matthias Artaria.

Beethoven had now fulfilled his commission, but Prince Golitsïn had paid only for the first of his three quartets; he still owed Beethoven 125 ducats – 50 ducats for each of the other two quartets, and 25 ducats for the dedication of the op.124 overture. Although the prince acknowledged the debt, and expressed himself immensely pleased with the quartets, he was financially embarrassed at the time, and his promise to pay was not carried out before Beethoven’s death.

By the beginning of 1826, if not earlier, Beethoven was at work on a fourth quartet, in C minor (op.131). Just as in the previous year, while he had been engaged on the A minor quartet, so now illness once again interrupted him. As before it was abdominal pain, and seemingly pain in his joints; his eyes were also affected. But before the end of March he was better, and completed the quartet in all essentials by June. This quartet was plainly intended for Maurice Schlesinger, to whom he had written on 22 April with a request for 80 ducats straight away, ‘for quartets are now in demand everywhere, and it really seems that our age is taking a step forward’. But Schlesinger’s Paris firm had been damaged by fire, and on getting no reply Beethoven impatiently offered the quartet to Schlesinger’s father in Berlin, to Probst of Leipzig, and to Schott of Mainz, who secured the work.

To understand the events of the summer of 1826 it is necessary to go back some way and resume the story of the nephew at the point that it was broken off in 1820. After the guardianship issue had been resolved in Beethoven’s favour in that year, Karl remained at Blöchlinger’s educational institute until the summer of 1823. Having by then matriculated, he proceeded to the university and attended the philological lectures that were given there. He was just 17, and in spite of the earlier forebodings of Beethoven and Blöchlinger about his character and his industry, the almost complete segregation from his mother that he had to endure, and the conflicts of loyalty constantly imposed on him, he had developed well and had shown good progress in his studies. He was also making himself useful to his uncle, with whom he spent the summer of 1823 in Baden, acting as messenger and handyman, and sometimes as amanuensis and ready-reckoner. When Beethoven returned to Vienna for the winter Karl moved in with him, and remained until Easter 1825, when he left the university for the Polytechnic Institute and moved to lodgings run by a certain Matthias Schlemmer.

Whether they were living together or apart, it was not an easy relationship. From the conversation-book entries Karl appears as good-natured, lively and shrewd, but perhaps also a little sly and prone to tell tales; he must after all have been used to hearing people slandered recklessly, and he was eager to please his intimidating uncle. Beethoven’s helplessness in practical matters, which included dealing with the servants, put a heavy load on Karl’s time; but his possessiveness, suspiciousness and irritability must have been even more of a burden. Beethoven was jealous of Karl’s young friends, and not only disparaged them but tried to prevent him from seeing them; at the same time, when he had moved for the summer to Baden, he expected Karl to come out to visit him on Sundays and holidays, thus greatly interfering with his nephew’s studies.

In 1825 Beethoven himself acquired a friend nearer to Karl’s age than to his own. This was Karl Holz, the second violin in the Schuppanzigh Quartet, who was then 27. Holz came to occupy something of the same place in his household that had previously been held by Schindler; Schindler was more or less completely displaced by Holz during 1825 and most of 1826, and never forgave him. The conversation-book entries suggest that Beethoven began to use Holz to spy on Karl.

The letters of Beethoven to Karl in the years 1825 and 1826 are full of reproaches and recriminations, and demands for his affection and attention. There are also violently emotional attempts at reconciliation. The conversation books tell the same story: Beethoven was ceaselessly suspicious of the friends Karl had, the use he made of his spare time, the way he spent his money, and made him accountable for all three. By the summer of 1826, at least, Karl seems to have grown more contemptuous of his uncle, and started seeing his mother clandestinely, as well as one of his ‘forbidden’ friends, Niemetz. It may be that this produced conflicts in him that he could not handle; there are suggestions too that he had also got into debt. On 5 August, at all events, he pawned his watch, bought two new pistols and drove to Baden. Next morning he went to the Helenenthal, one of his uncle’s favourite spots, and discharged both weapons at his temple. Neither bullet penetrated the skull, and when the injured young man was found he was carried back to Vienna – to his mother’s house.

Karl’s attempted suicide proved shattering to Beethoven; Schindler describes him soon after as looking like a man of 70. He was urged by his friends to give up the guardianship and to reach a decision about Karl’s future, for the penal aspects of the case were a constant threat. Two years earlier Karl had expressed a wish to enter the army, and now, through the help of Stephan von Breuning, it was arranged for him to be taken as a cadet into the regiment of a certain Baron von Stutterheim. Beethoven’s gratitude for this outcome is shown by the fact that he changed the dedication of his C minor Quartet, which he had declared to be his greatest, so that it could be dedicated to this unmusical warrior.

Since 1819 Beethoven’s brother Johann had owned a country property at Gneixendorf near Krems. Beethoven had often been asked to stay, but his dislike of his sister-in-law Therese had led him to turn the invitations down; shocked by her infidelities, in fact, he had from time to time urged Johann to divorce her and to make a will leaving his fortune to Karl. On this occasion, judging it prudent to be absent from Vienna, he accepted Johann’s invitation; and three days after Karl had been discharged from hospital on 25 September the two brothers travelled to Gneixendorf with their nephew, arriving after an overnight stop at a village. Beethoven was ill when he left Vienna; he seems also to have been very depressed and withdrawn, and his eccentricities of behaviour were found comic by the country folk. Yet as usual he managed to work. Since July he had been occupied with a quartet in F (op.135); he completed it at Gneixendorf by the middle of October, copied out the parts himself, and sent it straight away to Schlesinger in Paris. Then he turned to a problem that had arisen with the B Quartet (op.130). Because of the difficulty that had been found with the fugue that formed its last movement, he was asked by the publisher to supply a new, easier finale (which would be paid for). After reflection he undertook to do so, and delivered it to the publisher in the middle of November. It was the last complete piece that he composed. The ‘Grosse Fuge’, it was agreed, should be published as well, but as a separate opus (op.133).

Beethoven started back to Vienna with Karl on 1 December, arriving there the next day, and having got to his lodgings in the building known as the Schwarzspanierhaus he immediately called a doctor. He had already had swollen feet in the country, but the underlying pathology became manifest on 13 December when he developed jaundice and ascites (dropsy). His doctors appear to have perceived correctly that his liver was affected (the autopsy indicates cirrhosis of the liver caused either by hepatitis or alcohol and related multiple organ failure), but there was little they could do beyond relieving his swollen abdomen by tapping off the fluid. This was done on 20 December, and again on 8 January, 2 February and 27 February 1827. Meanwhile news of the seriousness of his condition, and exaggerated reports about his financial needs, had spread far and wide. The firm of Schott sent him a dozen bottles of Rhine wine; the Philharmonic Society of London resolved to provide £100 for his relief. There were occasional letters from Karl, now with his regiment, and some entertainment for the sick man was provided by Breuning’s 13-year-old son Gerhard, who called daily. There was also a stream of other visitors.

When it was clear that the end was near Breuning drafted a simple will, which bequeathed Beethoven’s whole estate to Karl; on 23 March Beethoven copied and signed it (‘luwig van Beethoven’) with great difficulty. He died at about 5.45 p.m. on 26 March. The funeral on 29 March was a public event for the Viennese; the crowd was estimated at 10,000 (fig.10). The funeral oration, written by Franz Grillparzer, was delivered at the graveside in the cemetery at Währing by the actor Heinrich Anschütz. In 1888 Beethoven’s remains were removed, together with Schubert’s, to the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) in Vienna, where they now rest side by side.

11. The ‘three periods’.

The division of Beethoven’s life and works into three periods was proposed as early as 1828 by Schlosser, taken up by Fétis in 1837, and then elaborated and popularized by Lenz in his influential Beethoven et ses trois styles of 1852. Though each of these critics grouped Beethoven's works differently, the three-period schema took hold and settled into something like a concensus: a first formative period ending around 1802, a second period lasting until around 1812 and a third period from 1813 to 1827. This schema has been attacked, not without reason, as simplistic and suspiciously consonant with evolutionary preconceptions (some of which are discussed below in §19). Yet it refuses to die, because in spite of all it obviously does accommodate the bluntest style distinctions to be observed in Beethoven’s output, and also because the breaks between the periods correspond with the major turning-points in Beethoven’s biography. There can be no doubt that with Beethoven – not to speak of other composers – a very close relationship existed between his creative energies and his emotional life.

The three-period framework should not be scrapped, then, but it is certainly in need of some refining. The following takes account of a number of suggestions made in the more recent literature. First, a fourth period should be added, or rather, divided off from the traditional first period: the music composed at Bonn, about which the 19th century knew little and probably cared less. Second, examination shows that each of the four periods breaks naturally into two sub-periods, and so they are best conceived of in this way. Third, allowance must be made not only for the general development of a composer’s style, but also for the inner necessities of certain genres and the effects of his experience with them. For example, works in genres which he was attacking for the first time may have less ‘advanced’ stylistic features than works of the same date in familiar, much used genres.

It is also necessary to understand that in each of the four periods the nature of the two sub-periods and their relation to each other differ considerably. In the Bonn period the first sub-period (1782–5) contains juvenilia of small importance. Then there seems to be a pause; it is known that the years 1786–9 were very eventful ones for Beethoven but little is known of any music he composed in this period. From 1790–92 a group of much more mature works survives – a rather impressive corpus, indeed, which could reasonably support the young composer’s ambitious plan of study in Vienna.

In the early Vienna period, Beethoven first had to gain control over the Viennese style and assert his individuality within it (1793–9). Then from 1800 to 1802 he produced at high speed a series of increasingly experimental pieces which must be seen in retrospect as a transition to the middle period. It is in this sub-period that the relative effects of genre and familiarity are especially clear. In 1798 and 1799 the piano sonatas are fluid and visionary but the earliest string quartets are relatively stiff. By 1800 the quartet writing moves more easily but the first of his symphonies is still decidedly conservative.

The middle period begins with a famous series of compositions in the heroic vein (1803–8): the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Leonore (Fidelio) and others. The music of the sub-period 1809–12 follows the same general stylistic impetus, but becomes rather less radical and turbulent as it becomes more and more effortless in technique. Most of Beethoven’s orchestral music dates from the middle period.

The late period is in every way the most complex. In 1813–18, years marked by emotional upheavals, Beethoven’s output fell off sharply. Naturally enough, most attention has been directed to the few compositions in this sub-period of a more serious nature; increasingly intimate and even ‘private’, they convey unmistakable hints of a new style. But the years 1813–16 also saw many ‘public’ works, such as the ‘Battle Symphony’, Der glorreiche Augenblick and the Chor auf die verbündeten Fürsten for the Congress of Vienna. These, as Maynard Solomon has observed, ‘regressed to a pastiche of the heroic style’ and show just as unmistakably that the style change was now being worked out slowly and with great difficulty – not at all like the earlier transition in 1800–02. The Hammerklavier Sonata of 1818 represented a kind of breakthrough, but only after the matter of his nephew’s guardianship was settled by the courts did Beethoven’s compositional energies flow easily again, in the unbroken series of late-period masterpieces written from 1820 to 1826.

12. Music of the Bonn period.

Ten compositions by Beethoven are known from the years 1782–5, when efforts were being made to promote him as a prodigy. Publication was gained for most of these works. Another 30 or so from the years 1787–92 are extant; of these, few appear to pre-date 1790 and only one was published at the time. As a good many of the others are known only from later sources, scholars have always suspected that they may be known in considerably revised versions. It was a pet theory of Thayer, the great 19th-century Beethoven biographer, that the young composer brought a thick portfolio of music from Bonn to Vienna and drew on it liberally for compositions of the next decade and even later. Rather more than most composers, as Thayer had observed, Beethoven was inclined to publish his juvenilia in later life and also to incorporate parts of them into mature pieces. And this in turn suggests a special motive for studying the unassuming music of Beethoven’s Bonn years.

The most substantial of the earliest compositions are sets of three piano sonatas and three piano quartets. The main musical influences on the boy have been seen as, first, Neefe and Sterkel, and then Mozart; each of the piano quartets is modelled on a specific work by Mozart, from the set of violin sonatas published in 1781 (k379/373a, 380/374f, 296). Beethoven looked to Mozart again and again during his first decade in Vienna (see opp.3, 16, 18 no.5).

During the second Bonn sub-period Beethoven produced about a dozen lieder of considerable interest. He published some of them later in op.52 (1805), but only the simpler ones; the more elaborate and intense Bonn songs are not well known because they were discovered relatively late and buried in the 1888 supplement to the Gesamtausgabe. In 1790, the important commission to prepare official cantatas on the death of Emperor Joseph II and the accession of Leopold II spurred Beethoven on to the most ambitious of his youthful projects. The funeral cantata gave him the opportunity for some admirably expressive writing in the pathetic C minor chorus which frames the work and in the serene soprano aria with chorus. He was to use this again with superb effect at the dénouement of Leonore, 15 years later. In addition to the five large arias within these cantatas, he also composed three accomplished concert arias: Prüfung des Küssens, Mit Mädeln sich vertragen (his first Goethe setting) and Primo amore.

A genre in which any budding virtuoso had to excel was the variation set. In 1790–92 Beethoven wrote out two brilliant sets for piano, on Righini’s ‘Venni amore’ and Dittersdorf’s ‘Es war einmal ein alter Mann’; one set for piano duet on a theme by Count Waldstein; and one for violin and piano on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ (completed in Vienna). While many of the variations are of the insipid decorative variety, others deal with the theme in a more interesting, substantive fashion. It is in these ‘analytical’ variations, perhaps, more than in the other Bonn music, that the Beethoven to come can be glimpsed.

Less impressive, in these years, is the instrumental music in the sonata style. There is an incomplete draft for a passionate symphony movement in C minor; fragments of a big violin concerto and of some sort of concertante for piano, flute and bassoon; a complete trio for the same three instruments; a piano trio (woo38) and what looks like part of a movement from another, and a few rather colourless sonata movements for piano. There are also many sketches. (Is it accidental that so much of this music has been transmitted in an incomplete form? An oboe concerto and the original version of the B Piano Concerto, both dating from this period, have vanished with barely a trace.) Where Beethoven departed from formula in these works he seems to have straggled helplessly, as in the violin concerto fragment. Although there are some bold strokes, they are seldom integrated convincingly into the total musical discourse.

Greater sophistication is shown by the Wind Octet op.103, but here there is reason to believe that Beethoven rewrote what was originally a Bonn score during his first years in Vienna, with an eye to publication. Leaving this work out of consideration, one is bound to conclude that Beethoven at Bonn was a less interesting composer of works in the sonata style than of music in other genres – variations, lieder and large vocal-orchestral pieces. In view of his later output, this conclusion may seem surprising. Yet the sonata style as it is generally known was very much a Viennese speciality. The Bonn works in the sonata style make clear how important and right it was for Beethoven to have gone back to Vienna in late 1792, and how large a part Vienna was to play in the formation and nurture of his musical personality.

13. Music of the early Vienna period.

During his first year or so in Vienna Beethoven appears to have composed considerably less than in the years just preceding and following. There are signs that he spent some time revising or recasting an amount of his Bonn music to reflect Viennese standards and taste. The Wind Octet has already been mentioned; sketches show that he also started reworking his violin and oboe concertos. Fragments of the juvenile piano quartets were incorporated into some of the first sonatas composed in Vienna, op.2 nos.1 and 3.

By the time opp.1 and 2 were published (July 1795, March 1796) Beethoven certainly had the musical wherewithal to make Vienna sit up and listen. Probably the best-known movement from this impressive group of six pieces is the opening Allegro of the Piano Sonata in F minor op.2 no.1, a remarkable precursor of Beethovenian concentration and intensity (and the more remarkable in that the sketches go back to Bonn). In 1795, however, this movement was an exception. Most of the early music is scaled very broadly, weighty and discursive, even overblown. Thus for many years Beethoven most often wrote sonatas in four movements, rather than three, as was common with Haydn and Mozart, and it seems indicative that his op.3 was a string trio in six movements, modelled on the large Divertimento k563 by Mozart. There is inconclusive evidence that op.3 goes back to a Bonn original, but in its final form it was certainly written in Vienna, like the Wind Octet.

Opp.1 and 2 provide examples of the rather ponderous slow movements characteristic of the first Vienna period, and also of that famous innovation the scherzo. Beethoven’s early scherzos move no faster than most Haydn minuets and sound no more humorous, but they last considerably longer and tend to be constructed out of more symmetrical periods. As for movements in sonata form, most of them contain a great deal of musical material – and a great many modulations in the second group. Though Beethoven’s still emerging powers of organization were sometimes overtaxed, sometimes they were not and there are passages of authentic Beethovenian power, especially in the matter of long-range control over bold harmonic action. Cases in point are the passing modulations in the first movement of the A major Sonata op.2 no.2, and the expanded recapitulation in the Adagio of the G major Trio op.1 no.2.

In these early years Beethoven made his name as a pianist and improviser and as a composer primarily for piano. Some ideas of his improvising style can be formed from his published piano variations, from copious notations on his early sketchleaves, and from certain incomplete piano scores which are perhaps better viewed as aides-mémoires than as unachieved compositions. The well-known Rondo a capriccio was completed probably by Diabelli after Beethoven’s death and published as op.129 under the irresponsible title ‘Rage over a Lost Penny’, and an interesting cyclic ‘Fantasia’ in three movements has come to light in the so-called ‘Kafka sketchbook’ (British Library). In later years he improvised less, of course, but evidence of his improvising style is still to be found in the Fantasias opp.77 and 80, the cadenzas to piano concertos, and shorter cadenza-like passages in a very large number of other pieces.

Beethoven was naturally open to the influence of other pianist-composers at a time when the technique of the instrument was expanding significantly. Too much can be made, however, of similar themes and pianistic textures in Beethoven and Clementi, Dussek and other such composers. From the start, and even at his most discursive, Beethoven had a commitment to the total structure that makes Clementi seem very lax. His well-known insistence on making transitional and cadential matter sound individual is already in evidence; he had little use for the debased coin of the style galant which was still in circulation in the 1790s. And in his ‘serious’ compositions piano virtuosity is always used in the service of a musical idea, never for its own sake. These compositions may sound pompous or gauche, sometimes, but they never sound meretricious and they never lack a certain intellectual and imaginative quality.

As has been mentioned above, when Haydn heard the op.1 trios he praised them but thought the public would not understand or accept the third, in C minor. One suspects that Haydn himself may have been put off by the extremes of tempo, dynamics, texture and local chromatic action in this piece, and still more by the resulting emotional aura. He would not have been the last listener to find something callow and stagey, which is to say essentially impersonal, in these insistent gestures of pathos and high drama. Beethoven of course paid no attention to his advice and published increasingly sophisticated C minor items in nearly every one of his composite sets of works over the next eight years (opp.9, 10, 18, 30). In these years C minor was practically the only minor key he used for full-length pieces (though D minor is used for the impressive slow movements of op.10 no.3 and op.18 no.1, as well as for the ‘Tempest’ Sonata op.31 no.2). The most successful early embodiments of Beethoven’s ‘C minor mood’ are no doubt the Sonate pathétique op.13 (1797–8) and the Third Piano Concerto (?1800–03). Still to come were the 32 Variations on an Original Theme, for piano, the Coriolan Overture, the Fifth Symphony and the last piano sonata.

The first movements, in sonata form, of the C minor Trio and the F minor Sonata have quiet main themes which are designed to return fortissimo at the point of recapitulation. This is a characteristic Beethoven fingerprint. In the early works it often makes for a rather blustery effect. Yet it adumbrates a new view of the form whereby the recapitulation is conceived less as a symmetrical return or a climax than as a transformation or triumph. The sonata style is always inherently ‘dramatic’, in the special sense expounded and illuminated by Tovey. Tovey also pointed out that at their most characteristic Haydn and Mozart use the style to project high comedy, the musical equivalent of a comedy of manners. Beethoven was already groping for ways of using it for tragedy, melodrama or his own special brand of inspirational theatre of ideas.

This radical approach to sonata form (which encompasses all its aspects, of course, not only the enhanced recapitulation) becomes clearer in the piano sonatas of 1796–9: op.7, op.10 nos.1–3 and op.13. In op.13 and in the fine Sonata in D op.10 no.3, although the main theme does not return loudly, there is still a compelling impression that something urgent is at stake in the musical dialectic. Broadly speaking, it was this sense of urgency in dealing with what became known as the Classical style that Viennese aristocratic circles found most novel and impressive in the ‘grand Mogul’, as Haydn called him, from the provinces.

A deliberate campaign to annex all current musical genres can be read into Beethoven’s activities in these years. He wrote an effective concert aria – a scena and rondò – to a text adapted from Metastasio, Ah! perfido, some deft little songs to lyrics by Goethe, and an interesting extended lied, the once-popular Adelaide. He produced two rather Mozartian piano concertos, one of them (the B, op.19) evidently revised several times from a Bonn original, and a good deal of miscellaneous wind music, including a Quintet for Piano and Wind op.16 which incautiously invites comparison with a similar work by Mozart (k452). In 1795–6 he sketched long and hard at a symphony in C. As it was turning out to be too big, he wisely shelved it, though he returned to some of its musical ideas when he wrote the First Symphony (also in C) in 1799–1800.

The three Violin Sonatas op.12 are not as impressive as the contemporary piano sonatas; the two Cello Sonatas op.5 are also lesser works but interesting in their bold virtuoso stance, looking ahead to the Kreutzer Sonata of 1802–3. After completing the three String Trios op.9 Beethoven launched into his most ambitious project yet, the set of six String Quartets op.18 (1798–1800). All the while he was contributing copiously to the ephemera of Viennese musical life: easy piano variations, ballroom dances by the dozen, patriotic marching songs, arias to be inserted into a Singspiel, pieces for mechanical clock-organ and a Sonatina for mandolin and piano.

There is no single work that demarcates the second sub-period within the early Vienna years, the time when Beethoven began to show signs of dissatisfaction with some of the more formal aspects of the Classical style and reached towards something new. In a way the signs were present from the beginning. Novelties of conception can be detected all along. They are multiplied in the Sonate pathétique of 1798 – the integration of the introduction into the first movement proper, the perfectly managed bold modulations in the second group, the prophetic breakdown on the dominant in the middle of the rondo; not to speak of the overall coherence of mood which has made the Pathétique the most famous piece in Beethoven’s early output. Another famous early piece, the first movement of the Quartet in F op.18 no.1, is his first exhaustive study in motivic saturation. The turn-motif of bars 1–2 forces its way into every available nook and cranny of the second group, the transitions, the development and coda. (When Beethoven revised op.18 no.1, after having given a fair copy of it to Amenda, he reduced the appearances of the turn-motif by nearly a quarter.)

The last two quartets of op.18, composed around 1800, show a rather new treatment of the traditional four-movement form (one that had recently been essayed by Haydn in several of his op.76 quartets). The first movements are not extensive and decisive but instead swift, bland and symmetrical, so that the later movements all seem (and were surely meant to seem) weightier or more arresting. The most visionary of these later movements is the composite finale of the Quartet in B op.18 no.6, where a slow, strange-sounding chromatic labyrinth entitled ‘La malinconia’ alternates with a swift, limpid little dance evocative of the Viennese ballrooms.

More far-reaching experiments with the weight, character and balance of the various movements in a work were made within the impressive series of about a dozen piano sonatas composed in 1800–02. These included op.26 in A with its ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe’ (cf the ‘Eroica’ Symphony), op.27 no.1 in E, op.27 no.2 in C minor (each marked ‘quasi una fantasia’) and op.31 no.3 in E. Some of the movements are run together, and there is a significant shift in weight away from the first movement and towards the last. Experiments of this kind with multi-movement works slowed down during the next period, when under the sway of his developing ‘symphonic’ ideal Beethoven found fresh resources in the traditional four-movement dynamic. But they played an important part in the growing flexibility of his art, and after 1812 they were resumed with much greater force and consciousness.

Greater flexibility already allowed for the incorporation of movements of widely different characters and forms. It is perhaps at this time that one first begins to be aware of the striking individuality of all Beethoven’s pieces, a characteristic that has often been noted. Prime examples are the so-called ‘Pastoral’ Sonata in D op.28 (also the locus classicus for successive thematic fragmentation in a development section), the Sonata in E op.31 no.3, and those great and deserving favourites of the Romantic era, the Pathétique, the ‘Moonlight’ and the D minor op.31 no.2.

The opening reverie of the ‘Moonlight’ is such a startling conception, even today, that Beethoven’s very careful plotting of the sequence of the movements in this sonata seems to pale by comparison. Unprecedented for a sonata opening is the half-improvisatory texture, the unity of mood, and especially the mood itself – that romantic mestizia which will have overwhelmed all but the stoniest of listeners by the end of the melody’s first phrase. An equally bold and emotional, but also more intellectual, experiment marks the opening of op.31 no.2. Here the first theme in a sonata form movement consists of antecedent and consequent phrases of radically different characters: a slow improvisatory arpeggio and a fast, highly motivic agitato. Both of these ideas can be heard echoing in the later movements of the sonata.

The inner pressure of his developing musical thought drove Beethoven on to more and more novelty, no doubt; and mixed in with this was a measure of artistic vanity. About 1801–2 he appeared much concerned with being original, even advising a publisher to point out the innovations in his Piano Variations on Original Themes opp.34 and 35 by means of a special advertisement. And that would certainly have been justified. Op.34 has its six variations in six different keys. Op.35 abstracts the ludicrous bare bass line of the contredanse theme from Prometheus and builds up from it fantastically in 15 variations and a full-length fugue. The finale of the ‘Eroica’ is a second building exercise on the same bass, this time involving variations in different keys and two fugato sections.

According to Czerny, his young pupil in those years, Beethoven spoke of a ‘new path’ he was following, a path which later Czerny associated with the important op.31 sonatas of 1802. Mention has already been made of op.31 no.2. Another novelty of conception was the key plan of the first movement of the Sonata in G op.31 no.1, which has the second group not in the dominant but in the mediant key (major and minor; cf the String Quintet op.29 of 1801). This looks ahead to Beethoven’s thorough exploration and extension of the tonal range of Classical music, a process that was to run parallel with his expansion of all aspects of Classical form in the next years. In the late period it is the exception rather than the rule to have the second group in the dominant.

Other important, but more conservative, works of 1799–1801 are the music for the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Beethoven’s introduction to the Viennese stage; the amiable but rather mindless Septet, whose great popularity soon came to irritate the composer; and the slender First Symphony, which can seem almost to wilt when commentators examine it for clues to future symphonic greatness. The Second Symphony of 1802 must also be counted among the more conservative works – this in spite of its great advance in assurance over the First and its inspired play with the notes F and G as a means of unifying the whole. Although one would not easily mistake this for a work by Haydn, the Second Symphony stands as a final realization of the concept of a large concert piece which he had developed. This impression is confirmed by Beethoven’s quotation of a sensational modulatory passage from The Creation, as Tovey observed.

One feels that in the Second Symphony Beethoven for the first time really engaged with the symphony orchestra and began to understand how it could serve his own emerging purpose. He had taken its true measure. In the middle period, from 1803 to 1812, he wrote most of his famous works for orchestra, evolving through them a new ‘symphonic ideal’ that also inspired most of his non-orchestral music.

14. The symphonic ideal.

After the period of inner turmoil expressed (and perhaps resolved) by the Heiligenstadt Testament of October 1802, Beethoven began to engage seriously with large public works involving explicitly extra-musical ideas. It was the first time he had done so since going to Vienna. An outer impetus was his association first with the Burgtheater and then with the Theater an der Wien, but the decision to embark on a ‘Bonaparte symphony’ at just this time came from inner pressures. The oratorio Christus am Oelberge, musically not a great success, was written hastily in early 1803. The opera Leonore was written very slowly in 1804–5. Between them came the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, no.3: an authentic ‘watershed work’, one that marks a turning-point in the history of modern music.

Thanks to Nottebohm’s monograph on the ‘Eroica’ sketches, more is generally known about the composition of this work than any other by Beethoven. The sketches show a minimum of false starts and detours. The most radical ideas were present from the start, if in cruder form, and work seems to have proceeded with great assurance. This is striking indeed, for however carefully one studies Beethoven’s evolving style up to 1803, nothing prepares one for the scope, the almost bewildering originality and almost continuous technical certainty manifested in this symphony. In sheer length, Beethoven may well have felt that he had overextended himself, for it was many years before he wrote another instrumental work of like dimensions.

In the first movement, one must marvel at the expansion in dimensions on every level; at the projection of certain melodic details of the main theme into the total form – the bass C (D) instigating moves to the keys of the supertonic and the flat seventh degree in the recapitulation, the violins’ G–A returning vertically as the famous horn-call dissonance; at the masterly coagulation of diverse material into the second group; and at the whole concept of the panoramic development section, with its passage of deepening breakdown redeemed by the introduction of a new theme (if it is indeed really new). The moving thematic ‘liquidation’ at the end of the Marcia funebre, the four alla breve bars in the da capo of the scherzo, the novel structure of the finale, the powerful fugatos throughout – none of these could have been predicted. Also astonishing is the quality of ‘potential’ that informs the main themes of the three fast movements. Two of them require (and in due course receive) horizontal or vertical completion, and the other is presented in a state of almost palpable evolution.

These themes were made to order for the new ‘symphonic ideal’ which Beethoven perfected at a stroke with his Third Symphony and further celebrated with his Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth. The forcefulness, expanded range and evident radical intent of these works sets them apart from symphonies in the 18th-century tradition, such as Beethoven’s own First and Second. But more than this, they all contrive to create the impression of a psychological journey or growth process. In the course of this, something seems to arrive or triumph or transcend – even if, as in the Pastoral, what is mainly transcended is the weather. This illusion is helped by certain other characteristic features: ‘evolving’ themes, transitions between widely separated passages, actual thematic recurrences from one movement to another, and last but not least, the involvement of extra-musical ideas by means of a literary text, a programme, or (as in the ‘Eroica’) just a few tantalizing titles.

In technical terms, this development may be viewed as the projection of the underlying principles of the sonata style on the scale of the total four-movement work, rather than that of the single movement in sonata form. This view takes account of the impression Beethoven now so often gives of grappling with musical fundamentals. He had the power – and it must be called an intellectual power – of penetration into the gestural level below sonata form. He could manipulate the basic elements of the sonata style in a more comprehensive, less formalistic way than ever before. One senses the same grasp of essences when Beethoven now isolates a melodic, harmonic or rhythmic detail of a theme and then appears to ‘compose it out’ – to spell out its implications later in the piece. Doubtless this also happens in earlier music, by Beethoven or by other composers, but in the middle period he began to draw attention to the process in a much more pointed fashion.

Beethoven’s fascination for musicians of a certain turn of mind rests on his continuing investigation of basic musical relationships in this sense. The investigations grew more momentous in the late period, and also more subtle and pervasive, as will be seen if one compares the ‘composing out’ of C and A in the ‘Eroica’ first movement, mentioned above, with the treatment of the Neapolitan D in the Quartet in C minor op.131.

For musicians and listeners of another turn of mind, Beethoven’s attraction rests on another aspect of the ‘symphonic ideal’, one that is less technical but probably no less essential. The combination of his musical dynamic, now extremely powerful, and extra-musical suggestions invests his pieces with an unmistakable ethical aura. Even Tovey, the most zealous adherent of the ‘pure music’ position, was convinced that Beethoven’s music was ‘edifying’. J.W.N. Sullivan taught the readers of his influential little book to share in Beethoven’s ‘spiritual development’. Concert-goers of the 19th and 20th centuries gladly attached programmatic suggestions to those symphonies that lack them: to the Fifth, Beethoven’s alleged remark about fate knocking at the door, and to the Seventh, Wagner’s less happy evocation of an apotheosis of dance. In 1937 the eccentric musicologist Arnold Schering proposed detailed Shakespearean and other literary programmes for a whole clutch of Beethoven compositions.

An important influence on the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and other works of this period is that of French post-revolutionary music. In 1802 and 1803 operas by Cherubini and Méhul enjoyed enormous success in Vienna. Their impact on Beethoven has been traced in such diverse areas as his driving orchestral tutti style, his partiality for marches and march-like material, the free form of his overtures (Leonore no.2, 1805, stands in the same relation to Prometheus, 1801, as the ‘Eroica’ Symphony does to the First), and various points of harmony and orchestration. Beethoven’s symphonic ideal itself is foreshadowed in the French repertory of the 1790s, in the grand revolutionary symphonies, sometimes with chorus, by Gossec, Méhul and their contemporaries. But with Beethoven there is not only an incomparably more arresting musical technique but also a decisive change in emphasis. He personalized the political symphony. The ‘Eroica’ was conceived as a tribute not to the idea of revolution but to the revolutionary hero, Napoleon, and really to Beethoven himself. Later concert-goers have been able to respond to Beethoven’s heroic quests and spiritual journeys in a way they could never respond to celebrations of long-past political ideologies.

The conception of this symphonic ideal, and the development of technical means to implement it, is probably Beethoven’s greatest single achievement. It is par excellence a Romantic phenomenon, however ‘Classical’ one may wish to regard his purely musical procedures. It is also a feature that has offended certain critics, especially in the early part of the 20th century, and set them against Beethoven. The composer himself was capable of producing a cynical and enormously popular travesty of his own symphonic ideal, in the ‘Battle Symphony’ of 1813.

15. Middle-period works.

Soon after the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the Fifth Symphony was conceived, but somehow work got deflected into certain other C major and minor projects, and things did not come together until late 1807 and 1808. More than any other piece of music, the Fifth Symphony has come to typify the thematic unification, or ‘organicism’, as the 19th century viewed it, that Beethoven developed to such a high degree in these years. The famous opening motif is to be heard in almost every bar of the first movement – and, allowing for modifications, in the other movements. The opening theme expands into the horn-call before the second subject, and the second subject employs the same note pattern as the horn-call. Then, in the development section, the horn-call is fragmented successively down to a single minim, alternating between strings and woodwind in a passage of extraordinary tension achieved primarily by harmonic means. As in many other works of the time, the last two movements are run together without a break; this device, obviously, contributes to the continuity and to a feeling of necessary sequence. But more than this: here the long transition passage between the movements, and the recurrence of a theme from the third movement in the retransition before the recapitulation of the fourth, give the sense that one movement is triumphantly resolved by the other – a sense confirmed by the enormously emphatic last-movement coda.

Such codas now become very common. They tend to assume the important function of finally resolving some melodic, harmonic or rhythmic instability in the first theme – an instability that has infused the movement with much of its energy up to the coda. This new weighting of sonata form towards the coda is associated, and sometimes coordinated, with another tendency, that of withholding full rhythmic or even harmonic resolution at the moment of recapitulation. Thus in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, as Robert Simpson has observed, solid dominant–tonic resolution waits in the recapitulation until the appearance of the second theme (compare the first movements of two other works in the same key, B, the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Quartet op.130). The Fourth Symphony, said Tovey, ‘is perhaps the work in which Beethoven first fully reveals his mastery of movement’.

Hardly less original than the Fifth Symphony is the Sixth (‘Pastoral’, 1808), though here for once the first movement is made as quiet as possible. This is done with the help of a development section devoid of tensions, a recapitulation approached hymn-like from the subdominant, and countless pedal points throughout. In compensation, a passage of fury comes elsewhere in the piece, as an extra movement (trombones and piccolo enter for the first time in the symphony to enforce this ‘Storm’). Each of the five movements bears a programmatic inscription, and one of these is frankly pictorial in nature – the ‘Scene by the brook’ inscribed over the slow movement, which includes a series of stylized birdcalls at the end, in a sort of woodwind cadenza (Beethoven was careful to identify the quail, nightingale and cuckoo – see fig.12). On the other hand, he stressed the word ‘Gefühle’ (‘feeling’) in two other inscriptions and so could quite properly observe that his reference was less to musical ‘Malerei’ (‘painting’) than to emotions aroused by the countryside. A sequence of such feelings guides the listener through the familiar therapeutic progress of a Beethoven symphony, in a somewhat gentler version.

The symphonic ideal inspires most of the non-symphonic pieces written between 1803 and 1808. That is true to an extent even of the Kreutzer Sonata, composed in early 1803, just before the ‘Eroica’. The Waldstein Sonata, composed just after the ‘Eroica’, adopts an idea for the groundplan of its opening paragraph from an earlier piano sonata, op.31 no.1 in G. But there is all the difference in ambition, scale and mood; what served in the earlier piece as a witty constructive device becomes in the later one an earth-shaking, or at least a piano-shaking, declaration. The slow movement was originally going to be the somewhat bovine piece now known as the ‘Andante favori’ (compare the Kreutzer and op.31 no.1). When Beethoven replaced this by the adagio ‘Introduzione’ which makes momentous preparations for the finale, he gave the sonata the characteristic ‘symphonic’ sweep even while shortening it, and also motivated (or validated) the grandiose coda of the finale. Planned on broader lines still, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata (1804–5) is an even more imaginative work, a work of the greatest extremes – as witness the fortissimo chord handfuls that shatter the brooding quiet of the very first page.

This and other equally violent effects were hardly thinkable on the Walter fortepiano owned by Beethoven before 1803, when he got his Erard (now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum). Yet even when dealing with instruments that were not in a state of radical development, he acted as if they were. The string quartets of op.59 so strained the medium, as it was understood in 1806, that they met with resistance from players and audiences alike. The first movement of the F major Quartet op.59 no.1, though in mood very different from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, resembles it in its unexampled scope and also, rather surprisingly, in a number of technical features. The second movement is Beethoven’s largest, most fantastic scherzando – not a true scherzo, but a free essay in the tradition of the sonatas op.31 no.3 and op.54. All three quartet slow movements, surely, cry out for evocative titles, and the last two finales are all but orchestral in conception.

Each quartet was supposed to include a Russian melody, for the benefit of the dedicatee Count Rasumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. Here for the first time may be seen Beethoven’s interest in folksong, which was to grow in later years. Folksongs did not much help the first two quartets, but Rasumovsky’s notion came to superb fruition in the third, where Beethoven gave up the idea of incorporating pre-existing tunes and instead wrote the haunting A minor Andante in what he must have conceived to be a Russian idiom.

In some ways the 1805 Leonore stands apart from other major works of these years. In local musical terms, the innovations and expanded horizons of the instrumental works are not deeply reflected in the separate operatic numbers, and probably could not have been. Apart from the overtures, there is a certain stiffness about many numbers which is understandable in a first opera. This quality is also discernible in Beethoven’s first oratorio and mass, Christus am Oelberge (1803) and the Mass in C (1807).

In broader musical terms, however, the importance of Leonore can scarcely be exaggerated. Faced by the task of matching music to an explicit narrative, and doubtless instructed by the Mozart operas which we know he consulted at the time, Beethoven here established a very large-scale dramatic continuity largely by tonal means. The Leonore overtures are famous for forecasting the opera’s turning-point by incorporating the trumpet signals for the arrival of the Minister who confounds the villain Pizarro. But the overtures also assert C major as the opera’s tonic key and A and E as subsidiary keys, and Leonore no.3 precedes its final triumphant tonic section with a recapitulation in G major; then the C minor/major of the first vocal number leads through many detours to moments central to the drama in E and A and then to G major, C minor and C major in the last two numbers. Even more than the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Leonore prefigures the more abstract (and of course more concise) tonal structures of the later instrumental works.

In terms of idea, furthermore, Leonore provides a shining prototype for the heroic progress implied in a less explicit way by the instrumental music. And what is remarkable is to see Beethoven gradually evolving a personal operatic style in the course of writing, and rewriting, Leonore. From the somewhat servile echoes of French and German light opera in the opening numbers, he moved on to find an increasingly individual and elevated voice – for example, in the Prisoners’ Chorus, the scena for Florestan, the duet ‘O namenlose Freude’ (revised from the Vestas Feuer fragments of 1803) and the long recitative before it which was the most regrettable of Beethoven’s cuts for the 1814 version. To say that Beethoven approached his libretto with utter seriousness and idealism may seem like a truism; but of how many other first operas of the time can as much be said?

Around 1808 the enthusiasm and high daring of Beethoven’s music begins to be tempered by ever-increasing technical virtuosity. Even when the pieces are still very powerful, as is often the case, they are smoother and a little safer than before. The stage work of this period is Egmont (1809–10), consisting not only of the well-known overture but also incidental music lasting 40 minutes, including a final ‘Siegessymphonie’ (‘Symphony of Victory’) in the face of disaster. Feelings that were turned inward in Leonore were turned outward in Egmont. Whereas the Leonore no.2 and no.3 overtures were involuted, explosive works dedicated to gigantic struggle, the Egmont overture is a tough, lucid one that comes by its Pyrrhic victories easily.

The change is clearest of all between the op.59 quartets and the ‘Harp’ Quartet of 1809 (a nickname deriving from its insistent functional pizzicatos). Nothing about this work is problematic. The climax of the first movement is a climax of sheer technical exhilaration, for in the coda Beethoven seems at last to have solved the problem of simulating orchestral idiom in a quartet. The second movement is serene and the third (in C minor) sounds like a speeded-up but smoothed-down version of the third movement of the Fifth Symphony. The finale is a set of simple variations on a suave 2/4 tune. This type of light finale recurs in the Violin Sonata op.96 (1812).

There are now no ‘symphonic’ sonatas, except perhaps the smaller-scaled ‘Lebewohl’ op.81a (1809–10). Beethoven’s new concern in the first movements of sonatas and chamber music is lyricism, which inspires works of such different character as the Piano Sonata in F op.78 (1809), the ‘Archduke’ Trio (1810–11) and the Violin Sonata op.96. Beethoven had never written such beautiful slow movements as he now wrote for the ‘Harp’ Quartet, the ‘Archduke’ Trio and the Fifth Piano Concerto (1809). The so-called ‘Emperor’ is by far the most ‘symphonic’ of his concertos and one of the strongest works he conceived. Yet in the very first bars, where the soloist and tutti join in a thunderous cadential celebration, the battle seems to be won even before the forces have been drawn up – as was certainly not the case in the introverted, searching Fourth Concerto first performed in 1807.

Writing his Seventh Symphony in 1811–12, Beethoven again reached for new horizons: the expanding introduction, the 6-4 chords spanning the Allegretto, the rolling ostinatos at the ends of the outer movements, the rhythmic preoccupation throughout. This work is perhaps less immediate in its emotional effect than the ‘Eroica’ or the Fifth, but its élan and its effortless control over musical processes at every level can make those earlier works seem more than a little hectic. The finale, all sinew, represents a particular advance, not only in elegance but also in sheer power.

Beethoven immediately capped this work with the delightful Eighth Symphony (1812), a salute to the symphonic ideal of the previous age. It has a comical slow movement and a slowish minuet in place of the now customary scherzo. Flashes of middle-period power occur only in the outer movements. Beethoven could hardly have planned a more genial gesture of farewell for a time to the symphony and to the decade of work produced under its aegis.

Another of the greatest works written between 1808 and 1812 refuses to fit any norms one may try to adduce for this period or, indeed, for any other – the Quartet in F minor op.95. The piece is unmatched in Beethoven’s output for compression, exaggerated articulation and a corresponding sense of extreme tension. The harmonic layout is radical. Like op.57 and op.59 no.2, the first movement treats Neapolitan relationships, both in the first group (F–G) and in the second (D–E or D). D is the key of the second movement, one of Beethoven’s most beautiful, as well as one of his most disturbed – D major shadowed by D minor, with a chromatic fugato plunging into enharmonic mysteries. The F minor scherzo has a trio ranging from G to D and B minor.

This quartetto serioso, as Beethoven called it, looks back to the impressive minor-mode compositions of the period 1803–8 and looks forward to the style and mood of the late quartets. It was some time, however, before this promise of a new style could be realized.

16. Late-period style.

For a considerable time after 1812, Beethoven’s production of important works fell off strikingly. These were difficult years for him, encompassing deep emotional turmoil and endless lesser distractions. In addition, he was probably suffering from something like exhaustion after the truly immense labours of the previous period. To speak only of the decade from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony to the Eighth, he had composed some 30 major works which in most cases involved serious rethinking of musical essentials. He had composed nearly as many slighter works and he had seen about 80 items through the press. Long or short, great or slight, they all required negotiations with publishers, correction of copyists’ scores, and proofreading – unfortunately an activity that Beethoven never fully mastered.

But more generally, these were difficult years for any serious composer of Beethoven’s generation. One can perhaps appreciate the growing sense of uncertainty that he must have felt as to artistic ends and means. On some level he was responding to powerful musical currents, which were soon to come flooding to the surface; the last works of Weber and Schubert and the first works of Berlioz, Chopin and Bellini all appeared during the 1820s. Like other great composers whose lives bridged a time of deep stylistic change – such as Josquin, Monteverdi and Schoenberg – Beethoven was facing a major intellectual challenge, whether or not he formulated it in intellectual terms. He had already met one such challenge, or one part of the challenge, by his reinterpretation of the sonata principle in his ‘symphonic’ works of 1803–12. Now the very basis of the sonata style was thrown in doubt. Beethoven had no easy answer. There is something private and problematic about the corpus of late-period works, and it is hardly accidental that their deep influence on the course of music came only much later, past the time of Beethoven’s own younger contemporaries who learnt so much from the middle period.

Beethoven’s concern for lyricism deepened throughout the late period. He has sometimes been criticized as an inept melodist, and it will be granted that when he was 23 he could not, like Rossini at a like age, produce the deathless melodies of a Barbiere. Yet some of his early Bonn songs make impressive lyric statements, and in the mid-1800s he developed a very effective type of slow hymn-like melody. This is continued, intensified and much refined in the late period; the melodic outline of Leonore’s ‘Komm, Hoffnung’ (1805) recurs in the Adagio of the Quartet op.127 (1824–5). A new feature is the intimacy and delicacy already apparent in the Violin Sonata in G op.96 (1812), the Piano Sonatas in E minor op.90 (1814) and A op.101 (1816) and the Cello Sonata in C op.102 no.1 (1815).

There is also a growing interest in folklike melody, hardly surprising in one who made arrangements of over 150 folksongs for Thomson in these years. The song cycle An die ferne Geliebte op.98 (1816) marks Beethoven’s closest approach to Goethe’s ideal of the Volksweise as a basis for song composition (closest except for the tiny Ruf vom Berge woo147, 1816, which adapts an actual folksong melody). Simple little tunes evocative of folksong and folkdance are constantly turning up in the late quartets and other music.

In all this Beethoven appears to have been reaching for a more direct and intimate mode of communication. Two verbal adjuncts to such folklike essays can be regarded as symbolic: in the song cycle, the line ‘ohne Kunstgepräng, erklungen’ (‘sounding without the adornments of Art’), set to music of rock-like simplicity, and in the Ninth Symphony, Schiller’s famous apostrophe to universal brotherhood. In the best early Romantic spirit, Beethoven was seeking a new basic level of human contact through basic song, as though without sophistication or artifice. Another manifestation of this powerful – and sometimes disruptive – urge is the now rather frequent use of instrumental recitative and arioso, such as the ‘beklemmt’ (‘constricted’) passage in the Cavatina of the Quartet in B op.130. Here instrumental music seems painfully to strive for articulate communication.

Several of the late works contain variation movements of a new kind. Earlier Beethoven had written many brilliant piano variations, from the precocious ‘Venni amore’ set of 1790–91 to the C minor Variations of 1806 – a series now to be capped by the encyclopedic Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli. In his first Vienna period, however, important variation movements within larger works are not frequent. More of these occur in the middle period. Generally the variations are of the progressively decorative variety (opp.57, 61, 67, 74, 97), a type that also continues into the late years (opp.111, 125). But in the Sonata in E op.109 and the late quartets, as well as in the Diabelli set, Beethoven evolved a new type of variation in which the members take a much more individual and profoundly reinterpreted view of the original theme. The theme seems transformed or probed to its fundamentals, rather than merely varied. All this suggests a changing concept of musical unity, now seen as an evolution from within rather than as a conciliation of contrasting forces: a Darwinian concept, perhaps, rather than a Hegelian one.

In the most general sense, variation may also be said to inspire the transcendent fugal finales of the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Quartet in B (the ‘Grosse Fuge’). The fugatos that occur in not a few of Beethoven’s earlier pieces hardly prepare one for his preoccupation with contrapuntal forms in the late years; scarcely a significant work now lacks an impressive fugal section or even a full-scale fugue bristling with learned devices. Evidently he was looking for some other means of musical movement than that provided by the style he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart; fugue is a more dense, even style which places harmonic action in a very different light. In Beethoven’s hands fugue became a means of flattening out the dramatic aspects of tonality. (It was not the only means that he devised, as witness the second and third movements of the Quartet in A minor.) Related to this general tendency is Beethoven’s frequent avoidance in the late music of obvious dominant effects, his characteristic undercutting of tonic triads by 6-4 chords, and his somewhat wayward experiments with the church modes. As noted above, his early plans for a ninth symphony include a ‘pious song … in the ancient modes’.

There is in fact a persistent retrospective current in Beethoven’s late period. He published or considered publishing several of his old songs (Bundeslied, Der Kuss, Mit Mädeln sich vertragen), reworked the Opferlied of 1794, resuscitated some old piano bagatelles for op.119 and reworked another in the second movement of the A minor Quartet. He finally set Schiller’s Ode to Joy – a project first considered about 1790 – to a tune adumbrated in works of 1795 and 1808 (woo118, op.80). An archaizing urge is manifest in his interest in strict counterpoint and modality, even if the resulting pieces hardly sound archaic; over and above this, some of them look back to certain specific academic exercises recommended by Beethoven’s old teacher Albrechtsberger. It was only in his late years that Beethoven developed his well-known penchant for writing canons d’occasion. Whereas in the 1800s he had spoken well of Cherubini, now his interest settled on Palestrina, Bach – he sketched an overture on the notes B–A–C–H – and especially Handel. Handel’s influence on the overture Die Weihe des Hauses (1822) is startling.

Yet ultimately Beethoven’s real concern with fugue, as with variation and lyricism, was to mould these elements so that they could be embedded integrally into the global concerns of the sonata style. The presentation, development and return of musical material within a finely controlled tonal field remained central to his artistic endeavour. Fugues perform the function of development sections in opp.101, 106, 111 and less directly in op.110 and the Ninth Symphony finale. Then the fugue at the beginning of the C minor Quartet acts as an exposition, presenting the basic tonal and thematic material that is worked out in the rest of the piece. The variation movements of opp.127 and 135 have a powerful tonal dynamic built in. So does the Diabelli Variations – thanks to another fugue, which precedes the final, recapitulatory variation. Even An die ferne Geliebte arranges its cycle of six artless melodies in a purposeful order of keys and features a recapitulation followed by a miniature ‘symphonic’ coda.

17. Late-period works.

In some ways the few compositions finished between 1814 and 1816 – the song cycle and the sonatas op.90, op.102 nos.1 and 2, and op.101 – stand closer to Romantic music of the 1830s than any other Beethoven pieces. The opening movement of op.101, a genuine miniature sonata form in an unbroken lyrical sweep, begins quietly on the dominant as though the music was already in progress: an almost Schumannesque effect. The returns of the first-movement themes (marked ‘mit der innigsten Empfindung’ and ‘teneramente’) later in the course of this sonata and in op.102 no.1 do not sound like characteristic Beethovenian recapitulations. They are nostalgic recollections which again suggest Schumann and his generation. All four sonatas carry on much further than before Beethoven’s search for more fluid solutions to the problem of the form of the total sonata, in terms of the weight, balance and mood of the various movements.

The Sonata in B op.106, arbitrarily, but not inappropriately called the ‘Hammerklavier’ (both op.101 and op.109 are also subtitled ‘für das Hammerklavier’), occupied Beethoven from late 1817 to late 1818; it was his first really large project in five years. Like the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, it occupies a pivotal position in his output, though the differences between the two works are striking. The ‘Eroica’ is one of the most popular and ‘available’ of his compositions, while the Hammerklavier is probably the most arcane. In different ways each represented a breakthrough for Beethoven, one like the crest of a great wave and the other like the breaking of a dam. And while both were works of revolutionary novelty, the Hammerklavier also paradoxically represents a reaction, in that Beethoven reverted to the traditional four-movement pattern in place of the fluid formal experiments of the sonatas of 1814–16, and turned away from their tone of lyrical intimacy.

One feature Beethoven did pick up from them was the idea of an abrasive fugal finale, present in the Cello Sonata in D op.102 no.2. The Hammerklavier fugue with its famous cancrizans section is integrated into the total conception with astonishing care and rigour. An improvisatory introduction to the finale seems to grope for the fugue or, perhaps, to will it into existence (something of the kind happens in other late finales: opp.110, 125, 133, 135). Then the shape of the subject and the modulation plan both follow a pattern that has been established firmly (not to say exhaustively) in each of the previous movements. This is construction by means of descending 3rds, acting to a large extent as a substitute for the traditional dominant relation, and creating large-scale conflict between the tonic B and B that is arrestingly resolved.

Beethoven had never written a work that depended so thoroughly, in all its aspects, on a single musical idea. The extremity of its conception, and of its demands on the performer, are as much a part of the character of this piece as are ideas of heroism in the ‘Eroica’.

In the three sonatas of 1820–22 Beethoven returned to the proportions and preoccupations of the sonatas of 1814–16. Of all his works, the Sonata in E op.109 is perhaps the most original in form, in respect both to its first movement and to the total aggregate. The first movement is another sonata form in an unbroken lyrical sweep, like the first movement of op.101, but much more complex and shadowy in quality, thanks first of all to the change from Vivace, ma non troppo to Adagio espressivo at the second group – after a mere eight bars. The next movement, an explosive Prestissimo, combines the functions of a more lucid sonata-form statement and a scherzo. A slow theme and variations follows, concluding with an extraordinarily serene da capo of the original hymn-like theme.

Under the lyrical spell of the Sonata in A op.110, even the fugue in the finale is tuneful and positively smooth in counterpoint. And in the Sonata in C minor op.111, after the first movement has recalled in a spiritualized way all the ‘C minor’ gestures of the early Vienna years, the variations of the second (and last) movement create a visionary aura that had never been known in music before. This mood is recaptured at the end of the Diabelli Variations.

Between October 1822 and February 1824 Beethoven completed three works which are in one way or another as gigantic as the Hammerklavier Sonata: the Diabelli Variations, the Mass in D (Missa solemnis) and the Ninth Symphony. Work on the variations and the mass had been in progress since early 1819. Beethoven’s slowness in composing the mass can be explained in part by his inevitable resolve to approach the text in the highest seriousness and treat the setting as a personal testament. Indeed, the religious impetus spilled over into his next composition, the Ninth Symphony, with its setting of stanzas from Schiller’s half-bacchanalian, half-religious Ode to Joy. Mass and symphony stand together as the crowning statement about non-musical ideas in Beethoven’s later life – a ‘religious’ statement to match or, rather, to supplant the ‘heroic’ statement made in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and Leonore nearly 20 years earlier. Between the two late works there are many parallels of musical gesture and language.

But whereas the Ninth Symphony, despite grumblings that are heard from time to time about the finale, has always been and remains one of Beethoven’s most successful and influential compositions, the same cannot be said of the Mass. It is perhaps unfortunate for the dissemination and appreciation of this work that the relaxed concert conventions of Beethoven’s day – at the première only three separate movements were ventured – no longer obtain. If they did, the musical public might well come to appreciate and love the simpler movements, at least: the restrained and lyrical Kyrie, one of the composer’s loveliest inventions; the Sanctus, with its organ-like interlude and ethereal violin solo in the Benedictus; and the Agnus, whose touching plea for what Beethoven described as ‘inner and outer peace’ is twice interrupted by exciting military fanfares and melodramatic recitatives, not to speak of one giddy modulating fugue.

Even the few statements made above are enough to suggest how much of this mass is unorthodox, both musically and liturgically. Unorthodoxies are multiplied in the Gloria and Credo (always the problematic movements for composers of masses). It is particularly in these two central movements that the traditions of the Viennese mass are made to accommodate older traditions deliberately resuscitated; Beethoven rubs shoulders with Haydn (the Haydn of the masses), Palestrina, Handel and Bach. Sublimity, awe and pathos are evoked unforgettably, but they are perhaps evoked too frequently and in too rapid a succession to leave a satisfactory total impression. One can feel this even while acknowledging Beethoven’s strenuous efforts at organization: the use of recurring themes for ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ and ‘Credo, credo’, the powerful tonal dynamic, and the weighting effect of the tremendous fugues ‘In gloria Dei Patris’ and ‘Et vitam venturi’.

In the Mass Beethoven was obviously constrained by the pre-set text; in the symphony he chose his own text. He also chose the context for it: not within an intellectual liturgical structure, but in the real world of experience – for paradoxically or not, that is what the three opening instrumental movements seems to have meant to Beethoven. Ultimately, in the introduction to the finale, this world is rejected in favour of Schiller’s transcendent vision of the joys of brotherhood, set ‘without the adornments of Art’ as an unaccompanied melody of universal folklike simplicity. From his experience of oneness with his fellows and with nature, says Schiller, man receives his intimation of a loving Father dwelling above the stars. This passage of the poem Beethoven set in a solemn religious style recalling that used in parts of the Mass in D.

As the one late-period Beethoven symphony, the Ninth is in a sense retrospective in resuming the ‘symphonic’ ideal which for a decade had inspired little music. Retrospective, too, is the frank echo of revolutionary French cantatas in the choral finale. Yet as a gesture, this finale shows once again Beethoven’s uncanny grasp of essences below ‘the adornments of Art’. As Wagner always insisted, words and a choir with soloists to sing them seem to force their way into the symphony in order to make instrumental music fully articulate, to resolve the conflict of the earlier movements with a consummation of unexampled ecstasy.

In the late period Beethoven’s treatment of sonata form grows more and more subtle and even equivocal. For example, he now tended to minimize the formal development section and place a major climax after, not at, the point of recapitulation (see opp.106, 130, 132). In the face of this, the first movement of the Ninth provides a magnificent reassertion of the traditional dynamic – though with a difference. During the famous and much imitated introduction, the main theme (another ‘evolving’ theme, one which seems to evolve out of timeless infinity) grows up over a hollow dominant 5th, A–E; then at the recapitulation this returns fortissimo as a tonic D–A with F in the bass: an enhanced recapitulation from which all sense of bluster has been filtered away and replaced by what Tovey called catastrophe, and others brutishness. The subsidiary tonal areas of this movement, B and a momentary B, are ‘composed out’ in memorable fashion throughout the rest of the symphony, as is the basic D minor/major tropism of the first-movement recapitulation.

After completing the Ninth Symphony in early 1824, Beethoven spent the two and a half years that remained to him writing with increasing ease, it seems, and exclusively in the medium of the string quartet. The five late string quartets contain Beethoven’s greatest music, or so at least many listeners in the 20th century came to feel. The first of the five, op.127 in E of 1824–5, shows all the important characteristics of this unique body of music. It opens with another lyrical sonata form containing themes in two different tempos (as in op.109); the Maestoso theme melts into a faster one, wonderfully intimate and tender – even though it is constructed in three-part species counterpoint over a cantus firmus. The slow variation movement is of the new, more integral kind and the scherzo takes its impetus from a fugato. The finale burgeons with country-dance tunes, of a kind associated in the other late quartets with the interior dance movements (which one can scarcely call scherzos; certainly Beethoven no longer did so). In a brilliant coda, this finale submits to a sort of spirtualized dissolution, an effect prefigured in the Quartet in F minor op.95 and repeated in the next quartet, the A minor op.132.

The composition of op.132 was interrupted by a serious illness in April 1825, and an extraordinary ‘Hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity, from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode’ forms the central movement (of five). Beethoven’s intimations of mortality take the form of modal cantus firmus variations dimly recalled from Albrechtsberger; they alternate movingly with a purely tonal section entitled ‘Feeling new strength’. Cantus firmus writing is also in evidence in the first movement, as the themes in different tempos are now closely woven together. Extreme rhythmic fluidity combines with extreme concentration of detail. Beethoven had never before written such a deeply anguished composition.

In the Quartet in B op.130, the confrontation of themes in different tempos gives the opening movement an elusive, even whimsical feeling. A deliberate sense of dissociation is intensified by the succession of five more movements, often in remote keys, with something of the effect of ‘character pieces’ in a Baroque suite. The feverish little Presto is followed by movements labelled by Beethoven Poco scherzando, Alla danza tedesca and Cavatina – and then by the ‘Grosse Fuge’, which seems to bear on its convulsive shoulders the responsibility for asserting order after so much disruption earlier in the piece. Its sections, built on various transformations of a cantus firmus subject almost have the weight of separate movements, as in the Ninth Symphony finale. The lyric beauty of the slow G section and the Gemüthlichkeit of the recurring section in 6/8 metre sometimes go unappreciated, it seems, by listeners awed by the determined dissonant fury of the others. A closed book to the 19th century, to Stravinsky the ‘Grosse Fuge’ was ‘this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary for ever’.

Years before, Beethoven had begun to extend the underlying principles of the sonata style to embrace the entire aggregate of movements in a piece. Now he found his largest movements breaking down into ‘sub-movements’ with a subsidiary integrity of their own. In the event, the Quartet in B proved to be quite literally disruptive. Beethoven sanctioned the removal of the fugal finale after the first performance, had it issued separately as op.133 and provided the quartet with a new, less radical (and less splendid) finale.

As though in reaction to this study in musical dissociation, Beethoven next wrote the most closely integrated of all his large compositions. From this point of view, the Quartet of C minor op.131 may be seen as the culmination of his significant effort as a composer ever since going to Vienna. The seven movements run continuously into one another, and for the first time in Beethoven’s music there is an emphatic and unmistakable thematic connection between the first movement and the last – not a reminiscence, but a functional parallel which helps bind the whole work together. A work of the deepest subtlety and beauty, at the end this quartet still seems to hinge on a stroke of the most elemental nature, as rushing D major scales in the finale recall the Neapolitan relationship set up between the opening fugue in C minor and the following Allegro in D. Charles Rosen has remarked on Beethoven’s continual

attempt to strip away, at some point in each large work, all decorative and even expressive elements from the musical material so that part of the structure of tonality is made to appear for a moment naked and immediate, and its presence in the rest of the work as a dynamic and temporal force suddenly becomes radiant.

A comparison with the analogous Neapolitan articulation at the end of the Quartet op.59 no.2 of 1806 shows how Beethoven could make such effects tell at the end of his lifetime.

The last quartet, op.135 in F, is a brilliant study in Classical nostalgia, though it does not lack a vision of the abyss in the second movement and a characteristic response through hymnody in the third. (A highly compressed variation set in the key of D, marked ‘Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo’, this piece was originally drafted as a postscript to the finale of op.131.) In the finale of op.135, when the main theme (marked with the words ‘Es muss sein!’) appears as a simple-minded inversion of the motif of the slow introduction (marked ‘Muss es sein?’), a strong suspicion arises of parody – a self-parody of the familiar evolutionary slow introductions of these late years (cf op.111). The thematic tag itself was taken over from a contemporary humorous canon (woo196).

Like the Eighth Symphony, op.135 seems to mark the composer’s farewell to a fully realized episode in his artistic journey. The writing of the late quartets was stimulated by external factors – Prince Golitsïn’s commission and the return of the Schuppanzigh Quartet to Vienna – but it continued under its own impetus after the commission was fulfilled. The cohesiveness of this crowning episode of Beethoven’s compositional activity is underlined by the observation made by various critics that three (or more) of the late quartets share melodic material. Even without this, they share some special stylistic characteristics; but even with all that, it is hard to accept the further implication that the individual works are aesthetically incomplete unless viewed as some sort of ‘triptych’ or ‘cycle’. This may be true of the poems by T.S. Eliot which they inspired but not of the original quartets, any more than it is of other clearly associated works in Beethoven’s output, such as the Mass in D and the Ninth Symphony.

18. Personal characteristics.

Beethoven left an indelible impression on all those who encountered him in the years of his maturity, and even for his contemporaries there were certain features of his life – his idiosyncratic working methods, for example, his mournful isolation through deafness, and the nobility of his total dedication to his art – that endowed him as an almost mythical figure. The course subsequently taken by a romantic image of the composer in the years after his death is discussed in §19 below. Here something must be said of the realities from which the myths drew their strength.

He was neither good-looking nor equipped with more than a very rudimentary education; it was by the force of his character that he produced such a powerful effect on those around him. This, notoriously, had its thorny side. As a young man he was already known to be difficult, impatient and mistrustful, an ‘unlicked bear’. A basic problem, it seems, was his ineptness at reading his own motives and interpreting those of others; thus misunderstandings were frequent, which his hot temper magnified into quarrels, even fisticuffs. But typically these were followed by reconciliations and scenes of penitence or remorse. What his capricious and at times outrageous behaviour could not dim was the enormous appeal of his personality. He fascinated and endeared himself to men and women of many sorts, who continued to value his friendship no matter how rough a ride he gave them. This magnetic quality was most in evidence in his earlier years, but even near the end of his life, when he was often wretchedly ill and his deafness was impenetrable, there was competition for the privilege of rendering him services, and devoted friends were never far off.

In his relationships certain recurrent patterns can be observed. His male friendships fell into two broad types. There were the warm and intimate ones with companions such as Wegeler, Amenda and Stephan von Breuning, and perhaps also Franz von Brunsvik and Ignaz von Gleichenstein, men with whom he felt he could share his most private feelings and aspirations. Some considerable way behind came his relations with many others who were valued more for their disinterested usefulness to Beethoven than for any depth of shared emotion. Chief of these was the amiable bachelor Zmeskall; the two Lichnowksy brothers can also be counted among them, and in later years his factotum Schindler and perhaps the young Karl Holz, for whom however Beethoven also entertained some genuinely warm feelings. Most of the first select class of true friends were unmarried at the time of Beethoven’s greatest intimacy with them. It is noteworthy, too, that both Wegeler and Amenda, the two with whom he maintained a serene relationship for the longest time, were in distant countries for most of his life; the friendship with Breuning, who remained in Vienna, was interrupted by a breach that lasted many years.

Beethoven’s relations with women have been discussed much more fully than his friendships with men; they form the subject of a large but mainly speculative and sometimes very silly literature. He was certainly highly susceptible to feminine beauty and charm. The reliable Wegeler reported that ‘he was never without a love, and most of them were from the upper ranks’. Of his attachments in Bonn little is known beyond a name or two, but in his early years in Vienna – again according to Wegeler – he was always involved in love affairs and ‘made some conquests that many an Adonis would have found difficult if not impossible’. What these affairs amounted to is another matter. No doubt there were some trivial sexual adventures, but it is hard to avoid the impression that he also spent much time in a showy pursuit of women who could not, or would not, return his affection, and the very fact that most of them were ‘from the upper ranks’ meant that there was usually an insuperable barrier of social class to prevent the relationship from going too far. Though Beethoven always professed his desire for a true union of hearts, many of the women that he admired were contentedly married or were already committed to another man. Thus he was usually doomed to get nowhere – as perhaps, unconsciously, he intended. Something of the same pattern can be seen in the two or three relationships with women, described earlier, that involved Beethoven most deeply. To judge from the course that they took it seems plain that he shrank from a total involvement with a woman, and that he came to regard the household that he established with his nephew as in some ways a substitute for marriage and family.

That his life was in many respects lonely, therefore, comes as no surprise. It is of course the overwhelming fact of his deafness that makes his personal history so poignantly different from that of other musicians. Its effect on his career was the long-term one of confirming the direction in which his interests were probably already turning; it obliged him at all events to commit himself almost entirely to composing, and to renounce any thoughts he may have had of pursuing fortune as a travelling virtuoso. But the impact of deafness on his social life was sharper and more immediate. It sank him in deep depression and led him to shun company for a time. In fact the years from 1800 to 1802, in which he brought himself to face the likelihood that his handicap would be permanent, were marked by a profound personal crisis, the resolution of which set the pattern for much of the rest of his life. Forced to recognize more and more that he was to be cut off from a part of human experience, he succeeded in coming to terms with an unusual and essentially solitary style of life. No doubt this reinforced his conviction, manifest even before the onset of deafness, that some of the rules of normal social behaviour did not apply to him.

There are many anecdotes of his peculiarities in this respect. Several concern his attitude to his superiors in rank, and to authority in general. Doubtless only too aware that he depended on aristocratic families for his financial support, he resolutely declined after his departure from Bonn to ‘play the courtier’ or to show the deference and obedience normally expected from musicians in circles of the nobility. He was often most unwilling, for instance, to perform on the piano if called on unexpectedly by his hosts to do so; sometimes he refused outright, and even left the soirée in a temper. He would also break off playing if people showed their inattention by chattering. The formal court etiquette that surrounded the Archduke Rudolph was especially irksome to him, and in the end it was Rudolph who surrendered by giving orders that the rules were not to be applied to Beethoven. Even in matters of dress Beethoven seems to have been unwilling to show the conformity expected of him, though in his earlier years in Vienna he was often smartly turned out.

This impatience with discipline and authority had more than one aspect. Temperamentally he was utterly unable to adopt a submissive attitude, and even in music he found it distasteful to accept the direction of living teachers (such as Haydn) or dead theoreticians. Moreover, as a child of his time, he was swayed by the ideals of the French Revolution; they must have dominated his student days, although a certain ambivalence can be detected in his attitude to them, as well as to the man who for a time embodied them, Napoleon. In his brusque dismissal of the conventions of an aristocratic society, in fact, Beethoven was less of the egalitarian than the élitist. He had little use for the common run of humanity, regarding himself as an artist – he was fond of the rather grand term ‘Tondichter’ (‘poet in sound’) – and, as such, at least the equal of anyone raised to eminence by birth or wealth. He accorded the greatest respect to other artists, particularly writers, and was puzzled and disappointed when he discovered that Goethe, whom he admired above all other poets, behaved over-deferentially to royal personages: was not Goethe as great as they were?

In matters of religion his views, as might be expected, were idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent. It was not a subject that he discussed much with others. He was brought up in the tolerant Catholicism of the late 18th century, but the formal side of religion held little interest for him, though he went to some trouble while composing the Missa solemnis to ensure that he fully understood the words of the Mass. The deity of his faith was a personal God, a universal father to whom he constantly turned for consolation and forgiveness. That much is clear from the many private confessions and prayers scattered throughout his papers. Among philosophical books he was moved by the moral reflections of Kant. Perhaps more surprisingly, he found certain oriental writings on the immaterial nature of God sympathetic to him, and he copied out a number of their texts. He even framed some ancient Egyptian inscriptions on the nature of the deity and kept them on his writing-desk.

He also felt the presence of God in the beauty of nature, and sought to worship him in the countryside, having been greatly influenced by Christian Sturm’s Betrachtungen der Werke Gottes in der Natur. Beethoven’s love of the country was an enduring characteristic. He left Vienna for some months almost every summer and settled in one of the outlying villages such as Mödling or Heiligenstadt, or in the spa of Baden somewhat further afield. There he would take long, solitary walks in the woods and find refreshment of spirit. ‘No-one’, he wrote to Therese Malfatti in 1810, ‘can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear’.

When on his walks he would usually carry a bundle of folded music paper, and pause from time to time to make entries in it with a pencil. This activity was regarded by his contemporaries as a harmless eccentricity. They laughed too at his singular behaviour in restaurants, where he would sometimes sit for hours sunk in thought and then offer to pay for a meal that he had not eaten. Beethoven was certainly often strangely unaware of his physical surroundings and preoccupied with his own thoughts – even in Bonn the word ‘raptus’ had been jokingly applied to his fits of emotional inaccessibility – and the squalor of his rooms was such that only he could tolerate it.

Yet in relation to the thing about which he cared most – composing, and presenting his works to the public – Beethoven could hardly be said to be ill-organized. He had a regular domestic routine, rising early, making coffee by grinding a precise number of coffee-beans, and then working at his desk until two or three o’clock, when he had a meal. The morning’s work was interrupted, though also in a sense maintained, by two or three short excursions out of doors, during which he continued to make sketches on music paper. Several of these ‘pocket’ sketchbooks have survived, together with a much larger number of ‘desk’ sketchbooks in which Beethoven worked when at home. The significance of these volumes, with page after page of seemingly illegible entries, was not understood by his contemporaries, who regarded his devotion to them as yet one more sign of his eccentricity. Only later did it come to be recognized that the sketchbooks provide a unique documentation, although a somewhat fragmentary and at times enigmatic one, of his creative processes.

When a work had been completed it was Beethoven’s concern to find a publisher for it. The importance that he attached to publishers throughout his life is shown by the extent and range of his correspondence with them – for he contrived to persuade himself that his livelihood depended on selling his music to them, though he was in fact maintained largely by aristocratic subventions. At that time all a composer could expect was a lump sum for the sale of a work. Royalties were unknown. Nor was there any international copyright; within his own country a publisher usually enjoyed some protection for the works he had bought, but they could be freely copied (pirated) abroad. Thus it was a composer’s concern to obtain the largest sum for each composition. In the case of Beethoven, whose later works involved many months or even years of labour, there was every inducement to compare the offers of various publishers and to play them off against each other – a form of behaviour that some modern critics, alerted no doubt by Beethoven’s shrill protestations of commercial probity, have found unattractive.

One plan that interested him was that of publishing a work simultaneously in more than one country – something that Haydn had done with success. The advantage was that a composer could count on receiving two or more fees, and was thus able to settle for a lower sum from each publisher. From the publisher’s point of view little was lost by sharing a work with a foreign publisher, since in practice the market of each country was more or less independent. In spite of the many practical difficulties of delivering manuscripts and synchronizing publication, Beethoven succeeded in getting a fair number of his compositions published by two or more firms in different countries at about the same time.

Beethoven’s chief publishers may be briefly listed, together with the dates at which they were most active in publishing him: Artaria & Co., Vienna (1795–8), and two of Artaria’s former partners, Tranquillo Mollo (1798–1801) and Giovanni Cappi (1802); Hoffmeister & Kühnel, Leipzig (1801–4); Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie, Vienna (1802–8); Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig (1802–3, 1809–12); Steiner & Co., Vienna (1815–17); A.M. Schlesinger, Berlin, and M. Schlesinger, Paris (1821–3 and 1827); Schott, Mainz (1825–7). Other publishers, such as Simrock of Bonn, occasionally issued important works. In the English market one firm predominated: that of Muzio Clementi (1810–23), who secured the English rights to a large number of works by direct dealings with Beethoven, and brought them out at the same time as the Viennese, Leipzig or Paris editions. Since these English editions were produced independently of the continental ones, each is potentially important for establishing an authentic text. George Thomson of Edinburgh also deserves a word or two. A civil servant and musical amateur who devoted much of his life to collecting national (and particularly Scottish) folksongs, he had already published several volumes of melodies with accompaniments by Pleyel, Kozeluch and Haydn before he approached Beethoven in 1803 with the request that he should write six sonatas introducing Scottish melodies. Although nothing came of this suggestion or other similar ones, Beethoven did in the end undertake to write piano trio accompaniments to a great quantity of Scottish, Welsh and Irish melodies submitted by Thomson. The work was carried out between 1809 and 1820, a period that included some otherwise barren years. In 1818 and 1819 Beethoven also wrote for Thomson some simple variations for flute and piano on national melodies (opp.105, 107: see fig.7).

Physically Beethoven was of no more than average height, but his stocky frame conveyed a sense of great muscular strength. He had broad shoulders and a short neck. His pockmarked face, with its wide nose and bushy eyebrows, was described by some as ugly and was certainly remote from the conventional good looks of the time, although it was recognized as having a quality of nobility about it. In youth his hair was coal-black and his complexion swarthy; in middle age, partly as a result of ill-health, his hair became grey and his face rather florid. What impressed those who met him was the intensity of the gaze from his deep-set eyes, and the enormous animation of his melancholy features and indeed of the whole of his restless body. This vitality is not captured in most of the portraits and sketches made in his lifetime. The best representation is probably the 1814 engraving by Blasius Höfel (based on a pencil drawing by Louis Letronne, but touched up from the life; fig.13 above). The bust by Franz Klein (fig.5 above) is based on a life-mask of 1812, so the features have claims to authenticity; and the sketches by Lyser showing Beethoven walking in the street, though not authenticated, also carry conviction (fig.16 above). The idealized portraits and busts of more recent years must be regarded as part of the Beethoven cult; they owe nothing to literal or even to poetic truth.

(ii) Beethoven's influence on music and musical thought.

19. Posthumous influence and reception.

The Beethoven we know today cannot be separated from the history of his critical and popular reception. No other Western composer has been amplified to the same degree by posterity; and none has come to embody musical art the way Beethoven has. More than a composer, he remains one of the pre-eminent cultural heroes of the modern West. For a comprehensive view of the full impact of Beethoven, three related strands of the history of his reception must be considered: the myth of the artist as hero; the deep and pervasive influence of his music on later music and thought about music; and the often disturbing political appropriations of his music.

(i) History of the myth.

(iii) Political reception.

Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception

(i) History of the myth.

Beethoven's music enjoyed an almost immediate appeal among the growing class of bourgeois music lovers, and its popularity has never wavered. Moreover, due to an irresitible conjunction of powerfully communicative music and compelling biographical circumstances, the mythically viewed image of Beethoven the creative artist took hold quickly and tenaciously, finding little or no resistance until the 20th century. To this day, the Beethoven myth remains an indelible part of the popular imagination.

Even within his lifetime, Beethoven began to be seen within emergent conceptions of the creative artist, which are developed in a growing literary tradition of Romantically-conceived works about artists and their lives. Writers such as Bettina Brentano, who invoked the newly fascinating power of electricity as a metaphor for Beethoven's creative powers, or E.T.A. Hoffmann, who placed Beethoven at the very portals of the ‘infinite realm of the spirit’, embraced him as a living example of the artist as suffering outsider and as courageous hero.

Public awareness of Beethoven's socially isolating deafness was galvanized by the posthumous discovery of the 1802 Heiligenstadt Testament. This selfconscious account of a wracking martyrdom for the sake of art may itself have relied on themes from the same literary tradition that Brentano, Hoffmann and others were to draw upon when writing about Beethoven. Beethoven's famous letter to the ‘Immortal Beloved’, also discovered after his death, help confirm his stature as a true Romantic. Here was a creative artist who felt cut off from the simple communal joys of society, who yearned for an idealized love, and who was able to react to these privations with an outpouring of music conceived on an unprecedented scale. A more potent model for the Romantic view of the artist could hardly be imagined. Add to this the fact that music itself was newly elevated by leading aesthetic theories to the sublime copestone of all artistic endeavour, and the mythic ascension of Beethoven seems virtually inevitable.

Several defining aspects of the critical reception of Beethoven contributed to the perpetuation of the Beethoven myth. He was widely held, from the earliest years of the 19th century, to be the culminating figure in a progressive triumvirate of musical greatness: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Not only is he here placed as the highest term of a triad, he was also understood to have descended from a line of genius: he was possessed of a secure spiritual patrimony. In the benevolent formulation of his patron Count Waldstein, Beethoven went to off to Vienna to receive ‘Mozart's spirit from Haydn’s hands’. Such early consecration is a powerful trope in myths of the great artist.

Another decisive triadic formation in the composer's reception is found in the early and sustained adherence to the idea of three style periods in his musical output. Here, too, the attractions of a triadic framework are manifest: they include the importance of the triad as a venerable organizing strategy (beginning, middle, end) and as a narrative structure that can support both an organic view of Beethoven's compositional development (the middle period as bloom, the late period as decay) as well as a teleological view (the first two periods as preparatory to, and culminating in, the third).

These two views have coloured much of the history of Beethoven's critical reception. In the broadest account of that history, one may discern a turn from the organic view to the teleological view, from regarding the middle period as the peak of Beethoven's output to regarding the late period as such. Indeed, of all his music, the music of the so-called late period has undergone the biggest transformation in its reception. Many early critics held these works to be the symptoms of illness; the prevailing later view prefers to understand them as the highest testimony to his genius.

The decisive turn to this latter view was helped by Wagner's influential monograph of 1870, written for Beethoven's centenary, in which he glorified Beethoven's deafness as a trait of enhanced interiority — the deaf composer forced to listen inwardly. The turn inward is a leading characteristic of 19th-century subjectivity; in this cultural field, Beethoven's deafness was initially understood as the tragic plight of the suffering artist and then as the guarantee of interiority, the sine qua non for the production of the highest art. This view reached its summit in the treatment by J.W.N. Sullivan, writing in 1927, for whom the late-period music marked a synthesizing vision of life in which all suffering is subsumed, ‘a final stage of illumination’ in the composer's spiritual development.

But around the same time as Wagner's quasi-mystical invocation of Beethoven's creative process, a more empirical approach to the composer was gaining ground. Taking advantage of an enormous amount of existing documentation, Alexander Thayer gradually published his celebrated biography, in which he sought to counteract mistaken views of previous biographers by carefully restricting himself to the known facts about Beethoven's life. Imaginative speculation about the composer's spiritual life yielded to a thickly detailed account of Beethoven's personal and professional circumstances. That he never completed the biography may well be due to his Victorian distaste for what he began to descry under the varnish of the myth.

Thayer prided himself on his use of Beethoven's actual sketchbooks to help solve problems of chronology. The study and transcription of Beethoven's sketches was pioneered by Gustav Nottebohm, again in the 1870s; they have since been the object of assiduous labour by analysts and musicologists. For in their sprawling and unruly traces, Beethoven's voluminous sketches provide a palpable sense of the composer's workshop, one which at once confirms the compositional act as both a human undertaking and a titanic struggle. Maintaining a status that hovers between holy relic and evidentiary documentation, the sketches offer the attractions of objectivity while keeping signature tenets of the myth alive and well. Thayer's biography and Nottebohm's work on the sketches together furnished the foundation for modern Beethoven scholarship.

If late 19-century positivism thus began to peer behind the aura of the Beethoven myth, a full frontal assault on it was not launched until the 20th century. Like so many other products of early 19th-century culture, the Beethoven myth faced the cleansing fires of 20th-century disillusionment — but the figure itself remained as potent as ever. The early years of the century witnessed a concerted effort to wrest Beethoven away from the Romantics and reclaim him for Classical art. In 1927, the centenary year of Beethoven's death, a spate of essays, including those by Hermann Abert, Guido Adler and D.F. Tovey, argued for the classical virtues of Beethoven's music. Arnold Schmitz wrote an entire book polemically engaging what he called ‘the Romantic image of Beethoven’. For Schmitz, Beethoven did not inhabit some romanticized realm of art separate from reality and its laws but rather deeply respected and supported the traditions of musical art in the service of a distinctly moral vision. In Germany, this view of the composer as a standard bearer of normality and moral health began to spread in conjunction with overtly nationalistic appropriations of Beethoven. In England, the criticism of Tovey also stressed the healthy normality of Beethoven's art.

Several decades later, Beethoven the man would submit to uncompromising psychoanalysis, emerging as anything but healthy. In their 1954 study Beethoven and his Nephew, the psychoanalysts E. and R. Sterba portray Beethoven as something like a hero of a lurid naturalist drama; they describe a disturbed man and the people he hurt. Maynard Solomon's more tempered account of 1977 (revised 1998) sympathetically relates the foibles and pretensions of a humanly flawed artist. Both accounts refuse to flinch from the more troubling aspects of the creative persona, and both go far to transform the mythical figure into a flesh and blood man.

Related to these efforts are recent attempts to augment our knowledge of the economic conditions of Beethoven's era, the system of patronage that served him so well, and the exact nature of his own financial circumstances. All these studies choose to observe Beethoven from the perspective of the social, commercial and psychological forces of the modern world. Thus they serve to place him within the traffic and commerce of a recognizable reality; he no longer appears as a tortured but transcendent onlooker from some romanticized realm of genius.

Perhaps the most unmistakable sign of demythification is the steadily growing interest in reception studies, for here the Beethoven myth is treated and studied as a cultural construction – the interest now lies in the nature of its formation and persistence. Initially prompted by the attractions of reception theory in literature and further motivated by a more strictly postmodern interest in the ways and means of the musical canon, the study of reception is now one of the more active branches of writing about Beethoven.

Meanwhile, traditional historical scholarship is by no means finished with Beethoven. The 1980s and 90s witnessed several crucially important additions to the foundation laid by Thayer and Nottebohm. First and foremost, the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn has continued to produce its indispensable editions: by the end of the 20th century Beethoven's letters were published in a new and definitive seven-volume edition (1996–8); the transcription and publication of the conversation books were lacking only two of its twelve projected volumes (1968–); and the even longer-term projects of the Neue Ausgabe (of all Beethoven's works) and the Skizzenausgabe (all the sketchbooks) were both moving forward. In 1985, Alan Tyson, Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter published The Beethoven Sketchbooks, a groundbreaking reference work that reconstructs the bewilderingly scattered corpus; and in 1996, Theodore Albrecht published three volumes of letters written to Beethoven. The long awaited establishment of these primary materials will give Beethoven scholars much to do in the 21st century.

Although the Beethoven myth has been dressed down in the academy, it remains alive as ever in mainstream commercial culture. A good deal of its vitality stems from the kitsch industry: the standard image of Beethoven's face and mane – the ‘Lion King’ of Western music – is reproduced ubiquitously, while the opening motive of the Fifth Symphony is still Western art music's most recognizable roar. An almost 200-year-old stream of minor novels, novellas and films about Beethoven continues unabated, less accomplished descendants of the Romantic Künstlerroman; the most substantial of these is Romain Rolland's Jean-Christoph (1904–12). (There is even a subtradition detailing the dangerous effects of listening to Beethoven's music: Robert Griepenkerl's 1838 novel about a fatally boisterous Beethoven cult, Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener, finds a distant echo in the ultra-violence of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, strikingly filmed by Stanley Kubrick.) Above all, the more explicitly highbrow commodification of classical music, in music shops and concert programmes, continues to provide supply for demand. It is indeed the perennial appeal of Beethoven's music that perhaps tells most heavily for the persistence of the myth in popular culture.

Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception

(ii) Beethoven's influence on music and musical thought.

Beethoven's music seemed almost at once to establish a watershed in Western musical history, both as a culmination of the Viennese Classical style and as the beginning of a new musical age. He is treated time and time again as the most imposing feature in the landscape of 19th-century music, the mountainside from which the music of the rest of the century would echo. Wagner, breathing the intoxicating air of his own heights, clamorously proclaimed Beethoven's music as a transhistorical force leading to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Even nowadays, in the lapidary invocation of ‘the three Bs’, Beethoven is popularly imagined as rising above the historical terrain of Western music, linking Bach to Brahms.

The sheer drama and scope of Beethoven's most ambitious works fostered an overriding perception that his music coheres organically even to the point of inevitability. Beethoven's art registered as a sublime force of nature: here was a music that fully embodied the recently propounded shift in aesthetics from mimetic imitation of the products of nature to expressive emulation of her processes. The overmastering coherence felt in Beethoven's music became an imposing measure of the greatness of musical artworks. Not only individual works but whole genres in his output came to assume a wholeness and totality, as well as a sense of teleology: the symphonies, the string quartets and the piano sonatas are all treated as coherent narratives of creative development. Playing these ‘cycles’ in their entirety continues to be a standard test for ambitious performers.

Mainstream symphonic composers above all chafed under the magnitude of Beethoven's accomplishment; as Schubert put it, ‘who would be able to do anything after Beethoven?’. Few escaped this stifling anxiety, and for some, like Brahms, it was practically overwhelming. Musical reactions to Beethoven range from the obvious to the subtle, and are both epigonal and agonistic. The Ninth Symphony by itself may be said to have fathered, for better or for worse, any number of later works: its opening alone furnished Bruckner with a problem he tackled anew in each of his symphonies. There are isolated cases of consuming interest: the teenage Mendelssohn's precocious modelling of several of Beethoven's late string quartets – the enigmatic sounds of the late style incorporated into the melodramatic emotional life of adolescence; or Schubert's modelling, in his Piano Sonata d959, of the proportions and textures, but not the themes or motifs, of the rondo finale of op.31 no.1. We have Schumann's quasi-philosophical reaction to Beethoven, in his Fantasy for piano, where he muses on a wistful theme from An die ferne Geliebte, and Berlioz's parodistic reaction in his anti-heroic symphony Harold en Italie. There is Brahms's earnest, historically burdened reaction: the opening of the First Symphony actually sounds as if it were dragging some great weight. The symphonic art of Dvořák is impossible to imagine without the Beethoven of the Pastoral and Eighth Symphonies. Mahler, Richard Strauss and Sibelius carry Beethoven's most sweeping manner into the 20th century; and even the more distinctly modernist composers of the 20th century do not shy from his influence, particularly with the ascendance of the late style. Schoenberg emulates Beethoven's motivic art, Bartók's string quartets breathe the air of the late quartets, and Stravinsky was impressed by the perpetual modernity of the fractiously grandiose Grosse Fuge. Even the iconoclastic Boulez owes much to Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata in his own Second Piano Sonata.

Beethoven was to exercise a more subtle and no less pervasive influence within mainstream music criticism and theory. From the beginning, his music seemed to demand a more serious and attentive manner of listening. In several landmark reviews, E.T.A. Hoffmann lauded the deep coherence in Beethoven's music, noting that, as in the case of Shakespeare, the music's underlying unity could easily elude those critics attuned to conventional surfaces. Music critics could no longer hope to judge this music competently at a first hearing; according to A.B. Marx, whose editorship of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung did so much to promote the music of Beethoven, critics needed to learn how to divine the Idea embodied in each of Beethoven's works. A hermeneutic imperative quickly gathered strength in the face of his music, one which has not abated. His works have been heard to be telling us something, as a kind of secular scripture in need of hermeneutic mediation. The 19th-century tendency to respond to much of his instrumental music with detailed extra-musical programmes has found renewed life throughout the 20th century, in the work of Arnold Schering, Harry Goldschmidt, Owen Jander and others. In 1994, Albrecht Riethmüller and others published two volumes containing variously authored interpretations of each of Beethoven's major works; here the hermeneutic impulse unites with the equally familiar compulsion to deal with every note of Beethoven's music.

Another pervasive, if less overt, influence on Beethoven's music lives on in the more mainstream methods of musical analysis, for it is not far-fetched to claim that they were formed largely in response to his music. For example, the codification of sonata form in the work of A.B. Marx – one of the imposing legacies of 19th-century music theory – was essentially a codification of Beethoven's sonata forms, as manifest in his piano sonatas. And inasmuch as one can speak of a theory of form in the work of Tovey, it will perforce refer to Beethoven, the mainspring of Tovey's analytical and critical élan. Form was a kind of temporal logic for Tovey, a logic most manifest (and most worth tracing) in Beethoven.

Beethoven's music was both proving ground and breeding ground for two of the most pervasive methods of demonstrating coherence in tonal music, motivic analysis and Schenkerian part-writing analysis. For proponents of motivic analysis, Beethoven's musical art was heard to live at the level of the motif rather than the theme; motivic ubiquity and transformation were shown to betoken underlying unity and compelling thematic process. From Schoenberg's Grundgestalt to Rudolph Reti's prime cell, the method that works so transparently with the music of Beethoven was eagerly and automatically transferred to other music, not always without strain.

Easily the most practised and most respected method of tonal analysis in Anglo-American academia continues to be Heinrich Schenker's part-writing analysis. Here the theoretical emphasis on deep structure finds resonance with prevailing attitudes towards coherence in Beethoven's music; moreover, the compelling sense of forward motion, of line, often heard in Beethoven's music is well served by Schenker's concept of Urlinie, or primal line, a coherent linear entity discernible beneath the surface phenomena of local themes and motifs. Schenker published many analyses of Beethoven's works throughout his career, including monographs on the Ninth Symphony, the Fifth Symphony and several of the late piano sonatas; these analyses tended to coincide with major turning points in the development of his thought.

The music of the late period came into its own in the 20th century, and enjoyed a special role in shaping the methods and aims of musical analysis. With the continued viability of psychoanalytical theory and Schenkerian depth analysis, the late works took on a special aura, beckoning analysts to discern a deeper seated – latent – coherence underlying the often shockingly dissociated musical surfaces of these works. As such coherence is not so much visceral as abstract, not directly felt but indirectly intuited, much ingenuity has gone into establishing it.

Despite such analytical efforts, the surface dissociations of the late works have continued to disturb; ultimately these works resist assimilation into some saving unity. This very sense of resistance lies at the heart of several influential strands of 20th-century critical thought about Beethoven and about music. Much of Theodor Adorno's musical philosophy hinges on establishing Beethoven's music as a quasi-Hegelian representative of the subject in the modern age. For Adorno, the middle-period music represented a unique and unrepeatable reconciliation of subject and object, individual and world; in the late style the subject proceeds to absent itself, in a critique of that former synthesis that leaves behind a kind of desubjectivized musical materiality. More recently, the dissociations of the late style have proved stimulating to a burgeoning poststructuralist critical sensibility that seeks to challenge more strictly formalist analytical suppositions. In particular, the A minor quartet, op.132, has become a favourite site for these newer efforts. Here, the idea of musical unity seems to share the fate of the unified self: both are disarticulated, opened up to the variegated forces of the postmodern condition. Recent feminist music criticism also finds itself vitally concerned with Beethoven and subjectivity. It has been argued that the compelling autonomous self heard in the heroic style is the sound of an exclusionary masculinist ideal whose coronation as a priviledged norm deters appreciation of other musical sensibilities. Beethoven's music has thus been heard to embrace and encompass the fate of the subject in the West, and to define and circumscribe the fate of the Other – what other music could be said to have such reach, to fit such overarching narratives of modernity?

Some scholars, such as William Kinderman and Maynard Solomon, are intent on developing a more specifically historicized view of Beethoven's place in Western culture, particularly the nature of his relation to Enlightenment thought. Here the work of Schiller has begun to figure heavily as a source of many of Beethoven's artistic aims and accomplishments. Like Schiller, Beethoven's music is said to explore problems of reason and sensibility, aesthetics and ethics, nature and freedom. As always, there continues to be much speculation on meaning in Beethoven's music, and from many different quarters; one semiotic theory of music (Hatten, J1994) is predicated on the music of Beethoven. A common theme runs through the work of all these recent critics: all argue strongly against the persistent notion of Beethoven's music as a timeless aesthetic force, agreeing instead that it performs specific cultural work. Just what that work is remains a source of fruitful and lively contention.

Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception

(iii) Political reception.

Although it has been argued that the reception of art is always political and ideological at some level, the history of Beethoven reception offers case after case of explicit political appropriation of his music and ideological monumentalization of his figure as a spiritual hero. Among the steady production of monuments erected to honour Beethoven throughout the 19th century, the most strikingly grandiose is the nude statue by Klinger (fig. 17), unveiled in Vienna in 1900. A more lasting and influential monument has been the continuing presence of Beethoven's music in Western political arenas, for such instances may well constitute the most overt and far-reaching effect of his music. Of course, Beethoven himself wrote occasional music for expressly political purposes: the ‘Battle Symphony’ and Der glorreiche Augenblick are only the best known of these ventures, both performed as part of the celebrations surrounding the Congress of Vienna in 1814. These pieces are routinely denigrated as hack-work, their politics all too obvious. Yet, Beethoven's symphonies — his most universally revered, public statements — have been readily and repeatedly appropriated for far more sweeping and insidious political ends.

The symphonies have consistently been heard to occupy a moral high ground. In particular, the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies came to represent the monumental and sublime as opposed to the ‘merely’ lyrical and beautiful, and consequently they were frequently conscripted in German denunciations of the music of France and Italy. In the 1820s, at a time when the Prussian nation sought to consolidate and maintain something like an aesthetic and civic character, Beethoven's symphonies formed an important bulwark in the burgeoning ideology of German spiritual nationhood. From then on, Beethoven and his music have never been far from the most momentous scenes of modern Germany's political history.

In 1870, German victory in the Franco-Prussian War coincided with the centenary of Beethoven's birth. The connection was seized upon by the organizers of numerous musical and political festivals, and by Wagner, whose 1870 monograph on Beethoven explicitly equated the sublimity of Beethoven's art with that of the German spirit, as a triumph of the ideal inner world over the French world of appearances. Bismarck himself was said to revere Beethoven; legend has it that he ordered a performance of the Fifth Symphony just before mobilizing his army.

The merger of Beethoven and German politics continued apace in the 20th century. During World War I, Beethoven's music was played relentlessly in German concert halls, and there are many accounts of soldiers invoking Beethoven as an inspirational model of German heroism. Later, the Third Reich aggressively exploited the power of his music in its propaganda and even turned to Beethoven during its demise: Hitler's death was announced on German radio to the strains of the Funeral March from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Ironically, the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony, due to its rhythmic similarity to the Morse Code letter V, became associated with Allied victory, and Beethoven's music in general was immensely popular in wartime Britain. Almost half a century later, the Ninth Symphony was heard at a concert commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Leonard Bernstein conducted, famously substituting the word ‘Freiheit’ for ‘Freude’ in the choral finale.

Thus Beethoven's music has served throughout the last two centuries as a kind of potent and free floating moral force that can be harnessed for any number of political enterprises, from racial purity to human rights, fascistic subjugation to world brotherhood, without suffering the stigma of the collaborator. His music has survived these multifarious appropriations, just as Beethoven's status as a cultural hero has survived concerted attempts to dismantle the Beethoven myth. One cannot but accord to this music and this composer an unexampled cultural and historical force in the modern West. His music has fought wars and celebrated victories, consoled and scorned, empowered and overmastered. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a time when Beethoven's music will not continue to exercise its paradoxically confounding and foundational force. Perhaps when that happens, the Western world will truly have passed into another age.

solo instruments and orchestra

WORKS

Editions:Ludwig van Beethovens Werke: Vollständige kritisch durchgesehene überall berechtigte Ausgabe, i–xxiv (Leipzig, 1862–5/R), xxv [suppl.] (Leipzig, 1888) [GA]Beethoven: Sämtliche Werke: Supplemente zur Gesamtausgabe, ed. W. Hess (Wiesbaden, 1959–71) [HS]Beethoven: Werke: neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, ed. J. Schmidt-Görg and others (Munich and Duisburg, 1961–) [NA]

Works are identified in the left-hand column by opus and woo (Werk ohne Opuszahl, ‘work without opus number’) numbers as listed in G. Kinsky and H. Halm: Das Werk Beethovens (Munich and Duisburg, 1955) and by Hess numbers as listed in W. Hess: Verzeichnis der nicht in der Gesamtausgabe veröffentlichten Werke Ludwig van Beethovens (Wiesbaden, 1957). Works published in GA are identified by the volume in which they appear (roman numeral) and the position in the publisher’s continuous numeration (arabic number); works published in HS are listed in the GA column and identified by volume number. Works published in NA are identified by category (roman numeral) and volume within each category (arabic number).

p	parts
s	full score
vs	vocal score

orchestral

wind band

chamber music for strings

chamber music for wind alone and with strings

chamber music with piano

collections of dances

operas

incidental music

ballets

choral works with orchestra

other choral works

solo voices and orchestra

songs

canons and musical jokes

miscellaneous

works of doubtful authenticity

folksong arrangements

orchestral



No.	Title, Key	Publication	GA	NA

op.21	Symphony no.1, C	p: Leipzig 1801	i/1	i/1
Composition, First performance : 1799–1800; 2 April 1800
Dedication, Remarks : Baron Gottfried van Swieten
op.36	Symphony no.2, D	p: Vienna, 1804; for pf, vn, vc: Vienna, 1805	i/2	i/1
Composition, First performance : 1801–2; 5 April 1803
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Karl von Lichnowsky
op.55	Symphony no.3 ‘Eroica’, E	p: Vienna, 1806	i/3
Composition, First performance : 1803; 7 April 1805
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz; 1st private perf. at Lobkowitz palace, sum. 1804
op.60	Symphony no.4, B	p: Vienna, 1808	i/4
Composition, First performance : 1806; March 1807
Dedication, Remarks : Count Franz von Oppersdorff
op.138	Overture ‘Leonore no.1’, C	s, p: Vienna, 1838	iii/19
Composition, First performance : 1807; 7 Feb 1828
Dedication, Remarks : for Leonore ovs. nos.2–3, see ‘Operas’
op.62	Overture to Collin’s Coriolan, c	p: Vienna, 1808	iii/18	ii/1
Composition, First performance : 1807; March 1807
Dedication, Remarks : Heinrich Joseph von Collin
op.67	Symphony no.5, c	p: Leipzig, 1809	i/5
Composition, First performance : 1807–8; 22 Dec 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Lobkowitz and Count Andreas Rasumovsky; preliminary sketches, 1804
op.68	Symphony no.6 ‘Pastoral’, F	p: Leipzig, 1809	i/6
Composition, First performance : 1808; 22 Dec 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Lobkowitz and Count Rasumovsky
op.92	Symphony no.7, A	s, p: Vienna, 1816	i/7
Composition, First performance : 1811–12; 8 Dec 1813
Dedication, Remarks : Count Moritz von Fries; arrs. for pf, pf 4 hands and 2 pf ded. Elisabeth Aleksiev, Empress of Russia
op.93	Symphony no.8, F	s, p: Vienna, 1817	i/8
Composition, First performance : 1812; 27 Feb 1814
Dedication, Remarks : shortened version of end of 1st movt, HS iv
op.91	Wellingtons Sieg oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria (‘Battle Symphony’)	s, p: Vienna, 1816; for pf: London and Vienna, 1816	ii/10; HS viii [for pf]	ii/1
Composition, First performance : 1813; 8 Dec 1813
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Regent of England (later King George IV); orig. version of pt 2, for Maelzel’s panharmonicon, HS iv
op.115	Overture ‘Namensfeier’, C	s, p: Vienna, 1825	iii/22	ii/1
Composition, First performance : 1814–15; 25 Dec 1815
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Anton Heinrich Radziwiłł; incorporates ideas sketched several years earlier
woo3	Gratulations-Menuet, E	p: Vienna, 1832	ii/13	ii/3
Composition, First performance : 1822; 3 Nov 1822
Dedication, Remarks : written for Carl Friedrich Hensler, ded. (by publisher) Karl Holz
op.125	Symphony no.9, d	s, p: Mainz, 1826	i/9
Composition, First performance : 1822–4; 7 May 1824
Dedication, Remarks : Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia

solo instruments and orchestra



No.	Title, Key	Publication	GA	NA

woo4	Piano Concerto, E	s: GA	xxv/310
Composition, First performance : 1784
Dedication, Remarks : survives only in pf score (with orch cues in solo part)
Hess 13	Romance, e, pf, fl, bn, orch, frag.	Wiesbaden, 1952	HS iii
Composition, First performance : ?1786
Dedication, Remarks : intended as slow movt of larger work
woo5	Violin Concerto, C, frag.	Vienna, 1879	HS iii
Composition, First performance : 1790–92
Dedication, Remarks : part of 1st movt only; 1st edn ded. Gerhard von Breuning
Hess 12	Oboe Concerto, F, lost	—	—	—
Composition, First performance : ?1792–3
Dedication, Remarks : sent to Bonn from Vienna in late 1793; a few sketches survive
woo6	Rondo, B, pf, orch	p: Vienna, 1829	ix/72; HS iii
Composition, First performance : 1793
Dedication, Remarks : orig. finale of op.19; solo part completed by Czerny for 1st edn
op.19	Piano Concerto no.2, B	p: Leipzig, 1801	ix/66	iii/2
Composition, First performance : begun c1788, rev. 1794–5, 1798; 29 March 1795
Dedication, Remarks : Carl Nicklas von Nickelsberg; score frag. rejected from early version, HS iii
	cadenza for 1st movt	GA	ix/70a
Composition, First performance : 1809
op.15	Piano Concerto no.1, C	p: Vienna, 1801	ix/65	iii/2
Composition, First performance : 1795, rev. 1800; 18 Dec 1795
Dedication, Remarks : Princess Barbara Odescalchi (née Countess von Keglevics)
	3 cadenzas for 1st movt	GA	ix/70a
Composition, First performance : 1809 (one slightly earlier)
op.50	Romance, F, vn, orch	p: Vienna, 1805	iv/31	iii/4
Composition, First performance : c1798; ? Nov 1798
op.37	Piano Concerto no.3, c	p: Vienna, 1804	ix/67	iii/2
Composition, First performance : ?1800–03; 5 April 1803
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia; ? rev. 1803
	cadenza for 1st movt	GA	ix/70a
Composition, First performance : 1809
op.40	Romance, G, vn, orch	p: Leipzig, 1803	iv/30	iii/4
Composition, First performance : 1801–2
op.56	Concerto (‘Triple Concerto’), C, pf, vn, vc, orch	p: Vienna, 1807	ix/70	iii/1
Composition, First performance : 1804–7; May 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Lobkowitz
op.58	Piano Concerto no.4, G	p: Vienna, 1808	ix/68	iii/3
Composition, First performance : 1804–6/7; 22 Dec 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Rudolph of Austria
	2 cadenzas for 1st movt, cadenza for finale	GA	ix/70a
Composition, First performance : ?1809
	cadenza for 1st movt, 2 cadenzas for finale (Hess 81, 82, 83)	NA	HS x	vii/7
Composition, First performance : ?1809
op.61	Violin Concerto, D	p: Vienna, 1808; London, 1810	iv/29; HS x	iii/4
Composition, First performance : 1806; 23 Dec 1806
Dedication, Remarks : Stephan von Breuning
—	arr. of Vn Conc. op.61 as a pf conc.	p: Vienna, 1808; London, 1810	ix/73 (solo pt)
Composition, First performance : 1807
Dedication, Remarks : Julie von Breuning
	Cadenza for 1st movt, cadenza for finale	GA	ix/70a
Composition, First performance : ?1809
	2 cadenzas for finale (Hess 84–5)	NA	HS x	vii/7
Composition, First performance : ?1809

op.80	Fantasia, c, pf, chorus orch (‘Choral Fantasy’)	p: London, 1810; Leipzig, 1811	HS xix/71	x/2
Composition, First performance : 1808, rev. 1809; 22 Dec 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Maximilian Joseph, King of Bavaria; notation of solo part completed 1809; string parts for rejected orch introduction
op.73	Piano Concerto no.5 ‘Emperor’, E	p: London, 1810; Leipzig, 1811	ix/69	iii/3
Composition, First performance : 1809; 28 Nov 1811
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Rudolph

wind band



No.	Title, Key	GA	NA

woo29	March, B, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn: see ‘Chamber Music for Wind alone and with Strings’
woo18	March ‘für die böhmische Landwehr’, F	xxv/287/1; HS iv; HS viii [pf]
Composition : 1809, rev. 1810
Publication : pf red.: Prague, ?1809; s: Berlin, 1818–19
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Anton of Austria (on autograph)
	trio to woo18, B	HS iv
Composition : c1822
Publication : HS
woo19	March, F	xxv/287/2; HS iv
Composition : 1810
Publication : pf red.: Vienna, 1810
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Anton (on autograph)
	trio to woo19, f	HS iv
Composition : c1822
Publication : HS
woo21	Polonaise, D	xxv/289
Composition : 1810
Publication : GA
woo22	Ecossaise, D	xxv/290
Composition : 1810
Publication : GA
woo23	Ecossaise, G	xxv/306 [pf]
Composition : c1810
Publication : pf red. in Czerny’s Musikalisches Pfennig-Magazin, i (Vienna, 1834)
woo24	March, D	ii/15
Composition : 1816
Publication : pf red.: Vienna, 1827
woo20	March, C	xxv/288; HS iv
Composition : c1810
Publication : GA
	trio to woo20, F
Composition : c1822

chamber music for strings



No.	Title, Key	GA	NA

Hess 33	Minuet, A, str qt	HS vi
Composition, First performance : 1790–92
Publication : HS
Dedication, Remarks : exists also in pf version, HS viii
op.3	String Trio, E	vii/54; HS vi	vi/6
Composition, First performance : before 1794
Publication : Vienna, 1796
Dedication, Remarks : frag. arr. Beethoven for pf trio, HS ix
op.87	transcr. of Trio for 2 ob and eng hn op.87 as str trio, C	—
Composition, First performance : 1795
Publication : Vienna, 1806
Dedication, Remarks : transcr. probably approved by Beethoven
op.4	String Quintet, E	v/36	vi/2
Composition, First performance : 1795
Publication : Vienna, 1796
Dedication, Remarks : thoroughly recomposed version of Octet op.103 (see ‘Chamber Music for Wind alone and with Strings’)
woo32	Duet, E, va, vc ‘mit zwei obligaten Augengläsern’, 1st movt and minuet	HS vi	vi/6
Composition, First performance : 1796–7
Publication : 1st movt: Leipzig, 1912; minuet: Frankfurt, London and New York, 1952
Dedication, Remarks : probably written for Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz
op.8	Serenade, D, str, trio	vii/58	vi/6
Composition, First performance : 1796–7
Publication : Vienna, 1797
op.9	Three String Trios, G, D, c	vii/55–7	vi/6
Composition, First performance : 1797–8
Publication : Vienna, 1798
Dedication, Remarks : Count Johann Georg von Browne
Hess 28	another trio for the minuet of op.9 no.1, G	HS vi	vi/6
Composition, First performance : 1797–8
Publication : Bonn, 1924
op.18	Six String Quartets, F, G, D, c, A, B	vi/37–42	vi/3
Composition, First performance : 1798–1800
Publication : Vienna, 1801
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Lobkowitz; early version of no.1, HS vi, NA
op.29	String Quintet, C	v/34	vi/2
Composition, First performance : 1801
Publication : Leipzig, 1802
Dedication, Remarks : Count Fries
Hess 34	arr. of Pf Sonata op.14 no.1 for str qt, F	HS vi	vi/3
Composition, First performance : 1801–2
Publication : Vienna, 1802
Dedication, Remarks : Baroness Josefine von Braun
op.59	Three String Quartets ‘Rasumovsky’, F, e, C	vi/43–5	vi/4
Composition, First performance : 1806
Publication : Vienna, 1808
Dedication, Remarks : Count Rasumovsky
op.74	String Quartet ‘Harp’, E	vi/46	vi/4
Composition, First performance : 1809
Publication : Leipzig and London, 1810
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Lobkowitz
op.95	String Quartet ‘Serioso’, f	vi/47	vi/4
Composition, First performance : 1810–11; May 1814
Publication : Vienna, 1816
Dedication, Remarks : Zmeskall von Domanovecz
op.104	arr. of Pf Trio op.1 no.3 for str qnt	v/36a	vi/2
Composition, First performance : 1817; 10 Dec 1818
Publication : Vienna and London, 1819
Dedication, Remarks : arr. corrected by Beethoven, but largely the work of Kaufmann
Hess 40	Prelude, d, str qnt	HS vi	vi/2
Composition, First performance : 1817
Publication : SMz, xcv (1955)
op.137	Fugue, D, str qnt	v/35	vi/2
Composition, First performance : Nov 1817
Publication : Vienna, 1827
woo34	Duet, A, 2 vn	HS vi
Composition, First performance : April 1822
Publication : T. von Frimmel: Ludwig van Beethoven (Berlin, 1901)
Dedication, Remarks : Alexandre Boucher
op.127	String Quartet, E	vi/48
Composition, First performance : 1824–5; 6 March 1825
Publication : Mainz, 1826
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Nikolay Golitsïn
op.132	String Quartet, a	vi/51
Composition, First performance : 1825; 6 Nov 1825
Publication : Paris and Berlin, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Golitsïn
op.130	String Quartet, B	vi/49
Composition, First performance : 1825–6; 21 March 1826; 22 April 1827 (with new finale)
Publication : Vienna, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Golitsïn; orig. with op.133 as finale; new finale composed 1826
op.133	Grosse Fuge, B, str qt	vi/53
Composition, First performance : 1825–6; 21 March 1826
Publication : Vienna, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Rudolph; orig. finale of op.130
op.131	String Quartet, c	vi/50
Composition, First performance : 1825–6
Publication : Mainz, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Baron Joseph von Stutterheim
op.135	String Quartet, F	vi/52
Composition, First performance : 1826; 23 March 1828
Publication : Berlin and Paris, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Johann Wolfmayer; theme of 3rd movt orig. associated with finale of op.131
Hess 41	String Quintet, C, frag.	HS viii
Composition, First performance : 1826–7
Publication : Vienna, 1838
Dedication, Remarks : survives only in pf transcr., woo62

chamber music for wind alone and with strings

woo26	Allegro and Minuet, G, 2 fl	Aug 1792	A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. H. Deiters, ii (Berlin, 1901)	J.M. Degenhart	HS vii
op.103	Octet, E, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn	before Nov 1792	Vienna, 1830	written in Bonn, then rev. 1793	viii/59
woo25	Rondino, E, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn	1793	Vienna, 1830	at one time intended as finale to op.103	viii/60
Hess 19	Quintet, E, ob, 3 hn, bn, inc.	?1793	Mainz, 1954	incl. 1st movt frag., slow movt, minuet frag.; probably begun before 1793, then rev. 1793	HS vii
op.87	Trio, C, 2 ob, eng hn	?1795	Vienna, 1806		viii/63
woo28	Variations, C, on ‘La ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni, 2 ob, eng hn	?1795; 23 Dec 1797	Leipzig, 1914		HS vii
op.81b	Sextet, E, 2 hn, 2 vn, va, vc	?1795	Bonn, 1810		v/33
op.71	Sextet, E, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn	?1796; April 1805	Leipzig, 1810	1st and 2nd movts probably written before 1796	viii/61
woo29	March, B, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn	1797–8	GA	pf version pubd in Schweizerische musikpädagogische Blätter, xx (1931), also HS viii; see also ‘Miscellaneous’, Hess 107	xxv/292
op.20	Septet, E, cl, hn, bn, vn, va, vc, db	1799; 2 April 1800	Leipzig, 1802	Empress Maria Theresia	v/32
op.25	Serenade, D, fl, vn, va	1801	Vienna, 1802		viii/62
woo30	Three Equali, 4 trbn: d, D, B	Nov 1812	GA	transcr. for 4 male vv by I. von Seyfried perf. at Beethoven’s funeral, pubd Vienna, 1827	xxv/293
woo17	Eleven Dances (‘Mödlinger Tänze’), wind, str: see ‘Collections of Dances’

chamber music with piano

woo36	Three Quartets, pf vn, va, vc; E, D, C	1785	Vienna, 1828	autograph gives ‘clavecin’ instead of pf and ‘basso’ instead of vc	x/75–7	iv/1
woo37	Trio, G, pf, fl, bn	1786	GA	autograph gives ‘clavicembalo’ instead of pf	xxv/294	iv/3
woo38	Piano Trio, E	?1791	Frankfurt, 1830	date of composition taken from early catalogue of Beethoven’s works	xi/86	iv/3
Hess 48	Allegretto, E, pf trio	c1790–92	London, 1955		HS ix	iv/3
Hess 46	Violin Sonata, A, frag.	c1790–92	HS	authenticity no longer in doubt	HS ix
woo40	Variations, F, on ‘Se vuol ballare’ from Le nozze di Figaro, pf, vn	1792–3	Vienna, 1793	Eleonore von Breuning	xii/103	v/2
woo41	Rondo, G, pf, vn	1793–4	Bonn, 1808		xii/102	v/2
op.1	Three Piano Trios, E, G, c	1794–5	Vienna, 1795	Prince Lichnowsky; no.1 probably composed before 1794	xi/79–81
woo43a	Sonatina, c, pf, mand	1796	Grove1 (‘Mandoline’)	probably written for Countess Josephine de Clary	xxv/295	v/4
woo43b	Adagio, E, pf, mand	1796	GA	probably for Countess de Clary; a slightly variant version pubd in Sudetendeutsches Musikarchiv (1940), no.2 (Hess 44)	xxv/296; HS ix	v/4
woo44a	Sonatina, C, pf, mand	1796	Der Merker, iii (1912)	probably for Countess de Clary	HS ix	v/4
woo44b	Andante and Variations, D, pf, mand	1796	Sudetendeutsches Musikarchiv (1940), no.1	probably for Countess de Clary	HS ix	v/4
woo42	Six German Dances, pf, vn: see ‘Collections of Dances’
op.5	Two Cello Sonatas, F, g	1796	Vienna, 1797	Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia	xiii/105–6	v/3
woo45	Variations, G, on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Judas Maccabaeus, pf, vc	1796	Vienna, 1797	Princess Christiane von Lichnowsky	xiii/110	v/3
op.66	Variations, F, on ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Die Zauberflöte, pf, vc	?1796	Vienna, 1798		xiii/111	v/3
op.16	Quintet, E, pf, ob, cl, hn, bn	1796; 6 April 1797	Vienna, 1801	Prince Joseph Johann zu Schwarzenberg	x/74	iv/1
	arr. of op.16 for pf qt		Vienna 1801 (with pf and wind version)	Prince Schwarzenberg; authenticity affirmed in Wegeler and Ries (D1838)	x/78	iv/1
op.11	Trio, B, pf, cl/vn, vc	1797 (?–1798)	Vienna, 1798	Countess Maria Wilhelmine von Thun	xi/89
op.12	Three Violin Sonatas, D, A, E	1797–8	Vienna, 1799	Antonio Salieri	xii/92–4	v/1
op.17	Horn Sonata, F	April 1800; 18 April 1800	Vienna, 1801; for pf, vc: Vienna, 1801	Baroness Josefine von Braun	xiv/112	v/4
op.23	Violin Sonata, a	1800	Vienna, 1801	Count Fries	xii/95	v/1
op.24	Violin Sonata ‘Spring’, F	1800–01	Vienna, 1801	Count Fries	xii/96	v/1
woo46	Variations, E, on ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen’ from Die Zauberflöte, pf, vc	1801	Vienna, 1802	Count von Browne	xiii/111a	v/3
op.30	Three Violin Sonatas, A, c, G	1801–2	Vienna, 1803	Aleksandr I, Tsar of Russia	xii/97–9	v/2
op.44	Variations, E, on an original theme, pf trio		Leipzig, 1804	sketched in 1792	xi/88	iv/3
op.47	Violin Sonata ‘Kreutzer’, A	1802–3; 24 May 1803	Bonn and London, 1805	written for George P. Bridgetower, ded. Rodolphe Kreutzer; finale orig. intended for op.30/1	xii/100	v/2
op.38	Trio, E, pf, cl/vn, vc (arr. of Septet op.20: see ‘Chamber Music for Wind alone and with Strings’)	1802–3	Vienna, 1805	Professor Johann Adam Schmidt	xi/91	iv/3
op.121a	Variations, G, on Wenzel Müller’s ‘Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu’, pf trio	?1803, rev. 1816	Vienna and London, 1824	probably offered for publication in 1803; surviving autograph dates from c1816–17	xi/87	iv/3
op.41	Serenade, D, pf, fl/vn (arr. of Serenade op.25: see ‘Chamber Music for Wind alone and with Strings’)	1803	Leipzig, 1803	arr. approved and corrected by Beethoven but largely the work of someone else	HS ix
op.42	Notturno, D, pf, va (arr. of Serenade op.8: see ‘Chamber Music for Strings’)	1803	Leipzig, 1804	arr. approved and corrected by Beethoven but largely the work of someone else	HS ix
op.69	Cello Sonata, A	1807–8	Leipzig, 1809	Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein	xiii/107	v/3
op.70	Two Piano Trios, D (‘Ghost’), E	1808	Leipzig, 1809	Countess Marie Erdödy	xi/82–3
op.97	Piano Trio ‘Archduke’, B	1810–11; 11 April 1814	Vienna and London, 1816	Archduke Rudolph	xi/84
op.96	Violin Sonata, G	1812, probably rev. 1814–15; 29 Dec 1812	Vienna and London, 1816	written for Pierre Rode, ded. Archduke Rudolph	xii/101	v/2
woo39	Allegretto, B, pf trio	June 1812	Frankfurt, 1830	Maximiliane Brentano	xi/85	iv/3
op.102	Two Cello Sonatas, C, D	1815	Bonn, 1817	Countess Erdödy	xiii/108–9	v/3
op.105	Six National Airs with Variations, pf, fl/vn	1818–19	London, Edinburgh and Vienna, 1819		xiv/113–4	v/4
op.107	Ten National Airs with Variations, pf, fl/vn	1818–19	London and Edinburgh, 1819 [nos.2, 6, 7]; Bonn and Cologne, 1820 [complete]		xiv/115–19	v/4

piano sonatas

woo47	Three Sonatas (‘Kurfürstensonaten’), E, f, D	?1783	Speyer, 1783	Archbishop Maximilian Friedrich, Elector of Cologne	xvi/156–8
woo50	Sonata, F (2 movts)	c1790–92	Munich and Duisburg, 1950	Franz Gerhard Wegeler; facs. pubd in L. Schmidt: Beethoven-Briefe (Berlin, 1909)	HS ix
op.2/1	Sonata no.1, f	1793–5	Vienna, 1796	Joseph Haydn; 2nd movt uses material from Pf Qt woo36 no.3	xvi/124	vii/2
op.2/2	Sonata no.2, A	1794–5	Vienna, 1796	Joseph Haydn	xvi/125	vii/2
op.2/3	Sonata no.3, C	1794–5	Vienna, 1796	Joseph Haydn; 1st movt uses material from Pf Qt woo36 no.3	xvi/126	vii/2
op.49/1	Sonata no.19, g	?1797	Vienna, 1805		xvi/142	vii/3
op.49/2	Sonata no.20, G	1795–6	Vienna, 1805		xvi/143	vii/3
op.7	Sonata no.4, E	1796–7	Vienna, 1797	Countess Barbara von Keglevics	xvi/127	vii/2
op.10/1	Sonata no.5, c	?1795–7	Vienna, 1798	Countess Anna Margarete von Browne	xvi/128	vii/2
op.10/2	Sonata no.6, F	1796–7	Vienna, 1798	Countess von Browne	xvi/129	vii/2
op.10/3	Sonata no.7, D	1797–8	Vienna, 1798	Countess von Browne	xvi/130	vii/2
woo51	Sonata, C, frag.	completed ?1797–8	Frankfurt, 1830	Eleonore von Breuning; 1st edn completed by Ferdinand Ries	xvi/159
op.13	Sonata no.8 ‘Pathétique’, c	1797–8	Vienna, 1799	Prince Lichnowsky	xvi/131	vii/2
op.14/1	Sonata no.9, E	1798	Vienna, 1799	Baroness Josefine von Braun	xvi/132	vii/2
op.14/2	Sonata no.10, G	?1799	Vienna, 1799	Baroness von Braun	xvi/133	vii/2
op.22	Sonata no.11, B	1800	Leipzig, 1802	Count von Browne	xvi/134	vii/2
op.26	Sonata no.12, A	1800–01	Vienna, 1802	Prince Lichnowsky	xvi/135	vii/2
op.27/1	Sonata no.13 ‘quasi una fantasia’, E	1801	Vienna, 1802	Princess Josephine von Liechtenstein	xvi/136	vii/3
op.27/2	Sonata no.14, ‘quasi una fantasia’ (‘Moonlight’), c	1801	Vienna, 1802	Countess Giulietta Guicciardi	xvi/137	vii/3
op.28	Sonata no.15 (‘Pastoral’), D	1801	Vienna, 1802	Joseph von Sonnenfels	xvi/138	vii/3
op.31/1	Sonata no.16, G	1802	Zürich, 1803		xvi/139	vii/3
op.31/2	Sonata no.17, d	1802	Zürich, 1803		xvi/140	vii/3
op.31/3	Sonata no.18, E	1802	Zürich and London, 1804		xvi/141	vii/3
op.53	Sonata no.21 ‘Waldstein’, C	1803–4	Vienna, 1805	Count Ferdinand von Waldstein	xvi/144	vii/3
op.54	Sonata no.22, F	1804	Vienna, 1806		xvi/145	vii/3
op.57	Sonata no.23 (‘Appassionata’), f	1804–5	Vienna, 1807	Count Franz von Brunsvik	xvi/146	vii/3
op.78	Sonata no.24 F	1809	Leipzig and London, 1810	Countess Therese von Brunsvik	xvi/147
op.79	Sonata no.25, G	1809	Leipzig and London, 1810		xvi/148
op.81a	Sonata no.26 ‘Das Lebewohl, Abwesenheit und Wiedersehn’, E	1809–10	Leipzig and London, 1811	Archduke Rudolph; Fr. subtitle ‘Les adieux, l’absence et le retour’	xvi/149
op.90	Sonata no.27, e	1814	Vienna, 1815	Count Moritz Lichnowsky	xvi/150
op.101	Sonata no.28, A	1816	Vienna, 1817	Baroness Dorothea Ertmann	xvi/151
op.106	Sonata no.29 ‘Hammerklavier’, B	1817–18	Vienna and London, 1819	Archduke Rudolph	xvi/152
op.109	Sonata no.30, E	1820	Berlin, 1821	Maximiliane Brentano	xvi/153
op.110	Sonata no.31, A	1821–2	Paris, Berlin and Vienna, 1822; London, 1823		xvi/154
op.111	Sonata no.32, c	1821–2	Paris, Berlin, Vienna and London, 1823	Archduke Rudolph; London edn ded. Antonie Brentano	xvi/155

piano variations

woo63	Nine Variations on a March by Dressler, c	1782	Mannheim, 1782/3	Countess Felice von Wolf-Metternich	xvii/166	vii/5
woo65	Twenty-four Variations on Righini’s Arietta ‘Venni amore’, D	c1790–91	Mainz, 1791; Vienna, 1802	Countess Maria Anna Hortensia von Hatzfeld; copy of 1791 edn recently discovered in The Hague	xvii/178	vii/5
woo66	Thirteen Variations on the arietta ‘Es war einmal ein alter Mann’ from Dittersdorf’s Das rothe Käppchen, A	1792	Bonn, 1793		xvii/175	vii/5
woo64	Six Variations on a Swiss Song, F, hp/pf	c1790–92	Bonn, ?1798		xvii/177	vii/5
woo68	Twelve Variations on the ‘Menuet à la Viganò’ from Haibel’s Le nozze disturbate, C	1795	Vienna, 1796		xvii/169	vii/5
woo69	Nine Variations on the Aria ‘Quant’ è più bello’ from Paisiello’s La molinara, A	1795	Vienna, 1795	Prince Lichnowsky	xvii/167	vii/5
woo70	Six Variations on the Duet ‘Nel cor più non mi sento’ from La molinara, G	1795	Vienna, 1796		xvii/168	vii/5
woo72	Eight Variations on the Romance ‘Un fièvre brûlante’ from Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-lion, C	?1795	Vienna, 1798		xvii/171	vii/5
woo71	Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance from Wranitzky’s Das Waldmädchen, A	1796–7	Vienna, 1797	Countess von Browne	xvii/170	vii/5
woo73	Ten Variations on the Duet ‘La stessa, le stessissima’ from Salieri’s Falstaff, B	1799	Vienna, 1799	Countess von Keglevics	xvii/172	vii/5
woo76	Eight Variations on the Trio ‘Tändeln und Scherzen’ from Süssmayr’s Solimann der Zweite, F	1799	Vienna, 1799	Countess von Browne	xvii/174	vii/5
woo75	Seven Variations on the Quartet ‘Kind, willst du ruhig schlafen’ from Winter’s Das unterbrochene Opferfest, F	1799	Vienna, 1799		xvii/173	vii/5
woo77	Six Variations on an Original Theme, G	1800	Vienna, 1800		xvii/176	vii/5
op.34	Six Variations on an Original Theme, F	1802	Leipzig, 1803	Princess Odescalchi	xvii/162	vii/5
op.35	Fifteen Variations and a Fugue on an Original Theme, E (‘Eroica Variations’)	1802	Leipzig, 1803	Count Moritz Lichnowsky; theme also used in the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus op.43, ‘Eroica’ Sym. op.55 and the Contredanse woo14 no.7	xvii/163	vii/5
woo78	Seven Variations on ‘God Save the King’, C	1802/3	Vienna, 1804		xvii/179	vii/5
woo79	Five Variations on ‘Rule Britannia’, D	1803	Vienna, 1804		xvii/180	vii/5
woo80	Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme, c	1806	Vienna, 1807		xvii/181	vii/5
op.76	Six Variations on an Original Theme, D	1809	Leipzig and London, 1810	Franz Oliva; theme used later for the Turkish March in Die Ruinen von Athen op.113	xvii/164	vii/5
op.120	Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, C	1819 and 1823	Vienna, 1823	Antonie Brentano	xvii/165	vii/5

shorter piano pieces

woo48	Rondo, C	1783	H.P. Bossler: Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber, ii (Speyer, 1783)		HS ix
woo49	Rondo, A	?1783	H.P. Bossler: Neue Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber, ii (Speyer, 1784)		xviii/196
op.39	Two Preludes through all Twelve Major Keys, C, C, pf/org	?1789	Leipzig, 1803		xviii/184
woo81	Allemande, A	c1793, rev. 1822	GA		xxv/307
op.129	Rondo a capriccio, G (‘Rage over a Lost Penny’)	1795	Vienna, 1828	autograph completed by unknown ed. (probably Diabelli), 1828	xviii/191
Hess 64	Fugue, C	1795	MT, xcvi (1955)		HS ix
woo52	Presto, c	c1795, rev. 1798 and 1822	GA	probably orig. intended for Sonata op.10/1	xxv/297/1
woo53	Allegretto, c	1796–7	GA	probably orig. intended for Sonata op.10/1	xxv/299
Hess 69	Allegretto, c	c1795–6, rev. 1822	HS	probably orig. intended for Sonata op.10/1	HS ix
op.51/1	Rondo, C	c1796–7	Vienna, 1797		xviii/185
op.51/2	Rondo, G	c1798	Vienna, 1802	Countess Henriette Lichnowsky	xviii/186
op.33	Seven Bagatelles, E, C, F, A, C, D, A	1801–2	Vienna and London, 1803		xviii/183
woo54	? Bagatelle ‘Lustig–Traurig’, C	?1802	GA		xxv/300
woo57	Andante, F (‘Andante favori’)	1803	Vienna, 1805	orig. slow movt of Sonata op.53	xviii/192
woo56	Allegretto, C	1803, rev. 1822	GA		xxv/297/2
woo55	Prelude, f	c1803	Vienna, 1805		xviii/195
woo82	Minuet, E	c1803	Vienna, 1805		xviii/193
op.77	Fantasia, g/B	1809	Leipzig and London, 1810	Count Franz von Brunsvik	xviii/187
woo59	Bagatelle ‘Für Elise’, a	1808/1810	L. Nohl: Neue Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1867)	lost autograph possibly inscribed ‘Für Therese’ i.e. Therese Malfatti	xxv/298
op.89	Polonaise, C	1814	Vienna, 1815	Empress Elisabeth Alekseyerna of Russia	xviii/188
woo60	Bagatelle, B	1818	Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, i (1824)		xxv/301
Hess 65	‘Concert Finale’, C	1820–21	in F. Starke, ed.: Wiener Piano-Forte-Schule, iii (Vienna, 1821)	arr. of coda to finale of Pf Conc. op.37	HS ix
woo61	Allegretto, b	1821	Robitschek: Deutscher Kunst- und Musikzeitung (15 March 1893)	Ferdinand Piringer	HS ix
op.119	Eleven Bagatelles, g, C, D, A, c, G, C, C, a, A, B	completed 1820–22	nos.7–11 in F. Starke, ed.: Wiener Piano-Forte-Schule, iii (Vienna, 1821); all 11, London, 1823	nos.2 and 4 sketched 1794–5; others also sketched before 1820	xviii/189
op.126	Six Bagatelles, G, g, E, b, G, E	1824	Mainz, 1825		xviii/190
woo84	Waltz, E	1824	Vienna, 1824	Friedrich Demmer (publisher’s ded.)	xxv/303
woo61a	Allegretto quasi andante, g	1825	NZM, cxvii (1956)	Sarah Burney Payne	HS ix
woo85	Waltz, D	1825	Vienna, 1825	Duchess Sophie of Austria (publisher’s ded.)	xxv/304
woo86	Ecossaise, E	1825	Vienna, 1825	Duchess Sophie (publisher’s ded.)	xxv/305

piano four hands

woo67	Eight Variations on a Theme by Count Waldstein, C	?1792	Bonn, 1794		xv/122	vii/1
op.6	Sonata, D	1796–7	Vienna, 1797		xv/120	vii/1
woo74	Six Variations on Beethoven’s ‘Ich denke dein’, D	1799, 1803	Vienna, 1805	Countess Therese von Brunsvik and Josephine Deym (née Brunsvik); variations nos.1, 2, 5, 6 written in 1799, nos.3–4 in 1803; melody of theme (to a text by Goethe) different from that of Andenken, woo136 (‘Ich denke dein’, text by Matthisson)	xv/123	vii/1
op.45	Three Marches, C, E, D	1803	Vienna, 1804	Princess Maria Esterházy	xv/121	vii/1
op.134	arr. of Grosse Fuge op.133 (see ‘Chamber Music for Strings’)	1826	Vienna, 1827	Archduke Rudolph	HS viii	vii/1

collections of dances

original scoring sometimes in doubt because versions for piano and for string trio may have been transcriptions



No.	Title, Original scoring	Composition	GA	NA

woo7	Twelve Minuets, orch	1795	ii/16 [orch]; HS viii [pf]	ii/3
Publication : for pf: Vienna, 1795; p: Vienna, ?1798; for 2 vn, b: Vienna, 1802; s: GA
Remarks : edn of parts sold as MS copies
woo8	Twelve German Dances, orch	1795	ii/17 [orch]; HS viii [pf]	ii/3
Publication : same as woo7
Remarks : edn of parts sold as MS copies
woo9	Six Minuets, 2 vn, b	? before 1795	HS vi	ii/3
Publication : Mainz, 1933
Remarks : authenticity not fully confirmed
woo10	Six Minuets	1795	xviii/194 [pf]
Publication : for pf: Vienna, 1796
Remarks : orchestral version probably existed
woo42	Six German Dances, vn, pf	1796	xxv/308
Publication : Vienna, 1814
woo11	Seven Ländler	1799	xviii/198
Publication : for pf: Vienna, 1799
woo13	Twelve German Dances, orch	c1792–7	HS viii [pf]
Publication : for pf: Vienna, Prague and Leipzig, 1929
Remarks : survives in pf version only; some dances sketched before 1800
woo14	Twelve Contredanses, orch	c1791–1801	ii/17a [orch]; HS viii [pf, lacking nos.3, 6, 11]	ii/3
Publication : for pf, for 2 vn, b, and p: all Vienna, 1802; s: GA
Remarks : nos.3, 4, 6 written in 1795; nos.2, 9, 10 in late 1801; others before 1802; 1st edn. for pf lacking 6 dances; nos.7 and 11 derived from ballet music Prometheus; no.7 later used in ‘Eroica’ Symphony
woo15	Six Ländler, 2 vn, b	1802	xxv/291	ii/3
Publication : p, and for pf: Vienna, 1802; s: GA
woo 83	Six Ecossaises, pf/?orch	c1806	xxv/302 [pf]
Publication : for pf: Vienna, 1807; GA
Remarks : may be half of woo16, see ‘Works of Doubtful Authenticity’
woo17	Eleven Dances (‘Mödlinger Tänze’), 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 hn, bn, 2 vn, b	1819	HS vii
Publication : Leipzig, 1907
Remarks : probably spurious; reported by Schindler; pts found by H. Riemann in 1905 were assumed to be same work

operas



No.	Title, Genre, Libretto	GA	NA

woo91	Two arias for Umlauf’s Singspiel Die schöne Schusterin: O welch ein Leben, T solo, Soll ein Schuh nicht drükken, S solo	xxv/270
Composition, Production : ?1795–6
Publication : s: GA
Remarks : melody of 1st aria also used for Maigesang op.52/4 (see ‘Songs’)
Hess 115	Vestas Feuer (opera, E. Schikaneder), frag.	HS xiii
Composition, Production : 1803
Publication : s: Wiesbaden, 1953
op.72	Fidelio oder Die eheliche Liebe (‘Leonore’) (opera, J. Sonnleithner, after J.-N. Bouilly: Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal); (for Leonore ov. no.1, see ‘Orchestral’)	HS ii. xi–xiii
Composition, Production : 1st version (with Leonore ov. no.2), 1804–5; Theater an der Wien, Vienna, 20 Nov 1805
Publication : vs: Leipzig, 1905; s: HS
Remarks : private edn of full score, Leipzig, 1908–10
		HS xi–xiii
Composition, Production : 2nd version (with Leonore ov. no.3), 1805–6; Theater an der Wien, 29 March 1806
Publication : vs: Leipzig, 1810; s: HS
Remarks : 3 nos. pubd separately, Vienna, 1807
		xx/206
Composition, Production : final version (with ‘Fidelio’ ov.), 1814; Kärntnertor, Vienna, 23 May 1814
Publication : vs: Vienna, 1814; s: Paris, 1826 (Fr.), Bonn, 1847 (Ger.)
woo94	Germania, finale of Die gute Nachricht (Singspiel, G.F. Treitschke), B solo, chorus	xx/207d	ix/7
Composition, Production : 1814; Kärntnertor, 11 April 1814
Publication : vs: Vienna, 1814; s: GA
Remarks : Die gute Nachricht is a pasticcio
woo97	Es ist vollbracht, finale of Die Ehrenpforten (Singspiel, Treitschke), B solo, chorus	xx/207c	ix/7
Composition, Production : 1815; Kärntnertor, 15 July 1815
Publication : vs: Vienna, 1815; s: GA
Remarks : Die Ehrenpforten is a pasticcio

incidental music



No.	Title, Text	GA	NA

op.62	Overture to Collin’s Coriolan (see ‘Orchestral’)
op.84	Egmont (Goethe): Ov., 1 Die Trommel gerühret, song, 2–3 Entr’actes I–II, 4 Freudvoll und leidvoll, song, 5–6 Entr’actes III–IV, 7 Clärchen’s Death, 8 Melodrama, 9 Siegessymphonie	ii/12, iii/27; HS v (no.4)	ix/7
Composition, Production : 1809–10; 15 June 1810
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : p: Leipzig, 1810 [ov.], Leipzig, 1812 [remainder]; vs: Leipzig, 1812 [without ov.]; s: Leipzig, 1831
op.113	Die Ruinen von Athen (A. von Kotzebue): Ov., 1 Tochter des mächtigen Zeus, chorus, 2 Ohne Verschulden, duet, 3 Du hast in deines Ärmels Falten, chorus of dervishes, 4 Turkish March, 5 Offstage music, 6 Schmükt die Altäre, march and chorus, and Mit reger Freude, recit, 7 Wir tragen empfängliche Herzen, chorus, and Will unser Genius, aria and chorus, 8 Heil unserm König, heil!, chorus	xx/207, iii/28
Composition, Production : 1811: 10 Feb 1812
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : no.4 for pf 4 hands: Vienna, 1822–3; s: Vienna, 1823 [ov. only], Vienna, 1846 [complete, ded. (by publisher) Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia]; see also woo98
op.117	König Stephan (Kotzebue): Ov., 1 Ruhend von seinen Taten, chorus, 2 Auf dunklem Irrweg, chorus, 3 Siegesmarsch, 4 Wo die Unschuld Blumen streute, chorus, 5 Melodrama, 6 Eine neue strahlende Sonne, chorus, 7 Melodrama, 8 Heil unserm Könige!, geistliche Marsch, chorus and melodrama, 9 Heil unsern Enkeln!, chorus	xx/207b, iii/23
Composition, Production : 1811; 10 Feb 1812
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : ov. and no.3 for pf 4 hands: Vienna, 1822–3; s: Vienna, 1826 [ov. only], GA [complete]
woo2a	Triumphal March, C, for Tarpeja (C. Kuffner)	ii/14	ix/7
Composition, Production : 1813; 26 March 1813
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : for pf: Vienna, 1813; p: Vienna, 1840; s: GA
woo2b	‘Introduction to Act 2’, for Leonore, 1805 version	HS iv
Composition, Production : 1813; 26 March 1813
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : s: Mainz, 1938
woo96	Leonore Prohaska (F. Duncker): 1 Wir bauen und sterben, chorus, 2 Es blüht eine Blume, romance, 3 Melodrama, 4 Funeral March	xxv/272	ix/7
Composition, Production : 1815
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : s: GA; no.4 is arr. of Funeral March from Piano Sonata op.26
op.124	Overture, C, to Die Weihe des Hauses (C. Meisl)	iii/24	ii/1
Composition, Production : 1822; Josefstadt-Theater, 3 Oct 1822
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : s: Mainz, 1825; ded. Prince Golitsïn
woo98	Wo sich die Pulse, chorus for Die Weihe des Hauses	xxv/266
Composition, Production : as op.124
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : s: GA; Die Weihe des Hauses is adaptation of Die Ruinen von Athen and incorporates new or revised texts for op.113 no.1 (pubd in HS xiii), no.6 (pubd as op.114, Vienna, 1826) no.7 and no.8

ballets



No.	Title, Choreographer	GA	NA

woo1	Ritterballett: 1 March, 2 German Song, 3 Hunting-song, 4 Love-song (‘Romance’), 5 War Dance, 6 Drinking-song, 7 German Dance, 8 Coda	xxv/286; HS viii [pf]	ii/2
Composition, Production : 1790–91; Bonn, 6 March 1791
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : for pf: Leipzig and Winterthur, 1872; s: GA; orig. thought to have been by Count Waldstein
op.43	Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (S. Viganò), ov., introduction and 16 numbers	ii/11; HX viii [pf]	ii/2
Composition, Production : 1800–01; Burgtheater, Vienna, 28 March 1801
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : for pf: Vienna, 1801; p: Leipzig, 1804 [ov. only]; s: GA; ded. Princess Christiane von Lichnowsky

choral works with orchestra



No.	Title, Scoring	GA	NA

woo87	Cantata on the death of the Emperor Joseph II (S.A. Averdonk), S, A, T, B, 4vv; orch	xxv/264	x/1
Composition, First performance : March 1790
Publication : GA
woo88	Cantata on the accession of Emperor Leopold II (Averdonk), S, A, T, B, 4vv, orch	xxv/265	x/1
Composition, First performance : Sept–Oct 1790
Publication : GA
op.85	Christus am Oelberge [The Mount of Olives] (orat, F.X. Huber), S, T, B, 4vv, orch	xix/205
Composition, First performance : 1803, rev. 1804; 5 April 1803
Publication : Leipzig, 1811
op.86	Mass, C, S, A, T, B, 4vv	xix/204
Composition, First performance : 1807; 13 Sept 1807
Publication : Leipzig, 1812
Dedication, Remarks : Prince Ferdinand Kinsky
op.80	Fantasia, c, pf, chorus, orch (see ‘Solo Instruments and Orchestra’)
woo95	Chor auf die verbündeten Fürsten ‘Ihr weisen Gründer’ (C. Bernard), 4vv, orch	xxv/267	x/2
Composition, First performance : Sept 1814
Publication : GA
Dedication, Remarks : for Congress of Vienna
op.136	Der glorreiche Augenblick (cant., A. Weissenbach), 2 S, T, B, 4vv, orch	xxi/208	x/1
Composition, First performance : 1814; 29 Nov 1814
Publication : Vienna, 1837
Dedication, Remarks : for Congress of Vienna; also pubd with new text by F. Rochlitz as Preis der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1837)
op.112	Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (?cant., Goethe), 4vv, orch	xxi/209	x/2
Composition, First performance : 1814–15; 25 Dec 1815
Publication : Vienna, 1822
Dedication, Remarks : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
op.123	Mass, D (‘Missa solemnis’), S, A, T, B, 4vv, orch, org	xxi/203
Composition, First performance : 1819–23; 7 April 1824
Publication : Mainz, 1827
Dedication, Remarks : Archduke Rudolph; orig. intended for Rudolph’s installation as archbishop, 9 March 1820
—	Opferlied ‘Die Flamme lodert’ (F. von Matthisson), S, A, T, 4vv, 2 cl, hn, va, vc	xxv/268
Composition, First performance : 1822; 23 Dec 1822
Publication : GA
op.121b	Opferlied, 2nd version, S, 4vv, orch	xxii/212	x/2
Composition, First performance : 1824
Publication : Mainz, 1825
Dedication, Remarks : version with pf acc. pubd in HS v; see also ‘Songs’, woo126
op.122	Bundeslied ‘In allen guten Stunden’ (Goethe), S, A, 3vv, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn	xxii/213	x/2
Composition, First performance : 1823–4
Publication : Mainz, 1825
Dedication, Remarks : version with pf acc. pubd in HS v
op.125	Symphony no.9, d (see ‘Orchestral’)

other choral works



No.	Title, Scoring	Composition, First performance	GA	NA

woo102	Abschiedsgesang ‘Die Stunde schlägt’ (J. von Seyfried), 2 T, B	1814	xxv/273
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA; Leopold Weiss; at the request of Mathias Tuscher
woo103	Cantata campestre ‘Un lieto brindisi’ (Abbate Clemente Bondi), S, 2 T, B, pf	1814; 24 June 1814	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Jb der Literarischen Vereinigung Winterthur 1945; Giovanni Malfatti; ? at the request of Andreas Bertolini
woo104	Gesang der Mönche ‘Rasch tritt der Tod’, from Wilhelm Tell (Schiller), 2T, B	1817	xxiii/255
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : NZM, vi (1839); in memory of Franz Sales Kandler and Wenzel Krumpholz
woo105	Hochzeitslied ‘Auf Freunde, singt dem Gott der Ehen’ (A.J. Stein), 2 versions:
	C major, T, unison male vv, pf	1819	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Der Bär 1927; Anna Giannatasio del Rio
	A major, male solo v, 4vv, pf	?1819	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : London, 1858; Anna Giannatasio del Rio
woo106	Birthday Cantata for Prince Lobkowitz ‘Es lebe unser theurer Fürst’ (Beethoven), S, 4vv, pf	April 1823	xxv/274
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : L. Nohl: Neue Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1867); Prince Lobkowitz

solo voices and orchestra

woo89	Prüfung des Küssens ‘Meine weise Mutter spricht’, aria, B solo	c1790–92	GA	xxv/269/1	x/3
woo90	Mit Mädeln sich vertragen, aria, from Claudine von Villa Bella (Goethe), B solo	c1790–92	GA	xxv/269/2	x/3
woo92	Primo amore, scena and aria, S solo	c1790–92	GA	xxv/271	x/3
woo91	Two arias for Die schöne Schusterin (see ‘Operas’) x/3
op.65	Ah! perfido, scena and aria, recit from Achille in Sciro (Metastasio), S solo	early 1796	p, vs: Leipzig, 1805; s: GA; Countess Josephine de Clary (ded. in MS, not in 1st edn)	xxii/210	x/3
woo92a	No, non turbarti, scena and aria, from La tempesta (Metastasio), S solo	early 1802	Wiesbaden, 1949	HS ii	x/3
woo93	Ne’ giorni tuoi felici, duet, from Olimpiade (Metastasio), S, T	late 1802	Leipzig, 1939	HS ii, xiv	x/3
op.116	Tremate, empi, tremate (Bettoni), S, T, B	1802; rev. ?1814	p, vs: Vienna, 1826; s: GA	xxii/211	x/3
op.118	Elegischer Gesang ‘Sanft wie du lebtest’, S, A, T, B, str qt/pf	July 1814	Vienna, 1826 [with pf acc., separate parts for str qt]; Baron Johann von Pasqualati	xxii/214	x/2

songs



No.	Title, Author of text	Composition	GA	NA

woo107	Schilderung eines Mädchens	?1783	xxiii/228	xii/1
Text incipit : Schildern, willst du Freund, soll ich dir Elisen?
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : H.P. Bossler: Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber, ii (Speyer, 1783)
woo108	An einen Säugling (? J. von Döhring)	?1784	xxiii/229	xii/1
Text incipit : Noch weisst du nicht wess Kind du bist
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : H.P. Bossler: Neue Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber, ii (Speyer, 1784)
woo110	Elegie auf den Tod eines Pudels	?c1790	xxv/284	xii/1
Text incipit : Stirb immerhin, es welken ja so viele der Freuden
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : ?GA; may have been pubd by the 1830s
woo113	Klage (L. Hölty)	c1790	xxv/283	xii/1
Text incipit : Dein Silber schien durch Eichengrün
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
Hess 151	Traute Henriette	c1790–92	HS v	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : ÖMz, iv (1949); inc.
op.52	Eight Songs		xxiii/218; HS v [no.2] xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1805
	1 Urians Reise um die Welt (M. Claudius), with unison vv	before 1793
Text incipit : Wenn jemand eine Reise tut
	2 Feuerfarb (S. Mereau)	1792, rev. 1793–4
Text incipit : Ich weiss eine Farbe
	3 Das Liedchen von der Ruhe (H.W.F. Ueltzen)	1793
Text incipit : Im Arm der Liebe
	4 Maigesang (Goethe)	? before 1796
Text incipit : Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : theme also used in woo91 no.1 (see ‘Operas’)
	5 Mollys Abschied (Bürger)
Text incipit : Lebe wohl, du Mann der Lust und Schmerzen
	6 Die Liebe (G.E. Lessing)	before 1793
Text incipit : Ohne Liebe lebe wer da kann
	7 Marmotte (Goethe)	?c1790–92
Text incipit : Ich komme schon durch manche Land
	8 Das Blümchen Wunderhold (Bürger)
Text incipit : Es blüht ein Blümchen irgendwo
woo111	Punschlied, with unison vv	c1791	HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Wer nicht, wenn warm von Hand zu Hand
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : L. Schiedermair: Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig, 1925/R, 3/1951)
woo109	Trinklied	c1792	xxv/282	xii/1
Text incipit : Erhebt das Glas
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo112	An Laura (F. von Matthisson)	c1792	HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Freud’ umblühe dich auf allen Wegen
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : G. Kinsky: Musik-historisches Museum von Wilhelm Heyer in Cöln: Katalog, iv (Cologne, 1916); pf arr. pubd (as Bagatelle, op.119/12) Vienna, ?1826
woo114	Selbstgespräch (J.W.L. Gleim)	c1792	xxv/275	xii/1
Text incipit : Ich, der mit flatterndem Sinn
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo115	An Minna	c1792	xxv/280	xii/1
Text incipit : Nur bei dir, an deinem Herzen
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo117	Der freie Mann (G.C. Pfeffel), with unison vv	1792, rev. 1794	xxiii/232; HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Wer ist ein freier Mann?
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Bonn, 1808
woo116	Que le temps me dure (J.-J. Rousseau)
Hess 129	1st version	?early 1794	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Die Musik, i (1901–2)
Hess 130	2nd version	?early 1794	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : ZfM, cii (1935)
woo119	O care selve (Metastasio), with unison vv	c1794	xxv/279	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo126	Opferlied (Matthisson)	1794–5, rev. 1801–2	xxiii/233; HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Die Flamme lodert
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Bonn, 1808; see also ‘Choral Works with Orchestra’, op.121b
woo118	Two songs (G.A. Bürger):	1794–5	xxiii/253	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1837; Melody of Gegenliebe later used in Choral Fantasy, op.80
	1 Seufzer eines Ungeliebten
Text incipit : 1 Hast du nicht Liebe zugemessen
	2 Gegenliebe
Text incipit : 2 Wüsst ich, dass du mich lieb
op.46	Adelaide (Matthisson)	c1794–5	xxiii/216	xii/1
Text incipit : Einsam wandelt dein Freund im Frühlings Garten
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1797; Friedrich von Matthisson
woo123	Zärtliche Liebe (K.F. Herrosee)	c1795	xxiii/249	xii/1
Text incipit : Ich liebe dich
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1803
woo124	La partenza (Metastasio)	c1795–6	xxiii/251	xii/1
Text incipit : Ecco quel fiero istante!
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1803
woo121	Abschiedsgesang an Wiens Bürger (Friedelberg)	1796	xxiii/230	xii/1
Text incipit : Keine Klage soll erschallen
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1796; Obrist Wachtmeister von Kövesdy
woo122	Kriegslied der Österreicher (Friedelberg), with unison vv	1797	xxiii/231	xii/1
Text incipit : Ein grosses deutsches Volk sind wir
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1797
woo125	La tiranna (? trans. W. Wennington)	1798–9	HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Ah grief to think
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : London, 1799; ded. (by Wennington) Mrs Tschoffen
woo128	Plaisir d’aimer	1798–9	HS v	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Die Musik, i (1901–2)
woo127	Neue Liebe, neues Leben (Goethe)	1798/9	HS v	xii/1
Text incipit : Herz, mein Herz, was soll das geben?
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Bonn, 1808; same text also set as op.75/2
woo74	Ich denke dein (see ‘Piano Four Hands’)
op.48	Six Songs (C.F. Gellert)	c1801–early 1802	xxiii/217; HS v [no.6] xii/1	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1803; Count von Browne; no.3 sketched 1798
	1 Bitten
Text incipit : Gott, deine Güte reicht so weit
	2 Die Liebe des Nächsten
Text incipit : So jemand spricht: ich liebe Gott
	3 Vom Tode
Text incipit : Meine Lebenszeit verstreicht
	4 Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur
Text incipit : Die Himmel rühmen
	5 Gottes Macht und Vorsehung
Text incipit : Gott ist mein Lied
	6 Busslied
Text incipit : An dir allein, an dir hab’ ich gesündigt
woo120	Man strebt die Flamme zu verhehlen	c1802	xxv/278	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA; Frau von Weissenthurn
woo129	Der Wachtelschlag (S.F. Sauter)	1803	xxiii/234	xii/1
Text incipit : Ach mir schallt’s dorten
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1804; Count von Browne
op.88	Das Glück der Freundschaft	1803	xxiii/222	xii/1
Text incipit : Der lebt ein Leben wonniglich
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1803
op.32	An die Hoffnung (C.A. Tiedge)	1804–5	xxiii/215	xii/1
Text incipit : Die du so gern in heilgen Nächten feierst
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1805; Josephine Deym (née Brunsvik) see also op.94
woo130	Gedenke mein	?1804–5, rev. 1819–20	xxv/281	xii/1
Text incipit : —
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1844
woo132	Als die Geliebte sich trennen wollte (?Hoffmann, trans. (from Fr.) S. von Breuning)	1806	xxiii/235	xii/1
Text incipit : Der Hoffnung letzter Schimmer
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : AMZ, xii (1809–10); also pubd as Empfindung bei Lydiens Untreue
woo133	In questa tomba oscura (G. Carpani)	1806–7	xxiii/252	xii/1
Text incipit : —
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1808; ded. (by publisher) Prince Lobkowitz
woo134	Sehnsucht (Goethe), 4 settings	1807–8	xxiii/250	xii/1
Text incipit : Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1810; no.1 first pubd in Prometheus, no.3 (1808)
woo136	Andenken (Matthisson)	1808	xxiii/248	xii/1
Text incipit : Ich denke dein
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Leipzig and London, 1810
woo137	Lied aus der Ferne (C.L. Reissig)	1809	xxiii/236	xii/1
Text incipit : Als mir noch die Thräne
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Leipzig and London, 1810; text orig. used for woo138, pubd in HS v
woo138	Der Jüngling in der Fremde (Reissig)	1809	xxiii/237	xii/1
Text incipit : Der Frühling entblühet
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1810; ded. (by Reissig) Archduke Rudolph; orig. written to text of woo137, pubd in HS v
woo139	Der Liebende (Reissig)	1809	xxiii/238	xii/1
Text incipit : Welch ein wunderbares Leben
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna and London, 1810; ded. (by Reissig) Archduke Rudolph
op.75	Six Songs		xxiii/219	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Leipzig and London, 1810; Princess Caroline Kinsky
	1 Mignon (Goethe)	1809
Text incipit : Kennst du das Land
	2 Neue Liebe, neues Leben (Goethe)	1809
Text incipit : Herz, mein Herz, was soll das geben?
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : text set previously in woo 127
	3 Aus Goethes Faust, with unison vv	1809
Text incipit : Es war einmal ein König
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : sketched c1792–3
	4 Gretels Warnung (G.A. von Halem)
Text incipit : Mit Liebesblick und Spiel und Sang
	5 An den fernen Geliebten (Reissig)	1809
Text incipit : Einst wohnten süsse Ruh
	6 Der Zufriedene (Reissig)	1809
Text incipit : Zwar schuf das Glück hienieden
op.82	Four Ariettas and a Duet, S, T	?1809	xxiii/220; HS v [no.1]	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Leipzig and London, 1811; may have been written c1801
	1 Hoffnung
Text incipit : Dimmi ben mio
	2 Liebes-Klage (Metastasio)
Text incipit : T’intendo, si, mio cor
	3 L’amante impatiente (Metastasio), arietta buffa
Text incipit : Che fa il mio bene?
	4 L’amante impatiente (Metastasio), arietta assai seriosa
Text incipit : Che fa il mio bene?
	5 Lebens-Genuss (Metastasio), duet
Text incipit : Odi l’aura che dolce sospira
op.83	Three Songs (Goethe)	1810	xxiii/221; HS v [no.1]	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Leipzig, 1811; Princess Caroline Kinsky
	1 Wonne der Wehmut
Text incipit : Trocknet nicht
	2 Sehnsucht
Text incipit : Was zieht mir das Herz so?
	3 Mit einem gemalten Band
Text incipit : Kleine Blumen, kleine Blätter
woo140	An die Geliebte (J.L. Stoll), 2 versions	Dec 1811, rev. 1814	xxiii/243a, 243	xii/1
Text incipit : O dass ich dir vom stillen Auge
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : 1st version (pf/gui acc.): Augsburg, c1826; 2nd version pubd in Friedensblätter (12 July 1814)
woo141	Der Gesang der Nachtigall (J.G. Herder)	May 1813	xxv/277	xii/1
Text incipit : Höre, die Nachtigall singt
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo142	Der Bardengeist (F.R. Hermann)	Nov 1813	xxiii/241	xii/1
Text incipit : Dort auf dem hohen Felsen sang
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Erichson: Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1814 (Vienna, 1813–14)
op.94	An die Hoffnung (C.A. Tiedge)	1813–15	xxiii/223	xii/1
Text incipit : Ob ein Gott sei
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816; Princess Kinsky; sketched 1813; see also op.32
woo143	Des Kriegers Abschied (Reissig)	1814	xxiii/240	xii/1
Text incipit : Ich zieh’ ins Feld
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1815; ded. (by Reissig) Caroline von Bernath
woo144	Merkenstein (J.B. Rupprecht)	1814	xxv/276	xii/1
Text incipit : Merkenstein! Wo ich wandle denk’ ich dein
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Selam: ein Almanach für Freunde des Mannigfaltigen auf das Schaltjahr 1816(Vienna, 1815–16); see also op.100
op.100	Merkenstein (J.B. Rupprecht), duet, S,A	1814	xxiii/226	xii/1
Text incipit : Merkenstein! Wo ich wandle denk’ ich dein
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816; Count Joseph Karl von Dietrichstein; see also woo144
woo135	Die laute Klage (Herder)	?c1815	xxiii/254	xii/1
Text incipit : Turteltaube, du klagtest so laut
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1837
woo145	Das Geheimnis (I. von Wessenberg)	1815	xxiii/245	xii/1
Text incipit : Wo blüht das Blümchen
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, i (1816)
woo146	Sehnsucht (Reissig)	early 1816	xxiii/239	xii/1
Text incipit : Die stille Nacht umdunkelt
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816
op.98	An die ferne Geliebte (A. Jeitteles), cycle of 6 songs	April 1816	xxiii/224	xii/1
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816; Prince Lobkowitz

Text incipit : 1 Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend

Text incipit : 2 Wo die Berge so blau

Text incipit : 3 Leichte Segler in den Höhen

Text incipit : 4 Diese Wolken in den Höhen

Text incipit : 5 Es kehret der Maien

Text incipit : 6 Nimm sie hin denn diese Lieder
op.99	Der Mann von Wort (F.A. Kleinschmid)	?May 1816	xxiii/225	xii/1
Text incipit : Du sagtest, Freund, an diesen Ort
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816
woo147	Ruf vom Berge (G.F. Treitschke)	Dec 1816	xxiii/242	xii/1
Text incipit : Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Gedichte von Friedrich Treitschke(Vienna, 1817)
woo148	So oder so (C. Lappe)	1817	xxiii/244	xii/1
Text incipit : Nord oder Süd!
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, ii (1817)
woo149	Resignation (P. von Haugwitz)	1817	xxiii/246	xii/1
Text incipit : Lisch aus, lisch aus, mein Licht!
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, iii (1818); sketches for 4vv, 1816; earlier sketches from 1814
woo150	Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel (H. Goeble)	March 1820	xxiii/247	xii/1
Text incipit : Wenn die Sonne nieder sinket
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, v (1820); Anton Braunhofer
op.128	Der Kuss (C.F. Weisse)	Nov–Dec 1822	xxiii/227	xii/1
Text incipit : Ich war bei Chloen ganz allein
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Mainz, 1825; sketched 1798
woo151	Der edle Mensche sei hülfreich und gut (Goethe)	Jan 1823	HS v
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : G. Lange: Musikgeschichtliches (Berlin, 1900), facs. in Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung (23 Nov 1843); written for Baroness Cäcilie von Eskeles

canons and musical jokes



No.	Composition	GA	NA

woo159	c1795	xxiii/256/1
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Im Arm der Liebe, 3vv, contrapuntal study for Albrechtsberger
Publication, Remarks : I. von Seyfried: Ludwig van Beethovens Studien im Generalbass (Vienna, 1832)
woo160/1	c1795	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : ? O care selve, 3vv, contrapuntal study for Albrechtsberger
Publication, Remarks : Seyfried (1832)
woo160/2	c1795	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Canon, 4vv, contrapuntal study for Albrechtsberger
Publication, Remarks : Seyfried (1832)
—	1796–7	—
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Canon, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : J. Kerman, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: Autograph Miscellany from circa 1786 to 1799 (London, 1970)
Hess 276	?1797	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Herr Graf, ich komme zu fragen, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : HS; also sketched with different text
woo100	1801	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Schuppanzigh ist ein Lump, T, 2 B, 4vv (not canonic), for Ignaz Schuppanzigh
Publication, Remarks : Grove1(‘Schuppanzigh, Ignaz’)
woo101	1802	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Graf, Graf, Graf, Graf, 3vv (not canonic), for Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz
Publication, Remarks : A.W. Thayer: Chronologisches Verzeichniss der Werke Ludwig van Beethovens (Berlin, 1865)
Hess 274	1803	HS ix
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Canon, 2vv
Publication, Remarks : N. Fishman: Kniga ėskizov Bėtkhoven za 1802–1806 godï (Moscow, 1962)
Hess 229	1803	HS xiv
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Languisco e moro, 2vv
Publication, Remarks : Fishman (1962); also sketched as song for 1v, pf
Hess 275	1803	HS ix
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Canon, 2vv
Publication, Remarks : HS
woo162
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ta ta ta … lieber Mälzel, 4vv
Publication, Remarks : see ‘Works of Doubtful Authenticity’
woo161	?c1811	xxiii/256/14
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ewig dein, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : AMZ, new ser., i (1863)
woo163	Nov 1813	xxiii/256/3a
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Kurz ist der Schmerz, 3vv, for Johann Friedrich Naue
Publication, Remarks : NZM, xi (1841), suppl.
woo164	Sept 1814	xxv/285/2
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Freundschaft ist die Quelle, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo165	Jan 1815	xxiii/256/16
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Glück zum neuen Jahr, 4vv, for Baron von Pasqualati
Publication, Remarks : Vienna, 1816
woo166	March 1815	xxiii/256/3b
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Kurz ist der Schmerz, 3vv, for Louis Spohr
Publication, Remarks : GA; facs. in L. Spohr: Selbstbiographie (Kassel, 1860)
woo167	c1815	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Brauchle, Linke, 3vv, ? for Johann Xaver Brauchle and Joseph Linke
Publication, Remarks : Thayer (1865)
woo168/1	Jan 1816	xxiii/256/5
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Lerne schweigen, puzzle canon (3vv), for Charles Neate
Publication, Remarks : Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, i (1816)
woo168/2	Jan 1816	xxiii/256/4
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Rede, rede, 3vv, for Neate
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo169	Jan 1816	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ich küsse Sie, puzzle canon (?2vv), for Anna Milder-Hauptmann
Publication, Remarks : Die Jahreszeiten, xii/3 (1853)
woo170	April 1816	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ars longa, vita brevis, 2vv, for Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Publication, Remarks : L. Nohl: Neue Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1867)
woo171	1817	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Glück fehl’ dir vor allem, 4vv, for Anna Giannatasio del Rio
Publication, Remarks : T. von Frimmel: Neue Beethoveniana (Vienna, 1888)
woo172	?c1818	xxiii/256/15
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ich bitt’ dich, schreib’ mir die Es-Scala auf, 3vv, for Vincenz Hauschka
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo173	sum. 1819	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Hol’ euch der Teufel!, puzzle canon, (?2vv), for Sigmund Anton Steiner
Publication, Remarks : Thayer (1865)
woo174	Sept 1819	xxv/285/3
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Glaube und hoffe, 4vv (not canonic), for Maurice Schlesinger
Publication, Remarks : L. Nohl: Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1865); facs. in A.B. Marx: Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (Berlin, 1859), ii
woo176	Dec 1819	xxiii/256/6
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Glück zum neuen Jahr!, 3vv, for Countess Erdödy
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo179	Dec 1819	xxiii/256/7
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Alles Gute! alles Schöne, 4vv, for Archduke Rudolph
Publication, Remarks : Nohl (1865); incl. non-canonic introduction ‘Seiner kaiserlichen Hoheit’
Hess 300	? Jan 1820	—
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Liebe mich, werter Weissenbach, ? for Aloys Weissenbach
Publication, Remarks : J. Schmidt-Görg, ed.: Drei Skizzenbücher zur Missa Solemnis, i (Bonn, 1952)
Hess 301	? Jan 1820	—
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Wähner … es sei kein Wahn, ?for Friedrich Wähner
Publication, Remarks : same as Hess 300
woo175	? Jan 1820	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Sankt Petrus war ein Fels; Bernardus war ein Sankt, puzzle canons (?4vv), for Carl Peters and Carl Bernard
Publication, Remarks : Thayer (1865); 2nd canon based on melody of 1st, in rhythmic augmentation
woo180	March 1820	xxiii/256/8
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Hoffmann, sei ja kein Hofmann, 2vv
Publication, Remarks : Caecilia, i (1825)
woo177	c1820	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Bester Magistrat, Ihr friert, 4vv, bass v
Publication, Remarks : D. MacArdle and L. Misch: New Beethoven Letters (Norman, OK, 1957); facs. in auction catalogue no.132 of K.E. Henrici (Berlin, 1928)
woo178	?c1820	xxiii/256/13
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Signor Abate, 3vv, ? for the Abbé Maximilian Stadler
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo181/1	c1820	xxv/285/4
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Gedenket heute an Baden, 4vv
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo181/2	c1820	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Gehabt euch wohl, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : Festschrift Arnold Scherings (Berlin, 1937)
woo181/3	c1820	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Tugent ist kein leerer Name, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : as woo181/2
woo182	Sept 1821	xxiii/256/9
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : O Tobias!, 3vv, for Tobias Haslinger
Publication, Remarks : AMZ, new ser., i (1863)
woo183	Feb 1823	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Bester Herr Graf, Sie sind ein Schaf!, 4vv, for Count Moritz Lichnowsky
Publication, Remarks : Mf, vii (1954); facs. in Musikalisch-kritisches Repertorium i/10 (Leipzig, 1844); inaccurate edn in A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. H. Riemann, iv (Leipzig, 1907)
woo184	April 1823	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Falstafferel, lass’ dich sehen!, 5vv, for Schuppanzigh
Publication, Remarks : Die Musik, ii (1902–3)
woo185	?May 1823	xxiii/256/10
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Edel sei der Mensch, 6vv, for Louis Schlösser
Publication, Remarks : Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, viii (1823) [in E major; Beethoven also wrote out version in E]; a canon in E for 3vv on the text ‘Edel hülfreich sei der Mensch’ sketched in 1822
Hess 263	?1824	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Te solo adoro, 2vv, ? for Carlos Evasio Soliva
Publication, Remarks : HS; similar to (? and earlier version of) woo186
Hess 264	?1824	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Te solo adoro, 2vv, ? for Soliva
Publication, Remarks : HS; similar to (? and earlier version of) woo186
woo186	June 1824	xxv/285/1
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Te solo adoro, 2vv, for Soliva
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo187	Nov 1824	xxiii/256/11
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Schwenke dich ohne Schwänke!, 4vv, for Carl Schwencke
Publication, Remarks : Caecilia, i/7 (1825)
woo188	Jan 1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Gott ist eine feste Burg, puzzle canon (2vv), for Oberst von Düsterlohe
Publication, Remarks : F. Prelinger: Beethovens sämtliche Briefe, iv (Vienna, 1909); facs. in auction catalogue no.36 of Leo Liepmannssohn (Berlin, 1906)
woo203	1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Das Schöne zu dem Guten, puzzle canon (?4vv), for Ludwig Rellstab
Publication, Remarks : L. Rellstab: Garten und Wald, iv (Leipzig, 1854); woo202 is 2-bar non-canonic greeting on the same text
woo189	May 1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Doktor, sperrt das Tor dem Tod, 4vv, for Anton Braunhofer
Publication, Remarks : Nohl (1865)
woo190	June 1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ich war hier, Doktor, puzzle canon (?2vv), for Braunhofer
Publication, Remarks : ?HS; facs. in auction catalogue no.21 of M. Breslauer (Berlin, 1912)
woo35	Aug 1825	HS vi
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Canon, 2vv (? for 2 vn), for Otto de Boer
Publication, Remarks : Nohl (1867)
woo191	Sept 1825	xxiii/256/12
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Kühl, nicht lau, 3vv, for Friedrich Kuhlau
Publication, Remarks : Seyfried (1832)
woo192	Sept 1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ars longa, vita brevis, puzzle canon (?4vv), for Sir George Smart
Publication, Remarks : Thayer (1865)
woo194	Sept 1825	xxiii/256/17
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Si non per portas, per muros, puzzle canon (?2vv), for Maurice Schlesinger
Publication, Remarks : Marx (1859), ii
woo204	Sept 1825	—
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Holz, Holz, geigt die Quartette so, 1v, for Karl Holz
Publication, Remarks : A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. H. Riemann, v (Leipzig, 1908)
woo195	Dec 1825	xxv/285/5
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Freu’ dich des Lebens, 2vv, for Theodor Molt
Publication, Remarks : GA
woo193	?c1825	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Ars longa, vita brevis, puzzle canon (?5vv)
Publication, Remarks : facs. in auction catalogue no.120 of Henrici (Berlin, 1927)
—	?April 1826	—
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Bester Magistrat, 3vv
Publication, Remarks : unpubd, appears in the sketchbook ‘Autograph 24’, D-Bsb
woo196	? July 1826	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Es muss sein, 4vv, for ‘Hofkriegsagent’ Dembscher
Publication, Remarks : A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. H. Riemann, v (Leipzig, 1908); facs. in Gassner: Zeitschrift für Deutschlands Musikvereine und Dilettanten, iii (Karlsruhe, 1844)
Hess 277	?Sept 1826	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Esel aller Esel, 2 canonic vv, ostinato v
Publication, Remarks : HS
woo197	Sept 1826	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Da ist das Werk, 5vv, for Holz
Publication, Remarks : Zürich, 1949
woo198	Dec 1826	HS v
Incipit, No. of parts, Recipient or Occasion : Wir irren allesamt, puzzle canon (?2vv), for Holz
Publication, Remarks : Nohl (1865)

miscellaneous



No.	Work	Composition	GA	NA

woo31	Fugue, D, org	1783	xxv/309
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : GA
woo 33/1	Adagio, F, mechanical clock	1799	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Die Musik, i (1901–2)
woo 33/2	Scherzo, G, mechanical clock	1799–1800	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : G. Becking: Studien zu Beethovens Personalstil: das Scherzothema (Leipzig, 1921)
woo33/3	Allegro, G, mechanical clock	?c1799	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Ricordiana, iii (1957)
woo33/4	Allegro, C, ? mechanical clock	?1794	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Mainz, 1940
woo33/5	Minuet, C, ? mechanical clock	?1794	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Mainz, 1940
Hess 107	Grenadiermarsch, F, mechanical clock	?c1798	HS vii
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Beethoven-Almanach der Deutschen Musikbücherei auf das Jahr 1927 (Regensburg, 1927); Prince Joseph Johann zu Schwarzenberg; consists of march by Haydn, transition section by Beethoven and transcr. of woo29 (see ‘Chamber Music for Wind alone and with Strings’)
woo58	Cadenzas to 1st movt and finale of Mozart’s Pf Conc., d, k466	?1809	ix/70a/11–12	vii/7
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : 1st movt: Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst … (23 Jan 1836); finale: GA; written for pupil Ferdinand Ries
—	Contrapuntal exercises prepared for Haydn and Albrechtsberger (see Hess 29–31, 233–46)	1793–5	HS vi, xiv
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : G. Nottebohm: Beethovens Studien (Leipzig, 1873), selective transcr.
—	Exercises in Italian declamation prepared for Salieri (see woo99; Hess 208–232)	1801–2	HS i
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Nottebohm (1873) [selective]; HS i [complete]; woo92a and woo93 may have been the culminating studies (see ‘Solo Voices and Orchestra’)
—	Various dances, kbd exercises, entered among sketches for larger works but probably not intended for publication (? incl. woo81; Hess 58–61, 67–8, 70–74, 312–34)	mostly 1790–98	(HS ix)
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : transcr. selectively in writings of Nottebohm (see Bibliography): many pubd in Kerman, ed. (I(ii)1970)
—	Various musical greetings, in letters and diaries etc (see woo205; Hess 278–95); see also ‘Canons and Musical Jokes’
woo200	Theme for variations by the Archduke Rudolph, with text ‘O Hoffnung’	1818
Publication, Dedication, Remarks : Vienna, 1819 (Rudolph’s set of variations)

works of doubtful authenticity

no.

woo27	Three Duets, cl, bn, C, F, B (Paris, ?c1810–15); probably spurious; GA viii/64
—	Flute Sonata, B, ?c1790–92 (Leipzig, 1906), listed as Anhang 4 in G. Kinsky and H. Halm: Das Werk Beethovens (Munich and Duisburg, 1955), MS copy found among Beethoven’s papers after his death, but authenticity not certain; HS ix
woo12	Twelve Minuets, orch, 1799 (for pf: Paris, 1903, s: Paris, 1906); probably by Beethoven’s brother Carl; HS iv
woo16	Twelve Ecossaises, orch, advertised Vienna, 1807; no copy survives; these Ecossaises and 12 waltzes are foreign arrangements of movements from Beethoven works
woo17	Eleven Dances, 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 hn, bn, 2 vn, b, see ‘Collections of Dances’
woo162	Ta ta ta … lieber Mälzel, 4vv, for Johann Nepomuk Maelzel; Musikalisch-kritisches Repertorium aller neuen Erscheinungen im Gebiete der Tonkunst, ed. H. Hirschbach, i/2 (Leipzig, 1844); GA xxiii/256/2; ?forgery by Schindler, see Howell (F(v)1979)

folksong arrangements

with piano trio accompaniment unless otherwise stated

Beethoven began arranging folksongs for the Scottish publisher George Thomson in late 1809. He continued to do so at intervals until 1820. It was his own idea to extend the scope of the project to include songs not of British origin; most of these were never published by Thomson. In the lists below, the songs are grouped as they appear in GA xxiv and many later publications. Composition dates are based on B. Cooper: Beethoven Compendium (1991) and Beethoven’s Folksong Settings (1994); replacement and/or alternative settings are also noted.

no.

woo152	Twenty-five Irish songs (London and Edinburgh, 1814); GA xxiv/261
	1 The Return to Ulster, July 1810
	2 Sweet power of song, duet, July 1810
	3 Once more I hail thee, July 1810
	4 The morning air plays on my face, July 1810
	5 The Massacre of Glenco, July 1810; Feb 1813 (Hess 192)

	6 What shall I do to shew how much I love her?, duet
	July 1810
	7 His boat comes on the sunny tide, July 1810
	8 Come draw we round a cheerful ring, July 1810
	9 The Soldier’s Dream, July 1810
	10 The Deserter, Feb 1812
	11 Thou emblem of faith, Feb 1812
	12 English Bulls, July 1810
	13 Musing on the roaring ocean, Feb 1812
	14 Dermot and Shelah, July 1810
	15 Let brain-spinning swains, July 1810
	16 Hide not thy anguish, July 1810
	17 In vain to this desert, due, July 1810
	18 They bid me slight my Dermot dear, duet, July 1810
	19 Wife, Children and Friends, duet, Feb 1812
	20 Farewell bliss and farewell Nancy, duet, July, 1810
	21 Morning a cruel turmoiler is, Feb 1812
	22 From Garyone, my happy home, Feb 1812; Feb 1813
	(woo154/7)
	23 A wand’ring gypsy, Sirs, am I, July 1810
	24 The Traugh Welcome, Feb 1812
	25 Oh harp of Erin, Feb 1812; Feb 1813 (woo154/2)

woo153	Twenty Irish songs (London and Edinburgh, 1814 [nos.1–4], 1816 [nos.5–10]); GA xxiv/262
	1 When eve’s last rays, duet, July 1810
	2 No riches from his scanty store, July 1810
	3 The British Light Dragoons, July 1810
	4 Since greybeards inform us, July 1810
	5 I dream’d I lay where flow’rs were springing, duet, July
	1810 (Hess 194); Feb 1813
	6 Sad and luckless was the season, May 1815
	7 O soothe me, my lyre, Feb 1813
	8 Norah of Balamagairy, with chorus, Feb 1813
	9 The kiss, dear maid, thy lip has left, Feb 1813
	10 Oh! thou hapless soldier, duet, July 1810
	11 When far from the home, Feb 1813; Feb 1813
	(Hess 195)
	12 I’ll praise the Saints, July 1810 (Hess 196); Feb 1813
	13 ’Tis sunshine at last, Oct 1815
	14 Paddy O’Rafferty, July 1810
	15 ’Tis but in vain, July 1810 (Hess 197); Feb 1813
	16 O might I but my Patrick love, Feb 1813
	17 Come, Darby dear, Feb 1813
	18 No more, my Mary, Feb 1813
	19 Judy, lovely, matchless creature, Feb 1813
	20 Thy ship must sail, Feb 1813

woo154	Twelve Irish songs (London and Edinburgh, 1816 [without nos.2 and 7]); GA xxiv/258
	1 The Elfin Fairies, Feb 1813
	2 Oh harp of Erin, Feb 1813; see also woo152/25
	3 The Farewell Song, Feb 1813
	4 The pulse of an Irishman, Feb 1813
	5 Oh! who, my dear Dermot, Feb 1813
	6 Put round the bright wine, Feb 1813
	7 From Garyone, my happy home, Feb 1813; see also
	woo152/22
	8 Save me from the grave and wise, with chorus,
	Feb 1813
	9 Oh! would I were but that sweet linnet, duet, Feb 1812
	(Hess 198); Feb 1813
	10 The hero may perish, duet, Feb 1813
	11 The Soldier in a Foreign Land, duet, Feb 1813
	12 He promised me at parting, duet, Feb 1813

woo155	Twenty-six Welsh songs (London and Edinburgh, 1817): GA xxiv/263
	1 Sion, the son of Evan, duet, July 1810
	2 The Monks of Bangor’s March, duet, July 1810
	3 The Cottage Maid, July 1810
	4 Love without Hope, July 1810
	5 A golden robe my love shall wear, July 1810
	6 The fair Maid of Mona, July 1810
	7 Oh let the night my blushes hide, July 1810
	8 Farewell, thou noisy town, July 1810
	9 To the Aeolian Harp, July 1810
	10 Ned Pugh’s Farewell, July 1810
	11 Merch Megan, July 1810
	12 Waken lords and ladies gay, July 1810
	13 Helpless Woman, July 1810
	14 The Dream, duet, July 1810
	15 When mortals all to rest retire, Feb 1813
	16 The Damsels of Cardigan, July 1810
	17 The Dairy House, July 1810
	18 Sweet Richard, July, 1810
	19 The Vale of Clwyd, July 1810
	20 To the Blackbird, July 1810 (Hess 206); Feb 1813
	21 Cupid’s Kindness, July 1810
	22 Constancy, duet, July 1810
	23 The Old Strain, July 1810
	24 Three Hundred Pounds, July 1810
	25 The Parting Kiss, May 1815
	26 Good Night, July 1810

op.108	Twenty-five Scottish songs (London and Edinburgh, 1818; Berlin, 1822); GA xxiv/257
	1 Music, Love, and Wine, with chorus, Feb 1817
	2 Sunset, Feb 1818
	3 Oh! sweet were the hours, Feb 1817
	4 The Maid of Isla, Feb 1817
	5 The sweetest lad was Jamie, May 1815
	6 Dim, dim is my eye, May 1815
	7 Bonnie laddie, highland laddie, May 1815
	8 The lovely lass of Inverness, 1816
	9 Behold my love how green the groves, duet, Feb 1817
	10 Sympathy, May 1815
	11 Oh! thou art the lad, Oct 1815
	12 Oh, had my fate, 1816
	13 Come fill, fill, my good fellow, with chorus, Feb 1817
	14 O, how can I be blithe, 1816
	15 O cruel was my father, 1816
	16 Could this ill world, 1816
	17 O Mary, at thy window be, Feb 1817
	18 Enchantress, farewell, Feb 1818
	19 O swiftly glides the bonny boat, with chorus,
	May 1815
	20 Faithfu’ Johnie, July 1810 (Hess 203); Feb 1813
	21 Jeannie’s Distress, Feb 1817
	22 The Highland Watch, with chorus, 1817
	23 The Shepherd’s Song, Feb 1818
	24 Again my lyre, May 1815
	25 Sally in our Alley, 1817

woo156	Twelve Scottish songs (London and Edinburgh, 1822 [no.1], 1824–5 [nos.2–4, 8, 9, 12], 1839 [nos.5–6], 1841 [nos.7, 10, 11); GA xxiv/260
	1 The Banner of Buccleuch, trio, 1819
	2 Duncan Gray, trio, aut. 1818
	3 Up! Quit thy bower, trio, 1819
	4 Ye shepherds of this pleasant vale, trio, aut. 1818
	5 Cease your funning, 1817
	6 Highland Harry, May 1815
	7 Polly Stewart, aut. 1818
	8 Womankind, trio, aut. 1818
	9 Lochnagar, trio, aut. 1818
	10 Glencoe, trio, 1819
	11 Auld lang syne, trio with chorus, aut. 1818
	12 The Quaker’s Wife, trio, aut. 1818

woo157	Twelve songs of various nationality (London and Edinburgh, 1816 [nos.2, 6, 8, 11], 1822 [no.3], 1824–5 [no.5], 1839 [no.1]); GA xxiv/259
	1 God Save the King (Eng.), with chorus, 1817
	2 The Soldier (Irish), May 1815
	3 O Charlie is my darling (Scottish), trio, 1819
	4 O sanctissima (Sicilian), trio, Feb 1817
	5 The Miller of the Dee (Eng.), trio, 1819
	6 A health to the brave (Irish), duet, May 1815
	7 Since all thy vows, false maid (Irish), trio, Oct 1815
	8 By the side of the Shannon (Irish), May 1815
	9 Highlander’s Lament (Scottish), with chorus, 1820
	10 Sir Johnie Cope (?Scottish), Feb 1817
	11 The Wandering Minstrel (Irish), with chorus,
	May 1815
	12 La gondoletta (Venetian), 1816

woo158a	Twenty-three songs of various nationality, Die Musik, ii (1902–3) [no.19], J. Schmidt-Görg: Unbekannte Manuskripte zu Beethovens weltlicher und geistlicher Gesangsmusik (Bonn, 1928) [no.17], complete (Leipzig, 1943); HS xiv
	1 Ridder Stig tjener i Congens Gaard (Dan.), Feb 1817
	2 Horch auf, mein Liebchen (Ger.), 1816
	3 Wegen meiner bleib d’Fräula (Ger.), 1816
	4 Wann i in der Früh aufsteh (Tirolean), 1816
	5 I bin a Tyroler Bua (Tirolean), 1816
	6 A Madel, ja a Madel (Tirolean), 1816
	7 Wer solche Buema afipackt (Tyrolean), 1817
	8 Ih mag di nit (Tyrolean), 1817
	9 Oj upiłem sie w karczmie [Oh, I got drunk
	in the inn] (Pol.), 1816
	10 Poszła baba po popiół [The women will
	send for the ash] (Pol.), 1816
	11 Yo no quiero embarcarme (?Port.), 1816
	12 Seus lindos olhos (Port.), duet, 1816
	13 Im Walde sind viele Mücklein geboren (Russ.), 1816
	14 Ach Bächlein, Bächlein, kühle Wasser (Russ.), 1816
	15 Unsere Mädchen gingen in den Wald (Russ.), 1816
	16 Schöne Minka, ich muss scheiden (Ukrainian: ‘Air
	cosaque’), 1816
	17 Lilla Carl, sov sött i frid (Swed.), 1817
	18 An ä Bergli bin i gesässe (Swiss), 1816
	19 Una paloma blanca (Sp.: ‘Bolero a solo’), 1816; earlier
	version (Hess 207) exists
	20 Como la mariposa (Sp.: ‘Bolero a due’), duet, 1816
	21 La tiranna se embarca (Sp.), 1816
	22 Édes kinos emlékezet (Hung.), 1817
	23 Da brava, Catina (Venetian), 1816

woo158b	Seven British songs [most texts traced by W. Hess]; HS xiv
	1 Adieu my lov’d harp (Irish), Feb 1813
	2 Castle O’Neill (Irish), no text, quartet, Feb 1813
	3 Oh was not I a weary wight (Scottish), Feb 1817
	4 Red gleams the sun (Scottish), 1817
	5 Erin! oh, Erin! (Irish/Scottish), May 1815
	6 O Mary ye’s be clad in silk (Scottish), May 1815
	7 Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill (Irish), no text,
	July 1810

woo158c	Six songs of various nationality [most texts traced by Hess]; HS xiv
	1 When my hero in court appears (from The Beggar’s
	Opera), 1817
	2 Non, non, Collette n’est point trompeuse (from
	Le devin du village), 1817
	3 Mark yonder pomp of costly fashion (Scottish), 1820
	4 Bonnie wee thing (Scottish), trio, 1820
	5 From thee, Eliza, I must go (Scottish), trio, aut. 1818
	6 Text unidentified (Scottish), July 1810

Hess 168	Air français [text unidentified]; HS xiv, 1817
—	Two Austrian folksongs, with pf acc., Niederrheinische Musikzeitung, xiii (1865)
Hess 133	Das liebe Kätzchen, March 1820
Hess 134	Der Knabe auf dem Berge, March 1820

a: catalogues of works, bibliographies, bibliographical studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

b: collections of essays and related publications

c: letters, conversation books and other documents

d: biographical studies

e: life-and-work studies

f: studies of the works

g: reception studies

h: catalogues and descriptions of beethoven archives

i: editions of autographs and sketchbooks

j: other studies

a: catalogues of works, bibliographies, bibliographical studies

Thematisches Verzeichniss der im Druck erschienenen Werke von Ludwig van Beethoven (Leipzig, 1851)

A.W. Thayer: Chronologisches Verzeichniss der Werke Ludwig van Beethovens (Berlin, 1865)

G. Nottebohm: Thematisches Verzeichniss der im Druck erschienenen Werke Ludwig van Beethovens (Leipzig, 2/1868/R)

E. Kastner: Bibliotheca Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1913, enlarged 2/1925 by T. von Frimmel)

‘Beethoven-Bibliographie’, NBeJb 1924–42; BeJb 1953–81

T. von Frimmel: Beethoven-Handbuch (Leipzig, 1926/R)

W. Haas: Systematische Ordnung Beethovenscher Melodien (Leipzig, 1932)

D.W. MacArdle: ‘A Check-List of Beethoven’s Chamber Music’, ML, xxvii (1946), 44–59, 83–101, 156–74, 251–7 [incl. substantial bibliography]

A. Bruers: Beethoven: catalogo storico-critico di tutte le opere (Rome, 4/1951)

P. Hirsch and C.B. Oldman: ‘Contemporary English Editions of Beethoven’, MR, xiv (1953), 1–35

G. Kinsky and H. Halm: Das Werk Beethovens: thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner sämtlichen vollendeten Kompositionen (Munich, 1955) [standard thematic and bibliographical catalogue of Beethoven’s works]

P. Nettl: Beethoven Encyclopedia (New York, 1956, 2/1967/R as Beethoven Handbook)

W. Hess: Verzeichnis der nicht in der Gesamtausgabe veröffentlichten Werke Ludwig van Beethovens (Wiesbaden, 1957)

A. Tyson: The Authentic English Editions of Beethoven (London, 1963)

H. Schmidt: ‘Verzeichnis der Skizzen Beethovens’, BeJb 1965–8, 7–128

G. Biamonti: Catalogo cronologico e tematico delle opere di Beethoven, comprese quelle inedite e gli abbozzi non utilizzati (Turin, 1968)

D.W. MacArdle: Beethoven Abstracts (Detroit, 1973) [periodical literature]

K. Dorfmüller, ed.: Beiträge zur Beethoven-Bibliographie: Studien und Materialen zum Werkverzeichnis von Kinsky-Halm (Munich, 1978) [incl. suppl. to Kinsky and Halm]

K. Schürmann, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: alle vertonten und musikalisch bearbeiteten Texte (Münster, 1980)

D. Johnson, A. Tyson and R. Winter: The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (Oxford, 1985)

K. and M. Stock and R. Heilinger: Beethoven-Bibliographen (Graz, 1986)

Beethoven Bibliography Databases (San Jose State U.; W. Meredith and P. Elliott) [on-line database 1990–]

B. Cooper, ed.: Beethoven Compendium: a Guide to Beethoven’s Life and Music (London, 1991)

b: collections of essays and related publications

G. Nottebohm: Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1872/R)

G. Nottebohm: Zweite Beethoveniana, ed. E. Mandyczewski (Leipzig, 1887/R)

T. von Frimmel: Neue Beethoveniana (Vienna, 1888)

E. Mandyczewski: Namen- und Sachregister zu Nottebohms Beethoveniana und Zweite Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1888/R)

T. von Frimmel: Beethoven-Studien (Munich and Leipzig, 1905–6)

Beethoven-Jb, ed. T. von Frimmel, i–ii (1908–9)

Beethoven-Forschung, ed. T. von Frimmel, nos.1–10 (1911–25)

A. Sandberger: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Musikgeschichte, ii: Forschungen, Studien und Kritiken zu Beethoven und zur Beethovenliteratur (Munich, 1924/R)

Neues Beethoven-Jb, ed. A. Sandberger, i–x (1924–42/R) [NBeJb]

G. Bosse, ed.: Beethoven-Almanach der Deutschen Musikbücherei auf das Jahr 1927 (Regensburg, 1927)

D.F. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis (London, 1935–44/R)

A. Schmitz, ed.: Beethoven und die Gegenwart: Festschrift … Ludwig Schiedermair (Berlin, 1937)

L. Misch: Beethoven-Studien (Berlin, 1950; Eng. trans., 1953)

Beethoven-Jb, ed. J. Schmidt-Görg and others (1953–) [BeJb]

D. Weise, ed.: Festschrift Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 60. Geburtstag (Bonn, 1957)

S. Kross and H. Schmidt, eds.: Colloquium amicorum: Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 70. Geburtstag (Bonn, 1967)

L. Misch: Neue Beethoven-Studien und andere Themen (Bonn and Munich, 1967)

GfMKB: Bonn 1970

H.C.R. Landon: Essays on the Viennese Classical Style (London, 1970)

E. Schenk, ed.: Beethoven-Studien: Festgabe der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna, 1970)

H. Sittner, ed.: Beethoven-Almanach 1970 (Vienna, 1970)

D. Arnold and N. Fortune, eds.: The Beethoven Companion (London, 1971)

P.H. Lang, ed.: The Creative World of Beethoven (New York, 1971)

E. Schenk, ed.: Beethoven-Symposion (Vienna, 1971)

W. Hess: Beethoven-Studien (Bonn and Munich, 1972)

T. Scherman and L. Biancolli, eds.: The Beethoven Companion (New York, 1972)

A. Tyson, ed.: Beethoven Studies (New York, 1973 and London, 1974); Beethoven Studies 2 (London, 1977); Beethoven Studies 3 (Cambridge, 1982)

H. Goldschmidt: Beethoven-Studien (Leipzig, 1974–7)

Beethoven Colloquium: Vienna 1977 [Beiträge ’76–’78]

Beethoven Congress: Berlin 1977

Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: Detroit 1977

The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven: Cambridge, MA, 1979

H. Goldschmidt, ed.: Zu Beethoven: Aufsätze und Annotationen, i–iii (Berlin, 1979–88)

S. Kross, ed.: Beethoven: Mensch seiner Zeit (Bonn, 1980)

M. Staehelin, ed.: Divertimento für Hermann J. Abs: Beethoven-Studien (Bonn, 1981)

L. Finscher, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven (Darmstadt, 1983)

L. Lockwood and P. Benjamin, eds.: Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes (Cambridge, MA, 1984)

W. Meredith, ed.: The Beethoven Newsletter (1986–94), The Beethoven Journal (1995–)

C. Dahlhaus: Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit (Laaber, 1987; Eng. trans., 1991, as Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music)

S. Brandenburg and M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff, eds.: Beethoven und Böhmen: Beiträge zu Biographie und Wirkungsgeschichte Beethovens, Prague, 20 May – 30 June 1988 (Bonn, 1988) [exhibition catalogue]

M. Solomon: Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988)

S. Brandenburg and H. Lühning, eds.: Beethoven: zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Bonn, 1989)

W. Kinderman, ed.: Beethoven’s Compositional Process (Lincoln, NE, 1991)

L. Lockwood: Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA, 1992)

C. Reynolds and others, eds.: Beethoven Forum (1992–)

J. Kerman: Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley, 1994)

S. Brandenburg, ed.: Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven: Studies in Music of the Classical Period: Essays in Honor of Alan Tyson (Oxford, 1998)

c: letters, conversation books and other documents

L. von Köchel, ed.: Drei und achtzig neu aufgefundene Original-Briefe Ludwig van Beethovens an den Erzherzog Rudolph (Vienna, 1865)

L. Nohl: Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1865; Eng. trans., 1866)

L. Nohl: Neue Briefe Beethovens (Stuttgart, 1867)

L. Nohl: Ludwig van Beethovens Brevier (Leipzig, 1870, rev. 2/1901 by P. Sakolowski)

L. Nohl: Die Beethoven-Feier und die Kunst der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1871) [transcr. of Beethoven’s diaries, 52ff]

F. Kerst: Beethoven im eigenen Wort (Berlin and Leipzig, 1904, 2/1905; Eng. trans., 1905, as Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words)

A.C. Kalischer, ed.: Beethovens sämtliche Briefe (Berlin, 1906–8, rev. 2/1909–11 by T. von Frimmel; Eng. trans., 1909/R)

F. Prelinger, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: sämtliche Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Vienna, 1907–11)

L. Schmidt, ed.: Beethoven-Briefe an Nicolaus Simrock, F.G. Wegeler, Eleonore v. Breuning, und Ferd. Ries (Berlin, 1909)

E. Kastner, ed.: Ludwig van Beethovens sämtliche Briefe (Leipzig, 1910, rev. 2/1923/R by J. Kapp)

A. Leitzmann, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: Berichte der Zeitgenossen, Briefe und persönliche Aufzeichnungen (Leipzig, 2/1921) [transcr. of Beethoven’s diaries, ii, 241ff]

M. Unger, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Verleger S.A. Steiner und Tobias Haslinger in Wien, Ad. Mart. Schlesinger in Berlin (Berlin and Vienna, 1921/R)

W. Nohl: Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, i/1 (Munich, 1924) [8 conversation books of 1819–20]

W. Hitzig: ‘Die Briefe Gottfried Christoph Härtels an Beethoven’, ZMw, ix (1926–7), 321–40

O.G. Sonneck: Beethoven Letters in America (New York, 1927)

E.H. Müller: ‘Beethoven und Simrock’, Simrock-Jb, ii (1929), 10–62

G. Schünemann, ed.: Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, i–iii (Berlin, 1941–3) [conversation books from Feb 1818 to July 1823]

J.-G. Prod’homme, ed.: Les cahiers de conversation, 1819–1827 (Paris, 1946)

M. Hamburger, ed.: Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations (London, 1951/R)

E. Anderson: ‘The Text of Beethoven’s Letters’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 212–23

D. Weise: Entwurf einer Denkschrift an das Appelationsgericht (Bonn, 1953)

D. Weise: ‘Ungedruckte oder nur teilweise veröffentlichte Briefe Beethovens aus der Sammlung H.C. Bodmer – Zürich’, BeJB 1953–4, 9–62

S. Ley: Beethoven: sein Leben in Selbstzeugnissen, Briefen und Berichten (Vienna, 1954, 2/1970)

D.W. MacArdle and L. Misch: New Beethoven Letters (Norman, OK, 1957)

J. Schmidt-Görg, ed.: 13 unbekannte Briefe an Josephine Gräfin Deym (Bonn, 1957) [incl. facs. of letters]

E. Anderson, ed. and trans.: The Letters of Beethoven (London, 1961/R)

D. von Busch-Weise: ‘Beethovens Jugendtagebuch’, SMw, xxv (1962), 68–88 [diary 1792–4]

D.W. MacArdle: An Index to Beethoven’s Conversation Books (Detroit, 1962)

L. Magnani: I quaderni di conversazione di Beethoven (Milan, 1962, 2/1970)

K.-H. Köhler, G. Herre and D. Beck, eds.: Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte (Leipzig, 1968–93); see also D. Beck and G. Herre: ‘Anton Schindlers fingierte Eintragungen in den Konversationsheften’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt (Berlin, 1979), 11–89

M. Braubach, ed.: Die Stammbücher Beethovens und der Babette Koch (Bonn, 1970/R)

C. Flamm: ‘Ein Verlegerbriefwechsel zur Beethovenzeit’, Beethoven-Studien, ed. E. Schenk (Vienna, 1970), 57–110

K.-H. Köhler and G. Herre, eds.: Ludwig van Beethoven: neun ausgewählte Briefe an Anton Schindler (Leipzig, 1970) [facs. and transcr.]

J. Schmidt-Görg, ed.: Des Bonner Bäckermeisters Gottfried Fischer Aufzeichnungen über Beethovens Jugend (Bonn and Munich, 1971)

H. Goldschmidt: ‘Beethoven in neuen Brunsvik-Briefen’, BeJb 1973–7, 97–146

A. Tyson: ‘Prolegomena to a Future Edition of Beethoven’s Letters’, Beethoven Studies 2, ed. A. Tyson (London, 1977), 1–19

M. Staehelin: ‘Die Beethoven-Materialien im Nachlass von Ludwig Nohel’, BeJb 1978–81, 201–19

C. Brenneis: ‘Das Fischof-Manuskript: zur Frühgeschichte der Beethoven-Biographik’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt (Berlin, 1979), 90–116

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–1818’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 193–285

C. Brenneis: ‘Das Fischhof-Manuskript in der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt, ii (Berlin, 1984), 27–87

T. Albrecht, ed.: Letters to Beethoven and other Correspondence (Lincoln, NE, 1996)

S. Brandenburg, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe (Munich, 1996–)

d: biographical studies

(i) General

J.A. Schlosser: Ludwig van Beethoven (Prague, 1828; Eng. trans., 1996, as Beethoven: the First Biography 1827)

F.G. Wegeler and F. Ries: Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven (Koblenz, 1838/R, suppl.1845/R; rev. 2/1906 by A.C. Kalischer; Eng. trans., 1987, as Beethoven Remembered)

A. Schindler: Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven (Münster, 1840, enlarged 2/1845, 3/1860; Eng. trans., 1966/R as Beethoven as I Knew him)

L. Nohl: Beethoven’s Leben (Vienna and Leipzig, 1864–77, rev. 2/1909–13 by P. Sakolowski)

A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, trans. H. Deiters, i (Berlin, 1866), ii (Berlin, 1872), iii (Berlin, 1879), vol. i rev. H. Deiters (Berlin, 1901); biography continued and completed by H. Deiters and H. Riemann, iv–v (Leipzig, 1907–8); final revisions by H. Riemann, ii–iii (Leipzig, 1910–11), i (Leipzig, 1917); vols. ii–v reissued (Leipzig, 1922–3); Eng. orig., ed. and rev. H. Krehbiel (New York, 1921), rev. E. Forbes as Thayer’s Life of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ, 1964, 2/1967)

T. von Frimmel: Ludwig van Beethoven (Berlin, 1901, 6/1922)

R. Rolland: La vie de Beethoven (Paris, 1907; numerous later edns)

F. Kerst, ed.: Die Erinnerungen an Beethoven (Stuttgart, 1913, 2/1925)

E. Ludwig: Beethoven: Life of a Conqueror (New York, 1943)

W. Hess: Beethoven (Zürich, 1956, 2/1976)

G. Marek: Beethoven: Biography of a Genius (New York, 1969)

D. Matthews: Beethoven (London, 1985)

D. Wyn Jones: The Life of Beethoven (Cambridge, 1998)

(ii) iconographies, picture biographies

T. von Frimmel: Beethoven-Studien, i: Beethovens äussere Erscheinung (Munich, 1905)

T. von Frimmel: Beethoven im zeitgenössischen Bildnis (Vienna, 1923)

S. Ley: Beethovens Leben in authentischen Bildern und Texten (Berlin, 1925, enlarged 2/1970)

R. Bory: La vie et l’oeuvre de Ludwig van Beethoven par l’image (Mulhouse, 1960; Eng. trans., 1960)

J. Schmidt-Görg and H. Schmidt, eds.: Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn, 1969; Eng. trans., 1970)

H.C.R. Landon, ed.: Beethoven: sein Leben und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Zürich, 1970; Eng. trans., 1970, as Beethoven: a Documentary Study)

A. Comini: The Changing Image of Beethoven: a Study of Mythmaking (New York, 1987)

(iii) character and personality

A. de Hevesy: Beethoven: vie intime (Paris, 1926; Eng. trans., 1927, as Beethoven the Man)

G. Adler: Beethovens Charakter (Regensburg, 1927)

E. Newman: The Unconscious Beethoven (London, 1927, 2/1968)

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven’s Birth Year’, MQ, lvi (1970), 702–10

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven: the Nobility Pretense’, MQ, lxi (1975), 272–94

M. Solomon: ‘The Dreams of Beethoven’, American Imago, xxxii (1975), 113–44

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven and his Nephew: a Reappraisal’, Beethoven Studies 2, ii, ed. A. Tyson (London, 1977), 138–71

(iv) education

I. von Seyfried, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Studien im Generalbass, Contrapunkt und in der Compositionslehre (Vienna, 1832, 2/1853/R; Eng. trans., 1853)

G. Nottebohm: ‘Generalbass und Compositionslehre betreffende Handschriften Beethovens’, Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1872/R), 154–203

G. Nottebohm: Beethoven’s Studien (Leipzig, 1873/R) [general refutation of Seyfried (1832)]

A. Orel, ed.: Ein Wiener Beethoven Buch (Vienna, 1921)

G. Schünemann: ‘Beethovens Studien zur Instrumentation’, NBeJb 1938, 146–61

A. Mann: ‘Beethoven’s Contrapuntal Studies with Haydn’, MQ, lvi (1970), 711–26

R. Kramer: ‘Beethoven and Carl Heinrich Graun’, Beethoven Studies, ed. A. Tyson (New York, 1973), 18–44

R. Kramer: ‘Notes to Beethoven’s Education’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 72–101

R. Kramer: ‘Gradus ad Parnassum: Beethoven, Schubert, and the Romance of Counterpoint’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 107–20

(v) Beethoven and his contemporaries

G. von Breuning: Aus dem Schwarzspanierhause: Erinnerungen an L. van Beethoven aus meiner Jugendzeit (Leipzig and Vienna, 1874, 2/1907/R by A.C. Kalischer; Eng. trans., ed. M. Solomon, 1992, as Memories of Beethoven)

L. Nohl, ed.: Eine stille Liebe zu Beethoven (Leipzig, 1875, 2/1902; Eng. trans., 1876) [diaries of Fanny Giannatasio del Rio]

A.C. Kalischer: Beethoven und seine Zeitgenossen (Berlin, 1908–10)

O.G. Sonneck, ed.: Beethoven: Impressions of Contemporaries (New York, 1926/R)

S. Ley, ed.: Beethoven als Freund der Familie Wegeler-von Breuning (Bonn, 1927) [incl. part of F.G. Wegeler and F. Ries: Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven, and G. von Bruening: Aus dem Schwarzspanierhause]

J. Heer: Der Graf von Waldstein und sein Verhältnis zu Beethoven (Leipzig, 1933)

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and George Thomson’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 27–49

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and the Bach Family’, ML, xxxviii (1957), 353–8

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and the Czernys’, MMR, lxxxviii (1958), 124–35

D.W. MacArdle: ‘The Brentano Family in its Relations with Beethoven’, MR, xviv (1958), 6–19

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and Grillparzer’, ML, xl (1959), 44–55

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and the Archduke Rudolph’, BeJb 1959–60, 36–58

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Anton Felix Schindler, Friend of Beethoven’, MR, xxiv (1963), 50–74

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and Ferdinand Ries’, ML, xlvi (1965), 23–34

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and Schuppanzigh’, MR, xxvi (1965), 3–14

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven und Karl Holz’, Mf, xx (1968), 19–29

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven and Bonaparte’, MR, xxix (1968), 96–105

M. Solomon: ‘Antonie Brentano and Beethoven’, ML, lviii (1977), 153–69

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven and Schiller’, Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: Detroit 1977, 162–75

M. Solomon: ‘Schubert and Beethoven’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 114–25

A. Tyson: ‘Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838): the History of his Contribution to Beethoven Biography’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 209–21

J. Webster: ‘The Falling-out between Haydn and Beethoven: the Evidence of the Sources’, Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes, ed. L. Lockwood and P. Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 3–45

T. Volek and J. Macek: ‘Beethoven’s Rehearsals at the Lobkowitz’s’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 75–80

S. Kagan: Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s Patron, Pupil, and Friend (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988)

J. Macek: ‘Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz: Musikfreund und Kunstmäzen’, Beethoven und Böhmen, ed. S. Brandenburg and M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff (Bonn, 1988), 147–202

J. May: ‘Beethoven and Prince Karl Lichnowsky’, Beethoven Forum, iii (1994), 29–38

(vi) the ‘Immortal Beloved’

M. Tenger: Beethovens unsterbliche Geliebte nach persönlichen Erinnerungen (Bonn, 1890; Eng. trans., 1898, as Recollections of Countess Therese Brunswick)

La Mara [M. Lipsius]: Beethovens unsterbliche Geliebte (Leipzig, 1909)

W.A. Thomas-San-Galli: Die unsterbliche Geliebte Beethovens, Amalie Sebald (Halle, 1909)

M. Unger: Auf Spuren von Beethovens ‘unsterblicher Geliebten’ (Langensalza, 1911)

La Mara [M. Lipsius]: Beethoven und die Brunsviks (Leipzig, 1920)

O.G. Sonneck: The Riddle of the Immortal Beloved (New York, 1927)

S. Kaznelson: Beethovens ferne und unsterbliche Geliebte (Zürich, 1954)

M. Solomon: ‘New Light on Beethoven’s Letter to an Unknown Woman’, MQ, lviii (1972), 572–87 [generally acknowledged as giving the correct identification: Antonie Brentano]

H. Goldschmidt: Beethoven-Studien, ii: Um die unsterbliche Geliebte: ein Bestandsaufnahme (Leipzig, 1977)

M. Solomon: ‘Antonie Brentano and Beethoven’, ML, lviii (1977), 153–69

M. Tellenbach: Beethoven und seine ‘unsterbliche Geliebte’ Josephine Brunswick: ihr Schicksal und der Einfluss auf Beethoven’s Werk (Zürich, 1983)

H. Goldschmidt: ‘“Auf diese Art mit A geht alles zu Grunde”: eine umstrittene Tagebuchstelle in neuem Licht’, Zu Beethoven, iii (Berlin, 1988), 8–30

M. Solomon: ‘Recherche de Josephine Deym’, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 157–65

(vii) Social studies

W. Schweisheimer: Beethovens Leiden: ihr Einfluss auf sein Leben und Schaffen (Munich, 1922)

J.M. Levien: Beethoven and the Royal Philharmonic Society (London, 1927)

W. Nohl: Beethoven: Geschichten und Anekdoten (Berlin, 1927)

R. Van Aerde: Les ancêtres flamands de Beethoven (Malines, 1927)

E. Closson: L’élément flamand dans Beethoven (Brussels, 1928, enlarged 2/1946; Eng. trans., 1936)

J. Boyer: Le ‘romantisme’ de Beethoven (Paris, 1939)

D.W. MacArdle: ‘The Family van Beethoven’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 528–50 [incl. substantial bibliography]

B. Bartels: Beethoven und Bonn (Dinkelsbühl, 1954)

E. and R. Sterba: Beethoven and his Nephew (New York, 1954)

W. Forster: Beethovens Krankheiten und ihre Beurteilung (Wiesbaden, 1955)

S. Ley: Aus Beethovens Erdentagen (Siegburg, 1957)

D.W. MacArdle: ‘Beethoven and the Philharmonic Society of London’, MR, xxi (1960), 1–7

L.G. Bachmann: Beethoven contra Beethoven: Geschichte eines berühmten Rechtsfalles (Munich, 1963)

J. Schmidt-Görg: Beethoven: die Geschichte seiner Familie (Bonn, 1964) [the standard genealogy]

A. Tyson: ‘Beethoven’s Heroic Phase’, MT, cx (1969), 139–41

R. Klein: Beethovenstätten in Österreich (Vienna, 1970)

E. Larkin: ‘Beethoven’s Medical History’, appx to M. Cooper: Beethoven: the Last Decade (London, 1970, 2/1985), 439–66

K. Smolle: Wohnstätten Ludwig van Beethovens von 1792 bis zu seinem Tod (Bonn and Munich, 1970)

F. Knight: Beethoven and the Age of Revolution (London, 1973)

H. Bankl and H. Jesserer: Die Krankheiten Ludwig van Beethovens: Pathographie seines Lebens und Pathologie seiner Leiden (Vienna, 1987)

M. Solomon: ‘On Beethoven’s Deafness’, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 93–8

J. Moore: ‘Beethoven and Musical Economics’, Beethoven Forum, i (1992), 191–223

R. Steblin: ‘The Newly Discovered Hochenecker Portrait of Beethoven (1819)’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 468–97

J. Webster: ‘The Concept of Beethoven’s “Early” Period in the Context of Periodizations in General’, Beethoven Forum, iii (1994), 1–27

K.M. Knittel: ‘Imitation, Individuality, and Illness: Behind Beethoven’s “Three Styles”’, Beethoven Forum, iv (1995), 17–36

S. Wolf: Beethovens Neffenkonflikt (Munich, 1995)

M. Solomon: ‘Economic Circumstances of the Beethoven Household in Bonn’, JAMS, (1997), 331–51

e: life-and-work studies

Grove1 (G. Grove)

MGG1 (J. Schmidt-Görg)

W. von Lenz: Beethoven: eine Kunststudie (Kassel and Hamburg, 1855–60, rev. 2/1908 by A.C. Kalischer, 4/1922/R)

A.B. Marx: Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (Berlin, 1859, 6/1908)

W.J. von Wasielewski: Ludwig van Beethoven (Berlin, 1888, 2/1895)

P. Bekker: Beethoven (Berlin, 1911, numerous later edns. Eng. trans., 1925, 2/1939)

V. d’Indy: Beethoven: biographie critique (Paris, 1911, 2/1927; Eng. trans., 1913/R)

W.A. Thomas-San-Galli: Ludwig van Beethoven (Munich, 1913, 8/1920)

J.-G. Prod’homme: La jeunesse de Beethoven (Paris, 1920, 2/1927)

L. Schiedermair: Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig, 1925/R, 3/1951)

H. Grace: Ludwig van Beethoven (London, 1927)

A. Schmitz: Beethoven (Bonn, 1927)

R. Rolland: Les grands époques créatrices (Paris, 1928–57; Eng. trans. of vol. i, 1929, as Beethoven the Creator; vol. ii, 1931, as Goethe and Beethoven)

R.H. Schauffler: Beethoven: the Man who Freed Music (London and New York, 1929)

F. Howes: Beethoven (London, 1933)

E. Bücken: Ludwig van Beethoven (Potsdam, 1934)

M. Scott: Beethoven (London, 1934, rev. 2/1974 by J. Westrup)

W. Riezler: Beethoven (Berlin and Zürich, 1936, 13/1990; Eng. trans., 1938/R)

A.E.F. Dickinson: Beethoven (London, 1941)

J.N. Burk: The Life and Works of Beethoven (New York, 1943)

M. Cooper: Beethoven: the Last Decade, 1817–1827 (London, 1970, 2/1985)

M. Solomon: Beethoven (New York, 1977, 2/1998 [with annotated bibliography])

K. Küster: Beethoven (Stuttgart, 1994)

W. Kinderman: Beethoven (Berkeley, 1995)

(i) general and historical assessments

f: studies of the works

(ii) orchestral music

(iii) chamber music

(iv) piano music

(v) vocal music

(i) general and historical assessments

W. von Lenz: Beethoven et ses trois styles (St Petersburg, 1852/R, 2/1909/R)

A. Oulibicheff [Ulïbïshev]: Beethoven: ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Leipzig and Paris, 1857)

H. Berlioz: A travers chants (Paris, 1862/R; Eng. trans., 1913–18); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1971); extracts ed. and trans. R. De Sola as Beethoven by Berlioz (Boston, 1975)

R. Wagner: Beethoven (Leipzig, 1870, numerous later edns; Eng. trans., 1880, 3/1903)

D.G. Mason: Beethoven and his Forerunners (New York, 1904, 2/1930/R)

F. Volbach: Beethoven (Munich, 1905)

E. Walker: Beethoven (London, 1905, 3/1920)

G. Becking: Studien zu Beethovens Personalstil: das Scherzothema (Leipzig, 1921)

H. Mersmann: Beethoven: die Synthese der Stile (Berlin, 1922)

A. Schmitz: Beethovens ‘zwei Prinzipe’ (Berlin, 1923)

F. Cassirer: Beethoven und die Gestalt: ein Kommentar (Stuttgart, 1925)

K. Kobald: Beethoven: seine Beziehungen zu Wiens Kunst und Kultur (Vienna and elsewhere, 1926, numerous later edns)

A. Halm: Beethoven (Berlin, 1927/R)

A. Schmitz: Das romantische Beethovenbild (Berlin and Bonn, 1927/R)

J.W.N. Sullivan: Beethoven: his Spiritual Development (London, 1927/R)

D.F. Tovey: ‘Some Aspects of Beethoven’s Art-forms’, ML, viii (1927), 131–55; repr. in Essays and Lectures on Music (London, 1949)

W.J. Turner: Beethoven: the Search for Reality (London, 1927, 2/1933)

A. Schering: Beethoven in neuer Deutung (Leipzig, 1934)

D.F. Tovey: Beethoven, ed. H.J. Foss (London, 1944/R)

K. von Fischer: Die Beziehung von Form und Motiv in Beethovens Instrumentalwerken (Strasbourg, 1948, 2/1972)

L. Ronga: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven: tre problemi critici (Venice, 1956)

L. Misch: Die Faktoren der Einheit in der Mehrsätzigkeit der Werke Beethovens (Munich, 1958)

C. Rosen: The Classical Style (New York, 1971, enlarged 3/1997 with new chap. on Beethoven)

M. Solomon: ‘The Creative Periods of Beethoven’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 30–38

H. Goldschmidt: Beethoven: Werkeinführungen (Leipzig, 1975)

C. Rosen: Sonata Forms (New York, 1980, 2/1988)

D. Johnson: ‘1794–1795: Decisive Years in Beethoven’s Early Development’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 1–28

J. Kerman: ‘Notes on Beethoven’s Codas’, ibid, 141–59

W. Mellers: Beethoven and the Voice of God (London, 1983)

M. Broyles: Beethoven: the Emergence and Evolution of Beethoven’s Heroic Style (New York, 1987)

L. Lockwood: ‘Beethoven before 1800: the Mozart Legacy’, Beethoven Forum, iii (1994), 39–52

A. Riethmüller, C. Dahlhaus and A. Ringer, eds.: Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke (Laaber, 1994, 2/1996)

(ii) orchestral music

G. Grove: Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies (London, 1884, enlarged 2/1896 as Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies, 3/1898/R)

J.-G. Prod’homme: Les symphonies de Beethoven (Paris, 1906, 5/1949)

F. Weingartner: Ratschläge für Aufführungen der Symphonien Beethovens (Leipzig, 1906, 3/1928R; Eng. trans., 1907/R in Weingartner on Music and Conducting, New York, 1969)

H. Schenker: Beethovens Neunte Sinfonie (Vienna, 1912/R; Eng. trans., 1992)

H. Schenker: Beethovens Fünfte Sinfonie (Vienna, 1925/R; partial Eng. trans. in Beethoven: Symphony no. 5 in C minor, ed. E. Forbes, New York, 1971)

J. Braunstein: Beethovens Leonore-Ouvertüren (Leipzig, 1927)

K. Nef: Die neun Sinfonien Beethovens (Leipzig, 1928/R)

D.F. Tovey: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (London, 1928)

A. Halm: ‘Über den Wert musikalischer Analysen, i: Der Fremdkörper im ersten Satz der Eroica’, Die Musik, xxi (1928–9), 481–4

H. Schenker: ‘Beethovens Dritte Sinfonie’ in ihrem wahren Inhalt zum erstenmal dargestellt’, Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, iii (Munich, 1930/R; Eng. trans., 1987), 29–101

R. Vaughan Williams: Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, with Writings on Other Musical Subjects (London, 1953/R)

W. Osthoff: Ludwig van Beethoven: Klavierkonzert Nr. 3, c-moll, op.37 (Munich, 1965)

K. Westphal: Vom Einfall zur Symphonie: Einblick in Beethovens Schaffensweise (Berlin, 1965) [on Sym. no.2]

A. Tyson: ‘The Textual Problems of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto’, MQ, liii (1967), 482–502

F.E. Kirby: ‘Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony as a Sinfonia caracteristica’, MQ, lvi (1970), 605–23

L. Lockwood: ‘Beethoven’s Unfinished Piano Concerto of 1815: Sources and Problems’, MQ, lvi (1970), 624–46

E. Forbes, ed.: L. van Beethoven: Symphony no. 5 in C minor (New York, 1971) [Norton Critical Score]

F. d’Amico: Sulle sinfonie di Beethoven (Rome, 1973)

P. Gossett: ‘Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony: Sketches for the First Movement’, JAMS, xxvii (1974), 248–84

T. Antonicek: ‘Humanitätssymbolik im Eroica-Finale’, De ratione in musica: Festschrift Erich Schenk, ed. T. Antonicek, R. Flotzinger and O. Wessely (Kassel, 1975), 144–55

A. Tyson: ‘The Problem of Beethoven’s “First” Leonore Overture’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 292–334

A. Tyson: ‘Yet Another “Leonore” Overture?’, ML, lviii (1977), 192–203

R. Winter: ‘The Sketches for the “Ode to Joy”’, Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: Detroit 1977, 176–214

C. Floros: Beethovens Eroica und Prometheus-Musik (Wilhelmshaven, 1978)

P. Gülke: Zur Neuausgabe der Sinfonie Nr. 5 von Ludwig van Beethoven: Werk und Edition (Leipzig, 1978)

L. Treitler: ‘History, Criticism, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 193–210

A. Hopkins: The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven (Seattle, 1980/R)

L. Lockwood: ‘Beethoven’s Earliest Sketches for the Eroica Symphony’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 457–78

L. Lockwood: ‘Eroica Perspectives: Strategy and Design in the First Movement’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 85–105

L. Treitler: ‘“To Worship That Celestial Sound”: Motives for Analysis’, JM, i (1982), 153–70

S. Brandenburg: ‘Die Skizzen zur Neunten Symphonies’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt, ii (Berlin, 1984), 88–129

O. Jander: ‘Beethoven’s “Orpheus in Hades”: the Andante con moto of the Fourth Piano Concerto’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 195–212

B. Cooper: ‘Newly Identified Sketches for Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony’, ML, lxvi (1985), 9–18

M. Tusa: ‘Die authentischen Quellen der “Eroica”’, AMw, xlii (1985), 121–50

P. Schleuning: ‘Beethoven in alter Deutung: der “neue Weg” mit der “Sinfonia Eroica”’, AMw, xliv (1987), 165–94

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: a Search for Order’, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 3–32

R. Taruskin: ‘Resisting the Ninth’, 19CM, xii (1988–9), 241–56

N. Cook: ‘Beethoven’s Unfinished Piano Concerto: a Case of Double Vision?’, JAMS, xlii (1989), 338–74

W. Kinderman: ‘Beethoven’s Compositional Models for the Choral finale of the Ninth Symphony’, Beethoven’s Compositional Process (Lincoln, NE, 1991), 160–88

P. Schleuning: ‘Das Uraufführungsdatum von Beethovens “Sinfonia eroica”’, Mf, xliv (1991), 356–9

J. Bauer: Rhetorik der Überschreitung: Annotationen zu Beethovens Neunter Symphonie (Pfaffenweiler, 1992)

J. Webster: ‘The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’, Beethoven Forum, i (1992), 25–62

N. Cook: Beethoven: Symphony No.9 (Cambridge, 1993)

A. Eichhorn: Beethovens Neunte Symphonie: die Geschichte ihrer Aufführung und Rezeption (Kassel, 1993)

O. Jander: ‘The Prophetic Conversation in Beethoven’s “Scene by the Brook”’, MQ, lxxvii (1993), 508–59

D. Levy: Beethoven: the Ninth Symphony (New York, 1995)

D. Wyn Jones: Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge, 1995)

W. Brauneis: ‘“…composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo”: Beethovens “Eroica” als Hommage des Fürsten Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz für Prinz Louis Ferdinand von Preussen’, Jb des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, lii-liii (1996–7), 53–88

R. Will: ‘Time, Morality, and Humanity in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony’, JAMS, l (1997), 271–329

T. Sipe: Beethoven: Eroica Symphony (Cambridge, 1998)

L. Plantinga: Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance (New York, 1999)

(iii) chamber music

T. Helm: Beethovens Streichquartette: Versuch einer technischen Analyse (Leipzig, 1885, 3/1921/R)

H.J. Wedig, ed.: Beethovens Streichquartett op.18, 1 und seine erste Fassung (Bonn, 1922)

J. de Marliave: Les quatuors de Beethoven (Paris, 1925, 2/1960; Eng. trans., 1928/R)

M. Herwegh: Technique et interprétation sous forme d’essai d’analyse psychologique expérimentale appliquée aux sonates pour piano et violon de Beethoven (Paris, 1926)

C. Engel: ‘Beethoven’s Opus 3: an “envoi de Vienne”?’, MQ, xiii (1927), 261–79

W. Engelsmann: Beethovens Kompositionspläne, dargestellt in den Sonaten für Klavier und Violine (Augsburg, 1931)

D.G. Mason: The Quartets of Beethoven (New York, 1947)

C.B. Oldman: ‘Beethoven’s “Variations on National Themes”: their Composition and First Publication’, MR, xii (1951), 45–51

D. Cooke: ‘The Unity of Beethoven’s Late Quartets’, MR, xxiv (1963), 30–49

W. Kirkendale: ‘The “Great Fugue” Op.133: Beethoven’s “Art of Fugue”’, AcM, xxxv (1963), 14–24

I. Mahaim: Beethoven: naissance et renaissance des derniers quatuors (Paris, 1964)

P. Radcliffe: Beethoven’s String Quartets (London, 1965, 2/1978)

W. Kirkendale: Fuge und Fugato in der Kammermusik des Rokoko und der Klassik (Tutzing, 1966; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1979)

J. Kerman: The Beethoven Quartets (New York, 1967/R)

H. Truscott: Beethoven’s Late String Quartets (London, 1968)

E. Krefft: Die späten Quartette Beethovens (Bonn, 1969)

D. Johnson: ‘Beethoven’s Sketches for the Scherzo of the Quartet Op.18, No.6’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 385–404

L. Lockwood: ‘The Autograph of the First Movement of Beethoven’s Sonata for Violoncello and Pianoforte, Opus 69’, Music Forum, ii (1970), 1–109

R. Stephan: ‘Zu Beethovens letzten Quartetten’, Mf, xxiii (1970), 245–56

A. Tyson: ‘Stages in the Composition of Beethoven’s Piano Trio op.70 no.1’, PRMA, xcvii (1970–71), 1–19

J.D. Kramer: ‘Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven’s Opus 135’, PNM, xi/2 (1972–3), 122–45; see also J. Lochhead: ‘The Temporal in Beethoven’s Opus 135’, In Theory Only, iv/7 (1979), 3–30

R. Kramer: The Sketches for Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, Opus 30: History, Transcription, Analysis (diss., Princeton U., 1973)

M. Mila: ‘Lettura della “Grande fuga” op.133’, Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan and Naples, 1973), 345–66

W.J. Mitchell: ‘Beethoven’s La malinconia from the String Quartet, Opus 18, No.6: Technique and Structure’, Music Forum, iii (1973), 269–80

S. Brandenburg: ‘Bemerkungen zu Beethovens op.96’, BeJb 1973–7, 11–25

G. Boringhieri: ‘Le due sonate di Beethoven, Op.102, n.1 e 2, per pianoforte e violoncello’, NRMI, xi (1977), 537–72

S. Brandenburg: ‘The First Version of Beethoven’s G major String Quartet, Op.18 No.2’, ML, lviii (1977), 127–52

F. Eibner: ‘Einige Kriterien für die Apperzeption und Interpretation von Beethovens Werk’, Beethoven Colloquium: Vienna 1977 [Beiträge ’76–’78], 20–36 [analysis of op.24]

L. Lockwood: ‘Beethoven’s Early Works for Violoncello and Contemporary Violoncello Technique’, ibid., 174–82

J. Webster: ‘Traditional Elements in Beethoven’s Middle-Period String Quartets’, Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: Detroit 1977, 94–133

R. Winter: ‘Plans for the Structure of the String Quartet in C sharp minor’, Beethoven Studies 2, ed. A. Tyson (London, 1977), 106–37

S. Brandenburg: ‘Die Quellen zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Beethovens Streichquartett Es-dur Op.127’, BeJb 1978–81, 221–76

S. Brandenburg: ‘The Autograph of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Opus 132’, The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Cambridge, MA, 1979, 278–300

R. Kramer: ‘“Das Organische der Fuge”: on the Autograph of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Opus 59, No.1’, ibid., 223–45

M. Staehelin: ‘Another Approach to the Last String Quartet Oeuvre: the Unfinished String Quintet of 1826/27’, ibid., 302–23

A. Glauert: ‘The Double Perspective in Beethoven’s Opus 131’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 113–20

S. Brandenburg: ‘The Historical Background to the “Heiliger Dankgesang” in Beethoven’s A-minor Quartet, op.132’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 161–91

R. Kramer: ‘Ambiguities in La malinconia: What the Sketches Say’, ibid., 29–46

J. Levy: Beethoven’s Compositional Choices: the Two Versions of Opus 18, No.1 (Philadelphia, 1982)

A. Tyson: ‘The “Razumovsky” Quartets: Some Aspects of the Sources’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 107–40

R. Winter: Compositional Origins of Beethoven’s Opus 131 (Ann Arbor, 1982)

K. Kropfinger: ‘Das gespaltene Werk: Beethovens Streichquartett Op.130/133’, Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Bonn 1984, 296–335

S. Brandenburg: ‘Beethovens Streichquartette op.18’, Beethoven und Böhmen, ed. S. Brandenburg and M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff (Bonn, 1988), 259–310

C. Reynolds: ‘The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, II: String Quartet in F Major, Op.135’, AcM, lx (1988), 180–94

Beethovens Klaviertrios: Munich 1990

R. Kramer: ‘Between Cavatina and Ouverture: Opus 130 and the Voices of Narrative’, Beethoven Forum, i (1992), 165–89

J. Yudkin: ‘Beethoven’s “Mozart” Quartet’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 30–74

R. Winter and R. Martin, eds.: The Beethoven Quartet Companion (Berkeley, 1994)

D. Chua: The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

L. Ratner: The Beethoven String Quartets: Compositional Strategies and Rhetoric (Stanford, CA, 1995)

(iv) piano music

A.B. Marx: Anleitung zum Vortrag Beethovenscher Klavierwerke (Berlin1863, 5/1912; Eng. trans., 1895)

C. Reinecke: Die Beethoven’schen Clavier-Sonaten (Leipzig, 1895, 9/1924; Eng. trans., 1898)

W. Nagel: Beethoven und seine Klaviersonaten (Langensalza, 1903–5, 2/1923–4)

H. Schenker: Die letzten Sonaten von Beethoven: kritische Ausgabe mit Einführung und Erläuterung (Vienna, 1913–21, rev., abridged 2/1971–2 by O. Jonas); see review by W. Drabkin, PNM, xii (1973–4), 319–30

H. Riemann: L. van Beethovens sämtliche Klavier-Solosonaten (Berlin, 1918–19, 4/1920)

D.F. Tovey: A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas (London, 1931/R, 2/1947)

J.-G. Prod’homme: Les sonates pour piano de Beethoven (1782–1823) (Paris, 1937)

E. Blom: Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas Discussed (London, 1938/R)

E. Hertzmann: ‘The Newly Discovered Autograph of Beethoven’s Rondo à capriccio, Op.129’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 171–95

E. Fischer: Ludwig van Beethovens Klaviersonaten (Wiesbaden, 1956, 2/1966; Eng. trans., 1959)

R. Rosenberg: Die Klaviersonaten Ludwig van Beethovens (Olten, 1957)

J.V. Cockshoot: The Fugue in Beethoven’s Piano Music (London, 1959)

A. Forte: The Compositional Matrix (Baldwin, NY, 1961/R) [on op.109]

C. Czerny and P. Badura-Skoda, eds.: Über den richtigen Vortrag der sämtlichen Beethoven’schen Klavierwerke (Vienna, 1963; Eng. trans., 1970) [orig. part of suppl. to Czerny’s Complete Theoretical and Practical Pianoforte School op.500]

R. Réti: Thematic Patterns in Sonatas of Beethoven, ed. D. Cooke (London, 1967/R)

J. Uhde: Beethovens Klaviermusik (Stuttgart, 1968–74)

H. Federhofer: ‘Zur Analyse des zweiten Satzes von L. van Beethovens Klaviersonate op.10, Nr.3’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 339–50

W.S. Newman: ‘The Performance of Beethoven’s Trills’, BeJb 1973–7, 347–76, also pubd inJAMS, xxix (1976), 439–62: see also replies by R. Winter and W.S. Newman in MQ, lxiii (1977), 483–504; lxiv (1978), 98–103; lxv (1979), 111–16

A. Leicher-Olbrich: Untersuchungen zu Originalausgaben Beethovenscher Klavierwerke (Wiesbaden, 1976)

E. Cone: ‘Beethoven’s Experiments in Composition: the Late Bagatelles’, Beethoven Studies 2, ed. A. Tyson (London, 1977), 84–105

R. Kramer: ‘On the Dating of Two Aspects in Beethoven’s Notation for Piano’, Beethoven Colloquium: Vienna 1977 [Beiträge ’76–’78], 160–73

C. Timbrell: ‘Notes on the Sources of Beethoven’s Opus 111’, ML, lviii (1977), 204–15

W. Drabkin: ‘Beethoven’s Sketches and the Thematic Process’, PRMA, cv (1978–9), 25–36 [on op.111]

A. Münster: Studien zu Beethovens Diabelli-Variationen (Munich, 1982)

C. Reynolds: ‘Beethoven’s Sketches for the Variations in E, Op.35’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 47–84

W. Kinderman: Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Oxford, 1987)

M. Frohlich: Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata (Oxford, 1991)

N. Marston: ‘Approaching the Sketches for Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata’, JAMS, xliv (1991), 404–50

W. Kinderman: ‘Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A Major, Opus 110’, Beethoven Forum, i (1992), 111–45

E. Sisman: ‘Pathos and the Pathétique: Rhetorical Stance in Beethoven’s C-Minor Sonata, Op.13’, Beethoven Forum, iii (1994), 81–105

G. Stanley: ‘The “wirklich gantz neue Manier” and the Path to it: Beethoven’s Variations for Piano, 1783–1802’, Beethoven Forum, iii (1994), 53–79

N. Marston: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E, Op.109 (Oxford, 1995)

G. Stanley: ‘Genre Aesthetics and Function: Beethoven's Piano Sonatas in their Cultural Context’, Beethoven Forum, iv (1998), 1–29

(v) vocal music

G. Schünemann: ‘Beethovens Skizzen zur Kantate “Der glorreiche Augenblick”’, Die Musik, ix/1(1909–10), 22–35, 93–106

M. Kufferath: Fidelio de L. van Beethoven (Paris, 1913)

H. Boettcher: Beethoven als Liederkomponist (Augsburg, 1928/R)

F. Lederer: Beethovens Bearbeitungen schottischer und anderer Volkslieder (Bonn, 1934)

C. Hopkinson and C.B. Oldman: ‘Thomson’s Collections of National Song, with Special Reference to the Contributions of Haydn and Beethoven’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, ii/1 (1940); addenda et corrigenda, iii/2 (1954), 123–4

W. Hess: Beethovens Oper Fidelio und ihre drei Fassungen (Zürich, 1953, enlarged 2/1986 as Das Fidelio-Buch)

T. Adorno: ‘Verfremdetes Hauptwerk: zur Missa solemnis’, Prisma der gegenwärtigen Musik, ed. J.E. Berendt and J. Uhde (Heidelberg, 1959); repr. in Moments musicaux (Frankfurt, 1964)

E. Anderson: ‘Beethoven’s Operatic Plans’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 61–71

W. Hess: Beethovens Bühnenwerke (Göttingen, 1962)

E. Forbes: ‘Sturzet nieder Millionen’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H.S. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 449–58

J. Lester: ‘Revisions in the Autograph of the Missa Solemnis Kyrie’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 420–38

A. Tyson: ‘The 1803 Version of Beethoven’s Christus am Oelberge’, MQ, lvi (1970), 551–84

J. Kerman: ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, Beethoven Studies 1, ed. A. Tyson (New York, 1973), 123–57

M. Ruhnke: ‘Die Librettisten des Fidelio’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1975), 121–40

S. Howell: ‘The Maelzel Canon: another Schindler Forgery?’, MT, cxx (1979), 987–90

R. Winter: ‘Reconstructing Riddles: the Sources for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis’, Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes, ed. L. Lockwood and P. Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 217–50

W. Kinderman: ‘Beethoven’s Symbol for the Deity in the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony’, 19CM, ix (1985), 102–18

C. Reynolds: ‘The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, I: An die ferne Geliebte’, AcM, lx (1988), 43–61

S. Whiting: ‘“Hört ihr wohl” zu Funktion und Programm von Beethovens “Chorfantasie”’, AMw, xlv (1988), 132–47

C. Brenneis: ‘Beethoven’s “Introduzione del IIdo Atto” und die “Leonore” von 1805’, BMw, xxxii (1990), 181–203

W. Drabkin: Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (Cambridge, 1991)

P. Robinson: ‘Fidelio and the French Revolution’, COJ, iii (1991), 23–48

M. Tusa: ‘The Unknown Florestan: the 1805 Version of “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen”’, JAMS, xlvi (1993), 175–220

B. Cooper: Beethoven’s Folksong Settings: Chronology, Sources, Style (Oxford, 1994)

P. Weber-Bockholdt: Beethovens Bearbeitung britischer Lieder (Munich, 1994)

B. Cooper: ‘Beethoven's Oratorio and the Heiligenstadt Testament’, Beethoven Journal, x (1995), 19–24

H. Lühning, ed.: Leonore, Oper in zwei Aufzügen von Ludwig van Beethoven: das Libretto der Aufführung von 1806 (Bonn, 1996)

P. Robinson: Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio (Cambridge, 1996)

B. Lodes: Das Gloria in Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’ (Tutzing, 1997)

H. Lühning: ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Arie des Florestan’, Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, ed. A. Beer, K. Pfarr and W. Ruf (Tutzing, 1997), 771–94

E. Sanders: ‘Beethoven’s Treatment of Form and Content in his Missa Solemnis’, Festschrift Walter Wiora zum 90. Geburtstag, ed. C.-H. Mahling and R. Seiberts (Tutzing, 1997), 398–418

g: reception studies

A. Schmitz: Das romantische Beethovenbild (Berlin and Bonn, 1927/R)

L. Schrade: Beethoven in France: the Growth of an Idea (New Haven, CT, 1942/R)

H.H. Eggebrecht: Zur Geschichte der Beethoven-Rezeption (Mainz, 1972, 2/1994)

D. Levy: ‘Thomas Massa Alsager, Esq.: a Beethoven Advocate in London’, 19CM, ix (1985–6), 119–27

R. Cadenbach: Mythos Beethoven: Ausstellungskatalog (Laaber, 1986)

H. Loos, ed.: Beethoven und die Nachwelt: Materialien zur Wirkungsgeschichte Beethovens (Bonn, 1986)

R. Wallace: Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime (Cambridge, 1986)

S. Kunze, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit: gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830 (Laaber, 1987)

R.A. Solie: ‘Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism’, Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. E. Narmour and R.A. Solie (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988), 1–42

M. Geck and P. Schleuning: ‘Geschrieben auf Bonaparte’: Beethoven’s “Eroica”: Revolution, Reaktion, Rezeption (Reinbek, 1989)

U. Schmitt: Revolution im Konzertsaal: zur Beethoven-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert (Mainz, 1990)

J. Johnson: ‘Beethoven and the Birth of Romantic Musical Experience in France’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 23–35

E.E. Bauer: Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam: die Entstehung eines musikalischen Mythos (Stuttgart, 1992)

T. Sipe: Interpreting Beethoven: History, Aesthetics, and Critical Reception (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, NJ, 1992)

S. Burnham: Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

T. DeNora: Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley, 1995)

O.F. Saloman: Beethoven’s Symphonies and J.S. Dwight: the Birth of American Music Criticism (Boston, 1995)

M.E. Bonds: After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA, 1996)

D.B. Dennis: Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven, CT, 1996)

K.M. Knittel: ‘Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style’, JAMS, li (1998), 49–82

W. Senner, ed.: Contemporary German Reception of Beethoven (Lincoln, NE, 1998)

h: catalogues and descriptions of beethoven archives

G. Adler, ed.: Verzeichniss der musikalischen Autographe von Ludwig van Beethoven … im Besitze von A. Artaria in Wien (Vienna, 1890)

J.S. Shedlock: ‘Beethoven’s Sketch Books’, MT, xxxiii (1892), 331–4, 394–7, 461–5, 523–5, 589–92, 649–50; xxxiv (1893), 14–16, 530–33; xxxv (1894), 13–16, 449–52, 596–600 [MSS in GB-Lbl]

A. Artaria: Verzeichnis von musikalischen Autographen … vornemlich der reichen Bestände aus dem Nachlasse … Ludwig van Beethoven’s (Vienna, 1893)

A.C. Kalischer: ‘Die Beethoven-Autographe der Königl. Bibliothek zu Berlin’, MMg, xxvii (1895), 145–50; xxviii (1896), 1–80

A. Hughes-Hughes: Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum (London, 1906–9/R)

G. Kinsky: Musikhistorisches Museum von Wilhelm Heyer in Cöln: Katalog, iv (Cologne, 1916)

J. Schmidt-Görg: Katalog der Handschriften des Beethoven-Hauses und Beethoven-Archivs (Bonn, 1935)

M. Unger: ‘Die Beethovenhandschriften der Pariser Konservatoriumsbibliothek’, NBeJb 1935, 87–123

M. Unger: ‘Die Beethovenhandschriften der Familie W. in Wien’, NBeJb 1937, 155–70 [Wittgenstein collection]

M. Unger: Eine Schweizer Beethovensammlung (Zürich, 1939) [collection of H.C. Bodmer]

G. Kinsky and M.A. Souchay, eds.: Manuskripte, Briefe, Dokumente von Scarlatti bis Stravinsky: Katalog der Musikautographen Sammlung Louis Koch (Stuttgart, 1953)

N. Fischmann [Fishman]: ‘Autographen Beethovens in der UdSSR’, BMw, iii/1 (1961), 22–9

B. Schwarz: ‘Beethoveniana in Soviet Russia’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 4–21 [see also MQ, xlix (1963), 143–9]

J. Kerman: ‘Beethoven Sketchbooks in the British Museum’, PRMA, xciii (1966–7), 77–96

H. Schmidt: ‘Die Beethovenhandschriften des Beethovenhauses in Bonn’, BeJb 1969–70, [whole issue]; suppl., BeJb 1971–2, 207–20

O.E. Albrecht, H. Cahoon and D. Ewing, eds.: The Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection (New York, 1970)

E. Bartlitz: Die Beethoven-Sammlung in der Musikabteilung der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek: Verzeichnis (Berlin, 1970)

P.J. Willetts: Beethoven and England: an Account of the Sources in the British Museum (London, 1970)

D. Johnson: ‘The Artaria Collection of Beethoven Manuscripts: a New Source’, Beethoven Studies 1, ed. A. Tyson (New York, 1973), 176–236

H.-G. Klein: Ludwig van Beethoven: Autographe und Abschriften, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz: Kataloge der Musikabteilung, i/2 (Berlin, 1975)

S. Brandenburg: ‘Die Beethovenhandschriften in der Musikaliensammlung des Erzherzogs Rudolph’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt, iii (1988), 141–76

J. Fojtíková and T. Volek: ‘Die Beethoveniana der Lobkowitz-Musiksammlung und ihre Kopisten’, Beethoven und Böhmen, ed. S. Brandenburg and M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff (Bonn, 1988), 219–58

i: editions of autographs and sketchbooks

(i) facsimiles of major autographs

Piano Sonata, A, op.26: ed. E. Prieger (Bonn, 1895)

Piano Sonata, c, op.27 no.2: ed. H. Schenker (Vienna, 1921) [with facs. of 3 sketch leaves]; new edn by K. Sakka (Tokyo, 1970) [with facs. of 1st edn of sonata]

Piano Sonata, D, op.28: ed. M. Frohlich (Bonn, 1996)

Violin Sonata, G, op.30 no.3: ed. A. Tyson (London, 1980)

Piano Sonata, C, op.53: ed. J. Schmidt-Görg (Bonn, 1954)

Symphony no.3, E, op.55 [facs. of Beethoven’s corrected score]: ed. O. Biba (Vienna, 1993)

Piano Sonata, f, op.57: (Paris, c1926/ Rc)

String Quartet, F, op.59 no.1: ed. A. Tyson (London, 1980)

String Quartet, e, op.59 no.2: ed. A. Tyson (London, 1980)

Symphony no.5, op.67: ed. G. Schünemann (Berlin, 1942)

Cello Sonata, A, op.69: ed. L. Lockwood (New York, 1970) [1st movt]

Piano Sonata, F, op.78 (Munich, 1923)

Piano Sonata, e, op.90: ed. M. Ladenburger (Bonn, 1993)

Violin Sonata, G, op.96 (Munich, 1976)

An die ferne Geliebte, op.98 (Munich, 1970)

Piano Sonata, A, op.101: ed. S. Brandenburg (Munich, 1998)

Piano Sonata, E, op.109: ed. O. Jonas (New York, 1965)

Piano Sonata, A, op.110: ed. K.-M. Komma (Stuttgart, 1967) [with transcr. of corrections in autograph and of relevant sketches]

Piano Sonata, c, op.111 (Munich, 1922/R)

Missa solemnis, op.123: ed. W. Virneisel (Tutzing, 1965) [1st movt]

Symphony no.9, d, op.125 (Leipzig, 1924/R)

Six Bagatelles, op.126: ed. S. Brandenburg (Bonn, 1984)

(ii) sketchbooks in facsimile, or in complete or substantial transcription

G. Nottebohm: Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven (Leipzig, 1865, rev. 2/1924/R by P. Mies; Eng. trans., 1979) [sketchbook of 1801–2: substantial transcr.]

G. Nottebohm: Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven aus dem Jahre 1803 (Leipzig, 1880, rev. 2/1924/R by P. Mies; Eng. trans., 1979) [substantial transcr.]

C. de Roda: ‘Un quaderno di autografi del 1825’, RMI, xii (1905), 63–108, 592–622, 732–67; pubd separately (Turin, 1907) [substantial transcr.]

W. Englemann, ed.: Beethovens eigenhändiges Skizzenbuch zur 9. Symphonie, (Leipzig, 1913) [facs.]

M. Ivanov-Boretsky: ‘Ein Moskauer Skizzenbuch von Beethoven’ Muzikal'noye obrazovniye (1927), nos. 1–2, pp. 7–58 [facs. of sketches for String quartets opp.130 and 132]; 59–91 [commentary in Russ. and Ger.]; also pubd separately (Vienna, 1927)

K.L. Mikulicz, ed.: Ein Notierungsbuch von Beethoven aus dem Besitze der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Leipzig, 1927/R) [transcr. sketchbook of 1800–01]

J. Schmidt-Görg, ed.: Beethoven: Drei Skizzenbücher zur Missa Solemnis (Bonn, 1952–70) [facs. and transcr.]

D. Weise, ed.: Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zur Chorfantasie op.80 und zu anderen Werken (Bonn, 1961) [transcr.]

D. Weise, ed.: Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zur Pastoralsymphonie op.68 und zu den Trios op.70 (Bonn, 1961) [transcr.]; see review by L. Lockwood, MQ, liii (1967), 128–36

N. Fishman, ed.: Kniga ėskizov Betkhoven za 1802–1803 godï (Moscow, 1962) [facs. and transcr.]

J. Schmidt-Görg, ed.: Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zu den Diabelli-Variationen und zur Missa Solemnis, SV 154 (Bonn, 1968–72) [facs. and transcr.]; see review by R. Winter, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 135–8

J. Kerman, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: Autograph Miscellany from circa 1786 to 1799 (London, 1970) [facs. and transcr.]

W. Virneisel, ed.: Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zu Streichquartetten aus op.18, SV 46 (Bonn, 1972–4) [facs. and transcr.]

S. Brandenburg, ed.: Beethoven: Kesslersches Skizzenbuch (Bonn, 1976–8) [facs. and transcr.; facs. also pubd separately (Munich, 1976)]

D.P. Johnson: Beethoven’s Early Sketches in the ‘Fischhof Miscellany’ (Ann Arbor, 1980) [transcr.]

C. Brenneis, ed.: Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch aus dem Jahre 1809 (Landsberg 5) (Bonn, 1992); see also review by N. Marston, Beethoven Forum, vi (1998), 207–33

R. Kramer, ed.: Ludwig van Beethoven: A Sketchbook from the Summer of 1800 (Bonn, 1996)

W. Kinderman, ed.: Beethoven’s Sketchbook for the Missa Solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E, op.109 (Artaria 195) (Bonn, forthcoming)

j: other studies

M. Unger, ed.: Beethoven über eine Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke (Bonn, 1920)

P. Mies: Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethovens zur Erkenntnis seines Stiles (Leipzig, 1925; Eng. trans., 1929/R)

M. Unger: Beethovens Handschrift (Bonn, 1926)

E. Newman: The Unconscious Beethoven (London, 1927, rev. 2/1968)

T. Veidl: Der musikalische Humor bei Beethoven (Leipzig, 1929)

E. Brümmer: Beethoven im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen rheinischen Presse (Würzburg, 1933)

G. Kinsky: ‘Zur Versteigerung von Beethovens musikalischem Nachlass’, NBeJb 1935, 66–86

A. Schering: Beethoven und die Dichtung (Berlin, 1936/R)

P. Mies: Textkritische Untersuchungen bei Beethoven (Bonn, 1957)

H. Unverricht: Die Eigenschriften und die Originalausgaben von Werken Beethovens in ihrer Bedeutung für die moderne Textkritik (Kassel, 1960)

A. Tyson: ‘Maurice Schlesinger as a Publisher of Beethoven’, AcM, xxxv (1963), 182–91

H. Grundmann and P. Mies: Studien zum Klavierspiel Beethovens und seiner Zeitgenossen (Bonn, 1966, 2/1970)

P. Stadlen: ‘Beethoven and the Metronome: I’, ML, xlviii (1967), 330–49

J. Kerman: ‘Beethoven’s Early Sketches’, MQ, lvi (1970), 515–38

L. Lockwood: ‘On Beethoven’s Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation’, AcM, xlii (1970), 32–47

A. Tyson: ‘Notes on Five of Beethoven’s Copyists’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 439–71

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven, Sonata, and Utopia’, Telos, no.9 (1971), 32–47

A. Tyson: ‘Sketches and Autographs’; ‘Steps to Publication – and Beyond’, The Beethoven Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1971), 443–58; 459–89

D. Johnson and A. Tyson: ‘Reconstructing Beethoven’s Sketchbooks’, JAMS, xxv (1972), 137–56

A. Tyson: ‘A Reconstruction of the Pastoral Symphony Sketchbook’, Beethoven Studies, ed. A. Tyson (New York, 1973), 67–96

A. Tyson: ‘Das Leonoreskizzenbuch (Mendelssohn 15): Probleme der Rekonstruktion und der Chronologie’, BeJb 1973–77, 469–99

M. Solomon: ‘Beethoven and the Enlightenment’, Telos, no.19 (1974), 146–54

R. Subotnik: ‘Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptoms of a Fatal Condition’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 242–75

R.W. Wade: ‘Beethoven’s Eroica Sketchbooks’, FAM, xxiv (1977), 254–89

D. Johnson: ‘Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven’s Sketches’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 3–17; see also S. Brandenburg, W. Drabkin and D. Johnson: ‘On Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven’s Sketches’, ibid., iii (1979–80), 270–79

S. Brandenburg: ‘Ein Skizzenbuch Beethovens aus dem Jahre 1812: zur Chronologie des Petterschen Skizzenbuches’, Zu Beethoven, ed. H. Goldschmidt (Berlin, 1979), 117–48

P. Gülke: ‘Zum Verhältnis von Intention und Realisierung bei Beethoven’, Beethoven: das Problem der Interpretation, Musik-Konzepte, no.8 (1979), 34–53

M. Solomon: ‘On Beethoven’s Creative Process: a Two-Part Invention’, ML, lxi (1980), 272–83; repr. in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 126–38

D. Greene: Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music (New York, 1982)

D. Johnson, A. Tyson and R. Winter: The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (Berekeley, 1985)

W.S. Newman: Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way (New York, 1988)

R. Winter: ‘Performing Beethoven’s Early Piano Concertos’, EMc, xvi (1988), 214–30

B. Cooper: Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford, 1990)

R. Kramer: ‘Cadenza contra Text: Mozart in Beethoven’s Hands’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 116–31

G. Barth: The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style (Ithaca, NY, 1992)

T.W. Adorno: Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1993, 2/1994; Eng. trans., 1998)

R. Kolisch: ‘Tempo and Character in Beethoven’s Music’, MQ, lxxvii (1993), 90–131

K. Drake: The Beethoven Sonatas and the Creative Experience (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

R. Hatten: Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

R. Stowell, ed.: Performing Beethoven (Cambridge, 1994)

H.-W. Küthen: Ein unbekanntes Notierungsblatt Beethovens aus der Entstehungszeit der ‘Mondscheinsonate’ (Prague, 1996)

Beethoven Association.

New York society, organized under the presidency of Harold Bauer in 1919. It promoted concerts, arranged the first English-language edition of Thayer’s Life of Beethoven (1921, ed. H.E. Krehbiel), and made grants to libraries and musical charities. It was dissolved in 1940.

Beethovenhalle.

Concert hall in Bonn, completed in 1959. For illustration see Acoustics, fig.31.

Beethoven Quartet.

Russian string ensemble, founded in 1923 as the Moscow Conservatory Quartet by Dmitry Tsïganov, Vasily Shirinsky, Vadim Borisovsky and Sergey Shirinsky. In 1927 the group presented its first Beethoven cycle for the composer's centenary; and after another successful cycle in 1931 it took the name by which it became known throughout the world. It gave the first performance of Myaskovsky’s quartets from no.4 onwards. Its members taught with distinction at the Moscow Conservatory and were all well known in their own right – Vasily Shirinsky was a noted musicologist. In 1940 the Beethoven Quartet began a collaboration with Shostakovich which resulted in its giving the premières of almost all his major chamber compositions; a number of his quartets were dedicated to the ensemble or its individual members. The ‘Beethoveners’ appeared in concert with many celebrated colleagues but in the West were known mainly by their recordings which, apart from Shostakovich’s works, included quartets and quintets by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms. Glière, Taneyev, Myaskovsky and Prokofiev. Their style of playing, though underpinned by considerable virtuosity, was more direct and unvarnished than that of the contemporary Komitas Quartet or the younger Borodin Quartet; and even on record they achieved interpretations of the utmost intensity and profundity. In 1964 Borisovsky gave way to his pupil Fedor Druzhinin and on Vassily Shirinsky’s death in 1965, Nikolay Zabavnikov became second violinist. A complete Beethoven cycle was recorded by this formation of the ensemble. Sergey Shirinsky died in 1974 during the preparation of Shostakovich’s 15th Quartet (which as a result was given its première by the Taneyev Quartet). Yevgeny Altman became the cellist in 1975 and on Tsïganov’s retirement in 1977, Druzhinin reorganized the group with Oleh Krysa as leader. This second Beethoven Quartet, in which Druzhinin was eventually succeeded by Mikhail Kugel (and Atlman by Valentin Feigin), disbanded in 1987.

TULLY POTTER

Beets [Beetz].

See Bätz.

Befa.

See B fa.

Beffroy de Reigny, Louis-Abel [Cousin Jacques]

(b Laon, 6 Nov 1757; d Paris, 17 Dec 1811). French playwright, author and composer. In 1785 he founded the satirical periodical Les lunes. Under the pseudonym ‘Cousin Jacques’ he became the acknowledged playwright of the Revolution, writing the texts and occasionally the music to numerous farces and pièces de circonstance which enjoyed a great popular vogue. Among these works is Nicodème dans la lune (1790), which had a run of 363 nights at the Théâtre Français Comédique et Lyrique and was revived at the Théâtre-Français de la Cité in 1796 for another 200 performances. It was one of the first boulevard plays to succeed both as entertainment and as propaganda. A number of plays based on Nicodème followed, but none matched the success of the original. Le retour du Champs-de-Mars (1790), an instantaneous success, saved the Théâtre des Beaujolais from bankruptcy. He was equally famous for his literary works, among them a Dictionaire néologique des hommes et des choses de la Révolution (1795–1800) and a Précis exact de la prise de la Bastille (1789).

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

all first performed in Paris, and all with texts by the composer unless otherwise stated

Les ailes de l’amour (divertissement, 1), 1786, airs (c1786; enlarged 2/c1786); Coriolinet, ou Rome sauvée (folie héroï-comique, 3), 1786, ?unperf.; Les clefs du jardin, ou Les pots de fleurs (divertissement, 1), 1787 (1787); Compliment, 1787; La fin du bail, ou Le repas des fermiers (divertissement), 1788 (1788); Sans adieux (compliment, 1), 1789, see Pougin; Bordier aux enfers (comédie, 1), 1789 (1789), ?unperf., attrib. Beffroy; La couronne de fleurs (compliment, 1), 1789; Apollon directeur (1), 1790; Arlequin, général d’armée (opéra bouffon, 2), 1790 (1790), ?unperf., attrib. Beffroy; La fédération du Parnasse (divertissement, 1), 1790

Les folies dansantes (oc, 2), 1790; L’histoire universelle (comédie, 2), 1790, collab. L.G.A. Chardiny, 1 air by Gaveaux, 1 air by J.P.-G. Martini; Jean-Bête (comedie, 3), 1790; Louis XII (comédie, 3, Valcour), 1790; Nicodème dans la lune, ou La révolution pacifique (folie, 3), 1790, ov., 25 ariettes (1791); Le retour du Champs-de-Mars (divertissement, 1), 1790; Les capucins, ou Faisons la paix (comédie, 2), 1791; Le club des bonnes-gens, ou Le curé français (La réconciliation) (folie, 2), 1791 (1791), collab. Gaveaux; Les deux Nicodèmes, ou Les français sur la planète de Jupiter (opéra folie, 2), 1791, air (n.d.); Nicodème aux enfers (5), 1791, see Pougin

Les trois Nicodèmes, 1791, ?unperf.; Le vrai Nicodème, 1791, ?unperf.; L’ivrogne vertueux (oc, 2), c1791, ?unperf., music by J.-B. Lemoyne; Le retour de Nicodème (4), 1792, ?unperf.; Sylvius Nerva, ou L’école des familles (La malédiction paternelle) (drame lyrique, 3), 1792, unperf., music by Lemoyne; Allons, ça va, ou Le Quaker en France (tableau patriotique, 1), 1793; Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la Liberté (tableau patriotique, 1), 1794 (1794), music by Lemoyne; Le compère Luc, ou Les dangers de l’ivrognerie (oc, 2), 1794, music by Lemoyne; Démosthènes (tableau patriotique, 1), 1794

La petite Nannette (oc, 2), 1796 (1796); Turlututu, Empereur de l’isle vert (farce, 3), 1797 (1797); Jean-Baptiste (oc, 1), 1798 (1798); Un rien, ou L’habit de noces (folie, 1), 1798 (1797), music rev. Gaveaux according to Pougin; Le grand genre (oc, 1), 1799; Magdelon (Madelon) (oc, 1), 1799 (1799); Emilie, ou Les caprices (comédie, 3), 1799 (1799); Les deux charbonniers, ou Les contrastes (comédie, 2), 1799 (1799); Le bonhomme, ou Poulot et Fanchon (oc, 1), 1799

other works

Hurluberlu, ou Le célibataire, poème demiburlesque avec des airs nouveaux (1783); Les romances de Berquin mises en musique, 1v, kbd, 2 vols. (1798), lost; Les soirées chantantes, ou Le chansonnier bourgeois, 1v, kbd, 3 vols. (1803–4)

Traité du chant, 1787, inc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

A. Pougin: ‘Le Cousin-Jacques’, Chronique musicale, x (1875), 17–30

M. Dietz: Geschichte des musikalischen Dramas in Frankreich während der Revolution (Vienna, 1885, 2/1886/R)

C. Pierre: Les hymnes et chansons de la Révolution (Paris, 1904/R)

C. Westercamp: Beffroy de Reigny … sa vie et ses oeuvres (Laon, 1930)

LELAND FOX

Begaliyev, Muratbek

(b Minkush, 21 June 1955). Kyrgyz composer. He attended a boarding music school until 1974 after which he studied at the Kirghiz Art Institute (under M. Abdreyev) and the Moscow Conservatory (under M. Chulaki). In his work he has attempted to unify various sources of Kyrgyz folklore within a system of expression that owes as much to Shostakovich as it does to Bartók. In 1991 he was awarded a UNESCO prize and in 1993 helped establish and became director of the Kirghiz Conservatory.

WORKS

(selective list)

Kyuu, ww, perc, 1975; Vospominaniya startsa [Reminiscences of an Old Man] (suite), pf, 1978; Sonata ‘Pamyati M. Abdrayeva’ (In memory of M. Abdrayev), pf, 1979; Sym. poem, 1981; I dol'she veka dlitsya den' [ … and the Day is Longer than the Century] (after Ch. Aytmatov), nar, solo vv chorus, orch, 1983; Prazdnichnaya uvertyura, orch, 1985; Napevï detstva [The Melodies of Childhood], sym. picture, orch, 1985; Gimn tvortsu [Hymn to the Creator], chorus, chbr orch, folk insts orch, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Shkol'nikov: ‘Lyubite muzïku v sebe’ [Love the music in yourself], Komsomolets Kirgizii (15 Dec 1984)

B. Bayakhunov: ‘S muzïkoy v serdtse’ [With music in one's heart], Vercherniy Frunze (7 June 1985)

M. Chulaki: ‘Murat Begaliyev’, Muzïka v SSSR: ‘VAAP-INFORM’ (1986), no.1

T. Salamatov: ‘Muratbek Begaliyev’, Soyuz Kompozitorov Kirgizskoy SSR (Frunze, 1989)

RAZIYA SULTANOVA

Beglarian, Eve (Louise)

(b Ann Arbor, 22 July 1958). American composer. The daughter of the composer Grant Beglarian, she studied at Princeton University (BA 1980) and Columbia University (MA 1983), and was trained in intricate serial techniques by Wuorinen and Lerdahl. At Columbia, however, she came to view post-serialism as sterile and elitist and began to write pieces that incorporated rock elements and performance art. From 1991 on, she has had a strong presence in the downtown Manhattan scene, especially with the pianist Kathleen Supové, with whom she formed the electronic duo Twisted Tutu.

Beglarian's output is extremely diverse, including contrapuntal variations on medieval songs, computer-altered disco collages, post-minimal and numerically-structured synthesizer pieces, songs of nonsense syllables and electric theatre pieces, notably TypOpera, based on Kurt Schwitters's Ur Sonata. Expert in sampling technology, she often uses noise samples in instrumental contexts; FlamingO, for example, combines chamber orchestra and samplers in such a way that the latter dominate, the orchestra emerging from an engulfing whirr of noise. In Wonder-Counselor for organ and tape, flurries of melody on the organ are laid over an ecstatic ebb and flow of a harmonic series and sampled accompaniment of ocean sounds, bird song and a couple having orgasms. Feminist and uninhibited, Belgarian is not afraid to tackle subjects of sex, politics and religion, though her music usually remains joyous and uplifting.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Making Hay, 2 pf, 1980; Quartettsatz, str qt, 1981; Music for Orch, 1981–2; 5 for Cl, 1982; Cl Qt, 1983; Spherical Music, 2 mar, 1985; Getting to Know the Weather, bar sax, 1986; Machaut in the Machine Age I, pf, perc, 1986, rev. fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1990; Miranda's Kiss, pf, 1988; FlamingO, 3 chbr ens, 1995; Play Nice, hp/toy pf, 1997; Elf Again, indeterminate ens, 1998

Inst with elecs: Uncle Wiggly, va, tape, 1980; Fresh Air, sax qt, tape, 1983; Michael's Spoon, 2 hn, tape, 1984; Making Sense of It, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, tape, 1987; Your Face Here, a sax, pf, vv, tape, 1988; Born Dancin', elec vc, drum machine, actor, 1989; Preciosilla, any single line inst, tape, 1990; Preciosilla (Margaret's Mix), fl, tape, 1992; Dive Maker, sampled perc, elecs, 1992; Machaut in the Machine Age II, bass, MIDI perc, 1993; Wolf Chaser, vn, amp bowed cymbals, tape, 1995; Wonder Counselor, pipe org, elecs, 1996; Creating the World, vn, bn, gui, elec kbd, perc, drums, 1996; Boy Toy Toy Boy, 2 kbd, elecs, 1997; Father/Daughter Dance, accdn, elecs, 1998

Vocal: 3 Love Songs, Mez, cl, va, pf, 1981–2; Ps cxxxiii, SATB, 1983; Medea, 7 choral odes, 1985; Enough, S, pf, bass, 1993; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1v, fl, sax, ob, bn, va, db, pf, perc, 1994; Landscaping for Privacy, spkr, kbd, 1995; The Bacchae (incid music), male chorus, Chin. ens, 1996; My Feelings Now, 1v, pf, 1996; Non-Jew (E. Pound), 2 spkrs, 1998

Vocal with elecs: Overstepping, sampled vv, elecs, 1991; Machaut a Go Go, v, a sax, hn, trbn, elec gui, vc, elec bass, hp, drums, 1991; YOursonate, 1v, perc, tape, 1993; typOpera, vv, elecs, 1994; No. You are Not Alone, vv, kbd, gui, bass, drums, elecs, 1994; No Man's Land, 1v, amp hand drum, 2 elec kbd, 1995; Hildegurls, or The Play of the Virtues, 4vv, elecs, 1996

KYLE GANN

Begleitung

(Ger.).

See Accompaniment.

Begnis, Giuseppe de

(b Lugo, 1793; d New York, Aug 1849). Italian bass. He made his début at Modena in 1813 in Pavesi’s Ser Marcantonio, and soon became a leading exponent of buffo roles in Italy. In 1816 he married the soprano Giuseppina Ronzi and the same year sang at La Scala, as the King of Scotland in Mayr’s Ginevra di Scozia. He created the role of Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Teatro Valle, Rome, in 1817. Two years later he and his wife appeared in Paris as Don Basilio and Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and as Geronio and Fiorilla in Il turco in Italia. They repeated the latter roles at their début in London at the King’s Theatre in 1821. De Begnis took part in a concert performance of Mosè in Egitto at Covent Garden in 1822, three months before Rossini’s opera was staged, as Pietro l’eremita, at the King’s Theatre. In the following year he sang in the first London performance of Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran, and in 1824 he took the part of Don Febeo in Mayr’s Che originali (Il fanatico per la musica), staged for Catalani’s return to London after a long absence. During his last season at the King’s Theatre (1827), he appeared in Pacini’s La schiava in Bagdad. Equally proficient as an actor and as a singer, he was an ideal interpreter of Rossini’s comic operas.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bego-Šimunić, Anđelka

(b Sarajevo, 23 October 1941). Bosnian-Hercegovinan composer of Croatian descent. She studied composition with Brkanović and Miroslav Špiler at the Sarajevo Music Academy before taking a masters degree there in 1973. After teaching theory at the secondary music school in Sarajevo, in 1975 she joined the staff of the academy, where she was later made assistant (1985) and then full professor. She was president of the Bosnian composers' association (1986–92) and one of the principal organizers of the Bosnian festival ‘Days of Musical Creation’. Her music is neo-classical in its Prokofiev-like extended tonality and treatment of form but it also contains neo-romantic elements (e.g. the Lisztian rhetoric of the melody) and early Expressionist features (e.g. the vertical dissonances of the chordal structure). Occasionally, her works make use of Bosnian folklore.

WORKS

(selective list)

Allegretto scherzoso, orch, 1963; Pf Sonatina, E, 1963; Čarobna frula [The Magic Flute] (J. Kaštelan), Bar, pf, 1964; Str Qt no.1, 1964; sym. no.1, 1966; Pf Conc., 1970; Ad perpetuam memoriam, pf, 1976; Premeditacija br.1–2 [Premeditation nos.1–2], str, 1977; Premeditacija br.3, pf trio, 1978; Premeditacija br.4, orch, 1979; Sonatni stav [Sonata Movt], bn, pf, 1981; Premeditacija br.5, va, pf, 1982; Moviment, fl, cl, hpd, str, qt, 1984; Sonanse, pf, 1985; Mozaik, pf, 1986; Ponoćne pjesme [Songs of Midnight] (song cycle, T. Ujević), S, orch, 1989; Conc. cantico, vn, orch, 1994

Principal publishers: Udruženje kompozitora Bosne i Hercegovine

IVAN ČAVLOVIĆ

Begrez, Pierre (Ignace)

(b Namur, 23 Dec 1787; d London, 19 Dec 1863). French tenor. He made his début at the Paris Opéra in 1815, but much of his career was spent in England. He was first heard in London at the King’s Theatre on 13 January 1816 (billed as Signor Begri) in Paer’s Griselda; that season he also sang Guglielmo in Così fan tutte (with Braham as Ferrando), and the following year appeared in Paisiello’s La molinara and Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (as Annius). In 1819 he sang Ottavio in Don Giovanni and Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte; and in 1824 he appeared in two Rossini operas, as Roderigo in Otello and as Narciso in Il turco in Italia. His career is discussed in W.C. Smith: The Italian Opera and Contemporary Ballet in London 1789–1820 (London, 1955). After giving up the stage, he continued to sing in concert for many years, and also taught singing in London. In an age famous for its fine tenors he had neither the remarkable voice nor the virtuoso technique of a Davide or a Garcia, but his musicality and his dependability made him a valuable member of the Italian opera company in London at a time when artistic, as opposed to purely vocal, standards were not high.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Béhague, Gerard (Henri)

(b Montpellier, 2 Nov 1937). American musicologist of French birth. He studied the piano and composition at the National School of Music of the University of Brazil and later at the Brazilian Conservatory of Music, Rio de Janeiro. He then worked under Jacques Chailley at the Institut de Musicologie of the University of Paris before settling in the USA, where he studied with Gilbert Chase at Tulane University, New Orleans, and received the PhD in 1966. He then worked on the music staff at the University of Illinois and later became professor of music at the University of Texas, Austin (1974). He has also worked as associate editor of the Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research (1969–75), editor of the music section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies (from 1970) and as editor of Ethnomusicology (1974–8). Although he has been specially concerned with American music, theory and methods of musical research, Béhague’s main interest has been Latin American music, in which he is recognized as a leading authority, and particularly that of Brazil, which he has studied as both music historian (in both classical and popular areas) and ethnomusicologist.

WRITINGS

‘Biblioteca de Ajuda (Lisbon) MSS 1595–1596: Two 18th-Century Anonymous Collections of Modinhas’, YIAMR, iv (1968), 44–81

‘Luiz Cosme: empulso creador versus conciencia formal’, YIAMR, v (1969), 67–89

The Beginnings of Musical Nationalism in Brazil (Detroit, 1971)

‘Música ‘Barroca’ mineira à luz de novos manuscritos’, Barroco, iii (1971), 6–39

‘Bossa & Bossas: Recent Changes in Brazilian Urban Popular Music’, EthM, xvii (1973), 209–33

‘Latin American Folk Music’, ‘Afro-American Folk Music in North and Latin America’, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2/1973; rev. 3/1990 by V. Woodring Goertzen), 179–206, 207–35

‘Notes on Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Cult Music’, Tradition and Renewal: Essays on Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature Culture, ed. M.H. Forster (Urbana, IL and London, 1975), 68–80

Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979)

‘Brazilian Music Values of the 1960s and 1970s: Popular Urban Music from Bossa Nova to Tropicalia’, Journal of Popular Culture, xiv (1980), 437–52

‘Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Brazilian Ethnomusicology: a General View’, LAMR, iii (1982), 17–35

ed.: Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives (Westport, CT, 1984) [incl. ‘Patterns of Candomblé Music Performance: an Afro-Brazilian Religious Setting’, 222–54]

‘Popular Music’, Handbook of Latin American Popular Culture, ed. H.E. Hinds and C.M. Tatum (Westport, CT, 1985), 3–38

‘Fonctions socio-liturgiques de la musique afro-brasilienne à Salvador, Bahia’, Les musiques guadeloupéennes: Pointe-à-Pitre 1986, 195–208

‘Popular Music in Latin America’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, v (1986), 41–68

‘Latin America: Independence and Nationalism’, Man & Music/Music and Society: The Early Romantic Era, ed. A. Ringer (London, 1990), 280–93

‘Latin America: Reflections and Reactions’, Man & Music/Music and Society: The Late Romantic Era, ed. J. Samson (London, 1991), 327–39

‘Reflections on the Ideological History of Latin American Ethnomusicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 56–68

‘The Hispanic World, 1918–45’, Man & Music/Music and Society: Modern Times, ed. R.P. Morgan (London, 1993), 231–56

Heitor Villa-Lobos: the Search for Brazil’s Musical Soul (Austin, 1994)

ed.: Music and Black Ethnicity: the Caribbean and South America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994)

PAULA MORGAN

Behaviourism.

See Psychology of music, §I, 2.

Beheim [Behaim], Michel

(b Sülzbach, nr Weinsberg, Württemberg, 29 Sept ?1420; d Sülzbach, 1472–9). German poet and Meistersinger. After training under his father, a weaver, he entered the service of the imperial chamberlain, Konrad von Weinsberg, as a singer (‘fürtreter’) in the 1440s. He named as his models Muskatblüt, whom he probably met in Konrad's household, and Heinrich von Mügeln. He performed his own songs mostly at royal and noble households in southern Germany in which he was employed: the Bavarian court in Munich (from at least 1447); the court of Albrecht Achilles, Margrave of Brandenburg, in Ansbach (1449–53, interrupted by a Scandinavian journey that took him to Copenhagen and Trondheim); the Bavarian court in Munich (1453–4); the court of King Ladislaus of Bohemia in Prague and Vienna (1455–7); in Austria, for Duke Albrecht VI (1454, 1458) and at the court of the Emperor Frederick III in Vienna (1459–65); and finally the court of the Elector Palatine Frederick I (1468–?1472).

Most of Beheim's extant works derive from sources close to the original, some of them autograph (D-HEu cpg 312 and 334, Mbs Cgm 291). This provides biographical and historical material and permits accurate study of the structure of his 12 Töne. An individual style could hardly be expected, and the great majority of the melodies are still formed from conventional figures, phrases and combinations of phrases. There is unmistakable interaction of text and Ton (see Ton (i)), and there are several examples of correspondence; structural elements and sometimes whole Töne have a semantic function (the Gekrönte Weise, for example, which resembles a dance-song, expresses joy). The articulation of the melody usually follows the text rather than the rhyme scheme. Beheim tends to favour the return of the melody, less often a polished rounding off, at the end of a stanza. As with other examples, there are no instrumental parts, and no ouvert and clos endings. Like others before him, he held himself, as a poet, aloof from the instrumentalists who were his rivals for princely favour; he felt that only an art in which the music was inseparable from the words could serve the divine order.

The Angstweise with its chronicle texts breaks away from the traditional epic metre (Bogenzeilen) in the last part of the stanza. Otherwise Beheim’s techniques were for the most part those of medieval monophony which was probably losing popularity in his lifetime at those courts that had their own chapels and choirs. In 1472 he returned to his birthplace, which lay within the territory of the palatinate where he had served; there he held the position of village mayor until his violent death. He was, if not the last, certainly one of the last of his kind.

WORKS

Editions: Das Singebuch des Adam Puschman nebst den Originalmelodien des Michel Behaim und Hans Sachs, ed. G. Münzer (Leipzig, 1906/R) [complete edn]‘Die Melodien und ihre Überlieferung’, ed. C. Petzsch, Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, ed. H. Gille and I. Spriewald, iii (Berlin, 1971) [complete edn]

Angstweise

Gekrönte Weise

Hofweise

Hohe guldin Weise

Kurze Weise

Lange Weise

Osterweise

Slegweise

Sleht guldin Weise

Trummeten Weise

Verkehrte Weise

Zugweise

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Petzsch: ‘Zur Notierungsweise im Beheimcodex cgm 291’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 252–73

C. Petzsch: ‘Michel Beheims “sleht gülden Weise”’, Mf, xx (1967), 44–55

C. Petzsch: ‘Text-Form-Korrespondenzen im mittelalterlichen Strophenlied: zur Hofweise Michel Beheims’, DVLG, xli (1967), 27–60

H. Gille and I. Spriewald, eds.: Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim (Berlin, 1968–71) [incl. poetry edn; vol.iii incl. C. Petzsch: ‘Die Melodien und ihre Überlieferung’, 451–86, with transcrs.]

C. Petzsch: ‘Michel Beheims “Buch von den Wienern”: zum Gesangsvortrag eines spätmittelalterlichen chronikalischen Gedichtes’, AÖAW, cix (1972), 226–315

W.C. MacDonald: ‘Whose bread I eat’: the Song-Poetry of Michel Beheim (Göppingen, 1981)

F. Schanze: Meisterliche Liedkunst zwischen Heinrich von Mügeln und Hans Sachs (Munich, 1983–4)

H. Brunner and B. Wachinger, eds.: Repertorium der Sangsprüche und Meisterlieder des 12. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, ii (Tübingen, 1986), 17–206

I. Spriewald: Literatur zwischen Hören und Lesen: Wandel von Funktion und Rezeption im späten Mittelalter: Fallstudien zu Beheim, Folz und Sachs (Berlin, 1990)

CHRISTOPH PETZSCH/MARTIN KIRNBAUER

Behr, Johann.

See Beer, Johann.

Behr, Joseph.

See Beer, Joseph.

Behrend, (Gustav) Fritz

(b Berlin, 3 March 1889; d Berlin, 29 Dec 1972). German composer and pianist. He studied composition with Heinrich van Eycken, Philipp Rüfer and Engelbert Humperdinck (1907–11), before serving as répétiteur at the Brunswick Hoftheater (1911–12). In 1913 he enlisted in the German army. After World War I, he worked as a chamber musician and pedagogue at the Ochs-Eichelberg (1918–42) and Klindworth-Scharwenka (1942–9) conservatories in Berlin. Out of favour during the Third Reich, his reputation as a composer was not established until after World War II. His style, greatly influenced by the music of Richard Strauss, particularly with regard to orchestration, shows a sympathy for post-Romantic idioms.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: König Renés Tochter (1, H. Hertz), op.22, 1919; Der schwanger Bauer (1), 1927, Berlin, 22 May 1949 [pt 3 of Hans Sachs-Spiele, op.53]; Die lächerliche Preziösen (1, after Molière), op.57, 1928, Berlin, 22 May 1949; Almansor (3, after H. Heine), op.61, 1929–31; Die Tänzerin des Himmels (Märchenpantomime), op.54, Augsburg, 12 Nov 1929; Dornröschen (Märchenoper, 3), op.76, 1933–4; Der Wunderdoktor (komische Oper, 3, Behrend, after Molière), op.98, 1947; Der Spiegel (komische Oper, 1, Behrend, after Chin. fairy tale), op.100, 1950; Romantische Komödie (komische Oper, 3, Behrend, after G. Büchner), op.111, 1953

Orch (dates are of perf.): Rotkäppchensuite, op.4, 1912; Am Rhein, op.8, pf, orch, perc, 1913; Fantasie, op.9, pf, orch, 1919; Im Hochgebirge, op.13, 1920; Festmarsch, op.15; Penthesilea, ov., op.31, 1926; Sym. no.1, op.38, 1928; Sym. no.2, op.50, 1931; Lustspiel Ouvertüre, op.55, 1937; Lustige Ouvertüre, op.87, 1947; 5 other syms., op.41, op.44, op.66, op.90, op.96

Vocal: Das heiss’ Eisen (H. Sachs), op.6; 2 Gesänge, op.10, 1v, orch; Der Einsiedler, op.17, T, orch; Jung-Olaf, op.25, Bar, orch; Kasier Friedrich II, ballad, op.32; 6 Kinderlieder, op.33; Der Page von Hochburgund, ballad, op.40, 1v, pf; 3 Gesänge, op.48, 1v, orch; over 100 other lieder and ballads

Chbr (dates are of perf.): Str Qt no.2, op.34, 1922; Pf Trio no.1, op.39, 1923; Pf Trio no.2, op.47, 1923; Str Qt no.3, op.37, 1923; Sonata, op.42, vn, pf, 1925; Sonata, op.43, vc, pf, 1925; Str Qt no.4, op.49; Septet (Tanzsuite), op.114, ob, cl, bn, tpt, trbn, vn, vc; Octet (Suite), op.116, fl, ob, 2 cl, b cl, bn, hn, tpt; Str Trio, op.118; 4 other str qts

Pf: 2 Stücke, op.1, 1899–1902; 24 kleine Stücke, op.12; 24 Preluden und Fugen, op.51; 22 Variationen und Fugen, op.82, orchd

MSS in Bremen, Archiv Deutsche Musikpflege

Principal publishers: Afas, Bühnenvertrieb Kiepenheuer, Heinrichshofen, Schott

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Bauer: ‘Berliner Komponisten’, Musikstadt Berlin zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. H. Kunz (Berlin, 1956), 130–53

JOHN MORGAN/ANDREW D. McCREDIE

Behrend, Siegfried

(b Berlin, 19 Nov 1933; d Hausham, 20 Sept 1990). German guitarist. Although his father, a skilled guitarist, encouraged him, he was virtually self-taught. At 16 he entered the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory to study the piano, composition and conducting, but gradually the guitar claimed his attention. He made his début in Leipzig in 1952 and then gave recitals throughout Germany. He toured Italy in 1954, Spain in 1956, the USSR in 1958, and in 1958–9 made the first of many world tours. He gave an annual masterclass at Rosenburg Castle, and also conducted in Germany. Behrend was specially distinguished in contemporary and avant-garde music: Becker, Bussotti, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Haubenstock-Ramati, Logothetis, Penderecki and Yun composed works for him, many of which he recorded. He was the most renowned German guitarist of his generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.Cooper: ‘Siegfried Behrend, 1933–1990’, Classical Guitar (Nov 1990), 11 only

G.Warren: ‘Siegfried Behrend, 1933-1990: an Appreciation’, Classical Guitar, ix/4 (1990-91), 49–50

J.Duarte: ‘Notes from Europe’, Soundboard, xviii (1991), 72–3

M.J. Summerfield: The Classical Guitar: its Evolution and its Players since 1800 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992, 4/1996)

PETER SENSIER/GRAHAM WADE

Behrens, Hildegard

(b Varel, nr Oldenburg, 9 Feb 1937). German soprano. She studied in Freiburg, making her début there in 1971 as Mozart’s Countess. She then sang at Düsseldorf and Frankfurt in roles including Fiordiligi, Agathe, Elsa, Eva, Kát’a, and Marie (Wozzeck). In 1976 she made her début at Covent Garden as Leonore (Fidelio) and at the Metropolitan as Giorgetta (Il tabarro). She sang Salome at Salzburg (1977) and Brünnhilde at Bayreuth (1983–6). Her repertory also includes Electra (Idomeneo), Tosca, Senta, Isolde, Donna Anna and Strauss’s Electra, which she first sang at the Paris Opéra (1986). Behrens sang Emilia Marty (The Makropulos Affair) at Munich (1988) and Senta at Savonlinna (1989) and the Metropolitan (1992). At the Vienna Staatsoper (1992–3) she sang Brünnhilde in a Ring cycle and Katerina Izmaylova (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), a role she repeated at Munich in 1994. A highly intelligent singer with a rich, warm-toned voice, she excels in Wagner and Strauss. Her extensive discography includes an impassioned Isolde with Bernstein, Salome with Karajan, Strauss’s Electra with Ozawa and Brünnhilde in the complete recording of the Ring under Levine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Blyth: ‘Hildegard Behrens’, Opera, xlii (1991), 502–8

ELIZABETH FORBES

Behrens, Johan Diderik

(b Bergen, 26 Feb 1820; d Kristiania [now Oslo], 29 Jan 1890). Norwegian choral conductor and singing teacher. He was a theology student before being appointed singing teacher at the Christiania Latinskole in 1846. He became a pioneer in men’s choral singing in Norway. At Christiania in 1845, together with Hartvig Lassen and Johan Hals, he founded the Norwegian Student Choral Society, which he conducted from 1849 to 1889; in 1847, also at Christiania, he formed a similar society for merchants, the Mercantile Choral Society, which he conducted until 1887; and in 1848 he established the Artisans’ Choral Society, of which he was conductor until 1854. In 1875 he founded still another society, Johaniterne, and conducted it until 1887. At Behrens’s initiative the first Norwegian choral festival was held in Christiania in 1849; and he was also responsible for song festivals in Asker (1851), Horten (1853), Halden (1856), Arendal (1859) and Bergen (1863). Each summer from 1866 to 1873 he organized singing courses for teachers at state schools. From 1887 to 1890 he taught church singing and chanting at the University of Kristiania.

Behrens’s editions of songs for men’s choirs had great influence in Norway, especially the Samling af flerstemmige mandssange published between 1845 and 1882; it contains about 500 pieces by most of the Norwegian composers of the time, some written specially for the collection, as well as folktunes and music from other countries, both in original form and in arrangement. Behrens was himself responsible for some of the arrangements and texts. His other publications include Skolesangbog (‘School songbook’, 1850–73) and Sanglaere for folkeskolen (‘Singing manual for elementary schools’, 1869–73). Melodibog til norske sangbøger (‘Tunes for Norwegian songbooks’, 1876) contains the only eight tunes known to have been composed by Behrens. His thesis, Om den lutherske salmesang og dens gjenindførelse i den norske kirke (‘Lutheran hymns and their revival in Norwegian churches’, 1858), heralded the beginning of a protracted ‘hymn war’, mainly centring on which rhythmic principles should be used in the new editions of Reformation chorales.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NBL (O.M. Sandvik)

H. Huldt-Nystrøm, ed.: Sangerliv, i–ii (Oslo, 1959)

N. Grinde: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971, 3/1981, abridged 4/1993; Eng. trans., 1991)

I. Hanssen-Bauer: En mann og hans gaffel: Johan Diedrich Behrens, 1820–1890 (diss., U. of Oslo, 1988)

A.S. Bertelsen: ‘Salmesangstriden i Norge på 1800-tallet: om musikalsk form og estetiske prinsipper’, SMN, xvi (1990), 141–59

K. Michelsen: ‘Historien om Carl Warmuths musikketablissement’, Festskrift til 150-Årsjubileet 1993 for Carl Warmuth, kongelig Hof-Musikhandler, Christiania, ed. Ø. Norheim and H. Herresthal (Oslo, 1993), 5–28

KARI MICHELSEN

Behrman, David

(b Salzburg, 16 Aug 1937). American composer. He studied at Harvard (BA 1959) and Columbia (MA 1963) universities. In 1966 he formed the Sonic Arts Union with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, a group that performed live electronic works throughout North America and Europe until 1976. During the late 1960s, he produced Music of Our Time for Columbia Masterworks, a series featuring music by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Henri Pousseur and others. He toured as a composer and performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1970 to 1976. Works written for this collaboration include For Nearly an Hour (1968), Voice with Melody-Driven Electronics (1975) and Interspecies Smalltalk (1984). He has served as co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College (1975–80), and taught at Ohio State University, Rutgers University and the California Institute of the Arts. In the 1980s he designed educational music software as a consultant for Children’s Television Workshop. His awards include grants from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission (1987–8), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individuals (1995) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996).

From the mid-1970s Behrman’s compositions have included live performers who interact with computer-controlled music systems. Works in this genre include Refractive Light (1991), Unforeseen Events (1991), QSRL (1994–7) and My Dear Siegfried … (1996). His sound installations, among them Cloud Music (1974–9), Algorithme et kalimba (1986), A Map of the Known World (1987) and In Thin Air (1995–7), have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Technology Museum, Paris and other institutions.

WORKS

(selective list)

cms

computer music system

Dance scores: For Nearly an Hour (choreog. M. Cunningham: Walkaround Time), 6-track tape, 3 pfmrs, 1968; Voice with Melody-Driven Elec (choreog. Cunningham: Rebus), 1975; Interspecies Smalltalk (choreog. Cunningham: Pictures), vn, elec kbd, cms, 1984

El-ac: Wave Train, 2 amp pf, 2–4 gui mic, 2–4 pfmrs, 1966; Runthrough, 4 pfmrs, 1967 [rev. as Sinescreen, 1970]; Questions from the Floor, loudspkrs, 1968, collab. S. Dienes [rev. as A New Team Takes Over, 1969]; A New Team Takes Over, 2 spkrs, 4-track tape, elec, 1969; Runway, 3 pfmrs, tape, loudspkrs, tape delay; 1969, collab. G. Mumma; Sinescreen, 4 pfmrs, elec, 1970; Pools of Phase-Locked Loops, 1972, collab. K. Morton; Homemade Synth Music with Sliding Pitches, 1973; Vc with Melody-Driven Elec, 1974; Voice with Tpt and Melody-Driven Elec (I.F. Stone), 1974; Voice with Melody-Driven Elec, 1975; Figure in a Clearing, vc, synth, cptr, 1977; On the Other Ocean, pfmrs, cms, 1977; All Thumbs, fl, tpt, cms, 1986–9; Leapday Night (3 scenes), 2 tpt, 1986–8; Mbira Preserves, elec mbira, cms, 1986; A Traveller’s Dream Journal, tape, cptr, 1988–90; Koto Kayak, 13- and 17-str koto ens, kbd, cms, 1990; Navigation and Astronomy, 21-str koto, cms, 1990; Refractive Light, kbd, cms, 1991; Unforeseen Events, 1991; QSRL, 1–2 wind/amp str, cms, 1994–7; My Dear Siegfried … (S. Sassoon, S.N. Behrman), 2vv, shakuhachi, trbn, kbd, cms, 1996

Sound Installations: Cloud Music, synth, video, 1974–9, collab. R. Watts, B. Diamond; Sound Fountain, 4 gui, cms, 1982, collab. P. De Marinis; Algorithme et kalimba, 1 or more mbiras, cms, 1986, collab. G. Lewis; A Map of the Known World, 1 or more mbiras, cms, 1987, collab. Lewis; Keys to Your Music, 1 or more mbiras, cms, 1987–9; In Thin Air, pedals, light board, loudspkrs, cms, 1995–7, collab. J. Lo

Principal recording companies: Lovely Music, Nova Era, New Tone, Classic Masters

WRITINGS

‘What Indeterminate Notation Determines’, PNM, iii/2 (1965), 58–73

‘Designing Interactive Computer-Based Music Installations’, CMR, vi/1 (1991)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Huff: ‘An Interview with David Behrman’, Composer [Hamilton, OH], iv/1 (1972), 29–32

J. Rockwell: ‘David Behrman: Electronic & Computer Music & the Humanist Reaction’, All American Music (New York, 1983), 133–44

H. Pollack: ‘A New Age and a New Left: David Behrman and Frederic Rzewski’, Harvard Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1992), 370–96

JOAN LA BARBARA

Beiaard

(Dut.).

See Carillon.

Beiderbecke, (Leon) Bix

(b Davenport, IA, 10 March 1903; d New York, 6 Aug 1931). American jazz cornettist. As a boy he had a few piano lessons, but he was self-taught on cornet and developed an unorthodox technique by playing along with recordings. His family disapproved of his interest in jazz, and sent him in 1921 to Lake Forest Academy, but the opportunity to play and hear jazz in nearby Chicago caused frequent truancy and eventually his expulsion. After several months working for his father in Davenport he turned to a career in music. Based in Chicago, he became known through his playing and recordings with the Wolverines in 1924. In the same year he began a long association with Frankie Trumbauer, recording with him in New York under the pseudonym of the Sioux City Six; after working with Jean Goldkette’s dance band (1924), he played with Trumbauer’s group in St Louis (1925–6). His association with Trumbauer broadened his musical experience and improved his music reading, in which, however, he was never to become adept. In late 1926 he and Trumbauer joined Goldkette, and were prominent members of his group in New York until it disbanded in September 1927. They then joined Paul Whiteman’s band, with which, and with various groups under their own names, they made a series of influential recordings, notably Singin’ the Blues and Riverboat Shuffle (both 1927, OK), issued under Trumbauer’s leadership. Beiderbecke’s alcoholism caused his health to deteriorate and he was frequently unable to perform. He left Whiteman in September 1929 and his hopes of rejoining the group after recuperation were not realized. Until his death he worked in New York, in a radio series, with the Dorsey Brothers a few times, with the Casa Loma Orchestra and with Benny Goodman.

From relatively undistinguished influences Beiderbecke developed a beautiful and original style. His distinctive, bell-like tone (his friend Hoagy Carmichael described it as resembling a chime struck by a mallet) achieved additional intensity through his unorthodox fingering, which often led him to play certain notes as higher partials in lower overtone series, imparting a slightly different timbre and intonation to successive pitches. With his basically unchanging tone as a foil, Beiderbecke relied for expressiveness on pitch choice, pacing and rhythmic placement (as opposed to Louis Armstrong, who systematically used variety of timbre). Beiderbecke played and composed at the piano throughout his working life; In a Mist, Flashes, Candlelights and In the Dark (his published piano compositions), in their use of pandiatonicism, whole-tone scales and parallel 7th and 9th chords, reflect his interest in impressionist harmonic language. However, his work on cornet, nearly always in settings over which he had no control, had to conform to the harmonic usages of contemporary jazz and popular music. His playing was largely diatonic and made sparing use of non-diatonic 9ths and 13ths as well as the lowered 3rds and 7ths common in jazz. By avoiding harmonically functional chromatic pitches his improvisations often seemed to transcend the ordinary harmonic progressions of their accompaniment without contradicting them, as his solo on Royal Garden Blues (1927, OK; ex.1) shows. This characteristic, together with his unique timbre, gave his work a restrained, introspective manner and often set his playing apart from its surroundings.

Beiderbecke’s originality made him one of the first white jazz musicians to be admired by black performers; Louis Armstrong recognized in him a kindred spirit, and Rex Stewart exactly reproduced some of his solos on recordings. Beiderbecke’s influence on such white players as Red Nichols and Bunny Berigan was decisive. Although he was largely unknown to the general public at the time of his death, he acquired an almost legendary aura among jazz musicians and enthusiasts; on account of such popularized accounts as Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (Boston, 1938), based very loosely on his life and career, he soon came to symbolize the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in the popular imagination. Only towards the end of the 20th century did legend and fact become clearly separated and Beiderbecke’s career and achievement become seen in a true perspective. The film biographyBix: an Interpretation of a Legend (1994) captured the essential circumstances of his life and the sound of his music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SchullerEJ

E. Nichols: ‘Bix Beiderbecke’, Jazzmen, ed. F. Ramsey and C.E. Smith (New York, 1939/R), 143–60

N. Shapiro and N.Hentoff, eds.: Hear me Talkin’ to ya: the Story of Jazz by the Men who Made it (New York, 1955, 2/1966), 140–64

B. James: Bix Beiderbecke (London, 1959); repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, 1978) 41–73

B. Green: The Reluctant Art: Five Studies in the Growth of Jazz (London, 1962), 18

V. Castelli and others: The Bix Bands: a Bix Beiderbecke Disco-biography (Milan, 1972)

J.P. Perhonis: The Bix Beiderbecke Story: the Jazz Musician in Legend, Fiction, and Fact (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1978)

JAMES DAPOGNY/J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Beijerman-Walraven, Jeanne

(b Semarang, Java, 14 June 1878; d Arnhem, 20 Sept 1969). Dutch composer. She studied harmony and composition privately with Frits Koeberg in The Hague. Her first compositions belong to the late Romantic tradition, showing the influence of Mahler, Bruckner and Franck. The Concert Overture is a robust, solidly constructed work, which opens with martial horn motifs and is rich in contrasting moods. The string quartet, with long, lyrical lines, is cyclic in that it closes with the opening motif of the first movement. Her love of Dutch and French poetry inspired a sizeable number of compositions. She gradually developed her own style, characterized by the alternation of bold, muscular gestures with more delicate effects, and later turned to a more contemporary Schoenbergian, atonal language. Her mature works are strongly Expressionist, often based on the development of a single motif with short violent drives towards a climax. In spite of the recognition it gained from influential Dutch musicians, her work was rarely played after the 1920s. Until her death she remained deeply interested in contemporary music by Stockhausen, Dallapiccola, Nono, Boulez, Messiaen and others.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Concert Ov., 1910; Orkeststuk, 1921; Lento and Allegro moderato, 1921

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, vn, pf, 1909, 1952; Koraal, org/pf, 1911; Str Qt, 1912; 2 stukken, pf, 1929; Andante espressivo con molta emozione, pf, 1950

Vocal: Pan (H. Gorter), S, pf; Het is winter, S, pf; Licht mijn licht, SATB; Uit de wijzangen (R. Tagore, trans. F. van Eeden), Mez, pf, before 1916: Ik moet mijn boot te water laten, Nu mogen alle vregdewijzen zich mengen; De zieke buur (F. Pauwels), A, orch, 1922; In den stroom (H. Keuls), song, 1924; Feestlied (Keuls), S, pf/orch, 1926; Om de stilte (Keuls), song, 1940; Mère (3 poèmes de M. Carême), low v, pf, 1950; De ramp (Renée), song, 1953

Principal publishers: Broekmans & Van Poppel, Donemus

HELEN METZELAAR

Beijing [Peking].

Capital city of China. With a recorded history of some three millennia, Beijing has been one of China's principal centres since its selection as imperial capital by the invading Mongols in the late 13th century. Capital for much of the intervening seven centuries, Beijing has been an important location for many genres of Chinese music, including court music, religious music, theatrical and ballad-singing forms and, more recently, Western and Western-influenced styles.

Perhaps foremost among the traditional musical forms closely associated with Beijing is Beijing opera, formed in the late 18th century as a combination of operatic styles from south and central China. Troupes from outside the capital visited Beijing to take part in imperial celebrations; the best of these troupes then stayed on, establishing schools for the training of young actors and adopting aspects of the music, repertory and performance style of other incoming ensembles. A second significant tradition form particularly identified with Beijing is the local style of narrative singing jingyun dagu, sometimes translated as Beijing drumsinging, which arose during the mid-19th century. The teashop-theatres at which these genres were performed were concentrated in the Qianmen district of Beijing, an area to the south of the Imperial Palace in central Beijing.

The modern city of Beijing has all the musical institutions of the capital of a major centrally planned nation. Many of the country's leading state ensembles are located in Beijing, and troupes and orchestras from other parts of China and further afield visit the city regularly. Beijing is also the home of important musical instrument factories, the principal centre for China's national radio and television broadcasting services (which employ many musicians), and the main site of studios for its emergent rock music industry. The head offices of China Records (Zhongguo Changpian) and China's main music publishing company, the People's Music Publisher (Renmin Yinyue Chubanshe), are based in Beijing.

Tertiary music education in Beijing dates from the 1920s, with the formation of a Music Training Institute attached to Beijing University in 1922. The curriculum included both Western art music and historical and contemporary Chinese genres, although the majority of students specialized in Western music theory or performance. The Institute closed in 1927 when its funding was cut, but similar courses were inaugurated at several teacher training universities, and some private music schools were also opened. Two music conservatories are presently of particular note, the Central Conservatory of Music (Zhongyang Yinyue Xueyuan) and the China Conservatory of Music (Zhongguo Yinyue Xueyuan). The Central Conservatory (founded in Tianjin in 1950) moved to Beijing in 1958. Its original set of four departments (composition, orchestra, piano, opera-voice) was gradually expanded to seven (the above plus conducting, musicology and national instruments). There is also a research institute and a scholarly journal. Most students follow four- or five-year degree programmes. In 1986 there were some 560 students (including approximately 100 postgraduates) at the Central Conservatory, and another 368 at the special primary and secondary schools attached to the conservatory. Staff numbered 668. The China Conservatory of Music (founded 1964) concentrates on Chinese music, and is again fed by a special secondary school for musically gifted students. Other than its five departments (composition, instrumental music, music education, musicology, opera-voice) the China Conservatory supports an experimental instrumental ensemble, a research institute and the journal Zhongguo yinyue (‘Music in China’). There are also specialist schools or departments in Beijing for dance, traditional drama and military music, and recently music courses have been added to several of Beijing's universities. Music education is taught at several teacher-training universities.

A further centre for music scholarship in Beijing is the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts (Zhongguo Yishu Yanjiuyuan Yinyue Yanjiusuo), founded in 1954 under the leadership of music historian Yang Yinliu. The Music Research Institute publishes various scholarly materials (including the journal Zhongguo yinyuexue) and maintains an extensive library of written materials and recordings, many of which are of historical importance. There is also a collection of new, old and reconstructed ancient instruments.

Scholarship also takes place under the auspices of various bodies, including the Chinese Musicians Association (Zhongguo Yinyuejia Xiehui). Other than staging conferences, this association publishes journals covering the fields of musicology (broadly defined), music education and composition. Of these, Renmin yinyue is well known abroad, particularly for its sensitivity to the political currents of the day.

The rise of Western-style performance ensembles in Beijing has paralleled the growth of the music conservatories and the broadcasting industry. Although there were student orchestras at some of the educational institutions of the 1920s and 30s, it was from the late 1930s onwards that large-scale professional ensembles began to develop. Important performance ensembles in contemporary Beijing include the Central Ballet (Zhongyang Baleiwutuan), Central Opera Theatre (Zhongyang Gejuyuan), Central Song and Dance Ensemble (Zhongyang Gewutuan), Central Minorities Song and Dance Ensemble (Zhongyang Minzu Gewutuan), Central Traditional Orchestra (Zhongyang Minzu Yeutuan), China Opera Theatre (Zhongguo Gejuyuan), China Broadcast Traditional Orchestra (Zhongguo Guangbo Yishutuan Minzu Yuetuan) and Central Philharmonic (Zhongyang Yuetuan). Many of these are large organizations, the Central Philharmonic, for instance, including a professional chorus, a team of instrumental and vocal soloists, staff composers as well as a large symphony orchestra. Since the mid-1980s direct government funding has not always kept pace with inflation, and salaries have fallen in real terms. This has led some musicians to seek work in hotel lobbies or bars, while others have taken posts abroad, moved into private teaching or given up music altogether.

Beijing is additionally one of China's centres for the production of popular music. Genres prominent there include state-promoted light music (tongsu yinyue) and karaoke. There is also a small rock community, among whom the musician Cui Jian achieved international prominence during the 1980s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.P. Mackerras: The Rise of the Peking Opera 1770-1870: Social Aspects of the Theatre in Manchu China (Oxford, 1972)

C.P. Mackerras: The Performing Arts in Contemporary China (London, 1981)

Zhongguo dabaike quanshu: xiqu, quyi [Encyclopedia Sinica: opera and narrative singing] (Beijing, 1983)

Zhongguo yinyue cidian [Dictionary of Chinese music] (Beijing, 1985)

R.C. Kraus: Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York, 1989)

Zhongguo dabaike quanshu: yinyue, wudao [Encyclopedia Sinica: music and dance] (Beijing, 1989)

T. Brace: ‘Popular Music in Contemporary Beijing: Modernism and Cultural Identity’, AsM, xxii/2 (1990–91), 43–66

P. Friedlander: ‘China's “Newer Value” Pop: Rock-and-Roll and Technology on the New Long March’, AsM, xxii/2 (1991), 67–81

Zhongguo yinyue cidian xubian [Dictionary of Chinese music, suppl.] (Beijing, 1992)

A.F. Jones: Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, NY, 1992)

JONATHAN P.J. STOCK

Beijing opera.

Beijing opera, still referred to by many English-speakers as Peking opera, is one of the most highly developed and best known of Chinese opera forms both in China and abroad. Before the 20th century, Beijing opera was not commonly performed outside of Beijing and a few other centres. Its enormous popularity in the early 20th century, however, carried it to the status of ‘national opera’.

1. History.

2. Music.

NANCY GUY

Beijing opera

1. History.

Following a long-observed custom of including opera in birthday celebrations, opera troupes from around China poured into the capital to take part in the celebrations for the Qianlong Emperor's 80th birthday in 1790. Among the theatrical participants were troupes from Anhui province in central-eastern China, who specialized in the performance of the xipi and erhuang music. Xipi and erhuang came to form the core of Beijing opera music, and it is believed that 1790 marks the first time that they were heard together in Beijing. Historians, therefore, take this year to represent the beginnings of Beijing opera. It was many years, however, before the opera evolved into an independent form with its own unique identity.

Despite an official ban in 1798, the new opera prospered in Beijing. By the 1820s four of the Anhui troupes dominated the stage: the Sanqing, Chuntai, Sixi and Hechun. Two of these, the Chuntai and Sixi, survived until the Boxer uprising in 1900.

Before 1860, the imperial court scorned Beijing opera as a vulgar entertainment, but in July of that year both the Sanqing and Sixi companies were invited to perform at the palace on the occasion of the Xianfeng Emperor's 30th birthday. This event indicates that in spite of its status as a lowly form of popular entertainment, some members of the imperial family were quite fond of Beijing opera. For various reasons, troupes from outside the palace did not appear at court again until the celebration of the dowager empress Cixi's 50th birthday in 1884. While her role in China's general history is typically viewed unfavourably, the dowager empress's contribution to the development of Beijing opera was enormous. Before her reign, most opera at court was performed by special companies that rarely performed outside the palaces. From 1884 to 1910, actors from the city frequently visited the palace, and some actors even took up residence at court, where they taught and performed. Imperial patronage raised the status of Beijing opera in society as a whole.

The early decades of the 20th century may be considered Beijing opera's golden age, with the art form being one of the most pervasive and popular types of entertainment in China. Until the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, the tradition remained extremely vital, with its practitioners actively involved in artistic experimentation and creative activity. The work of actors, musicians and librettists of the early republican period remain unsurpassed in terms of volume, innovation and longevity. Many of the schools of performance (liupai) developed during this period continue to dominate contemporary practice, and a large portion of today's standard repertory is comprised of works created during these years.

The composition of a single opera involved not only a librettist but also (of equal importance) musicians, who set the text by adapting melodies from the pihuang musical system, and actors, who were involved in shaping melodic and textual construction in addition to designing their individual choreographies. All of the major actors of the period were involved in the composition of new operas and the revision of old ones. The works they created are still identified as belonging to their school of performance. For example, the operas of four male performers of young female roles, Mei Lanfang (1894–1961; fig.2), Cheng Yanqiu (1904–58), Xun Huisheng (1900–68) and Shang Xiaoyun (1900–76), known collectively as the four famous dan (sida mingdan), continue to be widely staged and their performance styles closely imitated.

That Beijing opera held a relevant and dynamic role in society is demonstrated by the hopes of social activists, who viewed it as a potentially powerful vehicle for social and political change. The Beijing Opera Reform Movement, at its height from approximately 1908 to 1917, was just one of many such campaigns aimed at social and political reform. Activists believed that the theatre served as a classroom for the largely illiterate masses and that the most expedient way to achieve broad social change was through opera. To this end, progressive performers staged new operas called shizhuang jingju (contemporary-costume Beijing opera), the texts of which often focussed on contemporary social problems. The staging of these dramas employed realistic scenery and stage properties, and actors wore costumes based on contemporary clothing styles. The enthusiasm for this use of Beijing opera began to wane by the onset of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 as activists turned their attention away from opera and towards spoken drama.

Following changes in attitudes towards women in society at large, females began to assume roles on the stage during the early republican period. Women had hitherto been virtually excluded from the theatre, both as performers and spectators. A number of all-female troupes were active in the early 1900s, but they performed mostly at private gatherings and not in public theatres. There were a number of mixed companies throughout the 1920s and 30s, but the practice of keeping single-sex companies did not die out until after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Foreign tours of Beijing opera represent another milestone of the republican era. Mei Lanfang's 1930 tour to the United States gained the greatest acclaim. Mei toured more than five major cities, where his performance received rave reviews. Other early tours include Mei's 1919 and 1924 visits to Japan and his 1935 visit to the Soviet Union, as well as Cheng Yanqiu's tour to the Soviet Union, Germany, France and Italy in 1932 and 1933.

The War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45) brought a significant disruption to the performance and creation of Beijing opera. A number of China's finest artists refused to perform, and some training schools were closed. Creative teams such as that of Mei Lanfang and Qi Rushan (1877–1962), one of Mei’s most prolific librettists and artistic advisors, were broken by the circumstances of war and never reunited.

After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the communists reformed Beijing and other operas according to the ideology of Mao Zedong. Mao saw all art as representing the interests of a particular class and demanded that Beijing opera should serve the ‘workers, peasants and soldiers’, not the feudal aristocracy or bourgeoisie. Art should be explicit propaganda for the revolution and should help to convert the masses to socialism. To see that practice was brought in line with theory, the Ministry of Culture set up a Drama Reform Committee in July 1950. The reformers made certain changes to the texts and performance conventions to emphasize patriotism, democracy and equality between the sexes. At the same time, they developed a body of modern Beijing operas on contemporary themes.

The status of actors improved tremendously with the Communist party's efforts to eliminate institutionalized discrimination against actors, to raise their living standard and to promote the notion that theatre workers are due the same respect as other ‘brain workers’. Training methods also changed, and actors were recruited by a modern school system that included normal education in addition to instruction in the arts of the theatre.

Until 1963 traditional opera flourished, although particular patriotic or anti-feudal items enjoyed special prestige. From 1964 traditional operas virtually disappeared; during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) they were strictly banned and replaced by ‘model operas’ (yangbanxi), the themes of which were contemporary and revolutionary, with realistic staging and costumes. After the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ in 1976 the performance of model operas was halted, and the traditional repertory slowly reclaimed its place on the stage; in 1978 Deng Xiaoping publicly condoned the revival of traditional opera.

During the 1980s and 90s many social, political and economic forces combined to threaten Beijing opera's prospects of continuing as a living tradition. With economic reform, the state has withdrawn substantial funding from both professional companies and training schools. Box office sales are now directly responsible for a much greater portion of a company's funding than in previous decades. This change has come precisely at a time when young people's interest in the traditional arts is declining and audiences for them are growing old and dying.

Beijing opera in Taiwan experienced a significantly different history from that in mainland China. Performers who fled to the island in the late 1940s formed the foundation of Taiwan's tradition. Beijing opera's primary patron from 1949 until the mid-1990s was the Republic of China's Ministry of Defence, which operated a number of full-time troupes and training schools. The art form became known officially as ‘National Opera’ (guoju) in Taiwan, and it was more or less maintained in the ‘traditional’ pre-1949 performance style throughout the mid-1980s. As the move towards ‘Taiwanization’ has gathered strength on the island, support for mainland-derived culture has come under attack, while official patronage for Taiwan-born forms, such as Gezai opera, has increased. In 1996 the Ministry of Defence disbanded its remaining three troupes and relinquished control of its last training school. Currently there are two state-supported troupes, both under the administration of the Ministry of Education: the Guoguang Drama Troupe and the Fuxing National Opera School.

Beijing opera

2. Music.

Most traditional Beijing opera music belongs to either the xipi or erhuang tune families. The combination of these two families was so integral to the opera's identity that in the past, before it was called Beijing opera (jingxi or jingju), the genre was known as pihuang opera (pihuangxi), combining the pi from xipi and the huang from erhuang. Music of other regional operas was also absorbed into Beijing opera, including melodies from kunqu and clapper opera, but pihuang music remained dominant.

Xipi and erhuang may be conceived of as modes, and together they are referred to as the pihuang musical system. While they share the same basic scale, their cadential pitches are different, as are other crucial melodic and rhythmic features. Their dramatic associations are also distinct; erhuang is typically used in serious or melancholy situations, while xipi is heard in livelier, more positive circumstances. These associations are extended to the timbre of the accompanying instruments: jinghu (bowed fiddle) with bright timbres accompany xipi, while players use a dark-sounding jinghu with a slightly larger body to accompany erhuang arias.

Both xipi and erhuang have a number of different aria types. Aria types belonging to the same family share tonal, modal and large structural features but vary in terms of metrical structure, tempo, melodic detail and specific dramatic or emotional association. One prominent theory holds that these distinct aria types were evolved from a single ‘mother’ tune. Across generations of performance, the original tunes underwent permanent and lasting changes and, over time, developed unique musical identities and were given individual names. Today, for example, the erhuang family is comprised of at least eight different aria types, including the unmetred sanban (dispersed metre) and daoban (lead-in metre), and the metred yuanban (primary metre) in a moderate 2/4 and manban (slow metre) in 4/4.

The number of pihuang aria types has been growing continually over the course of the history of Beijing opera. Since 1949 several new aria types have been created, such as the new erhuang aria types in 1/4 metre, including liushuiban (‘flowing-water metre’) and kuaiban (fast metre), and recent experiments in 3/4 metre. Since the Cultural Revolution the use of composed music that is not directly related to the pihuang musical system has become increasingly common. Often this music is purely instrumental and is used for overtures or as background music. The question of genre identity is brought into play when this music is sung and when it constitutes a large portion of an opera's music.

Purely percussive music constitutes another important kind of Beijing opera music. Percussion patterns punctuate the actors' speech and movement, provide sound effects and mark the structural divisions of an opera including its beginning, ending and scene changes.

The traditional orchestra is comprised of two main sections, the wenchang (‘civil section’) and the wuchang (‘martial section’). The core wenchang instruments are jinghu, jing erhu and yueqin. The jinghu and the jing erhu are two-string bowed lutes and belong to a family of bowed lutes known as Huqin. The jinghu has a bamboo body, whereas the jing erhu body is hexagonal and made of wood (pterocarpus); both are covered on one end in snakeskin. The timbre of the jinghu is sharp and piercing, in contrast to the more mellow and sonorous jing erhu, which is an octave lower. The jing erhu was added to the orchestra in the 1920s to complement Mei Lanfang's bright and clear voice and, in traditional performances, is only used to accompany female and young male roles. The yueqin is a plucked short-neck lute with a large round body and two to four strings. Other instruments include the suona, a conical double-reed shawm with a rosewood body and a metal bell, and the sanxian, a three-string long-necked plucked lute.

Four players form the core of the wuchang. The leader plays both the drum called danpigu and the clappers and is responsible for leading and signalling the entire ensemble. The danpigu is a small, single-headed drum that sits on a large three-legged stand and is played with bamboo sticks. A small gong, a large gong and a pair of cymbals comprise the rest of the wuchang, although other musical instruments may also be added when dramatically or musically appropriate.

The orchestra was gradually expanded after the establishment of the People’s Republic. Up to the mid-1960s, the main source of these new inclusions was China's own folk and classical instruments. During the Cultural Revolution a wide variety of Western instruments were added, including strings, oboe, french horn, trumpet and timpani. Most of these were dropped from the ensemble after the Cultural Revolution, though the cello is still frequently heard. The double bass, timpani and electric piano are also commonly employed in works written during the 1980s and 90s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

A.C. Scott: The Classical Theatre of China (London, 1957)

Zhou Zhifu: Jin bainian de jingju [Beijing opera in the last 100 years] (Hong Kong, 1962)

C. Mackerras: ‘The Growth of the Chinese Regional Drama in the Ming and Ch’ing’, Journal of Oriental Studies, ix (1971), 58–91

C. Mackerras: The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770–1870: Social Aspects of the Theatre in Manchu China (Oxford, 1972)

R.C. Pian: ‘Text Setting with the Shipyi Animated Aria’, Words and Music: the Scholar's View, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 237–70

C. Mackerras: Chinese Theatre in Modern Times: from 1840 to the Present Day (London, 1975)

W. Dolby: A History of Chinese Drama (London, 1976)

Qi Rushan: Qi Rushan quanji [The complete works of Qi Rushan] (Taibei, 1979)

Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin and Mei Shaowu: Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: a Guide to China's Traditional Theatre and the Art of its Great Master (Beijing, 1980)

Liu Jidian: Jingju yinyue gailun [Survey of Beijing opera music] (Beijing, 1981)

An Luxing: Jingju yinyue chutan [An initial exploration of Beijing opera music] (Shandong, 1982)

C. Mackerras: Chinese Theater: from its Origins to the Present Day (Honolulu, 1983)

Hsü Tao-Ching: The Chinese Conception of Theatre (Seattle, 1985)

Su Yi and others: Zhongguo jingju shi [History of Beijing opera in China], i (Beijing, 1990)

E. Wichmann: ‘Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Beijing Opera Performance’, Drama Review, xxxiv (1990), 146–78

Yang Yuye: Jingju changqiang yanjiu [Study of Beijing opera vocal melodies] (Nanjing, 1990)

E. Wichmann: Listening to Theatre: the Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Honolulu, 1991)

M. Lopez: Chinese Drama: an Annotated Bibliography of Commentary, Criticism, and Plays in English Translation (Metuchen, NJ, 1991)

C. Mackerras: ‘Peking Opera before the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Drama, xxviii (1994), 19–42

N. Guy: ‘Peking Opera as “National Opera” in Taiwan: What's in a Name?’, Asian Theatre Journal, xxii (1995), 85–103

Wu Junda: Jingju changqiang yanjiu [Study of Beijing opera vocal melody] (Beijing, 1995)

N. Guy: Peking Opera and Politics in Post-1949 Taiwan (diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1996)

recordings

Zhongguo xiqu yishujia changqiang xuan [Selected vocal melodies of Chinese opera artists], ed. Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyuan Xiqu yanjiusuo, China Record Co. (c1980–)

Mei Lanfang: the Drunken Beauty and Mu Guiying Takes Command, BMG Pacific 8-880057 (1991)

Performing Arts of China: the Opera, videotape, dir. D. Bhattacharya, Sussex Tapes Audio-Forum (London, c1992)

Mei Lanfang de wutai yishu [The stage art of Mei Lanfang], videotape, Zhongguo luxiang dianying [Chinese video films] series, Solid Video Ltd (Hong Kong, c1993)

The Education of a Singer at the Beijing Opera, videotape, dir. M.-C. Ququemelledir, Films for the Humanities and Sciences (Princeton, NJ, 1994)

Opéra de Pekin: la forêt en feu, la princesse cent-fleurs, Buda 92618-2 (1994)

Beinum, Eduard (Alexander) van

(b Arnhem, 3 Sept 1900; d Amsterdam, 13 April 1959). Dutch conductor. Having studied composition (with Sem Dresden), the viola and the piano, he became conductor of the orchestra in Haarlem in 1927 and a keen advocate of contemporary Dutch music. He made his début as a pianist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1920, and in 1931 was appointed its second conductor, later becoming associate conductor and, in 1945, Mengelberg’s successor. He not only maintained the high standard of the orchestra but became internationally the best known of Dutch conductors. While in London to discuss the impending visit of the Concertgebouw, he made an unexpected first appearance (deputizing for the indisposed Albert Coates) as conductor of an LPO concert at the Stoll Theatre in 1946. After further guest engagements with the LPO he became its principal conductor (1949–51), while retaining the Concertgebouw post. He developed a warm relationship not only with the orchestra but also with his London public. He encouraged Malcolm Arnold, the LPO’s first trumpet, as a composer, and conducted the first recording of a work by Arnold, the overture Beckus the Dandipratt. He championed Britten and with the Concertgebouw gave the first performance of the Spring Symphony (Amsterdam, 1949). Beinum had already been a guest conductor with the Leningrad PO (1937) and other orchestras, when in 1954 he made his first appearance in the USA conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. Later that year he toured the USA with the Concertgebouw, and in 1956 became musical director of the Los Angeles PO, while maintaining his Amsterdam conductorship. Beinum was admired for his sincere interpretation of a considerable repertory. He was particularly committed to Dutch music, and the composers Hendrik Andriessen, Badings, Henkemans and Orthels, among others, benefited from his attention. An Eduard van Beinum Foundation was established after his death.

ARTHUR JACOBS/CHARLES BARBER

Beissel [Beisel], (Georg) Conrad [Konrad]

(b Eberbach, 1 March 1691; d Ephrata, PA, 6 July 1768). American composer of German birth. He was baptized into the Calvinist faith as Georg (not Johann) Conrad on 4 August 1691. He found himself in conflict with the church authorities because of his religious views, and in 1720 he emigrated to America, where he established and administered a Protestant monastic society at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 1732, basing it on austere self-denial, celibacy and pious simplicity (see Ephrata Cloister). Beissel was called Father Friedsam by the community, although his preaching was strict and his demeanour not always peaceful. He is recognized as one of America’s earliest composers, and the Turtel-Taube, containing works of Beissel and his followers, was the first book of original hymns published in the colonies. His ‘Verrede über die Sing-Arbeit’, published as a foreword to the Turtel-Taube, was the first on the subject written in America.

Beissel’s hymns are chorales in which a melody is adapted to a metrical, rhyming poem and the harmony is organized without traditional use of a bass line; this results in many inversions and awkward progressions. His anthems are settings of portions of scripture with much use of antiphony. Rhythmic stress is organized according to the accent of the words; the chorales were set in four to seven parts, the tenor always being sung by women. In addition to the Ephrata hymnals, Beissel’s compositions also appeared in hymnals published (in 1730, 1732 and 1736) by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, and in 1739 Christopher Sauer issued his Zionitischer Weyrauchs Hügel, a large collection of hymns and other verse (including some by European authors), in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

WORKS

Das Gesäng der einsamen und verlassenen Turtel-Taube (Ephrata, PA, 1747)

Paradisisches Wunder-Spiel (Ephrata, PA, 1754)

Hymns in: Göttliche Liebes und Lobes gethöne (Philadelphia, 1730); Vorspiel der Neuen-Welt (Philadelphia, 1732); Jacobs Kampff- und Ritter-Platz (Philadelphia, 1736); Zionitischer Weyrauchs Hügel (Germantown, PA, 1739); Nachklang zum Gesäng der einsamen Turtel-Taube (Ephrata, PA, 1755); Neuvermehrtes Gesäng der einsamen Turtel-Taube (Ephrata, PA, 1762)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (P.S. Leinbach)

GroveA (E.C. Wolf)

W.C. Klein: Johann Conrad Beissel, Mystic and Martinet (Philadelphia, 1942/R)

L.G. Blakely: ‘Johann Conrad Beissel and Music of the Ephrata Cloister’, JRME, xv (1967), 120–38

O. Kilian: ‘Konrad Beisel (1691–1768): Founder of the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania’, Bach, vii/3 (1976), 25–8; vii/4 (1976), 31–6; viii/1 (1977), 23–4

D.A. Seachrist: Snow Hill and the German Seventh-Day Baptists: Heirs to the Musical Traditions of Conrad Beissel’s Ephrata Cloister (diss., Kent State U., 1993)

L.A. Viehmeyer: First-Line Index to Ephrata Hymnody (unpubd computerized index, Youngstown State U.)

RUSSELL P. GETZ/R

Bek, Josef

(b Úsov, Moravia, 5 Dec 1934). Czech musicologist. He studied musicology with Jan Racek and Bohumír Štědroň and aesthetics with Mirko Novák at Brno University (1952–7), where he graduated with a dissertation on Czech secular folksong in the 16th and 17th centuries (Česká světská píseň lidová v XVI. a XVII. století). After his studies he worked in Olomouc, Brno and Prague until 1964, when he joined the Musicology Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Initially he was a research fellow and then scientific secretary; after the institute’s reorganization (1972) he became head of the musicology section and then deputy director (1974–90). He took the doctorate at Prague in 1969 with a dissertation on international music of the 20th century and the CSc in 1972 with a study of Czech music’s international relations in the years 1918–38. From 1972 he taught part-time at the Prague University musicology department and was made university docent in 1982. He was awarded the DSc in 1987.

During the period 1960–90 Bek was a prominent Czech writer on music of the first half of the 20th century. From a secure, party-based position at the Academy of Sciences and, as assistant (1971–4) and subsequently deputy chief editor (1974–90) of its journal Hudební věda, he helped ensure that modern trends and their Czech manifestations were a frequent preoccupation in its pages. The lavishly-produced history of Czech music 1918–45 (Dějiny české hudební kultury, 1981) was written as a team work during his tenure at the academy; he was a major contributor and adviser. After the fall of the communist government he left the academy. His subsequent writings have concentrated on the music of the German-Czech composer Ervín Schulhoff.

WRITINGS

‘Několik poznámek k studiu moravské obrozenské písně’ [Some remarks on the study of Moravian songs of the Czech revival], Rodné zemi, ed. R. Fukal and M. Kopecký (Brno, 1958), 462–9

‘Neznámý fragment Janáčkova kvarteta’ [An unknown fragment of a Janáček quartet], Slezský sborník, lviii (1960), 374–8

‘K otázce systematického třídění nápěvů kramářských písní’ [The systematic classification of the tunes of market songs], Václavkova Olomouc 1961, 369–75

Impresionismus a hudba [Impressionism and music] (Prague, 1964)

‘John Cage v Praze’, HRo, xvii (1964), 838–9

Světová hudba dvacátého století [International 20th-century music] (diss., U. of Prague, 1969; Prague, 1968)

‘Prag als Zentrum der tschechischen und deutschen Musikkultur zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen’, Musica bohemica et europaea: Brno V 1970, 381–8

‘Česká hudba: nejnovější období (1945–1965)’ [Czech music: the most recent period (1945–1965)], Československá vlastivěda, xi/3, ed. M. Očadlík and R. Smetana (Prague, 1971), 287–311

‘Česká hudba ve slovanské spolupráci 1918–38’ [Czech music and Slavonic cooperation 1918–38], HV, ix (1972), 291–303; x (1973), 3–20 [with Russ. summary, 21–5]

Mezinárodní styky české hudby 1918–38 [Czech music’s international relations in the years 1918–38] (CSc diss., U. of Prague, 1972)

‘Ervín Schulhoff a avantgarda’ [Schulhoff and the avant garde], Česká hudba světu, svět české hudbě, ed. J. Bajer (Prague, 1974), 247–68

‘Pokus o marxistickou interpretaci ideovosti hudby v české muzikologii’ [An attempt at a Marxist interpretation in Czech musicology of musical ideas], HRo, xxviii (1975), 42–4

with J. Fukač and I. Poledňák: ‘Česká hudební věda 1945–75’ [Czech musicology 1945–75], HV, xiii (1976), 3–26 [with Ger. summary]

‘Janáček a meziválečná avantgarda’ [Janáček and the interwar avant garde], HV, xv (1978), 291–304 [with Ger. summary]

‘Adorno, Stravinsky a Martinů’, HRo, xxxii (1979), 504–8

‘Musik als Ausdrucks- und Mitteilungssystem’, MZ, xvi (1980), 77–92

with others: Dějiny české hudební kultury 20. století [Czech musical culture of the 20th Century], ii (Prague, 1981)

‘Der Dresdner Aufenthalt Erwin Schulhoffs’, BMw, xxiv (1982), 112–22

Hudební neoklasicismus [Musical neo-classicism] (Prague, 1982)

‘Inovační trendy v české a sovětské hudbé 60. let’ [Innovative trends in Czech and Soviet music in the 1960s], HV, xx (1983), 291–7

‘Stylové problémy ve vývoji české hudby po roce 1945’ [Stylistic problems in the development of Czech music after 1945], MMC, no.30 (1983), 129–46

‘Die tschechische Musik-Avantgarde’, IRASM, xiv (1983), 79–92

Avantgarda: ke genezi socialistickeho realisimu v české hudební [The avant garde: development of socialist realism in Czech music] (Prague, 1984)

‘40 let tvorby současných českých skladatelů’ [40 years of writing by contemporary Czech composers], OM, xvii (1985), 161–71

‘Erwin Schulhoff’, Musik in der Theresienstadt: Dresden 1991, 44–59

‘Erwin Schulhoff: kleine Chronik seines Lebens’, Erwin Schulhoff: Cologne 1992, 9–34

‘Schulhoffs Wolkenpumpe: Dada in Musik’, Der jüdische Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte Böhmens und Mährens: Regensburg 1992, 92–8

‘“Alban Berg nennt sich mein neuer Freund”: Erwin Schulhoff als musikalischer “Futurist” in Dresden’, ÖMz, xlviii (1993), 469–76

Erwin Schulhoff: Leben und Werk (Hamburg, 1994)

‘Erwin Schulhoff und Prag’, ‘Zum Einschlafen gibt's genügend Musiken’: Düsseldorf 1994, 9–22

JOHN TYRRELL

Békésy, Georg von

(b Budapest, 3 June 1899; d Cambridge, MA, 13 June 1972). Hungarian acoustician. He studied at the universities of Berne and Budapest, where he took the PhD (1923). He taught at the University of Budapest until 1947, and was engaged in research with the Hungarian telephone service concerning the mechanical behaviour of the ear, work which led to a revision of the theory of hearing. He later worked on physiological acoustics at Harvard University, and is the only acoustician to have obtained a Nobel Prize. Békésy studied the acoustics of the ear, sometimes by direct microscopic observation through tiny holes bored into the bony wall of the cochlea. He made fundamental discoveries about the operation of the inner ear and the way in which it responds to complex sounds; these discoveries are described with great lucidity in his book Experiments in Hearing (New York, 1960).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Ratliff: ‘Georg von Békésy, 3 June 1899–13 June 1972’, Biographical Memoirs: National Academy of Sciences, xlviii (1976), 25–49

R.W.B. STEPHENS/CLIVE GREATED

Bekker, Dietrich.

See Becker, Dietrich.

Bekker, (Max) Paul (Eugen)

(b Berlin, 11 Sept 1882; d New York, 7 March 1937). German critic and writer on music. He studied the violin with Rehfeld, the piano with Sormann and theory with Horwitz. After working as a freelance violinist in Berlin and as a conductor at Aschaffenburg (1902–3) and Görlitz (1903–4), he became music critic of the Berliner neueste Nachrichten in 1906; in 1909 he moved to the Berliner allgemeine Zeitung and in 1911 became chief critic of the Frankfurter Zeitung (1911–23). Bekker’s position was an influential one, and he took full advantage of it, helped by his brilliant style and his extensive theoretical and practical knowledge. He was a judicious advocate of Mahler, Schoenberg and Schreker, but less enthusiastic about Strauss and Berg. Pfitzner attacked Bekker in Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz (1920); in that same year Busoni formulated his aesthetic of ‘Junge Klassizität’ in his correspondence with Bekker, parts of which were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung.

In 1925 Bekker was able to realize a longstanding ambition to direct an opera house when he became Intendant at Kassel; he held a similar position at Wiesbaden from 1927 to 1932. Through his theatre activity, which included stage direction, Bekker undertook ambitious revivals including seldom-heard works by Berlioz, Boieldieu, Cimarosa, Dittersdorf, Grétry and Weber, as well as premières, world and local, of works by, among many others, Alfano, Busoni, Casella, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Delius, Hindemith, Korngold, Krenek, Milhaud, Pfitzner, Schoenberg, Schreker, Strauss, Stravinsky, Stephan and Weill. In 1933 Bekker, whose father was Jewish, left Germany and settled in Paris, where he wrote for the Pariser Tageblatt. At the end of 1934 he emigrated to New York and became chief music critic for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. Shortly before his death he completed his first book in English.

Over three decades of critical activity Bekker helped articulate some of the major currents of early 20th-century aesthetic philosophy. In its examination of the poetic idea in Beethoven’s music, Bekker’s 1911 biography of the composer is a provocative example of historical hermeneutics, while Das deutsche Musikleben (1916) is a pioneering work of music sociology that had a demonstrable influence on the work of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Even while developing the idea of music as a societally formative force (gesellschaftsbildende Kraft) in such monographs as Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (1918), Bekker began to stake out the principles of a phenomenology of music that became the chief concern of his books and essays of the mid-1920s. This shift in critical focus anticipated certain precepts of neo-classicism and Neue Sachlichkeit and influenced the critic’s interest in the music of such younger composers as Hindemith, Weill and Krenek (who served as Bekker’s assistant in Kassel), although Bekker remained more interested in exploring fundamental principles of musical development and social interaction than in participating in aesthetic debates. Bekker’s activities as a theatre administrator influenced the more practical bent of his last books, including his popular surveys Wandlungen der Oper (1934) and The Story of the Orchestra (1936).

WRITINGS

Oskar Fried, sein Werden und Schaffen (Berlin, 1907)

Jacques Offenbach (Berlin, 1909)

Das Musikdrama der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1909)

Beethoven (Berlin, 1911, numerous later edns; Eng. trans., 1925, 2/1939)

Franz Liszt (Bielefeld, 1912)

‘Parsifal’-Schutz? (Frankfurt, 1912)

Zweck und Ziele des Männergesangs (Munich, 1914)

Das deutsche Musikleben (Berlin, 1916, 2/1922)

Politik und geistige Arbeit (Frankfurt, 1918)

Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin, 1918)

Kunst und Revolution (Frankfurt, 1919)

Franz Schreker: Studie zur Kritik der modernen Oper (Berlin, 1919, 2/1983)

Die Weltgeltung der deutschen Musik (Berlin, 1920)

Gesammelte Schriften, i: Kritische Zeitbilder (Berlin, 1921); ii: Klang und Eros (Stuttgart, 1922); iii: Neue Musik (Stuttgart, 1923) [vols. i and ii contain selection of articles orig. pubd in Frankfurter Zeitung]

Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin, 1921/R)

ed.: Robert Schumann: gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (Berlin, 1922)

Wagner, das Leben im Werke (Stuttgart, 1924; Eng. trans., 1931/R)

Von den Naturreichen des Klanges (Stuttgart, 1925)

Wesensformen der Musik (Berlin, 1925)

Materiale Grundlagen der Musik (Vienna, 1926)

Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen (Stuttgart, 1926/R; Eng. trans., 1927)

Organische und mechanische Musik (Stuttgart, 1928)

Das Operntheater (Leipzig, 1931)

Briefe an zeitgenössische Musiker (Berlin, 1932)

Wandlungen der Oper (Zürich, 1934/R; Eng. trans., 1935)

The Story of the Orchestra (New York, 1936/R; Ger. trans., 1989 as Das Orchester: Geschichte, Komponisten, Stile)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Riezler: ‘Der Fall Bekker’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, xviii/7–12 (1921), 305–10

M. Friedland: ‘Die “Neue Musik” und ihre Apologet’, ZfM, Jg.89 (1922), 334–8

H. Mersmann: ‘Paul Bekker und die zeitgenössischen Musiker’, Melos, xi (1932), 400–03

G. Schubert: ‘Aspekte des Bekkerschen Musiksoziologie’, IRMAS, i (1970), 179–86

B. Cherney: The Bekker–Pfitzner Controversy (1919–1920) (Toronto, 1973)

C. Hailey: Catalogue of the Paul Bekker Collection (New Haven, CT, 1993)

C. Hailey: ‘The Paul Bekker Collection in the Yale University Music Library’, Notes, li (1994), 13–21

C. Hailey, ed.: Paul Bekker/Franz Schreker: Briefwechsel, mit sämtlichen Kritiken Bekkers über Schreker (Aachen, 1994)

V. Baur: Paul Bekker: eine Untersuchung seiner Schriften zur Musik (Aachen, 1997)

CHRISTOPHER HAILEY

Bekker, Yakov Davidovich.

See under Becker (i).

Bekku, Sadao

(b Tokyo, 24 May 1922). Japanese composer. He studied physics (graduating in 1946) and aesthetics (1946–50) at Tokyo University, taking private lessons in composition with Ikenouchi from 1944. In 1946, 1947 and 1948 he won prizes in the Mainichi Music Competition, and in 1949, the year he joined the Shinsei Kai, he was awarded the Mainichi Prize. From 1951 to 1954 he was in Paris, where he studied at the Conservatoire with Milhaud, Messiaen and Rivier. He won both the Mainichi and the Otaka Prizes in 1957 with his Two Prayers for orchestra. He taught composition at the Tōhō Gakuen School of Music (1955–73) and at Chūō University (1973–93), while serving as the chairman of the Japanese branch of the ISCM (1963–79). As a composer he represents a Japanese branch of French neo-classicism, influenced by Messiaen and Rivier. His music tends to be lyrical and melodious, his orchestration sensitive. At the beginning of his career he wrote numerous songs; then gradually his interests shifted towards orchestral and chamber music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: San-nin-no onna-no monogatari [A Story of Three Women] (3, M. Suzuki, after kyogen play), 1965; Arima-no Miko [Prince Arima] (3, T. Matsubara, after T. Fukuda), 1967; Aoi-no-ue [Lady Aoi] (3, M. Suzuki, after Lady Murasaki), 1979

Choral: Ō-otoko no niwa [Giant’s Garden], reciter, vv, orch, tape, 1962; Yama no shiki [4 Seasons on the Mountain], vv, pf, 1967; Aru shōnen no shi [A Boy’s Death], vv, pf, 1978; Ki to tori no epiguramu [Epigram of a Tree and a Bird], vv, 1986

Orch: Kangengaku no tame no nishō [2 Movts for Orch], 1946; Futatsu no inori [2 Prayers], 1956; Symphonietta, str, 1959; Sym. no.1, 1962; Vn Conc., 1969; Va Conc., 1971; Sym. no.2, 1977; Pf Conc., 1981; Sym. no.3, 1987; Sym. no.4, 1989

Chbr: Nihon kumikyoku (Suite japonaise) no.1, wind qnt, 1955; Str Qt, 1955–7; Sonata, vn, pf, 1967; Sonata, vc, pf, 1974; Asa no uta [Morning Song], fl, vn, pf, 1976; Dialogue, 2 vn, 1980; Pf Trio, 1995

Song cycles: Umi yon shō [4 Songs on the Sea], 1947; Tansai-shō [10 Songs], 1948; Shiroi ondori [White Cockerel], 1957; Man'yō-shū ni yoru mittsu no uta [3 Poems from the Man'yō-shū], 1958; Arishihi no uta [Songs of Bygone Days], A, pf, 1959–75; Jojō shōkyoku-sh ū [Lyric Short Songs], S, pf, 1962–74; Miyoshi Tatsuji ni yoru yottsu no uta [4 Songs to Poems by Miyoshi], S, pf, 1977; Chieko-shō (9 songs, after K. Takamura), Bar, pf, 1983

Pf: Nishiki-megane [Kaleidoscope], suite, 1966; 3 Paraphrases, 1968

Principal publisher: Ongaku-no-Tomo Sha

MASAKATA KANAZAWA

Beklemmt

(Ger.: ‘oppressed’, ‘anguished’).

An indication of mood whose most famous use is near the end of the cavatina in Beethoven's String Quartet in B op.130.

See also Tempo and expression marks.

Bel, Barthélemy le.

See Le Bel, Barthélemy.

Bel, Mbilia

(b Democratic Republic of the Congo). Central African singer and performer. Formerly a singer with Tabu ley rochereau’s band Afrisa International during the 1980s, Bel began her career as a dancer for Abeti Masekini, an important early singer in the Zaïrean popular tradition. While Bel’s earlier performances and recordings, especially those made with Rochereau, are firmly rooted in the heavily guitar-driven Zaïrean Soukos and other popular dance traditions, her most recent efforts have embraced more popular African and Western cross-influences and have propelled her high on the international scene. Yet, Bel and her collaborators, such as guitarist Rigo Star and singer Vivick Matou, still draw on the roots, both rhythmic and melodic, of earlier Zaïrean popular musics.

RECORDINGS

Rochereau & Mbilia Bel, Gaeto 01 (1985)

Beyanga, Sonodisc GENCD1020 (1986)

Phénomène, Mélodie CD 35001 (1989)

Ba gerants ya malaba, Sonodisc CD GENCD1010 (1991)

Boya yé, Sonodisc GENCD1016 (1991)

Désolé, Celluloid CD 66887–2 (1991)

Keyna et cadence Mudanda, Sonodisc GENCD1014 (1991)

Tabu Ley Rochereau et M’Bilia Bel avec l’Afrisa International, Genidia GENCD 1007 (1991)

M’Bilia Bel et Rigo Star, Mélodie CD 669172 (1993)

8/10 Benedicta, Sonodisc CD74343

GREGORY F. BARZ

Belafonte, Harry [Harold George]

(b New York, 1 March 1927). American popular singer and actor. He lived in Kingston, Jamaica, for five years (1935–40), returning to New York in 1940. In 1945 he began a career as an actor, having studied in Erwin Piscator’s drama workshop at the New School of Social Research. He experienced greater commercial success, however, as a popular singer, making his début at the Royal Roost, New York, in 1949. The following year he rejected his popular song repertory and began to sing traditional melodies from Africa, Asia, America and the Caribbean, which he collected in folk music archives. Having secured an RCA recording contract in 1952, Belafonte went on to become the most popular ‘folk’ singer in the USA. His interpretations of Trinidadian calypso music between 1957 and 1959 won him his greatest success and marked the pinnacle of his career. His mass appeal through the 1950s, moreover, enabled him to resume his work as an actor, and he appeared in several films. During the 1960s and 70s his popularity waned, but he continued to record, and to perform in nightclubs and theatres for a predominantly white, middle-class audience. In 1976 and again in 1979 he made world tours, performing his folk-inspired songs for large crowds of dedicated followers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Belafonte, Harry’, CBY 1956

D. Cerulli: ‘Belafonte: the Responsibility of an Artist’, Down Beat, xxiv (1957), no.5, p.17; no.6, p.14; no.7, p.17

H. Steirman: Harry Belafonte: his Complete Life Story (Washington DC, 1957)

A.J. Shaw: Belafonte: an Unauthorized Biography (New York, 1960)

J. Welis: De weg van Harry Belafonte (Tielt, 1961) [incl. song texts]

‘Harry Belafonte’, Variety (25 April 1976), 54

RONALD M. RADANO

Belaieff.

Music publishing firm. See Belyayev, Mitrofan Petrovich.

Belamarić, Miro

(b Šibenik, Dalmatia, 9 Feb 1935). Austrian composer and conductor of Croatian descent. He studied conducting with Milan Horvat and composition with Šulek at the Zagreb Academy of Music. He continued his studies in conducting with Matačić in Salzburg and Celibidache in Siena. In 1959 he began his career as a conductor, first with the symphony orchestra of Zagreb radio and television, later as chief conductor of the Komedija Theatre and as chief conductor of the Zagreb Opera (1978–90). He was also assistant to Karajan at the Salzburg Festival (1965–8) and to Karl Böhm (1975–7). He has appeared as guest conductor in many prominent opera houses and at many festivals.

As a composer Belamarić aims to combine modern stylistic features with an intelligibility and directness of musical expression, drawing on his considerable orchestral experience in his use of timbre. His first opera, the two-act Ljubav don Perlimplina (‘The Love of Don Perlimplin’), is neo-expressionist in style, with instrumental preludes based on classical forms and highly refined in sound, in the manner of Alban Berg. Belamarić won first prize in the 1983 Vienna State Opera competition with his second, three-act opera, Don Juan – ein Rebell für alle Zeiten.

WORKS

Ops: Ljubav don Perlimplina [The Love of Don Perlimplin] (2, after F. García Lorca), op.9, 1969–74, Zagreb, 16 Nov 1975; Don Juan – ein Rebellfür alle Zeiten (3, T. de Molina), op.14, 1979–83; Gesichten aus dem Wienerwald (Ö. von Horváth), op.15, 1984–92, Karlsruhe, 4 April 1993; Ustani Bane, Hrvatska te zove [Arise, Banus, Croatia Calls You] (comic op, Belamarić), op.20, 1990

Orch: Karneval u Dalmaciji [Carnival in Dalmatien], op.4, 1956–7; Passacaglia i Fuga, bowed str, plucked str, perc, 1967; Kako ubiti Mozarta [How to Kill Mozart], op.8, pf, orch, 1968; Croatia, op.16, 1993–4; Spectrum, op.17, 1995–6; Lied für tote Liebende, op.18, 1997–8

Chbr and solo inst: Aria, op.1, vn, pf, 1953; 3 komada [3 Pieces], op.2, fl, pf, 1954; Danze antiche, op.5, wind qnt, 1958; Portreti, op.10, pf, 1979–81; Str Qt, op.11, 1982; Sanctum Antonium laudamus, fantasia, op.13, org, 1983–98

Vocal: Preobraženja [Transfigurations] (A.B. Šimić), song cycle, op.3, Bar, pf, 1955; Hrvatska ljubavna lirika [Croatian Love Songs], op.6, unacc. mixed chorus, 1959–81; 5 Poemas del cante jondo (F. García Lorca), song cycle, op.12, S, pf, 1983–4

Film scores, light music

Mss in A-Wn

Principal publishers: Muzički informatiuni centar (Zagreb), Thomas Sessler (Vienna)

KORALJKA KOS

Beland, Ambrose.

See Beeland, Ambrose.

Belarus.

Country in eastern Europe. Formerly the Belorusian Soviet Socialist Republic and part of the Soviet Union, it declared itself independent on 25 August 1991.

1. Byzantino-Gothic origins and the medieval period.

GUY DE PICARDA (I), ZINAIDA MOZHEIYKO (II)

Belarus

I. Art music

2. Renaissance and Baroque, 1569–1794.

3. From the Romantics to the folklore revival, 1795–1918.

4. Since 1918.

1. Byzantino-Gothic origins and the medieval period.

The cult-songs of the Krïvichï, Radzimichï and Drïhavichï tribes, together with the harp music of the Baltic skalds at the court of Rohvalad (Rognvald) of Polatsk, were the earliest forms of musical entertainment in the 10th-century Belarusian principalities. Illuminated manuscripts from the 11th century onwards depict the trumpets and horns of military bands, as well as the harps and psalteries of the court musicians. Itinerant skamarokhi (entertainers) were condemned by St Cyril of Turaw for their pagan ways, but such teams of players, round-dancers and trained animals remained popular with the nobility and people alike. The court painters Andrey z Litvï (c1390) and Matsey Dzisyaty (1502) both depicted a standard capella as comprising lute, vielle (skrypitsa), harp, horn, two natural trumpets, clarinet and drum; no secular music from the Middle Ages, though, appears to have survived.

Following the introduction of Christianity in 989, the cathedrals and choir schools (usually with 3–12 singers) of Polatsk (992), Vitebsk (992), Turaw (1055), Minsk (1073) and Hrodna Smolensk (1101) provided the bulk of early musical notation, based on Byzantine neumatic models (12th-century Stichiry to St Euphrosyne, St Raman, St David and other local saints). Among important cantors at Smolensk were Manuil (fl 1137), one of three Greek singers in the city, and Senka (15th-century). Under folk influences, particularly after the Mongol invasions of 1245 and the formation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Belarus in the early 14th century, the early znammenïy chant evolved into a variety of Kiev-Lithuanian, demestvennïy and local chants (Mir-Slutsk, Vilnia Belarusian and Kutseyna), as recorded in later manuscript compilations (the early 16th-century Codex peremysliensis, the Zhïrovitski heirmologion of 1649). The solemn bolgar chant has been attributed to the Bulgarian Tsamblak in Navahrudak (1415); later Greek chants were brought by a choir from Constantinople (1588) and recorded by Bohdan Anisimovich of Pinsk in his monumental Supraśl heirmologion (1598–1601).

Latin-rite missionaries (Torvald Vandrownik) also became active in the 10th century in the cities on the trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Gregorian graduals and organs spread throughout Belarus particularly after the dynastic union with Poland in 1386. Professional organists are mentioned in the Lithuanian Statute (1529), and scholae cantorum were founded during the 14th century in Vilnius (1320), Ashmyanï, Minsk, Navahrudak and Lida, and during the 15th in Mahilyow (c1430), Hrodna, Slutsk, Kletsk, Slonim and Polatsk. Printed chantbooks with staff notation, first introduced at the Reformation by the Calvinists in their Pieśni chwał Boskich (Brest, 1558), together with polyphony and kantïchki (hymns), became popular with the Greek-rite monastic and confraternity schools. Anisimovich of Pinsk was the first to use this Western notation (1598).

2. Renaissance and Baroque, 1569–1794.

In the wake of the Reformation and the presence of the Grand Duchess Bona Sforza (d 1558), Western Renaissance music came into vogue: a Lithuanian Capella, or chapel royal, of up to 15 players and singers was established in 1543 in Hrodna. In 1586 the English traveller Sir Jerome Horsey found the harpsichord popular at the court of Stephen Bathory in Hrodna and heard at the court of Mikola Radziwiłł, Vajavod of Vilnius, a female choir, which ‘came in with sweet harmony and mournful pipes and songs of art; tymbrils and sweet sounding bells’. Elsewhere consorts of viols, woodwinds and clavichords or spinets flourished at the courts of the feudal princes (Drutski, Radziwiłł, Sapieha, Chodkiewicz, Astrozhski), playing madrigals and kantïchki, as well as dances, of the type later recorded in the Polatski sshïtak (‘Polatsk Music-Book’, 1680).

Despite the religious wars of the 17th century, Greek-rite cantors were able to compile heirmologia and bahahlasniki (hymnbooks) of local chants in Western staff notation: some 70 of these manuscript collections have survived, often richly decorated with miniatures, title pages and headpieces. An early 17th-century Cherubicon from Supraśl was composed as a four-part chorale with florid bass and alto runs. Among the compilers were Todar Semyanovich (Supraśl 1638), Tsimafey Kulikovich (Bely Kovel 1652), inok Feafil (Supraśl 1662), Parkhomy Patsienka (Slutsk 1669), Hawrïla Aryasanovich (Sava Starawsk 1673), Antoni Kishïts (Supraśl 1674), Kiryl Il'inski (Davïd Haradok 1713), hieromonk Tarasy (Minsk c1750), Anton Taranevich (Pinsk 1759), hieromonk Awramï (Holy Ghost Church, Vilnius 1764), Protoarchimandrite Tsimafey Shchurowski (Vilnius, Supraśl 1740–1811) and others.

During the Russian invasions of 1648–67 and 1702–20 half the population of Belarus was massacred or deported to Moscow, the deportees including fashionable singers such as Yan Koklia, Yan Kalenda, Dziak Tyzenhaus, the organist Kazimier Vasiliewski, as well as numerous nuns and choristers. After the Peace of Andrusava (1667), Jesuit academies and schools of music were founded or rebuilt in ravaged Polatsk, Vitebsk, Orsha and Mahilyow. Fine organs by Casparini and others were installed in Minsk (1698), Slutsk (1752) and Hrodna (c1770), and played by accomplished organists (Masyazhkowski, Sïmkevich, Fok). Lesser parish churches relied on instrumental groups, which were also available for private functions, and became the nuclei of municipal orchestras in Slonim (1731), Minsk (1739), Pinsk (1742) and elsewhere. Hymns in the Latin and Old Slavonic languages, as well as in Belarusian and Polish were in the 17th and 18th centuries sung in two- or three-part harmony by congregations of both rites during Low Mass. The first printed collection of simpler Belarusian kantï was published in 1774 by the Jesuits of Polatsk (Kantyczka, albo nabożne pieśni w narzeczu Połockim, ‘Divine Songs in the Polatsk Dialect’). Manuscript bahahlayniki from this period often contain sophisticated and attractive settings of kantï, such as Ne plach Rakhile (‘Do not weep, O Rachel’).

With the return of prosperity in the 18th century, palaces and theatres flourished, church bells were rehung, and the capellae of the Belarusian nobility revived to play Paisiello, J.-C. Bach, Gluck, Holland, Jommelli, Haydn, Boccherini, Grétry and Stamitz. The court capella (1724–1809) at Nyasvizh (Pol. Nieśwież), which was ruled by Prince Maciej Radziwiłł, himself no mean composer of chamber music, boasted a theatre, a collegiate church choir, a music school and a ballet company of more than 18 dancers. At Slonim the Ogiński (Ahinski) capella included up to 53 players and singers, a ballet and a music school; their repertory included keyboard works by the Hetman Michał Kazimierz Ogiński and also three-part Latin masses with organ and instruments preserved at Nyasvizh and Slonim. Other distinguished court capellae of the Belarusian nobility flourished at Ruzhanï (Sapieha), Svislach (Tïshkevichï), Savichï (Vaynillovich) and later at Dukora (Ashtorp) and Shklow (Zorich). Court musicians, usually Italian or French (Viotti, Cipriani, Cormier, Durand), also included some Belarusians, among them the conductors Yan Tsentsilovich and P. Pyotukh, and the violinist Matsey z Karelich. The capellae of Hrodna (Tyzenhaus) and Minsk (Zavisha) tended to favour indigenous musical themes; there was also a growing interest in Belarusian folk music.

3. From the Romantics to the folklore revival, 1795–1918.

With the incorporation of Belarus into the Russian empire, a number of the great princely estates were expropriated, their capellae disbanded, the Roman Catholic orders and Greek-rite Basilians expelled and their colleges closed. In 1839 the religious union of 1596 was suppressed, and numerous Belarusian songbooks were destroyed. Thereafter vocational education became more readily available in St Petersburg and Moscow than in Warsaw, and professionals gravitated towards the municipal orchestras, musical societies, salons and private schools of Minsk, Vilnius, Brest, Vitebsk, Mahilyow, Babruysk and Hrodna.

Glinka received his basic musical education with his uncle’s capella near Smolensk, and the originality of many of his orchestral works lies in his use of Belarusian folk motifs. His St Petersburg contemporary Anton Abramovich (1811–57), a pianist from Vitebsk, endeavoured to develop a national style by setting Belarusian poetry and incorporating folk melodies, even a hymn (O moj Bozha), into his keyboard suites (Belaruskiya melodïi, Zacharavanaya dudka and Belaruskaye vyaselle).

An important role in 19th-century Belarusian musical life was played by the music schools and salons of the present capital Minsk. Central to their activity was the Minsk City Orchestra (1803–1917), its directors the brothers Dominik (1797–1870) and Wikenty Stefanowicz (b 1804) and a number of brilliant local pupils. Born in Ubiel near Minsk to parents connected with the Ashtorp capella at Dukora, Moniuszko studied in Minsk with the elder Stefanowicz, and held musical soirées at his family mansion. Other Belarusian-born composers connected with the Minsk circle were Napoleon Orda (1807–83), Florian Miładowski (1819–89) and Michał Jelski, and among noteworthy provincial composers and conductors were I. Dabravolski, L. Skrabetski (Mahilyow) and Yu. Shadurski (Vitebsk), author of a setting of the folkdance Lyavonikha from the lost Belarusian operetta Taras na Parnase. Many of these became implicated in the 1863 uprising and were imprisoned or obliged to emigrate.

Musical and dramatic societies, as well as high schools, promoted the foundation of orchestras in provincial cities such as Vitebsk (1883), Brest (1885), Mahilyow (1886), Slutsk (1906) and Homel' (1909), and even more importantly within the Belarusian circle of Vilnius (1910). Repertories reflected a growing sense of national identity. Many churches also had fine choirs, but after the imposition of the Italo-German synodal obikhod (1848, 1869) service books, local chants (such as the Minsk, Vilnius, Zhïrovitsï, Białystok and Palesse) and other national forms generally remained unpublished. But the rebirth of a national school of music was stimulated in the latter half of the 19th century by the publication of extensive collections of Belarusian folk music, which throughout the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods had never lost its popularity. Native and foreign ethnographers active in this field included Oskar Kolberg and Z. Radčanka. The latter was responsible for the first publication of Belarusian folksongs with piano accompaniment for concert performance (1881).

A new generation of ethnographers, involved in the literary Nasha Niva (‘Our Cornfield’) revival of 1905–16 and having had conservatory training in St Petersburg, Warsaw or Moscow, were instrumental in popularizing polyphonic Belarusian folksong as an art form: this group included K. Halkowski (1875–1963), A. Hrïnevich (1877–1937), N. Churkin (1869–1964), W. Terawsky (1871–1938) and M. Ravenski (1886–1953), and their choral settings formed part of the repertory of the popular First Belarusian Troupe of Ihnat Buynitsky (1907–17). A Holy Liturgy begun in 1898 by another noted folklorist, M. Antsaw (1865–1945) of Vitebsk, heralded the revival of Belarusian church music. A number of published works by A. Turankow, M. Ravenski and later Shchahlow Kulikovich (1893–1969), A. Valïnchïk (1899–1984), M. Butoma (1905–1983), A. Zalyotnew (b 1947) and S. Bel'tsyukow, the leading exponents in this field, have proved popular (Biełaruski Tsarkowny Spewnik London 1979; 1994). A first modern hymnal of Belarusian Latin-rite hymns, Kashchelny piesni (St Petersburg, 1917), was followed by an eponymous collection (Minsk, 1992), and M. Trapashka and other Catholic composers have achieved popularity through the Mahutny Bozha Festival of Church Music in Mahilyow, established in 1993. Comprehensive collections of evangelical hymns in Belarusian have also been published (Bozhaya lira, 1930; Himnï Khrïstsïyan, 1979).

4. Since 1918.

The creation of the short-lived Belarusian Republic (1918–19), with a national capital in Minsk, led to the establishment of a ministry of culture, state orchestras, a national opera and ballet and a national conservatory, all staffed and trained initially by qualified teachers from Moscow and St Petersburg. Academies of music were established in Vitebsk (1918, by Antsaw), Minsk (1919), Homel' (1919, by Turankow) and Babruysk (1921), with classes in composition and performance, generally based on Russian models. After the creation of a Belarusian Soviet Republic in 1919, Belarusian composers shared the experiences of their colleagues elsewhere in the Soviet domains. A celebration was held in Moscow in 1941 to mark the ‘first decade’ of Soviet music in Belarus, reunited with its western territories formerly under Poland. During the German occupation (1941–4) composers who had avoided evacuation to Siberia were now free from Soviet censorship and turned to patriotic themes; examples include Shchahlow Kulikovich’s opera Usyaslaw the Enchanter and Turankow’s songs. A gradual relaxation of official controls after the death of Stalin in 1953 led to the formation of numerous guild and workshop orchestras, ballet companies, brass bands and choirs throughout Belarus. International tours by some of these, as well as the activities of émigré composers and performers (Ravensky, Shchahlow Kulikovich, Karpovich, Barïsavets, Selakh-Kachansky), helped promote a knowledge of Belarusian music abroad.

20th-century composers of orchestral, chamber and piano music include N. Churkin (Sinfonietta, 1925), Ye. Tikotsky (six symphonies, 1927–63; Trombone Concerto, 1934), M. Aladau (Piano Quintet, 1925; ten symphonies, 1921–71), Shchahlow Kulikovich, A. Bahatïrow, L. Abeliyovich (four symphonies, Piano concerto, chamber music), Mdzivani and D. Smol'sky (four symphonies, 1961–86, three concertos for dulcimer and folk orchestra, Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto). Most operatic and choral music was officially sponsored, frequently didactic, set to warped texts and speedily dated. Best remembered are Antsaw’s Requiem, Ravensky’s Hapon, Aladau’s Taras na Parnase, Bahatïrow’s U pushchakh Palessya, shchahlow Kulikovich’s Katerina, Turankow’s Kvetka Shchastse and more recently Smol'sky’s Sivaya Lyagenda (1978) and Frantsisk Skarina (1980). A younger generation has turned increasingly to national pre-Soviet themes, and adventurous works have been produced by A. Bandarenka (The Prince of Navahrudak 1987), A. Litsvinowsky (Francisco Misterioso 1989), Ya. Paplawsky (Choral Symphony ‘Lux aeterna’), S. Bel'tyukov (Hravyurï) and A. Khadoska (Holy Liturgy).

The present discipline and quality of Belarusian choral singing owes much to the work of R. Shïyrma, V. Rowda (State Radio and Television Choir), M. Drinewski (State Academic Folk Choir), I. Matsyukhow (State Chamber Choir) and K. Nasayew (Unia Choir). Outstanding soloists in the past have included the legendary diva Larïsa Alyaksandrowskaya (1904–80) and the tenor M. Zabeyda-Shumitski. From the 1960s, after years of official disfavour, jazz concerts by amateur groups have flourished. A jazz club was founded in Minsk in 1978, and since 1979 an international festival of rock and popular music, ‘Slavyansky Bazar’, has taken place each year in Vitebsk.

See also Minsk.

Société Belge de Musicologie.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Kulikovich: Belorusskaya muzïka (New York, 1953)

M. Kulikovich: Belorusskaya sovetskaya opera [Belarusian Soviet opera] (Munich, 1957)

D. Zhuravlyov: Kompozitorï Sovetskoy Belorussii [Composers of Soviet Belarus] (Minsk, 1966)

H. Hlushchanka and others: Historïya Belaruskay Savetskay muzïki [A history of Belarusian Soviet music] (Minsk, 1971)

L. Kostyukavets: Kantovaya kul'tura v Belorussii [Popular hymns in Belarus] (Minsk, 1975)

D. Zhuravlyov: Soyuz kompozitorov BSSR [The Composers’ Guild of Belarus] (Minsk, 1978)

I. Nazin: Belorusskiye narodnïye muzïkal'nïye instrumentï [Belarusian folk instruments] (Minsk, 1979)

V. Rowda: Khorovaya polifoniya [Choral polyphony] (Minsk, 1981)

Y. Yasinovsky: Belaruskiya Irmaloi: pomniki muzïchnaha mastatstva XVI–XVIII stst. [Belarusian heirmologion as monuments of musical art in the 16th–18th centuries] (Minsk, 1984)

T. Dubkova: ‘Muzïka’, Entsïklapedïya litaraturï i mastatstva, iii (Minsk, 1986)

V. Martïnenka and A. Myalhuy: Praz rok-pryzmu [Through the prism of rock] (New York, 1989)

L. Kastsyukavets, ed.: Belaruskaya muzïka XVI–XVII stst. (Minsk, 1990)

V. Dadzyomava, ed.: Instrumental'naya muzïka belarusi XVIII st. [Instrumental music of Belarus in the 18th century] (Minsk, 1991)

A. Akhvierdava and others: Pomniki muzïchnay kul'turï Belarusi [Monuments of the musical culture of Belarus] (Minsk, 1993)

I. Churko: Belorussky balet (Minsk, 1993)

I. Hlushakow and others: Muzïchnï teatr belarusi [The musical theatre of Belarus] (Minsk, 1993)

H. Hlushchanka and K. Stsepantsevich: Belaruskaya muzïchnaya litaratura (Minsk, 1993)

T. Likhach: Liturhichnaya muzïka Belarusi XVIII st. [Liturgical music of Belarus in the 18th century] (Minsk, 1993)

W. Newdakh: Arhannaya kul'tura na Belarusi [Organ music in Belarus] (Minsk, 1993)

G. Picarda: ‘The Evolution of Church Music in Belarus’, Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, i: Slavic cultures in the Middle Ages, ed. B. Gasparov and O. Raevsky-Hughes (Berkeley, 1993), 328–56

Belarus

II. Traditional music

1. Song.

Although the roots of Belarusian traditional music are ancient, they are maintained in living traditions. The art of singing occupies a central place within these traditions, embracing two historical styles which in turn correspond to different eras. The oldest style, the roots of which go back to old Slavonic times, consists of songs of the calendar and agrarian cycles and those celebrating family rites.

(i) Ritual song.

Calendrical songs correspond to the four seasons. The winter cycle includes kolyadki (carols) and shchedrovki (New Year songs), sung during kolyada (the festivities of the winter solstice), which, owing to calendar changes, coincides with Christmas. The spring cycle consists of maslenichnïye pesni (Shrovetide songs), which are mostly performed on all kinds of swings; incantations and invocations of spring; volochebnïye pesni (trailing songs) from the verb volochit'sya (to trail about) during which the performers wander about in groups from village to village announcing the approach of spring and later the advent of Easter; yur'yevskiye (St George) and troitskiye (Whitsunday) songs, including kustovïye songs, performed as a kust or bush – that is a girl dressed up in greenery – is led through the streets, and rusal'nïye songs performed on Whitsunday and Whit Monday. The summer cycle includes kupal'skiye songs which are performed at the festivities of the summer solstice; zhnivnïye or reaping songs performed when winter crops are gathered in; and dozhinochnïye (songs sung for the end of reaping). The autumn cycle includes yarnïye songs performed when spring crops are gathered in; l’novïye songs sung during the gathering of flax and songs about the autumn season itself. Calendrical and agrarian songs also include spring and summer round-dances and winter game-songs. Themes concerning work, common to all calendrical songs, are interwoven with themes of everyday life and ancient rituals, including personified forms of both nature and the festivity itself, e.g. Kolyada, Maslenitsa, Vesna, Kupala and Sporïsh (with a double ear of corn as a personified symbol of fertility).

Family ritual songs include svadebnïye (songs for weddings) and rodinnïye (songs for births), as well as funeral laments. Kolïbel'nïye (lullabies) are also associated with this cycle. Svadebnïye, central to family ritual songs, are sung during all stages of the marriage ritual. These songs embody three emotional states: a ritually uplifted and solemn state (the glorification of the young couple and of the ritual bread, a round loaf); a lyrical and dramatic state (including the devishnik – the ‘Saturday gathering’ and the bride’s lamentations); and a humorous state associated with ritual laughter, which takes the form of a contest between the two families, the match-makers and the bride’s and groom’s parties. The rodinnïye (songs for births) include the ritual glorification of the parents of the new-born and of the midwife, and also humorous songs aimed at the midwife and particularly the godparents. The cycle of songs for births have been absorbed to a great extent into the so-called besednïye songs (from the word beseda, in the sense of a ‘communal feast’).

Laments are called golosheniya (from the verb golosit meaning to express grief vocally) and are performed in an improvised and dramatized sung recitative. In extreme circumstances such as great disasters, the lament has found new life in the form of a collective golosheniye-oplakivaniye (bewailing). Thus, after World War II, this genre found a new form as the collective lament of partisans and the inhabitants of burned villages performed at the side of memorials to those who had perished. After the catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986 a collective prichet-golosheniye (lament) for the forest polluted with radio nuclides emerged in the southern and eastern regions ‘I nash les chyornïy, i nasha zemlya chyornaya!’ (And our black forest, and our black earth!).

A specific feature of songs from calendar and family ritual cycles is the strict observation of the appropriate time and circumstances for their performance. This same feature governs the formation of standard polytextual melodies which are highly condensed, invariable melodic formulae. Each such melody has symbolic significance within the limits of its prescribed area (e.g. a song is not just a spring song, rather it is a musical symbol of spring). Despite their seemingly slender expressive means, a limited range and unsophisticated stanza form, song melodies using this ancient style have great strength of expression owing to the semantic weight of each melodic part and the equal dramatic force given to all means of musical expression: melodic (modal and rhythmic), embellishment and timbre.

Calendrical and family ritual songs are generally performed by women, except for volochebnïye and kolyadnïye songs, the ritual greeting songs used to accompany the practice of going around the yards of people in the same village, in which men also play an important part. Antiphonal singing is characteristic of the northern region (the Poozer'ye), whereas in the southern region (the Poles'ye) communal singing of calendrical and family ritual songs is generally heterophonic. Two variants of heterophonic style are known in this region: a droning diaphony and a polyrhythmic monody (ex.1).

(ii) Non-ritual song.

The second and more elaborate stylistic group of songs created by the Belarusian people consists of non-ritual songs, which ethnomusicologists believe date back to the 14th century. The culmination of their development was the era of the Cossack peasant uprisings between the 16th and 18th centuries. Besides non-ritual lyrical songs on the themes of love and everyday life, as well as songs with a ballad-like content, lyrical folk poetry of a social kind sung by men is widely found among this music, for example chumatskiye songs (the chumaki were peasants who drove ox-carts to the Crimea for salt), burlatskiye (barge haulers’ songs), Cossack songs and songs about military events and about the leaders of peasant uprisings. As distinct from the older type of songs, they are not tied to calendar events and are encountered over a wide area. Marked by a vivid individualization of the musical and poetic idea, the melodies of these songs are marked by an internal contrast of intonation and by a well-developed sense of stanza structure.

The songs of this second stylistic type (for both male and female voices) are associated with an established polyphonic style, which has a supporting voice in the polyphonic manner, and are widespread in the southern, eastern and central regions of the country. The choral scoring of these songs consists of two obligatory parts (in the folk definition ‘voices’), each one having a clear character of its own. The main melody, sung by the chorus, is always in the lower voice (it can often divide), while the upper solo voice sings in counterpoint (ex.2).

The Soviet period in the development of the art of folk singing can be seen as a kind of amalgamation of peasant oral traditions with urban traditions of literary origin. This showed itself especially clearly in the partisan songs which have occupied a prominent place in latter-day Belarusian song composition.

2. Instruments and instrumental music.

The instrumental folklore of Belarus is distinguished by its rich traditions. Musical instruments include both ancient instruments (the earliest archaeological finds date to the 2nd century ce) and those of more recent origin. The Cimbalom (tsimbalï) and violin (skrïpitsa) have gained the most widespread currency and social significance among string instruments but the basetlya (a bass fiddle with three or four strings tuned in 5ths or 4ths) is also found, as are the Balalaika (fig.1) and mandolin. In earlier periods the ‘wheel’ lyre (kolaveya lera) was known. This was a wooden, stringed instrument played with a wheel, which was attached to the lower section. A handle moved the wheel which then rubbed the strings. There are various types of traditional flute including single and double pipes made from reeds and the ocarina (vessel flute). Instruments with an embouchure include the horn (razhok), trumpet (truba), reed instruments, among them various types of zhaleyka (fig.2) (made from rye stems and rushes) and the clarinet. Until recently the duda (bagpipes) and dudka (duct flute) were also to be found, as well as the garmon' or garmonik (a kind of accordian) and later the bayan or accordion. The most widely found membranophones are the tambourine (buben) and the drum with cymbals (baraban z talerkami). Of the idiophones the zvon (bell), zvanochki (handbells), brazgotki (rattles), sharkhunï (tinkling bells), stal'ki (a triangle made from a rod of bent steel) as well as spoons and certain other everyday objects used in ensemble playing are known.

In village music-making instruments are used both for solo and ensemble playing (for instrumentals and vocal accompaniment). The most popular ensembles consist of different permutations of two or three instruments: the violin (or garmon') and the tambourine; the violin and garmon' (or cimbalom); the violin (or fife) and cimbalom (or garmon') and tambourine. Ensembles consisting of four instruments – the violin, cimbalom, garmon' and drum or two violins, cimbalom and tambourine – are also known. In the western region ensembles made up of even more instruments are found.

On the whole, Belarusian instrumental music is inseparably linked to the traditions of dancing and singing. In the performances of skilful musicians song melodies are distinguished by a fair degree of freedom in both intonation and embellishment (in terms of ornamentation and rhythm). The skill of the folk musicians as improvisers shows itself to its greatest extent, however, in instrumental melodies. These melodies have come to be called sam pa sabe (‘on my own’) because they are performed without any set plan or regulation in the improvisations (ex.3).

Besides existence in original forms musical folk art in Belarus at the end of the 20th century is also known through secondary forms (organized amateur collectives and amateur performances). Professional collectives have also been set up to perform folk music, including the G. Tsitovich State Folk Choir, the G. Shirma State Choral Academic Cappella and the I. Zhinovich State Folk Orchestra.

3. Belarusian ethnomusicology.

The origins of Belarusian ethnomusicology are associated with folksong collecting, which became more intensive, particularly in the second half of the 19th century when a whole group of Belarusian ethnographers and folklorists came to the fore including P. Sheyn, M. Nikiforovsky, Ye. Romanov, N. Dovnar-Zapol'sky and others. The first publications of the material gathered by these folklorists were of a linguistic nature with short appendices of musical examples. The establishment of Belarusian ethnomusicology proper is associated with the work of Nikolay Yanchuk (1859–1921). Besides Belarusian musicians, folklorists and ethnomusicologists (including Yanchuk, A. Grinevich, M. Goretsky, G. Shirma and G. Tsitovich), an important role in consolidating Belarusian ethnomusicology has been played by Polish ethnographers and ethnomusicologists (including M. Moszinski, N. Federowski and O. Kol'berg), the Czech artist and scholar L. Kuba and the Ukrainian ethnomusicologist K. Kvitka. The St Petersburg school of intonation organized by academician B. Asaf'yev and his pupils (the ethnomusicologists Ye. Gippius, Z. Eval'd and also F. Rubtsov) had a particular importance for Belarusian musicology.

At the present time Belarusian musicology is represented by two centres: the Institute of Art History and the Ethnography of Folklore at the Academy of Sciences of Belarus (by Z. Mozheyko and T. Varfolomeyeva, and earlier by V. Yelatov and I. Blagoveshchensky); and by the Belarusian Academy of Music (by the scholars T. Yakimenko, I. Nazina and L. Kostyukovets, and earlier by L. Mukharinskaya).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Shïrma, ed.: Belaruskiya narodnïya pesni [Belarusian folk songs] (Minsk, 1959–1976)

M. Ya. Grinblat: Belorusï: ocherki proiskhozhdeniya i ėtnicheskoy istorii [The Belarusians: essays on their origins and ethnological history] (Minsk, 1968)

G. Tsitovich and others: Antalogiya belaruskay narodnay pesni [An anthology of Belarusian folksong] (Minsk, 1968)

L.S. Mukharinskaya: Belorusskaya narodnaya pesnya: istoricheskoye razvitiye (ocherki) [Belarusian folksong: its historical development (essays)] (Minsk, 1977)

V.I. Yelatov: Pesni vostochnoslavyanskoy obshchnosti [Songs of the Eastern Slavonic community] (Minsk, 1977)

Z.V. Eval'd: Pesni belorusskogo Poles'ya [Songs of the Belarusian Poles'ye] (Moscow, 1979)

I.D. Nazina: Belorusskiye narodnïye muzïkal'nïye instrumentï: samozvuchashchiye, udarnïye, dukhovïye [Belarusian folk instruments: idiophones, percussion, wind instruments] (Minsk, 1979)

Z.Ya. Mozheyko: Pesni belaruskaga Paazer'ya [Songs of the Belarusian Poozer'ye] (Minsk, 1981)

I.D. Nazina: Belorusskiye narodnïye muzïkal'nïye instrumentï: strunnïye [Belarusian folk instruments: strings] (Minsk, 1982)

Z.Ya. Mozheyko: Pesni belorusskogo Poles'ya [Songs of the Belarusian Poles'ye] (Moscow, 1983–4)

Z.Ya. Mozheyko: Kalendarno-pesennaya kul'tura Belorussii: opït sistemno-tipologicheskogo issledovaniya [The culture of calendrical songs in Belorussia: an attempt at a systematic and typological investigation] (Minsk, 1985)

Z.Ya. Mozheyko, T. Yakimenko, T. Varfolomeyeva and others: Belorusskaya ėtnomuzïkologiya: ocherki istorii (XIX–XXvv) [Belarusian ethnomusicology: essays on its history (19th–20th centuries)] (Minsk, 1997)

T. Varfolomeyeva: Pesni Beloruskaga Panyamonnya [Songs of the Belarusian Ponemon'e] (Minsk, 1998)

Z.Ya. Mozheyko and T. Varfolomeyeva: Pesni Beloruskaga Padnyaprouya [Songs of the Belarusian Podneprov'e] (Minsk, 1999)

Belasio, Paolo.

See Bellasio, Paolo.

Belaver, Vincenzo.

See Bellavere, Vincenzo.

Bel canto

(It.: ‘beautiful singing’).

The phrase ‘bel canto’, along with a number of similar constructions (‘bellezze del canto’, ‘bell’arte del canto’), has been used without specific meaning and with widely varying subjective interpretations. It did not take on special meaning as a term until the mid-19th century: ‘neither musical nor general dictionaries saw fit to attempt definition until after 1900’ (Duey). Even so, the term remains ambiguous and is often used nostalgically in its application to a lost tradition.

Generally understood, the term ‘bel canto’ refers to the Italian vocal style of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the qualities of which include perfect legato production throughout the range, the use of a light tone in the higher registers and agile and flexible delivery. More narrowly, it is sometimes applied exclusively to Italian opera of the time of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. In either case, ‘bel canto’ is usually set in opposition to the development of a weightier, more powerful and speech-inflected style associated with German opera and Wagner in particular. Wagner himself decried the Italian singing model that was concerned merely with ‘whether that G or A will come out roundly’ and proposed a German school of singing that would draw ‘the spiritually energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression’ (Prose Works; Eng. trans., London 1894, iii, 202; iv, 238).

While to some, therefore, bel canto became the lost art of beautiful singing – so that in a conversation that took place in Paris in 1858, Rossini is reported to have inveighed against the decline of the traditional Italian singing with the words, ‘Alas for us, we have lost our bel canto’ – to others (e.g. J. Hey, Deutscher Gesangunterricht, Mainz, 1885) it took on the pejorative meaning of vocalization devoid of content. Similarly, the so-called German style was both heralded and derided. In a collection of songs by Italian masters published under the title Il bel canto (Berlin, 1887), F. Sieber wrote: ‘In our time, when the most offensive shrieking under the extenuating device of ‘dramatic singing’ has spread everywhere, when the ignorant masses appear much more interested in how loud rather than how beautiful the singing is, a collection of songs will perhaps be welcome which – as the title purports – may assist in restoring bel canto to its rightful place’.

The term ‘bel canto’ rapidly became a battle cry in the vocabulary of Italian singing teachers (e.g. Ricci), and the concept became clouded by mystique and confused by a plethora of individual interpretations. To complicate the matter further, German musicology in the early 20th century devised its own historical application for ‘bel canto’, using the term to refer to the simple lyricism that came to the fore in Venetian opera and the Roman cantata during the 1630s and 40s (the era of Cesti, Carissimi and Luigi Rossi) as a reaction against the earlier, text-dominated stilo rappresentativo. This anachronistic use of the term was given wide circulation in Robert Haas’s Die Musik des Barocks (Potsdam, 1928) and, later, in Manfred Bukofzer’s Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947, pp. 118ff). Since the singing style of 17th-century Italy did not differ in any marked way from that of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a connection can be drawn; but the term is best limited to its 19th-century use as a style of singing that emphasized beauty of tone in the delivery of highly florid music.

See Heldentenor and Singing, §§3 and 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Ricci: La crisi del bel canto (Florence, 1915)

P.A. Duey: Bel canto in its Golden Age (New York, 1951/R)

V. Fuchs: The Art of Singing (London, 1963)

A. Michotte: ‘An Evening chez Rossini, 1858’, Opera, xviii (1967), 952–62

F. Thomas: Bel canto: die Lehre des Kunstgesanges nach der altitalienischen Schule (Berlin, 1968)

M. Amstad: ‘Das berühmte Notenblatt des Porpora: Die Fundamentalübungen der Belcanto Schule’, Musica, xxiii/5 (1969), 453–5

C. Reid: Bel canto: Principles and Practices (New York, 1971/R)

D. Galliver: ‘Cantare con affetto: Keynote of the bel canto’, SMA, viii (1974), 1–7

L. Manén: The Art of Singing: a Manual (London, 1974/R 1987 as Bel canto: the Teaching of the Classical Italian Song-Schools, its Decline and Restoration)

C.L. Reid: A Dictionary of Vocal Terminology (New York, 1983)

R. Celletti: La storia del belcanto (Fiesole, 1983, 2/1986; Eng. trans., 1991)

K. Ott and E. Ott: ‘Rossini und der Belcanto’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (29 Feb 1992), 65–6

M.V. de Carvalho: ‘Belcanto-Kultur und Aufklärung: Blick auf eine widersprüchliche Beziehung im Lichte der Opernrezeption’, Zwischen Aufklärung und Kulturindustrie: Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum 85. Geburtstag, II: Musik /Theater, ed. H.-W. Heister, K. Heister-Grech and A. Scheit (Hamburg, 1993), 11–42

C. Osborne: The bel canto operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini (Portland, OR, 1994)

J.M. Fischer: ‘Wagner and bel canto’, OQ, xi/4 (1994–5), 53–8 [Eng. trans. of extract from ‘Sprechgesang oder Belcanto’, Grosse Stimmen (Stuttgart, 1993), 229–91]

W. Crutchfield: ‘The bel canto Connection’, ON, lxii/1 (1997), 30–35, 51

OWEN JANDER/ELLEN T. HARRIS

Belcher, Supply

(b Stoughton [now Sharon], MA, 29 March 1751; d Farmington, ME, 9 June 1836). American composer and tune book compiler. He began a career as a merchant in Boston in the early 1770s, but was back in his home town a few years later (he was a private in the company of Stoughton Minutemen that marched to Cambridge on 19 April 1775). Later in that decade he purchased a farm, where he operated a tavern. In 1785 he and his family moved to Maine and spent six years in Hallowell (now Augusta), before settling in Sandy River township (now Farmington), where he spent the rest of his life. He played a leading role in the community, as town clerk, magistrate, representative to the Massachusetts General Court, selectman, tax assessor and schoolmaster, and was also known as a violinist and singer; he is said to have led the town’s first choir. When his Ordination Anthem (with a concluding series of Hallelujahs strongly reminiscent of the famous Messiah chorus) was sung at the Hallowell Academy in 1796, a local newspaper dubbed the composer ‘the Handell of Maine’.

Most of Belcher’s 75 known compositions appear in his tune book The Harmony of Maine (Boston, 1794/R). His music is rooted in New England psalmody, yet shows other stylistic influences. Several of his pieces are in three rather than four voices; several more set secular texts, often with copious melodic ornamentation, appoggiaturas, and precise performance directions (for example, ‘Invitation’). Belcher was a talented, communicative composer, though his music was never widely reprinted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.G. Butler: A History of Farmington, Franklin County, Maine (Farmington, ME, 1885), 378–80

F.J. Metcalf: American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (New York, 1925/R), 83–5

E.M. Owen: The Life and Music of Supply Belcher (1751–1836), ‘Handel of Maine’ (diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1968)

L.G. Davenport: Maine’s Sacred Tunebooks, 1800–1830: Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier (diss., U. of Colorado, 1991), 169–84

L.G. Davenport, ed.: Supply Belcher (1751–1836): the Collected Works (New York and London, 1997)

RICHARD CRAWFORD/NYM COOKE

Belcke, Friedrich (August)

(b Lucka bei Altenburg, 27 May 1795; d Lucka, 10 Dec 1874). German trombone player. He was the son of the town musician of Lucka, and at an early age showed a fondness for brass instruments; before he studied the trombone he was a proficient horn player. He joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1815 and then obtained a permanent post in the royal orchestra in Berlin, where, apart from numerous concert tours, he remained from 1816 to 1858. In 1817 Weber brought him to Dresden, and in 1821 he played solos on H.D. Stölzel’s newly invented tenor horn in Berlin and later at Leipzig. He became widely known as one of the first trombone virtuosos. A contemporary noted his ‘astonishing skill in that which is not idiomatic to the instrument – for example, rapid passages, cantabile, trills etc.’. He left many solo compositions for the instrument. (M. Rasmussen: ‘Two Early Nineteenth-Century Trombone Virtuosi: Carl Traugolt Queisser and Friedrich August Belcke’, Brass Quarterly, v (1961–2), 3–17)

A. MACZEWSKY/TREVOR HERBERT

Beldemandis, Prosdocimus de [Beldomandi, Prosdocimo de’].

See Prosdocimus de Beldemandis.

Belém, António de

(b Évora, c1624; d Lisbon, 3 March 1700). Portuguese composer. He studied at Évora Cathedral choir school, while Manuel Rebelo was mestre de capela, and on 29 January 1641 he became a Hieronymite monk at Espinheiro Monastery, near Évora, where he was elected prior in 1667. He was for most of his career mestre de capela or vicar-choral at Belém Monastery, Lisbon. His numerous compositions, including masses for four to eight voices, festival psalms for multiple choirs, Holy Week Lamentations for four to six voices, polychoral Miserere settings, a four-part Prayer of Jeremiah ‘of exceptional sweetness’, Lessons for the Dead for four to eight voices and vilhancicos for the chief feasts, were all lost during the sacking of Belém Monastery in 1835.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Barbosa Machado: Bibliotheca lusitana, i (Lisbon, 1741/R), 218–19

R.V. Nery, ed.: A música no ciclo da ‘Bibliotheca lusitana’ (Lisbon, 1984), 51–2

ROBERT STEVENSON

Belfast.

Capital city of Northern Ireland. Belfast was only a settled river-crossing in earlier times. St Comgall (d c602) founded an important monastic centre at Bangor (20 km away) in 555, whose monks brought its rule and learning to Britain and continental Europe: the 7th-century Bangor Antiphonary originated here.

Belfast's prosperity followed its incorporation as a town in 1613. By the 1780s Belfast was a lively music cultural outpost of Dublin. A number of shops sold sheet music and musical instruments. Church organists, theatre musicians, tavern players and military instrumentalists were in demand as music teachers. A Belfast Musical Society, including singers and instrumentalists, flourished between 1768 and 1794. Comic operas performed by visiting groups were popular, and performers from Dublin gave concerts in the Assembly Rooms (erected 1777, cap. 400) from 1784. Subscription concert series in 1787 and 1789 enabled ‘Gentlemen Amateurs’ to supplement visiting soloists and local professionals in performances of music by Haydn, Pleyel, Vanhal and others.

Concern for the preservation of the ‘ancient music’ of Ireland culminated in the Belfast Harp Festival of July 1792. Edward Bunting (1773–1843) transcribed the pieces performed and was inspired to publish pioneering collections of Irish folksongs. A short-lived Harp Society was established to teach the harpers' skills to poor and blind children. Interest in traditional music waned thereafter despite the formation of Gaelic choirs towards the end of the 19th century, the presence of the folksong collector Carl Hardebeck (1869–1945) in the city between 1893 and 1932 (apart from four years spent in Cork from 1919), and a Gaelic Choir which flourished for many years after its formation in 1943. Traditional music has re-emerged in recent years as entertainment, in community arts programmes and in grant-aided initiatives of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, supplemented by a researcher and a folksong archive at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra.

As Belfast developed into a major industrial centre (it was incorporated as a city in 1888), musical institutions similar to those flourishing elsewhere were established. Touring companies occasionally presented operas in the Theatre Royal during the mid-19th century, but annual opera seasons only became possible when the Grand Opera House opened in 1895. Except for a period during World War II, opera seasons continued there and, after the Grand Opera House became a cinema in 1953, in the Grove Theatre. English ballet companies performed here during the 1950s and 60s. The Grand Opera House had become badly dilapidated by 1972 but resumed its original cultural role after restoration in 1980. The existing operatic society was renamed the Northern Ireland Opera Trust in 1969 and presented an annual season with local chorus and orchestra and visiting soloists; it was re-established as Opera Northern Ireland in 1985 under the directorship of Kenneth Montgomery and presented two seasons annually until its demise in September 1998. The Studio Opera Group, founded by Havelock Nelson (b 1917) in 1950, provided operatic opportunities for local professionals; a Glyndebourne-style opera season has become an annual summer attraction at Castleward House, 41 km away, with a further season at the Grand Opera House.

The Anacreontic Society was founded in 1814 to foster orchestral music. In 1840 public subscription enabled the society to build a New Music Hall (cap. 600) where it gave two or three concerts a year, sometimes with eminent soloists, including Liszt, Piatti and Clara Novello; Jullien brought his orchestra on a number of occasions and also performed in the Botanic Gardens. The New Music Hall was superseded in 1862 by the Ulster Hall (cap. 2000). Weekly organ concerts were a feature and led to the creation of the post of City Organist in 1902. Weekly organ recitals continued until 1936; the tradition was partially revived in 1982.

The demise of the Anacreontic Society in 1866 resulted in sporadic orchestral activity until the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra was established in 1924. It gave public concerts during the 1930s. Orchestral concerts were also presented by visiting English orchestras under famous conductors, including Hallé, Harty, Beecham, Boult and Barbirolli. The City of Belfast Orchestra was established in 1950 and was replaced in 1966 by the chamber-sized Ulster Orchestra, which performed regular concerts in Belfast and provincial towns and accompanied oratorio and opera. In 1981 the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra were amalgamated into an enlarged Ulster Orchestra to perform a wider standard repertory, including contemporary works and regular commissions from Irish-based composers. Under conductors including Bryden Thomson, Vernon Handley, Yan Pascal Tortelier and En Shao, concert and opera performances and an enhanced broadcasting schedule have been supplemented with tours, commercial recordings, school-based music education projects and recitals by orchestra-based chamber ensembles. A new development on Belfast's Laganside in 1997 added a concert hall, the Waterfront Hall (cap. 2500), and a smaller hall, the BT Studio (cap. 600), to the existing provision.

The Classical Harmonists, the first successful choral society, flourished between 1851 and 1874 and had a profound effect on Belfast's musical life. It collapsed due to the severe financial burdens in importing orchestral musicians after the demise of the Anacreontic Society, which had formerly supplied the orchestra. The Belfast Philharmonic Society, formed in 1874, attained a high position under such conductors as Francis Koeller (1887–1912) and Edward Godfrey Brown (1912–50); it performed four or five choral concerts annually and attracted excellent musicians to Belfast. Smaller amateur vocal and choral groups, together with operatic and musical societies, have continued to appear, exploring a wide range of musical genres.

A municipal school of music for schoolchildren was established in 1965; this has been replicated throughout Northern Ireland. Instrumental playing has blossomed and a number of youth choirs, bands and orchestras present regular concerts. The Arts Council supports youth musical initiatives including the Ulster Community Youth Jazz Orchestra, the Ulster Youth Theatre and, since 1994, the Ulster Youth Orchestra. Adult amateur instrumentalists perform in the Studio SO (founded by Havelock Nelson in 1950) and Queen's University Orchestra. Brass bands, flute bands and symphonic wind bands thrive; most of these originated in church organizations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Hamilton Harty Chair of Music was founded at Queen's University in 1947; professors have included Ivor Keys, Philip Cranmer, Raymond Warren, David Greer, Adrian Thomas and Jan Smaczny. Recitals and concerts are given by students, professionals and resident ensembles in the Whitla Hall, Harty Room and Elmwood Hall. The appointment of composers-in-residence since the mid-1970s has encouraged the development of Belfast as a centre of contemporary composition. The School of Music of the University of Ulster at Jordanstown (founded as the Northern Ireland Polytechnic in 1968) has also contributed to this development; directors there have included Donald Cullington, Layton Ring and Hilary Bracefield. Professional and amateur concerts and recitals are regularly given at Jordanstown and at its sister campus in Coleraine.

Queen's University Festival, a three-week event held annually in November since 1964, includes orchestral concerts, chamber recitals, ballet and opera, and jazz, popular, traditional and world music events. Other events include annual festivals of early music and of contemporary music at Queen's University, summer promenade concerts promoted by Belfast City Council (which replaced Belfast Corporation in 1973), chamber music recitals promoted by the Belfast Music Society (formed in 1920) and weekly lunchtime recitals promoted by BBC Northern Ireland. The Belfast Musical Festival, an annual competitive event, was established in 1908.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Benn: History of Belfast (Belfast, 1823, 2/1877)

J. Bernard: Retrospection of the Stage (London, 1830)

J.C. Beckett and R.E. Glasscock, eds.: Belfast: the Origin and Growth of an Industrial City (London, 1967)

B.F. Curtis: Music in Belfast in the 19th Century (diss., Queen's U., Belfast, 1969)

J. Harbison: ‘The Belfast Harpers' Meeting, 1792: the Legacy’, Ulster Folklife, xxxv (1989), 113–28

M. Leydon, ed.: Belfast, City of Song (Dingle, 1989)

D. Greer: ‘Elgar in Belfast’, Elgar Society Journal, x (1998), 167–76

PETER DOWNEY

Bel Geddes, Norman [Geddes, Norman]

(b Adrian, MI, 27 April 1893; d New York, 8 May 1958). American stage designer. He studied briefly at the Cleveland School of Art, but had no formal education after the age of 16. His first wife, Helen Belle Sneider, became his collaborator, and ‘Norman-Bel-Geddes’ was their nom de plume for articles on art and the theatre, until their divorce in 1932. Notable designs for Montemezzi’s La nave for Chicago Opera (1919) and Henry Hadley’s Cleopatra’s Night for the Metropolitan (1920) attracted Broadway attention, and his innovative approach was soon recognized. At an early stage of his career he discarded the proscenium arch and planned open-stage projects. For a commission in 1924 to design Vollmöller’s morality play The Miracle with Humperdinck’s music for Max Reinhardt, he converted the theatre into a Gothic cathedral. His work for Broadway included Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road (1937), Gershwin’s Strike up the Band (1927), Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929) and The Seven Lively Arts (1944, his last for Broadway): in all, he designed more than 200 theatrical productions. He later turned primarily to industrial design, but he also had a pivotal influence on the development of American theatre. His archives, designs and drawings were given to the University of Texas, Austin, in 1959.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (L. Moore)

F. Bruguière: The Divine Comedy (New York, 1924)

N. Bel Geddes: Horizons (New York, 1932)

T. Komisarjevsky, T. Simonson and L. Simonson: Settings and Costumes of the Modern Stage (New York, 1933)

T. Komisarjevsky, T. Simonson and L. Simonson: Miracle in the Evening (New York, 1960)

D. Oenslager: Stage Design: Four Centuries of Scenic Invention (London, 1975)

DAVID J. HOUGH

Belgian Congo.

See Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Belgioioso, Baldassare de.

See Beaujoyeux, Balthasar de.

Belgische Vereniging voor Muziekwetenschap

(Flem.).

Belgium.

European country, independent since 1830. See under Low Countries.

Belgrade

(Serb. Beograd).

Capital city of Yugoslavia. As the capital of the Kingdom of Serbia, which won its independence from the Turks in the early 19th century, Belgrade became open to Western cultural influence in the 1830s. Political and cultural life were strongly influenced by Romantic nationalism which gave rise to the development of choral music with a pronounced patriotic flavour. This was reflected in the number and stature of various choral societies which were founded during the second half of the century. At that time opera advanced very slowly and its main form was a type of Singspiel which owed its popularity largely to Davorin Jenko (1835–1914). In 1894 Vilém Blodek's V studni (‘In the well’) was the first opera to be performed in Belgrade, and Stanislav Binički's Na uranku (‘At dawn’, 1903) was the first Serbian opera. The first known orchestral concert took place in 1842; two years later Johann Strauss (i) and his orchestra performed in the city.

Musical life in the early 20th century was much influenced by the personalities of the composers and conductors Stevan Mokranjac and Stanislav Binički: the former continued to develop the established tradition of choral singing, the latter conducted orchestral concerts. Musical life intensified after 1918, when a general rise in standards became apparent. Three eminent composers active in Belgrade during the first half of the century were Petar Konjović (1883–1970), Miloje Milojević (1884–1946) and Stevan Hristić (1885–1958). After World War II musical life received another strong impetus, new professional bodies were formed and musical education was accorded particular importance. This resulted in the emergence of a generation of younger performers who contributed a great deal to the rich concert life in the city. A number of composers born or based in Belgrade also achieved prominence, including Stanojlo Rajičić (b 1910), Dušan Radić (b 1929) and Petar Ozgijan (1932–79).

Until 1920, when the permanent Belgrade Opera was founded, operas were performed within the repertory of the National Theatre. The Belgrade Opera owed its quick development and success partly to the first director, Stevan Hristić, and partly to the influx in the early 1920s of many prominent Russian singers and ballet dancers who emigrated after the Russian October Revolution. The repertory at that time included standard Italian and French 19th-century operas, and also, with increasing frequency, operas by Russian and other Slavonic composers. The company became well known in Europe under Oskar Danon's directorship (1944–63). The orientation towards the Slavonic repertory has remained a characteristic policy of the opera. The National Theatre which houses the opera was rebuilt in 1980, with a capacity of 660, as a replacement for the original theatre of 1869. The season lasts from September to June. The two other halls used for musical performances are the Kolarčev Narodni Univerzitet (Kolarac's Popular University), with a capacity of 883, and the Dvorana Doma Sindikata (Trade Union House Hall), with a capacity of 1600.

The Beogradska Filharmonija (Belgrade PO), founded in 1923, was reconstituted in 1951 as the State Philharmonic and reverted to its original name in 1952. It achieved a national reputation under Živojin Zdravkovíć, its director from 1951 to 1978, and has often toured abroad. Radio-Television Belgrade maintains a symphony orchestra and a choir. The Beogradsko Pevačko Društvo (Belgrade Choral Society), founded in 1853, developed into an accomplished body under the successive direction of Kornelije Stanković, Davorin Jenko, Josif Marinković and Stevan Mokranjac. Its activity was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and attempts to revive it after the war failed. Its place in the musical life of Belgrade was filled admirably by the Branko Krsmanović Choral Society of the University of Belgrade (founded 1945). Bemus, an annual festival founded in 1970, presents distinguished orchestras and soloists and has no particular programmatic scope. The first music school, founded under the auspices of the Belgrade Choral Society in 1899, is now called the Mokranjac Music School, and there are two other music schools, the Stanković and the Slavenski. The Academy of Music was founded in 1937 and the Musicological Institute of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1948.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (L. Savini)

J. Andreis, D. Cvetko and S. Đurić-Klajn: Historijski razvoj muzičke kulture u Jugoslaviji [History of the development of musical culture in Yugoslavia] (Zagreb, 1962)

M. Đoković, ed.: Jedan vek Narodnog pozorišta u Beogradu, 1868–1968 [A century of the National Theatre in Belgrade, 1868–1968] (Belgrade, 1968)

S. Đurić-Klajn: A Survey of Serbian Music through the Ages (Belgrade, 1972)

R. Pejović: Srpsko muƶičko izvodjaštvo romantičarskog doba [The performance of Serbian music in the Romantic age] (Belgrade, 1991)

BOJAN BUJIĆ/ROKSANDA PEJOVIĆ

Belgrade chant.

A variant tradition of Serbian chant. See Russian and Slavonic church music, §6.

Beliczay, Gyula [Julius von]

(b Komárom, Hungary, 10 Aug 1835; d Budapest, 30 April 1893). Hungarian composer and teacher. He studied music and music theory with Joseph Kumlik in Pozsony (Bratislava). From 1851 to 1857 he was a student at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, at the same time studying composition with Joachim Hoffmann, Franz Krenn and Nottebohm and the piano with August Halm. From 1857 to 1871 he lived in Vienna, where he worked as an engineer, composed and taught music. In the 1850s his piano pieces and sacred compositions began to be published in Vienna, Leipzig and Paris; their dedications bear witness to Beliczay’s extensive connections with important figures in the contemporary musical world, including Anton Rubinstein, Liszt, Wagner and A.-F. Marmontel. For the dedication of his Ave Maria to Franz Joseph I (1867) he was awarded the gold decoration ‘Viribus unitis’. From 1862 to 1888 he was a correspondent for the magazines Zenészeti lapok (Pest), Wanderer (Vienna), Blätter für Theater und Kunst (Vienna), Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (Leipzig), and Neues politisches Volksblatt (Budapest). From 1888 until his death he taught theory at the Academy of Music in Budapest.

Among the minor Hungarian composers of the second half of the 19th century, Beliczay was one of the best known at home and abroad. A cultured and cultivated composer, if not particularly original, he acted as a mediator between different cultures: his sacred works, influenced by Schubert, and his chamber and piano music influenced by Schumann, spread the spirit of German Romanticism in France and Hungary; his piano works, which owed their inspiration to Liszt’s and Mihály Mosonyi’s Hungarian style, contributed to the popularity of this eastern European art in western Europe.

WORKS

Vocal: numerous sacred pieces, incl. Mass, F, S, A, T, B, mixed vv, orch, op.50; 3 male choruses; c15 Ger. and Hung. songs, 1v, pf

Inst: 2 syms., d, op.45, A, op.66, both unpubd; Serenade, d, str orch, op.36; Suite de bal, orch, op.56, unpubd; 3 str qts, g, op.21, a, op.51, unpubd, B, unpubd; Pf Trio, E, op.30; works for vn, pf, opp.14, 39; works for pf 4 hands, opp.13, 22, 36; numerous pf works, incl. Tarantella, op.35. Sonate quasi fantaisie, op.40. 12 grandes études, op.52

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Bónis) [with list of works]

A. Jenetschek: Julius von Beliczay (Karlsbad, 1889)

I. Sonkoly: Beliczay Gyula mint egyház zenész [Beliczay as a church musician] (Eger, 1929)

I. Sonkoly: Beliczay Gyula és az egyházi zene [Beliczay and sacred music] (Eger, 1930)

I. Sonkoly: Beliczay Gyula (Budapest, 1943)

FERENC BÓNIS

Bélime, Jean.

See Coeuroy, André.

Belimov, Sergey Aleksandrovich

(b Leningrad, 27 May 1950). Russian composer. He studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with Chistyakov and Yevlakhov (1969–75), after which he took a postgraduate course with Arapov (1979–81) and then enrolled as a student of art history at the Sorbonne in 1995. He joined the Composers’ Union in 1977 and served on the board of its St Petersburg section in 1989. He taught composition at the Choral Academy of the Leningrad Academic Cappella (1972–81) and at the Music School attached to the conservatory (1981–92). Belimov's work is emblematic of his quest to synthesize Eastern and Western thought in the structure of both sound and form of a composition, and is evident not only in the totality but also in the rich, inner content of a single, isolated sound. Another facet of his experimentation resides in the invention of what he calls a supermodal technique which is applied in a unique form to each work; pieces written or, as the composer would have it, ‘cultivated’ in this manner include the Third Symphony and Sad raskhodyashchikhsya tropok (‘The Garden of Divergent Paths’) of 1990 and 1991 respectively. He further developed the technique in Za zerkalom tishinï (‘Beyond the Mirror of Silence’), written in 1992 and performed a year later in the In Tune II festival of microtonal music held in Britain in 1993. Since that time his interests have focussed on the broadening of instrumental timbral capablities; the ‘cordepiano’ technique he developed in 1996 allows for the production on a piano of microtonal intervals, harmonics and multiphonics. In 1997 he attempted to create a virtual interactive musical text with the composition I svet neprekhodyashchiy za oprokinutïmi nebesami (‘And the Light Inextinguishable beyond the Clouds Cast Asunder’).

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1981; Ot zvyozd do zvyozd [From Stars to Stars], 2 chbr orch, 1983; Legenda o Krasnom kone [The Legend of the Red Horse], suite, 1986 [from incid music Zherebyonok ‘The Colt’]; Sym. no.2, 1986; O vode zhivoy i myortvoy [Living Water and Dead Water], conc., ob, str, 1987; Sym. no.3, 1990; Sad raskhodyashchikhsya tropok [The Garden of Divergent Paths], conc., fl, chbr orch, 1991

Choral: 4 vremeni serdtsa [The 4 Seasons of the Heart] (orat, P. Neruda), S, Bar, spkr, chorus, orch, 1974; Tikhaya moya rodina [My Quiet Homeland] (N. Rubtsov), male chorus, 1978; Canticle Amores (cant., M. Tsvetayeva, ancient Mediterranean poems), 2 S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1981; Vokaler Regen jenseits des Vergessens (Ė. Merks and Belimov), chorus, 1992; Sous les voiles des voix (Belimov), chorus, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, vn, pf, 1969; Sonata, vn, 1978; Sonata una corda, non-tempered pf, 1982; Str Qt no.1, 1982; Str Qt no.2, 1985; Pesnya utrennego probuzhdeniya [Song of Morning Awakening], ob, pf, 1990, arr. fl, pf, 1991; Za zerkalom tishinï [Beyond the Mirrors of Silence], non-tempered pf, 4 Chin. metallic spheres, 1992; Für Elyse, pf, 1992; A travers les toiles des étoiles, fl, cordepiano, 1993; Strebende Winde nach der Unzulänglichkeit, vc, accdn, 1995; A l'ombre des voix errantes, bar sax, cordepiano, 1996; Cloches fugitives sous les ailes d'ailleurs, 2 cordepiano, 1996; Reflects du jour, cordepiano, 1996; De l'autre côté du cercle, study, cordepiano, 1997

Songs: Diptych (P. Grushko, after F. García Lorca), S, 2 fl, gui, 1975; Lianto por Santiago (P. Viliasante), 5 songs, Mez, fl, gui, 1976; Ozhidaniye [Anticipation] (Grushko, after García Lorca), S, pf, 1979 [arr. of second song from Diptych]; Proshchaniye [Farewell] (A. Gelescula, after García Lorca), song cycle, Bar, pf, 1979; I svet neprekhodyashchiy za oprokinutïmi nebesami [And the Light Inextinguishable beyond the Clouds Cast Asunder] (Belimov), 2vv, 2 cordepiano, 1997

El-ac: I solntse v nochi [And the Sun in the Night], fl, tape, 1985, version for spatial music hall in Kazan', 1989; Vers l'autre source du flux, 1v, fl, tape, 1995

Film scores, incid music

MSS in RUS-Mcm; Bibliothèque des archives du fonds musical de Saint-Petersbourg

Principal publishers: Kompozitor, Peters, Edipan

WRITINGS

‘Nekotorïye stilisticheskiye tendentsii v razvitii sovremennogo muzïkal'nogo iskusstva, 70-e godï’ [Certain stylistic tendencies in the development of the contemporary art of music, the 1970s], Traditsii i novatorstvo v muzïke: tezisï nauchno-teoreticheskoy konferentsii (Alma-Ata, 1980), 11–13

‘Avtorï rasskazïvayut’ [Composers give their views], SovM (1984), no.11, p.136 only

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Bogdanova: ‘Volnuyushchaya tema sovremennosti’ [An exciting theme in the modern world], SovM (1978), no.1, pp.18–23

A. Khar'kovsky: ‘Kuda zovyot nas sïn neba i zemli’ [Whither the son of heaven and earth calls us], Iskusstvo Leningrada (1991), no.4, pp.28–32

Sergey Belimov (St Petersburg, 1993) [pubn of Rossiyskiy Soyuz Kompozitorov Sankt-Peterburga; list of music pubns; Eng. and Russ.]

IOSIF RAYSKIN

Belin [Bellin], Guillaume

(b c1500; d 3 Dec 1568). French singer and composer. He was a tenor in the royal chapels of François I and Henri II between 1546 and 1560, much of the time drawing additional wages as a chantre ordinaire of the Maison du roy, the king's personal household. From 1547 to 1553 he also served (with Claudin de Sermisy and Hilaire Rousseau) as one of three sous-maîtres of the royal chapel, a position he still held in 1559. In 1550 he obtained a canonicate at the Ste Chapelle in Paris that passed at his death to another chantre du roy, Estienne Le Roy. Belin became the cantor of the Ste Chapelle in 1565, although he had begun exercising some of the functions of the office two years earlier. In 1560 Le Roy & Ballard published nine four-voice works by Belin (two chansons and seven settings of biblical canticles and psalms in the French translations of Lancelot de Carle, Bishop of Riez), none of which is now extant. The 14 chansons ascribed to him in collections of all the major French printers (RISM 1538¹⁴, 1539¹⁶, 1539²⁰, 1540¹², 1540¹⁴, 1543¹², 1544⁸, 1548³⁴, 1549²⁰, 1550⁵) lie well within the tradition of the homophonic Parisian chanson, and are mainly chordal and syllabic in their text-setting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetM, 112–13

G. Du Peyrat: L'histoire ecclésiastique de la cour, ou les antiquités et recherches de la chapelle et oratoire du roy de France, depuis Clovis jusques à nostre temps (Paris, 1645), 482

G. Durand: ‘La musique de la cathédrale d'Amiens avant la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie, xxix (1920–21), 329–457; repr. in La vie musicale dans les provinces françaises, i (Geneva, 1972), esp. 126

F. Lesure: ‘Clément Janequin: recherches sur sa vie et sur son oeuvre’, MD, v (1951), 157–93, esp. 185

JANE ILLINGWORTH PIERCE/JOHN T. BROBECK

Belin, Julien

(b in or near Le Mans, c1525–30; d after 1584). French lutenist and composer. According to La Croix du Maine (Les bibliothèques françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier, Paris, 1772–3/R, ii, 11) he was working in Maine in 1584. His only known work was published in Paris in 1556 by Nicolas Du Chemin: the Premier livre contenant plusieurs motetz, chansons & fantasies reduictz en tabulature de leut (ed. M. Renault, Paris, 1976) which contains eight vocal transcriptions and seven fantasias. Six of the songs (by Arcadelt, Gentian, Certon, Pathie and Sandrin) are highly ornate, and show Belin to have been an accomplished virtuoso and a skilful elaborator of vocal polyphony. The other two transcriptions (a motet, Cantate Domino, and a song, Les bourguignons) are intabulated without ornamentation, and since they bear no indication of authorship it is possible that they are by Belin himself.

The seven fantasias are small-scale works, of between 54 and 91 bars each. Two, economically written for three voices, are designated ‘trio’. The second, third, fourth and fifth fantasias and the first trio were included by Phalèse in his Thesaurus musicus (1574¹²). Their style is much more severe than that of the ornate songs, lucidly polyphonic with a clearly articulated form: the fourth fantasia, for example, has three equal sections based on the same theme. The Premier livre shows him to have been a musician who, although clearly influenced by such composers as Francesco da Milano and Alberto da Ripa, developed his own distinctive melodic and harmonic style.

MICHEL RENAULT

Belissen [Bellissen], Laurent

(b Aix-en-Provence, 8 Aug 1693; d Marseilles, 12 Feb 1762). French composer. His home was near the Cathedral of St Sauveur in Aix; although there is no evidence that he was admitted to the choir school, he was probably one of the last composers to study with Guillaume Poitevin, maître de musique there. By 1722 Belissen was in Marseilles, where he made his career. He followed Blanchard as maître de musique at the Abbey of St Victor, and held this position for the rest of his life, also directing the Académie de Concerts in Marseilles.

Many of Belissen's works are lost or in uncatalogued collections. The extant works, principally grands motets, reveal a style markedly different from the Versailles motets of Lalande, Campra and Mondonville. Belissen preferred a four-voice texture to the five-voice one popular with the Versailles composers. His choral style combines French and Italian characteristics: his choral fugues are highly developed and repeat the text continuously in the Italian manner. His orchestral treatment in the motets also reflects Italian practices, with the use of ritornello passages as an important articulatory device.

WORKS

Messe en Symphonie, D, frag., F-C

Beatus vir, 4vv, soloists, 2 insts, bc, Pn

Laudate pueri Dominum, 4vv, 2 insts, bc, Pn

Magnificat, 4vv, soloists, 3 insts, bc, Pn

Nisi Dominus, 4vv, soloists, 2 insts, bc, Pn

Presumably lost (mentioned in Achard): Benedicam, Bs, Credidi, Deus in nomine tuo, Jub, Lamentations, Mag settings, Messe en A mi la, Messe en a, Quam dilecta, TeD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PierreH

C.F. Achard: Dictionnaire des hommes illustrés de Provence et du Comtat-venaissin, iii (Marseilles, 1787), 74

A. Gouirand: La musique en Provence et le Conservatoire de Marseille (Paris and Marseilles, 1908), 85–6, 124–5

F. Raugel: ‘La bibliothèque de la maîtrise de la Cathédrale d'Aix en Provence’, GfMKB: Lüneburg 1950, 234–45

F. Raugel: ‘La maîtrise de la Cathédrale d'Aix-en-Provence’, Bulletin de la Société d'étude du XVIIe siècle, xxi–xxii (1954), 422–32

E. Lebeau: ‘Un fonds provenant du Concert spirituel à la Bibliothèque nationale’, RdM, xxxvii (1955), 187–91; xxxviii (1956), 54–62

F. Raugel: ‘La maîtrise et les orgues de la primatiale Saint-Trophime d'Arles’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 99–116

M. Frémiot: ‘L’école provençale’, Dictionnaire de la musique sacrée, ii (1971), 543, 549

M. Signorile: Musique et société: le modèle d'Arles à l'époque de absolutisme, 1600–1789 (Geneva, 1993)

JOHN HAJDU HEYER

Belitz, Joachim

(b Brandenburg an der Havel, c1550; d Stargard, Pomerania [now in Poland], 26 Dec 1592). German composer. He matriculated at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder in 1570. Since he published a wedding motet at Frankfurt in 1581, together with one by the town’s Kantor, Gregor Lange, he may well have continued to live there, or nearby, at least until then. From 1584, at the latest, until his death he was Kantor at Stargard. His successor, Peter Eichmann, acknowledged in his Oratio de divina origine (1600) the extent to which the cultivation and study of music developed during Belitz’s tenure of the post: for example, he taught the basic elements of musica poetica and musica practica. Seven years after his death the guardian of his children, who was not named but may have been Eichmann, brought out a volume of 31 four-part lieder by him in villanella style; 22 are secular and nine sacred, and the collection ends with an eight-part piece. Eichmann included five other works by Belitz in his Praecepta musicae practicae (1604). The chapter ‘De clavibus’ includes the four-part homophonic Da pacem, Domine, which is in Gothic notation. There are two pieces in the chapter on mutation, one in cantional style in four parts, with sharply differentiated rhythms, and a bicinium, in which a hymn melody is treated freely. Here Belitz differed from Michael Praetorius in renouncing varied repetitions, but the two choral responsories for the Preface of the Mass included as examples in the final chapter, ‘De tactu’, are very similar to the settings of the same words in Praetorius’s eighth book of Musae Sioniae (1610). The melody and general style of the six-part setting to German words are alike throughout; in the four-part setting to Latin words the embellished cantus firmus appears alternately in the tenor and cantus.

WORKS

Epithalamia in honorem … Lazari Opilionis (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1581) [incl. one motet each by Belitz and G. Lange]

Cantio gratulatoria … M. Wolfio, J. Fabro et D. Wilmanno (Greifswald, 1584), lost

Res, mores, amores: fröliche newe teutsche Lieder (Altstettin, 1599)

5 sacred works, 2, 4, 6vv, in P. Eichmann: Praecepta musicae practicae (Stettin, 1604)

10 works, 4–6vv, PL-WRu (inc.); motet, D-Z (inc.), ?lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K.W. Niemöller: Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600 (Regensburg, 1969)

M. Ruhnke: ‘Stand der Forschung zur Geschichte der Musik in Pommern’, Musik des Ostens, xi (1989), 251–70

MARTIN RUHNKE

Belïy, Viktor Arkad'yevich

(b Berdichev, Ukraine, 14 Jan 1904; d Moscow, 6 March 1983). Russian composer. He studied the violin and composition at the Kharkiv Conservatory (1919–21) and composition with Konyus and Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory (1922–9), and then returned to teach composition (1935–48), from 1941 as professor. After a further period of composition teaching at the Minsk Conservatory (1949–52) he went back to Moscow and became principal editor of Muzïkal'naya zhizn'. He held the titles Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR and Honoured Artist of the Belorussian SSR. Early in his career he showed expressionist tendencies. In the 1920s he was a member of Prokoll, a ‘production collective’ of composers whose aim was to write music in the spirit of the new revolutionary era, and later works demonstrate an involvement with public concerns, expressed in his melody with a garish, poster-like immediacy. Several of his choral songs have enjoyed great popularity.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Voyna [War], 1929; Golodnïy pokhod [The Hunger Campaign] (Pascal), chorus, pf, 1931; Syuita na chuvashskiye temï, 1936; 2 fragmenta iz poemï ‘Vladimir Il'ich Lenin’ (V. Mayakovsky), 1938; Step', 1954; Baykal, 1973; Russkiye lesa [Russian Woods], 1974; many other works, incl. folksong arrs.

Popular choral songs: Oktyabr'skaya pesnya [October Song]; Orlyonok [Eaglet]; Pesnya 30 divizii [Song of the 30th Division]; Pesnya smelïkh [Song of the Bold]; Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes' [Proletarians of All Countries, Unite]; Smeley, krasnoflottsï [Bolder, Red Navy Men]; V zashchitu mira [In Defence of Peace]

Pf: 4 Preludes, 1922; Sonata no.1, 1923; 2 Fugues, 1925; Sonata no.2, 1926; Lyric Sonatina, 1928; Sonatas: no.3, 1942, no.4, 1946; many folksong arrs.

Solo songs, chbr pieces, theatre music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Shlifshteyn: ‘V.A. Belïy: zametki o tvorchestve’ [Notes on his work], Sovetskoye iskusstvo (14 Dec 1939)

A. Russovsky: ‘Orlyonku: 25 let’ [To the eaglet: 25 years], SovM (1961), no.4, pp.202–3

Yu. Korev: V. Belïy (Moscow, 1962)

Ya. Frenkel': ‘Nashi yubilyarï’ [Our heroes], SovM (1964), no.1, pp.143–4

I. Mamgur: Viktor Belïy (Moscow, 1979)

Obituary, Sovetskaya kul'tura (17 March 1983)

I. Zemtsovsky: ‘Predtecha operï novogo tipa’ [Precursor to a new type of opera], SovM (1984), no.5, pp.27–8

GALINA GRIGOR'YEVA

Belknap, Daniel

(b Framingham, MA, 9 Feb 1771; d Pawtucket, RI, 31 Oct 1815). American composer and tune book compiler. He worked in his native town as a farmer and a mechanic, also teaching singing schools from the time he was 18. He married around 1800, and in 1812 moved to Pawtucket.

Almost all his 85 known compositions were first printed in his own tune books, an exception being his most widely published piece, ‘Lena’, which was introduced in The Worcester Collection (Boston, 5/1794). Belknap’s The Harmonist’s Companion (Boston, 1797), a 32-page collection, contains only his own compositions, which are written in an American idiom untouched by European-inspired reform. His later compilations, The Evangelical Harmony (Boston, 1800), The Middlesex Collection (Boston, 1802) and The Village Compilation (Boston, 1806), are devoted almost entirely to American music; they introduced pieces by 17 Massachusetts and Connecticut composers as well as many of Belknap’s own compositions. Unlike many of his fellow psalmodists, Belknap also wrote secular music. His compilation The Middlesex Songster (Dedham, MA, 1809) contains Belknap’s March, his only known instrumental composition. The American Antiquarian Society owns two letters by Belknap, including one from April 1810 asking the composer Timothy Swan to sell him the copyright to his tunes ‘China’ and ‘London’; Belknap published Justin Morgan’s Judgment Anthem that year as a separate issue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.J. Metcalf: American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (New York, 1925/R), 146–8

R.J. Wolfe: Secular Music in America 1801–1825: a Bibliography (New York, 1964)

N. Cooke: American Psalmodists in Contact and Collaboration, 1770–1820 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1990)

D.W. Steel, ed.: Daniel Belknap (1771–1815): the Collected Works (New York and London, 1998)

RICHARD CRAWFORD/NYM COOKE

Bell (i)

(Fr. Cloche; Ger. Glocke; It., Sp. campana).

An idiophone consisting of a hollow object, usually of metal but in some cultures of hard clay or even glass, which when struck emits a sound by the vibration of most of its mass. Bells differ from gongs in that their zone of maximum vibration is towards the rim, while that of gongs is towards the centre; bells are held at their vertex, or point farthest from their rim. While the word ‘bell’ is often loosely applied to any device that produces a metallic sound of gradual decay, a true bell is not so long in relation to its diameter as to be considered a tube closed at one end (see Tubular bells), nor so short as to form a shallow pan (see Cymbals, Gong, Metallophone). The term ‘bells’ often refers to the (See Glockenspiel (i)) because of its bell-like timbre; this usage originated in the USA and has become universally recognized though it has led to confusion with orchestral bells.

The bell is classified as a percussion vessel; certain types (for instance, pellet bells), however, are vessel rattles.

1. Forms and methods of sounding.

2. Timbre and tuning.

3. Sizes.

4. History.

5. Bellfounding.

6. European techniques and traditions.

7. The use and representation of bells in art music.

PERCIVAL PRICE (1–5), CHARLES BODMAN RAE (6), JAMES BLADES, CHARLES BODMAN RAE (7)

1. Forms and methods of sounding.

True bells are derived in shape from two basic forms: the cup and the hollow sphere. The cup form, also called the ‘open’ bell, is the more common. It appears in a great variety of profiles, of which the modern European tower bell with sides flared towards the rim is a representative example (figs.1 and 2). It is also found in more squat forms (as exemplified by many bicycle and clock bells, and some similarly shaped bells used in music) and in more elongated forms such as cylindrical and ‘barrel-shaped’ Buddhist bells, certain African tribal bells, and some of the earlier European ‘beehive’ and ‘sugar-loaf’ tower bells. In addition to the above forms, which all have circular rims, bells are found in many parts of the world with rims and cross-sections of oval, rectangular and other shapes – for example Cowbells, which have been used in the modern orchestra for tonal effects.

When the word ‘bell’ is used without further description the open bell or cup form is usually meant. The hollow-sphere form, or crotal (Fr. grelot; Ger. Schlittenglocke), however, is equally universal and of equally ancient origin; a representative example is the sleighbell. Called the ‘closed’ bell in contradistinction to the ‘open’ bell, the crotal's basic form is the sphere, but it has as many varieties of shape as the open bell, resembling such diverse objects as clam-shells, pears or teardrops. It does not have a wide rim; instead, most examples have a long slot or crossed slots in the lower half, or holes in either the lower or upper halves. A few examples have holes in both halves; and a few large crotals, such as those at Shinto shrines, have neither holes nor slots (fig.3) and are therefore distinct acoustically from bells in the normal sense. Both open bells and crotals have a device at the vertex for attachment. This may be a lug, a loop or crossed loops (‘canons’: Fr. anses; Ger. Krone) or in many modern open bells simply a bolt hole.

An integral part of many open bells is a clapper. This is either a rod with a knob on it or, in many non-European examples, a pellet or ball suspended by a string or thong; it is attached to the bell on the inside directly under the vertex. Its purpose is to sound the bell by striking it: either the bell is oscillated to cause the clapper to hit it at opposite points on the inside, the prevalent method in Western church usage, or the clapper is pulled by means of a rope or wire to make it strike the bell on one side only, as in most Eastern church usages and in manual chiming and carillon playing. An open bell may also be sounded by striking it with a hammer on either the inside or the outside, as in automatic clock-chiming, or by striking at a fixed point on the outside with a ramrod, which is the customary Buddhist method for ringing very large bells (see fig.9 below). Where the hammer is used it is usually affixed permanently close to the bell and moved by remote control; however, a series of bells within reach of one or two performers may be played with hammers held in the hands, as with the Chinese bianzhong, the medieval cymbala, and some modern performances on handbells (see Chimes, §1, Cymbala (ii) and Handbell).

For crotals the device corresponding to the clapper or hammer of the open bell is a loose pellet permanently enclosed inside. The crotal is sounded by agitating it so as to cause the pellet to bounce freely and strike the inner surface. There are crotals which have several pellets inside them, just as there are portable open bells with several clappers.

2. Timbre and tuning.

When a bell is struck it gives off a complex sound containing a considerable number of partials that may or may not be in concordant relationship, rather than a fundamental pitch with a series of concordant harmonics above it (as found in most wind and string instruments). Moreover, after each stroke the sound does not cease abruptly, as with the drum or the xylophone, but continues for an indefinite period depending on the bell's form and size, and the elasticity and homogeneity of the material of which it is made. The highest partials cease very soon after striking, and the lowest partial – which is not the loudest during most of the total decay – lasts longest (fig.4 and ex.1).

In European tower bells the hum-like quality of this lowest partial led English bellfounders to call it the ‘hum note’ (Fr. bourdon; Ger. Unteroktave). The next frequency, approximately an octave above but greatly varying in untuned bells, gives the impression of being the principal pitch of the bell during most of its decay, and is therefore called the fundamental (Fr. principal; Ger. Prime). The next two partials are called the tierce (Fr. tierce; Ger. Terz) and quint (Fr. quinte; Ger. Quinte): they lie approximately a 3rd and a 5th above the fundamental. This 3rd tends to be minor, not major, which indicates that these frequencies are independent partials, not overtones generated from a common root. Approximately one octave above the fundamental is the nominal (Fr. nominal; Ger. Oberoktave), so called because although it is short-lived its intensity at the moment of striking has great influence in defining the pitch of the bell. Above the nominal there are more partials: in the sound of a large bell there may be from ten to perhaps 100 extending over several octaves. They are in more or less dissonant relationship to each other and to the lower partials, but their decay is so rapid that they scarcely affect the pitch of the bell. However, they give its sound the rich, vibrant attack that is an essential characteristic of a bell's timbre and makes it uniquely useful for arresting attention.

In bells where the fundamental and the nominal are not a true octave apart, a keen ear can recognize another frequency at the instant of striking which lies a true octave below the nominal. This is called the ‘strike note’ (Fr. note de coup; Ger. Schlagton). It is of very short duration, and has caused controversy among acousticians because it is not of the same nature as the other partials but is a resultant tone. In bells with the fundamental an octave below the nominal it becomes part of the fundamental. Its presence has been a debatable asset, for while it is considered objectionable in music on chimes and carillons where precise pitch relationships are demanded, it may actually enhance the effect of bells swung as a peal, where the aural interest is that of kaleidoscopic patterns of sound melting one into the other, or of Russian-style chiming, where the interest derives chiefly from the sounding of rhythms and timbres at high and low pitches. From the 13th century, when a few founders – after a careful study of profile design – succeeded in casting bells with octaves between the nominal and the fundamental (thus eliminating an obvious strike note), European opinion has altered over the necessity of this interval in bells sounded by swinging. A controversy raged in the English press in 1933, for example, when the historic ‘Bow Bells’ of Bow Church, Cheapside, London, were replaced by bells with true octaves. Those bells, destroyed in World War II, were in turn replaced by the present ones, in which the interval is a few cents under the octave (see Whitechapel Bell Foundry).

Such fine control of individual partials in a bell is achieved by tuning the bell after it is cast. Tuning involves removing a small amount of metal from the bell's inner surface at certain concentric zones that determine the pitches of specific partials. This is a very delicate and highly skilled operation, for very slight alterations in the profile of the bell may alter the pitch frequency not only of the partial in question but of others as well. It is usually done in the foundry immediately after the casting, and remains permanent for the life of the bell unless it is affected by corrosion. In bells used for chimes and carillons the five most important partials (named above) must be tuned. The pitch to which they are made to relate is the fundamental: the nominal is tuned an octave above and the hum note an octave below; the tierce a minor 3rd above; and the quint a perfect 5th above (ex.1). As the removal of metal in most zones tends to lower – rather than raise – the pitch of the particular partial, bells intended to be tuned are usually cast sharp, and then ‘tuned down’. The above process is the internal tuning of a bell. For a bell to be used in musical performance with other bells there must also be external tuning: that is, the fundamental of each bell must be at the proper scale interval, not only from its other partials but also from the fundamental of every other bell.

This tuning of the five principal partials applies to bells of the form and thickness of the conventional Western tower bell, that is a conoid ‘cup’ form with its bottom or rim diameter twice that of the top diameter and equal to the distance between the edges of the two diameters. The sides of this type of bell are in fact not straight, but from the top flare out slightly for two-thirds of their length and then flare more rapidly until turning down at the rim. With the increase in flare at the outside there is also an increase in the thickness of the bell wall, the maximum thickness occurring near the rim at the zone where the clapper strikes, called the ‘sound-bow’ (fig. 5b).

After European bellfounders determined that these proportions yielded both the best bell sound and the necessary durability to withstand years of severe pounding from the clapper, they discovered that with slight deviations in profile and in the ratio of height to diameter they could cast a bell which, under proper foundry conditions, would have from a 7th to a 9th as the interval between fundamental and nominal. Some founders developed sufficient skill, in filing or chiselling at a few places on the inner surface, to bring this interval to an octave. This fine adjustment was not considered necessary for great outdoor bells, which were to inspire with awe as they summoned to church, or to drive demons out of occasional storms: but it was required for the more musical uses of bells on the cymbala and other chimes, and for the regular iteration of musical figures as clock signals. The relation of thickness to pitch (the thicker the bell the higher the pitch) had been determined in making cymbala bells in monasteries in the 12th century, just as it had been determined some 17 centuries earlier in making sets of oval bianzhong bells in China (see Zhong). By 1200 ce there were founders who could make tower bells with pure octaves between the fundamental and the nominal.

The first known written work on bell acoustics appeared in China in the 3rd century, and dealt with the sounding of bells by sympathetic vibration. The earliest dated treatises on bells in Europe are from the 13th century. One, by the French monk Vincent de Beauvais, noted three pitches in a bell and is the earliest record of recognizing partials. There is material on bells and their proportions of weight and size in Walter Odington's Summa de speculations musice (pt.3, c1300). Another treatise is credited to Theophilus Presbyter, a monk attached to a Benedictine monastery near Essen, who may have been of Byzantine birth and who has been dated as early as the 10th century; his Diversarum artium schedula (bk 3, §§lxxxv–vi) discusses the bellfounder's craft in great detail, and had a strong influence on bellfounding throughout Europe. In the 13th century bellfounding passed into lay hands; bellfounders experimented with broadening the rim to withstand clapper thrust and with other new profiles, trying to find the best design of bell for church towers, which were then increasing in number. The founders next developed the outward curve of the sides into the tower-bell form presently most common, which in some countries is referred to as the ‘Gothic profile’.

Modern investigations into bell acoustics sprang from the conflict between theological dogma and scientific curiosity among some men in religious orders. In the 17th century Mersenne wrote that the ringing of churchbells could disperse storms and thunder, but he was not sure whether this was due to the bells' baptism or to their vibrations tearing through clouds and releasing the thunder in them. He published a table of weights, diameters and thicknesses of sound-bows for bells sounding the C major scale in sizes up to 90 cm in diameter and weighing 450 kg. Mersenne's investigations, along with those of Descartes and of Christiaan Huygens, who also perfected a tower-clock mechanism, opened the way for the development of a wide range of well-tuned bells such as those made by the Hemonys and other 17th-century founders.

The investigations into bell acoustics by Mersenne and Huygens were continued in the 18th century by Leonhard Euler in Switzerland and Ernst Chladni in Germany, and in the 19th century by Baron Grimthorpe, Lord Rayleigh and Canon A.B. Simpson in England. In the 1890s Simpson made studies of sets of English and nearby continental bells, and reported that in most of them the founders had tuned only one partial, either the nominal or the fundamental, but in the bells of the best 17th- and 18th-century carillons on the Continent the founders had tuned the five most prominent partials. He therefore advocated that founders of his day should also tune all five, and he indicated the zones on the inside of the bell where metal should be removed in respect to each partial. Few founders followed his advice; but John Taylor & Co. and then Gillett & Johnston developed sufficient skill to tune a chromatic series of carillon bells properly. Although Simpson's desire was simply to improve the sound of English churchbells, he can be said to be the father of the modern Carillon.

At the same time Aristarkh Izrailev, a Russian priest, conducted research on Russian stationary bells (Russ. zvonï) and P.J. Blessing investigated swinging bells in Germany. The reawakening of Dutch interest in the carillon included research by Abraham vas Nunes in 1909 on the bells of François Hemony. During World War I Johann Biehle conducted research in Germany on the tonal qualities of steel bells as possible replacements for bronze ones that had been sequestered to supply bronze for war purposes.

In the 20th century a few Japanese physicists, including Ichiro Aoki (who published from 1934 to 1957), did research on the sounds of large and medium-sized Japanese bells. In the USA research was done by the Meneely bellfounders (Watervliet, NY) in the 1890s and A.T. Jones in the 1920s. Jones's research was followed in 1930 by that of Franklin Tyzzer, who introduced a new procedure into bell-tone analysis: while 17th-century Dutch founders used bronze bars similar to those of the East Indian gamelan as tone standards, and 19th-century founders and physicists used both resonators and plain and adjustable tuning-forks, Tyzzer used an electric oscillator that could be set to various frequencies and touched to the bell to cause each partial to sound individually as a sustained tone. The same procedure was used by Erich Thienhaus in Germany during and after World War II, and by E.W. van Heuven in the Netherlands just after the war. They worked under unique conditions in that the wartime removal of bells from towers in both countries made it possible to bring selected bells to the laboratory for testing. Since then a great variety of research on old and new Dutch bells has been conducted in the Netherlands by André Lehr.

Shortly before and after World War II other electrical apparatus was developed not only to analyse bell tones but also to imitate them. The reproduction of swinging bells, tried in Germany, proved impractical because of the changes in timbre and surge as a bell swings in opposite directions; but the sound of stationary bells was approximated closely enough for the ‘electronic carillon’ to be promoted in areas where real tower bells were little known. Two American physicists who were also carillonneurs – Robert Kleinschmidt and Arthur Bigelow – were prominent in pioneering this instrument. One principle of its operation involved activating metal rods (one for each note) and amplifying their vibrations (fig.6). The difficulty was that although the timbre might approximate to that of a bell for an instant, it was not the same throughout the decay, and in low notes the rich effect of the many high partials of large bells was lacking. The instrument was played automatically or from a digitial keyboard without transmission of the touch, and all dynamic variation was by electric control affecting the whole range at once.

It has been demonstrated that concordant tuning in a bell is not always preferable. In the early 1950s the Dutch found that, after a government commission for the inspection of tower bells permitted only those bells with partials reasonably in tune to be rung, every bell in a city sounded alike and could be distinguished only by its direction and pitch. The Russians learnt to value an element of discord in tower bells somewhat earlier: after the work of Izrailev and others, some careful tuning was done to Russian zvonï (e.g. those in the Russian Orthodox church in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem), but it was found that the magnificent timbre of the old Russian bells was sacrificed. (Tchaikovsky planned to use the glorious Russian bell timbres in the first performance of his 1812 Overture by having all the churchbells of Moscow rung on a signal from cannon in the Kremlin, but he had to be content with the massive bells at Uspensky Cathedral where it was first performed.)

The large Buddhist bells of East Asia, although not so dissonant as corresponding Western bells because of their fewer partials, are favoured with enough dissonance to have one to three beats per second; one reason they are hung low is so that the listener can come near enough to feel this pulsation bodily. For a discussion of the vibrational properties of bells, see Acoustics, §V, 5.

3. Sizes.

No instrument has been made in such a wide range of sizes as the bell. The smallest is no bigger than a pea; the largest could be used as a room. The smallest open bells have a diameter of less than 5 mm, and the largest just under 6 metres. Between these extremes bells have been made of almost every size, depending upon use, cost, attractiveness and the development of the bellmaking craft. But use and cost have determined that most open bells are much closer to the smaller size given than the larger, while all crotals are relatively small. The largest crotals (worn by Indian elephants) are about 18 cm in diameter, and the smallest (on pre-Columbian American jewellery) about 5 mm.

For such a universal instrument as the bell it is meaningless to speak of standard sizes. The size of a bell can sometimes be suggested by stating its use, as with a tower bell or animal bell, but this is in no way precise. Weight is in some ways a more useful standard than dimension for differentiating bells, especially large ones, because bells of very little difference in linear measurement may differ greatly in weight. In standard usage the figure given for the weight of a bell includes any inseparable protuberances for attaching it to a fixture (although this is not included in the height) and for holding its clapper, but does not include the weight of the clapper. The range of weights of bells is much greater even than that of their dimensions. Bells have been reported weighing as little as 1·5 grams and as much as 200,000 kg. Most bells are closer to the smaller limit than to the larger, and relatively few weigh more than 20,000 kg (Table 1).

There is no direct relationship between weight and size, even for bells with homologous outside dimensions, because of variables such as thickness (small bells varying up to ten times in weight; large bells having less variation in proportional thickness with more variation in actual weight), material (e.g. bronze or clay), or porousness due to slight differences in the manufacturing process.

It is difficult to obtain reliable statistics on the size of a bell, although the dimensions of existing bells can be measured. But often the investigator must rely on records of weight that may vary according to whether they represent the intended weight before casting, the weight of the total material used less that of what remains over, or the weight of the bell when it is removed from the mould. However, the true weight of the bell is its weight after cleaning and tuning (if done), when ready for delivery. There is a method for estimating the weight of a bell that is already in place, provided it is of circular plan, but the exactness of this method depends on the accuracy of measurement of the profile, which can be guaranteed only if the profile is in exact homologous relationship to a known one.

(ii) Central Asia to the Mediterranean.

4. History.

The bell is found in many cultures both ancient and modern, and probably originated as a copy and development of two natural noisemakers: the pod filled with dried seeds (a natural rattle) and hard sticks arranged in a loose cluster. The bell's earliest use appears to have been as an amulet worn by people to impress both gods and men; this was the case with the golden bells on the high priest's robe (Exodus xxviii. 33–5). They were also attached to animals to guard against evil spirits, frighten away predators, and hold a flock together by its distinctive sound. Although the magic or sacred efficacy of bells is almost nowhere maintained, it was an important part of their historical use in both Christian and non-Christian cultures.

The bell's cultivation as a musical instrument developed from its having been worn by people and shaken as a rhythm instrument to emphasize body movements in temple dances. Later it was hung on a frame singly or in small groups and used as a tone-colour instrument in court orchestras and was played by striking; from this it developed into an instrument of fixed scale comprising bells tuned in series. Bells were used thus in China from the Zhou to Ming dynasties (1122 bce to 1644 ce) and also provided a means of fixing interval relationships in the Chinese system of music theory. Such an instrument did not appear in Europe until about the 13th century, when it was used both for musical performances and to give the pitches for plainsong incipits. The Chinese development has been kept alive in Korea; the European one, after receiving further expansion in the Low Countries in the 17th century, has spread to all areas of Western culture (see Chimes, §1, Carillon, Handbell).

Paralleling the bell's musical uses, and sometimes borrowing from them, was its cultivation as a signalling device. This development can be traced back to the hanging of small bells on draught and riding animals to indicate their approach; to the placing of somewhat larger bells on posts and gates to warn of danger or designate an area of military control; and then to the hanging of still larger bells in specially built permanent structures to call people to religious and secular assemblies, mark the hours, enhance public rejoicing and solemnize public mourning. Meanwhile, the use of small bells was developed in various ways for such local signals as summoning a person.

(i) East and South Asia.

(iii) Africa.

(iv) Pre-Columbian America.

(v) Europe.

(i) East and South Asia.

Excavations suggest that small bronze bells of both open and crotal types, circular in cross-section, came into use first in South-eastern Asia before 3000 bce, and from there spread to India, China and the Near East. They were worn on the dress, presumably to ward off evil, signal a person's approach or emphasize body movements. Between 1500 and 1000 bce open bells of oval circumference with pointed or ‘fishmouth’ rims came into use in China. They were made in increasingly large sizes until about 1000 bce, when bells too large to be carried were made, necessitating a distinction between portable and non-portable bells. The non-portable ones were hung on a frame and struck with mallets. Terms describing the timbres of bells came into use, and eventually the tuning of bells to standard pitches was developed. By the 5th century bce bells held an important place in Chinese state orchestras playing for Confucian rituals (see Chimes, §1). For a detailed discussion of early Chinese bells see Zhong.

With the spread of bronze casting in the last centuries bce, another form of open bell, the windbell (with clappers moved by the wind; fig.8), came into being; these were hung in groups from the eaves of sacred structures from Bali to Tibet, replacing clusters of sticks and other natural materials. In regions where the horse was widely used, crotals were favoured over open bells on harnesses because they could be sounded by vertical (as well as sideways) shaking and so were better adapted to trotting motion.

In India both crotals and open bells started to be used in Vedic ritual in about the 6th century bce. Iconologically the open bell with flared sides represented the lotus flower. Handbells continue to be used in rituals and crotals are affixed to dancers' ankles. Open bells are hung in temple porches for devotees to invoke the deity they are about to worship by moving the clapper (see Ghantā).

Buddhism adopted the handbell and the temple bell, and spread their use. It also made greater use of windbells, placing them in profusion along the eaves of temples and pagodas, so that at shrines where hundreds and even thousands of them hung each gust of wind caused aeolian effects as if from a great orchestra. Buddhism related bellfounding to astrology, and cast larger bells than ever before as darbār (‘court’) bells. With its eastward spread Buddhism carried the bell of circular cross-section to China, where its much longer sound decay eventually caused it to replace bells of rectangular or oval cross-section. In Japan the Buddhist-type bell (see fig.9 and fig.5a above) was the successor to a flat bell with wide flanges. The belief that bell sounds transmitted a spiritual essence stimulated the casting of colossal bells by Korean, then Chinese and Japanese founders (see Table 1 above). This led to the use of large bells at gates for defence signals.

(ii) Central Asia to the Mediterranean.

From prehistoric times in the area north of the Himalayas and west as far as the Caucasus, bells were light enough to be held in the hand or worn on pack animals because of the nomadic habits of the population. Any increase in volume of sound was effected by using bells in clusters. In about the 10th century bce Iranian open bells were formed as representations of the flower, and crotals as the fruit of the pomegranate, thus adding bell timbres to potent visual symbols of regenerating life forces. In the 9th century bce small rugged open bells were worn on Assyrian royal horses, and by the 5th century bce such bells were hung singly on horses and camels from India to Libya and the Balkans. The Turks and Mongols made two-note crotals by joining two hemispheres sounding different notes to enclose the pellet. In Afghanistan the characteristic rhythmic patterns set up by bells on pack animals moving at an even pace were transferred to drum music and given descriptive names such as zang-i-shotor (‘camel-bell rhythm’) etc. The development of a clapper with an extension or ‘flight’ led to clusters of bells, one inside the other, used on camels in Persia and Egypt.

Although crotals (first of clay, then of bronze) were in use in Egypt as early as 2000 bce, open bells did not appear until about 1000 bce. They were probably first used as cult bells, often being decorated with the heads of such sacred animals as the ram, jackal or lioness, and sometimes shaped so that the body of the instrument represents the face of the god Bes. Magical purpose is clear in the case of a bell found at Meroe in the northern Sudan (late 1st millennium bce), on which are incised figures of captives transfixed with arrows or the sword. The developing use of animal bells is illustrated by the splendid sets found with horses in the burials of X-group chiefs at Ballana and Qustul, reminiscent of the bells shown on horses in Assyrian hunting scenes. The wearing of bells for certain dances is a very ancient custom, traceable from the Middle East across Egypt to western Africa (and eventually found in England in morris dancing). Just as the role of cult bells evolved from one of protecting against a wrathful god, to marking the order of worship of a beneficient one, so their iconology developed from representations of reptile and animal deities to representations of flowers, abstract designs and the Coptic cross (see Handbell, fig.2).

In Greece, clay bells were in use from about the 8th century bce and bronze bells from the 6th. They were all small and seem to have had slight musical or terpsichorean use, being employed rather as windbells to attract beneficient spirits or as votive offerings to a god. They also had military uses, such as dismaying people who were unfamiliar with the sound of metal. The Etruscans made use of large decorated bronze bells in funeral rites, presumably for apotropaic purposes. The cymbala and the crotala were the preferred instruments for dancing until Roman times, when both open bells and crotals, alone as well as with other instruments, were used to mark the rhythms of dances at festivals, especially in the orgiastic rites associated with Dionysus. With the gradual admission of the public to view rites formerly witnessed only by priests and initiates, a small bell was rung in front of some temples. The transfer of this custom to Christian rites in Alexandria and Carthage in the 3rd to 5th centuries may be seen to have prefigured the church tower bell. The largest pre-Christian Roman bell, found near Basle, Switzerland, and dated from about the 2nd century ce, is 17 cm in diameter and 10·5 cm high.

(iii) Africa.

From ancient times a great variety of bells has been used in all parts of sub-Saharan Africa. They are in both crotal and open forms, and mostly are made of hammered iron, although some are of wood and a few of cast bronze. All the indigenous types are portable, the largest being about 50 cm high (without the handle). There are also instruments that are simply pieces of folded iron and are not strictly bells.

The main uses of African bells are for ritual, music and the protection and location of cattle. They are used musically in processions, dances and especially songs introducing dances. The crotal is employed for tone colour, either separately or attached to another instrument as in the harp-lute of Sudan, West Africa. However, it is used more sparingly than the open bell because it usually is deemed to have a greater ritual potency. Most crotals retain the shape of the natural pod rattle from which they are derived. The custom of wearing small crotals to give tonal emphasis to body movements is not so great as on other continents, Jingles being used instead.

In some parts of Africa there are metal open bells with a suspended crotal for a clapper. However, the most typical open bell from Liberia to Mozambique has no clapper. It is made of forged iron shaped like a pyramid or a flattened hood, and is held in the left hand and struck with a hammer held in the right (fig.10); these struck bells may be manipulated against the players' bodies to produce changes of sound, usually in rapid succession. Sometimes two or three are joined to form a two- or three-note instrument. There are also wooden bells, usually with clappers and sometimes with multiple clappers hung to strike each other as well as the bell so that the instrument (resembling certain buffalo bells in South-east Asia) serves as both jingle and bell. In some parts of Africa a progenitor of the bell is used: the shell of a nut with a stick suspended inside as a clapper. Unusually, the erero, an open cast-bronze bell 10 to 30 cm high found in Benin, southern Nigeria and in variants along the western coast to the Congo, is regarded, however, more as an object to revere than as an instrument to sound.

(iv) Pre-Columbian America.

Small bells were used in most areas of North and South America before the European invasions of the 16th century. A multiple-clapper wooden bell, resembling those in parts of Africa and South-east Asia, was known from Bolivia to Argentina. Clay crotals in imitation of natural pod rattles were made in Central America between 2000 and 1000 bce. About the 1st century ce small clay crotals were atached as tripod legs to clay bowls, a device which had been applied to metal bowls in China in the 5th century bce. In the 5th century ce remarkably clear-sounding clay crotals up to 10 cm high were made in Mexico, as well as cone-shaped open bells; both kinds are still in use.

Metal bells first appeared between the 8th and 10th centuries in Colombia and Peru. They evolved from a tine conic jingle of copper, first taking the form of an open bell with a pellet suspended inside, and then of a crotal with the pellet enclosed loose. These were cast in bronze in sizes from 4 to 16 cm high, first in teardrop shape, then in fruit and animal forms. By the 11th century they were also made of gold and silver alloys in smaller sizes. Generally in South America the crotal was both a ritual object and an article of dress. In Peru it was attached to the leg to mark rhythms in dances. Metal crotals were circulated widely along trade routes from Argentina to what is now the central USA, being particularly attractive to peoples without indigenous metal. For their ceremonies the Aztecs imported great numbers of crotals from subject peoples. Metal open bells were also made in South America, but were less widely used than the crotal. They were made in several shapes, in heights up to about 30 cm. Some had single or multiple clappers of bone or stone, but metal clappers were unknown. One of their uses was as animal bells on llamas in caravans.

(v) Europe.

The primary development of the bell in Europe was as a signalling device first for the Christian church and later for secular uses. Crotals on censers and other altar furnishings were derived from the rituals of earlier faiths. The open bell was first spread by Celtic missionaries who from the 5th century to the 9th placed handbells, mostly of forged iron, in religious houses across central and northern Europe from Germany to Iceland. Cast bells began to be manufactured by Benedictines in Italy at the end of the 6th century, and their use, first in handbell size but then larger, spread north and west across Roman Catholic Europe; gradually they replaced forged bells because of their louder volume and longer decay. This led to the use of large bells permanently attached to religious buildings for regulating religious life. Eventually the upper part of the church tower, originally a structure for defence, became the usual place for housing such bells, which increased in size and number as religious institutions grew in size and wealth over the centuries. These tower bells were sounded in the same manner as handbells by swinging, regardless of their size. This added a surge to their volume which has been a characteristic of Western churchbell sounds ever since, while limiting their rhythmic and melodic use.

In eastern European churches the original signal for calling to worship was the sound of ‘knocking’, made by striking on a thick wooden board called (from the Greek) a Sēmantron. Tower bells appeared much later than in Western churches. As they were gradually adopted, however, the custom of ‘knocking’ was transferred to them by fastening the bell stationary and pulling the clapper to strike it. This method of sounding does not put such a sideward thrust on a structure as do swinging bells; therefore when the Eastern churches became increasingly wealthy they tended to acquire more bells, and much heavier ones, then were found in Western church towers.

At first the accumulation of bells in both Eastern and Western towers resulted from their function of giving distinct signals for mass, obit, alarm etc; hence a distinct, recognizable timbre for each bell was desired. Indeed for some uses a disagreeable timbre was the most effective (e.g. the alarm bell ‘tocsin’, originally a manner of striking the bell rapidly high on the waist to bring out the upper partials). But as it became more common to ring several bells together for festive occasions, attention was given to improving their tone. This led to changes in the bell profile in order to bring the most prominent partials into octave relationship (see §2); the earliest extant example of this, a bell in the parish church at St Martin am Ybbsfeld, Lower Austria, is dated 1200. The next step was to relate tower bells tonally. This had already been accomplished on much smaller bells in monasteries (see Chimes, §1). In the 14th and 15th centuries the impetus to relate the pitches of tower bells to short scale segments came from a desire to use fragments of liturgical melodies on tower clocks in abbeys, or to suggest such fragments in the interplay of notes in swinging peals.

In most of western Europe bells were swung at the natural pendular tempo of each bell, causing the smaller, higher-pitched bells to sound in faster succession than the larger, lower-pitched ones. In England a method of checking the bell's movement after each stroke was devised, so that each bell sounded the same number of times; variety was achieved by changing their sequences (see Change ringing). The arrest of the natural pendular swing of bells in order to control their succession in a series was also practised in parts of southern France. In the Iberian peninsula a type of tower-bell ringing using both stationary and swinging bells was developed. One large bell (signum) and sometimes several others were suspended stationary from the bell chamber ceiling and sounded, while smaller bells, which had great counter-balances and were hung pivoted in the bellchamber openings, were continually rotated – the player pushing alternately on the bell and the counter-balance.

Swinging bells were mostly rung by pulling a rope attached to an arm or a wheel, and required a person for each bell or even several people for a heavy bell. With stationary bells rung by pulling ropes attached to their clappers one man could sound several, except for the heaviest bells, which were often rung by one or two men directly pushing the clapper. This type of ringing was general in eastern Europe and was also practised in western Europe (see Chimes, §1).

The rise of cities introduced secular ownership and control of some large bells without greatly affecting their usage. The development of clock chimes, which before general literacy were more useful than dials, led to widespread automatic playing and the evolution of the carillon. New combinations of notes in swung tower bells came into use over the centuries, with departures from old church modes. Eventually even the bells used on herd animals were musically related: Balkan herd bells, following Turkish tradition, conformed to a melodic scale, whereas Alpine herd bells, following western European tradition, were usually based on a harmonic grouping. The military bells of Turkish troops in Europe contributed two bell stops to the Baroque organ: the Glockenspiel and the Zimbelstern.

Both European bell customs and the actual products of European foundries have spread to all continents with the growth of world trade. Electricity is used to sound bells ranging from the largest swinging churchbell to the most remote telephone bell. By means of an electrical hook-up a carillon in western Belgium, an orchestra in Switzerland and a chorus and conductor in Brussels were combined in a broadcast concert. The daily ringing of the angelus, once a sign that the sexton was in the church, is now done automatically according to a time-clock. Except for English change ringing, much of the church ringing in western Europe is similarly performed. At the same time the tonal accomplishments of bellfounders and the development and spread of the musical use of bells have never been greater.

5. Bellfounding.

The casting of bells is an ancient and complex art that requires skill in the making of suitable moulds and the heating and fusing of metals into an alloy with specific acoustical properties. The Egyptians made bronze crotals using plaster moulds about 2000 bce. Some time between 2000 and 900 bce small open bells were cast in northern Iran, and by 850 bce Assyrian bronze founders had found it better to use a higher ratio of tin to copper for harness bells than for their non-acoustical castings. The Hittite movements spread this knowledge to the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean areas. By the 4th or 3rd century bce the casting of small bells was established at Nola, near Naples. In the meantime the Egyptians were putting ornamentation on their bells by the ‘cire-perdue’ (lost-wax) method.

Bronze casting was known in India by about 2000 bce, but there is no proof of its use at that date to make bells. The ancient Indian bell-casting process (still used in Nepal) was conducted in the temple compound under strict astrological as well as metallurgical rules. From the Himalayas this knowledge spread over parts of south-eastern Asia, and after the advent of Buddhism it was applied to the casting of some very large bells, necessitating the use of furnaces instead of open fires.

Bellfounding in China began about the 11th century bce, and by the 5th century bce an alloy of about four parts copper to one of tin (the most common ratio of bell alloy today) was established. The metal was heated in crucibles and poured into clay moulds comprised of fitted sections. Bianzhong bells were at first made in different sizes for different notes, and later in different thicknesses; they were tuned by filing the rims.

The spread of Buddhism in eastern Asia between ce 200 and 600 gave a new impetus to bellfounding in Korea, China and Japan, and introduced cire-perdue for modelling small bells and for reliefs on large ones. Enormous bells were desired in order to produce a deep, prolonged and far-carrying note simulating the sacred sound ‘Om’. Korean craftsmen took the lead in supplying the enormous bells called for in China and Japan. From about ce 1000 some large bells were cast in iron.

Iron bells have been made in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa from times unknown; in Benin (West Africa) bronze bells were cast well before ce 1600. In the north Andean regions of South America small copper bells – both crotal and open – were made from about the 8th century. The craft gradually moved northwards, flourishing in Mexico in the 14th and 15th centuries, and extending as far as Arizona. A wax model was used and native copper, sometimes mixed with gold, was melted over a small charcoal fire with the aid of a blowpipe. (The clapper of the open bell was not a solid rod enlarged at one end, as on European bells, but a pellet on a string. In post-Columbian times this type was adapted to large tower bells by Latin American founders.)

In Europe and Christian Near East, evidence indicates that the small bells used by Christian cults in the first four centuries were cast according to pre-Christian Mediterranean traditions. The first recorded Christian bell makers are the smiths Tasag, Cuana and Mackecht, whom St Partick took to Ireland in the 5th century; but they seem to have made forged bells (like the ‘cowbells’ in some jazz orchestras) rather than cast bells. The development of cast churchbells started about the year 530 when the mother house of the Benedictine Order was established at Monte Cassino, providing easy contact with the pre-Christian bronze-casting centre of Nola. Drawing on this, the Benedictine order developed the casting of larger bells, making sketches of their profiles and writing specifications for their materials and weights. As the order spread, it established foundries in its monasteries elsewhere, and became the first widespread supplier of bells to Christian institutions throughout western Europe. As for such small bells as the Eastern churches then used, evidence suggests that those in the Balkans were supplied from Constantinople and those in Russia from Cherson in the Crimea.

Bellfounding in western Europe was aided in the 11th century by several treatises on metallurgy. The most detailed one was by the monk Theophilus (see §2); it tells how to make a wax model over a clay core on a horizontal spindle (as may be seen in the Bellfounder's Window of York Minster; see fig.11), and how to cast in a bronze alloy only slightly different from the ancient Chinese formula.

In the 12th century the horizontal spindle began to be replaced by a vertical one, except for the casting of small bells such as handbells. The common form of the bell changed form the more or less cylindrical ‘beehive’ shape to a slightly conical ‘sugar-loaf’, and eventually the present European bell form, a compromise between the two, was adopted by the end of the 14th century. Instead of the preliminary modelling in wax, clay was used to model a discardable ‘false bell’ on which to form the outer mould; and in place of line designs and lettering on the bell derived from stylus marks in the outer mould, reliefs and block lettering were obtained from wax forms applied to the false bell.

These changes in technique and design occurred as bellfounding slowly passed from clerical into lay hands. With this came the casting of the founder's name on the bell, rarely done by clerics but common among lay founders. The latter included widows who knew their late husbands' casting secrets, for the bellfounding craft was held within families, and a foundry worker would not learn its fine points until he had proved himself a worthy member of the family and made himself a legal part of it by marriage.

Most of the work of medieval founders was itinerant. The founder carried boards (sweeps) which were cut to the profiles of his bells and used for shaping them, and the parish or municipality supplied the metal and hired local labour. Heavy tower bells were cast beside or near the tower; part of the founder's work was to recast bells that had become cracked or needed larger replacements.

The advent of cannon in the 14th century enlarged the scope of the bellfounder's activities because cannon used almost the same alloy as bells and were made by similar methods. In order to have the security of a local arsenal, cities offered foundry sites and special privileges to founders who would settle within their walls. The supply of metal might come from the city's churchbells, which would be made into cannon in wartime and back to bells after hostilities – if they did not have to be yielded as bronze to a conqueror. Foundry locations also depended on the proximity of good moulding clays. In a treatise published in 1540, the Italian bronze founder, Biringuccio, gave formulae (which have been followed to modern times) for improving clays and building moulds to withstand the intense heat and pressures of the founding process.

The career of a bellfounder was not always profitable restricted to one place, and by the 16th and 17th centuries most founders were either itinerant or migrant. Itinerant founders would cover a smaller area, returning annually to their homes; migrant founders might never return. Migrant Italian founders of this period wandered into central Europe and the Balkans, central European migrants went to Italy, and western European migrants worked across central and eastern Europe; the bellfounding craft which flourished in Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries was derived from German Baltic sources. Almost no English founders went to the Continent though they shipped bells there, an export that Elizabeth I banned lest the bells be converted into enemy artillery.

On the Continent in the 17th century the perfection of the clock increased the usefulness of tower-clock chimes and led to interest in their musical possibilities. This gave a favoured market to founders who could tune bells in an extended musical scale. Two migrant brothers, François and Pieter Hemony from the Bassigny region of Lorraine, were to become prominent in this. After casting several bells in Germany the Hemonys met a Dutch clockmaker, Juríaan Sprakel, who in 1642 had them cast 19 bells (later increased to 26) for the chimes of a civic tower clock he was installing at Zutphen, near Arnhem. Further orders combined the Hemonys' skill in casting with guidance in tuning from Van Eyck, the carillonneur of Utrecht, producing a wide gamut of bells (i.e. a carillon) so finely tuned that chords and extended figures sounded pleasing on them. Sprakel's installation of such bells on his numerous tower clocks, where they not only sounded the hours but were hand-played in musical performance, introduced the carillon as a more sophisticated instrument then the more limited chimes.

The Hemony brothers settled in Zutphen and cast carillons there until 1657, when François Hemony moved to Amsterdam as bellfounder and ‘cannon maker by royal command’. His brother joined him in 1664 and soon took over the foundry. Later Pieter moved to Ghent, where he cast until about 1680. The two brothers cast over 50 carillons, with ranges of 26 to 37 bells (see Hemony). They had no qualified successors, but this did not prevent other clockmakers from selling tower clocks with two to three chromatic octaves of poorly tuned bells in regions where better bells were unknown. Usually the clockmaker arranged the contract for a civic tower clock with carillon and obtained the bells where he chose. The few musically valuable carillons between the death of the Hemonys and the 20th century were almost all made by Flemish founders.

During the 17th and 18th centuries bellfounding was also influenced by the more opulent Russian monasteries, which both increased the number of small bells in their trezvonï (see Chimes, §1) and added larger ones. Since ringing them put no lateral thrust on the tower (unlike swinging bells), Russian bellfounders were called upon to make larger bells than any in western Europe; in fact, before the founding of modern ship propellers no castings of any kind were as large as these bronze idiophones, many of which were melted down during the Russian Revolution. The very largest were cast at their site, using multiple furnaces; Russian founders also made large bells to be sold in open trade at annual bell markets in several cities.

In western Europe during and just after the French Revolution, there was a great melting of bells for armaments and coinage; but this (as with the destruction of bells in World War I and the much greater confiscations of World War II) meant an expansion of foundries after peace came, in order to make replacements. By the mid-19th century the railways made the itinerant founder unnecessary. By this time too the dominance of Europe in world politics and trade helped to place European bells where before they were unknown or forbidden.

European bellfounding had, however, already been long established in certain non-European areas. The crusaders introduced it to Lebanon where it has continued on a small scale (from the 16th century in the Naffah family). The Spanish and Portuguese brought bellfounders to their American colonies, and their descendants have carried on the craft. One of the largest bells in Mexico City Cathedral was cast in 1528 by Simon and Juan Buonaventura. In the American colonies further north, bells were imported from Europe as long as there were close political connections. The first native bellfounders in the USA were in New England: Aaron Hobart, who advertised in the Boston Gazette in 1770, the celebrated Paul Revere, who cast his first tower bell in 1792, and George Holbrook, who after ten years as apprentice to Revere set up a foundry in Brookfield, Massachusetts, moving in 1816 to Medway. In the 19th century foundries were established outside New England: McShane in Baltimore, Meneely in Watervliet, near Albany, New York, and others.

The 20th century, and particularly the post-World War II period, brought still greater changes in bell-founding practice. Foundries began to use commercial moulding materials and bell metal in ready-made alloy form. The drying of moulds could be done by forced air in controlled temperature chambers. There were sophisticated instruments for indicating the temperature of the metal before the bell was poured, and for measuring the frequencies of the partial tones both after it was removed from the mould and during the tuning process. Power equipment moved ladles from furnaces to moulds and hoisted the bells from their pits after casting. All this required a capital investment and made the head of a foundry more akin to the modern businessman than to the craftsman of earlier times. Modern founders include Gillett & Johnston, John Taylor & Co. and the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in England; Eijsbouts and Petit & Fritsen in the Netherlands; Paccard and Bollée in France; Cavadini and Colbacchini in Italy; Grassmayr in Austria; Rincker and Friedrich Schilling, and the VEB Glockengiesserei (formerly Franz Schilling Söhne) in Germany; and Sørensen in Denmark.

6. European techniques and traditions.

Most European languages use a word which is clearly related to the English ‘clock’ (as in ‘clocking’, striking or chiming a bell): cloche (Fr.); Glocke (Ger.); klokke (Dutch); kolokola (Russ.). Only in the English tradition do bells ‘ring’ fully, in the sense of rotating (on a wheel) through 360°. Most continental European bells ‘swing’, in that they rotate (sometimes on a full wheel, but often on a half wheel) through a maximum of 180°. Russian bells neither ring nor swing; they are hung ‘dead’ and are sounded not by the movement of the bell but by the movement of the clapper (operated by a rope or ropes). This means that they are ‘chimed’, albeit on the inside rather than on the outside rim, which is normally associated with controlled chiming. These contrasting installation methods not only determine the behaviour of individual bells, as ringing, swinging or chiming, but they determine the nature and effect of the ensemble when whole collections of bells are in play. The method of installation especially determines the range of rhythmic outcomes, and it is this rhythmic aspect which has determined the contrasting approaches to pitch in the English and central European traditions.

Because English bells rotate through 360° they can be balanced upside-down, using the point of inertia to delay the moment when the bell is rung. It is this capacity for controlled delay that enables the bells to be rung through all the rhythmic permutations known as ‘changes’ (see Change ringing). Central European bells, however, once in motion, tend to swing through an arc at a speed determined by their size and weight. While English bells are not normally intended to strike simultaneously, in the European tradition it is considered inevitable and desirable that two or more bells will strike simultaneously. Thus the English conception of bellringing is essentially melodic whereas the central European approach favours a clangorous euphony.

The disposition of pitches within a peal reflects these different melodic and harmonic priorities. English peals are almost invariably designed in tetrachords, according to the diatonic major scale, while continental peals tend to produce a chord or chords. In the great majority of cases these chordal effects are based on the pentatonic scale, or subsets of it. Some great peals (such as the ‘Plenum’ peals of the cathedrals of Frankfurt and Strasbourg) are designed on a hexachord which is configured like a major scale without the fourth degree; this allows for two pentatonic patterns (each produced by deleting either the top or the bottom pitch) and their respective subsets. Many European composers have incorporated such pentatonic patterns into their music as part of either a literal or a disguised representation of bells (e.g. Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Janáček, Debussy and Ravel). Such effects are entirely different in concept from the principles of English change ringing and these different traditions and techniques should not be confused.

While such pentatonic configurations are typical of bell peals throughout northern and central Europe, including Germany, northern France, Switzerland, Austria and Bohemia, they do not apply in Russia, where bells are rarely cast as complete collections and so are not required to conform to any overall pitch design. Religious foundations have tended to acquire individual bells at different times, often as gifts from local rulers or from the tsar. There were also periodic ‘bell fairs’ at which bells could be purchased ‘off the peg’, an approach quite different to the Western European preference for custom-made or commissioned peals. The dissonant properties – in particular, the strong tritone overtones – of individual Russian bells were regarded as part of their particular character, and it was not thought necessary or desirable to suppress such dissonant overtones by ‘tuning’ them, as was usual in Western Europe. The gradual, unplanned acquisition of bells by Russian foundations also made it possible (or even probable) that there would be harsh dissonances between bells hung in close proximity to each other.

7. The use and representation of bells in art music.

Bells were first used in orchestral music in the cantata Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde (formerly attributed to Bach, now tentatively attributed to Melchior Hoffmann) they were probably small and operated from the organ manual. Bells are called for in various late 18th-century scores, e.g. Dalayrac's opera Camille (1791) and Cherubini's Elisa (1794). Rossini called for a bell to sound g' in the second act of Guillaume Tell (1829), and Meyerbeer for low bells sounding c and f in Les Huguenots (1836). Possibly real church bells were used on these occasions, and also by Berlioz for the finale of his Symphonie fantastique (1830). In the original score of Boris Godunov (1868–9) Musorgsky called for trezvonï (see Chimes, §1; for details of the bells used at the first performance of Tchaikovksy's 1812 Overture(1882), see §2 above). The use of real church bells, or their near equivalent, is connected more with the theatre than the concert hall: the stage equipment of many opera houses includes real church bells. Some composers have aimed to imitate their effect with orchestral colour; others have used substitutes, including tubular bells, bell plates, mushroom bells and electrically amplified metal bars, piano wires and clock gongs. Mushroom bells and large bronze plates, such as those used in La Scala and the Covent Garden mushroom bells, have proved effective substitutes for church bells. The instruments used for the notorious ostinato tolling which accompanies the processions of the Grail Knights in Wagner's Parisfal (1882) have ranged from church bells and a piano frame with four strings (occasionally supplemented with the 16' stop of an electric organ) to hammered bell machines, amplified metal rods and gongs; since the 1970s synthesizers and electronic instruments have increasingly been used. Wagner apparently based the ostinato, a pattern of interlocking perfect fourths c–G–A–E, on chimes which he had heard at Kloster Beuron; the motif was soon to become as ubiquitous in German timepieces as William Crotch's ‘Westminster’ chimes had long been in England (see Chimes, §2). The bells generally used in the concert hall are Tubular bells (termed ‘chimes’ in the USA, ‘orchestra bells’ being the term for the glockenspiel). These were introduced by John Hampton of Coventry in 1886, for the peal of four bells in Sullivan's Golden Legend. In 1890, tubular bells appeared with a keyboard (the codophone) at the Paris Opéra. In the symphonies of Mahler, bells are used for literal effects (the sleigh bells in the outer movements of the Fourth Symphony) and metaphoric reasons (in the Sixth Symphony real alpine Cowbells allude to the ascension of a human soul). In the fifth movement of the Third Symphony Mahler employed bells in pentatonic patterns.

Outstanding bell writing in the modern orchestra can be found in John Ireland's These Things Shall Be (1937), Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw (1954), Messiaen's Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8) and Chronochromie (1960), Boulez's Pli selon pli (1959–62), William Alwyn's Fifth Symphony ‘Hydriotaphia’ (1972–3) and Tippett's The Rose Lake (1991–3); Stockhausen wrote for a specially constructed set of bell plates in Musik im Bauch (1975).

Composers also use orchestral colour to imitate the motivic and timbral effects of bell ringing and chiming for metaphoric or allusive reasons:

(i) The western European tradition.

The music of Liszt abounds in bell effects, mostly drawing upon central European pentatonic turnings. The opening bell-like motif of ‘Spozalizio’, from the second year of Années de Pèlerinage, permeates the texture and so determines the harmonic language of the piece. The ninth piece of the Weihnachtsbaum set (1874), ‘Abendglocken’, evokes evening bells by means of rhythmic layers of pentatonic harmony.

The bell textures which are so common in the piano works of Debussy and Ravel tend towards the pentatonic formations of the central European tradition. The last song in Debussy's collection Trois Mélodies (1891), ‘L'échelonnement des haies’, is a setting of the poem by Verlaine which depicts the flat Lincolnshire fenscape, closing with a reference to bells. Although Verlaine would have heard change ringing in Lincolnshire, Debussy's setting evokes the sound of pentatonic bells familiar to him from the churches of northern France. By contrast, allusions to bells in the music of Messiaen display his sensitivity to the principle of ‘added resonance’ and have a higher level of dissonance (for example, in ‘Noel’ from the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, 1944), suggesting a greater affinity with the Russian approach of Stravinsky.

(ii) The Russian tradition.

Within the Russian tradition the most outstanding musical treatments of Orthodox zvonï (chimes or peals) occur in works by Musorgsky, Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff. (The relative lack of bell effects in the music of later Russian composers can be attributed to the after-effects of the revolutions of 1917, including the destruction of numerous bells and the prohibition of sounding those which remained.) The ‘Coronation Scene’ in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov is not only a spectacular example of the musical simulation of Russian zvonï (specifically, the layering of rhythmic activity, representing the different sizes of bells); it also accurately reflects the tritonal dissonances so characteristic of Russian bell tunings. If this piece may be regarded as a touchstone for the tritonal harmony developed by Debussy, Stravinsky and others, then it must be acknowledged that the Russian bell tradition has had a remarkably potent effect on music of the 20th century, for example in the minimalist compositions of Steve Reich.

Apart from Stravinsky's liking for tritonal oppositions (exemplified by Petrushka), the most significant bell-derived element of his compositional technique is his use of layerd ostinato patterns. These permeate his music: in Petrushka the opening scene depicts the Shrovetide Fair in St Petersburg, a festival strongly associated with joyful bell chiming.

The rhythmic layering can also be found in an early work by Rachmaninoff, the ‘Russian Easter Festival’ from the Fantasie-tableaux (1893) for two pianos. His output contains numerous other examples of bell-derived harmonies and rhythms of which perhaps the most interesting case is the choral symphony Kolokola (1913), his treatment of Edgar Allen Poe's The Bells, in which he takes care not to overplay the opportunities for literal representation at the expense of the metaphoric meanings conveyed by the poetry.

(iii) The English tradition.

Numerous instances may be found of literal representations of change ringing in the music of English composers. An outstanding example of literal (yet highly imaginative) depiction is the ‘Sunday Morning’ interlude in Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. Here Britten fondly reproduces not only the melodic and rhythmic permutations of the changes, but also composes some realistic inaccuracies into them. Although bells (either individually or collectively) appear frequently in Birtwistle's music, they often occur in a disguised manner, as part of the musical fabric, for example in passages where the music proceeds in different layers of rhythmic pulsation. Two early works by Maxwell Davies have titles which are explicitly derived from change ringing: Stedman Doubles for clarinet and percussion (1955, rev. 1968) and Stedman Caters for sextet (1958, rev. 1968), although the musical content is in fact more strongly influenced by elements of Indian classical music. Several works by Gilbert have used change ringing principles as a means of generating rhythmic and motivic permutations of material; these are often used as part of the background texture of a work, although they can also operate at a developmental level. Such ideas have featured strongly throughout Gilbert's teaching career and have thus had a significant influence on the following generation of British composers.

Not all ‘bell’ pieces by English composers, however, have been influenced by the native change ringing tradition. John Tavener makes extensive use of bell patterns, but these tend to reflect his religious and musical interests in the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions. One of the most significant bell-inspired pieces is Jonathan Harvey's tape piece Vivos Voco! Mortuos Plango! (1980) which samples and transforms electronically the sounds of the great bell of Winchester Cathedral and a boy treble (the title derives from two of the Latin inscriptions on the bell).

(1) Konstantin Bellermann

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MersenneHU

Theophilus: Diversarum artium schedula (MS, 11th century, F-Pn lat.229); ed. C.R. Dodwell with Eng. trans. (London, 1961)

H. Magius: De tintinnabulis liber posthumus (Hanover, 1608, 2/1664)

A. Roccha: De campanis commentarius (Rome, 1612)

F. Harzer: Die Glockengiesserei und ihre Nebenarbeiten (Weimar, 1854)

F.W. Edel: Von den Glocken (Strasbourg, 1862/3)

J.-D. Blavignac: La cloche (Geneva, 1877)

A. Izrailev: Rostovskiye kolokola i zvonï [Rostov bells and peals] (St Petersburg, 1884)

M. Sutermeister: Die Glocken von Zürich (Zürich, 1898)

J. Berthelé: Enquêtes campanaires: notes, études et documents sur les cloches et les fondeurs de cloches du VIIIe au XXe siècle (Montpellier, 1903)

A. Fuchs: ‘Die Glocken des Strassburger Münsters: ein Beitrag zur klässischen Glocken- und Volkskunde’, Elsässische Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Volkskunde, i (Zabern, 1910)

N. Olovyanishnikov: Istoriya kolokolov i kolokololiteïnoye iskusstvo [The history of bells and bellfounding] (Moscow, 2/1912)

H.B. Walters: Church Bells of England (London, 1912)

K. Walter: Glockenkunde(Regensburg and New York, 1913)

W.G. Rice: Carillons of Belgium and Holland (London, 1915)

A. Gnirs: Alte und neue Kirchenglocken (Vienna, 1917)

A. vas Nunes: ‘Tonen en boventonen van torenklokken in verband met het beginsel der dynamische gelijkvormigheid’, Beiaardkunst II: 's-Hertogenbosch 1925, 82–7

A. Ungerer: Les horloges d'édifice (Paris, 1926)

P. Griesbacher: Glockenmusik(Regensburg, 1927)

J. Klein: ‘Der Salemer Münsterturm und seine Glocken’, Birnauer Kalender(1927)

A. Serafini: Torri campanarie di Roma e del Lazio nel medioevo (Rome, 1927)

A. Hirsch: Glocke als Wetterzauber (Epinal, 1928)

E. Gleichmann: Die Glocke in Volksglauben, Sage und Dichtung (Kulmbach, 1930)

I. Aoki: ‘Summary of the Acoustical Properties of Japanese Hanging-Bells’, Memoirs of the Faculty of Industrial Arts, Kyoto Technical University, vi (Kyoto,1931)

P. Sartori: Das Buch von deutschen Glocken (Leipzig, 1932)

S.N. Coleman: The Book of Bells (New York, 1938)

P.S. Rung-Keller: Danske sognekirkers klokker og deres støbere [Danish parish church bells and their founders] (Copenhagen, 1943)

N.N. Rubtsov: Istoriya liteïnogo proizvodstva v SSSR [The history of bellfounding in the USSR] (Moscow, 1947)

I. Aoki and I. Masayoshi: ‘A Note on the Beat in the Fundamental Tone of a Bell’, Collection of Articles for the 45th Anniversary of the Foundation of Kyoto Technical University (Kyoto, 1948), 18–19

C. Mahrenholz: Glockenkunde(Kassel, 1948)

P. Price: Campanology: Europe, 1945–47 (Ann Arbor, 1948)

H. Rolli: Kirchengeläute(Ravensburg, 1950)

L.M. Holmbäck: Klockor och klockringning (Stockholm, 1951)

E. Morris: Bells of All Nations (London, 1951)

J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed.: Cymbala: Bells in the Middle Ages, MSD, i (1951)

E. Sauermann: ‘Die deutsche Glocke und ihr Schicksal im Krieg’, Deutsche Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, i (1952), 14–32

P. Smets: Übersicht über das Tonsystem des Frankfurter Grossen Stadtgeläutes [MS, 1954, D-Fsa S3/H 5194]

W. Ellerhorst: Handbuch der Glockenkunde, ed. G. Klaus (Weingarten, 1957)

L. Kybalová: Pražské zvony (Prague, 1958)

S. Thurm: Deutscher Glockenatlas (Munich, 1959–85)

F.P. Schilling: ‘Das russische Glockengeläut’ Musik und Kirche, xxxi (1961), 107–15

A. Weissenbäck and J. Pfundner: Tönendes Erz: die abendländische Glocke als Toninstrument und die historischen Glocken in Österreich(Graz, 1961)

Pong-Do Yi: Korean Bells (MS, 1966, Seoul)

P. Price: ‘Japanese Bells’, Occasional Papers of the Institute for Japanese Studies of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1969), no.11, pp.35–66

W. Westcott: Bells and their Music (New York, 1970)

M. Schilling: Glocken und Glockenspiele (Gütersloh, 1982)

M. Seidler: Die Kölner Domglocken (Cologne, 1982, 3/1992) [incl. recording]

P. Price: Bells and Man (Oxford, 1983)

T.D. Rossing, ed.: Acoustics of Bells (Strondsburg, PA, 1984)

K. Bund, ed.: Das Frankfurter Domgeläute und das Frankfurter Grosse Stadtgeläute (Frankfurt, 1986) [incl. recording]

K. Bund, ed.: Frankfurt Glockenbuch (Frankfurt, 1986)

K. Kramer: Die Glocke und ihr Geläute Geschichte, Technologie und Klangbild vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1990) [incl. recording]

C.B. Rae: ‘The Voice of European Bells’, The Listener (Jan 1990)

W. Leib: Von Glocken, Klängen und Tonsystemen, ed. A. Leib-Lang (Frankfurt, 1991)

L. von Falkenhausen: Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China (Berkeley,1993)

Bell (ii)

(Fr. pavillon; Ger. Schallstück, Kopfstück; It. campana, padiglione).

The terminal part of an open-ended wind instrument tube, opposite the mouthpiece. Although the English word and the Italian ‘campana’, meaning ‘bell’, as well as the French equivalent and Italian ‘padiglione’ meaning ‘tent’, relate descriptively to the flared tubes of ancestral trumpet and shawm types, in modern usage the terms cover a wide range of shapes, some of them far from bell-like.

Among modern brass instruments the bell varies from a slight expansion of the open end, as in the bugle of the British Army type, to the abrupt and widely skirted flare found mainly in American-designed bass instruments. Intermediate forms include the wide and gradual flare typical of the orchestral horn and the smaller and more abrupt eversion associated with trumpet types.

Among modern woodwind instruments the bell embraces even more diverse forms. In clarinets and most smaller oboes it varies, internally, between a strict cone and a smoothly expanding curved flare, and may show elements of both combined in different ways according to formulae devised by individual makers for their own instruments. A bell with a thickened and in-turned rim is still characteristic of oboes made in the Viennese tradition, and may be regarded as the survival of a feature that was nearly universal in the 18th and early 19th centuries though rare today. The bell of the larger oboes is usually pear-shaped externally and spheroidal inside, a form termed ‘liebesfüss’ by German-speaking organologists; larger oboes are also known with a simple open bell. In the modern bassoon the bell is fusiform with a bore that may be conical, cylindrical or sometimes ‘choked’ (i.e. with a reverse taper relative to the main bore of the instrument; see Bassoon, fig.2a).

The form and dimensions of the bell are important factors in the acoustic behaviour of a musical wind instrument. In general terms the effect is as follows: when a wind instrument is sounded an array of related vibration frequencies is generated in the air column and passes along it towards the open end. Of these vibrations, those below a certain ‘cut-off’ frequency (which is specific for a given instrument) are almost completely reflected back at the open end, and very little of their energy is passed on to the surrounding air (i.e. they are poorly radiated). Above the cut-off progressively higher components of the spectrum are radiated with increasing freedom. In instruments in which the active air column occupies the whole length of the tube (horns, trumpets, etc.) the conformation of the bell determines which components are freely and which poorly radiated, and to what degree. The bell thus acts as a varying high-pass filter with respect to the internally generated spectrum, and it has a profound influence on the tone quality of the instrument. The rate of flare of the bell section of a brass instrument also affects the relative frequencies of the air column modes of vibration, and thus the tuning of its natural notes. Near the cut-off frequency (typically around 1000 Hz for a tenor trombone), sound waves from the mouthpiece travel practically all the way to the open end of the bell before being reflected. For waves with frequencies well below cut-off, on the other hand, the reflection occurs some distance inside the bell. Since this has the effect of making the effective acoustical length of the air column shorter than the actual tube length, it raises the pitches of the lower modes relative to those near the cut-off. The pitch change depends on the degree of flare of the bell section, which is thus an important factor in the design of a well-tuned brass instrument.

With woodwind instruments, in which the effective length of the air column is regulated by side holes, a more complex situation exists. The cut-off frequency of the instrument depends not only on the bell but also on the pattern of open and closed holes; it therefore varies from note to note. Components of the internal spectrum above cut-off frequency are freely radiated from all holes standing open, while below the cut-off frequency radiation takes place mainly from the highest one or two open holes. Playing down the scale, however, requires the successive closing of holes down to the lowest, so radiation from them must finally stop. As successive holes are closed, more radiation from the open end of the tube comes into play, provided that the open end has an appropriate flare. The bell becomes a substitute for side holes that are no longer open, and thus has a marked influence on the ‘heard’ spectrum in various parts of the scale.

With the spheroidal liebesfüss or d’amore bell, an additional property, cavity resonance, becomes evident. Though this form of bell has for many years been credited with imparting a nasal or melancholy quality to the associated instrument, it is now known that its effect – that of emphasizing certain frequencies – extends only to the first three or four notes of the scale. Above this, the heard spectrum is very much what might be predicted for a normal oboe proportionately enlarged.

See also Acoustics, §IV, and Sound, §7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Bouasse: Instruments à vent (Paris, 1929–30)

J. Backus: The Acoustical Foundations of Music (New York, 1969, 2/1977)

A.H. Benade: ‘On the Tone Colour of Wind Instruments’, Selmer Bandwagon, no.59 (1970), 17–21

A.H. Benade: ‘The Physics of Brasses’, Scientific American, ccxxix/1 (1973), 24–35

A.H. Benade: Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics (New York, 1976, 2/1990)

M. Campbell and C. Greated: The Musician’s Guide to Acoustics (London, 1987/R)

N.H. Fletcher and T.D. Rossing: The Physics of Musical Instruments (New York, 1991, 2/1998)

PHILIP BATE/MURRAY CAMPBELL

Bell, John L(amberton)

(b Kilmarnock, 20 Nov 1949). Scottish composer. He received degrees in arts and divinity from Glasgow University, and was ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1978. He has since been employed as a resource worker in areas of Christian liturgy and spirituality by the Iona Community, based in Glasgow; the community's Wild Goose Worship Group has provided the testing ground for much of his congregational music. Both individually and in association with Graham Maule (b 1950) he has produced ten collections of songs and hymns, including Heaven Shall Not Wait (Glasgow, 1987) and Love from Below (Glasgow, 1989), as well as anthems and a song cycle, Seven Songs of Mary (1989). He has also edited and arranged two volumes of international Christian music entitled Songs of the World Church (Glasgow, 1990 and 1991).

Bell follows a clear ecumenical path, his liturgical music appearing with increasing frequency in hymnbooks across the denominations. He works sensitively on both text and music, matching his own texts either to fine but neglected folktunes or to his own fluent and shapely melodies. In keeping with the breadth of his churchmanship, his liturgical music embraces a variety of forms and styles: responsorial, metrical or strophic, presented in homophony, imitative polyphony or even monody. In the conservative sphere of music for Christian worship, Bell seeks to broaden both subject matter and emotional range, as exemplified by his Psalms of Patience, Protest and Praise (Glasgow, 1993), in which Psalm lxxxiii is set responsorially to music of relatively high harmonic tension.

ANDREW WILSON-DICKSON

Bell, Joshua

(b Bloomington, IN, 9 Dec 1967). American violinist. He studied with Mimi Zweig, 1975–80, and with Josef Gingold at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1980–89. He made his solo début with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti in 1981, and has subsequently followed an international career as a soloist, appearing with many leading orchestras including the New York PO, the Boston SO and the Los Angeles PO, as well as the LPO and the CBSO. In October 1993 he gave the first performance of Nicholas Maw's Violin Concerto, of which he is the dedicatee, with the Philharmonia conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Bell has made many recordings of the concerto repertory, and has also recorded chamber music with the pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Olli Mustonen, and with the Takacs Quartet. In 1991 he formed a trio with Olli Mustonen and the cellist Steven Isserlis, and in 1997 established an annual chamber music festival at the Wigmore Hall, London. Bell is a player of solid technique, and produces a sweetness of tone with phrasing that is suave and musical. He plays a 1732 Stradivari, the ‘Tom Taylor’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Waleson: ‘Bel Canto’, The Strad, xcix (1988), 391–3

J. Duchen: ‘High-Flying Adored’, The Strad, cvii (1996), 564–71

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Bell, W(illiam) H(enry)

(b St Albans, 20 Aug 1873; d Gordon's Bay, Cape Province, 13 April 1946). English composer. He was a chorister at St Albans Cathedral and gained a scholarship to the RAM, studying the organ, violin and piano (1889–93). Corder was his composition teacher, and he also studied counterpoint privately with Stanford. From 1909 to 1912 he was a professor of harmony at the RAM and he was director of the Pageant of London for the 1911 Festival of Empire. August Manns presented a work by Bell in every season of the Crystal Palace concerts from 1899 to 1912, and performances were also given by Dan Godfrey at Bournemouth, Henry Wood at the Proms, Nikisch and Henry Balfour Gardiner. Beecham took some interest in Bell, conducting the Arcadian Suite and Love among the Ruins.

Despite a steady flow of performances, Bell left England in 1912 to become director of the South African College of Music (later absorbed into the University of Cape Town), where he contributed decisively to the musical life of South Africa, numbering John Joubert and Hubert du Plessis among his students. He was greatly assisted by his wife, Helen, sister of John McEwen. He founded and directed the Cape Town Little Theatre, nurturing an interest in opera and ballet. During a trip to England in 1921 he conducted his Symphonic Variations. The first conductor of the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra, Theo Wendt, presented most of Bell's music from the South African years until his own retirement in 1924. Bell retired from the university in 1935 and moved to England but, isolated from South African friends, he returned to the Cape in 1937. Bell's reticence contributed to the near disappearance of his music, until a commercial recording of the South African Symphony on the Marco Polo label and political change in South Africa opened the way for revival. His music is tonal, favouring an Impressionistic style leaning towards the idiom of Granville Bantock rather than Vaughan Williams.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Hippolytus (music drama, 3, after Euripides), c1914, unperf.; Isabeau (fantasia, 1), 1922–4, unperf.; The Mouse Trap (op, 1, after R.L. Stevenson: The Sire de Maletroit's Door), 1928, unperf.; Doctor Love (op, 1, after Molière), 1930; The Wandering Scholar (musical comedy, 1, C. Bax), 1933, Cape Town, Little, 28 Oct 1933; The Duenna (musical comedy, 3, after R.B. Sheridan), 1939, unperf.; Romeo and Juliet (op), 1939, inc.

Japanese nō plays (all texts trans. A. Waley): Komachi (Kwanam), 1925, unperf.; Tsuneyo of the Three Trees (Hachi No Ki), 1926, unperf.; Hatsuyuki (Komparu Zembo Motoyasu), 1934, Cape Town, Little, 19 Nov 1934; The Pillow of Kantan, 1935, Cape Town, Little, 28 Oct 1935; Kageyiko (Seami), 1936, unperf.

Incid music: Life's Measure (N. Monk), ?1905–8; A Vision of Delight (B. Jonson), small orch, 1906

instrumental

Orch: The Canterbury Pilgrims, sym. prelude, 1896; The Pardoner's Tale, sym. poem, 1898; Sym. no.1 ‘Walt Whitman’, c, 1899; A Song of the Morning, sym. prelude, 1901; Mother Carey, sym. poem, 1902; Epithalamium, serenade, 1904; St Alban's Pageant, 1907; Agamemnon, sym. prelude, 1908; Love among the Ruins, sym. poem, 1908; Arcadian Suite, c1908; Danse du tambour, 1909; The Shepherd, sym. poem, 1910; La fée des sources, sym. poem, 1912; Prelude, 1912 [based on 2 Eng. folksongs]; Staines Morrice Dance, 1912; Sym. Variations, 1915; Va Conc. ‘Rosa mystica’, 1917; Sym. no.2, a, 1918; Sym. no.3, F, 1918–19; The Portal, sym. poem, 1921; A Song of Greeting, sym. poem, 1921; Veldt Loneliness, 1921; In modo academico, suite, c, 1924; Sym. no.4 ‘A South African Sym.’, 1927; An English Suite, 1929; Sym. no.5, f, 1932; Aeterna munera, sym. fantasy, 1941; Hamlet, 5 preludes, 1942

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Qt, 1894; Vn Sonata, e, 1897; Cradle Song, vn, pf, 1901; Arabesque, vn, pf, 1904; Vn Sonata, D, 1918; Vn Sonata, f, c1925; Sonata, d, va/cl, pf (1926); Str Qt, g, 1926; Vc Sonata, 1927; Str Qt, F

Pf: The Witch's Daughter, 1904 [based on cant. by A.C. MacKenzie]; Chorale with Variations, 1940; 4 Elegiac Pieces, 1940

Org: Chants sans paroles, 1901; Minuet and Trio, C, 1901; Postlude (Romance, Spring Song), 1902

vocal

Choral: 5 Medieval Songs, female vv, pf, str; Hawke, chorus, orch, c1895; Mag and Nunc, G, 1895; Miserere Maidens (Ps li), v, chorus, orch, org, 1895; ‘The Call of the Sea’, ode, S, chorus, semi-chorus, orch, 1902–4; The Baron of Brackley (Scottish ballad), chorus, orch, 1911; Maria assumpta, S, double chorus, boys' chorus, orch, 1922; Prometheus Unbound (M.W. Shelley), chorus, orch, 1923–4; 4 Medieval Songs, chorus, pf, 1927–8; Dicitus philosophi (B. Farrington), chorus, orch, ?1932; The Tumbler of Our Lady, 2 S, A, male v, mixed choruses, male chorus, orch, 1936; The Song of the Sinless Soul, Mez, female chorus, orch, 1944; Adonis, S, Mez, female chorus, orch, 1945

Songs for 1v: The Rose and the Lily, 1892; Songs of Youth and Springtime, 1892–6; Serenade (From a June Romance), 1896; 3 Songs, 1896; Crabbed Age and Youth, 1898; 5 Settings of E. Nesbit, 1898; 3 Old English Songs, 1v, orch; Love's Farewell, 1902; The Four Winds (C.H. Luderz), Bar, orch, 1903; 6 Love Lyrics (W.E. Henley), Bar/A, 1903; Sing Heigh Ho!, 1903; Bhanavar the Beautiful (song cycle, G. Meredith), 1v, ens, 1908; The Ballad of the Bird Bride (after R. Marriot-Watson), Bar, orch, 1909; The Little Corporal, 1912; 4 Songs, 1v, orch, 1912 [arrs. of Brahms, Schubert and Arne]; Sappho (song cycle, B. Carman), S, orch, 1920, rev. 1942; Claire de lune (P. Verlaine), 1925; D'une prison (Verlaine), ?1925; Que faudre-t'il a ce coeur (J. Moréas), 1925; 4 Medieval Songs, 1927; 4 Medieval Songs, 1930

Hymns and partsongs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, The Times (15 April 1946)

L.E. Taylor: Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts of William Henry Bell (Cape Town, 1948)

H. Du Plessis: Letters from William Henry Bell (Cape Town, 1973)

H.H. Van der Spuy: ‘W.H. Bell’, South African Music Encyclopaedia, ed. J.P. Malan (Cape Town, 1979), 152–60

R. Barnett: ‘William Henry Bell: an Interim Sketch and Worklist’, British Music Society Journal, xi (1989), 19–27

J. Joubert: ‘W.H. Bell and South Africa’, British Music Society Newsletter, no.68, (1995), 175–7

Collection of papers in W.H. Bell Room, Cape Town University

ROBERT BARNETT

Bella, Ján Levoslav [Ján Ignác; Johann Leopold; János Leopold]

(b Liptovský Mikuláš, 4 Sept 1843; d Bratislava, 25 May 1936). Slovak composer and conductor. While at school in Levoča (1853–9), he studied the piano, the organ, several string and wind instruments, conducting, figured bass and composition. He completed his secondary education (1859–63) in Banská Bystrica, where he also read theology and began his musical career. In Vienna he read theology at the university (1863–5), studied music with Simon Sechter and the court Kapellmeister, Gottfried Preyer, and, as a student at the local Páƶemáneum Collegium, he became choirmaster of the Páƶemaneum choir and an adherent of the Cecilian movement. In 1865 he moved to Banská Bystrica, where he was ordained priest (1866) and taught singing and music theory at the theological seminary. His attempts to found a distinctive Slovak music were encouraged by the violinist Ede Reményi (1869) and the Czech critic Ludevít Procházka. In 1869 he was appointed town music director in Kremnica. During visits to Bohemia (1871) and Germany (1873) he met Smetana and Dvořák and was introduced to new trends in composition. In 1881 he became a teacher in Hermannstadt, Transylvania (now Sibiu, Romania), but converted to Protestantism, married and became choirmaster at the local Protestant church. He continued as choirmaster until 1921, and at the same time taught music at the Realschule and conducted the local choral society and the Hermania chorus. He lived in retirement in Vienna until 1928, when he was able to move to Bratislava and the Slovak cultural environment in Czechoslovakia.

Bella's compositions span nearly 70 years. His musical language was formed during the Czech National Revival of the 1860s and the Cecilian reform of church music. His technique, reinforced by Sechter's teaching, was governed by his efforts to lay the foundations of Slovak national music (for instance the Slovak songs for four male voices and the Variations for piano). At the same time he wrote the first modern Slovak chamber pieces: the Dumky for violin and piano, the String Quartet no.1 in G minor and the String Quintet in D minor. His contacts with musicians in Prague further stimulated his interest in the composition of chamber music (his string quartets nos.2–3), initiated the first Slovak orchestral pieces (the symphonic poem Osud a ideál, ‘Destiny and Ideal’), led him towards lyrical songs on German and Czech texts and inspired large sacred pieces (Mass in B minor for soloists, chorus and orchestra). This was also the period of his first attempts at opera: Jaroslav a Laura (‘Jaroslav and Laura’, 1873). Bella's achievement in the period 1862–81 was inspired first by his nationalist aspirations and second by his desire to adapt recent developments in compositional techniques. The sharp contrast between his aims and those of the local musicians resulted in disputes and crises which, however, led to further developments in his style. The years spent in Hermannstadt (1881–1921) represent a decline from the earlier ideal and a tendency towards neo-romanticism, as in the Piano Sonata in B minor, the String Quartet in B, the String Quartet in C minor and the (unfinished) Symphony in C minor. A decade was devoted to his masterpiece, the opera Wieland der Schmied, and to numerous sacred works and pieces for organ that demonstrate his ideals relating to church music.

Bella's return to Slovakia was prefaced by the première of Wieland the Smith (as Kováč Wieland) in the Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava, on 28 April 1926. His return reawakened his early desire to create a Slovak national style, as can be seen in the cantatas Svadba Jánošíka (‘Jánošík's Wedding’, 1927) and Divný zbojník (‘Strange Brigand’, 1933), and other choral works and songs. His long life inevitably resulted in a variety of styles and changes. His output, which covers all genres of the time, laid the foundations for modern Slovak music.

WORKS

MSS in SQ-BRnm

operas

Jaroslav a Laura [Jaroslav and Laura] (V. Pok Poděbradský), T, orch, 1873, inc.

Wieland der Schmied (3, O. Schlemm, after R. Wagner), 1880–90, perf. as Kováč Wieland, Bratislava, National, 28 April 1926

sacred

Catholic

10 masses (composed 1860–69 unless otherwise stated): Missa, B, TTBB, before 1864; Missa, E, TTBB, op.6, before 1865; Missa S Mariae, A major, SATB, orch; Missa pro die Dominica, E, SATB, orch; Omša [Mass], SATB; Missa brevis, G, TTBB; Requiem, S, A, T, orch; Missa brevis, E, 1v, org; Sonntags-Messe no.6, C major, SATB, orch, 1870s; Messe, b, solo vv, SATB, orch, org, 1875–80

c50 other works, incl. Staroslovenský Otče náš [Early Slovak Lord's Prayer], SATB, op.3, 1863; Pange lingua, 1v, org, 1863–5; Haec dies, offertorium solemne pro Paschate, TTBB, op.8, 1866; Tu es Petrus, cantus solemnis, TTBB, TTBB, op.20, 1869; Ave rex noster, S, vn, hmn, 1860s; Benedicta et venerabilis, 1v, 2 fl, ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, bn, 1860s; Te Deum, TTBB, 1860s; Alleluia, Emitte Spiritum, SATB, SATB, 1873; Christus factus est, SATTB, 1879; Cum audisse populus, SAB, 1870s; Ave Maria, S, T, org, 1930

Protestant

all after 1881

Ach bis zum Tod (Passionkantate), B, SATB, orch; Christus hat geliebt die Gemeine (Osterkantate), B, SATB, orch; Ehre sei Gott!, S, SATB, orch; Es täumelten (Reformationskantate), solo vv, SATB, orch; Gott, sei mir gnädig (Reformationskantate), solo vv, SATB, orch; Lobe den Herrn! (Geistlicher Festgesang), SATB, str orch; Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden, S, B, SATB, orch, org; O komm, mein Heiland, SATB, brass insts; Wende dich zu uns! (Kirchenkantate), solo vv, SATB, orch; Wie lieblich ist deine Wohnung, motet, solo vv, SATB, orch; Verzage nicht, du Häuflein klein, SATB, 2 tpt, 2 hn, 3 trbn, tuba

c15 other works

secular choral

Mixed vv (SATB unacc. unless otherwise stated): Trauerlied, 1873; Zum Jubiläum, after 1881; Apotheose (M. Guist), solo vv, TTBB, SATB, orch, 1883–90; Hymne an die Musik, SATB, orch, 1886; An den Frühling (F. von Schiller), SATB, orch, 1905; 4 slovenské národné piesne [Slovak Folksongs], solo vv, SATB, c1918; 9 slovenských národných piesní, c1918; Prvé Vianoce [1st Christmas], SSAATTBB, 1924; Vianoce [Christmas] (P. Bella-Horal), 1924; Zbor k inštalácii rektora [Chorus for the Inauguration of the Rector], 1925; Svadba Jánošíka [Jánošík's Wedding] (cant., J. Botto), solo vv, SATB, orch, 1927; Divný zbojník [Strange Brigand] (O. Bella), solo vv, SSAA, TTBB, SATB, orch, 1933; Československa štátna hymna [Czechoslovak national anthem], arr., 1934; Orol vták [The Eagle] (J. Kráǐ), SSTTBB; 3 other works, Ger. text

Male vv (TTBB unacc. unless otherwise stated): Búcsúhangok, 1863; Slovenské štvorspevy [4-part Slovak songs], bks 1–2, 1863–5; Ohlas [Echo] (A. Sládkovič), 1864, rev. 1928; Frühlingsmotette, 1882; Schönes Waldland, march, TTBB, 2 tpt, 3 hn, euphonium, 3 trbn, tuba, 1884; Die Ergebung der Witwe (Crassus), c1900; Hausbrauch (Crassus), c1900; Kuno's Ritt (Crassus), c1900; Parallele, c1900; Trost im Leid (Crassus), c1900; Wunsch und Erfüllung (Crassus), c1900; 3 ernste Gesänge (E. Grün, O. Schlemm, F.S. Höchsmann), before 1901; 4 heitere Gesänge (Offenbarung) (Crassus), before 1901; Gelübde (R. Lederhilger), 1917; Ako je to? [What is this about?] (P. Bella–Horal), 1924; Matke Sláve [To Mother Glory] (I. Žiak [Somolický]), 1924; Vianočná [Christmas Song] (S. Krčmery), 1924; Moyses-Kuzmány, 1927; Heslo Západoslovenskej speváckej župy [Motto of the West Slovakian Choral Province], 1928; 9 other works, Ger. text, after 1881; 4 other works, Slav text, 1920s

Female vv: Z ‘Cigánskych melódií’ [From ‘Gypsy Melodies’], SSSS

other secular vocal

Ballade (aus den Lustigen Weibern) (H. Herne), A, orch, 1905

Credo (J. Martinec), B, orch, 1927

c40 songs (lv, pf), incl. 2 písně: Dobrou noc [Good Night], Pěvcům [To Singers] (E. Krásnohorská), 1874, rev. 1923; 3 Lieder: Siehst du am Weg (A. Träger), Der Herzallerliebsten (H. Heine), Was du mir bist (J. Grasberger), op.2, 1874; Mag da draussen Schnee sich türmen (Heine), 1874; Ich habe, dich geliebet (Heine), 1877; Was du mir bist (Du bist die Sonne) (Hoffmann von Fallersleben), 1877; Frauen liebe (L. von Ploennies), 1880; 4 Lieder: Erste Liebe (J. Grosse), Allein mit dir (H. Krebs), Ich liebe was fein ist (J.N. Enders), Sehnsucht (Enders), op.5, 1880; Juhász legény (S. Petőfi), S, pf, 1905; Románc (G. Lauka), S, pf, 1905; Boli by sme popadali [We would have fallen] (P. Bella-Horal), 1924; Matka nad kolískou [Mother over the Cradle] (Bella-Horal), 3 songs, S, pf, 1924; Sedem dní [Seven Days] (J. Jesenský), 1924; Gajdoš Filúš [Filúš the Fiddler] (Lǔdmila Podjavorinská), T, pf, 1927; Iskierky [Sparks], 1927; Naše vrátka [Our Garden Gate] (Bella-Horal), S, pf, 1927; V našom sade [In our Orchard] (Bella-Horal), S, pf, 1927

instrumental

Orch: Fantasy on the Rákóczi March, 1871; Concert ov., E, 1872–3; Osud a ideál (Sort et ideál) [Destiny and Ideal], sym. poem, 1874, rev. 1880; Sym., c, after 1881, frag.; Ov. to operetta Hermina im Venusberg, 1886; Konzertstück im ungarischen Stile, 1893; Siebenbürgen Land des Segens!, concert ov. on folksongs of Transylvania and Saxony, 1904; Posviacka zástavy [Consecration of the Flag], march, ? after 1900

Chbr: Str Qt no.1, g, 1866; Vianočná sonáta [Christmas Sonata], F, str qt, 1866, lost; Qnt, d, 2 vn, 2 va, vc, 1867; Dumky, vn, pf, ?1860s; Elegy, vn, bn, vc/hmn, pf, 1870; Pf Trio, 1870, frag.; Str Qt no.2 (‘Hungarian’), e, 1871; Pieseň bez slov [Song without Words], vn, pf, 1874; Rêveries, vn, pf, 1875 [rev. version of Dumky]; Serenade, vc, pf, 1879; Str Qt no.3, c, op.25, 1880, rev. 1918; Rondo, (4 vn, va, vc, db)/(str orch), after 1881; Str Qt no.4, B, 1887; 2 sonatas, 3 vn (1st position), 1890, 1909; V cudzine [Abroad], vn, pf, 1923 [3rd version of Dumky]; Nocturne, str qt, 1930

Org: Fantázia–Sonáta, d, c 1881–90; Gottvertrauen, chorale trilogy, 1916; Fantasy on the chorale Christus, der ist mein Leben, 1918; 3 other pieces, after 1881

Pf: Svätomartinská kadrila [Quadrille of St Martin], 1862; Kleine Stücke, 1866–9; Variations on Slovak folksongs: Pri Prešporku [In Pressburg], 1866, Letí, letí roj [The Swarm is Flying], 1869; Sonatina, e, before 1875; Sonata, B, 1885; Puppenfest, waltzes, 4 hands, 1927

WRITINGS

‘Slovenská hudba a spev slovenský’ [Slovak music and Slovak singing], Dalibor, viii/8 (1869), 57–8

‘Podmienky a základy národnej hudby slovenskej’ [Conditions and foundations of Slovak national music], Hudební listy, iii (1872), 127–9

‘Myšlienky o vývine národnej hudby a slovenského spevu’ [Ideas about the development of national music and Slovak singing], Letopis Matice slovenskej, x/2 (1873), 10–29

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Orel: Ján Levoslav Bella (Bratislava, 1924)

K. Hudec: J.L. Bella (Prague, 1937)

Z. Bokesová: Návrat J.L. Bellu na Slovensko [Bella's return to Slovakia] (Liptovský Sv. Mikuláš, 1944) [Bella's letters to his son Rudolf, 1925–36]

L. Burlas: Život a dielo J.L. Bellu [life and work of Bella] (Bratislava, 1953)

Z. Nováček: J.L. Bella: velká postava slovenskej histórie [A great figure of Slovak history] (Martin, 1953)

J. Potúček: ‘Bibliografia tlačených diel J.L. Bellu’ [Bibliography of printed works by Bella], Hudobnovedný sborník SAV, i (Bratislava, 1953), 132–52

F. Zagiba: Johann L. Bella (1843–1936) und das Wiener Musikleben (Vienna, 1953), 132–52

E. Zavarský: Ján Levoslav Bella: život a dielo [Life and work] (Bratislava, 1955)

V. Čížik and J. Lengová, eds.: Exegi monumentum: Ján Levoslav Bella (1843–1936), život a dielo v obrazových dokumentoch [Life and work in photographic documentation] (Banská Bystrica, 1992)

J. Lengová, ed.: Ján Levoslav Bella v kontexte európskej hudobnej kultúry [Bella in the context of European music culture] (Banská Bystrica, 1993) [incl. bibliography by J. Potúček of books on Bella, 1953–92, pp.205–18]

VLADIMÍR GODÁR

Bellabene, Gregorio.

See Ballabene, Gregorio.

Bellaigue, Camille

(b Paris, 24 May 1858; d Paris, 4 Oct 1930). French critic. While studying law, he took music and piano lessons from Paladilhe and entered the Paris Conservatoire to study with Marmontel; in 1878 he won a premier prix for piano playing. A few years later he turned to music criticism, to which he devoted the rest of his life; he began in 1884, writing for the Correspondant, and in 1885 succeeded Blaze de Bury as music critic for the influential Revue des deux mondes, for which he wrote until a few months before his death. From 1886 to 1893 he was the editor for Année musicale (from 1892 Année musicale et dramatique). He also contributed numerous articles to all the foremost journals of the time, including Le temps, Le Figaro, Le gaulois and Echo de Paris.

Bellaigue exercised enormous influence through his writings. Thanks to his training as a pianist he was able to pronounce authoritatively on the deficiencies of others; his critical judgments were delivered magisterially, received deferentially. His biggest campaigns were fought in the field of opera, where he condemned the influence of Wagner and championed Italian music (especially Verdi) and French music (though he made a bitter attack on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, partially retracted in later life).

WRITINGS

Un siècle de musique française (Paris, 1887)

Georges Bizet: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1890)

La musique française au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1890)

Psychologie musicale (Paris, 1893)

Portraits et silhouettes de musiciens (Paris, 1896; Eng. trans., 1897)

Etudes musicales et nouvelles silhouettes de musiciens, i (Paris, 1898; Eng. trans., 1900); ii (Paris, 1903); iii (Paris, 1907)

Impressions musicales et littéraires (Paris, 1900)

Mendelssohn (Paris, 1907, 3/1911, 4/1920)

Mozart (Paris, 1906, 2/1935)

Les époques de la musique (Paris, 1909)

Gounod (Paris, 1910, 3/1919)

Verdi (Paris, 1911; It. trans., 1913)

Notes brèves (Paris, 1911–14)

Propos de musique et de guerre (Paris, 1917)

Echos de France et d'Italie (Paris, 1919)

Souvenirs de musique et de musiciens (Paris, 1921)

Promenades lyriques (Paris, 1924)

Paroles et musique (Paris, 1925)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (B. Bardet)

L. Gillet: ‘Camille Bellaigue’, Revue des deux mondes, 7th period, lx (1930), 203

R. de Rensis: ‘Camille Bellaigue’, Musica d'oggi, xii (1930), 455

GUSTAVE FERRARI/MALCOLM TURNER

Bellamy, Peter

(b Norfolk, 8 Sept 1944; d Keighley, Yorks., 24 Sept 1991). English singer. Influenced in his youth by American traditional songs and the blues, he arrived in London during the 1960s, where he gave up art studies to form the a cappella group the Young Tradition with Royston and Heather Wood. Although their repertory comprised English traditional songs, their exotic clothes, magnetic stage presence, multi-layered harmonies and powerful vocal delivery captured the imaginations of many young people in Britain and America. The group disbanded in 1969 having recorded three albums: The Young Tradition (1966), So Cheerfully Round (1967) and Galleries (1968). Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Bellamy pursued a solo career becoming increasingly influenced by English traditional singers such as Harry Fred Cox and Sam Larner. In the 1970s he began to set many of Rudyard Kipling’s poems to traditional-style melodies; he was later elected President of the Kipling Society. In 1977, he composed a ballad opera on the subject of transportation. An uncompromising outspoken advocate of traditional musics, Bellamy remains an icon for many folk revivalists despite his premature death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

Oak, Ash and Thorn, perf. P. Bellamy and others, Argo ZFB11 (1970)

The Fox Jumps over the Parson’s Gate, perf. P. Bellamy, Topic 12T200 (1970)

The Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling, perf. P. Bellamy, Green Linnet SIF1002 (1976)

The Transports – a Ballad Opera, perf. P. Bellamy, Free Reed (1977); reissued as Topic TSCD459 (1992)

Both Sides Then, perf. P. Bellamy, Topic (1979); reissued as Fledgling FLE1002 (1992)

Peter Bellamy Discography, Swing 51, i/4 (1981)

DAVE ARTHUR

Bellamy, Richard

(d Aug/Sept 1813). English bass and composer. On 28 March 1771 he was appointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and on 1 January 1773 a lay vicar of Westminster Abbey. He was vicar-choral of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1777, and from 1793 to 1800 was almoner and Master of the Choristers. He gave up his other appointments in 1801. He sang in the Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey in 1784, in oratorios at Drury Lane in 1786, and in Salomon’s concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms in 1790. In 1788 he published a volume containing a Te Deum for a full orchestra (performed at the installation of the Knights of the Bath in May that year) and a set of anthems; he also published two keyboard sonatas and a collection of glees (1789).

W.H. HUSK/WATKINS SHAW/R

Bellamy, Thomas (Ludford)

(b Westminster, London, 1770; d London, 3 Jan 1843). English bass, son of Richard Bellamy. He was educated in the choir of Westminster Abbey under Benjamin Cooke, and sang in the Handel Commemoration of 1784. He studied with Tasca, and sang in London in cathedral choirs and at concerts until 1794, when he went to Ireland. He became stage manager at the Dublin Theatre Royal in 1797 and made his début there on 9 February 1798. In 1800 he became part proprietor of the Manchester, Chester, Shrewsbury and Lichfield theatres. In 1803 he sold his share and became sole proprietor of the Belfast, Londonderry and Newry theatres. This speculation proving unsuccessful, he returned to London and sang at the Covent Garden theatre for five years; in 1812 he was engaged for five years at Drury Lane theatre. From 1819 to 1838 he was choirmaster at the chapel of the Spanish Embassy; in 1821, on the death of James Bartleman, he was engaged as principal bass singer at the Concert of Ancient Music. (DNB; W.B. Squire)

WRITINGS

An Explanation of the Circumstances which Caused the Removal of Mr. Bellamy from the Management of the Spanish Choir (London, 1838)

Lyric Poetry of Glees, Madrigals, Catches, Rounds, Canons and Duets (London, 1840)

W.H. HUSK/R

Bellanda, Lodovico

(b ?Verona, c1575; fl Verona, 1593–1613). Italian composer and organist. He was organist at S Marco, Rovereto from 1600 to 1602. The title-pages of his printed works describe him as Veronese, and the dedications are addressed to a few noble patrons. The copy of his Primo libro de madrigali (1602) in the Accademia Filarmonica, Verona, has been there since his lifetime. His earliest known volume, the three-part Canzonette of 1593, contains 19 brief pieces in two repeated sections to strophic texts of three or four lines per stanza; although the partbooks are labelled ‘cantus’, ‘tenor’ and ‘bass’, the pieces are in fact for two sopranos and tenor. The Canzonette spirituali (1599) includes eight duets for soprano and tenor and two instrumental compositions in four parts; according to the preface, the instrumental works are for organ. The parts in all the pieces are of equal importance and imitative throughout. The volume also includes a duet by Paolo Fonghetto and two three-part instrumental pieces by Ambrogio Bresciano. The 1602 volume contains 14 madrigals for five voices and one for eight. The Sacrae cantiones, of which only two partbooks survive, contains 19 motets by Bellanda and one by Giuliano Corsini of different lengths and textures; many have refrains in triple metre. O gloriosa domina is of special interest since it includes dynamic markings for echo effects. Bellanda's last three known publications are primarily for solo voice and continuo and show that he kept abreast of the newest developments in Italian music. The two volumes of Musiche comprise 30 madrigals, five strophic arias and four dialogues; six are for two voices. The madrigals are in various monodic styles and include some striking harmonic and melodic progressions in response to emotive texts (examples in AmbrosGM); two are formulae for sonnets and ottavas. The strophic pieces, two of them ballettos, are based on simple rhythmic patterns; the dialogues include Anima mia che pensi, which uses a segment of text from the Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo (Act 1 scene iv) earlier set by Cavalieri. The Sacre laudi (1613) contains 23 monodies with Latin texts.

WORKS

all published in Venice unless otherwise stated

Canzonette, 3vv (1593)

Canzonette spirituali, 2vv, insts (1599¹³)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5, 8vv (1602)

Sacrae cantiones, 3–5vv (1604³)

Musiche … per cantare, 1, 2vv, chit, hpd (1607)

Le musiche … per cantarsi, libro secondo, 1, 2vv, lute, hpd, other insts (1610)

Sacre laudi, 1v, org/chit/other inst (1613)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

G. Turrini: L'Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla Fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico (Verona, 1941), esp. 179, 197, 204, 210

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965), 107, 136, 154, 164, 209, 223

A. Gajoni-Berti: Dizionario dei musicisti e cantanti veronesi (1400–1966) (Verona, 1966)

M. Levri: La cappella musicale di Rovereto (Trent, 1972), esp. 56, 60, 64

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Documenti veronesi su musicisti del XVI e XVII secolo’, Scritti in onore di Mons. Giuseppe Turrini (Verona, 1973), 547–75, esp. 547

E. Paganuzzi and others: La musica a Verona (Verona, 1976)

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

WILLIAM V. PORTER

Bellante, Dionisio

(b Verona, c1610, d Verona, c1685). Italian composer and violinist. He was a priest and probably spent his whole life in Verona. In 1630–34 he was a musico straordinario at the cathedral and from 4 November 1658 until his death he was maestro di cappella there. In addition to four duets in Geronimo Bettino's Concerti accademici (Venice, 1643), his published music consists of Concerti accademici (Venice, 1629), whose title-page states that it is for one to six voices. However, two of the ‘voices’ in the only six-part piece are in fact violin parts, there are parts for two violins and also for bassoon in other works besides, and all the music is accompanied by continuo. Nearly all the contents are in the concertato style, homophonic and imitative writing alternating in a basically diatonic idiom reminiscent of music written in Venice at that time. Some of it is attractive, but the most interesting pieces in the volume are two long recitatives, a morning song (Matinata in genere rappresentativo) and a lament of Orpheus, Che veggio, ohime, which is a setting of a text by Sigismondo d’India, whose own music for it was published in his Musiche of 1621. Bellante would almost certainly have had to know that publication in order to have access to the words, and there are one or two similarities between the two settings. On the whole, however, Bellante went his own way, though at a lower level of inspiration than d’India; yet his setting is among the more rewarding chamber recitatives of the period and, like the morning song, is notable for striking use of dissonance. A volume of Propria missarum by him for four voices survives in a manuscript, possibly prepared for publication (I-VEcap), and six other sacred pieces also survive (in D-MÜs).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Turrini: Il patrimonio musicale della Biblioteca capitolare di Verona dal secolo XV al XIX (Verona, 1952), 19–20

C. Bologna: ‘Dalla musica post-rinascimentale ai giorni nostri’, La musica a Verona, ed. P. Bruguoli (Verona, 1976), 217–422

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

S. Leopold: ‘Al Modo d’Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts’, AnMc, no.29 (1995)

NIGEL FORTUNE

Bellasio [Belasio], Paolo

(b Verona, 20 May 1554; d Rome, 10 July 1594). Italian composer and organist. In 1582 he lived for a short time in Rome where he served first Cardinal Filippo Boncompagni, to whom he dedicated his second book of madrigals, and then Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto. His correspondence with Sirleto indicates that in 1583 Bellasio was travelling in Calabria, probably in search of a post as an organist. In a letter written from Paola on 16 February 1583 he mentioned his penurious state and requested permission to return to Sirleto’s or to Boncompagni’s service; it is not known whether he did so, but in 1584 Sirleto recommended him to Cardinal Carlo Borromeo for the position of organist at Milan Cathedral. This application was unsuccessful and he spent the next two years in part-time and occasional employment as an organist in many Roman churches and seminaries; for example, in May and June of 1585 he served as second organist at S Luigi dei Francesi. On 20 November 1587 he was appointed organist at Orvieto Cathedral for two years at an annual salary of 100 scudi. At the end of the period the chapter offered to extend the contract for another two years, but he declined the post and returned to Verona. He dedicated his first book of six-voice madrigals to the members of the Accademia Filarmonica and the title-pages of his 1591 and 1592 publications referred to him as ‘maestro di musica nell’Accademia’. Some time between 1592 and 1594 he returned to Rome where he remained until his death. He was well educated and had some influential friends, as can be determined from his epitaph which states that Pope Clement VIII made him a Knight of the Golden Spur.

Bellasio’s output appears to have consisted entirely of secular vocal music. Both his style and the anthologies in which his madrigals appeared place him in the circle of Roman composers of the later 16th century. In particular, Le Gioie (RISM 1589⁷) was a collection of madrigals by members of the Roman Congregazione dei Musici. His literary tastes reflect the somewhat anachronistic interests of the Veronese academies during the last quarter of the 16th century; he preferred the lyrics of Bembo and Petrarch to the verses of Tasso and Guarini, which were admired in more progressive circles. His madrigals are characterized by graceful motifs, diatonic harmony and smoothly flowing counterpoint.

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise stated

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1578²¹)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1582)

Il primo libro de madrigali, con un dialogo, 6, 10vv (1590)

Madrigali, 3–8vv (1591)

Villanelle con la intavolatura del liuto, 3vv (1592), ed. G. Vecchi (Bologna, 1952)

Il quinto libro de madrigali, 5vv (Verona, 1595⁷)

11 madrigals, 4–6vv, 3 canzonettas, 4vv, 1579⁴, 1583¹⁰, 1585²⁹, 1589⁷, 1590¹⁵, 1591¹², 1595⁵, 1596¹⁰; 2 lute intabulations, 1600⁶; 2 Latin contrafacta, 1594¹⁹, 1612¹⁸

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI [R. Meloncelli]

R. Casimiri: ‘Paolo Bellasio, musicista veronese 1554–1594: nuovi documenti biografici’, NA, xiv (1937), 97–108

H.-W. Frey: ‘Die Kapellmeister an der französischen Nationalkirche San Luigi dei Francesi in Rom im 16. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 32–60, esp. 53

PATRICIA ANN MYERS

Bellavere [Belaver, Bell’aver, Bell’haver], Vincenzo

(b c1540–41; d Venice, 29 Aug 1587). Italian composer and organist. He is first heard of as organist of the church of the Crosieri at Padua in 1567; in the same year he applied unsuccessfully for the post of organist of Padua Cathedral. The following year he was elected organist of the Scuola Grande di S Rocco, Venice. He remained there until June 1584, when he returned to Padua, having now attained the position of organist at the cathedral. His initial engagement was to have lasted three years but, perhaps due to an unexcused absence from Padua, a disagreement arose with the canons who, in December 1585, appointed Sperandio Saloni in place of Bellavere. In December 1586 he replaced Andrea Gabrieli as organist at S Marco, Venice; he died eight months later at the age of 46.

Bellavere’s reputation as a composer of madrigals is attested by the presence of his compositions in numerous contemporary anthologies. His style is indebted to that of Andrea Gabrieli: it shows the same penchant for bright sonorities (especially in the upper voices) and a similar attitude to word-setting, verbal images being taken up in the music in a modest rather than extravagant way (as in the Marenzian school). He was a leading composer of giustiniani and veneziane. Ten of these appeared in the Primo libro delle justiniane (RISM 1570¹⁷), an anthology edited by Bellavere himself. The works are strophic, as in the popular tradition; the comic texts are rich in doubles entendres, imprecations and stammering effects. Of the little church music by Bellavere that survives, the double-choir motet Vidi speciosam (in 1615²) is an excellent example of the Venetian polychoral tradition.

WORKS

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1575); 3 ed. in AMI, i (1897)

2 Magnificat, 8vv, 1590⁴, 1600¹

4 motets, 7, 8vv, 1590⁴, 1615²

Italian texted works, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12vv: 1564¹⁶ (ed. in Celebri raccolte musicali venete del Cinquecento, i, Padua, 1974), 1566⁷, 1568¹⁶, 1570¹⁷, 1579², 1579³, 1584⁴, 1585¹⁶, 1586¹, 1586¹¹, 1587⁶, 1590¹¹, 1593³

Toccata, 1593⁹

Lute intabulation, 1599¹⁹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS

EinsteinIM

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei sec. XIV, XV, XVI’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31

D. Arnold: Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance (London, 1979, rev. 1986)

P. Fabbri: ‘Andrea Gabrieli e le composizioni su diversi linguaggi: la giustiniana’, Andrea Gabrieli e il suo tempo: Venice 1985, 249–72

M.C. Bradshaw: ‘Gabrieli and the Early History of the Toccata’, ibid., 319–51, esp. 336–8

DENIS ARNOLD/SERENA DAL BELIN PERUFFO

Bellay, Joachim du.

See Du Bellay, Joachim.

Bellazzi [Bellazzo, Bellatius], Francesco

(b Vigevano, nr Milan; fl 1618–28). Italian composer. He entered the Franciscan order. The only musical appointment he is known to have held was as maestro di cappella of S Francesco, Milan, from 1623 to 1628. He was one of many north Italian church composers publishing liturgical music for parochial rather than metropolitan establishments, though he did not wholeheartedly adopt the concertato style of the day. His music for the Offices reflects this: the eight-part vesper psalms (1618) are for two block choirs throughout, without solo writing, thus recalling the double-choir style of decades earlier; and the volume of 1628 contains falsobordone chants – another old-fashioned feature. In contrast, the psalms of 1624 are marked ‘all’uso moderno’ and are in a more up-to-date idiom, with writing for ATTB (which could be SATB if the second tenor were transposed up an octave) even though there are no developed solos or duets. The psalms are unusual in being for Compline or Terce: the latter Office was normally sung, if at all, to plainsong. The motets of 1620 are more original in their textures and, as often in such music, the word-setting is expressive.

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise stated

Psalmi ad vesperas, 8vv (1618)

Liber primus sacrorum concentuum, 2–4, 6vv … 2 genera litanium B.V.M., 5vv, una cum missa, 4vv; ac partitione … organi, op.2 (1620)

Messa, motetti, letanie della B.V., Mag et falsi bordoni con Gloria Patri a 8 aggionto il primo choro, concerti a 2–4 … con la partitura per org, op.4 (1622)

Salmi intieri, 5vv, per li vespri … da capella e da concerto, op.5 (Milan, 1623)

Salmi concertati all’uso moderno … nelle compiete … a 4vv … con le antifone della B. Virgine e li salmi di terza a 5 con bc (org), op.7 (1624)

Messa, Mag et motetti concertati … falsi bordoni con Gloria Patri e canzon francese, 8vv, con partitura, op.8 (1628)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Roche: ‘Musica diversa di Compietà: Compline and its Music in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, PRMA, cix (1982–3), 60–79

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE

Bell Diapason.

See under Organ stop.

Belle, Jan

(fl 1546–?1566). Flemish composer. In 1546–7 he was magister duodenorum (master of the choirboys) at Ste Croix in Liège and was called ‘de Lovanio’. He was possibly a succentor at the Church of Our Lady, St Truiden, from 1563 to 1566. He was the author of a Musices encomion (Maastricht, 1552; lost) and composed six four-part songs on Flemish texts which were published in Phalèse’s Duytsch musyck boeck (RISM 1572¹¹; all ed. in UVNM, xxvi, 1903; one ed. in Cw, xcii, 1962, no.13). The first of these songs had already been published, attributed to ‘Joan Zacheus’, in 1554³¹; two of them were reprinted by Phalèse in later editions of the Septiesme livre des chansons à quatre parties (see H. Vanhulst, RBM, xxxii–xxxiii, 1978–9, pp.97–120).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vander StraetenMPB, viii

E.G.J. Gregoir: Littérature musicale: documents historiques relatifs à l’art musical et aux artistes-musiciens, i (Brussels, 1872), 21

R.-B. Lenaerts: Het Nederlands polifonies lied in de zestiende eeuw (Mechelen and Amsterdam, 1933), 32, 92

C. van den Borren: Geschiedenis van de muziek in de Nederlanden, i (Antwerp, 1948), 389

G. Huybens: Muziek te Leuven in de 16e eeuw (Leuven, 1982), 15, 30

GODELIEVE SPIESSENS

Bellère, Jean

(b Liège, 1526; d Antwerp, 15 Oct 1595). Flemish publisher, printer and editor. In 1553, the year of his marriage, he became a citizen of Antwerp and received a licence to print; he was elected a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1559. His first book was published there in 1555. One of the most important figures of his time, he published a wide variety of books, including classics, literature, history, science, Spanish books and French translations from Latin, Italian and Portuguese. He journeyed regularly to Frankfurt and had business dealings with a wide circle of printers and humanists, including Plantin.

From 1570 he collaborated with Pierre Phalèse (i) and together they issued some 50 volumes, both vocal and instrumental. During this association, Phalèse also issued some music alone, although Bellère is not known to have done so, nor to have owned music type. When Pierre Phalèse (i) died, Bellère worked extensively with his son, Pierre Phalèse (ii) for over 20 years. After Bellère’s death, his widow Elisabeth published two volumes jointly with Pierre Phalèse (ii), in 1597 and 1598. His eldest son. Balthazar, married Jean Bogard’s daughter and established his own business in Douai.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

GoovaertsH

A. Goovaerts: De muziekdrukkers Phalesius en Bellerus te Leuven en te Antwerp 1546–1674 (Antwerp, 1882)

S. Bain: Music Printing in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974)

A. Rouzet: Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites geographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop, 1975)

H. Vanhulst: Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse et ses fils, 1545–1578 (Brussels, 1990)

SUSAN BAIN

Bellermann.

German family of musicians.

(2) Johann Joachim Bellermann

(3) Johann Friedrich Bellermann

(4) (Johann Gottfried) Heinrich Bellermann

WILLIAM DRABKIN/R

(1) Konstantin Bellermann

(b Erfurt, 1696; d Minden, 1 April 1758). Composer. He studied philosophy, history and finally law in Erfurt and also had some theoretical and practical training in music. In 1719 he left Erfurt to take up the post of Kantor in Minden, where he had a successful career as a composer and teacher. In 1739 he was made assistant rector of the school in Minden, and three years later was appointed rector. He wrote several oratorios and cantatas, an opera, (?) Issipile, as well as instrumental concertos and 24 lute suites; none of his music, which was mentioned by Fétis, has survived.

(2) Johann Joachim Bellermann

(b Erfurt, 23 Sept 1754; d Berlin, 25 Oct 1842). Theologian and music educationist, a close relative of (1) Konstantin Bellermann. He studied theology at the universities of Erfurt and Göttingen. From 1778 to 1781 he visited Estonia and Russia, gathering information for his two-volume Bemerkungen über Russland (Erfurt, 1788), which includes a description of contemporary musical life in Russia. He was a professor of theology at the University of Erfurt until 1804, when he moved to Berlin to become the director of the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster (1804–28) and (from 1816) professor of theology at the university. Together with Carl Friedrich Zelter, he reformed music education in the schools; he introduced singing as an elective course at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster as early as 1808.

(3) Johann Friedrich Bellermann

(b Erfurt, 8 March 1795; d Berlin, 5 Feb 1874). Music scholar, son of (2) Johann Joachim Bellermann. He studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Jena and taught from 1819 to 1867 at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, of which he became director in 1847. He is known especially for his research on ancient Greek music and won the Gold Medal of Arts and Letters for his monumental work on ancient Greek scales and musical notation (1847).

WRITINGS

ed.: Die alten Liederbücher der Portugiesen (Berlin, 1840/R)

ed.: Die Hymnen des Dionysios und Mesomedes (Berlin, 1840)

ed.: Fragmentum graecae scriptionis de musica (Berlin, 1840)

ed.: Anonymi scriptio de musica: Bachii senioris introductio artis musicae (Berlin, 1841),

Die Tonleitern und Musiknoten der Griechen (Berlin, 1847/R)

(4) (Johann Gottfried) Heinrich Bellermann

(b Berlin, 10 March 1832; d Potsdam, 10 April 1903). Music scholar and composer, son of (3) Johann Friedrich Bellermann. He studied at what became the Königliches Akademisches Institut für Kirchenmusik and for a long time was a private pupil of A.E. Grell. In 1853 he was appointed singing teacher at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster and in 1866 succeeded A.B. Marx as professor of music at the University of Berlin. He became a member of the Akademie der Künste in 1875. A lifelong student of Renaissance music, he is known chiefly as the author of the first modern treatise explaining the mensural system (1858) and for his counterpoint treatise (1862), which he based on Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), and which contains in its introduction an important history of contrapuntal theory. His compositions, predominantly a cappella choral music, betray the influence of Grell in their strict adherence to the ‘new Palestrina style’ in vogue in Berlin in the middle of the 19th century. He also wrote melodramas that show the influence of Mendelssohn.

WRITINGS

Die Mensuralnoten und Taktzeichen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1858, 2/1906, enlarged 4/1963 by H. Husman)

Der Kontrapunkt (Berlin, 1862, 4/1901)

ed. and trans.: J. Tinctoris: Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, Jb für musikalischen Wissenschaften, i (1863), 61–114

Über die Entwicklung der mehrstimmigen Musik (Berlin, 1867)

Die Grösse der musikalischen Intervalle als Grundlage der Harmonie (Berlin, 1873)

ed. and trans.: Franconis de Colonia Artis cantus mensurabilis caput XI, de discantu et eius speciebus (Berlin, 1874)

August Eduard Grell (Berlin, 1899)

Numerous articles in AMZ and other journals

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (D. Sasse)

ScheringGO

H. Bellermann: Obituary of J.F. Bellermann, AMZ, new ser., ix (1874), 129–35, 145–51

J. Heidemann: Geschichte des Grauen Klosters zu Berlin (Berlin, 1874), 270ff, 297ff

O. Schneider: Heinrich Bellermann (Berlin, 1903)

K. Jeppesen: Der Palestrinastil und die Dissonanz (Leipzig, 1925; Eng. trans., 1927)

K. Jeppesen: Kontrapunkt (Vokalpolyfoni) (Copenhagen, 1930, 2/1946; Eng. trans., 1939)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Geschichte als Problem der Musiktheorie: über einige Berliner Musiktheoretiker des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte Berlins im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1980), 405–13

C. Dahlhaus: Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, i: Grundzüge einer Systematik (Darmstadt, 1984)

D. Harrán: World-Tone Relations in Musical Thought: from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Stuttgart, 1986)

D. Damschroder and D.R. Williams: Music Theory from Zarlino to Schenker: a Bibliography and Guide (Stuyvesant, NY, 1990)

Belletti, Giovanni Battista

(b Sarzana, 17 Feb 1813; d Sarzana, 27 Dec 1890). Italian baritone. He studied with Pilotti in Bologna and made his début in Stockholm in 1838 as Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia); he then appeared there with Jenny Lind in Robert le diable (1839) and Lucia di Lammermoor (1840), both sung in Swedish. In 1848 he was engaged at Her Majesty’s Theatre, singing Ezio in the first London performance of Attila, Belcore, Malatesta and Mozart’s and Rossini’s Figaro. He sang in Paris at the Théâtre Italien in Semiramide, Fidelio and Mercadante’s Il bravo. In 1853 he appeared at Covent Garden, singing Silva (Ernani), Saint-Bris (Les Huguenots), Alphonse (La favorite), Don Giovanni and Tristan d’Acunha (Spohr’s Jessonda). His beautiful voice and fine musicianship were much admired by his contemporaries.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Belle van Zuylen [née Tuyll van Serooskerken, Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van]

(b Zuylen castle, nr Utrecht, 20 Oct 1740; d Colombier, Switzerland, 26 Dec 1805). Dutch writer and composer. From 1771 she lived in Switzerland with her husband Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière de Penthaz. She is remembered especially for her extensive, witty and often caustic correspondence with James Boswell, Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël and others (see M. Flothuis: ‘An Unexpected Source of Musical Information: the Correspondence of Belle van Zuylen (1740–1805)’, FAM, xxvii (1980), 33–6; xxviii (1981), 145 only) and also for her novels, plays and pamphlets, all (including the letters) written in French. She was educated by a Swiss governess, Jeanne Prévost, with whom she continued to correspond for several years; only the letters of Mme Prévost have survived. Music played an important role in her career, as was usual in noble families of the time. As early as 1764 she expressed a desire to study composition with Rameau, but he died the same year. In 1785 she started studying with Niccolò Zingarelli, who had just earned his first great success with his opera Alsinda. On 28 May 1785 she wrote, ‘Since this first essay I have dreamt only of music’. Her letters frequently mention composers whose works she knew or wanted to get to know.

Belle van Zuylen embarked on several dramatic musical works, for which she wrote her own librettos, but none of these has come down to us except for some text fragments (in CH-N). In 1788 she sent the libretto of Les Phéniciennes to Mozart in the hope that he would set it to music, but neither her accompanying letter nor any reply from Mozart has been found. Her surviving compositions comprise six minuets for string quartet (The Hague and Amsterdam, n.d.), nine piano sonatas and ten airs and romances (Paris, n.d.); all have been published in volume x of her Oeuvres complètes [de] Isabelle de Charrière, Belle de Zuylen (Amsterdam, 1979–84). They do not surpass the average standard of the time, but the piano sonatas (originally published anonymously) show a gradual increase in the level of invention and skill.

MARIUS FLOTHUIS

Belleville, Anna Caroline de.

See Oury, Anna Caroline.

Belleville, Jacques de

(fl early 17th century). French dancer, violinist and composer. The only known fact in his personal life is that he was married on 27 May 1637 to Antoinette Guibourg, the widow of the painter and costume designer Daniel Rabel. Belleville was in charge of organizing court entertainments for Louis XIII from c1616 to c1637 and contributed to nearly all ballets performed at court during this time. As a dancer he rivalled Louis Constantin and the celebrated dancing-master Jacques Cordier. He wrote all the dance tunes and some of the airs for Etienne Durand's Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud (1617) and for the Ballet de Tancrède (1619). His virtues as a musician were extolled by Michel de Marolles (Mémoires, Amsterdam edn, 1755, iii, pp.207–8), and together with the singer Marais it was said of him by contemporaries that ‘[ils] n'ont besoing que d'estre nommez pour avoir des louanges’. An allemande and a four-part instrumental piece, Le testament du Sieur de Belleville, survive, and a number of other pieces were arranged for the lute and published in Airs de différents auteurs mis en tablature sur des accords nouveaux (Paris, 1631). Some appear in A. Souris, ed.: Oeuvres de Chancy, Bouvier, Belleville, Dubuisson, Chevalier (Paris, 1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Jacquot, ed.: Le luth et sa musique: Neuilly-sur-Seine 1957

M.M. McGowan: L'art du ballet de cour en France 1581–1643 (Paris, 1963/R)

M.M. McGowan: The Ballet de cour of Louis XIII (London, 1986)

D.J. Buch: Dance Music from the Ballets de cour 1575–1651 (New York, 1993)

MARGARET M. McGOWAN

Bell Gamba.

See under Organ stop.

Bell guittern.

See Cithrinchen.

Bell harp

(Ger. Schwungzither).

A type of wire-strung psaltery characteristically swung while being played. It is classified as a box zither. Examples were produced in the early 18th century by John Simcock of Bath, who may have invented the instrument (fig.1). A modern form, known as ‘fairy bells’ (fig.2), was played by English and French street musicians in the late 19th century and early 20th, and as a domestic and convivial instrument in England (see Coker). The player holds the instrument in both hands, the left thumb plucking the longer strings and the right thumb, with a plectrum, the shorter ones. At the same time he swings the instrument about at arm's length, a technique that produces an evocative, undulating sound. 18th-century bell harps were about half a metre high and had between 14 and 24 triple or quadruple courses tuned diatonically, 16 being the most common number. Many instruments had wooden lugs projecting from the sides, on which the player could rest his wrists and thus help control the momentum of the swing. Modern ‘fairy bells’ are somewhat larger and have between eight and 16 single courses, tuned diatonically.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Thibault, J. Jenkins and J. Bran-Ricci: Eighteenth Century Musical Instruments: France and England (London, 1973), 113 only

E. Coker: ‘“Fairy Bells in Oxfordshire”’, English Dance and Song, xxxvii (1975), 114–15

E. Halfpenny: ‘The Mythology of the English Harp’, GSJ, xxxi (1978), 29–35

I. Woodfield: ‘The Mythology of the English Harp’, GSJ xxxiii (1980), 133–4

M. Byrne: ‘Two Players with Bell Harp’, GSJ xliv (1991), 159 only

DAVID KETTLEWELL

Bell’haver, Vincenzo.

See Bellavere, Vincenzo.

Belli, Domenico

(d Florence, bur. 5 May 1627). Italian composer and musician. According to Fétis he served the ducal court at Parma at the beginning of the 17th century, but documents have not been found to support this assertion. On 10 August 1607 he became a member of the prestigious Compagnia dell'Arcangelo Raffaello, which put him into contact with many of the most important Florentines of the day. In a letter of 27 October 1609 to Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga (also a member of the confraternity), Belli indicated that he would be glad to enter the new cardinal's service in Rome. But he remained in Florence and from 1610 to 1613 he was tutor in music to the clerics of S Lorenzo, Florence, a position in which he succeeded Marco da Gagliano. Minutes of the chapter of canons there show that in addition he was given responsibility for music in S Lorenzo for Holy Week in 1611 and 1612. On 19 September 1618 both he and his wife Angelica were enrolled as musicians at the Medici court. He appears in payment records (in I-Fas) for the last time in April 1627; his wife continued in court service after his death.

All of Belli's surviving music was published in 1616. He composed his Orfeo dolente for Carnival in that year. It consists of five scenes (to a text at least partly by Gabriello Chiabrera) that were presented as intermedi between the acts of Tasso's Aminta, which the Rinaldi family had produced at their residence, the Palazzo della Gherardesca, in Florence. (The arguments for dating the work before 1600 made by A. Tirabassi: ‘The Oldest Opera: Belli's Orfeo dolente’, MQ, xxv, 1939, are specious.) Belli also wrote the music for Jacopo Cicognini's Andromeda, which was produced on 9 March 1618, again at the Palazzo della Gherardesca. The music is lost, but a description of it in which Belli is highly praised is contained in a letter (SolertiMBD) written by Caccini to the secretary of the Grand Duke of Tuscany the day after the performance.

In a remarkable letter written from Florence to Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on 11 June 1616, Belli indicated that his Arie were regarded as ‘difficult and unsingable’ because of the quantity of quavers in their basses. He continued by asking the duke to have the songs performed at the Mantuan court so that their unfortunate reputation might be improved. The bass lines are indeed rhythmically elaborate and are notable as well for the striking degree of chromaticism they contain. Some foreshadow the typical bass figurations of later strophic-bass cantatas, as also do the formal schemes of some of the songs. One song, Occhi belli a me severi, is in effect an early example of the form, with refrains and a ritornello in addition. Through both his harmonic and formal adventurousness, Belli belongs among the most radical monodists of the early 17th century.

WORKS

printed works published in Venice

Officium defunctorum, 4vv, bc (1616)

Orfeo dolente … diviso in 5 intermedi con li quali il signor Ugo Rinaldi ha rappresentato l'Aminta, favola boschereccia del sig. Torquato Tasso (1616); sections of text in Solerti, 375–91; ed. in Corboz (1979), vol.ii

Il primo libro dell' [35] arie, 1–2vv, chit (1616); facs. in ISS, i; ed. in Corboz (1979), vol.ii

L'Andromeda favola marittima (intermed: J. Cicognini), Florence, 9 March 1618, music lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM

FétisB

FortuneISS

SolertiMBD

A. Ademollo: La bell’Adriana ed altre virtuose del suo tempo alla corte di Mantova (Città di Castello, 1888), 61, 216

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Domenico Belli und der chromatische Kontrapunkt um 1600’, Mf, xv (1962), 315–40

Y. Corboz: Domenico Belli e sa contribution au stile recitativo et rappresentativo (thesis, U. of Fribourg, 1979)

Y. Corboz: ‘L'oeuvre de Domenico Belli: une contribution au “stile recitativo” et “rappresentativo”’, SMz, cxx (1980), 213–24

G. Bernardini: ‘Domenico Belli e la monodia da camera del primo Seicento’, Studi musicali, xxii (1993), 297–334

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 355–9

EDMOND STRAINCHAMPS

Belli, Girolamo

(b Argenta, nr Ferrara, 1552; d ?Argenta, c1620). Italian composer and teacher. He received his early musical training from Luzzaschi and began his career as a singer at the Gonzaga court at Mantua; he later moved to Rome. His earliest datable compositions are four madrigals in a manuscript (I-MOe 1358) compiled in about 1580, and one in Il lauro secco (RISM 1582⁵); the latter was published in Ferrara and suggests that he was there during the early 1580s, although he is not known to have settled there until 1583. Einstein’s claim that Belli served the Duke of Mantua between 1584 and 1587 was probably based on remarks in Bertolotti (1890) and on the dedications of Belli’s second book of six-voice madrigals and of I furti amorosi, but there is no archival evidence to support it. Belli dedicated the first two publications of his own works to Duke Alfonso II d’Este and his wife, Margherita Gonzaga, almost certainly in the hope of securing an appointment as a court musician; but the court records (in I-MOs) show that these ambitions were not realized. Most of his life seems to have been spent in Argenta as a teacher and maestro di cappella; his pupils included Giovanni Nicolò Mezzogorri and Biagio Tomasi. Baruffaldi incorrectly interpreted letters to Belli from Alessandro Guarini as meaning that Belli founded the Accademia degli Elevati at Argenta, but they refer to Belli’s heraldic motto and academic pseudonym in the Accademia degli Armonici at Cesena. He was also connected with the Accademia degli Intrepidi at Ferrara from at least 1608, when he dedicated his Madrigali e canzoni (now lost) to his fellow academicians.

Stylistically Belli’s secular music is clearly influenced by Luzzaschi’s. His debt to his teacher was publicly acknowledged in his Nono libro de madrigali a cinque voci, where he parodied four madrigals from Luzzaschi’s Madrigali per cantare e sonare a uno, due e tre soprani (Rome, 1601). The Furti amorosi are neat exercises in intellectual wit; their texts are patched together from well-known authors and the music often refers to celebrated contemporary madrigals. Similar in musical style are the contents of the first book of six-part madrigals, which also includes a five-section setting of Guarini’s popular poem Baci soavi e cari. Many of Belli’s madrigals are lost, including at least seven books for five voices and a book of madrigals and canzoni for four voices. Seven madrigals from the lost seventh book for five voices were included by Francis Tregian in the anthology that he began to compile during the second decade of the 17th century (GB-Lbl).

The Sacrae cantiones of 1585 are dedicated to Pope Sixtus V, who is praised in the opening motet, O Pastor optime. Many of the book’s motets are contrapuntal and sober in style. The Sacrae cantiones of 1594, dedicated to Cardinal Aldobrandini, include a sequence of double-choir motets followed by a mass setting (also cast for two four-part choirs) written in the Venetian manner. The Salmi of 1610 were published with a separate organ part.

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise stated

sacred vocal

Psalmi ad vesperas cum hymnis et Magnificat, 4vv (1585), inc.

Sacrae cantiones … liber primus, 6vv (1585)

Sacrae cantiones, 8vv (1589)

Sacrae cantiones cum B.V. cantico, 10vv, et in fine, missa, 8vv (1594)

Salmi, con doi Magnificat et letanie della beata vergine, 5vv, bc (org), op.20 (1610)

secular vocal

Madrigali … libro primo, 6vv (Ferrara, 1583), inc.

I furti … il secondo libro de madrigali, 6vv (1584; also pubd 1587 as I furti amorosi)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv, con un dialogo, 8vv (1586); 1 ed. M.A. Balsano: L’Ariosto: la musica, i musicisti (Florence, 1981)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 6vv (1590)

Canzonette … libro primo, 4vv (Ferrara, 1596)

Il nono libro de madrigali, 5vv, et nel fine cinque madrigali per cantare & sonare, 5vv, op.22 (1617), inc.

5 madrigals, 3, 5vv, 1582⁵, 1586⁹, 1587⁶, 1588²⁰, 1592¹⁴

4 madrigals, 5vv, I-MOe

lost works

[Masses], 4vv (?1585); MischiatiI nos.I:29, V:723, XII:56

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1584)

Madrigali e canzoni, 4vv (Ferrara, 1608), cited in Faustini

[Madrigals, bk 7], 5vv (n.d.); MischiatiI nos.VII:133, VIII:30; 7 scored by F. Tregian, GB-Lbl

Salmi, 10vv (2 choirs) (n.d.); MischiatiI no.V:795

[Vespers], 5 ‘voci pari’ (n.d.); MischiatiI nos.VIII:31, IX:526, IXbis:588, X:689

[Vespers], 5vv, bc (n.d.); MischiatiI nos.VII:405, IX:457, IXbis:507, X:607

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

BoetticherOL

EinsteinIM

MGG1 (A. Cavicchi)

MischiatiI

NewcombMF

A. Guarini: Prose (Ferrara, 1611), 28, 126

G. Faustini: Biblioteca degli scrittori ferraresi, i (MS, I-FEc), 149

G. Baruffaldi: Notizie istoriche delle accademie letterarie ferraresi (Ferrara, 1787), 54

A. Bertolotti: Artisti in relazioni coi Gonzaga duchi di Mantova nei secoli XVI e XVII (Modena, 1885/R), 135–6

A. Cavicchi: Introduction to Luzzasco Luzzaschi: Madrigali per cantare e sonare a uno, due e tre soprani (Brescia, 1965)

P. Kast: ‘Die Musikdrucke des Kataloges Giunta von 1604’, AnMc, no.2 (1965), 41–71

IAIN FENLON

Belli, Giulio

(b Longiano, nr Forlì, c1560; d ?Imola, after 1620). Italian composer. According to his own testimony, he was a pupil of Giovanthomaso Cimello in Naples before 1569; he then returned to Longiano and entered the Franciscan monastery there on 30 September 1579. On 7 November 1582 he became maestro di cappella at Imola Cathedral and on 20 May 1590 he was engaged for three years in a similar capacity at S Maria, Carpi; in 1591, however, he moved to S Francesco, Bologna, as ‘praefectus musices’. He seems to have been at Ferrara in 1592 and 1593, and in 1594 or 1595 he went to Venice as maestro di cappella of the church of the Ca’ Grande; in 1596 he took a similar position at Montagnana Cathedral. In 1597 he was maestro di cappella at the court of Duke Alfonso II d’Este and at the Accademia della Morte in Ferrara, and was maestro at Osimo Cathedral in 1599. From 1600 he was maestro di cappella at the cathedral and archiepiscopal seminary of Ravenna, and in 1603, after a brief stay at Reggio, he became maestro at Forlì Cathedral. At the beginning of 1606 he returned to the Ca’ Grande and on 9 May moved to S Antonio, Padua, where he stayed until 1608. In 1610 he was maestro di cappella at S Francesco, Assisi, and from 7 January 1611 to 1 April 1613 he again worked at Imola Cathedral. In 1615 he was once more maestro di cappella at the Ca’ Grande and in 1621 he returned finally to Imola. A Franciscan monk named Sante Belli, maestro di cappella at Correggio in 1590, seems to have been his brother. Some sources have incorrectly identified Giulio Belli with a scholar of the same name from Capodistria. He has also been confused with G.C. Belli, a court lutenist at Mantua. Several of Belli’s students have become known as composers, including G.B. Spada and Roberto Poggiolini.

A contemporary writer noted that Belli was a ‘virtuous and highly honoured man, and most skilled in his profession’ (see Casadio). This is confirmed mainly by his sacred works, some of which ran into many editions. His early music shows the influence of Palestrina and of the north Italian polychoral style, but his later works, particularly the sacred concertos, use smaller forces and acknowledge contemporary practice by including continuo parts. He also added continuo parts to later editions of some of his works that had originally been composed a cappella. Most of his masses are for five voices, but rapidly changing vocal groupings in the antiphonal choruses often give the impression of six to eight parts. His masses parody motets more often than madrigals, but he wrote a fine mass on Palestrina’s Vestiva i colli. He was less prolific as a composer of secular vocal music, but he was sufficiently well-known as a madrigalist to find a place in Morley’s Madrigals to Five Voyces (RISM 1598¹⁵). His canzonettas of 1584 are characterized by lively part-writing and consonant harmony. His instrumental pieces of 1613 are early examples of three-part canzonas.

WORKS

all published in Venice

sacred vocal

Missarum liber primus, 5vv (1586; in 2/1597 and subsequent edns Missa ‘Vestiva i colli’ replaced Missa ‘Estote fortes’)

Psalmi ad vesperas in totius anni solemnitatibus … duoque cantica beatae virginis, et in fine addito Te Deum laudamus, 5vv (1592)

Missarum sacrarumque cantionum, liber primus, 8vv (1595; 2/1607 with bc)

Psalmi ad vesperas in totius anni solemnitatibus, duoque cantica beatae virginis, 8vv (1596, bc pubd separately 1607; 3/1615 with bc)

Missarum, liber primus, 4vv (1599, 3/1615 with bc)

Sacrarum cantionum, cum litaniis Beatae Virginis Mariae, liber primus, 4–6, 8, 12vv (1600) [incl. motet by A. Righetti]

Psalmi ad vesperas in totius anni festivitatibus, ac tria cantica Beatae Virginis Mariae, 6vv (1603; 3/1607 as Salmi vespertini, che si cantano in tutte le feste dell’anno, with bc)

Compieta, mottetti & letanie della madonna, falsi bordoni sopra li otto toni, con li Sicut erat interi, 8vv (2 choirs) (1605)

Compieta, falsi bordoni, antifone et litanie della madonna, 4vv, bc (org) (1607)

Missae sacrae, 4–6, 8vv, bc (org) (1608)

Concerti ecclesiastici, 2, 3vv (1613) [incl. 2 canzonas, a 3, see ‘Instrumental’; incl. music by R. Poggiolini]

4 masses, 5, 6, 8vv; 9 motets, 5, 6, 8vv; 12 sacred concertos, 2–4vv, bc: 1609¹, 1610¹⁰, 1613², 1616², 1617¹, 1618², 1621², 1622², 1623², 1627¹, 1627²

24 masses, 4, 5, 8vv; 3 motets, 5, 8, 12vv: D-MÜs, Stadtbibliothek, Breslau, I-Ac, Bc, Md, Pca, PL-GD (6 masses, inc., bc only)

secular vocal

Canzonette … libro primo, 4vv (1584, 3/1595 with 2 addl pieces)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5, 6vv (1589)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 6vv (1590)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5, 6vv (1592–3)

Il secondo libro delle canzonette, 4vv, con alcune romane, 3vv (1593)

6 madrigals, 5vv, 1592¹⁴, 1598⁶, 1598¹⁵, 1604⁸

Madrigal, 5vv, GB-Cfm

instrumental

2 canzonas, a 3, in Concerti ecclesiastici (1613) [see ‘Sacred vocal’]

WRITINGS

Regole di contrappunto (MS, I-Bc, autograph)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberNL

HawkinsH

MGG1 suppl. (O. Wessely)

RicordiE

WaltherML

W.C. Printz: Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (Dresden, 1690/R1964 with introduction and index by O. Wessely), 130

G.B. Martini: Storia della musica, i (Bologna, 1761/R [dated 1757]), 194, 449

A. Isnenghi: La cappella musicale della basilica di S. Antonio (Padua, 1854), 7

A. Brigidi: Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere di Giulio Belli Longianese (Modena, 1865)

L. Busi: Il Padre G.B. Martini (Bologna, 1891/R), 280ff

G. Tebaldini: L’archivio musicale della Cappella Antoniana in Padova (Padua, 1895), 27ff

A.G. Spinelli: Notizie spettanti alla storia della musica in Carpi (Carpi, 1900), 7, 418

F. Pasini: ‘Notes sur la vie de Giovanni Battista Bassani’, SIMG, vii (1905–6), 581–607

D. Stella: ‘Serie dei maestri di cappella minori conventuali di S. Francesco, compilata dal Padre Stanislao Mattei’, Miscellanea francescana, xxi (1920), 148

D.M. Sparacio: ‘Musicisti minori conventuali’, Miscellanea francescana, xxv (1925), 13–29, 33–44, 81–112

A. Adrio: Die Anfänge des geistlichen Konzerts (Berlin, 1935), 10, 13–14, 137

E. Gerson-Kiwi: Studien zur Geschichte des italienischen Lied-Madrigals im XVI. Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1937)

R. Casadio: ‘La cappella musicale della cattedrale di Ravenna nel secolo XVI’, NA, xvi (1939), 136–85, 226–37, 258–73, esp. 161, 165, 236, 259, 262

R. Casimiri: ‘Musicisti dell’ordine francescano dei minori conventuali dei secoli XVI–XVIII’, NA, xvi (1939), 188–99

H.J. Moser: ‘Vestiva i colli’, AMf, iv (1939), 129–56, esp. 141

J. Roth: Die mehrstimmige lateinische Litaneikomposition des 16. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1959), 11

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Zur Kontrapunkt-Literatur im 16. Jahrhundert’, FAM, xiii (1966), 39–43

OTHMAR WESSELY/WALTER KREYSZIG

Bellin, Guillaume.

See Belin, Guillaume.

Bellincioni, Gemma (Cesira Matilda)

(b Como, 18 Aug 1864; d Naples, 23 April 1950). Italian soprano. She was taught by her father, a professional bass, and later by the famous tenor Roberto Stagno, whom she first met in 1886 and subsequently married. Except in the role of Violetta (in which she was praised by Verdi), she was rarely at her best in the older type of opera, and came into her own, both as actress and as singer, with the arrival of the verismo school; the great event of her life was her sensational portrayal of Santuzza in the première of Cavalleria rusticana (1890), with Stagno as Turiddu (see illustration). Though very successful in the principal European opera houses and in South America, she failed to establish herself at Covent Garden, where she appeared in 1895 amidst a company that was exceptionally strong in soprano talent; even her Santuzza, like her Carmen, was overshadowed by the immense popularity of Calvé. She created many other roles in verismo operas, among them Giordano’s Fedora, with the then unknown Caruso as Loris. The last phase of her career was dominated by Salome; she appeared in the first Italian performance of the opera (1906, Turin) under Strauss, who much admired her interpretation, and sang the role over 100 times. After World War I she spent some years as a teacher of singing in the Netherlands, and in 1924 reappeared as Santuzza, Tosca and Carmen at The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Her 14 early recordings (1903–5), though dramatic, lend support to the view that sheer voice was not her strongest suit; they show beside marked agility and individuality of style, a shrillness and excess of vibrato that cannot wholly be ascribed to the date of recording.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

G. Bellincioni: Io e il palcoscenico (Milan, 1920/R1977 incl. discography)

B. Stagno Bellincioni: Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni, intimi (Florence, 1943/R)

J.B. Richards: ‘Gemma Bellincioni’, Record Collector, xvi (1964–6), 196–219 [incl. discography]; xviii (1968–9), 139–40

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR

Bellingan, Johannes.

1. Education and early career (1801–26).

Bellini, Vincenzo

(b Catania, 3 Nov 1801; d Puteaux, nr Paris, 23 Sept 1835). Italian composer. He was a leading figure in early 19th-century opera, noted for his expressive melodies and sensitive approach to text-setting.

2. Achievement of fame (1827–9).

3. Rapprochement with the Rossinian style (1829–31).

4. Last works (1831–5).

5. Reception and influence.

MARY ANN SMART (text), FRIEDRICH LIPPMANN, SIMON MAGUIRE/MARY ANN SMART (works), FRIEDRICH LIPPMANN/MARY ANN SMART (bibliography)

1. Education and early career (1801–26).

Bellini was born into a musical family in Sicily, the eldest of seven children of Rosario Bellini (1776–1840) and Agata Ferlito (1779–1842). His grandfather, Vincenzo Tobia Bellini (1744–1829), originally from the Abruzzi, had studied in Naples at the Conservatorio di S Onofrio a Capuana, and from 1768 worked as an organist, composer and teacher in Catania. His father, Rosario, was also a composer, maestro di cappella and teacher, although his career was apparently overshadowed by that of Vincenzo Tobia. An anonymous manuscript now in the Museo Belliniano in Catania, almost the sole source of information about Bellini's childhood, tells of prodigious musical feats, but amid its hyperbole the account outlines what was a fairly typical career path for a musically gifted young Italian at this time. Without formal training, the infant Vincenzo reportedly sang an aria by Fioravanti at the age of 18 months, took over from his grandfather as conductor during a church service at three, and by the age of five played the piano expertly. The same chronicler reports a rigorous and well-rounded Classical education, encompassing Latin, Italian literature, philosophy and modern languages, though neither Bellini's correspondence nor his literary instincts later in life show much evidence of such training. He wrote his first composition at six, and the following year began to study composition formally with his grandfather. During his childhood and teenage years, he wrote much sacred music and some secular songs, many of which received local performances.

In 1819 he was granted a scholarship to study at the Real Collegio di Musica in Naples, where his teachers included Giovanni Furno, Giacomo Tritto and, after 1822, Niccolò Zingarelli. Besides the traditional lessons in harmony and counterpoint, an important element of Bellini's training with Zingarelli was the composition of hundreds of wordless solfeggi (none of which survive); his sense for vocal writing must also have benefitted from his study of theoretical aspects of singing with Girolamo Crescentini. The conservatory's mostly septuagenerian faculty promulgated a conservative style of composition represented by Neapolitan composers Cimarosa and the recently deceased Paisiello, espousing simple melodies and clear text-setting while violently opposing the florid vocal style and ‘noisy’ orchestration of Rossini, who, as resident composer of the Naples theatres from 1815 to 1822, was an ever-present threat. Bellini absorbed the Neapolitan doctrine thoroughly and produced works that pleased his teachers without ignoring the Rossini example. The conservatory training required regular attendance at the theatre, where Rossini was standard fare, and Bellini was reported as being particularly struck by performances of Semiramide, Mosè in Egitto and Maometto II; influential works by other composers included Donizetti's La zingara, Mayr's Medea in Corinto, and Spontini's La vestale. A simultaneous attraction and resistance to Rossini's style is one of the most intriguing aspects of Bellini's student works; indeed, the confrontation with Rossini remained both a creative problem and a spur to innovation throughout his career.

When he graduated in 1825, Bellini was given the opportunity to present an opera at the conservatory; performed by an all-male cast of students, Adelson e Salvini became popular enough to be repeated every Sunday in the school's teatrino. Bellini himself thought highly enough of the work to revise it over the next few years, but he never succeeded in securing a professional performance, and ended up in what would become a lifelong practice with unsuccessful works – recycling numbers into his next four operas. In an early instance of the determined careerism at which he excelled, Bellini built on this first operatic success, lobbying the conservatory's governor and superintendent of theatres to enforce a statute by which the most promising student each year should be invited to compose a new work for one of the two professional theatres in Naples. Bellini fulfilled this commission with Bianca e Fernando, to a libretto by Domenico Gilardoni; the opera had its première in May 1826 at the Teatro S Carlo, where it was renamed Bianca e Gernando to avoid an apparent allusion to the reigning prince and recently deceased king of Naples.

Although written close together, these two student operas have surprisingly little in common stylistically. Adelson e Salvini's semiseria plot and the cast of inexperienced singers seem to have called forth a mixture of a conventional buffo idiom and a smoother, almost folk-like vocal style, reminiscent of Paisiello. Bianca e Fernando, basically a ‘rescue opera’, also embraces established idioms, but here it is a seria style, characterized by two-tempo (or ‘double’) arias and generous vocal display. While Bianca is thus more predictable in its largest dramatic outlines, the two operas share a varied and imaginative approach to the construction of individual lyric pieces. The most predictable part of the form is the fast, concluding section of the double aria, the cabaletta, and in these early works cabalettas are the only numbers to be constructed along the lines of what Friedrich Lippmann has identified as the standard Bellinian melodic design, sometimes called the ‘lyric prototype’. This refers to a structure that distributes two quatrains of poetry across four (usually) four-bar phrases: the first two lines of poetry are set as a four-bar phrase, the next two as a modified repetition (AA'); the music for lines 5 and 6 introduces a contrasting motive and moves away from the tonic (B), and the last two lines return to the tonic, either with a version of the opening motive or cadential material (A'' or C).

The lyric prototype became an increasingly important element of Bellini's style after Il pirata, but in these first operas longer, freer designs are much more common. For example, Salvini's solo in the Act 2 finale of Adelson e Salvini, ‘Ecco signor la sposa’, begins with a conventional AA'BB' (all four-bar phrases), but when a new idea arrives in the text the music moves with it, proliferating new motifs (CC'DD'), before returning to a modified version of A to close. A surprising amount of the music in these early operas is designed according to an individual formal logic that resists representation as schemas of letters. In Adelson's half-declamatory, half-decorated aria ‘Obbliarti! abbandonarti!’ in the Act 1 finale of Adelson, for example, melodic repetition begins only in the seventh bar after a florid and proclamatory opening (ex.1); and the slow movement of Fernando's entrance aria, ‘A tanto duol quest’anima’ in Bianca e Fernando shows erratic melodic contours and a free, almost ad hoc formal plan that owes more to the alternation of verse metres in Gilardoni's poetry than to any conventional musical form.

Such freedom of construction suggests that, even while conforming to the conservatory's doctrine and (largely) resisting the lure of florid vocal writing, Bellini was already borrowing from Rossini in other ways, especially in his treatment of small-scale form, crafting lyric movements that eschewed symmetry and melodic repetition in favour of a freer alternation of declamation and ornament. While the extremes of Bellini's early style – melodic naivety drawn from Paisiello and Rossinian formal freedom with its occasional forays into pure virtuosity – may seem diametrically opposed, both could be seen as ways of bringing song closer to the rhythms and contours of speech.

2. Achievement of fame (1827–9).

In May 1827, Bellini left Naples, drawn north by a contract from impresario Domenico Barbaia to compose for Milan's Teatro alla Scala. He left behind in Naples two significant personal attachments, to Maddalena Fumaroli, a young woman he had hoped to marry once his financial position permitted, and to Francesco Florimo, his fellow student at the conservatory and closest friend. Once established in Milan, Bellini soon forgot Maddalena, but the attachment to Florimo never wavered, and his long and frequent letters to his friend are by far our fullest source of information about his professional and personal life. Florimo remained in Naples as librarian at the conservatory until his death in 1888, but his true calling was as chronicler and guardian of Bellini's fame. In 1882 he published a biography and edition of Bellini's letters; although Florimo's desire to protect and enhance his friend's reputation sometimes led him to censor or even substantially falsify the content of the letters, his portrait of the composer remains valuable and influential.

In Milan Bellini quickly formed a new series of personal and professional connections. He took rooms with Francesco and Marianna Pollini, who became almost surrogate parents, moved easily into society circles, and embarked on what would be his most important working relationship, with the librettist Felice Romani. As resident poet at La Scala, Romani was appointed as librettist for Bellini's first Milanese effort, Il pirata. The collaboration was such a success that Bellini began to insist on working only with Romani, and the two collaborated on all his subsequent operas except the last, I puritani. Romani had a remarkable sense for building dramatic situations with inherent musical potential, but what made him Bellini's ideal poet was his ability to craft beautiful lines and phrases in a classical mould. As Bellini himself put it in a letter to Florimo, ‘just notice in Il pirata how the verses, not the situations, inspire my talent … that's why I must have Romani’. Romani was inclined to autocratic treatment of his collaborators: his practice was to present composers with the fait accompli of a finished libretto, with little latitude for revision. Only Bellini and Meyerbeer enjoyed special status: sketch materials show that Bellini had active input from the very first stages of preparation, and indeed often presented Romani with already-composed music, demanding verse metres that fitted their rhythms and phrasing. Perhaps because of his own perfectionism, Romani was usually good-natured about Bellini's incessant demands for revision. Harmonious as the match was artistically, it often met with practical difficulties, since Romani was frequently over-committed and notoriously late in delivering poetry. Bellini suffered much from these delays; the phrase ‘Romani is late’ became a refrain in his letters, and in 1833 this chronic tardiness led to a serious rift.

Il pirata had its première at La Scala in October 1827 (fig.1) with a cast headed by three singers who maintained close ties to Bellini throughout his career: soprano Henriette Méric-Lalande (the first Bianca and Alaide in La straniera), Giovanni Battista Rubini, who created the tenor leads in Bianca e Fernando, La sonnambula and I puritani, and baritone Antonio Tamburini, who would sing in premières of both La straniera and I puritani. The opera was an immediate success, and was quickly taken up in Naples and Vienna, establishing Bellini as a leading figure of his generation and assuring his financial and professional security. Although Bellini was paid only about 2000F for Pirata itself, the success put him in a position to demand twice as much for his next opera, La straniera. La sonnambula and Norma would earn just over 10,000F each, fulfilling Bellini's long-standing dream of outdoing the 5000F Rossini had been paid for Semiramide in 1823, previously the top fee for an Italian operatic commission. Bellini was unusual in being able to earn his living entirely from operatic commissions, but even at the peak of his earning power, he seems to have lived fairly frugally, sending money to his family in Catania and indulging only in his taste for silk gloves and other fine clothing.

Il pirata's libretto is a radical departure from the Classical idiom and the calcified generic outlines of Bellini's Naples operas: drawn from Charles Maturin's tragedy Bertram (in an adaptation by J.S. Taylor), the plot is quintessentially ‘Romantic’, set on a storm-tossed seashore and focussing on the proscribed love between a Byronic pirate-exile and a married woman who ends the opera insane. Bellini devoted six months (an unprecedentedly long period by the standards of the time) to Il pirata's composition, and the Romantic innovations of both text and music seem to have been quite self-conscious. The autograph score bears witness to struggles over almost every detail, including transpositions, orchestration, and trimming back of cadential passages. One not particularly reliable witness even reported hearing Bellini exhort Rubini to a more impassioned performance during rehearsal by asking, ‘if I had taken it into my head to create a genre and a musical style that strictly expresses the words, and to make singing and drama into an integrated whole, ought I to give it up because you don't wish to support me?’. Identifying Romanticism in Italian opera of this period is contentious: certainly there is little about Bellini's music (or Donizetti's) at this stage that breaks sharply with past structures in the way we tend to expect of the Romantic. Indeed, for Italian composers, Romanticism was first of all a matter of literary innovation, an invitation to abandon mythological or classical plots in favour of those based on more recent history, preferably centred around a violent and passionate conflict and set in a remote and mysterious location. But musical experiment also played a role: if double arias and other conventional structures were rarely jettisoned completely, they often became a background for injections of couleur locale, an elevation of the status of the chorus to participant in the drama, or melodic gestures that infuse lyric numbers with something of the rhythms of conversation.

Although Bellini's decisive step into Romanticism and an individual style is – with some justification – often dated from the première of La straniera two years later, many of the later opera's innovations are anticipated in Il pirata, both in vocal style and approach to form. The lyric prototype design now dominates even more completely in the cabalettas, but is rare in slow movements, which tend to be more varied. The opening section of Imogene's aria finale, ‘Col sorriso d'innocenza’, expands on a lyric prototype design in order to make room for declamatory text-setting, resulting in a melding of syllabic and florid vocal writing that is almost the signature of this early style (ex.2). The A' phrase (bar 5) begins as a gracefully ornamented version of the opening motive, but after two bars moves off into a halting, nearly monotone exclamation (‘deh! favella al genitor’) that extends the phrase by two bars and leads to a florid cadence. Contrasting vocal styles are similarly melded in this aria's cabaletta, ‘Sole, ti vela’, where the alternation of syllabic declamation and coloratura (and the sharp registral shift) captures the extremes of the heroine's madness (ex.3).

An extreme example of the freedom with which Bellini lays out individual movements is the episodic organization of the slow movement of Imogene's entrance aria, the dream narration, ‘Lo sognai, ferito, esangue’, a piece that would exert an influence on dream narrations by both Donizetti (‘Regnava nel silenzio’ from Lucia di Lammermoor) and Verdi (‘Condotta ell’era in ceppi’ from Il trovatore). The form follows the logic of the text, proposing new melodic figures as each new image is described, even moving in and out of recitative. Such loose construction is often combined with a remarkable economy of motivic material, sometimes reaching the point of obsessiveness, as where Imogene's first 15 bars merely prolong and embellish the fifth scale degree, mostly elaborated through a rocking back and forth between D and E. The dream narration takes on a sense of periodicity only at the arrival of the E-major phrase (‘Era sorda la natura’) that becomes a sort of refrain, returning with new words to close the movement.

After the acclaim of Il pirata, Bellini turned to revising Bianca e Fernando for a Genoa performance, with new text by Romani substituting for some of Gilardoni's original poetry. Bellini began revision before receiving Romani's verses, using words by a mediocre poet as a template and later grafting Romani's verses onto the existing melodies. It seems typical of Bellini's compositional priorities that he found writing new music without poetry less of a problem than composing two new arias for the Genoa Bianca, Adelaide Tosi, without the singer on hand to consult. Some of Tosi's demands were extravagent, but, always eager to earn loyalty from good performers, Bellini acceded gracefully, even to her insistence that he rewrite her entire entrance aria twice. Tension arose only when he began to suspect that her dissatisfaction was provoked by Donizetti's verdict that the aria was ‘worth nothing’, a contretemps that prompted Bellini's bitter remark that ‘friendship within the profession is quite impossible’. Such rivalries, real or imagined, would torment Bellini more and more as time went on; he could be fiercely competitive and ungenerous with colleagues and his letters are strewn with references to the plots laid by his ‘enemies’. However, as John Rosselli has suggested, these remarks might be not so much signs of paranoia as the normal concerns of an often solitary man who had invested everything in professional success and who, having no one but Florimo to confide in, poured his anxieties into the letters without inhibition.

Bellini's position in Italy was secured decisively by the première of La straniera in February 1829, again at La Scala (fig.2). He had agonized over presenting a second opera in Milan so soon after the success of Il pirata, but the new work was immediately recognized as a bold and successful experiment; it was in reviews of the première that the word filosofico was first invoked to describe Bellini's style. Early critics remark again and again on opera's revolutionary use of canto declamato, a term that points to two separate elements, a predominance of syllabic writing and the practice of setting some lines of unrhymed, loosely metred recitative verse (or versi sciolti) as brief bursts of arioso, thus injecting melodic interest and periodic phrase-structure into stretches of recitative that had previously been more strictly plot-orientated. Bellini had already experimented sparingly with this technique in both Bianca e Fernando and Il pirata, but in La straniera arioso and a rigorously syllabic style become items of a Romantic doctrine, reaching extremes of adventurousness and austerity Bellini never again attempted.

La straniera also goes much further than Il pirata in combining formal freedom with thematic economy, lending the opera a brooding, obsessive character. Berlioz, who admired La straniera alone among Bellini's works, captured this when he approvingly described Valdeburgo's cabaletta, ‘Meco tu vieni’, as ‘devoid of development’ (ex.4). Berlioz's phrase could apply equally well to many other passages, including the circular crotchet figure spun out by the orchestra in the introduction to the Act 1 terzettino or the repetitive rhythmic profile and stepwise melodic contours of Alaide and Arturo's duet slow movement, ‘Ah! se tu vuoi fuggir’.

The minimalism of these melodies is clearly related to an effort to strip away ornament and to bring even the lyrical sections of the form closer in character to the cadences of conversation, a tendency that shows up more systematically in the crotchet-based cabalettas that were to become a Bellinian trademark, such as the closing sections of the duets for Isoletta and Valdeburgo or Alaide and Arturo (La straniera) or Gualtiero's ‘Ma non fia sempre odiato’ (Il pirata). In a sense, Bellini's style in these early operas is defined by his willingness to risk monotony in order to achieve novelty and expressive force.

3. Rapprochement with the Rossinian style (1829–31).

After the success of La straniera, Bellini was enough in demand to exert unprecedented control over the practical aspects of his career. In an age when composers were routinely expected to accede to the demands of singers and impresarios, he could be increasingly exigent about the practical circumstances of operatic production, refusing to sign a contract if the singers had not yet been determined, and sometimes electing not to work at all rather than compromise his conditions. This unusual freedom proceeded partly from the financial security of high commission fees, but also perhaps from the fact that for extended periods between 1828 and 1833 Bellini lived without expense in the home of his mistress, Giuditta Turina, a young and wealthy married woman. He had met Turina in Genoa in 1828 and he became her lover by September of that year, as Bellini recounted with surprising candour in a letter to Florimo. The liaison was discreet without being secretive: although Turina's husband and parents probably accepted Bellini's residence in their homes, she did not accompany Bellini on his travels except in the last few years of their relationship. Turina's character and the nature of the relationship remain mysterious, partly because Florimo destroyed many letters containing personal disclosures. However, one thing the letters make clear is that having a married mistress suited Bellini perfectly, in that Turina provided a limited emotional contact who could never make excessive demands nor threaten to compete with his career.

Partly thanks to the support of Turina (including her canny management and investment of his earnings), Bellini was able to compose more slowly than most of his contemporaries, writing at a rate of about one opera each year compared to the more usual three or four. However, Romani's delays often meant that an entire score had to be composed within only a month or so of a scheduled première, rather than at the more leisurely pace Bellini preferred. These rush jobs could be stunning successes (as with La sonnambula), but the forced haste never failed to bring on minor health problems and attacks of nerves. What is more, the intermittent pace imposed by Romani meant that even at the peak of his career Bellini must have spent several months of each year idle, waiting for words to set to music. He found such enforced inactivity burdensome, but apparently lacked the energy to compose without a pressing deadline.

After the première of La straniera, the next project came all too quickly, a commission for a new work to open Parma's Nuovo Teatro Ducale in May 1829. The ceremonial nature of the occasion made this a sensitive undertaking and difficulties with the choice of subject arose immediately. An official of the Parma theatre complained in an official report that Bellini had rejected the Classical libretto he proposed as ‘cold and tedious’, taking the man to a local print shop to view a series of gory engravings as examples of the sort of Romantic subjects that appealed to him. By the time Voltaire's Zaïre was agreed upon, only a few months remained to prepare libretto and score. Civic pride was already wounded before the première by reports that Bellini and Romani had been seen loitering in cafés while the theatre's copyists awaited material, and matters did not improve when Romani prefaced the libretto with a note admitting that the text lacked polish because it had been ‘written in shreds while the music was being composed’. Not surprisingly, the première was received coldly. However, Bellini lost no time in rescuing much of Zaira's music, re-using about a third of it in his next work, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, for La Fenice (fig.3). The music that had failed so completely in Parma was acclaimed in Venice, probably more because of a more congenial public climate than through any aesthetic improvements.

Late in 1831 Bellini and Romani began work on an Ernani (based on Victor Hugo's play) for Milan's Teatro Carcano, but after several pieces had been composed the project was abandoned, replaced with La sonnambula. Bellini once mentioned fear of censorship as a reason for the change of subject, but Romani's widow, Emilia Branca, suggested less charitably that Bellini had wished to avoid presenting another tragic opera after the success of Donizetti's Anna Bolena earlier in the season, and had seized on the pastoral subject of La sonnambula to avoid direct comparison with his rival. Branca's account doesn't quite stand up to historical scrutiny – the change of subject was announced before the Anna Bolena première – but the canny careerism behind her explanation seems characteristic of Bellini. Whatever the reasons, the switch of topics was an inspired decision: La sonnambula's successs surpassed even Bellini's previous acclaim in Milan. Based on a Parisian ballet, the opera places the vogueish melodramatic theme of sleepwalking against a pastoral background more typical of the old-fashioned genre of opera semiseria. The chorus plays a larger role than in any other Bellini opera, celebrating impending marriages and singing the bride's praises in hallowed 18th-century fashion, but also commenting extensively on the action and even at one point offering collective testimony to the heroine's innocence.

The three operas of this period can be regarded as a group mainly because they share a renewed interest in the florid vocal writing so strictly avoided in La straniera. The reasons for the retreat from the self-consciously innovative, ‘philosophical’ style are complicated: the heated journalistic debates over the excesses of La straniera may have been a deterrent to further experiments with canto declamato, and, in the case of Zaira (as Filippo Cicconetti suggested in 1859), the Parma public's reputation as dedicated Rossinians may have played a role, although if so, this was one of the few occasions when Bellini's instinct for audience taste failed him. Both Zaira and I Capuleti have been criticized for retreating into superficial vocal display and a mechanical succession of double arias, failed attempts – some have argued – to adopt the assembly-line working methods of his contemporaries. This seems unfair: these works, too, show elements of experiment, if not in the crucial area of vocal style. Zaira is striking for its integration of complex action into ensemble scenes, most impressively in the Act 2 finale, where a midnight rendez-vous, a murder and a suicide fall into place around a largo concertato quintet and aria finale for the grief-stricken bass, Orosmane; the more famous tomb scene from I Capuleti (fig.3) combines action and lyricism with similar flexibility.

The sweeping adaptation of eight entire numbers from Zaira in Capuleti was far from an exceptional instance of self-borrowing. Bellini re-used much material from his first two operas – one chorus from Bianca e Fernando (‘Tutti siam?’) reappears almost note-for-note in both Zaira and Norma (as ‘Non partì!’) – but he never recycled numbers from his successes, which would have been remembered by audiences. Bellini's self-borrowings were at once pragmatic and ‘Romantic’, initially motivated by reluctance to waste good music, but also guided by a subtle concern for dramatic context. When the last section of the terzetto from Zaira turns up as the stretta of I Capuleti's Act 1 finale, the two scenes share not only a general sentiment (two characters looking forward to a reunion in heaven) and a verse metre, but also end with identical poetic couplets. Similarly, Nelly’s cavatina, ‘Dopo l'oscuro nembo’ from Adelson e Salvini and its reworking as Giulietta’s romanza (‘Quante volte, o quante’) in I Capuleti are linked by the dramatic situation, a soprano alone, reflecting on her desperate fate. These two pieces are actually part of a larger group of harp-accompanied, minor-key, single-movement arias for sad sopranos that goes back to Desdemona's Willow Song from Rossini's Otello (other Bellinian examples are ‘Sorgi, o padre’ from Bianca e Fernando and Alaide’s romanza in La straniera). Rossini's model is heard not only in general features of timbre and tonality, but also in an allusion to the Willow Song's characteristic melodic gesture of gasping chromatic descent (ex.5).

Other manifestations of this pairing of dramatic situations with related melodic figures include the falling-4th figure used to launch duet movements beginning with the word ‘Vieni!’ (or ‘Taci!’) in the Imogene-Gualtiero duet in Act 2 of Il pirata and the Elvira-Arturo duet in Act 3 of I puritani (ex.6); and the resemblance between the E major refrains of Imogene's cavatina (at ‘Era sorda la natura’) and Elvira's ‘Rendetemi la speme’ in Act 2 of I puritani, both of which appear as moments of celestial clarification in the midst of an otherwise disordered musical and verbal discourse.

Only one self-borrowing ignores dramatic context altogether: the giddy cabaletta of Zaira's ‘Non è, non è tormento’ recurs in curiously effective tragic guise as Romeo's heart broken solo ‘Deh! tu, deh! tu bell'anima’ in the tomb scene of I Capuleti. Despite the frequency of the practice in the operatic world, scholarly opinion has traditionally regarded such extensive self-borrowing and self-allusion as a problem, challenging Bellini's reputation as a composer of uncompromising originality, who (to use his own phrase) ‘vomited blood to compose’ and took such care to suit music to words. However, the clear sense for detail that guides each recycling might just as easily testify not only to Bellini's practicality and economy of means, but also to his strong theatrical instincts.

As in the earlier operas, the force of Rossini's example in this period can be felt as much on the level of form as of melodic style. While most set pieces continue at least to allude to the lyric prototype, the design of individual movements looks in two directions: back to the virtuoso, asymmetrical Rossinian designs already prominent as far back as Adelson e Salvini, and forward to a new type of organization, more driven by harmonic and motivic activity, its formal idiosyncrasies often motivated directly by the dramatic situation. From about 1830, arias increasingly aspire to the condition of ensembles, with dialogue inserted in the central B section and melodic continuity provided by the orchestra: in the middle section of her Act 2 slow movement in I Capuleti, Giulietta converses with Lorenzo just before taking the sleeping potion, and in La sonnambula Elvino participates in the B section of Amina's ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, singing lines added to the libretto by Bellini himself. On a larger scale, the first encounter between the lovers in La sonnambula teeters between aria and ensemble. Labelled ‘Cavatina: Elvino’ in the autograph, but listed as a duet in the published scores, the number foreshadows the lovers' impending conflict by assigning them sharply contrasting material throughout. After a slow movement presented almost entirely by Elvino (‘Prendi, l'anel ti dono’; fig.4), the cabaletta emphasizes Amina's inarticulateness by isolating her melodically. Her whispered, agitated motive (‘Ah! vorrei trovar parola’) is forgotten as soon as Elvino enters with his confident new melody and moves to the relative major; rather than the two voices uniting at the cabaletta's conclusion, the lovers are subsumed into exclamations by the ever-present chorus, who – with perhaps a touch of irony – celebrate the ‘single thought’ that unites the couple (‘L'un nel altro un sol pensier’).

La sonnambula also inaugurates the period of what Verdi admiringly called Bellini's ‘melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe’ – although it is worth recalling that Verdi intended the phrase to refer to the ‘lesser-known’ Il pirata and La straniera. (Letter to Camille Bellaigue, 2 May 1898; Cesari and Luzio eds.: I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 415–16.) The term has become something of an analytical cliché, too often used as a blanket term of praise, almost a synonym for beautiful melody; but it has a more precise meaning. The locus classicus of ‘long melody’ is perhaps Amina's ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’: a long-breathed phrase, certainly – the first section spins out a remarkable 11 bars before coming to rest on a tonic – but with a melodic contour that is itself anything but long (ex.7). After the small arch of the first two measures, the melody proceeds in short gasps, never managing more than a few beats before being interrupted by a rest, and sometimes almost breaking down into speech-like units (as at bar 3). This combination of an ‘endless’ harmonic line and a melodic contour made up of breathless, declamatory fragments is typical of Bellini's ‘long melodies’: a similar balance is struck in other well-known examples, such as ‘In mia mano alfin tu sono’ and ‘Qual cor tradisti’ (both from the final scene of Norma) and Elvira's ‘Qui la voce sua soave’ from I puritani.

4. Last works (1831–5).

With the commission in 1830 of two operas that were to receive their premières at La Scala during the next two years (La sonnambula and Norma), Bellini reached his goal of financial pre-eminence, earning an unprecedented L12,000 for Norma alone. The December 1831 première of Norma in Milan was, however, no more than a moderate success (although far from ‘fiasco, fiasco, fiasco’ reported in one of the letters falsified by Florimo); several of the singers were below par, and it was not until the following summer in Bergamo, slightly-revised and with a superior cast, that the opera achieved the success it still enjoys today. The plot is drawn from a play by Alexandre Soumet, which had its première in Paris only the year before; Romani and Bellini tempered Soumet's boulevard-theatre excesses by omitting the sensational ending, in which Norma goes mad and throws herself off a precipice. Although the Classical restraint with which Bellini and Romani approached their melodramatic source might suggest a retreat from the Romantic experiments in both plot and music of Il pirata and La straniera, it is probably more accurate to see Norma, like Sonnambula, as a step towards a different brand of Romanticism, its passions all the more forceful for being collapsed into an understated dramatic design. Indeed, the pair's very next collaboration, Beatrice di Tenda, written in 1833 for La Fenice, embraces precisely those violent and tragic aspects of Romantic opera they had played down in adapting Norma and in substituting La sonnambula for Ernani. The plot of Beatrice is Romantic, but in the most conventional way: set in the generic Renaissance castle that provides the background for so many operas of the period, it concerns a tyrant who wrongly acccuses his wife of adultery and has her supposed lover tortured, then put to death. Even Romani himself called the subject ‘horrible’: he had already begun work on a Cristina di Svezia based on Dumas, but Giuditta Pasta, Bellini's first Amina and Norma, convinced Bellini to set Beatrice after she and Bellini together saw a ballet on the subject. This was probably far from an unwelcome or isolated instance of intervention from Pasta: throughout his career Bellini was unusually open to, even dependent on, advice from friends, and Pasta was foremost among both friends and artistic advisors. During the early 1830s Bellini paid extended visits to the Pastas' house at Lake Como and even at times entertained hopes of marrying their daughter, Clelia.

In this case, however, listening to Pasta turned out to be a mistake: not only was Beatrice received with utter coolness in Venice, it became the occasion for the disagreement that ended Bellini's relationship with Romani. As usual, Romani was late in delivering the poetry, so much so that La Fenice's impresario, Alessandro Lanari, called out the police to pressure him. The première was delayed by a month and the Venetian public became impatient, groundlessly suspecting that Bellini was devoting his energies to composing a new opera for a foreign theatre while neglecting their commission. Relations between the collaborators had deteriorated into hostility by the March 1833 première, but the irrevocable rift came just after this, when Romani and an anonymous defender of Bellini's exchanged vitriolic letters in Venice and Milan newspapers, blaming each other for the delays and for the opera's failure. Romani's complaints focussed on the selection of the subject, accusing Bellini of holding things up by dithering too long over the choice and of being too swayed by his ‘Minerva’ – Pasta. Bellini's champion, of course, tossed the blame back to Romani, and countered charges that Beatrice was merely a cynical retread of Norma (a claim that seems incomprehensible when the two scores are placed side by side). By 1834 Bellini and Romani had renewed their correspondence and were discussing future projects; the relationship might have been repaired had Bellini's sudden death not intervened.

After the Beatrice imbroglio, Bellini embarked on a period of rest and travel. In spring 1833 he paid an extended visit to Naples and Sicily, returning home for the first time in six years. The following spring he spent four months in London in connection with performances at the Italian opera there; extended periods of both 1833 and 1834 were spent in Paris. All this travel may partly have been motivated by a break with Giuditta Turina late in 1833: her marriage had reached a point of crisis and she wanted to live openly with Bellini. He refused, perhaps no longer as much in love as he had been five years earlier, but also – always – wedded to his career. As he confided to Florimo, ‘such a relationship would be fatal to me, because it would take away my time and my peace as well’. In London and Paris Bellini was much in demand in society circles, despite speaking no English, and French only (as Heine put it) ‘world-destroyingly, … [breaking] French words on the wheel like an executioner’. Although he clearly glittered in salon society, he found the carnival atmosphere of Paris tiresome at times, and passed long periods of retreat at the house of his friend S. Levy at Puteaux just outside Paris.

In Paris much energy was directed toward securing a contract at the Opéra, negotiations that were complicated by his insistence on a fee equal to Rossini's. Things were easier at the Théâtre Italien, where Bellini signed a contract early in 1834 for the opera that would become I puritani. The première in January 1835 featured the group of principal singers that would become famous as the Puritani quartet: Giulia Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache. The libretto was by exiled republican poet Carlo Pepoli, who made up for his utter lack of experience with infinite good humour and flexibility in the face of Bellini's incessant reprimands and requests for revision. Thanks to Pepoli's novice status, Bellini was obliged to spell out what he wanted more explicitly than ever before, and their correspondence is the most complete statement we have of Bellini's views on opera. Particularly interesting are Bellini's remarks concerning the tone he sought for I puritani. He hoped to capture something of the sentimental pastoral tone of Paisiello's Nina, another opera with a mad heroine and a happy ending; I puritani's unusual fusion of a misty historical atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of Walter Scott and a gentler style seems typical of the pastel-tinged, fluidly structured plots Bellini preferred in these last years, and might also be seen as a nostalgic return to the Neapolitan roots of his earliest style, now infused with a Romantic air.

At the same time as Bellini fought to match Rossini's earning power in Paris, he also sought both the older composer's friendship and his official stamp of approval as director of the Théâtre Italien. The relationship between the two had been fraught with tension, at least on Bellini's side, since an 1829 meeting in Milan when Rossini had complimented Il pirata, but remarked that Bellini's style was so ‘philosophical’ as to lack orchestral brilliance. Orchestration continued to be a main area of artistic disagreement, and Rossini's comments on the score of I puritani were orientated towards broadening the timbral palette and generally increasing the role of the orchestra to cater to the Parisian enthusiasm for complex instrumental passages. Rossini was encouraging, but Bellini wanted more: he wrote to Florimo that he longed for the affection ‘of a father for his son, of a brother for his brother’, a phrase that – even if one ignores its Oedipal resonances – speaks of the enduring and complex connection Bellini felt with the older composer, perhaps stretching back to the half-heeded prohibitions of his Naples teachers against Rossinian ornament.

Given the concentration with which Bellini absorbed French operatic style during these years, it seems surprising that I puritani marks no more of a break with Bellini's previous style than does, for example, La sonnambula or Norma. In fact, among the last operas it is Beatrice di Tenda that stands out, set apart by the florid style assigned to the heroine and by its predictable approach to aria and ensemble forms. One reason for this may be that Bellini was already experimenting long before the move to Paris, absorbing cosmopolitan trends and setting his sights on international success. Becoming more ‘French’ primarily meant formal experimentation, exploring alternatives to the lyric prototype and blurring or expanding the still-dominant double aria structures, but it also entailed scenic innovation: giving the chorus a larger role and using stage space more imaginatively. I puritani, with its rich exploitation of offstage effects, does this with virtuosity, but the tendency can already be felt in the final scene of La sonnambula, where the sight of Amina sleepwalking along a narrow beam above the mill-wheel is not only a striking stage picture, but a crucial plot ingredient, serving as wordless proof of her innocence.

Like La sonnambula, the last operas move freely between syllabic and florid style. Norma's dominant idiom is mostly syllabic ‘long melody’, but in moments of fury or religious transport she sings floridly (‘Oh non tremare, o perfido’ in the Act 1 finale; ‘Casta diva’); similarly, Elvira's cavatina, ‘Son vergin vezzosa’, presents her as a giddy, virtuoso bride-to-be, but in her Act 2 mad scene a more declamatory style predominates. Both Norma and I puritani offer numerous examples of ‘long’ melodies in the manner of ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, built of speech-like fragments strung together by harmonic or orchestral threads of continuity with few intermediate cadences or melodic repetition. In this last period the lyric prototype finally becomes the default mode for both slow movements and cabalettas, but at the same time French-accented alternatives become more common, especially ternary and strophic designs. Pollione's dream narration (‘Meco all'altar di Venere’) from Act 1 of Norma gestures toward both lyric prototype and ternary form, returning to the opening pair of phrases after an extended departure; however, in an effect that anticipates Verdi's treatment of such climactic moments in dream and vision scenes, as Pollione quotes Norma's curse the movement opens out into a loosely-organized passage of monotone declamation and chromatic harmony, never returning to its opening material.

The construction of the double aria as a whole was similarly diversified. Less willing to suspend conflict simply to make room for lyrical expansion, Bellini occasionally omits slow movements in duets for characters who are at odds dramatically, such as Romeo and Tebaldo in I Capuleti or Agnese and Orombello in Beatrice; in Norma, Adalgisa and Pollione simply do not take the time for a cantabile as they decide to flee together to Rome. The edges of individual sections within a double aria can also be blurred, as in the first duet for Norma and Adalgisa, where dialogue in versi sciolti evoking Norma's memories of past love (‘O rimembranza’) is layered over the slow movement's orchestral introduction; the cantabile proper begins only after ten bars when Adalgisa begins to tell of the birth of her love for Pollione (‘Sola, furtiva, al tempio’, ex.8). This double exposition is, in a sense, an extension of Bellini's lifelong practice of beginning set pieces with versi sciolti set as arioso, but here the blurring of aria and recitative also creates the sense of a musical discourse moving simultaneously on two levels: Norma's past and Adalgisa's present, Norma's fragmented dream of happiness and Adalgisa's melodically present reality.

A more radical challenge to the symmetries of the double aria is posed by Norma's Act 2 finale, which constantly spills over the confines of the standard aria finale model to become a free succession of lyric numbers, as much ensemble as aria. In the autograph score, Bellini labelled this finale only with a tempo marking, but he described it to a friend as composed of ‘a pezzo concertato and a stretta’, both pieces ‘of a completely new type’. In addition to replacing the cantabile-cabaletta sequence with a pair of slow movements (‘Qual cor tradisti’ and ‘Deh! non volerli vittime’), the Norma finale eliminates the plot tension that usually propels a double aria: the central conflict is resolved during the previous duet with Pollione, leaving these last two lyric movements as sites of pure vocal pleasure. This impulse towards loose structure and sonority for its own sake reaches an apex in the third act of I puritani. The act runs without interruption through a romanza for tenor, a duet and a finale. But, in a curious parallel to the idea of a ‘long, long, long melody’ built from separate tiny motifs, the effect of large-scale continuity is tempered by repeated fragmentation and interruption of individual numbers: in the romanza, the offstage soprano and onstage tenor toss fragments of the melody to each other; during the duet the soprano slides in and out of madness, her psychological shifts accompanied by recalled themes; and platoons of soldiers pass by offstage, their martial music breaking into the lyric movements of the lovers' duet. Paradoxically, the I puritani finale introduces so much scenic activity and so many plot reversals that suspense is almost erased: the tight balance between plot events and static set pieces disintegrates, replaced by a continuous dramatic discourse that, rather than becoming more like spoken drama, spills over into sheer song.

This final act of the final opera is an intriguing document of Bellini's late development and perhaps a hint of the qualities that might have emerged had he lived longer. His style would almost inevitably have become even more French, building on the dramatic continuity of moments like this third act of I puritani and on the flexible shaping of individual movements. The real innovation of I puritani is its use of the stage, in the emphasis it throws on spatial effects and especially its ongoing dialogue between onstage and offstage music; this seems a particularly Bellinian conception of the scenic emphasis of French grand opéra and one that might well have been developed further. Finally, the delicate musical tinta of I puritani, when seen in the context of the various attractions and resistances to Romantic plots evident in the negotiations over Zaira, Ernani, Norma and Beatrice, suggests that Bellini was moving toward a new vision of operatic Romanticism, a style less based on the sharply articulated conflicts and shocking stage effects of many of Donizetti's plots (and, indeed, of Victor Hugo's plays), but one that was more fluid, and perhaps as concerned with reviving a vaguely remembered pastoral mode as with engineering sharp breaks or steps into innovation.

Bellini died on 23 September 1835 after several weeks of illness. Much speculation has centred around the fact that he apparently died alone in Levy's house at Puteaux, and that during his illness an acquaintance who visited the house was sent away by servants without being allowed to see him. These events are sad but hardly sinister: Bellini died of an attack of the amoebic dysentery that had plagued him intermittently since 1831. A requiem mass was held at Les Invalides on 2 October, with Rossini, Paer, Carafa, and Cherubini as pall-bearers; Rossini served as executor of the estate. The remains rested in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris until 1876, when they were transported by train to Catania in a grandiose procession met at every station with patriotic speeches, musical performances, sentimental spectacles and copious tears.

5. Reception and influence.

It is a revealing quirk of Bellini reception that the fullest statement of the composer's aesthetic comes from a letter that is almost certainly fabricated, supposedly written around 1829 to Agostino Gallo and first published in 1859. In it ‘Bellini’ describes his method of setting a libretto to music:

shut up in my room, I begin by declaiming each character's lines with all the heat of passion, and I closely observe the inflections of my voice, the speeding up and slowing down of the declamation in each situation, the overall accent and the expressive tone that characterizes a man in the grip of passion, and I find the motifs and the general rhythmic character best suited to demonstrate them and infuse them with new life by means of harmony. Then I throw them onto paper, try them out on the piano, and when I myself feel the corresponding emotion, I judge that I have succeeded.

There is something deeply appealing about this picture of a composer locked up with his work, arriving at melodic inspiration by becoming his characters – so much so that the editor of the first modern collection of Bellini's letters could not resist including the ‘Gallo’ letter, although she felt obliged to add a footnote questioning its authenticity. If nothing else, the letter is a trace of the extravagant mythologising that surrounded Bellini from the last few years of his life until well into the 20th century. Similar legends were, of course, woven around other composers of the period, but the terms in which the Gallo letter imagines the moment of creation sets Bellini apart from colleagues like Rossini, Donizetti, or even the young Verdi, for whom the compositional process was more likely to be pictured as rapid, business-like, even a bit careless.

The Gallo letter springs from a tendency to see Bellini as the lone Romantic among Italian opera composers, pioneering what contemporary critics labelled a ‘philosophical’ style. In popular reception, the Romantic label spread from the music to the man: Bellini's delicate manners, fine features and blond hair – the qualities summed up in Heine's phrase ‘a sigh in dancing pumps’ – have obscured equally reliable evidence of the composer's energy and strong will. In one authentic statement of a compositional aesthetic, from an 1834 letter to novice librettist Carlo Pepoli, Bellini adopts an exigent, even hectoring tone and ascribes a power to opera that seems far from gentle: ‘Carve it in your head in adamantine letters: Opera must draw tears, must horrify, must kill through singing’. As such forceful passages remind us, the familiar image of a gentle man known for writing elegiac music, uniquely sensitive to the tones and rhythms of poetry, must be balanced with that of the confident professional willing to browbeat his librettist and to contemplate (however metaphorically) killing listeners with his music. Similarly, the Romantic portrait of an idiosyncratic, rule-breaking rebel is softened by passages from the correspondence showing that Bellini was friendlier to operatic convention than is often thought. Indeed, he was probably as much in sympathy with the operatic world that surrounded him as resistant to it, often content to rely on conventional musical structures inherited from predecessors, and both willing and able to cater to the tastes of his audience.

Although a handful of biographies appeared before Bellini's death, it was really only in the last quarter of the 19th century that influential attempts were made to establish Bellini's reputation. Florimo's notorious biography with its severely censored edition of the letters appeared in 1882. This period also saw a polemical battle over self-borrowing waged by two students of the sketches housed in the newly established museum in Catania. In his 1882 book, Michele Scherillo claimed that Bellini had re-used numbers originally sketched for Ernani in La sonnambula. Although Bellini himself had mentioned this in a letter to the publisher Giovanni Ricordi, native Catanese and Bellini acquaintance Antonino Amore was outraged by the idea. Amore excavated the Ernani sketches, only to prove Scherillo's case: he uncovered not only a fragment of a chorus from La sonnambula but several numbers later used in Norma as well. The passion with which Scherillo and Amore argued their cases seems out of proportion with the importance of the issue (after all Ernani was never finished and never performed) unless we consider that what was at stake was the much larger question of Bellini's originality, and even his image as a ‘philosophical’ composer for whom words and music were intimately, uniquely connected.

If this image was gaining ground in Sicily by the end of the century, it had a much longer history in Germany; indeed, it may even have originated as a German import. As W.F. Kümmel has shown, Bellini's music caught on remarkably quickly in Germany: as early as 1828 critics in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described him as unusually well acquainted with the German classics and approvingly cited his distaste for cabalettas and his desire to dispense with Italian operatic conventions generally, if only audiences would permit. The same aspects that earned him the philosophical label in Italy were received by German critics simply as ‘German’: as Schumann put it, Bellini was a ‘butterfly who fluttered around the German oak’. This tendency to appropriate Bellini culminated, of course, in Wagner, who seems to have maligned Bellini's music as ‘shallow and empty’ with about the same frequency that he found himself whistling or singing tunes from La straniera or I puritani or Norma. When he wasn't merely criticizing, Wagner cast Bellini as an early link in the great Wagnerian aesthetic chain, more than once referring to Bellini's decisive break with Classicism (which, strangely, he located in I Capuleti) and to the melodic simplicity that must have had such a great effect ‘after Rossini, in whom everything was dissolved into runs’.

However, no amount of Wagnerian disapproval or appropriation could have had much impact on the popular fate of Bellini's operas, whose fortunes were linked to those of bel canto opera generally. Like several works of Donizetti and Rossini and the young Verdi, Bellini's more famous operas were performed frequently and continuously until the end of the 19th century, then fell out of favour for several decades. Il pirata and I Capuleti were revived in Rome and Catania respectively to mark the centenary in 1935, but lasting revivals and resurgences of interest came only with championship by great sopranos in the 1940s and 50s. The leading figure was, of course, Maria Callas, who chose the role of Norma for prominent débuts (including those at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera House) in the 1950s, and sang famous performances of I puritani (from 1949), La sonnambula (1955) and Il pirata (1958). Other influential revivals include Monserrat Caballé's 1967 performance of Il pirata, Joan Sutherland's I puritani (including a 1964 production at Covent Garden, London, where the opera had not been heard for over 70 years), and Renata Scotto's La straniera, I Capuleti and La sonnambula. This is only the most recent chapter in a reception history that has always rested as much on the advocacy of singers as on more scholarly assessments of the operas: Giuditta Pasta's contribution to the initial success and subsequent popularity of La sonnambula and Norma is an obvious case, but even more interesting are the fortunes of Beatrice di Tenda, which, after its disastrous reception at the Venice première, became solidly established in the Italian repertory through the 1840s, mainly owing to several sopranos who included the role in their repertories, partly, no doubt, in order to compete with each other.

Today the practical aspect of Bellini's reputation is thriving, and scholarly activity is increasing. Most of the operas are solidly in the repertory, although performances and recordings are confined to a rather narrow school of singers who specialize in the style. Studies of individual operas, especially the early works, are few and far between. However, a critical edition is now underway, and publication in recent years of the first complete edition of the letters, a comprehensive critical study of Romani based on previously unknown documents, and a new biography that for the first time closely measures Florimo's manipulations of the correspondence provide an invaluable documentary basis that could inject a new energy into interpretative and analytical work on the operas.

WORKS

operas



Title	Genre, acts	Libretto	First performance	MS sources: printed scores

Adelson e Salvini	op semiseria, 3	A.L. Tottola, after P. Delamarre	Naples, S Sebastiano Conservatory, Feb 1825	I-CATm*
2nd version	2		unperf. [rev. completed 1826 or 1828–9]	GB-Lbl, I-Nc, Nc, frags. F-Pn*, I-Baf**; vs (Paris, n.d.; Milan, 1903/R)
Bianca e Fernando	melodramma, 2	D. Gilardoni, after C. Roti
1st version [as Bianca e Gernando]			Naples, S Carlo, 30 May 1826	Nc, Nc, frags. CATm**; vs (Naples, 1826)
2nd version		rev. F. Romani	Genoa, Carlo Felice, 7 April 1828	frags. Nc, Nc, sketches CATm*, Gim**; excerpts (Milan, 1828; Naples, 1828), vs (Milan, 1837, 2/1903/R)
Il pirata	melodramma, 2	Romani, after I.J.S. Taylor: Bertram, ou Le pirate	Milan, Scala, 27 Oct 1827	GB-Lbl, I-Nc* (R 1983: ERO, i), Vt (with autograph markings), frags. US-NYpm*; fs (Milan, c1960/R), vs (Milan, 1828)
La straniera	melodramma, 2	Romani, after V.-C. Prévôt	Milan, Scala, 14 Feb 1829	GB-Ob, I-Mc (with autograph markings; R 2: ERO, ii), Mr*, Nc; vs (Milan, 1829)
Zaira	tragedia lirica, 2	Romani, after Voltaire	Parma, Ducale, 16 May 1829	Nc*; fs (Catania, 1976), excerpts, vs (Milan, 1829; Milan, c 1894)
I Capuleti e i Montecchi	tragedia lirica, 2	Romani, after L. Scevola: Giulietta e Romeo	Venice, Fenice, 11 March 1830	CATm* (R1981: ERO, iii), Mr (with autograph markings), Vt; fs (Milan, c1955), vs (Milan, 1831)
La sonnambula	melodramma, 2	Romani, after E. Scribe and J.-P. Aumer	Milan, Carcano, 6 March 1831	Mr* (R1934), Nc, sketches CATm, US-NYpm**; fs (Milan, c1890), vs (Milan, 1831; London, 1849)
Norma	tragedia lirica, 2	Romani, after A. Soumet	Milan, Scala, 26 Dec 1831	I-Rsc* (R 1935; R1983: ERO, iv), sketches CATm*; fs (Milan, 1898, 3/1915/R1975), vs (Milan, 1832; Paris, 1835; London 1848, 2/1871/R)
Beatrice di Tenda	tragedia lirica, 2	Romani, after C. Tedaldi-Fores	Venice, Fenice, 16 March 1833	I-Nc, Rsc, Vt, sketches CATm**; fs (Rome, c1840/R1980: ERO, v), vs (Milan, 1833)
I puritani	melodramma serio, 3	C. Pepoli, after J.-A.F.-P. Ancelot and Xavier [J.X. Boniface dit Saintine]: Têtes rondes et cavaliers	Paris, Italien, 24 Jan 1835	PLcom* (R1983: ERO, vi), frags. CATm, Mr; fs (Milan, 1897, 2/c1960/R, vs (Milan, 1836)
(I puritani) ‘Naples’ version	2	Pepoli	London, Barbican, 14 Dec 1985	CATm (part autograph; R1983: ERO,vi)
Other: Ernani, Nov–Dec 1830 (Romani, after V. Hugo: Hernani), not completed, frags. CATm*

sacred

all works composed before 1825

Compline, lost; Cor mundum crea, F, 2 solo vv, org, in Pubblicazione periodica di musica sacra sotto gli auspici della S.C. di Propaganda Fide, ii/2 (Rome, 1879), also in Cronache musicali, i (Rome, 1900), no.28; Credo, C, 4vv, orch; Cum sanctis, I-Nc*; De torrente, Nc*; Dixit Dominus, solo vv, 4vv, orch, inc. Nc*, facs. of pt.iii, Tecum principium, in Vincenzo Bellini: Composizioni giovanili inedite (Rome, 1941); Domine Deus, Nc*

Gallus cantavit, ?autograph I-CATc; Gratias agimus, C, solo S, orch; Juravit, Nc*; Ky, Nc*; Laudamus te, Nc*; Litanie pastorali in onore della B.V., 2S, org; Mag, 4vv, orch, frag. F-Pn*; Mass, a–A, S, A, T, B, 4vv, orch, inc. I-CATm* (Milan, 1843); Mass (Ky–Gl), D, SSTB, orch, dated 1818, Nc*; Mass (Ky–Gl), G, SSTB, orch; Mass, g, solo vv, vv, orch, frags. CATm*, Nc*

Pange lingua, 2vv, org, CATm*; Qui sedes, Nc*; Qui tollis, Nc*; Quoniam, Nc*; Quoniam, T, vv, orch, F-Pn*; Quoniam and Cum sanctis, I-Nc*; Salve regina, A, 4vv, orch, CATm*, facs. in Vincenzo Bellini: Composizioni giovanili inedite (Rome, 1941); Salve regina, f–F, solo B, org (Milan, 1862); 4 Tantum ergo and Genitori: B, solo S, orch, E, solo S, orch, vs (Florence and Rome, n.d.), F, 2S [Genitori, 4vv], orch, G, 4vv, orch

5 Tantum ergo: F, solo S, orch, vs (Florence and Rome, n.d.), D, solo A, orch, I-Nc* dated 1823 (Milan, 1862), E, S, A, T, B, vv, orch, Nc* dated 1823 (Milan, 1862), F, solo A, T, orch, Nc* dated 1823 (Milan, 1862), G, solo S, orch, Nc* dated 1823 (Milan, 1862); 2 TeD, C, E, 4vv, orch; Versetti da cantarsi il Venerdì Santo, 2T, orch, autograph in private collection Marusia Manzella, Rome, mentioned in F. Pastura: ‘Le tre ore di agonia’, Rivista del Comune di Catania (1953); Virgam virtutis, Nc*

other vocal

composed after 1825 for 1v, pf, unless otherwise stated

6 ariette da camera (Milan, 1829 [Ricordi]; Naples, n.d. [Clausetti]; Paris, ?1831 [Launer, no copy found]; Naples, n.d. [Girard]) [A]

Bellini per camera: raccolta completa delle sue ariette (Naples, n.d.) [the Girard edn. of 6 ariette da camera, enlarged by 8 additional nos.] [B]

Brezze dell’Etna: 26 ispirazioni del cigno catanese (Naples, n.d.) [all 26 nos. probably not pubd] [C]

Soirées musicales: Sammlung beliebter Arietten und Romanzen (Vienna, 1839 [Mechetti]) [D]

3 ariette inedite (Milan, 1837–8 [Ricordi]) [E]

Composizioni da camera (Milan, 1935, 2/1948 [Ricordi]) [F]

Principal MS sources, some autograph: F-Pn, I-CATm, Fn, Mc, Nc, Rsc, US-NYpm, Wc

A palpitar d’affanno, romanza, no.270 in Aurora d’Italia e di Germania (Vienna, n.d.), also in Prima ed ultima composizione di Bellini (Turin, n.d.)

L’abbandono, romanza, B, C, D, F; as L’ultima veglia (Milan, 1836); as La mammoletta (Paris, n.d.)

L’allegro marinaro, ballata (Milan, 1844), B, C, F

Almen se non poss’io (Metastasio), arietta, A, B, C, D, F

Bella Nice che d’amore, arietta, A, B, C, D, F

Chi per quest’ombre (Giudiccione), free canon, 4vv, unacc., 15 Aug 1835, facs. in Gazette musicale de Paris, ii (Oct 1835), also in A. Pougin: Bellini: sa vie, ses oeuvres (Paris, 1868), following p.228

Dalla guancia scolorita, free canon, 2vv, pf, 1835, in Strenna letteraria artistica musicale del giornale ‘Il pirata’ (Bologna, 1872), also in La musica popolare, ii (1883), following p.145

Dolente immagine di Fille mia, arietta (Naples, c1824; Paris, n.d.), B, C, D, E, F, orch pts. I-Nc*

E nello stringerti a questo core, aria, 1v, orch, before 1825, Nc*

La farfalletta, canzoncina, ?1813, F

Il fervido desiderio, arietta, B, C, E, F

Imene, wedding cantata, S, T, T, vv, orch, ?1824, frags. I-CATm*, US-NYpm*, trio [Ombre pacifiche] pubd (Florence and Rome, n.d.)

Malinconia, ninfa gentile (I. Pindemonte), arietta, A, B, C, D, F

Ma rendi pur contento (Metastasio), arietta, A, B, C, D, F

No, traditor, non curo, aria, S, pf, before 1825, I-CATm [probably orig. with orch]

O souvenir: pagina d’album, arietta (Florence and Rome, n.d.)

Per pietà, bell’idol mio (Metastasio), arietta, A, B, C, D, F

Quando incise su quel marmo, aria, S, orch, before 1825, Nc*, with pf acc. (Milan, 1836), also as no.269 in Aurora d’Italia e di Germania (Vienna, n.d.), B, C, F [incl. introductory recit]

Guarda che bianca luna, romanza, ?Palermo, 1832

La ricordanza (C. Pepoli), 1834, US-Wc*

Si, per te, gran nume eterno, cavatina, S, orch, before 1825, I-Nc*

Sogno d’infanzia, romanza (Milan, 1835), B, C, D, F

T’intendo, si, mio cor (Metastasio), 4S, unacc., c1824, US-NYpm*

Torna, vezzosa Fillide, romanza, I-Mc, F

Vaga luna che inargenti, arietta, no.246 in Aurora d’Italia e di Germania (Vienna, n.d.), B, C, E, F

Vanne, o rosa fortunata, arietta, A, B, C, D, F

Lost: Amore, Malinconia, La speranza (C. Pepoli), 3 sonnets, 1834–5; Alla luna (Pepoli), 1834–5; Numi, se giusti siete (P. Metastasio), romanza, announced on title-page of C; Scena ed aria di Cerere, erroneously said by Weinstock, 1971, to be in I-Nc; Arietta, Milan, for Lady Christina Dudley-Stuart, 1828; Cavatina, Milan, for album of Duchess Litta

Spurious and doubtful: Ah, non pensar = section of Introduzione of Beatrice di Tenda; Era felice undì = transcr. with notable changes of a cavatina by Mercadante; Se il mio nome (Berlin, n.d.), D = Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia; Tu che al pianger, B, actually by F. Florimo; Le dernier soir, romanza (Paris, 1841) [authenticity very doubtful]

instrumental

Orch (all composed before 1825): Capriccio, ossia Sinfonia per studio, c; 6 sinfonie: B, I-CATm*, c (Milan, 1941), d-D (Milan, 1941), D, facs. in Vincenzo Bellini: Composizioni giovanili inedite (Rome, 1941) (Padua, 1959), E, facs. in Vincenzo Bellini: Composizioni giovanili inedite (Rome, 1941), E (Milan, 1941); Ob Conc., E, Nc*, facs. in Vincenzo Bellini: Composizioni giovanili inedite (Rome, 1941) (Milan, 1961)

Kbd: Allegretto, g, pf, I-Fn*; Capriccio, G, pf 4 hands, Nc; Pensiero musicale, pf, ed. F.P. Frontini (Florence and Rome, n.d.); Polacca, pf 4 hands; Org Sonata, G, US-NYpm*; Tema, f, pf, c1834, F-Pn*

Spurious: Sonata, F, pf 4 hands, Nc* = transcr. of Beethoven's Allegretto alla Polacca op.8

g: biographical and character studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

h: critical studies

i: works: specific aspects

j: Individual works

a: lists of works

F. Pastura: ‘Elenco delle opere’, Bellini secondo la storia (Parma, 1959), 709–12

F. Lippmann: ‘Bellinis Opern – Daten und Quellen’, Vincenzo Bellini und die italienische Opera seria seiner Zeit, AnMc, no.6 (1969), 365–97; It. trans., rev., in M.R. Adamo and F. Lippmann: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1981)

H. Weinstock: Vincenzo Bellini: his Life and his Operas (New York, 1971), 375–87

b: bibliographies

O. Viola: ‘Bibliografia belliniana’, Omaggio a Bellini (Catania, 1901), 336–84; pubd separately (Catania, 1902, 2/1923)

L. Ronga: ‘Note sulla storia della critica belliniana’, Bollettino dei musicisti, ii (1934–5), 70–74; repr. in L. Ronga: Arte e gusto nella musica (Milan, 1956)

A. Damerini: ‘Bellini e la critica del suo tempo’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 215–50

S. Pugliatti: ‘Problemi della critica belliniana’, Chopin e Bellini (Messina, 1953), 93–113

H. Weinstock: Vincenzo Bellini: his Life and his Operas (New York, 1971), 549–54

E. E. Abbadessa: ‘Gli eterografi belliniani del San Pietro a Majella’, Vincenzo Bellini: Critica-Storia-Tradizione, ed. S.E. Failla (Catania, 1991), 48–61

M.R. Adamo: ‘Aggiornamento alla Bibliografia belliniana di Orazio Viola’, ibid., 82–105

M.R. De Luca: ‘I bozzetti per opere belliniane del San Pietro a Majella’, ibid., 76–81

S.E. Failla: ‘Gli autografi belliniane del San Pietro a Majella’, ibid., 32–47

A. Tosca: ‘Le stampe belliniane del San Pietro a Majella’, ibid., 62–74

c: discographies

A. Porter: ‘Norma’, Opera on Record, ed. A. Blyth, i (London, 1979), 154–72

G. Cataldo: Il teatro di Bellini (Bologna, 1980), 159–65

L. Bellingardi: ‘Discografia’, in M. Adamo and F. Lippmann: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1981), 557–62

C. Marinelli: ‘La sonnambula’, Opere in disco (Fiesole, 1982), 136–47

R. Fairman: ‘“La sonnambula” and “I puritani”’, Opera on Record, ii (London, 1983), 115–28

d: letters

F. Florimo, ed.: Bellini: memorie e lettere (Florence, 1882)

A. Amore: Vincenzo Bellini: vita studi e ricerche (Catania, 1894) [incl. letters addressed to Bellini]

F. Pastura: Le lettere di Bellini (Catania, 1935)

L. Cambi: Vincenzo Bellini: epistolario (Milan, 1943)

F. Pastura: Bellini secondo la storia (Parma, 1959)

F. Walker: ‘Lettere disperse e inedite di Vincenzo Bellini’, Rivista del Comune di Catania, viii/4 (1960), 106–18

D. Musto: ‘Vincenzo Bellini in due autografi inediti dell’Archivio di Stato di Napoli’, Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato, xxi (1961), 351–60

L. Cambi: ‘Bellini: un pacchetto di autografi’, Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan and Naples, 1973), 53–90

F. Lippmann: ‘Belliniana’, Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 281–317

C. Neri: Lettere di Vincenzo Bellini (1819–1835) (Palermo, 1991)

e: iconography

B. Condorelli: ‘Il volto di Bellini’, Vincenzo Bellini: numero commemorativo a cura della Rivista del Comune di Catania (Catania, 1935), 18–24

O. Profeta: ‘Dantan e la Parigi di Bellini’, Vincenzo Bellini: numero commemorativo a cura della Rivista del Comune di Catania (Catania, 1935), 77–82

F. Pastura: Bellini secondo la storia (Parma, 1959)

R. Alajamo: ‘Iconografia belliniana’, I teatri di Vincenzo Bellini (Palermo, 1986), 159–223

C. Andò, D. de Meo, and S.E. Failla, eds.: Bellini: mostra di oggetti e documenti provenienti da collezioni pubbliche e private italiane (Catania, 1988)

G. Tintori: ‘Iconografia belliniana al Museo Teatrale alla Scala’, Vincenzo Bellini: Critica-Storia-Tradizione, ed. S.E. Failla (Catania, 1991), 118–27

f: life and works

ES (F. D’Amico)

FlorimoN

LaMusicaE (G. Pannain)

P. Beltrame: ‘Cav. Vincenzo Bellini’, Biografia degli italiani illustri nelle scienze, lettere ed arti, ii (Venice, 1835), 451–61; repr. as Biografia di Vincenzo Bellini (Venice, 1836)

F. Gerardi: Biografia di Vincenzo Bellini (Rome, 1835)

G. Bürkli: Biographie von Vincenz Bellini (Zürich, 1841)

A. Pougin: Bellini: sa vie, ses oeuvres (Paris, 1868)

F. Florimo, ed.: Bellini: memorie e lettere (Florence, 1882)

P. Voss: Vincenzo Bellini (Leipzig, 1901)

W.A.C. Lloyd: Vincenzo Bellini, a Memoir (London, 1909)

I. Pizzetti: ‘Bellini, Vincenzo’, Enciclopedia italiana, ed. G. Gentile and C. Tumminelli, vi (1930)

G.T. de Angelis: Vincenzo Bellini: la vita, l’uomo, l’artista (Brescia, 1935)

O. Tiby: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1938)

F. Pastura: Bellini secondo la storia (Parma, 1959)

L. Orrey: Bellini (London and New York, 1969)

H. Weinstock: Vincenzo Bellini: his Life and his Operas (New York, 1971)

W. Oehlmann: Vincenzo Bellini (Zürich, 1974)

M. Adamo and F. Lippmann: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1981)

P. Brunel: Vincenzo Bellini (Paris, 1981)

G. Tintori: Bellini (Milan, 1983)

J. Rosselli: :The Life of Bellini (Cambridge, 1996)

g: biographical and character studies

H. Heine: ‘Florentinische Nächte’, Der Salon, iii (Hamburg, 1837; Eng. trans., 1891, as The Works of Heinrich Heine, iv), 1–144

F. Cicconetti: Vita di Vincenzo Bellini (Prato, 1859)

E. Branca: Felice Romani ed i più reputati maestri di musica del suo tempo (Torino, 1882)

A. Amore: Vincenzo Bellini vita: studi e ricerche (Catania, 1894)

A. Cametti, ed.: Bellini a Roma: brevi appunti storici (Rome, 1900)

A. Aniante: Vita amorosa di Vincenzo Bellini (Milan, 1926)

G. de Gaetani: Ipotesi sulla natura della malattia che condusse a morte Vincenzo Bellini (Catania, 1931)

L. Cambi: Bellini: la vita (Milan, 1934)

G. Nataletti: ‘1819–1827: gli anni di Napoli’, Bollettino dei musicisti, ii (1934–5), 45–9

F. Pastura: ‘1801–1819: a Catania’, Bollettino dei musicisti, ii (1934–5), 41–4

A. Della Corte: ‘L’animo’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. A. della Corte and G. Pannain (Turin, 1935), 3–28

M. Ferranti-Giulini: Giuditta Pasta e i suoi tempi (Milan, 1935)

G. Policastro: Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1819) (Catania, 1935)

L. Cambi: ‘La fanciullezza e l’adolescenza’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 11–38

J. Chantavoine: ‘Bellini a Parigi’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 191–214

E.J. Dent: ‘Bellini in Inghilterra’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 163–90

P. Cavazzuti: Bellini a Londra (Florence, 1945)

G. Roncaglia: ‘Vincenzo Bellini: il musicista, quale appare dal suo epistolario’, RMI, l (1948), 159–77

F. Walker: ‘Amore e amori nelle lettere di Giuditta, Bellini e Florimo’, La Scala, no.112 (1959), 1–23; Eng. trans. as ‘Giuditta Turina and Bellini’, ML, xl (1959), 19–34

F. Lippmann: ‘Belliniana’, Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 281–317

J. Rosselli: ‘Vite e morte di Bellini a Parigi’, RIM, xix (1984), 261–76

h: critical studies

H. Berlioz: ‘Bellini: notes nécrologiques’, Journal des débats (16 July 1836); repr. in H. Berlioz: Les musiciens et la musique, ed. A. Hallays (Paris, 1903/R)

R. Wagner: ‘Bellini: ein Wort zu seiner Zeit’, Zuschauer [Riga] (7–19 Dec 1837); repr. in Bayreuther Blätter (Dec 1885); repr. in Vincenzo Bellini, ed. H.-K. Metzger and R. Riehn (Munich, 1985), 5–11; Eng. trans. in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, viii (1899/R)

C. Ritorni: Ammaestramenti alla composizione d'ogni poema e d'ogni opera appartenente alla musica (Milan, 1841)

J.C. Lobe: : ‘Bellini’, Fliegende Blätter für Musik: Wahrheit über Tonkunst und Tonkünstler (Leipzig, 1855), 262–80; repr. in Vincenzo Bellini, ed. H.-K. Metzger and R. Riehn (Munich, 1985), 47–63

A. Amore: Brevi cenni critici (Catania, 1877)

F. Hiller: ‘Vincenzo Bellini’, Künstlerleben (Cologne, 1880), 144–59; repr. in Vincenzo Bellini, ed. H.-K. Metzger and R. Riehn (Munich, 1985), 95–108

F. Ricci: ‘Una lettera di Federico Ricci su Bellini’, in F. Florimo, ed.: Bellini: memorie e lettere (Florence, 1882), 140–48

M. Scherillo: Vincenzo Bellini: note aneddotiche e critiche (Ancona, 1882)

M. Scherillo: Belliniana: nuove note (Milan, ? 1884)

A. Amore: Vincenzo Bellini: arte, studi e ricerche (Catania, 1892)

A. Amore: Belliniana: errori e smentite (Catania, 1902)

I. Pizzetti: ‘La musica di Vincenzo Bellini’, La voce, vii (1915), 149–228; also pubd separately (Florence, 1916); repr. in I. Pizzetti: Intermezzi critici (Florence, n.d.) and La musica italiana dell’ Ottocento (Turin, 1947)

C. Gray: ‘Vincenzo Bellini’, ML, vii (1926), 49–62; repr. in C. Gray: Contingencies (London, 1947)

F. Torrefranca: ‘Il mio Bellini’, Bollettino dei musicisti, ii (1934–5), 65–6

A. Della Corte: ‘La formazione’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. A. della Corte and G. Pannain (Turin, 1935), 29–48

D. de’ Paoli: ‘Bellini, musicien dramatique’, ReM, no.156 (1935), 52–62

A. Einstein: ‘Vincenzo Bellini’, ML, xvi (1935), 325–32

G. Pannain: ‘Saggio critico’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. A. della Corte and G. Pannain (Turin, 1935), 77–123

G. Pannain: ‘Vincenzo Bellini’, RaM, viii (1935), 1–14, 100–13, 174–82, 236–7; repr. in G. Pannain: Ottocento musicale italiano (Milan, 1952), 16–48

I. Pizzetti: ‘Hommage à Bellini’, ReM, no.156 (1935), 39–43

G. Gavazzeni: ‘Spiriti e forme della lirica belliniana’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 81–131

M. Mila: ‘Bellini cent’anni dopo (1935)’, Cent’anni di musica moderna (Milan, 1944, 2/1981), 29–38

S. Pugliatti: ‘Carattere dell’arte di Vincenzo Bellini’, Chopin e Bellini (Messina, 1952), 115–30

I. Pizzetti: ‘Spiriti e forme dell’arte belliniana’, Musica d’oggi, new ser., i (1958), 346–50

F. Lippmann: Vincenzo Bellini und die italienische Opera seria seiner Zeit, AnMc, no.6 (1969), 365–97; It. trans., rev., in M.R. Adamo and F. Lippmann: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1981), 313–576

W. Kümmel: ‘Vincenzo Bellini nello specchio dell’ “Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung” di Lipsia 1827–1846’, NRMI, vii (1973), 185–205

F. Lippmann: ‘Ein neuentdecktes Autograph Richard Wagners: Rezension der Königsberger “Norma”-Aufführung von 1837’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 373–9

F. Lippmann: ‘Donizetti und Bellini’, Studi musicali, iv (1975), 193–243

E.J. Dent: The Rise of Romantic Opera, ed. W. Dean (Cambridge, 1976)

C. Greenspan: The Operas of Vincenzo Bellini (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1977)

F. Lippmann: ‘Belliniana’, Il melodramma italiano dell'ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 281–317

G. Cataldo: Il teatro di Bellini (Bologna, 1980)

F. Lippmann: ‘Abbozzi di Vincenzo Bellini nella Biblioteca communale di Mineo’, Nuovi annali della Facoltà di magisterio dell'Università di Messina, ii (1984), 839–44

S.E. Failla: Vincenzo Bellini in Catania (Catania, 1985)

R. Alajamo, ed.: I teatri di Vincenzo Bellini (Palermo, 1986)

i: works: specific aspects

C. Di Ferrer: Rossini e Bellini (Cesena, 1843)

M. Scherillo: ‘Bellini e la musica popolare’, Giambattista Basile, iii (1885), 4; repr. Nuove effemeridi, iii (1990), 189

O. Viola: ‘Saggio bibliografico delle più antiche edizioni dei libretti musicati da Vincenzo Bellini’, appx to Bibliografia belliniana (Catania, 1902), 56–64

H. de Saussine: ‘L’harmonie bellinienne’, RMI, xxvii (1920), 477–82

A. Della Corte: ‘Vicende degli stili del canto dal tempo di Gluck al ’900’, Canto e bel canto (Turin, 1933), 229–79

L. Tonelli: ‘I libretti di Bellini’, Bollettino dei musicisti, ii (1934–5), 75–82

B. Condorelli: Il Museo Belliniano: catalogo storico-iconografico (Catania, 1935)

A. Della Corte: ‘Il canto e i cantanti’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. A. Della Corte and G. Pannain (Turin, 1935), 49–64

H. de Saussine: ‘Sur Bellini harmoniste’, ReM, no.156 (1935), 63–4

F. Pastura: ‘Rivelazioni degli autografi musicali belliniani: varianti e temi inediti’, Vincenzo Bellini: numero commemorativo a cura della Rivista del Comune di Catania (Catania, 1935), 25–34

F. Pastura: ‘Un'arietta inedita di Vincenzo Bellini’, Musica d’oggi, xviii ( 1936), 115–17

G.F. Winternitz: ‘I cimeli belliniani della R. Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna’, RMI, xl (1936), 104–18

G. Cocchiara: ‘Origine e vicende d'una canzone popolare’, Annali del Museo Pitrè, ii-iv (1951–3), 68–76; repr. in Nuove effemeridi, iii (1990)

F. Schlitzer: ‘Cimeli belliniani’, Tommaso Traetta, Leonardo Leo, Vincenzo Bellini, Chigiana, ix (1952), 61–88

N. Gallini: ‘Collana d’arie per Mademoiselle Carlier’, La Scala, no.49 (1953), 42–8

F. Schlitzer: ‘Vincenzo Bellini’, Mondo teatrale dell’Ottocento (Naples, 1954), 11–45

O. Tiby: ‘Leggenda e realtà d'una canzone popolare’, Annali del Museo Pitrè, v-vii (1954–6), 63–83; repr. in Nuove effemeridi, iii (1990)

M. Rinaldi: Felice Romani (Rome, 1965)

F. Lippmann: ‘Verdi e Bellini’, Studi verdiani I: Venice 1966, 184–96; Ger. trans. in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper, ed. H. Becker (Regensburg, 1969), 77–88

F. Lippmann: ‘Quellenkundliche Anmerkungen zu einigen Opern Vincenzo Bellinis’, AnMc, no.4 (1967), 131–53

F. Cella: ‘Indagini sulle fonti francesi dei libretti de Vincenzo Bellini’, Contributi dell’Istituto di filologia moderna, Fr. ser., v (1968), 449–573

R. Celletti: ‘Il vocalismo italiano da Rossini a Donizetti’, AnMc, no.5 (1968), 267–94; no.7 (1969), 214–47

F. Lippmann: ‘Wagner und Italien’, AnMc, no.11 (1972), 200–47

F. Lippmann: ‘Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythmus: zum Verhältnis von Vers und Musik in der italienischen Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts, mit einem Rückblick auf die 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, AnMc, no.12 (1973), 253–369; no.14 (1974), 324–410; no.15 (1975), 298–333; It. trans., rev., as Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale (Naples, 1986)

A. Caswell: ‘Mme. Cinti-Damoreau and the Embellishment of Italian Opera in Paris, 1820–45’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 459–92

R. Dalmonte: ‘La canzone nel melodramma italiana del primo ottocento: ricerche di metodo strutturale’, RIM, xi (1976), 230–312

D. Goldin: ‘Aspetti della librettistica italiana fra 1770 e 1830’, AnMc, no.21 (1982), 128–91

Studi belliniani: Catania 1985 [incl. F. Giovale: ‘ “Ah, tu perdoni. Quel pianto il dice”: note sul tema del sacrificio e del perdono nei libretti belliniani di Felice Romani’, 25–45; A. Nicastro: ‘Il caso Pepoli e il libretto dei “I puritani” ’, 47–61; R. Meloncelli: ‘La lirici vocale di Vincenzo Bellini nella produzione cameristica italiana dell'ottocento’, 63–111; M.R. Adamo: ‘Guarda che bianca luna: una “lettura” belliniana’, 113–44; S. Maguire: “On the Question of Analysis in Bellini’, 145–56; G. Tintori: ‘Lettere di Bellini e su Bellini al Museo Teatrale alla Scala’, 157–74; R. Vlad: ‘Modernità di Bellini’, 175–85; F.A. Agostinelli: ‘ “I Puritani” uno e due: la versioni napoletana’, 187–93; S.E. Failla: ‘La prima versione di Adelson e Salvini’, 195–212; L. Arruga: ‘Recitazione neoclassica: immedesimazione e drammaturgia’, 213–20; J. Budden: ‘La fortuna di Bellini in Inghilterra’, 225–31; M. Conati: ‘La “novella” belliniana’, 241–60; D. Cranmer: ‘A Portugese Perspective’, 261–88; P. Rattalino: ‘I melodrammi di Bellini nelle parafrasi pianistiche coeve’, 289–95; F. Lesure: ‘Bellini e Berlioz’, 297–304; R. Pagano: ‘Vincenzo Tobia e le sue Toccate per clavicembalo’, 305–29; ‘L'attuale situazione degli studi belliniani’, 331–61]

G. Tomlinson: ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: an Essay in their Affinities’, 19CM, x (1986–7), 43–60

S. Maguire: Vincenzo Bellini and the Aesthetics of Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (New York and London, 1989)

A. Roccatagliati: Felice Romani, librettista (Lucca, 1996)

A. Roccatagliati: ‘Felice Romani, librettist by trade’, COJ, viii (1996), 113–46

(1) Jan Jiří [Johann Georg, Hans Georg] Benda

j: Individual works

I capuleti e i montecchi

H. Berlioz: ‘Roméo et Juliette’, A travers Chants: études musicales, adorations, boutades et critique (Paris, 1862)

F. Schlitzer: ‘I capuleti e i Montecchi’ di Vincenzo Bellini: l'autografo della partitura con note illustrative (Florence, 1956)

W. Dean: ‘Shakespeare and Opera’, Shakespeare in Music, ed. P. Hartnoll (London, 1964), 89–175, esp. 148–50

F. Lippmann: ‘Pagine sconosciute de “I capuleti e i Montecchi” e “Beatrice di Tenda” di Vincenzo Bellini’, RIM, ii (1967), 140–51

L. Gherardi: ‘Una novella di Matteo Bandello “riletto” da Felice Romani per Vincenzo Bellini’, Esercizi: arte musica e spettacolo, iv (1981), 116–26

P. Gossett: Introduction to: I Capuleti e i Montecchi, ERO, iii (1981)

M. Collins: ‘The Literary Background of Bellini's I Capuleti ed i Montecchi’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 532–8

L'avant-scène opéra, no.122 (1989) [I Capuleti e i Montecchi issue]

La sonnambula

B. Cagli: ‘Il risveglio magnetico e il sonno della ragione’, Studi musicali, xiv (1985), 157–70

G. Paduano: ‘La verità del sogno: La sonnambula’, Il giro di vite: percorsi dell'opera lirica (Florence, 1992), 69–83

E. Senici: ‘From Camargue to Switzerland: La sonnambula's Alpine Landscape’, in Virgins of the Rocks: Alpine Landscape and Female Purity in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (diss., Cornell U., 1998)

Norma

C. Ritorni: Ammaestramenti alla composizione d'ogni poema e d'ogni opera appartenente alla musica (Milan, 1841), 159–68

A. Damerini, ed.: Vincenzo Bellini: ‘Norma’: guida attraverso il dramma e la musica (Milan, 1923)

F. Fano: ‘“Norma” nella storia del melodramma italiano’, RaM, viii/5 (1935), 315–26

G. Pannain: ‘La Norma’, ReM, no.156 (1935), 44–51

G. Pannain: ‘“Norma”: cento anni’, Ottocento musicale italiano (Milan, 1952), 49–51

R. Monterosso: ‘Per un'edizione di “Norma”’, Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan and Naples, 1973), 415–510

C.S. Brauner: ‘Textual Problems in Bellini's Norma and Beatrice di Tenda’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 99–118

L’avant-scène opéra, no.29 (1980) [Norma issue]

Atti del simposio belliniano celebrato in occasione del 150o anniversario della 1o esecuzione di ‘Norma’: Catania 1981

G. Paduano: ‘ “Norma”: la crisi del modello deliberativo’, Noi facemmo ambidue un sogno strano: il disagio amoroso sulla scena dell'opera europea (Palermo, 1982), 152–77

P. Gossett: Introduction to: Norma, ERO, iv (1983)

J. Deathridge: ‘Reminiscences of Norma’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 223–7

Beatrice di tenda

F. Pastura: ‘Due frammenti della “Beatrice di Tenda” di Bellini’, RaM, viii/5 (1935), 327–38

V. Gui: ‘Beatrice di Tenda’, Musica d'oggi, new ser., ii (1959), 194–7

J.A. Boromé: ‘Bellini and “Beatrice di Tenda” ’, ML, xlii (1961), 319–35

V. Gui: ‘A proposito della mia revisione della Beatrice di Tenda di Bellini’, L'approdo musicale, xix (1965), 207–14

P. Gossett: Introduction to: Beatrice di Tenda, ERO, v (1980)

I puritani

P. Petrobelli: ‘Nota sulla poetica di Bellini: a proposito de I puritani’, MZ, viii (1972), 70–85; Eng. trans. in Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 162–75

L. Gherardi: ‘Varianti nei “I puritani”’, Chigiana, xxiv (1977), 217–32

P. Petrobelli: ‘Bellini e Paisiello: altri documenti sulla nascita dei Puritani’, Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 351–63; Eng. trans. in Music in the Theater: Essays on Bellini and Other Composers (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 176–92

G. Spina: ‘Origine de “Puritani” ’, NRMI, xii (1978), 29–33

R. Monterosso: ‘Le due redazioni dei “Puritani”’, Letterature comparate, problemi e metodi: studi in onore di Ettore Paratore (Bologna, 1981), 589–609

P. Gossett: Introduction to: I puritani, ERO, vi (1983)

G. Pugliese and R. Vlad: I puritani ritrovati: la versione inedita dedicata a Maria Malibran (Manduria, 1986)

L'avant-scène opéra, no.96 (1987) [I puritani issue]

A. Nicastro: ‘Il caso Pepoli e il libretto dei “I puritani” ’, NRMI, xxi (1987), 214–27

M. Mauceri: ‘Ancora su “I Puritani” per Napoli: un inedito’, NRMI, xxiii (1989), 410–17

G. Spina: ‘Scott-Ancelot-Pepoli-Bellini: genesi del libretto de “I Puritani” ’, NRMI, xxiii (1989), 79–97

M.A. Smart: ‘Bellini's Unseen Voices: Offstage Music and Quotation in I puritani’, in ‘Dalla tomba uscita’: Representations of Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (diss., Cornell U., 1994), 87–154

others

P. Di Moiano: Alcune osservazioni critiche intorno alla musica dell'opera ‘La straniera’ del sig Maestro Vincenzo Bellini (Milan, 1830)

C. Alcari: ‘La “Zaira” fu veramente fischiata?’, Musica d'oggi, xvii (1935), 262–7

A. Della Corte: ‘Le prime opere’, Vincenzo Bellini, ed. I. Pizzetti (Milan, 1936), 39–80

F. Pastura: ‘Appunti belliniane 1: La duplice redazione dell‘ “Adelson e Salvini”’, Gazzetta musicale di Napoli, ii (1956), 121–4

F. Lippmann: ‘Su “La straniera” di Bellini’, NRMI, v (1971), 565–605

L. Orrey: ‘The Literary Sources of Bellini's First Opera’, ML, lv (1974), 24–9

F. Degrada: ‘Prolegomeni a una lettura della Sonnambula’, Il melodramma dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. G. Pestelli (Turin, 1977), 319–50

Convegno di Studi sull'opera ‘Bianca e Fernando’ di Vincenzo Bellini: Genoa 1978

S.A. Willier: ‘Madness, the Gothic and Bellini's Il pirata’, OQ, vi (1981), 7–23

P. Gossett: Introduction to: La straniera, ERO, ii (1982)

P. Gossett: Introduction to: Il pirata, ERO, i (1983)

S.E. Failla: ‘Adelson e Salvini (prima versione)’, I teatri di Vincenzo Bellini, ed. R. Alajamo (Palermo, 1986), 13–28

M. Engelhardt: Verdi und andere: ‘Un giorno di regno’, ‘Ernani’, ‘Attila’, ‘Il corsaro’ in Mehrfachvertonungen (Parma, 1992), 111–60

Bellinzani, Paolo Benedetto

(b Ferrara, c1690; d Recanati, 25 Feb 1757). Italian composer. Ferrara is cited as his birthplace in the Serie cronologica de' principi dell'Accademia de' filarmonici di Bologna, but archival documents in Udine and Recanati suggest Mantua. On 15 April 1715, when in Verona, Bellinzani was appointed maestro di cappella of Udine Cathedral and on 29 April was granted the benefice of S Ermagora. He must by then have taken holy orders and been proficient in canto fermo (plainsong) and canto figurato (polyphonic vocal music), subjects in which he had to instruct the clergy. On 11 December 1717 Bellinzani asked to be relieved of Vespers until Christmas in order to compose church music – possibly his Salmi brevi, which came out in the following year. On his nomination as a censor in Ferrara, Bellinzani left Udine in 1718 and moved to Pergola. He resigned his post at Udine on 30 September 1721, stating his intention to go to Pesaro. From 1724 until 1727, and probably until 1730, he was maestro di cappella of Pesaro Cathedral. The years 1722 and 1723 are unaccounted for; claims that he was maestro di cappella of Ferrara Cathedral in 1722 seem unfounded. In 1727 he was admitted as a composer to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. On 7 June 1730 he was appointed maestro di cappella of Urbino Cathedral, remaining there until 27 August 1734, when at Ferrara Cathedral he took up a similar post which also entailed the running of a music school attached to the seminary. On 19 May 1735 he relinquished his appointment, to go to Orvieto, where he probably remained for two years. In 1737 he succeeded Pietro Benedetti as maestro di cappella of Recanati Cathedral, a post he held until his death.

In their day Bellinzani's compositions enjoyed great popularity. He was an unusual combination of learned contrapuntist and sensitive melodist, generous with the use of ornamentation in his vocal lines. Not surprisingly, some have found his church music more secular than sacred in atmosphere. His instrumental music is heavily indebted to Corelli, as his op.3 sonatas, which close with a set of variations on the folia, clearly show.

WORKS

sacred vocal

[4] Missae 4 vocibus concinendae, SATB, vle/theorbo, org, op.1 (Bologna, 1717)

[12] Salmi brevi per tutto l'anno, SATB, SATB, 2 vn ad lib, vle/theorbo, org, op.2 (Bologna, 1718)

[40] Offertorj … per tutte le feste solenni dell'anno, S/T, A/B, org, op.4 (Pesaro, 1726)

Other liturgical works, principal sources: I-Md, URBcap (see list in Ligi)

Ester (orat, Neralco [G.M. Ercolani]), Ancona, 1723, lost

Abigaille (orat, Ercolani), Urbino, 1730, lost

secular vocal

[12] Duetti da camera, 2vv, bc, op.5 (Pesaro, 1726)

[20] Madrigali, 2–5vv, bc, op.6 (Pesaro, 1733)

instrumental

[12] Sonate, fl, hpd/vc, op.3 (Venice, 1728)

12 suonate da chiesa a 3 … ad imitazione d'Arcangelo Corelli, 2 vn, bc, Bc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI(R. Meloncelli)

DEUMM(S. Martinotti)

G. Radiciotti: Teatro, musica e musicisti in Recanati (Recanati, 1904)

G. Radiciotti: La cappella musicale del duomo di Pesaro (sec. XVII–XIX) (Turin, 1914)

B. Ligi: La cappella musicale del duomo di Urbino, NA, ii (1925)

G. Vale: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Udine’, NA, vii (1930), 87–201

D. Marsano: ‘Paolo Benedetto Bellinzani ed i suoi versetti per organo’, Bollettino dell'Accademia di musica italiana per organo di Pistoia, iii/2 (1991), 7–11

MICHAEL TALBOT/ENRICO CARERI

Bellis, Giovanni Battista de.

See De Bellis, Giovanni Battista.

Bellison, Simeon

(b Moscow, 4 Dec 1883; d New York, 4 May 1953). American clarinettist of Russian origin. He learnt first from his father, and at nine was playing in bands conducted by him. From 1894 to 1901 Bellison studied under Joseph Friedrich at the Moscow Imperial Academy. He was first clarinet for the opera orchestras in Moscow (1904–14) and Petrograd (1915). During the Russo-Japanese War and World War I he was in the army. In 1920 he settled in America and was first clarinet in the New York PO from 1920 to 1948. He organized and played in the following ensembles: the Moscow Quintet (toured Russia, Poland and Latvia, 1902), Zimro (toured Siberia, China, Japan, India, Dutch East Indies, the USA and Canada, 1917–20); the Clarinet Ensemble (75 players, formed in 1927 to tour the USA). Bellison had a high reputation as a teacher in Russia and the USA. He used Oehler clarinets, choosing a very hard reed which he tied on, and produced vibrato by finger movement. He was an authority on Hebrew music, and wrote many articles, as well as a novel, Jivoglot.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. King: The Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York (New York, 1940)

Obituary, The Clarinet, i/11 (1953), 12–13

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977), 45–7

PAMELA WESTON

Bellissen, Laurent.

See Belissen, Laurent.

Bell-lyra [bell-lyre, lyra-glockenspiel]

(Ger. Stahlspiel; militär-Glockenspiel).

A portable glockenspiel in lyre form designed for the use of marching bands. It is classified as an ‘idiophone: set of percussion plaques’. In the latter half of the 19th century the glockenspiel became a feature in German military bands. Originally the instrument consisted of a row of metal cups (later, steel bars) mounted in a pyramid on an upright rod held in one hand of the player, while the other held the beater. The bars (usually 15) were arranged in a single row and were detachable for key changes. Later instruments, with a compass of two or more octaves arranged in two or more rows mounted on a lyre-shaped frame, were supported from the shoulder. When ‘fully dressed’ the instrument bore the traditional horse-tail plumes. Its form is surely inspired by the Turkish crescent.

The modern bell-lyra, with its bars of steel or alloy arranged keyboard fashion with the ‘black’ notes to the player’s left, is often similarly adorned. A typical instrument has a compass of two octaves, and continues to be associated with marching bands. A rare instance of its use as an orchestral instrument occurs in Britten’s church opera The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966).

JAMES BLADES

Bellman, Carl Michael

(b Stockholm, 4 Feb 1740; d Stockholm, 11 Feb 1795). Swedish poet. He became known as an entertainer and creator of satirical drinking-songs during the 1760s, and his popular fame eventually brought him to the attention of the Swedish court. With the help of Gustavus III he acquired a government position that left him ample time to devote to his craft. His fortunes turned when the king was murdered in 1792, and his last years were plagued by debt and illness; but his fame continued to grow, and he has remained the favourite of latterday Swedish ‘troubadours’.

Bellman was one of Sweden’s most gifted poets of all time. His preferred medium was parody (the re-use of popular melodies to new poetry); but with his bold verses, intricate metrical patterns and improvements in his borrowed melodies he created an inimitable song form that has retained its popularity to the present day. He has been compared with Hogarth, but his message is more subtle than that of the artist, and his moral position is not as easy to determine. His best-known song collections are Fredmans epistlar (Stockholm, 1790; ed. G. Hillbom and J. Massengale, Stockholm, 1990) and Fredmans sånger (Stockholm, 1791; ed. G. Hillbom and J. Massengale, Stockholm, 1992): the former is a collection of fictional letters portraying imaginary scenes in the lives of known contemporary drunkards and loose women, and the latter is a mixed group of drinking-songs, satires and lyrical pieces. The transcriptions for the melodies in both cases were provided by Olof Åhlström, who was also Bellman’s publisher.

Much of the music for both collections has been traced to France. Bellman used ariettes from the opéra comique, instrumental dances and airs that have been found in old songbooks and in Swedish ‘dance books’ containing melodies transcribed for one or two violins. Less frequently, he took simple melodies by such well-known composers as Haydn and Handel. He often extensively revised his melodies, and the sources of more than a quarter of the tunes to his two popular song collections have not been identified. We have no concrete evidence that Bellman composed music in the traditional sense of the word, but an occasional melody or two, such as the interestingly awkward setting to Fredmans sång no.34, may be his own composition. The majority of his some 1700 poems have been published, with their music, in the standard edition, Bellmans skrifter (Stockholm, 1921–).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Flodmark: Bellmansmelodiernas ursprung (Stockholm, 1882)

T. Krogh: Bellman som musikalsk digter (Copenhagen, 1945)

N. Afzelius: Bellmans melodier (Stockholm, 1947)

P.B. Austin: The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman (Malmö, 1967)

J.R. Massengale: The Musical-Poetic Method of Carl Michael Bellman (Uppsala, 1979)

J. Massengale: Analytical Song Index of C.M. Bellman’s Poetry (Stockholm, 1988)

J. MASSENGALE

Belloc, Enrique

(b Buenos Aires, 28 Jan 1936). Argentine composer. He studied philosophy at the Buenos Aires National University. In 1961 he won a Ford fellowship to be an artist-in-residence in West Berlin. He studied with Schaeffer at the Pierre Bourdan Research Centre in Paris on a French government grant (1964–8). He was conductor-in-residence of the City of Buenos Aires Symphonic Band (1969–71) and deputy conductor of the National SO (1971–2); he has also directed the Buenos Aires PO, the University of Tucumán SO and contemporary music ensembles. His awards include the Argentine Composers’ Union Prize (1969) and the Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for his work in electro-acoustic music (1994–5). He was invited by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales to record Homenaje a Pierre Schaeffer in 1993 and to compose a work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of musique concrète in 1997.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Sym., str, 1969; 4 piezas, str, 1960; Movimientos, fl, cl, ob, pf, 1963; Secuencias, orch, 1967

Elec: 3 estudios concretos, 1966; Homenaje a Pierre Schaeffer, sampler, synth, 1989; Sinfonía concertante, synth, 1989; Espacios acusmáticos, octophonic sound, 1996–8; Geofonia, sound-clip, 1997; Objetos reencontrados, 1997

VALDEMAR AXEL ROLDAN

Belloc-Giorgi [Bellochi; Giorgi-Belloc; née Trombetta], (Maria) Teresa

(b San Benigno Canavese, nr Turin, 2 July 1784; d San Giorgio Canavese, 13 May 1855). Italian contralto. She made her début in 1801 at Turin. Engagements in Parma and Trieste followed and in 1803 she appeared in Paris, singing the title roles of Paisiello’s Nina and Paer’s Griselda. In the following year she sang Nina at La Scala, where she continued to appear during the next 20 years. From 1812, when she sang Isabella in the first performance of L’inganno felice in Venice, until her retirement in 1828, she specialized in Rossini roles. She created Ninetta, a soprano part, in La gazza ladra at La Scala (1817), but the contralto roles of Tancredi, Cenerentola and Isabella in L’italiana in Algeri were the most successful in her repertory. She appeared in London in 1819 under the name of Bellochi.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bello [Abello, Vello] de Torices [Torizes], Benito [Benitto]

(b Benavente, c1660; d Madrid, after 1717). Spanish composer. He was born into a noble family and probably studied with Andrés Lorente. He married Ana Pérez Daza y Brabo before 1687 and in that year was living at Alaejos. In 1691 he was in royal service as maestro de capilla of the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, and in 1696–7 of the royal church of S Cayetano. At some point, possibly before 1701, he became maestro de capilla of S Justo y Pastor in Alcalá de Henares, where he worked until 1714. In that year he was elected maestro of La Seo at Zaragoza. He was again in Madrid in 1718, as ‘maestro de música del Colegio del Rey’, his last known position. Bello de Torices is mentioned in Alaejos's necrology as the ‘great musician and composer’. His son, Juan de Alaejos, a Hieronymite monk at El Escorial from 1706 to 1752, was also a composer.

Bello de Torices's compositional style combines Spanish 17th-century traditions with a growing Italian influence. Works are found under a number of variants of his name, but some might be by other composers named Torices. The richest collection of his works, at El Escorial, was probably assembled by his son and includes four eight-part masses accompanied by two organs, 15 other Latin works and 17 villancicos; there are villancicos too, in other Spanish archives (E-Bc, PAL, SA, SE and V) and in Munich (D-Mbs). Bello de Torices was sensitive to text and a master of both imitative counterpoint and polychoral procedures. An excellent example of his work is the Christmas calends villancico Aves, flores, luces, fuentes (ed. in Laird, 1986, ii, 1–40), scored for three three-part choirs and continuo; the third choir includes two shawms and a bass wind instrument (probably a dulcian).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. de Larrea Palacín: ‘Catálogo de monjes músicos en El Escorial’, Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos, lxxi (1963), 390

S. Rubio and J. Sierra: Catálogo del Archivo de Música del Monasterio de San Lorenzo El Real de El Escorial (Cuenca, 1976, 1982), i, 224–31

D. García Fraile: Catálogo Archivo de Música de la Catedral de Salamanca (Cuenca, 1979)

P.R. Laird: The Villancico Repertory at San Lorenzo El Real del Escorial, c1630–c1715 (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1986), i, 273–9, 453–62, 559–60; ii, 1–40

P.R. Laird: ‘Los villancicos del siglo XVII en el Monasterio del Escorial’, La música en el Monasterio del Escorial: San Lorenzo de El Escorial 1992, 169–234

P.R. Laird: Towards A History of the Spanish Villancico (Warren, MI, 1997), 107–12

ROBERT STEVENSON, PAUL R. LAIRD

Bello Montero, Atanasio

(b Caracas, late 18th century; d after 1847). Venezuelan composer, educator and impresario. A disciple of Pedro Palacios y Sojo, he worked with the Venezuelan composers Luís Jumel and José María Izáza. With Jumel he founded a music academy that opened in Caracas on 22 October 1821; he and Izáza organized a philharmonic society in 1831. On 21 September 1834 Bello became director of the free music school founded by the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País which taught solfeggio and singing. In 1847 he took the first opera company to Bogotá. Among his most famous works is the Vigil and Mass of the Dead performed in 1842 on the removal of Bolivar’s ashes to Caracas.

WORKS

Sacred: Pange lingua, 1825; Lamentation to Our Lady of Sorrows, 1826; Vigil and Mass of the Dead, 1842; Ave maris stella; O vos omnes; Stabat mater; Estaba junto a la cruz; Grad and Off; Pésame a María santissima; Miserere; TeD; Lamentation for Wednesday of Holy Week; 2nd Lamentation; Mass; Mass, a 2vv; Tantum ergo

Other works: Los pepitos (juguete lyrico); National Song for 9 Feb 1843; National Song for 5 July 1845; Quien es esta, tono

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gazeta de Caracas (18 Oct 1821)

El venezolano (26 April 1843)

J.A. Calcaño: La ciudad y su música (Caracas, 1958/R)

Boletín del Archivo general de la nación [Caracas], no.210 (1970)

R. Günter, ed.: Die Musikkulturen Lateinamerikas im 19. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1982)

F.C. Lange, ed.: Compositores venezolanos (Caracas, 1994)

SHARON E. GIRARD

Bellona and Rennell.

See Melanesia, §IV, 3(ii).

Belloni, Giuseppe

(b Lodi, nr Milan, c1575; d after 1606). Italian composer. The only information about him is drawn from the dedication of his op.1 – that he was a priest from Lodi, who entered the Congregazione della Beata Vergine Annunziata established in the Brera Jesuit college in Milan. He was a competent composer in a traditional polyphonic style.

WORKS

Missarum liber I … et missa pro defunctis, 5vv, bc (org), op.1 (Milan, 1603)

Psalmi ad Vesperas, 5vv, op.2 (Milan, 1604)

Missa, motecta, 8vv, bc (org), op.3 (Venice, 1604)

Vespertini omnium solemnitatum psalmi, 5vv, bc (org), op.4 (Milan, 1605)

Messa e motetti … a 2 chori, 6vv, bc (org), op.5 (Venice, 1606)

1 motet, 8vv, 1612²

4 motets, D-As

MARIANGELA DONÀ

Bellosio, Anselmo

(b Cassine, Piedmont, 2 Dec 1743; d Venice, 21 Aug 1793). Italian violin maker. He was probably a pupil of Giorgio Seraphin, whose business he took over in 1777, having begun making instruments in Venice several years earlier (he had gone there to serve as a footman). The neatness and fine quality of Bellosio’s instruments led many experts to believe that his working period was a generation earlier. By his time the craft of violin making had fallen into decline in Italy, but in spite of limited demand Bellosio worked on in the best tradition, continuing to finish his violins with the old Venetian varnish. His instruments are rare, though many have been attributed to better-known names. He had two pupils, Pietro Novello (b 1759; d after 1800) and Marc Antonio Cerin (b Venice, 18 June 1774; d after 1808). Cerin had much to do with the manufacture of the later instruments labelled by Bellosio and was almost his equal as a maker. After his master’s death he was comparatively inactive, and as no successor came forward the great 18th-century Venetian school of violin making can be said to have died out in his shop under the clock tower in the Piazza S Marco.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Toffolo: Antichi strumenti veneziani 1500–1800: quattro secoli di liuteria e cembalaria (Venice, 1987)

Les violons: lutherie venitienne, peintures et dessins, Hôtel de Ville, Paris, 21 March – 7 May 1995 (Paris, 1995) [exhibition catalogue]

CHARLES BEARE

Bellotta, Francesco

(b Palermo, 1834; d Palermo, 1907). Italian harpist and composer. He studied the double-action harp under Filippo Scotti (1790–1865) and Scotti's son Alfonso at the Naples Conservatory. He founded the first school of modern harp at the conservatory in Palermo, as Filippo had done in Naples. The brilliant capriccio for harp, Il ritorno del pastore, is representative of some 50 solos he wrote on Neopolitan and Mediterranean fantasias, canzonas, studies and opera transcriptions for harp, harp and piano, and piano, which were published by Sandron, Cottrau, Mariani, Ricordi and Ashdown.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PazdírekH

B. Bagatti: Arpa e arpisti (Piacenza, 1932), 65

M.G. Scimeca: L’arpa nella storia (Bari, 1938), 128

A.N. Schirinzi: L’arpa storia di un antico strumento (Milan, 1961), 70

ALICE LAWSON ABER-COUNT

Bellou, Sotiria

(b Halia [now Drosia], Halkida, 1921; d Athens, 1997). Greek rebetika musician. One of the best known performers of rebetika songs, she was famous for her deep, earthy voice. At the age of 19, after a disastrous marriage, she fled to Athens where she became involved with the left-wing opposition to the German occupation. She also began singing and playing the guitar and was discovered by the well-known rebetika composer Vassilis Tsitsanis. He wrote two songs, Otan pineio sti taverna (‘When you drink in the tavern’) and To paidi pou eixes filo (‘The boy who was your friend’), which established her reputation.

From 1948 to 1956 she was at the height of her fame. An unusually free spirit and openly lesbian, Bellou was the first woman to perform at the legendary rebetika club Jimmy the Fat’s. As the rebetika lost their popularity she was abandoned by the record companies and survived by selling cigarettes in taverns. In 1966 she began a new recording career, collaborating with well-known Greek composers such as Dionysis Savvopoulos and making some of her best recordings for Lyra records. Bellou performed regularly with Vassilis Tsitsanis in her later years at the Harama Club. Among her best known songs are Yramma tha steilo sto theo (‘I’ll send a letter to God’), Apopse kaneis bam (‘Tonight you’re dynamite’) and San pethano sto karavi (‘If I die on the boat’).

For bibliography see Rebetika.

GAIL HOLST-WARHAFT

Bellovacensis, Vincentius.

See Vincent de Beauvais.

Bellows.

Properly speaking, the bellows of an organ or a harmonium supply wind directly to the soundboards (see Wind-chest), their own capacity being the only storage of wind against a large demand. Because at least two rectangular bellows are needed to wind an organ they have been called ‘a pair of bellows’. Wind is driven by the bellows' weighting (stone or lead weights, or a person standing on them) directly through wind-trunks into the pallet-boxes of the various soundboards; without an intervening reservoir to store and regulate the air, the resulting pressure may fluctuate.

The word appears to be a part of or an abbreviation of ‘blast-belly/bag’ (blaest-bel(i)g), which may indicate that early forms were bags made from animal belly-skins; in 1398, John de Trevisa defined ‘organum’ as being an instrument blown ‘wyth bellowes’. Some early bellows were reinforced with hoops of pliable wood such as willow or ash; the resemblance of these hoops to belly-ribs gave the English name ‘ribs’ to the folding wooden parts of later hinged leather-and-wood bellows. Some of these were multi-fold and some single-fold (Spanbälge or Faltenbälge; the terms used in written descriptions were not usually precise). Another type was tall and square like a Chinese lantern (Mersenne, Harmonicorum libri, 1635–6): the top was raised by a pulley and the inflated bellows slowly collapsed, expelling wind through the trunk bellow. The ‘box-bellows’, in which a weighted box was driven down like a piston inside another box to expel air from it, avoided ribs altogether.

The introduction of a combined apparatus for small organs (probably late in the 17th century and certainly by Snetzler, 1742), in which wind was stored in a wedge-shaped Reservoir (a later term) and a single bellows beneath was used merely for blowing air into it by means of a pedal, effectively separated the wind-raising and -storage functions of the simple bellows. By the 1780s, small organs in clocks and barrel organs were fed by linked ‘cuckoo’ bellows (see Chamber organ); many reed organs and mechanical instruments with pneumatic mechanisms are provided with bellows operated by foot treadles. By the early 1800s in England, horizontal reservoirs of any but the smallest size were fed by two transverse bellows. These could be operated through crankshafts by a ‘circular handle’ (e.g. by Elliot and Buckingham, 1808, for All Saints' Church, Derby). Hydraulic pistons, powered by pressure from the water-mains, were used to raise feeder-bellows (from 1854), and steam-generated power, gas (1862), oil (Töpfer, 1855) or large electric motors (from 1888) were all employed in various ways. Finally, fan blowing (from about 1895), using efficient electric motors, made the use of bellows unnecessary, although not necessarily undesirable. For further discussion and illustrations, see Organ, §II, 11, esp. figs.13, 14 and 15. See also Concussion bellows.

The Harmonium in common use in India and Pakistan usually has a bellows at the back of the instrument that is pumped with one hand while the other fingers the keyboard. In common with the European harmonium, the reeds are blown by compression bellows; the American organ, however, is sounded by suction bellows which, by creating a partial vacuum, pull air through the reeds (see Reed organ). Several varieties of Bagpipe are winded by bellows strapped to the arm.

MARTIN RENSHAW/R

Bells, tubular.

See Tubular bells.

Belly [table, soundtable, soundboard, top plate]

(Fr. table; Ger. Decke; It. tavola).

The upper surface of the body of a string instrument. It is normally made of a species of pine or spruce of fairly fine and even grain, which runs along the length of the instrument. In bowed string instruments (viols and violins), the belly is arched (see Violin, fig.2); in plucked string instruments (lutes and guitars), the belly is flat. Folk instruments of the fiddle and lute families often have a skin soundtable (for example see Rabāb, with illustrations).

DAVID D. BOYDEN

Belly rail.

On a piano or harpsichord, the transverse, wooden brace that supports the front edge of the soundboard.

Belmonte

(fl c1480). Spanish composer. He wrote the three-voice canción Pues mi dicha non consiente preserved in the Cancionero Musical de la Colombina E-Sc 7–1–28; ed. in MME, xxxiii, 1971), compiled in the latter part of the 15th century. Almost nothing is known about him, although he may have been the Alfonso de Belmonte who was cantor at León Cathedral in the 1450s and 60s. He clearly knew Urrede's celebrated song Nunca fue pena mayor since he transposed its melody down an octave and used it as the tenor of his setting, which belongs stylistically to the generation of composers before Juan del Encina. It is possible that he moved in the same circles as Urrede, but his name has not come to light either in connection with the royal chapels, the court of the Duke of Alba, or Salamanca, so that this skilful song composer remains an enigmatic figure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSM

StrohmR

J.M. Alvarez Pérez: ‘La polifonía sagrada y sus maestros en la catedral de León Siglos XV y XVI’, AnM, xiv (1959), 39–62

G. Haberkamp, ed.: Die weltliche Vokalmusik in Spanien um 1500 (Tutzing, 1968)

TESS KNIGHTON

Bělohlávek, Jiří

(b Prague, 24 Feb 1946). Czech conductor. He studied with Celibidache at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts and began his career as assistant conductor of the Czech PO before winning a state conducting competition in 1970 and reaching the finals of the Karajan International Competition the next year. He was then appointed conductor of the Brno State PO, 1972–8, and chief conductor of the Prague SO, 1978–89. He made his North American début at Toronto in 1982 and his British début in 1987 (BBC Welsh SO) before becoming principal conductor and artistic director of the Czech PO, 1990–92. In 1994 he was appointed chief guest conductor of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Bremen, and the following year became principal guest conductor of the BBC SO. His performances are noted for their fluency, discipline and technical finish. He is an eloquent advocate of the music of Martinů, and conducted The Greek Passion at the Edinburgh Festival (1990) and The Epic of Gilgamesh in London (1995). Bělohlávek has made vivid, idiomatic recordings of works by Martinů, Fibich, Ostrčil and others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Clark: ‘Martinů Idol’, Classical Music (3 June 1989), 24–5

NOËL GOODWIN

Beloiu, Nicolae

(b Ocniţa-Dâmboviţa, 9 May 1927). Romanian composer. He studied composition at the Bucharest Academy of Music (1948–53) under Leon Klepper, while also attending university courses in mathematics and classes at the Institute of Architecture. These studies led to the formation of a well-ordered and meticulous music personality. After a period of work in the creative department of Romanian National Radio (1960–72), he took up a post at the Bucharest Academy of Music, teaching orchestration (from 1970) and serving as rector (1990–92).

His modal style is interspersed with elaborate chromatic harmonies, usually deployed in non-developmental structures and setting up tension through the interaction of melodic lines and harmonic clusters. His music displays a powerful sense of colour as well as an attraction to elaborate superimpositions resulting in massive blocks of sound. Painstaking and demanding, he composes slowly, with great attention to detail and careful revision. His most significant works are for orchestra.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Divertissement, 2 va, orch, 1953, rev. 1961; Conc., 2 vn, va, orch, 1959; Sym. no.1, 1967; Ritmuri citadine [Town Rhythms], 1970; Sym. no.2, 1977; Jubilaţii şi Lamento, str, brass, perc, 1978

Chbr and solo inst: Septet scenic, wind qnt, va, hp, 1969; Str Qt, 1982; Sonata, vn, 1984; Sonata, vc, 1993; Sonata, va, 1996

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Popovici: Muzica contemporana românească [Contemporary Romanian Music] (Bucharest, 1970)

G.W. Berget: Muzica simfonică contemporană [Contemporary Symphonic Music] (Bucharest, 1977)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Musicians of Romania] (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Bel'styukow, Syarhey Pyatrovich

(b Bolbasovo, Vitebsk province, 1956). Belarusian composer. He graduated from the Minsk Conservatory in 1980 having studied the piano with G.I. Shershevsky. Between 1982 and 1987 he studied composition; he then held an assistant lectureship and undertook postgraduate studies with Hlebaw. In 1992 he was appointed head of the music section and the conductor of the Teatr yunogo zritelya (‘Theatre of the Young Viewer’); in 1994 he became the deputy chief editor of the music and entertainment programmes of Belorussian Radio.

Bel'styukow strives for emotionally substantial music, and he values the symbolic ambiguity of artistic images and the theatrical expressiveness of form. He is drawn to stage improvisation (he has collaborated with theatre and cinema producers) and is absorbed in the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries, as in his two toccatas for piano and Pechal'noye prinosheniye Motsartu (‘A Sad Offering to Mozart’). He has a Romantic tendency to attempt the instrumental incarnation of ethical and philosophical problems. His closeness to the legacy of the Russian school shows itself in the symphony Gravyurï (‘Engravings’; 1990), and in his Second Symphony with bells (1993). The old Church Slavonic of the Bible translation by F. Skorina and the image of this Belorussian teacher are embodied in the chorus Tvar Skarïnï (‘The Face of Skorina’). The composer addressed philosophical problems of existence in his cantata Spadchina (‘Legacy’) and in his Vsenoshchnoye bdeniye (‘All-Night Vigil’).

Bel'styukov is attracted by the late 20th-century fascination with the acoustic metamorphosis of sound in time and space. His belief in the need for a synthesis of electronic music and acoustic instruments is realized in Muzïka dlya goboya i magnitnoy lentï (‘Music for Oboe and Magnetic Tape’; 1989), Strontsiy-90 (‘Strontium-90’; 1990) and in Muzïka morya (‘Music of the Sea’; 1993). His stylistic mobility bears testimony to the general activity in creative thought and is characteristic of late 20th-century Belorussian art.

WORKS

Stage: Snï Rognedï [The Dreams of Rogneda] (ballet, Bel'styukow), 1988; Stsyapan-vyaliki pan (children’s musical, A. Vol'sky), 1989; Derevaynnïy rïtsar [The Wooden Knight] (children’s op., G. Bulïk), 1990

Orch: Kamernaya muzïka [Chamber Music], ob, pf, str, 1983; Conc. Grosso, vn, va, vc, str, 1985; Simfonicheskiye variatsii na belorusskomu temu [Sym. Variations on a Belorussian Theme], 1987; Conc., ob, chbr orch, 1990; Sym. ‘Gravyurï’ [Engravings], chorus, orch, 1990; Sym. no.2, orch, bells, 1993; Sym. no.3, 1995; Kontsert-kaprichchio, fl, orch, 1995; Credo, fl, cimb, chbr orch, 1996; Pechal'noye prinosheniye Motsartu [A Sad Offering to Mozart], fl, pf, chbr orch

Chbr and solo inst: 4 miniatyurï [Four Miniatures], pf, 1979; 4 p'yesï [4 Pieces], ob, pf, 1982; Tamburin, vn, pf, 1983; Sonata, fl, pf, 1983; Toccata, pf, 1988; Toccata no.2, pf, 1989; Prelyudiya i fuga, pf, 1989; Muzïka dlya goboya i magnitnoy lentï [Music for Oboe and Magnetic Tape], 1989; Obrazï [Images], ob, pf, 1989; Strontsiy-90 [Strontium-90], fl, ob, vib, pf, cimbalom, vn, vc, 1990; Ėskizï [Sketches], fl, trbn, org/fl, ob, trbn, 1992; 5 p'yes [5 Pieces], pf, 1992; Muzïka morya [Music of the Sea], electronic music (1993); Dvoynik [The Double], conc., chbr ens, 1993

Choral: Svet solntsa [Light of the Sun] (M. Tank), cant., 1984; Nochnaya babochka ‘Myortvaya golova’ [The Death’s-Head Night Moth] (A. Tarkovsky), S, T, chorus, 1987; Vandrouniki [The Wanderers] (Ya. Kolos, Tank), 1988; Tvar Skarïnï [The Face of Skorina] (M. Strel'tsov), 1989; Zabïtïy bogam kray [The Region Lost to the Gods] (Kolos, Ya. Kupala), cant., 1992; Vsenoshchnoye bdeniye [All-Night Vigil], 1994

Songs (1v, pf): 3 romansa (Bo-Djui-I), 1979; 3 romansa (M. Bogdanovich), 1979; 4 stikhotvoreniya [Four Poems] (B. Akhmadullina), 1984

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Vsyo nachalos' s improvizatsiy’ [Everything began with improvisations], Literatura i mastatstva (13 April 1990)

‘Ya kompozitor, prodyuser i menedzher v odno i to zhe vremya’ [I am the composer, the producer and the manager all at one time], Mastatstva (1995), no.12, pp.15–17

L. Turbina: ‘Spasi nas, Bozhe’ [Save us, O God], Literatura i mastatstva (20 Oct 1995)

TAISIYA SHCHERBAKOVA

Beltramo di Fulgenzio.

See Quemar, Vincenzo.

Belwin-Mills.

American firm of music publishers. Belwin, Inc., was founded in 1918 by Max Winkler, and Mills Music Publishers started a year later under the aegis of Jack and Irving Mills; the two organizations merged as the Belwin-Mills Publishing Corporation in 1969, with Martin Winkler as director. Formerly located in Melville, New York, the company is now based in Miami and is one of the most important publishers of educational music, producing many widely-used piano series, a number of class band methods and material for teaching string instruments. The firm represents such composers as Creston, Crumb, Davidovsky, Dello Joio, Ellington, Vittorio Giannini, Gould, Holst, Menotti, Penderecki, Schuller, Sessions, Virgil Thomson, Toch and Villa-Lobos, and also issues popular music. Divisions of the company include J. Fischer, H.W. Gray, McAfee Music, Musicord Publications and Pro Art Publications. In 1985 Belwin-Mills was acquired by Columbia Pictures, who divided the firm’s printing and publishing concerns; during 1987–8 the printing arm was sold to Boston Ventures while the publishing company was purchased by the London-based Filmtracks firm (subsequently a subsidiary of EMI). Since 1988 the publishing company has been known as CPP/Belwin Inc., a name retained by Warner-Chappell Music, who have owned the company since 1994. The firm’s catalogue has continued to grow, expanding in particular on the education traditions associated with the Belwin name.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Winkler: A Penny from Heaven (New York, 1951)

M. Winkler: From A to X: Reminiscences (New York, 1957)

W. THOMAS MARROCCO, MARK JACOBS/R. ALLEN LOTT, LESLIE A. TROUTMAN/R

Belyayev [Belaieff], Mitrofan Petrovich

(b St Petersburg, 10/22 Feb 1836; d St Petersburg, 28 Dec 1903/10 Jan 1904). Russian music publisher. He was the son of Peter Abramovich Belyayev, a rich timber merchant, and was educated at the German-speaking Reform School in St Petersburg where he learnt the piano, violin and viola. When he was 15, he joined his father’s flourishing business. He became an active participant in an amateur symphony orchestra directed by L.W. Maurer, and after its dissolution on the death of its conductor in 1878 a nucleus of its members, including Belyayev, continued to meet. Here Belyayev first came into contact with the group’s conductors, Lyadov and Borodin. A wide range of contemporary Russian music was promoted to which Belyayev appears to have been exposed for the first time. Belyayev was introduced to Glazunov and after hearing his Symphony no.1 in 1882 resolved to publish it. He achieved this in 1886 despite opposition from Balakirev, who was seeking to have the work published by Jürgenson. This inaugurated a lasting struggle between Belyayev and the leader of The Five.

Belyayev had established a music publishing house in 1885, registering it in Leipzig as ‘M.P. Belaieff’ for copyright reasons. Admission to the catalogue was restricted to Russian nationals and those who had become naturalized. Between 1886 and 1904, music by 35 composers was published including Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov (these three were lured away from Bessel), Borodin, Cui and N.V. Shcherbachyov. Lyapunov, who eventually settled with Zimmermann, Balakirev’s publisher, is represented by an early set of piano pieces, and several posthumous works of Musorgsky appeared in 1890. Other main contributors to the catalogue included Grechaninov, Skryabin and Taneyev. In the years leading to Belyayev’s death and thereafter until the Revolution, the quantity of music published diminished and the admission of new composers slowed, though quality was maintained. He published Glière’s chamber works from 1904 onwards, Medtner’s Piano Sonata op.5 (1904), Stravinsky’s The Faun and the Shepherdess, op.2 (1908), and six orchestral works by Glinka in the early 1900s.

Between 1885 and 1903 full scores of at least 80 orchestral works, choral music, 15 operas and ballets were published, including Borodin’s Prince Igor, described as ‘the jewel in Belyayev’s crown’. Many of these works received their premières at the Russian Symphonic Concerts initiated by Belyayev in 1885 which were restricted to Russian music. Belyayev’s insatiable appetite for playing chamber music led to gatherings at his home, resulting in the composition of about 35 string quartets, some specially written, together with a few octets, sextets and quintets. A special feature of some of these was the use of the motif B–L–A–F as an act of homage; F.M. and S.M. Blumenfeld and Kopïlov also wrote piano pieces embodying the motif. Another Belyayev initiative was the Russian Quartet Evenings, effectively extensions of the Russian Symphonic Concerts, and in 1889 he promoted two concerts of Russian music in Paris.

Belyayev published virtually no church music, and issued only music of quality, anticipating the policy of Edition Russe de Musique. All of his publications were printed on superior paper with a distinctive grey wrapper, by C.G. Röder of Leipzig. Title-pages were often adorned with chromo-lithographed designs, many of high artistic value.

Rimsky-Korsakov, who had assumed control of the Belyayev enterprise on the death of the latter in 1903/4, retired in 1907 and was succeeded by N.A. Artsïbushev, a contributor to the catalogue from its outset. All music publishing passed into the control of the state after the Revolution, but the firm was resuscitated by Artsïbushev in western Europe and ultimately passed into the hands of C.F. Peters, Leipzig.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V.V. Stasov: ‘Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev’, RMG, ii (1895), 81–130

M.P. Belyayev i osnovannoye im muzïkal'noye delo [Belyayev and his founding of a music business] (St Petersburg, 1910)

M. Montagu-Nathan: ‘Belaiev: Maecenas of Russian Music’, MQ, iv (1918), 450–65

Pamyati Mitrofana Petrovicha Belyayeva: sbornik ocherkov, statey i vospominaniy [In memory of Belyayev: collection of studies, articles and recollections] (Paris, 1929)

B.L. Vol'man: Russkiye notnïye izdaniya XIX–nachala XX veka [Russian music publishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries] (Leningrad, 1970), 126–58

V. Traynin: M.P. Belyayev i yego kruzhok [Belyayev and his circle] (Leningrad, 1975)

G.L. Mouravieff: Der Musikverlag M.P. Belaieff: eine Stiftung wird Musikgeschichte 1885–1985 (Frankfurt, 1985)

R.B. Davis: The Beauty of Belaieff: a Catalogue of Details of Selected Publications (1885–1900), Barbican Centre, London, 3 Feb – 9 March 1987 (London, 1987) [exhibition catalogue]

RICHARD BEATTIE DAVIS

Belyayev, Viktor Mikhaylovich

(b Uralsk region, 6 Feb 1888; d Moscow, 16 Feb 1968). Russian musicologist, folksong scholar and music critic. He graduated in 1914 in composition from the Petrograd Conservatory, where he had studied with Glazunov, Lyadov and Jāzeps Vītols. Having joined the staff of the conservatory the previous year, he was appointed senior lecturer in 1916 and professor of theory in 1919. After the October Revolution he participated in the work of various state musical organizations, and in 1922, after moving to Moscow, he was elected a member of the Academy of Artistic Sciences. During the 1920s he was an active figure in the Association for Contemporary Music, whose journal Sovremennaya muzïka (‘Contemporary Music’) he edited together with V.V. Derzhanovsky and L.L. Sabaneyev. He also pursued a wide range of activities as a music critic, writing for Soviet and foreign publications. Belyayev taught at the Moscow Conservatory (1938–40, 1943–59), and in 1944 was awarded the honorary doctorate. From 1959 until the end of his life he was a senior research fellow at the Institute for the History of the Arts in Moscow.

Belyayev was one of the most distinguished representatives of Soviet musicology. Early in his career he wrote a large number of articles and brochures about eminent Soviet composers, including Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Vasilenko and Anatoly Aleksandrov, and also prepared for publication S.I. Taneyev’s incomplete Ucheniye o kanone (‘Studies about the Canon’, Moscow, 1929) and A.D. Kastal'sky’s Osnovï narodnogo mnogogolosiya (‘Principles of Folk Polyphony’, Moscow, 1948). His principal research interests were in ancient Russian music and the folk music of the different nationalities of the Soviet Union. Of particular importance is his pioneering work on the musical culture of central Asia, which he began to investigate during several visits to Ashkhabad, Tbilisi, Baku and other central Asian cities (1928–37), and during his evacuation to Tashkent during World War II. He prepared many modern editions of folksongs collected and published by 19th-century Russian scholars such as Trutovsky, Rupin and D.N. Kashin. He also edited many general books on music history and a number of folklore anthologies, notably new critical editions of 18th- and 19th-century collections.

WRITINGS

‘Fugi N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova op.17’, Muzïka, no.176 (1914), 282–91; no.177 (1914), 311–18

Kratkoye izlozheniye ucheniya o kontrapunkte i ucheniya o muzïkal'nïkh formakh [A short guide to the study of counterpoint and musical form] (Moscow, 1915, 2/1923)

Aleksandr Kostantinovich Glazunov: materialy k yego biografiya, i (Petrograd, 1922)

‘Skryabin i budushcheye russkoy muzïki’ [Skryabin and the future of Russian music], K novïm beregam, no.2 (1923), 9–13

‘Russkaya simfoniya i simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo N.Ya. Myaskovskogo’ [The Russian symphony and Myaskovsky’s symphonic works], SovM (1924), no.4, pp.78–86

S.V. Rakhmaninov: kharakeristika yego tvorcheskoy deyatel'nosti i ocherk yego zhizni [Rachmaninoff: the character of his creative life and a biographical essay] (Moscow, 1924)

‘Sovremennaya muzïka v Yevrope’ [Contemporary music in Europe], Sovremennaya muzïka, no.11 (1925), 22–5

Paul' Khindemit: ocherk [Paul Hindemith: an essay] (Leningrad, 1927)

Pervaya i vtoraya redaktsii ‘Borisa Godunova’ Musorgskogo [The first and second versions of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov] (Moscow, 1928; Eng. trans., 1928, as Musorgsky’s Boris Gudonov and its New Version)

with V.A. Uspensky: Turkmenskaya muzïka (Moscow, 1928/R)

ed.: S.I. Taneyev: Ucheniye o kanone [Studies about the canon] (Moscow, 1929)

Rukovodstvo dlya obmera narodnïkh muzïkal'nïkh instrumentov [Advice on the measurement of folk instruments] (Moscow, 1931)

Muzïkal'nïye instrumentï Uzbekistana [The musical instruments of Uzbekistan] (Moscow, 1933)

‘Narodnïye muzïkal'nïye instrumentï Azerbaydzhana’ [The folk instruments of Azerbaijan], Iskusstvo azerbaydzhanskogo naroda [Art of the Azarbaijani people] (Moscow, 1938), 56–66

Belorusskaya narodnaya muzïka [Belorussian folk music] (Leningrad, 1941)

‘Po povodu zapisey muzïki kavkazskikh gortsev S.I. Taneyeva’ [Taneyev’s transcription of the music of the Caucasian mountain dwellers], Pamyati Sergeya Ivanovicha Taneyeva [In memory of Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev], ed. V.V. Protopopov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947), 212–19

ed.: A.D. Kastal'sky: Osnovï narodnogo mnogogolosiya [Principles of folk polyphony] (Moscow and Lenningrad, 1948)

ed.: Shashmakom (Moscow, 1950–66) [5 vols.]

Ranneye russkoye mnogogolosiye [Early Russian Polyphony], Studia memoriae Belae Bartok sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956), 307–36; Eng. trans. (London, 1959), 311–29

Muzïkal'nïy fol'klor dunayskogo basseyna [Musical folklore of the Danube basin] (Zagreb, 1959)

Afganskaya narodnaya muzïka [Afghan folk music] (Moscow, 1960)

Drevnerusskaya muzïkal'naya pis'mennost' [Ancient Russian music notation] (Moscow, 1962)

Ocherki po istorii muzïki narodov SSSR [Essays on the musical history of the Soviet peoples] (Moscow, 1962–3; abridged Eng. trans. of vol.i, 1975)

ed. with B.V. Miller: Persidskiye tesnifï [Persian tasnifs] (Moscow, 1964)

‘Stikh i ritm narodnïkh pesen’ [The poetry and rhythm of folksongs], SovM (1966), no.7, pp.96–102

‘August Eichhorn, ein Pionier der Musikethnologie Zentral-Asiens’, MF, xxii (1969), 456–9

Sbornik Kirshi Danilova: opït restavratsii pesen [The Kirsha Danilov collection: an attempt at song restoration] (Moscow, 1969)

O muzïkal'nom folklore i drevney pis'mennosti [On musical folklore and ancient notation] (Moscow, 1971) [incl. a biographical article and short bibliography]

Musorgsky, Skryabin, Stravinsky: sbornik statey (Moscow, 1972) [collected articles]

Victor Michaylovich Belyayev: 1888–1968, ed. A.V. Belyayev and I.K. Travina (Moscow, 1990) [collection of essays]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V.M. Belyayev: ‘25 let nauchno-muzïkal'noy deyatel'nosti: tvorcheskiy samootchot’ [25 years of musical research: an autobiography], SovM (1937), no.6, pp.105–9

Yu.V. Keldïsh: ‘V.M. Belyayev’, SovM (1963), no.2, pp.142–3

B. Szabolcsi: ‘Viktor Mikailovich Belayev’, SMH, iv (1963), 411 only

B.L. Krader: ‘Viktor Mikhailovich Beliaev’, EthM, xii (1968), 86–100 [incl. bibliography]

G.B. Bernandt and I.M. Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke [Writers on music], i (Moscow, 1971) [incl. complete list of writings]

E. Alexeyev: ‘O dvukh tomakh Turkmenskoy muzïki i yeyo avtorakh’ [The two-volume Turkmen music and its authors], SovM (1973), no.10, pp.29–37

A. Temirbekova: ‘V.M. Belyaev i yego rol' v kazakhskom sovetskom muzïkovedenii’ [V.M. Belyayev and his role in Kazakh Soviet musicology], Izvestiya Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, seriya filolog., no.4 (1974), 49–52

O. Levashova: ‘Unikal'nïye opïtï restavratsii’ [Unique attempts at restoration], SovM (1988), no.5, pp.69–72

M. Lobanov: ‘Tayna stroficheskogo var'irovaniya’ [The mystery of strophic variation], SovM (1988), no.5, pp.72–7

V. Shchurov: ‘Zhivoy smïsl obryada’ [The living meaning of the ceremony], SovM (1988), no.5, pp.78–80

YURY KELDÏSH/IOSIF GENRIKHOVICH RAYSKIN

Bėlza, Igor' Fyodorovich

(b Kel'tse, Russia [now Kielce, Poland], 26 Jan/8 Feb 1904; d Moscow, 5 Jan 1994). Russian musicologist, composer and literary scholar. After studying composition with Boris Lyatoshyns'ky at Kiev Conservatory (1922–5), he went on to study philology at Kiev University. He then taught at Kiev Conservatory (1925–41), and in 1936 was appointed professor. He was also a professor at Moscow Conservatory (1943–9) and was on the staff of the Institute for the History of the Arts (1954–61). In 1961 he was appointed director of the culture department at the Institute for Slav and Balkan Studies in the USSR Academy of Sciences, later becoming a scientific consultant there from 1970 to 1989. He also served on a number of musical committees. In 1954 Bėlza was awarded the doctorate for his dissertation on Czech Classical music. He also received honorary doctorates from Prague University (1967) and the Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw (1983), and was an honorary member of a number of musical and literary societies in Europe. In addition to his literary studies he made a valuable contribution to research into the history of Czech, Polish and Slav music, and also published books, pamphlets and articles on many Russian composers including Lyatoshyns'ky, Rachmaninoff, Skryabin and Glièrê. His compositions include four symphonies, five piano sonatas, two cello sonatas, a string quartet, an orchestral overture, film music and vocal pieces. From 1965 until his death he was the founder chairman of the Academy of Sciences Dante Society and a member of the Pushkin Commission.

WRITINGS

Motsart (Kiev, 1941)

Handbook of Soviet Musicians (London, 1943/R, 3/1945)

A.P. Borodin (Moscow, 1944, 2/1946)

Sovetskaya muzïkal'naya kul'tura [Soviet musical culture] (Moscow, 1947)

Antonin Dvorzhak (Moscow, 1949)

Cheshkaya opernaya klassika [Czech Classical opera] (Moscow, 1951)

Mechislav Karlovich [Mieczysław Karłowicz] (Moscow, 1951)

Ocherki razvitiya cheshskoy muzïkal'noy klassiki [Essays on the development of Czech Classical music] (diss., U. of Moscow, 1951; Moscow, 1951)

Istoriya pol'skoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï [The history of Polish musical culture] (Moscow, 1954–72)

Iz istorii russko-pol'skikh muzïkal'nïkh svyazey [The history of musical relations between Russia and Poland] (Moscow, 1955)

Iz istorii russko-cheshskikh muzïkal'nïkh svyazey [The history of musical relations between Russia and Czechoslovakia] (Moscow, 1955)

R.M. Glier (Moscow, 1955, 2/1962)

Mariya Shimanovskaya [Maria Szymanowska] (Moscow, 1956, 2/1989)

Vitezslav Novak (Moscow, 1957)

Istoriya cheshskoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï [The history of Czech musical culture] (Moscow, 1959–73)

Friderik Frantsishek Shopen [Chopin] (Moscow, 1960, rev. 2/1968 by O.K. Loginova, 3/1991)

O slavyanskoy muzïke [Slav music] (Moscow, 1963)

Zabïtïye pol'skiye muzïkantï [Some forgotten Polish musicians] (Moscow, 1963)

Mikhal Kleofas Ogin'sky (Moscow, 1965, 2/1974)

ed., with A.S. Golemba and I.K. Loginova: Ė.T.A. Gofman: Kreysleriana: Zhiteyskiye vozzreniya Kota Mura: Dnevniki (Moscow, 1972) [incl. ‘Kapel'meyster Iogannes Kreysler’ [Kreisler, leader of the orchestra], 541–64]

‘Literatura romantizma i muzïka’ [The literature of romanticism and music], Yevropeyskiy romantizm, ed. I. Soter (Moscow, 1973), 471–87

Portrety romantyków [Portraits of the romantics] (Warsaw, 1974)

O muzïkantakh XX veka [On 20th-century musicians] (Moscow, 1979)

Aleksandr Nikolayevich Skryabin (Moscow, 1982/R)

‘Karol' Shimanovsky, yego rol' i znacheniye v razvitii pol'skoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï’ [Szymanowski, his role and significance for the development of Polish musical culture], Karol' Shimanovsky: vospominaniya, stat'i, publikatsii, ed. I. Nikol'skaya and Yu. Kreynina (Moscow, 1984), 8–24

Istoricheskiye sud'bï romantizma i muzïka [The historical fate of romanticism and of music] (Moscow, 1985)

Pushkin i Mitskevich v istorii muzïkal'noy kul'turï [Pushkin and Mickiewicz in the history of musical culture] (Moscow, 1988)

‘Obraz Shopena: pravda i vïmïsel’ [A portrait of Chopin: the truth and the fiction], Venok Shopenu, ed. L.S. Sidel'nikov (Moscow, 1989), 33–63

Friderik Shopen [Chopin] (Moscow, 1991)

‘Filosofskiye istoki obraznogo stroya “Prometeya”’ [The philosophical origins of the imagery structure of Prometheus], Uchyonïye zapiski Gosudarstvennogo memorial'nogo muzeya A.N. Skryabina, i, ed. O.M. Tompakova (Moscow, 1993), 70–77

‘Prometeizm i obraz Prometeya v tvorchestve Skryabina’ [Prometheism and the image of Prometheus in the creative work of Skryabin], A.N. Skryabin: chelovek, khudozhnik, mïstitel', ed. I. Belza (Moscow, 1994), 226–40

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.B. Bernandt and I.M. Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke [Writers on music], i (Moscow, 1971)

B.A. Rïbakov, ed.: Slavyane i zapad: sbornik statey k 70-letiyu I.F. Bėlzï [The Slavs and the West: anthology of articles on the 70th birthday of Bėlza] (Moscow, 1975) [incl. A.A. Sidorov and V.I. Zlïdnev: ‘I.F. Bėlza kak istorik kul'turï’ [Bėlza as a cultural historian], 5–10; Y. Plavets: ‘Issledovatel' i drug cheshskoy i slovatskoy muzïki’ [The friend and scholar of Czech and Slovak music], 11–14]

V. Rogovsky: ‘Stroitel' kul'turï’ [The constructor of culture], Sirena i Moskovskiye kholmï, ed. E.I. Safanov and V.I. Shugayev (Moscow, 1988), 59–76

Z. Bėlza-Gulinskaya: ‘Bïloye pamyat' voskresit …’ [The memory conjures up the past …], Uchyonïye zapiski memorial'nogo muzeya A.N. Skryabina, ii, ed. O. Tompakova and N. Nonofilova (Moscow, 1995), 30–55

G. Wiśniewski: Igor Bėlza (Poznań, 1996)

LEV GINZBURG/LYUDMILA KORABEL'NIKOVA

Bembo, Antonia

(b ?Venice, c1640; d Paris, c1720). Italian composer and singer. Documents in Venice corroborate the ‘autobiography’ provided by the dedications of her six volumes of manuscript music, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: she was the only child of the doctor Giacomo Padoani and in 1659 married Lorenzo Bembo, a Venetian nobleman. Before 1676 she moved to Paris, where she sang for Louis XIV, who awarded her a pension, enabling her to live in the community of the Petite Union Chrétienne des Dames de Saint Chaumont. She composed in most of the contemporary vocal genres: opera, serenata, aria, air, secular and sacred cantata, grand and petit motet. Her first collection, Produzioni armoniche, consists of 41 arias and cantatas on Italian, French and Latin texts, mainly for soprano and continuo (1 ed. C. Fontijn, Fayetteville, AR, 1999; 1 ed. in J.G. Paton, Italian Arias of the Baroque and Classical Eras, Van Nuys, CA, 1994; 3 ed. in Fontijn, 1996). Bembo’s Italian musical training is reflected here in vocal virtuosity, madrigalisms, long melismas and expressive dissonance. Book 2 is dedicated to Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, Duchess of Burgundy, on the occasion of the birth of the first Duke of Brittany in 1704. It contains a three-voice Te Deum and a five-voice Italian serenata (‘un picciolo divertimento’), revealing a firm grasp of musical structure, melodic control and harmonic modulation. The characteristics of books 3–6 testify to the many years that Bembo lived in France. Book 3 contains two motets, a five-voice setting of the Te Deum (a grand motet in the style of Lully and Lalande; ed. W. Führlinger, Altötting, 1999) and a three-voice setting of Psalm xix. The 1707 opera Ercole amante, the only manuscript bearing a date, sets Buti’s libretto, as used by Cavalli, Bembo’s teacher, in 1662. Though similar to contemporary Italian operas, Bembo’s work attests to its French provenance in its use of chorus, ouverture and instrumental dance forms. The French idiom is particularly evident in her last book, Les sept pseaumes de David, which marks a return to vocal chamber music and shows her command of gallic prosody with numerous metrical changes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Y. Rokseth: ‘Antonia Bembo, Composer to Louis XIV’, MQ, xxiii (1937), 147–69

M. Laini: Le ‘Produzioni armoniche’ di Antonia Bembo (diss., U. of Pavia, 1987)

C.A. Fontijn: Antonia Bembo: ‘Les goûts réunis’, Royal Patronage, and the Role of the Woman Composer during the Reign of Louis XIV (diss., Duke U., 1994)

C.A. Fontijn: ‘In Honour of the Duchess of Burgundy: Antonia Bembo’s Compositions for Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy’, Cahiers de l’Institut de recherches et d’histoire musicale des états de Savoie, iii (1995), 45–89

M. Laini: ‘Antonia e le altre: percorsi musicali femminili nella Venezia del Sei-Settecento’, Ecco mormorar l’onde: la musica nel Barocco, ed. C. de Incontrera and A. Zanini (Monfalcone, 1995), 138–69

C. Fontijn: ‘Bembo, Antonia’, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, ed. M.F. Scheifer and S. Glickman, ii (New York, 1996), 201–16

M. Laini: ‘La musica di Antonia Bembo; un significativo apporto femminile alle relazioni musicali tra Venezia e Parigi’, Studi musicali, xxv (1996), 225–81

C. Fontijn: ‘Antonia Padoani Bembo (c1640–1720)’, Goldberg Early Music Magazine, vi (1999), 110–13

C. Fontijn: Desperate Measures: the Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo (forthcoming)

CLAIRE FONTIJN, MARINELLA LAINI

Bembo, Pietro

(b Venice, 20 May 1470; d Rome, 11 Jan 1547). Italian literary theorist and poet. Born into the Venetian aristocracy, he had a typical humanist upbringing broadened by frequent journeys with his father, an ambassador of the Venetian republic. After two years (1492–4) spent studying Greek in Messina, Bembo spent a year at the University of Padua. In 1497 he went to Ferrara, remaining at the d'Este court for two years. There he took an active part in courtly life and made many friends, including Ariosto, Tebaldeo and the Latin poet Ercole Strozzi. At that time he began his first vernacular work, Gli asolani.

In 1501 Aldo Manuzio published Bembo's edition of Petrarch; in 1502 his edition of Dante appeared. Both are volumes of fundamental importance in Italian philology and represent the foundation of Bembo's interest in Tuscan as a literary language. During another stay in Ferrara (1502–3) he met Lucrezia Borgia, the new wife of Alfonso d'Este; their brief relationship was the most celebrated of his love affairs.

Gli asolani (Venice, 1505), a dialogue on the theme of love, has a courtly setting like that of Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano. The work has many echoes of Boccaccio, but the poems interspersed throughout it are in illustration of Petrarchan themes. An example is a section (bk 1, chap.13) devoted to the theme of lovers torn by conflicting emotions; the two poems in this part, Quand'io penso al martire and Voi mi poneste in foco, were much favoured by madrigalists. Bembo's ideal for the musical performance of his poetry was at that time a solo female singer accompanied by the lute (bk 2, chap.25). This ideal was personified when in 1505 he met Isabella d'Este and sent her some poetry to be ‘recitato et cantato’ by Isabella herself. Two poems from Gli asolani were set to music at this time, appearing in Petrucci's seventh and eleventh frottola volumes.

Bembo spent some years (1506–12) at the court of Urbino. During this period he wrote the Stanze for a carnival (later set to music in its entirety by Jacques du Pont and in part as madrigal cycles by Wert and Andrea Gabrieli) and began his greatest work, the Prose della volgar lingua. In 1513 he became secretary to Pope Leo X, and he remained in papal service in Rome until the pope's death in 1521, when he returned to Venetian territory and took up residence in Padua. The Prose della volgar lingua appeared in Venice in 1525, dedicated to the Medici pope Clement VII. In its championship of Petrarch as the perfect literary model this work was of far-reaching importance. Though Bembo did not deal directly with music his poetic categories of dignity (gravità) and charm (piacevolezza) and his stress on the sound of words, on the need for Ciceronian decorum and variety of language, and on the importance of rhyme choice and of varied schemes for verse lengths are thought to have been of determining influence in shaping the aesthetic stance of the early madrigal.

During Leo X's reign Bembo's influence was felt by the musician and printer Antico and members of the papal chapel. In the years he spent at Padua his circle included many Venetian men of letters, among them a group frequented by Willaert; the madrigals of Willaert's Musica nova may represent the most impressive musical testament to the power of Bembo's Petrarchist theories.

Bembo realized a lifelong ambition when he became a cardinal in 1539. His last years were spent chiefly in Rome, where his ecclesiastical duties were accompanied by literary work, chiefly revisions of his Latin and Italian writings. His poetry (which includes the Rime, Venice, 1530, in addition to the above-mentioned works) was set by many madrigalists, from Arcadelt through the Venetians in Willaert's circle (Perissone, Donato) and Roman-trained musicians (Palestrina, Monte) to later composers such as Ingegneri, Monteverdi and Gagliano. His theories of language must be considered the chief literary impulse in the rise and development of the 16th-century madrigal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (C. Dionisotti)

EinsteinIM

M. Marti, ed.: Pietro Bembo: Opere in volgare (Florence, 1961)

D.T. Mace: ‘Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal’, MQ, lv (1969), 65–86

G. Padley: Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1988)

P. Sabbatino: La ‘scienza’ della scrittura: dal progetto del Bembo al manuale (Florence, 1988)

M. Feldman: City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, 1995)

JAMES HAAR

Bemetzrieder, Anton [Antoine]

(b Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin, 26 March 1739; d London, after 1808). French theorist and teacher. After obtaining degrees in philosophy (1760) and law (1762) from the University of Strasbourg, he established himself in Paris in 1766 and began to study music. In 1769 he met Diderot, whose daughter became his harpsichord and harmony student. His first work, Leçons de clavecin, et principes d’harmonie, was a tremendously successful dialogue-form treatise, which was edited and endorsed by Diderot. He continued publishing pedagogical works in French until he left Paris in 1781, moving to London, where he taught music and expanded, re-edited and translated his earlier works. He also wrote on music education, mathematics, philosophy and ethics.

In his writings Bemetzrieder emphasized the importance of improvisatory skills in combination with contemporary continuo practice. In his later works he developed these ideas in a four-stage pedagogical process which comprised the art of reading music, accompaniment, virtuoso performance and composition. He saw composition as the creative application of an analytical process of ‘decomposition’, which used grammatical models for phrase structure and a reductive harmonic signifier called the basse générale. He taught students to understand musical discourse by analysing chains of chords in various types of harmonic phrases. Although his speculative theory was built on the idea of the major triad being generated by the resonating body, he presented his system as a rejection of Rameau’s work and of mathematical calculation. In his contribution to the quarrel between the Gluckists and Piccinnists, Le tolérantisme musical (1779), Bemetzrieder took up a neutral position, arguing for an international operatic aesthetic.

WORKS

A Specimen of Composition Useful to the Performer and Singer and Very Curious for a Composer (London, c1786)

Humble Petition of Sophia, Frances and Louisa B*** to the Honourable Chiefs of the Three Musical Armies, 6vv (London, 1786)

The ABCD of Music, kbd (London, 1787)

Fugue, Sextuor, Sonatinas, Duets, Trios, Quartets, Quintets & Septuors, 6vv, hpd/org (London, c1787–92) [new edn of earlier works]

A New Singing Book in French and English, 1v, hpd (London, c1792–4)

The Gamut and Common Chord in All Keys Fingered for the Harpsichord with Various Lessons from Different Authors (London, c1792–4)

The Art of Modulating Illustrated in One Grand Lesson and Two Preludes, kbd (London, c1796–8)

Twelve Lessons, pf (London, 1802)

Musical Poem, 1v, pf/hp (London, n.d.)

WRITINGS

only those relating to music

Leçons de clavecin, et principes d’harmonie (Paris, 1771/R; Sp. trans., 1775; Eng. trans., 1778–9, as Music Made Easy to Every Capacity [with preface by Diderot; 1st edn. repr. in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat, xii (Paris, 1876), 171–534]

Lettre…à MM.***., musiciens de profession, ou Réponse à quelques objections (Paris, 1771)

Lettre…à M. le baron de S***, concernant les dièzes et les bémols (Paris, 1773)

Traité de musique concernant les tons, les harmonies, les accords et le discours musical (Paris, 1776, 2/1780 as Discours théorique sur l’origine des sons de l’octave; Eng. trans., 1779)

Réflexions sur les leçons de musique (Amsterdam and Paris, 1778, 2/1781 as Méthode et réflexions sur les leçons de musique)

Le tolérantisme musical (Paris, 1779)

Nouvel essai sur l’harmonie, suite de Traité de musique; Exemples des principaux éléments de la composition musicale (Paris, 1779–80, 2/1781)

Précis d’une nouvelle méthode pour enseigner la musique/Abstract of a New Method of Teaching the Principles of Music (London, 1782, 2/1782 as Principes et méthode de musique)

Précis des talens et du savoir du musicien (London, 1782, 2/1783 as Precis d’une nouvelle méthode de musique; Eng trans., 1783)

Nouvelles leçons de clavecin ou instruction générale/New Lessons for the Harpsichord (London, 1782, 2/1783, 3/c1798, 2 vols. as i: Nouvelles leçons de clavecin ou piano-forte, ii: La science et la pratique de l’harmonie à la portie de tout le monde)

A New Guide to Music (London, c1795) [in Fr. and Eng., with 24 lessons]

A Complete Treatise on Music (London, 1800–03, 2/1803 as A New Short & Easy Way to Various Branches of the Musical Science)

The Art of Tuning our Instruments (London, c1808–10)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

Grove 6 (A. Cohen)

J.-M. Quérard: La France littéraire, ou Dictionnaire bibliographique, i (Paris, 1827), 270–71

A. Jovicevich: ‘A Forgotten Text by Diderot: a Review of the Traité de Musique… of Antoine Bemetzrieder’, French Review, xlvi (1972), 271–7

J. Gribenski: ‘A propos des Leçons de clavecin (1771): Diderot et Bemetzrieder’, RdM, lxvi (1980), 125–78

G. Poitry: ‘Les Leçons de clavecin et principes d’harmonie: un ouvrage à plusieurs mains’, Diderot, les beaux-arts et la musique (Aix-en-Provence, 1986), 209–20

C. Gessele: The Institutionalization of Music Theory in France: 1764–1802 (diss., Princeton U., 1989), 78–89, 95–108

C. Verba: Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue 1750–1764 (Oxford, 1993), 101–11, 147–52

CYNTHIA M. GESSELE (with JEAN GRIBENSKI)

Bemi.

See B mi.

Bemol

(Sp.; Fr. bémol; It. bemolle).

See Flat.

Bemus.

Annual festival held from 1970 in Belgrade.

Bena, Augustin

(b Pianu-Alba, 9 Oct 1880; d Cluj, 10 Jan 1962). Romanian composer. He was first taught music at home, then at Blaj with Iacob Mureşianu, at Braşov with Max Krause and at Sibiu with Hermann Kirchner. Later, he studied at the Berlin Hochschule with Max Bruch (1903–5) and the Bucharest Conservatory (1905–6) with Georgescu Kiriac (conducting) and Castaldi (composition). After studies in philosophy and philology, he obtained a doctorate in the latter at the University of Cluj. Initially, his career was divided between teaching music and conducting choirs in schools and festivals in the towns of Sibiu and Nǎsǎud. Later he became a professor at the Cluj Conservatory, where he was rector (1925–40), holding a prominent position in the musical and educational life of Transylvania. He also was curator of the Music History Museum at the Cluj Conservatory.

His output includes vocal-orchestral notes such as Ave Maria (1906) and Suspine (‘Sighs’, 1910), and a Serenade for string orchestra (1906). However, his favoured field remained choral music. He composed in a homophonic, unpretentious style which achieved considerable local popularity. His most important choral works, based on the distinctive features of Romanian folk music, include La fântânǎ (‘At the Fountain’), Pe Mureş şi pe Târnavǎ (‘On the Mureş and the Târnavǎ’) Flori de nufǎr (‘Water Lilies’) and Eu mǎ duc, codrul rǎmâne (‘I am Going, the Woods are Staying’). The simplicity of the harmonic structure and the predominance of the melodic element can also be found in his religious works such as the Liturghia for mixed chorus (1912).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.L. Ivela: Dicţionar muzical ilustrat (Bucharest, 1927)

G. Sbarcea: ‘Augustin Bena’, Muzica, xii (1962)

D. Popovici: Muzica coralǎ româneascǎ [Romanian choral music] (Bucharest, 1966)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Musicians of Romania] (Bucharest, 1982)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Beňačková(-Cap), Gabriela

(b Bratislava, 23 March 1944). Slovak soprano. She studied in Bratislava, making her début in 1970 at the National Theatre, Prague, as Natasha (War and Peace). In 1975 she first sang Jenůfa, a role she has repeated many times in Europe and the USA. She made her Covent Garden début in 1979 as Tatyana (Yevgeny Onegin), returning as Leonore (Fidelio), and her Metropolitan début in 1991 as Kát'a followed by Mimì, Jenůfa, Leonore and Rusalka. Her repertory also includes such roles as Desdemona, Mařenka, Manon Lescaut, Marguerite (Gounod's Faust), Aida, Elsa, Ariadne and Smetana's Libuše, which she sang at the reopening of the Prague National Theatre in 1983. Beňačková has a beautiful, vibrant voice and sings with great involvement, especially in Czech music. She has recorded several of her major operatic roles, and is an admired soloist on disc in works such as Dvořák's Requiem and Stabat mater, Janáček's Glagolitic Mass and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Benade, Arthur (Henry)

(b Chicago, 2 Jan 1925; d Cleveland, 4 Aug 1987). American acoustician. His parents being missionaries, he spent much of his childhood in Lahore. After returning to the USA to study at Washington University, St Louis (AB 1948, PhD 1952), Benade was appointed in 1952 to the physics faculty at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, which later became Case Western Reserve University. Promoted to a full professorship in 1969, he continued in that post until shortly before his death. A skilled woodwind player, he had an exceptional ability to relate the results of acoustical research to the practical requirements of musicians and musical instrument makers. Benade established a research programme which made many fundamental contributions to the understanding of the operation of wind instruments. Also active in string instrument research, he was a founding member of the Catgut Acoustical Society and its president between 1969 and 1972. Through his technical papers, and through the hospitality which his laboratory afforded to foreign visitors, Benade was a major influence on a generation of music acousticians, and in popular articles and books he introduced a much larger public to the basic science of musical instruments. The Acoustical Society of America awarded him its Silver Medal in 1984 and its Gold Medal posthumously in 1988.

WRITINGS

Horns, Strings, and Harmony (New York, 1960/R)

‘On the Mathematical Theory of Woodwind Finger Holes’, JASA, xxxii (1960), 1591–608

‘The Physics of Woodwinds’, Scientific American, cciii/4 (1960), 144–54; repr. in The Physics of Music, ed. C.M. Hutchins (San Francisco, 1978)

‘The Physics of Brasses’, Scientific American, ccxxix/1 (1973), 24–35; repr. in The Physics of Music, ed. C.M. Hutchins (San Francisco, 1978)

Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics (New York, 1976, 2/1990)

with W.B. Richards: ‘Oboe Normal Mode Adjustment via Reed-Staple Proportioning’, JASA, lxxiii (1983), 1794–803

with S.N. Kouzoupis: ‘The Clarinet Spectrum: Theory and Experiment’, JASA, lxxxiii (1988), 292–304

‘Woodwinds: the Evolutionary Path since 1700’, GSJ, xlvii (1994), 63–110

MURRAY CAMPBELL

Benary, Barbara

(b Bay Shore, NY, 7 April 1946). American composer, performer, instrument builder and ethnomusicologist. She received the BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and the MA and PhD from Wesleyan University, where she studied Indonesian and Indian music. She has performed with the ensembles of Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, Alvin Lucier, Philip Corner and Daniel Goode. In 1976 she co-founded, with Corner and Goode, the Gamelan Son of Lion, New York, a new music collective and repertory ensemble under her direction. In addition, she has built several Javanese-style iron gamelans, including the instruments used by the Gamelan Son of Lion and Gamelan Encantada, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Benary’s compositional output has been primarily in the areas of ensemble and chamber music, and music for the theatre. She has described herself as a ‘part-time minimalist who also likes to write melody’. Many of her works integrate world music forms, structures and instruments with traditional Western materials. Her works for gamelan ensemble, which number more than 30, have been performed internationally. Karna: a Shadow Puppet Opera (1994) combines gamelan, vocal oratorio and Javanese wayang kulit (leather shadow puppets). She has also written theatre and dance scores for such companies as the New York Shakespeare Festival, Lenox Arts Theatre and the Bali-Java Dance Theatre. She describes her approach to music in D. Goode: ‘Braiding Hot-Rolled Steel: the Music of Barbara Benary’, Musicworks, no.56 (1993), 14–23. Her improvisational structures are published in her book System Pieces 1971–1992 (Hanover, NH, 1992).

WORKS

(selective list)

The Only Jealousy of Emer (chbr op, W.B. Yeats), 1966; Systems, improvisations, 1973–93; Gamelan Works, vols.1–4, 1974–94; Hot-Rolled Steel, gamelan, 1985; Sun on Snow, vv, insts, 1985; Karna: a Shadow Puppet Opera (chbr op), vv, insts, gamelan, 1994; Downtown Steel, wind, perc, 1995; Tintinnalogia, vn, pf, perc, 1995; Aural Shoehorning, b cl, perc, Javanese gamelan, 1997

Principal publishers: Frog Peak, American Gamelan Institute

JODY DIAMOND

Ben-Asher.

Family who in the 9th century, according to tradition, invented the Tiberian system of Hebrew Ekphonetic notation. See also Jewish music, §III, 2(ii).

Benatzky, Ralph [Rudolph Josef František]

(b Mährisch-Budweis [now Moravské–Budějovice, Czech Republic], 5 June 1884; d Zürich, 16 Oct 1957). Austrian-Moravian composer. In 1890 his family moved to Vienna, where he took up a military career which injury forced him to abandon in 1907. He then studied in Vienna, Prague and Munich, gaining a doctorate in German philology in 1911 and studying music with Mottl. Benatzky began a musical career as a writer of song lyrics and as conductor in Munich, before becoming director of a cabaret in Vienna and writing words and music for songs, particularly for the singer Josma Selim whom he married in 1914. These songs included the Viennese Ich muss wieder einmal in Grinzing sein (1915), and Benatzky also composed several operettas before moving to Berlin. There he concentrated on music for spectacular revue-style operettas, including Casanova (a Johann Strauss pastiche, 1928) and Im weissen Rössl (‘White Horse Inn’, 1930). For the latter work Benatzky wrote the bulk of the score including the title song, but others of the best-known numbers were by Robert Stolz, Robert Gilbert and Bruno Granichstaedten. Benatzky’s first wife died in 1930, and in 1933 he left Germany, moving to Paris, Vienna, Hollywood (1940) and Zürich (1948). He was buried in St Wolfgang, the setting of Im weissen Rössl. Apart from his stage music Benatzky composed some film scores, and is estimated to have produced over 5000 songs. His style was unambitious but catered admirably for the tastes of the time.

OPERETTAS

(selective list)

Casanova (3, R. Schanzer and E. Welisch), Berlin, Grosses Schauspielhaus, 1 Sept 1928 [arr. of music by J. Strauss, II]; Die drei Musketiere (2, Schanzer and Welisch, after A. Dumas père), Berlin, Grosses Schauspielhaus, 28 Sept 1929; Meine Schwester und ich (2, R. Blum and Benatzky, after G. Berr and L. Verneuil: Ma soeur et moi), Berlin, Komödienhaus, 29 March 1930; Im weissen Rössl (3, H. Müller and R. Gilbert, after O. Blumenthal and G. Kadelburg), Berlin, Grosses Schauspielhaus, 8 Nov 1930; incl. songs by Gilbert, R. Stolz and B. Granichstaedten

Bezauberndes Fräulein! (4, Benatzky, after P. Gavault: La petite chocolatière), Vienna, Deutsches Volkstheater, 24 May 1933; Axel an der Himmelstür (3, P. Morgan, A. Schütz and H. Wiegel), Vienna, An der Wien, 1 Sept 1936; Der Silberhof (Benatzky, after C. Birch-Pfeiffer: Grille), Mainz, Stadttheater, 4 Nov 1941

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GänzlEMT [incl. complete list of operettas]

O. Schneidereit: Operette von Abraham bis Ziehrer (Berlin, 1966)

R. Traubner: Operetta: a Theatrical History (New York, 1983)

V. Klotz: ‘Nach-Kakanische Operette um ’33 und ’38 Beispiel von Emmerich Kálmán und Ralf Benatzky’, Österreichische Musiker im Exil, ed. M. Wildauer (Kassel, 1990)

H. Hennenberg: ‘Es Muss was Wunderbares sein…’ (Vienna, 1997) [biography]

ANDREW LAMB

Bencard, Johann Kaspar

(bap. Würzburg, 30 Oct 1649; d Augsburg, 24 Dec 1720). German publisher. He started publishing in Frankfurt, and in 1670 took over the Jesuits’ academic press in Dillingen an der Donau. In 1694 he moved to Augsburg. He produced mainly theological literature, and also occasionally printed music, including masses and Tafelmusik by Samuel Friedrich Capricornus (1670–71), the Mirantische Mayen-Pfeiff by the Capuchin monk Laurentius von Schnüffis (1692, 1707) and religious works by the Benedictine monk Cajetan Kolberer (1709–10). Bencard’s widow and heirs in Augsburg and Dillingen produced a composition tutor by Justinus à Desponsatione BVM (1723).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Heitjan: ‘Die Buchhändler, Verleger und Drucker Bencard 1636–1762’, Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, xvi (1960), 1569

ADOLF LAYER

Bencini, Antonio

(b Rome; d Rome, c1748). Italian composer, probably the son of Pietro Paolo Bencini. Few details of his career in Rome are known; his position in 1742 as maestro di cappella of S Lorenzo in Damaso, in particular, is uncertain. The success which his music enjoyed is apparent from the number of copies of his works which survive in church archives in Rome, for example in S Maria in Trastevere, S Giovanni in Laterano and S Pietro (Cappella Giulia). However, the attributions are not always reliable: in the Cappella Giulia collection, for example, two copies of the same Magnificat have different attributions, one to Pietro Paolo Bencini and the other to Antonio. The dates of the librettos which he set to music suggest that he was not active after 1748.

Bencini, Pietro Paolo

WORKS

E quando, quando almo Signore al giorno (cant.), 3vv, insts, Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, 24 Dec 1729

Io dell’eterno sole (cant.), 4vv, insts, Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, 24 Dec 1730, I-Rc (Pt 1 only)

Le tre dee tornate in gara (serenata), Rome, 1730, lost, cited in RicordiE

La forza della divina grazia (M. Strinati), Rome, 1731

La morte di S Filippo Neri (orat, G. Cambogi), Rome, 1734, ?lost, cited in LaMusicaD

Di questo fatal fiume (componimento sagro per musica, F. Vanstryp), 4vv, insts, Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, 24 Dec 1736

Il sacrifizio d'Abramo (orat), Rome, 1736

Il Monte Parnasso (serenata), Rome, 1739, lost, cited in RicordiE

Gesù nato (orat, G.G. Terribilini), Bologna, 1742, I-Vsmc

Per la solenne esposizione del SS Sagramento, Foligno, 1744

La Maddelena al sepolcro (B. Trevisani), Rome, 1745

Solennizzandosi nell'almo Collegio Capranica (M. Golt), Rome, 1746

Giuseppe riconosciuto (P. Metastasio), Orvieto, 1748, Rcsg

S Elena al Calvario, Rome, n.d.

Mosè liberato dalla tirannia di Faraone (orat, Vanstryp), Rv

Per la nascita di N.S. Gesù Cristo (orat, Terribilini), Rv

Numerous masses, pss, Mag settings, motets, in A-Wgm, Wn, D-Bsb, I-Nc, Rsg, Rsmt, Rome, S Maria in Vallicella, Rvat; for complete list see MGG1 (H.J. Marx and W. Witzenmann)

For bibliography see Bencini, pietro paolo.

JEAN LIONNET

Bencini, Giuseppe

(fl 1723–7). Italian composer. In 1727 he served as virtuoso da camera to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence. His sole surviving works are four cantatas for solo soprano and instruments: Fileno, April s'intorn, Qual dispera tortorella, Impara a non temer and Consolati sul sasso (GB-Cfm) and a volume of Suonate per cimbalo (Mp). He is also credited (in SartoriL) with having written an oratorio, Il trionfo di Gedeone, performed at Florence, 1723, and an opera, Il Nerone, for the same city, 1727; both works are lost.

HANS JOACHIM MARX

Bencini, Pietro Paolo

(b ?Rome, c1670; d Rome, 6 July 1755). Italian composer. In 1690 he appeared for the first time at the general assembly of the Compagnia dei Musici di Roma, when he would have been between 18 and 20 years old. Several copies of his cantatas are dated 1696 and the libretto of his Latin oratorio, Susanna a propheta Daniele vindicata, for the Arcicon fraternita del SS Crocifisso, was published in 1698. L'innocenza protetta, his first oratorio in Italian, was composed for the brotherhood of Florentines in Rome in 1700. In 1702 Crescimbeni included Bencini among the most celebrated musicians in Rome, suggesting that the few works that survive from before this date represent only a small part of his output. In 1703 he was appointed maestro di cappella of the German church of Maria dell'anima (the church did not maintain a regular cappella so he only worked there on feast days). It was probably during this period that Bencini was noticed by the ambassadors of the emperor, for whom he later worked. On 28 May 1705 he was appointed assistant to Giovanni Bicilli, who had been maestro di cappella of S Maria in Vallicella since 1648. The death of Bicilli in October 1705 left Bencini in sole charge. From 1703 he took part in the tour of the maestri di cappella, organized by the Compagnia dei Musicisti. He was elected guardian of the company in September 1706, 1707, 1712 and 1715, serving for a year each time. In January 1727 he succeeded G.O. Pitoni as maestro di cappella of S Lorenzo in Damaso. When Pitoni died he also succeeded him as maestro of the Cappella Giulia at S Pietro on 1 February 1743. In 1749 the chapter of S Pietro appointed Niccolò Jommelli as Bencini's assistant. When Jommelli left Rome in 1752 he was replaced by G.B. Costanzi, who succeeded Bencini after his death.

Bencini's sacred music, despite its apparent simplicity, is characterized by an elegant vocality much appreciated by singers. The vast majority of his liturgical music survives in the Vatican archives and seems to have been written before his appointment at S Pietro. Although some solo arias, particularly in the psalms, contain sections in the galant style, he remained faithful to Baroque canons. His music was still in use at S Pietro at the beginning of the 19th century. The few surviving compositions which set Italian texts reveal a composer full of melodic inspiration, although he seems to have been rather timid in developing it.

WORKS

music lost unless otherwise stated

Susanna a propheta Daniele vindicata (orat, G.A. Magnini), Rome, Ss Crocifisso, 7 March 1698

L'innocenza protetta (orat, G. Buonaccorsi), Rome, 1700

L'Adrasto (favola boschereccia), Rome, 1702

De inopia copia (orat, F. Capistrelli), Rome, Ss Crocifisso, 1703

Salomon (sacred drama, F. Posterla), Rome, Ss Crocifisso, 14 March 1704

Le gare festose (Le gare festive) (serenata, Buonaccorsi), 3vv, insts, Rome, 24 Aug 1704, I-Rvat

Introduzione all' Oratorio della Passione (P. Ottoboni), Rome, 1706

La fama festeggiante (serenata, Buonaccorsi), 3vv, insts, Rome, ? Palazzo Grimani, 26 July 1707

Il sacrificio d' Abramo (orat, Buonaccorsi), Rome, Palazzo Cancelleria, 22 Feb 1708, GB-Mp

E quando o cielo (cant., P. Gini), 4vv, insts, Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, 24 Dec 1709

Già sorge il sol dalla marina (cant., I. de Bonis), 3vv, insts, Rome, Palazzo Apostolico, 24 Dec 1715

Oloferne (after Buonaccorsi: La Giuditta), Montefiascone, 1720

Componimento da cantarsi nel giorno del gloriosissimo nome, Rome, 1721

S Andrea Corsini (orat, Buonaccorsi), Rome, 1722

S Cecilia, Rome, 1728

La Jezabel (orat), Mp

Mosè esposto all'onde, Würzburg

Aminta e Dori, vv, bc, I-Rvat

c12 masses, c45 psalm settings, 5 Mag, 1 TeD, 16 grads, 20 ants, 17 offs, 21 hymns, various motets, in A-Wgm, Wn, D-Bsb, WDc, F-PPh, GB-Lbl, I-Nc, Rn, Rsq, Rvat, PL-WRu (according to Eitner); for complete list see MGG1 (H.J. Marx and W. Witzenmann)

At least 9 secular cants. (3 others by ‘Bencini’), in D-Hs, F-Pn, GB-Lbl, Mp, I-Mc, Nc, Rvat, US-CA; for complete list see MGG1 (H.J. Marx and W. Witzenmann)

2 arias in Recueil lyrique d'airs choisis (Paris, 1772)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

LaMusicaD

RicordiE

SartoriL

G.M. Crescimbeni: De comentarj … intorno alla sua istoria della volgar poesia (Rome, 1702), 239–40

A. Schering: ‘Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte des italienischen Oratoriums im 17. Jahrhundert’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 43–70

S. Gmeinwieser: Girolamo Chiti, 1679–1759: eine Untersuchung zur Kirchenmusik in S. Giovanni in Laterano (Regensburg, 1968)

H.J. Marx: ‘Römische Weihnachtsoratorien aus der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, xlix (1992), 163–99

J. Lionnet: La Cappella Giulia, i: I Vespri nel XVIII secolo (Lucca, 1995)

JEAN LIONNET

Benda.

Bohemian family of musicians, active in Germany.

(2) Franz [František] Benda

(3) Johann (Georg) [Jan Jiří] Benda

(4) Georg (Anton) [Jiří Antonín] Benda

(5) Joseph Benda

(6) Anna Franziska [Anna Františka] Benda [Hatašová]

(7) Maria Carolina Benda [Wolf]

(8) Friedrich (Wilhelm Heinrich) Benda

(9) Carl Hermann Heinrich Benda

(10) (Johann) Friedrich Ernst Benda

(11) (Bernhardine) Juliane Benda [Reichardt]

(12) Friedrich Ludwig Benda

JOHN D. DRAKE/ZDEŇKA PILKOVÁ (1, 3, 5, 8–10, 12), DOUGLAS A. LEE (2), JOHN D. DRAKE, THOMAS BAUMAN/ZDEŇKA PILKOVÁ (4), NANCY B. REICH (7, 11)

(1) Jan Jiří [Johann Georg, Hans Georg] Benda

(b Mstětice, Bohemia, 25 April 1686; d Nowawes, nr Potsdam, 4 Dec 1757). Village musician. A linen weaver, he married in 1706 Dorota Brixi of the well-known Bohemian musical family. Of their six children surviving infancy, five became musicians: (2) Franz, (3) Johann, (4) Georg, (5) Joseph and (6) Anna Franziska.

The removal of the Benda family to Prussia in 1742 was arranged by Frederick the Great at the instigation of Franz, Jan Jiří’s eldest son, who already held a prominent position in the king’s orchestra. It is not clear, however, how much this was due to a recognition of the whole family’s musical potential and how much to the religious persecution of the parents in Bohemia after a visit to Franz in 1734.

(2) Franz [František] Benda

(b Staré Benátky, Bohemia, bap. 22 Nov 1709; d Nowawes, nr Potsdam, 7 March 1786).Violinist and composer, son of (1) Jan Jiří Benda. His autobiography, written in 1763, presents details of his early training and the musicians with whom he associated during his long career; the documentation of his own activities and references to his associates make this one of the most frequently cited documents of the era.

As a youth Benda was an excellent singer, and this talent provided for much of his early musical education as well as for his material needs, starting in 1718 at St Nicholas’s in Prague, from 1720 in the Hofkapelle at Dresden. He returned to Prague in 1723 as an alto and student in the Jesuit seminary, where he began his first compositions, now lost. While participating in a performance of J.J. Fux’s Costanza e Fortezza, he was particularly impressed by the singing of Gaetano Ursini, whose style he emulated. The Jesuits permitted Latin texts to be added to these italianate arias, which Benda sang with great success and could still remember well into his later years. When his voice broke he returned to his parents’ home and began to focus his studies on the violin, particularly through studying the concertos of Vivaldi. At his father’s insistence he learnt the linen weaving trade, but he also played for dancing in taverns; he claimed later to have learnt much from a blind fiddler, particularly in matters of rhythm. Benda next held a series of appointments as a violinist in aristocratic households in Vienna, where he encountered many of the best musicians of the day. Together with several of these young musical friends, Benda ran away from his employers, eventually finding a position as Hofkapellmeister to Count Suchaczewsky in Warsaw, where he remained for more than two years. From this point his reputation as a musician and violinist preceeded him, and in 1732 he was invited to join the royal court orchestra in Warsaw, an offer which he accepted. However, dissatisfaction with his salary and duties led him to seek a better position, and the death of August II on 1 February 1733 provided an opportunity to return to Dresden; while visiting nearby Ruppin, he was engaged as violinist by Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia on 17 April 1733. During his early years in Frederick’s entourage Benda visited Dresden again, renewed his acquaintance with the violinist Johann Georg Pisendel and participated in performances with C.P.E. Bach and J.E. Goldberg. He remained to his death in the service of Frederick, following him to Rheinsberg in 1736 and then to Potsdam when Frederick assumed the throne in 1740. He was appointed Konzertmeister in the king’s Kapelle in 1771.

As a member of one of the outstanding musical establishments of the mid-18th century, Benda found himself in company with some leading musicians. He studied the composition and performance of adagios with Johann Gottlieb Graun, and later studied concerto writing with Johann’s brother, the Kapellmeister Carl Heinrich Graun. He continued to be recognized as a singer during the early years of his appointment, and in his autobiography related that he was expected to perform arias at court regularly. Benda evidently became a mainstay of Frederick’s orchestra. In his autobiography he estimated that he had accompanied the king, an avid flautist, in 10,000 concertos. His position was reflected clearly in the salary schedule for 1744–5, in which he ranked third, behind the Kapellmeister C.H. Graun and Konzertmeister J.G. Graun. Charles Burney described Benda as one of the prominent musicians at the court in Berlin, one who had ‘acquired a great reputation in his profession, not only by his expressive manner of playing the violin, but by his graceful and affecting compositions for that instrument’. J.F. Reichardt praised Benda as a performer who could ‘overwhelm and command the heart of his audience’. Benda’s stature was reflected in the publication of his death notice in the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen of 16 March 1786: ‘On the seventh of this month one of the most noteworthy and highly esteemed men of his time died, the royal Konzertmeister Franz Benda …. It is generally known that he was one of the greatest musicians, and that upon his instrument, the violin, he created an epoch.’

Few works by Benda were published during his lifetime. In 1763 he modestly listed his compositions as ‘80 violin solos, 15 concertos, a few symphonies and a considerable number of caprices’. More recent research has shown his total output to be considerably more extensive, but in the absence of a verified musical autograph, doubts remain over the attribution of works to individual members of the Benda family. Many of his works for violin and bass have embellishments written out in the fast movements as well as in the adagios. Burney noted that his manner of playing embellished slow movements was ‘so truly cantabile, that scarce a passage can be found in his compositions, which it is not in the power of the human voice to sing, and he is so affecting a player, so truly pathetic in an Adagio, that several able professors have assured me that he has frequently drawn tears from them in performing one’. Important as they are in the documentation of 18th-century performing practice, these embellishments, which are preserved in a number of archives, may have been prepared as only pedagogical examples; they were perhaps copied by Benda’s pupils or added to the solo line of violin sonatas in emulation of his style of playing.

Benda’s fame attracted many violin pupils after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and several later occupied important musical positions in northern Europe. Their influence coalesced to form a recognizable school of German violin playing that was founded on Benda’s own style and documented most clearly in his violin sonatas and caprices. Johann Adolph Scheibe (p.580) recognized Benda’s influence when he wrote that ‘Pisendel in Dresden, and Benda in Berlin, in regard to the violin, have been original geniuses and their own teachers, and one can call them the fathers of the violinists among the Germans, as was true of Tartini in Italy’. Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, in his translation of Burney’s The Present State of Music in France and Italy, maintained that ‘no violinist has exerted the influence of this excellent man, who created for us Germans an original style, and whose solos and concertos have represented music’s most worthy intention’ (iii, 91).

Of his six children who survived infancy, four became musicians: (7) Maria Carolina, (8) Friedrich, (9) Karl Hermann Heinrich and (11) Juliane.

WORKS

Thematic catalogue: D. Lee: Franz Benda (1709–1786): a Thematic Catalogue of his Works (New York, 1984)

Concs.: 14 for vn/fl, str, l II:1–3, 6–10, 12–14, 16–18, A-M, Wgm, B-Bc, D-Bsb, Ds, Dl, KA, MÜu, SWl; E, vn, str, l II:5, B-Bc; ed. J. Čeleda (Prague, 1927); 3 for fl, str, l II:4, 11, 15, all in D-KA, ed. in MAB, lxxx (1979), excerpt from l II:11 arr. va da braccio, A-M; 3 for vn, str, doubtful, l II:19, by G. Benda, lII:20, probably by J. Riepel, l II:21, probably by J. Benda, B-Bc, D-Dl, SWl, S-SKma; 6 concs., fl/vn, str, known only through catalogue citations

Other orch: Sinfonia, C, str, l I:1, D-LEm; ed. H. Förster (Leipzig, 1960); 9 other sinfonias, str, l I:2–10, B-Bc, CZ-Pnm, D-LEm, Bsb, Dl, S-Skma; Dragonermarsch, wind insts, pr. in 1764, pr. in MMg, xxxii (1900), 162–3; 4 sinfonias, l I:11–14, A-KR, D-RUl, S-L, Skma, doubtful, probably by G. Benda; 3 sinfonias, B-Bc, US-Wc, spurious: l I:15–16, by J.G. Graun, l I-17, by J.A. Hasse

Solo sonatas: e, fl, b l III:57 (Berlin, 1756), ed. in MAB, lx (1963); 6 sonates à violon seul avec basse, op.1, l III:1, 47, 51, 95, 98, 121 (Paris, 1763/R 1991 in ECCS, v), l III:98 and 121 ed. in MAB, lvii (1962); A, vn, b, l III:103, in Musikalisches Allerley, ix (Berlin, 1763), ed. L. Salter (London, 1985); at least 135 others, vn/fl, b, A-M, Wgm, Wn, B-Bc, CZ-Pnm, D-Bsb, DS, MÜu, SWl, DK-Kk, S-Skma, US-BEm, Wc, incl. C, vn, b, l III:2, ed. S. Gerlach and Z. Pilková (Munich, 1982); l III:25, 34, 40, 59, 83, 105, ed. in RRMCE, xiii (1981); l III:9, 47, 63, 83, 114, 130, ed. S. Gerlach and K. Röhrig (Munich, 1991); F, vn, b, l III:71, ed. A. Schering (Leipzig, 1909); G, vn, b, l III:82, A, vn, b, l III:109, both ed. in MAB, lvii (1962); a, vn, b, l III:116, ed. E. Chaumont (Paris, 1924); C, fl, b, l III:6, ed. K. Janetzky (Leipzig, 1967); 19 others, fl/vn, b, attrib. ‘Benda’, doubtful; 18, fl/vn, b, known only through catalogue citations

Vn: 16 caprices in Etude de violon ou caprices … de Messieurs François et Joseph Benda, i–(ii) (Leipzig, 1804); 28 caprices in Exercises progressifs pour le violin, iii (Leipzig, 1806), facs. ed J. Müller-Blattau (Stuttgart, 1957); 23 further caprices, pubd in Hohe Schule des Violinspiels, ed. F. David (Leipzig, 1867), 12 essercizi, ed. G. de Angeles (Milan, n.d.), Studien für die Violin (Berlin, n.d.); 1 caprice ed. J. Čeleda (Prague, 1960); 21 caprices, A-Wgm, CZ-Pnm, D-Bsb, SWl; 2 caprices, D-SWl, Bsb, CZ-Pnm, doubtful; 41 caprices known only through catalogue citations; 22 duets, l V:1–22, S-Skma; 6 duets, l V:23–8, B-Bc, D-Bsb, probably by Johann Benda; Duet, l V:29, A-Wn, doubtful; 2 duets, lV:30–31, B-Bc, D-Bsb, probably by Johann Benda

Other chbr and kbd: Trio, G, 2 fl, b, l IV:1, ed. H. Ruf (Wilhelmshaven, 1977), Trio, A, 2 vn, b, l IV:2, D-MÜu; 2 trios, D, G, l IV:3–4, D-SWl, formerly attrib. Benda, by J.G. Graun; 6 trios, vn, b, l IV:5–10, known only through catalogue citations; piece for mechanical clock, D-Bsb [arr. of Caprice, G, l VI:48]; 6 Sonatas, pf/hpd, opp.3, 5 (Berlin, c1781, c1786), Sonata, kbd, 4 hands (c1783), 3 duets, 2 vn (Birmingham, n.d.), all attrib. ‘Benda’, doubtful

Vocal: 3 songs in Oden mit Melodien, i (Berlin, 1753)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

BurneyGN

Grove6 (J.D. Drake and D.A. Lee) [incl. further bibliography]

MoserGV

F. Benda: Autobiography, 1763, abbreviated but with added commentary in J.A. Hiller, ed.: ‘Lebenslauf des Herrn Franz Benda, königlichen Preussischen Kammermusikus’,Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend, i (1766–7/R), 175–8, 187–94, 199–202, and in J.A. Hiller: Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit (Leipzig, 1784/R), 30–54; ed. in Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, x (1856), 251–3, 259–60, 267–9, 274–6, and LederburTLB; Eng. trans. in P. Nettl: Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951/R), 204–45; Eng. trans. and commentary in D.A. Lee: A Musician at Court: an Autobiography of Franz Benda (Warren, MI, 1998); orig text in F. Lorenz: Die Musikerfamilie Benda, i: Franz Benda und seine Nachkommen (Berlin, 1967), 138–59

Carl Burneys der Musik Doctors Tagebuch einer musikalischen Reise durch Frankreich und Italien, trans. C.D. Edeling and J.C. Bode (Hamburg, 1772–3)

J.A. Scheibe: Über die musikalische Komposition, i (Liepzig, 1773) [no other pts pubd]

J.F. Reichardt: Schreiben über die Berlinische Musik (Hamburg, 1775)

C.F. Cramer, ed.: ‘Nachrichten von der Tonkünstler-Familie Benda’, Magazin der Musik, i (Hamburg, 1783/R), 769–72

J. Čeleda: František Benda (Prague, 1939)

R. Pečman: ‘František Bendas Kunst des Violinspiels in Bezung auf sein kompositorisches Schaffen’,Violinspiel und Violinmusik (Graz, 1972), 27–40

Čechy rezervoár hudebnosti: Benátky nad Jizerou 1976

D. Lee: ‘Some Embellished Versions of Sonatas by Franz Benda’, MQ, lxii (1976), 58–71

E. Poole: The Embellished Fast Movements of Thirty-Two Violin Sonatas by Franz Benda (thesis, U. of Victoria, BC, 1978)

S. Gerlach: ‘Gedanken zu den “veränderten” Violinstimmen der Solosonaten von Franz Benda in der Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin’, Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. M. Bente (Munich, 1980), 199–212

R. Pečman: ‘Zur Frage der Interpretation der Violinsonaten František Bendas’, Zur Fragen des Instrumentariums in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Blankenberg, Harz, 1982, 38–48

Z. Pilková: ‘František Benda: úvaha k 200. výročí umrtí’ [For the 200th anniversary of the death of Franz Benda], HRo, xxxix (1986), 470–4

D. Heartz: ‘Coming of Age in Bohemia: the Musical Apprenticeships of Benda and Gluck’, JM, vi (1988), 510–27

C. White: From Vivaldi to Viotti: a History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Philadelphia, 1992)

(3) Johann (Georg) [Jan Jiří] Benda

(b Staré Benátky, bap. 30 Aug 1713; d Berlin, early 1752). Violinist and composer, son of (1) Jan Jiří Benda. In 1733 he was in Dresden with his brother (2) Franz Benda, and in 1734 he travelled with him from there to Ruppin, where he joined the musical establishment of Crown Prince Frederick as a viola player, later becoming a violinist in the royal orchestra. His music is rooted in the early 18th century, with all movements of each work normally in the same key and frequent use of counterpoint. The Breitkopf catalogue lists three violin concertos (one in S-Skma) and a sonata for flute, violin and bass (D-Bsb). Other compositions include ten caprices for solo violin, five violin sonatas (A-Wgm, three perhaps duplicated in CZ-Pnm and B-Bc) and 11 flute sonatas (DK-Kk); eight duets for two violins and a violin concerto have been attributed both to Johann and to Franz Benda (see work-list for (2) Franz Benda). A violin concerto in G ascribed to Benda in an edition by Samuel Dushkin is thought to have been composed by Dushkin himself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Lebermann: ‘Apokryph, Plagiat, Korruptel oder Falsifikat?’, Mf, xx (1967), 413–25

(4) Georg (Anton) [Jiří Antonín] Benda

(b Staré Benátky, bap. 30 June 1722; d Köstritz, 6 Nov 1795). Composer, son of (1) Jan Jiří Benda. In 1735 he attended the Piarist high school in Kosmonosy (Bohemia) and from 1739 to 1742 he went to the Jesuit college in Jičín. In 1742 he emigrated with his parents and sister to Prussia, where he joined his brothers as a violinist in the court orchestra.

In May 1750 he was appointed Kapellmeister to Duke Friedrich III of Saxe-Gotha. During the first years of his service, he wrote cantatas for the court chapel and various instrumental works. Initially opera was not performed at Gotha because of the clergy’s opposition, but on 11 August 1765, the birthday of the Duchess Luise Dorothea, the first performance of Benda’s only Italian opera Xindo riconosciuto took place; regular stagings of Italian intermezzos there commenced in the following month. Benda was then granted six months’ paid leave to study in Italy. Departing from Gotha on 10 October 1765, he visited Venice (where he met Hasse), Bologna, Florence and Rome, and during this time became acquainted with operas by Galuppi, Gluck, Traetta, Piccinni and Paisiello. On his return, he composed two intermezzos which were staged before performances were suspended after Luise Dorothea’s death on 22 October 1767. In recognition of his service to the court, Benda was given the new title of Kapelldirector in August 1770.

With the death of Friedrich III in 1772 and his succession by Ernst II, Benda’s chapel duties were reduced. However, an important new period of composition was stimulated by the arrival of the Seyler theatrical troupe at Gotha in June 1774, which gave Benda his first opportunity to write German stage works. The first of these was Ariadne auf Naxos, a melodrama (i.e. a work combining spoken text and music) written by Johann Christian Brandes for his wife Charlotte, who took the title role at the première. Its widely reported success led to the composition of a second melodrama Medea for Sophie Seyler, the other leading lady of the company; its text was written by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, the Gotha court archivist, who provided texts for four Singspiele by Benda staged in Gotha, Der Jahrmarkt, Walder, Romeo und Julie and Der Holzhauer.

On 20 March 1778 Benda resigned as Kapelldirector, a decision apparently influenced by his dislike of the composer Anton Schweitzer, who had come to Gotha with the Seyler troupe and remained as music director of the Hoftheater founded in September 1775. On 11 April 1778 he prepared a ‘Specification’ of the works he had composed during his service at Gotha. He then went to Hamburg to work in the theatre but left in October 1778 for Vienna, where his melodramas were well received; his hope of an appointment there did not, however, materialize. A third melodrama Pygmalion, composed in Vienna, was staged after his return to Gotha in September 1779. He then retired on a small pension and lived in seclusion first at Georgenthal near Gotha, where he prepared various works for publication, then at Ohrdruf and finally at Köstritz; in his last years he also frequently stayed at Bad Ronneburg.In 1781 he went to Paris to direct a performance of Ariadne at the Comédie-Italienne. He also made visits to Mannheim, where in 1787 his last Singspiel Das tartarische Gesetz failed in its first and only performance. In 1792 he composed his last work, a cantata for soprano and orchestra entitled Bendas Klagen.

Although in his lifetime Benda was equally famous as a composer of church music, today he is chiefly remembered for his German stage works and in particular for his melodramas. He did not originate the latter genre in Germany, but in Ariadne and Medea created the first successful examples of the form, which immediately became much imitated; Mozart’s enthusiasm for these works is recorded in a letter to his father dated 12 November 1778. Benda’s source of inspiration was recitativo accompagnato and its alternation of brief sections of instrumental music and spoken text; only occasionally does he combine music and text in a single, simultaneous stream. Each melodrama is based on one or two themes and a number of repeated episodic motifs; all are varied (sometimes substantially) to fit the dramatic situation. Changes of harmony and instrumentation play an important role. In Ariadne imitations of natural sounds are used to enhance the dramatic effect; in Medeamusic expresses the deeper facets of the heroine’s psychological development. Of Benda’s Singspiele, Der Jahrmarkt and Romeo und Julie enjoyed considerable popularity in the repertories of the north and central German theatres; Romeo and the earlier Walder were among the first Singspiele to have plots of a serious nature, this being reflected in the music of both works by the inclusion of longer, highly dramatic, through-composed scenes. Both have certain features of serious opera: extensive arias, recitativo accompagnato and, in Romeo und Julie, a funeral chorus of the kind used by Gluck, while Der Jahrmarkt already includes strong dramatic and lyrical scenes, effective musical characterization and large-scale musical numbers within the Singspiel framework. The secular vocal music is less well documented; Benda’s music written for Stöltzel’s Ode (1767) was later set to a new text by Grossmann and given at performances in Bonn and Frankfurt during 1781 in memory of the then recently deceased playwright Lessing. (Neefe, who added an overture for these performances, also later furnished Benda’s music with an oratorio text, Das Andenken an die Erlösung des Gottmenschen, in which form the work has sometimes been incorrectly attributed to Benda’s son (12) Friedrich Ludwig Benda.) Benda’s secular cantatas from the early 1770s, such as Amynts Klagen, approach the style of his later melodramas: the orchestral passages of their accompanied recitatives, in particular, resemble the instrumental episodes of his melodramas.

Among Benda’s instrumental works, a set of keyboard sonatas published in 1757 attracted favourable comments from writers including Hiller, Burney and Gerber. Benda’s fame also rests on his orchestral works, especially his sinfonias and harpischord concertos. His concertos anticipate early Romantic trends (especially in the slow movements) but retain Baroque features such as long-breathed, non-periodic themes; strongly rhythmic unison passages are also typical. The sinfonias, dating mostly from the period 1750–65, are each in three movements with the first in a clearly articulated sonata form and the second in a lyrical style.

Five of Georg’s children became musicians; besides (12) Friedrich Ludwig already mentioned, Heinrich Benda (1754–before 1806) was a violinist, and Catherina Justina (b 1757), Hermann Christian (1759–1805) and Carl Ernst Eberhard Benda (1764–1824) were all singers with various theatre companies.

WORKS

printed works published in Leipzig unless otherwise stated

stage

Xindo riconosciuto (os, 3, J.A. Galletti), Gotha, 11 Aug 1765, D-Rtt

Il buon marito (int, 2, Galletti), Gotha, 29 Oct 1766

Il maestro di capella (int, 2), Gotha, 25 April 1767

Ariadne auf Naxos (duodrama, 1, J.C. Brandes, after H.W. von Gerstenberg), Gotha, 27 Jan 1775, Bsb (2 copies, 1 autograph), Dl, vs (1778), ed. A. Einstein (1920), fs (1781/R1985 in GOB, iv); ed. J. Trojan (Prague, 1984)

Der Jahrmarkt (Lucas und Bärbchen) (komische Oper, 1, F.W. Gotter, with J.J. Engel), Gotha, 10 Feb 1775, A-Wn, D-Bsb, vs (1786); ed. in DDT, lxiv (1930/R); rev. as Der Dorfjahrmarkt (2), Leipzig, 26 April 1775, Bsb, SWl (2 copies), US-Wc, vs (1776)

Medea (melodrama, 1, Gotter, after Euripedes), Leipzig, 1 May 1775, D-Bs (2 copies, 1 autograph), Dl, vs (1778)

Walder (ernsthafte Operette, 1, Gotter, after J.F. Marmontel: Silvain), Gotha, 23 Feb 1776, Bsb (2 copies, 1 autograph), Mbs, DS, SWl, US-Bp, vs (Gotha, 1777)

Romeo und Julie (ernsthafte Oper, 3, Gotter, after W. Shakespeare and C.F. Weisse), Gotha, 25 Sept 1776, A-Wn, D-Bsb (2 copies, facs. of 1 in GOB, v, 1985), Dl, DS, Mbs, Rtt, US-Wc, vs (1778)

Der Holzhauer, oder Die drey Wünsche (comische Operette, 1, Gotter and J.G. von Wulff, after Guichard and Castet: Le bûcheron), Gotha, 2 Jan 1778, D-Bsb, Dl, US-Bp, vs (1778)

Theone (Philon und Theone; Almansor und Nadine) (melodrama, 1), unperf., A-Wn (2 copies, 1 with addl music not by Benda)

Pygmalion (monodrama, 1, J.J. Rousseau), Gotha, 20 Sept 1779, D-Bsb (2 copies, 1 autograph), Dl, vs (1780)

Das tartarische Gesetz (Schauspiel mit Gesang, 3, Gotter, after C. Gozzi: I pitocchi fortunati), Mannheim, 4 March 1787, vs (1787)

Das Findelkind, oder Unverhofft kömt oft (Operette, 1, Weisse), unperf., vs (1787)

Incid music to Macbeth, c1778, Bsb, ?unperf.

sacred vocal

Cants.: cycle for 1750–51, lost; cycle for 1753–4 (Rambach), some in D-Bsb, DS, GOa, SWl, others lost, texts pubd (Gotha, n.d.); cycle for 1760–61 (Münter), 4vv, insts, As, Bsb, F, GOa, SWl, texts pubd (Gotha, n.d.), 1 ed. in Organum, i/32 (Leipzig, 1961); 5 birthday cants. for Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, 1751, 1764–7, Bsb, GOa, 4 others lost

Other sacred: Der sterbende (leidende) Jesus (orat), 1757, music lost, extract in Sammlung vermischter Clavier- und Gesangstücke, ii (Gotha and Leipzig, 1781); 3 songs in Münter: Erste Sammlung geistlicher Lieder (1773); 2 Ky with Gl, 4vv, insts, D-Bsb*, 1 also in A-Wn with addl sections by M. Stadler; Qui tollis, 4vv, bc, Wn*, D-Bsb; Mag, 4vv, insts, bc, Bsb, attrib. uncertain

secular vocal

Cants.: Amynts Klagen über die Flucht der Lalage, S, orch, ?1772 (1774); Die Zurückkunft der Lalage, 1v, insts, ?1772, GOl*, sequel to Amynts Klagen; Marianne, S, str, ?1779, A-Wn; Cephalus und Aurore, S, orch (1789); Bendas Klagen, S, orch (1792); Gelegenheitsmusik: Anime illustri, or che con mio contento, 2vv, insts, D-Bsb*

Other vocal: Più non si trovano fra mille amanti (aria), Dl [from pasticcio, Il trionfo della fedeltà, 1753, see work-list for C.H. Graun]; Ode auf den Sterbemorgen der … Herzogin zu Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg, 1767, Bsb, also with altered text as Das Andenken an die Erlösung des Gottmenschen (orat); Canon, 3vv, in Fragmente einiger Gedanken des musikalischen Zuschauers (Gotha, 1767); c6 songs in Göttinger Musenalmanach (Göttingen, 1770–74); Sammlung vermischter Clavier- und Gesangstücke (Gotha and Leipzig, 1780–87), incl. 25 songs in vols.iii–vi; Collezione di [12] arie italiane, i–ii (1782–3), incl. 4 arias from Xindo riconosciuto; 2 songs in 6 Rondo’s und 6 kleine Lieder (1784)

instrumental

Orch: c30 syms., D-Bsb, GOl, LEm, SWl, 12 ed. in MAB, lviii, lxii, lxvi, lxviii (1962–6); 2 hpd concs. (1779), 1 ed. in MAB, xlv (1960); Concertino, hpd, str (1783–4); 7 hpd concs., Bsb, Dl, GB-Ckc, 3 ed. in MAB, x (1950) and xlv (1960), 1 ed. in NM, cxliv (1938/R), 1 lost; 11 vn concs., 4 in B-Bc, D-Dl, GB-Ckc, others cited in Breitkopf catalogue; Scherzi notturni, D-Bsb*; 2 va concs., Bsb, 1 ed. in Concertino (Mainz, 1968); Hpd Conc., B-Bc, D-LEm, not by G. Benda

Chbr: 6 sonate, hpd (Berlin, 1757), ed. in MAB, xxiv (1956), some ed. C. Hogwood (Oxford, 1997); Hpd Sonata in J. Haffner: Oeuvres melées, vi/2 (1760), ed. C. Hogwood (Oxford, 1997); Sammlung vermischter Clavier- und Gesangstücke, i–vi (Gotha and Leipzig, 1780–87), incl. 2 kbd sonatas with str, vn sonata, 10 kbd sonatas, ed. in MAB, xxiv (1956), 35 sonatinas and smaller works, kbd, ed. in MAB, xxxvii (1958), many kbd works ed. C. Hogwood (Oxford, 1997) and T. Roberts (Oxford, 1997); 8 sonatas, 2 vn/fl, vn, bc, 3 in B-Bc, D-Bsb, 1 ed. in MAB, ii (1934), others cited in Breitkopf catalogue; Fl Sonata, Bsb, Dl, ed. in NM, cliv (1941/R) [earlier version of vn sonata]; Sonata, 2 hpd, Rp; Kbd Sonata, B-Bc, D-DS, Dl, later version incl. in Sammlung

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (T. Bauman) [incl. further bibliography]

G. Benda: ‘Ueber das einfache Ricitativ’, Magazin der Musik, ed. C.F. Cramer, i (Hamburg, 1783/R), 750–55

F. Schlichtegroll: ‘Georg Benda, herzogl. Sachsen-Gothaischer Capelldirector’, Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1795 (Gotha, 1798), no.2, pp.290–336; ed. R. Schaal in Musiker-Nekrologe (Kassel, 1954)

C.F.D. Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806/R), 110–12

K. Hůlka: Jiří Benda: studie o starším českém hudebníku [A study of an earlier Czech musician] (Prague, 1903)

V. Helfert: Jiří Benda: příspěvek k problému české hudební emigrace [A contribution to the problem of Czech musical emigration] (Brno, 1929–34)

Z. Pilková: Dramatická tvorba Jiřího Bendy [The dramatic works of Georg Benda] (Prague, 1960)

J.D. Drake: ‘The Songs of Georg Benda’, MT, cxiii (1972), 964–5

Z. Pilková: ‘Die Mittel der musikalischen Mitteilung in den Cembalokonzerten von Jiří Benda’, Colloquium musica communicatio: Brno XIV 1979, 221–9

Z. Pilková: ‘Der Einfluss Jiří Bendas auf das Musikleben in Deutschland, besonders in Thüringen’, Einflüsse einzelner Interpreten und Komponisten des 18. Jahrhunderts auf das Musikleben ihrer Zeit: Blankenburg, Harz, 1980, 81–7

Z. Pilková: ‘Jiří Bendas Berliner Jahre und ihre Einfluss auf seine Melodramen’,Neue Aspekte zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert: Potsdam 1983, 67–75

T. Bauman: North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge, 1985)

G.D. Fee: The Solo Keyboard Sonatas and Sonatinas of Georg Anton Benda: a Stylistic Analysis, their Historical Context, and a Guide to Performance (diss., Indiana U.,1985)

D. Richerdt: Studien zum Wort-Ton-Verhältnis im deutschen Bühnemelodram: Darstellung seiner Geschichte von 1770 bis 1820 (Bonn, 1986)

T.-D. Meyer: ‘Jiří Antonín Benda als Komponist von Kirchenkantaten am Gothaer Hof’, Musik und Gottesdienst, xlvi/2 (1992), 59–64

C. Heyter-Rauland and C.-H.Mahling, eds.: Untersuchungen zu Musikbeziehungen zwischen Mannheim, Böhmen und Mähren im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Mainz, 1993) [incl. Z. Pilková: ‘Die Melodramen Jiří Bendas und die Anfänge dieser Gattung’, 163–7; M. Havlová: ‘Frauentragödie als Paradenummer, Antiquitätenladen und Lernprozess: zur Gestaltung des Ariande- und Medeastoffes in Jiři Antonín Bendas Melodramen’, 178–201; C-H. Mahling: ‘Original und Parodie: zue Georg Bendas Medea und Jason und Paul Wranitzkys Medea’, 244–95]

(5) Joseph Benda

(b Staré Benátky, bap. 7 May 1724; d Berlin, 22 Feb 1804). Violinist and composer, son of (1) Jan Jiří Benda. In 1742 he was taken by Frederick the Great to Potsdam, where he continued his studies with his brother (2) Franz. He became a violinist in the Prussian court orchestra in the same year and on Franz’s death in 1786 was appointed Konzertmeister, a duty he fulfilled until 1797. The only certain known works of his are a violin sonata (in D-Bsb) and 12 caprices for solo violin in Etude de violon ou caprices … de Messieurs François et Joseph Benda, ii (Leipzig, 1804). Of his four sons, the eldest, (10) Friedrich Ernst Benda, and the youngest, Carl Friedrich Franz Benda (1754–1816), became musicians.

(6) Anna Franziska [Anna Františka] Benda [Hatašová]

(b Staré Benátky, bap. 26 May 1728; d Gotha, 15 Dec 1781). Soprano, daughter of (1) Jan Jiří Benda. See Hataš family, (2).

(7) Maria Carolina Benda [Wolf]

(b Berlin, 27 Dec 1742; d 8 Feb 1820). Singer and composer, daughter of (2) Franz Benda and his first wife, Franziska Louise. She studied singing and the harpsichord with her father and took a position as a Hofsängerin in Weimar in 1761. She married the Weimar Kapellmeister Ernst Wilhelm Wolf in 1770, but continued her musical career and performed at the Weimar Liebhabertheater (1775–83), where Goethe was director. She composed the songs Die Rose and An die Rose (published in Der teutsche Merkur, 1779) and a setting of Ich träumte wie um Mitternacht, which appeared first in her husband’s collection Ein und fünfzig Lieder (1784) and later in the Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1817).

(8) Friedrich (Wilhelm Heinrich) Benda

(b Potsdam, 15 July 1745; d Potsdam, 19 June 1814). Composer and violinist, son of (2) Franz Benda. He studied the violin with his father and theory with J.P. Kirnberger. He seems to have spent his entire working life as a violinist at the Prussian court and was also active in the concert life of Berlin. Of his two through-composed operas, Orpheus and Alceste, Orpheus was especially popular in Berlin. However, he was noted chiefly for his instrumental music.

WORKS

stage

Orpheus (Spl, 3, G.F. von Lindemann), concert perf., Berlin, 16 Jan 1785, vs (Berlin, 1787)

Alceste (Spl, 3, C.M. Wieland), concert perf., 15 Jan 1786, Berlin, lost

Das Blumenmädchen (Spl, 1, F. Rochlitz), Berlin, 16 July 1806, D-Bsb

other works

printed works published in Berlin unless otherwise stated

Vocal: Pygmalion (cant.) (Leipzig and Dessau, 1784); Die Grazien (cant., F.W. von Gerstenberg) (1789); Die Jünger am Grabe des Auferstandenen (orat), Berlin, 1792, ?lost; Das Lob des Höchsten (orat), Berlin, 1806, ?lost

Orch: 2 vn concs., op.2 (1779); 3 fl concs., op.4 (c1782); ?7 syms., 2 in D-SWl, 3, c1790, HR, 2 dated 1795, ?lost; Conc., 2 vn, Bsb; Va Conc., Bsb, doubtful, ? by F.L. Benda;? hpd concs., 1 in GB-Ckc, attrib. F.L. Benda, probably by F.W.H. Benda

Chbr: 6 Trios, 2 vn, b, op.1 (1778); 3 Sonatas, hpd, fl/vn, op.3 (c1781); 3 Sonatas, pf/hpd, fl, op.5 (c1786); Sonate III, harp/pf, vn and fl ad lib (n.d.); ?2 str qts, 1 in B-Bc

Kbd: sonatas in Clavier-Magazin für Kenner und Liebhaber (1787); Sonata, pf/hpd 4 hands, op.6 (1799)

(9) Carl Hermann Heinrich Benda

(b Potsdam, 2 May 1748; d Berlin, 15 March 1836). Violinist, son of (2) Franz Benda. He studied with his father, entered the service of the Prussian court about 1766 and became Konzertmeister as a successor to his uncle, (5) Joseph Benda, in 1802. He was also a pianist and worked as a répétiteur at the Royal Opera in Berlin; he retired in 1809. Of his compositions only a violin sonata is extant (in D-Bsb); his only known publication, the Sechs Adagios für das Pianoforte nebst Bemerkungen über Spiel und Vortrag des Adagios von Carl Benda, issued by Hummel, is an edition of other composers’ music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Richter: ‘Mistr musicus a přítel Friedricha Velkého: Carl H.H. Benda’ [Master musician and friend of Frederick the Great: Carl H.H. Benda], OM, xxi (1989), 20–23

(10) (Johann) Friedrich Ernst Benda

(b Potsdam or Berlin, bap. 10 Oct 1749; d Berlin, 24 Feb 1785). Violinist and harpsichordist, son of (5) Joseph Benda. By 1766 he was a member of the Berlin court orchestra. In 1770 he founded with Carl Ludwig Bachmann a series of Liebhaberkonzerte in Berlin which he directed until his death. His only known composition is a Minuetto per il cembalo con variazioni(Leipzig, 1768); no copies of this edition are extant, but a manuscript similarly entitled (identified only by the surname ‘Benda’) survives in the library of Brussels Conservatory.

(11) (Bernhardine) Juliane Benda [Reichardt]

(b Potsdam or Berlin, 14 May 1752; d Berlin, 9 May 1783). Singer and composer, daughter of (2) Franz Benda. She had a reputation as an unusually expressive singer and even before her marriage to J.F. Reichardt in 1777 was a published composer. Her Lieder und Klaviersonaten (Hamburg, 1782) contains 17 songs and two sonatas; some 13 other songs appeared during her lifetime in almanacs and in a collection of Oden und Lieder (1779–81) by her husband.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.G. Jackson: ‘Musical Women of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Women and Music: a History, ed. K. Pendle (Bloomington, IN, 1991), 54–94

N.B. Reich: ‘Juliane Reichardt’, Women Composers: Music through the Ages, iii, ed. S. Glickman and M.F. Schleifer (New York, 1998), 41–3

(12) Friedrich Ludwig Benda

(b Gotha, bap. 4 Sept 1752; d Königsberg [now Kaliningrad], 20 or 27 March 1792). Composer and violinist, son of (4) Georg Benda. In 1775 he joined the orchestra of the Seyler troupe, then resident in Gotha, and travelled with it as rehearsal violinist (répétiteur) to Dresden, Leipzig and Frankfurt. On the disbandment of the troupe in 1779, he went with his wife, the singer Felicitas Agnesia Rietz, first to Berlin and then to Hamburg, where he was engaged by the theatre. In 1782 he moved to Ludwigslust as first violinist and Cammer-Compositeur to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. During the following years he and his wife travelled widely, giving concerts in many cities including Vienna and Prague. With the break-up of his marriage Benda was dismissed from his post at Ludwigslust in December 1788 and spent his few remaining years in Königsberg.

Benda’s output as a composer was varied. While a member of the Seyler troupe, his most important work was a setting, containing italianate arias, of Grossmann’s Der Barbier von Seville, which entered the repertory of several theatre companies. Apart from an aria for his wife to sing in a performance of Grétry’s Le jugement de Midas at Hamburg in 1781, he wrote no more for the stage until he settled in Königsberg, where he composed three operettas; the tuneful melodies of Louise and Mariechenwon them particular success there. He also wrote some instrumental music, mainly for the violin, but his duties at Ludwigslust seem mostly to have entailed the provision of church music.

WORKS

stage

Der Barbier von Seville (komische Oper, 4, G.F. W. Grossmann, after P.A. Beaumarchais), Leipzig, 7 May 1776, D-Bsb, vs (Leipzig, 1779)

Narrenballett, ?1779

Der Tempel der Wahrheit (prol, F. Meyer), 25 Sept 1780

Der Verlobung (Spl, F.E. Jester), Königsberg, 1789

Louise (komische Oper, 3, Jester), Königsberg, 16 Jan 1791, vs (Königsberg, 1791)

Mariechen (komische Operette, 3, Jester), Königsberg, 1792, vs (Königsberg, 1792)

other works

Sacred vocal: Trauercantate, 1785, ?lost; Ps lxlvii: Der Herr ist König, 1786, D-SWl; 3 cants. (H.J. Tode), SWl: Unser Vater, Der Tod, Die Religion (Königsberg, 1788); Das Andenken an die Erlösung des Gottmenschen (orat), wrongly attrib. F.L. Benda, see work-list for (4) G. Benda

Secular vocal: 2 songs in 6 Rondo’s und 6 kleine Lieder (Leipzig, 1784); ?1 song in Göttinger Musenalmanach (Göttingen, 1774)

Inst: Vn Sonata, 1782, D-SWl; 3 Vn Concs. (Leipzig, 1783); Sinfonie, SWl; ov. to Freeman, oder Wie wird das ablaufen? (Jester); Sym., LEm (attrib. F.C. Benda in Breitkopf catalogue, 1782); Va Conc., Bsb, doubtful, ? by F.W.H. Benda; Hpd Conc., GB-Ckc, doubtful, probably by F.W.H. Benda

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Güttler: Königsbergs Musikkultur im 18. Jahrhundert (Königsberg, 1925)

1. Benedictine monasticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

items concerning more than one member of family

MGG1 (H. Wirth)

J.D.H.: ‘Von der Tonkünstlerfamilie Benda’, Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts, ed. J.G. Meusel, xii (Erfurt, 1782), 323; repr. as ‘Nachrichten von der Tonkünstlerfamilie Benda’, Magazin der Musik, ed. C.F. Cramer, i (Hamburg, 1783/R), 769–72

A. Hnilička: Aus Georg Benda’s Jugend (Prague, 1911)

H. von Hase: ‘Beiträge zur Breitkopfschen Geschäftsgeschichte: die Familie Benda’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 454–82, esp. 475–81

C. Schoenbaum: ‘MGG und die Familie Benda: Berichtigungen und Ergänzungen’, Mf, x (1957), 140–42

F. Lorenz: Die Musikerfamilie Benda, i: Franz Benda und seine Nachkommen (Berlin,1967), ii: Georg Anton Benda (Berlin, 1971), iii: [thematic catalogue] (MS, D-Bsb)

Z. Pilková: ‘Die Familien Bach und Benda’, Internationales Bach-Fest III: Leipzig 1975, 215–21

W. Lebermann: ‘Zur Autorschaft dreier Violakonzerte von “Frederico” Benda’, Mf, xxxii (1979), 289–91

Bendall, Wilfred (Ellington)

(b London, 22 April 1850; d London, 16 June 1920). English composer. He studied with Charles Lucas and Edouard Silas and at the Leipzig Conservatory. His chief dramatic compositions were one-act comic chamber operas performed in London. Some, including Lovers’ Knots (C. Bridgman; St George’s Hall, 5 May 1880), appeared among the German Reeds’ entertainments; others, such as Beef Tea (H. Greenbank; Lyric, 22 Oct 1892), were companion pieces for longer musical works. His most popular work, Quid Pro Quo (R. Barrington and Bridgman; Opera Comique, 17 Oct 1881), appeared with Frederic Clay and W.S. Gilbert’s comic opera Princess Toto. Bendall composed several cantatas, including Parizādeh (1884) and The Lady of Shallott (for female voices). In 1894 Bendall was engaged as Sullivan’s secretary, and in his last years Sullivan relied on him to copy and correct his works, and in some cases arrange them for publication.

FREDRIC WOODBRIDGE WILSON

Bendazzi, Luigia

(b Ravenna, 1827/8; d Nice, 5 March 1901). Italian soprano. The child of illiterate parents, she studied in Milan with Antonio Piacenti and in 1850 was apprenticed to the Bolognese composer Federico Dallara; with him (and his wife) she lived for nine years in what seems to have been at first a relationship of total, possibly sexual, dependence. She made her début in 1850 at Venice as Elvira in Ernani; after scoring a notable success at the San Carlo, Naples, in 1851, she sang in all the major Italian houses. Verdi objected to her in 1853 as a possible Violetta because she was too much the powerful dramatic soprano, but he exploited her resources in 1857 when she created Amelia in Simon Boccanegra; she was also successful as Amelia (Un ballo in maschera), Lady Macbeth, and Valentine in Les Huguenots. After appearances at the Liceo in Barcelona in 1869–70 her career faded. She married the composer Benedetto Secchi; their daughter Ernestina Bendazzi (1864–1931), also a soprano, married the tenor Alfonso Garulli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bendazzi's papers: I-FOc, collezione Piancastelli 43.1–152

J. Budden: The Operas of Verdi (London, 1973–81)

J. Rosselli: Singers of Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1992)

JOHN ROSSELLI

Bendeler, Johann Philipp

(b Riethnordhausen, nr Erfurt, bap. 20 Nov 1654; d Quedlinburg, 26 Dec 1709). German theorist. He became a teacher at the Gymnasium at Quedlinburg in 1681, and he was also appointed Kantor there in 1687. He held both positions until his sudden death from a heart attack while conducting a choir during a Christmas service. Like his brother Johann Jacob he was a godson of Andreas Werckmeister, whose Hypomnemata musica (1697) includes encomiums by both brothers. Johann Philipp had earlier published an encomium in the form of a canon notated in intervallic proportions in Werckmeister’s Musicae mathematicae Hodegus curiosus (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1687). He may have been a pupil of Werckmeister; in any case he was a close disciple. His most important treatise, Organopoeia (c1690), continues a tradition established by Werckmeister of writing about the physical and mechanical nature of organs. His treatise is in three parts: ‘Vom Pfeiffwerck’, which contains important and innovatory comments about pipe measurement, ‘Von Abtheilung der Lade’, which concerns the construction and divisions of the wind chest, and ‘Von der Stimmung’, which deals with tuning and temperament. Temperament is also the subject of his Aerarium melopoeticum (1688). In a particularly interesting work, Directorium musicum (1706), he investigated the nature and desirable resolutions of the numerous quarrels arising between school rectors and Kantors; understandably Bendeler’s arguments are weighted on the Kantor’s side. He printed favourable judgments on typical legal disputes derived from the universities at Halle and Helmstedt and from the court of assessors of the electorate of Saxony at Leipzig, where three decades later J.S. Bach became involved in the same kinds of difficulty with the rector J.A. Ernesti.

THEORETICAL WORKS

Aerarium melopoeticum (Nuremberg, 1688)

Organopoeia, oder Unterweisung wie eine Orgel nach ihren Hauptstücken … aus wahren mathematischen Gründen zu erbauen (Frankfurt and Leipzig, c1690/R, 2/1739 as Orgel-Bau Kunst, oder Unterweisung)

Planimetria practica (Quedlinburg, 1700)

Redlich bezahlte Schuld oder gründlichst ausgeführte Quadratura circuli (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1700)

Directorium musicum (Quedlinburg, 1706)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WaltherML

G.A. Sorge: Der in der Rechen- und Messkunst wohlerfahrne Orgelbaumeister (Lobenstein, 1773); ed. P. Smets (Mainz, 1932)

C. Mahrenholz: Die Berechnung der Orgelpfeifenmensuren (Kassel, 1938/R; Eng. trans., 1975), 48ff

H. Winter: ‘Das Winddruckproblem bei den norddeutschen Orgeln im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Acta organologica, iii (1969), 176–82

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Bendeler, Salomon.

See Bendler, Salomon.

Bender, Paul

(b Driedorf, nr Wetzlar, 28 July 1875; d Munich, 25 Nov 1947). German bass. A pupil of Louise Ress and Baptist Hoffmann, he made his official stage début as Sarastro in 1900 at Breslau. In 1903 he was engaged by the Munich Opera, and continued as their first bass for 30 years; his last performance, as Rossini’s Don Basilio, took place there only seven days before his death. Bender made his Covent Garden début in 1914 as Amfortas in the British stage première of Parsifal; although the role was described as being rather high for his fine basso cantante, he made a profound impression. His other roles during this German winter season were Hunding, Sachs and Jacob in Méhul’s Joseph. When German performances resumed at Covent Garden in 1924 and 1927, Bender showed his outstanding gifts as a comedian in the parts of Osmin and Baron Ochs, but was again much admired in his Wagner roles, especially as Hagen. He sang all the leading bass roles of the German repertory at the Metropolitan (1922–7), where some of his performances were described as ‘ponderous’. This is the very opposite of the impression he made, during the same period, on visitors to the Munich and Salzburg festivals. Bender was a fine actor, and his great stature contributed to an imposing stage presence. He became famous also as a lieder singer, especially in the songs and ballads of Carl Loewe. Among his many recordings, the most valuable are those of Loewe ballads made in 1930 and 1933, which reveal a gripping dramatic power, a distinctness of enunciation and a quiet humour that are in sum delightful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Dennis: ‘Paul Bender’, Record Collector, xvii (1966–8), 244–56; xviii (1968–9), 4–6 [incl. discography]

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR

Bendidio, Lucrezia

(b Ferrara, 8 April 1547; d after 1584). Italian noblewoman and amateur singer. She came from an ancient and powerful Ferrarese noble family and entered the service of Leonora d’Este as a lady-in-waiting in 1561. In that same year she encountered the 18-year-old Torquato Tasso, who wrote numerous celebratory poems about her and incorporated her as Licori into his pastoral play Aminta. In 1562 she was married to Count Baldassare Macchiavelli of Ferrara, a widower with one daughter. It was an unhappy marriage with no children. A gifted singer, Bendidio was unrivalled during the 1570s as a soprano in the private musical evenings of the Ferrarese court (for accounts of her singing see Solerti, Durante and Martellotti, and NewcombMF). Poems about her and her singing were written by Tasso, Ridolfo Arlotti, Annibale Pocaterra, and especially G.B. Pigna. Her sister Isabella (b 13 Sept 1546; d after 1610) also sang in the private Ferrarese court entertainments, at least before her marriage in 1573 to the powerful Ferrarese nobleman Cornelio Bentivoglio. Isabella was the mother of Guido and Enzo Bentivoglio, the earliest patrons of Frescobaldi in Rome. The Bendidio sisters were eclipsed as singers at Ferrara by the formation in 1580–81 of a new and more highly skilled group of singing ladies, made up of Laura Peverara, Livia d’Arco and Anna Guarini. Anna Guarini was the niece of Lucrezia and Isabella and the daughter of the Ferrarese poet Battista Guarini.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Ceserani)

FenlonMM

NewcombMF

A. Solerti: Ferrara e la corte estense nella seconda metà del secolo decimosesto (Città di Castello, 1891, 2/1900)

A. Cavicchi: Introduction to L. Luzzaschi: Madrigali per cantare e sonare a uno, due e tre soprani, MMI, 2nd ser., ii (1965)

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Cronistoria del concerto delle dame (Florence, 1979)

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

Bendinelli [Bendinello], Agostino (i)

(b Verona, c1550; d Verona, 23 Nov 1598). Italian composer and singer. He has in the past been confused with Agostino Bendinelli (ii). He lived in Verona, where he attended the Scuola degli Accoliti and completed his musical education under Gabriele Martinengo, maestro di cappella of the cathedral. He became a priest, and in 1580 was appointed a singer in the cathedral choir and one of the 12 resident chaplains who formed the teaching staff of the Scuola. In codicils to his will dated 8 September 1598 he settled a legacy of 50 ducats upon Ippolito Baccusi, then maestro di cappella of the cathedral, on condition that he should arrange for some of his unpublished works to be printed posthumously; it is not known if Baccusi carried out this request. Bendinelli's counterpoint is clear and tightly constructed, lively in rhythm and deployed within a harmonic language that is varied by some effective modulations. In his compositions for double choir the more contrapuntal passages throw the homophonic sections into relief with restrained dramatic effect. An example of technical mastery is provided by the canon at the unison in the tenor of the motet Meditabor in mandatis in the 1588 collection.

WORKS

Sacrarum modulationum, liber primus, 8vv (Verona, 1585)

Sacrarum cantionum, liber secundus, 5vv (Venice, 1588⁶)

Sacrarum cantionum, liber primus, 4vv (Venice, 1592)

Sacra omnium solemnitatum vespertina psalmodia, 4vv (Verona, 1594)

1 work, 1626⁴

Iste sanctus, 4vv, D-Bsb

Immolatus, 4vv, Mbs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Spagnolo: ‘Le scuole accolitali di grammatica e di musica in Verona’, Atti e memorie dell'Accademia di agricoltura, scienze, lettere, arti e commercio di Verona, 4th ser., v (1904–5), 97–330

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Documenti veronesi su musicisti del XVI e XVII secolo’, Scritti in onore di Mons. Giuseppe Turrini (Verona, 1973), 543–75 [to the documents cited add Anagrafi Provincia, S Salvaro (I-VEas), no.711, for 1570, letter P]

ENRICO PAGANUZZI

Bendinelli, Agostino (ii)

(b Lucca, 26 April 1635; d Lucca, after 1702). Italian composer and teacher. He was a canon of S Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. About 1660 he was superintendent of the monastery of S Frediano, Lucca. He was prior of S Agostino, Piacenza, about 1671 and of S Leonardo, Lucca, in 1674. Records at S Frediano show him as ‘abbate privilegiato’ for 1691–3, 1697–8 and 1703. He taught A.M. Pacchioni and G.M. Bononcini, who paid tribute to him in his Musico prattico (Bologna, 1673, p.106) and included a canon by him in praise of Bononcini himself. Another canon, in honour of the dedicatee, prefaces Bendinelli’s only known volume of music, Psalmi vespertini ternis, quaternis, quinisque vocibus ad organum concinendi una cum litaniis BVM op.1 (Bologna, 1671). Its contents, in the concertato style, with solo episodes and full sections alternating, indicate his technical competence.

GIUSEPPE VECCHI

Bendinelli, Cesare

(b in or nr Verona; d ?Munich, 1617). Italian trumpeter and writer on the trumpet. He was active as a trombonist in Schwerin from 1562 to 1565. From 1567 he was in Vienna and then from 1580 until his death he was chief court trumpeter in Munich. In 1614 he presented the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona with a manuscript trumpet method, Tutta l'arte della trombetta (ed. in DM, 2nd ser., v, 1975; Eng. trans., 1976), the earliest one now known, the contents of which he had collected from the best players of his day or written himself. His method is of historical importance because it contains the first dated pieces, of 1584, 1587 and 1588, for the clarino register of the trumpet, and elucidates the late Renaissance practice of improvising over a second or ‘sonata’ part in a five-part trumpet ensemble. He claimed too to have been the first to apply tonguing syllables – an important aid to both articulation and register placement – to the trumpet. He also presented the academy with his trumpet, made by Anton Schnitzer in 1585 in pretzel shape. Bendinelli's portrait survives on a votive painting donated by him after a near-fatal boating accident on the Danube in 1582 to the pilgrimage church at Aufkirchen, near Starnberg, Bavaria.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Sandberger: Beiträge zur Geschichte der bayerischen Hofkapelle unter Orlando di Lasso, iii (Leipzig, 1895/R)

D.L. Smithers: The Music and History of the Baroque Trumpet before 1721 (London, 1973, 2/1988)

E.H. Tarr: ‘Cesare Bendinelli’, Brass Bulletin, no.17 (1977), 31–45; no.21 (1978), 13–25

P. Downey: The Trumpet and its Role in Music of the Renaissance and Early Baroque (diss., U. of Belfast, 1983)

EDWARD H. TARR

Bendīr [bendair].

Large single-headed frame drum of North Africa. The head, which is usually goatskin, is stretched over a flat wooden hoop usually no more than 15 cm wide. The diameter of the rim varies but is rarely more than 60 cm across the head. The frame usually has a single bored thumb-hole, which facilitates one method of playing. Very often, three or four gut or nylon snares are attached to the inner side of the drum, and these resonate against the skin when the drum is played. Occasionally jingles are attached through slots made around the frame. At many ambient temperatures the skin is slack, and is tightened either by placing the drum in direct sunlight or by heating it over a brazier.

The bendīr is played in a variety of ways, but is most commonly held upright against the body, supported by the left hand with the thumb through the thumb-hole and the fingers resting on the skin of the drum. By releasing or applying pressure to the skin with these fingers, ‘open’ and ‘closed’ tones can be struck. The head is beaten with a flat right hand, either in the centre, which produces a relatively deep note, or at the edge, producing a higher pitch. (These positions are reversed for left-handed players.) The bendīr can also be held between the legs or against the chest and beaten with both hands.

The bendīr is such a common instrument in the Maghrib that it is employed in many kinds of music, either singly or as an ensemble of benader. However, it is an instrument of low status, largely found in rural traditions and women's musics; instruments bearing snares and jingles are particularly associated with these musics, as the loud buzzing overtones are considered to be sensually stimulating and therefore unsuitable for urban art music or men's religious music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

C. Woodson: ‘The Effect of a Snare on the Tone of a Single-Headed Frame Drum, the Moroccan Bendīr’, Selected Reports, ii/1 (1974), 103–17

V. Doubleday: ‘The Frame Drum in the Middle East: Women, Musical Instruments and Power’, EthM, xliii (1999), 101–4

T. Langlois: ‘Heard but Unseen: the Female Aissawa Musicians of Oujda, Morocco’, Music and Anthropology, iv (1999) 〈www.muspe.unibo.it/m&a〉

TONY LANGLOIS

Bendix, Victor (Emanuel)

(b Copenhagen, 17 May 1851; d Copenhagen, 5 Jan 1926). Danish composer, pianist and conductor. He studied at the Copenhagen Conservatory and was trained as a composer by Gade and J.P.E. Hartmann and as a pianist by, among others, Liszt (from 1881). After leaving the conservatory he worked as a répétiteur at the Copenhagen Royal Theatre. Later he worked at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was much in demand as a piano teacher; he was extremely active as a concert pianist, sometimes with his second wife, Dagmar Bendix, also a fine pianist. He was an excellent conductor, and in this role made great contributions to the musical life of Copenhagen. From 1897 he established and conducted the Copenhagen Philharmonic Concerts, and his concert performances of Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde and his staged performances of Verdi’s Don Carlos were welcome innovations, in contrast to the usual repertory (mainly Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Gade) of the Copenhagen Musical Society. He was also a founder of the Copenhagen Korforening.

Bendix wrote many songs, but these are less important than his compositions for the piano, both solo and with other instruments: these include the Piano Trio op.12, the Piano Concerto op.17 and the Piano Sonata op.26. Still more valuable, however, is his symphonic music, especially the first two symphonies. The Second Symphony, Sommerklange fra Sydrusland (‘Summer Sounds from Southern Russia’) (1888), composed in a Slavonic folk style, is both graceful and coherent. The other symphonies, however, like much of his music, suffer from a badly integrated mixture of styles derived on the one hand from Gade and on the other from Liszt and Wagner. As Danish music began to follow a new course in the 1890s under the influence of Carl Nielsen, Bendix’s music, which originally had been progressive, soon assumed the character of an echo from the past; he was almost silent as a composer during the last 20 years of his life.

WORKS

MSS in DK-Kk; printed works published in Copenhagen unless otherwise stated

Orch: 4 syms., no.1 ‘Fjeldstigning’ [On the Mountain], C, op.16 (1883), no.2 ‘Sommerklange fra Sydrusland’ [Summer Sounds from Southern Russia], D, op.20 (c1890), no.3, a, op.25 (1894), no.4, d, op.30, 1905, unpubd; Pf Conc., g, op.17, arr. 2 pf (Leipzig, 1884); Ov., op.19; Dance Suite, op.29; Serenade, unpubd

Chamber: Pf Trio, A, op.12 (1888)

Pf: 5 Klavierstücke, op.1 (Leipzig, n.d.); Album, 10 pieces, op.22 (1891); Sonata, g, op.26 (Leipzig, 1901); many short pieces

Vocal: Ps xxxiii, chorus, orch, op.7 (1874); other choral works; many solo songs, incl. Almas sonetter, op.6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Lynge: Danske komponister i det 20. aarhundredes begyndelse (Århus, 1916, 2/1917), 45

K.A. Bruun: Dansk musiks historie fra Holberg-tiden til Carl Nielsen, ii (Copenhagen, 1969), 281

N. Schiorring: Musikens historie i Danmark, iii (Copenhagen, 1978), 109

BO MARSCHNER

Bendl, Karel

(b Prague, 16 April 1838; d Prague, 20 Sept 1897). Czech composer and conductor. He was born into a middle-class family and in accordance with his parents' wishes first studied glove-making, but at 16 entered the Prague Organ School. He studied with Karel Pietsch and (after Pietsch's death) with Josef Leopold Zvonař, and graduated with honours in 1858. One of his close friends at the organ school was Dvořák, at whose disposal Bendl placed his piano and collection of scores. After completing his studies, Bendl taught at Celestin Müller's music institute. There his colleague was Jindřich Pech, the brother of Eliška Krásnohorská, who later wrote the librettos for five of Bendl's operas. Bendl wrote several early pieces under the pseudonym Karel Podskalský, and won his first success as a composer when the periodical Dalibor awarded him a prize for his song Poletuje holubice (‘The Dove is Fluttering’, 1861). From autumn 1864 he spent ten months abroad, at first as assistant conductor at the Brussels Opera, then as chorus director of the German opera in Amsterdam; he also stayed in Paris for a while.

In 1868 his first opera, Lejla (1867), was performed at the Provisional Theatre in Prague. This work, based on a Spanish theme about the siege of Granada at the end of the 15th century, represents Bendl's response to grand opera. Encouraged by its success, he went on to compose other operas. Břetislav (1869), on a subject from Czech history, also takes as its starting point the principles of grand opera, while the comic opera Starý ženich (‘The Elderly Suitor’, 1871–4) follows the model of Smetana's The Bartered Bride. Bendl also attempted romantic fairy tale opera (Die Wunderblume, 1876, to a German libretto) and operetta (Indická princezna, ‘The Indian Princess’, 1877), but no other work matched the success of Lejla.

In 1861 Bendl was a co-founder of the Prague Hlahol, the first and most important of Prague's choral societies, whose performances became a focal point of the Czech cultural and social scene. He was its conductor from 1865 to 1877, and the bulk of his choral works – whose popularity made him one of the most frequently performed composers of the day – were written for this society. Bendl's performance of Dvořák's Hymnus in 1873 marked his friend's first public success as a composer. In addition to the Czech repertory, he also performed choral works by German and French composers (Liszt, Wagner, Bazin and Thomas). From 1868 to 1878 he edited the Hlahol collection of male choruses for the publisher Emanuel Starý.

During this period, he was also assistant conductor at the Provisional Theatre (July 1874 – May 1875) and choirmaster at the Orthodox church of St Mikuláš in Prague (1877–8). In October 1878 he accepted the post of choirmaster of the mixed chorus attached to the 50-piece private orchestra of the Russian Baron Paul von Dervies, whose establishment alternated between Lugano and Nice. The ensemble made an important contribution to the artistic life of both cities, and included some ambitious operatic productions among its performances, most notably, Glinka's A Life for the Tsar. Reviews paid glowing tribute to Bendl's role as choirmaster. Probably at the baron's instigation, he composed his opera Gina, on an Italian libretto by Giorgio Tommaso Cimino (it was completed by 1884, but was not performed). In August 1880 Bendl asked to be released from the baron's service, and on his way home may have spent some time in Milan, although there is no documentary evidence of this.

From 1881 until the end of his life he lived in Prague. From 1883 to 1886 he edited the music section of the paper Humoristické listy – his sense of humour is attested by several jokey compositions, for example the melodrama Uzený slaneček (‘The Kipper’), the duo Reformátoři divadla (‘The Theatre Reformers’), Kočičí dueto (‘Cat's Duet’) and others – and from 1886 to 1890 he again worked at St Mikuláš.

At that time opera was uppermost in his mind. 1881 saw the first performance of Černohorci (‘The Montenegrins’, composed in 1877, before Bendl's departure from Prague), which takes French grand opera as its starting point. Karel Škréta (1883) and Dítě Tábora (‘The Child of Tábor’, 1886–8), both to librettos by Krásnohorská, are on subjects from Czech history and musically lean towards the work of Smetana. The one-act Máti Míla (1895) – the original German version Mutter Mila (1893) was still unperformed at the end of the 20th century – represents Bendl's response to Italian verismo.

The orchestral Jihoslovanská rhapsodie (‘South Slavonic Rhapsody’, 1881) is (like The Montenegrins) an expression of the composer's interest in all things Slavonic, an interest further stimulated by the international success of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances. The Slavnostní pochod (‘Festive March’, 1881), composed to mark the opening of the Czech National Theatre, is in the spirit of romantic stage marches. The most noteworthy work in Bendl's small output of chamber music is the String Quartet in F major (1896–7).

Bendl's compositional style, light and easily accessible, fully met the requirements of middle-class society. In his time he was highly regarded and was considered to be almost equal to Dvořák and Smetana. His musical language was predominantly a lyrical one; his early pieces betray a close affinity with the music of Mendelssohn, and earned their composer the nickname ‘Bendelssohn’ within Krásnohorská's circle. The whole of his output reveals a dependence on contemporary models and musical fashions, which he was always happy to follow.

From November 1894 Bendl stood in for Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory, teaching orchestration during Dvořák's absence in the USA; after Dvořák's return Bendl continued to teach at the conservatory for a further two years. From 1890 onwards he was a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, and for an eight-month period (1890–91) was president of the Union of Czech Choral Societies. He died as the result of a stroke.

WORKS

printed works published in Prague unless otherwise stated

MSS in CS-Pnd, Pnm, Pr, National Museum (Theatre Division) and the Hlahol archives

stage

first performed in Prague unless otherwise stated

Lejla (grand romantic op, 5, E. Krásnohorská, after E. Bulwer-Lytton: Leila, or The Siege of Granada), 1867, Provisional, 4 Jan 1868 [4-act version]; rev.1874, Provisional, 24 Sept 1874, vs Acts 1 and 2 (1874), Acts 3–5 (1880)

Žena Vršovcova [The Vršovec Woman] (op, Krásnohorská), 1871–4, lost

Břetislav (historical op, 5, Krásnohorská), 1869, New Town, 18 Sept 1870, march, arr., pf, in Dalibor i (1873), suppl., aria in Burghauser

Starý ženich [The Elderly Suitor] (folklike op, 3, K. Sabina, rev. G. Eim and V.J. Novotný), 1871–4, Chrudim, 4 Feb 1882, vs (1883)

Die Wunderblume (komische Zauberoper, 3, E. Rüffer), 1876; Cz. excerpts (trans. M. Očadlík), Czech Radio, 30 Aug 1940

Indická princezna [The Indian Princess] (operetta, 3, A. Pulda), 1876–7, New Town, 26 Aug 1877; with new libretto (K. Mašek), National, 31 Aug 1906

Černohorci [The Montenegrins] (op, 3, J.O. Veselý), 1877, New Czech, 11 Sept 1881, excerpts arr. pf (n.d.)

Karel Škréta (comic op, 3, Krásnohorská), 1883, National, 11 Dec 1883

Gina (dramma lirico, prol, 3, G.T. Cimino), 1880–84, unperf.

Dítě Tábora [The Child of Tábor] (tragic op, 3, Krásnohorská), 1886–8, National, 13 March 1892

Mutter Mila (op, 1, A. Delmar), 1893, as Máti Míla (trans. Novotný), National, 25 June 1895

Švanda dudák [Švanda the Bagpiper] (folk fairy tale opera-ballet, 3, J. Vrchlický), 1895–6, National, 29 April 1907 [rev. version of cant., perf. 16 May 1880]

Česká svatba [Czech Wedding] (ballet, 10 scenes, Novotný), op.118, 1894, National, 13 Feb 1895

vocal

Choral: c300 works, incl. Smrt Prokopa Velikého [The Death of Prokop the Great], Bar, chorus, 1871; Tichému geniovi [To a Quiet Genius] (cant., E. Krásnohorská), mixed vv, 1873 (1874) [for 100th anniversary of the birth of J. Jungmann]; Slavín I–IV [Pantheon I–IV] (V.J. Novotný), mixed vv, pf, ?1875; Pochod Táborů [March of the Taborites] (A.V. Šmilovský), male vv, 1880; Cigánské melodie [Gypsy Melodies] (fantasy, A. Heyduk), 14 songs, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1881; Švanda dudák [Švanda the Bagpiper] (national fairy tale, J. Vrchlický), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1880 (1883); Zlatá hodinka [The Golden Hour] (R. Pokorný), mixed vv (1881); Štědrý den [Christmas Eve] (cant., K.J. Erben), solo vv, mixed chorus, orch, 1885 (1887); Z českého lidu [From the Czech People], mixed vv, pf, 1888; Slavnostní sbor (Národ sobě) [Festive Chorus] (The Nation unto itself) (Heyduk), male vv (?1900) [for the opening of the National Theatre]; Zpěv víl nad vodami [Song of the Nymphs under the Waters] (Šmilovský), S, chorus, orch

Songs: c140, incl. Album písní [Album of Songs], 1v, pf, 10 vols. (n.d.); Písně v národním tónu [Songs in National Style], low v, pf, 1882; Skřivánčí písně [Lark's Songs] (J.V. Sládek), lv, pf, 1883 (?1885)

Other vocal: Uzený slaneček [The Kipper], melodramatic joke, 1v, pf (Prague, n.d., 2/1923); Reformátoři divadla [The Theatre Reformers] (E. Züngel), 2 high vv, n.d.; Kočicí dueto (Srarý kocour) [Cats’ Duet (The Old Tomcat)], S/T, Bar, pf, Humoristické listy, no.36 (n.d.)

instrumental

Orch: Jihoslovanská rhapsodie [South Slavonic Rhapsody], op.60, 1881 (Berlin, 1896); Slavnostní pochod [Festive March], 1881 [for the opening of the National Theatre]; Tarantella, 1881; Polonéza [Polonaise], 1882; Capriccio, 1887; Dithyramb, 1887 (1888); 6 sousedských [6 Neighbours' Dances], 1889

Chbr: Cavatina, vn, pf, op.50a (n.d.); Romance, vc, pf, 1887; Str Qt, F, op.119 (Berlin, 1895); Suite, vn, pf (n.d.)

Pf: Nad hrobem Fr. Palackého [Over the Grave of František Palacký] (c1880); Z dětského světa [From the World of Childhood], 12 instructive little pieces, 4 hands, 1888; Slavnostní předehra [Festive Overture] (1896); Klavírní skladby [Piano Pieces], 1897

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS [with earlier bibliography and lists of contemporary reviews]

GroveO (M. Ottlová and M. Pospíšil)

E. Chvála: Ein Vierteljahrhundert böhmischer Musik (Prague, 1886)

Věstník Jednoty zpěváckého spolku [Bulletin of the choral union], ii (1897) [Bendl issue, with articles by K. Knittl, J. Srb and others]

E. Krásnohorská: ‘Z mladých let Karla Bendla: osobní vzpomínky’ [From Bendl's early years: a personal memoir], Osvěta, xxvii (1897), 959–76; pubd separately (Prague, 1920) as Z mého mládí [From my youth]

V.A.J. Hornové [V. Horn, A. Horn and J. Horn]: Česká zpěvohra [Czech opera] (Prague, 1903)

J. Polák: Karel Bendl (Prague, 1938)

M. Lejsková: Hlaholské jubileum [The Hlahol anniversary] (Prague, 1941)

J. Mikeš: Sbory Karla Bendla [Bendl's choruses] (diss., U. of Prague, 1957); extracts in MMC, no.14 (1960), 79–81 [incl. list of choruses and sources]

J. Burghauser: Národnímu divadlu: vklad zakladatelské generace [Towards a national theatre: the investment by the founding generation] (Prague, 1983)

J. Tyrrell: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988)

M. Ottlová and M. Pospíšil: ‘Italská opera v kontextu české národní opery’ [Italian opera within the context of Czech national opera], MMC, no.33 (1992), 39–69

M. Bártová: Reflexe italských vlivů v operní tvorbě Karla Bendla jako důsledek jeho tříletého pobytu v románských zemích [Italian influences in the operas of Bendl as a result of his three-year stay in Romance countries] (diss., U of Brno, 1994)

M. Bártová: ‘Léta 1878–1881: téměř neznámá etapa v životě a díle Karla Bendla’ [The years 1878–81: an almost unknown period in the life and work of Bendl], Hudební divadlo v Čechách, na Moravě a ve Slezsku: Ostrava 1995, 41–9

M. Bártová-Holá: ‘Po stopách tříletého působení Karla Bendla v cizině’, [In the steps of Bendl's three years spent abroad], OM, xxix (1997), 7–15

MONIKA BÁRTOVÁ-HOLÁ

Bendler [Bendeler], Salomon

(b Quedlinburg, 1683; d Brunswick, 1724). German bass, son of the theorist J.P. Bendeler, who taught him. He is said to have enjoyed great success in north Italy and throughout Germany; he sang at Weissenfels and Brunswick (1708), Hamburg, Leipzig and Danzig. In 1712 he appeared in Handel's Rinaldo (as Argante) and Gasparini's Ambleto at the Queen's Theatre in London. In 1717 he was appointed chamber singer to the Duke of Brunswick, accepting the job (according to one account) on condition that he could hunt in the duke's forests. He sang in Schürmann's Telemachus und Calypso that summer. Munchausen-like tales are told of the depth, power and resonance of his voice: that in London his E below the bass staff drowned an orchestra of 50 playing fortissimo and on another occasion the full organ at St Paul's.

WINTON DEAN

Bendusi, Francesco

(b Siena, fl ?Verona, c1553). Italian composer. His only known compositions, a collection of ensemble dance pieces, occupy an important place in the history of instrumental music of the 16th century; this work is not only the first but also one of the rare Italian publications of its kind. It comprises 24 dances, 21 of the galliard or saltarello type, titled either by genre, such as Pass’e mezo ditto il Romano and Pass’e mezo ditto il Compasso, or with fanciful titles, for example Moschetta, La mala vecchia and Gioia, which often refer to popular songs and villottas. The dances are thought to have been composed for the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, and may represent a repertory typical to that region.

The music is in mensural notation with consistent use of the sign C except in the ‘Cortesa Padoana’. The dances entitled Incognita and Bandera alternate bars of two and three beats, suggesting that they were intended for a special choreography. The harmonic bases employed by Bendusi include an early form of the folia, and some bear a striking resemblance to those used by Ortiz in the eight recercadas in book 2 of his Tratado of 1553. Two years after Gardane’s publication of Bendusi’s pieces, 23 were incorporated into Viel feiner lieblicher Stucklein, a collection of 322 compositions for instrumental ensemble printed in Breslau (RISM 1555³⁵).

WORKS

Opera nova de balli … accommodati da cantare & sonare, d’ogni sorte de stromenti, a 4 (Venice, 1553); ed. B. Thomas (London, 1974)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

F. Blume: Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Orchestersuite im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1925/R)

E. Gerson-Kiwi: Studien zur Geschichte des italienischen Liedmadrigals im XVI Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1937)

G. Turrini: L'Accademia Filharmonica de Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600. e il suo patrimonio musicale antico (Verona, 1941)

D. Heartz: Sources and Forms of the French Instrumental Dance in the Sixteenth Century (diss., Harvard U., 1957)

D. Kämper: Studien zur instrumentalen Ensemblemusik des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien, AnMc, no.10 (1970), 173

V. Ravizza: Das instrumentale Ensemble von 1400–1550 in Italien (Berne, 1970)

C. Cunningham: ‘Ensemble Dances in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy: Relationships with villotte and Franco-Flemish danceries’, MD, xxxiv (1980), 159–204

JEANETTE B. HOLLAND/ARTHUR J. NESS

Benecken, Friedrich Burchard.

See Beneken, Friedrich Burchard.

Benedette di Giov. dito Benoit.

See Benoit.

Benedetti, Francesco Maria

(b Assisi, bap. 12 Dec 1683; d Assisi, bur. 2 July 1749). Italian composer and priest. Baptized Giovanni Domenico Antonio, he took the name Francesco Maria when he entered the Franciscan order as a novice on 25 November 1699. He served for two and a half months in the chapel of the basilica of S Francesco, Assisi, before moving to Città di Castello on 1 July 1704, perhaps having already taken his final vows. He presumably had musical duties there, for a respond for the feast of St Anthony of Padua by him is dated 20 September 1704. Between 10 April 1706 and 10 February 1707 he was in Assisi as first organist of the basilica. A Bull of Pope Clement XI of 6 November 1706 allowed him to take holy orders 13 months earlier than the minimum prescribed age of 25, and he was ordained priest at the end of 1706. In March 1707 he was moved to Turin, and while he remained there until September 1711, there are three autograph motets dated 1710 by him in Assisi. On 3 October 1711 he returned to Assisi as maestro di cappella, replacing F.A. Urio. In 1715 he was invited to compose two ‘academic’ cantatas (Dialogo della Virtù e della Fama and Virtù e Honore) to celebrate the resumption of meetings of the Accademia degli Eccitati after 15 years. During this period his monastical commitments increased: he became a member of the Council of Fathers and was granted a licence to hear the confessions of the laity. On 30 April 1716 he left Assisi for S Francesco, Turin, where he stayed, probably with the same duties of maestro di cappella, until 1721 or 1722. Compositions dating from 1722 to 1727 suggest that he went to Aosta Cathedral, again as maestro di cappella. His signature in the Register of Masses on 19 July 1727 shows that he had returned to Assisi by this date, replacing F.M. Zuccari. On 22 December 1734 Benedetti was appointed maestro di cappella of Urbino Cathedral, but he was unable to accept the post as a decree of 1703 prohibited friars from taking up such positions outside the order.

At Assisi Benedetti successfully combined religious duties and musical tasks. He was a prolific composer, an energetic organizer of music for the most important feasts of the year, and as a teacher he was highly esteemed by Padre Martini. In 1741 Benedetti obtained permission to build at his own expense an apartment in the monastery, which eventually passed to his successors. In 1744 at Città di Castello the title of ‘Discreto perpetuo’ was conferred on him, because ‘for 24 years in succession he has acted as master of music in the holy chapel of Assisi and in various cathedrals in Piedmont, during which time he composed many musical works to great acclaim from those who heard them’. On the title-page of a Magnificat composed in Aosta in 1725 an unknown hand described him as ‘accomplished and strong’. Interest in his music continued after his death: Padre Martini requested scores of two of his Compiete and of ‘mute di psalmi pieni a 8’; and one of his requiem masses was sung until the mid-19th century.

Benedetti’s musical output, almost entirely sacred, provides an interesting example of Italian late-Baroque contrapuntal style. He wrote with clarity and rhythmic insistence, making rich use of progressions, dynamic effects and contrasts of timbre. His choice and use of ensembles shows technical ability and a preference for concertato forms. His works, over 270, include motets, sacred and ‘academic’ cantatas, masses, offices for matins and compline, collections of psalms for a whole year, single psalms and antiphons, oratorios, passions, lamentations, sonate da organo capricciose, organ responses and sonatas for strings and continuo. Most exist, in autograph or contemporary copies, at Assisi (I-Ac, Af) and Aosta (I-AOc), but others are in Bologna (I-Bsf), Loreto (I-LT) and Münster (D-Müs). His theoretical work Le regole per sonare sulla parte del basso (1737) survives in Bologna (I-Bc, autograph and copy).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

G. Fratini: Storia della Basilica e del Convento di S. Francesco in Assisi (Prato, 1882)

D.M. Sparacio: ‘Musicisti minori conventuali’, Miscellanea francescana, xxv (1925), 20

R. Casimiri: ‘Musicisti dell’ ordine franc. dei Minori conventuali dei secc. XVI–XVIII’, NA, xvi (1939), 186–99, 238–50, 274–5, esp. 246

C. Sartori, ed.: Assisi: la cappella della Basilica di S. Francesco, i: Catalogo del fondo musicale nella Biblioteca comunale di Assisi (Milan, 1962)

G. Chatzian: Il fondo musicale della Biblioteca Capitolone di Aosta (Turin, 1985)

C. Pampaloni: Francesco Maria Benedetti, maestro di cappella della Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi (diss., U. of Pisa, 1986)

CATERINA PAMPALONI

Benedetti, Gianfrancesco

(b Lucca, c1700; d Lucca, after 1760). Italian composer. He was maestro di cappella of the royal and archducal chapel in Mantua (as a collection of his psalm settings from 1742 testifies). According to Nerici he published while at Mantua a concerted four-part mass and vespers in honour of Filippo Neri; his only extant mass and vespers (manuscript at Lucca) is probably the same work. Although a large instrumental force (violin concertante, oboe, first and second violins, viola, cello, double bass and organ) accompanies a double four-part choir, the results are not exciting; contrapuntal effects are achieved only as a result of the homophonic choirs and homophonic instruments not moving rhythmically together. His six Salmi a 4 voci brevemente concertati con violini (with a Magnificat) show the same characteristics. It may seem curious that the work is dedicated to Benedetti’s ‘Guardian Angel’; but it should be noted that Lucca had a religious society in honour of guardian angels (Congregazione degli Angeli Custodi) and he may have been a member.

WORKS

[6] Salmi [incl. Mag], 4vv, str, bc, 1742, I-Ls

Messa e vespro, SATB, SATB, vn and ob obbl, str, org, Ls

In exitu Israel, 4vv, Pc [alternating verses with insts]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.A. Cerù: Cenni storici dell’insegnamento della musica iu Lucca (Lucca, 1871)

L. Nerici: Storia della musica in Lucca (Lucca, 1879/R)

E. Maggini: Lucca, Biblioteca del Seminario (Milan, 1965)

CAROLYN GIANTURCO

Benedetti, Jacopo dei.

See Jacopone da Todi.

Benedetti, Luigi

(b Bergamo, 2 Nov 1933). Italian organist. He studied at the Milan Conservatory from 1950 to 1960, under Carlo Lonati (piano), Alceo Galliera (organ) and Bruno Bettinelli (composition). Following his début recital in Milan in 1958, he began to build a solo and ensemble career of distinction. In 1986 he played the inaugural concert on the restored organ in Milan Cathedral, having been appointed organist there in 1983. Benedetti's international career includes solo recordings on a number of labels, performances in many organ festivals and recordings for radio and television. He plays in the Frescobaldi Ensemble, gives concerts for organ and trumpet, and conducts the Gruppo di Canto Ambrosiano, Milan, which specializes in Gregorian and Ambrosian chant.

PAUL HALE

Benedetti, Piero [Pietro]

(b Florence, c1585; d Florence, after 14 July 1649). Italian composer. He seems to have spent his life in Florence. Autograph letters from him reveal that he was at Mantua in 1608 to provide musical assistance at the time of Francesco Gonzaga’s wedding festivities, though he later complained bitterly that he had received no remuneration for his services. In 1610 Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga invited him to Rome to serve him at least temporarily, but he declined, saying that he had to remain in Florence because his family would suffer too much by his absence. On the title-pages of his publications of 1611 and 1613 he indicated that he was a member of the Accademia degli Elevati (founded by Marco da Gagliano in 1607), with the academic name ‘L’Invaghito’. Parigi referred to him as a chaplain at the Florentine court in 1618, and he is in fact recorded as such in the court salary rolls for 1620. He became Gagliano’s associate in a narrower sense on 27 May 1630, when he was made a canon of S Lorenzo, Florence, with the title ‘S Amato Abate’. He made his will on 14 July 1649 (according to a document in I-Fas).

Benedetti seems to have been a musical dilettante: his name has not been found in salary lists of musicians, and he restricted himself almost entirely to the composition of solo songs, a genre favoured by amateurs at this period. His three surviving books of Musiche are notable for their extremes of musical style: harsh dissonance, often unprepared and either irregularly resolved or not resolved at all, appears unexpectedly in some pieces, for example in the setting of Tasso’s Ho visto, al pianto mio in the Musiche of 1617 (in FortuneISS); unusual harmonic progressions and the juxtaposition of long harmonically static passages with sections of rapid and seemingly directionless harmonic movement are not uncommon, as in the setting of Petrarch’s In qual parte del ciel also in the 1617 volume; and the frequent use of short and dotted values alongside very long ones often gives the melodic phrases a discontinuous character. Many of Benedetti’s monodies display a striking use of declamatory style, particularly in the madrigals (which are more prevalent in the earlier books), though he was also fond of setting penultimate syllables to long ornamental melismas that contrast sharply with the surrounding syllabic treatment of the text. Nearly all the texts that he set are secular, though there are a few spiritual ariettas and sonnets, mostly in the last book. In this same book nine songs are headed ‘Parole dell’autore’, but several of these are adaptations of texts by well-known poets. In his books of 1611 and 1613 Benedetti included two pieces by Gagliano and one by Peri. Their presence makes all the more apparent the radical and amateurish style of his own songs, which are a fascinating extreme in the history of the monodic genre and indispensable examples of musical mannerism in early 17th-century Italy.

WORKS

Musiche, 1v, bc (Florence, 1611)

Musiche libro secondo, 1v, bc (Venice, 1613); facs. in ISS, i

Musiche con alcune spirituali nel fine, libro quarto, 1–2vv, bc (Florence, 1617); 1 ed. in FortuneISS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM

FortuneISS

L. Parigi: Dialogo terzo (Florence, 1618), 22

P.N. Cianfogni: Memorie istoriche dell’Ambrosiana R. Basilica di S. Lorenzo di Firenze, ed. D. Moreni (Florence, 1804), 261

E. Vogel: ‘Marco da Gagliano: zur Geschichte des Florentiner Musiklebens von 1570–1650’, VMw, v (1889)396–142, 509–68, esp. 512, 514, 534

B. Szabolcsi: Benedetti und Saracini: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Monodie (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1923); extract in Hung. of first section pubd, Magyar zene, xiv (1973), 233–57

N. Fortune: ‘Italian Secular Monody from 1600 to 1635: an Introductory Survey’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 171–95, esp. 184

N. Fortune: ‘Solo Song and Cantata’, The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, NOHM, iv (1968), 125–217, esp. 161, 165

E. Strainchamps: ‘New Light on the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence’, MQ, lxii (1976), 507–35, esp. 530–31

EDMOND STRAINCHAMPS

Benedicamus Domino.

A versicle sung at the end of all canonical hours except Matins, at the close of Mass in place of the Ite missa est in penitential seasons, and following the commemorations after Vespers and Lauds. It was performed by a soloist (or group of soloists), and its choral response, ‘Deo gratias’, was set to the same music.

The Benedicamus seems to have emerged as a distinct portion of the liturgy in Carolingian Francia. A late 8th-century customary, Memoriale qualiter, shows that the versicle served as the closing sentence for meal times (Hallinger, 1963), and liturgical commentator Amalarius of Metz in his early 9th-century discussion of the Offices (see Hanssens) treats it as commonplace.

The earliest melodies for the monophonic Benedicamus are scattered among patristic manuscripts from the late 10th century; later the tunes appear in more organized fashion in tropers, prosers and graduals. By the 13th century the number of collections devoted to the Benedicamus seems to have decreased, and those that exist occur mostly in missals and graduals, primarily in the kyriale, or, more rarely, in the Canon of the Mass. There is no comprehensive modern catalogue of Benedicamus melodies, but partial listings of monophonic and polyphonic settings are available in a number of different studies (see Reaney; Bryden and Hughes; Huglo; Barclay; Gallo; Robertson, 1988; and van der Werf).

The most elaborate Benedicamus melodies were reserved for the great Offices of Vespers and Lauds. Simpler ones were employed in lesser services and when the chant was substituted for the Ite missa est at Mass. The ornate chants served as showpieces, and the soloists – usually two or three singers, though maybe as many as five or six in the late Middle Ages – would normally stand conspicuously in one of three places in a church: on a step, in the middle of the Choir, or in front of the main altar. Often the soloist(s) for the Benedicamus would also sing the solo portions in the Great Responsory at Vespers and in the alleluia at Mass.

The paucity of collections of Benedicamus melodies from the late Middle Ages suggests that the chant’s transmission was largely oral. A 12th-century customary of Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny lends support to this view; it notes that on high feasts the Benedicamus could be drawn from melismas of responsories: ‘The Benedicamus should be sung according to the melody … Virgo Dei genetrix est, flos filius ejus [responsory Styrps jesse]. The melody is not taken from the whole verse, however, but from the end of the verse, that is Flos filius ejus’ (Hallinger, 1975, p.103). In the 13th century the Sarum Rite likewise sanctioned the practice of adapting the Benedicamus from a melismatic section of a responsory: ‘On duplex feasts and on feasts when the invitatory is sung by three, some appropriate Benedicamus is sung from the historia [i.e. the Matins responsories] of the feast with which it deals or some other which is appropriate to the feast’ (Frere, i, 254).

Three highly unusual collections of monophonic Benedicamus melodies clearly illustrate the practice of borrowing tunes from melismas of other chants. These collections survive in the following late 13th-century manuscripts: a Sarum missal, GB-Mr lat.24, ff.14–14v (see Harrison, 1965); a missal from St Denis in Paris, F-Pn lat.1107, ff.395v–96v (see Robertson, 1991, pl.18); and a gradual from St Corneille in Compiègne, Pn lat.17329, ff.246v–49 (see MGG2, pl.1; and Robertson, 1987, fig.1). The Benedicamus melodies are preceded by verbal and sometimes melodic cues alluding to the parent sources, which consist of antiphons, Kyries and sequences in addition to responsories; the text is carefully underlaid to the parent melisma through use of assonance. A singer could thus compose a Benedicamus melody orally by emulating the vowel sounds of the original chant and by changing from one syllable of ‘Benedicamus Domino’ to the next at the same moment when a shift would have been made in the model chant from one syllable to another. The melisma comes sometimes from the solo section, sometimes from the choral section, of a responsorial chant; this frequent use of choral music for the Benedicamus undoubtedly facilitated the choir’s performance of the florid Deo gratias responses.

Further evidence for the oral transmission of Benedicamus melodies is preserved in ordinaries and customaries, which state that the Benedicamus should be sung ‘as’, ‘like’ or ‘on’ (‘ut, ‘sicut’, ‘super’) a melody from another chant (e.g. the statutes of Lincoln Cathedral; see Bradshaw and Wordsworth, i, 369). Rubrics such as these indicate that melodies for the Benedicamus were routinely created from chants already notated elsewhere, often in the same book. This economy of notation likewise helps account for the lack of large numbers of written-out Benedicamus collections in the late Middle Ages. Favourite Benedicamus chants circulated throughout Europe, with such melodies as Flos filius, Clementiam (from Qui cum audissent, the responsory for St Nicholas), O Christi pietas (from the antiphon of the same name for St Nicholas) and Clemens (from the Kyrie Clemens rector) dominating the repertory.

Tropes for the monophonic and polyphonic Benedicamus Domino survive from the beginning of the manuscript Benedicamus tradition in sources from southern France and in the Codex Calixtinus. In some monophonic settings the trope text is set to the melisma of the host Benedicamus melody through the imitation of the vowels of the original, often of the syllable ‘Do-’ of ‘Domino’, as, for example, in F-Pn lat.887, f.46v: ‘Benedicamus regi magno ore pioatque puro Deo nostro Domino’ (ed. in Arlt, 1970, i, 165). Polyphonic tropes in the Aquitanian repertory run the gamut of styles from melismatic organum to note-against-note style, including settings in which organum and discant are mixed. The trope poem often precedes the text ‘Benedicamus Domino’ or some variant on these words, altered for grammatical reasons, as in Noster cetus psallat letus, in which the text ends ‘benedicat Domino’. In F-Pn lat.1139, f.61v, Noster cetus is written in successive notation, an Aquitanian practice in which voices were copied one after the other instead of in parallel fashion, so that they seem to form a monophonic composition (Fuller, 1971). Quite often in these pieces the Benedicamus melody is not identifiable, and the poem obscures the structure of the composition to a point where the term ‘Benedicamus versus’ or ‘Benedicamus verse-trope’ would be more appropriate; these compositions resemble the genres of versus and conductus. Many Benedicamus versus texts were intended for the Virgin Mary.

An early example of Parisian polyphony from the late 11th century, in an antiphoner from the abbey of St-Maur-des-Fossés (F-Pn lat.12584, f.306), includes two polyphonic Benedicamus settings in note-against-note style . The Notre Dame school of the 12th and 13th centuries likewise produced two- and three-voice Benedicamus settings cast in most of the major genres of this repertory: organa dupla and tripla, clausula, rondellus and Latin and French motet. In 1198 Bishop Odo of Sully sanctioned the use of the polyphonic Benedicamus in the Parisian liturgy: ‘and I add that the reponsory and the Benedicamus will be sung in triplum or quadruplum or organum’ (Guérard, i, 74). Only three melismas (Flos filius, Clementiam and Quem queritis) and a few simple tones served as tenors in the Parisian repertory.

After the 13th century the quality of polyphonic setting of the Benedicamus declined somewhat, and composers’ flagging interest in the versicle probably reflects the trend towards cultivation of sections of the Mass Ordinary in place of the Office in the late Middle Ages. Many Benedicamus settings from the 14th century to the 16th appear in southern German and northern Italian sources. These pieces, composed in simple note-against-note style with frequent voice crossing, are written-out examples of the oral practice cantus planus binatim (e.g. D-Bsb 40592, ff.179v–180; see Gallo; and Treitler). The few mensural Benedicamus compositions from the late Middle Ages tend to use the Flos filius and Clementiam melodies in their tenors, and a handful of settings of the versicle in imitative polyphony are found in the Trent codices.

Certain Benedicamus melodies have remained in use to the present day. A Venetian print from 1555 (I sacri e santi salmi … et Benedicamus) contains a troped setting of Flos filius in imitative polyphony around a long-note cantus firmus by Adrian Willaert, and this same tune serves at Vespers on feasts of the First Class in modern publications (see LU, 124–7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HarrisonMMB

MGG2 (A.W. Robertson)

B. Guérard, ed.: Cartulaire de l’église Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1850)

H. Bradshaw and C. Wordsworth, eds.: Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral (Cambridge, 1892–7)

W.H. Frere, ed.: The Use of Sarum (Cambridge, 1898–1901/R)

J.A. Jungmann: Missarum sollemnia: eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe (Vienna,1948, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1951–5, abridged 2/1961)

J.M. Hanssens, ed.: Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia (Vatican City, 1948–50)

M. Bukofzer: ‘Interrelations between Conductus and Clausula’, AnnM, i (1953), 65–103

J. Marshall: ‘Hidden Polyphony in a Manuscript from St. Martial de Limoges’, JAMS, xv (1962), 131–44

K. Hallinger, ed.: Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae: consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni (Siegburg, 1963)

N.E. Smith: The ‘Clausulae’ of the Notre Dame School: a Repertorial Study (diss., Yale. U., 1964)

F. Ll. Harrison: ‘Benedicamus, Conductus, Carol: a Newly-Discovered Source’, AcM, xxxvii (1965), 35–48

G. Reaney, ed.: Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music: 11th – Early 14th Century, RISM, B/IV/1 (1966)

J.R. Bryden and D.G. Hughes: An Index of Gregorian Chant (Cambridge, MA, 1969)

S. Fuller: Aquitanian Polyphony of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1969)

W. Arlt: Ein Festoffizium des Mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung (Cologne, 1970)

J. Stenzl: Die vierzig Clausulae der Handschrift Paris Bibliothèque nationale latin 15139 (Berne, 1970)

S. Fuller: ‘Hidden Polyphony: a Reappraisal’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 169–92

K. Hallinger, ed.: ‘Statuta Petri Venerabilis Abbatis Cluniacensis IX’, Consuetudines Benedictinae Variae, ed. Giles Constable (Siegburg, 1975)

M. Huglo: ‘Les débuts de la polyphonie à Paris: les premiers organa parisiens’, Aktuelle Fragen der musikbezogenen Mittelalterforschung: Basle 1975 [Forum musicologicum, iii (1982)], 93–163

B. Barclay: The Medieval Repertory of Polyphonic Untroped ‘Benedicamus Domino’ Settings (diss., UCLA, 1977)

A. Gallo: ‘The Practice of Cantus Planus Binatim in Italy from the Beginning of the 14th to the Beginning of the 16th Century’, Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa: Cividale del Friuli 1980, 13–30

L. Treitler: ‘Cantus Planus Binatim in Italy and the Question of Oral and Written Tradition in General’, ibid., 145–61

R. Falck: The Notre Dame Conductus: a Study of the Repertory (Henryville, PA, 1981)

C. Morin: ‘Mise en place de l’écriture polyphonique: l’école de Notre-Dame’, Etudes grégoriennes, xx (1981), 69–76

E. Lee: ‘Benedicamus Domino: Coherent Relationships between Plainsong and Organum Duplum’, In Theory Only, vi/5 (1982), 17–48

N. Sandon, ed.: The Use of Salisbury: the Ordinary of the Mass (Moretonhampstead, 1984)

A.W. Robertson: ‘The Transmission of Music and Liturgy from Saint-Denis to Saint-Corneille of Compiègne’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 505–14

J. Grier: ‘The Stemma of the Aquitanian Versaria’, JAMS, xli (1988), 250–88

A.W. Robertson: ‘Benedicamus Domino: the Unwritten Tradition’, ibid., 1–62

S. Thomann: ‘Zu den superponierenden Benedicamus-Tropen in Saint-Martial: ein Beitrag zur Erforschung früher Mehrstimmigkeit’, KJb, lxxii (1988), 1–19

H. van der Werf: Integrated Directory of Organa, Clausulae, and Motets of the Thirteenth Century (Rochester, NY, 1989)

J. Grier: ‘Some Codological Observations on the Aquitanian Versaria’, MD, xliv (1990), 5–56

A.W. Robertson: The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1991)

ANNE W. ROBERTSON

Benedicite [Canticle of the Three Children, Song of the Three Young Men].

One of the biblical canticles (‘Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord’) sung in Eastern and Western liturgies. The canticle was known in the medieval West as ‘benedictiones’ because of the constant repetition of the exhortation ‘benedicite’ (‘bless’). The text is a Greek interpolation in the third chapter of the book of Daniel (Apocrypha), which narrates the story of the miraculous survival of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace prepared as a punishment for their refusal to worship the golden image of King Nebuchadnezzar. (The Vulgate equivalents of their Hebrew names are Ananias, Mishael and Azarias; see Daniel i.6–7.) The interpolation includes the prayer of Azarias (iii.26–45), beginning (in its Latin version) ‘Benedictus es Domine Deus patrum nostrorum … qui iustus es’ and the song of the Young Men, divided into two sections (iii.52–6 and 57–90), beginning ‘Benedictus es Domine Deus patrum nostrorum … et benedictum nomen’ and ‘Benedicite omnia opera’ respectively. The latter calls upon all creation to bless the Lord, an exhortation answered by the refrain ‘laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula’ (‘praise and exalt him forever’). For Western liturgical use ‘laudate’ was replaced by ‘hymnum dicite’.

By the last quarter of the 4th century the Benedicite had entered liturgical use in the Christian East. It eventually became a standard feature of the solemn and festal Byzantine morning office (Orthros), the last five verses interrupted by stichoi (brief poetic stanzas). When the biblical texts were replaced by poetic versions, the Benedicite provided the basis for the 8th of the nine odes of the kanōn at Orthros. (The 7th ode paraphrased the prayer of Azarias and the first song of the Three Young Men, vv.26–45 and 52–6.) The reading of Daniel iii that concluded the Hesperinos (Vespers) readings of Holy Saturday in the Byzantine rite ended with the chanting of verses 57–88 by the psaltēs (cantor), to which the congregation responded with the refrain ‘hymneite kai hyperypsoute auton eis tous aiōnas’ (‘praise and exalt him forever’).

The Benedicite (vv.57–88 without the refrain but concluded by a doxology and v.56) served as the variable Old Testament canticle of Sunday and festal Lauds in the medieval Western monastic and secular Office. Several 6th-century monastic rules, including that of Benedict of Nursia, referred to the singing of ‘benedictiones’ in their descriptions of the morning Office. (In secular use a shorter version of the canticle, consisting of vv.52–7 only, was sung during Lent; see AR, 12.) As part of the regular psalmody of Lauds the Benedicite, like the other psalms, was sung to a simple psalm tone.

In the medieval Western liturgy an elaborate 3rd-mode setting of the canticle formed part of the Office of readings at Mass on Ember Saturdays. In this context it exemplified the lectio cum cantico: a liturgical reading terminating in a lyrical song, for which the lector might be instructed by a rubric to change the ‘tone’ of his delivery. This version of the Benedicite (analysed in Ferretti) is found in the earliest Gregorian chant manuscripts (listed in Bernard). Introduced by a moderately florid prelude (‘Benedictus es in firmamento caeli’), the individual strophes are constructed from three biblical verses, each beginning with the word ‘benedicite’, set to an embellished recitation tone (musical form: AA'B). Each strophe is completed by a single statement of the refrain ‘Hymnum dicite et superexaltate eum in saecula’ (‘Sing a hymn and exalt him highly forever’). Four of the strophes (2, 6, 9, 10) begin melismatically, and it has been suggested that these divide the ‘blessings’ according to the following themes: cosmic creation and the elements; the earth and its creatures; rational creation; and the redeemed. The final verse concludes with a melodically heightened version of the refrain.

This setting was eventually supplanted in the Ember Saturday liturgy by a completely different one, centonized from Daniel iii.52–6 and other biblical sources, with the refrain ‘et laudabilis et gloriosus in saecula’ after every verse (LU, 348; see also GS, pl.9). A single formula, related to mode-7 psalmody, is repeated for all the verses and the concluding doxology. The Old Roman gradual of S Cecilia in Trastevere (dated 1071, CH-CObodmer C.74, ff.7r–8v) has an adaptation of the original Gregorian version in its main corpus, supplemented by the later Gregorian version added in the margins. The Old Beneventan liturgy divided the complete text of the Benedicite into four segments distributed over the four embertide Saturdays (a practice also indicated by a rubric in the S Cecilia gradual and known from other central Italian sources). A paraphrase of the canticle, Omnipotentem semper adorant, by Walahfrid Strabo (d 849), was substituted for the biblical text in some medieval manuscripts.

The Gallican liturgies inserted the benedictiones between the New Testament reading and the Gospel of the Mass, and they occupied a similar position in the Mozarabic Mass on Sundays and feasts of the principal martyrs (i.e. sung before the psallendum that preceded the Gospel). While neither text nor music for the Gallican benedictiones has survived, the 10th-century Mozarabic antiphoner of León (E-L 8) contains 26 versions, ten assigned to specific feasts and a separate collection of 15 settings for use throughout the year. Each has a different selection of verses and apparently a slightly different melody (notated in unheighted neumes and hence untranscribable). In the Ambrosian (Milanese) rite selected verses of the canticle were sung to an elaborate melody on Good Friday and after the third lesson of the Easter vigil. The Ambrosian melody (Suñol, 183; see also PalMus, 1st ser., v, 1896/R, 249, and vi, 1900/R, 296) has two refrains (‘et laudabilis … ’ and ‘hymnum dicite … ’), each with an ‘amen’ response.

At the Beneventan Easter vigil the entire third chapter of Daniel received an impressively dramatic presentation. (An assignment to Good Friday in some manuscripts cannot be original.) The lector began in the ordinary lesson tone, then changed to a slightly more elaborate recitative for the prayer of Azarias; the lesson tone was then resumed for verses 46–50. At that point, one of the cantors sang the verse ‘tunc hii tres’, and the whole culminated with the choir chanting together a florid setting of four verses of the canticle concluded by a doxology. The same practice is also found in non-Beneventan manuscripts from central Italy.

The Benedicite was rarely set polyphonically in the Renaissance: Josquin’s motet Benedicite omnia opera begins with verse 57. The Benedicite (in English) was included in the Anglican service of Matins as an alternative to the Te Deum (see Service), and numerous settings have been composed since the 16th century for use in that context.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Mearns: The Canticles of the Christian Church, Eastern and Western, in Early and Medieval Times (Cambridge, 1914)

R.-J. Hesbert: ‘La tradition bénéventaine’, Le codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque vaticane, PalMus, 1st ser, xiv (1931/R), 222–4, 318–24

P. Ferretti: Estetica gregoriana, ossia Trattato delle forme musicali del canto gregoriano, i (Rome, 1934/R); (Fr. trans, 1938), 203–14

G.M. Suñol, ed.: Antiphonale missarum iuxta ritum sanctae ecclesiae mediolanensis (Rome, 1935), 183ff, 193ff

L. Brou: ‘Les “benedictiones”, ou Cantique des Trois Enfants dans l’ancienne messe espagnole’, Hispania sacra, i (1948), 21–33

L. Brou and J. Vives, eds.: Antifonario visigótico-mozárabe de la Catedral de León (Barcelona, 1953)

K. Gamber: Ordo antiquus gallicanus: der gallikanische Messritus des 6. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1965)

T.F. Kelly: The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989), 156–60

P. Bernard: ‘Le cantique des trois enfants (Dan. III, 52–90): les répertoires liturgiques occidentaux dans l’antiquité tardive et le haut Moyen Age’, Musica e storia, i (1993), 231–72

JOHN CALDWELL, JOSEPH DYER

Benedict, Sir Julius

(b Stuttgart, 27 Nov or 24 Dec 1804; d London, 5 June 1885). British composer and conductor of German birth. His date of birth is usually given as 27 November 1804, but Squire (DNB) stated that it was generally believed to have been 24 December. Benedict's father, a local banker, placed him under Ludwig Abeille for musical instruction; at the age of 15 he went to Weimar as a pupil of Hummel, who introduced him to Beethoven. His father, anxious for him to study with Weber, took him to Dresden in February 1821, and Hummel persuaded Weber to take Benedict as his first pupil. Weber soon treated him as a member of his family, and gave him 12 lessons a month. Benedict accompanied Weber to Vienna in September 1823 for the first performance of Euryanthe (25 October), and was present at Weber's famous meeting with Beethoven at Baden on 5 October. When Weber left Vienna on 5 November Benedict stayed behind to keep an eye on the subsequent performances.

In the summer of 1824 Weber passed him on to Barbaia, who had already secured him the post of conductor at the Kärntnertortheater. In 1825 Barbaia took him to Naples, where he became conductor at the S Carlo and Fondo theatres; he remained there for nine years as a successful conductor, pianist and teacher. He wrote three operas for Naples: despite his training they seem to have been principally in the style of Rossini. In 1834 he went to Paris, and in 1835 to London, which became his home for the rest of his long career.

In 1836 Benedict was appointed conductor of the Opera Buffa at the Lyceum Theatre, where on 31 January 1837 he brought out his one-act opera Un anno ed un giorno, performed at Naples earlier in the season. He was engaged as musical director at Drury Lane (1838–48) during the period of Alfred Bunn's management, which was also the most promising time for English Romantic opera. In addition to The Bohemian Girl, Maritana and other highly successful operas by Balfe and Wallace, Benedict brought out three English operas of his own, with more modest success. In 1848 he conducted Mendelssohn's Elijah at Exeter Hall, when Jenny Lind made her first appearance in oratorio. He accompanied Lind on an American tour in 1850, directing most of her concerts. On returning to London in 1852 he became conductor at Her Majesty's. His two remaining operas were produced by the Pyne-Harrison company at Covent Garden; one of them was The Lily of Killarney (based on Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn), by far his most popular work.

Meanwhile Benedict had become established in that thoroughly English institution, the provincial festival. He conducted every Norwich Festival from 1845 to 1878, the meeting due in 1851 being postponed until the following year to allow his return from the USA. He began to compose secular cantatas for the Norwich Festival in 1860, and wrote an English oratorio in 1870. He had also in 1855 founded a Vocal Association modelled on the German Gesangverein, and conducted its concerts at the Crystal Palace for ten years. He accompanied for many years at the Monday Popular Concerts, and conducted the Liverpool Philharmonic Society from 1876 to 1880. J.F. Barnett described Benedict in these later years:

He was one of the busiest musicians of the time … It was said by some he composed during the night and taught during the day; notwithstanding he continued to be present at nearly every important concert or fashionable reception given by patrons of musical art … Benedict was a man of engaging manners, and, of course, quite a society man; yet … he was at all times most accessible.

In 1871 Benedict, who had previously been naturalized, was knighted, together with Elvey and Sterndale Bennett. German and Austrian honours followed on his 70th birthday. In spite of his industry and reputation, he was in need of financial assistance at the end of his life: in 1884 a ‘Sir Julius Benedict Testimonial Fund’ was set up with royal patronage to raise money for him, with a Jubilee Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. He continued to teach almost until his death, which occurred suddenly from heart failure. He was twice married.

The geographical progress of Benedict's career closely paralleled that of Handel; and, as with Handel, it was the Italian influence, rather than the German or English, that formed the basis of his operatic and vocal style, despite his close association with Weber. In his earlier English operas he transferred the Rossinian idiom directly to the English situation. Perhaps for this reason he could not at first match the success of technically inferior composers such as Balfe and Wallace. He gradually learnt how to write an English ballad, and in The Lily of Killarney he at last produced a work which could equal the popularity of The Bohemian Girl and Maritana. It can be called the first Irish national opera, though without political overtones: it deliberately evokes nostalgia for old Ireland, using musical conventions established by Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies. Several themes are pentatonic, including a sinister ‘murder’ motif (anticipated in the overture). As well as several well-written ballads there are extended scenes of dramatic tension, such as the Trio and the Act 2 finale. The scene for Danny Mann, wrestling with conflicting emotions of tenderness for Eily (the Lily of the title) and fanatical devotion to his friend's cause, is especially powerful.

In later life his music became superficially more English: he wrote choral cantatas, an oratorio, even an anthem; but to the end he was apt to plunge into a cabaletta whenever he had the chance. On the other hand, his thorough contrapuntal training, of little use in his operas, showed up well in the choral works. The Legend of St Cecilia, thought by some critics to be his finest work, has some strong choral polyphony as well as some trivial solo songs.

Benedict was one of the most accomplished pianists of his day, and devoted more of his time to composing, editing and teaching piano music than to any other branch of the art. His piano style could be called pre-Lisztian, maintaining to the end the light-textured virtuosity of Field, Hummel and Weber. His concertos are worthy examples of this idiom, with by no means perfunctory orchestral parts. Most of his published piano pieces, however, are hack-work, including fantasias on operas by Balfe, Barnett, Bellini, Donizetti, Flotow, Gounod, Halévy, Meyerbeer, Verdi and Wallace; fantasias on Irish, Scottish and Welsh melodies; ‘Souvenirs’ and ‘Remembrances’ of this and that – including even Recollections of the Monday Popular Concert (1867); variations, dances, marches, and pieces with programmatic titles. His most pleasing style is a simple lyrical one, as in Evening Thoughts op.49 (1853). He published an important edition of Beethoven's piano works; edited sonatas and other major works by J.L. Dussek, Mendelssohn, Weber and others; and prepared valuable collections of teaching pieces that throw light on his methods as a teacher. Like Balfe, he tried his hand at chamber music in later years, with modestly successful results. In purely orchestral music, he seems ill at ease in the absence of his two habitual companions, the piano and the voice. His biography of Weber, published in 1881, has proved to be one of the most important sources for that composer's life.

WORKS

printed works published in piano or vocal score in London, unless otherwise stated

stage

operas, first performed in London unless otherwise stated

Giacinta ed Ernesto (L. Ricciutti), Naples, Fondo, 31 March 1827

I portoghesi in Goa (2, V. Torelli), Naples, S Carlo, 28 June 1830, I-Nc*

Un anno ed un giorno (1, D. Andreotti), Naples, Fondo, 19 Oct 1836; (lib rev. S.M. Maggioni), Lyceum, 31 Jan 1837, selections (1837)

The Gypsy's Warning (2, G. Linley, R.B. Peake), Drury Lane, 19 April 1838; pubd as Der Zigeunerin Warnung (Mainz, 1838); as Der Zigeunerin Weissagung, Berlin, 14 Oct 1840

The Brides of Venice (4, A. Bunn), Drury Lane, 22 April 1844 (1844); as Die Bräute von Venedig, Kassel, 20 Aug 1845

The Crusaders (3, Bunn, after J.-H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges), Drury Lane, 26 Feb 1846, selections (1846); as Der Alte vom Berge, Prague, May 1847

The Lily of Killarney (grand romantic op, 3, J. Oxenford and D. Boucicault, after Boucicault: The Colleen Bawm, or the Brides of Garryowen and G. Griffin: The Collegians, or The Colleen Bawm), CG, 10 Feb 1862 (1862)

The Bride of Song (1, H.B. Farnie), CG, 3 Dec 1864 (1864)

Adaptation of Flotow: Alessandro Stradella, Drury Lane, 1846

It. recitatives for Weber: Oberon, Her Majesty's, 1860, and for Mozart: II seraglio, CG, 9 June 1881

choral

L'amor timido (cant., P. Metastasio), Stuttgart, Aug 1822

Undine (cant., Oxenford), Norwich Festival, 1860 (1864)

6 Choral Songs (1862)

Richard Coeur de Lion (cant., Oxenford), Norwich Festival, 1863 (1864)

The Legend of St Cecilia (cant., H.F. Chorley), Norwich Festival, 1866 (1866)

St Peter (orat, Chorley, rev. J. Bennett), Birmingham Festival, 1870 (1870)

Praise the Lord, anthem (1877)

Graziella (cant., H. Hersee), Birmingham Festival, 1882 (1882)

other vocal

Variations de concert sur le Carnaval de Venise, 1v, pf (1865)

6 Four-Part Songs, op.79 (1870); 5 other qts

Marie Stuart (L. Courtenay), scena, 1v, pf (1883)

9 trios; 9 duets: 8 Eng., 1 It.; 99 songs: 79 Eng., 3 Fr., 3 Ger., 14 It.

orchestral

2 syms.: g, op.101, fs (1874); C, ?1874–6, private collection, London*

4 ovs.: Festival, op.42 (c1850); The Octoroon (1862); Le ménestrel, op.76 (1876); The Tempest, op.77 (1876)

2 pf concs.: A, op.90 (1867), 1st movt as Concertino no.1, op.18 (Leipzig, 1831); E, op.89 (1867), 1st movt as Concertino no.2, op.29 (Mainz, c1833)

Romeo and Juliet, incid music (1882)

chamber

Sonata, vn, pf, op.1 (Leipzig, c1822)

Andantino, concertina, pf (1858)

Sonata, vn, pf, op.88 (1867)

String Quartet, c, op.87 (Berlin, 1875)

Romanze, D, vn, pf, op.105 (Berlin, c1877)

piano

2 sonatas: op.2 (Leipzig, c1823); D, op.4 (Vienna, c1825)

Rondo, A, op.3 (Vienna, c1825); Rondo brillant, A, op.5 (Vienna, 1827)

Caprice en forme de galop, D, op.15 (Leipzig, c1832); c60 other pieces incl. 18 fantasias on operatic/popular tunes

20 Popular Melodies for Young Performers (1850)

3 Easy Lessons, pf 4 hands (1876)

Exercises (1876)

editions

Select Practice for the Pianoforte (London, c1850)

Beethoven's Works for the Pianoforte (London, 1858)

The Volunteers' Vocal Handbook (London, 1861)

Cramer's Juvenile Series, pf (London, 1870)

Album classique, pf (Brunswick, 1874)

WRITINGS

Sketch of the Life and Works of the Late Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (London, 1850, 2/1853)

Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1881, 5/1899)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

GroveO (‘Lily of Killarney, The’; N. Burton)

Kobbé10

LoewenbergA

PEM (N. Temperley)

StiegerO

AMZ, xxxiii (1831), 187–9

A. Bunn: The Stage (London, 1840)

MT, xxv (1884), 144, 330–31, 397–8, 469; xxvi (1885), 385–6

R.H. Legge and W.E. Hansell: Annals of the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Musical Festivals, 1824–1893 (London, 1896)

J.F. Barnett: Musical Reminiscences and Impressions (London, 1906)

J. Bennett: Forty Years of Music 1865–1905 (London, 1908), 37–44

F. de Filippis and R. Arnese: Cronache del Teatro di S Carlo 1737–1960 (Naples, 1961–3)

J. Warrack: Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1968, 2/1976)

N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age 1800–1914 (London, 1981/R)

E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983)

E.W. White: A Register of First Performances of English Operas and Semi-Operas (London, 1983)

H.E. Smither: A History of the Oratorio, iv: Oratorio in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, forthcoming)

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Benedictine monks.

The ‘Black Monks’, known since the 14th century as the Order of St Benedict (OSB). The order consists of a large number of monastic communities and federations which follow the Rule of St Benedict (see Benedict of Nursia), but it is to be distinguished from monastic bodies such as the Cistercians which, while retaining the Rule, broke away from the mainstream of Benedictinism to form autonomous orders.

2. Music and liturgy.

JAMES W. McKINNON

Benedictine monks

1. Benedictine monasticism.

When Benedict composed his Rule (c530) for the monastery of Monte Cassino, he could hardly have foreseen that it would become the universal norm for Western monasticism; or indeed that Benedictine monasticism was to play so central a role in the development of European civilization that historians today refer to the period between the 8th and the 12th centuries as the ‘Benedictine centuries’.

The first of these historical triumphs was substantially complete by the time of Charlemagne (d 812), who recognized no other monastic rule within his realm. The process by which it took place is not traceable in every detail. For example, there is no evidence supporting the tradition that the Rule came to the Roman monasteries after the destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards in 577, and that it was brought from Rome to England when Pope Gregory sent Augustine of Canterbury (supposedly a Benedictine) there in 596 (see Brechter; Knowles, 2/1963, p.17). There is more substantial evidence for the parts played by later figures such as Benedict Biscop (d 690) and Boniface (d 754); in any event it is now generally assumed that the Rule, by virtue of its sheer quality, was gradually accepted as equal to the more venerable rules that it eventually superseded.

However, from the viewpoint of the Carolingian desire for uniformity the Rule had one defect: it was designed for Monte Cassino alone and had no provisions for assuring uniform observance among many monasteries. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious (d 840), who shared his father’s desire for unity, found an energetic ally in the monk Benedict of Aniane (d 821). In 817 Louis appointed him president of a council of abbots at Aachen which drew up legislation designed to supplement the Rule with numerous specific regulations and to provide for their observance.

Benedict’s grand scheme was not to be realized, owing to the chaotic conditions of his time which deteriorated further with the Scandinavian incursions of the later 9th century. However, reforms similar to his achieved spectacular success in the following centuries. Cluny, founded in 910, was ruled by a series of brilliant abbots and by the 11th century came to preside over a quasi-feudal network of nearly 1000 monastic houses. Similar ‘orders’ were organized under other abbeys, including Bec in Normandy and Gorze in the Rhineland.

Nearly all monasteries, whether federated or autonomous, adopted the Cluniac way of life. This was far removed from the simple monasticism of Benedict of Nursia, where a community of lay monks devoted their time to manual labour, the recitation of the Office, and very basic spiritual reading. The later monks were priests rather than lay brothers; they had abandoned the practice of manual labour and devoted themselves almost exclusively to the performance of an immensely elaborate Office. Their churches were no longer the simple oratories of Benedict's time but towering stone structures that inspired the early 12th-century Cluniac Raol Grabar to speak of ‘the white mantle of churches which the world put on’. Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture was in fact a Benedictine architecture, as can be witnessed today in countless churches ranging from the exquisite Ste Foy of Conques, France, to the mighty English cathedral of Durham. The portals, capitals and cloisters of churches like those at Autun, Moissac and Vézelay were adorned with sculpture of surpassing imagination, while the monks engaged in copying manuscripts developed their craft into a major art form.

The order counted among its ranks many of the most learned men of the time, for example, Lanfranc, Anselm and Abelard, who fulfilled the promise of Carolingian Benedictines like Alcuin and Hrabanus Maurus. It provided the Church with its most brilliant bishops and at the same time exercised great influence in secular affairs, both by furnishing advisers for rulers, and acting as a feudal authority by virtue of its extensive territorial holdings. In fact Europe in about 1100 could, without exaggeration, be regarded as a Benedictine civilization.

Among the first signs that this hegemony was at an end was the breaking away of reform groups in the 11th and 12th centuries. Some, like the Camaldolese and the Carthusians, sought a return to the pre-Benedictine eremitical life, while others like the Vallombrosans and Cistercians wished only to revert to a primitive observance of the Rule. During the 12th and 13th centuries the leadership of the Black Monks was successfully challenged in many areas: for example, intellectual leadership with the rise of the universities, and artistic leadership with the undertaking of book illumination by urban workshops of lay artists.

In the 14th and 15th centuries the process of decline continued in spite of reform efforts like the establishment of the Italian Cassinese Congregation (1424) and of the Bursfeld Union in Westphalia (1434). Perhaps the most serious aspect of the decline was an increase in the practice of commendam, whereby a secular prelate or even a layman might hold the office and benefices of abbot without participating in the regular life of his monastery. Thus deprived of internal leadership, monasticism offered little resistance to the Protestant Reformation; by 1560 it had entirely disappeared in England, Switzerland, Holland and western Germany, and was severely weakened in France and central Europe. Yet in the 17th century the institution’s remarkable resilience was manifested in a revival best exemplified by the French congregations of St Vanne (1604) and St Maur (1621). The latter produced a century of scholars including Jean Mabillon, Luc d'Achéry and Bernard de Montfaucon, whose vast output in patristic philology and medieval history and whose critical method still command respect.

The climate of 18th-century rationalism was unhealthy for monasticism, and the French Revolution, together with the movement towards secularization in other Catholic countries, dealt it what appeared to be a death blow. By 1830 there were but a handful of monasteries, barely maintaining themselves, mostly in southern German-speaking areas. Then came the most remarkable of all monastic revivals. Within a few decades vigorous foundations sprang up, including Solesmes in France (1837) and Beuron in Germany (1868); the first American monastery was founded at Beatty, Pennsylvania, in 1846, and monasticism in Britain, after its tentative beginning at Downside in 1814, was flourishing by mid-century. The 19th-century renaissance maintained its momentum until after World War II, and by about 1960 Benedictinism was at its most flourishing since the 12th century, both with respect to numbers and to the quality of observance. Then came a blow from an unexpected quarter. The modern reform movement in Roman Catholicism, given impetus by the Second Vatican Council (1962), has called, in effect, for a purge of the medieval elements in the Church. Benedictine monasticism, even taking into account its adaptability, is essentially a medieval institution; in the decades since Vatican II it has been forced to engage in an exercise of self-questioning about the relevance of its mode of life for the present and the future.

Benedictine monks

2. Music and liturgy.

The fortunes of Benedictine music have consistently followed the fortunes of general Benedictine history. During the ‘Benedictine centuries’ the order was in the forefront of musical development; during the later medieval period of decline it receded into the background, and in the 19th-century revival it achieved a dramatic restoration of Gregorian chant.

Benedictine musical history begins with the Rule; chapters 8–19 are devoted to the earliest concise and comprehensive description of the Office, including its daily horarium, the weekly ordering of the 150 psalms, and the occasions at which the various antiphons, responsories, hymns (ambrosiana), lessons and versicles were to be sung. The horarium was based on the Roman system which divided the day and the night into 12 hours each; at the latitude of Monte Cassino a day hour varied in length from about 45 minutes on 21 December to 75 minutes on 21 June. The first service, vigiliae (the later Matins), began shortly after the eighth hour (between 1.50 and 2.30 a.m.) during the winter cycle (from 1 November to Easter); during the summer cycle it began about an hour before dawn. The second service, matutini (the later Lauds), began at dawn. The first of the shorter services, Prime, began at sunrise, Terce at the beginning of the third hour, Sext at midday and None in the early afternoon. Vespers was recited about half an hour before sunset, and Compline at dusk, after a break for supper in the summer or a simple collation in winter. A point that has long troubled historians is the omission from the Rule of daily Mass, but recent commentators have found a satisfactory explanation for this in the fact that Benedict and his fellow monks were not priests.

The Benedictine Office must have taken from three to four hours to perform, considerably less time than that of the later Carolingian and Cluniac liturgies. The relatively primitive nature of 6th-century Monte Cassino has caused some to question whether the Office was actually sung there or whether it was merely recited. Watkin, after examining both the language of the Rule and the contemporary state of the chant, has argued convincingly that it was sung. He conceded nevertheless that liturgical music was far from being as important for Benedict as it was for later monasticism. It is clear that Benedict’s famous phrase ‘nihil operi Dei praeponatur’ (‘nothing is to be put before the work of God’; chap.43) means simply that a monk must stop whatever he is doing at the appointed time for the Office, and not, as was later suggested, that the Office is the single essential function of the monastic life.

Music did, however, come to occupy a place of enormous importance within Benedictinism. Two historical developments help to explain this. First, since Benedictinism came to be virtually synonymous with Western ecclesiastical culture, new musical achievements were necessarily Benedictine. Thus Benedictine monks were crucial to the development of the so-called Gregorian chant, which took place in Frankish lands of the 9th century, and they were responsible for copying many of the earliest notated chant manuscripts.

The second was an internal development: the change from the lay monk to the clerical choir monk. By Carolingian times Benedictine monasticism had abandoned manual labour, had accepted that monks were normally priests, and had come to regard the singing of the liturgy as its central task. This process, which can be observed in the Capitularies of Benedict of Aniane, reached its climax two centuries later in monastic centres like Cluny. By that time the singing of the liturgy must have required about eight hours on a normal day and considerably longer on Sundays and feast days. There were massive accretions to the original Benedictine liturgy. The daily conventual Mass, sung at Terce, was to be expected within a clerical monasticism, but a second Mass, usually for the dead, was added after Prime, and eventually yet another in honour of the Blessed Virgin. Before Matins were sung the 15 ‘gradual psalms’; after Prime the seven penitential psalms and the litany; and after all the Hours psalmi familiares on behalf of monastic patrons. By the 9th century an Office of the Dead was added, consisting of Matins, Lauds and Vespers; by the late 10th century an Office of All Saints, comprising Lauds and Vespers; and this itself was then replaced by a full Office of the Blessed Virgin. Most of these accretions were confined to ferial days, while the liturgy of Sundays and feast days was expanded by the addition of tropes, verses, proses etc. rivalling in length the original chants.

The secular cathedrals and churches, which in general conformed to monastic usage, likewise accepted these liturgical additions. The popularity of the latter is indicated by their forming the basis of late medieval lay Offices such as are contained in the English Prymer, the French Book of Hours and the German Hortulus animae. Musically, many of them were comparatively insignificant, but certain of them, such as the Office and Mass of the Blessed Virgin, were of great importance for late medieval polyphony.

Apart from liturgical chant (in the restricted sense), there are several Benedictine musical achievements of central importance, most notably, the establishment of music theory, the development of ecclesiastical vocal polyphony, the introduction of the pipe organ into the church and the creation of liturgical drama. The music theory of late antiquity, even when expounded by Christian theorists such as Boethius and Cassiodorus, was a mathematical discipline, basically unconcerned with contemporary music. However, Benedictine theorists of the period from the 9th to the 11th centuries, like Aurelian, Hucbald of St Amand, Pseudo-Odo and Hermannus Contractus, while retaining a mathematical bias, took the crucial step of applying classical modes of thought to an analysis of their everyday musical experience – the chant – and worked out fundamental theoretical concerns such as the system of consonances and the eight ecclesiastical modes. The earliest efforts at notated polyphony also took place within Benedictinism and first flowered in the polyphony of the Winchester Troper and that of the Cluniac monasteries associated with St Martial of Limoges. The pipe organ, which after its reappearance in the West in 757 came to be employed by monastic teachers as a vivid illustration of the mathematical laws underlying pitch relationships, made its way into abbey churches with increasing frequency during the 10th century. The most noteworthy example of this was the introduction of the organ into English churches during the monastic revival of Dunstan, Oswald and Ethelwald (d 983), the last of whom oversaw the installation of the legendary organ in the Old Minster at Winchester. It was also under Ethelwald's aegis that the Regularis concordia (‘Monastic Agreement of Monks and Nuns of the English Nation’) was produced; this document contains the earliest preserved example of a fully rubricated liturgical drama, the Quem queritis dialogue.

In the second half of the 12th century, however, as general cultural leadership passed into the hands of groups other than the Black Monks, so too did liturgical leadership. Benedictine liturgy, with its accretions, became an obvious target for reform. The Cistercians, for example, eliminated tropes and excised long melismas from the chant. More important was the rite of the papal curia (see Van Dijk and Walker): in order to bring the liturgy into conformity with its active and mobile way of life, the curia shortened it by eliminating tropes and other accretions and by assigning the votive Offices to specific dates rather than having them sung daily. The Franciscans adopted the curial liturgy and promulgated it, creating a serious rival to the Benedictine observances and eventually exercising a crucial influence upon Pius V’s Breviary (1568) and Missal (1570). The Benedictines themselves in large measure adopted the principles underlying the curial liturgy: the 15th-century Bursfeld and Cassinese reforms, followed by the 1612 monastic breviary of Paul V, left the Benedictines with a Mass almost identical to the ‘Roman’ (i.e. curial) Mass and an Office differing only from the ‘Roman’ in certain peculiarities, such as Benedict’s original ordering of the psalms, and in vestiges of the votive Offices.

Closely tied to the surrendering of liturgical leadership is the loss of musical leadership; this is most decisively demonstrated in the development of modal and mensural polyphony within the sphere of the secular cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, and its exposition by scholastic theorists like Johannes de Garlandia and Franco of Cologne. From the remaining centuries of the Middle Ages and to modern times, Benedictinism remained largely outside the mainstream of musical progress, preserving the chant and occasionally incorporating contemporary trends. To cite an example of the latter, in late medieval England, where many of the great cathedrals like Canterbury, Durham and Winchester were also Benedictine abbeys, endowed chapels were constructed and secular musicians engaged to train choristers to perform polyphonic votive Masses and Offices. A more extraordinary adaptation took place in the splendid 17th- and 18th-century monastic churches of Bavaria and Austria: the choir screens were removed and orchestras were installed in the sanctuary to accompany the concerted music at Mass and Vespers. At the same time operas and oratorios were performed in the halls of the grander Benedictine establishments; Kremsmünster and Melk, to name but two, figured among the principle musical centres of the time, as is attested by their great collections of symphonies. Mozart himself played the organ on one occasion at Melk.

In the monastic renaissance of the 19th century, Benedictine musical conservatism was channelled into creative revival. The Liturgical Movement, which swept the church in the 19th and 20th centuries, and whose influence is still felt throughout the Western Church, was in its early stages primarily the product of new Benedictine foundations such as Solesmes and Maria Laach. In the USA the movement had its unofficial centre at St John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, the largest Benedictine community in the world. Central to the movement was the meticulous performance of Gregorian chant. The monk scholars of Solesmes did much to restore the chant, and while their rhythmic system was controversial, it enabled the chant to function both as practical church music and as an aesthetic experience for the musically cultivated. Pius X in his Motu proprio (1903) and Pius XII in Mediator Dei (1947) proclaimed it as the primary official music of the Church.

It is no small irony that in recent decades the very Liturgical Movement that was largely the creation of Benedictines has portrayed the singing of chant as a practice of dubious liturgical value.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HarrisonMMB

J. Mabillon: Annales ordinis S. Benedicti (Paris, 1703–39)

B. Albers: Consuetudines monasticae, i (Vienna, 1900); ii–v (Monte Cassino, 1905–12)

U. Berlière: L’ordre monastique des origines au XIIe siècle (Maredsous, 1912, 3/1924)

E. Bishop: Liturgica historica: Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church (Oxford, 1918)

E.C. Butler: Benedictine Monachism (London, 1919, 2/1924/R)

D. Knowles: The Benedictines (London, 1929)

J. Evans: Monastic Life at Cluny, 910–1157 (Oxford, 1931/R)

D. Knowles: ‘The Monastic Horarium’, Downside Review, li (1933), 706–25

S. Dulcy: La règle de Saint Benoît d’Aniane et la réforme monastique à l’époque carolingienne (Nîmes, 1935)

S. Brechter: ‘Monte Cassinos erste Zerstörung’, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens, lvi (1938), 109–50

M. Shepherd: ‘The Development of Monastic Worship’, Anglican Theological Review, xxi (1939), 1–21

D. Knowles: The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge, 1940, 2/1963)

A. Watkin: ‘St Benedict and the Chanted Office’, Downside Review, lix (1941), 311–26

P. Schmitz: Histoire de l’ordre de St. Benoît (Maredsous, 1942–56)

W. Levison: England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946/R)

P. Anson: ‘The Evolution of the Monastic Choir’, Downside Review, lxvii (1949), 183–93

S. Hilpisch: Das Benediktinertum im Wandel der Zeiten (St Ottilien, 1950; Eng. trans., 1958)

B. Steidle: ‘Psalmus directaneus: ein Beitrag zum Gesang in der Regel sancti Benedicti’, Benediktinische Monatschrift, xxviii (1952), 235–7

A. Kellner: Musikgeschichte des Stiftes Kremsmünster, nach den Quellen dargestellt (Kassel, 1956)

P. Cousin: Précis d’histoire monastique (Paris, 1959)

N. Cantor: ‘The Crisis of Western Monasticism, 1050–1130’, American Historical Review, lxvi (1960), 44–67

S. Van Dijk and J. Walker: The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy (London and Westminster, MD, 1960)

D. Knowles: ‘The Maurists’, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), 33–62

F. Prinz: Frühes Mönchtum in Frankenreich (Vienna, 1965)

H.E.J. Cowdrey: The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford, 1970)

J. Angerer: Die liturgisch-musikalische Erneuerung der Melker Reform (Vienna, 1974)

C. Brooke: The Monastic World, 1000–1300 (London, 1974)

J. Dubois: ‘Les moines dans la société du Moyen Age (950–1350)’, Revue d'histoire de l'église de France, lx (1974), 5–37

R.N. Freeman: The Practice of Music at Melk Abbey: Based upon the Documents, 1681–1826 (Vienna, 1974)

G. Constable: Medieval Monasticism: a Select Bibliography (Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1976)

J. Angerer: ‘Die Consuetudines Monasticae als Quelle für die Musikgeschichte’, Sacerdos et cantus gregoriani magister: Festschrift Ferdinand Haberl, ed. F.A. Stein (Regensburg, 1977), 23–38

R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville, MN, 1986)

T. Kardong: The Benedictines (Wilmington, DE, 1988)

Benedictio cerei

(Lat.: ‘blessing of the candle’).

See Exultet.

Benediction [Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament]

(from Lat. benedictio: ‘blessing’).

In the Roman rite, a ceremony comprising the exposition and veneration of the Sacred Host, the singing of hymns and a blessing of the faithful with the Host. It is not part of the Mass in the strict sense. Benediction probably developed from the new devotion to the Sacrament that appeared in the Latin West from the 12th century, reflected in innovations such as the Elevation within Mass and the processions carrying the Sacrament on the feast of Corpus Christi (instituted 1264). Hildebrand, Benedictine abbot at Hildesheim, issued instructions in 1301 that the faithful were to be blessed with the Host at a station during the Corpus Christi procession while the choir sang the antiphon O admirabile commercium (Browe, 74, n.9, cited also in Righetti, 613); there is further evidence of Benediction in northern Europe in the 14th century, but not in Italy until much later.

Benediction developed as an evening devotion, not necessarily allied to Corpus Christi, and it was further emphasized as a counterblast to the Reformers’ denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation; nevertheless, the service was not recognized by the Roman Church as a true liturgical action until 1958. The chant prescribed for Benediction is Tantum ergo, but the detail of the service is variable and many other eucharistic chants are customary; there are 250 chants in the Cantus selecti ad benedictionem (Paris, 1963), and vernacular hymns have been used for it too. Polyphonic settings and organ music have, since the Counter-Reformation, also played an established role within the service; the repertory of settings of the Tantum ergo, Ave verum corpus and other texts is vast, and most Catholic church composers since the 16th century probably contributed to it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Fortescue: The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (London, 1917, 12/1962)

P. Browe: Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich, 1933/R)

M. Righetti: Manuale di storia liturgica, iii (Milan, 1948, 3/1966), 608–14

J.A. Jungmann: Missarum sollemnia (Vienna, 1948, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1951–5, abridged 2/1961)

Benedictional

(Lat. benedictionale, liber benedictionum).

A book containing the blessings pronounced by the bishop at Mass before Communion in the Western Church. Some manuscripts, such as the Benedictional of Ethelwold (10th century, GB-Lbl Add.49598), are richly illuminated. See Liturgy and liturgical books, §II, 4(v).

Benedictiones.

Office antiphons and Mass chants in the Mozarabic rite. See Mozarabic chant, §§3(v) and 4(iv).

Benedictis [Benedetti] da Pascarola, Giovanni Tommaso

(b ?Pascarola, ?1550–60; d before 1601). Italian composer. He was named after his probable birthplace, a village 13 km north of Naples. His Primo libro de madrigali for five voices was published in Venice; its dedication (to ‘Giovan Thomaso Saracino’) is dated the last day of February 1589. On the title-page he is called ‘Don’. On 12 June of that year (not 1587 as stated in MGG1) the governors of SS Annunziata in Naples, dissatisfied with their ailing maestro di cappella Giovanni Domenico da Nola, decided to replace him with ‘R[everen]do Giov. Tommaso’ at the monthly wage of 70 ducats. Nola successfully blocked this move by appealing to an ecclesiastical council. Pannain stated, perhaps erroneously, that Pascarola was maestro di canto of the Annunziata chapel from 1576. Cerreto in Della prattica musica (1601) mentioned Pascarola among the excellent composers no longer living.

Although the inclusion of a madrigal by Pascarola in Califano’s book (1584) might suggest that Califano taught Pascarola, the two composers’ styles are markedly different. Pascarola’s works are more intricate, relying less on chordal texture and more on lengthy points of imitation which use double subjects, inversion, diminution and (double) augmentation. The poems are by Sannazaro (20), Petrarch (four) and Tansillo (one).

Pascarola was probably not related to Donato de Benedictis, a Celestine monk from Taranto who in 1614 published at Venice a book of motets for from two to four voices with basso continuo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VogelB

G. Filangieri, ed.: Documenti per la storia, le arti e le industrie delle provincie napoletane, v–vi (Naples, 1891), 254

KEITH A. LARSON

Benedict of Nursia

(b Nursia [now Norcia], Umbria, c480; d Monte Cassino, after 546). Italian saint and monk. His Rule became the norm for Western Christian monasticism. The only source of information concerning Benedict’s life is book 2 of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues (c594). Gregory was primarily interested in Benedict’s miracles, and although he outlined the main events of Benedict’s life he did not assign dates to them. The sole date of any certainty is that of the visit of the Ostrogothic King Totila to him near Monte Cassino, probably in 546; all others rest on speculation.

Benedict was born into a ‘good family’ (Gregory’s ‘liberiori genere’). As a youth he was sent to Rome to pursue his studies (‘liberalibus litterarum studiis’), but after a time, distressed by the worldliness of that city, he left it and settled near Sublacum (now Subiaco) for three years, living the austere life of a hermit in a cave on the craggy cliffs of the Anio valley. As his fame spread, he was asked by a group of lax monks to undertake a reform of their monastery at Vicovaro. This venture was unsuccessful, and he then began to organize his growing band of disciples into a cluster of small monastic communities according to the Eastern model.

His activity excited the jealousy of a local priest, Florentius; this prompted Benedict to leave his monasteries in the charge of others and to set out towards the south with a small group of companions. He stopped at Casinum, a ruined town on the Via Latina between Rome and Naples; there, on the summit of the mountain overlooking the town, he founded Monte Cassino, the monastery that was to be the mother house of Benedictinism. It was probably this new, carefully organized and self-sufficient monastery for which he wrote his celebrated Rule.

In its 73 short chapters the Rule represents a remarkable blend of practical and spiritual teaching. The administrative needs of the monastery are dealt with concisely and comprehensively, and spiritual directives are given in a manner that tempers austerity with humanity; in this latter respect, the Rule is unlike much earlier monastic legislation. Musically, the Rule is significant in that it stresses the importance of the Office and clearly sets forth its horarium (chaps.8–19), specifying how the 150 psalms are to be distributed throughout the week.

Benedict's Rule was unquestioningly assumed to have played a central part in the development of Western civilization; but the author's personal achievement was called into question when in 1938 it was claimed that the Rule was in great part derived from the Regula magistri, an anonymous monastic rule previously assumed to have been dependent on that of Benedict. An intense controversy ensued, but most scholars now acknowledge the anteriority of the Regula magistri and Benedict’s dependence upon it. Nevertheless, the significance of Benedict’s own accomplishment has been reaffirmed, for the value of his Rule resides largely in its character as a concise, well-integrated combination of the best material in earlier sources. The long, rambling, and occasionally eccentric Regula magistri cannot seriously compete with Benedict's Rule in historical importance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Chapman: Saint Benedict and the Sixth Century (London, 1929/R)

J. McCann: Saint Benedict (London, 1937, 2/1951/R)

O.J. Zimmermann and B.R.Avery: Life and Miracles of St. Benedict: Book Two of the ‘Dialogues’ (London, 1949/R)

J. McCann, ed.: The Rule of Saint Benedict in Latin and English (London, 1952)

R. Hanslik, ed.: Benedicti regula (Vienna, 1960, 2/1977)

D. Knowles: ‘The Regula Magistri and the Rule of St. Benedict’, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), 135–95

A. de Vogüé, ed.: La règle du maître (Paris, 1964–5)

A. de Vogüé, ed.: La Règle de Saint Benoît (Paris, 1971–7)

A. de Vogüé and P. Autin, eds: Dialogues: Grégoire le Grand (Paris, 1978–80)

T. Fry, ed.: The Rule of Saint Benedict in Latin and English with Notes (Collegeville, MN, 1981)

A. de Vogüé: Ce que dit Saint Benoît: une lecture de la Règle (Bellefontaine, 1991 Eng. trans., 1994)

JAMES W. McKINNON

Benedict of Peterborough

(d c1193). Benedictine abbot and composer. He was a monk, and later chancellor (1174) and prior (1175), of the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, and was appointed abbot of Peterborough in 1177. A friend of Archbishop Thomas Becket, whose murder he may have witnessed, he composed the rhymed monastic office of St Thomas of Canterbury (d 1170) as well as many other writings about Thomas, presumably shortly after the saint’s martyrdom. The plainchant Office, which begins with the Magnificat antiphon Pastor cesus (first responsory Studens livor), includes 22 antiphons and 12 responsories and is one of the most advanced compositions of its time, with texts in accentual rhyming verse and music of great melodic richness, fully exploiting tonal resources within a modal framework. The Peterborough chronicler Robert of Swapham expressly attributed both text and music to Benedict: ‘totam dico, quia dictamen cantu excellenter insignivit’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (E.M. Thompson)

R. Hunt: ‘Notes on the Distinctiones monasticae et morales’, Liber floridus: mittellateinische Studien Paul Lehmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. B. Bischoff and S. Brechter (St Ottilien, 1950), 355–62

B. Stäblein: Schriftbild der einstimmigen Musik, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, iii/4 (Leipzig, 1975), 162–5

A. Hughes: ‘Chants in the Rhymed Office for St Thomas of Canterbury’, EMc, xvi (1988), 185–201

DAVID HILEY

Benedictus (i)

(Lat.: ‘blessed’).

Part of the Sanctus after the first Hosanna, consisting of the sentence ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’ followed by a repeat of the Hosanna. It is an adaptation of a quotation from Matthew xxi.9: ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!’ which is itself an adaptation of Psalm cxviii.26. It is found in the Roman liturgy from the 7th century, and may have been added to the Roman Sanctus, together with the two Hosannas, through Gallican influence. It was also sung in various oriental rites and is attested in the Jewish Pesah (Passover) ritual.

In the Roman Mass, the Benedictus was until recently separated from the Sanctus by the consecration (a procedure outlined in the Caeremoniale episcoporum of 1600). According to Jungmann (Missarum sollemnia, ii, 137) this was ‘obviously an attempt to accommodate to the canon a polyphonic style of song wherein the richer melody of the Sanctus … stretches out to the consecration, while the Benedictus, along with the second Hosanna, fills out the rest of the canon’. Wagner and others also attributed the practice to the influence of polyphony, and certainly the Benedictus has usually appeared as a separate section in polyphonic masses since the Middle Ages. (See also Ordo cantus missae.)

In Renaissance polyphonic settings, the Benedictus was usually set for fewer voices than the rest of the Mass; later it was at times set as a solo aria (Bach's B minor Mass), for soloists and chorus (Mozart and Haydn), or was emphasized by a change in tempo (Schubert, Beethoven, Stravinsky).

Although the Benedictus was included in the Communion Service in the Anglican Prayer Book of 1549, and set by Marbeck (1550), it was omitted from the 1552 and subsequent editions. This may explain why there is music for it in the Wanley Partbooks (1546–7, containing ten masses in English), whereas it was rarely set by Elizabethan and later composers. By the 19th century, however, the Benedictus was once again included in music for the Anglican rite.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Wagner: Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien, i (Fribourg, 1895, 3/1911/R), 1141ff; ii (Fribourg, 1905, 2/1912/R), 455ff

F. Cabrol: ‘Cantiques évangéliques’, Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, ii/2 (Paris, 1910), 1994

F. Cabrol: ‘Messe’, Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, xi/1 (Paris, 1933), 513–774

A. Gastoué: ‘Le sanctus et le benedictus’, Revue du chant grégorien, xxxviii (1934), 163–8; xxxix (1935), 12–17, 35–9

E.H. Fellowes: English Cathedral Music (London, 1941, rev. 5/1969 by J.A. Westrup)

J. Jungmann: Missaram sollemnia (Vienna, 1948, 5/1962: Eng. trans., 1951–5, abridged 2/1961)

P.J. Thannabaur: Das einstimmige Sanctus der römischen Messe in der handschriftlichen Überlieferung des 11. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1962)

D. Stevens: Tudor Church Music (London, 1961, 2/1966), 50ff

RICHARD SHERR

Benedictus (ii)

(Lat.: ‘blessed’).

The first word of the canticle of Zechariah (Zachary), ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel’ (Luke i.68–79), sung towards the end of the Office of Lauds in most Latin rites, after the 9th ōdē of the kanōn in the Byzantine morning Office of Orthros (it replaces this ōdē during Eastertide), and before the Nicene Creed at Anglican Matins. It is also the first word of the canticle of David, ‘Benedictus es, Domine Deus Israel patris nostri’ (1 Chronicles xxix.10b–13), the festal canticle sung to the ordinary Office psalmody at Monday Lauds in the Roman monastic and secular Office.

The original assignment of the canticle of Zechariah to Lauds was presumably prompted by the words: ‘the day-spring from on high hath visited us to give light to them that sit in darkness’. Benedict of Nursia referred to the canticle as the ‘canticum de evangelia’, and his earlier contemporary, known only as the ‘Master’, called it simply ‘evangelia’. In the Gregorian (though not the Old Roman) repertory, a special psalmody in each of the modes and with ornate intonations and cadences is reserved for the singing of the Benedictus; the ‘Gospel antiphon’ sung with it is also generally more ornate than the normal Office antiphons. At solemn celebrations of Lauds the incensation of the altar takes place during the singing of this canticle. In the Gallican rite the Benedictus was sung at Mass immediately before the collect, but no evidence regarding the nature of its chant has survived.

Polyphonic music for the Roman Catholic Holy Week Office of Tenebrae, which concludes with Lauds, sometimes included a simple falsobordone or predominantly chordal setting of the Benedictus. Palestrina wrote several settings (some of which may not be authentic) as did Lassus, Victoria and Gesualdo, Corteccia, Antoine de Févin, J.G. Pérez, Tallis and Orazio Vecchi. Polyphonic settings of the text in English have continued to be composed by musicians writing for the Anglican morning Service.

For liturgical texts from the book of Daniel beginning with the word ‘Benedictus’ see Benedicite.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Bäumer: Geschichte des Breviers (Freiburg, 1895; Fr. trans., 1905/R)

J. Mearns: The Canticles of the Christian Church, Eastern and Western, in Early and Medieval Times (Cambridge, 1914)

R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours East and West: the Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today (Collegeville, MN, 1986)

J. Harper: The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: a Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991)

JOHN CALDWELL, JOSEPH DYER

Benedictus a Sancto Josepho [family name Buns]

(b Geldern, c1642; d Boxmeer, North Brabant, 6 Dec 1716). Dutch composer. He entered the Carmelite monastery at Geldern in 1659, took his vows in 1660 and was ordained in 1666. Before 1671 he was transferred to the monastery at Boxmeer, where he served as sub-prior at least during the years 1671–4, 1677–83 and 1692–1701; he was also organist from 1679 until his death.

Benedictus composed mainly sacred vocal works, which include seven masses, two requiem settings, six litanies, ten partly allegorical dialogues and numerous motets on Latin liturgical and non-liturgical texts. All have instrumental accompaniments; the majority have an instrumental introduction, some even a symphony or sonata in the middle. These works, which are predominantly in a concertato style, are sound technically, but there is little imaginative modulation and only sporadic chromaticism. The sonatas op.8 are arranged in a cycle of fifths, with a sonata which modulates from F minor to E major at the centre of the cycle.

WORKS

for detailed list of contents, see van der Meer (1958)

op.

1	Missae, litaniae, et motetta, 4–6vv, 2 vn, bn, bc (Antwerp, 1666); 1 piece ed. in Noske
2	Corona stellarum duodecim serta, 1–4vv, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 trbn, bn, bc (Antwerp, 2/1673)
3	Flosculi musici, 1–4vv, 2 vn, bn, bc (Antwerp, 1672)
4	Musica montana in monte Carmelo composita, 1–4vv, str, bn, bc (Antwerp, 1677)
5	Completoriale melos musicum, 2–4vv, str, bn, bc (Antwerp, 1678); also includes 1 sonata for 2 inst ensembles; 1 piece ed. in Noske
6	Encomia sacra musice decantanda, 1–3vv, str, bn, bc (Utrecht, 1683); 4 pieces ed. in EMN, xv (1982); 1 piece ed. in Noske
7	Orpheus gaudens ac lugens sive Cantica gaudii ac luctus, 1–5vv, str, bn, bc (Antwerp, 1693), lost; MS copy of Missa pro defunctis in B-Bc
8	Orpheus Elianus è Carmelo in orbem editus (Amsterdam, [1699]), 13 church sonatas, 2 vn, vc, org; edn of no.3 ed. by H. Schouwman
9	Missa sacris ornata canticis, 1–3vv, 1–4 str, bc (Amsterdam, c1699–1700); 1 piece ed. in Noske

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.I.M. Kat: De geschiedenis der kerkmuziek in de Nederlanden sedert de Hervorming (Hilversum, 1939), 111–12, 131ff

J.H. van der Meer: ‘Benedictus a Sancto Josepho van de orde der Carmelieten, 1642–1716’, TVNM, xviii/3 (1958), 129–47

J.H. van der Meer: ‘Benedictus a Sancto Josepho vom Karmelieterorden’, KJb, xlvi (1962), 99–120; xlvii (1963), 123–4

F.R. Noske: Music Bridging Divided Religions (Wilhelmshaven, 1989)

RANDALL H. TOLLEFSEN/RUDOLF A. RASCH

Benedictus Ducis.

See Ducis, Benedictus.

Benedictus Sirede.

See Benoit.

Bene Israel, music of the.

See Jewish music, §III, 8(v).

Beneken [Benecken], Friedrich Burchard

(b Kloster Wennigsen, nr Hanover, 13 Aug 1760; d Wülfinghausen, nr Hanover, 22 Sept 1818). German composer. He studied theology at Göttingen, then lived for a time in Kloster Wennigsen before being offered a pastorate in the town of Ronneberg in 1790. In 1802 or 1803 he became pastor of the church in Wülfinghausen, where he remained until his death. Although he published several philosophical works, he is primarily remembered as a lied composer, especially of the well-known Wie sie so sanft ruhen (often wrongly attributed to C.G. Neefe or to C.H. Graun). This work, an elegy, first appeared in Lieder und Gesänge für fühlende Seelen (1787); it was shortly thereafter published separately, and later became known under numerous other titles, including Der Gottesacker, Grabgesang, Der Friedhof and Der Entschlafenen. It has been frequently set for choir as Am Grabe. His numerous other lieder and several keyboard pieces (mostly simple minuets) similarly show a simple, direct style.

WORKS

Collections: [14] Lieder und Gesänge für fühlende Seelen, nebst 6 Menuetten (Hanover, 1787); Lieder und kleine Klavierstücke für gute Menschen in den Stunden des Frohsinns und der Schwermuth (Hanover, 1794); Lieder der Unschuld und Liebe (Hanover, 1802); Lieder der Religion, der Freundschaft und Liebe (Hanover, c1805)

77 lieder in A.L. Hoppenstedt: Melodien zu den Liedern für Volksschulen, i, ed. Beneken (Hanover, 3/1809)

In memoriam: Rosen welken und verschwinden (Göttingen, 1776), ?lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL

SchillingE

R. Músiol: ‘Ein Lieder-Jubiläum’, Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, xli (1887), 265–7

M. Friedlaender: Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902/R)

RAYMOND A. BARR

Benelli, Antonio (Pellegrino)

(b Forlì, 5 Sept 1771; d Börnichau, Saxony, 16 Aug 1830). Italian tenor, composer and singing teacher. He made his début as a singer in 1790 at Naples, where his own opera Partenope was produced eight years later. After appearing at the King’s Theatre in London (1798–1800), as Paolino (Il matrimonio segreto), Paisiello’s Almaviva, and Admetus (Gluck’s Alceste), he settled in Dresden in 1801 and sang there for over 20 years until his voice failed. He then taught singing in Berlin until 1829, when he was dismissed for publishing an attack on Spontini. Though not gifted with a large or brilliant voice, Benelli was a good teacher, and composed many vocal pieces.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Benenoit.

See Benoit.

Beneš, Juraj

(b Trnava, 2 March 1940). Slovak composer. After studying the piano at the Conservatory in Bratislava (1954–60), he continued his musical education at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where he studied composition with Cikker until 1964. Appointments followed as répétiteur with the Slovak National Opera (1964–74) and as lecturer in music theory at the Education faculty of Comenius University (1974–83) and then at the Bratislava Academy; he became a full lecturer at the latter in 1989. Between 1988 and 1991 he was also dramaturge at the Slovak National Opera. His works have received several awards, including first prize (for Lunovis canzone corale) at the Arezzo competition in 1978, twice the Ján Levoslav Bella Prize (for Tri monódie and the Second String Quartet), in 1983 and 1989 respectively, and the prize from the Slovak Ministry of Culture (for Hostina, ‘The Feast’) in 1984. In 1994 he was elected president of the Slovak section of the ISCM, and in 1997 he became a professor of composition in the Czech Republic.

Beneš’s early works, such as Préférence (1974), Waltz for Colonel Brumble (1975) and Musique pour Grock (1975) are allusions, pastiches on modernist compositional techniques. As with later works, they contain linear musical thinking whereby harmonic organization is of secondary importance. The individual horizontal lines, designed to create dense layered textures, develop separate melodic ideas supported by tonal or atonal harmony. Beneš occasionally uses counterpoint, imitation, quotation, motor rhythms and polyrhythms, his aim being to express motion that is freely progressing but free also of large contrasts, gradations and high drama; in this sense he was one of the first Slovak postmodernists of his generation. Šest’ tancov (‘Six Dances’, 1975), the concert aria O virtú mia (1983) and Canzona no.2 (1985) are indicative of his predilection towards historical forms. In the latter half of the 1970s modality appeared in his music for the first time.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage and vocal

Ops: Cisárove nové šaty [Emperor’s New Clothes] (1, Beneš, after H.C. Andersen), 1966; Skamenený [Petrified] (1, Beneš, after J. Kráľ), 1974; Hostina [The Feast] (3, after P.O. Hviezdoslav), 1980; The Players (2, after W. Shakespeare: Hamlet), 1994

Choral: Sym., chbr chorus, vn, 1974; 3 Female Choruses, 1974; 2 Male Choruses, 1975; 4 Mixed Choruses, 1976; Lunovis canzone corale, children’s chorus, 1978; Hymna k 130. výročiu narodenia P.O. Hviezdoslava [Hymn for the 130th anniversary of the birth of P.O. Hviezdoslav], 1978; Capriccio per coro misto sulla una villanella di Orlando di Lasso, 1980; Requiem (Hviezdoslav, J. Kráľ, I. Krasko, Latin fragments), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1986; Madrigalsonetto secondo Petrarca-Liszt, 1991

Other vocal: Monológy (M. Kundera), 7 songs, A, str qt, 1962; Cantamines, 5 songs, S, fl, hp, 1970; 4 piesne [4 songs], T, pf (LH), 1973; Vocalisez (Z. Herbert), 3 songs, S, pf, 1973; 6 romansov [6 Romances] (K. Prutkov), Bar, pf, 1974; Styskani po matce [Nostalgia for Mother] (M. Cervenka), low male v, drum, pf, 1975; Addio …, 5 songs, A, pf, 1975; Kľúč [Key] (M. Valek), 2 songs, B, cl, 1975; Zlomky Janka Kráľa [Fragments by Janko Kráľ], B, 1976; 3 monodie [3 Monodies] (Hviezdoslav), S, 2 vn, vc, hpd, 1979; Temptation of St A, 6 male vv, 1981; O virtú mia (Dante), B, org, 1983; Il sogno di Poppea, 7 canzoni, S, pf, 1984 [after Monteverdi]; Intoleranza, S, pf, 1987; Quatro identificazioni, S, pf, 1988; Cant. ‘Eating’, S, b cl, 1992; Cant. no.2 ‘Déjeuner’ (J. Prévert), S, cl, perc, 1995

instrumental

Orch: Allegro, 1974; Mémoire, 1977; Music for Tpt, Perc and Str, 1978; In memoriam Pavel Raška, 12 str, 1981; Music for Orch, 1982; Prelúdium, 1983; Music for J.S., 1985; Music for Trbn and Orch, 1989; Puzzle, str, 1990; When music …, 1991; Musica d’inverno, vc, orch, 1992; His Master’s Voice, 1997

Chbr: Suite, vc, pf, 1971; Préférence, 9 insts, 1974; Musique pour Grock nos.1–3: fl, chit; cl, vn, trbn; str trio, 1975; Waltz for Colonel Brumble, 11 insts, 1975; Intermezzo no.1, 6 fl, 1976; Canzona no.1, wind qnt, 1977; Str Qt no.1, 1977; Intermezzo no.2, 12 vc, 1979; Prelúdium a sonáta [Prelude and Sonata], ob, hp, 1984; Str Qt no.2, 1984; Canzona no.2, fl, ob, bn, vc, 1985; Str Qt no.3, 1989; Going to, 6 vc, 1994; Chanson triste, vn, cl, vc, 1996

Pf: Variácie, 1961; Sonata no.1, 1971; Manželská hudba [Matrimonial Music], 2 pf, 1976; Sonata no.2, 1976; Sonata no.3, 1977; Sonata no.4, 1978; Suite no.1, 1980; Suite no.2 ‘Old Boys Anthology’, 1981; Sonata no.5, 1985; Intermezzo no.3, 2 pf, 1987; Nocturnes nos.1–2, 1989; Noctumes no.3, 1992; Alice was beginning …, 1993; Sonata no.6, 1995; Nocturnes nos.4–5, 1997

Other solo: 3 skladby [3 pieces], ob, 1964; Ciaccona, bn, 1975; 6 tancov [6 dances], fl, 1975; 5 invenzioni, trbn, 1976; Populacijó Hajkeles, org, 1976; Sonata, vn, 1976; Melanchólia, positive org, 1977; Lamento, vn, 1979; Sonata, cl, 1981; Sonata, vc, 1985; For instance Black Pony, basset hn, 1992; Il seme seducente della genealogia, fl, 1994

Principal publisher: Slovenský hudobný fond

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Blaho: ‘Opera ako súčasné divadlo’ [Opera as contemporary theatre], Nové slovo, iii/21 (1984), 3

Z. Martináková: ‘Profily a reflexie: nad dielom Juraja Beneša’ [Profiles and reflections: on the work of Beneš], Hudobný život, xviii/9 (1986), 5 only

Ľ. Chalupka: ‘Slovenská hudba 20. storočia: vývoj po roku 1945’ [Slovak music of the 20th century: development after 1945], Dejiny hudby od najstaršich čias po súčasnosť, ed. O. Elschek (Bratislava, 1996), 273–342

I. Javorský: ‘Juraj Beneš’, Hudobný život, xx/3 (1988), 3 only

Y. Lábska: ‘Hudobný svet Juraja Beneša’ [The musical world of Juraj Beneš], Hudobný život, xxii/6 (1990), 4 only

S. Pettitt: ‘Petrified’, Opera, xliv (1993), 241–3

YVETTA LÁBSKA-KAJANOVÁ

Benestad, Finn

(b Kristiansand, 30 Oct 1929). Norwegian musicologist. He studied the violin privately with Ernst Glaser (1947–50) and music at the University of Oslo (1950–53, MA 1953), and worked as a teacher (1950–59) and music critic (1953–61) in Oslo. In 1961 he took the doctorate in musicology at the University of Oslo with a study of Johannes Haarklou; he was professor of musicology at the University of Trondheim (1961–4) and at the University of Oslo (1965–98). He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1968–9.

Benestad has exercised an important influence on the development of higher music education in Norway, both in the universities of Trondheim and Oslo and as chairman of the national Benestad Committee (1970), which reported on the training of music teachers in Norway. He is also the author of widely used teaching manuals. His most important publications have been his valuable studies of 19th-century Norwegian composers (Thrane, Haarklou, Grieg and Svendsen) but his interests also include musical aesthetics. He was a member (from 1962), and later chairman (from 1980), of the editorial committee for Edvard Grieg’s Complete Works (Frankfurt, 1977–95), for which he was the sole editor of a number of volumes (vols. viii, ix, xviii and xix). He was awarded the Edvard Grieg Prize in 1981, a prize by the University of Oslo in 1996 in recognition of the effective way in which he has communicated the results of his research, and he later received honorary doctorates from St Olaf College, Minnesota (1993) and Westphälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (1996). He was elected a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1979, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1991 and the Academia Europaea in 1993.

WRITINGS

‘Johan Svendsens violinkonsert’, NMÅ 1956–8, 209–65

‘Mozarts strykekvartett i D-dur, K.V.575’, NMÅ 1959–61, 74–89

Johannes Haarklou: mannen og verket (diss., U. of Oslo, 1961; Oslo, 1961)

Waldemar Thrane: en pionér i norsk musikkliv (Oslo, 1961)

Musikklaere (Oslo, 1963/R, 5/1977)

Musikkhistorisk oversikt (Oslo, 1965, 5/1987)

‘Med narrelue eller helteglorie? om komponistenes sosiale og økonomiske stilling før norsk komponistforening ble stiftet’, Norsk komponistforening gjennom 50 år, ed. K. Lange (Oslo, 1967), 9–26

ed. with P. Krømer: Festskrift til Olav Gurvin (Drammen and Oslo, 1968) [incl. ‘Institutt for musikkvitenskap, Universitetet i Oslo’, 13–31 (incl. Eng. summary)]

ed.: Norsk musikk, Studier i Norge, vi (Oslo, 1968) [incl. ‘Norske komponister’, 5–20 (with D. Schjelderup-Ebbe); ‘Musikkutdannelse’, 58–70]

‘Knut Nystedt og hans nye storverk “Lucis creator optime”’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, vii (1970), 1–7

‘Komponisten, folketoneeksperten, vitenskapsmannen Eivind Groven’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, viii (1971), 135–43

‘Tanker om musikk: intervju med Harald Saeverud’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, ix (1972), 41–9

‘Et ukjent Grieg-brev om strykekvartetten i G-moll’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, x (1973), 188–92

‘Noen notater om Edvard Griegs ufullendte strykekvartett i F-dur’, Festskrift Gunnar Heerup, ed. J. Høybye, F.V. Nielsen and A. Schiøtz (Egtved, 1973), 255–63

with T. Hauso and others: Aschehougs musikkverk for grunnskolen (Oslo, 1973–7)

‘Claude Debussy i norsk musikkliv frem til 1925 et dokumentarisk arbeidsmateriale’, SMN, ii (1976), 15–35

Musikk og tanke: hovedretninger i musikkestetikkens historie fra antikken til vår egen tid [Music and thought: mainstreams in the history of the aesthetics of music from ancient times to the present] (Oslo, 1976, 2/1977)

with D. Schjelderup-Ebbe: Edvard Grieg: mennesket og kunstneren (Oslo, 1980, 2/1990; Eng. trans., 1988, as Edvard Grieg: the Man and the Artist)

‘Das norwegische Lied im 19. Jahrhundert: eine Skizze der soziopolitischen Voraussetzungen und der Bestrebungen nach einer nationalen Identität’, Gattung und Werk in der Musikgeschichte Norddeutschlands und Skandinaviens: Kiel 1980, 125–35

‘Motivic-Thematic Unity in Grieg’s Chamber Music’, Tvärspel: festkrift till Jan Ling, ed. Å. Blomström and others (Gothenburg, 1984), 292–304

‘A Note on Edvard Grieg’s “Forbidden Symphony”’, Analytica: Studies in the Description and Analysis of Music in Honour of Ingmar Bengtsson, ed. A. Lönn and E. Kjellberg (Stockholm, 1985), 203–10

with D. Schjelderup-Ebbe: Johan Svendsen: mennesket og kunstneren (Oslo, 1990; Eng. trans., 1995, as Johan Svendsen: the Man, the Maestro, the Music)

with D. Schjelderup-Ebbe: Edvard Grieg, Chamber Music: Nationalism, Universality, Individuality (Oslo and New York, 1993)

ed.: Edvard Grieg: dagbøker 1865, 1866, 1905, 1906 og 1907 (Bergen, 1993)

‘Edvard Grieg og den nationale tone’, Musik & forskning, xix (1993–4), 23–40

‘Peer Gynt: the Fruits of Collaboration Between Two Cultural Giants: Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg’, European Review, iv (1996), 121–42

ed., with H. Brock: Edvard Grieg: Briefwechsel mit dem Musikverlag C.F. Peters 1863–1907 (Frankfurt, 1997)

ed., with H. de Vries Stavland: Edvard Grieg und Julius Röntgen, Briefwechsel 1883–1907 (Amsterdam, 1997)

ed.: Edvard Grieg: Brev i utvalg 1862–1907, i–ii (Oslo, 1998)

JOHN BERGSAGEL

Benet [Benett, Bennet, Benmet, Bonet, Bonnet, Jo. Benet Anglicus], John

(d ?1458). English composer. In his early or middle years he may have had some contact with John Dunstaple. Benet’s motet Lux fulget ex Anglia, dedicated to St Thomas of Hereford, was probably written for Hereford Cathedral (where Dunstaple was a canon), possibly for the celebrations of the centenary of St Thomas’s canonization in 1420; like Dunstaple, Benet composed a motet for St Alban’s Abbey. He was perhaps a pupil or protégé of the more famous composer.

He may have been the John Benet who was a vicar-choral of Lincoln Minster from 1437 to 1441; a John Benet of London, clerk, was appointed master of the six choristers of St Anthony’s Hospital in the City of London in 1443. The terms of the indenture suggest that he may have been approaching the end of his career; he was still there in 1449, but a London citizen’s will dated in July of that year may imply that the mastership was by then vacant. A John Benet, presumably the same man, was listed in 1448–9 as a member of the London Gild of Parish Clerks (see H. Baillie, PRMA, lxxxiii, 1956–7, pp.15–28). By the time of his death he was living in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, where he was buried; earlier he had lived in St Benet Fink, the parish of St Anthony’s Hospital. The probate for his will is dated 4 December 1458.

Benet’s earliest works appear to be an incomplete mass (nos.1–3) and a Sanctus (no.16). The mass, a very early cyclic setting, is one of the first known English works to use the terms ‘unus’ and ‘chorus’; it is unified only by a striking homogeneity of style and by the motto opening. Both mass and Sanctus contain a good deal of rather uneven movement in minims – even in passages employing minor prolation – in a manner foreign to the elegance of the later English idiom.

Benet’s transitional style is shown in the second mass (nos.4–8), a work of disputed authorship but probably from his pen. Again there is no cantus firmus; each movement is built on a tenor that constantly varies the same handful of phrases; the discantus makes use of a few recurring figures, but not in the consistent fashion of a true motto.

In his final period Benet attained to the harmonic clarity and smooth rhythmic flow of Dunstaple’s mature works. An incomplete mass on Jacet granum (nos.9–10), if it is indeed his, demonstrates that he played an important part in developing the isomelic tenor mass; the two surviving movements are also linked by a common opening. A second Sanctus Jacet granum (no.18), probably an earlier work, begins differently and transposes the plainchant a 4th lower.

None of Benet’s other single movements of the Ordinary appears to be based on chant. The Kyrie Deus creator (no.11) is a splendidly sonorous canon; duets and trios prevent the unusually thick texture (four voices) from cloying. The Gloria no.13 is paired in GB-Ob Add.C.87* with Credo no.15: the two works are not linked thematically, although they employ the same low clefs and dark colouring and the same melodious yet economical methods of declamation. The true pair with the Gloria may perhaps be an anonymous Credo, no.14, that stands next to Credo no.15 in I-TRmp 90; it has however been transposed a 5th higher. The Sanctus (no.17) follows an uncommon plan: a pair of duets (voices 1 and 2; 2 and 3) followed by a full section for three voices, the whole scheme three times repeated.

Benet’s three fine motets, isorhythmic in all voices, employ Dunstaple’s normal technique of two taleae twice repeated in the proportion 3 : 2 : 1.

He is not to be identified with Benoit.

WORKS




masses and mass movements
[1–3]	Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus, 3vv; Gl ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi (1924/R), 85; San and Ag ed. H.E. Wooldridge and H.V. Hughes, Early English Harmony, ii (London, 1913/R), 120 (although there is no common source, these movements may be grouped because of their similar openings and style)
[4–8]	Kyrie ‘Omnipotens Pater’, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus, 3vv; ed. in MB, viii (2/1970), 176, 138 (also attrib. Power and Dunstable; probably by Benet)
[9–10]	Mass ‘Jacet granum’ (Gl, San), 3vv, I-AO, TRmp 87, 90, 92, I-TRcap (Trent 93); ed. in Trowell (1960), iii, 5 (chant, respond for St Thomas of Canterbury, in voice 3; San anon., unique attrib. ‘Bonnet’, or possibly ‘Bonnum’, in AO index)
[11]	Kyrie ‘Deus creator omnium’, 4vv; ed. in CMM, xxxviii (1967), 69 (voices 1 and 2 in canon)
[12]	Gloria, 3vv; ed. in CMM, 1/2 (1969), no.25 (also attrib. Power; probably by Power; attrib. ‘Bonet’, or possibly ‘Bonum’, in I-AO)
[13]	Gloria, 3vv, D-Mbs 3232a, GB-Ob Add.C.87, I-TRmp* 90, TRcap (Trent 93) (scribal pairing with no.15; probably forms a pair with no.14)
[14]	Credo, 3vv, TRmp 90, TRcap (Trent 93) (anon., but opening bars similar to those of no.13 transposed a 5th higher; probably forms a pair with no.13)
[15]	Credo, 3vv, D-Mbs 3232a, GB-Ob Add.C.87, I-TRmp* 90, TRcap (Trent 93) (scribal pairing with no.13)
[16]	Sanctus, 3vv, TRmp 92
[17]	Sanctus, 3vv, TRmp 92
[18]	Sanctus, 3vv, TRmp 90, TRcap (Trent 93) (chant, respond ‘Jacet granum’ for St Thomas of Canterbury, in voice 3 transposed a 4th lower; not a pair with no.9)

motets

[19]	Gaude pia Magdalena/O certe precipuus, 3vv; ed. in EECM, viii (1968), 40 (chant, respond for first Vespers, St Mary Magdalen, in voice 3)
[20]	Lux fulget ex Anglia/O pater pietatis, 3vv, I-MOe α.X.1.11 (to St Thomas de Cantelupe, Bishop of Hereford; lacks voice 3 and end of 2; ed. (reconstructed) in Trowell and Wathey
[21]	Tellus purpurium/Splendida flamigero, 3vv, MOe α.X.1.11 (to St Alban), ed. W.T. Marrocco and N. Sandon, Medieval Music (London, 1977), no.88

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Trowell: ‘Some English Contemporaries of Dunstable’, PRMA, lxxxi (1954–5), 77–92

B.L. Trowell: Music under the Later Plantagenets (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1960)

A. Besser Scott: Coherence and Calculated Chaos: the English Composers of Modena, Biblioteca Estense A. X. I, II (Lat.471) (diss., U. of Chicago, 1969)

B.L. Trowell and A. Wathey: ‘John Benet’s “Lux fulget ex Anglia – O pater pietatis – Salve Thoma”: the Reconstruction of a Fragmentary Fifteenth-Century Motet in Honour of St Thomas Cantilupe’, St. Thomas Cantilupe Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour, ed. M. Jancey (Hereford, 1982), 159–80

R. Bowers: ‘Music and Worship to 1640’, A History of Lincoln Minster to 1640, ed. D. Owen (Cambridge, 1994), 47–76, esp. 56

BRIAN TROWELL

Beneventan chant.

A Latin liturgical chant repertory from southern Italy, in use from the 7th century until the 11th, when it was suppressed. Independent in many respects of parallel developments in the Roman Church, the Beneventan chant is characterized by a formulaic and rather ornate musical style, by a tonality not dependent on a system of eight modes, and by the use of non-standard and non-biblical texts. The term ‘Beneventan’ is used in the literature to refer to the city of Benevento, to the area of southern Italy in which the characteristic Beneventan script was practised, or to things generally associated with this area. Thus the versions of Franco-Roman chant and the tropes and sequences composed and used there have also often been called ‘Beneventan’; this article is concerned only with the early Beneventan liturgy and its music.

1. Chronology.

A Latin liturgy had certainly existed in southern Italy before the Lombard invasions of the 6th century, and some of the liturgical anomalies of books such as I-BV 33, a 10th-century missal of the Roman rite, may be remnants of what some have called an earlier ‘Campanian’ liturgy. Centred on the city of Benevento, the Beneventan rite and its chant developed during the 7th and 8th centuries when Lombard power was at its height. It includes music for St Barbatus (bishop); for the apparition of St Michael on Monte Gargano, a feast and a shrine particularly dear to the Lombards and Beneventans; and for the Holy Twelve Brothers of Benevento, whose remains were interred by Duke Arichis II in his palace church of Santa Sofia in 760.

The Beneventan chant bears many relationships to the northern, Ambrosian (Milanese) chant; both were liturgical repertories of regions dominated by the Lombards, and Ambrose has been claimed as the ancestor of the two rites. The Beneventan chant was, in fact, called ‘cantus ambrosianus’ by its scribes, thereby acknowledging a Lombard link. Musical similarities, too, suggest that the Lombards once shared a liturgy, but as a result of geographical and political separation, particularly after the fall of the Lombard kingdom of Pavia to Charlemagne in 774, each region gradually developed its own tradition.

By the 8th century, however, the Gregorian chant must already have been in place in southern Italy, to judge from archaic features in Gregorian books from this region. Beneventan and Roman chants may have co-existed in the Beneventan zone for a time: a rubric in I-Rvat Ottob.145 states, ‘Quando non canimus ipse ant. secundum romano. quo modo supra scripte sunt canimus secundum Ambro[sianum] hoc modo’ (‘when we do not sing these antiphons according to the Roman [rite, liturgy] as they are written above, we sing them according to the Ambrosian [i.e. Beneventan], as follows’; perhaps the Beneventan chant persisted among those who felt a long loyalty to Lombard heritage. The growing pre-eminence of the Roman chant can be traced through the saints of Benevento: the Twelve Brothers, celebrated from 760, have a Beneventan Mass; St Mercurius, whose relics were brought to Benevento in 768, has none. In 838 the relics of the apostle St Bartholomew were brought to Benevento, but the Mass for St Bartholomew, unique to manuscripts of the Beneventan zone, is in Gregorian style. The chronicle of Monte Cassino reports that in 1058 Pope Stephen IX strictly forbade the singing of ‘Ambrosian’ chant there: ‘Tunc etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista penitus interdixit’.

2. Sources.

As a result of the deliberate suppression of the Beneventan chant, what remains of the repertory survives in some 90 manuscript sources from the late 10th century onwards – palimpsests and fragments from complete books containing mostly doublets, appendixes, and supernumerary additions in manuscripts of the Gregorian chant, the repertory that ultimately replaced the Beneventan. Two south-Italian missals of the late 10th century, I-Rvat 10673 and BV 33 (PalMus, xiv and xx respectively), include among their Franco-Roman liturgy a substantial portion of the Beneventan Holy Week liturgy. Three manuscript graduals from Benevento Cathedral contain almost all the surviving Beneventan chants for the Mass: BV 38 and 40 (11th century) include an annual cycle of masses in Gregorian chant together with a repertory of tropes and sequences, but they also contain 19 doublet masses in Beneventan chant along with special Beneventan music for Holy Week; the final fly-leaf of BV 35 (12th century) from an 11th-century Beneventan Mass book contains the end of the Christmas Mass and the beginning of that for St Stephen. These 11th-century sources are notated in clefless neumes with only approximate diastematy (see illustration); however, careful analysis of comparable melodies and formulae results in mostly reliable transcriptions.

Also among the sources are the 25 magnificent Exultet rolls of southern Italy, which were used in important monasteries and cathedrals for the blessing of the Paschal candle during the Easter Vigil service. Such rolls, when they contain the special Beneventan text of the Exultet, or the Beneventan melody that persisited long after most churches had converted to the imported Franco-Roman text, testify to the extent and influence of the Beneventan ritual.

3. Liturgy.

Sources of the Beneventan liturgy are incomplete, since no sacramentary, missal, lectionary or antiphoner has survived. Although music exists for most of the principal feasts, there is little evidence that the Beneventan rite included a specific set of chants for every Sunday of the year as in the fully developed Roman calendar. Non-biblical texts and texts that rearrange biblical phrases and ideas occur frequently; such a variety of texts recalls the Milanese rite with its similar range of textual sources and suggests parallels with the poetry of the Byzantine Church. Some Beneventan texts have parallels at Milan or in the Greek rite, but most do not.

The chants of the Beneventan Mass always number at least four: ingressa, alleluia, offertory and communion; sometimes a gradual is also present. Ordinary chants are rare in the surviving sources, but the Creed was frequently present in the Mass (a Lombard symptom, perhaps, from a time when orthodoxy was not taken for granted); a single threefold Kyrie was sung after the Gloria (as in the Milanese rite). The ingressae, sung without psalmody as at Milan, are among the most elaborate chants. Graduals are included in only six Beneventan masses, each consisting of a single verse with a partial repetition of the opening portion sometimes indicated. All surviving masses except those for Holy Week have alleluias, most of them sung to the same melody; another melody was used for St Stephen and maybe for other saints; a third melody was sung on Holy Saturday and was adapted, perhaps at a later stage, to other texts for Christmas, St Peter, the Transfiguration and (in the Old Roman gradual CH-CObodmer 74 only) the Epiphany. Offertories and communions are present for each Mass and are usually relatively simple antiphons (although the Easter communion is exceptionally elaborate). Many masses have two communions, recalling the Milanese confractorium and transitorium. Some communions are found elsewhere as offertories or as antiphons.

It is possible that the Beneventan Mass never had, and was never intended to have, the fixity that has come to be associated with the Roman Mass. A number of Beneventan chants serve multiple functions: pieces may appear as antiphons, as offertories or as communions. In addition, there are many places where sources do not agree about the piece to be assigned to a certain function in the Mass, particularly in the case of offertories and communions. This may indicate that the preservation of Beneventan chant in a Gregorian format, which requires a fixed chant for every liturgical function, has misrepresented the less fixed, more flexible nature of the Beneventan repertory.

The unique Beneventan Holy Week rites are especially well documented; they are given with full rubrics, beginning with sources from the late 10th century. Elements of these Holy Week practices, which have survived for far longer than anything else in the Beneventan rite, are found in many sources in which no other Beneventan music has been retained. Music for three Vespers services (Good Friday, St John the Baptist and Epiphany) has also survived, and a few groups of antiphons in Beneventan style have been assimilated into Gregorian books for the Offices of regional saints. There are a small number of antiphons among the pieces for rogations, and a pair of pieces for the Purification, whose style seems decidedly Beneventan even though there is nothing in their transmission to suggest that the scribe knew of their Beneventan origin.

4. Musical characteristics.

Beneventan chant is uniform in style, proceeding at a regular, rather ornate pace using mostly stepwise intervals. Throughout the chant are small melodic formulae which are repeated far more often than are their counterparts in other chant dialects. Few stylistic distinctions can be made in the repertory on the basis of liturgical function or modal category, or between music for the choir and music for the cantor. The tonal range is limited. There is no evidence that the Beneventan chant was ever subject to the effects of the eight-mode system of organization that affects much medieval music. Almost every piece ends on one of two notes (A or G), no special characteristics being specific to either group. Some larger pieces, notably the ingressae, are made up from many repetitions of a single long phrase.

The Beneventan communion for the feast of the apparition of St Michael (ex.1), a piece of very modest proportions, shows some typical features of the chant: recitations on a repeating podatus (‘Multos infirmos’) or on a rising three-note figure (‘orando’); formulae repeated throughout the repertory (e.g. the music on ‘curasti’). This piece shares its melodic shape with three other antiphons in the repertory.

The simple and unified stylistic attributes of the Benevantan chant provide a view on a specific localized musical practice of the 8th century, a valuable repertory in itself and a paradigm for the early stages of chants found in more evolved forms in other repertories.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Andoyer: ‘L’ancienne liturgie de Bénévent’, Revue du chant grégorien, xx (1911–12), 176–83; xxi (1912–13), 14–20, 44–51, 81–5, 112–15, 144–8, 169–74; xxii (1913–14), 8–11, 41–4, 80–83, 106–11, 141–5, 170–72; xxiii (1919–20), 42–4, 116–18, 151–3, 182–3; xxiv (1920–21), 48–50, 87–9, 146–8, 182–5

Le codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque vaticane fonds latin (XIe siècle): graduel bénéventain, PalMus, 1st ser., xiv (1931–6/R)

Le codex VI.34 de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent (XIe–XIIe siècle): graduel de Bénévent avec prosaire et tropaire, PalMus, 1st ser., xv (1937–53/R)

R.-J. Hesbert: ‘L’“Antiphonale missarum” de l’ancien rit bénéventain’, Ephemerides liturgicae, lii (1938), 28–66, 141–58; liii (1939), 168–90; liv (1945), 69–95; lx (1946), 103–41; lxi (1947), 153–210

B. Baroffio: ‘Liturgie in beneventanischen Raum’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, ed. K.G. Fellerer, i (Kassel, 1972), 204–8

J. Boe: ‘A New Source for Old Beneventan Chant: the Santa Sophia Maundy in MS Ottoboni lat. 145’, AcM, lii (1980), 122–33

T. Bailey: ‘Ambrosian Chant in Southern Italy’, JPMMS, vi (1983), 1–7

J. Boe: ‘Old Beneventan Chant at Monte Cassino: Gloriosus Confessor Domini Benedictus’, AcM, lv (1983), 69–73

Le missel de Bénévent VI–33, PalMus, 1st ser., xx (1983)

T.F. Kelly: ‘Palimpsest Evidence of an Old-Beneventan Gradual’, KJb, lxvii (1983), 5–23

J. Mallet and A. Thibaut: Les manuscrits en écriture bénéventaine de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent (Paris, 1984–)

M. Huglo: ‘L’ancien chant bénéventain’, Ecclesia orans, ii (1985), 265–93

T.F. Kelly: ‘Montecassino and the Old-Beneventan Chant’, EMH, v (1985), 53–83

T.F. Kelly: ‘Beneventan and Milanese Chant’, JRMA, cxii (1987), 173–95

T.F. Kelly: ‘Une nouvelle source pour l’office vieux-bénéventain’, EG, xxii (1988), 5–23

T.F. Kelly: The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989)

N. Albarosa and A. Turco, eds.: Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 40: Graduale (Padua, 1991)

Les témoins manuscrits du chant bénéventain, PalMus, 1st ser., xxi (1992)

T.F. Kelly: ‘A Musical Fragment at Bisceglie Containing an Unknown Beneventan Office’, Mediaeval Studies, lv (1993), 347–56 and 4 pls.

G. Cavallo, G. Orofino and O. Pecere: Exultet: rotoli liturgici del Medioevo meridionale (Rome, 1994)

THOMAS FORREST KELLY

Beneventi, Giuseppe.

See Boniventi, Giuseppe.

Benevento di San Rafaele.

See San rafaele, benvenuto robbio.

Benevic, Antonín.

See Bennewitz, Antonín.

Benevoli, Orazio

(b Rome, 19 April 1605; d Rome, 17 June 1672). Italian composer. He was the son of a confectioner from Lorraine, Robert Venouot (italianized as Benevolo). From 16 February 1617 to 15 March 1623 he was a choirboy at S Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, where he was taught music by Ugolini and also studied grammar and Latin. When the administration of the church passed to the Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, Benevoli, who was still only 18, obtained his first position as maestro di cappella of S Maria in Trastevere, Rome, in February 1624. He remained there until 1630, when he moved to a similar post at Santo Spirito in Sassia, succeeding Gregorio Allegri and also filling the posts of organist and music master. At the same time he took part in the solemn festivals celebrated at S Luigi dei Francesi and S Pietro. From 5 June 1638 to 24 September 1644 he was maestro di cappella of S Luigi dei Francesi, succeeding his teacher Ugolini. He then went to Vienna, where he became Kapellmeister to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, brother of the Emperor Ferdinand III. At the beginning of 1646 he returned to Rome and according to Baini resumed his old post at S Luigi for a few weeks. From 23 February 1646 he was maestro di cappella of S Maria Maggiore. A decree of 7 October 1646 named him as successor to Virgilio Mazzocchi as maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia at S Pietro, and he held this important post until his death. On 14 August 1650 his 48-voice mass for 12 choirs, composed for Salzburg in 1628 and now lost, was performed. Benevoli was Guardiano della Congregazione di S Cecilia in 1654, 1665 and 1667. His personal pupils included Ercole Bernabei, Antimo Liberati and Paolo Lorenzani. Liberati blamed Benevoli’s lifelong poverty for the lack of contemporary published editions of his works. Only from 1642 did his music appear in print, and then only single pieces in various anthologies.

Appraisals of Benevoli’s music have hitherto been confined almost entirely to the 53-voice Missa salisburgensis, which was assumed to have been performed at the dedication of Salzburg Cathedral in 1628. It was regarded as at once a stroke of genius from the pen of a 23-year-old and as an anticipation of the climactic products of the monumental Roman Baroque style. In fact Hintermaier has proved that this was not the mass performed in 1628 and that Benevoli definitely did not compose it. It was probably performed at Salzburg in 1682 together with the hymn Plaudite tympani, and Biber has been suggested as the likeliest composer of it.

Various influences can be found in Benevoli’s output, which consists entirely of sacred music and comprises, at one extreme, monodic pieces with continuo and, at the other, masses of various kinds, many for large forces. Several works are known to have been lost. Those masses that continue the Palestrina tradition, in stile pieno with a tendency towards homophony, stand in apparent contrast to his otherwise forward-looking technique (using stile concertato with opposition between soloists and ripieno), but it should be remembered that alongside innovations the perpetuation of Palestrina’s style was specially required of 17th-century Roman composers of sacred music. The progressive Benevoli can be seen in a marked tendency towards modern major-minor harmonies and tonality, in his approach to form and in his treatment and disposition of textures. A characteristic feature is the principle, inherited from Palestrina and the Venetian school, of interlocking blocks of choral sound, sometimes polyphonic, sometimes homophonic. The various choirs, usually in four parts, are to be placed far apart, alternate during imitative sections, whether short or long, and then reunite. Each choir is a self-contained musical entity, and a work for four choirs, for example, is thus in 16 real parts. Counterpoint is less prominent than in the works of other representatives of the Roman school. Instrumental accompaniment is confined to basso continuos, which carry particular weight in the polyphonic structure. The solo vocal parts are freely ornamented with fioritura. A peculiarity of Benevoli’s work is composition for equal voices, for example in his Regna terrae for 12 sopranos in 6 choirs with organ, and in his Et ecce terremotus for four basses and continuo.

WORKS

Edition: O. Benevoli: Opera omnia, ed. L. Feininger (Trent, 1966–73), some duplicated in Monumenta liturgiae polychoralis Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Rome, 1966–) [F]

Manuscript works in A-Wn, KR, B-Br, D-Bsb, Dl, GB-Cfm, Lbl, Lcm, Obs, I-Bc, Rli, Rsg, PL-WRu, S-Uu

Masses, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 12, 16, 48vv, incl.: Angelus Domini, 12vv, 1643; Victoria, 16vv, 1643, F i; In angustia, 16vv, 1656; Si Deus pro nobis, 16vv, 1660, F ii; Ecce sacerdos, 12vv, 1661; In diluvium, 16vv, 1661, F ii; Tu es Petrus, 16vv, 1666–7; Maria prodigio, 16vv, F i: Onde tolse amor, 12vv, F iv; Sine nomine, 16vv, F i; Tira corda, 16vv, F ii

34 motets, 1–4vv, some with bc, 1642¹, 1643¹, 1643², 1645², 1646², 1647¹, 1647², 1648¹, 1649¹, 1649², 1650¹, 1651¹, 1652¹, 1653¹, 1654², 1655¹, 1656², 1659¹, 1662², 1663¹, 1664¹, 1665¹, 1667¹, 1668¹, 1672¹, 1675², C. Ballard: Recueil de motets (Paris, 1712)

c12 Mag, 8, 12, 14, 16, 24vv; 26 pss, 10, 12, 14, 16, 24vv; other sacred vocal works, incl. ants, offs, motets, hymns, 1–8vv

Missa salisburgensis, a 53, ?1682, A-Sca (formerly wrongly attrib. Benevoli, ?by H.I.F. von Biber or A. Hofer, see Hintermaier); F vii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FellererP

A. Liberati: Lettera … in risposta ad una del Sig. Ovidio Persapegi (Rome, 1685), 28f

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R)

A. Cametti: ‘La scuola dei pueri cantus di S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome e i suoi principali allievi (1591–1623)’, RMI, xxii (1915), 593–641

V. Raeli: Da Vincenzo Ugolini ad Orazio Benevoli nella cappella della Basilica liberiana (1603–1646) (Rome, 1920)

L. Feininger: ‘Orazio Benevoli (1605–1672)’, Congresso internazionale di musica sacra [I]: Roma 1950, 298–9

J.R. Bryden: The Motets of Orazio Benevoli (diss., U. of Michigan, 1951)

L. Feininger: ‘La scuola policorale romana del Sei e Settecento’, CHM, ii (1956–7), 193–201

E. Hintermaier: ‘The Missa Salisburgensis’, MT, cxvi (1975), 965–6

E. Hintermaier: ‘“Missa salisburgensis”: neue Erkenntnisse über Entstehung, Autor und Zweckbestimmung’, Musicologica austriaca, i (1977), 154–96

W. Jaksch: ‘Missa Salisburgensis, Neuzuschreibung der Salzburger Domweihmesse von Orazio Benevoli’, AMw, xxxv (1978) 239–50

WALTER GÜRTELSCHMIED/SIEGFRIED GMEINWIESER

Benga.

Term used in Kenya to refer to a variety of popular music forms. It is used in particular to refer to a style of music that emerged in the 1960s among the Luo people in the area surrounding Lake Victoria in western Kenya. Kikuyu and Kamba musicians also developed regional variations of benga. The benga guitar-based style became nationally recognized during the 1970s. The roots of the guitar-playing style may be found in nyatiti (lyre) playing; the interaction of bass and lead guitars in benga resembles the interdependence of the bass and the treble in nyatiti playing. Benga is characterized by a tight blend of vocals and lead and bass guitars, with the bass guitar providing a strong rhythmic pulsation throughout. D.O. Misiani was a highly important figure in the development of Luo benga, and he and his group Shirati Jazz became widely known for their benga recordings and performances; other noted performers include the Victoria Kings and George Ramogi. Joseph Kamaru was active in the development of Kikuyu benga and helped to transfer elements of benga performing style to gospel choral music. Benga was preserved as an older guitar-band tradition in western Kenya, but also influenced the development of emergent musical traditions during the last two decades of the 20th century.

RECORDINGS

Benga Beat, perf. D.O. Misiani and Shirati Jazz, World Circuit WCB 003 (1987)

Benga Blast!, perf. D.O. Misiani and Shirati Jazz, Earthworks STEW 13CD (1989)

The Mighty Kings of Benga, perf. Victoria Kings, GlobeStyle CDORB 079 (1993)

Piny ose mer / The World Upside Down, perf. D.O. Misiani and Shirati Jazz, GlobeStyle CDORB 046 (1994)

1994 USA Tour: Safari ya Ligingo, perf. G. Ramogi and C.K. Dumbe Dumbe Jazz Band, Dumbe Dumbe 01 (1994)

Kickin' Kikuyu-Style, perf. Sam Chege's Ultra Benga, Original Music OMCD 039 (1996)

GREGORY F. BARZ

Bengali music.

This article covers the musics of both Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. These comprise the region of Bengal, unified culturally, linguistically and historically. Its initial partition into East and West Bengal by the British in 1905 led to a great outpouring of nationalist sentiment and was a key moment in the struggle for Independence. Although the partition was reversed in 1911, at Independence in 1947, when the sub-continent was divided into India and Pakistan, Bengal was partitioned into West Bengal and East Bengal (East Pakistan). West Bengal, with a predominantly Hindu population, remained a province in India; East Bengal, with a predominantly Muslim population, became the eastern province of Pakistan with its seat of government in West Pakistan. East Pakistan fought a war of liberation against Islamabad in 1971 and became the sovereign country of Bangladesh.

I. Music before 1947

II. Music after 1947

III. Local traditions

KARUNĀMAYA GOSWAMĪ

2. Key figures in Bengali music.

I. Music before 1947

1. Traditional genres.

3. Film and ‘people's music’.

Bengali music, §1: History to 1947

1. Traditional genres.

(i) Devotional song.

The first mention of Bengali music is found in the Buddhist yogic charyāgīti (‘charyā song’) of the 8th to 12th centuries ce. These poems, the earliest written sources in Bengali, use the term rāga and contain specific rāga names, for example Bhairavī, Gunjari and Bangāla (on rāga see India, §III, 2). Buddhism declined rapidly in Bengal with the introduction of devotional Hinduism, particularly that of the 12th-century Vaisnava poet-composer Jayadeva. His Gītagovinda, written in Sanskrit and depicting the sensuous love of Rādhā and Krsna, also mentions rāga names and is claimed by some scholars to be based on dhruvapada form.

The Gītagovinda and the Śri Krsna kīrtana, a song-drama written between 1450 and 1500 by Baru Chandīdāsa and including hundreds of songs based both on rāgas and traditional Bengali forms, served as the musical basis for the flowering of Bengali Vaisnava culture in the early 16th century. This was inspired greatly by Śrī Caitanya (1486–1533), whose spiritual teachings were taken up by poet-composers who composed many padāvalī kīrtana (also known as vaisnaiva gīti) on Rādhā-Krsna love. Narottam Thākur (1531–1587) is regarded as the founder of the Vaisnava music movement, which continued until the end of the 18th century. Initially the songs were based on traditional Bengali melodies, but they later incorporated some elements from Hindustani music, including ālāp.

In the mid-18th century a different tradition of devotional song began to emerge. These were śāktapada sangīt, songs in praise of the goddess as represented by Dūrgā and Kālī, the texts of which were derived in large part from the narrative mangala gāna of the preceding centuries. If padāvalī kīrtana represented the eternal feminine, Rādhā, and masculine, Krsna, śāktapada sangīt exemplified the eternal mother, both compassionate and with terrifying physical features. Rāmprasād Sen (1720–81) set the trend, which was followed by contemporary and later poet-composers, including Kāzi Nazrul Islām (see §2(v) below). Rāmprasād Sen also developed an individual musical style that became known as the ‘melody of Rāmprasād’.

(ii) Tappā.

Secular love songs, tappā (see India §IV, 1), were introduced to Bengal at the beginning of the 19th century by Rāmnidhi Gupta (1741–1839). The form was developed by Golām Nabi (1742–92) in Lucknow, and Rāmnidhi Gupta began to sing self-composed Bengali versions of tappā in sessions in Calcutta, achieving rapid and great popularity. This neo-urban music proved to be a turning point in Bengali music. Until this point urban music had been largely devotional, but with the introduction of tappā, urban audiences could hear songs not about divine but about human relationships. Rāmnidhi Gupta's success, and that of the tappā poet Kālidās Chatterjī, inspired many other Bengali poet-composers to follow his model. These included Dāśarathi Ray (1806–57), Śrīdhar Kathak (b 1816), Govinda Adhikārī (1800–72), Āśutoś Deva (1803–56), Kaśiprasād Ghosh (1809–73) and Manomohan Basu (1831–1912).

Rāmnidhi's efforts to connect Bengali with Hindustani genres was also supported by other composers working in various places in Bengal. Devān Raghunāth Ray (1750–1836) from Burdwan and Devān Kārtikeyachandra Ray (1820–85) from Krishnanagar began to compose Bengali songs modelled on khayāl (see India, §III, 5(iii) and (6)), and Rāmśankar Bhattāchārya (1761–1853) from Vishnupur took dhrupad as a model. The Bengali nobility also contributed to the propagation of Hindustani music, emulating the Mughal courts by employing baiji (female singer-dancers), who enjoyed enormous prestige through their skill in performing classical genres. The music most favoured by the aristocracy was commonly known as rāgasangīt (‘song based on rāga’), a style of Bengali song that drew heavily on rāga traditions. This set the scene for the manifold developments in Bengali music of the 19th century.

(iii) Brahmasangīt.

One of the first genres to emerge as a result of a reinvigorated musical scene in Bengal was the congregational brahma song. These were the prayer-songs associated with Brāhma Dharma, a new religious movement founded by Rāmmohan Ray (1774–1833). The songs were in praise of one indivisible god, in contrast to the worship of many gods, goddesses and avatārs (‘incarnations’) in previous devotional song genres. Rāmmohan Ray was instrumental in composing brahma songs and inspired others to do the same. In 1828 he founded the Brāhma Samāj, which took on responsibility for the propagation of Brāhma Dharma, including the prayer-songs. The idea of congregational singing may have come from Anglican traditions, which the movement's leaders would have observed on their trips to England. Although written in rāga, in performance the songs were often accompanied by piano or harmonium.

Initially the songs were based stylistically on tappā, but when the dhrupad specialist Visnu Chakravartī was invited to join the Brāhma Samāj as a music teacher, the songs soon became associated with dhrupad. When Rāmmohan Ray died in England, the leadership of the sect passed to Devendranāth Tagore (1817–1905), an admirer of dhrupad who wanted all brahma songs to be performed in this style. The division of the sect by two breakaway factions, the Indian Brahma Society, founded in 1866 by Keśav Chandra Sen (1838–84), and the General Brahma Society, founded in 1878 by Śivnāth Śāstrī (1847–1919) and Ānandamohan Basu (1847–1906), reflected a musical split. The two new factions adopted popular forms, including padāvalī kīrtan, as a basis for their prayer-songs, while dhrupad remained the principal basis for the prayer-songs of the old Brāhma Samāj, one of the greatest composers of which was Rabindranath Tagore (see §2(i) below).

(iv) Svadeśī gān.

Bengali patriotic songs, svadeśī gān, are a product of the struggle for self-government in South Asia. The genre began to grow from the second half of the 19th century, and the sentiments it expresses were first heard in the poems and songs of Iśwar Chandra Gupta (1812–59), who had many followers, including poets and social reformers. The history of Bengali patriotic song may be said to date from 1867, with the organizing of the annual Hindu Melā exhibition. This was undertaken by the prominent nationalist Navagopāl Mitra and patronized by the Jorāsānko Tagore household. It was an occasion to display rural goods, watch traditional physical feats and, most importantly, to sing patriotic songs. The organizers saw this as a means of reaching many people at one event with their political message.

It is not known which songs were performed at the first melā, but the second session was inaugurated by a heroic song with a text by Satyendranāth Tagore and music by Visnu Chakravartī. This song became very popular and prompted others to compose patriotic songs for subsequent sessions, which continued until 1880. Dwijendranāth Tagore, the younger brother of Satyendranāth, wrote a song describing the miseries of British rule, and these songs from the two brothers set the two dominant styles for subsequent songs, either heroic or mournful. Other composers of patriotic songs include Jyotirindranāth Tagore, Manomohan Basu, Ganendranāth Tagore, Hemchandra Bandyopādhyāy, Govinda Chandra Ray, Visnuram Chattopādhyāy and Rangalāl Bandyopādhyāy. Rabindranath Tagore contributed songs to some of the later Hindu Melā. The founding of professional theatre in Calcutta in 1872 provided another platform for patriotic song, as did the setting up of the Indian National Congress (1885), whose sessions invariably included the singing of svadeśī gān.

If the first phase of Bengali patriotic song was triggered by the Hindu Melā of 1867, the second was due to the opposition to the partitioning of Bengal (1905–11) by Lord Curzon. The first patriotic songs were written mostly in Calcutta and drew on the traditions of Hindustani music and occasionally Western music. In contrast, the songs in opposition to the partition were greatly influenced by traditional Bengali music, particularly bāul gān (see §III, 1 below). Rabindranath Tagore was very active in this movement, along with other composers including Dwijendralāl Ray, Rajani Kānta Sen, Mukunda Dās, Atulprasād Sen, Kāliprasanna Kavyaviśarad, Amritalāl Basu, Pramathnāth Ray Chaudhuī, Vijay Chandra Majumdar, Aświni Kumar Datta, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Kāmini Kumar Bhattāchārya and Manomohan Chakravartī. When the plan for partition of Bengal was rescinded in 1911 the enthusiasm for Bengali patriotic songs waned, and by this time many of the chief musical exponents of the movement had either died or retired. However, with the massacre of peaceful protestors by the British at Jalianwallahbag, Amritsar (1919), and the start of the non-cooperation movement (1920–21) by Mahatma Gandhi, patriotic song began to flourish again in Bengal, harnessed to the independence struggle. The chief composer of patriotic song at this time was Kāzi Nazrul Islām (see §2(v) below).

Bengali music, §1: History to 1947

2. Key figures in Bengali music.

Educated in the Indian and Western music systems, Jyotirindranāth Tagore (1849–1925), son of Devendranāth Tagore, systematized the urban music of Bengal and tried to put it into a framework based on Western music. He founded a music school, published music journals and developed a notation system to preserve and teach music. He propagated the concept of written music as opposed to the Indian improvisatory oral tradition and fought a hard battle to establish the absolute right of the composer over a composition. His work prefaces the achievements of the five great poet-composers of Bengal, namely, Rabindranath Tagore, Dwijendralāl Ray, Rajanikānta Sen, Atulprasād Sen and Kāzi Nazrul Islām. The songs of these poet-composers are usually identified by proper names: Rabīndrasangīt (‘songs of Rabindranath [Tagore]’), Dwijendragīti (‘songs of Dwijendralāl [Ray]’), Rajanikānter gān (‘songs of Rajanikānta [Sen]’), Atulprasāder gān (‘songs of Atulprasād [Sen]’) and Nazrulgīti (‘songs of [Kāzi] Nazrul [Islām]’). A further figure who may be mentioned here is Dilip Kumar Ray (1897–1980), who was known for his vocal ability and knowledge of Indian and Western musicology. His compositional style was based on ‘light’ classical music and padāvalī kīrtan. However, his retirement to Auroville in 1928 cut short his musical career.

(i) Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).

Considered by many to be the greatest Bengali poet, songwriter and composer, Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1913) and was the composer of some 2500 songs. He classified his songs into four major categories: pūjā (‘worship’), svadeś (‘homeland’), prem (‘love’) and prakriti (‘nature’), and two minor ones, vichitra (‘variety’) and ānushthānik (‘ceremonial’).

Tagore composed about 650 pūjā songs for the Brāhma Samāj (see §1(iii) above). These were written in a style influenced by dhrupad, and even though as a religious movement Brāhma Dharma has declined, Tagore's brahmasangīt are still popular. He also wrote some 70 svadeśī or patriotic songs, mostly composed during the Swadeshi movement, including My Golden Bengal, I Love You, which is now the national anthem of Bangladesh. In these he drew on traditional bāul gān, a move that proved very influential for subsequent Bengali urban music. He wrote nearly 300 nature songs, stylistically close to khayāl and tappā, and more than 400 love-songs. His ‘ceremonial’ songs were written to cover a wide range of occasions, such as a farewell reception or the sinking of a tubewell.

Tagore was also responsible for the genre nrtya-nātya (‘dance-drama’), which he developed in the 1930s out of his gītinātya (‘song-drama’) composed in the late-19th century. He was apparently inspired by diverse musical theatre forms in India (particularly kathakali), the West, China, Indonesia and Japan. The texts are based on Hindu and Buddhist legends. The nrtya-nātya are performed by dancers (who present the story in mime), singers (who sing dialogues and choruses) and accompanying instrumentalists. There is no scenery, only a backdrop of floral designs. The musicians sit on the floor behind a decorated screen, about 30 cm high, at the rear of the stage. His best known nrtya-nātya are Chitrāngada and Chandālika (both 1936).

Brought up in the Jorāsānko Tagore household, known as the centre of the Old Brahma Society, he was exposed to many dhrupad performances, and on many occasions he said that his compositional style was greatly shaped by the dhrupad tradition, particularly his adoption of its four-part textual structure (see India, §III, 5(iii)(a)). He also pursued the concept of composed music and pioneered the rights of a composer over a composition. He was very careful in teaching his music and preparing its notation, grooming a generation of performers to pass on his compositions unchanged.

(ii) Dwijendralāl Ray (1863–1913).

Dwijendralāl Ray is mostly known for his patriotic and humorous songs and for the style he created out of a combination of rāga and the melodic patterns of Western music. He also combined khayāl and tappā to create a third style known as tap-khayāl. Brought up in a rich musical environment and educated in India and England, Dwijendralāl Ray possessed a wide knowledge of both Indian and Western music. His love-songs and devotional songs are also remarkable in respect to popularity and quality. He made use of kīrtana and bāul genres in devotional and love-songs, and he was also a dramatist. Most of his songs were performed on stage, contributing to the rising popularity of Bengali stage music.

(iii) Rajanikānta Sen (1865–1910).

Predominantly known for his devotional songs, which draw on khayāl and tappā, Rajanikānta Sen created a large body of Bengali devotional music that is easily distinguished from that of his contemporaries by his highly individual approach to composition. He took part in the movement opposed to the partition of Bengal and composed a number of songs inspired by the movement's idealism. The best known Bengali song on the boycotting of foreign goods was composed by him.

(iv) Atulprasād Sen (1871–1934).

A barrister who lived in Lucknow, Atulprasād Sen's prime contribution to Bengali music was to make thumrī an integral part of Bengali urban music. He himself composed many songs in a thumrī style (see India, §III, 5(iii)(c)) and also pioneered the idea of composing Bengali ghazal, writing 210 songs in all. Like Rabindranath Tagore, he classified his songs into four broad groups: devatā (‘god’), prakriti (‘nature’), mānava (‘man’) and svadeś (‘homeland’). In addition to composing using the ‘lighter’ Hindustani styles, he also adopted elements of kīrtan and bāul genres.

(v) Kāzi Nazrul Islām (1899–1976).

Kāzi Nazrul Islām, whose career ran from around 1920 to 1942, wrote nearly 3000 song texts, composing the music for hundreds of them. He joined HMV in the first half of 1928 and subsequently worked for all the other recording companies in Calcutta as a songwriter, composer and trainer. He worked with sound film in Calcutta from its inception in 1931 and with the Bengali theatre, contributing significantly to the development of stage music. His contribution to Calcutta radio's music programme is also substantial.

Known as the rebel–poet of Bengal for his staunch anti-British attitudes, he created a new genre of Bengali patriotic songs reflecting a fiery heroic sentiment. He also wrote songs raising Muslim consciousness and songs promoting Hindu–Muslim harmony, composing devotional pieces for both communities. He pioneered the concept of Islamic songs in Bengali urban music, and his compositions on the goddess Kāli and Rādhā–Krsna love are still widely sung. By composing a number of songs with socialist themes, he laid the foundations in Bengal of what later became known as ‘people's music’. Building on the compositions of Atulprasād Sen, Nazrul Islām experimented with the Bengali ghazal and established an academic basis for the genre.

He is credited with reviving rāgas that were being forgotten, as well as creating new ones. He is also regarded as the founder of a style of khayāl-based Bengali song known as rāg pradhān gān. Nazrul Islām also contributed to the new urban musics being created around the commercial recording industry and to the development of the film song. These marked a move away from traditional practices in that a lyric writer, composer and singer cooperated to produce a finished product. The compositional style aimed at entertaining filmgoers and record-buyers and grew out of a combination of many genres, such as khayāl, tappā, thumrī, ghazal, dhun and kīrtan. Nazrul Islām embraced these developments, and his use of traditional music models, particularly of jhumar, a Santāl dance and song genre, was an important addition to these new musics.

Contemporaries who worked alongside Kāzi Nazrul Islām in the 1930s and 40s include the songwriters Hiren Basu, Hemendra Kumār Ray, Tulsi Lāhiri, Anil Bhattachārya, Ajay Bhattachārya, Pranab Ray, Subodh Purakāyastha, Shailen Ray, Vani Kumār, Sourindramohan Mukhopādhyāy, Premendra Mitra and Dhirendranāth Mukhopādhyāy; the composers and music directors Hiren Basu, Hemendra Kumār Ray, Tulsi Lāhiri, Vinay Goswāmī, Himāngsu Datta, Nitāi Matilāl, Kamal Dās Gupta, Suval Dās Gupta, Krishna Chandra De, Shailesh Datta Gupta, Chitta Ray, Rāichand Varāl, Vishenchānd Barāl and Pankaj Kumār Mallik; and the singers K. Mallik, Āngur Bālā, Indu Bālā, Harimati, Kamalā Jhariā, Rādhārāni, Shaila Devi, K.C. De, Kānan Devi, Juthikā Ray, Shachin Dev Barman, Abbasuddin Ahmed, Satya Chaudhury, Mrināl Kānti Ghosh, Jaganmay Mitra, Suprabhā Sarkar and Kundanlāl Sāigal.

Bengali music, §1: History to 1947

3. Film and ‘people's music’.

Bengali film music grew out of the music of Bengali professional theatre and has come to dominate the modern musical scene since the inception of sound film in Calcutta in 1931 and the subsequent use of play-back singing. Initially Bengali film music was shaped by the writers and directors Hiren Basu, Pankaj Kumār Mallik, Rāichand Varal, K.C. De and Kamal Dās Gupta. Although at first the songs were based on ‘light’ Hindustani genres, songwriters and composers have subsequently turned to other more popular and often international genres for inspiration. This has caused some commentators to make unfavourable comparisons with earlier film scores, which they claim have an identifiably Bengali character.

The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) was founded in 1943 in opposition to international imperialism and fascism. It had a great effect across the country and initiated, in Bengal in particular, a music movement known as ‘people's music’. The principal inspiration for this music movement came from the cultural programme of the Communist Party of India and the IPTA, whose activists wanted to reach the working-class people in Bengal with the message of their struggle to restructure society on a socialist model. Vinay Ray, Jyotirindra Maitra, Hemānga Biswās and Salil Chaudhurī who initiated the movement as songwriters, composers and organizers, were quickly joined by many other activists, and the movement that began in Calcutta soon spread to Bengali villages.

II. Music after 1947

Urban music in West Bengal has largely been confined to film and record production. All India Radio Calcutta also played a role, while television ownership has only recently become at all widespread. A group of talented songwriters, composers and performers joined those who had been working from the 1930s: Mohinī Chaudhurī, Śyamal Gupta, Gauripasanna Majumdār, Pulak Bandyopādhyāy and Shivadās Bandyopadhyay as lyric writers; Anupam Ghatak, Rabin Chattopādhyāy, Hemanta Mukhopādhyāy, Nachiketa Ghosh, Salil Chaudhurī, Dilip Sarkār, Sudhin Dāsgupta, Pravir Majumdār, Abhijit Bandyopādhyāy and Anal Chattopādhyāy as composers; and a generation of singers, including Hemanta Mukhopādhyāy, Dhananjay Bhattācharya, Pānnalal Bhattāchārya, Śyamal Mitra, Satināth Mukhopādhyāy and Manavendra Mukhopādhyāy. The songs of Rabindranath Tagore are becoming increasingly popular again with an educated urban élite, and Nazrulgīti have retained their popularity. The ‘people's music’ movement, after its extremely popular initial impact, suffered a setback due to ideological divisions within the Communist Party and its subsequent split into the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Urban music in Bangladesh took two different directions, patriotic and modern song. Patriotic songs, like those leading up to Independence in 1947, grew out of popular protest. The people of East Pakistan were seen by the government in West Pakistan as a population to be dominated and exploited. Organized protest in East Pakistan against West Pakistan started as early as 1948, on the status of Bengali as a state language. The Language Movement reached its culmination on 21 February 1952, when demonstrating students and other activists were fired upon and killed by the police. This marked the beginning of a popular struggle that culminated, under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in the War of Liberation in 1971, which lead to the founding of the independent nation of Bangladesh. The songs that accompanied the movement were often those of Rabindranath Tagore, Dwijendralāl Ray, Rajanikānta Sen, Atulprasād Sen and Kāzi Nazrul Islām, and they became powerful symbols of Bengali nationalism. In addition, songs of IPTA were sung. Poets and composers from East Pakistan also worked together to produce a repertory of patriotic song, including the great song of the Language Movement of 1952, Can I Forget 21 February, Tinged with my Brother's Blood?, with a text by Ābdul Gaffār Chaudhury and music by Āltāf Māhmud.

During the nine months of the War of Liberation a group of songs, now known as the songs of the Liberation War, were regularly broadcast from the Independent Bangladesh Radio Station. They included songs of the earlier movements and the principal song of the freedom struggle, My Golden Bengal, I Love You by Rabindranath Tagore, which subsequently became the national anthem of Bangladesh. Songs that were newly composed include the extremely popular Victory to Bangladesh and Victory to Bangladesh, Bangladesh will Win.

Before partition all institutional support for popular urban song had been located in Calcutta. Dhaka did not possess the infrastructure to produce records and films; radio was the only medium that was established. Film production started up in the early 1960s and television later in the decade. There was little development from record companies. Despite these initial limitations, composers and lyric writers worked in close cooperation during the 1950s and 60s and built up a body of popular song that provided the foundations for contemporary musical activity in Bangladesh. Composers, lyric writers and performers who have contributed to the development of music in Bangladesh include the composers Ābdul Āhad, Yusuf Khān Quoreshi, Ābdul Hālim Chaudhuri, Samar Dās, Kāder Zāmeri, Khādem Hussain Khān, Sheikh Lutfur Rahmān, Sheikh Mohitul Huq, Dhir Āli, Mansur Āli, Āltaf Māhmud, Rabin Ghosh, Khān Ātāur Rahmān, Subal Dās, Satya Sāhā, Khandakār Nurul Ālam, Āzad Rahmān and Sujeya Śyām; the writers Sikandār Ābu Jāfar, Sayed Sidiqui, Māsud Karim, Āzizur Rahmān, Ābdul Latif, Khān Ātāur Rahmān, Mohammed Maniruzzāmān, Abu Hena Mostafā Kāmāl and Gāzi Mazhārul Ānwar; and the performers Feroza Begum, Āfsari Khānam, Husnā Bānu, Sanjidā Khātun, Fāhmida Khātun, Ajit Ray, Āltaf Māhmud, Jāhedur Rahim, Sukhendu Chakrabartī, Ātiqul Islām, Ānjuman Āra Begum, Ferdousi Rahmān, Ābdul Jabbār and Nilufar Yāsmin.

III. Local traditions

Although Bengal has strong and diverse rural musical traditions that have influenced many of the urban musics described above, the flow of urban media into rural districts is now displacing traditional musics, with the result that many are now no longer performed. Bengal is also home to a considerable Ādivāsī population, one group of which are the Santāls, who live in the Burdwan and Birbhum Districts of West Bengal and the northern parts of Bangladesh (see also India, §VII, 3). They perform the dance and song genre jhumar, usually accompanied by a bamboo flute and a Madar drum, which like bāul gān, has been influential on urban Bengali composers, including Kazi Nazrul Islām.

1. ‘Bāul gān’.

Baul is a Bengali heterodox religious sect, characterized by its male and female followers' rejection of caste and scripture-based ideals and their assertion that the mind and body are the paths to enlightenment, in part derived from the bhakti (‘devotional’) Vaisnava traditions of Śrī Caitanya. Song (known as bāul gān) and dance are important elements of devotion and a means of earning a living for Baul mendicants, and their songs are widely known and popular throughout Bengal, perhaps due to the interest shown by composers such as Rabindranath Tagore. There is, in theory, no one situation that is considered most appropriate for the performance of bāul gān, and a Baul may be reluctant to perform texts that deal with secret beliefs in public. However, there are collective situations, melā (‘fairs’) and utsab, where it would be considered odd if a Baul did not perform.

The Jayadeva Melā held at Kenduli is one of the most popular religious fairs in Bengal. The large crowds attracted to the event, which lasts for a couple of days, provide good audiences for the Bauls who provide entertainment, often performing for long stretches of time. A slightly different environment is provided by the Pous Melā, held at Rabindranath Tagore's school, Santiniketan. The performances at this event tend to be folklorized, with scheduled times, a performance platform and a largely educated and middle-class audience. An utsab is a smaller gathering, often organized by an individual family or religious group, where the music-making is more collective and the festivities domestic. These may also take place on the anniversary of a famous Baul, at their place of burial or worship. The annual Baul Festival in Kustia in Bangladesh (in memory of Lālan Sāh, the greatest Baul poet of Bengal), has now acquired national status.

The songs themselves, while not explicitly stated to be in particular rāgas, do bear some relation to classical rāgas in scale forms and characteristic melodic phrases. Baul musics are to a certain extent identified by the instruments they play to accompany their own singing. The most characteristic of these are: the Variable tension chordophone instruments gōpīyantrā and khamak; the dōtārā, a four-stringed plucked chordophone; ghunur and nūpur, ankle bells; and the duggi, a small kettledrum with a clay body, frequently paired with the gōpīyantrā.

2. Occupational songs.

Bhātiāli are boatmen's songs, sung by people in the low-lying river regions of West Bengal and Bangladesh. They are characterized by long melodic phrases that move from a middle register, via clusters of pitches, to a high concluding pitch. There are references in medieval texts to a rāga Bhātiāli or Bhātiāri, which some musicologists assert has a connection with the present-day genre. Other songs that have a connection with boats are sārigān. This is a collective term for ‘work song’, and their quick tempos and regular rhythms may be seen as an inducement to physical labour. One of the best known types of sārigān is that sung for boat racing by the crew, accompanied by a thin brass gong or a drum. With the mechanization of physical work sārigān are fast disappearing.

Bhaowāiyā denotes diverse genres originating in the high and dry land of Rangpur in Bangladesh and Coochbihar in West Bengal. One of these is a vocal genre associated with bullock-cart drivers. Bhaowāiyā have a characteristic ‘voice break’, when the singer momentarily interrupts the melody with a plosive sound. A further genre associated with occupation is jhāpān, the snake charmers' song. Previously, nomadic groups of snake-charmers, often travelling by boat, would catch snakes, treat snake bites and display snakes for entertainment. They would accompany these activities with songs in praise of Manasā, the snake goddess.

3. Narrative and dramatic genres.

Chau is a dance-drama found in Purulia district, West Bengal, and in adjoining areas in Bihar and Orissa (see India, §IX, 2(i)(a)). The narrative songs, which are believed to be derived from jhumar, have mythological texts. A song genre widely performed in the Rajshahi district of Bangladesh and the Maldaha district of West Bengal is gambhīrā. The genre name refers to Śiva, and previously these were songs addressed to the deity. This is no longer the case; they are now narrative compositions, combining singing, dancing and acting that deal with everyday affairs, often expressing problems that rural people confront. Ballad recitation traditionally known as puthipāth (‘reading’) is a form of singing. The bayāti, which here means ‘reader’, sings the narrative by chanting a melody made of three or four notes.

Jārigān, a narrative genre of the Muslim community, began as a commemoration of the Karbala massacre (680 ce), in which one of the grandsons of Hazrat Muhammad was killed. Present-day jārigān also comprises secular stories (mythological and historical) as well as religious and political themes. The music unfolds through solo narrative and strophic singing by the bayāti (‘leader’), and at the end of each section the chorus (dohār) sings a refrain in a faster tempo. The jāri ensemble is led by a double-headed drum and includes a harmonium, small brass cymbals and bells, all played by members of the chorus. The dohār stand around the leader, who sways, crouches and swings both hands to signal their entry.

The general Bengali term for sung drama is pālāgān, of which the most popular rural form is yātra. This developed towards the end of the 18th century and, although mostly spoken, is heavily dependent on songs, music and dance. The plots are based on religious and historical subjects, and the performance requires colourful costumes and make-up. A raised, square platform serves as an open-air stage, and the audience sits on all sides. The stage and the audience are sheltered by a large canopy about nine metres above the ground. The instrumental ensemble sits on the floor close to the stage. This consists of Western instruments such as saxophone, trumpet, clarinet, violin and harmonium, and local ones such as jhāñj (cymbals), khanjani (small cymbals), mandirā (paired brass idiophones) and dhol. The performance begins with a long, slow instrumental prelude, which also acts as an interlude between sections and concludes the performance. Yātra usually begin at 9 or 10 p.m. and continue almost until dawn. Participants in a yātra usually belong to a guild; a single performance may require more than 30 performers, including actors, dancers and musicians.

Although not strictly a narrative genre, kavigān revolves around a question from mythological literature. It takes the form of a poetic contest between two singing parties, each led by a kaviyāl, the leading poet, who is supported by a singing group called the dohār. One poet–singer performs his extemporized ‘questions’ and challenges his opponent to refute them with ‘answers’. The performance is divided into several sections interspersed with breaks. The audience judges the contest and chooses the winner on the strength of the performers' use of alliteration, puns, imagery and wit. This complex tradition developed during the late 18th and mid-19th centuries and is equally popular in urban and rural areas. Letogān is a similar genre found in Burdwan District in West Bengal. It includes acting and dance, and the leading poet is called the godākavi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.A. Bake: Chansons de Rabindranath Tagore (Paris, 1935)

D.K. Ray: Sāngītikī [On music] (Calcutta, 1938)

Ā. Bhattāchārya: Bānglā mangal kāvyer itihās [A history of Bengali mangal poetry] (Calcutta, 1958)

P. Swamī: The Historical Development of Indian Music (Calcutta, 1960, 2/1973)

P. Swamī: Historical Study of Indian Music (Calcutta, 1965)

A.K. Basu: Bānglā kavya sangīt o Rabīndrasangīt [Bengali art songs and Tagore songs] (Calcutta, 1966)

D. Bhattācharya: The Mirror of the Sky: Songs of the Bāuls from Bengal (London, 1969)

S. Ray: Music of Eastern India (Calcutta, 1973, 2/1985)

S.M. Bandyopādhyāy: Baul Songs of Bengal (Calcutta, 1976)

D.K. Mukhopādhyāy: Bāngālir rāga sangīt carcār itihās [The history of rāga music cultivation in Bengali] (Calcutta, 1976)

S. Ghose: Music and Dance in Rabīndranāth Tagore's Educational Philosophy (New Delhi, 1978)

N. Chaudhurī: Bāngālir gītacharchā [Music of Bengal] (Calcutta, 1983)

C. Dev: Bānglār pallīgīti [Traditional music of Bengal] (Calcutta, 1983)

K. Goswāmī: Sangīt koś [Dictionary of world music] (Dhaka, 1985)

K. Goswāmī: Bānglāgān [Bengali music] (Dhaka, 1986)

R. Tagore: Sangīt cintā [Thoughts on music] (Calcutta, 1986)

Ā. Āhad: Āsa yaoār pather dhāre [Waiting by the Way] (Dhaka, 1989)

C. Capwell: The Music of the Bauls of Bengal (Kent, OH, 1989)

H. Sānyāl: Bānglā kīrtaner itihās [The history of kīrtana in Bengal] (Calcutta, 1989)

S. Chakravartī: Bānglāgāner sandhāne [In search of Bengali songs] (Calcutta, 1990)

K. Goswāmī: Aspects of Nazrul Songs (Dhaka, 1990)

U. Goswāmī: Bhāratiya uccānga sangīt [Indian classical music] (Calcutta, 1991)

D.D. Majumdār: Rabīndrasangīter kramavikāś [The evolution of Tagore songs] (Calcutta, 1990)

K. Goswāmī: Bānglā gāner vivartan [The evolution of Music in Bengal] (Dhaka, 1993)

K. Goswāmī: Rabīndrasangīt parikramā [Essays on Tagore songs] (Dhaka, 1993)

K. Goswāmī: History of Bengali Music in Sound (Dhaka, 1995)

K. Goswāmī: Splendors of Old Bengali Songs in Sound (Dhaka, 1997)

K. Goswāmī: History of Bengali Music, i (Dhaka, 1999)

Bengoecha de Cármena, Soledad

(b Madrid, 21 March 1849; d Madrid, 1893). Spanish composer. She studied the piano, harmony and instrumentation with Arriola, Jesús Monasterio and Ledesma. During her childhood she took part in the concerts organized by her father at home. The first performance of her Mass (1867) was received with enormous enthusiasm, and the Madrid critics wrote that the beauty of its texture was reminiscent of Renaissance Spanish polyphony. In 1874 her zarzuelas Flor de los cielos and El gran día were produced in the Teatro Jovellanos, Madrid. The zarzuela A la fuerza ahorcan (1876) was performed only twice, despite critical praise. Her finest works were the overture Sybille, composed in Paris in 1873 (première 1875), and the Marcha triunfal, both performed at the Sociedad de Conciertos, Madrid. Her musical style combines elements of German music and Italian opera. She was a founder-member of the Sociedad Artístico-Musical de Socorros Mutuos.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage (all zarzs, first perf. in Madrid): Flor de los cielos (1, N. Serra), 5 April 1874; El gran día (1, Serra), 5 April 1874; A la fuerza ahorcan (3, P. Vizcaino), 6 March 1876

Orch: Sybille, ov., 1873; Capricho, orchd F. Espino; Geneviève, melody; Marcha triunfal

Sacred: Misa [Mass], 1867; Ave verum, T/S, C, chorus, 1881; O salutaris hostia, S, C (Madrid, 1881); Salve, S, chorus, pf/hp, 1883; Benedictus; 2 salutaciones a la Virgen, S, chorus, hp; Salve coreada

Other vocal: Les larmes, S, pf, 1873; Balada (Serra), 1v, pf; Serenata (R. Zapzter de Otal), 1v, harmonie-flûte, pf

Pf: Scherzo (Madrid, 1868); Gran vals de concierto (Madrid, 1869); Capricho, scherzo (Madrid, 1872); Marcha triunfal (Madrid, 1883); Mazurca, 1893

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LaborD

F. Pedrell: Diccionario biogáfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música (Barcelona, 1894–7)

RAMON SOBRINO SANCHEZ

Bengraf, (Johann) Joseph

(b Neustadt an der Saale, nr Würzburg, 20 June 1745; d Pest, 4 June 1791). German composer. His father Michael Bengraf was a town musician in Neustadt. He settled in Pest about 1776 and in 1784 became regens chori at Pest parish church, for which he wrote much sacred music: as late as 1831 the music catalogue of the church listed about 130 works by him. His inventories of the church's instruments and music (1786–90, 1791) reveal a lively, up-to-date music programme. He also composed secular music, of which his Ballet hongrois (1784) is regarded as the earliest known example in print of the then newly developed Hungarian dance form, the verbunkos.

WORKS

principal sources: A-Wgm, D-Bsb, H-Bn, KE, VEs

Sacred: Kirchenmusik abgesungen im evangelischen Bethause zu Pest (F.A.A. Werthes) (Pest, 1791); 9 masses; Veni Sancte Spiritus; 15 motets/offs; 2 Regina coeli; O sacrum convivium, ant; 3 TeD; 2 Libera me; Tantum ergo; 21 masses, 8 Requiem settings, c40 motets, 18 Marian ants, 15 Tantum ergo, etc., all lost

Lieder: Die Seligkeit der Liebenden (L.C.H. Hölty) (Vienna, 1784), lost; 12 Lieder (Pest, 1784); Sinngedicht auf Joseph und Friedrich (H.G. Bretschneider) (Pest, 1784); Mein Sterbetag ist da; songs pubd in anthology

Ens: 24 deutsche, 24 menuets, 2 vn, 2 ob/2 fl, 2 hn/2 tpt, bn, timp, b; Divertimento, 2 vn, 2 va, vc, ob, hn; Sextet, 2 vn, 2 va, vc, hn; 6 str qts, ed. in Musicalia danubiana, vi (Budapest, 1986); Variazioni di diversi soggetti, vn, vc

Kbd: 3 divertissements … avec un ballet hongrois, hpd (Pest, 1784), ballet ed. in Szabolcsi; 12 magyar tántzok [12 Hungarian Dances] (Vienna, 1790), ed. in Musicalia danubiana, vii (Budapest, 1986); 20 deutsche Tänze; 12 Deutsche; other pieces pubd in anthologies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberL

MGG1 (F. Bónis)

B. Szabolcsi: A Concise History of Hungarian Music (Budapest, 1964), 35, 144–5

K. Várhidi-Renner: ‘A pesti főplébániatemplom zenei élete a 18. században’ [Musical life at Pest parish church in the 18th century], Zenetudományi dolgozatok (1992–4), 23–66

ÁGNES SAS

Bengtsson, Erling Blöndal

(b Copenhagen, 8 March 1932). Danish cellist. He studied with Fritz Dietzmann in Copenhagen, 1937–45, and with Piatigorsky at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, 1948–50. He made his recital début in Copenhagen in 1936, and his concerto début with the Tivoli SO in 1942, after which he followed an international solo career, playing with leading orchestras and conductors. He performed the Walton concerto with the BBC SO conducted by the composer in 1958, and has given the first performances of many works by Scandinavian composers. From 1949 to 1953 he taught at the Curtis Institute, for some time as Piatigorsky's assistant. He was professor at the Copenhagen Conservatory, 1953–90, and also taught at the Swedish Radio Music School in Stockholm, 1958–78, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, 1978–82. In 1990 he was appointed professor at the University of Michigan School of Music at Ann Arbor. Bengtsson has made numerous recordings including all the Beethoven sonatas and the Bach suites. His playing has warmth, security and elegance and a deep musical understanding. He plays a cello by Nicolas Lupot dated 1823. He was made a First Knight of the Danish Order of Dannebrog in 1965.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CampbellGC

M. Campbell: ‘Erling Blöndal Bengtsson: a Profile’, The Strad, ci (1990), 1002–4

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Bengtsson, (Lars) Ingmar (Olof)

(b Stockholm, 2 March 1920; d Stockholm, 3 Dec 1989). Swedish musicologist. He studied the piano with Olof Wibergh at the Stockholm Royal Conservatory (1937–40) and then privately with Gottfrid Boon, making his début in 1942; concurrently he studied at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala (from 1941), specializing in musicology under Moberg, and with Handschin at the University of Basle (1947), where he gained practical experience with the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. He was active as a music critic for the Stockholm daily Svenska dagbladet (1943–59), as a pianist and harpsichordist (until 1955) and from 1947 as lecturer at the musicology institute of Uppsala University; in 1955 he took the doctorate there with a study of J.H. Roman’s instrumental music and was appointed reader. He succeeded Moberg as professor (1961–85), and was also elected president of the Swedish Society for Musicology (1961–86) and editor of its journal; in 1962 he became editor of Studia musicologica upsaliensia: nova series. He was also a moving force in the publication of Swedish music, especially through the editorship of the series Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (1958–) and the Berwald edition. In 1965 he founded the Swedish Archive of the History of Music.

Bengtsson’s studies of 18th-century Swedish music are particularly important and his practical experience of earlier music informs his musical editions as well as his valuable revised and much enlarged edition of Dart’s The Interpretation of Music, issued in Swedish as Musikalisk praxis. His wide range of interests and the ability to systematize knowledge are manifest in his important survey of the discipline of musicology, Musikvetenskap. In his own writing, as well as in his leadership of musicology in Sweden, he showed an increasing interest in descriptive and analytical theories of music.

WRITINGS

‘Henning Mankell: biografisk studie’, STMf, xxiii (1941), 5–33

Bach och hans tid (Stockholm, 1946)

Från visa till symfoni (Uppsala, 1947, 5/1997)

‘Den unga svenska musiken’, DMt, xxiii (1948), 47–51, 83–8, 113–18, 135–43; also in Prisma, i/6 (1948), 23–42

with R. Danielsson: Handstilar och notpikturer i Kungl. musikaliska akademiens Roman-samling (Uppsala, 1955) [incl. Eng. summary]

J.H. Roman och hans instrumentalmusik: käll-och stilkritiska studier (diss., U. of Uppsala, 1955; Uppsala, 1955) [incl. Eng. summary]

ed.: Modern nordisk musik (Stockholm, 1957) [analyses by composers of their own works]

‘“Signor Leos Dixit imiterat af Roman”: en inledande studie över J.H. Romans musikaliska bearbetningsteknik’, STMf, xl (1958), 15–60

‘Tonsättaren Geijer’, Geijerstudier, iii (1958), 153–249

‘Den svenska musikforskningens aktuella läge och uppgifter’, STMf, xli (1959), 58–146

‘On Relationships between Tonal and Rhythmic Structures in Western Multipart Music’, STMf, xliii (1961), 49–76

‘Über Korrelationen zwischen Durationsvariable und Rhythmuserlebnis’, GfMKB: Kassel 1962, 276–9

‘Anteckningar om Per Brant’, STMf, xlv (1963), 5–32; xlvii (1965), 7–49; xlviii (1966), 5–61

‘Romantisch-nationale Strömungen in deutscher und skandinavischer Musik’, Norddeutsche und nordeuropäische Musik: Kiel 1963, 42–7

ed.: Musikalisk praxis (Stockholm, 1964, 2/1970) [enlarged Swed. edn of T. Dart: The Interpretation of Music, London, 1954]

‘Musik och naturvetenskap’, Svensk naturvetenskap, xix (1966), 325–48

‘Tonsättare, idéer, teorier och musikforskning’, Nutida musik, x/9 (1966–7), 2 [special ISCM issue]

‘Numericode: a Code System for Thematic Incipitis’, STMf, xlix (1967), 5–40

‘On Melody Registration and “Mona”’, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung in der Musikwissenschaft, ed. H. Heckmann (Regensburg, 1967), 136–74

‘Anteckningar om 20 sekunder svensk folkmusik’, Festskrift til Olav Gurvin, ed. F. Benestad and P. Krømer (Drammen and Oslo, 1968), 32–48 [incl. Eng. summary]

‘Franz Berwald från vaggan till graven: en kronologisk tabell’, Musikrevy, xxiii (1968), 247–52

with A. Gabrielsson and S.-M. Thorsén: ‘Empirisk rytmforskning’, STMf, li (1969), 49–118

‘Svenska samfundet för musikforskning 50 år (1919–1968)’, STMf, li (1969), 7–48

‘Fakta och funderingar om musikvetenskap i Sverige’, Svenska musikperspektiv: minneskrift vid Kungl. musikaliska akademiens 200-års-jubileum 1971, ed. G. Hilleström, 283–307

‘Äkthetsproblem och en vitter tullkontrollör’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 219–32 [on J.H. Roman and A. Nicauder]

Musikvetenskap: en översikt (Stockholm, 1973)

‘“Verstehen”: Prolegomena zu einem semiotisch-hermeneutischen Ansatz’, Musik und Verstehen, ed. P. Faltin and H.-P. Reinecke (Cologne, 1974), 11–36

‘On Notation of Time, Signature and Rhythm in Swedish Polskas’, Festschrift to Ernst Emsheimer, ed. G. Hilleström (Stockholm, 1974), 22–31

‘Empirische Rhythmusforschung in Uppsala’, HJbMw, i (1975), 195–220

Mr Roman’s Spuriosity Shop: a Thematic Catalogue (Stockholm, 1976, suppl. 1980)

‘Om musik och mening’, STMf, lviii/2 (1976), 5–18

Beräkning av intervall: stämningar, tempereringar m.m. med hjälp av räknedosa (Uppsala, 1978)

ed., with B. Wickström and E. Oksaar: To ellogo stoicheio sten epistemonike kai sten exoepistemonike perioche: Portaria 1978 (Athens, 1981)

ed.: Funderingar kring vetenskap & musik: Stockholm 1984 [incl. ‘Funderingar om tid, rytm och rörelse’, 15–21]

Något om det heroiska i 1800-talets dikt (Bjärred, 1984)

‘Music in the Life of Man: Einige Bemerkungen aus dem MLM-Perspektive zu Komposition, Musikwerk und praktisch-musikalischer Interpretation in der abendländischen Kunstmusik’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 101–12

‘Musikanalys och den uttrycksbärande rörelsen’, Musik: oplevelse, analyse og formidling, ed. F.V. Nielsen and O. Vinther (Egtved, 1988), 97–170

EDITIONS

Svensk pianomusik (Stockholm, 1947)

Johann Helmich Roman: Assaggi à violino solo, MMS, 1st ser., i (1958) [with L. Frydén]; Sinfonie 1–3, MMS, 1st ser., iv (1965); Golovinmusiken, MMS, 1st ser., xiii (1992) [with L. Frydén and L. Hallgren]

with B. Hammar: Franz Berwald: Klavierquartett und Klavierquintette, Sämtliche Werke, xiii (Stockholm, 1973)

with B.H. van Boer: The Symphony in Sweden, i (New York, 1982) [incl. 6 symphonies by J.H. Roman]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Analytica: Studies in the Description and Analysis of Music in Honour of Ingmar Bengtsson 2 March 1985 (Stockholm, 1985) [incl. list of writings]

E. Kjellberg: ‘Ingmar Bengtsson: 2 mars 1920 – 3 december 1989’, STMf, lxxi (1990), 9–12

B. Hambreaus: ‘“Weichet nur betrübte Schatten”: Till minnet av Ingmar Bengtsson (1920–1989)’, STMf, lxxi (1990), 13–18

JOHN BERGSAGEL/HENRIK KARLSSON

Benguerel (y Godó), Xavier

(b Barcelona, 9 Feb 1931). Catalan composer. Between 1940 and 1954 he lived in Chile, where his parents were in exile because of the Spanish Civil War. In 1954 he returned to Barcelona, where he studied with Taltabull. He finished his musical education on a mainly self-taught basis; at the same time, by joining the Generación del 51, he quickly became part of the Catalan musical movement. He has received commissions from The Hague, the Berlin Schütz Festival, the Baden-Baden SWF, the Zagreb Biennial, the National and Radio and Television Orchestras of Spain and the festivals of Alicante, Barcelona, Perpignan and other towns.

Aesthetically, Benguerel's music has its foundations in the great masters of the century, Bartók, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, whose postulates he adopts and personalizes, at the same time incorporating the resources of the new Polish school. Prominent in his copious output, which embraces practically the full range of muscial genres, is his continual interest in timbre and his handling of tension. Among his most important works are Paraules de cada día, Arbor, the Cello Concerto, the Llibre vermell, Set Faules de La Fontaine and the Missa spirensis. Some of his vocal music is based on texts by his father, Xavier Benguerel Llobet.

WORKS

stage and vocal

Stage: Llibre Vermell (ballad op, 11 cantos from Llibre Vermell de Montserrat), 1987; Spleen (op, 1, 4 scenes, L. Permanyer), 1992

Choral: Cant. d'amic i amat (R. Llull), Mez, chorus, orch, 1959; Arbor (X. Benguerel Llobet, and others), chorus, orch, 1972; Metamorfosis (Ovid), unacc. chorus, 1972; Requiem (liturgical texts, S. Espriu), S, Mez, T, 2 Bar, chorus, orch, 1989; 2 poemes (A. Machado), chorus, pf, 1995; La sanch, Mez, Bar, chorus, orch, 1996; Missa spirensis, chorus, brass ens, org, timp, 1997

Works for solo voice and ens, incl. Paraules de cada día (Benguerel Llobet), Mez, ens, 1967; 7 faules (La Fontaine, trans. Benguerel Llobet), nar, 10 insts, 1995; L'encanteri de les bruixes, spkr, 4 gui, 6 perc, str, 1998

instrumental

Orch: Conc., 2 fl, orch, 1961; Simfonia contínua, 1962; Simfonia, small orch, 1966; Simfonia per a un festival, 1966; Simfonia, large orch, 1968; Test-Sonata, 1968; Dialogue orchestrale, 1969; Org Conc., 1970; Gui Conc., 1971; Quasi una fantasia, vc, ww, brass, pf, perc, 1971; Destructio, 1972; Perc Conc., 1975; Vc Conc., 1977; Raíces hispánicas, 1978; Tempo, gui, str, 1983; Música, perc, str, 1990; Obertura episódica, 1991

Chbr: Successions, wind qnt, 1960; Dúo, cl, pf, 1963; Música, 3 perc, 1967; Música, ob, chbr ens, 1968; Joc, fl, ob, cl, pf, perc, vn, va, vc, 1969; Música riservata, str, 1969; Consort Music, str, 1970; Intento a 2, gui, perc, 1970; Vermelia, 4 gui, 1976; Capriccio stravagante, chbr ens, 1974; Set, fl, cl, hn, vn, va, vc, 1974; Stella splendens, 2 gui, 1977; Astral, gui, pf 4-hands, perc, vc, db, 1979; Skizzen, vn, perc, 1982; Impuls, vn, pf, 1984; Conc. grosso, chbr ens, 1997; Hexagrama, fl, cl, vn, vc, perc, pf, 1997

Works for solo fl, pf, org, gui, perc

Principal publishers: Modern, Moeck, Schott, Zimmermann

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Leibowitz: La música de Xavier Benguerel (Barcelona, 1968)

M. Albet: Xavier Benguerel, músic (Barcelona, 1978)

C. Guinovart and T. Marco: Xavier Benguerel (Barcelona, 1991)

FRANCESC TAVERNA-BECH

Ben-Haim [Frankenburger], Paul

(b Munich, 1 Oct 1897; d Tel-Aviv, 14 Jan 1984). Israeli composer of German birth. After serving in World War I, he graduated from the Munich Academy of Music (1920) where his teachers included Friedrich Klose (composition). He went on to hold the posts of choral director and vocal coach at the Bayerisches Staatstheater under Bruno Walter and, in 1924, became Kapellmeister of the Augsburg Opera. He was also active as a pianist. His early compositions, written during these years, include the String Trio (1927), which demonstrates his fondness for stylistic pluralism in its juxtaposition of extreme chromaticism and jazzy rhythms, and works that display the influence of Orientalism (Pan, 1931) and neo-classicism (Concerto grosso, 1931). His friendship with the Jewish composer and organist Heinrich Schalit (1886–1976) led to the composition of a number of a cappella motets on biblical texts, culminating in a setting of Psalm cxxvi ‘Wenn der Herr’ (1929) that was well received at the Nürnberger Sängerwoche (1931).

With the rise of Nazism and Hitler’s ascendance to power, Frankenburger emigrated to Palestine (October 1933) where he changed his surname to Ben-Haim, after his father’s Hebrew name. One of many refugee composers from central Europe, he worked towards an appropriate mode of expression for his new life within a heterogeneous emigrant Jewish society. Although he fulfilled a few conducting engagements with the Palestine Orchestra (founded 1936), he concentrated primarily on composition and teaching, holding appointments at the Shulamit Music School, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and the Music Teachers’ Training College. He learnt Hebrew and became interested in modern Hebrew poetry, writing a series of intimate Hebrew lieder to poems by Hayyim Nahman Bialik (Hakhnisini), Rahel (Akara, ‘The Barren’, 1939) and others, as well as the biblical verse Shimu iyim elai (‘Listen O Isles unto Me’, 1945).

In 1939 Ben-Haim began a long period of collaboration with Bracha Zephira (1910–90), a folksinger of Yemeni descent. As well as serving as her accompanist, he transcribed and arranged around 35 of her songs for various instrumental ensembles. Through their partnership he became familiar with the tunes, vocal production and intonations of traditional Middle Eastern music, features he borrowed for use in his own works. Zephira’s melodies can be heard in the First Symphony (1940), integrated into the primary thematic material of the slow movement, the Clarinet Quintet (1941) and the Piano Concerto (1949).

Brought to prominence through commissions and frequent performances of his works by artists such as Menuhin, Pressler, Bernstein, Heifetz, Wiesel and others, Ben-Haim became internationally known soon after 1945. His flowing melodies, idiomatic instrumental writing and rich orchestration made his music appealing to audiences all over the world. Although he held the music of Bach in highest esteem, he was also strongly influenced by the harmonic and melodic styles of Debussy, Ravel and Falla and the dramatic and symbolic expression of Mahler. While most of his music is tonal with modal embellishment, he used dodecaphony to depict strong images, such as the dry bones in the Vision of a Prophet (1959). His honours included the 1957 Israel Prize for the orchestral work The Sweet Psalmist of Israel (1953). In 1972, after attending an honorary concert organized by the City of Munich, he was severely injured in a car accident that left him partially paralysed; this condition substantially limited his activities during the last 12 years of his life.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Ps cxxvi ‘Wenn der Herr’, male vv, 1929; Entrückung (S. George), Bar, pf, 1931; Pan (H. Lautensack), S, orch, 1931; Joran (R. Borchardt), S, T, Bar, B, chorus, orch, 1933; Akara [The Barren] (Rahel), 1v, pf/str qt, 1939; Variations on a Hebrew Melody, 1v, vc, pf, 1939; Hakhnisini [Take Me under your Wings] (H.N. Bialik), 1v, pf, 1940; Ps xxi, 1v, orch, 1940; Shimu iyim elai [Listen O Isles unto Me], A/Bar, pf, 1945; Liturgical Cant. (Pss), Bar, chorus, orch/org, 1946–50; Ronni, akara [Sing, O Barren] (Bible: Isaiah), SATB, 1947; Songs without Words, 1v, orch/pf, 1951 [arr. various ens]; Hazono shel navi [The Vision of a Prophet] (Bible: Ezekiel), T, SATB, orch, 1959; Bein hadassim [Myrtle Blossoms from Eden], S, Mez/Bar, pf/orch, 1966; Kabalat shabat (Friday evening service, Union Prayer Book), 1966; 80 German lieder, 1912–31; arrs. of traditional Middle Eastern songs, 1939–56; other Hebrew lieder

Orch: Concerto grosso, 1931; Sym. no.1, 1940; Yizkor [In memoriam], vn, orch, 1942; Sym. no.2, 1945; Conc., str, 1947; Conc., pf, orch, 1949; Fanfare to Israel, 1950; Zeim zmirot Yisrael [The Sweet Psalmist of Israel], hpd, hp, orch, 1953; Music for Str, 1956; Lamenatseah mizmor [To the Chief Musician], 1958; Capriccio, pf, orch, 1960; Dance and Invocation, 1960; Vn Conc., 1960; Vc Conc., 1962; The Eternal Theme, 1965; Sym. Metamorphosis on a Bach Chorale, 1968; Rhapsody, pf, str, 1972

Chbr and solo inst: Str Trio, 1927; Str Qt, 1937; Cl Qnt, 1941; Sonata, G, vn, 1951; Serenade, fl, str trio, 1952; Poème, hp, 1959; Str Qt, 1973; Music for Vc, 1977; Chbr Music, fl, va, hp, 1977

Kbd (pf, unless otherwise stated): Nocturne, 1936; 5 Pieces, 1943; Sonatina, 1946; Melody and Variations, 1950; Sonata, 1954; Music for Pf, 1957; Music for Org, 1966; Music for Pf, 1967

MSS in IL-J

Principal publisher: Israeli Music Publications

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Ben Haim: Short Biography and Appreciation (Tel-Aviv, 1967) [incl. work-list]

M. Broad and Y.W. Cohen: Die Musik Israels (Kassel, 1976)

J. Hirshberg: Paul Ben-Haim (Jerusalem, 1990)

J. Hirshberg: Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948 (Oxford, 1995)

P. Gradenwitz: The Music of Israel (Portland, OR, 1996)

JEHOASH HIRSHBERG

Benigni.

The published inventories of the Trent codices (DTÖ, xiv–xv, Jg.vii, 1900, and DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi, 1924) list Benigni as the composer of a textless three-voice piece in I-TRmn 90 and TRmd 93, dating from the mid-15th century. In both cases the ascription has been read incorrectly: it is most probably Benigun. Since the same song is intabulated in the Buxheim keyboard manuscript (D-Mbs Cim.352b) with the title Se belle anglicum, it is likely that the composer was English, and was presumably johannes Bedyngham.

DAVID FALLOWS

Benigun, Johannes.

1. Languages and ethnic groups.

Benin

(Fr. République du Benin) [formerly Dahomey].

Country in West Africa. Its frontiers, which cover an area of 112,622 km² and which result from the colonial partition of Africa at the end of the 19th century, do not correspond to any natural boundaries. With a population of 6·22 million (2000 estimate), the country groups together a number of peoples among whom there was no sort of unity before their conquest. Lying north to south, Benin extends from the Niger to the Atlantic and forms a perpendicular cut through both the climatic zones and the West African societies that run from east to west, parallel to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. From north to south, one moves progressively from dry, sparsely populated tropical regions to humid, densely populated equatorial regions. In the north-west a mountain massif that straddles Togo and Benin constitutes a region of its own.

2. Musical traditions of the main linguistic groups.

3. Modern developments.

GILBERT ROUGET

1. Languages and ethnic groups.

Linguistically, Benin may be divided into three broad regions: the north, where most of some 25 different languages, spoken by peoples sometimes ethnically quite distinct from one another, belong to a linguistic group called Gur, and the south, where an equivalent number of languages forms two quite separate groups, presently labelled Tadoid (or Gbe) and Yoruboid. Tadoid languages are part of a greater linguistic group called Kwa, extending westward through Ghana to Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia. Yoruboid languages are part of another group called Benue-Congo, extending eastward through Nigeria and Cameroon. Responding to this great diversity of languages, lands and climates, Benin is equally ethnically diverse. These linguistically divided regions interpenetrate at certain points and to varying degrees and often form enclaves. Each region is composed of several subgroups with their own characteristics (fig.1).

Throughout the country, with the exception of the north-western mountainous region of Atakora, more or less centralized and stable organizations of the kingship type have imposed themselves on regional populations since colonial times, thus giving birth to strata in the society, each with, at least partly, its own musical repertory. Another division is that separating initiated and non-initiated people, with, again, important consequences concerning music. All this, together with the cultural differences between men's and women's musical practices, as well as those between young people and adults, results in a highly diverse number of musical styles.

(i) Tadoid-speaking peoples.

2. Musical traditions of the main linguistic groups.

(ii) Yoruboid-speaking peoples.

(iii) Gur-speaking peoples.

Benin, §3: Modern developments

(i) Tadoid-speaking peoples.

(‘Tadoid’: from Tado, capital of the ancient Aja kingdom, located in Togo). Their languages are closely related to Ewe, spoken in Togo and eastern Ghana, and they occupy the whole of the coastal region and the greater part of the south of Benin. Although this region may be subdivided historically, culturally and musically into provinces corresponding to ancient kingdoms, it will be treated here as a whole.

A type of xylophone, the largest known, is found between Tori and Porto Novo (fig.2). It is in fact two log xylophones juxtaposed but forming an inseparable unit. The larger instrument is placed across an earth pit. It comprises seven to ten keys, of which the largest is a beam about 150 cm long, the smallest about 90 cm long. The musician sits on the edge of the pit with the four keys of lowest pitch on his left and the rest on his right. He strikes the instrument with two beaters of different shape, material and weight, the heavier being held in the left hand. The smaller xylophone is placed opposite. This smaller instrument comprises eight keys and is played by two musicians. The two xylophones are tuned differently: the keys of the small one are tuned to regularly ascending pitches, while the keys of the large one are tuned to pitches arranged in a saw-tooth fashion. The two xylophones form a sacred instrument that is brought out only on certain occasions and for certain vodun (gods).

Between Savalou and Porto Novo another instrument is found that is unique to this region, although a related form is used in parts of neighbouring Nigeria; it is the raft zither with bound strings (fig.3). This is relatively large, about 50 cm long by 20 cm wide, usually with 12 strings in two groups of six. It is an idiochord made from a number of palm stems tied together to form a flat board or raft; each string is a raised strip of a stem to which it remains attached at either end. The strings are held taut by two transverse bridges, one at each end of the instrument, and are stopped by sliding rings. They are bound by a ribbon of reed wound tightly round each string to weight it and thus lower its pitch. This initial tuning, determined by the weight of the string, is modified by varying the tension with the sliding rings. A small reed stem that serves as a buzzer is attached to each string.

Although it is gradually disappearing, the raft zither is often played with the bark flute and is used to accompany singing. A bark zither with a single string, used as a musical toy by children, is made from a palm stem that is much longer than those used for the raft zither. The centre of the stem is placed on a resonator made of an inverted half-gourd resting on the ground. The instrument is played by two people: one strikes the string with two fine sticks while the other stops it with a knife blade (Rouget, 1982).

Another instrument is the notched flute made of a liana stem that has been detached by heat. It has three finger-holes burnt in its length. The top of the pipe has a V-shaped notch and the bottom is partly closed by a small circular piece of gourd. In the 18th century, the King of Abomey granted a Whydah family the privilege of forming a bark flute ensemble to accompany long strophic songs performed by a chorus of women. Hunters use wooden whistles with a crescent-shaped mouthpiece and transverse bore. Side-blown ivory horns are played in honour of kings and princes by musicians who belong to their suite. The secret society of ‘night hunters’ uses large, side-blown oxhorns, which are played with a quite different technique.

The iron bell, which appears in several different forms, and the drum are the most frequently used musical instruments. The bell is used in every instrumental ensemble and often by itself to provide the rhythmic accompaniment to the singing. The bell that is used for secular purposes is made from a folded sheet of iron with its sides hammered and soldered together and extended by a shaft that forms a handle. It is struck with a wooden stick. Certain bells, dating from about the 17th century, are larger and up to 90 cm in length. The rhythm produced by the bell is a combination of one short and one long beat, in a ratio of two to three. This is the basis of what Jones called the ‘standard pattern’ of a large number of African rhythms. The bell used for religious music is made in the same general way, but is in fact a double bell consisting of two bells, side by side, joined at their vertices. These two bells are of unequal height and produce an approximate interval of a 7th. Other clapperless bells in secular use are made from a folded sheet of metal without a handle. They are often used in pairs and are recognized as being male and female, as are the double bells described above. Certain cults use bells that are struck inside and are cornet-shaped, slightly open in their length. The most common form is a single bell, but multiple bells are also found.

Rattles are of wickerwork containing rattling objects or are gourds strung with beads, shells or bones; both types have handles. Wickerwork rattles are usually shaken in pairs, one being held in each hand; gourds are played singly and are either shaken or hit against the palm of the other hand. The wide-mesh net with which the gourd is strung is knotted with beads if the instrument is secular, with cowries or snake vertebrae if it is sacred. The lamellophone used for entertainment has five or six small tongues made of iron; the sound-box is made of wood and is quite large.

There is a remarkable variety of membranophones. Da Cruz (1954) briefly described about 40 of them; these differ in the material and method of construction, the shape and height of their bodies, the methods of fixing the skins and the manner in which they are played. Most of them are single-skin drums and the membrane is always attached indirectly. The body is made either of wood or pottery; in the latter case the skin is attached by means of a wickerwork frame which almost entirely encloses the body. Certain instruments used at the Abomey court are of the same type as those found among the Asante (Ashanti) of Ghana and the Baoulé (Baule) of Côte d'Ivoire. They are drums played in pairs of male and female instruments resting obliquely on stakes and struck with forked sticks. These drums are used to sound the praise-names of kings and princes, the praise-names also being dance motifs.

Like all the Kwa languages, the Tadoid or Gbe (i.e. Ajagbe or Aja-Gbe, Fongbe or Fon-Gbe, Gungbe or Gun-Gbe, Mahigbe or Maxi-Gbe etc.) languages are tonal languages. The drums ‘talk’ by reproducing the inflections of the language, but in fact the words that are drummed are not identified unless the total phrase is itself already known; the patterns of sound are thus recognized rather than understood. Whether two sticks, a stick and a hand or two hands are used, the language tones are drummed by different types of opposition: either an opposition of place by striking the centre or the edge of the membrane, or an opposition of stroke through the use of ‘checked’ or ‘unchecked’ actions, or ‘muted’ or ‘free’ beats (in Jones's terms). The general principles of the system are described by Rouget (RdM, 1964). An ensemble of drums is generally composed of one ‘talking drum’ or pair of drums that jointly ‘talk’ and one or more accompanimental drums that are usually smaller. The ensemble is completed by a variable number of iron bells and rattles.

Among the small accompanimental drums, one is played with two sticks of different shape (fig.4): the right-hand stick is long and thin and the left-hand stick is in the shape of a small bow with a string made from a narrow strip of leather. One end of the bow is used either to stop the skin, which is struck with the other stick, or to obtain a different beat. Another type of drum found in this region is the rectangular frame drum (Schaeffner, 1958). Certain types of drum are reserved for particular uses, as were the war drums in the past. Secular and sacred drums are not always distinguished by their shape, but by whether or not they have been consecrated.

For funeral rituals, which occupy a very important place in the life of these peoples, different types of water-drum are used. The instrument consists of a rather large vessel, in principle of pottery, containing water on which floats an inverted half-gourd that is struck with a stick. The water-drum is usually played in pairs; it is accompanied by a variety of other rhythm instruments, the ensemble being used to accompany the singing and dancing during the vigils that follow interment or the celebrations that mark the end of mourning.

The percussion pots played by the queens at the courts of Abomey and Porto Novo have sometimes been wrongly included in the category of funeral instruments. These consist of large pottery vessels with rather narrow necks. They are placed on the ground in front of the player who strikes the mouth of each instrument with a type of leather fan, or sometimes with a wickerwork fan similar to that used to fan a fire (fig.5). The instrument produces a hollow sound, which provides the ensemble with a beat akin to a basic pulse. Among the Gun in Porto Novo, it is used to accompany the songs and dances of the young queens at the king's court, and of young princesses among other branches of the royal family. Queens and princesses dance leaning on metal staves decorated with rings that jingle to the rhythm of their dance steps (Rouget, 1971; fig.6). Music and dances accompanied by the percussion pots may be performed at festivities in memory of the dead, but they are performed just as often on other occasions as they do not have a particularly funereal character and, unlike those which are accompanied by water-drums, they do not incur any of the prohibitions connected with burial rituals (Rouget, IMSCR 1964).

In these areas, where the population density is one of the highest in Africa and where traditions remain very much alive, there is an intense social life. Birth, marriage, death, seasonal rituals, collective work, district or village festivities, ancestor worship or ceremonies for the vodun, all provide an opportunity for music-making. Each occasion and each ritual has its own music, and each god and each family has its own musical repertory. There is therefore a great variety of genres, each containing many pieces. Purely instrumental music exists, for example, in the use of iron bells, which are struck while a grave is being dug, as also does purely vocal music, like the songs that are sung twice a day for nine successive days over the grave of a man or for seven successive days over the grave of a woman.

Music, however, is for the most part performed by a combination of instruments and voices with a wide range of possible combinations. Singing is always monophonic; as far as is known, polyphonic music is not found in the Tadoid areas. For certain choral songs, whether secular or sacred, the chorus performs in unison and unfolds the melody in an absolutely linear form; but for other songs the melodic line is enriched, almost thickened, by all sorts of improvised ornaments (sung, spoken, shouted and ululated), which are of a rhythmic rather than a melodic character (Koudjo, 1988). This vocal heterophony is practised only in the lively songs that generally accompany frenzied dances characterized by the violent, almost disjointed shaking of the shoulders. The singers clap their hands in a deafening manner or beat their breasts fiercely with both fists, roaring at the same time. With the performers well stimulated by good food and drink, these songs of rejoicing, whether accompanied only by a beer bottle struck with a nail or by drums, bells and rattles, give an impression of unbridled exuberance.

In contrast, other songs are extremely restrained. They consist of long sequences of stanzas, carefully composed both poetically and musically and remarkable for the length of their melodic phrases. The style of these ‘long songs' (as they are called) varies from region to region, but they are on the whole epic–lyric compositions, full of allusions to the history of the clan, the village or the kingdom (Rouget, 1971). Some are sung by men, generally in pairs, who sing stanzas in turn and who are assisted by ‘prompters’ in case they fall victim to the magic machinations of an enemy and their memories fail them. This type of repertory is derived, at least in part, from the ‘challenge songs’ that were cast from village to village in the past. Others are sung by choruses of women. All are learnt and rehearsed at length before being performed in public. Performance of long songs by men takes place during popular concerts for audiences of several hundred people and by women during court ceremonies in the intimacy of the royal palace. These melodies are fundamentally tetratonic but with a tendency to pentatonicism (Rouget, 1996). Every long song is followed without a pause by a short song in quick tempo composed of a single stanza repeated a fair number of times. Sometimes this second part, which corresponds to a change in the dance, is more rhythmic than melodic, performed in styles reminiscent of speech song. Side by side with this music there exists an immense repertory of smaller songs of very different types, notably the chantefable (Rouget, 1962).

Although it has much in common with secular music, religious music is distinct from it in two respects. In the first place, the cult of the vodun gives rise to ceremonies in which music and dance form an integral part of an extremely elaborate ritual, which is developed as a structure in time and which, strictly speaking, constitutes a theatrical enactment. These ceremonies are thus a series of spectacles that include purely instrumental episodes, sung passages, recitatives, spoken or declaimed passages, dance sequences and mimed actions. A series of events forms a number of ‘scenes’ or ‘acts’ performed with magnificent costumes, displays of colour, a variety of protagonists, spectators and the scenic organization of the space. These combine to make these ceremonies a piece of musical theatre in the full sense of the term.

In the second place, the initiation into the cult of the vodun is performed in secluded places, each known as ‘couvent’ (a house of death), so called because as the initiates enter it they undergo a ritual death. The severe reclusion that the initiates undergo, sometimes for several years, is spent particularly in apprenticeship in a whole repertory of chants in a secret language. These chants are truly sacred; on no account can they be sung after final departure from the ‘couvent’. The sacred chants are divided into the two categories of thanksgiving and quest chants. Each family of vodun, if not each vodun, has his own musical style. Taken as a whole, this sacred music shows three noteworthy features: an unusual vocal technique, the use of chromaticism and rigorous unaccompanied performance (Rouget, 1961). However, thanksgiving and quest songs and chants have quite different formal characteristics, the thanksgiving items generally being lengthy, often more than ten minutes, and the quest items being short, of the order of one to two minutes. They all, however, consist of highly elaborate forms (Rouget, 1990). They are learnt for a long time, rehearsed each day under the direction of a woman belonging to the hierarchy of ‘féticheurs’, who acts as choirleader, and must be performed perfectly. The thanksgiving chants are distinguished by their slow tempo, the length of the stanzas and the rigour and asceticism of the melodic pattern, which is broken by carefully calculated silences. They give an impression of intense spirituality.

With its totally opposite spirit and style, the music of the secret society of night hunters avails itself of a particular vocal technique, which also distinguishes it from the rest of the repertory. The vocal delivery of vodun song owes its distinctiveness to a specific vocal placement and tension (yet to be authoritatively described); but the calls of the night hunters, made back and forth among themselves as they take cover in the darkness at the bends in roads or lanes, are produced at the back of the throat so as to give a low and raucous utterance. This disguising of the voice is further accentuated by the effect of resonators of oxhorn placed in front of the mouth, or by the use of mirlitons. Moving about naked in the dark, the night hunters sometimes meet for processions on the roads. When they do this, they intone songs, in warrior style, in fierce voices and accompany them with long bellowings on their horns and with bells and iron tubes beaten frenziedly. High-pitched shrieks, strange or comical sounds, bursts of laughter, interjections emitted in cavernous voices are all mixed together, for the night hunters are mysterious beings who live in the sea and who speak the language of another world.

Benin, §3: Modern developments

(ii) Yoruboid-speaking peoples.

The eastern part of their territory is closely related, linguistically and ethnologically, to the neighbouring region of Nigeria, where the Yoruba form a people of several million inhabitants (see Yoruba music and Nigeria). Since certain aspects of Yoruba culture, notably religion, have been maintained to a greater extent on Benin's side of the border, the corresponding music that has disappeared in Nigeria is still practised in Benin.

Like the cult of the vodun among the Fon and the Gun in Benin, that of the orisha among the Yoruba gives rise to magnificent ceremonies (Rouget, 1958), but ordered in a different way. Divine possession is more prominent, performers' roles are more individual, and although dance retains an important role, chanted speech plays a greater part. Chanted with clear language, but using texts that are often very difficult to understand, the liturgy of the orisha is imprinted with the same spirituality as that of the vodun (Laloum, Rouget, 1965). Whereas the Tadoid languages have only level tones, the softer inflexions of Yoruba, which has both level and gliding tones, give greater flexibility to the melody.

In the Yoruba area, the secret society called oro is comparable to that of the zangbeto, i.e. the ‘night hunters’ in the Tadoid area. The two societies use different musical instruments, but the music generally relates to the same aesthetic. Previously the oro was entrusted with the administration of justice, with the pursuit of wrong-doers, and with execution of those condemned to death. He makes himself known by his terrifying voice, which is that of the bullroarer, an instrument that may under no circumstances be seen by the uninitiated. His wife sings in a plaintive voice, which is produced by placing a mirliton made from a membrane of spider's cocoon in front of the mouth. Sometimes, in contrast, she yells in a piercing voice. For certain rituals an ensemble of bullroarers is used, in which several instruments of widely varying length are played together, the largest whirling slowly round and round to give a very low-pitched voice, that of the ‘grandfather’, and the smallest whirling rapidly round and giving a very high-pitched voice, that of the ‘dog’. These artistically combined buzzings are supplemented by the continuous playing of two enormous drums and that of a third very small drum, the skin of which is very taut and whipped with fine sticks so that it whistles almost as much as it resonates. From time to time, the shout ‘oro’ resounds, sung out in unison by all the participants to hail the miracle that is to be accomplished in the dark, the visible signs of which are spectacularly inscribed in the forest and will the next day stupefy the layman. Sacred music would thus seem to present in the Yoruba area as well as in the Tadoid area two opposed aspects: that of the unaccompanied chants for the vodun and the orisha; and the music of the secret societies, linked to the masks and the night. The latter, as much through the instruments used as by the use made of them, may be compared to the music of the ‘sacred forest’ of the Toma people in Guinea.

The Yoruba friction drum is particularly noteworthy (fig.7). It is made from the stem of a rush, which is inserted into the opening of a large gourd of water placed on the ground. The rush is held with one hand and rubbed with the other. The instrument, played in pairs, is used by members of the Ogboni society, which, in the past, was associated with the oro. Another secret society, known as egungun (‘voices of the dead’) or ‘ghosts’, plays an important role in funeral rites. The manner by which the ‘ghosts’ disguise their voices to sing in the course of their ceremonies, which resemble ritual theatre, is a noteworthy feature of music associated with masks. Completely hidden beneath speckled material cut from rich brocades, the ‘ghosts’ sing with raucous and extremely low-pitched voices that closely resemble those used for the ‘leaf-masks’ of the Basarí (Basari) of eastern Senegal for their agrarian rituals or those of the Tsogho (Tsogo) of Gabon for the ceremonies of Bwete (Bwiti).

The vocal music of a few peoples belonging to the western area of Yoruboid languages in Benin differs greatly from the music of the eastern side and more generally from the rest of the Yoruba area. Known as Itcha, Ife and Ana, these peoples, whose territory stretches also to Togo, sing polyphonically, an unknown practice among other members of the Yoruboid linguistic group. Their polyphony shows an extensive use of the interval of a 4th and is very different from the polyphony in 3rds of the Asante of Ghana or, among others, the Baoulé of Côte d'Ivoire. It also allows the voices greater mobility. Certain liturgical chants make a very particular use of chromaticism (Rouget, 1961).

Among Itchas, part-singing is, as far as is known, a musical practice of women. Young girls of 10–12 master this polyphonic singing. As a game or to accompany certain kinds of collective work, they sing short songs of elaborate strophic structures, one after another with quick tempos, and they are rigorously performed. Some girls also play a musical game in which two performers hold a long, hollow calabash tube. With their backs against a tree trunk, they stand side by side on one leg, keeping the other leg folded so they can beat the lower end of the tube against the thigh, while alternately opening and closing the upper end with the left hand in order to obtain two different sounds. The result is a rhythmic counterpoint in two parts made of a gentle and quiet series of bubbling sounds accompanied by the soft buzzing sound of a bead necklace coiled around the top of the calabash. Another game consists of playing a rudimentary kind of xylophone. This instrument is made of four short, stout and coarse rods of wood set across the two outstretched legs of the performer – usually a boy – who sits on the ground. These rods come from four different trees of four different densities and, therefore, yield differences in tone but not in tuning. This kind of xylophone exists elsewhere in West Africa (Rouget, 1969), notably among the Bariba of northern Benin.

Benin, §3: Modern developments

(iii) Gur-speaking peoples.

With the exception of the Dendi people and even more so the Fula (Fulani, FulBe or Fulɓe), who are scattered all over the region and have their own language and music, the entire population of the northern half of Benin belongs to the linguistic group called Gur. Nevertheless, a sharp distinction exists between east and west. The mountainous west, the Atakora, is inhabited by different small populations known as Somba (Sola or Solamba).

These societies are segmentary, with no central power, social stratification or people specialized in music-making. The common instrumentarium includes: drums (principally cylindrical with a snare), iron bells (struck with an iron ring or consisting of a hoe blade), lithophones (often described as rock gongs), rattles, wood whistles with short or long tubes, side-blown flutes with finger-holes blown in solo, duo or larger ensembles, side-blown horns (antelope horn) and idioglot clarinets made of millet stem, but this inventory is certainly incomplete. There exists at least one known example (Duvelle, 1963) of a musical bow with a gourd resonator, an uncommon type of instrument in this part of Africa.

Rituals of different kinds, notably for agrarian or for age-specific festivities, make use of only a few of these instruments. However, for a great collective event, such as an important funeral ceremony (Arom, 1976), the whole of it may be mobilized, with the entire village involved. None of the instruments are tuned to each other. Each has its own individual tone colour together with its own way of being blown, struck or beaten. The sound is rhythmically organized. Despite a high degree of freedom and improvisation, each instrumentalist plays a complementary part. To the outside listener, this sounds like a rhythmic polyphony of tone colours, but for participants in the ceremony, this kaleidoscope of resonances is not only musical, it is also highly symbolic. Singing plays, of course, its part in the collective performance and takes two forms: dirges, which are long sentences sung by a woman in a speech-song manner, and dancing songs, which are brief repetitive melodies in call-and-response form.

The other part of north Benin, i.e. its central and eastern regions, differs from the west in that it was conquered by peoples who came from eastern regions located in what is now Nigeria. Among the different kingdoms of this area, known under the name of Borgu, Nikki is the most renowned. The king of Nikki had a powerful cavalry and reigned over an important population, the Baatonu, often called Bariba, whose language is spoken in most of this northern area of Benin. Bariba thus form a stratified society, with both nobles and commoners (and at one time freemen and slaves). Religious life also takes several forms: an autochthonous religion, Islam and the bori, a cult where possession trance plays a central role, borrowed from the neighbouring Songhai.

The music of the Bariba people is similar to the music of the Atakora peoples but has its own peculiarities. One example among many is the important role played by different kinds of rattles, the making of which is elaborate (Bio Tanné, 1986). Another particularity occurs in the music and dance called teke, which is performed for the enthronement not only of the great king but also of local chiefs. It is a hieratic dance performed by men, accompanied by drums. Performers sing while dancing and knocking together rods made of hard and sonorous wood, carved with care and often shaped in the form of a phallus.

Apart from the people's music, to which teke belongs, there exists a completely different court music performed only for kings. The ensemble that plays for the enthronement of the paramount king of Nikki is large, consisting of 16 long trumpets and four kettledrums (Bertho, 1951). These trumpets, called Kakaki, are the same as those played for the Hausa emirs of neighbouring Nigeria. They are telescopic tubes of metal, and their overall length may vary between 2·5 and 4·25 metres (Ames and King, 1971). Men who blow them are professionals, members of a Hausa caste of musicians. As Schaeffner (1952) has shown, these instruments, of Middle Eastern origin, were introduced to Africa with Islam. At Kuande, capital of a smaller Bariba kingdom, the ensemble that performs every Friday (the Muslim day of prayer) in honour of the king is composed of only four kakaki and four drums, two of traditional cylindrical form and two of double-headed hourglass form. This last type of drum is probably also related to Islam. Music of this weekly ceremony requires the participation of singers, one of whom accompanies himself with a single-string fiddle (Arom, 1976). Singers as well as instrumentalists belong to a caste of musicians. The performance itself consists of vocal pieces in different styles and of different forms of praise for the king alternating with purely instrumental sections.

The aforementioned single-string fiddle, of which not only the bow but also the string is made of horsehair, is the principal musical instrument used for possession dances during the bori ritual. Tunes played by these fiddles (several may play together) call divinities to come down from above and be incarnated by their ‘horses’. A set of calabash drums supplies the rhythmic element of the music. With this cult and its instruments, one approaches the Songhai-Zerma area of civilization from where they originate. (See Niger as well as Songhai music for more detailed discussion.) The music of the Fula, a nomadic people scattered over northern Benin (Arom, 1975), is treated under The Gambia and FulBe music.

3. Modern developments.

The above description of the music of Benin corresponds to the traditional features of this music such as existed around 1975. Music, like everything else, changes, and radios and cassettes are now heard everywhere. Young musicians produce new music inspired either by local traditions or, in contrast, by turning their backs on them. Around 1980 a society named ‘Union Nationale des Compositeurs-Chanteurs Traditionnels du Bénin’ (UNCCTB) was created (Koudjo, 1989), and small firms now release their recordings under various labels. For lack of further information, a fuller discussion of this aspect of musical life in contemporary Benin cannot yet be attempted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

M.J. Herskovits: ‘Patterns of Negro Music’, Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science, xxxiv (1941), 19–23

J. Bertho: ‘Instruments de musique des rois de Nikki au Dohomey’, Notes africaines [Dakar], lii (1951), 99–101

A. Schaeffner: ‘Timbales et longues trompettes’, Bulletin de l’Institut français d’Afrique noire, xiv (1952), 1466–89

C. Da Cruz: ‘Les instruments de musique dans le Bas-Dahomey’, Etudes dahoméennes, xii (1954), 1–79

G. Rouget: Dahomey, musique des princes, fêtes des Tohusu, Musée de l'Homme (1955) [disc notes]

G. Rouget: Ogun, dieu du fer, Musée de l'Homme (1958) [disc notes]

A. Schaeffner: ‘Le tambour-sur-cadre quadrangulaire chez les noirs d'Afrique et d'Amérique’, Ethnomusicologie III [and IV] Wégimont IV [recte V] 1958 and 1960, 229–47/48

A.M. Jones: Studies in African Music (London, 1959)

J. Kunst: ‘The Origin of the Kemanak’, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, cxvi (1960), 263–9

G. Rouget: ‘Un chromatisme africain’, L'homme, i/3 (1961), 32–45 [with disc, Musée de l'Homme ID 17/3]

G. Rouget: ‘Une chante-fable d’un signe divinatoire (Dahomey)’, Journal of African Languages, i/3 (1962), 273–92

C. Duvelle: Musiques dahoméennes, Ocora Disques, Collection Radiodiffusion Outre-Mer OCR 17 (1963) [disc notes]

G. Rouget: ‘La musique funéraire en Afrique noire: fonctions et formes’, IMSCR IX: Salzburg 1964, ii, 143–55

G. Rouget: ‘Tons de la langue en Gun (Dahomey) et tons du tambour’, RdM, l (1964), 3–29

C. Laloum: ‘Deux chants liturgiques yoruba’, Journal de la Société des africanistes, xxxv (1965), 119–39

G. Rouget: ‘Notes et documents pour servir d'étude à la musique yoruba’, Journal de la Société des africanistes, xxxv (1965), 67–107

D.W. Ames and A.V. King: Glossary of Hausa Music and its Social Contexts (Evanston, IL, 1971)

G. Rouget: ‘Court Songs and Traditional History in the Ancient Kingdoms of Porto-Novo and Abomey’, Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. K.P. Wachsmann (Evanston, IL, 1971), 27–64

S. Arom: The Peuls, UNESCO (1975) [disc notes]

S. Arom: Ceremonial Music from Northern Dahomey, Philips 6586 022 (1976) [disc notes]

G. Rouget: ‘Cithare et glissando: nouvelles données sur le chromatisme au Bénin’, RdM, lxviii (1982), 310–23

G. Rouget: ‘La voix, la cloche et le pouvoir du roi, ou la transformation des symboles’, Ethnologiques: hommages à Marcel Griaule, ed. S. de Ganay (Paris, 1987), 313–32

B. Tanné: Les instruments de musique des Baatonou (MS, Library of U. of Paris X, 1988)

B. Koudjo: ‘Parole et musique chez les Fon et les Gun du Bénin: pour une nouvelle taxinomie de la parole littéraire’, Journal de la Société des africanistes, lviii (1988), 73–97

B. Koudjo: La chanson populaire dans les cultures Fon et Gun du Bénin: aspects sémiotiques et sociologiques (diss., U. of Paris, 1989)

G. Rouget: ‘Struttura de un canto iniziatico del Bénin’, Ethnomusicologica, ed. D. Carpitella (Siena, 1989), 205–7

G. Rouget: ‘La répétition comme universel du langage musical: à propos d'un chant initiatique béninois’, La musica come linguaggio universale, ed. R. Pozzi (Florence, 1990), 189–201

Porto-Novo: ballet de cour des femmes du roi, videotape, dir. G. Rouget, CNRS (Paris, 1996)

G. Rouget: Un roi africain et sa musique de cour: chants et danses du palais à Porto Novo sous le règne de Gbè (1948–1976) (Paris, 1996) [incl. discs]

Benincori, Angelo Maria

(b Brescia, 28 March 1779; d Belleville, nr Paris, 30 Dec 1821). Italian composer and violinist. Son of a secretary of the Duke of Parma, he studied the violin in that city with the virtuoso Alessandro Rolla and counterpoint with Ghiretti, performing at court when he was seven. After his father's death he completed his musical education with financial help from the duke, probably taking lessons with Cimarosa. He may have written some church music at this time, but none appears to have survived. There followed a disastrous trip to Spain with his older brother Giuseppe, a cellist; they lost their money and Giuseppe died of a fever. (Fétis, who gave the fullest biographical account, dated this trip 1797.) Back in Italy, he had his opera Nitteti performed; it was subsequently given in Carnival 1800 in Vienna, where he remained until 1803 and where, under the influence of Haydn, he published his first two sets of string quartets. In about 1803 he moved to Paris and continued to publish chamber music, his admiration of Haydn being explicitly stated in the preface, reprinted by Finscher, to op.8. Although befriended by Pleyel, his attempts to establish himself as a dramatic composer in Paris were unsuccessful. Two operas (Galatée and Hésione) were accepted by the Opéra, but never staged, and he had to depend on teaching. Between 1815 and 1819 he did have three one-act works performed at the Opéra-Comique, but these had little success and their music is now lost. However, in 1818 he was given Aladin to finish for the Opéra when Isouard died, having partly completed only the first two of its five acts. But Benincori himself died six weeks before the première, and never knew its spectacular success, although this was largely dependent on new scenic effects and on the first use of gas to light the stage of the Opéra.

By his contemporaries he was most admired as a composer of string quartets. Although many sets were published under the title of quatuors concertants, only op.2 can be strictly related to the French model, with predominant first violin, digressive harmony and operatic march or romanza melodies. From op.3, all his quartets are in four movements, including an extensive opening movement and a minuet, and present a wider variety of language and style, in which violin virtuosity of the Viotti school is combined with Haydn's structural patterns. The influence of Haydn is particularly evident in the Quartets opp.4 and 5 which include eccentric minuets and feature incisive musical gestures and unusually concentrated motivic elaboration. Although dedicated to Haydn's memory, op.8 marks instead a return to the quatuor brillant type, with long solo passages accompanied by the other strings.

WORKS

operas

Nitteti (P. Metastasio), Italy, ?1797; Vienna, Hofoper, 1800

Galatée, ou Le nouveau Pygmalion, c1804, unperf.

Hésione (tragédie lyrique), c1807, unperf.

Les parents d’un jour (oc, 1, A. de Beauplan), Paris, OC (Feydeau), 7 Nov 1815

La promesse de mariage, ou Le retour au hameau (oc, 1, M. Dieulafoy and N. Gersin), OC (Feydeau), 14 May 1818

Les époux indiscrets, ou Le danger des confidences (oc, 1, Saint-Alme and C. de Saint-Just), Paris, OC (Feydeau), 16 Jan 1819, draft MS lib in F-Pn

Aladin, ou La lampe merveilleuse (opéra-féerie, 5, C.G. Etienne), Paris, Opéra, 6 Feb 1822, F-Po [Acts 1 and 2 mainly by N. Isouard]

other works

3 Str Qts, op.1 (Vienna, c1801), lost; 3 quatuors concertants, op.2 (Vienna, c1802); 3 quatuors concertants, op.3 (Paris, 1802); 3 quatuors concertants, op.4 (Paris, 1803); 3 quatuors concertants, op.5 (Paris, 1805); 3 Trio concertati, with pf, op.6 (Paris, c1808); Sonate pour piano, op.7 (Paris, c1810); 6 Str Qts, op.8 (Paris, 1811); Pf Trio (I-BGi); MS copies in BC, BGc, BGi, Mc, OS, PESc, Ria

EitnerQ also lists 6 Qnts as op.8, A-Wgm; FetisB states that he wrote a mass at the age of 14; litanies

Doubtful: Symphonie dediée à Haydn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

FétisB

GerberNL

C.G. Etienne: Preface to Aladin, ou La lampe merveilleuse (Paris, 5/1825)

Castil-Blaze: Théâtres lyriques de Paris: l’Académie impériale de musique de 1645 à 1855 (Paris, 1855), ii, 173, 350, 436

T. de Lajarte: Bibliothéque musicale du théâtre de l'Opéra (Paris, 1876–8)

A. Valentini: I musicisti bresciani e il Teatro Grande (Brescia, 1894)

L. Finscher: ‘Joseph Haydn und das italienische Streichquartett’, AnMc, no.4 (1967), 13–37

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972), 252, 355

H. Walter: ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, Joseph Haydn: Tradition und Rezeption, ed. G. Feder, H. Hüschen and U. Tank (Regensburg, 1985), 17–53, esp. 21–2, 35–6

ANDREA LANZA

Benítez, Joaquim M(aria)

(b Barcelona, 6 June 1940). Spanish musicologist. He studied classics and philosophy at Saint Francis Borgia College, Barcelona (BA 1963) and then was dispatched to Japan by the Society of Jesus. He spent two years learning Japanese and studying Japanese culture, becoming one of the first Westerners to study musicology and aesthetics at the graduate school of Tokyo University, and gained the MA (1971). He was ordained priest in 1973, and was then appointed lecturer in music history and aesthetics at Elizabeth University of Music, Hiroshima (1974), becoming professor in 1985 and was also president of the university (1986–96). He has been an important mediator between Japanese and Western musicological worlds and his linguistic skills are clearly exhibited in his Japanese translation of Hughes’ A History of European Music, his editorial work on the Japanese edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and his editorship of the Contemporary Music Review (1986–). He organized the annual conference of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres in Tokyo (1988). He has published his research on Japanese and Western contemporary music in both Japanese and Western languages.

WRITINGS

‘Avant-garde or Experimental? Classifying Contemporary Music’, IRASM, ix (1978), 53–77

with J. Kondo: Well-Prepared Piano (Tokyo, 1978) [Jap.] [trans., of R. Bunger: Well-Prepared Piano, San Pedro, CA, 1973]

Gendai ongaku wo yomu: écriture wo koete [Reading contemporary music: beyond the écriture] (Tokyo, 1981)

‘Eximeno no ongaku sisô: ongaku no kigen to kisoku no bawai’ [Musical thought of Eximeno with special reference to the origin and rules of music], Bigakusi ronsô: Imamiti Tomonobu kyôtyu kanreci kinen [Festschrift for the 60th birthday of Professor Imamiti], ed. Institute of Aesthetics, University of Tokyo (Tokyo, 1983), 211–23

with J. Kondo: Yōroppa ongaku no rekisi: seiyō bunka niokeru geizyutu ongaku no dentō (Tokyo, 1984) [trans., of D. Hughes: A History of European Music, New York, 1974]

‘Collective Improvization in Contemporary Western Art Music’, The Oral and the Literate in Music, ed. Y. Tokumaru and O. Yamaguti (Tokyo, 1986), 453–61

‘Collected Editions and Music Series Published in Japan: a Comprehensive Listing’, FAM, xxxv (1988), 97–115

with H. Matsushita: ‘A Survey of Contemporary Music for Shakuhachi by Japanese Composers’, CMR, viii (1994), 239–56

with J. Kondo: ‘L'oreille orientale et la musique de l'Ouest: entretien ave Jo Kondo’, Etudes (1998), 369–77

with J. Kondo: ‘Serialism in a Japanese Context: a Conversation with Matsudaira Yoritsune’, CMR (forthcoming)

YOSIHIKO TOKUMARU

Benito (y Barbero), Cosme Damián José de

(b Madrid, 27 Sept 1829; d Madrid, 15 Jan 1888). Spanish composer. As a youth he studied solfège with his uncle, organist at the colegiata of Pastrana, and composition with Indalecio Soriano Fuertes. Later he studied the violin with Díez and the cello with Aguirre at the Madrid Conservatory and made a living as a cellist in various Madrid theatres until appointed organist and maestro de capilla at El Escorial on 1 September 1859. A reduction of personnel in 1868 left him in 1870 without a choir. On 20 December 1870 he was named professor at the Escuela Nacional de Música y Declamación in Madrid, and on 20 January 1886 he was appointed second organist of the royal chapel at Madrid. His honours included the Cross of the Order of Charles III (20 May 1871) and corresponding membership at the S Fernando Academy on 18 March 1879.

His more than 200 mostly sacred works, dated between 1846 and 1888, consist of masses (3 with orchestra), 6 settings of the Requiem, including opp.176 and 180 (Barcelona, n.d.), settings of the Miserere, Stabat mater, Salve regina (Madrid and Barcelona, n.d.), other Latin works, an oratorio Las siete palabras de Jesu Cristo with text by J.M. de Berriozábal (Madrid, 1861), and five textbooks (1877–84). Antonio Romero y Andía was his chief publisher. On request from the sesquicentennial commission at Philadelphia in 1873–5 he prepared a still useful 133-page catalogue listing 3000 titles of manuscript music at El Escorial (E-Mn M.2181).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Pedrell: Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música españoles, portugueses y hispano-americanos antiguos y modernos (Barcelona, 1894–7)

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986), 64–7

ROBERT STEVENSON

Benjamin, Anton J.

German firm of music publishers. Its origin can be traced to 1818, when Joseph Benjamin founded a book and music shop in Altona, which his son Anton later re-established in Hamburg. John Benjamin (1868–1931), a grandson of the founder who had taken charge of the firm in 1888, bought the Böhme music shop and concert agency in Hamburg in 1907. In 1917 he acquired the music publishing house originally founded in St Petersburg by A. Büttner but which had been taken over by Daniel Rahter in 1879. As Verlag Benjamin, the firm moved to Leipzig in 1920, and Richard Schauer, a nephew of John Benjamin, took over the direction. In 1925 they acquired the A.E. Fischer publishing house of Bremen, and in 1929 the Simrock music publishing firm. By taking over the Rahter and Simrock concerns, which continued to exist under their original names, the group publishing business of Benjamin acquired original publication rights on works by Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Respighi, Rheinberger, Wolf-Ferrari, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák and others. After the Jewish pogrom of 1938 Schauer was forced to sell the publishing complex and emigrate to England. In 1951 the firm was returned to its rightful owner and Anton J. Benjamin Musikverlag GmbH was founded in Hamburg (the Leipzig house was completely destroyed during an air attack in 1943). The principal areas of publication of the Benjamin Verlag are Hausmusik and other light music. The firm is now run from London (at the premises of Schauer and May Ltd) by Schauer’s daughter, Irene Retford.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Musikverlage in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in West-Berlin (Bonn, 1965), 58–60

C. Vinz and G. Olzog, eds.: Dokumentation deutschsprachiger Verlage (Munich and Vienna, 6/1977, 7/1980)

THEODOR WOHNHAAS

Benjamin, Arthur (Leslie)

(b Sydney, 18 Sept 1893; d London, 10 April 1960). Australian-English composer and pianist. After general education at Brisbane Grammar School he entered the RCM at 18, studying composition there with Stanford; a common admiration for Brahms eased his path with that teacher. Benjamin remained at the RCM until the outbreak of war in 1914, when he joined the infantry, later transferring to the air force. After the war he was for a short time a piano teacher at the Sydney Conservatorium, but his need for European musical life brought him back to London in 1921. His first published work, a string quartet, appeared in 1924 and won a Carnegie Award, and in 1926 Benjamin joined the staff of the RCM. An early enthusiasm for the music of Gershwin stimulated his Piano Concertino (1926), which he declared to have been influenced by the Rhapsody in Blue, although it is difficult to find this influence in the innocent sounds of Benjamin's Concertino, which bears a greater resemblance to salon music or to the music of the French music halls before the introduction of jazz. The composer himself played the solo part at the first performance in England, conducted by Wood. Benjamin was a very good pianist, although not perhaps a virtuoso, and his playing affected both his style of composition and his musical career. He also gave the first performances of Howells's Piano Concerto no.1 (1913) and Lambert's Piano Concerto (1931).

More long-lasting and fruitful than the influence of Gershwin was that of Latin American music, which Benjamin heard during his travels as an adjudicator and examiner for the Associated Board. He wrote works in Latin-American dance rhythms throughout his life, and indeed one of his best known pieces is the Jamaican Rumba (1938), originally for two pianos and later orchestrated. It made his name known throughout the world, and many would have been astonished to learn that he was a ‘serious’ composer and a professor at the RCM. The ‘light’ element remained an important feature in his music until his last years. With the exception of several works his music is jovial in mood and uncomplicated in technique; a touch of neo-classicism in the Violin Concerto (1932) merely reflects the compatibility of the manner with Benjamin's essential cheerfulness. His first opera, The Devil Take Her, displays his light touch and sense of humour. The longest and most serious of his completed operas is The Tale of Two Cities. This was revived (1995) in excerpts for a BBC radio broadcast. None of his dramatic pieces has held the stage. Benjamin's orchestral music has fared better: the two concertante piano works have a certain life, and the second (1949) ends with a rugged and dramatic Passacaglia, an indication of the more profound direction that his music was taking in his last years. The Romantic Fantasy for violin, viola and orchestra is an ardent and wholly successful work, indebted to both Delius and Bax. His only symphony (1944–5) was performed at the 1948 Cheltenham Festival. It is dark and powerful, tragic in expression, and its mood seems in keeping with the time at which it was written. Much the same mood is shared by the Viola Sonata and the Ballade for strings. There were two further operas: Mañana, the first opera commissioned for BBC television, and Tartuffe, of which Benjamin completed the short score but orchestrated only a few pages.

His piano pupils included Britten. As a teacher, pianist and composer Benjamin was an accomplished professional, as was recognized by the Worshipful Company of Musicians which awarded him the Cobbett Medal in 1956. Film music was eminently fitted to his talents, and he contributed some successful examples, including scores for An Ideal Husband and for a documentary about the ascent of Everest.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

all first performed in London

The Devil Take Her (op, prol, 1, A. Collard, J.B. Gordon), 1931; RCM, 1 Dec 1931

Prima donna (comedy op, 1, J.C. Cliffe), 1933; Fortune, 23 Feb 1949

The Tale of Two Cities (op, prol, 6 scenes, Cliffe, after C. Dickens), 1949–50, BBC, 17 April 1953; stage, Sadler's Wells, 23 July 1957

Orlando's Silver Wedding (ballet, after K. Hale), May 1951

Mañana (op, 1, C. Brahms, G. Foa, after C. Brahms: Under the Juniper Tree), televised, BBC, 1 Feb 1956

Tartuffe (op, 2nd epilogue, Cliffe, after Molière), 1957–60, orch completed A. Boustead; Sadler's Wells, 30 Nov 1964

orchestral

3 Dance-Scherzos, 1915–16; Rhapsody on Negro Folk Tunes, 1919; Concertino, pf, orch, 1927; Light Music Suite, 1928, 1933; Vn Conc., 1932; Heritage, ceremonial march, 1935; Ov. to an Italian Comedy, 1937 (used as ov. to Prima donna); Romantic Fantasy, vn, va, orch, 1937; Cotillon, suite of English dance tunes, 1938; 2 Jamaican Pieces: Jamaican Song, Jamaican Rumba, 1938; Fanfare for a Festive Occasion, 1938; Prelude to Holiday, 1940; Sonatina, chbr orch, 1940; Praeludium [from Mendelssohn: Prelude, b], 1941; Prelude and Fugue [from Mendelssohn], 1941; Conc. [after Cimarosa: kbd sonatas], ob, str, 1942; Sym. no.1, 1944–5; Elegy, Waltz and Toccata, va, pf/orch [also known as Va Conc., a version of Va Sonata], 1945; Red River Jig, 1945

From San Domingo, 1945; Caribbean Dance, 1946; Suite [after Scarlatti: kbd sonatas], fl, str, 1946; Ballade, str, 1947; Waltz, Hyde Park Galop [from film score An Ideal Husband], 1947; Conc. quasi una fantasia, pf, orch, 1949; North American Square-Dance suite, 1951; Divertimento on Themes by Gluck, ob, str, 1952; Fanfare for a State Occasion, 1953; Fanfare for a Brilliant Occasion, 1953; Fanfare for a Gala Occasion, 1953; Harmonica Conc., 1953

vocal

Choral: A Babe is Born, n.d.; 3 Mystical Songs: I see His Blood upon the Rose (J.M. Plunkett), The Mystery (R. Hodgson), He is the Lonely Greatness (M.C. Rock), 1925; The Gospel Train, unison vv; 3 Partsongs (Greenaway), 2vv, pf: Bell Song, Margery Brown, Prince Finikin, 1937; Nightingale Lane (W. Sharp), 2vv, pf, 1937; Sir Christemas (trad.), Bar, chorus, 1941; 2 Partsongs (D. MacCaughie): Dirge, Spring, 1942; Callers (C. Brahms), unison, 1949; A Tall Story, 2vv, 1949; Our Mr Toad (D. McCord), unison, 1954; Endeavour (C. Cliffe), 2vv, orch, 1955; To a Wine Jug, partsong, 1957

Songs: Before Dawn (de la Mare), 1922; Diaphenia (H. Constable), 1922; Hey Nonny No! (trad.), 1922; Man and Woman (P.A. Motteux), 1922; The Moon (H. McCrae), 1922; To Phyllis, milking her flock (W. Drummond), 1922; The Mouse (H. Macrae), 1923; The Piper (S. O'Sullivan), 1924; 3 Greek Poems (trans. R.H. Benson): The Flower Girl, On Deck, A Wine Jug, 1934; Heritage (C.A. Lewis), 1935; The Dreaming of the Day, 1v, ob, pf, 1936; Shepherd's Holiday (E. Wylie), 1936; Wind Song, 1936; Wind's Work (T.S. Moore), 1936; The Fire of your Love (F. Eyton), 1947; Jan, a Creole melody (trad.), 1948; Linstead Market (trad.), 1948; The Song of the Banana Carriers (trad.), 1957; Tone Poem, Bar, pic, ob, vn, db, n.d.

chamber and solo instrumental

Clt Qt, c1913; Sonata, vn, pf, e, 1918; 3 Pieces, vn, pf: Arabesque, Humoresque, Carnavalesque, 1919; 3 Impressions (W. Sharp), 1v, str qt/pf, 1920; 5 Negro Spirituals, vc/vn/cl, pf, 1924, 1929; Pastoral Fantasy, str qt, 1924; Sonatina, vn, pf, 1925; The Dancing Schoole, 5 pieces, bamboo pipes, 1934; Tune and Variations for Little People, vn, pf, 1937; Sonatina, vc, pf, 1938; Sonata: Elegy, Waltz and Toccata, va, pf/orch, 1945; Divertimento, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, 1958; Le tombeau de Ravel, Valse-Caprice, va/cl, pf, 1958; Str Qt no.2, 1959

Pf: 4 pieces, 1910; Novelette, 1913; Romance-Impromptu, 1913; Odds and Ends, 2 bks, 1924; Suite, 1927; 3 Little Pieces, 1928; Fantasies, 6 educational pieces, 1933; Let's go hiking, 5 pieces, 1936; Chinoiserie, 1936; Pastorale, Arioso and Finale, 1936; Scherzino, 1936; Siciliana, 1936; 3 New Fantasies: Dance at Dawn, March, Drifting, 1937; Forest Peace, 1937; Haunted House, 1937; Rainy Day, 1937; Squirrel’s Parade, 1937; Jamaican Rumba, 2 pf, 1938; Elegiac Mazurka, 1942; 2 Jamaican Street Songs, 2 pf: Mattie Rag, Cookie, 1949; Bruma’s Tunes, 1950; Jamaicalypso, 2 pf, 1957

Principal publisher: Boosey & Hawkes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Arundell: ‘Benjamin's Operas’, Tempo, no.15 (1950–51), 15–18

H. Keller: ‘Arthur Benjamin and the Problem of Popularity’, Tempo, no.15 (1950–51), 4–14

M. Seiber: ‘Arthur Benjamin: Symphony’, Tempo, no.32 (1955), 9–12

H. Howells: Obituary, Tempo, nos.55–6 (1960), 2–3

M. Schafer: British Composers in Interview (London, 1963), 47–52

C. Cliffe: ‘Benjamin's Tartuffe’, MT, cv (1964), 819–20

R. Barnett: ‘Arthur Benjamin: Australian Symphonist’, British Music Society Journal, x (1988), 27–35

A. Youdell: ‘Storm Clouds: a Survey of the Film Music of Arthur Benjamin’, British Music Society Journal (1996), no.18, 19–27

PETER J. PIRIE/ROBERT BARNETT

Benjamin, George (William John)

(b London, 31 Jan 1960). English composer and conductor. He started composing at the age of seven and studied both the piano and composition with Peter Gellhorn until the age of 15. From then until the age of 19 he studied first privately and then at the Paris Conservatoire with Messiaen, also taking piano lessons with Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod. He then studied composition with Goehr at Cambridge University (1978–82). Since the late 1980s he has also been active as a professional conductor; in 1993 he was appointed principal guest artist of the Hallé Orchestra. He was artistic director for the BBC's three-year festival Sounding the Century (1996–9) and was subsequently appointed composer-in-residence to the Berlin PO from Autumn 2000. Since 1999 he has taught and conducted at the Tanglewood Summer School.

Benjamin's first acknowledged pieces, composed in his late teens and early 20s, demonstrate remarkable assurance both in the handling of large orchestral sonorities and in the pacing of continuous, single-movement forms, often descriptive in character and inspiration. Despite his early studies with Messiaen, his harmonic style was already quite distinct from that of his teacher, owing more to Berg, Boulez and Dutilleux, with a clear preference for rich, resonant chords in overtone-type spacing. This is most evident in his early orchestral piece Ringed by the Flat Horizon (1979–80), which first brought him to public notice. He reacted very strongly against the serially derived compositional styles prevalent up to the late seventies: frank references to tonally inflected or jazz-inspired chords were also a common feature of his early work, especially the Piano Sonata (1977–8) and his later piano piece Sortilèges (1981). Attempts at a more abstract style, however, were largely unsuccessful, and he withdrew his dissonant, polyrhythmic Duo (1979–80) for cello and piano.

Benjamin's growing interest in the spectral music of Grisey and Murail is reflected in At First Light (1982) for ensemble. While never a strict spectral composer, he learnt much in terms of form and scoring from this trend; this is most evident in the work's long progression towards an overtone spectrum on C, which is reached at the end of the third movement. Benjamin obtains a very rich, almost orchestral sonority from an ensemble of only 14 players, both by his research into spectra and by the sophisticated layering of instrumental techniques employed in many registers simultaneously, giving the impression of a much larger ensemble.

This work marked the end of Benjamin's first group of pieces, all heavily influenced by French music. He has since moved away from this style towards a much more constructivist attitude, influenced by the music of Carter and the teaching of Goehr, with its emphasis on contrapuntal techniques, which had not until then been a major feature of his music. This resulted in a dramatic slowing of his output; he completed no large work for the next five years. The first steps towards a new manner were taken in the Three Studies (1981–5) for piano. In the first study, Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm, every detail is almost obsessively derived from a simple rhythmic cell, which is heard in multiple augmentation and diminution simultaneously in several independent layers. This technique was expanded in Antara (1985–7) for two solo flutes, live electronics and ensemble, which is a rare instance in Benjamin's output of sonorities and idioms loosely inspired by a folk music source (all the electronic sonorities were derived from the sampled sounds of Andean panpipes). Despite its primarily melodic, linear texture, the pitch structure of this work is more strictly spectral than anything else Benjamin has composed to date. Many of the modes used in the piece are constructed from scales of natural harmonics in pure tuning; the contrasting modal areas are formed by modulating between these different scales.

With Upon Silence (1989–90), a Yeats setting for mezzo-soprano and five viols, Benjamin finally abandoned the harmonic basis of his training with Messiaen in favour of an exclusively polyphonic texture of greater modal simplicity than anything he had previously written. Several extended passages have almost no accidentals at all; the work also introduced a personal adaptation of cantus firmus technique, and a melodic style loosely based upon plainchant neumatic cells. The vocal writing becomes increasingly melismatic as the work progresses, the entire final section being given over to a lengthy setting of a single line of poetry.

Throughout this period Benjamin had been working on a large orchestral project which was to emerge in 1993 as Sudden Time. This work combines many of the techniques of the previous ten years within the span of a single movement lasting 15 minutes. Much of the piece is based upon rhythmic premises developed from those in Antara and the first piano study. Sudden Time is not based upon a rhythmic cell, but a triple meter which is expanded, contracted and unpredictably distorted on several simultaneous layers throughout the second half of the work. The modal language of the work is formed from several multiple-octave scales, which Benjamin terms ‘screens’, characterized by different types of intervallic content, which are rarely heard in their entirety. A special system of passing notes is employed to modulate from one screen to the next, generating contrasting harmonic areas. In a typical process of intensification, the concluding viola solo virtuosically combines many of these techniques at once within a single instrumental line spanning more than four octaves, with separate staves for pitch and bowing articulation. The unusual instrumentation includes a muted upright piano, four alto flutes frequently playing natural harmonics and two Gartlein miniature recorders. The full orchestra is usually split up into numerous independent chamber groups in simultaneous dialogue; there are very few passages using the conventional tutti sonority.

Benjamin's first work for chorus, Sometime Voices (1996), was commissioned for the opening of Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, and is a setting of Caliban's speech from Act 3 scene ii of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Here Benjamin employed major and minor triads in his harmonic vocabulary for the first time since the early eighties, partly in order to ensure harmonic clarity in the choral writing. These triads are not used tonally, however, but in chains of progressions which specifically avoid any overt tonal references, employing common tones to link them in unpredictable patterns. The continuity of the piece, as well as its more overt dramatic shape, suggests the possibility of an as yet unexplored operatic talent.

The Three Inventions (1993–5) can to some extent be seen as an attempt to integrate elements from Benjamin's earlier manner with his later techniques, combining tributes to both of his principal teachers, Messiaen and Goehr, with a manic central scherzo partly inspired by Burmese court music. The pitch syntax of the three pieces is the widest he has yet employed, ranging from the pure diatonicism of the first invention to the extreme chromaticism of the last, which is perhaps the most dissonant piece he has ever written. His fascination with simultaneously evolving layers of material is most evident in this last piece, which combines seven different types of music in competition with each other, breaking off abruptly without resolution. The forms of these pieces elude any easy classification as they derive their shape from the perpetually changing interactions of the musical materials employed. This fluid attitude towards form and musical time is typical of all Benjamin's recent work, perhaps in reaction to the more obvious forms of his earliest pieces. This is equally evident in the duet Viola, Viola (1997), which attempts to give the illusion of many instrumental voices by means of dense polyphonic layering, similar to that of the third Invention.

Benjamin's activities as a conductor have included numerous first performances, among them pieces by Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin and Gérard Grisey. He was appointed professor of composition at the RCM in 1985.

Wisely, Benjamin has resisted the temptation to exploit his natural facility for composing, preferring instead to challenge himself afresh with each piece. Although he found it essential to break free from the harmonic bias of his studies with Messiaen, there is no doubt that in his later work he builds inventively upon fundamentals inculcated by the French master, especially in the field of rhythm. For all that his compositional trajectory has been characterized by a tendency to make every work quite distinct from its predecessors, there is a clear sense of stylistic consistency throughout, notably in the acuity of his ear for unexpected instrumental combinations of great refinement and his distinctively personal reinvention of modality. His meticulousness and insistence upon the highest standards of realization make his one of the most original and surprising outputs of any composer currently working.

WORKS

Orch and large ens: Altitude, brass band, 1977; Ringed by the Flat Horizon, 1979–80; At First Light, fl, ob, cl + b cl, bn + dbn, hn, tpt, trbn, perc, pf + cel, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1982; Fanfare for Aquarius, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, perc, pf, hp, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1983; Jubilation, 1985; Antara, 2 fl, 2 trbn, 2 perc, 3 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, db, 2 computerized kbd, 1985–7; Sudden Time, 1989–93; Tribute, chbr orch, 1993, withdrawn; 3 Inventions, chbr orch, 1993–5

Vocal: A Mind of Winter (W. Stevens: The Snow Man), S, orch, 1980–81; Upon Silence (W.B. Yeats: The Long-Legged Fly), Mez, tr viol, 2 t viol, 2 b viol, 1989–90, rev. Mez, 2 va, 3 vc, 2db, 1991: Sometime Voices (W. Shakespeare: The Tempest), Bar, chorus, orch, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, vn, pf, 1976–7; Pf Sonata, 1977–8; Octet, fl, cl, cel, perc, vn, va, vc, db, 1978; Flight, fl, 1978–9; Duo, vc, pf, 1979–80, withdrawn; Sortilèges, pf, 1981; 3 Studies, pf: 1 Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm, 1984–5, 2 Meditation on Haydn's Name, 1981–2, 3 Relativity Rag, 1984; Viola, Viola, 2 va, 1997

Tape: Panorama, 1985

Transcr.: Purcell: Fantasia VII, cl, vn, vc, cel, 1995

Principal publisher: Faber

Principal recording company: Nimbus

WRITINGS

‘Quelques réflexions sur le son musical’, Le timbre: métaphore pour la composition: Paris 1985, 386–401

‘Last Dance’, MT, cxxxv (1994), 432–5 [on Ravel's La valse]

‘The Master of Harmony’, The Messiaen Companion, ed. P. Hill (London and Portland, OR, 1995), 268–73

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CCI (J. Weir)

MGG2 (D.C.H. Wright)

B. Schiffer: ‘George Benjamin's Ringed by the Flat Horizon’, Tempo, nos.133–4 (1980), 78–9

A. Porter: ‘Profile’, New Yorker (5 March 1984)

P. Griffiths: ‘George Benjamin’, New Sounds, New Personalities (London, 1985), 22–30 [interview]

D. Bruce: ‘The Tongue Free’, MT, cxxxiv (1995), 581–3

R. Nieminen and R. Machart: George Benjamin (Paris, 1996; Eng. trans., 1997) [incl. interview, biography, work-list, discography and bibliography]

JULIAN ANDERSON

Benjamin, William E(mmanuel)

(b Montreal, 7 Dec 1944). Canadian music theorist. Following baccalaureate studies in composition at McGill University, Montreal (MusBac 1965), he continued his studies in composition and music theory at Princeton University (MFA 1968; PhD 1976, with a dissertation on modular equivalence as a musical concept). He taught at Wellesley College (1970–72) and the University of Michigan (1972–6), then joined the staff of the University of British Columbia (associate professor, 1978–83; professor, 1983–; director of the School of Music, 1984–91). Benjamin has contributed significantly to a wide range of theoretical issues with published writings in the areas of tonal and atonal pitch organization, musical metre, and meta-theory. His work falls within a neo-Schenkerian tradition (typical of theorists from Princeton) inasmuch as his concerns with issues of prolongation and voice-leading are not bound by strict Schenkerian concepts of monotonality and contrapuntal processes. However, unlike some theorists from this school, he remains highly committed to the concept of harmony as a fundamental force of pitch organization. He propounds a new theory of harmony in ‘Pitch-Class Counterpoint in Tonal Music’ (1981) and examines the broader implications of this theory – as well as any other theory of tonal harmony – in ‘Models of Underlying Tonal Structure’ (1982). His later work addresses issues of harmony and tonality in late 19th-century music.

WRITINGS

On Modular Equivalence as a Musical Concept (diss., Princeton U., 1976)

‘Interlocking Diatonic Collections as a Source of Chromaticism in Late Nineteenth-Century Music’, In Theory Only, i (1976), 31–51

‘Tonality Without Fifths: Remarks on the First Movement of Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments’, In Theory Only, ii (1977), 53–70; iii (1977), 9–31

‘Debussy's “Pour les Sixtes”: an Analysis’, JMT, xxii (1979), 253–90

‘Ideas of Order in Motivic Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, i (1979), 23–34

‘Pitch-Class Counterpoint in Tonal Music’, Music Theory: Special Topics, ed. R. Browne (New York, 1981), 1–32

‘Schenker's Theory and the Future of Music’, JMT, xv (1981), 155–73

‘Models of Underlying Tonal Structure: How can they be Abstract and How should they be Abstract?’, Music Theory Spectrum, iv (1982), 28–50

‘A Theory of Musical Meter’, Music Perception, i (1984), 355–413

‘Tonal Dualism in Bruckner's Eighth Symphony’, Alternatives to Monotonality, ed. W. Kinderman and H. Krebs (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 237–58

WILLIAM E. CAPLIN

Benjelloun, Hajj Driss [Bin Jallūn al-Tuwīmī, al-Hājj Idrīs]

(b Fès, 6 June 1897; d Casablanca, 1982). Moroccan musicologist. Born into a wealthy merchant's family, he began work as a trader, and founded his own company. He settled in Casablanca, where he studied Islamic hymnology, the piano and the ‘ūd. In 1958 he founded the Association of Amateurs of Andalusian Music in Casablanca and served as its president until his death. In 1978 the association launched the occasional journal al-Rabāb, of which Benjelloun was the chief editor. The leading Moroccan scholar of Arab-Maghrib music, he delivered papers at all of the important musicological conferences in the Arab world. His main contribution to musicology was the revision he made of poems sung to the nawbāh, and the publication of the Kunnāsh of al-Hā'ik (1981), to which he added two mizān (movements) lacking in previous editions. He also composed in the traditional Maghrib style.

WRITINGS

Kitāb al-Durūs al-Awwaliyyah fī Fann al-Mūsīqá al-Andalusiyyah [A book of elementary lessons in Andalusian music] (Casablanca, 1960)

‘Wusūl al-fann al-Mūsīqá al-‘Arabī ilá al-Maghrib’ [The arrival of Arab art music in the Maghrib], al-Mu’tamar al-Thānī lil-Mūsīqá al-‘Arabiyyah, ed. I. Sharrādī (Tangier, 1971), 139–48

‘Dirāsah Tārīkhiyya ‘an al-Fann al-Mūsīqá bi-al-Maghrib’ [A historical study on Moroccan art music], al-Funūn [Rabat], v/6 (1974), 13–16

‘Hawla Kunnāsh al-Hā’ik’ [On the Kunnāsh of al-Hā’ik], al-Funūn [Rabat], vi/7 (1974)

‘al-Mūsīqá wa-al-Raqs fī al-Maghrib wa-Turuq al-Muhāfazah ‘Alayhimā’ [The music and dance of Morocco and ways to protect them], al-Turāth al-Fannī al-’Arabī wa-Turuq ‘Ardih (Tunis, 1978), 26–46

‘Ta’thīr al-Mūsīqá al-Andalusiyyah ‘alá al-Aghānī al-Sha‘biyyah’ [The influence of Andalusian music on folksongs], al-Funūn [Rabat], v/1 (1978), 95–98

al-Turāth al-‘Arabī al-Maghribī fī al-Mūsīqá: Dirāsah wa-Tansīq wa-Tashīh Kunnāsh al-Hāyyik [The Arab-Moroccan patrimony of music: study, arrangement and correction of the manuscript of al-Hā’ik] (Casablanca, 1981)

CHRISTIAN POCHÉ

Benkő, András [Andrei]

(b Feiurdeni, Cluj, 21 Jan 1923). Romanian musicologist of Hungarian descent. He studied at the Cluj Conservatory (1946–50), where his teachers included Major, Mureşianu and Lakatos, and took the state music teacher’s diploma in 1951. He was secretary of the Cluj Béla Bartók Choir (1948–9) before joining the department of composition and musicology at the Cluj Conservatory in 1949, becoming lecturer (1952–67) and reader (1967–85). He took the doctorate at the Cluj Conservatory in 1977, with a dissertation on Bartók. His special interests include Romanian and Hungarian music, the interpretation of early manuscripts, questions of music theory and style and music bibliography. He became a member of the Romanian Composers’ Union in 1955 and was awarded the Bartók commemorative medal in 1968.

WRITINGS

‘Székely László kótáskönyve’ [Székely’s Notebook], ZT, vi (1957), 345–406

‘Haydn-bemutató Kolozsváron’ [A Haydn première in Cluj], ZT, viii (1960), 675–86

‘Csokonai-dalok Kolozsvárt levő kéziratos zenei gyűjteményekben’ [Csokonai lieder in the Cluj manuscript collection], Nyelv- és irodalomtudományi közlemények, vii (1963), 93–7

‘Date privind prezenţa unor instrumente şi instrumentişti în viaţa oraşului Bistriţa din secolul XVI’ [Musical instruments and musicians in Bistriţa during the 16th century], LM, ii (1966), 233–43 [incl. Fr., Ger. and Russ. summaries]

‘Motivul B–A–C–H în muzica secolului XX’, LM, iv (1968), 137–56 [incl. Fr., Ger. and Russ. summaries]

‘Contribuţiuni la problema evoluţiei materialului fonic’ [The historical evolution of sound material], LM, v (1969), 123–39 [incl. Fr., Ger. and Russ. summaries]

‘Apáczai Csere János magyar nyelvű zeneelmélete’ [Apáczai Csere’s music theory in Hungarian], Nyelv- és irodalomtudományi közlemények, xiv (1970), 171–7

Bartók Béla romániai hangversenyei, 1922–1936 [Bartók’s concerts in Romania] (Bucharest, 1970)

‘Importanţe unei formule ritmice eline în creaţia lui Beethoven’ [The importance of a Hellenic rhythmic formula in Beethoven’s works], LM, vi (1970), 29–47 [incl. Eng., Fr., Ger. and Russ. summaries]

‘Almási Sámuel kétkötetes dalgyűjteménye’ [Almasi two-volume lieder collection], Igaz szó, i (Tîrgu–Mureş, 1971), 115

‘Lakatos István zenei bibliográfiája (1911–1969)’ [Lakatos’s musical bibliography 1911–69], in I. Lakatos: Zenetörténeti írások(Bucharest, 1971), 245–90

‘“Mottoul Mozart” în Simfonia Jupiter’, LM, vii (1971), 199–210 [incl. Eng., Fr., Ger., It. and Russ. summaries]

Az egyetemes zene története [A general music history] (Cluj, 1973–80)

‘A romániai magyar zeneírás három évtizede’ [30 years of musical writings in Hungarian in Romania], Művelűdés (1974), no.8, p.53

‘Bartók Béla levelei Constantin Brăiloiuhoz’ [Letters of Bartók and Brăiloiu], Bartók-dolgozatok, ed. F. László (Bucharest, 1974), 191–239 [summaries in Eng., Ger.]

‘Bartók fogadtatása’ [Bartók’s reception], Korunk-évkönyv, ii (Cluj, 1974), 115

ed.: Seprődi János válogatott zenei irásai és népzenei gyűjtése [Seprődi’s selected writings on music and folksong collections] (Bucharest, 1974) [preface with I. Almási and I. Lakatos]

A Bolyaiak zeneelmélete: Bolyai Farkas zenészeti [The music theory of Farkas and János Bolyai] (Bucharest, 1975)

Bartók şi România (diss., Cluj Conservatory, 1977)

ed. Zenetudományi írások 1983 (Bucharest, 1983) [Nagy Festschrift]

Zenei kislexikon [A small music lexicon] (Bucharest, 1986)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România, i (Bucharest, 1989) [incl. further list of writings]

ISTVÁN LAKATOS/R

Ben marcato

(It.: ‘well marked’).

See Marcato.

Benmet, John.

See Benet, John.

Benn, Johann

(b in or nr Messkirch, Baden, c1590; d Muri, Aargau, Switzerland, c1660). German composer and organist resident in Switzerland. He is referred to as an organist at Messkirch in 1621, and he was probably also Kapellmeister of the private chapel of Count Wratislaus von Fürstenberg. He went on a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln in 1630. In 1638, on the recommendation of the Bishop of Konstanz, he was appointed organist of St Leodegar und Mauritius, Lucerne. In 1655 the Lucerne council agreed to his entering the monastery at Muri, where he was still living in 1657. His music is characterized by simple harmony, straightforward melodic lines and clear counterpoint. Venetian influence can be seen in the preference for polychoral writing. Johann Donfrid thought highly enough of his music to include six works in his celebrated anthologies of the 1620s.

WORKS

Missae concertatae, 3/4vv, una missa, 8vv (Lucerne, 1644), ed. in SMd, iv (1962)

Motets: 1 in 1623³, 3 in 1627¹, 1 in 1627², 1 in 1628²

8 ricercares (3 bearing Benn's name), org, GB-Lbl Add.34898; ed. in Matthen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RefardtHBM

F. Hirtler: ‘Neuaufgefundene Orgelstücke von J.U. Steigleder und J. Benn’, AMf, ii (1937), 92–100

L.E.R. Matthen: The Twenty-Two Organ Works of Johann Benn and Unknown Composer(s) in the MS British Museum Add.34898: a Transcription and Commentary (diss., Indiana U., 1973)

MAX ZULAUF

Bennet, John (i)

(b ?1575–80; fl 1599–1614). English composer. He dedicated his madrigal volume (1599), ‘these first fruits of my simple skill … the indeavors of a yong wit’, to Ralph Assheton, who held civic office in both Lancashire and Cheshire, as a token for favours received. It seems probable, therefore, that Bennet came from the north-west of England, and was born about 1575–80.

For his madrigal volume Bennet took an unusually large number of texts (six out of 17) from existing collections; three of these texts had been printed only in the preceding year. Although Bennet did not borrow musical ideas from these earlier settings, he was evidently well acquainted with the very latest trends in the English madrigal. Certain features in his work seem to derive from Weelkes and Wilbye, but Morley was clearly his main model. Yet a trend towards the more serious madrigal is also present in this collection, and one work, I languish, employs the measured manner, amorphous imitation, long-drawn lines, and textural consistency reminiscent of a pre-madrigalian English tradition. O sweet griefe essays the same manner with greater impact because of its more compressed treatment of the text. Weepe O mine eyes is more successful still; the resemblance of the opening to the first phrase of Dowland’s Flow, my teares can hardly be coincidental. By contrast, Bennet’s Oriana madrigal, All cre’tures now (in RISM 1601¹⁶), demonstrates his command of a forthright festive manner.

The older native root to Bennet’s style is also revealed in his works surviving in manuscripts. Of his two viol-accompanied songs, Eliza, her name gives honor is clearly an occasional piece in praise of Queen Elizabeth. His substantial verse anthem, O God of Gods (2pt To the Almighty Trinity, described in Clifford’s The Divine Services (1663) as ‘For the king’s inauguration’), uses viols to collaborate with soloists in weaving a complex contrapuntal web which is akin to Gibbons’s verse anthem style.

Bennet contributed four psalm settings and a prayer for the queen to Barley’s psalter (1599⁹). His remaining published works, six contributions to Ravenscroft’s A Briefe Discourse (1614²¹), reveal a vigorous native character, owing nothing to his earlier madrigals. Intended for unsophisticated diversion, they are forthright and humorous. Some are straightforward vocal pieces, while others combine verses with a repeated chorus. One piece is in a West Country dialect.

WORKS

Madrigalls, 4vv (London, 1599); ed. in EM, xxiii (1922, 2/1979)

Madrigal, 5vv, 1601¹⁶, ed. in EM, xxxii (1923, 2/1962); 6 secular pieces, 4vv, 1614²¹, 2 ed. in EM, xxiii (1922, 2/1979)

2 consort songs, 5vv; ed. in MB, xxii (1967)

5 sacred pieces, 1599⁹

Verse anthem, GB-Ckc, DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Och

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.H. Fellowes: English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632 (Oxford, 1920, enlarged 3/1967 by F.W. Sternfeld and D. Greer)

E.H. Fellowes: The English Madrigal Composers (Oxford, 1921, 2/1948/R)

R. Illing: ‘Barley’s Pocket Edition of Est’s Metrical Psalter’, ML, xlix (1968), 219–23

DAVID BROWN

Bennet [Bennett], John (ii).

See Benet, John.

Bennett, John

(b ?1725–30; d London, Sept 1784). English organist and composer. According to Burney, Bennett was a pupil of Pepusch and, though he occasionally appeared as a ‘Chorus singer & figurante in processions’ (i.e. as a stage extra or theatrical ‘walk-on’), was chiefly employed as a viola player in the Drury Lane orchestra; he subsequently became a member of the Royal Society of Musicians and a member of the Queen’s Band. In April 1752 he succeeded Burney as organist of St Dionis Backchurch, Fenchurch Street, and six years later he published an interesting set of Ten Voluntaries for the Organ or Harpsichord to which many contemporary musicians including Handel subscribed. These pieces are remarkable not only in that they show a keen awareness of developing galant idioms, but also as being among the most extended and technically demanding 18th-century examples of their kind. Bennett was a skilled contrapuntist, and his fugues in particular have an almost Germanic consistency of texture. It is curious that, apart from three hymn tunes contributed to A Collection of Melodies for the Psalms of David, according to the Version of Christopher Smart (London, 1765), he appears to have published nothing else.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Matthews, ed.: The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain: List of Members 1738–1984 (London, 1985)

H.D. Johnstone, ed.: Preface to John Bennett: Six Voluntaries for Organ (London, 1988)

S. Klima, G. Bowers and K.S. Grant, eds.: Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney 1726–1769 (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 46

H. DIACK JOHNSTONE

Bennett, Joseph

(b Berkeley, Glos., 29 Nov 1831; d Purton, nr Berkeley, 12 June 1911). English music critic and writer. He attended singing classes at Berkeley Town Hall, was solo boy in the parish church choir, and also studied the organ, violin, viola and cello. He was a church organist in Margate from 1853 to 1855, when he moved to London. In the early 1860s he served in the Regiment of Volunteers under Colonel J.H. Mapleson (later manager of Drury Lane Theatre).

Bennett was precentor of Weigh House Chapel and organist of Westminster Chapel, and in 1865 assisted Henry Coleman, music critic of the Sunday Times; when Coleman retired, Bennett was appointed in his place. In 1870 he joined the Daily Telegraph as leader writer and music critic, remaining there and exercising great influence until his retirement. In addition he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, Graphic, Pictorial Times and Musical World, still continuing to contribute to the Sunday Times. From 1874 his work was centred on the Daily Telegraph as leader writer and music critic, though he was also on the staff of the Musical Times and editor of Concordia for Novello (1875–6). In 1876 he attended the first Bayreuth Festival, publishing his Letters from Bayreuth the following year.

In 1883 he became the first editor of The Lute, and in the same year acted as adjudicator for the Welsh National Eisteddfod, also spending some time in Ireland. He sailed for New York in October 1884 intending to go to Winnipeg, but almost his whole time was spent in the USA, where he was much impressed by the music of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City; he returned to England in February 1885. He visited Bayreuth again in 1886 and was at the première of Verdi’s Otello at La Scala in 1887. He retired in 1906.

As a critic Bennett was influenced by J.W. Davison, music critic of The Times, who wielded considerable power. Bennett admired Brahms, but found Wagner beyond his comprehension. He gave encouragement to Elgar in his Daily Telegraph articles, though he declined Elgar's request to write a libretto on the subject of S Augustine. He was nonetheless a prolific librettist, providing texts for concert works by Barnett, Mackenzie and Sullivan (The Golden Legend).

WRITINGS

Letters from Bayreuth, Descriptive and Critical, of Wagner's ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (London, 1877)

The Musical Year 1883 (London, 1884)

Novello's Primers of Musical Biography (London, 1884–5) [5 vols. on Berlioz, Cherubini, Chopin, Meyerbeer and Rossini]

A Short History of Cheap Music as Exemplified in the Records of the House of Novello, Ewer & Co. (London, 1887)

A Story of Ten Hundred Concerts, being a Short Account of the Origin and Progress of the Monday Popular Concerts, St. James's Hall, London (London, 1887)

with F.R. Spark: History of the Leeds Festival (Leeds, 1892, 2/1892)

Forty Years of Music 1865–1905 (London, 1908)

Many articles in MT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (A.D. Walker) [with detailed list of writings]

Obituaries: MT, lii (1911), 468; Manchester Guardian (13 June 1911); The Times (13 June 1911)

M.B. Foster: History of the Philharmonic Society of London 1813–1912 (London, 1912), 398, 427, 429

R. Elkin: The Old Concert Rooms of London (London, 1955), 154

ARTHUR D. WALKER

Bennett [DiFiglia], Michael

(b Buffalo, NY, 8 April 1943; d Tucson, AZ, 2 July 1987). American director and choreographer. He made his début at the age of 17 as Baby John in a tour of West Side Story, and was influenced by working with Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd and Peter Gennaro in further Broadway shows. His first orginal dances featured in the short-lived A Joyful Noise (1966), and in the following year he staged How Now, Dow Jones whose producer, David Merrick, spotted Bennett’s potential and gave him his first hit, Promises, Promises (1968), with his first show-stopping number, ‘Turkey Lurkey Time’. His staging of Follies in 1971 was so integral to the show’s success that Hal Prince gave him co-director’s credit. By Seesaw (1973), he took over the direction, choreography and writing of an out-of-town disaster and reversed its fortunes: this level of artistic control inspired Bennett to develop A Chorus Line. A series of workshops and interviews with dancers talking about their lives was transformed by him into a non-stop collage of dance, speech and song which told a specific story about dancers seeking work, but also worked as a potent universal metaphor. The apotheosis of the musical, A Chorus Line ran from 1975 to 1990 in New York, and has remained in production continually since. Bennett’s fusion of all the elements of stage production into a seamless performance, also seen in the disappointing Ballroom (1978) and the commercially successful Dreamgirls (1981), has influenced all subsequent musicals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Mendelbaum: A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett (New York, 1990)

R. Viargas, B. Lee and T. Walsh: On the Line: the Creation of ‘A Chorus Line’ (New York, 1990)

ROBERT HOWIE

Bennett, Sir Richard Rodney

(b Broadstairs, 29 March 1936). English composer and pianist. He was educated at Leighton Park School and at the RAM, where he studied with Ferguson and, briefly, Lennox Berkeley. The son of a well-known writer of children’s books and a one-time pupil of Holst, his family background seemed set to nurture the talents of a budding musician. But such favourable circumstances cannot alone account for the fact that he started to write music almost before he could read, nor for the continued fulfilment of an early promise that enabled him to complete his third string quartet by the time he was 18 and, a year later, his first documentary film score.

Gifted with an acutely sensitive ear and consumed by an insatiable musical curiosity, Bennett’s self-education was predictively catholic, ranging from the early 20th-century English music he first knew as a child, to the show tunes he took down from recordings heard in his teens, to the newest of the new European composers he discovered through listening to the weekly late-night programmes broadcast from German radio stations in the years immediately following World War II. By the end of his first year as a scholarship student at the RAM he was a fully fledged European himself, spending part of his summer holidays at the Darmstadt summer courses, both before and after the award of a scholarship from the French Government enabled him to spend two years in Paris (1957–9) as a student of Boulez.

Having by then made an extremely auspicious professional début as a composer of music for feature films (Interpol and A Face in the Night both date from 1956, The Safecracker, Indiscreet and The Man Inside from the years of his Paris studentship), it is the more remarkable that he was able so wholeheartedly to immerse himself in the most up-to-date of the avant-garde techniques fresh from the workshop of Boulez and others of the Darmstadt persuasion. While there remains only one work dating from this period (the unpublished Cycle II for Paul Jacobs) of which Bennett himself is justifiably proud, and although he was thereafter to set aside these European influences, the Paris years were undoubtedly formative ones. Returning to London in 1959, his career in film music continued apace (20 of his 50 or so film scores date from the following 10 years); this intense activity not only provided him with a good living, but brought an almost embarrassing acclaim for work he has always regarded as incidental to his primary job as a composer of concert music. From this point on he learnt more and more to compartmentalize his various musical talents.

While Bennett could well have opted for the temptingly fashionable internationalism of the 1950s, his successful foray into avant-garde techniques was in the end to last no more than the couple of years he spent in Paris. It was nevertheless the enriching effect of this experience that enabled him to pick up the stylistic threads of his teenage Sonata for piano in a series of works in which the essentially melodic basis of the 12-note row was expanded to include ideas on harmonic proliferation learnt from Boulez. Almost a decade on Five Studies for piano show a distinctly more personal approach to serialism and to the evolution of a musical vocabulary that was to serve his expressive needs for the next twenty years or so. Composed in 1961, the one-act chamber opera, The Ledge, was followed in quick succession by The Mines of Sulphur, A Penny for a Song and Victory, all completed within a decade which also included a couple of stage pieces for children, two of his three symphonies, the Piano Concerto, Epithalamion, and 30 or more smaller but no less important vocal and instrumental works. This astonishing prolificity was sustained through the 1970s, with eight of his 17 concertos, Spells for voices and orchestra, and the important chamber music series of Commedias and Scenas all dating from this period.

It was in 1981 that the keyboard ballet Noctuary set out to explore the harmonic relationships between the strictly tonal world of the Scott Joplin piece it takes as its starting point and the strictly serial one of Bennett’s own music. Although this was undoubtedly a landmark piece, it was After Syrinx I that seems to have provided the spur for a more permanent loosening of harmonic controls, with the tonality of Debussy’s Syrinx seamlessly blended with what Bennett has called a more-or-less serial texture. This then paved the way for pieces whose harmony reflects freely-composed themes and, conversely, for chord sequences to yield corresponding melodic images. Once his newly atonal harmony had freed itself from the unspoken need to avoid pitch repetition, his neo-serial writing began to readmit previously excluded elements (such as octaves and tonal chords) and to reflect an evermore flexible use of proto-serial techniques. In line with the notion of an evolving harmony specific to each succeeding work, much of his 1980s chamber music stems from quotation, used either as an integral strand in the musical development (Noctuary, Reflections on a theme of William Walton) or as a starting point (the two pieces based on a madrigal by Monteverdi, and the five on Debussy’s Syrinx).

No composer of his generation has done more to develop the stylistic middle ground of 20th-century music. Amiably persuasive rather than confrontational, his work attracts performers at every level – whether for his virtuoso concertos, his sensitive and eminently singable vocal music, or his outstanding chamber music. As an agile if largely self-taught pianist, Bennett has always been involved with performance of one kind or another; as a student, both in London (where he gave the UK première of Boulez’s Sonata no.1 for piano) and in Paris, his ability to decipher new music could well have led to a successful career as composer/pianist in this field alone. But by 1959, winds of stylistic change were already beginning to cloud the carefully constructed certainties of the European avant-garde, and it was in any case obvious that significant choices would have to be made. Just as he had quickly discarded the sophisticated pre-compositional devices so eagerly absorbed in Paris, his piano playing adapted easily to a broader and generally more mainstream 20th-century repertory. A particular liking for ensemble playing of all kinds soon earned him a reputation as a sought-after accompanist as well as a valued collaborator in each of the several duo-partnerships he has enjoyed throughout his life – whether with other pianists (beginning with Cornelius Cardew, a fellow student at the RAM in the early 1950s, with whom he gave the English première of Boulez’s Structures I) or with the succession of distinguished wind players who have in turn been the inspiration for much of his chamber music and, in several instances, his concertos.

Meanwhile, a fascination with quite other kinds of music had drawn him inexorably to investigate the jazz scene of 1950s London, as if in preparation for what was to become something of a parallel outlet for a more loose-limbed style of keyboard playing and, latterly, singing. His jazz partnerships have been as various and as distinguished as his chamber music ones, although in the 1990s he developed a solo cabaret-style show with himself as singer/pianist that has enjoyed considerable success around the world. But, in composition as in performance, he has always insisted on a clear separation between these two fields of endeavour and, the extraordinary range of his film music apart, his concert music yields little evidence of stylistic seepage (beyond the obvious instance of the purposefully crossover Concerto for Stan Getz).

Bennett is a fine if sometimes reluctant teacher who, following a spell at the RAM (1963–5), determined not to accept any further long-term commitment; he is stimulated by summer schools and enjoys short-term residencies, particularly if they also involve coaching performers, like the one at Peabody Institute, Baltimore (1970–71). He was invited to accept the international chair of composition at the RAM from 1994 to 1997, an appointment that was immediately renewed for a further three years. He was a member of the general council of the Performing Rights Society (1975–6) and was elected vice-president of the RCM in 1983; he received the Arnold Bax Society Prize in 1964 and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Award for composer of the year 1965; film music honours include a BAFTA Award for Murder on the Orient Express (1975) as well as an Ivor Novello Award and an Academy Award nomination (both 1976) for the same score. He was made a CBE in 1977 and knighted in 1999.

Bennett, Sir Richard Rodney

SUSAN BRADSHAW

WORKS

stage

The Ledge (1, A. Mitchell), 1961; London, Sadler’s Wells, 12 Sept 1961 (Croydon, 1975)

The Midnight Thief (children’s operetta), 1963

Jazz Calendar (ballet), chbr ens, 1963–4

The Mines of Sulphur (3, B. Cross), 1963; London, Sadler’s Wells, 24 Feb 1965, vs (London, 1965)

A Penny for a Song (2, C. Graham, after J. Whiting), 1966; London, Sadler’s Wells, 31 Oct 1967, vs (London, 1967)

All the King’s Men (children’s op, 1, Cross), 1968; Coventry, Technical College, 28 March 1969 (London, 1969)

Victory (3, Cross, after J. Conrad), 1968–9; London, CG, 13 April 1970, vs (London, 1970)

Isadora (ballet, 2, choreog. K. MacMillan), 1980; London, CG, 30 April 1981

Noctuary (ballet, 1, unperf.), 1981

orchestral

Hn Conc., 1956; 5 Pieces, 1956; Music for an Occasion, 1959; Journal, 1960; Suite française, 1961; Nocturnes, chbr orch, 1962–3; Farnham Festival Ov., 1964; Aubade, 1964; Sym. no.1, 1965; Suite, 1966 [arr. from movts of The Aviary and The Insect World], small orch; Sym. no.2, 1967; Pf Conc., 1968; Ob Conc., ob, str, 1969–70; Gui Conc., gui, chbr orch, 1970; Party Piece, pf, small orch, 1971; Va Conc., va, chbr orch, 1973; Conc. for Orch, 1973; Vn Conc., 1975; Zodiac, 1975–6; Serenade, small orch, 1976; Actaeon, hn, orch, 1977; Music for Str, 1977; Db Conc., db, chbr orch, 1978; Sonnets to Orpheus, vc, orch, 1978–9; Hpd Conc., 1980; Anniversaries, 1982; Freda’s Fandango, 1982; Memento, fl, str, 1983; Sinfonietta, 1984; Moving into Aquarius, 1984, collab. T. Musgrave; Sym. no.3, 1987; Cl Conc., cl, str, 1987; Mar Conc., mar, chbr orch, 1988; Sax Conc., a sax, str, 1988; Diversions, 1989; Perc Conc., perc, chbr orch, 1990; Conc. for Stan Getz, t sax, timp, str, 1990; Celebration, 1991; Variations on a Nursery Tune, 1992; Bn Conc., bn, str, 1994; Partita, 1995

wind and brass

Morning Music, sym. wind ens, 1986; Conc. for 10 Brass Players, 4 tpt, 3 trbn, b trbn, t ba, 1988; Flowers of the Forest, brass band, 1989; The Four Seasons, wind ens, 1991; Conc., tpt, wind orch, 1993

vocal

With orch/ens: The Approaches of Sleep (T. Browne), S, A, T, B, chbr ens, 1959–60; London Pastoral (W. Wordsworth, J. Lydgate, L. Binyon), T, chbr orch, 1962; Epithalamion (R. Herrick), chorus, orch, 1966; Soliloquy (J. Mitchell), lv, jazz ens, 1966; Jazz Pastoral (Herrick), 1v, jazz ens, 1969; The Bermudas (A. Marvell), chorus, school orch, 1971; Sonnet Sequence (W. Shakespeare), T, str orch, 1974; Spells (K. Raine), S, chorus, orch, 1974–5; 5 Sonnets of Louise Labé, S, chbr ens, 1984; Lovesongs (e.e. cummings), T, orch, 1984; Ophelia (A. Rimbaud), Ct, ondes martenot, hp, str, 1987

With 1–3 insts/tape: Lament (C. Tichborne), T, gui, 1960; This Worldes Joie (anon.), S, pf, 1960; Tom O’Bedlam’s Song, T, vc, 1961; Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came (R. Browning), spkr, pf, 1961; One Evening (W.H. Auden), T, gui, 1964; The Aviary (J. Clare, A. Tennyson, P.B. Shelley, S.T. Coleridge), unison vv/lv, pf, 1965; The Insect World (Clare, W. Oldys, Marvell), unison vv/lv, pf, 1965; The Music That Her Echo Is (J. Dyer, anon., J. Campion), T, pf, 1967; Crazy Jane (W.B. Yeats), S, cl, vc, pf, 1968–9; A Garland for Marjorie Fleming (Fleming), S, pf, 1969; Tenebrae (T. Nashe, H. King, anon., Tichbourne, Donne), Bar, pf, 1971

Nightpiece (C.P. Baudelaire), S, tape, 1972; Time’s Whiter Series (J. Dryden, F. Martens, E. Sitwell, E. Bolton), Ct, lute, 1974; The Little Ghost who Died For Love (Sitwell), S, pf, 1976; Just Friends in Print, v, pf, 1979 [songs by Bennett and others]; Vocalese (J. Hansen), S, pf, 1981; Letters to Lindbergh (M. Hall), female vv, pf duet, 1982; Nonsense (M. Peake), SATB, pf duet, 1979, rev. 1984; this is the garden (e.e. cummings), high v, pf, 1984; And Death Shall Have No Dominion (D. Thomas), TTBB, hn, 1986; Dream-Songs (W. de la Mare), S/unison high vv, pf, 1986; A History of the Thé Dansant (M.R. Peacocke), Mez, pf, 1994

Unacc.: 3 Songs (J.G. Villa), T, 1955; The Tillaquils (L. Riding), SATB, 1955; Ricercar, unacc., 1956; 2 Madrigals (B. Jonson, anon.), SATB, 1961; 3 Elegies (J. Webster), SSAATTBB, 1962; Nowell, Nowell, Tidings, True (anon.), SATB, arr. 1962; Madrigal ‘And Can The Physician’ (anon.), SATB, 1962; 2 Lullabies (trad. Lat., James, John and Robert Wedderburn), SSA, 1963; Verses (Donne), SATB, 1965; 5 Carols (anon.), SATB, 1967; 2 Carols (Herrick, anon.), solo vv, SATB, 1968; 4 Devotions (Donne), SATB, 1971; The House of Sleepe (Ovid trans. A. Golding, J. Gower), 6 male vv, 1971; Puer Nobis (A. Meynell), SATB, 1980; Sea-Change (Shakespeare, Marvell, E. Spenser), SATB, tubular bells ad lib, 1983; Lullay mine liking (anon.), SATB, opt. soli, 1984; Nowell (de la Mare), SATB, 1986; Missa brevis, SATB, 1990; Lullaby Baby (J. Phillip), SATB, 1986; Sermons and Devotions (Donne), 2 Ct, T, 2 Bar, B, 1992; Calico Pie (E. Lear), SATB, 1994

chamber

Str Qt no.1, 1951; Str Qt no.2, 1953; Str Qt no.3, 1953; Studies for 5 Players, fl, ob, cl, a sax, perc, 1957; Calendar, chbr ens, 1960; Fanfare, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1962; Str Qt no.4, 1964; Trio, fl, ob, cl, 1965; A Canon for Stravinsky, vn, va, vc, 1967; Qnt, fl, ob, cl, hn, bn, 1968; Commedia I, fl, b cl, a sax, tpt, vc, perc, 1972; Commedia II, fl, vc, pf, 1972; Commedia III, fl + pic, ob + eng hn, cl, hn, tpt, 2 perc, pf + cel, vn, vc, 1973; Commedia IV, hn, 2 tpt, trbn, tuba, 1973; Ob Qt, 1974–5; Travel Notes 1, str qt, 1975; Travel Notes 2, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1976; Metamorphoses, 4 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, 1980; Music for Str Qt, 1981; Conc. for Wind Qnt, fl + pic, ob, cl, hn, bn, 1983; Sounds and Sweet Aires, fl, ob, pf, 1985; Sonata after Syrinx, fl, va, hp, 1985; Reflections on a Theme of William Walton, 6 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, db, 1985; Dream Dancing, chbr ens, 1986; Lamento d’Arianna, str qt, 1986; Sonata, wind qnt, pf, 1986; Tender is the Night, suite, ondes martenot, str qt, 1986 [arr. of 1985 BBC TV incid. music]; Arethusa, ob, vn, va, vc, 1989; A Book of Hours, chbr ens, 1991; Cl Qnt, 1992; Sax Qt, s, a, t, bar sax, 1994

solo instrument

Variations, ob, 1953; Sonata, pf, 1954; Sonatine, fl, 1954; 4 Improvisations, vn, 1955; Sonata no.1, vn, 1955; Cycle I–IX, pf, 1956–8; Stanzas, org, 1960; Fantasy, pf, 1962; 5 Studies, pf, 1962–4; Diversions, pf, 1964; Sonata no.2, vn, 1965; Impromptu, gui, 1968; Impromptu, fl, 1969; Alba, org, 1971; Scena I, pf, 1973; Scena II, vc, 1973; Telegram, pf, 1976; Eustace and Hilda, pf, 1977 [arr. of theme from BBC TV incid music]; Scena III, cl, 1977; 6 Tunes for the Instruction of Singing Birds, fl, 1981; Impromptu on the Name of Haydn, pf, 1981; Noctuary, pf, 1981 [ballet score]; Sonatina, cl, 1981; Sonata, gui, 1983; After Syrinx II, mar, 1984; Tango After Syrinx, pf, 1985; Tender is the Night, pf, 1985 [arr. of BBC TV incid music]; 3 Romantic Pieces, pf, 1988; Partridge Pie, pf, 1990; Arabesque, ob, 1992; Excursions, pf, 1993; Impromptu on a Theme of Henri Dutilleux, pf, 1994; Rondel, va, 1997

instrumental duo

Theme and Variations, vn, va, 1952; Study, tpt, pf, 1957; Music for 2 Pfs, 1957–8; Winter Music, fl, pf, 1960; Sonata, ob, pf, 1961; Conversations, 2 fl, 1964; Crosstalk, 2 basset hn/2 cl, 1966; Capriccio, pf duet, 1968; 4 Piece Suite, 2 pf, 1974; Kandinsky Variations, 2 pf, 1977; Sonata, hn, pf, 1978; Sonata, vn, pf, 1978; Up Bow, Down Bow, bk 1, vn, pf, 1979; Up Bow, Down Bow, bk 2, va, pf, 1979; After Syrinx I, ob, pf, 1982; Summer Music, fl, pf, 1982; Serenade II, ondes martenot, pf, 1984; Duo concertante, cl, pf, 1985; Romances, hn, pf, 1985; Sonata, s sax, pf, 1986; After Ariadne, va, pf, 1986; Suite for Skip and Sadie, pf duet, 1986; Capriccio, vc, pf, 1990; Over the Hills and Far Away, pf duet, 1991; Sonata, vc, pf, 1991; Sonata, bn, pf, 1991; 3 Sondheim Waltzes, arr. a sax, pf, 1992; 3 Piece Suite, a sax, pf, 1996

film scores

directors’ names in parentheses

Interpol (J. Gilling), 1956; A Face in the Night, 1956; The Safecracker (R. Milland), 1957; The Devil’s Disciple (G. Hamilton), 1958; Indiscreet (S. Donen), 1958; The Man Inside (Gilling), 1958; The Angry Hills (R. Aldrich), 1959; Blind Date (J. Losey), 1959; The Man Who Could Cheat Death, 1959; The Mark (G. Green), 1961; The Devil Never Sleeps (L. McCarly), 1961; Only Two Can Play (S. Gilliat), 1961; The Wrong Arm of the Law (C. Owen), 1962; Heaven’s Above (J. Bowlting), 1963; Billy Liar (J. Schlesinger), 1963; One Way Pendulum (P. Yates), 1964; The Engineers, 1965; The Nanny (S. Holt), 1965; European Tapestry, 1965; A Penny for Your Thoughts, 1966; The Witches (C. Frankel), 1966; Far from the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger), 1967; Billion Dollar Brain (K. Russell), 1967; Secret Ceremony (Losey), 1968; The Buttercup Chain (R.E. Miller), 1970; Figures in a Landscape (Losey), 1970; Nicholas and Alexandra (F. Schaffner), 1971; Lady Caroline Lamb (R. Bolt), 1972; Voices (K. Billington), 1973; Murder on the Orient Express (S. Lumet), 1974; Permission to Kill (Frankel), 1975; Sherlock Holmes in New York, 1976; Equus (Lumet), 1977; L’ímprécateur, 1977; The Brinks Job (W. Friedkin), 1978; Yanks (Schlesinger), 1979; The Return of the Soldier (A. Bridges), 1982; Murder with Mirrors (D. Lowry), 1985; Enchanted April (M. Newell), 1992; Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell), 1994; Swann (A. Benson Gyles), 1996; Sweeney Todd (A. Benson Gyles), 1997

Music for TV, radio and the theatre

Principal publishers: Novello, Universal

Bennett, Sir Richard Rodney

WRITINGS

with S. Bradshaw: ‘In Search of Boulez’, Music and Musicians, xi (1962–3), no.5, pp.10–13; no.12, pp.14–18, 50

with S. Bradshaw: Boulez on Music Today (London, 1971) [trans. of P. Boulez: Penser la musique aujourd’hui, Paris, 1964]

with S. Bradshaw: ‘Anthony Payne and his “Paean”’, Tempo, no.100 (1972), 40–44

‘Irwin Bazelon’, Contemporary Composers, ed. B. Morton and P. Collins (London and Chicago, 1992), 61–2

Bennett, Sir Richard Rodney

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Maw: ‘Richard Rodney Bennett’, MT, ciii (1962), 95–7

N. Goodwin: ‘The Mines of Sulphur’, Opera, xvi (1965), 85–8 [interview]

S. Bradshaw: ‘Victory’, MT, cxi (1970), 370–72 [interview]

P. Griffiths: ‘Bennett’s Comedies’, MT, cxv (1974), 649–50

S. Bradshaw: ‘Richard Rodney Bennett: the Last Decade’, MT, xxxiii (1982), 609–11

S. Bradshaw: ‘Bennett’s Versatility’, MT, cxxv (1984), 381–4

S. Craggs: ‘Richard Rodney Bennett’: a Bio-Bibliography (New York and London, 1990)

S. Bradshaw: ‘Richard Rodney Bennett’, Contemporary Composers, ed. B. Morton and P. Collins (London and Chicago, 1992), 72–3

Bennett, Robert Russell

(b Kansas City, MO, 15 June 1894; d New York, 18 Aug 1981). American composer, orchestrator and conductor. Early studies were taken with his parents and the composer and conductor Carl Busch. He went to New York in 1916, where he worked first at G. Schirmer and then at T.B. Harms. Employment as a copyist and arranger, interrupted briefly by army service during World War I, led to his first theatre orchestrations in 1920. Upon Frank Saddler's death Bennett became America's pre-eminent theatre orchestrator, a position which he held for four decades. He interrupted his commercial work for much of 1926–9 to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, funded in part by a Guggenheim fellowship. Prizewinning entries in composition competitions sponsored by Musical America magazine and Victor Records led to frequent performances of his orchestral pieces in the USA during the 1930s and 40s. Most of 1936–40 was spent in Hollywood, principally at RKO, working on both orchestrations and original scoring. He returned to New York to host and conduct WOR's network radio programme ‘Russell Bennett's Notebook’, which sparked his most prolific period as a composer. His extensive work for NBC television after World War II began with Victory at Sea (1952–3), which he scored using a dozen themes provided by Richard Rodgers; he went on to provide original music for about 35 of NBC's documentary telefilms. The Goldman Band, beginning in the late 1940s, gave the first performances of many of Bennett's works. More than 30 wind-band scores were completed, and among them are his most-played compositions. His large-scale works include seven symphonies and the opera Maria Malibran, lavishly first staged at the Juilliard School.

Bennett provided orchestrations for all or part of more than 300 Broadway musicals. He is renowned for his effective use of the limited orchestral forces available to him and the phenomenal speed with which he supplied tasteful and disciplined song accompaniments as well as underscoring, and also bridges, dance music, overtures and exit music. Bennett's many published ‘symphonic pictures’, especially of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, remain exemplars of their type and have circulated widely. His Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY, 1975), distilled from a lifetime's experience, is the standard reference on American theatre orchestration. Praised by Boulanger as ‘a true artist’, Bennett stands apart from his theatre-arranging colleagues for his sustained independent creativity and long-standing associations with the leading conductors and soloists of his day, and his success as a composer was pivotal in elevating the theatre orchestrator's status in the USA. Like his commercial orchestrations, Bennett's compositions are scored with masterful simplicity and clarity. Though the witty geniality of his best-known pieces has led to an under-appreciation of the more serious and expansive scores, Bennett's works in all genres are distinguished by their personal harmonic idiom, effortless counterpoint and rhythmic vitality.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Endymion (ballet-operetta), 1927; Hold Your Horses (musical play), 1933; Maria Malibran (op), 1934; The Enchanted Kiss (op, 1), 1944; Crystal (op), 1972

Musicals, as sole or principal orchestrator (composers in parenthesis): Wildflower (V. Youmans), 1923; Rose Marie (R. Friml and H. Stothart), 1924; Show Boat (J. Kern), 1927; Girl Crazy (G. Gershwin), 1930; Of Thee I Sing (Gershwin), 1931; Anything Goes (C. Porter), 1934; Oklahoma! (R. Rodgers), 1943; Carmen Jones (version of Bizet: Carmen), 1943; Annie Get your Gun (I. Berlin), 1946; Kiss Me, Kate (Porter), 1948; South Pacific (Rodgers), 1949; The King and I (Rodgers), 1951; My Fair Lady (F. Loewe), 1956; Bells are Ringing (J. Styne), 1956; Flower Drum Song (Rodgers), 1958; The Sound of Music (Rodgers), 1959; Camelot (Loewe), 1960; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (B. Lane), 1965

instrumental

Orch: Charleston Rhapsody, 1926; Paysage, 1928; Sights and Sounds, 1929; Sym. ‘Abraham Lincoln’, 1929; March, 2 pf, orch, 1930; Early American Ballade on Melodies of Stephen Foster, 1932; Variations in Fox-Trot Time on a Theme by Jerome Kern, 1933; Adagio Eroico, ?1932; Scherzo ‘Hollywood’, 1936; 8 études, 1938; Sym. ‘For the Dodgers’, D, 1941; Vn Conc., 1941; Antique Suite, cl, str, 1941; Classic Serenade, str, 1941; Conc., va, hp, orch, 1941, rev. vc, hp, orch, 1960; Sym. ‘Four Freedoms’, 1943; Ov. to an Imaginary Drama, 1946; A Dry Weather Legend, fl, orch, 1946; Pf Conc., 1947; Variations, vn, orch, 1949; Commemoration Sym. ‘Stephen Collins Foster’, 1959/60; Sym. [no.7], 1962; The Fun and Faith of William Billings, chorus, orch, 1975

Wind band: Tone Poems for Band, 1939–40 [for the New York World's Fair]; Suite of Old American Dances, 1949, orch, 1950); Mademoiselle, 1952; Rose Variations, tpt, band, 1955; Symphonic Songs for Band, 1957; Concerto Grosso, ww qnt, wind orch, 1957

Chbr: Rondo Capriccioso, 4 fl, 1916, rev. 1962; Vn Sonata, 1927; Toy Sym., ww qnt, 1928; Organ Sonata, 1929; Water Music, str qt, 1937; Dance Scherzo, ww qnt, 1938; Hexapoda, vn, pf, 1940; Tema Sporca con Variazoni, 2 pf, 1946; A Song Sonata, vn, pf, 1947; Qnt, accdn, str qt, 1962; Arabesque, brass qnt, 1978

film scores

As orchestrator (composer in parentheses): Show Boat (J. Kern), 1936; Born to Dance (C. Porter), 1936; Swing Time (Kern), 1937; A Damsel in Distress (G. Gershwin), 1937; Shall We Dance (Gershwin), 1937; Gunga Din (A. Newman), 1939; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Newman), 1939; Rebecca (F. Waxman), 1940; Lady in the Dark (K. Weill), 1944; Victory at Sea (R. Rodgers), 1954; Oklahoma! (Rodgers), 1955

As composer: Annabel Takes a Tour, 1938; Fugitives for a Night, 1938; Career, 1939; Fifth Avenue Girl, 1939; Pacific Liner, 1939; Stanley and Livingstone, 1939

MSS in US-Wc

WRITINGS

‘Orchestrating for Broadway’, Modern Music, ix (1931–2), 148–52

‘Orchestration of Theatre and Dance Music’, Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia, ed. R. Hughes, D. Taylor and R. Kerr (Garden City, NY, 1939/R), 780–86

‘All I Know about Arranging Music’, International Musician, xlvii (1949), no.8, pp.9, 33 only; no.9, pp.16, 33 only and April 1949)

‘Another Chapter on Arranging Music’, ibid., xlvii/10 (1949), 13 only

Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY, 1975)

G.J. Ferencz, ed.: The Broadway Sound: the Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett (Rochester, NY, 1999)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘The Boys that Make the Noise’, Time (5 July 1943)

H.W. Wind: ‘Another Opening, Another Show’, New Yorker (17 Nov 1951)

R. Hawkins: The Life and Works of Robert Russell Bennett (diss., Texas Tech U., 1989)

G.J. Ferencz: Robert Russell Bennett: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1990)

GEORGE J. FERENCZ

Bennett, William (Ingham Brooke)

(b London, 7 Feb 1936). English flautist. He studied with Geoffrey Gilbert at the GSM and in Paris with Jean-Pierre Rampal, winning a medal in the 1958 Geneva International Flute Competition. From 1965 he studied with Marcel Moyse who has remained a dominant influence on his playing. He has been principal flute with the LSO, the RPO, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and the English Chamber Orchestra. He also appears internationally as a soloist and has made many recordings. Bennett is an innately musical player, with a style and technique rich in expression, vibrancy and range of tone colours. He is widely considered to be the leading flautist of his generation. His experiments in improving flute design have been greatly influential, and since 1978 various makers in Britain, the USA and Taiwan have produced instruments tuned to the ‘William Bennett Scale’. He is the dedicatee of works by Richard Rodney Bennett and William Matthias, and has made many transcriptions to enlarge the repertory of the flute. He teaches at the RAM and gives masterclasses in many countries. He was made an OBE in 1995.

EDWARD BLAKEMAN

Bennett, Sir William Sterndale

(b Sheffield, 13 April 1816; d London, 1 Feb 1875). English composer. He ranks as the most distinguished English composer of the Romantic school.

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY (text, bibliography), ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON (work-list)

1. Life.

For his early musical training he was chiefly indebted to his grandfather, John Bennett (1754–1837), who came from Ashford, Derbyshire, but moved to Cambridge in 1792 as a bass lay clerk in the choirs of King’s, Trinity and St John’s colleges. His sixth son Robert (1788–1819) became a chorister at King’s, was made in 1804 an articled pupil of John Clarke (later Clarke-Whitfeld), organist of Trinity and St John’s, and became organist of Sheffield parish church in 1811. On 28 May 1812 he married Elizabeth Donn, daughter of the curator of the Cambridge Botanic Gardens. Their three children were born at Sheffield. The third child, and only son, was named after William Sterndale, a Sheffield friend who had supplied the verses for a set of Six Songs which Robert Bennett had composed and published the year before (Bennett never treated the name Sterndale as part of his surname, though it has been adopted as such by his descendants). Elizabeth Bennett died, aged 27, on 7 May 1818; Robert married again, but died on 3 November 1819, and it was decided that the orphaned William and his sisters would go to live with their grandparents at Cambridge, where William was baptized on 19 March 1820. From this time his connection with Sheffield ended. He was appointed a chorister at King’s, where his grandfather was still in the choir, on 17 February 1824. Two years later, on 7 March 1826 (before his tenth birthday), he was admitted to the RAM, having been recommended by the vice-provost of King’s as a ‘prodigy’. At first his principal study was the violin (with Oury and Spagnoletti), with the piano as a second instrument. Later he studied composition with Crotch. He played a piano concerto of J.L. Dussek at an academy concert on 6 September 1828, and sang the part of Cherubino in a student production of Le nozze di Figaro on 11 December 1830; he also sometimes sang in the choir at St Paul’s Cathedral. Few compositions date from this early period, and the academy examiners in the summer of 1831 rebuked Bennett for his failure to achieve anything substantial in composition.

From this time his real achievement began. He made the piano his principal instrument, and soon excited comment by the brilliance of his playing. In April 1832 he completed his first symphony. His activity in composition was stimulated in August of the same year when Cipriani Potter replaced Crotch as principal of the RAM, and as Bennett’s composition teacher. His first piano concerto, begun during the summer of 1832, was approved by his new master (a well-known exponent of this form), played at Cambridge on 28 November, and repeated at an academy concert on 30 March 1833. The impression it made was remarkable. William Ayrton, in The Harmonicon, declared that it ‘would have conferred honour on any established master’. Lord Burghersh, the president of the RAM, directed that the concerto be published at the academy’s expense. He also evidently spread word of Bennett’s abilities, for in a few days the boy was summoned to Windsor, where on two occasions he played the concerto to the king and queen. At the RAM midsummer concert on 26 June it was chosen as the principal work, and there it was heard by Mendelssohn, who asked to be introduced to the composer after the concert and forthwith invited Bennett to visit him in Germany, not as a pupil but as a friend.

Bennett, still only 17, was naturally very much encouraged. The six years that followed were an intensely creative period – the only one, as it turned out, in his career. During this time he wrote two or three major orchestral works a year, and was at the same time developing a delicately individual manner in songs and short piano pieces. For the first four years he continued to benefit from an excellent grounding in the Classics from Potter, the only academy teacher, according to G.A. Macfarren, who attempted to teach the principles of musical form. And he continued to enjoy warm encouragement from Mendelssohn, first in correspondence and, later, during a series of visits to Germany.

On 17 April 1833 he was elected organist of St Ann’s Chapel, Wandsworth (a chapel-of-ease in the parish of All Saints), at 30 guineas per annum, but he resigned after a year. He continued to add to his renown as a concert pianist; occasionally he played the violin or viola in the orchestra. The chief platforms for his compositions were the academy concerts, the Society of British Musicians (from 1834) and, occasionally, a concert at Cambridge, which he continued to visit both before and after his grandparents’ deaths. On 11 May 1835 he made his début at the Philharmonic Society, playing his Second Piano Concerto; he played the third there the following spring. In May 1836, having finished his fourth (unpublished) concerto (wo32), he left with Carl Klingemann and J.W. Davison to attend the Niederrheinisches Musikfest at Düsseldorf, where Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of St Paul on 22 May. Before returning home he had begun what was to be his most popular orchestral composition, the overture The Naiades. Shortly after his departure, on 28 May, Mendelssohn wrote to Attwood in terms of glowing admiration: ‘I think him the most promising young musician I know, not only in your country but also here, and I am convinced if he does not become a very great musician, it is not God’s will, but his own’.

His time as an academy pupil came to an end in September, and in October he began a longer visit to Germany. Mendelssohn welcomed him to Leipzig on 29 October and Bennett soon found himself an accepted member of the musical circle of which Mendelssohn was the acknowledged leader. In that circle was Schumann, who formed a close and lasting friendship with Bennett almost as soon as they had met. On Schumann’s side, friendship was coupled with intense admiration for the younger man’s music, soon to be expressed in an editorial devoted to Bennett in the New Year number of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. ‘Were there many artists like Sterndale Bennett’, wrote Schumann, ‘all fears for the future progress of our art would be silenced.’ On 13 January 1837 Bennett made his first appearance at the Gewandhaus concerts, playing his Third Piano Concerto; he conducted the overture The Naiades on 13 February (it had already been played at the Society of British Musicians on 25 January, with Davison conducting) and the Parisina overture on 6 March. The very high reputation which Bennett gained in Germany on this visit both as pianist and as composer is attested not only by Mendelssohn’s letters and Schumann’s reviews, but also by other newspaper reports and by requests that he began to receive from German publishers.

He returned to England in July, and in October began his long career as a teacher. He took his first private pupil on 2 October and began giving lessons at the RAM on 18 October. He had almost reached the end of his period of fecundity as a composer, a period that had been so full of promise that Schumann’s praises, if extravagant, were hardly exaggerated. Colles attributed the early decline in his output to ‘the stultifying influence which a professional life involving a great deal of teaching could not fail to exert on [a] sensitive musical nature’ (he escaped from these duties for two more visits to Leipzig, in the winters of 1838–9 and 1841–2, that were closely similar to the first). From whatever cause, he certainly at this period began to experience a new difficulty in completing compositions. In August 1839 he signed an agreement with Coventry, the publisher, to compose an opera, but nothing came of the plan; he spent the following summer working on an oratorio, which he eventually left uncompleted. A set of 12 songs promised to his German publisher (Kistner) in 1837 was delivered in two sets, in 1842 and 1855. Towards the end of 1841 he became engaged to Mary Wood, one of his pupils at the RAM. They were married on 9 April 1844.

It now became all the more necessary for Bennett to work hard at his teaching, and to seek salaried positions. He had failed to secure the Edinburgh professorship in 1844, despite Mendelssohn’s recommendation. He continued to play at the Philharmonic concerts until 1848, when a quarrel with Michael Costa led to his dissociation from the society’s affairs. From 1842 until 1856 he gave an annual series of ‘Classical Chamber Concerts’, first at his own house and then in the Hanover Square Rooms; these concerts explored the repertory of chamber music with piano and serious piano music. In 1849 he founded the Bach Society, and for many years he directed its concerts; on 6 April 1854 he conducted the first English performance of the St Matthew Passion. Few compositions of any kind date from this period. Bennett’s life was apparently a ceaseless round of playing and teaching, relieved only by family holidays at Cambridge or Southampton. In the 1850s the recognition due to his earlier success began to come to him in the shape of important appointments. In 1853 he was offered the conductorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts for the following season – a signal honour for an Englishman, but one which he turned down, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In November 1855 he accepted the conductorship of the Philharmonic Society in succession to Wagner, and began his new duties the following April; meanwhile, on 4 March 1856, he had been elected professor of music at Cambridge, by a majority of 149 votes. These twin appointments gave him the standing he had long deserved, but they added little to his income and certainly did not provide him with any additional time for composing. At Cambridge he refused to treat the position as a sinecure, but continued Walmisley’s policy of giving public lectures and of leading the musical life of the town. He instituted examinations for the music degrees, to replace the ‘exercises’ which had previously been the only requirement. He was himself presented for the MusD degree on 30 June 1856, and soon afterwards was made a life Fellow of St John’s College.

In May 1858 Bennett resigned from the RAM in protest against the high-handed behaviour of the president, Lord Westmoreland (formerly Lord Burghersh). In the same year he was chosen to conduct the Leeds Festival. He had to produce an ode (op.41) on the installation of the Duke of Devonshire as chancellor of the university in May 1862; his ode for the opening of the Industrial Exhibition (op.40) had been completed a few weeks earlier. On 22 June 1866 he returned to the RAM as principal, a position that involved arduous administrative duties, and he gave up conducting the Philharmonic concerts at the end of the season. He was made an honorary MA of Cambridge in 1867 and a DCL of Oxford in 1870, and was knighted on 24 March 1871, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, Gladstone. In March 1872 he received a public testimonial in St James’s Hall, and at the same time a scholarship in his honour was founded at the RAM.

Bennett had thus become a prominent public figure in the British musical world, and was still also held in honour in Germany. Despite the heavy combination of duties that he had assumed, the last period of his life saw a certain revival of his creative powers. Several major works appeared: The May-Queen, commissioned for the Leeds Festival of 1858; the two odes of 1862, and the overture Paradise and the Peri in the same year; the Symphony in G minor (1863–4), performed at the Philharmonic on 27 June 1864 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with Bennett conducting, on 12 January 1865; The Woman of Samaria, commissioned for the Birmingham Festival of 1867 and performed there on 28 August; the overture to Ajax (completed in 1872); and the piano sonata Die Jungfrau von Orleans, completed in 1873. In the leanest years of his composing activity, Bennett had managed to produce a few piano pieces, but this form of composition practically ceased when he gave up playing the piano in public. A careful study of his career shows that it was not so much overwork that caused a falling-off of creativity, but discouragement and the lack of a strong external stimulus. In the 1830s he responded to the admiration of his English and German colleagues, and above all of Mendelssohn. Between 1840 and 1855, he was discouraged by absence of due recognition in England, by Mendelssohn’s death, and by the increasing monotony of his daily life; and he produced only what was needed, piano pieces for playing and teaching. After 1855 he was spurred by belated honours, and occasional commissions, to compose a respectable number of significant and substantial works, though it was too late to recapture his early self-confidence. One might guess that the early loss of both parents produced in Bennett an exceptionally intense need for reassurance and encouragement. England could not provide this for a native composer in his time. He found it temporarily in German musical circles; yet, when the opportunity came to claim his earned place as a leader in German music, he was not quite bold enough to grasp it.

In the last few years of his life Bennett spent his summer holidays quietly at Eastbourne, where he did much of his composing. He continued his teaching in London, and gave occasional concerts there and in the provinces. He visited Cambridge two or three times a year. In January 1875 he was taken ill, and died on 1 February (his wife had died on 17 October 1862). He was buried at Westminster Abbey on 6 February 1875.

2. Works.

George Hogarth remarked in 1835 on the ‘purity of the English school of the pianoforte’, founded on the studies of Clementi and Cramer which, in turn, were based on the ‘old masters’:

Students thus imbued with solid knowledge and good taste, are in little danger of being corrupted by the shallow and frivolous style which, springing from Vienna and Paris, is spreading itself over Europe. Our principal public performers, Mrs Anderson, Neate, Potter and Bennett … belong to the school of these great masters, and follow their footsteps in tuition.

Bennett (who, it may be noticed, was already at 19 regarded as a ‘principal performer’) carried out this creed with inflexible resolve throughout his career as performer, teacher and composer. Several writers have used the word ‘purity’ in assessing his work. Like his fellow Romantics, Mendelssohn and Schumann, he saw himself as a fighter for what was good and true in the musical tradition he had inherited, against the mounting threats of commercialism, vulgarity and virtuosity. At several points in his career, the principle asserted itself in action; but his music reflects not the stresses and strains of the battle, but the ideals for which he was fighting, preserved and protected by an act of self-discipline. With perhaps misguided puritanism, he was determined not to be ‘corrupted’ by the innovations of Thalberg and Liszt, of Meyerbeer and Berlioz, of Chopin, or even of Schumann. His style bears a natural resemblance to that of the one Romantic composer he did wholeheartedly admire, Mendelssohn. Yet his model was not even Mendelssohn, but Mozart, as he confessed in a lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1871. This self-inflicted deafness to current musical sounds required a degree of conscious restraint that interfered with spontaneous expression.

For all that, Bennett composed some excellent music, and the best of it, the orchestral works of his youth that so greatly impressed Schumann, is now all but unknown. Few piano concertos between Beethoven and Brahms are as successful as Bennett’s in embodying the Classical spirit, not in a stiff frame to deck with festoons of virtuosity, but in a living form capable of organic growth, and even of structural surprise. The first movements of the concertos have a sinewy strength that recalls Beethoven more often than any other composer. The slow movement of no.3, a Romantic dialogue between piano and orchestra, takes its idea from Beethoven’s no.4, but in its detailed working out is quite original. The charming and long-popular ‘Barcarole’ movement, which first replaced the slow movement of the unpublished F minor concerto, and then, at Mendelssohn’s suggestion, replaced the slow movement of no.4 in the same key, is a good example of Bennett’s shy, subtle and quite individual personality. The Caprice in E major for piano and orchestra is a charming one-movement piece of generally Mendelssohnian character.

In the concert overtures also Bennett’s manner is close to Mendelssohn’s, evoking enchanted fairylands with gentle dance rhythms and delicate orchestral colouring. Parisina and The Naiades are the best; Die Waldnymphe and Marie du Bois seem to repeat, rather than add to, what Bennett had already achieved in the former works (as Schumann pointed out). Marie du Bois was re-used as the overture for The May-Queen, and he took tunes from it and used them in the course of the work. The symphonies were perhaps the least successful of the early group, though they have points of interest: the first begins, like no other symphony, with 32 bars of quiet counterpoint in mock ‘ancient’ style (used again, more aptly, in the eight-part anthem In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust). Of his later orchestral works, none recaptures the relatively carefree spirit of the 1830s. But in the late G minor symphony (op.43) Bennett did at last achieve a worthy tribute to Mozart.

Bennett has been called a musician’s musician. More specifically, he is a pianist’s musician, like Chopin. Much of the fascination of his piano pieces lies in their mastery of the natural potential of the instrument. Instead of pretending that the piano can sustain great lyrical melodies, he made use of its percussive qualities to create a beautiful tapestry of subtly varying tone-colours. Never did he permit himself the least concession to the gallery; he seems on the contrary to be talking to himself, or only to those who fully appreciate and sympathize with his point of view. His character-pieces have often a dryness and sometimes a harmonic ruthlessness that please the connoisseur but put off the crowd. Such devices as the inverted tonic pedal, the evaded resolution and what might be called harmonic anticipation (ex.1) are frequent in his piano pieces. Moreover, apart from a few pieces deliberately intended for beginners, they are too difficult for all but the most accomplished pianists. The Suite de pièces op.24, a collection of six excellent, though unrelated, pieces, is a fair representation of the best in his piano music. His few longer pieces sometimes fail to maintain the interest of their opening pages, though in the Sonata in F minor (op.13) and the Fantaisie in A, op.16 (in form another sonata) he succeeded at least as well as Schumann and Chopin in fitting pianistic material into a form that was not pianistically evolved. His piano trio and duo are also happy examples of this. The late programmatic piano sonata Die Jungfrau von Orleans has many beautiful passages but is not entirely successful as a whole. Geoffrey Bush has convincingly refuted Hadow’s opinion that Bennett was incapable of ‘vehemence and passion’. Few piano works by any composer are more passionate than the A minor finale of the Fantaisie (1837).

Bennett possessed no special flair for choral music, the medium in which his services were most in demand in later life. The May-Queen and the oratorio Zion, though far more popular in the later 19th century than his instrumental works, seem now quite faded, partly, it must be said, because of the ineptitude of their texts. This ‘Victorian’ flavour attaches also to his church music. The only anthem that remained popular was the quartet ‘God is a spirit’ from The Woman of Samaria, but the eight-part In thee, O Lord is much superior, while Lord, who shall dwell? contains an interesting use of a hymn tune in contrapuntal texture.

In the solo songs Bennett came closest of all to identity with the Leipzig Romantic school. The texts are sometimes German lyrics in translation, and the music often suits the German text better than the English. The form is generally that of the strophic or modified-strophic lied. In style there is no point of contact with the indigenous songs of Bishop, Horn or Balfe. Yet in the op.23 songs Gentle Zephyr, To Chloe in Sickness and May-Dew, and Dawn, gentle flower (op.35 no.3) Bennett showed how an English lied might be developed, and his example was taken up by his pupil F.E. Bache, and by Hatton, Loder, Pierson and a few others.

Bennett did useful work as an editor of Classical piano sonatas (including one by G.F. Pinto), and in harmonizing and editing, with Otto Goldschmidt, German chorales adapted to English texts, in The Chorale Book for England (1863), which had a great effect on English hymnody; he also published editions of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Handel’s Acis and Galatea. His work as a teacher, which occupied so much of his energy, had an incalculable if largely conservative influence on a generation of RAM students. His methods have been described in some detail by one of his most successful pupils, Bettina Walker (1890).

Most of Bennett’s songs, partsongs and piano pieces, and piano reductions of the concertos and choral works, were published under the composer’s supervision. The manuscript sources are still mostly in the possession of Bennett’s family, and have been divided into two collections: one portion belongs now to Barry Sterndale-Bennett, a grandson of Bennett’s grandson Robert Sterndale Bennett (1880–1963), who was for many years director of music at Uppingham School; the other is in the hands of Thomas Odling, a great-grandson of Bennett in the female line.

WORKS

printed works published in London unless otherwise stated; other dates are of composition, except for choral orchestral works

for sources and further details of first performances see Williamson (1996)

Editions:Anthems composed by William Sterndale Bennett (London, 1883) [A]Sterndale Bennett: Piano and Chamber Music, ed. G. Bush, MB, xxxvii (1972) [B]English Songs, 1800–1860, ed. G. Bush and N. Temperley, MB, xliii (1979) [E]William Sterndale Bennett: Works for Pianoforte Solo ed. N. Temperley, The London Pianoforte School 1766–1860, xvii–xix (New York, 1985) [LPS]

wo	without opus,
u	unfinished (abbreviations used in Williamson, 1996)

orchestral

op.

wo20	Symphony no.1, E, completed 6 April 1832
wo22	The Tempest, ov., Dec 1832
1	Piano Concerto no.1, d, 1832 (1833)
wo23	Symphony no.2, d, Nov 1832–Feb 1833
wo24	Overture, d, Oct 1833
4	Piano Concerto no.2, E, July–Nov 1833 (1835)
wo28	Symphony no.4, A, Dec 1833–Feb 1834, ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, vii (New York, 1982)
wo25	The Merry Wives of Windsor, ov., May 1834
wo27	Adagio, g, pf, orch, 24 Sept 1834
9	Piano Concerto no.3, c, July–Oct 1834 (1836)
3	Parisina, ov., completed 20 March 1835 (1836), ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, vi (New York, 1984)
wo29	Concerto, C, 2 pf, 1835; collab. G. Macfarren
u5	Dramatic Overture, A, Jan 1836
wo31	Symphony no.5, g, Oct 1835–Feb 1836, ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, vii (New York, 1982)
wo32	Piano Concerto, f, 12 Feb–4 May 1836; orig. 2nd movt ‘A Stroll through the Meadows’, wo37, replaced 1 July 1836 by ‘Barcarole’
15	The Naiades, ov., May–Sept 1836 (Leipzig, 1837), ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, vi (New York, 1984)
wo37	A Stroll through the Meadows, pf, orch, 1836, orig. 2nd movt of wo32, lost; rev. 1838 as 2nd movt of op.19
22	Caprice, E, pf, orch, 1836–8 (Leipzig, 1840)
19	Piano Concerto no.4, f, July–Sept 1838 (London and Leipzig, 1839); orig. 2nd movt rev. version ofwo37, replaced by ‘Barcarole’ from wo32
20	Die Waldnymphe (The Wood Nymph), ov., Nov 1838 (London and Leipzig, 1839)
wo48	Piano Concerto (Concert-Stück), a, 1841–3, rev. 1848
wo46	Marie du Bois, ov., 1842–3, rev. 1844; later incl. in The May-Queen, op.39
42	Paradise and the Peri, fantasia-ov., July 1862 (Leipzig, 1870)
43	Symphony, g, Aug 1863 – 21 June 1864, addl movt, Romanza, 1867; Minuetto and Trio (1865), full score (Leipzig, 1872), ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, vii (New York, 1982)

chamber

wo17	String Quartet, G, completed 15 Oct 1831, perf. London, 22 Nov 1885
8	Sextet, f, pf, 2 vn, va, vc, db, ?July–Dec 1835 (Leipzig and London, 1846)
26	Chamber Trio, A, pf, vn, vc, July 1839 (London and Leipzig, 1845), B
32	Sonata Duo, A, pf, vc, 1852 (1852), B

keyboard

for piano unless otherwise stated

wo15	Minuetto and Trio, f, 1831/2
wo21	Lady Georgina, A, 1832
2	Capriccio, d, 1834 (1835), LPS xvii
11	Six Studies in the Form of Capriccios, c, E, B, f, D, g, 1834–5 (1836), LPS xvii
10	Three Musical Sketches: The Lake, E, The Millstream, e, The Fountain, B; 1835/early 1836 (1836), LPS xvii
wo33	Romance, b, 28 May 1836, LPS xvii
12	Three Impromptus, b, E, f, 1836 (1836), LPS xvii
13	Sonata, f, 1836–March 1837 (Leipzig, 1837), B, LPS xvii
14	Three Romances, b, E, g, ?4 Dec 1836–10 April 1837 (Leipzig, 1837), LPS xvii
16	Fantaisie [in 4 movts], A, 1837 (Leipzig, 1837), LPS xvii
18	Allegro grazioso, A, Nov–Dec 1838 (London and Leipzig, 1839), LPS xvii
17	Three Diversions, A, E, a, pf duet, Dec 1838 (Leipzig and London, 1839), LPS xix
wo42	Genevieve, notturno, B, 10 Nov 1839 (ed. facs. in AMZ, 29 April 1840), LPS xvii
wo40	Waltz, E, in The Harmonist (1839), LPS xvii
wo43	Fandango, 22 June 1840, LPS xvii
29	Two Characteristic Studies: L’amabile, E, L’appassionata, g; Jan 1841 (1841), LPS xviii
24	Suite de pièces: Presto leggiero, c, Capricciosa, E, Agitato assai, e, Alla fantasia, A, Presto agitato, f, Lento-Allegro con bravura, B; ?1841 (Leipzig and London, 1842), B, LPS xviii
25	Rondo piacevole, E, Aug 1842 (1842), LPS xviii
wo45	Prelude, a, 31 July 1844
27	Scherzo, e, 1845 (Leipzig and London, 1846), LPS xviii
28	Introduzione e pastorale, A (1846), Rondino, E (Leipzig, 1852), Capriccio a, March 1853 (London and Leipzig, 1853), LPS xviii
31	Tema e variazioni, E (1850), LPS xviii
33	[30] Preludes and Lessons [in all keys], 1842–53 (1853), LPS xviii
38	Toccata, c, 13 Jan 1854, in Album van de Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (Amsterdam, 1855), LPS xviii
34	Pas triste, pas gai (rondeau), g, Nov 1854 (1855), LPS xviii
wo53	Minuetto espressivo, E, ?1854 (1854), LPS xviii
wo55	January, 11 Jan 1856 (1876), LPS xviii
wo56	February, 1856 (1876), LPS xviii
37	Rondeau à la polonaise, c, Aug 1857 (Leipzig, 1858), LPS xviii
wo60	Praeludium, B, 1863 (1863), LPS xviii
wo74	Adagio a 4 voci, voluntary, org, in The Village Organist (1870), Jan
wo79	Sonatina, C, Aug 1871 (London and Leipzig, 1876), LPS xviii
wo80	Andante, E, ?1871 (1892)
46	Die Jungfrau von Orleans, sonata, A, 1869–73 (1873), LPS xviii

choral and vocal

with orchestra

wo26	In radiant loveliness (canzonet, J. Montgomery), S, June 1834, vs (c1835)
wo39	Chorale (textless), A major, SSATB, 19 May 1839
u14	Zion (orat), 1839–44; 2 choruses in The Woman of Samaria, op.44
39	The May-Queen (pastoral, H.F. Chorley), S, A, T, B, 4vv, Leeds Festival, 8 Sept 1858 (1858) [incl. ov.,wo46]
40	Ode Written Expressly for the Opening of the International Exhibition, 1862 (A. Tennyson), 4vv, Dec 1861–April 1862 (1862)
41	Cambridge Installation Ode (C. Kingsley), S, T, 4vv, 1862
44	The Woman of Samaria (sacred cant. Bennett), S, A, T, B, 4vv, Birmingham Festival, 28 Aug 1867; with addl chorus, Therefore with joy, and quartet, God is a spirit, London, St James’s Hall, 21 Feb 1868 (1868) [incl. 2 choruses from Zion,u14]
wo83,u26	Ajax (incid music, Sophocles, trans. H. Snow): ov., 1871–2; funeral march chorus, TB, Aug 1873–Aug 1874, inc.

anthems, with organ

wo54	Remember now thy creator, S, S, 4vv, Aug 1855 (c1856), A [from op.30 no.1]
wo57	Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle?, S, T, B, 8vv, 1856, A
wo84	In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust, 8vv, 1856–73, A [partly from Sym. no.1]
wo58	Oh that I knew where I might find him, 4vv, in F.A.G. Ouseley: Special Anthems for Certain Seasons and Festivals of the United Church of England and Ireland (1861), A
wo59	Great is our Lord, 4vv, A
wo61	The fool hath said in his heart, 4vv, in Novello’s Collection of 31 Anthems (1864), A
wo72	Now, my God, let, I beseech thee, 4/4vv, 1869 (1870), A

other sacred

wo75	The Lord bless thee and keep thee, int, 4vv, org, 1870
11 hymn tunes: Boulcote,wo38, 1839, A; St Lawrence, wo49, 1849; St Junia, wo51, 1853, A (as Day of Wrath); Russell Place, wo52, 1854, A; God, who madest earth and heaven, wo63, 1864, A; Holy, holy, holy, wo64, 1864, A; Peace be to this habitation, wo68, 1866; From all thy saints, wo76, 1870, A (as Inverness); The radiant morn, wo77, 1870, A; Watching all through the weary night, wo81, 1871, A (as Courage, my sorely tempted heart); Jesu, solace of my soul, wo82, 1872, A
12 Anglican chants

songs and partsongs

for voice and piano unless otherwise stated

op.

wo35	Ch’io speri! padre amato (P. Metastasio), canzonetta, 1v, pf, hn, c1831
wo30	Resignation (J. Edmeston), acc. pf/org, in The Sacred Melodist (1836)
wo36	Herr Schumann ist ein guter Mann (?Bennett), canon, 2vv, Feb 1837
wo41	The Better Land (F. Hemans) (1839)
23	Six Songs, June 1837–Feb 1842 (Leipzig and London, 1842): Musing on the roaring ocean (R. Burns); O’er the woodlands (May-Dew) (L. Uhland, trans. H.H. Pierson); Wave that wand’rest (Forget-me-not) (L. Landon); Long is the night (To Chloe in Sickness) (Burns), E; Wilt thou forget (The Past) (P.B. Shelley), E; Gentle Zephyr (P. Metastasio), pubd separately (1838), E
wo47	Come live with me (C. Marlowe), partsong, SATB, in J. Hullah’s Vocal Scores (1846)
30	Six [recte 4] Sacred Duets (1849–51), 2 S, pf: Remember now thy creator, April 1848, rev. as anthem wo54; Do no evil, 1849; And who is he that will harm you, 1849; Cast thy bread upon the waters, ?1850
35	Six Songs (1855): Tell me not (Indian Love) (B. Cornwall); Winter’s gone (J. Clare), E; Dawn, gentle flower (Cornwall), Oct 1853; Loud blaw the frosty breezes (Castle Gordon) (Burns), pubd separately (1848) as The Young Highland Rover; As lonesome through the woods (Waldeinsamkeit) (C. Klingemann, trans. H.F. Johnston); Sing, maiden, sing (Cornwall)
wo65	Tell me where, ye summer breezes, 1861, rev. 1866
wo70	Lord, to thee our song we raise, 4 S, unacc., A
wo78	Sweet stream that winds (W. Cowper), partsong, SATB (1871)
wo85	Of all the arts (J. Hogg), partsong, SATB, 1873 (1874)
47	Four Songs (1875): Maiden mine (H. Heine, trans. T. Case), 1861, rev. 1866; Sunset (Case); Dancing lightly comes the summer (Case); Stay, my charmer (Burns), ?1839

4. The ‘Kammerkonzert’ and ‘Lyrische Suite’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB(W.B. Squire)

Grove1(H.H. Statham)

G. Hogarth: Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (London, 1835), 266

[R. Schumann]: ‘Wm. Sterndale Bennett’, NZM, vi (1837), 2–3; repr. in R. Schumann: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (Leipzig, 3/1875), i, 243–5; Eng. trans. in R. Schumann: On Music and Musicians, ed. K. Wolff (New York, 1946/R), 212–14

W.W. Cazalet: The History of the Royal Academy of Music (London, 1854)

W. Neumann: William Balfe, W. Sterndale Bennett, J. Benedikt: Biographien, Die Componisten der neueren Zeit, xxxv (Kassel, 1856)

H.H. Statham: ‘Sterndale Bennett’s Pianoforte Music’, MT, xix (1878), 130–34

A. O’Leary: ‘Sir William Sterndale Bennett: a Brief Review of his Life and Works’, PMA, viii (1881–2), 123–45

W. Spark: ‘Sir W. Sterndale Bennett, Mus.Doc.’, Musical Memories (London, 1888), 119–36

B. Walker: My Musical Experiences (London, 1890)

F.R. Spark and J.Bennett: History of the Leeds Musical Festivals 1858–1889 (Leeds, 1892)

W. Macfarren: ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, R.A.M. Club Magazine, no.1 (1900), 10–13

F.G. E[dwards]: ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, MT, xliv (1903), 306–9, 379–81, 523–7

E. Walker: A History of Music in England (Oxford, 1907, enlarged 3/1952/R by J.A. Westrup)

J.R. Sterndale Bennett: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge, 1907)

M.B. Foster: History of the Philharmonic Society of London, 1813–1912 (London, 1912)

F. Corder: ‘W. Sterndale Bennett and his Music’, MT, lvii (1916), 233–5

C.V. Stanford: ‘William Sterndale Bennett, 1816–1875’, MQ, ii (1916), 628–57

W.T. Freemantle: Sterndale Bennett and Sheffield (Sheffield, 1919)

C.V. Stanford: ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, Interludes, Records and Reflections (London, 1922), 161–209

F. Mendelssohn: Letters, trans. G. Selden-Goth (New York, 1945/R)

N. Temperley: ‘Domestic Music in England, 1800–1860’, PRMA, lxxxv (1958–9), 31–47

N. Temperley: ‘Mendelssohn’s Influence on English Music’, ML, xliii (1962), 224–33

G.W. Spink: ‘Schumann and Sterndale Bennett’, MT, cv (1964), 419–21

G. Bush: ‘Sterndale Bennett: the Solo Piano Works’, PRMA, xci (1964–5), 85–97

G. Bush: ‘Sterndale Bennett: a Note on his Chamber and Piano Music’, MT, cxiii (1972), 554–6

N. Temperley: ‘Sterndale Bennett and the Lied’, MT, cxvi (1975), 958–61, 1060–63

N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914 (London, 1981/R1988 as The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914)

N. Temperley: ‘Schumann and Sterndale Bennett’, 19CM, xii (1988–9), 207–20

B. Pelker: Die deutsche Konzertouvertüre (1825–1865) (Frankfurt, 1993), 102–14

C. Ehrlich: First Philharmonic: a History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford, 1995), 93–7

R. Williamson: William Sterndale Bennett: a Descriptive Thematic Catalogue (Oxford, 1996)

S.J. Lindeman: Structural Novelty and Tradition in the Early Romantic Piano Concerto (Stuyvesant, NY, 1999)

Bennewitz [Benevic], Antonín

(b Přívaty, nr Litomyšl, March 1833, d Doksy, nr Litoměřice, 29 May 1926). Czech violinist, teacher and administrator. He studied with Mořic Mildner at the Prague Conservatory (1846–52) and held posts in Prague, Salzburg (1861–3) and Stuttgart (1863–6). He was professor at the Prague Conservatory (1865–82) and then director (1882–1901). An energetic and progressive musician, he contributed much to the artistic eminence of the school, improved its orchestra, cultivated chamber music and taught a number of pupils who made the Prague violin school world-famous; these included Otakar Ševčík, Jan Ondříček, Josef Suk, Oskar Nedbal and Karel Halíř. Under his direction appointments to the staff included Dvořák (composition), Ševčík (violin) and Hanuš Wihan (cello). He also organized some pioneering public concerts of Czech and foreign music, and himself played in chamber concerts, including in a trio with Smetana and Hegenbarth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Branberger: Konservatoř hudby v Praze [The Prague Conservatory] (Prague, 1911; Ger. trans., 1911)

GRACIAN ČERNUŠÁK/JOHN WARRACK

Benoctus de Francia.

See Benoit.

Benois, Alexandre [Benua, Aleksandr Nikolayevich]

(b St Petersburg, 21 April/3 May 1870; d Paris, 9 Feb 1960). Russian stage designer, director and art historian. He was one of a neo-Romantic group of St Petersburg artists (including Diaghilev, Bakst and Nuvel) associated with the journal Mir iskusstvo (1898–1905). After graduating in law he lived in France for a time. In his writings and as an artist, he tried to promote the understanding of both western European modernism and the national Russian cultural tradition. Thanks to his and Diaghilev’s propagandist work, from 1899 the stage designs at the St Petersburg court theatres began to reflect trends in contemporary Russian painting, a process that Benois attempted to intensify and accelerate with his own designs (as in those for Götterdämmerung, Mariinsky Theatre, 1902). He played an important part in the Russian opera and ballet guest season in Paris in 1908 (organized by the Mir iskusstvo group) and in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes seasons that followed, as artistic director (until 1911), librettist and designer (see illustration), notably for The Nightingale (1914). Differences with Diaghilev led to a move to Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theatre, 1912–14. After the October Revolution he was director of the Hermitage painting collection and worked as designer for the Bol'shoy and Mariinsky theatres, including a production of The Queen of Spades (1921). In the 1920s he went to Paris, where he worked as an opera and ballet designer, notably for the Rubinstein Company (1923–34) and for the Opéra, as well as for La Scala and companies in Rome, Buenos Aires, Sydney and Monte Carlo. The main feature of his work was a desire to inject new life into the theatre of illusion by introducing the modernist style of painting of the turn of the century. His sets had a picturesque, fantastic quality, a fairy tale atmosphere and attractive local colour. Among his writings may be mentioned Russkaya shkola zhivopisi (‘The Russian School of Painting’; St Petersburg, 1904; Eng. trans., 1916), Vozniknoveniye ‘Mira iskusstva’: Aleksandr Benua (‘The origins of The World of Art’; Leningrad, 1928) and a volume of memoirs, Zhizn'khudozhnika: vospominaniya (New York, 1955; Eng. trans., 1960, 2/1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.G. Etkind: Aleksandr Nikolayevich Benua 1870–1960 (Leningrad, 1965)

M. Monteverdi, ed.: Alexandre Benois: il classico della rivoluzione 1870–1960 (Milan, 1970) [exhibition catalogue]

E. Klimoff: ‘Alexandre Benois and his Rôle in Russian Art’, Apollo, xcviii (1973), 460–69

M.G. Etkind: A.N. Benua i russkaya khudozhestvennya kultura kontsa XIX–nachala XX veka [A.N. Benois and Russian artistic culture of the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century] (Leningrad, 1989)

MANFRED BOETZKES

Benoist, François

(b Nantes, 10 Sept 1794; d Paris, 6 May 1878). French organist, teacher and composer. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1811 as a pupil of Catel for harmony and Louis Adam for piano; he won a premier prix for harmony the same year and for piano in 1814. In 1815 he won the Prix de Rome with his cantata Oenone and spent the obligatory three years in Italy. He was appointed principal organist of the royal chapel in 1819 and in the same year professor of organ at the Conservatoire, a post he held for 53 years. He was much loved as a teacher and his pupils included Adolphe Adam, Alkan, Franck, Bizet, Dubois and Saint-Saëns. In 1840 he became premier chef de chant at the Opéra, with the additional task of revising the repertory for current use.

Benoist’s compositions are not numerous; they consist principally of church and organ music and six works for the stage, none of which enjoyed more than modest success. He had considerable skill in improvising fugues, although according to Saint-Saëns he was a mediocre organist. He contributed to the Revue et gazette musicale for a number of years.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

first performed at the Paris Opéra unless otherwise stated

Léonore et Félix (oc, 1, [?J.-V.F. de] Saint-Marcelin), Paris, OC (Feydeau), 27 Nov 1821 (?1821)

La gipsy (ballet, 3, H. de Saint-Georges and N. Mazilier), 28 Jan 1839, collab. A. Thomas and A. Marliani

Le diable amoureux (ballet, 3, Saint-Georges and Mazilier), 23 Sept 1840, collab. H. Reber, excerpts arr. pf pubd

L’apparition (op, 2, G. Delavigne), 16 June 1848

Nisida, ou Les amazones des Açores (ballet, 2, A. Mabille, E. Deligny), 20 Aug 1848

Pâquerette (ballet, 3, T. Gautier, A. Saint-Léon), 15 Jan 1851

other works

Vocal: Oenone (cant., P.-A. Vieillard), 1815; Requiem, 4vv, 1842; Cantique à la Sainte Vierge, pubd in La maîtrise, iv (1860); Mass, choir, org, orch (1861); Pie Jesu, 4vv, org (1862); Inviolata, hymne à la vierge (1864); others

Org: Bibliothèque de l’organiste, ou Suites de pièces, 12 vols. (1841–61); Recueil de 4 morceaux (1878); others

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

C. Saint-Saëns: Ecole buissonnière (Paris, 1913; Eng. trans., 1919/R, as Musical Memories), 39ff

G. Bourligueux: ‘Autour de Franck: Benoist et Scheyermann’, RBM, xlvii (1993), 213–28

HUGH MACDONALD

Benoist, Nicolaus

(fl 1538–40). French composer. His works were published by Arrivabene, Moderne and Kriesstein. His ricercare, in its consistent use of points of imitation, is representative of the new instrumental style found in the pieces of Musica nova (RISM 1540²²).

WORKS

Motet, Aufer iram a corde, 4vv, 1539¹¹

4 chansons: Je ne vis onques, 4vv, 1538¹⁷; Je suis bien seur, 4vv, D-Mbs 1503a; Je suis tant sien, 4vv, 1538¹⁷, Mbs 1503a; Loyal amant, 4vv, Mbs 1503a

Ricercare a 4, ens, 1540²², 1550²⁴/R1991; ed. MRM, i (1964)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy c.1500–1550 with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1960)

H. COLIN SLIM

Benoit [Benedictus Sirede, Benoctus de Francia, Benenoit, Benedette di Giov. dito Benoit, Benotto di Giovanni, Benottus de Ferraria]

(fl 1436–55). French singer and composer. He was probably from the archdiocese of Sens in Haute-Bourgogne. His works appear in 15th-century musical sources under the name Benoit, but an authoritative papal document identifies him as Benedictus Sirede. He is first documented in 1436–7, as a singer for the confraternity of Orsanmichele in Florence. In 1438 he was recruited in Ferrara by Lorenzo de' Medici for the cathedral and baptistry choir of Florence, becoming choirmaster in 1439. He resigned from this position on 23 January 1448. From 1448 to 1450 he served in the chapel of Leonello d'Este in Ferrara; he was also a member of the papal chapel from December 1447 to February 1448, and again from January 1451 to October 1455.

Six works by Benoit survive, probably composed in the 1430s and 40s. All are in manuscripts copied in northern Italy during this period: I-Bc Q15, MOe α.X.1.11, Vnm 7554 (olim 145) and GB-Ob Can. misc.213. The isorhythmic motet Gaude tu baptista Christi and the antiphon Puer qui natus est nobis are in honour of St John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence, and may have been composed there. The hymns and antiphons closely resemble those by Du Fay from the same period. The chanson has been attributed by some scholars, on slender grounds, to a Guillaume Benoit who was choirmaster at Notre Dame in 1405 and possibly also a servant of the Duke of Suffolk between 1423 and 1427.

WORKS

Edition: Early Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. G. Reaney, CMM, xi/3 (1966) [complete edn]

Gaude, tu baptista Christi, 4vv, motet; Puer qui natus est nobis, 3vv, ant; Virgo Maria, non est tibi similis, 3vv, ant; Lucis Creator optime, 3vv, hymn; Tibi Christe splendor Patris, 3vv, hymn; De cuer joyeux, 3vv, rondeau

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lockwood MRF

F. D'Accone: ‘The Singers of San Giovanni in Florence during the 15th Century’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 307–58

C. Hamm and A.B. Scott: ‘A Study and Inventory of the Manuscript Modena Biblioteca Estense, α.X.1.11 (ModB)’, MD, xxvi (1972), 101–43

P. Starr: ‘The “Ferrara Connection”: Musical Recruitment in the Renaissance’, Studi musicali, xviii (1989), 3–17

B. Wilson: Music and Merchants: the Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford, 1992)

PAMELA F. STARR

Benoît, Camille

(b Roanne, 7 Dec 1851; d Paris, 1 July 1923). French composer and writer on music. From 1872 he was a pupil of Franck. His début as a composer took place in 1880, with a concert overture. By 1883 he was contributing articles and translations of Wagner’s writings to Le ménestrel and in the following year he published them in his Souvenirs, which attracted some attention. His writings also include Musiciens, poètes et philosophes: aperçus et jugements (Paris, 1887) and an analytical guide to Die Meistersinger (Les motifs lyriques des ‘Maîtres Chanteurs de Nuremberg’, Paris, 1888). He worked on the Guide musical under the pseudonym ‘Balthazar Claes’. Other than that he has done a translation into French of Gopethe’s Faust (Paris, 1891). Benoît’s third career, that of an antiquary, led him to join the staff of the Louvre in 1888, where he became keeper of antiquities in 1895. Within his limited time for composition he attempted several different musical genres.

For Anatole France’s dramatic poem Les noces corinthiennes (1876) he wrote an Epithalame, one of his earliest works. An Eleison for solo voices, chorus and orchestra (1890) was revived by the Schola Cantorum in 1916. Of the projected opera Cléopâtre only the scene of the heroine’s death was published (1889); Davies noted that ‘this made a powerful enough impression on those who heard it, its strength and beauty precipitating immediate tributes from both d’Indy and Samazeuilh’. Benoît wrote three symphonic poems, Fantaisie légendaire, Merlin l’enchanteur and La nuit (unfinished); he also composed three mélodies and several piano pieces. Despite his allegiance to Wagner’s principles, he was sufficiently interested in Berlioz to arrange Roméo et Juliette for piano duet (1878). He made a French translation of Goethe’s Faust (1891) and a Latin translation of Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang op.118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. d’Indy: César Franck (Paris, 1906; Eng. trans., 1910/R)

L. Davies: César Franck and his Circle (London, 1970), 321–2

J.M. Fauquet: César Franck (Paris, 1999)

GUSTAVE FERRARI, MARIE LOUISE PEREYRA/JOËL-MARIE FAUQUET

Benoit, Marcelle

(b Lille, 17 Dec 1921). French musicologist. She studied under Norbert Dufourcq at the Paris Conservatoire (1943–6, 1951–4), where she took premier prix in music history in 1952 and in musicology in 1954. From 1960 she was supervised for her research by Roland Mousnier at the Sorbonne and received the doctorat d'Etat in 1971 with a dissertation on music at Versailles. In 1958 she started teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, first as assistant lecturer, then as lecturer in music history (1965); she was appointed lecturer in musicology in 1973, obliging her to leave the Sweet Briar and Smith Colleges where she had been professor in music history since 1948.

Benoit was one of the first to make systematic use of the archives in the study of musical institutions and of music of the 17th and 18th centuries in France. A devoted assistant to Dufourcq, both in his teaching and in his publications, she was in particular his editorial assistant for the publishers Larousse (1948–85), especially for the dictionary Larousse de la musique (1957), and for the periodicals L'orgue (1947–96) and from 1960, Recherches sur la musique française classique. She was also the sub-editor from 1977 to 1987 for the music section of the series ‘Que sais-je?’ published by the Presses Universitaires de France. From 1993 Benoit worked for the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and edited the series ‘Le temps musical’. In 1988 she became the vice-president of the Association des Amis de l'Orgue and the president of the newly founded Société d'Etudes Philidoriennes.

WRITINGS

with N. Dufourcq: Dix années à la Chapelle royale de musique, d'après une correspondance inédite: 1718–1728 (Paris, 1957) [orig. pubd in RdM, xxxvii (1955), 2–29, 148–65]

with others: Notes et références pour servir à une histoire de Michel-Richard Delalande, ed. N. Dufourcq (Paris, 1957)

‘Une dynastie de musiciens versaillais: les Marchand’, RMFC, i (1960), 99–129; ii (1961–2), 139–58

with N. Dufourcq: ‘Les musiciens de Versailles’, RMFC, iii (1963), 189–205; vi (1966), 197–226

with N. Dufourcq and M. Rambaud: ‘Documents du minutier central: musiciens français du XVIIIe siècle’, RMFC, vii (1967), 217–33; viii (1968), 243–56; ix (1969), 216–38; x (1970), 197–220

with N. Dufourcq: ‘A propos des Forqueray’, RMFC, viii (1968), 229–42

‘Quelques nouveaux documents sur François Couperin, ses ancêtres, sa carrière, son foyer’, Mélanges François Couperin (Paris, 1968), 9–21

with N. Dufourcq and B. Gagnepain: Les grandes dates de l'histoire de la musique (Paris, 1969, 4/1991)

Versailles et les musiciens du roi: étude institutionnelle et sociale, 1661–1733 (diss., U. of Paris, 1971; Paris, 1971, abridged 1982 as Les musiciens du roi de France, 1661–1733)

Musiques de cour: chapelle, chambre, écurie, 1661–1733 (suppl. diss., U. of Paris, 1971; Paris, 1971)

with N. Dufourcq: ‘Les musiciens de Versailles à travers les minutes notariales de Maître Gayot versées aux Archives départementales des Yvelines (1661–1733)’, RMFC, xv (1975), 155–90

‘L'apprentissage chez les facteurs d'instruments de musique à Paris 1600–1661, 1715–1774’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 5–106

‘The Residences of Monsieur de Lully: a West Side Story’, Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. J.H. Heyer and others (Cambridge, 1989), 159–82

‘Norbert Dufourcq (1904–1990)’, RMFC, xxvii (1991–2), 4–7

ed.: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

‘L'organiste dans la société et la musique: 1660–1792’, Les orgues de Paris, ed. M. Le Moël (Paris, 1992), 132–55

ed.: ‘Norbert Dufourcq (1904–1990)’, L’orgue, nos.49–50 (1993)

‘Paris, 1661–87: the Age of Lully’, The Early Baroque Era: from the Late 16th Century to the 1660s, ed. C.A. Price (London, 1993), 239–69

L'Europe musicale au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1993)

‘Correspondance de Philidor: Londres, 1783–1795’, RMFC, xxviii (1993–5), 65–209

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/JEAN GRIBENSKI

Benoit, Peter (Leonard Leopold)

(b Harlebeke, 17 Aug 1834; d Antwerp, 8 March 1901). Belgian composer, conductor and teacher. He received his first music lessons from his father and then studied the piano and the organ with Carlier, verger and organist at Desselgem. In 1851 he became a pupil at the Brussels Conservatory, where he took courses in piano, harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition, winning first prize in harmony and composition in 1854. His chief teacher was the director, François-Joseph Fétis. Having completed his studies at the conservatory, he continued to study with C.-L. Hanssens, director of the Théâtre de la Monnaie. During these years Benoit was in severe financial straits and was obliged to take a post as additional triangle player with the Monnaie orchestra. In 1856 he became conductor of the Park Theatre at Brussels. He won the Belgian Prix de Rome in 1857 with his cantata Le meurtre d'Abel, a setting of a French text, as was stipulated by the government at that time. On Fétis's advice he used the prize money to visit Germany, spending time at Cologne, Dresden, Berlin, Munich and, briefly, Prague. On his return he moved to Paris, where, in 1862, he became conductor of the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. However, in 1863 he resigned, returned to Belgium and settled first at Brussels, then, in 1867, at Antwerp, where he founded the Flemish Music School. Within a short time this school became an important element in the difficult struggle to establish Flemish music education and in the larger movement for the cultural development of the Flemish people. Benoit's untiring efforts were rewarded when the Belgian government not only recognized the school, but in 1898 raised its status to Royal Flemish Conservatory, with the same rights as the French-speaking conservatories in Belgium. Benoit further insisted on the need for a Flemish lyric theatre at Antwerp. In 1890 the Nederlandsch Lyrisch Toneel was founded, and in 1893 this became the Vlaamsche Opera.

As a composer Benoit brought new life to Flemish music: he gave the Flemish people a belief in their art and through his own creative example encouraged others to compose. His chief aim was to bring Flemish musical life to the level of general European culture, to match standards set by Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, but in conjunction with the movement for Flemish national consciousness. These two sides of his work are seen in his Rubenscantate, which depicts the Antwerp of the painter's day. Stylistically, his works belong to 19th-century Romanticism. At first, his manner of writing, through Fétis's influence, was close to that of the French school; in his youthful works he was also influenced by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin and Weber. But as his style developed, he inclined towards Berlioz and Meyerbeer; at the peak of his creative powers he used what was then a bold and non-Classical harmony, with dramatic effects recalling Wagner.

Benoit was principally a composer of vocal music, with a striking mastery of large choral masses. He consciously placed his art at the service of an ethical sense rooted in the Flemish people, and his first aim in composing was to be performed and understood by them, to which end he deliberately simplified the style of his later works. He searched for national traits in the melody and rhythm of traditional folk and art music. At the beginning of his career, he used existing works and also originated the children's cantata. The most original form that he employed was lyric drama, a play in which the actors speak in rhythm, accompanied orchestrally throughout. He was a teacher of international stature, whose conservatory curriculum was far ahead of its time.

WORKS

complete list in Corbet (1944)

works published in Antwerp, n.d., unless otherwise stated

Stage: 3 lyric dramas: Charlotte Corday, 1876, B-Aa, excerpts (Brussels, 1877), marche funèbre, arr. pf (n.p., 1878); De pacificatie van Gent, 1876, Aa, suite pubd; Karel van Gelderland, 1892, Aa, unpubd; 6 ops, incl. Le roi des Áulnes, Brussels, 2 Dec 1859, rev. 1861, Aa, unpubd; Isa, Brussels, 24 Feb 1867, Aa, excerpts pubd; Het meilief, 1893

Orats: Lucifer, 1865 (Brussels, n.d.); Prometheus, 1867; De schelde, 1868; De oorlog, 1873 (1885); De Rhijn, vs (1889)

Cants.: Le meurtre d'Abel, 1857; Jan Borluut, 1875, Ac, unpubd; De Rubenscantate, vs (1877); De waereld in!, 1878; Hucbald, 1880; De genius des vaderlands, 1880; Hymne aan de schoonheid, 1882; Kinderhulde aan een dichter, 1884; Hymne aan de vooruitgang, 1885; Ledeganckcantate, 1897, Aa, unpubd

Sacred: Salut de Noël, vv, orch (Berlin, 1858); Quadrilogie religieuse, 1864 [component parts perf. separately 1860, 1862, 1863]; Drama Christi, 1871; Alleluja, male vv (Paris, 1872); Mass, male vv, org (Paris, 1873); 20 [Lat.] motets, 1–3vv, org/hmn (Brussels, n.d.); 12 [Lat.] motets, 2–3vv (Brussels, n.d.); others

Other vocal: pieces, male vv, incl. De maaiers, 1864, Aan Antwerpen, 1877, Ac, unpubd, Het dietsche bloed, 1879; numerous Fr. and Flem. songs, incl. De liefde in het leven, song cycle, 1870; Liefdedrama, song cycle, acc. orch, pf, 1872, pt.i Ac, unpubd, pts.ii, iii pubd; Joncvrou Cathelyne, concert aria, 1879

Orch: Danse des spectres, 1858; Sym. Poem, pf, orch, 1864; Sym. Poem, fl, orch, 1866, arr. fl, pf (?1890); Humoristische jubelgroet, 1879, Ac, unpubd

Chbr: Str Qt no.4, 1858, Aa, unpubd; Sonata, G, pf, 1860; Contes et ballades, 5 bks, pf, 1861, 4 bks pubd (Paris, 1866); Luim, str qnt, 2 cl, 1869; numerous pf pieces

WRITINGS

complete list in Corbet (1944)

De Vlaamsche Muziekschool van Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1873)

‘Verhandeling over de nationale toonkunde’, Vlaamsche kunstbode, iii (1873), 160; iv (1874), 24; vii (1877), 32; pubd separately (Antwerp, 1877–9)

‘Vlaamsche brieven’, Vlaamsche kunstbode, xv (1885), 31; pubd separately (Ghent, 1902)

Algemeen leerplan van het Koninklijk Vlaamsch conservatorium (Ghent, 1900)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Eekhoud: Peter Benoit: sa vie, son esthétique et son enseignement: son oeuvre (Brussels, 1897)

J. Sabbe: Peter Benoit: zijn leven, zijne werken, zijne beteekenis (Ghent and Antwerp, 1902, 2/1934)

G. Eekhoud: Persoonlijke herinneringen aan het intieme leven van Peter Benoit (Antwerp, 1909, 2/1934)

H. Baccaert: Peter Benoit: een kampioen aer nationale gedachte (Antwerp, 1919)

A. Pols: Peter Benoit's leertijd: honderd brieven aan zijn ouders uit de jaren 1851–1862 (Antwerp, 1934)

A. Corbet: Peter Benoit: leven, werk en beteekenis (Antwerp, 1944) [incl. complete list of works and writings]

P. Vandebuerie: Peter Benoit op de voet geroldg (1834–1901) (Antwerp, 1976)

G. Schmook: Peter Benoits onrust: hertoetst aan oud beproefd en nieuw onder de hand gekomen materiaal (1980) (Antwerp, 1983)

B. Huys: ‘Peter Benoits religieuze muziek en zijn betrekkingen met de sint-Goedelekathedraal te Brussel tot omstreeks 1865’, Academiae analecta, xlv/2 (1984), 1–18

MARIE-THÉRÈSE BUYSSENS

Benotto di Giovanni [Benottus de Ferraria].

See Benoit.

Benser, John Daniel

(d ?London, 3 Dec 1785). German pianist and composer, active in England. On the recommendation of J.C. Bach, who may have suggested he go to England, he taught music to members of the English court, including the young Mrs Papendiek, who reported that he was ‘an excellent master on Bach’s plan but could not give you any sentiment for the science’ (Broughton). He was also the first teacher of the piano virtuoso J.B. Cramer and was probably the ‘Mr Benser’ listed as a violist in Burney’s account of the 1784 Handel Commemoration. From 1772 he was a member of the Royal Society of Musicians. Benser published several keyboard works in an easy or ‘familiar’ style, and was among the first to champion the piano. In his op.1 some remarks are printed which represent an early attempt to distinguish between the respective capabilities of the harpsichord and piano. His programmatic pieces The Battle and The Storm antedate by several years the more famous Battle of Prague by Kocžwara and L’orage by Steibelt.

WORKS

all published in London

6 Sonatas, pf/hpd, vn/fl, op.1 (c1771)

A Second Sett of 6 Sonatas, pf/hpd, vn, op.2 (c1777)

A First Sett of 3 Divertimento’s, pf/hpd 4 hands, op.3 (c1780) [incl. The Chace, The Battle, The Echo]

Sonata: The Storm, pf [op.4] (1781)

5 Sonatas, pf/hpd, vn/fl, & 1 Duetto, kbd 4 hands, op.5 (c1785)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberNL

SainsburyD

Mrs V.D. Broughton, ed.: Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: being the Journals of Mrs. Papendiek (London, 1887)

R.R. Kidd: The Sonata for Keyboard with Violin Accompaniment in England (1750–1790) (diss., Yale U., 1967), 248

B. Matthews: Members of The Royal Society of Musicians 1738–1984 (London, 1985)

RONALD R. KIDD

Benserade, Isaac de

(b Paris, bap. 5 Nov 1613; d Paris, 19 or 20 Oct 1691). French poet, librettist and playwright. Helped by Cardinal Richelieu, Benserade studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris; however, fascinated by the theatre and attracted by salon life, he abandoned serious studies and developed his innate talents for witty verse, cleverly directed and full of grace and lightness. So successful was he that his contemporaries ranked him alongside Corneille, praising his style as ‘cet air noble, ce tour galant, cette pureté de langage’. He knew everyone of significance in Paris, frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet and was befriended by, among others, Jean Chapelain, Jean de La Fontaine, François La Rochefoucauld and Mme de Sévigné. Through his incisive wit and extraordinary success he made enemies of Molière, Antoine Furetière, Jean Racine and Nicolas Boileau, but throughout his life he was protected by the great – Richelieu and Anne of Austria, then the Duc de Brézé, Philippe d'Orléans, Cardinal Mazarin and Louis XIV (for whom he had genuine affection). His name was constantly on people's lips, and in 1651 he attained particular notoriety in his public verse conflict with Vincent Voiture. From 1663 onwards his name appeared annually in the list of the king's gratifications, and in 1674 he was elected to the Académie Française, which he attended assiduously, often presiding with distinction, and where he presented Bayle's Nouvelles in 1685.

His art of telling the truth about society people with elegance and dexterity was not only appreciated by the salons and developed in all the current poetic genres – epigrams, madrigals, rondeaux, enigmas, portraits and epitaphs – but was peculiarly suited to the court ballet. Benserade's popularity coincided with Louis XIV's career as a dancer of some talent, and between 1651 and 1669, when the king retired from the stage, Benserade wrote verses for 23 royal ballets. In the first, the Ballet de Cassandre, he depicted the king as the rising sun singing ‘Je ne suis point à moi, je suis à l'Univers’, and in the last, the Ballet de Flore, he expressed his own weariness:

Je suis trop las de jouer ce Rolet,
Depuis longtemps je travaille au Balet, L'Office n'est envié de personne …

He retired to Gentilly, whence he returned to write only one further work, the Ballet royal du triomphe de l'amour (1681), but his tired lines showed that he was now out of touch with a younger generation.

In his court productions he collaborated most often with François de Beauvilliers, Duc de Saint-Aignan, who devised the general scheme, the choreographer Pierre Beauchamp and the musicians Jean-Baptiste Boësset, Louis Mollier, Cambefort, Carlo Caproli, Lambert and Lully. These last two were his principal colleagues: he wrote the words of nearly all the songs performed by Lambert (see the Recueil des plus beaux vers qui ont esté mis en chant, Paris, 1661), and Lully virtually took over the composition of the music of court ballets from 1657. The collaboration of Benserade and Lully made sung récits more frequent and dialogues increasingly important – indeed in the Ballet de Flore (1669), for example, the music nearly overshadowed the dancing with récits (solos, duets, trios and quartets as well as several choruses); and the structure of court ballets now encouraged the inclusion of larger instrumental pieces and overtures, as in Les noces de village (1663) and the Ballet royal de la naissance de Vénus (1665).

In 1697 the Abbé Paul Tallemant brought out an edition of Benserade's Oeuvres including many of his verses for ballets but not his five plays, which were produced in Paris between 1636 and 1641; other, miscellaneous works, as well as collections in which poems by Benserade appeared, are listed by Silin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.I. Silin: Benserade and his Ballets de cour (Baltimore, 1940, 2/1970)

L. Maurice-Amour: ‘Benserade, Michel Lambert et Lulli’, Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, ix/June (1957), 53–76

M.-F. Christout: Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672 (Paris, 1967)

V. Kapp: ‘Benserade, librettiste de Lully et Panégyriste du roi’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Saint Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg 1987, 167–80

G. Durosoir: L'air de cour en France, 1571–1655 (Liège, 1991)

M. Benoît: Dictionnaire de la musique en France au 17e et au 18e siècles (Paris, 1992)

MARGARET M. McGOWAN

Ben-Shabetai, Ari

(b Jerusalem, 22 Jan 1954). Israeli composer. He studied composition at the Guildhall School in London (1978–9), with Mark Kopytman at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem (graduated 1983), and with George Crumb and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1987). Since 1987 he has been teaching at the Rubin Academy. He was the chairman of the Israeli Composers' League (1994–5).

His compositions tend to amalgamate different styles, for example aleatory means and proportional notation in Rubaiyat (1982) and atonal, extreme chromaticism with heterophony in the Sinfonia cromatica (1993). In the latter, each of the three movements represents a family of colours (magenta, aquamarine and white light) and the chromatic scale is developed as an important motif. In the Elegy for Anna Frank he uses a metalphone, an instrument of his own invention made of 11 gongs of different sizes, to evoke the sound of a railway. Ben-Shabetai's compositions have been performed in Europe and in the USA.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Elegy for Anna Frank, 1981; Ye'khezkel, conc., vc, orch, 1984; DELUSIONS on Mozart's Ave verum, pf, str, 1991; Sinfonia chromatica, 1993; Conc., pf, orch, 1995; Magreffa, 1995; Hora, chbr orch, 1996

Chbr: after ‘The Prophet’, cl, 1979; Ruba'yat (O. Khayyam), S, cl, bn, vn, va, pf, perc, 1982; Visions of Time, fl, perc + delay, 1983; BELLS – a Prayer for Peace, 2 pf/pf 4 hands, 1992; Sad City, vn, pf, 1992; ForteCelloPiano, vc, pf, 1992

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Y. Cohen: ‘Ari Ben-Shabetai’, Neimay Zmirot Israel (Tel Aviv, 1990), 400 only

R. Fleisher: ‘Ari Ben-Shabetai’, Twenty Israeli Composers (Detroit, 1997), 280–87

MIRI GERSTEL

Benson, George

(b Pittsburgh, 22 March 1943). American electric guitarist and singer. He sang in night clubs at the age of eight and formed a rock-and-roll group when he was 17. In the 1960s he attracted attention in jazz circles for his speed and agility on the electric guitar, which he played in an original style based on that of Wes Montgomery and somewhat touched by rock-and-roll. He played soul jazz as a member of Brother Jack McDuff’s quartet (1962–5), then performed and recorded as the leader of groups that included Ronnie Cuber and Jimmy Smith as sidemen. Having established his jazz credentials – he had recorded with Billy Cobham, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and Lee Morgan – Benson began to make more commercially orientated recordings in the early 1970s, on which he sang as well as played electric guitar. His recordings for Warner Bros., which include the Grammy-winning Breezin’ (WB, 1976) and Give me the night (WB, 1980) and show the influence of funk and soul music, elevated him to the status of a major pop star. He has continued to issue a long succession of popular hits, but also returns to the jazz setting for recording and performing engagements. A distinctive feature of Benson’s style is his practice of playing a florid guitar melody while scat singing an identical vocal line.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Dance: ‘George Benson: Guitar in the Ascendancy’, Down Beat, xxxiv/13 (1967), 20–22

J. De Muth and B. Rusch: ‘George Benson Double Interview’, Cadence, i/11–12 (1976), 5–6, 30 only

C. Mitchell: ‘Breezin' along with a Bullet’, Down Beat, xliii/15 (1976), 16–52

L. Feather: ‘George Benson: Superstar Update’, Down Beat, xlv/7 (1978), 13

J. Sievert: ‘George Benson: Platinum Jazz’, Guitar Player, xiii/7 (1979), 86–94, 98–102

G. Giddins: ‘Bensonality’, Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop (New York, 1981) [interview with Benson], 266–73

H. Mandel: ‘George Benson: Strike up the Band’, Down Beat, liv/5 (1987), 16–19 [interview]

M. Bourne: ‘George Benson: Back to Basics, Back to Basie’, Down Beat, lviii/1 (1991), 16–19 [interview]

J. Ferguson: ‘Guitar Player 25: George Benson’, Guitar Player, xxvi/1 (1992), 31–33

LEE JESKE/R

Benson, Ivy

(b Leeds, 11 Nov 1913; d Clacton, 6 May 1993). English dance bandleader, saxophonist, pianist and singer. She was a child prodigy as a pianist, broadcasting on ‘Children’s Hour’ in 1922, and playing frequently in public. She took up the clarinet and saxophone in her teens, and in 1929 joined her first all-female band, led by Edna Croudson. After some years with Croudson, she came to London and in 1937 played in female orchestras directed by Teddy Joyce, becoming leader of his Girl Friends. In 1940, after leading small groups of her own, she formed a nine-piece band for the revue Meet the Girls, which had an entirely female cast. For the rest of her career Benson led an all-female band, variously called her Rhythm Girl Band, her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra and her Showband. She broadcast frequently during World War II and afterwards, and toured internationally for the Entertainments National Servicemen’s Association from the 1940s onwards. In the 1940s she mainly played in a jazz-influenced swing style, but later often added a string section to play dance music in the manner of Victor Sylvester or Mantovani.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Ivy Benson’, The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, ed. C. Larkin (Enfield, 1992)

J. Chilton: Who’s Who of British Jazz (London, 1997)

ALYN SHIPTON

Benson, Warren (Frank)

(b Detroit, MI, 26 Jan 1924). American composer. He studied music theory at the University of Michigan (BM 1949, MM 1951) but is essentially self-taught as a composer. He was timpanist with the Detroit SO in 1946. He conducted and taught composition at Anatolia College in Salonica, Greece (1950–52, as a Fulbright scholar), Mars Hill (North Carolina) College (1952–3), Ithaca (New York) College (1953–67), where he organized the Ithaca College Percussion Ensemble, and the Eastman School (1967–93); he was also active in the Contemporary Music Project from its inception, developing its first pilot project. As a composer he has written especially successfully for percussion and wind ensembles and has received numerous commissions and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981–2). His music is varied and selective in technique; lyricism is prominent in it, as is colourful instrumentation. He is the author of Creative Projects in Musicianship (Washington DC, 1967) and Compositional Processes and Writing Skills (Washington DC, 1974).

WORKS

Orch: Vignettes, chbr orch, 1961; Theme and Excursions, str, 1963; Hn Conc., 1971; The Man with the Blue Guitar, 1980; Beyond Winter: Sweet Aftershowers, str, 1981; Concertino, fl, perc, str, 1983

Band: The Leaves are Falling, 1963; The Passing Bell, 1974; Sym. no.2 ‘Lost Songs’, 1983; Dawn’s Early Light, 1987; Meditation on ‘I Am for Peace’, 1990; other band works

Wind ens: Concertino, a sax, wind, 1954; Sym., drums, wind orch, 1962; Recuerdo, ob/eng hn, wind, 1965; Star-edge, a sax, wind, 1965; Helix, tuba, wind, 1966; The Solitary Dancer, 1966; The Mask of Night, 1968; Shadow Wood (T. Williams), Mez, wind, 1971, rev. 1992; The Beaded Leaf (A. Hecht), B, wind, 1974; Other Rivers, 1984; Wings, 1984

Perc: Variations on a Handmade Theme, 8 handclappers, 1957; Perc Trio, 1957; 3 Pieces, perc qt, 1960; Streams, 7 perc, 1961; 3 Dances, snare drum, 1962; Rondino, 8 handclappers, 1967; Winter Bittersweet, 6 perc, 1981

Chbr: works for solo inst, pf, 1951–66; Marche, ww qt, 1955; Qnt, ob/s sax, str, 1957; Wind Rose, sax qt, 1967; Str Qt, 1969; Capriccio, pf qt, 1972; The Dream Net, a sax, str qt, 1978; Largo Tah, b trbn, mar, 1978; Steps, brass qnt, 1989; Still, cl, reader, 1989; other inst pieces

Choral: Ps xxiv, SSAA, str, 1957; pieces for SATB, incl. Songs of O, SATB, brass qnt, mar, 1974; Earth, Sky, Sea (K. Rexroth), SATB, fl, b trbn, mar, 1975; Meditation, Prayer and Sweet Hallelujah (E. Bullins), chorus, pf, 1979; other choral works

Solo vocal: Nara (E. Birney), S, fl, pf, 2 perc, 1970; 5 Lyrics of Louise Bogan, Mez, fl, 1977; Songs for the End of the World (J. Gardner), Mez, eng hn, hn, vc, mar, 1980; Moon Rain and Memory Lane, song cycle, S, 2 vc, 1982; other solo works

MSS in US-R

Principal publishers: C. Fischer, MCA, E.C. Schirmer, Presser, Peters, Boosey & Hawkes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

R. Ricker: ‘Composer’s Profile: Warren Benson’, Saxophone Symposium, iv/1 (1979), 4–10

D. Hunsberger: ‘A Discussion with Warren Benson: The Leaves are Falling’, College Band Directors National Association Journal, i/1 (1984), 7–17 [incl. list of wind compositions]

R.G. George: An Analysis of the Compositional Techniques Used in Selected Works of Warren Benson (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1995)

JERALD C. GRAUE/MICHAEL MECKNA

Bent, Ian D(avid)

(b Birmingham, 1 Jan 1938). English musicologist. He studied at Cambridge University (BA 1961, MusB 1962, PhD 1969), and became a lecturer at King’s College, London in 1965, where he pioneered the first systematic Master’s programme in theory and analysis in Britain. His earliest publications reflected the focus of his doctoral dissertation on the English Chapel Royal (c1066–1327), but since the early 1970s his writings have been mainly concerned with the history and practice of music theory and analysis. From 1975 to 1986 he was professor of music at Nottingham University; he then moved to Columbia University, New York, where he was appointed Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music in 1990. At Nottingham, Bent developed a particular interest in the use of computers for analytical and musicological work, while at the same time he completed his major article on analysis for the sixth edition of this dictionary. Since moving to the United States, Bent has become a leading historian of music theory, editing and writing a substantial series of important publications. Among these, his translations of and commentaries on 19th-century and Schenkerian texts are of outstanding value for their authoritative explication of technical matters and their concern with all significant aspects of historical context. He has also remained involved in the editing and publication of medieval music, and the series Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, under his editorship since 1991, is notable for the range and thorough treatment of its subject matter.

WRITINGS

‘The English Chapel Royal before 1300’, PRMA, xc (1963–4), 77–95

with M. Bent: ‘Dufay, Dunstable, Plummer: a New Source’ [GB-Lbl Add.54324], JAMS, xxii (1969), 394–424

The Early History of the English Chapel Royal, ca. 1066–1327 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1969)

‘A New Polyphonic “Verbum bonum et suave”’, ML, li (1970), 227–41

‘Analytical Thinking in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Musical Scholarship: Oxford 1977, 151–66

with J. Morehen: ‘Computers in the Analysis of Music’, PRMA, civ (1977–8), 30–46

ed.: Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart (London, 1981)

‘The “Compositional Process” in Music Theory, 1713–1850’, MAn, iii (1984), 29–55

‘Heinrich Schenker, Chopin and Domenico Scarlatti’, MAn, v (1986), 131–49

Analysis (London, 1987; It. trans., enlarged, 1987)

‘History of Music Theory: Margin or Center?’, Theoria, v (1993), 1–21

‘Momigny’s “Type de la Musique” and a Treatise in the Making’, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. C. Hatch and D.W. Bernstein (Chicago, 1993), 309–40

ed.: Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, i: Fugue, Form and Style; ii: Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge, 1994)

ed.: Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1996) [incl. ‘Plato-Beethoven: a Hermeneutics for 19th-century Music?’, 105–24]

EDITIONS

with M. Bent and B. Trowell: John Dunstable: Complete Works, MB, viii (rev. 2/1970)

ARNOLD WHITTALL

Bent [née Bassington], Margaret (Hilda)

(b St Albans, Herts., 23 Dec 1940). English musicologist. She was organ scholar at Girton College, Cambridge, where she took the BA in 1962, the MusB in 1963 and the PhD in 1969 with a dissertation on the Old Hall manuscript initially supervised by Thurston Dart. From 1963 she taught freelance at Cambridge and King's College University of London, and was appointed lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College in 1972. She was appointed professor of music at Brandeis University in 1975 and at Princeton in 1981, serving as chairman in both departments. In 1992 she returned to England, taking up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. She was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association in 1979, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and an Honorary DMus by the University of Glasgow in 1997. As president of the AMS (1984–6) she was instrumental in establishing the AMS 50 dissertation fellowships; she was made a corresponding member in 1995. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (1993), a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of Academia Europea (1995), and a vice president of the RMA (1998). She has served on many boards and committees (including the directorium of the IMS, 1987–92, and the Council of the British Academy, 1995–8), held a wide range of visiting appointments (including the Walker Ames Visiting Professorship at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1996), and given numerous invited lectures and conference papers in Europe and America (including the British Academy Italian lecture, 1998). She remains actively involved in teaching, and has fostered the interests of many younger scholars, including an extensive list of doctoral students.

Much of Bent's earlier published work on English music of the 14th and 15th centuries grew out of her study of the Old Hall manuscript, which established new models for the palaeographical understanding of medieval sources. She discovered and described new manuscript fragments, and her broad-ranging concern with source and text criticism has resulted in a number of important editions. Her monograph Dunstaple (1981) has been followed by further discoveries relating to this composer. The medieval motet is a strong focus in her work, resulting in analytical, historical and musico-poetic studies of little-investigated repertories (the Italian motet, the Cyprus motets, papal motets) and individual works of Vitry and Machaut as well as English works. She has fostered interdisciplinary and collaborative ventures, notably the studies of the Roman de Fauvel coordinated in a volume edited together with Andrew Wathey. The relationships between compositional practice, theoretical testimony and performance have been developed in an important series of articles on musica ficta (starting in an appendix to her dissertation), manuscript transmission and the stemmatics of polyphony, counterpoint, analysis and mensural practice, as well as in practical work with professional and student performers.

WRITINGS

‘Initial Letters in the Old Hall Manuscript’, ML, xlvii (1966), 255–38

with A. Hughes: ‘The Old Hall Manuscript: an Inventory’, MD, xxi (1967), 130–47

‘Sources of the Old Hall Music’, PRMA, xciv (1967–8), 19–35

‘New and Little-Known Fragments of English Medieval Polyphony’, JAMS, xxi (1968), 137–56

with I. Bent: ‘Dufay, Dunstable, Plummer: a New Source’ [GB-Lbl Add.54324], JAMS, xxii (1969), 394–424

The Old Hall Manuscript: a Paleographical Study (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1969)

‘A Lost English Choirbook of the Fifteenth Century’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 257–62

‘Musica recta and Musica ficta’, MD, xxvi (1972), 73–100

‘The Transmission of English Music 1300–1500: some Aspects of Repertory and Presentation’, Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. H.H. Eggebrecht and M. Lütolf (Munich, 1973), 65–83

‘Some Factors in the Control of Consonance and Sonority: Successive Composition and the Solus tenor’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 625–34

‘The Definition of Simple Polyphony: some Questions’, Le polifonie primitive di Cividale: Cividale del Friuli 1980, 33–42

‘New Sacred Polyphonic Fragments of the Early Quattrocento’, Studi musicali, ix (1980), 171–89

‘The Songs of Dufay: some Questions of Form and Authenticity’, EMc, viii (1980), 454–9

‘Text Setting in Sacred Music of the Early 15th Century: Evidence and Implications’, Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Wolfenbüttel 1980, 291–326

Dunstaple (London, 1981)

‘Rota versatilis – towards a Reconstruction’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 65–98

with R. Bowers: ‘The Saxilby Fragment’, EMH, i (1981), 1–28

‘Some Criteria for Establishing Relationships between Sources of Late-Medieval Polyphony’, Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts, ed. I. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), 295–317

with P. Lefferts: ‘New Sources of English Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Polyphony’, EMH, ii (1982), 273–362

‘The Machaut Manuscripts Vg, B and E’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 53–82

‘Resfacta and Cantare super librum’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 371–91

‘Diatonic ficta’, EMH, iv (1984), 1–48

‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet’, L’Europa e la musica del Trecento: Congresso IV: Certaldo 1984 [L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento (Certaldo, 1992), 85–125

‘The Progeny of Old Hall: more Leaves from a Royal English Choirbook’, Gordon Athol Anderson, 1929–1981, in memoriam, ed. L.A. Dittmer, i (Henryville, PA, 1984), 1–54

‘Trent 93 and Trent 90: Johannes Wiser at Work’, I codici musicali trentini: Trent 1985, 84–111

‘A Contemporary Perception of Early Fifteenth-Century Style: Bologna Q15 as a Document of Scribal Editorial Initiative’, MD, xli (1987), 183–201

‘A Note on the Dating of the Trémoïlle Manuscript’, Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. B. Gillingham and P. Merkley (Ottawa, 1990), 217–42

with D. Howlett: ‘Subtiliter alternare: the Yoxford Motet O amicus/Precursoris’, CMc, nos.45–7 (1990), 43–84

‘The Yoxford Credo’, Essays in Musicology: a Tribute to Alvin Johnson, ed. L. Lockwood and E.H. Roesner (Philadelphia, 1990), 26–51

‘Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut's Motet 15 Amours qui a le pouoir/Faus samblant/Vidi dominum’, EMH, x (1991), 15–27

‘The Measurement of Time and the Structure of Motets’, La rationalisation du temps: au XIIIe siècle: musique et mentabilites: Royaumont 1991, 133–44

‘Some Aspects of the Motets in the Cyprus Manuscript’, The Cypriot-French Repertory of the Manuscript Torino J.II.9: Paphos 1992, 357–75

‘Early Papal Motets’, Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome: Washington DC 1993, 5–43

‘Pycard's Double Canon: Evidence of Revision?’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on The British Library Collections presented to O.W. Neighbour, ed. C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (London, 1993), 10–26

‘Accidentals, Counterpoint and Notation in Aaron's Aggiunta to the Toscanello in Musica’, JM, xii (1994), 306–44

‘Editing Early Music: the Dilemma of Translation’, EMc, xxii (1994), 373–94

‘Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito hec patimur and its “Quotations”’, Hearing the Motet: St Louis 1994, 82–103

‘Pietro Emiliani's Chaplain Bartolomeo Rossi da Carpi and the Lamentations of Johannes de Quadris in Vicenza’, Il saggiatore musicale, ii (1995), 5–16

‘Diatonic ficta Revisited: Josquin's Ave Maria in Context’, Music Theory Online, ii/6 (1996) <smt.ucsb.edu/mto/mto home.html>

‘The Early Use of the Sign Ø’, EMc, xxiv (1996), 199–225

‘Marchion de civilibus, prepositus brixiensis’, Trent'anni di ricerca musicologica: Studi in onore di F. Alberto Gallo, ed. P. Dalla Vecchia and D. Restani (Rome, 1996), 115–23

‘A New Canonic Gloria and the Changing Profile of Dunstaple’, PMM, v (1996), 45–67

‘The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Ockeghem and his Contemporaries’, Johannes Ockeghem: Tours 1997, 641–80

ed., with A. Wathey: Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146 (Oxford, 1998) [incl. introduction with A. Wathey and ‘Fauvel and Marigny: Which Came First?’, 35–52]

‘The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis’, Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. C.C. Judd (New York, 1998), 15–59

editions

with A. Hughes: The Old Hall Manuscript, CMM, xlvi (1969–73)

with I. Bent and B. Trowell: J. Dunstable: Complete Works, MB, viii (2/1970) [1st edn by M. Bukofzer]

Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music II: Four Anonymous Masses, EECM, xxii (1979)

with A. Hallmark: The Works of Johannes Ciconia, PMFC, xxiv (1985)

The Fountains Fragments, Musical Sources, xxvi (Clarabricken, 1987)

G. Rossini: Il turco in Italia, Edizione Critica delle Opere, i/13 (Pesaro, 1988)

ANDREW WATHEY

Benthem, Jaap [Jacob Barend] van

(b Rotterdam, 23 Dec 1937). Dutch musicologist. He was trained as a teacher (1956–60) and also studied the piano with Jaap Callenbach at the Rotterdam Conservatory (1956–9) and music theory with Herman Strategier and Ton de Leeuw at the Utrecht Conservatory (1962–5). He taught music theory at the conservatories of Utrecht (1963–6), Rotterdam (1965–74) and Amsterdam (1972–4). Since 1972 he has taught at the University of Utrecht. He has held various administrative posts and was deputy chairman of the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1981–9).

Van Benthem has carried out fundamental research on the structure, authenticity and tradition of the secular music of Josquin Des Prez, on modal structures in the music of Josquin, Clemens non Papa and Ockeghem, and on the role of numerical structures in Renaissance polyphony. He has provided critical editions of the masses and mass sections of Ockeghem (1994–), and, with Howard Mayer Brown, the three-part secular works of Josquin (1987–91). He has also published studies of Dutch composers and musicians from the period 1880–1940. Van Benthem’s Renaissance studies are characterized by cautious criticism of sources and great insight into the nature of 15th- and 16th-century modality.

WRITINGS

‘Die Chanson Entré je suis à 4 von Josquin des Prez und ihre Überlieferung’, TVNM, xxi/4 (1970), 203–10

‘Zur Struktur und Authentizität der Chansons à 5 & 6 von Josquin des Prez’, TVNM, xxi/3 (1970), 170–88

‘Josquin’s Three-Part “Chansons rustiques”: a Critique of the Readings in Manuscripts and Prints’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 421–45

‘Ein verstecktes Quodlibet des 15. Jahrhunderts in Fragmenter 17¹ der Kongelige Bibliotek zu Kopenhagen’, TVNM, xxiii (1973), 1–11

‘Einige Musikintarsien des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts in Piacenza und Josquins Proportionskanon Agnus Dei’, TVNM, xxiv (1974), 97–111

‘Kompositorisches Verfahren in Josquins Proportionskanon Agnus Dei’, TVNM, xxvi (1976), 9–16

‘Fortuna in Focus: Concerning “Conflicting” Progressions in Josquin’s Fortuna dun gran tempo’, TVNM, xxx (1980), 1–50

‘Concerning Johannes Tinctoris and the Preparation of the Princess’s Chansonnier’, TVNM, xxxii (1982), 24–9

‘The Scoring of Josquin’s Secular Music’, Josquin Symposium: Cologne 1984 [TVNM, xxxv (1985)], 67–96

‘O Venus bant: de minnaar in tweestrijd’ [O Venus bant: the lover in two minds], Liber Amicorum Chris Maas, ed. R. Wegman and E. Vetter (Amsterdam, 1987), 26–34

‘A Waif, a Wedding, and a Worshipped Child: Josquin’s Ut Phebi radiis and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, TVNM, xxxvii (1987), 64–81

‘Een verloren zoon als ondergeschoven kind: de problematische toeschrijving van een beroemd motet’ [A lost son as changeling: the problematic attribution of a famous motet], Musica antiqua, v/1 (1988), 22–8

‘Lazarus versus Absalom: about Fiction and Fact in the Netherlands Motet’, TVNM, xxxix (1989), 54–82

‘Was “Une mousse de Biscaye” Really Appreciated by L’ami Baudichon?’, Muziek & Wetenschap, iv (1991), 175–94

‘Josquins Motette Huc me sydereo, oder Konstruktivismus als Ausdruck humanistisch geprägter Andacht?’, Die Motette: Beiträge zu ihrer Gattungsgeschichte, ed. H. Schneider and H.-J. Winkler (Mainz, 1992), 135–64

‘Text – Tone – Symbol: Regarding Busnoys’s Conception of In hydraulis and its Presumed Relation to Ockeghem’s Ut heremita solus’, Antoine Busnoys: Notre Dame, IN, 1992 (Oxford, forthcoming)

‘“Erratic and Arbitrary” Harmonies in Ockeghem’s Missa Caput?’, Modality in the Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, MSD, xlix (1996), 247–58

‘“Prenez sur moy vostre exemple”: Signae, Text and Cadences in Ockeghem’s Prenez sur moy and Missa Cuiusvis toni’, TVNM, xlvii (1997), 99–118

‘“Vous nous voiez cy attachez …”: en découvrant la relation entre le texte et la musique dans la Messe Prolacionum’, Johannes Ockeghem: Tours 1997 (forthcoming)

EDITIONS

with H.M. Brown: Josquin des Prez: Secular Works for Three Voices, New Josquin Edition, xxvii (Utrecht, 1987–91)

Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Masses and Mass Sections (Utrecht, 1994–)

JOOST VAN GEMERT

Benti [Bente], Matteo

(b Maclodio, nr Brescia, c1580; d Brescia, after 1661). Italian violin and cittern maker. He moved to Brescia late in the 16th century, and he is mentioned there as a cittern and violin maker in city records between 1634 and 1661. No extant instrument can definitely be attributed to him. A richly ornamented lute by Benti was reported by De Piccolellis (Liutai antichi e moderni, 1885) and others as existing in the collection of the museum of the Paris Conservatoire. This is in fact a cittern: Sacconi later attributed it to Stradivari, but it is now thought to be by Girolamo Virchi. Benti's instruments were highly prized by his contemporaries, and Tartini is said to have praised one of his violins for its remarkable sonority.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A.M. Monterosso Vacchelli)

G. Livi: I liutai bresciani (Milan, 1896)

U. Ravasio: ‘Il fenomeno cetera in area bresciana’, Liuteria e musica strumentale a Brescia tra Cinque e Seicento: Salò 1990, 123–56

UGO RAVASIO

Bento Gomes, Manoel de S.

See Gomes, Manoel de S Bento.

Bentoiu, Pascal

(b Bucharest, 22 April 1927). Romanian composer and writer. He studied composition privately, mainly with Mihail Jora. He attended classes at both the Academy of Music and the law faculty of Bucharest University, but was expelled by the communist authorities before he could complete his studies. He started his career as researcher at the Institute of Folklore (1953–6), compiling and publishing folksongs. He then worked as a freelance composer and musicologist, publishing writings on aesthetics and the book Capodopere Enesciene (‘Enescu’s Masterworks’, Bucharest, 1984), in which he explores the position of Enescu in 20th-century music. He became a prominent member of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists, heading its symphonic section and later becoming its president (1990–92).

His rich musical language makes use of modern means of expression, assimilating the most varied techniques while remaining within the framework of a refined neo-romanticism. Tonal-modal balance, the use of symmetry, architectural rigour, and the grouping of works in cycles (String Quartets, nos.3–6) are all characteristics of Bentoiu’s chamber music. A prolific symphonist himself, he completed Enescu’s unfinished Fourth and Fifth Symphonies (1994–6). Having worked in the theatre for several years as a composer of incidental music, he produced an opera, based on Molière’s L’amour médecin in 1964; it was an immediate success and was followed by further works in the genre. In 1995 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Academy of Music in Bucharest.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Amorul doctor [Doctor Love] (comic op, 1, Bentoiu, after Molière: L’amour médecin), op.15, 1964, Bucharest, 23 Dec 1966; Jertfirea Iphigeniei [Iphigenia’s Immolation] (radio op, A. Pop and Bentoiu, after Euripides), op.17, Bucharest, 20 Sept 1968; Hamlet (op, 2, Bentoiu, after W. Shakespeare), op.18, 1969, Marseilles, 26 April 1974; incid music

8 syms: no.1, op.16, 1965; no.2, op.20, 1974; no.3, op.22, 1976; no.4, op.25, 1978; no.5, op.26, 1979; no.6 ‘Colours’, op.28, 1985; no.7 ‘Volumes’, op.29, 1986; no.8 ‘Images’, op.30, 1987

Other orch: Ov. de concert, op.2, 1948; Pf Conc. no.1, op.5, 1954; Suita ardelenească [Transylvanian Suite], op.6, 1955; Luceafărul [The Morning Star], op.7, sym. poem, after M. Eminescu, 1957; Vn Conc., op.9, 1958; Imagini bucureştene [Images of Bucharest], op.10, sym suite, 1959; Pf Conc. no.2, op.12, 1960; Vc Conc., op.31, 1989

Chbr: Pf Sonata, op.1, 1947, rev. 1957; Str Qt no.1, op.3, 1953; Sonata, op.14, vn, pf, 1962; Str Qt no.2 ‘al consonanţelor’ [Of Consonances], op.19, 1973; Str Qt no.3, op.27a, 1981; Str Qt no.4, op.27b, 1981; Str Qt no.5, op.27c, 1982; Str Qt no.6, op.27d, 1982

Songs: Patru cântece pe versuiri de Ş.O. Josif [4 Songs to Poems by S.O. Josif], op.4, 1953; 3 sonete (Eminescu), op.8, 1958; 5 cântece (N. Cassian), op.11, 1959; 4 cântece (M. Beniuc), op.13, 1961; Flăcări negre [Black Flames], op.21 (1974); Incandescente (A. Miran), op.24, 1977

Principal publisher: Editura muzicală (Bucharest)

WRITINGS

Imagine şi sense [Image and meaning] (Bucharest, 1971, 2/1973)

Deschideri spre lumea muzicii [Gateways to the realm of music] (Bucharest, 1973)

Capodopere Enesciene [Enescu’s Masterworks] (Bucharest, 1984)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O.L. Cosma: ‘Dramaturgia operei contemporane românesti: Amorul doctor de Pascal Bentoiu’, Studii de muzicologie, xi (1976), 55–111

V. Herman: Formă şi stil în noua creaţie muzicală românească (Bucharest, 1977)

O.L. Cosma: ‘Dramaturgia operei contemporane românesti: Hamlet de Pascal Bentoiu’, Studii de muzicologie, xvi (1981), 47–176

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România: Lexicon (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Benton, Brook [Peay, Benjamin Franklin]

(b Camden, SC, 19 Sept 1931; d New York, 9 April 1988). American singer and songwriter. Having started a black gospel singer, in the 1950s he co-wrote hits for artists including Nat ‘King’ Cole (Looking Back, with Clyde Otis) and Clyde McPhatter (A Lover's Question, with Otis and Belford Hendricks). During the period 1959–63 the latter songwriting partnership provided a series of hits for Benton himself. With Hendricks's opulent string and choral arrangements, these included It's a matter of time, Thank you pretty baby, So Many Ways and Endlessly; Benton's resonant, ingratiating baritone showed the influence of Billy Eckstine and Cole. At the same time, Benton recorded arrangements of the traditional Boll Weevil Song and Frankie and Johnny. One of his most effective recordings was an atmospheric version of Tony Joe White's A Rainy Night in Georgia (1970). Benton also sang with Dinah Washington on the standard Babe you got what it takes and the up-tempo A Rockin' Good Way, which was re-recorded in 1984 by the Welsh singers Bonnie Tyler and Shakin' Stevens.

DAVE LAING

Benton, Rita

(b New York, 28 June 1918; d Paris, 23 March 1980). American musicologist and music librarian. She studied with James Friskin at the Juilliard School, taking a diploma in the piano in 1938; she received the BA at Hunter College the following year. After graduate work in musicology at the University of Iowa, she received the MA in 1951 and the PhD in 1961. She was music librarian at the University of Iowa from 1953; in 1967 she was appointed associate professor of music there. She was president of the Music Library Association, 1962–3, and became secretary of the AMS in 1972 and editor of Fontes artis musicae in 1976.

Among Benton's interests was French music of the late 18th century. She endeavoured to solve the difficult bibliographical problems associated with Ignace Pleyel, whose compositions appear in different arrangements, with altered titles, or with movements transposed, added or omitted in different publications. Her translation of Frits Noske's La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc has been praised for the fluidity of its English while preserving the author's literary style. As a music librarian, she was active in the IAML. Her three-volume Directory of Music Research Libraries (1967–75), revised and reissued as part of RISM, provides a wealth of information about the collections of major music libraries and means of access to them, and about important music collections in other North American and European libraries.

WRITINGS

‘Form in the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti’, MR, xiii (1952), 264–73

‘The Early Piano in the United States’, HMYB, xi (1961), 179–88

Nicholas Joseph Hüllmandel and French Instrumental Music in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (diss., U. of Iowa, 1961)

‘Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel (1756–1823): quelques aspects de sa vie et de son oeuvre’, RdM, xlvii (1961), 177–94

‘Early Musical Scholarship in the United States’, FAM, xi (1964), 12–21

‘The Instrumental Music of Jean-Frédéric Edelmann: a Thematic Catalogue and List of Early Editions’, FAM, xi (1964), 79–88

‘Jean-Frederic Edelmann: a Musical Victim of the French Revolution’, MQ, l (1964), 165–87

‘Ignace Pleyel, Disputant’, FAM, xiii (1966), 21–4

‘London Music in 1815, as seen by Camille Pleyel’, ML, xlvii (1966), 34–47

Directory of Music Research Libraries (Iowa City, IA, 1967–75, 2/1979–85)

‘The Music Library of the University of Iowa’, FAM, xvi (1969), 124–9

French Song from Berlioz to Duparc (New York, 2/1970/R) [trans. of F. Noske: La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc (Amsterdam, 1954)]

‘A la recherche de Pleyel perdu, or Perils, Problems and Procedures of Pleyel Research’, FAM, xvii (1970), 8–15

‘Pleyel's Bibliothèque musicale (the Earliest Miniature Scores)’, MR, xxxvi (1975), 1–4

‘A Resumé of the Haydn–Pleyel Trio Controversy, with some Added Contributions’, Haydn-Studien, iv (1976), 114–17

‘Bemerkungen zu einem Pleyel-Werkverzeichnis’, Mf, xxix (1976), 280–87

‘J.-J. Imbault (1753–1832), violiniste et éditeur de musique à Paris’, RdM, lxii (1976), 86–103

‘The Nature of Music and some Implications for the University Music Library’, FAM, xxiii (1976), 53–60

Ignace Pleyel: a Thematic Catalogue of his Compositions (New York, 1977)

Pleyel as Music Publisher: a Documentary Sourcebook of Early 19th-Century Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1990)

EDITIONS

Claude Debussy: Songs, 1880–1904 (New York, 1981)

PAULA MORGAN

Bentwich, Thelma.

See Yellin, Thelma.

Bentzon, Jørgen (Liebenberg)

(b Copenhagen, 14 Feb 1897; d Hørsholm, 9 July 1951). Danish composer. At the age of seven he began cello lessons, and a few years later started studying the piano. His diverse interests at a young age also led him to learn painting and to develop knowledge of more than a dozen languages. Like his cousin, Niels Viggo Bentzon, he showed an early talent for composing; in 1915 he completed a piano sonata in G minor which so impressed Nielsen that he accepted Bentzon as a private student (1915–18). After receiving a law degree from the University of Copenhagen (1920) Bentzon went first to Rome for piano instruction, then studied for half a year at the Leipzig Conservatory with Karg-Elert (composition), Sitt (score reading) and Weinreich (piano). In 1921 he returned to Copenhagen, where he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice; from 1933 to 1951 he served as clerk of the Supreme Court. He became a musical administrator as well: head of the Danish section of the ISCM (1927–30), he was on the board of the Samfund til Udgivelse af Dansk Musik from 1931, and was vice-chairman of the Tonekunstnerforening (1934–6). His encounter with the German ‘Jugendbewegung’ in Baden-Baden in 1927 made a deep impression on him, and in 1931 he and Finn Høffding founded the first ‘Folkemusikskole’ in Copenhagen. Bentzon also served as head of all the Danish Folkemusikskoler from 1937 to 1946. Among the awards he received are the Anckerske Legat (1929) and the Kulturfonds Haederspris (1945).

Bentzon’s music ranges from a kind of witty, sometimes ironic, entertainment to works of highly crafted polyphony. The pieces up to 1920 reflect a Gade-like Nordic Romanticism. After his time in Leipzig, however, the influence of German Expressionism became discernible (for example in the string quartets of 1922 and 1924). In the mid-1920s, while concentrating on chamber compositions, he began to develop what he called karakterpolyfoni, ‘character-polyphony’. This involved using an individual set of principles for voices or for each different instrument, capitalizing on inherent possibilities and limitations; in this approach he may have been influenced by Nielsen’s Wind Quintet of 1922. Bentzon’s procedure was first clearly apparent in the Sonatina op.7 for flute, clarinet and bassoon (1924), a work performed at the 1927 ISCM Festival, and character-polyphony is shown in a refined form in the Variazioni interrotti op.12 (1926). During the years 1924–30, Bentzon tried to combine the expressionistic style with karakterpolyfoni, and in this artistic period he created some of his most important and radical works, such as Strygekvartet i en Sats (1928), Kammerkoncert no.1 (1929) and Kammerkoncert no.2 (1930).

Early in his career Bentzon showed a disappointing grasp of the orchestra, despite being a pupil of Nielsen. Critics found the Dramatisk ouverture op.5 (1922), which was first performed with Nielsen conducting, thinly scored and lacking in dramatic content. But in his works appropriate for amateur performance, stemming from his work in music education, he had more success; although largely choral music his educational output included such orchestral works as the Variationen über ein dänisches Volkslied op.17 (1928), and the Musikantisk koncertino op.23 (1935). Between 1933 and 1936 Bentzon’s many works for mixed choir combined ‘character polyphony’ with simpler vocal writing. He eventually returned to chamber music and, in combining his artistic principles from the late 1920s with a folk simplicity, he created a new genre: the Racconto, a one-movement work for three to five instruments of differing timbres (six Racconti were written between 1935 and 1949). He also composed to meet the need for orchestral works to be performed on the then developing medium of radio (Fotomontage op.27 (1934), Variationer for mindre orkester (1936), Mikrofoni for chamber ensemble (1939). After 1936 Bentzon only wrote two major choral works: En romersk fortaelling (‘A Roman Tale’) for soloists, mixed choir and piano (1937), which caused a scandal at its première because of the daring text, and the prize-winning Jorum, for mixed choir a cappella (1943). In 1943 he completed his opera Saturnalia; it was given only a few performances at the Royal Theatre, its lack of success being partly due to the difficulty of setting the text dramatically. In 1941 Bentzon wrote his Symphony no.1 in D, and in 1947 he finished his last major work, Symphony no.2 in B, in which he describes his compositorial development from ‘artistic style’ via folk simplicity to the synthesis of his last years.

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal and orchestral

Opera: Saturnalia (Bentzon, after Apuleius), 1942–4, Copenhagen, 1944

Choral: 3 sonetter af Michelagniolo Buonarotti, op.4, female choir, 1923; 3 Songs, op.9, male choir, 1925; 5 Songs, op.19, male choir, 1929–31; Hvem vil med op at flyve? [Who wants to come and fly?], cant., op.20, children’s choir, pf, recs, 1934; 3 Songs, cant., op.21, SATB, recs, 1934–5; Småsange og kanoner, op.22, children’s choir, 1932–5; 3 fabler (Bentzon, after La Fontaine), op.26, SATB, 1936; En romersk fortaelling [A Roman Tale] (Bentzon, after Petronius), op.32, S, Bar, chorus, pf, 1937; 4 Songs, op.36, 1940; Lyse land [Land of Light], op.36 no.1, 1940; 3 Songs, op.38, male choir, 1941; Lirekassen [The Hurdy-Gurdy], op.38 no.3, 1940; Jorum, op.40, SSATTB, 1943; 2 Songs, op.48, male choir, 1935 and 1948

Other vocal: 4 sange, op.13, 1v, pf, 1926; Mikrofoni no.1 (Lat.), op.44, Bar, fl, vn, vc, db, 1939; many other works

Orch: Dramatisk ouverture, op.5, 1922; Variationen über ein dänisches Volkslied, op.17, school/amateur orch, 1928; Kammerkoncert no.1 (Sym. Trio), op.18, vn, hn, vc, orch, 1929; Kammerkoncert no.2 (Intermezzo espressivo), ob, cl, hn, bn, str, perc, 1930; Musikantisk koncertino no.1, op.23, vn, str, 1935; Fotomontage, ov., op.27, 1934; Variationer for mindre orkester, op.28, 1936; Cyklevise-rhapsodi, op.29, 1936; Sinfonia seria, op.33, solo insts, str, 1937; Sinfonia buffo, op.35, solo insts, str, 1939; Sym. no.1 (after C. Dickens: Pickwick Papers), D, op.37, 1941; Kammerkoncert no.3, op.39, cl, small orch, 1941; Sinfonietta, op.41, str, 1941; Sym. no.2, b, 1946–7; Saturnalia-Suite, op.47, 1948

chamber and instrumental

6 str qts, op.3, 1922, op.6, 1924, op.8, 1925, op.11 (Preludio patetico), 1925, op.15, 1928; Racconto no.6, op.49, 1949

Other works: Variationer over et tema af Chopin, op.1, pf, 1921; Divertimento, op.2, str trio, 1921; Sonatina, op.7, fl, cl, bn, 1924; Etude rhapsodique, op.10, eng hn, 1925; Variazioni interrotti, op.12, cl, bn, str trio, 1926; Thema mit Variazionen, op.14, cl, 1926; 3 expressive Skizzen, op.16, vn, vc, 1927; Sonata, bn, va, vn, 1927; Racconto no.1, op.25, fl, sax, bn, db, 1935; Racconto no.2, op.30, fl, str trio, 1936; Racconto no.3, op.31, ob, cl, bn, 1937; Studie i variationsform, op.34, bn, 1938; Fabula, op.42, va, 1939; Pf Sonata no.1, op.43, 1946; Racconto no.4, op.45, vn, eng hn, cl, 1944; Racconto no.5, op.46, wind qnt, 1945

Principal publishers: Hansen, Samfundet, Skandinavisk

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBL2 (R. Hove)

DBL3 (M. Topp)

J. Bentzon: ‘Ny-orientering’, DMt, iv (1929), 111–19

J. Bentzon: ‘Fra “artisteri” til “popularisme”’, DMt, viii (1933), 237–42

F. Høffding: ‘Tilbageblik over 8 års folkemusikskolearbejde’, DMt, xiv (1939), 157–63, 188–92

V. Holmboe: ‘Om Jørgen Benizons Symfoni nr. 1 i D-Dur, overmotiver frå Charles Dickens vaerker’, DMt, xvi (1941), 69–70

N.V. Bentzon: ‘Jørgen Bentzon’s kammermusik’, DMt, xix (1944), 113–16, 134–7, 155–9

B. Hjelmborg: ‘Jørgen Bentzons opera “Saturnalia”’, DMt, xx (1945), 6–11

Mindeskrift over Jørgen Bentzon (Copenhagen, 1957)

M. Topp: ‘Jørgen Bentzon’, Musik & forskning, iv (1978), 5–111 [incl. list of works]

M. Topp: ‘Variazioni interrotti: Nine Episodes and a Coda on the Composer Jørgen Bentzon and his Music’, Music in Copenhagen, ed. N. Krabbe (Copenhagen, 1996), 202–48

WILLIAM H. REYNOLDS/MORTEN TOPP

Bentzon, Niels Viggo

(b Copenhagen, 24 Aug 1919; d Frederiksberg, 25 April 2000). Danish composer and pianist. He was a descendant of the Hartmann family, his mother (the pianist Karen Bentzon) being a granddaughter of J.P.E. Hartmann, and Jørgen Bentzon was his cousin. It was his mother who gave him his first piano lessons, and for a short time he was also taught by the jazz pianist Leo Mathisen. Bentzon’s formal musical education was at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music (1938–42), where he studied the piano (with Christian Christiansen), the organ (with Emilius Bangert) and music theory (with Jeppesen). He made his official début as a pianist in 1943. As a composer Bentzon was self-taught, and apart from a few attempts at the age of 15, his composing began quite suddenly in the summer of 1939, with his Klaverfantasi op.1a. He composed almost incessantly from that point onwards, and at his death his output had reached a total of more than 630 works.

Between 1945 and 1988 he was active as a teacher, initially at the Jutland Conservatory of Music in Århus (1945–56), where he taught the piano, then as a teacher of theory and music analysis at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music (1950–88, from 1960 as a lecturer). He wrote several books and articles on music, including a textbook on 12-note composition (1953), and from the 1960s also published poems, short stories and other fiction. He participated actively in cultural debate, writing countless articles and commentaries for the press. He also exhibited drawings and paintings, and was periodically involved in ‘happenings’. As a pianist he gave concerts both in Denmark and abroad, where he attracted notice as a unique interpreter of his own music, although his repertory extended to composers such as Beethoven, Schoenberg, Hindemith and Hartmann.

It was primarily as a composer, however, that Bentzon became known to a wide public. He was ranked among the most promising young Danish composers in the early 1940s, and in 1947 attracted considerable international attention during the ISCM concerts in Copenhagen with the performance of his Partita for piano op.38. His enormous list of works, which includes several classics of modern Danish music, consists primarily of instrumental music, especially for the piano. Bentzon relied little on romantic notions of ‘inspiration’, rather he spoke of his steady stream of compositions in terms of a ‘production process’. This great productivity appears to have been essential in allowing the occasional crystallization of truly significant works, but it resulted at the same time in a relatively large quantity of rather trivial music. He resisted a cerebral approach to composition, and many of his works can best be described as ‘frozen improvisation’ (he was an outstanding improviser).

Early influences were the music of Hindemith, Brahms, Nielsen and slightly older Danish contemporaries such as his cousin Jørgen Bentzon and Franz Syberg; later Bentzon looked to Britten, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky. But his style remained deeply personal and, particularly in the early works, exhibited an expressiveness unusual in Danish music of the postwar period. He used tonality, but freely, and up until about 1960 his works were predominantly diatonic, with an occasional touch of bitonality. His harmonies are often quite compact, tending towards complex textures and a saturation of 3rds and 7ths. Classical and Romantic forms and genres employing, for example, variation technique and the dualism of sonata form, were his models, as were on occasion the styles of the Baroque era (Passacaglia op.31 and the Chamber Concerto op.52). To some extent he made use of the metamorphosis technique (in, for example, the Fourth Symphony op.55), but only in the late 1950s and early 60s was there a more regular stylistic fluctuation, with an increased use of chromaticism and a move towards 12-note saturation (e.g. Propostae novae op.129 for two pianos). His was not a strict dodecaphonic method, however, and he remained faithful, fundamentally, to tonality and his neo-classical ideals. In 1961 he began a series of symbiotic works, where symbiosis represents close co-existence with a number of great composers such as Chopin, Schumann and, above all, J.S. Bach. Of particular interest, and including some of the finest music of his maturity, is Det tempererede klaver (‘The Tempered Klavier’), vols. i–xiii (1964–96), 13 hour-long collections each of which consists of 24 preludes and 24 fugues.

Alongside his traditional compositional activity Bentzon experimented with more unusual forms of expression such as ‘happenings’ (e.g. Glarmesterattituder, happening i ti afnit med rekvisitter [‘Glazier attitudes, happening in ten sections with props’], op.191). For a number of years these regular links to alternative artistic milieux and his strong media consciousness made Bentzon something of a cultural phenomenon and the subject of much discussion and media coverage, inevitably obscuring the view of him as a ‘serious’ composer. For many years attitudes towards him have been ambivalent and uncertain, and the uneven quality of his music must shoulder part of the blame for this; he is, however, one of the most significant figures in modern Danish music.

WORKS

(selective list)

for a complete list see Møllerhøj, 1980

stage and vocal

Operas: Faust III (K. Kroman, after J.W. von Goethe, F. Kafka and J. Joyce), Kiel, June 1964; Automaten (chbr op, M. Leinert, after E.T.A. Hoffmann), op.328, Kiel, 3 May 1974; Savonarola (chbr op, K. Jacobs) op.500, 1986

Ballets: Metaphor, op.58, 1950; Kurtisanen, op.89, c1952; Døren [The Door], op.141, 1962; Jenny von Westphalen, op.177, 1965; Duell, op.404, 1977

Orat: Torquilla (Bentzon), op.132, nar, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1961

Cant.: Bonjour Max Ernst (Bentzon), op.138, chorus, orch, 1961

orchestral

Syms.: no.3, op.46, 1947; no.4 ‘Metamorphosen’, op.55, 1948; no.5 ‘Ellipsen’, op.61, 1950; no.7 ‘De tre versioner’, op.83, 1952; no.8 ‘Sinfonia discrezione’, op.113, 1957; no.9 ‘Aerøsymfonien’, op.126, 1960; no.10 ‘Den hymniske’, op.150, 1963; nos.17–22, opp.522–7, 1988–91

Concs.: Pf Conc. no.1, op.49, 1947–8; Chbr Conc., op.52, 3 pf, cl, bn, 2 tpt, perc, db, 1948; Triple Conc., op.94, fl, ob, bn, str, 1953; Pf Conc. no.4, op.96, 1954; Vc Conc. no.1, op.106, 1956; Brillantes concertino on ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’, op.108, pf, orch, 1956; Conc. for Str, op.114, 1957; Vn Conc. no.2, op.136, 1961; Fl Conc., op.147, 1963; Pf Conc. no.5, op.149, 1963; Cl Conc., op.269, 1970–71; Conc., 2 pf, op.482, 1985

Other works: Variazione breve, op.75, 1951; Sym. Variations, op.92, 1953; Pezzi sinfonici, op.109, 1956; Mutationer, op.123, 1959–60; 5 mobiler, op.125, 1960; Ostinato, op.133, 1961; Sinfonia da camera, op.139, 1962; Kronik om René Descartes, op.357, 1975–6

chamber and solo instrumental

Str qts: no.3, op.72, 1951; no.6, op.124, 1960; no.7, op.165, 1964; no.8 ‘Dartmouth’, op.228, 1968; no.9, op.232, 1968; no.14, op.519, 1988; 8 others

Other works: Prelude, Intermezzo and Fugue, org, 1942; 6 Variations, op.17, fl, pf, 1942; Pf Trio, op.25, 1943; Kvadratrod 3 [Square Root of 3], op.35, vn, pf, 1944; 2 Pieces, op.41, ob, pf, 1946; Sonata, op.47, hn, pf, 1947; Mosaique musicale, op.54, fl, pf trio, 1950; Sonata, op.63, cl, pf, 1950; Sonata, op.71, eng hn, pf, 1951; Trio, op.82, bn, hn, tpt, 1952; Variations, op.93, fl, 1953; Variations, op.103, org, 1955; Sonata, op.110, vc, 1956; Wind Qnt no.5. op.116, 1958; Sonata no.6, op.280, vn, pf, 1972; Emil Kraepelin, op.287, vn, 1972; Variations on ‘The Volga Boatmen’, op.354, vc, 1974; Sonata, op.478, s sax, pf, 1985

piano

Sonatas: no.2, op.42, 1946; no.3, op.44, 1946; no.4, op.57, 1948–9; no.5, op.77, 1951; no.6, op.90, 1952; no.7, op.121, 1959; no.8, op.193, 1965; no.9, op.194, 1965; no.18, op.459, 1983; no.19, op.460, 1983; no.29, op.627, 1996; Sonata, op.51, 2 pf, 1948

Other works: 7 Little Pieces, op.3, 1940; Toccata, op.10, 1941; Passacaglia, op.31, 1944; Partita, op.38, 1945; Concert Etude, op.40, 1945; Sonatina no.2, op.62, 1950; Traesnit [Woodcut], op.65, 1950; Kaleidoskop, op.86, 1952; Det tempererede klaver, 13 vols., 1964–96; Paganini Variations, op.241, 1968; Hoffmann Sonata, op.248, 1969; Propostae novae, op.129, 2 pf, 1960

Principal publisher: Hansen

MSS in DK-Kk

WRITINGS

Tolvtoneteknik (Copenhagen, 1953)

Seks monologer (Copenhagen, 1954)

‘Omkring min 4 symfoni’, Modern nordisk musik, ed. I. Bengtsson (Stockholm, 1957), 179–93 [incl. list of works, 177–8]

‘En Faust-opera’, DMt, xxxviii (1963), 182–7

Beethoven: en skitse af et geni (Copenhagen, 1970)

‘Focus på Syberg’, DMt, lvi (1981–2), 160–69

‘Hvad kunne der dog vaere sket – hvis?’ [But what might have happened – if?], DMt, lxx (1995–6), 161–71

Paul Hindemith (Copenhagen, 1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Thybo: ‘Niels Viggo Bentzons klavermusik’, DMt, xxi (1946), 58–62, 86–9

B. Johnsson: ‘Niels Viggo Bentzons klavermusik’, Ord och bild, lxiii (1954), 501–11

H. Nørgård: ‘Dubbelporträtt i spegelkabinett: Vagn Holmboe – Niels Viggo Bentzon’, Musikrevy, xix (1964), 148–52

K. Møllerhøj: Niels Viggo Bentzons kompositioner (Copenhagen, 1980) [list of works]

B. Krarup: ‘Bentzon netop nu – den normspraengende enklave’ [Bentzon right now – the norm-breaking enclave], DMt, lxiii (1988–9), 16–24

B. Krarup: ‘Niels Viggo Bentzon og Det tempererede klaver’, DMt, lxv (1990–91), 50–55

K.Å. Rasmussen and J. Høm: Noteworthy Danes (Copenhagen, 1991)

B. Krarup: ‘Bentzons Klavermarathon’, DMt, lxxiii (1998–9), 283–5

BERTEL KRARUP

Benua, Aleksandr Nikolayevich.

See Benois, Alexandre.

Benucci, Francesco

(b c1745; d Florence, 5 April 1824). Italian bass. He sang at Pistoia in 1769, then more widely in Italy, appearing as the leading character buffo in Venice (1778–9), and singing in Milan (1779–82) with great success and in Rome (1783–4). He first appeared in Vienna in 1783 and became the leading member of the celebrated company there, creating Tita in Martín y Soler's Una cosa rara and four Salieri roles including Trofonio and Axur. Described by Mozart as ‘particularly good’ (letter of 7 May 1783), he sang Figaro at the première of Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Leporello in the first Vienna performance of Don Giovanni (1788), when Mozart composed an extra duet for him, and Guglielmo in the première of Così fan tutte (1790). In 1789 he went to London where he sang Bartolo in Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia and appeared in Gazzaniga's La vendemmia opposite Nancy Storace, with whom he had sung in Vienna. They introduced the first piece from any Mozart opera to be heard on the London stage, the duet ‘Crudel! perchè finora’ from Figaro. Benucci returned to Vienna later in 1789, remaining until 1795. His last great triumph was to create Count Robinson in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto in 1792. He had a round, beautifully full voice, more bass than baritone; probably he was the finest artist for whom Mozart wrote, and as a buffo outshone his contemporaries as singer and actor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Platoff: ‘The Buffa Aria in Mozart's Vienna’, COJ, ii (1990), 99–120

D. Heartz: ‘When Mozart Revises: the Case of Guglielmo in Così fan tutte’, Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on his Life and his Music, ed. S. Sadie (Oxford, 1996), 355–61

J. Rushton: ‘Buffo Roles in Mozart's Vienna: Tessitura and Tonality as Signs of Characterization’, Opera buffa in Mozart's Vienna, ed. M. Hunter and J. Webster (Cambridge, 1997), 406–25

D. Link: The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (Oxford, 1998)

CHRISTOPHER RAEBURN

Benvenuti, Arrigo

(b Buggiano, Pistoia, 2 May 1925; d Florence, 29 Dec 1992). Italian composer. He studied at the Florence Conservatory and with Dallapiccola, who steered him towards dodecaphony. With his ironic, restless character Benvenuti preferred a free use of 12-note technique employing permutation and aleatorism to obtain original results. But aesthetically, he followed his teacher's ideas, art for Benvenuti being a deep expression of liberty inseparable from that of constraint. Later he started using avant-garde devices including tape and a moderate degree of indeterminacy and improvisation. In 1954 he founded, with Bartolozzi, Bussotti, Company, Prosperi and Smith Brindle, the Schola Fiorentina, a group of musicians interested in the practice and theory of new musical trends. From 1961 he directed the Bruzzichelli publishing firm promoting among others Prosperi, Bussotti, Evangelisti, Guaccero and Barraqué. Benvenuti composed symphonic and chamber music, but he was particularly committed to dramatic genres. He was married to the soprano Liliana Poli.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: La seconda età (drama), 1950; Racconto I (drama), 1956; La bottega delle idee, 1961–71; Night Club (opera socchiusa), 1979–81

Inst: Toccata e fuga, 1950; 5 invenzioni, pf, 1955; 3 studi, 10 insts, 1961; Canoni enigmatici, 1959; Folia, pf qnt, 1963; Débris, 24 insts, 1964; Potpourri, 18 insts, 1967; Improvvisazione sopra un pedale, 2 fl, 1971; Froborsal's Trio, 3 gui, 1973; Schemi e cadenze, str, fl ad lib, 1974; Morceau en forme de …, fl, hp, 1977; Hoquetus, trio/qt, 1979; Humano troppo humano, trio, 1981; Doppio, gui, 1981; Cadenza sospesa, fl, 1981

Vocal: Fiore d'arancio (E. Montale), S, pf, 1959; Canctus gemellus, 1v, fl, 1961; Polymérie, S, orch, 1962; Chanson pour Lily, 1v, synth, 1977; Dominati, chorus, 1978

Works with tape: Racconto II, 7 insts, tape, 1961; Omaggio a S2 FM, tape, 1966; Gymel e corale, chorus, opt. tape, 1973; Et inquietum est cor nostrum, 1v, 15 insts, tape, 1976; Ricomposizione, 15 insts, tape, 1977

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Bussotti: ‘Arrigo Benvenuti’, Discoteca, no.69 (1967), p.26 only

R. Cresti: Carlo Prosperi (Lucca, 1993)

D. Bertoldi and R. Cresti: Per una nuova storia della musica, iii (Rome, 1994)

STEFANO A.E. LEONI

Benvenuti, Giacomo

(b Toscolano, 16 March 1885; d Barbarano di Salò, 20 Jan 1943). Italian musicologist and composer. He studied first with his father, the organist and composer Cristoforo Benvenuti, then with Vincenzo Sacchi and Paolo Chimeri at Brescia. He took a diploma in composition in 1909 at the Liceo Musicale at Bologna, where he studied with Torchi and Bossi; he also attended lectures in musicology by Sandberger in Munich. His first musicological studies were editions of sinfonias and sonatas by Sammartini, toccatas by Frescobaldi and ricercares by Cavazzoni; he also performed early music, training the singers and orchestra himself (he was a gifted organist and conductor). His interest in Monteverdi resulted in editions, recordings and concerts of his music. Benvenuti initiated the series Istituzioni e Monumenti for Ricordi, editing Andrea e Giovanni Gabrieli e la musica strumentale in San Marco and providing a lengthy preface on the Venetian school, then an unfamiliar subject. He instigated the series I Classici Musicali Italiani, planned 60 volumes for it and contributed those on Cavazzoni, Fogliani, Segni, Marcello’s cantatas and Gioàz, Piccinni’s La buona figliuola and Monteverdi’s Orfeo. His first compositions, a series of piano pieces, were published by Schott (1908–11), later works (Cinque canti a una voce, Frammenti lirici, Tre quartine di Omar Kajam) in Italy. His unpublished compositions include an overture, a quartet, the opera Juan José and works for piano and voice.

WRITINGS

‘Frescobaldiana, lettera a H. Prunières’, Bollettino bibliografico musicale, vi/4 (1931), 21–3

‘Il manoscritto veneziano della “Incoronazione di Poppea”’, RMI, xli (1937), 176–84

‘Il ritorno d’Ulisse non è di Monteverdi’, Il gazzettino (17 May 1942)

EDITIONS

Girolamo Cavazzoni: Dal I e II libro di intavolature per organo, Raccolta nazionale delle musiche italiane, xxiii–xxvii (Milan, 1919)

Cembalisti italiani del Settecento: diciotto sonate (Milan, 1926)

Andrea e Giovanni Gabrieli e la musica strumentale in San Marco, IMi, i–ii (1931–2)

C. Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea (Milan, 1938) [facs. edn of Venice MS with preface]; L’Orfeo, CMI, ix (1942)

Marco Antonio Cavazzoni: Ricercari, mottetti, canzoni; Jacobo Fogliano, Julio Segni and others: Ricercari e ricercate, CMI, i (1941)

B. Marcello: Cantate per contralto e per soprano, CMI, ii (1941); Gioàz, CMI, viii (1942)

N. Piccinni: La buona figliuola, CMI, vii (1941)

with G. Crepax: Carlo Graziani: Sei sonate per violoncello e basso continuo, op.3, CMI, xv (1943)

with E. Polo: Pietro Antonio Locatelli: Sei sonate da camera, per violino e basso, dall’op.6, CMI, xiv (1956)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Scalabrino)

C. Sartori: ‘Giacomo Benvenuti’, RMI, xlvii (1943), 1–2, 87–90

R. Bacchelli: ‘Di una sorte della musica (in memoria di Giacomo Benvenuti)’, Rassegna d’Italia, ii/5 (1946), 3–15

CAROLYN GIANTURCO

Benvenuti, Nicola [Niccolino]

(b Pisa, 10 May 1783; d Pisa, 14 Aug 1867). Italian composer and organist. He was the son of Santi Benvenuti, organist at Pisa Cathedral, from whom he had his first music lessons. He then studied composition and the organ under Filippo Gherardeschi, maestro di cappella at the church of the Cavalieri di S Stefano, which had a fine organ by Azzolino della Ciaia; in 1804 he was appointed organist there and gained great renown as a virtuoso. In 1808 he was named maestro di cappella at the cathedral, but he took up the post only in 1810, holding it until his death. The Grand Duke of Tuscany later appointed him music teacher to the grand ducal family and maestro di camera in their palaces at Florence and Pisa. In 1824 he founded a music school, supported by the municipal government, in which he trained many fine organists. Benvenuti is still remembered in Pisa and known there by the diminutive ‘Niccolino’.

In 1806 Benvenuti's cantata Il ratto di Proserpina for three solo voices and chorus was performed at Pisa. He wrote arias, duets and trios for the theatre, and in 1810 his Arianna e Teseo (G.R. Niccolini), an azione drammatica, and Werter, a one-act farsa, were performed. In 1812 Gervasoni listed among his works 12 symphonies for full orchestra, sonatas for piano and organ, variations and six solemn masses for four and six voices with orchestra. Four masses, eight hymns, 18 introits, lamentations, four motets, nine psalms and a sacred symphony for orchestra are in the Pisa Cathedral archives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Marotti)

C. Gervasoni: Nuova teoria di musica (Parma, 1812/R)

Ricordo sacro a Nicola Benvenuti (Pisa, 1875)

FRANCO BAGGIANI

Benzi, Roberto

(b Marseilles, 12 Dec 1937). French conductor of Italian birth. The son of a music teacher, he took lessons from the age of three and made his conducting début in July 1948 at the Théâtre Municipal, Bayonne. In addition to his career he pursued general and musical studies until 1958 (as a pupil of Cluytens, 1947–50). He made his opera début in 1954, and in 1959 appeared successfully at the Paris Opéra with Carmen (new to the Opéra repertory) and toured Japan with this production in 1961. Benzi has also toured in western and central Europe, North Africa and North and South America, making his first appearance in Canada in 1966, and in the USA in 1971 with the Philadelphia and Concertgebouw orchestras. He made his début at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972 with Faust. From 1973 to 1987 he served as founding music director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux-Aquitaine and from 1991 to 1996 as director of the Netherlands National Youth Orchestra.

Benzi began his career as a child prodigy and appeared in two films (Prélude à la gloire, 1949, and L'appel du destin, 1950). Unlike many such children, however, he has since brought his talent to maturity. He conducts with an expressive, supple style and a keen concern for tempos; his early concentration on Italian repertory has given way to a preference for the German Romantics, French music, opera and oratorio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Gavoty: Roberto Benzi, Les grands interprètes (Geneva, 1955)

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/CHARLES BARBER

Beograd

(Serb.).

See Belgrade.

Beolco, Angelo [Ruzante]

(b Padua c1496; d Padua, 17 March 1542). Italian playwright, actor, singer and poet. His plays are remarkable for their innovative use of popular Paduan genres combined with pastoral eclogue and learned comedy in imitation of antiquity. In the plays 52 songs, mentioned or sung, divide scenes or carry the action, as in L’Anconitana, where a Paduan servant named Ruzante holds a song contest with his Venetian master. Speaking the dialect of the Paduan countryside, Ruzante appears in most of Beolco’s plays. The playwright-actor performed Ruzante’s role and adopted his character’s name. Modern critics have identified the author with his character, whose polemics against the rustics’ historical antagonists, whether Venetian merchants, Paduan noblemen or proponents of a Tuscanizing academic culture, inform Ruzante’s theatre. Not least, Ruzante satirizes the country figure he impersonates.

Ruzante was also renowned for his singing voice. In addition to the songs in the plays, nine extant canzoni are attributed to him. Settings by Willaert of Zuogia zentil, Quando de ruos’e d’oro and Occhio non fu zà mai survive incomplete; there is also a setting of the last by Filippo Azzaiolo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Zorzi: ‘Canzoni inedite del Ruzante’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, cxix (1960–61), 25–74

E. Lovarini: Studi sul Ruzzante e la letteratura pavana, ed. G. Folena (Padua, 1965)

L. Zorzi, ed.: Ruzante: Teatro: prima edizione completa: testo, traduzione a fronte e note (Turin, 1967)

N. Pirrotta and E. Polovedo: Li due Orfei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin, 1969, 2/1975; Eng. trans., 1982, as Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi)

D.G. Cardamone: The canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537–1570 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

L. Carroll: ‘Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, xvi (1985), 487–502

N. Dersofi: ‘Le canzoni del Ruzante e l’Anconitana’, Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Ruzante [Padua, 1983], ed. G. Calendoli and G. Vellucci (Venice, 1987), 49–54

N. Pirrotta: ‘Willaert e la canzone villanesca: Scelte poetiche di musicisti’, Teatro, poesia, e musica da Willaert a Malpiero (Venice, 1987)

H. Colin Slim: ‘Two Paintings of “Concert Scenes” from the Veneto and the Morgan Library’s Unique Music Print of 1520’, In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta on his 80th Birthday, ed. F. Della Seta and F. Piperno (Florence 1989), 155–174

M. Feldman: ‘The Academy of Domenico Venier, Music's Literary Muse in Mid-Cinquecento Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, xliv (1991), 476–512

NANCY DERSOFI

Bequadro

(It.).

See Natural.

Berain, Jean

(bap. Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine, 6 June 1640; d Paris, 24 Jan 1711). French designer. After beginning his career in Paris as an engraver, he was summoned to Versailles in 1674 to work on the festivities celebrating the conquest of the Franche-Comté. That year he was appointed Dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi, succeeding Henry Gissey. Thereafter he was to provide all the models of costumes for the operas performed at the royal residences and on the operatic stage of Paris, replacing Carlo Vigarani as designer of the sets and stage effects there in 1680. Until at least 1707 he prepared designs at the Académie Royale de Musique for the works of Lully and his successors, Collasse, Marin Marais, Charpentier, Desmarets, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Campra, Destouches and Jean-Féry Rebel (for illustration see Ballet de cour, fig.3).

Berain won fame in other areas as well, notably in naval decoration and ‘grotesques’ (styles of ornament widely diffused through engravings) and many of his designs for operatic performances have survived in collections in Paris, Stockholm and London. He drew inspiration for his scenery from the Italians Torelli, Grimaldi, Burnacini and Vigarani, although he was less of an innovator than the Galli-Bibienas; he continued to respect the principle of frontal representation, with regular and symmetrical disposition of the lateral frames, and never used the oblique perspective known as per angolo that was already in use in Italy. However, he brought operatic costume to a state of perfection unequalled in the Europe of the time.

While Berain sometimes turned to Gissey’s models, he gave his costumes unusual refinement, striving for diversification in their cut and the details of their ornamentation. Like Gissey he attempted to make costumes appropriate to the roles, and was careful to give a good idea of the characters suggested in the librettos. When he was designing Lully’s Amadis, with its subject taken from a chivalric romance, he did research of a kind unusual for the time to achieve historical authenticity, turning to the fashions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berain exerted great influence on his immediate successors at the Académie Royale de Musique – his son Jean, Claude Gillot, Jean-Baptiste Martin and Louis-René Boquet. The younger Jean is known to have worked there until his death in 1726.

For further illustrations see Lully family, (1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.-A. Weigert: Jean I Berain: Dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet du roi (1640–1711) (Paris, 1937)

J. de La Corce: Berain: dessinateur du Roi Soleil (Paris, 1986)

J. de La Goce: Lully: un âge d’or de l’opéra français (Paris, 1991)

JÉRÔME DE LA GORCE

Beranek, Leo (Leroy)

(b Solon, IA, 15 Sept 1914). American acoustician. He gained his BS after studying at Cornell College, Iowa, and subsequently gained his doctorate under the supervision of F.V. Hunt. During the Second World War Beranek worked in the Cruft Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard University and later at the MIT. In 1948 he founded a company of acoustics consultants (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.) which quickly established an international reputation. Before writing his seminal book, Music, Acoustics and Architecture (1962), he travelled through 20 countries, listening and making measurements in many halls and consulting many acousticians. This preparation preceded the final designing of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, for which he and his firm held the acoustic consultancy. Beranek has been responsible for the acoustical design of many major concert halls, and through his writings has contributed greatly to the dissemination of good practice in the design and construction of buildings intended for musical use. He was president of the Acoustical Society of America (1954–5), which awarded him the Wallace Clement Sabine Medal in 1961, the Gold Medal in 1975 and Honorary Fellowship of the Society in 1994.

WRITINGS

Acoustic Measurements (New York, 1949)

Acoustics (New York, 1954)

Music, Acoustics and Architecture (New York, 1962)

‘Concert Hall Acoustics’, JASA, xcii (1992), 1–39

Concert and Opera Halls: How they Sound (Woodbury, NY, 1996)

MURRAY CAMPBELL

Béranger, Pierre-Jean de

(b 1780; d 1857). French songwriter. Son of a petit bourgeois who tried to make his way in the banking world, he was employed for a number of years as a clerk at the University of Paris. He had close friends among the upper bourgeoisie (notably the banker Laffitte). During the last years of Napoleon's Empire, he joined the ‘Caveau moderne’, a singing club whose members devoted their verses to traditional praise of wine, women and song. In 1813 he published his first political chanson, Le roi d'Yvetot, a satire on the Napoleonic Empire; it soon became one of the best-known songs in the country. With the restoration of the Bourbon royalty the next year, Béranger found no lack of subjects for his vivid and elegant pen. At times his songs expressed explicit support for a return to republican government (Ma république, Le vieux drapeau). His songs were considered so subversive that he was twice jailed (1822, 1828). The July Revolution of 1830 brought many of his wishes to fulfilment, but he was dismayed by the series of workers' uprisings and violent repressions that took place in succeeding years. He avoided any direct involvement in politics himself. From 1834 he published almost no songs, although an enormous body of chansons appeared posthumously.

Béranger did more than anyone else to revive and legitimize the French political chanson (see Revolutionary hymn). Like so many of his predecessors, he used pre-existing tunes (timbres) that were well known rather than compose new ones of his own. (Génin gives the few known exceptions: three graceful, even fragrant tunes that Béranger composed himself.) He is one of the few songwriters of any era to express, with a pen of professional and artistic cunning, a feeling for the desires of the popular masses. The uncrowned national bard of France and, in particular, the voice of the liberal and republican opposition during the Bourbon restoration, he lived to see his works sung and read throughout Europe, drawing praise and in some cases imitation from Goethe, Heine, Thackeray, Garibaldi and many of the progressive Russian writers. Various of his songs were subsequently set to music by professional composers. Some of these new settings were simple, intended for performance in the parlour or by amateur choruses, notably the Orphéon; others (e.g. Berlioz’s Le cinq mai) were much more elaborate, being performed in public by professional musicians. Both in general and in many specific details, Béranger set the pattern for activist songwriters of the 19th and 20th centuries, but most directly for the working-class songwriters who were his contemporaries and fellow Parisians (Charles Poncy, Gustave Leroy, Eugène Pottier). His songs remain a powerful example of the role that music can play in the propagation of social and political ideology.

EDITIONS OF SONGS

Oeuvres de Béranger (Paris, 8/1861)

F. Bérat, ed.: Musique des chansons de Béranger: airs notés et modernes … augmentée de la musique des chansons publiées en 1847 (Paris, 9/1861) [416 songs]

P. Brochon, ed.: La chanson française: Béranger et son temps (Paris, 1956)

F. Vernillat and P. Barbier, eds.: Histoire de France par les chansons (Paris, 1956–61), esp. vols.v–vi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Génin: ‘Béranger compositeur’, Musique des chansons de Béranger: airs notés et modernes … augmentée de la musique des chansons publiées en 1847, ed. F. Bérat (Paris, 9/1861), 303–15

J. Brivois: Bibliographie de l'oeuvre de P.-J. de Béranger (Paris, 1876)

France Vernillat: ‘La chanson littéraire et les sociétés chantantes’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, ii (Paris, 1963), 1477–93

J. Touchard: La gloire de Béranger (Paris, 1968)

R.P. Locke: ‘The Music of the French Political Chanson, 1810–50’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties: Northampton, MA, 1982, 431–56

H. Schneider: ‘Les mélodies des chansons de Béranger’, La chanson francaise et son histoire, ed. D. Rieger (Tübingen, 1988), 111–48

H. Thoma: ‘La chanson et le problème des deux cultures’, ibid., 89–102

R.P. Locke: ‘The Political Chansons of Béranger: Artistry for Progressive Social Change’, Musik/Revolution: Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum 90. Geburtstag ed. H.-W. Heister, ii (Hamburg, 1997), 115–32

RALPH P. LOCKE

Bérard, Jean-Antoine [not Jean-Baptiste]

(b Lunel, 1710; d Paris, 1 Dec 1772). French haute-contre singer, music teacher, cellist and composer. His début in 1733 at the Paris Opéra, according to La Borde, was in the monologue of Pélée, ‘Ciel! en voyant ce temple redoutable’ from Act 3 of Collasse's Thétis et Pélée (1689). He soon joined the Italian troupe, performing in divertissements between the acts of operas. After three years he returned to the Opéra and took several minor roles between 1737 and 1745 in Rameau's works: Un Athlète in Castor et Pollux (1737), Un Songe in Dardanus (1739), Lycurgue in Fêtes d'Hébé (1739), and Tacmas (replacing the well-known haute-contre Tribou) in the third entrée of Les Indes galantes (1743 revival). In 1743 he sang the title role in the première of Boismortier's ballet-comique, Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, with the famous soprano Marie Fel as Altisidore. Two years later he retired from the opera to devote himself to teaching and playing the cello. He became first cellist of the orchestra at the Comédie-Italienne in 1762 and the same year married Mlle Deschamps (b 1730), an actress at the Opéra-Comique. He was a ‘bon musicien’ (La Borde), played the guitar and harp and was the author of a collection of Airs pour la guitarre (Paris, c1775, now lost).

In his treatise, L'art du chant (Paris, 1755), dedicated to Mme de Pompadour, he discussed the physical and anatomical aspects of tone production. He divided sounds into two different classes, the first including those that are ‘violens’, ‘entre-coupé’, ‘majestueux’ and ‘étoufés’, and the second those that are ‘légers’, ‘tendres’ and ‘manièrés’. He emphasized the importance of the character of each sound and of appropriate ornamentation, appending valuable examples from the works of Lully, Campra, Mondonville, Rameau and others, in which he indicated the desired tone and appropriate ornaments using signs of his own invention. The Abbé Joseph Blanchet, author of L'art ou les principes philosophiques du chant (Paris, 1756), accused Bérard of incorporating portions of his manuscript. While many passages of the two works are exactly the same, La Borde discounted the accusation and criticized Blanchet's work for its inaccuracies in other parts. La Borde thought highly of Bérard's treatise and recognized it as a summation of vocal practice for the era of Lully to Rameau:

on trouve de bonnes choses, mais dont la plus grande partie sont inutiles aujourd'hui, ne pouvant convenir au nouveau goût de chant que l'on a adopté, & qui a détruit presqu'entièrement celui qui pendant plus de cent ans avait fait les délices de Paris & de toute la France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

La BordeE, iii

S. Murray: Jean-Baptiste Bérard: L'art du chant dédié à Mme de Pompadour: Translation and Commentary (Milwaukee, WI, 1969)

M. Cyr: ‘Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Singing: Rameau's Writing for the Voice’, ML, lxi (1980), 318–37

S. Pitou: The Paris Opéra: an Encyclopedia of Opera, Ballets, Composers and Performers (London, 1983)

M. Benoit: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

S. Jouve-Gouvert: ‘Bérard et l'art du chant en France au XVIIIe siècle’, RMFC, xxix (1996–8), 103–62

MARY CYR

Berardi, Angelo

(b S Agata, c1636; d Rome, 9 April 1694). Italian theorist, composer and organist. He was one of the most prominent Italian theorists of the later 17th century and is specially important for his writings on counterpoint.

1. Life.

Much of the information about Berardi's life derives from his published works. His place of birth is given on the title-pages of four of his theoretical works but it is yet to be established from which of the many S Agatas in Italy he originated. He was a pupil of Marco Scacchi, who lived at Gallese near Viterbo, from about 1650 until his death. Since Berardi's op.4 (1667) cites him as maestro di cappella of Viterbo Cathedral he must have studied with Scacchi at some time between 1650 and 1667. According to Radiciotti he was a maestro di cappella and organist at Tivoli from 21 September 1673 to 1679. When he published Ragionamenti musicali in 1681 he was ‘professor of music’ and maestro di cappella of Spoleto Cathedral. At the time of the publication of his next two theoretical works, Documenti armonici (1687) and Miscellanea musicale (1689), he was a canon at the college of S Angelo, Viterbo. The title-page of Il perchè musicale (1693) cites him as canon and maestro di cappella of S Maria in Trastevere, Rome. At the time of his death he was stated to be about 58.

2. Works.

Although Berardi's first treatise, Dicerie musicali, is lost, some idea of its contents may be derived from his references to it in his first extant treatise, Ragionamenti musicali. He referred to it for more thorough discussions of such subjects as the solmization syllables, modes and consonances and for a brief description of all musical instruments. If this is a representative sample of its contents it appears to have contained little information not found in his other treatises.

Ragionamenti musicali, which is in dialogue form, is the most traditional of Berardi's extant treatises. The subjects covered in it include the definition, division and origin of music, its noble nature, the music of the spheres and the diversities of musical styles. The final dialogue seems to have been an afterthought; it is described as ‘aggiunta’ and has its own title-page and dedication. In the third dialogue Berardi divided music into three styles, da chiesa, da camera and da teatro; he divided each of the first two categories into sub-groups and identified composers whose music falls into them. As composers in the da chiesa tradition he named Josquin Des Prez, Palestrina, G.M. Nanino and Carissimi; he included Marenzio, Monteverdi and Luigi Rossi in the da camera tradition and Peri, Monteverdi and Cesti as composers in the da teatro style. The same dialogue ends with a list of 136 writers on music, many of whom he designated as speculative or practical or both.

The most important aspect of Berardi's theoretical writings is his systematic description of contrapuntal composition. Documenti armonici and Miscellanea musicale provide a complete description of counterpoint as practised in the 17th century. Documenti armonici is in three books. The first begins with the basic types of counterpoint. Here Berardi explained the practice of composing ‘con l'obligo’, in which the composer adheres strictly to the consistent use, or avoidance, of a specific compositional device. The music examples include a four-part fugue in which one or more parts may be omitted, one four-part composition with a crab canon in the two upper parts which may be performed in 14 different ways, and another in which each performer may choose whether to use B or B. The salient features of the first book are, however, a clear explanation of double fugue and a preference for having the stretto at the end. At the end of the first book Berardi printed two motets by Scacchi and Willaert's chromatic duo Quid non ebrietas, explaining in detail how to compose such pieces. In the second book he gave rules for composing canons at every interval from the unison to the octave and included his own circular canon for 32 sopranos. He discussed soggetto cavato technique and mentioned Josquin's Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae. The book closes with a discussion of counterpoint at the octave, 10th and 12th; this can be seen as completing the study of counterpoint begun in Miscellanea musicale, which had still to be published. The third book concentrates on tied notes or suspensions. Berardi again went from the simple to the complex; the result is a comprehensive study of dissonance treatment.

The first of the three parts of Miscellanea musicale is primarily speculative. One interesting discussion is centred on the seconda pratica. Berardi mentioned the use of the tritone in expressing a text, and listed works by Rore, Marenzio, Nenna and Monteverdi in which it is employed; he always gave the words on which it appears. In the second part, attention is again focussed on the chromatic experiments of the Renaissance period. Berardi mentioned Aristoxenus (‘who divided the tone into two equal semitones’) and again included Willaert's chromatic duo, along with modulatory pieces by Alfonso del Violino and Romano Micheli (see Lowinsky). Berardi later outlined the rules governing various types of two-part counterpoint. The third part gives rules for three-part counterpoint, as well as a definition of the modes and an explanation of how they may be transposed using up to three sharps or flats.

In his last two treatises, Arcani musicali and Il perchè musicale, Berardi filled in gaps left by the other treatises and emphasized again some topics that he considered important. He devoted almost half of the 30-page Arcani musicali to a discourse on friendship. This leads into another discussion of modulatory works in which he again printed music by Micheli and Alfonso del Violino. The rest of the treatise demonstrates how to write an a cappella mass in the style of Palestrina and how to write for several choirs. The most interesting part of Il perchè musicale probably lies in two letters discussing the seconda pratica. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly for a contrapuntist, Berardi readily admitted its existence, but he warned against calling the prima pratica old and the seconda pratica new: since they used the same materials he felt that they co-existed.

Berardi was also a prolific composer, almost entirely of church music. His style, though indebted to Palestrina, is less conservative than his theoretical writings might suggest. His use of continuo, chromatic third relationships, modulation to keys distant from the church modes, concertato writing, melodic devices and performance instructions can all be classed Baroque characteristics.

WORKS

Missa pro defunctis, 5vv, ?op.1 (Rome, 1663)

Libro III de motetti, 2–4vv (Bologna, 1665); cited in FétisB

Sacri concentus, liber I, 2–5vv, op.2 (Rome, 1666)

Salmi vespertini concertati, liber I, 3vv, org ad lib, op.4 (Bologna, 1667)

Salmi concertati, liber II, 3vv, op.5 (Bologna, 1668)

Sacri concentus, liber II, 2–5vv, con una missa, 6vv, op.6 (Bologna, 1669)

Sinfonie, vn, op.7 (Bologna, 1670)

Psalmi vespertini, con una missa, 4vv, org ad lib, op.8 (Rome, 1675)

Psalmi vespertini, 3–6vv, con una missa, 5vv, op.9 (Bologna, 1682)

2 libri de offertorii concertati, 2–3vv (Bologna, 1680); cited in FétisB

Musiche diverse variamente concertate, 2–4vv, op.13 (Bologna, 1689)

14 masses, 4–16vv; Alleluia, Qui timent Dominum; 51 ant; 11 grad; 4 hymns; 3 off; 8 ps; 8 motets; 9 specific liturgies: I-Rsg

Canon, 3vv, 1689, lost

For a complete listing of MSS see Cannon and Fraley

WRITINGS

Dicerie musicali, before 1681, lost

Ragionamenti musicali, ed. G. Orsolini (Bologna, 1681)

Documenti armonici (Bologna, 1687/R)

Miscellanea musicale (Bologna, 1689/R)

Arcani musicali suelati dalla vera amicitia (Bologna, 1690)

Il perchè musicale (Bologna, 1693)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Radiciotti: L'arte musicale in Tivoli nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII (Tivoli, 1907, enlarged 2/1921)

K.-F. Waack: Angelo Berardi als Musiktheoretiker (diss., U. of Kiel, 1956)

A. Mann: The Study of Fugue (New Brunswick, NJ, 1958/R, 2/1965/R), 43ff

I. Horsley: Fugue: History and Practice (New York, 1966), 79ff

H. Hucke: ‘Palestrina als Autorität und Vorbild im 17. Jahrhundert’, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 253–61

E.E. Lowinsky: ‘Echoes of Adrian Willaert's Chromatic “Duo” in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Compositions’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 183–238

B.C. Cannon: ‘Music in the Archives of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere’, AcM, xli (1969), 199–212

A. Larsen: Angelo Berardi (1636–1694) as Theorist: a Seventeenth-Century View of Counterpoint (diss., Catholic U., Washington DC, 1978)

A. Angelis: ‘La capella musicale di Viterbo nel secolo XVII’, RIM, xix (1984), 21–35

A. Luppi: ‘Le origini della musica tra storia e mito nell'opera teorica di Angelo Beradi’, Antiquae musicae italicae studiosi, iv (1988), 13–20

C. Fraley: Selected Masses of Angelo Berardi: an Analytical Study (diss., Catholic U., Washington DC, 1989)

R. Groth: ‘Zur Musiktheorie Angelo Berardis’, Musiktheorie, iv (1989), 157–60

P. Barbieri: ‘Chiavette and Modal Transposition in Italian Practice (c.1500–1837)’, Recercare, iii (1991), 5–79

ARVED M. LARSEN III

Beratha, I Wayan

(b Belaluan, Denpasar, 1924). Balinese performer, teacher, composer and choreographer. At the time of his birth, Belaluan's acclaimed gamelan group, directed by his father Madé Regog, had been among the first to import the nascent kebyar style to the south of the island from its area of origin in the north. Beratha's musical talent was evident early, and by the age of ten he had mastered the sacred lalambatan repertory and was a proficient drummer.

While young he taught village ensembles throughout Bali and continued studying dance and music with the major figures of the day. His first dance composition, Yudha Pati, was introduced in 1958, and the instrumental Swa Buana Paksa a year later. Travelling widely, he performed for Sukarno in the 1950's and was in residence at the 1964–5 New York World's Fair. When the first Balinese KOKAR (Konservatori Karawitan) opened in 1960 in Denpasar, Beratha joined the faculty and from this influential centre greatly shaped Balinese music during the ensuing decades.

Like other Balinese composers, his works involve borrowing, reworking pre-existing materials and collaboration as well as original music. He made significant contributions to the sendratari (dance-drama), to the kebyar instrumental genre tabuh kreasi and to the modernized kebyar lalambatan. Since retiring from teaching in the late 1980s Beratha has been active as a builder, tuner and merchant of gamelan instruments.

WORKS

(selective list)

all for Balinese gamelan gong kebyar

Yudha Pati, 1958; Swa Buana Paksa, 1959; Jaya Semara, 1963; Ramayana (sendratari [dance–drama]),1966; Rajapala (sendratari [dance-drama]), 1966; Palguna Warsa, 1968; Kosalia Arini, 1969; Panyembrahma, 1971; Bangun Anyar, 1978; Mie Ing Segara, 1982; Citta Uttsawa, 1983

MICHAEL TENZER

Berberian, Cathy [Catherine]

(b Attleboro, MA, 4 July 1925; d Rome, 6 March 1983). American singer. Varied training and early experience helped to equip this versatile artist: courses in mime, writing and opera at Columbia and New York universities; Hindu and Spanish dancing; work as a soloist with an Armenian dance group and in summer repertory; and vocal study in Milan with Giorgina del Vigo. She made her début in Naples in 1957, at an Incontri Musicali concert. The following year, at a John Cage concert in Rome, she sang his Aria with Fontana Mix. Her American début was at Tanglewood, in 1960, with Berio’s Circles. Berio, to whom she was married from 1950 to 1966, in a series of works (notably Circles, Sequenza III, Visage and Recital I) inspired by her vocal virtuosity, darting, witty intelligence and vivid presence, in effect limned the voices, styles and temperament of this remarkable performer. The long list of composers who wrote for her includes Stravinsky (Elegy for JFK), Henze, Haubenstock-Ramati and Bussotti. Her repertory embraced 17th-century opera (she had a particular affinity with Monteverdi), folksong of all countries and the salon morceaux – ranging from exquisite miniatures to such trouvailles as Griepenkerl’s vocal version of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata – gathered in her recital ‘Une Soirée chez Mme Verdurin’. Her compositions include Stripsody for solo voice (1966) and Morsicat(h)y for piano (1971). A special issue of Symphonica, the magazine of Radiotelevisione della Svizzera italiana (no.30, Sept 1993), contains essays by and about Berberian, an interview with Berio and a discography.

ANDREW PORTER

Berber music.

See under Morocco.

Berberov, Rostislav Nikolayevich

(b Kondrovo, 28 March 1921; d Moscow, 12 June 1984). Soviet musicologist. He gained his early musical education at the Gnesin Academy of Music before going to study musicology in 1941 at the Moscow Conservatory. During the period of evacuation to Saratov, he was a member of the intimate circle of Boleslav Yavorsky and later a pupil of Mazel'. On the grounds that he did not conform adequately to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, he was not allowed to take his final examinations and instead had to spend ten years working without the requisite diploma in the music theory department at the October Revolution Music College. He was finally awarded his diploma in 1957, and in 1970 was appointed lecturer at the Gnesin Academy of Music, where he specialized in the formal theory of music analysis.

Berberov was a principal representative of the Soviet school of music analysis. During the 1960s he formulated a complex and structured system of integral analysis that was built upon Kurth's, Asafjev’s and Bobrowski’s ideas concerning the temporal development of musical form in an individual work and distinguished between the constructive and destructive formants of musical development. He also adopted ideas from Riemann on types of representation as conditioned by motif and phrase. He later examined the structure of the musical motif from the point of view of association-dissociation and developed the idea of a logical ictus within the structure resulting in a relationship between metrical and logical feet. He saw the complicated relations between the logical, compositional and organizational parameters as constituting the individuality of a musical work and formed connections between this individuality and elements of genre. His publications include Spetsifika strukturï khorovogo proizvedeniya (‘Specifics of the Structure of a Choral Work’, Moscow, 1981) and the important monograph ‘Ėpicheskaya poėma’ Germana Galïnina: estetiko-analisticheskiye pazmïshleniya (‘The Epic Poem of German Galïnin: Aesthetic-Analytic Reflections’, Moscow, 1986), in which he demonstrates his analytical method. He also wrote introductions to a number of editions of Tchaikovsky's works and edited the second volume of the complete collected works of Tchaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy (Moscow, 1950).

GRIGORY PANTYELEV

Berbigant.

See Barbingant.

Berbiguier, Antoine (Benoît) Tranquille

(b Caderousse, Vaucluse, 21 Dec 1782; d Pontlevoy, Loir-et-Cher, 20 Jan 1838). French flautist. Though in youth intended for law he devoted much time to music and, having taught himself the flute, violin and cello, he left home at the age of 23 and entered the Paris Conservatoire. From 1813 to 1815 he served in the Gardes du Corps and thereafter lived in Paris as a soloist without any orchestral appointments of importance. Berbiguier strongly advocated a larger flute sound than was usual in France. The perfection of his technique was admired, as was the sweetness of his tone, although at least one of his pupils regarded it as rather coarse. His adherence to the Bourbons led him to flee Paris during the Revolution of 1830 and he settled in Pontlevoy, remaining there until his death. Berbiguier, like several others of his time, was a left-handed player. He composed prolifically for his instrument; among his published works are several good instruction books dating from 1818 to 1838, the last issued posthumously; partial translations into English were also published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.C. Miller: Bibliography of the Flute (Cleveland, OH, 1935)

T.E. Warner: Bibliography of Woodwind Instruction Books (Detroit, 1967)

PHILIP BATE

Berceuse

(Fr.: ‘cradle’, ‘lullaby’; Ger. Wiegenlied).

A gentle song intended for lulling young children to sleep. In instrumental music the term usually refers to a character-piece for piano. The defining work of the genre is Chopin's Berceuse in D major op.57 (1843–4), a model imitated by several other composers. Its most notable characteristics are compound time, a quiet dynamic level, a tonic pedal bass and a ‘rocking’ accompaniment oscillating between chords I and V, over which Chopin places a simple melody later varied with a profusion of filigree passagework.

The first version of Liszt's Berceuse (1854), also in D major, is indebted to Chopin's, but the revised version (1862) is much more elaborate, featuring complex chromatic excursions and an extended coda. The ‘rocking’ feel of compound metre is here achieved by the use of triplets within 4/4 time; the same is true of the berceuse from Gounod's opera La reine de Saba, which Liszt freely arranged as a piano berceuse (1865). The ‘Berceau’ section of Liszt's symphonic poem Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (1881–2) was originally written as a berceuse for piano solo, but departs further from the Chopin model, displaying the austerity of Liszt's later style. Other examples of the piano berceuse are by Balakirev (again in D) and Debussy (Berceuse héroïque). Ravel composed a Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré for violin and piano, while Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque op.42 and the ‘Berceuse’ from Stravinsky's The Firebird are scored for orchestra. One of the most beautiful and sophisticated vocal berceuses is Brahms's Geistliches Wiegenlied op.91 no.2; a famous operatic berceuse is in Benjamin Godard's opera Jocelyn (1888).

See also Lullaby.

KENNETH L. HAMILTON

Berchem, Jacquet de

(b Berchem-lez-Anvers, c1505; d Monopoli, before 2 March 1567). South Netherlandish composer, active in Italy. Prominent in the early development of the 16th-century madrigal, he is often confused with his like-named contemporaries Jacquet of Mantua, Jacques Buus and Jacques Brunel. Nothing is known of his early years. By the 1530s he was in Venice, probably as a protégé of Willaert. Most of his music was published there from 1538 on, some of it in tribute to local nobility; the motet Unica lux Venetum salutes Marcantonio Trevisan, statesman and noted music patron later elected doge, and Jacquet dedicated his first book of madrigals (1546) to Giovanni Bragadin, one of the great heroes of the Republic. He became an important figure in a regional circle (Willaert, Nasco, Parabosco, Ruffo and Camaterò) drawn to the new secular form, the madrigal. Frequent printings of his music extended his reputation rapidly. Antonfrancesco Doni praised him in the Dialogo and Lettere, and Rabelais counted him among the celebrated musicians of the age. In 1546 Jacquet was elected maestro di cappella of Verona Cathedral, a post he may have held until about 1550. The Capriccio (published in 1561 but probably composed much earlier) was dedicated to Alfonso II d’Este, not by the composer but by the publisher Gardane. So far as we know, Jacquet’s grand scheme to create music for Ariosto’s poetry produced indifferent response from the family most frequently extolled in its pages. Nonetheless, when Jacquet was seeking employment in the 1550s, he may have made inquiries of Alfonso, but his name does not then appear in surviving Este paylists. In any event, Jacquet went farther south to arrange himself an advantageous marriage and to put down family roots.

At the end of his quest, he introduced the 1555 madrigal book and a new roster of patrons: he acknowledged service not to the Este family but to Andrea Marzato, governor of Monopoli. Similarly, Glorioso pastore, one of the 1555 madrigals, addresses an unidentified prelate, not Ippolito II d’Este (whose uncle was Ariosto’s chief patron), but more likely Juan Alvarez de Toledo, Inquisitor-General at Rome, or Ottaviano Preconio, Bishop of Monopoli. Further suggestion of his relocation are madrigals issued at Rome between 1555 and 1565. Either Marzato or Preconio was in a position to introduce Jacquet to Giustina de Simeonibus, a member of a local noble family, and to promote the couple’s marriage, which took place by 1553. Giustina bore Jacquet two children. In addition to whatever salary he received from cathedral and governor was joined his wife’s income. Their joint resources must have afforded them a comfortable life. Jacquet died in Monopoli before 2 March 1567; Giustina survived a further three years.

More than 200 secular vocal works by Jacquet survive. Three volumes of his madrigals were published at Venice in 1546, 1555 (reprinted 1556) and 1561, and individual pieces were included in numerous secular anthologies well into the following century. The most popular (O s’io potessi donna and Con lei foss’io, stanza 6 of A qualunque animale) were also favourite subjects for instrumental intabulation. He brought a fresh, individual touch to the madrigal. Texts usually convey light, amorous situations arising typically from unrequited love. His favourite authors were Petrarch, Ariosto, Cassola and Tansillo. He was one of the first to attempt an extended setting of Ariosto; his Capriccio, a setting of 91 stanzas from Orlando furioso, is a striking example of his tendency to organize series of related texts into broad formal units. In fact, he may have originated the concept of a madrigal cycle with Alla dolc’ombra, printed in 1544, in which he also introduced the practice of varying the number of voices (from three to six) for successive stanzas. Jacquet also appears to have been the first to use ‘capriccio’ as a musical title. His madrigals show an interaction of styles. In the five-voice collection of 1546, the Netherlandish contrapuntal manner predominates, but in later works (usually in four voices) this style yields to syllabic, chordal declamation and the animated rhythms of note nere writing. He relied often on borrowed materials to define his forms, for example by transplanting the superius of De Ponte’s Con lei foss’io as the superius of his own A qualunque animale. Elsewhere a given ‘melody’ may turn out on scrutiny to be a lightly elaborated intonation taken from the traditions of poetic recitation or religious chant. In joining music to units of poetry, he chose the mode most appropriate for the text on the basis of its expressive power. Repeated formulae affirm a consistent modal organization and guide the flow of internal cadences.

The chansons and religious works reveal some of the same characteristics, but here Jacquet’s contributions are few, some borrow elements from other works, and in general they evoke popular examples of the genre. In some sources, sacred works are attributed variously to him, to Jacquet of Mantua, or simply to an unspecified Jacquet; only two masses and nine motets can safely be ascribed to Jacquet de Berchem. As both masses are based on chansons beginning with the word ‘mort’, they may have some extra-musical relationship. In the motet Peccantem me, he may have intended musical homage to Josquin: the Miserere ostinato of the sexta vox recalls Josquin’s famous setting of Psalm 1. In contrast to the freedom and originality of the madrigals, however, the motets generally adopt a conservative approach to the time-honoured constructivist techniques of cantus firmus, ostinato and canon.

WORKS

Editions:Trésor musical, ed. R.J. van Maldeghem, xi (Brussels, 1875); xxiv (Brussels, 1988) [M]60 Chansons zu 4 Stimmen, ed. R. Eitner, PÄMw, xxiii (1899) [E]Adriano Willaert opera omnia, ed. H. Zenk, CMM, iii/4 (1952) [Z]Jacobi Arcadelt opera omnia, ed. A. Seay, CMM, xxxi/2 (1970) [S]The Anthologies of Black-Note Madrigals, ed. D. Harrán, CMM, lxxiii/1–5 (1978–81) [H i–v]

sacred

Missa ‘Mort et fortune’, 4vv, 1544¹ (on Gombert’s chanson)

Missa ‘Mort ou merci’, 5vv, 1540³

Motets: Ave virgo gloriosa, 5vv, 1539⁷; Factum est verbum, 6vv, Z 75; Hodie in Jordane, 6vv, 1555¹²; In te signis radians, 6vv, Z 12; O felix regina, 5vv, 1539⁷; O lux et decus Hispaniae, 5vv, 1539⁷; Peccantem me quotidie, 6vv, Z 109; Qualis es dilecta mea, 6vv, 1539³; Unica lux Venetum, 4vv, 1549¹² (tribute to Marcantonio Trevisan)

secular

Madrigali a cinque voci di Giachetto de Berchem … libro primo (Venice, 1546), SCMad, i (1993) [1546]

Il primo libro de gli madrigali a quatro voci di Jachet Berchem (Venice, 1555) [1555]

Chansons: Celle qui est, 4vv, 1540¹³; Jehan de Lagny, 4vv, E 9; Las que mon dueil, 4vv, 1540¹⁶; Las qu’on, 5vv, D-Mbs 1508; L’aultre jour, 4vv, M xxiv, 20; Ma fille disoit, 4vv, Mbs; Plus ne suis, 4vv,Mbs; Que feu craintif, 4vv, E 11; Si envuieulx, 4vv, Mbs; Sur tous amans, 4vv, 1540¹⁷; Ung moins amant, 5vv, Mbs; Veu le grief, 5vv,Mbs

Madrigals: Alla dolc’ombra (Petrarch sestina), 3–6vv, 1544²²; Alma diletta sposa (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Al più cocente raggio, 4vv, 1555; Altro non è ’l mio amor (Cassola), 4vv, 1539²⁴; Amar un solo amante (Cassola), 4vv, 1546¹⁵, H i, 200; A qualunque animale (Petrarch sestina), 4vv, 1555, stanza 6, H i, 148; Aspro cor’e selvaggio (Petrarch), 4vv, 1561¹⁵; Ben mille volt’al ciel (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Chiunque in petto, 4vv, 1555; Chi vuol veder, 4vv, 1546¹⁵, H i, 195; Cogliete delle spine, 4vv, 1555; Come del gran pianet’, 5vv, 1546; Come havrà vita amor (Cassola), 5vv, 1546; Con pura bianca neve, 5vv, 1546; Consumandomi vo (Petrarch), 5vv, 1538²⁰; Così ti donn’il ciel, 5vv, 1546; Crudel tu per me vedi, 5vv, 1546

Deh cara la mia vita, 5vv, 1546; Deh com’è spenta, 5vv, 1546; Deh perchè così presto, 4vv, 1555; Dolor ch’hai fatto, 4vv, 1555; Donna che veramente, 5vv, 1546; Donna se voi volete, 4vv, ed. in Einstein IM, iii; D’un altro fuoco, 5vv, 1546; Fuggite ’l sono (Petrarch), 5vv, 1546; Giovene donna (Petrarch), 4vv, 1555; Glorioso pastore, 4vv, 1555; Hai lasso io mi credea (Tansillo sestina), 5vv, 1555²⁵; Hor cruda, hor pia, 5vv, 1546; Hor date orecchie, 5vv, 1546; Hor mi scacci, 5vv, M xi, 25; Hor vedi amor (Petrarch), 4vv, 1555; Il sol giamai non vidde, 6vv, 1546¹⁹; Io mi sento (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Io non saprei mai dir (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Ite caldi sospiri (Petrarch), 5vv, 1540¹⁸

L’alto mio amor, 5vv, 1546; Lasso che desiando (Petrarch), 5vv, 1544¹⁷; L’infinità beltà, 5vv, 1546; Madonna poi ch’uccider, 5vv, 1563¹¹; Madonna se volete, 6vv, 1541¹⁶; Mai non vo più cantar (Petrarch), 5vv, 1546; Ma non me ’l tolse (Petrarch), 5vv, 1546; Misero lui sopra tutti, 4vv, 1558¹³; Nasce dal pensier mio, 4vv, 1555; Non muto qualità, 4vv, 1555; Non vidd’il sol giammai, 4vv, 1555; O amorose mamelle, 5vv, 1538²⁰; Occhi pianget’e tu (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; O dolci sguardi (Petrarch), 4vv, 1555; O felici occhi miei, 5vv, 1546; O s’io potessi donna (i), 4vv, S 84; O s’io potessi donna (ii), Primo … libro del capriccio (see below)

Perchè non date voi, 4vv, S 86; Perchè non sono, 5vv, 1546; Poi che tante nemiche, 5vv, 1546; Pungente dardo, 4vv, S 90; Qual anima ignorante, 4vv, 1542¹⁷; Qual iniqua mia sorte, 5vv, 1542¹⁶; Qual mort’è strana più (Cassola), 5vv, 1546; Quando fra l’altre donne (Petrarch), 4vv, 1555; Quando son più lontan, 4vv, 1542¹⁷; Quante lagrime lasso (Petrarch), 4vv, 1540²⁰; Quei bei pensier, 5vv, 1546; Quell’ardente desir (Cassola), 4vv, 1546¹⁵, Hi, 204; Quel rossignol, 5vv, M xi, 29; Questi ch’inditio fan (Ariosto), 5vv, 1546

Ragion è ben (Petrarch), 4vv, S 108; S’amor non è (Petrarch), 6vv, 1546¹⁹; Sapete amanti, 4vv, S 111; Scende da bei vostri occhi, 5vv, 1546; Se la mia donna (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Se una fede amorosa (Petrarch), 5vv, 1540²⁰; Si è debile il filo (Petrarch), 5vv, J1546; Si vario ’l mio pensiero, 4vv, 1555; Troppo scarsa madonna, 4vv, 1542¹⁷ (also attrib. to Yvo); Vagh’augelletto (Petrarch), 4vv, 1555; Vist’ho più volt’ (Cassola), 4vv, 1555; Voi ch’ascoltate (Petrarch), 5vv, 1546; Voi pur udite, 4vv, J1555; Volgendo gli occhi (Petrarch), 5vv, 1538²⁰; Vostra fui e sarò, 4vv, S 133

Primo, secondo et terzo libro del capriccio di Jachetto Berchem con la musica da lui composta sopra le stanze del Furioso, 4vv (Ariosto: Orlando furioso, cantos 1, 8, 17, 23, 24, 30, 32, 38, 39, Venice, 1561); 5 madrigals ed. in University of Western Australia Music Series, x (Adelaide, 1978)

doubtful works

Acquiesce Domine, 5vv, 1559¹ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

Angelus Domini apparuit Zachariae, 5vv, I-TVca 5 (probably by J. Lupi)

Apri, apri la porta, 4vv, 1542¹⁷ (probably by Ivo Barry)

Canamus et bibamus, 4vv, 1531⁴ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

Che giova saettar, 4vv, 1542¹⁷ (probably by Naich)

Doulce espérance, 4vv, 1544⁹ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

Expurgate vetus fermentum, 5vv, 1552² (probably by Gombert)

Inclina Domine, aurem tuam, 5vv, 1552² (probably by Gombert)

In illo tempore … non turbetur cor vestrum, 5vv, 1553¹⁷ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

In te Domine, speravi, 5vv, 1553¹⁷ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

Io mi son giovinetta, 4vv, 1596¹⁹ (probably by A. Ferrabosco (i))

Non più ciance, 4vv, 1539²² (by Arcadelt)

Novo piacer, 4vv, 1542¹⁷ (incorrectly attrib. Berchem in 1558¹¹, probably by Acradelt)

Poi che ’l fiero destin, 4vv, 1539²² (probably by Arcadelt)

Se foste voi dal mondo, 5vv, 1540²⁰ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

Vostre dolce parole, 4vv, 1534¹⁶ (probably by Jacquet of Mantua)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

MGG1 (‘Verona’; E. Paganuzzi)

K. Widmaier: Jachet von Mantua und sein Motettenschaffen (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1953)

G.F. Malipiero, ed.: Antonfrancesco Doni: Dialogo della musica (Venice, 1964), 131 [incl. edn of Alla dolc’ombra]

P.T. Jackson: The Masses of Jachet of Mantua (diss., U. of North Carolina,1968)

A.M. Monterosso Vacchelli: L’opera musicale di Antonfrancesco Doni (Cremona,1969), 82 [incl. edn of Alla dolc’ombra]

A. Dunning: Die Staatsmotette, 1480–1555 (Utrecht, 1970)

J. Haar: ‘Altro non è il mio amor’, Words and Music: the Scholar’s View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 93–114

D. Hall: The Italian Secular Vocal Works of Jacquet Berchem (diss., Ohio State U., 1973)

G. Nugent: The Jacquet Motets and their Authors (diss., Princeton U.,1973)

D. Hall: ‘Jacquet Berchem and his Capriccio’, SMA, xii (1978), 35–44

P.T. Jackson: ‘Two Descendants of Josquin's “Hercules” Mass’, ML, lix (1978), 188–205

J. Haar: Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350–1600 (Berkeley, 1986)

D. Hall: ‘An Unknown Example of Modal Ordering in Cinquecento Music’, SMA, xxi (1987), 1–9

I. Fenlon and J.Haar: The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century: Sources and Interpretation (Cambridge and New York, 1988)

J. Haar: ‘The Capriccio of Giachet Berchem: a Study in Modal Organization’, MD, xlii (1988), 129–56

D. Morgante: La musica in Puglia tra rinascite e rivoluzioni (Bari, 1991)

J. Taricani: ‘The Early Works of Jacquet de Berchem: Emulation and Parody’,RBM, xlvi (1992), 53–79

S. Norman: Cyclic Musical Settings of Laments from Ariosto's ‘Orlando furioso’ (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1994)

GEORGE NUGENT

Berchenshaw [Berkenshaw], John.

See Birchensha, John.

Beregan [Berengani, Bergani], Nicolò

(b Vicenza, 21 Feb 1627; d Venice, 17 Dec 1713). Italian lawyer, poet and librettist. He was one of the best-known lawyers in Venice and was widely respected as a literary figure and classical scholar. Between 1656 and 1660 he was exiled because of a personal vendetta against a German merchant. He was a member of three academies: the Dodonei in Venice, the Concordi in Ravenna and the Gelati in Bologna. During his period of activity as a librettist he was in contact with the musically italianate imperial court and corresponded with Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover, a principal military and musical supporter of the Venetians. Beregan’s librettos, generally in a heroic vein, were set by some of the best-known composers of the time, and were revised or drawn upon by other librettists. Genserico (1669) was the source for the libretto of Handel’s uncompleted opera of that name; and Handel also set Pariati’s 1724 revision (for Rome) of Beregan’s Giustino (1683, ed. R. Strohm (Milan, 1991)). Domenico Scarlatti wrote an opera based on Giustino to a text by Convò.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G.E. Ferrari)

Obituary, Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, xviii (1714), 482

C.B. Schmidt: ‘An Episode in the History of Venetian Opera: the Tito Commission’, JAMS xxxi (1978), 442–66

R. Bossard: Giovanni Legrenzi, ‘Il Giustino’: eine monographische Studie (Baden-Baden, 1988)

WILLIAM C. HOLMES

Beregovsky, Moisey (Yakovlevich) [Aron-Moysha]

(b Termakhovka, Kiev Province, 28 Dec 1892; d Kiev, 12 Aug 1961). Ukrainian ethnomusicologist. From 1915 to 1920 he studied composition at the Kiev Conservatory with Yavorsky; he also led choirs and taught music in Jewish schools. He continued his composition studies at the Petrograd Conservatory with Steinberg (1922–4) and from 1927 he concentrated on the methodology of folklore studies with Kvitka at the musical ethnography department of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences in Kiev. From 1929 to 1949 he headed the department for musical folklore at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture of the academy (in 1936 the Institute was reduced to the Cabinet of the study of the Jewish language, literature and folklore; in 1949 it was liquidated). He undertook numerous expeditions to transcribe Jewish musical folklore (1200 recorded cylinders, 4000 transcriptions), and he collected and transcribed Ukrainian, and later Bashkir folklore material. He also taught at the Kiev Conservatory (1937–41), where he headed the department for musical ethnography. He began work in 1930 on his five-volume study (of which only one volume has been published), Yevreyskiy muzïkal'nïy fol'klor (‘Jewish musical folklore’) and defended his Kandidat dissertation on Jewish folk instrumental music at the Moscow Conservatory in 1944; he also took part in expeditions to collect the musical folklore of the Jewish ghettos in 1944. A victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign, he was arrested on 18 August 1950; on 7 February 1951 he was accused of ‘group anti-Soviet agitation’ and sentenced to ten years imprisonment in Siberia. He was released in 1955 and rehabilitated in 1956 (Shostakovich played an important role in his rehabilitation). Beregovsky’s papers are held in the Russian Institute for the History of Arts in St Petersburg

WRITINGS

ed. M. Viner: Yevreyskiy muzïkal'nïy fol'klor [Jewish musical folklore], i: Rabochiye i revolyutsionnïye pesni: pesni o rekrutchine i voyne [Workers’ and revolutionary songs: songs about recruiting and the war] (Moscow, 1934), Eng. trans. in Slobin, 1982

Jidiše instrumentale folks-muzik (Kiev, 1937 [in Yiddish with Russ. trans.]; also pubd as Jidiser muzik-folklor, Moscow, 1934; Eng. trans. in Slobin, 1982)

with I. Fefer: Jidiše folks-lider (Kiev, 1938)

Yevreyskaya narodnaya instrumental'naya muzïka [Jewish folk instrumental music] (diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1944)

ed. S. Aksyuk:Yevreyskiye narodnïye pesni [Jewish folk songs] (Moscow, 1962; Eng. trans. in Slobin, 1982)

‘Izmenenniy doriyskiy lad v evreyskom muzïkal'nom fol'klore: k voprosu o semanticheskikh svoystvakh lada’ [An altered Dorian mode in Jewish musical folklore: a contribution to the semantic characterization of a mode], Problemï muzïkal'nogo fol'klora narodov SSSR.III., ed. I. Zemkovsty (Moscow, 1973), 367–88 [Eng. trans. in Slobin, 1982]

ed. and trans. M. Slobin: Old Jewish Folk Music: the Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski (Philadelphia, 1982)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Braun: ‘The Autobiography of Moshe Beregovsky’, Tatslil, no.19 (1979), 159–61 [in Heb.]

M. Slobin, ed.: Old Folk Jewish Music: the Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski (Philadelphia, 1982)

M. Slobin: ‘A Fresh Look at Beregovsky’s Folk Music Research’, EthM, xxx (1986), 253–60

J. Braun: ‘The Unpublished Volumes of Moshe Beregovski’s Jewish Musical Folklore’, Israel Studies in Musicology, iv (1987), 125–44

J. Braun: ‘Mosche Beregovski: zum Schicksal eines sowjetischen Ethnomusikologen’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xxxiii (1988), 70–80

I.I. Zemtsovsky: ‘Entsiklopedist yevreyskoga fol'klora: k 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya Moiseya Beregovskogo’, MAk (1993), no.1, pp.169–74

Arfï na verbakh: prizvaniye i sud'ba Moiseya Beregovskogo [Harps in the pussy willows: the calling and the fate of Moisey Beregovsky], ed. E. Beregovskaya (Moscow and Jerusalem, 1994)

G. V. KOPÏTOVA

Beregszászy, Lajos

(b Békés, 1817; d Budapest, 4 April 1891). Hungarian piano maker. He learned his trade in Temesvár (now Timisoara, Romania), Pest, Vienna, Hamburg (1839–40), London (from 1840) and Paris. He settled in Vienna in 1844, where he won an exhibition medal in 1845. His firm transferred to Pest in 1846. Until 1879 he produced many pianos for both western and eastern Europe. Among his inventions was a curved sounding board, the so-called ‘Beregszászy system’, the patent for which was bought by Bösendorfer. His pianos were honoured at the London Exhibition in 1862 and the Paris Exhibitions of 1856 and 1867.

WRITINGS

Eszmék a zongorahangfenék alkatának megjavításához [Observations concerning improvements in the construction of the sounding-board of pianofortes] (Pest, 1862)

Die Claviere auf der jetzigen Pariser Weltausstellung (Pest, 1867)

Die Steinway'sche Doppelmensur im Lichte der Praxis (Budapest, 1875)

Im Interesse unserer Clavier-Industrie (Budapest, 1879)

DEZSŐ LEGÁNY

Bereketes, Petros [Bereketēs, Petros; Byzantios, ho Melōdos, Glykys, Tzelepēs, Kouspazoglou]

(b Constantinople, ?1665; d ?1725). Romaic (Greek) composer and cantor. Though undoubtedly influenced by the works of Panagiotes the New Chrysaphes, Germanos of New Patras and Balasios, he appears never to have been directly associated with the patriarchal court that nurtured his older colleagues. His own substantial contributions to their continuing renewal of Byzantine chanting were made instead from the Constantinopolitan parish church of St Constantine (in the district of Hypsomatheia), where Bereketes held successively the offices of reader, domestikos and prōtopsaltēs.

Among the traditional repertories, Bereketes virtually ignored the stichērarion and heirmologion recently ‘beautified’ by Panagiotes, Germanos and Balasios in order to focus his compositional skills on the more structurally malleable chants of the Papadikē. He also brought the newer paraliturgical genre of the kalophonic heirmos to its highest point with the composition of 45 heirmoi for use in monastic refectories or during the distribution of antidoron (blessed bread) at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy. Cultivating what Chatzēgiakoumēs and Stathēs have described as a comparatively popular style of liturgical music, he occasionally composed works incorporating elements of the Arabo-Persian tradition of Ottoman secular music. Among his chants for Orthros are settings of the first and second polyeleoi (Psalms cxxxiv, cxxxv), the Marian polyeleos (Psalm xliv, ed. Phōkaeus, 1834), nine responsories with kratēmata for the Matins Gospel lection, Lenten troparia for Psalm l, eight Magnificat verses for the 9th ode of the kanon, and modally ordered series of eight Great Doxologies and of eight melismatic Trisagia for the Great Doxology. His eucharistic chants include 20 Cherubic Hymns (Liturgy of St John Chrysostom) and sets of communion verses for Sundays, weekdays and feasts. (For a fuller list of works see Stathēs, 1995.)

Bereketes was the first composer of Byzantine chant to have had his complete works transmitted posthumously as a unit. Despite their transcription into Chrysanthine notation by both Gregorios the Protopsaltes and Chourmouzios the Archivist, his complete works began to be published only in the late 1990s (see Karakatsanēs). Consequently, with the notable exception of his kalophonic heirmoi, which were transcribed into the New Method by Gregorios (ed. Phōkaeus, 1835), only a few of his chants have circulated widely in printed editions. The most popular of these is a massive setting in all eight modes for antiphonal choirs of the vigil hymn Theotoke parthene (‘Virgin Mother of God’) that lasts at least 40 minutes in Chrysanthine transcription (ed. Phōkaeus, 1824).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

chrysanthine music editions

T. Phōkaeus, ed.: Tameion anthologias [Treasury of an anthology] (Constantinople, 1824), i, 128–45 [transcr. Chourmouzios the Archivist]

T. Phōkaeus, ed.: Tameion anthologias [Treasury of an anthology] (Constantinople, 1834), i, 181–203 [transcr. Gregorios the Protopsaltes]

T. Phōkaeus, ed.: Heirmologion kalophōnikon (Constantinople, 1835), 21–48, 52–5, 70–75, 85–7, 94–112, 115–24, 126–35, 145–50, 169–83 [transcr. Gregorios the Protopsaltes]

C. Karakatsanēs, ed.: Byzantinē potamēis [Byzantine river], ii–iii: Apanta Petrou Bereketou [Complete works of Petros Bereketes] (Athens, 1996–8)

studies

G.T. Stathēs: ‘Hē synchysē tōn triōn Petrōn (dēl. Bereketē, Peloponnēsiou kai Byzantiou’ [The confusion of the three Peters (i.e. Bereketes, Peloponnesios and Byzantios)], Byzantina, iii (1971), 213–51

G.T. Stathēs: Ta cheirographa byzantinēs mousikēs: Hagion Oros [The MSS of Byzantine Music: Holy Mountain] (Athens, 1975–93)

S.I. Karas: Hē byzantinē mousikē palaiographikē ereuna en Helladi [The palaeographic investigation of Byzantine music in Greece] (Athens, 1976)

M. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Cheirographa ekklēsiastikēs mousikēs (1453–1820) [MSS of ecclesiastical music] (Athens, 1980)

G.T. Stathis: ‘The “Abridgements” of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Compositions’, Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin, no.44 (1983), 16–38

D. Conomos: ‘Sacred Music in the Post-Byzantine Era’, The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe, ed. L. Clucas (Boulder, CO, 1988), 83–105 [based on Chatzēgiakoumēs, 1980]

G.T. Stathēs: ‘Petros Bereketēs ho Melōdos’ [Petros Berektes the Melodist], Melourgoi tou iz aiōna [Composers of the 17th century], ed. E. Spanopoulou (Athens, 1995), 17–21, 28

sound recording

Petros Bereketēs ho Melōdos (a' tetarton IĒ' aionos): hē zōē kai to ergon tou [Petros Bereketes the Melodist (1st quarter of the 15th century): his life and work], dir. G.T. Stathēs, Institute for Byzantine Musicology, Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Composers, IBM 101 (1975)

ALEXANDER LINGAS

Berengerius de Orehem.

See Bernger von Horheim.

Berenguier de Palazol [Parazol, Pararol, Pararols, Palaol, Palaiol, Palon]

(b ?Palol, nr Elna [Elne]; fl 12th century). Troubadour. He is traditionally considered to be one of the first Catalan troubadours. He was born in the comté of Roussillon, and was in the service of Jaufre III, Count of Roussillon, who died in 1164. Although names similar to Berenguier’s appear in documents between 1196 and 1209, it seems that the name was fairly common, so these may not be references to the troubadour. 12 of his poems have survived, eight of which have melodies transmitted by a single manuscript, F-Pn fr.22543, f.36–7. The melodies are in a simple style but only four are in a conventional AAB or through-composed form. Domna, si totz temps vivia consists of ten heptasyllabic lines grouped into three sections: abba cca dda. This division is followed by the music which progressively varies the opening section: ABCD B¹C¹D¹ B²C²D². A similar technique is found in Domna, la gensor qu’om veja.

WORKS

Editions:La música a Catalunya fins al segle XIII, ed. H. Anglès, PBC, x (1935/R)Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours, ed. F. Gennrich, SMM, iii, iv, xv (1958–65)Las cançons dels trobadors, ed. I. Fernandez de la Cuesta and R. Lafont (Toulouse, 1979)The Extant Troubadour Melodies, ed. H. van der Werf and G. Bond (Rochester, NY, 1984)

Ab la fresca clardat, PC 47.1

Aital domna com eu sai, PC 47.3

Bona domna, cui rics pretz fai valer, PC 47.4

De la gensor qu’om vej’ al meu semblan, PC 47.5

Domna, la gensor qu’om veja, PC 47.6

Domna, si totz temps vivia, PC 47.7

Tan m’abelis jois et amors e chans, PC 47.11

Totz temoros e doptans, PC 47.12

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Milá y Fontanals: De los trovadores en España (Barcelona, 1861; ed. C. Martínez and F.R. Manrique, Barcelona, 1966)

M. de Riquer: Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos, i (Barcelona, 1975)

E. Aubrey: The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, IN, 1996)

For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

IAN R. PARKER

Berens, (Johann) Hermann

(b Hamburg, 7 April 1826; d Stockholm, 9 May 1880). Swedish composer and pianist of German origin. He first studied music with his father, Karl Berens, a flautist and composer, and later with Karl Reissiger in Dresden. In 1847 he settled in Sweden, where he soon made a name for himself as a pianist, playing in chamber music concerts in Stockholm. He was music director to the hussar regiment at Örebro from 1849 to 1860. He then returned to Stockholm to become music director at the Mindre (or Nya) Teatern (Dramatiska Teatern after 1863). He was appointed teacher of composition at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1861 and professor in 1868; for a time he was also Queen Lovisa’s piano teacher. His musical style ranges from a Schumannesque expressive depth to an elegant salon flavour; his stage works follow Lortzing's vein.

WORKS

stage works first performed in Stockholm

Violetta (operetta, 3, J. Granberg), Royal, 10 Jan 1855

En sommarnattsdröm (operetta, 2, F. Rosier and A. de Leuven), Nya, 27 Oct 1856

Lully och Quinault (operetta, 2, Dumanoir and Clairville), Royal, 15 Nov 1859

En utflykt i det gröna (comedy with song, 2, Sardon), Nya, 15 Sept 1862

Riccardo (op, 3, E. Scribe), Royal, ?Feb 1869

Str qt, op.78; 4 Gesellschaftsquartetten, pf 4 hands, vn, vc, opp.23, 48, 72, 80 (Hamburg, c1850–69); études, pf; fantasia, org

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SBL (J. Rabe)

Obituaries: Ny illustrerad tidning, xvi (1880), 183 only; Svea, xxxvii (1881), 237–9

KATHLEEN DALE/MARTIN TEGEN

Berenstadt, (Sebastiano) Gaetano

(b Florence, 7 June 1687; bur. Florence, 9 Dec 1734). Italian alto castrato. His German father Giorgio was timpanist to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Gaetano apparently sang in 55 dramatic works, 33 of which were freshly composed, during his 27-year career. Since ‘Gaetano Beynstetter’ first appears in Vignola's revision of Le regine di Macedonia (1708, Naples), he might have originally studied at a Neapolitan conservatory. He also studied with Pistocchi in Bologna, and his next known appearances were at the feast honouring St Gaudentius in Novara (1711), where Pistocchi was the leading alto castrato, and in Predieri's new opera La virtù in trionfo, o sia La Griselda (1711, Bologna). After appearing in two pasticcios at Florence during Carnival 1712, he obtained a post at the court of the Palatine elector in Düsseldorf, where he presumably sang cantatas and serenatas as well as roles in von Wilderer's new Amalasunta (1713) and in the anonymous Annibale pacificatore (1715). After the elector, Johann Wilhelm, died in June 1716, Berenstadt went to London, where he performed in four operas during the first half of 1717: Rinaldo (a Handel revival), Pyrrhus and Demetrius, Vincislao, re di Polonia and Tito Manlio (a new work by Ariosti). During this London trip Berenstadt wrote the first of his 42 extant letters (1717–33) to Zamboni, a Florentine merchant and diplomat who lived in London. Berenstadt's correspondence (especially his letter of 1724 to ‘maestro’ Pistocchi) reveals his great love of books and the visual arts. He bought and sold many rare books and unique works of art in order to earn money, and assembled a fine library including many incunabula. In 1718 Apostolo Zeno recommended him as a ‘worthy professor of music’ who had ‘an excellent knowledge of our best authors and superb taste in the realms of Italian poetry and eloquence’.

No Italian operas were performed in London between June 1717 and April 1720, and Berenstadt moved in September 1717 to the court of the elector of Saxony, Friedrich August I (King August II of Poland). During his year there he sang in Lotti's new Gl'odi delusi dal sangue at Dresden and was handsomely paid 600 louis d'or plus living expenses. In 1719 he performed during Carnival at Rome in Gasparini's new Lucio Vero and Astianatte, during spring at Bologna in two revivals, then in August at Brescia in an unidentified work. At Bologna he was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica on 3 July 1719. In 1720 he sang at Rome during Carnival in Gasparini's new Amore e maestà and Faramondo, then at Florence in his Lucio Vero. In 1721 he was at Milan during Carnival for two revivals, then at Padua for a summer production of Chelleri's new Temistocle. His only appearances in Venice were for three newly written scores of 1721–2: Antonio Pollarolo's Plautilla, Capelli’s Giulio Flavio Crispo and a collaboration (Venceslao) between these two composers and Porta.

Berenstadt then returned to London for two seasons with the Royal Academy of Music. In 1722–4 he performed in new works by three composers: Handel's Ottone, re di Germania, Flavio, re di Longobardi and Giulio Cesare in Egitto; Ariosti's Caio Marzio Coriolano, Vespasiano and Aquilio consolo; and Bononcini's Erminia, Farnace and Calfurnia. In summer 1724 he and four other singers from the Royal Academy performed Handel's Ottone and Giulio Cesare in Paris. His main operatic role throughout his career was that of a powerful man whose insidious machinations keep young lovers scurrying suspensefully until the happy ending. Metastasio affirmed this in a letter of 1732, when he said that the downright detestable Learco in his new Issipile would be a fine part for Berenstadt. He never portrayed a woman, perhaps because he had a ‘huge, unwieldy figure’ (Burney), which is clearly visible in John Vanderbank's engraving of June 1723 (see illustration) and in Ghezzi's caricature of 17 May 1725 (I-Rvat). His arias are usually blustery, filled with jagged leaps and with melismas of only moderate length. Languishing solos and stepwise passagework are avoided. His range is usually an 11th (a to d'') and rarely a 13th (g to e''). In Italy he sang from four to eight solos or duets in each opera, while at London in 1722–4 he usually performed only three solos.

After a ‘sabbatical’ in 1725, he began to sing music by the best-known galant composers. At Rome in 1726 he sang in three new works: Vinci's Didone abbandonata and Sarri's Valdemaro and Il sacrificio di Jefte. During the rest of 1726 and Carnival 1727 he appeared in four new works at Naples: Hasse's Sesostrate and Astarto, Vinci's Ernelinda and Sarri's Siroe re di Persia. During Carnival 1728 he sang at Florence in two revivals of Vinci scores. The following year he once again sang in new works at Rome: Auletta's Ezio and Vinci's Semiramide riconosciuta. Since his father had died, he and one of his sisters moved to Naples in mid-1728; but there he failed to obtain a court appointment and by 1730 he was back in Florence, where during Carnival 1730 he sang in one Pasticcio and in Porta’s new Il Gran Tamerlano. Between October 1730 and Carnival 1731 he sang in three revivals at Livorno. His edition of Benvenuto Cellini's Vita was published at Florence in 1731. At Rome during Carnival 1732 he sang in the revival of the Didone abbandonata he had helped to create in 1726 and in Giai's new Demetrio. His final two productions were revivals at Florence during Carnival 1734. He suffered increasingly from rheumatism during his last years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

SartoriL

J. Morelli, ed.: Lettere di Apostolo Zeno, cittadino veneziano istorico e poeta cesareo (Venice, 1785), ii, 442

B. Brunelli, ed.: Tutte le opere di Pietro Metastasio (Milan, 1943–54), iii, 61

U. Kirkendale: Antonio Caldara: sein Leben und seine venezianisch-römischen Oratorien (Graz and Cologne, 1966), 61

R.L. and N.W. Weaver: A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater, 1590–1750 (Detroit, 1978)

C. Vitali: ‘Gaetano Berenstadt tra Roma, Firenze e Napoli: interessi culturali e frequentazioni erudite di un “eunuco letterato”’, Antonio Vivaldi, Venice 1981, 515–19

F.Z. Boccazzi: ‘Episodi di pittura veneziana a Vienna nel Settecento’, Venezia Vienna: il mito della cultura veneziana nell'Europa asburgica, ed. G. Romanelli (Milan, 1983), 25–88

L. Lindgren: ‘La carriera di Gaetano Berenstadt, contralto evirato (ca.1690–1735)’, RIM, xix (1984), 36–112

W. Dean and J.M. Knapp: Handel's Operas, 1704–1726 (Oxford, 1987, 2/1996)

L. Lindgren: ‘Musicians and Librettists in the Correspondence of Gio. Giacomo Zamboni (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Rawlinson Letters 116–138)’, RMARC, no.24 (1991) [whole issue]

M.A. Morelli Timpanaro: ‘Su Gaetano Berenstadt, contralto (Firenze, 1687–1734), e sui suoi amici’, Studi italiani, ix/2 (1997), 145–211

LOWELL LINDGREN

Beretta, Bonaventura

(b Saronno, nr Milan; fl 1635). Italian composer and organist. In 1635 he was maestro di cappella and organist of the Basilica di S Antonio, Padua. He is known by a set of vesper psalms for two to four voices, Clio sacra Davidicos psalmos vespertinis horis adscriptos, notis musicis decantans (Venice, 1635 [one partbook dated 1636]). A collection of solo motets was listed in Vincenti's catalogue of 1658 (MischiatiI). He may have been related to the composer Lodovico Beretta (fl 1604), known only by Il primo libro delle canzoni for four to eight instruments (Milan, 1604).

Beretta [Beretti, Berretta], Francesco

(b ?Rome; d Rome, 6 July 1694). Italian composer and cleric. There is no evidence that he was related to Bonaventura or Lodovico Beretta. From May 1657 until October 1664 he was organist and maestro di cappella of Tivoli Cathedral. By 1675 he was maestro di cappella of Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, where he remained a canon regular. He is listed as maestro di cappella for the fourth oratorio of the Arciconfraternita del SS Crocifisso in the church of S Marcello, Rome, on 2 April 1677. The following year he became maestro of the Cappella Giulia in S Pietro, a post he held until his death. Three of G.B. Caifabri's sacred collections (RISM 1667¹, 1675³, 1683¹) each contain a piece by him. This small representation in contemporary prints suggests that he had no great reputation in his own time. However, Fétis claimed that polychoral masses, psalms and motets for six to 24 voices in four to six choirs by Beretta survive in the Vatican archives and that a number of eight-part settings of psalms are in the Santini Collection (D-MÜs): certainly settings of four works for eight voices in two choirs survive in the library of the Cappella Giulia. Charpentier copied and annotated Beretta's Missa mirabiles elationes maris for 16 voices in four choirs (F-Pn Vm¹ 260).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

G. Radiciotti: L'arte musicale in Tivoli nel secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII (Tivoli, 1907, enlarged 2/1921)

J.M. Llorens: Le opere musicali della Cappella Giulia (Vatican City, 1971)

C. Cessac: Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Paris, 1988), 433–6

JOHN HARPER

Berettari, Aurelio

(fl Fiesole, 1654–61). Italian composer. He was a member of the Congregation of S Girolamo, Fiesole, as is stated on the title-pages of his three surviving publications: Motetti a voce sola op.1 (Venice, 1654); Compieta da capella a otto con il basso per l’organo a beneplacito, con le letanie a otto voci concertate con otto istromenti e ripieni a beneplacito op.3 (Venice, 1656); and Liber primus missarum, for four and five voices, op.4 (Milan, 1661). In op.1 the continuo part, for organ, plays a prominent role: the organist is directed to improvise short interludes between the vocal sections, and several of the bass lines are elaborate and include passages in dialogue with the vocal part. Op.3, which is all for double chorus, contains five psalms and a hymn as well as the litanies, which, by virtue of the additional instrumental parts – eight concertante lines as well as the optional doubling of the voices – form the most immediately impressive section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GaspariC

M. Donà: La stampa musicale a Milano fino all’anno 1700 (Florence, 1961), 13

GIUSEPPE VECCHI

Berezovsky, Boris

(b Moscow, 4 Jan 1969). Russian pianist. He studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Elizabeth Virsaladze. In 1987, aged 18, he won fourth prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition. A critically acclaimed Wigmore Hall recital followed in 1988, and in 1990 he won first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Competition. He excels in repertory calling for the highest virtuosity, such as Liszt's Transcendental Studies, Chopin's 24 Etudes and much of the Russian Romantic repertory. He has also performed major works by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and others. His innate modesty is countered by formidable reserves of power and a capacity to rise to the greatest technical challenges with seeming nonchalance. His recordings include Rachmaninoff's D minor Sonata and Variations on a Theme by Chopin, and a recital of Musorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Balakirev, Medtner and Lyadov. He has also recorded with the Russian violinist, Vadim Repin.

BRYCE MORRISON

Berezovs'ky, Maksym Sozontovych

(b Hlukhiv, 16/27 Oct 1745; d St Petersburg, 24 March/4 April 1777). Ukrainian composer and singer. The scantly documented facts of his life have to be gleaned from early biographies and contemporary accounts of performances in St Petersburg and Italy. He began his musical training early, possibly at the Hlukhiv choir school, a source of many singers for the St Petersburg court, or at the Kiev Academy. He reportedly began composing three- and four-part motets when still a boy. On his arrival in St Petersburg, probably in the first half of 1757, he was employed by the court of Peter III as a principal singer at the Oranienbaum theatre, where he played the role of Poro in Francesco Araja's Alessandro nell'Indie in 1759 and that of Ircano in Vincenzo Manfredini's Semiramide riconosciuta in 1760. (Uncertainty as to whether these were soprano or tenor roles has led to some doubt about his age at the time and hence about the ascribed year of his birth.) After Catherine the Great assumed the throne in 1762, Berezovs'ky remained as a court singer but no longer sang principal operatic roles; this may have been because his voice had broken, or due to a change in policy in favour of foreign musicians.

In the early 1760s Berezovs'ky began more intensive study of composition, first under Francesco Zoppis and later under Galuppi. Several choral works are documented from this period. He was then sent (perhaps in autumn 1766) to continue his studies in Italy, where he became the first eastern Slavic composer to be sent to study music in Western Europe and to be admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna (15 May 1771). Several letters from the Russian court to Padre Martini indicate that Berezovs'ky may have studied with Martini in Bologna. Berezovs'ky was also the first Eastern Slav to compose an Italian opera seria; his opera seria Demofoonte was successfully performed in Livorno during Carnival 1773 and was repeated in Florence in the following November. During his stay in Italy Berezovs'ky also composed a violin sonata and possibly some choral works.

By October 1773 he had returned to St Petersburg, and despite his successes in Italy, he was assigned a humble post in the imperial court chapel. This appointment has been attributed variously to Catherine the Great's preference for Italian musicians, to her reputed antipathy towards Ukrainian-born (‘little Russian’) musicians and to the style of Berezovs'ky's music, which was not sufficiently ‘Classical’ or international for Catherine's taste. For several years Berezovs'ky continued to compose sacred music for the court, but he was never promoted. The prominent statesman Grigory Potyomkin promised him the directorship of his projected music academy in Kremenchuk, but before these plans could be realized, Berezovs'ky died, at the age of 32, in abject poverty and apparently as a result of suicide. A letter from the court official Yelagin to the empress states that there was insufficient money left in Berezovs'ky's estate to pay for a proper burial.

Both Berezovs'ky's meagre recognition in St Petersburg and the questions surrounding his death have inspired much literary embroidery. Among the representations of his life are a three-act play by P.A. Smirnov (1841); a novella by the poet Nestor Kukol'nik (1844); an essay in a collection on historically prominent Ukrainians, Neopalyma kupyna (‘Burning Bush’, 1968); and a veiled reference to him in Andrey Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia (1983).

Few of Berezovs'ky's works survive. Only four arias remain from Demofoonte, and out of a total of up to 40 choral works noted in 19th-century catalogues and advertisements approximately half survive, some of them recovered only in recent years. His choral music is nevertheless regarded by Russians and Ukrainians as providing an important link, in their musical history, between the Baroque style of his predecessor Mykola Dilets'ky and the Classical style of his successor Dmytro Bortnyans'ky. The choral concerto Ne otverzhi mene vo vremya starosti (‘Forsake me not in my old age’), in particular, is a mainstay of the Russian and Ukrainian choral repertories.

WORKS

only those extant

sacred choral

Edition: ed. M. Yurchenko (Kiev, 1995) [Y]

for SATB unless otherwise stated

Obednya (Cycle of hymns from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom): 1 Slava inynye, Yedinorodnïy Sïne [Glory to thee, only-begotten son]; 2 Priidite, poklonimsya [Come, let us bow down]; 3 Izhe kheruvimï [Cherubic Hymn]; 4 Vyeruyu [Credo], J; 5 Milost' mira [A mercy of peace]; 6 Dostoyno yest' [It is truly meet]; 7 Otche nash [Our Father], B part only, RUS-Mcm; entire cycle transcr. for TTBB (St Petersburg, 1914); Y

Comm anthems: Blazheni yazhe izbral [Blessed are those whom You have chosen], RUS-SPia; Chashu spaseniya [Cup of salvation]; Khvalite Hospoda s nebes [Praise the Lord from the heavens], 3 versions, SPia; Raduytesya pravednii [Rejoice O ye righteous], SPia; Tvoryay anhelï svoya dukhi [He has made His angels spirits]; V pamyat' vechnuyu budet pravednik [In eternal memory the righteous shall be], SPia; Vo vsyu zemlyu [Their sound is gone out into all lands], J; Znamenasya na nas [There has been signed on us], SPia

Choral concs.: Boh sta v sonme Bohov [God stands in the assembly of Gods], Y; Da voskresnet Boh [Let God arise], SPia; Dokole, Hospodi, zabudesh' imya moye [How long, O Lord, will you forget my name], SPia; Hospod' votsarisya [The Lord is become king], misattrib. T. Traetta in a 1793 catalogue, pubd in anthology (St Petersburg, 1903), Y; Ne otverzhi mene vo vremya starosti [Forsake me not in my old age], 2 versions, 1st version, 8vv, lost, 2nd version, SATB, GB-Lbl, ed. V. Morosan (Washington DC, 1991)Y; Tebye Boha khvalim [Te Deum laudamus], A-Wh; Unser Vater (Leipzig, 1813)

15 others mentioned in some sources, all doubtful/lost

Hic vir despiciens, cantus firmus motet, I-Bc* [submitted to Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna]

other works

Demofoonte (os, 3, P. Metastasio), Livorno, carn. 1773, 4 arias extant: Mentre il cor con meste voci, Misero pargoletto, Per lei fra l'armi, Prudente mi chiedi? I-Fc, all ed. M. Yurchenko, and V. Belyakov (Kiev, 1988)

Sonata, C, vn, hpd, 1772, F-Pn, ed. M. Stepanenko (Kiev, 1983)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (R. Taruskin) [incl. further bibliography]

MooserA

N. Kukol'nik: ‘Maksim Sozontovich Berezovsky’, Skazka za skazkoy, iv (St Petersburg, 1844), 281–396; repr. in Sochineniya, ii (St Petersburg, 1852)

N.A. Lebedev: Berezovsky i Bortnyansky kak kompositorï tserkovnogo peniya [Berezovs'ky and Bortnyansky as composers of church music] (St Petersburg, 1882)

P. Matsenko: Dmytro Stepanovych Bortnians'ky i Maksym Sozontovych Berezovs'ky (Winnipeg, 1959)

Yu. Kolisnychenko and S. Plachynda: Neopalyma kupyna [Burning Bush] (Kiev, 1968)

V. Vytvyts'ky: Maksym Sozontovych Berezovs'ky: zhyttya i tvorchist' [Berezovs'ky: life and works] (Jersey City, 1974)

N. Herasymova-Persyds'ka: Khorovyy Kontsert na Ukraïni v XVII–XVIII St. [The choral concerto in the Ukraine in the 17th to 18th centuries] (Kiev, 1978)

Yu.V. Keldïsh: ‘Ital'yanskaya opera M. Berezovskogo’, Ocherki i issledovaniya po istorii russkoy muzïki (Moscow, 1978), 113–29

N. Herasymova-Persyds'ka: Partesnïy konsert v istorii muzïkal'noy kul'turï [The partesny concerto in the history of musical culture] (Moscow, 1983)

M. Rïtsareva: Kompozitor M.S. Berezovsky (Leningrad, 1983)

M. Yurchenko: ‘Ukraïns'ki fol'klorni tradytsiï v tvorchosti Maksyma Berezovs'koho’ [Ukrainian folkloric traditions in the works of Maxym Berezovs'ky], Narodna tvorchist' ta etnohrafiya (1985), no.2, 18–26

M. Yurchenko: ‘Neizvestnïye proizvedeniya Berezovskogo’ [Unknown works of Berezovs'ky], SovM (1986), no.2, 99–100

M. Rïtsareva: ‘Bïlo li samoubiystvo?’ [Was it suicide?], Iskusstvo Leningrada (1990), no.2, 73–6

MARIKA KUZMA

Berezowsky, Nikolai [Berezovsky, Nikolay Tikhonovich]

(b St Petersburg, 4/17 May 1900; d New York, 27 Aug 1953). American composer, conductor and violinist of Russian birth. He studied at the court chapel in St Petersburg (1908–16) and played the violin at the Saratov opera (1917–19) and the Bol'shoy (1919–20). In 1920 he left the USSR; he studied violin with Robert Pollack in Vienna and in 1922 reached New York, where he was a member of the New York PO (1923–9). In 1927 he held a fellowship to study composition with Rubin Goldmark and violin with Pawel Kochański at the Juilliard School; he also conducted the Atwater Kent Radio Concerts (1926–7). In 1928 he became an American citizen. The following year he left the USA to live in Europe, but returned after two years and from 1935 to 1940 was a member of the Coolidge String Quartet; he was also assistant conductor at CBS radio (1932–6 and 1941–6). He received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1944) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1948). His style blended Russian folk melos, Rimsky-Korsakovian orchestral expertise and mild dissonance. The palatable symphonies, championed by Koussevitzky, won immediate critical acclaim, as did the concertos introduced by Primrose and Piatigorsky. His children’s opera Babar the Elephant was widely performed.

WORKS

(selective list)

dates in parentheses are those of publication, others are those of first performance

Orch: Introduction and Allegro, op.8, small orch (1945); Sym. no.1, op.12, 1931; Vn Conc., op.14, 1930; Sinfonietta, op.17, 1932; Sym. no.2, op.18, 1934; Conc. lirico, op.19, vc, orch, 1935; Sym. no.3, op.21, 1937; Sym. no.4, op.27, 1943; Va Conc., op.28, 1941; Cl Conc., op.29 (1941); Hp Conc., op.31, 1945; Passacaglia, theremin, orch, 1948

Vocal: Gilgamesh, cant., op.32, nar, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1947; Babar the Elephant (children’s op., 1, D. Heyward), op.40, 1953

Chbr: Thème et variations, op.7, cl, str, pf, 1926; Str Qt, op.16 (1933); Duo, op.15, va, cl (1941); Suite, op.22, wind qnt (1941); Brass Suite, op.24, 7 brass (1942); Fantasy, op.9, 2 pf (1944); Sextet Conc., op.26, str (1951)

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Edition Russe

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker8

EwenD

J.T. Howard: Our Contemporary Composers (New York, 1941), 184

A. Berezowsky: Duet with Nicky (Philadelphia, 1943)

N. Slominsky: Music since 1900 (New York, 1937, 5/1994)

ROBERT STEVENSON

Berg, Adam

(d Munich, 1610). German printer. He took over the Schobser publishing house in Munich in 1564 and by 1568 had expanded it sufficiently to necessitate the purchase of a larger building. Under the patronage of the Bavarian Dukes Albrecht V and his son Wilhelm V, it soon became the most important business of its kind in Bavaria. Apparently not a native of Munich, Berg was Protestant, but, after having been jailed for his religious beliefs in 1569, he became a Roman Catholic and served the Counter-Reformation which his patrons enthusiastically supported. After his death his widow, Anna, ably managed the business until 1629, when she turned it over to their son Adam (d 1634). However, the lead in music publishing had been taken over by Berg’s son-in-law and main competitor in Munich, Nikolaus Henricus.

An expert craftsman, Berg became the leading Bavarian printer of the Counter-Reformation and one of the most important German printers of his time. In addition to the official notices and reports required of him as court printer, he published a variety of books on religious and scientific topics and in the fields of literature and particularly music (which accounts for over 80 of his some 300 publications). His great interest in music reflects the brilliance of the musical establishment at the Bavarian court under the direction of Orlande de Lassus. Berg published a variety of motets and German lieder by Lassus himself and by other composers who worked in southern Germany, including Ivo de Vento, Jacobus de Kerle, Johann Pühler and Georg Victorinus. His Gesang und Psalmenbuch (1586) was the first book of German hymns published in Munich, and he also issued the second and third volumes of Michael Herrer's Hortus musicalis (1609). Berg is best known for his publication of Lassus's Patrocinium musices in the large choirbook format generally reserved for manuscripts, using single-impression type and decorating the pages with handsome woodcut initials.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (O. Kaul)

A. Schmid: Ottaviano dei Petrucci … und seine Nachfolger im sechzehnten Jahrhunderte (Vienna, 1845/R)

P. Dirr: ‘Ein Drucker und Verleger der Gegenreformation’, Buchwesen und Schrifttum im alten München 1450–1800 (Munich, 1929), 39–54

W. Boetticher: Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit 1532–1594 (Kassel, 1958)

H. Pohlmann: Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts (Kassel, 1962)

J. Benzing: Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Wiesbaden, 1963, 2/1982), 315–16

H. Leuchtmann: Orlando di Lasso: Briefe (Wiesbaden, 1977)

H. Leuchtmann: ‘Adam Bergs rätselhafte Notendruckkennzeichnung in den Jahren 1571–1575’, Musik in Bayern, xxii (1981), 63–72

H. Vanhulst: ‘Lassus et ses editeurs: remarques à propos de deux lettres peu connues’, RBM, xxxix–lx (1985–6), 80–100

J.E. Lindberg: Origins and Development of the Sixteenth-Century Tricinium (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1988), 113–21

MARIE LOUISE GÖLLNER

Berg, Alban (Maria Johannes)

(b Vienna, 9 Feb 1885; d Vienna, 24 Dec 1935). Austrian composer. Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, he moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals.

1. 1885–1911.

2. 1911–1914.

3. ‘Wozzeck’.

5. ‘Lulu’ and the final years.

DOUGLAS JARMAN

1. 1885–1911.

He was the third of four children of Johanna and Conrad Berg, at 8 Tuchlauben in the central district of Vienna, a few hundred yards from the Stephansdom. With an estate in Carinthia (the Berghof), a number of properties in Vienna and the income from a thriving export business, the Berg family lived comfortably until the death of Berg's father, in 1900, ushered in a difficult time for the family as a whole and for the young Berg in particular. A disastrous school career culminated in his having to repeat both his sixth year in 1901–2 and later his seventh year before he was finally able to pass the necessary exams, while an early sexual relationship with Maria Scheuchl, the kitchen-maid at the Berghof, resulted in the 17-year-old Berg becoming the father of an illegitimate daughter.

All four Berg children had been taught the piano by their governess, and the young Alban had already begun to compose for performance in the family circle; a number of piano duets and almost 80 songs, the earliest of them dating from 1901, were written before he began his studies with Schoenberg. Though passionately interested in music, he was, at that time, little more than an enthusiastic amateur. Clearly unsuited to an academic career, uninterested (unlike his two elder brothers) in business and without qualifications to enter the conservatory, he had little choice, on leaving school, but to take an unpaid post as a trainee civil servant. Not until October 1904, when, as a result of his sister and brother replying to a newspaper advertisement, he became a pupil of Schoenberg, did he receive any formal musical training, and not until two years later, as a result of his mother inheriting both money and property on the death of her unmarried sister, was he able to give up his work with the civil service and concentrate on music.

He studied with Schoenberg from 1904 to 1911, first as a student of harmony, counterpoint and music theory (though he continued to write songs during this period), then from 1907 onwards as a composition student. Writing to his publisher Emil Hertzka in 1910, Schoenberg observed: ‘Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme’. It was a flaw Schoenberg sought to correct in the first years of Berg's composition studies, during which he was required to write a host of minuets, variations, scherzos, impromptus and other small-scale instrumental pieces. Among these early pieces are the drafts (all of them incomplete) of five piano sonatas dating from 1907–8. It is a measure of how far and how rapidly Berg's musical language had developed in the previous four years that – unlike the fluctuating mixture of Brahms, Schumann, Debussy and Wolf that had characterized the pre-Schoenberg songs – the musical language of the five sonatas is that of their op.1 successor, and so close to that of Berg's maturity that he was to use the opening of the fourth as the theme of the D minor interlude in Act 3 of Wozzeck.

Of the works published during his lifetime, the Sieben frühe Lieder date from the beginning, and the single movement Piano Sonata op.1, the Four Songs op.2 and the String Quartet op.3 from the close of his time with Schoenberg. The Sieben frühe Lieder (1905–8) reveal the impact of Schoenberg's teaching and of Berg's growing acquaintance with music. Still essentially diatonic (though the first song, Nacht, strikes a balance between diatonic and whole-tone writing), even the earliest of the set – Im Zimmer (1905) and Die Nachtigall (?1905–6) – demonstrate a piano style far more idiomatic than anything in earlier songs, and whereas the piano accompaniments of the pre-Schoenberg songs frequently lack distinctive melodic figurations, here the handling of motivic ideas is skilful and highly developed. The motivic concentration of Liebesode (1907), for example, in which the right hand of the piano part is restricted to a single three-note figure and its inversion, or Traumgekrönt, which concentrates on a single melodic idea and a four-note cell, looks forward to the motivic complexity not only of the Piano Sonata but also of the mature Berg.

Though the String Quartet op.3 was the last work Berg wrote directly under his teacher's guidance, the Piano Sonata was in effect his graduation piece, the work in which he set out to demonstrate what he had learned from both Schoenberg's teaching and Schoenberg's music. The period of Berg’s studies was a particularly important time in Schoenberg's own creative development, during which he produced the First Quartet (1905), the first Kammersymphonie (1906) and the Second Quartet (1908–9) – a series of works which, with their exploration of cyclic forms and their concentrated motivic and intensely contrapuntal textures, were to have a lifelong influence on the younger composer. Among the most immediate lessons Berg learned from these pieces, and from the Kammersymphonie in particular, were how to handle an extended harmonic language that combined post-Wagnerian chromaticism with quartal, whole-tone and similar tonally ambiguous, ‘floating’ harmonies and how to structure a large-scale instrumental movement in such a way that it was both formally clear and thematically integrated. One of the basic tenets of Schoenberg's teaching was the necessity of what he would later call ‘developing variation’, the belief that the logic and coherence of a work depended on all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea. It was a belief that Berg would later pass on to his own students, as his pupil T.W. Adorno confirmed when he wrote: ‘The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different’ (Adorno, Eng. trans., 33). It is a principle that stands at the heart of both the Piano Sonata, in which, within the confines of a clearly defined sonata structure, a wealth of distinctive thematic ideas is generated from a minimum of motivic material, and the two-movement String Quartet.

Between these works came the Vier Lieder op.2, the last of which marks the point at which Berg's music moved from the extended tonal language of the Sonata to the free atonality of the following works. The Vier Lieder also, for the first time, reveal some of the compositional preoccupations that became a feature of Berg's later music: the linking of the movements of a multi-movement work through harmonic, melodic and rhythmic motifs in such a way as to form a single entity, the fondness for retrogrades and palindromic designs (the final bars of the first song are a retrograde restatement of the opening bars) and a fascination with the structural potential of interval cycles. Much of the second song, for example, is concerned with exploiting the structural and cyclic possibilities inherent in the French 6th chord, with the opening bars systematically transposing the chord halfway around the cycle of 5ths (at which point the original collection of notes is reinstated), the following bars recapitulating the same chord sequence in retrograde (but with the spacing changed so as to emphasize the two major 3rds in the chord) and the final six bars demonstrating that the sequence produced when the chord is transposed around the semitone cycle is identical to that resulting from the original cycle of 5ths transposition. What is equally characteristic of the later Berg is the fact that what, when described, seems a calculated and abstract procedure should produce a piece whose most immediately striking feature is its emotional spontaneity.

Berg's formative years coincided with one of the most exciting periods in Viennese cultural life. In his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern Berg's Viennese contemporary Stefan Zweig described the passion for art and literature that seized him and his classmates in their mid-teens, a passion ‘to discover the latest, newest, the most extravagant, the unusual which had not yet been dwelt on at length, particularly by the official literary circles of our daily newspaper … . We were the vanguard and shock troops of every sort of new art merely because it was new’. Even before meeting Schoenberg, Berg had, like his siblings, cultivated a lively interest in everything that was new in the arts, attending Mahler's performances at the opera, seeing new plays and reading Ibsen, Strindberg and the newly published Reigen of Schnitzler and Erdgeist of Wedekind (the first of the two plays that would later form the basis for Lulu). Once released from the drudgery of school, as a pupil of the man at the centre of one of the most radical musical developments of the period and the colleague of fellow students of the calibre of Webern, Wellesz and Jalowetz, Berg threw himself with enthusiasm into all artistic activities. He attended the first Vienna production of Wedekind's second Lulu play, Die Büchse der Pandora in 1905, travelled to Graz the following year to hear the Austrian première of Strauss's Salome and became acquainted not only with musicians of the standing of Zemlinsky and Schreker but also with Peter Altenberg, Gustav Klimt (with whom he attended the great Kunstschau exhibition in 1908), Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and other leading figures in Vienna's artistic and literary circles. He also, at the end of 1906, met for the first time Helene Nahowski, herself a friend and dedicatee of two of his Altenberg poems, whom, after a difficult courtship in the face of opposition from her family, Berg married on 3 May 1910.

Berg was, said Schoenberg in the letter to Hertzka cited above, ‘enthusiastic and uncritical, receptive of the beautiful whether old or new, whether music, literature, painting, sculpture, theatre or opera’. The enthusiasm and the curiosity were to last throughout his life, so that he remained in touch with, and receptive to, the influence of, areas of music, literature and theatre by which Schoenberg and Webern remained unaffected. It is indicative of the range of his interests that he was familiar with the music of Debussy at a time when Schoenberg hardly knew the work of the French composer, that he went to the first Vienna performance of Büchner's Woyzeck (the name then misread as ‘Wozzeck’), and that later in life he showed an interest in jazz and the ‘new opera’ of Weill and Brecht.

2. 1911–1914.

Berg's relationship with his teacher was and remained a difficult one. Schoenberg became a father figure whose approval he craved and whose disapproval or interference he dreaded for many years after his studentship had ended. The years following Schoenberg's move to Berlin in 1911 were particularly difficult, with the newly married Berg, still painfully conscious of his own lack of practical professional skills, torn between awareness of his debt to Schoenberg and the need to assert his personal and artistic independence.

Even when no longer in Vienna, Schoenberg expected his students to carry out various musical and non-musical tasks on his behalf, and the majority of letters from Schoenberg to Berg during this period consist of abrupt and peremptory demands requiring Berg to oversee various domestic tasks, run errands and organize his teacher's musical and financial affairs in Vienna, while frequently complaining about Berg's inefficiency and untrustworthiness in these matters. Berg's long and rambling replies (about both the nature and the illegibility of the handwriting of which Schoenberg also complained) are witness to his desperate desire to please his teacher. The growing personal difficulties between the two finally came to a head in late 1915 when communication more or less ceased for a while. The rift was gradually healed over the next three years, but it remained a thorny relationship, on both a personal and professional level; it was, Berg told his friend Soma Morgenstern ‘the great problem of my life – a problem that I've carried around for decades without being able to solve and which will be my downfall’ (Morgenstern, 1995, p.41). The letters between Berg and Schoenberg only begin to acquire the feeling of correspondence between equals in the late 1920s, when Berg had achieved some measure of international fame with the success of Wozzeck and the Lyrische Suite, but it is indicative of the continuing unease of the relationship that, while Webern was allowed to address Schoenberg by the familiar ‘Du’ in 1912, Berg had to wait until 1918 before being granted the privilege, and that while Schoenberg dedicated his Violin Concerto to Webern, and Berg dedicated four works to his teacher, there is not a single work by Schoenberg dedicated to Berg.

During the years from 1911 to 1915 Berg was devoting much of his time to paid and unpaid efforts on Schoenberg's behalf. His income came partly from administering the family properties, partly from private teaching and partly from his work for music publishers Universal Edition – work which included correcting the parts for and making a piano reduction of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in advance of its 1913 Vienna première, preparing an index for Schoenberg's Harmonielehre and a guide to the Gurrelieder, and making piano arrangements of, among other things, the third and fourth movements of Schoenberg's Second Quartet. But despite the fact that Schoenberg's constant demands left him little time for his own work, he found it possible in the summer of 1912 to start work on a new composition, the Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg op.4.

The first of Berg's works to be written without Schoenberg's guidance, this remains one of Berg's most perfect scores and his greatest achievement before Wozzeck. Uncharacteristically brief (even the two longest songs, the first and last, are only 38 and 55 bars long respectively), the cycle nevertheless contains large-scale dramatic and emotional gestures that are typically Bergian. Equally so is the formal and motivic complexity of the work, which is bound together by a host of recurring harmonic, melodic and rhythmic figurations.

Formally the set has an overall arch shape, with the first and last songs, though very different, having a large part of their musical material in common. Ex.1 shows the opening bars of the final song, a passacaglia. Theme A of the example has already appeared (with the same pitches but a different rhythm) as the main thematic idea of the first song, where it originally emerged out of the ‘snowstorm’ of overlapping ostinatos that formed the introduction; theme B2 is a motif that has also been heard in the introduction to the first song and appeared briefly in the second song, while theme B1 determined the transpositional levels of the motif in the upper part of the introduction to the first song, appeared on the celesta as the final melodic gesture of that song and reappeared in the fourth number. The climax of the introduction to the first song is marked by a harmonic shift from a vertical statement of B1 to a chromatic expansion of the same chord (with the four upper notes ascending and the lowest note descending a semitone); the final moments of the last song have this same chord sequence in reverse. This larger arch shape, resting on the relationship between the two outer songs, is reflected in the individual symmetrical formal designs of the three central songs. Especially interesting is the use of a rhythmic motif (embodied in theme C in the above example) that, originally announced as a repeated single note, acquires a number of thematic shapes during the course of the work. A similar rhythmic motif had made a fleeting appearance in the op.2 songs as a way of binding the set together; the more extensive use of such a motif here looks forward to the use of such independent structural rhythms (or ‘Hauptrhythmen’, to use his own term) in Berg’s later works. Significantly, in view of what was to happen, both the complexity of the formal design and the brevity of the individual songs militate against their being performed other than as a complete cycle.

There is, in much of the work of the Viennese artists of the period, a distinct desire to shock – a reaction, perhaps, to the complacent philistinism of Viennese bourgeoise cultural life. Berg's later decision to set Wedekind's scandalous Lulu plays is symptomatic of this reaction. Certainly his choice of Altenberg's aphoristic and slightly scurrilous texts, at a time when the poet was known to be in an asylum, was a provocative gesture, as was the musical language of the songs, their employment of so large an orchestra for such tiny poems and their use of unusual orchestral effects such as the col legno open string bariolage and the ‘noises’ (a glissando in harmonics on the violins and an effect on low strings produced by bowing on the holes of the tailpiece) that end the first number. The imagination, subtlety and sure-footedness of the instrumentation of the songs seem little short of miraculous in a composer's first work for orchestra. At the time even Schoenberg expressed doubts about what he called ‘their too overt striving to employ new orchestral effects’. Whether or not Berg intended the songs to be provocative, he was unprepared for the public reaction that greeted a performance of two of them in Vienna on 31 March 1913, in a programme Schoenberg conducted that also included Zemlinsky's Maeterlinck Lieder, Schoenberg's own first Kammersymphonie, the first performance of Webern's op.6 and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. The concert, in which the performance of Berg's songs led to a riot, with fisticuffs in the hall, the police called in and the concert organizer arrested, has gone down as one of the great musical scandals of the 20th century.

Two months after the ‘Skandalkonzert’, on the last day of a visit to Berlin, Schoenberg took Berg to task about the ‘insignificance and worthlessness’ of his recent compositions. The exact nature of Schoenberg's criticisms is unclear, though it has generally been assumed that Schoenberg criticized the brevity of his pupil's pieces. In the wake of the public reaction, Schoenberg's criticism provoked a crisis of confidence and destroyed what was left of Berg's belief in the Altenberg songs: ‘My self doubt’, he wrote to Schoenberg, ‘ is so strong that the least criticism from you, who alone are qualified to give it, robs me of almost all hope’ (The Berg–Schoenberg Correspondence, 257). He never published or tried to have the songs performed in their entirety in his lifetime. The fifth song appeared in vocal score in 1921 as a supplement to the Dresden periodical Menschen, but there was no complete performance until 1953.

The precise date of Berg's next composition, the Vier Stücke op.5 for clarinet and piano, is unclear. The score gives spring 1913, early writers (including Reich and Redlich) summer, Berg himself, in a chronology written in a letter to his wife, June 1913. The pieces, which are even shorter than the Altenberg songs, were probably written before the traumatic discussion with Schoenberg in Berlin in the early summer of that year. Like the Altenberg songs, the clarinet pieces again compress large-scale dramatic gestures into tiny forms (many writers have described the work as a miniature four-movement sonata); unlike the songs, with their intricate motivic structure, the op.5 pieces represent the furthest step Berg took in renouncing distinct thematic and motivic features in favour of a music whose material is generated from the manipulation of small cells, and where various more or less systematic techniques (wedge formations, interval series, progressive transformations) govern smaller, and in some cases larger, structures.

If Schoenberg's criticism of the Altenberg songs centered on their brevity, Berg's next work, the Drei Orchesterstücke op.6, was a deliberate answer, the model for which lay immediately to hand in Mahler's Ninth Symphony, whose first performance Berg had heard in June 1912. The pieces, on which he worked from the summer of 1913 until the autumn of 1915, are Berg's most Mahlerian work, adopting not only the ländler and march idioms that characterize so much of Mahler's music but also, in the final piece, the hammer blow of the finale of the Sixth Symphony. Like the Altenberg songs and the movements of the op.3 quartet, the three pieces (‘Praeludium’, ‘Reigen’ and ‘Marsch’) are linked by a network of recurring themes and motives – including a purely rhythmic theme – that binds the set into a single entity and provides a series of audible signposts within the proliferation of apparently new thematic ideas to which the constant motivic development gives rise. Much of the most important material in all three pieces grows initially from the basic three-note cell (the minor 3rd and semitone E–G–A) that emerges to form the opening themes of both the ‘Praeludium’ and ‘Reigen’ and that starts the ‘Marsch’, but the complexity of the transformation processes and the profusion of seemingly new ideas result, especially in the ‘Marsch’, in what is perhaps the most texturally, motivically and thematically complex of all Berg's works.

3. ‘Wozzeck’.

By the time he was working on the ‘Marsch’ of op.6 Berg had already decided on his next work. On 5 May 1914 he had seen Wozzeck and immediately determined to write an opera on the play. An acquaintance, who had sat a few rows in front of Berg at the performance, later remembered how, at the end of the play: ‘Indescribably excited and enthusiastic I stood amidst wild applause and met Alban Berg a few steps behind me. He was deadly pale and perspiring profusely. “What do you say?” he gasped, beside himself, “Isn't it fantastic, incredible?” then already taking his leave, “Someone must set it to music”.’ Though he began making preliminary sketches for the opera almost at once (some of the earliest appear on the same sheets of manuscript paper as material for the ‘Marsch’), work had to be laid aside when, following the outbreak of World War I, Berg was called into the Austrian army in June 1915 (fig.2). After spending a month training at the army camp at Bruck an der Leitha his health gave way, and he was transferred to guard duty and eventually to an office job in the War Ministry, where he served until 1918.

While not as overtly political as many of his acquaintainces, Berg was undoubtedly attracted to Wozzeck because of its socio-political message, which coincided with his own views (described by Adorno as ‘socialist in so far as in the 20s it behoved an orthodox reader of the Fackel’). He also, perhaps, saw in the play other features with which he identified. ‘There is something of me in this Wozzeck’, he observed in a letter to his wife Helene, a remark that on one level refers to the similarity between the situation of Wozzeck, the poor downtrodden army batman terrorized by his superior officer and the butt of absurd dietary experiments by the sadistic army doctor, and his own during his spell at the army training camp. Writing to his pupil Gottfried Kassowitz on various occasions during his stay as a reserve at Bruck an der Leitha, Berg commented on the sound made by a room full of sleeping men and complained of the injustices of the system, the inefficiency of the camp doctor and the disgusting mutton that was served every week – remarks echoed in the libretto of Wozzeck. At the same time, it is unlikely that Berg would not also have recognized the similarity between Wozzeck, as the father of an illegitimate child to a woman called Marie, and himself. From Wozzeck onwards all his works have autobiographical connotations.

In his 1928 article ‘Das “Opernproblem”’ (Reich, 1937, p.175), Berg observed:

Never in my wildest dreams would I have wished to reform the art-form of opera with the composition of Wozzeck. … Apart from my desire to make good music, to fulfil musically the spiritual content of Büchner's immortal drama, to transpose his poetic language into a musical one – apart from these things I had nothing else in mind when I decided to write an opera … than to return to the theatre what is the theatre's.

Despite the modesty with which Berg disclaimed any seeking after originality, Wozzeck was an epoch-making work that broke new ground musically, emotionally and dramatically. If Büchner's play was discovered and first performed at a time when its techniques and concerns seemed strikingly contemporary, it also appeared at a moment when its extreme states were peculiarly suited to Berg’s musical language – an atonal language that, constantly hovering on the edge of tonal confirmation, becomes a perfect musical metaphor for the emotional and mental state of the opera's chief protagonist. The world that the opera presents is a projection of the tortured mind of Wozzeck himself: a world without normality or humanity and peopled by grotesques, a haunted world of strange, hallucinatory voices and visions and of natural phenomena indifferent to the human tragedy being played out. Only at the very end of the opera is this viewpoint abandoned, when, after Wozzeck's death, the music of the final cathartic orchestral interlude achieves D minor and, with the theatre curtain down, steps outside the drama to reflect on the significance of what has happened.

Every critic and commentator on Wozzeck has discussed the formal structure of the opera; indeed, it is the aspect of which Berg himself was most proud and to which he drew attention in his pre-performance lectures. As one might expect in an opera written by an Austrian composer in the first quarter of the 20th century, the most immediately audible formal and unifying device in the work is a system of recurring leitmotifs (and, on a larger scale, of recurring sections), the reappearance of which underlines dramatic associations and parallels within the opera. Less immediately audible are the strict formal designs within which these leitmotifs operate. The opera is conceived as a single closed formal entity, with each act, and each scene within each act, forming a self-contained structural unit. Act 1, which is the exposition of the drama, consists of five character pieces – a suite (scene i), a rhapsody (scene ii), a military march and lullaby (scene iii), a passacaglia (scene iv) and a rondo (scene v) – each of which introduces one of the main characters and delineates his or her relationship to Wozzeck. The second act is designed as a five-movement symphony, consisting of a sonata form (scene i), a fantasia and fugue (scene ii), a largo slow movement (scene iii), a scherzo with two trios (scene iv) and a rondo (scene v). Act 3 consists of five ‘inventions’ each based on a single musical element: a theme (scene i), a single note (scene ii), a rhythmic pattern (scene iii), a six-note chord (scene iv) and a single note-value (scene v). The final orchestral interlude, which sums up the main motivic material of the opera and also, as the only orchestral interlude to have its own distinctive thematic material, stands as a self-sufficient musical structure, forms a sixth invention, an ‘invention on a key’.

The choice of formal designs for the different scenes is determined by dramatic considerations. In some cases the musical material or form is of a sort traditionally associated with the kind of activity depicted on stage – a ländler and a waltz for the tavern scene, Act 2 scene iv, for example, or a military march and lullaby in Act 1 scene iii. In other scenes Berg arranged his libretto so that the text defines a dramatic structure corresponding to an accepted musical form. In the sonata movement or the fantasia and fugue of Act 2, for example, the appearances and recurrences of musical ideas correspond exactly to the appearances and recurrences of verbal and dramatic ideas. Elsewhere, musical form symbolizes the psychological kernel of the scene. This is true of Act 1 scene iv, where the constantly repeated passacaglia theme stands as a symbol of the Doctor's manic obsession – his hopes of achieving immortality through the absurd and sadistic scientific experiments to which he submits Wozzeck – and becomes general in the final act, where the domination of each scene by a single musical element represents the obsessions dominating Wozzeck’s thoughts. Thus the single note B, present throughout the murder scene, Act 3 scene ii, moves up and down the score, receding into or emerging out of the orchestral texture as the idea of murder grows or diminishes in intensity in Wozzeck's mind. The orchestral interlude that follows this scene consists of two crescendos also on B (fig.3), separated by a fortissimo drum statement of the rhythm that will form the basis of the next scene, in which the constant presence of this single rhythmic pattern stands as a symbol of Wozzeck's memory of the crime, while the individual statements of the rhythm, adapting themselves to the moment-to-moment contingencies of the text, mirror Wozzeck's hesitations and unpredictable outbursts and the increasingly insistent accusations of Margret and the chorus. The unceasing quaver movement of the final scene suggests the indifference of the children, intrigued but unmoved by the discovery of Marie's body and the revelation of what has occurred. It is difficult to exaggerate Berg's achievement in this extraordinary work. In his first opera he not only reconciled but fused the demands of the dramatic and musical structures, and in so perfect and so personal a way that he himself was the only composer able to go further, in Lulu. He completed Wozzeck in short score in the middle of October 1921. The full score was finished in April 1922, and the vocal score, made under his supervision by his pupil Fritz Heinrich Klein, in June of the same year. Without a publisher, and unable to bear the expense himself (he had earlier managed to pay for the printing of his opp.1 and 2 only by selling some family furniture), he was forced to borrow money from a friend of his sister Smaragda in order to finance the publication of the vocal score; the loan was later repaid thanks to the efforts of Alma Mahler, to whom he dedicated the score as a token of gratitude. He then set about creating interest in the opera by advertising its publication and sending copies to opera companies and critics. Although these efforts resulted in a number of press articles, no company expressed more than a passing interest in the work. Indeed, it would have been surprising had any established opera house been willing to stage so difficult and complex an opera by a composer then little known even in his native city, let alone beyond.

Now in his mid-30s Berg was still eking out a precarious livelihood teaching, managing the family property (including acting as steward of the Berghof, which was finally sold in May 1920) and acting, from its inception in late 1918 until March 1921, as one of the performance directors of the Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen. The Verein, which took up an enormous amount of his time, had been founded by Schoenberg with the intention of promoting interest in contemporary music through closed performances (critics were banned) of carefully rehearsed pieces. Berg himself was represented on the programmes by his opp.1–3 and 5, but these performances did little to promote public recognition of his music. The turning-point came rather in 1923, when two of the op.6 pieces were performed in Berlin and the String Quartet was played, to great acclaim, at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg. Among the Salzburg audience was Hermann Scherchen, who suggested that Berg make a concert suite from the music of Wozzeck. The resulting Drei Bruchstücke aus ‘Wozzeck’ were performed under Scherchen in June 1924 and were, as Berg reported to Webern, ‘a great triumph with the public, the musicians and the press’. By this time, however, Erich Kleiber, the new music director of the Berlin Staatsoper, had already declared his intention of staging Wozzeck. Kleiber, a passionate admirer of the Büchner play, had already seen a vocal score, and during the autumn of 1923 made his interest in the piece known to a number of Berg's acquaintances. In 1924, when in Vienna for a few days, he requested that the entire opera be performed for him by the pianist Ernst Bachrich; Berg, who was not an accomplished pianist, helped out in the more difficult parts of the score. By the time the first two scenes had been played to him Kleiber had already decided to mount the work in Berlin – even, he joked, if it cost him his job. Wozzeck duly received its première in Berlin on 14 December 1925, and the conductor's little joke almost proved prophetic.

The Berlin Staatsoper was at that time passing through a particularly turbulent period in its history. The position of the general administrator, Max von Schillings, had been insecure for some time, and became increasingly so as his relations with the Minister of Culture grew progressively worse during the spring and summer of 1925. When Schillings was finally dismissed in November 1925 ideological groups on right and left, the press, the staff of the opera house and almost every interested party became involved in a bitter political dispute at the centre of which was Wozzeck, whose first performance had taken place on the very day the Schillings affair had come to a head with a heated debate in the Landstag. But in spite of the extended press campaign waged against the opera by Kleiber's enemies (in which, among other things, it was falsely suggested that the piece had required 137 rehearsals and that the open dress rehearsal had led to riots in the opera house), the first night of Wozzeck was a critical success (fig.4). The piece received ten performances in Berlin, with Leo Schützendorf in the title role, and then made its way slowly into the world, only fully establishing itself on its fourth production, at Oldenburg in 1929. Coming after a production in Prague which had to be cancelled after two performances because of political protests by Czech nationalists, and a successful but little-noticed production in Leningrad, the Oldenburg staging showed it was possible for a small provincial opera house to mount this ‘unplayable’ work with only 32 rehearsals. What Johannes Schüler, the conductor of the Oldenburg Wozzeck, called ‘the myth of the insurmountable difficulty of the opera’ was disproved and, as Josef Lex, who sang the title role, observed, the success of the production ‘broke like a hurricane and signified the final victory of the work’. The success of Wozzeck brought Berg not only recognition as a composer of international standing but also a degree of financial stability, and royalties from the opera, along with income from private teaching, enabled him to devote himself to composition.

4. The ‘Kammerkonzert’ and ‘Lyrische Suite’.

Though some of the themes in Wozzeck contain all 12 notes (the passacaglia of Act 1 scene v, for example, or the second theme of the variations of Act 3 scene i), the opera is not in any sense a 12-note composition. The two works that followed – the Kammerkonzert for violin, piano and 13 wind instruments and the Lyrische Suite for string quartet – are transitional, in that they mark Berg's gradual adoption of the 12-note system.

The Kammerkonzert, more than any other work, demonstrates Berg's love of intricate formal designs and his interest in using apparently abstract, mathematical schemes as structural determinants. It is, perhaps, both the most forbidding and one of the most fascinating works in his output. The scherzando first movement, for solo piano and wind, superimposes variation and sonata forms. A theme on the wind instruments alone is followed by a set of five variations: the first for solo piano is a reprise of the original theme; the next three, based on the retrograde, the inversion and the retrograde inversion of the theme respectively, constitute a development section; the last variation is a recapitulation of the original theme in canon. The design of the theme itself, with the harmonic structure of its constituent sections systematically based on chains of major 3rds, perfect 4ths, semitones, minor 3rds and whole tones, demonstrates Berg's abiding interest in interval cycles. (Material based on such interval cycles is a constant feature of his music from the op.2 songs to Lulu and the Violin Concerto.) The adagio second movement, for solo violin and wind, is based on a series of 12-note themes – employed as melodic elements rather than as 12-note rows – that determine the harmonic structure. Formally the movement consists of two halves, the first of which is an ABA structure (in which the second A is the inversion of the first) while the whole of the second half is the retrograde of the first. Despite their very different characters and forms (and indeed playing time) the first two movements have a number of proportional features in common, notably their overall number of bars and the structural break at the centre of each. The reasons for this structural relationship – which, as the profusion of formal and proportional sketches for the piece show, Berg went to enormous trouble in order to achieve – becomes clear in the finale.

In Act 3 scene iii of Wozzeck Berg had written a piece in which rhythm was the chief organizational feature and in which leitmotifs and material heard earlier reappeared rhythmically transformed by the application of a single ‘Hauptrhythmus’. The last movement of the Kammerkonzert radically extends this idea. In terms of pitch the movement consists entirely of simultaneous reprise of the first two movements; the thematic identity and the definition of the formal structure (a fusion of sonata and rondo) of the movement thus rest not on pitch but on rhythmic elements, most notably on the handling of three independent rhythmic patterns (one of which has already appeared as the ‘Hauptrhythmus’ of the second movement and now generates a variety of rhythmic cells) which are superimposed on the existing pitch material.

The Kammerkonzert is the first of Berg's instrumental works in which important structural elements are determined by extra musical programmatic considerations. Berg himself touched on some of these in his dedicatory ‘open letter’ to Schoenberg, in which he revealed that the motto theme which opens the work is built of the musical letters in the names ‘ArnolD SCHönBErG’, ‘Anton wEBErn’ and AlBAn BErG’, and that the number three, representing the three members of the Schoenberg school, was with its multiples a factor determining the length of sections, the metronome marks, the nature of the instrumental body and many other aspects of the work. Berg's own sketches, however, show that the programmatic elements in the work extend far beyond those discussed in his ‘open letter’ and that, among many other things, each of the variations of the first movement (entitled ‘Friendship’ in the sketches) depicts a different member of the Schoenberg circle, the second movement (‘Love’), with its quotation from Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and its use of a musical cipher based on the name ‘Mathilde’, portrays the relationship between Schoenberg and his wife, and the kaleidoscopic last movement portrays ‘the World’.

From the Kammerkonzert onwards all Berg's works have such ‘secret’ programmes, by means of which private, subjective elements – most often numbers that he regarded as having a particular significance or musical ciphers derived from the letters in people's names – are transformed into objective compositional constraints. In this, as in other respects, Wozzeck had marked a turning-point in his career. In Wozzeck he had set himself the task of imposing ‘abstract’ instrumental forms on an existing narrative in such a way that those forms would embody the largest and smallest details of the drama while at the same time retaining their integrity and autonomy as self-sufficient structures. The comparable task in the post-Wozzeck, non-operatic works would be to devise ‘secret’ narratives that would give rise to and be compatible with similarly ‘abstract’ formal structures.

Thanks to George Perle's discovery in 1976 of a score in which Berg had annotated the details of the autobiographical programme, the Lyrische Suite, the work following the Kammerkonzert, is the most completely documented demonstration of the extent to which such extra-musical considerations act as compositional determinants. Scholars had known that some kind of programmatic reference occasionally occurred in Berg's music long before the publication of Perle's discovery – Willi Reich's description of the programme of the Violin Concerto and Berg's own ‘open letter’ on the Kammerkonzert had made that much clear – and such things as the sequence of tempo directions that head the movements of the Lyrische Suite (Allegretto giovale, Andante amoroso, Allegro misterioso and Trio estatico, Adagio appassionato, Presto delirando, Largo desolato) had suggested the presence of some extra-musical programme. As early as 1957 Hans Redlich had hinted at ‘the enigmatic undercurrents of Berg's life and the fascinating contradictions of his personality’ (Redlich, Eng. trans., 217), yet such speculation was, by its nature, unprovable. The publication of Perle's articles on the annotated score supplied, for the first time, concrete evidence of the programme of what Adorno had called ‘a latent opera’. The annotated score reveals that the six movements of the Lyrische Suite document the love affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a wealthy Prague businessman and the sister of Franz Werfel, from their first meeting (Allegretto giovale), through a portrait of Hanna and her two children (Andante amoroso), their declaration of love (Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico) and a subsequent Adagio appassionato, to a depiction of the ‘horrors and pains’ of the following days and nights (Presto delirando) and an acceptance of the affair's hopelessness in the final Largo desolato, a secret setting of Stefan George's translation of Baudelaire's De profundis clamavi.

The most remarkable aspect of Berg's secret programme for the Lyrische Suite is not so much the presence or the nature of the programme itself – Janáček's Second Quartet, written three years after the Berg, has a similar one – but the extent to which Berg transforms details of this programme into elements that determine not simply the mood and character but the technical and formal details of the music. Thus, as in the Kammerkonzert, the names of the main actors are converted into musical notation, so that the most important musical material of the work – a four-note collection consisting of the notes A, B, B, F – is derived from the initials of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs, while both the formal proportions and the metronome markings of the whole work are based on the numbers 23 and 10, which Berg believed had a particular significance for himself and Hanna respectively.

The design of the Allegro misterioso, almost every aspect of which is determined by extra-musical considerations, may be taken as an example of Berg's methods. In the annotated score the movement is headed by the date ‘20.5.25’ – presumably the date when Alban and Hanna first declared their love. The choice of note row, row forms and transpositions in the outer 12-note sections is limited to those forms that keep the four notes of the A–B–B–F cell next to one another; the movement is an ABA structure in which the B section is a Trio estatico and the second A a shortened retrograde version of the first, the negation metaphorically associated with such retrogrades in Berg's music being explicitly indicated by the annotation ‘Vergessen Sie es …!’ (‘Forget it … !’) above the point at which the music starts to run backwards; the proportions of the movement are based on multiples of 23, Berg's fateful number, with the first Asection having 69 bars, the trio 23 and the reprise of A 46 bars, while the metronome marks are based on multiples of Hanna's number 10. Even the instrumentation, which requires the four strings to play muted throughout (even when playing fortissimo) as a symbol of the secret, repressed nature of Alban and Hanna's love for each other, is determined by programmatic considerations.

In form the work is, as usual with Berg, labyrinthine. The tempos of the six movements from a gradual expanding wedge in which fast movements, each faster than the last, alternate with slow movements, each slower than the last. Within this scheme each movement quotes (sometimes at length) from its predecessor. The sixth movement, which dies away into nothingness, quotes not only from the fifth but also from the first, and thus closes the circle.

Berg's earliest 12-note composition had been a setting of the short poem Schliesse mir die Augen beide, a text he had already set before and chose to reset using the row he was to use in the Lyrische Suite, whose first movement became his first extended 12-note composition. Though only the first and last movements of the quartet are entirely 12-note (the outer sections of the third movement and the central part of the fifth are also 12-note, the remainder being free), the work already demonstrates the features that distinguish Berg's handling of the 12-note system from that of Schoenberg or Webern. The first movement alone has what, in terms of interval sequence (that is to say, in orthodox Schoenbergian terms), are three different rows. All three are, however, related harmonically, in that their hexachords are identical in content. Each hexachord is a rearrangement of a segment of the cycle of 5ths, and as the work progresses these diatonic collections become increasingly chromatic as more notes are exchanged between the hexachords.

The third and fifth movements also continue, and expand into new areas, the rhythmic explorations of Wozzeck and the Kammerkonzert, the fifth by imposing on many passages a durational formula which determines the presentation of material in the tenebroso sections, the third by using, as the main rhythmic determinants of the outer sections, two rhythmic cells that arise from a particular method of partitioning the row according to its registral presentation. The use of more than one row and the derivation of both new rows and rhythmic patterns through registral presentation of a basic set were to be features of Lulu. Equally significant for Berg's later development is the large-scale temporal organization of the Lyrische Suite. The fact that the metronome markings of the different movements share a common numerical basis (as multiples of 23 or 10) is not simply a conceit but has the effect of interlinking the different tempos in the work. Berg had employed such interlinked tempos (which make it possible to move from one precise metronomic tempo to another by a process that has since become known as ‘metric modulation’) in sections of Wozzeck and had even, in sketches for the Kammerkonzert, experimented with the possibility which such relationships afford of having different layers of music moving at different tempos simultaneously. Such methods of organizing tempos, metres and rhythms underpin large sections, and even whole scenes, of Lulu.

5. ‘Lulu’ and the final years.

After the successful première of the Lyrische Suite in January 1927, Berg began to search for a subject on which to base another opera, eventually deciding on Wedekind's two Lulu plays. The 1905 performance he had seen of Die Büchse des Pandora, produced by Karl Kraus and with Wedekind himself in the role of Jack the Ripper, had been private, since the play was still under consideration on an obscenity charge (and was eventually banned) by the Royal Court in Berlin. To the 20-year old Berg, as to many of his generation, Wedekind represented the ‘really new direction in modern art’ and, fired by Kraus's introductory lecture to the Vienna performance, his enthusiasm for the play stayed with him for the rest of his life. By 1928, when he began work on Lulu, Wedekind's plays were no longer banned (censorship was abolished in Germany in 1918), but they remained controversial and were still widely regarded as obscene. In choosing, despite the advice of many of his friends, to base his opera on Wedekind's plays, Berg was making a deliberately provocative choice. Just how provocative would only become clear five years later, when the Nazis came to power.

As a composer of international standing Berg now spent much of his time travelling to attend performances or serving on various juries and committees, and work on Lulu progressed slowly. It was also twice interrupted by commissions. The first, in the summer of 1929, resulted in the concert aria Der Wein for the Czech soprano Růžena Herlingerová, and was undertaken partly because Berg needed a new work to keep his name before the public while he worked on the opera (the same period saw the orchestral arrangements of the Sieben frühe Lieder and the string orchestra arrangement of three movements from the Lyrische Suite) and partly because the aria gave him the opportunity to explore in advance some ideas for Lulu in terms of the handling of voice and orchestra, the use of a jazz idiom and the creation of a sound world characterized in particular by piano and saxophone – though the vibraphone, the sound of which is so prominent in the Lulu orchestra, is absent from Der Wein. Above all, the composition of the aria gave Berg the chance to experiment with ways in which new, subsidiary rows might be derived from a single basic row. The row of Der Wein (ex.2), like that of the later Violin Concerto, is based on one of the two most characteristic key-defining patterns of tonal music: in the case of Der Wein, an ascending minor scale. While such a row naturally gives rise to horizontal figurations reminiscent of tonal music, the production of tonally orientated vertical formations remains problematic. The most important harmonic (and some melodic) features of Der Wein are derived from the basic set by processes of extraction: by systematically extracting alternate notes (to produce a new row that consists of notes 1–3–5–7–9–11–2–4–6–8–10–12 of the original), by partitioning the set into four three-note collections which are then superimposed (in effect presenting vertically a new row that consists of notes 1–4–7–10, 2–5–8–11, 3–5–9–12) and by extracting three non-adjacent tritones (notes 4–7, 8–10, 11–3) so as to leave a residue of two three-note chromatic figures. Such methods of deriving subsidiary rows and further extensions of these methods (by the systematic extraction of every fifth or seventh note, for example) were to play an important role in Lulu.

Lulu represents the culmination of the technical and structural preoccupations of Berg's works from the op.2 songs onwards. In particular, the ingenious knitting together of dramatic and musical demands, already demonstrated in Wozzeck, is here taken a number of steps further. At the most detailed level Lulu is a 12-note work – the first 12-note opera, just as Wozzeck was the first, full-length atonal opera. Like the Lyrische Suite, Lulu uses a number of different rows, all of them, as sketches show, derived precompositionally from a single 12-note set in a number of intricate ways. The basic set of the whole opera (ex.3) and a few of the motifs that run throughout the work – most noticeably the four-note figuration on trombone that begins the whole piece and a short fateful rhythmic pattern that underlies every significant event in the drama – operate independently of the characters on stage. For the rest, the rows and the characteristic harmonies and themes to which they give rise (and also, in some cases, rhythms, metres and instrumental timbres) function as leitmotifs linked to particular characters and particular ideas in the text. This leitmotif system works within an intricate, multi-layered formal design.

On one level Lulu is a number opera consisting – as is appropriate for an opera in which one subject is the writing of an opera – of a sequence of arias, ensembles, cavatinas, ballades and other forms traditionally associated with vocal music, all of them clearly identified by Berg in the score. At the same time, each of the three acts has within it a single large-scale form. The different sections of the form are scattered throughout the particular act in a mirroring of the main dramatic development. Act 1, for example, is dominated by a sonata form, associated with Dr. Schön's attempts to break free of Lulu; the exposition and first reprise appear in scene ii, and the development and recapitulation in scene iii. In Act 2 the large-scale form is a rondo (continually interrupted in scene i but heard in its entirety in scene ii) associated with Alwa's declarations of love for Lulu, while in Act 3 a set of variations, based on a cabaret song by Wedekind himself, charts Lulu's descent into prostitution. Unlike the self-sufficient musical forms of Wozzeck, which follow one another in sequence, the musical forms of Lulu are interpenetrated and interrupted. At the highest structural level is the large-scale symmetrical relationship between the two halves of the opera, the dramatic and musical fulcrum of which is the orchestral film-music interlude linking the two scenes of Act 2. Constructed as a musical palindrome and designed to accompany the showing of a silent film (itself palindromic since each shot in the first half mirrors a shot in the second), the interlude marks the turning point of Lulu's career – the point at which begins her descent into the nightmare world of the final scene. The symmetrical musical-dramatic structure of the opera is emphasized by the relationship between the two scenes of Act 2 (the only scenes to share the same set) and, most importantly, by the extent to which large blocks of music from the first half of the opera increasingly reappear, until the final scene consists almost entirely of music that has been heard earlier. In some cases the return of music is occasioned, as one might expect, by a desire to underline dramatic similarities. Thus, to cite one of many examples, the return of the music of the duettino of Act 1 scene i as part of the cavatina of Act 2 scene i ironically anticipates Schön's fate by drawing attention to the fact that he, like the Painter earlier, is beginning to take Lulu for granted.

More generally, the reappearance of large blocks of music underlines a unique feature of the opera: the reappearance of certain performers in different roles. The largest and most important of these musical reprises are determined by the doubling of the roles of Lulu's three clients in the final scene with those of her three husbands in the earlier part of the opera: the Medical Specialist, the Painter and Dr. Schön, who comes back as Jack the Ripper. Similarly, the roles of the Prince in Act 1, the Manservant in Act 2 and the Marquis in Act 3 are sung by the same performer and share the same music, though the bit parts of the Wardrobe Mistress, the Schoolboy and the Groom, while also taken by a single performer, are not associated musically. The doubling of the roles of Lulu's husbands and clients is the key to both the musical structure and the dramatic meaning of the opera. In his introductory lecture to the 1905 Vienna performance of the second play Kraus had described the final scene of the work as ‘a men's world brashly taking revenge for its own guilt’. Berg's doublings not only symbolized this revenge strikingly but also, by equating the characters who inhabit the respectable bourgeois world of the first half with the shady inhabitants of the demi-monde depicted in the final act, draw attention to the sexual hypocrisy which is the subject of the work, and which gives it a wider moral and social significance.

With the exception of the two months in the summer of 1929 spent on Der Wein, Berg worked on the composition of Lulu from mid-1928 until the spring of 1934, by which time the whole opera was complete in short score. He then began to orchestrate the work, starting with those sections he intended to form part of a concert suite, the Symphonische Stücke aus ‘Lulu’. Having completed the suite he went back to the Prologue and scored the rest of the opera in order, pausing only for a period of about four months in the summer of 1935 to compose the Violin Concerto, the commission for which, from the American violinist Louis Krasner, he had initially accepted out of financial necessity. With the coming to power of the Nazi party in Germany in January 1933, performances of his music became rare in both Germany and Austria, and he grew desperately short of money – so short that he was even, at one point, forced to consider selling the Waldhaus, the retreat at Velden in Carinthia he had bought in 1932. The emotional and artistic stimulus for the concerto – the death from poliomyelitis of the 18-year-old Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius – only came after Berg had accepted the commission and begun work on the piece. On learning of Manon's death he resolved to dedicate the work to her memory (‘To the memory of an angel’) and create a tone poem which would paint her portrait.

The row of the Violin Concerto is based on a series of overlapping major and minor triads and a final whole-tone tetrachord, an ingenious set in which the inversion on B is identical to a cyclic permutation of the prime form in retrograde. In Der Wein Berg had derived harmonies from a scale-like row by systematically extracting notes; in the Violin Concerto he arrived at non-triadic figures by the opposite method of inserting notes: the long lamenting solo line in the final section of the work, for example, is produced by systematically alternating notes from three different row forms. The overtly tonal implications of the set also enabled Berg to include a number of diatonic references, some to particular sources (a Carinthian folksong and Bach's harmonization of the chorale Es ist genug), others to genres such as the ländler and the Viennese waltz. Written at a time when his music, labelled as a manifestation of ‘cultural bolshevism’, was no longer played in Germany or even in his native Austria, and when he himself was no longer regarded as an indigenous composer, the Violin Concerto, with its overt references to the Austro-German tradition, is perhaps as much a rejection of that narrow nationalism which denied him and other composers a place in their tradition as it is a depiction of the life and death of a young girl.

Shortly after completing the concerto Berg received an insect sting which formed an abscess. Returning to Vienna from the Waldhaus in November 1935 he was able to attend the Vienna première of the Symphonische Stücke aus ‘Lulu’, but was rushed to hospital shortly after, and died there during the night of 23–4 December. The Violin Concerto had not yet been performed or published; as to Lulu, Acts 1 and 2 had been scored, together with the first 268 bars of Act 3 and the two later sections (the orchestral variation interlude and the final 70 bars) that appear in the Symphonische Stücke, leaving 940 bars unorchestrated. The world première of the opera took place in Zürich in 1937, when, as a ‘temporary’ solution pending the expected – and, indeed, announced – publication of a complete Act 3, the opera was presented as a two-act torso, with the last moments acted to the music of the final Adagio of the Symphonische Stücke. The ‘temporary’ two-act version held the stage for 40 years, as Berg's widow gradually became more and more convinced that the opera should remain unfinished and refused all access to the sketches and short score. Only after her death in 1976, and after a court action instituted by the foundation set up by her to manage the Berg estate had attempted and failed to stop the performance, was it possible to perform the complete opera with Friedrich Cerha's brilliantly realized orchestration of Act 3 and thus finally, after almost half a century, to appreciate the full stature of Berg's final achievement.

6. Conclusion.

Though Berg was always the most popular of the three Viennese composers with concert and opera audiences, his posthumous critical standing fluctuated considerably. Until the 1960s, when Perle published his first articles on Lulu, there had been little detailed study of Berg's music, and it was generally accepted that he was the least strict, the least systematic and the most conservative and backward-looking of the composers of the Second Viennese School. Whether his supposed lack of system and of modernist conviction was seen as an asset or a failing depended on the writer's attitude to what was happening in contemporary music. To Boulez and other young composers who spearheaded the period of total serialism in the Europe of the 1950s, and for whom Webern was the most important of the three Viennese composers, Berg's attachment to tradition was a sign of an unacceptable willingness to compromise. ‘Dodecaphony’, wrote Boulez of the Violin Concerto, ‘has more pressing duties than to tame a Bach chorale’.

But such views of Berg were based on mistaken premisses. His ‘free’ music has been revealed as at least as systematic as – and, in some ways, more systematic than – that of his colleagues and contemporaries, involving methods of organizing pitch, metre, rhythm and proportion that seem strikingly relevant to what has happened in music since his death. That such innovative and apparently ‘abstract’ organizational procedures take place within, and indeed give rise to, an intensely expressive music invoking the emotional world of Tristan, Mahler and the late Romantics is one of the many paradoxes that underlie Berg's music. The bringing together of elements that would normally be regarded as mutually exclusive – tonality with atonality, subjective autobiographical elements with objective compositional constraints, quotation and reference to popular style with rigorous and integrated handling of all musical parameters – is a constant feature of Berg's music. It is perhaps the rich resulting ambiguity that makes Berg so important an influence on more recent composers, whether modernist or postmodernist. As the 20th century closed, the ‘backward-looking’ Berg suddenly came as Perle remarked, to look like its most forward-looking composer.

WORKS

Early works: c80 songs, 1v, pf, 1901–8; sonata fragments, variations, etc., pf; variations, str; for detailed list see Hilmar (1980), only those pubd listed below

op.

—	Jugendlieder, i, 1901–4, 1v, pf (1985): Herbstgefühl (S. Fleischer), Spielleute (H. Ibsen), Wo der Goldregen steht (F. Lorenz), Lied der Schiffermädels (O.J. Bierbaum), Sehnsucht I (P. Hohenberg), Abschied (E. von Monsterberg-Muenckenau), Grenzen der Menschenheit (J.W. von Goethe), Vielgeliebte schöne Frau (H. Heine), Sehnsucht II (Hohenberg), Sternefall (K. Wilhelm), Sehnsucht III (Hohenberg), Ich liebe dich! (C.D. Grabbe), Ferne Lieder (F. Rückert), Ich will die Fluren meiden (Rückert), Geliebte Schöne (Heine), Schattenleben (M. Greif), Am Abend (E. Geibel), Vorüber! (F. Wisbacher), Schummerlose Nächte (Greif), Es wandelt, was wir schauen (J.F. von Eichendorff), Liebe (R.M. Rilke), Im Morgengrauen (K. Stieler), Grabschrift (L. Jakobwski)
—	Jugendlieder, ii, 1904–8, 1v, pf (1985): Traum (F. Semler), Augenblicke (R. Hamerling), Die Näherin (Rilke), Erster Verlust (Goethe), Süss sind mir die Schollen des Tales (K.E. Knodt), Er klagt das der Frühling so kortz blüht (A. Holz), Tiefe Sehnsucht (D. von Liliencron), Über den Bergen (K. Busse), Am Strande (G. Scherer), Winter (J. Schlaf), Fraue, du Süsse (L. Finckh), Verlassen (Bohemian trad.), Regen (Schlaf), Traurigkeit (P. Altenberg), Hoffnung (Altenberg), Flötenspielerin (Altenberg), Spaziergang (A. Mombert), Eure Weisheit (J.G. Fischer), So regnet es sich langsam ein (C. Flaischlein), Mignon (Goethe), Die Sorglichen (G. Falke), Das stille Königreich (Busse)
—	Sieben frühe Lieder, 1v, pf, 1905–8, rev. and orchd 1928; orch version Vienna, 6 Nov 1928; vs (1928), fs (1969), critical edn (1997): Nacht (C. Hauptmann), Schilflied (N. Lenau), Die Nachtigall (T. Storm), Traumgekrönt (Rilke), Im Zimmer (Schlaf), Liebesode (O.E. Hartleben), Sommertage (Hohenberg)
—	Schliesse mir die Augen beide (T. Storm), 1v, pf, 1st setting, 1907, pubd in Die Musik, xxii (1930), separately (1955)
—	An Leukon (J. Gleim) 1v, pf 1908; pubd in Reich (1937), separately (1985)
—	Frühe Klaviermusik, i (1989)
—	Zwölf Variationen über ein eigenes Thema, C, pf, 1908, Vienna 8 Nov, 1908; pubd in Redlich (1957) and as Frühe Klaviermusik, ii (1985)
—	Symphony and Passacaglia, frag., 1913, facs. (1984)
1	Piano Sonata, 1907–8, Vienna, 24 April 1911 (1910)
2	Vier Lieder, 1v, pf ?1909–10 (1910): Schlafen, schlafen (C. Hebbel), Schlaffend trägt man mich (Mombert), Nun ich der Riesen Stärksten (Mombert), Warm die Lüfte (Mombert)
3	String Quartet, 1910, Vienna, 24 April 1911 (1920)
4	Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg, S, orch, 1912; 2 nos. cond. Schoenberg, Vienna, 31 March 1913; all 5 E. Calveti, cond. Horenstein, Rome 24 Jan 1953; vs (1953), fs (1966), critical edn (1997): Seele, wie bist du schöner, Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen, Über die Grenzen des All, Nichts ist gekommen, Hier ist Friede
5	Vier Stücke, cl, pf, 1913, Vienna, 17 Oct 1919 (1920)
6	Drei Stücke, orch, 1914–15: Präludium, Reigen, Marsch, nos.1–2 cond. Webern, Berlin, 5 June 1923, all 3 cond. J. Schüler, Oldenburg, 14 April 1930 (1923)
7	Wozzeck (op, 3, Büchner), 1917–22, cond. E. Kleiber, Berlin, Staatsoper, 14 Dec 1925 vs (1923)
—	Drei Bruchstüche aus ‘Wozzeck’, S, orch, cond. Scherchen, Frankfurt, 11 June 1924 (1924)
—	Kammerkonzert, pf, vn, 13 wind, 1923–5, cond. Scherchen, Berlin, 27 March 1927 (1925), critical edn (2000)
—	Adagio, vn, cl, pf (1956) [arr. of Kammerkonzert, movt 2]
—	Schliesse mir die Augen beide (Storm), 1v, pf, 2nd setting, 1925; pubd in Die Musik, xxii (1930), separately (1955)
—	Lyrische Suite, str qt, 1925–6, Kolisch, Vienna, 8 Jan 1927 (1927)
—	Drei Sätze [2–4] aus der Lyrischen Suite, arr. str orch, cond. Horenstein, Berlin, 31 Jan 1929 (1928)
—	Der Wein (C. Baudelaire, trans. S. George), concert aria, S, orch, 1929, R. Herlinger, cond. Scherchen, Königsberg, 4 June 1930; vs (1930), fs (1966), critical edn (1997)
—	Four-part Canon ‘Alban Berg an das Frankfurter Opernhaus’ (Berg), 1930 (1937)
—	Lulu (op, 3, Berg, after Wedekind: Erdgeist, Die Büchse der Pandora), 1929–35, orch of Act 3 completed F. Cerha; cond. R.F. Denzler, Zürich, 2 June 1937 [inc.], cond. P. Boulez, Paris, 24 Feb 1979 [complete]; vs of Acts 1–2 (1936), fs of Acts 1–2 and excerpts from Act 3 contained in suite (1964), complete vs, ed. E. Stein (1979), complete fs (1985)
—	[5] Symphonische Stücke aus der Oper ‘Lulu’ (Lulu-Suite), S, orch, cond. Kleiber, Berlin, 30 Nov 1934 (1935)
—	Violin Concerto, 1935; L. Krasner, cond. Scherchen, Barcelona, 19 April 1936 (1936), new critical edn (1996)
—	Arrs. in vs of F. Schreker: Der ferne Klang (Vienna, 1911); A. Schoenberg: Gurrelieder (Vienna, 1912), Litanei and Entrückung from Str Qt no.2, 1912 (Vienna, 1921); arr. of J. Strauss II: Wein, Weib und Gesang, pf, hmn, str qt, 1921 (Vienna, 1977)
MSS mostly in A-Wn; for locations of other individual MSS see Jarman (1979)
Principal publisher: Universal

WRITINGS

for fuller list see Ploebsch (1968)

Arnold Schönberg, Gurrelieder: Führer (Vienna, 1913); ed. R. Stephan and R. Busch as ‘Gurrelieder’ von Arnold Schönberg: Führer und Thementafel (Vienna, 1997)

Pelleas und Melisande, Symphonische Dichtung für Orchester von Arnold Schönberg Op.5: kurze thematische Analyse (Vienna, c1903)

Arnold Schoenberg, Kammersymphonie, Op.9: thematische Analyse (Vienna, n.d.)

Der Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Vienna, 1919) [prospectus]; Eng. trans. in Reich (1965)

‘Die musikalische Impotenz der “neuen Ästhetik” Hans Pfitzners’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii (1920), 399–408; Eng. trans. in Reich (1965)

‘Warum ist Schoenbergs Musik so schwer verständlich?’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, vi (1924), 329–41; Eng. trans. in Reich (1965)

‘Offener Brief an Arnold Schoenberg’, Pult und Taktstock, ii/Feb (1925); Eng. trans. in Reich (1965) [on the Kammerkonzert]

‘A Word about “Wozzeck”’, MM, v/1 (1927–8), 22–4; repr. in Reich (1965)

Lecture on Wozzeck, 1929; Eng. trans. in Redlich (1957)

‘Die Stimme in der Oper’, Gesang: Jb 1929 der UE (Vienna, 1929); repr. in Reich (1965)

Praktische Anweisungen zur Einstudierung des ‘Wozzeck’ (Vienna, 1930); repr. in Reich (1937); Eng. trans. in MT, cix (1968), 518–21

‘Was ist Atonal?’ [radio interview, Vienna, 23 April 1930]; Eng. trans. in N. Slonimsky: Music since 1900 (New York, 1937, 5/1994)

ed. H. Berg: Alban Berg: Briefe an seine Frau (Munich, 1965; Eng. trans., 1971)

J. Brand, C. Hailey and D. Harris, eds. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence (New York, 1987) [in Eng.]

(2) Michele Angelo Bergonzi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

monographs and collections of essays

‘Alban Bergs “Wozzeck” und die Musikkritik’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, viii (1926) [Berg issue]

W. Reich, ed.: 23: ein Wiener Musikzeitschrift, nos. 24–5 (1936) [Berg issue]

W. Reich: Alban Berg: mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek (Vienna, 1937)

H.F. Redlich: Alban Berg: Versuch einer Würdigung (Vienna, 1957/R; Eng. trans., abridged, 1957, as Alban Berg: the Man and his Music)

W. Reich: Alban Berg: Leben und Werk (Zürich, 1963; Eng. trans., 1965)

T.W. Adorno: Alban Berg (Vienna, 1968, rev. 2/1978; Eng. trans., 1991)

G. Ploebsch: Alban Bergs ‘Wozzeck’: Dramaturgie und musikaltische Aufbau (Strasbourg,1968)

International Alban Berg Society Newsletter (1968–)

K. Schweizer: Die Sonatensatzform im Schaffen Alban Bergs (Stuttgart, 1970)

M. Reiter: Die Zwölftontechnik in Alban Bergs Oper ‘Lulu’ (Regensburg,1973)

M. Carner: Alban Berg: the Man and the Work (London, 1975, 2/1983)

K. Vogelsang: Dokumentation zur Oper ‘Wozzeck’ von Alban Berg: die Jahre des Durchbruchs 1925–32 (Laaber, 1977)

50 Jahre Wozzeck von Alban Berg: Berlin 1975

R. Hilmar: Alban Berg: Leben und Wirken in Wien bis zu seinen ersten Erfolgen als Komponist (Vienna,1978)

F. Cerha: Arbeitsbericht zur Herstellung des 3. Akts der Oper Lulu von Alban Berg (Vienna, 1979)

D. Jarman: The Music of Alban Berg (London, 1979)

R. Hilmar: Katalog der Musikhandschriften, Schriften und Studien Alban Bergs im Fond Alban Berg und weiteren handschriftlichen Quellen im Besitz der Österrichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna, 1980)

G. Perle: The Operas of Alban Berg, i: Wozzeck (Berkeley, 1980)

Alban Berg: Vienna 1980

J. Schmalfeldt: Berg's Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design (New Haven, CT, 1983)

E. Berg: Der unverbesserliche Romantiker: Alban Bergs, 1885–1985 (Vienna, 1985)

R. Hilmar: Katalog der Schrifstücke von der Hand Alban Berg, der fremdschriftlichen und gedruckten Dokumente zur Lebensgeschichte und zu seinem Werk (Vienna, 1985)

G. Perle: The Operas of Alban Berg, ii: Lulu (Berkeley, 1985)

D. Jarman: Alban Berg: Wozzeck (Cambridge, 1989)

D. Jarman, ed.: The Berg Companion (London, 1989)

D. Gable and R.E. Morgan, eds.: Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives (Oxford, 1991)

D. Jarman: Alban Berg: Lulu (Cambridge, 1991)

A. Pople: Berg Violin Concerto (Cambridge, 1991)

C. Floros: Alban Berg: Musik als Autobiographie (Wiesbaden, 1992)

T.F. Ertelt: Alban Bergs ‘Lulu’: Quellenstudien und Beiträge zur Analyse (Vienna,1993)

S. Morgenstern: Alban Berg und seine Idole: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Lüneburg, 1995)

G. Perle: Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995)

P. Hall: A View of Berg's ‘Lulu’ through the Autograph Sources (Berkeley,1996)

D. Headlam: The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven, CT, 1996)

U. Krämer: Alban Berg als Schüler Arnold Schonbergs: Quellenstudien und Analysen zum Frühwerk(Vienna,1996)

A. Pople, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Berg (Cambridge, 1997)

S. Bruhn, ed.: Encypted Messages in Alban Berg’s Music (New York, 1998)

other literature

E. Viebig: ‘Alban Bergs “Wozzeck”: ein Beitrag zum Opernproblem’, Die Musik, xv (1922–3), 506–10

F.H. Klein: ‘Die Grenzen der Halbtonwelt’, Die Musik, xvii (1924–5), 281–91

K. Blaukopf: ‘Autobiographische Elemente in Alban Bergs “Wozzeck”’, ÖMz, ix (1954), 155–8

J. Russell: Erich Kleiber: a Memoir (London, 1957/R)

G. Perle: Serial Composition and Atonality (Berkeley, 1962, 6/1991)

M. DeVoto: ‘Some Notes on the Unknown Altenberg Lieder’, PNM, v/1 (1966–7), 37–74

A. Peryne: ‘Alban Berg und die Zahlen’, SM, ix (1967), 141–61

B. Archibald: ‘The Harmony of Berg's “Reigen”’, PNM, vi/2 (1967–8), 73–91

G. Kassowitz: ‘Lehrzeit bei Alban Berg’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 323–30

W. Stroh: ‘Alban Berg's Constructive Rhythm’, PNM, vii (1968–9), 18–31

D. Jarman: ‘Dr. Schön's Five-Strophe Aria, some Notes on Tonality and Pitch Association in Berg's Lulu’, PNM, viii/2 (1969–70), 23–48

D. Jarman: ‘Some Rhythmic and Metric Techniques in Alban Berg's Lulu’, MQ, lvi (1970), 349–66

N. Chadwick: ‘Berg's Unpublished Songs in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek’, ML, lii (1971) 123–40

N. Chadwick: ‘Franz Schreker's Orchestral Style and its Influence on Alban Berg’, MR, xxxv (1974), 29–46

H. Knaus: ‘Studien zu Alban Bergs Violinkonzert’, De ratione in musica: Festschrift Erich Schenk, ed. T. Antonicek, R. Flotzinger and O. Wessely (Kassel, 1975), 255–74

L. Treitler: ‘“Wozzeck” et l’Apocalypse’, SMz, cvi (1976), 249; Eng. trans. in Critical Enquiry, iii (1976–7), 251–70, and The Garland Library of the History of Western Music, ed. E. Rosand (New York, 1985), xii, 307–26; repr. in Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 1989), 242–63

D. Green: ‘Berg’s De Profundis: the Finale of the Lyric Suite’, International Alban Berg Society Newsletter, no.5 (1977), 13–23

D. Green: ‘The Allegro misterioso of Berg's Lyric Suite: Iso- and Retrorhythms’, JAMS, xxx (1977), 507–16

G. Perle: Twelve-Tone Tonality (Berkeley, 1977/R)

G. Perle: ‘The Complete “Lulu”’, MT, cxx (1979), 115–20

E. Berg: ‘Eine naturlicher Tochter: zur Biographie Alban Berg’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (21 May 1979)

E. Berg: ‘Bergiana’, SMZ, cxx (1980), 147–9

C. Ayrey: ‘Berg's “Scheideweg”: Analytical Issues in Op.2/ii’, MAn, i (1982), 189–202

D. Jarman: ‘The “Lost” Score of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu’, International Berg Society Newsletter, xii (1982), 14–16

D. Jarman: ‘Alban Berg: the Origins of a Method’, MAn, vi (1987), 273–88

J. Bard and C. Hailey: ‘Further Berg–Schoenberg Correspondence’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, xii/2 (1989), 133–74

G. Perle: The Listening Composer (Berkeley, 1990)

A. Ashby: ‘Of Modell-Typen and Reihenformen: Berg, Schoenberg, F.H. Klein and the Concept of Row Derivation’, JAMS, xlviii (1995), 67–105

D. Jasman: ‘“Correcting” Berg: some Observations on Analysis and Editorial Responsibility’, International Journal of Musicology, iv (1995), 155–67

G. Perle: The Right Notes (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995)

Berg, George [?Georg]

(b ?1730s; d London, 1775). English composer and organist of German origin. He may also have been a chemist who experimented in musical glassmaking. It is strange that a composer who published so much should be mentioned so little by his contemporaries and not at all by Burney or Hawkins. Sainsbury, whose other information is incorrect, said in his Dictionary of Music that he was German, and W.H. Husk (Grove1) said that he was a pupil of Pepusch. Berg probably played either the organ or the violin at Ranelagh Gardens in the late 1750s; he published six books of Ranelagh songs then, many of them for John Beard to sing. The scarcity of surviving copies may suggest that they were never very popular. No doubt Berg's op.1 concerti grossi were also written for Ranelagh; though rather conventional as music, the idiomatic violin writing suggests a composer-performer. As 19 organists in the London area subscribed to this publication, Berg was also clearly popular in the organ world and may have already held a church appointment. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Musicians in 1763, and in the same year was listed in Thomas Mortimer's The Universal Director as ‘composer & teacher on the harpsichord, Lincoln's Inn Fields’. By 1771 he was organist at St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London. Thereafter he published no more music. Following his death, his extensive music library was sold by Christie's (1776), in a joint sale with the business effects of the keyboard instrument maker Samuel Gillespy.

Nothing survives of Berg's operas, his oratorio, The Cure of Saul, or of his ode, The Invitation, but he published some glees, and in 1763 won a prize with one, On softest beds. His op.7 sonatas were among the earliest to be published as for harpsichord or piano, but their style is less progressive than their title suggests. The galant works are somewhat clichéd, with numerous Alberti basses; the more traditional sonatas, however, have greater individuality. Each sonata has three movements, and seven of the ten end with minuets.

WORKS

all printed works published in London

instrumental

op.

1	6 Concertos in 7 Parts, str (c1756)
2	10 Voluntaries, org/hpd (1757)
3, 4	24 Sonatinas or Easy Lessons, hpd (1759, 1760)
5	8 Suites, hpd (c1760)
6	12 Sonatinas or Easy Lessons, hpd (1762)
7	10 Sonatas, hpd/pf (1768)

vocal

New English Songs Sung … at Ranelagh (6 bks, 1757–9)

The New Songs Sung … at Marylebone (c1765)

Glees and catches

Lost works: Antigono (op), Spring Gardens, St James's, 13 Feb 1764; The Invitation (ode), Marylebone Gardens, April 1765; The Reapers (op); Titus (op), inc.; The Cure of Saul (orat); Arise, cry out in the night (dirge), on the death of Pepusch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Catalogue of the Valuable and Scarce Collection of Music, by the Most Eminent composers, Fine Ton'd Instruments, Books &c, Late the Property of Mr George Berg, dec., Christie's, 8–9 March 1776 (London, 1776) [sale catalogue]

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983)

P. Norman: ‘The Keyboard Music of George Berg’, MO, cix (1986), 358–61

W.A. Campbell: ‘Musical Glasses’, Chemistry in Britain, xxv (1989), 145–8

J. Harley: British Harpsichord Music (Aldershot, 1992–4)

ROGER FISKE/GERALD GIFFORD

Berg, Gunnar (Johnsson)

(b St Gallen, 11 Jan 1909; d Bern, 25 Aug 1989). Danish composer. His father died in 1914, and his upbringing in Switzerland, with a period in Copenhagen between 1921 and 1924, was marked by serious illness, with time spent in sanatoriums and in a children’s home. He began piano instruction at the age of 14. In 1928, after a short visit to Paris, he moved to Copenhagen. In 1931 he chose to make his life in music; he managed to attend the Salzburg Summer Festival in 1932 and 1935, and private tuition with, among others, Jeppesen led him to enter the Royal Danish Conservatory in 1936. He left after only one year, disappointed in the conservatory’s lack of interest in the new musical trends in central Europe. He studied the piano with Koppel (1938–42) and theory with Rosenberg. From 1944 to 1947 he took further piano instruction with Elisabeth Jürgens, who was to encourage him througout his career. In 1945 he introduced his freely atonal compositions in Copenhagen; they were received very negatively by Danish critics, and after a series of piano recitals in refugee camps in Denmark and another concert of his music in 1947 in Copenhagen, Berg left for Paris in 1948. There he studied for a short period with Honegger, but of greater influence was his contact in the French capital with the musical avant garde, in which he found a kindred musical thinking. In 1950 he attended the American Seminar in Salzburg, and in 1952 – the first Danish composer to do so – he visited Darmstadt, together with the French pianist Béatrice Duffour, whom he married the same year. In 1953 there was a concert devoted to Berg’s works in Paris, and his ballet Mouture was given several times in the Netherlands in 1956. Berg and his wife toured in several European countries introducing avant-garde music, supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1957 they moved to Denmark and, through their many lectures and concerts at the Folk High Schools, were among the first to introduce the music of the avant garde to the country. In 1965 Berg received a lifelong artist grant from the Danish Ministry of Culture and was made a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog. In 1966 the Bergs settled near Horsens in East Jutland. Béatrice died in 1976 and in 1980 Berg moved to Switzerland, where he found interest in his music slowly growing.

Berg was a respected but isolated figure in Danish musical life with neither position nor pupil, and his music, which has only rarely been performed, still awaits its deserved acknowledgement. Never compromising in his style, nor publishing analyses – and very seldom writing or speaking about his own music – Berg was not good at promoting his works. His music was accepted only by a limited audience, although Essai accoustique III (1954) and Aria (1981) received nominations for the Nordic Council Music Prize. His first compositions from the mid-1930s relate him more to a central European style in the tradition of Bartók, Honegger and Stravinsky than to the Nielsen tradition prevalent in Denmark, from which his personal creative approach was quite different. He was fascinated by the static aspects of the musical gesture and had an urge for innovation. Inspired by the Parisian avant garde, he became the first Dane to compose serial music with his Suite for cello (1950); in the Suite he used traditional 12-note technique, but in the trio Filandre (violin, clarinet and flute, 1953) all musical parameters were predetermined. Since then a personal kind of serial technique has enabled him to bring the various musical parameters into a new, different and unique relationship in his work. Characteristic of the compositions before the serial turning-point of 1950 is a highly constructed, dissonant harmonic structure with a tendency towards tone clusters, a specific, ‘turning’ melody and an extremely elaborate rhythmic design. From about 1950 his style ranged from a totally static music without gesture or inner dynamic tension, through quiet vegetation to violent eruption. There are similarities to the work of Stockhausen and Boulez, but Berg’s work is differentiated by its meditative, lyrically introverted sound.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Hymnos, str, 1946; Passacaille, 1948; Essai accoustique III, pf, orch, 1954; 5 études, double str, 1956; El triptico gallego, 1957; Mutationen, 1958; Pour piano et orchestre, 1959; 37 Aspects (Spoon River), ens, 1959; Frise, pf, orch, 1961; Uculang, pf, orch, 1967; Aria, fl, orch, 1981; Etincelles, hpd, brass, 1985

Chbr: Sonate, fl, cl, 1942; Pièce, tpt, vn, pf, 1949; Filandre, fl, cl, vn, 1953; Mouture, ballet, 1953; Trio d’anches, ob, cl, bn, 1955; Belem, pf 4 hands, 14 perc, 1956; Pour 2 violoncelles et piano I & II, 1958; Petite musique I & II, fl, str qt, pf, 1958–60; Pour quintette à vent, 1962; Pour quatuor à cordes, 1966; Tronqué, xyl, vc, pf, 1969; Mouvements, str qt, 1979; Aerophones II, 9 wind, 1983

Pf: Fantaisie, pf, 1936; Toccata – interludium – fuga, pf, 1938; Variations sur une daina litaunienne, pf, 1946; Sonata, pf, 1947; Eclatements I–XIII, pf, 1954-87; Gaffkys I–X, pf, 1959

Other solo inst: Pastourelle, fl, 1950; Suite, vc, 1950; Triedra, rec, 1952; Prosthesis, sax, pf, 1954; 9 Duos, rec, vc/gui, 1957, rev. 1984; Quatre aspects I–II, cl, 1957–61; Pour clarinette et violon, 1959; Pour orgue, 1960; Pour violon et piano, 1960; Random, vc and/or perc, 1968; Ennuyeux-évidemment, vc, perc (kitchen), 1969, rev. 1987; Midsommernatsdrøm, vc, perc (kitchen), 1969; Agregats I, ondes martenot, 1970; Agregats II, Baschets soundsculptures, 1970; Monologue, tpt, 1975; Fresques I–IV, gui, 1978; Melos I, gui, 1979; Melos II, org, 1979; Tantum ergo, org, 1979; Ar Goat, 2 gui, 1984

Vocal: 10 japanische Holzschnitte (J. Kitayama), 1v, pf, 1938; Drü Lieder (E. Thommen), S, pf, 1943; Le chemin de fer (P. Verlaine), 1v, fl, cl, vn, pf 4 hands, 1945; La princesse sur le pois (H.C. Andersen), nar, fl, vc, 1953; Tøbrud (I. Malinovski), 1v, vn, cl, pf, 1961; Vision (D. Thomas), A/Bar, chbr orch, 1962; Hyperion (F. Hölderlin), 1v, gui, chbr ens, 1977

MSS in DK-Kk

Principal publisher: Samfundet

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (P. Nielsen)

M. Andersen: ‘Gunnar Berg og hans galiciske triptyk’, Nutida musik, vi/5 (1962–3), 18–23

P. Nielsen: Sohlmans musiklexikon (Stockholm, 1948–52, rev. 2/1975–9 by H. Åstrand)

B. Wallner: Vår tids musik i Norden (Stockholm, 1968), esp. 282–5

E. Johansen: ‘Om en seriel analyse af assortiment I i Gunnar Bergs klavervaerk’ Gaffky’s’, Musik & Forskning, ii (1976), 131–44 [incl. English summary]

J. Rossel: ‘Vedrørende Gunnar Berg’, DMt, xlviii (1973–4), 64–70

J. Rossel: Den kompositoriske udvikling i Gunnar Bergs tidlige vaerker frem til midten af 50’erne (diss., U. of Århus, 1976)

J. Rossel: ‘Gunnar Berg – the Stranger in Danish Musical Circles’, Musical Denmark (1979), 1–4

S. Fränkel: ‘Der Däne Gunnar Berg – ein zu entdeckender komponist’, Der Bund (25 April 1987)

J. Rossel: ‘Der ewige Berg’, DMt, lxiii (1988–9)

V.K. Jensen: En registrant over Gunnar Bergs efterladte manuskripter (Copenhagen, 1996) [pubn of the Danish Music Information Centre]

JENS ROSSEL

Berg, Joachim.

See Bergen, Gimel.

Berg, Johann vom [Montanus; vom Perg, Johann; von Berg, Johann]

(b Ghent, ?c1500–15; d Nuremberg, 7 Aug 1563). German printer. He studied in Paris, and after becoming a Protestant emigrated to Nuremberg in a state of penury. He there was befriended by Veit Dietrich, the powerful preacher at St Sebald and important Reformation theologian; Berg later printed virtually all of Dietrich's writings. The earliest extant documentary evidence concerning him is the Nuremberg record of his marriage in 1541 to the widow Katherina Schmidt (née Bischoff) in 1541; he was granted citizenship shortly thereafter. With Ulrich Neuber he founded a printing house on his wife's property, known (according to the firm's colophon) as ‘auf dem Neuen Bau, bey der Kalkhütte’, in 1541. A daughter, Veronica, was born in 1545. In 1549 the firm acquired additional premises, and the colophon changed to ‘auf dem zwölf Brüder Platz, bey dem Cartauser Closter’.

The firm of Berg and Neuber was one of the most prolific publishers of polyphonic music in the 16th century, and is known to musicologists primarily for its editions of motet anthologies. It published at least 122 editions of music, including Latin motets, German polyphonic lieder, Kirchenlieder and treatises, besides works of literature and books on theology, mathematics, astronomy and medicine. It also sold books published by other firms. The firm's first volume of music was Hans Gamersfelder's Der gantze Psalter Davids in Gesangwies gestellt (1542); its earliest identified volume of polyphonic music is Hans Ott's Hundert und fünfftzehen guter newer Liedlein (RISM 1544²⁰). Berg apparently acted as editor for most of the volumes of sacred polyphony printed by the firm, particularly the enormous motet anthologies which characterized its output. He was a friend of Adrianus Petit Coclico, who lodged in his home for at least two years (1550–52) during the Augsburg Interim. Berg and Neuber also had a fruitful relationship with Lassus, printing his first book of motets in (1562) (it was printed simultaneously in Venice), and there is every reason to believe that Berg was a trained musician as well as a printer and publisher. At the time of Berg's death, the firm was the largest in Nuremberg as well as one of the most important and prolific in Europe. The printing dynasty founded by Berg and Neuber continued, with the Gerlach and Kauffmann firms, well into the 17th century and eventually dominated the Nuremberg printing market.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Gesner: Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalium … libri XXI (Zürich, 1548)

Epitaphia oder Grabschriften des Ersamen unnd namhafften Johan vom Berg (Nuremberg, 1564)

J.G. Doppelmayr: Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern (Nuremberg, 1730/R)

P. Cohen: Musikdruck und -Drucker zu Nürnberg im sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Nuremberg, 1927)

R. Wagner: ‘Ergänzungen zur Geschichte der Nürnberger Musikdrucker des 16. Jahrhunderts’, ZMw, xii (1929–30), 506–8

H.M. Brown: Introduction to facs. of Novum et insigne opus musicum (Nuremberg, 1558–9), RMF, xxvii–xxix (1986)

S. Jackson: Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Neuber: Music Printers in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg (diss., CUNY, 1998) [incl. catalogue]

SUSAN JACKSON

Berg, Josef

(b Brno, 8 March 1927; d Brno, 26 Feb 1971). Czech composer. He studied composition with Petrželka at the Brno Conservatory and musicology with Jan Racek at Brno University (both 1946–50). After a period as a music editor for Czech Radio in Brno (1950–53) he lived as a freelance composer, being a member of Tvůrčí Skupina A (‘Creative Group A’) from 1963. He also wrote criticism for the specialist and daily press (Hudebni rozhledy, Host do domu, Rovnost, Práce), but his literary talent found its best expression in the texts he wrote for his own works.

Berg’s early compositions, such as the First Symphony, were influenced by neo-classicism and Stravinsky. In the 1950s he turned in the direction of Moravian folk music and Janáček, composing folksong arrangements and suites for the Brno Orchestra of Folk Instruments. He adjusted to the ideas of socialist realism in several romanticized programme compositions, such as the overture Lidé bděte (‘People, Be on Guard’) and the Third Symphony, but these tendencies slowly gave way to a subjective lyricism which reached its peak in the cycle Písně nového Werthera (‘Songs of the New Werther’) of 1963.

Around that time Berg began to compose under the stimulus of new western European music and to concentrate on chamber pieces. Several of his instrumental compositions of this period are marked by lingering neo-classical traits and a clearly defined timbral drama; examples include the Sextet, the Nonet, the Sonata in modo classico for harpsichord and piano, and Snění (‘Dreaming’) for chamber orchestra. At the same time he began to use collage and the superimposition of different layers to reveal new meanings. His principal development, however, was of a theatre of alienation in his dramatic works, following Brecht’s ideas. All the resources of the stage and of (12-note) music are involved in social criticism expressed in terms of irony, grotesquerie and the absurd, which was pursued in the ‘happenings’ of Berg’s last years, in which his many talents (as writer, as composer, as dramatist and as provocative animateur) came together. Using new methods with a cheerful inventiveness and a contempt for technical dogmatism, Berg established himself as an outstanding representative of the Czech avant garde in a vibrant period of Brno’s musical history. The flowering of his art coincided with the political liberalization which culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968, his early death with the realities of ‘normalization’.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Odysseův návrat [The Return of Odysseus] (chbr op, Berg), nar, S, Bar, dancers, 5 insts, 1962; Brno, 27 Nov 1967

Evropská turistika [European Tourism] (chbr op, Berg), 6 solo vv, 6 insts, 1963; Brno, 27 Nov 1967

Eufrides před branami Tymén [Euphrides at the Gates of Tymen] (chbr op, Berg), actor, T, 2 ballerinas, tuba, tape, 1964; Brno, 27 Nov 1967

Snídaně na hradě Šlankenvaldě [Breakfast at Šlankenvald Castle] (scene from an old marionette comedy, Berg), 4 spkrs, Bar, cl, hn, bn, str trio, 1966; Prague, 6 March 1969

Johanes Doktor Faust (op, Berg), 1967; unperf.

Dějiny hudebního experimentu v Čechách a na Moravě [A History of Musical Experiment in Bohemia and Moravia] (happening), 1968

Hudební happening [Musical happening], 1970

Přednáška Prof. Salanradhaka o orientální hudbě [Prof Salanradhaka’s Lecture on Oriental Music] (happening), 1970

other works

Orch: Sym. [no.1], 1950; Veseloherní předehra [Comic Prelude], 1952; Sym. no.2, 1951; Lidé bděte [People, Be on Guard], ov., 1952; Jan Žižka, ov., 1952; Sym. no.3, 1953–5

Vocal: Písně nového Werthera [Songs of the New Werther] (Berg), B-Bar, pf, 1963; Pijácký orloj [The Drinking Clock] (Omar Khayyām), madrigal, S, A, T, B, 1964; 2 canti (J. Novák), Bar, female chorus, inst ens, org, 1966; Oresteia (scene, Aeschylus, Berg), 4 solo vv, reciter, ens, 1961; Ó Corinno (T. de Viau, trans. J. Vrchlický), chbr cant., S, A, T, B, cl, tpt, hn, bn, str qt, db, 1967; Hlasová vernisáž [Vocal Private View], S, B-Bar, 2 spkrs, 6 insts, tape, 1969, collab. M. Ištvan, A. Parsch, A. Piňos, R. Ružička, M. Štědroň

Chbr and inst: Něco o sobě [Something of Oneself], pf, 1953; Měsíce [Months], pf, 1955–6; 5 Fugues, wind qnt, 1957; Sonata, va, pf, 1956; 7 Preludes, pf, 1959; Sextet, hp, pf, str qt, 1959; Nonet, 2 hps, hpd, pf, 5 perc, 1962; Sonata in modo classico, hpd, pf, 1962; Varhanní hudba na téma Gillese Binchoise [Org Music on a Theme of Gilles Binchois], 1964; Str Qt, 1965–8; Str Qt, 1968; Snění [Dreaming], chbr ens, 1968

Principal publishers: Český Hudební Fond, DILIA, Panton, Supraphon

WRITINGS

‘Folklór a soudobé umění’ [Folklore and contemporary art], Zprávy Společnosti čs. národpisců, no.1–2 (1960), 3–7

‘Experiment a “Experiment”’ [Experiment and ‘experiment’], Host do domu, xi/4 (1964), 58–62 [review of Podešva’s book Současná hudba na Západě]

‘Divadlo objevuje divadlo’ [The theatre discovers theatre], Rovnost (22 Dec 1966) [interview]

‘Legendy a protilegendy’ [Legends and anti-legends], Rovnost (14 Oct 1967) [polemical article on the Brno festival Musica antiqua]

‘Poslední interview s Josefem Bergem’ [The last interview with Joseph Berg], OM, ii (1987), 62–4

Texty, ed. A. Martínková (Prague, 1988) [selection from Berg’s literary and dramatic works; incl. M. Štědroň: ‘Život mezi hudbou, divadlem a literaturou’ (A life between music, the theatre and literature), 177–89]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Fukač: ‘Nad skladatelským profilem Josefa Berga’ [A composer’s profile of Josef Berg], HRo, xii (1963), 663–5

F. Hrabal: ‘Odysseus in nás’ [Odysseus to us], Divadlo (1965), no.2, p.41–50

‘Léblovi Berg: výběr z korespondence’ [Berg to Lébl: a selection from correspondence], Konfrontace (1969), no.1, pp.41–6

F. Hrabal: ‘Marginálie k Josefu Bergovi 8.3.1927–26.2.1971’, HRo, xxiv (1971), 169–76

M. Štědroň: ‘Za Josefom Bergom’, SH, xv (1971), 267–71

J. Doubravová: ‘Světlá stránka pochybností Josefa Berga’ [The light side of Josef Berg’s doubts], HRo, xxix (1976), 204–9

OM, xix/2 (1987) [Berg issue; incl V. Lébl: ‘Odkaz Josefa Berga’ [Berg’s legacy], 34–9; M. Ištvan: ‘O Josefu Bergovi’, 40–42; M. Štědroň: ‘Josef Berg a teoretické učení Leoše Janáčka’ [Josef Berg and Janáček’s theoretical works], 43–7; P. Kofroň: ‘Individuální mytologie Josefa Berga’, 54–61]

M. Štědroň: Josef Berg: skladatel mezi hudbou, divadlem a literaturou [Josef Berg: a composer between music, the theatre and literature] (Brno, 1992) [incl. list of works and bibliography]

OLDŘICH PUKL/R

Berg [Rexroth-Berg], (Carl) Natanael

(b Stockholm, 9 Feb 1879; d Stockholm, 14 Oct 1957). Swedish composer. He studied singing and a little counterpoint at the Stockholm Conservatory (1897–1900); otherwise he was self-taught. When Berg was a young man, a patron offered him a large sum on condition that he also find himself non-musical work. Berg therefore studied to become a veterinary surgeon, and worked as such in the army (1902–39). He associated with Atterberg, Rangström and Lindberg in reaction against earlier Swedish music; his Straussian style was more cosmopolitan than the nationalist Romanticism of his colleagues, although his music tended increasingly towards pathos and was at times bombastically patriotic. His orchestration was skilfully adapted to dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, programmes and his taste was often for fragile romantic subjects. After Höga visan (‘Song of Songs’, 1925) his technique grew more refined. The central works are the operas; those to his original texts concern Engelbrekt, the 15th-century Swedish champion of liberty, and St Birgitta. Berg was founder-chairman of the Society of Swedish Composers (1918–25).

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops (texts by Berg): Leila (after Byron: The Giaour), 1908–10, Stockholm, 1912; Engelbrekt, 1924–8, Stockholm, 1929; Judith (after F. Hebbel), 1931–5, Stockholm, 1936; Birgitta, 1942, Stockholm, 1942; Genoveva (after Hebbel), 1944–6, Stockholm, 1947

Orch: Traumgewalten, sym. poem, 1911; Sym. no.1 ‘Alles endet was entstehet’, 1913; Varde ljus! [Let there be light!], sym. poem, 1914; Älvorna [The Elves], pantomime-ballet, 1914; Sym. no.2 ‘Årstiderna’ [The Seasons], 1916; Sym. no.3 ‘Makter’ [Forces], 1917, rev. 1939; Sym. no.4 ‘Pezzo sinfonico’, 1918; Vn Conc., 1918; Sensitiva, pantomime-ballet, 1919; Hertiginnans friare [The Duchess's Suitor], pantomime-ballet, 1920; Serenade, vn, orch, 1923; Sym. no.5 ‘Trilogia delle passioni’, 1924; Suite, 1931; Reverenza, 1949

Vocal: Saul och David (G. Fröding), Bar, orch, 1907; Eros vrede [The Wrath of Eros] (Fröding), Bar, orch, 1907; Predikaren [The Preacher] (Fröding), Bar, orch, 1911; Mannen och kvinnan [The Man and the Woman] (Fröding), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1911; Israels lovsång [Israel's Song of Praise], chorus, orch, 1915; Die badenden Kinder, S, orch, 1918; Cant., 1v, children's chorus, female chorus, 1922; Höga visan [Song of Songs], solo vv, chorus, orch, 1925; 11 sånger, 1v, orch, 1926; 50 songs, 1v, pf

Chbr: Pf Qnt, 1917; Str Qt, 1919

Principal publishers: Gehrmans, Hirsch, Musikaliska konstföreningen, Nordiska musikförlaget, Suecia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Rundberg: Svensk operakonst (Stockholm, 1952)

A. Isaksson: Natanael Berg, veterinär och tonsättare (Skara, 1990)

S. Hanson: Det praktiska tonsätteriets historia: Föreningen svenska tonsättare genom 75 år (Bromma, 1993)

ROLF HAGLUND

Bergamasca [bergamasco, bergomask]

(It.).

A tune widely used for instrumental variations and contrapuntal fantasias in the late 16th century and the 17th. It was probably based on a folksong or folkdance, and its name suggests a connection with the district of Bergamo in northern Italy. The tune was usually associated with the recurring harmonic scheme I–IV–V–I (ex.1).

Chordal accompaniments for the bergamasca appear in many Italian tablatures from Montesardo (1606) to G.P. Ricci (1677). Some keyboard variations retain the harmonic scheme in the manner of an ostinato (see Samuel Scheidt’s set in H-Bn 26). Others, however, simply use the melody of the first half of ex.2 without the bass formula, as in Frescobaldi’s bergamasca from Fiori musicali (1635), Giovanni Salvatore’s Canzone francese sopra un ballo detto la Bergamasca (1641) and G.B. Fasolo’s Fuga prima sopra la Bergamasca as well as in some ensemble pieces by Viadana (1610) and Giamberti (1657).

In Italy bergamasca variations were also written for keyboard by Bernardo Pasquini (D-Bsb L.215); for ensemble by Salamone Rossi (1622), Marco Uccellini (1642) and Gasparo Zanetti (1645); and for lute by Abondante (1587), Rasponi (1635), Alessandro Piccinini (1639) and Bernardo Gianoncelli (1650). Anonymous bergamascas in manuscript include works for violin (HR-Zaa I.a.44), keyboard (I-Rvat Chigi Q.IV.28) and lute (US-SFsc, Bentivoglio MS M.2.1.M3; I-Lg 774; and one transcr. Chilesotti in Da un codice Lauten-buch del cinquecento, Leipzig, 1890). Earlier pieces bearing the name ‘bergamasca’, such as Gorzanis’s Saltarello dito il bergamasco for lute (1564), two villotte by Filippo Azzaiolo (1569) and Barbetta’s Moresca quarta deta la Bergamasca (1585), are unrelated to the bergamasca melody, and only Barbetta’s Moresca follows the harmonic pattern I–IV–V–I.

Examples in French lute tablature may be found in Besard’s Thesaurus harmonicus (1603) and Novus Partus (1617) as well as in D-Ngm 33748, D-Hs B/2768 and the Thysius Lutebook (NI-Lu). English bergamascas (sometimes called ‘bergomask’) include settings by Bull and Holborne; in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a ‘Bergomask Dance’ is performed by rustics (Act 5 scene i). In Germany the first half of the tune, which became associated with the text Kraut und Rüben, occurs in the quodlibet of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1742).

In the 19th century the term was used for a fast dance in 6/8, which served as a model for Alfredo Piatti’s Bergamasca for cello and piano (op.14). Other 19th- and 20th-century compositions have titles based on ‘bergamasca’, such as Debussy’s Suite bergamasque (1890–1905) and Fauré’s Masques et bergamasques (1919), but with no evident connection to the traditional tune or the harmonic scheme.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (L.H. Moe)

P. Nettl: ‘Die Bergamask’, ZMw, v (1922–3), 291–5

L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956), 170–74, 251–3

J. Buzga: ‘Zwei Bergamascas von Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts’, MZ, xvli (1981), 36–41

T. Faganel: ‘Missa sopra la Bergamasca: Prispevek k poznavanju ustvarjanja J.K. Dolarja’ [Missa sopra la Bergamasca: a Study of the Music of J.K. Dolar], MZ, xxiv (1988), 29–38

G. Spiessens: ‘De Bergamasca’, Musica Antiqua, vi (1989), 154–61

RICHARD HUDSON/GIUSEPPE GERBINO, ALEXANDER SILBIGER

Bergamo.

City in Lombardy, Italy c50 km north-east of Milan, below the first foothills of the Alps. Its principal church, S Maria Maggiore, built in the 12th century, was administered from 1449 by the Misericordia Maggiore, whose consorzio (council) had conducted its liturgy and given alms since 1265. The Misericordia introduced music into the service and began to keep records, a practice which continued into the late 19th century. The first records of payments to singers date from 1361. Instruction in singing and playing was instituted in 1449, with two teachers serving under the maestro di cappella; these courses were then connected to the Accademia di Lettere, thus establishing a school of music. The first organ, a positive, was installed by 1402, and by 1527 instrumentalists were regularly employed at the church. The post of maestro di cappella was held by Franchinus Gaffurius in 1483; his 16th-century successors included Gasparo Alberti, who was attached to the cappella in several capacities during the period 1514–60, Pietro Pontio (1565–7), Pietro Vinci (1568–80), Ippolito Chamaterò (1580–81) and Giovanni Cavaccio (1598–1626). Among the students of the cappella was the composer Antonio Scandello, cornettist in the years 1541–7. As in Venice (Bergamo belonged to the Venetian Republic from 1430), there was a choir supported by two organs, brass and viols, appropriate especially to Renaissance double-choir music such as Alberti’s.

During the 17th century the musical forces were reduced and performed simple, though no less festive, concertato music. From the 1620s, and notably after the plague of 1630, the use of string instruments acquired a new importance, and some of the most progressive composers of Italian instrumental music were active in the cappella. The principal maestri of the 17th and 18th centuries included Alessandro Grandi (i) (1627–30), Tarquinio Merula (1631–2), G.B. Crivelli (1642–8), Filippo Vitali (1649), Maurizio Cazzati (1653–7), P.A. Ziani (1657–9) and G.B. Bassani (1712–16). Among the other musicians employed there were Giovanni Legrenzi (organist, 1645–55) and C.A. Marino (violinist, 1683–96 and 1700–05). Though it was never again as important, music continued at S Maria Maggiore: Simon Mayr was maestro in the early 19th century, with an ensemble of six solo voices, organ and orchestra. His successor, Alessandro Nini (1847–77), enlarged the group of performers to 19th-century proportions. Towards the end of the century the maestri di cappella were well-known opera composers, Ponchielli (1882–6), Cagnoni (1886–90) and Pizzi (1897–1900).

The Cathedral of S Alessandro, situated in the old town next to S Maria Maggiore and strictly speaking attached to it, was musically less significant; among the maestri di cappella there were Cavaccio (1581–98) and Merula (1638–46), following his dismissal from S Maria Maggiore. S Alessandro della Croce and S Alessandro in Colonna, which served two Renaissance suburbs of Bergamo, had modest musical establishments in the early 17th century, including voices, strings and an organ. These churches all exchanged musicians with S Maria Maggiore for special celebrations.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the celebrated Serassi family of organ builders worked in Bergamo in competition with the already established firm of Antegnati at Brescia; the organ at S Alessandro in Colonna (1781) is one of Giuseppe Serassi’s most brilliant creations.

The earliest documented opera performance in Bergamo was of Cazzati’s Ercole effeminato, at the Palazzo della Ragione in 1654. The Teatro Riccardi, Bergamo’s earliest permanent opera house, was begun in 1786 and opened on 24 August 1791 with a performance of Piccinni’s Didone. It burnt down in 1797 but was rebuilt within two years. During the period 1801–9 the repertory was dominated by Mayr’s operas, and later Bellini and Verdi staged and conducted their works there; the first Italian performance of Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord was given in 1879 and the repertory also included works by Donizetti and Rossini. The name of the theatre changed to Donizetti to mark the centenary year, 1897, of the city’s most famous native composer. In 1937 it achieved greater national importance with the institution of the Teatro delle Novità, a scheme which aimed to stage at least three new Italian operas each year (a list of premières is in ES). The Teatro Cerri was constructed of wood in 1797 within the precincts of the Palazzo Vecchio; after ten years it was replaced by the Teatro Sociale, which flourished in the early 19th century under Mayr as an aristocratic venue for residents of the old town (the Società dei Nobili Signori).

Mayr’s presence transformed Bergamo’s musical life. He came to the city to study with Carlo Lenzi in 1789; Canon Pesenti from Bergamo supported him financially during his studies in Venice, and he became maestro di cappella of S Maria Maggiore in 1802, a position he held until his death in 1845. He started by reorganizing the vocal and instrumental ensemble of the church (one soprano, one alto, two tenors, two basses, organ, two first and two second violins, viola, double bass, two oboes and two horns); in 1805 he founded the Lezioni Caritatevoli di Musica, which, after various changes of name, became the Istituto Musicale Gaetano Donizetti in 1897, when it ceased to be attached to the cappella of S Maria Maggiore. Mayr’s organization of this school established the pattern for music schools throughout Italy. The most famous students included Donizetti, the tenor G.B. Rubini and the cellist Alfredo Piatti. From 1809 to 1824 Mayr was also director of the Teatro Sociale, where he conducted and staged his operas. He promoted performances by amateur chamber musicians (in which he took part himself) and founded the Unione Filarmonica in 1822; it met in the Teatro di S Cassiano (later the Teatro G.S. Mayr). A later chamber music society, the Società del Quartetto, was founded in 1904 as a continuation of the Unione Filarmonica. The Festival Pianistico Internazionale (held in cooperation with Brescia) began in 1964 and the Festival Donizettiano in 1982.

The Museo Donizettiano, founded in 1897 by the Bergamo scholar Cristoforo Scotti, houses autograph scores and early and recent editions of Donizetti’s operatic and instrumental music, the house of his birth is also a small museum. The Biblioteca Civica A. Mai contains important early music prints and manuscripts (described in the library’s bulletin Bergomum, lxxxvii (1992), 67–91 and 157–75; lxxxix (1994), 89–102), and some from the archives of the Misericordia Maggiore, as well as Mayr’s personal library, rich in 18th-century manuscript opera scores and his own compositions.

The most important composers born in Bergamo besides Donizetti were P.A. Locatelli and Antonio Lolli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM (A. Gazzaniga)

ES (G. Gavazzeni)

GroveO (M. Caraci Vela)

MGG2 (C. Sartori/M. Padoan)

A. Alessandri, ed.: Biografie di scrittori e artisti bergamaschi nativi od oriundi … con aggiunta degli scrittori musicali bergamaschi del P. Vaerini (Bergamo, 1875) [incl. writings by S. Mayr]

G. Locatelli: ‘L’istruzione a Bergamo e la Misericordia Maggiore (storia e documenti)’, Bollettino della Civica biblioteca di Bergamo, v (1911), 21–99

G. Donati-Petteni: L’arte della musica in Bergamo (Bergamo, 1930)

A. Meli: L’istituto musicale G. Donizetti, ieri, oggi, domani (Bergamo, 1956)

C. Traini: Organari bergamaschi (Bergamo, 1958)

J. Roche: ‘Music at S. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, 1614–1643’, ML, xlvii (1966), 296–312

M. Ballini: Cento anni di musica nella provincia di Bergamo (1859–1959) (Gorle, 1972)

V. Ravizza: ‘Frühe Doppelchörigkeit in Bergamo’, Mf, xx (1972), 127–42

R. Bowman: ‘Musical Information in the Archives of the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, 1649–1720’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 323–56

M. Padoan: La musica in S Maria Maggiore a Bergamo nel periodo di Giovanni Cavaccio (1598–1626) (Como, 1983)

A. Colzani: ‘Musica in Santa Maria Maggiore a Bergamo dal 1361 al 1440’, Rivista internazionale di musica sacra, vi (1985), 224–36

E. Comuzio: Il teatro Donizetti: due secoli di storia e cronologia degli specttacoli 1786–1989 (Bergamo, 1990)

M. Eynard: ‘La genesi e il ruolo dell’Unione filarmonica di Bergamo nell’Ottocento’, Archivio storico bergamasco, nos. 18–19 (1990), 285–92

M. Padoan: ‘Un modello esemplare di mediazione nell’Italia del Nord: S Maria Maggiore a Bergamo negli anni 1630–1657’, Rivista internazionale di musica sacra, xi (1990), 115–57

G. Moraschini: L’organo della Basilica di S Maria Maggorie a Bergamo (Gorle, 1993)

P. Palermo: La musica nella Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore a Bergamo dal 1657 al 1711: studio archivistico (diss., U. of Pavia, 1995)

P. Palermo: ‘La musica nella Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore a Bergamo all’epoca dell’infanzia di Locatelli’, Intorno a Locatelli, ed. A. Dunning, ii (Lucca, 1995), 653–748

M. Eynard and R. Tibaldi: ‘Per una bibliografia delle opere a stampa dei musicisti nati o attivi a Bergamo nei secoli XVI–XVIII’, Bergomum, xci/3 (1996) [whole issue]

M. Eynard and R. Tibaldi: ‘Le fonti musicali bergamasche a stampa nell’età moderna’, Atti dell’Ateneo di scienze, lettere ed arti di Bergamo, lix (1997–8) [forthcoming]

JEROME ROCHE/RODOBALDO TIBALDI

Bergamo, Petar

(b Split, 27 Feb 1930). Croatian composer. He studied in Split with Josip Hatze, then at the Belgrade Academy with Rajičić (composition), graduating in 1960, with further studies until 1964, including conducting with Zdravković. From 1965 to 1972 he was an assistant and later lecturer in composition and instrumentation at the Belgrade Academy. He was a music editor at Universal Edition in Vienna from 1973 to 1976. In 1983 he settled in Zagreb.

Bergamo’s early music is romantic in style but always guided by a firm structural discipline. The Symphony no.1 (rewritten from an earlier piano sonata) and the overture-fantasy Navigare necesse est show his classical leanings, but the strong harmonic language indicates further developments. These were largely realized in the ironical and harsh Symphony no.2 and Musica concertante, works notable for their striking atonal harmony, a strong and sometimes violent dramatic sense and brilliant orchestration. Also noteworthy is Bergamo’s excellent orchestration of Vojislav Vučković's ballet Čovek koji je ukrao sunce (‘The man who stole the sun’, 1966).

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: U zemlji lazji [In the Land of Lies] (radio op, 1, D. Lukić), 1954

Orch: Navigare necesse est, ov.-fantasy, 1960; 2 syms., 1961, 1963; Musica concertante, 1962; Arco per archi, str orch, 1985; Sax Conc., 1991–3

Choral: Bezimini [The Nameless] (J. Kaštelan), suite, 1954; Rastanak i Podgorski mornari [Farewell and Sailors of Podgora], diptych, 1955; Spiriti eccellenti (M. Čapalija), female chorus, ob, 2 tpt, bells, perc, 1994–6

Chbr and inst: Pf Sonata, 1957; Variazioni sul tema interotto, pf, 1957; Str Qt, 1958; Canzone antiche, wind, 1962; Conc. abbreviato, cl, 1966; Gloria, alla memoria Vincenzo Bellini, 13 str, 1966–84; Espressioni notturne, pf trio, 1967; I colori d’argento, conc., fl, hpd, ens, 1967; Ritrovari per tre, pf trio, 1967; Concerto per una voce, bn, 1975; Canzona da sonar, vn, 1976; Domande senza ripostà, sax, pf, 1996

Songs, children’s songs, film scores, incidental music for radio

Principal publisher: Udruženje kompozitora Srbije

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Živković: ‘Petar Bergamo: Concerto abbreviato’, Pro musica (1967), no.27, p.7

V. Peričić: Muzički stvaraoci u Srbiji (Belgrade, 1969), 50–57

A. Koci and others: Jugoslovanska glasbena dela (Ljubljana, 1980), 33–35

P. Bergamo and A. Wagner: ‘Papuča po glavi avangardista’, Vjesnik (26 July 1991)

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Bergani, Nicolò.

See Beregan, Nicolò.

Berganza (Vargas), Teresa

(b Madrid, 16 March 1935). Spanish mezzo-soprano. She studied in Madrid with Lola Rodriguez Aragon, a pupil of Elisabeth Schumann. She made her début in 1957 as Dorabella at Aix-en-Provence, returning as Rosina, Purcell’s Dido, Cherubino, Octavia (L’incoronazione di Poppea) and Ruggiero (Alcina). In 1958 she sang Isolier (Le comte Ory) at the Piccola Scala and Cherubino at Glyndebourne, and made her American début at Dallas as Isabella (L’italiana in Algeri). She first appeared at Covent Garden in 1960 as Rosina, then sang Cherubino and, during La Scala’s 1976 visit, the title role of La Cenerentola. She sang at Chicago, the Metropolitan (1967–8), Vienna, Paris and Salzburg; her roles included Cesti’s Orontea, Mozart’s Sextus and Cherubini’s Neris (Médée). Her rich creamy voice with its great agility, perfect for the Rossini mezzo-soprano roles, developed a heavier tone and a more dramatic style appropriate to Carmen, which she sang at Edinburgh (1977–8) and repeated at Hamburg, San Francisco, Covent Garden and Paris; and to Charlotte, which she sang at Zürich (1979). She appeared as Zerlina in Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni (1979). In the 1980s she sang mainly in concerts, and in 1992 she took part in the gala ceremonies in the Olympic Games in Barcelona. Among her many recordings are memorable interpretations of Sextus (La clemenza di Tito), Carmen, Rosina and Cenerentola, operas by Falla and a delightful recital of Spanish song. A volume of memoirs, Flor de soledad y silencio: meditaciones de una cantante, was published in Madrid in 1984.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Loveland: ‘Teresa Berganza’, Audio & Record Review, iii/5 (1963–4), 16–23 [with discography by F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming]

J.B. Steane: The Grand Tradition (London, 1974/R), 395–7

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Berge, Håkon

(b Stavanger, Norway, 22 April 1954). Norwegian composer. He embarked on his career as a composer for the theatre, arranger and conductor even before he graduated from the conservatory in Stavanger and received his diploma in composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music (1986). He has collaborated with leading directors at all the major theatre companies in Norway and also several abroad. He has written music for more than 70 plays. For some years he was also active at the Norwegian Broadcasting Television’s group for experimental music production and presentation. The group was awarded several prizes, and Berge’s TV opera Gagarin (1990) on scenes from the life of the first Soviet cosmonaut won acclaim both for its music and innovative use of the visual medium. Berge has been instrumental in moulding Norwegian cultural policy and has held a number of important positions, among which was his chairmanship of the Norwegian Composers Association from 1991 to 1997.

WORKS

Dramatic: Movement from Eclipse, ballet, 1984; Gagarin (TV op, J. Bing and T.Å. Bringsvaerd), 1990; Bakkantinnene (incid music, Euripides), 1997

Orch: Coriolan, conc., tpt, sym. band, 1981; Landskap. Åpent. Stille [Landscape. Open. Quiet], 1982; Signal, chbr orch, tape, 1986; Trombel, trbn, brass band, 1990; (four unexpected dances), brass band, 1994; The Great Color-Gobbler March, brass band, 1996; Indian Song Book, S, orch, 1996

Chbr: Suite, brass qnt, 1978; Wave, trio, ob, vc, hpd, 1983; Rain-Dance, ob, cl, bn, 1985; Signal II, 14 brass insts, perc, 1986; Girlander, accdn, 1991; Shimmer: Erindring, pf, chbr ens, 1993; Nanawatai, 3 perc, 1994

Vocal: Kitairon (Sophocles), male chorus, tape, 1985; Windows, choir, tape, 1986

ARVID O. VOLLSNES

Bergeijk, Gilius van

(b The Hague, 7 Nov 1946). Dutch composer. From 1966 to 1972 he studied the oboe and the alto saxophone at the Hague Conservatory; there he also studied composition with van Baaren and electronic music with Raaijmakers. In 1972 he began lecturing on electronic music at the Conservatory. He has also held various administrative positions in the field of Dutch music. In 1987 he was awarded the Ooyevaer Prize.

Van Bergeijk has composed both instrumental and electronic music including works for ballet, film and theatre. His music, often tragic and bitter in its effect, often uses deconstructive procedures and he often selects well-known works for this treatment in order to make the process understandable to the listener. Demontage, for example, incorporates themes by Handel and Thelonious Monk, while Over de dood en de tijd is based on Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen. Instead of using modern digital techniques in his electronic pieces he restricts himself to analogue splicing methods. He does this out of a craftsmanlike conviction that the imperfection of manual work gives the music its necessary vitality.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Opwaartsche wegen [Ascending Roads] (ballet), 1972; De Indianen (music-theatre piece), 1976; Dulcinea, Dulcinea (music-theatre piece), 1990; Tables d’amour (ballet), 1994–5

Inst: Pianomuziek I–IV, pf, 1967; In memoriam Thelonious Monk, wind ens, 1983; Ondergang, 24 wind, 1984; Tussen twee werelden, orch, 1986, collab H. Emmer; Symphonie joyeuse, ens, 1987–93

El-ac: Over de dood en de tijd (after Schubert: Der Tod und das Mädchen), A, pf, org, elecs, 1980; De roep [The Shout], 1982; Pro juventute, 1985; Sym. der duizend, (alfabetisch), 1992; Een lied van schijn en weezen [A Song of Appearance and Essence], 1993; You are my Fairy Queen Dearest (van Bergeijk), 1v, pf, 1995

Other: D.E.S., tape, 1967–8; Demontage, 6 pieces, 1993–8

Principal publisher: Donemus

JACQUELINE OSKAMP

Bergen.

City in Norway. During the 16th century art music there was cultivated by the church, the grammar school and the official town musicians. Nils Mogensson (c1530–66) was the first organist at the cathedral. The first known contract for a town musician is dated 1591, although the post seems to have been well established by that time. Of the 18 town musicians appointed before 1848 (when the appointment was discontinued) the following were outstanding: L.J. Nattheide (appointed 1591), Povel Krøpelin (1669; d 1706), Rudolph Grip (1685; d 1716), O.P. Rødder (1789; d 1806) and F.G. Schediwy (1837–48). In 1671 Bergen appointed its first director of music, Peder Mogenssøn Wandel, who was succeeded by Søren Pedersen (from 1681), Anders Eckhoff (d 1718), Peder Stub (from 1719; d 1747) and Diderich Warnicke (d 1766). From the 16th century to the 18th the church choir consisted of grammar school pupils. Under Søren Linstrup (headmaster from 1696 to 1702) a series of church music dramas was performed.

In 1765 the Harmonien music society founded its own orchestra in Bergen, the Harmoniske Selskab (Harmonic Society), the first of its kind in Norway. Initiated by Jens Boalth and Claus Fasting, the orchestra had 20 members and gave weekly concerts of symphonies, chamber music and choral works. The first conductor was Samuel Lind (1765–9); his successors included Rødder (1785–1805), Ferdinand Rojahn (1856–9), A. Fries (1859–62 and 1864–73), Grieg (1880–82), Halvorsen (1893–9), Harald Heide (1905–48), Olav Kielland (1948–52), Arvid Fladmoe (1958–61), Karsten Andersen (1964–84), Aldo Ceccato (1984–90) and Dmitri Kitaienko (from 1990). In 1987 the orchestra (until then called the Musikselskab Harmoniens Orkester) was reorganized as the Bergen PO, with its own choir; in 1995 the orchestra and choir each had about 90 members. The orchestra has toured in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in the USA and Japan (1993).

The theatre Den Nationale Scene was founded in 1850 by the violinist and composer Ole Bull, and until the end of the 19th century many music dramas and operas were performed there by visiting companies. From 1894 Den Nationale Scene and Harmonien collaborated closely. The theatre had its own orchestra from 1902 to 1918. Opera Bergen, established in 1982, presents two major productions a year, using both professional and amateur performers.

The Bergen Festival was inaugurated in 1953. Each year a number of symphony, chamber, church and jazz concerts are held, as well as theatre and ballet performances, folklore and art exhibitions, in which both Norwegian and foreign artists participate. In 1953 the festival consisted of 22 events, but by the 1990s the annual number of events had risen to about 100. The director from 1994 was Ole Wiggo Bang. A large concert hall, the Grieghal, was opened in 1978.

The Bergen Musikkonservatorium was opened in 1905, on the initiative of T. Castberg. The first Norwegian music college was founded in Bergen in 1852 by the German-Norwegian composer Friedrich Vogel. The teacher-training college in Bergen opened a music department in 1958.

The city has several chamber music groups, including the Bergen Kammermusikforening (Chamber Music Society, founded 1935). The ensemble BIT20, established in 1989, specializes in contemporary music. Amateur music societies include the Bergen Handelsforenings Orkester (Trade Union Orchestra, 1941), and a number of choral societies, among them the Bergen Haandverks og Industriforbunds Sangforening (1847), the Søraas Kor (1882) and the Concordia society (1923). The Bergen Domkantori choir (founded 1971) has won prizes in Norway and abroad. The city also has several military bands. A piano factory was opened in Bergen in 1896 by Jakob Knudsen.

Composers who have worked in Bergen include Bull, Grieg, Sverre Jordan and Harald Saeverud. Troldhaugen, Grieg’s home, was completed in 1885, and remains as it was during the composer’s lifetime, as a museum, augmented by a visitor centre and a recital hall, where chamber concerts are held during the annual festival. A collection, established in 1906, of Grieg’s manuscripts and letters is in the Bergen public library (N-Bo). The 150th anniversary of Grieg's birth in 1993 prompted a series of cultural events.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.E. Erichsen: Bergens kathedralskoles historie (Bergen, 1906)

C. Geelmuyden and H. Schetelig, eds.: Bergen 1814–1914 (Bergen, 1914–19)

A.M. Weisener: Om stadsmusikantene i Bergen (Bergen, 1943)

A. Berg and O. Mosby: Musikselskabet Harmonien 1765–1945 (Bergen, 1945–9)

B. Volle: Om stadsmusikantene i Bergen 1620–1759 (diss., U. of Oslo, 1979)

K.F. Johannessen and S. Steen: ‘The Grieg Collection in the Bergen Public Library’, SMN, xix (1993), 55–8

R. Storaas: ‘Grieg, the Bergensian’, SMN, xix (1993), 45–54

KARI MICHELSEN

Bergen, Gimel [Berg, Joachim; Montanus]

(b Lübeck, c1540; d Dresden, 1597). German printer. After apprenticeship with Jakob Lucius in Rostock and Johann Eichorn in Frankfurt an der Oder, he moved to Dresden, working at first with Matthäus Stökel. His music printing began in 1570 with vocal collections by Matthaeus Le Maistre and Antonio Scandello, followed by several Lutheran hymnals. After his death the press was continued by his widow and heirs, including his son Gimel II (fl 1610–37, made Hofbruckdrucker in 1616), then Gimel III (fl 1640–43), Christian and Melchior (fl 1643–88), Melchior’s son Immanuel (fl 1688–93) and eventually Melchior’s son-in-law, Johannes Riedel (fl 1688–1716). Their most ambitious and best-executed printing coincides with their finest music. Editions of Heinrich Schütz began to appear in 1618, including the Psalmen Davids (1619) and the second and third parts of the Symphoniae sacrae (1647, 1650, the first having been issued earlier in Venice). Other major works are the dance music (1527–8) of Carlo Farina and the dialogues (1645–71) of Andreas Hammerschmidt, the latter often with the printer Georg Beuther in nearby Freiberg. Wolfgang Seiffert (fl 1624–55), who married Hedwig Bergen, Gimel II’s daughter, and his son Gottfried (fl 1655–c1662) are named in joint imprints and alone on works of Farina, Hammerschmidt and Schütz, notably Schütz’s Psalmen Davids of 1661. (BenzingB)

DONALD W. KRUMMEL

Berger, Andreas

(b Dolsenhaim, nr Altenburg, Saxony, 1584; d Ulm, 10 Jan 1656). German composer, singer and teacher. His father having left him little in the way of worldly goods, he went as a young man to Schwandorf, Nördlingen, and then to Augsburg, where his first publication appeared in 1606. The title ‘Kaiserlicher Notar’, which he held from 1624, indicates a legal training. At the end of 1606 he was appointed a tenor in the Stuttgart court chapel and in 1608 acted also as composer to the duke, Johann Friedrich; however, his application for the post of Kapellmeister was unsuccessful. Despite a contemporary report that he was ‘a good musician and a fine composer’, he was dismissed in 1612 when the number of singers in the chapel was reduced. After this he appears to have employed his talents in various directions. Until 1624 he worked as Präzeptor and music director at Bopfingen, near Nördlingen; then for ten years he was Kapellmeister and probably also official scribe to Count Ludwig Eberhard of Öttingen before returning to Augsburg in 1634 to become the town’s official secretary. He was town clerk of Leutkirch, near Memmingen, from 1635 until in 1641 he moved to Ulm, where he worked as clerk of the court until his death.

Berger composed both sacred and secular vocal music. The 1606 book of Harmoniae contains 32 motets in four to eight parts, of which those for fewer voices adhere strongly to the polyphonic style of the late 16th century. Those based predominantly on flowing counterpoint are musically the most effective, for Berger’s attempts to use shorter, pointed motifs as a basis for imitation are less successful. However, he handled other progressive features more ably; these include passages of homophony, which are specially strong when used antiphonally in the double-choir pieces; some imaginative word-painting, including quite startling discords; and an extensive use of sequences showing tonal feeling, which are found alongside traces of modal influence. The general layout of these motets shows a certain affinity with similar works by H.L. Hassler that were published in Augsburg at the time. Berger wrote his collection of secular lieder of 1609 to compensate for what he felt to be a comparative lack of German songs, as opposed to those in Latin and Italian; they are simple strophic pieces. The ten-part antiphon setting Da pacem, Domine of 1635 is his most mature surviving work; it displays effective contrasts in sonority and texture and in the treatment of the text, as well as strong reminders of the polychoral style of Giovanni Gabrieli.

WORKS

Harmoniae seu cantiones sacrae, 4–8vv (Augsburg, 1606); 3 motets, 8vv, also in 1618¹

Threnodiae amatoriae, das ist: Neue teutsche weltliche Traur- und Klagelieder, 4–8vv (Augsburg, 1609); canzone, 8vv, ed. H. Schultz, Reichsdenkmale des Erbes deutscher Musik, 1st ser., xiv/2 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1941); O Trauern, Angst und Klagen ed. in Volksliederbuch für die Jugend, x, nr.521 (Leipzig, 1930)

Da pacem, Domine, 10vv (Augsburg, 1635)

Magnum tricinium tergeminum (Ulm, c1648), lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

WaltherML

J. Sittard: Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am württembergischen Hofe, i (Stuttgart, 1890–91/R)

G. Bossert: ‘Die Hofkapelle unter Herzog Friedrich’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, new ser., xix (1910), 317–74

G. Bossert: ‘Die Hofkapelle unter Johann Friedrich’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, new ser., xx (1911), 150–208

W. Vetter: Das frühdeutsche Lied (Münster, 1928)

A. LINDSEY KIRWAN/STEPHAN HÖRNER

Berger, Arthur (Victor)

(b New York, 15 May 1912). American composer and critic. Between the ages of 11 and 16 he studied the piano and his first compositions were written while he was in high school. From 1928 to 1930 he attended the City College, CUNY; he received his first formal instruction in composition at New York University (BS 1934). In these years he became acquainted with the avant garde (Ives, Varèse, Cowell) and joined the Young Composers Group, formed by Copland. As a fellowship student he enrolled in the Longy School of Music (1935–7) and concurrently attended Harvard (MA 1936), where he was taught by Piston, A.T. Davison and Leichtentritt. During the years 1937–9 he studied in Paris with Boulanger. He then taught at Mills College (1939–42) and also studied composition with Milhaud, who helped him secure a commission to write a woodwind quintet for members of the San Francisco SO. Berger subsequently taught at Brooklyn College (1942–3), the Juilliard School and Brandeis University (from 1953); in 1979 he became a member of the faculty of the New England Conservatory, from whose composition faculty he retired in 1998. Long active as a writer and editor, he has been music critic for the Boston Transcript (1943–7), New York Sun (1943–6) and New York Herald Tribune (1946–53); served as editor of the Musical Mercury (1934–7) and Perspectives of New Music (1962–3), of which he was a co-founder; and contributed articles to many journals, notably Modern Music, Saturday Review, Atlantic Monthly, High Fidelity and Score. He also wrote a monograph on Copland (1953). Among his awards have been an American Council of Learned Societies grant (1936), a Fulbright scholarship (1960), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975–6). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

While in Paris (1937–9) Berger’s interest in Stravinsky’s music was heightened and this had considerable influence on the development of his style, leading to the publication of several articles on Stravinsky’s music. Berger is almost invariably categorized as a Stravinskian neo-classicist with regard to his music of the period 1940–57 and as a serial or post-Webern composer for his later works. Although he has admitted the early influence of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, particularly of the latter’s Die glückliche Hand and Piano Suite op.25, it is simplistic to classify him in this way, for he has developed his own procedures that lend special and highly effective qualities to his music. Paramount is a concern with musical space, both vertical and horizontal. To maintain the clarity of vertical pitch relationships he uses a lean, spare texture; horizontal connections are delineated by wide-spaced leaps. In his vocabulary of linear procedures, 7ths and 9ths are commonplace and function as they would in traditional tonal music; they are not used ‘as a means of speaking in a raised voice’ (Berger). Rhythmically fragmented lines also contribute to the openness of the textures. Berger’s concern with the structuring of musical space does not spring from an interest in the abstract, nor is it the result of formulaic manipulations; he believes simply that such treatment enhances the beauty of pitch relationships and sonorities.

During the early 1950s Berger’s harmonic idiom was essentially diatonic, but because he often displaced the elements of chords, exploding them by means of fragmentation, vertical octave spacings, or delayed progression, his music hardly seemed diatonic. Comparisons with Webern undoubtedly stemmed from his use of such techniques, yet the diatonic skeleton of his music provided a connection with Stravinskian neo-classicism; indeed, Babbitt used the term ‘diatonic Webern’ in a review of the Duo for cello and piano (1951) and Berger himself hinted at a merging of the two styles in his work when he described the Chamber Music for 13 players (1956) as ‘neoclassic twelve-tone’. His Five Pieces for piano (1969) display a sophisticated arsenal of procedures, including the use of combinatorial sets as well as refined techniques of pitch selection and registration. In a number of works he has used a group of five source-trichords whose pitch classes both provide vertical sonorities and are arpeggiated as melodic fragments.

Since 1961, when he wrote the Three Pieces for two prepared pianos, Berger’s music has tended to be less rigorously systematic in its serialism. In his words, ‘cells, often of a tone-cluster variety’, are used to create vertical organization in which individual pitch classes are dispersed by means of widely shifting octave dispositions. Since 1958 his output has not been large; at the same time he has shown increasing stylistic independence. Having ended his reliance on dodecaphony and neo-classicism, he derives new constraints and assumptions for each work in order to replace those previously provided by external procedures. Indeed, an increased attention to the use of instrumental colour has been noted by his friend, the artist Robert Motherwell.

Later in life Berger has paid considerable attention to the revisions of earlier works, utilizing a variety of techniques which range from re-composition to the simultaneous overlay of new materials. He considers these revisions to be collages based on the earlier pieces.

WORKS

Orch: Ideas of Order, 1952; Polyphony, 1956; Chbr Conc., 1959, 3rd movt rev. as Perspectives III, pf 4 hands, 1982, 2nd movt rev. as Perspectives II, 1985

Chbr: Qt in C, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1941; Serenade concertante, vn, 11 insts, 1944, rev. 1951; 3 Pieces, str qt/str orch, 1945, rev. 1982; 4 Duos: vn, pf, 1948, vn, pf, 1950, vc, pf, 1951, ob, cl, 1952, arr. cl, pf, 1957; Chamber Music, 13 insts, 1956; Str Qt, 1958; Septet, fl, cl, bn, vn, va, vc, pf, 1965–6; Trio, gui, vn, pf, 1972; Qnt, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1990, rev. and retitled as Diptych: Collages I and II; Collage III, fl, cl, vn, vc, perc, pf, 1992, rev. 1994

Pf: 2 Episodes, 1933; Entertainment Pieces, ballet music, 1940; Fantasy, 1942; Rondo, 1945, rev. as Duet for H.S., 1980; Capriccio, 1945; 3 Bagatelles, 1946; Partita, 1947; Intermezzo, 1948; 3 Two-Part Inventions, 1948–9, combined with Intermezzo (1948) and retitled 4 Two-Part Inventions, 1993; 3 One-Part Inventions, 1954; 3 Pieces, 2 prepared pf, 1961; 5 Pieces, 1969; Composition, pf 4 hands, 1976; An Improvisation for A[aron] C[opland], 1981; Perspectives III, pf 4 hands, 1982 [arr. of orch work]; For Elliott [Carter] at 75, Study in 7ths and 9ths, 1983

Vocal: Words for Music, Perhaps (3 Songs) (W.B. Yeats), S/Mez, (fl, cl, vc)/pf, 1939–40; Garlands (Asklepiades), Mez, pf, 1945; Psalm xcii, SATB, 1946; Boo Hoo at the Zoo: Tails of Woe (J. Mullan), 2vv, 1978; When I am Dead, S, pf, 1978; 5 Songs (Horace, R.M. Rilke, P. Valéry, Belli, C. Rossetti), T, pf, 1978–9; Love, Sweet Animal (D. Schwartz), SATB, pf 4 hands, 1982; Ode on Ronsard, medium v, pf, 1987

Principal publishers: Associated, Boelke-Bomart, C.F. Peters, E.B. Marks, G. Schirmer, Lawson-Gould, Mercury, New Music

WRITINGS

‘The Songs of Charles Ives’, Musical Mercury, i (1934), 97–8

‘Form is Feeling’, MM, xxii (1944–5), 87–92

‘Stravinsky and the Younger American Composers’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 38–46; repr. in The American Composer Speaks, ed. G. Chase (Baton Rouge, LA, 1966), 201–15

‘Aaron Copland's Piano Fantasy’ Juilliard Review, v/1 (1957–8), 13–27

‘Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky’, PNM, ii/1 (1963), 11–42; repr. in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 123–54

‘Notes on the Plight of the American Composer’, Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society, ed. N. Jacobs (Boston, 1964), 111–19

‘New Linguistic Modes and the New Theory’, PNM, iii/1 (1964–5), 1–9; repr. in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1972), 22–30

‘Some Notes on Babbitt and his Influence’, PNM, xiv/2–xv/1 (1976), 32–6

‘Music as Imitation’ Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, ed. J. Rahn (New York, 1994), 302–12

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

P. Glanville-Hicks: ‘Arthur Berger’, ACA Bulletin, iii/1 (1953), 2–5

J.M. Perkins: ‘Arthur Berger: the Composer as Mannerist’, PNM, v/1 (1966–7), 75–92, repr. in Perspectives on American Composers, ed. B. Boretz and E.T. Cone (New York, 1971), 230–47

Festschrift for Berger, PNM, xvii/1 (1978), 1–91 [incl. interview by J. Coppeck; articles by E. Barkin, S. Silver and others; bibliography of writings by P. Jones; and list of works]

E. Barkin: ‘Arthur Berger’s Trio for Violin, Guitar and Piano’, Breaking the Sound Barrier, ed. G. Battcock (New York, 1981), 215–20

B. Northcott: ‘Arthur Berger – an Introduction at 70’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 323–9

P. Driver: ‘Arthur Berger and his Unmistakable Music’, Boston Globe (28 Dec 1983)

P. Child: ‘A Glance Backward: Musical Activity in New England, c.1930–1950. An Interview with Arthur Berger’, Essays in Modern Music, iii/1–4 (1987), 11–22

R. Lister: ‘Arthur Berger: the Progress of a Method’, American Music, xiii/1 (1995), 56–95

R. Bauer: ‘An Interview with Arthur Berger’, Musically Incorrect, ed. H. Biggs and S. Orzel (New York, 1998), 49–69

CHARLES H. KAUFMAN

Berger, Christian

(b Freiburg, 13 Dec 1951). German musicologist. He studied the violin and music education at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg and musicology at Freiburg University with Eggebrecht. After completing the state examination at the Hochchule in 1975, he continued his musicological studies with Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan in Berlin and with Reckow and Krummacher in Kiel, where he worked as an assistant (from 1980) and later senior assistant (until 1994). He took two postgraduate degrees at Kiel: the doctorate in 1982 with a disseration on Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, and the Habilitation in 1989 with a study on French 14th-century chanson. In 1995 he was appointed professor and head of the music department at Freiburg University and he became an editor at the Musikforschung in 1998. His research focusses on late medieval music, late Baroque instrumental music, 18th- and 19th-century French music, Liszt's symphonic poems and Webern. One of his major achievements has been exploring the implications which the medieval hexachord-based teaching system has for the polyphonic writing of the Middle Ages. Based on his investigations of this neglected area of medieval music history, he has been able to provide new and often surprising insights into the compositional processes of this repertory.

WRITINGS

Phantastik als Konstruktion: Hector Berlioz' ‘Symphonie fantastique’ (diss. U. of Kiel, 1982; Kassel, 1983)

‘Ein “Tableau” des “Principe de l'Harmonie”: “Pygmalion” von Jean-Philippe Rameau’, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Dijon 1983, 371–84

‘Die melodische Floskel im Liedsatz des 14. Jahrhunderts: Magister Franciscus' Ballade “Phiton”’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 673–9

Hexachord, Mensur und Textstruktur: Studien zum französischen Lied im 14. Jahrhundert (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Kiel, 1989; Stuttgart, 1992)

‘J.S. Bachs Cembalokonzerte: ein Beitrag zur Gattungsgeschichte des Klavierkonzerts im 18. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xlvii (1990), 207–16

‘Hexachord und Modus: drei Rondeaux von Gilles Binchois’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xvi (1992), 71–87

‘Musikalische Formbildung im Spannungsfeld nationaler Traditionen des 17. Jahrhunderts: das “Lamento” aus Heinrich Ignaz Franz Bibers Rosenkranzsonate Nr.6’, AcM, lxiv (1992), 17–29

‘Das Zusammenspiel von Hexachordsystem und Modus am Beispiel der Motette “Tuba / In arboris / Virgo sum” von Philippe de Vitry’, RdMc, xvi (1993), 2410–20

‘“Pour doulz regard …” ein neu entdecktes Handschriftenblatt mit französisichen Chansons aus dem Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, li (1994), 51–77

‘“… a li ne doit on nul autre comparer”: Musik und Text in der Motette des 13 Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Motette “Lonc/Aucun/ANNUNTIANTES” von Petrus de Cruce’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte: eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, ed. A. Laubenthal and K. Kusan-Windweh (Kassel, 1995), 49–57

‘Das Rondeau “Ay las quant je pans” im Lucca-Codex’, Mf, xlviii (1995), 395–8

‘Atonalität und Tradition: Anton Weberns Vier Stücke für Geige und Klavier op.7’, AMw, liii (1996), 183–93

‘Solages Ballade “Calextone” und die Grenzen des Tonsystems’, Modalität in der Musik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. U. Gunther (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1996), 75–91

‘“Encore! … Encore, et pour toujours! … ”: die Rolle der idée fixe in Hector Berlioz’ Lélio ou le Retour à la vie’, Traditionen, Neuansätze: für Anna Amalie Abert, ed. K. Hortschanksy (Tutzing, 1997)

‘Mass und Klang: die Gestaltung des Tonraumes in der frühen abendländischen Mehrstimmigkeit’, Raum und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. J.A. Aertsen (Berlin, 1998)

‘Die Musik der Zukunft: Liszts Symphonische Dichtung Die Ideale’, Liszt und die Weimarer Klassik, ed. D. Altenburg (Laaber, 1997)

LORENZ WELKER

Berger, Erna

(b Cossebaude, nr Dresden, 19 Oct 1900; d Essen, 14 June 1990). German soprano. After studying in Dresden, she was engaged by the Dresden Staatsoper, making her début as First Boy (Die Zauberflöte) in 1927. She sang at Bayreuth (1929–33) as the Shepherd in Tannhäuser, the First Flowermaiden and the Woodbird. Her first Salzburg appearance (1932) was as Blonde, her last (1953–4) as Zerlina. She made her Covent Garden début in 1934 as Marzelline, returning in 1935 and 1938, when she sang Queen of Night, Konstanze and Sophie. She sang again in London in 1949, and in that year made her Metropolitan début as Sophie (performance preserved on disc). She continued to appear in Germany and Austria until the end of the 1954–5 season. On her retirement from the stage she devoted herself to lieder, giving her final public recital in Munich in 1968. Berger’s voice retained its youthful freshness throughout her career; her Queen of Night and Konstanze were considered peerless, and her purely sung, innocent Gilda was one of the best of its day. Among her recordings are the Queen of Night, Gilda and Zerlina (on film, 1954); she also made many notable recordings of lieder.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Höcker: Erna Berger, die singende Botschafterin (Berlin, 1961)

A. Blyth: Obituary, Opera, xli (1990), 934–5

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Berger, Francesco [Francis]

(b London, 10 June 1834; d London, 26 April 1933). English pianist and composer. The son of a businessman from Trieste, Berger’s early teachers in London were Adolf Gollmick (piano) and Raffaello Paravivini (composition). In 1848 he went to Trieste where he studied piano with Aegidius Karl Lickl and composition with Luigi Ricci. Together with Alberto Randegger, Giuseppe Rotta and Alberto Zelman (all pupils of Ricci), he composed an opera, Il lazzarone, which was produced at the Teatro Mauroner in Trieste on 23 August 1851. During his time in the city he composed a comic opera, I ciarlatani, and a mass with orchestral accompaniment which was performed in the cathedral of S Giusto, and also produced operas by Bellini and Donizetti in his role as maestro concertatore at one of the theatres. In about 1852 Berger decided to continue his studies in Leipzig, and took private lessons there with Moritz Hauptmann and Louis Plaidy. In 1855 he returned to London and established himself as a teacher of piano, appearing as soloist in concerts in London and the provinces. He became a friend of Charles Dickens, and composed the music for Dickens’s productions of two plays by Wilkie Collins, The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1857). In August 1857 The Frozen Deep was performed in Manchester with Berger conducting. He married the contralto Annie Lascelles (d 1907) in 1864. Between 1868 and 1908 Berger organized unique classes in London for the study of chamber music with piano, known as the ‘Après-midi instrumentales’. From 1886 he was on the staff of the RAM and from 1887 he also taught at the GSM. He was a member of the Philharmonic Society from 1871, a member of its directorate (1880–1912) and its honorary secretary (1884–1911).

Berger composed over 100 light piano pieces, and almost the same number of short vocal pieces. His partsong Night, lovely night had a considerable vogue, and his First Steps at the Pianoforte (1894), published in Novello’s series of music primers, was popular as a piano method. He left two books of memoirs, Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes (London, 1913) and 97 (London, 1931), which contain many interesting sketches of contemporary musicians personally known to him. He also published a useful book of musical expressions with translations into French, German and Italian (London, 1921).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.D. Brown: Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (Paisley and London, 1886/R)

Obituary, MT, lxxiv (1933), 559 only

ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Berger, Ludwig

(b Berlin, 18 April 1777; d Berlin, 16 Feb 1839). German composer and pianist. The son of an architect, he spent his youth in Templin and Frankfurt, where he studied the flute and piano and composed over 100 pieces, most of them songs. In 1799 he undertook a composition course with Gürrlich in Berlin; a projected course under J.G. Naumann in Dresden two years later was prevented by the latter’s death, and Berger composed a cantata in his memory. On his return to Berlin he became friendly with Clementi, with whom he visited Russia in 1804. Berger remained in St Petersburg for eight years, learning much from a close acquaintance with the music of Field. There he also married, but his wife died within a year. In 1812, Napoleon’s advancing army forced him to flee to London. The public received his piano playing enthusiastically, but homesickness drew him back to Berlin in 1815 when the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. He lived there until his death, an eminent teacher whose pupils included the young Mendelssohn, as well as Taubert and Henselt, but an increasingly embittered man: his career as a virtuoso had been curtailed in 1817 by a nervous disorder of the arm, and his music never attained the popularity he felt it deserved. In 1819 he founded the Jüngere Berlin Liedertafel with B. Klein, Ludwig Rellstab and G. Reichardt, in opposition to the earlier Berlin Liedertafel of C.F. Zelter.

As a composer Berger made his chief mark as a later exponent of the Berlin Song School, and he published over 160 solo songs. He was the first to set Wilhelm Müller’s texts for ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ in 10 Gesänge op.11, as a participant in Müller’s original Liederspiel. His works, extending to 55 opus numbers, also include a piano concerto in C, seven piano sonatas, partsongs, 29 studies (the 12 Etudes op.12 being the best known), a quantity of didactic piano works, variations, marches and rondos, and even unfinished operas. His piano style, especially in the works written between 1800 and 1810, reflects that of Beethoven; the Sonata-Pathétique in C minor op.7, for example, not only borrows title and key from Beethoven’s op.13, but also adopts his scheme of interpolating its slow Introduzione into the subsequent Allegro. Berger’s Sonata op.18, also in C minor, is based entirely on a six-note motif pervading all three movements with an insistence that quickly becomes wearisome; that the experiment was made at all, however, indicates an original mind and a willingness to attempt complex technical problems. In his later works, lyricism supersedes motivic preoccupations, and it is in his capacity as a ‘singing’ piano composer that his greatest influence on Romantic piano music can be seen: Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte stem directly from Berger’s Etudes, opp.12 and 22, as a comparison between Berger’s op.12 no.11 in G minor and Mendelssohn’s op.38 no.2 in C minor confirms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (W. Kahl)

NewmannSSB

L. Rellstab: Ludwig Berger: ein Denkmal (Berlin, 1846)

P. Egert: Die Klaviersonate im Zeitalter der Romantik, i (Berlin, 1934)

D. Siebenkäs: Ludwig Berger: sein Leben und seine Werke unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seines Liedschaffens (Berlin, 1963)

R.L. Todd: ‘A Sonata by Mendelssohn’, Piano Quarterly, xxxix (1980), 30–41

S. Youens: ‘Behind the Scenes: Die schöne Müllerin before Schubert’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 3–22

RICHARD KERSHAW/MICHAEL MUSGRAVE

Berger, Roland

(b Berlin, 16 June 1937). Austrian horn player. The son of Hans Berger, first horn player in the Vienna PO, he studied with Gottfried von Freiberg, whom he was to succeed as the orchestra's principal horn in 1962. He established his reputation leading the horns in Solti's recordings of Wagner's Ring; his rendering of the solo horn call in Act 2 of Siegfried was recognized as a definitive interpretation. Paradoxically, in Wagner and Bruckner he was to specialize not as first horn but as leader of the Wagner tuba quartet. His playing of the Vienna F horn was marked by great strength, solid warmth and a declamatory exactness; the standard of playing he set on this instrument, which is notably more unpredictable than one of more modern design but whose tonal qualities are unrivalled, has ensured the F horn's survival (at one time under threat) as the instrument of the Vienna PO. Berger retired from the orchestra in 1992 to devote himself to passing on the Vienna horn tradition as professor at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik.

OLIVER BROCKWAY

Berger, Roman

(b Cieszyn, 9 Aug 1930). Slovak composer, writer on music and pianist of Polish birth. During his schooling in Český Těšín he took theory, piano and organ lessons with Jan Gawlas. He entered the Katowice State Higher School of Music in 1949, and from 1952 continued his piano studies under Kafenda and Štefan Németh-Šamorínsky at the Bratislava Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After a period working as a pianist and piano teacher, he returned to the Academy in 1961 to study composition with Dezider Kardoš; his graduation piece, Transformácie (1965), became one of the most important Slovak works of the 1960s. He then worked as a piano teacher at the Conservatory in Bratislava and as a sound technician for Czechoslovak television; he was a lecturer at the Academy of Music (1969–71), and in 1976 he joined the staff of the Institute of Art History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The period of ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia after 1968 barred Berger from suitable employment in the years 1971–6. He remained at the Institute until 1991 when he joined the board of the contemporary music festival Melos-Ethos. In 1988 he was awarded the Herder Prize for his achievements in composition and music theory.

All his early works, without exception, are for piano, and are inspired above all by music of the Second Viennese School, and the ideas of Boulez and Adorno. His student compositions, in particular Suita v starom slohu (‘Suite in Olden Style’) and Transformácie, display considerable maturity and individuality. Within the four-movement symphonic structure of the latter piece, Berger tackled the problem of integration as viewed by the avant garde: the issue of strict organization versus random structure, and of rational construction versus intuitive composition. The three solo pieces that followed – Konvergencie I–III (1969–75) – seemed to focus on reconstructing the compositional process itself: they feature the audible transformation of a sequence of randomly selected notes. In addition to defining the space between music and non-music, Berger sought to bridge the gap between traditional and avant-garde approaches. In his unpublished theory of modern harmony, ‘Logické základy harmonického systému’, he sought, following the example of Xenakis, to systematize algebraically the harmonic series, an exercise that had direct bearing on Memento po smrti Miroslava Filipa (‘Memento on the Death of Miroslav Filip’) for orchestra (1973).

During the late 1950s and early 60s Berger also developed an interest in experimental music. One of the earliest exponents of electronic music in Slovakia, he realized a number of scores for radio and film before creating his first independent piece for the medium, Elégia in memoriam Ján Rúčka (1969), which was conceived during the heyday of the Experimental Studio at Czechoslovak Radio. His greatest achievement using electronics, however, is Epitaf pre Mikuláša Kopernika (‘Epitaph for Nicolaus Copernicus’, 1972), which combines orchestral sounds with their electronic transformation.

During the period of ‘normalization’ and beyond, Berger slowly rejected the ideas and principles of the avant garde in favour of a more semantic approach. His organ pieces Exodus II and IV (‘Finale’, 1981–2) represent the culmination of this development on a purely musical level. Another work from this period, De profundis for bass voice, piano, cello and live electronics (1980), is a setting of verses which treat of the moral dilemma of 20th-century man who is forced by circumstance to become both executioner and victim. Later works have meditative qualities, and some a harmony that suggests sacredness.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Suita v starom slohu [Suite in Olden Style], str, perc, kbd insts, 1963, rev. 1973; Transformácie, 1965; Memento po smrti Miroslava Filipa [Memento on the Death of Miroslav Filip], 1973

Vocal: Uspávanka [Lullaby] (J. Stacho), Mez, chbr orch, 1962; V tichu tak draho vykúpenom [In the Silence so Dearly Paid For] (T. Różewicz), SATB, 1962; Čierna a červená [Black and Red] (L. Novomeský), SATB, perc, 1967; Litánia k stromom [Litany to the Trees] (H. Jasiczek), TTBB, 1975; De profundis (Różewicz), B, pf, vc, live elecs, 1980; Wiegenlied (E. Gutjahr), A, pf, 1991

Chbr and solo inst: Fantasia quasi una sonata, pf, 1955; 5 veľmi krátych skladieb [5 Very Short Pieces], pf, 1959; 5 štúdií, pf, 1959–60; Romanca, vn, pf, 1960; Sonáta 1960, pf, 1960; 32 variáciína krátku tému [32 Variations on a Short Theme], pf, 1961; Malá suita [Little Suite], pf, 1961; Trio, fl, cl, bn, 1962; Konvergencie I, vn, 1969; Konvergencie II (Bachovské meditácie) [Bachian Meditations], va, 1970; Sonáta ‘da camera’ no.3, pf, 1971; Konvergencie III, vc, 1975; Exodus II, org, 1981; Exodus ‘Finále' IV, finale, org, 1982; Sonata, vn, pf, 1983; Adagio pre Jana Branného [Adagio for Jan Branny], vn, pf, 1987; Adagio no.2 ‘Pokánie’ [Atonement], vn, pf, 1988–9; November-Music I, pf, 1989

El-ac: Elégia in memoriam Ján Rúčka, 1969; Epitaf pre Mikuláša Kopernika [Epitaph for Nicolaus Copernicus], 1972; En passant, 1979; Transgressus I, 1993

Principal recording companies: Mediaphon, Opus, Supraphon

WRITINGS

‘Úvaha vyvolaná Oświęcimom Ilju Zeljenku’ [Reflections on Zeljenka's Oświęcim], SH, viii (1964), 229–32

‘Melos und Logos’, Methoden der ethnomusikologischen Analyse: Krpáčová 1974, pp.14–16

‘Sonáty Ludwiga van Beethovena’, HRo, xxx (1977), 425–9

‘Esej a post scriptum o hudobnej výchove’ [Essay and postscript on music education], Musica viva, ii (1981), 54–107

‘O adekvátnosti analyzy’ [On the adequacy of analysis], Musica viva, i (1981), 56–77

‘Stravinskij’, Hudobný život, xiv/12 (1982), 1, 5

‘O integracji muzycznej’ [On musical integration], Dzieło muzyczne: teoria, historia, interpretacja, ed. I. Poniatowska (Kraków, 1984) [Fs for Jozef Chomiński]

‘O tvorbe: skice’ [On composition: sketches], Melos – Logos – Ethos: Warsaw 1985, 24–38

‘Trzy monologi’ [3 monologues], ibid. 39–50

‘Museum and Utopy (an Outline to a Philosophy of Documentation)’, Contributions to the Study of Traditional Musical Instruments in Museums, ed. F. Hellwig, P. Kurfürst and I. Mačák (Bratislava, 1987), 8–40

‘Revolúcia v hudobnem myslení’ [Revolution in music], Umenie a revolúcia (Bratislava, 1988), 287–301

‘Esej o elektroakustickej hudbe’ [Essay on electro-acoustic music], Rozhlas a slovenská elektroakustická hudba (Bratislava, 1989), 111–50; repr. in SH, xxii (1996), 163–80

‘Nežná revolúcia a hudba: prolegomena k reforme umleckého školstva’ [The Velvet Revolution and music: prolegomena to the reform of art education], Hudobný život (1990), 10–15

‘Rekognoskácia v teréne’ [Field cognition], Medzinárodné fórum elektroakustickej hudby: Bratislava 1992, 181–7

‘Problém slovenskej hudobnej avantgardy z hľadiska neklasickej muzikológie’ [The Slovak musical avant garde from the point of view of non-classical musicology], Musikavantgarde in OstEuropa: 1992

Hudba a pravda [Music and Truth] (Bratislava, 1998) [collected essays]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ľ. Chalupka: ‘K vývoju slovenskej hudobnej avantgardy v 60. rokoch’ [The development of Slovak avant-garde music in the 1960s], Hudobný život, xxvii/20–21 (1995) [whole issue]

D. Gojowy: ‘Musik ist auch ein Politikum: der Komponist Roman Berger’, Das Orchester, xliv/4 (1996), 8–11

VLADIMÍR GODÁR

Berger, Theodor

(b Traismauer, Lower Austria, 18 May 1905; d Vienna, 21 August 1992). Austrian composer. He studied at the Vienna Music Academy (1926–32), where his teachers included Franz Schmidt and Hubert Kessler. Understanding music to be a state of nature or a portrayal of experiences in the natural world, he composed sound pictures linked to clearly defined instrumental ensembles. His melodies developed as the result of the sounds involved, rather than vice versa. ‘Scivolando’, for example, the first movement of the Sinfonia parabolica (1956), portrays skiing; Hydromelos (1965), reproduces sounds heard when diving. Although Berger wrote almost exclusively for the orchestra, his occasional use of the voice (Frauenstimmen im Orchester, 1959) was consistent with his emphasis on tone colour. After moving to Berlin during the 1930s, he adopted some of the ideas of the Neue Sachlichkeit, particularly those that accommodated his fondness for motor rhythms (‘Sägewerk’ and ‘Werkstattrhythmen’ from Impressionen, op.8, 1938). He returned to Vienna in 1939. His music did not receive its greatest exposure, however, until after World War II. Wilhelm Furtwängler and Karl Böhm were among his supporters.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballet: Heiratsannoncen, Salzburg, 1958

Orch: Malinconia und Rondo giocoso, op.5, str, 1933; Impressionen, op.8, 1938; Rhapsodisches Duo, vn, vc, orch (1939); Chronique, 1940; Rondo ostinato, wind, perc, 1940; Legende von Prinz Eugen, op.11, 1941; Ballade, op.10 (1942); Homerische Symphonie, 1946–8; Concerto manuale, 2 pf, mar, metallophone, str, perc, 1951; Musikalischer Nachrichtendienst, 1953; Symphonischer Triglyph, 1953, rev. 1958; La parola, 1955; Sinfonia macchinale, 1956; Sinfonia parabolica, 1956; Jahreszeiten, sym., 1957; Vn Conc., 1963; Fonofolium, 1987

Choral: Musik zu Goethes Faust II, chorus, orch, 1949; Frauenstimmen im Orchester, 6 female vv, hp, str orch, 1959; Divertimento, 6 male vv, 7 wind, perc, 1970

Other works: Str Qt no.1, 1930; Str Qt no.2, e–E, op.2, 1932; film, radio and TV scores, incl. Hydromelos, 1965

MSS in A-Wn

Principal publishers: Universal, Sikorski, Ries & Erler

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Rutz: ‘Theodor Berger’, ÖMz, iii (1948), 291–4

H.A. Fiechtner: ‘Theodor Berger’, ÖMz, xii (1957), 249–53

SIGRID WIESMANN

Berger, Wilhelm (Reinhard)

(b Boston, 9 Aug 1861; d Jena, 15 Jan 1911). German composer, pianist and conductor. He was taken to Germany at the age of one and grew up in Bremen, his father's native town, where he studied the piano and harmony with Wilhelm Kallmeyer. From 1878 to 1882 he attended the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, studying composition with Friedrich Kiel, the piano with Ernst Rudorff and score-reading with Woldemar Bargiel. As early as 1878 some of his lieder and piano works were published by Praeger and Meier in Bremen. In 1888 he married the singer Isabella Oppenheim and became a teacher at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. He made successful appearances as a concert pianist and as the conductor, from 1899, of the Musikalische Gesellschaft in Berlin. In 1903 he became a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste and succeeded Fritz Steinbach (on Steinbach's own recommendation) as court Kapellmeister at Meiningen. The stimulating activities of that post were troubled, after 1906, by his strained relationship with Duke Georg III. Max Reger became Kapellmeister on Berger's death.

As a composer Berger represents a link between the harmonic language of Brahms and that of Reger. In his day he was known chiefly for his lieder, choral works and piano muisc; he gained recognition for his work in 1898, when his chorus Meine Göttin and his String Quintet won prizes and his Symphony no.1 was performed in Meiningen under Steinbach. Some of his chamber music was performed at the Monday Popular Concerts in London in January 1904. His chamber music has recently been revived, but his works for chorus and orchestra, praised by his contemporaries, are forgotten.

WORKS

Catalogue: Wilhelm Berger-Katalog: vollständiges Verzeichnis sämtlicher im Druck erschienenen Tonwerke und Bearbeitungen, ed. W. Altmann (Leipzig, 1920)

instrumental

Orch: Dramatische Tondichtung, ov., op.33, unpubd; Konzertstück, pf, orch, 1888, unpubd; Sym., B, op.71 (Leipzig, 1899); Variationen und Fuge über ein eigenes Thema, f, op.97 (Leipzig, 1910); Sym., b, op.80 (Berlin, 1912)

Chbr: Fantasiestück, D, vn, pf, op.4 (Bremen, 1880); Sonata, d, vc, pf, op.28, 1880 (1930); Pf Trio, 1881–2, unpubd; Sonata, A, vn, pf, op.7 (Bremen, 1882); Pf Qt, A, op.21 (Bremen, 1887); Sonata, F, vn, pf, op.29 (Leipzig, 1888); Str Trio, g, op.69 (Berlin, 1898); Sonata, g, vn, pf, op.70 (Berlin, 1898); Str Qnt, e, op.75 (Berlin, 1899); Trio, g, cl, vc, pf, op.94 (Leipzig, 1905); Pf Qnt, f, op.95 (Leipzig, 1905); Pf Qt, c, op.100, unpubd; Serenade, 12 wind insts, op.102, 1910, unpubd

Kbd: Kleine Suite, a, hmn, op.56 (Berlin, 1894); Variationen und Fuge über ein eigenes Thema, e, 2 pf, op.61 (Berlin, 1896); 111 solo pf works, incl. Sonata, B, op.76 (1899), Variationen und Fuge über ein eigenes Thema, op.91 (1904), 7 Kompositionen, op.99 (1909), Klavierstücke, intermezzos, Humoresken, caprices, studies, etc.

vocal

Alt-Heidelberg (op, P.O. Höcker), mentioned by Altmann

Choral with orch: Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (J.W. von Goethe), 4vv, op.55 (Berlin, 1893); Meine Göttin (Goethe), male vv, op.72 (Leipzig, 1898); Euphorion: Szene aus Goethe's Faust II. Teil, solo vv, mixed chorus, op.74 (Berlin, 1899); Die Tauben (G. Hauptmann), S, Mez, mixed chorus, op.83 (Leipzig, 1902); An die grossen Toten (G. Schüler), mixed chorus, op.85 (1903); Der Totentanz (Goethe), 4vv, op.86 (Leipzig, 1903); Sonnenhymnus (Zoozmann), Bar, mixed chorus, op.106 (Leipzig, 1912); Heldenklage, 1889, Gesang der Erynnien, both unpubd, mentioned by Altmann

Several choral works with pf acc, for unacc. chorus, for female vv and for unacc. male vv

Solo vv, pf: Trios, op.84; 3 Duets, S, Bar, pf, op.38; 24 Volkslieder, Mez, Bar/A ad lib, pf (Berlin, 1901); 8 nordische Volkslieder, Mez, Bar/T, pf (Berlin, 1909); 191 solo songs, numerous op. nos., 14 arr. 1v, orch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (W. Kahl)

E. Krause: ‘Wilhelm Berger’, Monographien moderne Musiker, ii (Leipzig, 1907), 40–51

G. Ernest: Wilhelm Berger: ein deutscher Meister (Berlin, 1931)

K. Reinhardt: ‘Unbekannte Briefe des Herzogs Georg II. von Sachsen-Meiningen aus den Jahren 1904–1910 an den Hofkapellmeister Wilhelm Berger’, Mf, xl (1987), 135–49

K. Reinhardt: Eine Musiker-Jugend in Bremen: die Wiederentdeckung des Komponisten Wilhelm Berger (1861–1911) (Bremen, 1989)

R.J. PASCALL/IRMLIND CAPELLE

Berger, Wilhelm Georg

(b Rupea, Braşov district, 4 Dec 1929; d Bucharest, 8 March 1993). Romanian composer and musicologist. He studied at the Bucharest Conservatory with Alexandru Rădulescu (viola), Ion Şerfezi (theory and solfège), and Vancea (history); he also took private lessons with Cecilia Niţulescu-Lupu and Anton Adrian Sarvaş (violin) and Benjamin Bernfeld (chamber music). After beginning his career as a violinist in the Enescu PO (1948–58) and the Composers' Union Quartet (1953–6) he turned to musicology and composition. He received national and international prizes for composition, and in 1968 he was elected secretary of the Romanian Composers’ Union. As a composer he was quick to acquaint himself with new developments, but his work remained rooted in the Romanian national tradition, with dominant neo-classical and lyrical traits. The symphonies show a continuing search for variety; their dramatic moments are sometimes pushed to the monumental, as in the Third and the Fifth. His chamber works and concertos alike display virtuoso writing for the violin. Some of his most specifically Romanian music is in the works to texts by Mihai Eminescu. During his later years he embarked on a prolific study of aesthetics and musical form, producing over 20 publications.

WORKS

(selective list)

21 syms.: ‘Lirica’, 1960; ‘Epica’, 1963; ‘Dramatica’, 1964; ‘Tragica’, 1965; ‘Musica solemnis’, 1968; ‘Armonia’, 1969; ‘Energia’, 1970; ‘Luceafărul’ (M. Eminescu), chorus, orch, 1971; ‘Fantasia’, 1974; Sym. no.10, org, orch, 1975; ‘Sarmizegetusa’, 1979; ‘La steaua’, 1978; ‘Simfonia Solemnis’, 1980; ‘B–A–C–H’, 1985; ‘Anul pacii’, 1986; ‘Dimensiuni decshise’, sym. cycle [nos.16–21], 1987–92

Other orch: Conc., str, 1960; Vn Conc., 1965; Vc Conc., 1967; Meditations-variations, chbr orch, 1968; Variations, wind, 1968; 2 Vn Conc., 1968; Music for Fl, Orch, 1972; Conc., vn, vc, orch, 1977; Conc., vn, va, orch, 1978; Cl Conc, 1979; Solo Organ Conc., 1981; Pf Conc., 1986

20 str qts, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1966, 1967, 1967, 1967, 1967, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993

Sonatas: va, pf, 1957; vn, pf, 1958; pf, 1962; va, vc, 1962; vn, 1963; fl, va, vc, 1965; vn, va, 1967; vc, 1967; va, 1968; solo va, 1968; org, 1979; solo fl, 1985

Vocal: Stefan Furtună (orat, G. Dan), 1958; Dintre sute de catarge [Rising Stars] (cant, Eminescu), 1973; Faust (orat, J. Goethe), 1981

Principal publisher: Muzicală

WRITINGS

Ghid pentru muzica instrumentală de cameră [A guide to instrumental chamber music] (Bucharest, 1965)

Muzica simfonică barocă-clasică, i (Bucharest, 1967)

Cvartetul de coarde de la Haydn la Debussy (Bucharest, 1970)

Muzica simfonică romantică: 1830–1890, ii (Bucharest, 1973)

Muzica simfonicǎ romanticǎ-moderna: 1880–1930, iii (Bucharest, 1974)

Muzica simfonicǎ moderna-contemporana: 1930–1950, iv (Bucharest, 1976)

Muzica simfonicǎ contemporana: 1950–1970 (Bucharest, 1977)

Cvartetul de coarde de la Reger la Enescu (Bucharest, 1979)

Dimensiuni modale (Bucharest, 1979)

Estetica sonatei clasice (Bucharest, 1981)

Estetica sonatei romantice (Bucharest, 1983)

Estetica sonatei moderne (Bucharest, 1984)

Estetica sonatei baroce (Bucharest, 1985)

Estetica sonatei contemporane (Bucharest, 1985)

Teoria generala a sonatei (Bucharest, 1986)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: ‘Berger, Wilhelm Georg’, Sohlmans Musiklexikon, ed. H. Astrand (Stockholm, 2/1975–9)

D. Bughici: Formele muzicale (Bucharest, 1969), 167–83

V. Cosma: Muzicieni români: lexicon (Bucharest, 1970), 64–6

M. Popescu, ed.: Repertoriul general al creatiei muzicale romanesti, i (Bucharest, 1979); ii (Bucharest, 1982)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din Romania, i (Bucharest, 1989)

VIOREL COSMA

Bergerette (i)

(Fr.: ‘little shepherdess’, ‘pastoral song’).

(1) A kind of song in the 15th century, first found in a text manuscript (GB-Lbl Add.15224 (c1430)), which gives the heading ‘Bergerete chantee’ to 13 poems with no apparent common features; the heading ‘Bergerette’ appears in another manuscript (F-Pn fr.2230 and fr.19182) for virelais. Descriptions of the term in several literary treatises of the 15th century show no clear consistency of meaning.

(2) In common parlance the word is often used to denote a virelai setting from the second half of the 15th century, in the erroneous belief that its single-stanza form is not found among virelais of the 14th century. In this sense it is treated as a forme fixe (see Formes fixes); and the word appears to lie at the root of the Italian word Barzelletta, which does (in music) denote a forme fixe.

DAVID FALLOWS

Bergerette (ii)

(Fr.: ‘little shepherdess’, ‘pastoral song’).

In the 18th century the word, alongside ‘bergerie’, is given to folksong-like airs of a pastoral and amorous nature.

DAVID FALLOWS

Bergerette (iii)

(Fr.: ‘little shepherdess’, ‘pastoral song’).

A shepherd-dance, the title given to four dances in Susato’s Het derde musyck boexken (Antwerp, 1551); that three of them are in triple time but the other in duple, and that their formal designs have nothing in common, suggests that the title is just a broad characterization.

DAVID FALLOWS

Berggreen, Andreas Peter

(b Copenhagen, 2 March 1801; d Copenhagen, 8 Nov 1880). Danish folklorist, teacher and composer. He began composing and playing the flute while still in school. After his matriculation he studied law for a time, but influenced by the composer C.E.F. Weyse he soon dedicated himself to music and attracted attention in 1823 with a cantata for the 200th anniversary of Regensen, the students' college in Copenhagen. Over the next few years he composed several more cantatas as well as incidental music for the Royal Theatre. From 1838 he was organist at the Trinitatis Kirke, and from 1843 singing master at the metropolitan school. He held both posts until his death; they led him to an intensive occupation with church and school singing. He composed a notable set of hymn melodies, many of which are still used in the Danish Church, and edited many collections of partsongs for schools, containing several of his own compositions. He also made an important collection of Danish and foreign folksongs and melodies. In 1858 he was appointed honorary professor and in 1878 granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Copenhagen. From 1859 he was inspector of singing in the Danish schools. Although a self-taught musician, he became a distinguished teacher of music theory; among his pupils were Gade and Peter Heise. Late in life he published his complete songs and some other earlier vocal compositions. He also wrote a biography of Weyse and edited the periodicals Musikalsk Tidende and Heimdal.

Berggreen's original compositions are strongly indebted to Viennese Classical models. His folkloristic work was bound to the musical point of view of his time: he attempted to arrange folk melodies according to the traditional harmonic system, often at the expense of their original melodic character. Although his collections are thus without the scholarly method one finds in modern research, they have been valuable in stimulating interest in early folk music and for the Scandinavian peoples' consciousness of their musical roots.

WORKS

(selective list)

all printed works published in Copenhagen

Edition:Compositioner for sang og claveer (Copenhagen, 1872–4) [all with pf acc.] [B]

theatrical

Billedet og busten [The Picture and the Bust] (Spl, A. Oehlenschläger), Copenhagen, Royal, 1832, B iii

Incid music for tragedies (Oehlenschläger): Dronning Margareta, 1833, Tordenskjold, 1832, Socrates, 1835, all Copenhagen, Royal, B ii

cantatas

Cantate til Regensens 200 aars jubilaeum, 1823 (1823)

Cantate til Prins Ferdinand og Prinsesse Carolines bryllup (wedding cant.), 1829 (1829)

Cantate til Bogtrykkerkunstens jubelfest [Cantata for the Printers' Jubilee], 1840, B ii

Cantate til Oehlenschlägers mindefest, 1850, B ii

Cantate ved Kong Frederik VII død, 1863 (1863)

other works

Forspil til psalmemelodierne, org (1867); Thèmes variés, gui (n.d.); Fantasie over en norsk fjeldsang, fl, orch (1875)

Songs and partsongs, B i–ii

editions

Folke-sange og melodier, faedrelandske og fremmede, i–xi (Copenhagen, 1842–55, enlarged 2/1861–71)

Melodier til den af Roeskilde Praesteconvent udgivne psalmebog [Melodies for the Roskilde Psalter] (Copenhagen, 1853–6, 7/1889)

Aeldre sangmusik af forskjellige componister, i (Copenhagen, 1875), ii–iii (Copenhagen, n.d.)

WRITINGS

C.E.F. Weyse's biographie (Copenhagen, 1876)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBL (E. Abrahamsen)

C. Skou: Andreas Peter Berggreen (Copenhagen, 1895)

E. Dal: Nordisk folkeviseforskning siden 1800 (Copenhagen, 1956)

SIGURD BERG

Bergh, Gertrude van den

(bap. Cologne, 21 Jan 1793; d The Hague, 10 Sept 1840). Dutch pianist and composer. A child prodigy, she studied the piano with Ferdinand Ries and composition with J.A.F. Burgmüller. Her sonata for piano was published by J.J. Hummel when she was nine years old. By 1813 she had moved to The Hague, where she was especially renowned for her interpretation of Beethoven, and was also one of the earliest ‘revivalists’ of J.S. Bach’s music. She was the first Dutch woman to publish a manual on the fundamentals of music theory, Principes de musique (c1830). Besides conducting several choirs, she supported herself by teaching members of the Dutch royal family. Her sweetly romantic Lied für Pianoforte was probably the earliest ‘Song without Words’ to be written in the Netherlands. She also composed virtuoso works, such as the Rondeau pour le pianoforte op.3 (c1820–21). Manuscript works, including her string quartet and preludes and fugues, are lost. In 1830 she was made an honorary member of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (Association for the Promotion of Music).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Metzelaar: ‘Gertrude van den Bergh’, Zes vrouwelijke componisten, ed. H. Metzelaar (Zutphen, 1991), 21–51

H. Metzelaar: From Private to Public Spheres: Exploring Women’s Role in Dutch Musical Life from c. 1700 to c. 1880 and Three Case Studies (Utrecht, 1999)

H. Metzelaar: ‘Gertrude van den Bergh’, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, iii: Women Born Before 1799, ed. M.F. Schleifer and S. Glickman (New York, 1999), 329–39

HELEN METZELAAR

Berghaus, Ruth

(b Dresden, 2 July 1927; d Berlin, 25 Jan 1996). German director. She studied dance at the Palucca School in Dresden from 1947 to 1950. Her career as a choreographer began in 1964 with the Berliner Ensemble, of which she was later Intendant (1971–7), and she also staged productions of a strongly ideological character at the Deutsche Staatsoper, including a famous Il barbiere di Siviglia (in German) that remained in the repertory for 25 years. From 1980 to 1987 she worked under the Gielen-Zehelein regime at the Frankfurt Opera as one of a team of guest directors (which also included Alfred Kirchner, Christof Nel and Hans Neuenfels) who presented a series of challenging, radical stagings that put the house in the front rank of innovation.

In her production of Die Entführung (1981) the physical and psychological confinement of the harem was represented by an empty white, box-like set which at critical moments heaved and rolled. The staging was at once richly comic and a powerful theatrical realization of the notion that Die Entführung advocates freedom of choice for women as well as for men. Among Berghaus’s other productions – which included Die Zauberflöte (1980), The Makropulos Affair (1982), Parsifal (1982) and Les Troyens (1983) – that of Wagner’s last opera stood out as a bold attempt to address the ‘regeneration’ ideology that lies behind it. The Grail community was presented as a sinister gang of hoodlums with shaven heads and dark glasses, a depraved society in dire need of redemption. That process was aided by Kundry herself, who ultimately joined the knights in their apparently voluntary self-annihilation – a symbolic enactment of the passing away of the old, corrupt order.

The climax of Berghaus’s work at Frankfurt came with her Ring (1985–7), a demythologized, deconstructionist production that could similarly be understood as a confrontation with the Wagnerian ethos and legacy. Her repertory of frequently shocking images and bizarre gestures made a subliminal appeal to the imagination; her stage conventions owed something to the theories of Brecht and something to Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. Her Don Giovanni for the WNO (1984) was similarly notable for its arresting, if enigmatic, images and vibrant symbolism: crucifix-like swords shuddering in the ground fused the phallic with the religious. In a brilliant coup de théâtre, the swaddling-clothes caressed by Elvira unravelled to reveal that her baby was but a phantom; they then became a nun’s headdress – a telling combination of erotic longing and religious fervour. Ottavio’s isolation and frigidity were neatly represented by a snowfall.

Other notable productions include Lulu at Brussels, Tristan at Hamburg and Schubert’s Fierrabras in Vienna (all 1988) and Elektra at Dresden (1995). Berghaus’s surreal acting style, and even specific images, can be traced in the work of the next generation of directors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Neef: Das Theater der Ruth Berghaus (Berlin, 1989)

K. Bertisch: Ruth Berghaus (Frankfurt, 1990)

BARRY MILLINGTON

Berghe, Frans van den.

Baptismal name of Tiburtius van Brussel.

Bergholz [Perdeholtz, Perkholtz], Lucas

(fl 1520–51). German composer. In 1539 he matriculated at the University of Wittenberg. Three of his compositions are extant: a Latin motet for six voices and two German psalm motets for four voices (in D-Dl 1/D/3 and Z 73). His German works follow the tradition established by Thomas Stoltzer, and are distinguished by careful text setting and a fine understanding of imitative techniques. It is likely that Bergholz was acquainted with Sixt Dietrich, who taught music at Wittenberg in 1540, and with Johann Reusch, a prominent composer and theorist in the Wittenberg circle of Lutheran adherents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Albrecht)

G. Pietzsch: Zur Pflege der Musik an den deutschen Universitäten bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 1971), 159, 162

CLEMENT A. MILLER

Berghout, Phia [Sophia] (Rosa)

(b Amsterdam, 14 Dec 1909; d Doorn, 22 March 1993). Dutch harpist. A student of Rosa Spier at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, she made her début in 1926. She performed widely as a soloist and in chamber music, and with her help and encouragement many Dutch composers, including Badings, Flothuis and van Delden, wrote solo works for the harp. From 1933 to 1959 she was harpist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and after the death of its conductor, Eduard van Beinum, she established a foundation in his name, organizing courses and an international centre for musicians at Huis Queekhoven, Breukelen (1960–74). Particularly notable were the famous harp weeks (jointly led by Maria Korchinska) which eventually led to the establishment of both the World Harp Congress and its triennial international festivals. The first of these was held in 1983 in Maastricht, where Berghout settled after her retirement and continued to teach at the Conservatory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Verbugt: ‘Phia Berghout (1909–1993)’, Harpa, x/2 (1993), 11–16

W.M. Govea: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Harpists: a Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT, 1995)

ANN GRIFFITHS

Bergier, Nicolas

(b Reims, 1 Mar 1567; d Reims, Aug 1623). French historian and theorist. He trained in law and was appointed a professor of law and then syndic in Reims, where he was a popular representative. He acquired a lasting reputation as a historian, due to the success of his principal work, Histoire des grands chemins de l'empire romain (Paris, 1622). He published other works on diverse subjects and also left a number of important works in manuscript, including the treatise La musique speculative (F-Pn fr.1359; ed. with Ger. trans. E. Jost, Cologne, 1970), in which he sought to distinguish between poetic and musical rhythm, stressing that musical rhythm had to be flexible in order to accommodate the poetry. His views on certain topics (such as the musical proportions) are similar to those of Salinas. The treatise ends with proposals for assessing the effects of rhythm. For further discussion see P. Vendrix: ‘Nicolas Bergier: le dernier théoricien de la Renaissance en France’, ‘La musique de tous les passetemps le plus beau…’: hommage à Jean-Michel Vaccaro, ed. F. Lesure and H. Vanhulst (Paris, 1998), 369–86.

PHILIPPE VENDRIX

Bergijk, Johannes van.

See Oridryus, Johannes.

Bergiron [Bergiron de Briou], Nicolas-Antoine, Seigneur du Fort Michon

(b Lyons, 12 Dec 1690; d Lyons, before 27 April 1768). French composer and co-founder of a concert academy in 18th-century Lyons. The son of Antoine Bergiron (1654–1731), advocate of the Paris Parlement and one of Louis XIV's hunting organizers, he studied classics and law, matriculating at the University of Paris in July 1715. Two years earlier his father lamented his son's ‘fatal and violent stubbornness for music’, reflected in his collaboration with the scientist J.P. Christin (inventor of the mercury thermometer) in organizing the Académie des Beaux-Arts to give regular concerts of vocal and instrumental music.

His first surviving composition was an entertainment for the Marshal of Villeroy, Governor of Lyons and favourite of Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon, performed at the Académie in August 1714. The work opens with a typical Lullian overture and intersperses dances (minuets, sarabande etc.) and symphonies between the airs tendres and airs guerriers: Campra's Les fêtes vénitiennes (1710) was a clear model, and many passages rework themes by him. Bergiron composed a number of similar divertissements during the next decade, including La chasse (1723) based on excerpts from works by Louis Lully, Montéclair, Gervais, the Duke of Orléans, Desmarets, Lacoste, Salomon and Campra. He also attempted opera and was one of a group who early in 1739 attempted to reorganize and restore the Lyons opera to its former glory with a performance of Montéclair's Jephté. His reputation as a composer, however, rested mainly on his motets and cantatas, which provided the academy’s staple diet throughout his life. Although he ceded the direction of the largely amateur orchestra and choir to Jacques David in 1718, he remained attached to the academy as inspector (officier du concert) and succeeded Christin as copyist and librarian after the latter's death in 1757; he was still concert director in 1763–4 and his obituary in the Lyons Petites affiches of 27 April 1768 refers to him as ‘Examinateur et Censeur des ouvrages destinés au Théâtre’. The leading figure in the academy's activities for over half a century, he won the praises of distinguished visitors, including Bernier and Rameau.

WORKS

Ops: Aréthuse, 1722–3, lost; Pentezilée, 1722–3, F-LYm

Divertissements: Impromptu divertissement en musique (Bordes), Lyons, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 1 Aug 1714 [autograph]; Le retour de la paix; Hipermenestre et Lincée; La jalousie; Thétis et Pélée; Les fêtes de l’amour: all F-LYm; L'apothéose d'Hercule; La pastorale; La fête marine; Le désespoir; Les vendanges de Neuville, Lyons, 15 April 1722; La chasse (pastiche), Lyons, 10 Feb 1723: all lost

Cants.: Cantates françoises [Les Sirènes, Le supplice de Cupidon, Le songe d'Anacréon, Narcisse, La lire d'Orphée en Astre, Bacchus et l'Amour], 1v, insts (Lyons, 1729); others cited in Vallas (1908), lost

Grands motets: Misericordias Domini, LYm; In te Domini speravi, Jubilate Deo, Dies irae, Salvum me fac: all lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Vallas: La musique à Lyon au dix-huitième siècle (Lyons, 1908) [incl. catalogue of the academy's library]

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et théâtre à Lyon, 1688–1789 (Lyons, 1932/R) [incl. edns of 2 minuets from Bergiron's Impromptu divertissement]

FRANK DOBBINS

Bergkreyen.

See Bergreihen.

Berglund, Paavo (Allan Engelbert)

(b Helsinki, 14 April 1929). Finnish conductor. He studied the violin from the age of 11, and joined the Finnish RSO in 1949. Three years later he and several colleagues formed the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra to broaden the scope of musical performance in the city, and he became its first conductor. Soon after, he was appointed assistant conductor of the Finnish RSO, and was its chief conductor, 1962–71. He improved the orchestra’s standard, and toured with it to the USSR, Germany and Britain. His début in Britain was with the Bournemouth SO in 1965, conducting Sibelius centenary concerts; Berglund then became a frequent guest conductor at Bournemouth and, as well as giving the first performances outside Finland of Sibelius’s Kullervo symphony in Bournemouth and London in 1970, he made the first recording of the work with the Bournemouth SO and Finnish singers. After Silvestri’s death, Berglund succeeded him as principal conductor at Bournemouth, 1972–9, becoming, in addition, musical director and principal conductor of the Helsinki PO, 1975–9. Subsequently he was principal conductor of the Royal Stockholm PO, 1987–91, and from 1993 to 1996 was principal conductor of the Royal Danish Orchestra, with whom he recorded an invigorating set of the six Nielsen symphonies. His other recordings include ruggedly impressive series of Sibelius and Shostakovich symphonies. He has written A Comparative Study of the Printed Score and the Manuscript of the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius (Helsinki, 1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.L. Holmes: Conductors: a Record Collector’s Guide (London, 1988), 38–9

NOËL GOODWIN

Bergman, Erik (Valdemar)

(b Uusikaarlepyy, 24 Nov 1911). Finnish composer. He studied musicology with Ilmari Krohn and literature with Yrjö Hirn at Helsinki University (1931–3) and attended the Helsinki Conservatory (1931–8) as a pupil of Erik Furuhjelm and Bengt Carlson (composition) and Ilmari Hannikainen (piano). In addition, he studied composition with Heinz Tiessen at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1937–9, 1942–3) and 12-note techniques with Wladimir Vogel in Ascona (1954). He has taken a particular interest in non-European cultures and religions, especially those of north Africa and the Near East, and has travelled extensively in all continents, listening to traditional music and collecting instruments. Until the mid-1960s he devoted much time to conducting choirs, including that of the Roman Catholic church in Helsinki, the Sällskapet M.M. and the Akademiska Sångförening. From 1945 to 1981 he was a music critic for the Helsinki newspapers Nya pressen, Svenska pressen and Hufvudstadsbladet, and he was professor of composition at the Sibelius Academy (1963–76). His many honours include membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (1961), honorary membership of the Academy of Finland (1982) and honorary doctorates at the Åbo Akademi (1978) and the University of Helsinki (1982).

Bergman’s first important compositions date from the later 1940s, when he abandoned the Romantic idiom and was drawn towards neo-classicism; at the same time he was searching for new constructive methods, which gradually led him to serialism. In the early 1950s he became the first Finnish composer to adopt the 12-note method (in Espressivo, 1952, and Three Fantasies, 1954), used in an increasingly complicated but unorthodox and individual manner. More used as a device to control intervallic ‘colour’ than as a thematic principle, his 12-note music is comprised of rows that are unusually homogeneous in intervallic content and symmetrical in structure. Permutation technique is used, but in such a way that the original form is not greatly altered; the unifying factor is the intervallic colour even when new melodic and harmonic ideas are unfolded. In some works, such as Aubade (1958), the rhythm is controlled by serial principles, and occasionally this extends to the dynamics (Simbolo, 1960). Polyrhythm, variable metre and simultaneous use of different tempi also contribute to the rhythmic elasticity of his works during this period.

At the end of the 1960s Bergman abandoned strict serial procedures for a freer technique involving elements of improvisation and aleatory writing within oscillating tone-fields but retaining a strict control over form. This approach, as shown in, for example, Colori ed improvvisazioni, is reminiscent of Lutosławski’s ‘aleatory counterpoint’. A straight line of development runs from the ‘neo-Impressionist’ Aubade to the even richer yet more delicate scoring of Colori ed improvvisazioni. Bergman’s main interest since the 1980s has been the more dramatic orchestral concerto. The period is also characterized by chamber music for various combinations of instruments.

Choral works occupy a central position in Bergman’s output. His considerable experience of choral conducting has given him an extremely versatile technique in writing for voices. The melody is usually wide-ranging and he often employs various forms of Sprechgesang and speech (Galgenlieder, 1959–60), either for a whole piece or as a contrast with sung material, as well as other vocal techniques such as glissandos and microtones (Lapponia, 1975). In some works, for example Bardo Thödol, a continuum between instrumental and vocal sounds is created. Bergman’s choice of texts includes classical and modern poetry in various languages, religious texts of different cultures and even meaningless phonetic elements.

WORKS

(selective list)

Opera: Det sjungande trädet [The Singing Tree] (2, B. Carpelan), op.110, 1988; Helsinki, 3 Sep 1995

Principal publishers: Fazer, Novello

vocal

Choral with orch/insts: Rubaiyat (O. Khayyam), op.41, Bar, male vv, orch, 1953; Aton (Ikhnaton), op.49, Bar, spkr, SATB, orch, 1959; Nox (S. Quasimodo, J. Arp, P. Eluard, T.S. Eliot), op.65, Bar, SATB, fl, eng hn, perc, 1970; Missa in honorem Sancti Henrici, op.68, S, A, T, B, SATB, org, 1971; Hathor-Suite (Ancient Egyptian, Ger. trans. S. Schott), op.70, S, Bar, SATB, fl, eng hn, hp, perc, 1971; Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. L. Govinda), op.74, spkr, Mez, Bar, SATB, orch, 1974; Noa (Heb. texts), op.78, Bar, SATB, orch, 1976; Preisungen (Old Testament), op.135, S, Bar, SATB, orch, 1996; Yö [The Night] (textless), op.139, a fl, Ct, male vv (1997)

Choral unacc.: 3 Galgenlieder (C. Morgenstern), op.51a, Bar, 2 spkrs, male vv, 1959; 4 Galgenlieder (Morgenstern), op.51b, 3 spkrs, SATB, 1960; Springtime (S. von Schoultz), op.60, Bar, SATB, 1966; Lapponia (textless), op.76, Mez, Bar, SATB, 1975; Tipitaka Suite (S. Nipáta, Pali, Swed. texts), op.93, Bar, male vv, 1980; Petrarca Suite (F.P. Petrarch), op.118, Bar, SATB, 1991; Tapiolassa [In Tapiola] (Kalevala), op.121, 2 S, A, girls’ vv, 1992; Hommage à Béla Bartók (textless), op.132, SATB, 1995

Solo vocal (with insts): Triumf att finnas till [Triumph of Being There] (E. Södergran), op.87, S, fl, perc, 1978; Lament and Incantation (textless), op.106, S, vc, 1984; Die Blume (textless), op.115, Mez, perc, 1990; Den heliga oron [The Holy Restlessness] (von Schoultz), op.127, Mez, str qt, 1994; Ögonblicket [The Twinkling of an Eye] (von Schoultz), op.128, 1v, pf (1994); Aggadot (Heb. texts), op.129, 4 solo vv, fl, cl, bn, perc, 1994

instrumental

Orch: Aubade, op.48, 1958; Simbolo, op.52, 1960; Circulus, op.58, 1965; Colori ed improvvisazioni, op.72, 1973; Dualis, op.86, vc, orch, 1978; Birds in the Morning, op.89, fl, orch, 1979; Arctica, op.90, 1979; Cl. Conc., op.94, 1981; Ananke, op.97, 1982; Vn Conc., op.99, 1982; Tutti e soli, op.113, chbr orch, 1989; Poseidon, op.122, 1992; Musica marina, op.125, str, 1994; The Maestro and his Orchestra, op.136, vn, orch, 1996; Cadenza, op.137, ob, orch, 1996; Conc., op.140, chbr orch, 1997

Chbr: 3 Fantasies, op.42, cl, pf, 1954; Concertino da camera, op.53, fl, cl, b cl, perc, pf, vn, va, vc, 1961; Solfatara, op.81, a sax, perc, 1977; Dialogue, op.82, fl, gui, 1977; Silence and Eruptions, op.91, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, str qt, 1979; Janus, op.92, vn, gui, 1980; Mipejupa, op.96, fl, a sax, gui, perc, 1981; Str Qt, op.98, 1982; Borealis, op.101, 2 pf, perc, 1983; Quo vadis, op.102, vc, pf, 1983; etwas rascher, op.108, sax qt, 1985; Karanssi, op.114, cl, vc, 1990; Mana, op.117, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1991; Quint-essence, op.123, sax qt, perc, 1993; Attention!, op.124, perc (5 players), 1993; Now, op.126, va, pf, 1994; Una Fantasia, op.130, str qt, pf, 1994; Musica concertante, op.138, str qt, 1997

Solo inst: Sonatina, op.36, pf, 1950; Espressivo, op.40, pf, 1952; Aspekter, op.63, 1969; Energien, op.66, hpd, 1970; A propos de B–A–C–H, op.79, pf, 1976; Midnight, op.83, gui, 1977; Omaggio a Cristoforo Colombo, op.119, 1991

MSS in CH-Bps

WRITINGS

‘At My Age …’, Finnish Music Quarterly, vi/1 (1990), 51–3

Laulava puu [The singing tree], ed. K. Aho (Jyväskylä, 1995)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (M. Heiniö, K. Aho)

B. Wallner: Vår tids musik i Norden [The music of our time in the Nordic countries] (Stockholm, 1968)

P. Heininen: ‘Erik Bergman’, Musiikki, ii (1972), 3–24

P. Heininen: ‘Erik Bergman 70-luvulla’ [Erik Bergman in the 1970s], Musiikki, xii (1982), 194–219

H. Apajalahti: Espressivosta Svanbildin: Erik Bergmanin varhainen dodekafoninen tekniikka [From Espressivo to Svanbild: Erik Bergman’s early dodecaphonic technique] (Helsinki, 1989)

L. de Gorog: From Sibelius to Sallinin: Finnish Nationalism and the Music of Finland (New York, 1989)

K. Korhonen: ‘Erik Bergman and the 1950s Finnish Modernism’, Finnish Music Quarterly, vii/4 (1991), 3–7

J. Parsons, L. von Bonsdorff, M. Heiniö, eds.: Vägvisare till Det Sjungande trädet: en hyllning till Erik Bergman 24.11.1991 [A signpost to The Singing Tree: a tribute to Erik Bergman 24.11.1991] (Jyväskylä, 1991)

M. Heiniö: Aikamme musiikki [Contemporary music], Suomen musiikin historia [A history of Finnish music], iv (Porvoo, 1995)

K. Aho and others: Finnish Music (Helsinki, 1996)

ILKKA ORAMO

Bergmann, Carl

(b Ebersbach, 12 April 1821; d New York, 16 Aug 1876). American conductor and cellist of German origin. He studied with Zimmermann at Zittau and Hesse at Breslau. Involved in the German Revolution of 1848, he emigrated to New York in 1849, having had orchestral experience in Breslau, Vienna, Pest, Warsaw and Venice. He joined the Germania Musical Society, serving for a time as cellist, then as conductor until 1854. In 1852–4 he also conducted the concerts of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. When the Germania Society disbanded in 1854, he settled in New York, becoming conductor of the Männergesangverein Arion, cellist of the Thomas chamber ensemble and, in 1855, conductor (alternating with Eisfeld) of the New York Philharmonic Society orchestra. His surprising success in performances of the radical new music of Wagner (the overture to Tannhäuser on 21 April 1855, and other works later in the spring) led to his being appointed sole conductor for the 1855–6 and 1858–9 seasons of the Philharmonic. He then shared the conductorship with Eisfeld until the latter’s retirement in 1865, after which he retained the post alone until failing health compelled his resignation in March 1876. He was also conductor for several years of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society orchestra. One of his most noteworthy performances was that of Tannhäuser on 4 April 1859 at the New York Stadt Theater: it was the first hearing in America of a complete Wagner opera.

Among Bergmann's boldest New York ventures was a series of 11 concerts given in 1856 not by the Philharmonic but by his own smaller orchestra and including the American premières of Schumann's Fourth Symphony and Berlioz's overture Le carnaval romain; but it was Wagner whom Bergmann championed above all, conducting, besides the 1859 Tannhäuser, the first known American Wagner performance (1852) and the first all-Wagner concert in the USA (1853).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB(C.N. Boyd)

H.E. Krehbiel: The Philharmonic Society of New York (New York, 1892/R); ed. H. Shanet in Early Histories of the New York Philharmonic (New York, 1979)

H.E. Johnson: ‘ The Germania Musical Society’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 75–93

H. Shanet: Philharmonic: a History of New York’s Orchestra (Garden City, NY, 1975)

J. Horowitz: Wagner Nights: an American History (Berkeley, 1994)

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK, JOSEPH HOROWITZ

Bergmann, Walter (Georg)

(b Altona-Ottmarschen, 24 Sept 1902; d London, 13 Jan 1988). British editor and harpsichordist of German birth. He studied the piano and the flute at the Leipzig Conservatory, but turned from a musical career to the study of law, which he pursued at Halle and Freiburg. He qualified in 1930 and set up his own practice in 1933, often acting on behalf of Jews. In 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned for three months; shortly after his release he emigrated to London. After internment on the Isle of Man Bergmann worked at Schott as a packer, eventually becoming their most distinguished editor. He brought much hitherto unknown Baroque music into the repertory, especially that of Telemann, for whom he had a special affinity. His many editions include recorder sonatas by Handel, Francesco Barsanti, Francis Dieupart and (with Frans Brüggen) J.C. Schickhardt, and music by Blow and Purcell. Associated with Tippett at Morley College in London in the 1940s, he later taught at the Mary Ward Settlement which stimulated his flair for working with children and amateurs. He also appeared frequently at Alfred Deller's Stour Festival. As harpsichordist he performed with Ilse Wolf, April Cantelo and many other artists, and accompanied Deller in several recordings of Purcell's music. Endowed with a rare generosity of spirit, he encouraged recorder players, such as Brüggen and Michala Petri, and young scholars, notably David Lasocki. He also composed two sonatas for recorder.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

‘Three Pieces of Music on Henry Purcell's Death’, The Consort, no.17 (1960), 13–19

‘Some Old and New Problems of Playing the Basso Continuo’, PRMA, lxxxvii (1960–61), 31–43

‘Francesco Barsanti’, The Consort, no.18 (1961), 67–77

‘Michael Tippett: his Recorder Works’, Recorder & Music Magazine, i/8 (1965), 229–31

‘Henry Purcell's Use of the Recorder’, Recorder & Music Magazine, i/11 (Nov 1965), 333–5; vii/12 (Dec 1983), 310–13

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.M. Thomson: ‘Walter Bergmann’, Recorder Profiles (London, 1972), 13–15

D. Lasocki: ‘Walter Bergmann (1902–1988): as Editor, Author and Mentor’, Continuo, xv/5 (1991), 2–6

J.M. THOMSON

Bergmans, Paul (Jean Etienne Charles Marie)

(b Ghent, 23 Jan 1868; d Ghent, 14 Nov 1935). Belgian musicologist and librarian. As a university student at Ghent, Bergmans attended piano and violin classes at Ghent Conservatory and had private lessons in music theory from Hendrik Waelput. In 1885, while still at university, he began to write music criticism for Flandre libérale and continued to do so until his death. In 1892 he took a post as assistant librarian at Ghent University, where he remained for the rest of his professional life. He became principal librarian there in 1919 and in the same year accepted the chair of musicology at Ghent, the first to be established at a Belgian university. In the following year he became a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique. Bergmans was interested in all branches of history, not merely that of music, and with his training as a historian and librarian, had an exact and painstaking cast of mind. Throughout most of his life he played an important part in the commission for the Biographie nationale de Belgique, serving from 1889 as assistant secretary and from 1919 as secretary, and contributing numerous articles on musicians.

WRITINGS

Pierre Josephe Le Blau: carilloneur de la ville de Gand au XVIIIe siècle (Ghent, 1884)

Notice biographique sur Henri Waelput (Ghent, 1886)

Variétés musicologiques (Ghent, 1891–1920)

Analectes belgiques (Ghent, 1896)

Les imprimeurs belges à l’étranger (Ghent, 1897, 2/1922)

La vie musicale gantoise au XVIIIe siècle (Ghent, 1897)

L’organiste des archiducs Albert et Isabelle: Peter Philips (Pietro Philippi) (Ghent, 1903)

Nicolas Maiscocque: musicien montois du XVIIe siècle (Ghent, 1909)

Mélanges iconographiques, bibliographiques et historiques (Ghent, 1912)

Les musiciens de Courtrai et du Courtraisis (Ghent, 1912)

La biographie du compositeur Corneille Verdonck (1563–1625) (Brussels, 1919)

Henri Vieuxtemps (Turnhout, 1920)

Notice sur le Baron Limnander de Nieuwenhove (Brussels, 1920)

Quatorze lettres inédites du compositeur Philippe de Monte (Brussels, 1921)

Tielman Susato (Antwerp, 1923)

Les origines belges de Beethoven (Brussels, 1927)

Une famille de musiciens belges du XVIIIe siècle: les Loeillet (Brussels, 1928)

La typographie musicale en Belgique au XVIe siècle (Brussels, 1929)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.A. Mooser: ‘Notice nécrologique sur Paul Bergmans’, Dissonances, viii (1935)

R.F. Apers: ‘Paul Bergmans in memoriam’, Archives, bibliothèques et musées de Belgique, xiii (1936), 156–60

C. van den Borren: ‘Notice sur Paul Bergmans’, Annuaire de l’Académie royale de belgique, civ (1938), 103–45

MALCOLM TURNER

Bergna, Antonio

(fl probably at Ferrara, c1582–1587). Italian composer. He is mentioned among the musicians of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara by Lazzari, Della Corte and Newcomb, on the basis of a single payment register which can be dated after 1582. His connections with Ferrara are supported by the fact that his only known work, Ad vesperas omnes salmi falso bordonis concinendi (Ferrara, 1587), for five voices, was published by Vittorio Baldini, the ducal printer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (‘Ferrara’; A. della Corte)

NewcombMF

A. Lazzari: La musica alla corte dei duchi di Ferrara (Ferrara, 1928)

IAIN FENLON

Bergonzi.

Italian family of instrument makers, primarily luthiers. They were active in Cremona in the 18th and 19th centuries.

(1) Carlo Bergonzi (i)

(3) Nicola Bergonzi

(4) Benedetto Bergonzi

CHARLES BEARE/DUANE ROSENGARD

(1) Carlo Bergonzi (i)

(b Cremona, bap. 21 Dec 1683; d Cremona, 9 Feb 1747). The first of three generations of the family who made violins, he was one of the greatest Cremonese masters, overshadowed only by his contemporaries Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri ‘del Gesù’. The question of his early training has been a matter of speculation for two centuries. He was not born into a musical or artisan family: his father Michele was a successful flour miller and his mother, widowed in 1697, became an innkeeper. Early writers, including Count Cozio di Salabue, who had dealings with the Stradivari family, believed that Carlo Bergonzi was a pupil or assistant of one or more of the Stradivaris. However, more recent opinion has favoured Giuseppe Guarneri ‘filius Andreae’ as Bergonzi's possible teacher, though there is much evidence to suggest that Vincenzo Rugeri was his mentor during the early years of the 18th century. Whichever the case, Bergonzi had relationships with all three of these important families at different points in his life.

Carlo Bergonzi may have worked alone as early as 1720, but almost certainly not before. The fact that he began to label his own instruments comparatively late in life, towards 1730, is probably a reflection of his subordinate role in other workshops. His early violins are characterized by a delicacy of detail not found in the work of the Guarneris. This is particularly true of his scrolls, carved cleanly and with a symmetry that few violin makers have achieved. The form of his soundholes is influenced by Stradivari, while the waist of the soundbox is narrow and the upper corners project out squarely in Guarneri fashion. His finest instruments date from 1730 to 1740. Their character remains the same but the details gain in strength: the archings are broader and flatter, the soundholes more pointed, and the treatment of the edges heavier, at times massive. Made from unusually handsome wood and covered with a rich varnish, his violins stand both tonally and visually almost unsurpassed. The very last violins are less inspired: his eldest son Michele Angelo was doubtless taking a greater part in their construction. In the 19th century, many of Matteo Goffriller's cellos were wrongly attributed to Carlo Bergonzi.

In 1745 Carlo Bergonzi and his family took up residence in the Casa Stradivari; this suggests that the Bergonzis had a close working relationship with the heirs of Antonio Stradivari, who were the owners of a considerable patrimony of instruments. Carlo's second son Zosimo (b 18 Nov 1724; d after 1773) is listed as a maker in many dictionaries but no instruments can be definitely attributed to him. Zosimo's second son Carlo (ii) (b Cremona, 29 Jan 1757; d Cremona, 12 March 1836), the last of the Bergonzi craftsmen, made a small number of violins and guitars.

(2) Michele Angelo Bergonzi

(b Cremona, 29 Sept 1721; d Cremona, 24 June 1758). Son of (1) Carlo Bergonzi (i). Although he in no way equalled his father, he was a very good maker in his own right, and historically an important one. Still under the age of 25 when his father died, he remained a tenant in the former Stradivari house and workshop until his premature death. From 1747, the sole hope for the continuation of the Cremonese violin-making tradition rested on Michele's shoulders, for the previous decade had seen the demise of all the makers in the Stradivari and Guarneri families. Unfortunately he either failed to inherit, or chose to abandon, the varnish used by his predecessors, and the great secret was lost. Nevertheless his instruments are solidly crafted on the prototypes of his father, if at times less refined in the finer points of workmanship. His violins make good instruments for solo playing; his rare cellos are patterned after the smallest Stradivari form. A few mandolins are also known.

(3) Nicola Bergonzi

(b 19 Feb 1754; d 23 Feb 1832). Grandson of (1) Carlo Bergonzi (i) and eldest son of Zosimo Bergonzi. He began making instruments in the late 1770s, shortly after his contemporary Lorenzo Storioni, to whom he can be compared in many respects. During the period 1787 to 1794, Nicola and Storioni lived and worked in very close proximity on Cremona's Contrada Coltellai, which may in part explain a certain resemblance in the choice of materials in their work. Nicola, however, was much less productive than Storioni and in 1804 he officially changed his profession to that of cloth merchant, though he had ceased making instruments a few years earlier. His violins, violas and double basses, which date from approximately 1777 to 1798, are well designed and of a flat model, sometimes covered in an attractive orange varnish. Nicola and two of his sons were amateur players of the corno di caccia.

4. Orchestral works; sound in space.

(4) Benedetto Bergonzi

(b Cremona, 8 Feb 1790; d Cremona, 30 Sept 1839). Horn player and composer. Son of (3) Nicola Bergonzi. He designed mechanical improvements to the corno di caccia which were recognized by the Royal Institute of Milan in 1824. Benedetto was apparently the source of some of the historical anecdotes on the great Cremonese violin makers published by Fétis in the 19th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.H., A.F. and A.E. Hill: Antonio Stradivari: his Life and Work (1644–1737) (London, 1902/R, 2/1909)

W.H., A.F. and A.E. Hill: The Violin Makers of the Guarneri Family (London, 1931)

G. Rochetti: ‘Benedetto Bergonzi: cornista, compositore e inventore cremonese (1790–1839)’, Ricercare, ii (1990), 151–71

D. Rosengard: ‘La liuteria cremonese dopo gli Stradivari’, Liuteria, musica, cultura, no.33 (1991), 18–36

D. Rosengard: ‘The Ceruti Family of Violin Makers’, Journal of the Violin Society of America, xii/3 (1992), 35–68

D. Rosengard: ‘Cremona after Stradivari: the Bergonzi and Storioni Families’, Journal of the Violin Society of America, xii/1 (1992), 91–162

D. Rosengard: Cremonese Double Basses (Cremona, 1992)

Bergonzi, Carlo (ii)

(b Vidalenzo, nr Cremona, 13 July 1924). Italian tenor. He studied at the Parma Conservatory, making his début as a baritone at Lecce in 1948 as Rossini’s Figaro. After studying the tenor repertory he made a second début as Chénier at Bari in 1951. That year he was engaged by Italian radio to take part in performances to mark the 50th anniversary of Verdi’s death. He first sang at La Scala in 1953, creating the title role of Napoli’s Mas’Aniello, and appeared there for the next 20 years. He made his London début at the Stoll Theatre in 1953 as Don Alvaro, the role in which he first appeared at Covent Garden (1962); he returned as Manrico, Riccardo, Radames, Cavaradossi, Nemorino, Rodolfo (Luisa Miller) and Edgardo. He gave farewell recitals at Covent Garden (1992) and Carnegie Hall (1994), but continued to give occasional concerts in Italy. He made his American début in Chicago in 1955 in a double bill as Luigi (Il tabarro) and Turiddu, and sang regularly at the Metropolitan from 1956 for 30 years, making his last appearance there in 1988 as Rodolfo (Luisa Miller). In addition to the Verdi tenor repertory Bergonzi sang more than 40 roles, including Pollione, Enzo, Boito’s Faust and Canio. His voice was of beautiful quality, well modulated and well defined; he used it with taste, discretion and an elegant sense of line. These qualities can be heard in his many recordings, most notably of Verdi. He continued to give recitals well into his 70s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

G. Gualerzi: ‘Carlo Bergonzi’, Opera, xxix (1978), 257–62

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Bergreihen [Bergreyen, Bergkreyen]

(Ger.).

German popular songs, mainly of the 16th and 17th centuries, about various secular and sacred subjects. The term was originally used for dance-songs from the Erzgebirge in Saxony. The songs are strophic, and many were sung at mountain festivals, usually with instrumental accompaniment. The vogue for them began with W. Meierpeck's Etliche Bergkreien geistlich und weltlich (Zwickau, 1531) and continued into the 18th century, when the term was replaced by Berglieder. Only two printed collections of Bergreihen contain music. One, Erasmus Rotenbucher’s Bergkreyen (Nuremberg, 1551), contains mostly sacred songs (possibly contrafacta of secular pieces), all for two voices. The other, Melchior Franck's Musicalischer Bergkreyen (Nuremberg, 1602), consists of four-part, primarily homophonic secular songs mostly in bar form; they begin with the tenor voice alone and include a few melismas, usually on the penultimate syllable of a verse, which may be only suggestions for improvised ornaments. For an edition, see G. Heilfurth and others, eds.: Bergreihen, eine Liedersammlung des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1959). The rubric ‘in the manner of Bergkreyen’ occurs in the chorales of both Johann Walter and Caspar Othmayr and indicates the free, simple style of folksong. Many published collections of Bergreihen lack music, probably because it was meant to be improvised.

JOHN H. BARON

Bergsagel, John D(agfinn)

(b Outlook, SK, 19 April 1928). Canadian musicologist of Norwegian descent, naturalized Danish in 1984. After graduating at the University of Manitoba in 1949, he studied musicology under Grout at Cornell (1950–53), then composition with Howard Ferguson at the RAM. He was assistant professor of musicology at the University of Ohio from 1955 until 1959, when he was elected Senior Arts Fellow of the Canada Council. With this award he went to Oxford to carry out research on early Tudor church music, working especially on the unpublished mass cycles of that period and the music of Nicholas Ludford. From 1962 he also undertook teaching duties at Oxford, and in 1966 was appointed to a lectureship at New College. The following year, however, he moved to the University of Manchester as lecturer (later senior lecturer) in the history of music; in 1970 he left England to teach at the University of Copenhagen, where in 1981 he became professor of musicology. From 1961 to 1973 he was the executive editor of the Early English Church Music series, in which capacity he supervised the production of the first 16 volumes, contributing two of them himself; thereafter he remained a member of the editorial committee until 1985. In 1993 he was appointed chairman of the editorial committee for the collected edition Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, becoming director of the series in 1996. His research has been concerned with many aspects of English music, but has focussed increasingly on that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He has also developed an interest in Scandinavian music.

WRITINGS

The National Aspects of the Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (diss., Cornell U., 1957)

‘An Introduction to Ludford’, MD, xiv (1960), 105–30

‘On the Performance of Ludford's alternatim Masses’, MD, xvi (1962), 35–55

‘The Date and Provenance of the Forrest-Heyther Collection of Tudor Masses’, ML, xliv (1963), 240–48

‘An English Liquescent Neume’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 94–9

‘Anglo-Scandinavian Musical Relations before 1700’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 263–71

‘Cordier's Circular Canon’, MT, cxiii (1972), 1175–7; cxiv (1973), 144–5

‘Hovedlinier i engelsk kirkemusik indtil Vaughan Williams’, Dansk kirkesangs årsskrift 1973–74, 98–123

‘Danish Musicians in England 1611–14: Newly-Discovered Instrumental Music’, DAM, vii (1973–6), 9–20

‘Liturgical Relations between England and Scandinavia as seen in Selected Musical Fragments from the 12th and 13th Centuries’, Latinsk liturgiforskning: Espoo 1975, 11–26

with N.M. Jensen: ‘A Reconsideration of the manuscript A.M. 76, 80’, Festskrift Henrik Glahn, ed. M. Müller (Copenhagen, 1979), 19–33

‘The Practice of cantus planus binatim in Scandinavia in the 12th to the 16th Centuries’, Le polifonie primitive di Cividale: Cividale del Friuli 1980, 63–82

‘Music, a Science and an Art: the 18th Century Parting of the Ways’, DAM, xii (1981), 5–18

‘Remarks Concerning some Tropes in Scandinavian Manuscripts’, Rapport fra nordisk kollokvium V for latinsk liturgiforskning: Århus 1981 (Århus, 1982), 187–205

‘Music in Oxford in Holberg's Time’, Hvad Fatter gjør … essays tilegnet Erik Dal, ed. H. Glahn and others (Herning, 1982), 34–61

‘J.P. Jacobsen and Music’, J.P. Jacobsens spor i ord, billede og toner, ed. F.J. Billeskor Jansen (Copenhagen, 1985), 283–313

‘The Transmission of Notre Dame Organa in Some Newly-Discovered Magnus liber organi Fragments in Copenhagen’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 629–36

‘Nicolai sollempnia: another Polyphonic Benedicamus domino Trope in a Danish Source’, Festskrift Søren Sørensen, ed. F.E. Hansen and others (Copenhagen, 1990), 1–17

‘Scandinavia: Unity in Diversity’, Man & Music: The Late Romantic Era, ed. J. Samson (London, 1991), 240–65

‘A Musician among The Measurers’, Learning, Language and Invention: essays presented to Francis Maddison, ed. W.D. Hackmann and A.J. Turner (Aldershot, Brookfield, VT, and Paris, 1994), 84–102

‘Tinctoris and the Vatican Manuscripts Cappella Sistina 14, 51 and 35’, Capellae Apostolicae Sixtinaeque collectanea acta monumenta, iii (1994), 497–527

‘Forskning indenfor gregorianik i Danmark: Kilder og forskningsstrategier’, Gregorianikk, billedkunst og liturgi i middelalderen: nordiske studier, ed. O.K. Ledang (Trondheim, 1996), 29

‘Music at the Swedish Court of Queen Christina’, Cristina di Svezia e la musica: Rome 1996, 9–20

‘Kyrkomusiken: medeltid och reformation’, Musik i Norden, ed. G. Andersson (Stockholm, 1997), 51–70

‘Delius and Danish Literature’, Frederick Delius: Music, Art and Literature, ed. L. Carley (Aldershot, 1998), 290–310

‘The Offices and Masses of St. Knud Lavard (d. 1131)’, Gregorian Chant and Medieval Music, ed. A. Dybdahl, O.K. Ledang and N.H. Petersen (Trondheim, 1998), 13–28

EDITIONS

Early Tudor Masses I–II, EECM, i, xvi (1963–76)

The Collected Works of Nicholas Ludford, CMM, xxvii/3 (1963–77)

Anthems fra det 16. århundrede, Folke- og Skolemusik, xxii/3 (1973)

Musik i Danmark pa Christian IV's tid, ii: Instrumental ensemblemusik (Copenhagen, 1988); with H. Glahn, vi: Anonym messe og lejlighedsmotetter (Copenhagen, 1988)

PAUL DOE

Bergsma, William (Laurence)

(b Oakland, CA, 1 April 1921; d Seattle, WA, 18 March 1994). American composer. He studied at Stanford University (1938–40) and at the Eastman School (1940–44, BA, MA), where his principal composition teachers were Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. After teaching composition at the Juilliard School (1946–63) he joined the school of music at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he later became professor emeritus. He received numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships (1946, 1951), an NEA fellowship (1976) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1965).

When other 20th-century composers were abandoning tonality in favour of serialism, Bergsma remained unwaveringly conservative in his compositional style. This conservatism should not be mistaken for conventionality, however, for he was very successful in blending several styles into a highly individual compositional language. Predominately lyrical in nature, his music is resourceful and imaginative, employing long lines and transparent textures. His instrumental music (e.g. the Concerto for Wind Quintet, 1958) successfully infuses traditional formal frameworks with a clearly 20th-century use of melody, harmony, rhythm and metre. The early string quartets demonstrate the composer's skill as a contrapuntist. His two operas, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1956) and The Murder of Comrade Sharik (1973), deal with realistic issues and provide vivid social commentary. In later works, Bergsma explored elements of avant-garde compositional style, including aleatory techniques and a more dissonant harmonic language.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Paul Bunyan (ballet), 1938, San Francisco, 22 June 1939, orch suite, 1938, rev. 1945; Gold and the Señor Commandante (ballet), 1941, Rochester, 1 May 1942; The Wife of Martin Guerre (op, 3, J. Lewis), 1956, New York, 15 Feb 1956; The Murder of Comrade Sharik (op, Bergsma, after M. Bulgakov), 1973

Orch: Dances from a New England Album, 1939, rev. 1969; Music on a Quiet Theme, 1943; The Fortunate Islands, str, 1947, rev. 1956; Sym. no.1, 1949; A Carol on 12th Night, 1954; March with Tpts, band, 1956; Chameleon Variations, 1960; In Celebration, 1963; Documentary 1 ‘Portrait of a City’, 1963, rev. 1968; Serenade ‘To Await the Moon’, chbr orch, 1965; Vn Conc., 1966; Documentary 2 ‘Billie's World’, 1968; Changes, 1971; Sym. no.2 ‘Voyages’, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1976; Sweet was the Song the Virgin Sung: Tristan Revisited, va, orch, 1978

Choral: In a Glass of Water Before Retiring (S.V. Benét), 1945; Black Salt, Black Provender (L. Bogan), 1946; On the Beach at Night (W. Whitman), 1946; Let True Love Among us be, 1948; Riddle Me This, 1957; Praise (G. Herbert), chorus, org, 1958; Confrontation (Bible: Job), chorus, kbd/orch, 1963, rev. 1966; The Sun, the Soaring Eagle, the Turquoise Prince, the God (Florentine MS), chorus, brass, perc, 1968; Wishes, Wonders, Portents, Charms, mixed vv, insts, 1974

Songs: 6 Songs (e.e. cummings), 1944–5; Bethsabe, Bathing (G. Peele), 1961; 4 Songs (trad., Peele), medium v, cl, bn, pf, 1981

Chbr and solo inst: Suite, brass qt, 1940; Str Qt no.1, 1942; Pastorale and Scherzo, rec/fl, 2 va, 1943; 3 Fantasies, pf, 1943, rev. 1983; Str Qt no.2, 1944; Tangents, pf, 1951; Str Qt no.2, 1953; Conc., wind qnt, 1958; Fantastic Variations on a Theme from Tristan and Isolde, va, pf, 1961; Illegible Canons, cl, perc, 1969; Str Qt no.4, 1970; Clandestine Dialogues, vc, perc, 1976; Blatant Hypotheses, trbn, perc, 1977, Qnt, fl, str qt, 1980, rev. 1981; Four All, cl, trbn, perc, 1981; The Voice of Coelacanth, hn, vn, pf, 1981; Str Qt no.5, 1982; Symmetries, ob, bn, pf, 1982; Variations, pf, 1984

Principal publishers: C. Fischer, Galaxy, Hargail

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Bergsma: ‘Mechanics of Orchestral Notation’, MM, xxiii/1 (1946), 27–30

R.F. Goldman: ‘Current Chronicle’, MQ, xlii (1956), 390–95

A. Skulsky: ‘The Music of William Bergsma’, Juilliard Review, iii/2 (1956), 12–26

W. Bergsma: ‘The Laboratory of Performance’, College Music Symposium, ix (1969), 23–9

JAMES P. CASSARO (text, bibliography), KURT STONE (work-list)

Bergson [Bergsohn], Michał [Michel]

(b Warsaw, 20 May 1820; d London, 9 March 1898). Polish pianist and composer. He took his first music lessons in Warsaw, later studying composition with F. Schneider in Dessau and with K.F. Rungenhagen and W. Taubert in Berlin. In 1840 he went to Paris, where he continued his piano studies. He spent the years 1846–50 in Florence, Bologna and Rome, and from 1850 to 1853 he was in Vienna, Berlin and Leipzig. He then settled in Paris, performing as a pianist at numerous concerts. In 1863 he was appointed professor at the Geneva Conservatoire, and later became its director. Late in life he moved to London and taught there privately until his death.

Bergson’s works adhere strictly to the conventions of the period, particularly his pieces intended for domestic performance. These generally make few demands on the players and place great emphasis on cantabile melodic lines. Sometimes Bergson gave his pieces programmatic titles (e.g. Un orage dans les lagunes). Many of the piano pieces are in the style and forms of Chopin (e.g. Impromptu Mazourka op.35). Some works show the influence of national musical traditions, for example I zingari: grand caprice hongrois op.42 and La tatamaque: danse havanaise op.51. A large proportion of his work consists of pedagogical works (e.g. 12 nouvelles études caractéristiques op.60 and École nouvelle du mécanisme op.65), operatic paraphrases and fantasias, and the popularity of his own music is attested by the number of arrangements that were made of it. He composed three operas: Luisa di Montfort was performed in 1847 in Livorno, Florence and elsewhere in Italy, and in 1849 in Hamburg; Salvator Rosa was not staged, but parts of a one-act operetta Qui va à la chasse perd sa place were given in Paris in 1859.

WORKS

(selective list)

all MSS lost

Vocal: Luisa di Montfort, op.82 (op, 4), Livorno, Rossini, 7 Feb 1847; Salvator Rosa (op); Qui va à la chasse perd sa place (operetta), Paris, 1859; solo songs

Inst: Pf Conc., g, op.62; Pf Trio; 3 Duets, vn/cl, pf; Dramatic duet, vc, pf; works for fl, pf, incl. Grand Sonata; works for cl, pf; solo pf pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PSB (J. Reiss); SMP (J. Morawski) [incl. list of works]

K. Michałowski: Opery polskie (Kraków, 1954)

JERZY MORAWSKI

Bergt, (Christian Gottlob) August

(b Oederan, Saxony, 17 June 1771; d Bautzen, 10 Feb 1837). German composer. After studying various instruments with his father, he went first to the Dresden Kreuzschule and then to Leipzig as a theology student, continuing his music education especially with organ and composition. While acting as a family tutor he began composing, developed his organ playing and eventually in 1802 took up a full-time music post as organist of St Petri, Bautzen, where he was to remain all his life. In Bautzen he also taught, and founded a teachers’ seminar and a Singverein. His Briefwechsel eines alten und jungen Schulmeisters (ed. C.G. Hering, Zittau and Leipzig, 1838) cast in the fashionable form of an exchange of letters, was a popular practical handbook for students and young church musicians; it includes a biography and list of works. As a member of the Dresden Liederkreis, he knew many of the city’s poets and musicians, including Weber, who admired him. E.T.A. Hoffmann praised his Passion oratorio Christus durch Leiden verherrlicht in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Bergt wrote a large quantity of church music, including oratorios and cantatas, and Singspiels (including two settings of Goethe), instrumental music, chamber music and choruses. His sacred works in particular were at one time very popular in Germany and were also performed abroad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (D. Härtwig)

H. Schildhaus: ‘Christian Gottlob August Bergt (1771–1837)’, Bautzener Kulturschau, xxxvii/4 (1987), 9–11

JOHN WARRACK

Bergwald, Victor von.

See Montbuisson, Victor de.

Beria, Giovanni Battista

(b c1610; d c1671). Italian composer, teacher and organist. With Ignazio Donati and others Beria was one of the Milanese school of early Baroque composers. He was organist at S Pietro, Lodi Vecchio near Milan in 1638; from 1647 to 1650 he was maestro di cappella and organist at S Lorenzo, Mortara, and from 1651 to 1671 first organist of Novara Cathedral. Nothing further is known of his life, but several testimonial poems in his publication of 1647 indicate that he had a significant reputation in northern Italy in the first half of the 17th century.

Beria's known music is entirely sacred and is typical of Italian church music of the period; many of his motets are for two voices deployed in dialogue fashion. He set both liturgical and paraliturgical texts, and, in the latter especially, used various standard expressive devices with good effect. (C. Sartori: La cappella musicale del duomo di Milano: catalogo delle musiche dell'archivo, Milan, 1957)

WORKS

all pubd in Milan

Il primo libro delli motetti concertati, 1–5vv, con le letanie, 4vv, bc (1638)

Motetti, 2–4vv … et una messa, 5vv, op.2 (1647)

Concerti musicali, 2–4vv, con una messa, 4vv, concertata, et introiti Pange lingua, 4vv, da capella, op.3 (1650)

Concerti musicali, messa, salmi, 3–5vv, libro primo, op.4 (1671)

JOSEPHA KENNEDY

Berigan, Bunny [Roland Bernard]

(b Hilbert, WI, 2 Nov 1908; d New York, 2 June 1942). American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. He began playing in local groups while a teenager, and in the early 1930s moved to New York as a freelance musician and sometime member of such important bands as those led by Hal Kemp, Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. In 1933 he made a number of recordings under his own name, and from 1937 led his own successful big band. He rejoined Dorsey for a few months in 1940, then briefly led his own group until his death. Berigan and Bix Beiderbecke are often compared for the similarities of their lives and musical conceptions. As did many white trumpeters of his generation, Berigan showed the influence of Louis Armstrong in the variety of his timbre and attack, his wide range and his use of chromatic pitches. He showed too the influence of Beiderbecke in his use of ‘ghost’ notes, lengthy concentrations of quavers played with bell-like attack, and melodic lines that encompass more than one contrapuntal part. Berigan integrated these elements and a fine harmonic sense into a distinctive, uninhibited style, heard to advantage on Tommy Dorsey’s recording of Marie (1937, Vic.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SchullerSE

A. McCarthy: ‘The White Bands’, Big Band Jazz (New York, 1974), 187–195

V. Danca: Bunny: a Bio-discography of Jazz Trumpeter Bunny Berigan (Rockford, IL, 1978)

R. Dupuis: Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz (Baton Rouge, LA, 1993)

JAMES DAPOGNY/R

Berimbau [berimbau de barriga, urucungu, rucumba].

A Brazilian Musical bow of African origin, with a single wire string and sometimes a gourd resonator. Despite its origin, in the north and north-east it takes a Portuguese name, the berimbau or berimbau de barriga (jew’s harp of the belly), while it is called urucungu in the south. The berimbau is the principal accompanying instrument for Bahian capoeira, a stylized martial art of the region. A richly creolized product of the black world with several prototypes on both sides of the Atlantic, those in Brazil include several related to Kongo/Angolan bows. The most important found during the colonial period were the Luandan hungu and the embulumbumba of south-western Angola, brought as part of the slave trade.

The player holds a stick and a small wicker basket rattle, called caxixi in Bahia, in his right hand and percusses the string with the stick (see illustration). In his left hand he holds the bow and occasionally applies a metal coin to the string; the coin serves as a bridge, giving a second fundamental pitch perhaps a semi-tone or a whole tone above that produced from the open string. It is often played held against a naked body, specifically in capoeira, as the body serves as a resonating chamber, the gourd resonator actively manipulated against the stomach to shade the timbres of the instrument. According to Graham, ‘pitch change occurs when the space between the gourd’s opening and the player’s stomach is altered, isolating select harmonies of the string’s frequency swing. The performer’s stomach operates in the same way as a trombone mute, its lesser resonating capacity being only secondary in importance’ (p.4). By striking the bow’s string at different heights, subtle variation in both pitch and timbre are obtained. The caxixi usually accompanies the strokes of the stick. The African mouthbow was adopted by Brazilian Amerindian tribes with, for example, the Angolan friction bow mouthbow umgunga reappearing in Brazil as an ‘Indian’ bow called umcunga. It is often played in ensemble context. For further information see R. Graham: ‘Technology and Cultural Change’, LAMR, xxii/1 (1991), 1–20.

JOHN M. SCHECHTER/R

Beringen.

French firm of printers. It was founded by Godefroy Beringen (b Germany, fl 1538–59; d ?Lyons), who was active in Lyons as a humanist; several Lyons intellectuals, including Etienne Dolet in 1538, addressed Latin verses to him. He began to print books in 1544. In 1545 he formed an association with his brother Marcellin Beringen which lasted until the latter’s death in 1556. The Beringen brothers did not publish many titles but frequently reprinted those that were successful. Law, medicine, alchemy and the Roman classics dominated their production. They were in contact with Geneva through the poet Guillaume Guéroult and the musician Loys Bourgeois, and probably began printing music under their influence. Between 1547 and 1552 they issued a number of important music books, thus becoming the first music printers in Lyons to challenge the monopoly of Jacques Moderne. The Beringens were the first French music publishers to concentrate on issuing single-composer collections. The Premier livre des chansons spirituelles (1548) contained the first printing of Didier Lupi Second’s four-voice setting of Guéroult’s Susanne un jour, the tenor part of which was to be the source for about 40 different musical settings in the late 16th century. In September 1556, after Marcellin’s death, Godefroy was forced to sell everything, including his six presses, to pay his debts. Nevertheless, two other books appeared under his name, in 1554 and 1559. The inventory for the sale in 1556 lists three sets of music type: ‘noctes grandes d’Allemaigne’, ‘noctes petites gloses d’Allemaigne’ and ‘nocte de Louain à longue queue’. These music types were already used by German music printers, and the last by Phalèse in Leuven.

Unlike Moderne and the large Parisian music printers, the Beringens printed no anthologies but confined themselves mainly to separate publications of French psalms and chansons by three composers – Loys Bourgeois, Dominique Phinot and Didier Lupi Second. The repertory has a Protestant bias, and it may have been the Beringens’ Protestant sympathies that caused Bourgeois to apply to them instead of to Moderne to print his psalms in 1547. There are 12 known books of polyphonic music and two psalters by Beringen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. and J. Baudrier: Bibliographie lyonnaise (Lyons, 1895–1921/R), iii, 31ff

K.J. Levy: ‘“Susanne un jour”: the History of a 16th Century Chanson’, AnnM, i (1953), 375–408

V.L. Saulnier: ‘Dominique Phinot et Didier Lupi, musiciens de Clément Marot et des marotiques’, RdM, xliii (1959), 61–80

L. Guillo: Les éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise (Paris, 1991)

F. Dobbins: Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992)

SAMUEL F. POGUE, LAURENT GUILLO/FRANK DOBBINS

Beringer, Maternus

(b Weissenburg in Bayern, bap. 17 March 1580; d ?Neudorf, nr Pappenheim, after Aug 1632). German writer on music, schoolmaster and clergyman. He probably attended the Latin school in Weissenburg and may have been at a university for some time before he was appointed school clerk at Weissenburg in 1600. In 1601 he became Kantor and immediately afterwards took holy orders. Two petitions he submitted in 1605 and 1606 give evidence of the state of music in Weissenburg and of Beringer's own conditions. In the first document, he stressed the importance of music as a God-given remedy for troubled souls and as a symbol of unanimity. His main concern, however, was the deplorable state of church music at Weissenburg: the only bass singer had moved away and parents were withdrawing their sons from the school in order that they might learn more profitable trades. To secure the further performance of polyphonic music at feast days, he urged the mayor and council to employ a trombone player and a cornettist to support the few remaining singers. In the second petition he complained about his meagre income which, he feared, was to be further reduced at the appointment of another schoolmaster. His situation appears not to have improved, and in 1610 he left Weissenburg to take over a deaconry at Pappenheim and later worked as pastor at several villages within the county of Pappenheim. He probably eventually settled at Neudorf, and is last mentioned at Nördlingen on the occasion of his second marriage in September 1632.

Beringer published a short treatise, Musica, das ist die Singkunst, der lieben Jugend zum besten in Frag und Antwort verfasset (Nuremberg, 1605), in dialogue form to be used for elementary music education at school. Following Heinrich Faber and Johann Magirus (Artis musicae, Frankfurt, 1596), he dealt with fundamentals like note values, solmization syllables, letter notation, metre, proportion and the hexachord system. The second edition (Musicae, das ist der Freyen lieblichen Singkunst erster und anderer Theil, Nuremberg, 1610/R) included a second part on harmony and composition based chiefly on Magirus, whose systematization of the modes he took over, arranging them according to the position of the semitone. The music examples, mainly by Lassus rather than the Josquin generation, reveal a thorough knowledge of the contemporary motet repertory. The musical appendix consists of two- and three-part canons of increasing difficulty and 23 bicinia by Lassus, which are mostly excerpts from motets and Magnificat settings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

J. Schmuck: ‘Ein Lob der edlen Musica von Kantor Beringer zu Weissenburg’, Weissenburger Heimatblätter, vi (1939), 121–4

E. Schoener: Pfarrerbuch der Grafschaft Pappenheim (Nuremberg, 1956)

E. Nolte: Johannes Magirus und seine Musiktraktate (Marburg, 1971), 65–6

J. Lester: ‘Major-Minor Concepts and Modal Theory in Germany, 1592–1680’, JAMS, xxx (1977), 208–53

M. Ruhnke: ‘Der Weissenburger Kantor Maternus Beringer’, Musik in Bayern, xxii (1981), 89–98

DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Beringer, Oscar

(b Furtwangen, Baden, 14 July 1844; d London, 21 Feb 1922). English pianist, composer and teacher of German birth. His father was a political refugee who fled with his family to London in 1849. Having studied the piano with an elder sister, he performed during 1859–60 at the Crystal Palace and in 1861 made his first appearance at the Saturday Concerts. He studied from 1864 to 1866 under Moscheles, Richter, Reinecke, David and Plaidy at Leipzig, and then under Tausig, Ehlert and Weitzmann at Berlin. In 1869 he was appointed professor at Tausig’s Schule des höheren Clavierspiels at Berlin, but in 1871 he returned to a concert life in England. After visiting Leipzig again in 1872 he founded in London in 1873 the Academy for the Higher Development of Pianoforte Playing, which was very successful until its closing in January 1897. In 1882 he gave the first English performance of Brahms’s second concerto. He became a professor at the RAM in 1885. His compositions include an Andante and Allegro for piano and orchestra, other piano pieces and songs. He also wrote a set of Daily Technical Exercises (London, 1887, rev. 2/1915) and a Pianoforte Tutor (London, 1902), and produced several editions of piano classics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Beringer: Fifty Years’ Experience of Pianoforte Teaching and Playing (London, 1907)

Obituary, MT, lxiii (1922), 276–7

P.A. Scholes: The Mirror of Music (London, 1947/R), 324ff

WILLIAM BARCLAY SQUIRE/R.J. PASCALL

Berinsky, Sergey Samuilovich

(b Novïye Kushanï, Moldova, 14 April 1946; d Moscow, 12 March, 1998). Russian composer. He graduated from the Gnesin Pedagogical Institute where he studied composition with Chugayev (1975). He became a member of the Union of Composers in 1979, was made an Honoured Representative of the Arts of Russia (1996) and was the founder of the Sergey Berinsky Music Club (1986). In 1990 he became an editor for the journal Muzïkal'naya akademiya. Berinsky wrote in a wide range of genres; his early works bring to mind the stylistic and aesthetic features of Romanticism (discord, sudden emotional swings, a tendency towards soliloquising and confession), while in the Sonata for viola and piano he turned to the forms and genres of the Baroque which may account for the peculiar compositional logic of this work in which improvisatory principles and spontaneity of expression are subordinated to sober calculation. He later came close to the aesthetics of Expressionism (the Second Quartet is dedicated to the memory of Janusz Korczak). Characteristic of the large-scale works of this and other periods is the juxtaposition of the tragic and the grotesque with intellectual concentration, contemplation and absorption in pastoral visions alongside philosophical generalities and subjective lyrical monologue. The symphonic principles behind his works is combined with features of the music drama; correspondingly, the attention is focussed on story, dramatic intrigue, and substance of the plot in the spirit of Mahler, Shostakovich and Schnittke.

Berinsky frequently resorted to potent lexema which conjure up momentary associations in the listener's mind; he drew on sound metaphors which have a pungent symbolic meaning (the Dies irae in the Requiem, the quotation from Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in the Sonata for violin and piano). Along with Schnittke, Gubaydulina, Denisov, Karayev and Kasparov, Berinsky has been labelled a ‘citizen of the world’ on account of his openness to eras, styles, languages and faiths, for his striving to recreate through music the tragedies and cataclysms of the 20th century, and his willingness to touch on the sensitive subjects of modern human existence. Without losing touch with his folklore and the traditions of his country and of his Jewish background, Berinsky made use of texts of various languages: in the Motet on 7.12.88, written in response to the Armenian earthquake of that date, the literary material comes from Church Slavonic, old Armenian, Jewish and Latin sources. Berinsky ran frequent seminars at the House of Creative Work in Ivanovo, as well as at the creative workshop attached to his own Club; he also took part in conferences and published articles.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballet-Pantomime: Sorok pervïy [The Forty First] (after B. Lavrenyov), 1987

Orch: Vc Conc. no.1, 1975; Fl Conc., 1977; Ob Conc., 1981; Conc.-Sym., vn, orch, 1984; Vc Conc. no.2, 1986; Conc., S, orch, 1988; Conc., cl, prep pf, hpd, 12 str, 1989; Joyful Games, conc.-poem, fl, orch, 1991, And it Was So …, vn, pf, orch, 1993 [Sym. no.2]; And the Sun Became Black, bayan, orch, 1994 [Sym. no.3]; Sym. no.4, vn, vc, pf, 1996

Choral: Kamni Treblinki [The Stones of Treblinka] (cant., A. Vergelis), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1977; Requiem ‘Pamyati Janusz Korczak’ [In Memory of Janusz Korczak], solo vv, chorus, orch, 1979; K Orfeyu [To Orpheus] (sym.-cant., R.M. Rilke), 1983; 3 soneta Shekspira [3 Shakespeare Sonnets], chorus, 1984; Motet na 7.12.88 [Motet on the 7.12.88] (old church Slavonic, Armenian, Hebrew and Latin texts), chorus, 1989; Sprich aus der Ferne (C. Brentano), female vv, 1989

Settings for 1v, pf of A. Fet, W. Goethe, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, A.S. Pushkin, A. Ryazanov

Chbr and solo inst: 3 posvyashcheniya [3 Dedications], pf, 1970; Sonatina, pf, 1973; Ww Qnt, 1974; Str Qt no.1, 1974; Pf Trio, 1976; Sonata, vc, pf, 1978; Str Qt no.2, 1978; Sonata, vn, pf, 1979; Sonata, db, pf, 1979; Sonata, va, pf, 1979; Dvukhgolosnïye inventsii [Two-Part Inventions], hp, 1980; Detskaya syuita [Children's Suite], sax, 1984; Trio ‘Pamyati druga’ [In Memory of a Friend], fl, hp, vc, 1984; Kolokola Varshavï [The Bells of Warsaw], fantasy, prep pf, 1988; Also sprach Zarathustra, partita, bayan, 1990; La dolce dolore, largo, appasionato, vc, bayan, 1995; Lichtenwellen, poem, 2 bayans, 1996; Morskoy pesazh marina v dukhe Mone [Seascape in the Spirit of Monet], vn, bayan, 1996

WRITINGS

‘Fenomen Aleksandra Chugayeva’ [The phenomenon of Chugayev], SovM (1989), no.8, 23–5

‘Yelena Bazova, portret organistki’, SovM (1990), no.10, 95–6

‘Moyo Ivanovo’ [My Ivanovo], SovM (1990), no.12, 62–5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Nikol'skaya: ‘Na avtorskikh kontsertakh’ [At concerts of the composer's work], SovM (1984), no.9, 24–6

I. Romashchuk: ‘Neokonchennïy portret’ [An unfinished portrait], SovM (1989), no.2, 11–15

L. Rapatskaya: ‘Sergey Berinsky’, Kompozitorï Moskvï, iv (Moscow, 1994)

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Berio, Luciano

(b Oneglia, 1925). Italian composer. At a relatively early stage in his career, he succeeded in transcending the closed world of the European avant garde to address a wider public. The vivid, gestural idiom that he developed in the 1960s, and the creative consequences that he drew from other, often extra-musical aspects of the culture around him, established for him a world-wide reputation that has sustained his subsequent exploration of a wide, and sometimes challenging, arc of musical resources. Of formidable creative energy, he has proved one of the most prolific composers of the later 20th century.

1. 1925–71.

2. After 1971.

3. Text and commentary.

5. Voice and theatre.

DAVID OSMOND-SMITH

1. 1925–71.

He was born into a family of musicians working in the small but busy Ligurian port of Oneglia. Both his father (Ernesto) and grandfather (Adolfo) were organists and composers, and in consequence the young Berio received a thorough musical training at home. By the age of nine, he was participating, as a pianist, in his father's chamber music evenings, and by his early teens he was producing occasional compositions. But an injury to his right hand sustained while training as an unwilling conscript to the army of Mussolini's Republic of Salò changed the focus of his musical activities. When he entered the Milan Conservatory at the end of the war in 1945, it soon became plain that the consequences of his injury were such as to prevent a career as a pianist, and his studies centered increasingly on consolidating compositional technique.

Until the age of 20, Berio had written only a handful of compositions, and, living in the provinces amid the disruptions of war, he had had little contact with the musical thought of the previous 50 years. Now, like many of his generation, he embarked upon a rapid and seminal series of discoveries. In his first year at the conservatory he was able to attend performances of works by Milhaud, Bartók, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, by whose Pierrot lunaire he was at first baffled. Alongside his technical studies in counterpoint with Paribeni, he was assimilating by imitation a whole range of compositional models (at this stage Ravel and Prokofiev in particular). In 1948 he joined Ghedini's composition class, and thereby encountered a major formative influence. Ghedini's acute sense of the achievements of Stravinsky, and his own fastidious grasp of instrumentation both imprinted themselves rapidly upon Berio's work. Although in this, his most radical period, Ghedini had only occasional resort to serialism, he did not discourage students who wished to explore its techniques more deeply. At the time the the most congenial example for many young Italian composers was the recent work of Dallapiccola. Accordingly, after completing his conservatory studies in 1951, Berio applied for a Koussevitzky Foundation bursary to study with Dallapiccola at the 1952 Berkshire Festival in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.

During his years in Milan, Berio had earned a modest living as an accompanist for singing classes. One of the many tasks that he undertook during 1950 was to act as the accompanist for a young American singing student, Cathy Berberian, then applying for a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her Milanese studies. She won the scholarship, and within a few months she and Berio were married. The première of Berio's most assured hommage to Dallapiccola, Chamber Music (1953), was her last performance before the birth of their daughter, Christina. For several years thereafter she withdrew from engagements (a few radio recordings apart), but her return to professional work from 1958 on was to prove seminal for Berio's own development.

Berio's trip to Tanglewood in 1952 had allowed him to be present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 28 October, when the first concert in the USA to include electronic music was given. Fired with enthusiasm, he determined to explore further, and seized the opportunity on his return to Milan by taking on work for RAI, the Italian radio and television network. In 1953 he was commissioned to provide the soundtrack for a series of television films, but at the same time he tried his hand at an autonomous tape piece (Mimusique no.1). That year he also began drafting proposals for an electronic studio at RAI, encountered Maderna for the first time, and attended a conference on electronic music at Basle, where he first met Stockhausen. Maderna and Berio were quickly drawn into a congenial collaboration in planning the proposed Milan studio. By the time the Studio di Fonologia finally opened in 1955, Maderna had agreed to join Berio as co-director. Soon it was accommodating projects from other composers: Pousseur came to work there in 1957, as did Cage the following year.

Working alongside Maderna opened a vast range of contacts for Berio; thus encouraged, he appeared at the 1956 Darmstadt summer school, where his first major orchestral work, Nones, was received with interest. He was to return in subsequent years – accompanied in 1959 by Berberian – but maintained a canny distance from the impassioned aesthetic and technical debates that typified the summer schools at that period. As was so often to be the case, he instead chose to pursue a parallel but independent path. From 1956, he and Maderna began to plan concert series devoted primarily to contemporary music under the title Incontri Musicali, the first of which took place in Milan the following year. Berio additionally took on the editorship of a journal of the same name which published not only articles by his Milanese collaborators, but also Italian translations of major texts by Pousseur, Boulez and Cage. Four numbers appeared between 1956 and 1960.

Berio's taste for creative collaboration quickly affirmed itself. His work at RAI brought him into contact, and then enduring friendship, with Umberto Eco. Together they produced a radio programme on onomatopaeia, whose end-piece was a first version of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958). Over the next few years, Berio's music was to provide for Eco a cardinal example when developing his theory of the opera aperta, or open work. Eco instilled in Berio an abiding passion for Joyce; Berio introduced Eco to the subtleties of Saussure's linguistics. The broad field of semiotics into which the latter led Eco was to provide an inspirational framework for much of Berio's fascination with instrumental and vocal gesture over the coming years. Indeed, Berio's unusual delight in using the intellectual adventures of his contemporaries as an imaginative springboard has never left him.

The late 1950s were also a period of prodigious compositional productivity. A series of Quaderni, subsumed into Epifanie (1959–61, rev. 1965), set a seal on his grasp of the orchestra – which would remain a central medium for him. But Berio also began to concentrate on works for smaller groupings which, because they were more amenable to frequent performance, provided the basis for establishing his rapidly growing reputation in Europe and the USA. They include Tempi concertati (1958–9), Différences (1958–9), Circles (1960) and a work for flute which was to initiate a long line of Sequenzas for solo instruments. The flute Sequenza (1958), written for Severino Gazzeloni, made explicit Berio's fascination with virtuosity, understood not merely as technical dexterity, but as a manifestation of an agile musical intelligence that relishes the challenge of complexity. It was the presence of just these qualities in Cathy Berberian’s artistry that vivified Berio’s work with her. After relaunching her singing career during the Naples Incontri Musicali of 1958, Berberian tempted Cage into devising for her the vocal and stylistic acrobatics of Aria. Her performance of the piece at Darmstadt the following year provoked widespread interest. Berio took note of these adventures, but bided his time. It was only once he felt able to marry the pleasures of rhetorical surprise and vocal agility to the intellectual discipline of articulatory phonetics, and to a sense of vocal line honed by many years of immersion in the Italian lyric tradition, that his own vocal style was to spring forth in full complexity with Circles.

Berio's growing reputation brought with it invitations to teach composition. He returned to Tanglewood in 1960, and in the following two summers taught at the Dartington summer school. These peregrinations, and others occasioned by increasingly frequent performances, persuaded him to resign from the Studio di Fonologia in 1961. In the spring semester of 1962 he substituted for Milhaud at Mills College, Oakland, California, and when this arrangement proved a success, agreed to do the same for the whole of the academic year 1963–4. During his first stay at Oakland, he met the psychologist Susan Oyama, then still a student. Their relationship flourished, and in 1965 they married. But if the intense but explosive relationship between Berio and Berberian had necessitated their divorce, their extraordinary professional rapport flourished unchecked. Some of its most enduring fruits were produced at this time: Folksongs in 1964, Sequenza III in 1965–6. In 1964, Oyama had begun her doctoral research at Harvard University, where Berio accepted a semester's teaching. He was subsequently awarded a grant from the Ford Foundation, which took him to Berlin at the end of that year, but by the autumn of 1965 he had negotiated a post at the Juilliard School of Music that he was to occupy for the next six years. At first he and his wife continued to live in Boston, while she completed her doctorate. A daughter, Marina, was born there in 1966. The family then moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, where their son Stefano was born in 1968. Although primarily concerned with the teaching of composition and analysis, Berio’s work at the Juilliard included the founding of the Juilliard Ensemble, which promoted the performance of contemporary music. And although the east coast of America provided a professional and home base, throughout this period he was also constantly travelling and supervising performances on a worldwide front.

However variegated the surface detail of his life during the 1960s, Berio's experiences of the late 50s had equipped him with a fertile set of technical resources that provided a foundation for the brilliant and vivid works of this decade. His acute sense of the theatrical dimension latent in all performance, which came to the fore in works such as Laborintus II (1965), Sequenzas III (1965–6) and V (1966), and Sinfonia (1968–9), engaged listeners who normally felt neither affection nor curiosity for the works of their contemporaries. The imaginative framework for much of this work was still nourished by the structuralist tradition, particularly as reinterpreted by semiotics (of which Eco was becoming an inventive exponent). But Berio's craftsman-like confidence in the abundance that could be generated from parsimonious processes of melodic and harmonic transformation allowed him to retain control over his material, even as it gave rise to a dazzling and potentially diversionary display of gestural detail.

2. After 1971.

The international attention commanded by Berio's music was, by the late 1960s, keeping him in constant travel – a circumstance that naturally posed problems for his teaching duties at Juilliard. In 1971 he resigned, and began the process of transferring back to Italy. Although the well-nigh continuous travel was to continue for some years, in 1972 he bought land and buildings at Radicondoli, a hilltop village near Siena. Restoration and the planting of vineyards and fruit trees proceeded apace over the next two years, and in 1975 he was able to move in. In 1977 he married his third wife, the Israeli musicologist Talia Pecker, and from then on Radicondoli became his family home. Two sons were born from the marriage – Daniel in 1978, Jonathan in 1980 – and although their educational needs, and Berio's own projects, dictated the acquisition in due course of an apartment in Florence, Radicondoli remained the gravitational centre of his work.

A second focus on his return to Europe was provided initially by his acceptance in 1974 of an invitation from Boulez to direct the electro-acoustic section of IRCAM in Paris. The major project that Berio supervised there was the creation, by the physicist Giuseppe di Giugno, of the 4X digital system that broke new ground by its ability to process and transform sound in ‘real time’. Although Berio made cautious exploration of its potential in Chemins V (1980), which was subsequently withdrawn, the system achieved its first major showing in Boulez's Répons (1980–84). Berio resigned his post at IRCAM in 1980, and began protracted negotiations with the city council of Florence in the hope of creating a new research centre where he could further develop some of the implications of his work in Paris. This finally bore fruit in 1987, with the creation of Tempo Reale, based in the Villa Strozzi. Meanwhile engagement with the cultural life of the region was further developed by Berio's acceptance of the artistic directorship of the Orchestra Regionale Toscana in 1982, and that of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1984.

To those accustomed to the surface exuberance of the scores that Berio produced during the 1960s, the restraint and focus of those of the early 70s came as something of a shock. The success of such works as Sinfonia (1968–9) did not tempt Berio to capitalize on his unusually wide popularity, but rather to pursue what had become the central problem of his musical thought: that of reclaiming the fundamental role of harmony in musical structure. The device whereby he helped himself, and his listeners, to keep a hold on this venture was initially a central line that ran up and down a slowly evolving fixed field of pitches, from which selective resonances and anticipations were sustained to spell out a selection of the harmonic consequences. Such studies in harmonic listening reached an exemplary formulation in Points on the Curve to Find … (1974). Having thus consolidated a grasp on this notoriously daunting and amorphous field, he was able to move into the sophisticated harmonic flux of such works as Il Ritorno degli snovidenia (1976–7).

The later 1970s also saw confirmation of Berio's appetite for the challenge of working on a large time-scale, and with the full resources of opera house and concert hall, notably in the hour-long Coro for 40 vocalists and 40 instrumentalists (1975–7), and in the two-hour opera La vera storia (1977–81). In neither case were such time-spans achieved by interweaving or juxtaposing independent compositional projects, as had been the case in Epifanie (to a certain extent) and Sinfonia. Instead, Berio invented for each work a global musico-dramaturgical structure, as befitted the traditions of large-scale public art. Epifanie and Sinfonia had incorporated passing verbal challenges to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of art. But from Coro on, each major work – and above all Outis (1995–6) and Cronaca del luogo (1999) – has found its own way of reforging the link between public aesthetic experience and the shared ethical responsibilities of the humanist tradition.

Berio's collaborator in La vera storia was Italo Calvino, who had taken a technician's delight in finding words to fill a pre-established musico-dramatic structure, often already fully composed. Calvino now proposed a new libretto based upon the fable of a king making sense of his world, and the collapse of his kingdom, through listening. But as many of his collaborators have ruefully noted, Berio can only allow musical priorities to take possession of verbally formed ideas and structures by dismembering them. A (frequently heated) creative dialogue ensued, but the stage work which eventually resulted, Un re in ascolto (1979–84), stood at many removes from Calvino's original proposition. It conflated an apparently unlikely amalgam of sources (notably W.H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror and a Singspiel libretto based on The Tempest) into an intensely personal synthesis. However, unlike Berio's major theatre works before and since, the piece revolved around an empathetic central narrative – the story of an old impresario striving to realize his vision of ‘another theatre’ before he dies – and as a result it has proved his most resilient contribution yet to the contemporary operatic repertory (fig.2).

With two major music-theatre works complete, Berio was able to return his concentration to the research group assembling at his institute, Tempo Reale, in the Villa Strozzi. The first fruit of their work was a sound-location system, TRAILS, that could process and move live sound within an aural space that was not necessarily defined or limited by the acoustic characteristics of a given performing space. Berio offered his first demonstration of the artistic potential of such mobile, three-dimensional sound projection in Ofanim (1988). But although such explorations have continued to maintain a presence in more recent works, such as Outis (1995–6), they have yet to resume centre stage: Berio's profound commitment to the performing body has continued to assert its primacy.

Although from the pragmatic viewpoint a gamble – few full-scale 20th-century operas have gained an established hold – since the mid-1970s Berio has pursued his vision of musical theatre unswervingly. But the success of Un re in ascolto did not deflect him into a more compliant dialogue with the expectations of opera-lovers. After a protracted search for an appropriate collaborator, Berio encountered the classical scholar and translator Dario del Corno, and moved swiftly to the completion of a major azione musicale, Outis, first performed at La Scala, Milan in 1996. This proved the most forthright and powerful realization yet of his theatrical vision. Narrative, never a central presence in his theatrical work, here gives way to highly structured mixture of verbal and visual imagery that presents – often in starkly confrontational fashion – the global interconnectedness of what might otherwise seem merely co-existent facets of contemporary experience. (To take but one example, the third cycle of the work throws into disconcerting juxtaposition the consumerist seductions of the supermarket and the concentration camp – not only as agonized holocaust memorial, but also as contemporary Bosnian reality – to underline that there are more ways than one of obliterating, or failing to cherish, human individuality.)

The formidable creative energy that has sustained decades of production has not failed to focus the attention of those responsible for honours and prizes. In 1989 Berio received the Siemens-Musikpreis; in the academic year 1993–4 he was Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, and in 1996 he received the Praemium Imperiale conferred by the Japan Art Association. He has also received honorary doctorates from City University, London (1980), and the University of Siena (1995).

3. Text and commentary.

The many continuities that underlie Berio's work are most strikingly embodied in the ongoing series of virtuoso solo Sequenzas. The first, for flute, established many of the characteristics that have endured throughout the series. The ‘sequence’ of the title is, broadly, that of harmonic fields: fixed pitch resources that are each explored for their melodic and harmonic potential in turn. The ways in which this conception is realized vary widely from one Sequenza to the next. They serve a virtuosity that, as Berio has often emphasised, is not merely that of flying finger or agile tongue. The composer also requires a virtuosity of ‘sensibility and intelligence’ that often entails a thoroughgoing understanding of the history of the instrument: most explicitly in Sequenza VIII for violin (1976–7), but also, for instance, in the characterization of registers in Sequenza XII for bassoon (1995). Indeed, the piece may become an essay in the instrument's social history, as in Sequenza XIII for accordion (1995–6), which creates an amalgam of echoes from tango, work-song, cabaret and other forms of popular entertainment. In certain cases, where history has consigned to an instrument an excessively constricted range of characteristics, Berio may write à rebours. Both Sequenza II for harp (1963) and Sequenza VI for viola (1967) invest their instruments with an unwonted ferocity.

Berio's engrossed exploration of the physical details of performance (fingering patterns in Sequenza VI for viola, sequences of resonance points in the mouth in Sequenza III for voice (1965–6), different uses of the tongue to modify airflow in Sequenza XII for bassoon) engendered solo works of singular density and extent. (Most last between eight and ten minutes; the bassoon Sequenza is much the longest at twenty-six.) It is little wonder, therefore, that Berio has chosen to return to some of these works, and subject them to further scrutiny in the form of a superimposed commentary – the adding of extra layers to a pre-existent core so as to create new perspectives and balances. This possibility was in fact first explored by extraction rather than addition: the harp Sequenza grew out of preparatory work on a harp concerto, which subsequently formed itself around the solo line as Chemins I for harp and ensemble (1964). Once envisaged, the principle took on explosive life in Chemins II on Sequenza VI (1967), where a harmonic and textural core that sustains the solo viola line throws out an extraordinarily dense web of accretions. This in turn engendered an orchestral layer in Chemins III on Chemins II (1968). The series has always drawn strength from the fundamentally harmonic underpinning of the solo Sequenzas, as is made obvious by the harmonic backdrop provided by the ensemble in Chemins IV on Sequenza VII for oboe and strings (1975) or indeed Corale on Sequenza VIII (1980–1). But the variety of ways in which this principle could inflect the global import of the Sequenza upon which it is based has become evident in the additions to the series in the 1990s: Chemins V on Sequenza XI for guitar and chamber orchestra (1992), Kol-Od (Chemins VI on Sequenza X) for trumpet and chamber orchestra (1995–6), and Récit (Chemins VII on Sequenza IXf) for alto saxophone and orchestra (1996).

The principle of reworking by adding extra layers is not confined to the Chemins series. A range of further possibilities was opened up in Berio's most frequently performed orchestral work, Sinfonia (1968–9). Here O King, a work for voice and chamber ensemble completed in 1968, underwent a subtle harmonic transformation as the second movement of Sinfonia. The third movement took a radical step, treating the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony as its core ‘text’, on top of which fragments from a range of other repertory works, chosen to represent a wide range of harmonic densities (the maximum being provided by Berio's own chromatically saturated block chords), were superimposed. The appearance of many of these fragments was triggered by association, echoing some feature of Mahler's original even as they blocked it out. Such a process – not unlike the wild puns of Joyce's Finnegans Wake – can proliferate in all directions, and indeed in the final movement of Sinfonia the same interactions multiply, but now between the materials of all the previous movements.

Yet more radically, Berio experimented with the possibility of composing out the interaction of two completed ‘texts’, when the soft, dense staccato chords of Still (1973, subsequently withdrawn as a separate work) were made to interact with the core melodic line of Bewegung (1971) to form Eindrücke (1973–4). Although this was an extreme instance, the looser principle of ‘inter-textual’ exploration has remained strong: for example, materials from Part 1 of La vera storia converge upon the central scene v of Part 2; in Un re in ascolto, the three ‘auditions’ fuse into the protagonist's fifth aria. Complete works have also continued to be reviewed in a new context, Points on the Curve to Find… becoming the basis for the central section of Concerto II (Echoing Curves) (1988–9), the orchestral Continuo (1989) proliferating into Ekphrasis (Continuo II) (1996).

4. Orchestral works; sound in space.

Since the later 1950s, Berio's commitment to the inheritance of the symphony orchestra has been unwavering. An eager student of the great orchestrators from the decades surrounding the turn of the century, including Mahler, Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky, he has exercized himself in the medium with a consistency not easily matched among his major contemporaries. Although many of his devices (such as the momentary colouring of one instrumental line by other instruments) reflect and extend the achievements of his mentors, Berio's orchestra typically uses timbrally unified layers of sound superposed upon one another (the inspiration for which had been his experiences with the superposition of complex sounds in the electronic studio). From Epifanie on, his scores display families of instruments in choirs of four, five or six voices. Often, associated choirs can determine a characteristic sound-world: flutter-tongue flutes and trumpets in Epifanie A, clarinets and saxophones in Outis (1995–6). One further ‘choir’, that of eight amplified solo voices, was used to startling effect in Sinfonia as an integral part of his orchestral resources, and remained a crucial resource in the pit orchestra of ensuing theatrical works, such as Opera (1969–70), La vera storia and Outis.

In all of these instances, questions of ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ remain constantly malleable, as befits a medium dedicated to the ideal of ‘sounding together’. Only in isolated examples does a single instrument or line split off to pursue its own agenda – the flute line in certain works of the 1960s, such as Laborintus II or Sinfonia, or the ‘stratospheric’ violin lines of many works from the mid-1990s on. But even where Berio turns to the inherently dramatized opposition of soloist and orchestra, he shows a marked fondness for mediating the opposition by echoing soloistic timbre and gesture in the orchestra. Two orchestral harps respond to the harp soloist in Chemins I, an orchestral pianist echoes the two soloists in the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra (1972–3), the viola and cello similarly echo the viola soloist in Chemins II.

The fact that layers of sound potentially dramatize musical space (a possibility first explored through the multi-track tape works of the late 1950s) has also never been far from Berio's mind. After the ‘sound in the round’ experiments of Allelujah II (1957–8), Berio has, for practical reasons, kept his orchestra on the traditional platform. However, he has repeatedly devised new seating patterns for his performers so as to dynamize acoustic space within that confine. These range from the ‘echo-chamber’ provided by a third group of violins seated at the back (Epifanie, Sinfonia) to the radical rearrangements of Formazioni (1985–7) or Concerto II (Echoing Curves). Nevertheless, only by electronic means has he been able to reclaim music’s potential 360°. The resultant tension between the physically performing body, and the disembodied, roving sound of the TRAILS system (or its more economically viable successors), made explicit in Ofanim (1988), remains vivid and unresolved.

5. Voice and theatre.

Within Berio's output, quantitively the human voice has shared no more than equal honours with instrumental music. However, in terms both of public perception and personal history, its role has been seminal. No Italian of his generation (save, for many years, Donatoni) could escape transaction with that country's lyric tradition. But Berio found means, through his extraordinary collaborations with Berberian, of complicating and challenging it from within, incorporating every form of vocal behaviour that it had traditionally excluded. To do this he had to find an approach to the performed text that bestrode conceptual distinctions between word as sign, and as musically structurable sound. In Circles, the Cummings poems that Berio set already acknowledge this dimension typographically, and such poetically familiar devices as assonance could be allowed to ramify into analogous relationships between voice and ensemble. The tension between the formal musical potential that grows autonomously out of these materials, and the text’s linear semantic structure, has remained a cardinal source of strength in Berio’s vocal writing. It has led him towards authors undismayed by challenges to conventional semantic order – pre-eminently Edoardo Sanguineti, from whom he learnt how well it serves that tension to ‘cut and paste’ text: most notably, and radically, in Un re in ascolto and Outis.

The vocal idiom of Circles or Sequenza III, or its multi-voiced equivalents in Passaggio, Laborintus II, and Sinfonia, was exuberantly inclusive, but never negated its roots in the lyric tradition. Once that period of creativity had run its course, Berio was thus able to fall back on vocal writing – characteristic of his mature theatre works from La vera storia on – whose arching lines overtly proclaim that tradition. At first, sheer experience gave him a surer hand in creating a complex lyrical idiom for female performers: Leonora and Ada in La vera storia, the singers of the three audition pieces, and the Protagonist whose aria summates all three, in Un re in ascolto. The creation of an equally convincing male-voice idiom proceeded more cautiously. But if the arias sung by Prospero in Un re in ascolto are of rather muted lyrical eloquence (in part so as to give due resonance to Calvino's remarkable texts), the protagonist of Outis is given a starkly expressive line whose parsimony is profoundly telling.

Barberian's theatre of masks – each persona had momentarily assumed with blazing conviction – had demanded a psychological as well as a physical virtuosity that tended, in other hands, to become coldly brilliant acrobatics (although available as a potent signifier of psychological distress for the character of the third passer-by of La vera storia in part 2). But Berio had other counterbalances to the lyric tradition to hand. Popular singing styles of many traditions had fascinated him for many years. As with the tradition of opera lirica, he sought to extend imaginatively the resources that he found there. So E vo' (1972) uses with remarkably sustained intensity the melodic characteristics of Sicilian folksong (a consistent source of inspiration for Berio), but articulates a large melodic sweep whose roots are plainly in the concert hall and opera house. This process of assimilation is pursued on a characteristically ambitious scale in Coro (1975–6), where, in one of his most audacious rearrangements of concert-hall resources, each of 40 voices is coupled with (and sits next to) an orchestral melodic instrument. Thus the succession of individual sections, based on different popular singing styles, can create a kaleidoscope of different chamber ensembles, with massed tuttis in between to set them off.

From La vera storia (1977–81) on, lyric and popular traditions have jostled for position in a typically all-inclusive mix. In that work – as in its successors – each singing style is developed in a separate ‘number’. But the vertiginous volte-faces of the idiom that Berio created for Berberian, and of the multi-voiced works that grew from it, created a perceptual superabundance, an aural jungle full of half-grasped gestures in the face of which listeners must piece together their own sense of subjective continuity as best they can. By contrast, Berio's work from the late 1970s on restores to music its established function of knitting together a span of theatrical experience within which the most challenging diversities may be affirmed as ‘belonging together’. His instinctive distrust of the well-rounded story echoes the conviction of the modernist tradition at large that the artist's most urgent task consists in making a path into areas of experience about which there is not yet a coherent story to be told. Works such as Passaggio, Opera and La vera storia have shown that this is a task for which musical theatre, with its capacity for holding together things which, from the point of view of ‘common sense’, would otherwise fly apart, is uniquely suited. This understanding of the potential of musical theatre reached its most remarkable embodiment in the non-narrative counterpoint between word, music and visual symbol in Outis – a manifestation of Berio's fundamental and enduring mission to articulate, and thus to place in the realm of the humanly shared, perceptions for which there is as yet no code.

WORKS

for further details of incomplete and unpublished works see Karlen (1988)

stage

Tre modi per supportare la vita (Mimusique no.2) (azione scenica, 3, R. Leydi), 1952–5, Bergamo, 1955

Allez-Hop! (racconto mimico, I. Calvino), 1952–9, Venice, Festival, 23 Sept 1959; rev., Bologna, 1968

Passaggio (messa in scena, 1, Berio and E. Sanguineti), 1961–2, Milan, Piccola Scala, 6 May 1963

Esposizione (azione scenica, Sanguineti), 1963, Venice, 1963; destroyed

Opera (3, Berio, after U. Eco, F. Colombo, A. Striggio, S. Yankowitz, with Open Theatre of New York), 1969–70, Santa Fe, 12 Aug 1970; rev., Florence, Comunale, 28 May 1977

Per la dolce memoria di quel giorno (ballet, after Petrarch, choreog. Béjart), tape, 1974, Florence, 1974

Linea (ballet, choreog. F. Blaska), 2 pf, mar, vib, 1974, Grenoble, 1974

La vera storia (op, 2, I. Calvino and Berio), 1977–81, Milan, La Scala, 9 March 1982

Un re in ascolto (azione musicale, 2 pts, Berio, after Calvino, W.H. Auden, F. Einsiedel, F.W. Gotter), 1979–84, Salzburg, Kleines Festspielhaus, 7 Aug 1984

Outis (azione musicale, D. Del Corno, Berio), 1995–6, Milan, La Scala, 2 Nov 1996

Cronaca del luogo (azione musicale, T. Pecker-Berio), 1998–9, Salzburg, Felsenreitschule, 24 July 1999

orchestral

Preludio a una festa marina, str, 1944

Concertino, cl, vn, cel, hp, str, 1949

Mimusique no.2, 1952–3 [concert version of azione scenica]

Variazioni, chbr orch, 1953–4

Nones, 1954

Allelujah I, 6 groups, 1955; rev. as Allelujah II, 5 groups, 1957–8

Variazioni ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’, 2 basset hn, str, 1956

Divertimento, 1958, collab. Maderna; nos.2 ‘Scat rag’ and 3 ‘Rhumba-ramble’ [from Mimusique no.2] by Berio

Tempi concertati, fl, vn, 2 pf, small orch (in 4 groups), 1958–9

Quaderni I, 1959, II, 1961, III, 1961–2; incl. in Epifanie

Chemins I on Sequenza II, hp, orch, 1964

Chemins III on Chemins II, va, 9 insts, orch, 1968

Chemins IIb, small orch, 1969–70 [rev. of Chemins II]

Bewegung, 1971

Chemins IIc, b cl, small orch, 1972 [rev. of Chemins IIb], withdrawn

Concerto, 2 pf, orch, 1972–3

Still, 1973, withdrawn

Eindrücke, 1973–4

Après Visage, orch, tape, 1974, withdrawn

Points on the Curve to Find …, pf, 23 insts, 1974

Chemins IV on Sequenza VII, ob, str, 1975

Corale on Sequenza VIII, vn, 2 hn, str, 1975

Selezione, pf, chbr orch [from Conc., 2 pf, orch], withdrawn

Il ritorno degli snovidenia, vc, 30 insts, 1976–7

Encore, 1978

Requies, 1983–5

Formazioni, 1985–7, rev. 1988

Conc. II (Echoing Curves), pf, orch (in 2 groups), 1988–9 [incl. rev. pts of Points on the Curve to Find…]

Continuo, 1989

Schubert-Berio: Rendering, 1989 [on frags. of sym. by Schubert]

Festum, 1989

Chemins V on Sequenza XI, gui, chbr orch, 1992

Compass, ballet-recital, pf, orch, 1994

Vor, während, nach Zaide, 1995 [with projections of texts by Arruga]

Notturno, str, 1995 [after chbr work]

Re-Call, 23 insts, 1995

Kol-Od (Chemins VI on Sequenza X), tpt, chbr orch, 1995–6

Ekphrasis (Continuo II), 1996

Récit (Chemins VII on Sequenza IXb), a sax, orch, 1996

Alternatim, cl, va, orch, 1996–7

vocal

vocal-orchestral

L'annunciazione (R.M. Rilke), S, chbr orch, 1945; unpubd

Magnificat, 2 S, SSAATB, orch, 1949

Epifanie (M. Proust, J. Joyce, A. Machado, C. Simon, B. Brecht, Sanguineti), Mez, orch, 1959–61, rev. 1965; rev. 1991–2 as Epiphanies

Traces (S. Oyama, after J. Baldwin), S, Mez, 2 actors, chorus, orch, 1964, withdrawn

Sinfonia (C. Lévi-Strauss, S. Beckett, Berio), 8 amp vv, orch, 1968–9 [incl. arr. of solo vocal work O King]

Air (Striggio), S, orch, 1969 [from stage work Opera]

Laborintus II (Sanguinetti), 3vv, 8 actors, spkr, ens, tape, 1965

Ora (Berio, M. Essam, after Virgil), S, Mez, small chorus, fl, eng hn, 12 insts, orch, 1971, withdrawn

Bewegung II (Virgil), Bar, orch, 1971 [after orch work]

Coro (folk texts, P. Neruda), 40vv, 40 insts, 1975–6, rev. 1977

Calmo (Homer), Mez, small orch, 1989 [based on Calmo, S, ens, 1974]

Shofar (P. Celan), SATB, orch, 1995

other vocal

Due cori popolori, chorus, 1946, unpubd

O bone Jesu, chorus, 1946, unpubd

Tre canzoni popolari, female v, pf, 1946–7, rev. as Quattro canzoni populari, 1946-7, rev. 1973

Tre liriche greche, 1v, pf, 1946–8

Due canti siciliani, T, male chorus, 1948

Ad Hermes, 1v, pf, 1948

Due pezzi sacri, 2S, pf, 2 hp, timp, bells, 1949

Tre vocalizzi, 1v, pf, 1950

Deus meus, 1v, 3 insts, 1951

El mar la mar (Alberti), 2 S, fl, cl, gui, accdn, db, 1952; red. for 2S, pf, 1952; arr. for S, Mez, fl, 2 cl, hp, accdn, vc, db, 1969

Chamber Music (Joyce), female v, cl, hp, vc, 1953

Circles (e.e. cummings), female v, hp, 2 perc, 1960

Rounds (M. Kutter), 1v, hpd, 1964, withdrawn

O King, 1v, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1967–8; arr. incl. in Sinfonia

Prayer-Prière (Calvino), 1v, 1968 [for 40th birthday of K. Stockhausen]

Questo vuol dire che (various), 3 female vv, small chorus, insts, tape, 1968–9

Melodrama (Berio), T, fl, cl, perc, vib, elec org, vn, vc, db, 1970 [from stage work Opera]

Agnus, 2 female vv, 3 cl, drone (elec org/other sound source), 1971; incl. in rev. of Opera

E vo' (anon.), S, fl, ob, 3 cl, tpt, trbn, perc, pf, elec org, vn, va, vc, db, 1972; incl. in rev. of Opera

Recital I (for Cathy) (Berio, A. Mosetti, Sanguineti), 1v, 17 insts, 1972

Cries of London, 6 solo vv, 1973–4, rev. for 8 solo vv, 1975

Calmo (Homer), S, insts, 1974

A-ronne (Sanguineti), 8vv, 1975 [version of tape work]

Ecce: musica per musicologi (d'Arezzo), vv, bells, 1987

Ofanim (Bible: Ezekiel, Song of Solomon), female v, children's chorus, 2 inst groups, live elecs, 1988

Canticum novissimi testamenti, (S, S, A, A, T, T, B, B)/SATB, 4 cl, 4 sax, 1989

There is No Tune (Pecker-Berio), chbr chorus, 1994

Twice upon…, 6 groups children's vv, ob, cl, hn, tpt, trbn, vn, va, kbd, 1994

other instrumental

2 or more instruments

Toccata, pf 4 hands, 1939

Divertimento, str trio, 1946

Tre pezzi, 3 cl, 1947

Str Trio, 1948

Wind Qnt, 1948

Opus Number Zoo (R. Levine), spkr, 2 cl, 2 hn, 1950; rev. wind qnt, 1951; rev. 1970

Wind Qt, 1950

Due pezzi, vn, pf, 1951

Sonatina, fl, 2 cl, bn, 1951

Study, str qt, 1952

String Quartet, 1955–6

Serenata I, fl, 14 insts, 1957

Différences, fl, cl, hp, va, vc, tape, 1958–9, rev. 1967

Sincronie, str qt, 1963–4

Chemins II on Sequenza VI, va, 9 insts, 1967

Memory, elec pf, elec hpd 1970, rev. 1973

Autre fois: berceuse canonique pour Igor Stravinsky, fl, cl, hp, 1971

Musica leggera, fl, va, vc, 1974 [for 70th birthday of G. Petrassi]

34 duetti, 2 vn, 1979–83

Accordo, 4 groups wind insts, 1980–81

Voci, va, 2 inst groups, 1984

Call, brass qnt, 1985

Terre chaleureuse, wind qnt, 1985 [for 60th birthday of P. Boulez]

Naturale, va, tam-tam, tape, 1985–6

Ricorrenze, wind qnt, 1985–7

Notturno (Str Qt no.3), 1993

Glosse, str qt, 1997

sequenzas

Sequenza I, fl, 1958

Sequenza II, hp, 1963

Sequenza III, 1v, 1965–6

Sequenza IV, pf, 1965–6

Sequenza V, trbn, 1966

Sequenza VI, va, 1967

Sequenza VII, ob, 1969

Sequenza VIII, vn, 1976–7

Sequenza IX, cl, 1980, transcr. as Sequenza IXb, a sax, 1981

Sequenza X, tpt, pf resonance, 1984

Sequenza XI, gui, 1987–8

Sequenza XII, bn, 1995

Sequenza XIII, accdn, 1995–6

other solo instrumental

Pastorale, pf, 1937

Petite Suite, pf, 1948

Cinque variazioni, pf, 1952–3, rev. 1966

Rounds, hpd, 1964–5, arr. pf, 1967

Wasserklavier, pf, 1965 [orig. for 2 pf]

Gesti, rec, 1966

Erdenklavier, pf, 1969

Fa-Si, org, 1975

Les mots sonts allés, vc, 1978

Chemins V, cl, digital system, 1980, withdrawn

Lied, cl, 1983

Luftklavier, pf, 1985

Comma, E-cl, 1987

Feuerklavier, pf, 1989

Psy, db, 1989

Leaf, pf, 1990

Brin, pf, 1990

tape

Mimusique no.1, 1-track, 1953; other early pieces

Ritratto di città, 1-track, 1954, collab. Maderna

Mutazioni, 1-track, 1955

Perspectives, 2-track, 1957

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), 2-track, 1958

Momenti, 4-track, 1960

Visage, 2-track, 1961

A-ronne (radiophonic documentary, Sanguinet), 1974

Chants parallèles, 1974–5

Diario immaginario (V. Sermonti), chorus, orch, tape, 1975 [radio work]

Duo (teatro immaginario, Calvino), 2 vn, chorus, orch, tape, 1982 [radio work]

arrangements

Folk songs, S, 7 insts, 1964; also version for S, orch, 1973

C. Monteverdi: Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, S, T, Bar, 3 va, vc, db, hpd, 1966

J. Lennon and P. McCartney: Michele, 1v, fl, hpd, 1967, version for 1v, ens; Ticket to Ride, 1v, ens, 1967; Yesterday, 1v, fl, hpd, 1967

The Modification and Instrumentation of a Famous Hornpipe as a Merry and Altogether Sincere Homage to Uncle Alfred, fl/ob, hpd, perc, va, vc, 1969 [after H. Purcell, for 80th birthday of A. Kalmus]

K. Weill: Le grand lustucru, Mez, 12 insts, 1972 [from Marie galante]

K. Weill: Surabaya Johnny, Mez, 9 insts, 1972 [from Happy End]

K. Weill: Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit, Mez, 8 insts, 1975 [from Die Dreigroschenoper]

L. Boccherini: Ritirata notturna di Madrid, orch, 1975

Fantasia, orch, 1977 [after Gabrieli]

Toccata, orch, 1977 [after Frescobaldi]

M. Falla: Siete canciones populares españolas, Mez, orch, 1978

J. Brahms: Sonata, op.120/1, cl/va, orch, 1986 [as Brahms-Berio]

G. Mahler: Fünf frühe Lieder, Bar, orch, 1986

G. Mahler: Sechs frühe Lieder, Bar, orch, 1987

F. Schubert: An die Musik, chorus, orch, 1989

G. Verdi: Otto romanze, T, orch, 1990

MSS in CH-Bps

Principal publishers: Belwin-Mills, Schott, Suvini Zerboni, Universal

WRITINGS

‘Prospettive nella musica’, Elettronica, v/3 (1956), 108–15; Fr. trans. in Musique en jeu, no.15, (1974), 60–63

‘Studio di fonologia musicale’, The Score, no.15 (1956), 83 only

‘Aspetti di artigianato formale’, Incontri musicali, no.1 (1956), 55–69; Fr. trans. in Contrechamps, no.1 (1983), 10–23

‘Poesia e musica: un'esperienza’, Incontri musicali, no.3 (1959), 98–111; Eng. trans. in Words/Music, ed. M. Edwards, Prospice, x (Portree, 1979), 9–20; Fr. trans. in Contrechamps, no. 1 (1983), 24–35

‘Du geste et de Piazza Carita’, La musique et ses problèmes contemporains (Paris, 1963), 216–23; repr. in Contrechamps, no.1 (1983), 41–5

‘Commenti al Rock’, NRMI, i (1967), 125–35; Eng. trans. in The Lennon Companion, ed. E. Thomson, and D. Gutman (Basingstoke 1987)

‘Meditation a Twelve-Tone Horse’, Christian Science Monitor (15 July 1968)

‘Eco in ascolto’, Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, 1986), 329–34; Eng. trans. in CMR, v (1989), 1–3

‘Of Sounds and Images’, COJ, ix (1997) 295–9

Remembering the Future: Six Norton Lectures on Poetry (Cambridge, MA, forthcoming)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

general studies

KdG (J. Noller) [incl. fuller list of writings and further bibliography]

U. Eco: ‘Apertura e “informazione” nella struttura musicale: uno strumento d'indagine’, Incontri musicali, no.4 (1960), 57–88

P. Santi: ‘Luciano Berio’, Die Reihe, iv (1958), 98–102; Eng. trans in Die Reihe, iv (1960), 98–102

R. Smith Brindle: ‘Current Chronicle: Italy’, MQ, xliv (1958), 95–101 [on Nones]

M. Bortolotto: ‘The New Music in Italy’, Contemporary Music in Europe, ed. P.H. Lang and N. Broder (New York, 1965), 61–77; also in MQ, li (1965), 61–77

M. Bortolotto: ‘Luciano Berio ed dei piaceri’, Fase seconda (Turin, 1969), 128–48

P. Castaldi: ‘Luciano Berio ed Henri Pousseur: l'aspirazione a una libertà integrale’, Musica moderna, iii/101 (1969), 65–77

M. Philippot: ‘Luciano Berio’, ReM, nos.265–6 (1969), 85–93 [interview]

U. Eco: ‘Pensée structurale et pensée sérielle’, Musique en jeu, no.5 (1971), 45–56

G.W. Flynn: ‘Listening to Berio's Music’, MQ, lxi (1975), 388–421

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘Berio and the Art of Commentary’, MT, cxvi (1975), 871–2

J. Thibaudeau: ‘Une question à Luciano Berio’, La musique en projet, ed. S. Benmussa and B. Marger (Paris, 1975), 169–72 [interview]

R. Dalmonte and others: Il gesto della forma: musica, poesia e teatro nell'opera di Luciano Berio (Milan, 1981)

N. Dressen: Sprache und Musik bei Luciano Berio: Untersuchungen zu seinen Vokalkompositionen (Regensburg, 1982)

L. Berio: Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga, ed. D. Osmond-Smith (London, 1985)

I. Stoïanova: Luciano Berio: chemins en musique, ReM, nos.375–7 (1985)

R. Karlen: Inventare der Paul Sacher Stiftung: Musikmanuscripte, ii: Luciano Berio (Oxford, 1988)

D. Osmond-Smith: Berio (Oxford, 1991)

F. Menezes: Luciano Berio et la phonologie: une approche jakobsonienne de son oeuvre (Bern, 1993)

T. Gartmann: ‘…dass nichts an sich jemals vollendet ist’: Untersuchungen zum Instrumentalschaffen von Luciano Berio (Bern, 1994, 2/1997)

R. Piano and T. Regge: ‘Della creazione’, Micromega, no.3 (1995), 29–45

E. Restagno, ed.: Berio (Turin, 1995)

works

D. Avron and J.-F. Lyotard: ‘“A Few Words to Sing”: Sequenza III’, Musique en jeu, no.2 (1971), 28–44

F. Delalande: ‘L'“Omaggio a Joyce” de Luciano Berio’, Musique en jeu, no.15 (1974), 45–54

W. Gruhn: ‘Luciano Berio (1925): “Sequenza III” (1965)’, Perspektiven neuer Musik, ed. D. Zimmerschied (Mainz, 1974), 234–47

P. Altmann: ‘Sinfonia’ von Luciano Berio: eine analytische Studie (Wien, 1977)

P. Schnaus: ‘Anmerkungen zu Luciano Berios “Circles”’, Musik und Bildung, x (1978), 489–97

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘From Myth to Music: Lévi-Strauss's “Mythologiques” and Berio's “Sinfonia”’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 230–60

M. Hicks: ‘Text, Music and Meaning in Berio's “Sinfonia”, 3rd Movement’, PNM, xx (1981–2), 199–224

J. Jarvelepp: ‘Compositional Aspects of Tempi Concertati by Luciano Berio’, Interface, xi (1982), 179–93

N. Usher: ‘Luciano Berio: “Sequenza VI” for Solo Viola’, PNM, xxi (1982–3), 286–93

P. Albéra: ‘Introduction aux neuf sequenzas’, Contrechamps, no.1 (1983), 91–122

P. Albéra: ‘Matériaux et composition: sur trois oeuvres vocales de Luciano Berio’, Canadian University Music Review, iv (1983), 66–91

J. Demierre: ‘“Circles”: E.E. Cummings lu par Luciano Berio’, Contrechamps, no.1 (1983), 123–80

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘Joyce, Berio, et l'art de l'exposition’, Contrechamps, no.1 (1983), 83–9

I. Anhalt: ‘Berio's “Sequenza III”: a Portrait’, Alternative Voices (Toronto, 1984), 25–50

D. Osmond-Smith: Playing on Words: a Guide to Luciano Berio's ‘Sinfonia’ (London, 1985)

A.N. Schultz: Sequenze I–VII by Luciano Berio: Compositional Idea and Musical Action (diss., U. of Queensland, 1986)

J. Mackay: ‘Aspects of Post-Serial Structuralism in Berio's “Sequenza IV” and “VI”’, Interface, xvii (1988), 223–9

M. Hicks: ‘Exorcism and Epiphany: Luciano Berio's “Nones”‘, PNM, xxvii (1989), 252–68

M. Harry: ‘Un re in ascolto’, Music and Musicians, xxxvii/6 (1988–9), 18–22

P.F. Stacey: Contemporary Tendencies in the Relationship of Music and Text, with Special Reference to ‘Pli selon pli’ (Boulez) and ‘Laborintus II’ (Berio) (New York, 1989)

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘La mesure de la distance: “Rendering” de Berio’, InHarmoniques, no.7 (1991), 147–52

T. Gartmann: ‘“Una frattura tra intenzioni e realizzazione?” Untersuchungen zu Luciano Berios “Sincronie” für Streichquartett’, Quellenstudien II: zwölf Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. F. Meyer (Winterthur, 1993), 73–96

L. Cosso: ‘“Un re in ascolto”: Berio, Calvino e altri’, NRMI, xxviii (1994), 557–74

J. Noller: ‘Sulla forma in musica: Eco, Berio, gli altri e noi’, Sonus, vi/2–3 (1994), 14–24

R. Hermann: ‘Theories of Chordal Shape Aspects of Linguistics and their Roles in an Analysis of Pitch Structure in Berio's “Sequenza IV” for Piano’, Concert Music, Rock and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. E.W. Marvin and R. Hermann (Rochester, NY, 1995), 364–98

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘Nella festa tutto? Structure and Dramaturgy in Luciano Berio's La vera storia’, COJ, ix/3 (1997), 281–94

D. Metzer: ‘Musical Decay: Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5’, JRMA, cxxv (2000), 93–114

Bériot, Charles-Auguste de

(b Leuven, 20 Feb 1802; d Brussels, 8 April 1870). Belgian violinist and composer. He studied with J.-F. Tiby, and later with André Robberechts. In 1821 he travelled to Paris and played for Viotti, who encouraged him with these words: ‘You have a fine style; endeavour to perfect it. Hear all men of talent – profit by all but imitate no one.’ Unable to obtain lessons from Viotti, who was then director of the Paris Opéra, Bériot turned to Baillot. For a few months he attended Baillot’s violin class at the Paris Conservatoire but could not submit to the academic discipline. It is known that Baillot disliked the technical ‘eccentricities’ which were characteristic of Bériot’s style. Shortly afterwards, Bériot made a highly successful début in Paris, meeting with equal acclaim in London, where he played his own Concertino at the Philharmonic Society on 1 May 1826. After his return to Brussels, he was named solo violinist to King William I of the Netherlands at a salary of 2000 guilder, but the appointment was terminated by the revolution of 1830.

In 1829 Bériot met the famous singer Maria Malibran. For the next six years they travelled together, giving joint concerts in Belgium, England, France and Italy. This liaison led to their marriage on 29 March 1836. Less than six months later, Maria died unexpectedly in Manchester, shortly after appearing at a concert. The grief-stricken Bériot returned to Brussels and temporarily left the concert platform.

He resumed his career in 1838 when he undertook a concert tour to Austria and Italy with the singer Pauline Garcia, the younger sister of his late wife. Spohr heard one of their concerts in Karlsbad and praised Bériot’s playing, although he disliked his compositions. In 1840, while playing again in Vienna, Bériot married Marie Huber, the daughter of an Austrian magistrate. That year he played in Russia. In 1842 he was offered a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire as successor to Baillot. However, he declined, preferring to accept an appointment to the Brussels Conservatory. Here he served as head of the violin faculty from 1843 to 1852, when he was forced to retire because of failing eyesight. He became totally blind in 1858 but continued to be active as an author.

Bériot occupies an important place in the history of violin playing. He adapted the technical brilliance of Paganini to the elegance and piquancy of the Parisian style. Thus he modernized the classical French school, established by Viotti and perpetuated at the Conservatoire by Rode, Kreutzer and Baillot. Not being a true disciple of that school, Bériot was able to break the stranglehold of tradition and developed a new, essentially Romantic, approach, known as the Franco-Belgian School. Much of Bériot’s technique – harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, ricochet, even scordatura – was influenced by Paganini; this is particularly evident in Bériot’s Second Violin Concerto, first played by the composer in London in 1835. On the other hand, Bériot’s characteristic style of sweetness and elegance was already formed in the 1820s, before he met Paganini, as can be seen in his early Airs variés and the First Violin Concerto. Bériot’s success was not based merely on technical brilliance; he could play with such melting warmth as to make Heine exclaim, ‘It seems as if the soul of his late wife sings through his violin.’ As a composer, Bériot aimed at effect rather than depth; his melodies are sweet and sentimental, his technical display is ingenious and sparkling though basically less difficult than that of Paganini. His concertos and shorter pieces were widely popular in their time; today they are used mainly for study purposes. The elegance and elfin grace of Bériot helped initiate a new approach to the violin, and reflections of his style can be found in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. He was a methodical teacher and left several useful instruction books (Méthode de violon, 1858; Ecole transcendante de violon, 1867). His most famous pupil was Henry Vieuxtemps.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vn, orch: 10 vn concs., opp.16, 32, 44, 46, 55, 70, 76, 99, 104, 127; Le trémolo, caprice sur un thème de Beethoven, op.30; Fantaisie, ou Scène de ballet, op.100; Seconde fantaisie-ballet, op.105; Grande fantaisie, op.115

Chbr: 12 airs variés, vn, pf, opp.1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 15, 42, 52, 67, 79, 88; Toccata, pf, op.13; 6 études brillantes, vn, pf, op.17; 3 trios, opp.4, 58, 71; 12 petits duos, 2 vn, op.87; 6 duos caractéristiques, 2 vn, op.113; 12 études caractéristiques, vn, pf, op.114; Ouverture brillante, vn, pf, op.122; Sérénade, vn, op.124; many duos and sonatas, vn, pf, on opera themes, collab. Osborne, Thalberg and other pianists

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Heron-Allen: A Contribution towards an Accurate Biography of de Bériot and Malibran (London, 1894)

P. Soccanne: ‘Le “lion” belge: Charles de Bériot (1802–1870)’, Guide du concert, xxiii (1936–7), 679–81, 711–12, 743–6, 775–7

M. Goldstein: ‘Charles-August de Bériot’, Cahiers Ivan Tourgéniev, Pauline Viardot et Maria Malibran, x (1986), 64–72

G. Pinsart: ‘Quelques lettres inédites de violonistes belges – Charles de Bériot, [Henry] Vieuxtemps, [Hubert] Léonard – au Musée Royal de Mariemont’, Bulletin de la société liégeoise de musicologie, lvii (1987), 8–27

M. Tollet: ‘Catalogue des lettres de Charles de Bériot’, RBM, xliii (1989), 211–24

BORIS SCHWARZ

Bériot, Charles-Wilfrid

(b Paris, 12 Feb 1833; d Sceaux-en-Gatinais, 22 Oct 1914). French pianist and composer, son of Charles-Auguste de Bériot and Maria Malibran. He was an excellent pianist and pedagogue. In 1887 he was appointed to the piano faculty of the Paris Conservatoire where he taught for many years. Among Bériot’s works are four piano concertos, chamber music and various orchestral and vocal compositions. With his father he wrote Mélodies élémentaires, ou méthode d’accompagnement … pour piano et violon (Paris, 1854) and L’art de l’accompagnement appliqué au piano (Paris, n.d.).

BORIS SCHWARZ

Berkeley.

American city in California, near San Francisco. It has its own symphony orchestra (founded 1970) and opera company and is one of the seats of the University of California; see San francisco, §§1, 3 and 5.

Berkeley, Sir Lennox (Randall Francis)

(b Boars Hill, Oxford, 12 May 1903; d London, 26 Dec 1989). English composer. From the same generation as Walton and Tippett, he has little connection with national traditions represented by them or by Elgar and Vaughan Williams earlier. This is partly because of his French ancestry and temperament which made him closer to Fauré, and to Ravel and Poulenc who were both personal friends. Berkeley admired Mozart above all, then Chopin, Ravel and the neo-classical Stravinsky. His own idiom is built from an overt melodic expression, usually rooted in tonality and allied to a fastidious command of harmony and orchestral texture. Religious subjects in particular invariably gave rise to vocal music of unusual spiritual intensity, a mood also reflected in his instrumental slow movements.

PETER DICKINSON (text, bibliography), JOAN REDDING (work-list)

1. Life.

Berkeley was born into an aristocratic family. His grandfather was George Lennox Rawdon, Seventh Earl of Berkeley and Viscount Dursley, who married Cecile, daughter of Edward Drummond, Comte de Melfort, a family of French and Scottish origin. The composer’s father, Captain Hastings George FitzHardinge Berkeley, was the eldest son, but, born before his parents were able to marry, he was legally unable to inherit the title and estates to which Lennox, as his only son, would have succeeded. Berkeley’s childhood was spent in or near Oxford and was affected by listening to his father’s collection of piano rolls; visits to the family of his mother, Aline Carla Harris, who lived in France where her father was British consul at Nice; a godmother who had studied singing in Paris at the turn of the century; and an aunt who was a salon composer. He attended the Dragon School, Oxford; Gresham’s School, Holt, where he was followed by W.H. Auden and Britten; and St. George’s School, Harpenden, where one of his first compositions was performed.

Berkeley went to Merton College, Oxford, where he read French, Old French and Philology, and took the BA in 1926. Then, on the suggestion of Ravel to whom he showed some of his scores, he studied with Boulanger in Paris, where he was based until 1932. In many ways Berkeley was the quintessential Boulanger pupil, responsive to her passion for music and her rigorous demands in strict counterpoint; with her he effectively undertook his professional training; in this context, too, in 1928, he became a Roman Catholic, which profoundly affected both his life and work. After the prolonged influence of Boulanger the next landmark was not until Berkeley’s meeting with Britten at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona in 1936. They immediately collaborated on the orchestral suite, Mont Juic, and became close friends as well as colleagues. Even though Berkeley was ten years older the two composers found they had much in common and they influenced each other. Berkely was the first to set the poems of his Oxford contemporary, W.H. Auden (early songs now lost). Britten admired Berkeley's 1930s music and later conducted the Stabat Mater, which was dedicated to him; Berkeley eagerly awaited each of Britten's new works. During World War II Berkeley worked at the BBC in London as an orchestral programme builder and it was there that he met Elizabeth Freda Bernstein, whom he married in 1946; their happy domestic life proved an ideal background for his creative work.

From 1946 to 1968 Berkeley was professor of composition at the RAM, where he exercised an influence on later generations which was no less significant for being unobtrusive. His later pupils included Bedford, Bennett, Mathias, Maw and Tavener: they have all paid tribute to his sensitive guidance and personal generosity. Berkeley’s honours have included the CBE (1957), the Cobbett Medal (1962), the Ordre National du Mérit Culturel de Monaco (1967), the Papal Knighthood of St Gregory (1973) and a knighthood (1974). Many universities and other organizations have granted him honorary status too, among which doctor of Oxford University (1970), fellow of Merton College (1974), fellow of the RNCM (1975), professor of Keele University (1976–9), member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980), Member of the GSMD (1980), Member of the Académie Royale, Belgium (1983) and doctor of City University (1984). From 1975 to 1983 he was President of Honour of the PRS and from 1977 to 1983 he was president of the Cheltenham Festival.

2. Works.

Berkeley lacked confidence in most of his early works written while he was studying with Boulanger and many of them disappeared, some to be rediscovered later. His first published composition, however, had been written at Oxford, a polished song with piano in G major, D’un vanneur de blé aux vents. Soon after he reached Paris his style changed: Tombeaux – five songs to poems by Jean Cocteau – for example, draws on bitonality of the kind then fashionable amongst the composers of Les Six. Berkeley had opportunities for performances of works on a larger scale too with his orchestral Suite given its première in Paris as early as 1928 and at the Proms in London the following year. He came into greater prominence with the oratorio Jonah, when it was broadcast by the BBC in 1936 and given at the Leeds Festival a year later, conducted by Berkeley himself. However, despite Britten’s admiration for the work it received a mixed response, and Berkeley withdrew it (it was revived in London in 1990). The score is permeated with Stravinskian neo-classicism – in some ways it seems to anticipate The Rake’s Progress – and its construction in separate numbers derives from the Bach passions and cantatas.

Berkeley’s first unqualified success was a work for string orchestra, the Serenade op.12, which has become a mainstay of the British repertory alongside Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which was written just before it, and Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra which came just after. Its four movements are in contrasted styles, though not as diverse as the Britten. The opening Vivace is an exhilarating moto perpetuo recalling the rhythmic energy of Bach’s ‘Brandenburg’ Concertos; the following Andantino is a melancholy serenade with pizzicato strings suggesting guitars; the third movement is a kind of scherzo where, as often in Berkeley, the material is continuously developed rather than merely repeated; the final Lento strikes the most personal note. Berkeley began the Serenade at Snape in Suffolk, where he shared the Old Mill with Britten. By the time he was writing the last movement the war had started and the colleague whom he idolized had gone to the USA with Pears, circumstances which appear to be reflected in the music.

In 1940 Berkeley completed his First Symphony op.16, a spacious four-movement work lasting half an hour; but perhaps more characteristic is the Divertimento in B op.18, for small orchestra, commissioned by the BBC and one of several works the composer dedicated to Boulanger. The layout of the Divertimento avoids the formalities of symphonic design. It opens with a Prelude in extremely compressed sonata form and follows it with a Nocturne, a beautiful piece of lyrical pacing, leading to the emotional climax of the whole work. The Scherzo is of larger proportions than either of the two outside movements, while the vivacious Finale is a cross between Haydn and Poulenc in Berkeley’s own manner.

By the 1940s he had achieved real maturity. In particular, the Four Poems of St Teresa of Avila op.27, for contralto and string orchestra, first sung by Kathleen Ferrier, create in their religious intensity a strong impression; while the Stabat mater op.28, written for Britten’s English Opera Group, is, if rarely heard, a work of comparable distinction. Of the many piano works from all periods the extended Sonata op.20 is a true landmark; outstanding too are the Six Preludes op.23, a kind of Mikrokosmos of Berkeley’s compositional technique. The Concerto in B for piano and orchestra op.29 is one of his most successful works written in a particularly felicitous form. The thematic layout of the first movement has a Mozartian elegance, while the second subject shows a blues influence which can be traced back to 1920s Paris, and which surfaces frequently in his melodic writing. The second movement, an Andante, is again typical in its introspective tranquillity and objective passion. The Finale combines the dry humour of Prokofiev with the high spirits of Les Six but given Berkeley’s inimitable stamp.

In the 1950s he followed Britten’s lead into the theatre with three operas: the grand opera Nelson op.41, a one-act comedy, A Dinner Engagement op.45 and a biblical tableau, Ruth op.50. Nelson was well received at Sadlers Wells in 1954 but not revived until a concert performance in London in 1988. By contrast, the sophisticated, witty A Dinner Engagement is regularly staged. Ruth is an expansion of the serious language of the Four Poems of St Teresa into a touching sacred drama, and, as with A Dinner Engagement, it showed Berkeley to be more at home with something less ambitious than grand opera, something more in keeping with his personal reserve. The later Castaway op.68 is a one-act treatment of the story of Odysseus and Nausicaa, while at the end of his life illness prevented the completion of the first act of another grand opera, Faldon Park.

In the early 1960s Berkeley began to show a remarkable ability to extend his musical language, and like other Boulanger pupils such as Copland and Carter he moved away from neo-classicism. As Copland took up 12-note rows, so did Berkeley, if in a much less systematic way. ‘Aria 1’ from the Concertino op.49 has a 12-note ground bass; there is a similar use of all 12 pitch classes in Boaz’s recognition aria near the end of Ruth and in the Lento of the Violin Concerto op.59. Serial method in the Sonatina for oboe and piano op.61 is minimal, the row at the opening soon disappearing; but the Third Symphony op.74, by contrast, derives much of its taut cogency from manipulating a 12-note set divided into two hexachords. Connections with such techniques may not have been fundamental; he did, for example, continue to juxtapose tonal and atonal idioms in song cycles such as the Chinese Songs op.78, as he had done earlier in the Five Poems of W.H. Auden op.53. But, as with Copland, serial thinking had the effect of altering and extending Berkeley’s harmonic means. At a time when tonality was often regarded as exhausted, this was, then, a productive crisis for him, not least in the Windsor Variations op.75 which exhibits some of the abstract angularity of late Stravinsky. The new style is, perhaps, at its most impressive in a pair of atmospheric orchestral pieces: Antiphon op.85 and Voices of the Night op.86, as well as his last concerto, for guitar, op.88. In this he worked closely with Julian Bream, both performer and instrument being congenial and inspiring.

With his literary interests and melodic gifts, Berkeley naturally wrote outstanding songs to French as well as English texts: Tant que mes yeux op.14 no.2, a setting of Louise Labé, for example, is perfectly realised, as are the two sets of sonnets by Ronsard, op.40 and op.62. His choral music to religious texts was, like Poulenc’s, close to the core of the man and to his faith. He defines his own terms at once in a simple anthem such as Look up sweet Babe op.43 no.2, to a text by Richard Crashaw; a liturgical work such as the Missa brevis; or something more ambitious such as A Festival Anthem op.21, no.2. As for chamber music, throughout his career it was precisely judged and idiomatic. The Second String Quartet op.15 is an accomplished example from the 1940s, as too is the String Trio op.19, while the String Quartet no.3 op.76 represents the later style. Berkeley wrote for some of the leading performers of the time, including Dennis Brain, for whom he composed the Horn Trio op.44; Colin Horsley, who was associated with much of his piano music; and Janet Craxton, who gave rise to the Sonatina op.61, the Oboe Quartet op.70 and the Sinfonia concertante op.84.

Late in life Berkeley struggled against Alzheimer’s disease and completed nothing after 1983, but there was a perceptible decline before that. His Fourth Symphony op.94 lacked the concentration of his earlier orchestral works although late miniatures, such as the Sonnet op.102 (to words by Louise Labé again), and choral pieces to sacred texts remained strong. Though he was at his most distinctive in the 1940s and 50s, the achievement of his later extended language is not inconsiderable. His is an enduring, cultivated and imaginative voice in 20th-century British music.

WORKS

dramatic

Ops: Nelson (3, A. Pryce-Jones), op.41, 1949–54, London, Sadler's Wells, 22 Sept 1954; A Dinner Engagement (1, P. Dehn), op.45, 1954, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 17 June 1954; Ruth (3 scenes, E. Crozier), op.50, 1955–6, London, Scala, 2 Oct 1956; Castaway (1, Dehn), op.68, 1968, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 3 June, 1967; Falden Park (2, W. Dean), op.100, c1983, unfinished

Ballet: [untitled], 1932; The Judgement of Paris, London, Sadler's Wells, 1938; Serenade, op.12, 1939 [choreog. J. Jackson as Common Ground, 1984]; La fête étrange, London Arts Theatre, 1947

Incid music: The Seven Ages of Man/The Station Master (M. Slater), 1938; The Tempest (W. Shakespeare), 1946; Jig-Saw/Venus Anadyomene, 1945–8 [for revue Oranges and Lemons, 1949]; A Winter's Tale (Shakespeare), 1960

Film scores: Sword of the Spirit, 1942; Hotel Reserve, 1944; Out of Chaos, 1944; The First Gentleman, 1947–8; Youth in Britain, 1957

Radio scores: Westminster Abbey, 1941; Yesterday and Today, 1942; A Glutton for Life, c1946; Wall of Troy, 1946; Iphigenia in Taurus, c1954; Seraphina, 1956; Look Back to Lyttletoun, 1957

orchestral

Suite, 1927; Ov., op.8, 1934, unpubd, withdrawn; Mont Juic, suite of Catalan dances, op.9, 1937, collab. Britten; Serenade, op.12, str, 1939; Sym. no.1, op.16, 1940; Divertimento, B, op.18, 1943; Nocturne, op.25, 1946; Ov., chbr orch, 1947; Sinfonietta, op.34, 1950; Variation on an Elizabethan Theme (Sellinger's Round), str, 1953, collab. others, unpubd; Suite, 1953, unpubd; Suite, op.42, 1955 [from op Nelson, op.41]; Interlude, c1955 [from op Nelson, op.41]

Sym. no.2, op.51, 1956–8; Ov., light orch, 1959, unpubd; Suite ‘A Winter's Tale’, op.54, 1960 [from incid music]; Partita, op.66, chbr orch, 1965; Sym. no.3, op.74, 1969; Windsor Variations, op.75, chbr orch, 1969; Palm Court Music (Diana and Actaeon Waltz), op.81/2, 1971; Antiphon, op.85, str, 1973; Voices of the Night, op.86, 1973; Suite, op.87, str, 1974; Elegy, op.33/2b, str, 1978 [arr. of Elegy, vn, pf, 1950]; Sym. no.4, op.94, 1978

With soloist(s): Introduction and Allegro, op.11, 2 pf, orch, 1938; Vc Conc., 1939; Pf Conc., B, op.29, 1947; Conc., op.30, 2 pf, orch, 1948; Fl Conc., op.36, 1952; Conc., op.46, pf, double str orch, 1958; 5 Pieces, op.56, vn, orch, 1961; Vn Conc., op.59, 1961; Dialogue, op.79, vc, chbr orch, 1970; Sinfonia concertante, op.84, ob, orch, 1973 [arr. of Canzonetta, ob, pf, c1973]; Gui Conc., op.88, 1974

choral

With orch: Ode, SATB, tpt, str, c1932; Jonah, orat, op.3, Tr, T, B, SATB, orch, 1935; 2 poèmes de Pindare, solo vv, SATB, orch, c1936; Domini est terra, op.10, SATB, orch, 1937; Colonus' Praise (W.B. Yeats), op.31, SATB, orch, 1949, unpubd; Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons, op.35, T, SATB, str, org, 1951, unpubd; Batter my heart, three person'd God (cant., J. Donne), op.60/1, S, SATB, ob, hn, vcs, dbs, org, 1962; Signs in the Dark (L. Lee), op.69, SATB, str, 1967; Mag, op.71, SATB, orch, org, 1968

With org: Lord, when the sense of Thy sweet grace (R. Crashaw), op.21/1, SATB, org, 1944; A Festival Anthem (G. Herbert, H. Vaughan), op.21/2, SATB, org, 1945; Look up, sweet Babe (Crashaw), op.43/2, Tr, SATB, org, 1954; Salve regina, op.48/1, unison vv, org, 1955; Sweet was the Song (W. Ballet), op.43/3, SATB, org, c1957; Thou hast made me (Donne), op.55/1, SATB, org, 1960; Missa brevis, op.57, SATB, org, 1960 [version with Eng. text, c1961]; Hail Holy Queen, vv, org, 1970; Hymn for Shakespeare's Birthday (C. Day Lewis), op.83/2, SATB, org, 1972; The Lord is my shepherd, op.91/1, SATB, org, 1975; Mag and Nunc, op.99, SATB, org, 1980

Unacc.: The Midnight Murk (Sagittarius), SATB, 1942, unpubd; There was neither grass nor corn (F. Cornford), SATB, 1949, unpubd; Ask me no more (T. Carew), op.37/1, TTBB, c1952; Spring at this hour (P. Dehn), op.37/2, SSATBB, 1953; Crux fidelis, op.43/1, T, SATB, 1955; Justorum animae, op.60/2, SATB, 1963; Adeste Fideles, Tr, SSATB, c1964, unpubd; Mass, op.64, SSATB, 1964; 3 Songs (R. Herrick, R. Bridges), op.67/1, TTBB, 1965; The Windhover (G.M. Hopkins), op.72/2, SATB, 1968; Grace, SATB, 1971, unpubd; 3 Latin Motets, op.83/1, SATB, 1972; The Hill of the Graces (E. Spenser), op.91/2, SSAATTBB, 1975; Judica me, op.96/1, SSATBB, 1978; Ubi caritas et amor, op.96/2, SSATB, 1980; In Wintertime (B. Askwith), op.103, SATB, 1983

Hymn tunes: Christ is the World's Redeemer, 1963; Hail Gladdening Light, c1963; Hear'st Thou, My Soul (Crashaw), 1967; 3 nos. in The Cambridge Hymnal (1967)

Other works: La poulette grise, 2 children's chorus, tpt, 2 pf, c1931, unpubd

solo vocal

With orch: 4 Poems of St Teresa of Avila (trans. A. Symons), op.27, A, str, 1947; Stabat mater, op.28, S, S, A, T, B, B, chbr orch, 1947; 4 Ronsard Sonnets, set 2, op.62, T, orch, 1963, arr. T, chbr orch as op.62a

Songs for 1v, pf: 3 Early Songs, S/T, pf, 1924–5: D'un vanneur de blé aux vents (J. du Bellay), Pastourelle (13th century anon.), Rondeau (C. d'Orléans) [no.1 rev. as The Thresher, Mez/Bar, pf, 1925]; Tombeaux (J. Cocteau), S/T, pf, 1926; 3 poèmes de Vildrac, Mez/Bar, pf, 1929; How love came in (R. Herrick), S/T, pf, 1935; [7] Songs (W.H. Auden, F. García Lorca, P. O'Malley, L. Labé, J. Passerat), op.14/2, c1937–40 [2 unpubd]; 5 Songs (A.E. Housman), op.14/3, S/T, pf, 1940, unpubd; The Ecstatic (Day Lewis), S/T, pf, 1943, unpubd; Lullaby (Yeats), S/T, pf, 1943, unpubd; 5 Songs (W. de la Mare), op.26, Mez/Bar, pf, 1946; The Lowlands of Holland (trad.), Mez/Bar, pf, 1947, unpubd; 3 Greek Songs (Sappho, Antipater, Plato, all trans. F. Wright), op.38, Mez/Bar, pf, 1951; 5 Poems of W.H. Auden, op.53, S/T, pf, 1958; So sweet love seemed (R. Bridges), Mez/Bar, pf, c1959, unpubd; Autumn's Legacy (T.L. Beddoes, L. Durrell, A. Tennyson, Hopkins, W. Davies, H. Colleridge), op.58, S/T, pf, 1962; Automne (G. Apollinaire), op.60/3, Mez/Bar, pf, 1963; Counting the Beats (R. Graves), op.60, S/T, pf, 1963, rev. 1971; I carry your heart (e.e. cummings), Mez/Bar, pf, 1970; 5 Chinese Songs, op.78, Mez/Bar, pf, 1971; Another Spring (de la Mare), op.93/1, Mez/Bar, pf, 1977; Four Score Years and Ten (V. Ellis), 1977, unpubd; Sonnet (Labé), op.102, S/T, pf, 1982

Other works: 4 Ronsard Sonnets, set 1, op.40, 2 T, pf, 1952, rev. 1977; Songs of the Half-Light (de la Mare), op.65, S/T, gui, 1964; 5 Herrick Poems, op.89, S/T, hp, 1973–4, rev. 1976; Una and the Lion (Spenser), op.98, S, s rec, b viol, hpd, 1979, unpubd

chamber and instrumental

3–8 insts: Prelude-Intermezzo, fl, vn, va, pf, 1927, unpubd; Serenade, fl, ob, vn, va, vc, c1929; Piece, fl, cl, bn, 1929, unpubd; Suite, fl/pic, ob, vn, va, vc, c1930, unpubd; Polka, op.5/1, 2 pf, tpt, cym, tambour de basque, triangle, c1934, unpubd, arr. Polka, op.5, pf; Str Qt no.1, op.6, 1935; Trio, fl, ob, pf, 1935; Str Qt no.2, op.15, 1941; Str Trio, op.19, 1943; Trio, op.44, vn, hn, pf, 1953; Sextet, op.47, cl, hn, str qt, 1955; Concertino, op.49, fl/rec, vn, vc, hpd/pf, 1955; Diversions, op.63, 8 insts, 1964; Ob Qt, op.70, 1967; Str Qt no.3, op.76, 1970; Canon, str trio, 1971; In memoriam Igor Stravinsky, str qt, 1971; Fanfare, 7 tpt, timp, 1972 [for RAM banquet]; Quintet, op.90, wind, pf, 1975

2 insts: Minuet, 2 rec, c1924, unpubd; Petite Suite, ob, vc, 1927; Sonatine, cl, pf, 1928, unpubd; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1931, unpubd; Sonata no.2, op.1, vn, pf, c1928; Sonatina, op.13, rec/fl, pf, 1939; Sonatina, op.17, vn, pf, 1942; Sonata, d, op.22, va, pf, 1945; Elegy, op.33/2, vn, pf, 1950; Toccata, e, op.33/3, vn, pf, 1950; Allegro, 2 tr rec, c1955; Andantino, op.21/2a, vc, pf, c1955 [after A Festival Anthem, op.21/2, SATB, org]; Sonatina, op.61, ob, pf, 1962; Introduction and Allegro, op.80, db, pf, 1971; Duo, op.81/1, vc, pf, 1971; Duo, ob, vc, 1971; Canzonetta, ob, pf, c1973, arr. as Sinfonia concertante, ob, orch, op.84, 1973; Sonata, op.97, fl, pf, 1978, rev. 1983

1 inst: 3 Pieces, cl, 1939; Introduction and Allegro, op.24, vn, 1946; Theme and Variations, op.33/1, vn, 1950; Sonatina, op.52/1, gui, 1957; Nocturne, op.67/2, hp, 1967; Theme and Variations, op.77, gui, 1970

keyboard

Pf (solo unless otherwise stated): March, pf/hpd, 1924, unpubd; Toccata, 1925; Mr Pilkington's Toye, pf/hpd, 1926, unpubd; For Vere, pf/hpd, 1927, unpubd; Polka, op.5/1a, c1934; Polka, Nocturne, Capriccio, op.5, 2 pf, 1934–8; 3 Impromptus, op.7, 1935; 3 Pieces, op.2, 1935; 5 Short Pieces, op.4, 1936; 4 Concert Studies, set 1, op.14/1, 1940; Paysage, 1944, unpubd; Sonata, A, op.20, 1945; 6 Preludes, op.23, 1945; 3 Mazurkas (Hommage à Chopin), op.32/1, 1949; Scherzo, op.32/2, 1949; Sonatina, op.39, pf 4 hands, c1954; Concert Study, E, op.48/2, 1955; Sonatina, op.52/2, 2 pf, 1959; Improvisation on a Theme of Manuel de Falla, op.55/2, 1960; Theme and Variations, op.73, pf 4 hands, 1968, unpubd; Palm Court Waltz, op.81/2a, pf 4 hands, 1971; 4 Concert Studies, op.82, 1972; Prelude and Capriccio, op.95, 1978; Bagatelle, op.101/1, 1981; Mazurka, op.101/2, 1982

Org: Impromptu, 1941, unpubd; 3 Pieces, op.72/1, org, 1966–8; Fantasia, op.92, org, 1976; Andantino, op.21/2b, 1981 [arr. of A Festival Anthem, op.21/2, SATB, org, 1945]

Other kbd: Suite, hpd, 1930; Prelude and Fugue, op.55/3, clvd, 1960, unpubd

Principal publisher: Chester

WRITINGS

Articles in MMR (1929–34)

‘Nadia Boulanger as Teacher’, MMR, lxi (1931), 4 only

‘Britten and his String Quartet’, The Listener (27 May 1943)

‘Open Forum: Variations on a Theme – Tonal or Atonal?’, Music Today, i (1949), 145 only

‘Britten's Spring Symphony’, ML, xxxi (1950), 216–19

‘The Light Music’, Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1952/R), 287ff

‘The Sound of Words’, The Times (28 June 1962)

‘Britten's Characters’, About the House, i/5 (1962–5), 14

‘Concert-Going in 1963’, Sunday Times (30 Dec 1962)

‘Francis Poulenc’, MT, civ (1963), 205 only

‘Boulanger the Dedicated’, Piano Teacher, viii/2 (1965), 6–7

‘Nocturnes, Berceuse, Barcarolle’, Frederic Chopin: Profiles on the Man and the Musician, ed. A. Walker (London, 1966, 2/1973 as The Chopin Companion), 170–86

‘Truth in Music’, Times Literary Supplement (3 March 1966)

‘Berkeley Describes his Setting of the Magnificat’, The Listener (4 July 1968)

‘Lili Boulanger’, The Listener (21 Nov 1968)

‘Charles Burney's Tour’, The Listener (5 March 1970)

‘Berkeley Writes about Alan Rawsthorne’, The Listener (30 Dec 1971)

‘Alan Rawsthorne’, Composer, no.42 (1971–2), 5–7

‘A Composer Speaks’, Composer, no.43 (1972), 17–19

‘Walton – Yesterday’, Performing Right, no.57 (1972), 18–19

‘Views from Mont Juic’, Tempo, no.106 (1973), 6–7

‘Comments on the 1975 season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts’, Radio Times (19/25 July – 20/26 Sept 1975)

‘A Composer Looks Back’, Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Three Choirs Festival, ed. B. Still (Gloucester, 1977), 45 only

Foreword to P. Bernac: Francis Poulenc, the Man and his Songs (London, 1977), 11–12

‘Maurice Ravel’, Adam International Review, xli (1978), 13–17

‘Tribute’, Mademoiselle: entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger, ed. B. Monsaingeon (Luynes, 1980; Eng. trans., 1985), 124 only

Preface to C. Headington: Britten (London, 1981)

Untitled essay, R. Ricketts: Bid the World Goodnight (London, 1981), 19–21

‘Igor Stravinsky: a Centenary Tribute’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 395

‘Tribute’, Michael Tippett O.M.: a Celebration, ed. G. Lewis (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), 21 only

4. Music publishing and criticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bryan: ‘The Younger English Composers – Lennox Berkeley’, MMR, lix (1929), 161–2

D. Brook: Composers' Gallery (London, 1940)

R. Hull: ‘The Music of Lennox Berkeley’, The Chesterian (23 Jan 1948)

M. Flothuis: Modern British Composers (Stockholm and London, 1949)

A. Frank: Modern British Composers (London, 1953)

P. Dickinson: ‘Berkeley on the Keyboard’, Music and Musicians, xi/8 (1962–3), 10–11, 58

P. Dickinson: ‘The Music of Lennox Berkeley’, MT, civ (1963), 327–30

M. Schafer: British Composers in Interview (London, 1963)

P. Dickinson: ‘Lennox Berkeley’, Music and Musicians, xiii/12 (1964–5), 20–23, 54

F.S. Howes: The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966)

P. Dickinson: ‘Berkeley's Music Today’, MT, cix (1968), 1013–14

M. Berkeley: ‘Lennox Berkeley's Third Symphony’, The Listener (3 July 1969)

J. Tavener: ‘Lennox Berkeley at 70’, The Listener (10 May 1973)

P. Dickinson: ‘Interview with Sir Lennox Berkeley’, Twenty British Composers (London, 1975), 23–9

P. Dickinson: ‘Berkeley at 75 talks to Peter Dickinson’, MT, cxix (1978), 409–11

R.H. Hansen: The Songs of Lennox Berkeley (DMA diss., U. of North Texas, 1987)

P. Dickinson: The Music of Lennox Berkeley (London, 1988)

J. Redding: A Descriptive List of the Musical Manuscripts of Sir Lennox Berkeley (thesis, U. of North Carolina, 1988)

M. Williamson: ‘Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903–1989)’, MT, cxxxi (1990), 197–9

D. Mitchell and P. Reed, eds.: Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (London, 1991, 2/1998)

S. Craggs: Lennox Berkeley: a Source Book (London, 2000)

Berkeley, Michael (Fitzhardinge)

(b London, 29 May 1948). English composer and broadcaster, son of lennox Berkeley. A chorister at Westminster Cathedral, he began composing at the age of six, enthused with a love of music by his father and his godfather Britten, whose choral works he often sang with the choir. After studies at the RAM in composition, piano and singing, Berkeley performed professionally as a baritone and as a rock musician. From 1974 to 1979 he worked as a BBC radio announcer, later becoming a leading freelance radio and TV broadcaster. His composing career was profoundly influenced by studies in the mid-1970s with Richard Rodney Bennett, from whom he acquired the techniques of serialism and logical thematic development demonstrated in the String Trio, the Oboe Concerto and the Fantasia concertante. In 1977 Meditations won the Guinness Prize, and in 1979 Berkeley was made associate composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; but it was the compelling oratorio Or shall we Die? (1982) to Ian McEwan's anti-nuclear text that first attracted international attention. The climax of his first, broadly tonal stylistic phase, it was followed by a more searching, emotional idiom, with works that employed dissonant pitch-centred atonality, as well as aleatory and textural devices inspired by Lutosławski and Ligeti; such techniques are evident in Fierce Tears I (1984), the evocative, modally inflected Clarinet Quintet (1983), Songs of Awakening Love (1986) and Coronach (1988), a powerful work for strings based on a Scottish highland lament. The organ, clarinet and viola concertos (1987–94) continued to explore this expressive style with their combination of poetic intensity and expressionistic gesture.

Both the Clarinet Concerto and Entertaining Master Punch were preparatory essays for Baa Baa Black Sheep, Berkeley's highly acclaimed opera, which was later televised. Its libretto by David Malouf about the boyhood of Rudyard Kipling is set with keen musico-dramatic pacing and sharply drawn vocal characterizations. A similar concern with the private world of childhood imagination colours later works such as The Secret Garden, The Garden of Earthly Delights (aptly commissioned for the National Youth Orchestra's 1998 Prom concert) and a second opera, Jane Eyre, again to a libretto by David Malouf. Berkeley has championed new music as artistic director of the Cheltenham Festival and co-director of the Spitalfields Festival, London. In 1998 he was appointed chairman of the Royal Opera House Board. He has been a visiting professor at Huddersfield University and in 1996 was elected FRAM.

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal

Ops: Baa Baa Black Sheep (3, D. Malouf, after R. Kipling), 1993, Cheltenham, 3 July 1993; Jane Eyre (Malouf, after E. Bronte), 1998–

Choral: At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners (J. Donne), double chorus, org, opt. tpt, 1980; The Crocodile and Father Williams (L. Carroll), SSAA, 1982; Easter (G. Herbert), SATB, org, opt., brass, 1982; Or shall we Die? (I. McEwan), S, B, SATB, orch, 1983; Verbum caro factum est, Bar, SATB, org, 1988; The Red Macula (D.H. Lawrence), SATB, orch, 1989; Stupendous Stranger (C. Smart), SATB, org, opt., brass, 1990; We Wait for thy Loving Kindness, SATB, org, 1992; anthems, motets

Other: The Wild Winds (W. Blake), S, chbr orch, 1978; For Mrs Tomoyasu, aria, S, chbr orch, 1983 [arr. from Or shall we Die?]; Songs of Awakening Love (E.B. Browning, C. Rossetti), S, chbr orch, 1986; Grenadier, S, (vn, vc)/(viols), 1996; Winter Fragments, Mez, fl, ob, cl, hp, vn, va, vc, 1996; songs

instrumental

Orch: Meditations, str, 1975; Ob Conc., 1977; Fantasia concertante, 1978; Primavera, opt. chorus, orch, 1979; Uprising, sym., 1980; Flames, 1981; The Vision of Piers the Ploughman, suite, 1981; Gregorian Variations, 1982; The Romance of the Rose, 1982; Vc Conc., vc, chbr orch, 1983, rev. 1997; Conc., hn, str, 1984, rev. 1996; Daybreak and a Candle End, 1985; Org Conc., 1987; Coronach, str, 1988; Gethsemane Fragments, str, 1990; Cl Conc., 1991; Va Conc., 1994, rev. 1996; Severn Crossing, 1996; The Secret Garden, 1997; The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1998

Chbr: Passacaglia, 2 pf, 1978; Str Trio, 1978; Etude de fleurs, vc, pf, 1979; Sonata, vn, pf, 1979; Str Qt no.1, 1981; Nocturne, fl, hp, vn, va, vc, 1982; Pf Trio, 1982; Music from Chaucer, brass qnt, 1983; Cl Qnt, cl, str, 1983; Fierce Tears I, ob, pf, 1984; Str Qt no.2, 1984; For the Savage Messiah, vn, va, vc, cb, pf, 1985; Keening, sax, pf, 1988; Quartet Study, 1988; Fierce Tears II, ob, pf, 1990; Entertaining Master Punch, fl + a fl + pic, ob, cl + b cl, tpt + pic tpt, perc, hp, pf, vn, vc, 1991; Catch me if you Can, wind qnt, 1994; Re-Inventions, fl, ob + eng hn, cl + b cl, bn, hn, 1995 [from J.S. Bach]; Magnetic Field, str qt, 1996; Fantastic Mind, spkr, brass qnt, 1997; Torque and Velocity, str qt, 1997

Solo: Strange Meeting, pf, 1978; Org Sonata, 1979; Iberian Notebook, vc, 1980; Variations on Greek Folksongs, va, 1981; Worry Beads, gui, 1981; Sonata, gui, 1982; Flighting, cl, 1985; Wild Bells, org, 1987; The Snake, eng hn/ob, 1990; Dark Sleep, pf, 1995

Principal Publisher: OUP

WRITINGS

‘Lennox Berkeley's Third Symphony’, The Listener (3 July 1969)

‘A Man of Our Time’, Michael Tippett, O.M.: a Celebration, ed. G. Lewis (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), 18–20

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘OUP and Michael Berkeley’, MO (1978–9), cii, 158 only

M. Morris: ‘Michael Berkeley’, A Guide to 20th-Century Composers (London, 1996), 412–14

D. Lister: Profile, The Independent on Sunday (29 March 1998)

MALCOLM MILLER

Berkeley Manuscript

(US-BEm 744). Late 14th-century French collection of five theoretical treatises. See Anonymous theoretical writings, Cat.no.46.

Berken, Jo.

See Verben, Johannes.

Berkenstock, Johann Adam.

See Birkenstock, Johann Adam.

Berkovec, Jiří

(b Plzeň, 22 July 1922). Czech musicologist and composer. He attended the Prague Conservatory (1941–8), read musicology and psychology at Prague University (1945–9) and concurrently studied composition privately with Antonin Modr. A trained pianist, Berkovec often took part in concerts of Přítomnost, the Prague contemporary music society, and also toured Italy in 1957. He was editor of chamber and orchestral music at Czechoslovak Radio (1945–64), a lecturer in musicology at Prague University (1952–7) and editor-in-chief (1964–76) at the State Music Publishers, or Supraphon, as it was known from 1967. Subsequently he became a research fellow at the Prague Institute for Theatre Studies. Berkovec's music expresses optimism and exuberance. His early works show the influence of Josef Suk and Prokofiev. In the 1970s and 80s he assimilated new compositional techniques, though always with the aim of combining this with a classical sense of thematic development. His most successful achievements include the science-fiction opera Krakatit and pieces written for Concertino Praga (a competition for young performers). Berkovec’s importance as a musicologist is principally in his works on the history of Czech music from the 17th to 20th centuries and on the composers Ryba, Dvořák, Suk and Smetana.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: 12 mesíčků [12 Months] (children's op, J. Dolina), 1957; Krakatit (2, Berkovec, after K. Čapek), 1960; Hostinec u kamenného stolu [Inn at the Stone Table] (3, Berkovec, after K. Poláček), 1961; Epopej [Epopee] (‘tramp opera parody’, 2, Berkovec, after V. Rada and J. Žák), 1976

Orch: Stříbrný vítr [Silver Breeze], sym. poem, 1945; Nastal nám den veselý [A Merry Day has Begun], sym. fantasia, 1951; Sonatina, orch, 1956; Sonatina, vn, orch, 1956; Conc., fl, hp, orch, 1966; Vivat musica, sym., 1974; Ov., 1977; Conc. grosso for Concertino Praga, 1977; Tavba [Smelting], sym. poem, 1977; Rozmarné léto [Whimsical Summer], suite, 1981; Brixiana, sym. fantasia, 1986

Vocal: Návrat [Return] (F. Halas), Bar, SATB, orch, 1973; Vítej, máji [Welcome, May] (folk texts, F. Hrubín), SA, pf, 1955; 2 písně [2 Songs] (J. Seifert), S, fl, pf, 1956; Milostné písně [Love Songs] (medieval Czech poetry), SATB, fl, gui, 1984

Chbr: Sonatina, vn, pf, 1947; Malá suita [Little Suite], fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, str trio, db, 1954; Pastorální suita, 2 fl, va, vc, gui, 1971; Kvartetino, str qt, 1975; Minitrio, ob, cl, bn, 1996

Principal publishers: ČHF, DILIA, ǑR

WRITINGS

Josef Suk, 1874–1935: život a dílo [Josef Suk, 1874–1935: life and works] (Prague, 1956)

Josef Suk (Prague, 1968–70) [in Czech, Eng., Ger., Fr.]

Antonín Dvořák (Prague, 1969)

Hry s tóny [Games with notes] (Prague, 1971)

Zuzana Růžíčková (Prague, 1972)

Chvála muzyke: pjat glav o cesskoj muzyke i muzykantach [In praise of music: five chapters on Czech music and musicians] (Prague, 1974–5) [in Ger., Eng., Fr., Sp.]

Chvála hudby: eseje o české hudbě [In praise of music: essays on Czech music] (Prague, 1980)

Praga musicopolis Europae (Prague, 1983) [in Czech, Eng., Ger., Russ.]

V hudbě život Čechů [The life of the Czechs in music] (Prague, 1984)

Život plný hudby: vyprávění o Antonínu Dvořákovi [A life full of music: stories about Antonín Dvořák] (Prague, 1986)

České pastorely [Czech pastorellas] (Prague, 1987)

Musicalia v pražském periodickém tisku 18. století [Musical subjects in Prague periodicals of the 18th century] (Prague, 1989)

Jakub Jan Ryba (Prague, 1995)

Tematický katalog skladeb Bedřicha Smetany [Thematic catalogue of the works of Bedřich Smetana] (forthcoming)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (H. Havlíková)

M. Báchorek: ‘Berkovcův Hostinec u kamenného stolu’, HRo, xxvi (1973), 486–7

J. Šeda: ‘70 let Jiřího Berkovec’ [Berkovec's 70 years], Zprávy společnosti Josefa Suka, vii (1993), 9–13

MOJMÍR SOBOTKA

Berkshire Festival.

See Tanglewood.

Berkshire Music Center.

See Tanglewood.

Berl, Christine

(b New York, 22 July 1943). American composer of dual US and Italian citizenship. Her first music teacher was her father, Paul Berl, an accompanist for Victoria de Los Angeles and a founding member of the Mannes College of Music. Ernst Oster was also a primary influence. She studied at Mannes (1961–4) with Nadia Reisenberg (piano) and Carl Schachter (theory) among others, and at Queens College, CUNY (MA 1970), where her teachers included Weisgall and Perle; she later studied privately with Henry Weinberg and Yehudi Wyner. She has received commissions from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (1989), Peter Serkin (1990) and Pierre Amoyal (1991). From 1980 to 1997 she taught composition at Mannes.

Berl's style has been described as free of both modernist abstraction and neo-romantic nostalgia. Sonata quasi una fantasia (1988) is in a one-movement cyclical sonata form that evokes Ives’s Concord Sonata. The Violent Bear it Away (1989) bases its phrase structure on the Southern Baptist hymn I’m Going Thro’, Jesus. Dark Summer (1989), written for Frederica von Stade, treats the voice operatically. Indian metric and modal structures feature prominently in Lord of the Dance (1989).

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Ab la dolchor (cant. H. Weinfield), S, chorus, orch, 1979, arr. Mez, cl, vn, pf, 1990; And How that a Life was but a Flower (Weinfield: The Book of Sir Tristram), unacc. chorus, 1979; Dark Summer (L. Bogan), Mez, str trio, pf, 1989

Inst: Elegy, pf, 1974; 3 Pieces, chbr ens, 1975; Sonata quasi una fantasia, pf, 1988; Lord of the Dance, pf, 1989; The Violent Bear it Away (after F. O’Connor), opt. chorus, orch, 1989, arr. opt. chorus, 2 pf, orch, 1990; Ballade, vc, pf, 1990; Masmoudi, vn, pf, 1991

JANELLE GELFAND

Berlatus [?Berlantus]

(fl 14th century). ?French composer. Only the top voice of a Credo by him survives, in the fragment GB-Ob Can.pat.lat.229 (no.5) from Padua. The beginning of its melody is similar to that of a Credo in I-IV 115, whose tenor bears the designation ‘Tenor Guayrinet’ (see Garinus).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.J. Layton: Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass 1300–1450 (diss., Harvard U., 1960), 117

F. Facchin: ‘Una nuova fonte trecentesca nell'Archivio di Stato di Padova’, Contributi per la storia della musica sacra a Padova, ed. G. Cattin and A. Lovato (Padua, 1993), 115–39

KURT VON FISCHER/R

Berlengerius de Oreim.

See Bernger von horheim.

Berlijn, Anton [Aron Wolf]

(b Amsterdam, 3 May 1817; d Amsterdam, 18 Jan 1870). Dutch conductor and composer. He studied the piano and violin with B. Koch and theory with K.H.W.L. Erck in Amsterdam. In 1836 he continued his studies at Kassel with Spohr. In 1839 he went to Leipzig for counterpoint lessons with G.W. Finck. In 1840 he returned to the Netherlands and tried in vain to save Dutch opera with the composition of Die Bergknappen, performed in 1841 in Amsterdam in Dutch translation (as De Bergwerkers). After a visit to Fétis, Berlijn lived in Paris from 1845 to 1846, where he gave a concert with the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique and the choir of the Théâtre Royal Italien. When he returned to Amsterdam in 1846 he became conductor of the orchestra of the municipal theatre in Amsterdam, but he soon left that post, devoting himself to composition and to the direction of several singing societies, teaching in Hebrew schools, and directing the music in the synagogue, for which he made rhythmical settings of Hebrew verses in four parts. King Willem II made him a Knight of the Crown of Oak; he was also elected an honorary member of musical organizations in other countries, including the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome (1844), and was decorated by several foreign monarchs.

Stimulated by Erck and J.B. van Bree, Berlijn composed at least six operas, in opéra comique style, between 1835 and c1841, including Die Bergknappen (also known as Les mineurs or Runal), Lodoiska, Les méprises par ressemblance, Bianca Capello, Proserpina and Le lutin de Culloden (performed in Amsterdam in 1842 and Paris in 1846). In the same period several of his ballets were performed. A Grande ouverture triomphale op.66, dedicated to Mendelssohn, was printed in Amsterdam in 1842; the oratorio Moses auf Nebo was performed there in 1843 and praised by Berlioz in 1846. His Symphony no.2 in D op.104 was given at Kassel in 1857 by Spohr (who had heard it earlier in Amsterdam), and published in Leipzig in 1858. Berlijn’s other works include a symphonic cantata, a mass, orchestral fantasies and virtuoso concertos with dedications to Gade and Liszt, two string quartets, a nonet for wind instruments and double bass, many partsongs for male or children’s voices, solo songs and salon music. Most of his more than 500 compositions remain in manuscript (in NL-At).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Mendel and A. Reissmann, ed.:: Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1870–80, 3/1890–91/R)

Philharmonicus: Nachruf an den verstorbenden Komponisten A.W. Berlijn, ed. P.C. Böhm (Amsterdam, 1875)

HERBERT ANTCLIFFE/JOHN LADE/JAN TEN BOKUM

Berlin.

Capital city of Germany. It was capital of the German empire from 1871 to 1945 and afterwards politically divided until 1990; it was designated capital of a reunited Germany in 1991. The first record of the city was in 1237, and during the 13th century it grew rapidly from a fishing village to a leading economic centre of the Hanseatic League. The city became the residence of the electors of Brandenburg in 1448 but initially had only occasional periods of musical prosperity. After 1701, when Elector Friedrich III became king of Prussia, Berlin’s cultural life assumed greater importance, though at first it was superficial and dependent on foreign talent. In the 19th century musical life grew increasingly independent of the local court and churches, being supported more by private initiative; as the capital of the German empire, Berlin was one of the major cultural centres of Europe, a position which has been maintained despite political division. In 1945 the city was divided into four sectors, each controlled by one of the victorious powers. After an unsuccessful blockade of the western sectors by the Soviets in 1948–9, the city was granted special status and associated with the newly established Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). The Soviet sector became the capital of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), created in 1949. Until 1961, when the Wall was erected, Berliners were free to move within the city, though subject to control by DDR officials. After this the city was absolutely divided until the Wall came down on 9 November 1989.

1. Sacred music.

2. Secular music.

3. Opera.

5. Music education.

6. Musicology.

7. Libraries.

HEINZ BECKER, RICHARD D. GREEN (with HUGH CANNING, IMRE FÁBIÁN (3))/CURT A. ROESLER

1. Sacred music.

The earliest evidence of the practice of sacred music in Berlin dates from 1465, when five choristers were registered in the cathedral seminary. Greater activity resulted from the introduction of Lutheran Protestantism in 1539. The Brandenburg liturgies of 1540 and 1572 provide the first information about the cultivation of sacred choral music; at the three principal churches, the Nikolaikirche, Marienkirche and Petrikirche, music was provided by the choirs of the city’s two largest schools. In 1579 the first itinerant boys’ choir was organized. The inadequate income from the church choirs often obliged impecunious choir directors to teach other subjects in grammar schools, in addition to composing music for both schools and churches: an example of this music is Johannes Crüger’s Hymni selecti (1680).

During the 17th century sacred music reached its first zenith with the employment of Crüger (1622–62) and J.G. Ebeling (1662–8) as Kantors at the Nikolaikirche. Crüger’s close associates included the composer Jacob Hintze and Paul Gerhardt, minister of the Nikolaikirche from 1657, who wrote many of the texts for Crüger’s settings. Berlin’s first collection of Protestant hymns, Crüger’s Newes vollkömliches Gesangbuch, Augspurgischer Confession (1640), became one of the most popular hymnbooks of the time when it was published as Praxis pietatis melica (1647). After the conversion of the court to Calvinist Protestantism until the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), music in the cathedral declined; but in 1652 the elector charged Christoph Hasselberg with reviving the music of its services. Crüger’s Psalmodia sacra, Berlin’s first Protestant four-part hymn collection, was published in 1658 for use in the cathedral services. During the 18th century sacred music declined as musicians were increasingly attracted to secular organizations, and choristers joined the opera. R.D. Buchholz organized the first regular performances of sacred music at the Petrikirche, where he was musical director (1755–88); and J.G.G. Lehmann arranged church concerts by the combined choirs of the Nikolaikirche and Marienkirche (1778–1816). The repertory of the three major churches during the later 18th century consisted mainly of north German works.

The first concerts of sacred music presented outside the court and churches included those of an amateur chorus organized by the cathedral organist Gottlieb Hayne in the early 1720s. J.P. Sack (1722–63) continued this tradition and founded the Musikübende Gesellschaft (1749–63, about 20 members), which gave informal concerts in his house. In 1755 it gave the first performance of Carl Heinrich Graun’s oratorio Der Tod Jesu, which was performed regularly on Good Friday in Berlin for the following century. After 1770 Handel’s oratorios were included in both public and domestic concerts; J.F. Reichardt arranged the first Berlin performance of Messiah in May 1786.

The Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, established on 24 May 1791 as a weekly Singe Übung with amateurs and professionals by C.F.C. Fasch, is important in the city’s history of choral music. It gave the first performance (Marienkirche, 1791) of sacred music in a Berlin church by a mixed choir; in 1793 it moved into the Akademie der Künste and assumed the name Sing-Akademie. Throughout its history it has been responsible for introducing significant works to the Berlin public. In the 19th century it presented mostly German and Austrian compositions, giving the first Berlin performances of Mozart’s Requiem (1800) and Mendelssohn’s St Paul (1838), but in the 20th century it included 18th- and 19th-century French and Italian sacred music in its programmes. In 1829 it moved into a new building next to the university which it occupied until after World War II (fig.1). Under its first directors, Fasch (1791–1800), C.F. Zelter (1800–32), C.F. Rungenhagen (1833–51) and Eduard Grell (1853–76), the Sing-Akademie became one of the best vocal groups in Europe, a tradition that has been maintained. It was particularly important in the Bach revival, giving the first performances after his death of the St Matthew Passion (1829, conducted by Mendelssohn), the St John Passion (1833), the Mass in B minor (1834) and the Christmas Oratorio (1857). Georg Schumann, the chorus's director from 1900 to 1950, introduced Romantic repertory (including Verdi's Requiem in 1903) while maintaining the group's dedication to Bach and contemporary works. Under Schumann's direction the chorus began to tour, and by skilful negotiation he managed to keep it out of reach of the Ministry of Propaganda during the Third Reich and to prevent its dissolution after the war. He was succeeded by Mathieu Lange, who had a special interest in the Baroque repertory. Hans Hilsdorf (1930–99) was director from 1973 until his death, reviving the chorus's interest in the a cappella literature, with an emphasis on seldom performed sacred and secular works. The Sing-Akademie supported the Berlin PO from the orchestra's founding in 1882 by guaranteeing a series of annual concerts, a relationship which continued until 1990. After the destruction of its building in 1943 (later rebuilt by the Soviets as the Maxim-Gorki-Theater), the chorus had no permanent home until the new Philharmonie was built in 1963. The long-lost archive of the Sing-Akademie was rediscovered in 1999 in Kiev. A Berliner Sing-Akademie was founded in East Berlin in 1963; it was led by the distinguished choral conductor Helmut Koch, who was succeeded in 1989 by Achim Zimmermann.

The conservatism of the Sing-Akademie was balanced in the second half of the 19th century by the activities of the Sternscher Gesangverein (1847–1911), established by Julius Stern. His successors, who included Julius Stockhausen and Max Bruch, promoted the music of such contemporaries as Mendelssohn and Wilhelm Taubert as well as early music, and were encouraged by Joachim and Bülow. The Sternscher Gesangverein gave the first Berlin performances of many of Beethoven’s sacred works, including the Missa solemnis (1856).

Despite the number of choirs active in Berlin in the 19th century, sacred music was performed only occasionally outside the church. However, it assumed a more important role in the city’s concert life when the Lutheran Cathedral choir was reorganized by A.H. Neithardt (1843) and directed by Mendelssohn (1843–4) and Otto Nicolai (1847–9). By 1878 this choir numbered 50 boys and 15 men and consistently cultivated the tradition of male-voice settings. Under the direction of Hugo Rüdel (1903–33), who had become choral director at Bayreuth in 1906, the choir began to tour more frequently. After the fall of the monarchy, when court services at the cathedral (built 1894–1905) were discontinued, Rüdel prevented the choir's dissolution by persuading the city administration to take it over as the Staats- und Domchor, affiliated with the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (today the Hochschule der Künste). After the destruction of the cathedral in World War II, the mixed boys' choir sang in services in the cathedral crypt or in the Marienkirche until 1961. When the erection of the Wall forced the choir to suspend its activities (the churches were in the East, the Hochschule in the West), it moved to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche. With the rebuilt cathedral's re-dedication on 6 June 1993, the Staats- und Domchor (from 1973 under the direction of Christian Grube) returned to its former home.

The Catholic Hedwigskirche, consecrated in 1773, has had a choir since shortly after 1800. This has functioned as a cathedral choir since 1930, when the bishopric of Berlin was created and the church elevated to cathedral status. St Hedwig's was also destroyed in the war and seperated from its choir by the Wall. Karl Forster (1934–63) transformed the lay choir into an ensemble of international renown. His work was continued by Anton Lippe (1964–74) and Roland Bader (1974–91). Under Alois Koch (1992–8) the choir returned to its former home and merged with the cathedral choir founded in East Berlin in 1975. Since most of the singers did not accept the new Domkapellmeister Michael Witt, they founded in 1998 the Karl-Forster-Chor, led by Barbara Rucha.

The most important of the many choral societies founded in the 19th century include the Jähnsscher Gesangverein, established in 1845 by F.W. Jähns, who directed it until 1870; the Berliner Bachverein, a mixed choir founded in 1862 by Wilhelm Rust to promote early choral music and conducted by him until 1875; and the Cäcilienverein, which gave performances of exceptional quality from 1870 to 1902 under its director Alexis Holländer, concentrating on works by more contemporary composers, such as Brahms and Liszt (in 1872 it gave the first Berlin performances of Brahms’s German Requiem, and in 1882 it performed Liszt’s Christus).

2. Secular music.

The first court ensemble was established early in the reign of Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg (1535–71) and had three organists in the 1540s. A wind ensemble, organized in 1542 with 12 trumpeters, one cornett player and one drummer, performed with the court band, chorus and organist both at the court and in the city churches. The first known court Kapellmeister, Johannes Wesalius, was appointed in 1572 by the Elector Johann Georg (1571–98); he was responsible for the introduction of the first string players into the court Kapelle (1582). During this time Hans Schreiber, the inventor of the contrabassoon (c1620), was engaged as instrument maker. A royal decree of 1580 acknowledged for the first time in Berlin the difference between sacred and secular music and announced that the elector expected a completely independent style at court. A library inventory of 1582 shows that, although German and French music was performed, the court repertory was dominated by the more popular Dutch composers. Although under Elector Joachim Friedrich (1598–1608) the court choir diminished to only three singers, the orchestra continued to expand, so that under Johann Sigismund (1608–19) it consisted of 37 musicians and was one of the largest orchestras of its time. From 1608 to 1611 the court employed the Protestant composer Johannes Eccard, a pupil of Lassus, and his successor Nikolaus Zangius (1612–18), introduced many English and Czech musicians. In 1619, when the famous English violinist and suite composer William Brade was there briefly, a violinist became Hofkapellmeister for the first time. Bartholomaeus Praetorius, whose collection Newe liebliche Paduanen und Galliarden was published in Berlin by Runge (1616), served as court musician and trumpeter (1613–20).

During the Thirty Years War the Kapelle deteriorated; by 1640 only seven musicians remained. However, by 1683 it had increased to 13, dominated for the first time by the strings. When Friedrich III (1688–1713) declared himself King Friedrich I in 1701, Berlin changed from an electorate to a royal residence and assumed correspondingly greater musical significance. The king enlarged the court orchestra, which by 1712 included 18 strings, eight wind and one harpsichord, occasionally augmented by the six brass of the hunting-band. The king’s most lasting contribution to Berlin’s cultural history was the establishment of the Akademie der Künste in 1696 for the promotion of Prussian arts, in which music was not included until the early 19th century. After the death (1705) of Queen Sophie Charlotte, who had enthusiastically supported Italian music and had herself frequently performed in numerous chamber concerts, French composers became more popular than Italian. During the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–40), when Prussia was established through military strength and music at court became relatively unimportant, the orchestra was dispersed except for a few brass used for hunting and by the military; it was reassembled only on the accession of Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) in 1740.

At the court of Frederick the Great, music was integrated into court life to a greater extent than it had been before or was to be in the future. After his visit to Dresden in 1728 Frederick had had occasional flute lessons from Quantz, and after 1738 he also informally employed C.P.E. Bach, whom he engaged as principal harpsichordist when he became king. Bach remained until 1767, composing numerous works for the court, including the six ‘Prussian’ sonatas op.1 (1740–42), dedicated to the king. Christoph Nichelmann, a distinguished pupil of J.S. and W.F. Bach, served as assistant harpsichordist (1744–56) and was succeeded by C.F.C. Fasch. In 1741 Quantz became the king’s flute teacher and organized regular evening house concerts, for which he composed almost 300 concertos and over 200 other works for flute. Frederick the Great also often performed in the concerts at Sanssouci, his castle in Potsdam (fig.2), and himself wrote over 120 flute sonatas for them. J.S. Bach wrote his Musikalisches Opfer as a result of his visit to the court in May 1747. Before 1750 the court orchestra was conducted by the violinists Franz and Johann Georg Benda, who with C.H. Graun also participated in the Potsdam chamber concerts.

The first initiative for public concerts in Berlin came from civic groups. As early as the 1720s the cathedral organist Gottlieb Hayne introduced public singing lessons. The court musician J.G. Janitsch organized private gatherings called ‘Akademien’, followed by C.F. Schale’s Musikalische Assemblee; both gave small ad hoc performances of current instrumental music. Towards the end of Frederick the Great’s reign, Berlin concert life began to be controlled by professional rather than amateur musicians as the demands and difficulties of the music increased. J.F. Agricola, C.L. Bachmann and the violinist J.F.E. Benda organized the Liebhaberkonzerte (1770), which continued for over 20 years, longer than any other contemporary musical organization. J.F. Reichardt established a series of concerts spirituels in 1783 on the Parisian model. J.C.F. Rellstab organized the Konzerte für Kenner und Liebhaber (1787), which presented sacred and secular, choral and instrumental works of popular mid-18th-century composers every fortnight in the homes of the group’s members.

Berlin became the centre for a unique style of German lieder in the second half of the 18th century, practised by a group of composers which later became known as the Berlin Lieder School. The lieder were usually odes and strophic songs with simple piano accompaniment, some of which were collected by K.W. Ramler and C.G. Krause in Oden mit Melodien (1753–5) and by Marpurg in Berlinische Oden und Lieder (1756–63). A slightly more elaborate style was developed by the second generation – Reichardt, J.A.P. Schulz (Lieder im Volkston, 1782), F.L.A. Kunzler and Zelter (Lieder, Balladen, und Romanzen, 1810) – many of whose songs became popular throughout Germany. Zelter also established a Liedertafel (a group of 25 men who composed and performed works for each other) in 1809 which became a model for similar groups throughout Germany. In reaction to the exclusiveness of this organization, members of the third generation of the Berlin Lieder School, Ludwig Berger and Bernhard Klein, formed a Jüngere Liedertafel (1819) which included such members as E.T.A. Hoffmann and achieved a notable standard.

In 1882 Siegfried Ochs founded a small choir to sing lesser-known choral works of Schubert, Brahms and Schumann; it expanded after six years and became the Philharmonischer Chor, and as the Hochschul-Chor (from 1920) it developed a reputation for precision (Klemperer was its director from 1928 to 1933). After the war it reassumed the name of Philharmonischer Chor and under Hans Chemin-Petit (appointed 1944) performed the standard repertory in West Berlin. Chemin-Petit was succeeded by Uwe Gronostay in 1981. The Bruno-Kittelscher Chor (1902–48), organized by Bruno Kittel and known after 1942 as the Deutsche Philharmonischer Chor, was also active in the performance of sacred music.

Of the numerous men's choruses founded in the 19th century, the Berliner Liedertafel and the Berliner Lehrergesangverein are both still active. The Liedertafel was formed in 1884 from a number of smaller groups. The Lehrergesangverein grew out of the singing section of the Berlin Teachers' Association and gave its first concert in 1887. From 1918 to 1934 it was directed by Hugo Rüdel. From 1962 it included women and in the 1990s under Erwin Gabrysch, it was a mixed chorus with the name Berliner Lehrerchor.

Among the many choruses formed since World War II, two deserve special mention. The Berliner Konzert-Chor (founded in West Berlin in 1954), especially during the long tenure of its director Fritz Weisse (1961–94), gave concert performances of seldom-performed operas, many of them broadcast on radio. A new chamber choir came into being in the early 1960s when Ernst Senff, choral director of the Städtische Oper, brought together a group of young singers from the Hochschule für Musik to explore the a cappella literature. In order to avoid confusion with the Hochschule's own choir, he called his group the Kammerchor Ernst Senff. It now includes professional and semi-professional singers and, though it gives no concerts of its own, is financed through performances with the large Berlin orchestras, in radio broadcasts and in recordings. Sigurd Brauns was appointed director of the Ernst Senff Choir in 1991.

Instrumental music was less keenly cultivated than vocal music during the early 19th century in Berlin. Karl Möser’s soirées, in which members of the court orchestra played after 1816, introduced Beethoven’s symphonies (the Berlin première of the Ninth Symphony was in November 1826). From 1801 the court orchestra gave two or three annual public concerts (Mendelssohn was its director in 1843–4). The court musicians Bohrer and Schick organized numerous private subscription concerts, as did the Blissener brothers early in the century; G.A. Schneider presented popular Musikalische Divertissements (1808–11) and Eduard Rietz founded a Philharmonische Gesellschaft (1826), an amateur orchestra which participated in the Sing-Akademie concerts. Despite the efforts of Wilhelm Taubert, who succeeded C.W. Henning (1840–48) as Kapellmeister and directed until 1883, and of his successors Ludwig Deppe (1870–88) and Joseph Sucher (1888–90), the court orchestra’s repertory remained conservative throughout the 19th century. It became a fundamental part of the city’s concert life under Felix von Weingartner (1892–1907), who added contemporary works to the programmes and raised the standard of performances. Between 1908 and 1920 the orchestra, called the Staatskapelle and remaining the orchestra of the Staatsoper after World War I, was directed by Richard Strauss. His successors, including Furtwängler (1920–22), Erich Kleiber (1923–34), Karajan (1940–44) and Barenboim (1992–), developed it into one of the major Berlin orchestras.

Although economic recessions of the early 19th century severely limited public musical performances, informal house concerts continued to flourish. In the first half of the century families such as the Mendelssohns and Nicolais arranged private performances; later Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann organized private chamber concerts, and after 1869 Joachim gave public string quartet concerts. House concerts, which included a variety of solo works, chamber music and occasionally operas, became somewhat more formal in the early 20th century, with printed programmes available and audiences of up to 100. From 1914 to 1941 Marie von Bülow organized soirées at which most prominent musicians of the time appeared. From the early 19th century Berlin has been visited by almost every notable virtuoso and important soloist; for example, Paganini was enthusiastically received in 1829, Clara Wieck in 1835 and Joachim in 1853. In 1841 alone Liszt gave over 20 concerts there.

During the early 19th century the court’s role as the main stimulus of Berlin’s musical life was increasingly taken over by churches, schools and dilettante families. Foreign composers consequently became less popular and German music was more keenly promoted, though the city always remained cosmopolitan and musically eclectic. Some of the many private orchestras established during the 19th century achieved international recognition, particularly those of Josef Gung'l (1843–8), Karl Liebig (1843) – which from 1850 also accompanied the Sing-Akademie performances – and Wilhelm Wieprecht, who successfully led the Orchesterverein Euterpe. Benjamin Bilse formed the Bilsesche Kapelle (1867), which by 1882 numbered 70 professional musicians, of whom 54 then left to organize the Philharmonische Orchester, promoted by the impresario Hermann Wolf and directed by Franz Wüllner. This later became the Berlin PO. Joachim was appointed conductor (1884) and was succeeded by Bülow (1887); early guest conductors included Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Brahms.

The orchestra became the finest in Berlin with a large and varied repertory; under Arthur Nikisch (1895–1922; fig.3) it made several international tours and gained a reputation which was solidified by his successor, Wilhelm Furtwängler (1922–45). Furtwängler acquired a municipal subsidy, for which the orchestra had to give 20 popular annual concerts. After the destruction (1944) of its concert hall, the Philharmonie (fig.4), the orchestra played in the cathedral, the Beethovenhalle, the Admiralspalast (now the Metropol-Theater) and the Titania-Palast (a converted cinema). The last concert before the fall of the city was on 15 April 1945 but concerts began again as early as 26 May 1945 at the Titania-Palast, conducted by Leo Borchard. After Borchard’s death (1945) the young Romanian Sergiu Celibidache came from the Hochschule für Musik to direct the orchestra. In 1947 Furtwängler returned to the orchestra and was appointed chief conductor for life in 1952. He was succeeded on his death (1954) by Herbert von Karajan, who until shortly before his death in 1989 maintained the ensemble as one of the major international orchestras, with a repertory primarily from the late 18th century to the early 20th. He conducted in the new concert hall of the Hochschule für Musik until 15 October 1963, when the orchestra moved into the new Philharmonie by the Tiergarten in the Kemperplatz: it was designed by Hans Scharoun, and is Berlin’s largest concert hall (capacity 2440; fig.5). Claudio Abbado was appointed chief conductor in 1990. He was succeeded by Simon Rattle, as chief conductor and artistic director (effective from 2002).

By World War I Berlin was one of the major musical centres of the world, attracting leading soloists and orchestras and maintaining an unusually active concert life. In 1939 the city’s 81 orchestras, 200 chamber groups and over 600 choruses performed in over 20 concert halls, numerous churches and homes. Since the 19th century the city has been the home of many smaller ensembles including the Blüthner-Orchester (founded 1907) and the Berlin Tonkünstlerorchester; some of these ensembles, such as the Barock Orchester, the Haydn-Kammerorchester and the Mozart Orchestra, continue to be active.

The most important ensembles established in divided Berlin were the Berlin Sinfonie-Orchester (Berlin SO) and the Symphonisches Orchester Berlin (SO Berlin, today the Berliner Symphoniker). The Berlin SO, founded in 1952 in East Berlin, is the resident orchestra of the rebuilt Schauspielhaus (known since 1984 as the Konzerthaus) on the Gendarmenmarkt. Under the direction of Kurt Sanderling (1960–77), the orchestra's repertory ranged from the Baroque to contemporary East German compositions. Michael Schönwandt was chief conductor from 1992 until 1998. He will be succeeded in 2001 by Eliahu Inbal. The SO Berlin was established in the West in 1967 under the artistic direction of C.A. Bünte. In addition to subscription concerts in the Philharmonie and Konzerthaus, offering a broad programme at affordable prices, the orchestra presents family concerts, school workshops and performing opportunities for promising young talent; it also accompanies amateur choirs. Subsequent chief conductors have been Theodore Bloomfield, Daniel Nazareth, Alun Francis and, from 1997, Lior Shambadal.

The Berliner Funk-Orchester (Berlin RO) was the first German orchestra organized exclusively for radio and played in the first German broadcast on 29 October 1923. The current Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (Berlin RSO) considers itself the successor of this orchestra, whose chief conductors included Bruno Seidler-Winkler, Eugen Jochum, Sergiu Celibidache and Hermann Abendroth. It moved to the East German broadcasting house in 1952 and only in 1995 returned to its original home in Masurenallee. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos was chief conductor from 1994 to 2000. The Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (chief conductor, Kent Nagano) is the successor to the RIAS-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, which was founded in 1946 by Walter Sieber. Among its principal conductors were Ferenc Fricsay (1948–54 and 1960–63), Lorin Maazel (1964–75) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (1995–9). Both this orchestra and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin have also made many important commercial recordings.

The history of the radio choruses also dates from the beginning of broadcasting. After the Rundfunkchor Berlin was dispersed during the last year of the war, Helmut Koch re-established a group of solo singers in 1945 and then a large radio chorus in 1948; in 1974 the two ensembles, which served the East German Radio, were consolidated. The Rundfunkchor Berlin is directed by Robin Gritton. In 1946 Karl Ristenpart founded a radio chorus to serve RIAS Kammerchor, the forerunner of the RIAS, which has been a permanent ensemble since 1948. Under the direction of Günther Arndt (1954–72) it acquired international recognition, particularly for the performance of contemporary music. Marcus Creed was appointed director in 1986 and has emphasized authentic performances of Baroque music.

Through the presence of such composers as Schreker, Krenek, Schoenberg and Busoni, Berlin became an important centre for modern music in the years after World War I. Between 1933 and 1945 activities of progressive composers suffered from political suppression, but revived quickly after the war and the return to the city of Boris Blacher (1948) and Werner Egk (1950). After the war a new generation of composers was trained in both halves of the city, in the East principally by Rudolf Wagner-Régeny (whose most prominent pupil among today's Berlin composers is Siegfried Matthus), and in the West by Boris Blacher, whose most eminent Berlin pupil is Aribert Reimann. Through the efforts of the Akademie der Künste and the Gruppe Neue Musik Berlin has become more influential in the promotion of modern music; numerous studio concerts attract many composers to the city. In addition to the series of contemporary music concerts (‘Musik der Gegenwart’) at the Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), there are two important festivals of contemporary music: ‘Insel-Musik’ (its name inspired by the ‘islands’ from which the composers featured in the first festival came: Japan, Java and Berlin), which was founded in the early 1970s by the Berlin composer Erhard Grosskopf; and the Musik-Biennale, which has taken place since the 1960s in East Berlin and is now part of the Berliner Festspiele (Berlin Festival).

3. Opera.

Dramatic presentations involving singers and instrumentalists are recorded in Berlin from the 16th century, when performances were given at the royal residence. In the early 17th century these events probably included Italian comic plays with music, for which the first Italian singers were brought to Berlin as early as 1616. However, appreciation of opera developed relatively late in the city, as it depended for its support on a monarchy that had little interest in the genre. After the Thirty Years War rapid population growth and the increased political power of the city led to further wealth among the nobility, creating a demand for music that local talent could not satisfy. At the court of Elector Friedrich III (from 1701 King Friedrich I of Prussia) Italian and French ensembles frequently appeared, and interest in the French ballet spectacles was great.

More significant developments were initiated by Friedrich’s second wife, Sophie Charlotte, who was particularly fond of musical comedies; she introduced elaborate productions known as ‘Wirtschaften’, for which dancing-masters and stage and costume designers were employed. All performances took place on a temporary stage in the main palace until the queen had a small theatre built in the new Lietzenburg Palace (now the Charlottenburg Palace), completed in 1699. On 6 June 1700 the first Berlin production of an Italian opera, Atys, o L'Inganno vinto dalla Costanza by Ariosti, was staged there. Usually only selected members of the court (including the queen’s tutor Leibniz) were allowed to participate; the queen herself frequently accompanied at the harpsichord, while other guests joined in the dancing and singing. These events also stimulated interest in circles outside the court; private performances for paying guests were occasionally arranged, for example at the home of the city treasurer Hessing (1702–7).

The death of Sophie Charlotte in 1705 ended the first period of musical prosperity, as her consort Friedrich I had less enthusiasm for music. Singspiel performances, including Ariosti’s Mars und Irene (1703) and A.R. Stricker’s Der Sieg der Schönheit (1706), continued in rooms of the residence. Under Friedrich’s successor, Friedrich Wilhelm I, operatic life declined sharply as the king was interested mostly in hunting and military affairs and eventually forbade all performances by foreign ensembles. The theatre in Lietzenburg was initially used by performing acrobats and jugglers, but the king had it entirely dismantled in 1723.

As crown prince, Friedrich (later Friedrich II, known as Frederick the Great) had been impressed by a performance of J.A. Hasse’s Cleofide in Dresden and resolved that his Berlin court would equal the brilliance of that city. Shortly after his accession (1740) he commissioned the architect Knobelsdorff to construct a new opera house. As early as July 1740 the newly appointed Kapellmeister C.H. Graun was sent to Italy to recruit singers, among them Giuseppe Santarelli, while dancers were sought in France. The king also ordered his architect to erect a stage in the royal palace, where on 13 December 1741 Graun’s Rodelinda was presented. The new opera house opened on 7 December 1742 with Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare. In the following years the opera season lasted from November to March, with performances twice a week and on special occasions; the operas were seldom repeated more than four times and two new works, usually by Graun, were introduced each season; he also conducted the orchestra (about 35 players) from the harpsichord. The audience was generally restricted to members of the court and their guests, but at Frederick’s command all army officers attended, and properly dressed citizens were admitted. As Frederick retained his enthusiasm for Hasse’s Italian operas, Graun modelled much of his music for the Berlin opera on them. Within 15 years 29 of Graun’s works were staged, and many by Hasse. The king himself scrutinized all musical productions at court, selecting librettos, supervising the design of costumes and scenery and even writing arias for some productions, for example Graun’s Coriolan (1749); he also wrote the libretto to Graun’s Montezuma (1755) in French prose and had it translated into Italian verse by the court poet. The Berlin opera was recognized as one of the finest in Germany and enjoyed a period of grandeur that was not surpassed until the late 19th century. The company included such outstanding singers as Molteni, the castrato Salimbeni and the ballerina La Barbarina. Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena was set designer from 1751 until his death in 1756.

This period ended after Graun’s last opera Merope (1756), when political events interrupted the city’s cultural development. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) the opera house was closed and the ensemble dispersed. Graun died in 1759 and J.F. Agricola, a pupil of J.S. Bach, was appointed Kapellmeister after the war (1765). The opera house was reopened on 20 December 1764 with a revival of Merope, but from this point onwards interest in Italian opera declined. The appearance of the first German prima donna Gertrude Elisabeth Mara (née Schmehling) in 1771 and the appointment of J.F. Reichardt in 1775 did much to restore the distinction of the opera house.

Comic opera had a small but significant place in Berlin during Frederick’s reign, though his partiality for opera seria prevented it from achieving the popularity it had enjoyed under Sophie Charlotte. In 1745 the king had a small theatre built in the Potsdam palace by Knobelsdorff, where comic opera was performed by travelling companies for royalty and nobility. In 1747 an Italian troupe was summoned and performed opere buffe (e.g. Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, 1748); the success of these productions prepared for the introduction of Singspiel and hence the end of Italian operatic domination in Berlin. One of the first definite impulses to the new German opera came from England; in 1743 the ballad opera The Devil to Pay was presented in Berlin in German translation as Der Teufel ist los.

As German theatre became more popular in Berlin, Singspiel also gradually became established. Between 1771 and 1775 H.G. Koch produced 36 German and foreign plays with incidental music at a theatre in the Behrenstrasse, near the present site of the Komische Oper; on Koch's death in 1775 C.T. Döbbelin acquired both the theatre and privilege from Koch's widow. He established the first permanent Singspiel theatre in Berlin and produced such demanding works as Anton Schweitzer’s Alceste, and Belmont und Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail, written by the Kapellmeister Johann André for the theatre in 1781. By 1785 Frederick the Great was no longer attending the royal opera, and Berlin’s nobility lost interest in Italian opera, preferring Singspiel; as a result the number and quality of performances by Döbbelin’s ensemble rose in the next few years, eventually exceeding those of the Italian house. Frederick the Great had considered Gluck’s operas worthless, but Döbbelin added them to the repertory in 1783. On his accession in 1786 Friedrich Wilhelm II allocated the disused French Theatre to Döbbelin and gave his troupe financial support. Named the Nationaltheater, it opened on 5 December 1786. Unlike the royal opera (which was closed for repairs from 1786 to 1788) this house did not specialize in Italian opera seria, and became the site of important developments in the city’s opera history. Standards began to slip and Döbbelin was soon replaced by J.J. Engel, who worked vigorously to improve the musical and dramatic level of the Nationaltheater. Dittersdorf’s Doktor und Apotheker was enthusiastically received there in 1787 and helped to make him the most popular composer in the city during his visit in 1789. The first Berlin performance of a Mozart opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, was mounted at the Nationaltheater in 1788 but was not well received. Mozart himself was only politely welcomed when he visited Berlin in the same year as Dittersdorf (1789), though the king offered him a position as Kapellmeister. In 1790 Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni had successful performances at the Nationaltheater.

In the 20 years between the death of Frederick the Great and the French occupation of the city in 1806, German opera established itself firmly in this theatre, superseding opera seria at the royal opera house. This was largely due to B.A. Weber, Kapellmeister of the Nationaltheater from 1792 until his death in 1821, who keenly promoted operas by Mozart and Gluck; he himself composed numerous works. His productions of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1794; this has been the opera most frequently performed in Berlin) and of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1795) equalled the standard of the royal opera house and marked the end of Italian domination of Berlin opera.

The renovated Königliches Opernhaus (fig.6) reopened in 1788 with Reichardt’s Andromeda. The composer had been retained by Friedrich Wilhelm II, who commissioned him to write several operas for the court. A performance of Dittersdorf’s oratorio Hiob (1789) was the first occasion on which citizens were allowed to buy tickets for the court opera. Reichardt’s most famous opera, Brenno, had a successful première on the queen's birthday that year; a concert performance in 1798 was the first time a complete opera in German was sung at the royal opera house. Although Reichardt followed the models of Graun and Hasse, his operas were appreciably less italianate, approaching the style of German works performed at the Nationaltheater, for which he also composed. He initiated a form which he called the Liederspiel, usually a comedy with popular songs which was produced informally in homes as well as in theatres. During Reichardt’s absence in 1789 the Italian Felice Alessandri was appointed second Kapellmeister. Reichardt fell from grace in 1793; his opera L'olimpiade (1791) was his last work for the Berlin court opera. Alessandri was replaced by the more capable Vincenzo Righini (1793); however neither his Italian operas nor a notable production of Gluck’s Alceste (1796) could stimulate the declining interest in opera seria. After the king’s death in 1797 the opera house was again closed for two years. During the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm III, Reichardt returned to Berlin (1799) and Italian opera temporarily revived, but the lavish productions did not reach the standard achieved formerly.

The Königliches Opernhaus was closed during the two years of French occupation (1806–7), but the Nationaltheater, no longer dependent on royal subsidy, continued its productions in the Schauspielhaus, the new house built by Carl Langhans, which it occupied from 1802. In 1807 the royal opera and the Nationaltheater companies merged as the Königliche Schauspiele, but maintained the distinction between the two repertories. All performances were open to the general public. Under the direction of A.W. Iffland (1811–14) German opera was performed more frequently, though the royal opera house repertory was still entirely adapted to the king’s wishes. Iffland supervised productions of Spontini’s La vestale (1811) and Fernand Cortez (1814), Weber’s Silvana (1812) and Abu Hassan (1813), as well as works by Méhul and Boieldieu. His successor, Karl von Brühl, was given the task of making the royal theatre the finest in Germany and at first received enthusiastic support from Friedrich Wilhelm III. Scenery and costumes became more realistic and productions more dramatic. Brühl was responsible for the Berlin première of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1815), the world première of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Undine (1816, with sets by Schinkel), as well as revivals of works by Gluck. In the decade 1815–25 Rossini’s works became the most popular in Berlin. Against the wishes of Brühl, who hoped to secure Weber as Kapellmeister, the king engaged Spontini and created for him the title of general music director in 1820. Only five weeks after the first performance of Spontini’s Olympia, Brühl produced the successful world première of Weber’s Der Freischütz (18 June 1821) under the composer’s direction in the new Schauspielhaus designed by K.F. Schinkel (fig.7; Langhans’s theatre had burnt down in 1817). Whereas the audience of Spontini’s work mostly consisted of royalty and nobility, that of Weber’s was largely made up of wealthy citizens, including Heinrich Heine, Hoffmann and Mendelssohn; this was symptomatic of the rivalry between the two houses. Spontini’s Nurmahal was produced in 1822 and his Alcidor in 1825; although the works satisfied court demands, neither was well received by the public. As Spontini’s popularity decreased, Brühl had less trouble asserting his wishes at the Königliches Opernhaus. Four years before his retirement in 1829 he arranged performances of Spohr’s Jessonda and Weber’s Euryanthe.

Despite Spontini’s opposition, Wilhelm von Redern, Brühl’s innovatory successor, was able to expand the repertory in both sections of the Königliche Schauspiele and included more operas by German composers. He was responsible for the successful Berlin premières of Spohr’s Faust (1829) and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1832), as well as the world première of Marschner’s Hans Heiling (1833). Works by Albert Lortzing, however, were first heard in this theatre some time after their first performance, Zar und Zimmermann in 1849 and Hans Sachs in 1851. Nevertheless, during the 1830s German works performed at the royal opera house remained in the minority, while those by the French (Auber and Méhul) and the Italians (Bellini, Donizetti and especially Rossini) took precedence.

On the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840, Spontini lost his support at court and was dismissed in 1841. Lortzing, Marschner and Mendelssohn were considered for the position, but after an impressive production of Les Huguenots in 1842 Meyerbeer was named Spontini’s successor. Spontini had enlarged the opera orchestra from 78 to 94 members; Meyerbeer now secured greater financial benefits for the musicians. Also in 1842 Redern was appointed to the newly created position of general administrator of court music. The conservative K.T. von Küstner, who replaced him as director of the royal opera, was an administrator rather than a musician; he refused the world premières of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser and diminished the repertory during his nine years of service. However, this was partly because the audience now usually consisted less of royalty than of paying guests whom Küstner sought to please. On 18 August 1843 the Königliches Opernhaus burnt down, and performances were held in the Schauspielhaus during reconstruction. Lortzing’s Der Wildschütz had its Berlin première there (1843), as did Der fliegende Holländer (1844), conducted by the composer (the first Wagner opera produced in Berlin). The new opera house, reconstructed, modernized (with gas lighting) and enlarged by C.F. Langhans the younger, was opened on 7 December 1844 with Meyerbeer’s Ein Feldlager in Schlesien.

Two years later Rienzi was given its first Berlin performance; however, neither it nor Der fliegende Holländer was successful and both were removed from the repertory until the late 1860s. After an absence from the city of three years, during which Wilhelm Taubert had acted as general music director, Meyerbeer was finally dismissed from that post by the king on 26 November 1848. In the same year Otto Nicolai took up the appointment of Kapellmeister at the opera; Nicolai died on 11 May 1849, two months after the première of his Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, and was succeeded by Heinrich Dorn.

Under Botho von Hülsen, who replaced Küstner as director in 1851, the royal opera began to prosper even more. Meyerbeer’s grand operas and works by Italian and French composers dominated the repertory for the next three decades. Hülsen assembled outstanding singers (Lilli Lehman, Albert Niemann, Theodor Wachtel, Désirée Artôt and Adelina Patti), but performances suffered because of an inadequate orchestra until Carl Eckert replaced Dorn as Kapellmeister in 1869. As operatic tastes of both court and public became more conservative, Hülsen grew more cautious, retaining only well-established works in the repertory.

The production of Tannhäuser (1856) was the first successful performance of a Wagner opera in Berlin, and the production of Il trovatore at the royal opera (1857) marked the first performance of an opera by Verdi there. Although it was successful, later productions of Verdi’s operas (Rigoletto and La traviata, 1860) were coolly received. In 1876, six years after a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg had caused a scandal in the royal opera, Hülsen successfully staged the first Berlin performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. As comic opera became more popular, works by Offenbach came to be regarded as fit for the court opera, and his operas were added to those of Rossini in the repertory. During the 1870s Berlin’s population approached one million; the demand for opera increased and daily performances were instituted.

However, after Eckert’s death in 1879 there was a dearth of good conductors; neither Robert Radecke nor Heinrich Kahl adequately fulfilled the demands of the post, and Bülow referred to the royal operas as ‘von Hülsen’s circus’. When Botho von Hochberg became director in 1886, he concentrated on improving this situation, and by the early 1890s the court opera had three good conductors, Weingartner, Carl Muck and Josef Sucher. Under Hochberg, Wagner’s works became part of the standard repertory, partly as a result of the first performance in the royal opera of the Ring in 1888 (the Berlin première had been given at the Viktoria-Theater in 1881 by the Angelo Neumann touring company) and a spectacular production of ten Wagner operas from Rienzi to Götterdämmerung in chronological order in June 1889. Nevertheless, the staple of Berlin opera was still provided by Ponchielli, Verdi and Mascagni.

After Weingartner left the royal opera in 1898, Richard Strauss shared the position of First Prussian Kapellmeister with Carl Muck and added new works to the repertory. Hochberg and Emperor Wilhelm II had refused to mount the première of Strauss's Feuersnot in 1900, not realizing that Strauss was one of the most important composers of the day. Thereafter Strauss refused to allow a single first performance of his operas in Berlin. Feuersnot was presented in 1901, and Salome in 1906. That year Leo Blech joined Strauss and Muck as First Prussian Kapellmeister. In 1905 Strauss requested a reduction of duties to allow more time to compose and (following a year as Royal Prussian Generalmusikdirektor) in 1910 was released from his contract, although he continued to conduct (mostly his own operas) until 1920.

As at its beginning under Friedrich II, the last era of royal opera (1903–18) was characterized by the court’s active participation in operatic administration. Wilhelm II took an interest in selecting the repertory and in stage design, and though the artistic quality of the productions occasionally suffered, stagings were always lavish and pompous. A result of this interest in opera was the commission of Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, first performed in 1904. In the previous year the emperor had welcomed the resignation of Hochberg and replaced him by Hülsen’s son Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler, who remained until World War I disrupted operatic activity in the city. Under the new Intendant many older works were revived, while operas by Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Richard Strauss received their Berlin premières, including the successful production of Der Rosenkavalier in 1911.

During World War I performances continued at the Königliches Opernhaus (though somewhat less frequently than before) largely through the efforts of Strauss, who assisted the new director, Droescher, during the 1918–19 season, following Hülsen-Haeseler’s resignation. Court opera in Berlin came to an end at the same time as the Prussian monarchy; in November 1919 it was placed under the administration of the Ministry of Culture and renamed the Staatsoper.

The modern golden age of the Staatsoper in Unter den Linden was unquestionably the period between the end of World War I and the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s. Under the direction of the Generalintendant, Max von Schillings, the aristocratic house was successfully transformed into a company reflecting Germany’s new democratic ideals. Without neglecting the classical repertory, he emphasized works of contemporary composers such as Busoni, Pfitzner (Palestrina, 1919) and Schreker. Before the unification of Germany in 1871 the Berlin opera had been the finest in Prussia; afterwards it became the best in the country, and after World War I it was among the best in Europe. There were only three premières between 1850 and 1918, but 12 in the period 1919–32, including Schreker’s Der singende Teufel (1928), Milhaud’s Christophe Colomb (1930) and Pfitzner’s Das Herz (1931). The repertory grew to be one of the largest anywhere; in the 1926–7 season 66 different operas were performed. One month after Schillings’s resignation in November 1925, the Staatsoper gave the world première of Berg’s Wozzeck, which Erich Kleiber conducted after nearly 100 rehearsals. Despite the ensuing controversy, this work received 23 performances, proving Berlin’s open-minded attitudes to contemporary music. Both Leo Blech and Fritz Stiedry, who had conducted the opera from 1906 and 1916 respectively, left in 1923 and were replaced by Kleiber, Wohllebe, Szell, Ernst Praetorius and Selmar Meyrowitz. After a year of renovation and modernization, the Staatsoper reopened on 19 November 1927. Under its new Generalintendant Heinz Tietjen, who was to take a leading role in the operatic life of both Berlin and Bayreuth until the end of World War II, it performed mainly German works, especially those of Wagner, in some cases surpassing the precision of Bayreuth.

Whereas under the monarchy the opera had mostly reflected the wishes of the Prussian court, between 1933 and 1945 the Staatsoper, though intended to serve all Berlin’s citizens, was strictly controlled by the Prussian state ministry under Göring. The Nazis' suppression of political dissent and their systematic anti-Semitism drove many of Berlin's leading performers into exile or early retirement. Kleiber resigned in 1934. The works of Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky were added to the repertory, but operas by other composers, notably Berg, Hindemith, Krenek, Schreker and Stravinsky, were prohibited. Nevertheless, ten important world premières took place during these 12 years, including Egk’s Peer Gynt (1938) and Wagner-Régeny's Die Bürger von Calais (1939). Despite the depletion of the Staatsoper's ensemble, Tietjen maintained a large repertory and employed many outstanding singers and conductors; among the latter were Furtwängler (1933–4), Egk (1935–41) and Karajan (1939–45), while singers included Erna Berger, Maria Cebotari, Margarete Klose, Tiana Lemnitz, Viorica Ursuleac, Peter Anders, Rudolf Bockelmann, Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, Max Lorenz, Helge Roswaenge, Franz Völker and Marcel Wittrisch.

Following its destruction by bombs on 9 April 1941, the Staatsoper was reconstructed and reopened on 7 December 1942 with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under Furtwängler to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the company's forerunner; however, on 3 February 1945 it was again destroyed.

In June 1945 the ensemble was reassembled and Ernst Legal from the Kroll Opera (see below) was named Intendant of the new Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin; on 8 September the new company gave its first performance in the Admiralspalast, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (given in German). In the next decade the major works of Wagner and Verdi were added to the repertory, conducted by such guests as Solti and Furtwängler. The division of the city, the deteriorating political situation and currency discrepancies inevitably harmed the company, and it was no longer able to attract outstanding singers and conductors as in the past. With the formal establishment of the DDR in 1949, the administration of the opera was placed under the Ministry of Culture and its financial support secured, although the direction was increasingly subject to ideological pressure. The company gave its first world première in March 1951 with Dessau’s Das Verhör des Lukullus (revised later the same year as Die Verurteilung des Lukullus). It has since presented other world premières of East German composers, including Dessau’s Puntila (1966) and Einstein (1974). Among later performances Udo Zimmermann's Die wundersame Schustersfrau (1983) and Siegfried Matthus's Graf Mirabeau (1989) stand out. In 1952 Legal retired as Intendant of the Staatsoper in East Berlin and Heinrich Allmeroth from Rostock succeeded him.

In 1955 the theatre, which had been rebuilt to Knobelsdorff's plans of 1742, reopened with a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Erich Kleiber refused to accept his appointment as Generalmusikdirektor in protest against the name Deutsche Staatsoper, which replaced the original Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis. Franz Konwitschny conducted in his place, and subsequently directed the company until his death in 1962. His successors, Josef Keilberth, Horst Stein (Staatskapellmeister 1955–61), Leopold Ludwig and Lovro von Matačić, cultivated an international repertory. The harpsichordist and musicologist Hans Pischner, who had been DDR assistant minister of culture since 1956, was appointed Intendant of the Deutsche Staatsoper in 1963. The leading singers of the DDR, among them Peter Schreier and Theo Adam, belonged to the company. Ruth Berghaus's innovatory productions were a regular feature, notably her famous Barbiere di Siviglia. Daniel Barenboim became Generalmusikdirektor in 1992 after the reunification, assisted by Harry Kupfer, with whom he mounted a Wagner cycle based largely on their collaboration at Bayreuth. A new speciality is the interest in Baroque opera, initiated by Intendant Georg Quander, which is performed by ensembles under the direction of René Jacobs, beginning with a performance of Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare in 1992 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the house's opening.

As well as the court and later municipal operas, Berlin has supported a number of theatres with varied artistic and financial success. In 1824 the Königstädtisches Theater opened, producing both popular drama and Italian and French opera, and soon became a serious rival to the court opera. The soprano Henriette Sontag made her Berlin début there before performing in the court opera. After the company closed in 1851 the theatre was used by visiting Italian opera companies.

In 1844 Josef Kroll opened a theatre which had an impressive role in early 20th-century Berlin opera. The first productions were of popular plays and puppet shows. Kroll’s daughter Auguste was one of the leading Berlin impresarios in the 19th century. Her theatre grew from the hostelry entertainment initially provided by her father at Krolls Etablissement. Later, the Kroll theatre became a popular musical theatre with revues, Spielopern (such as the works of the Biedermeier composer Albert Lortzing) and operettas. In the late 1850s Offenbach's Bouffes-Parisiens company gave ‘Gastspiele’ with his one-act opérettes Le mariage aux lanternes and Les deux aveugles. Later still it was a receiving theatre for visiting companies such as that which hosted Francisco d'Andrade in Mozart's Don Giovanni in 1889. In 1894 the theatre came under the direction of the Königliche Schauspiele, and was later renamed the Neues Königliches Operntheater.

In 1924 the Neues Königliches Operntheater was rebuilt and enlarged to a capacity of 2100. In 1926 Klemperer signed a ten-year contract and the new Kroll opera company opened as an autonomous part of the Staatsoper on 19 November 1927 with a highly controversial production of Fidelio that was seen as a declaration of intent, a radical gauntlet thrown down to the operatic conservatives of the city. A sequence of the classic ensued under Klemperer's direction in collaboration with Jürgen Fehling (Der fliegende Holländer), Ernst Legal (Les contes d'Hoffman) and the great German actor-director, Gustav Gründgens (Le nozze di Figaro). Teo Otto, Ewald Dülberg and Caspar Neher were the Kroll's preferred stage designers during this period.

As well as the strikingly theatrical productions of standard works, the Kroll championed new works and Klemperer (or his colleagues Zemlinsky and Zweig) conducted the Berlin premières of Stravinsky's Oedipus rex, Janáček's From the House of the Dead, Hindemith's Neues vom Tage and Cardillac, and Schoenberg's Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand in a double bill. Inevitably with a programme such as this – and a predominantly hostile conservative press – the box office was badly hit as the German economic crisis deepened in 1930. The Kroll Oper was identified by right-wing politicians as a centre of leftist propaganda and ‘Kulturbolschewismus’, and on 25 March 1931 they determined to close it down.

F.W. Deichmann established a small theatre in 1848 where he produced plays with music. After two years this theatre became the Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater where Lortzing was briefly conductor. During the 1850s it developed into the city’s first operetta theatre and gradually specialized in the works of Offenbach, who established himself as Berlin’s favourite composer in the next decade after he conducted the successful Berlin production of Orphée aux enfers in 1860. The house became the Deutsches Theater in 1883, since when it has concentrated exclusively on spoken drama.

The large Viktoria-Theater was also constructed through private initiative in the three years before its opening in 1857 and equipped with modern stage machinery. As it was largely dependent on ticket sales, the theatre presented mostly familiar Italian operas and operettas by guest ensembles and with well-known singers. New works were occasionally staged, however, such as Rigoletto (in its Berlin première) in 1860. This theatre was let in May 1881 and ironically became the site of the first Berlin production of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle (produced by Angelo Neumann and conducted by Anton Seidl), attended by both the composer and Liszt.

The Theater des Westens was founded in 1896 under the direction of Alvis Pasch, and rapidly became distinguished through performances of guest singers, including Caruso in 1906. From 1903 to 1907 Pfitzner successfully conducted such performances as the Berlin première of Wolf-Ferrari’s Die neugierigen Frauen (1904). The theatre was renamed the Grosse Volksoper in 1934. In the decade 1935–45, as the Institut der Arbeitsfront, it gave some notable performances conducted by Erich Orthmann. Between 1945 and 1961 the theatre served the Städtische Oper and has since been used for performances of plays, operettas and musicals. In 1961 it was renamed the Theater des Westens.

The Komische Oper, founded in 1905 by Hans Gregor and modelled on the Paris Opéra-Comique, provided the most modern theatre in Berlin. Gregor presented comic opera, operetta and works from Mozart to Puccini, excluding Wagner, also arranging the Berlin premières of Wolf’s Der Corregidor (1906) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1908), and the world première of Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907). He attempted a regeneration of theatre production but, as the theatre was unable to survive as a private enterprise, it closed in 1911. It was succeeded by the Kurfürstenoper which presented a similar repertory (until 1913) under Gregor’s associate Viktor Moris, while Gregor succeeded Weingartner in Vienna.

Berlin’s enthusiasm for the works of Dittersdorf and Rossini during the early 19th century was later transferred to the Parisian and Viennese operettas which then dominated the repertory of most Berlin opera houses. Offenbach’s works were performed in almost all the city’s theatres and even Johann Strauss was performed at the royal opera (Die Fledermaus, 1899, conducted by Richard Strauss). At the turn of the century Berlin developed its own style of musical comedy, created largely by Paul Lincke (Frau Luna, 1899) and Walter Kollo; works in this style were frequently produced at the Apollotheater, where Lincke was conductor after 1892. The Metropoltheater (built 1898, now the Komische Oper) subsequently became the chief theatre for popular operas and satirical revues, especially those of Victor Hollaender and Leon Jessel, in which Fritzi Massary first attracted attention; it continues to be a centre for the performance of operetta. After World War I operetta, musical theatre and revue were all eagerly cultivated in Berlin and encouraged the rise of Berlin Cabaret in the 1920s with a strong element of political satire set off by music with a sweet-sour flavour strongly influenced by jazz; its most significant reflection was in Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (1928).

With the Deutsche Oper, in former West Berlin and the Staatsoper in former East Berlin, the Komische Oper, also in the former East, is the city’s third active opera company. It opened at the Metropoltheater on 23 December 1947 with Die Fledermaus and, largely through the imaginative work of its director Walter Felsenstein, who founded it as a postwar realization of the aborted Kroll experiment, it has developed into an internationally recognized company.

The Komische Oper was to be a radical extension of the Volksoper concept, in which works of modest proportions were to be treated as ‘realistisches Musiktheater’. Felsenstein's productions of Die Zauberflöte, Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann and Barbe-bleue, Otello, The Cunning Little Vixen and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream won international attention for their highly theatrical and psychologically penetrating ‘Personenregie’. Felsenstein created a ‘school’ of East German opera production, whose most celebrated alumni are Joachim Herz (Intendant of the Komische Oper, 1976–81, in succession to the founder-director; fig.9), Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer, the Komische Oper's chief director, who succeeded Herz in 1981. The policy of the Komische Oper has remained true to the principles of Klemperer's Kroll Oper, with brilliantly acted – if moderately sung – performances of the medium-sized classics and new works, among them Udo Zimmermann's Der Schuhu und die fliegende Prinzessin and Siegfried Matthus's Judith (1985).

The most important addition to Berlin’s operatic life in the first half of the 20th century was the Deutsches Opernhaus, which opened in the city of Charlottenburg with a capacity of 2300 on 7 November 1912 with a performance of Fidelio. Its first director, Georg Hartmann, maintained the standard repertory, especially Wagner, and in 1914 arranged the first Berlin performance of Parsifal, four days before the Staatsoper’s. When Hartmann was dismissed in 1923 and the three resident conductors subsequently resigned, Leo Blech from the Staatsoper became Generalmusikdirektor. Because the company had suffered irrecoverable financial losses during World War I, the city ministry took control of it in 1925 and renamed it the Städtische Oper. Performances at the Städtischer Oper, directed by Tietjen and conducted by Bruno Walter (1925–9), began to rival those at the Staatsoper. Along with operas by Wagner, Strauss and less familiar works, Mozart formed the core of Walter's achievement. New works by such composers as Busoni, Janáček, Zemlinsky, Krenek and Weill conducted by Fritz Zweig were also performed. Walter left in 1929. An interim period of two years followed with guest performances by La Scala and Toscanini as well as by the Diaghilev ballet. Blech returned as guest conductor, as did Furtwängler. After Tietjen joined the Staatsoper (1926), he continued as director of the Städtische Oper until 1930; after a short interim Carl Ebert took the position (1931–3). During his tenure Fritz Busch, Fritz Stiedry and Paul Breisach were conductors, and Rochus Gliese, Caspar Neher and Wilhelm Reinking introduced a new conception of stage design. Although the repertory consisted predominantly of standard works, operas by Braunfels, Schreker and Wellesz were performed, and the company produced important world premières including those of Weill’s Die Bürgschaft and Schreker’s Der Schmied von Gent (both 1932).

After Ebert's emigration, Max von Schillings was recruited by the Nazis as Intendant, but he was there only briefly before his death in the summer of 1933. The theatre was taken over by the German Reich as the Deutsches Opernhaus under the direct control of propaganda minister Goebbels in 1934, putting it into direct competition with the Staatsoper, which as the Preussisches Staatstheater was controlled by Göring. Political intrigue, however, managed to secure the continued existence of the theatre, whose ensemble had been decimated by emigration and forced resignations. As Intendant Hitler himself chose Wilhelm Rode, a singer he much admired, but of whom Goebbels thought little. Despite weak stagings that aimed at a naïve naturalism, high musical standards were maintained during the late 1930s by both singers (among them Michael Bohnen, Walther Ludwig, Karl Schmitt-Walter and Irma Beilke) and the conductors Artur Rother and Karl Dammer. Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt succeeded Rode as opera director, recruiting the director Günther Rennert and the conductor Leopold Ludwig. On 23 November 1943 the Deutsches Opernhaus was destroyed in a bombing raid. Productions continued in the Admiralspalast until 1944, when all German theatres were closed.

After World War II the company resumed its activity, thanks to the initiative of Michael Bohnen, who had been a member of the ensemble since 1935. Reverting to the name of the Städtische Oper, it found new accommodation in the Theater des Westens, which had suffered little damage, and opened on 4 September 1945 with Fidelio. Bohnen retired from the post of director in 1947, and there was a transitional period, during which modern opera appeared in the repertory with Britten's Peter Grimes. On 1 August 1948 Tietjen returned as director of the Städtische Oper. In his first season he presented two outstanding artists in the company's première of Verdi's Don Carlos: the conductor Ferenc Fricsay, who was music director of the theatre until 1952, and Josef Greindl, singing the part of Philip II. The young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who had recently been engaged, sang Posa. After a ten-year break, Leo Blech returned in the 1949–50 season. On 23 September 1952 Boris Blacher's ballet-opera Preussisches Märchen was given its first performance. When Fricsay left, criticism of Tietjen's direction became increasingly open.

Tietjen left his post and was succeeded in 1954 by Carl Ebert, who had been forced to emigrate in the 1930s by the Nazis. Mozart and Verdi were the mainstays of his repertory. He engaged Wilhelm Reinking as principal designer; other designers who worked with him were Caspar Neher, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Ita Maximovna. As well as guest conductors such as Karl Böhm, André Cluytens, Hermann Scherchen and Vittorio Gui, Ebert brought young artists into the company, including Silvio Varviso and Berislav Klobučar. One of Ebert's significant achievements was the founding of an opera studio to train young singers. Under his direction the Städtische Oper became the leading company in Berlin and soon had a prominent position in international music. Among the most important artistic events of these years were the first performance of Henze's König Hirsch, under Hermann Scherchen, on 23 September 1956 and Gustav Rudolf Sellner's production of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in 1959, also under the musical direction of Scherchen.

The new opera house in the Bismarckstrasse (1863 seats; designed by Fritz Bornemann) opened on 24 September 1961 with Mozart's Don Giovanni, and the company's occupation of the Theater des Westens came to an end. Carl Ebert directed the new production, with Fricsay as conductor and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role. Sellner was appointed the new general director of the theatre, henceforth known as the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and held the post for 11 years, until 1972.

The opening production was followed by the world première of Klebe's Alkmene on 25 September 1961. Wieland Wagner brought dramatic emphasis to his production of Verdi's Aida. Among outstanding premières given by the company in the Sellner years were those of Aribert Reimann's Melusine (1971, première at Schwetzingen in the same year), Henze's Der junge Lord (1965), Isang Yun's Der Traum des Liu-Tung (1965), Haubenstock-Ramati's Amerika (1966) and Blacher's Zweihunderttausend Taler (1969). Under Sellner the theatre consistently encouraged contemporary operatic writing.

Egon Seefehlner took over as general director for the 1972–3 season. On 23 October 1972, at the Berlin Festival, the Deutsche Oper gave the first performance of Fortner's Elisabeth Tudor. In 1976 Egon Seefehlner moved to Vienna; his successor in Berlin was the cellist Siegfried Palm, an outstanding interpreter of new music. His appointment was controversial, and the innovations he was expected to make did not materialize. In 1981 Götz Friedrich, a pupil of Felsenstein, under whom he had worked at the Komische Oper in Berlin for many years, became general director of the Deutsche Oper. He opened the repertory to a wide range of works and innovative stagings and engaged singers of international repute. This cosmopolitanism bore fruit in the first performances of Antonio Bibalo's Frøken Julie in the new instrumental version (1984), Wolfgang Rihm's Oedipus (1987) and Henze's Das verratene Meer (1990); in the revivals and first performances by the company of Korngold's Die tote Stadt, Rihm's Jakob Lenz and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten; in the consistent attention paid to the operas of Janáček; and in the work of such directors as Günter Krämer, Hans Neuenfels, Achim Freyer and John Dew. Friedrich set a high standard in his theatre with his own productions, which included a Ring cycle. Udo Zimmermann is appointed successor of Friedrich from 2001.

Musical standards at the Deutsche Oper have always been determined by great conductors as well as by great singers. The names of Ferenc Fricsay, Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum, Heinrich Hollreiser, Horst Stein, Lorin Maazel (Generalmusikdirektor, 1965–71), Daniel Barenboim, Gerd Albrecht, Jesus López-Cobos (Generalmusikdirektor, 1981–90), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (Generalmusikdirektor, 1992–7) and Christian Thielemann (Generalmusikdirektor, 1997–2001) are closely linked with the company. Guest conductors have included Claudio Abbado, Herbert von Karajan, Hermann Scherchen, Marek Janowski, Giuseppe Sinopoli and Charles Mackerras. Walther Hagen-Groll, chorus master for many years, left his artistic mark on the company. Fabio Luisi will succeed Thielemann in 2001.

The Deutsche Oper has given guest performances in countries throughout the world, including Japan, Sweden, the USA, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. Friedrich, as director, initiated close contacts with the Los Angeles Music Center. Following the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsche Oper has been affected by the political changes; its position in a city no longer divided is essentially unchanged, but is likely to alter as closer cooperation between the Berlin opera houses develops.

4. Music publishing and criticism.

Music publishing in Berlin began with the publication of sacred music in the mid-16th century, when the first printing houses were established. The true founder of Berlin music printing, however, was the Runge firm, which established its own printing shop in 1599 and later published works by Johannes Crüger and books of sacred songs. The first important writings printed in Berlin included Crüger’s Synopsis musica (1630), one of the first theoretical treatises based on harmonic principles. More significant musical writings appeared in Berlin as music became an integral part of court life during the reign of Frederick the Great. The first Berlin musical journal was F.W. Marpurg’s Der critische Musicus an der Spree (1749–50). Among the most important sources of German 18th-century rationalistic musical thought, all published in Berlin, were the writings of C.G. Krause, Marpurg’s Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen (1750), Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (1760–64) and Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753–4), Quantz’s Versuch (1752) and C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch (1753). After Kirnberger’s writings appeared, an antithesis between conservative and progressive musical ideals gradually developed in Berlin scholarship, stimulating a juxtaposition that characterized the city’s musical life for many years.

J.F. Reichardt promoted early music and was Berlin’s first notable music journalist, producing the short-lived Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung (1805–6). Concurrently E.T.A. Hoffmann was influential as a critic, writing vivid and forceful reviews of contemporary music. Before A.B. Marx wrote his extensive biography of Beethoven (1859), he founded, with Heinrich Dorn and the poet Ludwig Rellstab, the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1824–30), which assumed a leading role in the city’s music journalism. Rellstab continued to promote modern music, including Liszt’s, through his journal Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst (1830–41) and other writings; he was Berlin’s most respected critic until he grew cold to the works of Wagner after 1850. In the following years new music was supported in such journals as the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung (1847–96) and the Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung (1876–1942; later Allgemeine Musikzeitung). In 1834 Winterfeld’s important three-volume study Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter was published in Berlin. From the beginning of music journalism in Berlin, over 160 journals on all aspects of music have appeared, including Die Musik (1901–42) and Musikblätter (from 1948). Periodicals currently published in Berlin include Opernwelt, Orpheus ballettanz international and the Neue Berlinische Musikzeitung. Berlin has supported more than 100 music publishers of international repute, such as A.M. Schlesinger (from 1810 until 1899) and Bote & Bock (1838; since 1996 an affiliate of Boosey & Hawkes). Along with the Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig (now part of Breitkopf & Härtel), the leading East German publisher was Henschel, Berlin, which now collaborates with Bärenreiter and Alkor Edition, Kassel.

5. Music education.

Until the end of the 18th century music education in Berlin was limited to private tuition by local professional musicians. As increased secularization of city life caused a decline in the number of church choirs, several school choirs were established towards the end of the century to continue choral training. In the early 19th century schools began to give vocal instruction, which in 1826 became a compulsory part of public education. In 1804, at the Akademie der Künste, Zelter established the Ordentliche Singschule, the first state-supported programme of music education in Prussia. At the suggestion of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the first chair of music was created at the Akademie der Künste in 1809 and Zelter was appointed to supervise the city’s sacred and secular music education. A.W. Bach, Zelter’s successor as director of the academy’s music department (1832–69), added a series of masterclasses in composition to the syllabus; composers who participated included Meyerbeer, Bruch, Busoni, Pfitzner, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. Before World War I this important department had one of the most distinguished composition faculties in Germany.

Zelter was also responsible for the foundation in 1820 of the Musikalische Bildungsanstalt, which became the Institut für die Ausbildung von Organisten und Musiklehrern in 1822, and the Königliches Akademisches Institut für Kirchenmusik in 1875. The institute initially taught only composition, singing and keyboard instruments but expanded its scope after 1907 through the reforms of Hermann Kretzschmar. After World War I music was no longer compulsory in public education in Berlin, partly because of the reforms of the Prussian minister of culture Leo Kestenberg; the institute was renamed the Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik in 1922. The comprehensive training, especially under the directors Carl Thiel and H.J. Moser, made the academy into the leading school of church and school musicians. It was amalgamated with the Hochschule für Musik in 1944.

Although private keyboard, singing and string lessons were readily available in Berlin at the end of the 18th century, instruction in wind instruments was inadequate. After 1799 the clarinettist Franz Tausch assembled wind players for informal rehearsals and performances to encourage wind playing. As these gatherings became more regular, the Conservatorium der Blasinstrumente was organized; after Tausch’s death in 1817, this was continued by his son until he died in 1845. To supply string players for his concerts in the Sing-Akademie, Zelter founded the Orchester-Schule, or Ripienschule, in 1807: this gave rise to Spontini’s Königliche Theater-Instrumental-Schule (1822) which trained musicians for the royal theatres and also provided instruction for wind players after 1855. In the late 1830s Friedrich Wilhelm IV proposed the organization of a Hochschule für Musik, but administrative complications thwarted this scheme until 1869, when the school was founded as part of the Akademie der Künste. Under the direction of Joachim (1869–1907) the school became known as one of the finest in Germany, with a staff of outstanding musicians and scholars. After 1872 the teachers and students gave public recitals and orchestral concerts. Between the wars directors included Schreker, Schünemann and Fritz Stein; Schoenberg, Hindemith and Humperdinck taught composition. Other outstanding teachers at the school have included Max Bruch, Curt Sachs, Philipp Spitta, Edwin Fischer and Artur Schnabel. Dissatisfaction with the school’s administration towards the end of World War II led Höffer, Josef Rufer and Blacher to found the Internationales Musikinstitut, whose masterclasses competed with those of the Hochschule. This project ceased when Höffer was appointed director of the Hochschule in 1949 and drew many of the best musicians back to the school. Through his efforts and those of his successors Egk (1950–53) and Blacher (1954–70), the school has regained its international status.

One of the more important institutions that developed in the 19th century was the Berliner Musikschule, founded in 1850 by Julius Stern and A.B. Marx. In 1857 it was renamed the Sternsches Konservatorium, in 1935 the Konservatorium der Reichshauptstadt and in 1945 the Städtisches Konservatorium. In 1966 the conservatory merged with the Hochschule für Musik. After his withdrawal from the Sternsches Konservatorium in 1855, Theodor Kullak organized the Neue Akademie der Tonkunst, which concentrated chiefly on keyboard instruction until it closed in 1890. Berlin’s rapid growth in the 19th century prompted the establishment of many smaller music schools (over 20 by 1930) in various districts of the city, the most notable being the Klavier-Schule Tausig (1866–70), and the Konservatorium Klindworth-Scharwenka (1893–1939), formed by the amalgamation of the Scharwenka-Konservatorium (1881) and the Klavier-Schule Klindworth. In the former East Berlin, the Deutsche Hochschule für Musik was opened in 1950 and, under its founder and first director, the musicologist Georg Knepler, it quickly achieved a high international reputation; it was renamed after Hanns Eisler following the composer's death in 1962. The current director is Christhard Gössling.

6. Musicology.

The first academic music position in Berlin was established in 1815 when Zelter was appointed director of music at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, founded five years before. In 1830 the position was changed to that of a university lectureship, only the second of its kind in Germany; two years later Marx became Zelter’s successor. The succeeding lecturers, among them Spitta, developed music history into a scholarly discipline. In 1904 a chair of musicology was created, which has been held by such scholars as Hermann Kretzschmar, Curt Sachs, Hermann Abert, Johannes Wolf and Arnold Schering. In the second half of the 19th century municipal support of music scholarship in Berlin helped to attract such musicologists as Spitta and F.C. Stumpf; their pupils Sachs and Hornbostel also taught in Berlin. As other distinguished scholars moved to Berlin before World War I, the city became second only to Leipzig as a centre of German musicology. Hugo Leichtentritt (1905) and Alfred Einstein (1917) each published a Geschichte der Musik, concurrently contributing to such journals as Die Musik and Berliner Tageblatt.

To continue the research begun by Helmholtz and Stumpf, a chair of ethnomusicology was established (1934) at the University of Berlin (formerly Friedrich-Wilhelm University, after World War II the Humboldt University). Important teachers have included Walther Vetter, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Georg Knepler and Alfred Brockhaus. The last musicology department chairman, before the reunification, was Gerd Reinäcker; the first to be appointed in its aftermath was the Swiss musicologist Hermann Danuser. As a result of the city’s political division after the war, the Freie Universität was founded in 1948 in the western sector with chairs in both ethnomusicology and historical musicology, where incumbents have included Walter Gerstenberg, Kurt Reinhard and Rudolf Stephan. After his retirement in 1995, Albrecht Riethmüller and Jürgen Maehnder took over. Josef Kuckertz (1930–96) was chairman of the ethnomusicology department until his death. At the Technische Universität (successor of Frederick the Great’s Bergakademie), H.H. Stuckenschmidt, also a noted journalist, taught music history from 1948 to 1967 (professor from 1953). Under his successor, Carl Dahlhaus, the university's musicology department assumed a position of prominence comparable to that or the Freie Universtität. After the death of Dahlhaus in 1989, Christian Martin Schmidt became chairman. The department also has a position in music psychology.

7. Character and personality.

7. Libraries.

The first public music library in Germany was organized in Berlin in 1842 as a division of the Königliche Bibliothek after the purchase of the important Pölchau and Naue collections. Through the acquisition of other collections, such as the libraries of the Sing-Akademie and the Institute for Church Music, and of valuable manuscripts of Bach, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schumann and others, it became one of the most extensive music libraries in the world. On its amalgamation with the Deutsche Musiksammlung (1914) it became a valuable museum of German music printing and source for scholarly research. After World War II most parts of the collection which had been sent to the east were returned to their original location, now the music division of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin, directed by Karl-Heinz Köhler. Materials sent westward to Marburg and Tübingen, including many theoretical works, parts of the Deutsche Musiksammlung and newer manuscripts, have since come back to West Berlin where they form the basis of the music division, under Rudolf Elvers, of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz directed by Hans-Peter Reinecke. Much of the most valuable material, however, including many autographs of works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, disappeared in 1945. After the reunification, the eastern and western parts of the Staatsbibliothek merged under the organization of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

Carl Stumpf’s important collection of recordings of ethnic music developed into the Phonogrammarchiv, which Hornbostel directed after 1905. In 1932 the collection was annexed to the Hochschule, and in 1935 absorbed into the Völkerkundemuseum. The collection of musical instruments, begun in 1888 at the Hochschule, was extensively reorganized and restored by Sachs (appointed director in 1919) and taken over by the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung in 1935. This institute, part of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, consists of departments of music history, folk and electronic music, and has been responsible for such publications as Das Erbe Deutscher Musik and the Archiv für Musikforschung.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (D. Sasse)

L. Schneider: Geschichte der Oper und des Königlichen Opernhauses in Berlin (Berlin, 1852)

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin’s (Berlin, 1861/R)

A.E. Brachvogel: Geschichte des Königlichen Theaters zu Berlin (Berlin, 1877–8)

M. Blumner: Geschichte der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin (Berlin, 1891)

A. Raeder: Kroll: ein Beitrag zur Berliner Cultur- und Theatergeschichte (Berlin, 1894)

O. Weddigen: Geschichte der Berliner Theater (Berlin, 1899)

W. Altmann: ‘Zur Geschichte der Königlichen preussischen Hofkapelle’, Die Musik, iii/4 (1903–4), 3–22, 211–27

R. Sternfeld: Chronik des Philharmonischen Chors in Berlin zu seinem fünfundzwanzigjährigen Bestehen, ihm und seinem Dirigenten Siegfried Ochs gewidmet (Berlin, 1907)

C. Sachs: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Berlin bis zum Jahre 1800 (Berlin, 1908)

C. Sachs: Musik und Oper am kurbrandenburgischen Hof (Berlin, 1910/R)

A. Weissmann: Berlin als Musikstadt: Geschichte der Oper und des Konzerts von 1740 bis 1911 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1911)

G. Lenzewski: Die Hohenzollern in der Musikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1926)

J. Wolf: Zur Geschichte der Musikabteilung der Staatsbibliothek (Berlin, 1929)

H.U. Lenz: Der Berliner Musikdruck von seinen Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Lippstatt, 1932, reissued Kassel, 1933)

G. Schünemann: Carl Friedrich Zelter: der Begründer der preussischen Musikpflege (Berlin, 1932)

M. Seiffert: 100 Jahre Musiksektion der Preussischen Akademie der Künste (Berlin, 1933)

O. Schrenk: Berlin und die Musik: 200 Jahre Musikleben einer Stadt 1740–1940 (Berlin, 1940)

G. Schünemann: Die Singakademie zu Berlin 1791–1941 (Regensburg, 1941)

F. Herzfeld: Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester 1882–1942 (Berlin, 1943)

W. David: Die Organisten von St. Marien zu Berlin und andere berühmte Berliner Organisten (Mainz, 1949)

A. Yorke-Long: ‘Frederick the Great of Prussia’, Music at Court: Four Eighteenth-Century Studies (London, 1954), 97–147

H. Fetting: Die Geschichte der Deutschen Staatsoper (Berlin, 1955)

W. Virneisel: ‘Die Musikabteilung der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek’, FAM, ii (1955), 108–12

G. Braun: Die Schulmusikerziehung in Preussen von den Falkschen Bestimmungen bis zur Kestenberg-Reform (Kassel, 1957)

H.A. Frenzel: Brandenburg-preussische Schlosstheater: Spielorte und Spielformen von 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1959)

R. Elvers: 150 Jahre Musikverlag (Adolf Martin Schlesinger, Robert Lienau) (Berlin, 1960)

E.E. Helm: Music at the Court of Frederick the Great (Norman, OK, 1960)

R. Elvers: Altberliner Musikverleger (Berlin, 1961)

K.-H. Köhler: ‘Die Musikabteilung’, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek 1661–1961, i, ed. H. Kunze, W. Dube and G. Fröschner (Leipzig, 1961), 241–74

W. Otto: Geschichte der Deutschen Staatsoper Berlin: von der Gründung der Kapelle bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1961, rev. 3/1969)

S. Borris: Hochschule für Musik (Berlin, 1964)

W. Bollert: ‘Musikleben’, Berlin und die Provinz Brandenburg im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1967), 605

L. Richter: Der Berliner Gassenhauer: Darstellung, Dokumente, Sammlung (Leipzig, 1969)

H.C. Wolff: ‘Die Geschichte der Musikwissenschaft an den Universitäten Leipzig und Berlin’, Sborník prací filosofické fakulty brněnské university, H4 (1969), 17

K. Höcker: Hauskonzerte in Berlin (Berlin, 1970)

D. Kricklberg: ‘Einführungen zu Berliner Konzerten mit Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts seit 1947’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 507–11

E. Kruttge, ed.: Experiment Krolloper, 1927–1931 (Munich, 1975)

G. Huwe: Die Deutsche Oper Berlin (Berlin, 1984)

N. Ely: Berlinische Dramaturgie (Berlin, 1985)

S. Stompor: Die Komische Oper Berlin (Berlin, 1991)

G. Quander: Apollini et Musis: 250 Jahre Opernhaus Unter den Linden (Berlin, 1992)

G. Quander: Klangbilder: Porträt der Staatskapelle Berlin (Berlin, 1995)

Hundert Jahre Theater des Westens (Berlin, 1996)

E. Hartmann: Die Berliner Philharmoniker in der Stunde Null (Berlin, 1996)

W. Rösler: Das ‘Zauberschloss’ Unter den Linden (Berlin, 1997)

H. Traber: Das andere Orchester: zur Geschichte des Deutschen Symphonie-Orchesters Berlin (Berlin, 1998)

C. Mitlehner and U. Baak: Berlin für Musikfreunde (Berlin, 2000)

Berlin, Irving [Baline, Israel]

(b Mogilyov, 11 May 1888; d New York, 22 Sept 1989). American composer of Russian birth. The son of an impoverished Jewish cantor, he was taken to America at the age of five. His father died when he was 13, and a year later he ran away from home, rather than be a burden to his mother. He sang for pennies outside cabarets, became a chorus boy, a stooge in vaudeville, a song plugger and a singing waiter. Berlin had no formal musical training, but taught himself to play the piano, if only in one key, F. He began churning out songs, usually serving as his own lyricist, and finally caught America’s ear with Alexander’s Ragtime Band in 1911.

Berlin had three phenomenally successful careers: he was one of Broadway’s most melodic composers, he scored some of Hollywood’s most beloved film musicals, and he was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter with more singles hits than any other composer. It was as a Tin Pan Alley composer that he found early success, but throughout his life he wrote many songs outside the context of a show or film. Among his popular hits were Remember, Always, What’ll I do? and God bless America, the last earning Berlin a Congressional Gold Medal.

Berlin’s first complete stage work, Watch your Step (1914), purported to be the first musical written entirely in ragtime. Purists would argue that that was not strictly so, but cannot dispute that Berlin played a major role in making ragtime popular, just as the real genre was fading away. The show’s hit was ‘A Simple Melody’. Between Watch your Step and Mr. President (1962) Berlin wrote all or most of the songs for 19 other Broadway shows. Stop! Look! Listen! (1915) included ‘I love a piano’ and ‘The Girl on the Magazine Cover’ while Yip, Yip, Yaphank, performed by soldiers in 1918, gave us ‘Mandy’ and ‘Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning’. His numerous contributions to several Ziegfeld Follies and Music Box Revues included ‘All Alone’, ‘Lady of the Evening’, ‘A pretty girl is like a melody’, ‘Say it with music’, ‘Shaking the Blues Away’, ‘You’d be surprised’ and ‘What’ll I do?’. Face the Music (1932) is remembered for ‘Soft Lights and Sweet Music’, and As Thousands Cheer (1933) for ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘Heat Wave’. ‘It’s a lovely day tomorrow’ came from Louisiana Purchase (1940). In World War II, the all-soldier show This is the Army (1942) presented ‘I left my heart at the stage door canteen’ and ‘This is the army, Mr. Jones’.

Berlin’s most successful musical was Annie Get your Gun (1946). Based very freely on the life of Annie Oakley, the show was originally to have had music by Jerome Kern; he died while working on it, and Berlin replaced him. At the first performance Ethel Merman sang the title role and Ray Middleton played Frank. Annie Get your Gun has entered the repertory of opera companies in the USA, and the Vienna Volksoper. The hit song of his last success, Call me Madam (1950), was ‘You’re just in love’.

Berlin’s Hollywood career began when the talkies began, his ‘Blue Skies’ being interpolated into The Jazz Singer (1927). When the Depression cut down the number of musicals presented on Broadway, Berlin moved to California in the mid-1930s and scored film musicals for various studios. Most beloved were the series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films at RKO between 1935 and 1939, including Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936) and Carefree (1938). Astaire would also be featured in such later Berlin-scored films as Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946) and Easter Parade (1948). While few of Berlin’s early stage works were made into films, his songs were often interpolated into musicals built around the extensive Berlin repertory. Old favourites filled such film musicals as Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), This is the Army (1943), White Christmas(1954) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954).

One of the most remarkable aspects of Berlin’s 54-year career was his chameleon-like ability to adapt to the latest trends and styles in popular music. Berlin created rags for the first decades of the century, songs about the various dance crazes in the 1920s, optimistic songs for the Depression, swing numbers at the end of the 1930s, and theatre scores in the Rodgers and Hammerstein mode in the 1940s. He always managed to write successfully in whatever style was in vogue. Ironically, many of Berlin’s songs have successfully outlived the eras that they were created for. ‘White Christmas’, for example, is still the best-selling single song in American culture.

Some detractors have suggested that his work was too often lacking in subtlety, but careful analysis of his seemingly simple tunes and lyrics usually shows a knowing, complex artistry hidden behind the deceptive façade. As an example, one could cite the marvellous harmonic modulations in ‘A pretty girl is like a melody’. Berlin’s remarkable ear and his often underrated inventiveness in the face of rapidly changing styles led his contemporary Jerome Kern to conclude: ‘Irving Berlin has no place in American music; he is American music’.

WORKS

stage

Works for which Berlin wrote all or much of the score; lyrics are by Berlin. Names of librettists are given in parentheses; dates are those of first New York performance

Ziegfeld Follies of 1911 (revue, G.V. Hobart), 26 June 1911

Watch your Step (musical, H.B. Smith), New Amsterdam, 8 Dec 1914 [incl. A Simple Melody, The Syncopated Walk]

Stop! Look! Listen! (musical, Smith), Globe, 25 Dec 1915 [incl. The Girl on the Magazine Cover, I love a piano]

The Century Girl (revue, collab. H. Blossom), 6 Nov 1916 [musical collab. V. Herbert]

The Cohan Revue of 1918, collab. G.M. Cohan, 31 Dec 1917

Yip, Yip, Yaphank (revue), 19 Aug 1918 [incl. Mandy; Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning]

Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 (revue), 16 June 1919 [incl. A pretty girl is like a melody, You’d be surprised]

Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 (revue), 22 June 1920 [incl. Tell me, little gypsy]

Music Box Revue 1921–2, orchd F. Tours, M. DePackh, S. Jones, H. Akst, 22 Sept 1921 [incl. Say it with music, Everybody step]

Music Box Revue 1922–3, orchd Tours, DePackh, Jones, Akst, 23 Oct 1922 [incl. Lady of the Evening, Pack up your sins and go to the devil]

Music Box Revue 1923–4, orchd Tours, DePackh, Jones, Akst, 22 Sept 1923

Music Box Revue 1924–25, orchd Tours, De Packh, Jones, Akst, 1 Dec 1924

The Cocoanuts (musical, G.S. Kaufman, M. Ryskind), Lyric, 8 Dec 1925; film, 1929

Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 (revue), 16 Aug 1927 [incl. Shaking the Blues Away]

Face the Music (musical, M. Hart), New Amsterdam, 17 Feb 1932 [incl. Let’s have another cup o’ coffee, Soft Lights and Sweet Music]

As Thousands Cheer (revue, Hart), orchd Tours, A. Deutsch, H. Kresa, 30 Sept 1933 [incl. Easter Parade, Heat Wave, Supper Time]

Louisiana Purchase (musical, M. Ryskind), orchd D. Walker, Imperial, 28 May 1940 [incl. It’s a lovely day tomorrow, What chance have I, Fools fall in love, You’re lonely and I’m lonely]; film, 1942

This is the Army (revue), 4 July 1942 [incl. I left my heart at the stage door canteen, This is the army, Mr. Jones]; film, 1943

Annie Get your Gun (musical, H. and D. Fields), orchd P.J. Lang, R.R. Bennett, T. Royal, Imperial, 16 May 1946 [incl. Anything you can do, Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly, The Girl that I Marry, I got the sun in the morning, Moonshine Lullaby, There’s no business like show business, They say it’s wonderful, You can’t get a man with a gun]; film, 1950

Miss Liberty (musical, R. Sherwood), orchd Walker, Imperial, 15 July 1949

Call Me Madam (musical, H. Lindsay, R. Crouse), orchd Walker, Imperial, 12 Oct 1950 [incl. The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Ball, It’s a lovely day today, Marrying for Love, They like Ike, You’re just in love]; film, 1953

Mr. President (musical, Lindsay, Crouse), orchd Lang, St James, 20 Oct 1962

film

not all scores wholly by Berlin

The Jazz Singer, 1927 [incl. Blue Skies]

The Awakening, 1928

The Cocoanuts, 1929 [incl. When my Dreams Come True]

Hallelujah, 1929

Puttin’ on the Ritz, 1930 [incl. Puttin’ On the Ritz]

Mammy, 1930

Reaching for the Moon, 1931

Kid Millions, 1934

Top Hat, 1935 [incl. Cheek to cheek, Isn’t this a lovely day?, Piccolino, Top hat, white tie, and tails]

Follow the Fleet, 1936 [incl. I’d rather lead a band, I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, Let’s face the music and dance, Let yourself go]

On the Avenue, 1937 [incl. I’ve got my love to keep me warm, This Year’s Crop of Kisses]

Alexander’s Ragtime Band, 1938 [incl. Alexander’s Ragtime Band, All Alone, What’ll I do?]

Carefree, 1938 [incl. Change partners, The Yam]

Second Fiddle, 1939

Holiday Inn, 1942 [incl. Be careful, it’s my heart, White Christmas]

Blue Skies, 1946 [incl. You keep coming back like a song]

Easter Parade, 1948 [incl. A Couple of Swells, Better luck next time, It only happens when I dance with you]

White Christmas, 1954 [incl. Count your blessings, The best things happen while you’re dancing, Sisters]

There’s No Business Like Show Business, 1954

other songs

(selective list)

lyrics by Berlin; dates are of first publication

Marie from Sunny Italy (music M. Nicholson), 1907; Alexander’s Ragtime Band, 1911; Everybody’s doin’ it, 1912; When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’, 1912; International Rag, 1913; Snooky Ookums, 1913; When I Lost You, 1913; When I Leave the World Behind, 1914; Someone else may be there while I’m gone, 1917; I’ve got my captain working for me now, 1919; All By Myself, 1921; What’ll I do?, 1924; Always, 1925; Remember, 1925; Blue Skies, 1927; Russian Lullaby, 1927; The song is ended, 1927; Say it isn’t so, 1932; How deep is the ocean?, 1932; God bless America, 1938 [chorus written 1918]

Principal publisher: Berlin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Woollcott: The Story of Irving Berlin (New York, 1925/R1983 with introduction by S. Green)

D. Ewen: The Story of Irving Berlin (New York, 1950)

A. Wilder: American Popular Song: the Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York, 1972)

M. Freedland: Irving Berlin (New York, 1974)

I. Whitcomb: Irving Berlin and Ragtime America (New York, 1988)

L. Bergreen: As Thousands Cheer (New York, 1990)

R.H. Kornick: Recent American Opera: a Production Guide (New York, 1991)

M.E. Barrett: Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir (New York, 1994)

C. Hamm: Irving Berlin: Early Songs, 1907–1914 (Madison, WI, 1994)

A. Forte: ‘The Ballads of Irving Berlin’, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 86–116

R. Kimball: The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin (New York, forthcoming)

GERALD BORDMAN/THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Berlin, Johan Daniel

(b Memel, Prussia, 12 May 1714; d Trondheim, 4 Nov 1787). Norwegian organist, composer, inventor and writer of German birth. He studied the organ with his father Heinrich Berlin, and in 1730 went to Copenhagen, where he became the pupil of the city musician Andreas Berg. In 1737 Berlin was appointed city musician in Trondheim, a post he held until 1767. From 1740 to his death he was organist at Trondheim Cathedral and from 1752 to 1761 at the Vår Frue Kirke. Berlin was probably the most exceptional and versatile figure in 18th-century Trondheim: he not only conscientiously carried out his duties as city musician, but published books and papers on a variety of subjects (including music theory, meteorology and astronomy); he arranged concerts, composed, and built instruments; he was for many years the head of the city fire-service and inspector of the city waterworks; he was a map designer and architect; and he owned one of the largest collections of music literature and instruments in Norway. His Musikalske elementer is the first Danish-Norwegian music textbook and is still considered an instructive and comprehensive work. His papers on other subjects were published by the Royal Norwegian Scientific Association, of which he was a founder-member (1760). In 1746 Berlin built a keyboard viola da gamba which he called ‘cembalo da gamba verticale’, in 1751 a piano with a pedal and in 1752 a monochord; in addition he constructed a mechanism to enable him to play loud and soft on his Haas harpsichord. Only the monochord has survived (in the Ringve Museum, Trondheim). In January 1787 he was elected to the board of the Trondheim Music Society (founded 1786).

Berlin wrote almost 30 compositions, of which only a few are extant. Their style lies between late Baroque and the style galant, with perhaps a bias towards the latter. Of Berlin’s nine children three became musicians: Johan Andreas Berlin (1734–72), Johan Daniel Berlin (1749–91) and Johan Henrik Berlin (1741–1807).

WORKS

all MSS are in N-T

Edition:John Daniel Berlin: The Collected Works, ed. B. Korsten (Bergen, 1977)

Orch: 3 syms.; 6 hpd concs., lost; Vn Conc.; Conc., cembalo da gamba verticale, lost; Conc., b viol, lost

Other works: 6 Dants-Menuetter, vn, bc (Copenhagen, 1766); Sonatina, hpd (Augsburg, 1751), ed. in Norsk musikksamling, i (Oslo, 1953); 8 minuets, hpd; 5 sonatas, 2 b viol, lost; 2 cants, lost

WRITINGS

Musikalske elementer (Trondheim, 1744), ed. B. Korsten (Bergen, 1977)

Anleitung zur Tonometrie, oder Wie man durch Hülfe der logarithmischen Rechnung nach der geometrischen Progressionsrechnung die so gennante gleichschwebende musikalische Temperatur leicht und bald ausrechnen kann (Copenhagen and Leipzig, 1767); ed. B. Korsten (Bergen, 1976)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

GerberNL

SchillingE

E. Bernsdorf: Neues Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst (Dresden, 1856–61, suppl. 1865)

K. Dahlbach: ‘Rokokkomusikk i trøndersk miljø: Johan Henrich Berlin (1741–1807), et bidrag til Trondheims musikkhistorie 1750–1800’, Norsk musikkgranskning årbok 1954–5 (1956), 137–274

K. Michelsen: Johan Daniel Berlin (diss., U. of Trondheim, 1971)

H. Sivertsen: Det Trondhjemske musikalske selskab av 1786 (Trondheim, 1975)

K. Michelsen, ed.: Johan Daniel Berlin 1714–1787: universalgeniet i Trondheim (Trondheim, 1987)

KARI MICHELSEN

Berlioz, (Louis-)Hector

(b La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, 11 Dec 1803; d Paris, 8 March 1869). French composer. He stands as the leading musician of his age in a country, France, whose principal artistic endeavour was then literary, in an art, music, whose principal pioneers were then German. In many senses the Romantic movement found its fullest embodiment in him, yet he had deep Classical roots and stood apart from many manifestations of that movement. His life presents the archetypal tragic struggle of new ideas for acceptance, to which he gave his full exertions as composer, critic and conductor. And though there were many who perceived greatness in his music from the beginning, his genius only came to full recognition in the 20th century.

8. Introduction to the works.

9. Operas.

10. Symphonies.

11. Larger dramatic choral works.

12. Other choral works.

13. Songs.

14. Orchestral music.

15. Other works.

16. Musical style.

17. Orchestration.

18. Other stylistic aspects.

19. The critic.

20. Standing and research.

HUGH MACDONALD

1. 1803–21.

Louis-Hector Berlioz was the eldest child of Louis-Joseph Berlioz (1776–1848), a doctor of some distinction and a prominent, well-to-do citizen of La Côte-Saint-André, 48 km north-west of Grenoble in the département of Isère. The family had belonged to the region for many generations, and the countryside, especially the grandeur of the Isère plain against its distant background of the Alps, cast a lasting spell on the young composer. His father was a man of liberal outlook and broad intellectual range, an inspiring mentor for his son, and though the dispute over Hector’s career and marriage damaged their relationship for some years, there was a profound bond between them. His mother, Marie-Antoinette (née Marmion), was a Catholic of sharper temper and narrower outlook. Five more children were born, of whom two, Nanci and Adèle, lived to maturity, and enjoyed Berlioz’s permanent affection.

At about the age of ten Berlioz briefly attended an infant seminary at La Côte, but thereafter his education was entirely in his father’s hands. He took most keenly to French and Latin literature and to geography, especially travel books, which implanted in him a longing for distant, sometimes exotic shores that his later travels around Europe scarcely satisfied. Of Latin authors his favourite was Virgil, and in his Mémoires (the major source for knowledge and understanding of his life) he recounted how his father’s reading of the episode of Dido and Aeneas reduced him to tears. His father also gave him rudimentary instruction on the flageolet, and he later learnt the flute with a local teacher, Imbert, and the guitar with another, Dorant. There is no doubt that his ability on the flute and guitar quickly became more than adequate, and it satisfied not only social demand but the deep-rooted sensitivity to music of which Berlioz had first become aware as a small boy when attending Mass. A tune from Dalayrac’s Nina, pressed to the service of religion, first evoked a sense of wonderment mingling with an ardent but short-lived religious sense. He never studied the piano and never learnt to play more than a few chords.

Berlioz also linked his first steps in music, learning the flageolet, with his boyhood passion for Estelle Duboeuf, when he was 12 and she 18. He called her his stella montis, associating her with the mountains behind Meylan where she lived and with Florian’s Estelle et Némorin which he had already ‘read and reread a hundred times’. He was teased for his admiration from afar, but it proved to be deeper than anyone suspected. He found a copy of Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie at home and also procured Catel’s Traité d’harmonie. These provided the basis for a knowledge of harmony, learnt entirely without reference to a keyboard, with which he began to compose more ambitiously, probably at the age of 13 or 14. He wrote a potpourri on Italian melodies, and then two quintets for flute and strings, all now lost but for a melody from one of the quintets that became the second subject of the overture to Les francs-juges. Similarly, a setting of one of Florian’s poems Je vais donc quitter pour jamais made at this time survives as the first theme in the opening section of the Symphonie fantastique. ‘It seemed to me exactly right for expressing the overpowering sadness of a young heart caught in the toils of a hopeless love.’ He made copies of popular romances by Dalayrac, Boieldieu, Berton and others, sometimes with his own guitar accompaniments, and his own romances were in the same mould. In 1819, when he was 15, he wrote to two (and probably more) Paris music publishers offering a sextet and some songs with piano accompaniment, but none seem to have been published at that time.

When he reached 17 a decision had to be made about his career, and though an irresistible instinct drew Berlioz to music, his father’s wish that he should follow him into the medical profession prevailed, and he was sent to Paris to the Ecole de Médecine, having obtained his bachelor’s degree in Grenoble in March 1821. At this stage his horizons were still narrow; his knowledge of the world was more literary than real, and his profoundest impressions were probably the child’s absorption of his natural surroundings and of the echoes of the Napoleonic convulsion. Much of his experience was vicarious, for he found in Bernardin de St Pierre and Chateaubriand an outlet for his still dormant capacity for intense feeling. In music only the slightest works by minor composers were known to him and he had never seen a full score; Pleyel’s quartets were the most sophisticated music he had heard. In physique he was of middle height, with a mass of fiery, tawny hair; his eyes were blue and deep set, and a distinctive aquiline nose surmounted wide, thin lips.

2. 1821–30.

Even before Berlioz’s departure from La Côte his aversion to medicine was plain.

Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to music, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for dirty hospital orderlies, dreadful dissecting-room attendants, hideous corpses, the screams of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural order of my existence. It was monstrous. It could not happen. Yet it did.

With his cousin Alphonse Robert, with whom he shared lodgings, he attended medical school and pursued his studies for two years, with interruptions, at least until his baccalauréat de sciences physiques which he took in January 1824.

But medicine was fighting a losing battle against the overpowering strength of Berlioz’s musical impulse now inflamed a hundred times more strongly by the musical experience and opportunity offered by the capital, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Within a month of his arrival he began to attend performances at the Opéra. Gluck, whose Iphigénie en Tauride was one of the first operas he heard, made a deep and lasting impression and remained the composer he admired most wholeheartedly of all. He also heard operas by Salieri, Sacchini, Méhul, Spontini and Boieldieu, a repertory that supplied a stylistic basis for his own initial attempts at large-scale composition. There survive copies in his own hand of extracts from Gluck’s operas made in 1822 in the Conservatoire library, which he frequented as often as his studies allowed, but he soon felt the need to supplement his musical technique; at the end of 1822 he gained an introduction to Le Sueur through a pupil, Gérono, and was admitted to his class. By this time he had attempted for the first time a work for full orchestra, the cantata Le cheval arabe on a text by Millevoye (now lost). Six romancesfor one or two voices with piano had appeared separately in print since his arrival in Paris, but one effect of Le Sueur’s tutelage was that Berlioz published no further music for about six years, concentrating instead on larger works, with orchestral accompaniments. In 1823 he composed an opera on Florian’s Estelle et Némorin referring to childhood memories and doubtless childhood melodies too. This, like the two works that followed – a scene for bass from Saurin’s Beverley and the Latin oratorio Le passage de la mer rouge – was later burnt, on Berlioz’s confession. The first important work to have survived is the Messe solennelle composed for the church of St Roch in 1824. A first rehearsal under Valentino on 27 December 1824 was a fiasco, but a successful performance the following July, under the same conductor, restored Berlioz’s confidence in himself and strengthened his resolve to be, in Le Sueur’s words, ‘no doctor or apothecary but a great composer’.

Since his abandonment of medicine he had had to face the entrenched opposition of his parents and their curtailment of his funds. His father had always assumed that his son would inherit the responsibilities of the family estate in which he had invested so much of his own energies, and resisted any suggestion that Berlioz's career might take him elsewhere. Family disputes persisted for years and the visits he paid to La Côte only deepened the estrangement. With his father’s allowance reduced and intermittently refused, Berlioz was forced to borrow from his friends, and he was to suffer severe hardship for at least five years. He depended on whatever sources were at hand – a few pupils, a short period as a chorus singer at the Théâtre des Nouveautés, and occasional articles for the press, the beginnings of what was later to be his principal source of income. His closest friend at this period was a law student with literary inclinations, Humbert Ferrand, who supplied the text for La révolution grecque, set to music in 1825, and also for an opera Les francs-juges (1826) of which six fragments and the overture remain. It owed much to his teacher Le Sueur but also reflected the dark colours and sinister tones of Weber’s Der Freischütz(introduced to Paris as Robin des bois in 1824). Although Les francs-juges was completed, none of Berlioz’s efforts to secure a performance succeeded, and after at least two attempts to rewrite it, he discarded or re-used some of it in later works, notably the Marche des gardes, incorporated in the Symphonie fantastique as the ‘Marche au supplice’ in 1830.

In 1826 Berlioz entered the Conservatoire: here he was in Le Sueur’s class for composition, which he had been attending for some time, and Reicha’s class for counterpoint and fugue. Les francs-juges and the overture to Waverley, which followed it, revealed a growing individuality and a marked confidence in his own powers, especially in the handling of instruments. In 1826 he also entered for the Prix de Rome for the first time, getting no further than the preliminary round. The following year, though, he passed the first test and entered en loge for the first of four times to compose the cantata prescribed by the regulations of the competition. La mort d’Orphée, the cantata set in 1827, was declared unplayable by the judges (though Berlioz had it played in rehearsal in 1828 with some satisfaction). For the 1828 competition he composed Herminie, which contains the melody later used as the idée fixe in the Symphonie fantastique, and won second prize. In 1829 he wrote the most individual and dramatic of these cantatas, La mort de Cléopâtre, and no prize was awarded, probably to avoid bestowing official approval on a composer who ‘betrayed such dangerous tendencies’. At the fourth attempt, in 1830, Berlioz was finally successful, although only a fragment of the cantata, La mort de Sardanapale, survives. His tactic had been to restrain his more individual mode of expression in order to provide a conventionally acceptable style.

Meanwhile the emotional and artistic elements of his being had been set alight by a series of thunderstrokes. The capacity for absorbing powerful external impressions and transmuting them into high artistic form placed him in the avant garde of the generation of 1830, and implanted in the soil of his imagination the seed of great works, many of them to remain beneath the surface of realization for many years. The first was the simultaneous impact of Shakespeare and the actress Harriet Smithson on 11 September 1827. On that day Berlioz attended Hamlet presented by an English company at the Odéon theatre, with Charles Kemble playing Hamlet and Miss Smithson playing Ophelia. ‘The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius, was equalled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.’ Though the performance (of the Garrick version) was in English, of which Berlioz knew virtually nothing at that time, he grasped the grandeur and sublimity of Shakespeare’s language and the richness of its dramatic design, and he joined the ranks of those under Hugo’s leadership who extolled Shakespeare as a challenge to French Classicism and a model for the new Romantic theatre. For Berlioz Shakespeare represented the pinnacle of poetic utterance; his veracity of dramatic expression and freedom from formal constraints picked up direct resonances in Berlioz’s spirit. Shakespeare’s plays were to supply the basis of three major works, Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice et Bénédict and the Roi Lear overture. In addition, there were at least three pieces inspired by Hamlet, a fantasy on The Tempest, and some direct borrowings in Les Troyens. More profoundly Shakespeare provided a framework for the structure of both Roméo et Juliette and Les Troyens and was a source, in the form of dramatic truth, of Berlioz’s fundamental notion of expressive truth. Berlioz was to read and quote Shakespeare avidly for the rest of his life, putting him alongside Virgil in his literary pantheon.

This seminal discovery worked itself out more profoundly and more slowly than that of Miss Smithson, whom he referred to as his Ophelia, or Juliet, or Desdemona. His emotional derangement was immediate and violent. For the next two years he was obsessed by her, waiting for her return to Paris, vainly seeking a means to approach her. When in 1830 his love for her eventually turned sour, the accumulation of emotional tension broke out in the Symphonie fantastique, which describes and transmutes into artistic form the artist’s passions, dreams and frustrations. For Berlioz there was no clear distinction between the real Harriet Smithson and the idealized embodiment of Shakespeare’s heroines, so that when, later, he was to secure an introduction to her and ultimately marry her, a relationship that had begun on an ideal level could only spoil in the glare of everyday reality, and the wholly Romantic conjunction of the artist with the ideal woman came to a bitter end.

Two further discoveries at this time rank as of supreme importance: in March 1828 Berlioz heard Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies, played by Habeneck and the Société des Concerts at the Conservatoire. ‘Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.’ For the first time his horizons widened from the exclusively vocal genres of opera, cantata and romanceto the expressive potential of pure instrumental music. That Berlioz wrote symphonies at all is entirely due to his obeisance to Beethoven, and the Symphonie fantastique can be seen as a deliberate and conscious attempt to work out dramatic and poetic ideas in the framework of a Beethoven symphony. More important, Berlioz discovered that instrumental music has an expressive and articulative force far more penetrating than vocal setting, a discovery shown palpably in the ‘Scène d’amour’ of Roméo et Juliette, in the Hamlet funeral march, and at certain points in Les Troyens. Just as Berlioz hardly set any of Shakespeare’s poetry to music, similarly Berlioz rarely adopted the precise tone and timbre of Beethoven. He absorbed this impact at a deep level, seeing Beethoven as a supreme dramatist in music, more poet than craftsman.

Goethe’s Faust reached Berlioz through Gérard de Nerval’s translation, published in December 1827, and again its impact was profound and immediate. The Faustian conception of man struck numerous echoes in Berlioz’s breast. In a letter of 1828 he described Shakespeare and Goethe as ‘the silent confidants of my suffering; they hold the key to my life’. He went on to say that he had just set the ballad of the King of Thule to music, the first of what were to be eight scenes, settings of the verse portions of Nerval’s translation. The Huit scènes de Faust were published at Berlioz’s expense in the following year, an op.1 of exceptional originality and invention. Each scene bears a quotation from Shakespeare, and each has its appropriate musical setting, varying from the Concert de sylphes for six solo voices and orchestra to the Sérénade in which Mephistopheles is accompanied by a guitar. But despite its remarkable character Berlioz found the work ‘crude and badly written’. He collected all the copies he could and destroyed them. Dimly he may have realized that the music would eventually find its due place in the larger scheme of La damnation de Faust, completed in 1846.

Literary influences of a less overwhelming kind were numerous, chief among them being the works of Moore, Scott and Byron. All three inspired compositions. He submerged himself, too, in Chateaubriand, Hoffmann, Fenimore Cooper, and the work of his own compatriots and contemporaries, Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset and Nerval. Later he was to absorb and admire Balzac, Flaubert, and Gautier, whose poems supplied the text of Les nuits d’été.

The ferment of Berlioz’s mind in the late 1820s was astonishing. Instead of wilting under a constant onslaught on his sensitivities, he broke out in gusts of creative energy. The Waverley overture, the Huit scènes de Faust, the nine settings of Thomas Moore (the Irlandecollection), composed in 1829, and above all the Symphonie fantastique, composed in early 1830, are testimony to this. He was active too as a proponent of his own music. The Messe solennelle had been played at St Roch in 1825 and 1827, and on 26 May 1828 Berlioz gave his first orchestral concert in Paris. His intention was to bring himself to the attention of the public, especially Harriet Smithson, and he succeeded in his aim in that the press, particularly the influential Fétis, was favourable. Much of his time in the next 15 years was devoted to planning, organizing and, after 1835, conducting his own concerts in Paris, a task that made heavy demands on his energy and usually his purse, but which provided the sole outlet for his orchestral works.

His eventual success in winning the Prix de Rome in 1830 was important to him as a means of convincing his parents that his musical bent was serious, as well as a source of income for the next few years. The prize required residence in Italy, but before he left he had important concerts to give in Paris. At the prize-giving ceremony at the institute on 30 October his cantata La mort de Sardanapale (with an additional conflagration scene written after the prize had been awarded) misfired completely. His fantasy (or ‘overture’) on The Tempest for chorus and orchestra was heard for the first time on 7 November at the Opéra and on 5 December the Symphonie fantastiquereceived its first performance in a concert of Berlioz’s works conducted by Habeneck. Liszt, who was present, made Berlioz’s acquaintance on that occasion (fig.2).

Berlioz’s reputation as a composer of startling originality was by now confirmed and his progress in the musical world of Paris was not to be furthered by enforced removal to Italy. He made several requests to be exempted from going, giving as his reasons his need to pursue his career in Paris and the state of his health, which had certainly not been good. A more pressing reason, in Berlioz’s mind, was his attachment to Camille Moke, a 19-year-old pianist of exceptional gifts whom he had met earlier in the year at a school where she taught the piano and he the guitar. She replaced the unresponsive Miss Smithson in his affections and their ardent affair led even to betrothal on the eve of his departure for Italy.

3. 1831–42.

Berlioz spent a month at La Côte-Saint-André, where his parents were at last delighted with their son’s success. At the back of his mind he had a large-scale composition that was to haunt him for a number of years, while his immediate thoughts were entirely with Camille, already, according to Ferdinand Hiller (her previous attachment), cooling in her affections. His journey to Italy and the 15 months he spent there were crucially formative. His mind was constantly alive to the impressions, both inspiring and disappointing, of the country and the people, their customs and way of life. He was supposed to draw inspiration from the relics of classical antiquity. These certainly intrigued him, especially where they touched upon Virgil, but his musical output was relatively small and haphazard, and his official submissions from Rome were not especially remarkable. Italy was nonetheless to work upon his music in more gradual fashion, with far-reaching influence on his style. Henceforth there was a new colour and glow in his music, both sensuous and vivacious. These derive not from Italian art, which touched him little, or Italian music, which he despised, but from the scenery and the sun, and from his acute sense of locale. Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette are the most obvious expressions of his response to Italy: both Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict reflect the warmth and stillness of the Mediterranean, as well as its vivacity and force.

Berlioz’s descriptions of Italy in the Mémoires and the abundant accounts of his travels in letters to his friends and family are wonderfully evocative; he seems here to have discovered his gifts as a writer. In Italy he came face to face with experiences he had previously only read about or idealized. Byronism, so fashionable at that time, became reality as he encountered brigands, corsairs, revolutionaries, lazzaroni and pifferari, and as he sampled the harshness of a storm at sea or the Carnival in Rome or sleeping in the open air in the mountains. He met sailors, peasants, sculptors and travellers, but, with the notable exception of Mendelssohn, few musicians. The Villa Medici at Rome housed the institute prizewinners under the tutelage of Horace Vernet, but Berlioz greatly disliked the city: ‘Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know: it is no place for anyone with head or heart’. Florence, on the other hand, he adored: ‘Everything about it delights me, its name, its climate, its river, its palaces, its air, the style and elegance of its inhabitants, its surroundings, everything, I love it, love it’. At Rome he composed little, mostly because of the stifling atmosphere of the Villa, but on his travels he achieved much more.

Three weeks after his arrival in Rome Berlioz set off back to France, jeopardizing his pension, in order to discover why he had heard nothing from Camille. At Florence, where he suffered a serious attack of quinsy, he learned the truth: that she had abandoned him for a new and more prosperous suitor, Camille Pleyel, the piano manufacturer. In a torrent of rage and wounded pride, Berlioz determined to return to Paris to kill the two Camilles, her mother and finally himself. Although he reached Nice, his resolve wavered and his better sense persuaded him to give his passions time to cool. Vernet was prepared to pardon him; Berlioz was prepared to spare his victims. The experience was traumatic, with emotional recovery very closely related to the recovery of his health. He felt that he had ‘survived’, and that he could live again to compose the music still dormant in his mind. Here was born Le retour à la vie, a half-literary, half-musical work that folded a variety of experiences together under the title ‘mélologue’ taken from Thomas Moore. Much of the text reflected thoughts and ideas found in his letters of the time, while the music was almost entirely drawn from works written earlier in Paris. Although the work was always designed as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique and referred directly to Harriet Smithson, it was a different unrequited love that originated it. It was not renamed Léliountil its revival in 1855.

Resting for three weeks in Nice – the three happiest weeks of his life, Berlioz said – he gave priority to another pressing inspiration, an overture on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he had read in Florence, and started another on Scott’s Rob Roy. On the return to Rome he worked further on Le retour à la vie and revised the Symphonie fantastique. He moved out of Rome as often as possible, especially to the Abruzzi mountains, Tivoli and Subiaco, where he finished Rob-Roy. Antoine Etex, the sculptor, recalled how he and Berlioz went for long walks together, singing Guillaume Tell, bathing, searching for brigands and playing practical jokes. In September Berlioz went to Naples, visited Pompeii and the island of Nisida, and then returned to Rome on foot.

The only musical product of the rest of his stay in Italy was the song La captive (in its strophic form), written in Subiaco in February 1832. Impatient to get back to Paris and to have his new works performed there, he secured six months’ dispensation and left in May 1832. He was later exempted from the required residence in Germany. After some months at La Côte-Saint-André, he reached Paris in November and immediately organized a concert of his own music, including the revised Symphonie fantastique with its sequel Le retour à la vie. Thinly veiled references to Fétis’s ‘corrections’ of Beethoven symphonies earned Berlioz a bitter notice in the Revue musicale and the animosity of an influential critic, but he was more concerned by the fact that Harriet Smithson was in Paris at the time. Her performances were far from the fashionable success they had been five years earlier, but an intermediary secured her attendance at the concert and subsequently an introduction. Despite their respective accumulated debts and difficulties and objections from both families, especially his own, Berlioz soon proposed marriage. After a bizarre and stormy courtship, they were married on 3 October 1833. It was perhaps characteristic of Berlioz to take his idealized love for his Ophelia to the point of marriage and perhaps, too, no surprise that the marriage was happy for scarcely more than six years. A son, Louis, was born to them in August 1834, and the picture of the young ménage living at the top of Montmartre, where their friends went to visit them, is a touching one. But with a language barrier between them and the strains of temperament and material deprivations always acute, it is hardly surprising that by 1842 or earlier they had drifted apart. Harriet’s last years are a distressing tale of misery and decline, and she died in 1854. Berlioz supported her to the end and retained a warmth of affection for what she had meant to him and for her inspiring qualities as an artist.

Berlioz’s career in the 1830s is, despite its astonishing achievements, essentially a tragic one. Conscious of his own genius and of the springs of invention within him, he failed to win the recognition that alone assured him even the barest means of existence. As a composer he earned virtually nothing. The general view of his music was that it was eccentric and ‘incorrect’. His admirers were passionate but few, and no worthy official post, such as a teaching appointment at the Conservatoire, came his way; he became merely its assistant librarian. He secured two government commissions (for the Grande messe des morts in 1837 and the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in 1840), but neither of these was particularly profitable or helpful to his artistic standing. He was compelled to earn a living in a profession at which he excelled but which he abhorred – as a critic. He wrote for L’Europe littéraire in 1833, Le rénovateur from 1833 to 1835, and principally from 1834 for the Gazette musicale (later to become the Revue et gazette musicale) and the Journal des débats, an influential newspaper whose proprietors, the Bertins, were his staunch supporters. He was soon to be better known to Parisians as a critic than as a composer.

Journalism took him away from composing and from its essential adjunct, performance. Gladly would Berlioz have devoted more of his time to giving concerts, even though the financial burdens were always severe. The record of his concerts in Paris is as follows: in 1832 he gave two, in 1833 five, in 1834 four, in 1835 six, in 1836 two, in 1837 the official performance of the Grande messe des morts, in 1838 two, in 1839 three, in 1840 five (see Paris, fig.28), in 1841 one and in 1842 four. The programme was normally made up of his own music interspersed with vocal and instrumental solos and occasionally works by Beethoven, Weber, Spontini and others. Liszt, Chopin, Hallé and other members of the richly cosmopolitan circle of musicians who then inhabited Paris took part. After 1835, when Girard bungled a performance of Harold en Italie, Berlioz resolved to conduct his own works himself. This led in turn to an illustrious career as one of the first specialist orchestral conductors, in wide demand outside France for his skill and interpretative insight.

Discouragement could not stem the flow of major compositions. Harold en Italie was composed in the summer of 1834 in response to a request from Paganini for a work in which he might display a fine Stradivari viola. Berlioz used the opportunity to devise an unusual symphony with concerto elements in which echoes of his Italian journey are presented in the cloak of Byron’s Childe Harold. As in the Symphonie fantastique, a recurrent theme again serves to unify the four movements, but the modest role of the viola solo deterred Paganini from ever playing it.

If the image of Beethoven was still vivid in Berlioz’s mind at this time, his primary concern, for professional as well as artistic reasons, was to win success at the Opéra. Only thus was real recognition to be sought; only thus, too, could Berlioz prove himself in the noble line of Gluck and Spontini. Les francs-juges had already been revised once before he left for Italy. After his return he made a further attempt, with Thomas Gounet’s help, to refashion it into a single act, but it still aroused no interest. After abandoning it, he considered a comic opera on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (this eventually materialized as Béatrice et Bénédictin 1862) and briefly contemplated Hamlet before persuading Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier, with Alfred de Vigny’s assistance, to make a libretto out of Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (Memoirs), a book whose abundant incident appealed strongly to him. It provided, too, the irresistible local colour of Renaissance Italy. First written as an opéra comique with dialogue, the libretto was refused in 1834, but by elevating the tone and expanding the action Berlioz was able to offer it to the Opéra. It was accepted in 1836 and performed in September 1838. At that time the music of Meyerbeer and Halévy held such sway at the Opéra that few members of the company were able or prepared to consider Berlioz’s bewilderingly original and inventive music with real seriousness. At all events, the three performances of 1838 were a clear failure (fig.3), and the management had little interest in the few fragmentary revivals the following year. Berlioz described the experience with bitterness as being ‘stretched on the rack’, for it not only humiliated him as an artist, it also closed the door of the Opéra to him, except as the arranger of other men’s works, for the rest of his life.

Berlioz was preoccupied at the same time with a half-Revolutionary, half-Napoleonic conception on the grandest scale, which took various forms. Remnants of the 1824 mass, a military symphony sketched out on the journey back from Italy, and a preoccupation with the Last Judgment all contributed to plans for a huge work in seven movements commemorating France’s national heroes, of which two movements were completed in 1835. These do not survive, although they were probably included in the Requiem commissioned by the minister of the interior and performed in the Invalides on 5 December 1837, and also perhaps in the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, another government commission, performed during the tenth anniversary of the 1830 Revolution on 28 July 1840. Both works exploit Berlioz’s interest in grandiose spatial effects and in the appropriate matching of instrumental forces to the occasion and the place for which a piece was intended. The Symphonie funèbrewas originally written for large military band and performed out of doors. Berlioz later added parts for strings and for chorus. Traces of his Napoleonic leanings may be seen in his setting for solo bass, chorus and orchestra of Béranger’s Le cinq mai, first performed in 1835.

In contrast to these, many compositions of the 1830s were delicate and intimate. He continued to write songs, of which some were orchestrated, such as La captive and Le jeune pâtre breton. Sara la baigneuse, an exceptionally refined setting of a Hugo poem, was first heard in 1834. Les nuits d’été, six settings of Gautier poems with piano accompaniment, appeared in 1841: all six were later orchestrated.

Paganini’s unexpected gift of 20,000 francs in December 1838, a token of his admiration for Harold en Italie, made possible the composition of Roméo et Juliette, and consoled Berlioz for the failure of Benvenuto Cellini. ‘My one idea was to put it to a musical purpose. I would give up everything else and write a really important work, something splendid on a grand and original plan, full of passion and imagination, worthy to be dedicated to the glorious artist to whom I owed so much.’ Berlioz wrote movingly of the ardent months of composition and he came to regard the ‘Scène d’amour’ as one of his finest things. The critics accused him of failing to understand Shakespeare, although for Wagner at least, who was present at one of the first performances, it was a ‘revelation’.

4. 1842–8.

About 1841 Berlioz reached a turning-point in his career. In that year the only music of his publicly performed in Paris was the set of recitatives composed for Weber’s Der Freischütz in order to make it acceptable to the Opéra’s ban on spoken dialogue. At the same time reports of performances abroad were increasingly common. The Requiem, for example, was heard in St Petersburg, while smaller works, such as the overtures, especially Les francs-juges, were becoming more frequently heard in England and Germany. He still withheld publication of the symphonies to prevent performances outside his control, so that it was growing urgent to go abroad in person, and to reinforce a developing international reputation. At the same time the frustrations of Paris made themselves more keenly felt, with the brighter enthusiasms of 1830 already receding and bourgeois tastes daily more evident, especially in the theatre. His marriage was perhaps already strained. For the first time his musical creativity waned, with no major works appearing for five years. He worked intermittently and unenthusiastically on a Scribe libretto for the Opéra, La nonne sanglante, which was never completed. On the other hand his literary activity was extending beyond the regular demands of his newspaper criticisms to a comprehensive study of orchestration, which began to appear in 1841 in the Revue et gazette musicale and which was published as the Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes in 1843.

For the next 20 years much of Berlioz’s time was spent on peregrinations of Germany, Austria, Russia and England. Curiosity about advanced music was more evident in such places than in Paris, and the administrative and financial problems of promoting concerts were fewer. The more he travelled the more bitter he became about conditions at home; yet though he contemplated settling abroad – in Dresden, for instance, and in London – he always went back to Paris.

His first concert abroad was on 26 September 1842 in Brussels. His two concerts there were, in Berlioz’s words, ‘merely an experiment’, but sufficiently successful to justify the more ambitious tour that followed shortly afterwards. He was abroad from December 1842 to the end of May 1843, and his tour took in visits to Brussels, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hechingen, Mannheim, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, back to Leipzig, Brunswick, Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover and Darmstadt. The tour was vividly recounted in open letters to his friends published initially in the Journal des débats, then collected in the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie in 1844 and finally forming part of his Mémoires. He met new friends, including Schumann, revived his acquaintance with old ones – Mendelssohn and Wagner, for example – and made a study of orchestral playing in the different cities he visited. Generally his reception was wholeheartedly warm, a foretaste of many enthusiastic welcomes he was to receive in Germany. To his reputation as a new and original voice as composer was added that of being a leading modern conductor, even though he conducted few works by other composers on his first tour. His return prompted the following reflections:

Paris is where music one moment lies moribund and the next moment seethes with life; where it is sublime and second-rate, lordly and cringing, beggar and king; where it is at once glorified and despised, worshipped and insulted. In Paris music too often speaks to morons, barbarians and the deaf. You see it walking freely and without restraint, or barely able to move for the clammy fetters with which Routine shackles its powerful limbs. In Paris music is a god – so long as only the skinniest sacrifices are required to feed its altars.

Berlioz was accompanied on the German tour by a singer of mixed French and Spanish birth, Marie Recio, who sang in most of his concerts. For her he orchestrated the song Absence, from Les nuits d’été, which she sang in Leipzig for the first time. His feelings for her had none of the passionate élan he had felt towards Harriet Smithson, indeed he tried to escape her pursuit on a number of occasions. On this relationship his letters and writings are more or less silent, yet prosaic or not, it was to last 20 years, until her death. After his separation from Harriet in 1844, Berlioz was confronted with supporting two households and with the even more distressing spectacle of Harriet’s acute decline. Yet for his son, Louis, Berlioz felt an affection that was to grow stronger until it became the very focus of his emotional life.

The two years that elapsed before undertaking another concert tour were unremarkable, especially since he was now 40 and nel mezzo del cammin of his life. They were not unproductive, but were devoted far more to journalism and publication of his music and of his two first literary works than to composition. The Mémoires dwell on his endless obligations as feuilletoniste and on his concerts, the largest of which was on 1 August 1844 as part of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie, with over 1000 performers (fig.5). Four concerts early in 1845 formed a festival promoted by the Théâtre Franconi and were also given with large orchestra and chorus. From this period originates Berlioz’s unfortunate reputation as a noisy composer, and the cartoonists were not slow to exploit the image (fig.6). The finest composition of this period is the Corsaire overture, sketched in Nice immediately after the exertions of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie in 1844 and given at first with the title La tour de Nice. The broad and majestic Hymne à la France also dates from this year. Earlier he had arranged parts of his opera Benvenuto Cellini into a brilliant overture, Le carnaval romain, played for the first time on 3 February 1844, and an arrangement of Leopold de Meyer’s Marche marocaine had a notable success a year later. He saw both the Symphonie fantastique and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale through the press at this time.

In 1845 began a more intensive and varied succession of concert tours. The first was to Marseilles and Lyons, followed by a visit to Bonn for the Beethoven festival organized by Liszt and attended by leading musicians from all over Europe and a number of crowned heads. There followed a lengthy tour of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary that brought his name and music even more decisively into the forefront of European attention. Once again he recounted the details of his travels in the Journal des débats two years later and subsequently in his Mémoires. His itinerary was as follows: by carriage to Linz and thence by steamer to Vienna, where he stayed over two months and gave five concerts. He added two new songs to his repertory, Zaïdefor soprano and Le chasseur danois for bass, and his concerts, which included at least parts of all his major works to date, were a ‘grandissime succès’. One concert was devoted to a complete performance of Roméo et Juliette, and he had no need to exaggerate his reports of applause and enthusiasm; it was a reception entirely different from anything he had ever experienced in Paris. He then gave three concerts in Prague in as many weeks and then another back in Vienna. In February 1846 he gave three concerts in Pest, including a new arrangement of the Rákóczy March, rapturously received by an audience conscious of its national aspirations. He gave a concert in Breslau, then three more in Prague, where he found the musicians ‘generally speaking the finest in Europe’ and where he enjoyed success and admiration greater even than in Vienna. On his way back to Paris he gave one concert in Brunswick, on 24 April 1846.

Not only had Berlioz won unprecedented laurels and acclaim on this tour: he had also composed the bulk of a large new work, La damnation de Faust. For some years his mind had been turning back to Goethe’s Faust and the settings he had rejected in 1829. A librettist, Almire Gandonnière, supplied some material before his departure from Paris, and Berlioz wrote the rest himself: henceforth he would write all his own major texts. La damnation de Faust was put together in the various cities he stayed in, including Passau, Vienna, Pest, Breslau and Prague. It was completed and orchestrated on his return, although composition was briefly interrupted by the commission of Le chant des chemins de fer for the opening of the Chemin de Fer du Nord at Lille on 14 June 1846, an occasion wittily recounted in Les grotesques de la musique.

The first performance of La damnation de Faust, given on 6 December 1846 at the Opéra-Comique, was a serious reverse, both artistically and financially.

Faust was given twice before a half-empty house. The fashionable Paris audience, the audience which goes to concerts and is supposed to take an interest in music, stayed comfortably at home, as little concerned with my new work as if I had been the obscurest Conservatoire student …. Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference.

Signs of growing philistinism in Paris had been in evidence for some years, but the irony was all the sharper in contrast to the warmth and understanding shown to him abroad. Berlioz had no choice but to continue to till foreign soil and to extend the chronicle of his wanderings to new lands. Two principal nations offered hope, Russia and England, and it was to Russia that he went first, within two months of the Faust fiasco. Altogether he gave five concerts in St Petersburg and one in Moscow, the former including two complete performances of Roméo et Juliette. He now had La damnation de Faust to enrich his repertory, and the first two parts were heard three times in Russia. On his way home he gave a complete performance of Faust in Berlin at the invitation of the King of Prussia. Once again he was able to report, on his return:

great success, great profit, great performances, etc. etc. … France is becoming more and more philistine towards music, and the more I see of foreign lands the less I love my own. Art, in France, is dead; so I must go where it is still to be found. In England apparently there has been a real revolution in the musical consciousness of the nation in the last ten years. We shall see.

So he left Paris once again, reaching London in early November 1847. He had been engaged by Louis Jullien as conductor of the opening season at Drury Lane, and the works in his charge were Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoorand Linda di Chamounix, Balfe’s The Maid of Honour and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The season opened in December, yet within a month Berlioz was sensing alarm at Jullien’s approaching bankruptcy. Jullien had all the bravado and showmanship of the charlatan, and though the opera season ran its full two months Berlioz was never paid. He pinned his hopes, instead, on a concert of his own music, which won many admirers. At the same juncture revolution broke out in Paris, and Berlioz was perhaps thankful to be away from the barricades. He began to piece together his Mémoires and added a preface that despairs of artistic life in France. His one salaried post, as librarian of the Conservatoire, was threatened, and many of his friends were fleeing the Continent to settle in England, chief of them Charles Hallé. Despite Jullien’s failure Berlioz found the English friendly and hospitable and their appetite for music encouraging. A second major concert on 29 June 1848 in Hanover Square Rooms established his reputation, especially in the eyes of the London press, and he contemplated staying if a suitable position were offered to him. Yet he returned to Paris, perhaps because his feuilletons offered him his sole regular income and because it was after all, as he himself ironically noted, his home.

5. 1848–63.

Henceforth Berlioz’s tours to foreign cities were almost all to places he had visited before; his years of first conquest were over. In the space of six years his European fame had flowered and he had, too, published most of his major works (Benvenuto Cellini and Faust were exceptions), making possible the further dissemination of his music. Success abroad went a long way to compensating for failure at home, and he continued to make regular visits to England and Germany for 15 years. The new regime in France made the Romantic heyday seem even more remote, and soon Second Empire tastes were to infiltrate all walks of life. But Berlioz achieved a new lofty detachment based on his powerfully ironic sense of humour and on his deep-rooted faith in classical ideals. One may detect a new repose in his music after 1850, linking him with his adored Gluck and isolating him both from Parisian taste and from the new schools of Liszt and Wagner.

It is not necessary to chronicle every foreign tour of this period. The majority gave him deep satisfaction and showed a genuine understanding in his audiences. The most notable events were in Weimar where Liszt’s position at the Duke of Saxe-Weimar’s court allowed him to promote certain works of Berlioz. In March 1852 Liszt revived Benvenuto Cellini, after which Berlioz, with Liszt’s aid, devised a new version, partly to improve the dramaturgy and partly to meet the demands of German taste. Its success in Weimar and other German cities was lasting. In November 1852 Liszt gave a Berlioz Week, with Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette and two parts of La damnation de Faust, which was later dedicated to Liszt when published in 1854. In reply Liszt dedicated his own Faust Symphony to Berlioz. Further visits by Berlioz to Weimar in 1855 and 1856 were the occasion of discussions in which the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress, urged Berlioz to pursue his dream of a large epic opera based on the Aeneid; it came to fruition in Les Troyens in 1858.

But in London Benvenuto Cellini fared badly when it was performed there, at Covent Garden in June 1853, and was rapidly withdrawn, as it had been in Paris in 1838. This was a single blot on Berlioz’s otherwise happy reception in England in all his five visits. His stay in 1851, as a member of the international jury to examine musical instruments at the Great Exhibition, produced some remarkable impressions in his reports to the Paris press, above all the experience of hearing 6500 children intoning All people that on earth do dwell during the Charity Children’s annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral. Six concerts in Exeter Hall in 1852, in which his own music had relatively little prominence, were ‘an altogether extraordinary success exceeding anything I had had in Russia and Germany’. Two performances of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, in particular, set the seal on his celebrity as a conductor, and contributed to an invitation from the New Philharmonic Society to conduct their 1855 season. Since Wagner was then conducting the old Philharmonic Society it provided an occasion for the two men to meet and to exchange sympathy and encouragement in fuller measure than at any other time in their careers. Subsequently their radically divergent conceptions of music were to bring an estrangement between them. Other foreign visits that Berlioz recalled with satisfaction were to Hanover, Brunswick and Dresden in 1854, to Brussels in 1855, and his regular engagements for the summer season at Baden-Baden. He first conducted there in 1853 and was engaged every year from 1856 to 1863. Bénazet, manager of the casino, ‘let me have everything I could possibly want for the performance of my works. His munificence in this respect has far surpassed anything ever done for me even by those European sovereigns whom I have most reason to be grateful to’. It was Bénazet who commissioned for the Baden-Baden theatre Berlioz’s last work, Béatrice et Bénédict, first performed in 1862.

At home in Paris Berlioz made another determined attempt to win an audience for his music by the formation of a Société Philharmonique, in clear rivalry to the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. This new body gave its first concert on 19 February 1850 with Berlioz as conductor. Despite initial success the society was troubled by internal dissent and by an early shortage of funds, and lasted only until May 1851. But in that period Berlioz had conducted a wide range of music and had introduced some of his own works, notably L’adieu des bergers, later to be the central part of L’enfance du Christ. At its first performance Berlioz attributed it to an imaginary 17th-century composer Pierre Ducré, allowing him to delight in the delusion of his audience. The Société Philharmonique also gave his Requiem in the church of St Eustache. The complete L’enfance du Christ was first heard in Paris on 10 December 1854 having grown from L’adieu des bergers and La fuite en Egypte. Many critics observed a more restrained style in the work, but Berlioz insisted that on the contrary only his subject matter had changed and that his primary stylistic aim, accuracy of expressive content, was still unchanged.

Berlioz’s monumental manner was represented by the Te Deum, composed in 1849, although the conception probably goes back three or four years earlier. He found no opportunity to perform this work until April 1855, when it was included in the large-scale events promoted in connection with the Exposition Universelle. By that time he had added to its two choruses a part for large children’s choir, inspired by his experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1851. In November 1855 Berlioz conducted three big concerts in the Palais de l’Industrie for the closing events of the Exposition. Throughout the 1840s and most of the 1850s the Société des Concerts, Paris’s longest-established and most regular concert-giving body, continued to ignore Berlioz’s music completely.

His father died in 1848. Berlioz had felt deeply attached to him, the more since the strain in their relationship during Berlioz’s first days in Paris had passed, and he felt the loss keenly. He remained close to both his surviving sisters, Nanci and Adèle, who died in 1850 and 1860 respectively – and their families. He inherited a modest income from his father’s estate, which relieved some of his financial burdens. Harriet Smithson died in 1854 after four years of severe paralysis. Berlioz wrote movingly of her and of the failure of their happiness in the Mémoires; he never forgot the impression she first made on him or the style of dramatic interpretation that coloured his own conception of Shakespeare.

He married Marie Recio seven months later, a natural step after their 12-year association, and though she had not sung in public for some years he still had to suffer the damage done by her spiteful attitude to other musicians, Wagner especially. With her came her Spanish mother who outlived them both and cared generously for Berlioz in his last years. His son Louis, now in the French navy, caused Berlioz many an anxiety after a difficult adolescence, but gradually there developed a strong bond between them. In Louis’ words: ‘The thread of my life is but the extensions of my father’s. When it is cut, both lives will end’. Louis saw action in the Crimean War and in the Baltic. In 1867, when captain of a merchant ship plying between France and Mexico, he died of yellow fever in Havana, one of the severest blows Berlioz ever had to suffer and a direct contribution to his own final decline. In Louis’ love of travel and the sea Berlioz saw a reflection of his own lifelong, idealized passion for distant lands, inextricably interwoven with his dream of a land where art and music enjoyed unfettered cultivation, where the frustrations and miseries of Paris were not to be found. In 1862, in response, Louis came to love and admire his father’s music.

Berlioz’s compositions in the 1840s were haphazard in origin and frequency, partly because of his diversion of energy to travel, conducting, proof correction and journalism. In the following decade these diversions were no less pressing but he now found the mental and spiritual calm to produce a series of masterpieces that shine nobly through the day-to-day battles he was obliged to fight. After the Te Deum of 1849, his main productions were L’enfance du Christ, composed to his own text mostly in 1854. Another work of 1854 is the cantata in honour of the Emperor L'impériale, played at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Early in 1856 he orchestrated most of Les nuits d’été (Absence had been orchestrated in 1843) for publication in Winterthur, though he never heard more than Absence and Le spectre de la rose in orchestral form. At that point (April 1856) he yielded to his desire to compose a vast epic opera based on the second and fourth books of Virgil’s Aeneid. The idea had been in his mind for five years or so, and had doubtless haunted him since childhood when he wept at his father’s readings of Virgil. His love of Virgil had stayed with him even through the blinding discoveries of Shakespeare and Goethe and came back to him with irresistible force in his maturity. His muse was now in full flight, for long disillusionment with the world seems to have fanned the creative flame even though he knew what difficulties he would face if it were ever written. By abandoning most of his concert tours and much of his journalism he did in fact complete Les Troyens, words and music, in less than two years, with small additions and revisions to be made at intervals over the next five. It is a five-act grand opera in the French classical tradition, on the same approximate scale as Meyerbeer’s operas and many others that enjoyed regular performance in Paris, and composed with the Opéra in mind. Yet Berlioz’s chances of securing a production in which his work would receive attention at all close to its merits were negligible from the first – a fact he was fully aware of.

The following five years were devoted to a series of frustrating attempts to see Les Troyens on the stage. Berlioz’s enemies in the press were quick to exaggerate its length and its demands, and the failure of Benvenuto Cellini was still remembered at the Opéra. He gave numerous readings of the poem to carefully chosen audiences; he vainly sought the patronage of Napoleon III and his ministers. Eventually, in 1860, he accepted an offer to mount it at the Théâtre Lyrique, an independent theatre run by the enterprising impresario Carvalho, while Wagner’s Tannhäuserwas staged with unprecedented extravagance at the Opéra. Its failure in March 1861 was bitterly ironic for Berlioz, and it created an opportunity for Les Troyens to be accepted at the Opéra. This agreement fell through early in 1863 so turning Berlioz back to the Théâtre-Lyrique, where, in order to see any production at all, he was forced to divide his opera into two parts, Acts 1 and 2 becoming La prise de Troie and Acts 3 to 5 Les Troyens à Carthage. The second part was first performed on 4 November 1863, with Mme Charton-Demeur as Dido. It was an unequivocal success, warmly admired by the majority of the press and running to 21 performances. Berlioz was proud and touched, but gradually embittered, then enraged, to see cuts made by Carvalho at subsequent performances (the ‘Chasse royale et orage’, for example, was played on the first night only) and to see the printed vocal scores being mutilated to match the performances ‘like the carcass of a calf on a butcher’s stall’. Of La prise de Troie Berlioz only ever heard one extract sung at Baden-Baden in 1859.

6. 1863–9.

After 1863 Berlioz discouraged revivals of Les Troyens and none took place for nearly 30 years. The financial fruits were compensation for his artistic despair, for he was enabled at long last to resign his duties as critic of the Journal des débats. He retired from composition and criticism, and allowed his spirit to be overcome by a despair and disillusionment of appalling intensity. He became morbidly conscious of death, especially since the loss of two sisters and two wives, and as more and more of his contemporaries and friends disappeared he haunted the cemeteries. In 1864 he wrote:

I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions. My son is almost always far away from me. I am alone. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: ‘When you will’. Why does he delay?

And yet he lived another five years, suffering acutely from a form of intestinal neuralgia that had first appeared some ten years before and had reached severe proportions by 1859. Physical pain was never far away in the last 15 years, accentuated by his spiritual isolation. He depended more and more on a diminishing circle of friends for comfort, especially Stephen Heller, the Damckes, the Massarts and Edouard Alexandre. From time to time he would give readings of Shakespeare; but music he usually avoided. He went to few public concerts or operas, making an exception for Don Giovanni, for Pasdeloup’s concerts where Les francs-juges overture and parts of Les Troyenswere played, and for the Opéra’s revival of Gluck’s Alcestein October 1866. He completed and revised his Mémoires. 1200 copies were printed in 1865 and stored in his office in the Conservatoire. A few close friends received copies; the rest were to be published after his death.

The final pages of the Mémoires reveal the single ray of light that penetrated an otherwise all-pervading gloom. In 1864 he felt an overwhelming impulse to revisit the scenes of his childhood, especially Meylan, near Grenoble, where his adored Estelle had lived as a child. He had made an earlier pilgrimage and even written to her in 1848, but this time, having discovered that she was living in Lyons, he wrote again and paid her a visit. She was now a widow of 67, he 60, yet the memory of their childhood encounter was fully alive in his mind. ‘My soul leapt out towards its idol the moment I saw her, as if she had still been in the splendour of her beauty.’ Berlioz was enraptured to be in her presence, to kiss her hand, and, next day, to receive even a brief and formal letter from her. He sought permission to write to her, and for the rest of his life he did, nearly every month. He visited her the following three summers in Geneva, where she went to live with her son. She accepted his attentions with calmness and incomprehension turning gradually to understanding and sympathy. The full extent of his dependence on this glimpse of his own childhood cannot be measured: not for the first time he had fallen in love with an idealized vision, reality transfigured by imagination.

Berlioz had not wholly given up conducting his own music abroad. In December 1866 he accepted an invitation to conduct La damnation de Faust in Vienna. Hanslick, who had admired Roméo et Juliette in 1846, castigated the music but in general its success was immense. Age, illness and his poor knowledge of German now impaired his conducting skill, but he was lionized by Cornelius and Herbeck and fêted as he had been in 1845. The following February he conducted Harold en Italie and parts of Béatrice et Bénédict in Cologne as the guest of his old friend from 1830, Ferdinand Hiller. The final burst of energy was his acceptance of an invitation to St Petersburg in November 1867, shortly after the death of Louis. Perhaps he thought he would find renewal and escape. Instead the journey and the concerts – six in St Petersburg and two in Moscow – shattered his remaining strength. Not even the instinctively sympathetic response from the emerging school of Russian composers or the overwhelming public applause staved off a sense of impending collapse. He went directly to Nice, scene of happy memories of 1831 and 1844, and Monte Carlo. Twice, walking by the sea, he fell and was picked up dazed and bleeding. He returned to Paris where he had 12 months to live, now little more than a shadow, dragging out what had come to seem a meaningless existence. He died on 8 March 1869, having been cared for by his mother-in-law and visited by his remaining friends, the Damckes, Saint-Saëns and Reyer. He was buried in the Cimetière du Nord, Montmartre, on 11 March 1869.

7. Character and personality.

Berlioz was widely misunderstood in his own lifetime – and has been since – in spite of the clarity of his ideas and the abundance of his writings. Few composers have explained at such length or with such cogency the nature of their own inspiration, its sources, its aims or its meaning. In Berlioz certain qualities stand out, and chief among them must be cited his consistency and his sincerity. There was no dividing line between his life and his music; the same principles governed both and each was a reflection of the other. Few composers have woven their own personality so tightly into their music, so that all his works reflect something in himself expressed through poetry, literature, religion or drama. Expression is the key. Music was not for him an autonomous art obeying internal rules and exploiting internal relations. It was an integral part of emotional and spiritual life, reflecting the teeming motion of the mind, the explosive diversity of life. Just as Shakespeare had laid bare every facet of human nature in poetry and drama, so Berlioz aspired to chart his own experience in music. Of course, not all his music is autobiographical, but he remained steadfast to an ideal of truthfulness of artistic expression from the first note he wrote to the last.

Sincerity as burning as this meant an unwillingness to compromise. He was not a diplomat, and he often failed to win influential friends by being outspoken at unguarded moments. Cherubini and Fétis, for example, might have been won over to his cause had he been less severe on their work to their faces. Many acquaintances found him embarrassingly forthright in his views. ‘Few were at ease in his company’, wrote Legouvé; and his sister Nanci said as early as 1824 that with him everything was open and spontaneous and that he never made the slightest effort to conceal the vagaries of his mood. He was subject to violent emotional change, from enthusiasm to misery, and these are reflected in his music. The Symphonie fantastiquespecifically depicts the vague des passions of the young artist. Enthusiasm was to be seen in his adoration of Harriet Smithson, Shakespeare, Gluck, Goethe and Virgil; misery in his descriptions of the ‘spleen’ and the ‘mal d’isolement’ that afflicted him throughout his life, increasingly so as his isolation became more real and more intense. His dislikes, for example of inexpressive music, ornamented singing and of commercially minded theatre managers, were as intense as his enthusiasms and as consistently articulated. Sometimes he had to conceal his feelings, when writing public notices of works by respected contemporaries, a cause of bitterness about the critic’s métier that gradually intensified.

Another cause was the failure of the world to live up to his ideals, and not just its failure, its clear determination to dissociate itself from them. He was a passionate idealist, whose conception of what might be achieved in music drew him on even when external discouragement was most intense: in the treatise on orchestration he described an ideal orchestra; in Les soirées de l’orchestre he described an ideal city, Euphonia, where everything is arranged to the service of art and where commerce has no place. He expected his audience to have an imagination as vivid as his own, he made no rigid frontier between the kingdoms of imagination and reality. His lofty conception of the role of art and music presupposed an essentially aristocratic view that music was not for the many; it was a highly sophisticated form of expression (sometimes disarmingly simple in its outward form) that required the highest degree of imagination and intellect for its proper appreciation. He spoke as an artist to men of kindred capacity. The morons, fools, parasites and tune-mongers who made fortunes out of music he bitterly despised.

One quality saved him from morbid self-pity and from the tediousness of rapture: he had the sharpest sense of the ridiculous in human behaviour. His writings win us by their humour as much as by their style and their ideas. His conversation was laced with puns. His humour was largely based on the ironic, on the startling contrast between what is and what might be, but also on the foibles of singers, pianists and audiences. Contrast and diversity were to be cultivated as well as to be laughed at, so that the juxtaposition of passion and mockery in his writing is equally as characteristic as the simultaneous combination of opposites to be found so often in his music.

His intellect embraced the broad movement of ideas that Romanticism swept into currency and can be seen as a powerful expression of them. Yet some tastes passed him by, notably the nostalgia for things medieval so widespread in his time. He had little taste for painting and had, as he confessed, ‘little feeling for conventional beauty’. He knew classical Latin and French literature well and was given to quoting it at all times, especially to adapting quotations slightly to suit his purpose. His favourite authors remained with him through life and provided imaginative worlds for his fantasy.

Berlioz was no philosopher, since life, for all his idealism, was a practical matter whose problems had to be confronted by action not theories. The business of composing and performing music, educating listeners and guiding taste was a daily obligation from which he drew such evidence as he needed to reinforce his views on the proper place of music in culture. His historical sense did not extend to an appreciation of music much earlier than that of Gluck, and most of Bach and Handel left him cold.

Although he falls clearly into the French tradition, from Rameau and Gluck through Gossec, Méhul and Le Sueur, he had no nationalist preconceptions whatever. His distaste for Italian music stemmed purely from its composers’ higher regard for melody and vocalization than for expression. Because Germany, England, Bohemia and Russia applauded his music he was prepared to regard these as musical nations without going so far as to presume that their compositions were inherently superior to those of any other country. He was as happy to work with foreign musicians as with French, though he never fully mastered English and spoke little German. Many of the friends he valued most highly were foreigners, such as Hiller, Heller, Ernst, Davison, Damcke, Hallé and of course Liszt.

Slowly the youthful idealist changed into the aloof, dignified but weary figure of later years. His working life was characterized by tireless energy and the capacity to turn emotional stress into creative form. He was driven by the intensity of his emotional being, with nerves that responded more sharply than those of his fellow men. His life was a continuous search for an unattainable tranquillity, not the tranquillity of idleness or repose but the peace of mind that would allow him to work rather than labour, write music rather than prose, and grapple with his leaping imagination rather than with the petty squabbles of everyday life.

8. Introduction to the works.

It is fundamental to the understanding of Berlioz’s music to recognize that for him there existed rigid categories of neither form nor medium. Opera, cantata, song and symphony all merge imperceptibly one into another and overlap constantly. The important criterion is the matching of means to expressive ends. Heterogeneous elements are to be found in all his larger works and some, like Lélio or the Huit scènes de Faust, have unity of subject matter and artistic purpose, not unity of musical means. He did not refuse to adopt conventional means in order to be iconoclastic; he felt impelled to give every idea its proper musical setting according to its literary, pictorial or suggestive content, and this led him to construct new forms and to throw musical genres into new relationships.

Apart from two youthful quintets and a sextet, all now lost, Berlioz composed no chamber music. He wrote nothing for the most widely cultivated instrument of his time, the solo piano. He was not a pianist and his only solo keyboard music is a group of three short harmonium pieces commissioned in 1844. His chosen medium was the orchestra, expanding in his time with new speed and momentum. The best of his songs, though all composed with piano accompaniment, were eventually orchestrated. He was not, like Chopin or Schumann, a miniaturist by habit, yet the smallest of his works are little more than albumleaves, while the largest are conceived on a huge scale.

9. Operas.

Berlioz completed five operas, all different in style and dramatic stance. He contemplated or sketched many more and had at least one operatic project in mind at nearly all points of his working life. Opera was the medium of the predecessors he admired most – Gluck, Spontini, Méhul, Le Sueur, Weber – and was the most assiduously cultivated form of music in Paris during his first years there. Success in opera was also, in Berlioz’s time, the principal yardstick by which a composer was measured and the surest way to financial reward. Dramatic expression is the very pulse of his music, so that operatic elements are to be observed in many of his non-operatic works, especially the symphonies and larger choral works.

Estelle et Némorin, composed in 1823, has not survived. There followed Les francs-juges, composed to a libretto by Humbert Ferrand in 1826. The secret tribunals of the Black Forest in the later Middle Ages provided a background for a sombre story of heroism and virtue in the face of oppression and tyranny. Its colour came from Méhul and more especially Weber, whose Freischütz had been heard in Paris two years before. Six complete numbers and the overture survive, of which the latter is a bold and imaginative piece of orchestral writing, especially since Beethoven was still unknown to him. The first version, probably consisting of 14 numbers, was superseded in 1829 by a longer version, which probably included the Marche des gardes, later to become the ‘Marche au supplice’ in the Symphonie fantastique. But though Berlioz was soon pillaging the score, he made a further attempt to recast it in 1833 into a one-act intermezzo Le cri de guerre de Brisgau. His failure with this reflects the enormous strides his music was taking during these years and his desire to tackle new material. Consider his remark in 1828 that he had two operas in hand for the Opéra-Comique, a third for the Opéra and a fourth planned on the English play Virginius. Projects on Robin Hood and Atala perhaps never even reached libretto stage. In 1833 he considered Much Ado about Nothing for the Opéra-Comique, the theatre for which Benvenuto Cellini was destined when first drafted.

This opera, when finally presented in 1838, was utterly different from Les francs-juges in pace, colour, subject matter and dramaturgy, and was very different too from any other opera to be seen in Paris in that decade, comic or serious. It combined elements of both, perhaps accidentally, because the work, originally intended for the Opéra-Comique, had been upgraded for the Opéra. Yet the mixture of genres was utterly characteristic of Berlioz, with the tone veering from knockabout comedy to serious reflection on the duties and priorities of the artist. One reason for its poor reception was the dazzling brilliance of the music, its orchestral virtuosity and rhythmic élan, shifting in metre and colour with kaleidoscopic suddenness. Neither players, singers nor audience could grasp an opera so teeming with life when the more stolid manner of Meyerbeer was fashionable. The libretto has weaknesses, especially in the character of the Pope (changed to Cardinal on the order of the censor), and is diffuse in the last act; it was these problems that Berlioz attempted to solve in 1852 when he recast the work for Weimar. But at the same time other dramatic inconsistencies were created and some of the vitality of the 1838 version was sacrificed. In his own words, Benvenuto Cellini ‘contains a variety of ideas, an energy and exuberance and a brilliance of colour such as I may perhaps never find again’.

Berlioz made some sketches on Ballanche’s Erigone, an ‘intermède antique’ in the period 1838–40; he also considered a collaboration with Frédéric Soulié, and finally began work on La nonne sanglante by Scribe, a concession to the Opéra’s established tastes. The libretto, based on Lewis’s The Monk, recalls the sombre tones of Les francs-juges and the music survives, likewise, only in fragmentary form, for Berlioz abandoned composition and negotiation with the Opéra in 1847. What music survives is undistinguished, hampered by Scribe’s lumbering metres, though sometimes prophetic of the restrained accents of Les Troyens.

By 1850 Berlioz seems for the first time to have abandoned thoughts of opera. Nonetheless, involuntarily, the dream of a grand opera on Virgil’s Aeneid began then to impose itself. He resisted it, but in 1856, urged by the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, decided to yield. He wrote his own libretto, building Acts 1 and 2 around the tragedy of Cassandra in Troy and Acts 3, 4 and 5 around the tragedy of Dido in Carthage, linked in the character of Aeneas and the fateful destiny of the Trojan people. It is a truly epic opera, grand in conception and execution, with equal claim to be Berlioz’s masterpiece as to be one of the towering achievements of 19th-century music. In it all aspects of Berlioz’s art converge: the monumental and the intimate, the symphonic and the operatic, the decorative and the solemn. Its great scenes include the enormous finale of Act 1 where Cassandra’s wails of doom contrast starkly with the Trojans’ fatal faith in the Wooden Horse; the Royal Hunt and Storm, where the coming together of Dido and Aeneas is enacted in an elaborate and symbolic mime; the sublime sequence of quintet, septet and duet in the garden scene that follows; the final departure of Aeneas and Dido’s immolation, and much else. The opera belongs to a long tradition that embraces Rameau, Gluck, Spontini and Meyerbeer, and was anything but revolutionary. Yet the classical poise and sense of tragedy is imbued with a warmth of feeling and passion that only a Romantic composer could attain, ‘Virgil Shakespeareanized’, he called it.

His last opera was an opéra comique, composed almost as relaxation after the travail of Les Troyens. Béatrice et Bénédictwas begun in 1860 and first performed in 1862. Berlioz made his own libretto from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, adapting much of the original text for his dialogue. ‘It is a caprice written with a point of a needle’, in his own words, a fair description of the light textures and disarming immediacy of the work. There are moments of sterner feeling, as in Beatrice’s air in Act 2, ensembles of almost Mozartian grace, and a heaven-sent tranquillity in the Duo-Nocturne that concludes the first act. As an interpolation on Shakespeare, Berlioz invented a comic character Somarone, in which the archetypal pedantic Kapellmeister is gently satirized.

10. Symphonies.

It was Berlioz’s discovery of Beethoven that led him to compose symphonies, yet his treatment of music as an expressive and dramatic art made his symphonies into something other than the pure instrumental music that many Germans saw in Beethoven. They stretch the meaning of the word to new limits. The first, the Symphonie fantastique of 1830, is a five-movement symphony with a slow introduction to the first-movement Allegro, a waltz, a slow movement, a march and a finale, the whole unified by a theme that recurs, transformed, in each movement. But it is, more importantly, an ‘Episode in an Artist’s Life’, set out in detail in the programme, and the recurrent theme is an idée fixe representing the artist’s obsession with the woman he adores. There is no mistaking the artist or the woman as Berlioz and Harriet Smithson, and the programme spells out his dreams and fantasies in dramatic form. The slow introduction, for example, portrays the ‘flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows he experienced before he saw his beloved’; the Allegro describes ‘the volcanic love that his beloved suddenly inspired in him’. The last two movements represent an opium dream in which he dreams he has murdered his beloved and is led to execution, and in the finale he finds himself at a macabre and turbulent witches’ sabbath. Later (in 1855) the programme was altered to interpret the whole drama as a dream, not just the end. Berlioz devoted much time and attention to the programme, revised it frequently and generally issued it as a pamphlet when the symphony was performed. Its vivid action is matched by music of unprecedented boldness and originality. The orchestration adopts many practices previously associated with opera, such as the use of harps, bells and english horn. Berlioz used the E clarinet for the shrieking presentation of the beloved’s image in the finale, and brought together combinations and distributions (for example the multi-divisi strings) of extreme boldness; four timpani are used simultaneously to represent distant thunder, and the brass is given a distinctive new role. The novelty and defiant youthfulness of the score have never faded, and the musical and thematic invention is inextricably linked with Berlioz’s conception of a new world of colour and dramatic content. At one stroke the symphony as a form became a fully-fledged medium of explicit drama.

Harold en Italie, the symphony that followed in 1834, has a prominent concerto element, with a solo viola impersonating the character of Harold, a responsive and passionate observer of scenes of Italian life. The drama is more episodic and less cogent than in the Symphonie fantastique and the theme that here represents Harold recurs unchanged in each movement. There is a direct link with Beethoven in the last movement (‘Orgie de brigands’), which is introduced by brief reminiscences of the first three movements. There are picturesque echoes of Italy in the ‘Marche des pèlerins’, with its tolling bells and chanting pilgrims, and the serenade of the Abruzzi mountaineer. The symphonic idea is retained with limited acceptance of the principles of sonata form in the first movement and by the balance of the four movements. The music is also enriched by an obsession with rhythmic vitality and rhythmic experiment, looking forward to the impulsive vivacity of Benvenuto Cellini.

Berlioz’s third symphony was Roméo et Juliette (1839), sub-titled ‘symphonie dramatique’. It moves well away from the purely symphonic realm towards that of opera. Yet Berlioz was specifically not writing an opera, and he kept the idea of symphonic construction closely in mind. He was able, consequently, to express the main portions of the drama in instrumental music, while setting the more expository and narrative sections for voices. The three principal instrumental sections – ‘Fête chez Capulet’, ‘Scene d’amour’ and ‘La reine Mab’ – can be seen as first movement, slow movement and scherzo, with elaborate vocal introduction and finale. The introduction sets the scene with warring Montagues and Capulets, and outlines the coming drama in choral recitative, with foretastes of later movements and solo sections for tenor and contralto. The text is by Emile Deschamps, based on Garrick’s version of Shakespeare (which is what Berlioz saw at the Odéon in 1827). The instrumental sections intensify the drama, since instruments have a more powerful capacity for deep expression than voices, as Berlioz explained in his preface. The finale is a complex sequence of movements, scarcely symphonic in the traditional sense, but drawing the listener out from the inner drama to the world of action and resolution. Juliet’s funeral procession, the scene where Romeo comes to the vault, the death of the lovers, Friar Laurence’s explanation and the reconciliation of the two families are enacted in music mostly of operatic cast, especially the final Oath, which can match anything in Guillaume Tell or Les Huguenots for grandeur, and was later echoed in Tannhäuser.

The Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) is an occasional piece for a solemn public ceremony, scored for large military band, and was probably put together from earlier drafts. This is definitely so for the second movement ‘Oraison funèbre’, reworked as a trombone solo from a scene in Les francs-juges. The first movement, ‘Marche funèbre’, is one of Berlioz’s most powerful movements, immense in span and dynamic contrast, with an overwhelming sense of melancholy projected on to a public, even popular level. The finale, ‘Apothéose’, is a triumphal march. Of particular interest is the fact that the three movements are in different keys, F minor, G major and B respectively. In 1842 Berlioz added parts for optional string orchestra and later also for chorus, with a patriotic text by Antony Deschamps.

In his Mémoires Berlioz spoke of a symphony he dreamed of writing in the 1850s, though because of difficulties of time, expense and performance he decided not to commit it to paper, a tragic loss perhaps, but an indication too that he had still not lost sight of the symphonic mode. Yet it is easier to see the symphonic impulse expanding vastly into Roméo et Juliette and thence further towards dramatic expression in La damnation de Faust and L’enfance du Christ.

11. Larger dramatic choral works.

La damnation de Faust was described by Berlioz at the time of composition as an ‘opéra de concert’ but was finally issued as a ‘légende dramatique’ (fig.12). In 1847, when there was a proposal to turn it into an opera, it became clear that Berlioz would have wanted to revise it considerably for the stage. Its effect rests too strongly on the imagination to be directly transferable to the theatre, and the same can be said of Roméo et Juliette and L’enfance du Christ. Transformations of time and place are sometimes dramatically sequential and sometimes kaleidoscopic, since Berlioz used only those parts of Goethe’s Faust that met his needs. Taking the rejected Huit scènes de Faust of 1828–9 and inserting his rousing arrangement of the Rákóczy March at the end of the first part, he expanded the work into a broad conception of Faust as an aspiring, yearning soul, overwhelmed by the immensity of nature, with a heart sensitive to emotion at many levels, yet ultimately damned by his inner weaknesses, which Mephistopheles both represents and exploits. The nature music is particularly striking, in Faust’s welcome of spring at the beginning and the invocation early in the fourth part, where harmony and orchestration display Berlioz’s genius for the unexpected within the span of a huge melodic line. The chorus plays a large part, as penitents, carousers, sylphs, soldiers, students and as the occupants of both Heaven and Hell. The finale of the second part, combining the songs of both soldiers and students, is a tour de force; and the Pandaemonium, at the climax of the precipitous ‘Course à l’abîme’, is an apocalyptic scene worthy of John Martin (a comparison first made of Berlioz’s music by Heine) or even Blake.

L’enfance du Christ (1850–54) shows the same mixture of dramatic action and philosophic reflection as La damnation de Faust, though Berlioz still refrained from calling it an oratorio. It is constructed in three parts, ‘Le songe d’Hérode’, ‘La fuite en Egypte’ and ‘L’arrivée à Saïs’, the second of which was composed first. Like La damnation de Faust, the score contains stage directions to explain (to the imagination) the movement of events. The third part, with the Ishmaelites’ welcome of the holy family, is the most immediately theatrical. In the first part Berlioz’s concern was for the tormented soul of Herod, disturbed in his dreams yet at the mercy of his soothsayers; then, with a clear change of mood, the listener is taken to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and the angels’ warning. The second part is seen largely through the eyes of the narrator, with instrumental music in the overture setting the tone and distancing the action. At the end, when the Saviour has found repose, the music draws away from the portrayal of action to a serenely contemplative farewell, ‘O mon âme’, the nearest Berlioz ever came to a devoutly Christian mode of expression.

Perhaps these dramatic choral works would never have existed if Berlioz had won early success and acceptance in opera. Yet they constitute a heterogeneous genre entirely characteristic of his faith in expressive truth as superior to consistency of method. They left their mark, too, on the dramatic style of Les Troyens into which his symphonic, choral and dramatic impulses were then all compulsively channelled.

12. Other choral works.

Berlioz was not an orthodox Christian, yet he set sacred texts with a strong personal vision that has deep religious roots. The Messe solennelle of 1824 was partially modelled on the masses of Cherubini and Le Sueur, but Berlioz's distinctive tone is already marked, especially in the forceful close of the Kyrie, the closing ‘Domine salvum’, and the powerful ‘Resurrexit’. Although Berlioz turned against the work after its second performance in 1827 and claimed to have destroyed it, it was discovered in an Antwerp church in 1992, revealing that many later works, including the Symphonie fantastique, the Requiem and the Te Deum, borrowed or adapted passages from it. The Requiem (1837) and the Te Deum (1849) form a pair of monumental sacred works that exploit Berlioz’s sense of numinous space on a grand scale. Space and direction are essential elements in both. In the Requiem the large orchestra is supplemented by eight pairs of timpani and four groups of additional brass placed at the four corners of chorus and orchestra. These large forces are used for the ‘Tuba mirum’, where Berlioz’s vision of the Last Judgment is realized with overwhelming vividness and force, and there is no doubt that the music requires a building (such as the church of Les Invalides, for which it was composed) that can do justice to its sonority. This broad ceremonial style was a legacy from the outdoor music of the French Revolution, when immense forces of wind and percussion were assembled for public occasions; yet Berlioz was careful to contrast the great with the small. The ‘Quid sum miser’ and the ‘Quaerens me’ form a strikingly restrained contrast with the outbursts on either side of them. The Offertorium, adapted from the Kyrie of the 1824 Mass, is written in a subdued contrapuntal style, with the chorus intoning two alternating notes over a winding orchestral accompaniment. The Sanctus is a trifle worldly in its sweetness, and the ‘Hostias’ exploits the extraordinary sonority of high flutes and low trombones in combination. The Requiem is expressive without being theatrical, solemn without being sanctimonious. It marks an extreme point in his music, where Shakespearean and literary ideas have no place; all is subsumed in a vision of humanity in collective obeisance to the presence of God.

The feeling for space in the Te Deum is expressed by the contrast of the organ with the orchestra and chorus. The organ should be at a distance from the rest and is not often heard simultaneously with them; the opening chords particularly exploit the directional idea. There are parts for two choruses and an extra body of 600 children’s voices, in a manner similar to the ripieno line in the opening chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Counterpoint again plays an important part in the formulation of the style. The ‘Dignare’ is constructed on a highly original device of moving the bass line through a succession of pedals, a 3rd apart, and Berlioz’s technique of harmonic variation is much in evidence. The full forces produce moments of great dynamic impact, especially in the ‘Tibi omnes’ at the conclusion of each of three verses, and in the ‘Judex crederis’, described by Berlioz as ‘Babylonian, Ninevitish’, perhaps the most immense movement of his entire output: climax breaks over climax like an unending sea. The last movement is an orchestral march for the presentation of the colours, enacted at St Eustache in 1855, and an additional movement, never used by Berlioz, is a ‘Prélude’ designed for military occasions only. A tenor soloist sings in the ‘Te ergo quaesumus’, a movement retrieved from the Agnus Dei of the 1824 Mass.

There are other choral works in which the same monumental style is applied on a narrower scale, for example the Hymne à la France (1844) and L’impériale (1854) whose titles betray their patriotic origins. The Chant sacré (1829) and the Méditation religieuse (1831), both settings of Thomas Moore, can be coupled as contemplative works, short but broad in style. The Scène héroïque(1825–6) and Le cinq mai (1835) are more narrative, like dramatic cantatas. Sara la baigneuse, to a text by Victor Hugo, especially in its version for three separate choruses and small orchestra, is exquisitely poetic, one of Berlioz’s most delicate and refined compositions. A number of choral works were composed with piano accompaniment, and the best of these are Le ballet des ombres (1828), a remarkably daring evocation of nocturnal spirits, and the Chant guerrier and the Chanson à boire, both in the Irlande collection of 1829, both exploiting expressive contrast as an element of form.

13. Songs.

Some of Berlioz’s pieces, for example Hélène or Sara la baigneuse, exist in versions for four voices with accompaniment. There are songs for two or for three voices, so that the same phenomenon of a continuum between genres can be observed between choral music and songs. La belle voyageuse is a solo song with piano or orchestra, or a chorus for women’s voices and orchestra; La mort d’Ophélie is a solo song with piano or for women’s chorus with either piano or orchestral accompaniment. Berlioz made adaptations according to need wherever the expressive content of the piece allowed. A number of songs were orchestrated, and some, like Zaïde and Le chasseur danois, came into being in both piano and orchestral versions at the same time.

As a songwriter Berlioz owed much to the tradition of the French romance, with which he was familiar from childhood, and many of his earliest compositions were in this mould. It is interesting to see how La captive, composed in Italy in 1832, was originally a strophic song relying on an exquisitely shaped melody, but was later revised by Berlioz into a through-composed song with orchestral accompaniment, a fully elaborated work in his most expressive style. Even as late as 1850 he was publishing songs like Le matin and Petit oiseau (two settings of the same text) in an unambitious form with simple piano accompaniment. One of his highest achievements in song is the Elégie en prose, the last of the Irlande set of 1829, a fervent outpouring of Romantic feeling. Berlioz wrote of it: ‘I think I have rarely found a melody of such truth and poignancy, steeped in such a surge of sombre harmony’. But this is overshadowed by the Nuits d’été of 1840–41, six settings of poems by Gautier, originally composed for single voice with piano, but orchestrated with some transpositions for different voices in 1856. One should be wary of treating the set as a strict cycle and Berlioz never performed it as such, but it has a wholeness of mood and feeling and a satisfying emotional balance. The outgoing mood of Villanelle and L’île inconnue frame more sombre reflections on disappointed love, the longing of Absence and the icy serenity of Au cimetière. The orchestral versions are executed with supreme skill, with light yet richly coloured textures throughout.

14. Orchestral music.

Besides the symphonies, Berlioz’s orchestral output included five concert overtures that reflected Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s treatment of the overture as an independent form. Waverley (1828) and Rob-Roy (1831) are based on Scott novels without any supposition that they preface an opera. In Waverley the contrast of slow introduction with vigorous Allegro is an illustration of the couplet:

Dreams of love and Lady’s charms
Give place to honour and to arms.

It is one of the few works where Berlioz shows any affinity with the Italian style, but it is also experimental in feeling, especially at the beginning of the coda. Rob-Roy was rejected by the composer as ‘long and diffuse’, which is a fair summary, and two themes were re-used in Harold en Italie. Le roi Lear, composed just before it, displays, in contrast, great concentration of energy; it is not a retelling of the play but a general representation of its mood, with events and characters worked into a logical musical sequence. Its composition was a spontaneous response to first reading the play and has some of the energetic turbulence of the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique. The overture to Benvenuto Cellini established a formal pattern of brief allegro before a slow section returning to the main allegro, and Berlioz used this in all his subsequent overtures, Le carnaval romain, Le corsaire and Béatrice et Bénédict. Le carnaval romain is perhaps Berlioz’s most extrovert and brilliant orchestral work, whose pace and glitter have long established it as a favourite concert showpiece. Le corsaire has a similar swiftness and brilliance, and a beautifully expressive slow section recalled, at fast tempo, in the Allegro. The music spells out the atmosphere and associations of the sea, in particular the Mediterranean, which provided Berlioz’s first experience of wind and rigging in combat.

The Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet is a neglected work, but one of his finest. There is a part for wordless chorus intoning a lugubrious ‘Ah!’ from time to time, but the burden of a long relentless climax is carried by an orchestral ostinato and a melody of hollow solemnity, the feeling so clearly and so often inspired in Berlioz by his experience of the play. The closing pages, where he used chromatic harmony to fine effect, are as affecting as Dido’s final scene in Les Troyens and seem to have been conceived on an equivalently broad scale.

Another solitary orchestral work is Rêverie et caprice for solo violin with piano or orchestral accompaniment; its restless movement, alternating rapidly between slow and fast tempos, is explained by its origin as a solo air from Benvenuto Cellini, but it is hardly satisfactory as a violin showpiece and has too fragmentary a construction to be convincing as instrumental music.

15. Other works.

Only with Berlioz’s attitude to the mixing of opposites could a work like Lélio have come into being, for its six musical numbers are, if seen as separate entities, wholly diverse in subject and treatment. Yet the whole is given a sense of order by its literary format and by the vivid links with Berlioz’s personal life in each movement. Originally entitled Le retour à la vie in 1831, it was a pendant to the Symphonie fantastique, a further episode in an artist’s life, showing how he comes to terms with life after an overwhelming traumatic experience, largely through the healing power of music and of creative fantasy. The idée fixe is also used to recall the symphony at crucial points. Most of the music of Lélio had existed before; for example, the ‘Chant de bonheur’ and ‘La harpe éolienne’ are revised from La mort d’Orphée, the Prix de Rome cantata of 1827. The Tempestfantasy was incorporated unchanged. The relevance of each movement is made plain in the monologues between them, summarizing Berlioz’s obsessions with Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, with brigands as a symbol of the free life, with passionate identification of self with others; these give it, quite apart from its unusually heterogeneous musical form, a unique place in the territory occupied by both literature and music.

Berlioz assembled other miscellanies with looser internal associations. There are the nine Moore settings of Irlande and the six Gautier settings of Les nuits d’été. Two Hamletpieces and one Thomas Moore setting were grouped as Tristia for publication in 1850. Other groupings, largely for publisher’s convenience, were Feuillets d’album, Vox populi and Fleurs des landes.

Three of the Lélio pieces were derived from Prix de Rome cantatas, of which Berlioz wrote four. The best of these are the first and third. La mort d’Orphée, of 1827, contains a bold Bacchanale and an affecting ‘Tableau musical’ at the end. The more conventional Herminie, of 1828, won second prize. Cléopâtre, of 1829, is startlingly dramatic with clear adumbrations of Berlioz’s later tragic heroines, Juliet, Cassandra and Dido. The invocation, where she addresses the spirits of the Pharaohs, is magnificent. When re-used in Lélio, Berlioz’s description of it was: ‘Sombre orchestration, broad, sinister harmony, lugubrious melody… a great voice breathing a menacing lament in the mysterious stillness of the night’. The fourth cantata, La mort de Sardanapale, is mostly lost.

16. Musical style.

Berlioz’s style is one of the most idiosyncratic of the 19th century. It is quickly recognizable and has been as much reviled by his critics as vaunted by his partisans. It is true that its characteristics do not always take immediate effect and that a familiarity with his music is often regarded as essential to its understanding. For a long time the inaccessibility of many of his scores produced a correspondingly hesitant public response, but the higher standing now enjoyed by Berlioz’s music is reinforced and consolidated by its wider circulation. Opinions vary widely over the relative parts played in Berlioz’s style by technique and inspiration. That he was subject to inspiration in truly Romantic fashion has never been denied, but this created the extraordinary belief that he had no technique and composed in a kind of blind fury. The truth is that Berlioz’s music would be worthless with neither inspiration nor technique and that its mastery is due to an abundant provision of both. Both were of an unconventional kind; neither can be overlooked or denigrated for the advantage of the other. Certain elements of Berlioz’s style call for separate discussion.

Berlioz’s claim to be an inspired and natural melodist is irrefutable. Few of his melodies fall into regular phrase lengths, and when they do, as in the second subject of Les francs-juges overture or in the idée fixe of Harold en Italie, they sound uncharacteristic. He found the regular balance of four- and eight-bar phrases uncongenial and spoke naturally in a kind of flexible musical prose, with surprise and contour important elements. His melodies sometimes expand to great length as at the opening of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, or fill out a whole musical movement in one long arch, as in Aeneas’s ‘Ah! quand viendra l’instant des suprêmes adieux’, where internal repetition is minimal. The idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique is well known for its expansive length. Much of Berlioz’s melodic strength is built on small chromatic inflections, especially when an otherwise diatonic melody is slightly coloured by a chromatic note (with an attendant harmonic surprise). He was fond, for example, of falling chromatically from the 5th of the scale (G in the key of C), or falling chromatically downwards towards the 5th, so that using A, often in alternation with A, in C major or C minor is a recurrent fingerprint. The flattened 6th, especially in a major context, introduces a feeling of melancholy or loneliness, and a number of movements end with this almost unresolved hovering over the dominant note. The opening melody of La damnation de Faust offers a fine example of Berlioz’s flattened 6th. There is an occasional modal touch in his melodies, especially in L’enfance du Christ, but he eschewed the folk idiom altogether. The sharpened 4th in the melody of Le roi de Thulé is a deliberately sophisticated attempt to portray Marguerite’s naive nature, not the adoption of a naive style of his own.

Berlioz’s harmony has been greatly abused by those who have sought either a Brahmsian orderliness or a Lisztian spirit of adventure. By the standards of Chopin and Liszt the actual vocabulary of his harmony is restrained and there are few instances of enriched chromatic harmony. Berlioz was for the most part content with the harmonic vocabulary of Gluck and Beethoven, but he differed from most of his contemporaries in seeing harmony as an expressive rather than functional element. Chords do not lead one into another with inexorable cadential progress. They play their part one by one and become altered, when alteration is necessary, by the replacement of any or all of their notes. The element of surprise is intrinsic, for it is frequently the unexpected note of a chord that alters, and despite Berlioz’s avowed dislike of enharmonic change he used it constantly. He similarly disliked accented appoggiaturas for creating new harmony, though many are to be found in his music. Diminished 7ths and kindred secondary 7th chords are much used, but generally without tonal pull. The suggestion that his harmonic thinking was derived from his study of the guitar has too weak a technical basis to be convincing.

A characteristic sonority is the grouping of upper parts as high as possible with the bass line isolated at a distance from them; at such times the strong melodic role of the bass line becomes evident. Much has been said about Berlioz’s ‘false’ basses and his love of root positions, both of which are clear misrepresentations. A root position is sometimes disturbing when it anticipates a cadence on to the same root, but Berlioz preferred a smooth, often stepwise, movement to the striding pattern of a functional bass. The bass line is in free counterpoint with the upper line, with harmonic filling.

The free contrapuntal relationship of parts, especially the upper and lower parts of a texture, is an essential element of Berlioz’s style. His mature style exhibits plainly his distaste for ‘tune with accompaniment’, a mannerism associated by him with Italian opera and only used for special purposes, for example ‘Un bal’ in the Symphonie fantastiqueor Teresa’s cavatina in Benvenuto Cellini. Contrapuntal textures are often an extension of orchestral textures, with layers seen in both contrapuntal and colouristic relationship to one another.

Berlioz regarded strict contrapuntal forms as mechanistic and inexpressive. He parodied the Handel–Cherubini style of fugue in La damnation de Faust and Béatrice et Bénédict. On the other hand fugato occurs repeatedly, generally to fine expressive and formal effect. There are choral fugues in the Messe solennelle, the Requiem and the Te Deum, whose ‘Judex crederis’ exhibits a type of fugue learnt from his teacher Reicha: the entries are successively one semitone higher. ‘Châtiment effroyable’ in Act 1 of Les Troyens has the entries successively one tone lower. Berlioz’s orchestral fugatos range widely, from the turbulent effect of the ‘Ronde du sabbat’ in the Symphonie fantastique and the middle section of Le carnaval romain to the wonderfully atmospheric fugal openings of the first and second parts of La damnation de Faust or the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ in Les Troyens, whose fugal beginning is concealed in delicate harmony. Fugato is used to express strife in Roméo et Juliette and the streets of Jerusalem at night in L’enfance du Christ, and for a host of other purposes elsewhere. Canon and inversion are rare.

One type of contrapuntal treatment appealed greatly to Berlioz and this he called the ‘réunion de deux thèmes’ where two separate themes are heard first separately and then in combination. There are fine examples in the finale of the Symphonie fantastique, where the ‘Ronde du sabbat’ is combined with the Dies irae; in Harold en Italie; in the ‘Fête chez Capulet’ of Roméo et Juliette; in the overture to Benvenuto Cellini; in Act 4 of Les Troyens, and elsewhere. The chorus of soldiers and students in La damnation de Faust is brilliantly effective, for the soldiers sing in B major, in 6/8, and in French, while the students’ song is in D minor, 2/4, and in Latin. At the opening of the carnival in Benvenuto Cellini Berlioz superimposed three separate elements, all distinct in character; this technique is a clear example of his belief in the combination of opposites and the mingling of diverse genres in a single work.

The vitality of Berlioz’s music owes much to the clarity and boldness of his rhythmic articulation. In the mid-1830s, especially in Harold en Italie and Benvenuto Cellini, he exploited experimental rhythms, not just unusual time signatures but also superimpositions of different rhythms. Fieramosca’s air in Benvenuto Cellini is an exercise in shifting time signatures. The ‘Danse cabalistique’ in L’enfance du Christ is in 7/4, the ‘Combat de ceste’ in Les Troyens in 5/8. Berlioz did not succumb to the universal passion for triple metres, which his generation suffered, despite his recurrent fondness for 3/4 for music of tenderness or longing. He felt strongly that rhythm was inadequately studied by both composers and performers. As a conductor, too, he was noted for his rhythmic precision.

17. Orchestration.

Berlioz’s reputation has long rested on his supreme skill as an orchestrator, sometimes at the expense of his other gifts. Instrumental colour is a fundamental element of his music, for he was no pianist and never thought of sound, as Chopin and Brahms did, through the filter of the piano. But he played no orchestral instrument either (having abandoned the flute) and had to learn this art by studying textbooks, tutors, the instruments themselves, the scores of other composers, and by befriending players. Kastner’s orchestration treatise of 1837 is the main significant predecessor to Berlioz’s own, published in 1844 with a second edition in 1855. For Berlioz it was a sin to neglect the possibilities of orchestral instruments or to use them in unsuitable combinations. He was particularly anxious to use new instruments and took a close interest in Adolphe Sax’s work. Instruments that had previously been used for special purposes he introduced into his normal requirements: the harp, for example, and the english horn are found in most of his scores; he was one of the first to write for the bass clarinet, the valve trumpet and the saxhorn; he made a special arrangement for the newly invented saxophone in 1844 and called for tuned cymbals in Roméo et Juliette; he required a piano, with two players, in the ‘Tempest’ fantasy in Lélio; there is a Turkish crescent in the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale and an antique sistrum in Les Troyens.

But it is not the novelty of the instruments themselves that mark out Berlioz’s orchestration so much as his skill in using them. Sometimes one instrument is used for a solo of striking fitness, for example the viola in Harold en Italie or the english horn in Marguerite’s romance in La damnation de Faust. More often it is in combining and contrasting instruments that his judgment is most acute and inventive, especially in his use of wind. He wrote for woodwind in layers more often than in solos, and he liked the sound of wind chattering on repeated notes. Consider the ‘Menuet des follets’ in La damnation de Faust where the banks of woodwind give a splendidly rich effect followed by the darting brilliance of the two piccolos; in contrast there is the sombre colour of Romeo’s arrival at the Capulets’ vault, or of the ‘Choeur d’ombres’ in Lélio. Brass can be solemn or brazen; the ‘Marche au supplice’ in the Symphonie fantastique is a defiantly modern use of brass. Trombones introduce Mephistopheles with three flashing chords or support the gloomy doubts of Narbal in Les Troyens. With a hiss of cymbals, pianissimo, they mark the entry of the Cardinal in Benvenuto Cellini and the blessing of little Astyanax by Priam in Les Troyens.

There are innumerable instances of felicitous orchestral colour in Berlioz’s music, and the delicacy of his use of pianissimo (as in the Queen Mab scherzo) is as memorable as the force of his immense sounds (as in the Requiem or the Te Deum). Yet he could also miscalculate, and there are occasions when the correct balance is extremely difficult to achieve, or when acoustics hinder the proper realization of a novel idea. In the latter category must be placed the trombone and flute chords in the Requiem and the timpani chords in the Symphonie fantastique and the Requiem, effective though they are from the expressive point of view. The influence of his orchestration has been immense, directly upon Liszt, Wagner, the Russians, Strauss and Mahler, but more profoundly by his emancipation of the procedure of orchestration. For Berlioz it was intrinsic to composition, not something applied to finished music. Berlioz also disregarded the 18th-century conception of orchestration as similar to part-writing for voices; in his hands timbre became something that could be used in free combinations as an artist might use his palette, without bowing to the demands of line, and this leads to the rich orchestral resource of Debussy and Ravel.

18. Other stylistic aspects.

A related element of Berlioz’s style is his care for the spatial distribution of sound. He felt strongly that music should be fitted to the building in which it is heard and he severely castigated the sound of noisy orchestras in small theatres. His scores, especially Roméo et Juliette, are filled with directions for the placing of players and singers. He was fond of offstage music, not only in the operas, but in the symphonies too: the shepherd’s pipe is heard offstage in the Symphonie fantastique, the pilgrim’s march is heard au lointain at the end of Harold en Italie; in L’enfance du Christ the angels are in a neighbouring room whose door is gradually closed. The Requiem is the grandest example of wide orchestral distribution and both the Te Deum and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale exploit the distinct separation of parts of the orchestra. At the beginning of Act 1 of Benvenuto Cellini and Act 2 of Béatrice et Bénédict a great deal happens offstage, and the first-act finale of Les Troyens is constructed on an elaborate panoply of three offstage groups carefully scored to suggest the approach and passing of the Wooden Horse into the city. The offstage trumpets and drums in Marguerite’s romance in La damnation de Faust simultaneously exploit their separateness in space and their total distinctness in musical language, diversity doubly expressed in both spatial and musical terms.

In matters of form Berlioz never subscribed to rigid procedures and paid only lip service to such inherited patterns as sonata form. Intuition and expression were allowed to dominate expectation and rule. Thematic development is abundant but irregular, tonal balance is felt rather than preordained. Large-scale tonal designs are not easy to discern; indeed there is no reason to expect them. Two movements in Les Troyens, Andromache’s scene in Act 1 and the Sentinels’ scene in Act 5, do not end in the key in which they began, although they are musically self-contained; a similar case is the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. The dominant does not necessarily play its classical role as antithesis to the tonic, and the notion of a ‘second subject’ in the symphonies is not always applicable. Development for its own sake, as a purely musical procedure, he avoided; he preferred to throw the weight of a movement on to the coda, or sometimes on to a series of codas of cumulative impact, and the sense of climax and closure is always strong. There are few musical forms as satisfying musically or emotionally as the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ (from Les Troyens), yet apart from its return to C major, where it began, its tonal scheme is free and unfettered by pre-set schemes. Modulation in Berlioz’s music is always fluid. Mediant relationships of every kind abound, so do Neapolitan and closer tonal shifts, made possible by his open attitude to the directional sense of harmony.

Two structural techniques should be mentioned. Berlioz contributed much to the then current desire to relate movements to each other by thematic, dramatic and other means. Thematic transformation is clearly seen in the idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique, and in the treatment of many themes in La damnation de Faust and Les Troyens. To change the significance and colour of a theme by adjusting its pace, pitch, metre or orchestration, was a technique Berlioz applied with great subtlety, as for example in the opening of Act 4 of Les Troyens and the air of Narbal that follows. More personal to Berlioz is the device of harmonic variation, where a theme is presented against a series of different harmonies. The clearest example is the ‘Tibi omnes’ in the Te Deum, where the three strophes have the melody presented in three guises.

Berlioz’s use of programmes must be clearly understood as a natural outcome of his belief in the implicit kinship, identity even, of music and ideas. Since music was not autonomous, it must have equivalences and meanings in the world of action and imagination. In his mind music and literature were inextricably entwined, both expressions of the human soul. Poetry and literature often suggested music, music always suggested life and feeling.

It is thus absurd to speak, as many have, of Berlioz’s ‘reliance’ on programmes, or of his use of them as propaganda. They are not there to serve the music as a means of making it more palatable or more intelligible. They are part of it; they too reflect the movement of the composer’s mind. He did not write the programme of the Symphonie fantastique in order to make it more sensational – that was scarcely needed; he wrote it because he felt it as part of the impulse that brought the music to birth. His programmes have the same status as his vocal texts. Many, of course, are not so explicit; indeed a title often serves as the sole direction, but the title or the image is always there. In some cases, as in the death scene in Roméo et Juliette or the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ in Les Troyens, the action described by the music is continuous and precisely detailed.

A problem is presented by Berlioz’s recurrent habit of self-borrowing, which generally arose from the desire to find better use for music first placed in an unsuitable, unfinished or unsuccessful setting. Generally there is no real conflict between the expressive purpose of one context and another, for it is clear that music of a given type can express many kinds of poetic or pictorial image and that therefore successive images may evoke or require the same music. The same image may likewise relate to more than one musical setting, although this is rarer. Self-borrowing is common because many of his ideas were unrealized, for a variety of reasons, and because he recognized the vitality of pieces that could otherwise be wasted. There is no evidence that when he was borrowing most heavily he was suffering any lack of fecundity, although the Symphonie funèbre came suspiciously close to a fallow period.

19. The critic.

Berlioz’s views were presented regularly to readers of the Paris press, and his literary output was immense. In addition to the Traité d’instrumentation and the Voyage musical, he published three collections of criticism: Les soirées de l’orchestre (1852), Les grotesques de la musique (1859) and A travers chants (1862). In his feuilletons he wrote of new operas and singers, many of them of staggering unimportance; his opinion on momentous occasions was of crucial interest, for example at the première of Le prophète in 1849. He reviewed most of the concerts of the Société des Concerts; he wrote of new instruments and musical gadgets, of his own impressions of music abroad, and of important musicians visiting France; he wrote biographical notices of Gluck, Beethoven, Spontini, Méhul and himself; he wrote fiction and fantasy, often with a critical purpose; he wrote serialized treatises on orchestration and conducting. There are, in short, few facets of musical practice of the time untouched in his feuilletons.

Inconsistencies and changes of opinion are to be found, as one would expect over 30 years; but in general Berlioz’s opinions are trenchant and clearly expressed. He loathed the easy success of second-rate musicians with no personality and a borrowed style, and he fought endlessly against backstage politics that placed graft above art. His admiration for the greatest masters, especially Gluck and Beethoven, is a leitmotif of almost wearying persistence, and with secondary masters, such as Rossini, Meyerbeer and Halévy, he was carefully discriminating, separating the good from the bad. He greeted Glinka and Bizet with prophetic enthusiasm, yet Wagner ultimately taxed his deep-rooted beliefs beyond the boundaries of acceptance. The Tristan prelude had, for him, ‘no other theme than a sort of chromatic sigh’. It was ‘full of dissonant chords, the harshness of which is intensified by modifications of the real notes of the harmony’; he acknowledged Wagner as a powerful new voice, but one that was speaking a language he no longer understood, and leading the next generation away from the highest reaches of the art.

Berlioz was one of the first to enunciate a critical standpoint that is now a commonplace but was then startlingly new: that music should be enshrined in the form in which it was written and not brought up to date. He attacked Fétis and Habeneck for their ‘corrections’ of Beethoven, and repudiated singers who added ornamentation and ‘improvements’ to the vocal lines of Gluck and Mozart. For Berlioz the composer’s utterance had a sanctity that raised it above the tampering of mere performers. That is not to say that he only accepted whole performances, for his concert programmes were full of extracts, as was the custom of the day, but the principle of respecting a composer’s own directions had his constant support. Castil-Blaze’s travesties of Mozart and Weber appalled him, and it was an ironic twist that exposed him to the criticism of having mutilated Weber’s Der Freischütz when he had set the recitatives to music in order to prevent the Opéra from mutilating it any more. A series of sarcastic directions in the autograph of Les Troyens permits cuts to be made when circumstances render them necessary; a footnote in Roméo et Juliette advises suppression of the more demanding sections when the audience is not sufficiently attuned to the composer’s purpose.

Berlioz’s battles as a critic were not fought just to expound his points of view. They were intimately related to the more serious struggle for recognition as a composer. If his readers could be persuaded to recognize the good and the beautiful in Gluck, Spontini and any modern composer, so they might turn more sympathetically to his own music. But the strategy failed and his journalism was seen more and more as an independent professional activity, executed with extreme flair and wit, but in fact making his stature as a composer all the harder to establish.

20. Standing and research.

Berlioz belongs to a tradition, yet he is an isolated figure. Since the music on which he based his style is still little known, he has been regarded too simply as a wholly unprecedented phenomenon in French music. From his predecessors he inherited a basic language and certain mannerisms, for example dramatic recitative gestures from Spontini and a taste for plain melody from Gluck. Méhul’s raw vigour is to be seen echoed in Berlioz’s early music, and Le Sueur’s passionate search for new modes of expression, by using lengthy descriptions or unusual instrumental effects, left a clear mark. The grandiose music of the French Revolution, especially such pieces as the Marche lugubre of Gossec, is carried on in Berlioz’s monumental style. He learnt much from Weber and Beethoven and a little, despite himself, from Rossini; his contemporaries on the whole did not influence him greatly. The shape and pulse of his themes and their treatment, his sense of colour and contrast, the urgent flux of passion and the immense expressive variety of his music: these were all new. No other French composer of his time had the imagination or the genius to grasp the Berliozian manner, which was in any case too personal to permit easy imitation. German composers, like Schumann, admired his music but spoke a different language. Mendelssohn admired him as a man, but disliked his music.

Berlioz’s influence was most obviously shown (to the point of imitation) by such minor figures as David and Reyer in France and Cornelius in Germany. The latter’s Barbier von Bagdad is full of homage to Benvenuto Cellini. More important was the fertilization of Liszt’s music, shown especially in the symphonic poems, a debt Liszt was glad to acknowledge. Wagner stands clearly in line, yet though he adapted a number of felicitous inventions from Berlioz and can be shown to have learnt much from him, his fundamental outlook was too different and too all-embracing to be regarded as an offshoot of Berlioz’s Romanticism in particular.

The Russians adopted Berliozian ideas with enthusiasm, especially Balakirev, whose plan for a Manfred symphony, intentionally modelled on Harold en Italie, was taken up by Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar and many other poematic symphonies show a debt to Berlioz. Strauss showed it, too, in Aus Italien and especially Don Quixote. In France Berlioz’s style is heard occasionally in Saint-Saëns and Massenet. Debussy and Ravel repudiated him on technical grounds, although more sympathetic attitudes have been voiced by Milhaud and Messiaen. In sum, it is a sorry tale of rejection and isolation. Berlioz has inspired many by the sincerity and energy of his music, but in his lifetime the opportunity of absorbing even part of an idiosyncratic style was missed. As an idealist he had much to offer to artists of any milieu, and history has forced one to recognize him for what he was and what he did rather than for where he stood in relation to others. This may ultimately prove a blessing.

Much was written on Berlioz in his lifetime, but the first full-length biographies were written by Jullien and Hippeau in the 1880s. The centenary of 1903 coincided with a wave of Berliozian study that produced the Breitkopf & Härtel collected edition, Adolphe Boschot’s three-volume biography and a wide range of special studies by Prod’homme and Tiersot, who also published three volumes of correspondence. The greatest resurgence of interest was later in the century, assisted particularly by recordings, by Barzun’s two-volume study of 1950, and by the London revival of Les Troyens in 1957. The 1969 centenary created a wider familiarity with the music, especially Les Troyens, which was finally performed, published and recorded in full for the first time. New complete editions of the music, the literary works and the correspondence are all now in progress, so that by the 2003 bicentenary of his birth a full and fair presentation of Berlioz’s life and work may eventually atone for many years of neglect and misunderstanding.

WORKS

Editions: H. Berlioz: Werke, ed. C. Malherbe and F. Weingarten (Leipzig, 1900–10) [B&H]New Berlioz Edition, general ed. H. Macdonald (Kassel, 1967–) [NBE]Catalogue: Catalogue of the works of Hector Berlioz, ed. D.K. Holoman (Kassel, 1987) [H]

operas



op.	Title	Genre, acts	Libretto	Composed	First performance	Sources	B&H NBE	H	Remarks

	Estelle et Némorin	op	H.-C. Gerono, after Florian	1823				17	lost
	Les francs-juges	drame lyrique, 3	H. Ferrand	1825–6	unperf.	frags., F-Pn*, lib. Pc, ov. (Paris, 1836)	ov., iv; 4	23	rev. 1829; portions adopted for 1833 as Le cri de guerre du Brisgau (1, T. Gounet); 5 complete movts extant
23	Benvenuto Cellini	opéra semi-seria, 2	L. de Wailly, A. Barbier and A. de Vigny	1836–8	Paris, Opéra, 10 Sept 1838	Pc*, excerpts (Paris, 1839), vs (Brunswick, 1856)	ov., v; 1a–d	76	rev. version, in 3 acts, Weimar, 17 Nov 1852
	La nonne sanglante	op, 5	E. Scribe, after M.G. Lewis: The Monk	1841–7	unperf.	frags. Pn*	–; 4	91	inc.
	Les Troyens	op, 5	Berlioz, after Virgil, The Aeneid	1856–8	Les Troyens à Carthage, Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 4 Nov 1863; complete, Karlsruhe, 6–7 Dec 1890	Pc*, vs (Paris, 1863)	–; 2a–c	133	divided into La prise de Troie and Les Troyens à Carthage(with prol.), 1863
	Béatrice et Bénédict	oc, 2	Berlioz, after Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing	1860–62	Baden-Baden, Stadt, 9 Aug 1862	Pc*, vs (Paris, 1863)	xix–xx; 3	138

symphonies



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

14	Symphonie fantastique: épisode de la vie d’un artiste		orch	1830	1845		i	16	48
16	Harold en Italie, symphonie en 4 parties		va, orch	1834	1848		ii	17	68
17	Roméo et Juliette, symphonie dramatique	E. Deschamps, after Shakespeare	A, T, B, STBSTB, orch	1839	1847		iii	18	79
15	Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale	A. Deschamps	military band, str and SSTTBB ad lib	1840	1843		i	19	80
						Last movt arr. Mez/T, vv, pf, 1848 as L’apothéose	xvi	14

other orchestral



op.	Title and genre	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

1	Waverley, grande ouverture	1827–8	1839		iv	20	26
4	Le roi Lear, grande ouverture	1831	1840		iv	20	53
—	Intrata di Rob-Roy Macgregor	1831	1900	perf. 1833, withdrawn	iv	20	54
8	Rêverie et caprice, romance	1841	1841	for vn, orch/pf; arr. from air composed for Benvenuto Cellini	vi	21	88
9	Le carnaval romain, ouverture caractéristique	1844	1844	on material from Benvenuto Cellini	v	20	95
21	Le corsaire, ouverture	1844	1852	orig. title La tour de Nice; 2nd title Le corsaire rouge; rev. before 1852	v	20	101
—	Marche troyenne	1864	1865	arr. from Act 1 of Les Troyens	vi	21	133B

choral works



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Messe solennelle		S, T, B, STTB, orch	1824	1994	withdrawn 1827, rediscovered 1992	-	23	20A
—	Resurrexit		STTB, orch	1824	1902	arr. From Messe solennelle; rev. 1829, as Le jugement dernier; largely absorbed into Benvenuto Cellini, Grande messe des morts and Te Deum	vii	12a	20B
—	La révolution grecque, scène héroïque	Ferrand	B, B, SSSTTBB, orch	1825–6	1903	2 sections rev. for vv, wind band, 1833	x	12a	21A, B
—	La mort d’Orphée, monologue et bacchanale	H.-M. Berton	T, SSSS, orch	1827	1930	Prix de Rome cant.	—	6	25
2	Le ballet des ombres, ronde nocturne	A. Duboys, after J.G. Herder	STTBB, pf	1828	1829	withdrawn by Berlioz	xvi	14	37
1	Huit scènes de Faust	G. de Nerval, after J.W. von Goethe		1828–9	1829	withdrawn by Berlioz; later used in La damnation de Faust	x	5	33
	1 Chants de la fête de Pâques		SSSSTTBB, orch
	2 Paysans sous les tilleuls, danse et chant		STTB, orch
	3 Concert de sylphes		S, S, A, T, Bar, B, orch
	4 Écot de joyeux compagnons, histoire d’un rat		B,TTBB, orch
	5 Chanson de Méphistophélès, histoire d’une puce		T,TTBB, orch
	6 Le roi de Thulé, chanson gothique		S, orch			also for 1v, pf
	7 Romance de Marguerite, choeur de soldats		S, TTBB, orch
	8 Sérénade de Méphistophélès		T, gui
2/3	Chant guerrier	T. Gounet after T. Moore	T, TBB, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.3	xvi	14	41
2/5	Chanson à boire	Gounet, after Moore	T, TTBB, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.5	xvi	14	43
2/6	Chant sacré	Gounet, after Moore	T, SSTTBB, pf/orch	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.6; 2 versions; orchd 1843	xiv, xvi	12a, 14	44
—	La mort de Sardanapale	J.-F. Gail	S, TTBB, orch	1830	—	Prix de Rome cant., mostly lost	—	6	50
18/1	Méditation religieuse	Berlioz, after L. Swanton Belloc’s trans. of Moore	SSTTBB, orch	1831	1852	Tristia, no.1; orig. acc. 7 wind insts [lost]	xiv	12b	56
14bis	Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie, monodrame lyrique	Berlioz (except no.1)		1831–2	1855	orig. title Le retour à la vie, mélologue en six parties; sequel to Symphonie fantastique; rev. 1854	xiii	7	55
	1 Le pêcheur (ballade)	A. Duboys, after Goethe	T, pf			adapted from song of ?1828
	2 Choeur des ombres		STB, orch			adapted from section of Cléopâtre
	3 Chanson de brigands		B, TTBB, orch			adapted from lost Chanson de pirates, 1829
	4 Chant de bonheur		T, orch			adapted from La mort d’Orphée; also arr. T, pf
	5 La harpe éolienne, souvenirs		orch			adapted from La mort d’Orphée
	6 Fantaisie sur la Tempête de Shakespeare		SSATT, orch	1830		perf. 1830 as Ouverture pour la Tempête de Shakespeare			52
—	Quartetto e coro dei maggi		SSTB, orch	1832	1902	possibly rev. of lost Marche religieuse des mages, 1828	vii	12a	59
11	Sara la baigneuse, ballade	V. Hugo	STBB, SA, TTBB, orch	1834	1851	rev. 1850 from lost orig. for TTBB/STTB, orch; also pubd for 2 vv, pf (1850)	xiv	12a	69
13/5	Le chant des Bretons	A. Brizeux	TTBB, pf	1835	c1835	rev. as Fleurs des landes, no.5 (1850); both versions also arr. T, pf; an arr. for vv, orch is doubtful authenticity	xvi	14	71
6	Le cinq mai, chant sur la mort de l’empereur Napoléon	P.J. de Béranger	B, SSTTBB, orch	1835	c1840	refrain composed 1832	xiii	12a	74
5	Grande messe des morts (Requiem)		T, SSTTBB, orch	1837	1838	rev. 1852, 1867	vii	9	75
—	Choeur de 402 voix en langue celtique inconnue	Berlioz	SATB	1843	1969	albumleaf	—	21	93
20/2	Hymne à la France	Barbier	SSATTBB, orch	1844	1850	Vox populi, no.2	xiv	12b	97
2/2	Hélène, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	TTBB, orch	1844	1903	arr. of song orig. for 2vv	xiv	12a	40B
18/3	Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet		SATB, orch	1844	1852	Tristia, no.3	vi	12b	103
24	La damnation de Faust, légende dramatique	Nerval, A. Gandonnière and Berlioz, after Goethe	Mez, T, Bar, B, SSATTBB, orch	1845–6	1854	incorportating rev. versions of Huit scènes de Faust	xi–xii	8a-b	111
19/3	Le chant des chemins der fer	J. Janin	T, SSTTBB, orch	1846	1850	Feuillets d’album, no.3	xiv	12b	110
20/1	La menace des Francs, marche et choeur		T, T, B, B, SSTTBB, orch	1848 or earlier	1850	Vox populi, no.1	xiv, xvi	12b	117
18/2	La mort d’Ophélie, ballade	E. Legouvé, after Shakespeare	SA, pf/orch	1848	1852	arr. from solo song; Tristia, no.2	xiv, xvi	12b	92B
—	Prière du matin	A. de Lamartine	SS [children], pf	1846 or earlier	1848		xvi	14	112
22	Te Deum		T, STB, STB, S [children], orch	1849	1855		viii	10	118
25	L’enfance du Christ, trilogie sacrée	Berlioz	S, T, T, Bar, B, B, B, SATB, orch	1850–54	1855		ix	11	130
	1 Le songe d’Hérode			1854
	2 La fuite en Egypte			1850	1852
	3 L’arrivée à Saïs			1853–4
2/4	La belle voyageuse, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	SA, orch	1851	—	arr. of solo song	—	13	42D
26	L’impériale, cant.	Lafont	SATB, SATB, orch	1854	1856		xiii	12b	129
	Hymne pour la consécration du nouveau tabernacle	J.H. Vries	SSATTBB, pf/org	1859	1859		xvi	14	135
28	Le temple universel	J.F. Vaudin	TTBB, TTBB, org	1861	1861	rev. TTBB, unacc., 1867	xvi	14	137
—	Veni creator, motet		S, S, A, SSA, org ad lib	?	between 1877 and 1888		vii	14	141
—	Tantum ergo		S, S, A, SSA, org	?	between 1877 and 1888		vii	14	142

solo voice and orchestra



op.	Title and genre	Text	Voice	Composed	Orchestrated	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Herminie, scène lyrique	P.A. Vieillard	S	1828		1903	Prix de Rome cant.	xv	6	29
—	La mort de Cléopâtre, scène lyrique	Vieillard	S	1829		1903	Prix de Rome cantata	xv	6	36
2/4	La belle voyageuse, légende irlandaise	Gounet, after Moore	Mez	1829	1842	c1844	orig. for Mez, pf	xv	13	42C
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez/A	1832	1848	c1849	orig. for S, pf, earlier orchestration, 1834, lost; this version exists in 2 keys	xv	13	60E–F
13/4	Le jeune pâtre breton	Brizeux	Mez/T	1833		1839	orig. version, lost, used in Le cri de guerre de Brisgau, 1833; rev. 1835	xv	13	65D
—	Aubade	A. de Musset	S/T	1839	?	1975	arr. for 1v, 2 cornets, 4 hn of song for 1v, 2 hn, 1839	—	13	78
7	Les nuits d’été	T. Gautier					orig. for Mez/T, pf	xv	13	82–7
	1 Villanelle		Mez/T	1840–41	1856	1856
	2 Le spectre de la rose		A	1840	1855 or 1856	1856
	3 Sur les lagunes		Mez/A/Bar	1840–41	1856	1856
	4 Absence		Mez/T	1840	1843	1843
	5 Au cimetière (clair de lune)		T	1840–41	1856	1856
	6 L’ile inconnue		Mez/T	1840–41	1856	1856
	Le chasseur danois	A. De Leuven	B	1845	1845	1903	also for B, pf	xv	13	104B
19/1	Zaïde, boléro	R. de Beauvoir	S	1845	1845	1903	also for S, pf [2 versions]	xv	13	108B

songs



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Le dépit de la bergère, romance	Mme***	1v, pf	?1818–22	?1819		xvii	15	7
—	Pleure, pauvre Colette, romance	M. Bourgerie	(S, S)/(TT), pf	?1818–22	1822		xvi	15	11
—	Canon libre à la quinte	Bourgerie	A, Bar, pf	?1818–22	1822		xvi	15	14
—	Le maure jaloux, romance	Florian	T, pf	?1818–22	1822	also entitled L’arabe jaloux	xvii	15	9
—	Amitié, reprends ton empire, romance et invocation	Florian	S, S, B, pf	?1818–22	1823		xvi	15	10
—	Toi qui l’aimas, verse des pleurs, romance	Duboys	T, pf	?1822–3	1823		xvii	15	16
—	Le montagnard exilé, chant élégiaque	Duboys	S, S, pf/harp	?1822–3	1823		xvi	15	15
1/6	Le roi de Thulé, chanson gothique	Nerval, after Goethe	S, pf	1828	—	used in 8 scènes de Faust and La damnation de Faust	—	15	33B
14bis	Le pêcheur, ballade	Duboys, after Goethe	T, pf	?1828	1833	used in Le retour à la vie (Lélio)	xvii	15	55
2/1	Le coucher du soleil, rêverie	Gounet, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.1	xvii	15	39
2/2	Hélène, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	(S, S)/(T, B), pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.2; later arr. TTBB, orch	xvi	15	40
2/4	La belle voyageuse, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	Mez, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.4; later arr. TTBB, orch [lost], Mez, orch; later arr. SA, orch	xvii	15	42A
2/7	L’origine de la harpe, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	S/T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.7	xvii	15	45
2/8	Adieu Bessy, romance anglaise et française	Gounet, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.8; 2 versions	xvii	15	46
2/9	Elégie en prose	Louise Belloc, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.9	xvii	15	47
14bis	Chant de bonheur	Berlioz	T, pf	1831–2	1833	arr. from Le retour à la vie (Lélio); orig. from La mort d’Orphée	xvii	15	55
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, pf	1832	1904	1st version	xvii	15	60A–B
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, vc, pf	1832	1832	2nd version	xvii	15	60C
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, pf	?1834	1849	transcr. S. Heller from orch. version	xvii	15	65F
13/4	Le jeune pâtre breton	Brizeux	Mez/T, pf	1833	1835	rev. with hn ad lib, 1835; also orchd	xvii	15	65A, C
19/2	Les champs, romance	Béranger	1v, pf	1834 or earlier	1834	rev. in Feuillets d’album (1850)	xvii	15	67
—	Je crois en vous, romance	L. Guérin	Mez, pf	1834 or earlier	1834	used in Benvenuto Cellini	xvii	15	70
13/5	Le chant des bretons	Brizeux	T, pf	1834	c1835	rev. as Fleurs des landes, no.5 (1850); both versions also arr. TTBB, pf	xvii	15	71
—	Chansonette	Wailly	S/T, pf	1835	1974	used for the Choeur de masques in Benvenuto Cellini	—	15	73
—	Aubade	Musset	1v, 2 hn	1839	1975	later rev. acc. 2 cornets, 4 hn	—	15, 13	78
7	Les nuits d’été	Gautier	Mez/T, pf	1840–41	1841		xvii	15	82–7
	1 Villanelle					orchd 1856
	2 Le spectre de la rose					rev., orchd 1855 or 1856
	3 Sur les lagunes, lamento					orchd 1856
	4 Absence					orchd 1843
	5 Au cimetière, clair de lune					rev., orchd 1856
	6 L’ile inconnue					orchd 1856
18/2	La mort d’Ophélie	Legouvé, after Shakespeare	S/T, pf	1842	1848	later arr. SA, orch/pf, pubd as Tristia, no.2	xvii	15	92A
	La belle Isabeau, conte pendant l’orange	A. Dumas	Mez, pf	1843 or earlier	1843	2nd version, Mez, SSTTBB, pf, 1844	xvii	15	94
	Le chasseur danois	Leuven	B, pf	1845	1845	orchd 1845; Feuillets d’album, no.6	xvii	15	104A
19/1	Zaïde, boléro	Beauvoir	S, pf, castanets ad lib	1845	1845	2 versions: orchd 1845	xvii	15	108A
13/3	Le trébuchet	A. Bertin and E. Deschamps	S, S/T, Bar, pf	1846 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.3	xvi	15	113
—	Nessun maggior, page d’album	Berlioz, after Dante	S/T, pf	1847	1904		xvii	15	114
13/1	Le matin, romance	A. de Bouclon	Mez/T, pf	1849 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.1	xvii	15	124
13/2	Petit oiseau, chanson de paysan	Bouclon	T/Bar/Mez, pf	1849 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.2; words the same as for Le matin	xvii	15	125

miscellaneous works



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Fugue	—	4 pts.	1826	1998	Prix de Rome submission	—	6	22
—	Fugue à 3 sujets	—	4 pts.	1829	1902	Prix de Rome submission	vi	6	35
—	Dans l’alcôve sombre	Hugo	?1v, pf	c1832	—	sketch	—	15	62
—	Erigone, intermède antique	after P.-S. Ballanche	solo vv, vv, orch	?1836–41	—	frags. only	—	21	77
8	Rêverie et caprice	—	vn, orch	1841	1841	also for vn, pf, arr. from Benvenuto Cellini	vi	21	88
—	Andante in B	—	2 pts.	1842	—	albumleaf	—	21	93
—	Chasse à la grosse bête	—	ob, bn	1843	—	albumleaf	—	21	93
—	Feuillet d’album	—	pf	1844	—		—	21	96
	Trois morceaux	—	orgue-mélodium	1844	1844		vi	21	98
	1 Sérénade agreste à la Madone sur le thème des pifferari romains
	2 Toccata								99
	3 Hymne pour l’élévation								100
	Le vent gémit, sérénade	F.-J.-P.-A. Méry	1v	1845	—	2 versions	—	15	107
	Valse chantée par le vent dans les cheminées d’un de mes châteaux en Espagne	—	—	1855	—	albumleaf	—	21	131
	Au bord d’une rivière	?	1v, pf	?	1975	sketch	—	15	132
	Salut matinal (en langue kanaque)	Berlioz	1v	?	1954	albumleaf	—	15	140

arrangements



Composer or source	Title	Forces and remarks	Arranged	Published	B&H	NBE	H

Pollet	Fleure du Tage	v, gui	?1817	—	—	22b	5
?	Nocturne	S, S, gui	?1825–30	—	—	22b	31
Various		gui acc. for romances by Lintan, V. Martini, Dalayrac, Pollet, Catrufo, Bédart, Boieldieu, Della Maria, Plantade, Berton, Solié, Nadermann, Lélu, Messonier	?1818–21	1986	—	22b	8
Rouget de Lisle	Hymne des Marseillais
		1 TTB, SSTB, orch	1830	1830	xviii	22b	51A
		2 T, SSTTBB, pf	1848	1848	—	22b	51B
Rouget de Lisle	Chant du neuf Thermidor	T, SSTTBB, orch	1830	1984	—	22b	51bis
F. Huber	Sur les alpes quel délice (le chasseur de chamois)	3 male vv	1833	—	—	22b	64
Weber	Der Freischütz	dialogue composed to recit	1841	1842	—	22b	89
Weber	L’invitation à la valse	orch	1841	1842	xviii	22b	90
L. de Meyer	Marche marocaine	orch	1845	1846		22b	105
[trad.]	Marche de Rákóczi	orch; used in La damnation de Faust	1846	1854	xi	8b	109
Gluck	Orphée	adapted for P. Viardot	1859	1859	—	22a	—
Martini	Plaisir d’amour	Bar, orch	1859	1859	22b	xxii	134
Schubert	Der Erlkönig	T, orch	1860	1860	xviii	22b	136
Gluck	Alceste	adapted for P. Viardot	1861	1861	—	22a	—
Couperin	Invitation à louer Dieu	arr. from Soeur Monique for SSA, pf	—	between 1877 and 1888	xviii	22b	146

lost works



Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Remarks	H

Potpourri concertant sur des thèmes italiens	—	fl, hn, str qt	c1818		1
2 qnts	—	fl, str qt	c1818	1 melody used in ov. to Les francs-juges	2, 3
Estelle et Némorin, songs	J.-P. C. de Florian	1v, pf	1823	1 melody used in Symphonie fantastique	6
Le cheval arabe, cant.	C.-H. Millevoye	1v, orch	1822–3		12
Canon à trois voix			1822–3		13
Estelle et Némorin, op	Gerono, after Florian		1823	probably using the earlier Florian songs	17
Le passage de la mer rouge, Lat. orat	?		1823		18
Beverley ou Le joueur, scena	B.-J. Saurin	B, orch	1824		19
Les francs-juges, op	Ferrand		1826	ov., 5 complete movts survive; the rest was destroyed	23
Fugue	—		1827	Prix de Rome submission	24
Fugue	—		1828	Prix de Rome submission	28
Marche religieuse des mages	—		1828 or earlier	Possibly related to Quartetto e coro dei maggi of 1832	27
Variations on Mozart’s Là ci darem la mano	—	gui	1828 or earlier	pubd by Aulagnier	30
O salutaris		3 solo vv, org/pf	1828–9	probably the same as lost oratorio written for Choron	32
Chanson de pirates	Hugo	?1v, orch	1829	rev. as Chanson de brigands in Lélio	34
Fugue	—		1830	Prix de Rome submission	49
Choeur d’anges pour les fêtes de Noël	?		1831		58
Choeur de toutes les voix	Berlioz		1831		57
Romance de Marie Tudor	Hugo	T, ?orch	1833	perf. 22 Dec 1833	66
Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France	?	?vv, orch	1835	2 movts of 7 completed; these probably incorporated the Ressurexit and Le dernier jour du monde (planned 1831–2) and were used in, probably, Le cinq mai, Benvenuto Cellini, the Grande messe des morts and the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale	72
Plains-chants de l’église grecque		16vv	1843	commissined by the Russian imperial chapel	—
[Hymne]	—	6 Sax insts	1844	probably arr. of Chant sacré	44C
[Marche d’Isly]	—	orch	1845	arr. of Léopold de Meyer’s Marche d’Isly	108
Ouverture des ciseleurs	—	orch	1846	listed as unpubd in Labitte catalogue, 1846; probably based on Benvenuto Cellini; perhaps never written

WRITINGS

see Holoman, 1987, for more detailed bibliographical information

Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, op.10 (Paris, 1843, 2/1855/R; Eng. trans., 1856, rev. 2/1882 by J. Bennett)

Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (Paris, 1844/R)

Les soirées de l’orchestre (Paris, 1852/R, 5/1895; Eng. trans., 1956/R); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1968)

Le chef d’orchestre: théorie de son art (Paris, 1856; Eng. trans., 1917/R)

Les grotesques de la musique (Paris, 1859/R); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1969)

A travers chants (Paris, 1862/R; ed. and Eng. trans., E. Csicsery-Rónay, 1994); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1971)

Mémoires (Paris, 1870/R; ed. and Eng. trans. by D. Cairns, 1969, 2/1970); ed. P. Citron (Paris, 1969, 2/1991)

Les musiciens et la musique, ed. A. Hallays (Paris, 1903/R)

ed. G. Condé: Cauchemars et passions (Paris, 1981)

ed. H.R. Cohen and Y. Gérard: Critique musicale, i: 1823–1834 (Paris, 1996)

Articles in Le corsaire (1823–5), Le correspondant (1829–30), Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1829), Revue européenne (1832), Europe littéraire (1833), Le rénovateur (1833–5), Gazette (later Revue et gazette) musicale (1834–61), Journal des débats (1834–63), Journal des artistes (1834), Monde dramatique (1835), Italie pittoresque (Paris, 1836), Chronique de Paris (1837–8), L’éclair (Brussels, 1842), L’émancipation (1843), L’artiste (1844), Monde illustré (1858–9); see Holoman 1987

b: bibliographies and lists of works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Correspondence. B Bibliogrpahies and lists of works. C Contemporary memoirs. D Life and works. E Specialist publications. F Biographical studies. G General critical studies. H Specialized critical studies. I Individual works: (i) Messe solennelle (ii) Symphonie fantastique (iii) Harold en Italie (iv) Roméo et Juliette (v) Benvenuto Cellini (vi) La damnation de Faust (vii) Les Troyens (viii) Others

a: correspondence

c: contemporary memoirs

d: life and works

e: specialist publications

f: biographical studies

g: general critical studies

h: specialized critical studies

i: individual works

a: correspondence

D. Bernard, ed.: Correspondance inédite (Paris, 1879, 3/1896; Eng. trans., 1882 as Life and Letters of Berlioz, i)

V. Wilder, ed.: ‘Vingt lettres inédites … adressées à M. Adolphe Samuel’, Le ménestrel (8, 15, 22, 29 June; 6, 13 July 1879)

‘Lettres inédites de Hector Berlioz’,Nouvelle revue, iv (1880), 801; also pubd separately as Lettres intimes (Paris, 1882; Eng. trans., 1882 as Life and Letters of Berlioz, ii)

O. Fouque: Les révolutionnaires de la musique (Paris, 1882)

La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt (Leipzig, 1895–1904)

La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefe von Hector Berlioz an die Fürstin Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (Leipzig, 1903)

J. Tiersot: ‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, RHCM, iii (1903), 426–30

‘Une page d'amour romantique: lettres à Mme Estelle F.’, Revue politique et litéraire (Revue bleue) (4, 11, 18, 25 April 1903)

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Les années romantiques: 1819–1842 (Paris, 1904)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Nouvelles lettres d’Hector Berlioz’, RMI, xii (1905), 339–82

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Les lettres de Berlioz à Auguste Morel’, Guide musical, lviii (1912), 605–710

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Lettres inédites de Hector Berlioz’, RMI, xx (1913), 277–90

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz, le musicien errant: 1842–1852 (Paris, 1919)

H. Girard: Emile Deschamps dilettante (Paris, 1921/R)

J. Tiersot: ‘Lettres de Berlioz sur Les Troyens’, Revue de Paris, xxi/4 (1921), 449–73, 749–70; xxi/5 (1921), 146–71

‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz à Edouard Monnais’, ReM, iv/4–6 (1922–3), 206–17

‘Lettres de Berlioz à sa famille’,Bulletin de l’Académie delphinale (29 Feb 1924)

S. Dupuis: ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Berlioz’, Bulletin de la classe des beaux - arts de l’Académie royale de Belgique, i–ii (1927), 10–17

M. Fehr: ‘Achtzehn Briefe von Hector Berlioz an den Winterthurer Verleger J. Rieter-Biedermann’,Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, ii (1927), 90–106

J. Tiersot, ed.: ‘Lettres de musiciens écrites en français: du XVe au XXe siècle’, RMI, xxxvi (1929), 1–25, 408–29; xxxvii (1930), 1–20, 185–203, 329–49, 529–50; also pubd separately, ii (Turin, 1936)

G. Clarence: ‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, ReM, nos.100–05 (1930), 400–16

S. Ginsburg: ‘Correspondance russe inédite de Berlioz’, ReM, nos.100–05 (1930), 417–24

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz: au milieu du chemin, 1852–1855 (Paris, 1930)

‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, ReM (1935), nos.152–6, 164–8

M. Pincherle, ed.: Musiciens peints par eux-mêmes (Paris, 1939)

J. Barzun, ed.: Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz (New York, 1954)

R. Sietz, ed.: Aus Ferdinand Hillers Briefwechsel, i (Cologne, 1958)

P. Valléry-Radot: ‘Une lettre inédite de Berlioz’, Fureteur médical, xxiii (1964), 35–8

Pisma zarubyezhnïkh muzïkantov iz russkikh arkhivov (Leningrad, 1967)

R. Weeda: ‘Vier brieven van Hector Berlioz’, Mens en melodie, xxiv (1969), 177–9

‘Sixty-One Letters by Berlioz’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 48–87

P. Citron, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Correspondance générale, i: 1803–1832(Paris, 1972); ii: 1832–1842 (Paris, 1975); iii: 1842–1850 (Paris, 1978); iv: 1850–1855(Paris, 1983); v: 1855–1859 (Paris, 1989); vi:1859–1863 (Paris, 1995)

M. Marx-Weber: ‘Hector Berlioz: unbekannte Briefe an Peter Cornelius’, Mf, xxvi (1973), 235–40

R.P. Locke: ‘New Letters of Berlioz’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 71–84

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz and Officialdom: Unpublished Correspondence’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 134–46

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz to Ferrand: Eight billets intimes’, MQ, lxxix (1995), 552–79

H. Macdonald, ed.: Selected Letters of Berlioz (London, 1995)

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz à Ricordi: dix lettres inédites’, RdM, lxxxii (1996), 155–67

b: bibliographies and lists of works

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Bibliographie Berliozienne’, SIMG, v (1903–4), 622–59

T. Müller-Reuter: Lexikon der deutschen Konzertliteratur (Leipzig, 1909/R)

J. Kapp: Berlioz: eine Biographie (Berlin, 1917, 4–7/1922) [incl. list of writings]

C. Hopkinson: A Bibliography of the Musical and Literary Works of Hector Berlioz 1803–1869 (Edinburgh, 1951, rev. 2/1980 by R. Macnutt)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Bibliographie berliozienne’, ReM, no.233 (1956), 97–147

B. Jacobson: ‘A Berlioz Discography’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xix (1969), 56–60

J.B. Ahouse: The Centenary Years: a Bibliography of Articles in the Periodical Literature, 1967–71 (El Paso, TX, 1974)

D.K. Holoman: Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel, 1987)

M.G.H. Wright: A Berlioz Bibliography (Farnborough, 1987)

J. Langford: Hector Berlioz: a Guide to Research (New York, 1989)

c: contemporary memoirs

W.R. Griepenkerl: Ritter Berlioz in Braunschweig (Brunswick, 1843)

J. d’Ortigue: La musique à l’église (Paris, 1861)

L. Escudier: Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1863), 222–57

E. Reyer: Notes de musique (Paris, 1875)

A. Etex: Les souvenirs d’un artiste (Paris, 1877)

J.-B. Weckerlin: Musiciana (Paris, 1877), 319–36

G.A. Osborne: ‘Berlioz’, PMA, v (1878–9), 60–75

F. Hiller: Künstlerleben (Cologne, 1880), 63–143

A. Barbier: Souvenirs personnels et silhouettes contemporaines (Paris, 1883/R), 230–33

E. Legouvé: Soixante ans de souvenirs (Paris, 1886–7; Eng. trans., 1893)

L. Bourgault-Ducoudray: ‘Berlioz: souvenirs intimes’, Le conseiller des dames et des demoiselles, xxxix (1886), 276ff

M. Maretzek: Revelations of an Opera Manager in 19th-Century America: Sharps and Flats (New York, 1890/R)

C. Gounod: Mémoires d’un artiste (Paris, 1896; Eng. trans., 1896/R)

C.E. and M. Hallé eds.: Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé (London, 1896), abridged 1972 by M. Kennedy as The Autobiography of Charles Hallé

F. Hueffer: Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 (London, 2/1889), 151–234

V.V. Stasov: ‘List, Shuman i Berlioz v Rossii’, Severnïy vestnik (1889), no.7, pt i, pp.115–57, no.8, pt.i, pp.73–110; Eng. trans., 1968, in Selected Essays on Music

E. Reyer: ‘Hector Berlioz: Biographical Notes and Personal Reminiscences’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, xlvii (1893–4), 305–10

C. Saint-Saëns: Portraits et souvenirs (Paris, 1900, 3/1909), 3–14

E. Reyer: ‘Berlioz: souvenirs intimes’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 335

C. Saint-Saëns: ‘Souvenirs’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 335

‘Anecdotes sur Berlioz’, RHCM, iii (1903), 422ff

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Hector Berlioz jugé par Adolphe Adam’, ZIMG, vi (1904–5), 475–81

P. Cornelius: ‘Hector Berlioz in Weimar’, Die Musik, iv/2 (1905–6), 159–68

A. Schloesser: ‘Personal Recollections of Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz’, RAM Club Magazine (1911)

H. Davison, ed. : Music during the Victorian Era, from Mendelssohn to Wagner: being the Memoirs of J.W. Davison (London, 1912)

G.B. Shaw: ‘A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.81 (1973), 4–12; no.82 (1974), 9–14

d: life and works

F. Clément: Les musiciens célèbres depuis le seizième siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1868, 4/1887), 514–21

A. Jullien: Hector Berlioz: la vie et le combat: les oeuvres (Paris, 1882)

J. Bennett: Hector Berlioz (London, 1883)

A. Jullien: Hector Berlioz: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1888)

E. Hippeau: Berlioz et son temps (Paris, 1890)

W.H. Hadow: Studies in Modern Music, i (London, 1893, many later edns incl. 1926/R), 71–146

L. Pohl: Hector Berlioz’ Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1900)

A. Hahn and others: Hector Berlioz: sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1901)

R. Louis: Hector Berlioz (Leipzig, 1904)

R. Rolland: ‘Berlioz’, Revue de Paris, xi (1904), 65, 331; repr. in Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1908, many later edns; Eng. trans., 1915/R)

J.-G. Prod’homme: Hector Berlioz (1803–1869): sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1905, 3/1927)

J. Tiersot: Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps (Paris, 1904)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana’, Le ménestrel (1904–6) [series of articles]

A. Boschot: Histoire d'un romantique (Paris, 1906–13, 2/1946–50) [later pubd as Hector Berlioz: une vie romantique, édition définitive (Paris, 1951/R, 2/1965)]

A. Coquard: Berlioz (Paris, 1909)

P.-L. Robert: Etude sur Hector Berlioz (Rouen, 1914)

J. Kapp: Berlioz: eine Biographie (Berlin, 1917, 4–7/1922)

P.-M. Masson: Berlioz (Paris, 1923)

L. Constantin: Berlioz (Paris, 1934)

W.J. Turner: Berlioz, the Man and his Work (London, 1934/R)

J.H. Elliot: Berlioz (London, 1938, 4/1967)

E. Lockspeiser: Berlioz (London, 1939)

G. de Pourtalès: Berlioz et l’Europe romantique (Paris, 1939, rev. 2/1948)

A. Boschot: Portraits de musiciens, i (Paris, 1946)

J. Daniskas: Hector Berlioz (Stockholm, 1947; Eng. trans., 1949)

F. Knuttel: Hector Berlioz (The Hague, 1948)

J. Barzun: Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950; rev., abridged 2/1956/R as Berlioz and his Century, rev. 3/1969 under orig. title)

T. Tiénot: Hector Berlioz: esquisse biographique (Paris, 1951)

H. Barraud: Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1955, 2/1966)

A.A. Khokhlovkina: Berlioz (Moscow, 1960)

C. Ballif: Berlioz (Paris, 1968) [Berlioz and the Romantic Imagination (London, 1969) [Arts Council Exhibition Catalogue]

S. Demarquez: Hector Berlioz: l’homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1969)

H. Macdonald: Berlioz (London, 1982, 2/1991)

D. Cairns: Berlioz 1803–1832: the Making of an Artist (London, 1989)

D.K. Holoman: Berlioz (Cambridge, MA, 1989)

D. Cairns: Berlioz, ii: Servitude and Greatness: 1832–1869 (London, 1999) [vol. ii of Cairns, D1989]

e: specialist publications

Neue Musik-Zeitung (3 Dec 1903) [Berlioz issue]

RHCM, iii (1903), 403–46 [Berlioz issue]

RMG, no.49 (1903) [Berlioz issue]

Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.1– (1952–)

Revue musicale, no.233 (1956) [Berlioz issue]

Association nationale Hector Berlioz: Bulletin de liaison, i–1964–)

Romantisme, no.12 (1976) [Berlioz issue]

RdM, lxiii (1977) [Berlioz issue]

Silex, xvii (1980) [articles by M. Antoine, C. Ballif, S. Baudo, P. Boulez, A. Bourmeyster, M. Clavaud, G. Condé, G. Constance, B. Didier, G. Duval-Wirth, J.-F. Héron, D. Lémery, P. Reliquet, G. Rennaud, J.-V. Richard]

Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxvii/1 (1984) [Berlioz issue]

Cahiers Berlioz, i– (1991–)

P.A. Bloom, ed.: Berlioz Studies (Cambridge,1992) [incl. articles by J. Barzun, P.A. Bloom, D. Cairns, J.-M. Fauquet, I. Kemp, D.B. Levy, H. Macdonald, K. Reeve, J. Rushton]

f: biographical studies

E. de Mirecourt: Berlioz (Paris, 1856, 3/1856)

O. Fouque: Les révolutionnaires de la musique (Paris, 1882)

E. Hippeau: Berlioz intime (Paris, 1883, 2/1889)

J. Tiersot: ‘Un pèlerinage au pays de Berlioz’, Le ménestrel (1884–5)

M. Brenet: Deux pages de la vie de Berlioz (Paris, 1889)

E. Closson: ‘Hector Berlioz à Bruxelles’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 33–9

H. de Curzon: ‘Les débuts de Berlioz dans la critique’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 28–31

F. Grenier: ‘Cherubini et Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 4–8

E. Istel: ‘Berlioz und Cornelius’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 366–72

M. Kufferath: ‘Wagner et Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 24–7

R. Sand: ‘Berlioz et ses contemporains’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 23–4

M. Brenet: ‘L’amitié de Berlioz et de Liszt’, Guide musical, l (1904), 595–687

C. Maclean: ‘Berlioz and England’, SIMG, v (1903–4), 314–28

C. Malherbe: ‘Une autobiographie de Berlioz’, RMI, xiii (1906), 506–21 Le livre d’or du centenaire d’Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1907)

R. Blondel: ‘La jeunesse médicale de Berlioz’, Chronique médicale (1 April 1908)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Berlioz anecdotique’, Musica, vii(1908), 44 only

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz à l’Institut’, Le ménestrel (1910)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz, bibliothécaire du Conservatoire’, Le ménestrel (1910)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz, directeur de concerts symphoniques’, Le ménestrel (1909–10) [series of articles]

E. Dupuy: ‘Alfred de Vigny et Hector Berlioz’, Revue des deux mondes, 6th period, ii (1911), 837–65

O. Feis: Hector Berlioz, eine pathographische Studie, Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens (Wiesbaden, 1911), 81

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Une aventure d’amour de Berlioz’, ZIMG, xiii (1911–12), 137–45

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Hector Berlioz, bibliothécaire du Conservatoire’,Guide musical, lix (1913), 783, 803

J. Tiersot: ‘Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner’, MQ, iii (1917), 453–92

H. Labaste: ‘Alfred de Vigny, collaborateur d’Hector Berlioz’, Revue universitaire, xxix (1920), 369–74

A. Boschot: Chez les musiciens du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, i (Paris, 1922)

D. Lazarus: ‘Un maître de Berlioz: Anton Reicha’, ReM, iii/6–8 (1921–2), 255–61

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Wagner, Berlioz and Monsieur Scribe: Two Collaborations that Miscarried’, MQ, xii (1926), 359–75

E. Rey: La vie amoureuse de Berlioz (Paris, 1929)

K. Emingerova: ‘Hector Berlioz à Prague’, Revue française de Prague (1933), 167–86

A. Boschot: ‘Berlioz et l’Institut’, Monde français, xv (1949), 220

A.W. Ganz: Berlioz in London (London, 1950/R)

H. Kühner: Hector Berlioz: Charakter und Schöpfertum (Olten, 1952)

G. Court: ‘Hector Berlioz and Alfred de Vigny’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 118–27

L. Lack: ‘Berlioz à Londres’, ReM, no. 233 (1956), 87–90

M. Wright: ‘Humbert Ferrand’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.22 (1957), 5–6; no.23 (1957), 3–4

D. Cairns: ‘The Pinch of Snuff’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.40, (1962), 3–7; no.41, (1963), 3–10

M. Wright: ‘Berlioz’s Physiognomy’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.43 (1963), 3

G. Svyet: ‘Gektor Berlioz i Rossiya’, Russkaya mïsl' (2 March 1967)

V. Donnet: ‘Hector Berlioz et la médecine’, Lettres et médecins, i (1969), 3–21

V. Donnet and C. Moureaux: ‘Le baccalauréat-ès-sciences d’Hector Berlioz’, Marseille médical, iii (1969), 1–7

J. Gavot: ‘Berlioz à Nice’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 122–4

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Stendhal’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 114–18

M. Hofmann: ‘Hector Berlioz en Russie’, Journal Musical Français musica-disques, no.179 (1969), 28–30

J.W. Klein: ‘Berlioz’s Personality’, ML, l (1969), 15–24

F. Lesure: ‘Le testament d’Hector Berlioz’, RdM, lv (1969), 219–23

E. Schenk: ‘Berlioz in Wien’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 217–23

A. Vander Linden: ‘En marge du centième anniversaire de la mort d’Hector Berlioz (8 mars 1869)’, Bulletin de la classe des beaux-arts de l'Académie royale de Belgique, li (1969), 36–75

R. Weeda: ‘Hector Berlioz’ bezoecken aan Belgiee’, Mens en melodie, xxiv (1969), 374–5

F. de la Sablière: ‘Quel père fut Hector Berlioz?’, Revue de Paris, lxxvii/2 (1970), 94–103

C. Comboroure: ‘Harriet Smithson, 1828–37’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.86 (1975), 15–18

P.A. Bloom and D.K. Holoman: ‘Berlioz's Music for L'Europe littéraire’, MR, xxxix (1978), 100–09

P.A. Bloom: ‘La mission de Berlioz en Allemagne: un document inédit’, RdeM, lxvi (1980), 70–85

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz à l'Institut Revisited’, AcM, liii (1981), 171–99

P. Raby: Fair Ophelia: a Life of Harriet Smithson (Cambridge, 1982)

R. Clarson-Leach: Berlioz: his Life and Times (Tunbridge Wells, 1983)

E.F. Jensen: ‘Berlioz and Gérard de Nerval’, Soundings, xi (1983–84), 46–51

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz in the Year of the Symphonie fantastique’, JMR, ix (1989), 67–88

G. Payzant: Eduard Hanslick and Ritter Berlioz in Prague (Calgary, 1991)

P. Bloom: ‘Episodes in the Livelihood of an Artist: Berlioz's Contacts and Contracts with Publishers’, JMR, xv (1995), 219

g: general critical studies

G. de Massougnes: Berlioz: son oeuvre (Paris, 1870, 2/1919)

F. Niecks: ‘Hector Berlioz and his Critics’, MT, xxi (1880), 272–4, 326–9

G. Noufflard: Berlioz et le mouvement de l’art contemporain (Florence, 1883, 2/1885)

R. Pohl: Hektor Berlioz: Studien und Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1884/R)

C. Saint-Saëns: Harmonie et mélodie (Paris, 1885, 9/1923), 249–55

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1892–4)

G. de Massougnes: ‘Berlioz et les artistes d’aujourd’hui’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 339–45

E. Schuré: ‘Le génie de Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 1–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘Hector Berlioz’, PMA, xxx (1903–4), 15–36

T.S. Wotton: ‘Stray Notes on Berlioz’, ZIMG, v (1904), 395–9

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana’, Le ménestrel (1904–5) [series of articles]

E. Newman: Musical Studies (London, 1905, 3/1914) Le livre d’or du centenaire d’Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1907)

A. Bruneau: ‘L’influence de Berlioz sur la musique contemporaine’, Musica, vii (1908), 36 only

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1910), 105–57

F. Weingartner: Akkorde: gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1912/R)

M. Emmanuel: ‘Berlioz’, Le correspondant, cclxxviii (1920), 237–61

J. Kapp: Das Dreigestirn: Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner (Berlin, 1920)

A.W. Locke: Music and the Romantic Movement in France (London, 1920/R)

C. Koechlin: ‘Le cas Berlioz’, ReM, iii/3–5 (1921–2), 118–34

Berlioz: being the Report of a Discussion held on December 17, 1928 (London, 1929)

J. Tiersot: La musique aux temps romantiques (Paris, 1930/R)

T.S. Wotton: Hector Berlioz (London, 1935/R)

W. Mellers: ‘A Prophetic Romantic’, Scrutiny, vii (1938–9), 119–28

F. Farga: Der späte Ruhm: Hector Berlioz und seine Zeit (Zürich, 1939, rev. 2/1952 as Hector Berlioz: der Roman seines Lebens)

E.H.W. Meyerstein: ‘An Approach to Berlioz’, MR, ix (1948), 97–101

L. Guichard: La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955)

H. Raynor: ‘Berlioz and his Legend’, MT, xcvi (1955), 414–17

J.A. Westrup: ‘Berlioz and Common Sense’, MT, ci (1960), 755–6

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz and Criticism: Some Surviving Dodos’, MT, civ (1963), 548–51

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz: a Centenary Retrospect’, MT, cx (1969), 249–51

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz a Hundred Years After’, MQ, lvi (1970), 1–13

M. Guiomar: Le masque et le fantasme (Paris, 1970)

E.T. Cone: ‘Inside the Saint’s Head: the Music of Berlioz’, Musical Newsletter, i/3 (1971), 3–13; i/4 (1971), 16–21; ii/1 (1972), 19–22

A.E.F. Dickinson: The Music of Berlioz (London, 1972)

P. Heyworth, ed.: E. Newman: Berlioz: Romantic and Classic (London, 1972)

B. Primmer: The Berlioz Style (London, 1973)

R. Bockholdt: Berlioz-Studien (Tutzing, 1979)

M. Clavaud: Hector Berlioz: visages d'un masque (Lyons, 1980)

J. Rushton: The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge, 1983)

T. Schacher: Idee und Erscheinungsformen des Dramatischen bei Hector Berlioz (Hamburg, 1987)

J.-P. Bartoli: L'oeuvre symphonique de Berlioz: forme et principes de développement (diss., U. of Paris, Sorbonne, 1991)

A. Ramaut: Hector Berlioz: compositeur romantique français (Arles, 1993)

h: specialized critical studies

J. d’Ortigue: Le balcon de l’Opéra (Paris, 1833), 295–324

J. Mainzer: Chronique musicale de Paris (Paris, 1838)

P. Scudo: Critique et littérature musicales, i (Paris, 1850, 3/1856), 14–74

E. Hanslick: Aus dem Concert-saal (Vienna, 1870/R, 2/1896)

A. Jullien: Goethe et la musique (Paris, 1880), 126–43

A. Ernst: ‘Wagner corrigé par Berlioz’, Le ménestrel (1883–4)

A. Ernst: L’oeuvre dramatique de H. Berlioz (Paris, 1884)

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 2nd ser. (Paris, 1894), 94–112

M. Brenet: ‘Berlioz inédit: Les francs-juges, La nonne sanglante’, Guide musical, xlii (1896), 61–7, 81–5

F. Weingartner: Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Leipzig, 1898, 4/1926/R; Eng. trans., 1906)

A. Boutarel: ‘Berlioz und seine “Architecturale Musik”’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 323–31

P. Flat: ‘Le romantisme de Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 3–4

M. Puttmann: ‘Hector Berlioz als Gesangkomponist’, NZM, xcix (1903), 645–7

F. Weingartner: ‘Le manque d’invention chez Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 21–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘Einige Missverständnisse betreffs Berlioz’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 358–65

G. Pioch: ‘Berlioz littérateur’, Musica, vii (1908), 45 only

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioz symphoniste’, Musica, vii (1908), 41–2

A. Boschot: ‘La musique religieuse de Berlioz’, Le correspondant, ccxxxvii (1909), 1172–94

P. J. Bone: The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers (London, 1914, 2/1954/R)

E. Newman: ‘Rouget de L'Isle, “La Marseillaise”, and Berlioz’, MT, lvi (1915), 461–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘The Scores of Berlioz and Some Modern Editing’, MT, lvi (1915), 651–6

J. Tiersot: ‘Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner’, MQ, iii (1917), 453–92

G. Abraham: ‘The Influence of Berlioz on Richard Wagner’, ML, v (1924), 239–46

W.W. Roberts: ‘Berlioz the Critic’, ML, vii (1926), 63–72, 133–42

F. Bonavia: ‘Berlioz’, MMR, lix (1929), 231–5

C. Lambert: ‘The Isolation of Berlioz: Academic Criticism’, Daily Telegraph (27 April 1929)

T.S. Wotton: ‘Berlioz as Melodist’, MT, lxx (1929), 808–12

T.S. Wotton: Berlioz: Four Works (London, 1929)

F. Baser: ‘Hector Berlioz und die germanische Seele’, Die Musik, xxvi (1933–4), 259–63

E. Lockspeiser: ‘Berlioz and the French Romantics’, ML, xv (1934), 26–31

J. Tiersot: ‘Schumann et Berlioz’, ReM, no.161 (1935), 89–102

D. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, iv: Illustrative Musik (London, 1936/R, 2/1981) [on Harold en Italie, Le roi Lear and the ‘Scène d’amour’ in Roméo et Juliette]

T.S. Wotton: ‘Infernal Language: a Berlioz Hoax’, MT, lxxviii (1937), 209–10

H. Bartenstein: Hector Berlioz’ Instrumentationskunst und ihre geschichtliche Grundlagen (Strasbourg, 1939, 2/1974)

T.S. Wotton: ‘An Unknown Score of Berlioz’, MR, iv (1943), 224–8

R. Dumesnil: La musique romantique française (Paris, 1944)

M. Sahlberg: Berlioz et les russes (diss., U. of Paris, 1944)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Berlioz, Musset and Thomas de Quincey’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 98–106

C. Cudworth: ‘Berlioz and Wiertz: a Comparison and a Contrast’, RBM, vi (1952), 275–82

F. Noske: La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc (Amsterdam, 1954; Eng. trans., rev. R. Benton and F. Noske, 1970/R)

R.W.S. Mendl: ‘Berlioz and Shakespeare’, The Chesterian, xxix (1954–5), 95–107; xxx (1955–6), 1–11

J. Barzun: Energies of Art (New York, 1956/R), 281–301

A. Copland: ‘Berlioz Today’, Saturday Review (27 Aug 1960)

P. Friedheim: ‘Radical Harmonic Procedures in Berlioz’, MR, xxi (1960), 282–96

J.W. Klein: ‘Berlioz as a Musical Dramatist’, The Chesterian, xxxv (1960–61), 35–43

C. Wallis: ‘Berlioz and the Lyric Stage’, MT, ci (1960), 358–9

A.W.G. Court: Hector Berlioz: the Rôle of Literature in his Life and Work (diss., U. of London, 1961)

R. Collet: ‘Berlioz and Shakespeare’, New Statesman (20 Dec 1963)

F.V. Grunfeld: ‘The Colossal Nightingale’, Reporter, xxix (1963), 52–5

G. Warrack: ‘Hector, Thou Sleep’st’, MT, civ (1963), 896–7

E.C. Bass: Thematic Procedures in the Symphonies of Berlioz (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1964)

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz’s Rome Prize Works’, MR, xxv (1964), 163–85

A.S. Garlington: ‘Lesueur, “Ossian” and Berlioz’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 206–8

P. Hartnoll, ed.: Shakespeare in Music (London, 1964)

J. Warrack: ‘Berlioz and the “Theatre of the Mind”’, The Listener, (5 Nov 1964)

R. Hyatt: ‘The Earliest Compositions of Berlioz’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.51, (1965), 1–5, no.52 (1965), 2–9

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz’s Roots in 18th-century French Opera’, Berlioz Society Bulletin no.50 (1965), 3–10

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz’s Self-Borrowings’, PRMA, xcii (1965–6), 27–44

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz's Epic Opera’, The Listener, (1966)

D. Cairns: ‘Hector Berlioz (1803–69)’, The Symphony, ed. R. Simpson, i (London, 1966, 2/1972), 201–31

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz’s “Bleeding Nun”’, MT, cvii (1966), 584–8

K. Lucas: Hector Berlioz and the Dramatic Symphony (diss., U. of Melbourne, 1966)

E.C. Bass: ‘Thematic Unification of Scenes in Multi-Movement Works of Berlioz’, MR, xxviii (1967), 45–51

E. Gräbner: Berlioz and French Operatic Tradition (diss., U. of York, 1967)

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Heine’, Revue de littérature comparée, xli (1967), 5–23

P.H. Tanner: Timpani and Percussion Writing in the Works of Hector Berlioz (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1967)

R. Hyatt: ‘Le cheval arabe, Beverley, and Estelle’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.60 (1968), 6–13

R.F. Weirauch: The Orchestrational Style of Hector Berlioz (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1968)

J.-M. Bailbé: Le roman et la musique en France sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1969)

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz in 1969: a Fantasia for Friends Overseas’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 33–4

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Stendhal’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 114–18

H.J. Macdonald: Berlioz Orchestral Music (London, 1969)

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz’s Orchestration: Human or Divine?’, MT, cx (1969), 255–8

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Colossal Nightingale’, Music and Musicians, xvii/11 (1968–9), 24–5

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Two Peculiarities of Berlioz’s Notation’, ML, l (1969), 25–36

H. Pleasants: ‘Berlioz as Critic’, Stereo Review, xxiii/4 (1969), 89–93

J.F. Stuart: The Dramatic World of Hector Berlioz (diss., U. of Rochester, 1969)

N. Temperley: ‘Berlioz and the Slur’, ML, l (1969), 388–92

P. Vaillant: ‘Berlioz à la bibliothèque de Grenoble’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 133–6

M. Wright: ‘Berlioz and Anglo-American Criticism’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 93–101

R. Covell: ‘Berlioz, Russia and the Twentieth Century’, Studies in Music, iv (1970), 40–51

J. Day: ‘Goetz von Berlichingen and Les francs-juges’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.66 (1970), 6–10

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Labitte Catalogue: Some Unexplored Evidence’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.69 (1970), 5–7

D. Charlton: ‘A Berlioz Footnote’, ML, lii (1971), 157–8

S. Ironfield: L’art et l’artiste dans les écrits de Berlioz (diss., U. of Liverpool, 1971)

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Labitte Catalogue: More Evidence’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.70 (1971), 7–8

B. Primmer: ‘Berlioz and Harmonic Intensification’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.72 (1971), 3–6

C.B. Wilson: Berlioz’s Use of Brass Instruments (diss., Case Western Reserve U., Cleveland,1971)

E. Gräbner: ‘Some Aspects of Rhythm in Berlioz’, Soundings, ii (1971–2), 18–27

J.-M. Bailbé: Berlioz: artiste et écrivain dans les ‘Mémoires’ (Paris, 1972)

P.J. Dallman: Influences and Use of the Guitar in the Music of Berlioz (diss., U. of Maryland, 1972)

H.R. Cohen: Berlioz and the Opera (1829-1849) (diss., New York U., 1973)

L. Goldberg: A Hundred Years of Berlioz’s Les Troyens (diss., U. of Rochester, 1973)

D. McCaldin: ‘Berlioz and the Organ’, Organ Yearbook, iv (1973), 3–17

R.S. Silverman: ‘Synthesis in the Music of Hector Berlioz’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 346–52

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz’s “Huit scènes de Faust”: New Source Material’,MT, cxv (1974), 471–3

P.A. Bloom: ‘Orpheus’ Lyre Resurrected: a tableau musical by Berlioz’, MQ, lxi (1975), 189–211

D.K. Holoman: The Creative Process in the Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c1818–1840 (Ann Arbor, 1975)

D.K. Holoman: ‘The Present State of Berlioz Research’, AcM, xlvii (1975), 31–67

D.K. Holoman: ‘Reconstructing a Berlioz Sketch’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 125–30

R.F. Weirauch: ‘The Neo-Renaissance Berlioz’, MR, xxxvi (1975), 245–52

D. Cairns: ‘Spontini’s Influence on Berlioz’, From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun, ed. D.B. Weiner and W.R. Keylor (New York, 1976), 25–41

J.R. Elliott jr: ‘The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw’, ML, lvii (1976), 292–308

P. Friedheim: ‘Berlioz and Rhythm’, MR, xxxvii (1976), 5–44

D.K. Holoman: ‘Berlioz au Conservatoire: notes biographiques’, RdM, lxii (1976), 289–92

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz and the Critic: La damnation de Fétis’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 240–65

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz through the Looking-Glass’, Soundings, vi (1977), 51–66

J. Haar: ‘Berlioz and the “First Opera”’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 32–41

M. Henke and M. Stegemann: ‘Hector Berlioz: neue Aspekte zum Jugendwerk’, NZfM, cxli (1980), 241–3

D.K. Holoman: ‘The Berlioz Sketchbook Recovered’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 282–317

M. Biondi: ‘L'armonia di Berlioz: aspetti tecnici e stilistici’, NRMI, xviii (1984), 406–19

K. Murphy: ‘Attribution of some Unsigned Articles of Berlioz in the Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris (1834–1837)’, Musicology Australia, viii (1985), 39–49

K. Murphy: Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1988)

K.H. Kohrs: ‘Berlioz' coup rude de tam-tam: autobiographische Konstruktion als Kunstenwurf’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistergeschichte, lxiii (1989), 120

K.H. Kohrs: ‘Emphase und Sturz: Elevationsmotive bei Hector Berlioz’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistergeschichte, lxvi (1992), 697

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz and Shaw: an Affinity’, Unpublished Shaw ed. D.H. Laurence and M. Peters (Philadelphia, 1996), 67

J.-P. Bartoli: ‘La “Technique de la cigale”: la construction périodique et motivique des thèmes de Berlioz’, Musurgia, iv/2 (1997), 59

N. Del Mar: Conducting Berlioz (Oxford, 1997)

(2) Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei

i: individual works

(i) Messe solennelle

H. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz's Messe solennelle’, 19CM, xvi (1992–3), 267–85

H. Macdonald: ‘Die Wiederentdeckung der “Messe solennelle” von Hector Berlioz’, Musik und Kirche, lxiii (1993), 140–43

(ii) Symphonie fantastique

R. Schumann: ‘Aus dem Leben eines künstlers: Phantastische Symphonie in 5 Abtheilungen von Hector Berlioz’, NZM, iii (1835), 1–51

G. Noufflard: La Symphonie fantastique de Hector Berlioz: essai sur l'expression de la musique instrumentale (Florence, 1880)

P. Magnette: Les grandes étapes dans l'oeuvre de Hector Berlioz, i: La symphonie fantastique (1829–32) (Liège, 1908)

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz, the Cornet and the Symphonie fantastique’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.47 (1964), 2–6

E.T. Cone: Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony (New York, 1971)

N. Temperley: ‘The Symphonie fantastique and its Program’, MQ, lvii (1971), 593–608

W. Dömling: ‘Die Symphonie fantastique und Berlioz' Auffasung von Programmusik’, Mf, xxviii (1975), 260–83

C. Berger: Phantastik als Konstruktion: Hector Berlioz' ‘Symphonie fantastique’(Kassel, 1983)

J.-P. Bartoli: ‘Forme narrative et principes du développement musical dans la Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz’, Musurgia, ii (1995), 25ff

(iii) Harold en Italie

F. Liszt: ‘Berlioz und seine Haroldsymphonie’, NZM, xliii (1855), 25–97

A. Montaux: ‘Berlioz: son génie, sa technique, son caractère; à propos d'un manuscrit autographe d'Harold en Italie’, Le ménestrel (1890)

G. Court: ‘Berlioz and Byron and Harold in Italy’, MR, xvii (1956), 229–36

M.E. Bonds: ‘Sinfonia anti-eroica: Berlioz's Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven's Influence’, JM, x (1992), 417–63

J. Langford: ‘The Byronic Berlioz: Harold en Italie and Beyond’, JMR, xvi (1997), 199–221

(iv) Roméo et Juliette

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz in Verona’, Music and Musicians, xii/8 (1963–4), 15–17

J. Rushton: Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette (Cambridge, 1994)

(v) Benvenuto Cellini

H. von Bülow: ‘Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini’, NZM, xlvii (1852); repr. in Ausgewählte Schriften, i (Leipzig, 1911), 190

J.-G. Prod'homme: ‘Les deux Benvenuto Cellini de Berlioz’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 449–60

A. Hammond: ‘Benvenuto Cellini’, Opera, viii (1957), 205–9

H. Macdonald: ‘The Original “Benvenuto Cellini”’, MT, cvii (1966), 1042–5

L'avant-scène opéra, no.142 (1991) [Benvenuto Cellini issue; articles by F. Piatier, H. Macdonald, J.-M. Brèque, C. Capacci, J.-M. Fauquet, D. van Moere, A. Vanzo, E. Giuliani]

P.A. Bloom, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini, Dossiers de Presse Parisienne (n.p., 1995)

(vi) La damnation de Faust

L. Kreutzer: ‘Le Faust d'Hector Berlioz’, Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, xxi (1854), 389; xxii (1855), 10, 27, 41, 91, 97

J.-G. Prod'homme: Le cycle Berlioz, i: La damnation de Faust (Paris, 1896)

E. Colonne: ‘La damnation de Faust’, Musica, vii (1908), 37 only

A. Boschot: Le Faust de Berlioz (Paris, 1910, 3/1945)

K. Isoz: ‘Le manuscrit original du “Rákóczy” de Berlioz’, Revue des études hongroise, ii (1924), 5–17

J. Tiersot: La damnation de Faust de Berlioz (Paris, 1924)

E. Haraszti: ‘1846–1946: un centenaire romantique: Berlioz et la marche hongroise’, ReM (1946), suppl.

J. Rushton: ‘The Genesis of Berlioz's “La damnation de Faust”’,ML, lvi (1975), 129–46

(vii) Les Troyens

E. Destranges: Les Troyens de Berlioz: étude analytique (Paris, 1897)

A. Jullien: ‘Les Troyens’, Musica, vii (1908), 43 only

G. Servières: ‘Pièces inédites relatives aux Troyens’, ReM, v/7–8 (1923–4), 147–51

E. Newman: ‘Les Troyens’, Opera Nights (London, 1943), 283–324

J.W. Klein: ‘Les Troyens’, MMR, lxxxvii (1957), 83–91

G.S. Fraenkel: ‘Berlioz, the Princess and “Les Troyens”’, ML, xliv (1963), 249–56

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz and Virgil’, PRMA, xcv (1969), 97–110

H. Kühn: ‘Antike massen: zu einigen Motiven in Les Troyens von Hector Berlioz’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1975), 141–52

J. Rushton: ‘The Overture to Les Troyens’, MA, iv (1986), 119–44

I. Kemp: Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens (Cambridge, 1988)

L'avant-scène opéra, nos.128–9 (1990) [Les Troyens issue; articles by H. Macdonald, D. Cairns, J.-M. Brèque, G. Condé, J.-F. Labie, J.-M. Fauquet, C. Wasselin]

A. Ramaut: ‘Le livret des Troyens de Berlioz: le compromis d'une réécriture’, Le livret malgré lui (Paris, 1992), 94–105

F. Heidlberger: Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens à Carthage, Dossiers de Presse Parisienne (n.p., 1995)

(viii) Others

J.-G. Prod'homme: Le cycle Berlioz, ii: L'enfance du Christ (Paris, 1898)

R. Sternfeld: ‘Ist der Lélio von Berlioz aufführbar?’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 373–5

J. Tiersot: ‘Les huit scènes de Faust’, Le ménestrel (1910)

T.S. Wotton: ‘A Berlioz Caprice and its Programme’, MT, lxix (1927), 704–6

G.T. Sandford: The Overtures of Hector Berlioz: a Study in Musical Style (diss., U. of Southern California, 1964)

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz's “Bleeding Nun”’, MT, cvii (1966), 584–8

J. Warrack: ‘Berlioz's Mélodies’, MT, cx (1969), 252–4

C. Hopkinson: ‘Berlioz and the Marseillaise’, ML, li (1970), 435–9

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz's “Huit scènes de Faust”: New Source Material’, MT, cxv (1974), 471–3

E.T. Cone: ‘Berlioz's Divine Comedy: The Grande messe des morts’, 19CM, iv (1980), 3–16

O. Visentini: ‘I recitativi di Berlioz per il Freischütz di Weber’, RIM, xxviii (1993), 299–359

Berman, Bernhardt.

See Bar-Am, Benjamin.

Berman, Boris

(b Moscow, 3 April 1948). American pianist of Russian birth. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Lev Oborin from 1965 to 1971, and took part in the Russian premières of works by Ligeti, Berio, Stockhausen and Cage, as well as the first performances of Denisov’s Ode and Schnittke’s Serenade. In 1973 he emigrated to Israel, and for six years taught at Tel-Aviv University. After moving to the USA in 1979 he held various teaching posts, and from 1984 to 1997 was head of piano at Yale University, where he also directed the Yale Music Spectrum concert series. Among Berman’s many recordings are the complete piano works of Prokofiev, which display his powerful but always clear, stylish and intelligent playing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Gerber: ‘Conversation with Boris Berman’, Fanfare, xiv/3 (1990–91), 435–9

H. Goldsmith: ‘Boris Berman: Balancing Intellect and Heart’, Clavier, xxxi/7 (1992), 10–15 [interview]

DAVID FANNING

Berman, Eugene [Yevgeny Gustavovich]

(b St Petersburg, 4/16 Nov 1899; d Rome, 14 Dec 1972). American stage designer of Russian birth. He studied painting and architecture in St Petersburg until forced to flee in 1918. He settled in Paris in 1919 and remained there for 20 years, studying painting at the Académie Ranson until 1922. Along with Christian Bérard and Pavel Chelishchev (Tchelitchew), he was identified with neo-Romanticism and its preoccupation with architectural views of landscapes and the evocative use of perspective, twin features of his stage designs. In 1937 he designed a production of Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper at the Théâtre de l’Etoile, Paris, and then began a series of commissions for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. He emigrated to the USA in 1940, became a naturalized citizen in 1944 and finally settled in Rome in 1957.

Berman attracted attention in 1951 with his designs for a television production (NBC) of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors and for Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, the inaugural production at the Ringling Museum of Art’s Baroque theatre in Sarasota, Florida. From 1951 to 1957 he worked on productions at the Metropolitan Opera of Rigoletto (1951), La forza del destino (1952), Il barbiere di Siviglia (1954) and Don Giovanni (1957); he also designed Così fan tutte for La Scala in 1956. Otello (1963) was his last production for the Metropolitan.

Berman rejected the abstract impressions of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, describing them as ‘gloomy, rigid and depressing in their puritanistic primness and intellectual intolerance’. His colourful and elegant designs were brilliant mannerist illustrations that evoked crumbling architectural fantasies of earlier times.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Delarue: ‘The Stage and Ballet Designs of Eugene Berman’, Dance Index, v/2 (1946), 4–24

G. Amberg: ‘Introduction to the Theatre of Eugene Berman’, The Theatre of Eugene Berman (New York, 1947) [exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York]

J. Levy: Eugene Berman (London, 1948)

Eugene Berman (London, 1960) [catalogue, Lefevre Galleries]

DAVID J. HOUGH

Berman, Lazar' (Naumovich)

(b Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 26 Feb 1930). Russian pianist. From the age of two he was taught by his mother, Anna Makhover, and from three and a half by Samary Savshinsky of the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1939 his family moved to Moscow and he joined the class of Aleksandr Gol'denveyzer, first at the Central Children’s Music School, then from 1948 to 1953 at the Moscow Conservatory, where he continued as a postgraduate until 1957. He gained a reputation for astonishing virtuosity, and prizes at the 1956 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and the Franz Liszt in Budapest were followed by a foreign tour, during which he played and recorded Liszt's B minor Sonata and Beethoven's ‘Appassionata’ in London. From 1959 to 1971 he was not allowed to tour abroad because of his marriage to a Frenchwoman (from whom he was soon to be divorced, however).

Berman made recordings of the complete Liszt Transcendental Studies in 1959 and 1963, the latter at the invitation of the state recording firm Melodiya to take advantage of stereo technology; these contain Liszt playing of extraordinary rhetorical grandeur and agility. In the 1970s he was allowed to tour again and his international career blossomed. Although his concert performances were inconsistent, he made several fine recordings, including a Rachmaninoff Third Concerto of colossal power and structural command, and the original version of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto. In 1980, at the height of his success, he was again forbidden to tour and all his foreign contracts were cancelled, after the discovery of banned American literature in his luggage. In 1988 he was made Honoured Artist of the RSFSR. He left Moscow in August 1990 to teach in Norway and Italy, settling in Imola at the end of the year. In 1995 he was appointed to teach at the Musikhochschule in Weimar. He plays in a duo with his son, the violinist Pavel Berman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. James and V. Yurchenkov: ‘The Unveiling of Lazar Berman’, Fidelity and Musical America, xxvi/l (1976), 52–6 [interview with Berman]

‘Lazar Berman Talks to Alan Blyth’, Gramophone, liv (1976–7), 1257–8

M. Zilberquit: Russia's Great Modern Pianists (Neptune, NJ, 1983), 7–70 [interview with Berman]

DAVID FANNING

Bermann, Jeremias.

Austrian music publisher in the firm of Joseph Eder.

Bermúdez, Pedro

(b Granada; c1558; d Puebla, ?1605). Spanish composer. He was probably educated at Granada Cathedral under Santos de Aliseda, maestro de capilla there from 1557 to 1580, and perhaps also studied composition with Rodrigo de Ceballos, maestro de capilla at the adjacent Capilla Real from 1561–1581. On 8 July 1584, while holding a benefice at Santa Fe, he was elected maestro de capilla of the collegiate church at Antequera. Unhappy there, he unsuccessfully competed for the post of maestro de capilla at Málaga in February 1586. Dismissed from his Antequera appointment on 31 January 1587 for gross negligence and a fight with one of his tenors that had led to a brief imprisonment, he returned to Granada, where he secured a half chaplaincy at the Capilla Real. He unsuccessfully competed for the post of maestro de capilla at Granada Cathedral in April 1592 and remained at the Capilla Real until he left for the New World, probably in the spring of 1595. On 9 October 1597 he succeeded Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo as maestro de capilla at Cuzco, mountain capital of the Incas. He seems to have left Cuzco during 1598, probably because of dissatisfaction with his salary and the enmity of his singers, since in that year he became maestro de capilla at Guatemala City Cathedral; he remained in this post until his departure for Puebla in 1603. He probably died at Puebla late in 1605 since the sochantre Luis Mendes was placed in charge of the choir there on 1 January 1606.

All but one of Bermúdez's extant works are preserved in the choirbooks at Guatemala City Cathedral. The exception, Domine ad adiuvandum me, appears in the Puebla Libros de coro, which books also contain concordances to seven of the Guatemala works. All the works are liturgical and, except for the parody Misa de Bomba, based on the ensalada La Bomba by Mateo Flecha the Elder, they incorporate the monophonic music to which their texts were traditionally sung. Although not a composer of the stature of Guerrero or Victoria, Bermúdez was a well-trained craftsman capable of providing competently written polyphonic settings for liturgical use in New World churches.

WORKS

Editions: A New World Collection of Renaissance Polyphony for Holy Week and the Salve Service: Guatemala Cathedral Music MS 4, MRM, ix (1995) [N]

Masses: Misa de Bomba; Misa de feria, 4vv, N; Misa de feria, 5vv, N

Passions: Passio secundum Matthaeum, N; Passio secundum Lucam, N; Passio secundum Joannem, N

Hymns: Aurea luce; Christe redemptor omnium; Defensor alme; Hostis Herodes [2 settings]; Iste confessor [2 settings]; Jesu nostra redemptio [2 settings]; Lauda mater; Pange lingua; Veni creator

Antiphons: Christus natus est, 4vv; Christus natus est, 8vv; Lumen ad revelationem, 4vv; Lumen ad revelationem, 5vv; Salve regina, 4vv, N; Salve regina, 4vv, N; Salve regina, 5vv, N; Salve regina, 6vv, N; Salve regina, ed. Stevenson (1982–3), 45–50, formerly attrib. Bermúdez, actually by Hernandeo Franco

Other works: Cum invocarem, N; Qui habitavit, N; In manus tua, N; Nunc dimittis, N; Domine ad adiuvandum me; Lamentations of Jeremiah (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday), N; Miserere mei, N; O gloriosa Domina; Vidi aquam

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Stevenson: ‘Cuzco Cathedral: 1546–1750’, Inter-American Music Review, ii/2 (1979–80), 1–25

R. Stevenson: ‘Guatemala Cathedral to 1803’, Inter-American Music Review, ii/2 (1979–80), 27–71

R. Stevenson: ‘Puebla Chapelmasters and Organists: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Inter-American Music Review, v/2 (1982–3), 21–62; vi/1 (1983–4), 29–139

R. Snow: ‘Music by Francisco Guerrero in Guatemala’, Nassarre, iii/1 (1987), 153–201

ROBERT J. SNOW

Bermúdez Silva, Jesús

(b Bogotá, 24 Dec 1884; d Bogotá, 25 Oct 1969). Colombian composer. He studied the violin and theory with Uribe Holguín at the National Conservatory in Bogotá (1905–10) and taught the violin and the viola there (1910–19). From 1929 to 1933 he studied composition with Campo at the Madrid Conservatory. He then held posts as a teacher of counterpoint and composition at the National Conservatory in Bogotá (1935–7), a teacher of string instruments and theory at the Escuela Normal in Tunja (1928–40), director of the Regional Conservatory of Tolima at Ibagué (1942–4) and professor of harmony and counterpoint at the conservatory attached to the National University of Colombia in Bogotá (1952–62). From 1935 he played a decisive role in the heated discussion on nationalism, presenting various symphonic pieces inspired by traditional Colombian music. His orchestral and chamber works, though never daring, were always well crafted. He disavowed everything he wrote before 1930.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Cuento de hadas, vas, fls, orch 1930; Torbellino, sym. poem, 1931; Sym., C, 1933; 3 danzas típicas, 1938; Pf Conc., a, 1947, unpubd; Orgía campesina, sym. poem, 1959; Estampa criolla, sym. impression, 1959, unpubd

Choral: several pieces for 3–4vv, 1938, incl. Leyenda de oro (E. Ortega), 4vv, and Canción arrullo de María Isabel (L. Stella), 3vv, in Obras polifónicas, ed. L.A. Escobar (Bogotá, 1973), 39ff

Chbr and solo inst: Prelude and Fugue, g, org, 1930; Trio no.2, C, fl, vc, pf, 1943; Str Qt, D, 1947; Pf Trio, g, 1949; Sonatina, a, pf, 1950; Pf Sonata, D, 1951; 6 viejas estampas de Santa Fé de Bogotá, pf, 1958

Songs, 1v, pf: Canción de la tarde (M.H. Cortes), 1939; Fué un amor (R. Nieto), 1939; Ilusión (R. Nieto), 1939

WRITINGS

‘La posible ascendencia vasca de nuestra música popular’, Boletín de la Radio Nacional, no.217 (1962)

La guitarrería popular en Chiquinquirá (Bogotá, 1963)

Aires musicales de los indios guambianos del Cauca (Bogotá, 1970)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, ed. Pan American Union, viii (Washington DC, 1962), 29–33

J.I. Perdomo Escobar: Historia de la música en Colombia (Bogotá, 1975)

A. Pardo Tovar: ‘Jesús Bermúdez Silva’, Textos sobre música y folklore, i (Bogotá, 1978), 218–20

S. Friedmann: Jesús Bermúdez Silva, músico (Bogotá, 1986)

ROBERT STEVENSON/ELLIE ANNE DUQUE

Bermudo, Juan

(b Écija, c1510; d ?Écija, after 1559). Spanish music theorist. All our knowledge of his life comes from his treatises. He was the son of a well-to-do Écija family and joined the Observant Franciscans at the age of 15. He studied at the University of Alcalá de Henares, probably in the Franciscan college. Eventually he became guardián of his convent (perhaps that in Écija), a duty he had to relinquish owing to illness. On 24 June 1560 he was elected definidor, a member of the governing body of the Franciscan province of Andalusia. Since no later documents have come to light, it is believed that he died in the early 1560s.

Bermudo refers only obliquely to early studies in music; at the university he studied mathematics. He clearly never held a musical position, and as a theorist he seems to have been self-taught through wide reading; his main modern sources are Faber Stapulensis, Gaffurius, Ornithoparchus and Glarean. The titles by which he is addressed in his books refer to him only as a dignitary of his order; his superior praised him as a fine preacher and confessor. Although his career may seem surprising for a theorist, it corresponds well to the attitude of Spanish Observant Franciscans, who did not cultivate polyphonic music. Bermudo devoted himself to music only after illness forced him to resign as guardián, possibly already then with the intention of writing a book.

The publication of his Declaración did not come about easily. The first edition is an extract (the Libro primero) from what was intended to be four separate books and was dedicated to João III, King of Portugal. Despite the word ‘instruments’ (though not ‘music’) in the title, the book does not deal with instruments at all; only in the edition of 1555 does it become clear that the expression ‘instrumentos musicales’ refers to musica instrumentalis, practical rather than speculative music. The second publication, El arte tripharia (‘The Threefold Art’) of 1550, was written for the nuns of the Santa Clara convent in Montilla at the request of the abbess, Doña Isabel Pacheco, to whom it is dedicated. It is an abbreviated version in three books, comprising a manual for beginners of plainchant, polyphony and organ-playing. Not until 1555 was Bermudo able to bring out what he considered the definitive version of his treatise, dedicated to Francisco de Zúñiga y Avellaneda, Count of Miranda. It begins with an extended praise of music in the first book, combines much of the elementary treatises of the 1550 edition in the second book, followed by more advanced treatment in the third book, and includes a fourth book – actually on musical instruments, especially the organ, harp and vihuela – and a new fifth book on composition, prefaced with a commendatory letter by Cristóbal de Morales, praising the theorist for embedding theory in practice (the book includes complete compositions). A sixth book, though announced on the title-page, was not included, nor was a contemplated seventh book; Bermudo mentioned the high cost of paper.

Bermudo's stated goal (Prologue of El arte tripharia) was to distil Greek and Latin theory in a form intelligible to the average singer; his four-book treatise was intended as a textbook for university students, but could also be used by the self-taught. In this he succeeded admirably, guiding the student personally, with many interesting observations, from elementary instruction to advanced theory, not hesitating to criticize previous writers (the sixth book was to have refuted the errors of 14 of them). He made much of his ‘12 new things’ (in the sense that they had not been covered by previous treatises); nine of these, however, were in the unprinted sixth and seventh books. They mostly concern methods of achieving accidentals in harps, vihuelas and keyboard instruments, with advice on building organs and keyboard instruments. The novelties discussed in the 1555 treatise concern the tuning of the seven-course vihuela, including a proposed new tuning system applicable to all fretted instruments, close to equal temperament. He wrote at length on composing in the ‘semi-chromatic’ (mixed diatonic and chromatic) genus.

As Bermudo had hoped, his book achieved wide success; it was quoted well into the 18th century and remains today the most comprehensive and accessible source of 16th-century Spanish music theory. He successfully bridged the gulf that separated practice and theory and in the process raised the level of scientific discourse in the genre of musica practica treatises by introducing mathematical and geometrical demonstrations that formerly appeared only in musica speculativa and mathematical treatises. His careful didactic method but also his personal presentation of the material, interspersed with much ‘advice’, bring the sometimes dry theoretical tradition to life, and his treatise deserves to be much better known.

WRITINGS

El libro primero de la Declaración de instrumentos (Osuna, 1549)

El arte tripharia (Osuna, 1550/R)

El libro llamado Declaración de instrumentos musicales (Osuna, 1555/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.M. Ward: The Vihuela de Mano and its Music (diss., New York U., 1953)

M.S. Kastner: Postscript to Fray Juan Bermudo: Declaración de instrumentos musicales, DM, 1st ser., Druckschiften-Faksimiles, xi (1957)

R. Stevenson: Juan Bermudo (The Hague, 1960)

F.J. León Tello: Estudios de historia de la teoría musical (Madrid, 1962, 2/1991)

R. Stevenson: ‘Juan Bermudo’, Notes, xx (1962–3), 397–8

A. Corona Alcalde: ‘Fray Juan Bermudo and his Seven Vihuelas’, The Lute, xxiv (1984), 77–86

M.A. Ester-Sala: ‘Difusió en català de l'obra de J. Bermudo a l'Ordinarium barcinonense de 1569’, Recerca musicològica, v (1985), 13–43

A. Zaldívar Gracia: ‘Aportaciones sobre la discrepancia modal entre Bermudo y Santa María: el sexto modo cantando siempre con el bemol’, Nassarre: revista aragonesa de musicología, iii (1987), 203–23

M.T. Annoni: Tuning, Temperament and Pedagogy for the Vihuela in Juan Bermudo's ‘Declaración de instrumentos musicales’ (1555) (diss., Ohio State U., 1989)

A. Corona Alcalde: ‘The Vihuela and the Guitar in Sixteenth-Century Spain: a Critical Appraisal of Some of the Existing Evidence’, The Lute, xxx (1990), 3–24

W. Freis: Cristóbal de Morales and the Spanish Motet in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century: an Analytical Study of Selected Motets by Morales and Competitive Settings in Sev-BC 1 and Taraz-C 2–3 (diss., U. of Chicago, 1992)

N. van Ree Bernard: ‘Una afinación de Bermudo llevada a la práctica en una reconstrucción hipotetica de un monacórdio del siglo XVI’, Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, ed. M.F. Cídrais Rodrígues, M. Morais and R.V. Nery (Lisbon, 1992), 35–49

P. Otaola: ‘Instrumento perfecto y sistemas armónicos microtonales en el siglo XVI: Bermudo, Vicentino y Salinas’, AnM, xlix (1994), 127–57

W. Freis: ‘Perfecting the Perfect Instrument: Fray Juan Bermudo and the Tuning and Temperament of the Vihuela de mano’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 421–35

W. Freis: ‘Becoming a Theorist: the Growth of Juan Bermudo's Declaración de instrumentos musicales’, RdMc, xxviii (1995), 27–112

WOLFGANG FREIS (with BONNIE J. BLACKBURN)

Bernabei [Barnabei].

Italian family of composers, active in Germany.

(1) Ercole Bernabei

(3) Vincenzo Bernabei

OWEN JANDER (with JEAN LIONNET)

Bernabei

(1) Ercole Bernabei

(b Caprarola, 1622; d Munich, 5 Dec 1687). Presumably he grew up in Rome, where he became a pupil of Orazio Benevoli. On 25 August 1642 he took part as an additional continuo player in the church festival at S Luigi dei Francesi, where Benevoli was maestro di cappella, and in August 1653 he succeeded Luigi Rossi as organist there. He was temporarily replaced in 1658–9 by Ercole Pastorelli, but he continued in the post even after being appointed maestro di cappella at S Giovanni in Laterano in July 1665; presumably his son (2) Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei then officiated for him at S Luigi. In April 1667 he succeeded A.M. Abbatini as maestro di cappella at S Luigi dei Francesi, and remained there until June 1672, when, largely through the intercession of Queen Christina of Sweden, he assumed the important position, vacated by his late master Benevoli, of director of the Cappella Giulia at the Vatican. But within two years he left Rome for Munich to become Kapellmeister to Prince Ferdinand Maria of Bavaria in succession to Johann Kaspar Kerll (he was specially sought after for his maturity because the court had found the temperamental Kerll very difficult); he took with him as assistant and translator his young pupil Agostino Steffani. Although not altogether happy in Munich and longing to return to Italy, he remained there until his death.

During his years as a composer for various churches in Rome Bernabei proved himself a master of the stile antico, but he also showed that he was versatile by composing sacred music in more modern styles: he wrote numerous concertato works, both in the grand polychoral manner and in the intimate style for a few solo voices. His important church posts restricted his involvement with secular music, but despite criticism from conservative quarters he composed a few cantatas and canzonettas. Some of his most skilful work is found in the 15 three-voice pieces of his Concerto madrigalesco, a collection that served Steffani as a model. Only when Bernabei went to Munich was he required to compose operas; the music is lost.

WORKS

operas

all first performed in Munich; music lost

La conquista del vello d'oro in Colco (D. Gisberti), 1674

I portenti dell'indole generosa, ovvero Enrico terzo imperatore, duca di Baveria (Gisberti), 1675

Il litigio del cielo e della terra (V. Terzago), 1680

Erote ed Anderote (Terzago), 1686

Doubtful: La fabbrica delle corone (Gisberti), 1674

other works

Concerto madrigalesco, 3vv, bc (Rome, 1669)

Sacrae modulationes, op.2, 5vv, 2 vn, bc (Munich, 1691)

2 masses, 16vv, I-Rvat C.G.

23 motets, hymns, introits, antiphons, 4–8vv, D-Bsb, Mbs

Cantatas, canzonettas, arias, 1v, bc, A-Wn, D-Dl, F-Pn, GB-Cfm, Lbl, I-MOe

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Casimiri: Ercole Bernabei, maestro della Cappella musicale lateranese (Rome, 1920)

R. de Rensis: ‘Ercole Bernabei’, Musica d’oggi, ii (1920), 271–3

E. Katzbichler: Über das Leben und die weltlichen Vokalwerke des Ercole Bernabei (diss., U. of Munich, 1963) [incl. thematic catalogue of all surviving works and extensive bibliography]

J. Lionnet: ‘La musique à Saint-Louis des Français de Rome au XVIIème siècle’, NA, new ser., iii (1985), suppl.; iv (1986), suppl.

A. Morelli: ‘Il Theatro spirituale ed altre raccolte di testi per oratorio romani del Seicento’, RIM, xxi (1986), 61–143

Bernabei

(2) Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei

(b Rome, ?1649; d Munich, 9 March 1732). Elder son of (1) Ercole Bernabei. He presumably studied with his father, and probably replaced him at the organ of S Luigi dei Francesi from July 1665 to April 1667. He then went to work with him as vice-Kapellmeister in Munich, a post he assumed on 24 June 1677. After his father’s death he became Hofkapellmeister there. During the first 15 years of his career at Munich he regularly wrote operas, but the political situation then cut short this activity. When the production of opera was resumed Pietro Torri became the principal composer, Bernabei – who was a priest – restricting his output to sacred music. A large number of his sacred works are listed in the 1753 catalogue of the Munich Hofkapelle together with 30 sinfonias and three ‘Sinfonie, e Pastorel’.

WORKS

sacred

6 missarum brevium cum una pro defunctis liber primus, 4vv, insts (Augsburg, 1710)

Motet, 3vv, 1675³

Many masses, motets, hymns in MSS, principal sources: D-Bsb, Mbs, Rp, I-Bc

operas

all first performed in Munich

Alvilda in Abo (melodrama, 3, V. Terzago), 10 Feb 1678

Enea in Italia (Terzago), Jan 1679

Giulio Cesare, ricovrato all'ombra (Terzago), 11 July 1680, lib D-As, Mbs, Sl

L'Ermione (drama per musica, Terzago), Salvator, 14 July 1680, lib Mbs

L'Ascanio in Alba (melodramma, 3, F.R. Sbarra), Salvator, 19 Feb 1686, A-Wn (facs. in IOB, lxvi, 1982), D-Mbs

La gloria festeggiante [Gli dei festeggianti] (introducimento dramatico musicale del torneo, L. Orlandi), 18 Jan 1688, A-Wn

Diana amante (componimento dramatico, 3, Orlandi), St Georgs-Saal, Residenz, 26 Feb 1688, Wn

Il trionfo d'Imeneo (festa, 5, ?Orlandi), 22 Nov 1688, Wn

L'Eraclio, 5 Feb 1690 [also attrib. Clementin, and V. Bernabei]

Il segreto d'Amore in petto del Savio (melodrama, Orlandi), 7 Feb 1690, Wn, D-Mbs

La fiera (trattenimento musicale), ? 18 Jan 1691, A-Wn; ed. R. Münster (Lottstetten, 1979)

Vaticinio di Apollo e Diana, Nov/Dec 1692, Wn

oratorios

Il cielo nato, Rome, 1675

La santissima croce ritrovata da S Elena imperatrice, Rome, 1675

Regina Ester, liberatrice del popolo ebreo, Rome, 1675

other vocal

2 serenades: Venere pronumba (Orlandi), 1688, Wn; Egloga pastorale, D-Mbs; cantatas, arias, duets, A-Wn, I-Bc

instrumental

Orpheus ecclesiasticus: symphonias varias commentus [12 sonatas], 4 insts (Augsburg, 1698)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Forster: Über das Leben und die kirchenmusikalischen Werke des Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei (diss., U. of Munich, 1933) [incl. full catalogue of works]

R. Schaal: ‘Ein unbekanntes Inventar der Münchner Hofkapelle aus dem Jahre 1753’, Convivium musicorum: Festschrift Wolfgang Boetticher, ed. H. Hüschen and D.-R. Moser (Berlin, 1974), 309–24

A. Morelli: ‘Il Theatro spirituale ed altre raccolte di testi per oratorio romani del Seicento’, RIM, xxi (1986), 61–143

Bernabei

(3) Vincenzo Bernabei

(b Rome, 1660; d Munich, 1732–6). Younger son of (1) Ercole Bernabei. He was apparently a highly skilled keyboard player. During his early years in Rome he was active in the production of operas. Largely because of his financial irresponsibility his father and brother arranged to have him employed at the court in Munich, where he was installed as organist in 1684. He composed a small number of sacred works (in D-Dl and Mbs) and a number of pieces for operatic productions (one in A-Wn).

Bernac [Bertin], Pierre

(b Paris, 12 Jan 1899; d Avignon, 17 Oct 1979). French baritone. He began taking singing lessons at the age of 18, and was first taught by the composer André Caplet. He was later coached by Yvonne Gouverné, who accompanied him at his first recital, in Paris, in 1925. He quickly became a renowned interpreter of mélodies, and in 1926 he gave the first performance of Poulenc’s Chansons gailliardes, a harbinger of things to come. He made only two excursions into opera, both as Pelléas, at Paris in 1933 (Théâtre des Champs-Elysées) and at Geneva with Ansermet in 1936. From 1930 to 1932 he studied lieder with Reinhard von Wahrlich. Then, in 1934, looking for a pianist to partner him at a Debussy recital at the Salzburg Festival, he approached Poulenc. Their musical rapport was so great that they decided there and then on a musical partnership. Their first official recital together was at the Ecole Normale in Paris on 3 April 1935, when they gave the première of Poulenc’s Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard. They remained together for 25 years, touring all over the world, until Bernac retired in 1960. In all Poulenc wrote 90 songs for Bernac, his style influenced by the baritone’s peculiarly refined artistry. They appeared for the first time in Britain in 1938 and in the USA in 1948. Other French composers, including Jolivet, Sauguet and Françaix, wrote for Bernac, as did Hindemith, Berkeley and Barber. Among his many pupils the most distinguished was Gérard Souzay, whose style owed much to Bernac’s example.

Bernac’s art was consciously allied, in the French tradition, to a scrupulous enunciation of the text which, together with his light, pleasing high baritone, innate musicianship and refined taste in literature, epitomized the French style of his era. His repertory extended to lieder (he recorded an interesting but slightly mannered Dichterliebe with Robert Casadesus) but his reputation rests on his interpretations of mélodies, Poulenc’s in particular, of which he left a substantial legacy on disc. His most important recordings, made for EMI, were reissued complete in 1999. All demonstrate his fastidious artistry.

WRITINGS

The Interpretation of French Song (London, 1970/R)

Francis Poulenc: the Man and his Songs (London, 1977)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Hughes and P. Saul: ‘Pierre Bernac Discography’, Recorded Sound no.18 (1965), p.322

M. Chimènes: Pierre Bernac (Paris and London, 1999)

ALAN BLYTH

Bernacchi, Antonio Maria

(b Bologna, 23 June 1685; d Bologna, 1 March 1756). Italian alto castrato. He was a pupil of Pistocchi and G.A. Ricieri, and studied counterpoint with G.A. Bernabei at Munich. He made his Italian operatic début at Genoa in 1703 and appeared in Vienna in 1709 and Venice in 1709–10, 1717–19, 1721–4, 1731–2 and 1735, singing in at least 22 operas there (see illustration). During the same period he sang in many other Italian cities including Novara (1711), Bologna (1710, 1712–13, 1722, 1727, 1731), Florence (1712–15), Parma (1714, 1728–9, 1736–7), Pesaro (1719), Reggio nell’Emilia (1718, and 1719, in Gasparini’s Bajazet), Milan (1719), Rome (1712, 1721, in the first performance of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Griselda, and 1731), Turin (1726–7), Naples (1728–9) and Modena (1728–9, 1735–6). Following his success in Orlandini’s Carlo re d’Alemagna at Parma in 1714, he was appointed virtuoso to Prince Antonio Farnese. His fame spread throughout Europe and he sang in operas by all the leading composers of the age, from Pallavicino and Alessandro Scarlatti to Hasse, Vinci and Leo. In 1720 he was engaged by the Elector of Bavaria for Munich and sang there frequently until 1727, remaining nominally in his service until 1735. In 1729 Swiney described him as ‘the very best singer in the world’.

Bernacchi made his London début at the King’s Theatre in Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio in 1716 (when Handel composed three extra arias for him) and also sang in the pasticcio Clearte. In 1717 he appeared in Handel’s Rinaldo and Amadigi. In 1729 Handel engaged him as leading man for the second Royal Academy and he sang in the first performances of Lotario (1729) and Partenope (1730), revivals of Giulio Cesare and Tolomeo (1730), and the pasticcio Ormisda. Though English audiences preferred Senesino, Bernacchi was accepted on the score of his European reputation; Burney described him as ‘past his meridian’, but paid tribute to his taste and intelligence. He retired from the stage in 1738, apart from an unsuccessful reappearance in Florence, 1741–2, and founded a famous singing school at Bologna; among his many distinguished pupils were Guarducci, Raaff and Amadori. Bernacchi had been a member of the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, since 1722 and its president in 1748–9, and he sang in churches and private concerts in the city. He was also a composer; some arias, duets and church music survive (in F-Pn, I-Bc).

The range of Bernacchi’s voice was slightly higher than that of Senesino. The two parts Handel composed for Bernacchi – Lotario and Arsace (Partenope) – have a compass of a to f''. Though his natural musical gifts were not exceptional, he was renowned for technical virtuosity, especially in ornaments and cadenzas. He was accused, by Martinelli and Algarotti among others, of sacrificing expression to execution and adopting an instrumental style; his old master Pistocchi is said to have exclaimed: ‘I taught you to sing, and you want to play’. Farinelli studied under him briefly in 1727.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

SartoriL

L. Frati: ‘Antonio Bernacchi e la sua scuola di canto’, RMI, xxix (1922), 473–91

W. Dean and J.M.Knapp: Handel’s Operas 1704–1726 (Oxford, 1987, rev. 1995)

WINTON DEAN

Bernal, Afonso Perea

(b ?Seville; d Coimbra, 1593, before 6 Oct). Portuguese theorist of Spanish birth. His second name has sometimes been incorrectly cited as Pereira. He was appointed professor of music at Coimbra University on 29 May 1553. He published at Coimbra in 1550 an Arte de canto chão, translated from Juan Martínez’s Arte de canto llano (Alcalá de Henares, 1532), an extremely popular manual of plainchant. An enlarged and revised edition was published probably before 1560 (no copies have been found), and another appeared posthumously with the title Arte de Canto-chão, posta & reduzida em sua inteira perfeição, acrecentada de nouo em as entoações de cousas muito necessarias (Coimbra, 1597). The Ave sanctissimum once attributed to ‘A. Bernal’ is by Bernal gonçález.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBP

M. Joaquim: ‘Nota bibliográfica’, Boletim da Biblioteca da universidade de Coimbra, xxv (1962), 410

M. de Sampayo Ribeiro: ‘A “Arte cantollano” de autor desconhecido (R. 14670), da Biblioteca nacional de Madrid, e a “Arte” de Juan Martínez’, Boletim da Biblioteca da universidade de Coimbra, xxvi (1964), 362–96

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bernal Gonçález, ?José

(fl c1550). Spanish composer. His first name is uncertain; in the past it has sometimes (as in Grove5) been too readily assumed to be Antonio. According to Collet he was maestro de capilla of the collegiate church of S Salvador, Seville, about 1550. A well-known cancionero of the period contains four works for four voices attributed to ‘Bernal’ or ‘Bernal Gonçalez’: a mass (without Gloria or Credo) Domine, memento mei; the turbae (crowd scenes) of a St Matthew Passion; and the highly sophisticated and expressive madrigal Navego en hondo mar (the last ed. in MME, viii, 1949, 74–7). His four-part pentecostal hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus seems to have been popular, for three copies exist (two in E-Tc and one in the archive of Guadalupe monastery, Cáceres; ed. in Tesoro sacro musical, lvii/3, 1974, suppl., 19f). There is also a poignant motet, Ave sanctissimum, by him (in E-E 4; ed. S. Rubio, Antologia polifónica sacra, i, Madrid, 1954, pp.268–73). A romance by him, A las armas, moriscote, is extant in an intabulation (in M. Fuenllana, Orphénica lyra, RISM 1554³²; ed. C. Jacobs, Oxford, 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSCM

H. Collet: Le mysticisme musical espagnol au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1913), 261–2

R. Stevenson: ‘The Toledo Manuscript Polyphonic Choirbooks and Some Other Lost or Little Known Flemish Sources’, FAM, xx (1973), 94 only

S. Rubio: Catálogo del archivo de música del monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial (Cuenca, 1976), esp. 15, 237

D. Crawford: ‘Two Choirbooks of Renaissance Polyphony at the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora of Guadalupe’, FAM, xxiv (1977), 164 only

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bernal Jiménez, Miguel

(b Morelia, Michoacán, 16 Feb 1910; d León, Guanajuato, 26 July 1956). Mexican composer. A choirboy at Morelia Cathedral, he studied at the Colegio de Infantes there with Aguilera Ruiz and Mier y Arriaga. In 1928, after completing a course at the Escuela Superior de Música Sagrada, he was sent by Villaseñor to Rome for further study at the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra with Casimiri (musicology and composition), Refice and others. Graduating in 1933 in the organ, composition and Gregorian chant, he returned to teach in his home town. There he was appointed director of the Escuela Superior de Música Sagrada (1936), and in 1939 he founded under its auspices the monthly Schola cantorum, which he edited until 1953 while touring widely in Mexico and the USA as a concert organist, choral conductor and lecturer. In 1943 the Mexican Academia de Ciencas y Artes Cinematográficas awarded him its annual prize in recognition of La Virgen que for jo una patria, one of his four films for which he wrote the music. He taught at Loyola University, New Orleans, from 1954 until his death. His stage works include Tata Vasco, an opera to commemorate the fourth centenary of the arrival of Vasco de Quiroga, first bishop of Michoacán, the ballet Timgambato on a Tarascan legend, and Los tres galanes de Juana, a ballet paying tribute to the Mexican poet Juana Inés de la Cruz. Whatever the genre – opera, ballet, sharply etched film scores, pieces of local colour such as the orchestral Suite michoacana, liturgical organ sonatas or Christmas confetti villancicos – Bernal Jiménez’s music was the most tasteful composed by a conservative Mexican of his generation.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tata Vasco (opera, 5 scenes, M. Muñoz), Patzcuaro, 15 Feb 1941; Timgambato, ballet, Mexico City, 26 Aug 1943; Los tres galanes de Juana, ballet, Mexico City, Sept 1952

Orch: Noche en Morelia, sym. poem, Mexico City, 1 Aug 1941

Other inst: Sonata de iglesia, org (1942); Sonata de Navidad, org (1942); Prelude and Fugue, org, 1946; Cuarteto virreinal, str qt (1951); Catedral, 24 pieces, org (1964)

Sacred vocal music: numerous Latin and vernacular works

Principal publishers: Fischer, Ediciones Mexicanas de Música, Schola Cantorum (Morelia)

WRITINGS

El archivo musical del Colegio de Santa Rosa de Santa Maria de Valladolid, siglo XVIII (Morelia, 1939)

La técnica de los compositores (Mexico City, 1950)

‘La música en Valladolid de Michoacán’, Nuestra música, vi (1951), 153–76; vii (1952), 5–16

‘He hablado a Strawinsky’, Pauta, iv/16 (1985), 61–7

Many articles in Schola cantorum [Morelia], 4 educational texts

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PEM (M. Kuss)

O. Mayer-Serra: Música y músicos de Latinoamérica, i (Mexico City, 1947), 105–9 [incl. musical excerpts]

R.M. Stevenson: Music in Mexico (New York, 1952/R), 262–4

M. Querol Gavaldá: ‘Bernal Jiménez, Miguel: la técnica de los compositores’, AnM, x (1955), 224–5

B.I. Harrison: ‘Old Mexican Organs’, Diapason, xlvi/7 (1954–5), 35 only

A.S. Lemmon: ‘Miguel Bernal Jimenez’, Heterofonia, vii/4 (1974), 6–9

L.C. Cortez: ‘Aniversarios’, Pauta, iv/15 (1985), 96

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bernaola, Carmelo Alonso.

See Alonso Bernaola, Carmelo.

Bernard, Emery.

French writer on music, not identifiable with Etienne Bernard.

Bernard, (Jean) Emile (Auguste)

(b Marseilles, 28 Nov 1843; d Paris, 11 Sept 1902). French organist and composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, initially as a pianist, and was organist of the Paris church of Notre Dame des Champs from 1887 to 1895. In 1877 his Fantasy and Fugue for organ won a prize offered by the Société des Compositeurs de Paris. The Divertissement for wind instruments was played at the Parisian Société des Instruments à Vent, and his violin concerto played by its dedicatee, Sarasate, at the Conservatoire concert of 24 February 1895. Other works include two suites for orchestra, a Concertstück for piano and orchestra, the cantatas La captivité de Babylone and Guillaume le conquérant, chamber works and solo music for organ and piano; his serious and reflective disposition is shown in almost all his compositions.

WORKS

(selective list)

published in Paris unless otherwise stated

vocal

Scène de mai (L. Gallet), chorus, 2vv (1892)

Guillaume le conquérant (épisode lyrique, H. Brière), T, Bar, male vv, orch, vs (1896)

La captivité de Babylone (cantate biblique, L. Reed), Bar/Mez, chorus, orch, op.8 (1897)

Rondel (Charles, Duc d'Orléans), 5vv a cappella (Lyons, 1898)

3 offs: Exulta Deo, Voce mea, Dominus illuminatio mea, vv, org (Lyons, 1900)

instrumental

Orch: Suite no.1, op.23 (n.d.), arr. pf 4 hands (1877); Romance, fl, orch/pf, op.33 (1885); Vn Conc., op.29, arr. vn, pf (Berlin, 1885); Romance, vn, orch, op.27 (1888); Concertstück, pf, orch, op.40 (1892), arr. pf solo (1892); Suite no.2, op.38 (1892); Nocturne, pf, orch, op.51 (Lyons, 1902), arr. 2 pf (Lyons, 1902)

Chbr: Pf Trio, op.30 (Berlin, c1880–85); Suite, vn, pf, op.34 (1887); Andante and Rondo, vc, pf, op.43 (1892); Divertissement, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, op.36 (1894); Sonata, vc, pf, op.46 (1896); Sonata, vn, pf, op.48 (1897); Pf Qt, op.50 (1900); Str Qt, op.52 (Lyons, 1903)

Kbd: Souvenance!, nocturne, pf, op.9 (1863); Les idées de Mme Aubray Jeannine, waltz suite, pf (1867); Prelude and Fugue, e, org/pf, op.20 (1876); Ronde féérique, pf, op.19 (1876); Fantasy and Fugue, f, org (1877); 4 morceaux caractéristiques, pf 4 hands, op.39 (1892); Le calme du soir, rêverie, pf, op.11 (?1896); Plein air, 2 sketches, pf (1900)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Pierre, ed.: Le Conservatoire national …: documents historiques et administratifs (Paris, 1900), 698

DAVID CHARLTON/GÉRARD STRELETSKI

Bernard, Etienne [Stevan] [Bernardi, Stefanus; Bernardo, Estevan; Vernart, Esteban]

(b Soignies, 1569/70: d Douai, Sept 1600). French singer and composer. He received his early music education at the monastery of St Vincent at Soignies. He was engaged as a cantorcillo at Madrid in the Flemish choir of Felipe II of Spain; he may have been recruited by George de La Hèle who took up his appointment as Felipe's maestro de capilla in 1582. In Madrid Bernard was taught by Philippe Rogier from 1586, and, according to Pedro Vaz Rego's poem Armonico Lazo, was one of Rogier's best pupils. As a clerk of the Toledo diocese he was considered on 13 April 1587 for the living of the chapel of Lens Castle, which had fallen vacant on the death of La Hèle. In 1590 he returned with Rogier to the Netherlands to attend Douai University where he continued to study until his death. He obtained a living at Soignies in 1595 but it was annulled on 24 September 1600, and his membership of the chapel at Lens ‘vacante par le trespas de feu Estienne Bernard’ was awarded to Charles Manpetit. Bernard's only surviving works are two chansons published at Antwerp (RISM 1597¹⁰); another chanson and one Spanish sacred work are lost, and three Latin motets for five and six voices were formerly in the library of King João IV of Portugal (listed in JoãoIL).

Etienne Bernard was not related to Emery Bernard (b Orléans), the author of Brieve et facile méthode pour apprendre à chanter en musique (Paris, 1541).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (P. Becquart)

JoãoIL

MGG1 (P. Becquart)

A. Demeuldre: Le chapitre de Saint-Vincent à Soignies, ses dignitaires et ses chanoines (Soignies, 1902), also in Annales du Cercle archéologique du canton de Soignies, iii (1902)

N. Joachim: ‘Notice sur la chanterie, la maîtrise et les musiciens de l'ancien chapitre de Saint-Vincent à Soignies’, Courrier de St Grégoire (Oct 1910)

P. Becquart: Musiciens néerlandais à la cour de Madrid: Philippe Rogier et son école (1560–1647) (Brussels, 1967)

L. Wagner: ‘Music of Composers from the Low Countries at the Spanish Court of Philip II’, Musique des Pays-Bas anciens – musique espagnole ancienne: Brussels 1985, 193–214

DOUGLAS KIRK

Bernard, Matvey Ivanovich

(b Mitau [now Jelgava, Latvia], 1794; d St Petersburg, 28 April/9 May 1871). Russian music publisher, pianist and composer. In 1808 his family moved to Vilnius, where Bernard learnt to play the piano and decided on a musical career in preference to his father's military profession. Two years later he moved to Moscow, where he became involved in the leading musical circles, taking piano lessons from John Field and studying composition with Johann Hässler. Subsequently he decided to abandon his considerably successful performing career, and in 1816 was appointed to take charge of the serf orchestra on Count Potocki's estate. In 1822 he settled in St Petersburg and earned a reputation as a fine piano teacher.

As a composer, Bernard is known primarily for his songs and for an opera, Ol'ga, doch' izgnannika (‘Olga, the Exile's Daughter’), which enjoyed some success when it was first produced in St Petersburg during the 1845–6 season. However, his chief contribution to Russian music was in publishing. Having already produced several music journals, Bernard became established as an important and active publisher after he had purchased the Dalmas publishing house, put up for auction in 1829 after Dalmas's death. An early plan to publish a journal containing popular songs from recent vaudevilles was thwarted by the decline of public entertainment during the 1830 cholera epidemic, but in the same year he produced another journal, Hommage à la jeunesse de St. Pétersbourg, consisting of piano pieces. Like many of Bernard's publications this was intended for the amateur musician. He performed a valuable service by introducing to the St Petersburg public the music of contemporary Russian and foreign composers and produced many useful educational publications, including Le pianiste du jour, Répertoire des jeunes pianistes and Répertoire des enfants (St Petersburg, 1840). He is best known for his association with one of 19th-century Russia's most popular musical magazines, Nouvelliste, which continued to appear until 1916. Bernard published this from 1840, and included in it a vast quantity of music for piano and voice. He published the songs of Alyab'yev, Varlamov and Aleksandr Gurilyov, and was a champion of the early works of Glinka and Dargomïzhsky. Furthermore, he was instrumental in introducing the piano works of Laskovsky, Henselt and Liszt to Russian audiences. After Bernard's death the publishing house continued to flourish under his son, Nikolay, until it was finally absorbed into Jurgensen's publishing empire in 1885.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.L.Vol'man: Russkiye notnïye izdaniya XIX – nachala XX veka [Russian music publishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries] (Leningrad, 1970)

GEOFFREY NORRIS

Bernard, Pierre-Joseph [Gentil-Bernard]

(b Grenoble, 26 Aug 1708; d Paris, 1 Nov 1775). French poet and librettist. After working as an attorney’s clerk he joined the army, distinguishing himself in the Italian campaigns of 1733–4. He soon gained the protection of Mme de Pompadour, who secured for him administrative posts in the army and at court that provided a substantial income and the leisure to indulge his epicurean tastes. In 1736 he was briefly involved with La Pouplinière’s circle, where he probably met Rameau. He also participated in the Société du Caveau, a convivial literary society of which Rameau was a member.

Bernard’s Castor et Pollux (1737), in its revised version of 1754, has with some justification been described as the finest French libretto of the 18th century (Masson); in emphasizing brotherly rather than romantic love it was exceptional. The plot, which develops with pleasing logic, is rich in conflicts of sentiment and provides convincing pretexts for the all-important spectacle. His subsequent librettos, Les surprises de l’Amour and Anacréon, are more routine, though never less than competent. Both were set by Rameau: the first, written for Mme de Pompadour's amateur theatricals, as an opéra-ballet in 1748 (rev. 1757), and the second as an acte de ballet in 1757.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.J.M. Fayolle, ed.: Oeuvres de Bernard (Paris, 1803)

C. Malherbe: ‘Commentaire bibliographique’, J.-P. Rameau: Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1895–1924), viii, pp.xv–cxix

M. Emmanuel and M. Ténéo: ‘Commentaire bibliographique’, ibid., xvii, pp.ix–clix

G. Cucuel: La Pouplinière et la musique de chambre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1913/R)

P.-M. Masson: L’opéra de Rameau (Paris, 1930/R)

C. Girdlestone: Jean-Philippe Rameau: his Life and Work (London, 1957, 2/1969)

W.H. Kaehler: The Operatic Repertoire of Madame de Pompadour’s Théâtre des petits cabinets (1747–1753) (diss., U. of Michigan, 1971)

C. Girdlestone: La tragédie en musique (1673–1751) considérée comme genre littéraire (Geneva, 1972)

T. Green: Early Rameau Sources: Studies in the Origins and Dating of the Operas and other Musical Works (diss., Brandeis U., 1992)

C. Dill: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, 1998)

GRAHAM SADLER

Bernard, Robert

(b Geneva, 10 Oct 1900; d Paris, 2 May 1971). French music critic and composer. He studied at Geneva Conservatoire and University with G.T. Strong, Otto Barblan and Joseph Lauber, and with L.F.A. Aubert in Paris (1926). During his wide-ranging career he worked as a concert pianist, choirmaster and conductor, and as a teacher at the Conservatoire International de Paris (1929) and Schola Cantorum (1937), but he was known chiefly as a music critic and composer. He wrote for several Parisian daily newspapers and edited various French music periodicals including the Revue musicale (1939–40, 1946–51) and L'information musicale (1940–44); his books are mainly about French music. His compositions include the operas Flen (1918), Le chevalier au Barizel (1919) and Polyphème (1922), orchestral music (including Les bergers d'Arcadie and Prélude au cimetière marin, symphonic poems after P.A. Valéry), chamber music and songs.

WRITINGS

Les tendances de la musique française moderne (Paris, 1930)

Albert Roussel: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1948)

with others: L'art du ballet des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1952) [incl. ‘Salvatore Vigano’, 23–34]

Histoire de la musique (Paris, 1961–4/R)

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER

Bernardel.

French family of violin makers. Sébastien-Philippe Bernardel (b Mirecourt, 10 Jan 1802; d Bougival, 6 Aug 1870), known as Bernardel père, was apprenticed as a violin maker in Mirecourt before moving to Paris to complete his training with Nicolas Lupot and, after Lupot’s death in 1824, with Charles-François Gand (see Gand (i)). He opened his own workshop at 21 rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, Paris, in 1826, where he remained for 40 years, creating a large number of violins and cellos on the pattern of Stradivari. Occasionally he followed Guarneri or Maggini. He received several awards in national and international exhibitions (Paris 1839, 1844, 1849; London 1851). Although overshadowed by those of his colleague J.-B. Vuillaume, Bernardel’s instruments are characterized by fine workmanship and the choicest materials. He was less successful with his varnish, and his violins sometimes appear rather bulky. The cellos are greatly sought after. In 1859 he went into partnership with his two sons, Ernest-Auguste Bernardel (bParis, 1826; d Paris, 10 Dec 1899) and Gustave-Adolphe Bernardel (b Paris, 23 April 1832; d Cherbourg, 29 Jan 1904); he retired in their favour in 1866. That year the house was united with that of Gand, becoming Gand & Bernardel Frères. The Bernardel brothers built instruments and were responsible for maintenance and restoration, while Charles-Nicolas-Eugène Gand, renowned for his expertise, dealt with the purchase and sale of fine instruments. The firm made many fine instruments, though their striking red appearance shocked in some quarters. Ernest Bernardel retired in 1886, and Gand’s death in 1892 left Gustave Bernardel as sole proprietor. In 1901 the business passed to Albert Caressa amd Henri Français, who moved to 12 rue de Madrid in 1913. Less significant members of the Bernardel family were Louis (b Mirecourt, 3 July 1806; d Amsterdam, 26 Sept 1847), brother of Bernardel père, and Léon (b Paris, 1853; bur. 1 April 1931), son of Ernest-Auguste, who had a shop in rue du Faubourg Poissonnière from 1898.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VannesE

W. Henley: Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (Brighton, 1959)

CHARLES BEARE/SYLVETTE MILLIOT

Bernardi, Bartolomeo

(b ?Bologna, c1660; d Copenhagen, 23 May 1732). Italian composer. The title-page of his first published collection of trio sonatas (1692) names him as a member of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. On 1 January 1703 he was engaged by the Danish court as a violinist and composer. Dissatisfied with his conditions, he left Copenhagen in 1705, only to return in 1710 and be reinstated, as director of music. He remained in this post, taking occasional leave of absence, until his death in straitened circumstances. Since nearly all his vocal works – mostly pieces written for state occasions – were lost in the great fire of Copenhagen in 1794 it is difficult to evaluate Scheibe's negative assessment of Bernardi, coloured by anti-Italian prejudice. Bernardi's instrumental works, especially op.3, which is said to exhibit northern European as distinct from Bolognese characteristics, have won some guarded praise from modern writers. He wrote a treatise, Anweisung alle Noten in Generalbass, sie mögen gehen oder springen auff besonderer Art accomp. könne (D-Bsb).

WORKS

stage works

all lost

Il Gige fortunato (divertimento teatrale, 1), Copenhagen, Amalienborg Palace, 26 Aug 1703

Diana e la fortuna, Copenhagen, Royal Theatre, 10 Oct 1703

? La Libussa, Prague, 1703

other vocal

Tratenimento per camera (D. Doretti), 2vv, insts, A-Wn

Qual di feroce (cantata), S, bc, D-Bsb

Birthday and funeral odes, coronation music, cantatas etc. composed in Copenhagen, 1702–31: music lost, 16 texts DK-Kk, 1 text Ku, 1 text Ol, other texts lost

instrumental

[12] Sonate da camera a 3, 2 vn, vc, hpd, op.1 (Bologna, 1692)

[10] Sonate a 3, 2 vn, theorbo/vc, org, op.2 (Bologna, 1696)

[6] Sonate, vn, op.3 (Amsterdam, 1706)

1 sonata in Sonate per camera … da vari autori, vn, vc (Bologna, 1690–97)

Unidentified composition(s) in VI [VIII] sonates ou concerts à 4, 5 & 6 [–3, 4 & 5] parties, livre 1e [–2nd] (Amsterdam, c1710)

Sonata, vn, D-Dl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MatthesonGEP

NewmanSBE

J.A. Scheibe: Der critische Musikus (Leipzig, 2/1745)

C. Thrane: Fra hofviolinernes tid (Copenhagen, 1908)

H.G. Mishkin: ‘The Solo Violin Sonata of the Bologna School’, MQ, xxix (1943), 92–112

MICHAEL TALBOT

Bernardi, Francesco.

See Senesino.

Bernardi, Mario

(b Kirkland Lake, ON, 30 Aug 1930). Canadian conductor and pianist. His early musical promise prompted his family to send him to Italy to study, largely at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, and he returned to Canada to finish his training at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto. He began his career as a pianist, gaining added experience as an opera coach and conductor; he made his conducting début with the Canadian Opera Company’s 1956 production of Hänsel und Gretel. He moved to England where he became a conductor (1964) with the Sadler’s Wells company and subsequently its musical director (1966–9), and made his San Francisco Opera début in 1967. As founding conductor, he directed the first performance of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa in 1969, remaining there until 1981. In Bernardi’s hands the orchestra became a virtuoso ensemble, recording, touring Canada and abroad, and playing at the National Arts Centre’s Summer Opera Festival from 1971 to 1982. He became principal conductor of the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in 1982, made his Metropolitan Opera début in 1984 and became music director of the Calgary PO the same year, remaining in the post until 1994. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1972 and received an honorary degree from the University of British Columbia in 1997.

KEITH MACMILLAN/CHARLES BARBER

Bernardi, Stefano [Steffano]

(b Verona, c1585; d ?Salzburg, 1636). Italian composer and theorist. In his early years he sang under Baccusi at Verona Cathedral and was a chaplain there in 1603. He spent a period in Rome, where at least in 1610 he was maestro di cappella of the church of the Madonna dei Monti. He returned to Verona in April 1611 to take up a similar post at the cathedral and was also associated with the music at the Accademia Filarmonica there, at least in 1616. He left in 1622 to become a musician in the service of Archduke Carl Joseph, Bishop of Breslau and Bressanone, after whose death in 1624 he settled at Salzburg for at least ten years. He was involved in the music for the consecration of Salzburg Cathedral in 1628: he wrote a Te Deum for 12 choirs and a dramatic work, which does not survive. He became a Doctor of Law in 1627.

Although he was primarily a church composer, Bernardi wrote a good deal of secular music, and a few of his volumes of vocal music include at the back a number of instrumental works. He published his counterpoint treatise when he was hovering on the brink of the new concertato style while still adhering to a traditional polyphonic idiom. The dichotomy between old and new is typified in the exactly contemporary 1615 collection of masses, some of which are a cappella and some concertato. The former are in a kind of watered-down post-Palestrinian idiom, fluent and occasionally expressive; one is based on Arcadelt’s famous Il bianco e dolce cigno, then almost 80 years old – a testimony to that madrigal’s incredible popularity. Bernardi had, however, already espoused the concertato principle in the motets and psalms of 1613. In some of the former there are contrasting solo and tutti sections (though otherwise they are pale and inexpressive works), and the psalms are among the earliest to include such contrasts of texture, which an organ continuo made possible. Other psalm and mass collections by him are in a conventional stile antico, whether double choirs are used or not. But in a late volume, the Salmi concertati of 1637, he returned to the concertato manner: most interestingly he singled out only one soloist, a soprano, in all the psalms, while punctuating the solos with a four-part ripieno singing excitingly rhythmic, contrapuntal music. It is as if the solo concerto had already arrived, even if thematic integration had yet to be worked out. A number of the motets in the 1621 collection have parts for instruments, including cornett, lute and theorbo as well as the more common violins and trombones. The 1634 volume contains three dialogues.

Bernardi’s instrumental works are for three to six players and continuo. Their style renders them adaptable to various combinations, as is suggested on the title-page of the Madrigaletti of 1621. In the six-part works in the Concerti academici of 1616 Bernardi made the top two parts more agile, perhaps with violins in mind. His three volumes of five-part madrigals show the transition from unaccompanied to concertato texture: the first book recalls early Monteverdi with its attention to word-painting and its rich scoring, though the writing is often syllabic; the second book introduces a continuo, but only as a gesture to taste, for the textures are not very varied. Bernardi made an interesting contribution to the delicate art of the madrigaletto in the three-part volume of 1611 as well as that of 1621. The former was published in Rome while he was living there and lacks a continuo; its contents were perhaps directed towards the amateur market that Marenzio had supplied with just this sort of music in the 1580s. The collection ends with a ‘peasants’ masquerade’ in six parts.

WORKS

Editions:S. Bernardi: Kirchenwerke, ed. K.A. Rosenthal, DTÖ, lxix, Jg.xxxvi/1 (1929/R)Cantio sacra, ed. R. Ewerhart, xxiii (Cologne, 1955–)Alte Salzburger Meister der kirchlichen Tonkunst, ed. J. Messner, i, x, xiii (Augsburg and Vienna, 1927–)

sacred

Motecta, 2–5vv, bc (Rome, 1610)

Psalmi integri, 4vv, bc, op.4 (Venice, 1613)

Motetti in cantilena, 4vv, con alcune canzoni per sonare con ogni sorte di stromenti, bc (org), op.5 (Venice, 1613)

Messe, 4–5vv, parte sono per capella, e parte per concerto … bc (org), libro I, op.6 (Venice, 1615)

Missae, 8vv, liber I, op.9 (Venice, 1616)

Concerti sacri scielti, et trasportati dal secondo, et terzo libro de madrigali, 5vv, bc (org) (Venice, 1621)

Psalmi, 8vv, una cum bc (org), op.14 (Venice, 1624)

Encomia sacra, 2–6vv, op.15 (Salzburg, 1634)

Salmi concertati, 5vv, bc, ed. A. Vincenti (Venice, 1637)

Messe, 8vv, bc, ed. A. Vincenti, libro II (Venice, 1638)

Te Deum, 12 choirs (composed for the consecration of Salzburg Cathedral in 1628), lost

4 motets in 1616², 7 motets in 1620², 2 motets in 1624², 1 motet in 1624³, 8 motets in 1626², 1 lit in 1626³, 2 motets in 1626⁴, 3 motets in 1627¹, 3 pieces in 1628³, 1 motet in 1646⁴, 1 motet in 1672²; works in A-Sk, D-Bsb, F-Pn, S-Uu

secular

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1611)

Il primo libro di madrigali, 3vv, op.3 (Rome, 1611; 2/1621 with bc)

Secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv, bc, op.7 (Venice, 1616)

Concerti academici con varie sorti di sinfonie, 6vv, bc, libro 1, op.8 (Venice, 1616)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 5vv, concertati, bc, op.10 (Venice, 1619)

Madrigaletti, 2–3vv, con alcune sonate a 3, 2 vn/cornetts, chit/trbn/bn, bc, libro II, op.12 (Venice, 1621)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 6vv, bc, concertati con alcune sonate accomodate per ogni sorte d’istromente, op.13 (Venice, 1624)

2 madrigals in 1605¹¹, 2 spiritual madrigals in 1613³

WRITINGS

Porta musicale per la quale il principiante con facile brevità all’acquisto delle perfette regole del contrapunto vien introdotto, op.2 (Verona, 1615)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K.A. Rosenthal: Zur Stilistik der Salzburger Kapellmeister des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1927), 202

K.A. Rosenthal: ‘Steffano Bernardis Kirchenwerke’, SMw, xv (1928), 46–61

F. Posch: Steffano Bernardi’s weltliche Vokal- und Instrumentalwerke (Salzburg, 1935)

J. Roche: ‘Monteverdi and the Prima prattica’, The Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1968, 2/1985 as The New Monteverdi Companion), 169, 183

E. Hintermaier: ‘The Missa Salisburgensis’, MT, cxvi (1975), 965–6

E. Hintermaier: ‘ “Missa salisburgensis”: neue Erkenntnisse über Entstehung, Autor und Zweckbestimmung’, Musicologica austriaca, i (1977), 154–96

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE/ELIZABETH ROCHE

Bernardi, Stefanus.

See Bernard, Etienne.

Bernardini, Marcello [Marcello da Capua]

(b ?Capua, 1730–40; d after 1799). Italian composer and librettist. There is evidence in the archives of the Collegio Nazareno in Rome that he may have been the son of Rinaldo di Capua. He reached Rome in about 1764, when his La schiava astuta and other intermezzos – pantomime ed ariette in musica da recitare nel Teatro dei Signori Capranica – were performed. In 1767 he held a civic office (caporione) in the Campitelli district and in 1769 he received an appointment at the Collegio Nazareno to write the music for the Nativity of the Virgin, an office he held until 1784. The fact that he had been preceded in this post by Rinaldo di Capua, who according to Burney had a ‘graceless son’, supports the theory of a close link between Rinaldo and Bernardini, especially since it was customary for composers to suggest their successors, usually a son or pupil.

In 1771 Bernardini wrote Il vello di Gedeone for the Oratorio di S Girolamo, Rome, and later the same year he was in Naples, where his operas were performed at the Teatro del Fondo. From 1770 he also wrote librettos for himself and for other composers such as G.B. Borghi, Pietro Terziani and Martín y Soler. It is possible that he went to Turin and Munich when his operas were performed there. Some librettos from 1789 to 1799 designate him as being in the service of ‘the Princess Lubomirski Czartoryska of Poland’ (probably Elisabeth Helene Anna Czartoryska, Princess Lubomirski), whom he may have followed to Poland about 1795, after visiting Vienna for a performance of his cantata Angelica placata.

Of Bernardini’s large output of nearly 40 operas only 13 survive, together with two cantatas and a few librettos. All but three of his operas are comic. Some, such as La donna di spirito (1770), Li tre Orfei (1784) and Le donne bisbetiche (1785), were highly successful and widely performed into the first decade of the 19th century. As a composer he was particularly appreciated for his comic writing and his skill in characterization. He wrote mainly comedies of intrigue; but instead of following rigid conventional formulae, they have lively innovations and a sharp line in caricature.

WORKS

operas

La schiava astuta (int, 2), Rome, Dame, carn. 1765

La pescatrice (farsetta), Rome, 1768

Il Don Chisciotte della Mancia (dg, ? G.B. Lorenzi), Turin, Carignano, aut. 1769

Il cavaliere errante (farsetta, 2, M. Bernardini), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1770

La donna di spirito (farsetta, 2, Bernardini, after C. Goldoni: La vedolva scaltra), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1770, A-Wgm, rev. as La donna bizzarra, Naples, Nuovo, 1789, P-La; as Le quattro nazioni, Florence, S Maria, sum. 1793; as Li cinque pretendenti, Trieste, Carn. 1794

La molinara astuta (int, 2), Rome, Valle, carn. 1770, Mc

Amore in musica (ob, 3), Rome, Valle, carn. 1773, vs D-Dl (as L’amore della musica), ?H-Bn

La contessina (dg, 3, M. Coltellini, after C. Goldoni), Rome, Dame, carn. 1773

La bella forestiera, o sia La viaggiatrice fortunata (farsetta, 2), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1776

La finta sposa olandese (farsetta, 2), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1777

L’isola incantata (int), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1778, Perugia, 1784, D-Dl, P-La (as L’isola d’Alcina)

L’ambizione delusa (int), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1779

Il bassà generoso (int, 2), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1780, D-Dl, I-Mc

Il vecchio ringiovanito (int, 2), Rome, Tordinona, carn. 1781

Le vendette giocose, o sia Il conte pasticcio (int, ‘F. C.’), Rome, Pace, carn. 1782

Il conte di bell’umore (int, 2), Florence, Palla a Corda, carn. 1783, D-Wa, I-Mr, Tf, US-Wc

La poetessa fanatica, o sieno Li due gemelli (ob, 2), Rome, Pace, carn. 1784

Li tre Orfei (int, 2), Rome, Palla a Corda, carn. 1784, D-Rtt, I-Bc, Gl, Mr, P-La

Le donne bisbetiche, o sia L’antiquario fanatico (farsetta, 2, Bernardini), Rome, Pace, carn. 1785; rev. as La finta Galatea, Naples, 1788, D-Bsb, F-Pn (1790), I-Mc, Nc, US-Bp

Li muti per amore, o sia La schiava fedele (farsetta, Bernardini), Florence, Palla a Corda, carn. 1786

Gli amanti confusi, o sia Il brutto fortunato (farsetta), Rome, Valle, spr. 1786

La fonte d’aqua gialla, o sia Il trionfo della pazzia (ob, 2, Bernardini), Rome, Valle, aut. 1786

Barone a forza, ossia Il trionfo di Bacco (ob), Florence, 1786, D-Hs

La fiera di Forlinpopoli (ob, 2), Rome, Valle, spr. 1789

Gl’incontri stravaganti (ob 2), Naples, Nuovo, carn. 1790

L’ultima che si perde è la speranza (ob, 2, F.S. Zini), Naples, Fondo, 1 Aug 1790

Il pazzo glorioso (ob, 2, G. Bertati), Casalmaggiore, Communale, 1790

Pizzarro nell’Indie (os, 2), Naples, S Carlo, 23 Jan 1791

L’allegria della campagna (ob, 2), Naples, Nuovo, spr. 1791

L’amore per incanto (ob), Naples, Fondo, aut. 1791, Dl (as L’amore per magia)

La statua per puntiglio (ob, 2), Venice, S Moisè, carn. 1792, B-Bc

Il conte brillante (ob), Varese, aut. 1792, collab. Uboldi

Achille in Sciro (os, 3, P. Metastasio), Venice, Fenice, aut. 1794, I-Mr

La sposa polacca (dramma bernesco, 3, Bernardini), Rome, Apollo, carn. 1796

Don Simoncino, ossia Furberia e puntiglio (farsa giocosa, 1, G. Foppa), Venice, S Moisè, 12 Sept 1798, F-Pn, I-Fc, Gl, Mc, Mr

Le tre orfanelle, o sia La scuola di musica (farsa, 1, Bertati), Venice, S Benedetto, 25 Nov 1798

Il muto per astuzia (farsa giocosa, 1, Foppa), Venice, S Moise, carn. 1799

other works

Pantomime ed ariette in musica [Mirtillo, Serpilla, Vespina], Rome, Capranica, 1764

L’apparizione di Onia (componimento poetico), Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1769, I-Rps

Il vello di Gedeone (orat), Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1771, Rps

La stella di Giacobbe (orat), Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1772, Rps

La verga mistica di Aronne (orat), Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1773, Rps

L’Iride o L’arco di pace (orat), Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1777, Rps

Cantata per l’augustissimo giorno natalizio di … Maria Francesca regina di Portogallo [Religione, Giustizia, Pace, Gloria, Tempo] (L. Godard), 5vv, chorus, orch, Rome 1779, P-La

Cantata per la Natività della Beatissima Vergine, Rome, Collegio Nazareno, 1780

Angelica placata (cant., 2, Bernardini), 2vv, chorus, Vienna, 1794

Ulisse e Tiresia (componimento drammatico, A. d'Elci), 5vv, chorus, Vienna, 1800, I-Fc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (‘Bernardini, Marcello’, R. Meloncelli; also ‘Da Capua, Rinaldo’, A. Lanfranchi)

F.F. de Daugnon: Gli italiani in Polonia dal IX sec. al XVIII (Crema, 1907)

G. Pavan: ‘Il teatro Capranica (Catalogo cronologico delle opere rappresentate nel secolo XVIII)’, RMI, xxix (1922), 425–44

A. Cametti: Il teatro di Tordinona poi di Apollo (Rome and Tivoli, 1938)

RAOUL MELONCELLI (with MARITA P. McCLYMONDS)

Bernardino di Pietro.

See Draghi, Bernardino.

Bernardo, Estevan.

See Bernard, Etienne.

Bernardo delle Girandole.

See Buontalenti, Bernardo.

Bernard of Clairvaux

(b Fontaines-lès-Dijon, 1090; d Clairvaux, 1153). French theologian, reformer and mystic. He was educated at Châtillon by the canons of St Vorles. In 1112 or 1113 he entered Cîteaux, and in 1115, in obedience to his abbot, St Stephen Harding, he left it to found Clairvaux, which was to become one of the most famous houses of the Cistercian order. Bernard was its first abbot, ruling over it until his death. Many of his written works were designed for delivery in the chapter house before his own monks. His influence, however, extended far beyond the confines of Clairvaux. He travelled throughout Europe, from Speyer to Palermo and from Madrid to Bordeaux, crossing and recrossing the Alps and the Pyrenees. He made active contributions to synods and councils, notably at Troyes (1128), Pisa (1135), Sens (1140) and Reims (1148). At Troyes he was responsible for establishing the Order of the Knights Templar and he may have been the author of their Rule. He supported Pope Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II at the disputed election after the death of Honorius II in 1130.

An ardent defender of the faith, Bernard engaged in doctrinal disputes with Pierre de Bruys, Henri de Lausanne, Arnold of Brescia, Gilbert de la Porée and finally with Abelard, whom he condemned at the Council of Sens (1140). By his presence and moral support Bernard preached the Second Crusade (1147–9) and was deeply disappointed when it failed.

The secret of Bernard’s far-reaching influence lay in his saintliness and in the strength of his compelling personality. His contribution was essentially that of a monk. Under his leadership the Cistercian order came to be recognized throughout Europe, its austerely reformed type of monasticism contrasting sharply with the style of its great rival, Cluny. The differences are highlighted in the correspondence between Bernard and his friend Peter the Venerable, which called forth Bernard’s famous Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem.

Bernard’s writings include sermons, treatises, a few miscellaneous minor works and a vast output of letters (ed. in Mabillon; James, 1953; and Leclercq, 1957–77). The minor works include an Office for the feast of St Victor, with its important covering letter to the abbot and monks of Montiéramey, a hymn in honour of St Malachy and the tiny prologue to the Cistercian antiphoner (c1147) – all three pointing to Bernard’s concern for an authentic style of worship. ‘The chant’, he wrote in his letter to Abbot Guy, ‘should be quite solemn, nothing sensuous or rustic. Its sweetness should not be frivolous. It should please the ear only that it might move the heart, taking away sorrow and mitigating wrath. It should not detract from the sense of the words but rather make it more fruitful’. The so-called Tonale Sancti Bernardi and the two chant treatises connected with the reformed antiphoner and gradual (all ed. Mabillon, clxxxii) are of doubtful authorship but are associated with Bernard’s reforms (see Tonary, §6(iv)).

Bernard played a major role in the Cistercian liturgical reform. The founding fathers had sought a ‘pure’ tradition in what they considered to be the best source available – the Metz tradition for the music of the Office). A second stage in this reform came between 1140 and 1147 with the setting up of a commission of experts under Bernard’s presidency. Bernard was probably responsible for the textual revisions, based on clear editorial principles: the avoidance of unnecessary duplication; the removal of apocryphal or theologically debatable texts; and the provision of greater literary unity within a piece, for example, a responsory and its verse would preferably be chosen from the same biblical source, not from two different sources.

From the musical point of view the ‘Bernardine reform’ achieved three objectives. The corrupt repertory used by the early Cistercians was brought into line with what was being sung at the time in Europe. The age-old melodies were made to conform to recent theory; for example, melodies that exceeded the requisite range or were unduly florid were modified or transposed; modally ambiguous melodies were re-composed and confined within the straitjacket of a textbook mode; musica ficta was avoided. Finally, the reformers introduced many recently composed pieces in a more popular vein.

Bernard was canonized in 1174 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Mabillon, ed.: S. Bernardi opera omnia (Paris, 1667) [complete Lat. edn.]; repr. with addns in PL, clxxxii–clxxxv

Vita prima, PL, clxxxv, 225–455

Vita secunda, PL, clxxxv, 469–524

W. Williams: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Manchester, 1935/R)

B.S. James, ed. and trans.: The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux (London, 1953, 2/1967)

R. Monterosso: La riforma musicale di S. Bernardo (Cremona, 1955)

B.S. James: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: an Essay in Biography (London, 1957)

J. Leclercq, C.H. Talbot and H.M. Rochais, eds.: Sancti Bernardi opera (Rome, 1957–77; Eng. trans., 1970–) [critical edn.]

K.-W. Gümpel: Zur Interpretation der Tonus-Definition des Tonale Sancti Bernardi (Mainz, 1959)

I. Vallery-Radot: Bernard de Fontaines, abbé de Clairvaux (Tournai, 1963, 2/1990)

J. Leclercq: St Bernard et l’esprit cistercien (Paris, 1966)

C. Waddell: ‘The Origin and Early Evolution of the Cistercian Antiphonary: Reflections on Two Cistercian Chant Reforms’, The Cistercian Spirit: a Symposium, ed. M.B Pennington (Spencer, MA, 1970), 190–223

C. Waddell: ‘The Early Cistercian Experience of Liturgy’, Rule and Life: an Interdiscipliniary Symposium, ed. M.B. Pennington (Spencer, MA, 1971), 77–116

M. Huglo: Les tonaires: inventaire, analyse, comparaison (Paris, 1971)

C. Waddell: ‘An Aspect of the Chant Reform called “Bernardine”’, Liturgy, vi (1972), 81–95

F.J. Guentner, ed.: Epistola S. Bernardi de revisione cantus cisterciensis et tractatus scriptus ab auctore incerto cisterciense: Cantum quem cisterciensis ordinis ecclesiae cantare, CSM (1974)

G.R. Evans: The Mind of St Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford, 1983)

MARY BERRY

Bernardon [Kurz-Bernardon], Joseph Felix von.

See Kurz, Joseph Felix von.

Bernardus.

See Berno of Reichenau.

Bernart de Ventadorn [de Ventador, del Ventadorn, de Ventedorn]

(b Ventadorn, ?c1130–40; d ?Dordogne, c1190–1200). Troubadour. He is widely regarded today as perhaps the finest of the troubadour poets and probably the most important musically. His vida, which contains many purely conventional elements, states that he was born in the castle of Ventadorn in the province of Limousin, and was in the service of the Viscount of Ventadorn. In Lo temps vai e ven e vire (PC 70.30, which survives without music), he mentioned ‘the school of Eble’ (‘l'escola n'Eblo’) – apparently a reference to Eble II, Viscount of Ventadorn from 1106 to some time after 1147. It is uncertain, however, whether this reference is to Eble II or his son and successor Eble III; both were known as patrons of many troubadours, and Eble II was himself a poet, although apparently none of his works has survived. The reference is thought to indicate the existence of two competing schools of poetic composition among the early troubadours, with Eble II as the head and patron of the school that upheld the more idealistic view of courtly love against the propagators of the trobar clos or difficult and dark style. Bernart, according to this hypothesis, became the principal representative of this idealist school among the second generation of troubadours.

The popular story of Bernart's humble origins stems also from his vida and from a satirical poem by his slightly younger contemporary Peire d'Alvernhe. The vida states that his father was either a servant, a baker or a foot soldier (in Peire's version, a ‘worthy wielder of the laburnum bow’), and his mother either a servant or a baker (Peire: ‘she fired the oven and gathered twigs’).

After leaving Ventadorn, Bernart (according to the vida) entered the service of the Duchess of Normandy, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who received the title after her marriage to Henry Plantagenet in 1152, who in turn became Henry II of England two years later. There are a number of references in Bernart's poems to Eleanor, Henry and, probably, a trip to England with the royal pair. Bernart’s association with Eleanor and his presence in England some time after 1150 thus seem plausible but the fact that he met Chrétien de Troyes there, as some scholars have maintained, cannot be documented. The vida states that after Eleanor and Henry II went to England Bernart entered the service of Raimon V, Count of Toulouse (1148–94). After the count's death, the troubadour is reported to have entered a monastery in Dordogne, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Bernart is remarkable among the early troubadours in that more of his melodies have survived than of any other 12th-century poet. Of 45 poems attributed to him, 18 are extant with their melodies complete, and one other survives with a fragment of melody (Tuit cil que·m pregon qu'eu chan). His influence on the subsequent history of medieval song is demonstrated by the fact that four melodies served as the basis for later contrafacta by French, Latin, Provençal and German poets (Ara no vei luzir soleill; Be m'au perdut; Pos mi pregatz seignor and Quan vei la lauzeta mover). Quan vei la lauzeta mover was probably the most widely known of all medieval melodies: it inspired at least six contrafacta in four languages. The great popularity of this song, together with his presence in northern France and possibly England in the 1150s, lends credence to the view that Bernart more than any other single figure was responsible for transplanting the poetic-musical art of the troubadour to northern Europe, thus stimulating the development of the trouvère tradition.

Although the majority of the extant troubadour melodies are through-composed (oda continua), those attributed to Bernart show a predilection for repeated sections, a characteristic shared with Jaufre Rudel, Raimon de Miraval, Peirol and Giuraut Riquier. Of Bernart's 18 melodies, only three are through-composed; 12 are either in chanson form (ABABX) or derived from it. Scherner-van Ortmerssen has divided his output into the following categories: oda continua (PC 70.7, 19, 43); reduced oda continua, containing at least one repeated phrase (PC 70.8, 24, 42); chanson (PC 70.1, 17, 41); and the remaining nine, some variant of chanson. Later studies have shown instances of syntactical interplay between poetry and music in Bernart's melodies.

WORKS

Editions:Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours: I, ed. F. Gennrich, SMM, iii (1958) [complete edn]The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. S. Nichols and J. Galm (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962) [complete edn]Las cançons dels trobadors, ed. I. Fernandez de la Cuesta and R. Lafont (Toulouse, 1979) [complete edn]The Extant Troubadour Melodies, ed. H. van der Werf and G. Bond (Rochester, NY, 1984) [complete edn]

Ab joi mon lo vers e·l comens, PC 70.1

Amors, e que·us es vejaire, PC 70.4

Ara·m conseillatz siegnor, PC 70.6

Ara no vei luzir soleill, PC 70.7 [contrafactum: ‘Pour longue atente de merci’, R.1057] (two melodies; 2nd only agrees with R.1057, printed in Gennrich, p.299)

A tantas bonas chansos, PC 70.8

Be m'au perdut lai enves Ventadorn, PC 70.12 [contrafactum: Quens de Bar, ‘De nos, seigneur, que vos est il avis’, R.1522]

Cornatz, ara sai eu be, PC 70.16

En consirier et en esmai, PC 70.17

Estat a com hom esperdutz, PC 70.19 (1^st stanza, ‘Ma dosne fu al commencar’, is the 5^th in other sources)

La doussa votz ai auzida, PC 70.23

Lanquan foillon bosc e garic, PC 70.24

Lanquan vei la foilla, PC 70.25

Non es meravilla s'eu chan, PC 70.31 (two melodies found in 1 MS)

Pos mi pregatz seignor, PC 70.36 [contrafactum: Friedrich von Hûsen, ‘Deich von der guoten chiet’]

Quan l’erba fresc e·l foilla par, PC 70.39

Quan par la flors josta·l vert foill, PC 70.41

Quan vei la flor, l’erba vert e la foilla, PC 70.42

Quan vei la lauzeta mover, PC 70.43 [contrafacta: Philip the Chancellor, ‘Quisquis cordis et oculi’ and ‘Li cuers se vait de l'oil plaignant’, R.349; ‘Amis, qui est li mieus vaillant’, R.365; ‘Plaine d'ire et de desconfort’, R.1934; Deitmar von Eist, ‘Der Winter waere mir ein zît’; ‘Seyner, mil gracias ti rent’, PC 461.218a]

Tuit cil que·m pregon qu'eu chan, PC 70.45 (only small frag. of melody)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.L.E. Appel, ed.: Bernart von Ventadorn: seine Lieder (Halle, 1915) [complete music facs.]

C. Appel: Die Singweisen Bernarts von Ventadorn (Halle, 1934)

U. Sesini: Le melodie trobadoriche nel Canzoniere provenzale della Biblioteca ambrosiana (Turin, 1942), 132–53

M. Lazar, ed.: Bernart de Ventadorn: Chansons d'amour (Paris, 1966), 13ff

G. Scherner-van Ortmerssen: Die Text-Melodiestruktur in den Liedern des Bernart de Ventadorn (Münster, 1973)

M. Steel: ‘A Case for the Predominance of Melody over Text in Troubadour Lyric: Bernart de Ventadorn's “Can vei la lauzeta mover”’, Michigan Academician, xiv (1982), 259–71

N. Gossen: ‘Music und Text in Liedern des Trobadors Bernart de Ventadorn’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, iv–v (1984–5), 9–40

W.D. Paden: ‘Bernart de Ventadour le troubadour devint-il abbé de Tulle?’, Mélanges de langue et de littérature occitanes en hommage à Pierre Bec (Poitiers, 1991), 401–13

L. Treitler: ‘ The Troubadours Singing their Poems’, The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry [Austin 1987], ed. R.A. Baltzer, T. Cable and J.I. Wimsatt (Austin, 1991), 15–48

For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

ROBERT FALCK/ JOHN D. HAINES

Bernasconi, Alessio Boileau.

See Boileau Bernasconi, Alessio.

Bernasconi, Andrea

(b ? Marseilles, 1706; d Munich, 24 Jan 1784). Italian composer. Early sources state that he was born in 1712. His father, a French officer, settled in Parma after his withdrawal from military service. Little is known of Bernasconi’s education. In the librettos of his early operas he is referred to as a Milanese dilettante (1737 and 1743) and as a Veronese (1742 and 1745), but mainly as a Milanese (1737, 1743–53). In 1744–53 he was maestro di cappella at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, and in 1747 he married Maria Josepha Wagele (c1722–1762) in Parma. He instructed his stepdaughter, Antonia, in music and helped launch her successful singing career. A decree of 24 November 1753 refers to his engagement as assistant Kapellmeister of vocal music in Munich from 1 August 1753; his appointment coincided with the opening of the Residenztheater. He was soon appointed electoral councillor. On 5 June 1754 he was named music teacher to the princesses Maria Anna Josepha (until July 1755) and Josepha Maria (until January 1765); the Elector Maximilian III Joseph also received music lessons from him. Following the death of Giovanni Porta, Bernasconi was appointed Kapellmeister on 7 September 1755. In 1778 Elector Carl Theodor confirmed his official post, but he probably rendered no further service. His successor in 1784 was Paul Grua.

As a composer, Bernasconi was a conservative representative of the Neapolitan opera seria, his music devoid of any attempts at reform. Most of his arias are in a modified da capo form with florid melodic writing; the recitatives are noteworthy for their fluent and vocally graceful declamation. He employs accompanied recitatives effectively, especially in the later operas. Gerber reports that Hasse’s wife, the soprano Fuastina Bordoni, liked Bernasconi’s operas, and that his arias pleased her as much as those of her husband. His stage works performed in Munich, some being revisions of earlier works, were very popular. After 1772 Bernasconi devoted himself exclusively to church music. He wrote relatively little instrumental music and almost all of his sacred music (including 34 masses) is lost.

WORKS

stage

opere serie in three acts unless otherwise stated

Flavio Anicio Olibrio (A. Zeno ?and P. Pariati), Vienna, carn. 1737, A-Wn

Alessandro Severo (Zeno), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, 27 Dec 1738; rev. Palermo, S Cecilia, carn. 1746; rev. as Salustia, Venice, Vendramin, 31 May 1753

Temistocle (P. Metastasio), Padua, Obizzi, 6 June 1740, I-PLcon; rev. Lucca, 1741; rev., as pasticcio, Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, aut. 1744; rev. Munich, Residenz, carn. 1754; rev. Munich, carn. 1762; D-Bsb, Hs, Mbs, Wa, F-Pn

Demofoonte (Metastasio), Rome, Dame, carn. 1741; rev. Munich, Residenz, carn. 1766, D-Mbs

Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, carn. 1741; rev. Munich, Residenz, 26 Jan 1756, Mbs; rev. Munich, 1760

Endimione (serenata, 2, Metastasio), Venice, 6 Feb 1742; rev. Munich, Residenz, 1766

Il Bajazet (A. Piovene), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, aut. 1742; rev. Munich, Residenz, 12 Oct 1754; rev. as Baiazet, Prague, 1762; arias Mbs

La ninfa Apollo (scherzo comico pastorale, 2, F. de Lemene), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, 26 Feb 1743

Germanico (N. Coluzzi), Turin, Regio, carn. 1744, A-Wgm, Wn

Antigono (Metastasio), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, carn. 1745; rev. Treviso, Delfino, carn. 1752

Artaserse (Megastasio), Vienna, 8 Oct 1746; rev. Munich, Residenz, 10 Jan 1763, D-Mbs

Ezio (Metastasio), Vienna Schönbrunn, 4 Oct 1749, Mbs

L’huomo (festa teatrale, 1, Wilhelmine of Bayreuth), Bayreuth, sum. 1754, W

Adriano in Siria (Metastasio), Munich, Residenz, 5 Jan 1755, Mbs, F-Pn

Il trionfo della costanza (festa teatrale, P. Honory, after Metastasio: Il sogno di Scipione), Nymphenburg, 20 July 1755

Agelmondo (dramma per musica, 2), Munich, carn. 1760, D-Mbs

Olimpiade (Metastasio), Munich, Residenz, 20 Jan 1764, Mbs, F-Pn*

Semiramide riconosciuta (Metastasio), Munich, Residenz, 7 Jan 1765, D-Mbs, F-Pn

La clemenza di Tito (Metastasio), Munich, Residenz, Jan 1768, D-Mbs, F-Pn* (R/1982: IOB, lxxxviii)

Demetrio (Metastasio), Munich, Residenz, Jan 1772, D-Mbs, F-Pn

Music in: Didone abbandonata, 1743; Ixion, 1746; Andromeda, 1749; Euridice, 1750; Nerone, 1753; Issipile 1763

oratorios and sacred cantatas

Davidis lapsus et poenitentia, Venice, 10 Sept 1744; Adonias (drama sacrum), Venice, 1746; Pastorum dialogus in Domini nativitate, Venice, 1746; Jonathas (drama sacrum), Venice, 1747; David (drama sacrum), Venice, 1751; Carmina (drama sacrum), Venice, 1752; La Betulia liberata (componimento sacro, Metastasio), Munich, 30 March 1754, Vienna, 1754, A-Wn; Ricorrendo il giorno solenne (solo cant., Honory), Munich, 28 March 1755

other works

Sacred: mass, D-Mf; Stabat mater, Mf; 6 lits, WEY; Miserere, Po, 2 Mag, Bsb; Beatus vir, A-RB, 11 offs, D-Mbs, Mf, HR; 33 masses, lost; c125 other works, lost

Inst: 8 syms., Bsb, DO, KA, RH, Tl; fl conc.; trio sonata; c12 syms., lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF, ii

EitnerQ

FétisB

GroveO (R. Münster, P. Corneilson) [incl. further bibliography]

LipowskyBL

E.J. Weiss: Andrea Bernasconi als Opernkomponist (diss., U. of Munich, 1923)

H. Lühning: Titus-Vertonungen im 18. Jahrhundert, AnMc, no.20 (1983)

J. Liebscher: ‘Bayreuth vor Wagner: das markgräfliche Opernhaus’, Musik in Bayern, xxxv (1987), 11–23

K. Böhmer: W.A. Mozarts Idomeneo und die Tradition der Münchner Karnevalsopern (Tutzing, 1999)

ROBERT MÜNSTER (with PAUL CORNEILSON)

Bernasconi [Wagele], Antonia

(b Stuttgart, c1741; d ?Vienna, ?1803). German soprano. She was the daughter of a valet of the Duke of Württemberg. By her widowed mother's second marriage in 1743, she became the stepdaughter of Andrea Bernasconi, who instructed her in singing. Her successful début followed on 21 January 1762 as Aspasia in Bernasconi's Temistocle in Munich. In Vienna from about 1765–6 she first performed in opere buffe by Piccinni and Sacchini and in 1767 was highly successful as Alcestis in the première of Gluck's opera. J.A. Hiller gave a detailed account of her in the Wöchentlichen Nachrichten of 24 October 1768. In December 1770 she sang Aspasia in the première of Mozart's Mitridate; it is also possible that the part of Ninetta in his La finta semplice was composed for her. In 1771–2 she sang in Cesena, Milan and at the Teatro S Benedetto in Venice, in 1772–3 and 1774–5 at the Teatro di S Carlo in Naples. From November 1778 to May 1780 she was a member of the Italian opera company at the King's Theatre, London, and in the summer of 1781, supposedly at Gluck's request, she returned to the Vienna Burgtheater to sing in three Gluck operas that were specially mounted for the Grand Duke Paul of Russia. Mozart's letters are severely critical of her intonation and German declamation, although he said he would have trusted her with a part in the German performance of Idomeneo that he was planning. She was retained for the opera buffa company that was created in April 1783, but was released four months later, probably because, as Mozart had said (29 August 1781), she really sang well only in serious operas. In 1786 she appeared in Piacenza and Lucca. She is supposed to have married, under the name of Rieler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

SartoriL

U. Prota-Giurleo: ‘Notizie biografiche intorno ad alcuni musicisti d'oltralpe a Napoli nel Settecento’, AnMc, no.2 (1965), 112–43

O. Michtner: Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna, 1970)

G. Zechmeister: Die Wiener Theater nächst der Burg und nächst dem Kärntnerthor von 1747–1776 (Vienna, 1971), 209–34

M. Donà: ‘Dagli archivi milanesi: lettere di Ranieri de' Calzabigi e di Antonia Bernasconi’, AnMc, no.14 (1974), 268–300

E. Grossegger: Gluck und d'Afflisio (Vienna, 1995), 126–8

D. Link: The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (Oxford, 1998)

ROBERT MÜNSTER

Bernat-Verí, Jorge Bosch.

See Bosch bernat-verí, jorge.

Berne

(Ger. Bern).

Capital city of Switzerland. A strong musical tradition can be traced from the 15th century, particularly after the victorious conclusion of the Burgundian wars. Town musicians were employed early in the century, and Berne Minster, dedicated to St Vincent, had an organ by about 1450. The choir school at St Vincent was founded in 1485; its choir was singing polyphonic music by 1489. Among the pre-Reformation Kantors were Bartholomäus Frank (1481–1502), Heinrich Wölflin (1504–5), Johannes Wannenmacher (1510–13) and Cosmas Alder (1524), whose hymns received new texts after the Reformation, a sure indication of earlier polyphonic practice. Places for six boys were maintained in the choir school.

During the Reformation music was banned from church and the cathedral organ was sold, but music continued to play a role in secular life. The town council provided for a lute teacher in 1531, and from 1533 to 1541 the organist Hans Kotter taught at the Minster School. Music printing was fostered by Apiarius, who founded his business in 1537.

Choral dramas with solo vocal and instrumental elements, an outgrowth of humanistic school plays, were prominent in the decades following the Reformation. Music found its way back into the church service by way of psalm singing, and in 1574 the town council appointed the first Protestant Kantor. About the same time congregational singing was introduced and from 1581 four town pipers, hired in 1572, accompanied it. Berne led the way in introducing the Lobwasser Psalter into Switzerland: some of the psalms were included in early 17th-century songbooks, and the new edition of 1655 contained all 150.

The central figure in Berne’s musical revival during the second half of the 17th century was J.U. Sultzberger, musical director from 1675, author of a simplified Transponiertes Psalmenbuch and founder of several collegia musica, of which the Collegium Musicum Studiosorum lasted until the end of the 18th century.

With the rise of public concert life, music in Berne became less centred on church and school; the Hôtel de Musique (completed 1770) was the scene of regular operas and concerts from 1799.

The city’s orchestral life has been fostered by two large societies, the Bernische Musikgesellschaft (1815) and the Orchesterverein (1877). The Orchesterverein, subsidized by the city, governs the activities of the Berne SO (1876), which plays for the Stadttheater. It organizes regular series of symphony concerts, promoting 20th-century music as well as the standard repertory. The Musikgesellschaft organizes a number of subscription concerts (usually ten) each year, at which the major symphonies and concertos are performed by the Berne SO with international soloists. Resident conductors have included Karl Munzinger (1884–1909), Fritz Brun (1909–41), Luc Balmer (1941–64), Paul Kletzki (1964–8), Charles Dutoit (1968–78), Gustav Kuhn (1979–82), Peter Maag (1984–91) and Dmitri Kitayenko (1991–). Each season three or four guest conductors are engaged. The Musikgesellschaft also organizes chamber concerts in which the Berne String Quartet regularly participates. The Berne Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Hermann Müller, 1938–73, Jean-Pierre Moeckli, 1973–92, and, since 1992, Olivier Cuendet) plays pre-Classical and modern music. The Camerata Bern, founded in 1962, is a small string orchestra that gives about 50 concerts a year and has achieved an international reputation. The Stadttheater (1903), also subsidized by the city, stages Baroque, Classical, Romantic and 20th-century operas.

The main choral societies are the Caecilienverein (1862) and the Berner Liedertafel (1845): for decades they have given performances of oratorios in the 15th-century minster in collaboration with the Berne SO. Other important choirs include the Berner Männerchor (1870), the Lehrergesangverein (1909), the Berne Chamber Choir (1940) and the Berne Concert Choir (1981). The regular evening concerts in the minster were initiated by Ernst Graf, organist there from 1912 to 1937.

Berne has a section of the ISCM which organizes regular concerts of avant-garde music with the section’s own ensemble Neue Horizonte, directed by Urs Peter Schneider. The Berne radio studio shares broadcasting with those of Basle and Zürich.

The Berne Conservatory was founded in 1858, ten years after the city became the capital of Switzerland; Roman Brotbeck became its director in 1999. The chair of musicology at Berne University has been held by Ernst Kurth (1912–46), Arnold Geering (1950–72), Stefan Kunze (1973–92) and Anselm Gerhard (1994–).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Bloesch: Die Bernische Musikgesellschaft 1815–1915 (Berne, 1915)

A. Geering: Die Vokalmusik in der Schweiz zur Zeit der Reformation (Aarau, 1933)

M. Zulauf: Der Musikunterricht in der Geschichte des Bernischen Schulwesens von 1528–1798 (Berne, 1934)

J. Stenzl: ‘Zur Kirchenmusik im Berner Münster vor der Reformation’, Festschrift Arnold Geering (Berne, 1972), 89–109

H. Gugger, D. Hegg and H. Schmocker: Die bernischen Orgeln (Berne, 1977–8)

F. de Capitani and G. Aeschbacher: Musik in Bern: Musik, Musiker, Musikerinnen und Publikum in der Stadt Bern vom Mittelalter bis heute (Berne, 1993)

T. Schacher: 75 Jahre Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität Bern, 1921–1996 (Berne, 1996)

M.U. Balsiger: Von der Kapelle zum Sinfonieorchester: der bernische Orchesterverein 1877–1979 (Berne, 1998)

KURT VON FISCHER/JÜRG STENZL/CHRIS WALTON

Bernelinus

(fl Paris, late 10th and early 11th centuries). French mathematician. According to two late manuscripts used by Gerbert, he compiled a mathematical treatise, Prefacio libri abaci quem junior Bernelinus edidit Parisius (I-Rvat lat.4539, f.1; see GerbertS, i, Praefatio, no.X; RISM, B/III/2, 1968, p.95). The treatise claims to be based on the doctrine of Gerbert d’Aurillac (d 1003) and can thus be dated to the late 10th or early 11th century. A musical treatise (GerbertS, i, 312–30; PL, cli, 651–74) is ascribed to Bernelinus in only one manuscript, I-Rvat Regin.lat.1661 (see RISM, B/III/2, p.119). It comprises two sections; the first, Dimidium proslambenomenos (GerbertS, i, 312), sometimes appears, anonymously, separately from the second, Rogatus a pluribus (GerbertS, i, 314), as for example in GB-Lbl Harl.3199, f.69v (RISM, B/III/4, 1992, p.82) and I-CEc S.XXVI.1, f.177v; and, according to Smits van Waesberghe, Berno (Musica) quoted the first section but did not give the author’s name (only ‘quidam sapiens’; GerbertS, ii, 78B = i, 313B–314A; see J. Smits van Waesberghe: Divitiae musicae artis, vi, Buren, 1978–9, pt B, p.45). The second section of the treatise concerns the monochord; it seems unlikely to be the work of Bernelinus, if the attribution of it in E-Mn 9088 to Gerbert d’aurillac is to be believed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

RiemannG

N. Bubnov, ed.: Gerberti … opera mathematica, 972–1003 (Berlin,1899/R), 383

H. Riemann: Geschichte der Musiktheorie im IX.–XIX. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2/1921/R; Eng. trans. of pts i–ii, 1962/R, and pt iii, 1977), 23, 65ff, 69

J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed.: The Theory of Music from the Carolingian Era up to 1400, i: Descriptive Catalogue of MSS, RISM, B/III/1 (1961)

P. Fischer, ed.: The Theory of Music from the Carolingian Era up to 1400, ii: Italy, RISM, B/III/2 (1968)

C. Meyer, ed.: Mensura monochordi: la division du monocorde (IXe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 1996), cxii, 55, 256

MICHEL HUGLO

Berner, Alfred

(b Heinrichswalde [now Slavsk, nr Sovetsk], 10 April 1910). German musicologist. From 1928 he studied musicology with Schering, Sachs, Hornbostel and Wolf at Berlin University, with philosophy, art history and Arabic as subsidiary subjects. From 1931 to 1933 he worked at the Institute for Arabic Music in Cairo and in 1935 he took the doctorate at Berlin with a dissertation on Arabic music. He worked in Berlin at the Phonogramm-Archiv, in the music department of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek and at the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung; in 1937 he lost his position at the institute, under Seiffert, as he was not a member of the Nazi party. After military service (1939–45) he was principal adviser on music and art institutions for the municipal council of Berlin: simultaneously (1946–8) he held a lecturing post at the Humboldt University, Berlin. From 1948 he devoted himself to rebuilding the Institut für Musikforschung and its instrument collection: he effectively ran the institute from 1949 and was responsible for the first concerts on its collection of historical instruments in 1951. He was appointed chief academic adviser in 1961, institute director in 1962, director of the Museum der Musikinstrumenten in 1966 and professor in 1967. He retired in 1978. He won particular acclaim for expanding the museum of musical instruments attached to the institute. He lectured in the study of musical instruments at the Berlin Conservatory which merged with the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1966; Berner continued to lecture at the Hochschule until 1975.

WRITINGS

Studien zur arabischen Musik auf Grund der gegenwärtigen Theorie und Praxis in Ägypten (diss., U. of Berlin, 1935; Leipzig, 1937)

Die Berliner Musikinstrumenten-Sammlung: Einführung mit historischen und technischen Erläuterung (Berlin, 1952)

‘Das Staatliche Institut für Musikforschung’, Jb der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, i (1963), 346–70

‘Die Musikinstrumente zur Zeit Heinrich Schützens’, Sagittarius, i (1966), 30–42

with J.H. van der Meer and G. Thibault: Preservation and Restoration of Musical Instruments (London, 1967)

‘Das 19. Jahrhundert im Musikinstrumenten-Museum’, Die Bedeutung, die optische und akustische Darbietung und die Aufgaben einer Musikinstrumentensammlung: Nuremberg 1969 (1970), 80–89

‘Bildzeugnisse zur Aufführungspraxis der Schütz-Zeit’, Sagittarius, iii (1970), 56–65

‘Der Ruckers-Bestand des Berliner Musikinstrumenten-Museums’, Restauratieproblemen van Antwerpse klavecimbels: Museum Vleeshuis 1970, 53–62

‘28 Jahre Musikinstrumenten-Museum: Wiederaufbau, Probleme, Ziele’, Jb der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, xii (1976), 89–97

‘Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung und zum Gebrauch der Musikinstrumente im 17. Jahrhundert’, Heinrich Schütz e il suo tempo: Urbino 1978, 143–60

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/R

Berner, Friedrich Wilhelm

(b Breslau, 16 May 1780; d Breslau, 9 May 1827). German organist, teacher, composer and musical organizer. He studied music with his father, Johann Georg Berner (1738–1810), organist at St Elisabeth, Breslau, becoming his assistant at 13 and succeeding him in 1810. He also learnt many other instruments, and at the age of 16 became clarinettist in the city theatre orchestra; he also studied composition with Franz Gehirne. Around 1798 he heard the organist David Traugott Nicolai, whose father had been a pupil of Bach, and was so impressed that he abandoned ‘the galant style of organ playing’ for that of Bach. When Weber was appointed Kapellmeister in 1804 Berner befriended him, and when Weber accidentally drank some engraving acid, it was Berner's prompt action which prevented disastrous consequences. In 1812 Berner went to Berlin with Joseph Schnabel, leader of the theatre orchestra, to study Zelter's teaching methods at the Sing-Akademie, the Prussian government's intention being to form similar institutions. While in Berlin he played Mozart's Concerto for two pianos with Weber, and also performed as an organist. Three years later the Akademische Institut für Kirchenmusik was founded in Breslau, with Berner and Schnabel as directors. After the dissolution of the Silesian monasteries in 1810 Berner catalogued their music collections.

An important figure in Breslau's musical life, Berner was admired by Mendelssohn as a teacher and improvisor, and was in his day also highly regarded as a composer. His compositions include several cantatas, songs, organ and piano pieces and concertos for wind instruments; many of his works, including all his theoretical writings, are lost. His most important pupils were Ernst Köhler and Adolf Hesse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Feldmann)

J. Hientzsch: ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Berner’, Eutonia, i (1829), 271–310

C.J.A. Hoffmann: Die Tonkünstler Schlesiens (Breslau, 1830/R), 16ff

Kossmaly and Carlo: Schlesisches Tonkünstler-Lexicon (Breslau, 1846–7/R), 4ff

W. Eschenbach: Friedrich Wilhelm Berner (diss., U. of Breslau, 1935) [with complete list of works]

F. Feldmann: ‘Die schlesische Kirchenmusik im Wandel der Zeiten’, Das evangelische Schlesien, vi/2 (1975), 132–9

FRANZ GEHRING/JOHN WARRACK/RUDOLF WALTER

Berners, Lord [Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Sir Gerald Hugh, Baronet]

(b Apley Park, nr Bridgnorth, 18 Sept 1883; d Faringdon, 19 April 1950). English composer, writer and painter. The son of a naval officer, he was sent to Cheam School and Eton, described mercilessly in his memoirs. Then, for the first decade of the century, he studied and travelled in various parts of France, Germany and Italy. As a schoolboy he had admired Wagner, but now turned to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Schoenberg, although his teachers included academics such as Edmund Kretschmer, in Dresden, and, at home, Tovey. His experiences abroad gave him a European perspective and equipped him to work as an honorary attaché in the diplomatic service from 1909 until 1920. As an only child, his principal family connection was with his mother – his father was usually abroad and died in 1907 – and her fluent if superficial ability in music and painting was part of his background. He was first in Constantinople, where he was a colleague of Harold Nicholson, and moved to Rome in 1911. During this formative period he benefited greatly from his friendship with Stravinsky, whom he met in 1911. Fifty years later Stravinsky rated A Wedding Bouquet and The Triumph of Neptune ‘as good as the French works of that kind produced by Diaghilev’ and in 1937, noting the success of A Wedding Bouquet, told his publisher ‘I have always been devotedly sympathetic to his music’. Berners also showed his work to Casella and knew Diaghilev and Ronald Firbank in Rome. It was here that he composed some of the most advanced music by any British composer at that date.

Berners’ earliest mature works were for the piano – Le poisson d’or, dedicated to Stravinsky and published with designs by Natal'ya Goncharova of the Ballets Russes, and Dispute entre le papillon et le crapaud, which was not published until 1982. Both these pieces have illustrative texts in the manner of Satie’s Sports et divertissements, of which Berners possessed an early copy, and the Dispute has Berners’ own watercolour on the cover of the manuscript. Even at this stage Berners was working in more than one medium at once: this and his sense of humour caused him to be known as the English Satie. But his first published work, appearing in Florence and London under the name of Gerald Tyrwhitt, was the Trois petites marches funèbres, given its first performance by Alfredo Casella at the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome on 30 March 1917. The last of these pieces, Pour une tante à héritage, gained notoriety firstly for the dissonant style of its gleeful celebration and secondly from the fact that Berners inherited his titles and wealth just 18 months later.

No less remarkable is another triptych, the Fragments psychologiques, well aware of the Vienna of Schoenberg and Freud. Some of these exploratory piano pieces impressed Bartók so much that he copied them out. L’uomo dai baffi, a futurist marionette show by Fortunato Depero directed by Casella at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome on 15 April 1918, used chamber orchestra versions of the second of the Fragments psychologiques and all three funeral marches. Another piece, Portsmouth Point (based on the Rowlandson sketch and predating the Walton piece by several years), was added. But the British première of L’uomo was not until 1 November 1983.

With remarkable confidence Berners took the discoveries of these instrumental pieces into the orchestral medium with Trois morceaux, based on exotic idioms made fashionable by the Ballets Russes, and Fantaisie espagnole, carrying Spanish mannerisms to the limit with a genial genuflection towards The Rite of Spring. Both of these works became landmarks in modern British music of the period immediately after World War I. Most of his 15 songs with piano were written around 1920. His stance as a parodist is evident in the first song of the Lieder Album, where he claims that Heine’s poem ‘Du bist wie eine blume’ was addressed to a pig and not a girl. The piano part obliges with periodic grunting noises. The Trois chansons follow serious French models up to Debussy and Satie, but the distorted military fanfare introducing the drummer-boy in the last song is a comic touch. The Three English Songs open with a lullaby in pastoral vein, but then the elderly rich lady do-gooder is lampooned, as is the sulkily jealous girl in the third song ‘James gave Elizabeth a Dodo’. In the second of the Three Songs (sea chanties) Masefield’s Pirate King (who, ‘though dripping gore, was always courteous to the ladies’) is delineated with the precision of Satie. Of the two last songs, Red Roses and Red Noses is a unique comic encore – Berners wrote the poem, which appeared in an anthology edited by Edith Sitwell, and decorated the cover – and Come on, Algernon is a hysterically realistic music-hall number. Most of these songs have been particularly associated with Meriel Dickinson, especially since the Portrait of Lord Berners given at the Purcell Room and on BBC Radio 3 with John Betjeman on 8 December 1972. More recently they have been associated with Felicity Lott.

Berners had gained recognition with his piano music, songs and orchestral pieces – by 1950 over 3000 copies of the Trois petites marches funèbres had been printed – and his Valses bourgeoises were given at the ISCM at Salzburg in 1923. But his contribution to modernism was at an end. In the early 1920s he started to move towards the wider arena of the theatre. His first step was the opera. Le carosse du Saint Sacrement, based on a short story by Mérimée, vocally treated in arioso and recitative with a vivid orchestral response including Spanish mannerisms. The première was at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 24 April 1924 but it was not heard in England, apart from the concert piece (Caprice péruvien) arranged by Constant Lambert, until BBC Radio 3 broadcast it on 18 September 1983 for the Berners centenary. After the opera Berners found himself more decisively in ballet, giving free rein to his obsession with the waltz, and his music became more English in the process. The Triumph of Neptune was one of only two British commissions from Diaghilev, the other being Lambert’s Romeo and Juliet. The story was by Sacheverell Sitwell and the choreography by George Balanchine, as in Berners’ next ballet, Luna Park, given in a C.B. Cochran revue. Stylistic fingerprints in these scores include the use of short fragments shifting rapidly from one tonal centre to another. Frederick Ashton was the choreographer for Berners’ remaining three ballets, all directed by Lambert, but by far the most significant of these was A Wedding Bouquet, for which Berners himself designed the sets and painted the backcloth. This satire on marriage – a recurring theme in Berners’ novels and memoirs – employs a chorus, by way of Stravinsky’s The Wedding, with a text from Gertrude Stein. Berners found her an ideal literary partner because she disconcerted people and was fashionable. Like The Triumph of Neptune, A Wedding Bouquet has held the stage, although it has not had the advantage of Beecham’s recordings of the suite from the earlier ballet. In the original version for chorus, rather than the weak substitution of a speaker, A Wedding Bouquet is characteristic of Berners in so many ways that it can be claimed as his masterpiece, the climax of his more public concerns developed through the 1920s and now showing a zest for balletic idioms from Tchaikovsky to Ravel.

The 1930s was an extraordinarily creative decade for Berners since in 1931 and 1936 there were exhibitions of his oil paintings at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London. Unlike his earlier music, there was nothing avant-garde about his paintings, which showed him as a collector of Corot. Two volumes of his autobiography, First Childhhood (London, 1934) and A Distant Prospect (London, 1945), testify to the difficulties experienced by the arts in being taken seriously during Berners’ youth. Five novels and two short stories, with translations or editions in France, Sweden, Germany and the USA, were published between 1914 and 1941. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly for such a committed European, Berners felt demoralized by the onset of war and told Gertrude Stein that he felt ‘confronted with the breakdown of all the things that meant anything to me’. In the 1940s his work declined, although his drawing-room comedy, The Furies, ran for a week at the Oxford Playhouse from 1 June 1942 and he wrote two full-length film scores.

Historically Berners was part of a slender British avant garde which emerged after World War I. His example encouraged younger composers such as Bliss, Walton and Lambert; the Sitwells were a literary counterpart and all these figures were friends, even though Berners upset Walton with his caricature of a composer in his novel, Count Omega. Diana Mosley, who knew Berners well, confirmed: ‘He enjoyed painting, but looked upon himself as a composer. One sees the whole man in his music – jokes, but underlying sadness’. By the 1990s much of his music was available on CD and his fiction was reprinted as Collected Tales and Fantasies (London, 1999). In spite of Berners’ deserved reputation as a versatile eccentric, it is the irreverent stance and consistently sharp focus of his small musical output that ensure his survival as a unique figure in British music of the period.

WORKS

stage

An Egyptian Princess (operetta), c1900

L’uomo dai baffi (5 balli plastici, F. Depero), Piccoli, 15 April 1918 [arr. of Fragments psychologiques, 3 petites marches funèbres and Portsmouth Point]

Le carosse du Saint Sacrement (op, P. Mérimée), 1923, Paris, Champs-Elysées, 24 April 1924, rev. (1925)

The Triumph of Neptune (ballet, 10 tableaux, O. Sitwell), 1926, London Lyceum, 3 Dec 1926

Luna Park (ballet, 1), 1930, Manchester, Palace, 4 March 1930

A Wedding Bouquet (ballet, G. Stein), 1936, London, Sadler’s Wells, 27 April 1936

Cupid and Psyche (ballet), 1938, London, Sadler’s Wells, 27 April 1939

Les sirènes (ballet, 1), 1946, London, CG, 12 Nov 1946

other works

Orch: 3 Pieces, 1919; Fantaisie espagnole, 1920; Fugue, 1924; The Triumph of Neptune 1926–7; Caprice péruvien, suite [arr. C. Lambert of Le carosse du Saint Sacrement], 1938; Nicholas Nickleby, 1947

Film scores: Halfway House (dir. B. Dearden), 1944 [unpubd. except pf arr. Valse]; Champagne Charlie (dir. A. Cavalcanti), 1944 [2 no.s contributed by Berners]; Nicholas Nickleby (dir. Cavalcanti), 1947, arr. Suite, 1947

Pf: Dispute entre le papillon et le crapaud, c1915; Fragments psychologiques, c1916; Le poisson d’or, 1915; 3 petites marches funèbres, 1916; Portsmouth Point, c1918; In dulci jubilo, 1932 [transcr. of J.S. Bach]; A Fascist March, 1934; Polka, 1941; Valse, 1943 [from film score Halfway House]; The Expulsion from Paradise, 1945; March, c1945; Nicholas Nickleby, 1947 [arr. from film score]

Pf 4 hands: Valses bourgeoises, 1919; 3 morceaux 1919 [arr. orch. work]; Fantaisie espagnole, 1920 [arr. orch work]

Other inst: Fanfare, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, 3 perc, 1931

Songs: Lieder Album: 3 Songs in the German Manner (H. Heine), 1913–18; 3 chansons (G. Jean-Aubry), 1920; 3 English Songs (T. Dekker, R. Graves, E.L. Duff), 1920; 3 Songs (2 chanties, J. Masefield), 1921; Dialogue between Tom Filuter and his Man, by Ned the Dog Stealer (Berners), 1921; Red Roses and Red Noses (Berners), c1941; Come on, Algernon (T.E.B. Clarke), 1944 [from Champagne Charlie]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Goossens: ‘Lord Berners’, The Chesterian, no.3 (1919), 65–8

E. Evans: ‘Modern British Composers VII: Lord Berners’, MT, lxi (1920), 9–13

‘Lord Berners’, Miniature Essays (London, 1922)

R. Firbank: Memoir by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher (London, 1930), 145–50

S. Sitwell: ‘British Composers at the Proms (5): Lord Berners’, Radio Times (11 Sept 1931)

J.A. Westrup: ‘Lord Berners’, British Music of our Time, ed. A.L. Bacharach (London, 1946), 157–62

‘Lord Berners: Author, Painter, and Composer’, The Times (19 April 1950)

J. Betjeman: ‘Lord Berners: 1883–1950’, The Listener (11 May 1950)

C. Mason: ‘Lord Berners: a Miniaturist in Music’, The Listener (8 February 1951)

G. Bryars: ‘Berners, Rousseau, Satie’, Studio International, Nov/Dec (1975), 308–18

G. Bryars: ‘Satie and the British’, Contact, no.25 (1982), 4–14

P. Dickinson: ‘Lord Berners, 1883–1950: a British Avant-Gardist at the Time of World War I’, MT, xxiv (1983), 669–72

P. Dickinson: ‘Lord Berners (1883–1950): Composer, Author, Painter and Eccentric’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, cxxxii (1984), 313–24

I. Stravinsky: ‘Lord Berners’, Selected Correspondence, ii, ed. R. Craft (London, 1984), 135–59

D. Mosley: ‘Lord Berners’, Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (London, 1985), 96–131

P. Dickinson: ‘Stein Satie Cummings Thomson Berners Cage: Toward a Context for the Music of Virgil Thomson’, MQ, lxxii (1986), 394–409

M. Amory: Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric (London, 1998)

PETER DICKINSON

Bernet Kempers, Karel Philippus

(b Nijkerk, Gelderland, 20 Sept 1897; d Amsterdam, 30 Sept 1974). Dutch musicologist. After studying law for some years, he took lessons from Bernard Zweers (theory and composition), Simon van Milligen (music history) and Gonda van Dam (piano). In 1922, at a time when musicology was not being taught in the Netherlands, he went to the University of Munich to study with Sandberger and graduated in 1926 with a doctoral dissertation on the motets of Clemens non Papa. He taught music history at the Royal Conservatory at The Hague (1929–49) and at the Amsterdam Conservatory (1934–53). In 1929 he became Privatdozent in musicology at the University of Amsterdam; in 1938 he was appointed lecturer, in 1946 associate professor and in 1953 professor at the same university. He retired in 1968.

Bernet Kempers’s chief interest was the Dutch polyphonic school of the 16th century, in particular Clemens non Papa, whose complete works he edited; he also wrote extensively on Mozart, Schubert and the history of music in general. For many years he was on the boards of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Toonkunstenaars Vereniging (first secretary, 1934–41; chairman, 1945–65) and the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1959–72).

WRITINGS

Jacobus Clemens non Papa und seine Motetten (diss., U. of Munich, 1926; Augsburg, 1928)

De italiaansche opera, haar ontstaan en ontwikkeling van Peri tot Puccini (Amsterdam, 1929)

Muziekgeschiedenis (Rotterdam, 1932, 6/1965)

Muziek in den ban der letteren (Rotterdam, 1936)

Franz Schubert (Amsterdam, 1938)

with G. van der Leeuw: Beknopte geschiedenis van het kerklied (Groningen, 1939, 2/1948)

Meesters der muziek (Rotterdam, 1939, 6/1958)

Jamisatie: voorstel tot een nieuwe nomenclatuur in de muziek (Rotterdam, 1946, 2/1947)

Panorama der muziek: een beknopt overzicht der muziekgeschiedenis (Rotterdam, 1948)

Inleiding tot de opera Halewijn van Willem Pijper (Rotterdam, 1949)

EDITIONS

De liederen uit Valerius’ Nederlandtsche Gedenck-Clanck (Rotterdam, 1941)

Clemens non Papa: Opera omnia, CMM, iv (1951–76) [21 vols.; vol.xxi by C. Maas]

with C. Maas: De Leidse koorboeken Codex A, MMN, ix/1–2 (1970–73)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Reeser: ‘Ter herdenking van Karel Philippus Bernet Kempers’, TVNM, xxiv/2 (1974), 95–6

J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘In memoriam Karel Philippus Bernet Kempers’, Mf, xxviii (1975), 1–2

ELLINOR BIJVOET

Bernger von Horheim [Berengerius de Orehem, Berlengerius de Oreim]

(fl 1196). German Minnesinger. It has been assumed that he came from the Frankfurt region, on the grounds of his use of language, but it is also possible that he was from a north Bavarian family, or otherwise came from Horheim, near Vaihingen. He was one of a group of noblemen from south-west Germany who, as the followers of Friedrich von Hûsen, writing in a more international style than hitherto, brought about the blossoming of Minnesang. These men drew on the work of the northern French trouvères and southern troubadours for content and formal schemes of their poetry. Six songs (17 strophes) by Bernger have survived, all of them stylish and none with music. Of these, two (possibly four) may have used the melodies of his Romance precursors, since they can be recognized as contrafacta of works by, among others, Chrétien de Troyes and Gace Brule.

WORKS

Text edition: Des Minnesangs Frühling, ed. K. Lachmann and M. Haupt (Leipzig, 1857, rev. 38/1988 by H. Moser and H. Tervooren), 224–9 [MF]

Music editions:Singweisen zur Liebeslyrik der deutschen Frühe, ed. U. Aarburg (Düsseldorf, 1956) [A]Ausgewählte Melodien des Minnesangs, ed. E. Jammers (Tübingen, 1963) [J]The Art of the Minnesinger, ed. R.J. Taylor, i (Cardiff, 1968) [T]

none of the poems appears with music in any source

Mir ist alle zît also ich vliegende var, MF 113.1: ?contrafactum of ?Robert de Castel or Bertran de Born, ‘Puis ke li mal k’amours me font sentir’, R.1457; A

Nu enbeiz ich doch des trankes nie, MF 112.1: contrafactum of Chrétien de Troyes, ‘Onques del bevrage ne bui’ (from D’Amours qui m’a tolu a moi, R.1664); A, J, T

Nu lange ich mit sange die zît hân gekündet, MF 115.27: contrafactum of ?Gace Brule, ‘Ne puis faillir a bone chançon faire’, R.160; A, J

Wie solt ich armer der swaere getrûwen, MF 114.21; ?contrafactum of Conon de Béthune, ‘Mout me semont amours que je m’envoise’, R.1837; A

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Aarburg: ‘Melodien zum frühen deutschen Minnesang’, Der deutsche Minnesang: Aufsätze zu seiner Erforschung, i, ed. H. Fromm (Darmstadt, 1961), 378–421

G. Schweikle: ‘Bernger von Horheim’, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. K. Ruh and others (Berlin, 2/1977–)

V. Mertens: ‘Intertristanisches: Tristanlieder von Chrétien de Troyes, Bernger von Horheim und Heinrich von Veldeke’, Kulturelle Wandel und die Germanistik in der Bundesrepublik: Augsburg 1991, ed. J. Janota (Tübingen, 1993), iii, 37–55

For further bibliography see Minnesang.

BURKHARD KIPPENBERG/LORENZ WELKER

Bernhard, Christoph

(b Kolberg, Pomerania [now Kołobrzeg, Poland], 1 Jan 1628; d Dresden, 14 Nov 1692). German music theorist, composer and singer. He is best known for his discussion of musical-rhetorical figures in Tractatus compositionis augmentatus.

KERALA J. SNYDER

1. Life.

The birthplace given above is documented in a funeral poem by Bernhard’s brother-in-law C.C. Dedekind and is confirmed by Walther; the birth date appears in Müller-Blattau (2/1963) without documentation. Mattheson states, no doubt erroneously, that Bernhard was born in Danzig in 1612. According to Dedekind, Bernhard studied in Danzig (probably with the elder Kaspar Förster and possibly Paul Siefert) and in Warsaw (very likely with Scacchi); Mattheson’s assertion that Bernhard studied in Danzig with Balthasar Erben must also be in error for Erben did not become Kapellmeister at the Marienkirche until 1658, well after Bernhard was established in Dresden. At some point Bernhard also studied law. He began singing as an alto at the electoral court in Dresden under Schütz probably in 1648 and received a contract with the elector’s ensemble (which also required him to instruct the choirboys in singing every day) on 1 August 1649. Shortly thereafter he travelled with the royal retinue to Gottorf for a wedding. The music was directed by Agostino Fontana, a virtuoso Italian singer serving as Kapellmeister to Christian IV of Denmark; Bernhard remained in Denmark (Copenhagen, according to Dedekind) to study with Fontana for about a year.

On 1 August 1655 Bernhard was promoted to vice-Kapellmeister at Dresden and his salary was increased from 200 to 350 gulden; his new duties included conducting the unison singing of chorales and chant (see Spagnoli). With the accession of the italophile Johann Georg II as Elector of Saxony in 1656, Italian musicians gained greater influence at court. These included G.A. Bontempi, Vincenzo and Bartolomeo Albrici, Gioseppe Peranda and Dominicus Melani. Bernhard made two trips to Italy, supported by Johann Georg II, to gain more first-hand experience of Italian music, musicians and singing technique. One of the trips took place in 1657 (his dedicatory poem for Dedekind’s Aelbianische Musenlust is signed ‘Rome, 1657’) but the date of the other is unknown; according to Dedekind, Bernhard also visited Venice. He married Christina Barbara Weber on 28 October 1659.

Growing tension between the German and Italian musicians was probably the main factor in Bernhard’s decision in 1663 to follow his former colleague Matthias Weckmann to Hamburg. There he succeeded Thomas Selle as Kantor of the Johanneum and civic director of church music in Hamburg. There were six other contestants for the post, and he obtained it by one vote. Weckmann had helped make him known in Hamburg by performing a piece of his own under Bernhard’s name. Bernhard accepted the Hamburg offer on 18 October 1663 and was installed on 9 February 1664. The city fathers greeted his arrival in elegant style and completely remodelled his house, which Bernhard gratefully acknowledged when dedicating his Geistliche Harmonien (1665) to them. As civic music director he conducted figural music for Saturday vespers and Sunday morning services for the four principal churches, rotating among them, with eight to ten paid singers, eight municipal musicians and a chorus from the Johanneum.

The fact that Bernhard was taken into membership of the brotherhood Englandfahrer shortly after his arrival in Hamburg indicates the esteem in which he was held. Visits from Johann Rist (in 1666) and the younger Kaspar Förster (in 1667) provided occasions for chamber music at Bernhard’s house. In 1670 Schütz requested him to compose a motet for his funeral to the text Cantabiles mihi erant justificationes tuae, which, to Schütz’s great approval, he set for five voices in the stylus gravis (see §3 below). It was performed at Schütz’s funeral in 1672 but was subsequently lost. Bernhard must also have participated in the weekly concerts of the collegium musicum founded by Weckmann in 1660. In addition to performing the most up-to-date works from Venice, Rome, Vienna, Munich and Dresden, they joined with Reincken, Buxtehude and Theile in cultivating learned counterpoint as an esoteric art; Bernhard’s Prudentia prudentiana, in four-part invertible counterpoint, was imitated by Buxtehude two years later (buxwv76/1). The years of Bernhard and Weckmann’s joint activity formed one of the highpoints of 17th-century musical life in Hamburg.

Just before Weckmann’s death (on 24 February 1674) Johann Georg II called Bernhard back to Dresden to supervise the education of his two grandsons, and he was installed on 31 March 1674 with instructions to teach them religion, reading and writing. He also resumed his post as vice-Kapellmeister. In 1676 he supervised a new edition of the Dresden hymnal, combining the Lutheran chorales with Schütz’s settings of the Becker Psalter. Johann Georg III, who became elector in 1680, soon decided to reduce his musical establishment in order to cut costs. All the Italians either left or were dismissed, and from 24 August 1681 Bernhard was the sole Kapellmeister, as well as inspector of the music library; he held both positions until his death. With the accession of Johann Georg IV in 1691 he was serving his fourth Elector of Saxony.

2. Music.

Bernhard’s compositions consist almost entirely of sacred vocal music. His only published collection, Geistliche Harmonien, appeared in 1665 in Dresden; it was probably composed there. At this time most of the better Protestant church music was disseminated in manuscript, and this volume is exceptional among contemporary printed works for its quality, scope and virtuoso demands. It contains 20 sacred concertos for one to four solo voices and continuo, often with two violins. All the texts are German, and most of them are biblical. Two dialogues include extensive additions to the basic biblical text. In one of them, Euch ist’s gegeben, the interpolations are poetic and are set in a simple aria style; the work is a very early example of a German concerto-aria cantata. Vincenzo Albrici had introduced Latin works of this type to the Dresden court repertory in 1660 (see Frandsen, 1996). Otherwise, the style of the collection is clearly derived from Schütz’s Kleine geistliche Concerte and Symphoniae sacrae, especially in the careful text-setting. Bernhard’s concertos provide numerous examples of the musical-rhetorical figures that he described in his treatises.

Bernhard’s other sacred vocal works are of equally high quality. Composed in a variety of styles, they include masses and motets in the stylus gravis, many small and large sacred concertos and a few concerto-aria cantatas (e.g. Ich sahe an alles thun, composed in 1669 for a funeral). Most of the manuscript works survive in the collection of Gustaf Düben (i) and were copied in Stockholm during Bernhard’s Hamburg period (1664–74). None of Bernhard’s extant works can definitely be ascribed to his second Dresden period; the lost works listed in inventories from Leipzig, Weissenfels and Ansbach may date from this time, however (see Fiebig). The madrigal Lasst uns, o Schönste, lieben is the only secular work ascribed to Bernhard that can be regarded as authentic. The 14 songs by ‘C.B.’ in Caspar von Stieler’s Die geharnschte Venus (Hamburg, 1660) have been attributed to Bernhard even though the collection was published three years before his arrival in Hamburg. Although perhaps the best in the collection, they do not approach the quality of his sacred music; they could also be by Crato Bütner of Danzig or Christoph Bronner, a Hamburg organist. Bernhard is named as the author of two songs in Dedekind’s Aelbianische Musenlust, but in a manner that suggests that he wrote only the texts; he was also known as a poet.

3. Writings.

Although Bernhard was one of the better German composers of his generation, he is now remembered chiefly for his musical treatises, all of them disseminated in manuscript copies that circulated widely. The most important is Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, which must be dated some time after Bernhard’s trip to Rome in 1657, since he refers in it to many Roman composers. Its significance lies in his classification of music into three distinct styles according to the relationship of words and music, the typical place of performance and, above all, the types of dissonance used. His basic division between stylus gravis (stylus antiquus) and stylus luxurians (stylus modernus) goes back to Monteverdi’s prima and seconda pratica, and his further division of stylus luxurians into communis and theatralis bears some resemblance to Marco Scacchi’s three categories of church, chamber and theatrical music. But whereas Scacchi’s basic distinctions are sociological, Bernhard’s are strictly stylistic; his three categories are distinguished chiefly by their use of figures, according to his limited definition of a figure as ‘a certain way of employing dissonances, which renders these not only inoffensive but rather quite agreeable’.

In stylus gravis, which is used in church, music is the master of language; Palestrina is its main exponent. It uses only four figures – in modern terminology the passing note, auxiliary note, suspension and prepared appoggiatura. Stylus luxurians communis is found ‘in vocal works – both church and table music – as well as in instrumental pieces’, and here words and music are both masters. Bernhard added 15 figures, including most of the dissonances associated with 17th-century style. He named Monteverdi as the founder of this style and added several of his Italian successors, including Carissimi, Scacchi and his own colleagues in Dresden, Albrici, Bontempi and Peranda. He named only three Germans, Schütz, Kerll and the younger Förster. Stylus luxurians theatralis is used mostly in theatrical productions; the leading exponents of it are contemporary Roman musicians, and no Germans are listed. Here language is the absolute master of music, and Bernhard’s discussion includes suggestions for word-painting and other non-dissonant rhetorical devices as well as the addition of seven more figures.

Bernhard’s Tractatus also contains a discussion of the 12 modes (listed in the order of Zarlino’s 1573 edition of Le istitutioni harmoniche, beginning with the C modes), of fuga (as a generic term for all imitative counterpoint, including canon) and of invertible counterpoint (in an appendix, Von denen doppelten Contrapuncten, which also circulated independently). With his concepts of consociatio modorum and aequatio modi, Bernhard offered the composer a method of working with both tonal and real answers in points of imitation. Bernhard was perhaps the first theorist to consider four-part invertible counterpoint.

Bernhard wrote at least two other treatises. The Ausführlicher Bericht vom Gebrauche der Con- und Dissonantien appears to be a later abridgment of the main part of the Tractatus, combining the figures of the second and third styles into one group, figures superficiales, and omitting the discussion of modes, fuga and invertible counterpoint. A short treatise on vocal ornamentation, Von der Singe-Kunst, oder Maniera, probably originated earlier, reflecting Bernhard’s teaching of the choirboys during his first years in Dresden and derived in turn from his study with Agostino Fontana in Denmark. These shorter works confirm that Bernhard’s figures originated in Italian improvisatory practice and that they were justified for the composer as extensions and variations of the dissonance treatment permitted in the stylus gravis. This explicit combination of Italian vocal art with the German predilection for counterpoint was indeed a legacy from Schütz, and it was to recur often in German music.

WORKS

Edition: M. Weckmann und C. Bernhard: Solocantaten und Chorwerke mit Instrumentalbegleitung, ed. M. Seiffert, DDT, vi (1901/R) [S]Geistliche Konzerte und andere Werke Christoph Bernhards, ed. O. Drechsler, EDM, 1st ser., xc (1982) [D]

sacred

German

Geistlicher Harmonien erster Theil, begreiffende zwanzig deutsche Concerten, 1–4vv, 2 vn, bc (Dresden, 1665); ed. in EDM, 1st ser., lxv (1972)

Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, 3vv, bc, D; Fürchtet euch nicht, 1v, 2 vn, bn, bc, S-Uu, ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1933); Herr, nun lässest du deinen Diener, 5vv, 5 insts, bc, S; Wahrlich, wahrlich ich sage euch, 1v, capella 4vv, 5 insts, bc, S; Wohl dem der den Herren fürchtet, 2vv, 4 va, bc, S

Latin

Missa a 5, 5vv, 6 insts, D; Missa ‘Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam’, 5vv, ed. in Cw, xvi (1932/R); Missa ‘Durch Adams Fall’, 5vv, ed. in Cw, cvii (1969)

Anima sterilis quid agis quid torpes, 2vv, 2 vn, bc, D; Benedic, anima mea, 9vv, 11 insts, bc, D; Currite pastores in Bethlehem, 1v, 2 vn, bc, D; Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris, 5vv, 6 insts, bc, D; Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, 3vv, bc, D; Jubilate Deo omnis terra, 3vv, bc, D; O anima mea accipe pennas aurorae, 6vv, 8 insts, bc, D; Reminiscere miseratiorum tuarum, Domine, 3vv, bc, D; Salve mi, Jesu, 1v, bc, D; Surgit Christus cum trophaeo, 3vv, capella 4vv, 6 insts, bc, D; Surrexit Christus spes mea, 6vv, 5 insts, bc, D; Tribularer si nescirem, 10vv, 10 insts, bc, S

occasional

Lezter Schwanen-Gesang (Gott sei mir gnädig), so bei christlicher Beerdigung des … Johann Risten, 4vv, 2 vn, 3 va, bc (Hamburg, 1667)

Trauer-Music (Zur selbigen Zeit), bey hochansehentlicher Beerdigung des … Herrn Barthold Müllers Bürgermeisters der Stadt Hamburg, 5vv, bc (Hamburg, 1667); ed. in Cw, cvii (1969); ed. in EDM, 1st ser., lxxix (1975)

Letzter Ehren-Nachklang (Ich sahe an alles Thun) dem … Herrn Hinrich Langebeck, 4vv, 2 vn, 3 va, bc (Hamburg, 1669); S

Prudentia prudentiana (Jam mesta quiesce querela) … solatio tribus contrapunctis convertibilibus (Hamburg, 1669) [funeral music for the mother and wife of Dr Rudolf Capelli]; D

Cantabiles mihi erant justificationes tuae, 5vv, perf. Dresden, 17 Nov 1672, lost funeral music for H. Schütz

secular

Lasst uns, o Schönste, lieben, 3vv, 2 vn, bc, S-Uu

14 Songs, 1v, bc, in C. von Stieler, Die geharnschte Venus (Hamburg, 1600/R), doubtful, attrib. ‘C.B.’; ed. B. Billeter (Munich, 1968)

For lost works, see Fiebig

WRITINGS

ed. in Müller-Blattau; Eng. trans. in Hilse

Von der Singe-Kunst, oder Maniera, c1649

Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, c1657

Ausführlicher Bericht vom Gebrauche der Con- und Dissonantien [? abridgment of Tractatus]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FürstenauG

MatthesonGEP

WaltherML

C.C. Dedekind: Aelbianische Musen-Lust (Dresden, (1657/R)

C.C. Dedekind: Schwägerliche Ehren-kranz dem … Herrn Christophoro Bernhard (Dresden, 1692) [facs. in Fiebig]

J.M. Müller-Blattau, ed.: Die Kompositionslehre Heinrich Schützens in der Fassung seines Schülers Christoph Bernhard (Leipzig, 1926, 2/1963)

H. Rauschning: Geschichte der Musik und Musikpflege in Danzig (Danzig, 1931)

L. Krüger: Die hamburgische Musikorganisation im XVII. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1933, 2/1981)

E. Schmidt: Der Gottesdienst am Kurfürstlichen Hofe zu Dresden (Göttingen, 1961)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Christoph Bernhard und die Theorie der modalen Imitation’, AMw, xxi (1964), 45–59

B. Grusnick: ‘Die Dübensammlung: ein Versuch ihrer chronologischen Ordnung’, STMf, xlvi (1964), 27–82; xlviii (1966), 63–186

C.V. Palisca: ‘Marco Scacchi’s Defense of Modern Music (1649)’, Words and Music: the Scholar’s View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 189–235; repr. in C. Palisca: Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (New York, 1994), 88–145

W. Hilse, ed. and trans.: ‘The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard’, Music Forum, iii (1973), 1–196

F. Fiebig: Christoph Bernhard und die Stile Moderno: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk (Hamburg, 1980)

K.J. Snyder: ‘Dietrich Buxtehude's Studies in Learned Counterpoint’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 544–64

H. Federhofer: ‘Christoph Bernhards Figurenlehre und die Dissonanz’, Mf, xxxii (1989), 110–27

G. Spagnoli: Letters and Documents of Heinrich Schütz, 1656–1672: an Annotated Translation (Ann Arbor, 1990)

W. Braun: Deutsche Musiktheorie des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts: zweiter Teil, von Calvisius bis Mattheson (Darmstadt, 1994)

J. Butt: Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (Cambridge, 1994)

D.G. Yearsley: Ideologies of Learned Counterpoint in the Northern German Baroque (diss., Stanford U., 1995)

M. Frandsen: The Sacred Concerto in Dresden, ca. 1660–1680 (diss., U. of Rochester, NY, 1996)

G. Webber: North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford, 1996)

D. Bartel: Musica poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln, NE, 1997)

G. Jaacks: Hamburg zu Lust und Nutz: bürgerliches Musikverständnis zwischen Barock und Aufklärung (1660–1760) (Hamburg, 1997)

P.M. Walker: Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (Rochester, NY, 1999)

M. Frandsen: ‘Allies in the Cause of Italian Music: Schütz, the Prince, and Musical Politics in Dresden’, JRMA, cxxv (2000), 1–40

Bernier, Nicolas

(b Mantes-la-Jolie, 5/6 June 1665; d Paris, 6 July 1734). French composer, harpsichordist, theorist and teacher. He probably learnt music in the maîtrise of the collegiate church of Notre Dame, Mantes, and in that of Evreux Cathedral. According to the Etat actuel de la Musique du Roi (1773) he then studied with Caldara in Rome. In 1692 Bernier was living in the rue Tiquetonne in Paris and was teaching the harpsichord. On 20 November 1693 he failed to win the post of maître de musique at Rouen Cathedral in competition with Jean-François Lalouette. He was appointed head of the maîtrise of Chartres Cathedral on 17 September 1694 and remained there until 18 March 1698, when he obtained a similar position at St Germain-l'Auxerrois, Paris. A Te Deum performed before the king at Fontainebleau on 24 October 1700 was very successful, and was sung again in several Parisian churches in 1701 and 1704. On 5 April 1704 he succeeded Marc-Antoine Charpentier as maître de musique of the Sainte-Chapelle, resigning from this post on 18 September 1726 in favour of his friend François de La Croix. It had taken the patronage of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, for him to keep the position after his marriage to Marie-Catherine Marais on 20 June 1712, since the rule of the Sainte-Chapelle required its maître de musique to be ‘a celibate in clerical garb’. In spite of Le Cerf de La Viéville's claim, Bernier was not an abbé, but only an acolyte entitled to wear the clerical collar. In 1715 he took part in the divertissements organized by the Duchess of Maine at her château of Sceaux. In January 1723, at the request of the regent, Michel-Richard de Lalande gave up three of his four trimestrial periods of duty as sous-maître de musique at the Chapelle Royale. The posts thus created were allotted, without being thrown open to competition, to André Campra, Charles-Hubert Gervais and Bernier, who officiated during the summer term of duty until his death. In 1726 Lalande's term became vacant when he died, and was shared between the remaining sous-maîtres, with Bernier taking charge of the education of the Chapelle pages until 1733. He was in fact famous as a teacher. He wrote a treatise entitled Principes de composition and numbered Louis-Claude Daquin among his pupils.

Bernier offered a personal solution to the union of French and Italian tastes. He achieved equilibrium between the two styles in his first book of French cantatas, a genre of which he was one of the first creators together with Jean-Baptiste Morin. Vigorous recitatives and da capo airs, with or without an initial motto, follow each other freely, while the expressive melody, with few wide intervals or long melismas, is rooted more in the French tradition. Les nuits de Sceaux contains Bernier's only instrumental pieces: dances and two overtures which adopt the Lullian structure but are italianate in style. The 45 petits motets, the 36 grands motets and the 39 cantatas exhibit a stylistic feature peculiar to Bernier: the often systematic repetition of a motif, whether or not it is transposed. Bernier had a reputation as a contrapuntist, and the polished writing of fugal choruses in Beatus vir and Confitebor tibi Domine bear witness to his skill. Two of his grands motets were sung several times at the Concert Spirituel from 1725 onwards. Most of his Principes de composition is devoted to two-part counterpoint; the work resembles the treatises of Nivers and Masson.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

sacred vocal

[26] Motets, 1–3vv, bc, some with insts, op.1 (1703); 16 for 1v, 7 for 2vv, 3 for 3vv

[15] Motets, 1–3vv, bc, some with insts, op.2 (1713); 11 for 1v, 3 for 2vv, 1 for 3vv

3 motets, 1v, and 1 motet, 3vv, in Motets … par Mr. de la Croix, 1–3vv, bc, some with insts, op.1 (1741)

Grands motets, all SATBB, str: Beatus vir, F-Pc; Benedic anima mea, Pc; Cantate Domino, LYm; Confitebor tibi Domine, Pc; Cum invocarem, LYm; Deus noster refugium, Pc; Lauda anima mea Dominum, Pc; Lauda Jerusalem, Pc; Laudate Dominum quoniam, Pc; Miserere mei, Pc; Venite exultemus, Pc

[9] Leçons de Ténèbres, S, bc, LYm, V

Mass; Te Deum: both lost

Chants des offices de différents Saints nouveaus, cited in Privilège Général, 3 March 1724, lost

Motets attrib. Bernier, all doubtful authenticity: Quis habitat, Resonate, Salve regina, Sicut cervus, all Pn; Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, LYm

secular vocal

[24] Cantates françoises ou musique de chambre, 1–2vv, bc, some with insts, bk 1–4 (1703); repr, in The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata, vi–vii (New York, 1990); 21 for 1v, 3 for 2vv

Les nymphes de Diane, cantate françoise, 2vv, bc (1703); repr. in The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata, vi (New York, 1990)

Les nuits de Sceaux, concerts de chambre, ou cantates françoises, solo vv, bc, insts, bk 5 (1715); repr. in The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata, viii (New York, 1990); 2 divertissements

[6] Cantates françoises, ou musique de chambre, 1v, bc, some with insts, bk 6 (1718); repr. in The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata, viii (New York, 1990)

[6] Cantates françoises, ou musique de chambre, 1v, bc, some with insts, bk 7 (1723); repr. in The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata, viii (New York, 1990)

1 air in Recueil d'airs sérieux et à boire (1706); several airs in Nouvelles poésies, bk 1–8 (1703–7); 1 air in Nouveau recueil de chansons choisies, bk 7 (1736)

Works in Pc attrib. Bernier, all doubtful authenticity: Polyphème, cantata, B, insts [2 copies, 1 without insts]; 3 duos and 1 air in Recueil d'airs choisies

WRITINGS

Principes de composition de Mr Bernier (MS, F-Pn, n.d.); Eng. trans. in P.F. Nelson, Nicolas Bernier: Principles of Composition (Brooklyn, NY, 1964)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Dufourcq and M. Benoit: ‘A propos de Nicolas Bernier (1665–1734)’, RdM, xxxix (1957), 78–91

P.F. Nelson: Nicolas Bernier (1665–1734): a Study of the Composer and his Sacred Works (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1958)

P.F. Nelson: ‘Nicolas Bernier: a Résumé of his Works’, RMFC, i (1960), 93–8

P.F. Nelson: ‘Principes de composition de Mr Bernier’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 95–8

P.F. Nelson: ‘Nicolas Bernier (1665–1734): a Bibliographic Study’, Studies in Musicology, ed. J.W. Pruett (Chapel Hill, 1969), 109–17

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)

P.F. Nelson: ‘Nicolas Bernier’, RMFC, xviii (1978), 51–87; xix (1979), 51–101

J.A. Kotylo: A Historical and Stylistic Study of the Petit Motet 1700–1730 (diss., U. of Colorado, 1979)

M.J. Voloshin: The Secular Cantatas of Nicolas Bernier (diss., U. of Kentucky, 1984)

J.P. Montagnier: ‘Attributing Early Music: the Case of Nicolas Bernier’, Recercare, iv (1992), 81–104

J.P. Montagnier: ‘De l'air da capo à un embryon français de “forme sonate”: les cas du Confitebor tibi et du Beatus vir de Nicolas Bernier’, RdM, lxxix (1993), 308–18

JEAN-PAUL MONTAGNIER

Bernier, René

(b Saint-Gilles, Brussels, 10 March 1905; d Ixelles, Brussels, 8 Sept 1984). Belgian composer. His musical development was dominated by Gilson and he was a member of the group of Synthétistes formed by Gilson's disciples. His interests extended to composition and musicology. A professor of music history at the Mons Conservatory and inspector of music in secondary education (1945–70), he was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1963.

Bernier belonged to the tradition of Fauré, Ravel and Roussel. His Sinfonietta for strings (1957) is excellently written and stylistically refined; many of his other orchestral works are elegiac evocations of literary inspiration, such as Le tombeau devant l'Escaut. It is in vocal music, however, that Bernier excelled: his limpid melodies with their very regular contours have a charming naturalness. In his works for a cappella chorus he was influenced by the 16th-century French chanson. His harmony is essentially tonal, with modal suggestions, and his deeply lyrical and discreetly refined music creates an atmosphere of gentle melancholy.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch works incl. Ode à une madone, 1938; Epitaphe symphonique, 1945; Le tombeau devant l'Escaut, 1952; Sinfonietta, str, 1957; Tanagras (ballet), 1968–9; Danses parodiques, 1970; Ménestrandie, vn, orch, 1970; Hommage à Sax, wind, 1974

Inst pieces incl. Sonate à 2, fl, hp, 1939; Trio, fl, hp, vc, 1942; 3 Interludes, hp, 1944; Serinette en guise de bis, sax qt, 1971; Suite pour le plaisir de l'oreille, sax qt, 1973; 2 qnts, fl, str trio, hp; pf pieces

Songs incl. 3 quatrains pour ma mie, 1927; Evasions, 1942; Eclosions, 1942–4; Dévotions, 1944–51; Lettre d'un ami, 1959

Choral pieces incl. Sortilèges ingénus, female/children's chorus, pf/orch, 1939–42; Liturgies, chorus, 1941–2; Incantations, chorus, 1954–6; Ode française, chorus, org, orch, 1968

Principal publishers: Cranz, CeBeDeM, Salabert, Leduc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

R. Wangermée: La musique belge contemporaine (Brussels, 1959)

A. Peeters: ‘Entretien avec René Bernier’, Cahiers Albert Roussel, i (1978), 19–26

J. Leduc: ‘Notice sur René Bernier’, Annuaire de l'Académie royale de Belgique, clii (1986), 197–219

HENRI VANHULST

Bernoneau [Bernnoneau], Hilaire [Hilarius]

(fl 1510–20). French singer and maître de chapelle, probably to be identified with the composer Hylaire.

Berno of Reichenau [Berno Augiensis; Bernardus]

(d Reichenau, 7 June 1048). Writer on church music and liturgy, and possibly a composer. He is generally believed to have been of ‘German’ birth from a family of some standing, and was named abbot of Reichenau by Emperor Henry II in 1008. Before this he had been at the monastery of Prüm for an undetermined length of time. The belief that he was a novice at either St Gallen or Fleury is now rejected (see Oesch). Before his appointment, the abbey had fallen on evil days. Berno restored peace and discipline to it, although he himself became embroiled in squabbles over property and prerogatives, especially after Emperor Conrad came to power (1024–39).

He travelled to Rome in 1014 for Henry's coronation and used the occasion to collect materials for his monograph on the Mass, De quibusdam rebus ad misse officium pertinentibus. Eight years later he went to Italy again in the company of the emperor, visiting Monte Cassino briefly. Finally, he was present in Rome in 1027 at the coronation of Conrad. He appears to have felt special concern for the cultivation of scholarship at his abbey, and one of his pupils was the versatile and erudite Hermannus Contractus. Berno continued as abbot of Reichenau until his death.

His chief work on music is a tonary with extensive prologue (GerbertS, ii, 62–91) which, to judge from extant copies, was quite widely distributed in Germanic lands during the 11th and 12th centuries. The text of the prologue presents substantial difficulties since some manuscripts have extensive later interpolations by Berno himself in addition to the many borrowings from earlier writers such as Hucbald, Regino of Prüm, Gerbert, Anonymus 1 and pseudo-Bernelinus. Two topics of considerable interest touched on by Berno are transposition and the so-called middle modes (‘toni medii’). The tonary proper is perhaps a compilation from earlier sources, and exemplifies conservatism in musical and liturgical matters, showing in particular no influence of the modern theory of Guido of Arezzo. It appears to be the prototype for the tonary of Frutolfus of Michelsberg. Another work with the title De varia psalmorum atque cantuum modulatione (GerbertS, ii, 91–114) is thought to be inauthentic, at least in the version published by Gerbert; Oesch even raised doubts as to Berno's authorship. It does not, in any event, concern melody or music, but rather discrepancies between the texts of the ‘Gallican’ and ‘Roman’ psalters.

The brief De consona tonorum diversitate (GerbertS, ii, 114–17), an abridged tonary with a short preface of the most elementary sort, seems to have been written for teaching at Reichenau. The unique manuscript source CH-SGs 898 is devoted exclusively to the works of Berno, and is also the only old source containing his musical works, namely three hymns, an Epiphany trope, three sequences and an Office for St Ulrich. Another office is known for St Meinrad. None of the melodies has been published. Smits van Waesberghe has argued that the treatise published by Gerbert as Anonymus 1 is also by Berno on the basis of its attribution in the sole surviving manuscript source A-Wn cpv 51; he has re-edited the work under its title De mensurando monochordo. Certain other works on music have been attributed to Berno, but with little or no authority (see Oesch, 48–9).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Manitius: Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich, 1911–31/R), ii, 61–71

H. Oesch: Berno und Hermann von Reichenau als Musiktheoretiker (Berne, 1961)

F.-J. Schmale: Die Briefe des Abtes Bern von Reichenau (Stuttgart, 1961)

J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed.: Bernonis augiensis abbatis de Arte musica disputationes traditae (Buren, 1978–9) [edn with commentary of De mensurando monochordo]

D. Pesce: The Affinities and Medieval Transposition (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 14–18

LAWRENCE GUSHEE/DOLORES PESCE

Bernoulli, Daniel

(b Groningen, 8 Feb 1700; d Basle, 17 March 1782). Swiss physicist. He was the second son of Johann Bernoulli, the leading mathematician of his age, and nephew of Jakob Bernoulli, one of the greatest of all mathematicians. He was at first inclined towards mathematics, but turned more and more to experiment suggested or supported by mathematical theory. After taking the doctorate in medicine at the age of 21, he went to Venice to continue his studies but instead published noteworthy mathematical papers and was invited to the Academy of St Petersburg in 1725. In that year he won the Grand Prix of the Paris Académie for the first of ten times. He returned to Basle in 1733, where he held chairs in anatomy, botany and physics. His most famous work is Hydrodynamica (1733), but he made lasting contributions to several branches of mathematics, physics and medicine; most of his writings appeared in the proceedings of the academies of science at Berlin, Paris and St Petersburg.

Bernoulli was responsible for the idea that a body may execute free sinusoidal vibrations at only one of a series of definite (‘normal mode’) frequencies, to each of which corresponds exactly one proportional family (‘normal mode’) of shapes, and that, the higher the frequency, the greater the number of quiet points or regions (‘nodes’). Moreover, he was the first to calculate from theory the normal modes appropriate to the monochord, the flute, the chime and the conical horn. He claimed that any small vibrations may be regarded as a superposition of normal modes, each with its own suitably selected amplitude. Although his mathematical tools enabled him to illustrate his ideas only in rather simple cases, those provided telling examples. Mathematicians of the 19th century developed Bernoulli's ideas extensively by Fourier analysis or ‘harmonic analysis’. Bernoulli's concepts, as so substantiated, refined and extended, provide the general picture of sonic vibration that now underlies theoretical and experimental acoustics.

Bernoulli is probably best known for his work on fluid flow, particularly the relationship between velocity and pressure in the flow of air or other fluid. The so-called ‘Bernoulli effect’ states that an increase in flow velocity must be accompanied by a corresponding loss of pressure and vice versa. This phenomenon is crucial to an understanding of lip and mechanical reed vibrations and also the vibrations of the vocal folds in voice production.

See also Physics of music, §3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Straub: ‘Bernoulli, Daniel’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C. Gillispie (New York, 1970–80)

CLIVE GREATED

Bernstein, Elmer

(b New York, 4 April 1922). American composer and conductor. He was trained as a pianist but also studied composition with Citkowitz, Sessions, Ivan Langstroth and Wolpe. He attended New York University, then enlisted in the Army Air Corps (1942); he arranged and composed music for some 80 programmes for the Armed Forces Radio Service and was a concert pianist for three years after his discharge. Norman Corwin then engaged him to score radio drama, which led to composition for films; Bernstein's third film, Sudden Fear (1952), attracted favourable attention. In 1955, despite suffering career difficulties due to McCarthyism (see Marmorstein), he rose to sudden prominence with his score for The Man with the Golden Arm. In this, as in several scores that followed (e.g. Walk on the Wild Side, 1962), he effectively blended jazz into a modern symphonic idiom to suit gritty stories and contemporary settings. He subsequently became known for his rousing scores for westerns and action films (notably The Magnificent Seven, 1960, and The Great Escape, 1963), and in the 1970s and 80s he showed a flair both for youth-market comedies such as National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and for intimate adult dramas, including several Irish films.

Throughout a career of some 130 scores, Bernstein has crafted memorable themes, such as that for To Kill a Mockingbird (1963), and shown a fondness for thematic metamorphosis, lively rhythmic ostinatos and clean-cut, economical instrumental textures. In recent years, he has again blended jazz into his scores for period pieces such as Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and since the 1980s has made a point of using the ondes martenot. He also led efforts to secure screen composers' incomes and copyrights and has promoted the appreciation of film music through his writing. He founded the Film Music Collection (1974–8), which published FilmMusic Notebook and released recordings, mostly by other eminent film composers and conducted by Bernstein.

WORKS

(selective list)

film scores

director in parentheses

Saturday's Hero (D. Miller), 1951; Sudden Fear (Miller), 1952; The View from Pompey's Head (P. Dunne), 1955; The Man with the Golden Arm (O. Preminger), 1955; The Ten Commandments (C.B. de Mille), 1956; Fear Strikes Out (R. Mulligan), 1957; Sweet Smell of Success (A. Mackendrick), 1957; Kings Go Forth (D. Daves), 1958; Desire under the Elms (D. Mann), 1958; God's Little Acre (Mann), 1958; Some Came Running (V. Minnelli), 1958; The Story on Page One (C. Odets), 1959; From the Terrace (M. Robson), 1960; The Magnificent Seven (J. Sturges), 1960; Summer and Smoke (P. Glenville), 1961; Birdman of Alcatraz (J. Frankenheimer), 1962; Walk on the Wild Side (E. Dmytryk), 1962

To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan), 1963; The Great Escape (Sturges), 1963; Love with the Proper Stranger (Mulligan), 1963; Baby the Rain Must Fall (Mulligan), 1964; The World of Henry Orient (G.R. Hill), 1964; The Hallelujah Trail (Sturges), 1965; The Sons of Katie Elder (H. Hathaway), 1965; Return of the Seven (B. Kennedy), 1966; Hawaii (Hill), 1966; Thoroughly Modern Millie (Hill), 1967; True Grit (Hathaway), 1969; The Bridge at Remagen (J. Guillermin), 1969; The Liberation of L. B. Jones (W. Wyler), 1970; Big Jake (G. Sherman), 1971; See No Evil (R. Fleischer), 1971; The Trial of Billy Jack (F. Laughlin), 1974

The Shootist (D. Siegel), 1976; From Noon Till Three (F.D. Gilroy), 1976; Slap Shot (Hill), 1977; National Lampoon's Animal House (J. Landis), 1978; The Great Santini (L.J. Carlino), 1979; Airplane! (J. Abrahams, D. and J. Zucker), 1980; Stripes (I. Reitman), 1981; Heavy Metal (G. Potterton), 1981; An American Werewolf in London (Landis), 1981; The Chosen (J.P. Kagan), 1982; Trading Places (Landis), 1983; Ghostbusters (Reitman), 1984; The Black Cauldron (T. Berman), 1985; Spies Like Us (Landis), 1985; Da (M. Clark), 1988; My Left Foot (J. Sheridan), 1989

The Grifters (S. Frears), 1990; The Field (Sheridan), 1990; Rambling Rose (M. Coolidge), 1991; A Rage in Harlem (B. Duke), 1991; Cape Fear (M. Scorsese), 1991 [arr. of music by B. Herrmann]; The Babe (A. Hiller), 1992; Mad Dog and Glory (J. McNaughton), 1993; The Age of Innocence (Scorsese), 1993; Devil in a Blue Dress (C. Franklin), 1995; Frankie Starlight (M. Lindsay Hogg), 1995; Hoodlum (Duke), 1997; John Grisham's ‘The Rainmaker’ (F. Coppola), 1997; Twilight (R. Benton), 1998; Wild Wild West (B. Sonnenfeld), 1999; Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese), 1999

Scores for documentary films, short subjects, television films and shows

other works

How Now, Dow Jones (musical, C. Leigh; M. Shulman), New York, 7 Dec 1967; Conc., gui, orch, 1999; 3 suites, orch; 2 song cycles; works for pf, va and pf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Thomas: Music for the Movies (South Brunswick, NJ, and New York, 1973), 185–94

I. Bazelon: Interview, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York, 1975), 170–80

E. Bernstein : ‘Film composers vs. the Studios’, Film Music Notebook, ii/1 (1976), 31–9

T. Thomas: ‘Elmer Bernstein’, Film Score: the View from the Podium (South Brunswick, NJ, and New York, 1979, rev. 2/1991 as Film Score: the Art and Craft of Movie Music), 238–49

J. Macmillan: ‘A Filmography/Discography of Elmer Bernstein’, Soundtrack! (Mechelen, Belgium), xiv/54 (1995), 23–41

G. Marmorstein: Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and its Makers (New York, 1997), 136–41

CHRISTOPHER PALMER/CLIFFORD McCARTY/MARTIN MARKS

Bernstein, Lawrence F.

(b New York, 25 March 1939). American musicologist. He graduated from Hofstra University with the BS in 1960. At New York University he studied with LaRue, Martin Bernstein and with Reese, who also supervised his dissertation; he received the PhD there in 1969. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1965 to 1970. He then joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chairman of the music department (1974–7) and professor from 1981. He was named Karen and Gary Rose Term Professor of Music in 1996, and he has been visiting professor at Rutgers University (1982–3) and New York University (1992). He was also editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (1975–7), a member of the editorial board of the new Josquin Des Prez collected edition (1982–95) and has been general editor of the series Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance (from 1970) and American Musicological Society Monographs (from 1990).

Bernstein’s research has focussed on the music of the Renaissance, particularly 16th-century French chansons and the music of Ockeghem. His chanson research has centred on the uses of pre-existing material, including cantus-firmus and parody techniques; his dissertation traces the applications of these techniques in two- and three-voice works of the first half of the century and shows how treatment of borrowed material changed as the century progressed.

WRITINGS

‘Claude Gervaise as Chanson Composer’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 359–81

‘The Cantus-Firmus Chansons of Tylman Susato’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 197–240

Cantus Firmus in the French Chanson for Two and Three Voices, 1500–1550 (diss., New York U., 1969)

‘La courone et fleur des chansons a troys: a Mirror of the French Chanson in Italy in the Years between Ottaviano Petrucci and Antonio Gardano’, JAMS, xxvi (1973), 1–68

‘The Bibliography of Music in Conrad Gesner’s Pandectae (1548)’, AcM, xlv (1973), 119–63

‘Mathieu and Valentin Sohier: a New Pair of Renaissance Doppelmeister’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 25–44

‘The “Parisian Chanson”: Problems of Style and Terminology’, JAMS, xxxi (1978), 193–240

‘French Duos in the First Half of the 16th Century’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 43–87

‘Notes on the Origin of the Parisian Chanson’, JM, i (1982), 275–326

‘Chansons Attributed to Both Josquin and Pierre de la Rue and Related Anymous Works: a Problem in Establishing Autenticity’, Josquin Symposium: Utrecht 1986, 125–52

‘A Florentine Chansonnier of the Early Sixteenth Century’, EMH, vi (1986), 1–107

‘Melodic Structure in the Parisian Chanson: a Preliminary Study in the Transmission of a Musical Style’, Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. E.K. Wolf and E.H. Roesner (Madison, WI, 1990), 121–90

‘A Canonic Chanson in a German Manuscript: Faulte d'argent and Josquin's Approach to the Chanson for Five Voices’, Von Isaac bis Bach: Festschrift Martin Just, ed. F. Heidlberger, W. Osthoff and R. Wiesend (Kassel, 1991), 53–71

‘Ma bouche rit en mon cueur pleure: a chanson à 5 Attributed to Josquin des Prez’, JM, xii (1994), 253–86

‘Ockeghem's Ave Maria: Evidence of Structural Cogency’, From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders, ed. A. Clement and E. Jas (Amsterdam, 1994), 75–89

‘Josquin's Chansons as Generic Paradigms’, Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. J.A. Owens and A. Cummings (Warren, MI, 1996), 35–55

EDITIONS

with J. Haar: Jhan Gero: Il primo libro de’ madrigali italiani et canzoni francese a due voci, Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance, i (New York, 1980)

La couronne et fleur des chansons a Troys, Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance, iii (New York, 1984)

PAULA MORGAN

Bernstein, Leonard [Louis]

(b Lawrence, MA, 25 Aug 1918; d New York, 14 Oct 1990). American composerconductor and pianist. He was the most famous and successful native-born figure in the history of classical music in the USA. As a composer, conductor, pianist and pedagogue he bridged the worlds of the concert hall and musical theatre, creating a rich legacy of recordings, compositions, writings and educational institutions.

2. Early works and influences.

3. ‘Facsimile’ to ‘West Side Story’.

4. Composition after 1958.

5. Conducting.

6. Television programmes and writings.

DAVID SCHIFF

1. Life.

His parents, Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick, emigrated from Russia. His father was descended from a line of rabbis and remained a student of the Talmud, but the family managed to rise into the American middle class as a result of success in the supply of beauty products. The first of three children, Bernstein grew up in suburban comfort, but close to his immigrant roots. His family acquired a piano when he was ten, and, despite his father’s objections, he immediately began lessons; his early teachers included Helen Coates, who later became his assistant, and Gebhard. He attended the Boston Latin School, and then went on to Harvard where he studied with Ballantine, Edward Burlingame Hill, A. Tillman Merritt and Piston. During his time at Harvard he composed incidental music for a production of The Birds and directed and performed in a production of Blitzstein’s agitprop opera The Cradle will Rock. His thesis entitled The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music (reprinted in Findings, New York, 1982/R) already demonstrates a broad knowledge of contemporary music and a dedication to creating music with a distinctively American flavour. At Harvard, too, he met Copland, proving his devotion to the older composer by performing the Piano Variations at a birthday party for him. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship – Bernstein performed and recorded almost all of Copland’s works and commissioned Connotations for the opening of Philharmonic Hall in New York in 1962 – while Copland’s style, particularly that of El salón México, for which Bernstein made a piano reduction, forms much of the basis of his music.

After receiving the BA in 1939 Bernstein attended the Curtis Institute where his teachers were Vengerova (piano), Renee Longy (score reading), Thomson (orchestration) and Reiner (conducting). During the summers of 1940 and 1941 he studied conducting with Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, becoming Koussevitzky’s assistant in 1942. In these years he also worked with a group of cabaret entertainers called The Revuers, which included his future collaborators Betty Comden and Adolph Green as well as the comedienne Judy Holliday. In 1943 Rodzinski appointed Bernstein assistant conductor of the New York PO, and on 14 November 1943 he replaced Walter, who was indisposed, at short notice. The dramatic début of a young American conductor on a nationally broadcast concert brought him instant fame. He immediately followed that success with three others. His Symphony no.1 ‘Jeremiah’ was given its première by the Pittsburgh SO in January 1944, and it won the New York Music Critics’ Circle award as the best American work of the year. In April 1944 the ballet Fancy Free, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera House. In December of the same year On the Town, with book and lyrics by Comden and Green, opened on Broadway.

Over the next decade Bernstein pursued a highly diversified career. His conducting included many appearances with the Israel PO and, in 1953, a Medea at La Scala with Callas – the first time an American had conducted there. He composed a series of theatrical works – Facsimile, Peter Pan, Trouble in Tahiti, Wonderful Town, The Lark, Candide, West Side Story; concert hall music (including the Symphony no.2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’, Prelude, Fugue and Riffs and the Serenade); and a film score, for example, On the Waterfront. He also taught as professor of music at Brandeis University (where his chamber opera Trouble in Tahiti had its first performance in 1952) and, on Koussevitzky’s death in 1951, as head of the orchestra and conducting departments at Tanglewood. In the same year he married the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, with whom he had three children, while three years later he made his first appearance on television with ‘Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, as part of the programme Omnibus.

In 1958 Bernstein became music director of the New York PO, the first American-born conductor to hold the position. He introduced thematic programming, and the televised Young People’s Concerts, and at one concert every week he addressed the audience before playing each work; he launched a survey of Mahler’s symphonies, and inaugurated the new Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) at the Lincoln Center. The years at the orchestra made Bernstein internationally famous but were not free of rancour; Harold Schonberg, the chief music critic of the New York Times, regularly vented his contempt for Bernstein's extravagant gestures, for example. As a celebrity, too, Bernstein’s private life came under greater scrutiny: his leftist political sympathies became the object of derision when the writer Tom Wolfe ridiculed a fund-raising party given by the Bernsteins for the Black Panthers as an example of ‘radical chic’.

Bernstein remained musical director of the New York PO until 1969 (he was given the lifetime position of laureate conductor); his international reputation as a conductor soared but his composing became more sporadic and controversial although ever more ambitious, as in the multimedia theatre piece Mass (1971), the failed musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) and the opera A Quiet Place (1983). In 1973 Bernstein gave the Norton Professor of Poetry lectures at Harvard (filmed for TV and published as The Unanswered Question). In them he used a controversial reading of Chomsky’s theory of linguistics to argue, much against the wisdom of the time, for the universal nature of tonality in music. He continued to conduct up until his death, in his latter years forming a close association with the Vienna PO. On the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 he conducted an orchestra drawn from German musicians and those of the former occupying powers in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Bernstein won almost every award the American music world had to offer – only the Pulitzer Prize eluded him. Among his honours were the Kennedy Center Honor for Lifetime of Contributions to American Culture Through the Performing Arts, election to the Academy of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academy’s Gold Medal for Music, the Sonning Prize and the Siemens Prize. He won 11 Emmy Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Besides his influential teaching of young conductors at Tanglewood, Bernstein helped to found the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, helped to create a training orchestra at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.

2. Early works and influences.

Although he had little formal study of composition, with the Symphony no.1 (‘Jeremiah’), Fancy Free and On the Town Bernstein revealed a full mastery of symphonic, ballet and musical theatre idioms, and a distinctive style that would change little for the rest of his life. His abiding influences were Copland and Blitzstein, with secondary echoes of Schuman and Hindemith and occasionally Gershwin – but he created a personal synthesis. Most importantly Bernstein took up the Judaic and jazz elements from 1920s Copland, which Copland had mostly abandoned, bringing the jazz up to date in a manner derived from Woody Herman, and giving the prophetic, cantorial elements of early Copland a less austere, more lyrical treatment; throughout his career Bernstein returned to Jewish subject matter for inspiration.

The ‘Jeremiah’ Symphony, despite its obvious debts to Copland and Schuman, was an astonishing début. Its form, which already points to Bernstein’s interest in Mahler, is an original three-movement structure: a brooding first movement, ‘Prophecy’, based on cantorial chant motifs; a manic scherzo, ‘Profanation’, derived from a chant used for synagogal reading from the prophets, and a concluding ‘Lamentation’, a setting in Hebrew for mezzo-soprano of verses from Jeremiah. The outer movements evoke the anxiety of the Jewish people during the war years, while the second movement, which represents a questioning of belief, gives a traditional liturgical melody the jagged rhythmic development of a Copland hoedown, with a contrasting section that already forecasts the melody of ‘Maria’ from West Side Story.

Fancy Free was written for a Jerome Robbins ballet about three sailors on shore leave in wartime Manhattan. From its very opening, the symphonic treatment of jazz is clearly taken beyond Gershwin and Copland. The changing metres and cross accents look Stravinskian on paper, but, without using jazz structures or improvisation, the aural impression is one of the sounds of the big band era and the nervous energy of jazz. In the Three Dance Episodes Bernstein anticipates later works: a parody polka hints at the style of Candide (and also shows the influence of Shostakovich) while the Coplandesque ‘Danzon’ forecasts the dance at the gym in West Side Story. Oliver Smith, who designed the set for Fancy Free, suggested turning it into a musical. However, the only feature that the ballet has in common with On the Town is the presence of three sailors on leave in New York; the story and the music were new, as were the lyrics by Comden and Green and Robbins’s choreography. Bernstein’s symphonic score and the extended ballet sequences were innovatory and contributed to the originality of the show. For a conductor who spent most of his time interpreting the classics, his lifelong devotion to musical comedy is the defining oddity of his career, even if it made him a fortune; yet he rightly insisted that he was always a theatre composer, born to bring the theatre and the concert hall together. In On the Town, Bernstein seems more comfortable with the extended dance numbers than with simple songs; he moves back and forth between cleverly topical review skits, like the comic ‘I Can Cook, Too’, and more operatic and symphonic passages. Though a success, the show failed to produce a hit song; nevertheless ‘New York, New York’ became the unofficial anthem of Bernstein’s adopted city. Of the often performed Three Dance Episodes, the second is one of the few examples of an overt Gershwin influence; it sounds like an echo of the slow movement of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto.

3. ‘Facsimile’ to ‘West Side Story’.

The works of the immediate postwar years show Bernstein still to be exploring. The ballet Facsimile, one of his few early failures, depicts a complicated psychological triangle; by turns touching and humorous, it demonstrates how his personality could emerge even without constant recourse to jazz colours. By contrast Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, written for Herman, is an American response to Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, while in his Symphony no.2 (‘The Age of Anxiety’), based on Auden’s poem, Bernstein reveals a surprising debt to Hindemith, especially his Theme and Variations ‘The Four Temperaments’ (1940). Like the Hindemith work, which Balanchine choreographed in 1947, ‘The Age of Anxiety’ combines the genre of the piano concerto with theme and variations form, beginning with 14 variations derived from the poem’s account of ‘seven ages and seven stages’. However, the double influence of Hindemith’s classicism and Auden’s neo-Baroque portrait of four people who meet in a New York bar during the war makes for a strained impression. Compared to the ‘Jeremiah’ Symphony, the mood of ‘The Age of Anxiety’ remains unevocative of the text, its rhythms surprisingly Germanic; only the jazzy ‘Masque’ movement, scored for piano, harp, celesta and percussion, exhibits Bernstein’s usual manner.

He continued his Broadway work with songs for a production of Peter Pan (not to be confused with the later Jule Styne, Comden and Green musical) and Wonderful Town, based on the popular book My Sister Eileen by Ruth McKenney, subsequently dramatized by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov. This lively show, built around the talents of Rosalind Russell and his last collaboration with Comden and Green, was the closest Bernstein ever came to a traditional musical entertainment; it won a Tony as best musical of 1952–3. But he had already begun to think in more operatic terms – even if the model was Blitzstein, not Verdi - writing two years earlier Trouble in Tahiti, an exposé of suburban malaise framed by a Greek chorus singing in the style of radio commercials, and reminiscent of the parodies of popular music in Blitzstein’s The Cradle will Rock. Though the music for this updated Zeitoper begins with a satirical edge, its portrayal of the struggles of Sam and Dinah, based on his own parents’ unhappy marriage, quickly turns serious; Dinah’s anthem ‘There is a garden’ is a non-ironic prayer for inner peace, a genre that was to return in many of his later works.

Bernstein’s next two compositions, Candide and West Side Story, are his greatest achievements, though Candide, a cross between Blitzstein and Offenbach, has survived on the wit and brilliance of the music alone, its numerous versions not having solved the flaws in the dramatic structure. West Side Story, equally indebted to Blitzstein in such numbers as ‘Maria’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, reveals, too, how much Bernstein had come under the sway of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘book’ musical, which at the time he described as the true American form of opera. With its stylistic swings between the operatic and jazz, dramatic integration of dance (the show was originally held together by the power of Robbins’s choreography), use of song to reveal character and social consciousness, it is modelled – despite being set dramatically and musically in a gritty Manhattan – on South Pacific. In its mixture of 1930s Bowery Boys clichés, 1940s bebop and Latin jazz, and typical 1950s pop sociology about juvenile delinqency and alienation, it may be as much of a Broadway confection as the contemporary Rodgers and Hammerstein Flower Drum Song. Yet it is that very eclecticism – together with the freshness of Bernstein and Sondheim’s lyrics, and its range of melodic invention, from the intimately romantic ‘One Hand, One Heart’ to the brash, irreverent ‘America’ – that gives West Side Story its enduring strength.

Outside the theatre, Bernstein also achieved a distinctive manner, evident from works such as the Serenade, a violin concerto with an original formal structure based on Plato’s Symposium, and his bleak yet Romantic music for the film On the Waterfront. Of all his works the Serenade departs furthest from popular music, only erupting at the end as a representation of drunken high spirits; it shows what a fine neo-classicist Bernstein might have been. The raucous, urban score for On the Waterfront, on the other hand, had served as a preparation for West Side Story, and it was also to serve as a model for future film scores, especially those in the ‘noir’ mode, set in New York.

4. Composition after 1958.

When Bernstein accepted the leadership of the New York PO in 1958, Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times theatre critic, accused him of ‘capitulating to respectability’, fearing that the orchestra’s gain would be Broadway’s loss, a prediction that turned out to be true, for Bernstein never had a Broadway success after West Side Story. Composing now became a secondary activity, while it was his shorter, less grandiose works, like the Chichester Psalms and Songfest, rather than such extravagantly dramatic compositions as the Symphony no.3 (‘Kaddish’) and Mass, which were best received. The ‘Kaddish’ Symphony, dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy, was conceived as a vehicle for Bernstein’s wife, who had previously narrated Debussy’s Martyr de Saint Sébastien; like the Debussy, it stands somewhere between concert music and musical theatre. Its other sources include Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony, but the text – the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead placed within a melodramatic expression of doubt – restates the spiritual journeys of his previous symphonies. Anticipating the argument of his Norton lectures, Bernstein represented here the struggle between faith and doubt as between atonality and tonality in which the latter finally prevails.

Mass, a multimedia piece of music theatre, not a liturgical work, is an American equivalent to Britten’s War Requiem. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center in Washington and written during the Vietnam War and just after Woodstock, it gave rise to a pastoral warning from the Catholic Archbishop of Cincinnati for its irreverent treatment of religious ritual and for its vulgar language. It is very much a product of its times making use of electronic tapes, amplified guitars and keyboards, rock singers and a chorus of ‘street people’. The text, by Bernstein himself and Stephen Schwartz (who had previously written the rock musical Godspell), combines elements from Marat/Sade, Hair, the Swingle Singers, the Living Theater and Jesus Christ Superstar; the theme of faith, profanation and rebirth is one Bernstein had presented earlier in all three of his symphonies, though never before in such a vernacular idiom. Most typical of its era is the hallucinogenic explosion in which the celebrant desecrates the altar, though the most popular number from the work, ‘A Simple Song’, is a piece of true Bernstein sentiment that might have appeared in Candide or even On the Town. If the text of Mass is potentially offensive, the music reveals the composer to be in full command of his musical and theatrical powers, moving between styles and moods effortlessly and to great effect.

Of his later works, two song cycles, Songfest and Arias and Barcarolles, have achieved the broadest acceptance; but the two largest projects of these years remain controversial. For the American bicentennial celebrations, Bernstein collaborated with Lerner in the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The premise of the show was a history of the first hundred years of the White House, including a conflict between white presidential families and their black servants. Despite large claims for the political significance of the work, it emerged as the biggest fiasco in the careers of both of its creators. (In 1997 Charles Harmon and Sid Ramin refashioned the score as a 90-minute White House Cantata.) The opera A Quiet Place was commissioned jointly by the Kennedy Center, the Houston Grand Opera and La Scala. Written to a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, it surrounds the entire unchanged text of Trouble in Tahiti with a more contemporary soap opera that takes place 30 years later, thereby placing the audience in a strange time warp. Exhibiting something of the immediacy of a Sondheim musical or Robert Altman film in the context of the opera house, the new plot nevertheless remains somewhat opaque; and in contrast to the fragmented psychological drama of the added sections, the world of Trouble in Tahiti now appears as a 1950s idyll. Its treatment of autobiographical elements, including homosexuality and incest, and its mixture of musical styles are at the same time provocative and path-breaking. The piece is experimental in its flashback form (which Bernstein and Wadsworth revised significantly after its Houston première), while the new sections are strikingly different in idiom from Trouble in Tahiti, indeed from most of the earlier works. They are written as dissonant recitative without sustained lyricism, a kind of operatic modernism that until then he had always avoided. What little of the old Bernstein emerges in occasional arias and orchestral interludes often sounds like deliberate self-parody. Despite these novelties, the opera once more restated the theme of spiritual disintegration and hope which Bernstein had clung to over the previous 40 years. He considered it a summation of all his work.

5. Conducting.

Bernstein’s mentors, Mitropoulos, Reiner and Koussevitzky, were all modernists, and much of his early conducting and recording was devoted to contemporary music such as Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, Milhaud’s La création du monde, Copland’s Billy the Kid and Britten’s Peter Grimes, the American première of which the 27-year-old Bernstein conducted. Once at the New York PO, he began to record almost all the standard repertory; his huge recorded output shows that he was a modern Romantic, less interested in sound than Stokowski, less interested in structure than Boulez, but concentrating instead on revealing the narrative of the music in fervidly energized readings. Bernstein may not have made the New York PO the world’s leading orchestra – he was never a disciplinarian – but he did succeed, as no one had done before, in putting it at the centre of the city’s cultural life.

Bernstein’s stylistic range was vast; only Schoenberg and his latter-day followers remained alien to his sympathies. His particular strengths were in American music (especially Copland, Harris and Ives) and in Haydn, Schumann, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, above all, Mahler. Although Bernstein has been given too much credit for the Mahler revival (Klemperer, Walter, Mitropoulos and Barbirolli had all kept Mahler’s music alive), his recordings placed all of Mahler’s symphonies, which had been regarded as provincially Viennese, at the core of the orchestral repertory. The fact that, unlike Klemperer or Walter, Bernstein did not come from Mahler’s world served to enliven his interpretations, which are often far more observant of Mahler’s indications than those of other conductors. He recorded the complete cycle three times.

6. Television programmes and writings.

True to his rabbinic roots, Bernstein was always a teacher, but he was also an innovator in using television to educate the audience. He produced programmes for both adults and children, though those for children were so sophisticated and uncondescending in their approach that they delighted adults as well. Despite the technical crudeness of early television Bernstein exploited all the possibilities of the medium, its intimacy and immediacy, and its ability to create cultural icons for a wide audience – which is what he himself, by turns academic and familiar, became. Whether the subject was Beethoven’s compositional process, or the evolution of jazz, or Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, Bernstein stressed musical values which he illuminated by a careful exposition of ideas and striking juxtapositions of musical examples, and without the facile anecdotes and programmatic interpretations that had passed for music appreciation. Moreover, the medium of television directly served Bernstein’s belief in a cultural continuum, ranging from homespun blues to late Beethoven with the American musical theatre at the vital centre. As this vision splintered in the 1960s Bernstein’s programmes, like his compositions, lost their way; but he attempted to re-establish his views with the Norton lectures, the first time the series had been specifically designed for television. They were widely criticized at the time, partly because Bernstein used Chomsky’s ideas in a rather simplistic and apparently self-serving manner, and partly because the production was surprisingly clumsy and unvisual. Nevertheless, the lectures are a fascinating potpourri of Bernstein’s obsessions and insights, which reach their climax in a grand sermon on Mahler as the central figure in 20th-century music; here Bernstein’s theatrical and educational instincts come together in a passionate statement of the beliefs that sustained his remarkable career.

WORKS

all published unless otherwise stated

dramatic

The Birds (incid music, Aristophanes), 1938, unpubd; Cambridge, MA, 21 April 1939

The Peace (incid music, Aristophanes), 1940, unpubd; Cambridge, MA, 23 May 1941

Fancy Free (ballet, choreog. J. Robbins), 1944; New York, 18 April 1944

On the Town (musical, B. Comden, A. Green, Bernstein), orchd H. Kay, Bernstein, 1944; Boston, 13 Dec 1944

Facsimile (ballet, choreog. Robbins), 1946; New York, 24 Oct 1946, cond. Bernstein

Peter Pan (incid music, Bernstein, after J.M. Barrie), orchd Kay, 1950; New York, 24 April 1950, cond. B. Steinberg

Trouble in Tahiti (op, 1, Bernstein), 1951; Waltham, MA, 12 June 1952, cond. Bernstein

Wonderful Town (musical, Comden and Green, after J.A. Fields and J. Chodorov: My Sister Eileen), orchd D. Walker, 1953; New Haven, CT, 19 Jan 1953

On the Waterfront (film score, dir. E. Kazan), 1954

The Lark (incid music, L. Hellman, after J. Anouilh), 1955; Boston, 28 Oct 1955

Salome (incid music, O. Wilde), 1955, unpubd

Candide (comic operetta, Hellman, R. Wilbur, J. La Touche, D. Parker, Bernstein, after Voltaire), orchd Kay, Bernstein, 1956; Boston, 29 Oct 1956; rev. 1973 (Wilbur, La Touche, S. Sondheim, Bernstein, after H. Wheeler after Voltaire), Brooklyn, NY, 20 Dec 1973, cond. J. Mauceri

West Side Story (musical, Bernstein and Sondheim, after A. Laurents), orchd S. Ramin, I. Kostal, Bernstein, choreog. Robbins, 1957; Washington DC, 19 Aug 1957

The Firstborn (incid music, C. Fry), 1958, unpubd; New York, 20 April 1958

Mass (music theatre piece, S. Schwartz and Bernstein), orchd J. Tunick, Kay, Bernstein, 1971, Washington DC, 8 Sept 1971, cond. M. Peress; arr. Ramin for chbr orch, Los Angeles, 26 Dec 1972, cond. Peress

Dybbuk (ballet), 1974; New York, 16 May 1974, cond. Bernstein

By Bernstein (revue), 1975, withdrawn [based on unpubd and withdrawn theatre songs]; New York, 23 Nov 1975

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (musical, A.J. Lerner), orchd Ramin, Kay, 1976; Philadelphia, 24 Feb 1976; reworked as vocal-orch work White House Cant., 1997

A Quiet Place (op, 1, S. Wadsworth), 1983; Houston, 17 June 1983, cond. J. De Main; rev. 1984 in 3 acts, incl. Trouble in Tahiti

orchestral

Fancy Free, suite, 1944 [based on ballet]; On the Town, 3 dance episodes, 1945 [based on musical], transcr. concert band; Facsimile, choreographic essay, 1946 [based on ballet]; Sym. no.2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’, after W.H. Auden, pf, orch, 1949, rev. 1965; Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, cl, jazz ens, 1949; Serenade, vn, str, hp, perc, 1954 [after Plato: Symposium]; On the Waterfront, sym. suite, 1955 [based on film score]; West Side Story, sym. dances, 1960 [based on musical]; Fanfare I, 1961 [for inauguration of J.F. Kennedy]; Fanfare II, 1961 [for 25th anniversary of the High School of Music and Art]; 2 Meditations from Mass, 1971; Meditation III from Mass, 1972, withdrawn; Dybbuk Suite nos. 1–2 (Dybbuk Variations), 1974 [based on ballet]; 3 Meditations from Mass, vc, orch, 1977, arr. vc, pf, 1978; Slava!, ov., 1977; CBS Music, 1977; Divertimento, 1980; A Musical Toast, 1980; Halil, nocturne, fl, str, perc, 1981; Conc. for Orch, 1989; Suite, arr. Ramin, M.T. Thomas, 1991 [based on op A Quiet Place, 1983]

vocal-orchestral

Sym. no.1 ‘Jeremiah’ (Bible), Mez, orch, 1942; Hashkivenu (Heb. liturgy), T, chorus, org, 1945; Arr. of Reena (Heb. folksong), chorus, orch, 1947, unpubd; Sym. no.3 ‘Kaddish’ (Heb. liturgy, Bernstein), S, spkr, chorus, boys’ chorus, orch, 1963; Chichester Psalms (Bible), Tr, chorus, orch, 1965; Songfest, 6 solo vv, orch, 1977: To the Poem (F. O’Hara), The Pennycandy Store beyond the El (L. Ferlinghetti), A Julia de Burgos (J. de Burgos), To What you Said (W. Whitman), I, too, Sing America (L. Hughes), Okay ‘Negroes’ (J. Jordan), To my Dear and Loving Husband (A. Bradstreet), Storyette H.M. (G. Stein), If you can’t eat you got to (Cummings), Music I Heard with You (C. Aiken), Zizi’s Lament (G. Corso), What Lips my Lips have Kissed (Millay), Israfel (E.A. Poe); Olympic Hymn (G. Kunert), chorus, orch, 1981; White House Cant., arr. C. Harmon, Ramin, 1997 [based on musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1976]

other vocal

Choral: Arr. of Simch Na (Heb. folksong), SATB, pf, 1947; Yidgal (Heb. liturgy), chorus, pf, 1950; Harvard Choruses (Lerner), 1957; Dedication, Lonely Men of Harvard; Warm-Up, mixed chorus, 1970, incorporated into music theatre piece Mass, 1971; A Little Norton Lecture (e.e. cummings), male vv, 1973, unpubd, arr. as Storyette H.M. in Songfest, 1977 [See vocal-orchestral]; Missa brevis (Ct, mixed chorus)/(7 sol vv), perc, 1988 [based on incid music The Lark, 1988]

Solo vocal (1 v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Psalm cxlviii, 1932; I Hate Music (Bernstein), song cycle, 1943; My Name is Barbara, Jupiter has Seven Moons, I Hate Music, A Big Indian and a Little Indian, I’m a Person Too; Lamentation, Mez, orch, 1943 [arr. of 3rd movt of Sym. no.1 ‘Jeremiah’]; Afterthought (Bernstein), 1945, withdrawn; La bonne cuisine (4 recipes, Bernstein), 1947; 2 Love Songs (R.M. Rilke), 1949 : Extinguish my eyes, When my soul touches yours; Silhouette (Galilee) (Bernstein), 1951; On the Waterfront (La Touche), 1954, withdrawn; Get Hep! (Bernstein), 1955, withdrawn; So Pretty (Comden, Green), 1968; The Madwoman of Central Park West (Bernstein): My New Friends, Up!Up!Up!, 1979; Piccola serenata, 1979; Arias and Barcarolles (L. Bernstein, J. Barnstein, Y.Y. Segal), Mez, Bar, pf 4 hands, 1988

chamber

Pf Trio, 1937, unpubd; Music for 2 Pf, 1937, unpubd [incl. in musical On the Town, 1944]; Pf Sonata, 1938, unpubd; Music for the Dance, nos. 1 and 2, 1938, unpubd [incl. in musical On the Town, 1944]; Scenes from the City of Sin, pf 4 hands, 1939, unpubd; Sonata, vn, pf, 1940, unpubd; 4 Studies, 2 cl, 2 bn, pf c1940, unpubd; Arr. of Copland: El salón Mexico, pf/2 pf, 1941; Sonata, cl, pf, 1941–2; 7 Anniversaries, pf, 1943; 4 Anniversaries, pf, 1948; Brass Music, tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, pf, 1948; 5 Anniversaries, pf, 1954; Shivaree, brass, perc, 1969, incorporated into theatre piece Mass, 1971; Touches, pf, 1981; Dance Suite, brass qnt, opt. perc, 1990

Recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publishers: Amberson, Harms, Jalni

(1) Pierre-Montan Berton [Le Breton]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

P. Gradenwitz: ‘Leonard Bernstein’, MR, x (1949), 191–202

W. Hamilton: ‘On the Waterfront’, Film Music, xiv/1 (1954), 3–14

D. Drew: ‘Leonard Bernstein: Wonderful Town’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 77–80

H. Keller: ‘On the Waterfront’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 81–4

H.C. Schonberg: ‘New Job for the Protean Mr. Bernstein’, New York Times Magazine (22 Dec 1957)

H. Stoddard: Symphony Conductors of the U.S.A. (New York, 1957)

D. Gow: ‘Leonard Bernstein, Musician of Many Talents’, MT, ci (1960), 427–9

J. Briggs: Leonard Bernstein, the Man, his Work, and his World (Cleveland, 1961)

A. Holde: Leonard Bernstein (Berlin, 1961)

J. Gottlieb: The Music of Leonard Bernstein: a Study of Melodic Manipulations (diss., U. of Illinois, 1964)

J. Gottlieb: ‘The Choral Music of Leonard Bernstein, Reflections of Theater and Liturgy’, American Choral Review, x/2 (1967–8), 156–77

J. Gruen: The Private World of Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1968)

W.W. Tromble: The American Intellectual and Music: an Analysis of the Writings of Suzanne K. Langer, Paul Henry Lang, Jacques Barzun, John Dewey and Leonard Bernstein – with Implications for Music Education (diss., U. of Michigan, 1968)

E. Ames: A Wind from the West: Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Abroad (Boston, 1970)

M. Cone: Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1970)

G. Jackson: ‘West Side Story: Thema, Grundhalrung und Aussage’, Maske und Kothum, xvi (1970), 97–101

D. Wooldridge: Conductor’s World (New York, 1970), 310

H. Berlinski: ‘Bernstein’s Mass’, Sacred Music, xcix/1 (1972), 3–8

J. Gruen: ‘In Love with the Stage’, Opera News, xxxvii/3 (1972), 16–23

E. Salzman: ‘Quo vadis Leonard Bernstein?’, Stereo Review, xxviii/5 (1972), 56–9

N. Goemanne: ‘Open Forum: the Controversial Bernstein Mass: Another Point of View’, Sacred Music, c/1 (1973), 33–6

A. Pearlmutter: ‘Bernstein’s Mass Revisited: a Guide to using a Contemporary Work to Teach Music Concepts’, Music Educators Journal, lxi/1 (1974–5), 34–9

J.W. Weber: Leonard Bernstein (Utica, NY, 1975) [discography]

R. Chesterman: ‘Leonard Bernstein in Conversation with Robert Chesterman’, Conversations with Conductors (Totowa, NJ, 1976), 53–60, 69–72

G. Gottwald: ‘Leonard Bernstein’s Messe oder der Konstruktion der Blasphemie’, Melos/NZM, ii (1976), 281–4

J. Ardoin: ‘Leonard Bernstein at Sixty’, High Fidelity Musical America, xxviii/8 (1978), 53–8

P. Davis: ‘Bernstein as Symphonist’, New York Times (26 Nov 1978)

J. Gottlieb: Leonard Bernstein: a Complete Catalogue of his Works (New York, 1978, enlarged 2/1988)

A. Keiler: ‘Bernstein’s The Unanswered Question and Problems of Musical Competence’, MQ, lxiv (1978), 195–222

J. Gottlieb: ‘Symbols of Faith in the Music of Leonard Bernstein’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 287–95

J. Hiemenz: ‘Bernstein on Television: Pros and Cons’, High Fidelity Musical America, cx/4 (1980), 14–15

B. Bernstein: ‘Personal History: Family Matters’, New Yorker (22–29 March 1982); repr. as Family Matters (New York, 1982)

H. Matheopoulos: Maestro: Encounters with Conductors of Today (London, 1982), 3

P. Robinson: Bernstein (New York, 1982)

U. Schneider: ‘Die Wiedergeburr der Musik aus dem Geist des Dreiklangs – Leonard Bernstein als verbaler Musikdeurer’, Hi-Fi-Stereo-Phonie, xxi/1 (1982), 56–62

L. Botstein: ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’, Harper’s, cclxvi/May (1983), 38–40, 57–62

J. Peyser: Bernstein: a Biography (New York, 1983)

S. Lipman: ‘Lenny on our Minds’, New Criterion, iii/10 (1985), 1

M. Freedland: Leonard Bernstein (London, 1987)

P. Gradenwitz: Leonard Bernstein (London, 1987)

J. Fluegel, ed.: Bernstein Remembered (New York, 1991)

S. Chapin: Leonard Bernstein: Notes for a Friend (New York, 1992)

H. Pollack: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and his Students from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, NJ, 1992)

D. Schiff: ‘Re-hearing Bernstein’, Atlantic, cclxxi/6 (1993), 55–8ff

H. Burton: Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1994)

M. Secrest: Leonard Bernstein: Life (New York, 1994)

W. Burton: Conversations about Bernstein (New York, 1995)

D. Wilkins: Leonard Bernstein (Watford, 1995)

G. Block: ‘West Side Story: the Very Model of a Major Musical’, Enchanted Evenings: the Broadway Musical from ‘Snow Boat’ to Sondheim (New York, 1997), 245–73, 341–2

Bernstein, Martin

(b New York, 14 Dec 1904; d 19 Dec 1999). American writer on music and music educator. He graduated from New York University (BS 1925, BMus 1927 with Stoessel), where he began teaching in 1926. After working during World War II as an intelligence officer, he was appointed professor in 1947 and chairman of the music department in 1955. After his retirement in 1972 he was visiting professor at Harvard University in 1986; during the course of his career he was also a guest lecturer at many American universities, including Yale, Rutgers and Indiana.

Bernstein was known primarily for his dedication to teaching: he led graduate seminars (concentrating on Baroque performing practice, Bach and Wagner), taught the survey course of Western music for over 30 years, wrote music textbooks (Score Reading, 1932, 2/1947, and Introduction to Music, 1937, 4/1972 with M. Picker), and created an archive on music iconography of over 5000 slides. He was also a lecturer on music in a weekly radio programme for WCBS, New York (1955–7), and associate editor of the Reese Festschrift (1966). A collection of essays in his honour (ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook) was published in 1977. As a performer, Bernstein played the double bass in the New York SO (1925) and the New York PO (1926–8) and was founder and conductor of the Washington Square Chorus and Orchestra, which introduced many lesser-known works of Purcell, J.S. Bach and Handel to New York audiences.

PAULA MORGAN/R

Béroff, Michel

(b Epinal, 9 May 1950). French pianist. As a boy he came to the notice of Messiaen, who eventually made it possible for him to enter the Paris Conservatoire at an early age and study with Yvonne Loriod. By his late teens he was making an international reputation, at first mainly in the works of Messiaen but later with a wider 20th-century repertory. He showed himself a player of élan, exact rhythmic control and astonishing ability in commanding the nuances of resonance. Not surprisingly, he has had most success in the music of Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Boulez (including Eclat/Multiples under the composer’s direction) and Messiaen. Excepting the Mozart sonatas, of which he is a controversial performer, and the Liszt concertos (which he has recorded) he has given comparatively little attention to the literature from before 1900. He was appointed professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1989.

PAUL GRIFFITHS

Berr [Beer], Friedrich

(b Mannheim, 17 April 1794; d Paris, 24 Sept 1838). German clarinettist. He learnt to play the violin at the age of six, and later the flute and bassoon, with his father Jacob Beer, who drove him so hard that he would faint at his practice. At the age of 16 he fled from home and, joining a French infantry regiment as bassoonist, fought in the Peninsular War. After the war he studied composition, first with Fétis at Douai and then with Reicha in Paris, where he settled. It was only then that he took up the clarinet, teaching himself and developing a delicate, sensitive style of playing. In order to avoid confusion with the clarinettist Joseph Beer, he changed his surname to Berr. He played principal clarinet at the Théâtre du Vaudeville (1823) and at the Théâtre Royal Italien (1825–38). Influenced by Gambaro, he used Müller clarinets. Every worthwhile appointment came his way, including that of solo clarinettist to King Louis Philippe.

Berr was a professor at the Conservatoire from 1831 and in 1836 he took charge of the Gymnase de Musique Militaire. He was a fine teacher and had a profound influence on French clarinet playing, introducing German ideals of tone and advocating playing with the reed on the lower lip. In 1836 he wrote a tutor for the 14-keyed clarinet, which owed much to Müller, dedicating it to his pupil Klosé. He also wrote a bassoon tutor, many solo works for various instruments, and a large number of compositions for military band. In 1833 he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971), 156–7

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977), 49–50

D. Charlton: ‘Classical Clarinet Technique: Documentary Approaches’, EMc, xvi (1988), 396–406

PAMELA WESTON

Berra, Marco

(b Campagna, 24 Oct 1784; d Prague, 18 May 1853). Italian music publisher. He worked first for Artaria in Vienna. From 1811 to 1853 he owned his own publishing works and adjacent shop in Prague, where, in addition to music, maps and engravings, he sold instruments, strings, lithographs and oil paintings. From 1835 he also ran a large music-hire business, and maintained profitable commercial contacts with Italy, France, England, Germany and Russia. He issued about 1380 numbered items, of which some of the first 100 contain two separate compositions; nos.1330 to 1380 were published jointly with his son-in-law, Jan Hoffmann. Berra's main publications were songs and pieces for guitar or piano; besides some church music and works for flute and organ, he also published works by Bach, Beethoven, Weber and other widely known composers as well as many local ones (e.g. Tomášek, Vitásek, Kníže, Mašek, Jan Martinovský and Führer). He produced much contemporary dance music in the collections Prager Lieblings-Galloppen and Prager Lieblings-Polkas; his edition of organ compositions in the collection Museum für Orgelspieler is also well known. Animosity towards the competition from Jan Hoffmann, who opened his music publishing firm in Prague in 1841, prompted Berra to decide that after his death his publishing house should be sold. It was bought by the firm Christoph & Kuhé, who continued Berra's numbering. During the 1880s it foundered and the publishing was taken over by Jaromír Hoffmann.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

Z. Nejedlý: Bedřich Smetana, ii (Prague, 1924–33), ii, 372ff; (Prague, 2/1950–54), iv, 434–76, passim

J. Dostál: ‘Marco Berra, první velkorysý nakladatel hudební v Praze’ [Marco Berra, the first large-scale music publisher in Prague], Slovanská knihověda, vi (1947), 92–6

I. Janáčková: ‘Pražští vydavatelé Václava Jana Tomáška’ [Tomášek's Prague publishers], HV, xviii (1981), 171–80

ZDENĚK CULKA

Berretta, Francesco.

See Beretta, Francesco.

Berry, Chuck [Charles Edward Anderson]

(b St Louis, 18 Oct 1926). American rock and roll singer, songwriter and guitarist. Born into a solid working-class black family, he worked at a variety of jobs before pursuing a career in music. He achieved success rather late; his first number one hit, Maybellene, was recorded in 1955 when he was 29. During the 1950s and 60s he wrote a number of hit songs which have become rock and roll standards, including Roll over Beethoven, Too Much Monkey Business, Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, School Days, Back in the USA, Little Queenie, Memphis, Tennessee and Johnny B. Goode. Berry's songs were based on 12-bar blues progressions, with variations ranging from 8 to 24 bars, played at fast tempos with an emphasis on the backbeat. He had a high clear baritone, extremely clean diction and wrote literate, witty lyrics, many of them the best in early rock and roll. He was a consummate guitarist and his style has been as influential as his songwriting. He employed blues and rhythm and blues licks with bluegrass inflections, and adapted them to a pop-song format. Many of these were probably learned from his pianist and collaborator, Johnnie Johnson.

Like all black American musicians he faced severe racism, especially early in his career. He was often turned away from live performances (some promoters thought he was white because of his clear diction) and faced a number of legal troubles, some of which seemed to be the result of prejudice and vindictive authorities. However, as an entrepreneur as well as musician, Berry knew ways of surmounting musically this racial divide. In his autobiography he wrote:

the songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to deliver the down-home blues in the language they came from, Negro dialect. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

In attempting to reach a mixed audience he wrote songs about school, cars and love. In 1972 he had his second number one hit with My Ding-a-Ling, an unfortunate live recording of a risqué ditty. After that he stopped writing but continued to perform, occasionally appearing on television. He also performed at President Clinton's inaugurations in 1993 and 1997.

He was one of a few early rock and roll musicians whose work defined the genre in the 1950s and for two decades thereafter. Berry profoundly influenced many of the most popular rock and pop artists including the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 1984.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Marcus: ‘Roll over, Chuck Berry’, Rolling Stone (14 June 1969)

M. Lydon: ‘Chuck Berry’, Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon (New York, 1971, 2/1990), 1–23

H.A. De Witt: Chuck Berry: Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York, 1981, 2/1985)

S. Cubitt: ‘“Maybellene”: Meaning and the Listening Subject’, Popular Music, iv (1984), 207–24

R. Vito: ‘The Chuck Berry Style: a Modern Rocker Pays Tribute to the Master’, Guitar Player, xviii/June (1984), 72–5

C. Berry: Chuck Berry: the Autobiography (New York, 1987)

G. Sandow: ‘Chuck Berry: Beyond Beethoven’, Village Voice (24 Nov 1987)

B. Tucker: ‘“Tell Tchaikovsky the News”: Postmodernism, Popular Culture and the Emergence of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, Black Music Research Journal, ix (1989), 271–95

T.D. Taylor: ‘“His Name Was in Lights”: Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode”’, Popular Music, xi (1992), 27–40

TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR

Berry, Théodore.

See Labarre, Théodore.

Berry, Wallace (Taft)

(b La Crosse, WI, 10 Jan 1928; d Vancouver, 16 Nov 1991). American theorist and composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire (1953–4) and at the University of Southern California (PhD 1956). In 1977, after teaching music theory at the University of Michigan (1956–76), he was appointed head of music at the University of British Columbia. Despite broad recognition as a composer, including a 1978 award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Berry largely reorientated himself in mid-career towards theory. His books and contributions to teaching and administration made him a leader in the discipline. From 1982 to 1985 he served as President of the Society for Music Theory.

Berry's music is in a freely dissonant, but at times tonally centric idiom, of wide expressive range. His works are energetic and rhythmically complex, yet precise in detail, and clear in phrase structure and formal outline. His theoretical work provides a balanced treatment of rhythm, texture and tonality. He views musical coherence as deriving from patterns of intensification (‘progression’) and détente (‘recession’). While this perspective has precedents in the work of Ernst Kurth among others, its originality lies in Berry's analysis of the concept of intensity in terms of concrete, measurable factors. He calls these ‘structural functions’ and treats them hierarchically. Of special value are his essays linking analysis with performance, that draw on his extensive professional experience as a pianist.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: The Admirable Bashville (chbr op, G.B. Shaw), 1954

Orch: 5 Pieces, small orch, 1961; Pf Conc., 1964; Canto elegiaco, 1968; Intonation: Victimis hominum inhumanitatem in memoriam, 1972; Acadian Images, 1977–8

Choral: No Man is an Island (J. Donne), 1959

Solo vocal: Limericks, 1v, pf, 1951; Paean from the Grave (S. Sassoon, P. Dehn and A.E. Housman), 1v, pf, 1951; Spoon River (E.L. Masters), S, Bar, orch, 1952; Canticle on a Judaic Text, S/T, orch, 1953; 4 Songs of the Sea, 1v, pf, 1957; Des visages de France, S, Mez, ens, 1967; Credo in unam vitam, T, hn, vc, ens, 1969; Lover of the Moon Trembling Now at Twilight, S/T, ens, 1971; Of the Changeless Night and the Stark Ranges of Nothing (E. Birney), Mez, vc, pf, 1978–9; The Moment: Summer's Night (V. Woolf), Mez, pf, 1985

Inst: Variations, pf, 1952; 8 20th-Century Miniatures, pf, 1955; Canons, 2 cl, 1959; Str Qt no.1, 1960; Duo, vn, pf, 1961; Threnody, vn, 1963; Divertimento, wind qnt, pf, perc, 1964; Str Qt no.2, 1964; Canto lirico, va, pf, 1965; Str Qt no.3, 1966; Composition for Pf and Elec Sounds, 1967; Fantasy in 5 Statements, cl, pf, 1967; Duo, fl, pf, 1968; Pf Trio, 1970; 3 Anachronisms, vn, pf, 1973; 10 Pieces, tr inst, pf, 1973–4; Pf Sonata, 1975; Str Qt no.4, 1984

MSS in CDN-Tcm, Vcm

Principal publishers: Elkan-Vogel, Carl Fischer, Presser, Southern

WRITINGS

Form in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966, 2/1986)

Structural Functions in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975, 2/1987)

‘Rhythmic Accelerations in Beethoven’, JMT, xxii (1979), 177–236

‘On Structural Levels in Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, ii (1980), 19–45

‘Symmetrical Interval Sets and Derivative Pitch Materials in Bartók's String Quartet No.3’, PNM, xviii/1–2 (1979–80), 287–380

‘Text and Music in the Alto Rhapsody’, JMT, xxvii (1983), 239–53

‘Metric and Rhythmic Articulation in Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, vii (1985), 7–33

‘Formal Process and Performance in the “Eroica” Introductions’, Music Theory Spectrum, x (1988), 3–18

Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven, CT, 1989)

WILLIAM BENJAMIN

Berry, Walter

(b Vienna, 8 April 1929). Austrian bass-baritone. After study with Hermann Gallos at the Vienna Music Academy he joined the Staatsoper in 1950. His first big success was as the Count in Le nozze di Figaro, and in very few years he built up a sizable repertory and an enviable international reputation, appearing in the leading German houses and in North and South America (Metropolitan début, 1966). From 1952 he was a regular soloist at the Salzburg Festival, creating roles in such modern operas as Liebermann’s Penelope, Egk’s Irische Legende and von Einem’s Der Prozess, and singing the standard bass-baritone repertory. From 1957 to 1971 he was married to, and frequently appeared on stage with, the mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig. Apart from his Mozart roles (Masetto and Leporello, Guglielmo and Don Alfonso, Papageno, the Count and, later, Figaro) he won acclaim in a wide variety of parts: Wozzeck, Ochs, Escamillo, Pizarro, Telramund and subsequently Barak (Die Frau ohne Schatten), in which role he made his Covent Garden début in 1976, Wotan and Bartók’s Bluebeard. He also appeared frequently in the concert hall, and recorded the Bach Passions and Haydn oratorios, lieder and numerous choral works. His operatic recordings, for which he is especially noted, include leading roles in operas by Bartók, Strauss (Barak and Ochs), Berg (Wozzeck) and Mozart (Masetto, Leporello, Figaro and Papageno).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Lorenz: Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry (Vienna, 1968)

P. Dusek and V. Parschalk: Nicht nur Tenöre: das Beste aus der Opernwerkstatt, i (Vienna, 1986) [incl. discussion with Berry]

PETER BRANSCOMBE

Bersa, Blagoje

(b Dubrovnik, 21 Dec 1873; d Zagreb, 1 Jan 1934). Croatian composer. He studied at the Zagreb music school (from 1893) and then with Robert Fuchs and Julius Epstein at the Vienna Conservatory; his graduation work, the Andante sostenuto for orchestra, received its first public performance in Vienna in 1899. After working briefly as a choral conductor in Sarajevo and Split, he conducted at the Graz municipal theatre (1902–3). From 1903 to 1919 he worked in Vienna as a music teacher and orchestrator of operettas; from 1911 he was arranger and consultant for the publishing firm Doblinger. He returned to Croatia in 1919, and in 1922 he became professor of composition at the Zagreb Academy of Music (formerly the conservatory); he held this appointment until his death.

Bersa was a typical fin de siècle composer who enriched the Romantic tradition with fresh nuances. His orchestral output is mostly made up of programmatic symphonic poems, which developed a new sensibility in orchestral writing. Notable for its effective use of sound and space, the best of these works is Sunčana polja (‘Sunny Fields’, 1919). He also composed a number of fine chamber and piano works as well as songs to Croatian and German texts. Of his three operas the most important is Der Eisenhammer (1905–6), in which he drew on Wagnerian techniques as well as on the Italian verismo style to portray modern subject matter and the atmosphere of a factory; the ‘music of the machines’ in Act 3 is an example of musical futurism. He also composed ‘melo-monodramas’ and a film score. As both composer and teacher he laid the foundations of modern music in Croatia.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Jelka (J. Bersa), 1901, unperf.; Der Eisenhammer/Oganj [The Flame] (A.M. Willner), 1905–6, Zagreb, 12 Jan 1911; Der Schuster von Delft/Postolar iz Delfta (comic op., J. Wilhelm and Willner), Zagreb, 26 Jan 1914

Orch: Dramatska ouvertura, 1898, Idila, 1902, Capriccio-Scherzo, 1902 [orig. movts of unfinished sym.]; Sunčana polja [Sunny Fields], 1919; Sablasti [The Ghosts], 1926 [orig. formed first pt of diptych with Sunčana polja]

Choral: 3 pejsaža [3 Landscapes]: Mjesečina (ljetna) [Moonlight (In Summer)] (textless), 1921, Jesen [Autumn] (textless), chorus, ob, eng hn, 2 bn, 1922, Prvi snijeg (predvečerje) [First Snow (In the Evening)] (textless), male chorus, hp, 2 hn, vn, 1922

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Trio, 1895; Po načinu starih airs de ballet [In the Style of Old Airs de ballet], pf, 1924

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Kuntarić: Blagoje Bersa (Zagreb, 1959)

K. Kovačević: Hrvatski kompozitori i njihova djela [Croatian composers and their works] (Zagreb, 1960), 32–40

M. Cipra: Sunčana polja’ Blagoja Berse (Zagreb, 1968)

J. Andreis: Music in Croatia (Zagreb, 1974, enlarged 2/1982)

K. Kos: ‘Blagoje Bersa und die Moderne unter besondere Berücksichtigung seiner Lieder’, Zagreb i hrvatske zemplje kar most izmetu srednjoevropskih i mediteranskih glazbenih kultura, ed. S. Tuksar (Zagreb, 1998), 391–405

KORALJKA KOS

Bersag horn

(It. tromba per fanfara per Bersaglieri).

A type of valved bugle adopted by the Bersaglieri corps of the Italian army in 1861. The soprano, in B, has three valves and is similar to the flugelhorn. The E contralto, B tenor, B baritone and F bass are equivalent in pitch and bore to the tenor (alto) horn, baritone, euphonium and F tuba, respectively; each has a single valve that lowers the pitch of a note by a 4th, thus enabling a complete diatonic scale to be played from the fourth partial upwards. Bersag horns are still manufactured in Italy and are used by some Bersaglieri regimental bands.

CLIFFORD BEVAN

Berselli, Matteo

(fl 1708–21). Italian soprano castrato. He was apparently Venetian; he sang in six operas in Venice (1708–9), including works by Gasparini and Albinoni, in Bologna (1712), Reggio nell’Emilia (1713 and 1719), Rome (1714 in Gasparini’s Lucio Papirio and 1716), Florence (1715), Milan (1715) and in three operas at Naples, including Alessandro Scarlatti’s La virtù trionfante (1716). He was engaged at Dresden (1717–20) at a salary of 4500 thaler (and the use of a carriage), and appeared in Lotti’s Giove in Argo, Ascanio and Teofane and Ristori’s Cleonice. Handel negotiated with him in Dresden in 1719, but he did not reach London until September 1720, when he sang for one season with the Royal Academy at the King’s Theatre. He made his début in Giovanni Bononcini’s Astarto (1720) in a female role, and appeared in Handel’s Radamisto, the pasticcios Arsace (Amor e Maestà) and Ciro (Odio ed Amore) and the composite Muzio Scevola (1721). Handel composed three new arias for him in Radamisto and a duet and aria in Muzio Scevola, of which Burney remarked that ‘this singer must have been high in the composer’s favour for taste, as he is left to himself in no less than six ad libitums and adagios, which he had to embellish’. Berselli’s voice was a high soprano with a compass from e' to b'' in Handel, though according to Quantz, who thought his tone pleasing but rather thin, he could sing from c' to f'''.

WINTON DEAN

Bershadskaya, Tat'yana Sergeyevna

(b Petrograd [now St Petersburg], 4 July 1921). Russian musicologist. She graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1947 and undertook a postgraduate course there in 1951. Her teachers at the conservatory included Yu.N. Tyulin and K.S. Kushnaryov. She was appointed a lecturer at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1945, later becoming assistant professor (1961) and professor (1979). She gained the doctorate from the Moscow State Conservatory in 1986. She became a member of the Composers' Union in 1975, and has been a member of its traditional music section from 1976 and its criticism and musicology section from 1978. She has been awarded medals for her services to Leningrad during World War II, and in 1993 was made an Honoured Art Worker of Russia.

Bershadskaya's main research interest is pitch organization in music, particularly the issues of harmony and modes. Her work is based on the concepts that harmony is a system of accord with tones being linked to sound simultaneously and that the modal system is found in both traditional and classical music but is not identifiable with scale and tonality. She defines this theoretical basis for study in her published lectures on harmony (1978) and her book on harmony as an element of the musical system (1997). She has also made a significant contribution to the study of Russian traditional music. In her book on the basic laws of polyphony in Russian folksong (1961) she discusses fundamental questions concerning monody, forms of polyphony, heterophony and the principles forming modes. She has in addition published work linked to her teaching activities in the harmony section of the music theory department at the Leningrad Conservatory, including a book on the non-traditional forms of written work on harmony in conservatories (1982), and has written many articles on musical education and the methodology of teaching theoretical disciplines.

WRITINGS

Osnovnïye kompozitsionnïye zakonomernosti mnogogolosiya russkoy narodnoy krest'yanskoy pesni [The basic laws of composition in the polyphony of Russian folk (peasant) songs] (Leningrad, 1961)

‘Variatsii’ [Variations], ‘Rondo’ [Rondo], ‘Formï vokal'noy kamernoy muzïki’ [Forms of vocal chamber music], ‘Syuita’ [Suite], Muzïkal'naya forma, ed. Yu.N. Tyulin (Moscow, 1965, 2/1974), 172–97, 198–215, 312–29, 330–39

‘O garmonii Rakhmaninova’ [On the harmony of Rachmaninoff], Russkaya muzïka na rubezhe XX veka, ed. M.K. Mikhailov and Ye.M. Orlova (Moscow and Leningrad, 1966), 150–75

‘Printsipï ladovoy klassifikatsii: istoriya i teoriya’ [The principles of model classification: history and theory], SovM (1971), no.8, pp.126–30

‘K voprosu ob ustoychivosti i neustoychivosti v ladakh russkoy nardnoy pesni’ [Towards the question of stability and instability in the modes of Russian folksong], Problemï lada, ed. K.I. Yuzhak (Moscow, 1972), 181–90

‘Akkordï’ [Chords], ‘Lad i tonal nost’ [Mode and tonality], ‘Akkordï na stupenyakh mazhora i minora’ [Major and minor chords], Kurs teorii muzïki, ed. A.L. Ostrovsky (Leningrad, 1978, 3/1988), 54–9, 59–83, 89–95

Lektsii po garmonii [Lectures on harmony] (Leningrad, 1978, 2/1985)

‘Funktsii melodicheskikh svyazey v sovremennoy muzïke’ [The functions of melodic links in contemporary music], Kritika i muzïkoznaniye, ed. O.P. Kolovskii, ii (Leningrad, 1980), 16–22

Netraditsionnïye formï pis'mennïkh rabot po garmonii v konservatoriyakh [Non-traditional forms of written work on harmony in the conservatories] (Leningrad, 1982)

‘Asaf'yev ob intonatsionno-protsessual'noy prirode lada’ [Asaf'yev on the intonational-procedural nature of mode], Voprosï intonatsionnogo analiza i formoobrazovaniya v svete idey Asaf'yeva, ed. O.P. Kolovskii (Leningrad, 1985), 5–16

‘O ponyatiyakh, terminakh, opredeleniyakh sovremennoy teorii muzïki’ [On the concepts, terms and definitions of contemporary music theory], Kritika i muzïkoznaniye, iii (Leningrad, 1987), 97–113

‘Assotsiativnost' kak odin iz faktorov ladogarmonicheskoy organizatsii muzïki Sergeya Prokof'yeva’ [Associativity as one of the factors in the modal-harmonic organization of the music of Prokofiev], S.S. Prokofiev: Collection of essays, ed. I. Rogaliov (St Petersburg, 1995), 33–44

‘Ladovaya sistema muzïki, grammaticheskaya sistema yazïka’ [The modal system of music – the grammatical system of a language], Vïbor i sochtaniye: otkrïtaya forma, ed. K. Yuzhak (St Petersburg, 1995), 38–41

‘O monodiynïkh printsipakh mïshleniya v muzïke D. Shostakovicha’ [On the monodic principles of thought in the music of Shostakovich], D.D. Shostakovich: sbornik statey k 90-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, ed. L. Kovnatskaya (St Petersburg, 1996), 334–41

Garmoniya kak ėlement muzïkal'noy sistemï [Harmony as an element of the musical system] (St Petersburg, 1997)

ELENA TITOVA

Bertali [Bertalli, Berthali, Bartali, Barthali, Bertaldi], Antonio

(b Verona, March 1605; d Vienna, 17 April 1669). Austrian composer and violinist of Italian birth. Musical literature from the late 17th century to the mid-20th contains much inconsistency and misinformation about his life, and the resulting confusion was eliminated only in the 1970s by Bartels and Olsen. A portrait of him painted in October 1664 is inscribed ‘aetatis suae 59 ann, et 7 Mens’ (in A-Wn, see Schaal, 1970). He received his early training in music from Stefano Bernardi, maestro di cappella of Verona Cathedral from 1611 to 1622. It seems reasonable to assume that it was Bernardi’s appointment in 1622 to the service of Archduke Carl Joseph, Bishop of Breslau and Bressanone and brother of the Emperor Ferdinand II, that led to Bertali’s employment at the imperial court in Vienna. He seems to have arrived there in 1624, since an imperial resolution of 1666 referred to his 42 years’ service at the court. The earliest recorded evidence in Viennese archives, however, is his marriage certificate (at the Stephansdom), which is dated 26 January 1631 and lists him as an instrumentalist in the imperial chapel.

During his early years in Vienna, Bertali must have gained a solid reputation as a composer, for he was soon entrusted with the composition of music for special occasions at court, such as a cantata, Donna real, for the marriage of the future Emperor Ferdinand III to the Spanish Infanta Anna Maria in 1631, the Missa Ratisbonensis for the Imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1636, and the Requiem pro Ferdinando II in 1637. In Vienna and beyond he also enjoyed a reputation as an excellent violinist; the dedication of G.A. Bertoli’s Compositioni musicali (1645) calls him ‘valoroso nel violino’. It was not until 1 October 1649, however, that he was appointed Kapellmeister of the imperial court, in succession to Giovanni Valentini. One of his major achievements during his tenure of this position was the promotion and composition of operas, an activity that contributed in no small measure to the establishment of regular performances of Italian opera at court from the 1660s. His fame increased as he continued to contribute sacred works as well as festive instrumental music for important occasions at court and ably administered the affairs of the rapidly expanding imperial chapel. In his Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (1657) Christoph Bernhard mentioned his works, along with those of such composers as Monteverdi, Cavalli and Rovetta, as models of the luxuriant style. Bertali’s manuscript works, mostly lost, are listed in Distinta specificatione dell’archivio musicale per il servizio della cappella e camera cesarea, the catalogue of Leopold I’s private collection (in A-Wn). His immediate posthumous reputation rested largely on the two collections of instrumental music published in 1671 and 1672.

The style of Bertali’s music is firmly rooted in the north Italian tradition of the first half of the 17th century. Thus, his dramatic works rely on the models of Cavalli and Cesti, though there is more individuality in the oratorios than in the operas. His overtures resemble the French type, and the brief ritornellos are usually dramatically or thematically linked to preceding arias or scenes. Arias are short and in strophic form, with contrast provided by a binary or, less frequently, a ternary structure. Generally, Bertali eschews elaborate vocal writing and concentrates on expressive settings of the text, notably in the frequent arioso endings of recitatives. Ensembles, frequently found in his oratorios and short dramatic works, are similar in style to polyphonic madrigals of the early 17th century. His liturgical music encompasses a wide spectrum of styles and scorings, from short unaccompanied four-part pieces of a madrigalian type to strict contrapuntal masses in stile antico and festive polychoral pieces with instrumental ensembles. Most of these works fall within the basic liturgical styles of the Viennese court and many were apparently written for particular occasions, such as the Missa post partum (CZ-KRa). Bertali’s instrumental music includes a broad range of popular mid-17th-century styles, from the contrapuntal sonatas prevalent at court to large-scale, multi-sectional works including trumpets, cornetts, strings, and continuo for important church feasts and court festivities.

WORKS

operas

L’inganno d’amore (prol, 3, B. Ferrari), Regensburg, 24 Feb 1653, lost, pubd lib A-Wn

Theti (favola dramatica, prol, 5, Diamante Gabrielli), Vienna, Hof, 13 July 1656, pubd lib Wn

Il rè Gelidoro (prol, 3, A. Amalteo), Vienna, Hof, 19 Feb 1659, lost, pubd lib Wn

La magia delusa (prol, 1, Amalteo), Vienna, Favorita, 4 June 1660, Wn

Gli amori d’Apollo con Clizia (prol, 1, Amalteo), Vienna, Hof, 1 March 1661, lost, pubd lib Wn

Il Ciro crescente (prol, 3 intermezzos, Amalteo), Vienna, Laxenburg, 14 June 1661, Wn

La Zenobia di Radamisto (prol, 3, C. de’ Dottori), Vienna, Hof, 18 Nov 1662, Act 3 and pubd lib Wn

Untitled opera [incipit: Pazzo amor] (prol, 1), Vienna, Hof, ?18 Nov 1664, Wn

L’Alcindo (prol, 3, A. Draghi), Vienna, Hof, 20 April 1665, prol and pubd lib Wn

La contesa dell’aria e dell’acqua (festa a cavallo, F. Sbarra), Vienna, Hof, 24 Jan 1667, lost, pubd lib Wn [vocal music by Bertali, ballets by J.H. Schmelzer]

Doubtful: Niobe (introduttione alla barriera, 3, Gabrielli), Mantua, Ducale, 15 Feb 1652, pubd lib US-Wc: Theti (favola dramatica, prol, 5, Gabrielli), Mantua, Ducale, 24 Feb 1652, pubd lib Wc [relationship to Theti for Vienna, 1656, is unknown]; Cibele ed Ati (intermezzo), Vienna, ?Dec 1666

oratorios

Il pentimento, l’amore verso Dio, Vienna, 1661, lost, pubd lib Wn

Maria Maddalena (Draghi), Vienna, 1663, Wn

Oratorio sacro [title unknown], Vienna, 1663, lost

L’inferno deluso (Sbarra), Vienna, 1665, lost, pubd lib I-Vnm

La strage degl’innocenti, Vienna, 1665, A-Wn (facs. (New York, 1986)); ed. in Olsen

sacred vocal

2 motets, 1649¹, 1653¹

Missa Resurrectionis, SSAATTB, 2 tpt, 2 cornett, 5 tbn, str, bc; ed. B. Clark (Huntingdon, 1987)

Missa semiminima, SSAATTBB, 4 tbn, str, bc; ed. W. Fürlinger (Altötting, 1985)

Ecce illuxit nobis, vv, 6vv, 3 rec, 2 vn, va, bc; ed. K. Ruhland (Altötting, 1992)

32 masses, 8 requiem masses, 32 ints, seq, 8 Vespers, 10 Complines, 16 Mag, 5 TeD, 73 ants, 16 lits, 5 lessons and resps, 78 pss, 75 motets: most lost, extant works in A-KR, Wgm, Wn, CZ-KRa

secular vocal

40 ‘compositioni morali e spirituali’, 1–6vv, some with insts; 14 occasional cantatas, 1–9vv, insts; 134 ‘compositioni amorose’, 1–8vv, some with insts: most lost, extant works in A-Wn, S-Uu

instrumental

Thesaurus musicus, a 3 (Dillingen, 1671), lost

Prothinia suavissima, 24 sonatas a 3–4 (n.p. [?Dillingen], 1672), some doubtful, see Kačic

Sonatas: 11 ‘con trombe solenni’ a 13–18; 29 a 3–8; 10 for 2 vn, tbn/b viol, bc; 1 for vn, bc: some lost, extant works in CZ-KRa, D-Mbs, S-Uu; 6 ed. J.D. Hill and R.P. Block (London, 1972), 2 ed. J.D. Hill and R.P. Block (London, 1971), 1 ed. R. Wigness and R.P. Block (London, 1975), 23 ed. in Zink, 1 ed. in RRMBE, lxxxii (1997), 2 ed. B. Clark (Huntingdon, 1998)

Chiacona, vn, bc, ed. in RRMBE, lxxxii (1997)

WRITINGS

Instructio musicalis, A-KR

Sequuntur regulae compositionis, Wst

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

GroveO (R. Schnitzler)

KöchelKHM

NewmanSBE

SennMT

C. LaRoche: Antonio Bertali als Opern- und Oratorienkomponist (diss., U. of Vienna, 1919)

E. Wellesz: ‘Die Opern und Oratorien in Wien von 1660–1708’, SMw, vi (1919), 5–138

P. Nettl: ‘Zur Geschichte der kaiserlichen Hofmusikkapelle von 1636–1680’, SMw, xvi (1929), 70–85; xvii (1930), 95–104; xviii (1931), 25–35; xix (1932), 33–40

A. Bauer: Opern und Operetten in Wien: Verzeichnis ihrer Erstaufführungen in der Zeit von 1629 bis zur Gegenwart (Graz, 1955)

F. Hadamowsky: ‘Barocktheater am Wiener Kaiserhof, mit einem Spielplan (1625–1740)’, Jb der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 1951–2, 7–117; pubd separately (Vienna, 1955)

H.J. Moser: ‘Eine Pariser Quelle zur Wiener Triosonate des ausgehenden 17. Jahrhunderts: der Codex Rost’, Festschrift Wilhelm Fischer, ed. H. Zingerle (Innsbruck, 1956), 75–81

H. Federhofer: ‘Zur handschriftlichen Überlieferung der Musiktheorie in Österreich in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Mf, xi (1958), 264–79

R. Schaal: ‘Biographische Quellen zu Wiener Musikern und Instrumentenmachern’, SMw, xxvi (1964), 194–212

H. Knaus: Die Musiker im Archivbestand des kaiserlichen Obersthofmeisteramtes (1637–1705) (Vienna, 1967–9)

I. Bartels: Die Instrumentalstücke in Oper und Oratorium der frühvenezianischen Zeit (diss., U. of Vienna, 1970)

R. Schaal: Die Tonkünstler-Porträts der Wiener Musiksammlung von Aloys Fuchs (Wilhelmshaven, 1970)

S.S. Olsen: Antonio Bertali’s ‘La strage degl’innocenti’: an Edition with Commentary (diss., U. of Columbia, Missouri, 1972)

W. Apel: Die italienische Violinmusik im 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1983); Eng. trans., enlarged by T. Binkley (Bloomington, 1990)

G.D. Zink: The Large-Ensemble Sonatas of Antonio Bertali and their Relationship to the Ensemble Sonata Traditions of the Seventeenth Century (diss., Washington U., 1989)

N.M. Jensen: ‘The Instrumental Music for Small Ensemble of Antonio Bertali: the Sources’, DAM, xx (1992), 25–43

L. Kačic: ‘Ein Raubdruck aus den Jahren 1671–1672: S. Capricornus oder A. Bertali?’, Musik des 17. Jahrhunderts und Pavel Vejvanovský: Kroměříž 1993, 237–40

RUDOLF SCHNITZLER/CHARLES E. BREWER

Bertalotti, Angelo Michele

(b Bologna, 8 April 1666; d Bologna, 30 March 1747). Italian composer and pedagogue. Having received his initial musical training in Bologna, he was employed as a singer in Rome between 1687 and 1690, attached to the choirs of S Luigi dei Francesi and S Agostino. Returning to Bologna, he was appointed singing master at the Scuole Pie in 1693; later he also instructed the seminarists. In 1698 his Regole facilissime per apprendere con facilità e prestezza li canti fermo e figurato were published anonymously. On 22 March 1703 he was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. He joined the choir of S Petronio as a bass in January 1705, holding this post until his death.

Bertalotti's authorship of the Regole facilissime was confirmed in 1706 by a revised edition under the title Regole utilissime per apprendere con fondamento e facilità il canto fermo (Bologna, 1706, 3/1716), which omitted the section on ‘canto figurato’ and augmented the section on ‘canto fermo’. It was revised and enlarged in 1720, and further revised and enlarged (with an added ‘dialogo’) in 1744, an edition which received a fourth printing as late as 1820. The pedagogical usefulness of the Regole facilissime, which require a knowledge of solmization, did not outlive Bertalotti's age, but the Solfeggi a canto e alto dati alle stampe per comodo delli putti delle Scuole pie in two and three parts, first issued in 1744 (revised 1764; ed. R. Goitre, Milan, 1977), have retained their value for choir training and as models of contrapuntal writing in the strict style. Their most enthusiastic modern advocate was Haberl, through whose efforts they came to be included in the curriculum of Bavarian teacher-training colleges. They can be regarded as vocal equivalents without words of J.S. Bach's ‘inventions’ for keyboard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Cammarano Lanfranchi)

F.X. Haberl: Introduction to Angelo Bertalotti's 50 zweistimmige Solfeggien (Regensburg, 1881, 5/1900)

G. Tebaldini: L'archivio musicale della Cappella Antoniana in Padova (Padua, 1895)

MICHAEL TALBOT

Bertani, Lelio

(b Brescia, 1553–4; d Brescia, 1612). Italian composer. He had certainly composed madrigals by 1571, for a response by the fellow Brescian Costanzo Antegnati to a piece by Bertani was printed in that year. He succeeded his teacher Giovanni Contino as maestro di cappella of Brescia Cathedral in 1574, a post he still held in 1591 (Fontana). According to Rossi he served the last Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, which has been taken to mean that he was employed in the Ferrarese court music establishment, but although the Ferrarese court salary records are preserved almost complete for the end of the 16th century, Bertani is not mentioned there. He did visit the court, however, and presented some of his music, including the first book of madrigals for six voices, to the duke; this is probably the service for which he received the reward of 50 scudi mentioned by Rossi. He was appointed maestro di cappella of Padua Cathedral in November 1598 and he asked to be allowed to resign from this post in July 1604 (the dates 1588 and 1607 sometimes cited in this connection are incorrect).

Bertani enjoyed great esteem among his contemporaries, which is attested both by his recommendation for an important post in 1601 by Luzzaschi and by his inclusion in numerous anthologies of many countries during the years 1580–1610. A sampling of several of his madrigals indicates that this esteem was warranted. Particularly prominent in Bertani’s style of the 1580s is an almost instrumental attitude towards vocal composition: a preference, for example, for motivic textures and for development and unification by purely motivic and tonal means, independent of the words, of the sort that brought forth complaints by Bardi and Galilei during the same decade. Bertani must be recognized as a superior craftsman in the style in which he worked, however the style itself is judged. His skill in resolving the opposing demands of a harmonic and an imitative lowest part, in expanding and developing his repetitions by motivic, harmonic and textural means, in exposing two or three motifs simultaneously, or in using written-out ornamentation for structural purposes, withstands comparison with that of Marenzio or Monteverdi during the 1580s and 90s. His varying of texture and his control of pace are masterly. Only the lack of any great dramatic imagination and, as Rossi suggested, a lack of ambition prevented Bertani from being included among the finest madrigalists of his age.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Brescia, 1584); ed. in Collana di musiche sacre e profane del XVI–XVII–XVIII secolo, xxxvii (Trent, 1998)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 6vv (Venice, 1585); ed. in Collana di musiche sacre e profane del XVI e XVII secolo, vi (Trent, 1996)

Madrigali spirituali, 3vv (Brescia, 1585⁸), inc.

20 madrigals, 3–6, 11vv: 1582⁵, 1583¹⁰, 1583¹¹, 1584⁴, 1585¹⁶, 1 ed. in RRMR, lxxviii–lxxix (Madison, WI, 1990), 1585¹⁷, 1586¹, 1586¹⁰, 1 ed. M. Giuliani: I lieti amanti (Florence, 1990), 1586¹¹, 1587¹⁴, 1588¹⁷, 1 ed. H.B. Lincoln: The Madrigal Collection L'amoroso ero (Albany, NY, 1968), 1592¹¹, 1 ed. H. Powley: Il trionfo di Dori (New York, 1990), 1592²⁰, 1593³, 1594⁶, 1 ed. M. Giuliani: Madrigali pastorali … intitolati il bon bacio (Trent, 1993), 1596¹¹, 1598⁹, 1601⁷, 1 ed. S. Cisilano, Collana di musiche veneziane, i (Venice, 1961), 1604⁸, 1609¹⁵, 1609¹⁷, 1613¹³

Latin, German and English contrafacts, 1587¹⁴, 1588²⁹, 1609¹⁵, 1613¹³

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Cammerano-Lanfranchi)

NewcombMF [incl. 1 madrigal]

M.P. Fontana: Il sontuoso apparato fatto dalla magnifica città di Brescia nel felice ritorno dell’illustriss. & reverendiss. Vescovo suo, il Cardinale Morosini (Brescia, 1591)

O. Rossi: Elogi historici di bresciani illustri (Brescia, 1620), 491

A. Valentini: I musicisti bresciani ed il Teatro Grande (Brescia, 1894)

P. Guerrini: ‘Giovanni Contino di Brescia’, NA, i (1924), 130–42

P. Guerrini: ‘Di alcuni organisti della cattedrale di Brescia nel Cinquecento’, NA, iii (1926), 246–56

A. Anzellotti: ‘Una gara musicale nel secolo XVI’, NA, xi (1934), 225–30

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei sec. XIV, XV, XVI: contributo per una storia’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214; xix (1942), 49–92, pubd separately (Rome, 1942)

J. Kurtzman: ‘An Early 17th-Century Manuscript of canzonette e madrigaletti spirituali’, Studi musicali, viii (1979), 149–71

M. Rota: Il Primo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci di Lelio Bertani (diss., U. of Pavia, 1994–5)

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

Bertati, Giovanni

(b Martellago, 10 July 1735; d Venice, c1815). Italian librettist. The son of a farm agent, he was sent by a local nobleman to study at the Treviso seminary, but showed more interest in the theatre. His libretto La morte di Dimone, o sia L’innocenza vendicata, a translation of a German play by the impresario J.F. von Kurz, was set by Antonio Tozzi and inaugurated the renovated Teatro S Cassiano in Venice in 1763. Thereafter he wrote almost exclusively comic librettos. He benefited from his association with Baldassare Galuppi, who took him to Vienna in 1770 and for whom he wrote two librettos. Bertati wrote over 70 librettos, at least 45 of them for the Teatro S Moisè in Venice, where he served as principal comic librettist from 1771 to 1791. Many of his works set by Gazzaniga, Anfossi and other composers achieved considerable success beyond Italy. In 1791 after several earlier visits to Vienna, he succeeded the ousted Da Ponte as chief poet to the imperial theatre, where his Il matrimonio segreto (music by Cimarosa) was an instant and long-lasting success. He returned to Venice in 1794, apparently by his own choice, having written five librettos for Vienna. After 1798 he largely gave up writing librettos and worked as a civil servant, later an archivist, at the arsenal in Venice.

Bertati’s librettos reflect both the traditions of Italian comedy and the innovations of Carlo Goldoni, his leading predecessor in Venice. Most are dramas of domestic intrigue, populated by shrewd servants, vain or fatuous aristocrats and young lovers who have to outwit jealous, greedy or social-climbing guardians (as for example in Il matrimonio segreto). There are also librettos set in imaginary or distant lands, combining typical romantic intrigue with satirical observations about contemporary life and manners (for instance in L’inimico delle donne and L’isola di Alcina). Bertati relied heavily on the traditional mechanisms of Italian comedy: disguises and mistaken identities, magic incantations, and the other comic devices of the commedia dell’arte. He used to good advantage nonsense poetry, real or invented foreign languages, parodies of the elevated language of opera seria, and catalogue arias, which were a particular speciality. As with Goldoni, his intrigues involve rivalries both of class and of generation. Smith (1970) saw in Bertati’s librettos ‘a growing undertone of cynical protest at the license of the aristocrats’ – a protest broader than in Goldoni’s mocking of particular social customs (in particular in Bertati’s La villanella rapita and Don Giovanni). But Bertati was no revolutionary; his works are light and entertaining, and for the most part conventional and unchallenging in their subject matter. He was, however, among the first librettists to write texts exhibiting two important structural innovations: the change from three acts to two (his librettos to 1775 contain three acts; by 1777 they are in two); and the development of the introduzione (his examples encompass action that sets the plot immediately in motion).

The widespread success of Bertati’s librettos was due more to their theatrical than to their poetic merits. Perhaps partly because of the haste in which he frequently had to work, his language is often coarse, lacking the grace of such librettists as Da Ponte or G.B. Casti. Moreover, as Goldin has shown, Bertati’s poetry lacks the finesse and variety needed to distinguish characters from one another; the psychological subtlety of Da Ponte’s librettos for Mozart is not to be found in Bertati’s. His strength was his ability to ‘order a story line with clarity and concision and stuff it with the requisite amount of plot intrigue and commedia business’ (Smith, 1970). Even Da Ponte, who had little that was positive to say about his rival, acknowledged that Bertati’s librettos came across better on the stage than in reading.

Bertati’s one-act libretto Don Giovanni, o sia Il convitato di pietra (set by Gazzaniga in 1787) served as the model for Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni for Mozart. Da Ponte took over nearly complete the outlines of Bertati’s work, adding to it the Act 1 finale and most of the second act. But Bertati’s version, despite its strong characterization of Giovanni and its dramatic scenes of the duel and the final confrontation with the statue, has a less serious tone. It comprises the second act of a comedy, Il capriccio drammatico, depicting the woes of a touring opera company which out of desperation revives the old Don Juan story, even though the singers protest that the tale is fit for nothing but village fairs. This ‘frame’ thus presents Bertati’s one-act Don Giovanni in an ironic light. Even more striking is its final scene (after Giovanni’s descent to hell), a frivolous comic ensemble in which the other characters imitate the sounds of musical instruments with a variety of nonsense syllables.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (V. Frajese)

DEUMM (F. Cella)

ES (U. Rolandi)

GroveO (J. Platoff) [incl. list of librettos]

L. da Ponte: Memorie (New York, 1823–7, 2/1829–30; Eng. trans., 1929/R)

F. Fapanni: ‘G. Bertati trivigiano poeta drammatico’, L’apatista (1 Dec 1834)

G. Salvioli: Intorno al poeta drammatico Giovanni Bertati: opuscolo per nozze Bertoja-centenari (Venice, 1880)

A. Schatz: ‘Giovanni Bertati’, VMw, v (1889), 231–71

U. Rolandi: Il librettista del ‘Matrimonio segreto’ (Tricase, 1926) [orig. pubd in Rivista nazionale di musica, vii (1926)]

W. Dean: ‘The Libretto of The Secret Marriage’, Music Survey, iii (1950), 33–8

P.J. Smith: The Tenth Muse: a Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York, 1970)

S. Kunze: Don Giovanni vor Mozart: die Tradition der Don-Giovanni-Opern im italienischen Buffa-Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1972)

F. Cella: ‘La premessa di Giovanni Bertati’, Storia dell’opera, ed. G. Barblan and A. Basso (Turin, 1977), iii/2, 143–51

D. Goldin: ‘Un librettista da rivalutare’, Giovanni Bertati, 1735–1815 (Martellago, 1985), 23

D. Goldin: La vera fenice: librettisti e libretti tra Sette e Ottocento (Turin, 1985)

M.G. Accorsi: ‘Teoria e pratica della “variatio” nel dramma giocoso: a proposito della “Villanella rapita” di Giovanni Bertati’, I vicini di Mozart: Venice 1987, 139–64

R. Angermüller: ‘Die Wiener Fassung von Pasquale Anfossis “Il curioso indiscreto”’, ibid., 35–98

JOHN PLATOFF

Berté, Heinrich [Harry]

(b Galgócz, Hungary [now Hlohovec, Slovakia], 8 May 1857; d Perchtoldsdorf, nr Vienna, 23 Aug 1924). Austro-Hungarian composer. After the death of his father in 1867 he moved with his brother Emil to Vienna, studying with Hellmesberger, Fuchs and Bruckner at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Conservatory and becoming a fine pianist. After the success of his second ballet Die goldene Märchenwelt (Hofoper, 1893) he continued to compose for the stage, producing at least six ballets and a dozen operettas. His greatest success came with Das Dreimäderlhaus (Raimundtheater, 15 January 1916), an operetta using melodies by Schubert and based on a distorted version of his life. This became one of the greatest operetta successes of its time, achieving popularity in the USA as Blossom Time (arr. Romberg, New York, 21 September 1921) and in Britain as Lilac Time (arr. Clutsam, London, 22 December 1922; as Blossom Time, London, 1942). Berté’s brother Emil (1855–1922) became a music publisher in Vienna, and his son Emil jr (1898–1968), who studied composition with Franz Schmidt, wrote an opera and some operettas. GänzlEMT

ANDREW LAMB

Berteau [Berthault, Bertaud], Martin

(b 1708; d Angers, 23 Jan 1771). French cellist. He was the founder of the French school of cello playing. Among his pupils were Tillière, Janson, Cupis and the elder Duport. He began by playing the bass viol, studying in Germany with Kozecz, the Bohemian performer on that instrument. After hearing the Italian cellist Francischello he gave up the viol for the cello. In 1739 he played a concerto of his own composition with great success at the Concert Spirituel in Paris. La Borde praised him highly: ‘M. Berteau fut le Professeur qui contribua le plus à la perfection de cet instrument, par la manière dont il en jouait’. Some doubts have been cast upon the authenticity of the few works which survive, largely due to confusion over his date of death, thought by F.-J. Fétis, Eitner and others to be 1756. The later date given above is, however, confirmed by the register of St Pierre d’Angers and in an annotation by Abbé Roze to a manuscript of ‘Sonate del S[i]gnore Berteau 1759’ (F-Pn) of which two pages, according to Roze, are autograph. Jean Louis Duport included an étude (no.6) by Berteau requiring the use of thumb position in his Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle et la conduite de l’archet. A 19th-century etching, showing him seated with his cello, is reproduced by Vidal (ii, pl.lxxix).

WORKS

printed works pubd in Paris

[6] Sonate da camera, vc, bc (1748) [pubd under name Signor Martino]

[10] Sonate da camera, vn, bc, op.2 (1767)

[4] Sonate de S[i]gnore Berteau, vc, bc, 1759, F-Pn; also incl. Air varié, vc

Menuette, airs gracieux, airs gays, in Recueil d’airs choisis des meilleurs auteurs ajustés pour le violoncelle, par Mr. Cupis le jeune (1746); Vivace in J.B. Bréval, Méthode raisonnée de violoncelle (1804); Etude no.6, G, in J.L. Duport, Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle et la conduite de l’archet (1806)

Lost works: Pièces, vc/bn, op.3 (?1767); Musique de violoncelle [op.4] (?1777); Sonates (1783); 4 concertos perf. at Concert Spirituel according to F.-J. Fétis; Sonate en trio, 2 vn, vc, perf. at Concert Spirituel, 5 April 1750, cited in Mercure de France

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

J.B. de La Borde: Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, i (Paris, 1780/R), 90

A. Vidal: Les instruments à archet, i (Paris, 1876/R), 120; ii (1877/R), 24, 326, 329ff, 345, 349, 351–2, 357, 367

J.H. Adas: ‘Le célèbre Berteau’, EMc, xvii (1989), 368–80

V. Walden: One Hundred Years of Violoncello: a History of Technique and Performance Practice from 1740–1840 (Cambridge, 1998)

MARY CYR

Bertezen, Salvatore

(b Malta, fl 1780–?1792). Italian singing teacher of Belgian parentage. He was living in Rome about 1780, the year in which he published there his Principj di musica teorico-prattica. After a short stay in Paris he moved to London, where in 1781 a completely rewritten and much condensed second edition appeared as Principj della musica (in which he called Malta his homeland). In 1782 he produced an Extract of the Work entitled ‘Principles of Music’, including some new material. Fétis praised the author for his ‘knowledge and erudition’ and his work as ‘a rather estimable collection of good critical and historical observations’, but held that it did not fulfil its function as an elementary method for music students. Bertezen also published in London Four Songs and Two Duetts (?1783) and Six Songs. A letter by him is in the Bologna Conservatory library. A Salvatore Bertezen died in France in 1792, but this may have been the unnamed nephew to whom the first edition of Bertezen's Principj is addressed.

FERRUCCIO TAMMARO

Bertha, Sándor

(b Pest, 19 Aug 1843; d Paris, 24 Nov 1912). Hungarian composer, pianist and writer on music. He was a pupil of Mosonyi Mihály to whom he dedicated his first published composition, Két dal (‘Two Songs’, 1860), From 1861 he wrote numerous articles for, among others, the first Hungarian music periodical, Zenészeti lapok. In 1862 he moved to Leipzig, where he studied composition with Moritz Hauptmann; he studied the piano with Bülow in Berlin in the following year. From 1864 he became one of the circle around Liszt in Rome, and in 1865 moved to Paris, where he opened an artistic salon and contributed to both literary and musical journals. His articles, which were mainly about Hungarian music, were published under the pseudonym Alexandre de –. He aspired in his compositions to a synthesis of Baroque musical forms and elements of 19th-century Hungarian music; they include a comic opera, Matthias Corvin (Paris, 1883 and Budapest, 1884), a coronation hymn (1867), two Suites hongroises (1871–2), an overture to Othello, and various occasional marches, Hungarian dances and vocal works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Hamburger: ‘Vier unveröffentlichte Briefe Hans von Bülows an Sándor Bertha’, SMH, ii (1962), 321–9

B. Szabolcsi: ‘Bertha Sándor levelei Bartalus Istvánhoz’ [The letters of Sándor Bertha to Istvan Bartalus], Mosonyi Mihály és Bartók Béla emlékére, ed. F. Bónis (Budapest, 1973), 129–53

I. Kecskeméti: ‘Europai hatások Bertha Sándor zongoradarabjaiban’ [European influences in the piano compositions of Sandor Bertha], Zeneelmélet, stíluselemzés (Budapest, 1977), 45–67

KATALIN SZERZŐ

Berthault, Martin.

See Berteau, Martin.

Bertheaume [Berthéaume, Berthaume], Isidore [Julien]

(b Paris, c1752; d St Petersburg, 19 or 20 March 1802). French violinist and composer. The nephew and pupil of the violinist Lemière l’aîné, he was a child prodigy whose performances of his own works and those of Gaviniès, Lolli and Felice Giardini caused a sensation at 19 appearances at the Concert Spirituel during the years 1761 and 1765–9; he continued to be a favourite soloist there, appearing on 31 occasions between 1775 and 1790, when the concerts ended. He also studied with Lemière’s teacher Gaviniès. In 1767 he became a member of the Opéra orchestra, and in 1769 published his op.1, dedicated to the Duchess of Villeroy. Bertheaume withdrew from Parisian musical life between 1769 and 1775 – it is not known why or to where – but in the latter year he returned, rejoining the Opéra orchestra (until 1781) and appearing again at the Concert Spirituel as soloist and in the orchestra. He was also leader of the Concert d’Emulation (1786) and Opéra comique (1788), and played at the Société des Enfants d’Apollon (1787–90). From 1789 to 1791 he was conductor and co-director of the Concert Spirituel with Legros. These activities were interrupted by the Revolution, and he fled to Germany in 1791 with his nephew and pupil, Carl Philippe Lafont. There he played at several courts until in 1793 the Duke of Oldenburg and Prince-Bishop of Lübeck appointed him Konzertmeister to the court at Eutin. This post he retained until 1801 when he went by way of Copenhagen and Stockholm to St Petersburg, where he briefly held a position as leader of the imperial orchestra.

Bertheaume was a worthy rival of Viotti in Paris. He was an outstanding virtuoso, if not quite of Viotti’s calibre. His compositions are effective, well written for the violin and were regarded favourably by his contemporaries. Following a 1786 performance of one of his simphonies concertantes, a Mercure de France critic reported the audience’s approval of both the composition and its interpretation by its composer and his pupil Jean-Jacques Grasset. The concertos are simple in structure but allow for ample display of the soloist’s virtuosity. The op.2 sonata, written ‘dans le style de Lolly’, and the second sonata of op.4 are notable for their use of scordatura. His students, in addition to Lafont and Grasset included Bartholomeo Bruni and Antoine Lacroix.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

op.

1	6 sonates, vn, bc (1769)
2	Sonate dans le style de Lolly, vn, vn acc. (1786)
3	6 duo mellés de petits airs variés, 2 vn (1786)
4	2 sonates, vn, bc (1787)
5	2 concerto, vn, orch (1787)
6	2 simphonies concertantes, no.1, 2 vn, orch, no.2, 2 vn, va/hn, orch (1787); no.2 ed. J.P. Vasseur (New York, 1983)
7	3 sonates, hpd/pf, vn acc. (1787) [arr. from opp.4 and 6]
8	3 sonates, hpd/pf, vn acc. (1787), lost
9	Amusements … avec des airs variés, vn (?1788), lost

Sonate, vn, bc, F-Pc; syms., vn concs., simphonies concertantes, perf. Concert Spirituel, unpubd, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

GerberNL

La LaurencieEF

MooserA

NewmanSCE

PierreH

J. Rühlmann: ‘Die Kunst des Violinspieles: eine historische Studie’, AMZ, new ser., iii/42 (1865), cols.681, 696

C. White: From Vivaldi to Viotti: a History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Philadelphia, 1991)

NEAL ZASLAW

Berthier, Jacques

(b Auxerre, 27 June 1923; d Paris, 27 June 1994). French organist and composer. He first studied with his father, organist of Auxerre Cathedral, and later (1945–6) with Guy de Lioncourt (composition) and Edouard Souberbielle (organ, fugue, counterpoint) at the Ecole César Franck in Paris. In 1960 he moved to Paris as editor to the recording company Fleurus and in the same year was appointed organist of the Jesuit church of St Ignace, a position he held until his death.

From his youthful years onwards Berthier was consistently drawn to liturgical composition. His musical output includes settings of texts by Joseph Gelineau, the Jesuit liturgical scholar and composer who was to become the inspiration for much of his mature work; a Requiem, which blends Latin texts (chorus) with French (soloists) and is exceptional for its large scale; an important corpus of settings, for use in parish churches, of the revised, vernacular liturgy; and various contributions to monastic liturgy, particularly for the Roman Catholic communities of En-Calcat, Landévennec and Maredsous and, most notably, for the ecumenical community of Taizé. Berthier first supplied chants for Taizé in 1955, but his series of new, canonic and repetitive chants dating from 1975 were responsible for bringing Taizé’s music to the attention of churches throughout the Christian world. These chants typify Berthier’s interest in reducing music to a state of concentration and extreme simplicity, drawing equally on tonal and modal traditions within a rhythmically direct framework. His instrumental music exhibits similar qualities, although the two cantatas of his last years show a reawakened interest in writing more complex music for the concert hall. (P. Faure and D. Rimaud: ‘Jacques Berthier, compositeur pour la liturgie’, Célébrer, no.236 (1994), 3–15.)

WORKS

(selective list)

choral

non-liturgical

With insts: Requiem, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1951; Cantate en forme de croix, double chorus, 6 insts, 1991; On peut vivre sans musique moins bien, cant, solo vv, chorus, wind insts, 1992

Unacc.: Ave maris stella, SATB, 1940; Dans les prisons de Nantes, SATB, ?1955; Mater dolorosa, 1972

liturgical

Mass settings: Messe française, 1964; Que tes oeuvres sont belles, 1983; Comme une aurore, 1984; Du Christ roi, 1985; Au coeur de ce monde, 1986; Vienne la paix, 1986; Messe de Brabant-Vallon, 1987; Pour la gloire de Dieu, 1989; De St Jean Baptiste, 1990; Des amis de Dieu, 1991; Missa pro Europa, 1993

Collections: 51 antiphons, 4 mixed vv and 3 equal vv, 1955; Psaumes cantiques pour les paroisses, 1964; Liturgie du soir pour la Semaine d’Issy, 1966; 220 short chants, mixed vv, 1980–81; 250 antiphons, 1981; Acclamations à l’Evangile, 1991

Chants for Taizé: Office pour le temps de Noël, 1955; Canons, 1975; Chants, 1976; Ostinatos, 1979

instrumental

Organ: Variations on six chorales; 10 liturgical meditations; Variations sur ‘Le Cévénole’; Choral et variations à Marie de Medicis; Psaume 138; Pour le ‘Bonheur aujourd’hui’; Carole; Conductus; Pilota

Other: 50 pieces for the Daily Office, 1967; Suite pour le Berger David, fl, org, 1972; Espace de prière, sitar, 1979; Salve regina, fl, ob, org, 1987; 10 pieces, fl, org, 1992

Principal publishers: Editions du Cerf, Heugel, GIA (Chicago), Kevin Mayhew

ANDREW WILSON-DICKSON

Berthier, Jeanne-Marie.

See Bathori, Jane.

Berthod, François

(fl 1656–67). French composer and poet. He was a Cordelier (a kind of Franciscan friar), but his name does not appear in the list of writers of his order. His writings for the edification of the faithful include Le vray chemin du ciel pour les agonisans (1656), Emblesmes sacrez tirez de l'Escriture saincte (1655–65) and L'histoire de la passion de N. Sauveur Jésus-Christ (1666). Berthod continued in the tradition of Irénée d'Eu and many other religious figures of the 17th century in specializing in the production of sacred contrafacta. It was for the recreation of the nuns of Maubuisson and Val-de-Grâce, Paris, that he produced three books of Airs de dévotion à deux parties published by Robert Ballard (iii) (Paris, 1656, 1658, 1662); some of the pieces are with continuo, some without. The melodies are those of popular airs by Lully, Lambert, Moulinié and other French composers of the time. Normally the lists of contents cite the first lines of the secular originals; only the last six pieces in the third book are ascribed to a composer, Gobert. (Identification of other composers is given in Launay) Berthod explained that he had changed the words as little as possible so as not to spoil the melodies. He also published a book of motets for unaccompanied solo voice, Parolles très dévotes mises en chant pour glorifier Dieu pendant l'élévation (Paris, 1665), to Latin words taken from the liturgy. The melodies, by Berthod himself, are adapted from Gregorian chant. He stipulated in his preface that the ornaments and accidentals used in secular music should be used in their performance. With François Paschal, he was charged with revising the books of Roman plainchant that had suffered many changes after the Council of Trent. The result was the Service de l'église (1667), a collection of liturgical chants in Latin, printed in neumes. Berthod preached at the court notably during royal visits to Fontainebleau, where he had performed his ‘Airs pieux & innocens’ before the queen. Possibly to reward his faithfulness during the years of Fronde (1648–53), the king awarded him certain diplomatic assignments. His lively Mémoires give evidence of his audacity, his guile and even his love of sports.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.J.N. Monmerqué, ed.: Mémoires de Valentin Conrart … Suivis des Mémoires du Père Berthod (Paris, 1825/R)

D. Launay: La musique religieuse en France du Concile de Trente à 1804 (Paris, 1993)

DENISE LAUNAY/JAMES R. ANTHONY

Berthold [Bernold] de Lantins.

See Lantins, de.

Bertholdo, Sperindio.

See Bertoldo, Sperindio.

Bertholusius [Bertholussius, Berthulusius], Vincentius.

See Bertolusi, Vincenzo.

Berti, Carlo [Bertus, Carolus]

(b ?Florence, c1555; d Mantua, 1602, before 2 Sept). Italian composer and organist. He was born into the Florentine family of the Berti Signesi (i.e. originally from Signa); his birthplace is unknown as his name does not appear in the Florentine baptismal records. His father, Antonio di Tommaso, died in Antwerp on 4 September 1574 leaving him in the care of relatives. He was accepted as a novice in the Servite order at SS Annunziata, Florence, on 30 January 1577 and on 16 November 1580 he was ordained at the convent of the order in Lucca. In the dedication to Jacopo Corsi of his Magnificat octo tonorum (1593), Berti acknowledged his musical training with Maurizio Borselli, organist and maestro di canto at SS Annunziata. Berti was appointed maestro di cappella there some time before 10 January 1592, and in October of the same year he dedicated his first publication, the Psalmi for five voices, to Lelio Baglioni, the General of the Servite order, and to the priors of the Florentine convent, for which he was rewarded with 175 lire.

During Berti’s tenure as maestro di cappella the musical activities at the SS Annunziata were considerably expanded; besides putti (boys) and the occasional castrato lent by Emilio de’ Cavalieri, then superintendent of ducal music, trombone and cornett players mainly from the instrumental school of Bernardo Pagani ‘detto il Franciosino’ were regularly employed as musici straordinari on the principal feast days. On 20 January 1601 Berti left Florence for Mantua, taking a letter of recommendation to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga from Jacopo Corsi. According to a letter addressed to the duke by Francesco Rasi (in I-MAa), Berti was to continue in Mantua the training in singing and counterpoint that he had already begun in Florence of Rasi’s younger sisters. In another letter, Ascanio Rasi, Francesco’s father, requested of the duke that Berti be allowed to reside at the Rasi home in Mantua so that his daughters’ instruction might proceed without hindrance. On 2 September 1602 the Servite convent in Florence received news of Berti’s death in Mantua.

Berti’s three books of sacred music fill a gap in Florentine sacred music between Corteccia’s Canticorum (1571) and Marco da Gagliano’s Officium defunctorum (1607/8). Of the Psalmi omnes qui in vesperis a romana ecclesia toto anno decantantur, quinque vocibus concinendi (Venice, 1592), only the bass partbook survives. His Magnificat octo tonum quinque vocibus concinendi (Venice, 1593; holograph in I-Fn) are set out in the alternatim manner; the even-numbered verses are set polyphonically with the appropriate plainchant melody incorporated into the polyphonic structure, but recast rhythmically as a point of imitation pervading all the voices. In the doxology the number of voices is increased to six by the use of canon. An early example of the application of parody techniques to the Magnificat is the Magnificat supra ‘Vestiva i colli’, based on Palestrina’s madrigal. The Motecta octonis vocibus concinenda (Venice, 1596; only surviving copy in I-Ls) are written in the more up-to-date Venetian polychoral style, but without exploiting the possibilities of unequal voice groupings. They show a well-planned sectional organization, alternating short homophonic phrases with melismatic, triple-time and tutti episodes that closely follow the sense and rhythms of the words. Giovanni Battista Jacomelli ‘detto del violino’, who regularly performed at the SS Annunziata, and Luca Bati each contributed one motet to this publication. Several of Berti’s Magnificat settings and motets were reprinted in 17th-century German anthologies and a few motets arranged for organ (in D-Mbs; PL-PE, ed. in AMP, i, 1963, p.556; vi, 1965, p.206).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoetticherOL

EitnerQ

A. Giani: Annalium sacri ordinis fratrum servorum B. Mariae Virginis, ii (Lucca, 1721), 298, 343

A. Ademollo: La bell’Adriana et altre virtuose del suo tempo alla corte di Mantova (Città di Castello, 1888), 34

D.A. Nutter: The Life and Works of Carlo Berti (diss., Rosary College, 1970)

S. Parisi: Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: an Archival Study (diss., U. of Illinois, 1989), 552

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 560

DAVID NUTTER

Berti, Giovanni Pietro

(d Venice, 1638). Italian composer. He seems to have been in Venice for some years before he was appointed as a tenor at S Marco on 19 February 1619. On 16 September 1624 he was made second organist, a position he held until his death. His two collections of Cantade et arie (Venice, 1624, 1627; 1624 ed. in ISS, vi (1986)) contain almost exclusively strophic arias for solo voice; the remaining pieces are a strophic bass cantata, a sonnet, a dialogue and three arias to be sung as duets. In addition, two solo songs appeared in Carlo Milanuzzi's Quarto scherzo ariose delle vaghezze (Venice, 2/1624, ed. in ISS, vi, 1986) and one in Alessandro Vincenti's Arie di diverse (RISM 1634⁷). Three motets by Berti survive, one in Leonardo Simonetti's Ghirlanda sacra (1625²) and two in manuscript (PL-WRu).

Many of Berti's strophic arias were published before 1618 as texts with accompanying Spanish guitar tablature assembled into poetic anthologies by Remigio Romano. Berti's songs are thus some of the earliest extant Venetian examples of monody, alongside those of Bartolomeo Barbarino and Carlo Milanuzzi. His choice of texts reveals his interest in sophisticated epigrams and symmetrical rhyme and metre structures, in contrast to the typically bland pastoral poetry set by other Venetian composers, who appear to have been less concerned about symmetry in verse and rhyme structure. To underscore the structural logic of his texts Berti often employed large-scale harmonic and melodic sequential repetitions; in most cases strict sequential patterning overrode the importance of individual word rhythms, as in Ardo ma rivelar (1624), but on occasion such rigid patterns were loosened to admit even a recitative idiom, for example in O da Fila canore (1624). Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of Berti's music is its prevalent mixture of duple and triple metres. More than any other Venetian composer at this time, Berti employed changes in metre to highlight structural divisions or changes of affect in a text. In many cases severely contrasting melodic styles – triple-metre aria and duple-metre recitative – help to delineate such metrical divisions. While Berti's Fiati angosciosi (1627, but dating from before 1620) shows him to have been the first Venetian composer to employ a contrast between aria and recitative idioms within a single strophic song, the later Da grave incendio oppresso (1627) reveals the significant structural potential of such a technique. Berti divided the eight-verse poem into two sections of equal length, the first six lines to be rapidly declaimed in recitative, the final two lines, with numerous text repetitions, to be sung in aria style. But the diversity of Berti's musical language extends beyond his synthesis of aria, arioso and recitative idioms in these songs; his incorporation of traditional madrigalian affective devices within his strophic arias gives his music a stylistic depth beyond that of most other Venetian composers. Poiche à miei pianti neghi (1624), for example, ends with a striking chain of 7–6 suspensions descending through a 6th; undoubtedly provoked by the harsh imagery of the text, the sheer density of dissonance is unprecedented in the Venetian repertory of solo song. The three non-strophic monodies found in Berti's two collections display traits common to the genre, including fluid, declamatory writing, chromaticism and extended fioritura. It is likely that these extended monodies represent the ‘cantade’ referred to in the title-pages of the two collections, as do their counterparts in similarly named collections by Alessandro Grandi (i); the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti himself compiled and published Berti's two volumes after having previously published Grandi's. The wide stylistic range of Berti's music, together with his position as one of the earliest Venetian composers of monody, make him one of the most important composers of secular song of his time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS

FortuneISS

R. Miller: The Composers of San Marco and Santo Stefano and the Development of Venetian Monody (to 1630) (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993)

R. Miller: ‘New Information on the Chronology of Venetian Monody: the “Raccolte” of Remigio Romano’, ML, lxxvii (1996), 22–33

ROARK MILLER

Bertie, Willoughby.

See Abingdon.

Bertin, Louise(-Angélique)

(b Les Roches, 15 Jan 1805; d Paris, 26 April 1877). French composer. She was the daughter of Louis Bertin and sister of Armand Bertin, successive proprietors and editors of the influential Journal des débats. She was brought up in an artistic and literary milieu, and her energies were channelled into painting and poetry as well as music. She had singing lessons from Fétis, who directed a private performance in 1825 of her first opera, Guy Mannering, following the current fashion for Scott’s novels, with a libretto written by herself. In 1827 Le loup-garou, to a libretto by Scribe, was produced at the Opéra-Comique. But this one-act opera of intrigue, with its Rossinian music, was less characteristic of her lofty aspirations than the two larger operas that followed: Fausto in 1831 for the Théâtre Italien, in which a marked originality of style was observed, and Esmeralda, produced at the Opéra in 1836, to a libretto by Victor Hugo based on his own Notre-Dame de Paris. Despite the prestige of Hugo and the Bertins, or more probably because of it, and falling very much under the shadow of the success of Les Huguenots, the opera was not a success. Berlioz, critic of the Débats, gave Louise Bertin much assistance in the preparation of the production, although this did not extend, as some maintained, to composing the music for her. He acknowledged only that he suggested an improved end to Quasimodo’s aria in Act 4. He held a high opinion of certain parts of the opera and criticized it for its extreme irregularity of phrasing and heavy orchestration, both evidence of the music’s boldness for contemporary ears. Her style had developed very quickly in a short period.

The failure of Esmeralda turned Bertin away from opera, and her music thereafter, mainly a series of cantatas, was played only in private. She published two volumes of poetry, Glanes in 1842 and Nouvelles glanes in 1876. Throughout her career she had to contend with the prejudice against women which forced her sometimes to conceal her identity as a composer, and also against partial paralysis, from which she suffered from birth.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris

operas

Guy Mannering (oc, 3, L. Bertin, after W. Scott), Bièvres, 25 Aug 1825, US-Bp

Le loup-garou (oc, 1, E. Scribe and E. Mazères), Paris, OC (Feydeau), 10 March 1827 (1827)

Fausto (op semiseria, 4, after J.W. von Goethe), Paris, Théâtre Italien, 7 March 1831, vs (1831)

Esmeralda (5, Hugo), Paris, Opéra (in 4 acts), 14 Nov 1836, vs ed. F. Liszt (c1836)

other works

Ultima scena di Fausto, pf (1826); Pf Trio (Paris, n.d.); 6 ballades (1842); 5 chbr syms., unpubd; Prière avec choeurs, unpubd

12 unpubd cants.: Hymne à Apollon, Jean le Parricide, La chasse et la guerre, Le départ du Comte, Le plus beau présent des dieux, Le retour d’Agamemnon, Les chasseurs, Les enfants des fées, Les esprits, Les juifs, Ronde de jeunes filles, Vanité

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

FétisB

H. Berlioz: ‘Académie royale de musique: La Esmeralda’, RGMP, iii (1836), 409–11 [review]

H. Blaze de Bury: ‘La musique des femmes: Mlle Louise Bertin’, Revue des deux mondes, 4th ser., viii (1836), 611–25

M. Brenet: ‘Quatre femmes musiciennes’, L’art, 2nd ser., iv (1894), 177–83

D.L. Boneau: Louise Bertin and Opera in Paris in the 1820s and 1830s (diss., U. of Chicago, 1989)

A. Gerhard: Die Verstädterung der Oper (Stuttgart, 1992), esp. chap.6 [on Esmeralda]

HUGH MACDONALD

Bertin de La Doué, Toussaint

(b Paris, c1680; d Paris, 6 March 1743). French composer. Generally known incorrectly by the first name of Thomas, he was the son of a Parisian master carpenter, Jacques Ladoué; in 1705, the year of his marriage, he is recorded as teaching the harpsichord and ‘other instruments’. The following year his first dramatic work, Cassandre, composed in collaboration with François Bouvard, was performed at the Opéra. He wrote two more tragédies en musique, Diomède (1710) and Ajax (1716), the latter enjoying particular success in the provincial theatres of Lyons, Nantes and Bordeaux as well as in Paris, where it was revived in 1726, 1742 and 1770. He later composed a pastorale-héroïque, Le jugement de Pâris (1718), and an opéra-ballet, Les plaisirs de la campagne (1719). Between 1714 and 1734 he played the harpsichord for the continuo in the orchestra of the Opéra. From 1716 onwards he gave harpsichord lessons to the regent’s daughters and was organist at the Théatins church in Paris.

Bertin de La Doué was one of the most characteristic composers of the French Regency. His tragédies en musique were influenced by the disciples of Lully: his tempest in Diomède is directly inspired by the tempest in Marais’ Alcyone. However, his work also provides evidence of the italianate tendency successfully promoted by Campra. He excelled in evocation of the then fashionable pastoral world, with ‘hunting sounds’ or ‘musettes’, and with Les plaisirs de la campagne he was one of the first composers for the musical theatre of Paris to abandon Lully’s style of writing in five parts and adopt the four-part style (without ‘quintes de violon’) that was to be employed by Rameau.

WORKS

stage

all first performed at the Paris Opéra

printed works published in reduced score in Paris, unless otherwise stated

Cassandre (tragédie en musique, prol, 5, F.-J. de Lagrange-Chancel), 22 June 1706, full score (1706), collab. F. Bouvard

Diomède (tragédie en musique, prol, 5, J.-L.-I. de La Serre), 28 April 1710 (1710)

Ajax (tragédie en musique, prol, 5, A. Menesson), 20 April 1716 (1716)

Le jugement de Pâris (pastorale-héroïque, prol, 3, M.-A. Barbier and S.-J. Pellegrin), 14 June 1718 (1718)

Les plaisirs de la campagne (opéra-ballet, prol, 3, Barbier and Pellegrin), 10 Aug 1719, F-Po*, autograph full score (1719)

other works

Airs in: Lully: Atys, Dec 1709 (1709); Lully: Psyché, 22 June 1713 (1734)

Airs sérieux et à boire (Paris, 1700, 1703, 1705–13, 1715, 1717)

Prélude non mesuré pour le clavecin (F-Pn)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (F. Lesure)

MGG1 (G. Ferchault)

Mercure de France (July 1726), 1654–60

N. Boindin: Lettres historiques sur tons les spectacles de Paris (Paris, 1719)

F. and C. Parfaict: Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent (MS, ?1741, F-Pn)

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)

G. Sadler: ‘Rameau’s Singers and Players at the Paris Opéra’, EMc, xi (1983), 453–67

J. de La Gorce: ‘L’orchestre de l’Opéra et son évolution de Campra à Rameau’, RdM, lxxvi (1990), 23–43

J. de La Gorce: ‘Tempêtes et tremblements de terre dans l’opéra français sous le règne de Louis XIV’, Le mouvement en musique à l’époque baroque, ed. H. Lacombe (Metz, 1996), 171–88

J. de La Gorce: ‘Toussaint Bertin de Ladoué musicien du Régent et compositeur des Plaisirs de la Campagne’, Etudes sur le XVIII^e siècle, xxvi (Brussels, 1998), 67–76

JÉRÔME DE LA GORCE

Bertini, (Benoît-)Auguste

(b Lyons, 5 June, 1780; d London, after 1843). French composer, half-brother of Henri Bertini. He was the son of a church musician, Gabriel Bertin (1746–1819), who composed a number of masses and motets. In 1793 he went to London as a pupil of Clementi and made his first public appearance as a pianist on 14 February 1793 in Salomon’s second concert. He met Haydn and dedicated his Three Grand Sonatas op.1 to him. He remained Clementi’s pupil until 1799 and moved in 1806 to Paris. The refusal by the Théâtre Feydeau to mount his opera Le prince d’occasion in 1817 caused him to move to Naples. Subsequently he taught in Amsterdam and Brussels and returned to London, where a series of 36 Grand Fantasias for piano were published in the 1830s. Some of these are fashionably descriptive, others exploit unusual combinations of hands, with curiosities such as the One-fingered Waltz. He also devised a musical shorthand, pincers for giving extra facility to the wrist, and various diagrammatic teaching systems.

WRITINGS

Stigmatographie, ou L’art d’écrire avec des points, suivie de La mélographie, nouvelle manière de noter la musique (Paris, 1812)

New System for Learning and Acquiring Extraordinary Facility on all Musical Instruments (London, 1830, 3/1849/R as Phonological System …)

Bertini’s Self-Teaching Catechism of Music for the Piano Forte (London, 1855)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

WolfH

M. Unger: Muzio Clementis Leben (Langensalza, 1914/R)

P. Beyls: Henri Bertini 1798–1876: pianiste virtuose et compositeur de musique (Grenoble, 1999)

HUGH MACDONALD

Bertini, Gary

(b Brichevo, Bessarabia [now Moldavia], 1 May 1927). Israeli conductor and composer of Russian birth. Taken to Palestine as a child, he began violin lessons at the age of six. He later studied at the Milan Conservatory (1946–7), in Israel, and at the Paris Conservatoire (1951–4) while taking further studies with Nadia Boulanger, Chailley, Honegger and Messiaen. In 1954 he returned to Israel and taught conducting at the Music Teachers’ College, Tel-Aviv, and later at the Rubin Academy of Tel-Aviv University, where he was appointed a professor in 1975. In 1955 he formed the Rinat Choir, which quickly acquired a wide reputation and became the Israel Chamber Choir. Bertini’s orchestral début was also in 1955 with the Israel PO, with which he first toured the USA and East Asia in 1960. His British début was in 1965 with the English Chamber Orchestra at the Bath Festival, and he became a frequent visitor to Britain, conducting many BBC concerts and, from 1970, forming a close association with the Scottish National Orchestra (of which he was principal conductor, 1971–8) and Scottish Opera. He made his Paris Opéra début in 1975 with Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue, and his Berlin début the next year with Die Entführung. In Israel Bertini has given the premières of many works, notably those of Partos and Seter, and in 1965 he formed the Israel Chamber Ensemble, comprising an opera group as well as an orchestra, with which he has toured in Europe and the USA. He conducted the premières of Tal’s Ashmedai at the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1971 and his Massada 967 at the 1973 Jerusalem Festival. A dynamic and versatile conductor in a wide repertory, Bertini is also a skilled lecturer and has given frequent illustrated concerts for young audiences. His enthusiastic support of Israeli music is reflected in recordings of over 20 orchestral works by Israeli composers. In 1964 he became music adviser to the Batsheva Dance Company, and he has composed incidental music for some 40 plays produced by Habima (Israel National Theatre) and the Cameri Theatre. His other compositions include a Concerto for horn, strings and timpani (1952), a ballet Delet aluma (‘Unfound door’, 1962), a violin sonata, songs and choral arrangements. In 1976 Bertini became musical director of the Israel Festival. The following year he conducted the première of Tal’s opera Die Versuchung at the Munich Festival and became musical director of the Jerusalem SO, a post he held until 1986. During this time he created the annual Liturgica Festival, which features sacred music from all periods. In 1981–3 he served as music adviser to the Detroit SO, and from 1983 to 1991 he was chief conductor of the Cologne RSO. From 1987 until his resignation in 1990 he was music director and Intendant of the Frankfurt Opera. At Frankfurt he conducted the première of Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 in 1987. From 1994 to 1997 he was artistic director of the New Israel Opera, introducing several operas which had never been performed before in the country and conducting the première of Tal’s Joseph in 1995. Bertini was appointed music director of the Tokyo Metropolitan SO in 1998. In May 1998 he gave the world première of Philippe Fénelon’s Salammbó at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, where he became a regular guest conductor in 1995. Besides his recordings of music by Israeli composers, his extensive discography includes the first commercial recordings of Weill’s first and second symphonies and Mahler’s completion of Weber’s Die drei Pintos, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter and a cycle of Mahler symphonies. Bertini is the recipient of several prizes and honorary titles, among them the prestigious Israel Prize (1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CohenWE

I. Tsoref: ‘Gary Bertini’, Lamerchav (5 Jan 1968)

Y.W. Cohen: Ne’imi Zemiirot Yisrael [The heirs of the psalmist] (Tel-Aviv, 1990)

WILLIAM Y. ELIAS

Bertini, Giuseppe

(b Palermo, 20 Jan 1759; d Palermo, 15 March 1852). Italian musician and lexicographer, son of Salvatore Bertini. He was educated at the Scuole Pie degli Scolopi and became a priest, devoting himself to music and to studies in archaeology and the literary and cultural history of Sicily. In 1789 he and his brother Natale Bertini (c1750–1828) contributed music to the memorial services held in Palermo for Carlo III and the Infante Gennaro Carlo. At that time he was deputy maestro di cappella under his father in the Cappella Palatina and he later became maestro di cappella there. In May 1828 he replaced his brother Natale as president of a commissione di censura for sacred music, constituted by royal decree in December 1827 to eliminate theatrical elements from church music and to draw up a list of approved works. Bertini held this post for about two years, after which the commission apparently dissolved without having accomplished anything.

Bertini is best known to music for his Dizionario storico-critico degli scrittori di musica (Palermo, 1814–15); one of the earliest Italian works of its kind, it relies heavily on the dictionary of Choron and Fayolle, but includes some valuable material on Italian figures. According to Fétis, he composed a large amount of music for Vespers and the Mass, but none is known to survive. Two settings of lessons for Holy Week, sometimes ascribed to him, appear with his father’s name in the Santini collection (in D-MÜs).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

SchmidlD

M. Galeotti: ‘Elogio dell’abate Giuseppe Bertini’, Giornale arcadico di scienze, lettere, ed arti, cxxvi (1852), 267–86

F. de Maria: Il R. Conservatorio di musica di Palermo (Florence, 1941), 29

O. Tiby: ‘Una bocciatura di V. Bellini’, La Scala, no.49 (1953), 66–9

O. Tiby: Il Regio Teatro Carolino e l’Ottocento musicale palermitano (Florence, 1957)

Bertini, Henri(-Jérôme)

(b London, 28 Oct 1798; d Meylan, 30 Sept 1876). French pianist and composer, half-brother of Auguste Bertini. He spent his childhood in Paris and was the pupil of his father, but more especially of his brother, who passed on the fruits of Clementi’s teaching. At the age of 13 he was taken on tour by his father, playing in Belgium, Holland and Germany. Later he spent some time in London and Scotland before settling in Paris in 1821. His life was uneventful, devoted to giving concerts, teaching and the production of an immense number of compositions, reaching 180 opus numbers. As a player he had Clementi’s clarity of technique and a style of phrasing akin to Hummel’s and Moscheles’s. He was less brilliant in manner than Kalkbrenner and Herz, and was, according to Marmontel, no dreamer or Romanticist despite his association with the leading figures of the 1830s; he concentrated more on strict pedagogy. His compositions include numerous rondos, fantasias, variations, divertissements etc., and his studies were used for over a century. He published a nonet, six sextets for the piano and strings, and many smaller chamber works. Three nonets and three symphonies for the piano and orchestra are among his unpublished works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (W. Kahl)

O. Comettant: Musique et musiciens (Paris, 1862)

A.F. Marmontel: Les pianistes célèbres (Paris, 1878, 2/1887)

H. Fisher: Notes on Bertini’s Etudes opus 137 (London, 1914)

P. Beyls: Henri Bertini 1798–1876: pianiste virtuose et compositeur de musique (Grenoble, 1999)

HUGH MACDONALD

Bertini, Salvatore [Salvadore]

(b Palermo, 1721; d Palermo, 16 Dec 1794). Italian composer. According to his son Giuseppe Bertini (Dizionario), he had his first music lessons from Pietro Pozzuolo, a Palermo musician; he was sent to Naples, where he studied logic at the Jesuit college and then, for eight years, music under Fago and Leo at the Turchini Conservatory, receiving his diploma in composition in 1746. On graduating he was offered a post at the Russian court, but he refused it on religious grounds. On 9 March 1748 he was named substitute maestro di cappella at the Cappella Palatina, Palermo, in place of Perez, who was given leave to travel. Perez never returned, but Bertini became titular maestro only in 1778 on Perez’s death. In 1772–3 he composed three occasional dramatic works, performed at the royal palace in Palermo – Giuseppe Bertini related that a great storm at sea on his father’s return from a later trip to Rome and Naples caused him to vow to write nothing but sacred music if saved. Two oratorios, now lost, are known from the 1750s, but two Miserere settings, one for two choruses and another (in D-MÜs) for four voices and organ for Maundy Thursday, were his most famous works; two of his Lamentation settings are also extant (in MÜs). In 1789 he contributed considerable music to Palermo’s memorial services for Carlo III and the Infante Gennaro Carlo. Bertini wrote the mass for the climactic final ceremony, performed with 40 singers and 97 players and praised by Blasi for its excellent counterpoint, original ideas and suitability to the text. A generation later, Giuseppe Bertini described his father’s church music as out of date because of its theatrical style, but praised it as clearly and simply written and without excessive instrumental activity. A set of three accompanied piano sonatas op.1 (London, c1800), often attributed to him, is actually by Benoît-Auguste Bertini.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (A. Mondolfi Bossarelli) [incl. detailed work-list]

G. di Blasi e Gambacorta: Funerali per Carlo III re delle Spagne e per l’Infante di Napoli D. Gennaro Borbone (Palermo, 1789)

G. Bertini: Dizionario storico-critico degli scrittori di musica (Palermo, 1814–15)

G. Sorge: I teatri di Palermo nei secoli XVI, XVII, XVIII (Palermo, 1926), 244, 401, 404

Bertinotti(-Radicati), Teresa

(b Savigliano, Piedmont, 1776; d Bologna, 12 Feb 1854). Italian soprano and teacher. After singing at the age of 11 in a children's performance at the Teatro S Carlino in Naples, she studied with La Barbiera for four years and began her career as an operatic singer. By the time of her marriage to Felice Radicati in 1801, she was already well known in Italy as a prima donna. From 1801 to 1805 she continued to sing in Italy and, according to Schmidl, appeared in Russia in 1803. From 1805 to 1808 the Radicatis were in Germany and Austria; a Munich reviewer praised her in Cimarosa's Gli Orazi (September 1806) as ‘a sensitive, sweet singer with a voice not too strong or brilliant, but pleasant, clear and moving’. In 1809 she sang in the Netherlands on the invitation of Louis Bonaparte, and from 1810 to 1812 she appeared at the King's Theatre in London, enjoying particular success in Mozart operas. The next two years she sang at the Teatro S Carlo in Lisbon. Thereafter her career declined; her Paris performances in 1817 and 1818 were received less favourably. She continued to sing in Italy until 1820, the year of her husband's death, but then retired from the stage and devoted herself to teaching singing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FlorimoN

SchmidlD

T.J. Walsh: Opera in Dublin, 1798–1820: Frederick Jones and the Crow Street Theatre (Oxford, 1993)

ALBERT MELL

Bertola, Giovanni Antonio.

See Bertoli, Giovanni Antonio.

Bertoldi, Bertoldo di

(b Castel Vetro, nr Modena; fl1544). Italian composer. He may have been a cleric. His known output consists of a single volume of four-voice madrigals (Venice, 1544). From the dedication, to Laura d'Este, it appears that he had, or wished to have, some connection with the Este family in Ferrara. His madrigals, which are settings of texts commonly used at the time, are competently written in a somewhat unadventurous style reminiscent of Arcadelt.

JAMES HAAR

Bertoldo [Bertholdo], Sperindio [Sperandio, Sper'in Dio]

(b Modena, c1530; d Padua, 15 Aug 1570). Italian composer and organist. On 1 January 1552 ‘Master Sperandio’ was organist of Padua Cathedral. In 1557 he obtained a ten-year contract with a substantial increase in pay. In 1567 his income was raised again, with a 16-year contract, but in the same year he was suspended from his job for insubordination and the chapter began seriously to look for a successor. After some months the bishop informed the chapter members that their organist had apologized, and he was reinstated. Evidently things went smoothly after that; the payment of his salary was continued to his widow after his death. In the dedications of his two extant books of madrigals Bertoldo described them as the ‘second and third parts’ of his work; what he meant as the ‘first part’ is not specified.

Bertoldo's keyboard compositions, published posthumously, provide an important link between the music of Marc Antonio and Girolamo Cavazzoni and that of the Venetian composers Claudio Merulo and Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. The canzoni francese feature florid ornamentation with trills and rapid scale passages in both hands; this type of decoration also characterizes Bertoldo's two toccatas. The ricercares on the first and third tone are excerpted from ensemble pieces by Annibale Padovano, with ornaments added in the soprano and tenor parts, while the ricercare on the sixth tone appears to be an early example of monothematic ricercare.

WORKS

Il primo libro di madrigali, 5vv … con un'echo, 6vv, et un dialogo, 8vv (Venice, 1561)

Il secondo libro di madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1562)

Canzoni francese intavolate per sonar d'organo (Venice, 1591); ed. in CEKM, xxxiv (1969)

Tocate, ricercari et canzoni francese intavolate per sonar d'organo (Venice, 1591); ed. in CEKM, xxxiv

Madrigals in 1561⁵, 1564¹⁶ (ed. Celebri raccolte musicali venete del Cinquecento, i, Padua, 1974), 1568¹⁶, 1569²⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei sec. XIV, XV, XVI’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214, esp. 119–21; xix (1942), 49–92

KLAUS SPEER/KIMBERLY MARSHALL

Bertoli [Bertola], Giovanni Antonio

(b Lonato, bap. 27 Jan 1598; d ? after 1645). Italian composer and bassoonist. He served as an altar boy and chorister in the parish church of Lonato and studied alongside Antonio Bertali and Pietro Verdina for the priesthood at the acolytes' school in Verona, under Stefano Bernardi. From April 1614 to July 1615 he played the cornett at Verona Cathedral. In the dedication of his Salmi intieri (Venice, 1639) to Emperor Ferdinand III, he declared that he had been in the service of Archduke Carl Joseph Habsburg, Bishop of Breslau and Bressanone, presumably following on from his teacher Bernardi, who was in the archduke's employ from 1622 to 1624. In the two prefaces to his Compositioni musicali (Venice, 1645) he stated that he was persuaded to publish the collection by Francesco Turini, organist of Brescia Cathedral and the volume's dedicatee, and by two musicians working at the court of Ferdinand III, Bertali and Giovanni Sansoni, an indication both that he was definitely in Italy during that period and that he continued to have a stable connection with the Habsburg imperial chapel. According to the posthumous tribute by Stefano Pasino found in the preface to his sonatas of 1679, Bertoli also conducted a group of wind players active in the ‘sacred chapels of Lombardy’.

His Compositioni musicali is not only the first published set of sonatas for bassoon, but also the first known collection devoted to solo sonatas. The elaborate structure of the pieces derives from an established improvisatory practice that involved strophic variation and an increase in technical difficulty for the player. In each sonata the continuo introduces a short motif that returns several times in the form of an interlude. A series of extended passages is varied by both soloist and continuo, each variation bringing with it an increase in acceleration and an escalation of rhythmic complexity. The earlier collection of Salmi intieri reveals Bertoli's mastery in adapting the most up-to-date techniques in concertato writing to a complete cycle of psalms, including a five-voice Magnificat and the four main Marian antiphons for three voices, two violins or cornetts and continuo.

WORKS

Salmi intieri che si cantano alli Vespri di tutte le feste e solemnità dell'anno, 5vv, bc, other insts (Venice, 1639)

[9] Compositioni musicali fatte per sonare col fagotto solo, ma che puonno servire ad altri diversi stromenti, et delle quali anche le voci possono approfitarsi (Venice, 1645), nos.1–3 ed. in HM, ccxviii (1973)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NewmanSBE

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Documenti veronesi su musicisti del XVI e XVII secolo’, Scritti in onore di Mons. Giuseppe Turrini (Verona, 1973), 543–75

B. Klitz: ‘The Bassoon in Chamber Music of the Seventeenth Century’, JAMIS, ix (1983), 5–20

G. Bonomo: ‘Le Compositioni musicali fatte per sonare col fagotto solo (1645) di Giovanni Antonio Bertoli’, Liuteria e musica strumentale a Brescia tra Cinque e Seicento: Salò 1990, ii, 91–161

GABRIELE BONOMO

Bertolini, Orindio.

See Bartolini, Orindio.

Bertolli, Francesca

(b Rome; d Bologna, 9 Jan 1767). Italian contralto. In 1728 she was in the service of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany and sang in two operas in Bologna and two in Livorno. Handel engaged her for the second Royal Academy at the King's Theatre (1729–33); she appeared in 15 or 16 of his operas, in Ariosti's Coriolano, Leo's Catone and two pasticcios. She took part in Handel's first London performances of oratorio, singing in Esther and the bilingual Acis and Galatea (1732), and in the following year in Deborah. From 1733 to 1736 she sang with the Opera of the Nobility in 12 operas, including five by Porpora, Veracini's Adriano, and revivals of Bononcini's Astarto and Handel's Ottone. She returned to Handel (1736–7) and sang in four or five of his operas, and in a pasticcio based on Vinci's Didone. She sang in the first performances of Leo's Achille in Sciro and Galuppi's Adriano in Siria in Turin (1740), in Vicenza (1740), Venice (three operas in 1740–41) and Genoa (1742). She retired soon after, but appeared with Bernacchi in a private concert at Bologna in February 1746. She was married to one Vincenzo Corrazza.

No singer except Strada and Senesino appeared in so many of Handel's operas. The nine parts he composed for her, Idelberto in Lotario, Armindo in Partenope, Gandartes in Poro, Honoria in Ezio, Melo in Sosarme, Medoro in Orlando, Ramisa in Arminio, Leocasta in Giustino and Selene in Berenice, indicate a voice of limited range and capacity; her regular compass was b to e''. She specialized in male roles, as the above list suggests. Mrs Pendarves, who was contemptuous of her voice, ear and manner, described her as ‘a perfect beauty, quite a Cleopatra’. In 1733 she was courted (unsuccessfully) by the Prince of Wales.

WINTON DEAN

Bertolotti, Bernardino

(b Salò, 26 March 1547; d ?Rome, after 1609). Italian instrumentalist and composer. Bernardino was the son of Agostino, from 1571 to 1582 maestro di cappella of Salò Cathedral and a member of a famous family of instrumentalists and instrument makers. He was employed as an instrumentalist at the court of Ferrara from December 1578 until its dissolution early in 1598. A letter (in I-MOs) states that one of his functions at Ferrara was as a violinist. He served Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua briefly in 1598 and dedicated the third book of madrigals to him. He was almost certainly employed as a trombonist at S Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, in March 1600 and, according to the title-page of the third book of madrigals, in 1609 he was instrumentalist of the pope in Castel S Angelo in Rome. He was a composer of minor importance and managed to preserve the conventional style of the canzonetta-madrigal even in the midst of the revolutionary developments in style characteristic of the early 1590s in Ferrara. A comparison of his setting of Io t’amo of 1593 with Luzzaschi’s of 1594 well illustrates the two differing approaches. No works by Bertolotti were included in the anthologies of works by Ferrarese musicians assembled during the 1580s and 90s. Gasparo Bertolotti, known as Gasparo da Salò, was Bernardino’s nephew.

WORKS

Missarum liber primus, 5vv (Venice, 1593), inc.

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1593)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1609)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A.M. Monterosso Vachelli)

NewcombMF

H.-W. Frey: ‘Die Kapellmeister an der französischen Nationalkirche San Luigi dei Francesi in Rom im 16. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 32–60

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

Bertolotti, Gasparo.

See Gasparo da Salò.

Bertolusi [Bertholussius, Bertholusius, Bertulusius], Vincenzo [Vincentius]

(b Murano; d Copenhagen, 18 Sept 1608). Italian composer and organist. He was probably educated in Venice. He went to Poland in 1595 and was an organist in the chapel of King Zygmunt III Vasa at Kraków until 1607, when he moved to the court of King Christian IV in Copenhagen. A few madrigals included in anthologies (RISM 1577⁷, 1584⁴, 1598⁹) are known from his Italian period. In Poland he composed 29 polychoral motets, published as Sacrarum cantionum … 6, 7, 8 et 10 vocibus liber primus (Venice, 1601); ten appear reprinted in other collections or in manuscripts (Ego flos campi, 6vv, ed. in Musik i Danmark på Christian IV's tid, v, Copenhagen, 1988). Two other motets were included in the collection Melodiae sacrae (ed. W. Lilius, Kraków, 1604), which consists of works by Zygmunt III's musicians. Two instrumental pieces, a ricercare and a fantasia, survive in manuscript at the Lithuanian National Library in Vilnius.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Hammerich: Musikken ved Christian den Fjerdes hof (Copenhagen, 1829)

N. Krabbe: Traek a musiklivet i Danmark på Christian IV's tid [Aspects of music life in Denmark at the time of Christian IV] (Copenhagen, 1988)

J. Trilupaitiene: ‘Nieznany XVII-wieczny rękopis z Kroż’ [An unknown 17th-century manuscript from Kroze], Muzyka, xxxviii/1 (1993), 97–102 [with Eng. summary]

A. and Z.M. Szweykowski: Włosi w kapeli królewskiej polskich Wazów [Italians in the Chapel Royal of the Polish Vasa Kings] (Kraków, 1997) [with Eng. summary]

ZYGMUNT M. SZWEYKOWSKI

Bertomeu (Salazar), Agustín

(b Rafal, Alicante, 23 Dec 1929). Spanish composer. After receiving a basic musical education from his father, Manuel Serrano Folguera and José Izquierdo, he studied at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música, Madrid, where he was taught by Conrado del Campo, Julio Gómez and others (1948–52); he also took private composition lessons from Tomás Blanco. He joined the Spanish navy as its director of music in 1955. From 1963 he attended the Darmstadt summer courses for new music, where the influence of Boulez and Stockhausen effected a radical transformation of his compositional style. Hitherto notable for his nationalist and neo-classical tendencies, he now adopted serial techniques as well. After 1970 characteristics of his works include effective formal structures, sophisticated instrumentation and graphic notation. Despite many national and international awards (for Museo del Prado in 1967; Sinfonía equidistante in 1972 and 1974; Concierto galante in 1980; and the Cello Concerto in 1989) and frequent performances of his music at major contemporary music festivals, his works are not well known outside of Spain.

WORKS

Vocal: Navegar, navegar (Azorín), S, pf trio, 1973; 15 greguerías de Ramón Gómez de la Serna, SATB, insts, 1978; Recordando a Ramón Gómez de la Serna, S, cl, vc, perc, 1978; Derechos del niño, vv, 1980; 3 poemas de Juan Gil Albert, S, fl, cl, b cl, str trio, vib, xyl, 1986

Orch: Cádiz, sym. poem, 1960; Sinfonietta, 1961; Museo del Prado, 1967; Pantalán, 1967; Bululú, 1970; Miscelánea, 4 inst ens, 1970; Sinfonía equidistante, 1972; Variaciones sobre una configuración, 1974; Configurciones sinfónicas, 1975; Conc., ob, chbr orch, 1976; Concierto galante, fl, eng hn, orch, 1979; Sinfonía concertante, 1984; Concierto mediterráneo, band, 1985; Música para una inauguración, 1988; Vc Conc., 1989; Configuraciones sinfónicas, 1990; Nocturno de Madrid, 1992; Fl Conc., 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Wind Qnt, 1963; Variaciones, bn, str qt, 1964; Música, str qt, 1966; Confluencias sobre do sostenido, str qt, 1968; Vivencia, perc, 1970; Configuración I, str trio, 1974; Configuración II, str qt, 1974; Str Qt no.4, 1975; … Y después, cl, perc, 1976; De vez en cuando, 4 cl, 1977; Impromptu, 5 perc, 1979; Concertante, 2 tpt, 2 hn, 4 perc, 1985; Impromptu, fl, 1985; Retrospectiva de Mompou a Bach, org, 1985 [rev. kbd, 1990]; Divertimento, fl, kbd, 1986; Homenaje a Cabanilles, org, 1987; Divertimento, db, 1988; Fantasía galante, gui, 1989; Cuarteto romántico, 4 sax, 1990

Arrs.: Alfonso el Sabio: 7 cantigas de Santa María, SATB, rec ens, perc, 1975; D. Scarlatti: Sonata, K91, ob, bn, tpt, hn, 1985

Principal publishers: Alpuerto, Berben, Editorial de Música Española Contemporánea

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Marco: Música española de vanguardia (Madrid, 1970)

J. Ruvira: Compositores contemporáneos valencianos (Valencia, 1987)

Agustín Bertomeu (Madrid, 1991) [pubn of SGAE]

CHRISTIANE HEINE

Berton.

French family of composers and performers.

(2) Henri-Montan Berton

(3) Henri [François] Berton

(4) Adolphe Berton

DAVID CHARLTON

(1) Pierre-Montan Berton [Le Breton]

(b Maubert-Fontaine, Ardennes, 7 Jan 1727; d Paris, 14 May 1780). Composer, conductor and arranger. He was a boy chorister in Senlis Cathedral, and studied the organ, the harpsichord and composition at the choir school. Some of his youthful motets were performed at the cathedral. He left for Paris to continue his studies, receiving encouragement from J.-M. Leclair, and at 16 joined the choir of Notre Dame as a tenor. After two years he was engaged as a singer at the Paris Opéra, but withdrew immediately (possibly because of shyness) and joined the cello section. From about 1746 he sang bass parts at Marseilles for two years and then became musical director at the Bordeaux Grand Théâtre, where he began the career of editing and arranging for which he is remembered. He also directed concerts, served as organist at two churches and composed ballet music which was well received.

Berton returned to Paris in about 1753, and in 1755 won by competition the post of orchestral director at the Opéra in succession to Boyer. In September of the same year his first stage work, the opera-ballet Deucalion et Pyrrha, composed in collaboration with F.J. Giraud, was performed at the Opéra. Although his own stage works had little success, he excelled in the arrangement of older stage works to suit contemporary taste. In general, this process involved cuts, reorchestration, new recitatives and the insertion of newly composed material, including ballets, arias and choruses; existing recitatives were sometimes modernized with string accompaniment. The first work known to have received such attention was Campra’s Camille, reine des Volsques in 1756, and eventually Lully’s and even Rameau’s operas were modified similarly. Berton’s most successful personal contribution was a chaconne (commonly known as the Chaconne de Berton), originally heard in the 1762 revival of Campra and Desmarets’ Iphigénie en Tauride. All the works that Berton arranged were performed at the Paris Opéra; some were published and manuscripts survive (in F-Pc and Po), but research has yet to determine the exact extent of these revisions and the dates on which they were definitely introduced (the list below gives the most likely dates).

In 1767 Berton and J.-C. Trial succeeded François Rebel and Francoeur as managers of the Opéra; Berton remained a director when the city of Paris resumed financial control in 1769. He became general administrator of the Opéra in 1775–6 and 1777–8, retiring after the young Devismes bought control. The pension he secured lapsed with his death, this bearing upon the career of his son (2) Henri-Montan. Berton was also master of the King’s music (1760), and director of the Concert Spirituel (1771–3). He had taken direction of performances at Versailles from 1768 in both the royal theatre and the chapel. He apparently died of complications following the fatigue of directing his own arrangement of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux on 7 May 1780.

Berton radically raised orchestral standards at the Opéra from 1755 and assiduously looked for new talent; by updating performance techniques and facilitating the arrival in Paris of Gluck and Piccinni he paved the way for those composers in France. (He composed the ballets for the 1775 production of Gluck’s La Cythère assiégée at the Opéra.) In his own compositions no conspicuous individuality of style is apparent. There are reminders of Stamitz and Rameau and, in Silvie, italianate display arias and secco recitative. Occasionally there are fetching melodies (such as the musette ‘L’âge d’or’ in Deucalion) or an unexpected harmonic ellipsis (as in the ‘Gigue gratieuse’ from Erosine).

WORKS

printed works published in Paris

stage

Deucalion et Pyrrha (opéra-ballet, 1, G.-F.P. de Saint-Foix and P. Morand), Paris, Opéra, 30 Sept 1755, F-Po, 1 duet Pc; (n.d.), collab. Giraud

Silvie (opéra, prol., 3, P. Laujon), Fontainebleau, 17 Oct 1765 (1767), collab. J.-C. Trial

Erosine (pastorale-héroïque, F.-A. Paradis de Moncrif), Fontainebleau, 9 Nov 1765 (1766) [3rd entrée of Moncrif: Les fêtes lyriques]

Théonis, ou Le toucher (pastorale-héroïque, 1, A.-A.-H. Poinsinet), Paris, Opéra, 11 Oct 1767, Pc, Po, collab. Trial, Granier [2nd entrée of Poinsinet: Fragments nouveaux]

Adèle de Ponthieu (tragédie lyrique, 3, R. de Saint-Marc), Paris, Opéra, 1 Dec 1772, Po, frags. Pn*, collab. J.-B. de La Borde; rev. in 5 acts, 1775

Linus, 1775 (opéra, 5, C.-A. La Bruère), inc., Pn, collab. Trial and Dauvergne

Addns and modifications to operas by other composers (see OG work-list)

other works

Acis et Galathée, cant. (n.d.) [parody of Berton’s Chaconne]

In convertendo, motet, 1755

Songs: Selma; Vous à qui deux beaux veux assurent la victoire; Le premier amour; L’amour filial: Le jour répand sur la nature, duo

Other vocal works

Dance movements, incl. Chaconne de Berton [orig. written for Campra and Desmarets: Iphigénie en Tauride, 1762]

(2) Henri-Montan Berton

(b Paris, 17 Sept 1767; d Paris, 22 April 1844). Composer, teacher and writer, son of (1) Pierre-Montan Berton. According to Adolphe Adam, who based his account on Berton’s verbal reminiscences, Berton received little musical training from his father, who believed that proficiency came naturally. Thus, although Henri could read a score at the age of six, played keyboard instruments and the violin and later received some instruction in composition from J.-B. Rey (the conductor at the Opéra), he had no professional training; moreover Fétis wrote that Rey was not wholly sympathetic towards his pupil. What must have been a highly favoured musical household came to an end with the death of (1) Pierre-Montan. Shortly thereafter (or, according to Fétis, two years later), Henri Berton joined the Opéra orchestra as a violinist. At this time, when he was seeking further guidance in composition, his work was shown to Sacchini who subsequently helped him not, apparently, by imparting formal harmony or counterpoint, but by attempting to develop unity of style, coherence of melodies, and dramatic effectiveness in his stage compositions. From Sacchini and from Paisiello’s La frascatana, an early model, Berton adopted the easy melodic grace of the Italian style. Today this is heard as a Mozartian feature, but Berton had not yet encountered Mozart’s music.

Evidently Berton’s first publicly performed works were the opera Le premier navigateur (in 1784) and the cantatas he wrote for the Concert Spirituel, beginning in 1786. A favourable notice appeared in the Mercure de France in April 1787 after one of his cantatas was performed: ‘Each day this young composer increasingly justifies the expectations which he has created and stirs the public’s desire to see him work on a larger scale, more appropriate to his talents’. Berton, who was now supporting a family, continued with cantatas and stage works until the outbreak of the Revolution. The subsequent changes of direction in French music and dramatic taste proved crucial to him. The first flood of anti-clericalism resulted in his setting of Les rigueurs du cloître, in which a young nun is saved from entombment at the hands of a corrupt mother superior. Hardly the most subtle of operas, it nevertheless advanced his reputation and stands as one of the earliest prototypes of Fidelio. Several operas on topical themes followed, but Berton was evidently less interested in producing music for the Revolutionary cause than were many others; most of his functional Revolutionary music postdates his appointment as harmony professor at the new Paris Conservatoire (in 1795), an institution founded partly to provide music and musicians for public festivals.

Operatic work continued after a brief interval with Ponce de Léon (1797), for which Berton wrote both the libretto and the music, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to create greater dramatic freedom for his music. The ensembles of this comedy are certainly lively and effective, but the general dramaturgy is commonplace. In 1799 he presented his most original operas, Montano et Stéphanie and Le délire. Both have simple stories but high passions: the first work depicts the exploitation of innocence and the second the healing of a mentally deranged husband. Both held the stage for many years. Montano enjoyed performances throughout Europe and was given at Weimar as late as 1845; excerpts were played at concerts well into the 19th century. These operas were exceeded in their popularity only by Aline, reine de Golconde (1803), which reached the USA before being revived in Paris in 1847. Many published selections from these works were in circulation.

From 1807 to 1810 Berton was musical director at the Théâtre de l’Impératrice (Opera Buffa); this was followed by a period as chorus master at the Opéra (1810–15). His last really popular work, Françoise de Foix (1809), marked the beginning of a long decline in public estimation, despite a total of nine further original operas and several more in collaboration with such figures as Cherubini, Boieldieu and Kreutzer. He also made new arrangements of operas by Gluck (Echo et Narcisse, 1806), Mozart (Così fan tutte, 1813), Sacchini (Arvire et Evelina, 1820) and Grétry (Guillaume Tell, 1828). Berton was elected a member of the Institut in 1815, and devoted himself to teaching and writing. He took over Méhul’s composition class at the Conservatoire (on 1 January 1818) on the latter’s death. Later, Rossini’s great popularity prompted him to write the pamphlet De la musique mécanique in 1826, and it appears that he became a disillusioned man. In 1828 he suffered through the bankruptcy of the Opéra-Comique, to which he had sold the right of performing his works for an annuity of 3000 francs. Berlioz’s letters suggest not only Berton’s disapproval of Spontini’s music but opposition to all new developments whether by Berlioz or anyone else. In 1827 Berlioz reported Berton as saying, ‘There is nothing new in music … why try to improve upon the great masters?’. He was made an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1834 and received official recognition from several other countries. By his death he had taught at the Conservatoire for nearly 50 years.

Whether or not Berton really said what is reported above, it is important to know that on his own admission those masters he regarded as classics included Haydn and Mozart, and that several features of his own compositions vividly anticipate concerns of later Romantic music. His harmony treatise (1815) discloses a willingness to deduce musical laws from the relatively recent past. His analysis of phrase structure is coherent and expressed in up-to-date harmonic terms. There are sections on enharmonic and chromatic progressions including the augmented 6th chord, which he used freely in his own music. The three-volume dictionary of chords, appended to the treatise, is, however, far too rigid to be of any use.

Berton recommended fugue as an exercise, partly for its value in conferring unity in composition. Various other means of establishing unity are demonstrated in his operas; in Le délire and Montano et Stéphanie, motivic cross-reference and development are carried to impressive lengths, and the parallel-5th motif which opens Le délire is treated as a veritable idée fixe, representing Murville’s derangement. Other operas seek unity by starting a new act with the music which concluded the preceding one. Berton’s operas after 1789 never neglect the balanced and vocal Mozartian lyricism previously mentioned. But the second subjects of several overtures exploit the long-drawn-out, irregularly phrased instrumental melody found typically in the music of Schubert and Berlioz. He conceived many ideas directly in orchestral terms and shared with his compatriots an interest in unusual orchestration: a romance in Eugène is accompanied only by four violas.

Contemporary audiences were astounded by the tumultuous choral crescendo in the finale of Act 2 of Montano (though this was not a new feature in Berton’s music). Chorus scenes later became even more prominent; in the chivalric Françoise de Foix the structural stiffness and the emphasis on marching choruses recall Spontini. Berton's extreme use of psychological illustration is demonstrated in the scene from Le délire depicting Murville’s collapse after having a hallucination of his wife, whom he believes to be dead (ex.1).

There are many streaks of originality in Berton’s works, though not a persistent theatrical vision, and he never established a stable partnership with one librettist. His one undisputed success was Les deux mousquetaires (1824), seen each year to 1834 in 117 performances; but Ponce de Léon (1797), to his own libretto, enjoyed no fewer than 33 performances. Opposing musical lines (and love of wit) are exploited in his numerous and varied canons for voices. An ingenious eight-part example from the first collection contrasts four chromatic and four diatonic voices (at opposite ends of the table) and incorporates a pedal point for the non-singers. Berton’s romances were praised by Gougelot, but do not appear to exceed the narrow limits of expression usually adopted in this genre of French music.

Berton: (2) Henri-Montan Berton

WORKS

operas

all first performed in Paris; printed works published in Paris; genres are taken from librettos

PCI	Comédie-Italienne (Salle Favart)
PO	Opéra
PFE	Théâtre Feydeau
POC	Paris, Opéra-Comique

Le premier navigateur (cmda, 1, N.-F. Guillard), 1784, F-Pn*

Les promesses de mariage, suite de L’épreuve villageoise (opéra bouffon, 2, Desforges [P.-J.-B. Choudard]), PCI, 4 July 1787 (n.d.)

L’amant à l’épreuve, ou La dame invisible (oc, 2, P.-L. Moline and C.-F. Fillette-Loraux, after P. Scarron: Le roman comique), PCI, 5 Dec 1787, B-Bc*

Les brouilleries (comédie, 3, C.-J.L. d’Avrigny), PCI, 1 March 1790; rev. in 2 acts, 4 March 1790, F-Pn*

Les rigueurs du cloître (cmda, 2, J. Fiévée), PCI, 23 Aug 1790 (1790)

Le nouveau d’Assas (trait civique mêlé de chants, 1, Dejaure [J.-E. Bédéno]), PCI, 15 Oct 1790 (1790)

Les deux sentinelles (op, 1, F.-G.-J.-S. Andrieux), PCI, 27 March 1791, Pn*

Les deux sous-lieutenants, ou Le concert interrompu (comédie, 1, E.-G.-F. de Favières), PCI, 19 May 1792, Pn*; rev. version (with B.-J. Marsollier des Vivetières), POC (Feydeau), 31 May 1802 (1802)

Eugène, ou La piété filiale (op, 3, d’Avrigny), PFE, 11 March 1793, Pn*

Les congrès des rois (comédie, 3, Desmaillot [A.F. Eve]), POC (Favart), 26 Feb 1794, frag. by Berton Pn*, collab. Dalayrac, Grétry, Méhul and 8 others

Agricol Viala, ou Le héros de la Durance (op, 1, Fillette-Loraux), PFE, 9 Oct 1794, Pn*

Bélisaire [Act 3] (opéra, 3, A.-L. Bertin d’Antilly), POC (Favart), 3 Oct 1796 [Acts 1 and 2 by F.-A.D. Philidor]

Christophe et Jérôme, ou La ferme hospitalière (comédie, 1, Favières), POC (Favart), 26 Oct 1796

Ponce de Léon (opéra bouffon, 3, H.-M. Berton after Mme d’Aulnoy), POC, 4 March 1797 (n.d.)

Le dénouement inattendu (op, 1, Joigny), POC (Favart), 10 Nov 1797

Le rendez-vous supposé, ou Le souper de famille (comédie, 2, J.-B. Pujoulx), POC (Favart), 5 Aug 1798, Pn*, excerps, vs (n.d.)

Montano et Stéphanie (opéra, 3, Dejaure, after L. Ariosto: Orlando furioso), POC (Favart), 15 April 1799, Pn* (1799); rev. with new Act 3 (G.-M.-J.-B. Legouvé), 4 May 1800, fs (c1800), vs (1841)

La nouvelle au camp, ou Le cri de vengeance (scène lyrique, 1), PO, 14 June 1799, Po

L’amour bizarre, ou Les projets dérangés (oc, 3, C.-L. Lesur), POC (Favart), 30 Aug 1799

Le délire, ou Les suites d’une erreur (comédie, 1, J.-A. de Révéroni Saint-Cyr), POC (Favart), 7 Dec 1799 (c1800)

Le grand deuil (opéra bouffon, 1, J.-B.-C. Vial and C.-G. Etienne), POC (Favart), 21 Jan 1801 (1801)

Aline, reine de Golconde (opéra, 3, Vial and Favières, after M.-J. Sedaine), POC (Feydeau), 3 Sept 1803, frag. Pn*; (n.d.)

La romance (opéra, 1, F. Fillette and Lesur), POC (Favart), 26 Jan 1804 (1804)

Le vaisseau amiral [L’intrigue à bord, ou Forbin et Delville] (opéra, 1, Saint-Cyr), POC (Favart), 2 April 1805, Pn*; (n.d.)

Délia et Verdikan (opéra, 1, P.-J.-B. Elleviou), POC (Favart), 9 May 1805, frag. Pn*; (n.d.)

Les maris garçons (cmda, 1, P.C. Gaugiran-Nanteuil), POC (Feydeau), 15 July 1806 (1806)

Le chevalier de Sénanges [Adèle de Sénanges] (op, 3, A.J.P. de Ségur and L.N.P.A. de Forbin), POC (Feydeau), 23 July 1808, B-Bc*

Ninon chez Madame de Sévigné (comédie mêlée de chants, 1, Dupaty [L.E.F.C. Mercier]), POC (Feydeau), 26 Sept 1808, frag. F-Pn*; (n.d.)

Françoise de Foix (opéra, 3, J.-N. Bouilly and Dupaty), POC (Feydeau), 28 Jan 1809, frag. Pn; (n.d.)

Le charme de la voix (oc, 1, Gaugiran-Nanteuil and Fillette-Loraux), POC (Feydeau), 24 Jan 1811, Pn*

La victime des arts, ou La fête de famille (op, 2, L.-M. d’Estourmel), POC (Feydeau), 27 Feb 1811, collab. Isouard and Solié

Valentin, ou Le paysan romanesque (oc, 3, L.-B. Picard and ?M. Loraux), POC (Feydeau), 13 Sept 1813 (n.d.); rev. in 2 acts, 5 Dec 1818

L’oriflamme (opéra, 1, Etienne, L.-P.-M.-F. Baour-Lormian), PO, 1 Feb 1814, Pn, Po, I-PAc; (1814); collab. R. Kreutzer, Méhul and Paer

Les dieux rivaux, ou Les fêtes de Cythère (opéra-ballet, 1, Dieulafoy and Brifaut), PO, 21 June 1816, F-Po, collab. Kreutzer, Persuis and Spontini [for the wedding of the Duc de Berry]

Féodor, ou Le batelier du Don (oc, 1, Claparède), POC (Feydeau), 15 Oct 1816, B-Bc, F-Pn*, vs (n.d.); as Une journée du Czar, Brussels, 26 Oct 1816

Roger de Sicile, ou Le roi troubadour (opéra, 3, J.-H. Guy), PO, 4 March 1817, Po (n.d.)

Corisandre, ou La rose magique (oc, 3, J.A.P.F. Ancelot and Saintine [J.X. Boniface]), POC (Feydeau), 29 July 1820, Pn

Blanche de Provence, ou La cour des fées (opéra, 3, E.-G. Théaulon de Lambert and De Rancé), Tuileries, 1 May 1821, PO, 5 May 1821, Pc*, Po, collab. Boieldieu, Cherubini, Kreutzer and Paer

Virginie, ou Les décemvirs (tragédie-lyrique, 3, A.-F. Désaugiers), PO, 11 June 1823, Po; (1823)

Les deux mousquetaires, ou La robe de chambre (oc, 1, Justin-Gensoul and Vial), POC (Feydeau), 22 Dec 1824 (n.d.)

Pharamond (opéra, 3, Ancelot, P.-M.-A. Guiraud and A. Soumet), PO, 10 June 1825, Pn*, Po, R, vs (n.d.), collab. Boieldieu and Kreutzer

Les créoles (drame lyrique, 3, P.-J.-L. de Lacour), POC (Feydeau), 14 Oct 1826, Pn*; (n.d.)

Les petits appartements (oc, 1, J.-G. Ymbert, A.-F. Varner and H. Dupin), POC (Feydeau), 9 July 1827, Pn*; (n.d.)

La marquise de Brinvilliers (drame lyrique, 3, E. Scribe and Castil-Blaze [F.-H.-J. Blaze]), POC (Ventadour), 31 Oct 1831 (1831), collab. Auber, Batton, Blangini, A. Boieldieu, Carafa, Cherubini, Herold and Paer

Unperf.: La fête du soleil (opéra, de la Touloubre), rehearsed at PO, 1789, Pn (partly autograph), Po [mentioned in Lajarte]; Tyrtée (2, Legouvé), rehearsed at PO, 1793 [mentioned in FétisB and Choron-FayolleD]; Vingt ans de constance [La mère et la fille] (3, Dupaty), Pn*; Charles Deux [mentioned in Berton: Traité d’harmonie, 1815]

ballets

all unpublished; MSS in F-Po

L’enlèvement des Sabines (3), Fontainebleau, 4 Dec 1810; PO, 25 June 1811; another score, Pn

L’enfant prodigue (3), PO, 28 April 1812; another score, Pn

L’heureux retour (1), PO, 25 July 1815, collab. R. Kreutzer, L. Persuis

cantatas

first performed in Paris, unless otherwise indicated

Absalon [La mort d’Absalon], Concert Spirituel, 1786

Anne de Boulen [Bohlen], Société Académique des Enfants d’Apollon, 4 May 1787

Le sacrifice de Jephté: David dans le temple; Les bergers de Bethléem; La gloire de Syon; Marie de Seymours; Orphée dans les bois [?L’écho sacré]; all perf. Concert Spirituel, before 1791

Le retour de Thésée, Brussels, 1803, B-Bc

Trasibule, Hôtel de Ville, 16 Dec 1804 [for Napoleon’s coronation festivities], Br, F-Pc

Le chant de retour, POC (Feydeau), 27 July 1807, vs pubd

Cantata for the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise, T, Bar, chorus, orch, 1810, Pn

Lutèce, before 1815

other works

Sacred: Requiem; Te Deum; masses; other works

Revolutionary music: Strophes sur le dévouement des citoyens, 1v, b, 1793; Gaîté patriotique (F. Pilet), 1v, b, 1794; Marche militaire, wind band, 1795, arr. pf in Pierre (1899); Hymne du 21 janvier (Lebrun), 1v, kbd, 1796, repr. in Pierre (1899); Hymne pour la fête de l’agriculture (Lebrun), 1v, chorus, wind band, vs in Pierre (1899)

Solo vv, orch: Echos, témoins heureux, rondeau, T, hn obbl, orch (Paris, n.d.); O maîtresse chérie, duo, Pn

Other vocal: Hymne à Apollon, 1809; Hommage aux mânes du célèbre Grétry, 1816, Pc; 38 canons in 5 collections (all pubd Paris); over 50 romances, titles listed in Gougelot (1938–43), MGG2, RISM and Berton: Traité d’harmonie (1815)

Berton: (2) Henri-Montan Berton

WRITINGS

Traité d’harmonie, suivi d’un dictionnaire des accords (Paris, 1815)

Jeu des préludes harmoniques, ou Compas et boussoles des gammes musicales (Paris, 1819, 2/1842)

Rapport … sur les nouveaux instruments de musique … suivant la facture brevetée de M. Chanot (Paris, 1819)

De la musique mécanique et de la musique philosophique (Paris, 1826)

Rapport sur les instruments à cordes et à archet de M. Thibout (Paris, 1827)

Epître à un célèbre compositeur (Paris, 1829)

Rapport sur les perfectionnements apportés à la fabrication des pianos … de M. Le Père (Paris, 1837)

Catéchisme musical raisonné (Paris,1841)

with M.E. Carafa and G.Spontini: Reconstruction de la Salle Favart (Paris, n.d.)

Funeral speeches for Catel (1830), Boieldieu (1834), Le Sueur (1837) and Paer (1839), published by the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts (Paris)

Articles in encyclopedias and periodicals, incl. Gazette musicale de Paris, L’abeille

(3) Henri [François] Berton

(b Paris, 3 May 1784; d Paris, 19 July 1832). Composer and pianist, son of (2) Henri-Montan Berton. After musical instruction by his father, he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1796. On leaving in 1804 he began to publish piano arrangements of operatic pieces (including his father’s) and to compose. His first four stage works were produced in 1810 and 1811. Ninette à la cour displays fashionable levity with predominance of lively movements in the major mode, but no melodic originality. In fact, the first finale borrows the principal subject of the first movement of Mozart’s piano duet sonata k358/186c. He subsequently concentrated more successfully on romance composition, employing a popular and sentimental style. From 1820 to 1 January 1828 he taught singing at the Conservatoire; he also gained fame as a pianist. Une heure d’absence failed in 1827, but Le château d’Urtuby was produced posthumously and found some favourable comment. Berton died in a cholera epidemic.

WORKS

stage

all opéras comiques, first performed in Paris

Le présent de noces, ou Le pari (1, R.A.P.A. de Chazet), OC (Feydeau), 2 Jan 1810

Monsieur Desbosquets (OC, 1, C.-A. Sewrin), OC (Feydeau), 6 March 1810

Jeune et vieille (1, C.-A. Chazet and C. Dubois), OC (Feydeau), 12 Jan 1811, collab. L.B. Pradher

Ninette à la cour (2, C.-S. Favart and C.A. Creuzé de Lesser), OC (Feydeau), 21 Dec 1811 (Paris, n.d.)

Les casquets (1, Mme Riccoboni and J.-B.-C. Vial), OC (Feydeau), 19 Feb 1821

Une heure d’absence (1, ?M. Loraux), OC (Feydeau), 26 Dec 1827

Le château d’Urtuby (G. de Lurieu and Raoul), OC (Ventadour), 14 Jan 1834

other works

Vocal: Quatuor pour la fête de Sainte-Thérèse, 1806, F-Pc; c100 songs, incl. Pourquoi tourmenter, 1814; N’est-ce pas là l’amour, 1815; La mort du chevalier, 1816; Le cour et le village; Laisse-moi te parler de Bastien; Non, vous n’êtes plus Lisette; many other titles listed in MGG2 and catalogue of printed music, GB-Lbl

Pf: Les veillées parisiennes, ou Collection de contredanses, arr. pf (Paris, n.d.); 6 waltzes; arrs.; fantasias

(4) Adolphe Berton

(b Paris, 1817; d Algiers, 28 Feb 1857). Tenor, son of (3) Henri Berton. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he began his career at the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de la Renaissance. Lack of success prompted him to seek work elsewhere in France and in 1843 he was employed in a theatre at Nice with his wife. They travelled to Algiers the same year and remained there, Berton’s performances having been well received.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

Choron-FayolleD

EitnerQ

FétisB

La BordeE

PierreH

J. de la Porte and J.M. Clément: Anecdotes dramatiques, iii (Paris, 1775, R/1971), 45–6

‘Notice de la vie et des ouvrages de M. Berton’, Le nécrologe des hommes célèbres de France, xvii (Paris, 1782), 43–56

H. Blanchard: Henri-Montan Berton (Paris, 1839)

P. Smith [E.Monnais]: ‘Histoire d’un chef-d’oeuvre’, RGMP, viii (1841), 477–9, 485–7, 494–5

A. Adam: ‘Berton’,France musicale, vii (1844), 129–30

P. Smith [E. Monnais]: ‘Souvenirs anecdotiques sur Berton et plusieurs de ses ouvrages’, RGMP, xi (1844), 173–5

D. Raoul-Rochette: ‘Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Berton’, Académie royale des beaux-arts: séance publique annuelle (Paris, 1846), 21–47

A. Adam: Derniers souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris, 1859; Eng. trans., ML, xxx (1949), 121–35)

F. Halévy: Derniers souvenirs et portraits (Paris, 1863), 205ff

C. Pierre: Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris, 1899)

M. Ténéo: ‘Pierre Montan Berton d’après les “Souvenirs de famille historiques et artistiques” de son fils’, RHCM, viii (1908), 389–97, 416–24, 493 only

M. Ténéo, ed.: ‘Souvenirs de famille de H.M. Berton’, BSIM, vii (1911), no.1, pp.1–12; no.3, pp.41–6; no.6, pp.46–53

J. Tiersot: Lettres de musiciens écrites en français du XVe au XXe siècle, i (Turin, 1924); ii (Paris, 1936)

H. Gougelot: La romance française sous la Révolution et l’empire (Melun, 1938–43)

M.S. Selden: ‘Henri Berton as Critic’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 291–4

P. Citron, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Correspondance générale, i (Paris, 1972)

B. Deane: ‘The French Operatic Overture from Grétry to Berlioz’, PRMA, xcix (1972–3), 67–80

D.P. Charlton: Orchestration and Orchestral Practice in Paris, 1789 to 1810 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974)

K. Pendle: ‘A bas les convents: Anticlerical Sentiment in French Opera of the 1790s’, MR, xlii (1981), 22–45

Jean Mongrédien: ‘A propos de Rossini: une polémique Stendhal-Berton’, Stendhal e Milano (Florence, 1982), 673–93

M.E.C. Bartlet: ‘Opera as Patriotic Ceremony: the Case of L’Oriflamme’, IMSCR XIII: Strasbourg 1986, i, 327–39

C.J. Robison: One-Act Opéra-Comique from 1800 to 1810: Contributions of Henri-Montan Berton and Nicolo Isouard (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1986)

L. Rosow: ‘From Destouches to Berton: Editorial Responsibility at the Paris Opera’, JAMS, xl (1987), 285–309

M. Brzoska: ‘De l’anticléricalisme révolutionnaire au cléricalisme anti-révolutionnaire chez H.M. Berton de 1790 à 1799’, Le tambour et la harpe, oeuvres … musicales sous la Révolution: Lyons 1989, 257–66

M. Noiray: ‘Les créations d’opéra à Paris de 1790 à 1794’, Orphée phrygien: les musiques de la Révolution, ed. J.-R. Julien and J.-C. Klein (Paris, 1989), 193–204

P. Taïeb: ‘De la composition du Délire (1799) au pamphlet anti-dilettantes (1821): une étude des conceptions esthéthiques de H.-M. Berton’, RdM, lxxviii (1992), 67–107

P. Vendrix, ed.: Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique (Liège, 1992)

D. Charlton: ‘“A maître d’orchestre … conducts”: New and Old Evidence on French Practice’, EMc, xxi (1993), 340–53

R. Legrand and P. Taïeb: ‘L’ Opéra-Comique sous le Consulat et l’Empire’, Le Théâtre Lyrique en France au XIX^e siècle, ed. P. Prévost (Metz, 1995), 1–61

A. Jacobshagen: Der Chor in der Französischen Oper des späten Ancien Régime (Frankfurt, 1997)

M.E.C. Bartlet: Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opera, ii (Heilbronn, 1999), 641–51

Bertoncini, Mario

(b Rome, 27 Sept 1932). Italian composer and pianist. He studied in Rome with Petrassi (composition, 1958–62) and Caporali (piano, 1948–56) at the conservatory and at the Accademia di S Cecilia, where he won the Nicola d'Atri Prize in 1962; later he won first prize in the Gaudeamus Foundation competition (1965). One of the founders of the Nuova Consonanza improvisation ensemble, he was artistic director of the Rome concert organization of the same name (1969–72). Bertoncini taught composition at the Pesaro Conservatory (1967–73) and then spent some time in Berlin on a grant (1974–6). He also taught at McGill University in Toronto before holding a long-term post at the Hochschule der Künst in Berlin (1977–98). His early works show the results of study of Petrassi, Dallapiccola and Webern. A turning-point came when he encountered the work of Cage, Feldman and Brown: after the Sei pezzi (1962) all of his scores allow for performer choice, and he has used graphic notation consistently since Tune (1965). In such pieces as Spazio-tempo Bertoncini came to unify sound and gesture in what he described as ‘teatro della realtà’.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Spazio-tempo (teatro della realtà), 1967–70; Illegonda (azione teatrale), 1968; Elisaveta Barn (incid music), 1984

Inst: 6 pezzi, orch, 1962; Quodlibet, va, vc, db, perc, 1964; Cifre, pf, variable no. of pfmrs, 1964–7: Tune, 5 suspended cymbals, 1965; Mariolina, hps, 1969–70; Scratch-a-matic, prep pf/any str inst, 1971; Pavana, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, pf, 1974; Chanson pour instruments à vent, several pfmrs, 1974; Venti, 20 wind objects (40 players), 1980–82; Sinfonia ‘dei respiri’, 9 insts, 1997; Suite, prep pf, 1999

Other: Epitaffio in memoria di un conc., 3 sound sources, feedback, 1968; Chain reactions, multi media, wind hps, kinetic set of lights (2 groups of pfmrs), 1974, collab. P. Sedgley; Fokus, dancer, sound and light environment, 1974; Vele, 3 groups of aeolian hps (2 outdoors, 3rd operated by vocalists indoors), 1973–4; Alleluja, 8 gongs played on grand-pf mechanism, 1982; Str Qt no.1 ‘Die Lyra des Aeolus’, 4 sound objects, 1990–92; Chanson pour instruments à vent no.2, 4 sound objects (4 players), 1992; Fuochi, 8 wind, CD, 1998–9; Exercice, 1 female dancer, interactive sound environment, 1999

Several vocal works

Principal publisher: Music for Percussion (New York) [Tune]

WRITINGS

‘Proposta di costruire un istituto sperimentale di ricerca sul suono’, Autobiografia della musica contemporanea, ed. M. Mollia (Cosenza, 1979), 81–9

‘Note per un teatro della realtà’, Decalage, no.13 (1985), 21–8

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Bortolotto: ‘Colloquio con Mario Bertoncini’, Spettatore musicale, v/March–April (1970), 20–21

R. Gervais: ‘M. Bertoncini: entretien’, Parachute, no.4 (1976), 10–15

G. Borio: ‘Mario Bertoncini: Porträt eines radikalen Neueres’, Montags Musik: Mario Bertoncini (Berlin, 1994)

PIERLUIGI PETROBELLI

Bertoni, Ferdinando (Gasparo) [Giuseppe]

(b Salò, nr Brescia, 15 Aug 1725; d Desenzano, nr Lake Garda, 1 Dec 1813). Italian composer. He studied composition with Padre Martini in Bologna. His first opera was the successful pasticcio La vedova accorta, first performed in Florence in 1745. It was repeated in Venice (1746) and elsewhere in Europe. The Venetian libretto identifies Bertoni as the composer of ‘La Musica de' recitativi, e delle [9] arie’. His first serious opera, Il Cajetto, was staged privately, with puppets, in 1746. He composed two more opere serie within the year for commercial theatres in Venice, but was more successful in the comic genre: Le pescatrici (1751), on a Goldoni libretto, had 14 productions in 17 years throughout Europe, including Dresden (1754), London (1761) and Madrid (1765) in a Spanish translation by Ramón de la Cruz. La moda (1754) contains his earliest extant cavatinas, and Bertoni may have been the first to introduce the cavatina to opera.

With his appointment as primo organista at S Marco, Venice (1752), and maestro of the female chorus at the Ospedale dei Mendicanti (1753), Bertoni turned more to religious compositions and to serious opera, although his best comic opera, L'anello incantato, was written in 1771. In February of that year Mozart and his father may have heard Anna de Amicis sing in Bertoni's Alessandro nell'Indie (Venice, Teatro S Benedetto), and in 1778 Mozart requested a ‘grand aria’ by Bertoni, which Leopold sent to Mannheim. The Act 1 finale of Alessandro begins with accompanied recitative leading to a duet which includes a reprise of a cavatina and bravura aria from earlier scenes (sung now by opposite characters) and brilliant passaggi in thirds.

With the Bologna production of L'olimpiade (Carnival 1773), Bertoni began his professional association with the castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti, his former pupil in Venice. Following their triumphs in Artaserse (1776), Medonte (1777) and Quinto Fabio (1778), they travelled to London for the first of two visits with Bertoni as composer-in-residence and Pacchierotti as primo uomo at the King's Theatre. Of the seven operas Bertoni worked on during the first visit (1778–80), most were pasticcio versions of earlier works; only one new opera, Il duca di Atene, was composed. He wrote music for two other pasticcios: Demofoonte, in which Pacchierotti sang ‘Non temer bell'idol mio’ which became a favourite song, and La governante whose rondò ‘La virginella’ became a popular salon song, translated into English and French and transcribed for various instruments, as well as inserted in other operas. During the second visit (1781–3), Bertoni composed two new operas, Il convito and Cimene. Pacchierotti sang in pasticcio versions of three other operas, and in a production of Ifigenia in Aulide. Bertoni returned to Italy with ‘a bad portrait of Sacchini’ and the Reynolds portrait of Burney for Padre Martini's collection.

Burney praised Bertoni's graceful and flowing melody and his ‘clear and well-arranged’ harmony, and found his style ‘natural, correct, and judicious; often pleasing, and sometimes happy’, but had qualms about his inventiveness. Caffi described his style as ‘natural, clear, the voice part agreeable; the orchestration graceful, and not exaggerated’. Bertoni's progressive tendencies show mostly in his use of more flexible aria forms such as the cavatina, some 40 of which are found in his operas, and large scene complexes with accompanied recitative and fuller orchestration, as in Armida abbandonata. He wrote only one ‘reform’ opera, Orfeo ed Euridice (1776), on Calzabigi's libretto, patterned after Gluck's music. It was highly successful and his only opera printed in full score during his lifetime. Gluckists have never forgiven him for the similarities, yet Gluck himself ‘borrowed’ several Bertoni arias without attribution for his operas.

Although not a native of Venice, as was his wife, Bertoni was honoured as one of the city's greatest composers. He received many commissions for occasional cantatas and serenatas. Often set to laudatory texts in honour of Venetian nobility or visiting royalty, they were usually performed by singers currently appearing at one of the opera theatres. For the visit of the Emperor Joseph II on 15 July 1769 Bertoni conducted his cantata La reggia di Calipso at the Rezzonico palace with seven soloists, a chorus of 110 and orchestra, all females from the four Ospedali of Venice. More typical is his La Galatea, a ‘serenata reduced to three voices’, written for Pacchierotti, Anna Pozzi and Giacomo Panati, after their performance in Bertoni's Armida abbandonata at the Teatro S Benedetto in January 1781. The cantata I voti del secolo XVIII in 1791 again brought together two illustrious natives of Salò – the poet Mattia Butturini and Bertoni, as well as the Brescian castrato Giovanni Rubinelli, who had so impressed Michael Kelly in the 1783 Venetian revival of Bertoni's Orfeo ed Euridice and would repeat his role in 1795 at La Fenice. Bertoni's last cantata, Il trionfo della virtù (1804) for two choruses, was written for the Accademia degli Unanimi of Salò, which had elected him a member in that year.

Bertoni's religious works date from his earliest years in Venice. He achieved international recognition for his choral works written for the female chorus and orchestra of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti. Foreign visitors to Venice, such as Burney (1770), Beckford (1780) and Mount Edgcumbe (1784), later wrote enthusiastically about performances they witnessed under Bertoni. On 28 March 1775 the Emperor Joseph II, his brother Leopold and his children, attended unannounced a performance of Bertoni's oratorio David poenitens at the Mendicanti; it was performed later the same year in Vienna at the Kärntnertortheater in a concert of the Tonkünstler-Societät. Bertoni composed some 50 oratorios and, according to Smither, ‘may have written more oratorios than any other composer of the 18th century’. His Miserere (1762) was performed annually at the Mendicanti. Caffi devotes four pages to a comparison between Bertoni's Miserere and that of Hasse (1728) for the Incurabili, also for four voices and in C minor, concluding that, if Bertoni had written no psalm other than this, he would be ‘assured a place of honor among the classics’. Bertoni was elected a member of the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, in 1773. In addition to the large repertory for female voices, Bertoni composed numerous works for mixed chorus during his 55-year association with S Marco, Venice. His Requiem for Admiral Angelo Emo in 1792 was also performed at his own funeral on 28 June 1814 at S Marco with Pacchierotti coming out of retirement to sing publicly for the last time in honour of his teacher and long-time friend.

Bertoni's earliest extant instrumental work is a solo harpsichord sonata in a collection of sonatas by ‘celebrated Italian composers’ published in Germany by Haffner in 1757. His six sonatas for the harpsichord or pianoforte with violin accompaniment were published as his op.1 in various European publishing centres over a 20-year span. The six string quartets, first published in London then in Venice as op.2, were dedicated to William Beckford. All of his instrumental works, including his sinfonias, are written in treble-oriented, pre-Classic, harmonic style in two and three movements.

Bertoni's success as an opera composer in Venice and admiration for his religious music led to his appointment as maestro di cappella of S Marco in 1785, without opposition; he succeeded Galuppi, whose career he had emulated since their collaboration in I bagni d'Abano (1753). He composed only two new operas after this appointment and retired in 1808. Among his pupils in his last years in Venice were Mayr and Antonio Calegari.

(1) Johann Friedrich Berwald

GEORGE TRUETT HOLLIS

Bertoni, Ferdinando

WORKS

operas

opere serie unless otherwise stated

LKH	London, King’s Theatre
TR	Turin, Teatro Regio
VB	Venice, S Benedetto
VM	Venice, Teatro S Moisè

Il Cajetto (A. Gori), Venice, Palazzo Labia, carn. 1746

Orazio Curiazio, Venice, S Samuele, Ascension Fair, 1746, aria I-Vc

Armida (B. Vitturi, after T. Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata), Venice, S Angelo, 26 Dec 1746, D-Mbs

Didone abbandonata (tragedia, P. Metastasio), Venice, Palazzo Labia, carn. 1748, aria I-PAc

Ipermestra (Metastasio), Genoa, Falcone, carn. 1748, arias in B-Bc, I-Gl and Vnm

Le pescatrici (dg, 3, C. Goldoni), Venice, S Samuele, 26 Dec 1751, D-Bsb, Dl, Wa, F-Pc (without recits), P-La, Favourite Songs (London, c1761)

Antigono (Metastasio), VM, aut. 1752

I bagni d'Abano (dg, Goldoni), Venice, S Samuele, 10 Feb 1753, Act 2 D-W and MGmi, collab. Galuppi

Ginevra (A. Salvi, after L. Ariosto), Venice, S Samuele, aut. 1753

La moda (dg, D. Benedetti), VM, carn. 1754, Dl

Sesostri (dramma, P. Pariati), TR, 26 Dec 1754, Dl, LEmi

Antigona (G. Roccaforte), Genoa, Falcone, carn. 1756, I-OS*, aria in Six Favourite Italian Songs Performed … by Tenducci (London, 1778)

Lucio Vero (Zeno), TR, carn. 1757, Vnm, P-La

Il Vologeso (Zeno), Padua, Obizzi, carn. 1759, D-MÜs, P-La

Le vicende amorose (dg, D. Pallavicino), VM, aut. 1760, A-Wn, P-La

La bella Girometta (dg, P. Chiari), VM, aut. 1761, La

Ifigenia in Aulide (V.A. Cigna-Santi), TR, carn. 1762, I-OS* (Act 2), Tf P-La

Achille in Sciro (Metastasio), Venice, S Cassiano, carn. 1764, I-OS*, P-La

L'ingannatore ingannato (dg, Chiari), Venice, S Cassiano, aut. 1764, I-OS*

L'olimpiade (Metastasio), Venice, S Cassiano, carn. 1765, D-Dl, F-Pc, P-La, Favourite Songs (London, c1779)

Il Bajazetto (J.A. Sanvitale, after A. Piovene), Parma, Ducale, 3 May 1765, I-OS*

Tancredi (Balbis, after Voltaire), TR, 26 Dec 1766, F-Pn, I-OS* (Act 2), P-La, aria in Journal d'ariettes italiennes … (Paris, 1779)

Ezio (Metastasio), VB, carn. 1767, La, Favourite Songs (London, c1781)

Semiramide riconosciuta (Metastasio), Naples, S Carlo, 30 May 1767, La

Scipione nelle Spagne (Zeno), Milan, Ducale, 30 Jan 1768, I-Nc (without recits), P-La

Alessandro nell'Indie (Metastasio), Genoa, Falcone, spr. 1769, D-Bsb (Act 1), P-La

Il trionfo di Clelia (Metastasio), Padua, Nuovo, 10 June 1769, I-OS*, P-La

L'anello incantato (dg, G. Bertati), VM, aut. 1771, I-OS*

Andromaca (Salvi), VB, 26 Dec 1771, OS* (Acts 1 and 2), P-La (Act 3)

L'orfane svizzere (dg, Bertati), Livorno, S Sebastiano, carn. 1774

Narbale (Metastasio: L'eroe cinese), VM, 25 May 1774, I-OS* (Act 3), arias in B-Bc, I-Gl and US-NYp

Aristo e Temira (dramma per musica, 1, Conte de' Salvioli), VB, 3 Jan 1776, D-Mbs, F-Pc (inc.), parts I-Pca

Orfeo ed Euridice (dramma per musica, 3, R. de Calzabigi), VB, 3 Jan 1776; A-Wn, B-Bc, D-Bsb (with addns by Reichardt), Dl, DS, FS, Mbs, WRl, F-Pn, GB-Lbl, H-Bn, I-BGc, BRq, CMbc, Gl, Mc, OS* (facs. in DMV, xxiii, 1977), Pca, PAc, Tn, Vc, P-La (Venice, 1776, 2/1783)

Creonte (G. Roccaforte), Modena, Ducale, 27 Jan 1776

Artaserse (Metastasio), Forlì, Nuovo, spr. 1776, I-Mc (with addns by Generali), P-La; rev. version, Genoa, S Agostino, carn. 1788; arias in A-Wgm, I-Gl, Mc, PAc, Rc and Tn

Telemaco ed Eurice nell'isola di Calipso (G. Pindemonte), VB, 26 Dec 1776, D-Bsb, P-La, arias in Recueil de romances et chansons (Paris, c1788)

Medonte re d'Epira (G. De Gamerra), TR, 26 Dec 1777, I-Gl (Act 1), Tf, P-La; Favourite Songs (London, 1782); ov. arr. hpd (London, c1783)

Quinto Fabio (3, Zeno: I due dittatori), Milan, Interinale, 31 Jan 1778, I-Gl (Act 1), OS*, Pl, Vc, P-La (inc.), Favourite Songs (London, 1780)

Artaserse (Metastasio), LKH, 23 Jan 1779, Favourite Songs (London, c1779)

La governante, or The Duenna (dg, C.F. Badini, after R.B. Sheridan: The Duenna), LKH, 15 May 1779, arias in I-Mc and Vnm, Favourite Songs (London, 1779), arias (Edinburgh, Dublin and London, c1780)

Il duca di Atene (dg, Badini), LKH, 9 May 1780

Armida abbandonata, VB, 26 Dec 1780, B-Bc, D-Bsb, I-Gl, P-La

Cajo Mario (Roccaforte), VB, Ascension Fair, 1781, I-OS*, P-La

Il convito, or The Banquet (dg, A. Andrei. after F. Livigni), LKH, 2 Nov 1782, Favourite Songs (London, c1782)

Cimene, LKH, 7 Jan 1783, ov. arr. hpd (London, c1783)

Eumene (Zeno), VB, 26 Dec 1783, P-La (Act 1), arias in B-Bc and I-Vc

Nitteti (Metastasio), Venice, S Samuele, 6 Feb 1789, B-Bc, I-OS, ov. B-Bc and I-Vc

Angelica e Medoro (G. Sertor), VB, carn. 1791 [also attrib. G. Andreozzi]

Music in: La vedova accorta, 1745; Tigrane, 1755; Demetrio, 1757; Creso, 1758; Solimano, 1758; Cleonice, 1763; Gli orti esperidi, ?1764; The Summer's Tale, 1765; Le gelosie villane, 1776; Demofoonte, 1778; Il soldano generoso, 1779; Giulio Sabino, 1781; Il falegname, 1781; I viaggiatori felici, 1782; Giunio Bruto, 1782; The Castle of Andalusia, 1782; Robin Hood, 1784; Zemira e Azore, 1779; Richard Coeur de Lion, 1786; Der Fürst und sein Volk, 1791

Doubtful: Eurione (A. Papi), Udine, Nobile, Aug 1770; Decebalo (Papi), Treviso, Oneigo, Oct 1770

occasional dramatic

Cantata in lode di A. Rezzonico, 1v, 1759, D-MÜs

Licenza (G. Bertati), Venice, S Cassiano, 1763 (perf. after A. Tozzi’s La morte di Dimone]

Serenata: Notte si fausta (G. Bertati), 4vv, Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, 11 June 1764, Kl, Mbs

Festa pastorale, 5vv, Klagenfurt, 1767, lib I-Vc

La reggia di Calipso (Z. Seriman), 7vv, Venice, Palazzo Rezzonico, 15 July 1769, D-Dl, I-OS*

Ringraziamento alla Veneta Nobiltà (Goldoni), 1v, Venice, S Benedetto, 15 Jan 1771

Statira e Sidreno, 2vv, Venice, S Moisè, 25 May 1774, I-OS* [?reworking of Narbala]

Cantata (M. Butturini), Salò, 4 Sept 1775

La Galatea (?Metastasio), 3vv, 1781, D-Mbs, I-OS*

Apoteosi di Ercole (Butturini), Venice, S Benedetto, 1782

Cantata (A. Anelli), villa on Lake Garda, 1784

Deucalione e Pirra (A.S. Sografi), 3vv, Venice, Casino d'Orfeo, 30 Sept 1786

Il vaticinio di Proteo (Butturini), 3vv, Venice, Casa Società Mercantile, 29 March 1789, F-Pc, I-OS*, Pca

L'unione del senno e della fortuna (Butturini), 4vv, Venice, 19 May 1789

I voti del secolo XVIII (Butturini), 3vv, Venice, Casino Accademia de' Filarmonici, March 1791, F-Pc

Cantata ossia l'Evviva per l’apertura della Società dei Dilettanti Filarmonici (G.B. Colloredo), Venice, Accademia de' Filarmonici, 4 Oct 1802, A-Wn

Adria consolata (M. Cesarotti), 4vv, Venice, La Fenice, 12 Feb 1803, A-Wn, D-Mbs

Il trionfo della virtù (F. Girardi), 2 choirs, Salò, Accademia degli Unanimi, 14 Aug 1804

La perseguitata straniera, 4vv, F-Pc

other secular vocal

4 ariettas and 13 duets, after 1784, I-Vnm

5 duettini, 2 S, bc, Mc

Cantata [Elvira, Corillo, Linco, Montano], I-Pc

Cantata [Genio, Clemenza, Rigore], Treviso, OS*

oratorios

Ortus in praedio Gethsemani, Venice, 1746

performed Venice, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri

Il ritorno del figliuol prodigo, 1747, I-Bc, Vsmc; Il martirio di S Cecilia, 1747, Vsmc; Davide trionfante di Golia, 1751, Mc, Vsmc; L'obbedienza di Gionata (N. Arituseo), 1756, D-DS, I-Vnm, Vsmc; Il Giuseppe riconosciuto (Metastasio), 1787, D-Bsb*

female solo voices, female chorus; performed Venice, Mendicanti

Carmina praecinenda psalmo miserere, 1752; Piae virgines choristae … Synagogen Ponereuomenon id est Concilium Malignantium, 1752; Peregrinatio ad sanctum Domini sepulcrum, 1753; Cum amore divinae animae conjunctis, 1755; De prodigo filio carmina sacra, 1756, I-Vnm; Vaticinia prophetarum de Christo salvatore, 1757; Christus in sepulchro, 1758; Longinus centurio, 1759; Sermo discipulorum Christ in vespere Diei Parasceve, 1760; Mater Jesu justa crucem sacra isagogue, 1761; Maria Magdalenae apostola resurrectionis D.N.J.C., 1762

Pium ascetarum colloquium in illa verba ‘Pater, dimitte illis’, 1763; Parasceve ad sepulturam corporis D.N.J.C., 1764; Sacer dialogus inter Lazarum redivivum et Mariam sororem, 1764, S-Skma; Carmina in die solemnitatis S Mariae Magdalenae, 1765; Secunda dies sive Pium ascetarum colloquium in illa verba ‘Domine memento mei’, 1765; Conendo musices carmino, 1765; Argumenta desumpta ex sacris litteris, 1766; Hortus in praedio Gethsemani, 1766; Tertia dies sive Pium ascetarum colloquium in illa verba ‘Mulier ecce filius tuus’, 1767; Rex Assuerus requitatis custos, 1768; Virtutum concordia, 1769; Divinae completae redemptionis veritatem ab extrema Jerusalem desolatione, 1769; Exitium primogenitorum Aegypti, 1770; Gloria et exaltatio fidei in Abraham sacrificio, 1770; Goliath 1771; Jonathas, 1771; Profectio Maysis in Aegyptum, 1772; Salomon Rex Israel, 1772; Susanna, 1773; Tobias, 1773; Saul furens, 1774; David poenitens, 1775, A-Wn (facs. in IOB, xxv, 1986), D-MÜs, F-Pc, I-Mc; Interitus Absalon, 1775; Joas Rex Juda, 1776, D-Dlb; Abigail, 1777, as Nabal, 1778; Canticorum sponsa, 1777; Poenitentia David, 1779; Sententia David, 1779; Victoria militum David contra Absalon filium regis, 1779; Athalia mors, 1779; Balthasar, 1781, rev. 1784, as Abraham e Balthasar, 1797, I-Mc, ed. H. Geyer (Kraków, 1993); Canticorum sponsa, 1781; Il Convitto di Baldassare, 1788, DMbs, A-Wst [1 aria, 3 choruses and finale only]

other sacred

Mass, TTB, I-BDG

Mass, SATB, A-KN, I-BDG, VEcap, Vnm (Missa brevis), Vsmc (inc.)

Miserere, SATB, str, orch, 1762 (Venice, 1802)

Requiem, g, 1792, arr. TTB by Rova, Vc

c25 mass movts, mostly TTB, SATB, orch, A-Wn, D-Bsb, Dl, LÜh, MÜs, F-Pc, GB-Lbl, I-Baf, Bc, BDG, BG, Mc, Nc, PAc, Pc, Vc, Vnm, Vsmc

Over 40 psalms, psalm verses, 3, 4, 8vv, org/orch, A-Wn, B-Bc, D-Bsb, F-Pc, GB-Lbl, I-Bc, BGc, Fc, Mc, Nc, Vc, VEcap, Vnm, Vs

17 hymns, canticles, 2–8vv, orch, A-Wn, D-Dlb, F-Pc, I-BDG, BGc, Pc, Vc, Vnm, Vsmc

87 motets, mostly S/A, orch, perf. Venice, Mendicanti, 1740s–1784, A-TU, D-Bsb, F-Pc

9 Marian antiphons, solo vv, 4, 12vv, str, orch, F-Pc, GB-Lbl*, I-Bc*, Vnm, Vsmc

22 other sacred works, 2–16vv, str, org, orch, D-Bsb, F-Pc, I-Baf, Bc, BDG, Nc, Vc, Vnm, Vs

instrumental

Orch: Marcia funebre, g, for Requiem, 1792, D-MÜs, I-BGc, Vnm; Marcia funebre, B, Vc, Vsmc; Ov., D, Gl; sinfonias: C, Rdp, Vc, ed. E. Bonelli (Padua, 1956); c, Vc (Venice, 1782); D, A-LA, I-Rdp, Vc, Vnm; B, D-RH, I-Mc; E [‘Ecco’], D-Bsb*; others, D-W, I-PAc, Vnm

Chbr: hpd sonatas, E (Nuremberg, 1757), 4 in I-Bc, 2 in Vc; 6 Sonatas, hpd/pf, vn, C, F, D, A, B, E, op.1 (Berlin and Amsterdam, c1770; London, 1779; Paris, 1781; Venice, c1790 as op.9); 6 str qts, B, A, c, D, F, E (London, 1782; Venice 1784 as op.2; Paris, 1784–8), nos.1, 3, ed. A. Toni (Milan, 1922–7), nos.3, 5, arr. pf 4 hands (Milan, 1920); duet, 2 fl, D-Bsb, MGmi

Bertoni, Ferdinando

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

BurneyH

CaffiS

CroceN

DBI (F. Fano)

ES (E. Zanetti)

Grove6 (S. Hansell)

NewmanSCE

SmitherHO

C.-P. Coqueau: Entretiens sur l'état actuel de l'Opéra de Paris (Paris, 1779); also in M. Tourneaux, ed. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. (Paris, 1877–82), xii, 294–5, 305

M. Kelly: Reminiscences (London, 1826, 2/1826/R1968 with introduction by A.H. King); ed. R. Fiske (London, 1975)

R. Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences, Containing an Account of the Italian Opera in England from 1773 (London, 1834/R)

G. Brunati: Dizionarietto degli uomini illustri della riviera di Salò (Milan, 1837)

M. Fürstenau: ‘Ueber die Schluss-Arie des ersten Aktes aus Gluck's französ. Orpheus’, Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo, xix (1869), 261–5, 269–71

G. Desnoiresterres: Gluck et Piccinni: 1774–1800 (Paris, 1872, 2/1875), 266ff

A. Valentini: I musicisti bresciani ed il Teatro grande (Brescia, 1897)

T. Wiel: I teatri musicali venaziani nel Settecento (Venice, 1897/R)

G. Bustico: ‘Un musicista salodiano del secolo XVIII: F. Bertoni’, Illustrazione bresciana (1 Feb 1911)

G. Bustico: Per la storia del melodramma: F. Bertoni e Rubinelli (Salò, 1913)

E. Anderson, ed.: The Letters of Mozart and his Family (London, 1938, 3/1985)

A. Loewenberg: ‘Gluck’s Orfeo on the Stage with some Notes on Other Orpheus Operas’, MQ, xxvi (1940), 311–39, esp. 323

M. Gerosa: ‘Il melodramma e la musica del salodiano Bertoni’, Il Benaco nei ricordi e nelle sovrane bellezze, ii (Brescia, 1956)

I. Haas: Ferdinando Bertoni: Leben und Instrumentalwerk (diss., U. of Vienna, 1958)

H. Brofsky: ‘Students of Padre Martini’, FAM, xiii (1966), 159–60

G.T. Hollis: Ferdinando Giuseppe Bertoni (1725–1813): a Study of his Operas and his Contribution to the Cavatina (diss., U. of Southern California, 1973)

A. Schnoebelen: Padre Martini's Collection of Letters in the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna (New York, 1979)

D. and E. Arnold: The Oratorio in Venice (London, 1986)

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995)

Bertouch [Bertuch], Georg von

(b Helmershausen, 19 June 1668; d Christiania, 14 Sept 1743). Norwegian military officer and composer of German birth. Originally a titled family in Brabant, Bertouch’s forebears emigrated for religious reasons to Germany, where his father, Jacob, was a teacher. At the age of 15 he studied the violin and composition with Eberlin, after which he proceeded to university. He matriculated at both Jena (25 April 1688) and Kiel (4 October 1691), where in January 1693 he presented a thesis, Disputatio juridica de eo quod justum est circa ludos scenicas operasque modernas, dictas vulgo operen (Kiel, 1693; ed. B. Kortsen, Bergen, 1970). On a journey to Italy with Johann Nicolaus Bach, who was organist in Jena, he encountered the sons of a Danish general whose steward had died; assuming the vacant position, Bertouch travelled back to Denmark with them and embarked on a career in the Danish army. In the ensuing years he seems to have distinguished himself both militarily and musically; he is among the 13 famous musicians (along with Handel) to whom Johann Mattheson dedicated his Das beschützte Orchestre, where he is described as ‘Königl. Dänischen Obristen von der Cavallerie, General-Adjutant des Durchl. Herzogs von Würtemberg und Haupt der musikalischen Academie zu Mecheln’. Bertouch’s acknowledgement of this dedication was delayed (the war having prevented him from taking care of his personal affairs) and is dated 28 February 1719 from Akershus Castle in Christiania, of which he had just been made commandant in recognition of his long and faithful service. Mattheson made references to a cantata (‘Heldenstück’) Gott zürnet über Israel, for five voices and orchestra (his ‘most recent composition’), and a cantata da chiesa, both now lost, as are the other compositions which Mattheson said Bertouch was in the habit of sending him. Three cantatas in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek may derive from this source: they are Gott der Herr der Mächtige redet for soloists, chorus, three violins and three violas da gamba, Mein Herz ist bereit for alto and continuo, and Du Tochter Zion freue dich for bass, strings and continuo.

Mattheson also owed to Bertouch the two accounts of a purported supernatural musical phenomenon experienced from time to time in the vicinity of Bergen, which he published under the title Etwas Neues unter der Sonnen! oder Das unterirdische Klippen-Concert in Norwegen (Hamburg, 1740). The music here included is in fact a halling, a Norwegian folkdance, and is apparently the earliest instance of the publication of a piece of Norwegian folk music. Bertouch was also in correspondence with J.S. Bach and, according to Spitta, wrote him a letter in 1738, probably accompanied by a copy of his XXIV sonates composées par le canons, fugues, contre points & parties selon le sisteme de 24 modes & les preceptes du fameux musicien, componiste & polihistor Jean Mattheson a 3, avec la basse continüe, which he said would be published the following year. No printed copy of this work, in which Bertouch imitated the plan of J.S. Bach’s ‘48’, is known, but a manuscript copy from which the first five sonatas and all but the last page of no.6 have been torn out survives (DK-Kk Ny kongl.Saml.Fol.110d).

There can be little doubt that a musician of Bertouch’s international experience and standing exerted an important influence on the musical life of the Norwegian capital, but few details are known. He arranged for the Danish-born organist Johan Fredrik Clasen to be brought from Hamburg to the church of Our Saviour in 1720. Both he and Clasen contributed to the musical arrangements which celebrated the visit of King Christian VI to Christiania in 1733. He retired in 1740 with the rank of lieutenant-general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MatthesonGEP

WaltherML

J. Mattheson: Critica musica (Hamburg, 1722–5/R)

K. Visted: ‘Georg v. Bertouch’, NMÅ 1943–6, 24–30

Ø. Gaukstad: ‘Georg Bertouch: en barokkomponist i Norge’, Norsk musikktidsskrift, ii (1964), 135–43

N. Grinde: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971, 3/1981; Eng. trans., 1991)

A. Hemström: ‘Georg von Bertouch and his Sonatas with Trumpet’, Historic Brass Society Journal, v (1993), 22–8

JOHN BERGSAGEL

Bertouille, Gérard

(b Tournai, 26 May 1898; d Ixelles, Brussels, 12 Dec 1981). Belgian composer and critic. After studying philosophy and law he applied himself to thorough music studies, taking composition lessons with Absil and Souris. If Bertouille's attachment to traditional forms was reminiscent of neo-classicism, he considered melody as the essential element in music, assigning to it the expression of feeling as its principal objective. Avoiding any aggressivity in the sphere of harmony, he advocated aesthetic ideas opposed to the avant garde. In L'oeuvre d'art he argued that contemporary art had lost its way: by renouncing every structural principle it had ceased to have any meaning, existing only by virtue of its negations.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: 2 syms.; Sinfonia da requiem; Sinfonietta; 2 ovs.; 3 fantasias; 2 pf concs.; 2 vn concs.; 2 tpt concs.; hn conc.; concertinos for va, cl

Chbr: Wind Qnt; 7 str qts; Preluder hp qt; str trios; Prelude and Fugue, sax qt; 5 sonatas, vn, pf; Pf Sonata, other pieces

Vocal: Requiem, 8 Baudelaire songs

Principal publishers: CeBeDeM, Schott (Brussels)

MSS in B-Bcdm

WRITINGS

Perspectives de la musique contemporaine (Brussels, 1949)

Expression musicale (Brussels, 1959)

L'oeuvre d'art entre ses disciplines et ses libertés (Brussels, 1969)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

Catalogue des oeuvres de compositeurs belges: Gérard Bertouille (Brussels, 1953) [CeBeDeM publication]

HENRI VANHULST

Bertram, Johann [Johannes]

(b Celle, 1535; d Lüneburg, 17 April 1575). German Kantor, composer and theologian. He studied first at the Johannisschule in Lüneburg where Lucas Lossius was one of his teachers, and from 1555 in Wittenberg. He was appointed town Kantor in Lüneburg in 1558. In 1562 he accepted a post as a preacher at the Nikolaikirche, Lüneburg, and performed the duties concurrently with those of Kantor until 1564; in that year Christoph Praetorius, an uncle of Michael Praetorius, took over Bertram’s town post. From 1571 or 1572 until his death he was principal pastor in Lüneburg.

Bertram’s life story is characteristic of many early Lutheran figures whose first occupation as a Kantor was merely a stepping-stone to the profession of pastor. His are the earliest compositions by a Lüneburg Kantor to have survived. The most important is his contribution to the Erotemata musicae practicae (Nuremberg, 1563), a book of instruction designed by Lossius for music teaching in Lüneburg. In the preface it is stated that Bertram had ‘carefully compiled and extended the book with pleasing and suitable music examples’; it is possible that he was also responsible for the remaining music examples that cannot be identified. To the 1561 edition of Lossius’s famous Psalmodia (RISM, BVIII 1561²⁰) he contributed a poem ‘to the reader’ and a four-part arrangement of the song O wir armen Sünder (f.79r; also in D-Lr KN144). Three four-part Latin works are included in Ein geistlich Gesangbuch (RISM, BVIII 1612¹⁹).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Onkelbach: Lucas Lossius und seine Musiklehre (Regensburg, 1960)

H. Walter: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Lüneburg vom Ende des 16. bis zum Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1967)

WALTER BLANKENBURG

Bertrand, Anthoine [Antoine] de

(b Fontanges, Auvergne, 1530–40; d Toulouse, between 1580 and July 1582). French composer. His third book of chansons (1578) was dedicated to Charles de Bourbon, Bishop of Lectoure, but there is no evidence that he ever held a formal salaried post. From about 1560 until his death he seems to have lived at Toulouse, relying on the revenues from his estates. He frequented the circle of humanists and Ronsardist poets around Cardinal Georges d’Armagnac; some of their verses provided him with texts for his third book of chansons. The poet Jacques Grévin included a sonnet addressed to him in the second part of Olimpe (Paris, 1561) which was reprinted in Bertrand’s first book of chansons, along with two sonnets – more extravagant and personal in tone – by the dramatist Robert Garnier. Towards the end of his life he seems to have turned away from ‘chansons d’amour follastres’ to become religiously devout, probably under the influence of the Jesuits. A collection of his pieces entitled Airs spirituels, containing hymns and canticles for four and five voices, was printed posthumously in 1582 with a dedicatory sonnet by Michel de Bonnières, a Jesuit; a preface in prose explains Bertrand’s conversion and consequent martyrdom at Toulouse. Another Jesuit, Michel Coyssard, writing in 1608, confirmed that Bertrand was assassinated on his way from Toulouse to one of his farms by Protestants who resented his ecclesiastical hymns (Traicté du profit que toute personne tire de chanter … les hymnes et chansons spirituelles en vulgaire, Lyons, 1608). The Airs spirituels may have been published in response to the publication at Lyons in 1580 of two books of Sonnets chrestiens, sacred contrafacta adapted by the Protestant pastor Simon Goulart from pieces in Bertrand’s first two books of chansons.

Bertrand’s surviving music comprises 84 chansons, 14 canticles, 10 Latin hymns, three Latin motets and one Italian madrigal; one piece is monophonic, three are for five voices, the others for four. This probably represents about half his total output, since in the preface to the first book of chansons he expressed his intention of publishing five or six more books, including some pieces for five and six voices composed much earlier. His earliest published pieces appeared in Le Roy & Ballard’s 13th book of chansons (RISM 1570¹⁰); all three were reprinted in his third book of chansons. In his first two books, as in collections by Boni, Maletty and others, Bertrand set only poems by Ronsard. The first book contains sonnets from Ronsard’s Amours of 1552–5 and one piece each from his fifth book of odes (1553) and his Bocage (1554). The selection of poems broadly follows their ordering in the publications of Ronsard, recounting the vicissitudes of an unhappy love affair. The pieces are also grouped sequentially in a way that suggests that the composer believed in the fabled modal ethos mentioned in his preface. The second book contains 20 sonnets and five chansons taken from collections of poems originally published between 1555 and 1565. The third book contains a more varied selection of verses ranging from an Italian villanella and some jeux by Grévin and Ronsard to a chanson spirituelle (Sur moy, Seigneur) and sonnets by Du Bellay and Ronsard (among others), set mostly in a lighter vein described in the preface as ‘un air fort humain et commun’. Most of the sonnets have the musical structure AAB: the two quatrains are set to the same music and the final sestina is through-composed. Several, however, observe the old épigramme convention of repeating the final line, and a few divide the sestina into two matching tercets set to the same music (e.g. Mon Dieu que ma maistresse in the first book); in all the pieces there is a close syntactic correspondence of verse and musical phrase that is characteristic of 16th-century French chansons.

Bertrand attempted to combine the traditional French concern for structural clarity with the Italian madrigalists’ preoccupation with underscoring particular words by means of rhythm, tessitura, melisma and chromaticism. In the preface to his first book he described music as a sensuous rather than intellectual art, and expressed an abhorrence of pretentious chromaticism; he accepted the theory of Affections but resisted Zarlino’s idea that the enharmonic tetrachord was superior, though his Ces liens d’or in the first book is built solely on perfect intervals, minor 3rds and semitones, avoiding 2nds, 6ths and major 3rds; in a more extreme example, at the end of Je suis tellement amoureux in the second book, he followed Vicentino and Costeley by indicating microtones with dieses. His predilection for juxtaposing major and minor chords a 2nd or 3rd apart (often involving degree inflection in an inner voice) is unrelated to theoretical chromaticism, though intended for expressive effect. His harmonic language is half-modal, half-tonal, and shows a delight in unusual sequences with melodic parts that avoid difficult intervals.

Despite his repudiation of ‘mathematical demonstrations’ in the preface to the first book, many of his chansons reveal a geometric organization of rhythm and metre that affects their contrapuntal and structural development. Although duple metre predominates, phrases or sections in triple metre are introduced for contrast and the rhythmic periods are generally supple and varied. The preface to the first book explains that in the most recently composed pieces Bertrand took greater care in maintaining verbal accentuation; the mood of the poem clearly affects the tempo, just as nuances affect individual phrases, and Bertrand advised performers to adopt a leisurely pace. His four-part textures, alternating between homophony and rather restricted polyphony based on imitative and paired entries, are simple and conservative.

The 1582 collection includes 13 French sacred songs, three Latin motets and ten hymns, with both Latin and French texts, which use traditional Gregorian melodies in simple, homophonic settings like those of the Huguenot psalms.

WORKS

sacred

Premier livre de sonets chrestiens mis en musique, 4vv (Lyons, 1580) [ = sacred contrafacta by S. Goulart of Premier livre des amours]

Second livre de sonets chrestiens mis en musique, 4vv (Lyons, 1580) [ = sacred contrafacta by S. Goulart of Second livre des amours]

[27] Airs spirituels contenant plusieurs hymnes et cantiques, 4, 5vv (Paris, 1582)

secular

all published in Paris

Les amours de P. de Ronsard (35 chansons), 4vv (1576, 2/1578 as Premier livre des amours de P. de Ronsard); ed. in MMFTR, iv–v (1926)

Second livre des amours de P. de Ronsard (25 chansons), 4vv (1578); ed. in MMFTR, vi (1927)

Tiers livre de [24] chansons, 4vv (1578) (incl. 3 chansons previously pubd 1570¹⁰), 1 It. villanella; ed. in MMFTR, vii (1927)

3 chansons, 4vv, 1570¹⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Thibault: ‘Antoine de Bertrand, musicien de Ronsard, et ses amis toulousains’, Mélanges offerts à M. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1936/R), 282–300

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d’Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955); suppl., RdM, xl (1957), 166–72

B.J. Davis: ‘Antoine de Bertrand: a View into the Aesthetic of Music in XVIth Century France’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxi (1962–3), 189–200

J.-M. Vaccaro: ‘Le livre d’airs spirituels d’Antoine de Bertrand’, RdM, lvi (1970), 35–53

J. Brooks: ‘Ses amours et les miennes tout ensemble: la structure cyclique du Premier livre d’Anthoine de Bertrand’, RdM, lxxiv (1988), 201–20

J.-M. Vaccaro: ‘Les préfaces d’Anthoine de Bertrand’, RdM, lxxiv (1988), 221–36

J.-M. Vaccaro: ‘Geometry and Rhetoric in Anthoine de Bertrand’s Troisiesme livre de chansons’, EMH, xiii (1994), 217–48

F. Dobbins: ‘The Chansons of Anthoine de Bertrand in two Manuscript Sources’, La musique de tous les passetemps le plus beau: hommage à J.-M. Vaccaro, ed. F. Lesure and H. Vanhulst (Paris, 1998), 89–108

FRANK DOBBINS

Bertrand, Jean (Edouard) Gustave

(b Vaugirard, nr Paris, 24 Dec 1834; d Paris, 9 Feb 1880). French writer on music. After a classical education – he later became a member of the Société d’Encouragement des Etudes Grecques – at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Bertrand went on to the Ecole des Chartes in Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of ancient music and history of the organ. His thesis, ‘L’histoire de l’orgue dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge’, was partially published in the journal La maîtrise. He contributed to Didot’s Complément de l’Encyclopédie moderne and to the supplement to Fétis’s Biographie universelle, and published many articles on music in the Journal des débats, the Revue moderne and Le ménestrel. As a member of the Commission des Travaux Historiques, Bertrand paid a long visit to Russia: some of his conclusions, based more on personal impression than scholarly study, appeared in Les nationalités musicales, as well as in the form of reports for the Revue germanique (later Revue moderne) and Le nord. He became editor-in-chief of a number of publications, including Le nord (1862), then, towards the end of his life, République française.

WRITINGS

Histoire ecclésiastique de l’orgue (1859)

Essai sur la musique dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1860) [extracted from the Complément de l’Encyclopédie moderne]

Etude sur l’Alceste de Gluck (Paris, n.d.) [extracted from the Revue germanique, Nov 1861]

Les origines de l’harmonie (Paris, 1866) [extracted from the Revue moderne]

De la réforme des études du chant au Conservatoire (Paris, 1871)

Les nationalités musicales étudiées dans le drame lyrique: Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Auber, Berlioz, F. David, Glinka, Verdisme et Wagnerisme, L’école française militante (Paris, 1872)

GUSTAVE CHOUQUET/CORMAC NEWARK

Bertrand, Nicolas

(fl Paris, c1687; d c10 Nov 1725). French string instrument maker. He was one of the best and most prolific of French makers of string instruments and his viols are fine examples of 18th-century craftsmanship. He held the title faiseur d'instrumens ordinaire de la muzique du Roy. He built other instruments besides viols, including a kit (1689) in viol shape which is now in the Musée de la musique, Paris (illustration in Thibault, 1973). A posthumous inventory of the shop, which was at the corner of the rue Grenelle and the rue Pélican, shows that he possessed an extensive collection of both old and modern instruments. This included dozens of viols (some of them English), five cellos (‘violons de chelles’), several pardessus de violes, various parts for harpsichords and guitars, some bows (a few decorated with ivory), strings and a supply of several woods.

At least seven bass viols by Bertrand, with dates ranging from 1687 to about 1720, are known to survive (see Viol, fig.14a). The seven-string basses have considerably different string lengths, the smallest (in the Brussels Conservatory) being 66 cm and the largest (in Geneva) 76 cm. The manuscript label on the one in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (illustration in A Checklist of Viole da Gamba), reads: ‘Nicolas Bertrand/a Paris 1720’. A pardessus de viole dated 1701 is in the Brussels Conservatory. Bertrand's instruments are characterized by a red-brown varnish, often dark in colour; its ingredients he kept a carefully guarded secret.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VannesE

S. Milliot: Documents inédits sur les luthiers parisiens du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970)

H. Bol: La basse de viole du temps de Marin Marais et d'Antoine Forqueray (Bilthoven, 1973)

G. Thibault and others: Eighteenth-Century Musical Instruments: France and Britain (London, 1973) [exhibition catalogue: Victoria and Albert Museum]

C. Massip: La vie des musiciens de Paris au temps de Mazarin (1643–1661) (Paris, 1976)

A Checklist of Viole da Gamba (Viols) (New York, 1979) [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

P. Tourin: Viol List: a Comprehensive Catalogue of Historical Viole da Gamba in Public and Private Collections (Duxbury, 1979)

Le luth et sa musique II: Tours 1980

A.H. König: Die Viola da gamba (Frankfurt, 1985)

P. Jacquier: ‘Rediscovery of a Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Forqueray: Discovery of some Elements of the Represented “basse de viole”’, Viola da Gamba Miscellany: Utrecht 1991, 75–84

M. Benoit, ed.: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

S. Milliot: Les luthiers parisiens au XVIIIe siècle (Spa, forthcoming)

MARY CYR

Bertrand di Avignone.

See Feragut, Beltrame.

Bertran de Born

(b Autafort [now Hautefort], ?1150; d Dalon, nr Hautefort, before 1215). French troubadour. His birthplace was in the Périgord region of the former province of Limousin; he was lord of the family castle at Autafort. In about 1195 he entered the Cistercian monastery at Dalon, Ste Trie, and remained there until his death. He is probably best known for his praise of military and political exploits; in the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno he is referred to as the ‘headless trunk that followed in the tread … and by the hair held its severed head’. He was punished in this way because he was the instigator of the quarrels between Henry II and his sons in the 1180s. Though his actual participation in these events has possibly been exaggerated by his medieval biographers, many of his poems do refer to the events directly or indirectly.

Of over 40 poems attributed to Bertran, only one, Rassa, tan creis e mon' e poja, survives with music (PC 80.37). Yet it seems that he both imitated melodies of other troubadours and was musically imitated by one trouvère. Several of Bertran's poems without melodies are textual contrafacta of other poems for which melodies survive, including two by his contemporary Giraut de Bornelh. Three poems were models for later settings with melodies by Conon de Béthune, but it is uncertain whether any of these musical contrafacta was sung to Bertran's poems.

WORKS

Editions:Bertran de Born, sein Leben und seine Werke, ed. A. Stimming (Halle, 1879) [S]Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours, ed. F. Gennrich, Summa musicae medii aevi, iii (Darmstadt, 1958) [G]Las cançons dels trobadors, ed. I. Fernandez de la Cuesta and R. Lafont (Toulouse, 1979) [C]The Extant Troubadour Melodies, ed. H. van der Werf and G. Bond (Rochester, NY, 1984) [W]The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. W. Paden, T. Sankovitch and P. Stäblein (Berkeley, 1986) [P]

no music

Ai, Lemonis, franca terra corteza, PC 80.1 (nm) [same form and near-identical rhymes to Bertran's ‘Pois als baros enoia en lur pesa’, PC 80.31; model for: Conon de Béthune, ‘Mout me semont amors que je m’envoise’, R.1837], S, G, C, P

Ar ven la coindeta sazos, PC 80.5 (nm) [modelled on Raimon de Miraval's ‘Chansoneta farai’, PC 406.21], P

Be·m plai lo gais temps de pascor, PC 80.8a (nm) [modelled on Giraut de Bornelh's ‘Non posc sofrir’, PC 242.51], P

Cazutz sui de mal en pena, PC 80.9 (nm) [model for: Conon de Béthune, ‘Bele douce dame chiere’, R.1325, according to Gennrich and Fernandez de la Cuesta; model for: Conon's ‘Ne lairai que je ne die’, R.1131, according to Van der Werf], S, G, C, P

D'un sirventes no·m cal far loignor ganda, PC 80.13 (nm) [modelled on Giraut de Bornelh's ‘S'ie·us quier conseil’, PC 242.69], P

Ges de disnar no for’ oimais maitis, PC 80.19 (nm) [model for: Conon de Béthune, ‘Tant ai amé c’or me convient häir’, R.1420], S, G, C, P

Pois als baros enoia en lur pesa, PC 80.3 (nm) [see ‘Ai, Lemonis’, PC 80.1], P

Rassa, tan creis e mon’ e poja, PC 80.37 [model for: Lo Monge de Montaudo, ‘For m’enoja, so auzes dire’, PC 305.10], S, G, C, W (addressed to Geoffrey Plantagenet)

Ben grans avoleza intra, PC 233.2 (nm) (questionable attrib.) [modelled on Arnaut Daniel's ‘Lo ferm voler’, PC 29.14], P

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Appel: Bertran von Born (Halle, 1931)

G. Gouiran: L'amour et la guerre: l'oeuvre de Bertran de Born (Aix-en-Provence, 1985, abridged 1987)

R. Labaree: ‘Finding’ Troubadour Song: Melodic Variability and Melodic Idiom in Three Monophonic Traditions (diss., Wesleyan U., 1989), 276

For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

ROBERT FALCK/JOHN D. HAINES

Bertuch, Georg von.

See Bertouch, Georg von.

Bertus, Carolus.

See Berti, Carlo.

Bertz.

A name used in the Basque region for the Tambourin de Béarn.

Berutti, Arturo

(b San Juan, 27 March 1862; d Buenos Aires, 3 Jan 1938). Argentine composer. A brother of Pablo Berutti, he studied composition with his father, a composer and pianist, with Ignacio Alvarez, and later in Buenos Aires with Bassi. In 1882 he published the fantasia Ecos patrióticos as well as a series of articles, ‘Aires nacionales’, in the Revista Mefistófeles; these propounded his views on musical nationalism. He entered the Leipzig Conservatory in 1884 to study with Reinecke and Jadassohn, and in 1887 the Stuttgart court orchestra gave the first performance of his Obertura Andes. Continuing his studies of South American subjects, he moved to Berlin, where the Rivadavia and Colombiana symphonies were written. He then went to Paris and to Milan; there he composed several operas, including Vendetta (1890), Evangelina (1893) and Taras Bulba (1892–3). In 1895 he returned to Buenos Aires, where he wrote five more operas which were all performed there, and Pampa (1897), the first Argentine opera on a native theme. He used Latin American settings, although his technique is European, and was the most successful opera composer of the time in Argentina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (J.M. Veniard)

R. Arizaga: Enciclopedia de la música argentina (Buenos Aries, 1971)

J.M. Veniard: Arturo Berutti: un argentino en el mundo de la ópera (Buenos Aires, 1988)

M. Ficher, M. Furman Schleifer and J.M. Furman: Latin American Classical Composers: a Biographical Dictionary (Lanham, MD, 1996)

SUSANA SALGADO

Berutti, Pablo

(b San Juan, 24 Sept 1866; d Buenos Aires, 17 June 1914). Argentine composer and teacher. A brother of Arturo Berutti, he began music studies in Mendoza, where in 1884 he conducted for a musical comedy company. By that time he had toured the Andean region of Chile and Peru as a pianist (1881), and in 1887 he was appointed professor of piano at the National College, San Juan. Later he settled in Buenos Aires, and then a grant enabled him to travel to the Leipzig Conservatory for a course in counterpoint and composition under Jadassohn, at the end of which he won the Mozart Prize. While he was in Germany the Gran sinfonia (1891) and the Misa solemne, for four solo voices and chorus, were performed. He was invited to join the staff of the Leipzig Conservatory, but instead returned to Buenos Aires, where he founded a conservatory and worked as a teacher, and where he was made inspector of military bands. His works include two operas – Cochabamba (1890) and the unfinished Paraíso perdido – a Te Deum, an Offertorio and an Ave María, a Marcha fúnebre and a volume of 60 piano pieces, Hojas caidas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Arizaga: Enciclopedia de la música argentina (Buenos Aires, 1971)

M. Ficher, M. Furman Schleifer and J.M. Furman: Latin American Classical Composers: a Biographical Dictionary (London, 1995)

SUSANA SALGADO

Berwald.

Swedish family of musicians of German origin.

(2) Christian Friedrich Georg Berwald

(3) Georg Johann Abraham Berwald

(4) Johan Fredrik Berwald

(5) Franz (Adolf) Berwald

(6) (Christian) August Berwald

(7) Astrid (Maria Beatrice) Berwald

ROBERT LAYTON/DANIEL M. GRIMLEY (1–4, 6, 7), DANIEL M. GRIMLEY (5)

(1) Johann Friedrich Berwald

(b Königsberg, Neumark, 18 or ?22 March 1711; d Ludwigslust, 11 June 1789). German flautist. He was the son of Johann Gottfried Berwald (1679–1732), like his father before him Kunstpfeifer in Königsberg. After holding appointments in Copenhagen and Hohenaspe, Holstein and Schleswig, Johann Friedrich became a member of the Mecklenburg-Schwerin court orchestra at Ludwigslust in 1770. He married four times and had 21 children, of whom only 11 survived childhood. His son Johann Gottfried Berwald (b Copenhagen, 6 Sept 1737; d St Petersburg, ?1814) became a court violinist at Ludwigslust in 1770 and in 1786 moved to St Petersburg; among his writings on music is the Sendschreiben an den Herrn J.W. Hertel zu Schwerin … die Frage betreffend: wie Quinten und Oktaven zulässig und nich zulässig seyn (B-Br 6474).

(2) Christian Friedrich Georg Berwald

(b Hohenaspe, 14 Aug 1740; d Stockholm, 23 Feb 1825). Swedish violinist of German birth, son of (1) Johann Friedrich Berwald. A pupil of Benda in Berlin during the 1760s, he was a violinist in Frederick the Great's orchestra. In 1772 he settled in Stockholm, where he became a violinist in the court orchestra (1773–1806); he was also a teacher and in 1790 he founded a music lending library.

(3) Georg Johann Abraham Berwald

(b Schleswig, 29 or ?26 June 1758; dSt Petersburg, 27 Jan 1825). German bassoonist and violinist, son of (1) Johann Friedrich Berwald. He was a member of the court orchestra in Stockholm from 1782 to 1800, first as a bassoonist and later as a violinist. In 1798 he made a concert tour of St Petersburg, Moscow, Germany and Austria with his son (4) Johan Fredrik Berwald. Three years later he returned to settle in St Petersburg, where he remained active as a performer and conductor until his death. He was considered to be one of the outstanding bassoonists of the time.

(4) Johan Fredrik Berwald

(b Stockholm, 4 Dec 1787; d Stockholm, 26 Aug 1861). Swedish violinist, composer and conductor, son of (3) Georg Johann Abraham Berwald. As a violin prodigy (his début was in 1793) he made a great impression on tours with his father of Finland, Germany, Austria and Russia (1795–1803), and also by his youthful compositions; his three quartets op.2, written before he was 13, were dedicated to Tsar Aleksandr I. When the family settled in St Petersburg he continued a brilliant career, succeeding his teacher Rode as soloist of the imperial orchestra (1808–12). After his return to Sweden he became a member of the court orchestra (1814), and in 1823 he succeeded J.B.E. Dupuy as Kapellmeister, a position he held until his retirement in 1849. From 1822 to 1847 he also conducted the concerts of the Harmonic Society. His three daughters, notably Julia [Julie] Mathilda Berwald (1822–77), became well-known singers.

WORKS

principal MS source S-Skma

Orch: Ouverture périodique, C (Berlin, 1797); Symphonie périodique, E (Berlin, 1799) ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. F, vol.iii (New York, 1983); Vn Conc., B, 1805; Vn Conc., e. 1811, RUS-SPsc; Bn Conc., 1815; others

Chbr: 3 polonoises, vn, pf, op.1 (Berlin, 1796); 3 Str Qts, F, g, D, op.2 (Berlin, 1799); 3 Str Qts, E, C, A, op.3, 1801–4; Str Qt, G, op.5, 1802; Str Qt, f, 1809; Vn Sonata, E (Leipzig, 1812); Str Qt, D, 1813; Str Qt, A, 1814; Vn Sonata, c, 1816; Str Qt, g (Stockholm, 1822)

Other works: c25 stage works, incl. L’héroïne de l’amour filial (operetta), St Petersburg, 1811, ballets and incid music for Stockholm, Royal Theatre; several choral works, incl. ceremonial music for Swedish royal family; several songs, incl. 4 chansons françaises (Copenhagen, 1813); 6 romances (Stockholm, 1820); svenska sånger (Copenhagen, n.d.)

3. Posthumous reputation, works.

(5) Franz (Adolf) Berwald

(b Stockholm, 23 July 1796; d Stockholm, 3 April 1868). Swedish composer and violinist, son of (2) Christian Friedrich Georg Berwald. The leading Scandinavian composer of the early 19th century, he is remarkable for his bold and striking invention as well as for his originality in the handling of musical forms.

1. Life, to 1841.

2. Life, 1841–68.

1. Life, to 1841.

Franz Berwald began violin lessons at the age of five, presumably with his father, and by 1805 he had appeared in concerts in Stockholm, Västerås and Uppsala. After Gustavus Adolphus IV closed the royal chapel and opera in 1806, Berwald appeared in the series of open concerts arranged by J.B.E. Dupuy, performing a concerto by Schobert on 14 June 1806 and a polonaise by Viotti the following September. A coup d'état on 13 March 1809 removed Gustavus Adolphus from the throne; his successor, Carl XIII (brother of the assassinated Gustavus III) reopened the royal chapel and by 1811 Berwald had begun formal violin lessons with Dupuy, the newly appointed director of the royal chapel. From 1 October 1812 Berwald was employed as a violinist in the court orchestra, and he continued to earn his living as a violinist and, later, viola player in the orchestra until 1828, despite two unexplained breaks (1818–20, 1823–4). The repertory of the Royal Opera during this period was eclectic, including works by Mozart (Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni, Die Entführung), Weber (Freischütz), Rossini (Il turco in Italia, Il barbiere di Siviglia) and Boieldieu (La dame blanche).

The extent to which the music Berwald performed with the Royal Opera influenced his compositional development, however, is difficult to judge. His earliest surviving compositions date from 1816, although he had presumably completed works before then. The manuscript of an Introduction, Theme and Variations in B for violin and orchestra is dated 24–9 December 1816. The work was probably written for either Franz or his brother (6) August to play, but the date of the première is not known. The Three Fantasias for melodicon dedicated to Crown Prince Oscar (1799–1859, later Oscar I), probably composed the same or the next year, include sets of variations on themes from Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni. A benefit concert in the Exchange Hall, Stockholm, on 10 January 1818 included the première of an orchestral fantasia (now lost), a concerto for two violins and a septet for strings and wind. A review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (4 March 1818) observed how ‘one might wish the young, truly talented man would become more friendly with the rules of harmony and composition; that will take him more surely and quickly to his goal’ (quoted in Berwald's Sämtliche Werke [BW], vii, p.xiii).

During his period of employment in the court orchestra, Berwald spent his summers on tour in Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. He also seems to have come into contact with members of the Swedish aristocracy: as early as summer 1812 he spent time with the family of Count Niels Barck (1760–1822), a former president of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. On 13 June 1818, during his first break from the orchestra, he was granted a travel permit to visit Count Frederik Bogislaus von Schwerin (1764–1834), dean of Sala. It was probably contact with von Schwerin's intellectual circle that inspired Berwald to publish his own Musikalsk journal. Berwald's periodical was intended for the amateur market and included easy piano pieces and songs by, among others, Dupuy, Méhul, Spohr and Viotti, as well as original compositions by Berwald himself. The journal was published in six volumes from December 1818, and was followed by the Journal de musique, which appeared in three volumes between 1819 and 1820. Although both publications were disseminated widely throughout southern Scandinavia, Berwald was unable to give up his orchestral work to devote himself to composition. Similarly, he never received the same aristocratic patronage as that accorded to his contemporary, Adolf Fredrik Lindblad. On 1 July 1820 he was engaged once again in the court orchestra after an absence of almost 18 months.

Nevertheless, the success of the benefit concert in 1818 must have been encouraging, because Berwald arranged a similar event for 3 March 1821 to include the première of a symphony in A major, a violin concerto and a quartet for piano and wind. Only the concerto and quartet have survived intact, but a fragment of the first movement of the symphony is large enough to suggest that this was a substantial work. Reviews of the concert, however, were scathing. The newspaper Argus remarked (24 March) how ‘it seems as if Herr Berwald's hunt for originality and his constant striving to impress with great effects has deliberately banished all melodiousness from his compositions’. Berwald's response was characteristically forthright (Lomnäs, Bergtsson and Castegren, 63–5):

It was without the least surprise that I read the review Argus offered to the public in respect of my recent compositions; [the writer] can, on the contrary, be convinced that I had myself foreseen the least favourable impression these works, written in an entirely original style, should leave. But the reviewer should remember that all attempts to establish an uncommon system, a new handling of the instrumentation and its employment, will always begin with numerous difficulties.

The blunt tone of Berwald's reply, as much a feature of his prose as of his music, may be one reason why he found it increasingly difficult to ingratiate himself with the Swedish musical establishment in the 1820s. Nevertheless, his work did not meet with uniform hostility. A review in the Nya Argus (13 February 1828) of Berwald's music for Kellgren's Gustaf Wasa, originally set by J.G. Naumann in 1786, was largely positive, and the distinguished poet, scholar, politician and amateur composer Erik Gustaf Geijer spoke of ‘a young composer with much talent’ (DSL, 108). Even so, the pressure to combine a career as an instrumentalist with that of a composer was too great, and as early as 27 February 1822 Berwald applied for a grant from the king to travel to Germany.

The première of a ‘new’ septet (the work is most probably a revision of the septet of 1818) at a concert in the Exchange Hall, Stockholm, on 6 December 1828 was well received by the critics of both the Nya Argus and Heimdall, but played before a disappointingly small audience. Berwald left Stockholm for Berlin on 26 May 1829, preoccupied with operatic plans. A duet and chorus from an opera called Leonida, which was probably finished in 1830 but has since been lost, were re-used in another work, Der Verräter, which was sent to the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1834. Although parts of Der Verräter were rehearsed in 1837, the opera was never performed and has not survived. Similarly, Berwald recycled much material from a further opera, Donna Isabella (completed 1830–31), in the first version of Estrella di Soria (c1838–41). Significantly, however, Berlin was less receptive to the supposed radicalism of Berwald's music than Stockholm. By the late 1830s Berwald had almost completely given up composition in order to run a highly successful orthopaedic institute (founded in 1835), and it was only after moving to Vienna on 6 March 1841 that he began composing seriously again.

2. Life, 1841–68.

Berwald's renewed creative activity coincided with his marriage on 1 April 1841 to Mathilde Scherer (1817–88). A concert at the Redoutensaal, Vienna, on 6 March 1842, which included the premières of several new orchestral works, the tone poems Erinnerung an die norwegischen Alpen, Humoristisches Capriccio (now lost) and Elfenspiel, received some of the most favourable reviews of Berwald's career. The Allgemeine Theaterzeitung (8 March 1842) described the new compositions as ‘of great interest, notably for the originality of their material, their ideas and the disposition of their elements, and also of the treatment of the forms, and the composer's use of the manifold possibilities and the power of the orchestra’ (DSL, 211).

Berwald returned to Stockholm on 18 April 1842, but the relative success of his orchestral compositions during his stay in Vienna seems to have been the catalyst for the series of four symphonies that he wrote in the space of the next three years. The score of the Sinfonie sérieuse is dated ‘1842. Wien’, while the autograph piano score of a symphony in D, which has generally been assumed to be identical with the Sinfonie capricieuse mentioned in Mathilde Berwald's diary, 25 June 1842, is dated ‘Nyköping 18 Juni 1842’. The Sinfonie singulière is dated March 1845, while the Symphony in E, originally entitled Sinfonie naïve, was written in April that year. The only symphony Berwald heard performed during his lifetime, however, was the Sinfonie sérieuse, which was played at a concert devoted to his recent music conducted by his cousin (4) Johan Frederik Berwald in the Royal Opera House on 2 December 1843. The symphony received appalling reviews: the Nya dagligt allehanda (6 December 1843) complained that the work's most distinguishing characteristic was its ‘incomprehensibility’, even if ‘it was perhaps not executed with the punctuation and finesse or with the instrumental strength the composer desired’ (BW, i, p.xvi). A planned performance of the Symphony in E in Paris, supposedly arranged by Auber, was cancelled on account of the 1848 Revolution, and the work had its première after Berwald's death, on 9 April 1878 under Ludvig Norman. The Sinfonie singulière was not played until 10 January 1905, when it was conducted by the violinist and composer Tor Aulin, and the autograph score of the Capricieuse was lost, so that it could not be performed until Ernst Ellberg made a realization of the score, which was conducted by Sibelius's brother-in-law, Armas Järnefelt, on 9 January 1914. Berwald's operatic works fared little better. The operetta Jag går i kloster, first performed in the same concert as the Sinfonie sérieuse, was successful only because of the participation of Jenny Lind. The première of its successor, Modehandlerskan (‘The Modiste’), on 26 March 1845 was a fiasco, and the operetta received only a single performance.

Berwald returned to Vienna in 1846 via Paris, where he tried unsuccessfully to interest either the Opéra-Comique or the Conservatoire in his music. His dramatic tone poem Ein ländliches Verlobungsfest in Schweden, written for Jenny Lind, was given on 26 January 1847 at the Theater an der Wien but had a mixed reception. Hanslick (Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 1869) recalled that though ‘[a]s a man stimulating, witty, prone to bizarrerie, Berwald as a composer lacked creative power and fantasy’ (DSL, 359). Berwald was awarded membership of the Mozarteum in Salzburg on 27 December 1847, but in other respects his second visit to Austria was not an artistic success.

Shortly after returning to Stockholm in 1849 Berwald accepted the directorship of a glassworks at Sandö in Ångermanland, north Sweden, owned by Ludvig Petré (1818–52), an industrialist and amateur violinist. During the winter, which he spent in Stockholm, Berwald also began to teach privately. He composed a piano concerto in 1855 for his pupil Hilda Aurore Thegerström (1838–1907), to whom he also dedicated his C minor Piano Quintet; Thegerström never played the concerto, which was first performed only in 1904 by the composer's granddaughter, (7) Astrid Berwald. Most of the chamber works of the 1850s were composed, at least initially, for private performance, but Berwald continued to promote his music abroad. Three piano trios and two piano quintets from 1849–53 were published by Julius Schuberth of Hamburg (a fourth piano trio, in C, from 1853, was not published until 1894). Berwald dedicated his A major Piano Quintet to Liszt, who praised the work's ‘noble style and harmonious originality’ (BW, xiii, p.xvi) in a letter of 22 February 1858. Earlier that month, Carl Tausig played the D minor Piano Trio in Berlin as part of a chamber series organized by Hans von Bülow. The trios were arguably Berwald's most successful work during his lifetime. Ludvig Norman, in the Stockholm tidning för theater och musik (30 March – 11 May 1859), placed Berwald's music next to that of Schumann and Mendelssohn; Carl Petersen in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik claimed that ‘the composer approached Seb. Bach in the clarity and precision of the ideas which his works express, without in any way being reminiscent of that period’ (DSL, 501). Ironically, the assimilation of Berwald's work into the Austro-German canon by Petersen and Norman seems to have led to his belated assimilation into the mainstream of Swedish musical life. Norman's enthusiastic championship in particular was responsible for many performances during the latter half of the century.

In March 1860 Berwald was offered membership of the Concert Society, and in 1861 the director of the Royal Opera, Eugène von Stedingk (1825–71), finally agreed to perform Estrella de Soria. The opera opened on 9 April 1862, conducted by Norman with a chorus trained by August Söderman, and was repeated four times that month. It was subsequently revived for the inauguration of the new Royal Opera on 19 September 1898. A second major operatic work, Drottningen av Golconda (‘The Queen of Golconda’), was completed by 1864 and accepted for performance by Stedingk. Berwald had chosen the libretto from Henri-Montan Berton's Aline, reine de Golconde (1803), performed in Stockholm in 1812–35. He conceived the title role for his pupil Christine Nilsson, to whom he wrote: ‘not one note of the Queen's part have I written without thinking of you as her future representative’ (BW, xviii, p.xi). Although the parts were copied for rehearsal, however, the première of the work was cancelled by Stedingk's successor, Erik af Edholm, and the work was not staged in its entirety until 3 April 1968, as part of the centenary events to commemorate Berwald's death. Despite the problems associated with The Queen of Golconda, official recognition of Berwald's work continued to grow. On 25 July 1866 he was awarded the Order of the North Star, an honour reported by two national newspapers, Aftonbladet and Dagens nyheter. The following year the Swedish Royal Academy of Music commissioned him to revise J.C.F. Haeffner's collection of four-part chorale settings, originally published in 1820. Berwald undertook a brief study tour of north German libraries in July, but he had only progressed as far as correcting the first 51 harmonizations before his death from pneumonia on 3 April 1868. The second movement of the Sinfonie sérieuse was played at his funeral in the German Church, Stockholm, on 14 April.

3. Posthumous reputation, works.

After Berwald's death, Ludvig Norman continued to be the most active promoter of his music: a performance of the Sinfonie sérieuse on 18 November 1871 led to further performances in Stockholm and Helsinki in 1876, as well as the première of the E symphony in 1878. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, however, that Berwald's music emerged as an important point of reference for a younger generation of Swedish composers including Wilhelm Stenhammar and Hugo Alfvén. After Tor Aulin's performance of the Sinfonie singulière in 1905, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger hailed Berwald in Dagens nyheter (11 January) as ‘our most original and modern composer’. Despite the revival of Estrella de Soria in Stockholm for the 150th celebrations of his birth in 1946, Berwald's music has yet to occupy a secure place in the repertory, and since Hillman's pioneering biography (1920), only two full-length biographical studies of the composer have been published (Layton, 1956, and Andersson, 1970–71). Similarly, the music has yet to receive systematic analytical attention, although the completion of the critical edition, and several recordings of the symphonies, points towards a more positive reception of Berwald's work in the future.

In a motto dated 17 August 1838 Berwald declared: ‘Art may be coupled only with a cheerful frame of mind. The weak-willed should have nothing to do with it. Even if interesting for a moment, in the end every sighing artist will bore listeners to death. Therefore: liveliness and energy – feeling and reason’ (DSL, 186). Berwald himself seems to have been uninterested in forging a Swedish national identity in his music but this does not necessarily mean that his music is not ‘national’. His works could also be heard in a broader Scandinavian context: his music reflects formal and expressive preoccupations similar to those found in the works of other Northern composers.

The most ‘Northern’ characteristics of Berwald's work are an obsessive concern with large-scale structure and a heightened sensitivity to the timbral characteristics of the sound object so that the music is often conceived in terms of specific sonorities rather than more dynamic process-orientated forms. A prominent feature of Berwald's music is the use of extended pedal points to create moments of virtual harmonic inaction. In the A major Trio of the Sinfonie sérieuse (1842), for instance, the transparent scoring for strings and woodwind anticipates the C major interlude in the first movement of Nielsen's Fourth Symphony (1914–16) (ex.1). Similarly, at the close of the development of the first movement of the Symphony in E (bars 224–44) the second theme is slowly dissolved over a subdominant pedal to prepare for the abrupt reprise of the opening (ex.2).

The formalist aspect of Berwald's music is more apparent in his use of palindromic multi-movement designs. The symmetrical arch-like tonal scheme of the early Septet (?1828) is prefigured by the circle of 5ths motion of the main theme of its opening Allegro molto. In the Sinfonie sérieuse a fragment of the slow movement Adagio maestoso returns after the scherzo as both a reprise and a slow introduction to the finale. Berwald's use of symmetry reaches its most obsessive in the String Quartet in E of 1849, in which the scherzo Allegro assai is enclosed within the slow movement Adagio quasi andante which is in turn enclosed by a reprise of the first movement Allegro di molto.

The Sinfonie singulière (1845) is characteristic in many ways of Berwald's works. The scherzo is embedded within the slow movement, and the sense of formal circularity this creates is emphasized by the coda of the finale, which explicitly recalls the 1–5 oscillations with which the symphony opens. The first movement begins with a rising sequence opening harmonically from I to V⁷, a gradual ‘in-filling’ of the cello's initial 1–5 motion (ex.3). Berwald plays with the structural and rhetorical status of this opening, the insistence on 1–5 suggesting a cadential function which is fulfilled only by the reappearance of the passage at the close of the first movement. The repercussions of the unfolded V⁷ that is suddenly left unresolved at rehearsal figure 1 resonate throughout the movement. Disruption becomes one of the ‘structural topics’ of the symphony as a whole, in spite of the apparently seamless continuity of the opening bars. The central musical argument of the work is therefore predicated not so much on tonal opposition or thematic development, as on the juxtaposition of different types of musical discourse: static against linear harmonic motion, predominantly melodic against predominantly harmonic progression, tutti against solo or duet instrumental textures. The opening of the second movement consists of a chain of first inversion chords that suggests an introduction to a conventionally harmonized lyric melody which never actually arrives. The interjection of the Scherzo in place of a more emotionally involved development completes the denial of Romantic pathos that characterized the opening of the slow movement. The formal design of the movement, and consequently of the symphony as a whole, signifies the renunciation of a certain type of sentimental discourse particularly associated with such German Romantic symphonists as Mendelssohn and Schumann, in favour of a more abstract, formalist aesthetic. It is this isolationist attitude which is Berwald's most thoroughly Northern characteristic, and which led Carl Nielsen to write admiringly to Stenhammar: ‘neither the media, money nor power can damage or benefit good Art. It will always find some simple, decent artists who forge ahead and produce and stand up for their works. In Sweden you have the finest example of this: Berwald’ (letter dated 27 January 1911, quoted in Carl Nielsens breve, ed. I.E. Møller and T. Meyer, Copenhagen, 1954, p.112).

WORKS

Edition:Franz Berwald: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berwald-Kommitén, MMS [2nd ser.] (Kassel, 1966–) [BW]

printed works published in Stockholm unless otherwise stated; principal MS source S-Skma

stage

unless otherwise stated, all are operas, and first produced at Royal Theatre, Stockholm

Gustaf Wasa (after J.H. Kellgren), 1827, inc., concert perf. of Act 1, 12 Feb 1828, scene and aria from Act 2, 18 Nov 1828; lost except Christjerns marsch, vs (1828)

Cecilia, 1829, inc., lost

Leonida (Curtius), ?1829–30; lost except lib and frags.

Trubaduren (B. von Beskow), 1830, ?only projected, correspondence regarding lib in DSL

Donna Isabella, 1830–31, inc., lost except sketch frags., some used in Estrella de Soria

Der Verräter (?M.G. Saphir), 1830–34, 1 chorus perf., 19 May 1842, lost, frag. in BW ix

Estrella de Soria (3, O. Prechtler), c1838–41, 1848, rev. 1862, 9 April 1862, vs (1883), ov. (Tragische Ouvertüre) (1912); ov. and Acts 1 and 2, BW xviia

Jag går i kloster (operetta, 2, Berwald), 1842, 2 Dec 1843; excerpts, vs (1843)

Modehandlerskan [The modiste] (operetta, 3, Berwald), 1843, 26 March 1845; excerpts, vs (1845)

Ein ländliches Verlobungsfest in Schweden: nationales Tongemälde (cant., Prechtler), 1847, Vienna, An der Wien, 26 Jan 1847; vs (Vienna, 1847)

Slottet Lochleven (after W. Scott: The Abbot), 1863, inc., lost

Drottningen av Golconda [The Queen of Golconda] (romantisk op, 3, Berwald and L. Josephson, after J.-B.-C. Vial and E.-G.-F. de Favières: Aline, reine de Golconde), 1864, excerpts perf. 1933, complete op 3 April 1968; no.17 (Bröllopshymn) [Wedding Song], ed. in Musica sacra, ii (1867), complete op, BW xviii

choral and large vocal

Kantat i anledning av högtidligheterna den 5 november 1821 [Ceremonial Cant.], S, T, B, mixed vv, orch, 1821, 29 Jan 1822

Kantat författad i anledning av HKH Kronprinsessans ankomst till Sverige och höga förmälning [Cant. for the Crown Princess’s Arrival in Sweden and Wedding] (A.A. Grafström), S, S, T, B, B, orch, 1823, 8 April 1823

Serenad, F, T, cl, hn, va, vc, db, pf, 1825, 8 April 1826, frag.

Flagsang för den norske dampbaad ‘Constitutionen’ [Flag Song for the Norwegian steamship The Constitution], 1827, lost

Gebet der Pilger am heiligen Grabe (Bön) [Prayer], 4 male vv, orch, ?1844 [frag. of orat Der Zug nach Jerusalem]

Konung Karl XIIs seger vid Narva [Charles XII’s Victory at Narva] (Schwedisches Soldatenlied) (H.W. Bredberg), 4 T, fl, 2 cl, 2 hn, 1845

Gustaf Adolph den stores seger och död vid Lützen [Gustaf Adolph the Great’s Victory and Death at Lützen] (G.G. Ingelmann), solo vv, mixed vv, wind, org, 1845

Nordiska fantasibilder, solo vv, male vv, wind, org, 1846

Gustaf Wasas färd till Dalarna (H.W. Sätherberg), solo vv, male vv, wind, org, 1849, 5 April 1866

Apoteos: musik till N.N:s minnesfest över Shakespeare, solo vv, male vv, orch, 1864

Musik till industriexpositionens invigningsfest, male vv, wind, vs (1866)

Avskedssång till idoghetens representanter, male vv, wind, ?1866

Serenad, male chorus and/or 4 male vv, 1867, ed. in Sånger för mansröster (1894)

Choral, orch, mixed vv, 1867

Edns/arrs.: T. Boltzius: Effecit gaudium, mixed vv, orch; J.C.F. Haeffner: Svensk choralbok, chorales and chorale harmonizations, 1867–8, inc. [first 51 melodies only]; M. Praetorius: chorale, mixed vv, orch; J. Schop (i): chorale, mixed vv, orch

symphonies

all first performances in Stockholm

Symphony, A, 1820, 3 March 1821, lost except 1st movt MS frag.

Sinfonie sérieuse [Sym. no.1], g, 1842, 2 Dec 1843 (1875), rev. ?1843–4, arr. pf 4 hands (1874), BW i

Sinfonie capricieuse [Sym. no.2], D, 1842, 9 Jan 1914, only short score draft survives: realization by E. Ellberg (1945), realization by N. Castegren, BW ii

Sinfonie singulière [Sym. no.3], C, 1845, 10 Jan 1905, ed. (Copenhagen, 1911), BW iii

Symphony no.4, E, 1845, 9 April 1878, ed. (Hamburg, 1911), BW iv [orig. title Sinfonie naïve]

other orchestral

With solo inst: Introduction, Theme and Variations, B, vn solo, 1816, BW vii; Conc., E, 2 vn, 1817, BW vii; Vn Conc., c, 1820, ed. H. Marteau (Leipzig, 1911), BW v; Konsertstycke, F, bn solo, 1827, BW vii; Pf Conc., D, inc., undated, ?earlier version of following, BW vi; Pf Conc., D, 1855, BW vi;

Other works: Fri Fantasi, 1817, lost; Revûe-Marsch, E, military band, ?1818; Variations on ‘Göterna fordomdags drucko ur horn’, 1819, lost; Slaget vid Leipzig [The Battle of Leipzig], 1828, BW viii; Humoristisches Capriccio, 1841, lost; Elfenspiel, 1841, arr. pf 4 hands by H. von J. Hauer (1921), BW viii; Fugue, E, 1841, also arr. pf 4 hands; Ernste und heitere Grillen, 1842, ed. (1951), BW viii; Erinnerung an die norwegischen Alpen, 1842, ed. (1948), BW ix, arr. 2 org, 1866; Bayaderen-Fest, 1842, BW ix; Wettlauf, 1842, ed. (1946), BW ix

chamber

Septet, B, cl, bn, hn, vn, va, vc, db, ?1828, ed. (1893), BW x [?reworking of lost Septet, 1817]

2 pf qnts: no.1, c, 1853 (Hamburg, 1856); no.2, A, ?1850–57 (Hamburg, 1857): both BW xiii

3 str qts: no.1, g, 1818, ed. H. Rosenberg and S. Kjellström (1942); no.2, a, 1849, ed. (1903); no.3, E, 1849, ed. (1885): all BW xi; ?Str Qt, 1818, lost

Quartet, E, pf, cl, hn, bn, 1819, ed. (1943)

Pf Trio, C, 1845 [?rev. 1850, frags.]; 4 pf trios: no.1, E, 1849 (Hamburg, 1851); no.2, f, 1851 (Hamburg, 1852); no.3, d, 1851 (Hamburg, 1854); no.4, C, ?1853, ed. (Copenhagen, 1896): all BW xii

Duo concertante, A, 2 vn, ?1816–17; 2 duos: B, vc/vn, pf, 1857 (Hamburg, 1858), D, vn, pf, ?1858, ed. (1898); Concertino, a, vn, pf, 1859, inc.: all BW xiv

other works

Songs (all except lost songs in BW xvi): 3 Singlieder, 1817: Glöm ej dessa dar! [Forget not these days!], Lebt wohl ihr Berge (F. von Schiller), A votre âge; 7 songs, Musikalisk journal (1819): Romance Jag minnes dig [I remember you] Romance (Ma vie est une fleur), En parcourant les doux climats, Aftonrodnan [Gloaming] (G. Ingelmann), Ute blåser sommarvind [Outside blows the summer wind] (S. Hedborn), ed. K.F. Valentin, Gammalt och nytt av svenska tonsättare, i (1901), Romance (Un jeune troubadour), Mais ne l’oublions pas; 3 songs, Journal de musique (1820): Romance (Ah! Jeannot me delaisse), Le regard, Romance (Je t'aimerai); Des Mädchens Klage (Schiller), 1831; Traum (L. Uhland), ed. [Swed. trans.] in Svensk sång, ii (1901); Den 4 juli 1844: Konung Oscar! (Ingelmann) (1844); Svensk folksång (H. Sätherberg) (1844); Vid konung Oscars grav (1859); Östersjön [The Baltic] (Prince Oscar Frederik), 1859 (1883); Eko från när och fjärran (F. Hedberg), S, cl obbl, 1865; 4 lost songs: Sång till de närvarende kungliga personerna [Song for the presence of their royal highnesses], ?1828, Blomman [The Flower] (Runeberg), ?1842 [?music used in Vid konung Oscars grav, 1859], Der Vogel im Walde, ?1847, Coupletter Romance och rondoletto, ?1860

Pf (all in BWxv): 11 pieces in Musikalisk journal (1819): Andante and Allegretto, A, Echo, B, Polonoise bagatelle, G, Thema con variazioni, E, Andantino, F, Scherzo, E, Thema con variazioni, g (also ed. K.F. Valentin, Gammalt och nytt av svenska tonsättare, ii, 1911), Polonoise, E, Tempo di marcia, E, Polonoise, A, Polonoise, B; 5 pieces in Journal de musique (1820): Thema con variazioni, E, Marche triomphale, A, Rondeau bagatelle, B, Con spirito, B, Poco allegro, D; Waltz, A, 1844, BW xv; Marche triomphale, C, ?1856, BW xv; 3 pieces: Une plaisanterie, E, Romance et scherzo, A, Presto féroce, e, ed. (1927), BW xv; Fantasia on 2 Swedish Folktunes, c, BW xv

Other kbd: 3 Fantasias, A, c, A, melodicon, ?1816–17, BW xv; En landtlig bröllopsfest [A Country Wedding], org 4 hands, 1844, arr. pf 4 hands by P.F. Bengtzon (1891), BW xv

(6) (Christian) August Berwald

(b Stockholm, 24 Aug 1798; d Stockholm, 13 Nov 1869). Swedish violinist and composer, brother of (5) Franz Berwald. He enjoyed significantly more success as a performer, teacher and composer in Sweden than his brother, but none of his works have remained in the repertory. He gave the first performance, with his brother, of Franz's double violin concerto (1817), a work modelled on the double concerto by Dupuy which the brothers had performed the previous year. He was also the soloist in his brother's concerto of 1820. From 1815 he was a member of the court orchestra, becoming its leader from July 1832 until his retirement in 1861. Towards the end of his life he was head of the Conservatory of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (1863–6). He composed an orchestral overture, several works for violin and orchestra, some string quartets and incidental music to a play for the Royal Theatre (in S-Skma).

(7) Astrid (Maria Beatrice) Berwald

(b Stockholm, 8 Sept 1886; d Stockholm, 16 Jan 1982). Swedish pianist and teacher, granddaughter of (5) Franz Berwald. She studied at Richard Andersson's music school in Stockholm and later with Dohnányi at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1908–11). One of the leading Swedish pianists of her generation, she joined the staff of the Richard Andersson school in 1911 and was its principal from 1935 until her retirement in 1965. She gave the première of Franz Berwald's Piano Concerto in 1904 (with a piano transcription by Gustaf Heintze of the orchestral accompaniment) and in 1935 she founded the Berwald Trio, with whom she performed and recorded works by her grandfather.

(1) Alessandro Besozzi (i)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

berwald family: lives and works

MGG1(‘Berwald, Familie’, A. Helmer and A. Lönn; ‘Berwald, Franz Adolf’, E. Lomnäs and N. Castegren)

SBL(‘Franz Adolf Berwald’, O. Morales; ‘Christian August Berwald’, ‘Johan Fredrik Berwald’, J. Rabe)

P.C. Boman: ‘En svensk tonsättares verksamhet’, Ny tidning för musik, iv (1856), 97 [(4) Johan Frederik Berwald’s works]

A. Lindgren: ‘Johan Fredrik Berwald’, Svenske hofkapellmästare 1782–1882 (Stockholm, 1882)

A. Lindgren: Musikaliska studier (Stockholm, 1896)

A. Hillman: Franz Berwald: en biografisk studie med kompositionsförteckning (Stockholm,1920)

O. Morales: ‘Franz Berwald: förfäderna, ur en outgiven Berwaldbiografi’, STMf, iii (1921), 52–62

A. Arosenius: ‘Glimtar ur Franz Berwalds liv’, Bäckahästen, ii (Djursholm, 1946)

R. Layton: Franz Berwald (Stockholm, 1956; Eng. orig., London, 1959)

Å. Brandel: Släkten Berwald [The Berwald family] (Stockholm, 1960)

Å. Brandel: ‘Släkten Berwald: dess tidigare historia och dess verksamhet i Ryssland’, STMf, xliii (1961), 89–97

S. Broman: ‘Franz Berwalds stamträd’ [Berwald’s genealogy], STMf, l (1968), 7–50

H. Erdmann and H.W.Schwab: ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der Musikerfamilie Berwald’, Mf, xxiii (1970), 169–72

I. Andersson: Franz Berwald (Stockholm, 1970–71)

N. Castegren: ‘Berwald, Franz’, Sohlmans musiklexikon, ed. H. Åstrand (Stockholm, 2/1975–9)

S. Walin and B.Hammar: ‘Berwald’, ibid.

franz berwald: studies of works

L. Norman: ‘Franz Berwalds kammarmusik-verk’, Tidning för theater och musik (1859), nos.7, 8, 10

C. Petersen: ‘Werke von Franz Berwald’, NZM, l (1859), 185–6, 197–8, 205–6

E. Sundström: ‘Till kännedomen om Franz Berwalds operaplaner’, STMf, ix (1927), 195–200

P. Estreen: ‘Något om Berwalds ungdomsverk för piano’, STMf, xxviii (1946), 120–27

E. Sundström: ‘Franz Berwalds operor’, STMf, xxix (1947), 16–62

N. Castegren: ‘Musikaliska konstföreningen och Franz Berwald: bidrag till kännedomen om offentliggörandet av Franz Berwalds verk intill 1911’, STMf, xxxv (1953), 131–44

F. Törnblom: ‘Franz Berwald, Swedish Symphonist’, Musikrevy, ix (1954), 8–10

R. Layton: ‘Franz Berwald’, The Symphony, ed. R. Simpson, i (Harmondsworth, 1966, 2/1972)

I. Store: Musikalisk analys och Berwalds symfonisk teknik (Stockholm, 1968)

K. Stahmer: ‘Ein Beitrag Berwalds zur romantischen Sonatenform: das Duo für Violoncello und Klavier (1858)’, STMf, lix (1977), 23–33

A. Johnson: ‘Berwald and the Queen of Golconda’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 17–19

L. Hedwall: ‘Franz Berwald’, Den svenska symfonin (Stockholm, 1983)

H. Eppstein: ‘Franz Berwalds Septett: fakta och frågor kring verkets tillkomst’ [Berwald’s Septet: facts and questions about its origin], STMf, lxvii (1985), 53–8

R. Layton: ‘The Symphony in Scandinavia’, A Companion to the Symphony (London, 1993), 327–34

O. Ander: ‘Berwalds världsliga kantater: en studie i opportunism’, Artes, xxii/1 (1996), 30–41

H.-G. Peterson: ‘“Frisch und lebendig gedacht … ”: om Berwalds pianokonsert’, Artes, xxii/1 (1996), 23–9

J.L. Höglund: Franz Berwald, tonsättare, ortoped, glasbruksdisponent: ett liv, en konst (Stockholm, 1996)

franz berwald: other studies

S. Walin: ‘Franz Berwalds offentliga konsertverksamhet i Stockholm före utrikesresan 1829’, STMf, xxviii (1946), 8–71

A. Wiberg: ‘Franz Berwalds resestipendieansökningar’ [Berwald’s applications for travel grants], STMf, xxx (1948), 132–6

A. Baekström: ‘Franz Berwalds sista replik i hans första tidningspolemik’, STMf, xxxii (1950), 195–7

R. Layton: ‘De ursprungliga hos Berwald’ [Berwald’s originality], Musikrevy, ix (1954), 218–21

A. Wiberg: ‘Franz Berwald som tidskriftsredaktör’ [Berwald as journal editor], STMf, xxxvi (1954), 104–26

G. Olsson Nordberg, ed.: Franz och Mathilde Berwald: brev och dagboksblad (Stockholm, 1955)

F. Schnapp: ‘Franz Berwalds brevväxling med Liszt 1857–8’, Ord och bild, lxx (1961), 435–42

[Berwald committee:] ‘Briefe Franz Berwalds an Julius Schuberth’, Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1968), 152–8

‘Ein Berwald-Manuskript in der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek’, MG, xviii (1968), 252–4

M. Tegen: ‘Berlin på Berwalds tid’, Musikrevy, xxiii (1968), 253–6

N. Castegren: ‘Franz Berwalds kompositionselever vid Musikkonservatoriet 1867–68’, STMf, lvi/1 (1974), 19–30

M. Tegen: ‘Franz Berwalds samlade verk: några intryck av de hitills utgivna volymerna’ [Berwald’s collected works: some impressions of the volumes published so far], STMf, lix (1977), 81–4

E. Lomnäs, I.Bengtsson and N. Castegren, eds.: Franz Berwald: die Dokumente seines Lebens, MMS, 2nd ser., suppl. (Kassel, 1979) [DSL]

J. Bergsagel: Scandinavia: ‘Unity in Diversity’, Man & Music: the Late Romantic Era, ed. J. Samson (London, 1991), 240–65

A. Thoor: ‘Franz Berwalds privatliv’, Artes, xxii/1 (1996), 11–22

Berzé, Hugues de.

See Hugues de Berzé.

Bes

(Ger.).

B. See Pitch nomenclature.

Besançon.

City in France. Julius Caesar recognized its strategic importance and established a fortress there against the German Ariovisti in 58 bce. The settlement known as Vesontio subsequently became the metropolis of the Gallo-Roman region of Sequana. In the 5th century it became a bishopric but between 1290 and 1576 achieved the status of a free city. Administered as part of the Habsburg empire during the 16th century, it came under Spanish rule in 1595 and was later recognized as the capital of the Franche-Comté. In 1678, after Louis XIV’s conquest (1665–74), it was incorporated into France, and its university was founded in 1691.

The city’s two cathedrals, St Etienne and St Jean l’Evangéliste, shared one choir during the Middle Ages. A number of liturgical manuscripts from the 11th and 14th centuries are in the Bibliothèque Municipale, including one used at St Etienne which is important in the early history of notation. Another manuscript at the same library is a 12th-century musical treatise by Gerlandus who taught at the abbey of St Paul. The payments made to primitivis scholarum of St Jean, St Etienne and Ste Madeleine from 1262 suggest that there was polyphonic singing; this is confirmed by a 14th-century manuscript found at the Sorbonne containing the so-called Besançon Mass, a fragmentary 3-voice cycle with a troped Kyrie probably by Jean Lambelet. Other 14th- and 15th-century documents refer to the singing of ‘messes à notes’ and ‘choriaux, ténoristes et organistes’ at St Paul’s. The maîtrise of St Jean included Du Fay’s colleagues, Pierre Grosseteste (choirmaster, 1440–58) and Hugolin Folain (deacon, 1461–76), who had both served as singers in the papal chapel at Rome. Besançon’s cultural life flourished during the Renaissance because of its commercially advantageous location, particularly under Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, minister to Margaret of Austria and then to Emperor Charles V. Richard de Renvoisy was employed at St Jean in 1545. During the 17th century the city’s musical life was dominated by Jean Millet (1618–84), organist, singer and finally choirmaster at St Jean. He encouraged large polychoral performances but was also concerned with the liturgical reform directed by Archbishop Pierre de Grammont; he is specially noted for his La belle méthode, ou l’art de bien chanter (1666), and composed motets and sacred and secular songs.

Vaudry (1668–1742), councillor to the city’s parliament, compiled two anthologies for the lute and theorbo (the larger of which is dated 1699). A musical academy was founded in 1726, giving concerts of chamber music: J.-M. Leclair ‘le second’ directed the orchestra in 1732. Opera productions grew in stature when a new theatre designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was opened in 1786; it was burnt in 1956. The choirmaster at the cathedral of St Jean included Esprit Blanchard (1732) and Louis-Joseph Marchand (1739). The organist Jean-François Tapray assisted K.J. Riepp in the construction of a new instrument at St Jean from 1765. During the first half of the 19th century the town’s musical life was undistinguished. A music school established in 1860 counted among its pupils René Emile Ratez (1851–1934) whose operas Ruse d’amour and Paula were performed at Besançon in 1886 and 1904 respectively.

Early in the 20th century the new societies of St Thomas d’Aquin and Ste-Cécile revived respectively plainchant in the Solesmes manner and polyphony in the late Renaissance and Baroque style. In 1906 the amateur Société des Concerts Symphoniques was formed to promote orchestral and choral concerts; after World War II Gaston Poulet was its director, but it was disbanded in 1970. Activity has since revolved around the amateur Orchestre Philharmonique (directed by J. Costarini), the Chorales à Coeur Joie and the Chorale des Chanteurs Comtois, as well as a professional vocal ensemble and chamber orchestra (directed by R. Pernette) specializing in modern music. In 1945 the music school acquired the status of an Ecole Nationale de Musique under the direction of Pierre Villette. André Cauvin, appointed director in 1967, extended its activities by founding a music academy and lycée in 1968. The conductor Gaston Poulet established an annual Festival International de Musique in 1948, held in September and devoted primarily to symphonic music. Soloists such as Fournier, Enescu, Rubinstein, Cortot, Kempff, Souzay and Flagstad, and conductors such as Münch, Furtwängler, Monteux, Schuricht and Maazel have taken part. First performances of Milhaud’s Second Piano Concerto (1948), Boulez’s Livre pour quatuor (1959) and Messiaen’s Chronochromie (1961) were given there. Some concerts take place at Les Salines d’Arc-et-Senans, the royal salt-works designed by Ledoux in 1775. The Concours des Jeunes Chefs d’Orchestre was established in 1951 (held annually until 1995 and biennially since), and from 1981 Besançon was a base for the Festival Jazz en Franche-Comté. The music collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale is notable for French music manuscripts and treatises of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Composers born in Besançon include Goudimel (c1520–72), Besard (c1567–c1617), Blavet (1700–68), Suard (1735–1817) and d’Ollone (1875–1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (C. Becker, S. Mamy)

C. Beauquier: Les musiciens francs-comtois (Dôle, 1887)

A. Castan, ed.: Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Besançon (Paris, 1897–1904)

L. Baille: ‘Richesses musicales de Franche-Comté’, Revue de Franche-Comté et Monts-Jura, cxci (1936)

J. Gardien: L’orgue et les organistes en Bourgogne et en Franche-Comté au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1943)

S. Mamy: ‘A propos d’un fonds de musique française des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles à la Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon’, RdM, lxxiii (1987), 253–62

F. Lesure, ed.: Dictionnaire musical des villes de province (Paris, 1999)

FRANK DOBBINS

Besancourt

(fl 1549–68). French composer. Nine four-voice chansons by him, all with languishing, amorous texts, were printed in Paris by Pierre Attaingnant, Nicolas Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard. They are composed in a courtly musical idiom and a homophonic style that was rather old-fashioned by the late 1550s.

WORKS

all for 4 voices

Hélas mes yeux, 1557⁹; Jeune beauté, bon esprit, bonne grace (C. Marot), 1559¹⁰, ed. in SCC, ix (1994); Las qui eust deu voir, 1559¹⁰, ed. in SCC, ix (1994); Ne te voyant je languis, 1557¹²; Puisque je dois vivre en malheur, 1568^10a; Qui le sommeil à la mort, 1549²⁴; Qui pourra dire la douleur, 1553²⁰; Si vostre mal, 1557⁹; Si vous eussiés le naturel préveu, 1549²⁴

Vive sera et tousjours perdurable, attrib. Besancourt in 1573⁶, is by Arcadelt.

FRANK DOBBINS

Besanzoni, Gabriella

(b Rome, 20 Sept 1888; d Rome, 8 July 1962). Italian mezzo-soprano. She studied in Rome, making her début (as a soprano) as Adalgisa at Viterbo in 1911. After further study she became a mezzo-soprano, singing Ulrica in Rome and appearing throughout Italy. She first sang at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, in 1918, returning there frequently; she also visited Rio de Janeiro and, in 1919, Mexico City, where she sang Ulrica, Delilah, Nancy (Martha), Carmen and Amneris, all with Enrico Caruso as principal tenor. Engaged at the Metropolitan (1919–20), she made her début as Amneris, then sang Isabella in the Metropolitan première of L'italiana in Algeri, as well as Delilah and Preziosilla (Forza del destino) with Caruso. Besanzoni's repertory also included Laura (La Gioconda) and Santuzza, which she sang at performances of Cavalleria rusticana conducted by Mascagni himself. At La Scala (1923–4) she sang Gluck's Orpheus under Toscanini, and also appeared as Mignon and Carmen, the role of her farewell in 1939 at the Baths of Caracalla, Rome. Her voice was rich, powerful, smoothly produced and notably flexible.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Besard, Jean-Baptiste [Besardus, Joannes Baptista]

(b Besançon, c1567; d after 1616). Burgundian lutenist and composer. He received the education of a gentleman at the University of Dôle, taking the double degree of Licentiate and Doctor of Laws in 1587. He may then have spent some time in Rome, studying medicine and learning the lute. In 1597 he further matriculated at the University of Heidelberg, and also applied to teach the lute at the landgrave's court in Hesse; by this time he was established as a lute teacher in Cologne. A manuscript (PL-Kj 40143) compiled in Cologne for an anonymous pupil appears to testify to his activity in this field: it contains 33 pieces by Besard (dated between 12 October 1600 and 16 March 1601), 31 of which were later revised and reprinted in his Thesaurus harmonicus. In 1602 he returned to Besançon to marry Péronne Jacquot, and then went back to Cologne, where he published his Thesaurus harmonicus, a collection of lute music, at his own expense. The editing in 1604 of the Mercurii gallobelgici, a collection of historical documents and one of a series of collected European treaties and legal documents of the late 16th century brought out by Grevenbruch, his publisher, required the skills of a lawyer, and Besard may have undertaken it to pay for publication of the Thesaurus. In 1605 legal arrangements carried out in Besançon to assure his wife's marriage portion hint that he may have been somewhat spendthrift. In 1613 he inherited letters of nobility from his father. Between 1604 and 1617 Besard arrived in Augsburg, possibly to live with or use the influence of his friend Philip Hainhofer, a noted diplomat. He apparently continued his professions of law and medicine (see illustration), also teaching the lute. Here he published in 1617 Novus partus (a second collection of lute music) and had printed the Isagoge in artem testitudinariam, a German translation of the second edition of his lute manual (see below). In the same year he issued the Antrum philosophicum, a large, alphabetically arranged dictionary of diseases and their cures (not, as some have assumed, of alchemy) dedicated to the dukes of Pomerania. On 22 October, in Leipzig, Hainhofer wrote letters of recommendation to the Saxon, Pomeranian and Brandenburg courts, and dined with Besard. Whether Besard then actually visited these cities or gained employment at any of the courts is unknown, as are the place and date of his death.

The Thesaurus harmonicus is a major encyclopedic collection of 403 compositions in French tablature, arranged in ten books according to category: a manual on lute playing, De modo, is also part of the Thesaurus. Major types include most of the instrumental forms of the time: preludes, fantasias, psalm settings, chanson and madrigal intabulations, and a high proportion of dances (e.g. passamezzos, galliards, allemandes, courantes, branles). The music is for solo lute, or lute and voice (three pieces are for lute ensemble), and represents 21 different composers, the most important being Lorenzini (with whom Besard claimed to have studied), John Dowland, Vincenzo Galilei, Alfonso Ferrabosco (i) and Valentin Bakfark. About 10% of the works are directly ascribed to Besard himself, yet his significance is more as an anthologist than as a composer. The Thesaurus was printed in movable type, and its immense influence is proven by the numerous copies of individual compositions that appear in later manuscripts and printed collections: Hainhofer's Lutebooks contain several of Besard's works, and at least one complete manuscript copy of the collection survives.

The Novus partus, while not nearly so extensive a collection as the Thesaurus, is of interest on several counts. It is one of the last books to have been printed from woodblock in Germany; and its 59 compositions (also in French tablature) are divided into three sections, the first having 12 pieces for three differently tuned concerting lutes and two other instruments or voices, the second containing 12 pieces for two concerting lutes, and the third consisting of 35 compositions for solo lute. Apart from Besard, who claims 35 of the works in the entire collection, 11 other composers are included, among them Michelagnolo Galilei, La Barre, La Grotte, Pietro Paolo Melli and Mesangeau. Besard also appended to the Novus partus a second edition of his lute manual, entitled Ad artem testudinis. The similarities and differences between the contents of the Thesaurus and those of the Novus partus reveal the differences in musical tastes in 1603 and 1617.

Both collections reflect the general state of early Baroque instrumental music and both are fundamentally similar in style and content. The most pervasive compositional principle is that of variation, whether it appears in sets of variations on a cantus firmus, in the doubles of dances, or in other applications of diminutions. Other characteristics include idiomatic instrumental techniques (e.g. style brisé, octave equivalence), little true counterpoint (except between outer voices), strong rhythmic accents and rhythmic experimentation, simultaneous false relations and other experimental dissonances, and the equal importance of major–minor keys and modes. The chief differences between the collections lie in the absence of vocal intabulations in the Novus partus, its emphasis on the expanded lower range of the ‘theorboed’ lute, and the increase in the number of concerted works. There is attractive music in both volumes, although the texts are often frustratingly corrupt. Nevertheless, the collections are interesting today because of their sheer size, catholicity of taste, influence, historical context, and the fact that much of the music does not appear in any other source.

There are few fundamental differences between the two versions of Besard's lute instructions, although the second (Ad artem) treats right-hand techniques more extensively. Like many of the other Renaissance and Baroque manuals they concentrate on fingering technique, much of it on a highly sophisticated level. The significance of De modo is indicated by its appearance in English translation in Robert Dowland’s Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610) and in other manuscripts (e.g. Hainhofer’s).

WORKS

Editions: Lautenspieler des XVI Jahrhunderts, ed. O. Chilesotti (Leipzig, 1891/R); transcr. for guiAirs de court (secolo XVI) dal Thesaurus harmonicus di J.B. Besard, ed. O. Chilesotti, Biblioteca di rarità musicali, vii (Milan, 1914/R): transcr. for guiMadrigali, villanelle ed arie di danza del Cinquecento, ed. O. Chilesotti, Biblioteca di rarità musicali, ix (Milan, 1915/R): transcr. for guiOeuvres pour luth seul de Jean Baptiste Besard, ed. A. Souris and M. Rollin (Paris, 1969)

Thesaurus harmonicus (Cologne, 1603¹⁵/R)

Novus partus, sive Concertationes musicae (Augsburg, 1617²⁶)

WRITINGS

De modo in testudine libellus (appx to Thesaurus harmonicus) [trans. ?John Dowland in R. Dowland: Varietie of Lute Lessons (London, 1610/R1958) as ‘Necessarie Observations belonging to the Lute, and Lute-playing’]; 2nd edn as Ad artem testudinis (appx to Novus partus) [free Ger. trans. by ‘I.N.’ as Isagoge in artem testudinariam, Augsburg, 1617]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (W. Boetticher)

J. Garton: J.B. Besard’s Thesaurus harmonicus (diss., Indiana U., 1952) [incl. transcrs. of 14 pieces]

J. Sutton: Jean-Baptiste Besard’s ‘Novus partus’ of 1617 (diss., U. of Rochester, 1962) [incl. all incipits, 18 works transcr. and ed., and trans. of lute manuals]

J. Sutton: ‘The Lute Instructions of Jean-Baptiste Besard’, MQ, li (1965), 345–62

J. Sutton: ‘The Music of J.B. Besard’s Novus partus, 1617’, JAMS, xix (1966), 182–204

J. Sutton: ‘Jean-Baptiste Besard, Renaissance Gentleman’, JLSA, i (1968), 1–8

P. Kiraly: ‘Jean-Baptiste Besard: New and Neglected Biographical Information’, LSJ, xxxv (1995), 62–72

J. Lüdtke: Die Lautenbücher Philipp Hainhofers (1578–1647) (Göttingen, 1999)

JULIA SUTTON/TIM CRAWFORD

Beseda

(Cz.: ‘friendly conversation’; pl. besedy).

Several subsidary meanings developed in the 19th century; those connected with music are listed below.

(1) A type of social entertainment (often with instructive aims) or concert. This meaning developed in the 1840s during the Czech National Revival as a manifestation of middle-class cultural activity and could include declamation, music or dance.

(2) An organization, especially a club or society. The name beseda then became conferred on institutions which organized meetings, cultural events, lending libraries etc. The Měšťanská Beseda (‘Townspeople’s Club’) was formed in Prague 1846 as an important centre of national life and provided a model for other similar institutions such as the Beseda Brněnská (‘Brno Club’, 1860), which was particularly orientated towards music and which met in the purpose-built Besední Dům (‘Meeting House’). The first Czech organization which brought together writers, artists and musicians was the Umělecká Beseda (‘Artistic Society’, 1863); the Czech publishing firm Hudební Matice (later the Hudební Matice Umělecké Besedy) was formed under its auspices.

(3) A Czech ball. A Beseda národní (‘National beseda’), held in Prague 1848 to raise funds for the National Theatre, was in effect a continuation of the Czech balls of the early 1840s. The Slovanská beseda (‘Slavonic beseda’) in Brno 1900 featured characteristic dances from different Slav nations, three of them composed by Janáček for the occasion (jw VI/11-13).

(4) A Czech salon dance popular in the 19th century, inspired by the French Quadrille but using steps based on Czech folkdances. It was developed in 1863 by the dancing master Karel Link at the suggestion of the writer Jan Neruda and soon became a popular society dance. Unlike the quadrille, which with one exception (in 6/8) was confined to simple duple time, the Czech beseda included dances in fast duple time (polka, dvojpolka, kalamajka, obkročák, hulan and řezanka; all but the obkročák were played at the polka tempo of crotchet = 92), slow to moderate triple time (sousedská and rejdovák) and the Furiant. The resulting dance, in four sections, was performed by four couples who formed the shape of a square. It was introduced at a ball in the Convict Hall, Prague November 1863, to music arranged by Ferdinand Heller. By January 1864 it was danced by 140 couples in a Narodní beseda held in the Žofín Hall. A Moravian beseda was invented in the 1890s and a Silesian beseda in the early 20th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SČHK (S. Střelcová) [incl. further bibliography]

K. Link, ed.: Beseda: český salonní tanec [The beseda: a Czech salon dance] (Prague, 1863, 6/1939; Fr. trans., 1863)

F. Bonuš: Český salonní tanec beseda, jeho historie a tvůrci [The Czech salon dance beseda, its history and creators] (Prague, 1971)

J. Tyrrell: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988), 226–8

J. Tyrrell, ed. and trans.: Zdenka Janáčková: My Life with Janáček (London, 1998), 67–8

JOHN TYRRELL

Besetzung

(Ger.).

A convenient term meaning the combination of voices and/or instruments used to perform a composition, and for which there is no equivalent English word, although ‘setting’ or ‘scoring’ is similar.

Besler, Samuel

(b Brieg [now Brzeg], Silesia, 15 Dec 1574; d Breslau [now Wrocław], 19 July 1625). German composer. By 1602 he was Kantor of St Bernhard, Breslau, and by 1609 was a master at the school associated with it; he was in fact a leading light in the musical life of Breslau during the first quarter of the 17th century, and his numerous published works reflect his busy life there.

Besler's earliest works are the two German Christmas carols of 1602 and the 20 contained in his Crepundia angelica (1609); the latter are simple four-part pieces designed, as he said, to foster Christian devotion among the young. A further 12 carols appeared in 1615. Delitiarum mensalium of the same year comprises 30 graces, intended principally for students and written in the same simple style. So too are 22 pieces in Peregrinatorium spirituale (1614); to these Besler added ‘a prayer in time of pestilence’, as though he had a premonition of his death during the Breslau plague of 1625.

The two parts of Concentus ecclesiastico-domesticus, dedicated to the great patron and collector Duke Georg Rudolph of Liegnitz, are somewhat more contrapuntal and in a style reminiscent of Johannes Eccard. When there were state visits to be celebrated in Breslau, Besler composed in an appropriately grander style, through which he seems to have spoken for all Silesia. Thus it was with Melos harmonicum for two four-part choirs, which commemorated the occasion, on 18 September 1611, when Archduke Matthias (later emperor) received the homage of the Silesian people. Again, in 1620, when Friedrich I of the Palatinate (the ‘Winter king’) received homage in Breslau early in the Thirty Years War, Besler honoured him with two eight-part psalms in the French style. A year later, after Friedrich had been overthrown, Breslau heard the Syncharma musicum by Schütz, whose employer, the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony, received the homage of the Silesians as a representative of the emperor; Besler's role in these festivities is not clear. His three-part manuscript Hymnus gratulatorius for the building of the tower in the New Town of Breslau during 1624 was likewise written for a festive occasion (it was rediscovered only when the tower was demolished in 1838).

Besler's Passion compositions, which are closely related to the thinking of the Silesian mystic Jacob Böhme, probably stood specially close to his heart. The three sets of Hymnodiarum et threnodiarum (1611–14), with their monodic hymns, to some extent testify to the influence of plainsong, which was specially widely cultivated in Silesia, but they also include liturgical and devotional Passion music in a modern style, the texts of whose hymns are meditative observations on the Passion story. The same dichotomy between old and new can be seen in the four Passions of 1612; in the St Matthew and St John Passions the choruses are (according to Gerber) composed in the traditional manner but those in the St Mark and St Luke Passions are in an up-to-date style and can thus be seen as early forerunners of those in Schütz’s Passions. The monodic writing of Besler's last published work, Heptalogus in cruce pendentis Christi, is also modern in conception.

Besler acted sporadically as a music publisher: he edited, for the first time, A. Scandello's Gaudii Paschalis Jesu Christi (1612) and the St John Passion of 1561 (1621). He was the brother of Simon Besler.

WORKS

all printed works published in Breslau unless otherwise stated

Ein schön alt gottselig Weihnachtslied: Nun lasst uns alle fröhlich sein, 5vv (1602); ed. F. Feldmann and G. Speer in Silesia cantat, vi (Dülmen, 1971)

Von der fröhlichen und gnadenreichen Geburt … unsers Herrn, 5vv (1602)

Crepundia angelica: 20 gottselige Weihnachtslieder, 4vv (1609)

De gloriosa resurrectione et ascensione D.N.J.C.… 20 deutsch und lateinisch geistliche Lieder, 4vv (1610)

Hymnorum et threnodiarum… in … passionis Jesu Christi commemorationem (1611)

In augustissimum … Mathiae secundi … melos harmonicum, 8vv (1611)

Threnodiarum … continuatio Das heilige Leyden … wie es die heiligen vier Evangelisten beschreiben nach gewöhnlicher Passion Melodey, 4vv (1612); ed. K. Ameln and C. Mahrenholz, Handbuch der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenmusik, i/3, 4 (Göttingen, 1937)

Hymnorum et threnodiarum … pars tertia, 4vv (1613)

Hymnorum et threnodiarum … in ecclesiarum usum (1614)

Peregrinatorium spirituale: 22 christselige … Liedlein, 4vv (Liegnitz, 1614)

Delitiarum mensalium apparatus harmonicus … 30 Tisch-Benedicite und Gratias … meisten theils … mit neuen Melodiis gezieret, 4vv (1615)

12 gottselige Weihnacht Liedlein, 4vv, inc. (1615)

Concentus ecclesiastico-domesticus, Kirchen- und Haus-Musica geistlicher Lieder auf den Choral musicalischer Art, 4vv (1618)

Citharae Davidicae psalmorum selectiorum prodromus, 8vv (1620)

Votum Davidicum pro auxilio divino: Ach Herr ich seufftz, Ein feste Burg, 4vv (1622)

Gaudium natalitium aller christgleubigen Weyhnacht Hertzen, 4vv (1622)

Heptalogus in cruce pendentis Christi, 1v, bc (org) (1624)

Jehova Deus turris fortissima, hymnus gratulatorius, 3vv, bc, 1624, formerly PL-WRu; ed. E. Köhler (Breslau, after 1838)

Missa super ‘Quem vidistis pastores’, 6vv, formerly WRu, cited in Bohn (1890)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB

C.J.A. Hoffmann: Die Tonkünstler Schlesiens (Breslau, 1830/R)

E. Bohn: Bibliographie der Musikdruckwerke bis 1700 … zu Breslau (Berlin, 1883/R)

E. Bohn: Die musikalischen Handschriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau (Breslau, 1890/R)

O. Kade: Die ältere Passionskomposition bis zum Jahre 1631 (Gütersloh, 1893/R)

R. Starke: ‘Samuel Besler’, MMg, xxxiii (1901), 141–51

W. Vetter: ‘Altschlesische Kunst des Weihnachtsliedes’, Schlesische Monatshefte, iv (1927), 539–42; repr. as ‘Zum Liedschaffen Samuel Beslers’, Mythos-Melos-Musica: ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Musikgeschichte, ii (Leipzig, 1961), 283–8

R. Gerber: Das Passionsrezitativ bei Heinrich Schütz und seine stilgeschichtlichen Grundlagen (Gütersloh, 1929)

N. Hampel: Deutschsprachige protestantische Kirchenmusik Schlesiens bis zum Einbruch der Monodie (diss., U. of Breslau, 1937)

H.A. Sander: Beiträge zur Geschichte des lutherischen Gottesdienstes und der Kirchenmusik in Breslau (Breslau, 1937)

K. Ameln and C. Gerhardt: ‘Johann Walter und die ältesten deutschen Passionshistorien’, Monatshefte für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, xliv (1939), 105–199

H.J. Moser: ‘Zur sudetendeutschen Musik in Renaissance und Barock’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Sudetenländer, vi (1943), 309–30

S. Gissel: Untersuchungen zur mehrstimmigen protestantischen Hymnenkomposition in Deutschland um 1600 (Kassel, 1983)

FRITZ FELDMANN/DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Besler, Simon

(b Brieg [now Brzeg], Silesia, 27 Aug 1583; d Breslau [now Wrocław], 12 July 1633). German composer. He matriculated at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder in 1604 and was probably also a pupil of Bartholomäus Gesius there. He was active as a Kantor and teacher at Striegau (Strzegom) before 1610, from 1610 to 1620 he was at St Maria Magdalena, Breslau, and from 1620 to 1627 he was Kantor in the service of Duke Georg Rudolph at the princely collegiate church of St Johannes, Liegnitz (Legnica). It is still uncertain precisely when, towards the end of his life, he returned to Breslau. As a composer, apart from the six-part Heut geborn ist uns ein Kindlein klein, he confined himself to simple four-part writing for use in schools and churches and on special occasions. He was the brother of Samuel Besler.

WORKS

all printed works published in Breslau unless otherwise stated

Cantio votiva, Qui dare cuncta soles, 4vv (1615)

Christlicher Weyhnachtgesang, Von einer Jungfrau auserkorn, 4vv (1616)

Lob und Freuden Gesang, Heut geborn ist uns ein Kindlein klein, 6vv (1616)

Schönes und andächtiges Gebet, O Jesu Christ, gütigster Herr, 4vv (Brieg, 1618)

Auffmunterung, Da pacem Domine in diebus nostris, 4vv (Brieg, 1619)

Neu anmuttig Weynacht Lied, Das Jesulein nun ist geborn, 4vv (Brieg, 1619)

Trost Gesang dem Herren Friedrichen von Bebran über dem seligen Abschiede seiner Frauen Helenae, 4vv (1628)

Nobiliss. sponsor. Dn. Iohannis Hoffmann … ac Mariae Artztiae … sacris nuptialibus … votiva cantio, 4vv (n.p., 1628)

Frewd und Wollust dieser Welt, 4vv, PL-WRu, according to Bohn (1890); Handbüchlein gottseliger Weyhnachtlieder, 4vv, ?WRu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB

E. Bohn: Bibliographie der Musikdruckwerke bis 1700 … zu Breslau (Berlin, 1883/R)

E. Bohn: Die musikalischen Handschriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau (Breslau, 1890/R)

W. Scholz: Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte der Stadt Liegnitz von ihren Anfängen bis etwa zum Jahre 1800 (Liegnitz, 1941)

FRITZ FELDMANN

Besoyan, Rick [Richard] (Vaugh)

(b Alameda, CA, 1925; d Sayville, NY, 13 March 1970). American composer, lyricist and librettist. Besoyan showed an early interest in music and studied at the University of California at Berkeley. After serving in the army he went to New York City in 1946 to pursue a career as an actor and singer. For a while he toured with the Bredon-Savoy Light Opera Company performing operettas. Later Besoyan studied at the American Theatre Wing's school and became a musical coach at Stella Adler's Theatre School. He turned to writing and composing in the 1950s and, using his experience with light opera, wrote the book, music and lyrics for Little Mary Sunshine (1959), one of the most popular off-Broadway musicals of the era and an enduring favourite with schools, summer theatres and amateur groups. Little Mary Sunshine was a delicious spoof of Rose-Marie and other favourites of American operetta and the intimate production ran a surprising 1143 performances. Besoyan accurately captured the old style, playfully echoing the music of Romberg and Friml while satirizing the innocence of that era. Four years later Besoyan penned a similar parody, The Student Gypsy, or the Prince of Liederkranz (1963), based on The Student Prince and other European-set operettas, but the result was much less successful, opening in a Broadway theatre but running for only 16 performances. He fared little better with his off-Broadway Babes in the Woods (1964). This musical version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ran for 45 performances. Besoyan's output raises conjecture about his ability to compose beyond the level of parody, but there is an evident talent for lively and creative songwriting in his existing works.

WORKS

dates are those of the first New York performance

Little Mary Sunshine, 18 Nov 1959 [incl. Look for a Sky of Blue, Colorado Love Call]

The Student Gypsy, or The Prince of Liederkranz, 30 Sept 1963

Babes in the Woods, 28 Dec 1964

THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Besozzi [Besuzzi, Bezocy, Bezozi, Bezozzi, Bezzossi, Bisuzzi, Bizzossi, Pessozi].

Italian family of musicians. Their activities are recorded from the 16th century, when Cerborio Besozzi was a piffaro at Bergamo (1538) and Giovanni Francesco Besozzo was a music printer at Milan, to the mid-19th. They were mostly oboists.

(2) Cristoforo Besozzi

(3) Giuseppe Besozzi

(4) Alessandro Besozzi (ii)

(5) Paolo Girolamo Besozzi

(6) Antonio Besozzi

(7) Gaetano Besozzi

(8) Carlo Besozzi

(9) Louis-Désiré Besozzi

GUIDO SALVETTI/T. HERMAN KEAHEY

(1) Alessandro Besozzi (i)

(b Milan, fl 1680–1700). Singer and opera composer. He wrote Act 1 of the opera Antemio in Roma, performed at Novara in 1695, and an aria for the pasticcio opera Etna festivo performed at Milan in 1696. His lost Six Sonates à violon seule et basse qui peuvent se jouer sur la flüte was published in Paris about 1700.

(2) Cristoforo Besozzi

(b Milan, 1661; d Piacenza, 22 Oct 1725). Oboist and bassoonist, brother of (1) Alessandro Besozzi (i). He was established in Parma as an instrumentalist in 1701, where from 1 June 1711, he was an oboist in the Guardia Irlandese, a military band founded by Duke Antonio Farnese.

(3) Giuseppe Besozzi

(b Milan, 1686; d Naples, 22 Dec 1760). Oboist, eldest son of (2) Cristoforo Besozzi. He moved to Parma with his father and played with the Guardia Irlandese from 1711 to 1728, before becoming a virtuoso d'oboe at the ducal court until 1733. From 1734 to 1738 he was at the court of Naples but was dismissed because he became blind. After that he devoted himself to teaching.

(4) Alessandro Besozzi (ii)

(b Parma or Piacenza, 22 July 1702: d Turin, 26 July 1793). Oboist and composer, son of (2) Cristoforo Besozzi. He played in the Guardia Irlandese from 1714 to 1728, after which he served Duke Farnese as virtuoso d'oboe until 1731. For the rest of his life he served the King of Sardinia, Carlo Emanuele III, as virtuoso d'oboe in the court chapel at Turin. In 1735 he and his brother (5) Paolo Girolamo were favourably received in Paris at the Concert Spirituel, but they soon returned to Turin. Burney heard the brothers play duets at their home in Turin on 13 July 1770. In spite of their advanced years, Burney judged their performances to be remarkable. In 1776 Alessandro was named primo virtuoso di camera, dire Hore generale della musica istrumentale e suonatore di Hautbois.

Alessandro's known output includes several concertos, only one of which was printed during his lifetime, and hundreds of works for chamber groups. The style of the concertos is characteristic of the late Baroque. The harmonic language lacks the simple directness developed by Vivaldi and others. There is a predominance of a sequentially generated counterpoint, but the texture frequently features contrasting sections consisting only of solo and bass. The chamber music, much of which was printed, is often jointly attributed to Alessandro and his brother (5) Paolo Girolamo.

WORKS

Concerto, G, 5 insts (n.p., n.d.)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, vc, op.1 (Paris, n.d.), with (5) Paolo Girolamo Besozzi [may be the same as Six Sonates en trio pour deux violons et violoncello (Paris, ?1750) in GB-Lbl]

12 Sonatas, 2 vn, vc, op.2 (Paris, c1740)

6 Sonatas, fl, vn (London, ?1747)

6 Solos, fl/vn, op.2 (London, ?1750)

6 Trios, 2 vn, bc, op.2 (Paris, n.d.)

8 Sonatas, 2 fl/vn, bc, op.3 (London, ?1750)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, bc, op.3 (Paris, n.d.)

6 Solos, fl, ob/vn, bc (London, ?1759)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, bc, op.4 (Paris, n.d.; London, ?1760)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn/fl, bc, op.5 (London, 1764)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn ob, vc, op.7 (Paris, n.d.)

6 Trios, 2 vn ob, vn, bc (Venice, n.d.)

6 Sonatas, vn/fl, bc (Paris, n.d.)

6 Duets, 2 fl/vn (London, n.d.)

Ob conc., F, c1760, D-RH (2 copies); ob conc., D, c1760, RH (2 copies, 1 inc.), H-Bb; ob conc., D, c1760, D-Rtt; ob conc., B, c1760, Rtt; ob conc., G, c1760, Rtt, rev. with new 3rd movt in GB-Lbl; fl conc., G, S-L; ob conc., G, c1770, D-Rtt [attrib. (8) Carlo Besozzi in H-Bb

?Marchia da Caccia, pf, I-Vqs [attrib. ‘Sig:ri Bisuzzi’]

c100 trio sonatas, D-Bsb, KA, Mbs; I-U Dricardi; S-L, Skma, Uu; Us-BEm, SFsc [some identified by op. so may duplicate printed works]

12 Sonatas, vn, b, Genoa

(5) Paolo Girolamo Besozzi

(b Parma, 17 April 1704; d Turin, 28 May 1778). Bassoonist and oboist, son of (2) Cristoforo Besozzi. He was a member of the Duke of Parma’s Guardia Irlandese from 1717 to 1727, and in 1728 he became virtuoso d'oboe to Duke Farnese. In 1731 he became a bassoonist at the court in Turin. In 1735 he went to Paris with his brother (4) Alessandro Besozzi (ii) and played at the Concert Spirituel. Paolo Girolamo and his brother (4) Alessandro Besozzi (ii) are often cited as joint authors of works; no works are known which are attributed to Paolo Girolamo only.

(6) Antonio Besozzi

(b Parma, 1714; d Turin, 1781). Oboist and composer, son of (3) Giuseppe Besozzi. He was in the service of the Duke of Parma from 1727 to 1731, in the Guardia Irlandese, and in 1734 he performed at Naples. In 1738 he joined the royal chapel in Dresden, becoming first oboist in the following year. In December 1757 he played, probably with his son (8) Carlo Besozzi, at the Concert Spirituel in Paris. From 1758 to 1759 he was at the Stuttgart court under the direction of Jommelli. He returned to Dresden and was there until 1774. In 1775 he moved to Turin. He is known to have been an active composer but none of his compositions appear to have survived.

(7) Gaetano Besozzi

(b Piacenza, 25 Feb/March 1725 or Parma, 1727; d London, 1798). Oboist, son of (3) Giuseppe Besozzi. He was at the Naples court from 1736 to 1765. He moved to Paris in that year, where he worked in the royal chapel and appeared frequently at the Concert Spirituel. It is probably this Besozzi that Burney heard and admired there on 14 June 1770. In 1793 Gaetano moved to London, where he assumed the post of royal chamber musician and played first oboe in the Salomon concert series. His son Girolamo (b Naples, 1745–58; d Paris, 1788) travelled with him to Paris in 1765 and was an acclaimed oboist at the Paris court from 1770. Girolamo also played at the Concert Spirituel and was perhaps a composer, although no works can be attributed to him with certainty. His own son Henri (b Paris, c 1775; d ?Versailles, ?after 1814) was a flautist at the Opéra-Comique.

(8) Carlo Besozzi

(b Naples, 1738; d 22 March 1791). Oboist and composer, son of (6) Antonio Besozzi. His father Carlo was undoubtedly his teacher. He must have displayed phenomenal ability for in 1755 he became a regular member of the Dresden court orchestra, a position which he retained throughout his life. His tours of Europe with his father included visits to Paris (1757) and Stuttgart (1758–9). He was judged favourably by Burney and by Leopold Mozart, who heard him play in Salzburg in 1778. Schubert heard Carlo in Augsburg and referred to him as the monarch of oboists and a great, ‘but somewhat unusual’, theorist.

Even though none of Carlo’s music was printed during his lifetime, 23 concertos, 26 sonatas and a divertimento have survived. The concertos were clearly written for Carlo to play himself, and while conceived to display his skill, they rarely indulge in virtuoso display per se. The final movements are more serious than was common at that time and often introduce Sturm und Drang characteristics. There is an emphasis on novelty, frequently of an unexpectedly chromatic nature. The works for wind ensemble are, with one exception, in major keys and each of the four movements is usually in the tonic key.

Carlo’s son Francesco (b Dresden, 1766; d 23 March 1810/1816) succeeded him as oboist in the Dresden royal chapel in 1792. Francesco was one of the best-known oboists of his time but no compositions by him are known to have survived.

WORKS

Ob conc., C, c1770, D-HR, also H-Bb dated c1800 and CZ-K dated 1768–74; ob conc., C, c1800; H-Bb, also CZ-K dated 1768–74; 4 ob concs., C, 1768–74, K; ob conc., G, c1800, H-Bb, also D-Rtt dated c1770; 4 ob concs., G, 1768–74, CZ-K; ob conc., F, c1800, H-Bb, also CZ-K dated 1768–74; 2 ob concs., F, 1768–74, CZ-K; ob conc., B, 1800–25, H-Bb; 2 ob concs., B, 1768–74, CZ-K; ob conc., E, 1800–25, H-Bb, also CZ-K dated 1768–74; ob conc., g, c1800, H-Bb; 2 ob concs., D, 1768–74. CZ-K; conc., 2 ob, C, 1768–74, K, inc. [1 conc., C, ed. J. Adamus (Adliswil, 1994)]

24 Sonatas, 2 ob, 2 hn, bn, A-Wgm; 3 printed in Alte Musik klassischer Blasermusik, cxxii–cxxiv (Munich, 1973)

Sonata, 2 ob, c1760, D-Bsb; sonata, ob, bn, c1770, HR

Divertimento, 2 fl, vc, c1795, H-KE

3. Music and the sacred world.

(9) Louis-Désiré Besozzi

(b Versailles, 13 April 1814; d Paris, 11 Nov 1879). Pianist and composer, son of Henri, great-grandson of (7) Gaetano Besozzi. From 1825 he studied at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1836 he won second prize in the contest of the Accademia di Belle Arti for his cantata Velléda. In the following year he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Marie Stuart et Rizzio; Gounod was among the competitors. He was an important teacher and published numerous works, mostly now lost, for piano and organ, as well as vocal music. His surviving works include: Esquisses, 24 pieces for Piano (Paris, 1867); Musique Chorale … solfèges sans accompagnement (Paris, 1868); 84 versets on préludes for organ or harmonium, op.101 (Paris, ?1880); and a manuscript (in Brussels) of a Benedictus from one of his masses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

DEUMM (M.-T. Bouquet)

EitnerQ

FétisB

MGG1 (P. Petrobelli)

G. Roberti: La cappella regia di Torino, 1515–1870 (Turin, 1880), 31–43

N. Pellicelli: ‘Musicisti in Parma nel secolo XVIII’, NA, xi (1934), 29–57, 248–81

D. Nimetz: The Wind Music of Carlo Besozzi: Critical Edition of Twenty-Four Sonatas (diss., U. of Rochester, 1967)

R.G. Humiston: A Study of the Oboe Concertos of Alessandro Besozzi and Johann Christian Fischer with a Thematic Index of 201 Eighteenth-Century Oboe Concertos (diss., U. of Iowa, 1968)

J. Záloha: ‘Oboenkonzerte Carlo Besozzis in Cesky Krumlov’, MG, xix (1969), 746–8

I. Cavallini: ‘Contributi alla Conoscenza di Alessandro Besozzi e della Famiglia’, Nuova rassegna di studi musicali, ii (1978), 81–91

B. Haynes: Music for Oboe, 1650–1800: a Bibliography (Berkeley, 2/1992), 67–70

B. Höft: ‘Komponisten, Komponistinnen und Virtuosen’, Die Mannheimer Hofkapelle im Zeitalter Carl Theodors, ed. L. Finscher (Mannheim, 1992), 59–70

T. DuBois: ‘C.F.D. Schubart’s Comments about Double Reed Instruments and Performers’, Journal of the International Double Reed Society, xxiv (1996), 31–40

Bessaraboff, Nicholas [from 1945 Nicholas Bessaraboff Bodley]

(b Voronezh, 12 Feb 1894; d New York, 10 Nov 1973). American musicologist of Russian birth. Actively interested in music from childhood, he was trained as a mechanical engineer in St Petersburg (1912–15). In 1915 he was sent to the USA to join a Russian Artillery Commission seeking to procure munitions. After the 1917 Revolution, Bessaraboff stayed in the USA, working as an engineer in Rochester, New York; it was there that he began the serious study of musical instruments. In 1927 he became a naturalized American citizen. Four years later he moved to Boston, where in 1935 he began a short catalogue that grew into a general compendium of western European instruments, arranged in the form of a systematic classification of instruments. Ancient European Musical Instruments: an Organological Study of the Musical Instruments in the Leslie Lindsey Mason Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was published in 1941, after which time Bessaraboff devoted himself mainly to his engineering career and to the study of prime numbers. For further information, see D.D. Boyden: ‘Nicholas Bessaraboff's Ancient European Musical Instruments’, Notes, xxviii (1971–2), 21–7

DAVID D. BOYDEN

Bessel, Vasily Vasil'yevich

(b St Petersburg, 13/25 April 1843; d Zürich, 16 Feb/1 March 1907). Russian music publisher. He received his music education at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Wieniawski and music theory with Nikolay Zaremba, and graduated in 1865 from I.A. Veykman’s viola class. From 1866 to 1874 he played the viola in the ballet orchestra of the imperial theatres. In August 1869 he and his brother Ivan opened a music shop on the Nevskiy Prospekt and this swiftly expanded into a thriving publishing house. An important centre of Russian musical life, Bessel’s firm published works by all the prominent Russian composers, notably Tchaikovsky, Dargomïzhsky, Anton Rubinstein and the members of The Five. Bessel was known also as a writer, and several of his articles appeared in the weekly journal Muzïkal'nïy listok (‘The musical leaflet’), which he edited and published from September 1872 to May 1877. He also contributed to the Neue allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, and from 1878 until 1887 was the St Petersburg correspondent of the Neue Musik-Zeitung published in Leipzig. From September 1885 to December 1888 he published the weekly Muzïkal'noye obozreniye (‘Music review’), and in 1901 his book on music publishing, Notnoye delo, appeared in St Petersburg. After his death the firm passed to his sons Vasily and Aleksandr, who in 1920 moved the business to Paris.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N.F. Findeyzen: Vasiliy Vasil'yevich Bessel (St Petersburg, 1909)

B.L. Vol'man: Russkiye notnïye izdaniya XIX–nachala XX veka [Russian music publishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries] (Leningrad, 1970)

G.B. Bernandt and I.M.Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke [Writers on music], i (Moscow, 1971) [incl. full list of writings]

R.W. Oldani: ‘Editions of Boris Godunov’, Musorgsky in Memoriam, 1881–1981, ed. M.H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1982), 179–213

GEOFFREY NORRIS/CAROLYN DUNLOP

Besseler, Heinrich

(b Dortmund-Hörde, 2 April 1900; d Leipzig, 25 July 1969). German musicologist. He studied musicology with Gurlitt in Freiburg, with Adler and Fischer in Vienna and with Ludwig at Göttingen, along with philosophy (Heidegger) and German philology as secondary subjects. He obtained the doctorate under Gurlitt at Freiburg in 1923 with a dissertation on the German suite in the 17th century and completed his Habilitation there two years later with a work on the motet from Petrus de Cruce to Philippe de Vitry. In 1928 he was appointed reader in musicology at the University of Heidelberg. From 1935 to 1939 he oversaw all publications emanating from the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung. He became professor in musicology at the University of Jena in 1948 and in 1956 at the University of Leipzig, where he remained until 1965. Besseler edited the series Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft (1932–9), Musikalische Gegenwartsfragen (1949–53), Jenaer Beiträge zur Musikforschung (1954–61) and Musikgeschichte in Bildern (with M. Schneider and W. Bachmann), and oversaw the publications of Corpus mensurabilis musicae. Many of his students, including Bukofzer, Gerson-Kiwi, Lowinsky, E.H. Meyer, Hewitt and Salmen, became active at universities in and outside Germany. Among the honours he received were his election to full membership in the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Leipzig and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Besseler won an international reputation with his monumental study of the history of Western music to 1600, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1931). There followed numerous works on the music of the late Middle Ages, including Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (1950), which provoked discussion about the question of insular or continental origin of fauxbourdon. Almost simultaneously with this book he began his edition of the complete works of Du Fay. Shortly before his death he completed preparations for the publication of the Schedel Liederbuch (c1460), an important early source of German polyphonic song. In addition to his authoritative work in early music, Besseler gave much impetus throughout the 1950s to the study of Bach’s work, preparing editions of instrumental works for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe and promoting the idea that Bach’s instrumental music prepared the way for ‘German Classicism’. Besseler also made significant contributions in examining the differences between vocal and instrumental style (‘Singstil und Instrumentalstil in der europäischen Geschichte’, 1953), to which he contributed the concepts of Prosamelodik and Korrespondenzmelodik. Throughout his career, Besseler paid close attention to the different functions of music throughout the ages, and his writings covered a broad chronological range. He also contributed valuable essays in aesthetics and organology and was one of the first to give serious consideration to the study of paintings as a means of understanding the nature of early instruments and performing practice, leading to his co-editorship of the broadly conceived Musikgeschichte in Bildern.

In addition to his scholarly accomplishments, Besseler played a pivotal role as organizer in German musicology. Active during his student days as a music critic and a leader in the German youth movement, Besseler had a keen sense of the workings of contemporary musical life and the role of musicology in it. Pursuing a career in a volatile economic and political climate, Besseler learnt how to use politics to benefit musicology and strengthen its relationship with the state and the public, a skill which served him well in dealing with the authorities of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic. Although politics rarely comes through in his scholarly writings, his activities clearly reveal his engagement, such as the speech he delivered in 1934 (‘Musik und Nation’) endorsing plans to forge a bond between music and the Nazi state and to isolate German music from unsavoury influences. Thereafter, Besseler played a central role in the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung, supervising its periodicals and the expansion and transformation of the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst into Das Erbe deutscher Musik. Besseler cultivated a deep trust with the Nazi education minister and assumed the role of protecting Germany’s interests at international conferences. His strong political position actually allowed him to defy Nazi anti-Semitic policy and to promote two Jewish doctoral students, Lowinsky and E.H. Meyer. After the war, Besseler’s organizational skills combined with his high scholarly profile launched him to the position of leading musicologist in East Germany. Despite his dismissal from Heidelberg University owing to his activities during the Third Reich, Besseler was sought after by East German authorities to restore Leipzig’s musicological stature and oversee important collaborative ventures with Leipzig publishers that would rival musicological productivity in West Germany and the USA.

Many of Besseler’s innovative approaches have long stood the test of time. His concepts of Umgangsmusik (communal music making) and Darbietungsmusik (presentational music making), later developed by Doris Stockmann and others, served as an important basis for the sociology of music. Also widely accepted in both historical and pedagogical inquiries were his theories on hearing, in which he coined the designations of active-synthetic and passive listening and treated hearing as a phenomenon that can be traced historically. Scholars further adopted his notions of the inner structural unity of Viennese Classicism, his theories on metre, and his formulation for analysing Bach’s works by isolating ‘character themes’. Many of his ideas have been traced to the influences of Heidegger (his concept of musical discourse as an expression of subjectivity, and the basis for his ideas related to Gebrauchsmusik), while others of his theories have only recently been called into question and challenged, such as his assumptions about the development of French music, interpretations of Ockeghem and their applications in performing practice, attributions to Du Fay and theories concerning fauxbourdon. Besseler was nevertheless recognized by generations of musicologists for his gift for lucid and pointed argument and his rigorous development of historical concepts. His organizational talent, effectiveness as a teacher, universality of his work, multi-faceted interests and excursions into understanding the functions of art allowed Besseler to make a name for himself as one of the most influential musicologists of the 20th century.

WRITINGS

Edition: Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. P. Gulke (Leipzig, 1978) [with foreword] [G]

Beiträge zur Stilgeschichte der deutschen Suite im 17. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1923)

‘Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle – 1.–8. April 1924’, ZMw, vii (1924–5), 42–54

‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, JbMP 1925, 35–52; repr. in Musikhören, ed. B. Dolpheide (Darmstadt, 1975), 48–73 [G]

Die Motettenkomposition von Petrus de Cruce bis Philipp von Vitry (ca. 1250–1350) (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Freiburg, 1925, AMw, vii (1925), 167–252; viii (1926), 137–258, as ‘Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters’)

‘Grundfragen der Musikästhetik’, JbMP 1926, 63–80 [G]

‘Von Dufay bis Josquin’, ZMw, xi (1928–9), 1–22

Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1931/R)

‘Musik und Nation’, speech delivered in 1934; summary in H. Birtner: ‘Musikwissenschaft auf der 58. Philologentagung in Trier 1934’, ZMw, xvii (1935), 59–62, esp. 60

‘Schiller und die musikalische Klassik’, Völkische Musikerziehung, i (1934–5), 72–9

‘Die Neuordnung des musikalischen Denkmalwesens’, Deutsche Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volkbildung: Amtsblatt der Reichs- und Preussischen Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung und der Unterrichtsverwaltung der anderen Länder, i (1935), 187–9

‘Das Erbe deutscher Musik’, Deutsche Musikkultur, i (1936–7), 14–18

ed.: Musik und Bild: Festschrift Max Seiffert (Kassel, 1938) [incl. ‘Musik und Raum’, 151–60]

‘Katalanische Cobla und Alta-Tanzkapelle’, IMSCR IV: Basle 1949, 59–69

Zum Problem der Tenorgeige (Heidelberg, 1949)

‘Bach und das Mittelalter’, Wissenschaftliche Bachtagung: Leipzig 1950, 108–30; Eng. trans. in The Score (1954), no.9, p.31–42 [G]

Bourdon und Fauxbourdon: Studien zum Ursprung der niederländischen Musik (Leipzig, 1950, rev., enlarged 2/1974 by P. Gülke)

‘Charakterthema und Erlebnisform bei Bach’, GfMKB: Lüneburg 1950, 7–32

‘Die Entstehung der Posaune’, AcM, xxii (1950), 8–35

ed., with G. Kraft: Johann Sebastian Bach in Thüringen (Weimar, 1950) [incl. ‘Die Meisterzeit Bachs in Weimar’, 106–19, G]

‘Die Besetzung der Chansons im 15. Jahrhundert’, IMSCR V: Utrecht 1952, 65–72

‘The Manuscript Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 2216’, MD, vi (1952), 39–65

‘Neue Dokumente zum Leben und Schaffen Dufays’, AMw, ix (1952), 159–76

‘Singstil und Instrumentalstil in der europäischen Musik’, GfMKB: Bamberg 1953, 223–40 [G]

‘Bach als Wegbereiter’, AMw, xii (1955), 1–39 [G]

‘Zur Chronologie der Konzerte Joh. Seb. Bachs’, Festschrift Max Schneider zum achtzigsten Geburtstag, ed. W. Vetter (Leipzig, 1955), 115–28

Fünf echte Bildnisse Johann Sebastian Bachs (Kassel, 1956)

‘Markgraf Christian Ludwig von Brandenburg’, BJb 1956, 18–35

‘Mozart und die deutsche Klassik’, Musikwissenschaftlicher Kongress: Vienna 1956, 47–54 [G]

‘Spielfiguren in der Instrumentalmusik’, DJbM, i (1956), 12–38

‘Dufay in Rom’, AMw, xv (1958), 1–19

‘Einflüsse der Contratanzmusik auf Joseph Haydn’, Konferenz zum Andenken Josef Haydns: Budapest 1959, 25–40

‘Die Gebeine und die Bildnisse Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1959, 130–48

Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin, 1959) [G]

‘Umgangsmusik und Darbietungsmusik im 16. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xvi (1959), 21–43 [G]

‘Der Ausdruck der Individualität in der Musik’, BMw, v (1963), 161–8

‘Das Renaissanceproblem in der Musik’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 1–10

‘Renaissance-Elemente im deutschen Lied 1450–1500’, SM, xi (1969), 63–8

‘Deutsche Lieder von Robert Morton und Josquin’, BMw, xiii (1971), 174–81

EDITIONS

Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, iv: Messe und Lais (Leipzig, 1943/R) [first pubd separately; completed from notes left by F. Ludwig]

Guillaume Dufay: Opera omnia, CMM, i/1–6 (1951–66; no.6 rev. 2/1995 by D. Fallows)

Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke, VII/ii: Vier Ouvertüren (Kassel, 1956); VII/i: Sechs Brandenburgische Konzerte (Kassel, 1967)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Birtner: ‘Musikwissenschaft auf der 58. Philologentagung in Trier 1934’, ZMw, xvii (1935), 59–62

E. Klemm, ed.: Festschrift Heinrich Besseler zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1961) [incl. complete list of pubns to 1960]

L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Heinrich Besseler (1900–1969)’, Mf, xxiii (1970), 1–4

P. Gülke: ‘Heinrich Besseler zum Gedenken’, BMw, xii (1970), 69–73

L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Ricordo di Heinrich Besseler’, NRMI, iv (1970), 97–104

E.E. Lowinsky: ‘Heinrich Besseler (1900–1969)’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 499–502

E. Apfel: Aufsätze und Vorträge zur Musikgeschichte und historischen Musiktheorie (Saarbrücken, 1977)

P. Gülke: ‘Zu Heinrich Besselers 75. Geburtstag’, MG, xxv (1975), 231–3

M. Bent: ‘Songs of Dufay: some Questions of Form and Authenticity’, EMc, viii (1980), 454–9

C. Wolff: ‘Die Hand eines Handlangers: “Musikwissenschaft” im Dritten Reich’, Frankfurter Rundschau (24 July 1982), weekend suppl.; repr. in A. Dümling and P. Girth, eds.: Entartete Musik: zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938: eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, 16 Jan – 28 Feb 1988 (Düsseldorf, 1988), 93–4 [exhibition catalogue]

D. Stockmann: ‘Grundtypen musikalischer Kommunikation und ihre rezeptive Bewertung’, Musikhören als Kommunikationsprozess: Berlin 1983, 7–20

C. Wolff: ‘Communications’, JAMS, xxxvii (1984), 208–9

S. Hinton: ‘“Musik nach Mass”: zum Begriff der Gebrauchsmusik bei Paul Hindemith’, Musica, no.39 (1985), 146–50

H. Korth: ‘Der Fauxbourdon in seinem musikgeschichtlichen Umfeld’, Guillaume Dufay, Musik-Konzepte, no.60 (1988), 74–96

D. Zimmerschied: ‘Warum hat Heinrich Besseler das 20. Jahrhundert nicht erwähnt? Hörer, Musiker und Musikpädagogik zwischen Museum, Experiment und Tapete’, In rebus musicis: Richard Jakoby zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. A. Eckhardt and R. Stephan (Mainz, 1990), 95–107

M. Geck: ‘Zum 25. Todestag des Musikforschers Heinrich Besseler’, Musica, no.48 (1994), 244–5

L. Bernstein: ‘Ockeghem the Mystic: a German Interpretation of the 1920s’, Johannes Ockeghem: Tours 1997, 811–41

P.M. Potter: Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)

PAMELA M. POTTER

Besses (i Bonet), Antoni

(b Barcelona, 1945). Spanish pianist and composer. He studied at the Barcelona Conservatory with Joan Gibert Camins, Zamacois and Joan Massià. He was awarded a grant to further his studies in Paris with Sancan and Messiaen, and at the Antwerp Conservatory with Frederic Gevers. He was also awarded the ‘María Barrientos’ and special piano prizes by the Barcelona Conservatory, the first prize for orchestral conducting by the Antwerp Conservatory, first prizes in the Sabadell and French Institute competitions and the Silver Dragon at the International Competition in Tenerife.

As a pianist, he participated in the Santiago de Compostela, Siena and Waterloo festivals, and has performed in Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva, London, Milan, Paris, Warsaw, Vienna and other places. His repertory ranges from the Baroque to contemporary composers. He has collaborated with the violinist Gonçal Comellas and with the cellists Marçal Cervera and Radu Adulescu. He has made recordings with important recording labels and his compositions have often been included in festival programmes (such as Cuenca, Royan and Barcelona), in concert cycles and in television and radio programmes.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballets: Estels, pf; Joc de cadires I, pf

Orch: Divertimento, str; Ignot sonoris, perc, orch; Pf Conc.; Sym. no.1 ‘Terpsícore’

Vocal: Han tancat l'escola, spkr, inst ens; 3 lieder, 1v, pf; Música 17 (homenaje a Bartók), vv, tpt, perc, pf

Chbr: Dansa-impromptu, tpt, pf; 3 danses, vn, pf; El diàleg, vc, fl; 3 moviments, cl, pf; Muntanyes de Corbera (sardana), cobla band; 3 peces líriques, vn, gui; 2 sonates, vn, pf; Sonatina, fl, pf; Sonatina, vc, pf; Suite serial, 4 gui; Tarantella i fuga, tpt, pf; Trio a Mompou, pf trio

Pf: 2 danses, pf duet; 6 estudis; Himnari; 5 miniatures, 2 pf; 8 moments musicals; 2 nous preludis; 5 petits preludis; 4 preludis i danses; 2 preludis místics; Ritmes I–IV; Seguit

Other solo: Balada, vc; 6 peçes, db; 2 peces breus, vc; Tientos, org

El-ac: Joc de cadires II, pf, tape

F. TAVERNA-BECH

Besson.

French and English firm of brass instrument manufacturers. It was founded by Gustave Auguste Besson (b Paris, 1820; d Paris, 1874), an apprentice to L.-J. Raoux’s pupil Dujariez. It is unlikely that Besson founded his Paris firm at the age of 14 (as stated in the Besson catalogues) or in 1837 (as given by Arthur), but 1838 (Pierre) may be the correct date. The London branch of the firm was opened on the occasion of the Great Exhibition of 1851, first at the address of Pask, and from 1855 at that of Jullien. It was due to unsuccessful litigation against Adolphe Sax that Besson established a second London factory in 1858, leaving his wife in charge of the Paris plant. She is thought to have been Florentine Besson, who in 1864 was given a British patent for a multi-pitched cornet. Among Besson’s notable inventions and improvements in brass instrument making were the straight bore (1854), going directly through the valves rather than in the more common zigzag pattern; the full bore, which in affecting the size of the holes in the pistons improved response (1855); and, most important, the ‘prototype’ system of mandrels, which assured exact duplication of instruments and marked the birth of modern instrument manufacture (1856).

On Besson’s death the French firm passed to his widow and their daughters, Cécile and Marthe. Following the death of her mother a year later, Marthe, a woman described as ‘astute’, ‘businesslike’ and ‘energetic’ who had trained under her father, took over both the Paris and London firms. She married one Adolphe Fontaine in 1880, after which the firm took on the name ‘Fontaine-Besson’. Presumably the French trade name ‘F. Besson’ was adopted at that time, while the British instruments bear the simple attribution ‘Besson’. In the early 1890s Fontaine became ill and prone to fits of violence, leading Marthe to withdraw to London and sue for divorce. His provocative behaviour induced the French workers to strike in September and October 1894, but he stayed on and their salaries did not improve. The instruments invented by Marthe include: a cornet (1882) with two extra transposing rotary valves on the main tubing to eliminate the various loose mouthpipes previously in use; a trumpet in F (1884) with various crooks down to C, three valves and a slide; the first piccolo G trumpet, in straight form and crooking down to F and E, for a performance by Teste of Bach’s Magnificat in 1885; other high-pitched trumpets in F/E, E/D, C/B/A and B/A; a bass trumpet in C for the performance of works by Wagner: a C tuba with four valves, and a bass C tuba with five; the family of cornophones, with conical tubing and a large bore and played with a horn-type mouthpiece (1890); and a contrabass clarinet in B (1890). The F. Besson large-bore B trumpet, called the ‘Meha’ model, was the first modern B trumpet, and provided the point of departure for Elden Benge and Vincent Bach.

G.A. Besson's granddaughter Mathilde Sabatier managed the F. Besson factory before World War II, moving it after the war to 16 Faubourg Saint Denis. On her death (before 1957) Couesnon took over the firm. It was in private hands from about 1973 and ceased to exist in 1994.

During World War II, the British factory made no instruments. It has been owned by Boosey & Hawkes since 1948. While the French factory was known for its orchestral brass instruments, the British output consists mainly of band instruments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LangwillI7

C. Pierre: La facture instrumentale à l’Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris, 1890)

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique (Paris, 1893/R)

D. Arthur: Making Music (London, 1971) [Boosey & Hawkes catalogue]

M. Haine: Les facteurs d'instruments de musique à Paris au 19e siècle (Brussels, 1985)

EDWARD H. TARR

Besson, (Michel-)Gabriel

(b c1689; d Versailles, 22 Aug 1765). French violinist, musette player, flautist and composer. He may have been related to the three Bessons of 17th-century Marseilles described as ‘lieutenants du roi des violins’, or to a family of musicians of the same name living in Lyons in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1717 he was playing the violin in the king's Musique de la chambre, as a symphoniste, and he was in the orchestra of the royal chapel in 1722. In Paris in 1720 he published his ten Sonates à violon seul et la basse continue. The violin part does not go beyond the 3rd position, but Besson employed the entire technical range of the period, with arpeggios and double stops. In 1723 he acquired the reversion of François Duval's position with the 24 Violons du Roi, and he took up the duties of the post on Duval's death in 1728. At the same time he succeeded Pierre-Alexandre Pièche (1693–1728) as musette player and flautist, and he married Pièche's daughter Henriette-Claude in 1732. He was also a violinist in ensembles playing at the many court concerts. In 1746 he made over to his son the reversion of his posts, which by 1758 he himself no longer occupied (except for continuing to play in the orchestra of the royal chapel).

ELIZABETH KEITEL/BERNARD BARDET

Bessón, Gabriel Díaz.

See Díaz Bessón, Gabriel.

Besson, Gabriel-Louis

(b Versailles, 10 April 1733; d Versailles, 24 Aug 1785). French violinist, flautist, musette player and composer, son of Gabriel Besson. He was given the reversion of his father's appointments as a member of the 24 Violons du Roi, musette player and flautist of the Chamber in 1746, and in 1758 he was in charge of those posts, which were abolished in 1761. He and his father also played the violin in the royal chapel and in court concerts. He taught the violin and harp to Louis XV's daughters Mmes Adélaïde, Sophie and Louise-Marie, and in 1764 he was appointed huissier de la chambre to Mme Victoire. He received substantial pensions in his retirement. Leopold Mozart mentioned him in the journal of his visit to Versailles (1763–4), and his name appears in a letter that Leopold wrote from Salzburg to his son while the latter was in Paris (1778). Besson dedicated two collections of airs from opéras comiques and plays to Mme Victoire, one entitled Airs choisis, arrangés et variés pour le décacorde op.1 (Versailles and Paris, c1784), the décacorde being a ten-string lute-guitar hybrid he had invented, and the other Chansons et ariettes dont les accompagnements [sont] variés pour le décacorde op.2 (Versailles and Paris, c1785).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BenoitMC

La LaurencieEF

NewmanSBE

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et de théâtre à Lyon, 1688–1789 (Lyons, 1932)

W.A. Bauer and O.E. Deutsch, eds.: Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichungen, i (Kassel, 1962), 120; ii (Kassel, 1962), 271

M. Benoit: Versailles et les musiciens du roi, 1661–1733: étude institutionnelle et sociale (Paris, 1971)

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-century French Cantata (London, 1974)

M. Benoit, ed.: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

ELIZABETH KEITEL/BERNARD BARDET

Best, Matthew

(b Farnborough, Kent, 6 Feb 1957). English bass-baritone and conductor. He studied at Cambridge and at the National Opera Studio in London, and in 1982 won the Decca-Ferrier Award. He joined the Covent Garden company in 1980, and he has also sung frequently with Opera North, Scottish Opera (notably as Amfortas in 2000), WNO and Nederlandse Opera. In 1995 he toured with John Eliot Gardiner, singing Pizarro in his production of Beethoven’s Leonore, which was also recorded. In the same year he sang the High Priest in Alceste at Glyndebourne, and was praised for the dignity of his voice and his commanding presence. He is perhaps less favourably heard on recordings, which expose a certain roughness of production and where his more valued contribution has been as conductor of the Corydon Singers, founded by him in 1973. Particularly fine have been their Beethoven and Bruckner recordings; but their repertory is large and the standard of performance invariably high. Best has also worked with orchestras in Britain and Europe, being appointed principal conductor of the Hanover Band in 1998.

J.B. STEANE

Best, W(illiam) T(homas)

(b Carlisle, 13 Aug 1826; d Liverpool, 10 May 1897). English organist. He abandoned a career as a civil engineer to take up music professionally some time after 1840, and held appointments at churches in Liverpool before becoming organist to the Liverpool Philharmonic Society in 1848. From 1852 to 1855 he resided in London and for short periods was organist at the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art (Leicester Square), the Lincoln’s Inn Chapel and St Martin-in-the-Fields. In August 1855 he was elected to the post of organist at St George’s Hall, Liverpool. During his long tenure of this office Best became nationally known for his solo performances, and despite heavy commitments undertook many engagements in other cities. In 1871 he opened the Willis organ at the Royal Albert Hall, and in 1873 gave the inaugural recital on a Cavaillé-Coll instrument in the Albert Hall, Sheffield. During 1872 he resumed his connection with the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, also officiating at local churches. His appearances at the great Handel Festivals in London were kept up from 1871 to 1891; when in Rome during 1882 he gave a recital at which Liszt and Sgambati were present, and in 1890 he opened the Sydney Town Hall organ. He was granted a civil list pension in 1880; but in 1894 ill-health forced him to resign from his post with Liverpool Corporation.

Best was one of the greatest organ virtuosos of the 19th century, his powerful improvisations and fine pedal technique being especially admired. He also holds a distinguished place among the new class of civic musicians brought into prominence by the installation of concert organs in large public buildings. Although an experienced church musician, his real genius lay in the interpretation of secular music: he exploited his opportunities at Liverpool in such a way as to make the organ serve as a substitute for a municipal orchestra. His carefully planned recital programmes included not only masterpieces from the standard organ repertory but also arrangements of piano solos, chamber music, oratorio choruses and orchestral works. His fondness for adaptations inevitably dismayed purists; yet despite his enormous popularity Best rarely played to the gallery. Few of his contemporaries could equal his skill in demonstrating the potentialities of the large-scale modern organ: some of his suggested improvements were adopted by organ builders.

Best’s original compositions (anthems, keyboard works and some orchestral pieces) are unimportant; but his editions of Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn are highly professional, and he did useful work on the music of the Anglican liturgy. He also published instructional manuals, and reissued J.C.H. Rinck’s Practical Organ School (1864). His various anthologies of organ solos are exhaustive in scope, and include transcriptions from the works of most major composers from Bach onwards. He did much to reveal to a large public the full extent of Bach’s genius as a composer for the organ.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le grand orgue de la nouvelle salle de concert de Sheffield … construit par A. Cavaillé-Coll (Paris, 1874)

H.H. Statham: The Organ and its Position in Musical Art (London, 1909)

O.A. Mansfield: ‘W.T. Best: his Life, Character and Works’, MQ, iv (1918), 209–49

J.J.M. Levien: Impressions of W.T. Best (London, 1942)

E.D. MACKERNESS

Besuzzi.

See Besozzi family.

Beta Israel, music of the.

See Jewish music, §III, 9.

Betanio [Bethanio, Betani], Fausto.

Italian printer and partner of Merulo, Claudio.

Betella, Paolo.

See Bettella, Paolo.

Béthizy, Jean Laurent de

(b Dijon, 1 Nov 1702; d Paris, 19 Oct 1781). French theorist and composer. His opera L'enlèvement d'Europe was produced at Versailles in 1739 and two of his motets were performed at the Concert Spirituel: Laudate Dominum in 1749, and Domine, Dominus noster in 1756 and 1757. His only compositions to survive, however, are two cantailles: Le transport amoureux and Le volage fixé (both Paris, n.d.). Although best-known for his Exposition (1754), Béthizy also clarified, expanded and revised some of Rameau's ideas and formulated several of his own. His concept of ‘censée-toniques’ and his use of barred figures for dominant chords were adopted by Rameau in his Code de musique pratique (1760). D'Alembert and Béthizy quarrelled over Rameau's theories in the Journal oeconomique following the publication of d'Alembert's Elémens in 1752. Nevertheless in the second edition (1762) d'Alembert recommended the Exposition as a practical supplement.

Franceschini has identified Béthizy with Eugène-Eléonore de Béthisy de Mézières (1709–1781), a lieutenant general and governor of Longwy. However, there is evidence to suggest that they were different individuals, and the brochure Effets de l'air (1760), sometimes attributed to Béthizy, was written by Béthisy de Mézières.

WRITINGS

‘Reflexions sur les Elémens de musique théorique & pratique, suivant les principes de M. Rameau’, Journal oeconomique (July 1752), 89–121

‘Replique … sur les Elémens de musique’, Journal oeconomique (March 1753), 64–95

Exposition de la théorie et de la pratique de la musique (Paris, 1754, 2/1764/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (E. Franceschini); FétisB; GerberL

J. Mattheson: Plus ultra (Hamburg, 1754–6)

E.R. Jacobi: Introductions to J.-P. Rameau: Complete Theoretical Writings, Miscellanea, iii/3–6 (1968–72)

A.L.H. Earhart: The Musical Theories of Jean-Laurent de Béthizy and their Relationship to those of Rameau and d'Alembert (diss., Ohio State U., 1985)

A. LOUISE H. EARHART

Bethlehem Bach Festival.

Annual festival featuring the music of J.S. Bach, held at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It is presented by the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, founded in 1882 by John Frederick Wolle, organist of the Central Moravian Church, as the Bethlehem Choral Union, and renamed in 1898. The origins of the festival are rooted in the religious traditions of the Moravians, who settled in the area in the 18th century. The festival was initiated on 27 March 1900 with the first American performance of Bach’s B minor Mass, conducted by Wolle. Festivals were held in 1901, 1903 and 1905; after reorganization of the choir in 1911 they were resumed annually under Wolle (1912–33), whose successors include Ifor Jones (1938–69), Alfred Mann (1970–80), William Reese (1980–83) and Greg Funfgeld (from 1983). In addition to the festival in May, the choir presents the St Matthew Passion and St John Passion during Lent; it also performs in August at Bethlehem’s Musikfest and at Christmas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Walters: The Bethlehem Bach Choir (Boston, 1918, 2/1923)

R. Walters: ‘Bach at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’, MQ, xxi (1935), 179–89

M.A.D. Howe: ‘“Venite in Bethlehem” – the Major Chord’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 174–85

SARA VELEZ, RITA H. MEAD/R

Béthune, Conon de.

See Conon de Béthune.

Bethune (Green), Thomas [Blind Tom]

(b Columbus, GA, 25 May 1849; d Hoboken, NJ, 13 June 1908). Black American pianist and composer. He was blind from birth and was bought as a slave with his parents in 1850 by James N. Bethune, a journalist, lawyer and politician in Columbus. He demonstrated musical aptitude and exceptional retentive skills by his fourth year and was given musical instruction by Bethune's daughter Mary. He was exhibited throughout the state by his master in 1857, and then hired out to Perry Oliver, a planter of Savannah, who took him on an extensive concert tour throughout the slave-holding states; this included a command performance at Willard Hall in Washington DC, for visiting Japanese dignitaries. His programmes included works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg and other European masters, improvisations on operatic tunes and popular ballads, and several of his own published and unpublished compositions. He could perform difficult pieces after one hearing, sing and recite poetry or prose in several languages, duplicate lengthy orations, and imitate the sounds of nature, machinery and various musical instruments. On the outbreak of the Civil War he was returned to the Bethunes, who continued to exhibit him in the South to raise money for the Confederacy. After the Bethunes were successful in a guardianship trial in July 1865, Tom was taken abroad, with W.P. Howard of Atlanta as his musical tutor; he received testimonial letters from such musicians as Moscheles and Hallé. The Bethunes moved to Warrenton, Virginia, on their return, and Tom was shown throughout the USA and Canada; he studied with Joseph Poznanski in New York during the summers. In 1887 Bethune's son's widow gained legal control over Tom, and continued to exhibit him in major concert halls and as a vaudeville attraction. His final appearances were on the Keith Circuit, in 1904–5.

Tom wrote more than 100 piano works which are typical examples of 19th-century parlour pieces; they include The Rainstorm (1865), The Battle of Manassas (1866), March Timpani (1880), Cyclone Galop (1887), Blind Tom's Mazurka (1888), and Grand March Resurrection (1901). His vocal compositions reveal a familiarity with revival hymns.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB

The Marvelous Musical Prodigy, Blind Tom, the Negro Boy Pianist (Baltimore, 1868)

J. Becker: ‘Blind Tom as he is To-day’, Ladies' Home Journal, xv/10 (1898), 13–14; repr. in BPM, iv/2 (1976), 184–8

A. Tutein: ‘The Phenomenon of Blind Tom’, The Etude, xxxvi (1918), 91–2

E.B. Abbott: ‘The Miraculous Case of Blind Tom’, Etude Music Magazine, lviii (1940), 517, 564 only

E.M. Thornton: ‘The Mystery of Blind Tom’, Georgia Review, xv (1961), 395–400

N.T.N. Robinson: ‘Blind Tom: Musical Prodigy’, Georgia Historical Quarterly, li (1967), 336–58

G.H. Southall: ‘Blind Tom: a Misrepresented and Neglected Composer-Pianist’, BPM, iii (1975), 141–59

E. Southern: ‘Thomas Greene Bethune (1849–1908)’, BPM, iv/2 (1976), 177–83

G.H. Southall: Blind Tom: the Post-Civil War Enslavement of a Black Musical Genius (Minneapolis,1979)

G.H. Southall: The Continuing ‘Enslavement’ of Blind Tom, 1865–1887 (Minneapolis, 1982)

J.R. Seawright: ‘Slavery Onstage’, Oxford American (1998), 99–103 [Southern music issue no.2]

G.H. Southall: Blind Tom, the Black Pianist Composer (1849–1908): Continually Enslaved (Lanham, MD, 1999)

GENEVA H. SOUTHALL

Betini, Matteo [Matheus].

See Matheus de Brixia.

Betscher, Nikolaus [Leonardus Wolfgangus]

(b Berkheim, Upper Swabia, 31 Oct 1745; d Rot an der Rot, 18 Nov 1811). German composer. He was educated at the Premonstratensian abbey of Rot an der Rot and later became a monk there, taking the name Nikolaus; in 1769 he was ordained priest. He served as abbot from 1789 until the dissolution of the abbey in the secularization of 1803. As a composer he was decisively influenced by Michael Haydn. His works are in the early Viennese Classical style and show him to have been accomplished in the forms and techniques of church music of his day; they are marked by a consistent use of sonata form, melodic inventiveness and originality of texture and instrumentation. Betscher’s music lay largely forgotten until interest in it was renewed in 1984.

WORKS

most MSS in D-Tl

Sacred: 11 masses, incl. 1, C, 1794, ed. A. Šumski (Wasserburg, 1984); 2 requiem settings; 2 TeD, 1 ed. A. Šumski (Wasserburg, 1985); Mag, Vespere de confessore, Salve regina, psalms, hymns, pilgrimage songs, devotional songs

Other: Wider die Mode (12 social songs), unacc. choir; Sonata, hpd/pf; 24 pieces, various insts

ALEXANDER ŠUMSKI

Betschwarzowski, Antonín František.

See Bečvařovský, Antonín František.

Bettella [Betella], Paolo

(fl 1677). Italian composer. He was a pupil of Simone Vesi at Padua, where he became a chaplain at the cathedral. He published Messa e salmi op.1 (Venice, 1677), for one, three and four voices, with violins and continuo. There is also one piece by him in a manuscript at the University of Uppsala.

Bettendorf, Emmy

(b Frankfurt, 16 July 1895; d Berlin, 20 Oct 1963). German soprano. She made her début in 1914 at Frankfurt in Conradin Kreutzer’s Nachtlager in Granada. After two years with the company at Schwerin and an appearance in Vienna as Agathe in Freischütz she joined the Berlin Staatsoper, where her roles included Eva, Elsa and Desdemona; she also sang Ariadne and the Marschallin in performances conducted by Strauss. During the 1920s she undertook much concert work and appeared in opera with an impressive German company touring Spain and the Netherlands. Increasingly important in her career were broadcasts and recordings, through which she became one of the most popular singers of her time. She retired in 1934, but toured the eastern front singing to troops in wartime, and from 1947 to 1952 taught at the Städtisches Konservatorium, Berlin. Recordings reveal her exceptionally pure and mellow voice, the style sometimes lacking in vitality but well suited to the quieter and more relaxed parts of her extensive repertory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. White: ‘Emmy Bettendorf’, Record Collector, xv (1963–4), 149–68 [incl. discography]

J.B. STEANE

Bettlerleier

(Ger.: ‘beggar’s lyre’).

See Hurdy-gurdy.

Betterton, Thomas

(b London, 1635; d London, 28 April 1710). English actor, manager and opera director. Generally regarded as the greatest English actor before Garrick, he played a key role in the invention of Semi-opera. In 1668 he became co-manager of the Duke's Company, which was already featuring plays with musical interludes, many of them set by Matthew Locke. In 1671 the troupe moved into the new Dorset Garden Theatre, specially equipped with the machines necessary for opera. Betterton visited Paris to study stagecraft and may have seen the famed comédies-ballets of Lully and Molière. He then produced a series of musical extravaganzas, or semi-operas: adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1673, music by Locke) and The Tempest (1674, music by Locke, Humfrey and others), Thomas Shadwell's Psyche (1675, music by Locke) and Charles Davenant's Circe (1677, music by John Banister (i)). In addition to coordinating the production and devising the scenery, Betterton often acted the protagonists, roles that never required singing.

In late summer 1683 Charles II sent Betterton – now manager of the United Company, an amalgam of the former Duke's and King's companies – back to Paris to engage Lully and the Académie de Musique to produce a tragédie lyrique to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Restoration. When this proved impossible John Dryden was commissioned to provide a libretto for setting by Luis Grabu. Originally this was to have been a semi-opera, King Arthur, with a sung prologue, but the latter was expanded into a full-length, all-sung opera, Albion and Albanius. After this failed, no new musical work was attempted until 1690, when Betterton turned Philip Massinger and John Fletcher's The Prophetess (or Dioclesian) into a semi-opera; with music by Henry Purcell this proved a great success. He was probably also responsible for the adaptation of The Fairy Queen (1692). In 1694 he was paid £50 to adapt and stage Sir Robert Howard and Dryden's The Indian Queen, but any further involvement in Purcell's last semi-opera was prevented by the Actors' Rebellion: in spring 1695 Betterton and a group of senior colleagues left the United Company and set up a makeshift theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He continued to produce musical plays, even an occasional semi-opera, and in 1700 staged the first public production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas woven into an adaptation of Measure for Measure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.R. Rathke: The Career of Thomas Betterton as a Shaping Force of the Restoration Playhouse and the Restoration Drama (diss., Tulane U., 1976)

J. Milhous: Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708 (Carbondale, IL, 1979)

C. Visser: ‘French Opera and the Making of the Dorset Garden Theatre’, Theatre Research International, vi (1981), 163–71

J. Milhous: ‘The Multi-Media Spectacular on the Restoration Stage’, British Theatre and the Other Arts 1660–1800, ed. S.S. Kenny (Washington DC, 1984), 41–66

C.A. Price: Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984)

J. Muller: Words and Music in Henry Purcell's First Semi-Opera ‘Dioclesian’ (Lewiston, NY, 1990)

CURTIS PRICE/MARGARET LAURIE

Bettinelli, Bruno

(b Milan, 4 June 1913). Italian composer. He graduated in piano at the Milan Conservatory in 1931, and in choral singing, conducting and composition, studying with G.C. Paribeni and Bossi, in 1937. In 1941 he won the Accademia di S Cecilia prize in Rome and in 1955 the Busoni prize in Trieste. He began to teach theory in 1938 and harmony in 1941 at the Milan Conservatory, and he was professor of composition there from 1957 to 1979. His students included Corghi, Abbado, Chailly, Gentilucci, Muti and Pollini. He has been a member of the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome.

His earlier music (e.g. 2 invenzioni and the symphonies nos.2 and 3) owes much of the discipline of its rhythmically clear contrapuntal lines to the neo-classical approach of Hindemith. After the subsequent harmonic and timbral experimentation of the Sinfonia breve and the Second Concerto for Orchestra, he abandoned tonality for atonal chromaticism (e.g. in Musica), and a reconsideration of Webernian principles, as in Episodi, Varianti, Studio and the symphonies nos.5–7. His exploration of avant-garde elements led him to the use of electronics, for example in Count Down; but works such as Sono una creatura, Quadruplum and Contrasti demonstrate the emphasis he has continued to place on constructive rigour and on communication with the listener.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: La smorfía (azione drammatica, 1, R. Bacchelli), Como, 30 Sept 1959; Il pozzo e il pendolo (azione mimo-drammatica, C. Crispolti, after E.A. Poe), 1957–8, Bergamo, Novità, 24 Oct 1967; Count Down (A. Madau Diaz), Milan, Piccola Scala, 25 March 1970

Orch: Movimento sinfonico 1, 1938; Sinfonia da camera, 1938–9, incl. Corale ostinato, 1939; 2 invenzioni, str, 1939; Conc. for Orch no.1, 1940; Fantasia e fuga su temi gregoriani, str, 1942; Sym. no.2, 1943; Divertimento, 1944; Movimento sinfonico 2, 1945; Sinfonia breve, str, 1946; Sym. no.3, str, 1946; Fantasia concertante, str qt, orch, 1949; Conc. for Orch no.2, 1951; Pf Conc. no.1, 1953; Conc. for Orch no.3, 1954; Musica, str, 1958; Preludio elegiaco, 1959; Episodi, 1961; Conc., 2 pf, orch, 1962; Pf Conc. no.2, 1968; Varianti, 1970; Studio, 1974; Sym. no.5, 1975; Sym. no.6, 1976; Sym. no.7, 1978; Contrasti, 1979; Quadruplum, 1981; Vn Conc., 1982–3; Alternanze, 1983; Omaggio a Stravinskij, 1984; Strutture, 1985; Conc. for Orch no.4, 1988

Vocal with acc.: Laudi del natale e della pasqua, 2 S, chorus, str, hp, 1947; L terra (N. Rossi-Lemeni), S, cl, 1968; 5 liriche di Montale (S, orch)/(S, 5 str, 2 ww), 1948; Ps iv, S, orch, 1950; Sono una creatura (cant., G. Ungaretti), chorus, orch, 1971; Cantata in nativitate Domini, S, orch, 1982; Terza cant (T. Campanella), chorus, orch, 1984–5

Unacc. choral: 3 espressioni madrigalistiche, chorus, 1939; 3 liriche (Ungaretti), chorus, 1940; Messa da requiem, chorus, 1942–3; Poesie di Ungaretti, 1971; 90 canti per ragazzi (G. Rodari), 1972; 3 poesie di Fausta, 1972; Ave verum, 1974; 3 nuovi madrigali, 1974; 3 liriche di Tiziana, 1978; 3 canti, 1981; 3 nuovi mottetti, 1985–6

Chbr and solo inst: Dialoghi, str qt, 1941; Sonata, vc, pf, 1951; Fantasia, pf, 1955; Str Qt no.2, 1960; Musica per 12, 11 str, hpd, 1973; Octet, 1975; Musica per 7, fl, cl, va, vc, db, pf, perc, 1975–6; Duplum, tpt, org, 1981; Dialogo, fl, pf, 1983; 3 pezzi, pf, 1984; Triplum, 3 perc, 1984; Aforismi, 2 fl, pf, 1989

Principal publishers: Carisch, Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni, Zanibon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM (R. Zanetti)

GroveO (P. Petazzi)

MGG1 (G. Piamonte)

G. Gavazzeni: ‘Un milanese: Bruno Bettinelli’, Musicisti d’Europa (Milan, 1954)

N. Castiglioni: Bruno Bettinelli (Milan, 1955)

A. Gentilucci: ‘Presenza di Bruno Bettinelli’, Convegno musicale, ii (1965), 49–56

A. Gentilucci: ‘Bruno Bettinelli’, Guida all’ascolto della musica contemporanea (Milan, 1969), 76–8

E. Gabellich, ed.: Linguaggio musicale di Bruno Bettinelli (Milan, 1989, 2/1995)

B. Bettinelli: La composizione musicale: considerazioni e guida allo studio (Milan, 1996)

G. Mercanti: Bruno Bettinelli. Il cammino di un musicista. Analisi dell’opera dagli esordi al 1998 (Milan, 1998)

VIRGILIO BERNARDONI

Bettini, Giovanni

(b Prato; fl 1616–24). Italian organist and composer. He studied under Antonio Brunelli, possibly while the latter was serving at Prato in the early 1610s. Later, following Brunelli, he moved to Pisa, where he probably stayed for the rest of his life, for his only printed music appeared in volumes by composers connected with that city – Brunelli and Vincenzo Calestani. On 22 August 1618, doubtless on Brunelli’s recommendation and after an audition by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri, he was appointed organist to the Knights of St Stephen ‘nel sonare senza concerto come in concerto’, a post he held until May 1624. He may also have had connections with the Tuscan court, for the first of the three agreeable songs (two solos and a trio) by him in Brunelli’s Scherzi, arie, canzonette, e madrigali (RISM 1616¹²/R1986 in ISS, ii) is dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo II and its text reads as though it may have been part of an entertainment staged at court. His setting of ‘O primavera, gioventù dell’anno’ in Calestani’s Madrigali et arie (1617¹²) is less attractive: it may have been modelled on Domenico Visconti’s setting published the previous year. There are also five competent secular duets and trios by him in CZ-Pnm Sign.II La 2 (formerly in the Lobkowitz library at Roudnice) and I-Bc Q 49, though three of the pieces attributed to him in the latter manuscript are anonymous in the former. The manuscript at Prague also includes a solo aria and a lettera amorosa by him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Nettl: ‘Über ein handschriftliches Sammelwerk von Gesängen italienischer Frühmonodie’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 83–97

N. Fortune: ‘A Florentine Manuscript and its Place in Italian Song’, AcM, xxiii (1951), 124–36

F. Baggiani: ‘Musicisti in Pisa: i maestri di cappella nella Chiesa Conventuale dei Cavalieri di S. Stefano’, Bollettino storico pisano, lii (1983), 117–62

TIM CARTER

Bettino, Geronimo

(b Verona; d ?Verona, before 1 Sept 1643). Italian composer. He is known only from two published volumes of music: Concerti accademici (Venice, 1643, inc.) and Messa e salmi concertati (Venice, 1647); both were issued posthumously by his pupil Carlo Calzareti [Calzaresi]. Of the 1643 volume of secular music only the quinto partbook survives; its list of contents includes a sectional canzonetta for two voices and other music for two, four and five voices, with continuo. The collection also includes four works by Dionisio Bellante. The 1647 volume, which is all for five voices, contains, in addition to the mass, seven vesper psalms, a Magnificat and a motet, Jesum omnes agnoscite (these are also extant in manuscript in PL-WRu).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

EitnerQ

E. Bohn: Bibliographie der Musik-Druckwerke bis 1700, welche … zu Breslau aufbewahrt werden (Berlin, 1883/R), 68

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982), i, 248; ii, 149

JOHN WHENHAM

Betts, John

(b Stamford, Lincs., 1755; d London, March 1823). English violin maker and dealer. He learnt violin making as a pupil of Richard Duke, for whom he worked for 17 years, and the first instruments bearing his label and brand are very similar to those of his master. At the end of 1782 he took over Maurice Whitaker's shop in the Royal Exchange, London, and was joined by his nephew ‘Ned’ who had also been apprenticed to Duke. He seems on the evidence of his labels to have dealt in music and instruments, including his own. By 1790 his instruments, particularly the cellos, had absorbed something of the influence of Stradivari, and were most cleanly made on a good individual outline. They are often branded at the top of the back at this period. At the beginning of the 19th century Betts was employing some of the best workmen in London, including at times the Panormos and Lockey Hill. Many inexpensive new instruments were made for the shop, as well as bows of all qualities. After Betts’s death the business was continued by his nephew, Charles Vernon, and younger brother Arthur (1775–1846), and the new instruments were labelled ‘Arthur Betts’. After the departure of Vernon and the death of Arthur Betts, the firm was carried by Arthur's sons, Arthur (ii) (1804–69) and John (ii) (1807–80) under the name of Arthur & John Betts. Some of the best English imitations of Stradivari bear this label, doubtless made by one of the Fendt family. By 1850 the style of the instruments was again an individual one, elegantly made but varnished a rather dark brown. The firm was discontinued in 1869. Accounts of other members of the Betts family working as violin makers exist, but these cannot be confirmed, nor do any instruments by them survive.

Betts was one of the first to import Italian instruments and was certainly the leading dealer of his time in London. Justly or unjustly, his reputation as a dealer became somewhat tainted. The ‘Betts’ Stradivari of 1704, regarded as one of the finest in existence and now in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, was purchased by John Betts for £1. An anecdote is also told in the Musical World of 15 August 1839, in which Viotti had the idea of exchanging a noble acquaintance’s Stradivari for a copy to be made by Betts. Betts, understanding Viotti’s motive for commissioning the copy, made not one but two, and retained the Stradivari himself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LütgendorffGL

VannesE

W. Sandys and S.A. Forster: The History of the Violin (London, 1864)

W.M. Morris: British Violin Makers (London, 1904, 2/1920)

W. Henley: Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (London, 1959–60)

CHARLES BEARE

Betz.

See Bätz.

Betz, Franz

(b Mainz, 19 March 1835; d Berlin, 11 Aug 1900). German baritone. He studied in Karlsruhe and made his début at Hanover in 1856 as Heinrich in Lohengrin. In 1859 he sang Don Carlos in Verdi's Ernani at the Berlin Hofoper and was immediately engaged there, remaining until his retirement in 1897. He sang Valentin in the first Berlin performance of Gounod's Faust (given as Margarethe) in 1863. At the Munich Hofoper he sang Telramund in Lohengrin (1863) and Hans Sachs in the première of Die Meistersinger (1868), repeating the role in the first Berlin performance (1870). He was also Berlin's first Amonasro in Aida (1874) and King Mark in Tristan und Isolde (1876).

Having sung in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the ceremony for laying the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus (1872), Betz sang Wotan at Bayreuth in the first complete Ring cycle in August 1876. He took part in a gala performance of Spontini's Olympie in Berlin (1879) and visited London in 1882 to sing at the Crystal Palace and at a concert conducted by Richter. Returning to Bayreuth in 1889, he alternated as Kurwenal and King Mark in Tristan, and also sang Hans Sachs. He made guest appearances in Vienna and other cities in Austria and Germany. His vast repertory included the Dutchman, Wolfram in Tannhäuser, Pizarro in Fidelio, Don Giovanni and Falstaff, which he sang at the first Berlin performance in German of Verdi's opera (1894), but his favourite role was Hans Sachs, which he sang over 100 times in Berlin alone; it perfectly displayed the strength, evenness and warmth of his generous voice, and the humanity of his dramatic style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Newman: The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933–47/R)

J. Kapp: Geschichte der Staatsoper Berlin (Berlin, 1937)

H. Fetting: Die Geschichte der Deutschen Staatsoper (Berlin, 1955)

H. Wagner: 200 Jahre Münchner Theaterchronik, 1750–1950 (Munich, 1958, 2/1965)

G. Skelton: Wagner at Bayreuth (London, 1965, 2/1976/R)

ELIZABETH FORBES

Betzwarzofsky, Antonín František.

See Bečvařovský, Antonín František.

Beurhaus, Friedrich

(b Immecke, nr Meinerzhagen, 1536; d Dortmund, 6 Aug 1609). German theorist, teacher and Kantor. He was educated first in Münster and Dortmund, and later at Cologne University where he received the MA in 1560. After serving as teacher, Kantor and administrator for several years in various schools, mainly in Dortmund, he took up a post in 1567 as Kantor at the famous Reinoldi School there; he became Rektor in 1582 in succession to his former teacher and long-standing friend and colleague, Johann Lambach. His work in this post was widely acclaimed and in 1587 he was made Comes Palatinus by Emperor Rudolf II.

He is important for his treatise Erotematum musicae, originally published in 1573 under the title Musicae erotematum, and subsequently reprinted three times. The treatise, of the musica practica type, presents the fundamentals of music in question and answer form. For his formulations Beurhaus borrowed considerably, as was customary in a treatise of this kind, from other German theorists of the time, notably Agricola, Faber (both Gregor and Heinrich), Figulus, Galliculus, Ornithoparchus, Wilfflingseder and Zanger.

The Erotematum musicae is notable for its adaptation of the teaching principles of Petrus Ramus (1515–72), which found considerable acceptance in Germany at the time. Instead of following the customary organization of a musica practica treatise, according to which first the elements of plainsong and then the elements of polyphony would have been treated, Beurhaus first discussed the basic elements of music (‘de sonorum ratione’) and then showed how they work in combination and association (‘de sonorum harmonia’). Philosophical terminology is employed extensively. The treatise is also noteworthy for its presentation of counterpoint. A shorter version of the treatise, Musicae rudimenta, appeared in 1581.

WRITINGS

only those relating to music

Musicae erotematum libri duo, ex optimis hujus artis scriptoribus vera perspicuaque methodo descripti (Dortmund, 1573; 2/1580 as Erotematum musicae libri duo, 4/1591); ed. W. Thoene (Cologne, 1961)

Musicae rudimenta e pleniore eius descriptione, itemque exempla quaedam facilia ad puerilem exercitationem e bonis auctoribus collecta (Dortmund, 1581/R1960 in Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte, xxxviii)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (W. Thoene)

W. Thoene: Friedrich Beurhaus und seine Musiktraktate (Cologne, 1959)

K. Niemöller: ‘Nationale Elemente in der deutschen Musiktheorie des 16. Jahrhunderts’, GfMKB: Bayreuth 1981, 553–8, esp. 557

F.E. KIRBY

Beuron.

Benedictine abbey near Sigmaringen, in the province of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It was founded as a house of Augustinian canons about 1077 and was granted ecclesiastical sanction by Pope Urban II in 1097. The buildings date from the 17th and 18th centuries; the church was built between 1732 and 1738. In 1802, when church property was secularized, the house went into the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family's possession, and the buildings were later presented by the Dowager Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern (1819–93) to two Benedictine monks, Maurus and Placidus Wolter. Beuron thus became a Benedictine monastery (1863) and in 1868 it was made an abbey. It became the parent monastery of a Benedictine congregation, with daughter houses in Belgium, Great Britain, Bohemia, Styria, Germany and Brazil. Although it was closed from 1875 to 1887 (because of Prussian Kulturkampf legislation) it became a leading centre of the 19th- and 20th-century liturgical movement, distinguished for its cultivation of the Roman liturgy, the monastic Offices and Gregorian chant, according to the regulations formulated at Solesmes by Guéranger and Pothier. The most prominent Kantors after 1863 were Benedikt Sauter, Ambrosius Kienle, Dominicus Johner and Maurus Pfaff, while renowned composers of sacred music included Corbinian Gindele, Dominicus Johner and Gregor Molitor. In 1907 Molitor founded the Kirchenmusikschule St Gregoriushaus in Beuron.

The new library, containing about 300,000 volumes, was built in 1925; the monks study arts and sciences and devote themselves to pastoral care. The monastery's most important project has been an edition of the Vetus Latina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K.T. Zingeler: Geschichte des Klosters Beuron im Donauthale (Sigmaringen, 1886, 2/1890) [history of the earlier house]

Maurus Wolter, dem Gründer Beurons zum 100. Geburtstag: Erinnerungen und Studien (Beuron, 1925)

Beuron, 1863–1963: Festschrift zum hundertjährigen Bestehen der Erzabtei St. Martin (Beuron, 1963)

S. Mayer: Beuroner Bibliographie (Beuron, 1963), 190–94

P. Wenzel: Der Freundeskreis um Anton Günther und die Gründung Beurons: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Katholizismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Essen, 1965)

V. Fiala: ‘Die besondere Ausprägung des benediktinischen Mönchtums in der Beuroner Kongregation’, Revue bénédictine, lxxxiii (1973), 181–228

A. Dreher, ed.: Erzabtei Beuron: Kloster, Kirche, Umgebung (Beuron, 2/1973)

St.-Martinorgel, Beuron (Beuron, 1984) [pubn of Erzabtei St Martin, Beuron]

W. Schöntag, ed.: 250 Jahre Abteikirche Beuron: Geschichte, geistliches Leben, Kunst (Beuron, 1988)

S.K. Petzolt: Die Gründungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Abtei Beuron im Spiegel ihrer Liturgie (1863–1908) (diss., U. of Würzburg, 1990)

MAURUS PFAFF/MANFRED SCHULER

Beveringen [Bevernage], Andreas [André, Andries].

See Pevernage, Andreas.

Bevignani, Enrico

(b Naples, 29 Sept 1841; d Naples, 29 Aug 1903). Italian conductor and composer. He studied in Naples, where his melodrama Caterina Blum (3 acts, libretto by D. Bolognese; in I-Nc) was produced with great success at S Carlo on 3 September 1863. The next year he was engaged by Mapleson for Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, remaining there until he moved with Mapleson to Covent Garden in 1869. He stayed at Covent Garden with Gye from 1871 until the end of Gye’s management in 1877; he returned later, leaving finally in 1896. Bevignani conducted the first London performances of Aida (1876), La Gioconda (1883) and Pagliacci (1893). He was ‘the most admirable of orchestral “accompanists”’, according to Sir Dan Godfrey. He conducted several seasons of Italian opera in St Petersburg and Moscow (where he was decorated) and in New York (1893–5 and 1900). Tchaikovsky greatly admired him, and he conducted the first Bol'shoy performance of Yevgeny Onegin (1881). Shaw, however, considered his tempos to be too fast, and added: ‘There are few persons whom I have less desire to see alive again than Costa; but there are moments when Bevignani makes me miss him.’ ‘Signor Bevignani’s orchestra has … no force; but it is polite and delicate.’ Bevignani’s compositions are full of unexpected harmonic twists which immediately distinguish them from those of his Italian contemporaries. He also composed piano pieces and songs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Cammarano Lanfranchi)

ES (E. Zanetti)

FétisBS

SchmidlDS

D. Godfrey: Memories and Music (London, 1924), 117

G.B. Shaw: Music in London 1890–94 (London, 1932)

G.B. Shaw: London Music in 1888–89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto (London, 1937)

U. Manferrari: Dizionario universale delle opere melodrammatiche, i (Florence, 1954)

A. Basso, ed.: Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (Turin, 1985)

NIGEL BURTON, KEITH HORNER

Bevilacqua, Mario

(b Verona, 8 Oct 1536; d Verona, 1 Aug 1593). Italian patron of music. He was a member of the nobility. He graduated in law at Bologna in 1567, and on returning to Verona he entered the Accademia Filarmonica in 1568. He was an important member of the city government but his main interests lay in the arts and culture. In the Palazzo Bevilacqua, built by Sanmicheli in about 1535, he created a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, a picture gallery, a library and the famous ridotto. Among the salaried musicians of the ridotto were Sebastiano Pigna, Paolo Masnelli, Ercole Pasquini and Domenico Lauro. Stefano Bernardi also probably served there as a boy chorister. Pietro Pontio's dialogue Ragionamento di musica (1588) is dedicated to Bevilacqua and is set in the ridotto, which the author described as a place where ‘almost daily, many gentlemen gather and exercise themselves in virtuous things such as playing and singing and discussions of similar topics’. Many composers, including Lassus, Marenzio, Leoni, Orazio Vecchi, Claudio Merulo, Philippe de Monte, Girolamo della Casa, Massaino, Gabriele Martinengo, Filippo Nicoletti and Maddalena Casulana also dedicated their works to Bevilacqua. On 6 August 1593, just after his death, an inventory of his collection of musical instruments was drawn up. Although this has survived, the collection has not, which is particularly unfortunate since it contained a number of rare and unusual instruments including a claviorgan, six bassanelli and six curtalte.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Pontio: Ragionamento di musica (Parma, 1588), 11; ed. S. Clercx (Kassel, 1959)

G. Turrini: L'Accademia filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 (Verona, 1941)

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Mario Bevilacqua, amico della musica’, Verona: La Galleria Bevilacqua, ed. L. Franzoni (Milan, 1970), 145–58

M. Castellani: ‘A 1593 Veronese Inventory’, GSJ, xxvi (1973), 15–24

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Medioevo e Rinascimento’, La musica a Verona, ed. P. Bruignoli (Verona, 1976)

K.-J. Sachs: ‘“Theorica e prattica di musica” in Pietro Pontio's Dialogo (Parma, 1595)’, Musiktheorie, iv (1989), 127–41

ENRICO PAGANUZZI

Bevin, Elway

(b c1554; d Bristol, bur. 19 Oct 1638). Composer, theorist and organist of Welsh extraction. There seems to be no evidence for the alternative name ‘Ap Evan’. He is said to have been a pupil of Tallis. He was admitted a vicar-choral at Wells Cathedral on 10 May 1579, but on 2 January 1580, together with another vicar-choral, he was suspended ‘until they mend their ways’ for not having communicated for four years. He signed a Wells charter in 1584. At Michaelmas 1585 the dean and chapter of Bristol paid him six months’ salary, for he had become Master of the Choristers there at Lady Day; by 1589 he was described as organist. Between 1590 and 1603 the baptisms of six of his children were recorded in the parish registers of St Augustine-the-Less, Bristol. The date and place of his marriage are unknown but in 1611 he and his wife, Alice, were witnesses to the will of Nathaniell Pownell, registrar to the Bishop of Bristol.

On 3 June 1605 Bevin was sworn as Gentleman Extraordinary of the Chapel Royal. Possibly this came about through the influence of Godfrey Goodman, subsequently Bishop of Gloucester, to whom he dedicated his Briefe and Short Instruction in the Art of Musicke (1631). Goodman was the only Anglican bishop to enter the Church of Rome. Although many years his junior, Bevin claimed that he was ‘bound by many favours’ to Goodman and it seems likely that they were both lifelong recusants.

It has been claimed that Bevin’s most notable pupil was William Child. Child was, however, actually apprenticed to Thomas Prince, a petty canon in the cathedral choir. On 14 February 1637/8 the dean and chapter ‘capitularly ordered and decreed that Elway Bevin be expelled and dismissed from his office of organist and master of the choristers’. No reason was given but it is significant that when he died 20 months later he was buried, not in the cathedral, but in his parish church of St Augustine-the-Less.

Bevin’s reputation rests on two achievements. His complete ‘Short’ Dorian service in four and five parts, consisting of Venite, Te Deum, Benedictus, Kyrie, Creed, Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, was included in Barnard’s First Book of Selected Church Musick (1641/R) and subsequently by Tudway and Boyce in their collections. It is a creditable example of the period. Bevin had a considerable reputation as a composer of canons and his Briefe and Short Instruction in the Art of Musicke contains many ingenious examples. The preface promises instruction to the uninitiated, but little tuition is given; the author contented himself with explaining the difficulties. Christopher Simpson and Purcell both praised the work. In his dedication to Bishop Goodman, Bevin implied that his ‘tyred brain’ could no longer cope with the difficulties of polyphony. He promised the possibility of a larger book, but this did not materialize. (G. Hooper: Elway Bevin, Bristol, 1971)

WORKS

sacred

The Dorian or Short service (Ve, TeD, Bs, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), 4/4vv, GB-Y

‘Great’ Evening Service, ‘Mr. Bevin’s Gimill’, inc. (Mag, Nunc), 4/4vv, Och

Evening Service, inc. (org only), Och

5 full anthems, 3, 4vv, Cfm, Lbl, Lcm, Ob

My God, my God look upon me, inc., Cfm, sometimes attrib. Bevin, is by Blow

secular

2 songs, Lbl; canon, Y

instrumental

Keyboard pieces, Lbl

Browning, a 3, Lbl, Och, ed. in MB, ix (1955, rev. 2/1962)

Canon marked ‘Remember’ (20 parts in 1), Lbl

In Nomines, a 5, 2 in Ob

Over 300 short canons ‘written and composed by Elway Bevin’, Lbl

GRAHAM HOOPER

Bevington.

English firm of organ builders. It was founded about 1794 by Henry Bevington, who had worked as a journeyman for Robert Gray (see Gray & davison before establishing his own business in Greek Street, Soho, London. Bevington took over John Snetzler's old premises in Rose Yard (used by Ohrmann & Nutt after Snetzler's time) a few years later. He was succeeded by his four sons, Henry (b 1813), Alfred (b 1817), Martin (b ?1821) and Charles (b 1823), and the business later descended to a grandson, Lewis H. Bevington (c1859–1938). It was acquired by Hill, Norman & Beard in 1950.

The firm's early success was in the manufacture of barrel organs and small church instruments. They later became more ambitious, building a 30-stop organ for St Mary's Catholic Chapel, Moorfields, London (c1830), with duplication of the open and stopped diapasons, principal and trumpet on the Great and inclusion of a double in the Swell Organ. A number of other large instruments followed including a 41-stop concert organ for the Mechanics' Hall, Nottingham (1849), designed by H.J. Gauntlett and incorporating a 32' on the short-compass Swell, and organs for Cashel Cathedral (1846), St Martin-in-the-Fields, London (1854), and the Foundling Hospital, London (1855).

The firm built many organs for Ireland and the colonies. Their métier remained the smaller church organ (increasingly using pneumatic action) with characteristic stops such as the Bell-diapason, Clarionet & Bassoon, Höhl Flute and Bell Gamba. The organ in St Paul's, Covent Garden, London (1862) is one of the few larger instruments to survive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.J. Hopkins and E.F. Rimbault: The Organ: its History and Construction (London, 1855, 3/1887/R)

J.H. Cardwell: Two Centuries of Soho, its Institutions, Firms, and Amusements (London, 1898), 220–23

A. Freeman: ‘ The Organs at the Foundling Hospital’, The Organ, iii (1923–4), 197–205

L. Darling: ‘ The Bevington Sound Preserved’, The Organ, xlviii (1968–9), 108–17

N.J. Thistlethwaite: The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990)

NICHOLAS THISTLETHWAITE

Bewegt

(Ger.: ‘agitated’, ‘moved’; past participle of bewegen, ‘to move’).

A tempo mark sometimes used in the same sense as the Italian Agitato but also having further shades of meaning. For although etwas bewegt means ‘somewhat agitated’, Wagner gave the extremely steady Bridal Chorus in Lohengrin the tempo mark mässig bewegt, meaning simply ‘at a moderate speed’, and the exaggeratedly formal opening to Die Meistersinger the mark sehr mässig bewegt. In many cases mässig bewegt was used as the German equivalent of allegro moderato.

See also Tempo and expression marks.

DAVID FALLOWS

Bewerunge, Heinrich [Henry]

(b Letmathe, Westphalia, 7 Dec 1862; d Maynooth, 2 Dec 1923). German church music scholar, active in Ireland. He studied at Würzburg University (1881–5) and the Bayerisches Staatskonservatorium der Musik and was ordained priest in 1885; he then took a diploma at the Kirchenmusikschule in Regensburg. After one year as Kantor at Cologne Cathedral, he was appointed to a newly created chair in chant and organ at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in 1888. During this period (1891–3) he was also editor of Lyra ecclesiastica, the journal of the Irish Society of St Cecilia, whose aims he propagated. In 1914 he became the first professor of music at University College, Dublin; however, that same year war broke out while he was on holiday in Cologne and he was barred from re-entering Ireland. The post was declared vacant due to his alleged failure of duty and passed on to C.H. Kitson in 1916. He finally managed to return to Maynooth in 1920, but the war had undermined his health and he died shortly thereafter.

Bewerunge contributed significantly to the study of church music in Ireland. His translations of Riemann (Catechism of Musical Aesthetics, London, 1895; Harmony Simplified, London, 1896) were among the first published in English and his articles on the theory of metre in plainchant along with his commentary on the Editio Vaticana helped establish his renown as a scholar. He brought international standards of plainchant and polyphonic singing to St Patrick’s College, partly by means of his many arrangements of Lassus and Palestrina, and his trenchant journalism fostered an awareness of Continental art music and performance standards within Ireland.

WRITINGS

‘Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso’, Irish Ecclesiastical Review, 3rd ser., xv (1894), 1088–1115

‘Irish Traditional Singing’, New Ireland Review, xix (1903), 20–32

‘Einiges über die englische Orgelbaukunst’, KJb, xv (1900), 66–77

‘The Neumatic Notatation’, Church Music, i (1905) 33–44; ii (1906), 303–14

‘The Vatican Edition of Plain Chant’, Irish Ecclesiastical Review, 4th ser., x (1906), 44–63, 387–90; pubd separately (Dublin, 1906; Ger. trans., 1906)

‘Zur Tonalität der gregorianischen Gesänge’, Musica sacra [Regensburg], l (1917), 119–22, 134–57

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. White and N. Lawrence: ‘Heinrich Bewerunge (1862–1923): ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Cäcilianismus in Irland’, KJb, lxxiv (1990), 41–66 [incl. list of pubns]

H. White: ‘Towards a History of the Cecilian Movement in Ireland’, Music and the Church, ed. H. White and G. Gillen (Dublin, 1993), 78–107 [incl. complete list of pubns and papers, 97–8]

K. Daly: Catholic Church Music in Ireland (Dublin, 1995)

HARRY WHITE

Bexfield, William Richard

(b Norwich, 27 April 1824; d London, 29 Oct 1853). English composer. He became a chorister at Norwich Cathedral, where Zechariah Buck, the organist, was so impressed by his talents (as shown for example by an anthem in eight parts, composed at the age of 11) that he took him as an articled pupil at the age of 14. He became a proficient organist, playing Bach's fugues at 17. In 1845 he was appointed organist of St Botolph's, Boston, and in 1848 organist of St Helen, Bishopsgate, London. He took the Oxford BMus in 1846 and the Cambridge MusD in 1849. He played some of his ‘concert fugues’ for organ at the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of 1851, creating a considerable sensation, particularly with an improvisation which he called ‘Representation of a Storm’.

Bexfield’s oratorio, Israel Restored, was performed by the Norwich Choral Society in October 1851, and at the Norwich Musical Festival on 22 September 1852, with the composer conducting. It had been given great advance publicity, and attracted much attention in the musical world because it seemed to be placed in rivalry with Pierson's Jerusalem, which was performed for the first time the following day. Pierson's work, undoubtedly the more original of the two, was the more popular both among Norwich audiences and with the national press. Bexfield's was conservative: it contained fugal choruses along Handelian lines and even a fully-fledged French overture. But it was by no means worthless, and was well received when revived by Barnby at the Royal Albert Hall in 1880.

Bexfield was undeniably a gifted composer, and at the time of his early death was regarded by some as giving promise of becoming ‘another Purcell in church music’. His actual achievement, besides the oratorio, includes learned but rather heavy fugues, some attractive songs (for which he wrote the words as well as the music) and some church music.

WORKS

all published in London

8 Chorales, vv, org (1845)

6 Songs (1847)

[7] Church Anthems, 5–8vv, org (c1850)

Israel Restored (orat), 1851, vs (c1852)

A Set of 4 Concert Fugues, org (1860)

2 separate anthems; 2 glees and a trio, mentioned in Baptie

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

Obituary, Gentleman’s Magazine (1854), 102–3

W.A. Barrett: English Church Composers (London, 1882/R), 162–3

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 173

F.G. Kitton: Zechariah Buck: a Centenary Memoir (London, 1899), 55–6

H. Davison, ed.: Music during the Victorian Era, from Mendelssohn to Wagner: being the Memoirs of J.W. Davison (London, 1912), 141–4

P.A. Scholes, ed.: The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: a Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the ‘Musical Times’ (London, 1947/R), 85–7, 854

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Beydts, Louis (Hector Antoine)

(b Bordeaux, 29 June 1895; d Caudéran, 19 Sept 1953). French composer. The son of a wine merchant, he initially intended to go into business; he also began a course of classical studies, but abandoned this after two years and turned to music. He worked with Fernand Vaubourgoin in his native city until 1924, and then moved to Paris, where his first works were performed, notably at the Colonne and Lamoureux concerts. In 1931 he obtained permission to write a musical setting of La noce, a comedy by Pierre Wolff and Henri Duvernois, which he made into the operetta Moineau. This work was hugely successful, and marked him out as a master of the genre. Sacha Guitry wrote the libretto of La S.A.D.M.P. and then of Le voyage de Tchong-Li for him. He also wrote many mélodies and much incidental music, as well as several scores for the cinema, especially for films by Sacha Guitry. In parallel to his career as a composer he was also a music critic, and in 1952 became director of the Opéra-Comique. The best of Beydts's work is in his operettas and comic operas. Less influenced by jazz and dance rhythms than his contemporaries Yvain and Christiné, he is in the tradition of Messager and Hahn. The quality of his orchestration, the elegance of his style and the smiling irony of his scores make one regret that they have fallen out of the repertory.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Le bourreau des coeurs (operetta, 3, Guillot de Saix), c1931, unperf.; Moineau (operetta, 3, G. de Saix, after P. Wolff and H. Duvernois), Paris, 1931; La S.A.D.M.P. (Société Anonyme Des Messieurs Prudents) (opéra-bouffe, 1, S. Guitry), Paris, 1931; Le club des canards mandarins (operetta, 3, H. Duvernois and P. Fortuny), Monte Carlo, 1931; Le voyage de Tchong-Li (operetta, 1, S. Guitry), Paris, 1932; Monsieur Prud’homme a-t-il vécu? (incid music), Paris, 1932; Il ne faut jurer de rien (incid music, A. de Musset), Paris, 1939; A l’aimable Sabine (comédie musicale, 2, L. Marchand), Paris, 1947

other works

Inst: Musette et tambourin, pf, 1932; Fanfare pour la IVe Olympiade, wind ens, 1937; A travers Paris, orch, 1948

Songs (1v, pf): 5 humoresques (T. Klingsor), 1928, also 1v, orch; 4 odelettes (H. de Relgnier), 1929, also 1v, orch; Les jeux rustiques (J. du Bellay), 1931, also 1v, orch; La lyre et les amours (T. l’Hermite), 1939; La guirlande de Marceline (M. Desbordes-Valmore), 1944; D’ombre et de soleil (P.J. Toulet), 1946; Le coeur inutile (R. Honnert), 1949; Chansons pour les oiseaux (P. Fort), 1950; Many songs on texts by J. Cocteau, G. Apollinaire, Fort, F. Jammes and others

Other vocal: Lune sur la mer (G. d’Houville), S, A, pf (1936); Paris dans la Brume (d’Houville), S, A, pf (1936); Jeanne d’Arc: Donremy (M. Fombeure) (orat), 1942 [collab. G. Dandelot, Loucheur, Aubin, Chailley, Capdevielle and Jolivet]

Orchs of songs by C. Debussy, incl.: Le promenoir des deux amants, Colloque sentimental

Film scores: Pasteur, 1935; La kermesse héroïque, 1935; L’affaire du courrier de Lyon, 1936; Le colonel Chabert, 1943; Le diable boiteux, 1947

Principal publishers: Durand, Heugel, Salabert

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (G. Ferchault)

J. Bruyr: ‘Un entretien avec Louis Beydts’, Guide du concert, xviii (1931), 327–9

P. Landormy: La musique française après Debussy (Paris, 1943), 302–5

J. Combarieu and R. Dumesnil: Histoire de la musique, v (Paris, 1960), 152–5

JACQUES TCHAMKERTEN

Beyer, Andreas.

See Bayer, Andreas.

Beyer, Ferdinand

(b Querfurt, 25 July 1803; d Mainz, 14 May 1863). German composer and pianist. He was well known as a composer of light music, and especially for his piano arrangements of popular orchestral works. He is best known for his piano method Vorschule im Klavierspiel op.101 (c1851), which has been reprinted by many publishers (including Henle, Peters, Schirmer and Universal). This widely used method gained particular renown in Japan, after the American music educator L.W. Mason imported Carl Prüfer’s edition in 1880, and also in Korea. The 106 pieces are harmonically unadventurous, but serve their didactic purpose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Centenial History of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music, i (Tokyo, 1987)

W.K. Chung: An Analysis and Evaluation of Beginning Piano Methods Used in Korea (diss., Texas Tech U., 1992)

ISAAC NAGAO

Beyer, Frank Michael

(b Berlin, 8 March 1928). German composer and organist. He studied the organ with Joseph Ahrens at the Berlin Church Music School (1946–9) and composition with Ernst Pepping at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1951–4). From 1950 to 1963 he was active as an organist; he served as lecturer in organ, improvisation and theory at the Berlin Church Music School (1953–62) and from 1960 at the Hochschule, where he was appointed professor of composition in 1968 and founded the Institute for New Music in 1990. He has also organized the Musica Sacra Nova concerts series, Berlin and co-directed the Berlin Bach-Tage. His numerous honours include membership in the Berlin and Munich academies.

Beyer's early compositions are practical liturgical works. After 1956, however, he wrote more ambitious music influenced by Webern. An individual style characterized by lightness and lucidity emerged in the 1960s. For him, the most important element in a work is the tension resulting from intervallic development. A number of compositions refer to Renaissance and Baroque music; the Streicherfantasien (1977–9), for example, reflect motifs by J.S. Bach. He has also completed arrangements of works by Josquin and Bach. (KdG, C. Stahl)

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Geburt des Tanzes (Ophische Szenen) (choreog. T. Schilling), orch, 1987; Das Fenster (ballet, after R. Magritte, choreog. L. Höfgen), Hanover, 1991 [based on Griechenland]

Inst: Ricercare I, orch, 1957; Versi, str orch, 1968; Rondo imaginaire, orch, 1972; Concertino a tre, tpt, trbn, db, 2 ob, 2 str qt, 1974; Diaphonie, orch, 1975; Streicherfantasien, str qnt/orch, 1977–9; Canti dei misteri, org, 1979; Griechenland, str orch, 1981; Notre-Dame-Music, orch, 1983–4; Trio, ob, va, hp, 1983–90; Str Qt no.3 ‘Missa’, 1985; Mysteriensonate, va, orch, 1986; Ob Conc., 1986; Sym., cl, hn, bn, str, 1989; Canciones, cl, ens, 1991; Musik der Frühe, vn, orch, 1993; Klangtore, orch, 1997; Canto di Giorno, vc, orch, 1998–9; other chbr works, kbd music

Vocal: Biblische Szenen (Bible), 1v, insts, 1955; Maior Angelis (cant., Bible), S, female vv, 3 fl, a fl, org, db, 1970; Canticum Mose et Agni (Bible), chorus, 1976

Principal publishers: Bote & Bock

H. KUNZ

Beyer, Johanna (Magdalena)

(b Leipzig, 11 July 1888; d New York, 9 Jan 1944). American composer of German birth. She moved to the USA c1924, where she studied with Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford. She was a close associate of Cowell's, acting as his administrative assistant during his San Quentin years. Despite prolific composition between c1932 and 1940, she was largely ignored as a composer, even by the experimental music community in New York to which her music most appropriately belongs. Several of her works from the early 1930s, particularly those for the piano, show the influence of Crawford and Seeger in their use of dissonant counterpoint; the works for percussion are particularly innovative. Formalist tendencies are combined with a quirky sense of musical humour in the two string quartets. At the time of her death, Beyer's compositions had received few performances. The only work published in her lifetime, IV (1936), appears in Cowell's New Music Edition.

WORKS

Edition:Selected Works, ed. L. Polansky (Lebanon, NH, 1994–)

Orch: March, large ens, 1935; Cyrnab, chbr orch, 1937; Frag., chbr orch, 1937; Sym. Suite, 1937; Dance ‘Status quo’, 1938; Elation, band, 1938; Reverence, wind, 1938; Sym. Movt no.1, 1939; Sym., op.3, 1939; Sym., op.5, 1940; Sym. Movt no.2, 1941

Choral: The Robin in the Rain, 1935; The Federal Music Project, 1936; The Composers' Forum Laboratory, 1937; The Main-Deep, 1937; The People, Yes, 1937

Chbr: Perc Suite, 1933; Str Qt no.1, 1933–4; Suite, cl, bn, 1933; Ww Qnt, 1933; IV, perc ens, 1935; Movt, db, pf, 1936; Movt, 2 pf, 1936; Sonata, cl, pf, 1936; Str Qt no.2, 1936; Suite, b cl, pf, ?1936; Suite, ob, bn, 1937; Suite, vn, pf, 1937; Movt ‘Dance’, str qt, 1938; Movt, ww, 1938; Music of the Spheres ‘Status quo’, elec str ens, 1938; March, 30 perc, 1939; 3 Movts, perc ens, 1939; Perc, op.14, 1939; 6 Pieces, ob, pf, 1939; Waltz, perc ens, 1939; Trio, ww, c1940; Str Qt no.4, ?1943

Songs: Sky-Pieces (C. Sandberg), 1933; 3 Songs (Sandberg), S, perc, pf, 1933; Ballad of the Star-Eater (B. Wilkinson Overstreet), S, cl, 1934; 3 Songs (Beyer), S, cl, 1934; Have Faith! (Beyer), S, fl, 1936–7

Solo inst: Dissonant Counterpoint, pf, c1930; Suite no.1, cl, 1932; Gebrauchs-Musik, pf, 1934; Clusters (New York Waltzes), pf, 1936; Suite, pf, 1939

MSS in US-NYp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Polansky and J. Kennedy: ‘Total Eclipse: the Music of Johanna Magdalena Beyer’, MQ, xx (1996), 719–78

LARRY POLANSKY (with JOHN KENNEDY)

Beyer, Johann Baptist.

See Peyer, Johann Baptist.

Beyer, Johann Samuel

(b Gotha, 1669; d Carlsbad, 9 May 1744). German composer. After working as a music teacher in the house of the Jena lawyer Wildvogel, he became Kantor and teacher in Weissenfels in 1694. On 28 August 1699 he was chosen from 12 applicants as Kantor and director of music in Freiberg, a post he held until his death (while taking a cure at Carlsbad). He was succeeded by J.S. Bach's pupil J.F. Doles, who after Beyer's death continued to perform the latter's five Passion settings. As Schilling wrote, Beyer was a ‘diligent composer, a thorough teacher and an excellent musical writer, particularly of didactic works’. His Musikalischer Vorrath contains 97 hymns for feast days, catechism and special occasions; it is addressed to young people studying music and consists mainly of schematically treated figured chorale variations (in the cantus firmus, the bass or both) which, according to Frotscher, carry the south German principle of unity of figuration to its extreme. He also attempted to use ‘melodies from the oldest hymn books in the cantus, according to their nature and origin’. Like Kuhnau, he believed that the keyboard could not be surpassed for variety and sensitivity. The preface to the collection contains interesting remarks on the style of chorale composition at the beginning of the 18th century.

Beyer's other main didactic work was a kind of singing textbook, Primae lineae musicae vocalis, in which simple singing instruction is given, in dialogue form, with a supplement of examples including canons, fugues, bicinia and arias, and a list of foreign musical terms. His vocal and instrumental works are otherwise hardly more than competent ‘utility art’. Besides numerous cantatas, funeral hymns, and partitas, the collection Geistliche musicalische Seelen-Freude, ‘consisting of 72 concert arias with two vocal and five different instrumental parts, for use on every Sunday and feast-day’, should be mentioned; these compositions, like several unpublished cantatas by Beyer, use texts by Erdmann Neumeister.

WORKS

Primae lineae musicae vocalis, das ist, kurtze … Anweisung in Frag und Antwort, wie die Jugend … ein musicalisches Vocal-Stück wohl und richtig singen zu lernen, mit … canonibus, Fugen, soliciniis, biciniis, Arien und einem Appendice, worinnen allerhand … termini musici zu finden (Freiburg, 1703/R, abridged 2/1730)

Musicalischer Vorrath, neu-variirter Fest-Choral-Gesänge, auf dem Clavier, im canto und basso (Freiburg, 1716–19, 2/1720)

Geistlich-musicalische Seelen-Freude, in 72 Concert-Arien, 2vv, 5 insts, bc, auf alle Sonn- und Fest-Tage zu gebrauchen (Freiberg, 1724)

Numerous cants. (D-Dlb, FBa, MÜG, Rtt); 2 ed. R. Fricke, Meisterwerke alter Kapellmeister aus Sachsen und Thüringen, i, nos.5 and 9; 1 ed. R. Fricke (Kassel, 1929)

5 partitas, fl, vn, bc; 1 (in C) ed. I. Gronefeld (Leipzig, 1959)

2 funeral songs

5 passion settings, only printed librettos extant (FBa)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FrotscherG

GerberL

GerberNL

SchillingE

R. Vollhardt: Geschichte der Cantoren und Organisten von den Städten in Königreich Sachsen (Berlin, 1899, rev. 2/1978 by E. Stimme)

E. Müller: Musikgeschichte von Freiberg (Freiberg, 1939)

P. Wollny: ‘Anmerkungen zum Kantatenrepertoire der Mügelner Kantorei im 18. Jahrhundert’, Musik zwischen Leipzig und Dresden: zur Geschichte der Kantoreigesellschaft Mügeln 1571–1996, ed. M. Heinemann and P. Wollny (Oschersleben, 1996), 131–40

DIETER HÄRTWIG/PETER WOLLNY

Beyle, Henri.

See Stendhal.

Bèze, Théodore de

(b Vézelay, 24 June 1519; d Geneva, 13 Oct 1605). French poet, humanist and writer. He was one of the leaders of the Calvinist Reformation, and went to Geneva from Paris on 24 October 1548 after the publication in that year of a collection of his verse entitled Poemata juvenilia. He was professor of Greek in Lausanne (1549–59) and became Rector of the Geneva Academy in 1559. He succeeded Calvin as head of the Church in Geneva in 1564.

Clément Marot had collaborated with Calvin on the production of a French metrical psalter (beginning in 1542) and at his death (1544) Calvin asked Bèze to complete the work. 34 of his psalm translations appeared in print in 1551, and these, along with 49 paraphrases by Marot, formed the text of Loys Bourgeois' Pseaumes octante-trois de David (Geneva, 1551/R). By 1554 Bèze had added another six translations, which were added to the Genevan editions in the following years. In 1562 the translation of the Psalms was completed, and the monophonic Psalter was printed simultaneously in Geneva, Lyons and Paris. It has been suggested that Bèze's musical collaborator for the final segment of the Psalter may have been Pierre Davantes.

A tragedy by Bèze, Abraham sacrifiant, contains directions for the musical performance of certain verses, but no music has survived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Pidoux, ed.: Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle, i–ii (Basle, 1962)

P. Pidoux, ed.: Théodore de Bèze and L. Budé: Psaumes mis en vers français (1551–1562) (Geneva, 1984)

C. Marot and T. de Bèze: Les psaumes en vers français avec leurs mélodies (Geneva, 1986) [repr. of Les pseaumes mis en rime françoise, Geneva, 1562; preface by P. Pidoux]

B. Perregaux: ‘Abraham sacrifiant de Théodore de Bèze’, Approches de l'opéra: Royaumont 1984, 329–33

L. Guillo: Les éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise (Paris, 1991), 72–5

PAUL-ANDRÉ GAILLARD/RICHARD FREEDMAN

Bezekirsky, Vasily Vasil'yevich

(b Moscow, 26 Jan 1835; d Moscow, 8 Nov 1919). Russian violinist and composer. The son of an instrument maker, he began learning the violin at the age of 12, and in 1850 joined the Bol'shoy Theatre Orchestra. After two years in Brussels (1858–60) studying violin with Hubert Léonard and composition with Berthold Damcke, he returned to Moscow as a solo violinist in the Bol'shoy orchestra (1861–8 and 1871–91). In 1868 he performed his own violin concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and toured in western Europe. He began to give violin classes in Moscow in 1871, and from 1882 to 1902 was a professor at the Moscow Philharmonic Academy. In 1903 he moved to St Petersburg, where he taught in Yevgeny Rapgof’s music school. A brilliant virtuoso, he was also an excellent performer on the viola d’amore and a distinguished teacher, his best pupils being Karol Gregorowicz and Aleksey Yan'shinov. Bezekirsky composed numerous pieces for violin and several orchestral works, including a suite, a concert overture and a symphonic picture. He made an arrangement for violin and piano of Tchaikovsky’s Valse-scherzo op.34 and in 1913 published an edition of Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas.

Bezekirsky’s son Vasily Vasil'yevich (b Moscow, 15 Jan 1880; d East Windham, NY, 8 Nov 1960) was also a violinist. Taught by his father, he began his career as a child prodigy and in 1914 moved to the USA, where he was active as a soloist, orchestral player and teacher.

WRITINGS

Iz zapisnoy knizhki artista (St Petersburg, 1910; Eng trans., 1984, as From the Notebook of a Russian Violinist, 1850–1910)

Kratkiy istoricheskiy obzor muzïkal'no-skripichnogo iskusstva XVII–XX vekov [Concise historical survey of the art of the violin from the 17th century to the 20th] (Kiev, 1913)

I.M. YAMPOL'SKY/R

Bezić, Jerko

(b Kranj, Slovenia, 10 June 1929). Croatian ethnomusicologist. He studied musicology with Dragotin Cvetko at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana (BA 1956). In 1970 he completed the doctorate at the University of Ljubljana with a dissertation on Glagolitic chant in the Zadar area. After working in Zadar as an assistant at the Institute of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (1958–64), he worked, first as assistant, and from 1979 as scientific counsellor, at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb. He taught ethnomusicology at the University of Zagreb (1966–93). In 1980 he became a collaborating member of the Yugoslav (later Croatian) Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a full member in 1991. His research has focussed on rural and urban folk music in Croatia, music-making of Croats outside Croatia, religious and church folk music, rhythm, and the classification of folk music. He has edited folksong collections and ethnomusicological publications, and has been a member of the editorial boards of Demos (1969–84), Narodna umjetnost (1973–94), Arti musices (1980–), International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (1989–) and Bašćinski glasi (1997–).

WRITINGS

‘Muzički folklor Sinjske krajine’ [Musical folklore of the Sinj area], Narodna umjetnost, v–vi (1967–8), 175–275

Razvoj i oblici glagoljaškog pjevanja u sjevernoj Dalmaciji [The development of Glagolitic chant in northern Dalmatia] (diss., U. of Ljubljana, 1970; Zadar, 1973, as Razvoj glagoljaškog pjevanja na zadarskom području)

‘Raznolik glazbeni svijet šire okolice Donje Stubice’ [The varied world of music in the broad surroundings of Donja Stubica], Narodna umjetnost, x (1973), 309–77

‘Die Akkulturation als Fortbestandmöglichkeit der Volksmusik’, IRASM, v (1974), 209–15

‘The Tonal Framework of Folk Music in Yugoslavia’, The Folk Arts of Yugoslavia, ed. W.W. Kolar (Pittsburgh, 1976), 193–208

‘Dalmatinska folklorna gradska pjesma kao predmet etnomuzikološkog istraživanja’ [Dalmatian urban folksongs as a subject of ethnomusicological research], Narodna umjetnost, xiv (1977), 23–54

‘Spontani i organizirani glazbeni život na selu u Hrvatskoj’ [Spontaneous and organized musical life in the villages of Croatia], Zbornik radova u povodu 75. godišnjice rođenja Pavla Markovca: Zagreb 1978, ed. I. Supičić (Zagreb, 1979), 89–97

‘Folklorna glazba otoka Zlarina’ [Folk music from the island of Zlarin], Narodna umjetnost, xviii (1981), 27–148

‘Die Frau als Trägerin der Volksmusik in Međimurje (Murinsel, Murakoez)’, Die Frau in der Bauernkultur Pannoniens: Vinkovci 1980, ed. D. Rihtman-Auguštin and V. Domaćinović (Zagreb, 1982), 97–108

‘Elementi za klasifikaciju folklorne glazbe u Hrvatskoj’ [Elements for the classification of folk music in Croatia], Zbornik za narodni život i običaje, xlix (1983), 105–17

‘Prihvaćanje novih oblika u povijesnom razvoju glazbenog izražavanja Gradišćanskih Hrvata’ [Acceptance of new forms in the historical development of the Burgenland Croats’ means of musical expression], Gradišćanski Hrvati 1533–1983, ed. B. Finka (Zagreb, 1984), 189–202

ed.: Zbornik radova sa znanstvenog skupa održanog u povodu 150. obljetnice rodjenja Franje Ksavera Kuhača: Zagreb 1984 [Collection of studies on the 150th anniversary of Kuhač’s birth]

‘Etnomuzikološka djelatnost Božidara Širole’ [Širola’s ethnomusicological activity], Arti musices, xvi (1985), 5–39

ed.: Traditional Music of Ethnic Groups (Minorities): Zagreb 1985 [summaries in Eng.]

‘The Historical Dimension of Urban Folk Songs in Croatia, Yugoslavia’, Ethnomusicology and the Historical Dimension: London 1986, 89–95

‘Ungleiche Zählzeiten in rhythmisch gebundenen Liedern und sinnlich fassbare Teile der freirhythmischen Lieder in Kroatien’, Rhythmik und Metrik in traditionellen Musikkulturen, ed. O. Elschek (Bratislava, 1990), 81–5; also in Musicologica slovaca, xvi (1990), 81–6

‘Folklorna glazba otoka Šolte’ [Folk music from the island of Šolta], Narodna umjetnost, xxviii (1991), 9–48

ed.: Rasprave i prilozi uz stogodišnjicu rođenja Vinka Žganca: Čakovec 1990 [Narodna umjetnost, iii (1991)] [Proceedings of the conference to mark the centenary of Vinko Žganec’s birth]

‘Folklorna glazba (gradišćanskih Hrvata)’ [Folk music of the Burgenland Croats], Povijest i kultura gradišćanskih Hrvata, ed. J. Kampuš (Zagreb, 1995), 361–402

‘Music-Making of Croats outside their Mother Country’, Echo der Vielfalt/Echoes of Diversity, ed. U. Hemetek (Vienna, 1996), 189–202

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

S. Stepanov: Spomenici glagoljaškog pjevanja u Poljicima kod Splita [Monuments of Glagolitic singing in Poljica, nr Split], Spomenici glagoljaškog pjevanja, i (Zagreb, 1983)

with G. Marošević and R. Bonifačić: Vinko Žganec: Hrvatske pučke popijevke iz Međimurja [Croatian folksongs from Međimurje], (Zagreb, 1990–92)

Z. Lovrenčević: Folklorna glazba Bilogore [Folk music of the Bilogora region], i (Zagreb, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bašćinski glasi, iii (1994) [incl. N. Ceribašić, G. Marošević and S. Pettan: ‘Razgovor s dr. Jerkom Bezićem o njegovom životu i etnomuzikološkom radu’ [A conversation with Bezić about his life and ethnomusicological work], 7–24; A. Starčević-Štambuk: ‘Bibliografija radova Jerka Bezića’, 25–39; M. Pavlović: ‘Pregled glazbeno-folklorne građe i druge dokumentacije dr. J. Bezića u Instituta za etnologiju i folkloristiku’ [A survey of folk music material and other documentation collected by Bezić held in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb], 41–61]

GROZDANA MAROŠEVIĆ

Bezifferter Bass

(Ger.).

See Figured bass.

Beznosiuk, Lisa (Maria)

(b Sheffield, 20 Aug 1956). English flautist. She studied at the GSM in London under Kathryn Lukas and, for baroque flute, Stephen Preston. Her playing, distinguished by exceptional warmth and sensitivity, was soon much in demand among the burgeoning period-instrument orchestras, notably the English Baroque Soloists, the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music. She was a founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and in 1992 became principal flute of the London Classical Players. She has recorded many Baroque concertos with these orchestras since her solo début in London's Barbican Concert Hall in 1983. Beznosiuk has frequently performed in partnership with musicians including Stephen Preston, lutenist Nigel North, harpsichordist Maggie Cole, and her husband, the cellist Richard Tunnicliffe.

GEORGE PRATT

Beznosiuk, Pavlo (Roman)

(b London, 4 July 1960). English violinist. He studied from 1978 to 1982 with David Takeno at the GSM, specializing in the Baroque violin. He has worked with many leading period-instrument orchestras, and following his solo début at the Proms in 1993 has appeared increasingly as soloist and director. In 1992 he formed the Beethoven String Trio of London. Beznosiuk is noted particularly for his energetic and communicative performances, both on the concert platform and in his many recordings, which include music by Purcell, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart and Schubert. He is also remarkably versatile. He played the lira da braccio with the New London Consort in 1985, performs on the medieval fiddle and rebec, and, as leader of the Parley of Instruments (1984–7), pioneered the modern use of Renaissance violins.

GEORGE PRATT

Bezocy [Bezozi, Bezozzi, Bezzossi].

See Besozzi family.

Bezuglova, Irina Fedotovna

(b Leningrad, 23 March 1952). Russian musicologist. She graduated in 1977 from the Leningrad Conservatory in theory and composition and completed her postgraduate studies at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in Leningrad in 1980. That same year she began working at the Russian National Library, Leningrad, in the department of manuscripts and rare books. In 1982 she defended her Kandidat dissertation on 17th-century sacred chant (‘Opekalov chant’); in 1987 she was appointed head of the department of music editions and manuscripts of the National Library. Her chief interest lies in early Russian music and the traditions of Russian monastic chant.

WRITINGS

‘Opekalovskiy raspev [Opekalov chant]’, Pamyatniki kul'turï: novïye otkrïtiya 1978, 196–205

‘“Dostoyno yest'”: Opekalovskogo rospeva’ [‘Completely suitable’: Opekalov chant], Trudï Otdela Drevnerusskoy literaturï, xxxvi (1981), 308–20

Kanonicheskoye i individual'noye v tvorchestve rospevshchikov XVII veka (Opekalovskiy rospev) [The canonical and the individual in 17th-century chant (the Opekalov monastery chant)] (diss., Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, Leningrad, 1982)

‘Ėtiketnost' v drevnerusskom pevcheskom iskusstve (na materiale stikhirï na tselovaniye plashchanitsï)’ [Etiquette in early Russian religious chant (based on a hymn on kissing the Shroud)], Drevnerusskaya literatura: istochnikovedeniye, ed. D.S. Likhachyov (Leningrad, 1984), 215–21

‘Memuarnïye materialï muzïkantov v novïkh postupleniyakh otdela rukopisey i redkikh knig’ [Autobiographical materials of musicians in new acquisitions of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books], Issledovaniye pamyatnikov pis'mennoy kul'turï v sobraniyakh i arkhivakh otdela rukopisey i redkikh knig (Leningrad, 1988), 76–83

‘Marginalii v rukopisnïkh knigakh Kirillo-Belozerskogo monastïrya kak istochnik po istorii russkoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï’ [Marginalia in the manuscript volumes of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery as a source for the history of Russian musical culture], Musica antiqua VIII: Bydgoszcz 1988, 101–10

‘Muzïkal'naya deyatel'nost' solovetskikh inokov (po pevcheskim rukopisyam Solovetskogo sobraniya)’ [The musical use of the Solovetsky icons (based on the music manuscripts of the collection in the Solovetsky monastery)], Istochnikovedcheskoye izucheniye pamyatnikov pis'mennoy kul'turï, ed. G.P. Yenin and N.A. Yefimova (Leningrad, 1990), 39–50

Prizhiznennïye izdaniya kompozitorov Moguchey kuchki: Katalog [Editions of the work of the Mighty Handful published during their lifetimes: catalogue] (Leningrad, 1990)

with N.B. Zakhar'ina: Rabochiy katalog otechestvennïkh notnïkh izdaniy XVIII veka [A working catalogue of 18th-century music editions of our country] (Leningrad, 1990)

with N.B. Zakhar'ina: Svodnïy katalog Rossiyskikh notnïkh izdaniy [A composite catalogue of Russian music editions] (St Petersburg, 1996)

NATAL'YA SEMYONOVNA SERYOGINA

B fa [Befa].

(1) In the untransposed medieval Hexachord system with hexachords on G, C and F, the fourth degree of the hexachord on F, hence B. The letter-name of this note was written as a round or ‘soft’ B (for an illustration see Solmization, fig.2), and the note was therefore also known as ‘B rotundum’ or ‘B mollis’. When the system was transposed (see Musica ficta, §1(iv)), the term ‘B fa’ could designate the fourth degrees of other hexachords: E, A, F, C, or even other notes.

(2) In medieval treatises the term was also used for the round B (or ‘fa’) sign when used as a notational symbol; this symbol was the forerunner of the modern flat sign.

Bhangra (from Punj. bhāgrā).

A music and dance genre of the Punjab. The term is also used for loosely related modern popular music styles based in South Asia and Great Britain. Traditional bhangra (bhāgrā), associated in particular with the vernal Vaiśākhī festival, features vigorous male dancing accompanied by dhol (barrel drum) and occasional sung verses (boliyā). In India the term bhangra also came to denote syncretic popular Punjabi songs disseminated initially via films, but subsequently on cassettes, fusing traditional Punjabi modes, melodies, and rhythms with modern Western-influenced ones. In the mid-1980s bhangra emerged as a parallel popular music and dance phenomenon among South Asians, especially people of Punjabi descent, in Great Britain. Stylistically UK-based bhangra de-emphasizes lyrics and often reflects a greater degree of syncretization. It combines characteristically Punjabi elements with sampling techniques, drum machines and influences drawn from electronic dance music and, most prominently, Jamaican dance-hall reggae. By the early 1990s the innovative bhangra-informed music of Bally Sagoo and the more reggae-oriented Apache Indian (Steve Kapur) had extended its popularity to urban Indian audiences and, to a lesser extent, to aficionados of world music genres.

See also India, §IX, 3(iii).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Banerji and G. Baumann: ‘Bhangra 1984–8: Fusion and Professionalisation in a Genre of South Asian Dance Music’, Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. P. Oliver (Milton Keynes, 1990), 137–52

G. Baumann: ‘The Re-invention of Bhangra: Social Change and Aesthetic Shifts in a Punjabi Music in Britain’, World of Music, xxxii/2 (1990), 81–95

S. Sharma, J. Hutnyk and A. Sharma: Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (London, 1996)

PETER MANUEL

Bharata.

A sage (muni) in ancient Indian legend. The Nātyaśāstra, a Sanskrit text on drama and its ingredient arts composed or compiled from earlier source probably in the early centuries ce, is ascribed to him. The work was the first comprehensive treatise on the ancient Indian drama, and as music and dance were an important element in the production of such works it contains detailed chapters on the theory and practice of these arts. Like all early Sanskrit technical treatises it was traditionally ascribed to a mythical or legendary sage. There is internal evidence to show that many other treatises had been composed previously and were used for this compilation. It is thus a composite work, but in the material it describes and in its method there is also some appearance of unity and consistency; some scholars have argued that there was a strong unitary guiding authorial or editorial hand behind its composition. The Bharata-Nātyaśāstra in some form or other was cited constantly for its authority in dramaturgy, poetics, music and dance by authors from early medieval times on; it was the most influential source in the early discipline of sangīta-śāstra, and all subsequent theoreticians tended at least notionally to trace their intellectual tradition back to Bharata. However, the text as we now have it became available to modern scholarly scrutiny only over the last century. The American Sanskrit scholar Fitz-Edward Hall referred to manuscripts of the work in his 1865 edition of another Sanskrit treatise on dramaturgy. The history of the subsequent transmission of the text is related by Rocher (1981); there has not yet been sufficient clarity in the manuscript evidence for a fully critical edition and translation, and the different printed editions reflect the differences in coverage and chapter divisions between the regional manuscript recensions. Nevertheless a good idea of the scope of the Nātyaśāstra can be gained from the translations and summaries that have been published. Joanny Grosset, whose pioneering study of Indian music and its history was published in 1921 in Lavignac's Encyclopédie, based his earlier (1888) book on manuscript evidence, and in 1898 published a part of the Sanskrit text in Paris.

Musical references are scattered throughout the work in places where musical practice impinges on other topics in dramaturgy. Music is extensively and systematically treated in its own right in the last quarter of the work. This includes general theory of melody (pitch, intervals, scales and modes) and rhythm (basic concepts of time division, metrical organization, uses of metre in song compositions, tempo and punctuation), ornamentation and configuration of notes in melodic invention, formal structure of song compositions, variations of melodic style, instrumental classification and playing techniques, and qualitative criteria for assessing the characteristics of singers, players and teachers and disciples. There are many difficulties in the interpretation of this material, but English translations may be found in Ghosh (1961) and Rangacharya (1996). The musical topics are summarised in order, with comparative material from other early Indian texts, in Nijenhuis (1981).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Grosset: Contributions à l'étude de la musique hindoue (Paris, 1888)

J. Grosset, ed.: Bhāratīya-nātya-çāstram: traité de Bharata sur le théâtre, texte sanskrit (Paris, 1898) [with Fr. introduction]

M. Ghosh, ed.: The Nātyaśāstra: a Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics (Calcutta, 1961)

G.H. Tarlekar: Studies in the Nātyaśāstra, with Special Reference to the Sanskrit Drama in Performance (Delhi, 1975, 2/1991)

E. te Nijenhuis: ‘Die Musik im altindischen Theater nach dem Nātyaśāstra’, Altindien, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/8, ed. W. Kaufmann (Leipzig, 1981), 188–96

L. Rocher: ‘The Textual Tradition of the Bhāratīyanātyaśāstra: a Philological Assessment’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens, xxv (1981), 107–30

A. Rangacharya, ed.: The Nātyaśāstra: English Translation with Critical Notes (rev. ed., New Delhi, 1996)

For further bibliography see India, §III, 6

JONATHAN KATZ

Bhatkhande, Vishnu Narayan

(b Bombay, 10 Aug 1860; d Bombay, 19 Sept 1936). Indian musicologist. He was educated as a lawyer and from about 1875 also studied music; from 1884 he was an active member of the Gayana Uttejak Mandali, a newly formed Bombay music society, where he learnt hundreds of traditional raga compositions. Concurrently he studied well-known Sanskrit works on music. In 1900 he collected between two and three hundred khayals from the son of a senior musician at the court of Jaipur (Rajasthan), subsequently persuading the father, Muhammad Ali Khan, to accept him as a disciple, thus legitimizing his musical standing by becoming associated with a recognized professional lineage (gharana). In south India (1904) he encountered the other flourishing canonical system of Indian art music – Carnatic music – and from a study of the 17th-century treatise Caturdandi prakāśikā evolved his system of classifying Hindustani ragas primarily according to ten thāt (scale types). He did further research in central and east India (1907) and north India (1908–9) before retiring from legal practice (1910) to devote himself to musicology. He was an initiator of the first four All-India Music Conferences (Baroda, 1916; Delhi, 1918; Banaras, 1919; Lucknow, 1924); he also provided educational guidelines for state music schools in Baroda and Gwalior and for the Marris College of Hindustani Music in Lucknow (founded 1926). Becoming a disciple of the Nawab of Rampur (Rohilkand), he gained access to the rich repertory and traditions of his court and to its senior musicians, notably Wazir Khan (of the musical lineage of the Emperor Akbar's musician Tan Sen).

In his research Bhatkhande was concerned chiefly with the raga and never dealt with rhythm or instrumentation in isolation. His four-volume Hindustānī sangīta-paddhati (Bombay, 1910–32; Hindi trans., 1954–68; Eng. trans., 1990–) is an analysis of the ragas of the north Indian oral traditions, based on years of collection and notation of the performing practices and an exhaustive investigation of the theoretical literature. One of the most far-reaching and most resisted of his conclusions was that the earliest Sanskrit treatises (pre-15th century) are only marginally relevant to 20th-century Hindustani music theory, but he used numerous passages from later Sanskrit sources in discussing ragas. (Many treatises from the 15th century to the 18th were first published by Bhatkhande or at his instance.) The six-volume Kramik pustak mālikā (Bombay, 1913–37; Hindi trans. 1954–68; Eng. trans., 1990–) contains his conclusions (as opposed to his findings and arguments), hundreds of traditional compositions, and lengthy sets of model phrases for improvised ālāp (slow introduction) printed in his own refinement of the Indian letter notational system. Volume i (1919) is an introductory primer and with volume ii (1921) concerns ten major ‘foundation’ ragas, whose scale degrees and names were those of the ten thāt of his primary classification; the larger volumes iii and iv (1922–3) contain music in 35 additional ragas, and the two posthumous volumes (1937) concern ragas less familiar or less consistently agreed on than those of volumes iii–iv, grouped according to the ten scale types.

Bhatkhande was the most important and influential Indian theorist of the first half of the 20th century. His position with respect to raga in Indian music resembles Rameau's with respect to harmony in European music, in that even those who most vigorously rejected his hypotheses have done so in terms he set. His other writings include the treatise Śrīmal-laksya sańgītam (Bombay, 1910/R), in traditional Sanskrit verse form; the paper ‘A Short Historical Survey of the Music of Upper India’ given at the Baroda Conference in 1916 (published separately, Bombay, 1934/R); and brief accounts of Sanskrit musical treatises collected after his death as A Comparative Study of some of the Leading Music Systems of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries (Bombay, c1940/R).

HAROLD S. POWERS

Bhosle, Asha

(b Satara, 8 Sept 1933). Indian film playback singer. She is the younger sister of the playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, and has earned enormous renown for her renditions of Western-influenced rock, pop and disco film songs as well as film ghazals. Like her elder sister, Asha received classical music training from their stage actor-singer father, Dinanath Mangeshkar, and started working in films as a child artist. She sang in a chorus at the age of ten for the Marathi film Majha bala (1943), in which her 14-year-old sister Lata played the heroine. After the family moved to Bombay in 1945, she recorded her first Hindi playback song Sawan aya re, a chorus led also by the singers Geeta Roy and Zohrabai, composed by the music director Hansraj Behl for the film Chunariya (1948). Her first Hindi solo playback recording was Hain mauj main apne begane, do char idhar … for Raat ki rani (1949).

In the early 1950s Asha's elopement and marriage to Ganpat B. Bhosle alienated her from the Mangeshkar family. During the 1950s she recorded more film songs than any other singer, although many were for low-budget films that failed to earn her the same recognition and success as her elder sister. A fruitful partnership with the music director O.P. Nayyar led to several successful songs in 1957 (in Naya daur and Tumsa nahin dekha) and others into the 1960s. After having three children and her subsequent divorce from Bhosle, the family accepted her back in 1960. In 1974 Asha married the music director Rahul Dev Burman (1939–94). This bond grew out of an enormously successful trio which also included the playback singer Kishore Kumar. Her song Dum maro dum by Burman (in Hare rama hare Krishna, 1971) topped the annual Binaca Geetmala film song charts. Asha received an EMI award for recording the most songs – seven – in one day and won the Best Female Playback Singer annual Filmfare award seven times between 1967 and 1978. In 1998 she won a MTV award for her song Janam samjha karo; she continues to record both film and non-film songs and regularly tours abroad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Raheja and K. Kothari: ‘Asha Bhosle’, The Hundred Luminaries of Hindi Cinema (Bombay, 1996), 65 only

T. Schnabel: ‘Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar’, Rhythm Planet: the Great World Music Makers (New York, 1998), 41 only

ALISON ARNOLD

Bhutan.

Country in Asia. Its system of government is a hereditary monarchy; it is the last independent Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas. Bhutan shares its southern border with India, on the edge of the Brahmaputra plain, and its northern border with the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China in the high mountain ranges of the eastern Himalayas.

One of the most striking features of Bhutan is its isolation. Until the 20th century there was virtually no contact with people to the south of the country. The easier routes to travel had always been to the north and therefore Tibetan culture has had the most influence on Bhutan’s religious and ethnic make-up over the centuries. The Drukpas, people who mostly live in the western half of Bhutan, have origins connected with Tibet. Another significant group, the Sharchop people in eastern Bhutan, are thought to be descendants of peoples who pre-date the Tibetan influxes. Around 95% of the population practises subsistence farming, which mainly consists of growing rice in terraces. The capital city, Thimphu, in the western part of the country and halfway between India and Tibet, is at an altitude of 2300 metres.

Little is known about the early history of Bhutan. The Bon religion was widespread before Mahayana Buddhism was introduced from Tibet during the 7th–8th centuries. The Drukpa school of Tantric Buddhism, a branch of the Kagyupa sect in Tibet, was established in Bhutan in the 13th century. In the 17th century the powerful lama Ngawang Namgyel of the Drukpa school unified the country and set up a theocratic system of government. Since that time the Bhutanese have called themselves Drukpas. Ngawang Namgyel was called the shabdrung, a title which means ‘at whose feet one submits’; beneath him were the je khempho (rje mkhan-po), the religious leader, and the desi (sde-srid), the temporal leader. The shabdrung (zhabs-drung) began to build a series of fortress-monasteries (dzong/rdzong) throughout Bhutan. These dzong still house the administrative offices of the regions. The system of shabdrung leaders was perpetuated through reincarnation until the 20th century. In 1907 a monarchy was founded with the coronation of Ugyen Wangchuck, a former regional governor. The current monarch is the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck.

The first outside assistance came from India in the 1950s. However, the widespread effects were not felt until the 1980s, when schools and health units became available to the majority of people across the country. In order to foster a sense of national identity the king strictly enforces a code of conduct called driglam namzha (sgrigs-lam rnam-bzhag), which deals with adherence to traditional behaviour and respect for customs. For example, national dress is to be worn at all times and all houses are to be built in traditional style. Outside influences are carefully monitored and controlled: the use of television receivers is banned, and the number of foreigners allowed into Bhutan annually is limited.

A large minority group in Bhutan, called Southern Bhutanese (ethnically Nepalese), staged demonstrations in 1990 over the rigid enforcement of driglam namzha. Since then many Southern Bhutanese have been denied nationality and have left the country for refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Their music is not discussed here and there has been no known research into their traditions.

There are 18 classified languages in Bhutan and many more dialects. Dzongkha is the official language. Classical Tibetan, Choeki, is the language of the Buddhist texts. Both Dzongkha and Choeki belong to the Tibeto-Burman subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan language group.

1. Non-ritual music.

2. Ritual music.

SARA NUTTALL

1. Non-ritual music.

(i) Song genres.

The two major non-ritual song genres heard in Bhutan are the boeda (bod-sgra) and the shungda (gzhung-sgra). Boeda literally means ‘song from Tibet’, but the Bhutanese today consider it very much their own genre. The form is characterized by short phrases and a regular rhythm (ex.1).

Traditionally boeda are sung in Dzongkha or, less frequently, in Choeki. Recently boeda have been written in other Bhutanese languages, particularly Sharchop. The lyrics of a boeda are typically about nature, travelling or love. The song is generally performed as entertainment in the home, at village celebrations or to entertain senior government, royal or religious figures. It is usually accompanied by the dramnyen (sgra-snyan), the Bhutanese lute, in heterophony with the voice. With larger groups, and if the boeda is being used for dance, the song is unaccompanied. It is common for the Bhutanese to sing unaccompanied boeda when travelling on foot.

The shungda is characterized by a long melodic line and a lack of regular rhythm. The shungda is known to have existed in Bhutan in the 17th century, at the time of the first shabdrung. The Bhutanese consider the shungda an indigenous genre and it does not appear to have musical characteristics similar to those of songs in neighbouring countries. The word shungda means ‘sound of the centre’, a reference to the centre of government or governing power, and is a song generally performed by musicians of the court and a few specialist musicians in villages. The Bhutanese national anthem is a shungda. Most shungda are sung in Choeki, the rest in Dzongkha. Although the shungda have non-ritual texts, the most common theme is religious (e.g. about the origins of Buddhism or a religious ethical issue). The shungda was probably originally sung unaccompanied. Today the solo singer usually accompanies himself or herself on the dramnyen. The phrases are long, melismatic and highly decorated with a type of ornamentation called nyenku (snyan-khu), a combination of trill and mordent-like figures added according to the taste of the individual musician (ex.2).

The dramnyen is played in heterophony with the voice, with a characteristically rapid rhythm. If the shungda is danced to, the dancers stand in a straight line and move their bodies and arms slowly in an undulating motion. The shungda may be performed as private entertainment, at village events such as an archery competition, for government officials or royalty, or before a lama as a non-ritual offering to the gods.

Other song genres can be heard throughout Bhutan and are usually not accompanied by the dramnyen. There are village songs called the tsangmo (gtsang-mo) or jhe (gzhas) (jhem (gzhas-ma) if sung by women), and a popular eastern Bhutanese song called the alo (a-lo). There are also songs which accompany manual labour (e.g. for working in the fields, or for building houses).

(ii) Instruments.

There are five musical instruments considered by the Bhutanese to belong to the non-ritual sphere of music. The dramnyen is a long-necked, fretless lute with seven strings, one of which is only half the length of the others (its peg appears half-way along the neck). It is played with a wooden plectrum. The bowl and neck are made of hollowed-out wood. The soundholes are two spiral shapes carved out of the front wooden panel above the soundboard. Traditionally snake- or crocodile-skin is stretched across the soundboard; today instrument makers tend to use more easily available materials, such as cow- or goatskin. The strings are tuned in 4ths in two double courses and one triple course; the approximate pitches are g–G–c'–c–c–f–f. The whole instrument is ornately painted in several colours. Traditional Buddhist motifs, such as clouds or a floral design, typically decorate the neck and the back of the bowl. Some instruments have a painting of Lama Yangchenma, the goddess of music, or other religious symbols, on the front between the soundboard and the neck (fig.1).

The Bhutanese dramnyen has the head of a mythical sea animal called a chusing (chu-srin) carved into its semicircular pegbox. Whereas dramnyen are also found in other parts of the Himalayas, such as Tibet, Nepal, Ladakh and Sikkim, instruments from these regions may also use other fauna such as a bird, horse or lion on the pegbox. The Bhutanese instrument uses the chusing exclusively.

The dramnyen accompanies singers of boeda or shungda songs. It is also used to play solo instrumental versions of these genres. The dramnyen is played by specialist villagers or by urban dwellers who play in ensembles. Some monks also play the dramnyen. However, this is a private activity and they would never play it as part of their ritual duties.

The Bhutanese lim (gling-bu) is a six-holed duct flute, made of bamboo. The vertical flute is called a dunglim (dung-gling), and the transverse flute a zulim (zun-gling). Its repertory is that of popular Bhutanese songs. It is commonly played by young animal herders in remote pastures.

The kungtha, a jew’s harp, is usually made of bamboo or metal. It is normally played by village women performing melodies especially composed for the instrument. The dramnyen, lim and kungtha are the three instruments most commonly played by Bhutanese villagers.

The pchiwang (pyi-wang) is a two-string bowed fiddle, similar to the Chinese erhu and the Tibetan piwang, and is said to have come to Bhutan from Tibet. The bow of the pchiwang is threaded between the two strings. The strings are metal, the soundboard cow- or goatskin and the cone is made of animal horn, often buffalo. The pchiwang was originally played in Bhutan by mendicants who would travel from village to village playing popular melodies in exchange for food. Today the pchiwang is more commonly heard as part of an ensemble of instruments.

The yangchen (yang-chin), the most recent instrument to be introduced to Bhutan apart from Western pop music instruments, is derived from the Chinese yangqin. It is thought that the first yangchen to become part of a Bhutanese music ensemble was brought into the country in the 1960s by a Tibetan refugee who joined the Royal Academy of Performing Arts. The yangchen is a hammer zither with a hollow wooden trapezoidal box and several triple or quadruple courses of metal strings. There are two bridges, each supporting alternate courses of strings. The instrument is struck with two long, thin, flexible bamboo sticks, one held in each hand.

Bhutanese ensembles typically consist of a dramnyen, a lim, a pchiwang and a yangchen, or any combination of these. There are several ensembles based in Thimphu, composed of professional or semi-professional musicians. The ensembles, often joined by singers and dancers, play at most important royal, state or important Bhutanese events such as funerals, weddings and promotion celebrations. They also hold occasional concerts or make recordings for sale on cassette. The musicians play in heterophony and usually perform boeda rather than shungda, the former having a more regular rhythmic structure suitable for ensemble playing.

(iii) Change and the mass media.

Bhutan’s wider contact with the outside world is a recent phenomenon and older Bhutanese can recall the period prior to the arrival of motor vehicles, aeroplanes and money. The national flag and national anthem were first introduced in Bhutan during the second half of the 20th century. Bhutan began joining international organizations in the 1960s. The first road to cross the country from west to east was not built until the mid-1980s. This road has had a huge impact on communications throughout the country, and has resulted in the opening up of previously isolated valleys and the growth of small towns which have developed from clusters of trading shops and inns along the roadside.

The Bhutanese have tried to acquire some of the benefits of the outside world without losing the country’s heritage and identity. ‘Bhutanization’, a concept that requires any project to be sensitive to traditional Bhutanese culture, is a component of nearly all development plans made by the government. Despite the national policy of cultural protection, outside influences are being felt in Bhutan. Although receiving television transmissions from other countries is banned, videos, mostly of Hindi movies, are widely available in the capital Thimphu. Cassettes of Hindi, Tibetan and Western music are popular, and several shops in Thimphu have a good trade in foreign music. Magazine photos of Western pop stars are common wall decorations for the young and young amateur musicians in the capital are learning to play guitars and drums. However, the musicians of Bhutanese ensembles are also producing cassettes of their own traditional music which are popular. As well as playing traditional arrangements these ensembles are experimenting with recordings of well-known Bhutanese songs played by a standard ensemble with, for example, synthesizer and electric guitar. In other innovations the dramnyen may accompany a song with a Hindi melody and Bhutanese words.

The Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) is Bhutan’s national radio station and has played a key part in recent developments in Bhutanese music. Prior to the building of the lateral road and the founding of the BBS in the early 1980s, the majority of people heard only the music of their own valley, or of one or two neighbouring valleys. The isolation and difficult travelling conditions caused by Bhutan’s mountainous terrain resulted in the development of 18 distinct languages and dozens of dialects. This phenomenon also produced songs which varied slightly from valley to valley. The BBS has undertaken a huge project to travel throughout Bhutan to record and catalogue music and songs in an attempt to preserve the individual characteristics of each valley. These recordings are also being used as material for on-air programmes; the BBS plays very little non-Bhutanese music. Therefore, with the advent of radio a type of ‘cross-pollination’ is occurring, with people for the first time hearing songs from regions other than their own.

2. Ritual music.

Buddhism as practised in late 20th-century Bhutan is of the Drukpa school of the Kagyupa sect and the Nyingmapa school, both forms of Mahayana Tantric Buddhism. Buddhist practices have been mixed with older, indigenous traditions, particularly of the Bon religion. Ritual music in Bhutan closely follows the practices of Tibetan ritual music and performing practice is laid down in detail in religious texts and musical scores. The music consists of chanting and the playing of a group of instruments. Monks play instruments, usually in pairs, such as dungchen (dung-chen), a metal trumpet two metres long; bjelling (rgya-gling), a shawm; rolmo (rol-mo), cymbals; and nga (rnga), a double-headed drum. Ritual music may be heard in temples throughout the country as an integrated part of the prayer ritual. Ritual music can also be heard at annual religious festivals called tshechus (she-bcu). These are held in monasteries across the country in honour of Guru Rinpoche who came to Bhutan to teach Buddhism in the 8th century. These festivals last for several days and attract people from distant villages who come to watch the moral teachings of Buddhism being enacted in dances and ceremonies (fig.2).

The monks also perform rituals with musical accompaniment outside the monastery. These rituals are most commonly held in village houses and are ceremonies for events such as funerals and house blessings. There has been, to date, little known research into the ritual music of Bhutan.

3. Music and the sacred world.

All music in Bhutan is thought to have some association with the divine. Non-ritual as well as ritual music is played to bestow peace and goodwill both on player and listener. The non-ritual instruments of Bhutanese music, although not part of the formally structured music of the temples, nevertheless have a symbolic part to play in Bhutan’s religious life. The dramnyen is never played in ritual Buddhist music, but it nevertheless has an important place in the temples of Bhutan, as a symbolic representation of music (it may appear on an altar as a silent offering to represent the faculty of hearing). The lim may also appear in this context. The dramnyen is often depicted in artwork in temples. It appears at the entrance to nearly all Bhutanese temples in the hands of the sharchop gyalpo, the King of the East, one of the four Guardians of the Directions. The goddess of music, Lama Yangchenma, is shown on Bhutanese thankas (painted or appliqué cloth scrolls hung on temple walls) playing the dramnyen. The dramnyen also appears in a dance which is part of the tshechu, the annual religious festival (fig.2). The dance is called a dramnyen cham (sgra-snyan ’cham) and the dancer plays the instrument as he dances. Here, however, the instrument’s sound is too soft to be heard by the crowd and the dramnyen’s role is symbolic.

Of particular importance to the Bhutanese musical culture is Lama Yangchenma. She is the patron of music, the arts and learning, and is the goddess of the aural sense and of wealth. According to mythology, music was created on earth when she first rose up from the river Ganges, sitting on a lotus leaf and playing the dramnyen (fig.1). Devout Bhutanese dramnyen players offer a prayer to Lama Yangchenma and invoke her presence before they begin to play.

Bhutanese musicians traditionally believe that the music produced by their instruments has the power to attract spirits and creatures. For example, the chusing, the mythological creature on the head of the dramnyen, is supposed to frighten away evil spirits which hover around the player listening to the sound of the instrument and which might send the player mad. Similarly the lim and the kungtha are not supposed to be played during the winter as their music might wake dormant insects and small animals and draw them outside, where they would die of cold.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

M. Aris: Bhutan: the Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (Warminster, 1979)

B. Chakravarti: A Cultural History of Bhutan (Chittaranjan, 1979–80, 2/1981)

F. Pommaret: An Illustrated Guide to Bhutan (Hong Kong, 1990, rev. 2/1991)

I. Collinge: ‘The Dra-nyen: an Emblem of Tibetan Culture’, CHIME, no.6 (1993), 22–33

S. Nuttall: The Bhutanese Dramnyen: Music and Change in the Dragon Kingdom (thesis, U. of Cambridge, 1993) [incl. disc]

M. Aris: The Raven Crown: the Origins of Buddhist Monarchy in Bhutan (London, 1994)

M. Aris and M.Hutt, eds.: Bhutan: Aspects of Culture and Development (Gartmore, 1994)

D.K. Myers: From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan (New Delhi, 1994)

recordings

Tibetan Buddhist Rites from the Monasteries of Bhutan, rec. J. Levy, Lyrichord LLST 7255-8 (1971)

Music of Bhutan, rec. J.S. Szuszkiewicz, Folkways FE 4030 (1978)

Biaggi, Girolamo Alessandro

(b Calcio, nr Bergamo, 2 Feb 1819; d Florence, 21 March 1897). Italian music critic and composer. He studied the violin in Milan, and was taught composition by Vaccai. While still a student he wrote a comic opera Don Desiderio disperato per eccesso di buon cuore (1839) and his later works include the opera Martino delta Scala (1856, Messina), a Requiem (1856) and other sacred music, cantatas and songs. He was for some time a conductor. In 1847 he founded L’Italia musicale, and (as Ippolito d’Albano) contributed to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano and other periodicals. From 1863 he taught at the Istituto Musicale in Florence and was critic of La nazione; he played a major role in the city’s flourishing musical life.

Although Biaggi was a supporter of the German instrumental and chamber tradition, as an opera critic his standard was the Italian tradition that culminated in Rossini (he had met the composer in Paris), and he showed limited sympathy for opera of his own time. He did, however, adopt advanced ideas on Rossini, defending him against the formalistic criticism that categorized the composer as a mediocre dramatist and an unorthodox church composer. In his reviews of Beethoven performances, at that time manifestations of the avant garde in Italy, he on the one hand rejected any hedonistic concept of music, and on the other opposed the notion of ‘musical truth’ to the old canon of verisimilitude (the imitation of nature), that is, he stood for the principle of artistic creation according to its own laws. He consequently also upheld the artistic autonomy of sacred music, defending the composer’s freedom of language even in that sphere. A large work on the life and work of Rossini, the outgrowth of his essay of 1869, was left unfinished at his death, as was a Dizionario storico-critico della musica. ‘L’arte del pianista nel suo stretto significato’, sometimes attributed to him and published in 1868 in the Atti dell’Accademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, was actually written by Alessandro Biagi, professor of the piano at the Istituto.

WRITINGS

Della musica religiosa e delle questioni increnti (Milan, 1856)

‘I conservatorii di musica in Italia ed il loro riordinamento’, Nuova antologia, xvi (1871), 897–919

Essays pubd in Atti dell’Accademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, incl. ‘Considerazioni intorno allo stato presente della musica italiana’, iii (1865); ‘Ricerche storiche sulla musica melodrammatica’, iv (1866); ‘Della vita e delle opere di Gioacchino Rossini’, vii (1869); ‘Del melodramma e del Lohengrin di R. Wagner’, x (1872); ‘Della parte che dovrebbero avere negli studi del compositore di musica la teorica e la pratica’, xiii (1875)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (C. Frajese)

FétisB

SchmidlD

E. Ricordi: ‘Commemorazione del prof. G.A. Biaggi’, GMM, lii (1897), 182–3

I. Valetta: ‘Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi’, Nuova antologia, 4th ser., clii (1897), 559–61

A. Damerini: Il R. Conservatorio di musica ‘Luigi Cherubini’ di Firenze (Florence, 1941), 13, 74

A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961)

L. Pinzauti: ‘Un critico musicale dell’Ottocento: G. Alessandro Biaggi’, NRMI, vii (1973), 388–401

SERGIO LATTES

Biagi [Blasi], Luca

(b Perugia, c1545; d 13 Dec 1608). Italian organ builder. He was the son of Marino and Margherita Biagi. He had several brothers and sisters, one of whom, Stefano, was also an organ builder. Nothing is known about Luca's apprenticeship and first works; he is first heard of in connection with the organ of S Maria Nuova in Perugia in 1585: ‘the first and worthy work of the Cavalier Luca of Perugia’. The S Maria Nuova organ was replaced by a new electro-pneumatic instrument in 1960, although its spectacular façade survives. The pipes are arranged in seven groups: two extreme groups of two rows each (the upper rows consisting of dummy pipes), and five central fields, the largest pipe of each being spirally embossed.

Biagi was in Rome by 1593, when the organist Zucchelli obtained work for him on the organs of S Lorenzo in Damaso and the Cappella Gregoriana in S Pietro, and shortly afterwards in the construction of an organ at Frascati. In return, Biagi completed without charge a small transportable organ that Zucchelli had bought from the nuns of Monte Magnapoli and used to hire out to churches for services.

Biagi is known especially for the new organ for S Giovanni in Laterano, commissioned by Clement VIII to be ready for Holy Year 1600. Biagi built the instrument between 1597 and 1599; it was restored by Barthélémy Formentelli between 1987 and 1989. It has a spring chest of 66 channels and 15 stops. It originally had one manual with a compass of F'G'A'–f''', including seven split keys providing enharmonic notes for a, a', a'', a''', d', d'' and d'''; a second manual was added in the 18th century. It probably had a pull-down pedalboard, although this was not mentioned in documents until 1731: in 1776 this was said to have ten pedals. It had six wedge-shaped bellows, a tremulant and the following stops: Principale Profondo 24', Principale Ottava 12', Flauto in VIII, Flauto in XV, Decimaquinta 6', Decimanona 4', Vigesimaseconda 3', Vigesimasesta, Vigesimanona I, Vigesimanona II, Trigesimaterza I, Trigesimaterza II, Trigesimasesta I, Trigesimasesta II, Zampogne-Trombe 12'. Biagi looked after the maintenance of the instrument until his death in 1608.

As a result of the novelty and success of Biagi's Water organ in the Quirinale gardens, completed about 1598, Clement VIII gave him a 20-year privilege in 1600 for the construction of such instruments. Between November 1601 and March 1603 Biagi completed the two-manual organ built by Domenico Benvenuti and Francesco Palmieri (1586–7) for the church of S Maria in Aracoeli, Rome. In 1602 he built the organ of SS Annunziata, Sulmona, and in 1604 he enlarged the keyboard of the organ of Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, by adding three keys (C', D', E') in the bass, and also lowering the pitch by three semitones by shifting all the pipes upwards and adding new ones to the bass end of each stop. His obituary stated that he was ‘supra sexaginta’ when he died.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Bonanni: Gabinetto armonico (Rome, 1722/R, rev. and enlarged 2/1776/R by G. Ceruti with plates by A. van Westerhout; Eng. trans., 1969), 77ff

A. Allegra: ‘La cappella musicale di S. Spirito in Saxia di Roma’, NA, xvii (1940), 26–38

R. Lunelli: L’arte organaria del Rinascimento in Roma e gli organi di S Pietro in Vaticano, dalle origini a tutto il periodo frescobaldiano (Florence, 1958)

F. Luccichenti: ‘Luca Blasi (c1545–1608): profilo di un organaro’, L'organo, xix (1981), 113–31

F. Luccichenti: Documenti per la storia degli organi in S. Giovanni in Laterano a Roma (1427–1984) (Rome, 1994)

GUY OLDHAM/UMBERTO PINESCHI

Bialas, Günter

(b Bielschowitz, Upper Silesia, 19 July 1907; d Glonn, 7 Aug 1995). German composer and teacher. In his childhood he absorbed musical influence through personal connections, since his father was business manager at the local German theatre. He studied the piano and music theory with Fritz Lubrich in Katowice (1922–5), musicology and German language and literature at the University of Breslau (1926–8) and music education and composition at the Berlin Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik (1928–31). His first and principal composition teacher was Max Trapp whose masterclasses he attended at the Preussischer Akademie der Kunst (1936–8), although he had already been profoundly influenced by Fritz Jöde’s work in the youth music movement. In 1939 he became lecturer in music theory at the Institute of Music Education in the University of Breslau, but was called up for military service in 1941. After the war he moved to Bavaria and in 1946 became choral conductor of the Munich Bachverein. In 1947 he taught theory at the Weimar Musikhochschule and then became teacher of composition at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold where he was awarded a professorship in 1950. In 1959 Bialas was appointed professor of composition at the Musikhochschule in Munich, a post he held until 1974. His numerous honours included the music prize of North-Rhine Westphalia (1954), the Munich music award (1962), the Stamitz prize (1964), the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Music Award (1967), the Upper Silesian Cultural Award (1971), the Lower Saxony Silesian Art Award (1980), the Munich Cultural Prize (1987), the Schleswig Holstein Hindemith Award (1988) and the Bavarian State Foundation Cultural Award (1989).

Bialas belongs to the generation of German composers whose careers began to develop at a time when modernism was proscribed by the Nazis. However, his relatively conventional early compositions did not enjoy the same degree of exposure as those of his contemporaries Fortner and Höller. Since war service also caused a hiatus in his development, Bialas only emerged as a figure of consequence after 1945. Even then, the process of establishing an individual identity happened only gradually. In Detmold he was able to analyse for the first time musical developments from which he had been isolated during the Nazi era. But this exposure to modernism never resulted in a dogmatic approach to compositional style. He rejected 12-note composition, adopting a more flexible approach that allowed for free movement between tonality and atonality, and between simple and complex rhythmic procedures.

A master of all musical genres, Bialas received wider recognition relatively late in life. The real breakthrough occurred after the widespread acclaim accorded to his three chamber operas Hero und Leander (1966), Die Geschichte von Aucassin und Nicolette (1969) and Der gestiefelte Kater (1975), all of which revealed a great versatility of dramatic expression. Even more remarkable is the later song-play Aus der Matratzengruft (1992) which, in surveying the life of the ‘outsider’ Heinrich Heine, poses uncomfortable questions regarding the notion of German unity during the 1990s. Outside the theatre, Bialas produced a series of impressive concertante works which were given their premières by distinguished soloists including Heinrich Schiff, Eschenbach and Huguette Dreyfus. Probably his best-known composition, however, is the Meyerbeer-Paraphrasen (1971) in which a youthfulness of expression combined with wit and irony creates a brilliant orchestral showpiece.

WORKS

dramatic

Oedipus der Tyrann (incid music, Sophocles), 1962; Hero und Leander (op, 7 scenes, E. Spiess, after F. Grillparzer and Musaios), 1966, Mannheim, National, 1966; Die Geschichte von Aucassin und Nicolette (op, 13 scenes, T. Dorst), 1969, Munich, Cuvilliés, 1969; Der gestiefelte Kater, oder Wie man das Spiel spielt (op, prol, 2, epilogue, Dorst, after L. Tieck), 1973, rev. 1974, Schwetzingen, Schloss, 1975, rev. version, Munich, Staatstheater, 1987; Meyerbeer-Paraphrasen (ballet), Hamburg, Staatsoper, 1974; Aus der Matratzengruft (song-play, after H. Heine) (1991), Kiel, Bühnen des Landeshauptstadt, 1992; Die Frau von der Insel (incid music, after T. Wilder)

Arr., with H.W. Henze: K.A. Hartmann: Der Mann, der vom Tode auferstand (Wachsfigurenkabinett), Munich, May 1988

orchestral

Kleine Konzertmusik, orch, pf, 1935; Bolkenhaimer Burgmusik, serenade, 4 wind, timp, str, 1936: Conc. for Orch, 1938; Va Conc., 1940: Conc., double str, timp, 1946; Fl Conc., 1947; Vn Conc., 1948; Romanzero, 1956; Serenata, str, 1956; Invokationen, 1957; Quodlibet, divertissement, chbr orch, 1957; Sinfonia piccola, fl, ob, cl, str, 1960; Vc Conc. no.1, 1960; Conc., cl., chbr orch, 1961; Musik in zwei Sätzen, hp, str, 1966; Conc. lirico, pf, orch, 1967; Musik für 11 Str, 1970; Meyerbeer-Paraphrasen, 1971; Chbr Conc., hpd, 13 str, 1973; Introitus-Exodus, org, orch, 1976; Waldmusik, pic, fl, ob, cl, orch, 1977; Szenen und Balletmusik, 1980 [from Der gestiefelte Kater]; Der Weg nach Eisenstadt-Haydn Fantasy, 1980; Marsch-Fantasie, 1987; Ländler-Fantasie, 1989; Musik für Klavier und Orchester, 1990; Vc Conc. no.2, 1992; Trauermusik, va, orch, 1994

vocal

Choral: 3 Hochzeitslieder (J.G. Herder), 1936–50; 3 Choruses (Herder, trad.), 1939–40; Alte Weisen im neuen Satz, 1950; Indianische Kantate, Bar, chbr chorus, 8 insts, perc, 1950; Oraculum (cant., sibylline wisdom), S, T, SATB, orch, 1954; 3 schlesische Volkslieder, 1960; Ecce Dominus veniet, 1960; Im Anfang (Bible: Genesis, M. Buber), 3 echo vv, 6vv, org/orch, 1961; Veni Creator spiritus, 5vv, 1961; Lobet den Herrn, chorus, congregation, org, 1963; Da pacem, motet, 3 echo vv, 2 choruses, congregation, org, 1965; Eichendorff-Liederbuch, chorus, 2 gui, 1965; Symbolum (J.W. von Goethe), male vv, wind qnt, 1967; O Freude über Freude, 4vv, 1971; Huguenotten-Psalm, 4vv, echo vv, 1972; Die Bergpredigt (Jens), SATB, 1980; Unser Vater/Pater Noster, S, SATB, 1983; Lamento di Orlando, Bar, chorus, orch, 1985; Lamento ‘In te Domine speravi’, SATB, 1986; 5 Chorlieder (Heine), SATB, 1991

Solo vocal: 3 Geänge (Li Tai Pe), A, fl, 1946; Orpheus singt (R.M. Rilke), Mez/Bar, orch, 1946; Gesang von den Tieren (chbr cant.), A, fl, cl, hpd, perc, 1949; Lieder und Balladen (F. García Lorca), S, pf, 1957, 3 orchd; Jorinde und Joringel (J.L.C. and W.C. Grimm), female v, male v, chbr orch, 1963; Preisungen (Pss xc, cxvii, cxv; M. Buber), Bar, orch/org, 1964; 4 Scenes from Hero und Leander (Spiess), S, A, Bar, B, orch, 1966; 3 Gesänge (de Vega), Bar, fl, gui, 1971; Das Lied will Licht sein (García Lorca), 5 songs, S, pf, 1971; Haiku-Folge I, S, fl, 1972; Haiku-Folge II, Bar, pf, 1973; Mythos Zeit, 4 songs, Bar, pf, 1983; O Miserere (Heine), 4 songs, Bar, pf, 1983; Schwarze Serenade (Wondratscheck), Bar, 9 insts/pf, 1989; Überblickt man die Jahre (G. Benn), T, pf, 1989

chamber and instrumental

5 str qts: 1936, 1949, 1969, ‘Assonanzen’ 1986, 1991

Other chbr and solo inst: Str Trio, 1936; Klavierbuch, pf 3–6 hands, 1937, rev. 1987; Trio, fl, va, vc, 1945; Sonata, fl, pf, 1946; Sonata, vn, pf, 1946; Sonata, va, pf, 1946; Heptameron, 7 pf pieces, 1948; Jazz-Promenaden, 2 pf, 1952, rev. 1982; Kanonische Etüden, 2 fl, 1954; Sonata piccola, vn, pf, 1958; 7 Meditationen zu den Schöpfungstagen, org, 1961; Chanson variée [after G. Machaut], hpd/pf, 1962; Partita, 9 wind, db, 1963; 4 Impromptus, vc, pf, 1968; Pastorale und Rondo, 9 insts, 1969; 7 moments musicaux, vc, hp, 1970; Romanza e danza [after G. Meyerbeer], 8 wind, 1971; Erwartung, org, 1972; 3 moments musicaux, pf, 1973; Trio, vn, vc, pf, 1982; Moments musicaux III, cl, vc, pf, 1976; Assonanzen, 12 vc, 1978; 3 Elegies, fl, vn, vc, 1978; Kater-Paraphrasen, 6 vc, 1978; Baryton-Trio, baryton, va, vc, 1982; Bucolica, 5 pieces, 8 insts, 1982; Die Bergpredigt, org, 1982; Lamento, pf, 1983; Quintet, hp, str qt, 1983; Zu Zweit, 16 duos, 2 vn, 1983; Lamento, 4 Intermezzi and March, pf, 1983, rev. 1986; 9 Bagatelles, wind trio, str trio, pf, 1984; Herbstzeit, pf, vn, va, vc, 1984; Albumblatt GS, vc, 1985; 6 Bagatelles, sax qt, 1985, rev. 1986; 6 Pieces and a March, 2 pf, 1987; Romanze, vc, 1987, 5 Duets, va, vc, 1988; Kunst des Kanons, 10 pieces, 2-4 sax/str qt/str orch, 1991; 3 Pieces, vn, 1993; Abgesang, org, 1994; 6 Duos, cl, vc, 1995; Trio ‘Phoenix’, cl, vc, hp, 1995; Movement, wind qnt, 1995

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Edition Gravis, Möseler, Müller, Schott

WRITINGS

‘Eine Selbstdarstellung’, Zeitgenössische schelische Komponisten, i, ed. G. Pankalla and G. Speer (Dülmen, 1972), 125–41

‘Ist komponieren lehrbahr?’, Musica, xxxv (1981), 327–31; also in Festschrift für Siegfried Borris, ed. R. Jakoby and C. Kühn (Wilhelmshaven, 1982), 51–5

‘Überlegungen zur Textauswahl und zur musikalischer Gestalt einen Lamentos’, Musik in Bayern, xxxi (1985), 15–27

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.-E. von Lewinski: ‘Konsequenz im Wandel: der Komponist Günter Bialas’, Musica, xxi (1967), 101–4

N.A. Huber: ‘Der Komponist Günter Bialas’, Musica, xxvi (1972), 333–7

U. Stürzbecher: Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne, 1971, 2/1973)

G. Speer and H.-J. Winterhoff, eds.: Meilensteine eines Komponistenlebens: kleine Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Günter Bialas (Kassel, 1977)

G. Engelmann: ‘Der Orchestermusiker und die zeitgenössische Musik: Gespräch mit Günter Bialas’, Das Orchester, xxxi (1983), 894–6

A.L. Suder, ed.: Günter Bialas (Tutzing, 1984)

N.A. Huber: ‘Günter Bialas, Introitus-Exodus für Orgel und Orchester’, Melos, xlvi/2 (1984), 2–36

R. Kelterborn: ‘Zum 80. Geburtstag von Günter Bialas am 19 Juli 1987’, Musica, xli (1987), 331–5

G.E. Meyer and R. Schmoll, eds.: Günter Bialas zum 80. Geburtstag (Dülmen, 1989)

ERIK LEVI

Bianca

(It.).

See Minim (half-note); minima is also used. See also Note values.

Biancardi, (Nicolò) Sebastiano.

See Lalli, Domenico.

Bianchi [Bianco], Andrea

(b Sarzana, nr Genoa; fl 1611–26). Italian composer. In 1611 he was a musician employed by one Carlo Cybo, Marchese di Carrara, possibly in Genoa, and in 1626 maestro di cappella of the cathedral at Chiavari, also on the Ligurian coast. Like many north Italian church composers of the time, he was equally capable of writing in the conventional double-choir style and in the more expressive and intimate concertato idiom for a few voices and organ. The former characterizes his masses and motets of 1611: the double choir is used more than merely antiphonally, and valuable information on liturgical usage can be gleaned from his marking two motets, O sacrum convivium and Adoramus te, Christe, ‘for the Elevation’ at Mass. The motets reprinted in Antwerp in 1626 (one of which, most unusually, sets an Italian text) are in the modern manner, their small forces well suited to limited local resources; even with the simplest of all textures – solo voice and organ – Bianchi wrote in a pleasantly varied declamatory manner, as in the Communion motet Domine, non sum dignus.

WORKS

Motetti, e messe a 8vv … con dui motetti, a 5, e uno a 12, con bc (org), libro primo (Venice, 1611)

Vespertina omnium solemnitatem … 5vv, bc (org) (Venice, 1611)

Psalmorum omnium solemnitatum, 5vv (Venice, 1611)

Motetti, 1–4vv, bc … libro primo (Venice, 1612)

2 motets in 1611¹

Vespri (Loano, 1617), lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Zolesi: ‘Andrea Bianchi da Sarzana e la musica nella chiesa di provincia del primo ’600 in Italia’, Rivista internazionale di musica sacra, viii (1987), 159–92

O. Lacagnina and I. Zolesi: Diva armonia: Musica Sacra e profana del Levante Ligure dal XVI al XVIII sec., i (La Spezia, 1992), 46–88

JEROME ROCHE/ELIZABETH ROCHE

Bianchi, Antonio (i)

(b Venice, c1710; d Venice, ?1772). Italian poet and librettist. Although his early career as a gondolier implies a humble family background, the high quality of his writings clearly indicates a thorough education. His patron, Doge Pietro Grimani, for a time was accused of correcting his poetry or even writing it for him. Many Venetian aristocrats subscribed to several of Bianchi's works, and he provided occasional verses for state occasions. A number of his oratorio texts (including Elia sul Carmelo and Il Davide re d’Israele, both 1751, Il transito del giusto, 1755 and Il vitello d'oro, 1760) were published, but some remain among his unpublished papers in the Museo Correr, Venice. He also wrote several comic opera librettos: Le villeggiatrice ridicole (music by A. Boroni, performed 1765), L'amore in ballo (G. Paisiello, 1765) and La buona figliuola supposta vedova (G. Latilla, 1766), a parody on Goldoni’s libretto for Niccolò Piccinni, in turn based on Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (translated by E.R. Dunu, 1750). Musical settings of Camma, his componimento sacro dedicated to Carl Eugen of Württemberg (1767), and L'Alcibiade, a tragi-commedia, have not come to light.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G.F. Torcellan)

F.A. Zaccaria: Storia letteraria d'Italia, iii (Venice, 1752), 552; vii (Venice, 1755), 120

G.M. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d'Italia, ii (Brescia, 1760), 1130–31

E.A. Cicogna: Delle inscrizioni veneziane, v (Venice, 1842), 202ff, 659; vi (Venice, 1853), 924ff

G. Ortolani, ed.: Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, iv (Milan, 1945), 1003, 1272

D. and E. Arnold: The Oratorio in Venice (London, 1986)

SVEN HANSELL

Bianchi, Antonio (ii)

(b c1750; d ?Venice, after 1816). Italian composer. As he became a member of the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica in 1772, he was probably born about the middle of the century. He probably worked in Venice, where most of his extant scores are (including some autographs). Several liturgical works for the feast of S Filippo Neri suggest that he could have served S Maria della Consolazione, commonly called the Fava church, belonging to the Padri Filippini. A manuscript score in the Biblioteca Oratoriana dei Filippini, Naples, as well as autographs in the Fava church library further support this supposition. His masses, psalms and the Te Deum for eight voices prove him to have been skilled in counterpoint.

WORKS

Masses: di S Filippo Neri, 3vv, I-Vnm; 2, 8vv, both Vnm (1 autograph); Missa toni mixti, double choir, Nf; Kyrie, 3vv, orch, GB-Lbl; Missa pro defunctis, 4vv, I-Vnm

Propers: ints, grads, offs, post-comms for Advent Sundays, 3–4vv, org, Vsmc; ints for Nativity and Circumcision, 2vv, Vsmc; ints, grads etc. for Sundays in Lent, 2vv, 1815, Vsmc; int, off, comm for Palm Sunday, 3vv, Vsmc; grad, off, comm for Maundy Thursday, 3vv, Vsmc; int for feast of S Filippo Neri, 2vv, Vnm; Domine ad adiuvandum, off, 3vv, Vnm

Psalms: Ad te Domine levavi, 2vv, Rovereto, S Marco; De profundis, 4vv, 1772, Baf; 3 In convertendo, 3vv, 1797, Vnm, Vc, 4vv, Vnm; 3 Laetatus sum, 3vv, Vnm, 3vv, 1798, Baf*, inc., Vsmc; 4 Nisi Dominus, 3vv, 2 hn, org, Pc, 3vv, str, Pc, 3vv, Vnm, 4vv, Vnm; Qui habitat, 2vv, Vsmc; others, 3vv, Vnm

Hymns: 3 TeD, 3vv, Pc, 3vv, 1816, Vnm, 8vv, Vnm*; Veni Creator, 2vv, Vsmc; for feast of Sacratissimae spinae, 3vv, org, Vsmc; for feast of Sacratissimae cordis Jesu, 2vv, org, Vsmc

Marian ants: Regina coeli, 2vv, org, Vsmc; Salve regina, 3vv, org, Vsmc

Miscellaneous: Adoramus te Christe, 3vv, 2 ob, org, Vsmc; Cibavit, 2vv, 3 insts, Vsmc; 2 Lit della BVM, 3vv, str, Bc, another, Vnm; Mag, 3vv, 1807, Vnm; other sacred works, Vnm

SVEN HANSELL

Bianchi, Antonio (iii)

(b Milan, 1758; d after 1816). Italian singer and composer. He began a career as a baritone in Milan and Genoa and may have sung in Paris in the 1780s. Touring Germany in the early 1790s, he became court singer to the Prince of Nassau Weilburg and sang at the Berlin Königliches Nationaltheater from 1792. His performances in German (including roles in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and J.M. König’s Lilla, oder Die Gärtnerin) were criticized, but those in Italian comic operas by Paisiello, Sarti, Cimarosa and Astarita were highly praised. On 16 February 1794 his own serious opera Die Insel der Alcina (2, G. Bertati; manuscript in D-SWl) was staged at the Berlin Hoftheater, and in 1796 his pastoral intermezzo Fileno e Clorinda was given in Charlottenburg and Potsdam. Bianchi remained a member of the opera buffa company at the Prussian court until late 1797, when Friedrich Wilhelm II died. He then visited various German cities and became co-director with Krüger of an opera troupe touring Thuringia. His ballets Die Entführung, oder Das Feldlage bei Desengamo and Die Spanier in Amerika both dating from about 1798, featured special roles for himself and his wife, a dancer. After leaving Krüger’s company in the late 1790s he sang in Hamburg, where some of his songs were reviewed for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (June 1802). The last notice of him, dated 1817, is a petition to allow him and his family to perform briefly in Aachen. He may have performed in Paris about the turn of the 19th century. Bianchi’s considerable number of songs, written in French, Italian and German, were published and republished, mostly in Berlin and Hamburg; songs by Giacomo Bianchi, published in Paris, London and Vienna, have sometimes been attributed to Antonio. He may be the author of the song ‘Vienqua Dorina bella’ (also attributed to Francesco Bianchi), on which Weber wrote a set of piano variations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (V. Frajese)

MGG1 suppl. (J. Theurich)

SartoriL

AMZ, ii (1799–1800), 883; iv (1801–2), 335, 637, 735

SVEN HANSELL

Bianchi, Caterino

(fl 1574–88). Italian composer. He was a member of the order of the Crociferi. The majority of his mass settings are based on pre-existing polyphonic compositions, among them a number of Palestrina's most widely circulated works including the madrigal Vestiva i colli. The Primo libro delle canzonette also contains versions of some of the most frequently set madrigal texts of the period including Petrarch's Solo e pensoso.

WORKS

Missarum liber primus, 5, 6vv (Venice, 1574)

Missarum liber primus, 4vv (Venice, 1587)

Primo libro delle canzonette con una moresca, 5, 6vv (Venice, 1588)

IAIN FENLON

Bianchi, (Giuseppe) Francesco

(b Cremona, c1752; d Hammersmith, London, 27 Nov 1810). Italian composer. A Cremonese priest financed his studies at a conservatory in Naples, where he studied with Cafaro and assisted Jommelli in exchange for instruction. In 1772 he returned to Cremona, where his first opera, Giulio Sabino, successfully launched his career. In the summer of 1775 he went to Paris, where he worked as harpsichordist and composer of comic operas for the Théâtre-Italien and where he tried unsuccessfully to establish a conservatory after the Neapolitan model. His published op.1, six trio sonatas, dates from this period, as does a group of sacred pieces. He was admitted to membership of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna in August 1776 but did not return to Italy until 1778. From 1782 until 28 February 1793 Bianchi served as vice-maestro at the Metropolitana, Milan. On 21 January 1785 he was named second organist of S Marco, Venice. Except for a hiatus from 20 November 1791 to 20 February 1793, he remained there until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. Although never officially the maestro at the Mendicanti, he composed several oratorios for it during the 1780s.

In 1778 Bianchi began working with the progressive librettists De Gamerra and Sertor, and later also with Foppa, Botturini and Pepoli, Venetians moving away from the century-old opera seria conventions that were to prevail in Italy until the 1790s. Apparently influenced by Gluck and by Verazi’s librettos for the opening of La Scala (1778–9), his Erifile contains one of the earliest action-ensemble finales in an opera seria, and his Castore e Polluce is replete with French-inspired choruses and dance; both were given in Florence during the reign of Archduke Leopold. In Venice 1780 his Demetrio acquired a final sextet, one of the earliest Italian examples of an extensive action-ensemble finale to conclude a Metastasian opera – not a finale in buffa style but a fluid, seamless ensemble spanning several abrupt changes of mood but without clear sectional delineations until an obbligato recitative breaks the continuity and paves the way for an extensive joyful conclusion.

Bianchi’s collaboration with Sertor spanned 11 years, beginning in 1781, and yielded six new opere serie. Consequently, innovatory elements such as introduzioni, programmatic storms and battles, solos and ensembles with chorus, ensembles with increasing numbers of personnel and action-ensemble finales appear much more frequently and much earlier in Bianchi’s works than in others. Perhaps the most influential of his collaborations with Sertor was La morte di Cesare (1788), which initiated a decade of ‘morte’ operas.

Bianchi was the first composer to work with Foppa. Alonso e Cora (1786) and Calto (1788) initiated a new era in Venetian opera, and their innovations soon became common operatic components. Both operas treat non-classical subjects, employ ballet and chorus along with a duet for two men with chorus (an early giuramento), and have extensive final scene complexes (one of which makes up the whole of the short Act 3 of Alonso). Calto contains a ghost scene in which the chorus takes part in the action and an aria with interjections from a second character (pertichino). Also in Calto Bianchi introduced the clarinet to Venice, where it did not become a regular orchestral instrument for another five years.

By the early 1780s Bianchi was already bypassing the lengthy static solos that normally opened each ensemble and moving directly into animated musical dialogue. Programmatic battle music replaces the marcia. Extensive stretches of obbligato recitative move freely among changing accompaniment patterns. Wind colour, chromaticism, excursions deep into the flat keys and occasional use of the voce umana heighten the terror of dungeons or ghost scenes (for example in La vendetta di Nino, an opera with several innovatory features). Still contemporary critics praised his ‘lively, light and graceful music’ and the ‘softness and sweetness of his melodies’.

Bianchi took particular advantage of the wind instruments both as soloists and as a section, especially in his Neapolitan works. The bassoons have their own parts, and the violas often join with the upper strings or with the winds. In obbligato recitatives Bianchi employed a broad range of wind colour (oboe, bassoon, clarinet, horn and english horn) for expressive purposes. By the early 90s his orchestrations frequently combine the entire wind section. His accompaniments seldom adhere to a single figure throughout an aria. Often either the first violin or the voice states the melody, while the other provides embellishment or elaboration. The first violins may also join the seconds in maintaining rhythmic motifs, oscillating arpeggiation or tremolo. Wind instruments alone or with strings add musical commentary in caesuras and ritornellos, and solo winds answer each other, the strings and the voice. Wind instruments also reinforce dynamic contrasts and assist in building long crescendos.

Bianchi specialized in serious opera more than his contemporaries did, but he continued to write comic operas throughout his career. In a preface to the printed libretto of Il disertore (Venice, 1784), he defended its amalgam of serious and comic elements; nonetheless, audiences were shocked to see the castrato Pacchierotti singing the principal role in bourgeois dress.

Bianchi went to London in 1795 to direct a revival of La vendetta di Nino, performed 41 times in six seasons. Between 1795 and 1802 he prepared 14 other works for the King’s Theatre – six of them in collaboration with Da Ponte, the poet there from 1793 to 1798. Between 1802 and 1807 Bianchi travelled between London and Paris, composing operas and directing revivals in both cities. For a time his works dominated the opéra comique productions at several Parisian theatres. Of his comic opera Corali, ou La lanterne magique (1804) the Parisian Courrier des spectacles wrote: ‘The plot [is] weak by itself … but what rightfully received much applause was the lively, light and graceful music with which Signor Bianchi has embellished it’. A theoretical treatise, Trattato d’armonia, probably dates from this period, since R.M. Bacon, who published extracts in English in the Quarterly Musical Review (1820–21), claimed that a French institute had declined to publish the work at the time of English-French hostilities. In the preface to Selvaggi’s Trattato di armonia (Naples, 1823) this treatise, or possibly another by Bianchi (referred to as Analisi della corda sonora), was highly praised. On 15 November 1800 Bianchi married, but separated soon afterwards; his one child, Caroline Nelson Bianchi, died in January 1807. The Morning Chronicle (November 1810) and the Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1810) reported Bianchi’s suicide at his home in Hammersmith. The Daily Advertiser aptly reviewed a revival of Erifile on 20 February 1805: ‘Mr Bianchi’s bent, in this, as in all his former musical efforts, is certainly directed toward the tender and pathetic, and if he does not ravish or surprise us by novelty and boldness of composition, he seldom fails pleasing us by the softness and sweetness of his melodies’. His operas enjoyed revivals for another 15 years.

MARITA P. McCLYMONDS (with SVEN HANSELL)

Bianchi, Francesco

WORKS

operas

FP	Florence, Teatro della Pergola
LK	London, King’s Theatre
NC	Naples, Teatro S Carlo
PJE	Paris, Jeunes-Elèves
VB	Venice, Teatro S Benedetto
VM	Venice, Teatro S Moisè

Giulio Sabino (os), Cremona, 1772, cavatina (Vienna, n.d.)

Demofoonte (dramma per musica, Metastasio), Rome, Teatro Argentina, carn. 1773, D-MÜs

Il gran Cidde (os, 3, G. Pizzi), FP, Jan 1773

Demetrio (os, 3, P. Metastasio), Cremona, carn. 1774, F-Pn, P-La (1780, Venice)

Eurione (os, 3, A. Papi), Pavia, Quattro Signori, 25 May 1775

La réduction de Paris (drame lyrique, 3, B.F. de Rosoi), Paris, Italien, 30 Sept 1775, unacc. arias (Paris, n.d.)

Le mort marié (oc, 2, M.–J. Sédaine), Fontainebleau, 25 Oct 1776

Erifile (os, 3, G.D. Gamerra), FP, Jan 1779, lost; Modena, 1781, P-La (Acts 2 and 3); Petrovich Sheremetev Collection, Moscow

L’innocenza perseguitata (ob, 3), Rome, Dame, carn. 1779

Castore e Polluce (os, 3, C.I. Frugoni), FP, 8 Sept 1779, I-Pl, P-La (1781, Padua)

Arbace (os, 3, G. Serror), NC, 20 Jan 1781, I-Nc, Tf (Acts 2 and 3), P-La

Venere e Adone (azione teatrale, 2, F. Casorri), FP, 14 Sept 1781, I-Fc, Tf

La Zemira (os, 2, Sertor), NC, 4 Nov 1781, Pl (1786, Padua), P-La

Olimpiade (os, 3, Metastasio), Milan, La Scala, 26 Dec 1781, F-Pn, P-La

Il trionfo della pace (festa teatrale, 2, C. Olivieri), Turin, Regio, spr. 1782, I-Tf, P-La

La Zulima (os, 3, C. Olivieri, after Voltaire), NC, 4 Nov 1782, I-Nc, P-La

L’astrologa (ob, 3, P. Chiari), Naples, Fondo, Dec 1782, I-Tf, P-La

Piramo e Tisbe (os, 3, Sertor), VB, Jan 1783, GB-Lbl, I-Pca, P-La

La villanella rapita (op giocosa, 2, G. Bertati), VM, aut. 1783; as Le gelosie di Pippo, Lisbon, 1796 (Paris, n.d.); F-Pn, H-Bn, I-Gl (Act 1), Tf, P-La, PL-Kc, Petrovich Sheremetev Collection, Moscow

Briseide (os, 3, F.S. Gambino), Turin, Regio, 26 Dec 1783, P-La

Aspardi, principe di Battriano (os, 3, Sertor), Rome, Dame, carn. 1784

Cajo Mario (os, 3, G. Roccaforte), NC, 30 May 1784, I-Nc, P-La

La finta principessa (ob, 2, F. Livigni), Bologna, Formagliari, aut. 1784

Il disertore (os, 3, B. Benincasa), VB, 26 Dec 1784, D-Bsb (Act 3), F-Pn, H-Bn, I-Bc, Mc, Tf, P-La

Alessandro nell’Indie (os, 3, Metastasio), VB, 28 Jan 1785, F-Pn (1792 revival), H-Bn, I-Bc

Lo stravagante inglese (ob, 2, G. Greppi), VM, aut. 1785, D-Wa, F-Pn, I-Bc

Le villanelle astute (ob, 2, G. Foppa), Venice, S Samuele, carn. 1786

Alonso e Cora (os, 3, Foppa, after F. Moretti: Idalide), VB, 7 Feb 1786, P-La

Mesenzio, re d’Etruria (os, 2, F. Casorri), NC, 4 Nov 1786, I-Nc, P-La

L’orfano cinese (os, 3, after Voltaire), VB, 30 Jan 1787, ?D-Bsb, F-Pn, I-Bc, P-La

Artaserse (os, 3, Metastasio), Padua, Nuovo, 11 June 1787, F-Pn (as Arbace), I-Pl, P-La

Pizzarro (os, 3), Brescia, Accademia degli Erranti, sum. 1787, D-Mbs, GB-Lbl, I-Nc (2 copies), P-La

Scipione africano (os, 3, N. Minato), NC, 13 Aug 1787, I-Fc, Nc, Rsc (Act 1)

Il ritratto (ob, 2, F.S. Zini), Naples, Fondo, aut. 1787, GB-Lbl, I-Nc (2 copies), Tf

Calto (os, 3, Foppa, after Ossian), VB, 23 Jan 1788, P-La

La morte di Cesare (os, 3, Sertor), Venice, S Samuele, 27 Dec 1788, B-Bc

La fedeltà tra le selve (ob, 2, M.A. Prunetti), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1789, incl. 4 arias by Valentino Fioravanti

Nitteti (os, 3, Metastasio), Milan, La Scala, 20 April 1789, P-La

Daliso e Delmita (os, 2, De Gamerra), Padua, Nuovo, 12 June 1789, F-Pn, GB-Ob, I-Pl, Vnm

Il finto astrologo (ob, 2, A. Mariani), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1790, F-Pn, GB-Lbl, I-BDG, P-La (1792, Salvaterra)

L’Arminio (os, 3, F. Moretti), FP, aut. 1790

La vendetta di Nino, o sia Semiramide (os, 2, P. Giovannini, after Voltaire), NC, 12 Nov 1790, D-Mbs, F-Pn, GB-Lbl, Lcm, Ob, I-Fc, Nc

Caio Ostilio (os, 2, E. Manfredi), Rome, Argentina, carn. 1791, duet, trio in D-MÜs, LB, I-Bc and Rsc

La dama bizzarra (ob, 2, T. Mariani), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1791, P-La

Deifile (azione scenica, 2), Venice, Bruenner Palace, March 1791, I-Fc, Vnm

La sposa in equivoco (ob, 2, Zini), VM, aut. 1791, F-Pn, I-Fc

Seleuco, re di Siria (os, 3, M. Botturini), VB, 26 Dec 1791, Bc, Fc (1792, Bologna), PAc

Aci e Galatea (os, 2, Foppa), VB, 13 Oct 1792; as La vendetta di Polifemo, Palermo, 1793; ? new setting, London, 1795; arias in Fc, Nc

Tarara, o sia La virtù premiata (os, 3, Sertor), Venice, La Fenice, 26 Dec 1792, F-Pn (Act 1)

Il cinese in Italia (ob, 2, A. Pepoli), VM, aut. 1793; as L’olandese in Venezia, Turin, 1794; GB-Lbl, I-Fc

La secchia rapita (ob, 2, A. Anelli), Venice, S Samuele, 13 Feb 1794; rev. Milan, 1796, with new act by Zingarelli, I-Mr (?autograph)

Ines de Castro (os, 3, L. de Sanctis, after C. Giotti), NC, 30 May 1794, Nc, Pl (1798, Padua)

La capricciosa ravveduta (ob, 2, C. Mazzolà), VM, aut. 1794, F-Pn, I-Mr (?autograph)

Antigona (os, 2, Da Ponte), LK, 24 May 1796, I-Fc (1802, London)

Il consiglio imprudente (ob, 1, Da Ponte, after C. Goldoni: Un curioso accidente), LK, 20 Dec 1796, finale in vs (London, n.d.)

Merope (os, 2, Da Ponte, after Voltaire), LK, 10 June 1797, GB-Lbl, Ob

Cinna (os, 2, Da Ponte, ? after Anelli), LK, 20 Feb 1798, aria, trio (London, n.d.)

Alzira (os, 2, G. Rossi, after Voltaire), LK, 28 Feb 1801, D-BFb, MÜs, GB-Ob, US-CA, Wc

La morte di Cleopatra (os, 2, S. Bonaiuti), LK, 30 April 1801, aria (London, n.d.)

Armida (os, 2, Da Ponte, after T. Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata), LK, 1 June 1802, aria, duet (London, n.d.)

L’avaro (oc, 2, G. Bertati), Paris, Italien, 30 March 1804

Blaisot e Pasquin (oc, 1, Leroi, Francis and Martinelli), Paris, Montansier, 9 April 1804, duet (Paris, n.d.)

Le maître de chapelle (oc), Paris, Italien, 3 May 1804

Corali, ou La lanterne magique (oc, 1, A.-J. Grétry neveu), Paris, Molière, 7 July 1804, S-St, US-Wc (Paris, n.d.)

L’eau et le leu, ou Le Gascon a l’épreuve (oc, 1, M. Gangiran-Nanteuil), Paris, Montansier, 10 Aug 1804

Le contrat signé d’avance, ou Laquelle est ma femme? (oc, 1, Ligier), Paris, Molière, 29 Sept 1804

Le gascon, gascon malgré lui (oc, 1, Guillet and E. Hus), Paris, Molière, 17 Nov 1804

Amour et coquetterie (oc, 1, Coffin-Rosny), PJE, 7 Jan 1806

Le livre des destins (oc, 1, F. Nogaret), PJE, 2 Feb 1806

La famille vénitienne, ou Le château d’Orseno (oc, 3, F. Dupetit-Méné), Paris, Jeunes Artistes, 7 May 1806

Monsieur Jugolo, ou Les chercheurs (oc, 1), PJE, 22 May 1806

Le château mystérieux ou Le crime commis et vengé (oc, 3, M. de Redon and C.R. Defresnoy), PJE, 12 July 1806

Le triomphe d’Alcide à Athènes (dramma eroico, 2, P.L. Moline and A.F. Pillon), Paris, Molière, Sept 1806

La soeur officieuse, ou Adresse et mensonge (oc, 1, Redon and Defresnoy), PJE, 18 Oct 1806

Almeria, ou L’Ecossaise fugitive (oc, 3, B. Hadot), PJE, 8 Dec 1806

Les illustres infortunés, ou La souveraine vindicative (oc, 3, Redon and Defresnoy), PJE, 8 Jan 1807

Le pied de boeuf et la queue du chat (oc, 3, P.J. Charrin and Redon), Paris, Jeunes Artistes, 9 June 1807

Music in: Medonte, 1782; L’ape musicale rinnuovata, 1791; Pirro, 1793

Doubtful: Zenobia, London, 1797, F-Pn; Eliodoro, I-Mr; Gara d’amore, Mr

Miscellaneous arias and ensembles: A-Wgm, B-Bc, CH-E, D-Bsb, BFb, Dl, DS, MÜs, W; F-Pn, GB-Lbl; I-BAcp, Bc, Bsf, Gl, Mc, MOe, Mr, OS, PAc, Pca, Vc, Vnm, P-La, US-Wc

oratorios

Tres pueri hebrei in camino ignis ardentis, 1780, I-Vsm; Abraham sacrificium, 1783, Vsm; Agar fugiens, 1785, D-Bsb (Eitner), SWl, F-Pn, I-Mc; Joas rex Juda, 1790, F-Pn, I-Mc: female vv, orch, Venice, Mendicanti; Abraham et Isaac, S, A, T, B, chorus, orch, ?Venice, GB-Lbl

other sacred

Domine ad adiuvandum, 4vv, orch, Cremona, 2 Aug 1773, GB-Lbl*

Tantum ergo, 2vv, orch, Cremona, Nov 1774, Cu*

Antifona, 5vv; Fuga, 5vv; Qui tollis, A solo, Aug 1776, I-Baf; for entry to Bologna Accademia Filarmonica

Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, 8vv, 2 org, April–May 1779, F-Pn, I-BGc (Credo only), Mc; Converte Domine, 8vv, Exalta Domine, 5vv, Deus noster refugium with Gloria Patri, 8vv, all 10–12 May 1779, Bc; Vidi speciosam, 8vv, May 1779, F-Pn, I-Md: all for Milan Cathedral examination

Mass, Fc (Eitner); Kyrie, B, 3vv, orch, GB-Lbl*; Domine ne in furore, 3vv, bc, Lbl*; Salve regina, 2vv, orch, I-PAc; Introito pel giorno di S Filippo, Vnm; Introit stabant juxta crucem, 3vv, Vlevi; Motet, S, orch, Mc; Sequenza dei morti, Mc

other works

Vocal: Eppur fra le tempeste, notturno, S, S, orch, 1784, I-Gl; Il dardo (?cant.), Naples, Sala di Portici, 1787; Pigmalion (cant.), ?Naples, F-Pn; Esercizi progressivi par la voce, c1780, D-LB; Luci amate se volete, rondo with ornamentation, GB-Lbl

Inst: Concertino, D, 2 fl, I-Ac; 6 trios, 2 vn, bc, op.1 (Paris, c1776); 3 sonatas, hpd, vn, c1790, mentioned by Lancetti; 2 syms., D, B (Venice, n.d.); syms., I-Mc, Pca, Rvat, Vnm

Bianchi, Francesco

WRITINGS

Letter to G.B. Martini, I-Bc*

with S. Valcanonica: Gerletto, regolamento per li musici della cappella [of Milan Cathedral] (2 MSS, I-Md, c1782)

De l’attraction harmonique, ou Sistème phisico-mathematique (MS, I-Fc*); in It. as Trattato d’armonia teorico pratico … parte prima (MS, GB-Lcm*); Eng. extracts in Quarterly Musical Review, ii (1820), 22, 172, 296, 434; iii (1821), 96

Nuovo metodo per appredere con facilita l’accompagnemente (F-Pn)

Tavola armonica (MS, I-Rsc) [with MSS of H. Bishop]

Bianchi, Francesco

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

CaffiS

Choron-FayolleD

DBI (A.M. Monterosso Vacchelli)

FlorimoN

Grove1 (Lacy, Mrs., W.H. Husk)

GroveO (M.P. McClymonds)

MooserA

PierreH

B.F. de Rozoi: Dissertation sur le drame lyrique (The Hague, 1776)

L. Bachaumont: Mémoires secrets (London, 1777–8), viii, 227–8; x, 214 only

AMZ, ii (1799–1800), 335, 346; v (1802), 200; xiii (1811), 730–31; xiv (1812), 261–2

Gentleman’s Magazine, lxx (1800), 1106 only; lxxvii (1807), 180 only; lxxx/2 (1810), 595 only

Courrier des spectacles (6–8 July 1804); (17 Oct and 8 Dec 1806)

V. Lancetti: ‘Bianchi’, Biografia cremonese (Milan, 1820/R)

L. da Ponte: Memorie (New York, 1823, 2/1829); ed. (Milan, 1960), 186ff, 190, 196

S.D.: ‘Chronicles of the Italian Opera in England’, The Harmonicon, viii (1830), 10, 70, 112, 196

T. Wiel: I teatri musicali veneziani del Settecento (Venice, 1897/R), 385ff

A. Della Corte: L’opera comica italiana nel ’700, ii (Bari, 1923), ii, 81ff, 235ff

M.A. Zorzi: ‘Saggio di bibliografia sugli oratorii sacri eseguiti a Venezia’, Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, iv (1930–31), 226–46, 394–403, 529–43; v (1931–2), 79–96, 493–508; vi (1932–3), 256–69; vii (1933–4), 316–41

F. Mompellio: ‘La musica a Milano: la cappella del duomo dal 1714 ai primi decenni del ’900’, Storia di Milano, xvi (1962), 553–88 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la Storia di Milano]

T.J. Walsh: Opera in Dublin, 1705–1797 (Dublin, 1973)

S. Martinotti: ‘La villanella di Bianchi rapita da Ferrari’, Chigiana, xxxii, new ser. xii (1975), 311–25

M.G. Accorsi: ‘Teoria e practica della variatio nel dramma giocoso: a proposito della “Villanella rapita” di Giovanni Bertati’, I vicini di Mozart: Venice 1987, 139–63

M. McClymonds: ‘La morte di Semiramide, ossia La vendetta di Nino and the Restoration of Death and Tragedy to the Italian Operatic Stage in the 1780s and 1790s’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 285–92

M. McClymonds: ‘The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s’, I vicini di Mozart: Venice 1987, 221–40

R. and N. Weaver: A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater, 1751–1800 (Warren, MI, 1993)

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995), 249–67

Bianchi, Giovanni

(b Ferrara, c1660; d ?Milan, after 1720). Italian composer and violinist. He had settled in Milan early enough to be described in his op.1 of 1697 as ‘violinista milanese’. He was active there for many years as a violinist and his name, along with that of his son, Giuseppe, appears in lists of instrumentalists at the court in 1711 and 1720: ‘Bianchi, padre e figlio’. The sonatas of opp.1 and 2 are typical in style for the late 17th century; slow and fast movements alternate, the fast movements being somewhat more substantial. Bianchi’s concertos (op.2) are in three or four movements, some first movements having several sections. Similar in some respects to Corelli’s concerti grossi, these large-scale works are of a particularly high calibre and exhibit great melodic richness. Bianchi’s style is characterized by extensive use of sequences, violinistic writing (including broken chord figures and fast repetitive notes), contrapuntal entrances in all parts and (in the concertos) fanfare endings. His music shows marked stylistic affinities with that of Carlo Antonio Marino.

WORKS

12 sonate a 3, 2 vn, vc, bc (org), op.1 (Modena, 1697/R)

6 concerti di chiesa a 4, 2 vn, va, vc, bc (org), e 6 sonate a 3, 2 vn, vc, bc (org), op.2 (Amsterdam [1703]); facs. (of scores in US-NYp) in Three Centuries of Music in Scores, ii: Concerto I: Italy (c1703–1750) (New York, 1988); viii: Chamber Music II: Trio Sonatas, Part 1 (1688–1769) (New York, 1990)

12 sonate a 3, D-Bsb; cited in EitnerQ

2 arias, 1v, clvd, A-Wgm; cited in EitnerQ

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberNL

G. Barblan: ‘La musica strumentale e cameristica a Milano nel ’700’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 619–60 [pubn of Fondazione Treccani degli Alfiero per la storia di Milano]

ROBIN BOWMAN/ELEANOR F. McCRICKARD

Bianchi, Giovanni Battista (i)

(b Genoa; fl 1675). Italian composer. According to Eitner he was also an organist and moved to Bologna. He is described in his Madrigali a due e tre voci op.1 (Bologna, 1675) as an Augustinian monk and ‘bachelor’ (‘bacciliere’), although in which discipline is not stated. The madrigals, his only known music, comprise 15 trios and two duets; he dedicated them to Signora Livia Grilla, who ‘was pleased to admit him into her service’.

COLIN TIMMS

Bianchi, Giovanni Battista (ii)

(fl London, 1780–82). Italian conductor and composer. He was music director at the King’s Theatre, London, succeeding Bertoni, for the seasons 1780–81 and 1781–2. He added arias to several pasticcios and, with Rauzzini and Tommaso Giordani, composed L’omaggio di paesani al signore de contado, a festa teatrale performed on 5 June 1781 in celebration of the king’s birthday. He has sometimes been confused with Francesco Bianchi, to whom he was not related.

ALFRED LOEWENBERG/R

Bianchi [‘dal Cornetto’], Giulio Cesare

(b Cremona, 1576/7; d ?Cremona, in or after 1637). Italian cornettist and composer. He served the Gonzaga court, Mantua, from 26 March 1602 to June 1612. Bertolotti's report of service in Milan in 1603 appears to be incorrect. At Mantua Bianchi was in charge of the wind band – we have notice of him recruiting wind players in 1609 (from Cremona) and 1611 – and he worked closely with the maestro di cappella (and fellow Cremonese) there, Claudio Monteverdi. Bianchi also supplemented his salary with a position in the paymaster's office. He was dismissed by 8 June 1612 during the extensive restructuring of the court music after the succession of Duke Francesco Gonzaga; perhaps he annoyed the new duke by seeking a position (unsuccessfully) with Cardinal Borghese in Rome. By 1620 he was back in Cremona, from where he published his Libro primo de motetti in lode d'Iddio nostro Signore, 1–5, 8vv (Venice, 1620³), including four motets by Monteverdi, and Libro secondo de motetti: in lode della gloriosissima Vergine Maria, 1–5vv, e una messa, 4vv (Venice, 1620⁴), again with music by Monteverdi (the notice in FétisB of a reprint of the second book in Antwerp in 1637 remains unconfirmed). Bianchi may have taken religious orders: in 1631 he was residing with Countess Hieronima Terzi in Piacenza for whom he celebrated Mass. In 1637, at the age of 60, he leased Monteverdi's house in Cremona.

Bianchi's motets (all for voices and continuo) are typical of the small-scale concertato church music proliferating in early 17th-century Italy: as is normal for the style, they focus on strong melodic writing and textural contrasts between imitative episodes and homophonic tuttis. One canzonetta survives (in RISM 1605¹²).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

FétisB

G. Pontiroli: ‘Notizie di musicisti cremonesi dei secoli XVI e XVII’, Bollettino storico cremonese, xxii (1961–4), 149–92

G. Pontiroli: Notizie sui Monteverdi, su personaggi ed artisti del loro ambiente (Cremona, 1968)

D. Stevens: ‘Monteverdi, Petratti, and the Duke of Bracciano’, MQ, lxiv (1978), 275–94

D. Stevens, ed.: Claudio Monteverdi: Letters (London, 1980/R)

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

S.H. Parisi: Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: an Archival Study (diss., U. of Illinois, 1989)

TIM CARTER

Bianchi, Giuseppe

(fl 1637–63). Italian castrato. In 1637 his name appeared among the singers of the papal chapel in Rome; he then entered the service of Taddeo Barberini, prefect of Rome. The Abate Elpidio Benedetti, who was commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin to recruit Italian singers for the French court, named him in 1643 as the best castrato in Rome, and as a result he took part in a private performance of an opera in the Palais Royal, Paris, during Carnival 1645. In 1646 he was back in the papal chapel in Rome, but subsequently was probably in Germany, in the service of several rulers. On 14 April 1654, under the name ‘Giuseppe da Torino’, he sang at the Petit Bourbon in Paris in Carlo Caproli's opera Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti. In 1658 he sang in the Hofmusikkapelle in Vienna and in 1662 and 1663, and almost certainly earlier, he was among the chamber musicians of the court of Turin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

R. Casimiri: ‘“Disciplina musicae” e “Mastri di Capella” dopo il Concilio di Trento nei maggiori istituti ecclesiastici di Roma Seminario romano – Collegio germanico – Collegio inglese – (sec. XVI–XVII)’, NA, xix (1942), 103–29

M.T. Bouquet: Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino: il teatro di corte dalle origini al 1788 (Turin, 1976)

PAOLA BESUTTI

Bianchi [Tozzi], Marianna

(b ?Venice, c1735; d after 1790). Italian soprano. She made her opera seria début as ultima parte at Parma in 1753 and sang mostly secondary roles, sometimes appearing in opera buffa, before going to Vienna as prima donna in 1762, where she created Eurydice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. She then sang as prima donna in Italy and with her husband, the composer Antonio Tozzi, was engaged at Brunswick (1765–8) and Munich (1773–5); her Italian career then declined to secondary theatres and, after 1780, to opera buffa, ending in 1790. According to Burney, she had ‘a sweet and elegant toned voice, always perfectly in tune, with an admirable portamento; I never heard any one sing with more ease, or in a manner so totally free from affectation’.

DENNIS LIBBY

Bianchi, Pietro Antonio.

See Bianco, Pietro Antonio.

Bianchiardus, Francesco.

See Bianciardi, Francesco.

Bianchini [Bianchini Veneziano], Domenico [‘il Rossetto’, ‘il Rosso’]

(b ?Udine, c1510; d Venice, c1576). Italian lutenist and mosaicist. He was a younger brother of Vincenzo Bianchini (fl Venice, 1517–63), the most noted member of the family of Venetian mosaicists. He was admitted to the guild as a master mosaicist in 1537, and between 1540 and 1576 worked regularly at S Marco, where his mosaics include works after cartoons by Salviati and Tintoretto. As a musician he was praised and cited among the ‘moderns’ of the mid-16th century by Andrea Calmo. Girolamo Parabosco reported his participation in 1544 at Venice as a lutenist in an ensemble of two singers, a transverse flute, two viols, two cornetts, cembalo, lute and violone. Bianchini’s Intabolatura de lauto is dedicated to the German merchants of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German hostelry near the Rialto), with whom he appears to have had some business dealings. 11 pieces from the volume were reprinted in Hans Gerle’s lutebook of 1552 (RISM 1552³¹).

The collection is typical of the mid-16th century, and contains arrangements of vocal music, eight dances and six ricercares. They include Gombert’s motet Ave sanctissima, a napolitana by Willaert, and chansons and madrigals by Sermisy, Berchem, Arcadelt and Certon. Three of the dances provide an early instance of the passamezzo–paduana–saltarello suite, and the pavan Forze d’Ercule, which uses the same passamezzo antico bass, may have been intended as an additional movement to this suite. Other dances use popular Venetian street songs including the Cara cosa, Meza notte and El burato. The ricercares are exceptional in their use of imitation and consistent textures, and may be intabulations of instrumental ensemble music rather than works conceived originally for lute. One uses the famous Faulte d’argent melody and bears some resemblance to Cavazzoni’s organ canzona on the same melody. Others include tabulations of a vocal bicinium by Richafort and of two ensemble ricercares (one now lost) by Segni. Several pieces, including a harmonization of the superius of Sermisy's Tant que vivray, and most of the dances have an underlying structure of parallel 10ths between the outer parts, a technique favoured in improvisations in the earlier decades of the 16th century (see D. Heartz, JAMS, xix, 1966, pp.13–36).

WORKS

Intabolatura de lauto … di recercari, motetti, madrigali, napolitane et balli, libro primo (Venice, 1546²⁴/R, 2/1554/R, 3/1563); 8 ed. in Chilesotti, 2 ed. in Morcourt, 8 ed. in Ness, 5 ed. in Chiesa

1 intabulation of a Willaert motet in D-Sl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

O. Chilesotti: ‘Note circa alcuni liutisti italiani della prima metà del Cinquecento’, RMI, ix (1902), 36–61, esp.51

R. de Morcourt: ‘Le livre de tablature de luth de Domenico Bianchini (1546)’, La musique instrumentale de la Renaissance: Paris 1954, 177–95

A.J. Ness: ‘Domenico Bianchini: Some Recent Findings’, Le luth et sa musique II: Tours 1980, 97–111

R. Chiesa: ‘Storia della letteratura del liuto e della chitarra, LVIII: il Cinquecento – Domenico Bianchini’, Il Fronimo, xv/58 (1987), 23–7

ARTHUR J. NESS

Bianchini, Francescho [Blanchin, François]

(b Venice, fl Lyons, 1547–8). Italian lutenist and composer, active in France. His only known works are printed in the undated Tabulature de lutz (RISM 1547²⁷, ed. C. Dupraz and J.-M. Vaccaro, Paris, 1995), published in Lyons by Jacques Moderne. The date of 1547, generally assigned to the print, is assumed from the fact that the print's dedicatee, François Gouffer, Bishop of Béziers, took up his position in 1547 and died the following year (see Pogue). This collection, the first Italian lute tablature to be published by Moderne, contains one fantasia (the first time this term was used in France) and 15 intabulations. The fantasia that opens the print is a collage of musical ideas drawn from two ricercares by Julio Segni; following this are six intabulations of chansons by composers represented in Moderne's Parangon des chansons volumes (1538–43), including Crecquillon, Maillard and Lheritier, and three psalms by Mornable and Certon. Two basse danses (the last use of the term in France) follow: these draw on the superius parts of chansons by Clereau or Certon (Fortune alors; entitled La mestresse in the print), and Sandrin (Quant ieu congneu a ma pensee). The final four pieces are Italian: two pavans on forms of the passamezzo antico and romanesca, and two galliards on Venetian street songs.

It is not known if he was related to Pierre Blondeau (possibly known as Pietro Bianchini), who worked for Attaingnant in a similar editorial capacity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)

D. Heartz: ‘The Basse Dance: its Evolution circa 1450 to 1550’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 287–340

F. Lesure and R. de Morcourt: ‘G.P. Paladino et son “Premier Livre” de luth (1560)’, RdM, xlii (1958), 170–83

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy, ca. 1500–1550, with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1961)

H.C. Slim: Musica nova, MRM, i (Chicago, 1964)

S.F. Pogue: Jacques Moderne: Lyons music printer of the sixteenth century (Geneva, 1969)

R. Chiesa: ‘Storia della letteratura del liuto e della chitarra, LXI: il Cinquecento – Francesco Bianchini’, Il Fronimo, xv/61 (1987), 39–40

JEANETTE B. HOLLAND/ARTHUR J. NESS

Bianchini [Blanchino], Giovanni Battista

(b Rome, 2nd half of 17th century; d Rome, 26 Sept 1708). Italian organist and composer. He was maestro di cappella of Orvieto Cathedral in 1678 and of S Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, between 1684 and 1708. He was appointed phonascus (maestro di canto) of the Oratorio di S Marcello there in 1687, and subsequently, praefectus musicae. A member of the Congregazione di S Cecilia, he was guardiano dei maestri di cappella in 1687 and 1691. His name appears in connection with the performance of an ‘opera in musica’ at the Accademia del Teatro in Orvieto for Pentecost and Corpus Domini in 1693; he was probably director or maestro di compagnia for this occasion. In 1694 he was also maestro di cappella and organist of S Salvatore in Lauro, Rome. From 1685 he composed several oratorios for the Oratorio di S Marcello; nine other oratorios, for from three to six voices, are listed in the Poesie … dialoghi sagri e morali per musica (Orvieto, 1679) of the poet Alberici.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SartoriL

G. Rostirolla: ‘Domenico Scarlatti e la congregazione di S. Cecilia’, Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma: Rome 1985, 191–250

A. Morelli: ‘Le cappelle musicali a Roma nel Seicento: questioni di organizzazione e di prassi esecutiva’, La cappella musicale nell’Italia della Controriforma: Cento 1989, 175–204

G. Staffieri: Colligite fragmenta: la vita musicale romana negli ‘Avvisi Marescotti’ (1683–1707) (Lucca, 1991)

ANGELA LEPORE

Bianchy, Jacobelus

(fl 2nd half of the 14th century). Italian composer. His only known works are two two-voice ballatas in F-Pn 6771 (ff.25v–26 and f.26v; ed. in PMFC, x, 1977, p.72): Chi ama ne la lengua (possibly cited in Prudenzani’s Saporetto, sonnet no.33) and L’ochi mie piangne (text incomplete). Both exhibit ‘popular’ features that come from a local north Italian repertory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Wolf: Geschichte der Mensural-Notation von 1250–1460 (Leipzig, 1904/R), ii/iii, no.58

K. von Fischer: Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento (Berne, 1956), 44–5, 58–9

G. Corsi: Poesie musicali del Trecento (Bologna, 1970), p.lxix

N. Pirrotta: ‘Rhapsodic Elements in North-Italian Polyphony of the 14th Century’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 83–99

J. Nádas: The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony: Manuscript Production and Scribal Practices in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages (diss., New York U., 1985), 193, 207–8

KURT VON FISCHER/GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO

Bianciardi [Blanchardus, Bianchiardus], Francesco

(b Casole d’Elsa, nr Siena, ?1571–2; d Siena, between 1 March and 21 Sept 1607). In the preface to his Sacrarum modulationum (1596) he said that he was of humble origins. Until not later than 1596 he was organist and from no later than 20 June 1597 maestro di cappella of Siena Cathedral. In his manuscript Notitia de contrapuntisti e de compositori di musica Pitoni called him a ‘grandissimo suonatore di organo’, and he was praised as maestro di cappella by Banchieri in his Conclusioni nel suono dell’organo (1609). By 1601 and probably until his death he was responsible for musical affairs in the Accademia degli Intronati. According to Isidoro Ugurgieni Azzolini (Pompe sanesi, Pistoia, 1649) Bianciardi was 35 when he died. He was mainly a composer of church music in the style of Palestrina, whose pupil he may have been. The Canzonette spirituali is in a lighter style, however, and another late collection, the fourth set of Sacrarum modulationum (1608), is in the concertato tradition inaugurated by Viadana. Bianciardi’s posthumous fly-sheet Breve regola is a useful source for the early practice of thoroughbass.

WORKS

Editions:Francesco Bianciardi: Opera omnia, ed. S. Cisilino and L. Bertazzo (Padua. 1973–4)Francesco Bianciardi (1572?–1607), Costanzo Porta (1529–1601): Keyboard Compositions, ed. B. Billeter, CEKM, xli (1977)

all except treatise published in Venice

Sacrarum modulationum, quae vulgo mottecta, 4–8vv, liber I (1596)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1597)

Sacrarum modulationum, quae vulgo motecta, 4–6, 8vv, liber II (1601)

Vespertina omnium solemnitatum psalmodia, 4vv (1604)

Missarum, 4, 8vv, liber I (1605)

Canzonette spirituali, 3vv, libro I (1606)

Sacrarum modulationum, quae vulgo motecta, 4–6, 8vv, liber III (1607)

Sacrarum modulationum, quae vulgo motecta, 2–4vv, bc, liber IV (1608)

Sacred works in 1601², 1609¹, 1611¹, 1616¹⁰, 1617⁵, 1618¹, 1621²; secular works in 1605⁷, 1606⁵, 1613¹⁰, 1615², ?1601¹

20 madrigals, D-Mbs

8 motets, formerly Biblioteca Rudolfina, Liegnitz, now ?PL-WRu; MS motet in the copy of 1602¹⁰ in D-Dl; (both according to Eitner)

Breve regola per imparar’ sonare sopra il basso con ogni sorte d’istrumento (Siena, 1607); ed. R. Haas, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf (Berlin, 1929/R), 48ff, and V. Gibelli, Antiquae musicae italicae studiosi (Milan, 1965)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

R. Morrocchi: La musica in Siena (Siena, 1886/R)

F.T. Arnold: The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass (London, 1931/R)

F. Jacometti: L’Accademia degli Intronati (Siena, 1942)

B. Billeter: ‘Die Vokalkompositionen von Francesco Bianciardi’, Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, i (1972), 133–41

M. Lonardi: ‘Del sonare sopra il basso, overo La realizzazione liutistica del basso continuo’, Il Fronimo, no.21 (1977), 7–15

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Monodie und Generalbass’, Mf, xxxvii (1984), 99–110

G. Marini: Cenni sul basso continuo in Italia nel XVII secolo (Florence, 1990), 261–74

JOSEF-HORST LEDERER

Bianco, Andrea.

See Bianchi, Andrea.

Bianco, Giovanni Battista

(b Venice; fl 1610–21). Italian composer. In the first of his two publications he is described as an Augustinian monk, and he appears to have been employed at Concordia Cathedral from January 1613 for one year. He is known by his Musica a due voci utilissima per instruir i figliuoli a cantar sicuramente in breve tempo (Venice, 1610), which includes settings of Latin texts, and by his Salmi che si cantano a terza, con una messa a cinque voci, with organ continuo (Venice, 1621).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Vale: ‘Memorie musicali della cattedrale di Concordia (secoli XVI–XVII)’, NA, x (1933), 127–35

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982), i, 68

COLIN TIMMS

Bianco [Bianchi], Pietro Antonio

(b Venice, c1540; d Graz, bur. 2 Feb 1611). Italian composer and singer. He was probably educated in Venice, and he became a canon at S Salvatore there. On 1 November 1578 he was appointed a tenor in the Graz Hofkapelle, to which he belonged for the rest of his life. In 1580 he became court chaplain and in 1595 Hofkapellmeister; by then he was also principal court chaplain and almoner. His appointment to both posts resulted from the Graz court’s efforts in support of the Counter-Reformation. Bianco resolutely continued the italianization of the Hofkapelle, a task already begun by Annibale Padovano; in order to recruit musicians and obtain music, he visited Venice several times, and Venetian music became the most important influence on music at the Graz court. Bianco attracted musicians such as Georg Poss, who was trained in Venice, and Giovanni Gabrieli’s friend Francesco Stivori and pupil Alessandro Tadei. His testimonials on the Graz court musicians (in A-Gl) reveal his dedication to high artistic and social standards. In 1603, in recognition of his services, he was granted as a benefice the provostship of Maria Saal, Carinthia. He travelled to Poland in 1592 and to Spain in 1598 in the retinue of the dowager Archduchess Maria and went with Archduke Ferdinand of Inner Austria to the parliament at Regensburg from 1607 to 1608.

Bianco’s talent as an administrator was combined with an above-average ability as a composer; his style was greatly influenced by Giovanni Gabrieli. Although his output covered a period of some 35 years, it was not extensive. His secular vocal music was influenced by the villanellas and madrigals of his Italian contemporaries. Later he seems to have devoted himself solely to sacred works, of which his motets are the finest: the combination in them of contrasts in texture and rhythm is characteristic of polyphonic music of the period. His only known mass and his Magnificat, both in eight parts, are based on the eight-part motet Percussit Saul mille by Giovanni Croce; they are typical of Venetian church music of the time. Contrary to the usual practice of setting only alternate verses of the Magnificat polyphonically, he set all the verses in the manner of the papal chapel. His litanies in falsobordone style were written to satisfy the tastes of the dowager Archduchess Maria.

WORKS

Il primo libro delle canzoni napolitane, 3vv (Venice, 1572¹⁰), 2 ed. in DTÖ, xc (1954)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 4vv (Venice, 1582⁹), 1 ed. in DTÖ, xc (1954)

Sacri concentus, 8vv, bc (org) (Venice, 1609)

1 madrigal in 1604¹²; 1 motet in 1613²; 3 sacred works in 1617¹

6 litanies and 1 motet, 5vv, in A-Gu; 1 motet, 5vv, in Wn; 1 motet, 8vv, in D-Rp; 8 litanies, Missa super ‘Percussit Saul mille’, 8vv, in Yu–Lu; Magnificat super ‘Percussit Saul mille’, 8vv, in Yu-Lu, ed. in DTÖ, cxxxiii (1981)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Federhofer: ‘Pietro Antonio Bianco und seine Vorgänger Andreas Zweiller und Pietro Ragno an der Grazer Hofkapelle’, KJb, xxxviii (1954), 55–83

H. Federhofer: Musikpflege und Musiker am Grazer Habsburgerhof der Erzherzöge Karl und Ferdinand von Innerösterreich (1564–1619) (Mainz, 1967), 57ff

G. Gruber: ‘Magnificatkompositionen in Parodietechnik aus dem Umkreis der Hofkapellen der Herzöge Karl II. und Ferdinand von Innerösterreich’, KJb, li (1967), 33–60

HELLMUT FEDERHOFER

Bianconi, Lorenzo (Gennaro)

(b Minusio, Ticino, 14 Jan 1946). Swiss musicologist. He studied musicology with Reinhold Hammerstein and Wilhelm Seidel at Heidelberg University and took the doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on Cavalli and the diffusion of Venetian opera in Italy in the 17th century. In 1969–70 he worked for RISM (series A/I) in Italy and returned there permanently in 1973. In 1977 he was visiting professor at the department of music, Princeton University, and became professor of Drammaturgia musicale at the Università degli studi, Bologna. He also taught music history at the universities of Macerata (1978) and Arezzo (1980–83). He has been on the editorial boards of a number of publications including Rivista italiana di musicologia (1973–9), Monumenti musicali italiani (1979–86), the series Studi e Testi per la Storia della Musica (from 1979), Acta musicologica (1987–81), and Historiae Musicae Cultores (from 1999). In 1993–4 he founded with others the journals Musicae Storia and Il saggiatore musicale. He was a committee member of both the Società Italiana di Musicologia (1979–82) and the IMS (1982–92) and he was elected a corresponding member of the AMS in 1995. He was awarded the Dent medal by the RMA in 1983. His chief fields of research are Italian opera of the 17th–19th centuries, the theory of opera history and the Italian madrigal.

WRITINGS

‘Giulio Caccini e il manierismo musicale’, Chigiana, new ser., v (1968), 21–38

‘Struttura poetica e struttura musicale nei madrigali di Monteverdi’, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 335–48

‘Die pastorale Szene in Metastasios “Olimpiade”’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 185–91

‘Weitere Ergänzungen zu Emil Vogels “Bibliothek der gedruckten Weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens, aus den Jahren 1500–1700” aus italienischen Bibliotheken’, AnMc, no.9 (1970), 142–202; no.12 (1973), 370–97

‘L'Ercole in Rialto’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 259–72

‘Sussidi bibliografici per i musicisti siciliani del Cinque e Seicento’, RIM, vii (1972), 3–38

‘“Ah dolente partita”: espressione ed artificio’, Studi musicali, iii (1974), 105–30

with T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454

‘Funktionen des Operntheaters in Neapel bis 1700 und die Rolle Alessandro Scarlattis’, Alessandro Scarlatti: Würzburg 1975, 13–116

with A. Vassalli: ‘Circolazione letteraria e circolazione musicale del madrigale: il caso Giovan Battista Strozzi’, Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell'Europa del Cinquecento: Florence 1980, ii, 459–66

ed., with G. Morelli: Antonio Vivaldi: teatro musicale, cultura e società (Florence, 1982) [incl ‘Condizione sociale e intellettuale del musicista di teatro ai tempi di Vivaldi’, 371–88]

ed., with R. Bossa: Musica e cultura a Napoli: Naples 1982

Il Seicento, Storia della musica, v, ed. Società Italiana di Musicologia (Turin, 1982, 2/1991); Eng. trans., as Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987)

with T. Walker: ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera’, EMH, iv (1984), 209–96

ed.: J. Mainwaring: Memorie della vita del fu G. F. Handel (Turin, 1985)

‘Il Cinquecento e il Seicento’, Letteratura italiana, ed. A. Asor Rosa, Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici, vi (Turin, 1986), 319–63

ed.: La drammaturgia musicale (Bologna, 1986) [incl. ‘Introduction’, 7–50]

ed., with G. Pestelli: Storia dell'opera italiana (Turin, 1987–; Eng. trans., 1998–)

‘“Confusi e stupidi”: di uno stupefacente (e banalissimo) dispositivo metrico’, Gioachino Rossini: Pesaro 1992, 129–61

Il teatro d’opera in Italia: geografia, caratteri, storia (Bologna, 1993)

‘Hors-d’oeuvre alla filologia dei libretti’, Il saggiatore musicale, ii (1995), 143–54

‘Cinque o sei cose de fare per le musice (in Italie)’, Il saggiatore musicale, iii (1996), 151–61

‘L’opera metastasiana: prospettive critiche’, Il saggiatore, iv (1997), 481–5

‘Musica come bene culturale’, Il saggiatore musicale, iv (1997), 499–509

EDITIONS

with L. Sgrizzi: Benedetto Marcello: Sonates pour clavecin, Le pupitre, xxviii (Paris, 1971)

Pietro Maria Marsolo: [Secondo libro dei] Madrigali a quattro voci … e altre opere, MRS, iv (1973)

Antonio Il Verso: Madrigali a tre e a cinque voci, MRS, viii (1978)

with G. La Face Bianconi: I libretti italiani di Georg Friedrich Händel e le loro fonti (Florence, 1992–)

with M. Privitera: Girolamo Frescobaldi: Opere complete, v: Il primo libro dei Madrigali a cinque voci (1608) (Milan, 1996)

CAROLYN GIANTURCO/TERESA M. GIALDRONI

Biandrà [Blandrati, De Blandrate], Giovanni Pietro

(b late 16th century; d after 1633). Italian composer. Although styled ‘romano’ in his publications, he may have been born at Biandrate, near Novara, his surname and its variants thus deriving from that place. He appears to have been maestro di cappella of the Seminario Romano, Rome, possibly from 1618 to 1619, and from 1619 to 1633 he was maestro di cappella of Faenza Cathedral. By 1626–7 at least he was also maestro di cappella of the Accademia degli Spennati in Faenza, to which he dedicated his opp.1 and 2. He composed primarily in the monodic and concertato styles. His first book contains 19 solos, five duets and two trios, all set to spiritual texts, while among the polyphonic madrigals of the second book are three ‘resposte’ to madrigals by Domenico Brunetti, Ignazio Donati and Angelo Peracini, and an extended setting of the ‘Giuoco della cieca’ in Guarini's Il pastor fido.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigaletti, 1–3vv, op.1 (Venice, 1626)

Madrigali, 4–5vv, bc, op.2 (Venice, 1626)

Sacrae cantiones, 2–4vv, bc (org), op.3 (Venice, 1627)

Motectorum, 2–4vv, bc, liber secundus, op.5 (Venice, 1629)

Libro 3° madrigali, 2–5vv, bc, lost, listed in Robert Martin's catalogues of 1633 and 1635

Book of motets, op.4, lost

Sacred music, Pl-Kk, inc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

SchmitzG

R. Casimiri: ‘“Disciplina musicae” e “mastri di cappella” dopo il Concilio di Trento nei maggiori istituti ecclesiastici di Roma: Seminario romano – Collegio germanico – Collegio inglese (sec. XVI–XVII)’, NA, xv (1938), 1–14, 49–64

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982), ii, 130

V. Gibelli: ‘Due opere di Giovanni Pietro Biandrà della Biblioteca Universitaria di Wrocław in Polonia’, Antiquae musicae italicae studiosi, no.2 (1985), 11–13

COLIN TIMMS

Bianqing.

See Lithophone. See also Qing.

Bibalo, Antonio

(b Trieste, 18 Jan 1922). Norwegian composer. He studied at the Trieste Conservatory with Luciano Gante (piano) and Viozzi (composition). He also spent three years studying composition with Lutyens at the Trinity College of Music, London, which he found to be of decisive significance. He settled in Norway in 1957. In 1991 he was made a Knight of St Olav, first class.

With an output including five operas and three ballets, Bibalo is regarded as the leading Norwegian musical dramatist. He achieved an international breakthrough at the Hamburg Opera in 1965 with The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, followed by Frøken Julie (‘Miss Julie’, 1975). For the opera in Kiel he wrote Gespenster (‘Ghosts’, 1981) on Ibsen’s play. The music of Bibalo’s operas is centred on textual and dramatic expression, the musical techniques ranging from late Romantic tonality through dodecaphony and serialism to a free avant-garde style. The free stylistic diversity is bound together through integrating musical structure on the one hand and preserving a scenic-dramatic unity on the other. The resulting originality of sound gives the music a highly personal and uniform character. Piano works, chamber works and orchestral concertos also feature highly in Bibalo’s output, and they share the same personal integration of undogmatic mixing of styles and advanced compositional techniques.

WORKS

(selective list)

Opera: The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (H. Miller), 1958–62, Hamburg, 1965; Frøken Julie [Miss Julie] (A. Strindberg), 1974–5, Århus, 1975; Gespenster [Ghosts] (H. Ibsen), 1981, Kiel, 1981; Macbeth (W. Shakespeare), 1989, Oslo, 1990; Die Glasmenagerie (T. Williams), 1996, Trier, 1996

Ballet: Pinocchio, 1967; Nocturne for Apollo, 1969; Flammen, 1973

Orch: Pitture astratte, 1950–58; Pf Conc., 1955; 4 Balkan Dances, 1957; Vn Conc., 1957; Elegie einer Raum-Zeit, 2vv, choir, orch, 1963; Ouverture til ‘Tjener for to herrer’, 1968; Sinfonia-notturna, 1968; Pf Conc., 1971; Conc. da camera II, hpd, vn, str orch, 1974; Sym. no.2, 1978–9; Music for ob, str, perc, hp, 1986; Conc., wind qnt, orch, 1990; 5 frammenti sinfonici, 1997

Chbr: Autunnale: suite de concert pour 4 instruments, 1968; Str Qt, 1972; The Savage: 4 Impressions for 6 Players, 1983; 2 sonatinas, 5 insts; pieces for 7 insts, etc.

Other inst: La notte (Pf Sonata no.2), 1976; other pf pieces, inst sonatas and other works

Vocal works for 1v, tape; 1v, pf; 1v, fl, etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Reitan: ‘“Gespenster” – tidsaktuell og spennende’, Ballade (1982), no.2, p.7 only

L. Reitan: ‘Mine venner spør om jeg er masochist’, Ballade (1982), no.2, pp.8–12

E.M. Saetre: ‘Verdensmusikkdagene i Nederland 4–13 Oktober 1985: norsk pusterom i tettpakket program’, Ballade (1985), no.4, pp.31–2

Å. Kolberg: ‘Antonio Bibalo: Drama and Music’, Listen to Norway, iii/2 (1995), 28–9

ERLING E. GULDBRANDSEN

Biber, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von

(b Wartenberg [now Stráž pod Ralskem], nr Reichenberg [now Liberec], Bohemia, bap. 12 Aug 1644; dSalzburg, 3 May 1704). Austrian violinist and composer of Bohemian birth. He was the outstanding violin virtuoso of the 17th century and a first-rate composer; he wrote instrumental or vocal, sacred or secular music with equal ease. His fame rests mainly upon his violin sonatas, especially those which require scordatura, but his polychoral church music has also attracted interest and admiration.

ELIAS DANN/JIŘÍ SEHNAL

1. Life.

Biber may have had some music lessons, perhaps by the organist Wiegand Knöffee, in his birthplace, which was the property of Count Maximilian Liechtenstein-Castelcorno, brother of the Bishop of Olmütz. He may have studied at a Jesuit Gymnasium in Bohemia, and in the early 1660s he was already on friendly terms with Pavel Vejvanovský, who was then studying with the Jesuits in Troppau. Before 1668 Biber was a musician in the service of Prince Johann Seyfried Eggenberg in Graz, where Philipp Jakob Rittler and Jakob Prinner were also employed. In 1668 he became a valet de chambre and musician to the Bishop of Olmütz, Karl Liechtenstein-Castelcorno, in Kroměříž, where Pavel Vejvanovský was director of the Kapelle. Biber was popular among the courtiers at Kroměříž, and was highly valued as a violin virtuoso. In late summer 1670 the bishop sent Biber to the violin maker Jacob Stainer in Absam to negotiate the purchase of new instruments for his ensemble. Instead of visiting the violin maker, however, Biber entered the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, Maximilian Gandolph von Khuenburg. Liechtenstein felt greatly injured by this action but refrained from reprisals against his former employee out of friendship for Archbishop Khuenburg. He contented himself with waiting until 1676 to make out the document officially releasing Biber from his service. Biber regularly sent works to Kroměříž in order to win the bishop’s goodwill.

Biber’s career flourished in Salzburg. At the end of 1670 he had been classed among the valets de chambre, porters and stokers of fires at court, with a relatively small monthly salary of about ten florins, but the archbishop appreciated music for string instruments and Biber rose rapidly in the social scale. In the years 1676–84 he dedicated four printed collections of instrumental music to the archbishop. On 30 May 1672, in Hellbrunn, he married Maria Weiss, daughter of a merchant and citizen of Salzburg. In 1677 Biber performed several of his sonatas in Laxenburg before Emperor Leopold I, who gave him a gold chain, and early in 1679 he was appointed deputy Kapellmeister. When he performed before the emperor for the second time, in 1681, he petitioned him for promotion to the ranks of the nobility. Biber distinguished himself as a composer on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations of 1682 (see below), and in 1684, after the death of Andreas Hofer, was appointed Kapellmeister and dean of the choir school. After a second application to Emperor Leopold in 1690, he was raised to the noble rank of knight, with the title of Biber von Bibern. Subsequently the new archbishop, Johann Ernst, Count Thun, appointed him lord high steward, a title that marked the culmination of the composer’s social career.

In the same year Biber visited his birthplace of Stráž pod Ralskem, where his wife stood as godmother to his nephew. In 1690 his salary had risen to 60 gulden a month, with free board and lodging including such items as wine, bread and firewood. According to Chafe, Biber had some 75 to 80 excellent singers and instrumentalists at his disposal in the 1690s. He was acquainted with Pavel Vejvanovský, P.J. Rittler, Jakob Prinner and J.H. Schmelzer, but whether he was Schmelzer’s pupil must remain uncertain. No light has been cast on his relationship with his colleague at Salzburg, the cathedral organist Georg Muffat, but it does not appear to have been particularly friendly.

Biber had 11 children, only four of whom survived childhood: his sons Anton Heinrich (1679–1742) and Karl Heinrich (1681–1749) and his daughters Maria Cäcilia (b 1674) and Anna Magdalena (1677–1742). They were all musically gifted and received a good musical education from their father. Both sons were violinists at the Salzburg court, and Karl Heinrich (see Biber von Bibern, Karl Heinrich), the more gifted of the two, rose to become deputy Kapellmeister in 1714 and Kapellmeister in 1743. Biber’s daughter Anna Magdalena entered the Benedictine convent of Nonnberg in 1696. A fine alto singer and violinist, Maria Rosa Henrica (the name taken by Anna Magdalena in religious life) became mistress of the novices in her convent, and was appointed director of its choir and Kapelle in 1727. Biber composed and directed his Missa S Henrici for her investiture as a nun on 15 July 1697. As a singing teacher, Maria Rosa Henrica made use of her father’s manual, the Singfundament. Her elder sister Maria Cäcilia was also a nun, in the convent of S Clara in Merano.

One might think that the most highly honoured violin virtuoso of his time would have made some professional tours. Curiously there is almost no information on the subject. The final paragraph of Biber’s biography in Mattheson’s Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte of 1740 (written by Karl Heinrich, the composer’s son) indicates that he was well known in the emperor’s dominions and in France and Italy for his music rather than for concert appearances. There is evidence that he was well known in Munich, since he was decorated at the Bavarian court on two occasions. In his later years Biber seems to have devoted himself to the composition of sacred music, operas and school dramas. Of the dramatic works only one opera is extant; only the librettos of the others remain. He wrote his last school drama in 1698, his last opera in 1699.

2. Works.

Burney wrote: ‘of all the violin players of the last century Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and most fanciful of any music I have seen of the same period’. When Burney saw the Biber sonatas, 100 years after they had been written, interest in them was mainly historical. Quite early in the 18th century German violinists had turned towards the more formal and fully tonal compositions of Corelli and his followers. Burney’s opinion of Biber was based mainly upon the Sonatae violino solo, eight sonatas for violin and continuo published in 1681. These sonatas are elaborately developed, show a keen sense of formal structure and are completely uninhibited in their virtuosity. While they differ from one another to some extent in form and choice of movements, sets of variations are to be found in all of them. It was in the free preludes, in equally free and elaborate finales, in brilliant passage-work over ostinato basses and in polyphonic passages (in which multiple stops seem never to have been a problem) that Biber was able to give full rein to a formidable violin technique. In range he was able to reach the 6th and 7th positions and return from them with an ease and abandon which set him apart even from his only peer, Johann Jakob Walther. (In both left-hand technique and bowing these two men from the north far outstripped their Italian contemporaries.) Although Biber achieved his greatest technical brilliance in the sonatas with normal tuning, two of the Sonatae violino solo require the altered tunings shown in ex.1.

In contrast to the sonatas of 1681, in which conventional tuning by 5ths is the rule rather than the exception, 14 of the 16 Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas for violin and bass (completed about 1676) require scordatura. These works were not printed; in the one surviving manuscript each sonata is identified by an engraving depicting one of the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary. The remaining work, the Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin, is prefixed by a picture of a guardian angel and child. Biber probably performed these sonatas as postludes to services during October, the month specially devoted to the Rosary Mysteries at Salzburg Cathedral. The Passacaglia may have been written for performance at a special ‘Feast of the Guardian Angel’ falling on 2 October. The tuning chosen for each Mystery Sonata, shown in ex.2, helps to set the mood by providing for special tone-colours, rich sonorities and many multiple stops not ordinarily obtainable on the violin. Only occasionally does the chosen scordatura contribute to a clearly descriptive or programmatic passage. In these sonatas there are many dance movements, highly stylized forms which the composer moulded to his expressive purposes. As in many of his other works, the more conventional distinctions between church and chamber sonata are not observed. Like the Sonatae violino solo, the Mystery Sonatas include many sets of variations, all with strict ostinato basses. The unaccompanied Passacaglia, built on 65 repetitions of the descending tetrachord (g'–f'–e'–d'), is a monumental polyphonic piece, the oustanding work of its type before the Bach Chaconne.

Biber wrote another set of scordatura pieces, Harmonia artificiosa-ariosa, seven partitas for two instruments and bass. Five of the partitas are for two violins, one is for violin and viola, and one is for two violas d’amore. Six of them require the altered tunings shown in ex.3. Since these works are trios for two equal instruments and continuo, the fantastic, seemingly improvisational elements of the solo sonatas give way to more regularly patterned passages and to a richer polyphony, sometimes in as many as five parts – two solo instruments, each carrying two real parts, supported by an independent bass line. The trios are spectacular pieces for two soloists, taking full advantage of the sonorities and polyphonic possibilities of the scordatura; they are not typical of Biber’s chamber music for large forces. In his ensemble sonatas, partitas and ballettos, whatever the combination or number of instruments, he never used scordatura and always adhered to strict part-writing: one line only for each instrument and no double stops, even at cadences.

The Mystery Sonatas and the Harmonia artificiosa-ariosa represent the summit of the violin scordatura literature. Including the two scordatura sonatas of 1681 there are 22 works, having among them 18 different tunings. As shown in exx.1, 2 and 3, there is in each case a clear relationship between the open strings and the key of the piece, an obvious contribution to sonority. All the altered tunings are narrower in range than the g to e'' of the conventional tuning. Bringing some of the strings closer together in pitch makes possible or simplifies the production of the most resonant intervals and chords: unisons, 3rds and 4ths, and triads and chords of the sixth in close position. The result is a smoother, more easily flowing, richer-sounding polyphony than is possible with conventional tuning. Some of the tunings do provide for special effects, most notably the interlocking octaves of Mystery Sonata no.11. The tuning g–g'–d'–d'' (in the order noted, from the fourth string to the first) was planned for a highly resonant performance in octaves, each octave stopped across two strings by one finger. Historically, instruments tuned by 5ths have always been primarily melodic; Biber, in his very personal use of the scordatura, enlarged the polyphonic possibilities of the violin.

Much of the finest of Biber’s ensemble music was published during his lifetime. The Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes (1676) consists of sonatas in five, six or eight parts; some are for strings alone, others include one or two trumpets in the ensemble. The Mensa sonora (1680) is a group of six partitas. The stylized dance movements are often framed between an opening sonata or intrada and a closing sonatina or retirada. The Fidicinium sacro-profanum (1683) is a set of 12 sonatas for either one or two violins, two violas and bass. Biber, like many of the composers represented in the Liechtenstein-Castelcorno collection, frequently wrote fewer violin than viola parts. In the ballettos, the dance suites used for court entertainment, the usual four-part combination was one violin, two violas and violone.

Biber’s sacred compositions make up a considerable part of his work. They are distinguished by their masterly vocal writing, the use of all kinds of musical instruments, their strict counterpoint and Biber’s brilliant technique in writing variations over a basso ostinato. His magnificent masses and vespers are particularly notable, and were composed with a fine understanding of what could be done in the specific conditions of Salzburg Cathedral. Biber’s predecessors had already made use of the opportunity to situate different musical ensembles in spatially separated pillared galleries in front of the presbytery, but he was the first to make full use of the possibilities that this offered. An example of his art in this respect is represented by the Missa Salisburgensis, which, together with the 53-part hymn Plaudite tympana, was erroneously attributed by A.W. Ambros in 1878 to Orazio Benevoli. Hintermaier proved that Biber composed this mighty work in 1682 to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the archbishopric of Salzburg by St Rupert. The ensemble is divided into seven groups: Choro 1 (eight singers and organ), Choro 2 (two violins and four violas), Choro 3 (two oboes, four flutes and two trumpets), Choro 4 (two cornetts and three trombones), Choro 5 (eight singers, two violins, two violas and organ), Loco I and Loco II (each with four trumpets and timpani, Loco 2 also providing the basso continuo). The Missa S Henrici, Missa Bruxellensis and the 32-part Vesperae are also polychoral works.

In his sacred music Biber was capable of writing a cappella masses as well as huge concerted works for solo and ripieno voices with large orchestra. The Missa quadragesimalis is in pure a cappellastyle; although it is provided with a figured bass it may be performed just as well without it. As a composer of his own time Biber’s strong sense of late 17th-century tone-colour may be heard in the full vocal and orchestral sound of the Requiem in F minor.

Between 1679 and 1699 Biber wrote three operas and at least 15 school dramas. The only extant work is the opera Chi la dura la vince, a beautiful leather-bound copy of which was dedicated to Archbishop Johann Ernsthun. The opera was probably composed in 1690–92. It is less advanced than the Viennese operas of the time. Biber used an incipient form of da capo aria when that form was fully developed in Vienna. The school dramas were produced at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. The librettos that remain indicate that some of them had so many musical scenes that they might possibly be classified as operas with dialogue.

Most of Biber’s manuscripts, including all the known manuscripts of the chamber music, remain at the Kroměříž archbishop archive. Among them are a wide variety of interesting compositions. A few may be chosen at random to illustrate the range of Biber’s work; the 32-part Vesperae for solo and ripieno voices, strings, trumpets, trombones, timpani and ‘4 bassi continui’; Laetatus sum, an elaborate motet for two bass voices, violin solo, three violas and continuo (fig.2); the Serenada for strings, continuo and bass voice (singing the ‘Nightwatchman’s call’); the Battalia, a typical battle piece of the period; Sonata violino solo representativa, a programmatic piece in which Biber joins other violinists of the 17th century in using bird and animal sounds as part of the basic material of an extended violin solo; the Sonata S Polycarpi for eight trumpets and timpani; and a large number of dance suites, simply entitled ‘Balletti’ or ‘Arien’.

There have been very few composers of the first rank – and Biber must be counted in the first rank of his time – who were so completely outstanding in their instrumental virtuosity. Fortunately his virtuosity as a violin composer was at the service of a splendid musical mind. He had a gift for melody and was a master of counterpoint – and that mastery had its effect, even in the most fanciful of his violin preludes. As a composer of sacred music and instrumental ensemble music he was at least the equal of his Viennese contemporaries; as a virtuoso and composer for the violin his position is unique and of historic importance.

WORKS

operas, school dramas, large cantatas

music lost unless otherwise stated

Applausi festivi di Giove (cant.), Salzburg, 1687, SI-Lf (lib only)

Li trofei della fede cattolica (cant.), Salzburg, 1687, Lf (lib only)

Alessandro in Pietra (op, F.M. Raffaelini), 1689

Chi la dura la vince (op, Raffaelini), ?1690–92, A-Sca

Trattenimento musicale del’ossequio di Salisburgo (cant.), Salzburg, 1699, Sca(lib only)

15 school dramas, 1679–99, Salzburg, University [listed in Chafe]

masses

Missa Christi resurgentis, 9vv, orch, c1674, CZ-KRa

Missa catholica, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, KRa (inc.)

Missa Salisburgensis, 16vv, insts, 1682, A-Sca; ed. in DTÖ, xx, Jg.x/1 (1903/R) [attrib. O. Benevoli]; ed. L. Feininger, Orazio Benevoli: Opera omnia (Rome, 1966–73), vii

Missa Alleluia, 8 solo vv, 8vv, orch, after 1690, KRa

Requiem, 6 solo vv, 6vv, orch, after 1690, Sd (facs. in Jaksch, 1977)

Requiem, f, 5 solo vv, 5vv, str, 3 trbn, bc, after 1692, A-H, Sd; ed. in DTÖ, lix, Jg.xxx/1 (1923/R)

Missa S Henrici, 5 solo vv, 5vv, orch, 1697, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, xlix, Jg.xxv/1 (1918/R)

Missa Bruxellensis, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, after 1696, B-Br; ed. L. Feininger, Orazio Benevoli: Opera omnia (Rome, 1966–73), vii

Missa, ex B, 6vv, bc, A-SEI; ed. E. Hintermaier, Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, v (Munich, 1987)

Missa quadragesimalis (Missa in contrapuncto), 4vv, ?insts, bc, SEI, CZ-KRa, Pnm

other sacred

Salve regina, S, va da gamba, org, 1663, CZ-Kra (inc.)

Lux perpetua, 8 solo vv, 8vv, str, 3 trbn, org, c1673, Kra

Vespers, 8 solo vv, 8vv, orch, 1674, Kra

Laetatus sum, B, B, str, orch, 1676, Kra; ed. J. Sehnal, Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, xi (Salzburg, 1999)

Plaudite tympana, 16vv, insts, 1682, A-Sca; ed. in DTÖ, xx, Jg.x/1 (1903/R) [attrib. O. Benevoli]

Litaniae de S Josepho, 8 solo vv, 8vv, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, str, bc, after 1690, Sd; ed. E. Hintermaier, Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, ix (Salzburg, 1999)

Ne cedite, 5 solo vv, 5vv, str, 3 trbn, 4 org, after 1690, Sd

Vesperae longiores ac breviores una cum litaniis Lauretanis, 4 solo vv, 4vv, str, 2 trbn, org (Salzburg, 1693)

Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, B, vn, vle, org, c1700, D-Dl; ed. J. Sehnal, Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, xi (Salzburg, 1999)

In festo trium regum, S, S, 2 fl, 2 ob, vle, org, CZ-Bm; ed. J. Sehnal, Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, xi (Salzburg, 1999)

Quo abiit, 4 solo vv, 4vv, 4 va, 4 org, A-GÖ, Sd

Stabat mater, 4vv, bc, Sd, Ssp

solo violin

with continuo unless otherwise stated

Mystery (Rosary) Sonatas [and Passacaglia], ?1674, D-Mbs (facs. in Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, Faksimileausgaben, i (Munich, 1990)); ed. in DTÖ, xxv, Jg.xii/2 (1905/R)

Sonatae (Nuremberg, 1681/ ed. in DTÖ, xi, Jg.v/2 (1898/R); facs. in Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, Faksimileausgaben, iii (Munich, 1991))

Sonata … representativa, c1669, CZ-KRa (facs. in Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, Faksimileausgaben, v (Munich, 1994)); ed. in DTÖ, cxxvii (1976)

Sonata, c1670, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxxvii (1976)

Fantasia; Pastorella; 2 sonatas: all A-Wm

Doubtful: Ciacona, CZ-KRa, ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997); Balletti, vn solo, KRa, ed. in Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, ix (Salzburg, 1999)

ensemble

Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes, 5–8 insts (Salzburg, 1676); ed. in DTÖ, cvi–cvii (1963)

Mensa sonora, seu Musica instrumentalis, vn, 2 va, vle, hpd (Salzburg, 1680); ed. in DTÖ, xcvi (1960)

Fidicinium sacro-profanum, 1/2 vn, 2 va, bc (Nuremberg, 1683); ed. in DTÖ, xcvi (1960)

Harmonia artificiosa-ariosa: diversi mode accordata, 1/2 vn, va, 2 va d’amore, bc (n.p., 1696; Nuremberg, 1712); ed. in DTÖ, xcii (1956)

Sonata, 6 tpt, timp, org, 1668, CZ-KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

Balletti lamentabili, vn, 2 va, bc, 1670, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxxvii (1976)

Sonata pro tabula, 5 rec, 2 vn, 2 va, org, c1670, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

2 Arien, vn, 2 va, vle, hpd, 1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxvii (1976)

Battalia (Sonata di marche), 3 vn, 4 va, 2 vle, hpd, 1673, KRa (facs. in Denkmäler der Musik in Salzburg, Faksimileausgaben, viii (Salzburg, 1999)); ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

Serenada, B, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, hpd, 1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxvii (1976)

Sonata S Polycarpi, 8 tpt, timp, vle, bc, 1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

Sonata, tpt, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, org, c1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

Balletti, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxvii (1976)

Balletti, 2 tpt, vn, 2 va, vle, hpd, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

3 Balletti, vn, 2 va, vle, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxvii (1976)

Sonata die pauern Kirchfartt genandt, vn solo, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc, c1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

Trombet undt musicalischer Taffeldienst, vn, 2 va, vle, hpd, c1673, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cxvii (1976)

Doubtful: Ballettae ad duos choros, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc, before 1670, KRa; ed. in DTÖ, cli (1997)

c100 works listed in inventories, lost

theoretical works

Singfundament, 1694, A-Sn

2. Attempts at classification.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Schneider: ‘Zu Bibers Violinsonaten’, ZIMG, viii (1906–7), 471–4

C. Schneider: ‘Franz Heinrich von Biber als Opernkomponist’, AMw, viii (1926), 281–347

C. Schneider: Geschichte der Musik in Salzburg von der ältesten Zeit bis zur Gegenwart (Salzburg, 1935/R)

P. Nettl: ‘Heinrich Franz Biber von Bibern’, SMw, xxiv (1960), 61–86

E. Dann: Heinrich Biber and the Seventeenth Century Violin (diss., Columbia U., 1968)

J. Sehnal: ‘Die Kompositionen Heinrich Bibers in Kremsier’, SPFFBU, H5 (1970), 21–35

S. Dahms: ‘Neues zur Chronologie der Opern von Biber und Moffat’, ÖMz, xxix (1974), 365–7

E. Hintermaier: ‘“Missa salisburgensis”: neue Erkenntnisse über Entstehung, Autor und Zweckbestimmung’, Musicologica austriaca, i (1977), 154–96

W. Jaksch: H.I.F. Biber, Requiem a 15: Untersuchungen zur höfischen, liturgischen und musikalischen Topik einer barocken Totenmesse (Munich, 1977)

W. Jaksch: ‘Missa salisburgensis; Neuzuschreibung der Salzburger Domweihmesse von O. Benevoli’,AMw, xxxv (1978), 239–50

E.T. Chafe: The Church Music of Heinrich Biber (Ann Arbor, 1987)

J. Sehnal: ‘Heinrich Bibers Beziehungen zu Kremsier’, De editione musices: Festschrift Gerhard Croll, ed. W. Gratzer and A. Lindmayr (Laaber, 1992), 315–27

E. Kubitschek: ‘Die “Sonatae à violino solo, Salzburg 1681” von Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’, Musik des 17. Jahrhunderts und Pavel Vejvanovský (Brno, 1994), 153–62

M. Lutz: ‘Die Sonata violino solo representativa von Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) und ihre musikalischen Vorbilder’, ibid., 193–200

S. Dahms: ‘Zu H.I.F. Bibers Oper “Chi la dura la vince”’, ÖMz, xlix (1994), 107–12

Heinrich Franz Biber, 1644–1704: Musik und Kultur im hochbarocken Salzburg, Studien und Quellen (Salzburg, 1994)

E. Hintermaier: ‘Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) und das Musikleben Salzburgs’, Barockberichte, nos.8–9 (1994), 265–73

E. Kubitschek: ‘H.I.F. Bibers Instrumentalschaffen’, ÖMz, xlix (1994), 97–105

E. Hintermaier: ‘Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern (1644–1704) und das Benediktinen-Frauenstift Nonnberg’, Deus caritas Jakob Mayr, ed. H. Paarhammer (Thaur, 1996), 207–31

G. Walterskirchen, ed.: Heinrich Franz Biber: Kirchen- und Instrumentalmusik (Salzburg, 1997)

J. Sehnal and J.Pešková: Caroli de Liechtenstein-Castelcorno episcopi Olomucensis operum artis musicae collectio Cremsirii reservata (Prague, 1998), 177–202

Biber von Bibern, Karl Heinrich

(b Salzburg, 4 Sept 1681; d Salzburg, 19 Nov 1749). Austrian composer, son of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. As the son of Salzburg’s dominant late 17th-century musical personality, Karl Heinrich’s career was by and large predetermined. By the age of 11 he had performed in at least two school dramas, Rex catholicus, seu Hermenegildus rex et martyr and Rex invictus, seu D. Wenceslaus, Bohemiae, rex et martyr, both with music by his father, and in 1704, the year of Heinrich’s death, Karl Heinrich travelled to Rome, presumably to study violin playing and composition; some years later he also visited Vienna. Biber was first appointed to the court music in 1704; promoted to deputy Kapellmeister in 1714, he succeeded Biechteler as Kapellmeister in 1743.

As a composer Biber wrote exclusively for the church. His sturdily crafted and traditionally contrapuntal works, however, made little impression in Salzburg; he was considered far less important a composer than his contemporary Biechteler. About 120 of Biber’s works survive in the Salzburg Cathedral archives, among them 20 masses, 18 litanies and vespers settings and 31 church sonatas (six ed. in Accademia musicale ii, iv, v, Mainz, 1969); a late 1780s catalogue of the cathedral holdings additionally lists 14 offertories, three Dixit and Magnificat settings, three Te Deum, eight Regina coeli, three Miserere and a Recessit et tenebrae. Biber also wrote a brief biography of his father (published in MatthesonGEP).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Senn: ‘Der Catalogus musicalis des Salzburger Doms (1788)’, MJb 1971–2, 182–96, esp. 190

E. Hintermaier: Die Salzburger Hofkapelle von 1700 bis 1806: Organisation und Personal (diss., U. of Salzburg, 1972), 29–32

E. Chafe: The Church Music of Heinrich Biber (Ann Arbor, 1987), 71–7

CLIFF EISEN

Bibiena [Bibbiena].

See Galli-Bibiena family.

Biblical instruments.

The various musical instruments mentioned in the Bible (Old and New Testaments). The nature and significance of the biblical instruments has been the subject of considerable discussion from the early Middle Ages onwards. The following article focusses on the meaning of the words as they appear in the original languages of the various biblical texts (Heb., Aramaic, Gk.), using archaeological evidence and other literary sources to establish as far as possible the identity of the individual terms; it also addresses the interpretation of other musical terminology in the Bible. (See also Jewish music, §II.)

References to particular biblical passages follow the Revised Standard Version and the abbreviation IAA is used for the Israel Antiquities Authority.

1. The problem.

3. Old Testament instruments.

4. New Testament instruments.

JOACHIM BRAUN

1. The problem.

The controversy surrounding the identity and significance of the ‘biblical instruments’ derives from the complexity of the original source. Even the term itself is ambiguous, since it may denote the instruments of the period described by any given text of the Bible, those of the period and environment in which the written tradition originated, or those that have remained in the memory of society from a certain stage of the oral tradition. Furthermore, should a reference to an instrument be regarded as a theological symbol or a historical document? Must it be placed in the relevant context by archaeological finds before it may be regarded as concrete fact? It is possible to discuss the subject only if an interdisciplinary approach is adopted involving ‘new and processual archaeology’, recent studies of the Pentateuch, and modern archaeomusicology. Although the organological information provided by the biblical texts themselves is scanty, the social and symbolic context of the music can often be established quite precisely (see Kolari, 1947).

Study of the significance, closeness to reality and symbolism of biblical musical instruments goes back to the first translations of the authentic text from its original language of Hebrew. Even the Septuagint, the Peshitta (Syriac translation), the Targum (Aramaic translation) and the Vulgate provide evidence of uncertainty on the part of the earliest translators: for example, kinnor and ‘uġav (Genesis iv.21) are translated in the Septuagint as psaltirion and kithara, in the Peshitta as kinnora and zimara, in the Targum as kinnora and ‘abbuba and in the Vulgate as cithara and organo. Various different translations are also given for the same instrument within these languages: for instance, kinnor appears in the Septuagint as kithara, kinira, psalterion and organon. The interpretation of nebel as ‘harp’, now refuted by archaeological evidence, is partly based on confusing translations of this kind. The etymology of the names of instruments, however, may be helpful in identification: the derivation of kinnor from the root knr, for instance, clearly indicates that it is an instrument of the lyre type (Ellermeier, 1970). Comparative approaches – textual, etymological, archaeological and ethnological – often complement and elucidate questions of biblical organology.

Secondary sources such as the post-biblical scriptures (the Mishnah, and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds), the Apocrypha, the Qumran scrolls (1QM, 1QS), the writings of Jewish authors in the Roman period (Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria) and of the Church Fathers (see McKinnon, 1987) – may also be used in biblical interpretation. The Middle Ages regarded the range of musical instruments that features in the Bible as allegorical: musica practica was ignored, and scientia musicae studied only for the theological significance of the instruments.

Modern biblical organology begins with two works that appeared at almost the same time, one by a Jewish author (Portaleone, 1612) and one by a Christian (PraetoriusSM, 1614–19/R). The former refers to contemporary instruments for the interpretation of the biblical text; the latter bases its discussion exclusively on textual material, on the grounds that there were no relevant musical antiquities in Israel/Palestine (vol.ii, f.4), a claim still being made as late as NOHM (Kraeling and Mowry, 1960, p.295). Since Praetorius, scarcely a work of general historical musicology has been written that does not include a chapter on biblical instruments. In the 17th and 18th centuries the landmarks on the subject were the writings of Hawkins (1776), Pfeiffer (1779) and Forkel (1788). From the 19th century to the early 20th, biblical organology was concentrated on Jewish antiquity studies (Jahn, 1817; Saalschütz, 1829; Wellhausen, 1898) but reached its peak in the work of Engel (1864), who emphasized the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach. With Sachs (1940), biblical musicology entered a new era. Although his work has not lost its importance, the outmoded equation of biblical texts with the musical history of ancient Israel/Palestine is dominant in Sachs and indeed in some writers up to the present day (Kraeling and Mowry, 1960; Sendrey, 1969; Werner, Grove6, and 1989; Seidel, 1989). The first study devoted to the archaeomusicological finds of ancient Israel/Palestine was Sellers, 1941. A series of studies from the second half of the 20th century (Bayer, 1963, 1968, and 1971; Keel, 1972; Beck, 1982; Mazar, 1976; Meshorer, 1982; Meyers, 1987; Braun, 1994, and 1999) consider archaeology to be the primary source for studying the musical instruments of ancient Israel/Palestine.

2. Attempts at classification.

The text of the Old Testament suggests the possibility that there was an internal (‘culture-emerging/natural’, Kartomi, 1990) classification of biblical instruments, although it remains difficult to prove for certain. For example, the musical instruments of the priests (hasoserah) and the Levite guilds of musicians (kinnor, nebel, mesiltayim) appear as a group in Chronicles (1 Chronicles xvi.5–6). Gerson-Kiwi (1957), for instance, used such evidence to distinguish between ‘les instruments “sacerdotaux”’ (shofar, hasoserah), ‘les instruments lévitiques’ (kinnor, nebel) and ‘les instruments “laics”’ (‘uġav, halil, abuv, magrefah; the last is no longer considered to have been a musical instrument). Avenary (1958) attempted a socio-historical classification: magic sound-generating items of the Nomadic Period (shofar, hasoserah, mesiltayim); art music instruments of urban cultures (kinnor, nebel, halil); and Temple instruments (shofar, hasoserah, halil, kinnor, nebel, mesiltayim). Sachs (1940) preferred a classification based on the sequence of references to individual instruments in the Old Testament. The greater part of the literature on this subject is based on artificial patterns rooted in the contemporary musical culture of period in which it was written (‘observer-imposed/artificial’, Kartomi, 1990). The earliest such classifications are found in Portaleone as instruments designated as suitable and unsuitable for art music, and in PraetoriusSM as musical instruments mentioned in the texts of the Psalms, string instruments, cymbals and so on. Since Pfeiffer (1779) and Forkel (1788) a tripartite division into string, wind and percussion instruments has been accepted, and more recently has been equated with the Hornbostel and Sachs classification of 1914.

An internal classification clearly appears in the New Testament: the salpinx and kithara, both of which are identified with the voice of God, are sacred symbols, while the aulos and cymbals are secular instruments.

(vi) Mesiltayim and selselim

3. Old Testament instruments.

(xiii) The instruments of ‘Daniel’

(xiv) Collective terms

(xv) The terminology of the ‘Psalms’, and unexplained terms.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(i) ‘Asei beroshim

(2 Samuel vi.5).

This instrument (pl. of ‘es berosh: ‘cypress tree’) is mentioned only once in the Bible (bekhol ‘asei beroshim: ‘all manner of instruments made of fir wood’); in the parallel passage (1 Chronicles xiii.8) it is replaced by the phrase bekhol-’oz uvshirim (‘with all their might, with song’), apparently to evade the instrument's secular and orgiastic aspect. Modern studies interpret it as a cypress-wood clapper (Avenary, MGG1). Evidence exists for the use of bone clappers in the shape of the head of the goddess Hathor in Canaan in the late Bronze Age, and it is probable that clappers made of the widespread local cypress were used for ritual and pararitual mass events during the period of the Kings (10th–8th centuries bce).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(ii) Halil

(1 Samuel x.5. 1 Kings i.40. Isaiah v.12; xxx.29. Jeremiah xlviii.36).

The root word hll (‘to hollow out’ or ‘to bore through’) is widely distributed throughout the Semitic language area (Gesenius, 17/1921, p.233b). The word also means ‘profane’, ‘reprehensible’ (Köhler, Baumgartner and Stamm, 1967–90, i, 305), and in the Old Testament usually signifies ‘to desecrate’ or ‘to profane’ (Botterweck, 1973–, iii, 972 and 981–2). The Septuagint translates it as aulos, the Vulgate as tibia, but the Peshitta and Targum present a very confused picture, variously making it a drum, cymbals, a string or wind instrument. Modern editions of the Bible usually translate it as ‘flute’, although the Septuagint and Vulgate provide grounds for interpreting it as a double- or single-reed instrument. The talmudic literature confirms this viewpoint (Mishnah, ‘Arakhin ii.3), and modern musicology is inclined to accept the interpretation (Sachs, 1940; Bayer, 1968; Marcuse, 1975). Other scholars, supported by the Jerusalem Talmud (Sukkah 55b), prefer to see the word as a collective term for wind instruments (Gerson-Kiwi, 1957; Sendrey, 1969).

The halil is mentioned as being played at rejoicings for the anointing of the king (1 Kings i.40), at victory celebrations (Isaiah xxx.29) and in connection with prophetic ecstasy (1 Samuel x.5), but it is also a symbol of lamentation (Jeremiah xlviii.36) and an instrument of sinners (Isaiah v.12). The talmudic texts indicate that the halil was made of reed (Mishnah, ‘Arakhin ii.3) or bone (Mishnah, Kelim iii.6). Sometimes it was plated with copper or bronze, as is confirmed by archaeological finds from the Romano/Hellenistic Period, but this new technique was opposed by the religious establishment on the grounds that the halil then lost its sweetness of tone (Babylonian Talmud, ‘Arakhin 10b). The only Iron Age wind instrument in ancient Israel/Palestine for which archaeological evidence exists is the double reedpipe (fig.1), which is usually interpreted as an instrument of the clarinet or oboe type.

According to the Jerusalem Talmud, the halil was played before the altar on only 12 days in the year (Sukkah 55a) and the Temple orchestra was to contain no less than two and no more than 12 such instruments (Mishnah, ‘Arakhin ii.3). This, however, contradicts the Old Testament texts where none of the five passages where the halil is mentioned relates to liturgical or Temple music. It was often used on paraliturgical and secular occasions: an offering of fruits (Mishnah, Bikkurim iii.3–4; see Jewish music, §II, fig.13), at festivals of pilgrimage or rejoicing (Mishnah, ‘Arakhin ii.3), and at funerals (Mishnah, Ketubbot iv.4: ‘even the poorest man in Israel shall have no less than two halilim and a female mourner at his wife's funeral’). Archaeological and written sources confirm that the halil was an ecstatic and orgiastic instrument. The dualism whereby the halil is an instrument of both the Temple and sinners, of joy and lamentation alike, has been characteristic from ancient times to the present day (Avenary, 1971).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(iii) Hasoserah

(Numbers x.2 and 8–10; xxxi.6. 2 Kings xi.14; xii.13. Hosea v.8. Psalms xcviii.6. Ezra iii.10. Nehemiah xii.35 and 41. 1 Chronicles xiii.8; xv.24 and 28; xvi.6 and 42. 2 Chronicles v.12–13; xiii.12 and 14; xv.14; xx.28; xxiii.13; xxix.26–8).

The term, for which no clear etymology is known, is possibly linked to the Arabic verb hsr (‘to howl’, ‘to scream’). Translated in the Septuagint as salpinx and in the Vulgate as tuba, the hasoserah is generally understood to be a metal trumpet.

The hasoserah appears in the books written before the Babylonian Exile as an instrument of war and rejoicing, and was played by the people. After the Exile the instrument assumed a ritual and priestly status in the Temple (2 Kings xii.14), but was also played at assemblies of the community (Numbers x.2), on feast days (Numbers x.10), when the Ark was borne in procession (1 Chronicles xv.25), at the taking of an oath (2 Chronicles xv.14), in war (Numbers x.2), and on such solemn occasions as the king's accession to the throne (2 Chronicles xxiii.13) and the laying of the foundation stone of the Temple (Ezra iii.10). Two forms of sound production are mentioned (Numbers x.1–7): teqi‘ah, a long, strong note (for ‘the journeying of the camps’ and the assembly of army leaders); and teru‘ah, a blaring tone for an alarm warning of enemy attack or divine admonition.

This is the only instrument whose construction and material are mentioned in any real detail in the Old Testament: it was to be made of hammered silver (Numbers x.2), about an ell (40 cm) in length, with a narrow tube and a broad bell (Josephus, iii.12, 6; fig.2). The two pieces of archaeological evidence most frequently cited – the depictions of trumpets on the Arch of Titus in Rome and the Bar Kokhba coinage, however are not reliable sources. The widespread hypothesis that the hasoserah derived from such Egyptian instruments as the pair of trumpets found in the tomb of Tutankhamun has not been proven. Consequently, a Graeco-Roman or Philistine-Phoenician provenance should not be ruled out.

The Old Testament, and more particularly the post-biblical literature (Mishnah, Rosh ha-shanah iii.3) and the apocalyptic Qumran scroll ‘The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness’ (1QM ii.15–iii.11 and vii.1–ix.9), illustrate the many everyday, ritual and warlike functions of the hasoserah (Seidel, 1956–7). Here the signals of the hasoserah are further subdivided, for instance as a ‘long, drawn-out tone’, a ‘sharp, blaring tone’, and a ‘great warlike noise’. The instruments themselves had inscriptions engraved on them, probably invocations and descriptions of their functions (e.g. ‘called by God’, ‘trumpet of summons’, ‘trumpet of pursuit’). The shofar and hasoserah have often been confused in the interpretation of their significance and symbolism. Although there is a certain continuity in the function and symbolism of both instruments, the hasoserah was both a ritual instrument and a symbol of sanctioned and institutionalized secular autocratic power, while the shofar, had from ancient times been an instrument with magic and mystical theophanic connotations.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(iv) Kinnor

(Genesis iv.21; xxxi.27. 1 Samuel x.5; xvi.16 and 23. 2 Samuel vi.5. 1 Kings x.12. Isaiah v.12; xvi.11; xxiii.16; xxiv.8; xxx.32. Ezekiel xxvi.13. Psalms xxxiii.2; xliii.4; xlix.4; lvii.8; lxxi.22; lxxxi.2; xcii.3; xcviii.5; cviii.2; cxxxvii.2; cxlvii.7; cl.3. Job xxi.12; xxx.31. Nehemiah xii.27. 1 Chronicles xiii.8; xv.16, 21 and 28; xvi.5; xxv.1, 3 and 6. 2 Chronicles v.12; ix.11; xx.28; xxix.25).

The kinnor is a central organological concept in the Old Testament. As a ‘cultural word that cannot be limited to a linguistic and geographical area … a word the origins of which cannot yet be defined’ (Botterweck, 1973–, iv, 212), the term appears in literary sources long before the Old Testament was written: kinaratim (pl. of kinaru: ‘lyre’) – are first mentioned in a document of the 18th century bce found at Mari (now Tell Hariri, Iraq; Ellermeier, 1970). The root knr appears in Canaanite, Phoenician and Cypriot names of deities (Kinyras, Kinnaras, Kuthar), in the Akkadian and Ugaritic languages (kinaru), in place names (Kinneret, i.e. the Sea of Galilee, Numbers xxxiv.11), as a description of wood (kunar: ‘lotus wood’) and as a Semitic loan word in the New Kingdom of Egypt (knwrw: ‘lyre’).

The kinnor was unusually versatile in its functions: in the first biblical mention of musical instruments (Genesis iv.21) it is a symbol of professional activity, and thereafter appears at festivals of rejoicing (Genesis xxxi.27), at times of mourning (Job xxx.31), in connection with magical cures (1 Samuel xvi.16) and prophecy (1 Samuel x.5), and played in praise of God (Psalm xliii.4) as well as by harlots (Isaiah xxiii.16). Although the Septuagint and the Vulgate show uncertainty regarding the translation of the term (see above, §1), and despite the centuries-old tradition of depicting, both in writing and iconography, the kinnor as the ‘harp of David’, modern scholars are in no doubt that the instrument was in fact a lyre. In the time of Solomon (c974–c937) ‘almug’ wood (perhaps sandalwood) was imported to Israel/Palestine from Lebanon and used in the making of string instruments (1 Kings x.11–12). Josephus (viii.3.8) mentions electrum, an alloy of gold and silver used for making the kinnor. Post-biblical literature provides information about the number of strings (ten in Josephus, vii.12.3; six in Jerome, PL xxvi, 969; seven in the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Arakhin 13b). All sources agree that the kinnor had fewer strings than the nebel (Josephus, op.cit.; Jerusalem Talmud, Sukkah 55c). As a rule the kinnor was played with a plectrum (Josephus, op.cit.). It was struck with the hand only in order to achieve special expressive force in therapeutic treatment (1 Samuel xvi.23).

The identification of the kinnor as a lyre is confirmed by archaeological evidence: more than 30 depictions of lyres date from the period relevant to the biblical scriptures in ancient Israel/Palestine, while not a single find has been discovered relating to any other kind of string instrument. Depictions of lyres fall into four types: large asymmetrical box lyres with divergent side arms and a rectangular resonator (fig.3; see also Jewish music, §II, fig.5 and fig.7), asymmetrical lyres with parallel side arms and a rectangular resonator (Braun, MGG2, ‘Biblische Musikinstrumente’, Tafel 2, no.6), small symmetrical lyres with a round or rectangular resonator (ibid., no.11), and Hellenistic-Roman symmetrical lyres with rounded, horn-shaped side arms (fig.4). Important evidence for the Judaean kinnor also comes from Assyria, where a relief showing captive Judaean lyre players from Lakhish (701 bce; see Jewish music, §II, fig.8) was discovered at Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh.

Although all Middle Eastern lyres were clearly related (Lawergren, 1998; see Lyre (i), §2), the lyres of ancient Israel/Palestine constitute a distinct group within southern Levantine musical culture (see Dever, 1997) with regard to both social context and performing practice. Confirmed by iconographic sources and textual evidence, the social functions of the kinnor ranged from pagan ritual dance and the worship of Cybele to Canaanite and Israelite victory celebrations, and from its use in Judaean worship to its status as an attribute of Dionysus.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(v) Mena‘ane‘im

(2 Samuel vi.5).

Mentioned a single time in the Bible, this term is known only in the plural and is derived from the verb ni‘ana‘ (‘to shake’). Like the ‘asei beroshim (see above, §3(i)) the instrument has been omitted from the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles xiii.8. The Septuagint and Vulgate agree that it is an idiophone (kimbalon or sistra) and various interpretations have been suggested, but Bayer's identification of it (1964) as a pottery rattle is the most convincing. To date archaeological finds have provided over 70 intact specimens of such percussion instruments of Israelite/Palestinian origin (fig.5). Most have been found in tombs and can be regarded as ritual instruments.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(vi) Mesiltayim and selselim

(Mesiltayim: Ezra iii.10. Nehemiah xii.27. 1 Chronicles xiii.8; xv.16, 19 and 28; xvi.5 and 42; xxv.1 and 6. 2 Chronicles v.12–13; xxix.25. Selselim: 2 Samuel vi.5. Psalms cl.5).

Onomatopoeic in nature (from Heb. slsl: ‘to clink’, ‘to jingle’), the word mesiltayim (an idiomatic Hebrew dual form) appears only in the post-Exile books of the Old Testament. All written sources confirm the interpretation of the instrument as cymbals (kimbalon in the Septuagint, cymbala in the Vulgate, mzlt in Ugaritic – a dual form). The function of the mesiltayim was that of a ceremonial cult instrument. In the Bible, it is never performed by women, but is a guild instrument of the Levites (Ezra iii.10; 1 Chronicles xv.19), played together with other ritual instruments to accompany exclusively religious occasions (e.g. the dedication of the Temple in 2 Chronicles v.13; an expiatory sacrifice in 2 Chronicles xxix.25). Two texts give a description of the instrument: made of copper with a bright sound (1 Chronicles xv.19); and ‘of metal, large and broad’ (Josephus, vii.12.3).

The selselim (pl.), possibly a metal rattling instrument, appear in the Old Testament long before mesiltayim in a scene imbued with pagan frenzy and describing the carrying of the Ark in procession (2 Samuel vi.5); the institutional mesiltayim replaces it in the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles xiii.8. The instruments are also called silselei-shama‘ (‘sounding selselim’) and silselei teru‘ah (‘clashing selselim’) in the context of a paraliturgical mass ceremony of a syncretic nature (Psalm cl.5).

There is a great deal of archaeological evidence for cymbals: at least 28 finds, with diameters of 7–12 and 3–6 cm, have been discovered in 14 cities of ancient Israel/Palestine. The two sizes of these cymbals may correspond to the two descriptions of the selselim in the Psalms (see above). They are slightly vaulted discs with a small metal loop at the centre (fig.6) and give a loud and resonant sound. Such finds fall into two chronological groups: one from the late Canaanite period (14th–12th centuries bce) and the other from the late Hellenistic-Roman period (1st century bce – 3rd century ce). At present it is difficult to explain this wide archaeological gap; it is possible that the references in the Bible to cymbals in the service of God and the Temple are later interpolations.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(vii) Nebel

(1 Samuel x.5. 2 Samuel vi.5. 1 Kings x.12. Isaiah v.12; xiv.11. Amos v.23; vi.5. Psalms lvii.8; lxx.22; lxxxi.2; xcii.3; cviii.2; cl.3. Nehemiah xii.27. 1 Chronicles xiii.8; xv.16, 20 and 28; xvi.5; xxv.1 and 6. 2 Chronicles v.12; ix.11; xx.28; xxix.25. Nebel ‘asor: Psalms xxxiii.2; xcii.3; cxliv.9).

The root nbl can be vocalized in two ways, nabal and nebel (Heb. and Akkadian nabal: ‘ritually unclean’, ‘godless’, ‘a rogue’, ‘a carcass’; Heb., Ugaritic and Syrian nebel: ‘pitcher’, ‘leather bag to contain liquids’, ‘string instrument’; Botterweck, 1973–, v, 185). The word is clearly of Semitic or Phoenician origin (Botterweck, 1973–, v, 186), which may indicate a local origin for this instrument. The translations given in the Septuagint and Vulgate are not consistent (nabla, psaltiron, organon, kinira, lyra, kithara).

The function of the nebel was similar to that of the kinnor (see above, fig.4b; significantly, the two instruments are nearly always mentioned together). A Levite guild instrument (1 Chronicles xv.16), it was played when the Ark was carried in procession (2 Samuel vi.5), at the dedication of the wall (Nehemiah xii.27), at victory celebrations (2 Chronicles xx.28) and as an accompaniment to prophecy (1 Samuel x.5). However, it was also an instrument of the hostile royal power of Babylon and associated with sacrilege (Isaiah v.12). It resembled the kinnor in being made of the wood of ‘almug trees’ (1 Kings x.12).

Unlike the kinnor, the nebel seems to have had 12 strings and was played with the fingers (Josephus, vii.12.3) rather than a plectrum. The Mishnah limits the numbers of nebel instruments used in divine worship (two to six) by comparision with the numbers of kinnor instruments (no less than nine, and with no upward limit; Mishnah, ‘Arakhin ii.5). The strings of the nebel were made of thick gut and those of the kinnor of thin gut (Mishnah, Qinnim iii.6); the sound of the nebel could be loud and noisy (Isaiah xiv.11). Although the instrument has been widely interpreted as a harp, this theory is not supported by archaeological finds as there is no evidence for any pre-Hellenistic harps in the territory of ancient Israel/Palestine. In the present state of research, the hypothesis put foward by Bayer (1968) is convicing: the nebel was a local form of lyre that underwent very little Hellenization, and had a resonator resembling the kind of leather bag used to hold fluids; it produced a loud sound, had more and thicker strings than the kinnor, was played without a plectrum and served as a tenor or bass instrument. The depiction of lyres on the Bar Kokhba coinage may be taken as iconographic evidence (see above, fig.4b). Recently, a crucial proof of the interpretation of the biblical nebel as a lyre has come to light: a stone carving of the Roman period was discovered at Dion in Greece, showing the first instance of text and image side by side: a relief of a lyre next to the carved wording of a hymn of praise on the nabla (see Pandermalis, 1998; Yannou and others, 1998, p.80).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(viii) Pa‘amon

(Exodus xxviii.33–4; xxxix.25–6).

The Semitic root p‘m (Ugaritic, Phoenician, Heb.), meaning ‘foot’ or ‘step’, occurs frequently in Old Testament words, although less often with the sense of ‘to strike’, ‘make resound’ on which the identification of this instrument as a bell depends (Kolari, 1947). Translated in the Septuagint as kobon and in the Vulgate as tintinnabulum, these jingles and bells are mentioned in connection with the high priest's purple robe. The sound of the delicate little golden bells (Josephus, iii.7.4) ‘shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and when he comes out, lest he die’ (Exodus xxviii.35). Iconographic evidence dating from Assyria in the 15th century bce shows the use of little bells on priestly garments. The earliest finds of bells from ancient Israel/Palestine date from the 9th–8th centuries bce, and from this period onwards these instruments were an indispensable component of the musical sound of the area (fig.7). The Old Testament suggests that even in later centuries they had a prominent symbolic and protective function, sometimes being mentioned as items used in rites of exorcism. Archaeological finds confirm that bells were attached to cloth (see Braun, MGG2, ‘Biblische Musikinstrumente’, Abb.8b), and recently a depiction of bells on the robe of Aaron was discovered in a mosaic from the Sepphoris synagogue (5th century ce; Weiss and Netzer, 1996, p.20).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(ix) Qeren ha-yovel

(Joshua vi.5).

The Hebrew term qeren (‘animal's horn’) occurs only once in the sense of a musical instrument: in the mythical tale of the destruction of the Wall of Jericho at the blowing of the qeren ha-yovel (ram's horn). Indistinguishable in practice from the shofar ha-yovel. Its semantic field is amplified by the term yovel (‘jubilee’, ‘leader’).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(x) Shofar

(Exodus xix.16 and 19; xx.18. Leviticus xv.9. Joshua vi.4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 16 and 20. Judges iii.27; vi.34; vii.8, 16, 18–20 and 22. 1 Samuel xiii.3. 2 Samuel ii.28; vi.15; xv.10; xviii.16; xx.1 and 22. 1 Kings i.34, 39 and 41. 2 Kings ix.13. Isaiah xviii.3; xxvii.13; lviii.1. Jeremiah iv.5, 19 and 21; vi.1 and 17; xlii.14; li.27. Ezekiel xxxiii.3–6. Hosea v.8; viii.1. Joel ii.1 and 15. Amos ii.2; iii.6. Zephaniah i.16. Zechariah ix.14. Psalms xlvii.5; lxxxi.3; xcviii.6; cl.3. Job xxxix.24–5. Nehemiah iv.18 and 20. 1 Chronicles xv.28. 2 Chronicles xv.14. Shoferot ha-yovelim: Joshua vi.4, 6, 8 and 13).

The shofar, mentioned more frequently than any other instrument in the Old Testament, is the only one to have retained its place unaltered in the Jewish liturgy from biblical times to the present day. The etymology of the word (Akkadian sapparu; West Sumerian SEG.BAR: ‘goat's horn’) is not clear (Köhler, Baumgartner and Stamm, 1967–90, iv, 1343). The instrument is recognized to be the horn of a goat or a ram, and translations such as salpinx (the Septuagint), tuba (the Vulgate) and such modern renderings as ‘trumpet’ are misunderstandings. Typologically, shoferot ha-yovelim (pl.) are the same as the shofar (see above, §3(ix)).

Details of the instrument's construction are known only from post-biblical writings, mainly the tracts of the Talmud (Mishnah, Rosh ha-shanah; Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath). Two forms of the shofar are mentioned: a straight horn with a bell (piyyah) covered in gold and played at the New Year (Rosh hashanah), and a curved horn with a bell covered in silver for festive occasions (Mishnah, Rosh ha-shanah iii.3–4). Pictorial representations from the Roman period show a separate mouthpiece. In making the instrument the utmost care was taken to preserve its natural tone (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh ha-shanah 27a–b).

Iconographic evidence of natural horns in the Middle East dates back to the 2nd millennium bce. In the Israelite and Judaean contexts, depictions of the shofar do not appear before the Roman period, and then only in the context of a group of Jewish symbols, supplemented first by the menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) and the mahtah (a small incense scoop), later by the lulav and etrog (palm branch and citrus fruit). This symbolic group may be found as an architectural element (mosaic floors in synagogues – fig.8 – and public buildings, on pedestals, sarcophagi and tombstones) and on such small items as oil lamps, seals and amulets. A survey of these finds shows that it was a symbol of ethnic and national identity used in both sacred and secular contexts (Braun, 1999, Abb.V/8).

The two to three notes (with 2nd and 3rd overtones) produced by the shofar have an alarming tremolo horn sound described in the Old Testament as qol (‘voice’), teqi‘ah (‘blowing of the trumpet’), teru‘ah (‘rejoicing’) and yevavah (‘sobbing’, ‘groaning’). The Mishnah describes the notes as long, short, calm and agitated; the Qumran Scroll of War speaks of the ‘great noise of war’ (1QM viii.10). Rabbinical writings of around the 4th century employ the terms teqi‘ah (‘long tone’), teru‘ah (‘agitated’ or ‘tremolo tone’) and shevarim (‘broken tone’; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh ha-shanah xxxiii.2). The Talmud gives information about the three kinds of signals: ‘The order of the blowing of the trumpet is by three times three. The length of the teqi‘ah is like three teru‘ot (pl. of teru‘ah). The length of the teru‘ah is like three yevavot … ’ or shevarim (Mishnah, Rosh ha-shanah iv.9). Sachs (1940, p.110) sees a relationship with the modus perfectum of the Middle Ages here. Some idea of the shofar signals of the Roman period may be gleaned from the oldest known depictions of a shofar signal in the prayer book of Sa‘adyah Gaon (10th century; fig.9) and the 13th-century Adler Codex (USA-NYjts 932, f.21b; see MGG2, ‘Biblische Musikinstrumente’, Abb.10). Modern shofar signals in synagogues correspond to these written sources (ex.1).

In the Old Testament the shofar is mentioned in both sacred and secular contexts: as the omen of transcendental powers (Exodus xix.13), at Yom kippur (Day of Atonement; Leviticus xv.9), at the festival of the new moon (Psalm lxxxi.3), on a day of penitence (Joel ii.1), at the carrying of the Ark in procession (2 Samuel vi.15), in war (Judges iii.27; Joshua vi.4), at victory celebrations (1 Samuel xiii.3) and during a coup d'état at court (2 Samuel xv.10). The dual function of the shofar as an instrument of communication and of divine worship may be followed in the Old Testament; the former function came to an end with the destruction of the Second Temple (70 ce) and the beginning of the Exile, the latter continues to the present day. In Israel the shofar is sometimes blown at state or secular political events

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(xi) Tof

(Genesis xxxi.27. Exodus xv.20. Judges xi.34. 1 Samuel x.5; xviii.6. 2 Samuel vi.5. Isaiah v.12; xxiv.8; xxx.32. Jeremiah xxxi.4. Psalms lxviii.25; lxxxi.2; cxlix.3; cl.4. Job xxi.12. 1 Chronicles xiii.8).

The Ugaritic word tp (‘drum’, recorded in the 14th century bce), probably onomatopoeic in origin, is a widely distributed root and verbum denominatum (drum–drummer–to drum) found in almost all Middle Eastern languages, from the Sumerian DUB and Akkadian dadpu to the Egyptian tbu and Arabic daff (see Köhler, Baumgartner and Stamm, 1967–90). Translated as timpanon in the Septuagint and as tympanum in the Vulgate, tof (pl. tupim) is generally understood to be a drum.

The tof was usually played by women (Judges xi.34; Jeremiah xxxi.4; Psalm lxviii.25). A classic example is the women's dance with tof and singing after the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus xv.20), a tradition preserved to this day among Yemenite women of Jewish descent. The solo drum was played only by women, but when combined in an ensemble with other instruments could be struck by men as well. Although it is never mentioned as part of the music of the Temple, the tof was always played for ritual dances (Exodus xv.20; 1 Samuel xvii.6 etc.), for paraliturgical songs of praise (Psalm cl.4), at festivals (Psalm lxxxi.2) and processions (2 Samuel vi.5). In Psalm lxviii.25 the position of the women players of the tof at liturgical processions is described: the singers went first, followed by the women drummers, with all the other instrumentalists bringing up the rear. The secular function of the tof as an instrument of joy (Genesis xxxi.27) and ecstasy (1 Samuel x.5) seems to belong to an older tradition.

The tof is usually described as a round wooden frame drum with a diameter of 25–30 cm, without any attached jingles. However, other forms of drum (hourglass and rectangular drums) might also have been used. The Mishnah (Qinnim iii.6) indicates that the material of the head of the drum was ram's leather. Archaeological finds of round frame drums from ancient Israel/Palestine are uniform in structure, and appear as a distinct iconographic subject particular to the region in two types of pottery: (a) a statue of a female form in a long dress without any ornamentation, holding her drum upright against her breast, and (b) the relief of a half-naked female form, richly ornamented, wearing a head-dress or wig and holding the membrane of the drum flat against her breast (fig.10).

The synthesis of the sacred and the secular in these figures reflects the situation as it appears in the Old Testament texts: they may be domestic icons or amulets (cf terafim, Genesis xxxi.19), but attempts at interpretation have ranged from identifying them as deities to supposing that they were toys (Winter, 1983, p.127; Meyers, 1987). As in many other ancient musical cultures, in the Old Testament the drum functions as a sexual symbol: in Judges xi.34, Jephthah's daughter mourns her virginity by playing the drum. The eroticism of the naked female forms of the Israelite period is clear, and conflicts with the official orthodox faith of the time. In later books of the Old Testament the sexual aspect is sublimated in the metaphor of the ‘virgin of Israel’: ‘O virgin Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with timbrels’ (Jeremiah xxxi.4).

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(xii) ‘Uġav

(Genesis iv.21. Psalms cl.4. Job xxi.12; xxx.31).

The name of this instrument is controversial, and its etymology has not been entirely explained. The root ‘gv is related to the Hebrew and Arabic ‘agava: ‘the ecstasy of love’, ‘sensual longing’, ‘desire’ (see also Ezekiel xxiii.5; Köhler, Baumgartner and Stamm, 1967–90, iii, 740). As early as the Septuagint and the Peshitta, translations are inconsistent (see above, §1). The Targum, however, which gives abbuba (double- or single-reed instrument) and the Vulgate, with organum, are clearer. The possibility that a banned instrument was disguised in translation should not be excluded.

The ‘uġav appears in the very first mention of musical instruments in the Bible (Genesis iv.21), and only three times thereafter: as an instrument of mourning; as a sacrilegious instrument played outside the Temple; and associated with the tof and dancing in the doxology of the Psalms. In the Hebrew variant of the apocryphal Psalm cli (1st century ce), which links an Orphaic and a Christian David – the instrument maker – with the kinnor and ‘uġav, the meaning of ‘organ’ given to the ‘uġav seems plausible. Iconographical evidence confirms the existence of this instrument during the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce in ancient Israel/Palestine, and the ‘uġav is also interpreted as a ‘hydraulis’ in the Jerusalem Talmud (Sukkah 55c). In the Aramaic of the Targum, the ‘uġav is equated with the abuva, the instrument of the Roman ambubiae – prostitutes who performed music (Horace, Satires i.2.1). In the Mishnah (‘Arakhin ii.3) the abuva is equated with the halil.

Interpretations of the word ‘uġav range from a term denoting a musical instrument in general to identification as a pipe, bagpipe, lute or harp, none of which can be supported on either historical or etymological grounds. Sachs (1940, p.106) offers what is currently the only plausible interpretation: the onomatopoeic effect of the word (u-u), typical of flutes, and the connotations of love attached to the instrument suggest that it was a long end-blown flute of the kind found in neighbouring cultures (the ma’tof Egypt and the Sumerian TI.GI), and later distributed over a wide area of Israel/Palestine as the nāy.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(xiii) The instruments of ‘Daniel’

(Daniel iii.5, 7, 10 and 15).

The Book of Daniel (written 167–164 bce) contains a recurring phrase listing a group of musical instruments, often called the ‘Nebuchadnezzar orchestra’, whose playing served as a signal for the worship of an idol to begin. This part of the text is written in Aramaic, and the names of the musical instruments are given in a mixture of Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew.

Qarna derives from qeren (Heb.: ‘natural horn’), although a metal or pottery trumpet is more likely in the Babylonian kingdom. The mashroqita, from the Hebrew root shrq (‘to pipe’), was often used for apotropaic effects and at the mass events described in Daniel iii; it should most likely be identified with a tongued instrument (of the zmr type). The qaytros (from Gk. kithara) belongs to the tradition of Babylonian military bands (lyres accompanied by drums and cymbals) and could have suited a mass ceremony of adoration. Sabbekha is a term of Greek origin (cognate with Gk. sambukē); its etymology indicates a Phoenician provenance. Although this instrument is often identified as a lyre, Sachs's suggestion that it was a vertically-held angular harp (1940, p.84) seems better founded: there are written mentions of a type of harp of Phoenician origin in ancient Palestine (sambucinae of the whores; McKinnon, 1987, p.50). The pesanterin, from Greek psaltyrion, has been seen as deriving from an ancient Greek harp-type instrument (Sachs, 1940, p.83), although Kolari (1947, p.78) suggests that it was possibly a zither. Sumponyah is a much disputed term from the Greek, interpreted mainly as a bagpipe until the middle of the 20th century, but since Sachs (1940, p.84) it has been generally understood as a term meaning ‘the whole ensemble’; Mitchel and Joyce (1965, p.56), however, suggest it refers to a drum.

The phrase ve-khol zenei zemara, which occurs at the end of the recurring passage, is translated as ‘all kinds of music’. Kol zenei means literally ‘all kinds’, while zemara, from the Akkadian root zmr, is a widely distributed term in the Middle East and appears in the Old Testament in the sense of musicians, singers, song of praise, singing and instrumental playing, in particular of wind instruments (the last-named on the basis of a single find combining text and image from ancient Palestine in the Roman period; see Braun, 1999, Abb.V/3), allowing a strict translation of the verse from Daniel as ‘the whole ensemble, and other kinds of singing/songs of praise with instrumental music’.

The author of Daniel was describing a distinctively Seleucid group of musicians, and these are the only names of musical instruments in the Old Testament that belong to a non-Israelite tradition. At a time when Jewish and Hellenistic confrontation was becoming more acute, these enigmatic instruments, recurring four times as an ominous ostinato, symbolize an alien and hostile musical culture.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(xiv) Collective terms

(Kelim: 1 Chronicles xxiii.5. Klei-david: 2 Chronicles xxix.26–7. Keli-nebel and klei-nebalim: Psalms lxxi.22; 1 Chronicles xvi.5. Klei-‘oz: 2 Chronicles xxx.21. Klei-shir: Amos vi.5; 1 Chronicles xv.16; xvi.42; 2 Chronicles v.13; vii.6, xxiii.13, xxxiv.12; Nehemiah xii.36. Minnim: Psalms xl.8; cl.4).

Keli (pl. kelim) is used in the Old Testament primarily to denote an implement, vessel, weapon or art object. In texts concerned with worship in the Temple (e.g. Exodus xxv.9), keli is understood to be a ritual utensil. As a musical instrument the word is used only in the plural as a descriptive part of a compound: klei-david, ‘instruments of David’; klei-nebel, ‘nebel instruments’; klei-’oz, ‘loud instruments’; klei-shir, ‘instruments for song’. These nouns appear 11 times as Temple instruments of the Levites, and three times in connection with other activities.

Minnim (pl.), from the Syrian mina and Akkadian manani (‘hair’, ‘string’), has been interpreted since Pfeiffer (1779) as a collective term for string instruments. Organological names for types of instruments occur only in the post-Exile books, indicating a radical change in the cultural and musical life of the country that represents a new stage in rationalization.

Biblical instruments, §3: Old Testament instruments

(xv) The terminology of the ‘Psalms’, and unexplained terms.

The 117 superscriptions in the Psalms, most of which have musical implications, are among the most difficult lines to interpret in the Old Testament. There is a rich history of research into their meaning (e.g. Sachs, 1940; Sendrey, 1969; Bayer, 1982; Werner, 1989). They are principally of significance for the study of performing practice and contribute little to organology.

Foxvog and Kilmer (1980) treat the psalm titles in a section headed ‘Musical Performance’, which divides the material into functional or social titles, indications of the manner of performance and the incipits of songs. It is possible that there is a parallel with Arabic maqām or Indian rāga names. The diversity of variants given in the earliest translations shows that the meaning of these texts had already been forgotten in Antiquity, as even the most frequently mentioned words are not consistently interpreted. Lamnasseah (from nissahon: ‘victory’) – variously translated as ‘to the end’ (the Septuagint and Vulgate), ‘for the master of victory’ (Aquila translation), ‘to sing publicly’ (Luther), ‘for the choirmaster’ (New Jerusalem Bible) – seems to have little musical significance. On the other hand, mizmor (from the root zmr; see above, §3(xiii)), understood as a song with instrumental accompaniment, has a decisive meaning in the context of actual performance.

Words with organological implications are always used in a prepositional sense, prefixed by bi-, ‘al- or el- (‘with, to, on, in accordance with’). ‘Al-‘alamot (Psalm xlvi.1; sing. ‘almah: ‘maiden’) is interpreted in several ways as having musical significance: bi-nvalim ‘al-‘alamot (1 Chronicles xv.20) has been variously understood as a high-pitched string instrument with a soprano register, as a wind instrument, as a female drummer (on the basis of Psalm lxviii.25: ‘alamot tofefot), as a specially trained female musician or as the playing of an octave. ‘Al-ha-gittit: (Psalms viii.1; lxxxiv.1), has been translated as ‘of the city of Gath, where David was’ (cf 1 Samuel xxvii.2), ‘in the style of Gath’, ‘on the instrument of Gath’ and, assuming the word to derive from gat (‘winepress’ in the Septuagint and Vulgate), as ‘song of the wine pressers’ or ‘song of the wine merchants’. Al-mahalat (Psalms liii.1; lxxxviii.1) was interpreted in two different ways as early as the period of the first translations: as ‘dance’ and as ‘pipe’ (from hll). In the 18th and 19th centuries a syncretic interpretation of the word covering music, poetry and dance was favoured, and in modern times such translations as ‘wind instrument accompaniment’, ‘round dance’ or ‘quiet, muted performance’ (Foxvog and Kilmer, 1980, p.48) have been suggested.

Bi-nginot, ‘al-neginati (Psalms iv.1; vi.1; liv.1; lv.1; lxi.1; lxvii.1; lxxvi.1), with its root ngn, was already interpreted as meaning instrumentalists, musicians and song in the early translations; other meanings (‘skilled player of the kinnor’, 1 Samuel xvi.16; ‘professional instrumentalists’, Psalm lxviii.26) point to a meaning connected with instrumental playing; Sachs (1940, p.126) sees neginah as an early form of the later nigun (Heb.: ‘melody’, ‘melodic formula’, ‘tune’).

El-ha-nehilot (Psalm v.1) is translated with some consistency by modern authors, relating it to hll, halil as ‘for playing on flutes’. This interpretation, however, contradicts the early translations, which exclude any musical context and link the word to the meaning of ‘inheritance’.

‘Al-ha-sheminit (Psalms vi.1; xii.1) means ‘on the sheminit’ (sheminit: ‘one eighth’) and with the article ha is interpreted as an instrument with eight strings, or an instrument an octave distant from the fundmental tone. In Psalm vi.1, ‘al-ha-sheminit is linked to bi-nginot (see above), and in 1 Chronicles xv.20 David arranges his Levites in accordance with various groups of instruments, including bi-nvalim ‘al-‘alamot (see above) and be-kinnorot ‘al-ha-sheminit. This may indicate a system of playing in octaves in ancient Israel; the heptatonic system was known in Ugarit (Foxvog and Kilmer, 1980, p.446). making it possible that octaves were also part of ancient Israelite music.

‘Al-shushan (Psalms xlv.1; lx.1, lxix.1; lxxx.1) derives from shushan (‘lily’; also translated as ‘water lily’ and ‘lotus’). Early translations made no connection with any musical meaning, but the majority of theologians and musicologists now think that this is the incipit of another song; many other such references in the psalm superscriptions are also thought to indicate contrafacta of texts once well known but now long forgotten (Werner, 1989, p.91).

Shalishim (pl.), mentioned only once in the Bible (1 Samuel xviii.6), has been called ‘the most disputed musical term of the Hebrew language’ (Sachs, 1940, p.123). Using the root shlsh (‘three’) as a starting point, interpretations have dwelt on the number three as the characteristic of a musical instrument (e.g. a sistrum with three bars, a three-string lute, a triangle etc.). Taking an onomatopoeic angle, cymbals could be plausible (cf the kimbala of the Septuagint). Sachs cites the Latin tripudium, a dance in three measures, in understanding the term to mean ‘dance’, a sense that the text itself could easily support: be-tupin be-simhah u-vshalishim (‘with drums, with joy and dancing’).

U-nqavekha (Ezekiel xxviii.13) ‘and your neqavim’ (pl. of neqev: ‘hole’, ‘perforation’) has been translated only since Luther as ‘pipes’, probably on the grounds of the sequence of tupim and neqavim in the enumeration of decorative items in the text here. There is no real support for this interpretation, and the verse remains obscure.

4. New Testament instruments.

(Matthew vi.2; ix.23; xi.17; xxiv.31. Luke vii.32; xv.25. 1 Corinthians i.1; xiv.7 and 8; xv.52. 1 Thessalonians iv.16. Hebrews xii.19. Revelation i.10; iv.1; v.8; viii.2, 6–8, 10 and 12–13; ix.1 and 13–14; x.7; xi.15; xiv.2; xv.2; xviii.22).

Interest in references to musical instruments in the New Testament is limited for two reasons: there are not many of them, and their organological value is relatively small. The Greek names of instruments are contemporary with the authorship of the texts. In addition to mentions of particular instruments (see below), two verses (1 Corinthians xiv.7–8) are of particular significance for their emphasis on the clarity of the music: ‘If even lifeless instruments, such as the [aulos] or the [kithara], do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played? And if the [salpinx] gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?’. This repeated reference to clarity in performance, which is compared with the intelligibility of the spoken word, suggests the development of a new musical aesthetic and a new kind of musical practice striving to concretize the meaning of the music. To some extent it may be possible to see the beginnings of modern Western performing practice in these words.

(i) Aulos

(Lat. tibia). This occurs as both the name of an instrument (1 Corinthians xiv.7) and a term for an instrumentalist (Matthew ix.23). The reference is to the single or double aulos of the Roman period, for which there are several items of archaeological evidence in Roman Palestine (the best is the Sepphoris mosaic, see Jewish music, §II, fig.13). In the New Testament, as in the Old, this reed instrument was played in mourning for the dead (Matthew ix.23) and at weddings (Matthew xi.17).

(ii) Kithara

(Lat. cithara). Like aulos this terms occurs as both the name of an instrument (1 Corinthians xiv. 7) and to describe an instrumentalist (Revelation xiv.2). The kithara is an instrument of God and the ‘voice from heaven’ (Revelation xiv.2 and xv.2). The passage from Revelation contains the unusual comparison of the kithara to ‘the voice of many waters, and … the voice of a great thunder’ (ibid.). In two cases (Revelation v.8 and xiv.2–3) the instrumentalists are performing ‘a new song’. The kithara – a large lyre – may have acquired a new tonal quality at around this time as a result of changes in instrument-making, producing an effect that overwhelmed listeners with its dynamic power. However, a more likely interpretation is that the instrument of God symbolizes the spiritual force of Christianity in this passage. It is plausible that in the New Testament names of instruments ‘like aulos, kithara may have been used loosely to refer to more instruments of a general class’ (Smith, 1962).

(iii) Salpinx

(Lat. tuba). In the New Testament the salpinx, the long, straight Roman trumpet, is an instrument of communication and for the giving of signals; it is also credited with supernatural power, usually of an apocalyptic nature – the ‘trump of God’ (1 Thessalonians iv.16), the salpinges of the seven angels (Revelation viii–xi), and the tuba mirum/terribilis (1 Corinthians xv.52). The theophany of the sound of the salpinx, already indicated in the Old Testament (Exodus xx.19) and its eschatological significance are taken to extremes in the New Testament, where the instrument becomes a symbol of supremacy in the praise of God, the Resurrection and the Last Judgment (Giesel, 1978, p.101).

(iv) Cymbalon

(Lat. cymbalum). These are the familiar Graeco-Roman cymbals. The instrument is mentioned only once, in 1 Corinthians xiii.1, together with ‘sounding brass’, a term which may denote a gong (Montagu, 1965) or signify not a musical instrument but a resonating device at the back of a stage to amplify the voice of a singer or actor (Harris, 1982). This interpretation explains the real sense of Paul's metaphor when he compares speaking without love and deeper understanding to the noise of ‘tinkling cymbals’ and artificial sound amplification.

(v) Simphonias

(Lat. symphoniam). This word, used only once (Luke xv.25), is a collective term for the playing of musical instruments, in this case at a merry feast with dancing.

1. Reference bibliography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

literary sources

H. Danby, trans.: Mishnah: Translation from the Hebrew with Introduction and Brief Explanatory Notes (Oxford, 1933)

R. Marcus, trans.: Flavius Josephus: Early History of the Jews (Oxford, 1966/R)

J. Neusner, trans.: Jerusalem Talmud: The Talmud of the Land of Israel (Chicago, 1982–93)

J. McKinnon: Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987)

J.J. Slotki, ed.: The Babylonian Talmud (London, 1990)

F.G. Martinez, trans.: The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (Leiden, 1994)

studies

BurneyH

GerbertS, i, 2–12

HawkinsH

MGGI (‘Jüdische Musik’; H. Avenary and B. Bayer)

MGG2 (‘Biblische Instrumente’; J. Braun; also ‘Jüdische Musik’; J. Braun, J. Cohen)

PraetoriusSM, i–iii

D. ben Portaleone: Shiltei ha-gibborim [‘Shield of the heroes’] (Mantua, 1612)

A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650)

G.B. Martini: Storia della musica (Bologna, 1757)

J. Drechsler: ‘De cithara Davidica: dissertatio’, Thesaurus antiquitarum sacrarum, ed. B. Ugolino, xxxii (Venice, 1767), 171–206

B. Ugolino, ed.: Thesaurus antiquitarum sacrarum, xxxii (Venice, 1767)

A.F. Pfeiffer: Über Musik der Alten Hebräer (Erlangen, 1779)

J.N. Forkel: Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, i (Leipzig, 1788)

J. Jahn: Biblische Archäologie, i (Vienna, 1817)

J. Saalschütz: Geschichte und Würdigung der Musik bei Hebräern (Berlin, 1829)

K.F. Keil: Handbuch der Biblischen Archäologie (Frankfurt, 1858–9)

C. Engel: The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (London, 1864/R)

J. Wellhausen: ‘Music of the Ancient Hebrews’, The Book of Psalms, (New York, 1898), 217–34

H. Gressmann: Musik und Musikinstrumente im Alten Testament (Giessen, 1903)

J.P. Peters and H. Thiersch: Painted Tombs in the Necropolis of Marissa (London, 1905)

S. Krauss: Talmudishe Archäologie, iii (Leipzig, 1912)

E.M. Hornbostel and C. Sachs: ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente: ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xlvi (1914), 553–90

W. Gesenius: Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (Leipzig 17/1921/R)

S. Langdon: ‘Babylonian and Hebrew Musical Terms’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1921), 169–91

S.B. Finensinger: ‘Musical Instrumentsin the Old Testament’, Herbew Union College Annual, iii (1926), 21–76

S.B. Finensinger: ‘The Shofar’, Hebrew Union College Annual, vii/9 (1931–2), 193–228

D.O. Edzard and others, eds.: Reallexikon der Assyrologie und vordersiatischen Archäologie, i–vii (Berlin, 1932–96)

C. Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments (New York, 1940)

O.R. Sellers: ‘Musical Instruments of Israel’, Biblical Archaeologist, iv/3 (1941), 33–47

E. Kolari: Musikinstrumente und ihre Verwendung im Alten Testament (Helsinki, 1947)

H. Hickmann: Catalogue général des antiquités egyptiennes du Musée du Caire: instruments de musique (Cairo, 1949)

H. Avenary: ‘Magic, Symbolism and Allegory of Old Hebrew Sound-Instruments’, Collectanea historiae musicae, ii (Florence, 1956), 21–31

H. Seidel: ‘Horn-Trompete im Alten Israel unter Berücksichtigung der ‘Kriegsrollen’ von Qumran’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität, v (Leipzig, 1956–7), 589–99

E. Gerson-Kiwi: ‘Musique dans la Bible’, Dictionnaire de la Bible, v, Suppl. (Paris, 1957), 1411–68

H. Kraeling and L. Mowry: ‘Music in the Bible’, NOHM, i (London, 1960), 283–312

J. Yasser: ‘The Magrepha of the Herodian Temple’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 24–42

W. Smith: Musical Aspects of the New Testament (Amsterdam, 1962)

E. Anati: Palestine Before the Hebrews (New York, 1963)

B. Bayer: The Material Relics of Music in Ancient Palestine and its Environs: an Archaeological Inventory (Tel-Aviv, 1963)

B. Bayer: ‘Mena‘ane‘im: shaqshaqot heres?’ [Mena‘ane‘im: rattles?], Tazlil, iv (1964), 19–22 [in Heb.]

G. Fleishhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1965)

T.C. Mitchell and R. Joyce: ‘Musical Instruments in Nebuchadnezar's Orchestra’, Notes on some Problems in the Book of Daniel, ed. D.J. Wiseman and others (London, 1965), 19–27

L.W. Köhler, W. Baumgartner and J.J. Stamm: Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament, i–iv (Leiden, 1967–90)

B. Bayer: ‘The Biblical Nebel’, Yuval, no.1 (1968), 89–131

A. Sendrey: Music in Ancient Israel (New York, 1969)

Fr. Ellermeier: ‘Beiträge zur Fruhgeschichte altorientalischer Saiteninstrument’, Archäologie und Altes Testament: Festschrift für K. Galling, ed. A. Kuschke and E. Katsch (Tübingen, 1970), 75–90

H. Avenary: ‘Flutes for the Bride of a Dead Man: the Symbolism of the Flute According to Hebrew Sources’, Orbis musicae, i (1971–2), 11–24

H. Avenary and B. Bayer: ‘Music’, Encyclopaedia judaica, ed. C. Roth (Jerusalem, 1971–2/R, 2/1982)

O. Keel: Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alt Testament am Beispiel der Psalmen (Zürich, 1972)

H. Avenary: ‘The Discrepancy between Iconographic and Literary Presentations of Ancient Eastern Musical Instruments’, Orbis musicae, ii (1973–4), 121–7

G.J. Botterweck, ed.: Theologisches Wörterbuch des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart, 1973–)

E. Gerson-Kiwi: ‘Horn und Trompete im Alten Testament: Mythos und Wirklichkeit’, Studia instrumentarum musicae popularis, iii (Stockholm, 1974), 57–60 (cf ibid., 1980, pp.42–9)

S. Marcuse: A Survey of Musical Instruments (New York, 1975)

O. Keel: ‘Musikinstrumente, Figuren und Siegel im judasichen Haus der Eisenzeit II’, Heiliges Land, iv (1976), 35–43

A.D. Kilmer, R.L. Crocker and R.R. Brown: Sounds from the Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music, Bīt Enki Records BTNK 101 (Berkeley, CA, 1976) [disc notes and LP]

B. Mazar: ‘The “Orpheus” Jug from Megiddo’, Magdalia Deis: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of Ernest Wright, ed. F.M. Cross and others (New York, 1976), 187–92

H. Giesel: Studien zur Symbolik der Musikinstrumente im Schrifttum der alten und mittelatlerlichen Kirche (Regensburg, 1978)

H. Avenary: Encounters of East and West in Music (Tel-Aviv, 1979)

D.A. Foxvog and A.D. Kilmer: ‘Music’, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. J. Nuelsen and others, iii (Grand Rapids, MI, rev.edn. 1980), 436–49

E. Gerson-Kiwi: Migrations and Mutations of the Music in East and West (Tel-Aviv, 1980)

B. Bayer: ‘The Titles of the Psalms’, Yuval, no.4 (1982), 28–123

P. Beck: ‘The Drawings from Hor at Teiman (Kuntillet Ajrud)’, Tel Aviv, ix/1 (1982), 3–68

W. Harris: ‘“Sounding Brass” and Hellenistic Technology’, Biblical Archaeological Review, viii/1 (1982), 38–41

Y. Meshorer: Ancient Jewish Coinage, i–ii (New York, 1982)

M. Pfanner: Der Titusbogen (Mainz, 1983)

U. Winter: Frau and Göttin (Fribourg, 1983)

E. Pöthig: The Victory Song Tradition of the Women in Israel (diss., Union Seminary, New York, 1985)

A. Caubet: ‘La musique à Ougarit: nouveaux aperçus’, Comptes rendus des séances [Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres] (1987), 731–53

C. Meyers: ‘A Terracotta at the Harvard Semitic Museum and Disc-holding Female Figures Reconsidered’, Israel Exploration Journal, xxxvii/2–3 (1987), 116–122

E.J. Bikermann: The Jews in the Greek Age (London, 1988)

R. Eichmann: ‘Zur Konstruktion und Spielhaltung der Altorientalischen Spiesslauten: von den Anfangen bis in die seleukidisch-parthische Zeit’, Baghdader Mitteilungen, xix (Berlin, 1988), 583–625

H. Weippert: Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Munich, 1988)

H. Seidel: Musik in Altisrael (Frankfurt, 1989)

E. Werner: ‘Die Musik im Alten Israel’, Neues Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, i (1989), 76–112

M.J. Kartomi: On Concepts and Classification of Musical Instruments (Chicago, 1990)

P.J. van Dyk: ‘Current Trends in Pentateuch Criticism’, Old Testament Essays, iii (1990), 191–202

D.V. Edelman, ed.: The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel's Past (Sheffield, 1991)

T. Staubli: Das Image der Nomaden im alten Israel und in der Ikonographie seiner sesshaften Nachbaren (Fribourg, 1991)

L. Yarden: The Spoils of Jerusalem on the Arch of Titus (Stockholm, 1991)

O. Keel and C. Ühlinger: Göttinnen, Götter und Gottessymbole (Freiburg, 1992)

J. Braun: ‘Archaeo-musicology and some of its Problems: Considerations on State of the Art in Israel’, La pluridisciplinarité en archéologie musicale, ed. C. Homo-Lechner (Paris, 1994), 139–48

A. Caubet: ‘La musique du Levant au bronze récent’, ibid., 129–35

A.D. Kilmer, D. Collon and S. Martino: ‘Musik’, Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie, viii, ed. D.O. Edzard (Berlin, 1995–6), 463–91

J. Montagu: Musical Instruments of the Bible (Oxford, 1996)

Z. Weiss and E. Netzer: Promise and Redemption: a Synagogue Mosaic from Sepphoris, (Jerusalem, 1996)

J. Braun: ‘Musical Instruments’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. E.M. Meyers, iv (New York, 1997), 70–79

W.G. Dever: ‘Levant’, ibid., iii, 350–51

B. Lawergren: ‘Distinctions among Canaanite, Philistine, and Israelite Lyres, and their Global Lyrical Contexts’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, ccix (1998), 41–68

D. Yannou, A. Goulaki-Voutira and D. Themelis, eds.: Greek and European Music: Thessaloniki 1998 (Thessaloniki, 1998) [in Gk.]

J. Braun: Die Musikkultur Altisraels/Palästinas: Studien zu archäolgischen, schriflichen und vergleichenden Quellen (Fribourg, 1999)

W. Bachmann: ‘Das mit Glocken oder Schellen bestzte Priestergewand’, Archaeology and Iconography ICTM Study Group: Jerusalem and Ramat Gan 1994–5 (forthcoming)

J. Braun: ‘Remarks on Music History in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Written and Archaelogical Evidence’, Studien zur Musikarchäologie, i: Orient Archäologie, vi, ed. E. Hickmann and R. Eichmann (forthcoming)

E. Hickmann and R. Eichmann, eds.: Studien zur Musikarchäologie, ii: Orient Archäologie, vii (Rahden, forthcoming)

D. Pandermalis: ‘The Nablum of Dion’, Study Group of Musical Iconography IX: Dion, Greece 1998 (forthcoming)

Bibliography of music.

The study and description of musical documents and of the literature about music, especially in published form. The most widespread use of the word ‘bibliography’, in music or in any scholarly endeavour, refers to lists, appended to publications, of other scholarly writings which the author used while writing, or which would be useful to an interested reader. This usage is represented at the end of nearly every article in the present dictionary, and might be called ‘citation bibliography’. It is a reflection of a selection process, drawing on and assessing a detailed listing of as much of this secondary literature as possible. The preparation of such full-scale listings is called ‘reference bibliography’. Yet the term has arrived at this usage from more detailed and scholarly practices. The etymology of the word implies the writing of books, but (in common with most other terms ending in ‘-graphy’), it has come also to mean their study, or at least their description, and usually refers to printed material. This leads to two other usages, specifically concerned with the character of books and editions, and only secondarily with their contents. Under the specifier ‘descriptive’, bibliography refers to a listing (with detailed descriptions) of the make-up of books. ‘Analytical’ bibliography goes further, involving the study of books as objects, the manner of their making, their history, and their place in the history of their contents.

2. Descriptive bibliography.

3. Analytical bibliography.

4. Basic terminology.

5. History of musical bibliography.

6. Musical bibliography as music history.

STANLEY BOORMAN

1. Reference bibliography.

This involves collecting, assessing and arranging lists of earlier studies in a particular field. This is an essential process for the researcher, for without this evidence of past advances in thought or data-collection, we would be unable to climb upon the shoulders of our predecessors, and our work would advance no further than theirs. Bibliographical listings of the music itself are equally important, for they point the musician to compositions and their sources, for performance as well as for study.

Two central issues concern the preparer of such lists: one is the definition of the area to be covered (in particular the rigorousness or porousness of the topic's boundaries); the other is the level of annotation. For bibliographies in the present dictionary, neither of these is a problem. For most other writings, however, the first (in particular) regularly raises thorny issues, some of which will be discussed below.

(i) Music.

Bibliographies of music fall into a number of obvious basic genres: listings by composer, by genre or form, by performing resources, by date, by country of origin or by present-day library. Each is valuable in its own context, presuming a different interest on the part of the user, and therefore implying the different types of information that should be included. By far the best access to these bibliographies is through the listings in Duckles (B5/1997).

Composer bibliographies are used by the whole spectrum of scholars and performers. They supply the essential information about dates of composition, performing resources, available editions, texts being set and details of individual movements (preferably with musical incipits). These facts enable performers to find suitable material. If the list is arranged by genre, rather than simply by date, it shows at once the forms that interested the composer at different times during his or her life. The scholar has additional needs, and recent catalogues have attempted to meet these by extending the coverage to include material that would fall more easily within the definition of ‘descriptive bibliography’. Therefore, basic information on manuscripts – including sketches and drafts – and first editions, as well as revised versions, early sets of parts and corrected proofs, is often expanded to include a description of their structure and contents. Additional material might include reports on the critical reception of early performances, and subsequent writings about the work, as well as discussion of compositions that may have been incorrectly assigned to the composer. These ranges of information (not always found only in bibliographies) have forced revision of our view of composers as diverse as Bach and Ives, Rore and Beethoven, Mozart and Elgar.

For some composers the various layers of material have been catalogued separately. A bibliography of the early editions of Handel's music was compiled by Smith (C1970), and there are similar catalogues of early editions of Brahms and others; the manuscripts and printed editions of Chopin's music are listed in two distinct volumes (Chomiński and Turło, B1990), and Beethoven's sketchbooks have been the subject of a specialized bibliographical study, which goes far beyond the basic requirements of a descriptive bibliography.

Equally important, especially for performers, is scoring, and there is an increasing number of catalogues which list works for individual instruments or singers, or for various combinations. Early examples include Altmann's Kammermusik-Katalog (B1910), or Sears's Song Index (B1926). The genre shows no sign of diminishing, either in production or in usefulness, especially given the increasingly diverse ensembles for which composers are writing and the spread of bibliographical control to more ephemeral publications.

Bibliographies of repertory can be paralleled by a group of genre bibliographies. At first sight, they may seem similar, often providing material for consistent performing groups. Catalogues of violin sonatas, lieder or 16th-century madrigals clearly do fulfill that function, though others equally do not. But they also serve to stimulate research into how a genre (or a form) emerges, changes, and dies with the passage of time.

These listings raise a number of problems for both compiler and reader, of which the most important lies in decisions about what to include or exclude. The standard bibliography of printed Italian secular music, 1500–1700 (Vogel, B1892) would seem to face few such problems, but it includes works composed before 1500 though published later, and works composed by non-Italians working in Italy as well as elsewhere, while omitting secular works written in Italy but in another language. These seem to be reasonable decisions, ones that can be reached without difficulty, and justified without hesitation. But a similar catalogue of villanellas (Galanti, 1954) evidently heavily dependent on Vogel, faces the more difficult issue of trying to define the borders of a genre. The compiler chose to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and included canzoni and canzonettas, as well as spiritual villanellas, when she believed that they were related. The problem is even greater for later music: a bibliographer of opera, the Baroque cantata, or the 18th-century symphony or sonata is faced with almost intractable problems of defining the field, and of limiting the range of material to be included.

There is also the problem of how far to range in terms of date and type of source. An attempt at listing all the manifestations of a genre will immediately run into this problem, as will a decision to list all the extant sources. The Census-Catalogue of Renaissance polyphonic manuscripts (1979–88), while an ambiguously defined project as far as a catalogue or bibliographical description is concerned, also has porous chronological boundaries, including music probably composed before the cut-off date of 1550, but to be found in manuscripts compiled as much as 100 years later. Tyson (C1963) demonstrates that sources distant from the composer are often very important, and yet, for example, other sources with music printed by Petrucci between 1501 and 1520 span a period of over 150 years. The bibliographer must decide the relevance of the sources when they were copied far from the composer, or much later in time, and whether to include them. Several volumes of RISM face this problem, although they fall more correctly into the category of ‘descriptive bibliography’, for their first intention is to list sources for specific repertories, rather than to provide a conspectus of the repertory in them. Other volumes, such as those of Das Deutsche Kirchenlied or of Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources (RISM BVIII and BIX), can reasonably take a restrictive view of their repertories.

Other volumes in RISM and many other bibliographies of music adopt a chronological series of boundaries – one that is particularly satisfactory for the music historian interested in the rise and decline of musical taste. Sometimes the dates chosen or implied represent a real historical shift: catalogues of electronic and computer music necessarily do so, as do the famous volumes prepared by Friedrich Ludwig of music in the Notre Dame sources (B1910). The boundaries in others seem to some extent to reflect convenience. In either case, the contents can rarely be arranged in a true chronological order, given the absence of so much data. However, the exercise is a historiographical one, and, like all reference bibliography, is designed as an aid to further research.

More frequent are similar lists which cover the contents of individual libraries or groups of libraries. Often seeming more like catalogues than bibliographies, these are designed to accommodate a number of different readers. A first use, of course, is for the librarian, as a control on the collection: the bibliography will then give sufficient detail to identify the individual items precisely. Other users include local musicians, looking for copies of specific works, works with specific scorings, or by specific composers. These readers need enough detail and a clear arrangement, as well as the call-number, to allow reader or librarian to find the book. Finally, scholars wish to know, if possible, whether the book listed is worth a research journey: this is often asking too much of the catalogue, for it requires information that, again, falls within the bounds of ‘descriptive bibliography’. With a music collection the size of that at the British Library, the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris or the Library of Congress, it is not feasible either to gather or to print so much detail. The same is true for those volumes of RISM which set out, on the largest scale, to catalogue the musical contents of all possible libraries: series A comprises lists of editions, arranged by composer, with minimal additional information, and notes as to the libraries which hold copies (including incomplete copies). This type of listing, arranged by composer or repertory, but giving in addition the locations of copies, is not new. In the late 19th century, when attempting single-handedly to do something similar, Robert Eitner was already providing statements of the libraries holding copies.

Each of the categories and volumes mentioned so far has listed material found up to the date of publication – each is a ‘cumulative’ bibliography. However, at least as important are ‘current’ bibliographies, which reappear like journals, and attempt to list music that has appeared since the previous issue. The most important of these are the various national bibliographies of music, of which the British Catalogue of Music (1957–) is one of the best. Similar catalogues are published for a number of countries, among them Germany and the USA, as Deutsche Musikbibliographie (1829–) and The Library of Congress Catalogues (1954–). These cover music published within their area during the preceding year, with one important exception. They are almost invariably compiled from the music that is placed in one of the national ‘deposit libraries’, as part of the process of registering for copyright protection. This means that a small percentage of editions does not get listed, often comprising short-lived material or work from small presses – sometimes the most valuable for specific research projects. This percentage is likely to increase as editions are made available over the Internet, rather than by traditional means.

Many publishers issue similar lists of their own editions, or those from other publishers with whom they have agreements. Similarly, a few specialist music dealers (among them Theodore Front and Otto Harrassowitz) issue occasional lists which help librarians and collectors keep up-to-date. The range of catalogues produced by antiquarian and second-hand dealers obviously lies beyond the scope of the present article, for they do not aim to present complete coverage of any repertory other than the fortuitous collections acquired by the dealer.

Finally, there is one particular problem, encountered with anthologies of music, and particularly acute in repertories which largely comprise small-scale compositions – most music before 1600, piano Characterstücke and the like. The anthologies themselves will probably appear in one or other of the types of bibliographies already described, and there may even be an ‘analytical’ entry, listing the contents. But each item will not normally be entered separately, under the composer's name, or in any manner by which it can easily be found. As a result, a few bibliographers (most recently Hill and Stephens, B1997) have compiled catalogues of these compositions, both as the contents of anthologies and separately as works listed by composer. Such volumes serve the classic function of reference bibliography: they provide the reader (whether or not a specialist) with immediate guidance to works and editions otherwise difficult to trace.

(ii) Music literature.

Many of the same problems pertain here. There is a vast number of books and articles about all sorts of music and musical topics; they are not automatically arranged by subject – and even when books are so arranged, as in a library, most readers have specific (and different) enquiries in mind. Much published scholarship appears in anthologies (such as Festschriften) which often include a range of subjects; even more appears in journals, which must also cover various topics if they are to maintain their subscription lists. In almost all these categories, scholarship continues to appear at apparently ever-increasing rates. So great is the current rate of production that a comprehensive bibliography of writings on any major composer is bound to be a large volume. Similarly, a reasonably thorough bibliography of significant writings on music between 1400 and 1600 would include at least 15,000 items. When bibliographies begin to approach even several hundred entries, they cease to be of use unless the entries are carefully sorted into categories and supported by critical annotations.

Again, as with bibliographies of music, there is a major division between ‘cumulative’ and ‘current’ bibliographies – those listing works issued before the publication date of the bibliography (as in this dictionary), and those that behave like journals, appearing at regular intervals and listing the newest material, in each issue. As with musical editions, the first and simplest guide to these bibliographies is Duckles (B5/1997), although this too is a cumulative bibliography.

‘Current’ bibliographies are clearly essential for active researchers, just as they are for scientists working at the cutting edge of their field. With the emergence of computer databases for current research, and easy access to the Internet, these bibliographies are taking a leading role in making research accessible. Among the earliest to emerge, and still an invaluable guide, is The Music Index, which began appearing in 1949, and has steadily increased the number of journals which it covers. Other similar series have also included monographs, dissertations, and the contents of anthology volumes. The most important of these, RILM (1967–), now provides coverage for a large proportion of the writing about music, including reviews of editions and books. This publication relies heavily on the willingness of authors to submit references to their own writings, and to provide what is one of its most useful attributes, the addition of abstracts and key-words to almost all entries. Even so, RILM and all the other such current bibliographies demand vast amounts of labour to chase down relatively obscure material, such as is to be found in congress reports and anthology volumes of all sorts, or published in volumes not primarily devoted to music, or even in reprints of earlier volumes, and to sort and enter it in the database. In addition, current bibliographies, by their nature, do not include any coverage of publications dating from before their first issue, although RILM is beginning to work backwards in certain areas. For detailed bibliographical listing of scholarly work before the 1950s, it is still necessary to track down earlier or specialist bibliographies, sometimes concentrating on publications in a geographical area, or more often focussed on a topic (such as performing practice) or a specific composer. (These are not listed at the end of the present article, for they can be traced through the relevant entries elsewhere in the Dictionary.) The cumulative bibliography is therefore far from obsolete, and will continue to be necessary for many years to come.

2. Descriptive bibliography.

Occasional references have already been made to bibliographies and catalogues that include descriptive bibliography. The essential point in each case has been that the catalogues include commentary not merely on the music, but also on the nature of the sources listed. Both descriptive and analytical bibliography are concerned with the document – with the form of presentation of the content, rather than solely (or even primarily) with the content itself. The presumption underlying this interest is that the manner in which music is presented can tell us a great deal about the music itself, or about the circumstances of its use.

The description of a printed book involves three groups of components: two are obvious, one recording particular characteristics of the copy in hand, and the other listing and commenting on the contents. These are preceded by what is bibliographically the fundamental component, describing an ‘Ideal Copy’ (see §4 below). In brief, this is a description of a (notional) copy that represents what the printer and publisher wished to see put on the market; it provides a yard-stick against which surviving copies can be measured, and it is built up from examining many of those copies.

The first and fundamental part of the description of a book is therefore a description made from the study of a number of copies, sometimes with the addition of editorial material where, for example, one part is missing from all copies. This precedes the discussion of extant copies, and the description of their contents, even though it can not be prepared until after they have been examined.

It will be obvious that the structure of any book, and particularly that of musical volumes, is directly influenced by the contents: for example, the size of a score reflects the number of instruments and voices involved, as does the number of parts; for well over a hundred years, popular music has been laid out on the pages so that a decorative cover can act as a magnet for potential purchasers; and there are other similar instances. But the act of beginning a description with the structural aspects of the books partly reflects the bibliographer's primary concerns, and partly ensures that these features are seen as significant, thereby highlighting their relevance to the content.

The description contains a number of basic elements, common to all books and musical volumes. By convention, these follow certain patterns, in both the order and the style in which they are presented. The most thorough introduction to the techniques by which they are discovered, and the manners in which they are laid out, can be found in Bowers (C1949) with supplementary comments in Tanselle (C1982). Some of these elements are self-evidently necessary, and are to be found in any respectable catalogue and bibliography of sources (whether arranged by composer, by genre, by printer or by library). They include:

(i) an accurate transcription of the title-page (which offers an immediate first approximation for identifying a copy). This is presented in a conventional manner, following standardized procedures for indicating such features as borders and designs, coats of arms and pictures, line-ends and rules;

(ii) a statement of the size and format of the volume. The various formats – folio, quarto, octavo, etc., are of course vague indicators of the dimensions of the book (and are so used by dealers and auctioneers), but they are also indicative of the publisher's view of where a book fits in a hierarchy of functions and values. Piano music published in octavo (as were the Lea Pocket Scores) serves a different function from that in the more normal folio format, and organ music in landscape (horizontal) formats is more common than that in portrait (upright) arrangement. In bibliographical terms, the format is a reflection of the number of leaves that are printed from a single sheet of paper, and thus the number of times that sheet has been folded;

(iii) a statement of the collation of the book. This describes the formal structure in clear terms, indicating the gatherings and their sizes, which, in earlier volumes, can usually be determined from the signatures printed throughout the book. With engraved music, the collation is harder to detect, and sometimes seems almost random. However, it is a clear indicator of how the printer divided up the work, and will sometimes (as with 19th-century Italian opera) reveal whether two copies of the same work could have been printed at the same time;

(iv) a description of the style of signatures and the pages on which they appear. Equally important is a listing of plate numbers, also giving the abbreviated title, or other initials that appear with them. As with other parts of the description, any anomalies or errors are also cited;

(v) a similar sequence of page or folio numbers, again giving erroneous or missing numbers. It is surprising how frequently errors in pagination yield important information about how a book was planned and printed. Similar significance attends the evidence in those volumes, again not uncommon in the 19th century, in which two sets of pagination are used;

(vi) transcription of some other peripheral matter, all part of the production of the book rather than its contents. This may include direction lines and running heads. In addition, the presence of catchwords, part-names or similar indicators is usually noted, for they serve as evidence of the printer's technique and his concern for accuracy;

(vii) a transcription of other important material in the preliminary pages, or acting as support for the musical or verbal text of the book. This may include a dedication, a letter to the reader, a subscription list, a cast list for an opera or a colophon. All, of course, have a direct bearing on the history of the contents of the book, but they also bear in significant ways on its printing history;

(viii) the presence of advertising pages or sections, with a comment on their contents. These pages are sometimes dated; they will often have been prepared more recently than the musical contents, especially with engraved music. Since so many editions published after 1700 carry no dates, and since they could be reprinted as long as the plates remained usable, the evidence of a dated advertisement, or of the most recent compositions on an undated one, may be the best information we have for dating a copy in hand;

(ix) a comment on the technique used by the printer. When this involved type, a description of the material used for both music and text is expected, together with comments on how it was used. If the book was printed from engraved plates, or by one of the lithographic or later processes, the process should be described (as far as possible). In particular, for engraved plates, the size of the plate, the plate number and other identifying features are presented;

(x) the presence and style of a publisher's binding. Although publishers did supply bound copies of music on demand from the 16th century, providing their own bindings only began to be standard practice at the end of the 18th, when they begin to have titles, descriptions, and advertisements printed on them. These printed bindings are useful for dating and placing editions, in the same way that advertisements are.

This list includes the standard ingredients for the description of an Ideal Copy: in some cases, a few of these items may not be relevant, and in others there will be special additional information to include. However, at this point, the bibliographer turns from description of an Ideal Copy to the copies that actually survive. Each of these deserves individual attention: for music printed before the end of the 18th century, at the earliest, it is safe to assume that every copy is different in at least some significant aspect. Even later, copies continue to be produced apparently as part of the same edition, but with noticeable changes to structure and content. Each copy must therefore be examined, and each deserves discussion of the following elements:

(xi) the library or private collection where it is located, with a call number;

(xii) a note of the extent to which it is incomplete or defective;

(xiii) the size of the copy, and of its print area, the so-called ‘Spiegel’ or ‘text-block’. In many cases, the second of these items is listed under discussion of the Ideal Copy, for it is assumed that the printed area remains the same in all copies of the same edition. This is largely true, though paper shrinkage can affect the issue;

(xiv) a description of the paper, and the watermarks used (when present). These will often vary from copy to copy, and may be the best indicator of the presence of cancel leaves or of a later impression: in issues of 19th-century editions printed from the same plates, changes in the paper type or quality are sometimes the only sure indicator;

(xv) a note of any variations in text, especially the following: changes to the title-page, including new prices or publisher's agencies; the presence or absence of a dedication; different advertisement pages; a different publisher's binding, etc. Many of these serve to distinguish not merely different impressions, but actually different issues of the same edition, and are therefore crucial for dating. Of course, changes to the content are also important, and may be the result of proof corrections or of a later impression;

(xvi) a note of the binding, if specific to a particular copy, and not part of the book as published. The style and quality of the binding tells us much about the owner, and about the history of the copy;

(xvii) evidence of the music's use or history after it was printed. This may include simple inscriptions of donation or ownership, but it may equally include manuscript corrections or performance indications, suggestive of the musical taste and abilities of the owner.

Each of these features is peculiar to the copy in hand, and may be assumed to have arisen after the book left the publishing house. In this respect they represent the history of the individual copy and its musical contents, rather than its publishing history.

The third stage of description involves the contents:

(xviii) a simple list, accounting for every page, and supplying the original wording of the title, composer's or poet's name, and text incipits, as well as scoring, key, tempo indications, and any unusual features. It is still important at this stage to use the spelling or attributions found in the book, even if they are known to be inaccurate or erroneous. The corrected version can be supplied as well, of course, but the version found in the edition often indicates something of the history of the music before it was printed, as well as something of the background of the printer or editor;

(xix) some descriptions also add at this point references to other sources containing the same pieces, or to authoritative or recent editions. These are not part of the description proper, but they do provide an easy way of confirming the identity of each composition. The alternative, or an additional item, is to include:

(xx) a musical incipit for each composition, and for each part or movement;

(xxi) a final and most important section involves a commentary. This may include valuable information about the music, or the version presented in the edition. In the present context, it is the place for noting the existence of related editions, issues or states, for explaining the presence of bibliographical anomalies, and for drawing connections between the structure and the musical contents.

For much music, especially sheet music published after the late 18th century, some of these items will be irrelevant. For example, many such editions comprise a single bifolio, without pagination or advertising material, and were never intended to be bound by the publisher. However, they were often reprinted by the same or another company, and the detailed differences between copies and issues are of the greatest value. The many editions of such popular works can only be related or arranged in order, and the variations in musical content can only be evaluated, once the most careful bibliographical description has been completed. While this is evident for much ephemeral music of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is also true for much music of more lasting significance: many editions published before 1800 included dates that were misleading or reflected earlier editions, while few editions published after 1800 carry dates: even the works of great composers need careful bibliographical analysis.

This level of research and description vastly increases both the labour involved in preparing a descriptive bibliography, and the cost of disseminating it. In many cases, therefore, some elements are presented in a skeletal form or even omitted. However, as bibliographical control over the musical repertory gradually improves – and with the ability to circulate materials by CD-ROM and the Internet – such problems should gradually become less important. For example, RISM has begun producing its catalogues of musical manuscripts dating after 1600 on CD-ROM, and making them available on the Internet, allowing for much more detail to be stored and available to the scholar. There is still the labour of collecting the data and adding them to the data-base, so that progress is likely to remain slow, even with the willing cooperation of many international scholars. The benefits to scholarship, though, should be enormous.

It was early realized that such descriptive bibliographies were essential to any study of musical repertories, and examples date back into the 19th century: significant examples include Ludwig's study of the Notre Dame repertory (which goes into much greater detail, both of the music and of the sources, the first part appearing in 1910) or Sonneck's A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (B1905). These were followed by a number of catalogues of printed repertories, sometimes arranged by printer: Humphries and Smith's catalogues of Walsh's editions (which do not give detailed lists of contents, B1968), Hopkinson's of editions of Berlioz' music (C1951), or Lesure's of various French publishers (B1955; C1979–88). Excellent recent demonstrations of what is possible are to be found in the studies of theory manuscripts in RISM, in the catalogues of early printed editions of music by Brahms (Hofmann, C1975), or in Vanhulst's catalogue of the editions published by Phalèse (B1984).

A number of later bibliographies, especially of early music printers, have gone beyond the necessary descriptive features, and begun to introduce elements of analytical work: examples include Weaver's division of his work (C1994) on the printers Waelrant and De Laet into two volumes – a ‘descriptive bibliographical catalog’ and a study which is partly analytical, or Gustavson's study of Formschneider (C1998).

3. Analytical bibliography.

If there is a clear distinction between descriptive and analytical bibliography (other than in the depth of investigation), it lies in the underlying motivation for the study. Analytical bibliography is concerned primarily with understanding the printed document as a document, and its place in the history of printing and publishing. It is further concerned with the individual copy or copies, because we cannot assume that any two copies will be identical, and the variations are often of much significance for the musical text. Analytical bibliography examines the document as a carrier of the text, and as a vehicle for some musical function. While these may seem to be disparate topics, they are tightly bound together. A volume produced as a ‘vanity’ publication, or one in an old-fashioned printing technique, will often reveal much through this aspect of its motivation: for instance, it may not do justice to details of the musical text, or it may not be easily usable by performers.

In practice, analytical bibliography has come to be a separate discipline in its own right. It involves study of the history of the press and type-faces, patterns of engraving or lithography, of trade practices and marketing, and indeed of every decision made by printer and publisher. Printing house practice is a central concern, for the normal practices will indicate much about the priorities behind a publication, at the same time as they will highlight any anomalies found in surviving copies. This covers everything, from layout on the title-page to details of typesetting or engraving; from the routines of paper-use to filling blank space with advertisements; from the treatment of score layouts to patterns of signatures, pagination, and other non-text material – the so-called ‘meta-text’. Publishers' practices are equally central topics of study, and for the same reasons. These might include the ways of presenting different editions and issues, the patterns by which parts of a large-scale work are published separately, or by which vocal scores, piano reductions or study scores are marketed, or the patterns of relationships between publishers and sellers. Any one of these can turn into a lifetime's study, and any one may produce some slight piece of non-musical evidence that will allow the scholar to reach conclusions involving the music, its detailed readings, its market and popularity, its relation to other editions of the same works, or its place within a genre or a repertory.

Additional areas of interest include anything that will bear on dating the edition: trade catalogues, city census records, and (on the document itself) details of partnerships with other companies, of plate numbers, of the advertisements on spare pages. Since engraved plates, in common with the materials of more recent printing processes, can be re-used for many years, and can be corrected along the way, procedures for dating become increasingly important as we trace changes in a score, especially if they were overseen by the composer. Important examples concern a number of editions of Wagner's Tannhäuser (Hopkinson, C1973), and the series of revisions and new mistakes to be found in scores of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Cyr, C1982).

Further discussion of the breadth of topics involved in analytical bibliography could easily turn into a catalogue of things that scholars have learned by studying printed music and the means by which it was prepared and circulated. There are many ways in which this type of study has improved, and even changed, our perceptions of specific repertories and their circulation (for examples see §6 below). Here, instead, there follows a brief survey of some of the types of research that are fruitful, and of some serious lacunae in the field.

The bibliographer starts with the assumption, common among students of manuscripts, that the way in which the music is presented always affects the content. Study therefore includes a focus on the preparation of music for printing, and decisions affecting its visual impact.

Typefaces are distinctive, and the distribution of individual faces to printers in different cities is significant. This is particularly true for music, where the faces are fewer in number, but more closely related to the music to be printed, ranging in size from small faces for psalm books to large ones for chant and Catholic liturgical books, and in character from elegant rounded forms intended to imitate script to nested types for keyboard music. Since there were fewer different type-faces, cast by fewer founders, their dissemination tells us something about the distribution of the repertories to be printed, as well as the aesthetic taste of local purchasers. For example, the spread of German and French founts of type into the Low Countries can be related, in part, to the migrations of printers, but also to the ranges of repertory that were popular (Krummel, C1985; Guillo, C1997).

Study of lithographic and engraving processes focusses on similar details. The differences in style of the music to be printed are still part of the style of a specific printer working with a specific repertory at a specific time, but they are also a reflection of the individual preferences and practices of each craftsman working for that printer. Study of Walsh's editions or those put out by Ricordi over a hundred years later shows clearly that different craftsmen engraved different pages. In some cases, such study has been able to show how certain types of error were perpetrated (Poole, C1980) or the presence of a replacement plate, perhaps indicating a problem in the musical text.

This study of the musical notation thus is closely related to how it is laid out, and leads to a consideration of the general shape and character of musical books – what Krummel (C1976) called ‘bibliographical forms’. Beyond assuming a conservative mentality on the part of publishers and purchasers, we cannot yet explain the reasoning behind continuing to publish organ music in the landscape (or ‘oblong’) format long after virtually all other genres have changed to the more current portrait (or ‘upright’) orientation. A similar conservative practice involves the continuing production in Germany of vocal parts for large-scale choral works. While these are curious instances, more important is the emergence of new lay-outs – the adoption of partbooks as a regular format in the 16th century, the very unusual proportions of solo songbooks during the 17th, or the production of single operatic numbers in full score in England around 1800. Each of these must, on purely commercial grounds, have met a felt need, but until the bibliographer has fully studied them and their like, and traced the patterns of their use, we have little hope of understanding exactly what need they met, or how it arose.

Coupled with this is the significance of all the supporting verbal text – title, dedication, preface, etc. – as well as advertising pages. The wording of titles needs much study. We rarely understand fully the meaning of many words used by publishers: ‘printed for’, ‘published by’, ‘issued by’, ‘can be purchased at’; each of these seems to have had a specific meaning, which itself varied from time to time and place to place, perhaps (for all we know) from occasion to occasion. But our understanding of the financial arrangements which led to any given publication are closely bound up with our interpretation of these and similar phrases.

Nowhere is this more true than with the dedication. In some cases, it seems to represent the composer's thanks for past favours, as in the 16th-century examples which refer to a patron who, we happen to know, was the composer's employer. In others, it was probably an attempt at currying favour, or soliciting future employment. No doubt many of those keyboard works of the 19th century which are dedicated to young lady students represent a little of both, as well as an indication of the social acceptability of the composer in other affluent houses. Other dedications stem from the publisher, and in these cases, we have to assume a slightly different range of possible meanings.

But the dedication is only one of a number of texts attached to published music. When the publisher adds a page ‘To the Reader’, pointing out some feature of musical style or raising issues of performance, we hope we are justified in assuming that he (or the composer) has developed a clear view of who will be purchasing that music, even though we cannot always understand that view. Only considerable bibliographical research will clarify this issue, and so many others.

That research regularly has to be undertaken away from the book of music itself. It involves questions such as the following: what was the range of music this publisher put out? Does the appearance (the format and size of notation, etc.) differ from one repertory to another from the same publisher? Is this a reflection of different costs for different repertories? How did the publisher market these repertories, or advertise them? What about pricing? How fast did he expect to be able to recoup his expenses? These are all questions within the realm of publishing history, and yet they frequently produce results which illumine the content and function of an individual published musical work.

More immediately significant are questions related to reprints – new editions put out by the same or another publisher, new issues from the same plates, the separate issue of numbers from an opera, or of units from a set of quartets or a song cycle. Tied in with this is the evidence of published (as opposed to manuscript) parts for orchestral music or opera, of full as opposed to vocal scores, or of piano and piano duet versions of string quartets or symphonies. It is obvious that a publisher's decision to issue any one of these represents a calculation as to the popularity of the music or its composer. In addition, the geographical and temporal spread of such publications will help to define where and for how long that popularity lasted, just as the format of the publication, the nature of the arrangement and its cost, all define the types of musicians among whom such popularity continued. The publication of Arcadelt's madrigals over a period of 150 years is a significant example, and so is the proliferation of editions of Handel in different countries, or the pattern by which J.S. Bach's music was revived and printed throughout Europe.

Many of the ranges of topics touched on in the preceding paragraphs have not been studied in enough detail – at least in music. In this respect, the analytical bibliography of music is still in its infancy. Much of the best work in recent decades has been laying the ground-work, collecting the data and producing preliminary analyses. It is only recently, for example, that serious study of groups of publishers in Rome or Vienna has provided us with some of the basic material from which we could begin to answer the types of questions discussed above. Yet, as should by now be evident, analytical bibliography is almost certainly the key to a large number of issues of interest to contemporary musicologists.

4. Basic terminology.

This article is not the place to discuss definitions or problems of terminology in bibliography, even less to give a guide to practices and procedures. Information on the former can be found in Glaister (C1960) and Boorman (C1990); for the latter, the standard reference source remains Bowers (C1949). However, there are a few basic terms that do need to be discussed briefly, in part because music printing and publishing presents a slightly different picture from the procedures and practices of textual printing, which form the basis for most scholarly thinking.

Central to the identification of any printed matter are the concepts of edition, issue, impression and state. These terms define the series of actions that printers and publishers go through when producing a series of copies of a book across a period of time, and they also locate any individual copy within that series. An understanding of their implications is therefore necessary for any work in musical bibliography.

The most important is the term ‘edition’, which is used to define all the copies that are printed from basically the same printing surface, whenever they appear. When they are printed from type, they will usually have been printed at one time; music printed from engravings or lithographed plates can obviously be printed at any later date, for the surfaces can be retained for long periods. Photographic processes have extended the possibilities, so that a copy printed from a photograph of an earlier book is deemed to be part of the same edition, for it is based on the same printing surfaces.

This definition places the edition at the centre of all bibliographical work, for it asserts that all copies printed from the same edition will carry fundamentally the same text. It allows for corrections to a plate, for the replacement of a single page with a corrected version, and for later copies to be sold for a different price, or even by a different publisher. The copies need not be identical throughout: indeed, before the 19th century, it is unusual for several copies to be the same in every respect.

An ‘impression’ comprises all those copies that were printed at the same time, as part of one sequence of activities. As already implied, when printing from type, the impression usually comprised the whole of an edition, because the type would have to be dismantled after printing and distributed ready for use in the next volume. This is evidently not true for music printed from plates, stones, photographs and similar surfaces. Here, any number of impressions can be taken: indeed, it is the advantage of the processes that the publisher only need invest in as many copies as would sell relatively quickly, and then commission more copies from the printer.

In such instances, there may be almost no way of detecting consecutive impressions: they can be identical in every detail of the content, including the supporting details on the title-page, and even printed on similar paper – particularly after the middle of the 19th century. Sometimes, a change in paper may be the only evidence of a new impression.

This is not true for a new ‘issue’, for here we assert that some aspect of the publishing details has been changed. The change may be as slight as the substitution of a new price, to reflect the impact of inflation, or the addition of a second address for the publisher. It may be larger, showing a completely new cover or the addition of a dedicatory letter, or it may be primarily bibliographical, involving a different gathering structure and format (usually also indications of a new impression). In any of these cases, there need not have been any change to the musical content, for the concept of issue is tightly bound to the manner in which the music was put on the market.

When there are changes to the content, we speak of a new ‘state’. This presupposes that a page or pages have been changed or replaced. The change need not imply that the earlier version was erroneous, for a composer may have decided on a new version, perhaps of the orchestration or dynamics, or the language of a text set to music might have been changed, or a second language added as a translation. But, in other cases, there may have been a serious error, or the plate itself has been damaged during the printing process. All these potential reasons argue that several copies of a publication need to be studied and arranged in order by the bibliographer, before the content can be used by the musicologist or performer.

Clearly, a volume can go through a multiplicity of states, as individual plates are replaced or as the composer continues to tinker with the text, and the volume could gradually be transformed into something completely different, in effect a new edition. This has led to some discussion as to when this sequence of changes must be seen as producing a new edition. There is no clear-cut answer here – in part because it depends on the size of the changes – but there is a consensus among musical bibliographers that any sequence that changes more than 50% of an edition should be seen as introducing a new edition. This is not a very happy solution, for there may have been no such intention on the part of the publisher. In one sense, therefore, it is wiser to talk about states, not of a whole book of music, but of the individual pages or gatherings that make up the whole. Since the changes are made to each page separately, without any intention of changing the character (musical or bibliographical) of the whole, this reflects the process more accurately.

However, whatever decision is made, it is clear that each individual ‘state’, like each individual ‘issue’ and ‘impression’, is normally subordinate to the whole ‘edition’, and that this last is the fundamental categorization of copies. The other subdivisions are just that, usually subordinate to the edition, even though they are themselves essential to any understanding of the date, the reliability or the hierarchical place of the contents of a given copy of music.

In discussing each of these, describing and cataloguing them, and placing them in sequence, the bibliographer relies heavily on the ability to detect whether a copy is complete, and whether it actually represents what the publisher wanted to see sold. Many copies survive incomplete, adapted and annotated by performers and scholars, rebound or collected into a set with other works: sometimes these changes are of the greatest interest, as when a conductor such as Mahler annotates and modifies the parts for a Beethoven symphony, or when a collection of music can be taken as representing the taste of a known social circle. But such changes would be misleading for the bibliography of the music as published, and have to be discounted: the scholar needs to work with a mental construct, the Ideal Copy.

This concept of the Ideal Copy is central to all bibliographical research: Tanselle (C1980) regards it as ‘the element that distinguishes bibliographical description from cataloguing’. It is defined as a copy that survives complete and as the printer or publisher would like to have seen it leave the shop. For many books, and even more often in the case of music, copies no longer survive in that complete, corrected and pristine condition: pages (especially blank leaves) are missing; several printer's corrections are not found in any one copy; various publishers' or dealers' marks have been stamped on the copy; it has been bound, perhaps with other works, by a later owner, and this has affected its completeness; or perhaps some instrumental parts have disappeared. If the bibliographer were to describe such a copy as if it represented a newly published copy, the results would clearly be misleading. So the bibliographical version of an Ideal Copy is created – representing a copy with everything present, without later additions (owners' bindings and annotations), and with all corrections that the printer and publisher made – a version that may survive in only a few copies, if at all.

5. History of musical bibliography.

The earliest attempts at cataloguing music and musical books were, without exception, made during the process of listing the contents of libraries: thus a number of early monastic library catalogues include treatises about music, and a few institutions also listed the musical books they owned. An important early example is the catalogue of the library of the Duke de Berry, which included music by Machaut. In this case, however, as in most others, any music books were entered not because they were performing copies, but specifically because they were worthy to be placed alongside the other valuable books in the collection. Other books were often listed as a group, without any detail beyond perhaps a general categorization or, more often, an indication of their size or binding. This is particularly frequent in descriptions of the estates of the recently deceased. There are few lists of musical books used in performance, no doubt because they were usually kept in a different location, or were the private property of the musicians. This is particularly true for music used in liturgical situations. Most chant books were kept close to the church itself, while other musical books would have been kept in the library. Extant catalogues reflect this division.

However, the 16th century saw a significant change in this pattern. It opens with one of the most useful of all early book (and music) catalogues, that made of the acquisitions of Cristoforo Colòn during the early decades of the century. Colòn's various catalogues are remarkable, not merely because he attempted to acquire a copy of every book he came across, including music, but because he also entered the opening and closing items, where and when he had purchased the book, and the price he paid. This provides unparalleled evidence, on a grand scale, about the circulation and costs of early printed music. Colòn's catalogue is but the earliest of a series of lists that record musical volumes, appearing with increasing frequency throughout the next two centuries: these include catalogues of collections (the Fugger Musikbibliothek in Augsburg or the Lumley Collection now in the British Library), of institutions with performing traditions (the collections at Rheinpfalz or at St Anna, Augsburg), of publishers (Alessandro Gardano or Vincenti in Venice, or Gerlach in Nuremberg) or book-dealers (Martin and Playford in London or Mayr in Ljubljana), or for the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig. All these have proved invaluable for modern scholars, for they list many books that have since disappeared. The book fair catalogues are particularly useful, for they list all books which publishers were intending to bring to the fairs. While there are evident errors and problems of interpretation (especially for the dates), the lists still give much detail otherwise unavailable, and in particular illumine patterns of the spread of musical repertories and the contacts between publishers and dealers.

At the same time, scholars were compiling lists of the known literature in specific fields (or, still during the 16th century, of all fields), and these included lists of music or books on music. The earliest were the work of Conrad Gesner (D1548) and Antonfrancesco Doni (D1550–51): Gesner attempted to be comprehensive, while Doni concentrated on Italian secular music. These, and subsequent works, are examples of bibliographical work, although they hardly exceeded the limits of reference bibliography, providing lists of contents with little or no description. This is not surprising, for their function was as a display of the material available in a given field.

This pattern seems to continue for much of the 17th century. A number of catalogues of libraries (many of which contained important musical editions or manuscripts) survive, and one – the catalogue of the vast collection of João IV of Portugal – was actually printed (D1649). Other writers used the book fair catalogues to provide a bibliography of music and writings about music: these include Willer (D1592) and Draudius (D1610), the latter writing very much in the Gesner tradition. Similarly, publishers' catalogues grew in significance and scale (see, among others, Mischiati, D1984), a practice that continued well into the 20th century.

Near the end of the 17th century, the growth in writings about musical history followed a pattern of scholarship in many other fields: with it, there came the practice of citing one's sources – not necessarily in the form of footnotes, but at least as a bibliography of works consulted. J.K. Trost seems to have been the first to do this: his Ausführliche Beschreibung (Nuremberg, 1671) included such a list at the end. He was followed by many other writers, including those who compiled historical dictionaries. Brossard (D1703), Walther (D1732) and Adlung (D1758) all listed their musical sources, including earlier treatises, while Gruber (D1783) and particularly Forkel (D1792) added earlier scholarly writing. These lists were early examples of a number of bibliographical catalogues that have remained of value for modern scholarship. Perhaps the greatest achievements, and still the most useful, were the work of Gerber (1790–92/R), Fétis (D1835–44) and Eitner (B1900–04). These progressively increase the range and depth of material covered, at the same time as they respond to the growing sophistication of citations to be found in bibliographical work.

After about 1800, many of the attempts at cataloguing and studying musical material reflect new interests, particular the growth of a market in antiquarian books. Whereas Padre Martini in Bologna had acquired many of his books by exchange or gift, more and more collectors were now purchasing their rare and early books, and dealers emerged to specialize in the material. At the same time, details of the books themselves became more important – such features as the book's completeness, the presence of blank leaves, an early binding, large paper copies or autograph annotations made a book more valuable. Cataloguers and bibliographers therefore turned to studying the make-up of the books in more detail, and providing detailed descriptions. It was a short step from this to the emergence of bibliography as a discipline. At first, the field developed most strongly in the study of incunabula, and only slowly spread to 16th-century books. By the end of the century, however, scholarship had reached relatively recent volumes, books that had been produced less than 100 years earlier.

For music, a parallel development can be seen. Early work included both the study of incunables proper – which meant almost entirely treatises on music, with a little work on liturgical printing – and of what were called ‘musical incunabula’, books printed within the first 50 years or so of the start of music printing (i.e. the first half of the 16th century). It was natural that this growth of descriptive bibliography should be connected with the earliest music printing: apart from the value of those books on the commercial market, they had the fascination attaching to the ‘first’ examples of anything, and they were in some respects easier to describe than later editions. Typeset music books lend themselves to quantitative description more easily than does engraving, and the structure of the books was also easier to understand. It is true that there were many apparent anomalies, but these could usually be detected by an astute observer, and added their own fascination to the process. As a result, the basic processes for making typeset books came to be understood fairly well, and catalogues of incunables show considerable sophistication.

It is unfair, however, to characterize 19th-century musical bibliography as being driven by a commercial market or restricted to the earliest material. Many bibliographers were turning further afield, studying or cataloguing music from all periods to some of the most recent. Some were music librarians: Gaetano Gaspari worked at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, Anton Schmid was librarian at the court library in Vienna, and Emil Vogel was librarian for Peters, the publishing house in Leipzig. This pattern still continues: important work has been done by Alec Hyatt King and Oliver Neighbour at the British Library, by François Lesure at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, by Mariangela Donà in Milan and by Mary Kay Duggan in California, although the interests displayed by these scholars have changed as the field itself has expanded. Other early bibliographers were archivists and historians who became interested in printing history; yet others were essentially freelance scholars: Carl von Winterfeld was an early example, followed by Robert Eitner.

It was in the early years of the 20th century that musical bibliographers began to turn to other, often more detailed and analytical issues. One of the first of these issues was the significance of plate numbers, explored by Barclay Squire (C1913–14), followed by many scholars, importantly Deutsch (C1946), and Tyson and Neighbour (C1965). There were other purely bibliographical explorations: questions of typefaces and their uses (Meyer-Baer, C1962, since intensively developed in Duggan, C1992); issues of terminology and describing editions (Meyer, C1935; Hoboken, C1958); and problems of defining and dating first editions, especially of the major 18th- and 19th-century composers (Kinsky, C1934).

Since the middle of the 20th century, musical bibliography has expanded enormously: on one hand, many more scholars and librarians are addressing the issues, exploring new repertories (finally coming to grips with musical and other ephemera, for example), employing sophisticated analysis to explore new ranges of evidence, and attempting to face the difficult questions. In these respects, the discipline has begun to catch up with the skills deployed by bibliographers of English and American literature, or scholars studying engravings and etchings of the major artists. There is still ground to be explored, particularly in the realms of publishing history, of the ‘meta-text’, and of the relationship of the printed edition to its potential and actual consumers. Some current problems of this sort will not be usefully resolved until much more detailed research of many repertories has been undertaken. For example, the high level of research into 16th-century printing and publishing in Italy and the Low Countries is matched, in research into later periods or the rest of Europe, only by a number of excellent local or specific studies; work on editions of music by the major late-18th- and 19th-century composers is not equalled by that on the second- and third-rank masters, or by studies of composers before Haydn and Mozart; and we need serious research into 17th- and 20th-century printing and publishing.

There have been some recent efforts to survey the whole field of musical bibliography, placing its different aspects in context, perceiving trends and trying to suggest directions for work. Among these a most useful review of the more analytical end of the field is Krummel 1992.

It is evident that all forms of bibliography will change drastically under the impact of modern technologies. CD-ROM and the Internet have already made a difference. Large-scale bibliographical resources can be circulated on the former, and many details that have not reached a publishable condition are obtainable from the latter. While many scholars would perhaps be reluctant to see the printed page decline in importance, and there are some ranges of research that can not be conducted via the Internet, it must be acknowledged that the new resources are already making bibliographical control much more feasible, and thereby opening new doors for the analytical and speculative bibliographer.

6. Musical bibliography as music history.

There have already been many references to ways in which bibliographical work can aid the musician and scholar. Most obviously, catalogues and descriptive bibliographies are the tools by which we discover new materials, but they are useful in other ways. Behind the data presented in bibliographies are many strands of evidence waiting to be uncovered: the data show trends and patterns; they present evidence of popularity or salesmanship and reveal details of performance practice and of patterns of patronage.

The general rise in the numbers of editions over the past 500 years indicates a general increase in musical literacy and the desire to use notation in performance. These increasing numbers far outstrip the rate of growth of population, presenting an argument for the spread of notated music through increasing sectors of the population, an argument which is well supported by the advance of editions into popular genres of all sorts. Whether this expansion will continue under the impact of newer technologies is a moot point. But the pattern, over hundreds of years, both reflects and has its own impact on the styles in which composers write and the genres which publishers choose to promote, and the details of the pattern are most important for understanding historical developments.

In different periods, some repertories have been printed extensively, while others have more often remained in manuscript. Little keyboard music was printed in the first half of the 16th century: while this was partly due to the technical problems of printing chords, it is notable that the pattern continues even after engraving becomes widely used. The scarcity of printed church cantatas in 17th-century Germany can be contrasted with the many editions of Gelegenheitskompositionen – occasional pieces for weddings, funerals, degree ceremonies and the like. In the late 18th century and early in the 19th, few songs and opera arias were published in full score, appearing largely with piano reductions; this contrasts markedly with the practice in 17th- and 18th-century France.

The superficial reason for these phenomena must be that publishers decided that they could not sell enough copies of the neglected repertories, and would take a financial loss with them. But, beneath that, the deeper reasons are more diverse: the opera example is of course a reflection of the large number of domestic musicians, wanting to play and sing their favourite pieces, music heard at Vauxhall and similar places, or from stage works they had seen. There was no corresponding number of chamber orchestras willing to devote their energies to supporting singers. (This does raise the question of why any scores of single numbers were published.)

The contrast with published scores of French Baroque opera is highly significant. The historian is forced to believe that the French editions must have been subsidised, or else bought by many people who had no intention of performing them. Given that the scores often represent works presented before the French court, and that they were published in elegant form, it is probable that both explanations are correct, working in combination.

A related argument justifies the printing and sale of occasional compositions in 17th-century Germany: indeed, it is tempting to see the honoree buying, or commissioning, virtually all the edition, to serve as gifts to guests, friends and potential patrons. However, this raises another question, one for which we have few answers: how large was an edition, or how many copies were printed? Contracts do survive, giving specific figures, but there are far too few of them for us to be able to extrapolate. Instead, it seems likely that many print runs (at least before the late 18th century) were very small. It is hard to believe that a death in a small town in Germany could stimulate sales outside the area, and just as hard to believe that the heirs would give away more than 100 copies at most. Much the same argument can be raised for the French Opera scores, for vihuela music in Spain, and elsewhere. Given the relative costs of labour and materials, this is not unreasonable, and it was apparently cheaper for a printer to prepare a new edition, if more copies were needed, than to tie up capital in slow-moving copies.

The last point seems the best explanation for the many hidden editions that are being found as a result of detailed study of 16th- and even 17th-century editions. A small print run could well explain why new editions were so often printed within one or two years of the first.

Such arguments raise questions about how large the market for music ever was. We can only speculate about this for most generations before the 19th century. Two pieces of late evidence, however, are important: one is the continuing practice of publishing manuscript copies. Publishers in Italy and elsewhere, even as late as the middle third of the 19th century, continued to employ copyists, certainly working on sets of parts for hire, but also preparing piano-vocal arrangements of popular songs and arias for sale to the general public. There was evidently not enough demand (in a short enough period) to justify engraving the plates and running off copies. It was still cheaper to prepare manuscript copies as they were required.

The second evidence lies in the occasional survival of publisher's records, of which Ricordi's Libroni are among the most important. The small size of the print run indicated for many entries in these ledgers also argues a smaller market than we have tended to assume.

Parallel with this range of evidence is the presence on many title-pages of phrases such as ‘newly corrected’, ‘revised’ or ‘with additional compositions’. These wordings suggest that publishers, while recognizing that a second (or later) edition was being sought, were afraid that there were not enough purchasers to justify the cost of preparing it: they were therefore trying to persuade some of the original buyers to return for the new edition.

The few editions of keyboard music in the 16th century are significant not only by virtue of their scarcity, but also for the repertory they contained. It seems that, by contrast with the ready market for professional-level lute music, evident from the 1540s on, the potential purchasers of keyboard music were not regularly as skilled (at least before late in the century). There seem to have been fewer virtuosic keyboard players around, or (more probably) skilled organists and harpsichordists preferred to create their own music. If these types of evidence argue for the size and character of the market for particular repertories, there are also signs of publishers working to expand the number of purchasers of their music.

The pattern in the second half of the 18th century, whereby the title-pages of editions of keyboard music moved from the designation ‘for harpsichord’ to ‘for harpsichord or fortepiano’ and eventually to ‘for fortepiano’, is certainly an indicator of the progressive take-over by the latter instrument. While many of the compositions described as being for either instrument were evidently written for one rather than the other, the additional listing on the title-page implied that many amateur musicians had only one of the two instruments, and it was clearly intended to increase sales. Similarly, the mid-17th-century title-pages offering some version of the formula ‘for four soloists, with a four-part chorus ad placitum’ or ‘ad libitum’ tell us something about the number of institutions which could not afford, or find, enough qualified singers to cope with full choral music. These works, by Cazzati and others, are indeed composed so that the chorus is optional. They show the composer writing for as many situations as possible: the prominence given to the option on title-pages indicates that the publisher (probably influenced by Cazzati himself) also saw the commercial advantages implicit in this mode of writing. This sort of conclusion, while fairly obvious, is only justifiable once the bibliographical work has been completed. The evidence uncovered by such work is interesting for other aspects of musical history as well.

The problem of dating many 18th- and 19th-century editions has already been mentioned, and indeed the bibliography and cataloguing of 19th-century music remains one of the most important lacunae in the field. Major composers and their works have been studied in detail, and many of their editions have been dated, often with the aid of personal correspondence, newspaper advertisements and other external data. However, as soon as one turns to composers who are only marginally less important, such as Dussek, Thalberg or Humperdinck, the research is so uneven in coverage that few editions have been even approximately dated. Standard reference works give very different dates for first editions, often relying on opus numbers as a guide, or depending on the particular copy examined by the writer. The problem is of course compounded by the number of editions that went through series of impressions and issues, each without date. Careful work on the early editions of Brahms has shown what can be achieved (Hofmann, C1975).

It is clear that the history of styles and taste, as much as local histories of music and its reception, needs all these data, and needs this type of research to be undertaken. Given the extent to which publishing and dissemination were influential in the development of musical taste, to some extent taking the place of actual performances of the original form of the music in all but the most important cultural centres, much research is dependent on clarifying publication and selling data. The new edition of Ricordi's Libroni has again led the way here, allowing the reader to see the relative importance of selections from operas, arrangements of inidividual numbers for instruments, and fantasias or potpourris of themes. Each of these genres had a different function, and their relative importance (as measured by their appearance and the size of the print run) tells us something about the character of the market for the music. Similar studies of publishers' advertisements, dealers' catalogues, and purchasing records will certainly aid in our understanding of how, for example, features of Beethoven's music were so rapidly absorbed and imitated in different parts of Europe and America.

This highlights the extent to which bibliography is always at the service of our study of the content of the document. The bibliographer has to be immersed in the technicalities of printing and publishing, and has a whole armoury of research tools as complex and detailed as those available to the musicologist: he or she may in practice hardly look at the music itself. The end, product, though, is always either a deeper understanding of the processes of producing a musical edition or a better grasp of how a particular copy of an edition relates to the content which it purports to present to a musician. A few examples of the impact of such research follow:

(i) almost all early music printers seem to have preferred to reprint, going through the labour of preparing a new edition, rather than having larger initial print runs. This is true of the first publisher of music, Petrucci, and continues throughout the 16th century and as late as Thomas East (Smith, C1996–7). Such a pattern tells us something about the cost of labour as opposed to supplies, but it also says much about the speed with which publishers expected to be able to sell copies, and hence something about the extent to which purchasers were not only interested in ‘the latest thing’;

(ii) detailed study (Bernstein, C1985–6) of the typographical material found in several Venetian music books of the 1540s and 50s, which carry no printer's or publisher's name, but do include the device of a salamander, has shown that they were connected with one of the major Venetian publishing houses of the time. We still can not answer why he chose not to acknowledge these editions;

(iii) the relative numbers of editions of different repertories – congregational music, simple part-music, complex madrigalian styles and church or instrumental music at various levels – and the format and manner of their presentation, taken together, allow us to detect different patterns of music-making in Italy as opposed to the Low Countries, reflecting different approaches in the various strata of society;

(iv) demonstrations of the value of studying every available copy of each printed edition abound in the literature, revealing manuscript corrections of misprints made in the printing shop or by early owners (Charteris, C1995);

(v) analysis of the use of ornamental initial letters has helped in dating editions, and in the study of work-patterns, for French music of the 16th and 17th centuries (Guillo and Noailly, C1988);

(vi) study of the engravers for editions of Handel's instrumental music has led to detailed re-evaluations of the texts they prepared (Burrows, C1983);

(vii) analysis of how London engravers divided up their work on editions of Haydn has helped identify the characteristics of each craftsman and the range of errors each was liable to make (Poole, C1980);

(viii) Tyson's study (C1963) of the business arrangements for publishing Beethoven's works in England has shown that some English editions reflect the composer's intentions better than those published closer to home;

(ix) study of the engraved scores of 19th-century Italian operas reveals that some pages, while carrying the same plate numbers as their neighbours, are engraved in a different hand. While, in some cases, these pages appear to be replacements for defective ones, in others they represent necessary changes in layout as more popular numbers, published earlier, were incorporated into complete editions;

(x) close examination of copies of the original editions of works by Brahms throws light on the lack of care with which engravers handled many details of the composer's score, as well as the extent to which Brahms felt it necessary to notate corrections and improvements on his proof (Pascall, C1983; Grassi, C1995);

(xi) study of normal practice is beginning to draw attention to differences in the boldness with which a printer displays on the title-page the composer's name, the genre or title of the work, and the name of the dedicatee. This is important evidence for assessing the contemporary stature of the individual composer, the reputation of different genres (and particularly of the works that lay behind potpourris and fantasies), and the selling power attached to the name of a distinguished or accomplished and beautiful member of society;

(xii) the various editions of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring show in an exemplary manner how a new edition, intended to correct errors or to carry a composer's latest thoughts, will inevitably also carry new errors (Cyr, C1982).

These are all exemplary, not merely for the study itself, but because they show what can be done with other repertories. Similar problems abound, and remain untackled, throughout music history. In each case, bibliographical study will force us to reconsider the history of the music itself (of its composition and revision), of the ways in which it was performed, or of the manner in which it reached and was received by an audience.

b: reference bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Music bibliography: (i) General (ii) Cataloguing music and music literature. B Reference bibliography: (i) Music: major cumulative bibliographies (ii) Music: current and national bibliographies (iii) Music: reference bibliographies (iv) Music literature: cumulative bibliographies (v) Music literature: current bibliographies. C Descriptive and analytical bibliography: (i) General studies (ii) Music: methodologies (iii) Music: sample descriptive bibliographies (iv) Music: case studies in analytical bibliography. D History of music bibliography: (i) General (ii) Early printed music bibliographies (to 1850) (iii) Selected studies of early inventories.

For further relevant literature, especially concerning analytical bibliography, see Printing and publishing of music.

a: music bibliography

c: descriptive and analytical bibliography

d: History of music bibliography

a: music bibliography

(i) general

W. Schmieder: ‘Musikbibliographie: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte und ihren Problemen’, AMw xii (1955), 239–47

G.B. Koltypina: Bibliografiya muzïkal'noy bibliografii (Moscow, 1963)

Å. Davidsson: Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Musikdrucks (Uppsala, 1965)

H.-M. Plesske: ‘Bibliographie des Schrifttums zur Geschichte deutscher und österreichischer Musikverlage’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, iii (1968), 135–222

Foundations in Music Bibliography: Evanston, IL, 1986

D.W. Krummel: Bibliographical Handbook of American Music (Urbana, IL, 1987)

B.M. Antolini: ‘L'editoria musicale in Italia dal Settecento al Novecento: fonti e bibliografia’, Fonti musicali in Italia: studi e ricerche, iii (1989), 33–55

D.W. Krummel: The Literature of Music Bibliography: an Account of the Writings on the History of Music Printing and Publishing (Berkeley, 1993)

(ii) cataloguing music and music literature

O.E. Deutsch: ‘Music Bibliography and Catalogues’, The Library, 4th ser., xxiii (1942–3), 151–70

S. Goldthwaite: ‘Classification Problems in Bibliographies of Literature about Music’, Library Quarterly, xviii (1948), 255–63

IAML International Cataloging Code Commission: Code international de catalogage de la musique (Frankfurt, 1957–83)

Music Library Association and American Library Association: Code for Cataloguing Music and Phonorecords (Chicago, 1958)

E.J. Coates: The British Catalogue of Music Classification (London, 1960)

C.S. Spalding: Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (Chicago, 1967, rev. 2/1974 by P.W. Winkler)

I. Pethes: A Flexible Classification System of Music and Literature on Music (Budapest, 1968) [in Eng., Hung.]

b: reference bibliography

(i) music: major cumulative bibliographies

L. Allacci: Drammaturgia (Rome, 1666, enlarged 2/1755/R) [AllacciD]

C.F. Whistling: Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1817–27/R, 2/1828–39/R)

C. Gardeton: Bibliographie musicale de la France et de l'étranger, ou Répertoire général systématique de tous les traités et oeuvres de musique vocale et instrumentale (Paris, 1822/R)

C.F. Becker: Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, oder Systematisch-chronologische Zusammenstellung der in diesen zwei Jahrhunderten gedruckten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1847, 2/1855/R)

US Board of Music Trade: Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works (New York, 1870/R)

Le bibliographe musical (Paris, 1872–6/R)

R. Eitner and others: Bibliographie der Musik-Sammelwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1877/R) [EitnerS]

A. Deakin: Outlines of Musical Bibliography: a Catalogue of Early Music and Musical Works Printed or Otherwise Produced in the British Isles (Birmingham, 1899/R)

B. and F. Pazdírek: Universal-Handbuch der Musikliteratur aller Zeiten und Völker (Vienna, 1904–10/R) [PazdírekH]

Eesti muusikaajaloo lugemik: Eesti muusikakirjandus aastatel 1622–1917 [The history of Estonian music: Estonian musical literature] (Tallinn, 1934)

Bibliografia musical Brasileira, 1820–1850 (Rio de Janeiro, 1952)

A.H. Heyer: Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: a Guide to their Contents (Chicago, 1957, 3/1980)

E.B. Schnapper, ed.: British Union-Catalogue of Early Music (London, 1957) [BUCEM]

Répertoire international des sources musicales (Munich and Kassel, 1960–) [RISM]

Magyar könyvészet 1945–1960: a Magyarországon nyomtatott térképek szakosétott jegyzéke/Bibliographia hungarica 1945–1960: catalogus systematicus notarum musicarum in Hungaria editarum (Budapest, 1969)

B.S. Brook: Thematic Catalogues in Music: an Annotated Bibliography (Hillsdale, NY, 1972, enlarged 2/1997)

S.R. Charles: A Handbook of Music and Music Literature in Sets and Series (New York, 1972)

S. Klevenhusen: Thematische Werkverzeichnisse: eine annotierte Bibliographie (Berlin, 1972)

The Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Library to 1980 (London, 1981–7); updated versions on CD-ROM as CPM Plus (London, 1992, 2/1997)

Bibliografia da música brasileira, 1977–1984 (São Paulo, 1984)

B. Pierreuse: Catalogue général de l'edition musicale en France: livres, méthodes et partitions de musique sérieuse en vente (Paris, 1984)

C.A. Höweler and F.H. Matter: Fontes hymnodiae neerlandicae impressi 1539–1700/De melodieën van het Nederlandstalig geestelijk lied 1539–1700: een bibliografie van de gedrukte bronnen (Nieuwkoop, 1985)

G.R. Hill and N.L. Stephens: Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music (Berkeley, 1997)

(ii) music: current and national bibliographies

Hofmeisters Handbuch der Musikliteratur (Leipzig, 1844–)

Bibliographie musicale (Paris, 1875–1920/R) [from 1879 Bibliographie musicale française]

Uppslagsbok för Svenska musikhandeln (Linköping, later Stockholm, 1891–)

Dansk musikfortegenelse (Copenhagen, 1931–)

Deutschen Musikbibliographie (Leipzig, 1943–)

Bibliographie de la France: tables annuelles alphabétique, iv: Oeuvres musicales (Paris, 1946–) [later Bibliographie nationale française, suppl.iii: Musique]

Oesterreichische Musikbibliographie: Gruppe 13a (Vienna, 1949–) [later Oesterreichische Bibliographie: Gruppe 13a]

Library of Congress Catalogues: Music, Books on Music, Sound Recordings (Washington DC, 1954–) [formerly Music and Phonorecords]

The British Catalogue of Music (London, 1957–)

D.W. Krummel and J.B. Coover: ‘Current National Bibliographies: their Music Coverage’, Notes, xvii (1959–60), 375–84

Belgische bibliographie/Bibliographie belge, suppl. (Brussels, 1966–)

Svensk musikförteckning (Stockholm, 1966–)

Magyar zenemüvek bibliográfiája (Budapest, 1970–)

Norsk bokfortegnelse: musiktrykk (Oslo, 1981–7)

Música impresa: Biblioteca nacional, bibliografia español (Madrid, 1985–)

Muziek catalogus Nederland (The Hague, 1985–)

See also a series of articles in FAM, xxvii (1980) and xxxiii–xli (1986–94)

(iii) music: reference bibliographies

P. Wackernagel: Bibliographie zur Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenliedes im XVI. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1854–5/R)

E. Challier: Grosser Lieder-Katalog: ein alphabetisch geordnetes Verzeichniss sämtlicher einstimmiger Lieder mit Begleitung des Pianoforte (Berlin, 1885–1914)

G. Gaspari: Catalogo della Biblioteca del Liceo musicale di Bologna, i–iv (Bologna, 1890–1905/R); v, ed. U. Sesini (Bologna, 1943/R) [GaspariC]

E. Vogel: Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens, aus den Jahren 1500 bis 1700 (Berlin, 1892, rev. 3/1978 by F. Lesure and C. Sartori) [VogelB]

R. Eitner: Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzing, 1900–04, 2/1959) [EitnerQ]

H. Parent: Répertoire encyclopédique du pianiste (Paris, 1900–07)

O.G.T. Sonneck: A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (Washington, DC, 1905, rev. and enlarged 2/1945 by W.T. Upton, repr. 1964 with preface by I. Lowens)

W. Altmann: Kammermusik-Katalog: ein Verzeichnis von seit 1841 veröffentlichten Kammermusikwerken (Leipzing, 1910, 6/1945)

F. Ludwig: Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili, i/1 (Halle, 1910/R)

J. Ecorcheville: Catalogue du fonds de musique ancienne de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1910–14/R)

M.E. Sears: Song Index: an Index to more than 12,000 Songs in 177 Song Collections (New York, 1926, suppl. 1934)

H. Endō: Bibliography of Oriental and Primitive Music (Tokyo, 1929)

A. Weinmann: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alt-Wiener Musikverlages (Vienna, 1948–87)

Å. Davidsson: Catalogue critique et descriptif des imprimés de musique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles conservés dans les bibliothèques suédoises, excepté la bibliothèque de l'Université royale d'Upsala (Uppsala, 1952)

C. Sartori: Bibliografia della musica strumentale italiana stampata in Italia fino al 1700 (Florence, 1952–68) [SartoriB]

O.E. Albrecht: Census of Autograph Music Manuscripts of European Composers in American Libraries (Philadelphia, 1953)

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard, 1551–1598 (Paris, 1955)

C. Sartori: Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani (Florence, 1958) [SartoriD]

R.J. Wolfe: Secular Music in America, 1801–1825: a Bibliography (New York, 1964)

H.M. Brown: Instrumental Music Printed before 1600: a Bibliography (Cambridge, MA, 1965) [BrownI]

M. Farish: String Music in Print (New York, 1965, 2/1973; suppls., 1968, 1984, 1998)

J.H. Taylor: Vocal and Instrumental Music in Print (New York, 1965)

J.J. Fuld: The Book of World-Famous Music (New York, 1966, 2/1971) [FuldWFM]

L.M. Cross: A Bibliography of Electronic Music (Toronto, 1968)

H. Davies: Répertoire international des musiques electroacoustiques/International Electronic Music Catalog (Cambridge, MA, 1968)

W.C. Smith and C. Humphries: A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by the Firm of John Walsh during the Years 1721–1766 (London, 1968)

W.C. Smith: Handel: a Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Editions (Oxford, 1970)

T.R. Nardone, J.H. Nye and M. Resnick: Choral Music in Print (Philadelphia, 1974; suppls.: N.K. Nardone: Sacred Choral Music in Print, 1981; N.K. Nardone: Secular Choral Music in Print, 1982)

H. Rheinfurth: Der Musikverlag Lotter in Augsburg (ca. 1719–1845) (Tutzing, 1977)

Jazz-Index (Frankfurt, 1977–83)

The Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Library to 1980 (London, 1981–7); updated versions on CD-ROM as CPM Plus (London, 1992, 2/1997)

H. Vanhulst: Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse et ses fils, 1545–1578 (Brussels, 1984)

S.D. Westcott: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Music for Film and Television (Detroit, 1985)

Annotated Bibliography of Japanese Classical Music (Tokyo, 1987)

A.P. Britton, I. Lowens and R. Crawford: American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698–1810: a Bibliography (Worcester, MA, 1990)

J.M. Chomiński and T.D. Turło: Katalog dzieł Fryderyka Chopina [Catalogue of the works of Fryderyk Chopin] (Kraków, 1990)

C. Lems-Dworkin: African Music: an Annotated Bibliography (Munich, 1991)

(iv) music literature: cumulative bibliographies

W. Freystätter: Die musikalischen Zeitschriften seit ihrer Entstehung bis zur Gegenwart: chronologisches Verzeichnis der periodischen Schriften über Musik (Munich, 1884)

J.E. Matthew: The Literature of Music (New York, 1896/R)

B. and F. Pazdírek: Universal-Handbuch der Musikliteratur aller Zeiten und Völker (Vienna, 1904–10/R) [PazdírekH]

M. Brenet: ‘Bibliographie des bibliographies musicales’, Année musicale, iii (1913), 1–152; pubd separately (New York, 1971)

J. Prod'homme: ‘Essai de bibliographie des périodiques musicaux de langue française’, RdM, i (1917–19), 76–90

A. Aber: Handbuch der Musikliteratur in systematisch-chronologischer Anordnung (Leipzig, 1922/R)

E. Blom: A General Index to Modern Musical Literature in the English Language (London, 1927/R)

P.A. Scholes: A List of Books about Music in the English Language prepared as an Appendix to the Oxford Companion to Music (London and New York, 1939)

D.H. Daugherty, L. Ellinwood and R.S. Hill: A Bibliography of Periodical Literature in Musicology and Allied Fields (Washington DC, 1940–43/R)

Å. Davidsson: Bibliografi över Svensk musiklitteratur 1800–1945 (Uppsala, 1948, 2/1980)

J.B. Coover: A Bibliography of Music Dictionaries (Denver, 1952, rev. 3/1971 as Music Lexicography, including … a Bibliography of Music Dictionaries)

E.C. Krohn: The History of Music: an Index to the Literature available in a Selected Group of Music Publications (St Louis, 1952/R)

W. Kahl and W.-M. Luther: Repertorium der Musikwissenschaft: Musikshrifttum: Denkmäler und Gesamtausgaben in Auswahl (1800–1950) (Kassel, 1953)

J.A. Thoumin: Bibliographie rétrospective des périodiques français de littérature musicale 1870–1954 (Paris, 1957)

M. Briquest: La musique dans les congrès internationaux, 1835–1939 (Paris, 1961)

E. Rohlfs: Die deutschsprachigen Musikperiodica, 1945–1957 (Regensburg, 1961)

Å. Davidsson: Bibliographie der musiktheoretischen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden, 1962)

K.E. Mixter: General Bibliography for Music Research (Detroit, 1962, 3/1996)

R. Schaal: Verzeichnis deutschsprachiger musikwissenschaftlicher Dissertationen 1861–1960 (Kassel, 1963, suppl., 1974 [covers 1961–70])

F. Blum: Music Monographs in Series: a Bibliography of Numbered Monograph Series in the Field of Music current since 1945 (New York, 1964)

V. Duckles: Music Reference and Research Materials: an Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1964, 5/1997)

Å. Davidsson: Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Musikdrucks (Uppsala, 1965)

J.H. Davies: Musicalia: Sources of Information in Music (Oxford, 1966, 2/1969)

F. Gillis and P. Merriam: Ethnomusicology and Folk Music: an International Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses (Middletown, CT, 1966)

I. Fellinger: Verzeichnis der Musikzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1968)

W. Gerboth: An Index to Musical Festschriften and Similar Publications (New York, 1969)

D.-R. de Lerma: A Selective List of Masters' Theses in Musicology (Bloomington, IN, 1970)

P. Ericksen: Indeks til Danske periodiske musikpublikationer 1795–1841 (Århus, 1975)

G.A. Marco and S.P. Ferris: Information on Music: a Handbook of Reference Sources in European Languages (Littleton, CO, 1975–84)

G.D. Gibson and M.H. Gray: Bibliography of Discographies, i: Classical Music 1925–1975 (Munich, 1977)

J. Gribenski: Thèses de doctorat en langue française relatives à la musique: bibliographie commentée (New York, 1979)

J. Tyrrell and R. Wise: A Guide to International Congress Reports in Musicology 1900–1975 (London, 1979)

D. Allen: Bibliography of Discographies, ii: Jazz (Munich, 1981)

M.H. Gray: Bibliography of Discographies, iii: Popular Music (Munich, 1983)

A. Hodges and R. McGill: The British Union Catalogue of Music Periodicals (London, 1985, 2/1998)

I. Fellinger: Periodica musicalia (1789–1830) (Regensburg, 1986)

H. Walther: Bibliographie der Musikbuchreihen, 1886–1990 (Kassel, 1991)

(v) music literature: current bibliographies

The Music Index: a Subject-Author Guide to Music Periodical Literature (Detroit, 1949–)

Oesterreichische Musikbibliographie (Vienna, 1949–)

H. Hewitt [later C. Adkins and A. Dickinson]: Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (Philadelphia, 1952–)

W. Schmieder: Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums 1950/51–1958/59 (Frankfurt, 1954–64)

P. Doe: ‘Register of Theses on Music’, RMARC, iii– (1963–)

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (New York, 1967–)

Musikbibliographischer Dienst (Berlin, 1969–) [pubn of the Deutscher Büchreiverband]

Bibliographia musicologica: a Bibliography of Music Literature (Utrecht, 1970–78)

Bibliographic Guide to Music (New York, 1976–)

c: descriptive and analytical bibliography

(i) general studies

G. Schneider: Handbuch der Bibliographie (Leipzig, 1923, 4/1930; Eng. trans., 1934, as Theory and History of Bibliography)

R.B. McKerrow: An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1927)

F. Bowers: Principles of Bibliographic Description (Princeton, NJ, 1949)

G.A. Glaister: Glossary of the Book (London, 1960, 3/1997)

P. Gaskell: A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972)

G.T. Tanselle: ‘The Concept of Ideal Copy’, Studies in Bibliography, xxxiii (1980), 18–53

G.T. Tanselle: ‘The Description of Non-Letterpress Material in Books’, Studies in Bibliography, xxxv (1982), 1–42

S. Boorman: ‘Glossary’, Music Printing and Publishing, ed. D.W. Krummel and S. Sadie (London, 1990), 487–550

(ii) music: methodologies

W. Barclay Squire: ‘Publishers' Numbers’, SIMG, xv (1913–14), 420–27

J. Schmidt-Phiseldeck: ‘Datierung der Musikalien’, Beethoven-Zentenarfeier: Vienna 1927, 279–82

K. Meyer: ‘Über Musikbibliographie’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin, 1929/R), 118–22

K. Meyer: ‘Was sind musikalische Erstausgaben?’, Philobiblon, viii (1935), 181–4

C. Hopkinson: ‘Fundamentals of Music Bibliography’, Journal of Documentation, xi (1955), 119–29

A. van Hoboken: ‘Probleme der musikbibliographischen Terminologie’, FAM, v (1958), 6–15

O.W. Neighbour and A. Tyson: English Music Publishers' Plate Numbers in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1965)

M. Przywecka-Samecka: Drukarstwo muzyczne w Polsce do Końca XVIII wieku [Music printing in Poland to the end of the 18th century] (Kraków, 1969) [Przywecka-SameckaDM]

M. Bohatcová: ‘Bibliografie a dějiny knihtisku’ [Bibliography and the history of printing], Sborník Národniho Muzea v Praze: řada c. Lit.-Hist., xvi (1971), 205–42

H. Lenneberg: ‘Dating Engraved Music: the Present State of the Art’, Library Quarterly, xli (1971), 128–40

D.W. Krummel: Guide to Dating Early Published Music: a Manual of Bibliographic practices (Hackensack, NJ, 1974); suppl. in FAM, xxiv (1977), 175–84

D.W. Krummel: ‘Musical Functions and Bibliographical Forms’, The Library, 5th ser., xxxi (1976), 327–50

D. Fog: ‘Random Thoughts on Music Dating and Terminology’, FAM, xxiv (1977), 141–4

L. Weinhold: ‘Erst- und Frühdrucke von Beethovens Werken’, Beiträge zur Beethoven Bibliographie: Studien and Materialien zum Werkverzeichnis von Kinsky-Halm, ed. K. Dorfmüller (Munich, 1978), 245–68

A. Devriès and F. Lesure: Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique française: des origines à environ 1820 (Geneva, 1979–88)

M.K. Duggan: ‘A System for Describing Fifteenth-Century Music Type’, Gutenberg-Jb 1984, 67–76

D.W. Krummel: ‘Citing the Score: Descriptive Bibliography and Printed Music’, The Library, 6th ser., ix (1987), 329–46

B.M. Antolini and A. Bini: Editori e librai musicali a Roma nella prima metà dell'Ottocento (Rome, 1988)

(iii) music: sample descriptive bibliographies

C.L. Day and E.B. Murrie: English Song-Books, 1651–1702 (London, 1940) [Day-MurrieESB]

C. Hopkinson: A Bibliography of the Musical and Literary Works of Hector Berlioz, 1803–1869, with Histories of the French Music Publishers Concerned (Edinburgh, 1951, rev. 2/1980 by R. Macnutt)

W.C. Smith: Handel: a Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Editions (London, 1960, 2/1970)

K. Meyer-Baer: Liturgical Music Incunabula: a Descriptive Catalogue (London, 1962)

D. Heartz: Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music: a Historical Study and Bibliographical Catalogue (Berkeley, 1969)

E.-L. Berz: Die Notendrucker und ihre Verleger in Frankfurt am Main von den Anfängen bis etwa 1630: eine bibliographische und drucktechnische Studie zur Musikpublikation (Kassel, 1970)

K. Hofmann: Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1975)

G. Haberkamp: Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tutzing, 1986)

M.S. Lewis: Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538–1569: a Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study (New York, 1988–)

H. Schneider: Der Musikverleger Johann Michael Götz (1740–1810) und sein kurfürstlich priviligierte Notenfabrique (Tutzing, 1989)

R. Benton and J. Halley: Pleyel as Music Publisher: a Documentary Sourcebook of Early 19th-Century Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1990)

A.P. Britton, I. Lowens and R. Crawford: American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698–1810: a Bibliography (Worcester, MA, 1990)

M.K. Duggan: Italian Music Incunabula: Printers and Type (Berkeley, 1992)

R.L. Weaver: A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalog of the Music Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan De Laet (Warren, MI, 1994)

D. Hunter: Opera and Song Books Published in England, 1703–1726: a Descriptive Bibliography (London, 1997)

(iv) music: case studies in analytical bibliography

A. Goovaerts: Histoire et bibliographie de la typographie musicale dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Antwerp and Brussels, 1880/R) [GoovaertsH]

P. Hirsch: ‘Bibliographie der Musiktheoretischen Drucke des Franchino Gafori’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin, 1929/R), 65–72

G. Kinsky: ‘Erstlingsdrucke der deutschen Tonmeister der Klassik und Romantik’, Philobiblon, vii (1934), 347–64

O.E. Deutsch: Music Publishers' Numbers (London, 1946; Ger. trans., rev. 2/1961 as Musikverlagsnummern) [DeutschMPN]

C. Johansson: French Music Publishers' Catalogue of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Stockholm, 1955) [JohanssonFMP]

Å. Davidsson: Studier rörande svenskt musiktryck före år 1750 [Studies on Swedish music printing before 1750] (Uppsala, 1957) [with Ger. summary]

D.W. Krummel: ‘Graphic Analysis: its Application to Early American Engraved Music’, Notes, xvi (1958–9), 213–33

H. Pohlmann: Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts, ca. 1400–1800 (Kassel, 1962)

A. Tyson: The Authentic English Editions of Beethoven (London, 1963)

E.-L. Berz: Die Notendrucker und ihre Verleger in Frankfurt am Main von den Anfängen bis etwa 1630: eine bibliographische und drucktechnische Studie zur Musikpublikation (Kassel, 1970)

K. Hortschansky: ‘Die Datierung der frühen Musikdrucke Etienne Rogers’, TVNM, xxii/2 (1971), 152–86

D.W. Krummel: ‘Oblong Format in Early Music Books’, The Library, 5th ser., xxvi (1971), 312–24

H. Lenneberg: ‘Dating Engraved Music: the Present State of the Art’, Library Quarterly, xli (1971), 128–40

C. Hopkinson: Tannhäuser: an Examination of 36 Editions (Tutzing, 1973)

K. Hofmann: Die Erstdrucke der Werke Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1975)

A. Devriès: Edition et commerce de la musique gravée à Paris dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1976)

A. Leicher-Olbrich: Untersuchungen zu Originalausgaben Beethovenscher Klavierwerke (Wiesbaden, 1976)

S. Boorman: ‘The “First” Edition of the Odhecaton A’, JAMS, xxx (1977), 183–207

K. Forney: Tielman Susato, Sixteenth-Century Music Printer: an Archival and Typographical Investigation (diss., U. of Kentucky, 1978)

H.E. Poole: ‘Music Engraving Practice in Eighteenth-Century London: a Study of some Forster Editions and Haydn and their Manuscript Sources’, Music and Bibliography: Essays in Honour of Alec Hyatt King, ed. O. Neighbour (London, 1980), 98–131

R.J. Wolfe: Early American Music Engraving and Printing: a History of Music Publishing in America from 1787 to 1825 (Urbana, IL, 1980)

D.G. Cardamone: ‘Madrigale a tre et arie napoletane: a Typographical and Repertorial Study’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 436–81

L. Cyr: ‘Le sacre du printemps: petite histoire d'une grande partition’, Stravinsky: études & témoignages, ed. F. Lesure (Paris, 1982), 89–147

J. Kallberg: ‘Chopin in the Marketplace: Aspects of the International Music Publishing Industry’, Notes, xxxix (1982–3), 535–69, 795–824

D. Burrows: ‘Walsh's Editions of Handel's Opera 1–5: the Texts and their Sources’, Music in Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. C. Hogwood and R. Luckett (Cambridge, 1983), 79–105

R. Pascall: ‘Brahms and the Definitive Text’, Brahms (Cambridge, 1983), 59–75

D.W. Krummel: ‘Early German Partbook Type-Faces’, Gutenberg-Jb 1985, 80–99

J. Bernstein: ‘The Burning Salamander: Assigning a Printer to some 16th-Century Music Prints’, Notes, xlii (1985–6), 483–501

J. Coover: ‘Musical Ephemera: some Thoughts about Types, Controls, and Access’, Foundations in Music Bibliography: Evanston, IL, 1986, 349–64

B. Huys: ‘Overzicht van de muziektypografie in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden voor 1800’, Jb van het Vlaams centrum voor oude muziek, ii (1986), 21–42

S. Boorman: ‘Some Non-Conflicting Attributions, and some Newly Anonymous Compositions, from the Early 16th Century’, EMH, vii (1987), 109–57

B.M. Antolini and A. Bini: Editori e librai musicali a Roma nella prima metà dell'Ottocento (Rome, 1988)

L. Guillo and J.-M. Noailly: ‘Lettrines et ornements dans l'édition musicale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Ornementation typographique et bibliographique historique, ed. M.-T. Isaac (Brussels, 1988), 107–28

H. Vanhulst: ‘La diffusion des éditions de musique polyphonique dans les anciens Pays-Bas à la fin du XVIe siècle’, Musique et société hommages à Robert Wangermée, ed. H. Vanhulst and M. Haine (Brussels, 1988), 27–51

R. Cafiero and F. Seller: ‘Editoria musicale a Napoli attraverso la stamp periodica: il “Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilia” (1817–1860)’, Fonti musicali in Italia: studi e ricerche, iii (1989), 57–90; iv (1990), 133–70

D. Cardamone and D.L. Jackson: ‘Multiple Formes and Vertical Setting in Susato's First Edition of Lassus's “Opus 1”’, Notes, xlvi (1989–90), 7–24

G. Butler: Bach's Clavierübung III: the Making of a Print (Durham, NC, 1990)

S. Boorman: ‘Printed Music Books of the Italian Renaissance from the Point of View of Manuscript Study’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2587–602

H. Vanhulst: ‘Plantin et le commerce international de éditions de musique polyphonique 1566–1578’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2630–40

R. Charteris: ‘Newly Discovered Manuscript Parts and Annotations in a Copy of Giovanni Gabrieli's Symphoniae sacrae (1615)’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 487–96

A.M. Grassi: ‘Varianti d'autore e varianti di trasmissione nel Trio op.114 di Johannes Brahms: osservazioni sui testimoni manoscritti e a stampa’, La critica del testo musicale: metodi e problemi della filologia musicale, ed. M.C. Vela (Lucca, 1995), 325–57

G.S. Bozarth, ed.: The Brahms-Keller Correspondence (Lincoln, NE, 1996)

M. Twyman: Early Lithographed Music: a Study Based on the H. Baron Collection (London, 1996)

J.L. Smith: ‘The Hidden Editions of Thomas East’, Notes, liii (1996–7), 1059–91

L. Guillo: ‘Les caractères de musique utilisés des origines à environ 1650 dans les anciens Pays-Bas’, Music Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries; … Music Printing in Antwerp and Europe in the 16th Century: Antwerp 1995 [Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation, ii (1997)], 183–235

R. Gustavson: Hans Ott, Hieronymus Formschneider, and the Novum et insigne opus musicum (Nuremberg, 1537–1538) (diss., U. of Melbourne, 1998)

d: History of music bibliography

(i) general

E.C. Krohn: ‘The Bibliography of Music’, MQ, v (1919), 231–54

A.H. King: ‘Recent Work in Music Bibliography’, The Library, 4th ser., xxvi (1945–6), 122–48

W. Schmieder: ‘Musikbibliographie: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte und ihren Problemen’, AMw, xii (1955), 239–47

J.B. Coover: ‘The Current Status of Music Bibliography’, Notes, xiii (1955–6), 581–93

M. Plesske: ‘Zur Geschichte der deutsche Musikbibliographie: die periodische Verzeichnung der praktischen Musik’, BMw, v (1963), 97–111

D.W. Krummel: The Literature of Music Bibliography: an Account of the Writings on the History of Music Printing and Publishing (Berkeley, 1993)

D. Hunter: ‘Two Half-Centuries of Music Bibliography’, Notes, 1 (1993–4), 23–38

(ii) early printed music bibliographies (to 1850)

(not including catalogues put out by printers or publishers listing their own publications)

C. Gesner: Bibliotheca universalis (Zürich, 1545–55/R) [incl. Pandectarum (1548)]

A. Doni: La libraria (Venice, 1550–51)

G. Willer: Collectio in unum corpus, omnium librorum (Frankfurt, 1592) [incl. ‘Libri musici variaeque cantiones’, 608ff]

J. Cless: Unius seculi eiusque (Frankfurt, 1602)

G. Draudius: Bibliotheca exotica, sive Catalogus officinalis librorum peregrinus linguis usuabilus scriptorum … depuis l'an 1500 (Frankfurt, 1610, enlarged 2/1625) [2nd edn incl. ‘Libri musicorum, vocalium atque instrumentalium’]

P. Bolduanus: Bibliotheca philosophica, sive Elenchus scriptorum philosophicorum (Jena, 1616) [facs. of bk iv: Musicae praeceptae (Detroit, 1972)]

G. Willer: Catalogus librorum musicalium variorum (Augsburg, 1622)

[João IV:] Primera parte do index da livraria de musica do muyto alto, e poderoso Rey Dom João o IV. nosso senhor (Lisbon, 1649/R), ed. J. Vasconcellos (Oporto, 1874–6) [JoãoIL]

S. de Brossard: Dictionaire de musique, contenant … un catalogue de plus 900 auteurs qui ont écrit sur la musique (Paris, 1703/R, 3/c1708/R); Eng. trans., ed. A. Gruber (Henryville, PA, 1982)

J. Boivin: Catalogue général des livres de musique (Paris, 1729)

J.G. Walther: Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliotec (Leipzig, 1732/R) [WaltherML]

C. Mizler von Kolof: New eröffnete musicalische Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1736–54)

F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1754–78/R)

J. Adlung: Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit (Erfurt, 1758/R, 2/1783)

J.L. Albrecht: Gründliche Einleitung in die Anfangslehren der Tonkunst (Langensalza, 1761)

Catalogo delle sinfonie … che si trovano in manuscritto nella officina musica di Giovanno Gottlob Breitkopf (Leipzig, 1762–87) [pubd in several parts, with different titles]

J.A. Hiller: Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend (Leipzig, 1766–70/R)

[J.S. Gruber]: Litterature der Musik (Nuremberg, 1783)

J.S. Gruber: Beyträge zur Literatur der Musik (Nuremberg, 1785, 2/1790)

J.N. Forkel: Allgemeine Litteratur der Musik (Leipzig, 1792/R)

F.J. Fétis: ‘Revue des journaux de musique publiés dans les divers paus de l'Europe’, Revue musicale, ii (1828), 313–20

F.J. Fétis: Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (Brussels, 1835–44, 2/1860–65/R) [FétisB]

C.F. Becker: Systematisch-chronologische Darstellung der musikalischen Literatur von der frühesten bis auf die neueste Zeit (Leipzig, 1836/R, suppl. 1839/R)

A. Schmid: ‘Beiträge zur Literatur und Geschichte der Tonkunst’, Cäcilie, xxi–xxvii (1842–7), passim

(iii) selected studies of early inventories

A. Göhler: Verzeichniss der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759 angezeigten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1902/R)

G. Turrini: L'Accademia filarmonica di Verona (Verona, 1941)

R. Schaal: ‘Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.: ein Beitrag zur Musiküberlieferung des 16. Jahrhunderts’, AcM, xxix (1957), 126–37

D. Plamenac: ‘Excerpta Colombiniana: Items of Musical Interest in Fernando Colón's Regestrum’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), 663–87

H.C. Slim: ‘The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician, Hans Heinrich Herwart (1520–1583)’, AnnM, vii (1964–77), 67–109

R. Schaal: Das Inventar der Kantorei St. Anna in Augsburg, CaM, iii (1965)

M. de Sampaio Ribeiro: Livraria de música de el-rei D. João IV: estudo musical, histórico e bibliográfico (Lisbon, 1967)

C.W. Chapman: ‘Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music owned by Ferdinand Columbus’, JAMS, xxi (1968), 34–84

K. Hortschansky: ‘Pränumeration und Subskriptionslisten in Notendrucken deutscher Musiker des 18. Jahrhunderts’, AcM, xl (1968), 154–74

J. Haar: ‘The Libraria of Antonfrancesco Doni’ MD, xxiv (1970), 101–23

D.W. Krummel: Bibliotheca Bolduaniana: a Renaissance Music Bibliography (Detroit, 1972)

L. Bernstein: ‘The Bibliography of Music in Conrad Gesner's Pandectae (1548)’, AcM, xlv (1973), 119–63

H. Heussner and I. Schultz: Collection Musica: Musikbibliographie in Deutschland bis 1625, CaM, vi (1973)

D.W. Krummel: ‘Venetian Baroque Music in a London Bookshop: the Robert Martin Catalogues, 1633–1650’, Music and Bibliography: Essays in Honour of Alec Hyatt King, ed. O.W. Neighbour (London, 1980), 1–27

O. Mischiati: Indici, cataloghi e avvisi degli editori e librai musicali italiani dal 1591 al 1798 (Florence, 1984)

H. Vanhulst: ‘Balthasar Bellère, marchand de musique a Douai (1603–1636)’, RdM, lxxxiv (1998), 175–98

Bibyk, Valentyn Savych

(b Khar'kiv, 19 July, 1940). Ukrainian composer. In 1966 he graduated from the Khar'kiv Conservatory, where he had studied composition with D. Klebanov. Of the Ukrainian composers who came into prominence in the 1970s, he is one of the more interesting and original: even pieces written during the first decade of his creative career reveal a vivid and mature talent. His style is linked with folklore, though folk elements are always radically modified. Rooted in strong Slavic melodic traditions, his harmony is based on polytonal combinations of triads, layered so that each line – which is often laced with diatonic elements – has a harmonic life of its own. In his early works, he explores a single idea with the most economical use of pitches; drama is produced through melodic development which alternates sections with and without pulse, a device that Bibyk continues to exploit to the present day. He attempts to maximize the colouristic and formal dimensions of each musical gesture; in doing so he makes use of a wide range of techniques, including massive canons, tone clusters and simultaneous multiple tempos, as exemplified in two of his best known works, the fourth and seventh symphonies (1976, 1982). The result is a style that exhibits the contrasting natures of immobility and motion, of quietude and tempestuous outbreaks, of contemplation and activity. Continual variation – or troping – is applied in a slow and inexorable manner which gives his music both weight and a feeling of suspense. One of Bibyk’s more memorable and emotionally powerful works of the early 1990s is the 12-part cycle of psalms Do Tebe pidnoshu ya, Hospody … (‘To You I Raise my Soul, O Lord …’) op.91, for soprano and instrumental ensemble (1992). In 1994 Bibyk moved with his family from Khar'kiv to St Petersburg, where he headed the Department of Recording Arts at the university. In 1997 he emigrated to Israel.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Beg [Flight] (op, after M. Bulgakov), 1972; rev. 1981; Guttaperchevïy mal'chik [The Gutta Percha Boy] (ballet, D. Grigorovich), 1986

Choral: Duma pro Dovbusha [Meditation on Dovbush] (cant., folk poems), chorus, inst ens, 1972; Ekho [Echo] (chbr cant., A. Blok), S, perc, org, 1988; Do Tebe pidnoshu ya, Hospody … [To You I Raise my Soul, O Lord …], 12 psalms, S, inst ens, 1992

Orch: 12 syms.: no.1, 1966; no.2, 1969; no.3, 1970; no.4 ‘In Memory of Shostakovich’, 1976; no.5, 1978; no.6 ‘Dumy moii, dumy moii’ [My Thoughts] (T. Shevchenko), 1980; no.7, 1982; no.8, 1986; no.9 ‘Pastoral’, 1989; no.10 (M. Tsetayeva), 1990; no.11 (J. Brodsky), 1991; no.12, 1994; numerous inst concs.

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Trio no.1, 1972; 34 Preludes and Fugues, pf, 1973–8; Malen'kiy kontsert [A Little Concerto], vn, vc, pf, 1976; Partita on the Theme DSCH, vn, vc, pf, 1982; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1988; Pf Trio no.2, 1989; Sonata no.1, vc, pf, 1990; Sonata no.2, vc, pf, 1991; Ww Qnt, 1992; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1995; Garmonii tishinï [Harmonies of Silence], fl, vn, pf, 1996

Songs and choruses to texts by Y. Bondareva, H. Hdalia, O. Mandelstam, T. Shevchenko, O. Vyshnia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Baley: ‘Orpheus Unleashed’, Soviet Ukrainian Affairs, ii/3–4 (1988) [two parts]

L. Arkhymovych, ed.: Istoriya Ukrains'koy radyans'koy muzyky [A History of Ukrainian Soviet Music] (Kiev, 1990)

O. Zin'kevich: ‘Zdobutky ukraïns'koï symfoniï’ [Accomplishments of Ukrainian symphonies], Svito-Vyd, ii/7 (1992)

VIRKO BALEY

Bicci, Antonio

(b Florence, 4 Jan 1552; d Florence, 16 Sept 1614). Italian composer. He was born in the Santo Spirito district of Florence. In 1591 he was elected one of the ‘Four Captains of Orsanmichele’, an important legal-administrative institution. He was buried in the family tomb in S Maria del Carmine. The distribution of Bicci’s music suggests that his musical reputation may have been largely due to a handful of important connections in Florence. His seven madrigals were all included by other composers in collections of their own works. Most important among these was Luca Marenzio, who was employed at the Medici court in 1587–9. Marenzio included two of Bicci’s madrigals in two of his own publications. Among the others who published his works Luca Bati was a native of Florence and Stefano Venturi del Nibbio was there by 1594. Bicci may have belonged, between 1608 and 1614, to the Accademia degli Elevati, founded by Marco da Gagliano.

Described by Einstein as ‘pleasant, though shallow and musically uninteresting’, Bicci’s music is nevertheless significant for the high quality of his poetic choices. In his setting of a text from Guarini’s Il pastor fido, included in Marenzio’s seventh book for five voices, the verses are stripped of explicit references to scenes and characters in the play (the first verse is added; ‘mio core’ is substituted for ‘Mirtillo’); this is in keeping with Marenzio’s treatment of excerpts from Guarini’s play in the same book and is well suited to the refined and intimate tone of Bicci’s musical setting. His most effective piece is perhaps Candide perle, in which the lively overall texture is punctuated by episodes of considerable expressive intensity.

WORKS

all madrigals; for 5 voices unless otherwise stated

Candide perle e voi labbra ridenti, 6vv, 1591²¹, repr. with Eng. text, 1597²⁴, repr. with Latin text, 1610²; Baciatemi cor mio (L. Celiano), 1594¹¹; Deh, dolc’anima mia (B. Guarini, Il pastor fido), 1595¹⁰; Quasi tra rose e gigli (F. Alberti), 1596¹⁷, inc.; Cogli la vaga rosa (F. Alberti), 1598¹⁴, inc.; Il dolce mormorio (E. Cavalletto), 1598¹⁴, inc.; Pargoletta è Laurina (C. Rinaldi), 5vv, 1602⁷, inc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinM

A. Solerti: Gli albori del melodramma, i (Milan, 1904/R), 73–4

E. Strainchamps: ‘New Light on the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence’, MQ, lxii (1976), 507–35

J. Chater: Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal 1577–1593 (Ann Arbor, 1981), i, 26

P. Gargiulo: Luca Bati madrigalista fiorentino (Florence, 1991), 38, 45

P. Gargiulo: ‘Così d’Arno sul lido’: madrigali e autori fiorentini ospiti nelle sillogi di area medicea (1594–1629)’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2521–30

PIERO GARGIULO

Bicilli [Becilli, Biccilli], Giovanni

(b Urbino, 1623; d ?Rome, Oct 1705). Italian composer. Although nothing is known about his musical training it may be assumed that he finished his studies in Rome, where his brother Cesar was a member of the Congregazione dell'Oratorio at the Chiesa Nuova. On 16 December 1648 he was elected maestro di cappella of the Chiesa Nuova. In 1650 his motets began to appear in printed collections. Documents from the 1660s indicate that he conducted a private music school. He was particularly active in Roman oratories: he was in charge of the music at the Oratorio del SS Crocifisso in 1665 for the first and fifth weeks in Lent, in 1667 for the second week and in 1671 for the first week. Between 1675 and 1684 he was maestro di cappella of S Giovanni in Laterano and in 1686 became a guardiano of the division of maestri di musica for the Congregazione di S Cecilia. It is not known when he took up again the position of maestro di cappella at the Chiesa Nuova, but he held it from at least 1693 to 1705. He is important primarily as a composer of oratorios. In 1693 he presented manuscripts of 46 of them to the Congregazione dell'Oratorio; a list of these works, most of which are lost, is in the Archivio della Congregazione dell'Oratorio dei Padri Filippini, Rome (14.I.66; published, but not related to Bicilli, in Gasbarri, 314).

WORKS

oratorios

all MSS in I-Nf

S Felicità, 6vv; Oratorio dei Maccabei, 6vv; S Filippo Neri; S Nicolò, 5vv; S Teresa, 5vv; La vita humana, 5vv, Vienna, 1670; Ismaele esiliato, Vienna, 1698; S Cecilia, 5vv, 1700

other works

Single motets, 1650¹, 1655¹, 1664¹, 1668¹, 1672¹

Other liturgical works, D-MÜs, I-Rf, Rsg, Rvat, S-Uu

Secular arias and cants., A-Wn, B-Bc, S-Uu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Simonetti)

ScheringGO

SchmitzG

C. Gasbarri: L'oratorio romano dal Cinquecento al Covecento (Rome, 1962), 90, 92, 287, 293, 314

A. Morelli: ‘Il tempio armonico: musica nell'Oratorio dei Filippini in Roma (1575–1705)’, AnMc, no.27 (1991)

HOWARD E. SMITHER/R

Bicinium

(from Lat. bis: ‘twice’ and canere: ‘to sing’ or ‘to play’).

A term applied by many modern scholars to any two-part vocal or instrumental composition of the Renaissance or early Baroque. In its stricter, historically more correct definition, it was used in German-speaking areas of the period, mainly by Lutheran Latin schoolteachers, to designate pedagogical duos. Duos were written for this purpose in the 15th century (see Bernstein, 1980), but the Lutherans were the first to realize their value as aids for teaching and practising contrapuntal music in all clefs and church modes.

The term’s earliest known appearance is in Jan z Lublina’s Tabulatura (manuscript, 1540), which contains a definition, rules for composition and examples (see Chybiński). Georg Rhau first used it in a printed collection in his two volumes of bicinia published in 1545. These provided an international repertory of 194 duos (followed by a smaller assortment of three- to eight-part compositions) with secular French (borrowed mainly from Moderne’s, Gardano’s and perhaps also Attaingnant’s chanson publications of the 1530s; see Bernstein, 1980), and sacred and secular German and Latin texts, in canonic, freely imitative and homophonic textures. The Latin duos, most closely reflecting Luther’s desire to train children both in music and in the Bible, are two-part sections usually from masses (‘Pleni’, ‘Benedictus’, the second Agnus Dei), Magnificat settings and motets by the Franco-Flemish composers of Josquin Des Prez’s generation. In borrowing duos from this large repertory, Rhau sometimes retained the original texts, but more frequently replaced them with biblical moralizing contrafacta (in spite of his claim in the dedication to Secundus tomus biciniorum of 1545 that he had ‘attached to the individual songs the words that properly belong to them’, as he did not wish to ‘commit an injustice against artists of great worth and renown’). His procedure provided a model for other Lutheran editors, notably Rotenbucher who in his Diphona amoena (1549) borrowed 91 Latin duos from similar sources (including some from Eustachio Romano’s Musica of 1521) and added biblical texts to them.

Although not specifically recommending use of bicinia, contemporary Lutheran school ordinances frequently cited treatises with duo and trio examples. The early Lutheran theorists (including Rhau, Listenius and Lampadius) still followed the 15th-century tradition of Tinctoris, Gaffurius, Cochlaeus and Ornithoparcus in composing their own examples for illustrating rules of proportions. Artis canendi (1537) by Sebald Heyden marked a turning-point by providing for his schoolboys exercises ‘sought out with especial care from the best musicians … Josquin, Obrecht, Pierre de La Rue, Heinrich Isaac and the like’. Many of these ‘marvels of the musical art’ are duo- and trio-canons (or fugae), considered particularly good pedagogical material because they could be ‘correctly sung by boys of the same age among themselves’. Heyden’s method of progression from duos to trios to larger compositions may have been the model for Glarean (in his Dodecachordon) and definitely was for Wilfflingseder.

The most widely used textbook, the tiny Compendiolum musicae by Heinrich Faber (so popular that it was recommended by 49 school ordinances from 1559 to 1613 and was the basis of later revisions by Christoph Rid and Gumpelzhaimer, and the model for Colhart, Vulpius and Walliser), includes 12 duo and trio examples ‘extremely well suited to beginners’. Faber suggested that teachers supplement his own pieces with ‘many more examples, especially considering there are two-voice songs in print’ (perhaps referring to Rhau’s 1545 collections). In the 1560s Wolfgang Figulus and Ambrosius Wilfflingseder gathered their exercises in supplements to their books. In 1581 Friedrich Beurhaus designated his examples, many borrowed from Faber and Figulus as well as Rhau, as ‘bicinia’, ‘tricinia’ and ‘quadricinia’ in his supplement. By the 1590s, Lindner’s and Gumpelzhaimer’s large collections dwarfed the size of their brief handbooks of rules. Lindner’s title shows the changing emphasis in pedagogy: a collection of 80 bicinia (many by Lassus) ‘to which is added a handbook’. The Lutheran conservativeness continued well into the 17th century with bicinia collections and handbooks that maintained a duo style little changed from Josquin’s time.

Compared with the Lutheran bicinia, the Italian duo publications of the same period are progressive. Intended for a more exclusive clientèle, and particularly for private instruction of amateurs, most of the Italian collections include more contemporary music: chansons, madrigals and especially instrumental ricercares. The publications of Metallo, Lupacchino and Tasso, each with numerous editions, dominated the market.

The early wave of bicinium cultivation was not without influence on Catholic composers such as Castro and notably Lassus. The latter’s popular Novae aliquot contains 12 Latin pieces (whose style resembles that of the earlier Lutheran bicinia) and 12 textless ricercares (after the style of the contemporary Italian instrumental duos). A 1601 edition of his duos with a third part added, considered by Boetticher to be a ‘document of early monody’, illustrates a later manifestation of bicinium style, the concerto ecclesiastico in Italy and the geistliches Konzert in Germany (see Adrio). The amalgamation of various styles, including the bicinium and tricinium, in numerous early 17th-century publications such as Grimm’s Fest-Bicinia, nebst dem Generalbass (1636) and his Tyrocinia (1624), really tricinia with and without figured bass, is worthy of more research. By the late 17th century, a further alteration of the term occurred with the Lutheran Pezel’s Bicinia for Stadtpfeiffer; it continued to be used to designate duos for brass instruments by Mattheson (Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 1739), Altenburg (Versuch einer Anleitung, 1795) and Koch (Musikalisches Lexikon, 1802), the latter two including tricinia and quadricinia in a similar style. Numerous 20th-century composers, notably Kodály, have revived the term for compositions with a pedagogical purpose.

SOURCES BEFORE 1680

(selective list)

music collections

This list includes the German collections using the term in title or dedication, and those Italian and French collections with a pedagogical purpose or those that are sources for German publications.

Briand: Nouelz nouvaulx (1512) [lost]; E. Romano: Musica (Rome, 1521¹), ed. in MRM, vi (1975); A-Wn 18832, c1535; Quarante & quatre chanson a 2 (Paris, 1535; P. Attaingnant), lost, cited in Gesner: Pandectarum (Zürich, 1548); Trente et une chansons (Paris, 1535; P. Attaingnant), lost, cited in Gesner; Le parangon … quart livre (Lyons, 1538¹⁸; J. Moderne); Canzoni francese, 2vv (Venice, 1539²¹; A. Gardano); D-Mbs 260, ed. E. Evans and B. Bellingham, RRMR, xvi–xvii (1974); J. Gero: Il primo libro de madrigali … 2vv (Venice, 1541¹⁴), ed. L. Bernstein and J. Haar (New York, 1979); G. Scotto: Il primo [–terzo] libro de i madrigali, 2vv (Venice, 1541–62); Il primo libro, 2vv (Venice, 1543¹⁹; A. Gardano)

A. Licino: Il primo libro di duo cromatici (Venice, 1545); Bicinia gallica, latina, germanica (Wittenberg, 1545^6-7; G. Rhau), ed. B. Bellingham (Kassel, 1980); C. Othmayr: Bicinia sacra (Nuremberg, 1547), ed. in EDM, xxvi (1956); Diphona amoena (Nuremberg, 1549¹⁶; E. Rotenbucher), ed. R. Bodig (Albany, CA, 1996) [without texts]; Bergkreyen, 2vv (Nuremberg, 1551²⁰; E. Rotenbucher); J. Wannenmacher: Bicinia sive duo germanica ad aequales (Berne, 1553³¹); Premier livre de chansons a 2 (Paris, c1555²⁴; A. Le Roy & R. Ballard); B. Lupacchino and J. Tasso: Il primo libro, 2vv (Venice, 1559²⁴)

P. Vinci: Il primo libro della musica, 2vv (Venice, 1560); G. Paien: Il primo libro de madrigali, 2vv (Venice, 1564); Liber musicus, 2vv (Leuven and Antwerp, 1571¹⁵; P. Phalèse & J. Bellère); R. de Lassus: Novae aliquot … ad 2vv (Munich, 1577); A. Chrysoponus: Bicinia nova (Prague, 1579⁷); V. Galilei: Contrapunti, 2vv (Florence, 1584); J. Paix: Selectae … fugae, 2 … vocum (Lavingen, 1587 [lost], 2/1590³⁰); F. Guami: Ricercari a 2 (Venice, 1588); F. Nicoletti: Madrigali, 2vv (Venice, 1588)

Bicinia, sive cantiones (Antwerp, 1590¹⁹; P. Phalèse & J. Bellère); T. Whythorne: Duos, or Songs, 2vv (London, 1590); F. Lindner: Bicinia sacra (Nuremberg, 1591²⁷); G. Metallo: Ricercari a 2 (Venice, ?1591); J. de Castro: Sonets … 2vv (Antwerp, 1592); J. de Castro: Chansons … 2vv (Antwerp, 1592); J. de Castro: Bicinia seu 2vv (Cologne, 1593); T. Morley: The First Book of Canzonets, 2vv (London, 1595); T. Mancinus: 2 vocum cantiuncularum (Helstadt, 1597); P. Fonghetti: Capricci et madrigali (Verona, 1598); G. Gastoldi: Il primo libro della musica, 2vv (Milan, 1598); S. Calvisius: Bicinia septuaginta (Leipzig, 1599 [lost], 2/1612)

G. Otto: Opusculum, 2vv, D-Kl, dated 1601; L. Viadana: Cento concerti ecclesiastici, a 1, a 2 … voci libro II (Venice, 1602); G. Puliti: Scherzi, capricci et fantasie per cantar, 2vv (Venice, 1605); M. Praetorius: Musae Sioniae … 9. Theil (Wolfenbüttel, 1610) [repr. as Bicinia und Tricinia, 1611]; E. Bodenschatz: Bicinia XC selectissima (Leipzig, 1615); D. Friderici: Bicinia sacra (Leipzig, 1623); H. Grimm: Prodromus musicae ecclesiasticae … Fest-Bicinia, nebst dem Generalbass (Brunswick, 1636); J. Pezel: Bicinia variorum instrumentorum (Leipzig, 1675)

For other modern edns see SCMA, viii (1945); HM, iii, iv, v, xviii, xix, xxiii, xxiv, xxvii, xxviii, lxxiv, clxxxvii (1949–65); Antiqua Chorbuch, ii (Mainz, 1951–2) and Musica instrumentalis, iv (Zürich, 1960), as well as under individual composers and publishers.

books

using duo and trio examples

G. Rhau: Enchiridion (Wittenberg, 1518, 23/1553); N. Listenius: Rudimenta musicae (Wittenberg, 1533, 47/1600); Lampadius: Compendium musices (Berne, 1537, 5/1554); S. Heyden: Musicae, id est artis canendi (Nuremberg, 1537, 2/1540 as De arte canendi; H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae (Nuremberg, 1548, 46/1617); G. Faber: Erotematum (Basle, 1553); J. Zanger: Practicae musicae (Leipzig, 1554); J. Oridryus: Practicae musicae (Düsseldorf, 1557)

W. Figulus and M. Agricola: Deutsche Musica und Gesangbüchlein (Nuremberg, 1560, 3/1568); A. Wilfflingseder: Musica teutsch (Nuremberg, 1561, 6/1575); A. Wilfflingseder: Erotemata (Nuremberg, 1563); C. Rid: Musica: kurzer Inhalt (Nuremberg, 1572, 13/1655) [abridgment of H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae]; F. Beurhaus: Musicae erotematum (Dortmund, 1573, 4/1591); F. Beurhaus: Musica rudimenta (Dortmund, 1581); F. Lindner: Bicinia sacra … quibus adjuncta est compendaria (Nuremberg, 1591²⁷); A. Gumpelzhaimer, ed.: Compendium musicae (Augsburg, 1591²⁶, 15/1681) [based on Rid’s edn of H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae]; D. Wolkenstein: Compendium musicae (Strasbourg, 1596)

P. Eichmann: Praeceptae musicae (Stettin, 1604); J. Colhart, trans. and ed.: Musica: kurtze … Anleitung (Leipzig, 1605, 3/1609) [modelled on H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae]; M. Vulpius: Musicae compendium (Jena, 1608, 7/1665) [modelled on H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae]; M. Beringer: Musicae … Singkunst (Nuremberg, 1610); C. Walliser: Musicae figuralis praecepta (Strasbourg, 1611) [modelled on H. Faber: Compendiolum musicae]; B. Gesius: Synopsis doctrinae musicae (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1615); N. Gengenbach: Musica nova (Leipzig, 1626); J. Demantius: Isagoge artis musicae (Nuremberg, 1607, 9/1684); E. Grüber: Synopsis musica (Regensburg, 1673); J. Quirsfeld: Breviarum musica (Dresden, 1675, 5/1717); H. Gradenthaler: Horologium musicum (Regensburg, 1676)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Albrecht)

MGG2 (L. Finscher)

RiemannL12

A. Chybiński: ‘Polnische Musik und Musikkultur des 16. Jahrhunderts in ihren Beziehungen zu Deutschland’, SIMG, xiii (1911–12), 463–505

E. Preussner: ‘Die Methodik im Schulgesang der evangelischen Lateinschulen des 17. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, vi (1924), 407–49

L. Nowak: ‘Eine Bicinienhandschrift der Wiener Nationalbibliothek’, ZMw, xiv (1931), 99–102

A. Adrio: Die Anfänge des geistlichen Konzerts (Berlin, 1935)

K. Ameln, C. Mahrenholz and W. Thomas, eds.: Handbuch der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenmusik, ii (Göttingen, 1935)

A. Einstein: ‘Vincenzo Galilei and the Instructive Duo’, ML, xviii (1937), 360–68

H. Albrecht: ‘Zur Rolle der Kontrafaktur in Rhaus Bicinia von 1545: ein Vorbericht’, Festschrift Max Schneider, ed. H.J. Zingel (Leipzig, 1955), 67–70

A. Murphy: The Bicinia variorum instrumentorum of J. Chr. Pezel (diss., U. of Tallahassee, 1959)

W. Boetticher: ‘Eine französische Bicinien-Ausgabe als frühmonodisches Dokument’, Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer, ed. H. Hüschen (Regensburg, 1962), 67–76

E. Livingstone: The Theory and Practice of Protestant School Music in Germany as Seen through the Collection of Abraham Ursinus (ca. 1600) (diss., U. of Rochester, NY, 1962)

D. Kämper: ‘Das Lehr- und Instrumentalduo um 1500 in Italien’, Mf, xviii (1965), 242–53

W. Sheley: The Instrumental Instructional Duo (diss., U. of Rochester, NY, 1966) [incl. edn of A-Wn 18832]

L.F. Bernstein: Cantus Firmus in the French Chanson for Two and Three Voices, 1500–1550 (diss., New York U., 1969)

K. Niemöller: Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600 (Regensburg, 1969)

D. Kämper: Studien zur instrumentalen Ensemblemusik des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien, AnMc, no.10 (1970)

B. Bellingham: The Bicinium in the Lutheran Latin Schools during the Reformation Period (diss., U. of Toronto, 1971)

B.A. Bellingham: Foreword to Georg Rhau: Bicinia … 1542 (Kassel, 1980)

L. Bernstein: ‘French Duos in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 43–87

See also Tricinium.

BRUCE A. BELLINGHAM

Bickel, Conrad.

See Celtis, Conradus Protucius.

Bickerstaff, Isaac (John)

(b ?Dublin, 26 Sept 1733; d ?1808). English playwright of Irish birth. He served in the army before moving to London and drew on his military experience in his libretto for the patriotic afterpiece Thomas and Sally (1760). His successful Covent Garden piece Love in a Village (1762) started a new fashion in opera, as The Beggar’s Opera had done decades earlier. He combined a witty, romantic plot in spoken dialogue with sophisticated music drawn from continental comic opera. The pasticcio score is derived mostly from Italian opera, from oratorio, and from the songs of Thomas Arne, but uses little traditional English music, which Bickerstaff despised. As in ballad opera, the songs help to advance the action, but they also demand well-trained singers and full orchestral accompaniment.

Bickerstaff’s innovation spread quickly in the London theatre. He continued to vary the form: The Maid of the Mill (1765) had a strong continental flavour with its sentimental plot and borrowed French music; the farcical intrigue of The Padlock (1768), on the other hand, had a lively original score by Charles Dibdin. However, his successful career ended abruptly in 1772, when he fled from England rather than face charges of homosexuality. He probably died in 1808, the last year in which he received his military pension, although reports persisted for years that he was still alive. The genre of English comic opera that he pioneered eventually developed into the musical comedy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FiskeETM

GroveO (L.V. Troost) [incl. list of works]

P. Tasch: The Dramatic Cobbler: the Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff (Lewisburg, PA, 1971)

R. Fahrner: ‘David Garrick presents The Padlock: an Eighteenth-Century Hit’, Theatre Survey, xiii (1972), 52–69

S. Hall: English Dialogue Opera: 1762–1796 (diss., U. of Toronto, 1980)

P. Tasch, ed.: The Plays of Isaac Bickerstaff (New York, 1981)

L. Troost: The Rise of English Comic Opera: 1762–1800 (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1985)

T. Fenner: Opera in London: Views of the Press 1785–1830 (Carbondale, IL, 1994)

LINDA TROOST

Bickham, George, jr

(b ?London, ?1706; d London, bur. 23 June 1771). English engraver, publisher and bookseller. He worked in Covent Garden, London, having learnt the trade from his father George Bickham (b ?1684; d London, 4 May 1758), an engraver best known for The Universal Penman (1733–41). He was principally famous in music circles for his two illustrated folio volumes The Musical Entertainer, first issued in fortnightly parts, each containing four plates, from January 1737 to December 1739. The 200 plates are songs, headed and surrounded with pictorial embellishments illustrative of the song (see illustration), and engraved in the style of and even copied directly from Gravelot and Watteau. This work was the first of its kind to be published in England and quickly produced imitators such as Lampe’s British Melody, engraved by Benjamin Cole.

A second edition, corrected by Lampe, was also issued in parts (1740–41), and a third, printed from the original plates, appeared in 1765, issued by John Ryall. Other musical works engraved by Bickham include Songs in the Opera of Flora (1737), An Easy Introduction to Dancing (1738) and the frontispiece for Simpson’s The Delightful Pocket Companion for the German Flute (c1745).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

F. Kidson: ‘Some Illustrated Music-Books of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: English’, MA, iii (1911–12), 195–208

A. Heal: The English Writing-Masters and their Copy-Books, 1570–1800 (Cambridge, 1931)

H. Hammelmann and T.S.R. Boase: Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1975)

D. Hunter: ‘Pope v. Bickham: an Infringement of An Essay on Man Alleged’, The Library, 6th ser., ix/3 (1987), 268–73

N. Valpy: ‘Plagiarism in Prints: the Musical Entertainer Affair’, Print Quarterly, vi (1989), 54–9

FRANK KIDSON/H.G. FARMER/PETER WARD JONES, DAVID HUNTER

Bidera, Giovanni Emanuele

(b Palermo, 4 Oct 1784; d Palermo, 8 April 1858). Italian librettist. He studied law in Naples but returned penniless to Sicily, to work as an actor and playwright. Back in Naples, he turned to librettos, altering Mercadante’s Gabriella di Vergy for Genova (1832). He contributed the synopsis for Cammarano’s Ines de Castro (Persiani, 1835), becoming involved in a year-long struggle with the censors, and provided Donizetti with Marino Faliero, for performance in Paris, which the Neapolitan censors considered a highly subversive text and which was also submitted as Antonio Grimaldi and Il pascià di Scutari to escape their notice. His best libretto, Gemma di Vergy, was also set by Donizetti; his later librettos, of variable quality, were for minor composers. Bidera’s versification was better than his dramatic instinct, but he was willing to tackle ‘strong’ (notably Byronic) subjects. He was also the author of a popular book on travel around Naples and of one on declamation. He retired to Sicily in 1848.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Sallusti)

GroveO (J. Black) [incl. list of libs]

L. Miragoli: Il melodramma italiano nell’Ottocento (Rome, 1924)

W. Ashbrook: Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge, 1982)

JOHN BLACK

Bideri, Ferdinando.

Italian firm of music publishers. It was founded in Naples in about 1875 and rapidly established itself as one of the leading producers of popular Neapolitan songs. As well as printing songsheets (the firm's main output), Bideri also produced a series of musical postcards which depicted favourite comic or ballad singers of the day shown opposite the melodies of popular songs. Bideri's printing equipment was modern and he was able to publish songs with colour covers. The firm enjoyed huge commercial success and a constant flow of new songs was ensured by placing many of the firm's favoured composers under exclusive contracts. Bideri also organized an annual song-writing competition. For over 30 years the firm had a prolific production schedule, but it appears to have gone into decline after World War I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Rosselli: Music & Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London, 1991), 118–19

NIGEL SIMEONE

Bidermann [Biderman].

German makers of mechanical musical instruments. Samuel Bidermann (i) (b Ulm, c1540: d Augsburg, 7 Dec 1622) and his eldest son David (1582/3–1622) learnt the art of ‘barrel-pinning’ from the composer and organist H.L. Hassler, who built mechanical instruments as a side-line. They were also influenced by the organist Erasmus Mayr of Augsburg, who had examined the water organ at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in 1576. While other Augsburg makers, such as Marx Günzer and Achilles Langenbucher, produced mainly automatic organs, Bidermann specialized in automatic spinets besides building small and large organs. Examples survive in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the National Museum, Wrocław, and in the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon des Zwingers in Dresden. These instruments may be played either from the keyboard or by a clockwork-driven pinned barrel contained in the cabinet. The business was continued after Samuel Bidermann's death by his other sons, Samuel Bidermann (ii) (b Augsburg, c1600; d c1653) and Daniel Bidermann (b Augsburg, 1602–3; d Augsburg, 14 Feb 1663). Samuel Bidermann (ii) had previously worked as a journeyman with the cabinetmaker Konrad Eisenburger, and set up his own establishment in 1633. An automatic spinet by him is in the Rück Collection at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

Automatic spinets by all members of the Bidermann family occasionally were built into pieces of furniture (such as writing and sewing tables and ornate cabinets). An instrument combining a musical clock with a clockwork spinet, pipe organ and automaton parade is in the Time Museum, Rockford, Illinois. It bears the Augsburg cabinetmakers' marks and suggests that it is the result of a collaboration between the Bidermann family, the Langenbuchers and Eisenburger. However, for many years the Bidermanns and the Langenbuchers were locked in futile legal disputes. When Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, Paris, 1636–7/R) described the automatic spinet as a German invention he may well have had Bidermann instruments in mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Nettl: ‘Ein spielender Klavier-Automat’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 523–34

J. Schlosser: Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien, Publikationen aus den Sammlungen für Plastik und Kunstgewerbe, iii (Vienna, 1920)

M. Schneider: Seltene Musikinstrumente (Breslau, 1928)

A. Protz: Mechanische Musikinstrumente (Kassel, 1939)

E. Groiss: ‘Automatophone Musik: der Rechtstreit Bidermann-Langenbucher [über die Erfindung selbstschlagender Musikwerke in Augsburg]’, Die Welt als Uhr: deutsche Uhren und Automaten, 1550–1650, ed. K. Maurice and O. Mayr (Munich, 1980), 127–32; Eng. trans. in The Clockwork Universe (Washington DC and New York, 1980), 125–30 [exhibition catalogues]

HANS KLOTZ/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Bidon [Collebaudi, Colebault], Antonio [da Asti]

(b Asti, c1480; d before 1525).Soprano singer and composer, active in Italy. He was one of the most famous singers of his time; Castiglione described his manner of singing as one that was ‘so skilled, quick, vehement, impassioned, and has such various melodies that the spirits of his listeners are stirred and are so entranced that they seem to be uplifted to heaven’. Similar encomia can be found in other writings. A member of the Savoy chapel from 1500 to 1502, he was recruited to join the Ferrarese chapel in 1502 and stayed in Ferrara until he was lured to Rome by Leo X in 1516. He was first employed by the pope in some sort of private capacity, but had become a member of the papal chapel by 1519. He was not altogether happy in Rome, however, and made an attempt in 1517 to return to Ferrarese service which was rebuffed. He must have died before 1525 as two laudatory epitaphs were published that year. His only known composition is an added voice to Josquin's Miserere (CH-SGs 463). He may also have been related to Jacques Colebault (Jacquet of Mantua).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LockwoodMRF

B. Castiglione: Il Libro del Cortegiano (Florence, 1528; Eng. trans., 1959)

A. Pirro: ‘Leo X and Music’, MQ, xxi (1935), 1–16

H.-W. Frey: ‘Regesten zur päpstlichen Kapelle unter Leo X. und zu seiner Privatkapelle’, Mf, viii (1955), 58–73, esp. 62; ix (1956), 46–57, 139–56, esp. 54–5, 148

L. Lockwood: ‘Jean Mouton and Jean Michel: New Evidence on French Music and Musicians in Italy, 1505–1520’, JAMS, xxxii (1979), 191–246

L. Lockwood: ‘A Virtuoso Singer at Ferrara and Rome in the Period of Leo X: the Case of Bidon’, Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome: Washington, DC 1993, 226–41

RICHARD SHERR

Biechteler, Benedict

(b Obergünzburg, nr Kempten, 26 March 1689; d Wiblingen, nr Ulm, 21 Aug 1759). German composer. He was educated at St Gallen, Switzerland, entered the Benedictine monastery at Wiblingen in 1706, and taught in the school there until 1732. In that year he moved to another Benedictine house, at Kempten, where he had charge of the choirboys. Later he returned to Wiblingen, eventually becoming sub-prior there.

Biechteler's three surviving publications belong to the body of church music for parish choirs which appeared in the mid-18th century. The masses of op.1 appeared in the same year as the op.1 of Valentin Rathgeber, the composer who set the pattern for published church music for the next 20 years; but they are less well adapted to the needs of small choirs than Rathgeber's, requiring rather larger and more experienced forces. In particular, the orchestra includes a viola as well as two violins, and separate concertato and ripieno voice parts are provided. The scoring of op.2 is more obviously designed for parish choirs – solo voice and violin or concertante organ. However, these pieces are conceived in a thoroughly instrumental idiom; the voice is expected to negotiate exactly the same figurations as the violin or organ, sometimes even singing a separate syllable to each semiquaver; and they lack both the tunefulness and the simplicity of the best parish church music. An account of his career is given in A. Layer: ‘Die Biechteler: Allgauer Musiker der Barockzeit’, Allgäuer Geschichtsfreund [Dillingen], lxxiv (1974), 98–101.

WORKS

Liturgia musico-sacra … 6 Masses … 4 solo vv, 2 vn, va, org, chorus, op.1 (Ulm, 1721)

Vox suprema, 24 ant, S/A, org/vn, bc, op.2 (Augsburg, 1731)

Veni Sancte Spiritus, 8vv, org, D-Mbs

ELIZABETH ROCHE

Biechteler, Ignatius

(b Obergünzburg, nr Kempten, 1701; d Wiblingen, nr Ulm, 26 Nov 1767). German composer, brother of Benedict Biechteler. He became a monk at Wiblingen in 1719 and studied in Augsburg before returning to Wiblingen to teach. He later worked as parish priest in Wiblingen and in the nearby village of Gögglingen. None of Biechteler’s compositions is extant; the only one mentioned by name is his music to the prologue of the Singspiel Theodorus I, König von Korsika, which was performed at Wiblingen in 1731. His career is discussed in A. Layer: ‘Die Biechteler: Allgauer Musiker der Barockzeit’, Allgäuer Geschichtsfreund [Dillingen], lxxiv (1974), 98–101.

ELIZABETH ROCHE

Biechteler [Biechteller, Biechtele, Piechteler, Wiechteler, Wiechterl] von Greiffenthal, Matthias Siegmund [Mattia Sigismondo]

(b Leibnitz, nr Graz, c1668; d Salzburg, 27 Aug 1743). Austrian composer and lutenist. He studied at the Jesuit university at Graz from not later than 1684 to 1687, and then moved to the Benedictine university at Salzburg, probably as a result of the election of his father’s former master and patron, Johann Ernst, Count Thun, as Prince Archbishop of Salzburg. In 1688 he entered the court Kapelle, perhaps as a solo singer. He became vice-Kapellmeister in 1703, Kapellmeister in 1706, and also taught the choristers singing for some time. In 1723 he was ennobled by Emperor Charles VI. He was appointed high steward in 1726 by the ruling Archbishop of Salzburg. It is notable that as Kapellmeister, a post he filled until his death, Biechteler was paid less than his predecessor, Heinrich Biber.

Biechteler made an important contribution to the construction of a self-contained repertory for Salzburg Cathedral. His numerous liturgical works observe the distinctions, common in Catholic sacred music, between the stylus a capella, stylus mixtus and stylus solennis. They also take account of the particular practice in the cathedral whereby some of the musicians were placed in galleries beneath the dome at the intersection of the nave. Consequently Biechteler laid greater emphasis on sound effects than on contrapuntal structure. Quite often his vocal works revive the older motto technique, while his church sonatas seem to be influenced by Corelli but in form are similar to the contemporary sonata da chiesa. Biechteler was taught the theorbo at the behest of Archbishop Thun, and was among the last lute virtuosos in the south German area.

WORKS

complete list in Hochradner (1991)

sacred

21 masses, A-Sd (2 also in CH-E), 1 ed. J. Messner, Alte Salzburger Meister, xx (Augsburg, 1961); 2 masses, A-LA

4 requiems, Sd; 3 Magnificat, Sd; 7 Miserere, Sd (2 also in D-LFN); Miserere, A-LA; 3 Dixit Dominus, Sd; 5 Regina coeli, Sd; 4 vesper psalms, Sd

2 int, Sd, Sk; 4 hymns, Sd, Sk; seq, Sd, Ssp; seq, CH-E; 2 Ger. arias, A-Sn

35 motets, Sd (1 also in Sca, 3 also in CH-E), 2 ed. in DTÖ, lxxx, Jg.xliii/1 (1936); 2 motets, CH-E; 1 motet, A-LA

stage

Libertas romana feliciter captiva (Lat. music-drama, ?C. Leuthner), Salzburg, Universitätstheater, 1735, A-Sk

3 operas, lost: Le gare della deità nell’encomi, 1703–7; Il Tempo glorioso (F.M. Raffaelini), 1709–24; La Verità trionfante (Raffaelini), 1710

35 Lat. music-dramas, Salzburg, Universitätstheater, lost

instrumental

9 church sonatas, A-Sd; 1 ed. in Mw, xxxv (1970), 5 ed. in MAM, lxi (1975)

Lute works, Sd; Salzburg, Johann-Michael-Haydn-Gesellschaft; Graf Harrach’sches Familienarchiv, Vienna; PL-Kj

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

K.A. Rosenthal: ‘Zur Stilistik der Salzburger Kirchenmusik von 1600 bis 1730’, SMw, xvii (1930), 77–94; xix (1932), 3–32

E. Hintermaier: Die Salzburger Hofkapelle von 1700–1806 (diss., U. of Salzburg, 1972)

A. Layer: ‘Die Biechteler, Allgäuer Musiker des Barock’, Allgäuer Geschichtsfreund, lxxiv (1974), 98–101

T. Hochradner: Matthias Siegmund Biechteler: Leben und Werk eines Salzburger Hofkapellmeisters (diss., U. of Salzburg, 1991)

U. Haspel: Mozarts Vespermusiken und ihr Salzburg Umfeld (diss., U. of Würzburg, 1996)

THOMAS HOCHRADNER

Biedermeier

(Ger.).

A term used of the culture of German-speaking Europe between the Treaty of Vienna (1815) and 1848, the year of revolutions. It is associated especially with southern Germany and with the Austria of Metternich, the architect of political stability in post-Napoleonic Europe. The term is borrowed from the name of a fictional schoolmaster created in the early 1850s by Ludwig Eichrodt (1827–92) as a satirical caricature of a bourgeois philistine. It was later adopted to refer to the comfortable domestic architecture and the decorative arts and painting of the period, and to a way of life founded in peaceful domestic harmony by contrast with the turbulence of the Napoleonic years. In the visual arts it is reflected in the domestic scenes and picturesque genre paintings of Josef Franz Danhauser, Peter Fendi and Carl Spitzweg (see illustration).

The Biedermeier culture of domesticity, associated with a politically quiescent bourgeoisie, presents an image of social stability, underpinned by a political conservatism whose aims were summed up in 1839 by Grillparzer in an unpublished essay on Metternich as ‘the repression of liberalism and the preservation of the status quo’. The mood of cosy resignation is reflected in a popular song composed in about 1840 by Carl Hampe with words by J.B. Moser, Die Welt ist ein Komödienhaus (ex.1): it plays on the traditional metaphor of the world as a stage to express a fatalistic acceptance of the various roles allotted to mankind by providence or chance. However, the Biedermeier image of contented stability was not all it seemed. Beneath the surface there was growing political unrest, which was to lead to the fall of Metternich in 1848; so, too, in the arts the old-fashioned, rather staid taste that the term ‘Biedermeier’ suggests is only one element in a complex scene fraught with cultural tensions.

It was in the 1930s that the term was adopted in literary history as a designation for the post-Romantic period, which saw the beginnings of realism but also clung to the heritage of German classicism – a combination typified in the work of the Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter and the Swabian poet Eduard Mörike, whose poems were set to music by both Schumann and Robert Franz. The use of the term as a historical category came from an attempt to see the arts in a social context (a perspective at odds with the Romantic doctrine of the sovereign artist) and from a perception that much artistic activity was linked to an essentially un-Romantic social context. Yet most of the outstanding authors of the period achieved their lasting stature not by conforming to a ‘Biedermeier’ stereotype but by transcending it, as Grillparzer and Mörike did. This was also the age of the great German-language dramatists of radical discontent, Büchner and Nestroy. So too in music, there were sharply conflicting styles, so that the term is more accurately used as a description of the everyday musical culture of the period rather than as a designation of a school or a common creative mood: ‘to speak of “Biedermeier music” … is to invent a non-existent category’ (Hilmar).

Throughout the Biedermeier period the main musical and theatrical centre in German-speaking Europe, and the focal point for composers and performers, was Vienna, still the largest city in the German-speaking countries (it was not overtaken in size by Berlin until the 1850s). Public concerts flourished: the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, founded in 1812, opened the first public concert hall in Vienna in 1831, and 11 years later the Vienna PO, based on the orchestra of the opera house, gave their first concert. Commercial instrument manufacture also prospered: in 1828 Ignaz Bösendorfer founded his piano-making firm in Vienna (the equivalent in Berlin, the firm of Carl Bechstein, followed in 1853). The steady growth of the urban middle class also fostered the development of private music-making in small circles. The Schubertiads of the 1820s are the best-known example. There was also a vigorous salon culture, commemorated by Stifter in his essay ‘Wiener Salonszenen’ (first published in 1848) and by Danhauser in a painting, The Concert, which reputedly depicts a chamber concert in the house of one of the leading Viennese patrons. The music-making of the Viennese middle classes was recorded by the exiled Moravian novelist Charles Sealsfield in his (generally hostile) account of Metternich's Austria, Austria As It Is (London, 1828):

Wherever you go, the sound of musical instruments will reach your ears. Whatever family of the middle class you enter, the pianoforte is the first object which strikes your eyes; you are hardly seated, and a flagon filled with wine, another with water, and Pressburg biscuit placed before you, when the host will tell Caroline to play a tune to the gentleman.

In this culture it was natural that the fashion for lieder should thrive, also small-scale pieces for solo piano (or small groups), dances, études, and short lyrical pieces bearing titles such as ‘Albumblatt’, ‘Moment musical’, ‘Bagatelle’ and the like. Tastes ranged from the sentimental to the ironic (Schumann's Heine settings Dichterliebe). In the theatre, French Romantic operas such as Meyerbeer's Robert le diable enjoyed sustained success, while at the same time the commercial theatres in Vienna cultivated a tradition of musical pastiche. This is best exemplified by the figure of Adolf Müller, who provided the scores to most of Nestroy's plays in the 1830s and 1840s, including his parodies of Hérold and Meyerbeer, Zampa der Tagdieb (1832) and Robert der Teuxel (1833), both at the Theater an der Wien. Successful German operas and Singspiele included Der Freischütz (first performed in Berlin in 1821) and the works of Spohr and, above all, Lortzing in the 1830s and 1840s; Conradin Kreutzer's Das Nachtlager von Granada, first performed in 1834 at the Theater in der Josefstadt, is often cited as the archetype of Biedermeier opera. But the dominant operatic fashion of the time, in Vienna as in London, was Italian opera. The Rossini craze – 25 Rossini operas were performed in Vienna between 1816 and 1825, and Sealsfield records that a new Rossini opera at the Kärntnertortheater would produce ‘even more excitement than the opening of the Parliament in London’ – was followed by a vogue for Donizetti, who, appointed court composer in 1842, provided two new operas for the Kärntnertortheater, Linda di Chamounix (1842) and Maria di Rohan (1843).

Conservative (‘Biedermeier’) musicians tended to see themselves as followers of Mozart and the heirs of Classicism, while the Romantics saw themselves as followers of Beethoven. Both figures were treated by central authors of the Biedermeier period, including Grillparzer and Mörike. In the oration written to be spoken at the unveiling of the monument over Beethoven's grave in 1827, Grillparzer extolled Beethoven as the true inspirational artist; 15 years later, in a poem written at the time of the unveiling of the statue to Mozart in Salzburg, he defined Mozart's ‘greatness’ in terms of the quintessential Biedermeier virtues of control and moderation. Mörike's short story Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, written in the early 1850s and regarded as a prime example of Biedermeier writing, presents the artist in a setting of happy domesticity. Mozart was revered in traditionalist spirit as the ‘Shakespeare of music’, but the lack of understanding showed itself in the limited part of the opera repertory devoted to him in Vienna. In 1842 a reviewer of a new production of Die Zauberflöte, commenting on the high attendance, remarked that the number of Mozart lovers was generally reckoned to be very low (Der Humorist, 13 January 1842).

The juxtaposition of the Romantic and the parodistic, of the spectacular and the trivial, of traditionalism and timid philistinism, is typical of the contradictions of Biedermeier culture. The one common denominator in musical tastes that may be linked with the political climate is an element of escapism. This can readily be detected in the more trivial fashions: the phenomenal popularity of the waltz, inspired by Johann Strauss (i) and Joseph Lanner; the many expressions of sentimental local patriotism in popular songs of the time, which would often be sung to the zither in popular taverns (a number of Viennese examples are included in Eduard Kremser's collection Wiener Lieder und Tänze); in the 1840s, a vogue in the commercial theatres for trivial comedies punctuated by slight musical numbers, based on the model of the Parisian comédie-vaudeville. But there is also an escapist element underlying more serious trends, including the fondness for both Romantic opera and Romantic ballet: the star dancers (Jules Perrot, Carlotta Grisi, Maria Taglioni, Fanny Elssler) were as popular in Vienna as in the other great capitals. Escapism also underlies the cult of virtuoso performance: Paganini and Liszt were lionized in Vienna, and one of Nestroy's biggest successes, Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842), contains a telling satirical allusion to the expensiveness of the recitals that were all the rage.

All this was only part of the Romantic scene. As in literature and the theatre, though major figures may reflect elements of Biedermeier taste (examples commonly cited include some of Schubert's settings of Wilhelm Müller, or again Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben), the undemanding naivety of that taste stands at odds with the tensions, the pre-revolutionary spirit fermenting beneath the surface.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Kremser, ed.: Wiener Lieder und Tänze (Vienna, 1912–25)

G. Hermann: Das Biedermeier im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Berlin, 1913, rev. 2/1965 by H.J. Hansen)

H. Funck: ‘Musikalisches Biedermeier’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, xiv (1936), 398–412

P.H. Lang: Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941), 805ff

H. Heussner: ‘Das Biedermeier in der Musik’, Mf, xii (1959), 422–31

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Romantik und Biedermeier: zur musikgeschichtlichen Charakteristik der Restaurationszeit’, AMw, xxxi (1974), 22–41

A.M. Hanson: Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (Cambridge, 1985)

E. Hilmar: ‘Die Musik: Beethoven und Schubert, Lanner und Strauss’, Wien 1815–1848, Bürgersinn und Aufbegehren: Biedermeier und Vormärz, ed. R. Waissenberger (Vienna, 1986), 253–71; Eng. trans. as ‘Music in Biedermeier Vienna’, Vienna in the Biedermeier Era 1815–1848 (New York, 1986), 253–70

G. Kraus, ed.: Musik in Österreich: eine Chronik in Daten, Dokumenten, Essays und Bildern (Vienna, 1989), 185–235

K. Delong: ‘The Conventions of Musical Biedermeier’, Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. W.J. Allanbrook, J.M. Levy and W.P. Mahrt (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 195–223

W.E. Yates: ‘The Biedermeier Mozart’, London German Studies, v, ed. M. Swales (London, 1993), 19–33

W.E. YATES

Biego, Paolo

(fl 1682–1714). Italian composer, organist and singer. A member of the clergy, he worked at S Marco, Venice, from 12 January 1687 until his death in 1714, as an ‘organetto’ player and bass singer (promoted to basso del maestro in 1690). From 1688 to 1698 he was maestro di coro of the Venetian Ospedale dei Darelitti. At least two operas by him were staged in Venice; he may be the Don Paolo who sang at the Teatro S Giovanni Grisostomo there in 1682 and 1684.

WORKS

Ottone il grande (dramma per musica, F. Silvani), Venice, SS Giovanni e Paolo, 5 Dec 1682; arias I-Vqs

La fortuna tra le disgratie (dramma per musica, 3, R. Cialli), Venice, S Angelo, Jan 1688, arias GB-Ob

Il Pertinace (dramma per musica, text wrongly attrib. P. d'Averara), Venice, S Salvatore, 1689; attrib. Biego by Bonlini, music lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS

C. Bonlini: Le glorie della poesia e della musica (Venice, 1730/R)

G. Ellero and others: Arte e musica all'Ospedaletto (Venice, 1978)

E. Selfridge-Field: ‘Pallade veneta’: Writings on Music in Venetian Society, 1650–1750 (Venice, 1985)

M. Talbot: Benedetto Vinaccesi: a Musician in Brescia and Venice in the Age of Corelli (Oxford, 1994)

LORENZO BIANCONI/JENNIFER WILLIAMS BROWN

Biehle, August Johannes

(b Bautzen, 18 June 1870; d Bautzen, 4 Jan 1941). German acoustician. After studying at the Dresden Conservatory he became Stadtkantor at Bautzen from 1898 to 1914 (from 1908 with the title of director of church music), where he organized music festivals in 1905, 1907 and 1912. He then went on to study acoustics, especially the acoustics of bells, in which field he was a pioneer, at the Technische Hochschule, Dresden. From 1916 he taught acoustics at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin, becoming professor in 1922. Meanwhile in 1918 he took up a lectureship in church music at the University of Berlin, and in 1920 became adviser on church bells and organs to the Prussian Ministry of Culture. In 1927 he set up the Institut Biehle, under the auspices of the University and the Technische Hochschule, Berlin, for the study of church buildings, organs, bells and acoustics. Further information is given in E.M. Müller, ed.: Festschrift Johannes Biehle (Leipzig, 1930).

WRITINGS

‘Theorie der pneumatischen Orgeltraktur und die Stellung des Spieltisches’, SIMG, xiii (1911), 1–33

Theorie des Kirchenbaues (Wittenberg, 1913)

Wesen, Wertung und Gebrauch der Glocken (Wittenberg, 1916)

Vergleichende Bewertung der Bronze- und Guss-stahlglocken (Dieskau, 1918)

‘Die Analyse des Glockenklanges’, AMw, i (1918), 289–312

Beiträge zur musikalischen Liturgik (Leipzig, 1919)

‘Raum und Ton’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 129–40

Der Einfluss der Aufhängung schwingender Glocken auf die Tongebung (Berlin, 1921)

Raumakustische, orgeltechnische und bau-liturgische Probleme: Untersuchungen am Dome zu Schleswig (Leipzig, 1922)

Die liturgische Gleichung (Dresden, 1923, 2/1931)

Die Tagung für Orgelbau in Berlin 1928 (Kassel, 1929)

MALCOLM TURNER

Biel, Michael von

(b Hamburg, 30 June 1937). German composer. After leaving school in Canterbury, England, Biel abandoned his business training in order to study the piano, theory and composition at the University of Toronto (1956–7). He went on to study privately in Vienna (1958–60), in New York with Feldman (1960) and in London with Cardew (1961–2). In 1961 he began attending the Darmstadt summer school where he won the first prize for composition (Book for Three) in 1962. He moved to Cologne in 1963, to create Fassung for four groups of loudspeakers (1963) in the electronic studio of WDR. From 1965 to 1966 he served as composer-in-residence at SUNY, Buffalo. His ‘American experience’ led, in the mid-1960s, to an engagement with the ideas of Fluxus, resulting in the creation of ‘concert actions’, musical ‘happenings’ and ‘world pieces’ that paid considerable attention to the circumstances of performance. After studying with Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (1968–9), Biel turned the majority of his creative energy to the field of graphic design. Since the mid-1970s he has composed series or cycles of works particularly for solo instruments. While his early works (such as the String Quartet no.2) are concerned primarily with the analysis of musical material, more recent compositions – especially those written for guitar or piano – are postmodern, freely exploiting tradition, reflecting personal and period styles and seeking engagement with pop and entertainment music. The process of composition becomes the process of summarizing and assimilating music history. In spite of the composer’s stylistic changes, one central principle has remained constant throughout his career: Biel conceives of his activity as process oriented. Improvisation plays such an important role in performance that he considers even completed compositions to be open and subject to change.

WORKS

(selective list)

Chbr: Für Klavier no.1–3 (3 Klavierstücke für Morton Feldman), pf duet, 1960–61; Book for Three, (vn, 2 pf)/3 pf, 1961–2; Doubles (29 Stücke), vn, pf, 1961; Str Qt no.1, 1962; Str Qt no.2, 1963; Klavierduo (Für Klavier no.5, Für Klavier no.II), pf duet, 1965; Qt mit Begleitung (Qt no.3), str qt, vc, 1965; The Plain of S'cairn, at least 5 wind insts, at least 5 str, 1966; 13 traditionelle Stücke, 2 gui, 1974–7; Stücke, 2 gui, 1976; Fragment, 2 elec gui, 1981; 19 Stücke, pf, synth, glock, perc, elec gui, 1985

Solo inst: Für Klavier no.4 (Septenary, Klavier 1964/67, Für Klavier no.2), pf, 1964–5; Für Klavier no.5 (Etüden und Gesangsthemen, Für Klavier no.6), pf, 1968; Deutsche Landschaften, improvisation, vc, 1970; Cellokonzert, improvisation, vc, 1971; Übungsstück, improvisation, vc, filtered feedback, 1971; Präludien, improvisation, vc, 1972; Violoncellomusik I–III, improvisation, 1972; 28 Stücke, pf, 1987–9; 8 Projekt (Aufsatzstück), pf, 1992; Stücke, pf, 1992

El-ac: Fassung, 4 loudspeakers, 1964; Deklination, A, pf, 3 perc, hp, vc, db, elec, 1965; Jagdstück, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, db, elec, 1966

Other works: Welt I and II, aktionspartituren, 1965–6; Komposition, orch, 1968

Principal publishers: Feedback, Köln, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (H.-J. Wagner)

W.-E. von Lewinski: ‘Flaneure haben in Kranichstein ausgespielt’, Melos, xxx (1963), 343–5

M. von Biel: ‘2 Quartett für Streicher’, Melos, xxxiv (1967), 371

M. von Biel and J. Fritsch: ‘Fortschritt? Gibt's nicht’, Feedback Papers, no.1 (1971), 29–32

K. Stockhausen: Texte zur Music 1963–1970 (Cologne, 1971), 282–4

M. von Biel and W. Zimmermann: ‘Gespräche am Karfreitag 1977 im Drugstore Cafe Köln und am Ostersonntag in der Kneipe Alcazar’, Feedback Papers, no.13 (1977), 315–24

W. Zimmermann: Insel Music (Cologne, 1981), 125–33

H. Henck: ‘Zur Arbeit von Michael von Biel: eine Literatur- und Werkübersicht’, Neuland: Ansätze zur Musik der Gegenwart, iii (1983), 100–03

M. von Biel, ed.: Kölner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (Cologne, 1983)

HANS-JOACHIM WAGNER

Bieling, Franz Ignaz

(b after 1700; d Kempten, 14 Aug 1757). German organist and composer. He was a court musician in the service of the Prince-Abbot of Kempten. In 1731 he married there in the collegiate church of St Lorenz. Two works by him were published by Lotter in Augsburg: X Ariae de Deo & Sanctis, ad modernum stylum elaboratae (1729), and VI Lytaniae Lauretanae de B.V. Maria, cum annexis II Te Deum laudamus (1731) for four voices and instruments. These works remained in the publisher’s catalogue for two decades.

His son Joseph Ignaz Bieling (b Kempten, 7 March 1735; d Kempten, 7 Jan 1814) studied logic and possibly theology at Salzburg University in 1752, and while there was a pupil of Leopold Mozart. He married at the church of St Lorenz in 1762. He succeeded his father in the post of court organist, and in addition was Kapellmeister of the Hofmusik and Kammermusik, the last Kapellmeister to the princely court before the secularization of Kempten. Besides writing church music (in A-ST, CH-MÜ, SAf, D-KPsl, Tl and Kempten civic archives) he composed instrumental works (in CH-E), including a harpsichord concerto, as well as theatre music and a setting of a poem by the music director Count Fugger zu Kirchberg und Weissenhorn.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Layer: Musikgeschichte der Fürstabtei Kempten (Kempten, 1975)

F. Krautwurst: ‘Musik in Reichsstadt and Stift’, Geschichte der Stadt Kempten, ed. V. Dotterweich and others (Kempten, 1989), 303–21

ADOLF LAYER/STEPHAN HÖRNER

Bieling, Joseph Ignaz.

See under his father Bieling, Franz Ignaz.

BIEM

[Bureau International de l’Edition Mécanique]. See Copyright, §II.

Biener, Mathias.

See Apiarius, Mathias.

Bientina, Il.

See Buonavita, Antonio.

Bienvenu, Florent

(b Rouen, 3 March 1568; d Paris, 20 July 1623). French organist and composer. The family name (possibly Norman) was Helbic, but his father Jean, a hospital bursar in Rouen, adopted the French name Bienvenu. The young Florent was presumably influenced there by Titelouze, five years his senior. He became a priest and moved to Laon, where he was cathedral canon, and then to Paris, where he was chaplain and organist at the Ste Chapelle by September 1597. His widowed mother, Marguerite Lefèvre, was also there, and documents regarding a controversy with ecclesiastical authorities about her lodging in 1598 show him to have been strong-willed and independent. He became prominent enough to be asked to test the renovated organs at the abbey of St Denis in 1604 and at Poitiers in 1612, and he must have supervised the rebuilding of the Ste Chapelle instrument in 1616–20. At his death he owned two spinets, the larger described as his preferred instrument, as well as a clavichord and a five-stop chamber organ by Valeran de Hémant. His pupil Jean Denis called him the finest organist and composer of vocal music of his time (Traité de l’accord de l’espinette, Paris, 1643, 2/1650). No music is known today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetM

A. Pirro: Preface to N. Gigault: Livre de musique pour l’orgue (Paris, 1903)

P. Hardouin: ‘Notes biographiques sur quelques organistes parisiens des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, L’orgue, no.82 (1957), 1–8

BRUCE GUSTAFSON

Bierdiajew, Walerian

(b Grodno, Belorussia, 7 March 1885; d Warsaw, 28 Nov 1956). Polish conductor and teacher. He studied with Nikisch and Reger in Leipzig, and made his début as a conductor at Dresden in 1906 with Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin. From that time he appeared as an opera and concert conductor both in Poland and abroad, and was active as a teacher and musical organizer. In 1930 he was appointed conductor of the Warsaw Opera, in 1945 conductor of the Kraków PO, in 1949 conductor of the Poznań Opera, and in 1954 director of the Warsaw Opera. He was a fine interpreter of Classical music, particularly by Beethoven, and he taught a number of leading Polish conductors, including Bohdan Wodiczko, Artur Malawski and Henryk Czyż.

MIECZYSŁAWA HANUSZEWSKA

Bierey, Gottlob Benedict

(b Dresden, 25 July 1772; d Breslau [now Wrocław], 5 May 1840). German composer and conductor. He learnt singing, the oboe and the violin at home and studied basso continuo and composition with the Kantor of the Kreuzschule, Christian Ehregott Weinlig. In 1788 he became musical director of the Voigt drama company and in 1790 of the Döbbelin opera company. From 1791 to 1806 he held the same position in Joseph Seconda’s company, which toured Dresden, Leipzig, Brunswick and Ballenstedt. He married the singer Sophie de Merell in 1794. Following the successful première of his opera Wladimir, Fürst von Nowgorod, commissioned for the Theater an der Wien by its director Prince Esterházy, Bierey became Kapellmeister and musical director of the Breslau Stadttheater in January 1808 and remained there for 20 years, much to the advantage of the city’s musical and operatic life. He founded a choral society in 1812 and directed it until 1816. In January 1824 he took over the entire management of the theatre, of which he was also principal musical director, but after attacks from his enemies he resigned both posts in December 1828. Thereafter he divided his time between Leipzig, Weimar, Wiesbaden and Mainz, returning to Breslau in 1834.

Bierey was regarded as a ‘skilful, conscientious and artistic conductor’ (Mendel and Reissmann). He also won considerable renown as a prolific and versatile composer, and was even described as a ‘favourite composer of Germany’ (AMZ, 31 March 1840). His 30 or so operas and Singspiels, in particular, were popular during his lifetime, but the generally poor quality of their librettos prevented their having any lasting success. For serious opera, he admired and imitated Cherubini, whose influence is perceptible in, for instance, Wladimir. This and the delightful Singspiel Rosette, das Schweizer Hirtenmädchen are among Bierey’s best works and, like most of his pieces, were performed on the leading German stages and in Budapest. Pleasing melodies, skilful ensemble writing and effective instrumentation are characteristic of his music, which unites Classical and early Romantic elements.

WORKS

MSS IN B-Bc, D-Bsb, Dl

Das Blumenmädchen, oder besser Die Rosenkönigin (komische Oper, 1, F. Rochlitz), Leipzig, 1802; Clara, Herzogin von Bretannien (os, 3, Bretzner), Leipzig, 1803; Rosette, das Schweizer Hirtenmädchen (Spl, 2, Bretzner), Leipzig, 3 Feb 1806, Dl; Wladimir, Fürst von Nowgorod (os, 3, M. Stegmayer), Vienna, Wien, 25 Nov 1807

Much incid music, some pubd separately as inst ovs, dances and marches

Wie an dem stillen Abend (Easter cant.), soloists, chorus, orch (Leipzig, 1806); Ky, Gl, 8vv, orch (Leipzig, n.d.); Das Daseyn Gottes, 4vv, orch (Breslau, 1813); other religious music, Dl, LEt

Many songs, partsongs, pf pieces, some pubd separately and in contemporary anthologies

WRITINGS

Mein Verhältnis zu Seconda (Leipzig, 1804)

Kurze Übersicht, die Lehre vom Generalbass gründlich und nach der Ordnung zu studieren, MS, mentioned by Fétis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADB (A. von Dommer); GroveO (D. Härtwig) [incl. fuller list of stage works]; SchillingE

C.J.A. Hoffmann: Die Tonkünstler Schlesiens (Breslau, 1830)

Obituary, AMZ, xlii (1840), 506

Denkschrift zur Erinnerung an Bierey (Breslau, 1841)

H. Mendel and A. Reissmann: Musicalisches Conversationslexikon (Berlin, 1885)

H. Unverricht: ‘Gottlob Benedict Bierey: ein vergessener Opernkomponist’, Festschrift Martin Ruhnke zum 65. Geburtstag (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986), 364–73

H. Unverricht: ‘Die Streitschriften des Breslauer Opernkapellmeisters und Theaterdirektors Gottlob Benedict Bierey (1772–1840)’, Musik des Ostens (Kassel, 1992), 287–99

DIETER HÄRTWIG

Biernacki, Nikodem

(b Tarnopol, 1826; d Sanok, 6 May 1892). Polish violinist and composer. He began learning music from his father and Tonini, an Italian Kapellmeister at the court of Count Konstanty Przeździecki. In 1841 he played in a military band at Czerniowce and later he was Konzertmeister of the Lemberg (now L'vov) theatre orchestra. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Hauptmann (piano and composition) and David (violin), at the same time playing in the opera orchestra. In about 1850 he began a soloist's career, soon making his début at the Gewandhaus and then accepting the post of leader of the Warsaw Opera orchestra. He also made an extensive concert tour of eastern Europe. In autumn 1857 he went to Paris, where he continued his studies with Spohr, H.W. Ernst and Reber and gave concerts, including one at the Salle Pleyel in March 1858. In 1859 he made an extensive tour of Germany, Belgium, Austria and Russia; in 1862 he went to the USA and in 1864 he played at the court of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Later he was leader of the royal orchestra in Stockholm. After his return to Poland he settled in Poznań, where he organized a music school, taught and gave concerts until 1886, when he was forced by the occupying German authorities to leave the town. He spent his last years at Chyrów, teaching music at a Jesuit school. His small output, most of it unpublished, includes songs, chamber music and, above all, pieces for the violin.

ELŻBIETA DZIĘBOWSKA

Biezen, Jan van

(b Wassenaar, 22 April 1927). Dutch musicologist. He studied mathematics at the University of Leiden (MSc 1954) and organ with Adriaan Engels; he was a secondary school teacher (1954–72) and organist and choirmaster of the Dutch Reformed Church in Wassenaar (1954–97). He took the doctorate at Utrecht University in 1968, with a dissertation on middle Byzantine Kanon notation. He taught musicology at the Universities of Leiden (1970–89) and Utrecht (1971–88) and was deputy chairman of the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1975–9).

Van Biezen’s research is chiefly concerned with aspects of tempo and rhythm (especially in Byzantine and Latin hymns, Genevan psalms, hymns of the Reformation, and 15th-century ‘stroke notation’), tuning and temperament, and Dutch organ history. He played a key role in the creation of the Liedboek voor de Kerken, the collection of psalms and hymns that has been used in most of the Dutch Reformed churches from its publication in 1973. He has been involved with the restoration of several important organs in the Netherlands, and has written a standard work on the Dutch organ from the 15th century to the 18th (1995). He has also prepared scholarly editions, chiefly of Dutch music from the 16th and 17th centuries.

WRITINGS

‘Het calvinistische psalter: een onderzoek naar ritmische verschijnselen in tekst en melodie, en de consequenties daarvan voor de nieuwe psalmberijming’ [The Calvinist Psalter: an investigation into the rhythmic phenomena in text and melody, and their consequences for the new rhymed version], Kerk en Eredienst, xiii (1959), 238–56

with J.W. Schulte Nordholt: Hymnen: een bloemlezing met muziek uit de vroeg-christelijke en middeleeuwse gezangen van de Latijnse en Griekse kerk [Hymns: an anthology with music from the early Christian and medieval songs from the Latin and Greek churches] (Tournai, 1967)

The Middle Byzantine Kanon-Notation of Manuscript H: a Palaeographic Study with a Transcription of the Melodies of 13 Kanons and a Triodion (diss., U. of Utrecht, 1968; Bilthoven, 1968)

‘The Music Notation of the Gruuthuse Manuscript and Related Notations’, TVNM, xxii (1972), 231–51

Stemmingen, speciaal bij toetsinstrumenten [Tunings, especially with regard to keyboard instruments] (The Hague, 1977)

‘Nogmaals de gemeentezang: het tempo van de reformatorische kerkliederren’ [Once again on congregational singing: the tempo of the hymns of the Reformation], Het Orgel, lxxv (1979), 446–60

‘Die Hypothese eines Mensuralisten?’, Mf, xxxvi (1982), 148–54

‘Het ritme van de Geneefse psalmmelodieën’ [The rhythm of the Genevan psalm melodies], Het Orgel, lxxix (1983), 378–83

‘Het tempo van de Franse barokdansen’ [The tempo of the French Baroque dances], Tempo in de achttiende eeuw, ed. K. Vellekoop (Utrecht, 1984), 7–25

with K. Vellekoop: ‘Aspects of Stroke Notation in the Gruuthuse Manuscript and Other Sources’, TVNM, xxxiv (1984), 3–25

‘Maatsoorten en tempo in de eerste helft van de 18de eeuw, in het bijzonder in de orgelwerken van Johann Sebastian Bach’ [Times and tempo during the first half of the eighteenth century, especially in the organ works of J.S. Bach], Bachs ‘Orgel-Büchlein’ in nieuw perspectief, ed. P. Peeters (Voorburg, 1988), 191–239

Het Nederlandse orgel in de Renaissance en de Barok, in het bijzonder de school van Jan van Covelens [The Dutch organ during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, especially the school of Jan van Covelens] (Utrecht, 1995)

EDITIONS

A. van Noordt: Tabulatuurboeck van Psalmen en Fantasyen, MMN, xi (1976)

with M. Veldhuyzen: Souterliedekens 1540 (Buren, 1984) [facs. edn with introduction and notes]

with J.P. Gumbert: Two Chansonniers from the Low Countries: French and Dutch Polyphonic Songs from the Leiden and Utrecht Fragments (Early 15th Century), MMN, xv (1985)

with R.H. Tollefsen: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Livre quatriesme et conclusionnal des pseaumes de David, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Opera omnia edifioalfera, v (Amsterdam, 1988)

JOOST VAN GEMERT

Bifara [Biffaro].

See under Organ stop.

Bifetto [Biffetto], Francesco

(b Bergamo; fl 1545–61). Italian composer. In Pietro Aaron's Lucidario (1545) he is described as an exceptionally good ‘cantore a libro’, i.e. a singer of polyphonic music. Through the influence of Rore he was engaged as maestro di cappella at S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, on 17 September 1551; he left after a year but returned in 1554 and remained until 1561. He is known by two volumes of four-part madrigals (Venice, 1547, 1548, inc.). They are written in the C signature (a note nere) fashionable in the 1540s and include the use of declamatory melodic formulae, with a good deal of internal repetition, particularly in his settings of Ariosto and of other ottava stanzas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

A. Geddo: Bergamo e la musica (Bergamo, 1958), 43–4, 57

G. Towne: Gaspar de Albertis and Music at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of California, Santa Barbara, 1985)

JAMES HAAR

Biffi, Antonio [Antonino]

(b Venice, 1666/7; d Venice, early 1733). Italian composer and singer. His approximate date of death derives from a manuscript note (I-Vnm), which also states that he was 66 when he died. He is widely supposed to have been a pupil of Legrenzi, but there is no firm evidence. On 6 July 1692 he joined the choir of S Marco, Venice, as a contralto. After barely a week the procurators entrusted him with the task of helping the maestro di cappella, G.D. Partenio. On Partenio's death in 1701, he applied for the vacant post together with the vicemaestro, C.F. Pollarolo, and the two organists, Antonio Lotti and Benedetto Vinaccesi; he was appointed on 5 February 1702 and held the post until his death, though he may well have been assisted, or replaced, by Antonio Lotti during his last year because of infirmity. He also succeeded Partenio as director and maestro di coro of the Conservatorio dei Mendicanti; Giovanni Ferrandini and perhaps D.G. Treu were among his many pupils there. The style of his music is in general influenced by the spirited, colourful and expressive music characteristic of the Venetian school. Although this influence is tempered by a restraint typical of the more sober Roman school, he adhered in general to the concertato style, and counterpoint does not play a prominent role in his textures, which, although his output is predominantly sacred, may well have been influenced by secular music.

WORKS

principal source: I-Vnm; others: A-Wn, D-Dlb, GB-Lbl, I-Bc, Fc

Il figliuol prodigo (orat, R. Ciallis), Venice, Oratorio Filippino di S Maria della Fava, 1697, lost

La manna in deserto, orat, Venice, 1723, lost

6 ps: Ecce quam bonus, 2vv; Et exultavit cor meum, 2vv, org; Miserere, 4vv, vns, vas, org; Natus in Iudea, 3vv, bc; Quia laetatus, 2vv, bc; Repleti prius, 2vv, org

Masses, mass movts, motets, cant., further ps

Several secular works, incl. Amante moribondo, cant. (fragment only); Adorar beltà; La primavera

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS, i

DBI

ScheringGO, 130, 232

SchmitzG, 102

M.A. Zorzi: ‘Saggio di bibliografia sugli oratorii sacri eseguiti a Venezia’, Accademie e biblioteche d'Italia, v (1931–2), 79–96, 493–508

ARGIA BERTINI

Biffi, Gioseffo

(b Cesena; fl 1596–1606). Italian composer. His Primo libro delle canzonette, for six voices (Nuremberg, 1596), and his Madrigali con duoi soprani, for five voices (Milan, 1598), identify him as maestro di cappella for Zsigmond Báthory, and his Madrigali libro terzo, for six voices (Nuremberg, 1600), states that he was a composer for Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg. His Della ricreatione di Posilipo libro primo, for three to six voices (Naples, 1606), also survives.

BARBARA KIMBALL ANSBACHER

Bigaglia, Diogenio

(b Venice, c1676; d Venice, c1745). Italian composer. He entered the Benedictine monastery of S Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, on 11 March 1694. He became subdeacon in 1698, priest on 22 August 1700 and deacon on 12 June 1704 (or 1706), and in 1713 he was given the priorate of the monastery. Printed librettos indicate that his oratorios were performed in Bologna, Rimini and Faenza as well as Venice, but few copies of his sacred music have come to light. Large liturgical works for soloists and chorus with continuo or orchestral accompaniment indicate considerable skill; many of the solo motets and solo cantatas, written in a progressive style, are also very fine. In some manuscripts he is identified as Padre Benedettino Bigaglia.

WORKS

oratorios

L’Abele, Bologna, n.d., I-Bc

Giaele (D. Giupponi), Rimini, 1727, lost

Oreste, convertito ad intercessione di S Gaetano Thiene, Iesi, 1734, lost

Il profeta Daniele (Giupponi), Bologna, 1744, lost

sacred vocal

in A-KR unless otherwise stated

Masses, all Ky-Gl only: C, SSATB, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 vn, org; a, SSSSAATTBB, 4 str, org; G, SSATB, ob, 2 tpt, 3 str, org; e, SSSAATTBB, ob, tpt, 2 vn, vc, org; D, SSATB, 2 fl, tpt, 2 vn, org; F, SSATB, ob, fl, 2 vn, org; F, SSATB, 3 str, org; C, SATB, 2vn, 2 ob, 2 clarino in C, timp, org, CZ-Pak; G, SSATB, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 vn, vc, org; D, SSATB, 2 cl, 2 fl, 2 vn, org; G, SSATB, 2 ob, 2 tpt, 2 vn, va, org; F, SSATB, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 vn, org; F, SSATB, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 vn, va, bc, org; D, 2 SSATB choirs, ob, 2 clarino, 2 vn, vc, cembalo; e, SSSAATTB, ob, clarino solo, tpt, 2 vn, va, org; a, SSSSAATTBB, cl, 2 vn, va, org

Dixit Dominus, S, A, B, SSAATB, 2 tpt, ob, str, GB-Lbl; Laudate pueri, S, 4 str, org; Miserere, c, SSATB, 3 trbn, 4 str, org; Miserere, c, frag., ?same as Miserere, c, S, SATB, bc, I-Nf; Miserere, c, SATB, 3 trbn, 2 vn, va, vle, org; Miserere, str, org; Pange lingua, SSAATTBB, clarino, 3 trbn, vle, org; Pange lingua, SATB, 3 trbn, org

Motets, all for 1v; Aure placide, vn, bc, I-Ac; Contra navem in mari agitatem, 2 vn, va, bc, D-Bsb; Da mihi penas, vn, bc, I-Ac*; In serena coeli scena, 2 vn, va, bc, D-Bsb, MÜs; Pheonix vigit in ardore, 2 vn, va, bc, 1727, I-Ac*; Quid tyranno quid minaris, str, org, BV, CZ-Pak; Salve in amaros lumina fletus, 2 vn, va, bc, I-Ac*; Si consurgant in me costra, str, bc (org), BV, CZ-Pak; Vaga fonte non turbando, bc, I-Ac

2 masses in A-KR formerly attrib. Bigaglia are by N. Fago and F. Mancini.

secular vocal

cantatas, 1 voice, continuo, unless otherwise stated

Ah! santi numi, I-Nc; All’ombra di sospetto, Nc; Aure care, frondi amene, D-MÜs, GB-Lbl, I-Nc; Aure che qui d’intorno, GB-Lbl, I-Nc; Bel piacer d’un amante, Nc; Dammi o sposa, D-MÜs; Deh vane al mar più lento, B-Br

Di Giove in fronte, I-Vnm; Dove vai mio, ben crudele, GB-Lbl, I-Nc; Ecce che il primo albore, GB-Gu; Ecco perfida Irene, I-Nc; Eran ancor immote, Nc; Figlie del mio dolor, GB-Lbl; Filli che vedo, I-Nc; Fiumicel che lento, GB-Lcm; Già è pallido il fiore, S, str, bc, I-Bas; Gran crudeltà di stella, GB-Lbl, I-Nc, PAc; Grazie agli inganni tuoi, D-HRD, DK-Kk; In serena caeli scena, D-Bsb; Io non intendo, I-Vnm; Ite dilette mie candide’agnelle, D-Bsb; Mentre in torbido stato, GB-Lcm; Mi fai pur tanta pena, I-Gl; Mira la violetta, GB-Lcm; Non lasciarmi, o bella speme, I-Nc; O frondoso arboscello, GB-Gu; Ombre amiche, ombre care, B-Bc; O mesta tortorella, S-Sk; O sasso, amaro sassa, I-Gl; Oh Metilda anima, GB-Lbl, Lcm, Cfm; Pastor d’Arcadia, Gu; Per me fu caro, str, bc, D-BAs

Quante sian le mie pene, I-Nc; Se di me voi vedeste, GB-Lbl; Se in cielo, H-Bb, Bl; Se tu resisti, o cor, GB-Lbl, I-Nc; Siam soli Erminia, DK-Kk; Siedi Amarilli, GB-Gu; Silvio per questa volta, CH-E; Sto pensando à quel ruscello, I-Gl; Sudaste al fin, S-Sk, Uu; T’intendo si mio cor, cited in EitnerQ; Vaghe luci, GB-CDp; Vorrei che il mio timor, D-Bsb

Duets and trios, female vv, bc, B-Bc, D-Bsb, GB-Lbl, S-Sk

22 cants., F-Pc

instrumental

XII sonate, vn/fl, vc/bc, op.1 (Amsterdam, c1722)

Conc. à 6, 2 ob, 2 vn, va, bc, D-SWl; conc., hpd, 2 vn, va, vc, ob, B-Bc; conc., ob, orch, Bc, D-SWl; Conc. à 5, ob, str, bc, HRD

3 trio sonatas, 2 fl, bc, B-Bc, also D-SWl; 2 sonatas, vn, b, I-BGc; trios, S-L, Skma

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL (‘Bianchi’)

MGG1 (F. Fano and A. Kellner)

F. Caffi: Storia della musica sacra nella già cappella ducale di San Marco in Venezia dal 1318 al 1797 (Venice, 1854–5/R, repr. 1931); ed. E. Surian (Florence, 1987)

A. Kellner: Musikgeschichte des Stiftes Kremsmünster (Kassel, 1956)

SVEN HANSELL (with OLGA TERMINI)

Bigard, Barney [Albany Leon]

(b New Orleans, 3 March 1906; d Culver City, CA, 27 June 1980). American jazz clarinettist. He first learnt to play E clarinet, studying with fellow black jazz musician Lorenzo Tio jr and using an Albert system instrument. Discouraged on the clarinet, he adopted the tenor saxophone and late in 1922 joined Albert Nicholas’s band, with which he travelled to Chicago late in 1924. There the two men joined King Oliver at the Plantation Café from February 1925 to March 1927. Bigard recorded with a contingent from Oliver’s band and with Oliver.

As Oliver altered his band’s personnel, Bigard was occasionally called upon to play the clarinet, which soon became his principal instrument. He also recorded with Jelly Roll Morton and, in April 1927, with Johnny Dodds and Louis Armstrong. He joined Charlie Elgar’s group in Milwaukee for the summer and then returned to New York, playing with Luis Russell for two months before joining Duke Ellington at the end of 1927 or the beginning of 1928.

Except for a brief absence in summer 1935, Bigard remained with Ellington until June 1942. During this period he perfected a highly individual clarinet style characterized by a warm tone in all registers, sweeping chromatic runs and long, continuous glissandos. His quickly became a distinctive voice in the Ellington orchestra, and he was prominently featured on hundreds of recordings, most notably on Clarinet Lament (Barney’s Concerto) (1936, Bruns.), which he wrote with Ellington (Bigard also collaborated on Mood Indigo (1930, Bruns.), Ducky Wucky (1932, Bruns.) and Saturday Night Function (1929, Vic.), among others). In addition he recorded with Morton in 1929.

After leaving Ellington, Bigard led his own groups in Los Angeles and New York. His work during the autumn of 1946 with Louis Armstrong in the film New Orleans led to his next important association, as the clarinettist with Armstrong’s All Stars. During his long tenure with this group (1947–52, 1953–5, 1960–61) he toured the world. He went into semi-retirement in 1962, but continued to play occasionally at concerts, for recording dates and television appearances, and at numerous jazz festivals, both in the USA and overseas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Stewart: ‘Illustrious Barney Bigard’, Down Beat (8 Sep 1966), 18–20; repr. in Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York, 1972), 113–20

A. Judd: ‘Barney Goin’ Easy’, JJc, xx/9 (1967), 4 [interview]

S. Dance: ‘Barney Bigard [clarinet]’, The World of Duke Ellington (London, 1970/R), 77–87

D. Ellington: ‘Barney Bigard and Wellman Braud’, Music is my Mistress (Garden City, NY, 1973), 114–5

D. Koechlin: 50 ans de jazz avec Barney Bigard (n.p. [Darnetal], n.d. [1979])

B. Bigard: With Louis and the Duke, ed. B. Martyn (London, 1985)

M. Tucker, ed.: The Duke Ellington Reader (New York, 1993)

Oral history material in US-NEij, NORtu

LEWIS PORTER

Bigelow, Michael L.

(b Annapolis, MD, 7 Dec 1946). American organ builder. After graduating from the University of Utah with a degree in architecture, he studied organs informally in America and Europe before serving an apprenticeship with John Brombaugh for four years. In 1978 he opened his own workshop in Provo, Utah, to build mechanical-action organs based on historical northern European tonal principles, and in 1984 moved to a larger workshop in American Fork, Utah. A characteristic of some of his smaller two-manual organs is his unique ‘either-or’ stop action whereby three-position stop knobs allow the organist to use any stop on either of the two manuals, or to put it off altogether. An example of this type of organ, housed in a decorated case of classical design, was built in 1987 for the Mormon Church in Provo. Among Bigelow's larger instruments are those built for First Congregational Church, Oroville, California (1985), Victory Lutheran Church, Mesa, Arizona (1987), and Conception Abbey, Conception, Missouri (1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.J. Cramer: ‘An Interview with Michael Bigelow’, American Organist, xx/10 (1986), 54–5

L. Edwards, ed.: The Historical Organ in America (Easthampton, MA, 1992)

BARBARA OWEN

Biggs, E(dward George) Power

(b Westcliff, Essex, 29 March 1906; d Boston, 10 March 1977). American organist of English birth. He studied at the RAM in London. After touring the USA in 1929 as the soloist in an ensemble, he took up residence there in 1930 and became an American citizen in 1937, initially holding church and teaching positions before embracing a career as a recitalist, broadcaster and recording artist that did much to popularize the concert organ and organ music as well as the artist. From 1942 to 1958 he broadcast weekly solo programmes over a nationwide radio network. Originating in the Germanic (now Busch-Reisinger) Museum at Harvard University, these recitals on an Aeolian-Skinner ‘classic style’ organ brought the sound of organ mixtures, mutations and Baroque reeds, as well as the music itself, to many listeners for the first time. Biggs was meanwhile an indefatigable public performer. A product of both activities was the extensive series of recordings, made in the USA and in many European cities, including the ‘Historic Organs of England’, the ‘Mozart Organ Tour’ and the award-winning ‘The Glory of Gabrieli’, the Handel organ concertos (recorded at Great Packington), various Bach projects, and others with instrumental ensembles. Biggs published editions of early music and performed new works (by Hanson, Piston, Quincy Porter, Sowerby and others, with particular emphasis on those for organ and orchestra). His career was marked, then, by interest in organ music of all eras and in many kinds of organs most suitable to its interpretation, and by unfailing energy in performance. He played with most major American orchestras, and in 1962 joined Catharine Crozier and Virgil Fox in inaugurating the organ at Philharmonic Hall, New York. He was a major contributor to the ‘Organ Reform’ movement of the mid-20th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Owen: E. Power Biggs, Concert Organist (Bloomington, IN, 1987)

E.J. Hunt: E. Power Biggs: Legacy of the Performing Artist (DMA diss., Boston U., 1986)

VERNON GOTWALS/R

Biggs, (William) Hayes

(b Huntsville, AL, 5 May 1957). American composer. He studied at Southwestern [now Rhodes] College, Memphis (BM 1979), the Berkshire Music Center (1981), Southern Methodist University (MM 1982) and Columbia University (DMA 1992). His principal composition teachers included Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Donald Erb, Donald Freund and Marvin Lamb. He first came to public attention in 1984 with the humorous song Northeast Reservation Lines. In 1993 his Mass for All Saints was awarded second prize in the 5th Concours International de Musique Sacrée, Festival de Musique Sacrée de Fribourg. It was given its première the following year in Fribourg by the NDR Chor. In 1995 he received a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation to write When You are Reminded by the Instruments (1997) for the Parnassus ensemble, New York.

Biggs’s experience as a vocal accompanist and choral singer has shaped his approach to text setting. His performances of Gregorian chant and Renaissance motets, in particular, have influenced the rhythmic and contrapuntal suppleness of his instrumental writing. Seeking to integrate tonal and non-tonal elements by means of tight motivic unity, his music also displays a concern for highly variegated and subtly shifting timbres.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: E.M. am Flügel, pf, 1992; God Hath Sent Me to Sea for Pearls, va, pf, 1992; A Consuming Fire, fl + pic + a fl, ob + eng hn, pf, 1995; To Becalme His Fever, 1995; When You are Reminded by the Insts, ob + eng hn, cl + b cl, hn, str, 1997

Choral (unacc. SATB, unless otherwise stated): Introit: Requiem aeternam, S, SATB, orch, 1982; Phos hilaron (Book of Common Prayer), SATB, org, 1986; Der gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand (Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon), 1987; O sacrum convivium, 1989; O magnum mysterium, 1990; Vidi aquam, 1991; Mass for All Saints, 1993; Videntes stellam, S, SATB, 1994; O Sapientia, 1995; Quem vidistis pastores?, 1996; Cantate Domino, 1997; Miserere mei, Deus, T, TBarB, 1997

Solo Vocal: i carry your heart (e.e. cummings), med v, pf, 1977; 2 Poems from Chbr Music (J. Joyce), S, pf, 1977–8; Northeast Reservation Lines (J. Shore), S, pf, 1984; Songs from Water and Stone (A. Macleish, L. Glück, D. Levertov, L. Bogan), S, fl + pic + a fl, cl + b cl, vn, vc, pf, 1985; Ave formosissima (Carmina Burana), S + claves + tamborine, cl, vc, 1987; Child of the Ravenhair (C. Hebald), S, Mez, T, B-Bar, chbr orch, 1988; Sephestia’s Song to Her Child (R. Greene), S, pf, 1991; I pastoria (G. d’Annunzio), S, 4 vc, 1994; Ps xxiii, S, pf, 1996

Principal publishers: Peters, Margun

DON C. GILLESPIE

Bignami, Carlo

(b Cremona, 6 Dec 1808; d Voghera, 2 Oct 1848). Italian violinist, composer and conductor. A pupil of his father Giovanni, also a violinist, as was his elder brother Giacomo, he gave his first public concert in 1819 in Cremona. He then played in theatre orchestras in Cremona and later in Milan; in 1829 he became concert leader and director at the Teatro Sociale in Mantua. From there in 1836 Paganini summoned him to Parma and after a rigid examination gave him a ten-year contract as leader of an orchestra there. After Bignami had resigned his Mantua post, however, it appeared that Paganini had not cleared the appointment with the archduchess Marie-Louise, who rejected it, perhaps partly because Bignami was suspected of liberalism; his fame rests mainly on his having been the innocent cause of this embarrassment to Paganini. In 1837 he returned to Cremona as conductor at the Teatro della Concordia; financial difficulties caused him in 1839 to apply for help to Paganini, who bought him off with 400 francs and a letter of patronizing advice (he was to give recitals in neighbouring towns with piano accompaniment to avoid the expense of an orchestra) and praise (he was ‘the greatest violinist in Italy’, a phrase which there is no evidence that Paganini meant seriously). A report of a concert that Bignami gave at La Scala with the cellist Alfredo Piatti (AMZ, xliii (1841), col.641) describes Piatti as an ‘excellent’ player and Bignami as a ‘respectable’ one. Having taken part in the Revolution of 1848, he was forced to flee on foot to Piedmont and died on the trip at an inn near Voghera. He wrote a number of works for violin, of which Capricci estudi per violono solo was published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (P. Donati)

F. Regli: Dizionario biografico (Turin, 1860/R), 62

A. Mandelli: ‘Carlo Bignami e Nicolò Paganini’, GMM, xlviii (1893), 732, 743, 787

G.I.C. de Courcy: ‘Carlo Bignami 1835–1836’, Paganini, the Genoese, ii (Norman, OK, 1957/R), 222

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972)

SERGIO MARTINOTTI

Bignami, Otello

(b Bologna, 6 Aug 1914; d Bologna, 1 Dec 1989). Italian violin maker. Originally a violinist, Bignami became interested in violin making towards the end of the 1940s. During the early 1950s he studied with Gaetano Pollastri (1886–1960), who schooled him in the Bolognese violin tradition. A period of intense activity and considerable success followed, with numerous commissions received from Italian conservatories and artists. In 1956 he won the first prize (viola section) of the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome; in 1957 he obtained the Gold Medal at the Exhibition in Ancona and in 1976 he was awarded the ‘gold violin’ at the Bagnacavallo competition. From 1979 until 1983 he directed the Violin Making School in Bologna. A natural disposition for teaching ensured his success in this role, for which he was awarded a special prize at the Bagnacavallo Competition in 1979.

Bignami’s instruments possess classic Bolognese features and are always coated with a red or golden orange varnish, rich in colour and texture. He was inspired by the Amati style; the tonal qualities of his instruments reflect this and have assured him a world-wide reputation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Salomoni, ed.: A misura d’uomo (Venice, 1985)

R. Verti and others: Vita d’autore: note su Otello Bignami, liutaio in Bologna, 1914–1989 (Bologna, 1991) [incl. bibliography]

W. Bignami, ed.: Otello Bignami, liutaio in Bologna/Violinmaker in Bologna (Cremona, 1998)

S. Pasqual and R. Regazzi: Le radici del successo della liuteria a Bologna (Bologna, 1998)

ROBERTO REGAZZI

Bignens, Max

(b Zürich, 9 June 1912). Swiss designer. In 1939 he became chief designer and director of the costume workshops at the Berne Stadttheater, moving to the Basle Stadttheater in 1946. After 1952 he began collaborating with the opera houses in Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, becoming chief designer and head of technical and artistic services at Cologne in 1964, where he designed sets and costumes for productions of La traviata, Auber’s Fra Diavolo, Stiffelio and Der Rosenkavalier, as well as for the première of Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965). A meeting with the Argentine producer Jorge Lavalli led to a fruitful artistic partnership lasting 15 years. Their production of Idomeneo for Jean-Albert Cartier at the Angers Opéra in 1975 won the French Critics’ Prize. That year Rolf Liebermann invited them to stage Faust at the Paris Opéra, followed by Pelléas et Mélisande (1977), Oedipus rex (1979) and Rameau’s Dardanus (1980), and also mounted their La Scala stagings of L’enfant et les sortilèges (1976) and Madama Butterfly (1980). The Aix Festival invited them for La traviata (1976), Figaro (1979) and Zauberflöte (1989). While he always insisted that he had no specific style, Bignens’s hallmarks were the grand scale of his sets, the use of hanging lighting projectors like hair dryers, and the exploitation of each stage to the utmost limits of its technical capabilities. He and Lavalli collaborated in opera productions throughout Europe, including Carmen (1979, Brussels), Norma (1983, Bonn), Andrea Chénier (1986, Bonn), Sutermeister’s Le roi Bérenger (1985, Munich) and Salome (1986, Zürich). Bignens also designed sets for the Comédie Française, and for Die Entführung with Everding (1980, Munich), La fanciulla del West with Kurt Tscherer (1981, Munich), and Cherubini’s Médée (1985), Turandot (1986) and the beginning of a Ring cycle (1990) in Bonn with Jean-Claude Riber.

CHARLES PITT

Bignetti, Emilio

(fl 1671). Italian composer and organist. He was maestro di cappella and organist at Prato. He published Novelli fiori di messe (Bologna, 1671) for four and five voices with the addition of violins in some of the works. An earlier volume of masses that he is thought to have published in Rome is not extant.

Bigonzi, Giuseppe

(b Rome; fl 1707–?33). Italian alto castrato. He sang intermittently in Venice (1707–23), appearing in five operas, including works by Albinoni and Michelangelo and Francesco Gasparini, and in Florence (1718–19) in Predieri’s Partenope. He was probably the ‘Biganzo’ who according to the Ruspoli account books sang in the Roman Chiesa degl’Agonizanti in June 1715. About 1723, also in Rome, he took the title role in Caldara’s oratorio Santo Stefano. Engaged for the London season of 1723–4, he arrived on 7 October and made his début in Ariosti’s Vespasiano at the King’s Theatre on 14 January 1724. He sang small parts in Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Bononcini’s Calfurnia, but made little mark. He sang in Paris later in 1724, and probably in Macerata in 1730 and Camerino in 1733. A caricature by A.M. Zanetti in the Cini collection (I-Vgc) may represent him as Megabise in M. Gasparini’s Arsace (Venice, 1718). Another Bigonzi, Giovanni Battista, also an alto, sang at Senigallia in 1709.

WINTON DEAN

Bigophone [Bigothphone].

A Mirliton invented in 1888 by Bigot. A descendant of the Eunuch-flute, it was made of zinc or cardboard in various shapes, often in the form of orchestral brass instruments. Similar mirlitons were called Varinette, Jazzophone or Cantophone. Bigophones were given literary recognition by André Malraux in Lunes en papier (1921).

Bigot, Eugène

(b Rennes, 28 Feb 1888; d Paris, 17 July 1965). French conductor. After studying the violin and the piano at the Rennes Conservatoire, he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1905, where his teachers included Xavier Leroux, André Gédalge and Paul Vidal. He was appointed chorus master in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1913, and then, after World War I, toured Europe with the Ballets Suédois, for whom he composed several works, including Dansgille and La princesse d’Elide. He conducted the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra from 1923 to 1925 before returning to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées as musical director (1925–7). Bigot’s most important appointments were as president and director of the Concerts Lamoureux (1935–50), as principal conductor of the Opéra-Comique (1936–47), and as a radio conductor. He was responsible for the orchestral and operatic broadcasts of the Compagnie Française de Radiophonie from 1927 to 1935, and from 1947 until his death was principal conductor of the ORTF. From 1947 to 1958 he also directed a conductors’ course at the Paris Conservatoire for students of the special foreign section.

Bigot’s repertory consisted largely of 19th-century works. He was highly regarded as a conductor of Wagner, Russian music and French composers from Berlioz to Pierné, but he also gave many first performances of new music, including works by Alain, Barraud, Hubeau, Rivier and Sauguet. He was a thoroughly competent conductor, faithful to the composer’s score and eschewing all spectacular effects. He also composed numerous instrumental pieces, chamber music, ballet suites and symphonic works.

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER

Bigot (de Morogues) [née Kiené], Marie

(b Colmar, 3 March 1786; d Paris,16 Sept 1820). Alsatian pianist. At the age of five she moved with her parents to Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where her mother gave her early piano lessons. In 1804 she married Paul Bigot, librarian to Count Razumovsky in Vienna, and thus gained introductions to Haydn, Salieri and Beethoven. On 20 February 1805 she played to Haydn, who exclaimed ‘Oh! my dear child, it is not I who wrote that music, it is you!’. In May 1805 she played at the opening concert of the Augarten, encouraged by Beethoven, and Nohl recorded that she played the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata at sight from the autograph, which Beethoven later gave her. It is clear from Beethoven’s correspondence that he was on friendly terms with the Bigots, and Marie also partnered Schuppanzigh in his concerts. There was intense rivalry between Marie Bigot and the eminent piano manufacturer Nanette Streicher .

In 1809 the Bigots moved to Paris, where she came in contact with Cherubini, Baillot and many others; Cramer and Fétis praised her playing highly. Her husband was captured during the Russian campaign of 1812, and the remaining years of her life were devoted to teaching; one of her pupils was the young Mendelssohn. She also published some piano works in Vienna and Paris. Her playing was clearly of exceptional quality. Fétis wrote: ‘exquisite feeling gave her a rare understanding of every masterpiece, and enabled her to interpret every kind of expression, and, reaching to her fingertips, gave her playing-style indefinable charm unequalled in her time’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

Miel: ‘Biographie: Bigot (Marie née Kiené)’, Revue musicale, xiii (1833), 316–18

L. Nohl: Beethoven’s Leben (Vienna, 1867, rev. 2/1912 by P. Sakolowski), ii, 246

R. Vannes: Documents inédits sur une virtuose française oubliée Marie Bigot de Morogues (?Liège, 1932)

C. Johnson, ed.: Marie Bigot (Pullman, WA, 1992)

HUGH MACDONALD

Big Youth [Buchanan, Manley Augustus]

(b Kingston, 19 April 1949). Jamaican DJ and rapper. Born into poverty, his career began in the early 1970s as the resident toaster for the Emperor Lord Tippertone sound system in Kingston. However, it was through his alliance with the producer Keith Hudson that he achieved success. Between 1971 and 1973 in Jamaica he had seven songs in the charts, five of them in the top ten, including his sound-effect driven S.90 Skank, named after a Japanese motorcycle. In 1973 he appeared in New York at one of the first major reggae events in America, performing Every Nigger is a Star, co-written with the American actor Calvin Lockhart and recorded with Bob Marley’s female vocal backing trio, the I Three. In the mid-70s he caused controversy when he attacked Michael Manley’s socialist government in the song Green Killing Bay (1978).

Big Youth became one of the most influential and emulated DJs. His style was often alive with calls to consciousness and rebellion and was simultaneously humorous and intimidating. Over familiar roots rhythms and foreign pop tunes, his vocal style included shrieks, squeals, shouts and growls, as can be heard on the albums Screaming Target (Trojan, 1973) and Natty Cultural Dread (Trojan, 1976). Recognized by the red, gold and green jewels embedded in his front teeth, he still recorded and toured sporadically into the 1990s.

ROGER STEFFENS

Bihari, János

(b Nagyabony, Hungary [now Vel'ké Blahovo, Slovakia], bap. 21 Oct 1764; d Pest, 26 April 1827). Hungarian violinist and composer. He appeared in Pest in 1801 (or 1802) with his band, which is said to have consisted of four violinists and a cimbalom player. From then on he worked mainly in Pest and soon became widely known.

It was his superb interpretation, not his own music, that was praised in contemporary records. Of the former not even a rough idea can be formed from the three publications (Vienna, 1807–11), which include nearly a quarter of Bihari's surviving Hungarian dances, written down and transcribed by others, perhaps partly by Count János Fáy. When he played to the members of the Hungarian Parliament in Pozsony, he was praised by the best-known Hungarian paper (Hazai tudósitások, 24 November 1811) not as a composer, but as ‘a consummate master of the violin’. The only letter in his own hand that has come down to us was written to the palatine in the capital (Buda-Pest) in 1814; in it he referred to his recruitment of soldiers at the time of Napoleon's offensive in 1809, presenting himself not as a composer but as ‘a musician well known to the public’.

To Bihari, recital and composition, or reshaping, were probably fairly similar notions, since his own world of music was so close to folk art (doubtless due to his gypsy origins). Some of his compositions were variants of folksongs, others completely original. Many of both these categories have survived as folk music to the present. The genre of which he (together with Lavotta and Csermák, two non-gypsy violin virtuosos) was the most illustrious representative, the recruiting music, the verbunkos, had its origin in popular music, more particularly in an energetic male peasant dance which had been performed during recruitment since the mid-18th century. This is the source of the captivating pathos and heroism of the verbunkos and of Bihari's music, and of its noble, dance-like character common to his slow and fast movements. Still older were the tunes he used which are probably contemporary with or slightly later than Rákóczi's war of independence (i.e. early 18th century). One of these, a Rákóczi song which was widespread in the 18th century and extant in a number of variants, was amalgamated in about 1810 with the recruiting music to produce the Rákóczi March. Bihari played both the song and the march; it cannot be proved whether the latter was devised by him or another, but it was he who made it most widely known.

All social classes found pleasure in his music, which was halfway between folk music and well-written art music, and in his matchless skill as a performer. Bihari was praised by such poets as Sándor Kisfaludy and Dániel Berzsenyi as well as by Count István Széchenyi; Beethoven heard him play on several occasions in Vienna, and used one of Bihari's tunes in his overture König Stephan (1811). In 1814 he played in Vienna during the Congress. In 1815, on Margaret Island, well-born young men performed a stately national dance to his music at one of the Grand Duchess Pavlovna Katharina's festivities. In 1820, on Csepel Island at a great popular spectacle following the military exercises, it was to Bihari's music that peasants performed dances in the presence of the Emperor Franz, Prince Albrecht and other royalty. It was at this time that Baron Podmaniczky sent some pieces by Bihari to Weber. In 1823 Liszt, then still a child, played the Rákóczi March together with compositions by Bihari, Lavotta and Csermák from Ágoston Mohaupt's verbunkos collection, which was then published, at one of his Pest concerts. In 1825 Bihari performed at the queen's coronation ceremony and ball in Pozsony, with works of his own composed for that occasion (published in Vienna in 1828, arranged for the guitar by Pfeifer and for the piano by Joseph Czerný). That, however, was during his decline as a performer; in the previous year he had broken his left arm and he was gradually deserted by his former colleagues. He died in poverty.

A large number of compositions by Bihari, who never read or wrote a note, had by that time been published in various Hungarian verbunkos collections, written in far simpler notation than that in which their composer played them. His influence was lasting. It can be felt in the character of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, observed in the formal principles of one type of Erkel's arias, and traced even in the latest published transcriptions and current musical practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Liszt: Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (Paris, 1859, 2/1881/R; Eng. trans., 1926/R, as The Gypsy in Music)

E. Major: Bihari János (Budapest, 1928) [incl. thematic catalogue of about 80 of his works]

B. Szabolcsi: A XIX. század magyar romantikus zenéje [Hungarian Romantic music of the 19th century] (Budapest, 1951)

D. Legány: A magyar zene krónikája: zenei művelodésünk ezer éve dokumentumokban [Chronicle of Hungarian music: 1000 years of documentation on musical culture] (Budapest, 1962)

B. Sárosi: Cigányzene [Gypsy music] (Budapest, 1971; Eng. trans., 1978)

DEZSŐ LEGÁNY

Bihler, Franz.

See Bühler, Franz.

Biland, Ambrose.

See Beeland, Ambrose.

Bilash, Oleksandr Ivanovych

(b Hraduz'k, Poltava region, 6 March 1931). Ukrainian composer. He graduated in 1957 from the Kiev Conservatory where he studied with Vilinsky; he taught at the Kiev Pedagogical Institute from 1956 to 1961. He became vice chairman of the Composers' Union of Ukraine in 1968, then chairman in 1989; he was also chairman of the Kiev branch of the Composers' Union of Ukraine from 1976. He was the recipient of the Shevchenko Prize in 1975. He achieved fame as a very prolific writer of over 200 songs (of both concert and popular variety) which combined elements of traditional Ukrainian folk songs (primarily lyrical), 19th-century romance, 20th-century cabaret and Ukrainian popular choral music. At the height of his popularity (1960–85), Bilash's musical style completely conformed to the tradition of socialist realism, but it possessed a national face: it was very tuneful, exploiting the populist urban quasi-folk manner, and embraced either the sentimental, heroic or dance-like modes. In his operas (and orchestral pieces) the style became more academic but retained its basic naïve quality. The characterization in the stage works were clearly defined, but two-dimensional, while his orchestral style owed much to late 19th-century Russian operatic tradition.

WORKS

(selective list)

Pavlo Korchahin, sym. poem, orch, 1955; Buratino, ballet suite, orch, 1960; Scherzo, orch, 1964; Haydamaky (op, after T. Shevchenko), 1965; Balada viyny [Ballad of War] (op, I. Drach), 1971; Chysta krynytsya [The Clear Well] (operetta), 1975; Pf Conc. [no.1], 1982; Lehenda pro Kyiv [The Legend of Kiev] (operetta), 1983; Pf Conc. [no.2], 1983; Kolokola Rosiy [The Bells of Russia] (operetta), 1984; Prapornostsi [Standard Bearers] (op, B. Oliynyk, after O. Honchar), 1985

Film scores, incid music, over 200 songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I.A. Nemyrovych: Oleksandr Bilash (Kiev, 1986)

VIRKO BALEY

Bilbao

(Basq. Bilbo).

City of Spain in the Basque country. It was founded in 1300 by Diego López de Haro (fl 1295–1310), whose family is known to have patronized juglares and troubadours, for instance Pero da Ponte, Raimon Vidal de Besalú and Aimeric de Peguilhan. Two musical chapels existed. The chapel of the convent of S Francisco, built in 1498, ceased its activities in 1851, when it was demolished after a fire. The Capilla de Santiago, documented as early as 1577 and supported financially by the Ayuntamiento (town council), functioned until 1882, when its last director and organist, Nicolás Ledesma, retired after a 52-year tenure. Important directors were Simón de Huarte Arrizabalaga (fl mid-17th century), José de Zaylorda (c1688–1779) and Manuel de Gamarra (1723–91). The use of the regional language, Euskera, is documented earlier in the convent church of S Francisco (in 1755 with Nay duen ezquero sein ederrac by Martín Jarabeitia) than in the church of Santiago (in 1794 with O padre amoroso by Pedro Estorqui, which includes the Basque zortziko, Urte Guztijetaco). Not much of the music used in the chapels has been preserved. Among the organists, often considered more important than the directors, Joaquín Ojinaga (1719–89) became organist of the cathedrals of Burgos and Toledo and of the Capilla Real.

Musical instruments were imported; in a census from the last years of the 18th century only two organ builders are listed. The organ of Santiago, built in 1662, was rebuilt by the Franciscan friar Domingo de Aguirre in 1710, and renovated in 1792 by Diego de Amezua. It was rebuilt in 1890; work began again on a new organ, by Pellerin & Uys, during the 1990s. The other three churches possessed small organs. S Nicolás, consecrated in 1756, had an organ only when that of the Jesuit Colegio de S Andrés had been transferred to it, the Jesuits having been expelled from Spanish territory in 1767. When the convent church of S Francisco was demolished, its organ was moved to the nearby church of Begoña. Music education took place in the two chapels, but private teachers were active in the town as well. Music was taught at the Colegio de S Nicolás, founded in 1603 to help poor children. For official events the Ayuntamiento maintained three city waits and several tambolineros for dance music. The Consulado, an association of local merchants, employed a minstrel until 1713. Most of the waits and minstrels were of foreign origin.

In 1733 amateurs are known to have taken part in the capilla of Santiago for the first time. Professional musicians performed chamber music at the gatherings of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, a society patronized by Javier María de Munibe, Count of Peñaflorida (1729–85), which met in the nearby villages of Azcoitia, Marquina and Vergara from 1764, and is still in existence. This society, the first in Spain to promote the ideals of the French Enlightenment, regarded musical activities as among its most important objectives. One member functioned as maestro de capilla, and several were musicians, mostly from Bilbao. Instrumental music and opera were performed by this ensemble. In 1772 members of the society endorsed the performances of the first Italian opera company to visit the Basque country, that of the impresario Nicolà Setaro.

The musical activities of the Real Sociedad Bascongada provided important support for the regime of Carlos III (reigned 1759–88), organized by his most important counsellor, the Count of Aranda (1719–98). The Count's downfall in 1773 caused these activities to be restricted to private settings. Setaro was captured and tried on false accusations of amorality, and the maestro de capilla of the Real Sociedad Bascongada, who also directed the capilla of Santiago, was threatened with dismissal. After these incidents the works of musical theatre performed at Bilbao were Spanish comedias and tonadillas; Italian opera was not given regularly again until the 19th century. Chamber music continued in the houses of such families as the Mazarredo, Torres and Villabaso. This was the setting of the early activities of Michael Rophino Lacy and Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga. When the royal family of Spain passed through Bilbao in 1845 the Orquesta Filarmónica Vascongada was founded, though its activities remained limited.

Regular performance of musical theatre became possible after the construction of the first public theatre in 1799. The Teatro de la Villa, a free-standing building, was opened in 1834. It was demolished in 1886 and replaced by the present Teatro de Arriaga, whose inauguration in 1890 coincided with a period of major industrial development, rapid population growth and an incipient nationalist movement. Emiliano de Arriaga (1844–1919) and other enthusiasts encouraged the organization of the Sociedad de Cuartetos in 1884 and the founding of the Sociedad Filarmónica in 1896; the latter still offers an excellent chamber music series.

In the mid-19th century the first signs of a choral movement appeared. In 1886 the Orfeón Bilbaíno (later Sociedad Coral de Bilbao) was founded. The admission of women made possible the development of the so-called Basque opera, treating Basque themes and using librettos in Euskera and idealized folk melodies. Most of these operas had their premières in the Teatro Campos Elíseos during the second decade of the 20th century.

During the 1880s Luis Dotesio set up as a publisher of music. His firm became a major publishing house after buying several other small firms and moving to Madrid. Juan Carlos de Gortázar (1864–1926) published the Revista musical, a periodical of high quality, from 1909 to 1914.

The Conservatorio Vizcaíno de Música was founded in 1919; its primary goal became the education of musicians for the Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao, which was founded in 1922. The orchestra's conversion into a purely municipal institution was an event of the utmost importance in Spanish musical life. From 1959 on the Ayuntamiento shared its patronage with the Diputación, a regional council, and the orchestra suffered notable neglect during the last years of Franco's government (to 1975). It subsisted only thanks to private sponsorship. During the 1980s it was reorganized, concurrent with the city's project of converting itself into a centre of cultural interest, having been deindustrialized. From 1953 the Asociación Bilbaína de Amigos de la Opera maintained a chorus and staged an annual season of opera. The Palacio Euskalduna was inaugurated in 1999 as the new home of the Bilbao SO and the Asociación Bilbaína de Amigos de la Opera.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (B. Sutcliffe)

T. Guiard y Larrauri: Historia de la noble villa de Bilbao (Bilbao, 1905–12)

J.C. de Gortázar: Bilbao a mediados del siglo XIX: según un epistolario de la época y otras paginas (Bilbao, 1966)

J.A. Arana Martija: Música Vasca (San Sebastián, 1976, 2/1987)

C. Rodríguez Suso: ‘Sobre la formación de un grupo de músicos ilustrados en el País Vasco (Bilbao, 1725–40)’, RdMc, vi (1983), 457–89

J. Bagüés Erriondo: La música en la Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País (San Sebastián, 1990)

C. Rodríguez Suso: ‘Viejas voces de Bilbao: la música en la Villa durante los siglos XVIII y XIX’, Bilbao: arte e historia, ed. J.M. González Cembellín and A.R. Ortega Berruguete (Bilbao, 1990), 225–51

M. Nagore: ‘Orígenes del movimiento coral en Bilbao en el siglo XIX’, RdMc, xiv (1991), 125–43

N. Morel Borotra: ‘La ópera vasca (1884–1933)’, Minima, i (1992), 32–5

CARMEN RODRÍGUEZ SUSO

Bilbao, Beatriz

(b Caracas, 8 Dec 1951). Venezuelan composer. She studied composition and choral conducting with Bor and Grau in Caracas. She later studied orchestral conducting with Emil Simon in Romania and composition at the University of Wisconsin with Les Thimmig, and at Indiana University in Bloomington with Juan Orrego-Salas, Eaton and Fred Fox (BA, 1982). On her return to Venezuela in 1982 she started teaching composition and founded several children's choirs in schools in Caracas. In 1990 she was appointed head of the composition department of the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Musicales in Caracas. With the composer Ricardo Teruel and the percussionist Edgar Saume she founded in 1985 the ensemble Ipso-Facto, dedicated to the performance of electro-acoustic and mixed-media compositions. Their joint project, the Concierto de las tres esferas, won the Previsora prize in 1989. In 1992 she founded the Arkeom ensemble to develop projects exploring the relationship between the arts. She returned to the United States in 1994 to present her compositions at the Inter-American Composition Workshop of the Indiana University Latin American Music Center and at the Sonidos de las Américas Festival of the American Composers Orchestra in New York.

Bilbao has earned several Venezuelan national composition prizes, and she is considered a leading representative of mixed-media, interdisciplinary and middle-of-the-road trends in her country. By the 1990s she was using indigenous Venezuelan elements in her composition.

WORKS

(selective list)

El-ac: Akelarre, Mez, fl, vib, video projector, 1979; ABYSS, synth, 1981; ABYSS II, 2 synth, tape, 1988; Hologramas, multimedia, 1988; Concierto de las tres esferas, 2 synth, orch, 1989; Los ojos de Picasso (R. Alberti), Mez, fl, synth, elec bass, sequenced drums, 1989; Cha-cha-chá galáctico: el gato nocturno, fl, t sax, synth, elec bass, perc, drums, 1990; Los tres sabios, synth, aromas, 1990; Shekina, synths, 1990; Suite ancestral, Tr chorus, vn, synth, perc, 1992; Madaka, Bar, perc, tape, 1994; Canción de Capricornio, 2vv, vn, synth; Ciudad de mil caras, A, pf, sequenced perc

Acoustic: Tum mi Kalimá, str qt, 1978; Transmutación, orch, 1979; Sea of Madness, cl, 4 perc, pf, db, 1980; Oración por los sacerdotes, 1v, pf, 1987; Tríptico de luz, vn, 1991; Medio cielo, vn, kbd, 1993; 4 danzas a color, pf, 1994; Corona stellarum, str, 1994, rev. 1996; Secuencias mestizas, pf, 1995; Tutto 4 en 7, S sax, 2 trbn, 3 perc, 2 db, 1996; Ecos del origen, band, 1998; Soneto, A, pf, 1999; A una gitana, vc, pf; 2 canciones andaluzas, T, gui; Con duende, vc, pf; 4 danzas a color, pf; Feeling Vortex, A, t sax, perc; Inner Spiral, orch; Luz de Caracas, A, pf; Maya e Naiche, vn, pf; Las nueve musas, vn, kbd; La pasionaria, chbr orch; 4 piezas, prep pf; Rosa mutable (F. García Lorca), A, gui; La saeta, S, A, T, B, pf 4 hands; Sol de Arkeom, vn, kbd; Tributo aborigen, children's choir/SATB

MSS in Latin American Musical Center, Indiana University, Bloomington

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Tortolero: Sonido que es imagen … imagen que es historia (Caracas, 1996)

CARMEN HELENA TÉLLEZ

Bildstein, Hieronymus

(b Bregenz, c1580; d in or after 1626). Austrian composer and organist. He came from a respected middle-class family from Bregenz and received his first musical education there, though he probably soon started studying at Konstanz. According to his own testimony he received particular encouragement from Jakob Fugger, an energetic advocate of Catholic reform and the Counter-Reformation, a great patron of the arts and himself a practising musician. Fugger was Prince-Bishop of Konstanz from 1604 to 1626 and made Bildstein court organist immediately after his enthronement. Bildstein was one of a number of prominent organists at important centres in southern Germany, and his reputation as an excellent organist and teacher gradually spread from Meersburg, where the prince-bishop usually resided: in 1604 Ferdinand de Lassus unsuccessfully recommended him as organist to the Hohenzollern court; in 1607 his advice was sought over the building of the large organ in the church of the monastery at Mittelzell on the Reichenau; in 1613 there was close competition between him and Christian Erbach for the position of organ teacher to Heinrich, Lord High Steward of Waldburg; and from 1617 to 1620 a chorister from the Hohenzollern court was his pupil. Prince-Bishop Fugger very early rewarded his ‘loyal services’ with annual salary rises, which in 1615 became a pension that was to remain valid until the many children born of his marriage (1604) came of age. In return he had to pledge himself to continue in his post at Konstanz and Meersburg until Fugger’s death. This occurred in 1626, after which there is no further trace of Bildstein.

His only surviving volume of music is Orpheus christianus seu Symphoniarum sacrarum prodromus, 5–8 vocum cum basso generali (Ravensburg, 1624; ed. in DTÖ, cxxii, 1971; cxxvi, 1976). It comprises 25 motets that show him to have been a gifted south German pioneer of the new concertato style. In the preface he mentioned a second collection, Amphion christianus, but it presumably either never appeared or is lost; either it or the 1624 volume may be identical with the Symphoniae sacrae mentioned in a Freising inventory of 1651. Bildstein’s only other extant piece is the five-part motet Maria Frau, hilf (ed. in TM, viii, 1972, p.20) in an important Counter-Reformation anthology (RISM 1604⁷); the motet shows that he was also a master of the stile antico.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (E.F. Schmid) [incl. further bibliography]

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Ein Musikalien-Inventar des fürstbischöflichen Hofes in Freising aus dem 17. Jahrhundert’, AMw, vi (1924), 471–83, esp. 474

E. Schneider: Vorarlberger Komponisten (Dornbirn, 1973)

W. Pass: ‘Die Bregenzer Musikalieninventare von 1608, 1609 und 1651’, Musik im Bodenseeraum um 1600, Vorarlberger Landesmuseum (Bregenz, 1974) [exhibition catalogue]

W. Pass: ‘Hieronymus Bildstein und der Konstanzer Fürstbischof Jakob Fugger’, ibid.

WALTER PASS

Billart

(fl ?c1400). French composer. He is known only from the four-voice Marian isorhythmic motet Salve virgo virginum/Vita via veritas/Salve regina in GB-Ob Can.misc.213 (ed. in Van den Borren, no.24). This is a work of exceptional mensural complexity and repeated harsh dissonances in the upper voices, optimistically described by Van den Borren as giving ‘some idea of improvised counterpoint, as it was practised in the fifteenth century’. The top voice has as its text one of the best-known glosses (Chevalier no.18318) on the antiphon used in the tenor. Given the manuscript context and the style of the work, Billart may well be identifiable with Aubert Billard (Albertus Billardi), a clerk and chaplain at Notre Dame, Paris, from 1392 to 1394.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Pirro: La musique à Paris sous le règne de Charles VI (1380–1422) (Paris, 1930/R)

C. Van den Borren, ed.: Polyphonia sacra: a Continental Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century (Burnham, Bucks., 1932, 2/1963)

C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1989), 301–2

DAVID FALLOWS

Billaudot.

French firm of music publishers. It was founded in Paris in 1896 by Louis Billaudot (1871–1936) with his purchase of Editions Alphonse Laurens and initially specialized in choral, band and theatrical music as well as works on the study of harmony. The business was expanded with the publication of new music and the acquisition of other firms: Cordier (1903), Lory (1905), Gobert (1907), Tilliard (1914), Guille (1918), Thomas (1921), Pinatel (1926), Librairie Théâtrale (1929) and, since World War II, Béthune (1945), Costallat (1958), Andrieu (1962), Pierre Noël (1966), Jacquot (1973) and Editions Françaises de Musique (the former publications section of Radio France; 1988).

In the 1920s Robert Billaudot (1910–81) and Gérard Billaudot (1911–86) joined the firm; from 1958 it was run by the latter as Gérard Billaudot Editeur, and from 1979 by his son-in-law François Derveaux (b 1940). The firm has specialized since the 1950s in educational publications, including instrumental methods and study notebooks, edited by such musicians as Maurice André, Pierre Pierlot, Daniel-Lesur, Jacques Lancelot, Pierre-Yves Artaud, Jean-Yves Fourmeau and Gérard Caussé; it has also established a substantial instrumental and orchestral catalogue including early French music and the works of many modern and contemporary composers, including Auric, Barraud, Castérède, Clostre, Denisov, Dubois, Dutilleux, Françaix, Ibert, Jolas, Jolivet, Koechlin, Nigg, Ohana, Schmitt, Tailleferre and Tansman as well as representatives of the younger generation including Hurel, Dalbavie, Qigang Chen, Levoux and Escaich. Theatrical publishing and bookselling continues with the Librairie Théâtrale in the place de l’Opéra-Comique. (Gérard Billaudot Editeur: 1896 Centenaire 1996, Paris, 1996)

JEREMY DRAKE

Billeter, (Otto) Bernhard

(b Zürich, 26 July 1936). Swiss musicologist and organist. He studied the piano with Grete Hinterhofer and the organ with Anton Heiller at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna (1958–61) and the piano with Paul Baumgartner at the Basle Music Academy (1962–4). He also studied musicology with Kurt von Fischer at the University of Zürich, where he took the doctorate in 1970 with a dissertation on the harmony of Frank Martin. He was organist at the church of Zürich-Unterstrass (1963–91) and taught a piano class at the Lucerne Conservatory (1969–81). He also taught theory at Zürich University (from 1971) and organ at the Musikhochschule of Zürich (from 1975). He was appointed editor of the Schweizer musikpädagogische Blätter in 1984.

Billeter’s reputation as an interpreter rests particularly on his performances on historic keyboard instruments, particularly the clavichord and fortepiano, and he was the pianist of the Zürich Piano Quintet, 1967–87. He has, however, achieved great success as an interpreter of the music of Frank Martin, which he has made the subject of two definitive books. He has also done important work on the history and construction of the organ, tuning, 20th-century music theory and the works of Brunner and Rheinberger.

WRITINGS

‘Daniel Gottlob Türks Beitrag zur Kirchenmusik’, Musik und Gottesdienst, xvii (1963), 143–61

‘Historisches zum Klangeinsatz bei der Orgel’, AMw, xxii (1965), 183–93

Frank Martin: ein Aussenseiter der neuen Musik (Frauenfeld, 1970)

Die Harmonik bei Frank Martin: Untersuchungen zur Analyse neuer Musik (diss., U. of Zürich, 1970; Berne, 1970)

‘Die Silbermann-Stimmungen’, AMw, xxvii (1970), 73–85

Adolf Brunner (Zürich, 1972)

‘Ist Hindemiths “Unterweisung im Tonsatz” für die harmonische Analyse geeignet?’, Hindemith Jb 1972, 114–36

‘Die Vokalkompositionen von Francesco Bianciardi’, Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, i (1972), 133–41

‘Die Musik in Hegels Aesthetik’, Mf, xxvi (1973), 295–310

‘Die letzten Vokalwerke von Frank Martin’, SMz, cxvi (1976), 344–51

‘Albert Schweitzer und sein Orgelbauer’, Acta organologica, xi (1977), 173–225

Anweisung zum Stimmen von Tasteninstrumenten in verschiedenen Temperaturen (Kassel, 1979, 3/1989)

‘Der Briefwechsel Albert Schweitzer – Ernst Kurth’, Festschrift Hans Conradin, ed. V. Kalisch (Berne and Stuttgart, 1983), 233–48

‘Die Sängerhaus-Orgel zu Strassburg’, Acta organologica, xviii (1985), 339–78

‘Zahlensymbolik bei Bach’, Schweizer musikpädagogische Blätter, lxxvi (1988), 82–90

‘Die geistlichen Werke von Frank Martin’, Musik und Kirche, lx (1990), 233–44

‘Bachs Wohltemperiertes Klavier’, Schweizer musikpädagogische Blätter, lxxix (1991), 83–90; lxxx (1992), 192–8

‘Die Harmonik im Spätwerk von Frank Martin’, Frank Martin, ed. D. Kämper (Mainz, 1993), 185–96

‘The Organ Music of Josef Rheinberger and its Environment’, International Organ Academy: Göteborg 1994, 403–12

‘Verzierungs- und Artikulationszeichen in Johann Sebastian Bachs Triosonaten für Orgel’, Max Lütolf zum 60. Geburtstag: Festschrift, ed. B. Hangartner and U. Fischer (Basle, 1994), 235

EDITIONS

Keyboard Compositions by Francesco Bianciardi [and] Costanzo Porta, CEKM, xli (1977)

Paul Hindemith: Klaviermusik, Sämtliche Werke, v/9–10 (Mainz, 1981–90)

Othmar Schoeck: Chorwerke, Sämtliche Werke (Zürich, forthcoming)

JÜRG STENZL

Billhon, Jhan de.

See Billon, Jhan de.

Billi, Lucio

(b Ravenna; fl 1601–3). Italian composer. A Camaldolese monk, he was working at Ravenna in 1601 but had moved further down the Adriatic coast to Pesaro the following year. His three published volumes show him to belong to the generation of Giovanni Gabrieli, for they comprise double-choir sacred music and five-part madrigals. The double-choir music is of course provincial: it is simple, lacks Venetian splendour, and uses an eight-part texture rather than Gabrieli's bolder ten or 12 parts, and the word-setting is generally syllabic. However, Gabrieli's concern for formal symmetry is echoed in two of Billi's motets of 1601, which are in ternary form; in one of them the central section is in a lively triple time with sequences. (J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi, Oxford, 1984)

WORKS

Messa e motetti, 8vv, bc, libro primo (Venice, 1601)

Il primo libro de madrigali a 5 voci con un dialogo a 8 (Venice, 1602)

Messa e motetti, 8vv, bc, libro secondo (Venice, 1603)

2 madrigals, 5vv, in 1604¹²; 1 motet, 8vv, in 1611¹; 1 mass, 8vv in org tablature, in D-Mbs

JEROME ROCHE

Billings, William

(b Boston, 7 Oct 1746; d Boston, 26 Sept 1800). American composer and teacher of choral singing. The son of a Boston shopkeeper also named William Billings, he was apprenticed to a tanner following elementary schooling and worked in the leather trade on and off for much of his life. His primary musical education probably came in singing schools (class instruction in music reading and choral singing). In composition he is thought to have been largely self-taught, learning his craft by studying the tune books and choral works of English psalmodists, such as William Tans'ur, Aaron Williams, John Arnold and Uriah Davenport. Later in his career he may also have had some help in the techniques of modulation from Hans Gram, a Danish immigrant musician in Boston.

Billings began teaching singing schools in the Boston area as early as 1769 and quickly gained a high reputation that led him, by 1778, to musical leadership in many of Boston's most fashionable churches. While his teaching centred on Boston, in 1774 he taught as far south as Providence, Rhode Island, and later perhaps as far north as Yarmouth, Maine. On 26 July 1774 Billings married Lucy Swan, who had been a student in his 1774 singing school in Stoughton, Massachusetts. They had nine children, six of whom survived their parents. Although no portrait of Billings is known to exist, he was described by contemporaries as a man of moderate size, with a short leg, one eye, a withered arm, a stentorian voice and a habit of taking enormous amounts of snuff. Still, according to the diarist William Bentley, he spoke, sang and thought as a man above the common abilities.

Billings's physical handicaps did not prevent him from achieving great success as a singing master, and by 1780 he was affluent enough to purchase a house at 89 Newbury Street in Boston and to rent a pew at the Hollis Street Congregational Church. During the American Revolutionary War he supported the patriot cause musically and was friends with such leaders as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. In 1783 he attempted to broaden his activities by becoming editor of The Boston Magazine, a literary publication, but protests from Boston's gentlemen forced his removal from this post after only one issue. In the mid-1780s Billings was active with the Aretinian Society (a choir of accomplished singers) presenting concerts of sacred music in Boston.

The late 1780s saw his financial fortunes decline, because of which he accepted several menial public positions, such as scavenger, hogreeve, and Sealer (inspector) of Leather for the City of Boston, a post he retained until 1797. By 1790 his financial condition was desperate, and Boston choristers arranged a benefit concert on his behalf. Soon afterwards Billings mortgaged his house and attempted to sell all of his music to the publishing firm of Thomas and Andrews, an offer they declined. As an act of charity, Boston's choristers arranged for Thomas and Andrews to publish his final tune book, The Continental Harmony (Boston, 1794), and give him the profits, which were probably very small. On 26 March 1795 Billings's wife died, leaving him with six children under the age of 18. His last five years are shrouded in obscurity, and while he probably continued to teach singing schools, all that is known is that upon his death in 1800 he left an estate valued at about $800, principally his house. He is thought to have been buried in an unmarked grave in the Boston Common cemetery.

Billings composed over 340 compositions, almost exclusively sacred choral pieces for four-part unaccompanied chorus, intended for use in singing schools and churches. He composed no instrumental music or solo songs. Most of his works are hymn tunes, but he also composed 51 fuging tunes, 4 canons and 52 anthems and set-pieces. Billings published six collections of his music between 1770 and 1794, with The New England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770) being the first tune book devoted solely to compositions by a single American composer. In spite of musical and graphical deficiencies, it was widely popular and gained considerable fame for its author. In 1772 Billings attempted to secure copyright for his tune book. Although the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill approving copyright, the royal governor refused to sign it. His most successful tune book was The Singing Master's Assistant (Boston, 1778), known as ‘Billings's Best’, which went through four editions by 1789 and contained many of his most popular pieces. Before the US copyright law of 1790, his music could be freely reprinted, and many of his best pieces appeared in collections of other musicians. After 1790, however, his new pieces were seldom reprinted while his old ones continued to be held in high esteem. Music in Miniature (Boston, 1779) contains a group of pieces for congregational singing printed in a small, upright format designed to be bound with a metrical psalter. The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (Boston, 1781) has been described as ‘Billings's most flamboyant performance’ because of the audacity of the music. It contains anthems, fuging tunes and hymn tunes designed to attract and challenge the accomplished singer. The Suffolk Harmony (Boston, 1786) provides a set of newer pieces in a more restrained style, some of which were probably intended for use by the Universalist Church. The Continental Harmony (Boston, 1794) was, as noted above, published as an act of charity. It is Billings's largest tune book, containing some of his most advanced music, and is considered a ‘retrospective compendium of [Billings's] musical achievements’ (Kroeger and Nathan, 1977–90). In addition to the six tune books, during the 1780s and 90s Billings issued half a dozen pamphlet-sized booklets containing five anthems, two fuging tunes and two hymn tunes, including An Anthem for Easter, his most enduringly popular work. A few pieces first appeared in tune books other than his own, including John Stickney's The Gentleman and Lady's Musical Companion (Newburyport, MA, 1774), John Norman's The Massachusetts Harmony (Boston, 1784), The Worcester Collection (Boston, 1788) and William Norman's The Boston Collection (Boston, 1799). Over a dozen pieces are found only in manuscripts (not in Billings's hand) and were unpublished in his day.

Billings was attracted to the poetry of Isaac Watts, and the great majority of the texts he set were taken from Watts's psalms and hymns. Other texts were drawn from Brady and Tate's A New Version of the Psalms, the Universalist poets James and John Relly, and local poets such as Mather Byles and Perez Morton. Billings himself wrote about a dozen hymns that he set, modelled on the poetry of Watts. He constructed his anthem texts from various biblical verses, but often interspersed biblical prose with poetry drawn from Watts or which he wrote himself. He frequently altered the biblical texts to suit his own aesthetic purposes.

Billings used an additive method of composition, akin to techniques found in Renaissance choral music. The principal melody was composed first and assigned to the tenor voice. The bass was added following the rules of consonant counterpoint. The treble (soprano) was then composed to fit consonantly with the tenor and bass, and finally the counter (alto) was written to fill in any missing pitches in the harmony. He advocated doubling the tenor part an octave above with a few trebles and the treble part an octave lower with a few tenors. He recommended that half the voices in the choir be assigned to the bass part. Billings attempted to give each voice an interesting melodic line, passing motifs between the parts to form a generally tightly knit, complex and rhythmically exciting musical structure. He had a great gift for expressive melody, but his contrapuntally derived harmony is sometimes static and does not follow the harmonic principles of Classical art music. In his later works he seems to have made a conscious effort to align his harmonic procedures closer to the norms of his day. He achieved his highest artistic goals in his anthems, many of which are dramatic settings of prose and poetry exceeding ten minutes in length. He enjoyed composing fuging tunes (strophic pieces with at least one section of imitative polyphony having overlapping text) and highly praised the form as having ‘more variety in one piece of fuging music, than in twenty pieces of plain song [i.e. hymn tunes]’. He claimed to follow compositional rules that he had devised for himself and encouraged ‘every Composer to be his own Carver’.

Billings was the most talented member of a group of largely self-trained composers who arose in New England during the period 1770–1820. They created an indigenous sacred music intended to be sung by their friends and neighbours that achieved a great popularity. A reform movement, dating from the 1790s but begun in earnest about 1805, suppressed this music and led to a European-orientated repertory. After 1820 little of Billings's music is found in mainstream American sacred music collections, and during the 19th century Billings's music was denigrated as crude in technique and irreverent in spirit. His style and some of his pieces were, however, kept alive by the southern shaped-note singers in the American rural south. Following World War II a new generation of scholars and performers found his music fresh and vigorous, leading to a re-evaluation of his work.

WORKS

Edition:The Complete Works of William Billings, ed. K. Kroeger and H. Nathan (Charlottesville, VA, and Boston, 1977–90)Catalogue:K. Kroeger: Catalog of the Musical Works of William Billings (Westport, CT, 1991)

collections

all published in Boston

The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770)

The Singing Master's Assistant, or Key to Practical Music (1778/R, 4/1786–9)

Music in Miniature (1779)

The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (1781/R)

The Suffolk Harmony (1786)

The Continental Harmony (1794/R)

WRITINGS

Prefaces to The New-England Psalm-Singer, The Singing Master's Assistant and The Continental Harmony

ed.: Boston Magazine (Oct 1783)

The Porcupine, Alias the Hedge-Hog, or Fox Turned Preacher (Boston, 1784)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (K. Kroeger) [with more detailed work-list and further bibliography]

J.M. Barbour: The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing, MI, 1960)

D.P. McKay and R. Crawford: William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, NJ, 1975)

H. Nathan: William Billings: Data and Documents (Detroit, 1976)

G. Anderson: ‘Eighteenth-Century Evaluations of William Billings: a Reappraisal’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, xxxv (1978), 48–58

K. Kroeger: ‘William Billings's Music in Manuscript Copy and some Notes on Variant Versions of his Pieces’, Notes, xxxix (1982–3), 316–45

K. Kroeger: ‘William Billings's “Anthem for Easter”: the Persistence of an Early American “Hit”’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, xcvii (1987), 105–28

K. Kroeger: ‘Word Painting in the Music of William Billings’, American Music, vi/1 (1988), 41–64

K. Kroeger: ‘William Tans'ur's Influence on William Billings’, Inter-American Music Review, xi/2 (1991), 1–12

K. Kroeger: ‘William Billings and the Puritan Musical Ideal’, Studies in Puritan American Spirituality, ii (1992), 31–50

N. Cooke: ‘William Billings: Representative American Psalmodist?’, Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, vii/1, (1996), 47–64 [250th anniversary celebration]

N. Fawcett-Yeske: ‘Stylistic Development in the Fuging Tunes of William Billings’, ibid., 32–46

K. Kroeger: ‘Two Unknown Billings Compositions in John Norman's The Massachusetts Harmony (1784)’, The Hymn, xlvii/3 (1996), 44–9

K. Kroeger: ‘William Billings's The Singing Master's Assistant as a Pedagogical Aid to Singing Schools’, Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, vii/1 (1996), 18–29

D. Music: ‘William Billings in the Southern Fasola Tunebooks’, The Hymn, xlvii/4 (1996), 14–25

KARL KROEGER

Billington [née Weichsel], Elizabeth

(b London, 27 Dec 1765; d nr Venice, 25 Aug 1818). English soprano. On her death, the Gentleman's Magazine described her as ‘the most celebrated vocal performer that England ever produced’, although it was as a child pianist that she first attracted public notice. Her mother was a singer and her father an oboist; she was taught by him, J.C. Bach and J.S. Schroeter and was playing the piano at her mother's benefit concerts from an early age. She first sang in public in March 1775. Her brother Charles, a year younger than her, appeared with her in these concerts and was to be leader of the orchestra for many of her later operatic performances. She composed two sets of piano music before she was 12. She sang at Oxford in July 1783, and that October married her singing teacher, James Billington. They went to Dublin, where she made her début as Eurydice in an adaptation in English of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. At this time, according to Mount Edgcumbe, she was young and pretty with ‘a delightful fresh voice of very high compass’. Her first London stage appearance was as Rosetta in a royal command performance of Love in a Village (February 1786); she was an instant success, commanding high fees and playing only leading roles. She sang Clara in The Duenna, the title role in Rosina and Polly in The Beggar's Opera, and created parts in works by Shield and others. She sang in London concerts, including the Professional Concert, in oratorio seasons and in provincial festivals. In the Concerts of Ancient Music George III asked that she should be persuaded ‘to sing pathetick songs and not to over grace them’, but Anna Seward wrote that ‘she had too much sense to gambol like [Mara] in the sacred songs’. She continued to improve her technique, working with Michele Mortellari, and with Antonio Sacchini in Paris in 1786. The accuracy of her intonation, the brilliance and taste of her ornaments and the high tessitura of her voice dazzled audiences and impressed the connoisseurs. Burney declared: ‘nothing but envy or apathy can hear her without delight’.

The scandal following the publication of the scurrilous Memoirs of Mrs Billington in 1792 caused her to leave London and that November there were overflow audiences for her in Dublin. In 1794 the Billingtons, accompanied by her brother, were on the Continent. Here she mastered a new repertory of Italian opera, singing first at Naples, where her husband died suddenly the day after her triumphant début. After two years she embarked with her brother on a highly successful tour of other Italian operatic centres. In Milan she sang with John Braham, was received by Josephine Buonaparte and married her second husband, Felissent. They lived near Venice, but he ill-treated her and she returned to London, where rivalry for her services resulted in her singing alternately at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in 1801–2. From January 1803 she starred in four seasons of Italian opera at the King's Theatre, where for her benefit in 1805 she revived J.C. Bach's La clemenza di Scipione and in her 1806 benefit sang Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito, the first Mozart opera to be given in London. This was her last season on stage, but she continued to perform regularly in concerts for a few more years, including subscription series she helped organize at Willis's Rooms in 1808 and in 1810. In 1817 she returned with her husband to Italy and there were rumours that he was responsible for her death.

The Harmonicon praised her ‘inexhaustible fund of ornaments, always elegant, always varying, always extemporaneous: not even a pencil memorandum of what she meant to do was ever in her singing copy’, but admitted that later in her career ‘Enbonpoint deprived her of elegance, and even ease of motion’. She was generous to younger singers and Michael Kelly describes her travelling to Bath to sing, for no fee, at Rauzzini's concerts. To Kelly she was ‘an angel in beauty, and the Saint Cecilia of song’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

DNB (W.B. Squire)

SainsburyD

A. Pasquin [J. Williams]: The Children of Thespis, ii (London, 1787, 13/1792)

A. Seward: Letters (Edinburgh, 1811)

R. Edgeumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences of an Old Amateur (London, 1824, 4/1834)

M. Kelly: Reminiscences (London, 1826, 2/1826); ed. R. Fiske (London, 1975)

‘Chronicles of the Italian Opera in England’, The Harmonicon (1830), 10–13, 70–73

‘Memoir of Mrs Billington’, ibid., 93–7

T.J. Walsh: Opera in Dublin 1705–1797 (Dublin, 1973)

S. McVeigh: Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge, 1993)

U.M. Rempel: ‘Elizabeth Weichsell Billington (1765/1768–1818)’, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, iii: Women Born before 1799, ed. M.F. Schleifer and S. Glickman (New York, 1998), 181–92 [incl. edn of op.2, Sonata VI]

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Billington, Thomas

(b Exeter, 1754; d ?Tours, ?1832). English composer and music teacher. He described himself as a ‘Harpsichord and Singing Master’. His brother James, a double-bass player, was the husband of Elizabeth Billington: another brother, Horace, was an artist of some repute. He was a chorister at Exeter Cathedral and was admitted to the Society of Musicians on 6 April 1777. On 6 May 1783 he sang catches and glees at Covent Garden alongside Reinhold and Champness. He sang in the Handel Commemoration in 1784 and from 1790 to 1792 took part in the annual charity concerts for the clergy at St Paul’s Cathedral. He lived and taught for most of his career at 24 Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place, and moved to Sunbury, Middlesex, in 1824. Although the Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1832 mentions the death in Tunis of ‘Thomas Billington, late of Sunbury’, his place of death was probably Tours. His will, which was signed 13 September 1827 but not witnessed, was ratified by two of his neighbours, who swore ‘acquaintance of the deceased formerly of Sunbury but late of Tours in the kingdom of France’.

Billington began with chamber works, but was soon concentrating on secular cantatas for soloists, chorus and orchestra, and setting poems of consistently high quality, undeterred either by length or by unwieldy decasyllabic lines. Young’s Night Thoughts (1788) is virtually a secular oratorio in three acts, each with its own overture, and Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1786) is as long, with 366 lines. Billington usually eked out his own fitful invention with borrowed items; Young’s Night Thoughts includes music by Handel and Arne, Gray’s Elegy (1784) music by Haydn. His short solo cantatas include three based on Thomson (The Seasons) and one on Petrarch (Laura, 1790). The fourth of his sets of Love Canzonets for one or two voices (1784) includes some ‘Observations on Singing’ in which it is stated that falsetto is bad for the male voice and French bad for any voice; a list of London’s singing teachers is provided. Billington set 30 poems by Shenstone; the six ‘pastoral ballads’ of 1787 were published with an overture, and of the 24 that appeared about 1795 two have orchestral accompaniment given in full score. This latter publication is one of several that offers a list of Billington’s compositions. Billington also arranged concertos by Corelli and Geminiani for organ or harpsichord and some Boccherini quintets for keyboard with violin accompaniment. Pope’s Dying Christian to his Soul was almost the only poem he ever set that was actually intended for music, or indeed suitable for it. Unsurprisingly, Billington had to publish most of his music at his own expense. (BDA)

WORKS

published in London, not dated

vocal

The Te Deum, Jubilate, Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis, 3vv, op.1

Cants.: Celadon and Amelia (after J. Thomson: The Seasons), vv, hpd; The Children in the Wood, S, S, B, insts; Damon & Musidora (after Thomson: The Seasons); Gray’s Elegy, vv, pf, op.8; Lavinia (after Thomson: The Seasons); Laura (after F. Petrarch); Pope’s Dying Christian to his Soul, 1v, hp; Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard; Pope’s Messiah, op.13; The Soldier’s Farewell on the Eve of a Battle; Young’s Night Thoughts

Ballads: Shenstone’s Pastorals, consisting of 24 Ballads, acc. hp/pf; 6 Pastoral Ballads after Shenstone

Glees: A First Set of Glees … selected from the Scots Songs, 3–4vv; A Second Set of Glees … selected from the Scots Songs, 3–5vv; I Lost my Poor Heart with a Kiss, 3vv; Laura’s Wedding Day; The Coast Storm, 4vv

Canzonets: 8 Canzonets peculiarly adapted for Ladies, 1–2vv, pf/hp; A Fourth Set of 12 Love Canzonets … to which is added a Sonata, & a Few Hints to Young Vocal Performers, 1–2vv, op.10; Sylvia

Other vocal: Jubilee Songs in Honor of Handel; Be it the god’s peculiar care; How rapid how fleeting; A Lovely Rose; Maria’s Evening Service to the Virgin; Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady; Prior’s Garland; Sterne’s Soliloquy on hearing Maria sing her Evening Service to the Virgin, 1v, insts; St George and the Dragon; Strephon and Sylvia; The Consolation for a Nation’s Loss; The Faded Bouquet; The New Storm

instrumental

6 Sonatas, hp/pf, 4 with obbl fl, 2 with obbl vc, op.5

3 Trios, vn, va, vc, op.7

6 Duets, vn, va, op.12

Qt, F, ob, vn, va, vc; Str qt, E: both US-BEm

Arrs. of works by Boccherini, Corelli, Geminiani, Handel, Haydn, Pleyel, Sammartini, Stamitz

ROGER FISKE/R

Billon [Billhon], Jhan [Jan, Jehan, Joannes] de [du]

(fl 1534–56). South Netherlandish composer. His Missa ‘Content désir’, printed by Attaingnant in 1534, parodies Sermisy’s chanson, which had appeared from the same press 13 months earlier. The work also exists in a manuscript copied in the middle of the century by the papal scribe Joannes Parvus; this was no doubt the basis for Fétis’s claim that Billon was a singer in the papal chapel. However, more recent studies of Vatican musicians have failed to substantiate this hypothesis. Billon’s musical style closely resembles that of Jhan Gero and Jacquet de Berchem, maintaining a similar balance of canonic writing, imitation, voice-pairing and chordal passages. His other sacred works, a three-voice Magnificat and five motets for two to five voices, were first printed in Paris or Lyons between 1534 and 1553 before being reprinted or copied in Italy and Germany.

The ‘Jo. debillon’ who set a chanson text by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Quand viendra la clarté, is almost certainly the same composer. Only the bassus part survives, but it is sufficient to show the simple syllabic text-setting, root-position harmony and short, clearly defined phrase-structure typical of the voix de ville favoured at Paris in the mid-16th century.

WORKS

Missa ‘Content désir’, 4vv, 1534¹, I-Rvat C.S.154

Magnificat primi toni, 3vv, 1534⁸, ed. A. Smijers, Treize livres de motets parus chez Pierre Attaingnant, vi (Paris, 1960)

Virgo prudentissima, 5vv, 1539⁵, ed. in SCMot, x (1998); Nativitas tua Dei genetrix virgo, 4vv, 1539¹⁰, ed. in SCMot, xi (1998); Constantes estote videbitis auxilium, 5vv, 1542⁵, ed. in SCMot (forthcoming); Pleni sunt caeli, 2vv, 1543¹⁹; Ego Joannes vidi, 5vv, 1553⁷

Quand viendra la clarté, 4vv, 1556²⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

F.X. Haberl: Bibliographischer und thematischer Musikkatalog des päpstlichen Kapellarchives im Vatikan zu Rom (Leipzig, 1888/R), 118

FRANK DOBBINS

Bilson, Malcolm

(b Los Angeles, 24 Oct 1935). American pianist and fortepianist. After receiving his BA from Bard College in 1957, he studied with Grete Hinterhofer at the Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Berlin, with Reine Gianoli at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, and with Stanley Fletcher and Webster Aitken at the University of Illinois (DMA 1968). He was appointed to the faculty of Cornell University in 1968, became a full professor in 1976 and the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music in 1990. In 1969 he purchased one of the first five-octave fortepianos by Philip Belt, based on a Louis Dulcken original in the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1977 he acquired a copy by Belt of Mozart’s Walter concert instrument. Bilson was one of the first artists to make a persuasive case for the use of period instruments in Viennese Classical music. He achieved this through stylish and imaginative performances that took the idiomatic capabilities of the fortepiano as their starting-point; he has played all over the USA and Europe, and given numerous masterclasses. With Sonya Monosoff and John Hsu, he formed the Amadé Trio in 1974 and made several recordings with the ensemble; in 1983 he embarked on an admired complete recording of Mozart’s piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists. His solo recordings of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert sonatas have received high praise for the new light they throw on a well-established repertory. More recently Bilson has ventured further into the 19th century, playing works by Schumann, Chopin and other composers on an 1825 Alios Graf piano.

ROBERT WINTER

Bilstein [Bilstenius], Johannes

(b Ober- or Niedermarsberg, c1560; d after 1595). German writer and theologian. During his youth he lived for a time at Emden and in 1581 matriculated at the University of Marburg, but in 1582 he transferred to Rostock, where he studied with David Chyträus. He was again living at Marburg in 1587. In 1588 he matriculated at the University of Basle, where on 15 May 1593 he became a doctor of theology. He gave some lectures at Kassel in 1590. Between 1584 and 1596 he published numerous learned books on grammar, rhetoric and so on, among them Syntagma Philippo-Rameum artium liberalium (Basle, 1588, 2/1596), which includes a chapter on music (‘De musica’, 355–60). In this book, which he wrote for a private pupil at Marburg in ten weeks in 1587, he steered a middle course – as its title suggests – between the views of Philipp Melanchthon and Petrus Ramus. In the chapter on music he subscribed to Ramus’s definition ‘Musica est ars bene canendi’ as well as to the rules for ligatures set out by Friedrich Beurhaus, whose Musicae erotematum (first published in 1573) he recommended as a textbook along with Listenius’s extremely popular Musica.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Thoene: Friedrich Beurhaus und seine Musiktraktate (Cologne, 1959), 42, 60, 108

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Zur Musiktheorie im enzyklopädischen Wissenschaftssystem des 16./17. Jahrhunderts’, Über Musiktheorie: Berlin 1970, 23–36

KLAUS WOLFGANG NIEMÖLLER

Bimboni, Alberto

(b Florence, 24 Aug 1882; New York, 18 June 1960). American composer of Italian birth. He studied at the Cherubini Conservatory in Florence and began his career there as a conductor. As an accompanist he later worked with Caruso, Eugene Ysaÿe and John McCormack; he was also active as an organist. In 1911 he emigrated to the USA, where he toured as a conductor with the Henry Savage Opera Company; he also conducted the Century Opera Company and later appeared at the Havana Opera House. He taught at the Curtis Institute and at the University of Pennsylvania, and for 20 years was conductor of the Chautauqua Opera Association. For the last 26 years of his life he coached French and Italian at the Juilliard School.

Bimboni composed six operas, of which the most important is Winona, first performed by the American Grand Opera Company in Portland in 1926. Basing the opera on a Sioux-Dakota legend, Bimboni incorporated melodies which he had either collected from Minnesota Indians or obtained from the Smithsonian collection; overall, however, the opera’s music may be likened to the idealized ‘Indian style’ of his contemporary Charles Wakefield Cadman. Bimboni was awarded the David Bispham Memorial Medal when the opera was revived in Minneapolis in 1928. He also composed songs, including the collection Songs of the American Indians (1917). Further information is given in E.E. Hipsher: ‘Alberto Bimboni’, American Opera and its Composers (Philadelphia, c1934); repr. with introduction by H. Earle Johnson (New York, 1978), 72–6.

WORKS

Calandrino (The Fire Worshippers), 1902 (1, after G. Boccaccio), ?unperf.

Fiaschi?! Delitto perpetrato dagli studenti W.C. e Costanzo Arrigoni (operetta-ballo, 3), Florence, 1903

Winona (3, P. Williams), Portland, 11 Nov 1926

Karin, 1929–30 (3, C.W. Stork), unperf.

Il cancelleto d’oro (The Gilded Gate; There was a Gilded Gate) (1, A. Romano), New York, National Arts Club, 11 March 1936

In the Name of Culture (1, N.F. Stolzenbach), Rochester, Eastman School of Music, 9 May 1949

other works

Lovelights, 1v, pf (1900); Preludio e fuga, org (1915); Red Day, 1v, pf (1917); Your Voices Raise, SATB; Mass ‘Cor Jesu, fons vitae’ (1942)

THOMAS WARBURTON

Bimio, Giacomo Filippo.

See Biumi, giacomo filippo.

Bimler, Georg Heinrich.

See Bümler, Georg Heinrich.

Bi-musicality.

This was first proposed by Ki Mantle Hood who argued that if a scholar's ‘desire is to comprehend a particular Oriental musical expression so that his observations and analysis as a musicologist do not prove to be embarrassing, he will have to persist in practical studies until his basic musicianship is secure’ (Hood, 1960, p.58). He dismissed ‘the argument that an alien musical expression has cultural or racial characteristics which make it inaccessible’ (p.55). Intellectually, he was reacting against anthropologists of music and an earlier generation of comparative musicologists who limited their research to ‘passive observation, working with informants and museum studies’ (p.55). Hood claimed that learning to improvise, ‘the crowning achievement’ of bi-musicality, involved the assimilation of ‘the whole tradition’, including ‘the related arts … language, religion, customs, [and] history’ (p.59). The anthropologist Alan Merriam, an advocate of holistic studies of music, remained unconvinced, and criticized scholars’ active participation in studying music and performance as ‘sandbox ethnomusicology’. He and some others at the time found bi-musicality ‘too subjective, too self-indulgent, too unscholarly [and] too much fun’ (Titon, 1995, p.289).

Though controversial in the 1960s, the acquisition of bi-musicality through active training and participation in the music making of a second culture has become a standard, useful and largely unproblematic aspect of ethnomusicological fieldwork. In the United States, pre-fieldwork training in bi-musicality is a feature of graduate programmes at UCLA (which Hood founded) and those started by UCLA graduates at Brown, Florida State, Michigan, Washington and Wesleyan universities. Programmes founded by anthropologists, folklorists, or European comparative musicologists and their students (including Columbia, Illinois, Indiana and Texas) do not emphasize such training, though their students have effectively employed bi-musicality in their research.

In a 1995 issue of the Journal of American Folklore devoted to bi-musicality, ethnomusicologists and folklorists advanced Hood's position that bi-musicality led to cultural and social, as well as musical, understanding. Bi-musicality, they claimed, allows ethnomusicologists to enter into realms of feeling, value and social relations opened up by music and to experience them in ways that deepen and amplify the results of observation and explanation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Hood: ‘The Challenge of “Bi-musicality”’, EthM, iv (1960), 55–9

B. Feintuch, ed.: ‘A Conversation Between Two Disciplines: What Do We Learn When We Learn Music from Our “Informants”?’, Journal of American Folklore, cviii/3 (1995) [Bi-Musicality issue; inc J.T. Titon: ‘Bi-musicality as a Metaphor’, 287–97]

TIMOTHY RICE

Bīn (i).

A South Asian double clarinet. See Pūngī.

Bīn (ii).

A North Indian stick zither. See Vīnā, §4.

Bin ‘Abd al-Jalīl, ‘Abd al-‘Azīz

(b Meknes, 1931). Moroccan musicologist. After completing his musical training in Morocco and later in Paris (1959), he was appointed director of the Conservatory in Meknes (1979–97). He writes on Moroccan music, focussing on Arab-Andalusian music, known in Morocco as Andalusian-Maghrebian music. He has tried to link the opinion of current practitioners and their colloquial terminology for musical vocabulary to the historical roots preserved in old treatises, which resulted in his publishing a dictionary on Andalusian-Maghrebian music (1992). He has also written about Moroccan countryside music and in his recent publications has turned to the study of Moroccan music manuscripts. He is a member of the Arab Academy of Music.

WRITINGS

al-tarbiyya al-mūsīqiyya li-mu‘allimī al-madāris al-ibtidā’iyya [Music education for teachers of elementary schools] (Casablanca, 1966)

‘al-mūsīqā al-sha‘biyya al-maghribiyya’ [Moroccan folk music], al-Funūn [Rabat], v/1 (1978), 48–71

madkhal ilā Tārīkh al-mūsīqā al-maghribiyya [Introduciton to the history of Moroccan music] (Kuwait, 1983)

‘masādir tārīkh al-mūsīqā al-maghribiyya’ [Sources of the history of Maghrebian music], al-Bayān [Kuwait], no.230 (1985), 118–28

al-mūsīqā al-andalusiyya al-maghribiyya [Andalusian-Maghrebian music] (Kuwait, 1988)

mu‘jam mustalahāt al-mūsīqā al-andalusiyya al-maghribiyya [Dictionary of terms of Andalusian-Maghrebian Music] (Rabat, 1992)

ed.: muhammad al-bu‘samī: iqād al-shumū‘ lil-ladhat al-masmū‘ bi-naghamāt al-tubū‘ [Muhammad al-Bu‘sami: lighting candles for the pleasure of the listener by the modes of music] (Rabat, 1995)

‘Le chant et la musique’, Civilisation marocaine, ed. M. Sijelmassi and A. Khatibi (Arles, 1996), 224–33

CHRISTIAN POCHÉ

Binaghi [Binago], Benedetto

(b Milan, late 16th century; d before 1619). Italian composer. According to the title-page of his Sacrarum cantionum, in 1598 he was the organist of S Ambrogio in Settala, near Milan. From 1602 to 1610 he was organist of S Gaudenzio, Novara, and from 1611 maestro di cappella of S Maria della Scala, Milan. According to Borsieri, Binaghi left a large number of printed works, notably several books of motets; only two publications, however, along with several individual works in anthologies, are known. Borsieri also indicated that the composer was dead by 1619.

WORKS

Sacrarum cantionum, liber primus, 5vv (Milan, 1598)

Coronae divinarum laudum, liber primus, 3vv (Milan, 1604) [score pubd separately, Milan, 1604]

Sacred vocal works in 1608¹³, 1609²⁰, 1612⁹, 1616², 1619³, 1619⁴, 1620², 1622², 1627¹

Pater noster, 5vv, I-Mcap

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Borsieri: Il supplimento della nobilità di Milano (Milan, 1619), 54

V. Fedeli, ed.: Le cappelle musicali di Novara dal secolo XVI a' primordi dell'Ottocento, IMi, iii (1933), 15, 18

MARIANGELA DONÀ

Binaria

(Lat.).

A ligatura binaria or ligature comprising two notes. See Ligature (i).

Binary form.

A musical structure consisting of two mutually dependent sections of roughly equal duration. It is usually symbolized as AB, but often may be better expressed as AA'.

1. Definition.

Binary form is characterized by an articulated movement to another key followed by an articulated return to the tonic. A conclusive arrival on the principal contrasting key (normally the dominant) marks the end of the first section, and is matched by the final return to the tonic at the end of the second half. Each section is usually marked to be repeated. Binary form is generally understood to imply a continuous form in which the harmonically incomplete first half demands continuation. It may also be sectional or composite, however, and contain harmonically complete and thematically distinct first and second halves. In its most characteristic manifestations binary form is associated with Baroque instrumental music, in particular the dance movements of the suite; but so obvious a form was in use long before the Baroque period.

2. To 1700.

The medieval Bar form can be classed as a sectional binary form in which only the first part is repeated, giving an AAB structure. Even in the early rondeau and other formes fixes, in which a complex system of phrase repetition was required by the verse structures, the music itself was often made up of two periods or phrases. With the disappearance of the formes fixes, and the development of instrumental music whose shaping owed a good deal to the symmetries of phrases required for dancing, binary movements became more and more frequent.

Some of the keyboard settings from a Venetian collection of about 1520 (I-Vnm Ital.iv.1227) illustrate this. De che le morta la mia signora has two strains closely corresponding in rhythm, the first in G minor, the second beginning in B and moving back to G minor. No repeats are indicated but they would make good sense. Elsewhere in the collection double bars suggest that repeats should be made (O Dio, ch’a fatto il ciel con la fortuna), or such repeats are actually written out (Margaritum). Attaingnant’s publications of the 1530s contain branles in binary form; an allemande by Claude Gervais (HAM no.137) and Ammerbach’s Wer das Töchterlein haben wil from the Leipzig Orgel order Instrument Tablatur of 1571 are similarly constructed, and partsongs like Anerio’s Al suon (HAM no.160) and Hassler’s Ach Schatz (HAM no.165) provide vocal examples. In balletts such as Morley’s My bonny lass or Weelkes’s Hark, all ye lovely saints, fa-las provide a textual identity for the close of each section: a comparable musical identity was to become a usual feature of instrumental dances later in the development of the form.

Many dances of the late Renaissance were written in three strains, however, and such pieces are preponderant in a collection like the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, though galliards by Bull and Philips (nos.17 and 87 respectively) and Muscadin (no.19) show the new tendency towards binary form. But the pavan in three strains persisted almost to the end of the 17th century and sarabands and minuets were also occasionally constructed in this way. By the close of the century, however, binary form was usual in the majority of dances.

3. After 1700.

In the 18th century sectional binary form continued to appear in folk music and in chorales (for example in Bach’s chorale no.38, Straf mich nicht in deinem Zorn). It is most commonly found in arias, and may be understood retrospectively as a da capo form that unexpectedly fails to complete itself. This almost always occurs for dramatic reasons, as in Jonathan’s ‘No, no, cruel father, no!’ from Handel’s Saul, where a lamenting first section in B minor is succeeded by a G major Allegro. Both sections are harmonically closed, leaving the larger structure open; AB is clearly a more appropriate designation here. A more complex example is Iole’s aria ‘My father! ah! methinks I see’ from Handel’s Hercules. In the first section, beginning and ending in C minor, Iole relives the killing of her father by Hercules. The relative major is held in reserve for the second section, in which Iole bids her father rest in peace. Rather than finishing in E major, though, the music clouds over into E minor, implying that Iole’s remembrance of the violent death has invaded her thoughts. The close thus reverts to the mode of the first section and creates some sense of rounded shaping to the whole, if in the first instance for dramatic reasons; there are also some subtle thematic recollections from A. Handel therefore manages to give both an informal hint of a da capo in terms of mode and material and a sense of coherence to an unusual sectional binary structure.

Simple binary form was the most common type of continuous binary form used in the Baroque period. It is characterized by a broad continuity of manner, with much freedom of detail, and the second section is often at first only loosely thematically related to the first. In the second half of the Courante from Handel’s Suite no.6 in G minor, for example, references to the material of the A section are sporadic and unsystematic, and although much of the material is new, it is not distinctively so and is similar to the manner of the first part. The two halves are roughly equal in length, creating a large-scale temporal balance that helps secure the coherence of the whole. (This simple continuous binary form is rarely found after the mid-18th century, and it is perhaps for that reason that Schoenberg omitted it from his Fundamentals of Musical Composition, implying that it was no longer of use to the student of tonal music.)

Both these aspects of design were subject to alteration. It became increasingly common during the Baroque era for the second half to relate more precisely to the first. In particular, the listener’s comprehension of the form was aided by a ‘rhyming’ of the outer parts of each half. Thus the second half would often begin with a dominant version of the first half’s opening unit or phrase, either briefly acknowledged or quoted extensively. An inversion of the material was also common, particularly in gigue movements (see, for instance, the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite no.4 in F). In the Allemande from the same work, not only does the material appear in retrograde, but also the hands swap roles, the left hand now taking the melodic lead. This dominant version of material was often used as a springboard to regaining the tonic, albeit often only briefly before the harmony moved further afield.

The dominant equivalent of the first-half opening was retained as if by force of habit for some time in sonata-form movements, remaining common until the 1780s. In the first movement of Haydn’s Sonata no.46 in E, for example, the account of the theme in the dominant is followed immediately by one in the tonic. This acts rather like a false reprise, although it is quickly deflected by a turn towards V of VI. The two features may be seen in conjunction in a simple binary context in the Presto of Benedetto Marcello’s Sonata no.2 in G. Occasionally the return to the tonic is still more direct, such as in the Sonata no.21 in A by Seixas (ed. in PM, ser.A, xxxiv, 1980), where the first two bars of the second half are almost identical with the first two bars of the first. With the first half ending unusually in the relative minor, though, the tonic and its initial material are a necessary reference point before further ambitious harmonic journeys can be undertaken. This exposes the underlying premise of this harmonic habit.

Such rhyming could also be found at the ends as well as the beginnings of the respective halves. At first it may have amounted to little more than a correspondence between the respective cadences, as in the Allemande of Froberger’s Suite in E minor, but the explicit thematic matching became more extensive, as often the entire final strain of the first half in the dominant was repeated in the tonic at the end of A'. This procedure yields the so-called balanced binary form. It is perhaps associated above all with the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, where a significant amount of end-rhyme is common. Many binary-form pieces of the period are ‘balanced’ at both the beginning and the end of the second half.

The end-rhyming form has perhaps received more emphasis (to the extent of earning its own label) because of its apparent anticipation of one of the governing principles of sonata form. That is, it restores to the tonic prominent material originally exposed in another key, making thematically explicit the harmonic structure that underpins the form. Sonata form in fact exemplifies the other principal binary type, rounded binary form. Here the double return creates a discontinuity of design that leads to the perception of three sections in thematic terms, yet the harmonic process remains the same as that found in simple binary form. This conflict between melodic and cadential design leads to a designation of ABA' for this binary form. Sonata form does not have to coincide with rounded binary form, however. Chopin’s sonata-form movements are closer to the principles of balanced binary form, avoiding as they do the return of the opening material in the tonic but transposing all the important non-tonic material in the last section. On the other hand, there are also many rounded binary movements that are not in sonata form, particularly minuets and scherzos. A representative example is the Minuetto from Clementi’s Sonata in A op.10 no.1. Where the first section ends in the tonic, though, the form should be thought of as a sectional rounded binary form: in spite of the firm tonic cadence at the end of A, the thematic continuity between first and second sections makes the description ‘ternary’ misleading (see Ternary form). The Minuet of Haydn’s String Quartet in E op.20 no.1 provides an instance of this.

The development of rounded binary form is indicative of a trend found also in simple binary form: the tendency for the second half to become longer than the first. A succinct example is the Sarabande of Bach’s French Suite in D minor. The first half, a single eight-bar strain moving to a half-cadence on the dominant, is answered by a second half of precisely twice the length. Although there is no rounding of the form as such nor any end-rhyme beyond the rhythmic resemblance of the two final cadential bars, similar impulses are at work. Bach begins A' by transferring the melody of the first five bars to the left hand, untransposed, and reharmonizing it with new upper parts; this is part of an eight-bar phrase that cadences on the subdominant. The final eight-bar phrase restores the first five melodic bars to the soprano, but transposes them with slight adaptations up a 5th. The whole of the second section, while obviously maintaining continuity of material with the first part, has the more expansive and somewhat exploratory character typical of this lengthened version of simple binary form.

There was no simple progression from simple to balanced to rounded binary form, however. For a considerable time in the earlier 18th century these types were merely alternative means of structuring an instrumental movement. Bach’s Partita no.4 in D, for example, exploits all the resources and nuances of binary construction. A simple binary form can be found in the Minuet, but the minimal end-rhyme found between the left-hand parts of the respective final bars of each half is not enough to constitute a truly balanced form. The second half begins with fresh material, and, although there are two references to the opening melodic unit, neither would justify the description ‘rounded’ binary form. The second half is much expanded, having 20 bars as opposed to the eight of the A section. The Allemande, on the other hand, has nearly equal halves, the first having 24 bars and the second 32, and it is balanced at both ends. The start of the second half provides an equivalent of only the first bar of the piece, with the characteristic flattening of the fourth scale-degree and consequent touching on the tonic, but the end-rhyme is extensive, the final six bars of the first half being transposed at the end of the second. Bach inserts some derived material near the end to create a grander sense of climax. Apart from this, almost every event of A is accounted for in A', but is reordered to yield a still larger, if complex, sense of rhyme. The Sarabande, too, is balanced at both ends of the second half, but it also exemplifies rounded binary form, the opening two bars being straightforwardly recapitulated at bars 29–30. After this, though, the music seems to revert to the processes and material of the central section, so that any sense of recapitulation in a later, sonata-form sense is denied. Thus, although seemingly more ‘progressive’ in its formal essentials, the Sarabande is considerably less concerned with establishing a large-scale equilibrium than the Allemande.

The example of Domenico Scarlatti also reminds us that balanced binary form should not be considered less well developed or less versatile than the rounded form. Scholars have been much preoccupied with the composer’s consistency in this formal regard and have failed to do justice to the variety of its realizations. Indeed, Scarlatti can hardly have been aware of the fact that he was using what we would now define as the subspecies of one historical form. After all, that many subsequent composers consistently employed sonata form in certain movements is hardly a matter for comment. In any case, Scarlatti’s sonatas often begin with material that is relatively indeterminate thematically (but certainly not in the force of its expression) and do not arrive at something more clearly shaped, and more ‘thematic’ in its behaviour (in other words, reiterated as a unit), until the end of the first half. By ensuring, like Chopin later, that this material is accounted for in the tonic at the end, the composer is in fact articulating the same principles of harmonic argument that are evident in rounded binary and sonata forms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NewmanSBE

E.J. Dent: ‘Binary and Ternary Form’, ML, xvii (1936), 309–21

R. Kirkpatrick: ‘The Anatomy of the Scarlatti Sonata’, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton, NJ, 1953/R), 251–79

C. Thorpe Davie: Musical Structure and Design (London, 1953)

D.S. Green: Form in Tonal Music (New York, 1965)

I. Spink: An Historical Approach to Musical Form (London, 1967)

W. DEAN SUTCLIFFE (1, 3), MICHAEL TILMOUTH (2)

Binchois [Binchoys], Gilles de Bins [Binch, Binche] dit

(b ?Mons, c1400; d Soignies, 20 Sept 1460). Franco-Flemish composer. He is one of the three major musical figures from the first half of the 15th century. Modern critics normally rank him behind his contemporaries Du Fay and Dunstaple, for he had none of the legendary influence attributed to Dunstaple and far less music than Du Fay. But the extent to which his works were borrowed, cited, parodied and intabulated in the later 15th century implies that he had more direct influence than either. His composing career was shorter than Du Fay’s; but in the musical sources of the 1420s and 1430s his work is more often recopied than that of Du Fay – a notable detail, considering that these sources are mainly from northern Italy, where Du Fay was living, whereas Binchois was in far-away Flanders. He was the only one of the three composers to have had any significant connection with the Burgundian court in the ‘Burgundian era’. The years he spent there resulted in a body of work whose consistency of style lends meaning to the concept of a Burgundian tradition in music. All ascriptions for his music read simply ‘Binchois’ or ‘Binchoys’, and archival references tend to use that or the forms ‘Gilles de Bins’ or ‘Gilles de Bins dit Binchois’ (with varying orthographies); evidently, then, his professional name or sobriquet was simply Binchois, his personal name was Gilles de Bins, and the conflated form ‘Gilles Binchois’ is a misnomer (though he does appear in the much later theorist Tinctoris twice as ‘Egidius Binchois’).

3. Reputation and influence.

2. Portraits.

4. Binchois and England.

5. Transmission of his works.

DAVID FALLOWS

1. Life.

An obit-book of St Vincent, Soignies (Archives de l’Etat, Mons, Obituaire 51, ed. in Demeuldre, 1904), names his parents as Johannes and Johanna de Binche. They are probably to be identified with Jean de Binch (d ?1425) and his wife Jeanne, née Paulouche (d ?1426), both bourgeois of Mons. Jean was a councillor to Duke Guillaume IV of Hainault and from 1417 to his daughter Jacqueline of Bavaria; he also built a new chapel for the church of St Germain (with provision for daily masses to be said in his memory in perpetuity) and was a councillor of the neighbouring church of Ste Waudru in Mons. So the composer was probably born in the same city as Lassus rather than the town of Binche 16 km away; and he may have received his first musical education around the Mons court which had strong cultural ties with the courts of France and Burgundy. The earliest known documents mentioning the composer are in the accounts of Ste Waudru, where he played the organ from 8 December 1419 (Archives de l’Etat, MS 71) and was registered as ‘fil Ghinoit l’orghanistre’, ‘1 jovene homme appelet Binchois liquels jeuwa des dittes orghenes’ and ‘maistre Ghile l’orghanistre’; on 28 July 1423 ‘Ghuis l’orghanistre’ paid the town of Mons for the privilege of going to live in Lille (Archives de l’Etat, Comptes de la ville, 294, f.9).

Gilles probably trained as a chorister, in which case it may have been at St Germain, Mons, whose choristers also served Ste Waudru. Certainly there is no evidence for the common assertion that he was a chorister at Cambrai Cathedral. It derives from a carelessly phrased sentence in J. Houdoy, Histoire artistique … de Cambrai (Lille, 1880/R1972, p.83). The Binchois concerned is a Jean de Binche who entered as a chorister on 17 August 1469 and subsequently sang both at the Burgundian court (1472–94) and at ’s-Hertogenbosch (1495–1507).

In Ockeghem’s Deploration for Binchois it is stated that in his youth he was ‘soudart/De honnourable mondanité’ – an honourably chivalrous soldier. This may have been in the service of William Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who was among the English occupying forces in France. A legal deposition made by one Guillaume Benoit in 1427 concerning a suspected assassination attempt on Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy tells, as peripheral background information, how in 1424 Suffolk commanded ‘Binchoiz’ to create the rondel Ainsi que a la foiz m’y souvient; and the same deposition tells how in April 1425 ‘Binchoiz’ supported the Duke of Burgundy rather than the Duke of Gloucester in an argument against two Norman servants of Suffolk’s.

Later in the 1420s Binchois joined the Burgundian court chapel. The precise date cannot be determined since the payment lists between 1419 and 1436 are missing. The first evidence of his presence is in his own motet Nove cantum melodie written for the baptism of the short-lived Prince Anthoine of Burgundy on 18 January 1431; its text names the 19 chapel singers, among them Binchois himself. But he must have been there some years earlier since the list of 1436 places him as fifth chaplain in order of seniority within the choir. Moreover the otherwise irrelevant references to Binchois in Benoit’s deposition of 1427 suggest that he was already a ducal employee at that time.

Lists of chapel payments show that Binchois did not have a university degree and was not an ordained priest, though he was ordained subdeacon in 1437 (Strohm, 1985, p.153). This was one of the few choirs in which it was possible to be a chaplain without being a priest. Nor was it necessary for him to be a priest to hold his prebends at St Donatian, Bruges (7 January 1430), at Ste Waudru, Mons (17 May 1437), at St Vincent, Soignies (from 1452), and at St Pierre, Cassel (21 May 1459), all of which he retained until his death. These were almost certainly acquired by the collation of the duke, from whom Binchois received further favours: about 1437 he was made an honorary secretary to the court; on 29 May 1438 he was paid for the volume of Passions en nouvelle maniere (see work-list); and he seems also to have had some powers as a healer, for in July 1437 he was sent 28 sous to provide for the duchess a ring that cured toothache.

Each day’s absence from the choir was scrupulously noted in the court accounts, however, so Binchois cannot have travelled independently much during these years: the prebends were held in absentia. But he did visit Mons in March 1449 when he arrived there together with Du Fay for a convocation of the canons of Ste Waudru. This is the only documented meeting of the two composers, though they probably met in Chambéry in February 1434 and could have met frequently in the 1440s when Du Fay was at Cambrai and freer to move as he chose. By an intriguing coincidence, Du Fay’s apparent patron Jehan Hubert appears as a witness in many Mons court documents alongside Binchois’ father; there is therefore a possibility that the two composers knew one another from an early age.

Soignies was Binchois’ retirement home. He was appointed provost of the collegiate church of St Vincent in 1452 and any payments in the Burgundian court accounts after the end of February 1453 have the annotation that he was ‘paid even though he was absent’. At his death he was still receiving this extremely generous pension, presumably as a reward for some three decades of distinguished service. During these last years the composers Guillaume Malbecque (an executor of his will) and Johannes Regis, were both present in Soignies, whose musical reputation was then growing such that it was later to be praised by both Lessabaeus (Hannoniae urbium, Antwerp, 1534) and Lodovico Guicciardini (Descrittione di tutti i paesi bassi, Antwerp, 1567) for its exceptionally fine singing in an age when musicians from this area were in demand throughout Europe. Binchois died there on 20 September 1460, as recorded in his execution testamentaire (Archives de l’Etat, Mons, Chapitre de Soignies, 42) that also mentions his brother Andri de Binch, his nieces Catherine and Biétrison, daughters of Ernoul de Binch, and a more distant relation Maigne Tramasure, wife of Aimery Dirich, living in Graty (7 km north-west of Soignies).

2. Portraits.

Four alleged portraits of Binchois survive. (1) The illumination in a manuscript of Martin le Franc’s Le champion des dames prepared at Arras in 1451 (for illustration see Du Fay, Guillaume). Binchois holds a harp and faces Du Fay who stands by an organetto; Binchois points his hand upwards and Du Fay points downwards. No convincing explanation of this symbolism has been advanced. Both composers are named in the illumination. (2) Jan van Eyck, Portrait of ‘Tymotheos’, signed and dated 10 October 1432, with the motto ‘LEAL SOVVENIR’ (see fig.1). Panofsky (1949) argued persuasively that this could be Binchois on the thesis that the name Tymotheos might symbolize a musician who extended the range and scope of music (after Timotheus of Miletus) and that of the three major composers of the day only Binchois was at the Burgundian court in the 1430s. But nothing specifically defines the sitter as Binchois; indeed he may even not be a musician since the scroll in his hand contains script, not music. Although this identification has been supported by Lowinsky and Seebass, there must remain doubt so long as there is no convincing explanation for either the odd pseudo-Greek lettering or the antique scuffing of the parapet on which the sitter leans. Other proposed identifications are reported in Campbell (1998). (3) The Wedding of Philip the Good and Isabelle of Portugal (otherwise known as The Hawking Party of Philip the Good; see Mullally, 1977). The original, formerly attributed to Jan van Eyck, was destroyed by fire in 1608, but late copies are at the Musée National du Château de Versailles (see Burgundy, fig.3) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (formerly at the Château d’Azay-le-Rideau). Besseler (1959) suggested that the man dressed in black (one of only two in the whole picture who are not in white) could be Binchois. The man is apparently singing with the two ladies and the man who surround him. Besseler asserted that the scroll of music in his hand contained music from the tenor of Binchois’ four-voice song, Filles a marier/Se tu t’en marias; but this cannot be confirmed, either from the Versailles detail published by Besseler or from the Dijon detail presented here (fig.2). As with the Tymotheos portrait, the arguments lean rather too heavily on the assumption that Binchois was the only eminent musician at the Burgundian court. (4) A funeral monument now in the cloister of St Vincent, Soignies, taken from the body of the church during restoration in the 19th century. Kreps (1960) suggested it was that of Binchois as described in his execution testamentaire. The donor kneels between two figures in an annunciation scene. The monument is badly rubbed and few details remain; the inscription now below it, in pseudo-Gothic script, was made at the suggestion of Kreps and reflects no demonstrable fact.

Doubt is in order for all of these identifications. Only the first can be accepted with any conviction; and manuscript illuminations are not often careful portraits. The most this one tells is that Binchois may have been slightly taller than Du Fay.

Eyewitness descriptions provide another kind of portrait. Martin le Franc wrote (1442) of the composer’s self-effacing reaction to the two blind vielle players from Castile:

J’ay veu Binchois avoir vergogne
Et soy taire emprez leur rebelle

(‘I saw Binchois ashamed and silent at their rebec playing’). He contrasted this with the more angry and envious reaction of Du Fay. Ockeghem’s Deploration described Binchois as ‘Le pere de joyeuseté’ and ‘patron de bonté’, adding that he served God ‘en humilité’.

3. Reputation and influence.

His reputation among writers went hand in hand with that of Du Fay: Martin le Franc twice mentioned the two composers in one breath, and the habit has continued to this day. Simon Greban’s Complainte sur la mort de Jacques Milet (1466), Guillaume Crétin’s Deploration sur la mort d’Ockeghem (1497), Jean Molinet’s Naufrage de la Pucelle and Eloy d’Amerval’s Livre de la deablerie (probably c1490, though printed only in 1508) all mention them together and only Eloy d’Amerval – himself a musician – showed any awareness of the difference between the two.

Binchois is similarly represented in the theoretical and critical writings. Martin le Franc’s opinion that the influence of Dunstaple caused Du Fay and Binchois to produce a ‘nouvelle pratique’ was taken over by Tinctoris (Proportionale musices; CSM, xxii/2a, 1978, p.10) who called it an ‘ars nova’; the idea appeared again in Sebald Heyden (De arte canendi, 1540), Johannes Nucius (Musices poeticae, 1613) and even in an inaugural discourse given by the German schoolmaster Joannes Moller (De musica eiusque excellentia, 1667, published 1681). In his Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477; CSM, xxii/2, 1975, p.12) Tinctoris described Binchois, Dunstaple and Du Fay as the teachers of the next generation; and in the Proportionale musices (CSM, xxii/2a, 1978, p.45) he endorsed an unusual mensuration sign in Binchois. His list of ten famous composers in the Complexus effectuum musices (CSM, xxii/2, 1975, p.176) appeared again in Hermann Finck (Practica musica, 1556), with severe reservations in Adrianus Petit Coclico (Compendium musices, 1552), and was the single fact about Binchois relayed in the earliest modern dictionaries of J.G. Walther (1732), Choron and Fayolle (1810) and Gerber (1812). A similar but different list of ten famous composers representing the peak of contrapuntal skill in the anonymous Spanish treatise in E-E C.III.23 (c1480) included Binchois. But it would seem that the only critic between Martin le Franc and Ficker to remark independently on the music was Gaffurius, who in his Practica musicae (1496) observed that Binchois, like Dunstaple, Du Fay and Brassart, was apt to employ a passing dissonance on the semibrevis. (The frequently found assertion that Binchois is mentioned in Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogo is incorrect and derives from a misreading of a passage in Haberl.)

If his name survived in the literature only alongside that of Du Fay, his music had more of an independent reputation attested by the intabulations of six songs in the Buxheimer Orgelbuch (one of them seven times), by the citation of 11 song titles in the poetry of Jean Molinet (who cited one of them four times), and by other citations in plays and in the poetry of Jean Régnier and John Skelton. The appearance of his Te Deum in the choirbooks of Gaffurius at Milan and (with two additional voices) in the Segovia Cathedral manuscript gives it a longer active life than almost any work of its generation. Tenor lines were abstracted from two (possibly three) of his songs to make basse danses; and the tenor of Vostre tres doulx appears in two English sources in contexts that suggest it was used as a basis for improvisation. His songs were used for four mass cycles of the mid-15th century: Ockeghem’s Missa ‘De plus en plus’, Bedyngham’s Missa ‘Dueil angoisseux’, the anonymous mass Se tu t’en marias and the anonymous mass-motet cycle Esclave puist il devenir. The subsequent generation made extensive use of three pieces that may not be by Binchois: Tout a par moy (possibly by Frye), Je ne vis oncques (possibly by Du Fay) and Comme femme desconfortée (thought by Rehm to be unauthentic). But if they are his – and the evidence of the sources suggests that all three are – Binchois’ song tenors provided the material for no fewer than seven works by Agricola, and three each by Josquin and Ghiselin as well as other works by Brumel, Tinctoris, Obrecht and Isaac. The latest Renaissance setting of a Binchois tenor is probably in the motet Ave rosa sine spinis by Senfl who may have known the tenor of Comme femme only through its use in Josquin’s Stabat mater.

Nevertheless the finest tribute came at his death in the form of laments by his two greatest surviving contemporaries. Ockeghem’s Mort tu as navré de ton dart contains more biographical information than any other single source. It is a ballade written at a time when ballades were almost extinct, and it adds a fragment of the Requiem Mass in the tenor towards the end. At the opening, before the entry of the French text, the three lower voices have a section texted ‘Miserere’, as though quoting from a work of Binchois, though no such quote can be located. Du Fay’s magnificent rondeau En triumphant de Cruel Dueil must date from around 1460, has a text lamenting the loss of a friend, and contains the words ‘Dueil Angoisseux’ and ‘Triste Plaisir’. Du Fay must have known these two most successful of Binchois songs, and their presence here can hardly be a coincidence. The most reasonable explanation is that this song, too, was written to commemorate the composer who embodied Burgundian music.

Surviving sources of information are clear in their estimate of Binchois. He was always numbered among the great composers. The musical sources of the 1420s and 1430s appear to suggest that in those years Binchois was rather more valued than Du Fay: even though Du Fay was in Italy, where most of these manuscripts were copied, it is the works of Binchois that more often appear in multiple copies during these years. In the later 15th century his works are far more quoted and borrowed than those of Du Fay and Dunstaple. Tinctoris (CSM, xxii/2a, 1978, p.45) said that his immortality was ensured by his ‘compositione jocundissima’ (‘most joyful composition’), but the music itself does not fully endorse the remark which may simply be a paraphrase of Ockeghem’s description of him as ‘pere de joyeuseté’.

4. Binchois and England.

Several writers suggest that Binchois may have visited England with either Suffolk or Gloucester, but the evidence is to the contrary. Suffolk did not return to England until 1432, by which time Binchois was permanently employed by the Duke of Burgundy. A letter written by Gloucester’s third wife, Jacqueline of Bavaria, from Valenciennes (Rehm, 1957, p.5*, incorrectly states that it was from England) on 23 November 1428 mentions a ‘Binchois’: but the references in Guillaume Benoit’s testimony of 1427 suggest that Binchois was already at the Burgundian court by then.

Despite this, he would have known English music well. Martin le Franc in Le champion des dames (1442) told how Binchois and Du Fay developed a new style by following Dunstaple and taking on the contenance angloise. That the work of Binchois shows no stylistic change comparable to that identified by Besseler (1950) in the work of Du Fay may be merely because Binchois would have come across English music rather earlier than the colleague who was making his career in Italy. The English occupation of France brought with it English singers and English liturgies; if he worked for Suffolk in 1424 Binchois would have had direct contact with English music.

Insular characteristics often appear in his music: clear cases of this are the Sarum antiphon for In exitu Israel, the use of a favoured English text for Ave regina celorum and the general pauses in Gloria laus et honor. In addition the Kyrie feriale and the paired Sanctus–Agnus feriale bear a family resemblance to the Missa ferialis in GB-Lbl Eg.3307; and the section from ‘Visibilium’ to ‘omnia facta sunt’ of his Credo K18 appears identically as the verse of the English carol Pray for us (ed. in MB, iv, 1952, no.106) – though in this last case there may be room for wondering whether the Credo is really by Binchois. Other manifestations of English style in Binchois were tentatively mentioned by Harrison (1958) and have been fully explored by Peter Wright (in Kirkman and Slavin, 2000). The discussion in Kenney (1964) is an interesting attempt to define the Binchois song style and draw parallels with the English carol repertory; but it treats Binchois as though he were a contemporary of Walter Frye, rather than a leader of the preceding generation, and it makes much of the conflicting ascriptions of Binchois’ works to English composers, while omitting to mention those to Du Fay, Grossin and Clibano. Such matters are easily overstressed; and they are extremely difficult to interpret with any precision. Some of the pieces may actually be by English composers and only mistakenly ascribed to Binchois, but it is dangerous to use style as a criterion for attribution in that repertory. Moreover, the city of Bruges, where the Burgundian court often resided, was a vital point of both commercial and cultural interchange between England and the continental mainland; several other composers from that area show bafflingly English details in their style. Some writers refer to the chant paraphrase in the middle voice of two hymns and a Kyrie as being in the English style: indeed it is, but the same is found in two hymns, a Kyrie and a sequence by Du Fay. If these are exclusively English fingerprints – and evidence has yet to be brought to prove it – then they merely confirm Martin le Franc’s testimony that both composers were influenced by English music.

The two works of Binchois which were demonstrably known in England are songs. Vostre tres doulx is mentioned twice in the works of John Skelton, and its tenor appears in two English manuscripts. Dueil angoisseus was used for a mass cycle by Bedyngham who may never have left England; and the song itself has so many characteristics of English style that it would be tempting to doubt his authorship were it not that it is ascribed (as is Vostre tres doulx) in the most authoritative of all Binchois manuscripts and sets a poem by Christine de Pizan. In such cases interchange of ideas between English and continental musicians seems clear, as indeed it was inevitable, even though evidence of its influence on subsequent English music is negligible.

5. Transmission of his works.

Although music of Binchois appears in over 50 manuscripts of the 15th century, the survival of many pieces in only one source implies a substantial loss over the centuries. The very diversity of format in his smaller sacred pieces, for instance, gives reason to suspect that more is buried in the anonymity of Trent codices 90 and 88. In this way history has perhaps favoured Binchois less than Du Fay, who spent much of his active life in that part of Europe where most of the major surviving manuscripts were prepared.

Binchois the songwriter is most strongly represented in GB-Ob Canon.misc.213 (copied probably between 1428 and 1436), which contains nearly half of his secular music, most of it ascribed to him in that source only; since several of the Binchois ascriptions are over erasures it is possible (as Schoop suggested) that the manuscript was revised by somebody close to the composer. I-TRmn 92 and the related manuscript AO 15 are similarly responsible for most of the mass sections while the Magnificat settings and smaller sacred pieces are mostly in MOe α.X.1.11. These four manuscripts, which account for most of what is known of his work, were copied in Italy, far from the Burgundian court where he spent his life.

In the few surviving northern sources he is poorly represented. The Cambrai choirbooks (F-CA 6 and 11) contain only five Binchois works between them. The chansonnier E-E V.III.24 (EscA), written in the north, has excellent readings but unfortunately very few ascriptions, and may thus contain more Binchois songs than we now know (see Kemp, 1990). A northern-looking hand of unusual authority added two Binchois pieces (Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens’ and Magnificat primi toni) to an otherwise Italian manuscript, I-Bu 2216.

Northern origin seems probable for an extremely important source, D-Mbs Mus.Ms.3192, a fragment of four parchment bifolia containing 11 songs, some more complete than others. Eight are ascribed ‘binchois’. For the other three, the facing page which would contain the ascription is missing, though one of them, Margarite fleur de valeur, is ascribed to Binchois elsewhere. The remaining two songs are included below as probable works of Binchois on the grounds that the collection is apparently exclusively of his work. None of the songs in GB-Ob 213 is found in this Munich fragment, which may therefore contain a later repertory, perhaps from 1435–40. Such a hypothesis provides a guide to a chronology of his songs and makes it easier to see how in the early 1450s he could have written more complex works such as Comme femme, Je ne vis oncques, Tout a par moy and the textless rondeau found in the Schedelsches Liederbuch (D-Mbs Cgm 810).

6. Secular works.

Binchois belongs to the first generation of composers for whom the rondeau was the dominant form in secular song. For the rest of the 15th century over three-quarters of the polyphonic song repertory was to be in rondeau form. In Binchois this concentration is matched by a restriction to four- and five-line stanzas, which appear in approximately equal proportions. (Comme femme is his only rondeau with a six-line stanza.) Over three-quarters of his rondeaux have an eight-syllable line. Add to this that all but one of the songs are in triple time, and a picture emerges of a singular restriction in external stylistic features.

Courtly manners and traditions inform not only the musical form but the poetic content. Whereas the songs of his contemporaries include May Day songs, New Year’s Day songs, songs to celebrate an occasion and whimsical spoof songs, those of Binchois almost always remain firmly within the strictest courtly conventions. The Burgundian court was reputed to be the embodiment of courtly tradition; and Binchois supplied what was expected of him. Filles a marier/Se tu t’en marias is well outside this boundary, of course, but it is alone. Otherwise the nearest thing to an infringement is the mildly obscene Je ne pouroye estre joyeux; but even this remains far closer to the court code than do the equivalent songs of Du Fay or Hugo de Lantins.

His use of textures is also more restricted than that of his contemporaries. Many Du Fay songs are clearly designed to be sung by several voices, whereas little of Binchois seems suited to having more than one voice texted. For him a song almost invariably has a discantus which carries the text (sometimes with an untexted introduction), a tenor in longer notes a 5th lower in range, and a contratenor normally in the same range as the tenor but sometimes a little lower. Deviations from this format are rare, just as the textural experiments with overlapping voices so common in Du Fay’s songs do not seem to have appealed so much to Binchois.

Over all his contemporaries Binchois excelled in an effortlessness of melody. This is found not only in the unforgettable grace of De plus en plus or the restrained elegance of Mon cuer chante but more tangibly in the carefully balanced phrases of Adieu jusques je vous revoye. His melodic style is a relatively simple one involving an almost complete absence of hemiola or rhythmic intricacy. Any rhythmic displacement is confined to the lower parts and is normally restricted to a simple hemiola pattern; rhythmic complexity is apt to come only in the coda (as in Vostre tres doulx). His melodies are also characterized by a tendency for iambic or trochaic patterns to underlie apparently more complex rhythmic schemes. Most striking is the extreme economy of material, which led Reese to describe Adieu m’amour as ‘a mere perfunctory stringing together of cadence formulas’, but which when seen in the context of a careful deployment of cadential pitches, a precise balance of phrase lengths, a wide range of passing dissonances and a precisely calculated melodic peak is merely another aspect of the restrained but refined courtly tradition within which Binchois worked.

In line with this melodic perfection is a classic approach to balance. Rehm noted how many of the songs are symmetrical, in terms of their length, about the midpoint cadence. This tendency may be coincidental, and becomes less common in the later works. But in stanzas of five lines Binchois often inserted an extra untexted line as though to restore the balance between the sections. Occasionally, too, it is this added, untexted line that contains the melodic peak of the song (as in Adieu adieu, Jamais tant, Je me recommande). It is as though the poetic form was much less important than the musical design: for it is in Binchois that matching of melodic material sometimes specifically contradicts the rhyme scheme of the poem, as in Amours et souvenir where a poetic scheme of abba is set by music in the form ABA¹B¹. Whatever the reasons, Binchois is one of the few composers from the 15th century in whose music the poetic form of a song cannot always be deduced correctly from the music alone.

So also, there is a concern for keeping musical form free of the shackles imposed by the poetic formes fixes. The untexted prelude and postlude to Je ne pouroye are identical and imply that the music should continue nonstop in cyclic fashion; and the sectional nature of the rondeau form is thereby avoided. Similar short cuts can be found in several other Binchois songs. The idea may have come from the famous ‘circle rondeau’ of Baude Cordier, several of whose works anticipate the style of Binchois. Alongside that phenomenon, and perhaps for the same reasons, is Binchois’ odd approach to tonal centres: most famously in De plus en plus, but also in many of his other songs, the final pitch can be almost impossible to predict from what has gone before (see Slavin in Kirkman and Slavin, 2000).

7. Sacred works.

Neither the chronology nor the stylistic profile of the songs can be extended to apply to the sacred music. As is perhaps inevitable for a composer so deeply committed to fulfilling specific functions, the different categories of his work are markedly different in style. The octave-leap cadence which is found in practically all his songs appears seldom in the sacred music. Major prolation, so common in the early songs, appears but twice in the sacred music, and then just to mark the contrast between sections. With one exception, tempus perfectum diminutum is found only in the multi-sectional sacred works (see Bent, 1996). The precious symmetry of the songs gives way in the mass movements to a discursive structure in which sections are contrasted by changes of texture, range and mensuration.

Before the publication of Kaye’s edition of the sacred music (1991), several writers tended to portray Binchois as primarily a song composer; that view does not correspond to either the relative quantity of his works in the various categories or the greater variety of styles and techniques found in his sacred music. According to such criteria, the mass movements are at the centre of his artistic world. Here there is a more freely articulated flow of melodic and rhythmic invention. The lower parts move more independently: their large melodic leaps, long held notes and attention-seeking patterns contrast strongly with the gentle passive accompaniments to the songs. His Credo settings include some of the longest works of their generation.

No complete cyclic mass by Binchois survives. Even though Feininger and Parris have attempted to deduce cycles from the scattered movements, none can be established with any of the kind of coherence found in the contemporary cycles of Du Fay, Dunstaple, Power, Grossin, Reson, Liebert, Johannes de Lymburgia and Arnold de Lantins, nor even that of the 14th-century cycles. Only pairs survive. These are united not by a common tenor or motto opening, but by more general stylistic features. Moreover, there is room for a reconsideration of how composers in the 1420s planned their pairing of mass movements: three independent manuscripts of high authority (GB-Ob Canon.misc.213, I-Bc Q15, TRmp 92) pair the Gloria K1a with the very different Credo K19; the much more closely matched Credo in the two Cambrai manuscripts and elsewhere in TRmp 92 (all probably after 1440) may well have been written much later to fit in with different attitudes to pairing.

In the mass movements, as in his other sacred pieces, chant is used as a basis for melodic paraphrase but apparently never as a structural foundation in the form of a long-note cantus firmus. (The few long-note tenors, Kyrie feriale, Nove cantum melodie and Veneremur virginem, have not been traced in the Gregorian repertory.) Thus for all their increased freedom in relation to the songs, his mass movements show a conservative manner in their outward shape.

Binchois wrote only one isorhythmic motet in an age when Du Fay and Dunstaple employed the form for their most dazzling technical displays. But the pattern is clear: his sacred music, apart from the Mass Ordinary settings, is mostly simple in style. Expansive writing appears in only two other motets, Veneremur virginem and Domitor Hectoris. The longer votive motet, so popular with the English composers and Johannes de Lymburgia, is almost entirely absent: four of those ascribed to Binchois are more convincingly ascribed elsewhere to English composers, and the fifth, Inter natos mulierum (second setting, K42), leaves many hints that it too is the work of an Englishman. These considerations suggest that the Burgundian court chapel was less festive and ambitious than its emulators in the south and less longwinded in its devotions than the more pretentious English establishments.

Thus also in Binchois there is also a large amount of extremely simple service music in a homophonic style, often based on melodies of the Parisian rite that was favoured at the court of Burgundy. In terms of contrapuntal complexity his Magnificat settings are positively ascetic, even when compared with the relatively simple settings by Du Fay and Dunstaple. In many such pieces fauxbourdon style is the norm, although sometimes the inner part is written out in full and shows a modicum of independence in its figuration. The most appropriate comparison is with similar works by Brassart and Johannes de Lymburgia; and in this context Binchois excels with his declamation rather than his counterpoint. Even with slightly more ambitious works, such as the Sanctus and Agnus feriale, and the Magnificat secundi toni, the counterpoint is severely functional, almost defensive in its manner. Comparison of the two versions of Asperges me shows that his main concerns were declamation and the contour of the chant paraphrase in the discantus.

Characteristic of the composer who so frequently spurned contrapuntal sophistication in favour of a supple word-setting is his tendency to cadence an otherwise regular piece on an unexpected beat. In exitu Israel consistently cadences in a manner that implies a lengthening of the last bar in a triple-time section to four beats; and the same technique is employed in some of his songs.

8. Style.

As a melodist Binchois scarcely had an equal in the 15th century. Ex.1 shows an extreme example of a discantus line shaped from the minimum of material. Its total reliance on conjunct movement is not typical, but it exemplifies a tendency in Binchois’ melodic writing. The manner in which the melodic repetitions are at variance with the text underlay and with the poetic scheme is absolutely characteristic of Binchois.

Details that recur in his work as both fingerprints of his style and characteristics of his individuality include the apparent ‘cross-relations’ effect in exx.2a and 2b as well as the rhythmic figure ‘a’ in ex.3. These occur repeatedly throughout his work; and while they do not predominate in the same way as the underlying trochaic rhythms (seen in exx.2, 3, 4 and 5), their presence has been used convincingly as an aid to identifying possible Binchois works among the anonymous works of the Escorial chansonnier (see Kemp).

Binchois sometimes seems a crude stylist. In ex.4 the parallel 5ths in bars 2–3 and the unisons in bar 9 are similar to many in the work of Dunstaple and Power; but as the opening gesture of a piece they are a little startling, no doubt intentionally. Parallel 5ths are relatively common in Binchois but occur almost exclusively in a single context: when two parts are moving outwards to a 12th (as in ex.4; but for an exception see ex.3, bar 4). In this manner they are still found in Ockeghem’s Requiem (and occasionally even in Josquin); but such progressions were avoided in Du Fay’s three-voice music from his earliest years, and it is in that context that the Binchois style seems strange.

Similarly, his dissonance treatment is usually less systematic and detailed than that of Du Fay. Bockholdt (1960, pp.196ff) gave several instances from the sacred music of Binchois where an easily avoided contrapuntal dissonance is nevertheless retained, and often confirmed by several manuscripts of independent authority. Ex.5 shows a frequently found cadential formula in which the internal logic of a single line is seemingly unperturbed by a momentary dissonance in another part. But perhaps the most successful treatment of dissonance is found in such cases as ex.6, where one of the parts is delayed and resolves upwards in a manner that seems characteristic of Binchois. Any suspicion that Binchois was not aware of the effects of a well-placed dissonance must surely be dispelled in the face of the insinuating manner of this gentle pushing dissonance and many like it. But it is a style that poses problems of understanding and interpretation.

If the details are problematic, the larger form is less so. The interest in overall form manifest in the structural short cuts in the rondeaux and in the mensuration schemes of the larger works is also apparent in the key scheme of several of his songs. Finscher (1958, following a lead from Besseler) showed how several of them deploy their cadences across the final and fifth degree in a manner that makes the concept of functional tonality seem applicable for the first time in Western music.

The time is not yet ripe for a judicious evaluation of Binchois’ position in musical history. Placed alongside Du Fay he inevitably suffers in the face of the inexhaustible range of techniques and ideas in the more cosmopolitan composer; and it is largely in this context that he has received an unkind press from students of 15th-century music. But his work shows no signs of having the same aims as that of Du Fay. The Burgundian court that employed Binchois was by all accounts a home of tradition; and Binchois wrote traditional music for it. His skill lay in how he handled the accepted forms, not in external innovations. The sense of tradition, closely coupled as always with the concept of a paramount ‘good taste’, resulted in a body of music that keeps fairly closely to a middle road, with nothing outrageous or startling; and from a distance this can look both unadventurous and drab. His music can be considered the classic example of the central tradition in the north, and the aims of his contemporaries and followers are most easily seen in terms of how they accepted or rejected the tradition epitomized by Binchois.

psalm and canticle settings

WORKS

3vv unless otherwise stated

Editions:Sieben Trienter Codices … V. Auswahl, ed. R. von Ficker, DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi (1924/R) [F]Polyphonia sacra, ed. C. van den Borren (Burnham, 1932, rev, 2/1962) [B]Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle, ed. J. Marix (Paris, 1937) [M]Die Chansons von Gilles Binchois (1400–1460), ed. W. Rehm, Musikalische Denkmäler, ii (Mainz, 1957) [R no.]The Sacred Music of Gilles Binchois, ed. P. Kaye (Oxford, 1991) [K no.]

LU	Liber usualis

mass movements

mass movements



Title	Sources	Editions

Kyrie ‘angelorum’	D-Mbs 14274, I-AO (twice), Bc Q15, TRmp 87 (twice), 90, 92, TRmp 93	K9, F 48; also ed. in Feininger (1949)
Chant or pairing : Kyrie ‘de angelis’ (LU 37, Mass VIII) in Ct
Remarks : in TRmp 87, f.56v: ‘Illud Kyrie pertinet ad Et in terra’ followed by incipit of Gl K1a (below); it is difficult to justify the pairing
Kyrie ‘apostolorum’, ‘de martiribus’ or ‘brevioris perfecta’	I-AO twice, TRmp 87, 90, TRmd 93	K10, F 49
Chant or pairing : Kyrie ‘Orbis factor’ (LU 46, Mass XI) in T
Remarks : apparently sets only the 5 solo sections of the chant
Kyrie [Cunctipotens]	D-Mbs 14274, I-Bu 2216, TRmp 90, TRmd 93	K11, F 65, M 154
Chant or pairing : Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens’ (LU 25, Mass IV) paraphrased in Dc
Kyrie ‘de domina’ or ‘de beata Maria’	AO, TRmp 87	K12, F 50
Chant or pairing : Kyrie ‘cum jubilo’ (LU 40, Mass IX) in Dc
Remarks : final Ky sections apparently missing
Kyrie ‘feriale’	TRmp 87 (twice), 92	K13, M 158
Chant or pairing : ferial Ky (GS, pl.9*) paraphrased in Dc
Remarks : perhaps forming 3-section cycle with San and Ag feriale (see below)
Kyrie ‘in simplici die’	AO, TRmp 87	K14, M 156
Chant or pairing : T of 1st Ky also used in motet ‘Nove cantum melodie’ (see below); it is chant-like but has not been identified
Remarks : presumably connected with either foundation of Toison d’or (1429) or baptism of Anthoine (1431), though the setting is the simplest of the Binchois Kyries
Paired Gloria and Credo	F-CA 6, 11; GB-Ob 213, I-Bc Q15, TRmp 92 (Gl); F-CA 6, 11, I-TRmp 92 (Cr)	K1a-b; B 53 (Gl); M 169 (Cr)
Chant or pairing : pairing on basis of range, mensuration signs, texture and melodic content; MS authority only in F-CA 6 but implied in CA 11
Remarks : alternates 2vv ‘’ with 3vv ‘’; in GB-Ob 213, I-Bc Q15 and TRmp 92 Gl is paired with Cr K19, which is quite different in style; Gl ed. in Feininger (1949)
Paired Gloria and Credo ‘brevioris imperfecta per medium’	I-AO (twice), TRmp 92 (Gl); AO (Cr)	K2a-b; F 42 (Gl)
Chant or pairing : paired in AO
Remarks : title from index of AO; C throughout
Paired Gloria ‘hominibus’ and Credo ‘factorem’	AO (twice), TRmp 87, 92 (Gl); AO, TRmp 87, 92, F-CA 11 (Cr)	K3a-b; F 55, 58
Chant or pairing : paired in AO and TRmp 87
Remarks : titles from indexes of AO, TRmp 92; texture alternates high Ct with low, and other sections in 4vv, cf Du Fay’s Sanctus ‘papale’
Gloria	TRmp 92	K16, F 44
Gloria	F-CA 11, I-AO, TRmp 87, 92	K17, M 163
Chant or pairing : this and next setting possibly a pair in terms of range, texture, material and tonality; but not of scribal authority
Remarks : alternating 3vv and 2vv
Credo	TRmp 92	K18, M 176
Remarks : alternating 3vv and 2vv; the 2-v music is all in the carol ‘Pray for us’, ed. in MB, iv (1952), no.106
Credo ‘aversi’ or ‘autenti triti irregularis’ (Tinctoris)	F-CA 11, GB-Ob 213, I-Bc Q15, TRmp 92	K19, B 63; also ed. in Feininger (1949)
Chant or pairing : paired in 3 sources with Gl K1a, though not a pair musically
Remarks : alternating 3vv and 2vv; title ‘aversi’ from index of GB-Ob 213; section ‘Qui ex patre Filioque procedit’ cited in Tinctoris, CS, iv, 170
Paired Sanctus and Agnus	I-AO, TRmp 90, 92, TRmd 93 (San); AO, TRmp 90, TRmd 93 (Ag)	K4a-b; F 53, 55
Chant or pairing : paired in 3 sources and in use of chants from Mass XV in Dc
Paired Sanctus and Agnus [for low voices]	AO, TRmp 92 (San); AO, TRmp 92, TRmd 93 (no.1827b, following 1st section of Ag by Ja. de Clibano (Ag); Ag frag. in B-Bc 33346	K5a-b; F 51, 53
Chant or pairing : paired in 2 sources and in use of chants from Mass XVII in Dc
Remarks : 3vv except for word ‘Osanna’ which is 2vv; also ed. in Feininger (1949) as last 2 sections of a Missa ‘de angelis’
Paired Sanctus and Agnus [feriale]	AO, TRmp 92 (San); AO, TRmp 92 (Ag)	K6a-b; M 182 (San); F 50 (Ag)
Chant or pairing : paired in AO and in use of chants from Mass XVIII in Dc
Remarks : fauxbourdon style: perhaps forming 3-section cycle with Ky ‘feriale’ (see above); opening sections closely related to San in GB-Lbl Eg.3307, ed. G. McPeek, The British Museum Manuscript Egerton 3307 (Oxford, 1963), 51
Paired Sanctus and Agnus	AO, TRmp 92, SI-Lnr 71 (San); I-AO, TRmp 88, 92 (3 times), SI-Lnr 71 (Ag)	K7a-b; M 183 (Ag)
Chant or pairing : paired in I-AO and SI-Lnr 71
Remarks : alternating 3vv and 2vv
Paired Sanctus and Agnus	GB-Ob Mus.c.60, I-TRmp 87	K8
Chant or pairing : San setting with words of Ag also underlaid; San chant from Mass IV lightly embellished in Dc
Remarks : Kovarik (1973, pp.451–65) made strong case for Eng. origin, pointing in particular to Eng. chant and duo sections
Sanctus	AO, f.147	K20
Remarks : only use of C mensuration in his sacred music
Agnus Dei	TRmp 92	K21, M 185
Chant or pairing : c.f. similar to Ag of Mass IX in higher T
Remarks : 4vv with middle section in 3vv; 2 voices are marked ‘tenor’, taking turns to function as structural centre; for almost certain matching San identified by Gozzi, see ‘Doubtful works' below

psalm and canticle settings



Title	Editions

In exitu Israel (Ps cxiii)	K40, M 196
Sources : I-Fn 112bis, MOe α.X.1.11
Chant or pairing : tonus peregrinus (LU 160) in Dc; ant, AS, pl.109, in Dc
Remarks : fauxbourdon style; followed by Sarum ant ‘Nos qui vivimus’ and liturgically superfluous ‘Amen’
Magnificat primi toni	K22, M 131
Sources : I-Bu 2216, MOe; Rvat S Pietro B80 (odd vv. only); Fn 112bis (even vv. only); TRmp 90 (even vv. only, rev.)
Chant or pairing : LU 213 elaborated in Dc
Remarks : mostly in loose fauxbourdon style; I-MOe has dual ascription to Du Fay and Binchois; possibly dual authorship
Magnificat secundi toni	K23, M 138
Sources : I-Fn 112bis, MOe; TRmp 90 (even vv. only); Rvat S Pietro B80 (odd vv. only, with 3rd voice added)
Chant or pairing : LU 214 elaborated in Dc
Remarks : verses alternate 2vv and 3vv
Magnificat tercii toni	K24, M 144
Sources : MOe (even vv. only)
Chant or pairing : LU 215 elaborated in Dc
Remarks : loose fauxbourdon style
Magnificat [quarti toni]	K25, M 148
Sources : TRmp 87
Chant or pairing : LU 216 in Dc
Remarks : fauxbourdon style
Magnificat sexti toni ad omnes versus [= rondeau: Mort en merchy]	K26, R 32, M 69
Sources : D-Mbs 14274
Chant or pairing : ? LU 211 elaborated in Dc, but cadencing at the midpoint on E rather than F
Remarks : ?contrafactum; 1 stanza of music only; though unlike 15th-century Mag settings, it is even more unlike a rondeau; ascription ‘Egidius Pinchoys’
Magnificat octavi toni	K27
Sources : I-MOe (even vv. only)
Chant or pairing : LU 218 elaborated in Dc
Te Deum laudamus	K48, M 219
Sources : I-Md 2269 (2vv), MOe, Rvat S Pietro B80, VEcap DCCLXI; E-SE (vv.1–6, 4vv with newly composed contratenor and bassus)
Chant or pairing : LU 1834 in Dc
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon; earliest polyphonic setting apart from 2 frags. in Eng. sources

smaller sacred works



Text	Editions	Chant

A solis ortus cardine	K28, M 188	LU 400 in Ct
Sources : I-AO, TRmp 92, D-Kl 4° mus.259
Form : hymn, Christmas
Remarks : text by Sedulius, Analecta hymnica, l (Leipzig, 1907), 58
Asperges me (i) (verse: Miserere mei)	K29	LU 11 in Dc
Sources : I-AO, TRmp 87, 90, 92 (with discantus altered to setting ii), TRmd 93
Form : ant, Mass Ordinary
Remarks : in TRmp 90 and TRmd 93 it immediately precedes setting ii
Asperges me (ii) (verse: Miserere mei)	K30
Sources : Bc Q15, TRmp 90, TRmd 93, Rvat S Pietro B80
Remarks : an adaptation of K29
Ave corpus Christi carum	K31
Sources : [= rondeau: Adieu mes tres belles amours]
Form : ant ‘Ante Christi corpus carum’, Corpus Christi
Remarks : contrafactum
Ave dulce tu frumentum
Sources : [= ballade: Je loe Amours]
Form : versus, Corpus Christi
Remarks : full poem scattered among 3 such tenor contrafacta on 2 facing pages in D-Bsb 40613
Ave regina celorum	K32, M 189	LU 1864 at beginning only of Dc and T
Sources : I-MOe
Form : ant, BVM
Remarks : text has strong Eng. connections, set also in D-W 628 [W1]. fasc.xi, GB-Ob Selden B26, Lbl Add.5665 and by Frye
Beata nobis gaudia	K33, M 191	Hymn. aest. 22 in Dc
Sources : I-TRmp 92
Form : hymn, Pentecost
Remarks : text, Analecta hymnica, li (Leipzig, 1908), 97
Da pacem Domine	K34, M 192	LU 1867 in Dc
Sources : D-Mbs 14274, I-MOe
Form : ant for peace
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon
Deo gracias	K35, M 192
Sources : TRmp 92
Form : re, Mass Ordinary
Dixit sanctus Philippus	K36, M 193
Sources : MOe
Form : ant, St Philip
Domitor Hectoris Paride	K37, de Van (1948)
Sources : AO
Form : motet, Holy Cross
Remarks : Cobin (1978) proposes 1435, for Cardinal Albergati at Peace of Arras; Strohm (1993) proposes 1429 for 10th anniversary of death of John the Fearless
Felix namque es	K38	not related to LU 1271, and not nearly so intricate as that cited by Hamm and Scott (1972)
Sources : AO, MOe
Form : off, Mass of BVM
Gloria laus et honor (verse: Israel es tu rex)	K39, M 194	GS, pl.83, in Dc; related to LU 586
Sources : TRmp 87
Form : hymn, Palm Sunday
Remarks : refrain 3vv; verses 2vv; text by Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, Analecta hymnica, l, 160
Inter natos mulierum (i)	K41, M 209	AS, pl.573, in Dc; related to LU 1504
Sources : TRmp 87
Form : psalm ant, St John the Baptist
Remarks : fauxbourdon style
Inter natos mulierum (ii)	K42, M 210
Sources : MOe
Form : psalm ant, St John the Baptist
Nos qui vivimus		AS, pl.109, in Dc
Sources : see In exitu Israel
Form : psalm ant, Sunday at Vespers
Nove cantum melodie/Tanti gaude germinis/… enixa meritis [textless] tenor	K43, M 212	T also used in Ky ‘In simplici die’ (see above)
Sources : MOe (most of 1st section missing)
Form : isorhythmic motet
Remarks : for baptism of Anthoine, 1st son of Philip the Good, 18 Jan 1431
‘Passions en nouvelle maniere’
Sources : lost
Remarks : 29 May 1438 Binchois paid for having ‘fait et composé’ this book, to be placed in court chapel
Quem terra pontus	K44, M 218	chant, unidentified, in Ct
Sources : Vm IX 145
Form : hymn, Purification of BVM
Remarks : text, perhaps by Venantius Fortunatus, in Analecta hymnica, l, 86
Rerum conditor respice	K45
Sources : [= ballade: Dueil angoisseus]
Remarks : contrafactum
Salve sancta parens (i) (verse: Sentiant omnes)	K46a	LU 1263
Sources : AO, TRmd 93
Form : int ant, Mass of BVM
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon
Salve sancta parens (ii)	K46b
Sources : AO, TRmp 90, TRmd 93 (twice)
Remarks : 3vv with discantus identical with previous setting; verse and doxology identical with setting i
Sancti Dei omnes	K47, M 218	AS, pl.569, in Dc closest version
Sources : MOe
Form : psalm ant, All Saints
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon
Ut queant laxis	K49, M 226	as set by Du Fay in CMM, v, 61
Sources : D-Mbs 14274, I-Vm IX 145
Form : hymn, St John the Baptist
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon; text, by Paulus Diaconus, in Analecta hymnica, l, 120
Veneremur virginem	K50	long-note T c.f., unidentified
Sources : AO
Form : seq, Assumption of BVM
Veni Creator Spiritus	K51	LU 885 in Dc
Sources : TRmp 92
Form : hymn, Pentecost
Remarks : 2vv + fauxbourdon; also ed. in DTÖ, liii, Jg.xxvii (1940/R), 89
Virgo rosa venustatis	K52
Sources : [= rondeau: C’est assez]
Remarks : contrafactum
Vox de celo ad Anthonium	K53, M 231
Sources : MOe
Form : ant, St Anthony, hermit

rondeaux

Sources in this and following 3 sections cited only to note unica or to make adjustments to the otherwise complete listing in R.



Text	Edition

Adieu adieu mon joyeulx souvenir	R 1
Remarks : ascription in GB-Ob 213 over an erasure; 2 versions of Ct
Adieu jusques je vous revoye	R 2
Remarks : cited twice in Molinet
Adieu m’amour et ma maistresse	R 3
Adieu ma dulce [no more text]	R 4
Source observations : D-Mbs 14274 only
Adieu mes tres belles amours [= motet: Ave corpus Christi carum]	R 5
Source observations : also 3 intabulations in D-Mbs 3725 (Buxheim)
Remarks : cited in Molinet; only Dc and T are by Binchois since the Ct is different in each source and entirely omitted in the most authoritative source, E-E V.III.24
Ainsi que a la foiz m’y souvient
Source observations : lost
Remarks : possibly composed in 1424, see Desplanque (1865); the context does not specify whether the poem was set or written by Binchois
Amoureux suy et me vient toute joye	R 6
Amours et qu’as tu en pensé	R 7
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Amours et souvenir de celle	R 8
Source observations : Ob 213 only
Ay douloureux disant helas	R 9
Source observations : Ob 213 only
Bien puist [no more text]	R 10
Source observations : F-Sm 222 only
C’est assez pour morir de dueil [= motet: Virgo rosa venustatis]	R 11
Comme femme desconfortée	R 56
Remarks : for further sources and later works based on it, see Fallows (1999); authorship suggested as doubtful in Atlas (1975)
De plus en plus se renouvelle	R 12
Source observations : ascription in GB-Ob 213 over an erased ascription to Arnold de Lantins
Remarks : cited in Molinet; T used for mass by Ockeghem, in which Henze (1968) found the numerological acrostic ‘Egidius de Binche’
Depuis le congié que je pris	CMM, lxxvii (1980), 6
Source observations : D-Mbs 3192, E-E V.III.24
Remarks : attrib. on the basis of presence in Mbs 3192, f.13. of the 2 lower parts; facing verso probably contained ascription to Binchois, as do all surviving versos in this MS
En regardant vostre tres doulx maintieng	R 13
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Remarks : text perhaps by Alain Chartier; first stanza set to related music, 4vv, in c1528⁹, ed. in CMM, xciii/4, no.3
En sera il mieulx a vostre cuer	R 14
Source observations : I-Rvat Urb. lat. 1411 only
Esclave puist yl devenir	R 15
Source observations : only intabulation in D-Mbs 3725 is no.102
Remarks : cited twice in Molinet, basis of mass-motet cycle in I-TRmp 88
Helas que poray je plus faire	R 16
Source observations : D-Mbs 3192 only
Remarks : final text line illegible
Jamais tant que je vous revoye (i)	R 17a
Source observations : F-Pn n.a.fr.6771 only; text also in Jardin de plaisance, f.92v
Remarks : C mensuration; anon.
Jamais tant que je vous revoye (ii)	R 17
Remarks : mensuration; more florid reworking of R 17 A
Je me recommande humblement	R 18
Je ne fay tousjours que penser	R 19
Remarks : cited in Molinet
Je ne pouroye estre joyeux	R 20
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Remarks : earlier ascription to ‘Ar. de Lantins’ erased and replaced by one to Binchois
Je ne vis oncques le pareille	R 57
Source observations : ascription not in D-Mbs 810 but in F-Pn 57
Remarks : contrary ascription to Du Fay; sung at ‘Banquet du voeu’ in Lille (1454); Basiron’s virelai ‘Nul ne l’a telle’ contains musical and textual citation of opening of Dc; for many later quotations, see Fallows (1999)
Joyeux penser et souvenir	R 21
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
La merchi ma dame et Amours	R 22
L’amy de ma dame est venu	R 23
Source observations : I-TRmp 87 only
Remarks : T related to basse danse ‘Maistresse’, only 1 stanza of text survives
Les tres doulx ieux du viaire ma dame	R 24
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Remarks : ascription over an erasure
Liesse m’a mandé salut	R 25
Source observations : ascription not in E-E V.III.24 but in GB-Ob 213
Remarks : contrary ascription to Grossin
Ma léesse a changié son non	R 26
Source observations : Ob 213 only
Margarite fleur de valeur	R 27
Remarks : ?for Margaret of Burgundy (d 1441)
Mes yeulx ont fait mon cuer porter	R 28
Source observations : Ob 213 only
Mon cuer chante joyeusement	R 29
Source observations : add text sources listed in Fallows (1999); music also in D-Bk 78 C 28
Remarks : text perhaps by Charles d’Orléans; cited in Molinet
Mon doulx espoir tres desireux las [no more text]	R 30
Source observations : I-Rvat Urb.lat.1411 only
Mon seul et souverain desir	R 31
Source observations : text listed by Rehm in D-Bk 78 B 17 is a different poem
Remarks : clefless, see Dahlhaus (1964)
Mort en merchy [no more text] [= Magnificat sexti toni]	R 32
Source observations : Mbs 14274 only
Remarks : if this is a rondeau it is one with a 3-line stanza, otherwise extremely rare in 15th-century song
Nous vous verens bien Malebouche	R 33
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Remarks : text in Rehm can be completed from Jardin de plaisance
Plains de plours et gemissemens	R 34
Remarks : ascription over an erased ascription to A. de Lantins
Pour prison ne pour maladie	R 35
Source observations : for text sources, see Fallows (1999)
Remarks : text perhaps by Alain Chartier; cited twice in Molinet; Pullois, ‘Pour prison’, includes direct citations
Qui veut mesdire si mesdie	R 36
Source observations : F-Pn n.a.fr.6771 only; but also intabulated in D-Mbs 3725 (Buxheim) and text in F-Pn fr.1719
Quoy que Dangier, Malebouche et leur gent	R 37
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Rendre me vieng a vous sauve la vie	R 38
Source observations : text also in A-Wn 2619
Remarks : acrostic: ROBIN HOQVEREL (not Robin Verel, as in Marix and Reese); text perhaps by Chartier
Se je souspire, plains et pleure	R 39
Source observations : F-Pn n.a.fr.6771 only
Se j’eusse un seul peu d’esperanche	R 40
Se la belle n’a le voloir	R 41
Source observations : ascription not in E-E V.III.24 but in I-TRmp 87
Seule esgaree de tout joieulx plaisir	R 42
Source observations : ascription not in E-E V.III.24 but in I-Rvat Urb.lat.1411
Remarks : mensuration: C; only Binchois song not in triple time; citations in Brown (1963), 274
Tant plus ayme tant plus suy mal amé	R 43
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Tout a par moy afin qu’on ne me voye	R 58
Remarks : 2 contrary ascriptions to Walter Frye; cited twice in Molinet; to later refs. in Fallows (1999), add text citation in ballade ‘Ung jour allant’, in Jardin de plaisance, f.202r
Toutes mes joyes sont estaintes	R 44
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Tristre plaisir et douleureuse joie	R 45
Source observations : Ob 213 only; ed. not in Early English Harmony but in OHM, ii/2 (1905), 177
Remarks : text by Alain Chartier and sung by Jean Régnier on his release from prison in 1433; T related to basse danse ‘Triste plaisir’ but probably not to monophonic rondeau in F-Pn 9346; basis of Ernst Pepping’s ‘Zwei Orchesterstücke über eine Chanson de Binchois’ (1959)
Vostre alee me desplaist tant	R 46
Vostre tres doulx regart plaisant	R 47
Source observations : T alone also in GB-Lbl Harl.1512, f.2; source in Lbl 5665 is 2vv using only the tenor of Binchois, text in Lbl Lansdowne 380
Remarks : cited twice in garbled form in the work of John Skelton
[textless]	—
Source observations : D-Mbs cgm 810, f.71v-72r, ‘Binzois’
Remarks : normally read as ‘Buczois’ and attrib. Busnois

ballades



Text	Edition

Adieu mon amoureuse joye	R 48
Source observations : text for 1st stanza also in Namur, Archives de l’Etat, Reg. aux transports, 12, f.320
Amours merchi de trestout mon pooir	R 49
Source observations : complete in both sources
Remarks : only 2 stanzas of text survive
Dueil angoisseus rage demeseurée [= motet: Rerum conditor respice]	R 50
Source observations : Rehm printed 2 versions: (i) 3vv, (ii) 4vv, which seems to be the earliest state; he omitted what seems to be the latest and most widely distributed version, found in most sources, ed. E. Droz and G. Thibault, Poètes et musiciens du XVe siècle (Paris, 1924), where completion of poem is also found
Remarks : text by Christine de Pizan; for further sources and later citations, see Fallows (1999)
J’ay tant de deul que nul homs peut avoir	R 51
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only
Je loe Amours et ma dame mercye [= versus: Ave dulce tu frumentum]	R 52
Source observations : also in fragment owned by Stanley Boorman
Remarks : only 2 stanzas of text survive; intabulations discussed in Funck (1933); for later arrangements and citations, see Fallows (1999)
Ma dame que j’ayme et croy	R 53
Source observations : D-Mbs 3192 only
Remarks : only 1 stanza of text survives; perhaps connected with Croy family, powerful in Burgundian court
Mesdisans m’ont cuidié desfaire	R 54
Source observations : GB-Ob 213 only

virelai

… Et osci [only the 2 lower parts extant]

Slavin (1987), after p.143

D-Mbs 3192, f.19

facing verso probably contained ascription to Binchois, as do all surviving versos in this MS

combinative chanson

Filles a marier ne vous mariez ja/[Se tu t’en marias]

R 55

I-Rvat Urb.lat.1411 only

4vv; form aabb; text and later history of the tenor in Picker (1965); the 3 other parts are imitative and should probably all carry the text, frag. in source, but more complete in different setting in E-Sc 5–1–43; basse danse ‘Filles a marier’ unrelated musically

doubtful works



Title	Source or editions

Mass cycle with troped Kyrie ‘Omnipotens Pater’	B-Br 5557
Remarks : ed. in EECM, xxxiv (1989); now ascribed ‘G. Binchois’ though as recently as 1844 it read ‘Jean Plourmel’, see Staehelin (1973); Eng. style in fasc. devoted to Eng. work, musically reminiscent of Walter Frye, though the more intricate melismatic writing with smaller note values suggests an even later date, perhaps from the 1470s
Missa ‘Pax vobis ego sum’ (Gl and Cr only), 5vv	I-TRmp 88
Remarks : ed. in Monumenta polyphoniae liturgicae, 1st ser., ii (Rome, 1952), attrib. Binchois or Eloy; no reasons given
Gloria	K54, F 46
Remarks : contrary ascription to Ja. de Clibano in I-AO, where it appears with matching Cr and Ag, the latter also ascribed to Clibano
Gloria	K15, M 160
Remarks : in a style otherwise unknown in the work of Binchois and showing strong influence of Ciconia; Bockholdt indentified its pair as the Cr (F 25) ascribed in I-TRmp 92 to ‘Jo Bodoil’ and elsewhere to ‘Anglicanus’ and ‘Anglicus’; perhaps a scribe misread a hastily written ‘Bodoil’ as the more familiar ‘Binchois’
Sanctus, 4vv, with trope ‘Marie filius’	TRmp 90, TRmd 93
Remarks : ed. M. Gozzi in Kirkman and Slavin (2000), where it is shown that this must be the pair to the 4-v Agnus Dei K21
Magnificat sexti toni	CMM, i/5, 75
Remarks : ascribed variously to Dunstaple and Du Fay, but in I-TRmp 92 with erased ascription to Binchois; normally considered to be by Du Fay
Alma Redemptoris mater	MB, viii, no.40
Remarks : ascribed variously to Dunstaple and Leonel; I-Bc Q15 has ascription to Binchois that is crossed out and replaced by ‘Leonelle’ in another hand
Beata Dei genitrix	K56, MB, viii, no.41
Remarks : ascribed in D-Mbs and I-MOe to Dunstaple, in AO with illegible ascription and in Bc Q15 to Binchois, there might just be an argument for accepting the Binchois attrib. on stylistic grounds
Beata mater	K55, MB, viii, no.42
Remarks : in TRmp 87 an earlier Dunstaple ascription is erased and replaced by one to Binchois; nevertheless ascriptions to Dunstaple in I-MOe and D-Mbs 14274 seem convincing, especially since the piece appears (anonymously) in the insular MS GB-Ob Selden B26
Beata viscera	I-AO, f.10
Remarks : comm; ed. in Cobin, no.10; indirectly proposed in Dangel-Hofmann (1975), 113, as part of a BVM proper cycle with K46 (int) and K38 (off)
Quam pulchra es	MB, viii, no.44
Remarks : although 3 authoritative MSS ascribe to Dunstaple, I-AO ascribes ‘Egidius’; in view of the excellence of the piece the only Egidius who comes into question would be Binchois, and many features in it are not all unlike his style; on the other hand, to accept this would seriously confuse most received opinion on Eng. style in the 15th century
Virgo prefulgens	K57, M 227
Remarks : in I-TRmp 92 1st 30 bars of discantus are copied and ascribed ‘Winchois’; but the scribe abandoned the piece; there is no reason to disbelieve ascription to Sandley in I-MOe; see Standley
Adieu ma tresbelle maistresse	CMM, lxxxvi (1980), 16
Remarks : attrib. on stylistic grounds in Kemp (1990); Slavin (1987) sees the trimmed ascription in I-TRmp as being to Binchois; text perhaps by Charles d’Orléans, see Fallows (1999)
Ce moys de may	CMM, i/6, 59
Remarks : ascribed in GB-Ob 213 to Du Fay; Kiesewetter, knowing only the anon. F-Pn 6771 source, attrib. Binchois on basis of line ‘Carissime Du Fay vous en prie’ and of assumption that Binchois was Du Fay’s closest friend; more recent scholarship amends the line and agrees that this must be genuine Du Fay; but Kiesewetter’s publication as Binchois’ in Schicksale und Beschaffenheit (1841) represented the only published ‘Binchois’ for Fétis and Ambros and until Riemann’s Sechs bisher nicht gedruckte dreistimmige Chansons (1892)
Je cuidoye estre conforté	R 60
Remarks : attrib. in Rehm (1952), 144–5
Va tost mon amoureux desir	R 59
Remarks : text by Charles d’Orléans: attrib. by Marix (1939), 188, and Rehm (1952), 144–5
Songs in GB-Ob 213	CMM, ix/4
Remarks : Reaney tentatively attrib. the following rondeaux: Dame que j’ay lointamp servie, Espris d’amours l’autre jour, Faisons bonne chiere et lie, Soyés loyal a vo povoir, Veuillés hoster de che dangier
Songs in E-E V.III.24	CMM, lxxviii (1980)
Remarks : Kemp (1990), 3–64, attrib. the following on the basis of style: Adieu ma tresbelle maistresse, Bien viengnant ma tres redoubtee, De ceste joieuse advenue, Je ne porroye plus durer, Je vous salue ma maistresse, La tresorire de bonté, L’une tresbelle clere lune, Mon coeur avoec vous s’en va; more tentatively he attrib.: Bien viegnés mon prinche gracieux, Je n’atens plus de resconfort, L’onneur de vous dame sans per, Tous desplaisir m’en sont, Va t’en mon desir gracieux

1. Origins and early history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: biographical

HarrisonMMB; ReeseMR

A. Desplanque: ‘Projet d’assassinat de Philippe le Bon par les anglais (1424–1426)’, Mémoires couronnés et autres mémoires publiés par l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, xxxiii (1865–7), 3–78; pubd separately (Brussels, 1867)

L. Devillers, ed.: Cartulaire des comtes de Hainaut (Brussels, 1881–96)

A. Pinchart: Archives des arts, sciences et lettres, iii (Ghent, 1881) [with first full biographical study]

G. Decamps and A.Wins, eds.: Description abrégée des villes … du Hainaut, Societé des bibliophiles de Mons, Publications [xxix] (Mons, 1885) [Fr. trans. of Lat. orig. (1534)]

F.X. Haberl: ‘Wilhelm du Fay’, VMw, i (1885), 397–530

E. Matthieu: Biographie du Hainaut (Enghien, 1901–5)

A. Demeuldre: Le chapitre de Saint-Vincent à Soignies, ses dignitaires et ses chanoines (Soignies, 1902); also as Annales du Cercle archéologique du canton de Soignies, iii (1902)

A. Demeuldre: Les obituaires de la collégiale de Saint-Vincent à Soignies (Soignies, 1904); also as Annales du Cercle archéologique du canton de Soignies, ii/2 (1904)

C. Rutherford: ‘The Forgeries of Guillaume Benoit’, English Historical Review, xxx (1915), 216–33

E. Closson: ‘L’origine de Gilles Binchois’, RdM, v (1924), 149–51

E. Dahnk: ‘Musikausübung an den Höfen von Burgund und Orléans während des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, xxv (1935), 184–215

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg, 1939)

H. van der Linden: Itinéraires de Philippe le Bon, duc de Bourgogne (1419–1467), et de Charles, comte de Charolais (1433–1467) (Brussels, 1940)

A. Dewitte: ‘De geestelijkheid van de Brugse Lieve-Vrouwkerk in de 16e eeuw’, Handelingen van het genootschap voor geschiedenis gesticht onder de benaming Société d’émulation te Brugge, cvii (1970), 100–35

C. Wright: ‘Dufay at Cambrai: Discoveries and Revisions’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 175–229, esp. 179–80, 203–4

M. Schuler: ‘Neues zur Biographie von Gilles Binchois’, AMw, xxxiii (1976), 68–78

C. Wright: Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1354–1419: a Documentary Study (Henryville, PA, 1979)

R. Strohm: Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985, 2/1990)

b: iconographical

E. Panofsky: ‘Who is Jan van Eyck’s “Tymotheos”?’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xii (1949), 80–90

E. Panofsky: Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, MA, 1953), i, 196–7

J. Kreps: Gilles de Binche, 1460–1960 (Leuven, 1960); also in Hainaut-tourisme, lxxxiii (Mons, 1960), 13, Musica sacra ‘Sancta sancte’, lxi (1960), 112

R. Mullally: ‘The So-called Hawking Party at the Court of Philip the Good: a Study of a Burgundian Primitive of 1431’, Gazette des beaux-arts, lxxxix (1977), 109–12

W. Wood: ‘A New Identification of the Sitter in Jan van Eyck’s Tymotheos Portrait’, Art Bulletin, lx (1978), 650–54

T. Seebass: ‘Prospettive dell’iconografia musicale: considerazioni di un medievalista’, RIM, xviii (1983), 67–86 [with discussion of the ‘Tymotheos’ portrait]

E.E. Lowinsky: ‘Jan van Eyck’s Tymotheos: Sculptor or Musician? with an Investigation of the Autobiographic Strain in French Poetry from Rutebeuf to Villon’, Studi musicali, xiii (1984), 33—105

T. Seebass: ‘Lady Music and her protegés: from Musical Allegory to Musicians’ Portraits’, MD, xlii (1988), 23–61 [with discussion of the ‘Tymotheos’ portrait]

D. Jansen: ‘Jan van Eycks Selbsbildnis’, Pantheon, xlvii (1989), 36–48

J. Paviot: ‘The Sitter for Jan van Eyck's Léal Souvenir’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lviii (1995), 210–15

L. Campbell: National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth-century Netherlandish Schools (London, 1998), 218–33

c: stylistic

H. Riemann: Introduction to Sechs bisher nicht gedruckte dreistimmige Chansons von Gilles Binchois (Wiesbaden, 1892)

R. Ficker: ‘Die frühen Messenkompositionen der Trienter Codices’, SMw, xi (1924), 3–58, esp. 20–27

H. Funck: ‘Eine Chanson von Binchois im Buxheimer Orgel- und Locheimer Liederbuch’, AcM, v (1933), 3–13 [Je loe Amours]

W. Gurlitt: Preface to Gilles Binchois: Sechzehn weltliche Lieder zu drei Stimmen, Cw, xxii (1933/R)

E. Dannemann: Die spätgotische Musiktradition in Frankreich und Burgund vor dem Auftreten Dufays (Strasbourg, 1936/R)

L. Feininger: Introduction to G. Binchois: Missa de angelis, Documenta polyphoniae liturgicae, 1st ser., v (Rome, 1949)

H. Besseler: Bourdon und Fauxbourdon: Studien zum Ursprung der niederländischen Musik (Leipzig, 1950, rev., enlarged 2/1974 by P. Gülke)

W. Rehm: Das Chansonwerk von Gilles Binchois (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1952); extracts pubd in Musikalische Denkmäler, ii (1957)

L. Finscher: Review of W. Rehm, ed.: Die Chansons von Gilles Binchois, Musikalische Denkmäler, ii (Mainz, 1957), Mf, xi (1958), 113

R. Bockholdt: Die frühen Messenkompositionen von Guillaume Dufay (Tutzing, 1960), esp. chap.6: ‘Die Messenkompositionen von Dufay und von Binchois’, 184–204

Roland-Manuel, ed.: Histoire de la musique, i (Paris, 1960) [sections on secular music by G. Thibault, pp.897–900, and on sacred music by L. Schrade, pp.971–4]

J.A. Boucher: The Religious Music of Gilles Binchois (diss., Boston U., 1963)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Zu einer Chanson von Binchois’, Mf, xvii (1964), 398–9 [Mon seul et souverain desir]

S.W. Kenney: Walter Frye and the ‘Contenance Angloise’ (New Haven, CT, 1964), 176ff

A. Parris: The Sacred Works of Gilles Binchois (diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1965) [incl. edn]

M. Picker: ‘The Cantus Firmus in Binchois’s Files a marier’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 235–6

C.J. Maas: Geschiedenis van het meerstemmig Magnificat tot omstreeks 1525 (Groningen, 1967)

G. Reaney: Preface to Early Fifteenth-century Music, iv: Anonymous Chansons from the Ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 213, CMM, xi/4 (1969)

E. Kovarik: Mid Fifteenth-Century Polyphonic Elaborations of the Plainchant Ordinarium Missae (diss., Harvard U., 1973), esp. 324–58

A. Atlas: The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, CG.XIII.27) (New York, 1975–6), 183ff [on Comme femme]

F. Dangel-Hofmann: Der mehrstimmige Introitus in Quellen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1975), 59ff, 97ff, 237ff [on Salve sancta parens]

S. Burstyn: ‘Power’s Anima mea and Binchois’ De plus en plus: a Study in Musical Relationships’, MD, xxx (1976), 55–72

W.H. Kemp: ‘“Dueil angoisseus” and “Dulongesux”’, EMc, vii (1979), 520–21

W.H. Kemp: ‘“Votre trey dowce”: a Duo for Dancing’, ML, lx (1979), 37–44

D. Slavin: Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment and the Two Layers of Escorial A (diss., Princeton U., 1987)

R.D. Reynolds: ‘A Gloria–Credo by Gilles Binchois’, MD, xlii (1988), 63–71

J. Snoj: ‘Dva lista z Binchoisovo i brezimno glasbo 15. stoletja v Ljubljanski Narodni i Univerzitetni Knjižnici’ [Two 15th-century leaves of Binchois and anonymous music in the Public and University Library in Ljubljana], Muzikološki zbornik, xiv (1988), 5–20

C. Dahlaus: ‘Bitonalität oder Oktatonik? Divergierende Vorzeichen in den Chansons von Binchois’, Festschrift Wolfgang Rehm zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. D. Berke and H. Heckmann (Kassel, 1989), 15–21

D. Slavin: ‘Genre, Final and Range: Unique Sorting Procedures in a Fifteenth-century Chansonnier’, MD, xliii (1989), 115–39

D. Fallows: ‘Embellishment and Urtext in the Fifteenth-century Song Repertories’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, xiv (1990), 59–85 [Jamais Tant]

W.H. Kemp: Burgundian Court Song in the Time of Binchois: the Anonymous Chansons of El Escorial, MS V.III.24 (Oxford, 1990)

R. Semmens: ‘Music and Poetry in a Chanson by Gilles Binchois’, Beyond the Moon: Festschrift for Luther Dittmer, ed. B. Gillingham and P. Merkley (Ottawa, 1990), 307–21 [Amoureux suy]

M. Staehelin: ‘Geistlich und Weltlich in einem deutschen Fragment mit mehrstimmiger Musik aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Augsburger Jb für Musikwissenschaft, vii (1990), 7–17

C. Berger: ‘Hexachord und Modus: drei Rondeaux von Gilles Binchois’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, xvi (1992), 71–87

D. Slavin: ‘Questions of Authority in some Songs by Binchois’, JRMA, cxvii (1992), 22–61

D. Slavin: ‘Some Distinctive Features of Songs by Binchois: Cadential Voice Leading and the Articulation of Form’, JM, x (1992), 342–61

D. Fallows: review of P. Kaye: The Sacred Music of Gilles Binchois, in EMc, xxi (1993), 282–4

R. Strohm: The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), 181–96

A. Kirkman and P.Weller: ‘Binchois’s texts’, ML, lxxvii (1996), 566–96

A. Kirkman and D.Slavin, eds.: Binchois Studies (Oxford, 2000)

d: contextual

J., J.F.R. and C. Stainer: Dufay and his Contemporaries (London, 1898/R)

E. Droz and A.Piaget, eds.: Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique (c1501) (Paris, 1910–25)

W. Gurlitt: ‘Burgundische Chanson- und deutsche Liedkunst des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Musikwissenschaftlicher Kongress: Basle 1924, 153–76

N. Dupire, ed.: Les faictz et dictz de Jean Molinet (Paris 1936–9)

C.W.H. Lindenburg: Het leven en de werken van Johannes Regis (Amsterdam, 1939)

C. van den Borren: Etudes sur le quinzième siècle musical (Antwerp, 1941)

G. de Van: ‘A Recently Discovered Source of Early Fifteenth Century Polyphonic Music: the Aosta Manuscript’, MD, ii (1948), 5–74

P. Gülke: Liedprinzip und Polyphonie in der burgundischen Chanson des 15. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1958); abstract in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig: Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, ix/2 (1959–60), 309

H. Besseler: ‘Umgangsmusik und Darbietungsmusik im 16. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xvi (1959), 21–43 esp. 28

E. Trumble: Fauxbourdon: an Historical Survey (New York, 1959)

H.M. Brown: Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, MA, 1963)

E.H. Sparks: Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963), 51ff, 67, 114–15

C. Hamm: A Chronology of the Works of Guillaume Dufay based on a Study of Mensural Practice (Princeton, NJ, 1964)

W. Marggraf: Tonalität und Harmonik in den französischen Chansons vom Tode Machauts bis zum frühen Dufay (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1964)

W. Marggraf: ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Oktavsprungkadenz’, Mf, xviii (1965), 399–400

P. Gossett: ‘Techniques of Unification in Early Cyclic Masses and Mass Pairs’, JAMS, xix (1966), 205–31

M. Henze: Studien zu den Messenkompositionen Johannes Ockeghems (Berlin, 1968), 197ff

H. Schoop: Entstehung und Verwendung der Handschrift Oxford Bodleian Library, Canonici misc. 213 (Berne, 1971)

C. Hamm and A.B.Scott: ‘A Study and Inventory of the Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.X.1.11 (ModB)’, MD, xxvi (1972), 101–43

M. Staehelin: ‘Möglichkeiten und praktische Anwendung der Verfasserbestimmung an anonym überlieferten Kompositionen der Josquin-Zeit’, TVNM, xxiii/2 (1973), 79–91

R.D. Reynolds: The Evolution of Notational Practices in Manuscripts Between 1400–1450 (diss., Ohio State U., 1974)

D. Fallows: ‘Two More Dufay Songs Reconstructed’, EMc, iii (1975), 358–60 [on Dufay’s déploration for Binchois and their possible meeting at Chambéry]

T.R. Ward: ‘The Structure of the Manuscript Trent 92–1’, MD, xxix (1975), 127–47

M.W. Cobin: The Aosta Manuscript: a Central Source of Early-Fifteenth-Century Sacred Polyphony (diss., New York U., 1978)

T.J. McGary: ‘Partial Signature Implications in the Escorial Manuscript V.III.24’, MR, xl (1979), 77–89

W.H. Kemp: Introduction to Anonymous Pieces in the Chansonnier El Escorial, Biblioteca del Monasterio Cod. V. III. 24, CMM, lxxvii (1980)

K. Berger: Musica Ficta (Cambridge, 1981)

M.J. Bloxam: A Survey of Late Medieval Service Books from the Low Countries: Implications for Sacred Polyphony, 1460–1520 (diss., Yale U., 1987)

S. Meyer-Eller: Musikalischer Satz und Überlieferung von Messensätzen des 15. Jahrhunderts: die Ordinariumsvertonungen der Handschriften Aosta 15 und Trient 87/92 (Munich, 1989)

S.E. Saunders: The Dating of the Trent Codices from their Watermarks (New York, 1989)

P. Wright: The Related Parts of Trent, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, MSS 87(1374) and 92(1379) (New York, 1989)

L. Curtis: Music Manuscripts and their Production in Fifteenth-Century Cambrai (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1991)

D. Slavin: ‘In Defense of “Heresy”: Manuscript Evidence for the a cappella Performance of Early 15th-Century Songs’, EMc, xix (1991), 179–90

A.M. Busse Berger: Mensuration and Proportion Signs (Oxford, 1993)

A. Blachly: Mensuration and Tempo in 15th-Century Music: Cut Signatures in Theory and Practice (diss., Columbia U., 1995), esp. 336–53

D. Fallows: Introduction to Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Canon.Misc.213 (Chicago, 1995)

M. Bent: ‘The Early Use of the Sign ’, EMc, xxiv (1996), 199–225

T. Brothers: Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson (Cambridge, 1997)

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999)

Binder, Carl

(b Vienna, 29 Nov 1816; dVienna, 5 Nov 1860). Austrian composer. He spent almost his entire career as a Kapellmeister at Viennese suburban theatres, writing a large number of scores for Possen (farces) and Singspiele, most of which did no more than satisfy the expectations of the audiences of his day. He did, however, achieve a few major successes, most notably with the scores to seven of Nestroy’s plays written between 1851 and 1859, and in his instrumentation (from pirated vocal scores) of Offenbach’s operettas which reached Vienna in the late 1850s. From 1840 to 1851 he wrote over 60 scores for the Theater in der Josefstadt, the first being to F. Blum’s Die Tochter des Räubers (7 July 1840) and the most successful probably being that to J. Nikola’s Der letzte Zwanziger (12 September 1850), which was performed first at the Hernals Arena and altogether 111 times. Of approximately 80 works written by Binder between 1849 and 1860, those most frequently performed at the Carltheater (formerly the Theater in der Leopoldstadt) included the scores to Nestroy’s Kampl (1852) and Umsonst (1857), Kaiser’s Verrechnet (1851) and the ‘Charakterbild’ Die Frau Wirtin (1856), and Kalisch’s Ein gebildeter Hausknecht (1858). The only score truly to outlive its composer was for Nestroy’s parody Tannhäuser (1857), which enjoyed 75 performances in the Carltheater between 1857 and 1860 and has been revived successfully (and recorded) in modern times.

The recent discovery of a letter (now in A-Wst) from Binder to his colleague A. E. Titl has resolved some longstanding uncertainties about the middle years of Binder’s career. Sent from Pressburg and dated 15 December 1847, this letter lists nine operas Binder had conducted at the theatre there in two months since his arrival, and shows that he considered he had been unfairly dismissed from his post at the Theater an der Wien by its director, Franz Pokorny. It is unclear when he returned to Vienna, but he mentions plans to perform Titl’s opera Das Wolkenkind in Pressburg for the latter’s benefit evening, 15 January 1848. Another recent discovery indicates that Binder was elected an honorary member of the Dom-Musik-Verein in Salzburg on 10 April 1854. The music of Binder's vocal numbers for Nestroy's plays is included in Johann Nestroy: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (ed. J. Hein and others, Vienna, 1977–); the full vocal score of the Tannhäuser parody is in Stücke, xxxvi (ed. P. Branscombe).

Binder’s son Karl, a promising musician, died in Vienna in 1870, at the age of 27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (P. Branscombe) [incl. list of stage works]; MCL; RiemannL12

F. Hadamowsky: Das Theater in der Wiener Leopoldstadt 1781–1860 (Vienna, 1934)

F. Hadamowsky and H. Otte: Die Wiener Operette (Vienna, 1947)

A. Bauer: Das Theater in der Josefstadt zu Wien (Vienna, 1957)

PETER BRANSCOMBE

Binder, Christlieb Siegmund

(b Dresden, bap. 29 July 1723; d Dresden, 1 Jan 1789). German composer. The son of an oboist, he probably received music instruction as a Dresden choirboy from Pantaleon Hebenstreit, to whom he was referred by the court in 1742 to learn his teacher’s dulcimer-like invention, the pantaleon. It was as a pantaleonist that he became a court musician in 1751, but he also performed as a harpsichordist. In 1764 he became second organist to Peter August in the court’s Catholic chapel, and he was first organist from August’s death in 1787; both were active as harpsichordists in Dresden’s public musical life.

Most of Binder’s career took place in the reign of Friedrich August III, an amateur musician, and his compositions reflect the court’s active interest in keyboard and chamber music. His extant works show a mixture of Empfindsamkeit and earlier Baroque elements, although they require greater virtuosity. The intense slow movements and the concentrated development of thematic material echo the style of C.P.E. Bach, but the keyboard figuration and choice of genres hark back to J.S. Bach; similarly, exact gradations of dynamics are interspersed with Baroque echo effects. Although Binder was a prolific composer, his influence was virtually confined to Dresden; few of his works were published in his lifetime.

Binder had two sons who were also musicians. August Siegmund Binder (b Dresden, 1761; d Dresden, early March 1815) was an organist and composer who became first organist of the electoral chapel on his father’s death in 1789; he composed harpsichord sonatas, organ preludes, cantatas and sacred music, but only the preludes have survived (D-Dl). Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand Binder (b Dresden, 1764) was an instrument maker in Weimar who specialized in harps.

WORKS

MSS, in D-Dl, unless otherwise indicated

Hpd: 6 sonatas, before 1758; 6 suonate, op.1 (Dresden, 1759); 6 divertimentos, after 1762; 12 sonatas, lost, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1763; Sonata, in 6 Easy Lessons (London, ?1765), attrib. G.D. Binder; 2 solos, lost, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1768; 6 sonatas, after 1768; 6 sonatas, before 1776; Sinfonia, D-Bsb; other pieces in contemporary anthologies

Orch: Hpd Conc., in 4 concerti per cembalo composti da vari autori (Paris, 1758); Fl Conc., lost, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1763; 12 hpd concs., c1760–80 [with 2 later adagios]; 18 hpd concs., before 1768, also arr. for 2 hpd; 3 concs., 2 hpd, orch, c1767; 3 org concs.; 12 Piècen; 3 syms., B-Bc, CH-E, Kloster Marienthal, Bibliothek, Ostritz bei Görlitz, doubtful

Chbr: 6 sonate a 3, hpd, fl/vn (Leipzig, 1763); 2 trios, hpd, vn, lost, listed in Breitkopf catalogue, 1763, 1769; Trio, hpd, va, vc, 1771; 2 qts, hpd, 2 vn, vc, ?1773; Trio, hpd, fl, vc, 1774; Trio, hpd, fl; Trio, fl, hpd/fl/vn, b; Trio, 2 fl/vn, b; 2 trios, hpd, vn; 4 divertimentos, hpd, fl/vn; Sonata, hpd, fl/vn, PL-WRu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyGN

EitnerQ

GerberL

GerberNL

F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, ii (Berlin, 1756/R), 477

O. Schmid, ed.: Musik am sächsischen Hofe, iv (Leipzig, 1903); vi (1904)

R. Engländer: ‘Zur Dresdner Instrumentalmusik in der Zeit der Wiener Klassik’, ZMw, xiii (1930–31), 2–10

H. Fleischer: Christlieb Siegmund Binder (1723–1789) (Regensburg, 1941)

R. Engländer: Die Dresdner Instrumentalmusik in der Zeit der Wiener Klassik (Uppsala, 1956)

A. Rosenmüller: Die Überlieferung der Clavierkonzerte in der Königlichen Privatmusikaliensammlung zu Dresden im letzten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Dresden, 1999)

DIETER HÄRTWIG/ANNEGRET ROSENMÜLLER

Binet, Jean

(b Geneva, 17 Oct 1893; d Trélex, 24 Feb 1960). Swiss composer. After studies in Geneva at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze and with Otto Barblan, William Montillet and Templeton Strong, he went to the USA in 1919 where he became a pupil of Bloch and with him founded the Dalcroze Rhythmic School, New York, and later the Cleveland Institute of Music. From 1923 to 1929 he taught the Dalcroze method in Brussels; he then returned to Switzerland and settled in Trélex, devoting his attention to composition. Many of his orchestral works were introduced by Ansermet, and his ballet Le printemps (1950), commissioned by the Pro Helvetia Foundation, was first performed at the Paris Opéra. The Psaumes de la délivrance (1952) were written for the canton of Geneva to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Reformation. From 1951 until his death Binet was president of the Société Suisse des Auteurs et Editeurs, and in 1955 he received the composition prize of the Swiss Musicians’ Association. His music was influenced by French impressionism and by Dalcrozian rhythm. Rejecting large forms, he expressed a refined and intimate sensibility in music that deliberately avoids extensive development. All of Binet’s work is tonal and shows a mastery of tender nuances.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage and vocal

Ballets: L’île enchantée, 1947; Le printemps, 1950

7 sets of incid. music incl. Antigone, 2 pf, 2 perc, 1937; Les joyeuses commères de Windsor, small orch, 1940; Coriolan, hn, 2 tpt, trbn, perc, 1956; La grange au Rouds, chorus, fl, ob, 2 cl, bn, tpt, 1957

Choral: Ps cxxx, A, T, chorus, brass, perc, 1924; 5 choeurs mixtes (C. Marot), 1929; Ode à Diane et Apollon (Horace), chorus, orch, 1932; Ode à Sestius (Horace), chorus, orch, 1932; Cantate de Noël (N. Soutter), children’s vv, org, 1935; 4 choeurs mixtes (C.F. Ramuz), 1942; Psaumes de la délivrance (Piachaud), Bar, chorus, orch, 1952; Les comptines de l’oiselier (J. Cuttat), chorus, cl, 1956; Pétrarque (G. Nicole, after Petrarch), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1958; Ode à la musique (R. Morax), S, female chorus, 2 male chorus, orch, 1959

Songs: 4 chansons (Ramuz), 1v, pf, 1927; 6 mélodies (Marot), 1v, pf, 1928; 3 mélodies (G. Apollinaire), 1v, pf/orch, 1933; 10 chansons (Cuttat), 1v, pf/orch, 1943; 6 chansons (Cuttat), 1v, pf/orch, 1945; L’or perdu (Cuttat), 1v, pf/orch, 1953

instrumental

Orch: Concertino, small orch, 1927; Suite d’airs et de danses populaires suisses, small orch, 1931; Divertissement, vn, pf/small orch, 1934; 4 danses, 1936; 3 pièces, str, 1939; Cartes postales, small orch, 1940; Musique de mai, 1943; L’île enchantée, 2 suites, 1946 [from ballet] ; 6 pièces enfantines, small orch, 1947; Le printemps, suite, 1949 [from ballet]; Prélude symphonique, 1949; Petit concert, cl, pf/str, 1950; Suite grisonne, small orch, 1951

Chbr: Str Qt, 1927; Dialogues, fl, vn, 1936–7; Sonatine, fl, pf, 1942; Kaval, fl, pf, 1945; Sonate brève, vn, pf, 1946; 3 dialogues, 2 fl, 1957; Variations sur un chant de Noël, bn, pf, 1957; 4 chorals, org, 1958

MSS in CH-Bps

Principal publishers: Foetisch, L’Oiseau Lyre, Henn, Heugel, Symphonia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Gagnebin: ‘Jean Binet’, 40 Schweizer Komponisten der Gegenwart/40 compsiteurs suisses contemporains (Amriswil, 1956; Eng. trans., 1956)

E. Ansermet, N. Boulanger, L. Dallapiccola, F. Martin, R. Sessions and others: Hommage à Jean Binet (Nyon, 1961)

Werkverzeichnis Jean Binet (Zürich, 1970)

Jean Binet Musikmanuscripte, Inventare der Paul Sacher Stiftung, ix (Winterthur, 1990)

PIERRE MEYLAN/JACQUES TCHAMKERTEN

Bing, Sir Rudolf

(b Vienna, 9 Jan 1902; d New York, 2 Sept 1997). British impresario of Austrian birth. The son of an iron and steel magnate, he began his career in a Viennese bookshop whose proprietor soon branched out as an impresario of artistic events. In the 1920s Bing worked in Berlin before becoming assistant to Carl Ebert at the Hessisches Staatstheater in Darmstadt (1928–30), assistant to the Intendant of the Charlottenburg Opera, Berlin (1930–33), and general manager of the Glyndebourne Opera (1936–49). In 1946 he took British nationality and helped to found the Edinburgh Festival, of which he was artistic director from 1947 to 1949.

In 1950 Bing became general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, New York. His tenure (until 1972) was the second longest in its history. He had a great influence on both the company and American opera in the 1950s and 60s, particularly because of his autocratic attitudes. In the early years he improved standards of performance and direction. His emphasis on scenic design and imaginative direction reflected his European experience, and was new to the USA. Bing introduced a number of black singers and dancers and extended the season to fill the whole year; he also supervised the move to the Lincoln Center. In the later years, however, like his predecessor Gatti-Casazza, he failed to develop new ideas for coping with the economic and artistic climates of the period, although the house continued to have individual successes. In 1973 he was appointed Consultant for Special Projects by Columbia Artists Management. His 5000 Nights at the Opera (London, 1972) and A Knight at the Opera (New York, 1981) relate some of the many vicissitudes of his career. He was knighted in 1971.

PATRICK J. SMITH

Bing, Stephen

(b Canterbury, bap. 20 Sept 1610; d London, 26 Nov 1681). English cathedral singer and music copyist. He was trained as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1617/18–24) and probably left Canterbury soon after his voice changed. It seems likely that sometime during the 1630s he moved to Cambridge, where he became acquainted with the music patron Sir Christopher Hatton and his musicians and copyists, in particular George Jeffreys and John Lilly. During the 1630s Bing took holy orders, and in 1640 or 1641 he was appointed as a minor canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Among Bing’s colleagues at St Paul’s were John Barnard and John Woodington (also a court violinist). The association between Barnard, Bing and Woodington is apparent in a number of surviving manuscripts copied by Bing in the late 1630s and early 1640s, the most important of which are the sets of viol consort music in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, copied in conjunction with Lilly whilst working under the patronage of Hatton.

Bing’s appointment as minor canon unfortunately coincided with the king’s forced withdrawal from London and the start of the Civil War. He left St Paul’s sometime after midsummer 1642 and probably joined the king’s supporters in Oxford. There he would have been reunited with Hatton and Jeffreys. It appears that Hatton, as Comptroller of the King’s Household, assumed responsibility for the music at the Oxford court, and surviving manuscripts suggest that Bing was closely involved. Oxford yielded to parliamentarian forces on 20 June 1646 and Bing probably took advantage of the surrender terms to return to his former employment at St Paul’s. In April 1649, however, the act of parliament abolishing ‘Deans, Deans and Chapters, Canons, Prebends, and other Offices’ and ordering the sale of ecclesiastical land and property deprived Bing of both his job and his home. Thereafter, like many redundant church and court musicians during the Commonwealth, he earned his living as a teacher.

Following the Restoration, Bing was appointed senior cardinal at St Paul’s, as well as warden of the College of Minor Canons (1660–62). After the Fire of London (1666), which destroyed the cathedral, Bing was appointed senior vicar-choral at Lincoln Cathedral, where he stayed until early 1672. It is from this period that we have the first evidence of his Restoration liturgical-copying activities: the set of eight books now known as the Bing-Gostling Partbooks (GB-Y M 1 S). It is probable that they were begun at Lincoln in the late 1660s, but the majority of pieces appear to have been added in the 1670s following Bing’s appointment as lay vicar at Westminster Abbey (on 1 April 1672). Bing also renewed his connections with St Paul’s, and by midsummer 1672 his signatures resume in the minor canons’ accounts. As a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey in the late 1670s, Bing was a colleague of Henry Purcell and copied a number of the composer’s early anthems. His close associations with the country’s best musicians and most influential music patrons for over 50 years make Bing one of the most important 17th-century English music copyists yet identified.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Willetts: ‘Stephen Bing: a Forgotten Violist’, Chelys, xviii (1989), 3–17

S. Boyer and J.P. Wainwright: ‘From Barnard to Purcell: the Copying Activities of Stephen Bing’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 620–48

J.P. Wainwright: ‘The Christ Church Viol-Consort Manuscripts Reconsidered’, John Jenkins and his Time: Studies in English Consort Music, ed. A. Ashbee and P. Holman (Oxford, 1996), 189–241

J.P. Wainwright: Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England: Christopher, First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997)

JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT

Binge, Ronald

(b Derby, 15 July 1910; d Ringwood, 6 Sept 1979). English arranger and composer. After work as a cinema organist and arranger he moved to London in 1930 to play in theatres and café ensembles. From 1936 he arranged for Mantovani’s Tipica Orchestra, and during war service in the RAF began a long association with Sidney Torch, subsequently providing many scores for Torch’s radio broadcasts, especially for ‘Friday Night is Music Night’. With Mantovani, Binge also orchestrated Noël Coward’s musicals Pacific 1860 (1946) and Ace of Clubs (1950). A love of Church music, especially Monteverdi, inspired Binge in 1951 to create the famous ‘cascading strings’ effect which made the Mantovani orchestra world-famous. This contribution to Mantovani’s success only became public knowledge in later years, by which time he was concentrating more on composition. His Elizabethan Serenade won an Ivor Novello Award in 1957, and he contributed many works to London publishers’ mood music libraries for use by radio, television and film. Other successes included The Watermill, Concerto for Alto Saxophone (1956) and Saturday Symphony (1966–8), while Sailing By became particularly known through its use as the closing-down music for BBC Radio 4.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Spitfire, 1940; Trade Winds (1949); Elizabethan Serenade, 1951; Impressions of London, suite, 1953; Cornet Carillon, brass band (1954); Conc. for A Sax, E, 1956; The Watermill, ob, str (1958); Scherzo – Allegro molto, 1961; Sailing By (1965); Las Castanuelas; The Dance of the Snowflakes; Faire Frou-Frou; The Fire God; Fiesta; High Stepper; The Liberty Boat; Madrugado (Daybreak); Man in a Hurry; Miss Melanie; Prelude; The Red Sombrero; Scottish Rhapsody; Skylarks; String Song; Thames Rhapsody; Venetian Carnival; The Whispering Valley

Film scores, incl. Desperate Moment, 1953; Our Girl Friday, 1953; The Runaway Bus, 1954

DAVID ADES

Bingham, Judith (Caroline)

(b Nottingham, 21 June 1952). English composer and mezzo-soprano. She attended the RAM from 1970 to 1973, where she studied composition with Alan Bush and Fenby, and singing with Eric Vietheer. She continued her composition studies with Hans Keller (1975–8) and in 1971 won the Principal's Prize for Composition. She was elected an ARAM in 1997.

From the mid-1970s Bingham followed careers both as a singer and as a composer, winning the BBC Young Composer Award in 1977. She sang with the BBC Singers on a full-time basis (1983–96), before resigning in order to concentrate on composition. Several early scores have been lost; those that survive show a quixotic imagination, a fondness for pungent harmonies, prickly rhythms and pithy statement, and an ear for unusual instrumental combinations. Later, after exposure to large-scale polyphonic scores during her time with the BBC Singers, she moved away from overt experiment to a more homogenous, direct style, developing an individual approach to structure based on organically related, through-composed mosaics extended over long time-scales. This is seen in two pivotal works, Irish Tenebrae and Chartres, which established her reputation. Recurring features are a fondness for brass (ensembles or band) and the voice, which coalesce in Salt in the Blood, commissioned for the 1995 Proms. She is also interested in educational work with young performers and composers. Her music embraces a wide range of literary sources, subjects and metaphors. While her contribution to choral music has been widely recognized, it is in the visionary orchestral works that her best writing is to be found. Her compositional voice is independent rather than subversive and stands apart from both British and European models.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage (all texts by Bingham): Flynn (op), 1978; The Red Hot Nail (children's music theatre), 1994; The Mysteries of Adad (children's music theatre), 1996

Orch: Chartres, 1988; Beyond Redemption, 1994–5; The Temple at Karnak, 1996; Passaggio, conc., bn, orch, 1998; The Shooting star, conc., tpt, orch, 1999; Walzerspiele, 1999

Band music: Four Minute Mile, brass band, 1991, orchd 1997; The Stars Above, the Earth Below, brass band, 1991; Prague, brass band, 1996; The American Icons, wind band, 1997

Choral: Wessex Heights (T. Hardy), S, nar, SATB, 1977; A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix (S.T. Coleridge, P.B. Shelley), 1982; Cradle Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary (medieval text), SSATB, 1984; Just before Dawn (Bible: Matthew xxviii.1–7, Corinthians v.7, H. Kingsley), SSAA, 1985, rev. 1990; A Cold Spell (J. Clare and others), 1987; A Winter Walk at Noon (E. Brontë and others), 1987; Tu creasti domine (H. Belloc), SATB, org, 1989; Where Light and Shade Repose (J. Betjeman, W.H. Auden, W. Wordsworth), 1989; I Have a Secret to Tell (Cormac), TTBB, bell ad lib 1990; Irish Tenebrae (W.B. Yeats and others), S, TTBB, vn, org, perc, 1990; The Darkness is No Darkness (Ps lxxxix), 1991; Unpredictable but Providential (Bingham), 1991; The Ghost of Combermere Abbey (Lady Elgar, anon.), SSAA, 1993; The Past is a Strange Land (A.C. Doyle and others), 1993; The Uttermost (C. Marlowe), S, T, SATB, orch, 1993; Epiphany (Bingham), SATB, org, 1995; Mag and Nunc, SATB, org, 1995; O magnum mysterium (Bible: Matthew ii.8–9) 1995; Salt in the Blood (F. Beaufort and others), SATB, brass, 1995; At the Mid Hour of Night (T. Moore), SAT, org, 1996; Lacemaking (Bingham), SSAA, 1996; Below the Surface Stream (J. Keats, E. Blunden, R. Brooke, T. Arnold, Bingham), SATB, org, orch, 1997; Consider St Cecilia (W.B. Benson), SATB, org, 1997; Gleams of a Remoter World (Shelley), 1997; The Waning Moon (Shelley, Bingham), male vv, pf, 1997; The Clouded Heaven (L. Andrewes, Wordsworth), SATB, org, 1998; The Drowned Lovers (Bingham), 1998; Missa Brevis (Lat. text), 1998; Water Lilies (Bingham), 1999

Chbr and solo inst: A Divine Image, hpd, 1976; Chopin, pf, 1979; Moonrise, gui, 1979; Pictured Within, pf, 1981; Into the Wilderness, org, 1982; Scenes from Nature, hpd, 1983; Christmas Past, Christmas Present, pf, 1989; Dove Cottage by Moonlight, 2 pf, 1989; A Dream of the Past, hn, 2 tpt, trbn, tuba, 1993; Santa Casa, 2 gui, 1994; The Gift, org, 1996; No Discord, a fl, gui, 1996; Chapman's Pool, vn, vc, pf, 1997; Lacemaking, sax qt, 1997; The Snows Descend, hn, 4 tpt, 4 trbn, tuba, 1997; Summer Dance, a fl, va, perc, 1997

Vocal: Cocaine Lil (Auden), S, pf, 1976; A Falling Figure (E. Brontë), Bar, cl, pf, 1979; Clouded Windows (Keats), Mez, pf, 1980; Lake (Keats), Mez, pf, 1985; Blacker (Coleridge), B, pf, 1987; Alba (E. Pound), T, pf, 1991; Vorarlberg, 2 gui, 1998; Shelley Dreams, vn, pf, 1999

Principal publisher: Maecenas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Fuller and N. LeFanu, eds.: ‘Reclaiming the Muse’, CMR, xi (1994), 37 only

GILES EASTERBROOK

Bingham, Seth Daniels

(b Bloomfield, NJ, 16 April 1882; dNew York, 21 June 1972). American organist and composer. He studied with Horatio Parker at Yale (BA 1904; BMus 1908) and in Paris with d’Indy, Widor, Guilmant and Harry Jepson (1906–7). After teaching at Yale from 1908 to 1919, he was a member of the music faculty of Columbia University until his retirement in 1954; he also held classes in advanced composition at the Union Theological Seminary and was for 35 years organist and music director at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Bingham was a prolific composer, whose rhythmic vitality, quasi-modal lines and mildly chromatic contrapuntal textures can best be heard in his liturgical choral and organ works. He also wrote numerous concertos, suites and sonatas in a conservative, lyrical vein; perhaps his best-known secular work is the Concerto for brass, snare drum and organ.

WORKS

Op: La charelzenn, 1917

Choral: Come thou Mighty King, SATB, 1916; Let God Arise, male vv, 1916; The Strife is O’er, SATB, 1916; Wilderness Stone, nar, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1933; Canticle of the Sun, chorus, orch, 1942; Perfect through Suffering, chorus, org, 1971; many other sacred choral works

Orch: Wall Street Fantasy, 1916; Passacaglia, 1918; Memories of France, 1920; Pioneer America, 1926; The Breton Cadence, 1928; Org Conc., 1946; Conc., brass, snare drum, org, 1954

Chbr: Suite, 9 wind, 1915; Str Qt, 1916; Tame Animal Tunes, 18 insts, 1918; Connecticut Suite, org, str, 1953; sonatas, suites

Org: Roulade, 1920–23; Suite, 1923; Pioneer America, 1925; Harmonies of Florence, 1928; Carillon de Château-Thierry, 1936; Pastoral Psalms, 1937; 12 Hymn-Preludes, 1942; Baroques, suite, 1943; Variation Studies, 1950; 36 Hymn and Carol Canons, 1952; many other org pieces

Pubd songs, incl. An Old Song (1908), 5 Cowboy Songs (1930), Brahma, The 4-way Lodge, 2 Japanese Songs

MSS in US-NYp, US-Wc

Principal publishers: J. Fischer, Gray, Peters, G. Schirmer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.J. Basch: ‘Seth Daniels Bingham: a Tribute’, Music: the A.G.O. and R.C.C.O. Magazine, vi/4 (1972), 32–33, 58–9 [incl. list of works]

M.S. Wright: ‘Seth Daniels Bingham: 100th Anniversary’, American Organist, xvi/6 (1982), 40–43

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK/MICHAEL MECKNA

Bini, Pasquale [Pasqualino]

(b Pesaro, 21 June 1716; d Pesaro, April 1770). Italian violinist and composer. He evidently attracted patronage at an early age, for when he was 15 years old Cardinal Olivieri sent him to Padua to study with Tartini. He remained there for more than three years and then went to Rome, where he played so well that rumour credited his success with causing the death from embarrassment of the violinist Montanari. Bini soon returned to Padua for more study, however, having heard that Tartini had changed his style. His admiration for Tartini was returned by the teacher, who spoke of no other pupil except Nardini in such complimentary terms. On Bini’s return to Rome a year later, Tartini wrote recommending him to an English patron: ‘He plays better than I do, and I am proud of it, for he is an angel in morals and religion’.

Cardinal Olivieri died in 1738, and Bini entered the service of Cardinal Acquaviva Troiano. After the latter’s death in 1747, Bini was unhappy in Rome and returned to his native Pesaro. Exactly what his difficulties were is unknown. Tartini, who again tried to help, hinted at serious emotional problems in recommending him to Algarotti and to Prince Lobkowitz. Bini, Tartini wrote, had suffered

a hundred disasters of body and soul. He is most good and saintly in morals, marvellous in his profession, but feeble in spirit. Persecuted in Rome since the death of His Eminence Acquaviva, he has become so familiar with persecution as to have been in a manner of speaking maddened by it.

Bini remained in Pesaro teaching and playing at the Teatro del Sole until 1754, when he entered the service of the Duke of Württemberg at a high salary as director of concerts and chamber music. He held the post until about 1759 and then returned once more to Pesaro. His emotional problems had perhaps worsened, for a contemporary account from Pesaro speaks of a ‘cerebral complaint’ which eventually caused his death.

Bini was evidently a fine player and widely admired, but he owes his lasting reputation almost entirely to Tartini’s esteem for him. As a composer he had almost no fame and left only a handful of compositions, none of which was published. All his works, particularly the concertos, reflect a good technique and contain graceful passage-work, but they are conventional in form and generally unimaginative. Tartini’s early and middle works are the obvious models for the concertos and the sonata, but the duets are slightly more modern in style.

WORKS

3 concs., solo vn, 2 vn, va, b; 5 duets, 2 vn; Sonata, vn, b: all US-BEM

Concerto, vn, str, A-Wgm

Sonata, vn, b, cited in EitnerQ

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

G. Radiciotti: ‘Aggiunte e correzioni ai Dizionari biografici dei musicisti’, SIMG, xv (1913–14), 583–6

A. Capri: Giuseppe Tartini (Milan, 1945)

V. Duckles and M. Elmer: Thematic Catalog of a Manuscript Collection of Eighteenth-Century Italian Music (Berkeley, 1963)

A. Mell: ‘Antonio Lolli’s Letters to Padre Martini’, MQ, lvi (1970), 463–77

C. White: From Vivaldi to Viotti: a History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Philadelphia, 1992)

CHAPPELL WHITE

Binički, Stanislav

(b Jasika, nr Kruševac, 27 July 1872; d Belgrade, 15 Feb 1942). Serbian composer and conductor. After studying mathematics at Belgrade University, he studied composition (with Rheinberger) and singing in Munich. Back in Belgrade he took part, with Mokranjac and Manojlović, in the founding of the Serbian School of Music in 1899. He conducted the newly formed Beogradski Vojni Orkestar (Belgrade Military Orchestra) and in 1904 founded the Muzika Kraljeve Garde (The Music of the Royal Bodyguard); with these orchestras as well as the choir of the Stanković Musical Society he took an active part in the musical life of Belgrade, and introduced Haydn’s Creation (1908) and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1910) to the city. In 1911 he became the first director of the new Stanković Music School. During the war he was a bandmaster in various French cities. From 1920 to 1924 he was the first director of the new opera company at the National Theatre; his wife, the singer Miroslava Binički (née Frieda Blanke, b Munich, 9 Oct 1876; d Belgrade, 5 Aug 1956), acted as répétiteur and choir trainer.

Most of Binički’s music is theatrical, and includes much incidental music and an opera, Na uranku (‘At Dawn’, 1903). This was the first Serbian national opera to be performed, and, though based on the manner of Italian verismo, it makes significant use, to reflect the opera’s subject of the conflict with the Turks, of Serbian as well as oriental folklore. The incidental music for Ljiljan i omorika (‘The Lily and the Pine Tree’, 1900) and Ekvinocio (‘Equinox’, 1903) displays characteristic motifs from the beginning of the overtures, and the concert overture Iz mog zavičaja (‘From my Homeland’) uses folk music. His songs are more sentimental in character, and in his choral compositions he uses a very simple, folk-influenced idiom. He also wrote some religious music and a number of military marches: of these the Marš na Drinu (‘March on the Drina’, 1915) has been exceptionally popular.

Binički’s brother Aleksandar (b Belgrade, 16 May 1885; d Zagreb, 7 Aug 1963) was a buffo tenor and producer, who studied in Munich with Reger and Mottl. He was director of operetta in Zagreb; his own notable roles included Vašek (The Bartered Bride) and Beppe (Pagliacci).

WORKS

Stage: Na uranku [At Dawn] (op, B. Nušić), 1903, Belgrade, 2 Jan 1904, arr. pf (Belgrade, 1903); Ljiljan i omorika [The Lily and the Pine Tree] (incid music, after Nušić), 1900; Ekvinocio [Equinox] (incid music, after I. Vojinović), 1903; Put oko sveta [A Trip around the World] (incid music, after Nušić), 1908; Nahod (incid music, after Nušić), 1923

Orch: Iz moga zavičaja [From my Homeland], ov., 1899; many marches, incl. Marš na Drinu [March on the Drina], 1915

Seljančice [Peasant's Songs], 1908; Opelo [Serbian Orthodox Requiem], 1912; Tetovka [Tetovo Songs], 1914; Liturgija, 1923

Vocal: Mijatovke [Song dedicated to Mijat Mijatovič], c1925; other songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Nušić: ‘O životu i radu Stanislava Biničkoga’ [Life and work], Comoedia [Belgrade], v (1924)

D. Maĉuka: Obituary [of Aleksandar Binički], Vjesnik (8 Aug 1963)

R. Pejović: ‘Stanislav Binički kao organizator muzičkog života u Beogradu’ [Binički as organizer of Belgrade musical life], Zvuk, no.69 (1966), 558–67

V. Peričić: Musički stvaraoci u Srbiji [Musical creators in Serbia] (Belgrade, 1969)

S. Đurić-Klajn: A Survey of Serbian Music through the Ages (Belgrade, 1972)

R. Pejović, ed.: Stanislav Binički: Zbornik radova [Studies] (Belgrade, 1991)

JOHN WARRACK/ROKSANDA PEJOVIĆ

Biniou

(Fr.).

A type of bagpipe. See Bagpipe, §6.

Bin Jallūn al-Tuwīmī, al-Hājj Idrīs.

See Benjelloun, Hajj Driss.

Binkerd, Gordon (Ware)

(b Lynch, NE, 22 May 1916). American composer. He studied the piano at Dakota Wesleyan University (BMus 1937), where Russell Danburg and Gail Kubik helped to shape his musical thinking. After teaching in Kansas and Indiana, he pursued further training at the Eastman School of Music (MMus 1941). Following US Navy service during World War II, he entered Harvard University (MA 1952), where he studied with Walter Piston, Irving Fine, Otto Kinkeldey and Archibald Davidson, among others. From 1949 to 1971 he taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His numerous honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1959), an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1964) and commissions from the St Louis SO, the Fromm and Ford foundations, and the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress. In 1996 a week-long series of concerts was organized at the University of Rhode Island and Brown University in celebration of his 80th birthday.

Binkerd’s harmonic style developed from conventional tonality (in the early works, later withdrawn), through serialism (forsaken between the second and third movements of the First Symphony) and highly chromatic tonality (from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s), to simple but unconventional tonality (from the early 1980s). A deft handling of counterpoint is common to all of his compositions. In 1980 he began to concentrate on works for solo piano, an instrument he dubbed the ‘sonic machine’, and on works for solo voice and piano. Also notable are his penetrating choral settings.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Sonata, vc, pf, 1952; Sonata no.1, pf, 1955; Sym. no.1, orch, 1955; Trio, cl, va, vc, 1955; Service, org, 1957; Sym. no.2, orch, 1957; Str Qt no.1, 1958; Sym. no.3, orch, 1959; 3 Canzonas, brass, 1960; Entertainments, pf, 1960; Str Qt no.2, 1961; Concert Set, pf, 1969; Miscellany, pf, 1969; A Part of Heaven (2 Romances), vn, orch, 1972; The Battle, brass, perc, 1972 [after Frescobaldi]; Movt, orch, rev. 1972; Sonata, vn, pf, 1977; Str Trio, 1979; Sonata no.2, pf, 1981; Sonata no.3, pf, 1982; Sonata no.4, pf, 1983; short pf pieces; org works [several transcrs. orch, wind ens]; other chbr works

Choral: Autumn Flower (J. Very), 1968; To Electra (R. Herrick), 9 choruses, 1968–73; In a Whispering Gallery (T. Hardy), 1969; Nocturne (W.C. Williams), chorus, vc, 1969; A Christmas Carol (Herrick), 1970; A Scotch Mist (R. Burns), male vv, 3 choruses, 1976; Choral Strands (S. Freud, A. Tennyson), 4 choruses, 1976; Sung under the Silver Umbrella (G.K. Chesterton, W. Blake, J. Stephens, S. Mead, T. Moore), tr vv, 6 choruses, pf, 1977; Requiem for Soldiers lost in Ocean Transports (H. Melville), 1983–4; Houses at Dusk (H.W. Longfellow, H. Belloc, F.-G. Halleck, trad.), male vv, 4 choruses, pf, 1984; Dakota Day (Tennyson), mixed vv, fl, ob, cl, hp, 1985; c90 other choral works

Songs: Music I Heard with You (C. Aiken), 1v, pf, 1937; Shut out that Moon (Hardy), S/T, pf, 1968; 3 Songs (Herrick, A. Crapsey), Mez, str qt, 1971; Portrait intérieur (R.M. Rilke), 1v, vn, vc, 1972; 4 Songs, 1976; Secret-Love (J. Dryden), Mez, vc, hp, 1977; Shut out … Heart Songs (Burns), T, pf, 1980; 3 Songs from The Temple (G. Herbert), 1v, pf, 1985; Things Near and Far (4 Folk Songs of Wales), 1v, pf, 1987; 3 Dorset Songs (W. Barnes), S, pf, 1995; many other songs, 1v, pf

MSS in US-R

Principal publishers: Associated, Boosey & Hawkes, Peters, Samizdat

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (R.A. Monaco) [incl. further bibliography]

H. Pollack: ‘The Center Holding: Gordon Binkerd’, Harvard Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1992), 254–72

T. Duda: What Sweeter Music: an Examination of Selected Later Songs of Gordon Binkerd with Suggestions for Performance (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1995)

D. Saladino: ‘An Interview with Gordon Binkerd’, Choral Journal, xxxv/9 (1994–5), 33–41

THEODOR DUDA

Binkley, Thomas (Eden)

(b Cleveland, OH, 26 Dec 1931; d Bloomington, IN, 28 April 1995). American musicologist, lutenist and player of early wind instruments. He graduated from the University of Illinois (BM 1954) and then went to Germany to study musicology at the University of Munich. In 1959 in Munich he founded the Studio für alte Musik for the performance of early music; the other members were the mezzo-soprano Andrea von Ramm, the tenor Nigel Rogers and the string player Sterling Jones. This group, later known as the Studio der Frühen Musik, toured throughout the world until 1972, when it moved to Basle in Switzerland to take up residence at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Binkley returned to the USA in 1978 as a visiting professor at Stanford University. In 1979 he became director of the Early Music Institute at the School of Music of Indiana University, remaining in that position until his retirement in January 1995. Binkley’s publications include articles on performance practice. He made more than 40 recordings with the Studio der Frühen Musik, for which he was awarded many European prizes, including the Edison Award, Amsterdam (1964 and 1974), the Grand Prix du Disque, Paris (four times between 1968 and 1974), and the Preis der deutscher Schallplattenkritik, Berlin (seven times between 1965 and 1982). An account of his career is given in D. Lasocki: ‘The Several Lives of Tom Binkley: a Tribute’, Early Music America, i/1 (1995), 16–24.

LARRY PALMER

Binns [Hoyle], John

(b Halifax, c1744; d Grantham, 6 May 1796). English bookseller and dictionary compiler. He was the eldest son of Nathaniel Binns, printer and bookseller in Halifax, under whom he studied the book business. Early in life he went to London as an apprentice of, or employee in, the firm of Crowder. By 1770 he had established his own firm in Leeds, where he was also a partner in the commercial bank of Scott, Binns, Nicholson & Smith, and an amateur performer on the violin and cello. He published a Dictionarium musica (sic) (London, 1770, 2/1790, 3/1791) which appeared under different titles and was issued under the pseudonym John Hoyle. The work is derived chiefly from the dictionary published by James Grassineau in 1740.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Nichols: Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812–15/R)

J.C. Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830 (New York, 1979), i, 95–7

JAMIE C. KASSLER

Binns, Malcolm

(b Nottingham, 29 Jan 1936). English pianist. He studied with Arthur Alexander at the RCM, where he was awarded the Chappell Medal. A well-schooled and energetic pianist, with a quick memory, cultivated musicianship and reliable fingers, he made his London début in 1958, and soon afterwards was engaged to play with all the British orchestras. He first appeared at the Promenade Concerts in 1959, and played there in 14 subsequent seasons. In September 1961 Binns gave the first British performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no.4 for the left hand with the RPO at the Royal Festival Hall. He has given recitals and broadcasts on late 18th- and 19th-century pianos, and has recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas on a series of historically appropriate instruments. His other recordings include concertos by Stanford, Sterndale Bennett and Rawsthorne, as well as Lyapunov’s Etudes d’exécution transcendante op.11 for solo piano. He taught at the RCM (1962–9), and in 1966 formed a duo partnership with the violinist Manoug Parikian.

DOMINIC GILL/JAMES METHUEN-CAMPBELL

Biography.

Music biography is a literary genre consisting of ordered, written accounts of the lives of individuals who are involved in the creation, production, dissemination and reception of music, particularly the lives of composers and musicians but including also librettists, publishers, instrument makers, patrons, music lovers, scholars and writers. In the broadest view, biography is the life history of an individual: it therefore may be said to involve the totality of phenomena impinging upon or shaping the individual, every event participated in or generated by the individual's activities, as well as every aspect of the subject's mental and psychological processes and every product of his or her creativity. Music biography centres on the documentation and interpretation of events, influences and relationships in a life, but its legitimate field of inquiry extends to the biological and ancestral inheritance, the social and historical nexus, the musical tradition and the intellectual milieu. Thus, music biography is inextricably joined to disciplines such as history, mythology, music history, genealogy, sociology and psychology.

2. The early 19th century.

3. The later 19th century.

4. The age of musicology.

5. The later 20th century.

MAYNARD SOLOMON

1. Origins and early history.

The prehistory of music biography is to be found in folklore, myth and theology, with accounts of legendary musicians and musical deities such as Apollo, Dionysus and Orpheus, David and Jubal, Narada and Sarasvati, Odin, and Väinämöinen. From as early as the 10th century, compendia and lexica offered brief biographies of musicians, but music biography, having no Vasari, was delayed in its further development until approximately the early 18th century, when the genre developed as a component and offshoot of the burgeoning fields of musical lexicography and music history (Lenneberg, 1988). The proliferation of descriptive and taxonomical dictionaries and encyclopedias in every sphere of interest included separate dictionaries of music, both with and without biographies, and volumes wholly devoted to biography. Several notable examples of the latter are W.C. Printz, Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (1690/R), which contains concise biographical sketches of musicians, chronologically arranged; J.G. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, oder Musicalische Bibliothec (1732), a general dictionary with entries for 900 composers; Johann Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740), with 148 entries, including numerous contemporary autobiographies; G.O. Pitoni, unpublished biographical compendium of composers from 1000 to 1700 (c1725); J.-B. de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780), the third and fourth volumes of which contain a biographical dictionary of musicians, poets and writers on music; and J.A. Hiller, Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit, i (1784). The most influential 18th-century dictionary of music biography is E.L. Gerber's Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1790–92), revised as Neues historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1812–14), which served as precedent for such monumental biographical dictionaries as those of F.-J. Fétis (1835–44), Robert Eitner (1900–04) and Theodore Baker (1900). The 18th-century interest in music biography was also manifested in a variety of music journals and almanacs, such as F.W. Marpurg's Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (1754–78) and in periodicals, edited by such music journalists as C.F. Cramer, H.P. Bossler, J.F. Reichardt and J.F. Rochlitz, which fed a healthy public appetite for anecdotes, reminiscences and memoirs.

Leaving aside the occasional early example of autobiographies by musicians, such as those by Thomas Whythorne (c1576) and Lodovico Zacconi (1620), and the memoirs of such figures as Benvenuto Cellini and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who happened also to be musicians, the brief Berufsbiographien solicited for the pages of the 18th-century lexica and journals made autobiography a new sister-genre of music biography: significant examples are autobiographical accounts by J.J. Quantz, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Franz Benda, Leopold Mozart and C.G. Neefe.

2. The early 19th century.

The age of music biography as a distinct literary genre opened towards the turn of the 19th century (but see John Mainwaring's stray Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 1760), and by 1840 several of the enduring types of music biography were established. Many early biographies loosely combined the factual Berufsbiographie with personal memoirs, anecdotes and surveys of the music. Among these were Friedrich Schlichtegroll's obituary of Mozart (1793), F.X. Niemetschek's Mozart (1798), J.N. Forkel's Bach (1802), G.A. Griesinger's and A.C. Dies's books on Joseph Haydn (both 1810), G.J. Schinn and F.J. Otter's Michael Haydn (1808), F.-G. Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries's biographical notes about Beethoven (1838–45) and Anton Schindler's initial biography of Beethoven (1840). The earliest biographies to be based upon archival and historical research included Luigi Angeloni's Sopra la vita, le opere, ed il sapere di Guido d'Arezzo (1811), Giuseppe Baini's Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1828) and Carl von Winterfeld's Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (1834). A rough prototype of the documentary biography, with copious documentation and correspondence, was G.N. Nissen's Biographie W.A. Mozart's (1828).

Music autobiography and fictional music biography came into their own simultaneously with music biography. Musicians such as C.F.D. Schubart (1791), A.-E.-M. Grétry (1789, 1797) and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1801) wrote extended memoirs, inaugurating a vigorous genre that eventually came to include famous writings by Spohr (1860–61), Berlioz (1870), Wagner (1870–80) and Stravinsky (1935–6), among numerous others. Beginning with W.H. Wackenroder's ‘The Remarkable Musical Life of the Tone-Poet Joseph Berlinger’ (1797 [recte 1796]), Romantic writers wrote imaginative fictional accounts of musicians, most famously E.T.A. Hoffmann's ‘Ritter Gluck’ and ‘Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters musikalische Leiden’, establishing the narrative of the suffering and/or alienated musician that was later taken up in novels by Romain Rolland in Jean-Christophe (1904–12), Jakob Wassermann in Das Gänsemännchen (1915), Hermann Hesse in Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) and Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus (1947).

3. The later 19th century.

This period saw the high tide of music biography, in a series of monumental efforts to write definitive lives of the great composers: Otto Jahn, W.A. Mozart (1856–9, 2/1867); Friedrich Chrysander, G.F. Handel (1858–67); Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, Franz Schubert (1865); K.F.L. Nohl, Beethovens Leben (1864–77); A.W. Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben (1866–79); C.F. Pohl, Joseph Haydn (1875–1927); Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach (1873–80); and Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms (1904–14); plus noteworthy biographies of Chopin by Frederich Niecks (1888) and of Schumann by Joseph Wasielewski (1858), and significant monographs on Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn by George Grove in his Dictionary of Music and Musicians and of Mozart and Haydn in Constantin von Wurzbach's Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Österreich, 1750–1850. The great biographers of the period – whether musical amateurs like Jahn and Thayer or professional music editors like Chrysander, Pohl and Spitta – dedicated themselves to documentation of a single biographical subject. Led by Nohl and Marie Lipsius (La Mara), however, there also developed a class of prolific music biographers, writing a variety of accessible biographies for popular audiences. Additional testimony to the widespread interest in musical biography was the abundance of lives, reminiscences and personal memoirs of virtuosos, from Paganini and Liszt to such as Ole Bull, L.M. Gottschalk and Jenny Lind.

4. The age of musicology.

Music biography was increasingly in high repute during the later 19th century, except within the new discipline of musicology. Guido Adler's methodical taxonomy of ‘musical science’ (1885, 1919) acknowledged ‘Biographistik’ as one of the auxiliary fields of historical investigation, but left little room in practice for biography, either as a serious field of study or as an explanatory factor. Similarly, despite Hugo Riemann's recognition that music is an emanation of a composer's psychology (1908) and Hermann Abert's defence of biography (1919–20), biography in the first three quarters of the 20th century became peripheral to the concerns of the musicologist and the subject tended to fall outside the realm of musicological discourse. Its possible significance for musicology has been left virtually unexamined in systematic studies of musicology or music historiography in the 20th century; nor has there been an entry on the subject in any previous general encyclopedia of music. Partly, this may be seen as a reaction against the later-18th-century aesthetic of ‘expression’ and the 19th-century Romantic ‘cult of genius’, which had overemphasized the biographical factor in creativity and even advocated views of music as ‘autobiography in tones’; these presuppositions gave way in the 20th century to a wide variety of formalist, sociological and structuralist aesthetics which stressed the autonomy of the musical work or its place within a particular stylistic tradition or its essential derivation from historical or ideological factors.

Several major musicological projects involved the editing, revision and completion of leading biographies of the previous century (e.g. Pohl-Botstiber, Thayer-Deiters-Riemann, Thayer-Krehbiel and Thayer-Forbes, Jahn-Deiters and Jahn-Abert), leaving essentially intact their 19th-century theoretical premises and psychological assumptions. The biographical genre perhaps best suited to the age of ‘objective’ musicology became the documentary biography, originated by O.E. Deutsch in Franz Schubert: die Dokumente seines Lebens und Schaffens (1913–14) with further examples including Deutsch's documentary lives of Handel (1955) and Mozart (1961), Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel's Bach Reader (1945), Werner Neumann and H.-J. Schulze's Bach-Dokumente (1963–72), Jay Leyda's Musorgsky Reader (1947) and Kurt Blaukopf's documentary iconography of Mahler (1976). A profusion of special biographical dictionaries devoted to numerous sub-categories of music and musicians – e.g. by particular genre (jazz, folk, popular, theatre, opera), nationality, gender, ethnicity, instrument – attests the lexicographical and taxonomic preoccupations of recent times (see Duckles; see also Dictionaries and encyclopedias of music, §I). Other specialized forms of biographical documentation also flourished, including thematic catalogues, discographies, pictorial biographies and oral histories, the last ranging from Vivian Perlis's interviews of those who knew Ives (1974) to Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff's interviews with jazz musicians (1955). Musicology in effect largely withdrew from interpretative biography, leaving the field to non-academic biographers and music journalists, and to encyclopedia-style life-and-works overviews. It became a common practice in both popular and academic biography to preface a survey of the music with a biographical sketch or series of biographical essays: some landmark studies of composers are of this type, for example Paul Bekker's Beethoven (1911), Walter Riezler's Beethoven (1936), Alfred Einstein's Mozart: his Character, his Work (1945), several biographies by Karl Geiringer, and the volumes in such series as Dent's Master Musicians. Nevertheless, worthy full-length biographies in the 19th-century tradition continued to be written, such as C.S. Terry, Bach: a Biography (1928), Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (1933–47), Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950), Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: a Critical Biography (1958), Paul Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (1966) and H.C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (1976–80), the last combining documentary biography with a chronological critical survey of the music. For the most part, such biographies are untouched by 20th-century theories of creativity, psychology or genetic causation.

3. Benefit concerts and festivals.

5. The later 20th century.

In the later 20th century, a heightened interest in biography as a narrative form of literature combined with a general weakening of the authority of traditional belief systems – including musicology – revived the willingness to test biography as an explanatory tool in the study of creativity. Biographers have undertaken to investigate the achievements of women and other under-reported groups in music history and to explore the implications of sexual orientation upon creativity. Studies of musicians and composers by psychoanalytically orientated biographers have placed issues of fantasy, familial conflict and unconscious sources of creativity on the biographer's agenda. Similarly, T.W. Adorno's idiosyncratic writings on Mahler, Berg, Wagner and Bach have encouraged prospects for biographies that apply a synthesis of psychoanalysis and critical theory. Musicology, too, had by this time achieved an ambivalent reconciliation with biography, resulting in biographies too numerous to mention individually marked by a high degree of accuracy and scholarly acumen. Proponents of biography see its resurgence in terms of a renewed emphasis on the individual, as part of a search for meaning and as embodying a need to find exemplary models. But the revival of biographical modes of exploration has not gone unchallenged, with some critics concerned about tendencies that would impose on the life a fairly restrictive array of mythic, narrative or other extramusical structures.

It has long been recognized that the accumulation and analysis of biographical data – performances, correspondence, autographs, sketches, publications – are crucial in dealing with matters of chronology, the authenticity of compositional sources, personal motivations, creative intentions, patronage, ideology and reception. And it is unquestioned that the biographer's legitimate subject matter includes the nature of creativity, documentation of the minutiae of daily life, the historical impact of individual creativity and trans-historical patterns of behaviour and belief. In the end, the primary area of dispute about the value of biography appears to centre on the vexed question of how – or whether – the pathways between life and art can be mapped, whether a ‘personal’ factor in creativity can be identified. The ancient Platonic and Plotinian archetypes, viewing the poet now as a mirror of nature and again as an active agent capable of shaping reality, thus continue to play themselves out in shifting conceptions of the nature of musical art and biography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker8

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

La BordeE

WaltherML

W.C. Printz: Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (Dresden, 1690/R)

G.O. Pitoni: Notitia de contrapuntisti e de compositori di musica (MS, I-Rvat C.G. I/1–2, c1725); ed. C. Ruini (Florence, 1988)

J. Mattheson: Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (Hamburg, 1740); ed. M. Schneider (Berlin, 1910/R)

F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1754–78/R)

J.A. Hiller: Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit, i (Leipzig, 1784)

G. Adler: ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, VMw, i (1885), 5–20

H. Riemann: Grundriss der Musikwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1908, 4/1928)

O. Rank: Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Leipzig, 1909, 2/1922; Eng. trans., 1914)

H. Kretzschmar: ‘Populäre Musikerbiographien’, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik und anderes aus den Grenzboten, i (Leipzig, 1910), 433–43

A. Einstein, ed.: Lebensläufe deutscher Musiker von ihnen selbst erzählt, i: Johann Adam Hiller; ii: Christian Gottlob Neefe; iii: Adalbert Gyrowetz (Leipzig, 1915)

G. Adler: Methode der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1919)

H. Abert: ‘Über Aufgaben und Ziele der musikalischen Biographie’, AMw, ii (1919–20), 417–33; repr. in H. Abert, Gesammelte Schriften und Vorträge, ed. F. Blume (Halle, 1929/R), 562–88

A. Einstein: ‘Die deutsche Musiker-Autobiographie’, JbMP 1921, 51–65

E. Panofsky: Idea: ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der ‘alteren Kunsttheorie’ (Leipzig, 1924; Eng. trans. as Idea: a Concept in Art Theory,1968)

E. Kris and O. Kurz: Die Legende vom Künstler: ein historischer Versuch (Vienna, 1934; enlarged, Eng. trans., as Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: a Historical Experiment, 1979)

W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939, 2/1962)

W. Kahl: Selbstbiographien deutscher Musiker des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Cologne and Krefeld, 1948/R)

P. Nettl: Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951/R)

W. Vetter: ‘Gedanken zur musikalischen Biographie’, Mf, xii (1959), 132–42

J.M. Osborne, ed.: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961)

V. Duckles: Music Reference and Research Materials: an Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1964, 3/1974)

C. Dahlhaus: Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Cologne, 1967; Eng. trans., 1983, as Foundations of Music History), 19–26, 76–7

R.B. Slocum: Biographical Dictionaries and Related Works (Detroit, 1967, suppl. 1972)

Komponisten, auf Werk und Leben befragt: Weimar 1981

M. Solomon: ‘Thoughts on Biography’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 268–76; repr. in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 101–15

H. Lenneberg: Witnesses and Scholars: Studies in Musical Biography (New York, 1988)

Biondi, Fabio

(b Palermo, 15 March 1961). Italian violinist. He began violin studies at five and at 12 played concertos on Italian television. During his teens he became interested in period instrument performing practice and since then he has played violins set up in Baroque, Classical and modern styles with equal mastery. In 1981 he formed the Stendhal Quartet, which played a repertory ranging from the Classical to the contemporary, on instruments appropriate to the music. Several Italian composers wrote for the group. Biondi also worked with Hesperion XX, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Musica Antiqua of Vienna, the Camerata di Lugano and the orchestra of the Due Dimensioni festival in Parma. In 1990 he founded the Baroque ensemble Europa Galante, which can vary in size from an orchestra to the handful of players required for a sonata. His full-blooded approach to the music of Corelli, Vivaldi, Biber, Bach, Tartini, Leclair and others, going side by side with the similar approach to Monteverdi adopted by Rinaldo Alessandrini, has caused some scholars to rethink their ideas on Baroque practice. Biondi's own playing, full of personality yet always directed to the service of the music, is based on a virile, italianate tone, a magnificent technique and superb intonation. He has recorded not only much of the Baroque repertory but also Mozart, Schubert and 20th-century music by such composers as Pizzetti, Malipiero, Respighi, Casella and Prokofiev. His instruments include a 1750 violin by Paolo Antonio Testore.

TULLY POTTER

Biondi [Cesena], Giovanni Battista

(b Cesena; fl 1605–30). Italian composer. He was often known in his lifetime as Cesena after his birthplace. He was a Minorite friar. Despite his large output of church music he seems not to have held a church post; he was living in Bologna before 1606 and at Brisighella, near Faenza, in 1610. He may have died in 1630 (perhaps from the plague), for his last publication was edited by another friar at Cesena in that year. He published as many as 19 volumes of sacred music, some of which were reprinted and 14 of which survive; he is also well represented in anthologies of the period, German as well as Italian. Five of his volumes contain motets, and there are several collections including masses and music for Vespers and Compline. The Secondo libro de concerti of 1606 is unusual in that each motet is ascribed to a specific major feast. All this music is provided with continuo parts, and very little of it relies on the conventional double-choir medium often used for functional music in Italy in the early 17th century. Even so, the style of the 1608 compilation is transitional: polyphonic textures inform the masses – one of which is a parody on Palestrina's Vestiva i colli – and the continuo is merely a gesture to fashion. With its three-part scoring, op.12 of a year later is more up to date. The post-Viadana concertato idiom is best seen in the motets, e.g. op.14 of 1611: the solo motets have simple melodies, with quaver melismas as ornamentation (as in Viadana), the duets have formal schemes such as ABCB, and in the four-part pieces tutti refrains contrast with solos. In the duet Alleluia haec dies, in RISM 1623², a tautly constructed rondo form, ABACABADABA, is used, A being a four-bar ‘Alleluia’ in triple time and B comprising a setting of the text ‘haec dies … laetemur in ea’.

WORKS

all except anthologies published in Venice

2 messe et motetti, 4vv, bc (org) … libro I (1605)

Salmi, 4vv, bc (org), che si cantano alli Vespri nelle solennità di tutto l'anno … libro I (1606)

Compieta con letanie che si cantano nella Santa Casa di Loreto, et motetti, 8vv, bc (org) (1606)

Secondo libro de concerti, 2vv, bc, per tutte le solennità dell'anno (1606)

Motetti, 4vv, bc (org), con letanie … libro I (1606)

Salmi intieri, 5vv, bc, che si cantano alli Vespri nelle solennità di tutto l'anno (1607)

Messe, letanie, et motetti, 5vv, bc (org) (1608)

Li salmi, 4vv, bc (org), … che si cantano ali Vesperi nelle solennità di tutto l'anno … libro II, op.11 (1609)

Messe et motetti, 3vv, bc (org), con una messa da morto, op.12 (1609)

Li salmi, 5vv, bc (org) che si cantano alli Vesperi nelle solennità di tutto l'anno, libro II, op.13 (1610)

Il quarto libro delli concerti, 1–4vv, bc (org), op.14 (1611)

2 compiete, 4vv, bc, op.15 (1612)

Il quinto libro delli concerti, 1–3vv, bc (org) (1621)

Salmi intieri, 4vv, bc, che si cantano alli Vespri … libro IV, op.19 (1630)

31 motets in 1622², 1623², 1626², 1626⁴, 1627²; 2 masses in 1628²; according to EitnerQ, 4 masses in PL-WRu and missa brevis, 2 motets in B-Br

JEROME ROCHE/ELIZABETH ROCHE

Biondin.

See Segni, Julio.

Bioni, Antonio

(b Venice, ?c1698; d after 1739). Italian composer and singer, active mainly in Bohemia and Silesia. Other than his Venetian origins, which are confirmed in many documents, almost all the information usually given about his life before his arrival in Bohemia is unverifiable, including reports of his birth in 1698 as the son of a tailor in the Rialto district of Venice, study with Giovanni Porta and productions of his operas in Chioggia, Ferrara, Venice and Baden-Baden in the years 1721–4. The first known records of him date from 1720, when he sang in productions of Lucio Papirio and Astarto in Udine and La ninfa bizzarra in Rovigo. He may be the singer listed as Antonio Biondi in librettos for productions of Il pastor reggio in Chioggia in 1721 and L’Arminio in Mantua in 1722.

In May 1724 Bioni was contracted by Antonio Denzio in Venice to serve as composer for the Peruzzi company that was to perform in Prague, but before arriving in Bohemia the Peruzzi company was engaged to provide operatic entertainments during summer 1724 at Kuks, the estate of Count Franz Anton von Sporck in north-east Bohemia. Bioni’s most important work, Orlando furioso, was performed first at Kuks and then as the inaugural opera for the opening of the Sporck theatre in Prague on 23 October 1724. After Denzio won control of the Italian opera company in Prague late in 1724, Bioni followed a newly formed Peruzzi company to Breslau in 1725. From this time until 1734, the only period of Italian opera in Breslau, Bioni contributed music to at least 24 of the 42 operatic productions given at the Ballhaus theatre in addition to serving as Kapellmeister for the orchestra after 1727. In 1731 he was named court composer to the Elector of Mainz, Franz Ludwig, Pfalzgraf of Neuburg (simultaneously Archbishop of Mainz, Breslau and Trier), and during the years 1732–4 served as impresario for the Ballhaus. He still maintained connections with Prague, however, due to the instability of the opera companies that performed in Breslau. He was almost certainly resident in Prague in 1730–31 during a period of operatic inactivity in Breslau, and he definitely returned to Prague in the summer or autumn of 1734 after the Breslau opera collapsed permanently. He attempted unsuccessfully to mount an operatic venture in Prague at this time, but may have contributed music for productions mounted in the Malá Strana ballhouse by singers stranded in Prague in 1734–5 after the collapse of the Denzio company. His career after 1734 cannot be traced with confidence, but it is supposed that he visited Vienna in the late 1730s. Gerber claimed that his opera Girita was performed at the Hoftheater in 1738. A manuscript score of his setting of Metastasio’s La pace fra la virtù e la bellezza is dated 1739 with a dedication to the Archduchess Maria Theresa, but no performance of it is known. What little of Bioni’s music survives confirms that he found it necessary to tailor his compositions to the modest instrumental and vocal resources available to him in Prague and Breslau.

WORKS

operas

unless otherwise stated, first performed at Breslau, Ballhaus theatre, and music lost

Orlando furioso (dramma per musica, G. Braccioli, after L. Ariosto), Kuks, estate of Count Sporck, Aug 1724 [according to FétisB, composed in 1723, first perf. Baden-Baden, 1724]

Armida abbandonata (dramma per musica, F. Silvani, after T. Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata), Prague, Sporck, Nov 1725

Armida al campo (dramma per musica, Silvani, after Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata), 24 June 1726

Endimione (? F. Mazzarà, after P. Metastasio), 7 Jan 1727

Lucio Vero (dramma per musica, A. Zeno), May 1727

Attalo ed Arsinoe, Nov 1727

Artabano re dei Parti (dramma per musica, ? A. Marchi), 12 Jan 1728

Filindo (? P. d’Averara), 20 April 1728

La fede tradita e vendicata (Silvani), carn. 1729

L’innocenza rinosciuta in Engelberta (?Zeno), sum. 1729

Andromaca (?Zeno), 16 Jan 1730

Ercole su’l Termodonte (dramma per musica, S. Burigotti), 17 April 1730

Adone (pastorale per musica, ? A. Denzio), Prague, Sporck, carn. 1731

Siroe, rè di Persia (dramma per musica, Burigotti or Metastasio), 4 Feb 1732

Silvia (dramma per musica, E. Bissari), 24 Feb 1732

Lucio Papirio (dramma per musica, A. Salvi), carn. 1732

La verità conosciuta (dramma per musica), 28 April 1732

Demetrio (dramma per musica, Metastasio), June 1732

Issipile (musicalische Op, Metastasio), aut. 1732, Breslau, Ballhaus, A-Wgm

Alessandro Severo (Zeno), July 1733

L’odio placato (Silvani), aut. 1733

Alessandro nell’Indie (Metastasio), carn. 1734

Music (lost) in: L’innocenza giustificata, Prague, Sporck, 27 Dec 1724 [?=Giuditta, 3 July 1730]; Ariodante, Oct 1727; Griselda, 18 June 1728; Merope, Nov 1728; Costantino il grande, May 1729, doubtful; Il ritorno del figlio con l’abito più approvato, Prague, Sporck, carn. 1730; Teseo in Creta, aut. 1730, doubtful; Artaserse, July 1733; Aglatida, wint. 1733, doubtful

Doubtful: Climene, Chioggia, carn. 1721, mentioned in FétisB; Mitridate, Ferrara, spr. 1722, mentioned in FétisB; Cajo Mario, Ferrara, spr. 1722, mentioned in FétisB; Udine, Venice, 1722, mentioned in FétisB; Arsinoe, 1728; Nissa ed Elpino (int for Griselda), 18 June 1728; Girita (Vienna, 1738), mentioned in GerberNL

other works

Messa, D, 4vv, 2 vn, va, ob, org, D-Dl

Serenata, perf. Breslau, 1732, to honour Elector of Mainz, lost; La pace fra la virtù e la bellezza (serenata, Metastasio), Vienna, 1739, A-Wn

3 arias, 1v, insts, D-SWl; duetto, 2vv, bc, Bsb (according to EitnerQ); duet, 2vv, bc, GB-Lbl; aria, 1v, 2 vn, va, org, CZ-KU

Overture, D, Pnm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Meloncelli)

ES (E. Zanetti)

FétisB

GerberNL

MatthesonGEP, 374–8

MGG1 (W. Sandelewski)

H. Riemann: Opern-Handbuch (Leipzig, 1887, 2/1893/R with suppl. by F. Stieger)

H.H. Borcherdt: ‘Geschichte der italienischen Oper in Breslau’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Geschichte Schlesiens, xliv (1910), 18–51

F.X. Seppelt: Geschichte des Bistums Breslau (Breslau, 1928)

R. Brockpähler: Handbuch zur Geschichte der Barockoper in Deutschland (Emsdetten, 1964)

D.E. Freeman: The Opera Theater of Count Franz Anton von Sporck in Prague (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992)

D.E. Freeman: ‘“Orlando furioso” in the Bohemian Lands: Was Vivaldi’s Music Really Used?’, Informazioni e studi vivaldiani, xii (1992), 51–73

SVEN HANSELL/DANIEL E. FREEMAN

Biordi, Giovanni

(b Rome, 1691; d Rome, 11 March 1748). Italian composer. In 1714 he was maestro di cappella of Tivoli Cathedral, where he remained until 1716. On the recommendation of Cardinal Ottoboni, he was made a chapel singer to the pope on 19 December 1717. In May 1722 he won a competition for the post of maestro di cappella at S Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Rome, where he remained until his death. From 1724 onwards, he taught singing at the pope's municipal college, where Pasquale Pisari was among his pupils. In 1730 he became secretary, and in 1737 chamberlain, of the Cappella Sistina. In 1742 he retired from there as a singer but continued as chamberlain. In recognition of his ability to write in the style of Palestrina, he was given the task of completing the Lamentations of Palestrina and Allegri. Biordi was also significant as a composer in the concertante style. His compositions, however, show a simpler technique and are often far removed from Palestrina's polyphony. He wrote exclusively church music.

WORKS

Motetto Transfige dulcissime Domine Jesu, ed. K. Proske, Musica divina, ii (Regensburg, 1855)

Ave maris stella, 4vv, ed. K. Proske, Musica divina, iii (Regensburg, 1859)

Litanie di SS Maria, 4vv, ed. K. Proske, Musica divina, iv (Regensburg, 1863)

Dixit Dominus, Beatus vir, Laudate pueri: 4vv; Lamentazioni, 4vv; Jerusalem ad Dominum, 5vv; O salutaris hostia, 5vv; Miserere, 2 choirs, Te Deum, 2 choirs; Lauda Sion, 8vv; Laudate pueri, S, choir, org: I-Rsg, Rvat

Many other sacred works incl. ants, grads, hymns, ints, Lamentations, lits, Mag, motets, offs, resps, seqs, 2, 4, 6, 8vv, some with org, D-Bsb, Mbs, MÜs, Rp, I-Rsg, Rvat

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI

EitnerQ

FellererP

E. Celani: ‘I cantori della cappella pontificia nei secoli XVI–XVIII’, RMI, xvi (1909), 55–112

G. Stanghetti: ‘La scuola di canto nel pontifio collegio urbano di Roma’, NA, iii (1926), 46–57

J.M. Llorens: Capellae Sixtinae codices (Vatican City, 1960)

SIEGFRIED GMEINWIESER

Bi-punctum, tri-punctum [double punctum, triple punctum].

In Western chant notations, groups of puncta of the same pitch (see Punctum).

Biquardus.

See Picard, (2).

Birchall, Robert

(b ?London, c1750; d London, 19 Dec 1819). English music seller, instrument dealer and publisher. From his early imprints it appears that he had been apprenticed to Walsh’s successors, william Randall (ii) and his wife Elizabeth. In 1783 he was in business with T. Beardmore as Beardmore & Birchall (or Birchall & Beardmore). From 1783 to May 1789 he was in partnership with Hugh Andrews as Birchall & Andrews; he also issued publications under the name Birchall & Co., and established a circulating music library. He then continued alone in the firm until 1819, though John Bland appears to have had some association with Birchall after he sold his own firm in 1795, until about 1801.

Birchall managed the series of Ancient Concerts and most of the benefit concerts of the time. In 1783 he proposed a complete reissue of Handel’s works in 80 folio volumes, but the project never materialized, though Birchall subsequently published many Handel items. In addition to glees, country dance books and much Italian vocal music, his publications included the first English edition of J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier, edited by Samuel Wesley and K.F. Horn in 1810. He also published many of Beethoven’s works, including the original English editions of the ‘Battle’ Symphony, the Violin Sonata op.96, the Piano Trio op.97 and a piano adaptation of the Seventh Symphony, the English copyrights of which he purchased from the composer.

Birchall was succeeded at his death by the firm of Birchall, Lonsdale & Mills (also known as Birchall & Co., or Mills & Co.), Christopher Lonsdale having been in Birchall's employ since at least 1817. The firm was known as Lonsdale & Mills from about 1829 until the dissolution of the partnership in 1834. Richard Mills (b ?1798; d London, 28 Nov 1870), a nephew of Birchall, remained active until about 1868, when he was succeeded by Richard Mills & Sons, a firm run by Richard Mills jr and Robert M. Mills, which continued until 1903. The firm of Christopher Lonsdale (?1795–1877), which had a large circulating music library, continued until 1880 when it was succeeded by Alfred Hays. At an early date the firms’ catalogues included vocal scores of Mozart operas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

KidsonBMP

Neighbour-TysonPN, 17–19

C. Burney: An Account of the Musical Performances … in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785/R)

A. Tyson: The Authentic English Editions of Beethoven (London, 1963)

C. Flamm: ‘Ein Verlegerbriefwechsel zur Beethovenzeit’, Beethoven-Studien, ed. E. Schenk (Vienna, 1970), 57–110

J.A. Parkinson: Victorian Music Publishers: an Annotated List (Warren, MI, 1990)

R.J. Rabin and S. Zohn: ‘Arne, Handel, Walsh, and Music as Intellectual Property: Two Eighteenth-Century Lawsuits’, JRMA, cxx (1995), 112–45

FRANK KIDSON/WILLIAM C. SMITH/PETER WARD JONES

Birchensha [Berchenshaw, Berkenshaw, Birkenshaw], John

(b early 17th century; d ?London, bur. 14 May 1681). English theorist, composer and teacher. He seems to have been a younger son of Sir Ralph Birchensha, who in 1598 was sent to Ireland as Comptroller of the Musters and Cheques. According to Anthony Wood (GB-Ob Wood D 19 [4], f.19) he resided in Ireland with the Earl of Kildare until the rebellion of 1641 forced him to quit Dublin for London. In A Musicall Banquet (1651) he is listed among teachers of the viol active in London; but it was as a teacher of the rudiments of composition that he made his name. He boasted that by means of his rules ‘not only those, who skillfully can sing or play on some Instrument, may learn to compose but also those, who can neither sing nor play’ (letter to the Royal Society, 26 April 1664), and claimed in a printed prospectus for his treatise Syntagma musicae that with its aid a beginner might within two months ‘(exquisitely, and with all the Elegancies of Musick) Compose two Parts; in three Months, three Parts; and so forwards to seven Parts’. Wood mentioned a published sheet of Plaine Rules and Directions for Composing Musick in Parts, which seems not to have survived, but a manuscript in the British Library (Add.4910, ff.39–61) contains notes of Mr Birchensha's 6 Rules of Composition; & his Enlargements there-on to the Right Hon^ble William Lord Viscount Brouncker, partly autograph and partly in Silas Taylor's hand; another manuscript of the Rules of Composition (B-Br 6689) belonged in 1695 to William Corbett. Taylor was an enthusiastic disciple of ‘Mr Berchenshaw's way’, which according to Pepys (10 June 1664) he ‘magnifies mightily’. Pepys took a course of lessons from Birchensha early in 1662, costing £5; it terminated ‘in a pet’ after Pepys criticized his rules, which he nevertheless conceded to be ‘the best I believe that ever yet were made’. Another pupil was Thomas Salmon, on Matthew Locke's recommendation; Birchensha subsequently wrote a preface to Salmon's Essay to the Advancement of Musick (London, 1672/R). Evelyn knew him as the inventor of ‘a mathematical way of composure very extraordinary: True as to the exact rules of art, but without much harmonie’ (3 August 1664). Another reference to his method occurs in Thomas Shadwell's The Humorists (1671): ‘Berkenshaw is a rare fellow, give him his due, fa, la, la, for he can teach men to compose that are deaf, dumb and blind’. After his death his reputation remained sufficiently high for Philip Becket, a former musician to Charles II, to advertise in 1681–2 for pupils ‘desirous to Learn Composition in Musick in Mr Birchinshaw's Method’, and for the Oxford musician Francis Withy to include a version of the rules (‘M^r Joh: Birchensha's notes’) in his commonplace book (GB-Och 337).

Birchensha attached great weight to his ‘compleat Scale of Musick’, a chart showing all ‘consonant and dissonant intervals suitable to musical harmony’ (including those involving double flats and double sharps) with their ratios in Pythagorean intonation. This was probably what Pepys saw at his house in Southwark on 24 February 1662 (‘his great Card of the body of Musique, which he cries up for a rare thing’). In a lecture on 9 June 1665 he contended that ‘by this Scale I will make any rationall Man understand more of the mathematicall part of Musick … then can be known … by reading & studying of all the Bookes, which have been written’ (Lbl Add.4388, f.67), and on 10 February 1676 he demonstrated the scale to the Royal Society. Birchensha's insistence on correct notation of intervals (at a time when notes such as E were often represented in viol music by enharmonic substitutes) was admirable, but he must have been well aware of the obstacles to the practical adoption of Pythagorean tuning.

Birchensha was unusual among professional musicians in holding that all aspects of music were susceptible of rationalisation, and it is here that his chief significance lies. Some scorned his pretensions, but others regarded him highly. In the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions (9 February 1674) he was praised as a ‘judicious and extraordinarily skilful Musitian’; Henry Oldenburg, its secretary, described him as ‘in Musica tum theoretica tum practica apprime versatus’ (letter to Marcello Malpighi, 7 June 1673). Templum musicum, his translation of part of Alsted's Encyclopaedia of 1630, was an outcome of his desire to disseminate ‘some Principles of the Mathematical part of Musick’. The first of several papers from him to the Royal Society was presented in 1662; two years later a committee including Lord Brouncker and Robert Boyle was set up to examine his ideas. There ensued a series of discussions on tuning and temperament, in which such eminent mathematicians as John Wallis and Christiaan Huygens were involved, and Birchensha was invited to participate in some experiments. His most important surviving theoretical work is the unpublished Compendious Discourse that he wrote for Robert Boyle: it includes 13 chapters on ‘Practicall’ and 21 on ‘Mathematicall’ aspects of music. His intention in Syntagma musicae was to cover the subject ‘Philosophically’ as well as ‘Mathematically, and Practically’; but despite a call for subscribers in 1672–3 and encouragement from the Royal Society this magnum opus remained unpublished, and it is doubtful whether he ever completed it.

Birchensha made more impact as a speculative theorist than as a composer. In his fantasia-suites he adopted a crude, jagged, declamatory style reminiscent of William Lawes, though without Lawes's imaginative richness; in other instrumental pieces he embraced the fashionable French violin style. Pepys owned a manuscript of his two-part settings of the Ordinary Church-Tunes of the Singing Psalms, in which proper and common tunes (such as ‘Winchester’ and ‘York’) are provided with alternative counterpoints; though probably intended for teaching, these doubtless illustrate the kind of simple descant used in some churches. His three-part psalms are included in a manuscript collection of ‘Choicest Divine Hymns or Anthemnes’ dated 1688 (GB-Y M 5 S). Two meetings of the Royal Society (3 and 10 August 1664) were followed by concerts featuring ‘some Instrumental Musique of Mr Berchenshaws’; the first of these was attended by Evelyn, the second by Pepys, who wrote that he ‘found no pleasure at all in it’. Birchensha was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

WORKS

theoretical works

Rules of composition (MS, B-Br, GB-Lbl, Och)

A Letter Written to the Royall Society … Concerning Musick(MS, 26 April 1664, London, Royal Society, Letter Book Copy, i, 166–73)

Templum musicum (London, 1664) [trans. of J.H. Alsted: ‘Loci musices’, Encyclopaedia, bk 14]

A Compendious Discourse of the Principles of the Practicall & Mathematicall Partes of Musick; Also, Directions How to Make Any Kind of Tune, or Ayre (MS, London, Royal Society, Boyle Papers, 41.1)

An Account of Divers Particulars, Remarkable in my Book [Syntagma musicae]; In w^ch I Will Write of Musick Philosophically, Mathematically, and Practically (MS, 10 Feb 1676, London, Royal Society, Classified Papers, XXII.(1).7); see also the printed Animadversion for this bk (signed and sealed by Birchensha, 27 Dec 1672; Lbl Add.4388, f.69), and the similar prospectus in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (20 Jan 1673), 5153–4

Plaine Rules and Directions for Composing Musick in Parts, lost, mentioned by Wood

instrumental

4 fantasia-suites, d, d, D, D (fantasia, alman, galliard), vn, b viol, org, GB-Och

Suite, B (ov., 3 branles, gavot, courant, minuet, rondeau), vn, b, Lcm

Suite, d (branles), 2 vn, b, US-NYp

Suite, a (pavan, alman, corant, alman, corant, saraband), 2 vn, b viol, lute, GB-Ob

Threnodia, F (Prelude, Passing Bell, Entrance, Entertainment, Knell, Solemnity, Returne), 2 vn, ?2 b viols, bc, D-Hs (inc.)

vocal

24 psalm tunes in alternative settings, 2vv, GB-Cmc

7 Psalms, 3vv, Y M 5 S: My shepherd is the living Lord; My soul to God shall give good heed; O Lord consider my distresse; Send aide and save mee from my foes; The mighty God, th'eternall hath thus spoake; When as wee sat in Babylon; Yee children which doe serve the Lord

Service, C, LF, by ‘Beckinshaw’, doubtful

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

M. Locke: Observations upon … An Essay to the Advancement of Musick (London, 1672)

M. Locke: The Present Practice of Musick Vindicated (London, 1673)

T. Birch: The History of the Royal Society of London, i (London, 1756)

Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland [1598–1632] (London, 1872–1912)

W.H.G. Flood: A History of Irish Music (Dublin, 1905, 3/1913/R, 4/1927)

E.S. de Beer, ed.: The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955)

M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719)’, RMARC, no.1 (1961), 1–107; no.2 (1962), 1–15

A.R. and M.B. Hall, eds.: The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ii (Madison, WI, 1966); x (London, 1975)

S. Pepys: Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (London, 1970–83)

J.T. Johnson: The English Fantasia-Suite, ca.1620–1660 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1971)

T. Crawford: ‘An Unusual Consort Revealed in an Oxford Manuscript’, Chelys, vi (1975–6), 61–8

P.M. Gouk: ‘Acoustics in the Early Royal Society, 1660–1680’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, xxxvi (1982), 155–75

P.M. Gouk: Music in the Natural Philosophy of the Early Royal Society (diss., U. of London,1982)

L.E. Miller and A. Cohen: Music in the Royal Society of London, 1660–1806 (Detroit, 1987)

L.E. Miller: ‘John Birchensha and the Early Royal Society: Grand Scales and Scientific Composition’, JRMA, cxv (1990), 63–79

R. Thompson: ‘“Francis Withie of Oxon” and his Commonplace Book, Christ Church, Oxford, MS 337’, Chelys, xx (1991), 3–27

R. Charteris: ‘A Rediscovered Manuscript Source with some Previously Unknown Works by John Jenkins, William Lawes and Benjamin Rogers’, Chelys, xxii (1993), 3–29

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

I. Spink: English Cathedral Music 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995)

CHRISTOPHER D.S. FIELD

Birchtree.

American firm of music publishers, previously known as Summy-Birchard.

Birck [Birckh], Wenzel Raimund (Johann).

See Pirck, Wenzel Raimund.

Birckenstock, Johann Adam.

See Birkenstock, Johann Adam.

Bird, Arthur H(omer)

(b Belmont, MA, 23 July 1856; d Berlin, 22 Dec 1923). American composer, organist and pianist. He received his early training from his father and uncle, who were composers and compilers of hymn tunes, and in 1875 was admitted to the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, where he was a pupil of K.A. Haupt, A. Loeschhorn and E. Rohde. In 1877 he returned to America and was appointed organist at St Matthew’s, Halifax, Nova Scotia. During his second stay in Germany (1881–6) he studied composition under H. Urban and became a close friend and disciple of Liszt. After a brief visit to the USA, where he was honoured at the Milwaukee Musical Festival for his compositions, he returned permanently to Berlin and became the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago journal Musical Leader. He also wrote on musical topics for The Etude and The Musician.

Bird’s music was well known in Germany, and most of it was published there, but after about 1895 he composed relatively little. He was the first American composer to receive commissions from France and Germany, and Rübezahl (1886) was the first major ballet written by an American. Contemporary critics agreed that his music, late Romantic in style, was pleasing and melodious, that he was an excellent contrapuntist, and that his orchestrations were colourful. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1898.

WORKS

MSS in US-Wc

Daphne (operetta, 3), 1894, New York, private perf., 13 Dec 1897

Volksfest (ballet), op.13, 1886, perf. 1887, lost [also version for pf 4 hands]

Rübezahl (ballet), op.13, Berlin, 1886, pf score pubd

Vocal works, incl. The World’s Wanderers (P.B. Shelley), B; 3 Quartettes (Shelley, G.E. Lessing), male vv; 5 Songs, female vv, pf, op.36, 1896

20 orch works, incl. Sinfonie no.1, A, op.8 (Breslau, 1886); Eine Carneval Szene, op.5 (Breslau, 1887); Second Little Suite, op.6, Milwaukee, 1886; 2 other suites; Two Episodes, op.25, 1889, US-Wc

7 chbr works, incl. serenade, 10 wind insts, op.40, c1901

11 org works, incl. 3 Oriental Sketches (New York, 1903)

28 pf works, incl. 8 Sketches, op.15 (Breslau, 1887) [incl. no.1, Musical Essay]; 7 morceaux, op.20 (Breslau and New York, 1887); Albumblatt, Scherzando, op.35, c1895, US-Bp

6 opp. for pf 4 hands

8 opp. for hmn; several songs and choral works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (W.T. Upton)

EwenD

GroveA (W.T. Marrocco) [incl. detailed work-list]

L.C. Elson: The History of American Music (New York, 1904, rev. 3/1925/R by A. Elson)

W.C. Loring: ‘Arthur Bird, American’, MQ, xxix (1943), 78–91

W.C. Loring: The Music of Arthur Bird (Atlanta, GA, 1974, 2/1977)

W. Apple: ‘The Organ Works of Arthur H. Bird’, Diapason, xii (1995), 12–13

W. THOMAS MARROCCO/WARREN APPLE

Bird instruments.

Mechanical instruments that imitate birdsong. The earliest known references to automatic singing birds date from the 3rd century bce with the descriptions of Hero of Alexandria. In the second half of the 9th century two automatic musical instruments with artificial trees and singing birds are said to have been created for the Byzantine emperor Theophilus (see Organ, fig.24). About 1250 the poet Konrad von Würzburg wrote of an artificial tree on which synthetic birds were sitting, flapping their wings and singing. In his Musurgia Universalis, Kircher referred to ‘an automatic organ that produces the sound of animals and even the singing of birds’.

1. Bird organ.

A small Barrel organ designed to encourage caged birds to sing. It is also known as a canary organ but is more correctly called a serinette. These very small hand-cranked instruments first appeared in France early in the second quarter of the 17th century. Their manufacture centred on the border region of the Vosges. The flourishing period of the serinette lay in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, but the instrument remained virtually unaltered in design and appearance for over 200 years. The majority of serinettes had one rank of open metal pipes at 2' pitch with a compass of ten notes, tuned to the diatonic scale c'''– d'''' with an added b'''. Some had an additional 4' rank of stopped metal pipes on a slider chest (see Organ, §II, 2–4); these were called pionne or serinette-pionne. Larger instruments, sometimes called perroquette, serinette-merline (‘blackbird serinette’) or turlutaine (‘curlew’), had a 14-note scale and were provided with three registers by the addition of an 8' stop, operated manually and usually of stopped wooden pipes but occasionally of stopped metal. Songs, dances and airs d'oiseau (simple bird-like melodies) were composed or arranged to fit the compass; the melodies were often richly decorated with trills, mordents, slides and appoggiaturas. As on larger church and chamber barrel organs, tunes were changed by shifting the barrel sideways. Although contemporary illustrations show them in use with caged birds (fig.2), it seems unlikely that these instruments would have succeeded in their goal.

2. Mechanical bird whistle.

Early attempts to create instruments to imitate birdsong employed sets of small organ pipes. By their nature, such instruments precluded miniaturization and could not reproduce the microdivisions of reference pitch that is a feature of real birdsong. Around 1768–70 the Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet (1745–c1820) invented a mechanism with a single pipe and a sliding piston. This was the first use of the principle which, a century later, would be used in the ‘swanee whistle’. Here the movement of the piston was controlled by a multiple cam while air to the pipe (and thus articulation) was governed by another cam which opened and closed a single pallet (fig.3). Not only was the size of the mechanism reduced dramatically, but a high degree of realism could now be attained. Swiss makers such as Jaquet-Droz, Rochat, Leschot, Bruguier and Frisard excelled in the creation of miniature singing birds which demanded the highest watch-making craftsmanship. The mechanism was used in singing-bird snuffboxes (where a tiny bird would spring up under a hinged lid and appear to sing) and similar mechanisms in scent bottles, watches and jewellery. These reached the peak of their popularity in the 1780s when Swiss craftsmen (working both in Switzerland and in London) enjoyed a rich trade. Early in the 20th century, the Bontems family of Paris produced life-sized singing birds in cages. Blasé Bontems was responsible for the remarkably realistic song these produced and the best pieces very accurately simulate the songs of the blackbird, thrush, canary, nightingale and goldfinch. Similar technology was applied to other automata, specifically the ‘whistling man’ or ‘whistling boy’ pieces made in Triberg between 1920 and 1960 by Griesbaum, which in the mid-1990s was Europe's only remaining singing-bird maker. (See also Musical box.)

3. Bird whistle (orchestral).

Instruments used in the orchestra to imitate birdsong. Two distinct types are found: the bird warbler, which is also known as the Swanee whistle, and the bird whistle or ornithophone. The latter consists of a small metal canister into which water is placed with a mouthpipe leading to a semi-submerged whistle. Blowing into the mouthpipe displaces the water and creates a bubbling in the whistle which can imitate the warbling and trilling of birds. The popular name for this device is the nightingale. The sound of the cuckoo is produced by a two-note whistle on an air reservoir or by a small duct flute with one or two finger-holes.

Various bird-imitating toy stops have been used in organs. See under Organ stop (Vogelgesang).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. de Caus: Les raisons des forces mouvantes (Frankfurt, 1615, 2/1624)

A. Kircher: Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650/R)

A. Chapuis and E. Droz: Les automates figures artificielles d'hommes et d'animaux (Neuchâtel, 1950)

A. Buchner: Hudební automaty (Prague, 1959; Eng. trans., London, 1959)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Clockwork Music (London, 1973)

J.J.L. Haspels: Automatic Musical Instruments, their Mechanics and their Music, 1580–1820 (The Hague, 1987)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Musical Box (Atglen, PA, 1996)

ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Birdsong.

The present article is concerned with the use of birdsong in human music; for discussion of birdsong itself see Animal music.

The vocalizations of birds have been of interest to musicians since at least the 14th century. They have been described as musica avicularis (Schröder, 1639), ‘protomusic’ (Hartshorne, 1973) or ‘micromusic’ (Szöke, Gunn and Philip, 1969). Music notation of birdsong began with Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650); options include graphic notation (Hold, 1970) and sound spectrograms, available since the 1940s.

Ethnomusicological studies indicate that listening to birdsong has influenced some musical cultures, especially in areas with intense bird vocalizations, such as the rain forest of Papua New Guinea (Feld, 1982). Non-Western people have imitated birdsong in daily life and rituals (Feld) for hunting purposes (Brandily, 1982) and to aid the learning of rhythmic structures in their own music (Shimeda, 1986). While the aural sensitivity of the inhabitants of rain forests is shaped by their continuous immersion in the tapestry of avian sounds, birdsong is more distant from city dwellers, and has been domesticated by the keeping of captive birds in homes and attracting them to gardens. Some caged birds can be taught human melodies; various instruments and tunes have been devised for this purpose (e.g. The Bird Fancyer’s Delight for flageolet, 1717).

Composers have included birdsong in their music in these ways: (a) by imitation, by voices or instruments (including Bird instruments); (b) by quotation, using recordings; and (c) by using live birds’ voices. Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds (414 bce) illustrates two forms of birdsong imitation common before the advent of recordings, syllabic onomatopoeia (e.g. ‘io, io, ito, ito’) and with wind instruments (e.g. the flute as nightingale). Here birds serve as an allegory for human relationships, as they do in some musical repertories, such as the Parisian chanson (van Orden, 1995) or in folksongs from India (Sharma, 1979).

Birdsong portrayal may appear in music for anecdotal, symbolic or ornamental purposes, or simply for its significance as sound (see Programme music). Migratory songbirds carry associations with (i) the spring and joy, as in the English 13th-century rota Sumer is icumen in, (ii) love and love relationships, as in Szymanowski’s ‘Nightingale’ from Three Songs of the Fairy Princess (1915), (iii) the serenity of nature, as in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808, where three birds described by Kircher – the nightingale, cuckoo and quail – are imitated) and (iv) spiritual jubilation, as in Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte for organ solo (1949–50). The first three meanings are intertwined; less common significations of birdcalls and songs include (v) freedom (Wishart’s Red Bird for tape, 1985), (vi) mystery (Mahler’s ‘Der Vogel der Nacht’ in Symphony no.3 (1893–6)), and (vii) madness (Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, 1969).

In European music, birdsong frequently shares the decorative role of captive birds; repertories of ‘bird’ music (see Jensen, 1985; Schneider, 1985–6; Roggenkamp, 1987) include 14th-century virelais (Vaillant, Senleches), 16th-century chansons and madrigals (Gombert, Janequin, Morley, Weelkes) and 17th- and 18th-century harpsichord miniatures (Couperin, Daquin, Frescobaldi, Kerll, Pasquini, Rameau). Composers portray calls and songs of a small group of familiar, local species by means of simple patterns, such as a descending 3rd for the cuckoo (also a 2nd, or a 4th in Janequin’s Le chant des oiseaux, c1559) and a series of repeated pitches with trills for the nightingale (see exx.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). Other musical birds include blackbirds (Tiessen, 1953), skylarks, quails, owls, crows, hens and roosters; the last three groups have been assigned comic functions in Italian madrigals and frottolas.

In vocal music, birdsong may be rendered by syllabic onomatopoeia or by extended vocalises. In instrumental music, birdsong is usually simplified and accommodated to musical conventions, appearing at cadence points (Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony), in episodes (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons), cadenzas (Handel’s Organ Concerto no.13 in F) and more rarely in thematic material (J.S. Bach’s Sonata in D for keyboard, bwv963). Instrumental virtuosity is a common feature of generic birdsong representation; Liszt used pianistic trills and arabesques to suggest bird timbres and flight patterns in Légende: St François d’Assise: la prédication aux oiseaux (1862/3). In orchestral music, the voices of songbirds are represented primarily by woodwind timbres, high registers, brief motifs, staccato articulation, grace notes and trills. Wagner’s ‘Forest Murmurs’ in Siegfried (1856–71) evokes birdsong in the natural habitat with a texture of fragmented motifs set against a static chordal background. Stylized birdsong soundscapes appear in works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Delius (In a Summer Garden, 1908), Strauss (Eine Alpensinfonie, 1911–5), Bartók (the ‘nature music’ idiom), Britten (Spring Symphony, 1949) and others. While these textures usually represent bird choruses, an individual may sing a free-flowing melody in a quasi-improvisatory manner, for example the soprano vocalise in Stravinsky’s ‘Chanson de Rossignol’ from The Nightingale (1908–14).

Before the 20th century, musical birdsong belonged to the domain of ornamental beauty; birds could be lyrical and, at times, amusing, but seldom dramatic or tragic. Messiaen transformed birdsong from an ornament to an element of musical style, drawing particularly on its complex rhythmic ostinatos and varied melodic contours, and approximating birds’ microtonal intervals with the 12 chromatic pitch classes (Messiaen, 1944, 1995). His first attempts at a free ‘style oiseau’ in organ music from the 1930s (e.g. La Nativité du Seigneur, 1935) emphasize the asymmetry and rhythmic irregularity of birdsong (Johnson, 1995). Bird species are first named in ‘Liturgie de cristal’ from Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940–41), in which the clarinet has the ‘principal melody’ of the blackbird and the violin plays the ‘secondary counterpoint’ of the nightingale. Réveil des oiseaux (1953) contains only transposed and slowed-down birdsong, of 38 species, faithfully rendered in its daily variations including the dawn chorus and the silences of the sunrise and noon. The monumental piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–8) seeks to portray the birds of France within their visual and aural landscapes. After 1950, birdsong appears in virtually all Messiaen’s works: he used his own transcriptions and related the choice of birds to the subject matter, for example, Japanese birds in Sept haïkaï (1962) or birds of the American desert in Des canyons aux étoiles (1971–4). From Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) onwards, he included birds from all the continents and represented all available birdsong models, from brief calls to elaborate compositions. The ornithological accuracy is less important than the development of a new musical style with the birds’ irregular phrase structures, rich timbres, complex melodic contours and intricate rhythmic patterns in incessant variation (see Hold, 1971; Kurenniemi, 1980; and Mâche, 1987).

In the bird choruses of the opera Saint François d’Assise (1983), Messiaen employed controlled aleatory techniques, which had been used by Lutosławski in woodwind textures with traits of musical birdsong (e.g. Symphony no.2, 1965–7; Mi-Parti, 1975–6). The virtuoso tempos and rhythmic spontaneity of birdsong have inspired jazz musicians, particularly in the bebop tradition (e.g. Mingus’s Birdcalls, 1959). Charlie Parker’s creative improvisations, especially in a series of ‘bird’ pieces (Ornithology, 1946; Bird of Paradise, 1947) share traits with The Birds’ Free Composition, especially in his use of quotation from many musical sources (reminiscent of avian mimicry) and the cento technique of improvisation, based on a corpus of distinct formulae, arranged in ever new patterns.

While the improvisations of jazz musicians may display some general stylistic traits of birdsong, the notated music of North America contains representations of various local species, especially the hermit thrush (Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Morn, 1922; Bartók’s Piano Concerto no.3, 1945; see Harley, 1994) and R. Murray Schafer’s The Princess of the Stars (1981, rev. 1984). The two last portray whole choruses of birds: Bartók stylized motifs of the wood thrush and the towhee, while Schafer used vocal and instrumental imitations of the white-throated sparrow, whippoorwill, chickadee and others to incite live birds to sing. His work, designed for performance at dawn at a wooded lake, blends birdsong imitation and presence.

The quotation of recorded birdsong in orchestral music was introduced in Respighi’s Pini di Roma (1923–4; the nightingale accompanied by the orchestra). In Gli uccelli (1928) Respighi reverted to adding conventional woodwind embellishments to tonal music. With the advancement of electroacoustic technology, the musical potential of recorded birdsong has increased. Even a simple transposition downwards may bring interesting effects (James Fassett, Symphony of the Birds, 1955). François-Bernard Mâche has explored connections between bird vocalizations and music, for example by borrowing birds’ rhythmic patterns in Rituel d’oubli (1968), blurring the distinction between recorded birdsong and voice in Korwar (1972) and creating a birdsong counterpoint in Naluan (1974). In Michaël Lévinas’s opera La conférence des oiseaux (1985) singer-actors display a grotesque mixture of human and avian characteristics while the tape part includes sonorities derived from birdsong. Many electroacoustic works quote or stylize birdsong (e.g. François Bayle’s Trois rêves d’oiseau, 1971; Joan la Barbara’s Urban Tropics, 1988). However, recorded birds reiterate their song with each playback of the tape, thus sharing the main shortcoming of birdsong representation, that is, the loss of variability of real birds’ voices. More diversity can be created in live-electronic music with manipulation of recordings (e.g. Cage’s Telephones and Birds, 1977) and with the use of improvisation, sampling and computer processing of recorded birdsong.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Schröder: Ein nützliches Tractätlein zum Lobe Gottes oder Der herzefreuenden Musica (Copenhagen, 1639)

A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650/R)

F.S. Matthews: World Birds and their Music (New York, 1904)

W. Garstang: Songs of the Birds (London, 1922)

A.A. Saunders: Birdsong (New York, 1935)

P.A. Scholes: ‘Bird Music’, Oxford Companion to Music (London, 1938, 10/1970)

O. Messiaen: Technique de mon langage musical (Paris, 1944; Eng. trans., 1957)

H. Tiessen: Musik der Natur: über den Gesang der Vögel, insbesondere über Tonsprache und Form des Amselgesangs (Freiburg, 1953, 2/1978)

C. Hartshorne: ‘The Relation of Bird Song to Music’, The Ibis, c (1958), 421–45

P. Szöke: ‘Zur Entstehung und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Musik’, SMH, ii (1962), 33–85

E.A. Armstrong: A Study of Bird Song (London, 1963)

R.A. Hinde, ed.: Bird Vocalizations (Cambridge, 1969)

P. Szöke, W.W.H. Gunn and M. Filip: ‘The Musical Microcosm of the Hermit Thrush’, SMH, xi (1969), 423–38

T. Hold: ‘The Notation of Bird-Song: a Review and a Recommendation’, The Ibis, cxi (1970), 151–72

F. Jakob: Die Orgel und die Vogelwelt (Zürich, 1970)

T. Hold: ‘Messiaen’s Birds’, ML, lii (1971), 113–22

C. Hartshorne: Born to Sing: an Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington, IN, and London, 1973)

P. Bondesen: North American Bird Songs: a World of Music (Klampenbord, 1977)

R. Jellis: Bird Sounds and their Meaning (Ithaca, NY, 1977)

R.M. Schafer: The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977)

N. Sharma: ‘Folksongs on the Birds of Jaisalmer’, Sangeet Natak, nos.53– (1979), 33–44

M. Kurenniemi: ‘Messiaen, the Ornithologist’, MR, xli (1980), 121–6

M. Brandily: ‘Songs to Birds among the Teda of Chad’, EthM, xxvi (1982), 371–90

S. Feld: Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, 1982/2/1990)

F.-B. Mâche: Musique, mythe, nature, ou Les dauphins d’Arion (Paris, 1983; Eng. trans., 1992)

D. Stockmann and G. Tembrock: ‘Interdisciplinäre Problem zwischen Musikwissenschaft und Bioakustik’, BMw, xxv/3–4 (1983), 171–95

R. d’A. Jensen: ‘Birdsong and the Imitation of Birdsong in the Music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, CMc, no.40 (1985), 50–65

K. Schneider: ‘Musikalische Ornithologie: Vogeldarstellungen in der Instrumentalmusik: eine Bibliographie’, Gefiederte Welt, cix/5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 (1985), cx/2, 3 (1986)

T. Shimeda: ‘Patterned Listening as a Basis of the Music Tradition of the Penan, Sarawak, Malaysia’, The Oral and the Literate in Music: Tokyo 1985, 180–92

F.-B. Mâche: ‘La musique au naturel’, Cahiers du CRFM, iii/March (1987), 9–20

P. Roggenkamp, ed.: Vogelstimmen in der Klaviermusik des 17.-20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1987)

D. Goode: ‘Phrases about the Hermit Thrush’, Musicworks, l (1991), 12–19

M.A. Harley: ‘Słowik i tajemnice nocy: o realistyczności i symbolice śpiewu słowika w muzyce’ [The nightingale and secrets of the night: realism and symbolism of nightingale song in music], Muzyka, iii (1992), 13–36

M.A. Harley: ‘Birds in Concert: North-American Birdsong in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No.3’, Tempo, no.189 (1994), 8–16

O. Messiaen: Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992) (Paris, 1994–)

C.K. Catchpole and P.J.B. Slater: Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1995)

M.A. Harley: ‘Natura naturans, Natura naturata and Bartók’s Nature Music Idiom’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 329–50

R.S. Johnson: ‘Birdsong’, The Messiaen Companion, ed. P. Hill (Portland, OR, 1995), 249–65

K. van Orden: ‘Sexual Discourse in the Parisian Chanson: a Libidinous Aviary’, JAMS, xlviii (1995), 1–41

M. Head: ‘Birdsong and the Origins of Music’, JRMA, cxxii (1997), 1–23

MARIA ANNA HARLEY

Bird warbler.

See Swanee whistle. See also Bird instruments, §3.

Biret, Idil

(b Ankara, 12 Nov 1941). Turkish pianist. She began piano lessons at the age of three, later studying the piano with Cortot and Kempff and composition with Boulanger. At 15 she graduated from the Paris Conservatoire with three premiers prix and embarked on an international career which has included appearances with most of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. In 1993 she became the first pianist to record the complete works of Chopin. Her other complete recordings include the solo piano works of Brahms and Rachmaninoff, Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies and the piano sonatas of Boulez. Known mainly for her interpretations of the great Romantic composers, she possesses an encyclopedic repertory and a formidable technique. In addition to the complete, or near-complete, piano works of Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Skryabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, Biret has performed all of the principal keyboard works of Bach, Schubert, Liszt and Bartók, the complete keyboard concertos of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, most of the Mozart concertos, many contemporary works (she gave the première of Jean Françaix’s Piano Sonata in 1960) and reams of chamber music. Notable ensemble partners have included Kempff, Maurice Gendron and Yehudi Menuhin. Like many leading players, Biret is an uneven artist, capable of rhythmically prosaic and tonally opaque playing, but also of profoundly inspired interpretations.

JEREMY SIEPMANN

Birgisson, Snorri Sigfús

(b Copenhagen, 29 April 1954). Icelandic composer and pianist. He studied the piano with Jón Nordal and Árni Kristjánsson and composition with Thorkell Sigorbjörnsson at the Reykjavík College of Music, graduating as a pianist in 1974. He continued piano studies with Barry Snyder in the USA at the Eastman School of Music (1974–5). In 1975–6 he studied composition with Mortensen in Oslo, electronic music with Lasse Thoresen and sonology with Thoresen and Olav Anton Thommessen. He then pursued further composition studies with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam (1976–8). On returning to Iceland in 1980 he became active as a pianist, composer and teacher in Reykjavík.

Birgisson's compositions span a wide stylistic range, from the 11 slow-moving, meditative movements of Hymni (1982) to the experimental choral work Aevintýri (1983–5), in which the musical material is determined by punctuation marks in the text, an old Icelandic fairy tale. One of several works inspired by extramusical elements, Aefingar (‘Etudes’, 1981) is a set of 21 piano pieces based on the imagery of the ‘major arcana’ tarot cards. His four volumes of Piano Pieces for Beginners (1984) introduce young students to various techniques of contemporary composition and performance, including aleatory procedures and the interaction of tape with live performance. In 1996 he was the soloist in the première of his Concerto for piano and orchestra, a work notable for its gentle lyricism, particularly in the central slow movement. More stylistically diverse, his Seven Portraits (1997–8) are musical depictions of seven unnamed friends and colleagues.

WORKS

(selective list)

Rotundum, cl, 1979; Aefingar [Etudes], pf, 1981; Dans [Dance], vc, 1981–2; Hymni, str, 1982; Sofðu nú saelin [Lullaby] (folk verse), chorus, 1982; Aevintýri [Fairy tale], chorus, 1983, rev. 1985; Pf Pieces for Beginners, 1984; Cantilena, cl, pf, 1989; ‘ … the sky composes promises … ’, cl, vc, pf, 1989; Str Qt no.2, 1991; Novelette, vn, pf, 1993; Afmorsvísa [Song of Love] (P. Vídalín), chorus, 1994; Coniunctio, orch, 1994, rev. 1999; Í segulsviði [In a Magnetic Field], chbr ens, 1996; Pf Conc., 1996; 7 Portraits, pf, 1997–8; Fegurð veraldar mun hverfa [World's Beauty shall Vanish] (H. Pétursson), S, chbr ens, 1999

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bergendal: New Music in Iceland (Reykjavík, 1991)

M. Podhajski: Dictionary of Icelandic Composers (Warsaw, 1997)

ÁRNI HEIMIR INGÓLFSSON

Birimbao.

A small Jew’s harp with a pear-shaped iron or copper frame to which a steel tongue is attached. In Spain, where it is also called guimbarda, it is a shepherd’s instrument. In parts of the Basque country it was found until the end of the 19th century under the local names trompa, mosu-gitarra and mosu-musika; it is now almost obsolete there. In Latin America it is commonly used in children’s games. It is found in Cuba and Brazil, and among the Venezuelan Guajiro (where it is known as trompa), the Chilean and Argentine Araucano (known as trompe) and the Mataco of the Gran Chaco.

JOHN M. SCHECHTER

Biriotti, León

(b Montevideo, 1 Dec 1929). Uruguayan composer, conductor and oboist. He studied the violin with Antonio Maiquez and Juan Fabbri, then the oboe at the local municipal music school. He later concentrated on his oboe studies with Jean-Louis Le Roux and studied composition with Enrique Casal Chapi (1950–55). While in France on a Karolyi Foundation scholarship he studied conducting with Jean Martinon. In 1969–70 he studied composition with Ginastera at the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires; he attended Ligeti's composition course in Darmstadt in 1976.

As a soloist, conductor and composer, Biriotti has been an active and influential promoter of contemporary music in Uruguay and Brazil. He founded and directed a string orchestra and conducted the Uruguayan Jeunesses Musicales chamber orchestra and the SODRE SO; he has conducted some of the main orchestras in South America. As an acclaimed virtuoso oboist, he has performed throughout North and Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, playing his own works and giving premières of those of his Latin American colleagues. Many composers have dedicated oboe works to him. The strong reputation he has enjoyed as a composer, especially since the late 1970s, has taken him to numerous international festivals and congresses.

In general, Biriotti's music developed from a preoccupation with craftsmanship (the Suite concertante, 1953, and Sinfonía Ana Frank, 1964) to a total serialist style and the use of electronics. In the early 1970s he was particularly concerned with questions of set theory, which he referred to as a system of structures through permutations of ordered sets. For him, a set comprised not only the usual possible transformations of a 12-note row, applied horizontally as well as vertically, but a series of internal, numerical relationships and interactions among the various forms of the rows. This combinatorial method applied, in works including Espectros (1970), Permutaciones (1970) and Laberintos (1970), frequently produced a total chromatic cluster, each time different, with internal timbral variety. While this technique of composition allowed the most varied diversity of aesthetic and stylistic idioms, it also provided a cohesive means of internal structure.

Biriotti often expressed his deep sorrow over the Jews' historical plight (as in the Sinfonía Ana Frank, Treno por Auschwitz, the ‘Jerusalem’ Symphony and Sinfonia da Requiem, the last of which was written in 1998 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust). His works of the 1980s and 90s show structural skill, virtuoso instrumental writing, genuine expressiveness and a sense of humour, as in Voyage autour de mon nombril or Prélude à l'après-midi d'un dinosaure.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Candombe (children's mini-op), 1991; film scores, incid music

Orch: Suite concertante, vn, orch, 1953; Concertino, str, 1960; Concertino, tpt, str, 1960; Sinfonía Ana Frank, str, 1964; Sym. no.2, 1965; Sym. no.3 ‘In memoriam Lauro Ayestarán’, 1968; Sym. no.4, 1969; Espectros, 3 orch, 1970; Permutaciones, 1970; Paraingo, ob, str, 1973; Soles, 1974; Ob, Conc., 1983; Yiskor for Terezin (Children's Drawings), ob, str, 1986; Conc., vn/va/vc, chbr orch, 1988; Sym. no.6, 1991; Conc. ditto l'Orfeo, fl, str, hpd, 1994; Conc. no.3, ob, wind orch, 1995; Mikroconcertino, vc, chbr orch, 1995; Dbn Conc., 1997; Sinfonietta, 1997

Vocal: El Paseo de Buster Keaton (cant.), chorus, insts, 1955; … de la melancolia y el suicidio …, nar, 2 male choruses, 1970; Treno por Auschwitz, nar, chorus, orch, tape, 1970; Crónica de Ouro Preto, nar, bar, ob, pf, 1978; Sinfonia concertante ‘Sefarad’, S obbl, vc, orch, 1982; Sym. no.7 ‘Jerusalem’, S, ob, str, 1996; Sinfonia da Requiem, S, chorus, orch, 1998

Chbr: 2 Inventions, ob, eng hn, 1952; Mikros, timbric essay, 8 insts, 1957; Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1963; Romanza sefaradi, vn, pf, 1964; Str Qt, 1965; Sonata, vn, pf, 1967; Montaires, pf, cel, perc, 1969; Laberintos, 5 insts, 1970; Simetrias, 9 insts, 1970; Metamorphose after Kafka, ob, pf/tape, 1974; Treno por Laura, ob, inst, ens 1975; Geminis, 2 vn, 1978; Conc. Brandenburlesque, pf, 13 insts, 1985; Ob Qnt, 1989; Sonata, ob, pf, 1989; Conc. II, ob, 12 str, 1990; Hn Qnt, 1991; Candombe alla tocata, timp, pf, 1993; Bereshit, vn, vc, pf, 1994

Solo inst: Espirales, pf, 1970; A la recherche du apex, vc, 1977; Spleen, ob, 1977; Voyage autour de mon nombril, ob, 1977; Memoria de la vihuela de Indo Iguez, gui, 1978; Cándidos O.V.N.Is., ob, 1979; Lettera a Fernando Grillo, db, 1980; Fioriture, pf, 1981; Sonata, vn, 1981; Velour, gui, 1981; Sonata-Fantasia, gui, 1991

El-ac: En las moradas da la muerte, 1970; Prélude à l'après-midi d'un dinosaure, ob, live elecs, 1988; Pulsars, elecs, 1989; Self Portrait with Family, ob, insts, live elecs, 1991

WRITINGS

Grupo de compositores de Bahia: reseña de un movimiento contemporáneo (Montevideo, 1971)

‘Técnica del sistema de estructuras por permutaciones’, Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research, x (1974), 138–69

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, ed. Pan American Union (Washington, DC, 1967)

S. Salgado: Breve historia de la música culta en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1971)

G. Béhague: Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Birk, Wenzel Raimund (Johann).

See Pirck, Wenzel Raimund.

Birkenshaw, John.

See Birchensha, John.

Birkenstock [Birckenstock, Birkenstok, Berkenstock], Johann Adam

(b Alsfeld, Hessen, 19 Feb 1687; d Eisenach, 26 Feb 1733). German violinist and composer. In 1700 his family moved to Kassel where he studied music for five years with the Italian Kapellmeister Ruggiero Fedeli. Impressed by his progress, the Landgrave sent him to Berlin to study with Volumier. After a year in Berlin, Birkenstock spent a year at Bayreuth as the pupil of Fiorelli. He then went to Paris in 1708 to perfect his violin technique under the guidance of François Duval. The following year he became a member of the court orchestra at Kassel, and in 1721 was promoted to the position of first violin. During the year 1722 he undertook a concert tour, spending seven months in Amsterdam where his first violin sonatas were published. While in Holland Birkenstock refused a lucrative appointment at the King of Portugal's establishment. Returning to Kassel, he was subsequently (1725) appointed Konzertmeister, with a salary of 200 thalers and gifts in kind. After the Landgrave's death in 1730, Birkenstock moved to Eisenach as Hofkapellmeister, a position he held until the end of his life.

Birkenstock was regarded in his own day as one of Germany's leading violinists. He was also widely respected as a composer of instrumental music. Although his main publishers were Roger & Le Cène of Amsterdam, some of his compositions appeared in England and seem to have enjoyed considerable success: John Walsh's edition of the op.1 set was reissued several times between 1727 and 1746. These sonatas are all in four or more movements. The basic plan is that of the sonata da chiesa with its alternating slow and fast movements, but Birkenstock also introduces various dances (allemande, sarabande, gigue) within this framework. Contrapuntal movements (e.g. the Alla breve from no.1) are included alongside dances of a lighter character. Stylistically, the music is firmly rooted in Baroque traditions: the airs and sarabandes are occasionally reminiscent of similar Handelian movements, while the thematic material of the gigues and the quality of the string writing in allegro movements show the influence of Corelli. The sonatas do not make excessive technical demands but are well written for the violin. Virtuoso runs and idiomatic passages of double stopping are common in the allegro movements. Birkenstock's training in the French school is apparent in such movements as the ‘Rondau’ from the fourth sonata.

It is not clear how many of Birkenstock's sonatas were published. The op.1 set appeared in 1722, but J.G. Walther also mentioned another set of XII. sonate à violino solo e continuo together with XII. concerti à 4 violini obligati, alto viola, violoncello e basso continuo which Birkenstock sent to Amsterdam to be printed in 1730. There is however no record of these works in catalogues issued by Roger & Le Cène, and the concertos mentioned have been variously attributed to Pergolesi, Ricciotti and Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer.

WORKS

Sinfonia in D, S-Uu

XII Sonate, op.1, 2 bks. vn, vc/bc (Amsterdam, 1722); ed. in Ostrow

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, bc (hpd/b vn) (?London, c1725)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MoserGV

NewmanSBE

WaltherML

P. Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1837–80, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1884, 2/1899/R) i, 514

E.S.J. van der Straeten: The History of the Violin (London, 1933/R), i, 117

I.M. Ostro: 12 Sonatas for Violin and Continuo, op.1 by Johann Adam Birkenstock: a Practical Edition (DMA diss., Eastman School, U. of Rochester, 1970)

A. Dunning: Count Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692–1766): a Master Unmasked, or the Pergolesi/Ricciotti Puzzle Solved (Buren, 1980)

J. Schroeder: ‘The Baroque Repertory for Violin in the German Countries: a Survey’, Journal of the Violin Society of America, v/4 (1980), 5–17

PIPPA DRUMMOND

Birmingham.

City in England. Known for the music festivals that began there in the mid-18th century and achieved international renown in the 19th, the city has enjoyed a return to its 19th-century musical status in the 1980s and 90s, and notably with the opening of its widely admired Symphony Hall in 1991.

1. Churches.

2. Opera and theatres.

MARGARET HANDFORD

1. Churches.

In 1392 Birmingham merchants established the Gild of the Holy Cross, which appointed priests to sing at services at St Martin’s, the parish church, and an organist whom they housed by the church. The last organist appointed before the dissolution of the guild in 1547 was Sir William Bothe (Booth). The 1503–4 Churchwardens’ Accounts for Halesowen Parish in North Worcestershire mention an organ maker and repairer in Birmingham.

The population rose from 3000 to 15,000 during the 17th century. A second church, St Philip’s (now Birmingham Cathedral), was consecrated in 1715 and given a fine organ, built by Schwarbrick (replaced in 1929 by a Nicholson organ). The first organist there, Barnabas Gunn, was also organist at Gloucester Cathedral (1730–40) and finally at St Martin’s, Birmingham, the town having reinstalled an organ there in 1725. Later organists at St Martin’s were Joseph Harris (from 1787) and Thomas Munden, who in 1822, 1825 and 1828 presented occasional Sunday ‘selections of Sacred Music’ by Palestrina, Orlando Gibbons, Handel, William Boyce, William Crotch, Mozart, Beethoven and a Mozart pupil, Thomas Attwood. St Martin’s had fully choral services from the 1880s.

Michael Broome (1700–75) arrived at St Philip’s as Parish Clerk in about 1733. He trained the adult males of the choir (some were paid) and the children of the neighbouring Blue Coat School (established 1724), who sang the treble parts at St Philip’s. Broome also taught privately and was a member of the Musical and Amicable Society, which met at a coffee-house for practice and music-making. This society was vital to Birmingham’s musical development. Drawn at first mainly from the men of St Philip’s choir, it attracted other choristers and was large enough by 1762 to warrant its formal name and a constitution. Between 1733 and 1760, Broome published collections of metrical psalm tunes and simple anthems, which were distributed in the Midlands for the use of Anglican and Dissenting churches. James Kempson (b 1742) produced four similar collections between 1770 and 1780; also a member of the Musical and Amicable Society, he was clerk to St Bartholomew’s church, which was opened in 1749, subsidized by the iron-master John Jennens and his wife (relations of Charles Jennens, Handel’s librettist).

2. Opera and theatres.

At the Moor Street Theatre, open by 1740, Barnabas Gunn promoted concerts. The Smallbrook Street Theatre was open from 1747, and the first purpose-built house, the King Street Theatre, opened in 1751 and closed in 1779. All three took a regular flow of London productions; not being licensed, they sold tickets for concerts with the drama presented free, supposedly, in the interval. This suited the scenes-with-music format of current theatre pieces: for example Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui, adapted by Henry Fielding in 1732, came to Birmingham in 1746 as The Mock Doctor, with music by Richard Jones and songs by Seedo and Henry Carey. Local musicians generally joined the visiting orchestra in the pit.

In 1774 the New Street Theatre (later the Theatre Royal) replaced the King Street Theatre. It was not licensed until 1807. Operatic concerts there, associated especially with Mrs Billington, Catalani (many visits, 1807–28) and John Braham, were vastly popular. Recently composed operas by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi were brought to Birmingham by visiting companies from about 1827 onwards, including those of Sims Reeves, Pyne and Harrison, the Drury Lane Theatre and some simply named ‘An Italian Company’ bringing well-known singers. The Theatre Royal had its own orchestra which, in the 1840s, was trained and directed by an excellent Birmingham musician, the violinist Alfred Mellon, soon lured away. From Mellon’s day until 1939 the town was visited regularly by all the major touring companies of the time. They played the Theatre Royal, the Grand Theatre in Corporation Street and the Prince of Wales Theatre in Broad Street, the last having excellent acoustics. At the old Repertory Theatre in Station Street, Barrie Jackson presented some opera in the 1920s, including Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour (1922) and the premières of operas by Messager, Ethel Smyth and Bantock. These theatres have gone or, in the last case, found a new home; the Birmingham Hippodrome is now the principal opera and ballet venue, and a second home since 1968 to the Welsh National Opera company. They and the Birmingham Royal Ballet (from 1990) each present three two-week runs every season.

A Baroque opera was staged annually between 1959 and 1985 at the University of Birmingham, in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (opened in 1939 with a seating capacity of 370); a Cherubini piece was given in 1991. Inspired by Anthony Lewis (holder of the Chair of Music, 1947–68), performances continued under his successor Ivor Keys, with eleven operas by Handel (many of them modern premières) and others by Alessandro Scarlatti, Rameau, Keiser and Lully, as well as Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Berlioz, Bizet and Bellini. Janet Baker, in the early stages of her career, appeared in 1964 and 1966 in Handel’s Ariodante and Orlando.

The City of Birmingham Touring Opera (CBTO) started in 1987, funded jointly by the city and the Arts Council. It uses young performers and plays suburban venues in Birmingham and elsewhere, aiming to reach a new audience for opera. In 1989 the company gave the première of Ravi Shankar’s Ganashyam and in 1997 performed Britten's three church parables at Aldeburgh with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Amateur grand opera companies, once popular, have declined in number since 1972, but amateur light opera companies have doubled their numbers to 40 in the same period.

3. Benefit concerts and festivals.

In 1759 and 1760 the organist of St Martin’s, Richard Hobbs, presented three-day early-autumn oratorio festivals at the New Theatre, King Street, with 24 chorus singers, 40 instrumentalists and well-known solo singers. In 1762 an oratorio performance, including some Purcell and Handel and conducted by Hobbs, was given at St Bartholomew’s to celebrate the end of the Seven Years’ War. The peace, however, caused a slump in Birmingham’s trade; to assist those most stricken by unemployment, James Kempson organized a similar performance at St Bartholomew’s Christmas morning service in 1766, a collection being taken. Capel Bond from Coventry conducted an oratorio festival in 1767. The Musical and Amicable Society created an offshoot, the Chappell Society, to sing for charitable purposes. The St Bartholomew’s Christmas festival continued until 1838. Noting its success, and no doubt aware of Hobbs’s and Bond’s recent commercial festivals, Kempson suggested to the Hospital Trustees, whose building plans lacked funds, the idea of a three-day festival in aid of the General Hospital. Held between 7 and 9 September 1768, it ushered in Birmingham’s great era of Music Meetings (1768, 1778, 1780, 1784 and 1787), from 1790 called Musical Festivals. Their three-yearly pattern was established in 1784, with breaks in 1793 (a theatre fire) and between 1829 and 1834, while awaiting completion of the Town Hall. Profits passed to the Hospital Trustees rose from £300 (1768) to between £5000 and £6000 (1820–1900), declining thereafter.

Capel Bond was the first Music Meetings conductor. In his time, Handel oratorios monopolized the three morning performances at St Philip’s, with the Thursday morning Messiah early established as a tradition; the three evening Grand Miscellaneous Concerts afforded a contrast. Music by composers then living included an Abel symphony in 1780 and a Haydn overture and extracts from William Boyce’s Solomon in 1784. The magnetic Thomas Greatorex, well-connected socially and musically, followed Bond (conductor 1796–1829), with breaks in 1808 and 1811 when William Crotch and Samuel Wesley took charge. Programmes became more adventurous: music by Purcell, Boyce, Crotch, William Croft, William Shield and Samuel Arnold was included, and in 1805 the first part of Haydn’s Creation (1798) was given. From then on major works, including symphonies, by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were performed.

A St Matthew Passion chorus given in Birmingham in 1837 evidently inspired a London performance of extracts from Bach’s Magnificat and B minor Mass only months later, the link being Lord Burghersh, founder of the Royal Academy of Music, a Birmingham Festival patron and director of the Concert of Ancient Music in London. William Knyvett, singer and conductor (1834–43), was followed as festival conductor by Ignaz Moscheles (1846), Michael Costa (1849–82), Hans Richter (1885–1909) and Henry Wood (1912). Costa consolidated the new system of a single conductor on a podium, controlling all and visible to every performer. Singers with European reputations were employed, among them Billington, Mara, Catalani, Malibran, Braham, Grisi, Mario, Novello, Reeves, Patti, Santley, Butt and Muriel Foster (esteemed by Elgar). Costa’s programmes naturally had an Italianate flavour, though he was generous to native composers. Richter introduced Palestrina, Wagner, Berlioz, Bruckner, Glazunov, Dvořák and a great deal of Brahms. In 1900 he dared to replace Messiah with Bach’s St Matthew Passion, but only for that year. He did succeed in presenting Bach’s Mass in B minor in 1903.

Joseph Moore directed festival affairs from 1799 to 1849. With a business in Birmingham’s die-sinking trade, Moore was the driving force behind the building of the Town Hall, Paradise Street (cap. 2323), in 1834, sorely needed for large public meetings as well as for the Triennial Musical Festivals and an increasing number of public concerts (see §4 below). Moore’s European researches enabled him to advise on the size and shape of the hall and its equipment, including the organ. The new venue encouraged ever more ambitious programmes and, with Moore’s influence, the commissioning of works, notably Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in D minor (1837) and his Elijah (1846; fig.1), conducted by the composer. Arthur Sullivan, Max Bruch, Niels Gade, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Hubert Parry, C.V. Stanford and Elgar were all commissioned to write for the Birmingham Music Festival and visited Birmingham personally. Of these works, only Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (1900) is regularly performed. Sibelius’s Symphony no.4 in A minor op.63 and Skryabin’s Prometheus (Poem of Fire), both composed in 1911, were given performances at the 1912 festival.

High taxation bore heavily on the earned income of a large proportion of festival supporters; donations declined as costs rose, World War I finally putting an end to this illustrious period in Birmingham’s musical history.

4. Concert life.

From the mid-18th century, regular summer concerts were given at the Vauxhall Gardens at Duddeston, promoted by Barnabas Gunn, with music by Handel, Arne and others writing for Vauxhall Gardens in London, and also at the Apollo Gardens in Deritend, particularly associated with a singer, Holte Bridgman, and offering somewhat lighter fare. An oratorio benefit performance was given for Gunn and another composer, Musgrave Heighington, at the Moor Street Theatre in 1740. After his death Gunn’s widow, with his successor at St Philip’s, John Eversman, continued to present musical entertainments at the gardens. Eversman launched an annual subscription series of ten concerts at Mr Sawyer’s Rooms in the winters of 1759 to 1764. A Dilettanti Music Society promoted concerts from 1780. John Freeth (1730–1808), a local balladeer, wrote topical verses fitted to well-known tunes of the day, which made his coffee-house a mecca for businessmen. A collection of these was published as The Political Songster (Birmingham, 1790).

During the Musical Festival era, promoters sought to encourage concerts between festivals and to have a change from the choral repertory. The manufacturer Matthew Boulton supported Joseph Moore in the presentation of a series at Dee’s Hotel with music by Mozart and Beethoven. Theatres occasionally presented instrumental stars such as Paganini, as well as famous singers, and Dee’s Hotel was also used by touring ‘concert-parties’, as when Liszt visited in November 1840.

For many years, regular Thursday morning organ recitals were given at the Town Hall. Thomas Munden (1834–7) and George Hollins (1837–41) were in practice, if not officially, the earliest Town Hall organists; their successors, James Stimpson (1842–86), C.W. Perkins (1888–1923), G.D. Cunningham (1924–48), George Thalben Ball (1948–83) and Thomas Trotter, were all officially appointed. In 1844, a ten-year series of popular, cheap-entry Monday evening concerts was initiated at the request of some factory employees, to be held at the Town Hall, with the organ, as both accompanying and solo instrument, the mainstay of the programmes (possibly the earliest ‘Monday Pops’ in the country). Louis Jullien brought his sensational Monster Promenade Concerts, often featuring Beethoven symphonies as well as lightweight items, to the Town Hall between 1844 and 1859. These enterprises were replaced between 1853 and 1916 by Harrison’s Celebrity Concerts, which brought every vocal and instrumental star of the day to Birmingham. The festival singers used the concerts for return visits, notably Adelina Patti, who appeared for Harrison in Birmingham 15 times. Among instrumentalists were Clara Schumann, Wilma Neruda (Lady Hallé), Joseph Joachim, the cellist Alfredo Piatti, Hans von Bülow, I.J. Paderewski, Eugène Ysaÿe and Wilhelm Backhaus. After 1873, the Hallé, London Symphony and Queen’s Hall orchestras were regular visitors. Held monthly during the winter season, most concerts were at the Town Hall and a small number at the Masonic Hall, New Street.

After 1916, Harold Holt’s International Celebrity Series brought Amelita Galli-Curci, Maria Jeritza, Rachmaninoff, Alfred Cortot, Fritz Kreisler and others, who performed to packed houses; but this was ended by World War II. The occasional Vincent Celebrity Concerts represented a brave later attempt, in the 1970s, but they foundered for lack of public funding and publicity. From 1920 the city orchestra began to fill the concert scene. From 1991, concert seasons were held in the new Symphony Hall, featuring world-famous orchestras and performers.

An increasing number of chamber concerts was promoted after 1850. The Birmingham Musical Union presented excellent local performers, some associated with the Midland Institute School of Music. Its work was carried on towards the end of the century by Charles Swinnerton Heap. The pianist Stephen Stratton and the clarinettist T.E. Pountney gave admirable programmes in the 1880s. The Drawing Room Concerts, held between 1898 and 1925 at the Grand Hotel by an ex-Concertgebouw violinist, Max Mossel, were the best supported and the most durable. Mossel promoted well-known musicians as well as young artists, among them Dorothy Silk, William Primrose and Gerald Moore. The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) Gallery in New Street was often the venue for chamber music. Oscar Pollack, a Birmingham Mail music critic, used it between 1904 and 1909 for soloists and small ensembles; Clarence Raybould’s Birmingham Chamber Concerts Society began there in 1914, its mainstay the Arthur Catterall Quartet; and a Mme Minadieu promoted excellent performers there from 1914 to 1920. Other performers were the pianist Wilfred Ridgeway, the violinist Herbert Downes and the cellist Johann Hock. From 1968 to 1978 there was a further series at the RBSA Gallery, promoting musicians from the Midlands.

The Midland Chamber Players Concerts Society gave concerts elsewhere in the city from 1966. The Birmingham Chamber Music Society was founded in 1952 by Wilfred Mellers, linked to Birmingham University; now independent, it continues to present international chamber ensembles of the highest quality. Since 1992, there has been an annual Early Music Festival, held in the autumn. This followed the smaller-scale St Alban’s Festival, started in 1984.

The main concert venues are the 2200-seat Symphony Hall, the Adrian Boult Hall (cap. 529) at the Conservatoire, two small theatres at the Birmingham and Midland Institute (cap. 290 and 118), the Town Hall and Birmingham Cathedral. The city-owned Birmingham Hippodrome receives large-scale opera and ballet, and the arena at the National Exhibition Centre and the National Indoor Arena are occasionally the scene of ‘spectaculars’ or celebrity appearances. The Alexandra and Repertory theatres have occasional musical productions. The Midland Arts Centre in Cannon Hill Park, supported by the city, has a dance centre in its Randle English wing, opened in 1987. Its activities, including performances by jazz, swing, wind and steel bands, strongly reflect the cultures brought into the city from the late 1950s onwards by people from the New Commonwealth.

5. Orchestras.

The first Festival orchestra consisted of some 25 virtuoso players, with the usual tripartite direction from principal violin, keyboard and chorus-master. The great cellists James Cervetto, John Crosdill and Robert Lindley, the clarinettists T.L. Willman and the Mahons and the oboists Parke, Erskine and Griesbach were leading players. Thomas Pinto (1768), Wilhelm Cramer (1778–1802) and his son Franz Cramer (1805–43) were distinguished principal violinists, with Weichsel, Mori and Loder leading the evening performances during the 1840s. By 1814, players numbered 82; in 1834 there were 151, contributed by the Concert of Ancient Music, the Vocal Concerts, the Philharmonic Society and the Italian Opera. Each presumably played its own repertory, given the different pitches still used for different musical genres. When Michael Costa became Festival Conductor in 1849 Prosper Sainton led the orchestra, while during Richter’s tenure the Hallé Orchestra supplied the leader and most of the players.

William Stockley, appointed Birmingham Festival Choral Society conductor in 1855, was determined to establish a permanent orchestra to match the renowned Choral Society. At some financial risk to himself, he gave three orchestral concerts a year between 1873 and 1897, building a repertory of some 35 symphonies, 27 concertos and various suites and overtures. Elgar played in the first violins from 1882 to 1889 and had three early works performed at Stockley’s concerts. The orchestra made an occasional Festival appearance. From 1897 to 1899 Stockley’s efforts were continued by Rowland Winn, admired by Richter. Winn’s enterprise was, however, eclipsed by George Halford’s symphony orchestra, which presented ten concerts a season between 1897 and 1906. In spite of programmes that encompassed all the Beethoven symphonies and some Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Rachmaninoff, this series also ran into financial difficulties and was reduced to four concerts a season from 1907 to 1909.

The gap left by the curtailing of Halford’s concerts was filled from 1906 to 1920 by an assortment of ten orchestras consisting of local or visiting players. The newly formed Birmingham SO gave popular Saturday night concerts between 1907 and 1918 conducted by Richter, Wood, Landon Ronald and Halford. At Granville Bantock’s initiative, the Birmingham Philharmonic was set up in 1910, using some Birmingham SO players. Ronald also presented annual promenade concerts in late spring at the Theatre Royal, and Beecham brought the Hallé in the 1916–17 season. Beecham’s New Birmingham SO followed in 1917–18, with Beecham, Wood and Ronald conducting. The Midland Concert Promoters Association, established in 1916, drew all these strands together. Its leading light was the current Lord Mayor, Neville Chamberlain, keen to establish an orchestra funded by the city. In 1920 the City of Birmingham Orchestra (CBO) came into existence. 40 of its 75 players came from an orchestra recently established by T. Appleby Matthews, which had already played 40 Sunday evening concerts in each of two seasons from 1918 to 1920 at the Scala Theatre and the new Futurist Cinema. The orchestra thus launched was the country’s first municipally funded symphony orchestra, its initial civic grant £1250.

Matthews was its first conductor. His laudable ambitions outran the budget; he was replaced in 1924 by Adrian Boult, who oversaw an expansion of activities, with more out-of-town engagements, school concerts and broadcasts. Boult’s replacement when he left for London in 1930 was the equally gifted Leslie Heward, with whom the orchestra made nine recordings. Heward’s early death (1943) from tuberculosis at the age of 46 and the wartime blackouts and bombing made progress difficult. The popular George Weldon (conductor 1943–51) nonetheless recruited players of a consistently high standard, and in 1944 the seasonal engagement of players ceased with the city's annual grant. At his request the orchestra became the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) in 1948. The financial situation was bad, and the committee, perhaps thinking that a new conductor would generate interest, appointed Rudolf Schwarz and dismissed Weldon in 1951. Neither Schwarz nor his successor Andrzej Panufnik (conductor from 1957), in spite of their gifts, brought the necessary commitment to the building of an orchestra. Hugo Rignold’s qualities as an orchestral trainer, however, were exactly what were required; with his appointment in 1960 signs of potential began to emerge. There were foreign tours and some recordings. Rignold’s successor from 1969, Louis Frémaux, brought flair and panache which enhanced the orchestra’s growing reputation, increased Birmingham audiences and brought more outside work, including a Prom appearance after a long gap.

The militancy of some players in the 1970s led to a seating dispute in 1978, which precipitated Frémaux’ decision to leave. In any case, he was unhappy with the uneven acoustics and spartan conditions of the 160-year-old Town Hall, and had called in vain, as had many others, for a new concert hall. He departed before the expiry of his contract; the two-year interregnum was filled by distinguished visiting conductors, notably Erich Schmid, who was then invited to be principal guest conductor from 1979–82.

In 1980 the young Simon Rattle was appointed principal conductor. His rigorous selection of players, and sectional rehearsals under a charismatic musician of the highest quality with a long-term commitment to the orchestra, made the city orchestra surpass in international fame the Birmingham Musical Festivals of the 19th century. Since 1991, Symphony Hall has provided a worthy home (cap. 2200; fig.2) which, in its turn, has required from the orchestra even higher standards of playing. The CBSO's new headquarters, housing a rehearsal and concert room (cap. 300) and offices, opened in 1998. In the same year Sakari Oramo succeeded Rattle as principal conductor.

Throughout its history, in spite of the periodic need to resort to the popular, the orchestra has presented new and recent works. Vaughan Williams conducted his own seven-year-old London Symphony in 1920, and Sibelius his Symphony no.3 (1907) in 1921. The John Feeney Charitable Trust has commissioned some 35 works, given first performances by the CBSO since 1955, including Tippett’s Piano Concerto (1956) and Thomas Adès's Asyla (1997). Mark-Anthony Turnage (1991–5) and Judith Weir (1995–) have worked with the orchestra as composers-in-residence. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (established 1987), consisting of CBSO players, promotes and performs new music. In 1989 it combined with Birmingham Jazz to launch an enterprise known as The Series. In addition, the CBSO provides string players for the Birmingham Ensemble, a small string orchestra. Led by the CBSO leader, Peter Thomas, it gives concerts mainly of Baroque and Romantic repertory.

Birmingham youth orchestras are the Midland Youth Orchestra (established 1956), the Birmingham Schools SO (established 1964) and the Academy of St Philip’s (established 1976). The Birmingham PO (established 1941), with 80 players, gives some dozen concerts annually in the Midlands.

6. Choirs.

The chorus of 45 for the Music Meeting of 1768 consisted of the men of the Chappell Society and women choralists from Lancashire. By 1808 there was a Choral Society of the Town, which in 1811 was evidently designated the Birmingham Oratorio Choral Society, its director Samuel Buggins himself a singer. By 1814 there were 120 singers, including some from other towns. The organist and director, Thomas Munden, prepared the local singers from 1820 to 1840; there was a chorus of 184 voices at the 1834 festival in the new Town Hall, Birmingham providing 114 of them. Munden was succeeded by the Town Hall’s first official organist, James Stimpson, who trained them from 1843 to 1849. In 1840 local choirs had formed the Birmingham Musical Institute, directed by a St Philip’s organist, Henry Simms, which gave three concerts a year between festivals. They ceased after a quarrel with Munden’s Oratorio Choral Society; the Birmingham Festival Choral Society (established 1843) replaced both bodies. William Stockley’s appointment as its conductor in 1855 began a phase of regular concerts every year, the number of singers rising from 70 in 1855 to 200 in 1859. By 1861, the chorus had little need for outside help; The Times called them ‘champion choralists of England’. In 1879, Saint-Saëns praised them in the French press. Stockley was succeeded in 1895 by Swinnerton Heap, whose first-class musicianship was lost to the choir by his early death in 1900. His role was taken over by George Robertson Sinclair, organist of Hereford Cathedral and friend of Elgar. The Festival Choral Society survived the 1916 demise of the festivals themselves, being conducted by Beecham, Wood and Boult between 1918 and 1930. After some difficult years, the appointment in 1969 of Jeremy Patterson resulted in a rise in the number of singers. Since 1975 the society has given the premières of 13 works, of which nine were commissioned by the society.

The Midland Music Society gave popular oratorio concerts, with low ticket prices, from 1889 to 1940. A dozen or more other choirs were active in Birmingham between 1882 and World War II, and the large suburbs also formed choirs in the period 1905–10. The Birmingham Choral Union (established 1887) is still active, as is the City of Birmingham Choir (established 1921), which usually gives its concerts with the CBSO. The CBSO Chorus itself was established in 1973; now the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, it has a reputation worthy of its orchestral parent. Trained by Simon Halsey, it was joined by the CBSO Youth Chorus in 1994, and the City of Birmingham Young Voices in 1998.

The Birmingham Bach Club, started in 1925, was replaced in 1947 by the Birmingham Bach Society, still active. Other choirs are the Birmingham Singers (1937), the Canoldir Male Voice Choir (1966), the Birmingham Hospitals Choir, the Birmingham Youth Choir and, for older pupils, the Birmingham Chorale, the last two organized by the city’s Music Education Service. The successful women's gospel choir, Black Voices, started in Birmingham in 1988. The chamber choir Ex Cathedra, about 40 strong, has a growing national reputation.

7. Education.

Private teaching was offered by Michael Broome, Jeremiah Clarke and others in the 18th century, and they may well have had earlier predecessors in the Gild organists. A musical magazine was announced in 1783, planned as a species of music dictionary, delivered in monthly instalments.

‘Music and Singing’ were introduced into all the King Edward VI Foundation Elementary Schools from 1851, and into the syllabus of the Board Schools set up in 1870. There was a large Tonic Sol-fa Festival in Birmingham in 1859, and the Sunday Schools Choral Union, active between 1865 and 1878, was drawn from a dozen Anglican churches. One of Granville Bantock’s initiatives was the biennial Musical Competition Festival (1912–32). Elementary schools sent thousands of entrants to compete in solo singing, choral and folkdancing classes.

A move towards advanced education in music was made in 1859 when the Birmingham and Midland Institute offered classes in singing and later in most instruments. This became the Midland Institute School of Music in 1886. By 1900 the school was attracting outstanding teachers, among them Swinnerton Heap and Max Mossel, and producing noted musicians, including the Wagnerian tenor Walter Hyde. In 1900 Bantock became its principal, and two years later, Elgar its Honorary Visitor. Staff members included Ernest Newman and Rutland Boughton; among students were Julius Harrison and Clarence Raybould. Separately constituted as the Birmingham School of Music in 1949, it was still part of the Birmingham and Midland Institute until 1965 when city rebuilding forced the Institute into a building too small to accommodate the school. Under the aegis of the City Education Department from 1965, the school moved to purpose-built premises in 1973, becoming part of what is now the University of Central England. It was renamed Birmingham Conservatoire in 1989.

In 1905 a Chair of Music was established at the University of Birmingham, Elgar its first holder. He resigned in 1908, Bantock taking his place and building up a respected department. A demanding balance between the academic and the practical was established by Ivor Keys between 1968 and 1986, enhancing the department’s reputation. One or two academics at the University and the Conservatoire are active composers.

Private teaching still provides a vital foundation for music education, supported by the Birmingham Centre of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and the Birmingham Competitive Music Festival (established 1937). School music teachers’ courses and public lectures on music are provided by the College of Education (now part of the University of Central England) and the Birmingham University School of Continuing Studies. In addition to the usual provisions of school music syllabuses, gifted pupils can also have instrumental and orchestral training through the city Music Education Service. The CBSO's education department has links of various kinds, often through individual players, with city schools. Since September 1994 the Conservatoire has had a Junior Department.

8. Broadcasting.

As the nerve-centre of the Midland region, Birmingham had BBC radio studios from the earliest days, broadcasting soloists and the City of Birmingham Orchestra. After the BBC started its own studio orchestra, membership of both orchestras was barred, but in the 1930s the BBC ensemble was small, leaving the field to the CBO. The popular BBC Midland Light Orchestra was formed after World War II, working from studios in Islington Row, Broad Street and Carpenter Road, Edgbaston. In the 1960s, chamber concerts were started; they have become a regular series, free and open to the public, relayed from Pebble Mill, the television and radio studio complex opened in 1971.

2. The time of ‘The Mask of Orpheus’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FiskeETM

Grove5 (C. Edmunds)

W. Dugdale: The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (London, 1656/R)

Programmes of Birmingham Music Meetings and Festivals, 1768–1912, and of concert series, 1845–1951 (GB-Bp)

W. Hutton: An History of Birmingham (Birmingham, 1780, 6/1835)

J.A. Langford: A Century of Birmingham Life (1741–1841) (London, 1868, 2/1870–71)

J.A. Langford: Modern Birmingham and its Institutions (1841–1871) (London, 1873–7)

E. Edwards: ‘Some Account of the Origin of the Musical Festivals and of James Kempson, the Originator’, Birmingham Institutions (Birmingham, 1882)

A. Deakin: A History of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society (Birmingham, 1897)

J.T. Bunce: Birmingham Sixty Years Ago [compiled from notes written for the Birmingham Weekly Post, 1899, based on personal recollections]

W. Poutney: A History of the Festivals (MS, 1899, Bp)

F.E. Bache: Letters on orchestral music in Birmingham (1856), in C. Bache: Brother Musicians (London, 1901), 108

J.H. Muirhead: Birmingham Institutions (Birmingham, 1911)

W.C. Stockley: Fifty Years of Music in Birmingham from 1850 to 1900 (Birmingham,1913)

C.E. Pearce: Sims Reeves: Fifty Years of Music in England (London, 1924/R)

H. Snow: ‘The Organs of Birmingham Cathedral’, The Organ, ix (1929–30), 137–43

D.M. Powell: Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation (London, 1937,3/1949)

J. Stone: ‘Music in Birmingham: a Concise History – Five Centuries’,HMYB, ii–iii (1945–6), 100–09

P.A. Scholes: The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944 (London, 1947–70)

R.E. Waterhouse: The Birmingham and Midland Institute (Birmingham, 1954)

W.B. Stephens, ed.: A History of the County of Warwick, vii : The City of Birmingham (London, 1964/R) [pubn of Victoria County History]

N. Fortune: ‘Birmingham’, MT, cvii (1966), 795 only

H. Pleasants: The Great Singers: from the Dawn of Opera to Our Own Time (London, 1967/R)

P.M. Young, ed.: A Future for English Music, and other Lectures, by Edward Elgar (London, 1968) [Birmingham U. lectures of 1905–6]

B. King-Smith: 1920–1970: the First 50 Years: a History of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Birmingham, 1970)

B. Pritchard and D.J. Reid: ‘Some Festival Programmes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, iv: Birmingham’, RMARC, no.8 (1970), 1–33

R. Fiske: English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1973, 2/1986)

A. Cross: ‘Birmingham’, MT, cxv (1974), 771 only

R. Palmer: A Ballad History of England from 1588 to the Present Day (London, 1979)

N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979)

J.N. Moore: Edward Elgar: a Creative Life (Oxford, 1984)

D. Brock: The Birmingham School of Music: its First Century (Birmingham,1986)

L.E. Davis and R.A. Huttenback: Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: the Political Economy of British Imperialism 1860–1912 (Oxford, 1986)

M. MacDonald, ed.: British Music, i: Havergal Brian on Music (London, 1986) [articles from various music journals]

N. Kenyon: Simon Rattle: the Making of a Conductor (London, 1987)

M.B. Rowlands: The West Midlands from AD 1000: a Regional History of England (London, 1987)

V.J. Price: Birmingham Theatres, Concert and Music Halls 1740–1988 (Studley, Warwicks., 1988)

J.N. Moore: Edward Elgar: the Windflower Letters: Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and her Family (Oxford, 1989)

M. Handford: Sounds Unlikely: Six Hundred Years of Music in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1992)

B. King-Smith: Crescendo! 75 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (London, 1995)

Birnbach.

German firm of music publishers. It was founded in 1911 in Berlin by Richard Birnbach (1883–1953) who quickly developed a successful catalogue, publishing a wide variety of works, including educational music, music for salon orchestra, and contemporary instrumental and vocal music. In 1919 he expanded his publishing enterprise by acquiring the catalogue of C.A. Challier & Co., a notable Berlin publishing company. It had been founded by Carl August Challier (d Berlin, 17 July 1871) and Karl Gaillard in 1835 and had published works by Gluck, Haydn and Mozart as well as composers from Berlin. From 1844 Challier and Gaillard edited the Berliner musikalische Zeitung, which in 1847 merged with the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung (founded by Gustav Bock). Challier's son, Willibald (b Berlin, 29 July 1849; d Berlin, 25 Jan 1926), managed the firm from 1865 until its acquisition by Birnbach who carried it on under its original name. Birnbach's catalogue was further extended with the purchase in 1934 of Verlag Dreililien, through which he acquired some of Schoenberg's early works (opp.1–4, 6–7). Other composers published by the firm include Rezniček, Richard Strauss, Weingartner, Leon Jessell, Oscar Straus and Gerhard Winkler. Important editions of piano music by lesser-known composers were also published. After Birnbach's death the company passed to his widow Hanna and son Richard. In 1990 Richard Birnbach became the sole general partner of the firm and since then has taken over the music publishers Risi-Ton, Friedrich Wilhelm Fröhlich and R. Erdmann. (Musikverlage in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in West-Berlin, Bonn, 1965)

ALAN POPE/WILLI KAHL

Birnbaum, Eduard

(b 1855; d 1920). Austrian-Jewish musicologist and liturgiologist. See Jewish music, §I, 2.

Birnstein, Renate

(b Hamburg, 17 Nov 1946). German composer. In 1966 she entered the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Hamburg, where she studied music theory and composition with Diether de la Motte and Ligeti. From 1973 to 1980 she taught music theory at the Hochschule für Musik in Lübeck and from 1974 at the Hamburg Hochschule, where in 1988 she became a professor of composition and music theory. She has received many prizes and grants, including a three-month stay at the Boswil Künstlerhaus in Switzerland and a year at the Villa Massimo, Rome. Birnstein’s output includes orchestral, choral and chamber music. Her rigorously structural, crystalline and linear thought processes were originally stamped by the music of Webern, but it was Steve Reich’s minimalism, first encountered by her in 1972, that provided new inspiration at a time of disenchantment with the Darmstadt School. Her choral piece In terra (1978) is an example of how she used a form of ‘pattern technique’ based on small motivic units to produce her own minimalist style. In the 1980s she wrote a number of multi-layered compositions, including the Sextet (1981) for six orchestral ensembles and the Octet (1984). In the 1990s, in a process of rediscovery of the piano, she began to compose more for the instrument (only a single piano composition existed before then).

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Imaginations, 1972; Scatola, 1978–9; 5 Pieces, str, 1979–80; Sextet, 6 orch ens, 1981; Intrada, str, 1987; 5 Lieder (A. von Droste-Hülshoff), S, orch, 1990–91

Chbr: 4 Pieces, cl, trbn, vc, 1971; Ribambelle, cl, perc, 1972; Ossia, qnt, fl, cl, S, vn, vc, 1974; Idem, sextet, fl, a fl, cl, vn, va, vc, 1974; Inter pares, qnt, fl, vn, vc, vib, pf, 1975; Peram, trio, fl, gui, vib, 1976; Variations, vn, va, vc, 1977; Duo concertante, vc, b cl, 1980; Str Qnt, 1982; Pf Music II, cl, pf, 1977–84; Trio in 12 pts, fl, vn, vc, 1984; Octet, fl, cl, trbn, vn, va, vc, perc, 1984; Str Qt, 1986; Schattenspiele, b fl, basset-hn, 1986; Septet, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1988; ‘...und aus Abend und Morgen...’, cl, va, vc, 3 perc, 1993; Musique pour les fleurs de givre, fl, ob, bn, vn, vc, 1997; Les formules magiques, pf trio, 1998

Solo inst: Heptagon, pf, 1976; Quasi fantasia, gui, 1983; Wie ein Kondukt, b fl, 1985; Kassiopeias Lied, cl, 1989; Kurwenal, vc, 1990; Les pendules, pf, 1994; Les horloges, pf, 1995; Les grains de sable, pf, 1998

Choral: In terra, 24vv, 1978; Ich rufe an mit meiner Stimme, sacred conc., SATB, vn, org, 1980–81

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.Schulze: ‘Renate Birnstein, ein Porträt’, Neuland, iv (Bergisch Gladbach, 1984), 159–70

D.de la Motte: ‘Zur Situation junger deutscher Komponisten’, Tendenzen zwischen Tonalität und Atonalität (Mainz, 1987), 42–8

ROSWITHA SPERBER

BIRS.

The British Institute of Recorded Sound, later the National Sound Archive.

Birtner, Herbert

(b Hamburg, 16 June 1900; d Voronezh, 27 Sept 1942). German musicologist. After beginning medical studies at Hamburg and Freiburg (where he also studied music under Gurlitt, 1919–20), he turned to history and art history at Heidelberg and Leipzig and continued his musical studies under Kroyer. He took the doctorate in Leipzig in 1924 with a dissertation on the 16th-century German composer Joachim a Burcke, and was assistant lecturer at the musicology institute until 1927. He went to Heidelberg in 1928 to work on his Habilitation, which he completed in 1930. He was named reader at the University of Marburg in 1938 and at the University of Graz in 1941. Conscripted in 1942, he was killed in action. Despite his comparatively early death, Birtner had already shown himself to be one of the foremost scholars of his generation, particularly in his contributions on music of the Reformation. He set out to concentrate on German music of the Renaissance, searching for distinct German traits in an age of musical dominance by the Netherlands, later focussing on Isaac and Schütz. He was active as director of the collegium musicum and spearheaded a campaign to incorporate musicology into music education. He was named a member of the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung, and from 1936 until his death he was president of the Neue Schütz-Gesellschaft.

WRITINGS

Joachim a Burck als Motettenkomponist (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1924)

‘Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der protestantischen Musik’, ZMw, x (1927–8), 457–94

‘Die Probleme der spätmittelalterlichen Mensuralnotation und ihrer Übertragung’, ZMw, xi (1928–9), 534–48

Studien zur niederländisch-humanistischen Musikanschauung (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Marburg, 1930; Heidelberg, 1930)

‘Renaissance und Klassik in der Musik’, Theodor Kroyer: Festschrift, ed. H. Zenck, H. Schultz and W. Gerstenberg (Regensburg, 1933), 40–53

‘Heinrich Schütz, der Vater der deutschen Musik’, Lied und Volk, v (1935)

‘Pindar oder Kircher?’, Hermes, xx (1935), 463–75

‘Heinrich Schütz im Schrifttum der neueren Zeit’, Deutsche Musikkultur, i (1936–7), 51–6

‘Zur deutschen Beethoven-Auffassung seit Richard Wagner’, Beethoven und die Gegenwart: Festschrift … Ludwig Schiedermair, ed. A. Schmitz (Berlin, 1937), 1–40

‘Fragen der Aufführungspraxis, insbesondere der Continuo-Besetzung bei Heinrich Schütz’, Deutsche Musikkultur, iii (1938–9), 269–83

‘J.J. Fux und der musikalische Historismus’, Deutsche Musikkultur, vii (1942–3), 1–14

EDITIONS

Michael Praetorius: Gesamtausgabe der musikalischen Werke, iv: Musae Sioniae (Wolfenbüttel, 1933); xiii: Eulogodia Sionia (Wolfenbüttel, 1929)

Moritz, Landgraf von Hessen: Ausgewählte Werke, EDM, 2nd ser., Kurhessen, i (Kassel, 1936–8)

with M. Staehlin: Heinrich Isaac: Messen, aus dem Nachlass von Herbert Birtner, Musikalische Denkmäler, vii (Mainz, 1969–73)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Blume: ‘Herbert Birtner’, AMf, viii (1943), 2–4

MALCOLM TURNER/PAMELA M. POTTER

Birtwistle, Sir Harrison

(b Accrington, Lancs., 15 July 1934). English composer. Along with his soft Lancastrian accent, his North Country origins have never entirely left him – indeed, they continue to colour his distinctive musical voice. This colouring is at its most obvious in a work such as the opera Yan Tan Tethera (1984), which draws on a folktale concerned with the rivalry between a northern and a southern shepherd. Birtwistle’s description of the piece as a ‘mechanical pastoral’ is telling: it implies that the natural coexists with the man-made, that the rural is somehow tempered by the urban. The composer’s childhood home was a small-holding on the edge of Accrington, at the point where the rural and the urban met, and he grew up knowing both natural and industrial landscapes. Examples of pure pastoral are rare in his work. More usually, the pastoral and the urban complement one another, as in Panic (1995), a celebration of the nature god Pan for the decidedly urban soloists of saxophone and drum kit plus an orchestra of wind and percussion (fig.1). At the age of seven, with the local bandmaster as teacher, he began to play the clarinet, eventually joining the Accrington military band. So it was that his formative musical experiences were more of (typically northern) industrial working-class music-making – later to re-emerge, for example, in two works for brass band, Grimethorpe Aria (1973) and Salford Toccata (1989) – than of middle-class concert halls. And it is these sounds – of wind, brass and percussion (he has a self-confessed discomfort with writing for strings) – that have dominated his sonic imagination throughout most of his creative life.

1. To 1969.

3. After 1986.

JONATHAN CROSS

1. To 1969.

It was as a clarinettist that Birtwistle won a scholarship in 1952 to the RMCM, where he studied with Frederick Thurston (clarinet) and Richard Hall (composition). Arguably a more important influence on him than his teachers, however, were his fellow students, an exceptionally rich coming-together of the brightest musical minds of his generation. Among his contemporaries were the composers Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies, the pianist John Ogdon and the trumpeter Elgar Howarth. Together they formed, in 1953, the New Music Manchester Group, which, at a time when even the music of the Second Viennese School was rarely heard outside London, provided an important opportunity for them to explore significant 20th-century works. Birtwistle undertook his National Service in London between 1955 and 1957 as a clarinettist with the band of the Royal Artillery, after which he embarked on a postgraduate year of clarinet studies with Reginald Kell at the RAM (1957–8), followed by a brief period with the Royal Liverpool PO.

None of his student compositions survive publicly. While at Manchester he did not consider himself an active composer, partly, no doubt, because he remained in the shadow of Davies and Goehr. Nonetheless, he must have experimented with 12-note methods under Hall’s tutelage and encountered the music that was most strongly to make its mark on his own work, that of Stravinsky, Webern and Varèse. While on National Service he first heard Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître and Stockhausen’s Zeitmasze, which, along with Gruppen, made a profound impression. On New Year’s Eve 1957 he completed Refrains and Choruses for wind quintet, his first acknowledged work. It was written very quickly and is through-composed without any obvious large-scale repetitions or compositional systems: ‘I wrote it completely off the top of my head. I can’t justify a single note’. It clearly sets out the musical path Birtwistle was to follow in having a straightforward overall structure based in part on verse-refrain patterns, an acute awareness of the possibilities of wind writing (Varèse is a clear model), an interest in instrumental role play (after Stravinsky) and an assured and imaginative control of musical materials. It was selected by the SPNM for performance at the 1959 Cheltenham Festival. On hearing the news, so the story goes, Birtwistle made the symbolic decision to sell his clarinets and devote himself entirely to composition.

In 1962 he took up the appointment of director of music at Cranborne Chase School, a girls’ boarding school at Wardour Castle, Dorset. It was there in 1964, with Goehr and Maxwell Davies, and with Michael Tippett as president, that he set up the first of two Wardour Castle summer schools, at least partly to provide an outlet for his and his colleagues’ own music. The second gathering saw the première of his ensemble work Tragoedia (1965), a milestone in his development and the score which was to suggest most clearly his future direction. Its title literally means ‘goat dance’, suggesting a wild Dionysian ritual (evident in some of the work’s aggressive material), but its model was the formality of ancient Greek tragedy, to which he was to return on many future occasions. It is an abstract drama which, according to the composer, ‘is intended to bridge the gap between “absolute music” and theatre music’. Birtwistle took the principal formal divisions of Greek choric ode – Prologue, Parados, Episodion, Stasimon, Exodos – and organized them into a cyclic structure. Tragoedia signals an overt fascination with the theatre – particularly ancient, stylized, ritual theatre – and with symmetrical structures, often employing verse-refrain patterns and involving instrumental role play. In these respects it is clearly a study for his first opera, Punch and Judy (1966–7), in which all its music was to reappear.

A Harkness Fellowship, won in 1966, enabled him to spend some time at Princeton, where he composed Punch and Judy. From Babbitt’s serialism he moved on to a period of Schenkerian study at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Both experiences were necessary, he argues, in order for him to reject both post-Webernian serialism and Schenkerism. Nonetheless, both left their mark – the former in the kind of pitch and rhythmic mechanical schemes he occasionally employs (such as the ‘pulse labyrinth’ which prefaces Silbury Air), the latter in an increasing interest in a sustained linearity in more recent works (such as the ‘fundamental melodic line’ on which he has suggested Gawain is built).

The première of Punch and Judy, at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival, was a landmark in 20th-century opera (fig.2). The ritualized, cyclic structures Birtwistle had been working with up to this point found their match in Stephen Pruslin’s sophisticated libretto, described by Auden as ‘one of the most outstanding and original libretti of the century’. Pruslin took the principal features and characters of the traditional English Punch and Judy plays (a fine example of urban folk drama) and cross-fertilized them with other equally stylized dramatic structures, such as Greek tragedy, Baroque opera and the Bach Passions, in order to produce what he described as ‘a source opera which, though written after them, would give the illusion of having been written before them’. The result is a complex structure of over 100 self-contained numbers (arias, chorales, dances, ‘travel music’, ‘weather reports’ etc.) organized into repetitive, ritual cycles. Birtwistle takes a ‘Baroque’ approach to his music, where each number adopts a distinct musical affect, successfully balancing the violent (e.g. ‘Punch’s War-Cry’) and the lyrical (e.g. ‘Judy’s Aria’). Punch and Judy is clearly not a traditional opera: its small cast doubling roles and its chamber scoring suggest a music-theatrical lineage stemming from Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat. It marks definitively Birtwistle’s interest in a non-narrative kind of music theatre, which was to reach its apogee in The Mask of Orpheus.

The two years Birtwistle spent in America were punctuated by occasional trips home. On one such occasion, in 1967, he set up the Pierrot Players (with Davies, Stephen Pruslin and the clarinettist Alan Hacker) to provide among other things the opportunity for experiment with small-scale music theatre. The latent theatre of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire offered a suitable model as well as a flexible instrumental grouping which, with the addition of percussion, the Pierrot Players adopted. The group’s first concert included Birtwistle’s Monodrama (1967), to a text by Pruslin drawing once more on Greek tragedy, where a single actor takes on a number of roles and functions. As a highly abstract drama, it did not, it seems, succeed in the concert hall, and Birtwistle withdrew it. He nonetheless remained involved with the Pierrot Players until 1970, when, as a result of increasing tensions between personnel, he resigned.

If Punch and Judy was one consequence of the musico-dramatic possibilities suggested by Tragoedia, Birtwistle’s next significant work, Verses for Ensembles (1968–9), was another. Here he invented an ‘instrumental theatre’ (precedents for which can be found in, for instance, Berio’s Circles of 1960) where the players move about the concert platform according to their changing musical roles. Though not explicitly derived from Greek tragedy, the overall scheme of Verses for Ensembles, like that of Tragoedia, is highly formal: a ritual cycle of repetitions organized around a central sequence of verses and refrains. Its language is bold, involving the stark and dramatic juxtaposition of distinct blocks of musical material, and draws together the formal concerns of Stravinsky, the extreme sonorities of Varèse and the ritual structures of Messiaen. At the same time, Birtwistle was writing a different kind of theatre piece: Down by the Greenwood Side (1968–9). Like Punch and Judy, this is the retelling of a folk myth, but now a rural one based on the medieval English Mummers’ Play and versions of the Ballad of the Cruel Mother. It is a vivacious and often witty entertainment, more in the manner of the English pantomime tradition; yet Birtwistle’s preoccupations are still evident: myth, ritualized violence, seasonal renewal. Many of its themes were to be fully developed in larger stage works, such as Yan Tan Tethera (pastoral folk ballad), Gawain (turning of the seasons, the Green Man) and The Mask of Orpheus (ritual presentation of a myth from changing perspectives).

2. The time of ‘The Mask of Orpheus’.

Verses for Ensembles marked the end of one phase of development in Birtwistle’s music. Down by the Greenwood Side represented a renewed interest in the pastoral and was followed by a series of works in which this notion was pursued in music more obviously lyrical, melodic and continuous, most notably Nenia: the Death of Orpheus (1970), The Fields of Sorrow (1971), An Imaginary Landscape (1971) and The Triumph of Time (1971–2). These, and other works from the 1970s, explored the idea of the ‘processional’, which, in relation to The Triumph of Time, Birtwistle described as ‘a (necessarily) linked chain of material objects which have no necessary connection with each other’. The title of this orchestral work is taken from an engraving by Pieter Breughel the Elder which Birtwistle encountered only once he had begun writing the piece, but which seemed entirely apt. The engraving depicts a procession of allegorical figures – Time, Death and Fame – moving across a desolate landscape, trampling over the ephemeral objects of earthly life, while in the background are represented eternal events such as the turning tides and seasons. Similarly, the music suggests a slow procession of musical ideas in the context of repeated events (amplified english horn and soprano saxophone melodies) and familiar objects (quotations from The Fields of Sorrow and Chorale from a Toy-Shop). It confirms Birtwistle’s preoccupation with a new kind of non-narrative temporality, where recurrent musical objects are viewed in different lights and from constantly changing perspectives.

Along with a continuing fascination with subject matter drawn from Greek mythology, such concerns marked the start of the composer’s massive project The Mask of Orpheus, which was originally commissioned by Covent Garden in 1970 but which eventually passed to the ENO. The composition of the first two acts was undertaken during Birtwistle’s next visit to America (1973–5), when he taught first at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and then (at the invitation of Feldman) at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Because of the hiatus in the commissioning process, there was a gap before he began work on the final act, but he resumed work in 1981 and the whole score was finished by 1984. In the interim (1975–82) he took up what was to prove to be a decisive appointment, first as music director and then as associate director, at the new National Theatre in London. There he produced music for a wide variety of plays, but his most important contribution was to Peter Hall’s production of the Oresteia (1981) in a translation by Tony Harrison. Hall produced the plays in the Greek manner, employing a masked, all-male cast. Birtwistle’s sparse, ritualistic music, exploiting pulse and rhythmic recitation for the chorus, and scored predominantly for percussion over simple drones, had the quality of being utterly modern and yet appearing as ancient as the text itself. It was perfectly in tune with Hall’s production, and showed a composer utterly at ease in the theatre.

During his period at the National Theatre Birtwistle continued to produce important concert works, but they now showed the influence of his theatrical enterprises. For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot (1976), written for Les Percussions de Strasbourg, takes its title from Hamlet, and instrumental role play is again in evidence: two of the six percussionists are denoted ‘King’ and ‘Queen’, while the other four play the ‘Chorus’. Their physical movements are prescribed in the score, though the musical material is often provided only in outline, to be realized by the players. Like the Oresteia score, a concern with pulse is pre-eminent, as it was to become in many subsequent pieces, notably Silbury Air, Pulse Field and Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum (all 1977) and Pulse Sampler (1981). Pulse Field (originally, Frames, Pulses and Interruptions), written in association with Jaap Flier and the Ballet Rambert, was Birtwistle’s first ballet score, for which he pared his materials down to the basics of pulse and drones, and concentrated on coordinating music and movement as precisely as possible. At the same time, he was working on a new theatre piece with Tony Harrison, Bow Down (1977), scored for four musicians and five actors. In this case it was the formality, the hieratic, non-narrative ritual of Japanese nō drama that provided the model – and that can be seen to have had an important bearing on much of Birtwistle’s work, not least The Mask of Orpheus.

A more elaborate exploration of pulse was attempted in Silbury Air, which took its title from the prehistoric Silbury Hill in Wiltshire – another mysterious hill, replete with its own music, was to reappear in Yan Tan Tethera. The score is prefaced with a ‘pulse labyrinth’ which controls the changes of metre and tempo (metronome marks) in the piece, ensuring smooth ‘metric modulation’ (to appropriate Carter’s term) and focussing attention on pulse as a foreground feature – issues to be followed up in … agm … (1978–9). Birtwistle’s concern with the basics of his vocabulary is again apparent: the opening of Silbury Air, which recurs on two further occasions, always begins with an elementary pulsation at a very soft dynamic level and on a unison E, so often a focal point for Birtwistle. The ‘air’ of the work’s title is a melody which seems to override the cycles of recurrence in the piece, and is a sign of the growing importance to him of melody throughout the 1980s and 90s. The result is what Birtwistle calls an ‘imaginary landscape’ (after Paul Klee), a musical parallel to the man-made landscape of Silbury Hill. A painting by Klee, The Twittering Machine (1922), was the model for Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum, almost a companion piece to Silbury Air and another example of a mechanical pastoral, as its title suggests. Like Silbury Air, it is concerned with pulse, but in this case without any attempt to modulate between different tempos: in the composer’s words, ‘it consists of six mechanisms which are juxtaposed many times without any form of transition’.

With the passing of the commission of The Mask of Orpheus to the ENO, Birtwistle resumed work on the project, and its première took place at the London Coliseum on 21 May 1986. It is a central work in Birtwistle’s output, and has come to be understood as equally central in the development of postwar opera, a work which extended the boundaries of what was possible in lyrical theatre. Though the gap in composition meant that the third act is very different in character and style from the first two, the work as a whole is an extraordinary synthesis of Birtwistle’s compositional, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations developed over 25 years.

Like Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus has a formal structure of many discrete events – in this case 126, always grouped in threes, with such titles as ‘Song of Magic’, ‘Poem of Reminiscence’, ‘Orphic Hymn’ and ‘Hysterical Aria’. Each is given a conventional operatic designation (usually recitative or aria) which defines its ‘ritual situation’, its musical and dramatic personality. In other respects, however, Orpheus is very different from Punch: ‘I wanted to invent a formalism which does not rely on tradition in the way that Punch and Judy [did] …. In The Mask of Orpheus, I didn’t want to hark back any more; I wanted to create a formal world that was utterly new’.

Peter Zinovieff, the librettist, argued that Orpheus never existed as an individual but as a collective inheritance (the same mythical events have often been retold from many different perspectives). So we are presented in Orpheus with multiple versions of the legend. One way in which this multiplicity is achieved is through the threefold representation of each of the three principal characters as Man/Woman (singer), Hero/Heroine (mime) and Myth (giant singing puppet). All wear masks in order to emphasize the work’s ritual dimension. Key events are presented more than once, either simultaneously or successively (in ‘Time Shifts’), so that the drama discloses a central concern with time itself, with the exploration of a multiple present containing both past and future. Working with myth absolves Birtwistle from conventional narrative responsibilities, tied to a singular, linear concept of time, and thus the precise subject matter becomes unimportant (Orpheus actually began life as a Faust opera) because the focus is on the ritual, repetitive structures. The most significant of these lies in Act 2, which is dominated by a vast, allegorical scheme of 17 arches. This scheme is not to be seen: it is an imaginary device that both symbolizes and gives order to Orpheus’s dream of his descent to and return from the underworld.

Another important aspect of The Mask of Orpheus is its electronic dimension. Six interludes, named ‘Passing Clouds of Abandon’ and ‘Allegorical Flowers of Reason’, interrupt the main action and are mimed to a tape realized at IRCAM by Barry Anderson, the music sounding, in Birtwistle’s words, like that of ‘a mad, mechanical percussion instrument’. The disembodied voice of Apollo, speaking in an invented language, is also electronic (manufactured using the CHANT program at IRCAM), and there are electronic ‘auras’ – background sounds representing, among other things, summer, winter and the tides.

The immense achievement of The Mask of Orpheus lies in its imaginative and ambitious fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, in the convergence of an extraordinarily rich dramatic concept with music of a deep expressive power. The work met with universal critical acclaim and won for Birtwistle the Grawemeyer Award (1987), as well as the 1986 Evening Standard Opera Award. Other honours quickly followed: he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1986, and knighted in 1988. In 1995 he won the Siemens Music Prize, the first British composer to receive the award since Britten in 1973. In 1994 he was appointed Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s College, London and director of contemporary music at the RAM, positions he holds simultaneously with that of composer in residence to the LPO, to which he was appointed in 1993.

3. After 1986.

The period of the later 1980s and early 1990s was particularly rich and productive, and was dominated by three large operatic projects – Yan Tan Tethera, Gawain and The Second Mrs Kong – interspersed with a number of major ensemble and orchestral works. In many respects Yan Tan Tethera, first performed in the same year as The Mask of Orpheus, is its complement. Though on a much smaller scale, it shares with Orpheus its retelling of a pastoral myth, its viewing of the same events from different perspectives, its stylization (including singing sheep), its themes of birth, imprisonment and seasonal renewal, and its musical and dramatic structure of ritualistic cycles of repetitions. The title alludes to an ancient English way of counting, used by northern shepherds to number their sheep. Ritual counting, the mystery of number, forms much of the substance of the work and constitutes one aspect of the ‘mechanical’ part of this pastoral. Birtwistle’s other major composition of 1984 was the ensemble work Secret Theatre. Its title, taken from a poem by Robert Graves, could stand for so many of his pieces which engage covertly with some sort of theatre or drama, where the audience witnesses a ritual whose meaning is only half-revealed. In Secret Theatre, as in Verses for Ensembles before it, players move about the concert platform to give physical substance to their changing musico-dramatic roles. In this case, Birtwistle distinguishes between two basic musical categories: cantus and continuum, representing the individual and the collective (never mere ‘melody’ and ‘accompaniment’). It is the changing relationship between these two categories that forms the dramatic as well as the musical argument of the piece. The cantus takes on the aspect of an ‘endless melody’, a line which is present virtually from the start to the end of the piece, and a feature which, in a different way, was to reappear in Gawain as well as explicitly in An Interrupted Endless Melody (1991).

But before Birtwistle started on his next opera, another important work appeared: Earth Dances, his first large orchestral work since The Triumph of Time. The lines in Earth Dances appear as layers, or ‘strata’ as Birtwistle calls them, relying once again on a topographical metaphor. As in Secret Theatre, it is the shifting relationship between these strata (where the ‘earth’ literally ‘dances’) that forms the music’s substance, though there are many more layers of material moving in and out of focus. Each stratum is distinguished by a different interval collection and a distinct register. The overall form, as in other large-scale works of the later 1980s and 1990s, is hard to define. Events recur and are transformed, but the logic of these recurrences is not explicit; forms remain open-ended and a way out of the labyrinth is rarely disclosed: the relatively simple symmetries and formal plans of the 1960s are long gone. In the case of Endless Parade (1986–7), Birtwistle used the analogy of wandering through an unfamiliar city, continually encountering the same carnival procession from different viewpoints, and this image might be equally appropriate to most of his works of this period. There is a ‘rightness’ about the overall shape of Earth Dances: its climaxes are perfectly timed. It is a monumental work of primeval power, a work which has drawn fruitful comparisons with The Rite of Spring.

As on so many previous occasions, Birtwistle turned to English mythology as the source of his next opera, based on the medieval alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – a text he had first used as early as 1963 in Narration: a Description of the Passing of a Year. Its subject matter of ritual beheading, seasonal renewal and courtly love is familiar Birtwistle territory. David Harsent’s libretto offered many opportunities for Birtwistle’s favoured rituals, especially the large-scale cyclic structures which dominate each act – the turning of the seasons in Act 1 and the hunt/seduction in Act 2 – in addition to smaller-scale verse-refrain structures. However, in other respects Gawain marks a distinctly new development in that it has a strong narrative line, paralleled by a fundamental musical line. Punch and Orpheus, for example, are archetypes, not individual operatic characters, and are therefore incapable of development; Gawain grows, matures, changes as a result of his experiences: we witness his progress from Parsifal-like innocent fool to experienced adult who comes to recognize his own limitations (‘I am not that hero’, he sings at the end, on his return to Arthur’s court). Musical characterization is strong. Furthermore, Birtwistle relies to a greater extent than before on motivic recurrences to structure the musico-dramatic argument, such as the motifs associated with the axe and with Gawain himself. The orchestra, dominated by the sounds of the brass (especially two tubas) and using a cimbalom as continuo, is organized, as in Earth Dances, in rich layers, which complement rather than literally accompany the stage action.

Birtwistle’s next opera, The Second Mrs Kong, continues the tendency towards a more direct narrative. Absent are the familiar large-scale repetitive cycles; instead we are presented with a more conventional operatic two-act structure, where the episodic first act sets up characters, ideas and situations, while the second is a ‘quest’ narrative as Kong journeys to find Pearl (the subject of Vermeer’s Head of a Girl with a Pearl Earring; fig.4). The work’s starting point was the popular 1933 film King Kong, though the opera is actually about ‘the idea of Kong’, i.e. the ‘mythical’ Kong as archetype (the ‘wild and wordless, lost and lonely child of all the world’). Russell Hoban’s eclectic libretto moves rapidly between high drama and farce, while its dramatis personae is as varied (and as unlikely) as that of a variety show. It explores ideas and characters Hoban had been working with as a novelist for many years, and Birtwistle was clearly drawn to him because their preoccupations seemed to coincide (myth, cinema, story-telling, even Orpheus and Eurydice). Despite Kong’s being only an ‘idea’, the central theme of this opera is a very human one – ‘the yearning for what cannot be’ – and, in Kong, Birtwistle and Hoban present us with a believable operatic character who, like Gawain, grows and develops as the narrative unfolds. The balance between words and music is skilfully handled, especially at comic moments such as the Act 2 scene with Madame Lena, where Hoban’s text dominates in a kind of recitative; elsewhere, in lyrical moments of ‘aria’, the music comes to the fore. At the very end, when Kong has found Pearl but realizes they can never be united, it is as if time stands still: all that remains to the characters is their shared memories. Where words are no longer useful or meaningful, music takes over. Birtwistle layers ‘remembered’ musical fragments over a long pedal E, and so poignantly and powerfully captures the dramatic situation. All through the work his exploration of different kinds of time, musical and dramatic, remains as fresh and as challenging as ever.

A number of works since The Second Mrs Kong have continued to explore aspects of the musical world established in that opera, most notably the strikingly lyrical tuba concerto The Cry of Anubis (1994), where the soloist plays the role of the mythical character from the opera, and Panic, which takes up the urban sound-world of saxophone and percussion from the ‘Death of Kong’ scene in Act 2. The première of Panic received wide critical attention, much of it negative, for the alleged inappropriateness of a modernist work in the reactionary context of the Last Night of the Proms; by contrast, nothing but positive critical acclaim, both in England and in Germany, was bestowed on Pulse Shadows (1996), a generally restrained but powerfully expressive interweaving of the Nine Settings of Celan (1989–96) and the Nine Movements for string quartet (1991–6).

Though the origins of Birtwistle’s musical language lie clearly in the European modernist tradition of Stravinsky, Varèse, Webern, Messiaen, Boulez and Stockhausen, these influences are synthesized and reworked to produce a music of striking independence and authority. In some respects that music has not changed in four decades, in that Birtwistle’s preoccupations with myth, ritual, theatre, time and with certain musical fundamentals of pulse and pitch have remained a consistent feature, a fact evident even in his latest opera, The Last Supper (1998–9). In other respects his music has become very different: having passed through distinct periods concentrating (in very general terms) on violent, formalist oppositions in the 1960s, lyrical processionals in the 1970s, and an exploration of the basics of rhythm, melody and gesture in the 1980s, Birtwistle is writing music which confidently balances dramatic confrontation with narrative continuity, harmonic and rhythmic boldness with melodic expressiveness, and doing so in significant works for opera house and concert hall that are among the most individual produced during the second half of the 20th century.

WORKS

dramatic

The Visions of Francesco Petrarca (allegory, Petrarch sonnets, trans. E. Spenser), Bar, mime ens, 9 insts, school orch, 1965–6, York, St Michael-le-Belfrey, 15 June 1966; withdrawn

Punch and Judy (tragical comedy or comical tragedy, 1, S. Pruslin), 1966–7, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 8 June 1968

Down by the Greenwood Side (dramatic pastoral, 1, M. Nyman, after English Mummers’ Play and Ballad of the Cruel Mother), 1968–9, Brighton, West Pier, 8 May 1969

Pulse Field (Frames, Pulses and Interruptions) (ballet, choreog. J. Flier), 6 dancers, 9 insts, 1977, Snape Maltings, 25 June 1977

Bow Down (music theatre, T. Harrison, after versions of the Ballad of the Two Sisters), 5 actors, 4 musicians, 1977, London, Cottesloe, 5 July 1977

The Mask of Orpheus (lyrical tragedy, 3, P. Zinovieff), 1973–5, 1981–4, London, Coliseum, 21 May 1986

Yan Tan Tethera (mechanical pastoral, 1, T. Harrison), 1984, London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 7 Aug 1986

Gawain (op, 2, D. Harsent, after Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), 1990–91, rev. 1994; London, Covent Garden, 30 May 1991

The Second Mrs Kong (op, 2, R. Hoban), 1993–4, Glyndebourne, 24 Oct 1994

The Last Supper (op, R. Blaser), 1998–9, Berlin, Staatsoper, 18 April 2000

incidental music

Hamlet (W. Shakespeare), 1975

Tamburlaine (C. Marlowe), 1976

Julius Caesar (W. Shakespeare), 1977 [collab. D. Muldowney]

Volpone (B. Jonson), 1977

Herod (P. Mills), 1978 [collab. Muldowney]

The Cherry Orchard (A. Chekhov), 1978 [collab. Muldowney]

As You Like It (W. Shakespeare), 1979 [collab. Muldowney]

The Oresteia (Aeschylus, trans. T. Harrison), 1981

The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (J. Giraudoux, trans. C. Fry), 1983

film score

The Offence (dir. S. Lumet), 1973

orchestral

full orchestra

Chorales for Orchestra, 1960–63

Nomos, 4 amp wind insts, orch, 1967–8

The Triumph of Time, 1971–2

Earth Dances, 1985–6

Les hoquets du gardien de la lune, after G. de Machaut, 1987

Machaut à ma manière, 1988

Gawain’s Journey, arr. E. Howarth from op, 1991

Antiphonies, pf, orch, 1992

The Cry of Anubis, tuba, orch, 1994

Exody (23:59:59), 1996–7

wind and percussion

An Imaginary Landscape, brass, 4 perc, 8 db, 1971

Grimethorpe Aria, brass band, 1973

Fanfare for Will, 11 brass, 1987

Salford Toccata, brass band, 1989

Fanfare for Glyndebourne, brass, timp, 1994

Panic, a sax, drums, wind, perc, 1995

Placid Mobile, 36 muted tpt, 1998

strings

Melencolia I, cl, hp, 2 str orchs, 1976

Still Movement, 13 str, 1984

Endless Parade, tpt, vib, str, 1986–7

mixed ensemble

Three Sonatas for 9 Instruments, 1958, withdrawn

The World is Discovered, after H. Isaac, 12 insts, 1960–61

Three Movements with Fanfares, chbr orch, 1964

Tragoedia, wind qnt, hp, str qt, 1965

Verses for Ensembles, 5 ww, 5 brass, 3 perc, 1968–9

Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum, 14 insts, 1977

Silbury Air, 15 insts, 1977

Mercure: poses plastiques, arr. of Satie, 14 insts, 1980

Secret Theatre, 14 insts, 1984

Ritual Fragment, 14 insts, 1990

Bach Measures, after J.S. Bach: Orgelbüchlein, 15 insts, 1996

Slow Frieze, pf, 13 insts, 1996

choral

Music for Sleep, children’s vv, pf, perc, 1963

Narration: a Description of the Passing of a Year (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. B. Stone), SATB, 1963

Carmen paschale (Sedulus Scottus, trans. H. Waddell), SATB, org, 1964–5

The Mark of the Goat (dramatic cant., 4 scenes, A. Crang), children’s vv, pf 6 hands, perc, 1965–6

The Fields of Sorrow (Ausonius, trans. Waddell), 2 S, vv, 16 insts, 1971, rev. 1972

… agm … (Sappho, trans. T. Harrison), 4 S, 4 A, 4 T, 4 B, 3 inst ens, 1978–9

Choral Fragments from … agm … , 16vv, 1979

On the Sheer Threshold of the Night (Boethius, trans. Waddell), S, Ct, T, B, 12vv, 1980

solo vocal

Monody for Corpus Christi (Middle Eng.), S, fl, hn, vn, 1959

Entr’actes and Sappho Fragments, S, fl, ob, vn, va, hp, perc, 1962–4

Ring a Dumb Carillon (dramatic scena, C. Logue), S, cl, perc, 1964–5

Monodrama (S. Pruslin), S, spkr, fl, cl, vn, vc, 2 perc, 1967, withdrawn

Cantata (Sappho), S, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf + cel, glock, 1969

Nenia: the Death of Orpheus (dramatic scene, P. Zinovieff), S, 3 b cl, pf/prep pf, crotales, 1970

Prologue (Aeschylus, trans. P. Vellacott), T, 7 insts, 1971

Meridian (Logue, T. Wyatt), Mez, 2 female choruses 3vv, hn, vc, 11 insts, 1971

Epilogue (Shakespeare), Bar, 5 brass, 2 perc, 1972

La plage: 8 Arias of Remembrance (A. Robbe-Grillet), S, 3 cl, pf, mar, 1972

Five Chorale Preludes, arr. of J.S. Bach, S, cl, basset hn, b cl, 1975

Deowa, S, cl, 1983

Songs by Myself (Birtwistle), S, fl, str trio, db, pf, vib, 1984

Words Overhead (Birtwistle), S, fl, ob, bn, str, 1985

Four Songs of Autumn (Jap., trans. G. Bownas, A. Thwaite), S, str qt, 1987

An die Musik (R.M. Rilke), S, ww qt, vib, str qnt, 1988

The Wine Merchant Robin of Mere (Birtwistle), male v, pf, 1989

Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski, S, 13 insts, 1991

Nine Settings of Celan, S, 2 cl, va, vc, db, 1989–96 [interleaved with 9 Movts, str qt, as Pulse Shadows]

Three Niedecker Verses, S, vc, 1998

Love Cries, arr. M. Berkeley from op The Second Mrs Kong, S, Mez, T, orch, 1998–9

The Woman and the Hare (D. Harsent), S, spkr, fl + pic, fl + b fl cl + E-cl, perc, cel, 2 vn, va, vc, 1999

chamber and solo instrumental

for 4–7 instruments

Refrains and Choruses, wind qnt, 1957

Chorale from a Toy-Shop, various realizations, 1967

Three Lessons in a Frame, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1967, withdrawn

Hoquetus David, arr. of Machaut, fl, cl, vn, vc, glock, bells, 1969

Some Petals from my Twickenham Herbarium, pic, cl, va, vc, pf, bells, 1969

Ut heremita solus, arr. of Ockeghem, fl, cl, va, vc, pf, glock, 1969

Medusa, fl, cl, va, vc, pf + cel, perc, elec, 1969, rev. 1970, withdrawn

Dinah and Nick’s Love Song, 3 melody insts, hp, 1970

Tombeau in memoriam Igor Stravinsky, fl, cl, hp, str qt, 1971

For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot, 6 perc, 1976

Clarinet Quintet, 1980

Five Distances for Five Instruments, wind qnt, 1992

Nine Movements, str qt, 1991–6

for 1–3 instruments

Oockooing Bird, pf, c1950

Précis, pf, 1960

Verses, cl, pf, 1965

Linoi, cl, pf, 1968; version for cl, pf, tape, dancer, 1969; version for cl, pf, vc, 1973

Signals, cl, tap, 1970

Four Interludes for a Tragedy, basset cl, tape, 1968, withdrawn

Eight Lessons for Keyboards, 1 player, 1969, withdrawn

Chanson de geste, amp sustaining inst, tape, 1973, withdrawn

Pulse Sampler, ob, claves, 1981

Duets for Storab, 2 fl, 1983

Berceuse de Jeanne, pf, 1985

Hector’s Dawn, pf, 1987

An Interrupted Endless Melody, ob, pf, 1991

Hoquetus Petrus, 2 fl, pic tpt, 1995

Harrison’s Clocks, pf, 1997–8

The Silk House Tattoo, 2 tpt, 1 perc, 1998

tape

Chronometer, realized Zinovieff, 1971–2

Principal publishers: Universal, Boosey & Hawkes

MSS in CH-Bps, GB-Lbl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Henderson: ‘Harrison Birtwistle’, MT, cv (1964), 188–9

R. Smalley: ‘Birtwistle’s “Chorales”’, Tempo, no.80 (1967), 25–7

G. Crosse: ‘Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy’, Tempo, no.85 (1968), 24–6

R. Smalley: ‘Birtwistle’s Nomos’, Tempo, no.86 (1968), 7–10

M. Chanan: ‘Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side’, Tempo, no.89 (1969), 19–21

M. Nyman: ‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’, Tempo, no.88 (1969), 47–50

H. Rees: ‘Birtwistle’s Medusa’, Tempo, no.92 (1970), 28–30

E. Cowie: ‘Birtwistle’s Time Piece’, Music and Musicians, xx/10 (1971–2), 22

M. Bowen: ‘Harrison Birtwistle’, British Music Now: a Guide to the Work of Younger Composers, ed. L. Foreman (London, 1975), 60–70

M. Hall: ‘Birtwistle in Good Measure’, Contact, no.26 (1983), 34–6

A. Clements: ‘Harrison Birtwistle: a Progress Report at 50’, MT, cxxv (1984), 136–9

M. Hall: Harrison Birtwistle (London, 1984)

P. Griffiths: ‘Harrison Birtwistle’, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s (London, 1985), 186–94

E. Howarth: ‘The Mask of Orpheus’, Opera, xxxvii (1986), 492–5

T. Morgan: ‘Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus’, New Music 87, ed. M. Finnissy and R. Wright (Oxford, 1987), 76–8

A. Clements: ‘Endless Parade’, BBC Birtwistle Festival (London, 1988) [programme book]

M. Hall: ‘The Sanctity of the Context: Birtwistle’s Recent Music’, MT, cxxix (1988), 14–16

J. Cross: ‘Issues of Analysis in Birtwistle’s Four Songs of Autumn’, New Music 89, ed. M. Finnissy and R. Wright (Oxford, 1989), 16–23

R. Samuel: ‘Gawain’s Musical Journey’, Gawain, London, Royal Opera House, May 1991; rev. repr. in COJ, iv (1992), 163–78 as ‘Gawain: an Essay and a Diary’

A. Ford: ‘The Reticence of Intuition – Sir Harrison Birtwistle’, Composer to Composer: Conversations about Contemporary Music (London, 1993), 52–9

A. Whittall: ‘The Geometry of Comedy’, MT, cxxxiv (1993), 17–19

J. Cross: ‘The Action Never Stops, it Only Changes’, MT, cxxxv (1994), 698–703 [on The Second Mrs Kong]

J. Cross: ‘The Challenge of Modern Music: Birtwistle’s Refrains and Choruses’, Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. A. Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 184–94

J. Cross: ‘Lines and Circles: on Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy and Secret Theatre’, MAn, xiii (1994), 203–25

R. Samuel: ‘Time Remembered: Birtwistle’s “The Second Mrs Kong”’, Opera, xlv (1994), 1153–8

A. Whittall: ‘Comparatively Complex: Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Modernist Analysis’, MAn, xiii (1994), 139–59

D. Wright: ‘Clicks, Clocks and Claques: the Achievement of Harrison Birtwistle at 60’, MT, cxxxv (1994), 426–31

R. Adlington: ‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Recent Music’, Tempo, no.196 (1996), 2–8

D. Bruce: ‘Challenging the System’, MT, cxxxvii/April (1996), 11–16 [on Panic]

J. Cross: ‘Birtwistle’s Secret Theatres’, Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. C. Ayrey and M. Everist (Cambridge, 1996), 207–25

S. Pettitt: ‘Birtwistle’s Secret Theatres’, Opera, xlvii (1996), 366–9

H. Birtwistle, in conversation with R. Lorraine: ‘Territorial Rites 1’, MT, cxxxviii/Oct (1997), 4–8; ‘Territorial Rites 2’, MT, cxxxviii/Nov (1997), 12–16

A. Whittall: ‘Modernist Aesthetics, Modernist Music: Some Analytical Perspectives’, Music Theory in Concept and Practice, ed. J.M. Baker, D.W. Beach and J.W. Bernard (Rochester NY, 1997), 157–80

M. Hall: Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (London, 1998)

R. Adlington: The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (Cambridge, 1999)

A. Whittall: ‘The Mechanisms of Lament: Harrison Birtwistle's “Pulse Shadows”’, ML, lxxx (1999), 102

J. Cross: Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Myth, Music (London, 2000)

BIS.

Swedish record company. It was founded by Robert von Bahr (b Solna, 1943) in 1973. Bahr took degrees in law and music in Stockholm and appeared as a conductor and flautist. He established Grammofon AB BIS, known simply as BIS, after he had attempted to find a record company to release an album featuring his wife, the flautist Gunilla von Bahr. Record sales were growing in Sweden in the 1970s, but there was relatively little domestic production of classical music, and BIS gradually established itself as the leading label in its field in Sweden. Annual output has varied between 70 and 90 new albums; the company has a policy of keeping all its issues available. Its repertory has a Scandinavian bias, with complete surveys of Nielsen, Stenhammar, Sibelius, Kokkonen and Aho in progress during the 1990s. The company has also published an extensive selection of Baltic and Russian music including a planned complete Schnittke series. However, it also issues a wide selection of music from other countries, often works outside the standard repertory. It supports the idea of ‘original dynamics recordings’, with minimum interference from the sound engineer.

PEKKA GRONOW

Bisbigliando

(It.: ‘whispering’).

(1) A special effect used in harp playing, available only on the double-action pedal instrument. The term was first used in various solo harp works by Elias Parish Alvars (1808–49), who is credited with its invention. Easily performed, yet sounding extremely virtuoso, it involves setting the pedals so that the strings to be played can be doubled at the same pitch by their enharmonic equivalents, with both hands playing alternately on adjacent strings, e.g. D–F–A in the right hand alternating with C–E–G. Most typically played very fast and pianissimo, it is most effective in the harp’s middle and upper registers. Notable orchestral examples include Chabrier’s España (1883), Strauss’s Don Juan (1888–9), where it is spelt ‘bispiglando’, and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), where there is an extended bisbigliando passage in Nedda’s Act 1 scene ii aria ‘Stridono lassu’.

(2) Term used for a timbral trill in woodwind playing, achieved by oscillating between alternative fingerings producing the same pitch.

ANN GRIFFITHS

Biscardi, Chester

(b Kenosha, WI, 19 Oct 1948). American composer. He studied electronic music with Bert Levy and composition with Les Thimmig, receiving the MM in composition from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1974. He spent the summers of 1974 and 1975 studying with Davidovsky at the Composers' Conference (Johnson, Vermont). He later studied with Morris, Penderecki, Takemitsu and Wyner at Yale (MMA 1976, DMA 1980). In 1977 he joined the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, New York). His many awards include a Prix de Rome (1976–7), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979–80), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1990) and numerous grants.

Timbral and spatial concerns play an important role in Biscardi's music, especially in his early works. Often a single word or poetic phrase generates the central idea of a composition, though his works are never overtly programmatic. The Italian tenzone [dialogue] inspired Tenzone (1975), while T.S. Eliot's ‘Burnt Norton’, with its interplay of form and time evoked At the Still Point (1977). In the 1985 opera Tight-Rope, and the later song cycle The Gift of Life (1990–93) Biscardi's musical lyricism is more pronounced. Resisting Stillness (1996), an intimate, strikingly spare work, is autobiographical in nature.

WORKS

stage

Music for the Duchess of Malfi (incid music, J. Webster), v, fl, cl, tpt hn, 2 vn, vc, perc, pf, 1975; Music for the Witch Dance (dance, A. Gamson, after M. Wigman), 2 perc, 1983; Tight-Rope (op, 9 scenes, H. Butler), 1985

instrumental

Ens: Tartini, vn, pf, 1972; Chartres, ob, cl, s sax, vn, vc, 2 perc, pf, 1973; Orpha, str qt, mar, vib, 1974; Tenzone, 2 fl, pf, 1975; They had Ceased to Talk, vn, va, hn, 1975; Pf Trio, 1976; At the Still Point, orch, 1977; Trasumanar, 12 perc, pf, 1980; Di vivere, (cl, fl, vn, vc, pf)/(cl, pf), 1981; Pf Conc., pf, orch, 1983; Traverso, fl, pf, 1987; Netori, ob, cl, hn, vn, vc, pf, 1990; Companion Piece, db, pf, 1989, arr. pf, 1991; Music for an Occasion, brass, perc, pf, 1992; Incitation to Desire (Tango), cl, hn, vn, vc, perc, pf, 1993 [see Solo]; Nel giardinetto della villa, pf 4 hands, 1994; Resisting Stillness, 2 gui, 1996

Solo: Mestiere, pf, 1979; Incitation to Desire (Tango), pf, 1984, arr. chbr ens 1993; Pf Sonata, 1986, rev. 1987; No Feeling is the Same as Before, s sax, 1988; Companion Piece, pf, 1991

vocal

Choral: Heabakes: 5 Sapphic Lyrics (Sappho), 2 S, A, SATB, perc, 1974; Indovinello (Indovinello veronese), 12vv, 1974; Eurydice (H.D.), SSAA, chbr orch, 1978; Good-bye My Fancy! (M. D'Alessio, from W. Whitman), nar, SATB, 1982

Solo: Turning (C. Biscardi), S, vn, str trio, 1973; Trusting Lightness (J. Anderson), S, pf, 1975; Chez vous, S, pf, 1983; The Gift of Life (E. Dickinson, D. Levertove, T. Wilder), S, pf, 1990–93; Baby Song of the Four Winds (C. Sandburg), S/Mez, pf, 1994; Guru (A. Ginsberg), 1v, pf, 1997; I Wouldn't Know About That (W. Zinsser), 1v, pf, 1997; What a Coincidence (Zinsser), 1v, pf, 1997

Principal publishers: American Composers Edition, Presser, Peters

JAMES CHUTE

Bischof, Rainer

(b Vienna, 20 June 1947). Austrian composer, aesthetician and music administrator. He studied conducting with Swarowsky at the Vienna Music Academy (1965–7), and theory and analysis privately with Apostel (1967–72). He completed the PhD in philosophy at Vienna University in 1973. He has taught philosophy and aesthetics at the Alpbach Forum (1983, 1985), philosophy at the Vienna Music Academy (from 1987) and composition at the Vienna Conservatory (1996–). He has also served as musical advisor to the Vienna Festival (1984), head of the music section of Vienna’s Department of Culture (1986–8), vice-president of the Alban Berg Foundation (1986), secretary general of the Vienna SO (1988) and president of the International Gustav Mahler Society (1991).

Bischof’s precise formalism and his consistent use of note row techniques reflects the influence of the Second Viennese School. He regards serialism as an open system capable of further development and uses it as a framework for musical expression. This is particularly evident in Largo desolato (1985), a tribute to Berg, and … stracci (1988–9). His works often project melancholy, despair and anger at the world. In his chamber opera Das Donauergeschenk (1990–91), for example, an attempt by three ‘do-gooders’ to force an individualist to accept ‘reality’ proves fatal. His lieder cycles evoke impressions reminiscent of Schubert. (LZMÖ)

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Das Donauergeschenk (chbr op, F. Danielis), op.29, 1990–91, Vienna 1991

Orch: Deduktionen, op.7, str, 1973–4; Orchesterstücke, op.10, 1976–82; Conc., op.11/1, fl + a fl + b fl, orch, 1978–9; Org Conc., op.19/1, 1983–6; Largo desolato, op.20, str, 1985; Come uno sviluppo … stracci, op.25, chbr orch, 1988–9; Stracci II, chbr sym, op.33, 1992; Solo, op.38, 1994–5; Quasi una fuga, op.43, 1995–6; Sinfonia, op.40, small orch, 1995

Vocal: Morgenstern-Eichendorff Lieder, op.12, med v, pf, 1978; Und so sink ich leise in mich selbst hinein (I. Bachmann, F. Braun, N. Lenau, C. Busta, A. Hergouth, L. Kefer, F.T. Csokor, R. von Schaukal), song cycle, op.17, Mez, vn, 1982–3; Gebet und Verzweiflung (E. Heintel), op.35, SATB, orch, 1992–3; Herbstgesänge (E. Istler), op.36, SATB, a fl, b cl, cel, vib, crotales, va, vc, 1993; Ein Jahr im Turm mit Hölder (F. Hölderlin), op.44, A, bn/vc, cel, pf, 1996; Gesänge zur Kunst (Istler), op.45, SATB, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Cl Sonatina, op.1, 1969; Duo, op.3, fl, cl, 1970; Grave, op.6, vn, pf, 1970–71; Wind Qt, op.5, 1971; Charakteristische Differenzen, op.8, vn, pf, 1974; Studies for Fl Conc., op.11/2, fl, 1978; Org Variations, op.14, 1981; Music for 6 Rec, op.15, 1982–3; Str Qt, op.18, 1983–6; Trio fragile 1985, op.21, vn, vc, pf, 1985; Mallet ricercare, op.22, xyl, vib, mar, 1988; Nightwoods, sax qt, op.23, 1988; Str Trio, op.27, 1989–90; Str Sextet, op.28, 1989–90; Trio 89, op.26, vn, vc, pf, 1989; Hawa naschira, 8 variations, vn, 1990–91; Gedanken, op.34, hn, vn, pf, 1993; Mutationen, op.41, vc, 1994; Transfigurazione, op.42, bn, 1995; Auf der Suche nach … , op.46, pf, 1996

Principal publishers: Doblinger, Marmor, Universal

WRITINGS

‘Vom Missbrauch der Musik’, ÖMz, xxx (1975), 113–17

‘Vom Verstehen der Musik’, ÖMz, xxxiv (1979), 65–70

‘Gedankensplitter zur geschichtlichen und ästhetischen Innovationsproblematik der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts’, SMw, xxxvii (1986), 211–28

‘Grundsätzliche Betrachtungen zum Verhältnis Musik und Sprache’, Wort und Ton im europäischen Raum, ed. H. Krones (Vienna, 1989), 13–23

‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Komponieren’, ÖMz, xlix (1994), 446–55

LOTHAR KNESSL

Bischoff, Hans

(b Berlin, 17 Feb 1852; d Niederschönenhausen, nr Berlin, 12 June 1889). German pianist, teacher and editor. He was a piano pupil of Theodor Kullak and Richard Wüerst in Berlin, and studied philosophy and modern languages at Berlin University (1868–72), taking the doctorate at Göttingen in 1873 with a dissertation on Bernart de Ventadorn. He taught the piano and (from 1879) theory at Kullak’s Neue Akademie der Tonkunst (1873–8), and later at the Stern Conservatory, where he remained until his death. He also had an active career as a concert pianist, playing mainly chamber music; with the violinist W. Helmich he organized the Monday Concerts at the Berlin Sing-Akademie. He was a leading figure among 19th-century German critical editors. He edited Adolf Kullak's Aesthetik des Klavierspiels (1876). His editions of piano music were exemplary for their time and encompass keyboard works of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Clementi, Weber and Schubert, including the first variorum edition of Bach's Das wohltemperirte Clavier.

WRITINGS

Biographie des Troubadours Bernhard von Ventadorn (Berlin, 1873)

‘Über die ältere französische Klavierschule’, Programm der Neuen Akademie der Tonkunst in Berlin (1875); repr. in Der Klavierlehrer, xv (1892), 102, 113, 125, 139

ed.: A. Kullak: Die Ästhetik des Klavierspiels (Berlin, 2/1876, 3/1889; Eng. trans., 1907/R)

‘Über Johann Kuhnaus Vorstellung einiger biblischen Historien’, Programm der Neuen Akademie der Tonkunst in Berlin (1877); repr. in Der Klavierlehrer, xiv (1891), 68, 83, 93, 107

Zur Erinnerung an Theodor Kullak (Berlin, 1883)

EDITIONS

Ausgewählte Klavier-Kompositionen von G.F. Händel (Leipzig, 1880)

J.S. Bach: Klavier-Werke, i–vii (Hannover,1880–88)

M. Clementi: 50 Etüden aus dem ‘Gradus an Parnassum’ (Berlin, 1888); 12 ausgewählte Sonaten für Pianoforte (Leipzig, 1893); 12 Sonatinen für Pianoforte (Leipzig, 1893)

F. Schubert: Ausgewählte Klavier-Kompositionen (Leipzig, 1893)

C.M. von Weber: Ausgewählte Klavier-Kompositionen (Leipzig, 1893)

W.A. Mozart: Sämtliche Sonaten, Fantasien und Rondos für Pianoforte (Leipzig, 1894)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Stieglitz: Dr. Hans Bischoff: ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1889)

W. Altmann: ‘Zu Hans Bischoffs Bach-Ausgabe: aus Briefen Dr. Hans Bischoffs an Dr. Wilh. Rust mitgeteilt von Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Altmann (Berlin)’, BJb 1919, 76–96

G. Wehmeyer: ‘Sag mir, wie du zu Bach stehst …’, Musica, xxxvii/3 (1983), 221–9

CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bischoff, John (Lee)

(b San Francisco, 7 Dec 1949). American composer. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory (1968–70) with Robert Moran, Robert Helps and Ivan Tcherepnin, at the California Institute of the Arts (BFA 1971), where his teachers included James Tenney and Morton Subotnick, and at Mills College (MFA 1973) with Robert Ashley, ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny and David Tudor, among others. In 1978 he co-founded, with Jim Horton and Rich Gold, the League of Automatic Music Composers, the world’s first computer network band. He was also a founding member of the computer network band The Hub in 1985. In 1989 with Chris Brown and Tim Perkis, he co-founded Artifact Recordings, a label specializing in experimental electronic and computer music. He was appointed studio coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Music and lecturer in computer music at Mills College in 1992. A composer of live electronic and computer music, he has created software instruments with rich and somewhat unpredictable sonic behaviours. He interacts with these in performance within predefined structures that leave room for exploration. The quirks and challenges of the devices he creates are incorporated into his music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Piece, pf, 1968; Sign Angle Side, cl, vc, gui, hp, 1970; Terrain, any insts, 1970; Summer Network, live elecs, 1973; Pf Social, live elecs, 1975; Three Manners of Attachment, pf, toy pf, tape, 1975; Silhouette, live elecs, 1977; Audio Wave, cptr, 1978; Next Tone, Please, cptr, 1983; Artificial Horizon, cptr, tape, 1985; Space Detail, tape, 1985; The Curve Behind the Line, cptr, 1987; The Industrial Revolution, cptr, 1990; The Glass Hand, cptr, 1991; Drift, cptr, 1993; Silent Theater, cptr, 1993; Surface 11-5-2, cptr, 1995; The Curve Behind the Line, pf, 1998; Variable Tranist, cptr, 1998

WRITINGS

with J. Horton and R. Gold: ‘Microcomputer Network Music’, Foundations of Computer Music (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 588–600

with C. Brown and T. Perkis: ‘Bringing Digital Music to Life’, Computer Music Journal, xx/2 (1996), 28–32

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Cope: New Directions in Music (Dubuque, IA, 1971, 6/1993), 313–14

C. Roads: The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 684–5

CARTER SCHOLZ

Bischoff, Ludwig Friedrich Christian

(b Dessau, 27 Nov 1794; d Cologne, 24 Feb 1867). German music critic, writer and teacher. After participating in the Napoleonic Wars, he studied philology in Berlin, had a notable career as teacher and school director that included 26 years in Wesel, and moved in 1850 to Cologne to become music critic of the Kölnische Zeitung and to found the Rheinische (later Niederrheinische) Musikzeitung, which he edited and to which he contributed until his death. His writings, distinguished by their musical acuity and vivid expressiveness, strove to raise the public's musical standards and served as a voice for the lower Rhineland.

Bischoff venerated certain values in the music of the past as representing the highest in musical art. His writings reflect the then growing enthusiasm for Handel and Bach, while his aesthetic ideals were realized in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He held an ambivalent position towards Romantic music, admiring its expressive qualities but decrying a perceived decline in the accessibility, formal integrity and universality that he most valued. While he supported contemporary composers active in Cologne (e.g. Ferdinand Hiller, Carl Reinecke, Eduard Franck, Reinthaler, Bargiel and Bruch), his encounter with the progressive New German School of Liszt and Wagner, supported by a dedicated band of critics and essayists, impelled him to become one of its first and most outspoken opponents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADB (F. Hiller)

MGG1 suppl. (R. Sietz)

H. Mendel, ed.: ‘Ludwig Friedrich Christian Bischoff’, Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon, ii (Berlin, 1872), 18–20

R. Sietz: ‘Bischoff, Ludwig Friedrich Christian’, Rheinische Musiker, ii, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1962), 8–11

R.L. Curtis: Ludwig Bischoff: a Mid-19th-Century Music Critic (Cologne, 1979)

ROBERT CURTIS

Bischoff [Bischof, Episcopus], Melchior

(b Pössneck, Thuringia, 20 May 1547; d Coburg, 19 Dec 1614). German clergyman, hymn writer and composer. He attended several Gymnasiums in central Germany, in 1563 sang in the Arnstadt Kurrende (a choir consisting of the poorer boys of the town) and from 1564 studied at Jena University. In 1565 he became headmaster of the school at Rudolstadt, in 1567 Kantor at Altenburg and in 1570 minister in his native town. In 1573, refusing to assent to Calvinist articles, he was deprived of his living. He became minister at Geckenheim, near Uffenheim, Central Franconia, in 1574 and at Thundorf, near Bad Kissingen, in 1579 before returning to his post at Pössneck in 1585. In 1590 he went to Coburg as court chaplain to Duke Johann Casimir and in 1597 to Eisfeld as superintendent. From 1599 he again lived at Coburg, this time as superintendent-general; he was a friend of Melchior Franck there from 1602. His few compositions are all occasional sacred pieces; they show that he was familiar with the expressive polyphony of his Dutch contemporaries and with Venetian double-choir techniques, but lack any marked individuality. They appear in five prints (RISM 1568¹¹, 1603¹, 1618¹ and 1631², and Cantionale sacrum, Gotha, 1646), while Christi agonisantis precatio was published separately (Coburg, 1608); others are in manuscript (at D-Dl). They comprise five Latin motets for six to eight voices, three German motets for four, six and eight voices and two four-part German hymns.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

WaltherML

ZahnM

A. Fischer and W. Tümpel: Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17. Jahrhunderts, i (Gütersloh, 1904/R), 7ff

T. Krieg: Das geehrte und gelehrte Coburg, i (Coburg, 1927), 9 [incl. fuller bibliography]

FRANZ KRAUTWURST

Biscogli, Francesco

(fl c1740). Italian composer. His sole extant work is an extended concerto in D for trumpet, oboe, bassoon, two violins and continuo (F-Pc), unless a flute concerto (S-Uu) attributed to Don Antonio Biscogli is by the same man. The absence of a viola part in both works suggests Neapolitan provenance. From the extreme difficulty of the wind parts it can be deduced that the triple concerto was written as a showpiece for particular players, perhaps conservatory pupils.

MICHAEL TALBOT

Biscroma

(It.).

See Demisemiquaver (32nd-note). See also Note values.

Biseghino, Giovanni

(b Mantua; fl 1613). Italian composer and organist. In 1613 he was an organist at Porto Gruaro, Lombardy. His only known work is the Missarum quaternis vocibus liber primus (Venice, 1613). Three of the five masses in this book are based on popular madrigals of the second half of the 16th century, a fourth is for equal voices and the last is an alternatim setting of extreme simplicity. The volume is rounded off with a Marian litany and a version of the devotional hymn Pange lingua gloriosa, designed for performance while carrying the sacrament in procession on the feast of Corpus Christi. These too are composed in an uncomplicated and largely homophonic manner, which makes them approachable by choirs of modest ability. This concern with accessibility contrasts with the earlier masses in the book, which are not only more densely written but also contrary to Tridentine orthodoxy in their reliance upon secular models. Fétis also recorded a book of five-voice madrigals (now lost; FétisB).

IAIN FENLON

Bishop.

English firm of organ builders. It was founded in 1807 by James Chapman Bishop (c1783–1854), who is remembered as the inventor of the Clarabella, an 8' open wood-flute stop, which he frequently used on his own instruments, and often added to old organs, removing Cornets to do so. He claimed to have invented the Composition pedal (as did his former masters Flight & robson) and the Concussion bellows (also attributed to w.m. Goodrich). His Pedal Organs were somewhat in advance of those of his contemporaries. He added an octave of large pedal pipes to Father Smith’s organ at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1826, at the same time adding a separate bellows to ensure steadiness of wind. At St James’s, Bermondsey (1829), he built a remarkable three-stop Pedal Organ (G'–g) which could also be played from an independent manual keyboard. Tonally, his work of the 1820s and 30s, with its refinement and fondness for foundational effects, anticipated the taste of the mid-century. His use of closed shallots for chorus reeds was also ahead of his time. His later organs were less successful, though the C-compass organ with 39 stops at St Giles’s, Camberwell (1844), built in collaboration with Samuel Sebastian Wesley, who drew up the list of stops, is fascinating evidence of a conservative builder wrestling with new ideas.

On Bishop’s death a partnership was formed between his son, Charles Augustus Bishop (b 1821) and John Starr (c1808–c1878); a third partner, William Ebenezar Richardson, was added in 1857 but withdrew four years later. The firm built a number of significant instruments during the third quarter of the century (Brompton Oratory, London, 1857; St Mary’s, Nottingham, 1871; Bombay Town Hall, 1873) but the business got into financial difficulties and was acquired in 1880 by Edward Hadlow Suggate. It is still in existence, with offices in London and Ipswich, and was responsible for the reconstruction of the Thamar organ at Framlingham (1970) and the new organ for Lancaster University (1979).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, Musical World, xxxii (1854), 836–7

E.J. Hopkins and E.F. Rimbault: The Organ: its History and Construction (London, 1855, 3/1887/R)

G. Benham: ‘Interesting London Organs XXXV: St. Giles Church, Camberwell’, The Organ, xiii (1933–4), 46–54

G. Sumner: ‘J.C. Bishop, Ushaw College, and the Lancashire Catholics’, JBIOS, iv (1980), 77–89; v (1981), 70–82

L. Elvin: Bishop and Son, Organ Builders (Lincoln, 1984)

N.J. Thistlethwaite: The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990)

S. Bicknell: The History of the English Organ (Cambridge, 1996)

GUY OLDHAM/NICHOLAS THISTLETHWAITE

Bishop [née Riviere], Anna

(b London, 9 Jan 1810; d New York, 18 or 19 March 1884). English soprano. Her father, Daniel Riviere, was a drawing master of Huguenot descent. She studied the piano with Moscheles and singing with Henry Bishop, entering the RAM as a foundation student in 1824. She soon distinguished herself by her singing, and made her professional début at the Ancient Concerts on 20 April 1831, shortly before her marriage to Bishop on 9 July. During the next few years her reputation quickly grew, especially in the provinces, where she made several tours with her husband and the harpist Nicholas Bochsa. At this time her singing was confined to sacred music and to English songs, including many by her husband. In 1839, however, she began to give ‘dramatic concerts’ with Bochsa in which she sang Italian opera excerpts, first at Dublin, then at Edinburgh, and finally, on 5 July, at Her Majesty's Theatre, London. Four weeks later she eloped with Bochsa to Hamburg (deserting her husband and three children) and began a long tour of the Continent with him. Bochsa had a somewhat unsavoury reputation as a forger and bigamist.

For the rest of her life ‘Madame Bishop’, as she was now universally known, travelled almost incessantly, first with Bochsa and, after his death, alone. From 1839 to 1843 she visited all the principal towns in Europe (except in France, where Bochsa would have been arrested), including, for a year, St Petersburg; during this time she sang in 260 concerts. In summer 1843 she arrived in Italy, where she was engaged for 27 months at S Carlo, Naples, appearing in 20 operas. Her Italian admirers were many, though they did not include Verdi, who had heard her in I due Foscari and was unimpressed. Despite a press campaign in her favour (prompted, in Verdi's opinion, by bribery) he refused to engage her for Alzira in 1845.

She returned to London in 1846, and was well received despite the scandal of her elopement. The Morning Post (9 October) described her:

Madame Anna Bishop, after a lengthened and prosperous career as prima donna in the great capitals of Europe, made her debut last night as Isoline in Balfe's opera of ‘The Maid of Artois’. This lady has rare qualifications for the stage, a soprano voice of excellent quality, unerring intonation, facile execution, artistic feeling, and, what is uncommon even among the best vocalists, perfect musical accent. Her register extends from E flat on the first line to D flat in alt. She is of the middle size and symmetrically formed – her eyes are large, lustrous, and full of fire – her actions free, graceful and dramatic. We welcome Madame Bishop as a rich addition to the English lyrical drama.

But within a few months she was off again, to Dublin and then to New York, where she appeared on 12 July 1847 at a private reception held in her honour, and made her public début in Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix at the Park Theater on 4 August. A long tour with Bochsa followed, with engagements in Mexico, Cuba and California; in 1850 she was back in New York, where on 1 November 1852 she produced and sang in the first American performance of Flotow's Martha, at Niblo's Garden. In 1854 she was in San Francisco; in the following year she sailed for Sydney, Australia. After Bochsa's death there on 6 January 1856 she toured Chile, Argentina and Brazil and returned to New York in 1858, where she married a diamond merchant, Martin Schultz. She was in England again for the season of 1858–9, then began another long American tour, this time including Canada. From California in 1866 she set sail across the Pacific, where on 18 February she was shipwrecked on a coral reef. After more than a month the small boat in which she and her husband had survived reached Guam, from which they travelled to Manila; but she had lost all her music, clothes and jewellery. The indomitable singer continued her tour in Hong Kong, Singapore and India, then returned to England via Australia. She then went back to New York, but before retiring made yet another world tour between 1874 and 1876, this time including Sydney, Cape Town and Madeira. She was in London for three years, then returned finally to New York, where she made her last public appearance on 22 April 1883.

Anna Bishop was one of the most popular English singers of her generation. Her voice was brilliant, her technique masterly; but she lacked the expressive power of Jenny Lind or Clara Novello.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

Scrapbook of concerts by Bochsa and Anna Bishop, 1839–45 (MS, US-Bp 446.109)

G.G. Foster: Biography of Madame Anna Bishop (Sydney, 1855)

Obituary, MT, xxv (1884), 212 only

R. Northcott: The Life of Sir Henry R. Bishop (London, 1920), 85ff

F. Schlitzer: ‘Verdi's “Alzira” at Naples’, ML, xxxv (1954), 125–7

R. Davis: Anna Bishop: the Adventures of an Intrepid Prima Donna (Canberra, 1996)

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Bishop, Sir Henry R(owley)

(b London, 18 Nov 1786; d London, 30 April 1855). English composer. In his day he enjoyed a commanding reputation as the guardian of the best traditions of English song, and for a time he kept English opera alive almost single-handed. Yet he is now remembered for little but the song Home, Sweet Home.

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY (text, bibliography), BRUCE CARR (work-list)

1. Life.

His father, Samuel Bishop, came from a Shropshire family and was a London watchmaker and later haberdasher. Such education as Henry Bishop received was gained at Dr Barrow's Academy at 8 Soho Square. By the age of 13 he was already in business as a music seller with his cousin Charles Wigley, at 6 Spring Gardens, Charing Cross, and his first songs and piano pieces were published by this firm (c1801–4). Bishop then went to Newmarket to train as a jockey, but his patron, the racehorse owner Thomas Panton, finding the boy physically unsuited to this occupation, agreed instead to pay for his musical education. He returned to London and studied harmony under Francesco Bianchi. Meanwhile his earliest dramatic compositions had appeared, with some success. He wrote the music for several ballets at the King's Theatre and Drury Lane Theatre. His first fully fledged opera, The Circassian Bride, was performed at Drury Lane on 23 February 1809; the score was destroyed when the theatre burnt down the following day, but the music had made an impact. Several notably successful works followed, including The Maniac (26 performances). As a result Bishop was offered the post of musical director at Covent Garden in 1810. There, in the next 14 years, he supervised the composition and performance of dramatic musical works of all kinds, from original operas to collections of songs interpolated in mangled versions of Shakespeare's plays. Despite the immense amount of musical hack-work that Bishop was compelled to perform in this job, he found time for several excursions to the Continent, for a season at the Dublin Theatre (1820), and for direction of many of the Lenten Oratorio concerts from 1819. In 1813 Bishop was one of the founder-members of the Philharmonic Society, and he took his turn as conductor of its concerts. He was also one of the original professors of harmony at the RAM, though he did little teaching there.

In 1824 Bishop left Covent Garden because of a dispute over his salary, and became musical director at Drury Lane. His most ambitious opera, Aladdin, was put on there in a futile attempt to steal the thunder of Weber's Oberon at the rival house. Shortly after this he was engaged to succeed Tom Cooke as ‘director and composer’ to Vauxhall Gardens, in an effort to revive the fading popularity of the resort; he continued to write theatre music on a regular basis until 1840. Meanwhile in 1833 he was awarded a prize by the Manchester Gentlemen's Glee Club for his glee Where shall we make her a grave? and in the following year the Philharmonic Society commissioned and performed his cantata The Seventh Day. He applied for, but failed to secure, the post of organist of St George's, Windsor (1835), and the Gresham Professorship of Music (1837). In 1839 he took the BMus degree at Oxford. In 1841 he was elected to the Reid Professorship at Edinburgh University, but he resigned in 1843, having given a total of two lectures. From 1840 to 1848 he was the principal conductor of the Ancient Concerts. He was knighted on 1 June 1842 on the instigation of Prince Albert. In 1848 he was appointed to the chair of music at Oxford in succession to Crotch, and in 1853 he was awarded the DMus for his ode on the installation of the Earl of Derby as chancellor.

Bishop was twice married, first, on 30 April 1809, to the singer Elizabeth Sarah Lyon (1787–1831), by whom he had two sons and a daughter, and second, on 9 July 1831, to Anna Riviere (1810–84), another singer, who bore him two daughters and a son, but left him for Bochsa in 1839 (see Bishop, Anna). During his later years Bishop almost ceased to compose, but he edited a number of works, including Handel's chamber duets and cantatas (for the Handel Society) and Lord Mornington's glees. He died after an operation to cure the cancer from which he had long suffered.

2. Works.

Bishop's reputation has altered more than that of almost any other composer. In 1820 he was considered ‘one of the few modern composers whose writings will survive’ (Hunt); in 1851 George Hogarth thought that the best of his operas ‘are in many respects worthy of the greatest masters of the German school, and justify the title which was bestowed on him of “the English Mozart”; in 1895 he was still ‘one of our ablest and most elegant composers of vocal music’ (Baptie). But Fuller Maitland in 1902 dismissed his ‘so-called operas’ – ‘the low taste of the public was pandered to in each and all of them’. To Percy Young (1967) he was ‘a quite negligible composer’.

A glance at the list of Bishop's dramatic works suggests an almost incredible productivity, especially during the years 1813–20. This impression is misleading. Only one of his works, Aladdin, is anything like a full-length opera: even this is not through-composed, for the autograph score contains cues indicating spoken dialogue. In the rest Bishop provided set pieces in what was essentially a spoken play, numbering anything from 25 (in The Maniac) to one (in The Vespers of Palermo). Many of his works are adaptations, or medleys of well-known airs; in some he collaborated with other composers. Frederick Corder boiled down the entire corpus of 70 published stage works to 48 overtures, 190 airs and ballads, 53 display songs, 73 duets and trios, 150 glees and ensemble pieces, and 340 melodramas, marches and ballet airs. None of these pieces shows any suggestion of that cumulative effect that is the stuff of real opera; often they are not even apt in their dramatic context. Bishop may therefore be dismissed as an opera composer in any sense that is valid today. Nevertheless he could provide the musical part of an evening's entertainment in the theatre with considerable skill and taste, and occasionally with brilliance.

Bishop's mutilations of Mozart and Rossini have been condemned and ridiculed by critics from his day to ours; they are indeed abominable, but the ‘blame’ falls not so much on Bishop – who carried out his task with professional unconcern – as on the managers who, sure of their public, tried in this way to snatch some of the takings of the Italian Opera House. His musical versions of Shakespeare are more worthy of respect. True, the texts were corrupt, the songs often irrelevant: with singular perversity Bishop was generally asked to set lyrics from other plays. In Twelfth Night (1820), for instance, one of the most successful, the two great lyrics in the play, ‘Come away, death’ and ‘O mistress mine’, were ignored in favour of ‘Bid me discourse’ (from Venus and Adonis), ‘Who is Sylvia?’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and ‘Crabbed age and youth’ (from Marlowe's The Passionate Pilgrim). Bishop set ‘Who is Sylvia?’ as a quintet, taking the melody of the first verse from Ravenscroft and that of the second verse from Morley. Elsewhere music of Mozart and Winter was incorporated. Despite all this, one of the most enlightened critics of the time, Leigh Hunt, treated Twelfth Night as a masterpiece:

[It] is interspersed with songs, glees and duetts, taken from the German and English masters; and Mr. Bishop, besides adapting these to the scene with his scientific hand, has added some compositions, of which though a high, it is no undeserved praise to say, that a hearer must be nicely acquainted with the varieties of musical style to distinguish it from the rest … [He has] adapted the songs to the several characters ‘with difference discreet’. Viola's are deep and tender; Olivia's, like her rank and pride, more vehement, gorgeous, and wilful; those of the others as wilful too, but light, festive, and seasonable.

Such words could only have been written of a man who had attained mastery of his medium and of his audience. Bishop's medium was the incidental set piece; his audience was not unmusical, but more attached to a good tune than to a profound masterpiece.

Thus Bishop's most popular songs and glees were usually first associated with a dramatic work, but survived as separate numbers long after the show was forgotten. Examples are ‘The pilgrim of love’ (from The Noble Outlaw, 1815), ‘The chough and the crow’ (glee, from Guy Mannering, 1816), ‘Lo, here the gentle lark’ (The Comedy of Errors, 1819), ‘Tell me, my heart’ (Henri Quatre, 1820), ‘Bid me discourse’ (Twelfth Night, 1820), ‘Should he upbraid’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1821) and ‘O well do I remember’ (Maid Marian, 1822). An exception is The Bloom is on the Rye (‘My pretty Jane’), not from an opera, highly regarded by Corder, but not by Baptie nor (according to Fitzball) by Bishop himself. Corder felt that Bishop was at his best in duets (such as ‘As it fell upon a day’), trios (such as ‘The sailor's welcome’, which he reprinted) and glees (such as ‘Blow, gentle gales’). Macfarren and others regarded Bishop as one of the greatest glee composers; certainly his glees are sweet and fluent, and pay careful attention to expressive word-setting.

The overtures, marches, dances and ballads are generally quite trivial. A few have shown powers of survival: ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ (from The Lord of the Manor, 1812) is still a popular dance, while the ‘Pastoral Dance’ (from John of Paris, 1814) is well known as a regimental march. Eclipsing all else in popularity is the ballad Home, Sweet Home. It was foreshadowed in Who Wants a Wife? (1816) and as a ‘Sicilian Air’ in a volume of National Airs which he edited in 1821. Then he used it as the theme-song of Clari (1823), with the now famous words by the American poet John Howard Payne, and repeated it in various transformations throughout the opera. Its fame was immediate, and spread quickly through Europe. It was used not only in the overture of Bishop's Home, Sweet Home (1829) but also as a leading motif in Donizetti's Anna Bolena (1830), and it appears to have taken a permanent place in European and American folksong. It reached its height of popularity after 1850, when Jenny Lind made it her own and it became the staple item of every ballad concert. The tune seems to have little to recommend it beyond the effective rise to the upper tonic: harmonically, nothing could be more unenterprising. Yet it had some magic by which Bishop reached the heart of his public.

His excursions into sacred music were unsuccessful, and his instrumental music amounts to very little, with the exception of a vigorous and surprisingly inventive string quartet that could easily bear revival. Despite his academic positions he never gained recognition as a scholar: his lectures show that he could not entirely overcome the shortcomings of his early education. In later life he was a sad and lonely figure. Not only his wife but his public had deserted him. The craft that had exhausted his youthful talent was no longer valued, and it had not even left him with enough means to support a dignified retirement. He had only that fame which, as he wrote in 1840, he had worked so hard to attain.

WORKS

all printed works published in London

stage

descriptions of works, taken from original sources, often omit ‘grand’

unless otherwise stated, all in MS at GB-Lbl, and all published (vocal score) shortly after first performance

MS librettos of most works in US-SM (up to 1824) or GB-Lbl

LCG	Covent Garden
LKH	King’s Theatre in the Haymarket
LDL	Drury Lane Theatre
LVG	Vauxhall Gardens
LLY	Lyceum Theatre (English Opera House)
LLH	Little Theatre in the Haymarket

†	partly adapted
‡	wholly adapted

Angelina (musical farce, 2, M. Goldsmith), Margate, Theatre Royal, 30 Aug 1804, GB-Lcm, not pubd; collab. G. Lanza

†Tamerlane et Bajazet (ballet, G. Rossi), LKH, 8 April 1806, Lcm

Armide et Renaud (ballet, Rossi), LKH, 15 May 1806, Lcm, ov. by Bishop

Narcisse et les graces (anacreontic ballet, 3, Rossi), LKH, 24 June 1806, MS lost

Caractacus (ballet of action, T. Sheridan), LDL, 22 April 1808, US-Wc

The Mysterious Bride (play, 3, L. St G. Skeffington), LDL, 1 June 1808, GB-Lcm

Love in a Tub (pastoral ballet, J. d’Egville), LDL, 23 Nov 1808

The Circassian Bride (op, 3, C. Ward), LDL, 23 Feb 1809 [MS ‘revised from memory by the composer’]

Mora’s Love, or The Enchanted Harp (Scottish ballet, 3, d’Egville), LKH, 15 June 1809

The Vintagers (musical romance, 2, E.J. Eyre), LLH, 1 Aug 1809, 2 songs pubd

The Maniac, or The Swiss Banditti (serio-comic op, 3, S.J. Arnold), Lyceum, Drury Lane company, 13 March 1810

†The Knight of Snowdoun (musical drama, 3, T. Morton, after W. Scott: The Lady of the Lake), LCG, 5 Feb 1811

The Virgin of the Sun (operatic drama, 3, F. Reynolds, after A. von Kotzebue: Die Spanier in Peru), LCG, 31 Jan 1812, US-Wc

The Aethiop, or The Child of the Desert (romantic drama, 3, W. Dimond), LCG, 6 Oct 1812; rev. as †Haroun-al-Raschid (op, 3, Dimond), LCG, 11 Jan 1813

†The Lord of the Manor (op, 3, J. Burgoyne), LCG, 24 Oct 1812, GB-Lcm; collab. Davy, J.C. Doyle, Reeve, T. Welsh; after Jackson

The Renegade (historical play, 3, Reynolds, after J. Dryden: Don Sebastian), LCG, 2 Dec 1812

†Poor Vulcan (burletta/extravaganza, 2, C. Dibdin jr), LCG, 3 Feb 1813; after Dibdin’s burletta

The Brazen Bust (melodrama, 2, C. Kemble), LCG, 29 May 1813

†Harry-le-Roy (heroic pastoral burletta, 1, I. Pocock, after R. Dodsley: The King and the Miller of Mansfield), LCG, 2 July 1813

†Artaxerxes (op, 2, T. Arne, after P. Metastasio), LCG, 23 Sept 1813, Lbl, Lcm; after Arne

†Selima and Azor (op, 2, G. Collier), LCG, 5 Oct 1813; collab. T.S. Cooke and Welsh; after T. Linley (i)

The Miller and his Men (melodrama, 2, Pocock), LCG, 21 Oct 1813

Epicedium, in Antony and Cleopatra (melodrama, 2, G. Colman, after W. Shakespeare), LCG, 15 Nov 1813

For England, Ho! (melodramatic op, 2, Pocock), LCG, 15 Dec 1813; collab. Welsh

†The Farmer’s Wife (comic op, 3, C. Dibdin jr), LCG, 1 Feb 1814; collab. Davy, Reeve and others

The Wandering Boys, or The Castle of Olival (romantic drama, 2, Pocock, from the Fr.), LCG, 24 Feb 1814, MS lost

Sadak and Kalasrade, or The Waters of Oblivion (Asiatic spectacle, 2, C. Farley), LCG, 11 April 1814, US-Wc; collab. Ware

†Lionel and Clarissa (revived op, 3, I. Bickerstaffe), LCG, 3 May 1814, MS lost; after Dibdin jr

‡The Grand Alliance (patriotic interlude, 1, ?Farley), LCG, 13 June 1814, Wc

Dr Sangrado (Spanish ballet, d’Egville), LCG, 26 Sept 1814, US-BEM

The Dog of Montargis, or The Forest of Bondy (melodrama, 3, H. Harris, after R.C.G. de Pixérécourt), LCG, 30 Sept 1814, MS lost

†The Maid of the Mill (ballad op, 3, Bickerstaffe), LCG, 18 Oct 1814, GB-Ge; after S. Arnold

†John of Paris (comic op, 2, Pocock, from the Fr.), LCG, 12 Nov 1814, US-Bp; after Boieldieu: Jean de Paris

†Brother and Sister (musical entertainment, 2, Dimond, after J. Patrat: L’heureuse erreur), LCG, 1 Feb 1815, GB-Lbl, Lcm; collab. Reeve

The Noble Outlaw (comic op, 3, Mrs Opie, after J. Fletcher: The Pilgrim), LCG, 7 April 1815

†Comus (masque, 2, after J. Milton), LCG, 28 April 1815, Ge, Lbl, Lcm, unpubd; after Arne

†Telemachus (ballad op, 2, G. Graham), LCG, 7 June 1815, Ge, Lbl

†The Magpie or the Maid? (melodrama, 3, Pocock, after T. Badouin d'Aubigny and L.-C. Caigniez: La pie voleuse), LCG, 15 Sept 1815, US-Bp

John du Bart, or The Voyage to Poland (historical melodrama, 3, C. Farley and Pocock), LCG, 25 Oct 1815, MS lost

†Cymon (dramatic romance, 3, D. Garrick), LCG, 25 Nov 1815; after M. Arne

†A Midsummer Night’s Dream (comedy, 3, Reynolds, after Shakespeare and Garrick), LCG, 17 Jan 1816

†Guy Mannering, or The Gipsy’s Prophecy (musical play, 3, D. Terry, after Scott), LCG, 12 March 1816

Who Wants a Wife? or The Law of the Land (musical drama, 3, Pocock), LCG, 16 April 1816

†The Royal Nuptials, or The Masque of Hymen (pageant, 1, ?Farley), LCG, 6 May 1816, unpubd

Exit by Mistake (comedy, 3, R.F. Jameson), LLH, 22 July 1816, MS lost, 1 song pubd

†Lodoiska (op, 3, Kemble), LCG, 15 Oct 1816; after Storace

†The Slave (musical drama, 3, Morton), LCG, 12 Nov 1816

The Humorous Lieutenant, or Alexander’s Successors (musical play, 3, Reynolds, after Beaumont and Fletcher), LCG, 18 Jan 1817, unpubd

The Heir of Vironi, or Honesty the Best Policy (operatic piece, 2, Pocock), LCG, 27 Feb 1817; collab. J. Whitaker

The Apostate (tragedy, 5, R. Shiel), LCG, 3 May 1817, MS lost, 2 choruses pubd

‡The Libertine (operatic drama, 2, Pocock, after L. da Ponte and T. Shadwell), LCG, 20 May 1817, MS lost; after Mozart: Don Giovanni

Teazing Made Easy (comedy, 3, Jameson), LLH, 30 July 1817, MS lost, 2 songs pubd

The Duke of Savoy, or Wife and Mistress (musical play, 3, Reynolds, from the Fr.), LCG, 29 Sept 1817, ov. and 4 songs pubd

The Father and his Children (melodrama, 2, Reynolds), LCG, 25 Oct 1817, unpubd

Retribution, or The Chieftain’s Daughter (tragedy, 5, Dillon), LCG, 1 Jan 1818, GB-Lcm, unpubd

The Illustrious Traveller, or The Forges of Kanzel (melodrama, 2, Reynolds), LCG, 3 Feb 1818, unpubd

Fazio (tragedy, 5, Milman), LCG, 5 Feb 1818, Lcm

Zuma, or The Tree of Health (comic op, 3, Dibdin, after S.F. Genlis), LCG, 21 Feb 1818; collab. Braham

December and May (operatic farce, 2, Dimond, after B. Brittle), LCG, 16 May 1818, 1 song pubd

The Burgomaster of Saardam, or The Two Peters (musical drama, 2, Reynolds), LCG, 23 Sept 1818, Lcm, unpubd

†The Barber of Seville (comic op, 3, J. Fawcett and D. Terry, after T. Holcroft and P.-A. Beaumarchais), LCG, 13 Oct 1818; after Rossini

†The Marriage of Figaro (comic op, 3, Bishop, after Holcroft and Beaumarchais), LCG, 6 March 1819; after Mozart

Fortunatus and his Sons, or The Magic Purse and Wishing Cap (melodramatic romance, 2, Farley, after T. Dekker), LCG, 12 April 1819

†The Heart of Mid-Lothian (musical drama, 3, Terry, after Scott), LCG, 17 April 1819

†A Roland for an Oliver (musical farce, 2, Morton), LCG, 29 April 1819

Swedish Patriotism, or The Signal Fire (melodrama, 2, W. Abbott), LCG, 19 May 1819, unpubd

†The Gnome-King, or The Giant Mountains (dramatic legend, 2, G. Colman), LCG, 6 Oct 1819

Macbeth (tragedy, after Garrick and Shakespeare), LCG, 11 Nov 1819, MS lost

†Comedy of Errors (comedy, 3, Reynolds, after Shakespeare), LCG, 11 Dec 1819

†The Antiquary (musical play, 3, Pocock and Terry, after Scott), LCG, 25 Jan 1820

†Henri Quatre, or Paris in the Olden Time (musical romance, 3, Morton), LCG, 22 April 1820

Montoni, or The Phantom (dramatic piece, 3, Shiel), LCG, 3 May 1820, unpubd

†The Battle of Bothwell Brigg (musical romance, 2, Farley, after Scott: Old Mortality), LCG, 22 May 1820

†Twelfth Night (comedy, 5, Reynolds, after Shakespeare), LCG, 8 Nov 1820

Mirandola (tragedy, 5, B. Cornwall), LCG, 9 Jan 1821, MS lost, unpubd

†Don John, or The Two Violettas (operatic drama, 3, Reynolds, after Beaumont and Fletcher: The Chances), LCG, 20 Feb 1821; collab. Ware

The Tempest (play, 5, Reynolds, after Shakespeare), LCG, 15 May 1821, Lcm, 1 song and 1 duet pubd

†Coronation Scene, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part ii (spectacle, 1, Farley), LCG, 25 June 1821, Lcm, unpubd

Two Gentlemen of Verona (play, 5, Reynolds, after Shakespeare), LCG, 29 Nov 1821

†Montrose, or The Children of the Mist (op, 3, Pocock), LCG, 14 Feb 1822; collab. Ware and Watson

†The Law of Java (musical drama, 3, Colman), LCG, 11 May 1822, Lbl, Lcm

Maid Marian, or The Huntress of Arlingford (op, 3, J.R. Planché, after T.L. Peacock and Scott: Ivanhoe), LCG, 3 Dec 1822

Nigel, or The Crown Jewels (play, 5, Pocock, after Scott: The Fortunes of Nigel), LCG, 28 Jan 1823, Lbl, Lcm, unpubd

Clari, or The Maid of Milan (op, 3, J.H. Payne), LCG, 3 May 1823, US-R

†The Beacon of Liberty (historical romance, 2, P. Bayley), LCG, 8 Oct 1823, MS lost

Cortez, or The Conquest of Mexico (op, 3, Planché, after Prescott), LCG, 5 Nov 1823, MS sold at Maggs Bros., Christmas 1927

The Vespers of Palermo (tragedy, 5, F. Hemans), LCG, 12 Dec 1823, GB-Lcm, unpubd

†Native Land, or The Return from Slavery (op, 3, Dimond), LCG, 10 Feb 1824; partly after several Rossini operas: Tancredi

Charles II, or The Merry Monarch (comedy, 3, Payne), LCG, 27 May 1824, 1 song pubd

‡Der Freischütz (op, 3, G. Soane, after F. Kind), LDL, 10 Nov 1824, MS lost; after Weber

†As You Like It (comedy, 5, after Shakespeare), LDL, 25 Nov 1824, Lcm, unpubd; collab. Horn

†As You Like It (comedy, 3, after Shakespeare), LCG, 10 Dec 1824; after Arne

The Fall of Algiers (op, 3, C.E. Walker), LDL, 19 Jan 1825

Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples (historical play, 5, Soane), LDL, 17 Feb 1825, unpubd

William Tell (historical play, 5, J.S. Knowles), LDL, 11 May 1825

†Faustus (romantic drama, 3, Soane, Terry, after Goethe), LDL, 16 May 1825; collab. Cooke, Horn

The Coronation of Charles X, in Colman’s Five Minutes Too Late, or An Elopement to Rheims (spectacle, 1, Colman), LDL, 5/10 July 1825, Lbl, Lcm, unpubd

Aladdin (romantic fairy op, 3, Soane), LDL, 29 April 1826

†The Knights of the Cross, or The Hermit’s Prophecy (musical romance, 3, S. Beazley, after Scott: The Talisman), LDL, 29 May 1826, Lbl [MS, and Dept of Printed Books: H.577.e]; partly after Boieldieu: Charles de France

Englishmen in India (comic op, 3, Dimond), LDL, 27 Jan 1827

The Rencontre, or Love Will Find Out the Way (operatic comedy, 2, Planché), LLH, 12 July 1827

Edward, the Black Prince (historical play, 3, Reynolds), LDL, 28 Jan 1828, 1 song pubd

Don Pedro (tragedy, 5, Lord Porchester), LDL, 10 March 1828, Lcm, unpubd

†Yelva, or The Orphan of Russia (musical drama, 2, Bishop, from the Fr.), LCG, 5 Feb 1829, B-Lc, GB-Lbl

†Home, Sweet Home, or The Ranz des Vaches (operatic drama, 2, C.A. Somerset, from the Fr.), LCG, 19 March 1829, Lbl, Lcm

†The Night before the Wedding and the Wedding Night (comic op, 2, E. Fitzball), LCG, 17 Nov 1829, unpubd, after Boieldieu: Les deux nuits

‡Ninetta, or The Maid of Palaiseau (comic op, 3, Fitzball, after G. Gherardini), LCG, 4 Feb 1830, US-Wc, unpubd, after Rossini: La gazza ladra

‡Hofer, the Tell of the Tyrol (historical op, 3, Planché), LDL, 1 May 1830, GB-Lcm; after Rossini: Guillaume Tell

Under the Oak, or The London Shepherdess (vaudeville op, 1, Fitzball, after Burgoyne: The Maid of the Oaks), LVG, 25 June 1830, Lcm, unpubd

Adelaide, or The Royal William (nautical burletta, 1, Fitzball), LVG, 23 July 1830, Lcm, unpubd

Stanfield's Diorama, in Davy Jones, or Harlequin and Mother Carey’s Chickens (spectacle, 1, Stanfield), LDL, 27 Dec 1830, Lcm, unpubd

The Romance of a Day (operatic drama, 2, Planché), LCG, 3 Feb 1831

‡The Love Charm, or The Village Coquette (comic op, 2, Planché, from the Fr.), LDL, 3 Nov 1831, MS lost, unpubd; after Auber: Le philtre

‡The Demon, or The Mystic Branch (romantic op, 3, Fitzball, J.B. Buckstone, after Scribe), LDL, 20 Feb 1832, Lcm, unpubd; after Meyerbeer: Robert le diable

‡Der Alchymist (romantic op, 3, Fitzball, T.H. Bayly, after W. Irving), LDL, 20 March 1832, MS lost, unpubd; after several Spohr operas

The Tyrolese Peasant (domestic op, 2, Payne), LDL, 8 May 1832, Lcm, 1 song pubd

The Magic Fan, or The Filip on the Nose (operetta, 1, Fitzball), LVG, 18 June 1832, Lcm, unpubd

†The Bottle of Champagne (operetta, 1, Fitzball), LVG, 27 July 1832, Lcm, unpubd

The Sedan Chair (operetta, 1, Fitzball), LVG, 27 Aug 1832, Lcm, unpubd

†Pageant in Memory of Sir Walter Scott (spectacle), LDL, 13 Oct 1832, Lcm, unpubd

The Doom-Kiss (legendary operatic entertainment, 2, Pocock), LDL, 29 Oct 1832, unpubd

‡The Maid of Cashmere (ballet-op, 2, Fitzball, after Scribe), LDL, 16 March 1833, MS lost, 1 song pubd; after Auber: Le dieu et la bayadère

‡La sonnambula (op, 2, Beazley), LDL, 1 May 1833, MS lost, vs pubd c1840; after Bellini

†Rural Felicity (comic op, 2, Buckstone), LLH, 9 June 1834, 1 duet pubd

†Manfred (dramatic poem, 3, Byron), LCG, 28 Oct 1834, unpubd

‡The Maid of Palaiseau (comic op, 2, Fitzball), LDL, 13 Oct 1838, MS lost, unpubd; after Rossini: La gazza ladra

‡Guillaume Tell (op, 4, A. Bunn, after E. de Jouy, H.-L.-F. Bis and A. Marrast), LDL, 3 Dec 1838, Lbl [Dept of Printed Books: H.385.a], unpubd; after Rossini

†The Fortunate Isles, or The Triumphs of Britannia (allegorical and national masque, 2, Planché), LCG, 12 Feb 1840, unpubd

4 songs for Incledon’s Travellers at Spa, 1807

3 songs for Incledon’s A Voyage to India, 1807, Lcm

3 songs for Mazzinghi’s The Wife of Two Husbands, LDL, 9 May 1808, Lcm

1 glee, 1 march for Hook’s The Siege of St Quintin, LDL, 10 Nov 1808, Lcm, unpubd

1 song for a revival of Braham’s The Cabinet, Lyceum, Drury Lane company, 25 Nov 1809, Lcm

1 song for a revival of Horn and Braham’s The Devil’s Bridge, LCG, 11 April 1818, Lcm

Lost works or contributions to works, mentioned in Bishop (1841): The Czar of Muscovy, 1804; Romeo and Juliet, 1811; Midas, 1812; The Gentle Shepherd, 1817; Macbeth, 1819; The Captain and the Colonel, 1836; The Beggar’s Opera, 1839; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1839; others not mentioned in Bishop: The Conquest of Taranto, 1816; The Castle of Andalusia, 1817; Shakespeare’s Early Days, 1829; Alcestis, 1855

Minimal contributions, mostly add. accs., to The Foundling of the Forest, 1809; Up to Town, 1811; A Winter’s Tale, 1811; Frost and Thaw, 1812; The Secret Mine, 1812; Cymbeline, 1812; The Tempest, 1812; Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1814; Aurora, 1814; Percy, 1815; Poor Soldier, 1815; The Seraglio, 1816; X.Y.Z., 1818; Arthur and Emmeline, 1819; The Beggar’s Opera, 1820; Ivanhoe, 1820; Incle and Jarico, 1822; Hamlet, 1830; Kenilworth, 1832

oratorios, cantatas, odes

in MS in GB-Lbl, unless otherwise stated

The Jolly Beggars (cant., R. Burns), 4vv, pf, fl, vn, vc, Edinburgh, 1817; pubd in Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, v (London, 1818)

Funeral anthem from the 18th Psalm, 4vv, org, 1818, US-Ws

Ode for the Anniversary of the Accession of George IV, 1821

Waterloo (cant.), 5vv, orch, Vauxhall Gardens, 1826

The Seventh Day (cant., J. Milton), Philharmonic Society, 3 March 1834 (London, c1835)

The Departure from Paradise (cant.), Philharmonic Society, 6 June 1836, US-Wc

The Fallen Angel (orat), Oxford, 10 June 1839, US-STu

Ode on the Installation of the Earl of Derby, Oxford, 1853, GB-Ob

other vocal

327 glees, mostly from theatrical works, incl. 120 listed and described by Baptie (1895) and 153 pubd in Bishop’s A Complete Collection of Glees (1839), listed and described by Macfarren (1864–5)

Many songs, duets and trios, pubd separately

Several vols of ‘National Airs’, incl. Melodies of Various Nations (T.H. Bayly), i, iii, iv (1822–30), Lays and Legends of the Rhine (J.R. Planché) (1827), Historical Ballads and Songs (Planché) (1832)

instrumental

Grand sinfonia, c-C, 1 movt, 1805, GB-Lbl

Concertante, c, fl, ob, bn, vn, db, 1807, US-R

Trio, pf 4 hands, harp, 1810, GB-Lbl

Trio, 3 fl (c1812)

String Quartet, c, 1816, Lbl

Overture, E, Philharmonic Society, 26 May 1817

Overture alla Irlandese, Dublin, 5 Aug 1820

Several marches, dances, other pf pieces

Sonata, vn, pf, lost, mentioned in Bishop (1841)

20 vols of add. accs. for Ancient Concerts, 1840–48, Lbl

3 vols of add. accs., formerly LVp, lost

WRITINGS

Syllabus of a Course of 6 Lectures on … Vocal Music … in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hull, 1848)

Lectures on the History of Music (autograph MS, GB-LEc, c1849–50)

6. Posthumous reputation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown-StrattonBMB

DNB (W.B. Squire)

J.H.L. Hunt: Reviews in The Examiner (1 Oct 1820; 12 Nov 1820)

H. Bishop: List of the Musical Compositions of Henry R. Bishop, MS, 1841, lost; summarized and described in F.J.W.C.: ‘Sir Henry R. Bishop’, MT, xxxvi (1895), 662–6

G. Hogarth: Memoirs of the Opera, ii (London, 1851/R), 367ff

E. Fitzball: Thirty-Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life (London, 1859)

G.A. Macfarren: ‘Bishop’s Glees’, MT, xi (1864), 257–9; xii (1865), 5–7

‘Henry Rowley Bishop’, MMR, x (1880), 73–104

D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896), 105ff

J.A. Fuller Maitland: English Music (London, 1902/R), 103–4

H. Simpson: A Century of Ballads 1810–1910 (London, 1910), 88ff

F. Corder: ‘The Works of Sir Henry Bishop’, MQ, iv (1918), 78–97

R. Northcott: The Life of Sir Henry R. Bishop (London, 1920) [incl. letters]

P.M. Young: A History of British Music (London, 1967), 466

C. Humphries and W.C. Smith: Music Publishing in the British Isles (Oxford, 2/1970), 333

T. Fawcett: ‘Bishop and Aladdin’, MT, cxiii (1972), 1076–7

T. Fenner: Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism (Lawrence, KS, 1972)

S.T. Carr: ‘Bunn, Byron and Manfred’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research, i (1973), 15–27

N. Temperley, ed.: Music in Britain: the Romantic Age 1800–1914 (Oxford, 1981/R) [incl. section on Bishop's stage works by B. Carr, 290–303]

C.E. Fuhrmann: ‘Arranged and Adapted for the English Stage’: Transformations of Continental Operas for London, 1814–33 (diss., Washington U., St. Louis, MO, 2000)

Bishop, John

(b c1665; d Winchester, 19 Dec 1737). English cathedral musician. According to Hawkins (History), he was a pupil of Daniel Roseingrave. Hawkins’s further statement that he was a lay singer of King’s College, Cambridge, is supported by the name of one ‘Bishop’ in the college books as lay clerk from 1687 and Master of the Choristers from 1688. In 1696 he was appointed organist of Winchester College, retaining this post until his death. In 1697 he became also lay clerk of Winchester Cathedral, and was organist of the cathedral from 1729, likewise until his death. His music for the Winchester College graces was printed by Philip Hayes in Harmonia Wiccamica (1780). In 1700 Bishop published A Sett of New Psalm Tunes, and a supplement thereto in 1725. A small amount of church music by him is found in manuscript (GB-Lbl, Lcm, Ob, Och). (B. Matthews: ‘Winchester Cathedral and its Music’, MT, cxx (1979), 333–4)

WATKINS SHAW

Bishop, Stephen.

See Kovacevich, Stephen.

Bishop-Kovacevich, Stephen.

See Kovacevich, Stephen.

Bisiach.

Italian violin makers. Leandro Bisiach (i) (b Casale Monferrato, 16 June 1864; d Venegono, 1 Dec 1945) took an interest in the violin at an early age, becoming a pupil of Riccardo Antoniazzi in Milan in 1886. He soon showed considerable business acumen, and promoted under his own name not only Antoniazzi’s work, but also that of his teacher’s father and brother, Gaetano and Romeo Antoniazzi. Later collaborators included Luigi Montanari, Giuseppe Ornati and Gaetano Sgarabotto, followed by Bisiach’s four sons and, among others, Sesto Rocchi. Bisiach was also a prominent dealer in old instruments. Instruments made by him and his partners before 1914 are much preferred to the later ones, which tend to be heavy and to lack individuality, both tonally and visually.

Andrea Bisiach (b Milan, 16 Dec 1890; d Milan, 25 Aug 1967) was Leandro’s eldest son, and learnt his craft from his father. His workshop was at 23 corso Monforte, Milan. He was keenly interested in early instruments; as custodian of the family collection he took a delight in the rich variety of Italian violins that surrounded him in his shop, and in showing them to visitors. Carlo Bisiach (b Milan, 9 March 1892; d Florence, 23 April 1968) was Leandro’s second son, and was also his pupil. He worked on the outskirts of Florence, and his instruments acquired a high reputation. Giacomo Bisiach (b Milan, 28 Dec 1900; d 9 May 1995) and Leandro Bisiach (ii) (b Milan, 29 Feb 1904; d Venegono, 11 Feb 1982), also sons of Leandro Bisiach (i), made new instruments under their father’s direction and from 1934 worked together at 27 corso Magenta, Milan, until their retirement in 1973. They were also restorers and dealers in old instruments. Their violins have a pleasing and distinctive style and are well known. For further information see E. Blot: Un secolo di liuteria italiana, 1860–1960, ii (Cremona, 1995).

CHARLES BEARE/CARLO CHIESA

Bismantova [Bis Mantoua], Bartolomeo

(b Reggio nell’Emilia, before 1675; d ?Ferrara, after 1694). Italian writer on wind instruments, cornettist and composer. A few biographical details are in his correspondence with the princes of Este, preserved in the Modena state archive. He was educated in Reggio nell’Emilia at the Servite convent and joined the Servite order; after studying away from home (possibly in Bologna, according to Cavicchi) he returned to Reggio nell’Emilia, then went to Ferrara in 1675 and lived in the Servite convent there. He was a musician at Ferrara Cathedral and a cornett virtuoso at the Accademia dello Spirito Santo. His Compendio musicale, its foreword dating from 1677, survives as a manuscript (I-REm). Dedicated to his patron, Abbot Ferrante Bentivoglio, it was probably intended for publication; a postscript of 1694 implies that it was not printed because of his patron’s death. It is mostly rather conservative; its significance lies in the detailed instructions on playing the recorder, the flageolet and especially the cornett, as practically no other wind instrument tutor is known from Italy or France for the period between 1638 (Fantini’s instruction book for trumpet) and 1700 (Freillon Poncein’s for oboe). The 1694 postscript to the contents of the Compendio mentions a ‘Regole del oboè’; this is missing in the surviving copy, but appears entitled ‘Regola generale per suonare l’oboè’ as a supplement to Bismantova’s 66 Duetti à due trombe da camera (for two trumpets or cornetts) of 1688–9. It represents the earliest known fingering tables for the Baroque oboe; while the playing instructions are similar to those found elsewhere, the fingerings are highly developed. It is difficult to tell whether Bismantova’s knowledge of oboe playing was purely theoretical. He may have received information on the instrument from the French; his fingering chart is greatly similar to Freillon Poncein’s of 1700. Bismantova’s book of duets is subtitled Libro secondo; no other compositions survive, and the addition Libro principale on the cover of the Compendio musicale suggests that this counts as the first book.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Cavicchi: ‘Prassi strumentale in Emilia nell’ultimo quarto del Seicento: flauto italiano, cornetto, archi’, Studi musicali, ii (1973), 111–43

M. Castellani: ‘The Regola per suonare il flauto italiano by Bartolomeo Bismantova (1677)’, GSJ, xxx (1977), 76–85

B. Dickey, E.H. Tarr and P. Leonards: ‘The Discussion of Wind Instruments in Bartolomeo Bismantova’s Compendio Musicale (1677); Translation and Commentary’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, ii (1978), 143–87

G. Morini: ‘Cenni sul basso continuo in Italia nel XVII secolo’, Studi corelliani IV: Fusignano 1986, 261–74

E.H. Tarr: ‘Bartolomeo Bismantova und die früheste bekannte Grifftabelle für Oboe’, Tibia, xii (1987), 413–21

C. Johnson: ‘Early Italian Keyboard Fingering’, Early Keyboard Journal, x (1992), 7–88

JUTTA LAMBRECHT

Bismarck Islands.

See Melanesia, §I, 1.

Bisozzi.

See Besozzi family.

Bispham, David (Scull)

(b Philadelphia, 5 Jan 1857; d New York, 2 Oct 1921). American baritone. He studied in Milan (1886–9) with Vannuccini and Francesco Lamperti and then in London with William Shakespeare and Albert Randegger. He made his operatic début in 1891 as Longueville in Messager’s La basoche at the English Opera House, where his comic acting ability and singing brought him immediate success. He sang Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde) the following year at Drury Lane, and later sang at Covent Garden as well. He made his début at the Metropolitan Opera as Beckmesser in 1896 and remained with the company until 1903. Much in demand in England and the USA in opera and oratorio and on the recital stage for several decades, he excelled in the Wagnerian roles, of which he considered Kurwenal and Beckmesser to be his best.

Bispham was ardently in favour of using the English language in operas and songs, and to this end helped to form the Society of American Singers in 1917, which presented comic operas in English using American casts; he toured with the troupe for several years both as singer and administrator. He also developed lecture-recital programmes, in which he promoted the works of English and American composers.

A highly skilled actor, Bispham appeared as Beethoven in Hugo Müller’s play Adelaide (1898) in both England and America. In his later years he developed a repertory of monologues of poetry and prose which he performed to musical accompaniment, often provided by famous groups of the day. From 1902 he was also an influential teacher in Philadelphia. Bispham’s musical memorabilia are in the New York Public Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (F.H. Martens)

GV (J.B. Richards)

D. Bispham: A Quaker Singer’s Recollections (New York, 1921/R)

Obituary, MusAm, xxxiv/24 (1921), 1

O. Thompson: ‘David Bispham’, The American Singer (New York, 1937/R), 204

J. Dennis: ‘David Bispham’, Record Collector, vi (1951), 5 [with discography]

RICHARD ALDRICH/DEE BAILY

Bisquertt (Prado), Próspero

(b Santiago, 8 June 1881; d Santiago, 2 Aug 1959). Chilean composer. He studied music privately in Santiago and was self-taught in composition. The Chilean government enabled him to stay in Paris from 1929 to 1933. His harmonic and orchestral style was strongly influenced by French Impressionism; most of his works are programmatic, and some are based on themes and rhythms drawn from Chilean folk music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Sayeda (op-ballet, Bisquertt, after The 1001 Nights), Santiago, Municipal, 20 Sept 1929)

Orch: Taberna al amanecer, sym. poem, 1922; Procesión del Cristo de Mayo, sym. poem, 1930; Destino, sym. poem, 1934; Nochebuena, sym. triptych, 1936; Misceláneas, suite, 1936; 2 emocionales, 1940; Metropolis, sym. poem, 1940; Jugueteria, suite, 1943; 1945, sym. poem, 1945

Chbr: Aires chilenos, str qt, 1931

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Salas: La creación musical en Chile, 1900–1951 (Santiago, [1951])

G. Becerra: ‘Próspero Bisquertt, Premio Nacional de Arte 1954’, RMC, ix/47 (1954), 18–29

A. Letelier: ‘Editorial’, RMC, xiii/66 (1959), 3

J. Urrutia: ‘In memoriam: apunte sobre Próspero Bisquertt’, RMC, xiii/67 (1959) [obituary], 56–61

JUAN A. ORREGO-SALAS/LUIS MERINO

Bisschop, Ludovicus de.

See Episcopius, Ludovicus.

Bisson, Loys

(fl Paris, 1561–8). French composer and editor. He worked as a corrector and transcriber for the press of Nicolas Du Chemin between 1561 and 1568 and was commissioned to prepare a series of selections from existing anthologies: four volumes duly appeared in 1561 and 1567. Among others he drew on pieces in the two Trophée de musique collections printed at Lyons in 1559. According to Du Verdier, in 1567 he adapted for two voices a collection of four-voice chansons, retaining the original melodies intact except for the insertion of an occasional rest, and edited a set of 30 similar duet reductions of pieces by E. (? recte A.) Gardano and Antoine de Villers. Neither has survived, but the latter must surely have been modelled on a collection already published by Le Roy & Ballard (RISM 1555²⁴). The only original piece by Bisson which has survived is the lively, imitative four-voice chanson, Devenu suis amoureux depuis trois moys, found in another Du Chemin anthology which he corrected for publication in February 1568.

EDITIONS

Premier (–Quart) livre du recueil des recueilz des chansons à quatre parties, les plus excellentes qu’on a peu choisir tant aux livres des trophées, qu’en plusieurs autres par cy-devant imprimés, veues et corrigées par Loys Bisson (Paris, 1561) [all lost]

Seiziesme livre contenant vingt chansons nouvelles … veuës et corrigées par Loys Bisson (Paris, 1568^10a)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Du Verdier: La bibliothèque d’Antoine Du Verdier, Seigneur de Vauprivas (Lyons, 1585), 791; repr. in Les bibliothèques françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier, iv (Paris, 1773/R), 590

H. Leclerc: Catalogue des livres anciens (Paris, 1904), 5–6

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: ‘Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas Du Chemin (1549–1576)’, AnnM, i (1953), 269–373, esp. 276

FRANK DOBBINS

Bistropha.

See Distropha, tristropha.

Biteryng.

See Byttering.

Bitetti (Ravina), Ernesto (Guillermo)

(b Rosario, Argentina, 20 July 1943). Argentine guitarist. He began to play the guitar at the age of five, and studied in Santa Fé with Graciela Pomponio and Jorge Martínez Zarate; at 15 he made his début in Rosario. He then built a national reputation, becoming a professor at the Instituto Superior de Música de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fé, in 1964. In 1965 he first played abroad, subsequently touring North and South America, Europe (including the former USSR), the Middle East, East Asia and Australasia, and in 1966 he began a prolific recording career. He settled in Spain in 1968.

Bitetti’s strong, brilliant yet sensitive style is at its most impressive when he performs with orchestra, but he is also much in demand as a recitalist, especially for his interpretations of Spanish and South American music. The many composers who have written for him include Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Tomás Marco, Rodrigo and Moreno Torroba. He became professor of guitar at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1989, and has edited the complete works of Gaspar Sanz and music by Albéniz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Irving: ‘Ernesto Bitetti in New York’, Guitar International, xiii/4 (1984–5), 12–15

C. Cooper: ‘Ernesto Bitetti’, Classical Guitar, v (1986–7), no.9, pp.12–16; no.10, pp.23–4 [interview]

M.J. Summerfield: The Classical Guitar: its Evolution, Players and Personalities since 1800 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 4/1996)

PETER SENSIER/GRAHAM WADE

Bitgood [Wiersma], Roberta

(b New London, CT, 15 Jan 1908). American composer, organist and choral director. After graduation from Connecticut College for Women (BA 1928), she studied theory and organ at the Guilmant Organ School (1930), attended Columbia University (MA 1932) and was the first woman to take the doctorate at the School of Sacred Music, Union Theological Seminary (MSM 1935; DSM 1945). Her principal composition teachers included J. Lawrence Erb, Howard Murphy, Edwin Stringham (1933–5), T. Tertius Noble (1943–5) and Wayne Bohrnsted (1957–60). During her career as organist and director of music she held positions in Protestant churches and temples in New York, New Jersey, California, Michigan and Connecticut. She was the first woman president of the American Guild of Organists (1975–81). As a composer she has focussed exclusively on church music, writing many anthems for young people and giving special attention to practicable works for small church choirs (e.g. Hosanna, 1935). Her style is triadic, using seventh chords, but often avoiding dominant 7ths. The harmonic motion and part-writing of her music are influenced by organ playing, with frequent common-note progressions, planing and pedal points, as found in The greatest of these is Love (1934) and Be still and know that I am God (1940), two of her most popular works. Modulations are frequent and generally move to the sixth or flattened third degree of the scale, producing false relations, for example in the Chorale Prelude on ‘Jewels’ (1942) and Ye Works of the Lord.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Hosanna (Moravian liturgical texts), children’s chorus, chorus, org (1935); Give me a Faith (C.L. Reynolds), S, Bar, mixed chorus, org, 1945, arr. 1v, pf (1950); Job (cant., Bible, D. ben Judah, trans. N. Mann and M. Landsberg), S, 2 T, Bar, chorus, org, 1945; Let there be Light (cant., M.L. Kerr), children’s SA chorus, org, 1965; Ye Works of the Lord (Bible, W. Blake), chorus, org, 1993; c75 other sacred works

Other vocal: The greatest of these is Love (Bible: 1 Corinthians), 1v, pf/org, 1934, arr. SSA/chorus, arr. (S, A)/(T, B); Be still and know that I am God (Bible), 1v, pf/org, 1940, arr. chorus

Org: Chorale Prelude on ‘Jewels’, 1942; On an Ancient Alleluia, 1962; Offertories from Afar, 7 pieces based on folk melodies (1964); Meditation on ‘Kingsfold’, 1976

Principal publishers: Choristers Guild, Flammer, H.W. Gray, Sacred Music Press, Westminster

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.F. Block and C. Neuls-Bates: Women in American Music: a Bibliography of Music and Literature (Westport, CT, 1979)

J.M. Meggett: Keyboard Music by Women Composers: a Catalog and Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1981)

G. Claghorn: Women Composers and Hymnists (Metuchen, NJ, 1984), 19

A. Armstrong: ‘A Conversation with Roberta Bitgood’, American Organist, xxx/4 (1996), 63–6; xxx/5 (1996), 70–72

B. Harbach: ‘Roberta Bitgood: Active Octogenarian’, Women of Note Quarterly, iv/2 (1996), 1–10

J. MICHELE EDWARDS

Bithner, Jacob.

See Bittner, Jacob.

Bitogu.

The syllabic names given to the first three notes of the C major scale in the ‘Tonwort’ system devised by Carl Eitz and employed as a popular name for the system itself. See Eitz method.

Bitonality.

The simultaneous, superimposed presence of two distinct tonalities. In practice the term is applied not only to compositions which employ two unambiguously diatonic keys, but also to those which superimpose contrasted modal segments, or two conventionally unrelated triads without other elements of diatonic progression. Techniques loosely categorized as bitonal are often passing effects within a harmonic language that is subtly balanced between traditional hierarchies and new symmetries.

Ives was probably the first composer to experiment with the strong dissonances that could result from bitonal and polytonal writing (Psalm 67, c1898–1902). In the first of Bartók's Bagatelles for piano (1908) the right hand uses a six-note mode on C, the left a five-note mode on C: although the primary effect is the exploitation of the C–C polarity, the two modes share the pitches C/D and D/E, and the piece ends consonantly, with E over C. In a famous passage from Stravinsky's Petrushka (1910), arpeggios of C major and F major are superimposed; however, there is no extended harmonic progression in these keys, and the combined arpeggios are best thought of as an instance of a musical idea derived from a single modal construct. This is the Octatonic scale, whose effect when Stravinsky employs it is to generate a kind of ‘extended’ or even ‘floating’ tonality (to use Schoenberg's terms). The feeling for interactive polarities in such contexts is far more dynamic and sophisticated than that achieved in the rare attempts to sustain the invariant identities of two different tonalities over complete structures. Even a composer as interested in the possibility of combining conflicting diatonic tonalities as Milhaud could move from superimposition of two keys to final resolution into one of them (e.g. ‘Botafogo’ from Saudades do Brasil, 1920).

Interest in bitonality can be linked to the broader 20th-century concern with the superimposition of complementary textural strata, such as is promoted by Schoenbergian combinatoriality, generating 12-note music which often has a high degree of tonal allusiveness. In addition, bitonality’s ability to suggest a fractured psyche or diametrically opposed traits of character gives it a particular, small-scale appropriateness in contexts like the duet in the Prologue of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. Even here, however, bitonality (four flats for Peter, four sharps for Ellen Orford) is only the preliminary to an eventual, if insecure, progression from opposition to agreement. Similarly, in The Turn of the Screw (1954), the crisis embodied in the conflict between the Governess’s A and Peter Quint’s A is resolved in favour of the former, though with bitter irony in the sense that, with the death of the boy Miles, Quint might be said to have won the contest.

The failure of bitonality to win wider acceptance confirms that it is a distinctly mechanical way of deriving something new from something traditional. Many significant 20th-century composers explored the interaction between tendencies to symmetry and hierarchy, focussed and freely floating textures and therefore, in the widest sense, between tonality itself and forces undermining it, rather than employing two inflexible manifestations of tonality in its simplest form.

ARNOLD WHITTALL

Bitter, Carl Hermann

(b Schwedt an der Oder, 27 Feb 1813; d Berlin, 12 Sept 1885). German musicologist. His name has sometimes been incorrectly given as Heinrich. After studying at the universities of Berlin and Bonn he entered the Prussian civil service in which he held several important posts until 1882. In spite of his many professional duties, Bitter gave much of his spare time to the study of music history. He discovered important documents concerning the life and works of J.S. Bach, though he often quoted his sources imprecisely or not at all, a practice which brought criticism from Spitta and Chrysander. Of equal importance are his contributions to the catalogue of Bach’s works, especially those on questions of authenticity and the problem of parody. He also studied Bach’s sons, in particular C.P.E. Bach, whose work Bitter judged and classified with unusual objectivity for his day. In spite of all his errors in printing and transcribing and his imprecision in quotation, he laid the foundation for Bach research with a historical-philological orientation. It was only eight years after the appearance of his Johann Sebastian Bach (1865) that the first volume of Spitta’s parallel work was published.

From 1850 to 1855 Bitter was active as a concert promoter and choral conductor in Minden. He put on Sunday afternoon concerts and initiated amateur concert series for charity; he also founded a mixed-voice choir, which he conducted himself. Their repertory included works by A. Lotti, Palestrina, Pergolesi, Handel and J.S. Bach.

WRITINGS

Johann Sebastian Bach (Berlin, 1865, rev., enlarged 2/1880–81/R; Eng. trans., abridged, 1873)

Mozart’s Don Juan und Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris: ein Versuch neuer Übersetzungen (Berlin, 1866)

Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brüder (Berlin, 1868/R)

Über Gervinus’ Händel und Shakespeare (Berlin, 1869)

ed.: Dr. Carl Loewe’s Selbstbiographie (Berlin, 1870/R)

Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums (Berlin, 1872/R)

Eine Studie zum Stabat Mater (Regensburg, 1883)

Die Reform der Oper durch Gluck und R. Wagner’s Kunstwerke der Zukunft (Brunswick, 1884)

Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1885)

EDITIONS

ed.: C.P.E. Bach: Geistliche Lieder (Berlin, c1880)

Sechs deutsche Lieder von J.S. Bach (Berlin, 1885)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADB (R. Eitner)

H. Mendel and A. Reissmann: Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon, suppl. (Berlin, 1870–80, 3/1890–91/R) [from information supplied by Bitter]

H.P. Mielke, ed.: K.H. Bitter: Stationen eines Staatsmannes (Minden, 1981)

RENATE FEDERHOFER-KÖNIGS

Bitti, Martino

(b Genoa, 1655/6; d Florence, 2 Feb 1743). Italian violinist and composer. He entered the service of the Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany as a violinist on 1 March 1685. His duties during his first years in Florence included performing in the numerous operas and private concerts arranged by Prince Ferdinando de' Medici. From 1696 to 1720 he frequently appeared in oratorio performances at Florentine religious companies. By 1726 he had apparently retired as principal court violinist in favour of G.M. Fanfani, though he received his salary until he died. His surviving music shows that he was a composer of modest talent and limited imagination.

WORKS

vocal

music lost unless otherwise stated

Il martirio di S Agata (orat), Florence, 1693

L'accademia festeggiante nel giorno natalizio del Ser.mo Principe Ferdinando di Toscana, Florence, 1693

Anacreonte [Acts 1 and 3] (op), Pratolino, 25 Sept 1698 [Act 2 by A. Scarlatti and F. De Castris]

Lucio vero [Act 1 only] (op), Pratolino, Sept 1700

Arias in I trionfi di Giosue (orat, Giosuè in Gabaon), Florence, 1703

Arias in Sara in Egitto (orat), Florence, 1708

Trio in Dal trionfo le perdite ovvero Jefte, che sagrifica la sua figlia (orat), Florence, 1716

Silvia nella partenza d'Erinto (cant.), lv, bc, I-Bc

instrumental

2 Sonatas, vn, bc (London, 1704 and 1706)

[8] Sonate, vn/fl, b (London, 1711, 2/?1712 as Solo's for a Flute)

Conc., vn, insts, in Concerts à 5, 6 et 7 instrumens (Amsterdam, c1712–16)

Pieces, hpd, The Harpsichord Master (London, c1715, c1722, 1727, 1728) and The Lady's Banquet, v (London, 1732)

12 sonate, vn, bc (Amsterdam, c1724), lost, listed in Le Cène catalogue, 1737 (see Kirkendale)

No.5 (?and no.6) in VI sonate da camera, fl/ob/vn (Amsterdam, n.d.)

4 sonatas, vn, bc, D-Dl

Conc., vn, insts, GB-Mp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Giazotto: La musica a Genova (Genoa, 1951), 253ff

M. Fabbri: ‘Due musicisti genovesi alla corte granducale medicea: Giovanni Maria Pagliardi e Mar[t]ino Bitti’, Musicisti piemontesi e liguri, Chigiana, xvi (1959), 79–94

J.W. Hill: ‘Oratory Music in Florence, III: the Confraternities from 1655 to 1785’, AcM, lviii (1986), 127–77

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 432–7

JOHN WALTER HILL

Bittner [Bithner, Büttner], Jacob [Jacques]

(fl 1680). Austro-Bohemian lutenist and composer. The few lines devoted to him in Baron's Untersuchung (1727) are misleading as regards his publications. His Pieces de lut (1682), engraved by G. de Groos, then residing in Prague, and with a title-page by Karel Skreta, contains 53 technically demanding pieces for 11-course lute. The collection is dedicated to Johann Peter Pedroni, a wealthy citizen and tradesman in Prague. The pieces are grouped into ten suites, generally following the allemande–courante–sarabande–gigue pattern, each (except the second) preceded by a prélude non mesuré. French influence is evident, for example in the ornamentation, but the cantabile style of the music, praised by Baron, reveals the aesthetic approach of the Germanic school initiated by Esaias Reusner (ii).

WORKS

Pieces de lut (?Nuremberg, 1682/R); minuet from suite in G ed. in Kiesewetter

Allemande, lute, US-NH, MS appx to copy of Pieces de lut formerly in D. Plamenac's private collection [other pieces in the appx may be by Bittner, see Rave]

Sarabande (recte gavotte), Bourrée, tr, A-Wn, suppl. mus. 1813

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.G. Baron: Historisch-theoretisch und practische Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten (Nuremberg, 1727/R), 73

R.G. Kiesewetter: ‘Die Tabulaturen der älteren Practiker seit der Einführung des Figural- und Mensuralgesanges und des Contrapunctes, aus des Gesichtspuncte der Kungstgesichte betrachtet’, AMZ, xxxiii (1831), suppl.8

W.J. Rave: A Baroque Lute Tablature: Jacob Bittner ‘Pieces de Lut’, 1682 (diss., U. of Illinois, 1965)

CLAUDE CHAUVEL

Bittner, Julius

(b Vienna, 9 April 1874; d Vienna, 9/10 Jan 1939). Austrian composer. He was essentially self-taught as a musician, but received some formal instruction from the Bruckner disciple Josef Labor. He composed mainly in his spare time while pursuing a career as a lawyer and judge in Wolkersdorf (from 1905) and Vienna (from 1908). After World War I he was counsel for the Ministry of Justice (1920–22). He subsequently gave up his legal career and devoted himself to music.

Although Bittner’s output embraces orchestral and chamber music, a large-scale Mass and several lieder and choruses, he devoted most of his creative energies towards writing for the stage. His passion for opera was fuelled by attending a performance of Lohengrin at the age of 12, and, following the precedent set by Wagner, he wrote the librettos for 15 of his own operas. Although his early attempts at the genre were not performed publicly, his friendship with the conductor Bruno Walter proved decisive in establishing his reputation, primarily with the opera Der Musikant produced in Vienna in 1910. His most successful work was Das höllisch Gold (1916) in which he emulated the example of his older compatriot Wilhelm Kienzl in attempting to merge the principles of German Singspiel with a post-Wagnerian harmonic language.

After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bittner’s work ceased to arouse much interest. Attacked mercilessly in the Viennese press for his dilettantism and lack of sophisticated musical technique, he eventually turned to operetta as a more appropriate vehicle for his musico-dramatic gifts. But his achievement in this genre failed to match the melodic memorability of such composers as Lehár and Kálman. Nonetheless, a collaboration with Korngold in the Johann Strauss-inspired operetta Walzer aus Wien (1930) proved to be enormously popular. During the 1930s Bittner returned to opera and also composed a Requiem which was left unfinished at his death. Praised by the Nazis for his patriotism and his resistance to the influence of modernism, he achieved greater prominence through his work after the Anschluss, though the revival of some of his earlier music was short-lived.

WORKS

operas

librettos by Bittner unless otherwise stated

Die rote Gred (3), Frankfurt, 26 Oct 1907

Der Musikant (2), Vienna, Hofoper, 12 April 1910

Der Bergsee (prelude, 2), Vienna, Hofoper, 2 Nov 1911, rev. 1938

Der Abenteuer (Spiel, 4), Cologne, 30 Oct 1913

Das höllisch Gold (Spl, 1), Darmstadt, 15 Oct 1916

Der liebe Augustin: Szenen aus dem Leben eines wienerischen Talents (4), Vienna, Volksoper, 11 June 1917

Die Kohlhaymerin (3), Vienna, Staatsoper, 9 April 1921

Das Rosengärtlein (Legende, 3), Mannheim, 18 March 1923

Die silberne Tänzerin (Operette, 3, L. Hirschfeld and P. Frank), Vienna, Carl, 1 Feb 1924

Général d’amour (Operette, 3, J. Wilhelm and Frank), Vienna, Volksoper, 3 March 1926

Der unsterbliche Franz (Operette, 4 scenes, E. Decsey), Vienna, Volksoper, 24 April 1928

Mondnacht (3), Berlin, Staatsoper, 13 Nov 1928

Das Veilchen (3), Vienna, 8 Dec 1934

Other ops unperf.

other works

3 Männerchöre (1913); Str Qt, A (1913); Sonata, vc, pf, perf. 1915; Vaterland; sym. poem (1915); Str Qt, E (1917); Tänze aus Österreich, pf/orch (1918); Sym., f (1918); Grosse Messe mit TeD, D, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1925; Das Lied von den Bergen, sym. poem, male chorus, orch (1930); Sym., c, perf. 1934; Requiem, inc.; other patriotic choral pieces and songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Specht: Julius Bittner: eine Studie (Munich, 1921)

J. Korngold: ‘Julius Bittner: “Die rote Gred”, “Der Musikant”, “Der Bergsee”, “Das höllisch Gold”’, Deutsches Opernschaffen der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1922), 196–223

H. Ullrich: Julius Bittner (Vienna, 1968)

W. Zauner: Studien zu den musikalischen Bühnenwerken von Julius Bittner: mit Beiträgen zur Lebensgeschichte des Komponisten (diss., U. of Vienna, 1983)

W. Zauner: ‘Neues zur Lebensgeschichte von Julius Bittner’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, xxxv (1984), 131–84

W. Zauner: ‘“Meine tiefe und aufrichtige Verehrung für Ihre Person und Ihr Werk”: Briefe an Julius Bittner’, ÖMz, xliv/2 (1989), 70–80

ERIK LEVI

Bittoni, Bernardo (Raimondo)

(b Fabriano, 20 Aug 1756; d Fabriano, 18 May 1829). Italian composer. He studied music in Fabriano, first under his father, Mario Gaetano Bittoni (c1723–1798), maestro di cappella from 1743 at the cathedral, and later under a teacher named Lombardi. In March 1779 Bernardo was named maestro di cappella at Rieti Cathedral. In 1798 he became maestro di cappella and organist at Fabriano and also took over the music school founded by his father. He was invited back to Rieti in 1815, but did not go. Bittoni was a noted improviser on the organ and an excellent violinist. He composed several oratorios and a large amount of church music (in I-FAd, MAC, RI), most of it with instrumental accompaniment. In his time he was regarded as a great contrapuntist. His brother Luigi Bittoni (b 1753) was from 1774 to 1789 maestro di cappella at Macerata Cathedral and later at Camerino.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI

FétisB

MGG1 (G. Rostirolla) [with detailed work-list]

P. Alfieri: Notizie sulla vita e sulle opere di Bernardo Bittoni fabrianese (Rome, 1852)

R. Sassi: ‘La vita fabrianese del Maestro Domenico Concordia’, NA, xiii (1936), 128–46

A. Sacchetti Sassetti: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Rieti’, NA, xvii (1940), 89–104, 121–70; xviii (1941), 49–88

Biumi [Bimio], Giacomo Filippo

(b ?Milan, c1580; d Milan, 24 Nov 1653). Italian composer and organist. He was organist of at least two churches in Milan, first of S Maria della Passione, afterwards (certainly in 1612) of S Ambrogio. On 30 March 1623 he was appointed organist at the second organ of Milan Cathedral, succeeding Cesare Borgo, and he held this post until his death. In January 1651 the cathedral chapter saw that he was too old to do the job alone and gave him an assistant, Francesco Fumasio. His contemporaries praised Biumi as an excellent organist. In his sacred music he followed the polyphonic tradition strictly, whereas he showed a freer inventiveness in his instrumental canzoni alla francese. The four-part canzonas and the correntes in this volume are rich in modern stylistic elements, while the eight-part canzonas show the influence of Giovanni Gabrieli and the Venetian polychoral style.

WORKS

Magnificat, 4–8vv, op.1 (Milan, 1612)

Partito delle canzoni alla francese, a 4, 8, con alcune arie de correnti, a 4, libro I, op.2 (Milan, 1627); in IIM, xxx (New York, 1989)

Concentus musicales, 1–4vv, adduntur praeterea missae duae et Magnificat duo, una cum symphonia ad tonos a 4, op.3 (Milan, 1629)

Motet, 1615¹³; motet, psalm, 1617²; Pater noster, 1619⁴; 2 works, 1626⁵

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Borsieri: Il supplemento della nobiltà di Milano (Milan, 1619), 34

F. Picinelli: Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670), 240

F. Mompellio: ‘La musica a Milano nell’età moderna’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 515

J. Ladewig: Introduction to Giacomo Filippo Biumi: Canzoni alla francese, IIM, xxx (New York, 1989)

MARIANGELA DONÀ

Bi-virga, tri-virga [double virga, triple virga].

In Western chant notations, groups of virgae of the same pitch. See Virga.

Biwa.

Generic term for necked bowl-lutes of Japan. Discussed here are construction and tunings; for history and schools, see Japan, §V, 3. Forms of biwa have been played in Japan since at least the 8th century. Early forms used for gagaku derived from China, but biwa subsequently developed in Japan have been played in the performance of various kinds of oral narrative and Buddhist ritual texts (sūtras). While structural dimensions and playing techniques vary, all biwa share a shallow, pear-shaped body and neck cut from a single piece of wood, four or more wooden frets, a shallow cup-shaped wooden bridge that transmits the vibrations of four or five strings of entwined silk, and a large plectrum. With the exception of the gogen-biwa, an archaic instrument played in gagaku until perhaps the 9th century (see also Japan, §§II, 3(i); V), the strings of biwa are secured to tuning pegs inserted into a pegbox bent back nearly perpendicular to the neck. Common to most forms of biwa, moreover, is a distortional timbral element, a buzzing quality (sawari) that is produced by contact between a short length of fretted or open string with the upper surface of either a fret or the joint of the neck and pegbox (see illustration).

The gaku-biwa is the largest of all forms (Table 1). Unlike biwa used for vocal performance, its timbre lacks sawari. The strings are touched lightly against the upper edge of each of four frets, without use of additional pressure to produce higher pitches at a given fret. A relatively thin, round-tipped plectrum is wielded at an acute angle to the four strings, which are tuned differently for each of the principal modes of the modern tōgaku and saibara repertories.

TABLE 1: Dimensions and characteristics of principal forms of biwa

type		length	frets	tunings of strings*


gaku biwa		c100 cm	4
				ichikotsuchō	A – d – e – a
				hyōjo/taishikicho	E – B – e – a
				sōjō	G – A – d – g
				ōshikichō	A – c – e – a
				suijō	A – B – e – a
				banshikichō	F – B – e – a

heike biwa		c60 cm	4		A – c – e – a
				(Tsugaru school,
				until c1965	A – c – e – a

sasa biwa		various, but	5	various, but commonly:
		commonly c85 cm		rokuchōshi	A – d – e – e
				honchōshi	A – d – a – a

chikuzen biwa
4-string	c83 cm	5	honchōshi	A – d – a – a
				hikyoku-chōshi	A – e – a – a
5-string	various	5		A – E – A – B – e

satsuma biwa	c91 cm
	Seiha		4		A – E – A – B
	nishiki biwa		5		A – E – A – e – e

* Tuning is relative to the pitch of the voice in all cases except gaku biwa, which is tuned relative to the fixed pitches of the shō

The heike-biwa is closest in form to the gaku-biwa, although it is much smaller and is sounded by a larger, sharp-tipped plectrum. In modern practice both Nagoya and Tsugaru tradition instruments have five frets, but the positioning of frets differs. Unlike gaku-biwa, left-hand pressure is applied between the frets, and is used to produce pitches raised by a major 2nd or less at some frets. The tunings used in the Nagoya and Tsugaru traditions of heikyoku differed until the mid-1960s, but have since been identical, with the exception of a revised tuning used by the Tokyo-based performer Hashimoto Toshie.

Until the 20th century it seems that there was little or no standardisation of instruments formerly played by blind priests (mōsō) and blind professional narrative performers (zatō) in south-western Japan. Common to all instruments of the region, however, are four strings, strong sawari and relatively tall frets that allow for manipulation of pitch by up to a minor 3rd at some frets. Mōsō and zatō have required a collapsable instrument for both seasonal ritual work and itinerant secular performance. One of two relatively small, light forms was the sasa-biwa, named for its slender shape (see Japan, fig.1). The others are what scholars have dubbed uguisu-biwa, and hyōichi-biwa; both are shorter, rounder-bodied instruments. A large form of sasa-biwa with a relatively deep resonating chamber was used by zatō in the Higo region. On such instruments, various techniques were employed to regulate sawari, including the insertion of a detachable strip of bamboo between the strings and the bridge, and the insertion of extra soundposts. Plectra and tunings vary by region, but extant data point to a distinction between tunings used for performing sūtras (usually called rokuchōshi) and those for secular narrative repertory (honchōshi tuning). From the early 20th century, many mōsō and zatō started to use standard four-string chikuzen-biwa and satsuma-biwa (albeit with carrying straps, often made from a string of juzu prayer beads).

The satsuma-biwa and chikuzen-biwa both derive from instruments formerly played by mōsō. The foremost distinguishing features of the satsuma-biwa's structure are its large, thin plectrum (see illustration), tall frets and its slightly convex soundboard. The hardwood plectrum is often intentionally struck against the soundboard, either by itself or concurrently with a plucked string. The outward curve of the soundboard is said to have been an innovation of the putative designer of the modern instrument, and may have been influenced by the form of European string instruments introduced by Jesuit priests in the 16th century. The four-string variety is now often called the seiha instrument, for many Kinshinryū and all Nishikibiwa school and Tsurutaryū players have adopted a five-string instrument, also called the nishiki-biwa. The seiha instrumental technique is distinguished by the production of ornamental figures through left-hand regulation of pressure during the decay period of plucked tones.

The four-string chikuzen-biwa was a little-altered version of a form of biwa played by mōsō in the Chikuzen region. Its tuning is the same as the shamisen's basic tuning, honchōshi, for all repertory except a small number of advanced pieces taught to chosen students. It also inherited from the mōsō instrument a strong sawari, enhanced by the placement of bamboo strips across the top of its frets. Popular among many thousands of amateurs between about 1900 and 1920, the four-string instrument was produced and sold cheaply, but was gradually displaced by the five-string instrument, which provided a far larger range of melodic and technical possibilities. The ornate instrumental patterns developed for both varieties of chikuzen-biwa require rapid left-hand movement over the frets, as well as subtle microtonal inflection of individual pitches in the course of melodic phrases.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chikuzen-biwa Seisaku Gijutsu Chōsa I-in Kai: Chikuzen-biwa (Fukuoka, 1977)

F. Koizumi, Y. Tokumaru and O. Yamaguchi, eds.: ‘Satsumabiwa’, Asian Musics in an Asian Perspective (Tokyo, 1977), 223–6

D. Murayama: ‘Biwa: wasurerareta oto no sekai’ [Biwa: a forgotten sound world], Aruku, miru, kiku, no.135 (1978), 4–30

R. Wolpert: ‘A Ninth-Century Score for Five-Stringed Lute’, Musica asiatica, iii, ed. L. Picken (1981), 107–35

S. Nelson: ‘Gogen-fu shinkō - omo ni gogen-biwa no jūsei oyobi chōgen ni tsuite’ [The Gogen-fu, a Japanese Heian-period tablature score for five-stringed lute: concentrating on the fret system and tunings of the instrument], Tōyō ongaku kenkyū, li (1986), 13–76 [Eng. summary 4–9]

K. Hirano: ‘Mōsō-biwa’, Nihon ongaku daijiten, ed. K. Hirano, S. Gamō and Y. Kamisangō (Tokyo, 1989)

K. Tohnai: Nihon kindai biwa no kenkyū [Study of biwa in Japan in the modern period] (Tokyo, 1994)

HUGH DE FERRANTI

Bizcargui, Gonzalo Martínez de.

See Martínez de Bizcargui, Gonzalo.

Bizet, Charles.

See Bizey, Charles Joseph.

Bizet, Georges (Alexandre-César-Léopold)

(b Paris, 25 Oct 1838; d Bougival, nr Paris, 3 June 1875). French composer. Bizet might have surpassed all the many composers active in France in the last third of the 19th century had it not been for his untimely death at the age of 36. Carmen, first performed three months before his death, has become one of the most popular operas of any age.

HUGH MACDONALD

1. Life.

Both of Bizet’s parents were musical. His father, Adolphe-Armand Bizet (1810–86), came from a family of artisans in Rouen. He had set up in Paris as a hairdresser and wigmaker, but by the time of his marriage in 1837 he had become a singing teacher. He was also a modest composer, with a few published works, but he was evidently not very highly regarded as a musician, even by his son, who leaned more towards his mother’s guidance. She, born Aimée Delsarte (1815–61) in Cambrai, came to Paris to stay with her brother François Delsarte, a singing teacher of much greater eminence than his brother-in-law and a champion of the works of Gluck and of classicism in general at a time when such things were receding from fashion. Delsarte was a musician of eccentric and unorthodox tastes who exercised an important influence on his brilliant nephew, and his wife, a professor of solfège at the Conservatoire, was yet another musician in the family. Bizet’s mother taught him to read music alongside his other early lessons, and she probably taught him the piano too.

Bizet was his parents’ only child, and he took the name Georges in preference to his three grander baptismal names. The family lived in the northern part of Paris, and the proximity of six Delsarte cousins provided the boy with company. Bizet’s musical gifts were evident at an early age. He liked to listen outside the door of the room in which his father was teaching. At the age of eight his father called him in and was astonished to hear him sing a song he had heard without looking at the music. The following year Bizet’s father decided to enrol him at the Conservatoire, and there is little doubt that he was admitted on merit alone, even without the support of Delsarte and his connections. He enrolled on 9 October 1848, while still nine years old. For the next nine years the Conservatoire, not far from his home, was the centre of his life and the focus of his rapid musical development as pianist and composer. He was never in danger of becoming too narrowly wedded to music since he was already an avid reader and a boy of unusual intelligence. Of Auber, the Conservatoire’s elderly director, Bizet always had a poor opinion, but he was blessed with sympathetic teachers. He started in Marmontel’s piano class, and won a premier prix for solfège within six months of his arrival. Zimmerman, Marmontel’s predecessor now in retirement, took an interest in the boy and gave him private lessons in piano and solfège. Marmontel’s efficacious teaching turned Bizet into a brilliant pianist, soon to be well known for his exceptional gifts as a sight-reader. He won a second prix for piano in 1851 and a premier prix the following year.

In 1852 Bizet entered Benoist’s organ class and a year later he began to take the composition class of Fromental Halévy, a composer of distinction with an enquiring mind. Unlike many other Conservatoire teachers, Halévy had a busy career in other spheres, for his operas were regularly staged at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, and in 1854 he became Permanent Secretary of the Institute, a position of immense prestige in French academic circles. Bizet was undoubtedly drawn by Halévy’s interest in a wide range of intellectual pursuits, and he was soon to be on intimate terms with his family; Geneviève, Halévy’s daughter, later became his wife. In 1854 he won a second prix for both organ and fugue, and in 1855 a premier prix for both.

Equally important for his development, and more crucial to the growth of his musical style, was the figure of Gounod, certainly the leading influence on Bizet in his formative years. Bizet probably encountered Gounod through Zimmerman, whose daughter Gounod married in 1852. Gounod is said to have deputized for the ailing Zimmerman on a number of occasions and thus acted as Bizet’s teacher. The works which most impressed Bizet were Sapho, played at the Opéra in 1851, the choruses for Ponsard’s tragedy Ulysse, played at the Comédie-Française in 1852, and the First Symphony (1855). ‘You were the beginning of my life as an artist. I spring from you’, Bizet told Gounod in later years. Each took a close interest in the other’s work for many years, although there were times when their friendship was less close. A substantial correspondence survives.

Bizet’s impressive record at the Conservatoire led inexorably to the institution’s highest accolade, the Prix de Rome. With Halévy’s encouragement he entered in 1853, when he was 14, but was eliminated after the preliminary round. He did not compete again until 1856 when he reached the final round. Although his cantata David was judged to be the best, he was awarded only a second prix; there was therefore little surprise in his winning the Prix in 1857, when two premiers prix were awarded, to Bizet and to Charles Colin. His cantata Clovis et Clotilde was performed at the Institute ceremony on 3 October 1857, and he left for Rome the following December. He was 19 years old.

Behind this successful academic record Bizet was rapidly maturing as a composer and pianist. His first surviving works are a handful of piano pieces from before 1854. In that year three of his songs appeared in print, two of them in a collection that included one of his father’s. Again through the agency of his father in all probability, three piano pieces were published in Le magasin des familles, beginning with a Méditation religieuse in 1854 or 1855 and two further piano pieces in 1856. Bizet’s true gifts as a composer spring into view in 1855 with the composition of his first opera, La maison du docteur (although little is known about its origin or precise date), an overture in A major, and with his earliest work to have entered the repertory, his Symphony in C. Not performed until 1935, this symphony reveals an extraordinarily accomplished talent for an 18-year-old student, in melodic invention, thematic handling and orchestration (fig.1). Few contest its claim to surpass Gounod’s First Symphony, on which Bizet was working as arranger that year and which was clearly his model.

In 1856 Bizet composed his second opera, a setting of Le docteur Miracle by Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy. Offenbach had picked these two novice librettists to provide a one-act text for a competition designed to raise the status of operetta. Ludovic Halévy was Fromental’s nephew just embarking on a remarkable career. He was later to supply Offenbach with many of his successful texts, and won immortality as one of the librettists of Carmen. The jury for the competition, which included both Fromental Halévy and Gounod, awarded the prize equally to Bizet and Charles Lecocq, so that the two winning works were staged on consecutive evenings in April 1857 at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. The award of the Prix de Rome a few months later confirmed his striking prospects of a successful career.

At the same time Bizet was beginning to earn recognition in the public arena as an arranger of other composers’ music for Parisian publishers. This was to become a major source of income in later years and also a tremendous drain on his precious time. Since he did not arrange the Ulysse choruses in 1852, as often supposed, his first certain assignment was the vocal score of Gounod’s La nonne sanglante in 1855, followed by the arrangement for four hands of the Gounod symphony, published by Colombier. He seems to have preferred this labour to giving piano lessons, although it is certain that he was active as a piano teacher during his Conservatoire years.

The sojourn in Rome filled nearly three years, taking him away from Parisian music from December 1857 until September 1860. The events that he most regretted missing were the appearance of three new Gounod works at the Théâtre Lyrique, Le médecin malgré lui in January 1858, Philémon et Baucis in February 1860, and especially Faust in March 1859. But he had a lively taste for Italian music, particularly Rossini, and was not averse to turning his hand to a fresh style. Italy offered Bizet, like most Prix de Rome winners, an opportunity to explore the landscape, drink in Italian art and architecture, listen to Italian opera, and be lazy or hard-working at will. He felt free, perhaps for the first time, to indulge his taste for women and to remain youthful for a few years more. Throughout this period he maintained a regular correspondence with his mother, reporting every fortnight on his doings and providing the most substantial body of letters of his whole career.

The Parisian Bizet had never travelled far from the city, so the impression made by the landscapes of southern France and northern Italy was profound. In addition he set eyes for the first time on the sea. He travelled with a group of fellow pensioners, sailing from Genoa to Livorno, and stopping in Pisa, Siena and Florence en route. Their destination was the Villa Medici in Rome, home of the French Institute under its director Victor Schnetz, and here Bizet settled in for a long and very agreeable stay. He made regular excursions into the mountains and in his second year went further afield first to Anzio, then to Naples and Pompeii. In his third year he went north to Perugia, Assisi, Bologna and Venice on his way home to Paris. He delighted in the art and architecture that was everywhere to be seen, and enjoyed the company of country people more than the citizens of Rome, especially since the French were politically suspect, thanks to Napoleon III’s tireless meddling in Italian affairs.

He was a gregarious member of the French community at the Villa Medici, much in demand for his fluent piano-playing and his lively, rather blunt character. He enjoyed social occasions and made many new friends, especially among the painters and sculptors that shared the premises. In April 1858 a new arrival, Edmond About, boulevardier and travel writer, ruffled a few feathers but became a friend who genuinely admired his music. There were few musicians there to interest Bizet until the arrival in 1860 of Ernest Guiraud, whom he had known before in Paris and who was to remain a lifelong friend.

High spirits and his delight in the Italian way of life could not mask a certain anxiety about his prospects as a composer and the progress of his work. He was frustrated too by the lack of good music to be heard in Rome. He did not grasp the significance of Verdi’s striking advances in the 1850s, for he disliked Un ballo in maschera (which was first heard in Rome in 1859) and felt that his music was crude and lacking in true style. He was much more attached to Rossini, Mozart and Mendelssohn, forgetting for a moment the basis of his own style in Meyerbeer and Gounod. Conforming with the rather easy-going regulations of the Prix de Rome, Bizet sent one envoi each year and started to make a habit of pondering new projects and abandoning them after a little thought (and sometimes a few drafts and sketches).

He composed a Te Deum in the spring of 1858 and entered it for the Rodrigues prize, which was open only to Rome prizewinners. Nevertheless he did not win, ascribing his failure partly (and correctly) to his lack of experience in church music, and the Te Deum remained unpublished until 1971. His next work was an opera buffa, Don Procopio, entirely in the Italian style on an Italian libretto by Carlo Cambiaggio which had already been set by the younger Fioravanti in 1844. This was far more congenial to Bizet than choral music, but he submitted it in some apprehension since it did not match the Institute’s regulations (he was required to write a mass). In fact it was well received and the judges commented on its ‘easy and brilliant touch’. There was no prospect of staging it, however, and it remained unperformed until 1906.

His next step was to attempt a grand opera. Three subjects took his fancy in turn: Hugo’s La Esmeralda, Hoffmann’s Le tonnelier de Nuremberg and Cervantes’s Don Quichotte, but it is unlikely that he composed much, if anything, for any of these. Self-doubt kept intervening, so he moved on each time to another project. An ode-symphony on Homer, Ulysse et Circé, was considered then abandoned, then an orchestral symphony, on which he worked for two months. Finally, in 1859, he worked out a scenario from Camoens’s Lusiads relating Vasco de Gama’s adventurous discovery of a sea-route to India. He persuaded a French poet resident in Rome, Louis Delâtre, to write the verses for an ‘ode-symphonie’ (the model was Félicien David’s Le désert) in six movements for soloists, chorus and orchestra. When Vasco de Gama was ready to be submitted to the Institute, Bizet felt that he had never written anything so good, and it was in due course judged to display ‘elevation of style, spaciousness of form, fine harmonic effects, and rich and colourful orchestration’. He planned a symphony on the subject of Rome which was not to be finished until eight years later. What he had achieved during his stay in Rome was not embarrassingly insignificant, yet not truly substantial enough to give him, or anyone else, much confidence about his making his way in Paris on his return. He was perfectly resigned to the struggle that lay ahead, but curiously blind to the realities of the musical profession and frequently assailed by agonies of doubt.

He left Rome in July 1860 with Guiraud, taking a leisurely detour through north Italian cities and reaching Venice on 5 September. Here he learned that his mother was seriously ill; Guiraud returned to Rome while Bizet, with the architect Heim as his travelling companion, headed on in no particular haste to Paris. He was now thrust back into the routine that was to be his for the remainder of his life: the eternal quest for opera engagements, courting directors, patrons and singers, offering compositions to reluctant publishers, organizing and conducting occasional concerts, working as a rehearsal pianist and accompanist, and making transcriptions and arrangements of other composers’ works for money (the vocal score of Reyer’s La statue, which he greatly admired, occupied him in the spring of 1861). Bizet never again travelled outside France (except to Baden-Baden and Belgium), and rarely left Paris. Without the steady bulletins of his letters home we now have sketchier information about his daily life, and his correspondence is practical and laconic; his handwriting, never good, becomes increasingly illegible. The production of four operas in Paris in the next 15 years are landmarks in his brief career, but between those significant moments it is a tale of struggle, with some successes and many reverses.

For two years, while his Rome scholarship continued, he had no need to worry about money. His mother’s illness brought different anxieties, and he was not able to set up separate living quarters as he had hoped. In his first year back in Paris the highlights were the performances of Tannhäuser at the Opéra in March 1861, with Wagner’s ignominious rejection by a noisy public, and the occasion two months later when Bizet had the opportunity to meet Liszt and display his phenomenal powers as a sight-reader, an event recounted by Pigot with the aura of legend; Liszt is said to have declared Bizet to be the equal, as a pianist, of von Bülow and himself. In September 1861 his mother died at the age of 45; relations with his father, who was to outlive him by 11 years, had never been entirely easy, and they were sharply complicated the following year by the birth of a son, Jean, to the family maid, Marie Reiter. The boy was given to believe that he was Adolphe Bizet’s child, yet many years later Marie, who remained in the service of the Bizet household, revealed that the true father was Georges. Another death that affected Bizet deeply was that of his teacher and mentor Halévy in March 1862. For his funeral he collaborated on a setting of the 23rd Psalm.

For his 1861 submission to the Institute Bizet presented two movements from an incomplete symphony and an overture, La chasse d’Ossian. The two symphony movements, a Funeral March and a Scherzo, were played at the Institute on 12 October, and while the March was thought to resemble the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony too closely, the Scherzo enjoyed some success with three more performances within 16 months. Although the overture has disappeared, the March, still unpublished, was partly absorbed into Les pêcheurs de perles, and the Scherzo became part of the symphony Roma, completed in 1868.

In the next few years he was extremely productive, and his career prospered. Soon after his return from Rome he had asked Ludovic Halévy for the libretto of a one-act opera to submit as his final envoi, but he never followed it up, perhaps because a commission for a one-act opera came his way from the Opéra-Comique. This was La guzla de l’émir, to a libretto by Barbier and Carré, Gounod’s usual librettists, which he could not refuse. Such a commission was a frequent but by no means guaranteed bonus for returning Rome scholars. The opera was composed in 1862 and submitted as his envoi for that year. It was warmly commended for its elevated feeling and vivacious style, and it duly went into rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique, but Bizet was forced to withdraw it when a superior commission, for a full-length work, came from the Théâtre Lyrique, a condition of which was that the recipient should not have had a work previously staged in Paris. This was to be Les pêcheurs de perles, composed rapidly in the summer of 1863. La guzla de l’émir has disappeared, although it is certain that parts of it were absorbed by Les pêcheurs de perles and perhaps other works, and a setting by Théodore Dubois of the same libretto was staged in 1873.

Meanwhile Bizet had composed the bulk of a third opera, Ivan IV, whose origins seem to lie in a visit he paid to Baden-Baden in the summer of 1862 where he assisted Reyer with the production of his opera Erostrate. Bénazet, who directed the Baden-Baden festivals, intended to mount Ivan IV in 1863. Gounod had worked on the same libretto for some years, but to no avail. We may suppose that Bizet’s urgent absorption in Les pêcheurs de perles in the summer of 1863 prevented the other opera’s completion at this time; furthermore parts of it were borrowed for inclusion in Les pêcheurs de perles.

In the concert hall Bizet had some success with his Scherzo, for it was played by three different organizations in the winter of 1862–3: the Cercle de l’Union Artistique conducted by Deloffre, the Concerts Populaires conducted by Pasdeloup, and the Société des Beaux-Arts conducted by Bizet himself. On 8 February 1863 he conducted Vasco de Gama at a concert of the Société des Beaux-Arts, its only hearing in his lifetime. Despite all this activity he began to feel the pinch of financial insecurity as his scholarship came to an end. He was working as an arranger for Gounod’s publisher Choudens, a liaison that was to have far-reaching implications for the fate of his own music since Choudens was also to become Bizet’s principal publisher, starting with Les pêcheurs de perles in 1863.

This work, Bizet’s first full-length opera to be staged and today restored to the repertory, was commissioned by the Théâtre Lyrique in April 1863 for performance that September. Borrowing freely from earlier works, Bizet completed the score in time and had the satisfaction of seeing 18 performances before the end of November (fig.2). This was a respectable number, but Bizet regarded it as a failure, particularly in view of the hostile reaction from the press, who condemned the libretto as absurd and the score as noisy and offensive. Some were shocked by the impudence of Bizet, at the age of 24, appearing on stage at the end to take a bow. The best notice came from Berlioz, writing his last feuilleton in the Journal des débats, which recognized Bizet as a serious talent with a great future. Bizet was, reciprocally, thrilled by Berlioz’s Les Troyens à Carthage, which was put on in the same theatre a few weeks later. He even offered to fight a duel in its defence.

Carvalho, director of the Théâtre Lyrique, with characteristically reckless courage regarded Les pêcheurs de perles not as a failure but as evidence of promise. He scheduled Ivan IV for production in the spring of 1864, but unknown delays and difficulties kept it from performance. This state of affairs continued for nearly two years when Bizet, in frustration, withdrew the opera from the Théâtre Lyrique and offered it to the Opéra. It was, after all, more suited to that theatre, being closer to the Meyerbeer style than anything else he ever wrote. But the Opéra never took it up and it remained unperformed until 1946. Fragments of it, according to Bizet’s well-established habit, found their way into later works, notably La jolie fille de Perth.

The years 1864–6 were disappointingly bleak after the previous two. His father had built two adjacent cottages at Le Vésinet, west of Paris, for himself and his son, where Bizet liked to spend the summer months, while he spent the winters in Paris largely occupied with his work as an accompanist and arranger. He arranged the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria for piano solo, and edited Handel’s ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ variations; he assembled a collection of 150 transcriptions for the publisher Heugel under the title Le pianiste chanteur; he arranged six Gounod choruses for piano solo. He also published a little music of his own, including the song Vieille chanson and a group of piano pieces, a ‘song without words’ entitled Venise, the virtuoso Chasse fantastique, and the six Chants du Rhin, based on poems by Méry. Heugel commissioned a collection of six songs, the Feuilles d’album. He took a few composition students, to one of whom, Edmond Galabert, we are indebted for some affectionate memories of Bizet in the years 1865 to 1869 and a volume of correspondence that reveals much about Bizet’s view of his art. Another student, Paul Lacombe, began to work with Bizet in March 1867 by correspondence and remained a close friend.

Despite his lack of interest in Ivan IV, Carvalho still had faith in Bizet’s talent. In June 1866 he signed a contract for a four-act opera to be staged at the Théâtre Lyrique. The libretto, based on Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth, was by Jules Adenis, a friend of Bizet’s, and the eccentric, successful Saint-Georges. Bizet’s response was immediate and enthusiastic, and by the end of the year La jolie fille de Perth was finished. He was impatient to see it staged, especially since the 1867 Exposition Universelle promised to bring big summer crowds to Paris. In fact it was to be Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette on which Carvalho relied for his summer success, so La jolie fille de Perth after several postponements did not open until December. It was well received, and Bizet was delighted, yet it did not draw the public and enjoyed only 18 performances, the same number as Les pêcheurs de perles in the same theatre four years before. The precarious state of the theatre’s finances was reflected in the recycled sets and costumes that did not escape notice. A production in Brussels followed in April 1868, but Bizet disliked the performance and it made little impact there. Pierre Berton later recalled that it was disappointment over this opera that marked Bizet’s brow henceforth with ‘furrows of anxiety that he never lost’.

1867 had brought a crop of new competitions, one from each of the three main Paris opera houses, and one for a cantata for the Exposition. Bizet, one of 823 contestants for the cantata, came within the first 15, but his cantata was not performed and is now lost. The winning cantata by Saint-Saëns did not receive a performance either. At first Bizet did not intend to enter the Opéra’s competition since he was negotiating for a contract with that theatre for an unnamed opera on a libretto by Sauvage and Leroy. Instead he encouraged his pupils Galabert and Lacombe to set the selected libretto, an appealing story called La coupe du roi de Thulé by Blau and Gallet. The correspondence with Galabert discusses the dramatic potential of the libretto in some detail. Eventually Bizet was prevailed upon to set the text too, which he did between October 1868 and the early months of 1869. But his opera was rejected, like Massenet’s, in favour of Eugène Diaz’s setting, played in 1873 and instantly forgotten. The dismemberment of Bizet’s score, of which only fragments remain, is one of the most galling features of his posthumous fate.

Since 1866 his creative activity had returned to the level of 1862–3. He now completed the symphony Roma, first conceived in 1860. It was performed (lacking the scherzo) in February 1869 by Pasdeloup at the Cirque Napoléon, its only hearing in Bizet’s lifetime. He contributed the first act of a composite operetta Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre played at the Théâtre de l’Athénée two weeks before La jolie fille de Perth. He composed three songs for Choudens to publish, including the masterly Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe, and an unusual piano piece, the Variations chromatiques, which he dedicated to a composer he greatly admired, Stephen Heller. A huge amount of time in 1867 was devoted to arranging the whole of Thomas’s Mignon, the current success at the Opéra-Comique, first for piano solo and then for piano duet; the following year he performed the same two laborious tasks for Thomas’s Hamlet.

It is not known when Bizet first met Geneviève, the younger daughter of his teacher Fromental Halévy, although he must have known her as a little girl when he was Halévy’s student at the Conservatoire. When her father died in 1862 she was 13. Her sister died two years later, and her mother, who suffered from recurrent mental disturbance, thereafter entrusted her care to relatives. She was a beautiful young woman with whom Bizet was in love by 1867 and they were engaged in October of that year. But the family, prosperous Jewish bankers on her mother’s side who were in the strange position of being both wealthy yet currently hard up, disapproved of her marriage to an unsuccessful composer and the engagement was broken off. Had her father been alive, Bizet’s path to marriage might have been smoothed. In the event they were married in a civil ceremony (Bizet had no tolerance for established religion) in June 1869 and were very happy for a while. But Bizet’s lack of serious success, his brusque character and her persistent neurosis touching on mental disorder, made the last years of Bizet’s short life less than tranquil. A son Jacques was born to them in 1872, destined for a turbulent and tragic career.

Immediately after his marriage Bizet paid homage to his father-in-law by completing and revising the opera Noé, which Halévy had left unfinished at his death. With his usual parsimonious instincts he used up some old music for this purpose, including sections of Vasco de Gama, but certain parts of it were newly composed. The extent of Bizet’s contribution has never been fully established, and the vocal score published when the opera was finally performed in Karlsruhe ten years after Bizet’s death has confused the issue further. The opera was supposed to have been staged at the Théâtre Lyrique under its new director Pasdeloup, but the usual financial problems and the outbreak of war in 1870 made it impossible. With Noé done Bizet started to plan a number of new works, some of which he had been contemplating for years; none of them were ever completed, some not even started: an opera on the life of Vercingetorix, an opera on Mistral’s Calendal for the Opéra-Comique, an opera on Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, an opera on the Indian epic Ramayana, and a setting of Sardou’s libretto Grisélidis.

Lack of any firm commitment from opera managements and a chronic indecision about the direction of his own career would probably have left all these projects in limbo even without the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870. It was assumed that Napoleon III, like his uncle, would throw the German armies into retreat, but the realities of defeat, siege and humiliation quickly cast France into chaos. Bizet, who, like Saint-Saëns, Massenet and many others, enlisted in the National Guard, greeted the proclamation of the Third Republic with enthusiasm. He and Geneviève endured the hardships of the siege with grim determination. At the armistice on 26 January 1871 they were free to leave the city, so they travelled to Bordeaux to visit Mme Halévy. This caused distress of a quite different but equally severe kind, since the meeting of mother and daughter triggered hysterical outbursts on both sides. They hurried back to Paris with Geneviève in need of lengthy recuperation. Next came the two months of Commune and civil bloodshed from which they escaped by going first to Compiègne and then to Le Vésinet, within earshot of gunfire in Paris.

The restoration of peace in June brought with it the prospect of reinvigorating French music from within. Thomas took over the direction of the Conservatoire and Saint-Saëns put his energies into the new Société Nationale de Musique with the aim of building a new concert repertory by French composers. Within the year Bizet had completed two small masterpieces, leaving all his other projects on the shelf. The first was a one-act opera, Djamileh, commissioned by the new directors of the Opéra-Comique to a libretto by Gallet based on de Musset’s Namouna. It was staged in May 1872 and was poorly sung and poorly received, with only 11 performances, at some of which it shared the bill with Saint-Saëns’s La princesse jaune, his first opera to be staged. The other work of 1871 was the suite of 12 pieces for piano duet, Jeux d’enfants, with six of them also orchestrated. The orchestral suite (containing just five pieces) was rehearsed by Pasdeloup in 1872 but withdrawn by Bizet, then performed by Colonne a year later. The four-hands suite was published by Durand in 1872 and has remained popular among duettists to this day. Durand also published at this time Bizet’s transcription for piano solo of Schumann’s op.56 Etudes for pedal piano.

Despite the obscurity of Djamileh’s passing, Bizet was soon engaged to write his final two masterpieces, L’arlésienne and Carmen. The indefatigable Carvalho, Bizet’s patron at the Théâtre Lyrique, was now director of the Vaudeville theatre, where he planned to mount a production of Daudet’s play L’arlésienne. As with most incidental music of the period, the orchestra was small and the musical insertions mostly short. Bizet relied a good deal on the device of mélodrame, much used in opéra comique since the 1850s, where music is played under spoken dialogue. It was particularly well suited to this Provençal drama. The music was composed quickly in the summer of 1872 and the play opened on 1 October. It was not well received, and both Daudet and Bizet were bitterly discouraged. The musical press took little notice of incidental music for plays and the theatrical press found Bizet’s music too complex and demanding, but one or two musicians whose discernment Bizet appreciated, among them Reyer and Massenet, understood the special qualities of this music in the context for which it was designed.

Bizet quickly arranged four extracts from the music as a suite for full orchestra, and this was played by Pasdeloup in November. Its success was immediate and lasting, and the general familiarity of this music has generated occasional revivals of the play. His next task was to work once again for Gounod, preparing Roméo et Juliette for its revival (in a revised form) at the Opéra-Comique in January 1873. Gounod, who had fled to England to escape the siege of Paris, was entangled in London affairs and unable to be present himself. Bizet was then able to embark on the opera that du Locle and de Leuven, the Opéra-Comique directors, had proposed with Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy as librettists. Carmen, Mérimée’s novel from 1845, was Bizet’s own suggestion, but its risqué character and the fact that Carmen meets a violent death on stage at the end of the opera caused misgivings that split the two directors and held up the opera’s prospects of being staged.

We have little information about progress on the opera, although it is likely that much of it was composed if not orchestrated by the summer of 1873 when he began to discuss the choice of singers for the title role. But then he set the work aside, first to stand in again for the absent Gounod, assisting with his incidental music for Barbier’s play Jeanne d’Arc. Bizet helped with rehearsals, arranged the vocal score and transcribed the complete work for piano solo. He was also approached to write a new work for the Opéra. This was something that he could scarcely refuse, for the great baritone Faure was to play the leading role and the subject was to be based on the legendary Spanish hero El Cid, with a libretto by Gallet. Bizet could not have asked for a better proposition and he worked at incredible speed. Don Rodrigue, as the opera was called, was drafted by October of that year. Then the misfortune that never seemed to be far from Bizet’s heels struck again. The Opéra’s celebrated theatre in the rue Le Peletier, where the genre of grand opera had held sway during Meyerbeer’s long reign, burned down on 28 October. Don Rodrigue had always, in any case, been Faure’s idea, not that of the director, Halanzier, who felt no obligation to pursue it now that he had no theatre of his own.

In the winter of 1873–4 Bizet composed a ‘dramatic overture’ Patrie, which was played by Pasdeloup on 15 February 1874 and was well received. Its main theme came from Act V of Don Rodrigue. He could then turn his whole attention to Carmen. In December 1873 Galli-Marié was engaged to sing the title role, which pleased Bizet since he considered her right for the part and since she had enjoyed enormous success at the Opéra-Comique in Maillart’s Lara in 1864 and even more in the title role of Thomas’ long-running Mignon since 1866. Rehearsals were repeatedly postponed, for de Leuven found the libretto unacceptable, a dilemma which was resolved by his resignation early in 1874. Du Locle, now sole director of the Opéra-Comique, was more sympathetic to the work, though never free of misgivings about the music or the public’s response to something so at odds with the conventional family entertainment for which the theatre was thought to exist.

Bizet’s marriage was clearly under strain at this time, and it probably never recovered. Georges was often moody, Geneviève in need of constant attention. They separated for at least two months, although they spent the summer of 1874 together in a villa in Bougival, not far from Le Vésinet. There she is said to have enjoyed the attentions of the eccentric pianist Delaborde, their neighbour, and gossip later linked Bizet’s name with Galli-Marié, a liaison which is not impossible in the backstage turmoil which the production of Carmen was to undergo, although neither of these suppositions can be substantiated with any certainty. The Halévy family later destroyed many papers and letters from this period, but who that action was intended to protect is not clear.

Carmen was orchestrated at Bougival in the summer of 1874 and rehearsals began in September. Bizet arranged the piano score himself and played the piano for rehearsals. There were objections from both the orchestra, who found Bizet’s forthright style of scoring beyond their reach, and the chorus, who were expected to act convincingly as individuals rather than respond in unison as a group. The women objected to having to both smoke and fight on stage (fig.3). Fortunately Bizet was firmly supported by Galli-Marié and by Lhérie, the Don José, so that few compromises had to be made. The rehearsal period was prolonged and difficult, and the first performance was not given until 3 March 1875. The conductor was Deloffre.

Despite the outraged response of many of the audience and the generally hostile response of the press, Carmen was not a failure. It ran for 45 performances in 1875 and three more the following year, a respectable number. As many were attracted as were repelled, perhaps, by its scandalous tone, and the appalling misfortune of Bizet’s death may have awoken the curiosity of others.

Soon after the opening night Bizet suffered a recurrence of quinsy, which had often afflicted him before. He was undoubtedly depressed by the uncomprehending and ignorant tone of many of the reviews. This exacerbated the melancholy mood that had often beset him and may well have weakened his resistance to ailments from which in other circumstances he might have recovered. He was soon battling rheumatism and pain in his ears as well as the throat. Towards the end of May he moved with his family to Bougival, where he rashly went for a swim in the Seine, and on 30 May he suffered a severe attack of rheumatism followed by two heart attacks. He died in the early hours of 3 June, a few hours after the 33rd performance of Carmen. He was 36 years old. The funeral took place two days later at the church of La Trinité in Paris, and he was buried in the Cimetière Père-Lachaise.

In his Portraits et souvenirs Saint-Saëns spoke warmly of Bizet’s openness and lack of guile: ‘Loyal and sincere, he never hid either his friendships or his antipathies. This was a characteristic we both shared, although in other respects we differed completely, with different ideals. He was in search of passion and life, while I ran after the chimera of stylistic purity and formal perfection. Our endless conversations had a vivacity and delight that I have never enjoyed with anyone since.’ He admired the dogged resolution with which Bizet refused to be discouraged by misfortune. There was an impetuous, youthful element in his nature and a driving energy which concealed the thoughtful intelligence which was always at work.

2. Stage works.

Of the many operas that Bizet at one time planned or projected (30 in Winton Dean’s enumeration) only six now survive in a performable version, and only five were performed in his lifetime, none with any real success. Yet he was unmistakably a dramatic composer and Carmen is one of the great operatic masterpieces of the 19th century. It is true that he was dogged by ill-fortune, that he was not well provided with librettos, and that press reception was consistently unfair. Some of his best material came to nothing through no fault of his own. At the same time he suffered from deep uncertainties about the direction of his career and was inclined to spend a good deal of time on projects which he might have been wiser to avoid. There was little point in writing operas that would not be performed, yet the state of Parisian theatres was such that almost no guarantee could ever be given that a work once composed would receive any performances at all. He lacked Wagner’s dogged determination and he never enjoyed Verdi’s commanding authority over theatre managements even though the Théâtre Lyrique, in the person of Carvalho, served him well and showed a perceptive faith in his talent.

His operatic taste was wide: he could as readily compose farce as high drama; he admired both French and Italian opera; he was less troubled than modern critics by theatrical absurdities (in La jolie fille de Perth, for example), and except in Carmen, which opened the door to a new genre of realistic opera, he was no reformer or visionary. He came to maturity at a time when the traditional genres of French opera, both at the Opéra and at the Opéra-Comique, were falling into obsolescence, yet his operas belong unmistakably to his time. He owed various debts to Rossini, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Gounod and Thomas, but he was more advanced than any of them in harmony and orchestration. His critics saw only Wagner in any technical advances they might observe but his brilliant touches of harmonic and orchestral colour owe nothing to Wagner.

His habit of self-borrowing is a reflection of his uncertain, even casual, attitude to the setting of texts. From Don Procopio to Carmen he constantly pilfered his scores for pieces to re-use in later settings. The result can be awkward declamation (as in Don José’s Flower Song), which never troubled him as it did Saint-Saëns or Massenet. He attached more importance to the sentiment and colour of words than to their metrical properties, and like Mozart, whose career his own in some respects resembles, he had a wonderfully sure feeling for the human voice. He thought deeply about the problems of dramatic music, as his letters testify, and had trenchant opinions about contemporary composers.

His first opera, the one-act La maison du docteur, exists only in vocal score and may not have been orchestrated. It was evidently written while he was a student. Le docteur Miracle, of 1856, also in one act, is an example of the newly emerging style of French operetta, spearheaded by Offenbach, a composer Bizet later came to despise. The centrepiece of the comedy is the ‘Omelette Quartet’ with its solemn and mock-heroic invocations to a poorly cooked omelette.

The next opera, Don Procopio, in two acts, is entirely Italian in style and spirit, with Cimarosa and Donizetti as its models. It is a brilliant, youthful work of great wit and invention. He infused a familiar idiom – vocal coloratura, patter declamation, swift-moving ensembles, and so on – with frequent original touches in harmony, orchestration and melodic style. One piece, a march, was borrowed from the Symphony in C; other sections were later used in Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth, including the famous Serenade from that opera.

Several operatic schemes passed through his mind before the next complete work, La guzla de l’émir, on a traditional Turkish story, the loss of which is much to be regretted. In all likelihood it was substantially re-used in Les pêcheurs de perles, composed immediately afterwards in 1863. This three-act opera, set in Ceylon in ancient times, was originally designed as an opéra-comique with dialogue, and is now, after Carmen, Bizet’s best-known work for the stage. The duet for Zurga and Nadir ‘Au fond du temple saint’ has become a popular hit familiar even to people who know nothing of opera. It is a noble melody accompanied with bald root-position triads and scored, on its first appearance, for flute and harp, a symbol of sanctity in French music of the time. Bizet relies heavily throughout on his great melodic gift, close in style to Gounod in this work, yet there is abundant evidence of his growing subtlety with harmonic and tonal colouring. The drama has a strong basis in the conflict between love and duty in the heart of Leïla, a priestess of Brahma, but it is inevitably weakened by its dependence on two separate vows pledged many years before, and the potential for conflict between jealousy and brotherly feeling is not given full scope, partly because space had to be found for the conventional apparatus of priests, dancing and incantation. The action strains credulity at times, although the ending, which shows an act of noble self-sacrifice by Zurga on behalf of the lovers who have deceived him, is powerful.

Ivan IV, Bizet’s longest work, is a grand opera conceived for a large cast and orchestra, with a setting in the Caucasus and the Kremlin in the 16th century. The action is full of villainy, usurpation, revenge, vows of fidelity to race and family, poison, dissembling and scenes of entertainment and fantasy. There is no attempt to disguise the grand opera clichés. Bizet’s invention is prodigal but without any real conviction, and some scenes are perfunctory or sentimental. He used many passages in later works. The orchestration of the last act is missing.

Of the shortcomings of La jolie fille de Perth, Bizet’s next opera, he was well aware, although he was probably not troubled by the remoteness of the libretto from Scott’s original. A persistent criticism, with which he privately agreed, was that the music had been ‘sacrificed to the false gods of the quadrille, the roucoulade, and the concessions of coloratura’. The soprano role of Catherine was written for the coloratura of Christine Nilsson, who never sang it. Making Catherine coquettish justified her treatment as a coloratura, which in turn required a mad scene in the last act. Bizet did not attempt any Scottish colour at all. The strength of the opera lies in the vitality of its set pieces and individual numbers. Scenes of festivity, ensembles of bewilderment or challenge, duets and solos of different types: all this draws out the best of his gifts, full of wonderful melodic, harmonic and instrumental invention. It is hard to accept that such a fresh score belongs to an unstageable opera, but its fate is always more likely to be in the form of extracts than as a dramatic continuum. Smith’s Serenade, the best-known piece from the opera and well worthy of its celebrity, was borrowed from Don Procopio.

The dismemberment of La coupe du roi de Thulé is a grave misfortune, since the 15 fragments that remain provide evidence of Bizet’s acute sense of the stage and his growing maturity. In Winton Dean’s words, it ‘gives the first unmistakable sign of a tragic power that was to culminate in L’arlésienne and Carmen’. There are similar indications in the little that remains of Clarissa Harlowe and the more susbtantial fragments of Grisélidis. If Bizet had been able to complete and perform these three works, his legacy would have been infinitely richer. Don Rodrigue, too, survives in a tantalizingly incomplete form.

Djamileh, slight though its one-act opéra comique form and conventional orientalism may be, is a truly enchanting piece, full of inventive touches, especially of chromatic colour. There are opportunities for oriental melodies and dances, a comic servant and a dash of real passion. The role of the slave girl Djamileh is characterized from the beginning by a darkly expressive melody. Her main solo, the ‘Ghazel’, blends exotic colour, chromatic side-slips, suppressed passion and the key of D minor to give a strong foretaste of the Habanera in Carmen.

The nature of L’arlésienne forced Bizet to be economical, with only short passages of music for the most part and only a small orchestra, and in this he was triumphantly successful. The Prélude-Ouverture is an extended piece like the entr’actes that introduce each act, but elsewhere the music consists for the most part of brief mélodrames under dialogue. They succeed superbly in delineating character with pointed and expressive themes, while the longer movements suggest a Provençal tone, using genuine melodies from the region. Daudet’s drama has certain parallels with the story of Carmen, since the girl from Arles, who is never seen, bewitches Frédéri in rivalry with Vivette, a local girl of good family. On the eve of his wedding Frédéri is driven mad by thoughts of the unfaithful girl from Arles and he throws himself to his death. There is some lively music for the chorus, and the scoring is deft and apt, using a saxophone and a solo viola for special effects, plus the ‘tambourin’, a Provençal drum. The orchestral suite which Bizet fashioned out of four of the movements is scored for a larger orchestra. A second suite was put together by Guiraud after Bizet’s death, incorporating a Minuet from La jolie fille de Perth.

In Carmen the promise of dramatic genius sporadically but increasingly displayed by all his operas since Les pêcheurs de perles attains magnificent fulfilment. The characteristic handling of chromatic harmony and subtle scoring seen in the Jeux d’enfants suite and L’arlésienne is the foundation of a fully mature style on which a whole series of great works might have been built, had he lived. He reached maturity at the same age as Verdi and Wagner but was tragically deprived of the opportunity to explore and exploit it. But at least Carmen is recognized as one of the greatest of 19th-century operas, and certainly the most popular. Its tunes are familiar to millions, and its evocation of Spain, where Bizet never set foot, has done as much to propagate the elements of the style as Spanish music itself.

Carmen’s framework is that of a traditional opéra comique, with spoken dialogue, two-verse couplets with choral refrains, some comic relief, and opportunities for local colour and exotic dances. The subsidiary characters were familiar to the genre: the comic pair Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado belong to a tradition going back to Auber’s Fra diavolo, and the secondary leading roles Escamillo and Micaëla have kindred characters in Gounod. But Bizet went far beyond expectations in fashioning a drama of high tension thanks largely to the outstanding characterization of Carmen herself and to a lesser extent that of Don José, the passionate lover driven to despair. The literature abounds in interpretations of the opera, from Nietzsche’s attempt to use it as a stick with which to beat Wagner, to more recent feminist readings which raise questions about patriarchal morality and the treatment of women as victims. Carmen’s brazen personality is starkly contrasted with Micaëla’s purity and innocence, but the contrast is not simply one of goodness and badness. Escamillo is the irresistible lure that entices Carmen from Don José, although the bullfighter, unlike the soldier, would never shed a tear over her infidelity. In Carmen the combination in abundance of striking melody, deft harmony and perfectly judged orchestration ensures the opera’s immortality. It magnificently transcends both the genre of opéra comique and the norms of 19th-century French music.

The world success of Carmen began with the production in Vienna in October 1875, with Guiraud’s recitatives. Before its revival at the Opéra-Comique in 1883 it had reached 20 other cities from St Petersburg to Melbourne, since which time it has never been out of the repertory. It has been adapted in a bewildering variety of different screen and stage presentations and its music has been arranged for every imaginable ensemble.

3. Vocal works.

Much of Bizet’s early vocal music was written as exercises in composition and was not intended for performance. Such, for example, are the settings of Prix de Rome texts from earlier years: L’ange et Tobie is the beginning of a setting of the 1847 text; Herminie, a similar effort on the 1828 text; of Loyse et Montfort, a setting of the 1840 text, and Le chevalier enchanté, the 1843 text, only fragments remain, although they were once evidently substantial works. Le retour de Virginie, on the 1852 text, is complete, and so is Bizet’s winning cantata of 1857, Clovis et Clotilde. This is a lengthy dramatic cantata for three solo voices and orchestra which confirms Bizet’s skill and invention in this genre, and one passage, Clotilde’s ‘Prière! prière!’, stands out from the rest as a page of marvellous imagination and suggestiveness. An undated Choeur d’étudiants is a lively setting for male voices of a text from Auber’s Le lac des fées of 1839. Two choruses with piano accompaniment composed for the Prix de Rome preliminary rounds in 1856 and 1857 were published posthumously: Le golfe de Baïa, with a text by Lamartine, and La chanson du rouet, a light-hearted piece on a poem by Leconte de Lisle.

The Te Deum, composed in Rome in 1858, is Bizet’s largest choral work, but the genre of sacred choral music had little appeal for him and the music is disappointing. The lack of conventional counterpoint (except in the fugal ‘Fiat misericordia tua’) gives it an operatic flavour, and the soloists’ music is more rewarding that that for the chorus. His other choral music is scanty and miscellaneous. Saint-Jean de Pathmos is a setting for male voices of a poem by Hugo, and La mort s’avance! is a strange setting of a pious text for chorus and orchestra, almost unrecognizably based on two Chopin études.

The ‘ode-symphonie’ Vasco de Gama reflects its model, David’s Le désert, with some mélodrame for the opening narration and its evocation of the broad open sea, but it has too many characters and too little narrative for so brief a work. It contains two fine numbers, a Boléro for the young officer Léonard (a soprano), hinting at the lively Spanish colour of many later pieces, and the choral Prière offering thanks for the passing of the storm. Vasco da Gama, a bass, plays little part in the sequence.

In 1874 Bizet planned an oratorio Geneviève de Paris in emulation of Massenet’s Marie-Magdeleine, but he seems to have made no progress on it. His slight attachment to choral music is surprising in view of the high profile and vigorous activity of Orphéons and similar choral societies during his time, but it was a sphere he was never much drawn to, being always more attracted to the stage.

Bizet published some two dozen songs during his lifetime. The best of them were collected in the Vingt mélodies of 1873, although the currency of this Choudens collection has overshadowed the high quality of the six Feuilles d’album, published by Heugel in 1866. Choudens’s second anthology, the Seize mélodies, published posthumously in 1886, contains many pieces of doubtful provenance or with inauthentic words. The two early romances of 1854 already show Bizet’s sleight of hand with keys and a distinct melodic gift. His best songs appeared in the years 1866–8, four from Choudens (including the masterly Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe), six from Heugel, and six from Hartmann. He admitted in a letter to Galabert that he composed the Heugel set ‘at top speed’. ‘I have chosen the words carefully’, he added, and indeed his wide choice of poets reflects his broad literary tastes. His treatment is frequently strophic, with the dramatist’s sense of effect when called for by the poem. While his accompaniment figures can be repetitive and too persistent and his word-setting less than fastidious, his writing for the voice is instinctively effective, and any suggestion of exotic effect is met with marvellous inventiveness; Hugo’s Guitare is a fine example, and the setting of a Ronsard sonnet is particularly sensitive.

4. Orchestral music.

The popularity of the Symphony in C and of transcriptions of L’arlésienne and Jeux d’enfants has overshadowed Bizet’s other orchestral music. The Symphony is indeed a work of remarkable freshness recalling early Mozart, at the same time looking forward to fine lyrical moments in the operas and even to the brilliant energy of Carmen. The early Première ouverture in A is equally fresh, with an Italian flavour. Bizet’s efforts to compose a second symphony in the 1860s left a fine Marche funèbre in F minor (still unpublished) and were finally realized in Roma, posthumously published as ‘3me suite de concert’ but in fact a symphony in four movements in C major (like the first symphony), completed in 1868 and revised in 1871. Only the last movement, Carnaval, a tarantella, is explicitly related to Italy, although much of the symphony was conceived during his Italian stay, and the first and third movements were given titles when the work was played by Pasdeloup in 1869: Une chasse dans la forêt d’Ostie and Une procession. The latter title suggests that the Marche funèbre was then the work’s slow movement. Another Marche funèbre (the title is probably inauthentic) in B minor, is a forthright and richly scored piece, originally intended as the prelude to La coupe du roi de Thulé. Bizet’s last orchestral work was the ‘dramatic overture’ Patrie of 1873, a weighty, sectional work with pompous, sentimental and balletic episodes in turn. By scoring some of the Jeux d’enfants and re-scoring scenes from L’arlésienne Bizet undoubtedly created his most effective and colourful orchestral music, for although his handling of the orchestra is usually deft and wonderfully imaginative, he can equally score with a rather clumsy fondness for octave doublings and exposed brass.

5. Piano music.

With the exception of the masterly Jeux d’enfants for four hands, Bizet’s piano music has never entered the pianist’s canon. The solo works are miscellaneous in genre and mostly too difficult for the amateur player. His early piano works reflect the Parisian virtuoso school and his own brilliant gifts as a pianist, yet despite the influence of Mendelssohn and Schumann in the Chants du Rhin, a set of six picturesque pieces from 1865, he never ventured on the larger forms. The Chasse fantastique (1865) is a brilliant virtuoso scherzo worthy of Alkan or Liszt. The only trace of Beethoven (whom Bizet enormously admired) is to be found in the curious Variations chromatiques (1868), a set of 14 variations and a coda on a slowly rising and falling chromatic scale. The technical challenge of such a design provoked ingenuity and novelty rather than any deeper musical satisfaction, and the piano writing is sometimes surprisingly awkward. So much of Bizet’s energy was devoted to writing piano reductions of operas that he never developed an interest in the solo piano genres. He responded better to the depiction of picturesque or dramatic vignettes, as in La bohémienne, the third of the Chants du Rhin, and especially in Jeux d’enfants. This set of 12 pieces for piano duet, composed in 1871, evokes the child’s world with exquisite skill, a fine example of high sophistication in the service of apparent naivety. Writing for four hands, Bizet was not tempted to throw in the big stretches and virtuoso leaps that make his solo works too daunting for many players.

6. Posthumous reputation.

The posthumous misfortunes suffered by Bizet’s music are unequalled in the history of music and have yet to be righted. His output is relatively small, yet much of it has circulated in seriously bowdlerized forms; titles and texts are commonly spurious in a multitude of different ways. Many of his autographs have disappeared while many of the surviving autographs are still unpublished. Critical editions exist only of his early piano music, L'arlésienne and Jeux d’enfants. Bizet was himself careless in handling and presenting his music, complicated by his fondness for transferring music freely from one piece to another. His widow (who later became a society notable as Mme Emile Straus) was no more scrupulous in her concern for her husband’s legacy. But most of the blame for this sorry state of affairs can be laid at the door of the publishers Choudens, who issued unauthorized versions of many of the most important works in the years when Carmen first became a world success. Vocal scores of Les pêcheurs de perles, La jolie fille de Perth and Carmen were particularly affected, while anthologies of songs, piano transcriptions and orchestral suites included music with cuts and revisions, with new titles and new texts, and without any explanation or identification. Works published by Heugel or Durand have fared better, but even modern editions, such as Choudens’s 1951 score of Ivan IV, have been tampered with. The most controversial of modern scores is Fritz Oeser’s edition of Carmen (1964), which claimed, against powerful evidence to the contrary, to be representing Bizet’s intentions. New versions of Carmen continue to appear both on stage and in print.

Biographical studies of Bizet have fared better. As early as 1886 Charles Pigot, Bizet’s first biographer, had to contend with falsehoods contained in Arthur Pougin’s entry in the Fétis Supplément of 1878. The most important work of Bizet scholarship is due to D.C. Parker, who unearthed the Symphony in C in 1935, to Mina Curtiss, whose purchase of an enormous archive of Halévy and Bizet papers formed the basis for her detailed and compelling biography Bizet and his World (1958), and to Winton Dean, Bizet’s stalwart champion and the author of a number of important studies of his work. Recent work by Lesley Wright and Hervé Lacombe has further extended the range of scholarly enquiry.

The misrepresentation of Bizet’s music has persisted partly because Bizet has never been embraced by the French as a great national composer, and there has been little desire to seek out unfamiliar works or question the authenticity of the familiar ones. For many generations Carmen was preferred with Guiraud’s recitatives rather than with dialogue. It is no endorsement of this state of affairs to acknowledge that Bizet’s output is indeed uneven and that he was always capable of mediocre work within the less exalted tastes of his times. Flashes of future potential are to be found from the earliest years, but there is a lack of maturity and of focus until the last five years of his life. His brief fragmented career reveals many hesitations and false starts; his abundant musicality and brusque energy was channelled in many different activities, yet later generations have wished that it was serious dramatic composition that absorbed him wholly, and that his contemporaries might have spotted his genius earlier than they did. The spectacle of great works unwritten either because Bizet had other distractions, or because no one asked him to write them, or because of his premature death, is infinitely dispiriting, yet the brilliance and the individuality of his best music is unmistakable. It has greatly enriched a period of French music already rich in composers of talent and distinction.

WORKS

all first performed and published in Paris, unless otherwise stated; most autographs in F-Pn

stage



Title	Genre	Composed

La maison du docteur	oc, 1	early
Librettist : H. Boisseaux
First performance : —
Remarks : Vs, F-Pn
Le docteur Miracle	opérette, 1	1856
Librettist : L. Battu and L. Halévy
First performance : Bouffes-Parisiens, 9 April 1857
Remarks : Pn*; vs (1962)
Parisina	opéra	—
Librettist : F. Romani
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1858
[untitled]	oc, 1	—
Librettist : E. About
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1858
Don Procopio	ob, 2	1858–9
Librettist : C. Cambiaggio
First performance : Monte Carlo, 10 Mar 1906
Remarks : Pn*; vs (1905), fs (1906); Italian text
Esmeralda	opéra	—
Librettist : after V. Hugo
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1859
Le tonnelier de Nuremberg	opéra, 3	—
Librettist : after Hoffmann
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1859
Don Quichotte	opéra	—
Librettist : after Cervantes
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1859
L’amour peintre	oc	1860
Librettist : Bizet, after Molière
First performance : —
Remarks : Unfinished, lost
La prêtresse	opérette, 1	—
Librettist : P. Gille
First performance : —
Remarks : Sketched, ?1861
La guzla de l’émir	oc, 1	1862
Librettist : J. Barbier and M. Carré
First performance : —
Remarks : Lost, absorbed into other works
Ivan IV	opéra, 5	1862–5
Librettist : F. Leroy, H. Trianon
First performance : Mühringen, nr Horb am Neckar, 1946
Remarks : Act V unfinished; Pn*; vs (1951)
Les pêcheurs de perles	opéra, 3	1863
Librettist : Carré and E. Cormon
First performance : Lyrique, 30 Sept 1863
Remarks : Vs (1863), fs (1893)
Nicolas Flamel	opéra	—
Librettist : E. Dubreuil
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1865
La jolie fille de Perth	opéra, 4	1866
Librettist : J.-H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges and J. Adenis, after W. Scott
First performance : Lyrique, 26 Dec 1867
Remarks : Pn*; vs (1868), fs (c1891)
Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre	opérette, 4	1867
Librettist : P. Giraudin and W. Busnach
First performance : L’Athénée, 13 Dec 1867
Remarks : Bizet wrote Act 1 only; other composers were Legouix, Jonas, Delibes; lost
Les templiers	opéra, 5	—
Librettist : L. Halévy and Saint-Georges
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1868
[untitled]	opéra	—
Librettist : A. Leroy and T. Sauvage
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1868
La coupe du roi de Thulé	opéra, 3	1868–9
Librettist : L. Gallet, and E. Blau
First performance : —
Remarks : Frags., Pn
Noé	opéra, 3	1868–9
Librettist : Saint-Georges
First performance : Karlsruhe, 5 April 1885
Remarks : Completion of Halévy’s unfinished work; vs (1885), fs (1886)
Vercingétorix	opéra	—
Librettist : E. Délérot
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1869
Calendal	opéra	—
Librettist : P. Ferrier
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1870
Rama	opéra, 4	—
Librettist : E. Crépet
First performance : —
Remarks : Projected, 1870
Clarissa Harlowe	oc, 3	1870–71
Librettist : P. Gille and A. Jaime, after S. Richardson
First performance : —
Remarks : Sketches, Pn
Grisélidis	oc, 3	1870–71
Librettist : V. Sardou
First performance : —
Remarks : Sketches, Pn
Djamileh	oc, 1	1871
Librettist : Gallet
First performance : OC (Favart), 22 May 1872
Remarks : Vs (1872), fs (1892)
L’arlésienne	incidental music	1872
Librettist : A. Daudet
First performance : Vaudeville, 1 Oct 1872
Remarks : Pn*; vs (1872); 4 movements arr. as suite for orchestra
Sol-si-ré-pif-pan	opérette, 1	1872
Librettist : Busnach
First performance : Château d’eau, 16 Nov 1872
Remarks : Lost
Don Rodrigue	opéra, 5	1873
Librettist : Gallet and Blau, after Corneille
First performance : —
Remarks : Unfinished; draft, Pn
Carmen	oc, 4	1873-4
Librettist : H. Meilhac and L. Halévy after P. Mérimée
First performance : OC (Favart), 3 Mar 1875
Remarks : Pn*; vs (1875), fs (?1877)

orchestral



Title	Composed

Overture, a-A	c1855
First performance : 26 Oct 1838
Remarks : (London, 1972), Pn
Symphony, C	1855
First performance : Basle, 26 Feb 1935, cond. Weingartner
Remarks : (Vienna, 1935), Pn
Symphony	1859
First performance : —
Remarks : Begun twice, destroyed Dec 1859
Scherzo et Marche funèbre, f	1860–61
First performance : Institut, Nov 1861
Remarks : Scherzo later used in Roma; Marche, Pn
La chasse d’Ossian, ov.	1861
First performance : —
Remarks : Lost
Roma, sym., C	1860–68, rev. 1871
First performance : 28 Feb 1869, Cirque Napoléon, cond. Pasdeloup
Remarks : (1880)
Marche funèbre, b	1868–9
First performance : 12 Dec 1880, Châtelet, cond. Colonne
Remarks : (1881); originally Prelude to opera La coupe du roi de Thulé
Petite suite	1871
First performance : 2 March 1873, Odéon, cond. Colonne
Remarks : Nos.2, 3, 6, 11, 12 from Jeux d’enfants for pf duet (1882); these and no.8, Pn
L’arlésienne, suite no.1	1872
First performance : 10 Nov 1872, Cirque d’hiver, cond. Pasdeloup
Remarks : (1873); Suite no.2 is by E. Guiraud; both considerably rewritten from original incidental music
Patrie, ov.	1873
First performance : 15 Feb 1874, Cirque d’hiver, cond. Pasdeloup
Remarks : (1874)

choral works and cantatas



Title	Forces	Text	Composed

Valse	4vv, orch	?	1855
Remarks, publication : (Mainz, 1978)
L’ange et Tobie, cant.		Léon Halévy	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn; incomplete
Herminie, cant.		Vieillard	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn; incomplete
Loyse et Montfort, cant.		E. Deschamps	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn; incomplete
Le retour de Virginie, cant.		Rollet	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn
Le chevalier enchanté, cant.		Marquis de Pastoret	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn; incomplete
Choeur d’étudiants	male vv, orch	Scribe	?1855–7
Remarks, publication : Pn; the words are from Auber’s Le lac des fées
Le golfe de Baïa	S, T, 4vv, pf	A. de Lamartine	1856
Remarks, publication : Pn; Prix de Rome (1880)
David, cant.		G. d’Albano	1856
Remarks, publication : Lost
La chanson du rouet	solo v, 4vv, pf	E. Blau	1857
Remarks, publication : (1880)
Clovis et Clotilde, cant.		A. Burion	1857
Remarks, publication : Pn; Prix de Rome
Te Deum	S, T, 4vv, orch		1858
Remarks, publication : Pn (London and Hamburg,1971)
Ulysse et Circé, ode-symphonie		after Homer	—
Remarks, publication : Projected, 1859
Vasco de Gama, ode-symphonie		L. Delâtre	1859–60
Remarks, publication : Pn (1880)
Carmen saeculare		Horace	1860
Remarks, publication : ?Unfinished; lost
Saint-Jean de Pathmos	male vv	V. Hugo	?1866
Remarks, publication : (1874)
Les noces de Prométhée, cant.		R. Cornut	1867
Remarks, publication : Lost
La mort s’avance!	4vv, orch	Abbé Pellegrin	1869
Remarks, publication : Pn (1869)
Geneviève de Paris, orat		L. Gallet	1875
Remarks, publication : Projected

songs



Title	Poet	Published	Remarks

La foi, l’espérance et la charité	R. de Lagrave	1854
La rose et l’abeille	O. Rolland	1854
Petite Marguerite	Rolland	1854
Vieille chanson	C.-H. Millevoye	1865	no.3 in Vingt mélodies (1873)
A une fleur	A. de Musset	1866	no.1 of Feuilles d’album (1866)
Adieux à Suzon	Musset	1866	no.2 of Feuilles d’album
Sonnet	Ronsard	1866	no.3 of Feuilles d’album
Guitare	V. Hugo	1866	no.4 of Feuilles d’album
Rose d’amour	C.-H. Millevoye	1866	no.5 of Feuilles d’album
Le grillon	A. de Lamartine	1866	no.6 of Feuilles d’album
Chants des Pyrénées	trans. J. Ruelle	1867	6 folksongs, with pf accomp.
Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe	Hugo	1867	no.4 of Vingt mélodies
Après l’hiver	Hugo	1867	no.15 of Vingt mélodies
Douce mer	Lamartine	1867	no.14 of Vingt mélodies
Rêve de la bien-aimée	L. de Courmont	1868	no.5 of Vingt mélodies
Berceuse sur un vieil air	M. Desbordes-Valmore	1868	no.11 of Vingt mélodies
La chanson du fou	Hugo	1868	no.12 of Vingt mélodies
Pastorale	Regnard	1868	no.9 of Vingt mélodies
La coccinelle	Hugo	1868	no.16 of Vingt mélodies
Ma vie a son secret	F. Arvers	1868	no.8 of Vingt mélodies
L’esprit saint	?	1869	no.19 of Vingt mélodies
Absence	T. Gautier	1872	no.13 of Vingt mélodies
La fuite	Gautier	1872	For two voices
Chant d’amour	Lamartine	1872	no.17 of Vingt mélodies
Tarentelle	E. Pailleron	1872	no.20 of Vingt mélodies
Chanson d’avril	L. Bouilhet	1873	no.1 of Vingt mélodies
Vous ne priez pas	C. Delavigne	1873	no.7 of Vingt mélodies

Unpublished songs (Pn): Vocalise, 1849; Barcarolle [vocalise], 2S, 1849; L’âme triste est pareille au doux ciel (A. de Lamartine); Le colibri (A. Flan); Vœu (V. Hugo); Oh, quand je dors (Hugo)
Songs published in the Seize mélodies (1886), of uncertain authenticity: La sirène (C. Mendès); Voyage (P. Gille); Aubade (P. Ferrier); La nuit (Ferrier); Le doute (Ferrier) (the music also occurs in Roma); Conte (Ferrier); Aimons, rêvons (Ferrier); La chanson de la rose (J. Barbier); Le gascon (C. Mendès); N’oublions pas! (J. Barbier); Si vous aimez! (Gille); Pastel (Gille); L’abandonnée (Gille)
Versions with new words by J. Barbier, published in 1887: Les nymphes des bois (version of La nuit); Le retour (version of Voyage); Rêvons (version of Aimons, rêvons!)

keyboard



Title	Composed	Instrument

1er Caprice original, cm	?1851	pf
Remarks, publication : 2 versions (1984)
2me Caprice original, C	1851	pf
Remarks, publication : 3 versions (1984)
Thème	?1852	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
Valse, C	?1852	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
Quatre préludes, C, a, G, e	?1852	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
Romance sans paroles, C	?1852	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
1er Nocturne, F	1854	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
Grande valse de concert	1854	pf
Remarks, publication : (1984)
Méditation religieuse		org, hmn or pf
Remarks, publication : (c1855)
Romance sans paroles, C		pf
Remarks, publication : (1856)
Casilda, polka mazurka		pf
Remarks, publication : (1856)
Trois esquisses musicales		harmonium
Remarks, publication : (1858)
Ronde turque
Sérénade
Caprice
Venise		pf
Remarks, publication : (1865)
Chants du Rhin	1865	pf
Remarks, publication : on poems by Méry (1866)
L’aurore
Le départ
Les rêves
La bohémienne
Les confidences
Le retour
Chasse fantastique	1865	pf
Remarks, publication : (1866)
Marine		pf
Remarks, publication : (1868)
1er Nocturne, D		pf
Remarks, publication : (1868)
Variations chromatiques	1868	pf
Remarks, publication : (1868)
Simplicité, valse à ne pas danser	1871	pf duet
Remarks, publication : The secondo part is by Bizet, the primo part by Massenet
Jeux d’enfants	1871	pf duet
Remarks, publication : (1872); nos.2, 3, 6, 8, 11 and 12 orchd Bizet
L’escarpolette, Rêverie
La toupie, Impromptu
La poupée, Berceuse
Les chevaux de bois, Scherzo
Le volant, Fantaisie
Trompette et tambour, Marche
Les bulles de savon, Rondino
Les quatre coins, Esquisse
Colin-maillard, Nocturne
Saute-mouton, Caprice
Petit mari, petite femme!, Duo
Le bal, Galop
Réception de Clapisson par Beethoven aux Champs-Elysées		pf
Remarks, publication : Lost

other works

Vocal scores: Gounod: Jeanne d’Arc (1873), La nonne sanglante (1855), La reine de Saba (1862); Massé: Le fils du brigadier (1867); Reyer: La statue (1861); Saint-Saëns: Le timbre d’argent

Arrs. for pf solo: Gounod: Six choeurs, Méditation sur le 1er Prélude de Bach; Handel: L’harmonieux forgeron; Massenet: Scènes de bal, Scènes hongroises; Mozart: Don Giovanni (1866), L’oca del Cairo (1867); Reyer: Erostrate (1862); Thomas: Mignon, Hamlet; Le pianiste chanteur (6 vols.)

Arrs. for pf duet: Gounod: Symphony no. 1; Mozart: Don Giovanni (excerpts); Schumann, 6 Etudes; Thomas: Mignon, Hamlet

Piano-scandé: 100 fragments tirés de divers auteurs

Misc: fugues and exercises, 1850–4, Pn, S-Smf; [Morceau à déchiffrer], bn, vc, 1874 (1970); [Morceau à déchiffrer], ob, pf, 1874, US-Bm

(1) Henry (Gamble) Blagrove

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Source materials. B Biographies, biographical studies. C Operas. D Other studies.

a: source materials

V. Wilder: Obituary, Le ménestrel (4, 11, 18 July 1875)

E. Galabert: Georges Bizet: souvenirs et correspondance (Paris, 1877)

A. Marmontel: Symphonistes et virtuoses (Paris, 1881)

L. Gallet: Notes d’un librettiste (Paris, 1891)

H. Imbert: Portraits et études: lettres inédites de Georges Bizet (Paris, 1894)

Gounod–Bizet correspondence: Revue de Paris, vi (1899), 677–703

L. Ganderax, ed.: Lettres de Georges Bizet: Impressions de Rome, 1857–1860: La Commune, 1871 (Paris, 1907)

H. Maréchal: Souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris, 1907)

G. Bizet: Lettres à un ami, 1865–1872, ed. E. Galabert (Paris, 1909)

Musica, no.117 (1912) [Bizet issue]

G. Servières: ‘Georges Bizet d’après les souvenirs de Pierre Berton’, Guide musical (8–22 March 1914)

J. Chantavoine: ‘Quelques inédits de Georges Bizet’, Le ménestrel (4 Aug–22 Sept 1933)

Exposition Georges Bizet au Théâtre national de l’Opéra [illustrated catalogue] (Paris, 1938)

RdM, xix (1938), 129–58 [Bizet issue]

M. Curtiss: ‘Unpublished Letters by Georges Bizet’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 375–409

G. Pitorno: Georges Bizet, Museo Teatrale alla Scala, 6 Dec 1975 – 10 Jan 1976 (Milan,1975) [exhibition catalogue]

M. Poupet: Le rétablissement de la partition originale des Pêcheurs de perles de Georges Bizet (Paris, 1976)

M. Poupet: ‘A propos de la mort de Bizet: une lettre inédite de Célestine Galli-Marié’, RdM, lxiii (1977), 148–53

L.A. Wright, ed.: Georges Bizet: Letters in the Nydahl Collection (Stockholm, 1988)

C. Glayman, ed.: Georges Bizet: Lettres (1850–1875) (Paris, 1989)

C. Schwandt: Georges Bizet: mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten dargestellt (Reinbek, 1991)

L.A. Wright: ‘Gounod and Bizet: a Study in Musical Paternity’, JMR, xiii (1993), 31–48

b: biographies, biographical studies

C. Pigot: Georges Bizet et son oeuvre (Paris, 1886, 2/1911)

C. Bellaigue: Georges Bizet: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1890)

H. Imbert: Georges Bizet (Paris, 1899)

P. Voss: Georges Bizet (Leipzig, 1899)

A. Weissmann: Bizet (Berlin, 1907)

H. Gauthier-Villars: Bizet (Paris, 1911) [actually by E. Vuillermoz]

G.M. Gatti: Giorgio Bizet (Turin, 1914)

P. Landormy: Bizet (Paris, 1924, 2/1950)

J. Rabe: Georges Bizet (Uppsala, 1925)

D.C. Parker: Georges Bizet (London, 1926, rev. 2/1951 as Bizet)

M. Delmas: Georges Bizet (Paris, 1930)

M. Bruk: Bize (Moscow, 1938)

M. Cooper: Georges Bizet (London, 1938)

W. Dean: Bizet (London, 1948, rev. 2/1965 as George Bizet: His Life and Works, enlarged 3/1975)

M. Cooper: ‘Georges Bizet’, The Heritage of Music, ed. H.J. Foss, iii (London,1951), 108–23

P. Stefan-Gruenfeldt: Georges Bizet (Zürich, 1952)

M. Curtiss: ‘Bizet, Offenbach and Rossini’, MQ, xl (1954), 350–59

M. Curtiss: Bizet and his World (New York, 1958)

F. Robert: Georges Bizet: l’homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1965)

J. Klein: ‘Georges Bizet’s Tragic Son’, ML, xlix (1968), 357–66

A. Németh: George Bizet elete es müvei [Bizet: life and works] (Budapest, 1976)

M.S.K. Curtiss: Bizet and his World (Westport, CT, 1977)

F. Robert: Georges Bizet: l’homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1981)

L.A. Wright: Bizet Before Carmen (diss., Princeton U., 1981)

M. Cardoze: Georges Bizet (Paris, 1982)

J. Roy: Bizet (Paris, 1983)

G. Corapi: ‘Bizet: l'ansia et la svolta’ [Bizet: anxiety and turning point], Musica, no.20 (1988), 25–60

M. Poupet: ‘Gounod et Bizet’, Cahiers Ivan Tourgéniev, Pauline Viardot et Maria Malibran, no.12 (1988), 113–30

R. Stricker: Georges Bizet (Paris, 1999)

c: operas

L. Mastrigli: Giorgio Bizet: la sua vita e le sue opere (Rome, 1888)

H. Daffner, ed.: Friedrich Nietzsches Randglossen zu Bizets ‘Carmen’ (Regensburg, 1912, 2/1938)

F. Hühne: Die Oper ‘Carmen’ als ein Typus musikalischer Poetik (Greifswald,1915)

D. Imsan: Carmen: Charakter-Entwicklung für die Bühne (Darmstadt, 1917)

C. Gaudier: Carmen de Bizet (Paris, 1922)

E. Istel: Bizet und ‘Carmen’ (Stuttgart, 1927)

J. Tiersot: ‘Bizet and Spanish Music’, MQ, xiii (1927), 566–81

M. Cooper: Bizet: Carmen (London, 1947)

W. Dean: ‘An Unfinished Opera by Bizet’, ML, xxviii (1947), 347–63 [on La coupe de roi du Thulé]

W. Dean: Carmen (London, 1949)

J.-P. Changeur: six articles on Ivan IV, La vie bordelaise (12 Oct–16 Nov1951)

H. Malherbe: Carmen (Paris, 1951)

W. Dean: ‘Bizet’s Ivan IV’, Fanfare for Ernest Newman, ed. H. Van Thal (London, 1955), 58–85; repr. in Essays on Opera (Oxford,1990), 262–80

W. Dean: ‘The True Carmen?’, MT, cvi (1965), 846–55; repr. in Essays on Opera (Oxford, 1990), 281–300

M. Poupet: ‘Les infidélités des “Pêcheurs de perles”’,RdM, li (1965), 170–200

J. Westrup: ‘Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 157–70

W. Dean: ‘The Corruption of Carmen: the Perils of Pseudomusicology’, Musical Newsletter, iii/4 (1973), Oct, 7–12, 20

M. Koerth: Felsenstein inszeniert Carmen (Berlin, 1973)

H.E. Phillips: The Carmen Chronicle: the Making of an Opera (New York, 1973)

J. Klein: ‘Reflections on Bizet's Djamileh’, MR, xxxv (1974), 293–300

L.A. Wright: ‘A New Source for Carmen’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 61–9

L’avant-scène opéra, no.26 (1980) [Carmen issue]

W. Dean: Bizet: Collana autori ed opere (Turin, 1980)

N. John, ed.: George Bizet: Carmen (London and New York, 1982) [ENO opera guide]

J. Leukel: ‘Puccini et Bizet’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxv/2 (1982), 61–6

D. Maingueneau: Carmen, les racines d’un mythe (Paris, 1984)

F. Fornari: Carmen adorata: psicoanalisi della donna demoniaca (Milan, 1985)

F. Reckow: ‘“Cette musique est méchante, rusée, fataliste!” Un défi lancé a l'exégèse de Carmen de Bizet’,Les ecrivains français et l’opéra (Cologne, 1986), 197–214

L.A. Wright: ‘Les pêcheurs de perles: Before the Première’, Studies in Music, xx (1986), 27–45

T. Beardsley: ‘The Spanish Musical Sources of Bizet's Carmen’, Inter-American Music Review, x/2 (1988–9), 143–6

L’avant-scène opéra, no.124 (1989) [Les pêcheurs de perles issue]

W.E. Girard: A Performing Version of Georges Bizet’s Carmen (diss., U. of Texas,1989)

E. Baker: ‘The Scene Designs for the First Performance of Bizet's Carmen’, 19CM, xiii (1990), 230–42

K. Kaindl: ‘Stimme und Gestalt in der Opernübersetzung: am Beispiel Carmen von G. Bizet’, TEXTconTEXT, vi (1991), 227–50

S. McClary, ed.: Georges Bizet, Carmen (Cambridge, 1992)

S. Oksanen: ‘Oopperakäännösten ongelmia: Esimerkkinä Bizet'n Carmen’ [Problems with opera translations: Bizet’s Carmen as an example], Synteesi, xii/2 (1993), 59–68

E. Gould: The Fate of Carmen (Baltimore, 1996)

H. Lacombe, ed.: Georges Bizet, Les pêcheurs de perles: dossier de presse parisienne (1863) (Heilbronn, c1996)

H. Lacombe: Les voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris,1997)

d: other studies

R. Laparra: Bizet et l’Espagne (Paris, 1935)

W. Dean: Introduction to the Music of Bizet (London, 1950)

H. Shanet: ‘Bizet’s Suppressed Symphony’, MQ, xliv (1958), 461–76

W. Dean: ‘Bizet’s Self-Borrowings’, ML, xli (1960), 238–44

J. Klein: ‘The Centenary of Bizet's L'Arlésienne’, ML, liii (1972), 363–8

A. Renaudin: Georges Bizet et ses parents, en cinq enigmes (Yvetot, 1975)

G. Pintorno: Georges Bizet: la vita e la produzione teatrale (diss., U. of Parma, 1975–6)

M. Muller: L'oeuvre pianistique originale de Georges Bizet (diss., U. of Neuchâtel, 1976)

R. Luck: An Analysis of Three Variation Sets for Piano by Bizet, d'Indy and Pierné (diss., U. of Indiana, 1978)

J. Weiland: ‘Untergetaucht im Reich des Vergessens: Das Te Deum von Georges Bizet’, NZM, Jg.149 (1988), 3–7

L.A. Wright: ‘Bias, Influence and Bizet's Prix de Rome’, 19CM, xv (1992), 215–28

R.P. Locke: ‘The French Symphony: David, Gounod, and Bizet to Saint-Saëns, Frank, and Their Followers’, The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D.K. Holoman (New York, 1997), 163–94

Bizey [Bizet], Charles Joseph

(fl Paris, 1716–c1758). French maker of woodwind instruments. He was admitted into the Communautés d’arts et métier de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris (Paris community of master makers) in 1716 for which he served as juré compatible (‘expert responsible’). In 1721 he supplied two oboes to the Munich court. By 1734 he was located at rue Mazarine, Saint Sulpice; in that year he served as an ‘expert’ in the valuing of the instruments and tools of the maker Antoine Delerablée, successor to the Naust workshop. By 1746 his workshop address was rue Dauphine, St André des Arts. A document of ‘obligation’ dated 18 April of that year shows that Bizey was owed 515 livres for money and merchandise supplied to Nicolas Hannès Desjardins, oboist to the King's chamber.

Bizey was part of a network of makers who were linked by family and professional ties: he married three times (although he remained childless), each time to relations of his apprentice, the Parisian maker Paul Villars (Anne Simonne Villars, Elizabeth Simonne Chalopet and Anne Marguerite Chalopet). Bizey was also the first of a ‘dynasty’ of woodwind makers that continued at the rue Daulphine until 1812: Prudent Thieriot served a six-year apprenticeship with him, and Bizey came to consider him as his son. Prudent married Bizey's sister-in-law and on Bizey's death became master of the workshop, which was eventually bought by Dominique Porthaux who had also married into the family.

Although this dynasty of makers were renowned for all types of woodwinds, they specialized in reed instruments of the highest quality. Bizey used the marks ‘fleur-de-lis/BIZEY’ and ‘fleur-de-lis/BIZEY/A PARIS/sun’, and both Villars and Prudent adopted the fleur-de-lis of their master’s mark. Bizey was noted for his exceptionally fine oboes. An announcement in the Mercure de France of December 1749 (ii, 209) credits him with the invention of an oboe descending to g and of one an octave below the soprano instrument (a tenor oboe and a baritone oboe survive in the Musée de la Musique, Paris). He was among the first in France to make four-piece flutes. About 31 instruments with his mark survive, including recorders, flutes, a five-key bass flute, oboes, oboes da caccia, bassoons and rackets. These show him to be a maker of the highest order, one of the finest French woodwind instrument makers of the 18th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

YoungHI

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique les luthiers et la facture instrumentale: précis historique (Paris, 1893/R), 40–46, 98–9

P. Loubet de Sceaury: Musiciens et facteurs d’instruments de musique sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1949)

W. Jansen: The Bassoon: its History, Construction, Makers, Players, and Music (Buren, 1978)

M. Benoit: ‘L’apprentissage chez les facteurs d’instruments de musique à Paris, 1660–1661, 1715–1774’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 5–106

T. Giannini: Great Flute Makers of France: the Lot and Godfroy Families, 1650–1900 (London, 1993)

T. Giannini: The Baroque Flute in France (forthcoming)

TULA GIANNINI

Bizzarro, Il.

See Accademico Bizzarro Capriccioso.

Bizzossi.

See Besozzi family.

Bjelinski, Bruno

(b Trieste, 1 Nov 1909; d Silba, 3 Nov 1992). Croatian composer. He studied law at Zagreb University and then music at the Zagreb Conservatory, where his composition teachers were Blagoje Bersa and Franjo Dugan. Although Bjelinski began by practising law, he was a teacher at the Split Music School (1944–5) and from 1945 to 1977 was professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Zagreb Academy of Music. After his retirement he devoted himself tirelessly to composition. His music moved very rapidly away from the Germanic Romanticism of his teacher Bersa. Bjelinski developed a vivid neo-classical style, notable for its lively rhythms, strong melodic appeal and sharply etched harmonic structure. The brilliant and entertaining Divertimento (1948) was followed by a series of three sinfoniettas and five symphonies that are the best of his early works. Programmatically conceived, they include powerful funeral marches and dance movements, often moving from one to the other abruptly and sardonically. His old age was marked by the composition of nine symphonies (a number with voices) and many orchestral works, all written from the age of 70. His excellent handling of instruments is reflected in his numerous concertos, which have been used as advanced studies, but are also valuable contributions to the repertory. His dry, unsentimental style has proved readily adaptable to children’s works, of which Bjelinski has made a specialism. These include the operas Pčelica Maja (‘Maya the Bee’) and Slavuj (‘The Nightingale’) after Hans Christian Andersen, puppet plays based on Kipling and Andersen, and the ballets Pinocchio and Peter Pan.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Pčelica Maja [Maya the Bee] (children's op, 2, M. Koletić, after W. Bonsels), 1952, Rijeka, 9 Feb 1963, vs (Vienna, 1957)

Pinocchio (ballet, C. Collodi), 1959

Zaboravljiva princeza [The Forgotten Princess] (musical tale, Bjelinski), 1963

Peter Pan (ballet, after J.M. Barry), 1966

Noćni sastanak [Nocturnal Meeting] (musical tale), 1968

Heraklo (comic youth chbr op, 1, Bjelinski), 1969, Osijek, 2 June 1971

Močvara [The Swamp] (op, 1, Bjelinski), 1970, Osijek, 26 June 1972

Zvona [The Bells] (chbr op, 1, Bjelinski), 1972, Osijek, 7 Dec 1975

Mačak u čizmama [Puss in Boots] (ballet), 1976

Orfej XX stoljeća [Orpheus of the 20th Century] (op, 2, Bjelinski), 1978, Belgrade, 10 Oct 1981

Ružno pače [The Ugly Duckling] (puppet play, after H.C. Andersen), 1981

Slavuj [The Nightingale] (op, 3, epilogue, Bjelinski, after Andersen), 1982, Sarajevo, 15 Dec 1984

Knjiga u džungli [The Jungle Book] (puppet play, after R. Kipling), 1989

vocal

Svjetli grobovi [Shining Graves] (cant., Z.J. Jovanović), 1944; Ciciban (song cycle, O. Župančič), 1v, orch, 1947; Dvije pjesme Gorana Kovačića, 1v, pf, 1952; Candomblé, S, pf, perc ad lib, 1952–72; Bez povratka [Without Return] (Li-Tai-Po), 1v, orch, 1953; 3 dječje pjesme, 1v, pf, 1953; Pjesme za bezimenu [Songs for the Nameless One] (G. Krklec), 1v, orch, 1955; Zore i vihori [Dawns and Gales] (cant., V. Parun), 1961; Gitanjali (R. Tagore), 1v, str, 1962; Šuma spava [The Forest Sleeps] (G. Vitez), 1v, pf, 1965; Plavi čuperak [Blond Tuft of Hair] (M. Antić), S, fl, pf, 1968; Figuli-faguli, 1v, pf, 1973; Dialog (A.B. Šimićic), Mez, pf, 1975; Davidovi psalmi, 2 S, pf trio, 1988; Memories (Bjelinski), S, pf/pf trio, 1990; choruses and children's songs; see also orchestral [Festivalska sinfonietta, Syms. 6, 7, 14, 15]

orchestral

Suita iz Korkyre, 1944; Vc Conc. no.1, 1945, rev. 1968; Chbr Conc., pf, orch, 1948, rev. 1968; Divertimento, chbr orch, 1948; Bn Conc., 1950; Prelude, 1951; Cl Conc., 1952; Vn Conc., 1952; Vc Conc. no.2, 1953; Ob Conc., 1954; Fl Conc., 1955; Sym. no.1 ‘Summer’, 1955; Concertino, pf, str, perc, 1956; Va Conc., 1956; Concertino, vn, orch, 1957; Serenade, tpt, pf, str, perc, 1957; Mediterranean Sinfonietta, 1958; Sym. no.2 ‘In memoriam poetae’, 1961; Sinfonietta brasiliera, 1962

Svečana uvertira [Festive Ov.], 1963; Sym. no.3 ‘Music for Friends’, 1965; Sym. no.4 ‘Symphonia jubilans’, 1965; 5 Inventions, 1965; Sinfonietta concertante, pf, orch, 1967; Concertino, hn, cel, perc, str, 1967; Musica tonalis, bn, ob, str, 1968; Sym. no.5 ‘Simfonija za Taliju’, 1969; Petit concert, pf, chbr orch, 1973; Sym. no.6 ‘Symphonia vocalis’, chorus, pf, org, perc, 1974; Zimske svečanosti, tambura orch, org, perc, 1975; Concertino, gui, hpd, perc, str, 1977; Concertino di primavera, vn, hpd, str, 1978

Sym. no.7, Mez, orch, 1980; Festivalska sinfonietta, B, accdn ens, timp, military drum, 1980; Sym. no.8 ‘Četiri radosti života’ [Four Delights of Life], 1982; Sinfonietta, a trbn, str, 1982; Sym. no.9 ‘Simfonija otoka’, 1983; Sym. no.10 ‘Europa’, 1984; Sym. no.11, 1985; Sinfonietta, sax, perc, str, 1985; Sym. no.12, 1986; Sym. no.13, 1986; Igra sa zlatnim stijenama, accdn orch, 1987; Poesies, cl, str, 1987; Sym. no.14, B, rec, orch, 1987; Conc. ‘Oboe iubilans’, ob, str, 1988; Sym. no.15, 4 v, orch, 1988; Flauto concertante, fl, orch, 1989; Concerto grosso, solo insts, str, 1990; Die Musik ist unsrer Trost (Elegija), str, 1991; Dnevnik iz Italije [Diary from Italy], chbr orch, 1991

chamber and solo instrumental

Chbr: Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1933, rev. 1976; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1935; Str Qt no.1 ‘Lirski’, 1943; 6 Inventions, vc, pf, 1947; 2 Inventions, bn, pf, 1950; Sonata, vc, pf, 1950; Str Qt no.2, 1951; Pf Trio no.1, 1953; Sonata no.3, vn, pf, 1960; Trio, fl, vc, pf, 1960; Sonata, cl, pf, 1966; Scherzo di notte, wind qnt, 1969; Sonatina, hn, pf, 1973; April-Sonatine, fl, pf, 1975; Musica per tromba, tpt, pf, 1975; Varijacije na pučku temu [Variations on a Popular Tune], wind qnt, 1975

Aprilska sonatina, fl, pf, 1976; Poema o pupoljcima, vn, pf, 1978; Gumpis Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1979; Poesies, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, 1979; Sonatina ‘Laudate Joanem’, ob, pf, 1980; Preludij, arija i rondo, bn, pf, 1981; Tri biblijske legende, trbn, pf, 1983; Tri mušketira [Three Musketeers], 3 hn, 1984; Str Qt no.3, 1985; Sonata no.4 ‘Sonata na rastanku’ [Sonata of Farewell], vn, pf, 1989; Pf Trio no.2 ‘Trio de collines’, 1989; Priča [A Tale], 4 sax, 1990; Sonatina ‘Encore un printemps…’, vn, pf, 1991; Sonata ‘Dona Cupidis’, fl, pf, 1991; Spielmusik, 4 sax, 1992

Pf: Prelude in C, 1938; Sonata no.1, 1938, lost; 3 Suites, 1938; Toccata, f, 1938; Sonata no.2, 1944; 7 Bagatelles, 1950; Partita, 1954; Proljetne igre [Spring Games], suite, 1957; Sonata no.3, 1960; Na velikom brodu [On a Big Ship], 1961; Tri čudesna sna [3 Wonderful Girls], 1967; Interludij, 1969; Iz dječje glave [From Children's Heads], 1973; Koncert za Romea i Juliju, 1981; Cvijeće za Scarlattija [Flowers for Scarlatti], 1983

Principal publishers: Ars Croatica, Breitkopf, Drustvo hrvatske kompozitora, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Kovačević: Hrvatski kompozitori i njihova djela [Croatian composers and their works] (Zagreb, 1960), 41–66

I. Spuvičić: ‘Estetski pogledi u novijoj hrvatskoj muzici: pregled temeljnih gledanja četrnaestorice kompozitora’ [Aesthetic views in contemporary Croatian Music: a survey of the basic concepts of 14 composers], Arti musices, i (1969), 23–61

I. Supičić: ‘Aesthetic Views in Contemporary Croatian Music: a Survey of the Basic Concepts of Nine Composers’, Arti musices (1970), 107–37 [special issue]

T. Reich: Susreti sa suvremenim kompozitorima Jugoslavije [Meetings of contemporary composers of Yugoslavia] (Zagreb, 1972), 23–6

J. Andreis: Music in Croatia (Zagreb, 1974, 2/1982)

A. Koci and others: Jugoslovanska glasbena dela [Musical works of Yugoslavia] (Ljubljana, 1980), 43–51

B. Bjelinski and E. Krpan: ‘Volim da me vole: svakome valja dopustiti da ima svoj put’ [I want to be liked: everyone should be allowed to make his own journey], Danas (31 Sept 1989)

I. Supičić, ed.: Bruno Bjelinski: 1909–1992 (Zagreb, 1994)

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Bjerre, Jens

(b Århus, 13 Oct 1903; d Copenhagen, 3 Jan 1986). Danish composer and organist. He studied at the Copenhagen Conservatory (1919–23) with Christiansen (piano) and Rung-Keller (organ and theory). After passing the organists’ examination in 1925 he studied in Paris (1925–7), notably with Lazar Levy (piano), and served as organist at the Danish church there. From 1933 he was organist at the Stefans Kirke in Copenhagen, and from 1955 to 1973 at the Garnisons Kirke. Much of his music, such as the Piano Trio (1947), is marked by a lyrical and light style influenced by French neo-classicism and in accordance with the prevailing mood of Danish music in the 1930s. However, the density of musical argument in later works such as the dramatic Diapsalmata for cello and piano (1953), inspired by Kierkegaard, suggests that he was also influenced by Hindemith.

WORKS

(selective list)

dates are of first performance unless otherwise stated

Dramatic: Hans og Trine (song-play, P.M. Møller), S, T, pf, 1939; Danserinden (ballet, P. Lange), S, orch, 1957; Kameliadamen (ballet), Copenhagen, 1958; En sjael efter Døden (television score, J.L. Heiberg), children’s choir, 1962; Much Ado about Nothing (incid music, W. Shakespeare), wind band, Copenhagen, 1963; Den hvide Souper (ballet), orch, 1963; radio scores

Orch: Madrigal con variazioni, 1948; Ouverture parisienne, 1949; ‘Før og nu’ [‘Then and Now’], orch fantasy, 1966

Chbr: Mosaïque musicale 1, fl, vn, vc, 1936; Serenade, fl, ob, va, 1936; Sonatina, vn, pf, 1939; Koncertante, vn, pf, 1940; Sonate, vn, pf, 1945; Pf Trio, 1946–7; Sérénade des vagabonds, fl, pf trio, 1949; Mosaïque musicale 2a, eng hn, vn, vc, 1950; Croquis, ob, cl, 1950; Diapsalmata, vc, pf, 1953; Wind Qnt, 1954; Duo, fl, eng hn, 1955; Samspil mellem fløjte og violoncel, fl, vc, 1968; Mosaïque musicale 2b, fl, vc, pf, 1974; Mosaïque musicale 3, fl, vn, vc, 1974; Mosaïque musicale 4, fl, vn, vc, 1975; 4 Etudes, cl, pf, 1976; 5 Short Pieces, vc, pf, 1980

Inst: 22 croquis de Paris, vn, 1943; Sonata, vc, 1946; Variété, fl, 1952; Toccata con fughetta e ciaconna, org, 1956; Parabel, org, 1956; Dionysisk suite, ob, 1962; Purgatorio con 3 intermezzi, va, 1963; Riflessione, cl, 1965

Choral: Nordisk treklang [Nordic Triad], mixed vv, orch, 1946; Stefanus, mixed vv, org, 1949; Itokih, mixed vv, wind qnt, 2 pf, perc, 1950–4; 14 Little Choral Pieces, unacc. vv, 1957; music for children’s choir

Songs: 6 lyriske sange, 1930–57; Feberdikte [Fever Poems] (K. Hamsun), B, pf, 1939; 7 Songs, 1966; c60 other songs

Principal publishers: Borups, Edition Dania, Hansen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Mortensen: ‘Portraet af Jens Bjerre’, DMt, lx/1 (1985–6), 12–15

NIELS MARTIN JENSEN/DANIEL M. GRIMLEY

Björk (Gundmundsdottir)

(b Reykjavik, 21 Nov 1966). Icelandic pop singer and songwriter. Although her earliest recordings date back to her eponymous debut album in 1977, it was with the Icelandic indie band the Sugarcubes, formed in 1986 with Einar Orn Benediktsson, that Björk made her initial impact outside her homeland. Her eccentric, mannered vocal style was captured perfectly on the band's debut single Birthday (1987) which was a minor UK hit. The group secured moderate commercial success with their guitar-based style, only to disband in 1992 after their most successful UK hit single, Hit.

It was not until Björk's excellent solo album Debut (1993), largely produced by Nellee Hooper (of Soul II Soul and Massive Attack), that the singer truly established herself as a major musical force. Debut contained songs which fused dance, non-western, jazz and ballad styles into a seamless whole, and yielded five UK hits, including ‘Human Behaviour’ and ‘Venus as a Boy’. Björk's breathy, shrill, melismatic vocal style is instantly recognizable, and her unusual accentuation and distinctive lyricism highlight a bizarrely naive and poetic use of English. Her lyrics play around with metre and syntax, and possess an almost child-like symbolism. Post (1995) was more disparate, bolder and with a greater reliance on contemporary dance rhythms (two tracks were written with the trip hop producer Tricky). The tracks ‘Hyperballad’ and ‘Isobel’ stood out, while the cover, ‘It's oh so quiet’, was a typically eccentric take on 1940s big-band music and became her biggest hit to date, reaching number four in the UK singles chart. Telegram (1996) was primarily a remix album of Post, while Homogenic (1997) was starker still, and showed the singer moving farther away from the pop mainstream (and, perhaps, into self-parody). A talented and unique artist, Björk's refreshingly eclectic approach to music-making has made her one of the most important artists of the 1990s. For further information see M. Aston: Björk: Björkography (London, 1996).

DAVID BUCKLEY

Bjørkvold, Jon-Roar

(b Oslo, 2 May 1943). Norwegian musicologist. After studying musicology and singing at the Leningrad Conservatory, he completed the MA (1969) with a thesis on the songs of Glinka and the doctorate (1981) at Oslo University with a dissertation on children’s songs. In 1970 he was appointed to teach at the institute of musicology of Oslo University, where he was made full professor in 1982 and was chair of the institute, 1983–5. His work focusses mainly on Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries and children’s music; he has also compiled collections of children’s songs, including Barnas egen sangbok [‘Children’s Own Songbook’] (Oslo, 1979), and made the documentary film When the Moment Sings: the Muse Within, with Africa in the Mirror, 1995.

WRITINGS

Den spontane barnesangen vårt musikalske morsmål [Children’s spontaneous singing: our musical mother tongue] (diss., U. of Oslo,1981; Oslo, 1985)

‘Ivan Susanin, en russisk nasjonalopera under to despotier’, SMN, viii (1982), 9–44

‘En drofting av russiske trekk i Igor Stravinskijs musikk’ [Discussing Russian traits in Igor Stravinsky’s music], SMN, ix (1983), 151–79

‘Sostakovic’s opera Nesen i spenningsfeltet mellom folketradisjon, intonasjonsteori og kulturpolitikk’ [Shostakovich’s opera Nos suspended between folk tradition, the theory of intonation and cultural politics], Tvärspel: festskrift till Jan Ling, ed. Å. Blomström and others (Göteborg, 1984), 313–24

Komponist og samfunn: Hans Eislers musikk i lys av lif og skrifter, Schönberg og Brecht [Composer and society: the music of Hans Eisler in light of his life and the writings of Schönberg and Brecht] (Oslo, 1985)

‘Canto, ergo sum: Musical Child Cultures in the United States, the Soviet Union and Norway’, The Biology of Music Making: Denver 1987, 117–35

Fra Akropolis til Hollywood: filmmusikk i retorikkens lys [From the Acropolis to Hollywood: film music in the light of rhetoric] (Oslo, 1988)

Det musiske menneske: barnet og sangen, lek og learinggjennom livets faser [The muse within: creativity and communication, song and play from childhood through adulthood] (Oslo, 1989; Eng. trans., 1992; Dutch, 1993; Chin., 1996)

KARI MICHELSEN

Björling, Jussi [Johan] (Jonaton)

(b Stora Tuna, 5 Feb 1911; d Stockholm, 9 Sept 1960). Swedish tenor. He was first taught by his father, David Björling (1873–1926), a professional tenor, and from 1916 made many concert tours with his father and two brothers as a treble in the Björling Male Quartet, which made a few commercial recordings in the USA in 1920. In 1928 he entered the Stockholm Conservatory, where he studied with Joseph Hislop and John Forsell. After a preliminary appearance at the Royal Swedish Opera as the Lamplighter in Manon Lescaut (21 July 1930), he made his recognized début there on 20 August 1930 as Don Ottavio, shortly afterwards singing Arnold in Guillaume Tell and Jonathan in Carl Nielsen’s Saul og David. Until 1938 he was a regular member of the Stockholm Opera, and always maintained his connection with that house. He was soon in general demand in the leading European operatic centres (Vienna début as Radames, 1936); and his international status was confirmed by his successful débuts at Chicago in Rigoletto (8 December 1937), in New York in La bohème (24 November 1938), at Covent Garden in Il trovatore (12 May 1939) and at San Francisco in La bohème (18 October 1940). Covent Garden had to wait until the last year of his life for another chance to hear him (in La bohème), whereas in America he became an indispensable favourite, returning regularly to the Metropolitan and other houses except during the war years of 1941–5, which he spent in Sweden.

Although Björling’s repertory had by this time become almost entirely Italian, his appearances were infrequent in Italy itself, where the purity and restraint of his style may perhaps have disconcerted a public used to a more overt and impassioned display. His voice was a true tenor of velvety smoothness, though capable also of ringing high notes; admirably schooled, it showed remarkable consistency from top to bottom of his register and throughout the 30 years of his career. To the end, the glowing tone and impeccable musicianship provided ample compensation for a stage presence that was rather a matter of deportment than of acting. His smooth legato and plangent tone were particularly well suited to Gounod’s Faust and Romeo; but the centre of his repertory consisted of Verdi’s Manrico, Riccardo and Don Carlos and Puccini’s Rodolfo, Cavaradossi and Des Grieux (see illustration). He was also a notable soloist in Verdi’s Requiem, of which he made three recordings (the finest is with Toscanini at Carnegie Hall in 1940) and an appreciable interpreter of songs, especially those of Richard Strauss. Having a voice ideally adapted to the gramophone, he made a large number of delightful and valuable records, including many complete operas, among which his Rodolfo in the famous Beecham set of La bohème well illustrates the distinction of his tone and phrasing. Björling can also be heard on several live recordings from the Metropolitan and the Royal Opera in Stockholm. He published a volume of memoirs, Med bagaget i strupen [Travels with my larynx] (Stockholm, 1945).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (G. Baldini; R. Vegeto)

E.S. Lund and H. Rosenberg: Jussi Björling: a Record List (Copenhagen, 1969)

J.W. Porter and H. Henrysson: A Jussi Björling Discography (Indianapolis, IN, 1982)

A.-L. Björling and A.Farkas: Jussi (Portland, OR, 1996)

A.-L. Björling and A.Farkas: ‘Jussi Björling’s Début at the Met’, OQ, xiii/2 (1996–7), 78–88

A. Blyth: Jussi Björling’, Opera, xxxvi (1985), 994–7

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/ALAN BLYTH

Björnsson, Árni

(b Lóni, Kelduhverfi, 23 Dec 1905; d Reykjavík, 3 July 1995). Icelandic composer, flautist and pianist. Largely self-taught, he studied at the Reykjavík College of Music (1930–35) with Victor Urbancic and Franz Mixa (theory, composition and piano), while earning a living playing in Rejkjavík dance bands. He studied at the RMCM (1944–6), graduating with an associate’s diploma. A prominent musician in Reykjavík in the years following World War II, he taught the piano and the flute at the Reykjavík College of Music (1946–52), and was a flautist in the Iceland SO from its formation in 1950. In 1952 he was the victim of a violent attack that left him permanently brain damaged, leading to the abandonment of his professional career.

Björnsson’s early works are often playful and elegant, in a tonal style permeated by chromaticism. His experience in writing dance and band music occasionally informs his concert works. Among the best-known of these, the two violin romances consist of central sections in a popular vein framed by more lyrical, expansive themes. Although still able to compose after 1952, his compositional style was severely affected, and his later output consists mostly of simple songs and arrangements. Among the large-scale works aborted following the attack was Gunnlaugur ormstunga, which would have been the first full-scale opera by an Icelandic composer.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Upp til fjalla [In the Mountains], op.5, 1939; Variations on an Icelandic Song, 1949; Nýjársnótt [New Year's Eve] (ov. and incid music, I. Einarsson, op.11, 1950; Lítil svíta, op.12, str, 1950

Inst: Romance, op.6, vn, pf, c1945; Romance, op.14, vn, pf, c1951; 4 Icelandic Folk Songs, fl, pf, c1950

Many songs, org pieces, dance music

Principal publishers: Iceland Music Information Centre, Musica Islandica

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Haraldsson: Lífsfletir (Akureyri, 1979)

G. Bergendal: New Music in Iceland (Reykjavík, 1991)

M. Podhajski: Dictionary of Icelandic Composers (Warsaw, 1997)

ÁRNI HEIMIR INGÓLFSSON

Blacher, Boris

(b Niu-chang, China, 19 Jan 1903; dBerlin, 30 Jan 1975). German composer of Baltic descent.

JOSEF HÄUSLER

1. Life.

In 1922 he went to Berlin, where he initially studied architecture and mathematics at the wish of his parents. He studied composition with Friedrich Ernst Koch at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1924–6) and read music under Schering, Blume and von Hornbostel at Berlin University (1927–31). Thereafter he worked in Berlin as a composer and arranger until his appointment in 1938 as director of a composition class at the Dresden Conservatory, a post he was obliged to relinquish the following year because his teaching was not in accord with Nazi cultural policy. After World War II he returned to his work as a composition teacher, first at the Internationales Musikinstitut in Berlin-Zehlendorf and then, from 1948, as a professor at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, which he directed from 1953 to 1970. He gave lectures and seminars at the summer courses in Bryanston (1949, 1950), at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1950, 1951) and at Tanglewood (1955) and wrote the textbook Einführung in den strengen Satz (Berlin, 1953). Also in 1955 the West Berlin Academy of Arts appointed him a regular member of its music section, the direction of which he assumed in 1961; from 1968 to 1971 he was president of the academy. His composition pupils include Ballif, Burt, von Einem (Blacher had a decisive hand in writing the libretto of Der Prozess), Erbse, Klebe, Reimann and Sheriff. Among the many awards he received were the Bach Prize of Hamburg and the Grosse Kunstpreis of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Blacher, Boris

2. Works.

Blacher's music is playful in character, with an avoidance of brooding and tragedy. His ideal is a light, transparent texture with delicately traced and coloured ornamental lines; his best works are dominated by brightness of tone and an unobtrusive logic that reveals both agility of mind and a sure sense of formal proportioning. The themes and motifs are terse and often witty and caustic: Blacher's ideas often give the impression of throwaway instrumental bons mots, but closer examination reveals their careful intervallic shaping. In working his material, particularly from the 1950s onwards, he starts with a single cell, clearly defined in its intervals and rhythm, and subjects it to processes of expansion and contraction. In this way the music achieves a quality of organic growth and decline. There is a connection between his playful approach to construction and the tendency to high spirits always present in his music, though this can equally modulate into irony or attain an Apollonian spirituality.

In general Blacher's work is based on the poles of dynamism and lyricism, but even his lyricism is more animated than dream-like and characterized by understatement. His allegro-type compositions are dominated by a subtle play of motoric rhythms, pauses and shifts of metrical emphasis, techniques that give his language flexibility and rhythmic variety, two unmistakable attributes of his style. His lyricism aims at immediate communication, favouring the mimetic over the rhetorical, and is determinedly anti-Romantic, recalling Satie's notion of ‘expression dépouillée’. Blacher's tendency towards the greatest possible reduction of musical means became increasingly pronounced, and with this the pictorial and ornamental elements in his work took on greater importance, though this tended to rob the linear writing of a sense of direction and necessity. Blacher was influenced relatively little by the Austro-German tradition, but rather by French composers (Satie and Milhaud), Stravinsky (above all in the field of rhythm) and jazz (in melodic construction and musical rhetoric).

Harmonically Blacher's compositions remained until the late 1940s within the bounds of tonality, extended and defamiliarized by dissonance and polytonality. After 1948 he began to come to terms with the 12-note method, but in this he was attracted more by its possibilities of interval ordering than by its atonal features. Characteristic of Blacher's approach was his concern from the outset to achieve a correspondence between 12-note serial motivic writing and rhythmic and metrical organization. The result was a development of his earlier practice, in that alternating time signatures which, under Stravinsky's influence, had become a general principle in Blacher's work shortly after 1940, were now systematized, their succession being determined by rows that are also subject to retrograde operations. These so called ‘variable metres’, which Blacher introduced in Ornamente for piano (1950), created a great deal of interest at the time and were taken up by other composers, among them Hartmann. But Blacher, by nature anti-orthodox, never used the principle as his sole means of durational organization.

Blacher's works for the theatre, both operas and ballets, are particularly important. Given the playful quality of his music, its precision and its almost gestural, graphic character, it was perhaps inevitable that Blacher should feel a strong affinity for the dance. The subjects of his stage works (as well as the range of texts he has set) reflect varied intellectual and literary interests. First in the series of major ballets were Hamlet (1949) and Lysistrata (1950), two highly contrasted works. Blacher had been considering a ballet on Hamlet shortly before World War II; at the time it remained unrealised, and Blacher subsequently reworked the existing music into a symphonic poem, composing anew for the 1949 score, whose melodic, rhythmic and harmonic permutations prefigure the move to dodecaphony and variable metres. Lysistrata was his first major 12-note composition. Of the later ballets, Der Mohr von Venedig (after Othello) is particularly noteworthy; it was succeeded by Demeter and Tristan.

The subjects of Blacher's operas are equally fascinating, and again he turned quite early to Shakespeare for the chamber opera Romeo und Julia (1943). This piece was affected by the material restrictions of war: it requires only a small number of instruments, though its vocal forces are less modest (eight singers, three speakers and a madrigal chorus). Another chamber opera, Die Flut, followed in 1946, this time taking its story, concerning the behaviour of people in extreme situations, from Maupassant. The tendency to social and political criticism that Die Flut revealed was pursued in the ballet-opera Preussisches Märchen (1949), which, based on the celebrated Wilhelmine affair of the Captain of Köpenick, mocks German trust in authority and veneration of uniforms, using a consciously operetta-like manner.

With Rosamunde Floris (1960) the drama moves into surrealist realms from which Blacher's music stands at a certain distance. Zwischenfälle bei einer Notlandung (1965), which uses electronic means, returns to a portrayal of people under extreme conditions. Zweihunderttausend Taler (1969) combines a fairytale atmosphere with social criticism. All of these and Blacher's earlier operas have a more or less straightforward plot, and there is an evident predilection for ‘epic music theatre’. But Blacher's output also includes an epic piece abstracted to the highest degree: the Abstrakte Oper no.1 (1953). Instead of a narrative the work presents basic patterns of human behaviour: love, fear, pain, panic. The text, by Blacher's friend Werner Egk, consists, in all except one scene, of materials that have no semantic meaning but portray an archetypal emotional situation. In this the piece may be considered a precursor of Ligeti's much more complex Aventures. Blacher's constructive methods in the Abstrakte Oper include variable metres, ostinato forms and 12-note series. On the periphery of opera are the Gesänge des Seeräubers O'Rourke und seiner Geliebten Sally Brown, a concert piece with an imaginary scenario. The music has an affinity with jazz, shows pointillist tendencies in its sparseness of texture, and draws on the idiom of Weill. Of Blacher's other vocal works, the oratorio Der Grossinquisitor (after Dostoyevsky) and the Requiem are the most significant.

It was Blacher's instrumental works that made his name most widely known. Principal among these is the Concertante Musik for orchestra (1937), a three-part composition that brings together instrumental virtuosity, the transparency of chamber music and a jazz-like impulsiveness in a successful and highly effective manner. But it was the Orchestervariationen über ein Thema von Niccolò Paganini (1947) that established his international reputation. These 16 variations on the famous A minor theme, also used by Brahms, Rakhmaninov, Lutosławski and others, may be seen as a true reflection of his compositional talents, giving a free rein to his orchestral virtuosity and brilliance, and revealing a mastery that can clothe the most complex contrapuntal writing in the guise of ‘faire plaisir’. Other major, large-scale instrumental works include the Orchester-Ornament (1953), in which the technique of variable metres is applied to a large orchestra, the Second Piano Concerto (1952), also in variable metres, and the Variationen über ein Thema von Muzio Clementi for piano and orchestra (1961). The considerable output of chamber compositions was, after 1962, supplemented by a series of pieces that use electronic means to modify instrumental and vocal sounds.

Blacher, Boris

WORKS

Principal publisher: Bote & Bock

dramatic

op.

—	Habemeajaja (chbr op, 1, Heggars), 1929; Berlin, 30 Jan 1987
6	Fest im Süden (dance drama, 1, E. Petz), 1935; Kassel, 4 Feb 1937; orch suite, op.6a
13	Harlekinade (ballet, prol, 1, epilogue, J. Keith), 1939; Krefeld, 14 Feb 1940
19	Fürstin Tarakanowa (op, 3, K.O. Koch), 1940; Wuppertal, 5 Feb 1941; orch suite, op.19a
—	Das Zauberbuch von Erzerum (ballet, A. Mierau) [on themes of Flotow], 1941; rev. as Der erste Ball, 1950; Berlin, 11 June 1950
22	Romeo und Julia (chbr op, 3, after W. Shakespeare), 1943; Berlin-Zehlendorf, 1947
24	Die Flut (chbr op, 1. H. von Cramer), 1946; Dresden, 4 March 1947
27	Die Nachtschwalbe (dramatisches Nocturno, 1, F. Wolf), 1947; Leipzig, 22 Feb 1948
30	Preussisches Märchen (ballet-opera, 5 scenes, von Cramer, after C. Zuckmayer: Der Hauptmann von Köpenick), 1949; Berlin, 23 Sept 1952
33	Chiarina (ballet, 1, P. Strecker), 1946; Berlin, 22 Jan 1950
34	Lysistrata (ballet, 3 scenes, after Aristophanes), 1950; Berlin, 30 Sept 1951; orch suite, op.34a
35	Hamlet (ballet, prol, 3 scenes, T. Gsovsky, after Shakespeare), 1949; Munich, 19 Nov 1950; orch suite, op.35a
43	Abstrakte Oper no.1 (op, 1, W. Egk), 1953; Hesse Radio, 28 June 1953; staged, Mannheim, 17 Oct 1953
50	Der Mohr von Venedig (ballet, prol, 8 scenes, epilogue, E. Hanka, after Shakespeare: Othello), 1955; Vienna, 29 Nov 1955
60	Rosamunde Floris (op, 2, G. von Westerman, after G. Kaiser), 1960; Berlin, 21 Sept 1960
—	Demeter (ballet, Y. Georgi), 1963; Schwetzingen, 4 June 1964
—	Tristan (ballet, T. Gsovsky), 1965; Berlin, 10 Oct 1965; orch suite
—	Zwischenfälle bei einer Notlandung (reportage, 2 phases and 14 situations, von Cramer), 1965; Hamburg, 4 Feb 1966
—	Zweihunderttausend Taler (op, 3 scenes, Blacher, after S. Alejchem), 1969; Berlin, 25 Sept 1969
—	Yvonne, Prinzessin von Burgund (op, 4, Blacher, after W. Gombrowicz), 1972; Wuppertal, 15 Sept 1973
—	Das Geheimnis des entwendeten Briefes (chbr op, 7 scenes, H. Brauer, after E.A. Poe); Berlin, 14 Feb 1975
—	Incid music: Romeo und Julia (Shakespeare), 1951, unpubd; Lulu (F. Wedekind), 1952, unpubd; Georges Dandin (Molière), 1955, unpubd; Krieg und Frieden (A. Neumann, E. Piscator and G. Prüfer, after L. Tolstoy), 1955; Robespierre (R. Rolland), 1963, unpubd; Trauung (Gombrowicz), 1968, unpubd; Heinrich IV (Shakespeare), 1970, unpubd
—	Film scores: Bismarck, silent film score, orch, 1926, unpubd, lost; Aus dem Todeslager Sacksenhausen, 1946, unpubd; Gustav Stresemann, orch, 1956, unpubd; Bernhard Heiliger, 1956, unpubd; Le tribunal, small orch, 1965, unpubd; Wassertropfen, elec, 1966, unpubd; Heine heute, 1970, unpubd

orchestral

—	Symphony, 1929; destroyed
—	Concerto, 2 tpt, str, 1931; Greifswald, 1932; destroyed
—	Konzert-Overtüre, 1931; Berlin, 6 Jan 1993
2	Kleine Marschmusik, 1932; Berlin, 22 Nov 1932
—	Serenade [arr. Zwei estnische Nationaltänze, pf], 1933; destroyed
4	Capriccio [on a folksong], 1933; Berlin, 14 July 1935
5	Kurmusik, small orch, 1933; Bad Pyrmont, 1933
—	Divertimento, str, 1935; Mannheim, 14 Oct 1977
—	Piano Concerto, 1935; Stuttgart, 1936; lost
—	Drei Orchester-Etüden, 1936; destroyed
7	Divertimento, wind, 1936, Berlin, 24 Feb 1937
8	Geigenmusik, vn, orch, 1936; Wiesbaden, 1937
—	Lustspiel-Ouvertüre, 1937; destroyed
10	Concertante Musik, 1937; Berlin, 6 Dec 1937
12	Symphony, 1938; Berlin, 5 Feb 1939
—	Concerto da camera, 2 vn, vc, orch, 1939; Birmingham, 1939; unpubd
17	Hamlet, sym., poem, 1940; Berlin, 28 Oct 1940
20	Concerto, str, 1940; Hamburg, 18 Oct 1942
24	Partita, str, perc, 1945; Berlin, autumn 1945
—	Concerto, jazz orch, 1946; Berlin, 1946
26	Orchestervariationen über ein Thema von Niccolò Paganini, 1947; Leipzig, 27 Nov 1947
28	Piano Concerto no.1, 1947; Göttingen, 20 March 1948
29	Violin Concerto, 1948; Munich, 17 Nov 1950
36	Concerto, cl, bn, hn, tpt, harp, str, 1950; Berlin, 14 June 1950
—	Dialog, fl, vn, pf, str, 1950; Basle, 1952
42	Piano Concerto no.2, 1952; Berlin, 15 Sept 1952
44	Orchester-Ornament, 1953; Venice, 15 Sept 1953
45	Studie im Pianissimo, 1953; Louisville, Kentucky, 4 Sept 1954
46	Zwei Inventionen, 1954; Edinburgh, 28 Aug 1954
48	Viola Concerto, 1954; Cologne, 14 March 1955
51	Orchester-Fantasie, 1956; London, 12 Oct 1956
52	Hommage à Mozart, 1956; Berlin, 10 Dec 1956
53	Music for Cleveland, 1957; Cleveland, 21 Nov 1957
59	Musica giocosa, 1959; Saarbrücken, 30 April 1959
61	Variationen über ein Thema von Muzio Clementi, pf, orch, 1961; Berlin, 4 Oct 1961
—	Konzertstück, wind qnt, str, 1963; Donaueschingen, 19 Oct 1963
—	Cello Concerto, 1964; Cologne, 19 March 1965
—	Virtuose Musik, vn, 10 wind, timp, perc, harp, 1966; Hanover, New Hampshire, 19 Aug 1967
—	Plus minus one, str qt, jazz ens, 1966; unpubd
—	Das musikalische Opfer, arr. 1966
—	Collage, 1968; Vienna, 5 Oct 1969
—	Concerto, high tpt, str, 1970; Nuremberg, 11 Feb 1971
—	Triga I, small orch, 1970, collab. S. Kai, P.G. Soegijo; Graz, 24 Oct 1970
—	Concerto, cl, chbr orch, 1971; Schwetzingen, 12 May 1972
—	Sonata, 2 vc, 11 insts ad lib, 1972; Berlin, 26 Dec 1972
—	Stars and Strings, jazz ens, str, 1972; Nuremberg, 12 Jan 1973
—	Poème, orch, 1974; Vienna, 31 Jan 1976
—	Pentagramm, str, 1974; Berlin, 4 April 1975

choral

21	Der Grossinquisitor (L. Borchard, after F. Dostoyevsky), orat, 1942; Berlin, 14 Oct 1947
—	Vier Chöre (F. Villon), 1944
—	Es taget vor dem Walde (old Ger.), cant, S, B, chorus, str, 1946; Berlin, 29 June 1946; unpubd
49	Träume vom Tod und vom Leben (H. Arp), cant, T, chorus, orch, 1955; Wuppertal, 5 June 1955
56	Die Gesänge des Seeräubers O'Rourke und seiner Geliebten Sally Brown, beide auf das Felseneiland En Vano Anhelar verschlagen (G. von Rezzori), high S, female cabaret singer, Bar, spkr, speaking chorus, orch, 1958; Berlin, 5 Oct 1959
58	Requiem, S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1958; Vienna, 11 June 1959
—	Jüdische Chronik (J. Gerlach), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1961, collab. Dessau, Hartmann, Henze, Wagner-Régeny (Prol by Blacher); Cologne, 14 Jan 1966
—	Anacaona (A. Tennyson), chorus, 1969; Zagreb, 13 May 1969
—	Vokalisen, chorus, 1974

solo vocal

1	Jazz-Koloraturen, S, a sax, bn, 1929
3	Fünf Sinnsprüche Omars des Zeltmachers, Mez/Bar, pf, 1931; Swiss radio, 1932
—	Drei Psalmen, Bar, pf, 1943; Berlin, 4 Oct 1962
—	Zwei Chansons (B. Brecht), 1v, cl, tpt, pf, gui, db, 1947; unpubd
25	Vier Lieder (F. Wolf), S/T, pf, 1947; Berlin, 24 March 1947
—	Nebel (C. Sandburg), 1v, pf, 1951
47	Francesca da Rimini (Dante), S, vn, 1954; Hamburg, 21 April 1958
54	Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (W. Stevens), S/T, str, 1957; Vienna, 11 Jan 1959
57	Aprèslude (G. Benn), 4 songs, Mez/Bar, pf, 1958; Berlin, 4 Dec 1958
—	Five Spirituals, Mez/Bar, insts, 1962; Vienna, 9 March 1963
—	Parergon zum ‘Eugen Onegin’ (A. Pushkin), Mez, small orch, 1966
—	Ungereimtes (nursery rhymes), 1v, pf, 1967; Berlin, 26 Nov 1969
—	3 (6 + x) oder For Seven, S, perc, db, 1973; Berlin, 13 May 1973
—	Prelude und Konzertarie, Mez, orch, 1974; Vienna, 12 Dec 1985

chamber

9	Estnische Tänze, 10 wind, 1935; unpubd, destroyed
11	Four Pieces (String Quartet no.1), 1930, Frankfurt, 6 Dec 1939
—	String Trio, 1931; Berlin, 18 April 1993
15	Sonata, fl, pf, 1940; Mannheim, 8 Feb 1978
16	String Quartet no.2, 1940; Venice, 1941
—	Sonata, vc, pf, 1940–41; Riga, 28 Jan 1944
18	Sonata, vn, pf, 1941
31	Divertimento, tpt, trbn, pf, 1946; Berlin, 1946
32	String Quartet no.3, 1944; Berlin, June 1947
38	Divertimento, 4 ww, 1951; Munich, 28 Sept 1951
40	Sonata, vn, 1951; Berlin; 27 Jan 1952
41	Epitaph (String Quartet no.4), 1951, Berlin; 25 Jan 1953
55	Two Poems, jazz qt, 1957; New York, 14 Nov 1958
—	Perpetuum mobile, vn, 1963
—	Octet, cl, bn, hn, str qnt, 1965; Saarbrücken, 19 Oct 1966
—	Variationen über einen divergierenden c-moll-Dreiklang (String Quartet no.5), 1967; Berlin, 16 Jan 1968
—	Vier Studien, hpd, 1967
—	Spiel mit (mir) oder Die sieben Plagen, vn, pf, other melody insts ad lib, 1967
—	Vier Ornamente, vn, pf ad lib, 1969; New York, 5 Nov 1969
–	Piano Trio, 1970
—	Blues, Espagnola und Rumba philharmonica, 12 vc, 1972; Berlin, 28 Oct 1973
—	Duo, fl, pf, 1972
—	Sonata, 2 vc, 1972; Mannheim, 1973
—	Quintet, fl, ob, str trio, 1973–4; Tokyo, 22 Feb 1974
—	Tschaikowsky-Variationen, vc, pf, 1974

piano

—	Two Toccatas, 1931
—	Zwei estnische Nationaltänze, 1931; destroyed
14	Two Sonatinas, 1940; Berlin, 21 April 1941
—	Sonatine, pf 4 hands, 1942
23	Trois pièces, 1943
—	Piano Sonata no.1, 1943; Berlin, 6 Jan 1983
—	Piano Sonata no.2, 1943; Berlin, 6 Jan 1983
37	Ornamente, 7 studies, 1950
39	Sonata, 1951; Hamburg, 8 Feb 1952
—	24 Préludes, 1974; Berlin, 30 Oct 1976

electronic

—	Multiple Raumperspektiven, pf, elec, 1962; Berlin, 3 Oct 1962
—	Studie in Schwarz [elec version of ‘Nobody knows the trouble’ from Five Spirituals], 1962; Berlin, 19 Nov 1962
—	Glissierende Deviationen, tape, 1962
—	Persischer Sinnspruch [after Fünf Sinnsprüche Omars des Zeltmachers], tape, 1962
—	Der Astronaut, tape, 1963, unpubd
—	Elektronisches Scherzo, tape, 1965
—	Ariadne (F.W. Gotter), duodrama, 2 spkrs, elec, 1968–71; Berlin, 1968 (inc.), Berlin, 1975
—	Grosse Kugelkomposition, 1970; Osaka, 1970

Blacher, Boris

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (F. Reimer)

F. Burt: ‘The Teaching and Ideas of Boris Blacher’, The Score, no.9 (1954), 12–17

F.K. Grimm: ‘ Boris Blacher als Ballettkomponist’, Bühnengenossenschaft, x (1958–9), 390–91

K. Rehberg: ‘ Boris Blachers Concertante Musik op.10’, Musik und Musikerziehung in der Reifezeit, ed. E. Kraus (Mainz, 1959)

H.H. Stuckenschmidt: ‘Boris Blacher sechzig’, Melos, xxix (1962), 383–8

H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Boris Blacher (Berlin, 1963) [incl. work-list by H. Kunz]

K. Höcker: Gespräche mit Berliner Künstlern (Berlin, 1964)

W. Oehlmann: ‘ Zum Werk Boris Blachers’, Musica, xxi (1967), 54–6

S. Jahnke: ‘ Boris Blacher: Ornamente für Klavier, op.37’, Musik und Bildung, i (1969), 508–10

D. Stoverock: Der Feuervogel von Igor Strawinsky und Hamlet von Boris Blacher [= Die Oper, without no.] (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1969)

U. Stürzbecher: ‘Boris Blacher’, Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne, 1971), 9–18

Boris Blacher (Berlin, 1973) [Academy of Arts exhibition catalogue, incl. essays by T.M. Langner, J. Meyerowitz and H.H. Stuckenschmidt, and work list by H. Kunz]

H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Boris Blacher (Berlin, 1985)

S. Kross: ‘Zu Boris Blachers Oratorium Der Grossinquisitor’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums seit Händel: Festschrift Günther Massenkeil zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. R. Cadenbach and H. Loos (Bonn, 1986), 493–512

F. Riemer: ‘ Boris Blacher: 2. Konzert für Klavier und Orchester’, Melos, xlix (1987), 2–19

P. Scherf: ‘ Die “variablen” Prozesse in der Abstrakten Oper Nr. 1 von Boris Blacher’, Zum Verhältnis von zeitgenössischer Musik und zeitgenössischer Dichtung (Vienna, 1988), 136–53

H. Henrich, ed.: Boris Blacher 1903–1975: Dokumente zu Leben und Werk (Berlin, 1993)

Blachut, Beno

(b Ostrava-Vítkovice, 14 June 1913; d Prague, 10 Jan 1985). Czech tenor. He came from a poor mining family and at 14 worked in the iron works. He sang in a church choir, and in the Ostrava opera chorus. He studied at the Prague Conservatory under Louis Kadeřábek (1935–9) and made his début as Jeník with the Olomouc Opera in 1939. Under the director, Karel Nedbal, he studied 18 parts, notably Laca in Jenůfa and the Prince in Rusalka. He joined the Prague National Theatre in 1941 and was soon given Heldentenor roles; an excellent performance of Dalibor in 1945 made his name as the leading Czech tenor, whose Smetana roles, Laca in Jenůfa and later Ondrej in Suchoň’s The Whirlpool were regarded as models. He was also in demand for concerts, in which he sang tenor parts in cantatas and oratorios (including Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, Dvořák's Stabat mater and The Spectre's Bride, and Janáček's Glagolitic Mass), and songs. His recording of Janáček’s The Diary of One who Disappeared achieved renown.

Blachut’s voice, balanced in all registers, did not lose its lyric character even in Heldentenor parts. He was notable for his beautiful cantilena, a brilliantly mastered mezza voce, exemplary enunciation and pleasant dark vocal colouring. At dramatic moments he made use of a careful gradation and expressive accentuation, never at the expense of true vocal line, and always keeping his natural dignity. Towards the end of his career he took buffo roles, notably an excellently sung and acted Matěj Brouček in Janáček’s opera. He sang with the National Theatre on tours to Moscow, Berlin, Brussels and Edinburgh and as a guest in Vienna, Amsterdam and Helsinki. His many operatic recordings include a classic portrayal of Boris in Kát'a Kabanová.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

V. Pospíšil: ‘Profily výkonných umělců: Beno Blachut’ [Profiles of performers: Beno Blachut], HRo, v/1 (1952), 16 only

L. Šíp: Pěvci před mikrofonem [Singers in front of the microphone] (Prague, 1960)

J. Brožovská: Beno Blachut (Prague, 1964) [incl. lists of operatic and concert repertory and discography]

Obituary, HRo, xxxviii (1985), 119 only

V. Procházka, ed.: Národni divadlo a jeho předchůdci [The National Theatre and its predecessors] (Prague, 1988) [incl. list of repertory and discography]

ALENA NĚMCOVÁ

Black, Andrew

(b Glasgow, 15 Jan 1859; d Sydney, NSW, 15 Sept 1920). Scottish baritone. He relinquished a post as organist at Anderston United Presbyterian Church, Glasgow, to train as a singer with Alberto Randegger and John B. Welch in London, then in Milan with Domenico Scafati. His London début (Crystal Palace, 30 July 1887) was enthusiastically acclaimed, followed by operatic successes in Britain and America. Real recognition came at the Leeds Festival of 1892, when he sang the role of the Spectre in Dvořák’s The Spectre’s Bride. In constant demand for concerts and oratorios, Black was associated particularly with the title role in Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1894, Birmingham Festival) and Judas in Elgar’s The Apostles (1903, Birmingham). When the Royal Manchester College of Music was established in 1893 Black was appointed professor of singing. Later, after touring Australia, he settled in New South Wales.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Baptie: Musical Scotland Past and Present (Paisley, 1894/R)

H.G. Farmer: A History of Music in Scotland (London, 1947/R)

JEAN MARY ALLAN/RUZENA WOOD

Black(stone), Don(ald)

(b London, 21 June 1938). English lyricist. In the 1950s his various jobs included that of a writer for the New Musical Express, a performer in the rapidly declining variety theatres (billed under such titles as ‘Donald Black, the young gangster’ and ‘Don Black, a living joke’) and a song-plugger. He began writing song lyrics in the mid-1950s, gaining success in the 1960s when Matt Monroe recorded his April Fool and Walk away, Black’s English version of the German Eurovision song contest entry Warum nur warum. Beginning with the James Bond film Thunderball (1965) he worked with the composer John Barry on many title songs for films, including Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), and Born Free (1966), for which Black received an Academy Award. Further collaborations with Barry include the musicals Billy (1974) and The Little Prince and the Aviator (1982), he has also worked with Henry Mancini, Michel Legrand, Quincy Jones, Maurice Jarre and Ron Grainer. Other notable title songs for films include To Sir with Love (1967, with Mark London) and True Grit (1969, with Elmer Bernstein), while he provided Michael Jackson with the pop hit Ben (1972, with Walter Scharf ). He worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday (1980; later incorporated into the theatrical evening Song and Dance, 1982), Aspects of Love (1989) and Sunset Boulevard (1993). In these last two works Black’s direct style that creates strong poetic images from deceptively simple language was hampered by the prosaic needs of narrative in a sung-through structure.

WORKS

(selective list)

composers in parentheses

Musicals (dates those of first London performance unless otherwise stated): Maybe that’s your Problem (W. Scharf), Roundhouse,16 June 1970; Billy (J. Barry), Drury Lane, 1 May 1974 [incl. Some of us belong to the stars]; Bar Mitvah Boy (J. Styne), Her Majesty’s, 25 Sept 1978; Tell Me on a Sunday (A. Lloyd Webber), Royalty, Jan 1980, rev. as Song and Dance, 1982; The Little Prince and the Aviator (Barry), New York, Alvin, 1 Jan 1982; Dear Anyone (G. Stephens), Cambridge Theatre, 9 Sept 1983; Merlin (E. Bernstein), New York, Mark Hellinger, 13 Feb 1983; Budgie (M. Shuman), Cambridge Theatre, 18 Oct 1988; Aspects of Love (Lloyd Webber), Prince of Wales, 17 April 1989 [incl. Love changes everything; collab C. Hart]; Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber), Adelphi, 12 July 1993 [incl. With One Look; collab C. Hampton]

c100 songs for films (title songs unless otherwise stated), incl. Thunderball (Barry, 1965); Born Free (Barry, 1966); Pretty Polly (M. Legrand, 1967); To Sir with Love (M. London, 1967); On Days like These (Q. Jones; The Italian Job, 1969); True Grit (Bernstein, 1969); Diamonds are forever (Barry, 1971); Wish was Then (Barry; Mary Queen of Scots, 1971); The Man with the Golden Gun (Barry, 1974); Play it again (Barry; The Tamarind Seed, 1974); Wherever Love Takes Me (Bernstein; Gold, 1974); All the Wishing in the World (S. Myers; The Wilby Conspiracy, 1975); Come to me (H. Mancini; The Pink Panther Strikes Again, 1976)

Individual popular songs, incl. Ben (Scharf), 1972; Always There (S. May and L. Osborn), 1986; Amigos para siempre (Lloyd Webber), 1994 [anthem for the Barcelona Olympic Games]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GänzlBMT; GänzlEMT

M. Steyn: Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (London, 1997)

Black, John

(fl 1546–87). Scottish composer. In 1546 he was ‘singer’ of the parish church and ‘deput’ under John Fethy at the song school in Aberdeen. By 1556 he was master of the song school, but between 1559 and 1570 his name disappears from the burgh records, and in the latter year he is described as ‘presentlie absent of the realme’. By 1574 he was back in Aberdeen and in 1577 was again appointed master of the song school, but he died in office shortly before 14 August 1587.

Black wrote a number of interesting compositions for instrumental consort. Some, bearing such attractive titles as Black called My Delight, are in fully-fledged fantasy form, but only fragments remain. The Lessons on the Psalms (one of which is known to be by Black; three others are identical in form and style) are more complete, however, and show a real creative talent, elaborating the Protestant psalm tunes as cantus firmi in a characteristically instrumental style, and in a musical form otherwise known only in France. Black may indeed have been in France when he was ‘absent of the realme’, whether or not the Reformation was the original cause of his departure from Scotland. A 17th-century psalm tune is entitled ‘Mr Blaks toone’, and some of his psalm settings are incorporated (anonymously) in Edward Millar’s psalter of 1635.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Stuart, ed.: Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1844–8)

J. Cooper, ed.: Cartularium ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, ii (Aberdeen, 1892)

W. Walker, ed.: Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Andrew Melville, 1621–1640 (Aberdeen, 1899)

T. Dart and W. Coates, eds.: Jacobean Consort Music, MB, ix (1955, 2/1962)

K. Elliott, ed.: Music of Scotland, 1500–1700, MB, xv (1957, 3/1975), no.80 [song texts ed. H.M. Shire]

KENNETH ELLIOTT

Black American music.

See United States of America, §II, 2.

Black bottom [black shuffle].

A quick-tempo American social dance, particularly of the 1920s. It is thought to have originated in the early 1900s in the ‘juke’ (black) bawdy houses of the ‘Bottoms’, the black quarter of Nashville. The movements of the dance as described in Perry Bradford's song The Original Black Bottom Dance (1919) include slides and hobbling steps; the dance also involved a twisting motion of the body similar to the Shimmy, hops forward and back, side turns, stamps, a skating glide performed with deep knee bends, and according to the Stearns, ‘a genteel slapping of the backside’. Its popularity, along with other related dances such as the charleston (see Charleston (ii)), developed from the success of the black revue Shuffle Along (1921), the first theatrical adaptation of the black bottom occurring in the show Dinah (1924). It was Ann Pennington's performance of the dance, however, to the song ‘Black Bottom’ (music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown) in George White's Scandals of 1926 that led to its widespread popularity. In the same year it reached Europe, but its vogue lasted only about two years and it was absorbed into the Lindy and other jazz dances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. and J. Stearns: Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968)

I.F. Emery: Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, CA, 1970)

P. Oliver: The Meaning of the Blues (New York, 1972)

PAULINE NORTON

Blackburn, Bonnie J(ean)

(b Albany, NY, 15 July 1939). American musicologist. She graduated from Wellesley College (BA 1961) and studied with Edward Lowinsky and Howard Mayer Brown at the University of Chicago (MA 1963, PhD 1970). She was a lecturer at the School of Music, Northwestern University (1987) and served as a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago (1986) and SUNY, Buffalo (1989–90). In 1990 she moved to Oxford and became a freelance editor; in 1993 she became general editor of the series Monuments of Renaissance Music.

Blackburn studies 15th- and 16th-century music and music theory, with a special interest in lost sources. Her dissertation on the Lupus problem was followed by an article on the subject and the edition of Johannes Lupi’s works. She has researched both written and musical documents, and she frequently collaborated as author and editor of these sources with her husband, Lowinsky; some of these publications appeared after his death in 1985, notably their edition of the Spataro correspondence.

WRITINGS

‘“Te Matrem Dei laudamus”: a Study in the Musical Veneration of Mary’, MQ, liii (1967), 53–76

The Lupus Problem (diss., U. of Chicago, 1970)

ed., with E.E. Lowinsky: Josquin des Prez: New York 1971

‘Johannes Lupi and Lupus Hellinck: a Double Portrait’, MQ, lix (1973), 547–83

‘Josquin’s Chansons: Ignored and Lost Sources’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 30–76

‘A Lost Guide to Tinctoris’s Teachings Recovered’, EMH, i (1981), 29–116

‘Two “Carnival Songs” Unmasked: a Commentary on MS Florence Magl. XIX.121’, MD, xxxv (1981), 121–78

‘On Compositional Process in the Fifteenth Century’, JAMS, xl (1987), 210–84

Music for Treviso Cathedral in the late Sixteenth Century (London, 1987)

ed.: E.E. Lowinsky: Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and other Essays (Chicago, 1989)

ed., with E.E. Lowinsky and C.A. Miller: A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford, 1991)

‘Music and Festivities at the Court of Leo X: a Venetian View’, EMH, xi (1992), 1–37

with E.E. Lowinsky: ‘Luigi Zenobi and his Letter on the Perfect Musician’, Studi musicali, xx (1993), 61–114

‘The Printing Contract for the Libro primo de musica de la salamandra (Rome, 1526)’, JM, xii (1994), 345–56

‘Thomas Crequillon’s “Salamander”: an Italian Import’, Musicologia humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 125–38

ed.: ‘A Letter to N.N.’, in B.J. Blackburn and L. Holford-Strevens, eds.: The Perfect Musician (Kraków, 1995) [trans. of L. Zenobi: Lettera a N.N. (MS, early 17th century)]

‘Obrecht’s Missa Je ne demande and Busnoys’s Chanson: an Essay in Reconstructing Lost Canons’, TVNM, xlv (1995), 18–32

‘Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Lost Isaac Manuscript, and the Venetian Ambassador’, Musica franca: Essays in Honor of Frank d’Accone, ed. I. Alm, A. McLamore and C. Reardon (Stuyvesant, NY, 1996), 19–44

‘Did Ockeghem Listen to Tinctoris?’, Johannes Ockeghem: Tours 1997

‘For Whom do the Singers Sing?’, EMc, xxv (1997), 593–609

‘The Virgin in the Sun: Music and Image for a Prayer Attributed to Sixtus IV’, Encomium musicae: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert J. Snow, ed. D. Crawford (Stuyvesant, NY, forthcoming)

‘Masses Based on Popular Songs and Solmization Syllables’, Josquin Companion, ed. R. Sherr (Oxford, forthcoming)

‘Musical Theory and Musical Thinking after 1450’, New Approaches to Late Medieval Music, ed. R. Strohm (Oxford, forthcoming)

EDITIONS

Johannes Lupi: Opera omnia, CMM, lxxxiv (1980–89) [3 vols.]

PAULA MORGAN

Blackburn, (Joseph Albert) Maurice

(b Quebec City, 22 May 1914; d Montreal, 29 March 1988). Canadian composer. After studying music at Laval University (1937–9) and the New England Conservatory (1939–41), he worked as a staff composer with the National Film Board of Canada (1942–79), continuing to compose freelance for the NFB until 1983. He studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (1946–8) and with the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (1954–5). Blackburn’s eclectic style ranged from folksong pastiches to electronic music. While his experimental work was mainly for film, he cited Stravinsky, Honegger and Poulenc as influences on his concert music and Messager as a model for his two comic operas. He created or collaborated on the music for over 400 films, mostly documentaries and short animated films, though some feature films in his later years. Among the film makers with whom he collaborated were Norman McLaren, Jacques Godbout, Gilles Carle and Claude Jutra.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Une mesure de silence (comic op, 1, M. Morisset-Blackburn), 1955; Pirouette (comic op, 1, Morisset-Blackburn), 1960; Rose Latulippe (ballet), perf. 1953; incid music for theatre, TV and film

Vocal: Messe, tr vv, 1949; Soir d’hiver (E. Nelligan), Bar, pf, 1949; L’âne de p’tit Jean (folksong texts), SATB, 1952; Chanson du gars perdu (E. de Grandmont), 1v, pf, 1957; Ramenez-moi chez moi (Grandmont), 1v, pf, 1957

Orch: Les petites rues de vieux Québec, 1938; Fantaisie en mocassins, 1940; Concertino, pf, ww, brass, 1948; Riguadon, vn, chbr orch, 1949; Ov. pour un spectacle de marionnettes, 1951; Promenade, 1951; Suite, str orch, 1960

Chbr and solo inst: 5 digitales, pf, 1940 [nos. 1, 3, 4 destroyed]; Sonatina, pf, 1940; 3 danses, pf, 1949; Marine, hp, str, 1950; 6 formes musicales (Morisset-Blackburn), nar, ww qt, str trio, pf, org, 1967

MSS in CDN-Tcm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMC2 (D. Allaire, L. Cloutier)

L. Cloutier: ‘Maurice Blackburn et la “filmusique”’, Cahiers de l’ARMuQ, x (1988), 24–33

ROBIN ELLIOTT

Blackface minstrelsy.

See Minstrelsy, American.

Blackhall, Andrew

(b 1535 or 1536; d 31 Jan 1609). Scottish composer. Originally a canon of the Abbey of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, he was appointed after the Reformation ‘minister of God’s word’ to a number of charges nearby: first in 1564 to Liberton, then in 1567 to Ormiston in the parish of Dalkeith. About this time he contributed at least one canticle in chordal style (O Lord, of whom I do depend) to the important anthology made by thomas Wood (i) (EIRE-Dtc, GB-Eu, Lbl, US-Wgu). In 1569 Blackhall composed a more ambitious piece, the anthem Of mercy and of judgement both, a setting for five voices of the metrical version of Psalm ci, ‘giffin in propyne [i.e. as a gift or tribute] to the kyng’. Preparations were being made in that year for the education of the infant king and for the formation of his royal household. Blackhall’s anthem, an extended piece in two sections involving much close imitation, somewhat in late Renaissance English style, may have been a bid for royal favour on the part of the composer.

In 1574 Blackhall was appointed minister of Inveresk Parish Church in Musselburgh. In the following year another anthem was commissioned, a setting for five voices of the metrical version of Psalm cxxviii, Blessed art thou, for a wedding in the noble Mar and Angus families – both much involved in power politics during the childhood of King James VI. Blackhall’s wedding anthem is cast in one continuous movement, with effective imitation, though perhaps lacking somewhat in rhythmic interest. In the preface to Edward Millar’s 1635 printed psalter Blackhall is stated as having composed a ‘set’ of psalm tune arrangements, although only very few have survived. Three chordal settings are recorded in Wood’s anthology, and one imitative setting (Psalm cxxxvii ‘in reports’) is identified in a 17th-century source. Another two psalms in reports (vi and xviii) have all the features of Blackhall’s style and may well be his work. All probably date from about this period.

In 1578 Blackhall received an important commission from Lord Morton to make a setting of Psalm xliii. James, 4th Earl of Morton, and regent for the last six years, had defended the cause of the dead Darnley and the infant prince in 1567, when under a banner emblazoning the words of that very psalm – ‘Judge and revenge my cause, O Lord’ – he had routed Mary Queen of Scots at Carberry Hill. By 1578, however, his enemies were linking his name with Darnley’s death; he seems to have resorted to musical as well as political means to retrieve his good name with the young king – a measure eloquently emphasized by Blackhall in his choice of the Miserere plainsong as cantus firmus in this composition. Morton was eventually accused of complicity in Darnley’s murder and executed in 1581.

In the 1580s James VI began to set up court in style and gathered together a group of distinguished poets and musicians, known as the Castalian Band. At least one partsong by Blackhall dates from this period: The Bankis of Helicon, a beautiful chordal setting of an internationally current tune, The Nine Muses, and the vehicle for several fine sets of verses by the Scottish poet Alexander Montgomerie (including The Cherrie and the Slae and Adeu O desie of delyt). In 1582 King James granted a pension to ‘Mr Andro Blackhall, Minister, ane of the Conventuall brether of the Abbay of Halyrudhous’. Other pieces by Blackhall may survive in the many anonymous and fragmentary items in Scottish sources of the later 16th and early 17th centuries, for example the isolated bassus part of Anna veni, perhaps composed for the coronation of Anne of Denmark in 1590; and there is some evidence to attribute to him the editing, if not partial composition, of the Twelve Common Tunes that first appeared as a group in the 1615 psalter, published in Edinburgh. Blackhall is mentioned in church records in the 1590s and up to 1608 and according to the inscription at Inveresk church died in 1609, ‘aged 73’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Johnson, ed.: The Scots Musical Museum, i (Edinburgh, 1787, enlarged 3/1853)

H. Scott, ed.: Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, i (Edinburgh, 1915); viii (Edinburgh, 1950)

K. Elliott, ed.: Music of Scotland, 1500–1700, MB, xv (1957, 3/1975) [song texts ed. H.M. Shire]

K. Elliott, ed.: Fourteen Psalm-Settings of the Early Reformed Church in Scotland (London, 1960)

H.M. Shire: Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge, 1969)

G. Donaldson, ed.: The Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland, viii: (1581–84) (Edinburgh,1982)

K. Elliott: ‘Some Helpes for Young Schollers: a New Source of Early Scottish Psalmody’, The Renaissance in Scotland, ed. A.A. MacDonald and others (Leiden, 1994), 264–75

KENNETH ELLIOTT

Blacking, John (Arthur Randoll)

(b Guildford, 22 Oct 1928; d Belfast, 24 Jan 1990). British anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Raised in the Anglican environment of Salisbury Cathedral close, his father, the cathedral architect, was closely concerned with the restoration of the Sarum rite and with the Dolmetsch early music revival. Blacking served as a commissioned officer in the Coldstream Guards, with active service in Malaya (1948–9), where the exposure to Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures was a formative experience. He read anthropology and archaeology at Cambridge (1949–52) with Meyer Fortes and in 1954 he was appointed musicologist in Hugh Tracey's International Library of African Music, Johannesburg. From 1956 to 1958 he carried out 22 months of fieldwork in the Venda area of Northern Transvaal, establishing his international reputation as an ethnomusicologist. In 1959 he was appointed lecturer in social anthropology and African government at the University of Witwatersrand, and in 1965 he was appointed professor and head of the department. In 1970 he was made professor of social anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast, which under his direction became an internationally renowned centre for ethnomusicology, attracting students from many parts of the world, particularly Africa. He was president of the Society for Ethnomusicology (1982–3) and founded the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology.

Blacking's reputation was established by How Musical is Man?, a book based on the John Danz Lectures he delivered at the University of Washington in 1971. He championed the anthropological approach in ethnomusicology, while not underplaying the musicological side of the discipline. A keen classical pianist throughout his life, his theorizing about music passed through a number of stages, from functionalism, to structuralism and phenomenological transactionalism, and his thinking was much influenced by his anthropologist colleagues at Queen's. He published significant articles on most of the debated issues in ethnomusicology, and in later years he returned to a concern with dance that had started with his research on Venda girls' initiation schools.

WRITINGS

‘Musical Instruments of the Malayan Aborigines’, Federation Museums Journal, nos.1–2 (1954–5), 32–52

‘The Role of Music in the Culture of the Venda of the Northern Transvaal’, Studies in Ethnomusicology, ed. M. Kolinski, ii (New York, 1965), 20–52

Venda Children's Songs: a Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis (Johannesburg, 1967)

‘Tonal Organization in the Music of Two Venda Girls' Initiation Schools’, EthM, xiv (1970), 1–54

How Musical is Man? (Seattle, 1973)

‘An Introduction to Venda Traditional Dances’, Dance Studies, ii (1977), 34–56

ed.: The Anthropology of the Body (London, 1977) [incl. ‘Towards an Anthropology of the Body’, 1–28]

‘Some Problems of Theory and Method in the Study of Musical Change’, YIFMC, ix (1977), 1–26

‘Political and Musical Freedom in the Music of Some Black South African Churches’, The Structure of Folk Models, ed. L. Holy and M. Stuchlik (London, 1980), 35–62

‘The Structure of Musical Discourse: the Problem of Song Text’, YTM, xiv (1982), 15–23

‘The Concept of Identity and Folk Concepts of Self: a Venda Case Study’, Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural, ed. A. Jacobson-Widding (Stockholm, 1983), 47–65

‘A Commonsense View of All Music’: Reflections on Percy Grainger's Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education (Cambridge, 1987)

‘Ethnomusicology and Prehistoric Music-Making’, The Archaeology of Early Music Cultures, ed. E. Hickmann and D.W. Hughes (Bonn, 1988), 329–36 Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft

‘The Biology of Music-Making’, Ethnomusicology: an Introduction, ed. H. Myers (London, 1992), 301–14

ed. R. Byron: Music, Culture & Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking (Chicago, 1995) [incl. list of writings]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Baily: ‘John Blacking and his Place in Ethnomusicology’, YTM, xxii (1990), 12–21 [incl. list of writings]

K. Howard: ‘John Blacking: an Interview Conducted by Keith Howard’, EthM, xxxv (1991), 35–76

J. Baily, ed.: Working with Blacking: the Belfast Years, World of Music, xxxvii/2 (1995)

JOHN BAILY

Blackmar, A(rmand) E(dward)

(b Bennington, VT, 1826; d New Orleans, 28 Oct 1888). American music publisher. He worked as a music teacher in Huntsville, Alabama (1845–52), and Jackson, Louisiana (1852–5). In 1858 he joined E.D. Patton’s music shop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which he bought out the following year with his younger brother Henry (1831–1909). They moved to New Orleans in 1860, where they operated publishing firms and music shops jointly, separately and often with others. From 1861 to 1866 Henry also ran a shop in Augusta, Georgia. Armand was imprisoned briefly in 1862 by the Union Army for his espousal of the Southern cause; he issued more Confederate music than any other publisher in New Orleans, including one of the earliest editions of Dixie (1861), and The Bonnie Blue Flag (1861) and Maryland! My Maryland! (1862). He frequently arranged or composed music under the pseudonym A. Noir. Blackmar was in San Francisco between 1877 and 1880, but was publishing again in New Orleans from 1881 to 1888.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.B. Harwell: Confederate Music (Chapel Hill, NC, 1950)

P.C. Boudreaux: Music Publishing in New Orleans in the 19th Century (MA thesis, Louisiana State U., 1977)

R. Powell: A Study of A.E. Blackmar and Bro., Music Publishers of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augusta, Georgia, with a Checklist of Imprints in Louisiana Collections (MA thesis, Louisiana State U., 1978)

F.W. Hoogerwerf: Confederate Sheet-music Imprints, ISAMm, xxi (Brooklyn, NY, 1984)

JOHN H. BARON

Black Sabbath.

English heavy metal band. Formed in 1968, it underwent many personnel changes but its classic line-up was Ozzy [John] Osbourne (b 3 Dec 1948; vocals), Tony Iommi (b 19 Feb 1948; guitar), Bill Ward (b 5 May 1948; drums) and Geezer Butler (Terry Butler; b 17 July 1949; bass). Although it was hated by rock critics and ignored by radio programmers, it nonetheless became arguably the single most influential heavy metal band. Evolving from the heavy blues-rock of Cream and other 1960s groups, the band echoed the fatalism and occultism of such blues forebears as Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf. Black Sabbath helped constitute heavy metal as something separate from rock by moving away from such topics as love, sex, partying and masculine strutting to brooding lyrics that dealt with evil, war, pain and drug addiction, delivered by Osbourne's distinctive paranoid whine. Their music was often ponderously slow, based on straightforward melodic riffs, with a guitar sound that was as distorted and heavy as possible. Paranoid (Vertigo and WB, 1971) was probably their most influential album.

ROBERT WALSER

Black shuffle.

See Black bottom.

Blacksmith [Blakesmit, Blakismet], Henry

(fl c1261). English singer. One of three Englishmen described by the late 13th-century theorist Anonymus 4 as ‘good singers’ of mensural polyphony, who sang with great refinement (‘valde deliciose’). The theorist referred to him as ‘Blakesmit, at the court of the late King Henry [III]’. He was clerk of the king's chapel in May 1261, and may have held that post since 1258. He was probably one of the members of the royal chapel who accompanied the king to Paris in July 1262 and who were stricken by an epidemic in that September.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I.D. Bent: ‘The English Chapel Royal before 1300’, PRMA, xc (1963–4), 77–95, esp. 94

F. Reckow, ed.: Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4 (Wiesbaden, 1967), i, 50, 95

IAN D. BENT

Blackwell, Chris

(b London, 22 June 1937). English music producer. The owner of Island Records, he was a key figure in the internationalization of Jamaican popular music in the 1970s, notably through his association with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Island also nurtured the leading rock performers Steve Winwood, Free and U2. Blackwell grew up in Jamaica where he began his musical career, recording local singers. He moved to London in 1962, importing recordings to sell to the expatriate West Indian population in Britain. Blackwell moved into white popular music with Steve Winwood's groups, the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic (producing both), followed by Cat Stevens, Free and others. In 1970 he produced Bob Marley and the Wailers' album Catch a Fire, notable for its combination of reggae rhythms and rock guitar playing.

Although he later became involved in film production, Blackwell produced recordings by the singer Grace Jones and the quirky American group the B-52s. Under his leadership, Island issued recordings by numerous other rock, reggae and African musicians. In 1989 the company was bought by the Polygram group but Blackwell retained a musical involvement, notably in the management of the Bob Marley estate. In 1997 he founded a new record company, IslandLife.

DAVE LAING

Blackwell, Isaac

(d London, 1699). English composer and organist. He was organist of two London parish churches – St Dunstan-in-the-West (1674) and St Michael's, Cornhill (1684) – before becoming a vicar-choral of St Paul’s Cathedral on 7 February 1687. From about that same time he combined all these posts with that of organist of the cathedral, continuing as such until his death, whereupon he was succeeded by Jeremiah Clarke (i). He was thus the first to use Bernard Smith’s new organ (1697).

John Playford, a fellow vicar-choral, printed some of Blackwell’s songs in Choice Ayres and three anthems in Cantica Sacra. Another five anthems are known, of which three are in the Bing-Gostling partbooks at York (GB-Y M. 1. S). They are in the rather cramped idiom of the early 1670s, most convincingly represented by Bow down thine ear, O Lord.

WORKS

anthems

Behold how good and joyful, 1674²; Bow down thine ear, O Lord, GB-Y; Let my complaints, 1674²; Lord, come away, Y; Lord, let me know my end, Ob; O God, thou art my God, Y; O Lord, our governor, Cu; See sinfull soul (A Hymn for Good Friday), 1674²

songs

Edition:Choice Ayres, Songs and Dialogues, ed. I. Spink, MLE, A5 (1989) [S]

Cease fruitless hopes lest you convey, 1683⁵, S; Give me thy youth the time of love, 1681⁴, S; If languishing eyes without language can move, 1673³, S; I saw fair Chloris, GB-Gu; Lovers who in silent anguish, 1678⁴; So pale Amintas does thy looks appear, 1683⁵; Though Sylvia loved too well she knew, 1683⁵; Were Celia but as chaste as fair, 1675⁷, S; When Damon saw fair Sylvia’s face, 1683⁵, S; When first Celinda blessed mine eyes, 1683⁵, S;

Setting of Flatman’s song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1686, lost

instrumental

Trio sonata, GB-Lbl (tr pts only)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Spink: English Song: Dowland to Purcell (London, 1974, repr. 1986 with corrections), 157–8, 178

H.W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991), 174

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995), 298–301

IAN SPINK

Blackwell, Otis

(b Brooklyn, NY, 1931). American rhythm and blues songwriter and singer. His list of over 900 songs includes several of Elvis Presley's best-known hits. Blackwell's earliest success as a black songwriter came with Fever, written for the singer Little Willie John in 1956; this sensual ballad was later taken up by the cabaret star Peggy Lee who added new lyrics. In a different vein, Blackwell composed the gospel-tinged Daddy Rolling Stone, which became a favourite of English rock groups such as the Who. For Presley, Blackwell wrote the pulsating All Shook Up, Don't be cruel, Paralysed and the quirky ballad Return to Sender. As part of the publishing contract, Presley was credited as co-author of the songs, although he did not contribute to their composition. Blackwell also composed the tempestuous Great Balls of Fire and Breathless for another rock and roll star, Jerry Lee Lewis; like All Shook Up, these songs built up tension through sudden breaks in the flow of the song. During the early 1960s Blackwell also wrote the song Handy Man for Jimmy Jones, Nine Times out of Ten for Cliff Richard and Hey Little Girl for Dee Clark. He recorded his own versions of his best songs on a 1978 album, These are my Songs.

DAVE LAING

Blackwell, Scrapper [Black, Francis Hillman]

(b NC, 21 Feb 1903; d Indianapolis, IN, 7 Oct 1962). American blues guitarist. See under Carr, Leroy.

Blackwood, Easley

(b Indianapolis, IN, 21 April 1933). American composer and pianist. He studied with Messiaen at the Berkshire Music Center (1949), with Hindemith at Yale (1950–54) and, on a Fulbright scholarship, with Boulanger in Paris (1954–7). From 1958 to 1997 he taught theory and composition at the University of Chicago. He has received a first prize from the Koussevitzky Foundation (1958), the Brandeis Creative Arts Award (1968) and commissions from the Chicago SO and the Library of Congress. In the late 1970s he received a grant from the NEH to investigate the harmonic and modal properties of microtonal tunings. As a pianist he has distinguished himself as an interpreter of the contemporary repertory, notably the second sonatas of Ives and Boulez.

After early works in a modernist idiom (dating from 1946), Blackwood adopted in the 1950s a more conservative style, best represented in his First Symphony. During the 1960s and 70s he returned to an atonal language involving complex counterpoint. This phase culminated in his Twelve Microtonal Etudes (1980), Fanfare (1981) and the Sonata for guitar (1983). In the early 1980s his style again became conservative – radically so – with the adoption of forms and a harmonic language more commonly associated with the 19th century. The most significant work of this period is his Fifth Symphony (1990) which has a conventional sonata-form first movement, developmental sections and clear harmonic progressions; the second movement quotes the Dies irae theme, while the third and final movement combines the characteristics of a rondo or scherzo.

WORKS

Orch: Sym. no.1, op.3, 1955; Sym. no.2, op.9, 1960; Cl Conc., op.13, 1964; Sym. no.3, op.14, 1964; Sym. Fantasy, op.17, 1965; Ob Conc., op.19, 1965; Vn Conc., op.21, chbr orch, 1967; Fl Conc., op.23, str, 1968; Pf Conc., op.24, 1970; Sym. no.4, 1977; Sym. no.5, 1990

Vocal: Un voyage à Cythère (C. Baudelaire), op.20, S, wind, 1966; 4 Letter Scenes from Gulliver, op.25, Mez, Bar, tape, 1972

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, op.1, va, pf, 1953; Chbr Sym., op.2, 14 wind, 1954; Str Qt no.1, op.4, 1957; Concertino, op.5, 5 insts, 1959; Str Qt no.2, op.6, 1959; Sonata, op.7, vn, pf, 1960; Fantasy, op.8, vc, pf, 1960; Chaconne, op.10, carillon, 1961; Pastorale and Variations, op.11, wind qnt, 1961; Sonata, op.12, fl, hpd, 1962; Fantasy, op.15, fl, cl, pf, 1965; 3 Short Fantasies, op.16, pf, 1965; Sym. Movt, op.18, org, 1966; Pf Trio, op.22, 1967; Sonata no.1, op.26, vn, pf, 1973; Sonata no.2, op.26, vn, pf, 1975; Sonata, op.29, gui, 1983; 5 Concert Etudes, op.30, pf, 1984; Sonata, op.31, vc, pf, 1985; Sonata, op.32, vn, 1986; Suite, op.33, gui in 15-note equal tuning, 1987; Rondo Caprice, op.35, fl, gui, 1992; 7 Bagatelles, op.36, pf, 1993; Sonata, a, op.37, cl, pf, 1994; Sonatina, F, op.38, cl, pf, 1994; Sonatina, op.39, carillon, 1996; Sonata, op.40, pf, 1996; 2 Nocturnes, op.41, pf, 1996

El-ac: 12 Microtonal Etudes, op.28, synth, 1980; Fanfare, op.28a, elec music media in 19-note equal tuning, 1981

Principal publisher: G. Schirmer

Principal recording company: Cedille

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Keislar: ‘Six Composers on Non-Standard Tunings’, PNM, xxix/1 (1991), 176–211

P. Rapoport: ‘Just Inton(no)tation’, Just Intonation, vii/1 (1991), 1, 12–14

JAMES R. McKAY

Bladder and string.

See Bumbass.

Bladder pipe

(Fr. vèze; Ger. Platerspiel).

A wind instrument in which a reed is enclosed by an animal bladder. The player blows through a mouthpiece into the bladder, which serves, like the bag of a bagpipe, as a wind reservoir. Thus the performer does not directly control the reed with the lips; the instrument probably cannot be overblown, but has a compass limited by the number of finger-holes. The bladder pipe is depicted in a number of late medieval and Renaissance sources, but no specimens survive from that period. It is related to the Wind-cap instruments of the Renaissance, on which the reed was also enclosed, but in a rigid wooden cap. Bladder pipes occurred in both straight and curved forms, the latter being more common and bearing a superficial resemblance to the Crumhorn. The bore was mostly conical, though cylindrical bores are also depicted; some instruments had two parallel pipes, with the second pipe apparently serving as a drone or for accompaniments. In most iconographic sources both of the player’s hands cover the finger-holes; thus neither would be free to apply pressure to the bladder, which may have been elastic enough to expand and contract by itself. Pictures do not, of course, make clear whether the instrument had a single or a double reed, and the practice may have varied with the locality.

Aristophanes in Lysistrata (411 bc) mentioned a wind instrument called a phusallis (a word derived from ‘bladder’), so the bladder pipe may have originated in the ancient world. The 9th-century epistle to Dardanus by Pseudo-Jerome defines the chorus in terms that suggest a bladder pipe. One of the earliest clear references to the instrument was made by Seifried Helbling about 1290, and two bladder pipes (see illustration) figure among the instruments illustrating one of the late 13th-century Spanish manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa María, a collection of sacred songs written for the court of Alfonso el Sabio (reigned 1252–84). Gerbert (De cantu et musica sacra, ii, 1774) reproduced a bladder pipe labelled ‘Chorus’ after a 13th-century manuscript once in St Blasien, now lost, and the Loenberg family coat of arms (St Gallen, c1340) consisted of a curved bladder pipe with conical bore and six finger-holes (illustrated in Becker). Numerous later examples have been cited by Kinsky and Becker.

While many medieval depictions suggest a courtly context, by the later 15th century the bladder pipe had become predominantly a folk instrument. It appears quite often in drawings, woodcuts and other pictures by Dürer and other early 16th-century German artists, usually played by itinerant musicians or shepherds. Virdung included a woodcut of a bladder pipe in his Musica getutscht (1511), but had nothing to say about it, and Praetorius did not mention the instrument at all. It seems to have made its last appearance in western European art in an engraving by Wolfgang Kilian of the Muse Euterpe, dated 1612, but Kilian in all probability was merely copying Virdung.

The bladder pipe survives today as a toy or folk instrument in various parts of the world, for example in Brittany and Sicily where an ordinary rubber balloon replaces the animal bladder, in Albania where it is played by children, and in Poland where it is sometimes played by shepherds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Kinsky: ‘Doppelrohrblatt-Instrumente mit Windkapsel’, AMw, vii (1925), 253–96

A. Baines: Woodwind Instruments and their History (London, 1957, 3/1967/R)

H. Becker: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstrumente (Hamburg, 1966)

R. Weber: ‘Tournebout–Pifia–Bladderpipe (Platerspiel)’, GSJ, xxx (1977), 64–9

K.T. Meyer: The Crumhorn: its History, Design, Repertory, and Technique (Ann Arbor, 1983)

HOWARD MAYER BROWN/BARRA R. BOYDELL

Blades, James

(b Peterborough, 9 Sept 1901; d Cheam, 19 May 1999). English timpanist and percussionist. He was apprenticed as an engineer, but a youthful passion for drumming led him to join the band of a travelling circus when he was 19. Engagements in orchestras accompanying silent films followed. Here he played a lot of the standard orchestral repertory and accompanied many of the variety acts that performed between films, often having to invent sound effects as he went along. His early career was spent playing in dance bands and making recordings, the most famous of which perhaps being the three Chinese tam-tam notes that heralded the beginning of every Rank film after 1935 and the V-for-Victory morse code signal recorded in 1941 for BBC wartime radio. He became principal percussionist of the LSO in 1940 and until his retirement was a regular freelance player with most of the major British orchestras, notably the Melos Ensemble and the English Opera Group. It was while playing for the latter that he formed a close working relationship with Benjamin Britten who sought his advice on certain sound effects. Blades was able to put his engineering background to good use, often devising one-off instruments to achieve a sound that pleased Britten. These were used mainly in the chamber operas and church parables performed by the English Opera Group. Following an accident in 1956, which left him in hospital for five weeks, Blades developed a gift for public speaking, and built lectures for school and adult audiences alike on the history and use of percussion instruments into his working schedule. So successful were these that they were made into a film series, ‘We Make Music’, and a record, ‘Blades on Percussion’, issued in 1973. He became professor of timpani and percussion at the RAM in 1960 where he did much to improve the standard of percussion students and was particularly proud of the achievements of Evelyn Glennie, whom he taught. He worked extensively with the handicapped and was awarded the OBE in 1972.

WRITINGS

Orchestral Percussion Technique (London, 1961, 2/1973)

Percussion Instruments and their History (London, 1970, rev. 4/1992)

with J. Montagu: Early Percussion Instruments from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (London, 1976)

Drum Roll (London, 1977)

NOËL GOODWIN/MATTHEW DICKINSON

Blades, Ruben

(b Panamá, 16 July 1946). Panamanian popular singer, composer, bandleader and actor. His father was a Panamanian percussionist and his mother was a Cuban vocalist, and he began his career as vocalist in his brother’s rock band in 1963. Turning to Latin American styles, he travelled to New York in 1969 and recorded his first album, De Panamá a Nueva York, with Pete Rodríguez. He graduated in law from the University of Panamá in 1974 and was also interested in politics. Returning to New York in 1974, Blades worked as a mail clerk for Fania Records, the main salsa label, until he was given a break with the Ray Barretto band in 1975. He subsequently joined forces with salsa ‘bad-boy’ Willie Colón, recording for Fania a number of albums including Metiendo mano (1977), Siembra (1978) and Canciones del solar de los aburridos (1981). In 1982 he launched his own band, Seis de Solar, with whom he recorded Buscando América (1984) and Escenas (Elektra, 1985). He resumed his law career while maintaining performance activities, graduating as Doctor of Law from Harvard University in 1985. During the 1980s he also took up acting, appearing in over a dozen Hollywood films and in Paul Simon’s Broadway musical Capeman (1998). He returned to politics in 1994, running as presidential candidate in the Panamanian elections.

Blades is the most political of salseros, fusing salsa with the spirit of Latin American nueva canción (protest music). Astute commentary permeates most of his compositions, including his hits Pablo pueblo, Pedro navaja, Plástico, Buscando América, Decisiones, Todos vuelven and Padre Antonio. While earning him an enormous following and two Grammy awards, Blades’s politically charged songs have garnered criticism in more conservative quarters: Tiburón, protesting against US intervention in Central America, earned him the label of communist among Miami Cubans in 1981.

LISE WAXER

Blado, Antonio

(b Asola, nr Mantua, 1490; d Rome, 1567). Italian printer. From 1516 until his death Blado printed more than 1200 editions in Rome as well as a few elsewhere. For the popular market he printed guidebooks, prognostications, devotional books and the like, and under clerical or aristocratic sponsorship classical and modern literature, books in Greek and Hebrew, theological works and much else. His books use a variety of ornaments, decorated initials and typefaces, including the Ethiopic type of his Modus baptizandi (1549); some are lavishly illustrated. In 1535 he obtained the exclusive right to print Vatican documents and thereafter styled himself ‘impressor camerale’ or ‘stampatore apostolico’. Blado was a dominant figure in Roman printing, and in 1550 his was one of the largest printing shops, with six or seven printers. His printer’s mark was a crowned eagle facing left, with wings unfolded, holding a standard in its talons.

Blado was the second Roman printer (after Valerio Dorico) to print music from movable type in a single impression. He may have printed the 1538 Madrigale de M. Constantio Festa libro primo, although the surviving parts are without name or place. The Exercitium seraficum, madrigali di M. Hubert Naich, undated but probably 1542, was signed by Blado but uses music type not seen in his later music books. These include Giovanni Animuccia's Secondo libro de i madrigali (1551), Guerrero's Psalmorum quatuor vocum liber primus (1559), Zoilo's Libro secondo de madrigali (1563) and Martelli's La nuova, et armonica compositione (1564). For, or with, Antonio Barrè he printed madrigal books by Francesco Menta (1560) and Lasso (1563). He also published Vicente Lusitano's Introdutione facilissima (1553), and his type was used in Barrè's 1555 edition of Vicentino's L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica. Several of his liturgical books, beginning with Officium gloriosissimi nominis Jesu (1539), include plainchant.

Blado's heirs included his widow Paola (d 1588) and sons Paolo (d 1594) and Stefano (d 1585). The latter's marriage to Livia Dorico linked the Blado firm with one of its most important competitors (as had daughter Agnese's marriage to Giovanni Osmarino Gigliotti). The heirs continued to print voluminously (about 1700 editions) both ephemera and serious editions, most notably an 18-volume edition of Aquinas, and a few musical editions: G.D. Petrucci's introits (1568); two books of laude spirituali, the Secondo, by Animuccia (1570), and the Terzo, edited by Francesco Soto de Langa (1577); Florido Zaccardi's Psalmi vespertini (1577); and Giulio Cesare Romano's Motecta (1580). After Paolo's death the business was continued until 1609 by Paolo's widow Porzia (d 1624) and by her daughter Isabella and son-in-law Geremia Guelfi until 1626, although not under the Blado name after 1609.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (F. Barberi); SartoriD

D. Bernoni: Dei Torresani, Blado e Ragazzoni (Milan, 1890/R)

G. Fumagalli and G. Belli: Catalogo delle edizioni romane di Antonio Blado Asolano ed eredi, possedute dalla Biblioteca nazionale centrale Vittorio Emanuele di Roma (Rome, 1891–1942), fascs.i–iii

G. Fumagalli: Antonio Blado tipografo romano (Milan, 1893)

B.M. Galanti: ‘Note per la storia dell'arte della stampa in Roma: la “Stamperia Camerale” ed i suoi stampatori’, Bollettino dell'Istituto di patologia del libro Alfonso Gallo, vii (1948), 17–20

E. Vaccaro Sofia: ‘Documenti e precisazioni su Antonio Blado ed eredi tipografi camerali del sec. XVI’, Bollettino dell'Istituto di patologia del libro Alfonso Gallo, ix (1950), 48–85

F. Ascarelli: La tipografia cinquecentina italiana (Florence, 1953), 65

C. Sartori: Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani (Florence, 1958)

E. Vaccaro Sofia: Catalogo delle edizioni romane di Antonio Blado Asolano ed eredi (1516–1593) possedute dalle Biblioteche Alessandrina, Angelica, Casanatense, Corsiniana e Vallicelliana di Roma, dalla Biblioteca Vaticana, dall’Archivio di stato di Roma e dall’Archivio segreto Vaticano (Rome, 1961), fasc.iv [continuation of Fumagalli and Belli, with full bibliography]

A. Tinto: ‘I corsivi dell'Arrighi e del Tagliente’, in L. Balsamo and A. Tinto: Origini del corsivo nella tipografia italiana del Cinquecento (Milan, 1967), 125–71, esp. 137–8

J. Haar: ‘The Libro primo of Costanzo Festa’, AcM, lii (1980), 147–55, esp. 152–3

G.L. Massetti Zannini: ‘Una dinastia di stampatori: i Blado’, Stampatori e librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: documenti inediti (Rome, 1980), 61–84

D.G. Cardamone: ‘Madrigali a Tre et Arie Napolitane: a Typographical and Repertorial Study’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 436–81

T.W. Bridges: The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals (diss., Harvard U., 1982), i, 47

E. Vaccaro: Le marche dei tipografi ed editori italiani del secolo XVI nella Biblioteca Angelica di Roma (Florence, 1983), 173–7, figs.191–6

G. Zappella: Le marche dei tipografi e degli editori italiani del Cinquecento (Milan, 1986)

S. Morison: Early Italian Writing-Books: Renaissance to Baroque, ed. N. Barker (London and Verona, 1990)

S. Franchi: Le impressioni sceniche: dizionario bio-bibliografico degli editori e stampatori romani e laziali di testi drammatici e libretti per musica dal 1579 al 1800 (Rome, 1994), 68–72, 307–9

THOMAS W. BRIDGES

Blaes, Arnold Joseph

(b Brussels, 1 Dec 1814; d Brussels, 11 Jan 1892). Belgian clarinettist. The son of an amateur clarinettist, he was orphaned at ten. His guardian discouraged the child’s passion for music and sent him out to work as a clerk at the Ministry of Finance when only 13. A few years later relatives overcame the guardian’s scruples and the boy was allowed to buy a clarinet. While still earning his living, Blaes enrolled at the Brussels Conservatory as a pupil of Georges Chrétien Bachmann and won first prize in 1834. On his coming of age he rejected commerce for the life of a clarinettist. His career was brilliant, for besides great expressive ability he had a panache which enabled him to hold his own in partnership with performers such as Liszt and Rubinstein. Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant (j204) was his favourite showpiece, but he was assiduous in performing new works by his compatriots. He had a delicate, impressive style of playing and was particularly noted for his pianissimo.

Blaes went to Paris in 1839 and 1846, and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire struck a medal in his honour on the first visit. He also visited London in 1841 and 1845. His greatest successes were in Russia in 1842 and 1847; on the first visit he was made director of the Imperial Guard music and remained in the country two years. Many of his appearances as soloist in St Petersburg and Moscow were shared by the soprano Elisa Meerti, whom he married in 1843 (see Blaes, Elisa).

The Brussels Conservatory awarded Blaes an honorary post in 1837 and in 1844 he was appointed to the professorship there. His pupils gained 28 premiers prix but he bore the conservatory a grudge for inadequate pay and resigned the appointment to Gustav Poncelet in 1871. Blaes wrote a Méthode, which was successful only in his own country. He used 14-key clarinets, with Janssen-type rollers made by Bachmann; one was of boxwood, the other ebony. His autobiography is interesting and animatedly written.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.J. Blaes: Souvenirs de ma vie artistique (Brussels, 1888) [autobiography]

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971)

P. Weston: More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1977)

PAMELA WESTON

Blaes [née Meerti], Elisa

(b Antwerp, 2 Nov 1817; d Brussels, 6 Nov 1878). Belgian coloratura soprano, wife of Arnold Joseph Blaes. Mendelssohn admired her and engaged her for concerts at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1839, 1841 and 1842. She first sang for the Philharmonic Society of London in June 1839. After appearances in Dresden, Prague and Weimar she joined her future husband for a tour of Dutch provinces in 1840. In Russia (1842–3) she sang many times with Rubini, and Liszt played her accompaniments. After her marriage to Joseph Blaes on 21 September 1843 the couple settled in Brussels. A child was born in the following year and Elisa resumed concert tours with her husband, making a speciality of the aria ‘Parto, parto’ with clarinet obbligato from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. In 1846 the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris awarded her their medal. Later she became a teacher.

PAMELA WESTON

Blagrave, Thomas

(b c1620; d London, 21 Nov 1688). English composer, cornett player, violinist and singer. He was the son of Richard Blagrave, wind player at Charles I's court, and joined his father in the cornett and sackbut consort in 1637, inheriting his place in 1641. He shared the role of Mustapha with Henry Purcell the elder in Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656), and was one of Cromwell's musicians (probably 1657–8). At the Restoration, Blagrave took up his former post as a court wind player, also receiving a place in the Twenty-Four Violins; his nephew Robert served alongside him in this dual capacity. Thomas was also a member of the revived Chapel Royal, was made Clerk of the Cheque in 1662, and Master of the Choristers of Westminster Abbey (where he was buried) in 1664, though according to Anthony Wood he was ‘a player for the most part on the cornet’ in the Chapel Royal. Wood thought him ‘a gentile and honest man’, and Pepys often mentioned him in his diary. His portrait is in the Oxford Music Faculty, and two songs of his survive: What conscience say is it in thee (RISM 1669⁵) and an attractive setting of Sir Robert Ayton's What means this strangeness now of late (ed. in MB, xxxiii, 1971).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, ii, iii, v, viii

BDA

J.D. Shute: Anthony à Wood and his Manuscript Wood D 19(4) at the Bodleian (diss., International Institute of Advanced Studies, Clayton, MO, 1979), i, 77

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

PETER HOLMAN

Blagrove.

English family of musicians.

(2) William (Manning) Blagrove

(3) Richard (Manning) Blagrove

CHRISTINA BASHFORD

Blagrove

(1) Henry (Gamble) Blagrove

(b Nottingham, 20 Oct 1811; d London, 15 Dec 1872). Violinist. He was the son of Richard Manning Blagrove, a Nottingham violinist and teacher who wrote A New and Improved System of the Art of Playing the Violin (London, 1828) and several lightweight piano pieces. Taught by his father, he was taken in 1817 to London, where he was displayed as a child prodigy and even played in the Drury Lane orchestra. In 1821 he began to have lessons from Spagnoletti, and in 1823 became one of the first pupils of the RAM, studying composition with William Crotch and the violin with François Cramer. He joined Queen Adelaide's private band as soloist and principal second violin in 1832, and two years later went to Cassel to study with Spohr. While abroad he visited several European cities, among them Paris and Vienna, where he probably witnessed string quartet concerts. He returned to London in 1834 and shortly afterwards (November 1835) set up the Concerti da Camera, the first West End chamber music concerts, at the Hanover Square Rooms. Later that season (March 1836) he began the Quartett Concerts, a regular chamber series which ran under his leadership until 1842. Through these concerts Blagrove introduced much of the Viennese chamber repertory, including Beethoven's middle- and late-period quartets, to London audiences.

Blagrove was also a prominent orchestral leader and soloist, and for many years played at the Italian Opera, the Philharmonic Society, the Handel Festivals at Crystal Palace and other London concerts. From 1831 he was a professor at the RAM. His published compositions include a number of didactic works, violin solos and duets. Although one of the most talented English violinists of the period, with a large tone and good technical facility, Blagrove paled in comparison with such foreign violinists as Sivori, Sainton and Vieuxtemps; Walter Macfarren's assessment that ‘though a talented and estimable individual, his temperament, like his violin-playing, was decidedly cold’, is borne out by other commentators.

Blagrove

(2) William (Manning) Blagrove

(b Nottingham, 1 April 1813; d London, 1 Nov 1858). Violinist and music publisher, brother of (1) Henry Blagrove. He played the violin and viola in several London orchestras, appeared in the Quartett Concerts and other chamber music series, and wrote a few lightweight violin pieces. He was also active as a music publisher from 1843 (in partnership with William Attwater, 1844–6), trading from 1847 at 71 Mortimer Street; the premises, known as Blagrove's Rooms, were also used by the Blagrove family and others for small-scale concerts.

Blagrove

(3) Richard (Manning) Blagrove

(b ?London, 1826/7; d Clapham, London, 21 Oct 1895). Viola and concertina player, brother of (1) Henry Blagrove. From 1837 to 1841 he was a student at the RAM, where he had viola lessons from Henry Hill. During the 1840s he regularly played the viola in London orchestras and at chamber music concerts; in 1856 he succeeded Hill as principal viola at the Philharmonic concerts and the Three Choirs Festival, positions he held until 1894. He was professor of viola at the RAM from 1856 to 1890.

While a student at the RAM Blagrove learned to play the concertina (invented by Wheatstone in the late 1820’s). One of the first in England to take the instrument seriously, he made his début as a concertina soloist at the Hanover Square Rooms in March 1842, and with Giulio Regondi, George Case and Alfred B. Sedgwick formed a concertina quartet which played in public from 1844, often performing arrangements of classical string quartets. Blagrove composed several short pieces for solo concertina and arranged operatic airs; he also wrote a concertina tutor (London, 1864). G.A. Macfarren wrote two romances and a quintet for concertina and strings for him. In 1876 and 1877 he ran a series of ten Concertina Concerts in London, with the aim of raising money to support concertina composition. Another brother, Charles Frederick Blagrove (bap. London, 16 March 1823; d before Nov 1858), was a pianist and composer of piano waltzes and polkas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (‘Blagrove, Henry Gamble’; W.B. Squire)

W.W. Cazalet: The History of the Royal Academy of Music, compiled from Authentic Sources (London, 1854)

J.D. Brown and S.S. Stratton: British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897/R)

W. Macfarren: Memories: an Autobiography (London, 1905), 108

F. Boase: Modern English Biography (London, 1892–1921), esp. suppl.

P.A. Scholes: The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944: a Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the ‘Musical Times’ (London, 1947), 341, 813

A.W. Atlas: The Wheatstone English Concertina in Victorian England (Oxford, 1996)

C. Bashford: Public Chamber-Music Concerts in London, 1835–50: Aspects of History, Repertory and Reception (diss., U. of London, 1996)

Blahetka, (Anne Marie) Leopoldine

(b Guntramsdorf, nr Vienna, 15 Nov 1809; d Boulogne-sur-Mer, 17 Jan 1885). Austrian pianist and composer. Over a period of more than 60 years she made a major contribution to the image of the professional woman pianist. On the advice of Beethoven, who followed her musical development with interest, she studied the piano with Joseph Czerný; her teachers also included Joachim Hoffmann, Catharina Cibbini, Simon Sechter, and, for a short period, Kalkbrenner and Moscheles. She first performed in public in 1818, and in 1820 was the soloist in Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto. The music critics praised her precise touch, technical brilliance and the ‘cantabile performance of the melodies’ (Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 1820). In 1823 she began including compositions of her own in her programmes. During her first major concert tour in 1825–6 she performed in Frankfurt, Brunswick, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig. In 1828 she appeared in Vienna with Nicolò Paganini. In 1830 she set out on a concert tour of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, England and France. On her way back, about 1833, she decided to make her permanent home at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the north coast of France. She lived there until her death, still making occasional appearances as a pianist, but concentrating more on teaching and composition.

To judge by the number of her published works (64), Leopoldine Blahetka was one of the most successful women composers of the 19th century. Although critical reaction to her Singspiel Die Räuber und der Sänger (1830, Vienna) was negative, her instrumental compositions, distributed in many editions from 1822, were reviewed favourably. Most of her works are of a virtuoso character, but she also wrote several compositions in the Classical mould, including a Violin Sonata, a Piano Trio and two piano quartets.

WORKS

Stage: Die Räuber und der Sänger (Spl), Vienna, Kärntnertortheater, 22 March 1830

Vocal: 6 deutsche Lieder, 1v, pf, op.16; Ave Maria, S/T, pf, op.57; Pater noster, S, A, T, B, pf/org, op.58; other works

Orch: Variations brillantes, pf, orch/str qt, op.4; Variations brillantes, pf, orch, op.14; Variations brillantes sur un thème hongrois, pf, orch/str qt, op.18; Concertstück, pf, orch/str qt, op.25

Chbr: Pf Trio, op.5; Grande polonaise concertante, vc, pf, op.9; Sonata, vn, pf, op.15; 2 pf qts, opp.43 and 44; sets of variations, pf, str qt; sets of variations, vn, pf; works for fl, pf

Pf: Polonaise, op.19; 3 rondeaux élégants, op.37; 2 nocturnes, op.46; Grand Duo, pf 4 hands, op.47; Capriccio, op.48; Caprice élégant, op.59; Nocturne, op.62; 11 sets of variations; 6 sets of waltzes; other works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.M. Gruber: Nicht nur Mozarts Rivalinnen: Leben und Schaffen der 22 österreichischen Opernkomponistinnen (Vienna, 1990), 46–57

F. Hoffmann: Instrument und Körper: die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt, 1991), 352–70

E. Rössl: ‘Leopoldine Blahetka: eine Pianistin und Komponistin der Biedermeierzeit’, Biographische Beiträge zum Musikleben Wiens im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Leopoldine Blahetka, Eduard Hanslick, Robert Hirschfeld, ed. F.C. Heller (Vienna, 1992), 112–211

F. Hoffmann: ‘Zwischen klassischer Tradition und marktgerechtem Virtuosentum: Leopoldine Blahetka’, Ich fahre in mein liebes Wien: Clara Schumann, ed. E. Ostleitner and U. Simek (Vienna, 1996), 111–20

FREIA HOFFMANN

Blahoslav, Jan

(b Přerov, 20 Feb 1523; d Moravský Krumlov, 24 Nov 1571). Czech music theorist, hymnographer, grammarian and poet. He studied theory under Listenius and Hermann Finck at Wittenberg University from 1544. After a short period at Mladá Boleslav (1548–9) he continued his education at Königsberg and Basle. He was a fine linguist who strove to preserve the purity of his native tongue and succeeded in bridging the gulf between Christianity and humanism. He was ordained at Mladá Boleslav in 1553, and became a bishop of the Fraternity of Czech (or Moravian) Brethren in 1557. In the following year he established himself at Ivančice, where before long he installed a printing press. Towards the end of his life he moved to Moravský Krumlov.

His treatise Musica: to gest knjžka zpěwákům, published in Olomouc in 1558 (ed. and Eng. trans. in Sovík), is believed to be the first on music theory in the Czech language, but its information is derived from the writings of Listenius, Finck, Ornithoparchus and Coclico. Blahoslav wrote two entirely new sections for the second edition giving critical and practical advice to singers and choirmasters, and guidance to composers of hymns: he emphasized the need for the musical rhythm to correspond with the časomíra system of prosody (i.e. the alternation of long and short syllables) of the verses. He was the chief editor of the Pisně duchowni ewangelistské (1561), known as the Szamotuły Kancionál, which comprised 735 hymn texts, 52 of them by Blahoslav, and more than 450 tunes, including a number drawn from secular sources and eight which he may have composed himself. Blahoslav has been greatly esteemed for his Czech translation of the New Testament (1568; ed. J. Konopásek, Prague, 1931–2), which was the initial step in the preparation of the celebrated Bible of Kralice (1588).

EDITIONS

Pisně duchowni ewangelistské [Sacred songs] (Szamotuły, 1561, 2/1564, 7/1598)

Evangelia aneb čteni svatá [Gospels or holy readings] (Ivančice, 2/1571)

WRITINGS

Musica: to gest knjžka zpěwákům náleźité zprávy v sobě zavírající [Music: a book containing necessary information for singers] (Olomouc, 1558, enlarged 2/1569)

Písní duchovních některých, jichž se ode uši jednoty bratrské uživá rejstřík [Index of songs of the brethren] (1561, MS, D-HER)

Rejstřík no kancionál v Šamotulích vyšlý [An index for the Szamotuły Kancionál] (1561, MS, HER)

Apologia pro editione cantionales nova (1564, MS, HER)

Vady kazatelů [Preacher’s faults] (1571, MS, HER)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (J. Kouba)

O. Hostinský: Jan Blahoslav a Jan Josquin (Prague, 1896)

R. Quoika: ‘Die Musica des Jan Blahoslav 1569’, GfMKB: Bamberg 1953, 128–31

J. Kouba: ‘Blahoslavův rejstřík autorů českobratrských písní a jeho pozdější zpracování’ [Blahoslav’s index of songs of the Czech Brethren and its subsequent revisions], MMC, no.17 (1962), 1–175

J. Janáček: Jan Blahoslav (Prague, 1966)

O. Settari: ‘Blahoslav jako hudební teoretik a hymnograf’ [Blahoslav as music theorist and hymnographer], Z kralické tvrze, v (1971), 18

T.P. Sovík: Music Theorists of the Bohemian Reformation: Translation and Critique of the Treatises of Jan Blahoslav and Jan Josquin (diss., Ohio State U., 1985)

J.T. Sovík: ‘The Education and Training of the Jednota Musician: the Case of the Bishop Jan Blahoslav’, Die Instrumentalmusik (Struktur – Funktion – Ästhetik)… : Brno XXVI 1991, 293–8

JOHN CLAPHAM

Blaikley, David James

(b London, 13 July 1846; d London, 29 Dec 1936). English acoustician. He was principally noted for his design and manufacture of wind instruments. He had a long career with the firm of Boosey & Hawkes and when Boosey’s took over the business of Henry Distin in 1868, Blaikley was appointed works manager. He became widely known as an authority on woodwind and brass, and in 1874 devised a system of compensating pistons (patented in 1878) which Boosey & Co. adopted (see Valve (i)). The firm continued to use equipment designed by him until the late 1980s. Blaikley also devised other improvements for trumpets, horns and trombones. In 1875 he joined the (Royal) Musical Association and in 1878 read the first of many papers to that society. This highly technical discussion of resonance was followed by others on such subjects as quality of tone in wind instruments (1880), the velocity of sound in air (1883), the trumpet scale (1894) and the french horn (1909). His theoretical and experimental abilities were highly regarded by such famous acousticians as Rayleigh and R.H.M. Bosanquet. From 1884 to 1935 Blaikley served as the Association’s honorary auditor; he also gave lectures to the Royal Society of Arts and at Kneller Hall, the RAM and the Royal College of Organists. The vexed question of pitch led him to contribute an authoritative essay to C.R. Day’s Descriptive Catalogue … (London, 1891) of the musical instruments included in the Royal Military Exhibition (1890) and in 1910 he wrote a memorandum on the pitch of army bands. Blaikley was a keen collector. In connection with the Music Loan Exhibition organized in 1904 by the Worshipful Company of Musicians he delivered a lecture on reed instruments, published in T.L. Southgate, ed.: English Music 1604–1904 (London, 1906, 2/1911).

E.D. MACKERNESS

Blainville, Charles Henri de

(b nr Tours, 1711; d Paris, 1769). French theorist, composer and cellist. The Marquise de Villeroy was for a time his pupil and patron. He claimed the discovery of a third mode (‘mode mixte’) between major and minor, and his theories provoked controversy and criticism (from Daquin, La Borde and others); after the performance of his symphony in the newly discovered third mode, on 30 May 1751, Rousseau published a sympathetic comment in the Mercure de France (June 1751), and Blainville himself replied (November 1751 and May 1752) to objections such as those of J.A. Serre (January 1752).

In his L'esprit de l'art he discussed aspects of vocal composition and performance: recitative, ariette, the voice, accompaniment and expression. His last theoretical work, the Histoire générale et philologique (dedicated to the Duchesse de Villeroy) has a final section on harmonic theory, in which he tried to demonstrate that the method of ‘counterpoint’ (of Corelli, Lully and Campra) is preferable to that of the basse fondamentale (of Rameau), citing examples from Rameau's Talents lyriques (Les fêtes d'Hébé), where Blainville found ‘un mélange de bisarrerie & de caprice du vrai beau’.

Among his compositions heard at the Concert Spirituel was an ‘Ode de Rousseau’ sung by M. Gélin (Mercure de France, March 1757). He also played the cello at the Concert Spirituel, but neither his performances nor his compositions met with outstanding success.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

vocal

Cantatilles, 1v, acc: Le dépit amoureux (n.d.); Iphise (n.d.); Le serin perdu (n.d.); Les plaintes inutiles (1757); Venus vengée (1758)

Chansons pubd in Mercure de France (1752–4): Le retour du printems; Le bonheur de la vie champêtre; Flore en nos champs; D'une aimable bergère; Goutons les douceurs de la vie

Les secondes leçons de Ténèbres (1759)

1er recueil de romances et ariettes, 1v, vn/fl, bc (1769)

1er recueil des récréations lyriques (1771), lost

Bouquet à Mme la Marquise de Villeroy, S, T, B, chorus, orch, 1751, F-Pn

lost vocal works

Cantatilles: La prise de Berg op Zoom, 1751; Le rossignol, 1751; La musette, 1751; L'heureuse surprise, 1758; Le bouquet d'Eglé

Thésée (op); Midas, pièce pour le théâtre du collège des Jésuites à Paris, 1753; Ode de Rousseau, perf. Concert Spirituel, March 1757

Regina coeli, motet, 1760; Dixit Dominus, 1765; Confitebor tibi Domine, motet à grand choeur, 1765

instrumental

VI sonates, 2 vn/fl, bc, op.1 (before 1740)

Concerti grossi (c1740) [arr. of G. Tartini's op.1]

6 simphonies, 2 vn/fl/ob, va, bn/vc, bc, op.2 (c1751)

Simphonie dans le mode mixte (1751)

1er livre de [6] sonates pour le dessus de violle, bc (c1753)

2nd livre de [6] sonates, 2 vc (1753), lost

Menuet, pubd in Journal de musique (1777)

Simphonie no.6, 2 vn/fl, va, bn, vc, bc, S-Uu

V^e sonate en quatuor, F-Pn

Double quatuor simphonie, 1741, lost

theoretical works

Essay sur un troisième mode (Paris, 1751)

L'esprit de l'art musical, ou Réflexions sur la musique et ses différentes parties (Geneva, 1754/R)

Harmonie théoretico-pratique, divisée en six parties (Paris, 1766)

Histoire générale, critique et philologique de la musique (Paris, 1767/R)

Abrégé de tous les différents systèmes de musique depuis l'origine de cet art jusqu'à présent, MS, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF

RiemannL12

J.-G. Prod'homme: ‘La musique à Paris de 1753 à 1757, d’après un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de Munich’, SIMG, vi (1904–5), 568–96

M. Benoit: Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)

MARY CYR

Blaise, Adolfe Benoît

(d ?Paris, 1772). French bassoonist and composer. He was probably the son of a bassoonist at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris in the late 17th century, who may have been maître de chapelle at Limoges in 1717. The younger Blaise was a bassoonist at the Comédie-Italienne by 1737, when (according to the Mercure de France) he arranged music for Le petit maistre. In 1743 he was chef de l’orchestre at the Foire St Laurent, and the next year he took the same post at the Foire St Germain (Boismortier, formerly his deputy, assumed the head position at St Laurent). Blaise continued as bassoonist for the Comédie-Italienne, composing and arranging ariettes, divertissements, vaudevilles and dances for 44 parodies, ballet-pantomimes, comic operas and a spectacle à machines presented there between 1737 and 1769 (for detailed lists see Brenner, 1947 and 1961, and Barnes). He was listed in the Almanach des spectacles and Etat actuel de la musique as that orchestra’s maître de musique (1753–60) and composer (1762–6). He retired in 1767.

The scoring of the popular ariettes for Favart’s Annette et Lubin, first performed at a wedding in January 1762 and at the Comédie-Italienne the following month, is widely attributed to Blaise; numerous 18th-century French song collections contain ariettes from the work. The 1765 version of Favart’s Isabelle et Gertrude, with original music by Blaise except for three Gluck airs, was also successful. Some criticized Blaise’s music as plain and weak, but others praised the way it fitted the verse and kept pace with the dialogue. The work played in Paris for more than 20 years; by 1767 there was a German adaptation using Blaise’s music, and it was given as far afield as Moscow. Grimm wrote of Isabelle et Gertrude: ‘There is nothing to be said about the music: it consists of chansons – little airs that do not merit that name; and as soon as M Blaise attempts to raise himself above the poetry, the music becomes wretched’. Contemporary accounts in the Mercure de France, however, claimed Blaise was ‘known for his other good works’ and that his music was ‘always distinctive’. The hundreds of performances at the Comédie-Italienne including music by him attest to his success. He published two cantatilles, Le feu de la ville, in 1739, and Le coucher du soleil, without date; some of his songs and other items were included in contemporary anthologies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.-A.J. Desboulmiers: Histoire anecdotique et raisonnée du Théâtre italien, despuis son rétablissement en France jusqu’à l’année 1769 (Paris, 1769/R)

A. d’Origny: Annales du Théâtre italien depuis son origine jusqu’à ce jour (Paris, 1788/R)

F.M. Grimm: Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (Paris, 1812–14); complete version, ed. M. Tourneux (Paris, 1877–82/R)

G. Cucuel: Les créateurs de l’opéra-comique français (Paris, 1914)

A. Iacuzzi: The European Vogue of Favart: the Diffusion of the Opéra-Comique (New York, 1932/R)

C.D. Brenner: A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language 1700–1789 (Berkeley, 1947, 2/1979)

C.D. Brenner: The Théâtre Italien: its Repertory 1716–1793 (Berkeley, 1961)

C.R. Barnes: The Théâtre de la Foire (Paris, 1697–1762): its Music and Composers (diss., U. of Southern California, 1965)

M. Noiray: ‘Ariettes et vaudevilles dans les années de formation de l'opéra comique’, Gesellschaft für Musikforschung: Bayreuth 1981, 117–20

K. Pendle: ‘L'opéra-comique à Paris de 1762 à 1789’, L'opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. P. Vendrix (Liège, 1992), 79–178

JEFFREY R. REHBACH

Blaison, Thibaut de.

See Thibaut de Blaison.

Blak, Kristian

(b Fredericia, 31 March 1947). Danish composer and musician. He studied music at Århus University from 1966 to 1971, and moved to the Faeroes in 1974, where he soon became an important musical figure. As a music administrator, Blak has in particular played a key role: he took the initiative for, among others, the Musikforbunden, the Komponistforeningen, the festival ‘Summartonar’, the Tórshavn Jazz Club and the record company TUTL. He is an active folk and jazz musician, playing the piano in several groups, including Spillemaendene (from 1974). In 1980 he formed the group Yggdrasil, which has had various line-ups and has collaborated with other musicians such as John Tchicai. For this group Blak has written several rhythmic suites which blend jazz and folk music with a more serious ‘art’ music, creating a crossover ‘world’ music. One feature common to the suites is their use of different art forms, such as poetry recitation, slides or art works; in addition, several have been performed in conjunction with exhibitions or other special environments, allowing the ambient sounds of indoor or outdoor performance to enter the music. Brøytingar, a rhythmic suite for improvisation group and tape (1988), was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1998.

Since 1983 Blak has moved away from purely rhythmic composition, and has written chamber music for various ensembles. Most of these works are in a moderate modernist style, with eclectic elements. Faeroese nature and culture is often present in the music, as it is in the rhythmic suites, either through the titles or in the music’s mood or melodic lines.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Fl Conc., 1987; Cl Conc., 1988–9; Conc., db, Baroque orch, 1993; Harpan, conc., hp, chbr ens, 1996; Vienne la nuit, chbr ens, 1997

Ballet: De fire tårne [The 4 Towers], improvisation group, tape, 1985; Harra Paetur og Elinborg, orch, perc, 1988

Chbr and solo inst: Trio, fl, cl, bn, 1985; Rørsla, str qt, 1985; Antifonale, fl + t sax, 2 gui, kbds, pf, bass, drums, 1987; Images, str qt, 1987; Sextet, fl, cl, hn, pf, vn, vc, 1991; Ariettes, vc, 1991; Steinamoss, pf, 1991; Ørn [Eagle], fl, sax, gui, pf, bass, drums, perf. 1991; Undirlysi, str qt, 1992; Goragangur, pf, 1992; Oprindelsen [The Origin], pf, 1992; Álvarann, vn, 1993

Rhythmic suites: Den yderste ø [The Outermost Island], improvisation group, reciter, 1981; Concerto grotto, 1984; Brøytingar, improvisation group, tape, 1988; Drangar, 1993

Principal publisher: Samfundet til Udgivelse af Dansk Musik

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Ketting: ‘Two Ballets: Two Kinds of Music, One Composer’, Nordic Sounds (1989), no.1, pp.6–7

K. Blak: ‘Musical Renaissance in the North Atlantic’, Danish Music Review, lxix (1994–5), 22–5

ERIK H.A. JAKOBSEN

Blake, Benjamin

(b Hackney, 22 Feb 1751; d London, 1827). English violinist, viola player and composer. Almost all we know of him comes from information he himself supplied for Sainsbury’s dictionary in 1824. As a boy he was taught the violin by Antonín Kammel, and later by Wilhelm Cramer, leader of the Italian Opera orchestra at the King’s Theatre. Blake himself played the violin in this orchestra from about 1775, as also at the Concert of Ancient Music. It was as a viola player, however, that he came into public prominence. He was principal and soloist at the Professional Concert from 1785 to 1793, appearing regularly in string quartets with Cramer. He also played the viola at the Prince of Wales’s musical evenings, and his unusual interest in this instrument led to his publishing 18 duos for violin and viola in the 1780s. After the 1793 season Blake resigned from public performance. He was already studying the piano under Clementi to equip himself as a teacher, and though he continued to play the viola for the Prince of Wales he lived almost entirely by teaching until 1820 when he retired. Some of his duos would merit revival, as also his sonatas for violin and piano, which were published in score and show an interesting taste for minor keys; the violin parts are called ‘accompaniments’ on the title page, but wrongly.

WORKS

all published in London

op.

[1]	Six Duets, vn, va (c1780)
2	A Second Sett of 6 Duetts, vn, va (1781)
3	A Third Sett of 6 Duetts, vn, va (1785)
4	Six Sonatas, pf, vn acc. (1794)
5	Nine Divertimentos, pf, vn (?1811)
6	A Miscellaneous Collection of Vocal Music (1814)
7	A Duet for vn, va/vc (c1820)
9	Three Solos, va, vc (c1825)
op.8 missing

Sacred music in collections: The Divine Harmonist, ed. T. Busby (1792), Sacred Harmony, ed. R. Willoughby (c1800), Harmonia sacra, ed. J. Page (1800)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

SainsburyD

S. McVeigh: ‘The Professional Concert and Rival Subscription Series in London, 1783–1793’, RMARC, no.22 (1989), 1–135

ROGER FISKE/SIMON McVEIGH

Blake, Christopher (Hugh)

(b Christchurch, 5 Jan 1949). New Zealand composer and administrator. After initially working as a civil engineer, he completed the BMus at Canterbury University, New Zealand, in 1973 and followed this with postgraduate composition studies at Southampton University with Eric Grabner and Jonathan Harvey. Since 1977 he has pursued twin careers in composition and performing arts administration. He was the chief executive of New Zealand's Ministry of Cultural Affairs (1991–7) and in 1997 became National Librarian and Chief Executive of the National Library of New Zealand. The practical knowledge of voices and instruments gained while managing the Canterbury Orchestra (1977–8), National Opera of New Zealand (1979–82) and Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra (1985–90) is evident in his music, which is notable for its clarity of thought and texture. Although underpinned by European organizational techniques, particularly serialism, his works project a strongly New Zealand spirit and imagery and are characterized by a finely judged instinct for theatrical gesture. Many of Blake's major scores reflect his concern for social issues, including the pacifist Till Human Voices Wake Us (1986), which featured in a Television New Zealand documentary on his work (1988).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Bitter Calm (op, 3, S. Hoar), 1983–93, Wellington, St James, 11 March 1994

Orch: Leaving the Plains of C, chbr orch, 1979; Music for Orch, 1980; Music for a New Life, 1981; Dialogues on the State of ‘81’, chbr orch, 1981; Night Walking with the Great Salter, orch, 1982; Four Minutes to Midnight, perc, str qt, str orch, 1983; The Lamentations of Motuarohia, chbr orch, 1983; The Coming of Tane Mahuta, pf conc., 1987; Echelles de glace, elegy, 1992; Sym.-The Islands, 1995; All Fall Down, 1996

Vocal: Till Human Voices Wake Us (A. Baxter), T, orch, 1986

Brass band: Melodium, 1989

Chbr and solo inst: Viola on Skye, va, 1976; Ribbonwood is Home, pf, series I, 1976, series II, 1977–8; Regions, wind qnt, 1978; Towards Peace, cl, 1978; Pattern Piece, tpt, pf, 3 perc, 1979; Bullmores [sic] Accolade, 2 tpts, hn, trbn, tuba, 1984; Sounds, wind qnt, 1985; Clairmont Triptych, wind qnt, pf, 1988; Ancient Journeys, pf, 1991; Little Dancings, fl, pf, 1991; Tranquilla sia l'onda, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, 1997; Studies for Hammers, pf, 1997

Principal publishers: Waiteata Music Press

WRITINGS

A Commentary on the Music from Nought to Nineteen Eighty Four in the Form of an Autobiographical Time Capsule (Wellington, 1984)

‘The Case for Change: Strategies for the Performing Arts’, Music in New Zealand, no.6 (1989), 8–10

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Dart: ‘Christopher Blake: a New Accessibility’, Philharmonia News, vi/2 (1987), 10

J.M. Thomson: ‘ Blake, Christopher’, Biographical Dictionary of New Zealand Composers (Wellington, 1990), 25–7

R. Biss: ‘Spectres and Shortcomings: Bitter Calm at the International Festival of the Arts’, Music in New Zealand, no.25 (1994), 38–9

W. Dart: ‘Composer of Conscience’, Philharmonic News, xv/1 (1996), 16

J. Young: ‘Christopher Blake: Towards a Sense of Place’, Music in New Zealand, no.32 (1996), 8–13

ADRIENNE SIMPSON

Blake, David (Leonard)

(b London, 2 Sept 1936). English composer. He read music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his teachers included Patrick Hadley. The award of the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1960 enabled him to study in East Berlin, at the Akademie der Künste, with Hanns Eisler. During this time he wrote his first acknowledged works, the Variations for Piano and the First String Quartet. Upon his return to the United Kingdom he began a career as a schoolteacher, and composed the children’s musical It’s a Small War. An appointment as the first Granada Arts Fellow at the then new University of York was followed in 1964 with his appointment as one of the founding teaching staff of the new Department of Music, along with Wilfred Mellers and Peter Aston. He became professor in 1976 and was head of department from 1980 to 1983. Among his most important commissions have been two from English National Opera, for Toussaint in 1974–7 and The Plumber’s Gift in 1988. His Violin Concerto (1976) was a BBC Proms commission. Blake is an active perfomer, conducting university ensembles. He has done much to promote the work of Eisler, both in performance and as editor of Hanns Eisler: a Miscellany (Luxembourg, 1995).

Blake’s music is both highly personal and widely eclectic in style, and he has a natural penchant for expressivity and drama, literal and abstract. His earlier works show his thorough absorption, acquired through Eisler, of Schoenbergian techniques, serial and otherwise; in Beata L’Alma this technique is combined with a Straussian lyricism. An interest in non-occidental cultures has also informed his work, but beyond that his music serves a broadly socialist political agenda without, however, compromising artistic integrity. This conscience is manifested on its largest scale in his first opera, Toussaint, in which Blake brings together various stylistic strands – here they include vodou drumming as well as an ironic neo-classicism – in his potent retelling of the story of the Haitian black revolutionary and leader. Structurally the opera is united by a broad tonal plan. A second opera, the witty The Plumber’s Gift, is in some ways the opposite of Toussaint, a work based on the everyday world and the hope and fantasy nurtured by those who inhabit it.

WORKS

Stage: It’s a Small War, musical for schools, 1962; Toussaint (op, 3, A. Ward), 1974–7, rev. 1982; The Plumber’s Gift (op, 2, J. Birtwhistle), 1985–8, rev. 1990; Scoring a Century – an Entertainment (K. Warner), 10 singer/actors, small orch, 1999

Orch: Chbr Sym., 1966; Metamorphoses, large orch, 1971; Vn Conc., 1976; Sonata alla marcia, chbr orch, 1978; Scherzi ed intermezzi, large orch, 1984; Pastoral Paraphrase, bn, small orch, 1988; Vc Conc., 1992; Nocturne, str orch, 1994 [arr. of A Little More Night Music]

Chbr and solo inst: Variations, pf, 1960; Str Qt no.1, 1962; Sequence, 2 fl, 1967; Nonet, wind, 1971, rev. 1978; Scenes, vc, 1972; Str Qt no.2, 1973; Arias, cl, 1978; Cassation, wind octet, 1979; Scherzo and Two Dances, 7 players, 1981 [from Cassation]; Cl Qnt, cl, str qt, 1980; Capriccio, 7 players, 1980, rev. 1984; Str Qt no.3, 1982; Arietta, str trio, 1984; Fantasia, vn, 1984; Seasonal Variants, 7 players, 1985; A Little More Night Music, sax qt, 1990; Diversions on Themes of Hanns Eisler, a sax, pf, 1995; 4 intermezzi, vn, pf, 1995

Choral: 3 Choruses to Poems of Robert Frost, 1964; On Christmas Day (T. Traherne), 1964; 4 Songs of Ben Jonson, 1965; The Almanack (J. Hatfield), 1968; Lumina (cant., E. Pound), S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1969; Change is going to come (cant., S. African poetry), Mez, Bar, chorus, 4 players, 1982; 3 Ritsos Choruses, male vv, gui(s), 1992, arr. mixed chorus, guis, 1993, arr. chorus, orch without vns, 1993; Searching the Skie: 6 Poems of Jessica George, children’s vv, str, 1994; The Fabulous Adventures of Alexander the Great (Birtwhistle), Bar, B, young people’s chorus, orch, 1996

Other vocal: Beata L’Alma (cant., H. Read), S, pf, 1966; What is the Cause (F. Greville), 6 vv, 1967; The Bones of Chuang Tzu (cant., Chang Heng, trans. A. Waley), Bar, pf, 1972, arr. Bar, small orch, 1973; In Praise of Krishna (the Bengali), S, 9 insts, 1973; Toussaint Suite, Mez, Bar, orch, ?1977; The Song of the Common Wind from Toussaint, scena, Mez, orch, ?1977; From the Mattress Grave (H. Heine), high v, 11 insts, 1978, 9 songs arr. high v, pf as 9 Songs of Heine, 1978, 5 songs arr. Bar, ob, pf as 5 Heine Songs, 1985, 5 songs (with Doch die Kastraten klagten) arr. Bar, ob, str qt as 6 Heine Songs, 1988; A Song for Spanish Anarchists (Read), T, gui, prep pf, opt. chorus, 1979; Rise Dove (A. Césaire: Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, trans. D. Blake), B, large orch, 1983, also Fr. version; Doch die Kastraten klagten (Heine), Bar, ob, pf, 1988; The Griffin’s Tale (legend, Birtwhistle), Bar, small orch, 1994

Brass/wind band: Mill Music, brass band, 1990; Winelands, sym. wind ens, 1997

Principal publishers: Novello, University of York Music Press

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. MacDonald: ‘David Blake’, British Music Now, ed. L. Foreman (London, 1975), 120–32

G. Larner: ‘Toussaint: David Blake Talks to Gerald Larner’, MT, cxviii (1977), 721–3

R. Saxton: David Blake (Novello, 1996) [publisher’s brochure]

STEPHEN PETTITT

Blake, Eubie [James Hubert]

(b Baltimore, 7 Feb 1883; d New York, 12 Feb 1983). American ragtime pianist and composer. When he was six years old his parents, who had been slaves, purchased a home organ and arranged for him to have lessons. Later he studied music theory with a local musician, Llewelyn Wilson. Despite the disapproval of his mother, an extremely religious woman, Blake began to play professionally in a Baltimore nightclub at the age of 15, and in 1899 wrote his first piano rag, Charleston Rag. In 1915 he met the singer Noble Sissle. The two men formed a songwriting partnership and had an immediate success with It's all your fault, performed by Sophie Tucker. Blake and Sissle went to New York and joined James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra, and after World War I they formed the Dixie Duo, a vaudeville act. In 1921 they produced an extremely successful musical, Shuffle Along, which ran for more than 14 months on Broadway and subsequently went on tour. Blake continued to write songs with Sissle and other lyricists for several Broadway and London shows during the 1920s and 30s, and toured as musical director for United Service Organizations productions during World War II. He first recorded in 1917, and continued to record as a soloist, including piano rolls, and with his orchestra into the 1930s. He retired in 1946 and returned to the study of composition at New York University, completing the Schillinger system of courses three years later. During the ensuing years he spent much time notating many of his compositions.

A ragtime revival in the 1950s focussed attention on Blake as the nation's foremost rag pianist and launched him on a new career as a touring player and lecturer. He returned to recording in 1969 with the album The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake (Col.), and in 1972 established his own publishing and record company, Eubie Blake Music. He also made piano rolls for the QRS Company (1973). Blake became a legendary figure, constantly performing on television and at jazz festivals in the USA and abroad. He received awards from the music and theatre industries and from civic and professional organizations; he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1981) and honorary degrees from Brooklyn College (1973), Dartmouth College (1974), Rutgers University (1974), the New England Conservatory (1974) and the University of Maryland (1979). His life was celebrated in documentary films and on Broadway in such shows as Eubie (1978).

Blake's music is distinguished by an enormous diversity, reflecting tastes in popular music in the early and middle decades of the 20th century. Many of his more than 300 songs are infused with the syncopated ragtime rhythms that swept Tin Pan Alley between 1900 and 1920. His tunes tend to have a large melodic range and exhibit disjunct motion, while his harmonic language includes many altered blues chords and chromatic progressions. The broad range of Blake's music can be seen in his ethnic songs (If You've Never been Vamped by a Brownskin), which derive from the earlier coon song, in musical-theatre ballads (Love will find a way), in spiritual songs (Roll, Jordan), or in double-entendre novelty songs (My handyman ain't handy any more). His piano music, which consists mostly of rags, displays many of the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of the songs. With their use of broken-octave basses, highly embellished melodies and arpeggiated figurations, they give a good indication of Blake's own virtuosity at the keyboard. His rags, along with works written in the 1920s by composers such as Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, had a direct influence on the development of the Harlem stride-piano school of the following decade.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

musicals unless otherwise stated; some music written in collaboration with N. Sissle; writers shown as (lyricists; book author); dates those of first New York performance

Shuffle Along (N. Sissle; F.E. Miller and A. Lyles), 23 May 1921 [incl. Everything reminds me of you, If You've Never been Vamped by a Brownskin, I'm just wild about Harry, Love will find a way]

Elsie (Sissle; C.W. Bell), 2 April 1923

The Chocolate Dandies (orig. title In Bamville) (Sissle; L. Payton and Sissle), 1 Sept 1924 [incl. That Charleston Dance, Bandanaland, Jazztime Baby, The Sons of Old Black Joe]

Lew Leslie's Blackbirds (revue, A. Razaf: Miller and Razaf), 22 Oct 1930 [incl. Memories of You, My handyman ain't handy any more, Who said blackbirds are blue?, Roll, Jordan]

Shuffle Along of 1933 (Miller; Sissle), 26 Dec 1932 [incl. Harlem Moon]

Swing It (C. Mack), 22 July 1937 [incl. Ain't we got love]

Tan Manhattan (revue, Razaf), 1940 [incl. Tan Manhattan, We are Americans too, Weary]

Shuffle Along of 1952 (Sissle, F.E. Miller and J. Scholl; Miller and P.G. Smith)

Others, unperf.

Contribs. to revues in London, incl. London Calling!, 4 Sept 1923 [incl. You were meant for me]; Cochran's Revue of 1924, 1924; Charlot's Revue, 30 March 1925; Cochran's Revue (1926), 29 April 1926

songs

Some associated with Broadway shows; unless otherwise stated, all lyrics by N. Sissle

It's all your fault (1915); At the Pullman Porter's Full Dress Ball (1916); Floradora Girls (1920); Vision Girl, in Midnight Rounders, 1920; Serenade Blues (1922); When the Lord Created Adam (Razaf) (1931); Blues – why don't you let me alone (A. Porter) (1937)

piano

Charleston Rag (orig. title Sounds of Africa) (1899); Corner of Chestnut and Low (In Baltimo') (1903); Tricky Fingers (1904, rev. 1969); The Baltimore Todalo (1908); The Chevy Chase (1914); Just a Simple Little Old Blues (Blue Rag in 12 Keys) (1919); Tickle the Ivories (1928); Eubie's Boogie (1942); Dicty's on 7th Avenue (1955); Eubie's Classical Rag (1972); Eubie Dubie (1972); The High Muck de Mucks (1972)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Blesh and H. Janis: They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, 4/1971)

R. Blesh: ‘Little Hubie’, Combo: USA: Eight Lives in Jazz (Philadelphia, 1971/R), 187–217

E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971, 2/1983)

W. Bolcom and R. Kimball: Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York, 1973) [incl. work-list, discography]

W.J. Schafer and J. Riedel: The Art of Ragtime (Baton Rouge, LA, 1973/R)

B. King: ‘A Legend in His Own Lifetime’, BPM, i (1973), 151–6

E. Southern: ‘A Legend in His Own Lifetime: Conversation with Eubie Blake’, BPM, i (1973), 50–5

D.A. Jasen and T.J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978)

L. Carter: Eubie Blake: Keys of Memory (Detroit, 1979)

A. Rose: Eubie Blake (New York, 1979)

E.A. Berlin: Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley, 1980/R1984 with addenda)

D.A. Jansen and G. Jones: ‘“If You've Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin”: Black Theatre Composers of the 1920s’, Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York, 1998), 335–60

EILEEN SOUTHERN, JOHN GRAZIANO

Blake, George E.

(b England, ?1775; d Philadelphia, 20 Feb 1871). American music engraver and publisher. He emigrated to the USA before 1793 and in 1794 began teaching the flute and clarinet. In 1802 he acquired the piano manufactory of John I. Hawkins in Philadelphia, and soon after began to publish and to operate a circulating music library. His production included many American compositions (c1808) and political songs (c1813); an early piracy of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–c1825); a serial, Musical Miscellany (from 1815); and the first American edition of Messiah (c1830), along with other major vocal works by Handel. Most numerous among his output, however, were songs of the Philadelphia theatre, based on London publications. Blake also issued typeset opera librettos and engraved tunebooks. He remained active throughout the 1830s, in later years issuing minstrel music and excerpts from Italian opera. At the height of his career (c1810–30) he was America’s most prolific music publisher.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WolfeMEP

Obituary, Philadelphia Evening Transcript (21 Feb 1871)

J.C. White: Music Printing and Publishing in Philadelphia, 1729–1840 (MA thesis, Columbia U., 1949)

D.W. Krummel: Philadelphia Music Engraving and Publishing, 1800–1820: a Study in Bibliography and Cultural History (diss., U. of Michigan, 1958)

R.J. Wolfe: ‘Index of Publishers, Engravers and Printers’, ‘Publishers’ Plate and Publication Numbering Systems’, Secular Music in America, 1801–1825: a Bibliography, iii (New York, 1964), 1133–1200

DONALD W. KRUMMEL

Blake, Howard

(b London, 28 Oct 1938). English composer. He studied at the RAM with Harold Craxton (piano) and Howard Ferguson (composition). While serving as a projectionist at the National Film Theatre his enthusiasm for cinema led him to make a film himself. He began his career in London as composer, arranger, session keyboard player and conductor, gaining experience in radio, television and film. As a pianist in recordings for film he worked for major composers including Quincy Jones, Bernard Herrmann and Henry Mancini. His meeting with Laurie Johnson resulted in his being commissioned to compose music for ‘The Avengers’ television series (1968–9). In 1970, already with numerous assignments in film and television, he spent five years away from the commercial scene in order to develop his own style of concert music, which remains broadly conservative in the interest of accessibility to a non-specialist audience. His major choral work, the dramatic oratorio Benedictus (1979, rev. 1985), has been widely performed. His concert music includes the comic opera The Station (1987, rev. 1992), the ballets The Annunciation (1979) and Eva (1995), several concertos, vocal works and chamber music. Music from The Snowman (1982) for narrator, boy soprano and orchestra first achieved enormous popularity through its use in a short animated film (1982) of the same name. Blake has written extensively for film and television, scoring for documentaries, commercials and feature films. His return to film began with a romantic orchestral score for The Duellists (1977), followed by others including Flash Gordon (1980), The Lords of Discipline (1983) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996). His experience of both classical and popular styles has enabled him to score for many different film and television genres. He was Executive Director of the PRS (1978–87), was co-founder in 1980 of the Association of Professional Composers, and was awarded an OBE in 1994.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Op: The Station (1), 1987; rev. 1992, Haywards Heath, Platform, 18 Nov 1992

Ballets: Reflections, 1976; The Court of Love, 1977; Meeting and Parting, 1977; Leda and the Swan, 1978; The Annuciation (1), 1979; The Snowman, 1993 [See vocal]; Eva (3), 1995

Incid music for theatre, incl. Henry V, 1985; As You Like It, 1989; The Master Builder, 1989

Film scores (director in parentheses): The Duellists (R. Scott), 1977; Agatha (M. Apted), 1978; Blood Relatives (C. Chabrol), 1978; The Riddle of the Sands (T. Maylan), 1978; S.O.S. Titanic (W. Hale), 1979; Flash Gordon, 1980; The Lords of Discipline (F. Roddam), 1983; Amityville 3D ( R. Fleischer), 1983; The Canterville Ghost (P. Bogart), 1986; A Month in the Country (P. O'Connor), 1986; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (A. Noble), 1996

Incid and theme music for TV: The Avengers, 1968–9; The Remarkable Rocket, 1974; Stronger than the Sun, 1977; The Moon Stallion, 1978; Gentle Folk, 1979; Mrs Reinhardt, 1981; Down at the Hydro, 1982; Granpa, 1988–9

vocal

Choral: The Song of St Francis (cant., St Francis of Assisi), SATB, orch/org, 1976, rev. 1990; Benedictus (dramatic orat), T, opt. spkr, SATB, treble vv [opt.], orch, 1979, rev. 1985; The Snowman, nar, boy S, opt. SATB, orch/pf duet, 1982, rev. as ballet and stage show, 1993; Festival Mass, double chorus, opt. org, 1987; 4 Songs of the Nativity (medieval texts, trans. B. Stone), SATB, brass ens/org, 1990; The Bells (cant., E.A. Poe), children’s vv, orch, 1991; The Land of Counterpane (song cycle, R.L. Stevenson), opt. spkr, young vv, orch/pf, 1994; All God’s Creatures (cant., W. Blake, A. Tennyson, J. Bunyan and others), children’s vv, orch, 1995; Charter for Peace (after United Nations Charter), SATB, fanfare tpts, orch, 1995; Still Falls the Rain (E. Sitwell), S/treble, SATB, org, 1997

Solo vocal: 3 Sussex Songs (J. Garrett), Mez, pf, 1973; Farewell my Gentle Harp (anon.), high v, hp, str, 1976, rev. 1993; A Toccata of Galuppi’s (R. Browning), Bar, hpd, 1978; [9] Shakespeare Songs, T, str orch/str qt/pf, 1987; Sleepwalking, S, 8 vc, 1998 [vocalise]

instrumental

Concs.: Cl Conc., 1984; Pf Conc., 1990; Vn Conc., 1992–3; Conc., fl, str orch, 1997

Orch: Sym. in 1 Movt, ‘Impressions of a City’, 1967, rev. 1990; Toccata, 1976, rev. 1988; Nursery Rhyme Ov., 1984; The Conquest of Space, concert ov., 1988; A Month in the Country, str, 1989–92

Chbr: Sonata, ob, str qt, 1971; Reflections, vn, va, vc, pf, 1974; The Up and Down Man, suite, 1974, rev. for orch 1985; Str Trio, 1975; Leda and the Swan, str qt, 1977; Dirge for Fidele, cl, str qt, 1987; Serenade, wind octet, 1990

Solo inst.: 8 Character Pieces, pf, 1976; Prelude, va, 1979; Prelude, vc, 1979; Prelude, Sarabande and Gigue, gui, 1995

Principal publisher: Faber

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Palmer: ‘Howard Blake: a Profile’, From Silents to Satellite (1991), no.5, 34–7

M. Carlsson: ‘Howard Blake’, Music from the Movies, no.12 (1996), 34–9

DAVID KERSHAW

Blake, Richard

(fl late 18th century). Irish ballet dancer and composer. He is probably the ‘Riccardo Bleck’ described as newly hired who danced at Florence in 1763. He composed a ballet in Parma in 1776 and several for Venice in 1777–8 when librettos refer to him as in the service of the Duke of Parma. He appeared again in Florence both as dancer and composer of ballets in 1779 and 1781–2. Michael Kelly met him in Naples in 1780 and said he ‘had gone abroad very young, and had become a very fine pantomime actor, and was considered the best grotesque dancer of his day’. In Naples he danced Artabanes in a ballet called Artaxerxes and Sancho Panza in one Kelly called The Achievements of Don Quixote. The articles on Kelly in the General Magazine for May and June 1788 mention his friendship with Blake, ‘a famous dancer now in London, and retired from the profession’. Blake published Twelve New Country Dances for the Year 1788, and perhaps was lured out of his retirement by the King’s Theatre, for someone called Blake was dancing ‘mature’ roles as late as 1797–8. Two successful ballets, La bergère des Alpes (7 January 1790) and Les mariages flamands (13 February 1790) both had music composed and selected by ‘Blake’; this may have been Benjamin Blake who was still playing in the theatre band, but Richard Blake seems more likely to have been responsible.

ROGER FISKE/R

Blakesmit [Blakismet], Henry.

See Blacksmith, Henry.

Blakey, Art [Abdullah ibn, Buhaina]

(b Pittsburgh, 11 Oct 1919; d New York, 16 Oct 1990). American jazz drummer and bandleader. By the time he was a teenager he was playing the piano full-time, leading a commercial band. Shortly afterwards he taught himself to play the drums in the aggressive swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc, and he joined Mary Lou Williams as a drummer for an engagement in New York in autumn 1942. He then toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (1943–4). During his years with Billy Eckstine’s big band (1944–7) Blakey became associated with the modern-jazz movement, along with his fellow band members Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and others.

In 1947 Blakey organized the Seventeen Messengers, a rehearsal band, and recorded with an octet called the Jazz Messengers. He then travelled in Africa, probably for more than a year, to learn about Islamic culture. In the early 1950s he performed and broadcast with such musicians as Charlie Parker, Davis and Clifford Brown, and particularly with Horace Silver, his kindred musical spirit of this time. Blakey and Silver recorded together on several occasions, including the album A Night at Birdland (1954, BN), having formed in 1953 a cooperative group with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham, retaining the name Jazz Messengers. By 1956 Silver had left and the leadership of this important band passed to Blakey, and he remained associated with it until his death. It was the archetypal hard-bop group of the late 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots. Over the years the Jazz Messengers served as a springboard for young jazz musicians such as Donald Byrd, Johnny Griffin, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, JoAnne Brackeen and Wynton Marsalis. Blakey also made a world tour in 1971–2 with the Giants of Jazz (with Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk and Al McKibbon).

From his earliest recording sessions with Eckstine, and particularly in his historic sessions with Monk in 1947, Blakey exuded power and originality, creating a dark cymbal sound punctuated by frequent loud snare- and bass-drum accents in triplets or cross-rhythms. Although Blakey discouraged comparison of his own music with African drumming, he adopted several African devices after his visit in 1948–9, including rapping on the side of the drum and using his elbow on the tom-tom to alter the pitch. His much-imitated trademark, the forceful closing of the hi-hat on every second and fourth beat, was part of his style from 1950–51. A loud and domineering drummer, Blakey also listened and responded to his soloists. His contribution to jazz as a discoverer and moulder of young talent over three decades was no less significant than his very considerable innovations on his instrument.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Tynan: ‘The Jazz Message’, Down Beat, xxiv/21 (1957), 15 only

Z. Carno: ‘Art Blakey’, Jazz Review, iii/1 (1960), 6–10

J. Cooke: ‘Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’, Jazz Monthly, vi (1960), no.3, pp.4–7, 31; no.8, pp.4–8

A. Taylor: Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (Liège, 1977/R), 251–68

C. Stern: ‘Art Blakey’, Modern Drummer, viii/9 (1984), 8–13

D.H. Rosenthal: ‘Conversation with Art Blakey: the Big Beat!’, BPM, xiv (1986), 267–90

LEWIS PORTER

Blamauer, Karoline Wilhelmine.

See Lenya, Lotte.

Blamont, François Collin de.

See Collin de Blamont, François.

Blanc, Didier le.

See Le Blanc, Didier.

Blanc, Ernest

(b Sanary-sur-Mer, 1 Nov 1923). French baritone. A student at the conservatories in Toulon and Paris, he made his début in Marseilles as Tonio (1950). At the Paris Opéra (1954–80) he sang a wide variety of roles including Rigoletto, Theogène (which he sang in the première of Barraud’s Numance, 1955), Valentin, Amonasro, Germont, Renato, Wolfram, Enrico Ashton, Michele (Il tabarro) and Andrey Shchelkalov. His large, well-focussed, sensuous voice was soon heard in Milan, Vienna and London, but the turning-point of his career came in 1958, when he sang a remarkable Telramund at Bayreuth (a recording of the occasion reveals that his German declamation was as clear and determined as his French). He made his American début in 1959 at Chicago as Escamillo (a role he recorded, in aptly swaggering fashion, for Beecham) and his British début in 1960 as Riccardo (I puritani) at Glyndebourne, where he also sang Don Giovanni. He sang Rigoletto at Covent Garden (1961) and appeared in Milan, Vienna, Brussels and throughout France in a repertory that included Zurga, Scarpia, Luna, Massenet’s Herod, Ourrias (Gounod’s Mireille), the Father (Louise), Golaud, Offenbach's Bluebeard and the Count des Grieux. Besides his Telramund and Escamillo, his recordings include Zurga, a sturdy Valentin and High Priest (Samson et Dalila), and a resplendent Dapertutto (Les contes d’Hoffmann).

ANDRÉ TUBEUF/ALAN BLYTH

Blanca

(Sp.).

See Minim (half-note); minima is also used. See also Note values.

Blancafort (de Rosselló), Manuel

(b La Garriga, Barcelona, 12 Aug 1897; d 8 Jan 1987). Spanish composer. Although he was mainly self-taught, he had early lessons with his father, a pianist and composer, and then studied analysis, form and orchestration with Lamote de Grignon. From the age of 20 he travelled throughout Europe and America as a representative for the Victoria piano-roll company, which his father had founded in 1910, and he was music director of the firm from 1917 to 1931, thus coming into contact with music of many different styles and periods. Around 1914 he had been initiated, through his friend Mompou, to the work of the French Impressionists and Stravinsky, and during the course of his travels he came to know many of the young composers of France and Italy. His own music became better known after the première of the piano suite El parc d’atraccions, given by Viñes in Paris in 1926 and the piano came to occupy an important position in Blancafort’s output. Like Mompou he produced numerous collections of short pieces, conventional large forms replaced by concise ideas within looser structures. His music was often inspired by popular events such as the circus, street festival and jazz bands. It is often sprinkled with refreshing new harmonies and instrumental combination, which owe something to Les Six. Among the awards he received are two prizes from the city of Barcelona (1950 for the Symphony in E, and later for the Rapsodia catalana), the National Prize (1949 for the Quartet in C) and the Orféo Català prize (1965 for the cantata Virgo Maria). In 1986 he was awarded Barcelona’s Golden Medal.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Matí de festa a Puiggracíos, 1929; El rapte de les sabines, 1931; L’ermita i panorama, 1933; Pf Conc., 1944; Preludio, aria y giga, 1944; Concierto ibéric, pf, orch, 1946; Sardana simfònica, 1949; Sym., E, 1950; Rapsòdia catalana, vc, orch, 1953; Evocaciones, 1969; American Souvenir, 1978; Serenata de l’infant, 1978

Choral: Camí de Siena, 1915–20; Nit de Nadal, 1971; El Crist de la Bona Mort (J. Maurí), SATB, org, 1972; Salve estrella de la mar (T. Garcés), SATB, org, 1972; El bou recula, SATB, 1973; Cantos de mis montañas, SATB, 1974; Tripticum sacrum, SATB, 1976

Solo vocal: Sonet penitencial, S, pf qt, 1954; L’aire del Montseny, S, fl, ob, cl, str, 1961; Cançó de l’únic camí, l’infinit, 1v, pf, 1966; Camí sota les branques (Blancafort), 1v, pf, 1973; Ojalá (J.A. Prima de Rivera), 1v, pf, 1974; Cami barrat (N. Albó), 1v, pf, 1979; Pensa repassa, 1v, pf, 1984

Chbr: Pastorel·la, vn, pf, 1927; Str Qt, C, 1948; Str Qt ‘de Pedralbes’, 1949; La verge de Palau-solità, ens, 1978

Pf: Notas de antaño, 1915–20; Cants íntims I, 1918–20; El parc d’atraccions, 1920–24; Chemins, 1926; American Souvenir, 1926–9; Sonatina antigua, 1929; 5 nocturnos, 1930–40; 3 tonades, 1935; Romanza, intermedio y marcha del flautista, 1940; Tema de dansa, 1947; Obsessió, 1954; Homenaje a Turina, 1976; Petites peces per a mans petites, 1981; Remembrances, 1982; Peces petites per a mans menudes, 1985

Principal publishers: Armónico, Elkan Vogel, Porter, Salabert, Senart, Unión Musical Espanola

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Blancafort: La Garriga el Belenari i jo (Barcelona, 1976)

M. Sunyol Genís: De la Garriga i la seva gent (San Cugat de Vallés, 1983)

E. Casares: ‘Manuel Blancafort, o la afirmación de la nueva música catalana’, La música en la generación del 27: homenaje a Lorca, 1915/1939, Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escenicas y de la Música, Festival de Granada, 1986 (Madrid, 1986) [exhibition catalogue]

O. Martorell: Quasi un segle de simfonisme a Barcelona (Barcelona, 1995)

X. Aviñoa: Manuel Blancafort (Barcelona, 1997)

A. MENÉNDEZ ALEYXANDRE/ANTONI PIZÀ

Blancafort Paris, Alberto

(b La Garriga, Barcelona, 1928). Spanish conductor and composer, the son of Manuel Blancafort. Among Alberto's teachers was Nadia Boulanger. He participated in the emergence of the Spanish avant garde through belonging to the Falla Circle and was one of the founders of the Grupo Nueva Música (Madrid, 1958). His emergence as a composer was early and successful, his Piano Sonata (1955) receiving good reviews; however, his subsequent production was scant and irregular. Among his most memorable works are the Concertino de camera (1945) and the Sinfonietta coral (1981). He has written a number of arrangements and harmonizations, of choral music in particular, all highly functional, treated with perfect technique and a balanced sense of modernity.

As a conductor Blancafort devoted much time to working with choirs, including the Capilla Polifonica Ciudad de Oviedo and the Spanish Radio and Television Choir. He later tackled orchestral conducting with groups such as the Chamber Orchestra of Pforzheim (Germany).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Marco: Música española de vanguardia (Madrid, 1970)

T. Marco: Historia de la música española, vi: Siglo XX (Madrid, 1983, 2/1989; Eng. trans., 1993)

ANGEL MEDINA

Blanchard, Antoine [Antonius] dit Esprit

(b Pernes-les-Fontaines, 28 Feb 1696, d Versailles, 10 April 1770). French composer. The son of a doctor, he joined the choir school at the cathedral of St Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence, at the age of eight. His teacher was Poitevin, who had also taught Gilles, Campra and Pellegrin. He was dismissed in 1715 and in 1717 was appointed maître de musique of St Victor, Marseilles. Between 1720 and 1721 he spent a few months at Toulon Cathedral, and in 1732 he became maître de musique of Besançon Cathedral, where Rousseau sought lessons from him. At this time he was connected with the Concert Spirituel, where his motet Cantate Domino … quia mirabilia was performed in 1732. On 31 March 1734 he was appointed to Amiens Cathedral, while maintaining contact with Paris. According to Giberti the motet Laudate Dominum quoniam bonus was performed before the king in 1737, ‘thanks to the friendship of Campra’, whom Blanchard had met during the period 1714–16, when Campra was director of the Académie de Musique, Marseilles. In June 1738 he succeeded Nicolas Bernier as one of the four sous-maîtres of the Chapelle Royale, Versailles (the others were Gervais, Campra and Madin), a post he held until his death. After Campra's death Blanchard became maître des pages de la chambre and after Madin's death he taught the pages de la chapelle, but in 1754 he sold back this office, abandoning his clerical collar to marry Magdelaine Jovelet, who bore him two sons. In 1742 he was granted a priory near Saint Malo and the income from an abbey. The reorganization of the musique de roi in 1761 effected the change of his title from sous-maître to maître de la chapelle, a post he shared with the abbé Gauzargues. In 1764 he was ennobled and awarded the Grand Cordon de l'Ordre de St Michel, which had been left vacant by the death of Rameau. He was one of the adjudicators who chose Giroust as the double winner of a competition held by the directors of the Concert Spirituel in 1767. Blanchard's last-recorded public appearance was in 1768, when he conducted his De profundis at the funeral of Queen Maria Leszcinska. Three years earlier he had chosen J.-A. Matthieu (1734–1811), a violinist in the royal chapel orchestra, as his successor. There is an engraving of Blanchard by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, after Charles-Nicolas Cochin.

During his life Blanchard was regarded as one of the best composers of church music. His motets ‘à grand choeur’, which constitute the bulk of his output, were composed for the Chapelle Royale and the Concert Spirituel. The style of the music reflects the evolution of the French style during Louis XV's reign. His early works are organized along the same lines as those of Lalande and Campra, and they reveal melodic originality, a keen sense of harmony and a regard for polyphony. The works composed during the early years at Versailles treat the psalm texts like librettos, with poetic meaning expressed in the music and the suppleness of French melodic writing in the récits and duos. The five-voice grand choeur is sometimes opposed to a petit choeur of three voices; there is contrapuntal interest within each choir, with the occasional use of plainchant themes as cantus firmi. Joyful texts are conveyed through fast movements, Provençal themes and dance rhythms, and some are in rondo form with hemiolas at the ends of phrases (e.g. Jubilate Deo, 1743). The use of arpeggios and rapid changes of position for the violins (Benedicam Dominum), as well as the violinistic contours of some of the vocal melodies, show the influence of the Italian sinfonia.

The late motets show Blanchard's sensitivity to the new style and his concern for orchestral colour: he used the horn in a second version of Beati omnes, the clarinet in Benedicam Dominum and pizzicato in Cantate Domino … laus ejus. After 1760 many movements reflect the framework of sonata form, with special use of the subdominant and expressive use of dynamics, with varied string textures typical of the late 18th-century idiom.

WORKS

motets, for solo voices, 5-voice chorus, orchestra, basso continuo, unless otherwise stated

sources F-A, AIXm, C, Pc, Pn, see Mongrédien

Pc, Pn sources are autographs

Cantate Domino … quia mirabilia, 1732; Laudate Dominum quoniam bonus, 1734; Lauda Jerusalem, 1736; Venite exultemus, 1737; Cantate Domino … annuntiate, 1738; Deus, Deus meus, 1738; Laetatus sum, 1738; Laudate pueri Dominum, 1738; Paratum cor meum, 1738; Deus in nomine tuo, 1739; Domine in virtute tua, 1739; Exaltabo te, 1739; Jubilate Deo, 1739; Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, 1739

De profundis, 1740; Beatus vir, 1741; Benedic anima mea, 1741; Magnificat, 1741; Nisi Dominus, 1741; Conserva me, Domine, 1742; Jubilate Deo, 1743; Saepe expugnaverunt me, 1743; Confitebor tibi, 1744; Te Deum, 1744; Deus, qui doces manus meas, 1745; Regina Coeli, 1745; Beati omnes, 1746, for the confinement of the Dauphine; Deus misereatur nostri, 1746; Noli aemulari, 1746

Deus in adjutorium meum, 1748; In exitu Israël, 1749; O filii et filiae, 1749; Inclina Domine, 1753; Dominus illuminatio mea, 1754; Benedicam Dominum, 1757; Cantate Domino … laus ejus, 1757; Expectans, expectavi, 1760; Misericordias Domini, 1762; Bonum est confiteri, 1765; Salvum me fac Domine, 1765

Chants de l’Eglise en concertos (24 noëls), arr. orch, 1755

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PierreH

Mercure de France (Dec 1733; Oct 1744; June 1745, 181; Aug 1767, 205)

J.-J. Giberti: Histoire de la ville de Pernes, ancienne capitale et sénéchaussée du Comtat venaissin (MS, 1748, F-C)

J.-J. Rousseau: Les confessions, v (Paris, 1781); repr. in Oeuvres complètes, i, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris, 1959), 176–224, esp. 207–9

J.-B. de La Borde: Essai sur la musique, iii (Paris, 1780/R)

M.-F. Beche: ‘Notes sur la vie de Monsieur Blanchard’, Recueil de motets choisi (MS, 1788, F-Pn)

E. Marbot: Notre maîtrise métropolitaine: son histoire (Aix-en-Provence, 1883)

G. Durand: ‘La musique de la Cathédrale d’Amiens avant la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie, i (1922), 112

R.A. Leigh, ed.: Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, i (Geneva, 1965), 16–19, 28 only

B. Lespinard: La vie et l'oeuvre d'Antoine Blanchard, contribution a l'étude du grand motet sous le règne de Louis XV (diss., U. of Paris-Sorbonne, 1977) [incl. thematic catalogue]

B. Lespinard: ‘Aspects du grand motet dans les années 1760–1770’, Le grand motet français: Paris 1984, 259–76

J. Mongrédien, ed.: Catalogue thématique des sources du grand motet français 1663–1792 (Munich, 1984)

B. Lespinard: ‘La Chapelle Royale sous le règne de Louis XV’, RMFC, xxiii (Paris, 1985), 131–75

Li, Tai-wai: Marc-François Bêche's collection of eleven grand motets by E.J.A. Blanchard (1696–1770) (diss., U. of Illinois, 1993)

BERNADETTE LESPINARD

Blanchard, Henri-Louis

(b Bordeaux, ?April 1791; d Paris, 18 Dec 1858). French violinist, composer, dramatist and critic. His date of birth, given as 7 February 1778 in all reference works since Fétis, is contradicted by Blanchard himself in the Revue et gazette musicale (21 January 1838). He was a pupil of Franz Beck in Bordeaux and of Kreutzer (violin), Méhul and Reicha (composition) in Paris. In 1815 he wrote the words and music of a pantomime, Clarisse et Lovelace, and was conductor at the Théâtre des Variétés from 1818 until 1829. There he came into contact with the leading actors and entertainers of the day, and composed a large quantity of vaudeville airs, some of which, for example Tra la la and Guernadier, que tu m’affliges, enjoyed immense popularity. In 1830 he became director of the Théâtre Molière, where a series of his plays appeared, one of which, Camille Desmoulins, gave rise to a fashion for wearing deep-lapelled white waistcoats after the manner of 1793. In 1831 his one-act opera Diane de Vernon, after Scott’s Rob Roy, was heard at the Théâtre des Nouveautés. Two further operas, Arioste and Les précieuses ridicules, were never performed.

Blanchard composed a small number of more serious works, such as quartets, concertinos for various instruments (e.g. violin) as well as couplets, songs and romances, of which 12 are collected in an Album lyrique (Paris, 1834). The latter part of his career was devoted to criticism. He contributed to La Pandore in 1828 and to L’Europe littéraire, Le foyer and Le monde dramatique in the 1830s. His principal work, however, was as contributory editor of the Revue et gazette musicale from 1836 until his death. His biographical notices of Beck, Cherubini and H.-M. Berton were published separately.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

B.S. Carrow: The Relationship between the Mannheim School and the Music of Franz Beck, Henri Blanchard, and Pierre Gaveaux (diss., New York U., 1956)

J. Cooper: The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris 1828–1871 (Ann Arbor, 1983)

J.-M Fauquet: Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restauration à 1870 (Paris, 1986)

K. Ellis: Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge, 1995)

HUGH MACDONALD

Blanchardus, Francesco.

See Bianciardi, Francesco.

Blanche

(Fr.: ‘white [note]’).

See Minim (half-note); minime and demie are also used. See also Note values.

Blancher, M.

(fl c1556). French composer. He was one of the ‘bons et scavantz musiciens’ who contributed nine works to two anthologies of four-voice chansons published by Michel Fezandat at Paris in 1556 (RISM 1556²⁰ and 1556²¹). Most of these chansons are settings of simple rustic poems in popular vein but they also include Ronsard’s Odelette à l’arondelle. Only the bass partbook of each collection survives.

FRANK DOBBINS

Blanchet.

French family of harpsichord and piano makers, active from the end of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th. A Nicolas Blanchet, master instrument maker, worked in Paris in the first half of the 17th century, but his relationship to the later family is unknown. The founder of the family firm was Nicolas Blanchet (b Reims, c1660; d Paris, 1731); it is not known where or to whom he was apprenticed, but he was in Paris at the rue des Fosses St Germain when he married in 1686. He was admitted to the guild as a master in 1689 and prospered during the next few years judging by his surviving instruments and guild position. In 1717 he moved to rue St Germain l’Auxerrois. His second son, François-Etienne Blanchet (i) (b Paris, c1700; d Paris, 1761), became a full partner with his father in 1722, and an inventory of the assets of the partnership taken in 1726 shows their wealth to have nearly tripled in four years.

In 1727 François-Etienne (i) married Elisabeth Gobin, who as part of her dowry had a share with her brothers and sisters in a large house in the rue de la Verrerie. Blanchet father and son moved there and set up shop ‘vis-à-vis la petite porte de S. Merry’, where the workshop of the Blanchets and later Taskin was to remain to the end of the century. Two children were born of the marriage: Elisabeth-Antoinette (b ?Paris, 1729; d ?Paris, 1815), who married Armand-Louis Couperin in 1752, and François-Etienne (ii) (b Paris, c1730; d Paris, 1766), who became his father’s partner and successor.

The Blanchet relationship with the court began in the 1740s with the building of a harpsichord for Mesdames à Fontevrault and with increased repair work sent by Christophe Chiquelier, keeper of the king’s instruments; during the 1750s the firm became ‘facteur des clavessins du Roi’. Although harpsichord making and rebuilding dominated the workshop’s activities until the 1790s, the firm was one of the first in Paris to make pianos, one of which was owned by the prominent Parisian harpsichordist Claude-Bénigne Balbastre in 1763. On the death of François-Etienne Blanchet (ii) in 1766, the workshop was taken over by his chief workman, Pascal Taskin. Blanchet’s infant son Armand-François-Nicolas (b Paris, 1763; d Paris, 1818) was brought up and trained by Taskin. Armand Blanchet wrote a Méthode abrégée pour accorder le clavecin et le piano (Paris, 1797–1800/R). His son Nicolas (ii) managed the workshop from 1818 and later entered into a partnership with Johannes Roller, a German piano maker active in Paris from about 1808. When Roller retired in 1851, he was replaced by Nicolas’s son P.A.C. Blanchet, who succeeded his father in 1855.

Inventories and guild records show the Blanchet shop to have been both financially and artistically successful from the beginning. An inventory taken at the death of François Couperin (1668–1733) lists his large harpsichord as by Blanchet, and instruments made by the firm were prized and commanded considerably higher prices than those of other Paris makers. (For a description of Blanchet harpsichords, see Harpsichord, §4(i).) The Blanchets were particularly renowned for their reworking of 17th-century Flemish instruments. During the first quarter of the century Nicolas Blanchet replaced keyboards and actions, but later the cases were enlarged to meet the needs of an increased range, and sometimes large harpsichords were made from small Ruckers singles or even from several old soundboards. The Dictionnaire portatif des arts et métiers (1767, ii, 7) states: ‘It is in the art of enlarging the harpsichords of Ruckers that the late Blanchet has succeeded incomparably well … a harpsichord of Ruckers or Couchet, skilfully cut and enlarged, with jacks, slides and keyboards of Blanchet, becomes today a very precious instrument’.

The firm built their first upright piano in 1827, and an improved model produced in 1830 was widely imitated by other makers; the high-quality small upright pianos in which the firm specialized were successfully exhibited at many international exhibitions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoalchM

R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)

P.J. Hardouin: ‘Harpsichord Making in Paris: 18th Century’, GSJ, x (1957), 10–29

C. Samoyault-Verlet: Les facteurs de clavecins parisiens (Paris, 1966)

W.R. Dowd: ‘The Surviving Instruments of the Blanchet Workshop’, The Historical Harpsichord: a Monograph Series in Honor of Frank Hubbard, i, ed. H. Schott (Stuyvesant, NY, 1984), 17–107

A. Anselm: ‘Un clavecin singulier: Blanchet 1736’, Musique ancienne, xx (1985), 24–66

J. Koster: ‘Foreign Influences in Eighteenth-Century French Piano Making’, Early Keyboard Journal, xi (1993), 7–38

WILLIAM R. DOWD/JOHN KOSTER

Blanchet, Emile-Robert

(b Lausanne, 17 July 1877; d Pully, nr Lausanne, 27 March 1943). Swiss pianist and composer. After early studies with his father, the organist Charles Blanchet (1833–1900), and then with his mother, Marie Schnyder, an excellent pianist, Blanchet attended the Cologne Conservatory from the age of 18, where his teachers included Gustave Jensen for harmony and counterpoint, Friedrich Wilhelm Frankel and Seiss. In 1898 he left Cologne for Berlin, and subsequently Weimar, to study with Busoni, whose influence was to prove pivotal to Blanchet's future development. At 25 he made his début with the Berlin PO, after which he appeared throughout Germany and elsewhere, including a tour of Switzerland as accompanist to the violinist Henri Gerber. In 1905 he became director of the Lausanne Conservatoire, a position he relinquished in 1908 in order to concentrate more on teaching and composition. In 1909 he was awarded first prize for his Tema con variazioni for piano op.13 in a competition in Berlin. As a pianist, Blanchet's virtuoso technique was well suited to his chosen repertory, which was based primarily on the works of Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms and especially Chopin, in addition to those of Debussy, Ravel and Louis Vierne. His playing was particularly admired for its power and control and for the variety of colour and nuance he was able to achieve through a subtle pedal technique.

In 1929 Blanchet's Concertstück no.1, op.14, for piano and orchestra was chosen as a compulsory piece for the virtuoso class at the Chicago Musical College. The Concertstück and the Ballade op.57, originally written for two pianos but later arranged for piano and orchestra by Ansermet, are the only two of Blanchet’s published works to involve the orchestra; and, with the exception of some works for voice and piano, violin and piano, and a single composition for organ, Blanchet's output was exclusively for the piano. In addition to the Tema con variazioni op.13, of which he later made a revised version, his most characteristic compositions include the Suite Turquie, comprising opp.18, 50 and 51, which adumbrates his interest in orientalism; the ten-movement Suite Romantique op.54b; the Suite in A minor op.87; and, especially, the Sonata op.108, a highly concentrated work, dedicated to his colleague, Josef Turczynski. Blanchet also devoted a considerable portion of his output to études, in which the poetic and expressive content evolves directly from the featured technical elements. Like Godowsky, he also used figurations from other composers' works, for example Liszt, Schumann and particularly Chopin, as the starting point for original études of his own. Blanchet's students included Germaine Schmidt, Francis Lombriser, François Olivier and Irène Bächtold-Hertig.

CHARLES HOPKINS

Blanchet, Joseph

(b Tournon, 10 Sept 1724; d Paris, 1778). French writer. He was the author of a treatise on singing entitled L'art ou les principes philosophiques du chant (Paris, 1756). He was not a musician; he referred to himself as ‘un homme de lettres amateur’. His work is largely concerned with physical aspects of singing, such as sound production and breathing, based upon the earlier work of a physician and anatomist, Antoine Ferrein (De la formation de la voix de l'homme, Paris, 1741). In a lengthy preface he accused the author of L’art du chant (Paris, 1755), Jean-Antoine Bérard, of incorporating his material, and listed corrections to Bérard's work. The two treatises include many passages which are nearly identical (particularly the first and third chapters, ‘La voix considérée par rapport au chant’ and ‘La formation de la voix’), but La Borde discounted the accusation, criticizing Blanchet's work for its ‘balourdises’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

La BordeE

S. Jouve-Ganvert: ‘Blanchet, abbé Joseph ou Jean’, Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. M. Benoit (Paris, 1992)

MARY CYR

Blanchin, François.

See Bianchini, Francescho.

Blanck (Valef), Hubert de.

See De Blanck, Hubert.

Blanckenburg, Quirinus Gerbrandszoon van.

See Blankenburg, Quirinus Gerbrandszoon van.

Blanckenmüller [Blanckmüller, Planckenmüller], Georg [Jörg]

(b 1480–1500). German composer. As nearly all his known compositions survive in Augsburg and Nuremberg sources, he may have lived in Bavaria, perhaps in Augsburg, and have been one of Senfl's contemporaries. He dedicated his déploration, Erravit primus nomen mihi, to the Augsburg singer Joannes Jordanus, mentioned by Tinctoris. Blanckenmüller may have had Protestant sympathies, for the collection Concentus novi (Augsburg, 1540) contains two Protestant lieder by him. Technically and stylistically he is indebted to the older cantus-firmus lied, but his technique is not particularly varied. His pieces are balanced and the parts, often consisting of familiar melodic formulae, are melodious and very singable.

WORKS

5 Latin motets, 2, 4, 5vv, 1545², 1549¹⁶, D-Mbs 22, H-BA 22, 23

2 sacred lieder, 4vv, 1540⁸, ed. in EDM, Sonderreihe, ii (1955)

9 secular lieder, 4vv, 1539²⁷, 1540⁷, 1549³⁷, 1556²⁸; Innsbruck, Schloss Ambras 5374–77, Wn 18810, D-Mbs Mus.ms.3155; 2 ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xx (1942/R); 1 ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xxi (1942/R)

Fors seulement, 4vv, Mbs Mus.ms.1516

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BlumeEK

MGG1 (H.-C. Müller)

R. Eitner: ‘Das alte deutsche mehrstimmige Lied und seine Meister’, MMg, xxvi (1894), 74–7

H.J. Moser: Paul Hofhaimer (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1929 enlarged, 2/1966)

G. Reichert: ‘Die Preces primariae-Register Maximilians I. und seine Hofkapelle um 1508’, AMw, xi (1954), 103–19

HANS-CHRISTIAN MÜLLER/CLYTUS GOTTWALD

Blanck Martín, Olga de.

See De Blanck Martín, Olga.

Blancks [Blanks], Edward.

See Blankes, Edward.

Blanco (Rodríguez), Juan

(b Mariel, nr Havana, 29 Jan 1929). Cuban composer. After private tuition with Leonor Feliú he moved to Havana (1935) and studied at the Peyrellade Conservatory, and was then taught composition by José Ardévol at the Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana. He formed part of the Sociedad Cultural Neustra Tiempo (1950), a multi-disciplinary group that aimed to recover the cultural values of the past and also promote the new. In the same year he won the music prize of the Cuban Movement for Peace with his Cantata de la Paz, and in 1951 won the choral music prize with Tríptico Coral. He was director of the Ministry of Education’s radio broadcasting station, CMZ, and then professor of music history at the Alejandro García Caturla Conservatory (1961). He became the music director of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (1967), and later helped establish the Estudio de Música Electroacústica (1979), the first of its kind in Cuba, becoming its director general.

Blanco’s early compositions (1938–48) were modelled on the German lied and on the piano works of Schubert, Brahms and Chopin. From 1948 to 1959 his musical language was typical of the contemporary nationalistic trend, and he experimented with the orchestra and small instrumental groups. His varied forms revealed the need for free structure, and traditional harmony was mainly surplanted by a reliance on chords incorporating a tritone; his themes tended to be revolutionary, heroic or dramatic. From 1959 his work increasingly incorporated changing nationalist ideals and technical developments. Characterized by the use of multiple techniques and sound media, Blanco has constantly sought structures that lead to new ways of arranging the passage of sound alongside a meticulousness in the use of harmony and his ongoing fondness for themes of love, the struggle against oppression and support for human rights.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballets: Son para turistas (ballet de cámara), 1955; Música para danza (ballet, 3), tape, 1961–2

Choral: Triptico Coral (N. Guillén), C, mixed chorus, tpt, 2 db, perc, 1951; Cant. de la Paz (P. Neruda and A. Machado), B, mixed chorus, orch, 1952

Orch: Elegia, 1956; Episodios, 1964 (1988)

Chbr: Qnt No.1, fl, ob, cl, bn, vc, 1954; Divertimento, brass band, 1957–8; Contrapunto Espacial I, 3 ww ens, 4 perc ens, org, 1965 (1977); Estimulos para sonar I, 3 pf/3 gui, 1971; Estimulos para sonar II, 3/6 insts, 1971; Estimulos para sonar III, inst ens, 1971; Estimulos para sonar IV, 2 pf, 1971; Estimulos para sonar VII, 3 players, 1971; Estimulos para sonar V, inst ens, 1971; Estimulos para sonar VI, inst ens, 1971

El-ac: Studies I and II, tape, 1961–2; Ensemble V, tape, 1964; Variaciones americanas, 5 tapes, 6 dancers, 1990

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Ardévol: Música y Revolución (La Habana, 1966)

L. Brouwer: La música, lo cubano y la innovación (La Habana, 1982)

V. Eli: ‘Apuntes sobre la creación musical actual en Cuba’, Revista temas, no.11 (1987)

A. Valdés Cantero: ‘El discurso sonoro de Juan Blanco’, Revista revolución y cultura, no.1 (1990), 10–17

ALICIA VALDÉS CANTERO

Blancq, Edward.

See Blankes, Edward.

Blancrocher.

See Fleury, charles.

Bland.

English family of singers.

(1) Maria Theresa Bland [Romanzini]

(2) James Bland

(3) Charles Bland

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Bland

(1) Maria Theresa Bland [Romanzini]

(b ?1768/9; d London 15 Jan 1838). Soprano and actress. She was said to have had Italian Jewish parents who came to England when she was very young and, despite reports of a certificate stating that she was born and baptized at Caen in Normandy in September 1770, it seems almost certain that she was the ‘Italian Lady (four years old)’ who sang with the conjurer Breslaw and his Italian company at Hughes's Riding School near Blackfriars Bridge in May 1773. After further seasons with Breslaw she sang in 1780 with an Italian puppet show and the next year was in a pastoral medley at the Italian Opera and sang Cupid in King Arthur at Drury Lane. Miss Romanzini was a leading member of Charles Dibdin's child company at the Royal Circus, and then sang principal female roles in English operas in Dublin in 1784–5. After a return to the Royal Circus she created a sensation at Sadler's Wells as La Petite Savoyard in The Gates of Calais (1786) and that autumn began her long career at Drury Lane in Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion.

She was short, swarthy and scarred by smallpox but was a very popular performer whose sweet and pure voice moved audiences to raptures until the 1820s. Arnold, Storace and later Kelly regularly created parts for her in their English operas. Kelly wrote of the ‘great simplicity and truth’ of her singing of ‘A little bird sat on a spray’ in Storace's The Cherokee and claimed that Haydn and Pleyel agreed with him that ‘no real judge … could find a single blemish in her style or taste’. She composed songs in the ballad style, notably ‘'Twas in the solemn midnight hour’, which she sang to her own guitar accompaniment in the comedy The Sighs, and a setting of Monk Lewis's Crazy Jane. She sang in three London oratorio seasons in the 1790s, in concerts in the provinces and at Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens. In 1798–9 she deputized for Banti in Italian opera and Mount Edgcumbe commented that ‘few, if any, English singers who have appeared at the opera, sung with such pure Italian taste, or equalled her in recitative’.

In 1790 she married George Bland, the brother of Mrs Jordan, but by 1795 she was living with the actor Thomas Caulfield. The birth of several children did not affect her career but depression caused by the death of a child kept her off stage for several months in 1800. She retired from the stage in 1822 and suffered a complete mental breakdown two years later, when the theatre put on a benefit to provide care for her. There was a further benefit for her at the Argyll Rooms in 1826, when she sang a ballad, and against the advice of her friends she sang at the unfashionable White Conduit House that summer. James Winston saw her there, looking ‘a decrepit little old woman’, but recorded that she sang well. Oxberry wrote of her in 1825: ‘As a singer, we never heard her equal; she had all the requisites for a first-rate vocalist – compass, power, feeling, taste, flexibility, and sweetness’.

Bland

(2) James Bland

(b London, 5 March 1798; d London, 17 July 1861). Bass-baritone and actor, son of (1) Maria Theresa Bland. He sang in the company of the English Opera House at the Lyceum (1826–30) and then, after a brief period acting minor roles at Drury Lane, achieved fame in J.R. Planché's burlesque burlettas. Planché called him the ‘monarch of the extravaganza’, praised his ‘good baritone voice’ and wrote that his acting never degenerated into buffoonery. He died suddenly at the Strand Theatre, where he was due to perform in Aladdin.

Bland

(3) Charles Bland

(b London, 14 Aug 1802; d after Jan 1838). Tenor, son of (1) Maria Theresa Bland. He sang at Covent Garden from 1824 and created the title role in Weber's Oberon (1826) under the composer's direction. The librettist, Planché, wrote that he sang ‘at least respectably the airs assigned to the King of the Fairies’, but the reviewer of the Harmonicon commented: ‘his voice is disagreeable and his manner is not much better than his voice’. His career did not prosper and at the time of his mother's death he was described as ‘late of Covent Garden’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

DNB (‘Bland, Maria Theresa’, W.B. Squire)

FiskeETM

A. Pasquin [J. Williams]: The Children of Thespis, i (London, 13/1792)

J. Roach: Authentic Memoirs of the Green Room (London, 1796)

The Thespian Dictionary (London, 1802, 2/1805)

C.H. Wilson: The Myrtle and Vine (London, 1802)

R. Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences (London, 1824, 4/1834)

W. Oxberry: ‘Memoir of Mrs. Bland’, Dramatic Biography, i (1825), 161–7

The Harmonicon, iv (1826), 42, 108, 154

M. Kelly: Reminiscences (London, 1826, 2/1826); ed. R. Fiske (London, 1975)

W. Robson: The Old Play-Goer (London, 1846)

J.R. Planché: Recollections and Reflections, i (London, 1872)

T.F. Dillon Croker and S. Tucker, eds.: The Extravaganzas of J.R. Planché, Esq. (London, 1879)

T.J. Walsh: Opera in Dublin 1705–1797 (Dublin, 1973)

A.L. Nelson and G.B. Cross, eds.: Drury Lane Journal: Selections from James Winston's Diaries (London, 1974)

Bland, James A(llen)

(b Flushing, NY, 22 Oct 1854; d Philadelphia, 5 May 1911). American minstrel performer and songwriter. He was educated in Washington, DC, where he enrolled in the law department of Howard University and was deeply moved by the spirituals and the rhythm and harmony of the work songs of labourers on the university campus. He learnt to play the banjo, taught himself the rudiments of harmony and began composing songs. He organized musical groups and performed at various social functions, where he soon became known as a versatile entertainer. He found the perfect outlet for his musical and theatrical talents in the minstrel show and joined the Original Black Diamonds of Boston as a leading performer in 1875.

In 1876 Bland joined the Bohee Minstrels, then Sprague’s Georgia Minstrels who, as Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels, opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 30 July 1881. Bland was a star performer and became famous for his rendition of Oh, Dem Golden Slippers with a special comic routine at the end; another favourite with his audiences was The Colored Hop. He also displayed his varied talents in ‘An Ethiopian Specialty’, which consisted of singing, dancing and acrobatic stunts. The show met with huge success and, when the company sailed for New York on 5 August 1882, Bland and a few others remained in London, where he became a member of English companies for a short time but achieved his greatest success as a solo performer.

Bland returned to the USA in 1890 at the peak of his career and fame, touring with W.S. Cleveland’s Colossal Colored Carnival Minstrels. He remained with this company for about a year, but his subsequent appearances became fewer and his itinerary is unclear. W.C. Handy states in his autobiography, Father of the Blues (New York, 1941), that he met Bland in Louisville in 1897, but Bland was no longer such a dazzling entertainer. A year later he sang for a short time with Black Patti’s Troubadours, but the black minstrel era was nearing its end, and another musical theatre was developing. Bland tried to meet the new challenge by writing a musical comedy, The Sporting Girl, but it was a failure. Eventually he returned to Philadelphia where, penniless and ill, he died of tuberculosis. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Colored Cemetery in Merion, Philadelphia; a gravestone was not erected until 15 July 1946.

Only a tenth of the 600 songs that are repeatedly claimed for him are verifiably by him. He wrote his songs and dances for specific performances, shaping the melodies, texts and rhythms to suit the situation and the character. They range from sentimental ballads to vigorous dances and sturdy marches. His musical inspiration was drawn from black spirituals, gospel hymns and work songs, with their rhythmic pulse and leader-response elements. Bland’s most famous song, Carry me back to old Virginny, was adopted by the State of Virginia in 1940 as its official state song.

WORKS

Unless otherwise indicated, all works are minstrel songs with texts by Bland and all were published in Boston

Edition:J.A. Bland: Album of Outstanding Songs, ed. C. Haywood (New York, 1946)

The Farmer’s Daughter (1874); Carry me back to old Virginny (1878); Close dem windows (1879); Fascinating Coon (New York, 1879); Father’s growing old (1879); Flowers will come in May (1879); In the Morning by the Bright Light (1879); Lucy, the Pride of the South (1879); My Old Home in Mississippi (1879); Oh, Dem Golden Slippers (1879); Old Homestead (1879); Old Plantation Lonely (1879); Pretty Little South Carolina Rose (1879); Rambling Through the Clover (1879); Silver Slippers (1879); Take good care of mother (1879); Uncle Joe, or The Cabin by the Sea (1879); Whisper softly, baby’s dying (1879)

De angels am a coming (New York, 1880); Dancing on the Kitchen Floor (1880); Darkey’s Request (New York, 1880); Darkie’s Jubilee (1880); Dashing Harry May (New York, 1880); De Golden Wedding (1880); In the Evening by the Moonlight (New York, 1880); Keep dem golden gates wide open (New York, 1880); Kiss me goodnight, mother (1880); Listen to the silver trumpets (1880); Oh, my brother! (1880); Sister Hannah (n.p., 1880); Sons of Ham (New York, 1880); Way up Yonder (1880); Won’t we have a jolly time? (New York, 1880); The Colored Hop (Philadelphia, 1881); Come along, Sister Mary (n.p., 1881); Dandy Black Brigade (New York, 1881); Darkie’s Moonlight Picnic (New York, 1881); Gabriel’s Band (New York, 1881); I’ll name the boy Dinnes, or no name at all (n.p., 1881); Mid’st Pretty Violets (1881); My own Sweet Wife to Be (n.p., 1881)

Oh, Lucinda! (Philadelphia, 1881); Oh, why was I so soon forgotten? (n.p., 1881); The Old Fashioned Cottage (n.p., 1881); Only to Hear her Voice (n.p., 1881); Rose Pachoula (n.p., 1881); Taddy, please, scare me again (n.p., 1881); Tell all de children good bye (Philadelphia, 1881); Tell ’em I’ll be there (New York, 1881); Traveling Back to Alabama (n.p., 1881); You could have been true (New York, 1881); Christmas Dinner (1889); Tapioca (n.p., 1891); Happy Darkies (New York, 1892)

Climbing up the Golden Stairs, lost; Kingdom Coming; The Missouri Hound Dog; The Old Log Cabin in the Dell

The Sporting Girl (musical comedy), c1900

Principal publishers: B.W. Hitchcock, J.F. Perry, Pauline Lieder

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB

C. Haywood: James A. Bland: Prince of the Colored Songwriters (Flushing, NY, 1944)

C. Haywood: A Bibliography of North American Folklore and Folksong (New York, 1951, 2/1961)

T. Fletcher: 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York, 1954)

J.B. Bland: James Allen Bland, Negro Composer: a Study of his Life (MMEd thesis, Howard U., Washington DC, 1968)

E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971, 2/1983)

I. Simond: Old Slaves Reminisences and Pocket History of the Colored Profession from 1865 to 1891 (Bowling Green, OH, 1974)

R.C. Toll: On with the Show (New York, 1976)

C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)

CHARLES HAYWOOD

Bland, John

(b ?London, c1750; d ?London, c1840). English music seller, instrument dealer and publisher. By 1776 he was established in London, where he remained active until his comparatively early retirement in 1795. In 1789 he went to Vienna to induce Haydn to visit England and to seek compositions from him and other composers, including Hoffmeister and Kozeluch. Bland is said to have been the hero of the ‘Razor’ Quartet story, in which he supposedly received the manuscript of the quartet, op.55 no.2, as a reward for presenting the composer with his English-style razor; however, the op.55 quartets were published in England not by Bland, but by Longman & Broderip in 1790. Haydn did eventually send Bland three piano trios (hXV: 15–17) which he subsequently published, and when Haydn arrived in London in January 1791 he spent his first night as a guest of Bland at his house in Holborn. Bland published other works by Haydn, though his business relationship with him was by no means an exclusive one. He also appears to have commissioned the 1792 portrait of Haydn by Thomas Hardy (now in the RCM), and issued engravings from it.

Bland published many collections of catches and glees, operas and sheet music, in addition to republishing many of Handel’s works, often in unusually inexpensive editions. In 1795 the business, including Bland’s stock of 12,000 engraved plates, was taken over by Lewis, Houston & Hyde, who in 1797 were followed by Francis Linley (1771–1800); he in turn gave place in 1798 to William Hodsoll who kept on the business until 1831. After giving up his own business, Bland appears to have had some association with the Birchall firm until about 1801.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

KidsonBMP

Letter to the editor, Musical World, ii (1836), 95

H.C. Robbins Landon, ed.: The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn (London, 1959)

C. Flamm: ‘Ein Verlegerbriefwechsel zur Beethovenzeit’, Beethoven-Studien, ed. E. Schenk (Vienna, 1970), 57–110

H.C. Robbins Landon: Haydn: Chronicle and Works, ii–iii (London, 1976–8)

FRANK KIDSON/WILLIAM C. SMITH/PETER WARD JONES

Blandrati, Giovanni Pietro.

See Biandrà, Giovanni Pietro.

Bland & Weller.

English music publishers and instrument makers. The business, not to be confused with that of John Bland, was founded in London in 1784 by Anne Bland, who went into partnership with E. Weller in 1792. In addition to their publishing activities, which included country-dance collections and the first English edition of three Mozart piano sonatas (k280, 282, 283), they are also described as piano makers, and wind instruments bearing their name are extant. In 1805 the firm purchased from Dibdin the copyrights of 360 of his songs together with his musical stock, which they then reissued. Anne Bland retired in about 1818, and a sale of plates and copyrights took place, though Weller carried on the business as Weller & Co. until 1820.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

KidsonBMP

Waterhouse-LangwillI

M.N. Clinkscale: Makers of the Piano 1700–1820 (Oxford, 1993)

FRANK KIDSON/WILLIAM C. SMITH/PETER WARD JONES

Blangini, (Giuseppe Marco Maria) Felice

(b Turin, 18 Nov 1781; d Paris, 18 Dec 1841). French composer, singing teacher and tenor of Italian birth. As a boy he sang in the Turin Cathedral choir and was a pupil of Bernardo Ottani. Arriving in Paris in 1799, he became fashionable as a singer, composer of salon music and singing teacher. He also opened a concert room at his home in the rue Basse-du-rempart de la Madeleine, which was run by his mother; he took part in concerts there (as did his sister Félicité, a pupil of Crescentini), notably when he was in Paris in 1810 and 1811, performing his famous romances and nocturnes. In 1810, as recorded in the Journal de l’Empire of 13 March, ‘several music-lovers who were members of the Société de la rue de Cléry’ took over the renovated concert room, which according to the Tablettes de Polymnie of January 1811 was ‘the concert room frequented for preference by the best society of Paris’.

In 1802 Blangini made his début as an opera composer at the Théâtre Feydeau and, in 1806, at the Opéra. In 1805 he became maestro di cappella to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg in Munich. Then, with the title of ‘director of her private music’, he was in the service of Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, with whom he had an affair (reflected in some of his most popular songs). She took him to Nice but they were separated by Napoleon, who in 1809 transferred him to Kassel where he was director of the theatre, maestro di cappella and master of chamber music to the new King of Westphalia, Jérome Buonaparte, until the latter’s fall. Back in Paris in 1814 and protected by Talleyrand and the Duchess of Berry, he was appointed superintendent of the royal chapel, court composer and professor of singing at the Conservatoire. He was a member of the Légion d’Honneur and received an aristocratic title, became a French citizen and married a banker’s daughter. After the Revolution of 1830 he lost his court appointments, and as a musician was overtaken by the rise of Romanticism. His autobiography, edited by Maxime de Villamorest, was published as Souvenirs de Blangini (Paris, 1834).

Blangini composed nearly 30 operas, mostly opéras comiques, as well as church music, 174 romances, 170 nocturnes for two or three voices and many canzonets for one or more voices with piano or harp accompaniment; he claimed, and has subsequently been credited with, the invention of the vocal nocturne (in 1801). Many of his stage works were unsuccessful and received few performances; they are written in a light style. The texts of his very popular romances and nocturnes are of almost exclusively amorous inspiration, and display simplicity of texture and an elegant, fluent melodic style.

WORKS

operas

opéras comiques unless otherwise stated

KH	Kassel, Hoftheater
PFE	Paris, Feydeau
PN	Paris, Nouveautés

La fausse duègne (3, G. Montcloux d’Epinay), PFE, 24 June 1802 [completion of Della Maria’s opera]; Zélie et Terville, ou Chimère et réalité (1, E. Aignan), PFE, 6 Jan 1803; Encore un tour de Calife (1), in Ger. as Noch ein Streich des Kalifen, Munich, 28 June 1805; Nephtali, ou Les ammonites (op, 3, Aignan), Paris, Opéra, 15 April 1806 (Paris, 1806); Le sacrifice d’Abraham (op, 3, Col. Saint-Marcel), KH, 14 Nov 1810, excerpt, pf acc., duet (Leipzig, 1811); Les femmes vengées (1, M.-J. Sedaine), PFE, 22 Oct 1811, song (Paris, 1811); L’amour philosophe (2, Aignan), KH, aut. 1811

Le naufrage comique (2, Sedaine), KH, spr. 1812; La fée Urgèle (2, ? C.-S. Favart), KH, sum. 1812, ariette (Paris, c1815); La princesse de Cachemire (3, Sedaine), KH, aut. 1812; Trajano in Dacia (os, 2, G. Rossi), Munich, Hof, 14 July 1814; La sourde-muette (3, J. de Valmalette), PFE, 26 July 1815; La comtesse de Lamarck, ou Tout par amour (3, Saint-Cyr and Armand d’Artois), PFE, 16 April 1818; La fête des souvenirs (intermède, 2, T.M. Du Mersan), PFE, 16 April 1818; Le jeune oncle (1, H.A. Advenier-Fontenille), PFE, 10 April 1821, trio (Paris, 1821); Le duc d’Aquitaine (1, Achille d’Artois, M. Théaulon and A.-J. Le Bouthillier Rancé), PFE, 1823, excerpts (Paris, c1825)

Le projet de pièce (1, Mély-Janin [J.M. Janin]), PFE, 4 Nov 1825; Le Saint-Henri (1, Advenier-Fontenille), Paris, Court, 1825; L’intendant (1, Mély-Janin), Paris, Court, 1826; Le coureur de veuves (2, M.J. Brisset), PN, 1 March 1827; Le jeu de cache-cache, ou La fiancée (2, Achille d’Artois), PN, 25 May 1827; Le morceau d’ensemble (1, Armand d’Artois), PN, 19 Nov 1827; L’anneau de la fiancée (3, Brisset), PN, 28 June 1828; Le chanteur de romances (2, Armand and Achille d’Artois), Paris, ?Variétés, 5 Nov 1830; La marquise de Brinvilliers [1 duet only] (drame lyrique, 3, Castil-Blaze and E. Scribe), Paris, OC (Ventadour), 31 Oct 1831; Un premier pas (1, E. Mennechet and J.F. Roger), Paris, OC (Bourse), 24 Nov 1832; Les gondeliers (2, E. Champeaux and A. Bréant de Fontenay), Paris, OC (Bourse), 19 April 1833

Music in: Figaro, ou Le jour des noces, 1827

Not perf.: Les fêtes lacédémoniennes, c1807; Inès de Castro, c1810; Marie Thérèse à Presbourg, ou La naissance du duc de Bordeaux (4, Bérard), 1820, vs (Paris, 1820); Le vieux de la montagne (4), written for the Opéra

other works

Songs, pf/harp acc., mostly pubd Paris: c174 romances in at least 39 numbered collections; c170 It. nocturnes, 2–3vv, in at least 29 numbered collections; numerous Fr. and It. canzonets, in at least 17 numbered collections

Sacred: 4 masses, vv, orch; 6 motets, incl. Miserere, solo vv, vv, perf. Kassel, 1813; Libera me, vv, orch, perf. Kassel, Dec 1810

Orch: Ov., on a Sp. theme; perf. Kassel, ?1810; Funeral March, perf. Kassel, Dec 1810

It. cant., on the last moments of Werther, T, orch, perf. Kassel, 14 March 1813

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI

FétisB

Review of Le sacrifice d’Abraham, AMZ, xiii (1811), 137–42, 159–66

C. Gervasoni: Nuova teoria di musica (Parma, 1812/R), 95–6

Review of Trajano in Dacia, AMZ, xvi (1814), 584–6

A. Houssaye: ‘Blangini’, Revue de Paris [Brussels], new ser., i (1841), 37–52

Castil-Blaze: L’Académie impériale de musique … de 1645 à 1855, (Paris, 1855), ii, 103

M. Zenger: Geschichte der Münchener Oper, ed. T. Kroyer (Munich, 1923), 85–6, 133, 135

L. Cocchi: ‘Un musicista torinese alla corte di re e di principi: Felice Blangini’, Torino: rassegna mensile della cittá, xv/7 (1935), 21

D. Zanetti: ‘Il romanzo di Felice’, La Scala, no.85 (1956), 72–3

R. Paoli: ‘La lirica da camera di Blangini’, Musicisti piemontesi e liguri, Chigiana, xvi (1959), 35–40

R. Berthelot: ‘La vie romanesque du chevalier Blangini’, Musica-disques, no.101 (1962), 28–31

EMILIA ZANETTI/HERVÉ AUDÉON

Blank, Allan

(b New York, 27 Dec 1925). American composer. In his youth, he studied the violin and attended the High School of Music and Arts in New York, where he developed an interest in composition and conducting. He held a fellowship in conducting at the Juilliard School (1945–7), after which he studied at Washington Square College (BA, 1948), University of Minnesota (MA in composition, 1950) and the University of Iowa. From 1950 to 1952 he was a violinist in the Pittsburgh SO, and he taught instrumental music in New York high schools from 1956 to 1965. He has also taught at Western Illinois University (1966-8), Paterson (New Jersey) State College (1968–70), and Lehman College, CUNY (1970–77). From 1978–96, he taught and directed the New Music Ensemble at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is now emeritus professor. Blank has received numerous awards and honours for his composition, among them an NEA composers’ grant (1983) and first prize in the George Eastman Composition (1983) for his Duo for bassoon and piano. In 1988 he won the Eric Satie Mostly Tonal Award and the annual choral competition of the Chautauqua Chamber Singers, and in 1989 the Lind Solo Competition sponsored by Cornell University. He has received commissions from various organizations in Virginia: the Music Teachers Association (1979, 1988, 1991), the Shakespeare Festival, and, in 1990, a grant from the Virginia Commission of the Arts. Blank has written an especially wide range of concert and stage pieces, including works for small mixed ensemble, large wind ensemble and orchestra. His output of more than 100 pieces encompasses a broad range of expressive and idiomatic possibilities. His chamber music is often characterized by a soloistic impulse: flowing arabesque lines combine in a sonorous polyphony in which each instrument or voice remains distinct.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Aria da capo (chbr op, E. St. Vincent Millay), 1958–60; Excitement at the Circus (children’s op, 1, I. Leitne), 1968; The Magic Bonbons (8 scenes, Blank, after L.F. Baum), 1980–83; The Noise (chbr op, 2, G. Hopper, after B. Vian: Les batisseurs d’empire) incid music

Large ens: Concert Piece, band, 1960–63; Music for Orch, 1964–7; 6 Significant Landscapes, chbr orch, 1972–4; Divertimento, tuba, band, 1979; Concertino, bn, str, 1984; Music for Brass and Perc, 4 hn, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, tuba, 5 perc, 1985; Concertino, str orch, 1987; Passacaglia, str orch, 1989; Wheels, fl choir, 1989; Conc., cl, str orch, 1990; Statements and Interactions, hn, str orch, 1995; Music for Small Orch, 1977

Chbr: Coalitions, 2 cl, trbn, pf, 2 perc, 1975; Trio, tpt, hn, trbn, 1975; Coalitions II, sax qt, 1976; Ceremonies, tpt, perc, 1977; Duo, bn, pf, 1978; Introduction and Rondo Fantastico, bn, pf, 1979; Fantasy on Cantillation Motives, vn, va, vc, 1983; Trio, fl, vc, pf, 1983; Qnt, cl, str qt, 1985; Concertino, fl + pic, cl + b cl, vn + va, vc, pf, 1984–6; Duo Suite, 2 tpt, 1987; Polymorphics, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn, 1988; 3 Miniatures, 2 cl, bn, 1990; 3 Windgrams, fl, cl, bn, 1991; Elegy, vn, org, 1992; Divertimento, fl, ob, cl, hn, bn, 1992; Duos, 2 mar, perc, 1992; Summer Music (Bicinium VIII), 2 vn, 1993; Dualisms, vn, org, 1994; 2 Pieces, a sax, pf, 1996; Dyptich, 8 hn, 1996; A Little Suite, 3 tbn, 1997; Trio, fl, bn, pf, 1997; 4 wind qnts, 2 str qts

Solo inst: Rotation, pf, 1959–60; A Song of Ascents, va, 1968; 3 Pieces, tpt, 1969; 3 Novelties, a sax, 1971; 2 Studies, cl, 1972; Restatement of Romance, pf, 1973; November Light, hp, 1985; Five from Seven, va, 1985; 6 Studies, pf 1 hand, 1987–93; Angels of Vision: 5 Perspectives, fl, 1988; Die Gedanke Sind Frei, gui, 1990; Around the Turkish Lady, a sax, 1991; Sonata, vn, 1991; … and the breath stirred, a fl, 1992; 3 Bagatelles, bn, 1992; Meditation, org, 1992; Meditation, org, 1996

Choral: Buy me an ounce and I’ll sell you a pound (e.e. cummings), SATB, pf, 1956; Poor Richard’s Almanak, SATB, 1987; My Love in Her Attire, TTBB, 1989; 4 Chin. Poems, SA, 1991; What Became of Them, children's choir, pf, 1994; The Tide Rises, SATB, 1994; Catch a Little Rhyme, children’s choir, pf, 1995

Solo vocal: Poem (Cummings), S, cl, vc, harp, 1963; 2 Ferlinghetti Songs, S, bn, 1964; 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (W. Stevens), S, fl + pic, cl + b cl, pf, vn + va, vc, 1964–5; Esther’s Monologue (M. Blank), cant., S, ob, va, vc, 1970; Some Funnies and Poems (O. Nash, E. Lear, Cummings, M. Blank, A. Blank), nar, pf, 1982; Around the Clock, S, fl/pic, cl/b cl, pf, 1983

Principal publishers: Associated, CFE, Dorn, Music for Percussion, Presser, Seesaw, Smith

MARTIN BRODY

Blankenburg [Blanckenburg, Blanckenburgh], Quirinus [Quirijn, Gideon] Gerbrandszoon van

(b Gouda, 1654; d The Hague, 12 May 1739). Dutch composer, organist, theorist and poet. He was the son of Gerbrant Quirijnszoon van Blankenburg (c1620–1707), organist in Zevenbergen and Gouda. He probably received his first instruction in music from his father. He started his musical career at an early age, as an organist in Rotterdam (1670–75, at the Remonstrantse Kerk) and at Gorinchem (1675–9). For some years from 1679 he studied at the University of Leiden (he was registered under the name Gideon van Blankenburg). In the mid-1680s he settled at The Hague, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He was organist of the Walloon church from 1687 to 1702. In 1699 he was appointed to the Nieuwe Kerk but was active there only after the new organ had been completed in 1702. Because of his old age his pupil Frans Piton deputized for him from 1720. He was sought after as a music teacher by the nobility of The Hague: his pupils included Willem Bentinck, Ludwig Friedrich, Prince of Württemberg, and probably Count Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer.

Blankenburg was considered a proficient keyboard player and a first-class expert on carillon and organ building. His advice was requested as early as 1676 in connection with the carillon newly ordered from Pieter Hemony for the tower of the St Janskerk, Gouda, where his father was organist. He proposed the inclusion of C and D in the lowest octave but was strongly opposed by other advisers and by Hemony himself. He published a defence of his position (De nootsakelijkheid van Cis en Dis in de bassen der klokken, c1677, now lost). Hemony replied with De onnoodsakelijkheid en ondienstigheid van Cis en Dis in de bassen der klokken (Delft, 1678/R1927), but Blankenburg's proposal eventually prevailed. Later on he was asked to try out newly built or restored organs and carillons in various towns and cities, but his judgments, which may have been influenced by financial interests, drew him into controversy several times.

Blankenburg's printed music consists entirely of keyboard pieces. The Clavicimbel- en orgelboek der Gereformeerde Psalmen en kerkzangen comprises essentially homophonic settings for organ or harpsichord of all the psalms and hymns of the Dutch Protestant Church. The rhythm and harmony of the original 16th-century melodies are adapted to 18th-century taste, with many ornaments added. A few of the settings are preceded by a fugal prelude. De verdubbelde harmony is a little volume written in honour of the marriage of Prince Willem Carel Hendrik Friso and Princess Anna of Hanover. It contains a number of small, unpretentious pieces of various kinds. Some were printed on transparent silk and could be played when viewed from either side. A volume announced in 1739 as Fugues, allemande, courante, sarabande, bourée, gavotte, menuets, gigue et autre pièces de clavecin apparently never appeared, possibly because of Blankenburg's death. Three autograph manuscripts (D-ROu) include vocal and harpsichord pieces (see Praetorius). Some are by Blankenburg himself, others are arrangements by him of vocal extracts from operas by Handel and Destouches and from a cantata by J.G.C. Störl. The remainder of the pieces are anonymous or can be attributed to other composers. Blankenburg's curious treatise Elementa musica is principally a textbook on thoroughbass but also includes many autobiographical remarks. He accused François Campion and Handel of the unauthorized use of some of his musical ideas. One was the theme for a fugue, and he included in the book his own fuga obligata based on it. He dated his theme 1725, and accused Handel of using it in his Six fugues or voluntaries (1735). We now know, however, that Handel wrote these pieces around 1720.

WORKS

all printed works published in The Hague

Clavicimbel- en orgelboek der Gereformeerde Psalmen en kerkzangen (1732); 2/1745 enlarged and with Fr. text as Livre de clavecin et d'orgues pour les pseaumes et cantiques de l'église réformée

Duplicata ratio musices ou La double harmonie/De verdubbelde harmony (1734/R)

Fuga obligata, pubd in Elementa musica; ed. R. Rasch (Utrecht, 1985)

L'apologie des femmes, 1v, 2 vn, bc, D-ROu; ed. A. Komter-Kuipers (Delft, 1937); ed. W. Thijsse (Amsterdam, 1984)

Prelude, kbd, GB-Lbl

Air nouveau, 1v, bc; Marche, kbd: ROu, ed. in TVNM, viii (1892), suppls. v–vi

2 airs à 2 trompettes, kbd, NL–At [in copy of Duplicata ratio musices]

Arrs.: 2 arias from G.F. Handel, Rinaldo; air from A. Destouches, Issé; Airs allemans, 1714, from J.G.C. Störl, Cantata: holograph, D-ROu

WRITINGS

Elementa musica of Niew licht tot het welverstaan van de musiec en de bas-continuo (The Hague, 1739/R)

De nootsakelijkheid van Cis en Dis in de bassen der klokken, c1677, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vander StraetenMPB, i, 56ff

J.P.N. Land: ‘Quirinus van Blankenburg en zijne Fuga obligata’, TVNM, i/2 (1883), 90–94

E. Praetorius: ‘Beiträge zu Quirijn van Blanckenburg's Leben und Werken’, TVNM, viii/1 (1905), 25

D.J. Balfoort: ‘Quirinus Gideon van Blankenburg’, Jaarboek ‘Die Haghe’ 1938 (1939), 153–224

R.A. Rasch and K.Vlaardingerbroeh, eds.: Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (Hilversum, 1993)

RUDOLF A. RASCH

Blankenburg, Walter

(b Emleben, nr Gotha, 31 July 1903; d Schlüchtern, 10 March 1986). German theologian and musicologist. He came from a line of Lutheran ministers. After a classical education in Gotha and Altenburg (1914–22), he studied theology (1922–9) in Rostock and Göttingen; at the same time he studied musicology and history, first in Göttingen with Ludwig and Brandi, then in Freiburg with Gurlitt, Besseler and Ritter, and finally in Berlin with Schering and Blume. He took the doctorate in 1942 at Göttingen, where he studied with Zenck, with a dissertation on Bach. After teaching music in Rotenburg an der Fulda and Kassel (1930–33) he was a pastor in Vaake. From 1947 to 1968 he directed the Protestant Kirchenmusikschule in Schlüchtern. In 1962 the University of Marburg granted him an honorary doctorate of theology and in 1966 he was honoured with the title of Kirchenrat; he was also music director of the Evangelische Landeskirche of Kurhessen-Waldeck.

Throughout his life Blankenburg devoted himself to the organization, practice and current theological questions of church music. He was active in the Singbewegung from the beginning of his academic career: from 1930 to 1947 he directed the Kasseler Singgemeinde; in 1938 he was regional director (Kurhessen-Waldeck, 1938–75), national executive committee member (1947) and (from 1948) deputy director of the Verband der Evangelischen Kirchenchöre for West Germany. He was also editor of the Zeitschrift für Hausmusik (1933–41), co-editor of the Kirchenchordienst (1935–42) and editor (from 1941), and editor-in-chief of Musik und Kirche (1952–80). He was an authority on the works of J.S. Bach, Schütz and Johann Walter and his investigations were often guided by his interest in the relation between theology and music; he also helped to transform the education and professional image of church musicians in Germany through the conferences he organized for the directors of church music programmes. He was honoured with a Festschrift, Bach-Interpretationen (ed. M. Geck, Göttingen, 1969), and was awarded the Karl Straube plaque (1978).

WRITINGS

Die innere Einheit von Bachs Werke (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1942)

Einführung in Bachs h-moll-Messe (Kassel, 1950, 3/1974/R)

‘Geschichte der Melodien des evangelischen Kirchengesangbuchs: ein Abriss’, Handbuch zum evangelischen Kirchengesangbuch, ii/2 (Göttingen, 1957), 45–120

‘Der Harmonie-Begriff in der lutherisch-barocken Musikanschauung’, AMw, xvi (1959), 44–56; repr. in Kirche und Musik (1979), 204–17

ed., with K.F. Müller: Leiturgia: Handbuch des evangelischen Gottesdienstes, iv: Die Musik des evangelischen Gottesdienstes (Kassel, 1961) [incl. ‘Der gottesdienstliche Liedgesang der Gemeinde’, 559–660; ‘Der mehrstimmige Gesang und die konzertierende Musik im evangelischen Gottesdienst’, 661–719

‘Das Parodieverfahren im Weihnachtsoratorium J.S. Bachs’, Musik und Kirche, xxxii (1962), 245–54; repr. in Wege der Forschung, no.170 (1970), 493–506

‘Zwölf Jahre Bachforschung’, AcM, xxxvii (1965), 95–158

ed. with others: Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenmusik (Kassel, 2/1965; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1974, as Protestant Church Music: a History) [incl. ‘Die Kirchenmusik in den reformierten Gebieten des europäischen Kontinents’, 341–400; ‘Die Musik der böhmischen Brüder und der Brüdergemeine’, 401–12]

‘Die Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenmusik’, Die evangelische Kirchenmusik: Handbuch für Studium und Praxis, ed. E. Valentin and F. Hofmann (Regensburg, 1967), 38–106

‘Neue Forschungen über das geistliche Vokalschaffen Dietrich Buxtehudes’, AcM, xl (1968), 130–54

ed., with F. Hofmann and E. Hübner: Kirchenmusik im Spannungsfeld der Gegenwart (Kassel, 1968) [incl. ‘Historisierende Kirchenmusik?’, 9–19]

‘Johann Walters Gedanken über die Zusammengehörigkeit von Musik und Theologie’, Musik und Kirche, xl (1970), 317–25; repr. in Kirche und Musik (1979), 31–9

‘Heinrich Schütz 1672–1872’, ‘Die Dialogkompositionen von Heinrich Schütz’, ‘Schütz und Bach’, Musik und Kirche, xlii (1972), 3–11, 121–30, 219–26; repr. in Heinrich Schütz in seiner Zeit (1985), 283–98

‘Überlieferung und Textgeschichte von Martin Luthers “Encomion musices”’, Luther-Jb, xxxix (1972), 80–104

‘Der Conradsche Stich von der Dresdner Hofkapelle (1676)’, Sichtbare Kirche: Festschrift für Heinrich Laag, ed. U. Fabricius and R. Volpe (Gütersloh, 1973), 137–46; repr. in Heinrich Schütz in seiner Zeit (1985), 317–28

‘Was war die Singbewegung?’, Musik und Kirche, xliii (1973), 258–60; repr. in Kirche und Musik (1979), 343–6

‘Johann Walters Chorgesangbuch von 1524 in hymnologischer Sicht’, JbLH, xviii (1973–4), 65–96

‘Entstehung, Wesen und Ausprägung der Restauration im 19. Jahrhundert’, Traditionen und Reformen in der Kirchenmusik: Festschrift für Konrad Ameln, ed. G. Schuhmacher (Kassel, 1974), 25–40

‘Die Musik der Brüdergemeine in Europa’, Unitas Fratrum: Herrnhuter Studien/Moravian Studies, ed. M.P. van Buijtenen, C. Dekker and H. Leeuwenberg (Utrecht, 1975), 351–86

‘Krisenzeiten des evangelischen Kirchenliedes’, Tradition–Krisis–Renovatio aus theologischer Sicht: Festschrift Winfried Zeller, ed. B. Jaspert and R. Mohr (Marburg, 1976), 621–37; repr. in Kirche und Musik (1979), 267–83

‘Eine neue Textquelle zu sieben Kantaten J.S. Bachs und achtzehn Kantaten J. Ludwig Bachs’, BJb 1977, 7–25

‘Die Bachforschung seit etwa 1965’, AcM, l (1978), 93–154; liv (1982), 162–207; lv (1983), 1–58

‘Aufbruch zu einem neuen Gesangbuch’, Musik und Kirche, xlix (1979), 213–21

ed. E. Hübner and R. Steiger: Kirche und Musik: gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte der gottesdienstlichen Musik (Göttingen, 1979) [incl. list of writings pubd 1940–78]

‘50 Jahre “Musik und Kirche”: Rückschau und Ausblick’, Musik und Kirche, l (1980), 285–95

Evangelische Theologie und Kirchenmusik (Stuttgart, 1981); repr. in Kirchenmusikalische Umschau, no.4 (1984), 3–16

Das Weihnachts-Oratorium von Johann Sebastian Bach (Kassel, 1982)

‘Johann Sebastian Bach und das evangelische Kirchenlied zu seiner Zeit’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 31–8

‘Mystik in der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs’, Herrenalber Texte, xlvi (1983), 67–81; repr. in Beiträge zur theologischen Bachforschung, iv (1987), 47–66

ed., with R. Steiger: Beiträge zur theologischen Bachforschung, i–iv (1983–7)

Heinrich Schütz in seiner Zeit (Darmstadt, 1985)

Musikalische Gattungen in Einzeldarstellungen, ii: Die Messe (Kassel, 1985)

‘Theologische Bachforschung heute’, Augsburger Jb für Musikwissenschaft, ii (1985), 91–106

ed. F. Brusniak: Johann Walter: Leben und Werk (Tutzing, 1991)

EDITIONS

Heinrich Schütz: Der Psalter in vierstimmigen Liedsätzen nach Cornelius Beckers Dichtungen (Kassel, 1936, 2/1957 as Heinrich Schütz: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, vi)

with A. Dürr: J.S. Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium, Neue Bach-Ausgabe, 2nd ser., vi (Kassel, 1960–62)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Steiger: ‘Walter Blankenburg’, Musik und Kirche, lvi (1986), 113–15

F. Ganslandt: Jugendmusikbewegung und kirchenmusikalische Erneuerung: Impulse, Einflüsse, Wirkungen dargestellt in Verbindung mit Leben und Werk Walter Blankenburgs (Munich, 1997)

R. Steiger: ‘Walter Blankenburg’, Theologische Bachforschung heute: Dokumentation und Bibliographie der Internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bachforschung 1976–1996 (Berlin, 1998), 449–54 [incl. list of writings pubd 1979–86]

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/FRIEDHELM BRUSNIAK

Blankes [Blanks, Blancks, Blanke, Blancq], Edward

(fl 1582–94). English composer. An Edward Blancq (or Blanke) was a London wait from 1582 to 1594. It is assumed that he is the ‘Maister Blankes’ listed among England’s ‘excellent Musitians’ in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). Much of Blankes’s surviving music is either fairly insignificant or is incomplete. Credo quod redemptor, while fairly short at just under 40 breves, has some quite striking antiphonal effects and sonorous passages in 12 parts. Six three-part fantasias show some skill and variety in contrapuntal writing that is again somewhat vocal in character; but while Blankes aims to create interest in his five-part ‘Phancy’ by including a homophonic passage in triplets and by some venturesome harmonic passages, the melodic lines often move rather narrowly and lack real distinction.

WORKS

music without text

6 fantasias, a 3, ed. in MB, xlv (1988)

fantasia, a 5, ed. in MB, xlv (1988)

Sil solsi costa and untitled piece, vocal or consort pieces (single parts), US-Ws

Mr Blankes his farewell, a 5 (single part), GB-Ob Tenbury

Credo quod redemptor, a 12, ed. in Key

Blankes pavane, a 4, viols (single part), Eu

Allmaine for lute (single part), Cu

music with text

Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, inc., ?4vv, DRc, Cp

With wayling voice from out the depth of sinne, a 6, Ob Tenbury

Verbum caro factum est, 5vv, Ob Tenbury, McGhie MS

Psalm setting ‘Low Dutch’, 4vv, 1592⁷, 1599⁹, 1621¹¹

3 psalm settings, 4vv, 1621¹¹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le HurayMR

H. Davey: History of English Music (London, 1895, 2/1921/R), 185–6

E.H. Meyer: English Chamber Music (London, 1946/R, 2/1982 as Early English Chamber Music), 105, 109

W.L. Woodfill: Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (Princeton, NJ, 1953/R), 43–5, 248

D.R. Key: Two Manuscripts of Instrumental Ensemble Music from the Elizabethan Period (British Museum Add. Ms. 31390 and Bodleian Library Mss. D.212–216) (diss., U. of Boston, 1960)

G. Dodd: Thematic Index of Music for Viols (London, 1980–87)

HUGH BENHAM

Blanquer, Amando

(b Alcoy, 5 Feb 1935). Spanish composer. He began his musical studies with the municipal band in Alcoy (1946–7), where he learnt to play the piccolo, flute, horn, piano and violin and was taught harmony. Between 1954 and 1958 he studied the piano, horn and composition at the Valencia Conservatory with Leopoldo Magenti, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Palau Boix respectively, completing his training with Miguel Asins Arbó. From 1958 until 1962 he was in Paris, where he studied composition with Lesur and orchestration with Wissmer, and attended Messiaen's analysis lectures at the Conservatoire. In 1962 he won the Prix de Rome and attended the Accademia di Spagna di Belle Arti, also studying with Petrassi at the Accademia di S Cecilia. He was appointed to the composition chair at Valencia Conservatory (1969; director, 1971–5). The Valencian government commissioned two works from him, the stage cantata Tríptic de Tirant lo Blanc (1990) and the opera El triomf de Tirant (1991). He received the UNICEF prize for his Sinfonía coral (1981), the Joaquín Turina prize of Seville for his Invenciones para orquesta (1984) and several other awards. In 1986 he was named a corresponding member of the Real Academia de S Fernando.

His aesthetic is guided by a desire to communicate, and his music is characterized by a fine sense of timbre and a highly personal approach to a modal technique derived from Messiaen. Blanquer is the author of Técnica del contrapunto (Madrid, 1975) and of Análisis de la forma musical (Valencia, 1989).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tríptic de Tirant lo Blanc (cant. escénica, J. Palacios, after J. Martorell: Tirant lo Blanc), 1990, Valencia, Palau de la Música, 20 Nov 1990; El triomf de Tirant (op, 2, 4 scenes, J. Lluis and R. Sirera, after J. Martorell: Tirant lo Blanc), 1990–91, Valencia, Teatro Principa 17 Oct 1992

Choral: Cant. de Nadal (J. Valls), S, T, B, children's chorus, chorus, orch, 1976–7; Sinfonía coral (Niño universal) (J. Valls), chorus, orch, 1981; Missa a Sant Jordi, chorus, orch, 1981–2

Orch: Suite blanca, 1955, rev. 1985; Sinfonietta, 1958; Conc., bn, str, 1962; Homenaje a Juan Ramón Jiménez, gui, orch, 1974, rev. 1990; Hn Conc., 1976; Dédalo, cl, str, 1977; Oda a Manuel de Falla, hpd/pf, orch, 1977; L'os hispánic, tuba, orch, 1979; Suite galaica, str, 1979; Tríptic orquestal, 1983; Invenciones para orquesta, 1984; Fl Conc., 1986; Conc., 4 hn, str, 1987; Concierto fantasia (Homenaje a G.F. Haendel), org, orch, 1989; Tpt Conc., 1989; 3 homenajes, 1990–1: Cumbres (a Oscar Esplá), Perfumes (a Joaquín Rodrigo), Burlesca (a Manuel Palau)

Many other works, incl. pieces for wind band, choral works, solo vocal pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Miró: Amando Blanquer en su vida y en su música (Alcoy, 1984)

V. Galbis: Catálogo de obras de Amando Blanquer (Madrid, 1992)

MARTA CURESES

Blanter, Matvey Isaakovich

(b Potshep, Chernihov region, 28 Jan/10 Feb 1903; d Moscow, 24 Sept 1990). Russian composer. He studied at the music institutes of Kursk (violin and piano, 1915–17) and Moscow (1917–19), where he was a pupil of Mogilevsky (violin) and Kochetov and Potolovsky (theory). From 1920 to 1921 he took composition lessons with Konyus. He worked at theatres in Moscow (from 1921), Leningrad (1926–7), Magnitogorsk (1930–31) and Gor'kiy (1932–3), and his name is principally associated with songs, dance music and light scores for the theatre. Of his songs, Katyusha (1938) gained international popularity, particularly during the war years; in Italy it became the hymn of the anti-fascist partisans. Like all of Blanter’s work, it is distinguished by warm, open lyricism and a distinctive Russian character.

WORKS

(selective list)

Operettas: Na beregu Amura [On the Bank of the Amur] (1939)

Songs: Katyusha; V lesu prifrontovom [In the Wood at the Front]; Letyat pereletnïye ptitsï [The Migrating Birds are Flying]; Luchshe netu togo tsveta [There is No Better Flower than You]; Moya lyubimaya [My Darling]; Partizan Zheleznyak; Pesnya o Shchorse [Song about Shchors]; Solntse skrïlos' za goroyu [The Sun was Hidden behind the Hill]; Do svidaniya, goroda i khatï [Goodbye, Towns and Huts]; Pod zvezdami balkanskimi [Under Balkan Stars]; c200 others

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Sokhor: ‘Katyusha M. Blantera’, Muzïkal'naya zhizn (1960), no.19, pp.18–19

V. Zak: Matvey Blanter (Moscow, 1971)

I. Nest'yev: ‘Matvey Blanter’, Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1973), no.5, pp.15–16

L. Genina: ‘Vïsokiy bereg’ [A high bank], SovM (1983), no.4, pp.4–7

Obituary, Izvestiya (28 Sept 1990)

GALINA GRIGOR'YEVA

Blanton, Jimmy [James]

(b Chattanooga, TN, Oct 1918; d Los Angeles, 30 July 1942). American jazz double bass player. He played locally in groups led by his mother, a pianist, and attended Tennessee State College briefly before moving in the late 1930s to St Louis, where he performed with fellow black musicians in the Jeter–Pillars Orchestra and in Fate Marable’s riverboat bands. There he was discovered in late 1939 by Duke Ellington, who engaged him immediately for his orchestra. Blanton’s playing subtly altered the Ellington sound, stabilizing the band’s rhythm and greatly enhancing its swing; it also ushered in Ellington’s most creative period as a composer, particularly in masterpieces such as Ko-Ko, Concerto for Cootie, Harlem Air Shaft and In a Mellotone (all 1940, Vic.), where Blanton’s bass part is especially prominent. Blanton also took part in a few of the informal jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York that contributed to the genesis of the bop style. From 1941 his playing became somewhat erratic, and late that year he was obliged by ill-health (diagnosed as congenital tuberculosis) to take up residence in a California sanatorium, where he died shortly afterwards.

In his tragically brief career, Blanton revolutionized jazz bass playing, and until the advent of the styles of Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden in the 1960s all modern bass players drew on his innovations. He possessed great dexterity and range, roundness of tone, accurate intonation, and above all an unprecedented sense of swing. His strong feeling for harmony led him to incorporate many non-harmonic passing notes in his accompaniment lines, giving them a contrapuntal flavour and stimulating soloists to their own harmonic explorations. Blanton also contributed the earliest fully satisfying jazz solos on this instrument, which depart in their inventive melody and flexible rhythms from the walking bass style that was then prevalent. Despite his short career Blanton left a large recorded legacy, not only in his 130-odd recordings with Ellington’s orchestra, but also in many small-group performances with some of Ellington's sidemen, and especially in a remarkable series of duos with Ellington himself. As adapted by his followers Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown and Charles Mingus, Blanton's innovations led indirectly to the creation of the bop rhythm section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.G. Reisner: The Jazz Titans (Garden City, NY, 1960/R)

I. Kanth: A Discography of Jimmy Blanton (Stockholm, 1970)

D. Ellington: Music is my Mistress (Garden City, NY, 1973)

G. Schuller: The Swing Era (New York, 1989)

M. Tucker, ed.: The Duke Ellington Reader (New York, 1993)

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Blaramberg, Pavel Ivanovich

(b Orenburg, 14/26 Sept 1841; d Nice, 28 March 1907). Russian composer and writer. He studied at the Alexander Lycée in St Petersburg until 1860, then joined the central statistics committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was the official Russian delegate to the International Statistical Congress at The Hague in 1869, but in the following year resigned from government service. In 1876 he joined the staff of the newspaper Russkiye vedomosti. From 1878 he was in charge of its foreign section, and was a member of the editorial board; he also contributed articles, notably ‘Musorgsky pered parizhskoy publikoy’ (10/22 June 1896, p.2), an account of Pierre d'Alheim's newly published book on Musorgsky and the interest which Musorgsky's music was arousing in Paris.

Blaramberg studied theory with A.A. Herke. In the late 1850s he came to know Balakirev, whom he helped to establish the Free School of Music in 1862. Besides teaching at the Moscow Philharmonic School (from 1878), he taught at the Moscow Philharmonic Society's Music and Drama School (1886–98). As a composer he was not highly regarded by other musicians and composers, not even by his friends in the Five: Rimsky-Korsakov bluntly dismissed ‘some kind of suite on oriental melodies and dances, which I didn't like much’, and Cui described the music of Skomorokh, a comic opera, as ‘dry and shallow’. He composed elegant songs and some efficient orchestral works; his stage works, modelled to some extent on Meyerbeerian grand opera, achieved success with the public, but his music has subsequently been forgotten.

WORKS

Stage: Voyevoda [voivode] (incid music, A.N. Ostrovsky), 1865; Mariya Burgundskaya [Mary of Burgundy] (op, after V. Hugo), 1878, Moscow, 1888 (orig. title Mariya Tyudor rejected by the censor); Skomorokh [wandering minstrel] (comic op, after Ostrovsky: Komik XVII stoletiya), 1887, Moscow, 1908; Devitsa-rusalka [The Water Maiden] (op), 1888; Tushintsï [The People of Tushino] (op, after Ostrovsky), 1891, Moscow, 1895; Volna [The Wave] (op), 1902

Orch: Umirayushchiy gladiator [The Dying Gladiator], sym. picture, 1882; Sym., b, 1886; Scherzo; Mechtï [Dreams], 2 musical pictures on poems by I. Turgenev

Vocal: Demon (cant., after M. Lermontov), 1869; Strekozï [Dragonflies], fantasy, Mez, female vv, orch, 1879; Na Volge [On the Volga], musical picture, male vv, orch, 1880; other choral works; songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.A. Shchetinin: ‘Idealist-shestidesyatnik: pamyati P.I. Blaramberga’ [An idealist of the sixties: in memory of Blaramberg], Istoricheskiy vestnik, cviii (1906), 938

M.O. Yankovsky, ed.: Ts.A. Kyui: izbrannïye pis'ma [Cui: selected letters] (Leningrad, 1955)

GEOFFREY NORRIS

Blarer [Blaurer], Ambrosius

(b Konstanz, 4 April 1492; d Winterthur, 6 Dec 1564). Swiss reformer and poet, active in Germany. He studied literature at Tübingen University from 1505 and received the MA degree in 1513. In 1510 he entered the Benedictine monastery at Alpirsbach, in the Black Forest, where he later became prior. He was musically inclined and, like Luther and Zwingli, played the lute. He had contact with the humanists of the time: his friendship with Melanchthon is attested by a lively exchange of letters, and through his brother Thomas, a student at Wittenberg University from 1520, he became acquainted with Luther’s writings. Blarer’s stand on Protestant doctrine caused him to leave the monastery in 1522. He returned to Konstanz, where he became a preacher in 1525. In the same year he made contact with Zwingli but rejected his teaching on the Last Supper, and subsequently maintained a position midway between Luther and Zwingli.

In Konstanz he governed the church, promoted the political alliance with Zurich (1527–31), and, after the Bishop and chapter had left, drew up with the help of the mayor of the city a Book of Order. He reformed other towns in south Germany and in 1534 Archduke Ulrich of Württemberg entrusted him with reforming southern Swabia. In 1539 he returned to Konstanz. During this time he collaborated on the Konstanz hymnbook, the second or third edition of which (1540) corresponded entirely to Zwingli’s ideas; it was important as a model for numerous publications in south Germany until about 1565. Sixt Dietrich may have been a musical adviser for it. When Konstanz was captured by the Emperor Charles V in 1548, Blarer fled to Switzerland and worked until his death in Winterthur (1549–51) and Biel (1551–9).

Blarer’s poetic gifts had appeared early in life. Around 1522 he wrote one of the earliest Protestant hymns, Wies Gott gefällt. His hymns and spiritual poems were widespread in the 16th century; 25 survive, but many are lost. A few poems are parodies of secular texts, such as Mag ich dem Tod nicht widerstan, after Mary of Hungary’s famous song, Mag ich Unglück nicht widerstan. Benedictus Ducis and Siegmund Hemmel set some of Blarer’s texts to music. The satirical poem on court life, Wiewohl viel harter Orden sind, set several times by Senfl and others, was formerly believed to be by Blarer, but is probably not by him (see introduction to Ludwig Senfl: Opera omnia, v). Blarer’s hymns were rediscovered chiefly by Spitta in the 19th century. Four are still retained in German Protestant hymnals: Wies Gott gefällt, Freu dich mit Wonn, Jauchz Erd und Himmel and Wach auf, wach auf.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (M. Jenny)

T. Pressel: Ambrosius Blaurers des schwäbischen Reformators Leben und Schriften (Stuttgart, 1861) [incl. many poems]

P. Wackernagel: Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, iii (Leipzig, 1870/R)

T. Schiess, ed.: Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas Blaurer, 1509–1548 (Freiburg, 1908–12)

F. Hindenlang: Die Konstanzer Reformatoren und ihre Kirchenlieder (Leipzig, 1936)

M. Jenny: Geschichte des deutschschweizerischen evangelischen Gesangbuches im 16. Jahrhundert (Basle, 1962)

B. Moeller, ed.: Der Konstanzer Reformator Ambrosius Blarer 1492–1564: Gedenkschrift zu seinem 400. Todestag (Konstanz and Stuttgart, 1964)

H.-C. Rublack: Die Einführung der Reformation in Konstanz von den Anfangen bis zum Abschluss 1531 (Gütersloh, 1971)

MARTIN BENTE/JOHN KMETZ

Blas-

(Ger.).

Prefix meaning ‘wind’, as in Blasinstrumente (‘wind instruments’), Blasorchester (‘wind band’) and Blasmusik (‘music for wind’).

Blasco de Nebra (Orlandi), Manuel

(b Seville, 2 May 1750; d Seville, 12 Sept 1784). Spanish organist and composer. In 1768 he became assistant organist at Seville Cathedral to his father, José Blasco de Nebra (Lacarra), who had been organist there since 1735. He was made titular organist in 1778 and remained in the post until his early death, predeceasing his father. He was renowned during his career for his remarkable sight-reading ability and his expressive performances on the organ, the harpsichord and the nascent piano. A prolific composer, he left some 170 compositions, of which only 30 have survived: Seis sonatas para clave y fuerte-piano op.1 (Madrid, 1780; ed. R. Paris, Madrid, 1964); six pastorellas and 12 sonatas (E-MO; ed. B. Johnsson, Egtved, 1984); six keyboard sonatas (Osuna, Encarnación Monastery; ed. M.I. Cárdenas Serván, Madrid, 1987). They are technically demanding, virtuoso compositions which reveal the composer’s talents as a keyboard player.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NewmanSCE

B. Saldoni: Diccionario biográfico-bibliográfico de efemérides de músicos españoles, iii (Madrid, 1880/R), 191ff

E. Ayarra Jarne: La música en la catedrala de Sevilla (Seville, 1976)

A. Martín Moreno: Historia de la música andaluza (Seville, 1985), 238ff

A. Martín Moreno: Historia de la música española, iv: Siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1985), 186–7

M. Salud Alvarez: ‘José y Manuel Blasco de Nebra: la otra casa de la familia Nebra Blasco’, RdMc, xv (1992), 775–813

M. Salud Alvarez: José de Nebra Blasco: vida y obra (Zaragoza, 1993)

JOSÉ LÓPEZ-CALO

Blas de Castro, Juan

(b ?Barrachina, Teruel province, c1561; d Madrid, 6 Aug 1631). Spanish composer, singer, guitarist and theorbo player. On 11 August 1592 in Alba de Tormes (near Salamanca) he received 30 reales for vihuela strings in his capacity as musician to the 5th Duke of Alba. At the duke’s court he formed a lasting friendship with Lope de Vega, through whose Arcadia of 1598 we know that Blas de Castro sang and played at courtly festivities as well as setting Lope’s poems to music. In 1596 he was in the service of the future king, Felipe III, singing his own compositions in a scene incorporated by Lope into his comedy La bella malmaridada (dated Madrid, 17 December 1596), and in 1597 he entered the service of the aged Felipe II as a part-time chamber musician. At the accession of the new king in 1599 the chamber musicians obtained full-time posts with annual salaries of 30,000 maravedís, and Blas de Castro was offered an additional post as usher of the king’s privy chamber, with a total salary of 43,800 maravedís.

The fleeting establishment of the court at Valladolid (1601–6) found Blas de Castro and other chamber musicians singing his tonos on 7 June 1605, accompanied by the composer on the theorbo, and by the others on the guitar: it appears that Blas de Castro was in fact directing the ensemble. In 1619 he accompanied the royal entourage to Portugal, acting as both musician and usher to the king’s privy chamber. Later he was appointed to a special post at a salary of about 75,000 maravedís. When Felipe IV came to the throne in 1621, Blas de Castro remained at court as an interpreter and composer; around 1628, however, he appears to have reduced or even ceased his attendance at the palace because of ill-health and advancing years, and in 1629 he authorized his nephew in Barrachina to sell his negro slave. In January 1630 he wrote his will: on his death the following year his estate listed 761 tonos on loose sheets, some guitar strings, and three guitars (including a very valuable one in ebony and ivory). Felipe IV contributed 600 silver reales to Blas de Castro’s funeral, and in return acquired all his compositions; these perished in the fire at the Palacio Real, Madrid, on 24 December 1734.

Blas de Castro achieved great fame during his lifetime. He was cited as a guitar player by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa in his Plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes (1615), and by the court poet Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, who described his compositions as ‘solemn and sweet’. The writer who made the most frequent and flattering references to him was his close friend Lope de Vega, most importantly in his Elogio en la muerte de Juan Blas de Castro (ed. J. Barbazán, Madrid, 1935).

His 20 surviving tonos for three or four voices (ed. Robledo) are transmitted in two manuscripts: ‘Tonos castellanos’, copied between 1600 and 1615 (E-Mmc), and a songbook compiled by the royal copyist Claudio de la Sablonara between 1624 and 1625 (D-Mbs, E-Mn; see Etzion). The texts are for the most part anonymous, but include one each by Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora and the Prince of Esquilache. The music is characterized by frequent hemiolas, alternating homophonic and imitative passages, added 7th chords and chromaticism, and the refrains include many passages for one or two voices with instrumental accompaniment: in some cases these clearly prefigure the tonos humanos of the second half of the 17th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986), 78–89

L. Robledo: Juan Blas de Castro (ca.1561–1631): vida y obra musical (Zaragoza, 1989) [incl. edns of all surviving works]

L. Stein: Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 1993)

J. Etzion: The Cancionero de la Sablonara (London, 1996) [incl. edns of 18 works by Blas de Castro]

LUIS ROBLEDO

Blasi, Luca.

See Biagi, Luca.

Blasis, Carlo

(b Naples, 4 Nov 1803 or 1795/7; d Cernobbio, 15 Jan 1878). Italian dancer and writer on dance. See Ballet, §2(i).

Blasius

(fl c1440). Composer. He was the author of Audi nos nam te filius, perhaps only a fragment (vv.7–9) of a complete three-voice setting of the Assumption sequence Ave preclara maris stella (AH, l, 1907/R, 313–15), in D-Mbs Clm 14274. The chant (Rajeczky, no.I/2) is paraphrased in the discantus and structural cadences are often emphasized by full triads. A Blasius de Este was master of the choirboys at Padua Cathedral in 1421; a ‘Frater Blasius ungarus’ was cantor at S Francesco, Bologna, in 1426; and Archangelo Blasio was in the papal chapel from 1476 to 1492; but the name is too common to permit certain identification.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmR

F.X. Haberl: ‘Die römische “Schola Cantorum” und die päpstlichen Kapellsänger bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, VMw, iii (1887), 189–296

L. Busi: Il Padre G.B. Martini, musicista-letterato del secolo XVIII (Bologna, 1891/R)

K. Dèzes: ‘Der Mensuralcodex des Benediktinerklosters Sancti Emmerami zu Regensburg’, ZMw, x (1927–8), 65–105

B. Rajeczky, ed.: Melodiarum hungariae medii aevi, i: Hymni et sequentiae (Budapest, 1956)

I. Rumbold: ‘The Compilation and Ownership of the “St Emeram” Codex (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274)’, EMH, ii (1982), 161–235

DAVID FALLOWS/IAN RUMBOLD

Blasius, (Mathieu-)Frédéric [Mathaeus, Matthäus]

(b Lauterbourg, Alsace (now Bas-Rhin), 24 April 1758; d Versailles, 1829). French conductor, composer and instrumentalist. He received music instruction from his father, Johann Michael Blasius, and from a Herr Stadt, and between 1780 and 1782 was employed by the Bishop of Strasbourg, Prince Louis-René-Edouard de Rohan. He first performed in Paris as a violinist, playing his own concerto at the Concert Spirituel in 1784 to favourable reviews, but in 1790 gave up his career as soloist to become music director and first violin of the Comédie-Italienne (Opéra-Comique). In addition to the violin, he also played the clarinet and bassoon, for which he wrote methods, and the flute. He was a member of the National Guard Band from 1793 to 1795, and taught violin and probably also wind instruments at the Conservatoire from 1795 to 1802. His compositions, influenced by the foreign musicians he encountered in Strasbourg and Paris, include theatre pieces and wind band or Harmoniemusik for the Revolutionary fêtes, which were especially well received, and many instrumental works. His string quartets in particular employ a balance of parts uncommon in France at a time when the virtuosity of the first violin was the standard practice.

Blasius directed the bands of the Garde Consulaire (1799–1804) and the Grenadiers de la Garde de Napoléon I; with the restoration of Louis XVIII (1814) he became director of the fifth regiment band of the Imperial Guard, and a member of the king's private orchestra. Contemporaries whose works he performed, including Grétry, Méhul and Dalayrac, regarded his abilities as a conductor highly. He retired as music director of the Opéra-Comique in 1816, and lived in Versailles until his death in 1829.

Blasius had two brothers who became noted musicians: Pierre Blasius (b Lauterbourg, 2 Sept 1752), a violinist, and Ignace Blasius (b Lauterbourg, 11 April 1755), a bassoonist. Both were members of the National Guard Band, and taught at the Institut National de Musique and the succeeding Conservatoire.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated; thematic catalogue in Rau (1974) and McCormick (1983)

theatrical

all first performed in Paris

La paysanne supposée, ou La fête de la moisson (comédie, 3, Dubois), Comédie-Italienne, 28 Aug 1788, music lost

L’amour hermite (pièce anacréontique, 1, P. Desriaux), Beaujolais, 31 Jan 1789 (1789)

Prince Polastri, 1789, cited in a letter from Duprat, F-Po

Ballet, 1791, unperf., cited by Fétis

Le pelletier de St-Fargeau, ou Le premier martyr de la république française (traité historique, 2, A.-L. Bertin d’Antilly), OC, 23 Feb 1793 (1793), music lost

Le congrès des rois (comédie, 3, Maillot), OC, 26 Feb 1794, collab. Cherubini, Grétry, Méhul, Kreutzer, Dalayrac, Deshayes, Solié, Devienne, Berton, Jadin, A.-E. Trial

Africo et Menzola (mélodrame, 3, Coffin-Rosny), Ambigu-Comique, 10 March 1798

Adelson et Salvini (mélodrame, 3, P. Delmarre), Gaîté, 1802 (choreog. M. Adam)

Don Pèdre et Zulika (mélodrame), Gaîté, 1802, music lost

Clodomire, ou La Prêtresse d'Irmensul (mélodrame, 3, N. and H. Lemaire), Porte-S-Martin, 5 May 1803 (choreog. M. Aumer)

Fernand, ou Les Maures (3, A.-J. Coffin-Rony), OC, 11 Feb 1805

Doubtful: Les trois sultanes, ou Soliman second (comédie, C.-S. Favart), Comédie-Italienne, 25 Aug 1792, new music by Blasius, lost

other vocal

Vive l’amour et la folie (C. Grenier), couplets (1795)

Française, point de vengeance, couplets (1814)

Messe in A, T, Bar, B, acc. wind insts, I-Mc

instrumental

Simphonie concertante, 2 hn, orch (1795); Simphonie, 1785, lost, see Brenet

Concs.: 3 for vn (1797–1801); 4 for cl (1802–5); 1 for bn (after 1800), lost

Qts: 6 quatuors concertantes, 2 vn, va, vc, op.3 (1780–82); 3 quatuors concertantes, cl/vn, vn, va, vc, op.1 (1782); 3 qts, cl, str (1782–4); c12 str qts, opp.3, 10 (1785), 12, 19 (1795); 6 qts, cl, vn, va, vc, op.13 (?1788); bn qts, op.5 (c1788); Qt, cl, vn, va, vc, op.2 (c1799); Qt, inc., Ov., bn, vn, va, b, D-SWl; 6 quatuors concertants, bn, vn, va, b, op.9 (1797), ? by I. Blasius; pf sonatas by Haydn, arr. str qt

Trios: 3 trios dialogués for cl, vn, vc/bn, op.31 in GB-Lam; 10 for 2 cl, bn, incl. op.2, 1 in A-Wgm; 3 for 2 vn, vc, op.48; 3 for cl, hn, vc, choisis dans les ouvrages du célèbre Michel [Yost]

Duos: c69 for 2 vn, opp.4, 8 (1783), 26, 28 (Offenbach and Zürich), 29 (1796), 30 (Offenbach), 32–3 in F-Pn, 39, 43, 52–3 (c1794); 12 for 2 bn (1784), incl. op.27; 1 for vn, a (?1784); 6 for fl, vn, op.12 (1788); c64 for 2 cl, opp.18, 20 (1794), 21 (1794–6), 27, 35, 38, 39 (?1797/8), 40 (1800), 46, incl. 6 very easy duets from the lost Méthode de clarinette

Sonatas: 6 for pf, vn acc. (1783); Sonates (1797); 9 for vn, vc acc., opp.40, 41(1800), 43 (1801); 6 for cl, va acc., op.55 (1805); 3 grand sonates, vn, vn acc., op.60 (?1817); 3 for vn, vc acc. op.55; 6 for bn, vc acc., op.57, I-Mc; 6 for fl, b acc.; 6 études graduelles, fl, b acc., op.58; 6 grand sonatas for vn, vn acc., op.66; 6 sonatines, vn, vc acc., op.55, US-AAu, nos.1–3 GB-Lbl; Sonata, vn, pf, ed. in D. Alard: Les maîtres classiques du violon (Mainz, c1862); 3 for vn, b acc.

Caprices ou Etude, vn; Préludes ou Caprices, vn, US-NYp

7 collections of pieces for wind band; Ov., wind insts (1794), ed. in C. Pierre: Musique des fêtes et cérémonies (1899); Ov., wind insts (1796)

Pieces in Musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales (1794–5) and Cartier’s L’art du violon (1798)

theoretical works

Méthode de clarinette (?c1795), lost

Nouvelle méthode de clarinette et raisonnement des instruments, principes et théorie de musique dédiés aux élèves du Conservatoire (1796/R)

Méthode de Basson (1800)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetC

FétisB

GerberNL

GroveO (M. Noiray)

MGG1 suppl. (U. Rau)

C. Pierre: Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: documents historiques et administratifs (Paris, 1900)

M. Vogeleis: Quellen und Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters im Elsass, 500–1800 (Strasbourg, 1911/R), 697ff

D.A. Klein: Le quatuor à cordes français au 18e siècle (diss., U. of Paris, 1970)

C.L. McCormick: Mathieu-Frédéric Blasius (1758–1829): a Biographical Sketch, Catalog of Works, and Critical Performance Edition of the Quatuor Concertant in F, op.1 no.1 (diss., Michigan State U., 1983)

DEANNE ARKUS KLEIN

Blason, Thibaut de.

See Thibaut de Blaison.

Blatný, Josef

(b Brno, 19 March 1891; d Brno, 18 July 1980). Czech composer, teacher and organist. He was taught by Janáček at the Organ School (1909–12). Remaining in Brno, he taught the organ at the conservatory, established himself as a leading organist and acted as choirmaster at St Jakub. Later he was appointed professor of organ improvisation at the academy; he was himself an excellent improviser. His music, in the late Romantic tradition, is unusual in showing no trace of folksong influence. Structurally simple, it has a delicately graded expressive quality. Most of his music is for church use or for organ, and in these genres he combined his experience of art music and domestic traditions. His instructional works for piano gained wide popularity.

WORKS

(selective list)

Sonata, vn, pf, 1925; Te Deum and Alleluja, org, 1942; Lotr na pravici [The Robber on the Right] (orat, J. Durych), S, orch, 1953; Sonata, org, 1955; Trio, cl, vn, vc, 1955; Sinfonia brevis (Veni creator spiritus), str, 1957; Chbr Sym., 1961

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Kundera: Janáčkova varhanická škola (Olomouc, 1918)

J. Racek: Leoš Janáček a současní moravští skladatelé (Brno, 1940)

JAN TROJAN

Blatný, Pavel

(b Brno, 14 Sept 1926). Czech composer. He studied the piano with Vaňura and composition with Schaefer at the Brno Conservatory (1950–55), and then continued composition studies with Bořkovec in Prague (1955–7). He read musicology with Racek and Štědroň at Brno University. During the second half of the 1960s Blatný was a participant at Darmstadt, and in 1967–8 he received a scholarship that enabled him to study at the Berklee College of Music, Boston. He was head of the music department at Czechoslovak Television in Brno (1963–91) and for 12 years was a lecturer at the Brno Academy.

Blatný’s output is remarkable for having passed through a number of different styles, beginning with neo-classicism in the late 1950s in works influenced by Martinů, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. It was at this stage that he created his characteristic ‘dialogic’ compositional technique whereby two contrasting streams of material combine to form one, such as in the Suite for wind and piano (1958). He then experimented with jazz elements and serial technique and shortly afterwards realized a synthesis of contemporary art music and spontaneous musicianship that had become the Third stream; examples of this include Per orchestra sintetica (1960), the Study for quarter-tone trumpet and jazz band (1964) and the orchestral Apel (1974). In works such as the cantatas from the 1980s (after poems by K.J. Erben), Blatný's musical language became simpler, while in the late 1990s he began collaborating with his son Marek to create pieces fusing rock music and elements of a contemporary classical expression.

WORKS

(selective list)

Principal publishers: Český hudební fond, Institut für Jazz, Modern, Panton, Supraphon, Lippman & Rau

stage

Pohádky lesa [Fairy Tales of the Wood] (2 mini-ops for children): Studánka [The Little Pool] (Z. Malý), 1959, Domeček [The Little House] (K. Bednář), 1975; Náčelník severní vánek [Chieftan Northern Breeze] (musical, after J. Nestroy), 1971; Večer tříkrálový [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] (musical, after W. Shakespeare), 1975

orchestral

for symphony orch unless otherwise stated

Music for Pf and Orch, 1955; Conc. for Orch, 1956; Conc., chbr orch, 1958; Dialogue, s sax, jazz orch, 1959–64; Per orchestra sintetica, jazz orch, wind orch, 1960; Conc. for Jazz Orch, 1964; Study, 1/4-tone tpt, jazz band, 1964; 10' 30'', 1965; Für Graz, jazz orch, 1965; Dedicated to Berlin, jazz orch, 1966; Pour Ellis, tpt/s sax, jazz orch, 1966; 24 VI 1967, jazz orch, 1967; D–E–F–G–A–H–C, jazz orch, 1968; Quattro per Amsterdam, S, chbr orch, jazz orch, 1969; Halekačka [Herding Call], classical orch, jazz orch, 1970; 3 Pieces for E. Verschuaeren, big band, 1971; Jazz-Suite für Stuttgart, big band, 1972; Svita pro Gustava Broma, 1972; In modo classico, str qt, jazz orch, 1973; In modo archaico, pf, jazz orch, 1973; Apel [Appeal], 1974; Concertino, cl, jazz orch, 1974; Satz, sym. wind band, 1974; Trubači [Trumpeters], jazz orch, 1977; Věta pro smyčce [Movt for Str], 1977; Zvony [The Bells], sym. movt, 1981; Hommage à Gustav Mahler, 1983; Per organo e big band, 1983; Collage, hommage à J.S. Bach, 1984; Sym., 1984; Nénie za moji matku [Nenia for my Mother], 1985; Play jazz, play rock, play new music, rock group, sym. orch, 1997, collab. M. Blatný; Meditace nad básní Susanne Renaud [Meditation on a Poem by Susanne Renaud], rock group, orch, 1998, collab. M. Blatný

other works

Vocal: Letí jaro, letí [Spring is Flying, Flying], children’s chorus, inst ens, 1960; Zpěv [Song] (textless), children’s chorus, 1971; Canto, chorus, 1976; Vrba [The Willow Tree] (cant., K.J. Erben), 1980; Polednice [Noonday Witch] (cant., Erben), 1982; Štědrý den [Christmas Eve] (cant., Erben), 1983; Vodník [Water Sprite] (cant., Erben), 1988; Podivné lásky [Odd Affections] (cant., J. Muchy), 1989

Chbr and solo inst: Suite 1957, pf; Suite, wind, pf, 1958; Suite 12, b cl, pf, 1960; Trio, fl, b cl, pf, 1962; Meditace, pf, 1963; Trio per S + H, jazz septet, 1964; Dialogue, 2 pf, perc, 1967; Autokolaž [Autocollage], pf, 1972; Scéna, brass qnt, 1972; 2:3, wind qnt, 1975; 2 pezzi, brass qnt, 1978; Musica cameralis per Ars cameralis, cl, va, pf, 1981; Kruh [Circle], sax qt, 1983; Žesťové epizody [Brass Episodes], brass ens, 1983; Dialog, vc, jazz trio, 1987

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Matzner: ‘Třeti proud a Pavel Blatný’ [The Third Stream and Blatný], HRo, xviii (1965), 162–3

I. Poldeňák: ‘Pavel Blatný: skladby třetího proudu’ [Blatný: third stream works], HRo, xxiii (1970), 285 only

L. Feather and I. Gitler: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies (New York, 1976/R) [incl. introduction by Q. Jones]

A. Matzner, I. Poledňák and I. Wasserberger: Encyklopedie jazzu a moderní populární hudby, iv (Prague, 1990), 48–50

KAREL STEINMETZ

Blatt, František Tadeáš

(b Prague, 1793; d Prague, 9 March 1856). Czech clarinettist and composer. After studying art in Vienna he attended the Prague Conservatory (1811–17), where he learnt the clarinet with Václav Farnik and composition with Dionys Weber. In 1814 he toured Germany and northern Europe, and in 1820 succeeded Farnik at the conservatory. Blatt took a large part in the college's administration, eventually becoming assistant director. He did little solo work, but his sensitive playing in the opera orchestra prompted Berlioz to name him the foremost Bohemian player of the day. In 1827 or 1828 Schott published his clarinet tutor with French and German texts (Méthode complète pour la clarinette), which included two fingering charts for clarinets with nine and twelve keys. A second, revised tutor, published in 1839, includes a fingering chart for a 13-keyed clarinet. Blatt's other compositions include clarinet studies, duets, trios and a quintet, oboe exercises, a singing tutor (Kurzgefasste theoretische praktische Gesangschule, Prague, 1829) and some piano works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971)

A.R. Rice: A History of the Clarinet to 1820 (diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1987)

PAMELA WESTON

Blau, Jenő.

See Ormandy, Eugene.

Blaukopf, Kurt

(b Czernowitz [now Chernovtsy, Ukraine], 15 Feb 1914; d Vienna, June 14 1999). Austrian music sociologist and writer on music. He studied music theory with Stefan Wolpe and conducting with Hermann Scherchen in Vienna (1932–7), and music theory with Josef Tal and music history with Edith Gerson-Kiwi in Jerusalem (1940–2). When he returned to Vienna he edited the periodical Phono (1954–65) and collaborated with the German periodical Hifi Stereophonie (1965–83). He was appointed lecturer (1962), and subsequently professor (1963) in music sociology at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik; he also directed the Institute for Music Sociology (1965–84) and the UNESCO institute Media cult (1969–89). In 1976 he became chairman of the ISME commission on music in education and mass media, and in 1992 he was put in charge of an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between scientific conceptual models and the arts, whose findings are being published as a series (see Blaukopf, 1995 and 1996). He was the general editor of the series Musik und Gesellschaft (Karlsruhe and Vienna, 1968–).

Blaukopf's research, based mainly on the writings of Max Weber, has placed special emphasis upon the sociology of tonal systems and on the influence of the media on music. He has also written several books on Mahler and his time. The University of Vienna made him an honorary professor in 1974 and awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1994.

WRITINGS

Musiksoziologie: eine Einführung in die Grundbegriffe mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Soziologie der Tonsysteme (1950, enlarged 2/1972)

Grosse Dirigenten (Teufen, 1953, 2/1957; Eng. trans., 1955)

Grosse Virtuosen (Teufen, 1954; Fr. trans., 1955)

Symphonie fantastique (Teufen, 1959) [a novel on Berlioz]

Gustav Mahler, oder Der Zeitgenosse der Zukunft (Vienna, 1969, 2/1989; Eng. trans., 2/1992)

Gustav Mahler: sein Leben, sein Werk und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna, 1976; Eng. trans., 1976, as Gustav Mahler, a Documentary Study)

Neue musikalische Verhaltensweisen der Jugend (Mainz, 1974)

Musik im Wandel der Gesellschaft: Grundzüge der Musiksoziologie (Munich, 1982, enlarged 2/1996; Eng. trans., 1992, as Musical Life in a Changing Society: Aspects of Music Sociology)

with H. Blaukopf: Die Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna, 1986, enlarged 2/1992)

Beethovens Erben in der Mediamorphose: Kultur- und Medienpolitik für die elektronische Ära (Heiden, 1989)

with H. Blaukopf: Gustav Mahler: his Life, Work and World (London, 1991; Ger. trans., 1994, as Gustav Mahler: Leben und Werk in Zeugnissen der Zeit)

Pioniere empiristischer Musikforschung: Österreich und Böhmen als Wiege der modernen Kunstsoziologie (Vienna, 1995)

ed.: Philosophie, Literatur und Musik im Orchester der Wissenschaften (Vienna, 1996)

Die Ästhetik Bernard Bolzamos (Sankt Augustin, 1996)

Unterwegs zur Musiksoziologie (Graz, 1998) [incl. list of writings]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Bontinck and O. Brusatti, eds.: Festschrift Kurt Blaukopf (Vienna, 1975, 2/1999) [incl. list of writings, 9–19]

M. Huber, ed.: Fast eine Biographie: Kurt Blaukopf in seinen Schriften (Strasshof, 1999)

‘In memoriam Kurt Blaukopf’, Musikerziehung, liii/Feb (1999–2000)

F. Stadler, M. Seiler, eds.: Kunst, Kunsttheorie und Kunstforschung im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs: In memoriam Kurt Baukopf (Vienna, 2000)

RUDOLF KLEIN

Blaurer, Ambrosius.

See Blarer, Ambrosius.

Blautz, Gabriel.

See Plautzius, Gabriel.

Blavet, Michel

(bap. Besançon, 13 March 1700; d Paris, 28 Oct 1768). French flautist and composer. The son of Jean-Baptiste Blavet, a turner, and Oudette Lyard, he taught himself several instruments, becoming accomplished on the bassoon and flute. He married Anne-Marguerite Ligier in 1718; the couple’s long and happy marriage resulted in two daughters and two sons, both of whom became priests and one of whom, Jean-Louis, was the author of five books and a number of translations.

In 1723 Blavet moved to Paris in the entourage of Duke Charles-Eugène Lévis. Three years later he made his début at the Concert Spirituel, launching a remarkable public career. During the next quarter of a century Blavet appeared at the Concert Spirituel more frequently than any other performer, and throughout the period musicians and writers were unanimous in stating that his singing tone, pure intonation and brilliant technique set the standard in flute playing for all of Europe. On 1 October 1728 Louis XV granted to Blavet, ‘musicien ordinaire de notre très cher cousin le prince de Carignan’, a privilège général for six years to publish ‘plusieurs sonates pour la flûte traversière’, and op.1 was issued immediately, dedicated to Carignan. By 1731 Blavet had transferred his allegiance to the Count of Clermont, with whom he maintained ties for the rest of his life. An invitation to join the Prussian court, issued by Frederick the Great while still crown prince, was declined. When he added to his other duties the posts of first flute in the Musique du Roi (c1736), in the Musique de la Reine (1738) and at the Opéra (1740), Blavet’s position in Parisian musical life was unrivalled. Among those who wrote with admiration of him were Telemann, Marpurg, Quantz, Hubert Le Blanc, Serré de Rieux, Ancelet, La Borde, Daquin and Voltaire. It is likely that many of Leclair’s nine flute sonatas and his flute concerto were written for Blavet, for the two often performed together.

Blavet’s sonatas, among the masterpieces of the early flute repertory, represent the successful transfer to the flute of the goûts réunis of French violin sonata style, developed by Anet, Duval, Senaillé, Leclair and others. The sonatas of op.2 show the influences of the French suite and the Corellian sonata da camera, and those of op.3 exhibit a more modern, galant style. Only one of Blavet’s flute concertos survives: it has brilliant Vivaldian outer movements flanking a pair of French gavottes serving as a slow movement.

Blavet’s four stage works were written for the private theatre of the Count of Clermont’s château at Berny; Le jaloux corrigé was also given six performances at the Paris Opéra on a double bill with Rousseau’s Le devin du village. The music of the overture, arias and an accompanied recitative of this pasticcio was taken from popular Italian intermezzos; Blavet provided the secco recitatives and the divertissement (six dances and a vaudeville). His innovation was to abandon for the first time the arioso recitative that the French had used since Lully. ‘The recitative of this French intermezzo’, reported the Mercure de France, ‘is approximately in the style of Italian recitative, at least to the extent that the differences between the languages permitted it; and in spite of the almost universal bias of our nation against the Italian recitative, it did not appear that the spectators were extremely shocked by this first attempt’. The Mercure politely neglected to mention that the audience hissed. Whatever the initial reception (Blavet’s divertissement continued to be performed at the Opéra after the rest of the intermezzo had been dropped), Le jaloux corrigé and Le devin du village helped launch a new era of italianate music at the Opéra, and with it the Querelle des Bouffons. Le jaloux corrigé was also performed at Mannheim in 1754.

Blavet’s interest in teaching was reflected in his op.2, in which he meticulously marked correct breathing places, and in his three Recueils de pièces, which contain pieces in all styles and at all levels of difficulty, many arranged for two flutes in a manner suitable for student and teacher to play together. Blavet’s most brilliant flute pupils were the composer and publisher Pierre-Evard Taillart and the teacher and composer Félix Rault, who succeeded Blavet at court, the Opéra and the Concert Spirituel.

WORKS

vocal

Floriane, ou La grotte des spectacles (comédie-ballet), Château de Berny, 25 Aug 1752, F-Pa

Le jaloux corrigé (int with divertissement, 1, C. Collé) [music by Pergolesi, Galuppi, Orlandini, Dolletti [Auletta], Buini, Caroli, Capelli, Blavet and others], Château de Berny, 18 Nov 1752 (Paris, 1753)

Les jeux olympiques (ballet héroïque, Henri-Charles, Count of Senneterre), Château de Berny, 25 Aug 1753, F-Pa

La fète de Cythère (op, 1, A. de Laurès), Château de Berny, 19 Nov 1753, Pa

Songs in 18th-century anthologies

instrumental

6 sonates, 2 fl, op.1 (Paris, 1728); ed. H. Ruf (Mainz, 1967); ed. W. Kolneder (Heidelberg, 1977); ed. J. Patéro (Paris, 1978)

[6] Sonates mêlées de pièces, fl, bc, op.2 (Paris, 1732/R); ed. W. Kolneder (Heidelberg, 1969); ed. W. Hess (Winterthur, 1983); ed. D. Ledbetter (Paris, 1999)

[6] Sonates, fl, bc, op.3 (Paris, 1740/R); ed. P. Baubon (Paris, 1980)

Conc., fl, D-KA, ed. in Florilegium musicum, xi (Lörrach and Baden, 1956)

Miscellaneous pieces in 18th-century anthologies

arrangements

1er [– 3ème] recueil de pièces, petits airs, brunettes, menuets, etc. avec des doubles et variations, 2 fl/vn/tr viols (Paris, 1744–c1751/R, 2/1755/R), incl. some pieces by Blavet; 1er recueil ed. Y. Morgan and W. Michel (Winterthur, 1993)

[Recueil des menuets anglais, autrichiens, hongrois, alsaciens, prussiens et russes], fl (Paris, after 1754), title-page lacking in sole surviving copy, F-Pn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AnthonyFB

PierreH

M. François de Neuf-Château: ‘Eloge de Monsieur Blavet’, Nécrologe des hommes célèbres, iii (1770), 335–43

H. Bonhomme, ed.: Correspondance inédite de Collé faisant suite à son journal accompagnée de fragments également inédits de ses oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1868)

M. Brenet: ‘La libraire musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, d'après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

L. de La Laurencie: ‘Deux imitateurs français des bouffons: Blavet et Dauvergne’, Année musicale, ii (1912), 65–125

C.W. Coffee: The Sonatas for Flute and Bass of Michel Blavet (diss., Boston U., 1965)

J.M. Bowers: The French Flute School from 1700 to 1760 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1971)

D. Launay, ed.: La Querelle des Bouffons (Geneva, 1973) [a repr., with introduction and index, of 61 pamphlets pubd Paris, 1752–4]

J.M. Bowers: ‘Catalogue of French Works for the Transverse Flute, 1692–1761’, RMFC, xviii (1978), 89–125

C.C. Bauer: Michel Blavets Flötenmusik: Eine Studie zur Entwicklung der franzözischen Instrumentalmusik im 18. Jahrhundert (Freiburg, 1981)

L. Vaissier: ‘Michael Blavet, 1700–1768: essai de biographie’, RMFC, xxii (1984), 131–59

L.E. Peterman: ‘Michel Blavet's Breathing Marks: a Rare Source for Musical Phrasing in Eighteenth-Century France’, PPR, iv (1991), 186–98

B.A. Berryman: Michel Blavet’s Flute Concerto: an Edition and Commentary (diss., Stanford U., 1994)

NEAL ZASLAW

Blaze, François Henri Joseph.

See Castil-Blaze.

Blažek, Zdeněk

(b Žarošice, Hodonín district, 24 May 1905; d Brno, 20 June 1988). Czech composer, teacher and music theorist. He studied with Petrželka at the Brno Conservatory and with Helfert at the university, from which he received the PhD in 1933 for a dissertation on Smetana. He completed his education in Suk’s masterclasses at the Prague Conservatory (1933–5). His first appointment was with Czech Radio in Brno; he then taught theory and composition at the Brno Conservatory and was later its director for many years. At Brno University he completed the Habilitation (1961) and became professor of music theory in 1968. In his music he remained faithful to the late Romantic, nationalist Suk–Novák tradition. Contemporary musical developments hardly touched his style, which remained essentially homophonic. Though he wrote piano and chamber pieces, many of his works are vocal, and his songs and choruses achieve considerable expressiveness through harmonic subtlety.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Verchovina [Highlands] (4, J. Zatloukal), 1951; R.U.R. (K. Čapek), 1975

Vocal: ‘Zpěv rodné zemi’ [Song of my Native Land] (cant., J. Hora), 1939; Óda na chudobu [Ode to Poverty] (P. Neruda), 1958; Domov [Homeland] (1962)

Inst: 7 str qts, 1943–81

WRITINGS

O harmonické a polyfonní struktuře díla Smetanova (diss., U. of Brno, 1933)

Dvojsměrná alterace v harmonickém myšlení [Two-directional alteration in harmonic thought] (Brno, 1949)

ed.: L. Janáček: Hudebnĕ teoretické dílo [Works of music theory] (Prague, 1968–74)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Racek: Leoš Janáček a současní moravští skladatelé (Brno, 1940)

L. Peduzzi: Zdeněk Blažek: obraz života a díla [Blažek: a picture of his life and works] (Brno, 1988)

JAN TROJAN

Blazon, Thibaut de.

See Thibaut de Blaison.

Blech

(Ger.).

Brass, as in Blechblasinstrumente (‘brass instruments’) and Blechmusik (‘music for brass bands’).

Blech, Harry

(b London, 2 March 1910; d London, 9 May 1999). English conductor and violinist. He studied at Trinity College of Music and the RMCM, and played in the Hallé Orchestra from 1929 to 1930 and the BBC SO from 1930 to 1936. He led the Blech String Quartet from 1933 until it was disbanded in 1950, by which time his interests had turned towards conducting. He founded the London Wind Players in 1942 and (under the auspices of the Haydn-Mozart Society, of which he was also founder) the London Mozart Players in 1949, remaining musical director until 1984. The London Mozart Players was the first chamber orchestra in Britain to specialize in the Viennese classics and, with his lively and clear-textured (if not always well-poised) readings of music by Haydn and Mozart, Blech not only built up a large and loyal audience but also exercised considerable influence on interpretative styles. He consistently encouraged young soloists and made a point of exploring the byways of the Viennese Classical repertory. He was created OBE in 1962 and CBE in 1984.

STANLEY SADIE

Blech, Leo

(b Aachen, 21 April 1871; d Berlin, 24 Aug 1958). German conductor and composer. In Berlin he studied the piano under Ernst Rudorff, and composition under Woldemar Bargiel and later under Humperdinck. He was conductor at the Stadttheater, Aachen (1893–9) and then at the Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague (1899–1906), where his reputation as a conductor and composer of opera became well established. In 1906 he was appointed conductor of the Royal Opera House, Berlin, where he became Generalmusikdirektor in 1913. In 1923 he moved to the Deutsches Opernhaus, Berlin, as artistic director, and this was followed by a year at the Berlin Volksoper in 1924, and a year at the Vienna Volksoper in 1925. In 1926 he returned to Berlin as conductor of the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden, and remained there, achieving great success, until, being Jewish, he found himself unable to return from a guest engagement at Rīga in 1937. He stayed at Rīga for four years; in 1941, when his safety was again threatened, he moved to Stockholm. He secured a post at the Stockholm Royal Opera, where he had been a regular guest conductor for several years, and also conducted concerts. In September 1949 he returned to Berlin, where he became conductor at the Städtische Oper.

Blech's operatic repertory was wide. He was especially renowned for his performances of Wagner and Verdi, and of Carmen, which he conducted about 600 times. He was also a fine orchestral conductor, admired for reliability, clarity and elegance, and for his sensitivity as an accompanist. He made many recordings, principally with the orchestra of the Berlin Staatsoper, including a famous recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Kreisler. During his lifetime he achieved considerable success with his own operas, particularly Das war ich (1902, Dresden), Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind (1903, Dresden), and, most popular of all, Versiegelt (1908, Hamburg). His stage works were said to show a deft lightness of touch in the tradition of Humperdinck. He also wrote orchestral, choral and chamber works, and songs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Rychnovsky: Leo Blech (Prague, 1905)

W. Jacob, ed.: Leo Blech (Hamburg, 1931)

W. Poch: Leo Blech: ein Beitrag zur Berliner Theatergeschichte (Berlin, 1985)

J.A. FULLER MAITLAND/ROBERT PHILIP

Blechbläser

(Ger.).

See Brass instruments.

Blechflöte

(Ger.).

See Pennywhistle.

Blegen, Judith

(b Missoula, MT, 27 April 1941). American soprano. She studied singing with Euphemia Gregory at the Curtis Institute from 1959. After an apprenticeship at the Santa Fe Opera Festival (to which she later returned as a principal), she was engaged for concerts at Spoleto in 1963. She studied further in Italy and in 1964 went to Nuremberg, where during two years she sang such varied roles as Lucia, Susanna and Zerbinetta. Engagements followed in Vienna, Salzburg and the major American houses; her début role of Papagena at the Metropolitan (1970) led to performances as Marcellina, Mélisande, Ascanius and Sophie in Werther. She made her Covent Garden début in 1975, as Despina, and her début at the Opéra in 1977, as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. Her singing, notable for its intelligence, charm and polish, is preserved on recordings of oratorio and lieder, and in her Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro.

MARTIN BERNHEIMER/R

Blesh, Rudi [Rudolph] (Pickett)

(b Guthrie, OK, 21 Jan 1899; d Gilmanton, NH, 25 Aug 1985). American writer on music. He attended Dartmouth College and earned the BS in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1940s he served as jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote a pioneering serious history of jazz, Shining Trumpets (1946), and with Harriet Janis was co-author of the first history of ragtime, They All Played Ragtime (1950). The latter work established him as the leading authority in this field, and eventually prompted a revival of the music. Also with Janis, he founded Circle Records, a small but significant jazz label which became the first to issue the Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton. In 1953 they sold Circle Records – apart from the Morton recordings – to Jazzology Records. From 1947 to 1950, and again in 1964, Blesh wrote and narrated radio programmes on jazz and American folk music. From 1956 he taught jazz history at Queens College, CUNY, and New York University, and in the 1970s he contributed disc notes to numerous ragtime recordings. Blesh also edited ragtime piano music and wrote on modern art and the cinema.

WRITINGS

This is Jazz: a Series of Lectures Given at the San Francisco Museum of Art (San Francisco, 1943)

Shining Trumpets: a History of Jazz (New York, 1946/R, enlarged 2/1958/R)

with H. Janis: They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, 4/1971)

Combo, USA: Eight Lives in Jazz (Philadelphia, 1971/R)

‘Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist’, The Complete Works of Scott Joplin, ii, ed. V.B. Lawrence (New York, 1981), xiii–xl [2nd edn of Ragtime Revival: The Collected Works of Scott Joplin) (1971)]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.E. Hasse: ‘Rudi Blesh and the Ragtime Revivalists’, Ragtime: its History, Composers, and Music (New York, 1985), 178–86

S. Holden: Obituary, New York Times (28 Aug 1985)

JOHN EDWARD HASSE

Blessi, Manoli.

See Molino, Antonio.

Blessinger, Karl

(b Ulm, 21 Sept 1888; d Munich-Pullach, 13 March 1962). German musicologist and composer. He studied with Wolfrum in Heidelberg, worked as music director from 1910 to 1912 in theatres in Bremen, Koblenz and Bonn, and studied musicology in Munich with Sandberger, receiving his doctorate in 1913 with a dissertation on music in Ulm in the 17th century. From 1920 to 1945 he taught music theory, musicology and music education at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich, where he was named reader in 1935 and professor in 1941. Aside from his pedagogical works on form and melody, Blessinger became known for his conservative leanings in the 1920s through his polemical writings on the degeneracy of modern music. In the Nazi period he received acclaim for writing one of the few comprehensive anti-Semitic tracts on music, using graphic biological imagery to condemn 19th-century Jewish composers for allegedly infiltrating European music and destroying its essence.

WRITINGS

Studien zur Ulmer Musikgeschichte im 17. Jahrhundert, insbesondere über Leben und Werke Sebastian Anton Scherers (diss., U. of Munich, 1913; Ulm, 1913)

Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart, 1920)

Die Überwindung der musikalischen Impotenz (Stuttgart, 1920)

Hans Pfitzner (Augsburg, 1921)

‘Neue Begründung der musikalischen Logik’, ZMw, iv (1922), 365–8

Grundzüge der musikalischen Formenlehre (Stuttgart, 1926)

Melodielehre als Einführung in die Musiktheorie, i (Stuttgart, 1930)

‘Musik und Politik’, Auftakt, xii (1936), 1–6

Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler: drei Kapitel Judentum in der Musik als Schlüssel zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1939; enlarged 1944 as Judentum und Musik: ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Rassenpolitik)

‘Englands rassischer Niedergang im Spiegel seiner Musik’, Die Musik, xxxii (1939–40), 37–41

‘Der Weg zur Einheit der deutschen Musik’, Deutschlands Erneuerung, xxv (1941), 75–84

PAMELA M. POTTER

Blewitt, Jonas

(d London, 1805). English organist and composer. He seems to have studied with R.J.S. Stevens, who said that he was almost blind. From about 1795 he was organist of the united London parishes of St Margaret Pattens and St Gabriel Fenchurch, also of St Katharine Coleman, Fenchurch Street. His Complete Treatise on the Organ (c1795) was the first separately published English organ tutor.

WORKS

all published in London

Six Songs and a Cantata, op.1 (c1778); 10 Voluntaries, op.2, org/hpd (c1780); A Collection of Favourite Ballads Sung … at the Spa Gardens Bermondsey, op.3 (c1785); A Complete Treatise on the Organ, to which is added a Set of Explanatory Voluntaries, op.4 (c1795); 10 Voluntaries or Pieces … in an Easy and Familiar Style, op.5, org (1796); 12 Easy and Familiar Movements, op.6, org (c1797), 36 singly pubd ballads: see BUCEM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

M. Argent, ed.: Recollections of R.J.S. Stevens: an Organist in Georgian London (Carbondale, IL, and London, 1992)

EDWARD F. RIMBAULT/R

Blewitt, Jonathan

(b London, 19 July 1782; d London, 4 Sept 1853). English organist, conductor and composer, son of Jonas Blewitt. He studied with Battishill and with Haydn, and held various organ appointments in England, moving to Ireland in 1811 as private organist to Lord Cahir. He was organist of St Andrew’s, Dublin, and composer and director of the music to the Theatre Royal (Crow Street), succeeding Tom Cooke in the latter post in June 1813. In the same year the Duke of Leinster appointed him grand organist to the Masonic body of Ireland, and he became the conductor of the principal concerts in Dublin. He joined J.B. Logier in his system of music instruction in Ireland and soon became the foremost teacher in Dublin.

Before 1825 Blewitt was again in London and wrote the music for Drury Lane Theatre with great success. In 1828 and 1829 he was director of the music at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. In his latter years he was connected with the Tivoli Gardens at Margate. His ballads in the Irish style were particularly popular, and in 1849 he revisited Ireland as a pianist, with the tenor John Templeton. He is reported to have died in great poverty.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

first performances and publications in London, unless otherwise stated

CS	Crow Street Theatre
CG	Covent Garden Theatre
DL	Drury Lane Theatre
†	partly adapted

The Corsair, or The Pirate’s Isle (musical play, M. O’Sullivan), Dublin, CS, 1814 (Dublin, c1814)

The Forest of Bondy, or The Dog of Montargis (musical play, ?C. Dibdin, after G. de Pixérécourt), CS, 1814 (Dublin, c1814)

†The Musician without Magic (operatic drama, W.H. Hamilton), Dublin, CS, 1 March 1815; after Isouard’s opera

Egbert and Ethelinda (?C. Dibdin), Dublin, CS, 1816

Actors al fresco (burletta, W.T. Moncrieff), Vauxhall Gardens, 1823, lib pubd; collab. T.S. Cooke, C.E. Horn

The Man in the Moon, or Harlequin Dog-Star (pantomime, W. Barrymore), DL, 26 Dec 1826

The Boy of Santillane, or Gil Blas and the Robbers of Asturia (musical play, G. Macfarren), DL, 16 April 1827, lib pubd; collab. Cooke

The Kiss and the Rose, or Love in the Nursery Grounds (vaudeville, W. Moncrieff), Vauxhall Gardens, 10 Aug 1827, lib pubd

The Talisman, or The Genii of the Elements (musical play, Macfarren), Surrey, 7 April 1828, lib pubd

Auld Robin Grey (operetta, Macfarren), Surrey, 17 May 1828; collab. A. Lee

Mischief-Making (interlude, J.B. Buckstone), Surrey, 16 Sept 1828

†My Old Woman (comic op, Macfarren, after Scribe, Delavigne: La vieille), Surrey, 14 Jan 1829, lib pubd; after Fétis’s opera

Black-Eyed Susan, or All in the Downs (musical play, D. Jerrold), Surrey, 8 June 1829 (1829), lib pubd

The House of Aspen (play, incidental music, W. Scott), Surrey, 17 Nov 1829, lib pubd

Paul Clifford (musical drama, E. Fitzball, after Bulwer-Lytton), CG, 28 Oct 1835, lib pubd; collab. G. Rodwell

Rory O’More (burletta, S. Lover), Adelphi, 29 Sept 1837, lib pubd

Harlequin Hudibras, or Dame Durden and the Droll Days of the Merry Monarch (pantomime, E.L. Blanchard), DL, 27 Dec 1852, lib pubd

other works

The Battle and Victory of Salamanca, sonata, pf (?Dublin, 1812)

A Grand Royal Divertimento, pf/harp, fl acc. (?Dublin, 1821)

Several collections of quadrilles, polkas and rondos, pf

Hundreds of songs, ballads, duets, glees, pubd separately

WRITINGS

The Vocal Assistant: a Treatise on Singing (?Dublin, n.d.)

An Epitome of the Logierian System of Harmony (?Dublin, n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

NicollH

EDWARD F. RIMBAULT/ALFRED LOEWENBERG/R

Bley [née Borg], Carla

(b Oakland, CA, 11 May 1938). American jazz composer, bandleader and keyboard player. She learnt the fundamentals of music from her father, a church musician, but is otherwise self-taught. At the age of 17 she moved to New York, where she wrote jazz tunes for musicians such as George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre and her husband at the time, the pianist Paul Bley. In 1964, with her second husband, the trumpeter Mike Mantler, she formed the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra, known from 1965 as the Jazz Composer's Orchestra. In 1966 she helped found the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, a novel non-profit organization which commissions, produces and distributes commercially unviable jazz. In 1968 they founded the New Music Distribution Service, a pioneering outlet which extends far beyond jazz and into the realms of avant-garde and electronic recording and composition, to supply albums and scores that are otherwise difficult to obtain. Although already highly regarded by this time among critics, Bley first came to public notice with A Genuine Tong Funeral (1967), a cycle of pieces recorded with the Gary Burton Quartet, and with her compositions and arrangements for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra (1969, Imp.). In 1971 she completed the eclectic ‘jazz opera’ Escalator over the Hill (JCOA). This work led to several composing grants. Bley continued to compose, expand the activities of the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, and lead her own ten-piece touring band; her sidemen included Mantler, Roswell Rudd and Steve Swallow. Around 1985 she reduced the group to a small band, but this new group was not well received, and in 1990 she established an 18-piece big band. An indifferent keyboard player, Bley is an outstanding jazz composer with a wide range of styles at her command. Much of her best work is infused with a spirit of parody and sardonic humour. Her composition 3/4 has been performed by musicians as varied as Keith Jarrett, Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Cuscuna: ‘Carla Bley's New Opera: Worth the Toil and Trouble’, Down Beat, xxxix/6 (1972), 16–17

B. Primack: ‘Carla Bley: First Lady of the Avant-garde’, Contemporary Keyboard, v/2 (1979), 9–11, 46, 48

L. Dahl: Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (London, 1984)

M. Bourne: ‘Carla Bley & Steve Swallow: Making Sweet Music’, Down Beat, lviii/4 (1991), 19–21

K. Franckling: ‘Carla Bley's “Normal” Big Band’, Jazz Times, xxii/1 (1992), 26–7

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Bleyer, Georg

(b Tiefurt, nr Weimar, bap. 28 Oct 1647; d ?after 1694). German composer and poet. He possibly attended the Thomasschule at Leipzig. From 1664 he studied law and music at Jena and matriculated at Leipzig in 1666 but broke off his studies later that year on the death of his father. He soon succeeded Caspar von Stieler as chamber secretary at the court of Count Schwarzenburg at Rudolstadt, where he also assisted the Kapellmeister, Wolf Ernst Roth. He was crowned Poet Laureate in 1672, and the count paid for him to go on journeys to France, probably before 1670, and to Italy in 1673–4. But he also came into conflict with the count on several occasions, and his application from Vienna in 1675 to succeed Roth was unsuccessful; so too was his later application to join the Hofkapelle at Dresden, and when he applied to succeed Sebastian Knüpfer, who died in 1676, as Kantor of the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, he was turned down because his knowledge of Latin was defective. He was in Rudolstadt in 1677, but serious disputes with the count led to his finally being banished. From 15 August 1677 until 31 August 1678 he worked at the court at Darmstadt simply as a musician. Among the last records of his life are an application for a post when he was in Frankfurt in 1680 and a poem of homage of 1683 in which he called himself court musician to Duke Julius Franz of Saxe-Lauenburg. That his Zodiacus musicus (1683) was published at Antwerp may indicate that he was also in Brabant that year. A note on the manuscript of his Ich danke dir, Herr suggests that he was still alive, probably in Germany, in 1694.

Bleyer never succeeded in exchanging the uncertain status of court musician for that of established church organist or Kantor. Nevertheless, his output seems to have consisted above all of sacred vocal music, which formed the main part of the repertory at Rudolstadt. An assessment of his work in this sphere has to be based, however, on only six surviving manuscript pieces which are technically accomplished, genuinely expressive and include virtuoso vocal parts and extended fugal sections. Lust-Music consists of two sets of dances, each containing 50 pieces, and a supplement containing a further 18; although they do not fall into readily identifiable types or into stereotyped groupings, they provide early evidence of the vogue in Germany for up-to-date French dances. He was better known for his Lust-Music than for his occasional poetry; moreover, his authorship as both poet and composer of the Rudolstädter Festspiele has been called into question by Höfer.

WORKS

Lust-Music, 4, 5 insts (Leipzig, 1670) [2 vols.]

Zodiacus musicus XII. sonatarum, 2–4 insts (Antwerp, 1683), inc.

Musikalische Andachten über die Sonn- und Fest-Evangelia, 4–8vv (Jena, 1679); lost, cited in Göhler

Musicalische Erquickstunden, 4–6vv (Jena, 1683), lost, cited in Göhler

Ich danke dir, Herr, 5vv, 5 insts, bc, 1694; Jauchzet dem Herrn, 1v, 6 insts, bc, Frankfurt, 2 or 11 May 1680: D-F

4 psalms, 1, 4vv, 2–11 insts, bc, Bsb, S-L, Uu (anon.)

Other works, now lost, indicated by 133 text incipits in inventories, incl. many sacred vocal works in Rudolstadt inventories (see Kinkeldey and Baselt)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Göhler: Verzeichnis der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759 angezeigten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1902/R)

R. Sachse, ed.: Acta Nicolaitana et Thomana: Aufzeichnungen von Jacob Thomasius während seines Rektorats an der Nikolai und Thomasschule zu Leipzig, 1670–1684 (Leipzig, 1912), 183–4, 201–2, 206–7

O. Kinkeldey: Preface to DDT, xlvi–xlvii (1913/R)

K. Nef: Geschichte der Sinfonie und Suite (Leipzig, 1921/R), 75ff

P. Epstein: ‘Aus Frankfurter Ratsakten des 17. Jahrhunderts’, ZMw, v (1922–3), 368–72

A. Schering: Musikgeschichte Leipzigs, ii: Von 1650 bis 1723 (Leipzig, 1926/R), 47, 404

E. Mohr: Die Allemande: eine Untersuchung ihrer Entwicklung von den Anfängen bis zu Bach und Händel (Zürich, 1932), 83, ex.67

W. Fleming, ed.: Oratorium: Festspiel (Leipzig, 1933, 2/1965), 134ff

E.H. Meyer: Die mehrstimmige Spielmusik des 17. Jahrhunderts in Nord- und Mitteleuropa (Kassel, 1934/R), 189–90

W. Serauky: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Halle, ii (Halle and Berlin, 1939–42), 70ff

C. Höfer: Georg Bleyer: ein thüringischer Tonsetzer und Dichter der Barockzeit (Jena, 1941) [incl. F. Blume: ‘Georg Bleyer als Musiker’, 93–101, and texts of Bleyer's occasional poetry]

B. Baselt: ‘Die Musikaliensammlung der Schwarzburg-Rudolstädtischen Hofkapelle unter Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657–1714)’, Traditionen und Aufgaben der hallischen Musikwissenschaft, ed. W. Siegmund-Schultze (Halle, 1963), 105–34

F. Krummacher: Die Überlieferung der Choralbearbeitungen in der frühen evangelischen Kantate (Berlin, 1965), 233ff, 237

E. Noack: Musikgeschichte Darmstadts vom Mittelalter bis zur Goethezeit (Mainz, 1967), 125, 131

H. Kümmerling: Katalog der Sammlung Bokemeyer (Kassel, 1970), 107

MICHAEL SPAETH

Bleyer, Nicolaus

(b Stolzenau, 2 Feb 1591; d Lübeck, 3 May 1658). German violinist and composer. From about 1610 he was a member of the court orchestra at Gottorf, where from 1614 to 1617 he had lessons from William Brade. In 1617, after the death of Duke Johann Adolf, he and Brade joined the orchestra of Count Ernst at Bückeburg. Here he also made the acquaintance of Thomas Simpson, who named a five-part piece in one of his collections Bleyers Armbandt (RISM 1617²⁵) and published six pieces by him for four instruments and continuo in another (1621¹⁹). In 1621 he was appointed a civic musician at Lübeck, received the freedom of the city on 1 May 1623 and remained there until his death. He was active in the city's musical life and had many pupils, among them Nathanael Schnittelbach. In addition to the six pieces already mentioned there is a collection of his own, Erster Theil Newer Paduanen, Galliarden, Balletten, Mascaraden und Couranten, which must have appeared in Hamburg in 1628. It survives incomplete but part of it at least reappeared in his collection Erster Theil Newer Pavanen, Galliarden, Canzonen, Synfonien, Balletten, Volten, Couranten und Sarabanden (Lübeck and Leipzig, 1642). There are 43 pieces in the latter volume, for five instruments and continuo. His violin writing, derived from English models, is characterized by lively figuration and rich double stopping. A set of five variations on English Mars (c1650; formerly at PL-WRu, now lost, but in Beckmann, vol.ii) reveals the extent of his virtuosity. Another set of dances is lost, as is a cantata for three voices, two violins and continuo, O süsser, o freundlicher Herr Jesu Christ (formerly at D-Lm).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Seiffert: ‘Die Chorbibliothek der St. Michaelisschule in Lüneburg zu Seb. Bach's Zeit’, SIMG, ix (1907–8), 593–620

G. Beckmann: Das Violinspiel in Deutschland vor 1700 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1918, music suppl. 1921)

A. Moser: Geschichte des Violinspiels (Berlin, 1923, rev. 2/1966–7 by H.J. Nösselt)

E.H. Meyer: Die mehrstimmige Spielmusik des 17. Jahrhunderts in Nord- und Mitteleuropa (Kassel, 1934/R)

J. Hennings: Musikgeschichte Lübecks, i (Kassel, 1951)

W. Greve: Braunschweiger Stadtmusikanten: Geschichte eines Berufsstandes 1227–1828 (Brunswick, 1991)

GEORG KARSTÄDT/ULF GRAPENTHIN

Blich, Richard

(fl ?c1370). English musician. The sole extant reference to his work occurs in the text of the motet Sub Arturo/Fons citharizancium/In omnem terram (see Alanus, Johannes, perhaps composed in 1372 or 1373. Its upper voice praises some 14 English musicians, recording a lively and productive group of composers, singers and instrumentalists then active in court circles, of whom Richard Blich was one: his ‘works please both holy people and rulers’. All the named musicians so far identified were active at some point in their careers in the English Chapel Royal between about 1340 and 1405 (during the reigns of Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV), or in the chapel of the Black Prince (d 1376). It is possible that Blich may be identifiable with the Richard Blithe who was admitted a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal between 1406 and 1413 and remained so until his death in 1419 or 1420; this hypothesis implies a date of birth about 1350.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Trowell: ‘A Fourteenth-Century Ceremonial Motet and its Composer’, AcM, xxix (1957), 65–75

R.D. Bowers: ‘Fixed Points in the Chronology of English Fourteenth-Century Polyphony’, ML, lxxi (1990), 320–25; with ‘Postscript’, ML lxxx (1999), 269–70

ROGER BOWERS

Blikken fluit

(Flem.).

See Pennywhistle.

Blindennotenschrift, Blindennotation

(Ger.).

See Braille notation.

Blindhamer [Blindthaimer, Blyndthamer, Plinthamer], Adolf

(b c1475; d between 1520 and 1532). German lutenist and composer. From September 1503 at the latest (probably earlier) he was court lutenist to Maximilian I; in this capacity he was in Augsburg in 1509 and 1518. He was made a citizen of Nuremberg on 5 August 1514; the document recording this event refers to him as ‘the good lute player’. In 1515 he was employed there for two years ‘so that he might with even more diligence teach young persons how to play the lute and other instruments’. As late as 1520 Dürer ranked him as one of the three best lutenists of his time in the inscription on the portrait of the Antwerp lutenist Captain Felix Hungersperger. In the early 1530s Hans Gerle spoke of him in Musica teusch (Nuremberg, 1532) and Tabulatur auff die Laudten (Nuremberg, 1533) as being dead.

Gerle was probably Blindhamer's pupil in Nuremberg: in the two treatises mentioned above he singled out Blindhamer for praise of his playing style, his skill in ornamenting, and his teachings on notating rhythms. By citing ‘so widely celebrated a master’ as being adept and successful within the conceptual framework of German lute tablature, Gerle defended his own use of this notation against its detractors, most notably Martin Agricola in his Musica instrumentalis deudsch (1529). Agricola's complaint that this tablature (in which the entire alphabet is applied crosswise on the frets rather than lengthwise along the strings) was a case of ‘a blind master making his pupils blind’ drew inspiration from information in Virdung's Musica getutscht (1511) that a blind man, Conrad Paumann, had invented it. Agricola's words must have had the unintended consequence of reflecting negatively on Blindhamer – through no fault of his other than his name.

Five compositions by Blindhamer have come to light: two prelude-like pieces and three intabulations of German songs, all in three parts. The titles of the songs he arranged are Ach unfal was czeystu mich, Christ ist derstanden and Meyn sin und gemüt. All five works appear in a manuscript formerly in the court archives at Wertheim am Main (now in A-Wn Ms Mus. 41950) dating from around 1525, and all bear the ascription ‘AB’ except the second, which carries Blindhamer's full name. The ornamented and chromatic style of these works, with their rich chordal underpinnings, places them midway between the compositions of Hans Judenkünig and Hans Neusidler. On the basis of his extant works, his position at the imperial court, and the positive judgments of his contemporaries, Blindhamer emerges as an important link in German lute playing between Paumann and the generation of Gerle and Neusidler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (F. Krautwurst)

F. Krautwurst: ‘Bemerkungen zu Sebastian Virdungs Musica getutscht 1511)’, Festschrift Bruno Stäblein (Kassel, 1967), 143–56

W. Koschatsky and A. Strobl: Dürerzeichnungen der Albertina (Salzburg, 1971; Eng. trans., 1972)

C. Meyer: Sources manuscrites en tablature, ii: Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Baden-Baden, 1994), 301

FRANZ KRAUTWURST/BETH BULLARD

Blind octaves.

A way of writing passage-work for the piano to produce the effect of rapid scales or arpeggios in triple octaves, more easily seen than described. The notes of the passage are taken alternately by the left and right hands in octaves in such a way that the linear movement is carried by alternate thumbs, the outer notes sounding only every other time (see ex.1). Previous editions of Grove have maintained that the device is unworthy of a serious composer, apparently on the grounds that great effects should not be purchased at bargain prices.

Blind Tom.

See Bethune, Thomas.

Bliss, Sir Arthur (Drummond)

(b London, 2 Aug 1891; d London, 27 March 1975). English composer of American descent.

1. Life.

He was educated at Rugby and Pembroke College, Cambridge (1910–13), where he studied counterpoint with Charles Wood. While still at Cambridge he came to know Elgar, whose music made a deep and lasting impression on him, and came under the stimulating influence of E.J. Dent. He spent a year at the RCM (1913–14), where he studied conducting, but he derived little benefit from Stanford's teaching. He served throughout World War I, in the Royal Fusiliers and, from 1917, in the Grenadier Guards. After demobilization in 1919 he soon won a reputation as a cosmopolitan and advanced composer, with a series of lively ensemble works. In Madame Noy, the Rhapsody for two voices with chamber ensemble, and Rout he experimented with instrumental uses of the voice, in wordless vocalization and nonsense syllables. These works occasionally show the influence of Stravinsky, Ravel and Les Six, while some use is made of jazz idioms. At the same time Bliss became actively engaged in London musical life. He arranged and composed music for Nigel Playfair's productions at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where he put on a series of concerts at which many English works were played (1919). He also wrote music for a production of The Tempest in 1921, using an ensemble of tenor and bass voices, piano, trumpet, trombone, gongs and five percussionists, all dispersed through the Aldwych Theatre.

In 1921 Bliss took up an appointment as conductor with the Portsmouth Philharmonic Society, gaining valuable experience that was to make him one of the most efficient composer-conductors of his generation. His earliest orchestral works were also performed that year: the Two Studies and Mêlée fantasque. On Elgar's suggestion he was asked to write a work for the Three Choirs Festival, and A Colour Symphony was duly performed, under his direction, in autumn 1922. In this bold and picturesque work it is already possible to recognize many of the characteristics that were to mark his mature work. In 1923 he moved, with his father and brother, to Santa Barbara, California. He wrote little music during the two years he spent in the USA, but continued to conduct. He also became the pianist of a chamber ensemble, lectured, wrote criticism and, in 1925, married Trudy Hoffmann. That year he returned to England and once more became actively involved in composition. The Introduction and Allegro of 1926, dedicated to the Philadelphia Orchestra and Stokowski, was the first of many works written for virtuoso ensembles or soloists – a series that included the Clarinet and Oboe Quintets (for Thurston and Goossens), the Viola Sonata (for Tertis) and the Piano, Violin and Cello Concertos (for Solomon, Campoli and Rostropovich). The Pastoral: Lie Strewn the White Flocks was the first of many works written for amateur choirs. In 1935 he firmly established his position as Elgar's natural successor with the Romantic, expansive and richly scored Music for Strings.

1930 saw the production, at the Norwich Festival, of one of the most deeply personal of Bliss's works, the choral symphony Morning Heroes, written as a tribute to those who died in World War I. Each of its five movements describes an aspect of war common to all ages. In this work, after more than ten years, Bliss at last exorcized his memories of the war. In 1934–5 he moved into a new field, when he wrote music for Alexander Korda's and H.G. Wells's film Things to Come, working in close collaboration with Wells, and writing much of the music before the film was shot. Here, and in the three ballet scores written between 1935 and 1946, Bliss showed striking ability to write vivid illustrative music in a relatively simple and direct style that is entirely his own. His love of the theatre and keen artistic sense served him well in Checkmate and Miracle in the Gorbals, two of the most successful of English ballets.

Bliss was in the USA when war broke out in 1939, and he remained there to teach at Berkeley until 1941, when he returned to England to take an administrative job with the BBC, soon becoming director of music (1942–4). His full-length opera The Olympians, written with J.B. Priestley, occupied him from 1948 to 1949, when its under-prepared Covent Garden production met with a cool reception. In 1950 he was knighted, and in 1953 became Master of the Queen's Music, fulfilling the appointment’s many musical and official tasks conscientiously and energetically. These included writing music for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. His later works include cantatas, several orchestral works, among which the Meditations on a Theme of John Blow stands out as one of his finest scores, an opera for television, Tobias and the Angel, and many occasional pieces.

2. Works.

In the early 1920s Bliss was outspoken in rejecting the forms and idioms of established tradition (and particularly of Germanic tradition), aligning himself with those who looked to Stravinsky, Schoenberg and the younger French composers for leadership. His earlier ensemble works reflect the spirit of an age that wished to put memories of a devastating war behind it. However, he soon rediscovered the strong ties that bound him to his predecessors, most of all to Elgar, and for the rest of his life was content to work within an idiom that owed much to earlier Romantic composers of the 19th and 20th centuries; but his music retained some of the characteristics of the advanced composers whose music had influenced him in youth: wide-ranging melodies, instrumentally rather than vocally inspired, recall the Viennese Expressionists; his brilliant orchestration is designed, like Stravinsky's, to separate parts rather than to blend and mix timbres; and the consonance–dissonance range is wide, dissonance being reserved for dramatic use, rather than appearing as a regular part of speech.

While Bliss's large-scale works, fluent, inventive and richly textured, reflect his warm and outgoing personality, his music has little of the introspective quality of Mahler's, Elgar's or Schoenberg's. He depicted turbulence, conflict or jubilation in music as a skilled illustrator, rather than as one who expresses his inner feelings. Except in the case of Morning Heroes, which embodied his own memories of the war in which he had served, many of his most striking works were written in response to external stimuli. In the film and ballet scores he matched dramatic and visual situations with apt and vivid musical images and textures, and proved his ability to broaden and simplify his style to meet the needs of the occasion. The limitations involved in writing for amateurs (whether choirs or brass bands) seem to have helped him to focus and concentrate his style. He was always happy writing for known and admired performers, and took pleasure in reflecting and responding to the character of their playing.

Although all his big works are soundly and clearly constructed, interest in processes of organization and thematic transformation is generally subsidiary to the expression of emotion and action. Some of his most successful works or movements are cast in episodic form, including the anthology cantata Lie Strewn the White Flocks, the Meditations on a Theme of John Blow and the Metamorphic Variations for orchestra. Later works, and notably the Meditations and the Metamorphic Variations, sometimes display a new lightness of touch, and a serenity that was missing in the turbulent music of his middle years.

WORKS

(selective list)

numbering assigned by Foreman, 1980

dramatic

85	As you like it (incid music, W. Shakespeare), 1919 [arr. of Elizabethan pieces], Stratford, Memorial Theatre, 1919
164	The Tempest (incid music, Shakespeare), 1920–21, London, Aldwych, 1921
131	Things to Come (film score, dir. A. Korda), 1934–5
112	Conquest of the Air (film score, dir. Z. Korda), 1937
2	Checkmate (ballet, Bliss, choreog. N. de Valois), 1937, Paris, Champs-Elysées, 1937
6	Miracle in the Gorbals (ballet, M. Benthall, choreog. R. Helpmann), 1944, London, Prince’s, 1944
121	Men of Two Worlds (film score, dir. T. Dickinson), 1945
120	Memorial Concert, vn, orch (incid music for radio play, T. Bliss), 1946
1	Adam Zero (ballet, Benthall, choreog. Helpmann), 1946, London, CG, 1946
97	The Olympians (op, 3, J.B. Priestley), 1948–9, London, CG, 1949
105	Christopher Columbus (film score, dir. D. MacDonald), 1949
96	The Beggar's Opera (film score, J. Gay, dir. P. Brook), 1952–3
95	Welcome the Queen, march (film score, Thomas), 1954
129	Seven Waves Away (film score, dir. R. Sale), 1956
5	The Lady of Shallott (ballet, Christensen), 1958, Berkeley, U. of California, 1958
98	Tobias and the Angel (TV op, 2, C. Hassall), 1960

orchestral

189	Purcell Suite, set of act tunes and dances, str, 1919
133	Two Studies, 1920
119	Mêlée fantasque, 1921, rev. 1937, 1965
106	A Colour Symphony, 1921–2, rev. 1932
110	Concerto, 2 pf, orch, 1924; rev. 1925–9, 1950, arr. for 2 pf 3 hands, orch, 1968
117	Introduction and Allegro, 1926, rev. 1937
116	Hymn to Apollo, 1926, rev. 1965
123	Music for Strings, 1935
13	Kenilworth, suite, brass band, 1936
108	Piano Concerto, 1938–9
94	March ‘The Phoenix’, 1945
120	Theme and Cadenza, vn, orch, 1946 [from incid music for radio play Memorial Concert, 1946]
126	Processional, orch, org, 1953
95	March ‘Welcome the Queen’, 1954
111	Violin Concerto, 1955
118	Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, 1955
114	Overture ‘Edinburgh’, 1956
113	Discourse, 1957, rev. 1965
10	The Belmont Variations, brass band, 1963
93	March of Homage in Honour of a Great Man, 1964
107	Cello Concerto, 1970
122	Metamorphic Variations, 1972
Many fanfares etc. for ceremonial occasions

choral

33	Pastoral: Lie Strewn the White Flocks (B. Jonson, J. Fletcher, Poliziano, R. Nichols, Theocritus), Mez, chorus, fl, timp, str, 1928
32	Morning Heroes, sym. (Homer, W. Whitman, Li Bai, W. Owen, Nichols), orator, chorus, orch, 1930
37	Aubade for Coronation Morning (H. Reed), 2 S, chorus, 1953
34	A Song of Welcome (C. Day Lewis), S, B, chorus, orch, 1954
51	Seek the Lord (anthem, Bible: Amos), SATB, org, 1956
38	Birthday Song for a Royal Child (Day Lewis), SATB, 1959
54	Stand up and bless the Lord your God (Bible: Nehemiah, Isaiah, 1 Kings), S, B, SATB, org, 1960
28	The Beatitudes (cant., H. Vaughan, G. Herbert, Bible: Isaiah, Thomas, Taylor), S, T, chorus, orch, org, 1962
31	Mary of Magdala (cant., C. Hassall, after E. Sherburne, R. Watkins), A, B, chorus, orch, 1962
40	Cradle Song for a Newborn Child (E. Crozier), SATB, hp, 1963
30	The Golden Cantata (K. Raine), T, chorus, orch, 1963
45	O give thanks unto the Lord (anthem, Ps cvi), SATB, org, 1965
50	River Music (Day Lewis), SATB, 1967
56	Three Songs (P.B. Shelley, anon.), girls'/boys' vv, pf ad lib, 1967
42	Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? (anthem, Pss xv, cxxii), SATB, org, 1968
48	A Prayer to the Infant Jesus, female vv, 1968
136	The world is charged with the grandeur of God (cant., G.M. Hopkins), SATB, 2 fl, brass, 1969
49	Put thou thy trust in the Lord (Ps xxxvii), double choir, 1972
47	Prayer of St Francis of Assisi, SSAA, 1972
43	Mar Portugues (F. Pessoa, trans. A. Goodison), SATB, 1973
52	Shield of Faith (W. Dunbar, Herbert, A. Pope, A. Tennyson, T.S. Eliot), S, B, SATB, org, 1974
53	Sing, Mortals! (R. Tydeman), SATB, org, 1974

solo vocal

with ensemble

160	Madame Noy (E.H.W. Meyerstein), S, fl, cl, bn, hp, va, db, 1918
161	Rhapsody (wordless), S, T, fl, eng hn, str qt, db, 1919
162	Rout (nonsense syllables, Bliss), S, fl, cl, glock, hp, perc, str qt, db, 1920, orchd 1921
166	The Women of Yueh (Li Bai), song cycle, S, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, str qt, db, 1923
163	Serenade (E. Spenser, W. Wotton), Bar, orch, 1929
157	The Enchantress (scena, H. Reed, after Theocritus), C, orch, 1951
156	Elegiac Sonnet (Day Lewis), T, pf qnt, 1954
159	A Knot of Riddles (Old Eng.), Bar, wind qt, hp, str qt, db, 1963

with piano

182	The Tramps (R. Service), c1916
179	Three Romantic Songs (W. de la Mare), 1921
180	Three Songs (W.H. Davies), 1922, rev. 1972
170	The Ballads of the Four Seasons (Li Bai), 1923
172	The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House (T. Hardy), 1924
174	Rich or Poor (W.H. Davies), 1925–6
177	Simples (J. Joyce), 1932
176	Seven American Poems (E. St Vincent Millay, E. Wylie), A/B, pf, 1940
184	Two American Poems (Millay), S, pf, 1940
167	Angels of the Mind (song cycle, Raine), S, pf, 1968

chamber and instrumental

Chbr: Str Qt, A, 23, c1914; Pf Qt, a, 18, 1915; 2 Pieces, 92, cl, pf, c1916; Pf Qnt, 22, 1919; Conversations, 16, fl + a fl, ob + eng hn, str trio, 1920; Ob Qnt, 21, 1927; Cl Qnt, 20, 1932; Sonata, 91, va, pf, 1933; Str Qt no.1, B, 25, 1941; Str Qt no.2, 26, 1950

Pf: Suite, 147, c1912; Valses fantastiques, 152, 1913; Bliss one-step, 138, 1923; Masks, 141, 1924; 2 Interludes, 151, 1925; Suite, 148, 1925; Toccata, 149, c1925; The Rout Trot, 144, 1927; Study, 146, 1927; Sonata, 145, 1952; Triptych, 150, 1971

Org: Praeludium, 1971

Principal publishers: Faber, Novello

WRITINGS

‘Aspects of Contemporary Music’, MT, lxxv (1934), 401–5 [from lectures to Royal Institution]

‘Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1955)’, MT, xcvi (1955), 304–5

‘Let us Take the Initiative’, Composer, no.14 (1964), 3 only

As I Remember (London, 1970, 2/1989)

ed. G. Roscow: Bliss on Music (Oxford, 1991)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (G. Dannatt)

A. Robertson: ‘Arthur Bliss’, British Music of our Time (London, 1946)

D. Cox: ‘A View of Bliss's Music’, The Listener, lxxiv (1965), 818 only

C. Crisp: ‘The Ballets of Arthur Bliss’, MT, cvii (1966), 674–5

J.B. Priestley: ‘Sir Arthur Bliss, 75th Birthday’, Composer, no.20 (1966), 12–13

K.L. Thompson: ‘Arthur Bliss: Catalogue of Works and Bibliography’, MT, cvii (1966), 666–73; suppl. in MT, cxii (1971), 745–6

A. Bliss and H. Keller: ‘Four Aspects of Music’, Composer, no.22 (1966–7), 16–17 [interview]

C. Palmer: ‘Aspects of Bliss’, MT, cxii (1971), 743–5

J.B. Priestley: ‘My Friend Bliss’, MT, cxii (1971), 740–41

L. Foreman: Arthur Bliss: a Catalogue of the Complete Works (London, 1979; suppl. 1982) [incl. introduction by G. Dannatt]

A. Burn: ‘Now Trumpeter for thy Close: the Symphony “Morning Heroes”’, MT, cxxvi (1985), 666–8

S. Craggs: Arthur Bliss: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1988)

T. Bliss: ‘May 1966–March 1975’, in A. Bliss: As I Remember (London, 2/1989), 273–88

A. Burn: ‘Bliss's Music 1966–75’, ibid., 289–96

A. Burn: ‘From Rebel to Romantic: the Music of Arthur Bliss’, MT, cxxxii (1911), 383–6

S. Craggs: Arthur Bliss: a Source Book (Brookfield, VT, 1996)

HUGO COLE/ANDREW BURN

Bliss, Philip Paul

(b Clearfield Co., PA, 9 July 1838; d nr Ashtabula, OH, 29 Dec 1876). American singer and composer of gospel hymns. He was the compiler with I.D. Sankey of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875). See Gospel music, §I. See also D.W. Whittle, ed.: Memoirs of Philip P. Bliss (New York, 1878); DAB (H.E. Starr).

Blithe, Richard.

See Blich, Richard.

Blitheman [Blithman, Blytheman, Blythman], John

(b c1525; d London, 23 May 1591). English organist and composer. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which includes the third of his Gloria tibi Trinitas settings, gives his forename as William. No other 16th- or early 17th-century musical source mentions any forename, but Chapel Royal records from 1558 to 1590 consistently refer to John Blitheman, and there can be little doubt that this is the composer. In or before 1558 he was admitted as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and he held that position until his death. John Blitheman was also associated with Christ Church, Oxford, being recorded in 1555–6 as a chaplain there, and in 1560 as a member of the choir who was evidently often absent; from 1569 to 1578 he is listed at the head of the lay clerks. He died on Whitsunday and was buried at St Nicholas Olave, Queenhithe. His epitaph (quoted in Shaw) refers to his skill as an organist and mentions that John Bull was his pupil.

Although Blitheman's recorded career falls mainly within the reign of Elizabeth, the style and function of his liturgical organ music and his few vocal works suggest that they were written during the reign of Mary. The most important of these earlier works is the set of four verses intended for the nine-verse hymn Aeterne rerum Conditor. In the first three pieces the cantus firmus is embellished: in the first as the lower of two parts, in the second as the lowest of three parts and in the third verse as the third of four parts, where it is marked ‘melos suave’. In the fourth verse the plainchant is in the top voice, unadorned, accompanied by two florid parts in the left hand. This clear, rhythmic distinction between the plainchant and the other parts is the hallmark of his set of six variations on Gloria tibi Trinitas (in the Mulliner book, probably compiled between 1558 and 1564: see Mulliner, Thomas), which serve no liturgical purpose. Here the element of virtuosity is paramount; only in the sixth setting does the composer revert to a smooth four-part texture, with the plainchant in the bass.

WORKS

Edition: The Mulliner Book, ed. D. Stevens, MB, i (1951, 2/1954) [S]

vocal

Gloria, laus et honor, 4vv (processional hymn for Palm Sunday), 2 settings, GB-Lbl Add.17802–5

In pace, 4vv (respond for Compline); ed. in MT, civ (1963), Jan suppl.

keyboard

[without title], S no.27

Aeterne rerum Conditor (hymn), S nos.49–52

Christe qui lux (hymn), S no.22

Christe Redemptor (hymn), S no.108 (anon. in source, attrib. Blitheman on stylistic grounds)

Felix namque (off), S no.32 (MS note: ‘A excellent meane’)

Gloria tibi Trinitas (ant), S nos.91–6

Te Deum, S no.77

3 parts; ed. in MB, lxvi (1995)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR

D. Stevens: ‘William Blitheman: a Note’, MT, civ (1963), 37 only

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

J. Irving: ‘John Blitheman's Keyboard Plainsongs: Another “Kind” of Composition?’, PMM, iii (1994), 185–93

D. Mateer: ‘The “Gyfford” partbooks: composers, owners, date and provenance’, RMARC, xxviii (1995), 21–50

JOHN CALDWELL/ALAN BROWN

Blitzstein, Marc [Marcus] (Samuel)

(b Philadelphia, 2 March 1905; d Fort-de-France, Martinique, 22 Jan 1964). American composer. His early works reflect his admiration for the craft of musical composition, an aesthetic encouraged by both of his otherwise antipodal teachers in Europe, Boulanger and Schoenberg. Thereafter, his style changed from an abstract neo-classicism, in which form and structure were primary, towards a more functional agit-prop style, crystallized in his stage works. Well-known examples, such as The Cradle will Rock, bring together blues, pop, speech patter, parody and satire (often involving quotation or other referential material). His skilful use of American vernacular speech patterns is perhaps his crowning achievement.

As a child, Blitzstein, whose parents were of Russian Jewish heritage, was sent to the Ethical Culture Sunday School and to programmes sponsored by the Socialist Literary Society. At the age of seven he gave his first public performance, a reading of Mozart’s ‘Coronation’ Concerto k537 with his teacher, Constantine von Sternberg, at the second piano. By the age of nine he had skipped two years at school, his academic precocity paralleling his remarkable musical talent. Following the separation of his parents, he moved with his mother and sister to Venice, California, where he continued his piano studies with Katherine Montreville Cocke and Julian Pascal, performed at charitable concerts and basked in the attention of society writers. The family’s return to Philadelphia early in 1917 enabled Blitzstein to re-establish a warm relationship with his father, with whom he attended the theatre and concerts.

At the age of 16, Blitzstein enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. After his scholarship was rescinded because of poor progress in physical education, however, he began a three-year period of study with Siloti, commuting to New York for lessons. In 1924, after a brief affair with Alexander Smallens, he entered the newly formed Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied composition with Rosario Scalero. His works from this period include salon-style piano pieces and songs to texts by Housman and Whitman. In 1926, shortly before leaving Europe, he performed as solo pianist with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Henry Hadley. While studying with Boulanger in Paris, he completed two more songs on Whitman texts: O Hymen! O Hymenee!, a foray into bitonality, and Gods, a tonal work featuring frequent changes in metre, key and rhythm. He went on to Berlin, where he enrolled in a course with Schoenberg at the Akademie der Künste. As he immersed himself in the principles of 12-note composition, he grew increasingly antipathetic towards what he came to view as a sterile approach to musical creation. His own compositions, which he later came to call Songs for a Coon Shouter, continued to consist of theatrical settings of Whitman texts. He returned to Philadelphia in 1927.

While resident at the MacDowell Colony during the summer of 1928, Blitzstein met the novelist and critic Eva Goldbeck, whom, despite his homosexuality, he later married. That same year he began writing articles in Modern Music, a journal to which he regularly contributed until 1940. As a composer, his fascination with Whitman texts continued. The blues harmonies employed in songs such as I am He and Ages and Ages suggest a commonality between jazz and primal sexuality. These were given their première in 1928, together with O Hymen! O Hymenee! and As Adam, by the black American baritone Benjohn Ragsdale at a Copland-Sessions Concert in New York. The Piano Sonata (1927) was performed several times in 1929 and Percussion Music for Piano (1929) was introduced, a work which gained notoriety for its slapping, shutting and opening of the piano lid. During the same year, Triple-Sec (1928), a one-act opera containing a love scene between a black man and a white woman, was first performed in Philadelphia. Blitzstein’s association with both advanced musical circles and leftist political ideology was solidified through these challenges to public sensibility.

For the next several years, Blitzstein travelled in Europe and America composing works in diverse styles. Parabola and Circula (1929), for example, although set in a cubist formal world and based on a story replete with symbolic abstraction, contains music which is melodious, conservative and suggestive of the style of Les Six. The ballet Cain (1930) is modal and mildly dissonant, featuring moments best described as polytonal. The Harpies (1931), with its Thracian setting, satirization of Gluckian, Wagnerian and Mozartian mythology, and Broadway theatricality, suggests the influence of neo-classicism. The Condemned (1932), an opera based on the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, broke new ground in employing a chorus for each of the four dramatic roles. Jimmie’s got a goil (1935), and other songs set to texts by e. e. cummings, offered audiences musical amusement. The ‘Italian’ String Quartet (1930), the Romantic Piece for orchestra (1930), the Piano Concerto (1931) and the Serenade for string quartet (1932) were designed to prove his compositional ability in the genres of absolute music.

If the early 1930s marked a period in which Blitzstein was searching for an appropriate musical language, they were also characterized by his yearning to understand the personal demons and political-social issues that so consumed him and his wife. Their marriage survived in part because of a shared support for the Communist movement, and a shared concern about how best to express that support while continuing to enhance their careers. After Eva’s untimely death from anorexia in 1936, Blitzstein became more open about his homosexuality. Hanns Eisler’s lectures at the New School for Social Research, New York (1935), pushed him to agitate for music that would address social concerns, attack social enemies and, most importantly, convey its message in an accessible, vernacular musical language. To fulfil these objectives, he turned to tonality, popular song, sardonic references to earlier styles and parodies of art music. He also wrote for ‘red’ journals such as New Masses (1936–46), worked for leftist groups such as the Composers Collective, New York, and adhered to a belief that the composer must join and fight for the people, rather than living as a parasite on society’s beneficence.

The intended première of The Cradle Will Rock (1936–7) was cancelled by the Federal Theater Project when the work’s anti-establishment, pro-union theme was deemed too controversial. It was later produced independently by John Houseman and Orson Welles at the Mercury Theater, New York. With its satirical quotations of Bach and Beethoven, conjoined with stylistic elements taken from patter, jazz and the musical revue, the work has come to symbolize the musical equivalent of Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’. I’ve Got the Tune (1937), a radio song-play, made Blitzstein the composer par excellence of the Communist movement. No for an Answer (1937–40), which followed, deals with hardships faced by unemployed and non-unionized Greek immigrants; the films Valley Town (1940) and Native Land (1940–41), for which Blitzstein wrote scores, are concerned with unemployment and fascistic elements in capitalist society. His reputation became so politicized that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began a serious investigation of his ties to the American Communist Party.

In 1942 Blitzstein joined the war effort, becoming attached to the Eighth Air Force in London. With the breaking of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1941 and the addition of the USSR as an ally, he felt the war had become entirely just. His works from this period, including Freedom Morning for orchestra and chorus of black enlistees (1943, when blacks were still segregated in the US armed services), the Airborne Symphony (1944–6), commissioned by the air force, and a film score for Garson Kanin’s documentary The True Glory (1945–6), were pleasing both to the military and to his own social conscience.

After the war Blitzstein returned to writing for the stage. Regina (1946–8), a character study of the mores of the American South at the turn of the 19th century, melded together the diverse styles of the spiritual, ragtime, blues and traditional opera. The opera’s focus on the struggle of black Americans for equality reflected Blitzstein’s continuing concern for minority issues. In Reuben, Reuben (1955) and Juno (1957–9) he continued his role as a social critic. It was his translation and adaptation of Die Dreigroschenoper by Brecht and Weill, however, that brought him the long elusive fame he had sought: the seven-year run of the production also brought him a financial bounty he could not have envisioned.

In 1959 Blitzstein was honoured with membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite his reputation as an advocate of leftist causes, he also gained a commission from the Ford Foundation to write an opera. Returning to the subject of his early work The Condemned, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, he incurred the wrath of right-wing journalists such as George E. Sikolsky. He took time away from composition in 1962 to serve as the John Golden Professor of Playwrighting at Bennington College. While there, he established a friendship with Bernard Malamud and began to set the writer’s short stories The Magic Barrel and Idiots First. In November 1963 he went to Martinique to work and rest. In January 1964, after a beating at the hands of three sailors he had met in a waterfront bar, he died in hospital in Fort-de-France.

WORKS

dramatic

Triple-Sec (op-farce, 1, R. Jeans), 1928, Philadelphia, 6 May 1929; Parabola and Circula (op-ballet, 1, G. Whitsett), 1929, unperf.; Cain (ballet), 1930; The Harpies (op, 1, Blitzstein), 1931, New York, 25 May 1953; The Condemned (choral op, 1, Blitzstein), 1932, unperf.; Send for the Militia (theatre sketch, Blitzstein), 1v, pf, 1935; The Cradle Will Rock (play in music, 10 scenes, Blitzstein), 1936–7, New York, 16 June 1937; I’ve Got the Tune (radio song-play, 1, Blitzstein), 1937, New York, 24 Oct 1937; No for an Answer (op, 2, Blitzstein), 1937–40, New York, 5 Jan 1941; Plowed Under (theatre sketch, Blitzstein), 1937

Labor for Victory (radio series, Blitzstein), 1942; Galoopchik (musical play, Blitzstein), 1945, unfinished; Show (ballet), 1946; Regina (op, 3, L. Hellman and Blitzstein), 1946–8, New York, 31 Oct 1949; rev. 1953, 1958; The Guests (ballet), 1948; Reuben, Reuben (musical play, 2, Blitzstein), 1955, Boston, 10 Oct 1955; Juno (musical play, 2, J. Stein and Blitzstein, after S. O’Casey), 1957–9, New York, 9 March 1959; Sacco and Vanzetti (op, Blitzstein), 1959–64, unfinished; Idiots First (op, 1, Malamud and Blitzstein), 1963, completed L.J. Lehrman; The Magic Barrel (op, 1, B. Malamud and Blitzstein), 1963, unfinished

Incid music: Julius Caesar (W. Shakespeare), 1937; Danton’s Death (G. Büchner), 1938; Androcles and the Lion (G.B. Shaw), 1946; Another Part of the Forest (Hellman), 1946; King Lear (Shakespeare), 2 versions: 1950, 1955; Volpone (B. Jonson), 1956; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 1958; A Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 1958; Toys in the Attic (Hellman), 1960

Film scores: Hände, 1928; Surf and Seaweed (R. Steiner), 1931; War Department Manual, 1935; Chesapeake Bay Retriever, 1936; The Spanish Earth (J. Ivens), 1936–7, collab. V. Thomson; Native Land (L. Hurwitz and P. Strand), 1940–41; Valley Town, 1940; Night Shift (J. Chambers), op, 1942; The True Glory (C. Reed and G. Kanin), 1945–6

vocal

After the Dazzle of Day (W. Whitman), 1v, pf, 1925; As if a Phantom Caress’d me (Whitman), 1v, pf, 1925; Into my Heart an Air (A.E. Housman), 1v, pf, 1925; Gods (Whitman), Mez, str, 1926; 4 Whitman Songs, Bar, pf, 1928; Is Five (e.e. cummings), S, pf, 1929; Cantatina, female chorus, perc, 1930; Children’s Cantata, chorus, 1935; Jimmie’s Got a Goil (Cummings), 1v, pf, 1935

A Child Writes a Letter, Bar, pf, 1936; Invitation to Bitterness (Blitzstein), ATB, 1938; The Airborne Sym. (Blitzstein), nar, T, B, male chorus, orch, 1944–6; Displaced (Blitzstein), 1v, pf, 1946; This is the Garden (Blitzstein), chorus, orch, 1957; 6 Elizabethan Songs (Shakespeare), 1v, pf, 1958; From Marion’s Book (Cummings), 1v, pf, 1960; songs

instrumental

Orch: Sarabande, 1926; Romantic Piece, 1930; Pf Conc., 1931; Surf and Seaweed, suite, 1933; Variations, 1934; Freedom Morning, sym. poem, male chorus, orch, 1943; Native Land, suite, 1946; Lear: a Study, 1958

Chbr and solo: Sonata, pf, 1927; Perc Music, pf, 1929; Scherzo, pf, 1930; Str Qt ‘Italian’, 1930; Serenade, str qt, 1932; Discourse, cl, vc, pf, 1933; Suite, pf, 1933; Le monde libre, march, pf, 1944; The Guests, suite, pf, 1949; Show, suite, pf, 1947

MSS in US-MAu

Principal publisher: Chappell

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Goldbeck: ‘Principles of “Educational” Theater’, New Masses (31 Dec 1935)

H. Brant: ‘Marc Blitzstein’, MM, xxiii (1946), 170–75

J.O. Hunter: ‘Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock” as a Document of America, 1937’, American Quarterly, xvi (1964), 227–33

M. Lederman: ‘Memories of Marc Blitzstein, Music’s Angry Man’, Show, iv (1964), 18–24

W.H. Mellers: Music in a New Found Land (New York, 1964/R)

P.M. Talley: Social Criticism in the Theatre Librettos of Marc Blitzstein (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1965)

J. Peyser: ‘The Troubled Time of Marc Blitzstein’, Columbia University Forum, ix/1 (1966), 32–7

J. Gruen: Close-Up (New York, 1968)

R.J. Dietz: ‘Marc Blitzstein and the “Agit-Prop” Theatre of the 1930s’, Yearbook of the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, vi (1970), 51–6

R.J. Dietz: The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein (diss., U. of Iowa, 1970)

J. Houseman: Run-Through: a Memoir (New York, 1972)

C. Davis: The Sun in Mid-Career (New York, 1975)

J. Lehrman: A Musical Analysis of ‘Idiots First’ thesis, Cornell U., 1975)

E. Gordon: ‘The Roots of “Regina”’, Performing Arts, iii/8 (1980), 6

E. Gordon: ‘Of the People: Marc Blitzstein Remembered’, ON, xliv/19 (1979–80), 26–28, 30

E. Gordon: Mark the Music: the Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York, 1989)

C. Oja: ‘The Cradle Will Rock and Mass-Song Style of the 1930s’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 445–75

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Marc Blitzstein: Musical Propagandist’, Opera Journal, xxvi/2 (1993), 2–20

G. Block: ‘The Cradle Will Rock: a Labor Musical for Art’s Sake’, Enchanted Evenings: the Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (Oxford, 1997), 115–32

DAVID Z. KUSHNER

Bloc de bois

(Fr.).

See Woodblock.

Bloch, Augustyn (Hipolit)

(b Grudziądz, 13 Aug 1929). Polish composer and organist. At the Warsaw Conservatory he studied the organ with Feliks Rączkowski (1950–55) and composition with Tadeusz Szeligowski (1952–9). Between 1954 and 1977 he composed a large amount of children’s songs and incidental music for the Polish Radio Theatre in Warsaw. He has won several international prizes for his chamber music and symphonic works, including two special mentions in the Prince Rainier II Competition (for Medytacje and the ballet Oczekiwanie, ‘Awaiting’), the UNESCO Prize (for Dialoghi) and an award from the Brighton Festival (for Oratorium). He has also received numerous honours in Poland, and served as vice-president of the Polish Composers’ Union (1977–9, 1983–7) and as president of the programme committee for the Warsaw Autumn Festival (1979–87).

After composing French-influenced works for organ during his student days (e.g. Fantasia, 1953, and the Sonata, 1954), Bloch experimented briefly with neo-classicism in such works as the Concertino (1958). He used 12-note rows – predominantly linear – for the first time in Espressioni (1959). The works of the 1960s show an increasing preponderance of intense chromaticism in clusters or 12-note chords, as in Awaiting (1963); blocks of sound in a single tone-colour (e.g. Dialoghi) and complex, metrically free textures are also traits of this period. These various tendencies culminated in the theatre works Ajelet, córka Jeftego (1967) and Gilgamesz (1968), both of which are on subjects from the remote past. The evocation of an archaic sound world with the suggested variation of formulae, such as that found in Gregorian, Byzantine and synagogal chant, has since characterized works such as Wordsworth Songs (1976), Anenaiki (1979), Carmen biblicum (1980) and Exaltabo Te (1988), while the tradition of the evangelical chorale is heard in quotations of Bach (in Oratorium, 1982, and Canti per coro ed organo, 1984). The religious pieces and those for the stage, the core of Bloch’s output, possess a lighthearted scepticism that is typical of his style. The form of many works and individual movements describes an arc of surging and ebbing motion between beginning and end.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Voci (ballet, 1, W. Gruca and R. Lindenbergh), 1962; Oczekiwanie [Awaiting] (ballet, 1, W. Giersz and L. Perski), 1963; Byk [Bull] (ballet, 1, H. Tomaszewski), 1965; Ajelet, córka Jeftego [Ayelet, Jephta’s Daughter] (mystery op, 1, J. Iwaszkiewicz), 1967, Warsaw, 22 Sept 1968; Gilgamesz (ballet-pantomime, 1, Tomaszewski), 1968; Pan Żagłoba [Mr Żagłoba]) (musical, 1, W. Maciejewska, after H. Sienkiewicz), 1971; Barzdo śpiąca królewna [Deeply Sleeping Beauty] (op-ballet-pantomime, Bloch, after C. Perrault), 1973; Zwierciadło [Mirror] (ballet-pantomime), tape, 1975

Orch: Concertino, vn, str, pf, perc, 1958; Dialoghi, vn, orch, 1964; Enfiando, 1970; Oratorium, org, str, perc, 1982; Bleibe bei uns Herr, 1986; Wzwyż [Upwards], 1993

Vocal-orch: Espressioni (Iwaszkiewicz), S, orch, 1959; Impressioni poetiche (J. Kasprowicz), male chorus, orch, 1959; Gilgamesz, 16 Bar, orch, 1969 [concert version of ballet-pantomime]; Poemat o Warszawie [Poem about Warsaw], nar, SATB, orch, 1974; Wordsworth Songs, Bar, chbr orch, 1976; Taka sobie muzyka [Just a Little Music] (T. Kubiak), S, orch, 1977; Denn Dein Licht kommt (Bible: Isaiah), nar, SATB, org, orch, 1987; Litania ostrobramska [Litany of Ostra Brama], SATB, orch, 1989; Du sollst nicht töten, Meditation (Bible:John, psalms, St Albert, St Augustine), Bar, SATB, vc, orch, 1991; Hac festa die (13th century), SATB, org, period insts, orch, 1996

Other vocal: Medytacje (Bible: Isaiah, Ps xxxix), S, org, perc, 1961; Depesza [Dispatch] (Kubiak), children’s vv, 2 pf, perc, 1963; Salmo gioioso, S, 5 ww, 1970; Z gwiazdą w Cudobudzie: pastorałka mazowiecka [With the Star in the Cudobuda: a Mazovian Christmas Carol] (S. Czachorowski), solo vv, ens, 1974; Anenaiki, 16 vv (SATB), 1979; Carmen biblicum (Pss lvii, cxlviii, cxlix, cl, Bible: Isaiah), S, 9 insts, 1980; Canti, SATB, org, 1984; Exaltabo Te (Ps cxlv), chorus, 1988; Lauda, S, A, perc, 4 str, 1988; Die Verscheuchte (E. Lasker-Schüler), Bar, va, vc, pf, 1994

Chbr: Warstwy czasu [Layers of Time], 15 str, 1978; Supplicazioni, vc, pf, 1983; A due, sax, b cl, vib, mar, 1984; Musica, cl, 4 str, 1985; Duetto, vn, vc, 1986; Geige und Orgel, vn, org, 1988; Musica per tredici ottoni, 13 brass, 1988; Fanfare, 6 brass, 1991; Pf Trio, 1992; Infiltrazioni ‘In memoriam Béla Bartók’, 2 vn, 1995

Solo inst: Fantasia, org, 1953; Variations ‘In memoriam Karol Szymanowski’, pf, 1953; Sonata, org, 1954; Jubilate, org, 1975; Clarinetto divertente, cl, 1976; Głos milczenia [Voice of Silence], tape, 1977; Notes, sax, 1981; Forte (lieto), piano (corale) e forte (furioso), org, 1985

Principal publishers: PWM, Agencja Autorska, Schott, Sonoton

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Kompozytorzy mówią A. Bloch rozmawiała I. Grzenkowicz’ [The composers speak: Bloch talks to Grzenkowicz], RM, xv/11 (1971), 5–8

J. Cegiełła: Interview, Szkice do autoportretu polskiej muzyki współczesnej [Sketches for a self-portrait of Polish contemporary music] (Kraków, 1976), 140–50

B.M. Maciejewski: Twelve Polish Composers (London, 1976), 148–58

D. Gojowy, ed.: A. Bloch: ein Komponistenleben in Polen (Cologne, 1998)

MARTINA HOMMA

Bloch, Ernest

(b Geneva, 24 July 1880; d Portland, OR, 15 July 1959). American composer and teacher of Swiss origin.

DAVID Z. KUSHNER

1. Life.

He studied in Geneva with Albert Goss and Louis Etienne-Reyer (violin) and Jaques-Dalcroze (solfège and composition) before leaving, at the suggestion of Martin Marsick, to study in Brussels. There he took lessons from Eugène Ysaÿe (violin), Rasse (composition) and Franz Schörg (violin and chamber music), at whose home he lived from 1896 to 1899. He then went to study in Frankfurt with Knorr (1899–1901) and in Munich with Thuille (1901–3). After a year in Paris (1903–4), during which time he absorbed the French Impressionistic style, he returned to Geneva, married Margarethe Augusta Schneider, and entered his father’s business as a bookkeeper and salesman of Swiss tourist goods. Meanwhile, he kept his hand in music by composing in piecemeal fashion, conducting orchestral concerts in Neuchâtel and Lausanne (1909–10) and lecturing on aesthetics at the Geneva Conservatory (1911–15). A high point of this period was the première of his lyric drama, Macbeth, at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, on 30 November 1910.

Bloch went to the United States in 1916 with the encouragement of Alfred Pochon, second violinist of the Flonzaley Quartet, as conductor for a tour by Maud Allan’s dance company. When the tour collapsed, he accepted a position at the newly formed David Mannes College of Music in New York, teaching theory and composition there and also privately (1917–20). He was thus able to bring his wife and three children, Suzanne, Lucienne and Ivan, to America. The successful première of his String Quartet no.1 by the Flonzaley Quartet on 31 December 1916 led to performances of his orchestral works in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. He conducted his Trois poèmes juifs with the Boston SO in March 1917 and Schelomo, with Kindler as the cello soloist, at a concert sponsored by the Society of the Friends of Music in New York in May of the same year. Following additional successes in Philadelphia, where he conducted a programme of his ‘Jewish’ works with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1918, he signed a contract with G. Schirmer, who published these compositions with what was to become a trademark logo – the six-pointed Star of David with the initials E.B. in the centre; it was an imprimatur which firmly established for Bloch a Jewish identity in the public mind.

Bloch expanded his contact with American life by conducting Renaissance choral music with amateur singers at the Manhattan Trade School, teaching the fundamentals of music to children in Joanne Bird Shaw’s experimental summer school in Peterboro, New Hampshire, and discussing art and life with such figures as Julius Hartt. In 1919 his Suite for viola and piano (or orchestra) won the Coolidge Prize, quickly earning a place in the viola repertory.

Bloch served as founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music (1920–25), where he conducted the student orchestra, taught composition, established masterclasses and courses for the general public, and proposed such radical reforms as the abandonment of examinations and textbooks in favour of direct musical experience, with study rooted in the scores of the great masters. However, the trustees continued to favour a practical curriculum and a more traditional approach to music education, and this eventually led him to resign. (It was in Cleveland, in 1924, that he became a naturalized US citizen.) He then accepted the directorship of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1925–30), during which time he was awarded the Carolyn Beebe Prize of the New York Chamber Music Society for his Four Episodes for chamber orchestra (1926), the first prize in a contest sponsored by Musical America for his epic rhapsody in three parts, America, and a shared RCA Victor Award for his homage to his native land, Helvetia.

During the 1930s Bloch lived mainly in Switzerland, composing such works as Voice in the Wilderness, the Piano Sonata, Evocations for orchestra, the Violin Concerto and, most importantly, the Sacred Service, with which he began his second European period. He conducted his works in various European cities, and returned briefly to the USA to conduct the Sacred Service in New York in 1934. Major festivals of his works were held in London in 1934 and 1937, the latter in connection with the founding of an Ernest Bloch Society, with Albert Einstein as honorary president, and Alex Cohen as secretary. Macbeth was revived in Naples in Italian translation in March 1938, but only three performances were given owing to Mussolini’s deference to a visit from Hitler. Because of growing anti-Semitism and also because he wished to retain his American citizenship, Bloch returned to the USA and, in 1940, assumed a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught summer courses until his retirement in 1952. The Berkeley duties fulfilled an obligation he owed the institution, which, in conjunction with a grant from the Stern family had enabled him to compose in Europe from 1930 to 1939 freed from the responsibilities of teaching.

In his later years, during which he lived reclusively at Agate Beach, Oregon, he was the recipient of numerous honours, including the first Gold Medal in Music (String Quartet no.2), from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1947) and the Henry Hadley Medal of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors (1957). He continued to compose in a wide variety of genres, and to pursue his lifelong hobbies of photography and mushroom collecting, and his newer interest in collecting and polishing agates. In 1958, suffering from cancer, he underwent unsuccessful surgery; he died a year later. In 1968 an Ernest Bloch Society was formed in the USA through the efforts of the composer’s children.

2. Works.

Bloch’s student compositions are diverse and derivative, ranging from the sprawling Symphonie orientale (1896) to the Romantically effusive Vivre – aimer (1900). The periods in Munich and Paris produced two major efforts, the extravagantly orchestrated Symphony in C minor, a four-movement formally conceived work despite a broad programme (a fugue opens the fourth movement), revealing the influence of Richard Strauss with regard to melody, harmony and orchestration, and the pair of symphonic poems, Hiver – Printemps, with Impressionistically coloured instrumentation, notable in the harp and woodwind solos, and in the closing reflective coda. Macbeth, the only published operatic venture by Bloch, established his credentials as a dramatic composer. In this work, he synthesized elements from the Wagnerian music drama, from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and from Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov with his own emerging originality. Certain characteristics associated with the composer’s later works appear in Macbeth: frequent changes of metre, tempo and tonality, melodic use of the perfect fourth and augmented second at crucial moments, modal flavouring, dark instrumentation, repeated-note patterns, ostinatos and pedal points, and ever-present cyclic formal procedures (the last refined through study with Rasse, a pupil of Franck).

Bloch’s search for his own musical identity found fulfilment in a series of highly charged epics on a broad scale, biblical in inspiration and known as the ‘Jewish Cycle’. In these deeply emotive utterances, which include settings of Psalms cxxxvii and cxiv for soprano and orchestra (1912–14), Psalm xxii for baritone and orchestra (1914), the symphony Israel with five solo voices (1912–16), and Schelomo (1915–16), a Hebraic rhapsody for cello and orchestra (including the use of quarter-tones for the first time in his output), he painted sweeping musical canvases with a rich orchestral palette. Their ‘oriental’ or quasi-Hebraic character is intensified by the augmented intervals, melismatic treatment of melody, and large, colouristic orchestra. The Scotch-snap rhythm and its variants is so pervasive that it has come to be known as the ‘Bloch rhythm’. Authentic Hebrew material is rare (exceptions are quotations from the Song of Songs in Israel and a gemora nigun in Schelomo); however, certain of Bloch’s compositional traits take on a new meaning in the context of the ‘Cycle’. The repeated-note patterns and the augmented and perfect fourth intervals in the Psalms and Schelomo, for example, evoke the call of the shofar as it is sounded in the synagogue on the High Holy Days (Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur); the unfettered rythmic flow suggests the melismas of Hebrew chant. Additionally, the frequent accents on the final or penultimate beat of a bar have analogies in the Hebrew language.

Following the ‘Jewish’ works, Bloch moved, in part, towards a neo-classical aesthetic as exemplified, to varying degrees, in his two sonatas for violin and piano, the First Piano Quintet (with effective use of quarter-tones in the first and third movements), and the first Concerto grosso (with a powerful closing fugue). Even in these ‘abstract’ works, however, certain referential associations are revealed, for example to the Gregorian mass Kyrie ‘Fons bonitatis’ in the Second Violin Sonata, or the ‘Dirge’ and ‘Pastorale and Rustic Dances’ movements of the Concerto grosso. And, in the same period, there is still a residue of overt Judaic expression, as in Baal shem for violin and piano and From Jewish Life for cello and piano (albeit an expression more akin to the Jew of the eastern European ghetto than that of the Bible); Bloch’s propensity to eclecticism is further seen in the piano cycle, Poems of the Sea, in which there is a mixture of Impressionism, modality and Hebrew shtaygers.

With his move to San Francisco, Bloch produced a series of widely varied works, including America: an Epic Rhapsody, a three-movement programme symphony unified by a recurring motto and containing ample quotations from Amerindian melodies, English shanties, American civil war tunes, Negro spirituals and references to the mechanization of 20th-century America (e.g. factory noises, car horns). A closing anthem is intended to be sung by the audience. The Four Episodes for chamber orchestra conjures another slice of American life, that of San Francisco’s Chinatown, while Helvetia, replete with folksong quotations and other Alpine suggestions, pays homage to his native land.

In the 1930s Bloch returned to his roots and, in his retreat at Roverdo-Capriasca, Ticino, produced his monumental Avodath hakodesh (‘Sacred Service’), based on texts drawn from the Reform Jewish prayer book. His other music from that European decade is mostly large in scale and diverse in inspiration and subject matter. Voice in the Wilderness, an orchestral work with obbligato cello, is, essentially, a series of meditations but without a specific subject and decidedly not Jewish in intent (as opposed to Schelomo); Evocations has a quasi-oriental atmosphere, as in the second movement, ‘Houang-Ti’, with its pentatonic and exotic scales, and the inclusion of harp, piano and celesta; and the Violin Concerto, despite its Amerindian motto used structurally to unify the work, reverts to well-practised traits, i.e. cyclic procedures, the ‘Bloch rhythm’, and open fourths and fifths.

The substantial body of music after 1941 is, in the main, less subjective than that of earlier years. The Concerto grosso no.2 and the string quartets nos.2–5, with their formal design and abstract quality, fall into the neo-classical category. Similarly, the passacaglias and fugues of the Suite symphonique and the String Quartet no.2 cement a return to principles associated with early masters whose technical polish Bloch admired. The Concerto symphonique, on the other hand, is a large-gestured Romantic piano concerto, while the Sinfonia breve may be described as both tightly compressed and Expressionistic. 12-note themes are commonly employed in the late works regardless of their style (as in the Symphony in E major, Sinfonia breve and String Quartet no.3), while Jewish assocations are still occasionally noticed (e.g. in the Symphony for trombone and orchestra and the Suite hébraïque for violin or viola and orchestra). Earlier pictorialism is largely absent; indeed the kaleidoscopic and sometimes rhetorical features of the ‘Jewish Cycle’ have been supplanted by objectivity, serenity and control.

Bloch attracted many distinguished students (among them Sessions, Douglas Moore, Rogers, Chanler, Frederick Jacobi, Porter and Elwell), whom he taught to develop and create according to their individual temperaments and talents, an approach he adopted from his teacher, Knorr. He neither founded any school nor blazed new trails; he moulded into a distinctive style the ingredients he found already in use, including aspects of atonality and 12-note themes.

The passion, fervour and colourful florid writing of Bloch’s ‘Jewish Cycle’ are perhaps most characteristic, though in retrospect even these works are guided by an acute sense of form. However, unlike the late string quartets and suites for solo string instruments, the biblically inspired works, with their luxurious waves of phantasmagoria, engage the listener more emotionally than intellectually. Patriotic efforts such as America and Helvetia, though somewhat selfconscious, are meritorious as pièces d’occasion. But in his best work, the expression of his firm faith in the spirituality of mankind always shows through. Bloch was, and continues to be, a singular figure in the music of the 20th century.

WORKS

stage

Macbeth (op, 3, E. Fleg), 1904–9, Paris, Opéra-Comique, 30 Nov 1910

orchestral

Helvetia, 1900–29, Chicago, 18 Feb 1932

Symphony in c, 1901–2, Geneva, 1910

Hiver – Printemps, sym. poems, 1904–5, Geneva, 27 Jan 1906

Three Jewish Poems, 1913, Boston, 23 March 1917

Schelomo, vc, orch, 1915–16, New York, 3 May 1917

Suite, va, orch, 1919

In the Night, 1922

Concerto grosso no.1, str, pf obbl, 1924–5, Cleveland, 1 June 1925

Four Episodes, chbr orch, 1926, New York, March 1927

Voice in the Wilderness, orch, vc obbl, 1936, Los Angeles, 21 Jan 1937

Evocations, 1937, San Francisco, 11 Feb 1938

Violin Concerto, 1937–8, Cleveland, 15 Dec 1938

Suite symphonique, 1944, Philadelphia, 26 Oct 1945

Variation no.10 ‘Solemne’, 1944 [from the multi-composer Variations on a Theme by Eugene Goossens]

Concerto symphonique, pf, orch, 1947–8, Edinburgh, 3 Sept 1949

Scherzo fantasque, pf, orch, 1948, Chicago, 2 Dec 1950

Concertino, fl, va, str, 1950

Suite hébraïque, va/vn, orch, 1951, Chicago, 1 Jan 1953

Concerto grosso no.2, str qt, str, 1952, London, 11 April 1953

In memoriam, 1952

Sinfonia breve, 1952, London, 11 April 1953

Symphony, trbn, orch, 1954, Houston, 4 April 1956

Symphony in E, 1954–5, London, 15 Feb 1956

Proclamation, tpt, orch, 1955, New York, 18 Nov 1957

Suite modale, fl, str, 1956; Kentfield, CA, 11 April 1965

Two Last Poems, fl, orch, 1958

vocal

Choral: America: an Epic Rhapsody, chorus, orch, 1926; Avodath an hakodesh [Sacred Service], Bar, chorus, orch, 1930–33

Other works: Historiettes au crépuscule, 1v, pf, 1904; Poèmes d’automne, Mez, orch, 1906; Prelude and 2 Psalms, S, orch, 1912–14; Israel, 5 solo vv, orch, 1912–16; Psm xxii, A/Bar, orch, 1914

chamber and solo instrumental

3–5 insts: Str Qt no.1, 1916; Pf Qnt no.1, 1921–3; 3 Nocturnes, pf trio, 1924; In the Mountains, str qt, 1925; Night, str qt, 1925; Paysages, str qt, 1925; Prelude, str qt, 1925; 2 Pieces, str qt, 1938–50; Str Qt no.2, 1945; Str Qt no.3, 1952; Str Qt no.4, 1953; Str Qt no.5, 1956; Pf Qnt no.2, 1957

Solo str: Suite, va, pf, 1919; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1920; Baal shem, vn, pf, 1923, orchd 1939; From Jewish Life, vc, pf, 1924; Méditation hébraïque, vc, pf, 1924; Nuit exotique, vn, pf, 1924; Sonata no.2 (Poème mystique), vn, pf, 1924; Abodah, vn, pf, 1929; Melody, vn, pf, 1929; 2 Pieces, va, pf, 1951; 3 suites, vc, 1956, 1956, 1957; Suite, va, 1958; 2 suites, vn, 1958

Pf: Ex-voto, 1914; 4 Circus Pieces, 1922; In the Night, 1922; Poems of the Sea, 1922, orchd; Danse sacrée, 1923; Enfantines, 1923; Nirvana, 1923; Sonata, 1935; Visions and Prophecies, 1936

Org: 6 Preludes, 1949; 4 Wedding Marches, 1950

juvenilia 1895–1900

all unpublished

Symphonie orientale; Vivre – aimer, sym. poem; Str Qt; Orientale, orch; Vn Conc.; Sonata, vc, pf; Poème concertante, vn, orch; Fantaisie, Pastorale, vn; songs incl. Là-bas, Larmes d’automne, Musette, Près de la mer

MSS in US-Wc [juvenilia], BEm, R, Hhc, ATs, Western Jewish History Center, Berkeley, CA

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Broude, Carisch, Eschig, Fischer, Leuckart, Mills, G. Schirmer, Suvini Zerboni

WRITINGS

‘Gustave Mahler et la Deuxième Symphonie’, Courrier musical, vii (1904), 408–11; Eng. trans., Ernest Bloch Society Bulletin (1984), 5–12

‘Man and Music’, The Seven Arts, ii (1917), 493–502: repr. in MQ, xix (1933), 374–81

‘Ernest Bloch Surveys the Problem of Music Education’, Musical America, xxxiv/4 (1921), 3, 40 only

‘Music’, A School in Action: a Symposium (New York, 1922), 145–234

‘Proper Music Education’, Woman’s Forum [Akron, OH] (15 March 1922)

‘The Pitfalls of Memorizing’, The Musician, xxviii (1923), 11–12

‘Securing the Best Results from Piano Study’, The Etude, xli (1923), 59 only

‘How and When to Begin Musical Training’, The Musician, xxiv (1924), 29 only

Biography and Comment (San Francisco, 1925) [privately printed]

‘Musical Education’, Women’s City Club Magazine of San Francisco (1927), Nov, 7–8

‘Thoughts at 70’, The Etude, lxix (1951), 9–10, 57 only

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Lalo: ‘Macbeth de M. Ernest Bloch’, Revue musicale de Lyon, nos.12–13 (1911), 388–92

O. Downes: ‘Ernest Bloch, the Swiss Composer, on the Influence of Race in Composition’, Musical Observer, xv (1917), 11–12

G. Gatti: ‘Ernest Bloch’, Critica musicale, iii (1920); Eng. trans., in MQ, vii (1921), 20–38

R.H. Sessions: ‘Ernest Bloch’, MM, v/1 (1927–8), 3–11

M. Tibaldi-Chiesa: Ernest Bloch (Turin, 1933)

R. Hall: ‘The Macbeth of Bloch’, MM, xv (1937–8), 209–15

H.S. Minsky: Ernest Bloch and his Music (diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, TN, 1945)

L. Stein: ‘The Problem of Ernest Bloch’, Chicago Jewish Forum, v/1 (1946), 27–33; repr. in Mid-Century, ed. H.U. Ribalow (New York, 1955), 406–16

D. Newlin: ‘The Later Works of Ernest Bloch’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 443–59

J. Hastings: ‘Ernest Bloch and Modern Music’, Menorah Journal, xxxvi (1948), 195–215; repr. in MR, x (1949), 115–27, and in The Menorah Treasury, ed. L. Schwarz (Philadelphia, 1964), 769–87

E. Chapman: ‘Ernest Bloch at 75’, Tempo, no.35 (1955), 6–12

F.B. Blanks: ‘Ernest Bloch, 1880–1959’, Canon, xii/12 (1959), 381–3

W.M. Jones: The Music of Ernest Bloch (diss., Indiana U., 1963)

D.Z. Kushner: Ernest Bloch and his Symphonic Works (diss., U. of Michigan, 1967)

D.Z. Kushner: ‘A Singular Ernest Bloch’, Musical Journal, xxviii/1 (1970), 40, 51, 53 only

E. Raditz: An Analytical Study of the Violin and Piano Works of Ernest Bloch (diss., New York U., 1975)

S. Bloch and I. Heskes: Ernest Bloch, Creative Spirit (New York, 1976)

C.L. Wheeler: The Solo Piano Music of Ernest Bloch (DMA diss., U. of Oregon, 1976)

R. Rafael: ‘Ernest Bloch at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’, Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly, ix/3 (1977), 195–215

R. Strassburg: Ernest Bloch, Voice in the Wilderness (Los Angeles, 1977)

A. Knapp: ‘Bloch: a Reassessment’, R.C.M. Magazine, lxxiv (1978), 85–91

M. Schwager: ‘A Contribution to the Biography of Ernest Bloch: Letters at the University of Hartford’, CM, no.28 (1978), 41–53

D. Sorani: ‘Ernest Bloch: un compositore Ebraico?’, Rassegna mensile di Israel, xlv (1979), 379–84

A. Knapp: ‘The Life and Music of Ernest Bloch’, Jewish Quarterly, xxviii (1980), 26–30

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Ernest Bloch: a Retrospective on the Centenary of his Birth’, College Music Symposium, xx/2 (1980), 77–86

C. Tappolet, ed.: Lettres de compositeurs Genèvois à Ernest Ansermet (1908–1966) (Geneva, 1981), 37–99

E. Brody: ‘Romain Rolland and Ernest Bloch’, MQ, lxviii (1982), 60–79

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Ernest Bloch’s Enfantines’, College Music Symposium, xxiii/2 (1983), 103–12

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Ernest Bloch: Music Educator’, International Journal of Music Education, iv (1984), 37–40

J.-F. Tappy, ed.: Ernest Bloch/Romain Rolland Lettres (1911–1933) (Lausanne, 1984)

J.-M. Fauquet: ‘Les quatuors à cordes d’Ernest Bloch’, Revue musicale Suisse Romande (1985), 22–30

D.Z. Kushner: ‘The Jewish Works of Ernest Bloch’, Journal of Synagogue Music, xiv/1 (1985), 28–41

D.L. Sills: ‘Bloch Manuscripts at the University of California’, Notes, xlii (1985), 7–21

M.D. Nott: Ernest Bloch’s Pedagogical Writings: a Didactic Legacy of Twentieth-Century America (diss., U. of Rochester, 1986)

D.L. Sills: ‘Bloch Manuscripts at the Library of Congress’, Notes, xlii (1986), 726–53

D.Z. Kushner: Ernest Bloch: a Guide to Research (New York, 1988)

A. Knapp: ‘Helvetia – Israel – America: Identity in Bloch’s Life and Music’, Journal of Synagogue Music, xix/2 (1989), 5–16

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Ernest Bloch, Daniel Gregory Mason, and the Jewish Question’, American Music Teacher, xxxviii/6 (1989), 16–19

D.Z. Kushner: ‘Ernest Bloch’s America’, Currents in Musical Thought, ii (1993), 125–41

J. Lewinski and E. Dijon: Ernest Bloch (1880–1959): sa vie et sa pensée, i (Geneva, 1998)

Bloch, Ernst

(b Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 8 July 1885; d Tübingen, 4 Aug 1977). German philosopher. He studied philosophy at Munich University and at Würzburg University, where his subsidiary subjects were physics and music and where he took the doctorate in 1908 with a dissertation on Rickert. In 1933 he left Germany, eventually reaching the USA, but returned after the war as professor of philosophy and director of the institute of philosophy at the University of Leipzig (1949–56); in 1961 he became visiting professor of philosophy at Tübingen University. His principal writings on music are incorporated in his major philosophical works, Vom Geist der Utopie (Munich, 1918/R, 2/1923/R), and Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Berlin, 1954–9/R; Eng. trans., 1986), which deploy a romanticized and depoliticized Marxism akin to the early work of his friend Lukács. Bloch compensated for what he saw as Marxism's incomplete view of reality, as dominated by material exchange, by introducing the notion of a basic human ‘hunger’ which could be characterized as ‘spiritual’ and take on a religious tone in its description, without a necessary commitment to any faith. This hunger is evident in the emotional attitude of hope, expressed in aspirations for a better society, or future utopia. Bloch defended utopian ideas from both conservative and orthodox Marxist criticism (see Zabel, 1990).

Music is central to Bloch's utopian thought because it provides a means for the expression of ideal images of the subject (or self), free from the constraints of society. An inner freedom from social constraint is itself constitutive of ‘hope’. Music embodies this basic freedom because its development is more than a mere reflection of socio-economic contingencies. Stylistic evolution shows how different ideals of selfhood have evolved independently of society, each style presenting a new utopian view of the self and giving an image of how ‘man hears himself’ in a given era. The basic human hunger for reconciliation of the subject with the ideal self-image, or ‘object’ of hope, can thus be shown to change historically in its form, and yet to remain consistent in its general nature. In his Vom Geist der Utopie Bloch elaborates on changing forms of the idealized self-image: the ‘sacred self’ (Bach), the ‘secular self’ (Mozart), the ‘dramatic self’ (Beethoven), forms of aspiration to a ‘transcendent self’ (Wagner, Bruckner). Despite their historical expression, each of these ideals could be generalized as relevant to the people of any time. They are not limited to the historical circumstances which led to their expression, but present universal possibilities. The second volume of Das Prinzip Hoffnung includes an allegory that illustrates the importance of music in a philosophy of hope. Excerpts from both works are included in the collection Zur Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1974; Eng. trans. as Essays on the Philosophy of Music, 1985)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K.H. Wörner: ‘Die Musik in der Philosophie Ernst Blochs’, Die Musik in der Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur Situation der Jahre um 1910 (Bonn, 1970), 1–20

A. Muenster: ‘Ernst Bloch: une esthétique de l'anticipation’, Revue d'esthétique, viii (1985), 161–71

W. Matz: Musica humana: Versuch über Ernst Blochs Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1988)

G. Zabel: ‘Ernst Bloch and the Utopian Dimension in Music’, MT, cxxxi (1990), 82–4

C. Flinn: Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ, 1992)

F.E. SPARSHOTT/NAOMI CUMMING

Blochwitz, Hans Peter

(b Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 28 Sept 1949). German tenor. He studied in Mainz and Frankfurt. After developing a successful career as a concert and lieder singer, he made his operatic début in 1984 at Frankfurt as Lensky (Yevgeny Onegin). He sang the Evangelist in stagings of the St Matthew Passion at La Scala, Milan (1985), and the St John Passion at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris (1986). At Aix-en-Provence he has sung Belmonte, Ferrando and Tamino. Blochwitz made his Covent Garden début in 1989 as Ferrando, returning as Don Ottavio, the role of his Metropolitan début in 1990. In addition to his four major Mozart roles, his repertory includes Monteverdi's Nero and William in Henze's Der junge Lord, which he sang at Munich in 1995. A very stylish singer, with superb diction, he has a firm-toned lyrical voice perfectly adapted to Bach and Mozart. His recordings include Ferrando, Don Ottavio and Tamino, and several admired discs of lieder.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Blockflöte (i)

(Ger.).

The English term ‘blockflute’ is sometimes used to mean Recorder.

Blockflöte (ii)

(Ger.).

See under Organ stop.

Block harmony.

A homorhythmic accompanying texture in which harmonies are presented as simultaneous chords, often one per beat, below a more active and soloistic melodic part (see Homophony). Block harmony accompaniment is most often associated with piano music (e.g. the left hand harmonizing a right-hand melody or a solo instrument or vocal line), but is also found in orchestral music. See Homophony, ex.2.

BRIAN HYER

Blockland [Brockland], Cornelius [Corneille de] [Montfort, Corneille de]

(b Montfoort, nr Utrecht, c1540; fl 1571–86). Dutch composer and music theorist, active in the Franche-Comté. He was also a doctor, astrologer, mathematician and poet. He wrote two Latin poems, published in 1581, in honour of the Florentine mathematician and theologian Francesco Giuntini. According to Du Verdier he also wrote several ephemerides mostly issued under the pseudonym Imbert de Billy; in these Billy is described as ‘natif de Charlieu en Lyonnais’ and tailor to the Baron of Saint Amour (Louis de La Baume, to whom Blockland’s musical Instruction was dedicated). That Billy was in fact Blockland seems to be confirmed by Billy’s Almanach pour l’an 1582 (Lyons, 1582); in the address to the councillors and bourgeois of Lons-le-Saulnier the author declared that he was merely the mouthpiece for ‘le docteur de Montfort’ who had recently settled in the town. He described Montfort as of noble birth, raised in the Catholic religion, and ‘educated at good and famous universities’. This attempt to impress the town councillors and ecclesiastical authorities suggests that Blockland may have been suspected and persecuted as a Protestant. The same Almanach includes a woodcut of Montfort as well as eulogies in Greek and Latin by Jean Willemin and Claude Morel, schoolmasters in Saint Amour. An almanac by Morel of the same year (Diare au journal pour l’an 1582, Lyons, 1582) laments the misfortune of Montfort in two prefatory poems.

Blockland’s Instruction fort facile pour apprendre la musique pratique (Lyons, 1573) was written at Saint Amour in 1571; a second edition was prepared at Lons-le-Saulnier in 1586 and published in the following year as Instruction méthodique et fort facile pour apprendre la musique pratique (Lyons, 1587/R). This simple didactic treatise draws heavily on Loys Bourgeois’ Droict chemin (1550) and Maximilian Guilliaud’s Rudiments (1558) by paraphrasing or plagiarizing certain passages and reproducing some of their tables and music examples; its principal innovations are the omission of the traditional discussion of the Guidonian hand and the gamut, and the inclusion of music examples from 31 chansons, two madrigals, a Provençal song and a motet, by composers of the previous generation (including Lassus, Clemens non Papa, Arcadelt, Janequin and Certon). The chapter on mutation mentions a Latin treatise (now lost) by Blockland, ‘treating the complete knowledge of music’. His only surviving music is Le [second] livre du jardin de musique (Lyons, 1579; only the superius partbook is extant), for four voices. It contains 36 chansons and voix de ville, including settings of poems by Clément Marot, Ronsard (four sonnets) and Du Bellay, as well as three old narrative anecdotes, two graces and three occasional pieces addressed to local gentry, among them an epithalamium for the wedding of Louis de La Baume and Catherine de Bruges in 1574. The archaic rondeau Elle m’aime bien and the equally venerable Faute d’argent (which uses the same imitative motifs as Josquin’s setting) contrast with similar voix de ville in dance rhythm, such as the pavane Celuy se peut promettre and the galliard Belle que j’aime. The collection closes with poems by de La Taissonnière and Claude Morel in praise of Blockland and his music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Dobbins)

F. Junctinus [Giuntini]: Speculum astrologiae (Lyons, 1581)

A. Du Verdier: La bibliothèque d’Antoine de Verdier, repr. in Les bibliothèques françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier (Paris, 1772–3/R), iii–v (Lyons, 1585), 238

F. Dobbins: Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992), 92–3, 207–54

FRANK DOBBINS

Blockwerk

(Ger.; Dut. blokwerk).

The undivided principal chorus of the medieval organ (see Organ, esp. §IV, based upon a ‘double Principal’ (two open unison Principals/Diapasons) without any ranks separated off as individual stops. The term itself may be 18th-century (Utrecht organ documents, 1731), although according to J. Hess (1807) it was used by ‘old builders’. At Reims (1487) it is known only that the organ had 2000 pipes, at Amiens (1422) that the four-octave keyboard began at 19 ranks and ended at 91, at Dijon (c1350) that those ranks were made up of Principals, Octaves, Super-octaves and Twelfths. As well as 8', the Blockwerk could be based on open 4' (Leuven, 1445), open 16' (Delft, 1458) or deeper, according to the pitch and key compass. The 1480 Blockwerk now in Middelburg, Netherlands, had a probable disposition of:

The most useful description of the sound of a Blockwerk is Praetorius's (Syntagma musicum, ii (1618, 2/1619), p.99) of that at Halberstadt (1357–61):

The large Praestants and the low manual compass, which does not rise high enough for lightness of sound, caused together a deep coarse rumbling as of a dreadful distant thunder, while the many-rank Mixture [i.e. undivided chorus] gave an exceeding shrillness, strong, loud and powerful.

The Blockwerk belonged essentially to (a) the fixed church organ (as distinct from positives, etc.) and (b) northern Europe. Organs in Bordeaux, Lombardy and Tuscany already had mostly single, separable ranks by c1500 (S Giustina, Padua, 1493, organ of 16.8.51/3.4.22/3.2.11/3.1). A full account of the history of the Blockwerk is given in R. Quoika: Vom Blockwerk zur Registerorgel: zur Geschichte der Orgelgotik, 1200–1520 (Kassel, 1996).

PETER WILLIAMS/BARBARA OWEN

Blockx, Jan

(b Antwerp, 25 Jan 1851; d Kapellenbos, nr Antwerp, 26 May 1912). Belgian composer. He received his first lessons in theory and piano from Frans Willem Aerts, choirmaster of St Pauluskerk, Antwerp, and was a fine treble singer there. He was a pupil at the Ecole de Musique, which under Peter Benoit became the Flemish Music School (Vlaamsche Muziekschool) in 1876; there Blockx received organ lessons from Jozef Callaerts and was a pupil of Benoit for harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition. He soon withdrew from the influence of his imposing teacher to follow his own path; in 1879 he went to Leipzig, where he became a friend of Grieg and Sinding and attended Reinecke’s classes at the conservatory. From Germany he travelled to Italy, but this journey does not seem to have made a strong impression on him. In 1885 he was appointed lecturer in harmony at the Flemish Music School, in succession to Hendrik Waelput, and in 1886 he became conductor of the Royal Art Society. He was an outstanding teacher and idolized by his pupils, who included the composers Lodewijk Mortelmans and Flor Alpaerts. In May 1901 he succeeded Benoit as director of the Antwerp Conservatory, where he introduced a number of reforms in order to raise the standard of tuition; he founded a string quartet consisting of prizewinning players from the conservatory. He was a member of the Royal Belgian Academy and of a jury, set up by the publishers Sonzogno of Milan, for an international competition in opera composition.

Blockx’s fame rests chiefly on the success enjoyed by his operas; the day of the first performance of Herbergprinses, 10 October 1896, may be regarded as the beginning of Flemish opera. His work can be seen as a national variation of Romantic realism and as a typical product of his education at Benoit’s school, which was based largely on the study of Flemish folksong. Blockx knew instinctively how to underline the dramatic action with suitable musical effects. From Wagner he inherited certain principles in the use of leitmotif, recitative and symphonic commentary. His orchestration, though on the whole conventional, is always polished and effective, and his melodies reveal a considerable lyric gift.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in B-Aac, Ac

stage

operas unless otherwise stated; all publications in vocal score

Iets vergeten (Spl, 1, V. de la Montagne), Antwerp, Koninklijke Harmonie, 19 Feb 1877

Milenka (ballet, 1, P. Berlier), Brussels, Monnaie, 3 Nov 1888 (Brussels, 1896)

Maître Martin (4, E. Landoy, after E.T.A. Hoffmann), Brussels, Monnaie, 30 Nov 1892

Sint-Niklaas (pantomime, 3, T. Hannon), Brussels, Royal du Parc, 1894

Herbergprinses (3, N. de Tière), Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 10 Oct 1896 (Paris, 1897)

Thijl Uilenspiegel (3, H. Cain and L. Solvay), Brussels, Monnaie, 12 Jan 1900 (Paris, 1900)

De bruid der zee (3, de Tière), Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 30 Nov 1901 (Paris, 1902)

De kapel (1, de Tière), Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 7 Nov 1903 (Paris, 1903)

Baldie (3, de Tière), Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 25 Jan 1908, rev. as Liefdelied, Antwerp, Vlaamse Opera, 6 Jan 1912

Telamon en Myrtalee, 1910 (R. Verhulst)

Thijl Uilenspiegel II (3, Cain and Solvay), Brussels, Monnaie, 12 Nov 1920, completed by P. Gilson

choral with orchestra

all publications in vocal score

Vredezang (K. Ledeganck), female vv, orch (Brussels, c1877)

De kleine bronnen (J. Vuylsteke), female/children’s vv, orch, 1878 (Paris, 1898)

Een droom van’t paradijs (orat, J. van Beers), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1881–2; Waltz, arr. pf 4 hands (Antwerp, n.d.)

Klokke Roeland (cant., A. Rodenbach), chorus, orch, 1888

Antwerpen’s schutsgeest (cant., A. Wouters), chorus, orch, 1888

Gloria patriae (cant., H. Melis), children’s vv, orch (Brussels, 1902)

Scheldezang (cant.), chorus, ww, 1903

Feest in den lande (cant., R. Verhulst), T, children’s vv, orch (Brussels, ?1905)

Jubelgalm (cant., de Tière), chorus, orch (Brussels, ?1905)

other works

Choral unacc.: Licht, solo vv, male vv, 1895 (Leipzig, n.d.); De heide, male vv (Brussels, 1899); Het graf, 4vv (Ghent, 1904); Ave verum, mixed vv (Brussels, 1905); other works

Orch: Rubensouverture, 1877; Kermisdag, 1879; Vlaamsche dansen (Danses flamandes), 1884 (Paris, 1898); Sym., D, 1885; Symphonische drieluik (Brussels, 1905); Suite in den ouden vorm, 1907, ed. (Paris, 1922); other works, incl. music for ww

Chbr music, incl. numerous works for vn, pf; pf works; songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Solvay: Académie royale de Belgique: notice sur Jan Blockx (Brussels, 1920)

P. Gilson: Notes de musique et souvenirs (Brussels, 1942)

F. Blockx: Jan Blockx (Brussels, 1943) [with complete list of works]

MARIE-THÉRÈSE BUYSSENS

Blodek, Vilém

(b Prague, 3 Oct 1834; d Prague, 1 May 1874). Czech composer, flautist and pianist. He was born into a poor family and was educated at a German Piarist school in Prague. After studying with Dreyschock (piano) and at the Prague Conservatory (1846–52) with Antonín Eiser (flute) and Kittl (composition) he became music teacher to the Zieliński family in Lubycza, Galicia (1853–5). On returning to Prague he worked as a concert pianist and music teacher and briefly as second conductor of the Prague Männergesangverein, for which he wrote a number of patriotic choruses. In 1860 he succeeded Eiser as professor of flute at the conservatory, and as a basis for teaching he wrote his own flute tutor (1861). He was also active as a writer of incidental music for both the German and Czech theatres: from 1858 onwards he wrote music for 60 plays and collaborated with Smetana on music for the tableaux for the 1864 Shakespeare celebrations. In 1865 he married his pupil Marie Doudlebská, despite opposition from her father, a rich lawyer. Overwork caused a nervous breakdown, and after a spell in a mental home in 1870, he returned there permanently in May 1871.

Blodek began composing at the conservatory at the age of 13 (wind sextet, 1847) in a style that owed much to his teacher Kittl, to Mendelssohn and to the early German Romantics. His Symphony in D minor (1858–9), his most ambitious work at the time, easily surpasses works by the more established Czech symphonists Kittl and Měchura. Though its Mendelssohnian Scherzo betrays Blodek’s early affiliation, its monothematicism makes a suggestive link with Smetana and his Triumphal Symphony (1853) and remained a characteristic device, for instance in his Flute Concerto (1862), the most brilliant and attractive of his virtuoso flute works.

Blodek’s best-known work is his one-act opera V studni (‘In the Well’), first performed at the Provisional Theatre in November 1867. One of several comic village operas written to Sabina librettos (The Bartered Bride is the most famous), it has a cast of just four characters and is made up of a handful of closed numbers: five solos, two duets, one quartet, an overture and an intermezzo, and three brief ensembles for chorus and soloists. It was the first Czech comic opera to replace spoken dialogue with recitative. Blodek’s opera is often considered to be one of the most ‘Czech’ operas after those of Smetana – it was written shortly after the première of The Bartered Bride – but its pleasant melodic style and rather foursquare construction suggests Nicolai or Lortzing. Blodek’s next opera, Zítek, again to a Sabina libretto (a historical comedy set in the 14th century), was a more ambitious work both in its musical vocabulary and in its operatic form. A full-length three-act opera with a large cast, it made some attempt to break down the divisions between the closed numbers of its predecessor, using arioso and a chorus more integrated into the action. Blodek completed only one act and part of the second before his death; Smetana, already ill, declined to finish it, but it was eventually completed by F.X. Vaňa and was performed for the first time in 1934 on the 100th anniversary of Blodek’s birth.

From Zítek’s advance on In the Well it is clear that Blodek’s illness and early death robbed 19th-century Czech music of a remarkable talent. In the Well has survived, despite a naive text often more tedious than charming, an oversweet harmonic vocabulary and the occasional clumsiness of technique; this is a tribute to a lightness of touch and appealing freshness of melody that is not always excelled by Blodek’s greater contemporary, Smetana.

WORKS

stage

Mlhavé obrazy [Misty Pictures] (incid music to J. Brandeis’s play), Prague, 1859

Clarissa (op), 1861, unfinished [lib in Ger.]

Chorista (vaudeville, F. Hainiš-Zdobnický), 1861, Prague, 22 March 1862, lost

Hudba k slavnosti Shakespeareově [Music for the Shakespeare Celebrations], Prague, 23 April 1864

V studni [In the Well] (comic op, 1, K. Sabina), Prague, Provisional, 17 Nov 1867, vs (Prague, 1878)

Svatojánská pouť [St John’s Pilgrimage] (incid music to F.F. Šamberk’s play), Prague, 1868, ov. (Prague, n.d.)

Zítek (comic op, 3, Sabina), 1868–9, unfinished, completed by F.X. Váňa, Prague, National, 3 Oct 1934

Incid music to 60 plays

vocal

Die Kapelle, 1v, pf, pubd in musical suppl. to Erinnerungen

[20] Liebeslieder, 1v, pf, 1860–?, 13 as Písně milostné [Love Songs] (Prague, 1909)

6 mužských sborů [6 Male-Voice Choruses], 1859, 1 pubd: K bratrům [To the Brothers]

20 choruses for male vv, some to Ger. texts by J. von Eichendorff, H. Heine and A. von Chamisso, and to Cz. texts by V. Hanka, J.V. Jahn, J. Pick and K. Sabina; several pubd, incl. Ach ty Labe tiché [O quiet Elbe], 1865; Pijácká (Společná) [A Drinking-Song (A Social Song)], 1867; Pochod [March], 1867

Sacred: Solemn Mass, D, 1853; Ave Maria, C, mixed choir, 1863 (Prague, 1888); Otče náš [Our Father], F, male vv, 1863; Veni Creator, C, mixed vv, 1863; Off, C, 1863, inc.; Mass, D, 1865

instrumental

Orch: Concert ov., C, op.2, 1850; Ov., D, 1854; Sym., d, 1858–9; Concert Ov., E, 1859; Ov., e, ?1862, inc.; Fl Conc., D, 1862, ed. J. Kàan (Prague, 1903); Skladba [Composition], A, 2 fl, orch, ?1862

Chbr: Sextet, D, fl, 2 vn, ob, hn, trbn, 1847; Salon Piece, C, vn, pf, 1850; Grand Solo, D, fl, pf, op.1, 1851; Allegro di bravura, D, fl, pf, 1852; Fantasie e Capriccio, F, fl, pf, 1863; Andante cantabile, D, fl, pf, 1863; pf music

Principal publishers: Urbánek, Vilímek, E. Starý, J.A. Christophe & Kuhé, Český hudební fond

MSS in CZ-Pnd, Pnm, Czech radio, Prague Hlahol

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.X. Váňa: Blodek (privately printed, 1934) [incl. chronological list of works and earlier bibliography]

F.X. Váňa: ‘Vilém Blodek a dopis Bedřicha Smetany’ [Blodek and a letter from Smetana], Tempo [Prague], xiv (1934–5), 33–42

R. Budiš: Vilém Blodek (Prague, 1964) [incl. further older literature, p.37, and list of works, pp.38–9]

R. Budiš: ‘Hudební romantismus’ [Musical romanticism], Československá vlastivěda, ix/3, ed. M. Očadlík and R. Smetana (Prague, 1971), 180–225, esp. 209–10

J. Tyrrell: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988)

JOHN TYRRELL

Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

(b St Petersburg, 16/28 Nov 1880; d Petrograd, 7 Aug 1921). Russian poet. In 1904, his Stikhi o prekrasnomy dame (‘Verses About a Beautiful Lady’) appeared; in these poems, Blok's obsession with a paragon of femininity, often identified with the Divine Sophia, first appeared. This obsession also inspired his drama Neznakomka (‘The Unknown Woman’) for which the composer Vladimir Kryukov wrote a symphonic prologue in the early 1920s. Blok soon became the most popular Russian poet of his generation. Inspired by Wagner and, in turn, by Vladimir Solov'yov's theories of collectivity (sobornost'), Blok became interested in the stage and a number of his dramas were produced with music written by the poet and composer Mikhail Kuzmin. The influence of Wagner on Blok's work is indisputable: while the poem Val'kiriya (na motiv iz Vagnera) (‘Walküre (on Motifs from Wagner)’) provides the most obvious example, other poems such as the early V zharkoy plyaske vakkhanalii (‘In the Hot Dance of the Bacchanale’) are considered to have been written under his influence. It has even been suggested that Blok and his wife saw themselves as characters from the Ring (Bartlett, 1995). Blok's writings have attracted a number of mostly Russian musicians: in his only settings of contemporary Russian verse, Rachmaninoff selected a poem by Blok for the op.38 songs, while Aleksandr Krein's symphonic fragments Roza i krest' (‘The Rose and the Cross’) were inspired by Blok's drama of that name. During the early Soviet period, Blok exerted a fascination over Feinberg (whose op.7 settings are considered to be particularly close in spirit to the poetry) and Vladimir Shcherbachyov, whose mighty Second Symphony (1922–6) and the piano suite Nechayannaya radost' (‘Unexpected Joy’) were both inspired by the poet's own reading of his verses. In 1920, Artur Lourié and Anna Akhmatova were planning a ballet based on Blok's drama Snezhnaya maska (‘Snowy Masque’) but the project was abandoned on the composer's emigration the following year. His poems subsequently inspired composers ranging from Mosolov, Myaskovsky and Roslavets to Denisov and Shostakovich.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Pyman: A Life of Aleksandr Blok, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979–80)

R. Bartlett: Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, 1995) [esp. 195–217 on Blok and Wagner]

JONATHAN POWELL

Blokviool.

Variant of the Hommel (box zither) of the Low Countries.

Blokwerk.

See Blockwerk.

Blom, Eric (Walter)

(b Berne, 20 Aug 1888; d London, 11 April 1959). English music critic, writer and editor. He was of Danish and British extraction on his father's side and Swiss on his mother's, and he was educated privately. As a young man, he was employed by the music publishing firm of J. & W. Chester in London. His career as a writer began in 1919, when he was invited by Rosa Newmarch to assist her in providing progamme notes for the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts. He continued to do this until 1926. From 1923 to 1931 he was London music critic of the Manchester Guardian. In 1931 he was appointed music critic of the Birmingham Post. He returned to London in 1946 to begin work as editor of the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary. Three years later he became music critic of The Observer. In the meantime he had succeeded A.H. Fox Strangways as editor of Music and Letters in 1937. Under pressure of work on the dictionary he resigned the editorship of Music and Letters in 1950 but resumed it in 1954. In 1946 he was appointed chairman of the Central Music Library in Westminster and a member of the music committee of the British Council. In 1955 he was awarded the CBE and made an honorary DLitt of Birmingham University.

He was an excellent linguist and made a number of translations of foreign works (Einstein's Gluck, Deutsch's documentary biographies of Schubert and Mozart). As an editor he was punctilious, even to the point of overriding the views of his contributors. As a writer he had an acute ear for English style. He believed firmly in the English language as a means of expression, and not only defended it against encroachments from abroad but endeavoured to enrich it by proposing the revival of obsolete musical terms. His prejudices were apparent but failed to arouse enmity. The number of his publications, though impressive, does not give a complete picture of his unremitting industry. He did much to encourage younger writers and had many friends.

The width of Blom's interests is evident from his first book, Stepchildren of Music, which ranges from The Dragon of Wantley to Bartók's first two quartets. The Music Lover's Miscellany, which he edited, also gives evidence of wide reading as well as discrimination in the choice of texts and their juxtaposition. Music in England is a popular history which achieved a broad readership. Though he was thoroughly familiar with contemporary music – although critical of, for example, Rachmaninoff and Weill – and not hostile to it, the classics were the core of his musical experience, particularly Mozart, on whom he wrote perceptively and with affection. As an analyst he had no use for what he called ‘philosophical criticism’ and ‘psychological probing’ but aimed at conveying to others the pleasure he got from the music he was discussing. He had an unrivalled capacity for digesting information and organizing it systematically for the benefit of readers – not only in his Everyman's Dictionary of Music but in the many pages of the 5th edition of Grove's Dictionary for which he was personally responsible. His knowledge of technical details was occasionally faulty and his judgment could sometimes be criticized – for instance, his decision to exclude living performers from Everyman's Dictionary. But against this must be set his complete absorption in music as a humane art and an eager desire to share his interests with others.

WRITINGS

Stepchildren of Music (London, 1925/R)

Tchaikovsky: Orchestral Works (London, 1927)

A General Index to Modern Musical Literature in the English Language (London, 1927/R)

The Limitations of Music: a Study in Aesthetics (London, 1928/R)

The Romance of the Piano (London, 1928/R)

Strauss: The Rose Cavalier (London, 1930)

‘An Essay on Performance and Listening’, The Musical Companion, ed. A.L. Bacharach (London, 1934, 2/1977), 651–718

Mozart (London, 1935, 5/1962, rev. 6/1974 by J. Westrup; Ger. trans., 1954)

Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas Discussed (London, 1938/R)

A Musical Postbag (London, 1941/R)

Music in England (Harmondsworth, 1942, 2/1947; Ger. trans., 1947; It. trans., 1954)

Some Great Composers (London, 1944/R; Heb. trans., 1953; Sp. trans., 1962)

‘Works for Solo Instrument and Orchestra’, Tchaikovsky: a Symposium, ed. G. Abraham (London, 1945/R1946, 1969 and 1970 as The Music of Tchaikovsky), 47–73

Everyman's Dictionary of Music (London, 1946, rev. 15/1971 by J. Westrup, rev. 6/1988 by D.M. Cummings as The New Everyman Dictionary of Music)

‘The Piano Music’, Sibelius: a Symposium, ed. G. Abraham (London, 1947), 97–101

Classics Major and Minor (London, 1958/R)

‘How it Started: the Nineteenth-Century Pioneers’, Twentieth Century Music, ed. R.H. Myers (London, 1960, enlarged 2/1968), 13–22

‘Three-Groats Opera’, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. S. Hinton (Cambridge, 1990), 138–43

JACK WESTRUP/ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Blomberg, Leopold

(b Warsaw, 1831; d Warsaw, 20 April 1900). Polish organ builder. He was a member of the Warsaw school established by Mateusz Mielczarski. In 1882 he founded the firm Blomberg i Syn in Warsaw, having worked on his own since 1854. He built about 150 fine, sturdy organs for parish churches, mostly of medium size, and exported dozens of such instruments to various provinces of the Russian empire, including the Russian-occupied region around Helsinki. Among his firm's greatest achievements were overhauls of the organs at Płock Cathedral (1876), Lublin Cathedral (1894–5) and the Warsaw churches of the Blessed Virgin (1873), St Martin (1889) and All Saints (1901; three manuals and pedal, 50 stops). This last, the largest, was highly praised by Marco Enrico Bossi, but was destroyed in 1939 by a German bomb. (For further description see J. Gołos: Polskie organy i muzyka organowa, Warsaw, 1972; Eng. trans., 1992, as The Polish Organ, i: The Instrument and its History.) Leopold's two sons Andrzej (d 1911) and Edward (1866–1900) reportedly spent some time as apprentices with Cavaillé-Coll and in 1894 took over their father's firm, which existed until 1911.

JERZY GOŁOS

Blomdahl, Karl-Birger

(b Växjö, 19 Oct 1916; d Kungsängen, nr Stockholm, 14 June 1968). Swedish composer, teacher and administrator. He went to Stockholm in 1934 to study biochemistry, but soon his interest in music prevailed and in 1935 he began lessons with Rosenberg. His earliest works – the Trio for woodwind (1938), the First String Quartet (1939) and the Symfoniska danser (1939) – already show solid craftsmanship and thorough motivic work; stylistically they recall not only contemporary Rosenberg but also Nielsen and Sibelius. Blomdahl continued his studies, after wartime service, at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music with Tor Mann (conducting) and Mogens Wøldike (Baroque music). In the mid-1940s he appeared frequently as a conductor outside Stockholm, but later he conducted only occasionally, and then only his own music.

At this time there began also the acitivies of the Monday Group, an informal association of young composers, instrumentalists and musicologists who met in Blomdahl’s flat to discuss and analyse new works and compositional techniques, their attention being centred on Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz. Other aspects of musical life were considered as well: teaching methods, the situation of old and new music within the institutions (here the Little Chamber Orchestra and the Chamber Choir were important instruments), and the role of radio and daily newspapers. From 1946 members of the Monday Group took over the chamber music society Fylkingen, and later they gained control of the Swedish section of the ISCM; again Blomdahl was generally the leading figure.

Blomdahl’s compositions of the mid-1940s are to a great extent marked by an active concern with the structural and polyphonic matters associated with Hindemith’s ‘new objectivity’. Major examples include the neo-Baroque Concerto grosso (1944), the String Trio (1945) with its cantabile polyphonic first movement and its lively, musicianly finale, the Bach-derived Three Polyphonic Pieces for piano (1945) and the Second Symphony (1947). This, the terminal work of the period, shows the full development of certain features of Blomdahl’s style, notably his strong-willed construction, marked by powerful climaxes, and his vigorous rhythms, which exist in a distinctive oscillation between dance and march.

In 1946 and 1947 Blomdahl made his first journeys abroad, not to study but to investigate. He began to move in several new directions, taking a growing interest in Bartók and Stravinsky, and gradually also in 12-note serialism, which he encountered principally in the writings of Leibowitz and Krenek; given his dynamic temperament, he was attracted less by Schoenberg and Webern than by Berg. At the same time he was collaborating with the literary group around the poet Erik Lindegren and the review Prisma. This resulted in, for example, the Pastoralsvit (1948) influenced by a poetic cycle of Lindegren, the Danssvit no.1, which Birgit Åkesson choreographed as Fruktbarhet, and the highly dramatic music for Rabbe Enckell’s radio play Agamemnons hemkomst (material from which was used in the choral work I speglarnas sal, ‘In the Hall of Mirrors’).

During these years Blomdahl also began his work in teaching. His pupils of the late 1940s included Pettersson, Bucht and Karkoff; later, as professor at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (1960–64), he taught Bark, Rabe, Mellnäs and many others. He also organized courses at a more popular level, made many radio programmes and presented teaching programmes on television. In addition, he was chairman of Fylkingen (1949–54), secretary to the Swedish section of the ISCM (1947–56) and general secretary for the first ISCM Festival in Sweden (1956), consultant to the Swedish radio music department (1956–60) and its director (1965–8). The concert series of contemporary music, Nutida Musik, organized by the Concert Hall Society and Swedish Radio from 1954, was proposed by him. In 1953 he was elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.

A key work in the evolution of Blomdahl’s later style was the Symphony no.3, sub-titled ‘Facetter’ (1950), a name which says much about the work’s structure: it is a series of variations whose bold, individual mutations mirror the possibilities for development afforded by a 12-note series. At the same time the piece shows features of a traditional cycle of movements: a slow introduction is followed by a slow movement for strings, a scherzo, a climactic allegro and an epilogue establishing a connection with the introduction. It is noteworthy that the series is a tonal one and that the style, with its rhythmic pregnancy and tight contrapuntal structure, recalls Bartók rather than the Second Viennese School.

In later years Blomdahl’s rate of production decreased, but his works came to have a greater capacity for stylistic renewal, reflecting currents in central European music. He never approached the developments associated with Darmstadt; rather, his contacts were with Holmboe in the 1940s and later with Seiber and Ligeti. In the Danssvit no.2, one of his most original smaller pieces, there are links with the blues, foreshadowing certain episodes in I speglarnas sal (1951–2).

The latter work contains a number of features which Blomdahl had previously criticized, such as tone painting in the introduction and recitation with orchestra. Its vocal writing is particularly interesting (this was his first large vocal work), moving from pointillism to parody-jazz, from spoken choral passages to melodious solos. The ‘neo-expressionist’ style of this work did not prevent Blomdahl from continuing his musicianly and more traditionally polyphonic manner, as in the Chamber Concerto (1953) with its two playful movements, the first opening with a fugue. The ballet Sisyphos (1954) also has lively, effective music, such as the orgiastic final dance which, despite its schematic construction, shows the influence of The Rite of Spring.

Another ballet, Minotauros (1957), was preceded by the lyrically introvert Trio for clarinet, cello and piano (1955) and a second broadly built choral work, Anabase (1956), in which St John Perse’s poetic technique is mirrored in detailed, mosaic-like music. Blomdahl’s next major work was the ‘space opera’ Aniara (1957–8), his best-known composition. Sub-titled ‘a revue on man in time and space’, it treats, according to Blomdahl, ‘the relationship between individual and group in respect to time’. The revue-like form brings abrupt changes of style, ranging over sacred choral music, jazz, ecstatic vocalise, lyrical intimacy and mime; the electronic episodes, the first examples of Swedish work in the medium, caused great excitement.

Aniara was followed by two orchestral compositions, Fioriture and Forma ferritonans (written for an iron company), of which the latter shows a move towards cluster technique in its development from a slow introduction to a dynamic climax. Then came a second opera, Herr von Hancken (1962–3), a reflection less on time than on a specific, psychologically curious destiny; it is a kind of chamber-musical tragedy in buffo form. Blomdahl’s last work was the intense electronic sound-picture Altisonans, composed at the Stockholm Electronic Studio he had helped to establish. At his death he was working on another opera with electronic features, Sagan om den stora datan (‘The Tale of the Big Computer’).

Throughout his life Blomdahl was engaged in debate on Swedish musical life. Two questions concerned him particularly: the role of new music and the improvement of institutions. In spite of the pessimism into which he fell for long periods, his achievement, made through his vigorous willingness to take the initiative, has few equals in the history of Swedish music.

WORKS

dramatic

Operas: Aniara (E. Lindegren, after H. Martinson), 1957–8, Stockholm, 1959; Herr von Hancken (Lindegren, after H. Bergman), 1962–3, Stockholm, 1965; Sagan om den stora datan [The Tale of the Big Computer] (after H. Alfvén), inc.

Ballets: Sisyphos (B. Åkesson, after Lindegren), 1954, Stockholm, 1957; Minotauros (Åkesson, K. Gundersen, after Lindegren), 1957, Stockholm, 1958; Spel för åtta [Game for Eight] (Åkesson), 1962, Stockholm, 1962

Incid music: Vaknatten (H. Åkerhielm), 1945

Film scores: Gycklarnas afton (I. Bergman), 1953; Så börjar livet (L. Nilsson), 1965

Radio scores: Agamemnons hemkomst (R. Enckell), 1949; Theseus (N. Kazantzakis), 1950; Hekube (Enckell), 1952; De trogna (J. Masefield), 1954; Mordet på Kiron (Enckell), 1958

other works

Orch: Symfoniska danser, 1939; Concert Ov., 1940; Va Conc., 1941; Sym. no.1, 1943; Conc. grosso, chbr orch, 1944; Conc., vn, str, 1946; Sym. no.2, 1947; Pastoralsvit, 1948; Prelude and Allegro, str, 1948; Sym. no.3: Facetter, 1950; Chamber Conc., pf, wind, perc, 1953; Fioriture, 1960; Forma ferritonans, 1961; suites from ballets and Vaknatten

Choral: I speglarnas sal [In the Hall of Mirrors] (Lindegren), reciter, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1951–2; Anabase (St. J. Perse), reciter, Bar, chorus, orch, 1956

Solo vocal: Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque (Catullus), T, gui, 1949; Dityramb (G. Ekelöf), Mez, pf, 1949; 5 canzone (Quasimodo, Arcangioli), A, pf, 1954; … resan i denna natt [… the journey in this night] (Lindegren), S, str orch, 1966

Inst: Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1938; Str Qt no.1, 1939; Suite, vc, pf, 1944; Little Suite, bn, pf, 1945; 3 Polyphonic Pieces, pf, 1945; Str Trio, 1945; Litet tema med variationer, pf, 1946; Str Qt no.2, 1948; Danssvit no.1, fl, str trio, perc, 1948; Danssvit no.2, cl, vc, perc, 1951; Trio, cl, vc, pf, 1955

Tape: Altisonans, 1966

Principal publisher: Schott

WRITINGS

‘Hindemiths kompositionslära’, Musikvärlden (1945), no.2, pp.48–54 (1946), no.9, pp.5–12

‘Ung svensk tonkonst’, Musikvärlden (1946), no.6, pp.162–4

with S.E. Bäck: ‘Två tonkonstnärer’, Prisma (1948), no.1, p.94

‘Tolvtonsteknik’, Musikrevy, v (1950), 233–5, 276–9

‘Facetter’, Modern nordisk musik, ed. I. Bengtsson (Stockholm, 1957), 168–76

‘Aniara’, The Modern Composer and his World: Stratford, ON, 1960, 102–6

‘In the Hall of Mirrors and Anabase’, The Composer’s Point of View, ed. R.S. Hines (Norman, OK, 1963/R), 138–50

‘En snak om min musik’, Musikalske selvportraetter (Copenhagen, 1966), 64–8

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Aiken: Karl-Birger Blomdahl (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1968)

Facetter: av och om Karl-Birger Blomdahl (Stockholm, 1970)

R.K. Inglefield: ‘Karl-Birger Blomdahl: a Portrait’, MQ, lviii (1972), 67–81

G. Bucht: ‘Karl-Birger Blomdahl som musikdramatiker’, Operan 200 år (Stockholm, 1973), 165–78

A.E. Ostrander: Style in the Orchestral Works of Karl-Birger Blomdahl (diss., Indiana U., 1973)

C. Tobeck: ‘Aniara: ett skri av förtvivlan – en vädjan om besinning’, Nutida musik, xxvii/4 (1994–5), 24–36

J.W. Morthenson: ‘Karl-Birger Blomdahl’, Tonsättare om tonsättare (Stockholm, 1993), 89–97

B. Wallner: ‘Karl-Birger Blomdahl’, Musiken i Sverige, iv: Konstmusik, folkmusik, populärmusik 1920–1990, ed. L. Jonsson (Stockholm, 1994), 445ff

BO WALLNER, HANS ÅSTRAND

Blome [Bloym]

(fl c1430–60). English composer. His music suggests that he was a slightly younger contemporary of Dunstaple. Four settings of the Ordinary of the Mass survive, all as unica, in the ‘English’ fascicles of the Trent manuscripts (I-TRmp) (second stratum) and the Aosta manuscript (I-AO); Meyer-Eller (i, pp. 72–85) has proposed that several more works in I-AO may be by Blome. His music is usually sonorous, with interesting use of syncopation, but is at times rhythmically stiff and dissonant (although some passages are corrupt). Only I-AO calls him ‘Blome’, but he is probably the Richard Blome listed as an extra fifth clerk in the College of the Holy Trinity, Arundel, in 1455–6, and as Instructor of the Choristers there in 1458–9.

WORKS

Gloria, 3vv, I-TRmp 92 (‘Bloymi’ paired with Credo by scribe but related to it only in mode; no chant)

Credo, 3vv, TRmp 92; ed. in Meyer-Eller, ii, 77 (text shared between i and ii; no chant)

Sanctus, 3vv, TRmp 87; ed. in Meyer-Eller, ii, 90 (no chant)

Sanctus, 3vv, AO; ed. in Meyer-Eller, ii, 38 (Sarum Sanctus no.5 in iii, largely unornamented)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.L. Trowell: Music under the Later Plantagenets (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1960), i, 32–62 passim; ii, 175, 301–2

R. Bowers and W. Summers: ‘Arundel, the Castle, Archives of the Duchy of Norfolk, A340’, in R. Bowers and A. Wathey: ‘New Sources of English Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Polyphony’, EMH, iv (1984), 298–346

S. Meyer-Eller: Musikalischer Satz und Überlieferung von Messensätzen des 15. Jahrhunderts: die Ordinariumsvertonungen der Handschriften Aosta 15 und Trient 87/92 (Munich, 1989)

D. Skinner: Nicholas Ludford (c1490–1557): a Biography and Critical Edition of the Antiphons, with a Study of the Collegiate Chapel of the Holy Trinity, Arundel, under the Mastership of Edward Higgons, and a History of the Caius and Lambeth Choirbooks (diss, U. of Oxford, 1995), 95, 101, 104

BRIAN TROWELL

Blomstedt, Herbert (Thorson)

(b Springfield, MA, 11 July 1927). Swedish conductor. After early lessons in conducting at the Swedish Royal College of Music (1945–50) under Tor Mann, and in musicology at the University of Uppsala (1948–52) under Carl-Allan Moberg, Blomstedt studied contemporary music with John Cage at Darmstadt and Renaissance and Baroque performance practice at the Schola Cantorum in Basle. He subsequently studied conducting with Markevitch at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1950–55), with Jean Morel at the Juilliard School of Music (1953) and with Bernstein at Tanglewood (1953), winning the Koussevitzky Prize that year. He made his professional début with the Stockholm PO in 1954. Blomstedt has since held numerous musical directorships, including the Norrköping SO (1954–61), Oslo PO (1962–7), Danish RSO (1967–77), Dresden Staatskapelle (1975–85) and Swedish RSO (1977–83). In 1984 Blomstedt first appeared with the San Francisco SO, and a year later was appointed its music director, holding that position until 1995 and thereafter named conductor laureate. He significantly strengthened the musical and analytical rigour of the orchestra, and gave premières of works by Carter, Danielpour, Harbison, Perle and Wuorinen, winning Columbia University's Ditson Award for distinguished service to American music in 1992. He has remained a lifelong champion of Scandinavian composers, among them Bäck, Jørgensen, Lidholm, Norgärd, Nørholm and Pettersson. He is also an admired exponent of Bartók, Berwald (editing the Sinfonie singulière for Bärenreiter in 1965), Hindemith, Nielsen, Sibelius and Richard Strauss, and has recorded cycles of symphonies by Beethoven, Nielsen, Schubert and Sibelius. In 1996 Blomstedt was appointed music director of the NDR SO in Hamburg and in 1998 of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His conducting is distinguished by rhythmic clarity and control, structural insight and a powerful sense of drama. Blomstedt's years in San Francisco seem also to have induced a deeper warmth and a more eloquent sense of phrase in his music-making.

CHARLES BARBER

Blondeau, Pierre

(fl Paris, 1st half of the 16th century). French lutenist. He was a singer at the Ste Chapelle in 1506, and in 1532 was paid as a music copyist for the royal chapel. Attaingnant printed a Pavane Blondeau and several pieces for lute in the same style signed ‘P.B.’ in Dixhuit basses dances (Paris, 1529/30; ed. in Société de musique d’autrefois, textes musicaux, ii, Neuilly, 1964). Possibly Blondeau served the printer in an editorial capacity. The ‘Pierre Blondeau, maître joueur d’instruments’, cited in a rent contract of 1550, and again as the father of children in baptismal records of 1551 and 1553, may be identifiable with the earlier one or his namesake.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Heartz: ‘Mary Magdalen, Lutenist’, JLSA, v (1972), 52–67

DANIEL HEARTZ

Blondeau, Pierre-Auguste-Louis

(b Paris, 15 Oct 1786; d Montargis, 14 April 1863). French viola player and composer. He studied the violin with Baillot and composition with Gossec and Méhul at the Paris Conservatoire and in 1808 won the Prix de Rome with his cantata Marie Stuart. He composed a Te Deum in honour of Napoleon, which was played in Rome in 1810; his opera Così si fa a’ gelosi was performed in Perugia in 1812 and a ballet Almanzor in Lisbon in 1814. He played the viola in the Paris Opéra orchestra from 1816 until 1842, devoting his remaining time to composition, theoretical writing and translation. His compositions include numerous sacred vocal works, chamber music and some orchestral pieces. His most important writings are his vivid account of his stay in Italy as one of the first Prix de Rome scholars and his Histoire de la musique moderne (1847); besides treatises on harmony and counterpoint, he wrote studies of Palestrina and Marcello, as well as poetry and translations. Neither as composer nor as teacher did Blondeau achieve celebrity in Paris. Blanchard referred to his ‘misplaced knowledge’ and the tendency of his music to modulate freely and frequently. As a memoirist, however, he is the equal of many of his literary contemporaries.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

Così si fa a’ gelosi (ob, 2), Perugia, 1812

Almanzor (ballet, ?3), Lisbon, 1814

La répétition (divertissement, 1, Blondeau), doubtful attrib.

Choruses for Esther, vv, orch, doubtful attrib.

vocal

Masses: A Sancta Cecilia, 6vv, orch, 1811, MS; Mass, 7vv, orch, 1812, MS; Mass, 8vv, org, 1812, MS

Other choral works: TeD, 4vv, orch, 1810; TeD, 4vv, orch, 1846; TeD, 5vv, orch, 30 cants., MS, incl. Marie Stuart (E. de Jouy), 1808 (pubd in Journal hebdomadaire, 1809, nos.45–8); 15 offs, 5vv, orch

11 romances (some pubd); chansonnettes

instrumental

Orch: 3 ovs., orch, perf., 1815, MS; Cl Conc., F (n.d.); Bn Conc., C (n.d.); Pf Conc.; Hn Conc., 1810, MS; 2 hn concs., lost

Chbr: Str qnt (1862); 24 str qts in 8 bks (n.d.); 3 bks of trios, 2 vn, bc/vn, va, bc (n.d.); 3 duos, 2 vn, bc, op.18; 12 bks of duos, various insts (n.d.); 2 bks of sonatas, vn, bc (1st bk, op.20, n.d.); 3 bks of nocturnes, pf, vn (n.d.); 3 airs variés, vn (n.d.); pf pieces (n.d.); 3 bks of figured bass; 3 str qts (n.d.) [from Beethoven: pf sonatas, op.2, nos.1–3]

WRITINGS

Notice sur Palestrina, sur ses ouvrages, sur son époque, sur son style (Paris, 1809)

Traité des principes élémentaires et constitutifs de la musique (Paris, 1843–4)

Traité du contrepoint, de l’imitation et de la fugue (Paris, 1843–4)

Traité d’harmonie (Paris, 1843–4)

Histoire de la musique moderne, depuis le premier siècle de l’ère chrétienne jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1847)

Revue musicale ou nouvelle méthode de chant (Paris, n.d.)

Vie de Benedetto Marcello (MS, F-Pn)

Voyage d'un musicien en Italie (Paris, 1809–12), ed. J.-M. Fauquet (Liège, 1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (P. Barthélemy)

FétisB

HUGH MACDONALD

Blondel, Jorge Urrutia.

See Urrutia blondel, jorge.

Blondel, Louis-Nicolas

(fl 2nd half of the 17th century). French composer and musician. He was a musician in the royal chapel in Paris. He published Motets à deux, trois et quatre parties, avec la basse-continue, propres pour les concerts et pour toutes les dames religieuses (Paris, 1671). The 12 pieces, of the petit motet type, have well-constructed melodic lines and interesting rhythms and are in a style free of the dance elements that influenced much French church music of the late 17th century. It has been suggested that these pieces may be by Simon Blondel, musician ordinary of the king also at that time. There is also an air for solo voice and continuo in Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire de différents auteurs (Paris, 1702). Three untitled compositions ascribed to ‘Mounsieur Blondill’ appear at the end of a manuscript partbook (GB-BEcr TW 1172); they are in binary form, common time and D minor, and may be by Louis-Nicolas Blondel or by another composer named Blondill or Blondhill.

WILLIAM HAYS

Blondel de Nesle

(fl 1180–1200). French trouvère. Although the legend recounting the part he supposedly played in freeing King Richard the Lionheart from captivity is traceable to manuscripts of the 13th century, it is accurate only with respect to period. The trouvère's identity is a matter for speculation. Because the poet is never named Messire or Monseignor in the manuscripts, he would seem to be at most a younger son of lesser nobility, and perhaps a commoner. On the other hand, it has also been suggested that he is identifiable with the powerful Jehan II de Nesle. Quant je plus sui and Tant ai en chantant are dedicated to Conon de Béthune, and therefore antedate 1200, while A l’entree de la saison is sent to Gace Brulé, another of the oldest generation of trouvères. On this basis, Blondel's date of birth may be estimated c1155–60. Features of dialect in the poems indicate that he was a native of Picardy, his home most likely being the town of Nesle in the département of Somme, lying between Péronne and Saint Quentin.

Works by Blondel are among the most widespread within the trouvère repertory, several surviving in ten or more manuscripts. Quant je plus sui, the model for four other chansons, is among the famous works quoted by Gilles de Vies Maisons (in R.1252 – other quotations being drawn from poems by Gace Brulé and the Chastelain de Couci). Li plus se plaint provided the model for three other chansons, and four or five other poems by Blondel were the subject of later imitations. Gautier de Coincy based four of his Miracles de Nostre Dame on Amours dont sui espris, Bien doit chanter, Li plus se plaint and Quant je plus sui. Bien doit chanter apparently also provided the basis for Ich hôrte wol ein merlîkin singen by Ulrich von Gutenberg. Blondel's name is coupled with those of the Chastelain de Couci and Tristan by Eustache Le Peintre de Reims, who (in R.2116) compared himself with these ideal representatives of the tradition of courtly love.

Blondel displayed a strong preference for isometric strophes, although a few of his poems have three different line lengths to the strophe, while one has five. In addition to the common heptasyllabic, octosyllabic and decasyllabic verses, there are others that are rare. Puis qu'Amours provides the only example of an isometric nonosyllabic poem in the repertory. Amours dont sui espris and Ma joie me semont comprise isometric hexasyllabic strophes, as do De la plus douce amour, whose authenticity has been questioned, and R.1163, a work of contested authorship that is attributed to Blondel only in an unreliable manuscript. Amours dont sui espris shares its form and melody with Purgator criminum and Procurans odium, while Ma joie me semont is similarly related to Ver pacis aperit, written for the coronation of Philippe II Auguste in 1179. Because the latter date is suspiciously early for Blondel, and because isometric hexasyllables constitute less than 3% of the trouvère repertory, these examples probably demonstrate the influence of conductus on secular song. (The temporal priority of Ver pacis has also been claimed on the basis of a supposed quotation from the antiphon Unxerunt Salomonem.)

Most of the original melodies to Blondel's poems are cast in bar form, although Tant ain et veul et desir is non-repetitive, and Puis qu'Amours has the structure ABCDBEF. More often than not there is some repetition, strict or varied, within the cauda. There is considerable variety to the modal constructions, and several of these vary according to different manuscript readings. Two readings of J'ain par costume place the final at an extraordinarily high point within the ambitus. The late setting of Li plus se plaint in F-Pn fr.24406 is unusual in that the melody begins an 11th above the final; the late setting of Se savoient mon tourment in F-Pa 5198 has an even more extended range of a 12th. Most melodies display a fairly strong sense of tonal centre, but Coment que d'amours, De mon desir and Tant ai en chantant raise the expectation of a final at the lower part of the ambitus, while ending at or above the centre. Portions of Amours dont sui espris are notated in 2nd mode in F-Pn fr.846, and one suspects that the rhythmic solution valid for Ver pacis is applicable also to Ma joie me semont. A late setting of De la plus douce amour in F-Pn fr.844 is in 1st mode with upbeat, the notation being fully mensural. Elements of regularity in the construction of other chansons are few, and these vary from the fairly simple Se savoient mon tourment to the much more florid Cuers desirous apaie.

Sources, MS

WORKS

Editions: Trouvères-Melodien, ed. H. van der Werf, MMMA, xi–xii (1977–9), iTrouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete and Comparative Edition, ed. H. Tischler, CMM, cvii (1997)

Abbreviations: (T) etc

MS (using Schwan sigla:

see Sources, ms) in which a late setting of a poem occurs

(nm)

no music

Ains que la fueille descende, R.628 (T)

A l'entrant d'esté que li tens s'agence, R.620 [model for: Oede de la Couroierie, ‘Trop ai longuement fait’, R.210; Anon., Quant Deus ot formé’, R.249], (R)

A l'entree de la saison, R.1897

Amours dont suit espris, R.1545 [contrafactum: Anon., ‘Purgator criminum’; Anon., ‘Procurans odium’; Anon., ‘Suspirat spiritus’; Gautier de Coincy, ‘Amours dont sui espris/De chanter’, R.1546] (V)

Bien doit chanter cui fine Amours adrece, R.482 [model for: Gautier de Coincy, ‘Qui que face rotrouenge novele’, R.603 = 748; Anon., ‘Bien deust chanter’, R.1102b]

Chanter m'estuet, car joie ai recouvree, R.551 (V)

Coment que d'amours me deuille, R.1007 (R, V)

Cuers desirous apaie, R.110 (a)

De mon desir ne sai mon mieus eslire, R.1497 (V) (replaces 1st strophe of Li plus se plaint with a new one, and uses certain later strophes of that poem; melodically independent)

En tous tens que vente bise, R.1618

J'ain par costume et par us, R.2124 (R, V)

Li plus se plaint d'Amours, mais je n'os dire, R.1495 = 1950 [model for: Gautier de Coincy, ‘Je pour iver, pour noif ne pour gelee’, R.520; Anon., ‘Chanter m'estuet, car nel doi contredire’, R.1491 (nm); Anon., ‘Se de chanter me peüsse escondire’, R.1496 (nm)] (R, V)

Li rossignous a noncié la novele, R.601

Ma joie me semont, R.1924 [contrafactum: Walter of Châtillon, ‘Ver pacis aperit’] (V)

Mes cuers me fait comencier, R.1269

Onques mais nus hons ne chanta, R.3

Puis qu'Amours dont m'otroie a chanter, R.779 (V)

Quant je plus sui en paor de ma vie, R.1227 [model for: Thibaut IV, ‘Cuens, je vous part’, R.1097; Anon., ‘Gent de France’, R.1147; Anon., ‘Un jeu vous part, Andreu’, R.1187 (nm); Anon., ‘Quant je sui plus en perilleuse vie’, R.1236 (nm)] (V); ed. in NOHM, ii (2/1990), 369

Qui que soit de joie partis, R.1585

S'Amours veut que mes chans remaigne, R.120 (R)

Se savoient mon tourment, R.742 (K, N, P, X, V)

Tant ai en chantant proié, R.1095 (R, V)

Tant ain et veul et desir, R.1399

doubtful works

A la douçor d'esté qui reverdoie, R.1754 (V)

Cil qui tous les maus essaie, R.111 (V)

De la plus douce amour, R.1953 (M)

Ja de chanter en ma vie, R.1229

Mout se feist bon tenir de chanter, R.802 (nm)

Quant voi le tens felon rassoagier, R.1297, A 69

Rose ne lis ne me done talent, R.736 (K, N, P, X)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Wiese: Die Lieder des Blondel de Nesle: kritische Ausgabe nach allen Handschriften (Dresden, 1904)

F. Gennrich, ed.: Die altfranzösische Rotrouenge (Halle, 1925)

F. Gennrich: Grundriss einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes als Grundlage einer musikalischen – Formenlehre des Liedes (Halle, 1932/R)

U. Aarburg: Die Melodien Blondels de Nesle (diss., U. of Frankfurt, 1946)

R. Dragonetti: La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: contribution à l'étude de la rhétorique mediévale (Bruges, 1960/R)

F. Gennrich, ed.: Die Kontrafaktur im Liedschaffen des Mittelalters, SMM, xii (1965)

H. van der Werf: The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: a Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972)

H. Tischler: ‘Metrum und Rhythmus in der französischen Poesie und Musik des 13. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, xxxii (1975), 72–80

H. Tischler: ‘Trouvère Songs: the Evolution of their Poetic and Musical Styles’, MQ, lxxii (1986), 329–40

Y.G. Lepage, ed.: L'oeuvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle (Paris, 1994)

For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

THEODORE KARP

Blondi [Blondy, Blonde], Michel

(b ?Paris, ?1676; d Paris, 6 Aug 1739). French dancer and choreographer. His dancing-master father, Antoine, married the sister of Pierre Beauchamp, with whom Michel is said to have studied. References before about 1728 to a Blondi as choreographer probably signify Antoine (d 20 July 1740), who survived his son. Michel was a dancer at the Paris Opéra from 1690 to 1729, when he became a maître de ballet, responsible for the disposition of dance in each opera produced. He held this post until his death. Nemeitz stated that he also directed entr'acte ballets at the Jesuit Collége Louis le Grand. He taught Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo, Marie Sallé and, allegedly, Franz Hilverding van Wewen. Despite Noverre's claim that Blondi did not teach his students to read dance notation, as a member of the Académie Royale de Danse, Blondi signed a resolution condemning Pierre Rameau's notation system; he preferred the Beauchamp-Feuillet system, partly for its closer alliance with the music (Mercure de France, September 1732). He was admired for his expressive dancing and the variety in his choreographies: an examination of some of his colourful character dances suggests that he was inspired by their music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Nemeitz: Le séjour de Paris (Leiden, 1727), i, 72, 107

P. Rameau: Le maître à danser (Paris, 1725/R; Eng. trans. 1728, 2/1732)

J.-G. Noverre: Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (Lyons and Stuttgart, 1760, 2/1783, enlarged 1803 as Lettres sur la danse, i; Eng. trans., 1966), 139

I. Ferguson: ‘Notes on the Blondy Family’, Dancing Times, lxxiii (1983), 368–9

M. Inglehearn: ‘Blondy, Michel’, International Dictionary of Ballet, ed. M. Bremser (Detroit, 1993)

SARAH McCLEAVE

Blondie.

American rock group. Its key members, Deborah Harry (b Miami, 1 July 1945; vocals) and Christopher Stein (b New York, 5 Jan 1950; electric guitar), had been part of the artistic network centred on the CBGBs club in New York in the early 1970s and their first recordings, such as Rip her to Shreds (1977), were inspired by a post-Warhol sensibility. In 1978 Blondie was teamed with the producer Mike Chapman, whose previous productions included the British pop groups Mud and Smokie. His attention to detail brought international hits like Sunday Girl (1979), Heart of Glass (1979), Atomic (1980), The Tide is High (1980) and Rapture (1981), several of which were composed by Harry and Stein. Although Blondie is often described as part of the punk rock movement, the group's most successful music was more a highly skilled form of ‘power pop’, which featured Harry's deadpan soprano and Marilyn Monroe-like visual image, and Stein's pointed arrangements of quirky, lightweight songs.

The group was dissolved in 1983 and Harry subsequently pursued a career as a solo singer in collaboration with Stein as songwriter, bandleader and record producer. In 1999 the band reformed to release an album of new material called No Exit; the first single from the album, Maria, made number one in the UK.

DAVE LAING

Blondy, Alpha [Seydou Kone]

(b Dimbokro, Côte d'Ivoire, 1 Jan 1953). West African singer. He is known for his performances of Afro-Reggae. He and his band Solar System sing in French, English, Arabic, Hebrew and Dioula. Unlike the lyrics of Jamaican reggae, Blondy's lyrics are primarily political; his songs often concern issues of freedom, unity and social revolution. His first single, Brigadier Sabari, documents his experience of being arrested in Abidjan in the 1980s and his subsequent mistreatment by the police. He received the Senghor prize for ‘Best African Group’ in 1986, and in the same year one of his most popular recordings, Jerusalem, was released; this recording and Apartheid is Nazism established his position as a leading European recording artist. After his successful tour of North America many regarded Blondy as the successor to Bob Marley.

recordings

Cocody Rock, Pathé Marconi EMI 24 0233 1 (1984)

Apartheid is Nazism, Pathé Marconi EMI 24 0449 1 (1985)

Jerusalem, Pathé Marconi EMI 24 0664 1 (1986)

Revolution, Pathé Marconi EMI 74 8655 1 (1987)

Prophet, Pathé Marconi EMI 79 1793 1 (1989)

Masada, Pathé Marconi EMI 79 8620 2 (1992)

Dieu, Alpha Blondy Solar System Productions EMI 829847 2 (1994)

Best of Alpha Blondy, Shanachie 43075 (1990)

GREGORY F. BARZ

Blood, Sweat and Tears.

American jazz-rock group. Emanating from the late 1960s melting pot, they were one of the earliest bands to characterize the jazz-rock idiom. Formed in 1967 by Al Kooper (b 1944; vocals and keyboards), Steve Katz (b 1945; guitar) and Bobby Colomby (b 1944; drums), the group blended original composition with their own stylized arrangements of jazz, country, rock and rhythm and blues material. Jazz standards such as Billie Holiday's God bless the child and Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage sat beside versions of songs by Laura Nyro (And When I Die, He's a runner), Brenda Holloway (You've made me so very happy), Lennon and McCartney (Got to get you into my life) and Jagger and Richards (Sympathy for the Devil). Much of the original material framing these came from Katz and the band's second and longest serving singer, the Canadian David Clayton-Thomas, who joined for the second, best-selling and Grammy award-winning album Blood, Sweat and Tears (Col., 1968). Thomas is the writer of the much-covered ‘Spinning Wheel’ from this album, as well as the fiery ‘Lucretia MacEvil’ and ‘Go Down Gamblin'’.

Blood, Sweat and Tears produced arrangements enriched with jazz solos which in turn often signalled a change in tempo or feel, creating multi-sectioned pieces rather than just straightforward songs. ‘Spinning Wheel’ is a fine example of this, as is their version of Joe Cocker's ‘Something's coming on’ from Blood, Sweat and Tears 3 (Col., 1970). Discussing the overall style of Blood, Sweat and Tears, Thomas said that the band took works from other genres and ‘turned them over to Juilliard and Berkeley trained jazz arrangers and came up with this hybrid – this child of many worlds’.

These arrangers were largely the horn players. As a section, the horns underwent something of a revolution with Blood, Sweat and Tears. Following the simple homophonic stabs in the soul bands of James Brown and Otis Redding, theirs was like a big-band sound in miniature with jazzy, contrapuntal lines both backing the vocals and featuring as melodic interludes. From an ever-changing personnel, the members have included Randy Brecker (trumpet), Lew Soloff (trumpet) and Tom Malone (trombone), as well as the rhythm players Larry Willis (keyboards), Mike Stern (guitar) and Don Alias (percussion).

Diminished sales heralded the end of a nine-album partnership with Columbia in 1976. The band effectively split after Brand New Day (ABC, 1977), although Thomas has fronted Blood, Sweat and Tears intermittently since then.

GEORGE DOUBLE

Bloom, Robert

(b Pittsburgh, 3 May 1908; d Cincinnati, 13 Feb 1994). American oboist. From the age of 19 he studied with the founder of the American school of oboe playing, Marcel Tabuteau, at the Curtis Institute, Philadelphia. In 1930 he received his first appointment as assistant principal, and later solo, english horn in the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. In 1946 he was invited as a founding member of the NBC SO, where for six years he played principal oboe under Toscanini. As a core member of the Bach Aria Group from its foundation by William Scheide in 1946 until 1980, Bloom played an important part in the revival of Baroque music in post-war America, and is remembered above all for his poised performances of Bach and tasteful ornamentation. Bloom was also eager to explore new oboe music; he played in an early US performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet and inspired numerous compositions, including Quincy Porter’s Quintet for oboe and strings and Winter’s Past by Wayne Barlow. He was awarded an honorary MMus from Yale University in 1971. Bloom composed a number of short works for oboe and taught at several of America’s leading educational institutions, where his pupils included Bert Lucarelli, Ray Still and Allan Vogel. His wife Sara Lambert Bloom has edited a complete collection of Bloom's compositions and editions of oboe music, The Robert Bloom Collection (New Haven, 1998), and will soon re-release important recordings from his eventful career.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Bloom: ‘A Tribute to Robert Bloom’, Double Reed, xi/3 (1988), 11–21

R. Woodhams: ‘Robert Bloom, Eminent American Oboist’, The Instrumentalist, xliv/4 (1989–90), 24–30

GEOFFREY BURGESS

Bloomfield, Fannie.

See Zeisler, Fannie.

Bloomington.

American city in Indiana, site of the Indiana University School of Music.

Blossom Music Center.

Concert venue opened in 1968 in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland; it is the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Blount, Herman ‘Sonny’.

See Sun Ra.

Blow, John

(b Newark, Notts., bap. 23 Feb 1648/9; dWestminster, London, 1 Oct 1708). English composer, organist and teacher. By his mid-20s he had become the foremost musician in England, and in later years he was the elder statesman of the Restoration school, whose chief luminary was Henry Purcell.

2. Character and portraits.

BRUCE WOOD

1. Life.

Blow's origins were humble. He was the second child of Henry and Katherine Blow, who were married at Newark in 1646. Burney and Hawkins both stated that he was born at North Collingham, Nottinghamshire, but the parish registers there do not mention anyone named Blow, whereas those at Newark record the baptisms of Blow and of his brother and sister, the marriage of his parents, and the burial of his father; moreover, the register of Lambeth degrees notes that in 1677, on taking his doctorate, he himself declared on oath that his birthplace was ‘the faithful borough of Newark’. It is likely that he was one of the six music scholars at the Magnus Song School, Newark, and he was among five boys from Newark and Lincoln whom Henry Cooke conscripted during winter 1660–61 into the choir of the Chapel Royal; there his contemporaries included Pelham Humfrey, Robert Smith (ii), Thomas Tudway, William Turner and Michael Wise. He showed early promise in composition: while he was still a chorister at least three of his anthems (I will magnify thee, Lord, rebuke me not and Lord, thou hast been our refuge) were in the chapel repertory, their texts being included in the second edition of James Clifford's The Divine Services and Anthems, printed in January 1664 (the music is lost). Also from this period is I will always give thanks unto the Lord, composed jointly by Humfrey, Blow and Turner and designated the ‘Club Anthem’ because, as Boyce explained, it was conceived ‘as a memorial of their fraternal esteem and friendship’.

Late in 1664, when Blow's voice broke, he remained in the charge of Cooke. He presumably continued his musical studies under Christopher Gibbons, one of the chapel organists, and possibly also assisted John Hingeston, the royal instrument keeper (as Purcell was later to do). He also continued singing, though only informally: on 21 August 1667, at Samuel Pepys's home, he performed trios with two other former choristers, one of whom, Tom Edwards, was by now servant to Pepys; the latter admired their ‘extraordinary skill’, presumably in sight-reading, but not their adolescent voices, which, he observed, were so badly out of tune they ‘would make a man mad’.

In December 1668 came Blow's first formal appointment, as organist of Westminster Abbey in succession to Albert Bryne. His first extant anthem of known date, Oh Lord, I have sinned, was written in 1670 for the funeral of the Duke of Albermarle (formerly General Monck). January 1669 brought his first post at court, as musician for the virginals, and in 1671 he served as a supernumerary organist when the Chapel Royal moved to Windsor for the summer. He was also increasingly prominent among musicians in the city: by 1672 he was an assistant of a guild, the Corporation of Music, becoming one of its annual wardens in 1673 and again in 1676. On 16 March 1673/4 he was sworn a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in succession to Roger Hill. Further important appointments followed rapidly. In July 1674 he succeeded Humfrey, whose will he had witnessed three months earlier, both as Master of the Children of the Chapel and as composer-in-ordinary for voices in the Private Music; and in October 1676 he succeeded Christopher Gibbons as one of the three organists of the Chapel Royal. In September 1674 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Edward Braddock, Master of the Choristers of Westminster Abbey and a Gentleman, and subsequently also Clerk of the Cheque, of the Chapel Royal. They had five children, of which only the three daughters survived their father; of the sons, Henry, the first-born, died in infancy, and John, ‘a youth of great Forwardness and extraordinary Hopes’, died in 1693, aged 15. Elizabeth Blow died in childbirth in October 1683; Blow was then living in the Great Sanctuary at Westminster, where he continued paying rates until his death. He never remarried.

As Master of the Children of the Chapel, Blow exercised a powerful influence over several generations of budding musicians who were choristers there, including William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke (i), Daniel Purcell, Henry Hall (i), John Walter, Francis Pigott, James Hesletine, John Robinson, Vaughan Richardson and Bernard Gates. His duties, being domestic as well as musical, were onerous, but they did not sap his creative energies: during the 1670s he produced an impressive quantity of sacred music, including about 30 anthems (almost half of them elaborate examples with instrumental symphonies and ritornellos), several services, and nine Latin motets presumably intended for private devotional use. In December 1677 the first Lambeth degree of Doctor of Music was conferred upon him by the dean and chapter of Canterbury (the see being vacant), a signal recognition of his pre-eminence as a church musician. At Michaelmas 1679 he created a vacancy for the young Purcell by resigning as organist of Westminster Abbey. The two men shared a close professional relationship and, it appears, a lifelong friendship; in 1682 Purcell joined Blow as one of the three organists of the chapel (the third being William Child), and in 1684 the two of them successfully championed Father Smith in his ‘battle of the organs’ with Renatus Harris at the Temple Church.

Blow's output of church music continued to be substantial during the 1680s, but he was also increasingly involved in secular composition; he turned out at least one ode for the court, and sometimes two or three, nearly every year from 1678 onwards (and probably earlier), as well as occasional works for other events, including the Oxford Act on two occasions during the 1670s and St Cecilia's Day in 1684, while songs of his appeared in published collections from 1678 onwards. In addition to these manifold activities, he accepted a further position at court: from Michaelmas 1682 he shared with Nicholas Staggins, the Master of the King's Music, the somewhat nebulous and apparently unremunerated responsibilities of ‘musician in ordinary for the composition and practise for the violins’ (for which group Purcell was the officially designated composer). Blow also became involved with dramatic music; his masque Venus and Adonis was performed at court, probably in 1683, and in April that year he and Staggins applied for a royal licence ‘for the erecting [?creating] an Academy or Opera of Musick, & performing or causing to be performed therein their Musicall compositions’, though nothing more is heard of this project.

For the coronation of James II, in 1685, Blow provided three of the eight anthems, including God spake sometime in visions, a symphony anthem on the grandest scale. Four years later, when William and Mary were crowned, the music was generally less lavish, the largest of Blow's three contributions being the comparatively modest The Lord God is a sun and a shield. In 1687 he filled an unexpected vacancy, caused by the sudden death of Michael Wise, as Almoner and Master of the Choristers of St Paul's Cathedral. In this capacity he began by reconstituting the choir, disbanded since the Fire of London; once services began, initially in temporary accommodation but from 1697 in Wren's new cathedral, Blow's duties must have become heavier, but he continued to discharge them until 1703, when he resigned in favour of Jeremiah Clarke, who was already organist. On Purcell's death (1695) Blow succeeded to his post (held jointly with Father Smith) of ‘tuner of the regals, organs, virginals, flutes and recorders’ to the court, and resumed his own former appointment as organist of Westminster Abbey. In 1700 a new post at court, that of Composer for the Chapel Royal, was established for him; he retained this and all his other royal appointments, and continued serving as Abbey organist, until his death.

During the years that followed the Revolution of 1688 Blow continued to meet many of the musical needs of the court, setting New Year odes and sharing with Staggins the chore of providing those for the birthday of William III, while the more congenial task of composing odes for Queen Mary's birthday fell to Purcell's lot. It was Blow, too, who provided the Chapel Royal, now largely neglected by Purcell in favour of theatrical commissions, with the bulk of its new repertory. He was also busy outside the court. He set the ode for the St Cecilia's Day celebrations in 1691, 1695 (together with a grandiose orchestrally-accompanied Te Deum and Jubilate, which emulates Purcell's celebrated setting) and 1700. Large-scale anthems with instruments, banned from the Chapel Royal in 1691 on account of the king's austere tastes, were still required elsewhere on special occasions, and Blow enjoyed three such opportunities, composing I was glad for the consecration of the chancel of St Paul's Cathedral in 1697; Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord for the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy a year later, when he was steward of the festival; and O sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord for a charity concert held in 1701 in aid of relief and education for the poor. He also published numerous smaller pieces: he contributed to Musick's Hand-Maid (RISM 1689⁷), The Harpsichord Master and A Choice Collection of Ayres for the Harpsichord (both issued in London in 1700 and containing items by various of his pupils). In 1695 his No, Lesbia, no was one of the Three Elegies Upon the Much Lamented Loss of our Late Most Gracious Queen Mary (1695⁹) that he and Purcell issued as a joint tribute; An Ode, on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell (Mark how the lark and linnet sing), Blow's setting of a fulsome text by Dryden, was published the following year. Two subsequent publications by Blow emulated posthumous issues of Purcell's music: A Choice Collection of Lessons for the Harpsichord, Spinnet, &c (1698) borrowed even its title from a Purcell anthology that had appeared two years earlier, while Amphion Anglicus (1700), a substantial volume of his solo songs, vocal chamber music, and numbers excerpted from odes, was published by subscription following the successful example of Orpheus Britannicus.

After 1700 Blow's output diminished sharply. He produced his last court ode probably in 1701, but he continued to provide new anthems for the Chapel Royal, most of them in the archaic full style. At the coronation of Queen Anne, in 1702, three of his anthems were sung; none is extant, but their surviving texts suggest that they were merely abbreviated adaptations of pieces composed in 1689 (the more martial portions, originally associated with William III, being excised). On his death Blow was buried in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, close to Purcell's grave. In his will, made nine months previously, he had described himself as being already in failing health; after minor bequests to his servant, sister and niece, he left the residue of his estate to his three surviving daughters. During the reigns of Charles II and James II, Blow, like all the royal musicians, had received his salary and allowances only late and irregularly, but his diligent book-keeping must eventually have borne fruit, for at his death he had investments in eight leases at Westminster and owned a substantial country property at Hampton.

2. Character and portraits.

Hawkins, who was personally acquainted with some of Blow's later pupils, described him as ‘a very handsome man in his person, and remarkable for a gravity and decency in his deportment … a man of blameless morals and of a benevolent temper, but … not … totally free from the imputation of pride’. As for likenesses, the frontispiece of Amphion Anglicus (see illustration) is a fine engraving from life by R. White, and three other reputed portraits have survived. A half-length by John Riley, now in the possession of the family of Detmar Blow (reproduced in Grove3 and Grove4, when it was thought to be by Lely), certainly depicts Blow; a small head, attributed to Lely (formerly at GB-T), is more doubtful; whilst a head and shoulders attributed to Closterman, belonging in turn to W.H. Cummings and A.H. Mann but untraced after its subsequent sale at Sotheby's, bears scant resemblance to the White engraving (see portrait supplement to MT, xlix, 1908). The frontispiece to Amphion Anglicus includes a coat of arms, seemingly appropriated from the family of Bloywe; it is displayed also on Blow's monument in Westminster Abbey (to which it seems to have been belatedly added some time after 1723), together with an epitaph concluding: ‘His own Musical Compositions, (Especially his Church Musick) are a far nobler Monument to his Memory, than any other can be rais'd for Him’.

3. Works.

Blow himself declared that he valued his sacred music above his other output, a judgment endorsed by posterity; within this field his symphony anthems, composed for the Chapel Royal and scored for violin consort (two with additional woodwind), are of exceptional interest. If the earliest among them are indebted to Humfrey, later examples are restlessly exploratory, both in structure and also in the concertante treatment of the instruments. Though sometimes uneven, they form a body of work scarcely inferior to, and much less stereotyped than, the symphony anthems of Purcell, a comparison that discloses persistent mutual influence. In the finest of them, such as Blessed is the man that hath not walked, I said in the cutting off of my days and Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints, freshly inventive instrumental movements, expressive solos, close-knit ensembles and sonorous choruses unfold in lucid and satisfying patterns, and it is unfortunate that their scoring denies them regular liturgical performance (although one or two, shorn of their instrumental passages, remained in the cathedral repertory long after Blow's death). The verse anthems without instruments are mostly less striking, though they range widely in style, with solo writing of limpid simplicity in early examples such as Turn thee unto me (a work that Burney singled out to lambast for its supposed grammatical solecisms), arresting declamatory passages in The Lord, even the most mighty God, hath spoken and other anthems of the 1680s, and extravagant, sometimes vapid coloratura in later pieces such as Bring unto the Lord, O ye mighty; the choruses, mostly short and homophonic, are much less varied.

During the 1670s Blow also cultivated the old full anthem, creating webs of sonorous polyphony laced with resolute harmonic clashes, as in the brooding O Lord God of my salvation; the equally sombre five-part O God, wherefore art thou absent and the more brilliant God is our hope and strength, in eight parts, served as immediate models for two of Purcell's pieces in the same style, O God, thou hast cast us out and O Lord God of hosts. All these works include contrasting but still essentially polyphonic passages for verse ensemble. Blow returned to this genre towards the end of his life: My God, my God, look upon me (1697), a modest four-part anthem, ushered in a group of 14 further examples, which recall, sometimes vividly, their Jacobean and Caroline precursors. The full-anthem style is successfully combined with the techniques of the Chapel Royal symphony anthem in Blow's occasional anthems with orchestra. The first of these, God spake sometime in visions, scored for eight-part choir and strings, is a work of compelling grandeur and expressive power. In the flamboyant I was glad the orchestra includes trumpets, which enrich the choruses and add brilliant obbligato parts to one solo. Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord again includes a trumpet air but also, unusually in such a work, extended antiphonal exchanges among contrasting verse ensembles and the full choir. In O sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord, a fine piece in which statuesque choruses alternate with elaborate solos, an almost Handelian amplitude of gesture vividly illustrates how far Blow's musical language had evolved since his first adult anthems.

Blow was, for his period, an unusually prolific composer of services, although these are inferior to his anthems. His early settings, those selected by Boyce, are broadly syllabic and eschew text repetition after the manner of the short service, but exploit contrasts between the full choir and frequently regrouped upper and lower verse ensembles. The G major setting, though uneven, is the most notable. Bizarrely compendious, it includes all the main and alternative canticles except the Benedicite, a further setting of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in verse style, alternative common-time settings of the ante-Communion music, and the entire Communion service recomposed in triple time; nearly all these 19 movements share one head-motif. Despite its individuality, the work reveals Blow's familiarity with settings by his polyphonic forebears, especially in its array of ingenious canons (which are entirely absent from the E minor service); it was perhaps inspired by Child's Sharp Service, and served in its turn as the immediate model for Purcell's Service in B flat. The C major service, apparently a later composition, is less severe in style, encompassing florid passages. His morning and evening services for full choir, apparently associated with the full anthems of his late years and matching their austerity, are the last descendants of the Tudor and Jacobean short service (one example of which, that in G minor by Nathaniel Patrick, he painstakingly transcribed in score).

In the mid-1670s Blow composed nine sacred pieces to Latin texts; they are quite different from his anthems, being far more italianate, but no specific models have been identified. Their circulation in his lifetime was limited, and their context and purpose remain unknown. Seven of them are unremarkable duets with continuo accompaniment, four employing a ground bass. Two, however, both for five voices, are justly celebrated: Gloria Patri, qui creavit nos, an effective display of rhythmical declamation within contrapuntal textures, and Salvator mundi, an eloquent essay in the use of bold dissonance and pathetic chromaticism.

Although Blow's secular output represents a substantial achievement, only isolated works match the quality of his best sacred music. One such example is the subtly proportioned and tenderly lyrical Awake, awake, my lyre, a short ode written for the Oxford Act in the mid-1670s. It is very different from Blow's court odes, the earliest of which, composed in the late 1670s for New Year and for the king's birthday, are comparatively slight works. Building on foundations laid by Humfrey, they soon grow more complex in structure and more varied in style, but they contain little or none of the elaborate concerted writing that was already prominent in Blow's symphony anthems. In 1680, however, the commencement of Purcell's parallel series of court odes stimulated Blow to greater enterprise, resulting in a constant reciprocal traffic and a friendly rivalry in the music of the two men; it was Blow who, between 1681 and 1683, was first to introduce into the court ode a ground bass, a symphony in dancing compound time, and a solo for ‘that stupendious Base’ John Gostling. All these features are found in his 1684 Cecilian ode Begin the song, which in invention and craftsmanship outshines any of his court odes, although those composed later in the 1680s contain rich concerted writing as well as shapely instrumental movements, and show increasing concern with structural integration. After 1690 only a few of Blow's court odes survive intact, but his rivalry with Purcell persisted in other works: his 1691 Cecilian ode The glorious day is come, for instance, while emulating such works as Purcell's Dioclesian by employing brass and woodwind as well as strings, is the first English score with a notated kettledrum part. Blow's late odes include novelties of style as well as instrumentation, for example urbane italianate airs in slow triple metre and massive common-time contrapuntal choruses.

Blow's only dramatic work, Venus and Adonis, is another composition for the court, two of whose members (a former mistress of the king, and their natural daughter) were cast in leading roles. For these reasons, and because it gives prominence to picturesque dance numbers, Blow termed it a masque, though it is in all essentials a miniature all-sung opera, mingling elements inherited from Jacobean and Caroline court entertainments with others borrowed from France and Italy in a masterly and highly original synthesis. It exercised a seminal influence on Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, but Blow, regrettably, wrote nothing more for the stage save a few songs for inclusion in plays.

Blow composed well over 100 secular songs, duets and trios. Most of them were included in the published songbooks of the period, and almost a third reappeared in Amphion Anglicus (1700/R). Their style – lyrical, declamatory, florid, suave, vivacious, pathetic and dramatic – is as diverse as their quality. Simple minuet songs, for instance, may be as fresh as It is not that I love you less (The Self-Banish'd) or as insipid as Why does my Laura shun me? (The Grove), and duets as vigorous as the celebrated Go, perjur'd man or as contrived as its companion piece Go, perjur'd maid; and while the finest examples are the equal of anything in the period, in weaker ones the phrase structure lacks discipline and the tonal planning is often wayward. The two most ambitious of them are both elegies. No, Lesbia, no, on the death of Queen Mary, employs related ground basses in three of its four movements, but their treatment lacks rigour; though expressive, it is overshadowed by Purcell's two elegies for the Queen, with which it was published. The heartfelt Mark how the lark and linnet sing (An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell), for two countertenors and two recorders, eschews ostinato basses in favour of sustained and finely crafted counterpoint. Blow's 17 devotional songs are, as a group, no match for those of Purcell, but such examples as the solo O that mine eyes would melt into a flood and the dialogue How art thou fall'n from heav'n, O Lucifer combine sensitive declamatory writing with vivid musical imagery.

Blow showed little interest in instrumental chamber music. His solitary trio sonata, in A major, is thematically related to a symphony anthem in the same key, The Lord is my shepherd; though an early piece, it is notably italianate, lacking the Englishries of Purcell's sonatas. The Ground in G minor is conventional, but the powerful and inventive ‘Chacone’ in G relies less on ostinato technique than on the cumulative effect of increasing rhythmic activity. A keyboard version of the latter piece, in F, also survives. Blow's other harpsichord music, only about a quarter of which was published in his lifetime, comprises 12 suites, the same number of grounds (among them a fine technical showpiece in E minor), several independent preludes, and numerous single dance movements including effective arrangements of numbers from Venus and Adonis. Blow's output of organ music is the most substantial of his period. Most of it is thoughtful and polyphonic, florid passage-work being carefully controlled (as in the Double Verse in G, for example), and even the lighter pieces are dignified in tone. Archaisms and novelties are curiously mingled: several pieces contain strong Mixolydian inflections, but in one (a voluntary in A) these flank an arresting Neapolitan progression; the cornet voluntaries are among the earliest English examples of their type, yet elsewhere there are extended borrowings, only lightly reworked, from Frescobaldi. Blow's lifelong interest in the work of continental composers is further illustrated by transcriptions that he made in the 1670s of vocal chamber music by several Italian composers, of motets by Henry Dumont in the 1680s, and of organ pieces by Froberger, Reutter (i) and J.C. Fischer not long before his death.

A short manuscript treatise on continuo playing, which Blow presumably wrote in his capacity as a teacher, deals helpfully with keyboard realization, though not with the theorbo, on which the Chapel Royal choristers learnt figured bass. What purports to be another treatise of his, entitled Dr Blow's Rules for Composition (Lbl Add.30933), is merely a corrupt copy, made by an unknown hand, of John Coprario's Rules How to Compose (?before 1617).

In view of Blow's eminence as a composition teacher, Burney's vitriolic tirades about his musical language make ironic reading, particularly since his target was not Blow's occasional idiosyncracies but merely some of the stylistic commonplaces of his period. The diatribe sheds more light on its author than on its victim, and it did Blow's reputation little damage at the time, although it may long have discouraged systematic study of his music. During his lifetime his renown approached that of Purcell, despite the limelight in which the younger man basked as a successful theatrical composer. Even though Purcell's superior genius was widely recognized, Henry Sacheverell saluted him and Blow jointly (‘Hail, mighty Pair! Of Jubal's art / The greatest glory’), while their fellow composer Henry Hall framed a similar sentiment with an unexpected emphasis (‘Only Purcell e're shall equal Blow’). A balanced appraisal must acknowledge technical flaws in some of Blow's music: imperfect control of texture, aimlessness of melodic line in places, and occasional indecisiveness in harmonic and tonal planning – though these defects are usually local. A more general shortcoming is the unevenness of invention that mars even some of his finest scores. But his music, much of it steeped in the English polyphonic tradition, remains strongly individual and inventive; his ideas are mostly effective and sometimes truly memorable, and their working out, often searching, is at best thoroughly satisfying. His position as the most important composer among Purcell's contemporaries is unquestionable; his true stature approaches that of Purcell himself more closely than has generally been acknowledged.

WORKS

odes for other occasions

services

Edition:Cathedral Music, ed. W. Boyce (London, 1760–73) [B]

In A (TeD, Bs†, Jub, re, Cr, CanD, DeM, Mag†, Nunc†), GB-Cfm Mus.116†, Mus.117, B

In C (TeD, Jub, Cr, Mag†, Nunc†), Cfm†, Ob

In D (TeD, Jub), 1695, with tpts, str, Lbl

In D (TeD†, Jub†, San, Gl, Mag†, Nunc†), Cfm†; San, Gl, ed. in The Choir and Musical Record, xvii (1874)

In e (TeD, Bte, Jub, re, Cr, CanD, DeM), Cfm, (without Bte) B

In G (TeD, Bs, Jub, re [3 settings], Cr [3 settings], San [2 settings], Gl [2 settings], Mag [2 settings], Nunc [2 settings], CanD, DeM), Och, Lbl; Mag, Nunc (full with verse), ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1941)

Short services with chants to Venite: a (TeD, Jub, Mag, Nunc); d (TeD, Jub, Mag, Nunc), Mag, Nunc, ed. H. Statham and H.W. Shaw (London, 1958); F (TeD, Bs, Mag, Nunc), Mag, Nunc, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1971); g (TeD, Bs, Mag, Nunc), Cfm†, Lbl

[Evening service in B, verse, Lbl, attrib. Blow by W.H. Husk in Add.33288, is by Tudway]

anthems

verse unless otherwise stated

Editions:Cathedral Music, ed. W. Boyce (London, 1760–73) [no syms. or ritornellos] [B]Harmonia Sacra, ed. J. Page (London, c1800) [P]John Blow: 14 Full Anthems, ed. H.D. Statham (London, 1925) [S]John Blow: Coronation Anthems and Anthems with Strings, ed. A. Lewis and H.W. Shaw, MB, vii (1953/R) [LS]John Blow: Anthems II: Anthems with Orchestra, ed. B. Wood, MB, l (1984) [W i]John Blow: Anthems III: Anthems with Strings, ed. B. Wood, MB, lxiv (1993) [W ii]A Blow Anthology: 8 Anthems, ed. D.S. King (Oxford, 1996) [K]John Blow: Anthems IV: Anthems with Instruments, ed. B. Wood, MB, lxxiii (forthcoming) [W iii]

And I heard a great voice, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, LS, adapted as I was in the spirit

Arise, O Lord, A, T, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

Ascribe unto the Lord (2p. of O sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord)

Awake, awake, utter a song (Battle of Blenheim), 1704, A, T, B/SATB, lute, org, GB-Cfm

Behold, now praise the Lord, B/SSATB, org, Ckc

Behold, how good and joyful, A, T, B/SATB, org, Cfm

Behold, how good and joyful (Act of Union with Scotland), 1707, music lost, collab. Croft and Clarke

Behold, O God our defender (coronation of James II), 1685, full, SSATB, org, LS

Behold, O God our defender (as above, but adapted for coronation of William and Mary), 1689, full, SATB, org, LS

Be merciful unto me, A, T, B/SATB, org, US-AU

Be merciful unto me, full with verse, SATB/A, T, B, org, GB-Cfm†, Ob, S

Blessed be the Lord my strength (g), S, B/SSAATTBB, org, Lbl, US-AU

Blessed be the Lord my strength (D), A, T, B/SATB, org, GB-Cfm

Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord (Festival of the Sons of the Clergy), 1698, A, A, T, T, B, B/SATB, 2 tpt, 2 vn, va, bc, org, Wiii

Blessed is the man that hath not walked (C), A, A, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, Wi

Blessed is the man that hath not walked (d) (Battle of Ramillies), 1706, T, B/SATB, lute, org, Ob

Bow down thine ear, O Lord, full with verse, SATBB/S, A, T, B, B, org, Cfm†, Ob, S

Bring unto the Lord, O ye mighty, S, S/SATB, org, Lgc, Mp†

Christ being raised from the dead, S, A, T, B/SATB, org, Cfm

Consider mine enemies: pt of Turn thee unto me

Cry aloud, and spare not, T, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, Wii

Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, for King Charles the Martyr's Day, A, bc, Ob, added to Humfrey's Have mercy upon me

God be merciful to us, Y†

God is our hope and strength (C), B, B/SATB, org, Ob

God is our hope and strength (C), A, A, B, B/SATB, org, Lbl

God is our hope and strength (A), full with verse, SSAATTBB/S, S, A, A, T, T, B, org, Cfm, B, ed. H. Statham (London, 1931)

God spake sometime in visions (coronation of James II), 1685, full with verse, SSAATBBB/S, S, A, A, T, B, B, B, 2 vn, va, bc, org, LS

Hear my voice, O God (discovery of Rye House Plot), 1683, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, bc, org, W iii

How doth the city sit solitary, A, T, B, org, Och

I beheld, and lo! a great multitude, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W iii

I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, Ckc, W iii

In the time of trouble, full with verse, SATB/A, T, B, org, Cfm†, Ob, S

I said in the cutting off of my days, A, T, T/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, LS

I waited patiently (incl. Let them be desolate), S, S/SATB, org, Lbl

I waited patiently (variant, incl. But let all those), S, S/SATB, org, Ob

I was glad (consecration of the chancel of St Paul's Cathedral), 1697, A, A, T, T, B/SATB, 2 tpt, 2 vn, va, bc, org, Wi

[I was glad, attrib. Blow in Cu Ely 6, is by Purcell]

I was in the spirit (adaptation of And I heard a great voice), B

I will alway give thanks unto the Lord (The Club Anthem), A, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, ed. in MB, xxxiv (1972), collab. Humfrey and W. Turner

I will call upon the Lord, Fast Day, 19 Jan 1704, A, T, B/SATB, org, Lcm

[I will cry unto God, doubtful, attrib. Blow by W.H. Husk, Lbl Add.33291)]

I will cry unto thee, T/SATB, org, Och

I will hearken, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

I will magnify thee, music lost, words in J. Clifford: The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 2/1664)

I will praise the name of God, full with verse, SATB/S, S, A, T, B, org, Cfm†, Ob, S

Jesus, seeing the multitudes, A, A, T, B/SSATB, org, Och

Let my prayer come up (coronation of William and Mary), 1689, full, SATB, org, LS

Let the righteous be glad, A, A, T, B/SATB, lute, org, Cfm

Let thy hand be strengthened (coronation of James II), 1685, full, SATB, org, LS

Lift up your heads, S, S, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W iii, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1970)

[Lift up your heads (a), attrib. Blow in Cfm Mus.117, is by Humfrey]

Look upon mine adversity: pt of Turn thee unto me

Lord, how are they increased, T, T/SATB, org, Cfm Mus.152†, Mus.117

Lord, rebuke me not, music lost, words in J. Clifford: The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 2/1664)

Lord, remember David (opening of Whitehall Chapel), 1698, S, A, A, T, B/SAATB, org, Mp†, Lbl

Lord, thou art become gracious, full, SATB, org, K

[Lord, thou hast been gracious, doubtful, Lbl Add.31444]

Lord, thou hast been our refuge, music lost, words in J. Clifford: The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 2/1664)

Lord, thou knowest all my desire, full with verse, SATB/S, S, A, T, B, org, K

My days are gone like shadow, full, SATB, org, K

My God, my God, look upon me, 1697, full, SATB, org, K

My God, my soul is vexed within me, full with verse, SSATB/S, S, B, org, Cfm

O be joyful in God, all ye lands, A, A, B/SATB, org, Lcm

O give thanks unto the Lord, and call, S, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious (G), S, S, S, A, A, T, T, B, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, bc, org, W iii

O God, my heart is ready, full with verse, SATB/A, T, B, org, Cfm†, Lbl, S

O God, wherefore art thou absent, full with verse, SSATB/S, S, A, A, T, B, org, Cfm, B

O how amiable are thy dwellings, A, T, B/SATB, org, Lbl

O Lord God of my salvation, full with verse, SSAATTBB/S, S, A, T, T, B, org, Cfm, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, c1950)

O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth, full, SATB, org, IRL-Dcc

O Lord, I have sinned (funeral of Duke of Albermarle), 1670, S, A, T, B/SATB, org, GB-Och, B

O Lord, thou art my God, B/SATB, org, US-AU

O Lord, thou hast searched me out, B, B/SATB, org, GB-Ckc, B

O praise the Lord of heaven, full, SATB, org, K

O pray for the peace of Jerusalem, S/SATB, org, in H. Playford: The Divine Companion (London, 2/1707), ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1952)

O sing unto God, and sing praises, A, T, B/SATB, org, Lbl, B

O sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath done, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

O sing unto the Lord a new song, let the congregation, A, T, T, B/SSAATTBB, 2 vn, bc, org, W i

O sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord, for Cavendish Weedon, 1701, A, T, B/SAATBB, 2 vn, bc, org, W i

Ponder my words, O Lord, T/SATB, org, US-AU

Praise the Lord, O my soul, and all (Peace of Ryswick), 1697, S, S, A, T, B, B/SSATBB, org, GB-Lbl

Praise the Lord, O my soul; while I live, full with verse, SATB/S, S, A, A, T, T, B, B, org, Cfm, K

Praise the Lord, O ye mighty, Ob†

Praise the Lord, ye servants, full, SATB, org, K

Praise thou the Lord: pt of Praise the Lord, O my soul; while I live

Put me not to rebuke, full with verse, SATB/S, A, T, B, org, Cfm†, Ob, S

Save Lord, and hear us: pt of We will rejoice

Save me, O God, full with verse, SATB/S, S, A, T, B, org, Cfm, B

Shew us thy mercy: pt of Lord, thou hast been gracious

Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 rec, 2 tenor ob, 2 vn, bc, org, W i

Sing we merrily, S, S, A, A, T, T, B/SSATTB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W iii

Teach me thy way, O Lord, full with verse, SATB/S, S, A, T, B, B, org, K

The days of man, T/SATB, org, Ob

The floods are risen: pt of The Lord is king, and hath put on (a)

The kings of Tharsis, A, T, T/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

The Lord, even the most mighty God, hath spoken, B/SATB, org, US-AU

The Lord God is a sun and a shield (coronation of William and Mary), 1689, full with verse, SATB/A, T, B, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W iii

The Lord God is a sun and a shield (coronation of Anne), 1702; slight textual variant of above, music lost

The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble, full, SATB, org, Och, B

The Lord is king, and hath put on (a), A, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, bc, org, W iii

The Lord is king, and hath put on (g), T, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

The Lord is king, the earth may be glad, A, T, B/SATB, org, Mp, US-AU

The Lord is my shepherd, A, T, B, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, LS

The voice of the Lord, pt of Bring unto the Lord, and of God is our hope and strength (C)

Thy hands have made me, full, SATB, org, Cfm†, Ob, S

Thy mercy, O Lord, A, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, bc, org, W i

Thy righteousness, O God, A, A, T, B/SATB, org, Lbl

Thy way, O God, is holy, S, S, A/SATB, org, Cu

Turn thee unto me, S/SATB, org, Och

Turn us again, O Lord, A, T, B/SATB, org, Lbl, US-AU

Up, Lord, and help me: pt of Lord, how are they increased

We will rejoice in thy salvation (discovery of plot against King William), 1696, A, A, B/SATB, org, GB-Lbl

When Israel came out of Egypt, A, T, T, B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

When the Lord turned again, A, T, T (B), B/SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, org, W ii

When the Son of man, Ob†, Y†

Why do the heathen, A, A, B/SATB, org, Lbl

motets

all autograph, in Och Mus.14

Cantate Domino, A, A, org

Gloria Patri et filio, S, A, org

Gloria Patri, qui creavit nos, S, S, A, T, B, org, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1958)

In lectulo meo, A, T, org

Laudate nomen Domini, S, S, org

Paratum cor meum, S, S, org

Post haec audivi, A, B, org

Quam diligo legem, S, S, org

Salvator mundi, S, S, A, T, B, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1949)

dramatic

Venus and Adonis (masque for the entertainment of the king, ?1683), Lbl, Lwa, Och, ed. A. Lewis (Monaco, 1949)

court odes

dating is that given by McGuinness (1965), with some emendations

‡ – song pubd in Amphion Anglicus (London, 1700/R)

Dread sir, the prince of light (New Year’s Day), 1678, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, GB-Lbl

The birth of Jove (king's birthday), 1678, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl

Great Janus (New Year's Day), 1679, S, S, A, T, B, SSATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl

The new year is begun (New Year's Day), 1680, A, T, B, SATB, Lbl

Great Sir, the joy of all our hearts (New Year's Day), 1681, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Bu

Up, shepherds, up (king's birthday), 1681, A, T, B, B, SATB, bc, Ob

Arise, great monarch (J. Allestry) (New Year's Day), 1682, S, S, A, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Bu

Dread Sir, Father Janus (New Year's Day), 1683, S, A, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Bu

My trembling song, awake (T. Flatman) (New Year's Day), 1684, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Ckc, ed. A.H. Mann (London, 1901), ‡Rise mighty monarch, ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900)

How does the new-born infant year (New Year's Day), 1685, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl

Hail monarch, sprung of race divine (New Year's Day), 1686, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm; ‡Make bright, [Till then] make bright your warrior's shield, 2vv

Is it a dreame (New Year's Day), 1687, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm; ‡Arms, arms he delights in

Ye sons of Phoebus (New Year's Day), 1688, A, A, T, B, SSATB, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm

With cheerful hearts (T. Shadwell) (New Year's Day), 1690, S, S, A, T, B, B, SSATB, 2 rec, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, Lcm

Behold, how all the stars give way (T. D'Urfey) (New Year's Day), 1692, music lost

Welcome, welcome, genial day, king's birthday, 1692, ?S, S, B, SATB, tpt, ?ob, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl†

The happy, happy year is born (N. Tate) (New Year's Day), 1693, ?A, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, ABu (frag.); Thus let departing winter sing, song, Gentleman's Journal (Dec 1692)

Sound, sound the trumpet (P. Motteux) (New Year's Day), 1694, ?A, T, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, ABu (frag.); 2 songs pubd: He leaves, he slights his precious rest, Gentleman's Journal (Jan/Feb 1694), ‡The sullen years are past

Hail, thou infant year (New Year's Day), ?1697, S, S, A, A, B, SAAB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lgc

The nymphs of the wells (birthday of Duke of Gloucester), 1697, S, S, A, T, B, SSATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lgc

Music now thy charms display (Tate) (New Year's Day), 1698, music lost

Welcome, welcome, happy day (?Tate) (king's birthday), ?1699, Lbl†

Appear in all thy pomp (Tate) (New Year's Day), 1700, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm

Come, bring the song (birthday of Princess Anne), 1700, S, A, T, B, SATB, tpt, 2 vn, va, bc, Ob

Welcome, welcome, glorious day (birthday of Princess Anne), ?1701, S, B, SATB, tpt, kettledrum, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm, collab. D. Purcell

Lost: for New Year's Day, 1691, Whilst he abroad likes the sun, song, Ye great defenders of the faith, chorus, ed. J.S. Smith, Musica Antiqua, ii (London, 1812); for the king's birthday, 1691, ‡Oh! when [But oh], ye pow'rs, when must his labours cease; for the Duke of Gloucester's birthday, 1696/7/9, And now the duke's march let the hautboy's play, song, 1695¹⁰, ‡A prince so young

odes for other occasions

‡ – song pubd in Amphion Anglicus (London, 1700/R)

Awake, awake, my lyre (A. Cowley) (Oxford Act), before 1678, S, B, SSTB, 2 vn, bc, GB-Lbl, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1941/R); Awake, awake, my lyre, song, 1681⁴

Diva quo tendis (Oxford Act), 1678–9, S, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Ob

Begin the song (J. Oldham) (St Cecilia's Day), 1684, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc, pubd as A Second Musical Entertainment (London, 1685), ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1950); ‡Musick's the cordial, with 2 vn

The glorious day is come (St Cecilia's Day), 1691, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 tpt, kettledrum, 2 ob, tenor ob, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lgc, ed. M. Bevan (London, 1981); ‡Ah heav'n! what is't I hear, 2vv, ed. A.C. Lewis, Three Songs from ‘Amphion Anglicus’ (Paris, 1938), ‡Couch'd by the pleasant Heliconian spring, 2vv

Dum pulsa strident timpana (with final chorus of Non arma regum) (Oxford Act), c1695, S, S, A, T, B, SSAATTBB, 2 vn, vc, bc, Och

Great quire of heaven (St Cecilia's Day), 1695, S, S, A, A, T, B, SSATB, 2 tpt, 2 ob, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lgc

Non arma regum (Oxford Act), c1695, S, S, A, T, B, B, SSAATTBB, Och

Bring, shepherds bring the kids (?for a wedding), c1695–1700, A, B, SATB, 2 tpt, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lgc, ed. H.W. Shaw and W. Bergmann (London, 1954); ‡Bring, shepherds, bring the kids/The rites are perform'd, 2 vv, ‡Sing, ye muses, 4vv 2 vn, bc

Welcome, welcome, every guest (for a non-Cecilian ‘music feast’), c1695–1700, T, B, SATB, 2 tpt, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lbl; ‡Welcome, welcome, every guest, arr., S, 2 rec, 2 vn, bc

Triumphant fame (St Cecilia's Day), 1700, S, S, A, T, B, SATB, 2 tpt, 2 rec, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm

devotional songs

for solo voice unless otherwise stated

All things are hush'd, GB-Bu

And art thou griev'd, sweet and sacred Dove? (G. Herbert), 1688¹

Arise, my darken'd melancholy soul, Och

As on Euphrates' shady banks, 3vv, Och

A wingèd harbinger, 4vv, Lbl

Bless, mortals, bless the cheering light, 1683⁵

Enough, my muse, of earthly things, 2vv, 1688¹

Hark how the wakeful cheerful cock, 2vv, Och, collab. Humfrey

Hear God's almighty voice, WO

Help, Father Abram, 1688¹

How art thou fall'n from heav'n, O Lucifer, 2vv, 1688¹

O mighty God, who sitt'st on high, 1693¹

O that mine eyes would melt into a flood, 1688¹

O thou that didst create the light, Bu

Peaceful is he, and most secure (T. Flatman), 1688¹

The Angel Gabriel always kind, CH

To God I make my prayer, Ob

secular songs

for solo voice unless otherwise stated

‡ – pubd in Amphion Anglicus (London, 1700/R)

Edition:John Blow: 10 Songs for High Voice, ed. M. Pilkington (London, 1979) [P]

Ah me! undone, GB-Lbl

Alexis, dear Alexis (T. Flatman), 1684³

All my past life (The True Constancy; J. Wilmot, Earl of Rochester) 1685⁵

Amintor on a riverside, 1683⁵

‡And is my cavalier return'd?, with 2 rec

As Celadon and Chloris, 1679⁷

Ask not the cause why sullen spring (J. Dryden), 1699⁴

As on his deathbed gasping Strephon lay (Elegy on the Earl of Rochester; Flatman), 1681⁴

‡As [Whilst] on Septimius' panting breast (A. Cowley), 2vv, 2 vn, bc, 1685⁵

‡At looser hours in the shade (Horace to his lute)

Boasting fops who court the fair (P. Motteux), Gentleman's Journal (Sept 1692), P

Born with the vices of my kind (T. D'Urfey), 1689⁵

Bring my mistress, 1689⁵

‡Chloe found Amintas (D'Urfey), 3vv, 1695⁸

Church scruples and jars (D'Urfey), Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive (London, 1719)

Clarinda's heart is still the same, Cfm

‡Clarona, lay aside your lute, ed. A. Lewis, Three Songs from ‘Amphion Anglicus’ (Paris, 1938), P

‡Come fill the glass, 2vv

Come, poetry, and with you bring along, 3vv, 1688⁷

Could softening, melting looks prevail, 1687⁶

Draw out the minutes twice as long, 1683⁵

‡Employ'd all the day still in public affairs, for the Music Society, 2vv

Euridice, my fair (Flatman), 2vv, 1688⁷

Fain would I, Chloris, ere I die, 1683⁵, P

Fairest work of happy nature, 1689⁵

Fair lady, so strong are the charms, 1678⁴

Fair nymph, that to the wanton winds, 3vv, Och

Farewell, my useless scrip, 1699⁴

Fill me a bowl, a mighty bowl (J. Oldham), 1687⁵

For honour and glory the soldier prepares, 1691⁷

‡Go, perjur'd maid, 2vv

‡Go, perjur'd man (R. Herrick), 2vv, 2 vn, bc, 1683⁵

Grant me, ye gods, the life I love (Cowley), 1688⁷, P

Great Queen of Love, behold, 3vv, Lbl

‡Happy the man who, languishing (Sappho to the Goddess of Beauty)

How I have serv'd (Colonel Salisbury), with chorus a 3, 1687⁵

If I live to be old (W. Pope), 1685⁵

‡If I my Celia could persuade (G. Etherege), 2vv, ed. M. Tippett and W. Bergmann (London, 1963)

‡If mighty wealth, 1686³

I little thought (Cowley), 1687⁵

I'll tell thee, my Celia, 1681⁴

Illustrious day, what glory canst thou boast (queen's birthday), Ckc

In Caesar all the joint perfections meet, Ge

In vain, brisk God of Love, 2vv, 1683⁵

‡It grieves me when I see what fate, with vn

‡It is not that I love you less (The Self-Banish'd; E. Waller), ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900), P

‡Lately on yonder swelling bush (The Bud; Waller), 2vv

Leave to him all our cares, 1687⁶

Let equipage and dress despair, 1683⁵

Let us drink to the well-wishers, 2vv, 1685⁴

Long by disdain has Celia strove (Ousley), 2vv, sung in The Lucky Chance (A. Behn), 1687, 1685⁵

Lovely Selina, sung in The Princess of Cleve (N. Lee), 1689, 1683⁵

‡Lysander, I pursue in vain (A Mad Song)

Mark how the lark and linnet sing (Dryden), 2vv, 2 rec, 1696, pubd as An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell (London, 1696)

Mighty Sir, 'tis you alone (king's birthday), Lbl

‡Morpheus, the humble god (J. Denham), 2vv

No, Lesbia, no, you ask in vain, 1695⁹

No, Lucinda, I swear, 3vv, Och

No more the dear, the lovely nymph (Motteux), Gentleman's Journal (Oct 1692)

‡Of all the torments, P

O love, that stronger art than wine, sung in The Lucky Chance (Behn), 1687, 1687⁵

‡O Nigrocella (The Fair Lover and His Black Mistress; G. Herbert), 1691⁶, ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900)

‡Orethea's bright eyes, 2vv

‡O turn not those fine eyes away

‡O Venus, daughter of the mighty Jove (Sappho to the Goddess of Love)

‡Philander, do not think of arms (Myrtilla to Philander Designing for Flanders), 1699⁵, P

Phyllis, accept a broken heart, 1683⁵

Phyllis, I must needs confess, 1687⁶

Pleasures by angels unenjoy'd, 1685⁵

‡Poor Celadon, he sighs in vain (Loving Above Himself), with 2 vn, bc

Poor Mariana long in vain, Cfm

‡Prithee die, and set me free (Kellsea Coom; J. Denham), 2vv

Return, fair princess of the blooming year, 1687⁵

‡Sabina has a thousand charms, ed. A. Lewis, Three Songs from ‘Amphion Anglicus’ (Paris, 1938)

Shall all the buds, 2vv, chorus, Lbl

She, alas, whom all admir'd, is dead, 1687⁶

‡Shepherds, deck your crooks, 3vv, ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900)

Shot from Orinda's brighter eyes, 1685⁵

Since the Spring comes on, 1687⁵

Stay, gentle Echo, 2vv, Lbl

Strife, hurry, and noise, 1685⁶

Stubborn church division (D'Urfey), Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive (London, 1719)

‡Tell me no more you love, P

Tell my Strephon that I die, sung in The Loyal General (N. Tate), 1680, 1683⁵

The great Augustus like the glorius sun (D'Urfey), with chorus a 2, sung in The Royalist (D'Urfey), 1682, 1683⁶

The world was hush'd (D'Urfey), 1691⁷

Thou flask once fill'd with glorious red, sung in The Committee (R. Howard), ?1697, Gentleman's Journal (Feb 1693)

Though the [our] town be destroy'd (D'Urfey), 1688⁶

Tired with destroying, Lbl

'Tis not my lady's face (A. Brome), 1679⁷

‡To me you [y'ave] made a thousand vows, 2vv, sung in The Rival Sisters (R. Gould), 1696

Vain are thy charms, fair creature, 1686⁴

We all to conqu'ring beauty bow (The Perfection; D'Urfey), 1685⁷, P

Weep, all ye nymphs, sung in The Princess of Cleve (Lee), 1689, 1685⁵

‡What is't to us who guides the state?, sung in The History of Adolphus (C. Howe), 1691, ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900), P

‡When artists hit on lucky thoughts, 2vv

‡Whence, Galatea, why so gay?, a complaint that Princess Anne's birthday was not celebrated, 1698, 2vv

When from the old chaos, 1688⁷

‡When I drink my heart is possesst (Sir Robert Howard), 2vv, 1687⁵

‡Whilst on your neck no rival boy (A Dialogue Between Horace and Lydia), 2vv

Whilst our peaceful flocks, 2vv, Cfm

Whilst you vouchsafe your thoughts to breathe, 1695⁸

‡Why does my Laura shun me? (The Grove)

Why does the morn in blushes rise? (D'Urfey), 1683⁵

‡Why, Flavia, why so wanton still? (Flavia Grown Old), ed. in The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900)

‡Why is Terpander pensive grown?, on the burning of Whitehall Chapel, 1698, 2vv

‡Why weeps Asteria? (Herbert), 1688⁷

Will fair Panthea's cold disdain?, 2vv, 1688⁷

You, whom cruel Sylvia charms (Motteux), Gentleman's Journal (July 1694)

You wrong me, Sylvia, when you cry (‘M.L.M.’), Gentleman's Journal (March 1693)

catches

Although Jolly Tom, 3vv 1685⁴, sometimes attrib. Aldrich, probably by Blow

Come hear me, my boy, 3vv, Supplement of New Catches to the Pleasant Musical Companion, ii (London, 1702) doubtful

Come, here's a good health to Prince Lewis (G. Herbert) (Battle of Heilbronn), 1701, 3vv, The Pleasant Musical Companion, ii (London, 1701)

Fie, I prithee, John, 3vv, GB-Cfm

God preserve His Majesty (The King's Health), 3vv, 1685⁴

Here are [is] the rarities [rarity] of the whole fair (Second Part of Bartholomew Fair; D'Urfey), 4vv, 1685⁷

How shall we speak thy praise, delicious bowl? (In Praise of the Punch Bowl), 3vv, 1686⁴

I knew [know], brother tar (Battle of la Hogue), 1692, 3vv, 1695¹⁰

I'll tell my mother, my Jenny cries (Kind Jenny), 3vv, 1678⁴

In a cellar in [at] Sodom (D'Urfey), 3vv, The Pleasant Musical Companion, ii (London, 1701)

Joan has been galloping, 3vv, 1673⁴

Joan, Joan, for your part, 3vv, Cfm

John asked his landlady (John the Miller), 1685⁴, music as for Here are the rarities

Ring the bells, and the glasses pull away, on the king's return from Flanders, 1701, 3vv, The Pleasant Musical Companion, ii (London, 1701)

'Uds nigs! here ligs [lies] John Degs (A Yorkshire Epitaph on Two Abbey Lubbers), 3vv, 1685⁴

We've rais'd an army, 4vv, Lbl

chamber

Sonata, A, 2 vn, bc, Lbl, Ob, ed. W. Whittaker (Paris, 1934)

Ground, g, 2 vn, bc, Lbl

Chaconne, G, 2 vn, va, bc, Ob, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1958)

organ

Edition:John Blow: Complete Organ Works, ed. B. Cooper, MB, lxix (1996) voluntaries

2 in A: C, 19–20

4 in a: C, 21–23, C, 30 (for the cornet stop)

5 in C: C, 1–4 (C, 2: embodies material from Frescobaldi's Toccate, Rome, 1637), C, 24 (2 manuals)

2 in D: C, 5a; C, 5b

6 in d: C, 6–8, C, 25 (for the cornet stop), C, 26 (2 manuals), C, 27 (2 manuals)

1 in F: C, 9

9 in G: C, 10–16, C 28 (2 manuals; embodies material from Frescobaldi's Toccate, Rome, 1637), C, 29 (for the cornet stop plus 2 manuals)

2 in g: C, 17–18

Doubtful: in A: C, 48 (the 100th Psalm Tune; for the cornet stop), attrib. Purcell in one late source; in D: C, 47 (for the tpt stop); in d: C, 46; in G, attrib. Blow in John Blow: Complete Organ Works, ed. H.W. Shaw (London, 1958, 2/1972 as Thirty Voluntaries and Verses by John Blow), is pt of Frescobaldi's Iste confessor from his Il secondo libro di toccate (Rome, ?1627)

psalm settings

published in The Psalms by Dr Blow Set Full for the Organ or Harpsichord as they are Play'd in Churches or Chapels (London, 1703, 2/c1730)

Canterbury Tune; C, 39

Lichfield Tune; C, 33

London Tune; C, 42

Martyrs Tune; C, 37

Oxford Tune; C, 34

St Mary Hackney; C, 36

Southwell Tune; C, 32

Windsor Tune; C, 31

York Tune; C, 40

Cantus 119; C, 43

Ps 100; C, 41

Ps 113; C, 45

Ps 125; C, 35

Ps 148; C, 38, 44

harpsichord

Editions:Musick’s Handmaid, II, ed. T. Dart, EKM, x (1958, 2/1962/ R1969) [D]Six Suites by John Blow, ed. H. Ferguson, EKM, v (1965) [F]

7 pieces in 1689⁷; D

15 pieces, in 4 suites, in A Choice Collection of Lessons (London, 1698), incl. 3 pieces from 1689⁷; F

3 pieces in 1700⁹; F

3 pieces in 1700¹⁰; F

c47 pieces, B-Bc, F-Pc, GB-CDp, Cfm, En, Lbl, Och, J-Tn, incl.: 2 preludes, C; 2 preludes, G; 3 grounds, C; Ground, e; 2 grounds, G; Ground, g [version of ground for 2 vn, bc]; Chaconne, C; Chaconne, F [version of Chaconne in G, str]; Chaconne, g; Ov., g; numerous dance movts, mostly organised into suites, incl. movts based on the Dance for a Huntsman and the Graces' Dance from Venus and Adonis

didactic

Rules for Playing of a Through Bass upon Organ and Harpsicon, Lbl Add.34072; ed. F.T. Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (Oxford, 1931/R), 163–72

3. The 1920s: first recordings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDECM

BurneyH

Grove6

HawkinsH

G.E.P. Arkwright: Introductions to The Old English Edition, xxiii (London, 1900/R); xxv (1902/R)

F.G. E[dwards]: ‘Dr John Blow’, MT, xliii (1902), 81–8

W.H. Cummings: ‘Dr John Blow’, PMA, xxxv (1908–9), 69–85

H.D. Statham: ‘ Dr Blow’s Church Music and its Deformities’, MT, lxvii (1926), 988–90, 1083–5

E.J. Dent: Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge, 1928/R), 96, 149, 172ff

H.W. Shaw: ‘ John Blow, Doctor of Music’, MT, lxxviii (1937), 865–7, 946–9, 1025–8

A.C. Lewis: Introduction to Three Songs from ‘Amphion Anglicus’ (Paris, 1938)

H.W. Shaw: ‘ Blow's Use of Ground Bass’, MQ, xxiv (1938), 31–8

A. Lewis: Introduction to J. Blow: Venus and Adonis (Paris, 1939)

C.L. Day and E.B. Murrie: English Song-books, 1651–1702 (London, 1940)

H.L. Clarke: ‘ John Blow: a Tercentenary Survey’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 412–20

E.H. Fellowes: ‘The Restoration Period: I’, English Cathedral Music (London,1941, rev. 5/1969/R), 129–50, esp. 142–50

A. Lewis: Introduction to John Blow: ‘Venus and Adonis’ (Monaco, 1949)

H.W. Shaw: ‘ Tradition and Convention in John Blow’s Harmony’, ML, xxx (1949), 136–145

H.D. Statham: Restoration Church Music (London, 1949)

E.F. Hart: ‘ The Restoration Catch’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 288–305

W. Shaw: ‘John Blow’, MT, xcix (1958), 542–4

W. Shaw: ‘The Organ Music of John Blow’, MO, lxxxii (1958–9), 179–81

A. Lewis: ‘Purcell and Blow's “Venus and Adonis”’, ML, xliv (1963), 266–9

H. McLean: ‘ Blow and Purcell in Japan’, MT, civ (1963), 702–05; see also 878

L.M. Ruff: ‘ Dr Blow's “Rules for Composition”’, MT, civ (1963), 184–5

W. Shaw: ‘The Autographs of John Blow’, MR, xxv (1964), 85–95

R. McGuinness: ‘The Chronology of John Blow's Court Odes’, ML, xlvi ( 1965), 102–121

T. Dart: ‘Elizabeth Edgeworth's Keyboard Book’, ML, l (1969), 470–4

C. Dearnley: English Church Music 1650–1750 (London, 1970), esp. 212ff

R. McGuinness: ‘The Ground Bass in the English Court Ode’, ML, li (1970), 118–40, 265–78

R. McGuinness: English Court Odes, 1660–1820 (Oxford, 1971)

I. Spink: English Song: Dowland to Purcell (London, 1974/R)

B. Wood: John Blow's Anthems with Orchestra (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1977)

B. Cooper: ‘ Did Purcell write a Trumpet Voluntary?’, MT, cxix (1978), 791–3, 1073–5

B. Hodge: ‘A New Frescobaldi Attribution’, MT, cxxii (1981), 263–5

D.R. Evans: ‘ Blow's Court Odes: a New Discovery’, MT, cxxv (1984), 567–9

B. Wood: Introductions to John Blow: Anthems II: Anthems with Orchestra, MB, 1 (1984); John Blow: Anthems III: Anthems with Strings, MB, lxiv (1993), and John Blow: Anthems IV: Anthems with Instruments, MB, lxxiii (forthcoming)

W. Shaw: The Services of John Blow (Croydon 1988)

B. Cooper: English Solo Keyboard Music of the Middle and Late Baroque (New York and London,1989)

G. Cox: Organ Music in Restoration England: a Study of Sources, Styles, and Influences (New York and London, 1989)

R. Luckett: ‘ A New Source for “Venus and Adonis”’, MT, cxxx (1989), 76–9

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

W. Shaw: ‘John Blow's Latin Sacred Music’, Church Music Society Eighty-Sixth Report (1991–2), 14–19

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993)

M. Adams: ‘Purcell, Blow and the English Court Ode’, Purcell Studies, ed. C. Price (Cambridge, 1995), 172–91

M. Burden: ‘ Purcell and his Contemporaries’, The Purcell Companion, ed. M. Burden (London, 1995), 52–98

B. Cooper: ‘ Problems in the Transmission of John Blow's Organ Music’, ML, lxxv (1995), 522–47

P. Holman: Henry Purcell (Oxford, 1995)

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995)

B. Wood: ‘Only Purcell e're shall equal Blow’, Purcell Studies, ed. C. Price (Cambridge, 1995), 106–44

H. Diack Johnstone: ‘Ornamentation in the Keyboard Music of Henry Purcell and his Contemporaries’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (London, 1996), 82–104

Bloym.

See Blome.

Bluebeat.

See Ska.

Bluegrass music.

A style of American country music that grew in the 1940s from the music of Bill Monroe and his group, the Blue Grass Boys. It combines elements of dance, home entertainment and religious folk music of the rural South-east. A bluegrass band typically consists of four to seven individuals who sing and accompany themselves on acoustic string instruments: two rhythm instruments (guitar and double bass) and several melody instruments (fiddle, five-string banjo, mandolin, steel guitar and second guitar). Lead instrumentalists take solo breaks between verses of a song and provide a harmonic and rhythmic background often in a responsorial relationship to the vocal part. Instrumental works have alternating solos as in jazz. Notable performers who have initiated bluegrass instrumental techniques are Earl Scruggs (banjo) and Monroe (mandolin). The vocal range of bluegrass music is higher than most country music singing, often reaching c''. In vocal duets the second (tenor) part lies above the melody, trios include a baritone part below the melody, and in religious songs a fourth (bass) part is added. Usually these parts are harmonic, but in duets particularly they provide vocal counterpoint. The music is mostly in duple meter with emphasis on the offbeats. Tempos are generally fast: an average slow song has 160 crotchets per minute, a fast one 330.

The bluegrass repertory includes traditional folksongs but is dominated by newly composed music, including sentimentally reminiscent secular songs, religious spirituals, revival hymns and instrumental numbers. Phonograph records have always been important for disseminating the repertory and style. In the 1940s most groups played on the radio and toured rural communities in the South. During the 1950s they appeared on television and in ‘hillbilly bars’ in the urban North-east. In the 1960s the folksong revival opened up college concert halls, coffee houses and folk festivals to bluegrass performers, and in 1965 Carlton Haney established the First Annual Blue Grass Festival in Fincastle, Virginia, the prototype for many such yearly events nationwide. During the 1970s and 80s bluegrass music included many styles, from ‘traditional bands’, such as the Johnson Mountain Boys and Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers, performing the 1945–55 repertory, to ‘progressive’ and ‘newgrass’ groups, such as the Seldom Scene and New Grass Revival, that combine rock songs and techniques with bluegrass instrumentation and performing style. In the 1990s bluegrass changed significantly with the emergence of women like Alison Krauss and Laurie Lewis as featured vocalists, instrumentalists and bandleaders. Meanwhile the repertories and styles of the leading performers now tend toward an eclectic mix of traditional and progressive elements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.M. Smith: ‘An Introduction to Bluegrass’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxviii (1965), 245–56

G.O. Carney: ‘Bluegrass Grows All Around: the Spatial Dimensions of a Country Music Style’, Journal of Geography, lxxiii (1974), 34–55

B. Artis: Bluegrass (New York, 1975)

R. Cantwell: Bluegrass Breakdown (Urbana, IL,1984)

N.V. Rosenberg: Bluegrass: a History (Urbana, IL, 1985)

M. Kisliuk: ‘“A Special Kind of Courtesy”: Action at a Bluegrass Festival Jam Session’, Drama Review, xxxii (1988), 141–55

J. Wright: Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music (Urbana, IL, 1993)

M. Fenster: ‘Commercial (and/or?) Folk: the Bluegrass Industry and Bluegrass Traditions’, South Atlantic Quarterly, lixiv (1995), 81–108

NEIL V. ROSENBERG

Blue note (i).

A concept used by jazz critics and musicians from the early decades of the 20th century onwards in black American music, notably in Blues and Jazz, to characterize pitch values perceived as deviating from the western diatonic scale.

1. Definitions.

It was already observed in the 1920s that blues and jazz singers, as well as instrumentalists tend to present the 3rd and 7th, sometimes also the 5th degree in a diatonic framework by pitch values a semitone lower, often with microtonal fluctuations. From this observation musicologists have tried to construct ‘blues scales’. The earliest proposition was that blues singers were using minor-3rd intonations or ‘blue 7ths’ such as E and B respectively over a C major triad. Although its origin is unknown, by 1925 the term ‘blue note’ was established in the literature (Niles, 1925–6). It is significant, however, that ‘downhome’ blues musicians do not use it, unless influenced by jazz critics. Generally, blues singers in the Deep South speak of ‘worrying’ or ‘bending’ the notes. Against the background of a strong central tonality, blues singers develop themes and melodic variations largely independently of the guitar chords used in the accompaniment. The intonation, often with glides and considerable melisma, sometimes deviates by microtonal values from the standard tunings of the guitar or the piano. Jessie Mae Hemphill, for example, is known for a pronounced melismatic style.

From a western viewpoint, blue notes have been described in terms such as ‘deviations’, ‘inflections’ and ‘lowering’, taking the western tonal system as a yardstick. In search of underlying ideas, musicologists have systematized some of these deviations, proposing ‘blues scales’ with ever-increasing numbers of notes, from eight tones to fifteen (Titon, 1977, 2/1994, p.153) within the octave. More recently this approach has been challenged (Evans, 1982, p.24). By the mid-1970s, Titon (op. cit., p.154) had already proposed ‘E’, ‘G’ and ‘B’ complexes , leading to his ‘Downhome blues scale’. Evans (op. cit., p.24) suggested that blues musicians proceed from an awareness of ‘flexible pitch areas’. Tonemic analysis of blues singers’ concepts and behaviour, in which all possible intonations together constitute the same toneme, has reconciled present-day ethnomusicological views with statements by blues singers (Kubik, 1999). If blue notes are considered intra-systemic as part of a non-western tonal system, they vanish as separate entities and become those points where the deviations between western and non-western systems of pitch are greatest.

2. Origins.

Explanations of the blue note as originating ‘from the American slaves’ difficulties in adapting West African pentatonicism (lacking the 3rd and 7th degrees) to European diatonicism’ (Grove6) have been universally disproved. Research has shown that no degrees were lacking (Waterman, 1952 and Kubik, 1996) and, since Paul Oliver's findings (1970), it has been generally accepted that the cultural genealogy of African-American music in North America – in contrast to that of the Caribbean – points predominantly to the savanna and sahel zone of West Africa, rather than the coast. While blues is most certainly an African and American late 19th-century development with no single link to any specific African musical genre, a majority of the blues' traits can be firmly traced to areas in West Africa that represent a contact zone between an ancient sub-Saharan culture world of agriculturalists and an Arabic-Islamic culture world that became effective from c700 ce on. Many traits in the tonal world of blues can be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component. For historical reasons and from the performing practice of ‘downhome’ blues, the theory of an equiheptatonic origin of the blue note (Jones, 1951, pp.9–10, Dauer, 1955, pp.v, 6, and Dauer 1958, p.78) can also be discarded. In an equiheptatonic system the 3rds are ‘neutral’, neither major nor minor. A memory of such tonal systems, as found in the tunings of balo xylophones in Guinea and those of the Asena of the Lower Zambezi valley, lingers on in North America, but not in ‘downhome’ blues. If it had continued in the blues, then blues singers would regularly intonate the upper blue note between B and B; they tend, however, to flatten the B rather than sharpen it. In addition, very few blues are heptatonic, which also invalidates theories considering the blue note as ‘neutral 3rds’. Some authors have linked blue notes to a ‘neutral mode’ in Anglo-American folk music of the Appalachian mountains, with a possible Scottish and Irish background (Buchanan, 1940, p.79). One of the most prominent theories encountered in the literature (for a summary see Mecklenburg and Scheck, 1963) was that blue notes could be explained by the superposition of an (African) pentatonic scale over a heptatonic (European) framework of chords.

As it now stands, the origin of the blues tonal system (see illustration), is more complex, connected with the structure of various penta- to hexatonic systems across the west-central Sudanic belt and possibly northern Mozambique. Benjamine V. Boone (1994) and Gerhard Kubik (1999) have both suggested that the tonal system behind the blues derives from pitch patterns ultimately rooted in the formants of speech as articulated by speakers of certain West African languages. The most recent theory about the nature and origin of the tonal system behind the blues (Kubik, 1999) postulates that its salient pitch values result from a merger of a common west-central Sudanic pentatonic pattern extrapolating partials 4 to 9 with its own transposition a 5th down or a 4th up, as if the same melody were articulated first by a woman and then a man.

3. Global diffusion.

Reinterpretation of the blue note within the western tonal system has become a prominent feature of most western popular music, as well as some art-composed music, such as in that of Gershwin. Jazz harmony has largely placed the concept of blue notes within its own western-oriented theoretical framework. Brothers (1994) and Kubik (1999) have suggested that jazz harmonic practice, however, was predominantly non-Western in its underlying structures and concepts. Although the idea of equidistance, prominent in one set of African tonal systems (as in the equiheptatonic system described above), was not generative in the development of the blues' tonal system, it resurges as a shadowy structure in bebop, as evidenced by common descending progressions of some chord clusters in narrow intervals. Bebop harmony has incorporated elements of blues tonality as well as structural elements of harmonic parallelism in narrow intervals inherited from equiheptatonic African tunings. It was developed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others from a background different from that of western composers such as Schoenberg and Hindemith, with whose harmonic devices bebop harmony can only be superficially compared. As in the blues, pitch perception by musicians in bebop is also heavily entrenched in the concept of pitch areas within an essentially heptatonic framework that is ‘elastic’ with frequent tendencies towards equidistance. It is the pitch area concept inherited from the blues and ultimately from African traditions that steered developments in jazz during the 1940s in the direction of ‘altered’ and ‘substitute’ chords.

Thus, a non-Western analysis of the characteristic pitch-values prevalent in blues and jazz, described as ‘blue notes’ in the literature, leads to an assessment of this music’s historical, audio-psychological and aesthetic characteristics, with results that diverge sharply from those obtained by any approach based on classical European music theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6

A. Niles: ‘Blue Note’, The New Republic, xlv (1925–6), 292–3

A. Niles: ‘The Story of the Blues’, Blues: an Anthology, ed. W.C. Handy (new York, 1926, 2/1949 as A Treasury of the Blues, rev. 3/1972/R by J. Silverman under orig. title), 12–45

W. Sargeant: Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (New York, 1938, 3/1975)

A.M. Buchanan: ‘A Neutral Mode in Anglo-American Folk Music’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, iv (1940), 77–92

A.M. Jones: ‘Blue Notes and Hot Rhythm’, African Music Society Newsletter, i/4 (1951), 9–12

R.A. Waterman: ‘African Influences on the Music of the Americas’, Acculturation in the Americas, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952), 207–18

A.M. Dauer: ‘Grundlagen und Entwicklung des Jazz’, Jazz Podium (1955), no.4, pp.7–8; no.5, pp.5–6; no.6, p.7; no.7, p.7, 10; no.9, pp.7–8; no.10, pp.11–12

A.M. Dauer: Der Jazz: Seine Ursprünge und seine Entwicklung (Eisenach, 1958)

A.M. Dauer: Jazz – die magische Musik: Ein Leitfaden durch den Jazz (Bremen, 1961)

C.G.H. zu Mecklenburg and W. Scheck: Die Theorie des Blues im modernen Jazz (Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, 1963)

G. Rouget: ‘Sur les xylolphones équiheptaphoniques des Malinke’, Revue de musicologie, lv/1 (1969), 47–77

G. Kubik: ‘Transcription of Mangwilo Xylophone Music from Film Strips’, African Music, ii/4 (1965), 35–51; corrigenda in iv/4 (1970), 136–7

P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (New York, 1970)

J.T. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977, 2/1994 with new foreword by A. Trachtenberg)

D. Evans: Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, 1982)

B.V. Boone: ‘A New Perspective on the Origin of the Blues and Blue Notes: a Documentation of Blues-Like Speech’, paper presented at the conference on America's Blues Culture and Heritage, U. of North Florida, Jacksonville, April 1994, unpubd ms

T. Brothers: ‘Solo and Cycle in African-American Jazz’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 479–509

D. Evans and V. Abold: The Spirit Lives On: Deep South Country Blues and Spirituals in the 1990s, Hot Fox Records HF-CD-005, LC 5740 (1994) [incl. disc notes]

G. Kubik: ‘Multipart Singing in sub-Sahran Africa: Remote and Recent Histories Unravelled’, Symposium on Ethnomusicology XIV: Grahamstown 1996, 85–97

G. Kubik: Africa and the Blues: Connections and Reconnections (Jackson, MI, 1999)

See also bibliographies to Blues and Jazz.

GERHARD KUBIK

Blue Note (ii).

American record company. It was established in New York in 1939 by Alfred Lion, to record jazz; its earliest sessions produced records now acknowledged as classics, by such musicians as Sidney Bechet, Earl Hines, Albert Ammons and Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis. In the 1940s the company established an important catalogue of traditional jazz and swing, including recordings by James P. Johnson, Art Hodes and Sidney Bechet; Blue Note was among the earliest to record bop musicians, notably items by Thelonious Monk.

In the LP era the company concentrated on styles that were then contemporary, with a close involvement with soul jazz and hard bop, represented by, among others, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Jimmy Smith and Ike Quebec. In 1963 Blue Note was purchased by Liberty; musicians recording for the company included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Blue Note then began recording jazz-rock and more commercially orientated music; Donald Byrd’s album Black Byrd (c1972) became the company’s best-selling album. In 1975 systematic reissue began of the back catalogue, and from the 1980s reissues appeared on Mosaic.

The connection with Liberty meant that Blue Note records were distributed by EMI. In 1979 EMI purchased Liberty, thus acquiring Blue Note; control passed in 1985 to Manhattan, a subsidiary of Capitol. In addition to a reissue scheme, the company began making new recordings again, including items by younger musicians as well as albums by established musicians, among them McCoy Tyner, Jackie McLean and Freddie Hubbard.

In 1989 EMI discontinued Manhattan and Blue Note became the umbrella company under which EMI's jazz activities were organized; in 1991 Manhattan was revived for releases in smooth jazz and pop-jazz styles. In 1993 Blue Note achieved its highest sales for a single disc when it crossed over from jazz into pop with the CD Hands on Torch by the acid-jazz group Us3, which used ostinatos from classic Blue Note sessions as a basis for a session of hip-hop dance music. In April 1997 the company was the subject of a documentary television show, ‘Blue Note: a Story of Modern Jazz’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Cuscuna and M. Ruppli: The Blue Note Label: a Discography (New York, 1988)

G. Marsh, G. Callingham and F. Cromey, eds.: The Cover Art of Blue Note Records (Zürich, 1992)

F. Wolff: The Blue Note Years: the Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff, ed. M. Cuscuna, C. Lourie and O. Schnider (New York, 1995)

BARRY KERNFELD, HOWARD RYE

Blues.

A secular, predominantly black American folk music of the 20th century, which has a history and evolution separate from, but sometimes related to, that of jazz. From obscure and largely undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all traditional music types. It has been subject to social changes that have affected its character. Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development of Western popular music (see Popular music; Pop).

1. Definition.

2. Origins.

4. Piano blues and the northern migration.

5. 1930s blues.

6. Urban blues.

7. Postwar blues.

8. Blues and the white audience.

9. Conclusion.

PAUL OLIVER

1. Definition.

The most important extra-musical meaning of ‘blues’ refers to a state of mind. Since the 16th century ‘the blue devils’ has meant a condition of melancholy or depression. But ‘the blues’ did not enter popular American usage until after the Civil War; and as a description of music that expressed such a mental state among the black population it may not have gained currency until after 1900. The two meanings are closely related in the history of the blues as music, and it is generally understood that a blues performer sings or plays to rid himself of ‘the blues’. This is so important to blues musicians that many maintain one cannot play the music unless one has ‘a blue feeling’ or ‘feels blue’. Indeed, the blues was considered a perpetual presence in the lives of black Americans and was frequently personified in their music as ‘Mister Blues’. It follows that ‘blues’ can also mean a way of performing. Many jazz players of all schools have held that a musician’s ability to play blues expressively is a measure of his quality. Within blues as folk music this ability is the essence of the art; a singer or performer who does not express ‘blues’ feeling is not a ‘bluesman’. Certain qualities of timbre sometimes employing rasp or growl techniques are associated with this manner of expression; the timbre as well as the flattened and ‘shaded’ notes (produced by microtonal deviations from standard temperament; see Blue note) so distinctive to the blues can be simulated, but blues feeling cannot, so its exponents contend.

As the blues was created largely by musicians who had little education and scarcely any of whom could read music, improvisation, both verbal and musical, was an essential part of it, though not to the extent that it was in jazz. To facilitate improvisation a number of patterns evolved, of which the most familiar is the 12-bar blues (see Blues progression). Apparently this form crystallized in the first decade of the 20th century as a three-line stanza in which the second line repeated the first, thus enabling the blues singer to improvise a third, rhyming line while singing the second:

I’m troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.
I’m troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.
The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad.

This structure was supported by a fixed harmonic progression, which all blues performers knew: it consists of four bars on the tonic, of which two might accompany singing and the fourth might introduce a flattened seventh; two bars on the subdominant, usually accompanying singing, followed by two further bars on the tonic; two bars on the dominant seventh, accompanying the rhyming line of the vocal part; and two concluding bars on the tonic. Such a progression could be played in any key, though blues guitarists favoured E or A and jazz musicians B. Many variants exist, but this pattern is so widely known that ‘playing the blues’ generally presupposes the use of it.

The term ‘blues’ is also used to identify a composition that uses blues harmonic and phrase structure but which is intended to be performed as written, such as Dallas Blues (1912) by Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett, among the first to publish the form, or St Louis Blues (1914) by W.C. Handy. There are numerous compositions that are in no way related to blues but that bear the name, among them Limehouse Blues (1924) by Douglas Furber and Philip Braham. Published compositions in blues form, while at first bringing a new sound to a larger audience, contributed much to the confusion about the nature of blues as folk music, and helped to link the term with jazz. This association with jazz retarded blues research and the independent consideration of its origins, traditions, forms and exponents. Only since 1960 has it been extensively discussed in its own right.

2. Origins.

In its early years the blues was wholly African American. It has been suggested that it existed before the Civil War, but this view has no supporting evidence. Influential in its development were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a responsorial ‘leader-and-chorus’ form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping. Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or ‘hollers’, comparatively free in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the holler (see Field holler).

Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong traditions of string playing, predominated. The jelli, or griots – professional musicians who also acted as their tribe’s historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike those of the later blues singers, while the banjo is thought to be a direct descendant of their banza or xalam.

In the 1890s the post-Reconstruction bitterness of southern white Americans towards the black community hardened into segregation laws; this in a sense forced the latter to recognize their own identity, and a flowering of black sacred and secular music followed. Ballads in traditional British form extolling the exploits of black heroes (e.g. John Henry, John Hardy, Po’ Lazarus and Duncan and Brady) were part of this musical expansion, and blues emerged from the combination of freely expressive hollers with the music of these ballads. Few blues were noted by early 20th-century collectors, but those collected frequently had a four-line or rhyming-couplet form. Some of the ballads popular among black singers, for example Railroad Bill, Frankie and Albert, Duncan and Brady and Stack O’Lee, had a single couplet with a rhyming third line as a refrain. In blues the ‘couplet’ consisted of one repeated line; See, See Rider, Joe Turner Blues and Hesitating Blues were among the earliest songs of this type.

At first the blues was probably only a new song form in the repertory of the black songster (see Songster (ii)), the titles providing a theme for a loose arrangement of verses (e.g. Florida Blues, Atlanta Blues and Railroad Blues). Many songsters and early blues singers in the South worked in medicine shows, street entertainments promoted by vendors of patent medicines. Their travels helped to spread the blues, as did those of wandering singers who sang and played for a living. They followed the example of the street evangelists who at that time were popularizing gospel songs. Preferring the guitar to the banjo as an accompanying instrument, the songsters represent a link between the older black song tradition and the blues. By the 1920s the blues singer, who sang and played only blues, began to replace the songster.

Blues songs had no fixed number of stanzas, and the inevitable return to the tonic after the stanza’s third line gave shape to long improvisations. The ballad singers had concentrated on the exploits of legendary black heroes, but blues singers sang of themselves and those who shared their experiences. Many stanzas rapidly became traditional and certain images or lines entered the stock-in-trade of every blues singer. But the inventive singer expressed his anxieties, frustrations, hopes or resignation through his songs. Some blues described disasters or personal accidents; themes of crime, prostitution, gambling, alcohol and imprisonment are prominent in early examples and have persisted ever since. Some blues are tender but few reveal a response to nature; far more express a desire to move or escape by train or road to an imagined better land. Many are aggressively sexual, and there is much that is consciously and subconsciously symbolic of frustration and oppression.

3. The 1920s: first recordings.

The earliest forms of blues were not the first to be recorded. Mamie Smith’s recording of Crazy Blues (OK/Phonola) in August 1920 brought a popularized form to a large audience; Smith was a stage performer, and her blues, accompanied by a jazz band, were sung in vaudeville fashion. They set the pattern for numerous recordings by Edith Wilson, Sara Martin, Clara Smith and many other black singers, most of whom were professional entertainers working with touring shows on theatrical circuits such as the Keith-Orpheum, or the circuit of the Theater Owners Booking Agency, which managed black artists. Among them were singers whose songs were blues in name only; but others had a deep feeling for the new idiom, including Lottie Beamon from Kansas City, Missouri, and Ma Rainey from Athens, Georgia (see fig.1), both stocky women with powerful voices, as well as Ida Cox from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was much admired for her nasal intonation. But the ‘Empress of the Blues’, as she came to be called, was Bessie Smith from Chattanooga, whose majestic recordings set a standard that few could emulate.

Many of these so-called classic blues singers came from the South or from border states and had heard rural singers whose blues they borrowed. Published blues, which had been available for some years, were performed with jazz-band accompaniment to audiences in northern cities. With Papa Charlie Jackson’s Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues (Para.), recorded with banjo accompaniment in 1924, the recording industry began to make known the songs of the country tradition. Jackson’s style and technique were those of the songsters, but Long Lonesome Blues (1926, Para.), by Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, had the authentic sound of rural blues.

Mississippi has been popularly regarded as the birthplace of blues and has been the source of many of the earthiest, least sophisticated recordings. Many Mississippi singers were guitarists who played a heavily accented accompaniment to their frequently guttural and always expressive singing. The most influential blues singer from the state was Charley Patton, who initiated a school of singer-guitarists on Dockery’s plantation, near Clarksdale, before World War I. He influenced Tommy Johnson from the Jackson area, and they represented distinct, though linked Mississippi styles: Patton, Son House and Henry Sims, and their successors, Tommy McClennan and Bukka White, performed with deep, ‘heavy’ voices and strong, persistent rhythms, while Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Bo Carter and the related Chatmon family used more complex, lighter rhythmic patterns and sang in higher voices, sometimes using falsetto for final syllables. Bo Carter and the Chatmons had a string band called the Mississippi Sheiks which played blues and other forms of country music and was a link with the earlier songster tradition. In Memphis, north of the Mississippi delta region, similar bands were formed in which a jug was often played as a bass instrument (see Jug band and Washboard band). Ensembles using improvised instruments to augment strings were started in many small towns, most notably in Memphis.

The Texas approach to blues was exemplified by Blind Lemon Jefferson (fig.2). His words were original and often poetic:

Sittin’ here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?
Sittin’ here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?
Ain’t got so many matches, but I got so far to go.

This was one of the many images he created that passed into general usage. Rambling Thomas followed his use of the guitar as an expressive ‘second voice’ answering the words of the long vocal lines. Alger Texas Alexander was so close to the holler tradition that he did not play an instrument, but on his best recordings he was accompanied on the guitar by Lonnie Johnson from New Orleans, who worked in Texas, or George ‘Little Hat’ Jones from San Antonio.

Mobile units, notably those of Columbia, Victor and Okeh, made field recordings of many singers who would otherwise have remained unknown. Some singers made few recordings, perhaps giving a false impression of their abilities. As only a few centres were used, vast areas of the South were unrepresented: hardly any recordings were made in the 1920s in Alabama, Arkansas or Florida. In Atlanta, Georgia, a school of 12-string guitar players with rich voices was recorded: among them were Barbecue Bob Hicks, his brother Charlie Lincoln, Curly Weaver, Peg Leg Howell and Blind Willie McTell. Several of them employed a knife, bottleneck or other slide to press the strings against the frets of their guitars. Some tuned their guitars to an open chord, producing a ‘cross-note’ tuning, which enabled them to press the slide against all the strings while playing a blues sequence. By moving the slide along the frets, whining, mournful sounds in keeping with blues feeling could be produced. This adaptability of the guitar made it a favourite instrument of blues singers.

Of the early southern singers only a few women were recorded. Among them were the powerful-voiced Bessie Tucker from Texas whose songs were largely about prison, and Lucille Bogan (Bessie Jackson) from Birmingham, Alabama, who sang robust blues about prostitution and lesbianism. The most notable was Memphis Minnie who, in Big Bill Broonzy’s words, ‘played the guitar like a man’. These women were admired for the masculinity of their musical attack: traditional femininity was replaced by a bragging sexuality.

4. Piano blues and the northern migration.

The shadings and inflections of the blues can be obtained relatively simply on a guitar, but the blues pianist can produce the effect of blues grace notes and glissandos only by ‘crushing’ the keys (striking adjacent keys not quite simultaneously) and the effect of blues rhythm only by syncopation and strongly accented rhythmic phrases. Blues piano style may have derived partly from ragtime: the form known as Barrelhousehas similarities to improvised rags. Many blues pianists from Texas and Louisiana played in the makeshift lumber-camp saloons where barrelhouse style originated; among them was Little Brother Montgomery, who was an exponent of the Vicksburg Blues (1930, Para.), a standard basis for extemporization with a climbing bass figure. His contemporary from Arkansas, Roosevelt Sykes, recorded it in 1929 under the alternative name of 44 Blues (OK).

Bass figures were important in the development of piano blues; the walking bass of broken or spread octaves repeated through the blues progression provided the ground to countless improvisations. Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport’s recordings, including Cow Cow Blues (1928, Bruns.), illustrate facets of the early piano blues that were unified in the playing of his protégé, Pine Top Smith, who popularized the name Boogie-woogie. Both went to Chicago from the South, as did hundreds of other blues singers, pianists, guitarists and other instrumentalists in the decade after World War I. The many immigrants forced up rent prices in Chicago and Detroit, and pianists played for beer and tips at ‘rent parties’ organized for mutual aid in the tenements. These became schools for other pianists, among them Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis and Albert Ammons.

The many blues teams formed in Chicago included that of the pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey and the guitarist Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker), who were both from Georgia and had worked with Ma Rainey. The combination of blues and vaudeville experience led them to a vein of ‘hokum’, a combination of rural wit, sly urban sophistication and bawdiness; it was a new type of blues, entertainment without serious intent, which mildly ridiculed country manners while helping southern immigrants to adjust to urban life. With Big Bill Broonzy, another member of the Hokum Boys, Georgia Tom and Tampa Red managed to go on making recordings when the financial crash of October 1929 stopped most blues recording.

5. 1930s blues.

In the early 1930s the most popular blues singer was Leroy Carr, a pianist who was accompanied with uncanny rapport by the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell (fig.3). Their approach had a strong southern character, but their lyrics had a considered, reflective quality, coloured by disappointment rather than bitterness and reflecting the mood of many of their listeners. Carr was widely copied, and his classic performances, such as How Long, How Long Blues (1928, Voc.) and Midnight Hour Blues (1932, Voc.), were recorded by numerous singers, even in the 1970s, long after his death in 1935. The fatalism of his works is also found in those of his principal imitator, Bumble Bee Slim (Amos Easton), and of Walter Davis, a pianist based in St Louis. Both had somewhat flat voices and a far less impassioned delivery than that of the previous generation of blues singers. Many of the 1930s blues are characterized by a fatalism prompted by the difficulties of the Depression. Several singers of this period were based in St Louis, midway between North and South, and their blues reflected both southern and northern attitudes. Although he was still recording in 1934 (the year of his death), Charley Patton in Mississippi was already outdated, and 16 titles he made that year remained unissued. His generation of Mississippi bluesmen, including Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Son House, was still active but unrecorded; the cooler, less emotional singers of the younger generation had taken over. So it is perhaps surprising that a singer such as Sleepy John Estes from Brownsville, Tennessee, with a country guitar and cracked voice, singing extremely parochial lyrics, should have been as extensively recorded as he was. He had a counterpart further east in Tennessee and the Carolinas in Blind Boy Fuller, a street singer with a coarse-grained voice and ragtime guitar style. He was accompanied by a brilliant harmonica virtuoso, Sonny Terry; Estes was no less sympathetically supported by his own harmonica player, Hammie Nixon.

6. Urban blues.

In Chicago the tough conditions of the 1930s stimulated a more defiant, extrovert blues sound and collective performance. Tampa Red recorded some 200 titles in the decade, augmenting his plangent guitar with the heavier sound of his Chicago Five band. Its personnel varied but generally included Black Bob or Blind John Davis playing the piano, with other instruments such as tenor saxophone or trumpet taking the lead. A new departure in blues, it was followed by Big Bill Broonzy, the undisputed leader of Chicago folk music in the 1930s. Broonzy’s groups were always subordinate to his singing and immaculate guitar playing, but he was the centre of a school of urban singers of southern origin, including his reputed half-brother Robert Brown, known as Washboard Sam. Sam’s washboard playing was matched by his loud, rough voice, and he and Broonzy often played in groups. They were frequently joined by John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson, a highly influential harmonica player with a distinctive ‘tongue-tied’ voice who recorded extensively under his own name, and William ‘Jazz’ Gillum, who also played the harmonica. Together they created an outgoing, topical form of blues that did not lose its sense of contact with those newly arrived from the South, though the sound was essentially that of Southside Chicago.

In contrast to these developments in urban blues, a new generation of ‘down-home’ singers from Mississippi, with a style firmly rooted in the Patton-House tradition, began to be recorded as the decade came to a close. Their blues were coarser and fiercer than that of their predecessors and provided a powerful stimulus for the blues in the early 1940s, when the Jive music of Louis Jordan and his contemporaries was shifting the emphasis of the blues with humorous novelty pieces intended only as entertainment. These later Mississippi singers included Tommy McClennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White and above all Robert Johnson (iii), who had the most lasting influence on the evolution of the blues. While still in his early 20s (1936–7) he recorded some 30 titles shortly before his death; these highly introverted, sometimes obsessive blues, with a whining guitar sound and throbbing beat, made a profound impression even on singers who recorded more than 20 years later. If one artist epitomized the range of performance and attitudes of the blues in the 1930s it was probably Broonzy, but the most memorable creations came from the singing and playing of Carr and Johnson.

7. Postwar blues.

Until the end of World War II the recording of blues had been controlled by a few large companies, but in the late 1940s small companies, many with black proprietors, started commercial production. Some were in southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, some on the West Coast, where a smooth style of blues created by westward-moving migrants from Texas found a new market. New concerns also operated in Chicago and Detroit, so the combined output of blues records was considerable. Until then blues recordings had been classified and marketed in sales catalogues as ‘Race’ records (see Race record). This segregation contributed to the development of postwar rhythm and blues, a term free of racial connotations. Rhythm-and-blues encompassed many kinds of blues and related music, from the soft-toned West Coast blues of Charles Brown to the technically brilliant guitar playing of T-Bone Walker. But, like the related rock and roll, it encompassed much else besides, including the harmonizing of the rhythm and blues quartets, the popular, nostalgic, blues-based vocals of the New Orleans pianist Fats Domino, the frenetic performances of Little Richard and the witty lyrics of rock and roll singers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

Of postwar blues singers among the most notable was Muddy Waters (fig.4). His early manner (as seen in his Chicago recordings of 1947) owed much to Robert Johnson, but he soon added a harmonica (Little Walter) and a piano, guitar or drums to fill out the sound, as the Broonzy-Williamson groups had done. In the 1950s his music became increasingly threatening, with hoarse singing, slow blues-boogie piano playing by Otis Spann and the complementary warbling harmonica of Little Walter, Walter Horton or James Cotton. With all instruments amplified, the live sound was highly charged, and the recordings sold in large numbers. Muddy Waters’s principal rival was Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett) – romantic sobriquets were still expected of blues singers. Howlin’ Wolf developed a ferocious and energetic style, shown for instance in Smokestack Lightnin’ (1956, Chess). He derived much of his style from Charley Patton, whereas Robert Johnson inspired Elmore James, who was in many ways the archetypal postwar Chicago blues singer. James was technically quite limited, depending on a bottleneck slide and rhythms formulated by Johnson; he sang in a taut, constricted voice and, like many singers of his generation, paid more attention to projection and volume than to content and subtle expression. This reflects a general change in the relationship of the blues singer to his audience: though ‘blues’ still signified both music and mood, there was greater emphasis on performance to audiences, and lyrics became more stereotyped and less personal to the singer.

Many other southern blues singers were popular in the 1950s, among them John Lee Hooker, who left Mississippi to settle in Detroit and developed his own heavily accented guitar technique. Another was Jimmy Reed, whose loose vocals against insistent rhythms set him somewhat apart from his contemporaries but made him very popular with black audiences. In Texas, Lightnin’ Hopkins extended the tradition of Blind Lemon Jefferson, dominating blues in that state. Even when the young, more urban singers from Memphis, Bobbie Bland and Little Junior Parker, settled in Texas to work and record, Hopkins did not lose his pre-eminence.

8. Blues and the white audience.

Though blues was without doubt of African American origin, it was adopted by a number of white hillbilly and country artists, who began recording blues in the 1920s. Some were imitators, but a few were innovators, like Chris Bouchillon who created the ‘talking blues’ with a spoken narrative. The Allen Brothers sang blues in harmony while, in the 1930s, the popular country singer Jimmie Rodgers often recorded his ‘blue yodels’. Though Woody Guthrie sustained the ‘talking blues’ form, white blues singers were few in the 1940s, the blues being perceived as in decline. Within jazz criticism blues had been treated with some respect, though it was seen as a precursor of jazz rather than as a distinct musical style with a parallel evolution. Leadbelly, though primarily a songster, was widely acclaimed in New York in the 1940s among jazz enthusiasts and mourned at his death (1949) as ‘the last of the blues singers’. This of course was not the case, not even in jazz itself, for the blues singers Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing continued to sing in jazz groups, and blues recordings were prominent in rhythm-and-blues in the 1950s. When Big Bill Broonzy went to Europe in the early 1950s he too was seen as a rare survivor of the blues tradition; he helped to stimulate the growing interest in blues by the publication of his autobiography (1955). Soon after his death (1958) the team of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry went to Europe, and during the 1960s a succession of blues singers visited Britain and the Continent; some remained, among them the pianists Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, Curtis Jones and Champion Jack Dupree.

In 1959–60 the first serious studies of blues were published and field trips for research were undertaken, largely by Europeans. During the following years strenuous efforts were made to find forgotten or unrecorded blues singers, with the result that Fred McDowell, Robert Pete Williams, Mance Lipscomb and Robert Shaw were recorded for the first time, while Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Son House and others were rediscovered. Many veteran singers toured Europe, where they played to large and enthusiastic audiences. Skiffle, a quasi-country blues band music, had a fleeting popularity in Britain when Broonzy was alive, and the later visits of blues singers, the publication of many studies and magazines on the subject, the availability of recordings and the consciousness of a ‘generation gap’ (which seemed to parallel the segregation of black people in the USA) all contributed to the emergence of British pop and rock groups whose early work was strongly influenced by blues. Of these the Beatles were the best known, but the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who owed more to blues. Blues-based pop music was loud, heavily amplified and augmented with sound-distorting devices; the performers were extravagantly dressed, and deliberately challenged established pop music (see Blues-rock). A similar movement followed in the USA, where the young musicians were, theoretically, closer to blues artists. Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and the group Canned Heat depended closely on postwar blues based on the Chicago style.

9. Conclusion.

The kindling of white interest in black music always presaged or coincided with a departure from the idiom by the black population; when blues gained white enthusiasts it lost black audiences. Some singers, for example Otis Rush and J.B. Hutto, retained their integrity as artists, taking day-time jobs and performing in clubs when they could. Fortunate blues singers toured American universities; others returned to truck driving or growing crops. In black America soul music predominated, with its gospel techniques and some element of blues expression. Few blues singers retained their audiences in the soul era; the most prominent was B.B. King, an articulate, expressive, technically accomplished guitarist with a large following. His namesakes Albert King and Freddie King worked in a similar vein, appearing at the large open-air concerts of the 1970s. Other singers of a younger generation, including Buddy Guy and Junior Wells (fig.5), used the vocal techniques and stage mannerisms of soul singing, but they too were most successful performing at universities. In the mid-1970s there were only a few blues singers working steadily, and their audiences were mainly white, though the blues had gained an international following, and blues singers were sponsored by the State Department for tours in Africa and Asia. A few black singers, notably Taj Mahal, departed from a sophisticated popular style to find some satisfaction in traditional blues, but they cannot be said to represent the culture in the sense that Jefferson, Carr, Johnson or Muddy Waters once did. By 1980, however, soul-blues singer-guitarists such as Johnny Copeland, Z.Z. Hill and Robert Cray were welcomed. Meanwhile, blues had become international, with white blues bands in most European countries, and blues being played in Japan and South-East Asia. It had also become background music to television commercials and features. Appropriated in this way it entered a new phase, being no longer African American, but a part of the currency of global popular music.

Assessment of the importance of the blues in 20th-century American folk music has often been made in relation to jazz or to pop music. As a music of the people it had its minor artists, but within the extensive corpus of recordings there are innumerable examples of folk compositions of genius and beauty, expressions of the human spirit that are both profoundly moving and complete in themselves as creative works. It is a music that will increasingly be valued in its own right. Blues singers and musicians extended the expressive range of the guitar, piano, harmonica and human voice and evolved many musical substructures within the framework of a recognizable and distinct idiom. Blues was also important as the primary artistic expression of a minority culture: it was created mainly by black working-class men and women, and, through its simplicity, sensuality, poetry, humour, irony and resignation transmuted to aggressive declamation, it mirrored the qualities and the attitudes of black America for three-quarters of a century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Pre-Blues, Proto-Blues. B Early Blues History. C Blues, Post-War. D Content and Analysis. E Discography and Biography – Reference.

a: pre-blues, proto-blues.

H.W. Odum and G.B. Johnson: The Negro and his Songs (Chapel Hill, NC, 1925)

R. Blesh: Shining Trumpets: a History of Jazz (New York, 1946, enlarged 2/1958/R), chaps.4–6

H. Courlander: Negro Folk Music U.S.A. (New York, 1963/R)

P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London, 1970)

T. Russell: Blacks, Whites and Blues (London, 1970)

P. Oliver: Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (London, 1984)

A. Lomax: The Land Where the Blues Began (London, 1993)

b: early blues history

S.B. Charters: The Country Blues (New York, 1959/R)

L. Jones: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963)

S. Charters: The Bluesmen (New York, 1967–77/R1991 as The Blues Makers)

P. Oliver: The Story of the Blues (London, 1969/R, 2/1997)

G. Oakley: The Devil’s Music: a History of the Blues (London, 1976)

S.B. Charters: Sweet as the Showers of Rain (New York, 1977)

R. Palmer: Deep Blues (New York, 1981/R)

D.D. Harrison: Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)

W. Barlow: Looking Up at Down: the Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989)

B. Basatin: Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana, 1986)

T. Russell: The Blues, from Robert Johnson to Robert Gray (London, 1997)

c: blues, post-war

P. Oliver: Conversation with the Blues (London, 1965, 2/1997)

C. Keil: Urban Blues (Chicago, 1966/R)

C. Gillett: The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll (New York, 1970, 3/1996)

W. Ferris: Blues from the Delta (London, 1971)

M. Rowe: Chicago Breakdown (London, 1973/R)

J. Broven: Walking to New Orleans: the Story of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues (Bexhill-on-Sea, 1974)

M. Haralambos: Right On: from Blues to Soul in Black America (London, 1974/R)

J. Demêtre and M. Chauvard: Land of the Blues (Paris, 1994)

d: content and analysis

P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: the Meaning of the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)

P. Oliver: Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (London, 1968/R)

H. Oster: Living Country Blues (Detroit, 1969)

R. Middleton: Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972)

P. Garon: Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London, 1975/R)

P. Oliver: ‘Blue-Eye Blues: the Impact of Blues on European Popular Culture’, Approaches to Popular Culture, ed. C.W.E. Bigsby (London, 1976), 227–39

J.F. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977)

D. Evans: Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, 1982)

D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester, 1987)

G. van Rijn: Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson, MS, 1997)

e: discography and biography – reference

M. Leadbitter and N. Slaven: Blues Records: January 1943 to December 1966 (London,1968, enlarged 2/1987–94 as Blues Records: 1943–1970) [discography]

P. Oliver: Blues entries, Jazz on Record: a Critical Guide to the First 50 Years: 1917–1967, ed. A. McCarthy and others (London, 1968) [listeners’ guide]

R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich: Recording the Blues (London, 1970)

S. Harris: Blues Who’s Who: a Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (New Rochelle, NY, 1979/R)

P. Oliver: Blues off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary (Tunbridge Wells, 1984) [collection of previously pubd items]

R.M.W. Dixon, J. Godrich and H.W. Rye: Blues and Gospel Records, 1892–1943 (Oxford, 1997) [discography]

J. Cowley and P. Oliver: The New Blackwell Guide to Blues Records (Oxford, 1997)

Blues progression.

The underlying harmonic structure of the blues. In the broad sense, the term can refer to the harmonic basis of any piece called a Blues (an exhaustive survey of these progressions can be found in Dauer), but it must be noted that in an attempt to capitalize on the blues craze of the early 1920s, popular songwriters used ‘blues’ in the titles of pieces whose harmonies bear no relation to that of the blues progression (e.g. Limehouse Blues). In the narrow sense, it refers to a flexible, cyclic 12-bar structure, consisting of three four-bar phrases with the chord pattern shown in ex.1. Many variants of this pattern are possible: frequently IV is used in place of I in bar 2, or in place of V in bar 10. Country blues guitarists characteristically vary the rhythms of the basic progression, and sometimes maintain a tonic drone on the bass strings; in this case a blues harmonic progression may be intimated by the vocal and treble-string melodies.

Themes based on 12-bar blues progressions appeared in ragtime compositions from 1904; later, composer–collectors of the blues published multi-thematic ‘blues’, combining 12-bar blues progressions with 16-bar ragtime themes and popular songs (e.g. W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues, 1912). These hybrid pieces were popularized by ‘classic’ blues singers such as Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith from 1920. A few years later, in 1923, recordings by innovative black jazz ensembles from New Orleans revealed that there were several established variants from the standard blues pattern. Only later were field recordings made of rural blues musicians. Because of this confusion in the sources it is impossible to establish an original form of the blues progression.

Jazz, particularly bop, musicians took advantage of the flexibility inherent in the simple 12-bar scheme and often presented it in new guises using a variety of passing and substitute harmonies. An extreme example is Charlie Parker's Blues for Alice (1951; ex.2) with its interpolated secondary dominant progressions. A minor-mode form of the blues progression also exists, which later became a common characteristic in soul jazz. Drummers, most notably Max Roach, have adapted the blues progression and poetic form to unaccompanied solos, translating the 12-bar blues into percussive terms; a fine example is found in Roach's solo in the middle of ‘Blue Seven’ on the Sonny Rollins album Saxophone Colossus (1956, Prst.)

Broadly speaking, the blues progression entered the repertory of rock musicians from two distinct sources: from rock and roll and from country and urban blues. It is found in its simplest form (ex.1) in Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock (1954) and across the spectrum of rock and roll, including Jerry Lee Lewis's Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (1957) and Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode (1958). Gene Vincent's Be-bop-a-lula and Little Richard's Tutti Frutti (both 1956) use IV in bar 10 – this is the most common variant – while Fats Domino's Ain't that a shame (1955) uses IV–IV–V–V in the last four bars. Thereafter, the 12-bar pattern and its variants entered the work of Buddy Holly (Peggy Sue and Oh Boy, both 1957), the Everly Brothers (Bird Dog, 1958), the Beach Boys (Little Deuce Coupe and Surfin' USA, both 1963) and, ultimately, the Beatles (A Hard Day's Night and Can't buy me love, both 1964) and the Rolling Stones (19th Nervous Breakdown, 1966). By this point, it had lost touch with the conventionalized AAB pattern of the blues lyric...\Frames/F922567.html

In the later 1960s, blues rock musicians returned to the blues pattern, but through the influence of country and blues musicians (such as Robert Johnson, Elmore James and Willie Dixon) rather than early rock and roll. In Fleetwood Mac's Dust my broom (1968), this resulted in a strict adherence to the pattern; in Cream's Sunshine of your Love (1967) the riff is transposed rather than remaining on the same pitch; while in Led Zeppelin's Since I've been Lovin' You (1970), the substitution-rich pattern is found in the bass alone (ex.3).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveJ

SchullerEJ

L. Koch: ‘Structural Aspects of King Oliver's 1923 Okeh Recordings’, JJS, iii/2 (1976), 36–46

E. Newberger: ‘Archetypes and Antecedents of Piano Blues and Boogie Woogie Style’, JJS, iv/1 (1976), 84–109

J. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977)

A. Dauer: ‘Towards a Typology of the Vocal Blues Idiom’, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, xi (1979), 9–92

P. van der Merwe: Origins of the Popular Style: the Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford and New York, 1989)

B. Kernfeld: What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT, 1995)

BARRY KERNFELD, ALLAN F. MOORE

Blues-rock.

A style of popular music that flourished during the 1960s. It originated in and is particularly associated with Britain, and depends on the electric guitar with its blues-pentatonic scale patterns and propensity for sudden shifts of movement between anguished held, bent notes and sudden runs. It attempted to counter the banality of the hit-parade material and of rock and roll (which by the early 1960s had lost its power to surprise) by retrieving what was felt to be emotionally more ‘authentic’ blues material. It was thus originally an underground movement originating in the London blues revival, itself an outgrowth of the trad jazz movement headed by Chris Barber. The blues revival was centred on clubs booked by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, namely Wardour Street’s Roundhouse (from 1955) and West London’s Ealing Club (from 1962). By the early 1960s other clubs were popular: the Scene and the Flamingo in Central London and the Crawdaddy in Richmond.

Korner’s venues hosted a variety of touring musicians, from Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Otis Spann to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Waters had been playing electric blues since the early 1950s, but British audiences initially wanted only the ‘authentic’ acoustic style on his first visit in 1958. Korner’s Blues Incorporated (formed in 1962) was an important training ground for many of the most significant musicians of this phase. The clubs were frequented by listeners bored with the trad jazz scene, and by art school musicians who would become crucial to British rhythm and blues: the nascent Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Yardbirds, Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe, John Baldry, Graham Bond, John Mayall and Jimmy Page. These developed a close-knit circuit that included Elton John, Rod Stewart, Peter Green, John McLaughlin and Eric Clapton.

Clapton’s early career epitomizes the changes of style which accompanied the development of blues-rock. With the Yardbirds he had worked with Sonny Boy Williamson ‘II’ in 1963 (as had the Animals in Tyneside), but he left them in 1965 after they switched from rhythm and blues towards pop and psychedelia. Playing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (1966), he covered material by Little Walter, Ray Charles and even Robert Johnson, before forming Cream (later in 1966) with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Although they covered songs from Delta blues singers, Clapton’s now extended solos helped develop progressive rock.

Blues-rock was still current in 1968 – both Led Zeppelin (Atl., 1969) and Fleetwood Mac’s Mr Wonderful (Col., 1968) included material by Willie Dixon – but this phase was ending. While Georgie Fame went into cabaret and big bands, Baldry, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac (without Peter Green) eventually went into pop, and Led Zeppelin and Cream developed rock. By the mid-1960s, some white US musicians, of a slightly younger generation, were making much use of similar blues material: Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield (who developed through jamming with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush from about 1963), Canned Heat, Roy Buchanan, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Chicago scene focussed on Steve Miller and Johnny Winter. The popularity of artists such as Robert Cray in the 1980s suggests that this style, like any other, can be made amenable to revival.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blues Unlimited (1963–)

R. Middleton: Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972), 186–210

B. Brunning: Blues: the British Connection (Poole, 1986)

D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester, 1987), 99–110, 135–40

A.F. Moore: Rock, the Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Milton Keynes, 1993), 62–77

H. Shapiro: Alexis Korner (London, 1996)

ALLAN F. MOORE

Blühmel, Friedrich

(d before 1845). German musician and inventor. A coal miner, he learned to play the violin and various woodwind instruments, changing in 1808 to trumpet and horn and calling himself a ‘Berghautboist’ or mine musician.

Together with Stölzel, who had demonstrated a horn with tubular valves in July 1814, Blühmel was co-inventor of the valve mechanism for brass instruments. According to his own testimony, Blühmel was inspired between 1810 and 1813 by the ventilating pipes and faucets of Silesian blast furnaces. It was not until 1816 that Blühmel could demonstrate working models of a trumpet and a horn with two box valves each, followed in February 1818 by a trombone with three such valves. Finally the two men joined forces and were awarded a joint patent on 12 April 1818, Stölzel paying Blühmel 400 thalers for surrendering all further rights to him. For illustration see Valve (i), fig.8.

By 1819 Blühmel had fitted out a trumpet with a kind of rotary valve, but Blühmel’s and Stölzel’s separate patent applications in 1828 for a rotary valve were refused. In the same year, however, Blühmel secured Prussian patents for devices for prolonging the tone of stringed instruments and for tuning timpani with only one tuning-screw.

Instruments with Blühmel’s box valves were made by Friedrich Wilhelm Schuster (1798–1873) of Karlsruhe until about 1833.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Heyde: Das Ventilblasinstrument (Leipzig, 1987)

EDWARD H. TARR

Blum, Robert

(b Zürich, 27 Nov 1900; d Bellikon, canton of Aargau, 10 Dec 1994). Swiss composer and conductor. At the Zürich Conservatory (1919–22) he studied composition and conducting (with Andreae), the piano (with Baldegger) and counterpoint (with Laquai and Jarnach). In 1923 he attended Busoni's masterclass in composition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. On returning to Switzerland he was conductor of several orchestral and vocal ensembles, among them the Männerchor Aussersihl (which gave the première of Stravinsky's Oedipus rex in Switzerland) and the Orchesterverein in Baden. In 1935 he founded the Madrigalchor in Zürich, and helped found the Pro Musica society. Between 1943 and 1976 he also taught composition and counterpoint at the Musikakademie in Zürich.

Best known for his sacred choral music and his film music, Blum composed works influenced by the classicist styles of Busoni and Jarnach, by medieval and Renaissance models, and by Swiss folk music. His classicist tendency is evident in his preference for polyphony, strict forms and tonality, as well as in his struggle to suppress subjective expression and achieve an objective style in which widely contrasting compositional approaches, even serial techniques, could be synthesized. As a result of his involvement in choral music festivals in Switzerland he arranged numerous folk songs for choir. He was awarded the C.F. Meyer Prize (1942), the Musikpreis der Stadt Zürich (1960) and the composer's prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (1968).

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Stage: Amarapura (op, E. Neudegg), 1924; Der Maler (dramatic cant., Blum), 1929; St Galler Spiel von der Kindheit Jesu (H. Reinhart), ?1935; Im Aargäu sind zweu Liebi (Volksliederspiel, A. Haller), 1935; Der Bauer als Millionär (incid music, R. Schweizer), ?1937; Hansjoggel im Paradies, Dialektlustspiel, 1937; Das alte Tellenspiel (incid music), ?1941; Der Misanthrop (incid music, Molière, trans. F.W. Fulda), 1958; Unspunnen-Festspiel (H.R. Hubler), solo vv, chorus, wind orch, 1968

Film scores: Die missbrauchten Liebesbriefe, 1941; Der Schuss von der Kanzel, 1943; Die letzte Chance, 1945; Die Gezeichneten, 1948; Heidi, 1952; Die Vier im Jeep, 1954; Uli der Knecht, 1955; Uli der Pächter, 1956; c100 other scores, including many documentary films

choral and vocal

Kantate von der Erlösung durch den Geist in Jesu Christo, chorus, str orch, ?1933; Vogel Juhei (Thürer), 36 Dialektlieder, 1958; 2 Chöre (A. Gryphius), chorus, orch, 1960; 4 Psalmen, S, chorus, orch, 1960; Erzengel Michael (orat, Blum, after Bible), 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, org, ?1961; Der Tod des Agamemnon (orat, Blum), solo vv, male chorus, orch, 1965; 2 Meditationen (K. Marti, after Bible), Bar, female vv, wind qnt, org, 1970; Trias (Bible), B, male vv, orch, 1973; many a cappella pieces for mixed/male/female/children’s vv

Das 12. Kapitel der Offenbarung Johannis, A, 3 va, vc, pf, 1930; 4 Psalmen, S, small orch, 1932; 6 Hymnen (F. Wolters), S, str qt, ?1941; Der Streiter in Christo Jesu, S, chbr orch, ?1941; Lobgesang aus der Offenbarung Johannis, 12 solo vv, small orch, 1945; 5 Hymnen, A/B, pf, 1949, arr. B, orch, 1951; Serenade, S, B, 11 insts, 1956; 8 Fragmente nach Sappho, S, fl, vn, 1970; many lieder with pf

instrumental

Orch: Sym. no.1 (O. Khayyam), B, orch, 1924; Sym. no.2 (F. Hölderlin), chorus, orch, 1926; Sym. no.3, ?1927; 2 partitas, 1929, ?1935; Passionsmusik, str, org obbl., 1943; Partita, ?1951; Variationen über ‘Aus tiefer Not’, 1952; Va Conc., 1953; Conc. for Orch, 1955; Sym. no.4 (J.W. von Goethe), male chorus, wind, ?1959; Ob Conc., 1960; Toccata, Fantasia und Fuge, str, ?1960; Conc., vn, ob, tpt, orch, 1963; Konzertante Sinfonie, wind qnt, timp, hp, str, 1964; Sym. no.5. 1965; Partita, 1967; Sym. no.8 ‘Seldwyla’; Tropi e canzoni, str, 1968; Conc., str trio, chbr orch, 1969; Sym. no.6, 1969; Sym. no.10 ‘Pentatonischer Lobgesang’, chorus, orch, 1980; ovs., suites

Wind ens: An Orpheus, 13 insts, 1951; Wind Qnt, 1962; Stationen, wind qnt, 1967; Tombe di Ravenna, 11 brass, 1969; Zitat, 9 fl

Other works: Kleines Konzert, va, cl, 1926; Musik für 8 Inst, 1927; Duett, 2 vn, 1934; Str Qt, 1934; Str Trio, 1937; Lamentatio angelorum, fl, ob, cl, hn, str qt, db, 1942; Pf Trio, 1943; Capriccio, tpt, pf, 1959; Qt, fl, str trio, 1963; Sonata, fl, vn, 1963; Divertimento über eine Zwölftonreihe, 10 insts, 1966; Musik über 3 altdeutsche Volkslieder, cl, str trio, 1970; Str Qt, 1970

Principal publisher: Hug

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SML

W. Schuh: ‘Robert Blum’, Schweizer Musik der Gegenwart (Zürich, 1948), 223–9

P. Mieg: ‘Robert Blum’, 40 Schweizer Komponisten der Geganwart/40 compositeurs suisses contemporains (Amriswil, 1956; Eng. trans., 1956)

R. Blum: ‘Die Musik im Film’, SMz, c (1960), 66–70

G. Fierz: Robert Blum: Leben und Werk, Neujahrsblatt der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft in Zürich, cli (Zürich, 1967)

Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Robert Blum (Baden, 1975)

T. Levitz: ‘Busonis Meisterklasse in Komposition: Drei Schweizer Komponisten in Berlin’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenshcaft, xi (1991), 115–37

‘Robert Blum’, Schweizer Komponisten unserer Zeit (Winterthur, 3/1993), 36–7

TAMARA LEVITZ

Blum, (Robert) Stephen

(b East Cleveland, OH, 4 March 1942). American musicologist and ethnomusicologist. He received the BMus at Oberlin College (1964) and the PhD (1972) at the University of Illinois, where he studied with Bruno Nettl, Alexander Ringer and Charles Hamm. He taught at Western Illinois University (1969–73), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1973–7), York University (1977–87), and in 1987 became professor of music at CUNY Graduate School. His research and writings have focussed on two main interests: the music of Iran and the scope and methods of ethnomusicology and musicology. He conducted fieldwork in northeastern Iran in 1968–9, 1972 and 1995, and selections from his field recordings have been published on cassette by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (1997). A series of writings beginning in the 1970s has investigated fundamental issues in musical scholarship and historiography.

WRITINGS

‘The Concept of the ‘Asheq in Northern Khorasan’, AsM, iv/1 (1972), 27–47

Musics in Contact: the Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshed, Iran (diss., U. of Illinois, 1972)

‘Persian Folksong in Meshhed (Iran), 1969’, YIFMC, vi (1974), 86–114

‘Towards a Social History of Musicological Technique’, EthM, xix (1975), 207–31

‘Ives's Position in Social and Musical History’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 459–82

‘An Ethnomusicologist's Reflections on “Complexity” and “Participation” in Music’, College Music Symposium, xvii/2 (1977), 25–41

‘Changing Roles of Performers in Meshhed and Bojnurd, Iran’, Eight Urban Musical Cultures, ed. B. Nettl (Urbana, IL, 1978), 19–95

‘Rousseau's Concept of Sistême musical and the Comparative Study of Tonalities in Nineteenth-Century France’, JAMS, xxxviii (1986), 349–61

‘On the Disciplines and Arts of Music’, World of Music, xxix/1 (1987), 19–32

ed., with D.M. Neuman and P.V. Bohlman: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana, IL, 1991) [incl. ‘Prologue: Ethnomusicologists and Modern Music History’, 1–20]

‘European Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays in the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 1–36

‘Analysis of Musical Style’, Ethnomusicology: an Introduction, ed. H. Myers (London, 1992), 165–218

ed., with M.J. Kartomi: Music-Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions (Basel and Sydney, 1994) [incl. ‘Conclusion: Music in an Age of Cultural Confrontation’, 250–77]

THEODORE LEVIN

Blume, Friedrich

(b Schlüchtern, Hesse, 5 Jan 1893; d Schlüchtern, 22 Nov 1975). German musicologist. From 1911 he studied in Munich (with Sandberger, Kroyer, Wölfflin and Istel), Leipzig (with Riemann, Schering, Abert, Pinder, Schmarsow, Volkelt and Wundt) and Berlin (with Kretzschmar, Wolf and Goldschmidt). Detained by military service, he completed the doctorate in 1921 at Leipzig with a dissertation on the precursors of the orchestral suite in the 15th and 16th centuries. The same year he became assistant lecturer in Leipzig and in 1923 was named lecturer at the University of Berlin, where he completed the Habilitation in 1925 with a work on monody in Protestant church music. Appointed reader in Berlin in 1933, he went to the University of Kiel the following year, where he won acclaim for his direction of the collegium musicum and was named professor in 1938; he remained there until his retirement in 1958.

Blume’s research speciality was the music of the Lutheran church, to which he devoted his first major book, Die evangelische Kirchenmusik, in addition to a number of studies of Schütz and Bach and the complete edition of Michael Praetorius (1928–40). Active in the Jugendmusikbewegung and well regarded as a collegium director, Blume took a special interest in the proliferation of performance editions of Renaissance and Baroque music. He was general editor of the choral music series Das Chorwerk (1929–38), which included several of his own editions of works by Josquin, Pierre de La Rue, Lassus and Purcell. In 1938, he attracted national attention with his interest in race issues, delivering a keynote speech on music and race at the largest musical gathering of the Third Reich, the Reichsmusiktage. Vague in his acceptance or rejection of racial methodology, Blume managed to appease both Nazi leaders and postwar supporters for simultaneously embracing and criticizing Nazi ideological trends. He went on to edit a series of race studies in music (Studien zur musikalischen Volks- und Rassenkunde) and earned the privilege of contributing an essay on musicology to a Festschrift for Hitler’s 50th birthday. For the bulk of his later career, Blume was intensely engaged with the preparation of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), the comprehensive music dictionary that was one of the crowning achievements of postwar German musicology. He worked closely with contributors all over the world and reportedly took personal responsibility for each of the 9414 articles. The writings for which he is best known in Britain and the USA are the four comprehensive essays on Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, originally written for MGG1 and later published separately in English translation as Renaissance and Baroque Music (New York, 1967) and Classic and Romantic Music (New York, 1970).

Blume was deeply involved in musicological organizations and large-scale projects for much of his career, and was a driving force behind the rebuilding of German musicology after World War II. From 1935, he was affiliated with the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung, the central musicological institute established by the Nazi Education Ministry, where he served from 1939 to 1945 as the secretary in charge of Das Erbe Deutscher Musik (EDM) and editor of Deutsche Musikkultur, a journal designed to direct musicological scholarship to a wider readership. In 1943, under the auspices of this institute, Blume was appointed general editor of MGG even though its preparation had to be put off until the end of the war. After the war, Blume evaded the complexities of denazification and was free to devote himself to rebuilding German musicology. His first priority was to salvage MGG, which had been jeopardized by the dissolution of the Staatliches Institut. He succeeded in bringing out 14 volumes from 1949 to 1968, after which his daughter Ruth oversaw the production of the supplement. No novice at organizational leadership (he was president of the new HeinrichSchütz-Gesellschaft, 1942–56), Blume also spearheaded the founding of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in 1946 and served as its president until 1962 and honorary president thereafter, and he urged the authorities of the Federal Republic to resurrect such enterprises as the Staatliches Institut and EDM. Blume was careful to publicly disassociate himself from any suggestions of Nazi thought or actions, winning the trust of scholars outside Germany and re-establishing international ties severed during the war. He played a central role in reconstituting the IMS, serving as vice-president and president (1958–61); he also helped to found the IAML and was general editor of RISM from 1952. From 1955 to 1973 he was also president of the Joseph-Haydn-Institut in Cologne.

WRITINGS

Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Orchestersuite im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1921; Leipzig, 1925/R)

‘Die formgeschichtliche Stellung der Klavierkonzerte Mozarts’, Mozart-Jb 1924, 81–107

Das monodische Prinzip in der protestantischen Kirchenmusik (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Berlin, 1925; Leipzig, 1925/R)

Michael Praetorius Creuzburgiensis (Wolfenbüttel, 1929)

Die evangelische Kirchenmusik, (1931, 2/1965 as Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenmusik; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1974 as Protestant Church Music: a History)

‘Joseph Haydns künstlerische Persönlichkeit in seinen Streichquartetten’, JbMP 1931, 24–48

‘Das Werk des Michael Praetorius’, ZMw, xvii (1935), 321–31, 482–502

‘Musik und Rasse: Grundfragen einer musikalischen Rasseforschung’, Die Musik, xxx (1937–8), 736–48

‘Deutsche Musikwissenschaft’, Deutsche Wissenschaften: Arbeit und Aufgabe: dem Führer und Reichskanzler zum 50. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1939), 16–18

‘Erbe und Auftrag’, Deutsche Musikkultur, iv (1939–40), 1–11

‘Musikforschung und Musikpraxis’, Festschrift Fritz Stein, ed. H. Hoffmann and F. Rühlmann (Brunswick, 1939), 13–25

Das Rasseproblem in der Musik (Wolfenbüttel, 1939, 2/1944)

‘Die Formung der Musikgeschichte’, Deutsche Musikkultur, v (1940–1), 1–8

‘Das Kantatenwerk Dietrich Buxtehudes’, JbMP 1940, 10–39

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Gedenkrede zu Mozarts 150. Todestag am 5. Dez. 1941 (Wolfenbüttel, 1942, 2/1948)

‘Lasso und Palestrina’, Deutsche Musikkultur, ix (1944), 31–45

Wesen und Werden deutscher Musik (Kassel, 1944)

‘Musikwissenschaft und Gegenwart’, Melos, xiv (1947), 72–6

Johann Sebastian Bach im Wandel der Geschichte (Kassel, 1947; Eng. trans., 1950/R as Two Centuries of Bach)

‘Bilanz der Musikforschung’, Mf, i (1948), 3–19

Goethe und die Musik (Kassel, 1948)

Denkschrift zur Schulmusikerziehung (Bonn, 1951)

‘Zur Lage der deutschen Musikforschung’, Mf, v (1952), 97–109

‘Neue Bachforschung’, STMf, xxxvi (1954), 5–25

‘Mozart’s Style and Influence’, ‘Mozart: the Concertos, their Sources’, The Mozart Companion, ed. H.C. Robbins Landon and D. Mitchell (London and New York, 1956, 2/1965), 10–31, 200–33

Was ist Musik? (Kassel, 1959, 2/1960)

‘Das Problem der Kirchenmusik in unserer Zeit’, Musik und Kirche, xxx (1960), 129–37

‘Begriff und Grenzen des Barock in der Musik’, Manierismo, barocco, rococò: concetti e termini: Rome 1960 (Rome, 1962), 377–84

‘Die Musik von 1830 bis 1914’, Musica, xvi (1962), 283–91

Umrisse eines neuen Bach-Bildes (Kassel, 1962); Eng. trans. in ML, xliv (1963), 214–27

ed. M. Ruhnke: Syntagma musicologicum: gesammelte Reden und Schriften (Kassel, 1963)

Der Junge Bach (Wolffenbüttel, 1967); Eng. trans. as ‘J.S. Bach’s Youth’, MQ, liv (1968), 1–30

‘Historische Musikforschung in der Gegenwart’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 13–25; repr. in AcM, xl (1968), 8–21; Eng. trans. in SMA, ii (1968), 1–14

‘Das musikalische Kunstwerk in der Geschichte’, Festschrift Bruno Stäblein, ed. M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1967), 9–27; repr. in Syntagma musicologicum II (1973), 47–67

‘Musikwissenschaft’, Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1968), 77–88

‘Musicology in German Universities’, CMc, no.9 (1969), 52–64

‘Lo stato attuale degli studi su Bach’, NRMI, iii (1969), 381–97

‘Josquin des Prez: the Man and the Music’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 18–27

‘Heinrich Schütz nach dreihundert Jahren’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (5 Nov 1972); repr. in Syntagma musicologicum II (1973), 139–47; Eng trans. in SMA, vii (1973), 1–9

ed. A.A. Abert and M. Ruhnke: Syntagma musicologicum II: gesammelte Reden und Schriften 1962–1972 (Kassel, 1973) [incl. autobiographical note]

EDITIONS

Josquin Des Près: Missa Pange lingua, Cw, i (1929/R) xviii: Vier Motetten (c1926/R); xx: Missa da pacem (1932/R); xxiii: Drei Evangelien-Motetten (1933/R); xxxiii: Drei Psalmen (1935/R); xlii: Missa de Beata Virgine (1936/R)

Michael Praetorius: Gesamtausgabe der musikalischen Werke, v, vii–ix: Musae Sionae, pts 4, 7–9 (Berlin, 1929–39); xi: Missodia Sionia 1611 (Berlin, 1934); xvi: Urania 1613 (Berlin, 1939); xviii: Polyhymnia exercitatrix 1620 (Berlin, 1941)

Weltliche Lieder, Cw, iii (1930/R); Sieben chromatische Motetten des Barock, Cw, xiv (1931/R)

Pierre de La Rue: Requiem und eine Motette, Cw, xi (1931/R)

Henry Purcell: Fünf geistliche Chöre, Cw, xvii (1932/R)

Christoph Demantius: Passion nach dem Evangelisten Johannes, Cw, xxvii (1934/R)

Alessandro Grandi: Drei konzertierende Motetten, Cw, xl (1936)

with W. Schulze: Johannes Hähnel (Galliculus): Ostermesse über das Lied ‘Christ ist erstanden’, Cw, xliv (1936/R)

with W. Schulze: Balthasar Harzer (Resinarius): Summa passionis Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Johannem, Cw, xlvii (1937/R)

Lambert de Sayve und Michael Praetorius: Teutsche Liedlein, Cw, li (1938/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Vetter: ‘Friedrich Blume 60 Jahre alt’, MG, iii (1953), 26–7

A.A. Abert and W. Pfannkuch, eds.: Festschrift Friedrich Blume (Kassel, 1963) [incl. list of pubns to 1963]

K. Gudewill: ‘Zur Geschichte des Faches Musikwissenschaft an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel’, Musikerziehung in Schleswig-Holstein, ed. C. Dahlhaus and W. Wiora (Kassel, 1965), 11–23

A.A. Abert: ‘Friedrich Blume zum 75. Geburtstag’, Mf, xxi (1968), 1–2

W. Wiora: ‘Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag Friedrich Blumes’, Mf, xxv (1972), 417–19

G. Henle: ‘Zum 80. Geburtstag von Friedrich Blume’, Haydn-Studien, iii (1973), 1–2; see also G. Feder: ‘Friedrich Blume zum 80. Geburtstag’, ibid., 3 only

B. Stäblein: ‘Die Entstehung des gregorianischen Chorals: Friedrich Blume zum 80. Geburtstag’, Mf, xxvii (1974), 5–17

P.M. Potter: Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)

PAMELA M. POTTER

Blumenfeld, Fannie.

See Zeisler, Fannie.

Blumenfeld, Felix (Mikhaylovich)

(b Kovalyovka, South Ukraine, 7/19 April 1863; d Moscow, 21 Jan 1931). Russian conductor, pianist, composer and teacher, uncle of Heinrich Neuhaus. He studied the piano with Stein and composition with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught the piano from his graduation in 1885 until 1918 (excluding the years 1905–11), being appointed a professor in 1897. From 1895 to 1911 he was also conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, where he gave the premières of Rimsky-Korsakov's Servilia (1902) and Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (1907) and the Russian première of Tristan und Isolde (1899). In 1908 he conducted the Russian seasons in Paris, achieving wide recognition as a conductor and, more especially, as a pianist. He lived and worked in close contact with Anton Rubinstein, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin. His performing style, influenced by Rubinstein's, was heroically brilliant and lyrically melodious; he gave the first performances of many piano works by Glazunov, Lyadov and Arensky, among others. He was well known as a teacher, first in St Petersburg, then in Kiev (1918–22) and at the Moscow Conservatory (1922–31), and his methods influenced many famous Soviet piano teachers (including his nephew, Neuhaus) and are widely discussed in Soviet musical literature; among his pupils were Horowitz, Grinberg, Barere (who recorded Blumenfeld's Etude for the Left Hand in 1935) and Gauk. Dubyansky, considered to be his most gifted pupil, and to whom he dedicated his Two Lyric Fragments op.47, committed suicide at the age of 21. As a composer Blumenfeld was close to the ‘Belyayev Circle’ and influenced by Chopin. Although sincere and attractive pianistically, his music did not outlive him. Of some interest are his songs, including the song cycle Vesna (‘Spring’), and some piano works, among them the Variations opp.8 and 34, and 24 Preludes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDRSC

B. Asaf'yev: ‘K 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya F.M. Blumenfel'da’ [On the 100th anniversary of F.M. Blumenfeld's birth], SovM (1963), no.4, pp.74–6

L. Barenboim: Fortepianno-pedagogicheskie principi F.M. Blumenfel'da (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964)

R.A. Moozser: ‘Vospominaniya o F.M. Blumenfel'de’ [Memories of F.M. Blumenfeld], Muzïkal'noye ispolnitel'stvo, vi, ed. G. Ya. Edel'man (Moscow, 1970), 213–6

JOACHIM BRAUN

Blumental, Felicja [Blumenthal, Felicia]

(b Warsaw, 28 Dec 1918; d Tel-Aviv, 31 Dec 1991). Brazilian pianist of Polish birth. She studied composition under Szymanowski and the piano with Zbigniew Drzewiecki and Joseph Goldberg at the Warsaw Conservatory, making her international début shortly before World War II. The political situation in Europe forced her to emigrate in 1942. She settled in Brazil and made a successful American début at Rio de Janeiro. Villa-Lobos was so favourably impressed with her playing of his Bachianas brasileiras no.3 in 1954 that he composed his Fifth Piano Concerto for her, which she first performed in the Festival Hall, London, in 1955. She was also the dedicatee of Penderecki’s Partita for harpsichord and chamber orchestra (1971). From the 1960s Blumental made a speciality of music outside the regular repertory, particularly from the early 19th century, and she recorded works for piano and orchestra by Clementi, Field, Kozeluch, Czerny, Hummel, Ries and Paderewski, among others, as well as the piano version of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

FRANK DAWES/R

Blumer, Rodney (Milnes).

See Milnes, Rodney.

Blumner, Martin (Traugott Wilhelm)

(b Fürstenberg, Mecklenburg, 21 Nov 1827; d Berlin, 16 Nov 1901). German conductor and composer. He studied theology, philosophy and natural science in Berlin from 1845, during which time he was a member of the Sing-Akademie. He decided to become a musician and studied composition with S.W. Dehn from 1847; but the principal influence on his musical background was Eduard Grell, under whom he was assistant conductor of the Sing-Akademie from 1853 and whom he succeeded as the principal conductor in 1876. For many years Blumner also conducted the Berlin male-voice choir (‘Liedertafel’) founded by Zelter. At the Akademie der Künste, of which he had been a member since 1875, Blumner held various posts, the last one being chairman of a masterclass for composition. In 1891 he published his Geschichte der Singakademie zu Berlin, and in the same year he received an honorary doctorate from Berlin University.

As a composer Blumner belonged to the so-called Berlin ‘academics’. He was committed to the Romantic-historical a cappella ideal and wrote exclusively vocal music. Chief among his works are the biblical oratorios Abraham op.8 (1859) and Der Fall Jerusalems op.30 (1874); he also composed motets and other unaccompanied choral works, as well as sacred and secular works for solo voice. His musical outlook was conservative, his style epigonal; his obvious models were Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn. According to Schering his works ‘lack neither seriousness nor profundity but … nevertheless sound like music on second hand’ (ScheringGO, 463). In this sense, as a traditional rather than a progressive musician, Blumner also served the Sing-Akademie as its respected conductor. (G. Schünemann: Die Singakademie zu Berlin 1791–1941, Regensburg, 1941)

REINHOLD BRINKMANN

Blundell, James

(fl London, c1775–82). English music publisher, associated with the firms of the Welcker family.

Blundevile, John

(b Lincoln, c1650; bur. Durham, 11 April 1721). English musician. He was the son of the John Blundevile who was associated with the choir of Lincoln Cathedral from 1622 to 1692. It is reasonable to identify him with the chorister of that name who was at Lincoln in 1660, and then at the Chapel Royal until Christmas Day 1664. It appears he then worked successively in Ely, as a lay clerk and informator between 1669 and 1674, in Lichfield in 1676 (having failed to produce the necessary certificate at Winchester on 16 May), and in Dublin, from 1677 to 1679. From 1681 he was a lay clerk at York Minster, becoming Master of the Choristers the following year. He held this post until 1692. On 15 May 1693 the Dean of Durham Cathedral was instructed to write to Blundevile to ascertain on what terms he would transfer his allegiance from York to Durham. Although Blundevile did leave York at this time, it is not known where he went, and it was not until January 1703 that he was appointed a lay clerk at Durham Cathedral.

He may well have been the composer of the two duets Tho' our pockets are out and The Juice of the Grape (GB-Lbl Add. 29397), though the anthem Let God arise, in certain of the Lincoln part-books, could be by his father. It is thought that the younger John may have been responsible for bringing to Durham an early post-Restoration book of anthems primarily in the hand of Hosier (DRc B1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDECM

H. Cotton: Fasti ecclesiae hibernicae (Dublin, 1848–9)

B. Crosby: ‘An Early Post-Restoration Liturgical Music Manuscript’, ML, lv (1974), 458–64

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995)

BRIAN CROSBY

Blur.

English rock group. It was formed in Colchester in 1989 by Damon Albarn (b Whitechapel, London, 23 March 1968; vocals), Graham Coxon (b Rinteln, nr Hanover, 12 March 1969; electric guitar), Alex James (b Bournemouth, 21 Nov 1968; bass guitar) and Dave Rowntree (b Colchester, 8 May 1964; drums). Their first album, Leisure (Food, 1991), hinted at a psychedelic pop sensibility, but subsequent recordings established the band as mordant and witty observers of small-time English psychoses, which they housed in an infectious combination of mod and punk styles indebted to the Small Faces, The Kinks, David Bowie and the Jam. Thematically, Modern Life is Rubbish (Food, 1993) remains perhaps their most complete work, a paean to ‘little Englandism’ in the face of American imperialism, but musically Parklife (Food, 1994) is superior, with its sarcastic post-Aids disco anthem of sexual liberation, ‘Girls and Boys’, its tale of transvestism in ‘Tracy Jacks’ (a 1990s update of Pink Floyd's ‘Arnold Layne’) and the epic ballad ‘This is a low’. As Britpop took off in 1995, the arty, middle-class ‘Essex Boys’ Blur were contrasted in the media with the more demotic rock of Manchester's Oasis; ‘Country House’ (Food, 1995), released on the same day as Oasis's ‘Roll with it’, famously beat its rival into second place in the UK pop charts in August that year. Afterwards, however, Blur's star was temporarily on the wane as the next album, The Great Escape (Food, 1995), reused old themes. In 1997 the band effected a volte face and embraced the slow, grunge-influenced ‘low-fi’ American sound of such artists as Pavement and Beck. The resultant eponymously titled album was an unexpected artistic triumph. 13 (1999) was even more experimental, with haunting, expressionistic soundscapes best evidenced on tracks such as ‘1992’ and ‘Battle’, while the gospel-influenced ‘Tender’ retained a sufficiently broad appeal to enter the charts. See also S. Maconie: Blur: 3862 Days: the Official History (London, 1999).

DAVID BUCKLEY

Blüthner.

German firm of piano makers. Julius Blüthner (b Falkenhain, nr Leipzig, 11 March 1824; d Leipzig, 13 April 1910) began working as a cabinet maker. After working for Hölling and Spangenburg (piano makers) in Zeitz, he started his own small business in Leipzig in 1853, building grand pianos with the assistance of three men and a boy. He patented his ‘repetition action’ after his success at the 1854 Munich Industrial Exhibition. In 1864 he began making upright pianos. He expanded his business as he won prizes and medals at various exhibitions and attracted orders from royalty. He strove constantly to refine his instruments and this work culminated in the 1873 patent for the aliquot scaling of grand pianos. This added a fourth, unison-tuned sympathetic (‘aliquot’) string to each trichord group in the treble to enrich the piano's weakest register by enhancing the overtone spectrum of the instrument. The Aliquot string runs parallel to the normal strings, but is elevated where the hammer strikes so that it is not struck directly, but vibrates in sympathy with the other strings (the illustration shows the modified aliquot scaling system introduced by the firm in 1991; for an illustration of the original system, see Grove6). Julius Blüthner personally tested every piano; his sons, Max, Robert and Bruno, later took over this responsibility. Bruno, who had spent some time with the American piano manufacturer Chickering, took charge of the technical side of the business.

The large Leipzig factory was completely destroyed in World War II, but Bruno’s son-in-law, Rudolph Blüthner-Haessler, was able to recommence manufacture against considerable odds. Under the direction of his son, Ingbert (b Leipzig, 4 March 1936), Blüthner pianos have regained their former eminence; a splendid factory was completed in October 1974, and pianos are still made there largely by hand. From 1972 the company was volkseigener Betrieb, or ‘owned by the people’, but in 1990 it was reprivatized and passed back into the Blüthner family's ownership. By 1995 150,000 pianos had been made. A new range of cheaper pianos was introduced in 1998 under the name of Haessler.

Modern Blüthner pianos, still with aliquot scaling, are prized by many eminent pianists for their quality and craftsmanship. The pianos won the gold medal at the 1965 Leipzig 800th Anniversary Fair. Blüthner instruments are distinguished by a round, slightly romantic tone, with a particularly full treble. Pianos made today have an improved, arched soundboard crown, which enhances the lower overtones. The Blüthner patent action is described and illustrated by Blüthner-Haessler. The firm's British agents since 1876 have been Whelpdale, Maxwell & Codd of London, who in 1934 began to make an entirely British piano, the ‘Welmar’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Blüthner and H.Gretschel: Lehrbuch des Pianofortebaues in seiner Geschichte, Theorie und Technik (Weimar, 1872/R)

The History of the Blüthner Pianoforte: Julius Blüthner, Pianoforte Maker 1824 to 1910 (London, n.d.)

I. Blüthner-Haessler: Pianofortebau, elementar und umfassend dargestellt von einem Klavierbau (Frankfurt, 1991)

MARGARET CRANMER

Blyma, Franz Xaver

(b Austria or Bohemia, 1770; d Kiev, c1812). Russian composer and conductor of Czech birth. In 1799–1800 he was music director at the Petrovsky Theatre, Moscow. Later he entered the service of Count Komburley, provincial governor of Volhynia, where he spent the remainder of his life. In addition to some violin music and two symphonies (op.1, Moscow, 1799; op.2, Bonn, 1806), Blyma composed (in 1798) the score for Starinnïye suyatki (‘The Old-Time Yuletide’; three acts, libretto by A.F. Malinovsky), one of the most popular Russian Singspiele of its day. First performed at the Petrovsky under the composer’s direction on 3/14 February 1800, it remained in the repertory until the 1830s, epitomizing the sentimental approach to national subject matter that characterized the early Romantic style in Russia. The neglible plot – a couple of maidens tell fortunes and are betrothed – serves as an excuse for a pageant of old ceremonies, costumes, song and dance.

One of the divining songs (podblyudnïye) the maidens sing is ‘Slava’ (‘Glory’), famous owing to its use in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov; in The Old-Time Yuletide it is heard (for the first time on stage) in its natural habitat, accompanying a domestic ritual (an excerpt, together with one from the overture, is printed in Findeyzen). During the Patriotic War of 1812, it became customary to insert the names of valorous officers into the ‘Slava’, turning it into an expression of civic sentiments. This direction was continued by Alexey Nikolayevich Titov in his patriotic opera of 1817, Muzhestvo kievlyanina, ili Vot kakovïye russkiye (‘The Courage of a Kievan, or That’s what Russians are Like’), where it serves as a climactic chorus in praise of the Great Prince Svyatoslav. Musorgsky’s use of the song to epitomize a tsar’s coronation may thus be seen as a further continuation along this line of transformation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MooserA

N. Findeyzen: Ocherki po istorii muzïki v Rossii s drevneyshikh vremyon do kontsa XVIII veka [Studies in the history of music in Russia from ancient times to the end of the 18th century], ii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1929)

A. Gozenpud: Muzïkal'nïy teatr v Rossii ot istokov do Glinki [Music theatre in Russia from its origins to Glinka] (Leningrad, 1959)

Yu.V. Keldïsh and others: Istoriya russkoy muzïki v desyati tomakh [The history of Russian music in ten volumes], iv (Moscow, 1986)

RICHARD TARUSKIN

Blyth, (Geoffrey) Alan

(b London, 27 July 1929). English critic. Educated at Rugby and Oxford, where he studied with Jack Westrup, he began writing criticism in The Times in the early 1960s and later in The Listener and Gramophone, and quickly made a mark as a sure judge of the human voice and performing style. He was an associate editor of Opera magazine (1967–83), and worked as a staff critic for the Daily Telegraph (1977–89). A prolific writer with wide experience, on singers and on opera from Mozart to the present day, Blyth has edited discographic reviews of opera (Opera on Record, London, 1979, 1983, 1984; Opera on CD, London, 1992, 2/1994; Opera on Video, London, 1996) and song (Song on Record, London, 1986–8) and has written Wagner’s Ring: an Introduction (London, 1980) and Remembering Britten (London, 1981).

Blyth, Samuel

(b Salem, MA, bap. 13 May 1744; bur. Salem, 13 Jan 1795). American craftsman and organist. He worked all his life in Salem, where from 1766 to 1783 he occasionally played the organ at St Peter’s Church. He also ran a boarding-school for girls, and is recorded in Salem account books as a painter of ships, carriages, carpets and canisters, a gilder and a maker of Venetian blinds. Only one musical instrument by him is known: a spinet from about 1785, now in the Essex Institute, Salem. It is one of the few extant examples of 18th-century American plucked-string keyboard instruments, and is modelled on English types. The instrument has a range of G/B to f''' and has a mahogany case, with the painted inscription ‘Samuel Blyth SALEM Massachusetts Fecit’ over the keyboard. A bill dated 7 February 1786 from Samuel Blyth to Mrs Margaret Barton ‘To making a Spinnett for her daughter – L 18 . . 0–0’ is also in the Essex Institute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Russell: The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1959, 2/1973), pl.80

N.F. Little: ‘The Blyths of Salem: Benjamin, Limner in Crayon and Oil, and Samuel, Painter and Cabinetmaker’, Essex Institute Historical Collections, cviii (1972), 49–57

CYNTHIA ADAMS HOOVER

Blytheman [Blythman], John.

See Blitheman, John.

Blyton, Carey

(b Beckenham, 14 March 1932). English composer. He trained at Trinity College of Music, London (1953–7), took the London BMus (1957) and studied with Jersild at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen (1957–8). His subsequent appointments include music editor at Faber Music (1963–74), where he edited Britten’s works from Curlew River to Owen Wingrave, and visiting professor of composition for film, television and radio at the GSMD (1972–83), establishing there the first course of its kind at a British conservatory. Blyton is a skilful miniaturist of generally lighthearted and lyrical music. His songs are exemplified by the cycle Lachrymae – In memoriam John Dowland (1956–7), and his extensive works for woodwind by Dance Variations (1975), one of many works for saxophone quartet. There is a large body of music for guitar, including The Oceans of the Moon (1975). In his many commercial commissions his keen ear for unusual sonorities is evident, as in the BBC television documentary The Goshawk (1969), incidental music for the children’s serial Dr Who and a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds documentary Flying Birds (1972). He has written extensively for young performers including stage works such as Dracula! or The Vampire Vanquished (1983), and has edited The Faber Book of Nursery Rhymes (1968). Several works reveal an interest in Japanese music and certain of its characteristic modes, including his most important piece, the chamber opera The Girl from Nogami (1976).

Principal publishers: Berben, Roberton, Modus Music

ANDREW BURN

BMG [Bertelsmann Music Group].

International record company with interests in music publishing, online music sales and audio equipment manufacturing. A subsidiary of the German media group Bertelsmann, BMG is one of the five companies that dominate the global record market. Based in New York, the company controls over 200 record labels including BMG Classics, RCA Victor Red Seal, Gold Seal, DHM, Melodiya and Arte Nova. BMG also owns the publishing rights to over 700,000 songs, including the catalogues of artists as diverse as The Beach Boys and B.B. King; in 1995 the company took control of Ricordi, whose catalogue contains the operas of Verdi and Puccini.

BMI [Broadcast Music Inc.].

See Copyright, §V, 14(ii).

B mi [Bemi].

(1) In the medieval Hexachord system with hexachords on G, C and F, the third degree of the hexachord on G, hence B. The letter-name of this note was written as a square or ‘hard’ B (for an illustration, see Solmization, fig.2), and the note was therefore also known as ‘B quadratum’ or ‘B durum’. When the system was transposed (see Musica ficta, §1(iv)), the symbol could designate the third degrees of other hexachords: F, C, E, A, or even other notes.

(2) In medieval treatises, the term was also used for the square B (or ‘mi’) sign when used as a notational symbol; this symbol was the forerunner of the modern sharp and natural signs, and also gave rise to the modern German use of H for B.

B molle

(Lat.: ‘soft B’).

The note corresponding to the syllable fa in the soft Hexachord, hence B.

See Accidental, §§1–2, and Musica ficta, §§1–2.

B mollis.

See B fa.

Bo.

Chinese cymbals. See Cymbals, §3.

Bo, Sonia

(b Lecco, 27 March 1960). Italian composer. She studied composition with Renato Dionisi and Azio Corghi at the Milan Conservatory, graduating in 1985; she also studied the piano, choral singing and conducting there, and took further composition classes with Donatoni at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena, in 1988. Her reputation was established through various national and international competitions: she won first prize in the Guido d’Arezzo competition in 1985 for Frammenti da Jacopone, an award from the European Cultural Foundation in 1985 for Da una lettura di Husserl and the 1995 city of Trieste gold medal for Synopsis. She began to teach composition at the Piacenza Conservatory in 1989.

Bo’s music is characterized by a mingling of complex bands of sound, rich in timbral and contrapuntal effects. Works such as Da una lettura di Husserl create a fascinating interplay between different blocks of sound within an episodic formal structure. The voice plays a central part in her output both as a means of expression and as a medium through which to experiment with monodic writing, as in Polittico and Studi ‘con testo a fronte’.

WORKS

Orch: Da una lettura di Husserl, chbr orch, 1984; Synopsis, 1987

Choral: Frammenti da Jacopone, female chorus, 1985; Lauda (J. da Todi), spkr, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1987; 3 filastrocche, child’s v/children’s chorus, 1992; La minestra (G. Rodari), children’s chorus, 10 insts, kitchen pots, 1996; Filastrocche del cavallo parlante 1996 (Rodari), spkr, children’s chorus, 10 insts, 1996

Solo vocal: Come un’allegoria (G. Caprioni), S, cl, vc, pf, 1986; Studi ‘con testo a fronte’ (P. Volponi), v, 1989; Polittico, 5 liriche, S (G. Marino, U. Foscolo, T. Folengo, L. Ariosto, T. Tasso), vn, hn, perc, pf, with dance ad lib, 1991–2; … rosee le fila (Foscolo), S, fl, pf, 1994; … oro alle fila (Foscolo), S, fl, cl, pf, perc, live elecs, 1995; Come si chiamano gli uccelli (Rodari), spkr, 10 insts, whistle, calls, 1996; D’ametista (E. Montale), spkr, b cl, vc, hp, live elecs ad lib, 1996; Con testo a fronte (Volponi), v, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Wind Qnt, 1982; Nugae, vn, va, vc, 1982; Tre studi, vn, pf, 1984; Str Qt, 1985; Piccolo studio, 2 cl, pf, 1985; D’Iride, fl, cl, perc, pf, va, vc, 1988; 2 bagatelle, fl, gui, 1988; Blankes Turkenschwert, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, pf, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1991; 3 canti da Saffo, vn, 1994; Pronto chi fischia? (Rodari), ‘speaking’, cl, 1995; Dal ‘Libro dei prodigi’, sax, 1995; Come nella memoria, 3 pezzi, pf, 1996

Principal publishers: Ricordi, Edi-Pan

GIORDANO FERRARI

Boas, Franz

(b Minden, 9 July 1858; d New York, 21 Dec 1942). American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist of German birth. He was trained at Heidelberg, Berlin and Kiel as a physicist and geographer (1877–81), and, having gone to Baffinland, North America, to do a survey of Cumberland Sound, he went on to compare Inuit perceptions of space with his own technical mapping. It was during his stay among the Inuits in 1883–4, that he formulated the anthropological perspectives and field methodology that was to shape the character of early 20th-century American anthropology. On his return to Berlin, he became interested in the methods used by Carl Stumpf, Hornbostel and Herzog in the study of music in other cultures. In 1886 Boas returned to North America to work among the Bella Coola Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast; in 1888 he took a post teaching anthropology at Clark University and settled in the USA, having decided to make Amerindians the centre of his anthropological work.

Boas was well acquainted with other pioneers in the study of Amerindian music, including Alice Cunningham Fletcher, J. Walter Fewkes and Frances Densmore, with whom he was associated through the Bureau of American Ethnology. For some publications Boas and Fletcher shared the services of John Comfort Fillmore as transcriber for their recordings of Amerindian melodies and in 1893, while chief anthropological assistant at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he and Benjamin Ives Gilman simultaneously recorded a performance in the Kwakiutl exhibit.

Boas was professor of anthropology at Columbia University (1899–1936), and in his teaching he emphasized that music was vital to the integrated ethnological study of indigenous cultures. While curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History (1901–5), Boas organized the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1902–6), the first comprehensive anthropological survey of the north circumpolar region, during which he and his associates made sound and film recordings. He urged his students to collect music along with other ethnological data. He recorded much material among the Kwakiutl and neighbouring tribes in British Columbia and among the Yoruba in Africa. His publications of the period 1887–1900 include many transcriptions: ‘The Central Eskimo’ (1888) and ‘The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians’ (1897) served as models for later ethnological treatises that included music. After 1900 Boas developed a keen interest in linguistics and the closely linked oral arts and their accompanying forms (tale and myth, poetry, music and dance), emphasizing the interrelationship of different aspects of culture within the whole cultural frame. His publications (over 600 items) often included song texts with translations.

WRITINGS

‘Poetry and Music of some North American Tribes’, Science, ix (1887), 383–5

‘The Central Eskimo’, Bureau of American Ethnology: Annual Report 1884–1885, vi (1888), 399–669; pubd separately (Lincoln, NE, 1964)

‘Second General Report of the Indians of British Columbia’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, lx (1891), 562–715

‘Eskimo Tales and Songs’, Journal of American Folklore, vii (1894), 45–50

‘The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians’, Report of the United States National Museum 1895 (1897), 311–753

‘The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians’, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, ii (1900), 25–127

Primitive Art (Oslo and Cambridge, MA, 1927/R)

ed.: General Anthropology (New York, 1938/R) [incl. ‘Literature, Music and Dance’, 589–608; ‘Music and Folk-Lore’, 609–26]

ed.: The Function of Dance in Human Society (New York, 1944, 2/1972) [incl. ‘Dance and Music in the Life of the Northwest Coast Indians of North America (Kwakiutl)’, 5–9]

ed. R.P. Rohner: The Ethnography of Franz Boas (Chicago, 1969) [diaries and letters, 1886–1931]

ed. G.W. Stocking: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: a Franz Boas Reader (New York, 1974/R)

ed. C.C. Knötsch: Franz Boas bei den kanadischen Inuit im Jahre 1883–1884 (Bonn, 1992; Eng. trans., 1998) [diaries and letters]

ed. A. Jonaitis: A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art (Seattle and Vancouver, 1995)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Laufer, ed.: Boas Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of Franz Boas (New York, 1906) [incl. list of pubns, 515–40]

‘Franz Boas, 1858–1942’, American Anthropologist, new ser., xlv/3, pt 2 [suppl.61] (1943) [memorial issue; incl. A.L. Kroeber: ‘Franz Boas: the Man’, 5–26; R. Benedict: ‘Franz Boas as an ethnologist’, 27–34; G.A. Reichard: ‘Franz Boas and Folklore’, 52–7, and complete list of writings, 67–109]

R.H. Lowie: ‘Biographical Memoir of Franz Boas, 1858–1942’, Biographical Memoirs [National Academy of Sciences], xxiv (Washington, 1947), 303–22

M.J. Herskovits: Franz Boas: the Science of Man in the Making (New York, 1953/R)

B. Nettl: North American Indian Musical Styles (Philadelphia, 1954)

L.A. White: The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas (Austin, 1963)

R. Darnell: The Development of American Anthropology, 1879–1920: from the Bureau of American Ethnology to Franz Boas (Philadelphia, 1969)

Guide to the Microfilm Collection of the Professional Papers of Franz Boas (Wilmington, DE, 1972)

M. Hyatt: Franz Boas, Social Activist: the Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York, 1990)

J.E. Liss: The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Franz Boas and the Development of American Anthropology (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1990)

V. Rodekamp, ed.: Franz Boas, 1858–1942: eine amerikanischer Anthropologe aus Minden (Bielefeld, 1994)

M. Dürr: Franz Boas: Ethnologe, Anthropologe, Sprachwissenschaftler, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 17 Dec 1992 – 6 March 1993 (Berlin, 1992) [exhibition catalogue]

SUE CAROLE De VALE/R

Boatner, Edward Hammond

(b New Orleans, 13 Nov 1898; d New York, 16 June 1981). American composer. The son of a travelling minister, he became familiar with African American religious folk music at an early age. He studied at Western University (1916), the Boston Conservatory (1921) and the Chicago College of Music (BM 1932). While in Boston, he studied composition with Dett, who shared his interest in spirituals, and became a featured soloist in Dett’s ensemble, the Hampton Institute Singers. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he was active as a singer, organist and choral director, serving from 1925 to 1931 as music director for the National Baptist Convention. After teaching in Texas at Samuel Huston College and Wiley College, he moved to New York (1933) where he opened the Edward Boatner Studio.

Boatner’s over 200 arrangements of African American spirituals are his primary musical legacy. Since the 1920s they have been performed by singers such as Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Leontyne Price and Paul Robeson. In addition to his collection Thirty Afro-American Choral Spirituals (1971), he published several stage works and pedagogical manuals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB

E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971, 3/1997)

A. Tischler: Fifteen Black American Composers: a Bibliography of their Works (Detroit, 1981)

WILLIE STRONG

Boatwright, Howard (Leake)

(b Newport News, VA, 16 March 1918; d Syracuse, NY, 20 Feb 1999). American composer, violinist and musicologist. He was trained as a violinist in Norfolk, Virginia, by Israel Feldman, made his début at New York Town Hall in 1942 and was assistant professor of violin at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1943 to 1945. At Yale (BM 1947, MM 1948) he studied theory and composition and viola d'amore with Hindemith, at whose urging he stayed on as assistant professor in music theory. As music director at St Thomas's Church, New Haven (1949–64), Boatwright established a reputation as a pioneer in the performance of early choral music. While in New Haven he also served as conductor of the Yale University Orchestra from 1952 to 1960, and was concertmaster of the New Haven SO (1950–62). He became dean of the school of music at Syracuse University in 1964, and from 1971 was professor of music in composition and theory. He was a Fulbright lecturer in India during the year 1959–60 and received a Fulbright grant to study in Romania, 1971–2. A pioneering scholar of Ives, he was elected to the board of directors of the Charles Ives Society in 1975.

He initially concentrated on sacred choral music and composed both choral works and works for solo voice with piano or instruments. Of his instrument works, the most notable are the Quartet for clarinet and strings, which received the award of the Society for the Publication of American Music in 1962, the Symphony and the Second String Quartet. His earliest choral works are modal; subsequently the chamber works in particular were influenced by Hindemith's middle-period style. In 1966 Boatwright began to develop a style he described as ‘dodecaphonic, though not serial’, in which he appropriates the total chromatic resource while exercising control over harmony, within the context of a layered, contrapuntal approach. This technique (described in Chromaticism) is demonstrated in the Second Quartet, a work which is consistent in style but also impressive in its ability to project a wide variety of moods. A versatile and creative musician, Boatwright also demonstrated an unusually wide breadth of erudition as a scholar.

WORKS

Orch: A Song for St Cecilia's Day, large str ens, 1948; Variations, small orch, 1949; Sym., 1976

Choral: The Women of Trachis (Sophocles, trans. E. Pound), 6 choruses, female vv, chbr orch, 1955; Mass, C, 1958; The Passion According to St Matthew, solo vv, SATB, org, 1962; Canticle of the Sun (St Francis of Assisi), S, SATB, orch, 1963; Music for Temple Service, Bar, SATB, org, 1969; A Song for St Cecilia's Day, S, SATB, orch, 1981; Nunc dimittis and Magnificat, SATB, org (1997); over 20 other works incl. 4 masses, many choral partsongs

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1947; Trio, 2 vn, va, 1948; Serenade, 2 str, 2 wind, 1952; Qt, cl, str, 1958; Str Qt no.2, 1974; 12 Pieces for Vn Alone, 1977; Sonata, cl, pf, 1980; other chbr and kbd works, incl. Orgelbuch, 8 preludes, org

Other vocal: The Ship of Death (D.H. Lawrence), S, A, T, B, str qt, 1966; The Lament of Mary Stuart (Carissimi cant. text), S, hpd/pf, opt vc, 1968; 6 Prayers of Kierkegaard (trans. P. LeFevre), S, pf, 1978; Prologue, Narrative and Lament (W. Whitman), T, str qt, 1987; From Joy to Fire (U. Vaughan Williams), Mez, pf, 1989; Adoration and Longing (Bible: Song of Solomon), S, str qt, 1991; 5 Poems of Sylvia Plath, S, pf, 1993 c50 songs

Principal publishers: Oxford UP, Walnut Grove

WRITINGS

Introduction to the Theory of Music (New York, 1956)

Indian Classical Music and the Western Listener (Bombay, 1960)

‘Ives' Quarter-Tone Impressions’, PNM, iii/2 (1964–5), 22–31

‘Paul Hindemith's Performances of Old Music’, Hindemith-Jb 1973, 39–62

Chromaticism: Theory and Practice (Fayetteville, NY, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

J. Knapp: ‘Howard Boatwright: an American Master of Choral Music’, American Choral Review, vi/1 (1963), 1

J.W. Sobaskie: ‘Associative Harmony: the Reciprocity of Ideas in Musical Space’, In Theory Only, x/1–2 (1987), 31–64

A. Kozinn: ‘Howard Boatwright, Violinist, Composer and Professor, 80’, New York Times (24 Feb 1999) [obituary]

TERENCE J. O'GRADY

Bobescu, Constantin

(b Iaşi, 9/21 May 1899; d Sinaia, 26 May 1992). Romanian composer, violinist, teacher and conductor. He studied the violin in Iaşi (1908–12) with Eduard Caudella and in Craiova (1912–16) with Jean Bobescu and then entered the Schola Cantorum in Paris (1920–24, 1926–7) where he studied with Nestor Lejeune (violin), d’Indy (composition) and Paul le Flem (harmony). After starting his career as a solo violinist he became professor of violin at the conservatories of Cernăuţi and Braşov. In 1935 he was appointed conductor of the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bucharest where he remained until 1972. Bobescu’s compositions range in theme from historical and biblical subjects to satirical comedy. Though post-Romantic in structure, his music has a pronounced lyrical character: the melodic writing is essentially Romanian but it is clothed in a traditional European harmonic language. His lively orchestration displays a perfect handling of timbres, especially of strings, which he used to achieve impressionistic shading in the operas.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Zobail (1, Bobescu, after G. Coşbuc), 1929, Cluj, Romanian Opera, 10 March 1930; Trandafirii roşii [Red Roses] (3, Bobescu, after Z. Bârsan), 1934, Cluj, Romanian Opera, 15 Jan 1937; Ioan Botezătorul [John the Baptist] (5, Bobescu, after H. Sudermann), 1939, broadcast, Bucharest radio, 1939 [Act 2 only]; Gaiţele [The Clackers] (3, after A. Kiriţescu), 1980, unperf.

Orch: Fatma, sym. poem, 1924; Preludiu la jocul Irozilor [Prelude to the Clowns Game], sym. poem, 1928; Cadix, scherzo, vn, orch, 1936; Haşiş, Lunaticul şi Paiaţa [Hashish the Lunatic and the Clown], 3 sketches, 1936; Noaptea sfîntă [Blessed Night], sym. suite, 1940; Rapsodia română [no.1], 1948; Rapsodia română [no.2], 1950; 6 dansuri simfonice româneşti [6 Romanian Symphonic Dances], 1953; Vn Conc., 1954; Siciliană, str, 1969

Vocal: Barbu-Lăutarul [Barbu the Musician] (V. Alecsandri), 1v, pf, 1919; Dragoste de ţigancă [The Love of a Gypsy Woman], 1v, pf, 1922; La mormîntul unei tinere fete [At the Grave of a Young Girl], 1v, pf, 1922; Legenda şi Eva [Eve and the Legend] (L. Blaga), 1v, pf, 1924; Basm [Fairy Tale], 1v, pf, 1932; Bratul [The Arm] (Focşăneanu), 1v, pf, 1935; Calul-dracului [Devil Horse/The Devil’s Horse], chorus, 1935; Betivul [The Drunkard], male chorus, 1935; Cornul [The Horn], male chorus, 1935; Greierele şi furnica [The Crickets and the Ant] (ballad, T. Arghezi), 1v, PG, 1954, arr. orch, 1958

Chbr and solo inst: Suită, pf, 1919; Pf Qt, 1920; Str Qnt, 1921; Facerea lumii [The Creation], str qt, 1922; Nocturnă, vn, pf, 1935; Clovnul [The Clown], pf, 1936; Foaie de album [Page from an Album], vn, pf, 1940; Adagio espresivo, vn, pf, 1944; Parafrază [Paraphrase], wind qnt, 1958

Film scores

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Z. Vancea: Creaţia muzicală românească în secolele XIX–XX, ii (Bucharest, 1978)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România: Lexicon bio-bibliografic (Bucharest, 1989), 133–6

VIOREL COSMA

Bobillier, Marie.

See Brenet, Michel.

Bobïlyov, Leonid Borisovich

(b Tula, 15 Oct 1949). Russian composer. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1973, having studied composition with Chulaki and the piano with N.P. Yemel'yanova. From 1973 to 1979 he taught at the Dargomïzhsky Music School in Tula, and in 1979 he was appointed senior lecturer of theory and composition at the Moscow Conservatory. He is a member of the Composers’ Union.

Bobïlyov’s career began in the 1970s when varied trends ranging from the avant garde to the exploration of ancient Russian art and folklore co-existed in Soviet music. In his operas, instrumental and vocal works, Bobïlyov utilizes a broad stylistic palette. His two operas for children – Kto pridumal puskat' mïl'nïye puzïri? ‘Who Thought up the Idea of Blowing Bubbles?’ and Privet, Alisa! ‘Greetings to you, Alice!’ – are particularly eclectic, embracing both dodecaphonic and rock elements. In his vocal works, his concern for the expressivity of words frequently gives rise to melodic recitative and other narrative forms (such as in the monologue and narrative from the opera Poslednim tselovaniyem ‘With a Last Kiss’ after Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago, in the opera Propavshaya okhota ‘The Wasted Hunt’ and in the oratorio Materi, syostrï, zhenï ‘Mothers, Sisters, Wives’).

In his instrumental compositions Bobïlyov follows Stravinsky and Prokofiev in taking the character of an instrument as a point of departure; these works are similarly eclectic and have theatrical tendencies. His works are frequently performed at the Moscow Autumn Festival and have been recorded by Melodiya. In addition to composing, he has studied the history and principles of teaching composition in Russia, and has systematically developed theoretical courses in polyphony, harmony and orchestration for composers.

WORKS

Ops: Grigory Melikhov (A. Medveyev and L. Lukinov, after M. Sholokov), unfinished; Privet, Alisa! [Greetings to you, Alice!] (children’s op, V. Fisherman, after L. Carroll), 1983; Propavshaya okhota [The Wasted Hunt] (T. Vershinina and Bobïlyov, after V. Astaf'yev), 1983; Kto pridumal puskat' mïl'nïye puzïri? [Who Thought up the Idea of Blowing Bubbles?] (children’s op, O. Volozova), 1990; Poslednïm tselovaniyem [With a Last Kiss] (Bobïlyov, after B. Pasternak), 1994

3 orats on verses by Russian poets, 1977, 1980, 1990

Orch: Conc., va, str, 1971; Conc. grosso no.1, 1972; Poėma pamyati geroev Leningrada [A Poem in Memory of the Heroes of Leningrad], 1972; Vn Conc., 1972; Conc., pf, ww, perc, db, 1979; Conc., pf, vn, pf, str, 1981; Sym., 1985; Conc. grosso no.2, 1989; Conc., E cl, perc, 1991; De profundis, 1991

Chbr and solo inst: Bagateli, pf, 1972; Sonata [no.1], vn, pf, 1975; Pf Trio [no.1], 1977; Sonata [no.2], vn, pf 1978; Ballada, pf, 1979; Kvazi menuyetto, pf, 1984; Pf Trio [no.2], 1985; Diatonicheskaya polifoniya – tsikl prelyudiy i fug v starinnïkh ladakh [Diatonic Polyphony – a Cycle of Preludes and Fugues in Ancient Modes], 1987

Vocal: Divertisment-allyuziya ‘Salyut Sati’ [Divertissement-Allusion ‘Gun Salute, it’s Satie’], 1v, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1996; song cycles (1v, pf) after A. Akhmatova, 1972, A. Voznesensky, 1975, O. Mandel'shtam, 1978, F. García Lorca, 1984, N. Oleykov, 1988, P. Verlaine, 1993

Incid music for film and theatre

WRITINGS

Istoriya i printsipï kompozitorskogo obrazovaniya v pervïkh russkikh konservatoriyakh (1862–1917) [The history and principles of teaching composition in the first Russian conservatories (1862–1917)] (Moscow, 1992)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Kuznetsov: ‘Pokoleniye “semidesyatïkh” – vechno vtorïye?’ [The 1970s generation – for ever second class?], MAk (1996), no.1, pp.129–31

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Bobization.

The name used in Nikolaus Gengenbach’s Musica nova, Newe Singekunst, so wol nach der alten Solmisation, als newen Bobisation und Bebisation (Leipzig, 1626/R), and later in J.G. Walther’s Musikalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), for the Solmization system also known as Bocedization.

Bobo, Roger

(b Los Angeles, 8 June 1938). American tuba player. He studied from 1956 to 1961 with Donald Knaub and Emory Remington at the Eastman School of Music, and subsequently with William Bell and Robert Marsteller. He was a member of the Rochester PO (1956–62), the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (1962–4) and the Los Angeles PO (1964–91). From 1965 to 1975 he was also a member of the Los Angeles Brass Quintet. In 1990 he was appointed professor at the Lausanne Conservatoire.

Bobo has made a very significant contribution as a soloist. In April 1962 he gave the first ever Carnegie Hall recital for solo tuba. About 100 solo pieces have been written for him, including concertos by William Kraft (1974) and Harut'unyan (1994). He has given many performances of Vaughan William’s Tuba Concerto with leading orchestras worldwide. He has made several solo discs of tuba repertory, and has also written Mastering the Tuba (Bulle, 1993).

EDWARD H. TARR

Bobowski, Wojciech.

See Ufkī, ‘Alī.

Bobrovsky, Viktor Petrovich

(b Simferopol, Ukraine, 24 July/6 Aug 1906; d Moscow, 24 May 1979). Russian musicologist and pianist. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory having specialized in piano under F.F. Keneman (1925–30); he then taught piano at a music school in Voronezh (1931–41) while studying theory as a correspondence student at the Central Institute of Music Education, Moscow, with V.A. Tsukkerman (1936–41). After serving on the Russian front from 1941 to 1945, he returned to Voronezh and was invited in 1949 to teach at the department of music theory at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught music analysis until 1970. Awarded the Kandidat degree in 1953, he was a made a dotsent in 1958; he also taught at the Gnesin State Institute for Music Education, 1954–63 and 1972–8, and was a senior researcher at the All-Union Institute for Art Research, 1969–79. He was awarded the doctorate in 1975. A member of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1935, he also directed its musicology and criticism section during the late 1960s.

Bobrovsky’s early research was concerned with the programmatic potential in music, particularly in the symphonies of Shostakovich. He was also attracted to questions of drama in instrumental music and strove to explain musical form and language in terms of semantics, interpreting form as ‘a model of spiritual movement’. He formulated a theory of the variability of functions of musical form (the theme of his doctoral study), in which the general functions of exposition, development and conclusion manifest themselves on various formal levels and may be combined to create a greater complexity of meaning. To this flexible combining of functions he applied the terms ‘compositional divergence’ (‘otkloneniye’), ‘compositional modulation’ and ‘compositional ellipsis’, to reflect what is not planned by the standard form, but has emerged under the influence of the specific drama of the composition. A prominent specialist in the works of Shostakovich, he contributed a number of monographs, articles and reviews on the composer, some of which are as yet unpublished; his intense involvement with Shostakovich’s work meant that he responded – publicly or in notes in his journal – to almost all of the composer’s new works. He also supported other young composers – Gubaydulina, Schnittke, Butsko – in the press. Bobrovsky’s later writings were concerned with general questions in the philosophy of music and sought to investigate issues such as thematism, how music relates to other art forms and the role of music in daily life.

WRITINGS

Sonatnaya forma v russkoy klassicheskoy programmnoy muzïke [Sonata form in Russian classical programme music] (diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1953)

Kamerniye instrumental'nïye ansambli D. Shostakovicha [The chamber instrumental ensembles of Shostakovich] (Moscow, 1961)

Pesni i khorïy D. Shostakovicha [Songs and choral works of Shostakovich] (Moscow, 1962)

‘Programmnïy simfonizm Shostakovicha’ [The programmatic symphonies of Shostakovich], Muzïyka i sovremennost', iii (1965), 32–67; v (1967), 38–73

O peremennosti funktsiy muzïkal'noy formï [The variability of functions in musical form] (Moscow, 1970)

‘Sonata Betkhovena “Quasi una fantasia” (“Lunnaya”)’ [Beethoven’s sonata ‘Quasi una fantasia’ (‘Moonlight’)], Betkhoven: sbornik statey, ii, ed. N.L. Fishman (Moscow, 1972), 5–28

‘O nekotorïkh chertakh stilya Shostakovicha shestidesyatïkh godov: stat'ya pervaya’ [Some characteristics of Shostakovich’s style in the 1960s], Muzïka i sovremennost', viii (1974), 161–201; ix (1975), 39–77

‘Instumental'nïye ansambli Shostakovicha’ [The instrumental ensembles of Shostakovich], Tvorchestvo D.D. Sostakovica: Leningrad 1976, 193–205

Funktsional'nïye osnovï muzïkal'noy formï [The foundations of function of musical form] (Moscow, 1978)

‘Muzïykal'noye mïshleniye Shostakovicha i osnovï yego instrumental'nogo tematizma’ [Shostakovich’s musical thinking and the foundations of his instrumental thematics], Sovremennoye iskusstvo muzïkal'no kompozitsii, ed. N.S. Gulyanitskaya (Moscow, 1985), 88–95

‘Poslednyeye sochineniye Shostakovicha’ [Shostakovich’s last composition], Problemy muzïykal'noy nauki, vi (1985), 55–71

ed. E.R. Skurko and E.I. Chigaryeva: Stat'i: issledovaniya [Articles and research] (Moscow, 1990)

Tematizm kak faktor muzïkal'nogo mïshleniya: ocherki [Thematics as a factor in musical thinking: essays] (Moscow, 1990)

Shostakovich v moyey zhizni: lichniye zametki [Shostakovich in my life: personal notes], SovM (1991), no.9, pp.23–9

‘O muzykal'noy myhslenii Shostakovicha’ [The musical thought of Shostakovich], Shostakovichu posvyashchayetsya: sbornik statey k 90-letiyu kompozitora (Moscow, 1997), 39–61

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Tarakanov: ‘O nauchno-issledovatel'skoy deyatel'nosti V.P. Bobrovskogo’ [The research activities of Bobrovsky], Stat'i: issledovaniya, ed. E. Skurko and E. Chigaryeva (Moscow, 1990), 7–16

E. Skurko and E. Chigaryeva: ‘V.P. Bobrovsky: chelovek, pedagog, muzykant’ [Bobrovsky: man, teacher, musician], ibid., 16–37

TAT'YANA S. KYUREGYAN

Bobrowicz, Jan Nepomucen

(b Kraków, 12 May 1805; d Dresden, 2 Nov 1881). Polish guitarist, composer and publisher. He studied in Vienna with Mauro Giuliani (1816–19). After a short career as a soloist he was made, in 1829, secretary of the senate of the Kraków Republic. When news of the 1830 Warsaw uprising reached him, he volunteered for the Polish Army and served as aide-de-camp to Bem; he was awarded the Virtuti Militari order. On the collapse of the uprising in 1831 he emigrated to Germany. In Leipzig he performed at the Gewandhaus with Karol Lipiński, Clara Wieck and others. Liszt called him ‘Chopin sur la guitare’. He wrote about 40 pieces for his instrument, mostly fantasies, marches, polonaises and waltzes, published by Hofmeister or Breitkopf & Härtel. In addition, he revised Carulli's tutor and published his own with Sennewald in Warsaw. He gained particular importance between 1833 and 1861 through the publication of about 380 literary works, among them a limited number of pocket-book editions of Polish classics. (EMuz, T. Przybylski; PSB, S.P. Koczorowski)

JÓZEF POWROŹNIAK/KLAUS-PETER KOCH

Bocal

(Fr.).

The crook of a bassoon, serpent etc. It has become the American term for a bassoon or english horn crook.

Bocan.

See Cordier, Jacques.

Boccaber, Matteo.

See Buechenberg, Matteo.

Boccaccio, Giovanni

(b Certaldo, 1313; d Certaldo, 1375). Italian poet and writer. Along with Dante and Petrarch he was among the most influential literary figures in medieval Italy. The illegitimate son of a Tuscan merchant, in 1327 he moved with his father to Naples. There he was introduced into the French-influenced court of King Robert of Anjou, and this milieu influenced his first writings: the terza rima poem Caccia di Diana (c1334), the ottava rima poem Filostrato (c1335), the romance Filocolo (1336–8), the first draft of the epic poem Teseida (1339–41) and many of his Rime. On his return to Florence in 1341 Boccaccio strengthened his literary links with the pure Tuscan tradition, completing the Teseida and writing more works, among them the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (1341–2) and the Elegía di Madonna Fiammetta (1343–4). The Black Death, which reached Florence in 1348, inspired Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the Decameron (1349–51; ed. V. Branca, Turin, 1992), a collection of 100 tales grouped into ten ‘giornate’ and told, according to the story, by ten young Florentine nobles who have escaped the plagued city. This work, which is an invaluable source of information about 14th-century Italy, made an instant reputation for its author. After 1350 Boccaccio enjoyed a friendship with Petrarch, a source of influence for his late Latin works. He spent his last years mainly at Certaldo, and left his considerable library to the Augustinian convent of Santo Spirito in Florence.

Many works by Boccaccio contain references to dance and to vocal and instrumental music, although they hardly go beyond stereotyped allusions to the musical experience. There are, however, no descriptions of polyphony, which was surely practised in Florence at that time. Within the frame of the Decameron Boccaccio inserted ten ballata texts: one ballata is sung at the end of each ‘giornata’ by a single member of the group. Only once does the author specify that a lute player accompanies the singer, whereas on three more occasions the whole group joins in, probably doubling the ripresa. It is possible that Boccaccio never heard a polyphonic ballata, a suggestion strengthened by the fact that the only one for which a musical setting survives, Non so qual i’ mi voglia, was set for one voice only by Lorenzo da Firenze. Lorenzo also set Boccaccio’s madrigal Come in sul fonte fu preso Narciso, this time polyphonically, whereas the text of another madrigal, O giustizia regina al mondo freno, set by Niccolò da Perugia, is ascribed to Boccaccio in an unreliable source (I-PAp Parm.1081).

The Decameron also mentions indirectly a richer variety of poetico-musical repertoires. References vary from the quotations of obscene songs to the performance of old-fashioned stampite, and from the singing of ottava rima poems (a genre possibly invented by Boccaccio himself at the time of the Filostrato) to that of laude spirituale. The later musical tradition of ballatas from the Decameron began in 1539, with the first of Girolamo Scotto’s nine settings, and continued until the 17th century. Among the other composers to set Boccaccio’s poetry were Arcadelt, Francesco de Layolle, Corteccia, Domenico Maria Ferrabosco, Henri Schaffen, Palestrina, Lassus and Sigismondo D’India.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Bonaventura: ‘Il Boccaccio e la musica’, RMI, xxi (1914), 405–42

V. Branca, ed.: Giovanni Boccaccio: Tutte le opere (Milan, 1964–97)

V. Branca: Boccaccio medievale (Florence, 1956, 8/1996 as Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi; Eng. trans. as Boccaccio: the Man and his Works, New York, 1976)

V. Branca: Giovanni Boccaccio: profilo biografico (Florence, 1977/R)

H.M. Brown: ‘Fantasia on a theme by Boccaccio’, EMc, v (1977), 324–39

A.M. Monterosso Vacchelli: ‘Gli strumenti musicali nell’ opera del Boccaccio’, La musica al tempo del Boccaccio e i suoi rapporti con la letteratura: Siena and Certaldo 1975 [L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iv (Certaldo, 1978)], 315–44

F. Piperno: ‘Ricercare e variationi su Io mi son giovinetta’, In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta, ed. F. Della Seta and F. Piperno (Florence, 1989), 221–58

G. D’Agostino: ‘Le ballate del Decameron’, Studi sul Boccaccio, xxiv (1996), 123–80

GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO

Bocca chiusa

(It.: ‘closed mouth’; Fr. bouche fermée; Ger. Brummstimme).

Singing without words and with the mouth closed: that is, humming. Especially in choral passages, the effect can be magical, and composers have used the technique for special colouration. Puccini’s use of a humming chorus in the interlude of Act 2 of Madama Butterfly poignantly marks the passage of Butterfly’s waiting. Verdi uses this choral effect in the storm scene of the final act of Rigoletto. Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras no.5 makes a rare use of bocca chiusa for solo voice.

In comic opera singers are sometimes called on to sing with their mouths obstructed, such as in Die Zauberflöte where Papageno sings with a padlock on his mouth, but that is not a true use of bocca chiusa. Although untexted singing has become more common in the 20th century, often this is not hummed but sung on one or more vowels (see Vocalise). The female humming chorus in Holst’s The Planets, which aids in the depiction of Neptune, ‘the mystic’, for example, is not marked bocca chiusa, and at least some editions suggest that the vocal lines be sung on the vowel ‘u’ as in ‘sun’. Similarly, the solo vocalization in Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony is not marked bocca chiusa.

ELLEN T. HARRIS

Boccalino [Boccalini, Boccarini], Francesco

(b Rome, ?1604; d Rome, after 1673). Italian composer and instrumentalist. The census of the Rione Campo Marzio, taken at the time of the plague of 1656, gave his age as 52. He was organist at S Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from 1631 to 1637, and from 25 August 1633 he was also active at S Luigi dei Francesi as a theorbo player. He also played the violin. From at least 1638 he was in the service of Cardinal Pier Maria Borghese until the cardinal’s death in June 1642. Between 1644 and 1649 he was regularly employed in organizing the music for the Festival of St Jerome at the church of S Girolamo degli Schiavoni. The 1656 census describes him as a scudiero (groom) to Pope Alexander VII. He was an active member of the Congregazione dei Musici di S Cecilia, and was elected guardiano of the organists in 1670.

In 1658 Boccalino was entrusted with organizing the music for the Quarant’ore celebrations in the Borghese chapel in S Maria Maggiore, and he is known also to have composed an oratorio, Tre fanciulli della fornace di Babilonia, the music of which is lost. His surviving works (in F-Pn, GB-Och, I-Bc, MOe, Rc, Rdp and Rvat) are secular arias and cantatas for one or two voices and continuo, closer in style to Luigi Rossi than to Carissimi. One aria was included in Florido de Silvestris’s Ariette di musica (RISM 1646⁷).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

J. Lionnet: ‘Les activités musicales de Flavio Chigi, cardinal neveu d’Alexandre VII’, Studi musicali, ix (1980), 287–302

J. Lionnet: ‘La Salve de Sainte-Marie Majeure’, Studi musicali, xii (1983), 97–120

J. Lionnet: La musique à Saint-Louis des Français de Rome au XVIIème siècle, NA, new ser., iii (1985), suppl.; iv (1986), suppl.

A. Morelli: ‘Il Theatro spirituale ed altre raccolte di testi per oratori romani nel seicento’, RIM, xxi (1986), 61–143

W. Witzenmann: ‘Materiali archivistici per la Cappella Lateranense nell’Archivio Capitolare di San Giovanni in Laterano’, La musica a Roma attraverso le fonti d’archivio: Rome 1992, 457–67

JEAN LIONNET

Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi

(b Lucca, 19 Feb 1743; d Madrid, 28 May 1805). Italian composer and cellist. A prolific composer, particularly of chamber music, with a distinctive and highly wrought style, he is the chief representative of Latin instrumental music during the Viennese Classical period.

3. Vocal and orchestral music.

2. Sources.

4. Chamber music.

CHRISTIAN SPECK (1–5, work-list, bibliography); STANLEY SADIE (6–7)

1. Life.

(i) 1743–67.

Luigi Boccherini (his first baptismal name seems never to have been used), was the third child of the musician Leopoldo Boccherini (1712–66) and his wife Maria Santa, née Prosperi (d Aranjuez, 1776). Leopoldo's activities as a singer, and from 1747 as a second double bass player (contrabassista soprannumerario) in the Cappella Palatina, allowed the family only a modest standard of living in their home town of Lucca. Thanks to intensive parental encouragement, the Boccherini children developed their considerable artistic talents early: Luigi's elder brother Giovanni Gastone (1742–c1800) began a career as a ballet dancer in 1756 (Grossato, 1993, pp.137–8), appearing in Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere, and from 1773 was ‘dramatic poet’ (Theatraldichter) at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he worked with Calzabigi and made a name as librettist for comic operas (including works by Antonio Salieri and Florian Gassmann) and for Joseph Haydn's oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia of 1775. Luigi's elder sister Maria Ester (1740–c1800) became a popular and successful solo dancer while she was still very young at the Burgtheater, where she worked with Gluck. The records also mention her appearances as a prima ballerina in Bologna, Venice and Florence between 1763 and 1777; Salvatore Viganò was the son of her marriage to the dancer and choreographer Onorato Viganò. Luigi's sister Anna Matilde (b 1744) was a ballet dancer in Vienna and his sister Riccarda (b 1747) an opera singer, appearing in Florence in 1777.

Luigi Boccherini probably had his first musical education from his father, as was usual in musicians' families. He attended the archiepiscopal Seminario di S Martino in Lucca as a day pupil from about 1751 to 1753 and received a comprehensive musical training from the maestro di cappella and cellist Domenico Francesco Vannucci, including tuition in singing and cello playing. There is evidence that he sang as a choirboy in Luccan churches and at the Teatro Pubblico in 1753. That autumn he went to study in Rome, where G.B. Costanzi, nicknamed ‘Giovannino del Violoncello’, is said to have been his teacher (Bonaventura, 1931). It is not known exactly how long he remained there, but he was back in Lucca by the summer of 1756, making his début on 4 August 1756 with a cello concerto. Through the sympathetic support of Giacomo Puccini, maestro di cappella of the Cappella Palatina and organist at S Martino, he made a number of further appearances on local occasions involving sacred music and at other festivities. Judging by the fees he commanded, the young Boccherini must already have been regarded as one of the city's outstanding musicians.

In 1757 Boccherini may have accompanied his father and his elder siblings at engagements in Venice and Trieste. In any case, he made a very successful appearance with his father in Vienna in the spring of 1758 as a soloist in the Musikalische Fasten-Accademien at the Burgtheater. Subsequently, they were both engaged as musici in the imperial capital from Easter until the autumn, playing in the orchestra of the German theatre of the imperial court theatre, the Kärntnertortheater, directed by Count Giacomo Durazzo. Most of the music Boccherini played there was ballet music, by Starzer, Gassmann and Gluck. Father and son returned to Vienna for further engagements in the same capacity in 1760–61 and 1763–4, on each occasion for a full theatrical year beginning after Easter. In Vienna, Boccherini encountered strong competition as a soloist; the known sources indicate that he did not appear at the academies of the imperial court as often as other cellists in the city, and there is documentary evidence only for two solo concerts given by him in Vienna in 1763. The sources provide only fragmentary information about Boccherini's other movements between the end of 1758 and 1764. He gave several concerts in Lucca; on 19 March 1761, in Florence, the ‘celebre suonatore di Violoncello’ earned much applause for a concert of music by himself, its mode of composition being described by the diarist who mentions it as being ‘of a completely new kind’ (‘d'un maniera dell tutto nuova’, I-Fas, Ospizio dei Melani Ms.34, p.230); and he appeared in Modena on 7 January 1762. No programmes for his solo concerts are known. Neither Vienna nor the Italian cities could offer a cello virtuoso of the time the means to make a living purely as a soloist. During a period of intensive creativity in 1760 and 1761, Boccherini wrote his first significant compositions, 18 in all: the trios op.1, the quartets op.2 and the duets op.3, all for strings (the opus numbers cited in this discussion are those from Boccherini's own catalogue, which often differ from the published opus numbers; see §5 below). In April 1764 an application Boccherini had made in 1760 for a post as cellist in the Cappella Palatina of Lucca was finally granted. A commission to compose a cantata for the local election festivities (Tasche) in December 1765 in Lucca, shows that he was by then recognized as a composer. In July 1765 he met G.B. Sammartini at festival concerts in Pavia and Cremona, where he and his father were making a well-paid appearance before Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. In April 1766 he applied for an orchestral position at the Teatro Alibert in Rome, where he gave a solo performance, but it seems that he was unsuccessful. The story of Boccherini's membership for six months of a string quartet, with the violinists Filippo Manfredi and Pietro Nardini, and Giuseppe Cambini as the viola player (recounted by Cambini in his Nouvelle méthode of c1795 and in AMZ, vi, 1803–4, cols.781–3), may relate to this period, although their alleged study of Haydn's early quartets as well as Boccherini's own does not seem plausible at this date. Soon after the death of his father in August 1766 Boccherini and his friend Manfredi, primo violino of the Cappella Palatina, went to Genoa, where they enjoyed the patronage of the nobility. Boccherini wrote at least one of his two oratorios for the oratorian congregation in that city. In September 1767 they left Genoa together, intending to travel to London; the records show that they were in Nice on 5 October.

(ii) 1767–86.

The next stop on their tour was Paris, where Boccherini and Manfredi stayed for six months at the most. There Boccherini came under the patronage of the influential Baron de Bagge (Charles-Ernest Ennal). Boccherini was not an unknown when he arrived, for in April 1767 Jean Baptiste Venier had published his first six string quartets there as op.2, and in July Bailleux issued his first six trios for two violins and cello as op.1; the Mercure de France (April 1768) described these works as ‘very effective’. Paris was the main place of publication for Boccherini's works throughout his lifetime, although the only work published under his own supervision was the series of six trios op.4, g83–8, issued by Venier in March 1768. However, the most important product of his visit to Paris was the set of six sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment op.5, which Boccherini dedicated to the amateur keyboard player Anne Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy, and which was distributed in numerous copies and editions into the 19th century. Boccherini performed at private concerts in the salons of Baron de Bagge, Mme Brillon de Jouy and no doubt other figures of Parisian society. His only recorded public appearance in Paris was at the Concert Spirituel on 20 March 1768, when Manfredi played a violin concerto of his own composition and Boccherini performed one of his own cello sonatas. The Mercure de France praised Boccherini's performance but the Mémoires secrets of Louis-Petit Bachaumont speak of his harsh playing and a lack of harmonious chords (Rothschild, 1962, p.33). After a second appearance by Manfredi on 4 April, the two men left the French capital, but in a change to their original plan they went not to London but to Madrid, having been promised posts there by the Spanish ambassador. By spring 1768 they were playing in the orchestra of an Italian opera company in Aranjuez. The sources mention a performance of Gian Francesco de Majo's Almeria to which Boccherini contributed an interlude aria with cello solo. The ‘Compagnia dell'opera Italiana dei Sitios Reales’ enjoyed the patronage of Crown Prince Carlos, Prince of the Asturias, to whom Boccherini's six trios op.6 of 1769 are dedicated. The company performed in the newly equipped theatres of the royal residences at Aranjuez and La Granja of S Ildefonso, where the Spanish court regularly stayed in spring and summer. There must also have been performances at the Escorial and perhaps at the hunting lodge of El Pardo. The company's base was the castle of Boadillo del Monte near Madrid, the principal home of the Infante Luis Antonio Jaime of Bourbon, younger brother of King Carlos III. Boccherini seems to have been a member of the opera company until 1770, and Manfredi was its first violinist until 1772. In the autumn of 1768 Boccherini was with the company when it visited Valencia, and ate there with Giacomo Casanova, who described him as ‘célèbre’ (The Story of my Life, xi, chapter 4). The orchestra performed Boccherini's first sinfonia concertante (g491) in the ‘academies’ of July 1769 at the Teatro del los Caños del Peral in Madrid, probably with the composer playing the solo cello part in the second movement, and Niccolò Piccinni's La buona figliuola was given in Aranjuez in the spring of 1769 with Boccherini's overture g527, based on the Symphony g490. Boccherini must also have played at many private concerts in the houses of the nobility in Madrid and the Sitios, as the dedication of his series of quartets op.9 (1770) ‘alli Signori Diletanti di Madrid’ indicates. About 1770 he married Clementina Pellicia, second soprano in the opera company; of the six children of this marriage only Boccherini's two sons Luis Marcos and Jose Mariano survived him.

On 8 November 1770 Boccherini entered the service of Don Luis in Aranjuez as compositore e virtuoso di camera at a salary of 14,000 reals (raised to 18,000 in 1772). He had dedicated his quartets op.8 to Don Luis a year before. This relatively well-paid position led to a marked increase in Boccherini's activity as a composer, and he immediately extended the range of genres in which he worked with his quintets and sextets for strings and flute or oboe (the sextets op.16 and ‘quintettini’ op.17, 1773), his series of six symphonies op.12 (1771), and above all his first two series of string quintets, each containing six works, opp.10 and 11 (1771). The string quintet formation with two cellos that Boccherini created seems to have resulted from the fact that Don Luis had a string quartet which with Boccherini himself could become a quintet. During these years most of his compositions were very soon published, the majority of them in Paris. According to a later statement by Boccherini, his annual quota of music written for Don Luis was to comprise three opere, each of six compositions. On Don Luis's morganatic marriage in 1776 he moved his residence first to Velada near Talavera, in 1777 to Cadalso de los Vidrios, and at the end of 1777 to Las Arenas de San Pedro in the Sierra de Gredos, taking Boccherini with him. Don Luis's staff now also included Boccherini's brother Giovanni Gastone.

From the seclusion of Las Arenas, Boccherini made energetic efforts to resume contact with the musical world. He set up a business relationship with the publishing firm of Artaria in Vienna in 1780, and in 1781 entered into a short correspondence about the firm with Joseph Haydn, whom he greatly admired. In 1783, through the Prussian envoy at the Madrid court, he sent compositions written in his own hand to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, an enthusiastic cellist. The prince immediately wrote a personal letter back expressing his lively interest in new works, which Boccherini satisfied by sending some of his earlier compositions to Berlin; however, his conditions of service with Don Luis stipulated that he was not to compose for any other patron at the same time. Perhaps to ensure that he remained in Madrid rather than going to Berlin, Don Luis improved these conditions: under his renewed contract of 17 August 1784, Boccherini received a additional 12,000 reals for the compositions he was to write. If the dates in Boccherini's own catalogue of his works and on the surviving musical manuscripts are correct, his creative production at this period was already considerably reduced. Apart from the six string quintets op.36 of 1784, he apparently wrote no new chamber music for the four years from 1782, and for the three years 1783–5 the only other work mentioned in the records is the villancico g539, a Christmas cantata.

Boccherini's wife and his patron Don Luis both died in 1785. At his petition, King Carlos III granted him an annual pension of 12,000 reals, and he was promised the next place to fall vacant in the Real Capilla. The entry into the Real Capilla in 1787 of another cellist, Francesco Brunetti, then only just 20 years old, may be the origin of the legend that jealous rivalry existed between Boccherini and Francesco Brunetti's father Gaetano, a violinist of high standing in the Real Capilla and music master to the Prince of the Asturias. At the end of 1785 or early in 1786 Boccherini returned to Madrid and was nominally appointed a member of the Real Capilla (músico agregado a la Real Capilla).

(iii) 1786–96.

On 21 January 1786 Boccherini was appointed ‘compositeur de notre chambre’ to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, who was crowned king as Friedrich Wilhelm II in the same year (Rothschild, 1962, p.59). The post carried an annual salary of 1000 talers. Subsequently Boccherini sent his new patron in Prussia 12 instrumental works a year, almost without a break, most of them string quartets and quintets. The only gap in this regular production of works was in 1791; possibly the 12 concert arias g544–55 were composed that year. It now seems unlikely that Boccherini himself ever went to Prussia as earlier biographers assumed (solely on the evidence of a letter of doubtful authenticity from Breslau). More probably, he continued living in Las Arenas near Madrid for the rest of his life. From March 1786 onwards he was also engaged in Madrid at a salary of 1000 reals a month as director de orquesta y compositor by María Josefa Alfonsa Pimentel, Duchess-Countess of Benavente and Duchess of Osuna, a notable patron of music. It is not known whether this appointment continued after the ten months mentioned in the documents, and if so for how long. According to the account of his travels (1834) by the English writer William Beckford, Boccherini was still in the duchess's service at the end of 1787. His music was evidently highly esteemed by the Benavente-Osuna family, for its music library contained a large number of his works from 1761 to 1787 (111 items, including compositions dedicated to the duchess from 1782, 1786 and 1787), and his opera or zarzuela La Clementina was performed at the duchess's palace in Madrid in 1786 (the only other recorded performance was in Valencia in 1796). Beckford tells an amusing story about Boccherini's feeling for dance and sense of musical decorum at a ball given in the Madrid palace of a rich member of the Pacheco family in December 1787. In the same year Boccherini married María del Pilar Joaquina Porretti, daughter of a former first cellist of the Real Capilla who had died four years earlier and who had been admired by Farinelli.

Carlos III died in 1788 and was succeeded by his son Carlos IV, the former Prince of the Asturias. The music-loving monarch, who played the violin himself, established both a chamber music ensemble (músicos de la real cámera, with Gaetano and Francesco Brunetti) and in 1795 the royal chamber orchestra. Boccherini was not a member of either group, but according to tradition he was recruited by the king to perform with him in quartets and symphonies, and suffered from his ‘ear-splitting’ playing (letter, François de Fossa to Louis Picquot, 8 August 1847; see Ophee, 1981). There was still great interest in Boccherini's music in Paris; around 1790–91 he had a private patron there, a man called Boulogne who perished in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution (possibly the taffeta manufacturer Jacques-Laurent Boulogne, 1753–94). Boccherini's chamber music was performed at concerts in his house, with Viotti as first violin, as Boccherini wrote to Pleyel on 4 January 1798. According to Boccherini, Boulogne's music library contained transcripts of 110 of his works. Friedrich Wilhelm II owned copies of the same works, also purely for private use.

(iv) 1796–1805.

Boccherini's last nine years were troubled by illness and misfortune. His unmarried daughter Joaquina died in 1796 at the age of about 25. In the same year Boccherini accepted an offer from the Parisian publisher Ignace Pleyel, and after brief negotiations sold him 58 works (opp.44 to 54) for 7200 reals. Immediately afterwards, negotiations began for the sale of 110 other works written earlier, and an unhappy chapter in Boccherini's life began. Friedrich Wilhelm II died unexpectedly in 1797. Boccherini petitioned his successor for employment, but on 2 March 1798 the new king refused his application, and declined to grant him a pension. He finally sold the 110 works mentioned above to Pleyel for 9600 reals (letter to Pleyel, 24 December 1798). It was understandable that Pleyel at first hesitated over the purchase, since a number of these works had already been distributed for years by other publishers. However, the letters to Pleyel (reproduced in an appendix to Della Croce, 1988) suggest that Boccherini's generous and honourable behaviour was often answered by suspicion, discourtesy and procrastination; though it is also clear that Pleyel's letters (which do not survive) contained praise of Boccherini's music. Pleyel also dedicated three of his own string quartets (b365–7) to Boccherini in 1803. In any event, in 1798 and 1799, and at longer intervals thereafter, Pleyel's published collections meant the concentrated distribution of works by Boccherini, some of which had lain unknown for as long as 12 years. Pleyel took considerable liberties in his choice of works and the order in which he printed them, thus contributing a good deal to the confusion surrounding the opus numbering of Boccherini's printed compositions. Boccherini's next publisher was Sieber in Paris.

The patronage of the house of Benavente-Osuna came to an end, at the latest, when the duke and duchess moved to Paris in 1799. In 1798–9 Boccherini wrote a dozen arrangements of his own works for guitar, two violins, viola and cello for François de Borgia, Marquis of Benavente (not a member of the same dynasty). At this time he was turning increasingly to vocal music: he wrote the Scena dell'Ines di Castro for the stage by April 1798, and a second opera, Dorval e Virginia, which was performed during the carnival season of 1799–1800 in Turin but is now lost. Of his sacred works, he wrote a Mass (now lost) and a second version of his Stabat mater in 1800, and the Christmas cantata op.63 (now lost) in 1802. In 1799, flattered by reports of the popularity of his works in Paris and hoping for new patronage, Boccherini composed the six piano quintets op.57 with a dedication to the French nation. The invitation to him to become a member of the administrative council of the Paris Conservatoire may have been a response to this dedication; however, Boccherini's great-grandson Alfredo Boccherini said in his biography of the composer that Boccherini declined the post. He finally found a new patron in November 1800 in the person of Lucien Bonaparte, French ambassador in Madrid. Boccherini organized musical performances for him, and continued writing works dedicated to him even after Bonaparte was recalled from Spain in December 1801. On 20 January 1802 Joseph Bonaparte granted Boccherini a pension of 3000 francs a year. Nothing is known about Boccherini's connection with Tsar Aleksandr I of Russia apart from the dedication to him of the Christmas cantata op.63. The composer's grief at the deaths of his two daughters Mariana (b 1782) and Ysabel in 1802, and then of his fourth daughter Maria Teresa and his second wife two years later, must have hastened his death. In the late 1790s he had a friendly paternal relationship with the singer Pierre Garat and the violinist Pierre Rode, whom he is said to have helped with the orchestration of a concerto. He taught the young violinist Alexandre-Jean Boucher how to interpret his works, but there is no evidence that he regularly taught either the cello or composition. Unfortunately, he never wrote a treatise describing what must have been his outstanding cello technique. Musicians of note visited Boccherini in Madrid, including the cellist B.H. Romberg in 1801 and the singer and pianist Sophie Gail in 1803; she found him living in a state of exhaustion in a small apartment consisting of a single room with a gallery (at Calle de Jesus y Maria 5, near the Plaza Tirso de Molina).

Towards the end of his life Boccherini's financial circumstances were modest and his health poor. He seems to have given up composition in 1804, with his unfinished String Quartet op.64 no.2. He died of peritoneal tuberculosis in 1805 and was buried in the church of S Justo y Pastor in Madrid. In 1927 his remains were taken to Lucca and re-buried in the basilica of S Francesco. A second exhumation in 1995 showed that Boccherini was about 1·65 metres tall and of slight build; the middle finger of his left hand was chronically inflamed, from playing the cello, and he suffered from epicondylitis of the left arm and elbow and arthrosis of the cervical vertebrae. An inventory of his possessions in his own hand, drawn up in 1787, indicates that he owned two Stradivari cellos.

2. Sources.

The manuscripts Boccherini left on his death, about half of them music manuscripts, were kept by his family in good order, in ten fascicles, until they were burnt in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. Along with many musical autographs and transcripts of letters, the catalogue of Boccherini's works he himself had kept from 1760 onwards was lost. Fortunately it had been published in 1851, edited by Louis Picquot, who conducted a correspondence with Boccherini's grandson Fernando in 1848; Alfredo Boccherini, a son of Fernando, published another edition in 1879. According to Alfredo, Boccherini's own catalogue was not complete: he excluded all his vocal works up to 1799, certain orchestral works, his arrangements, and all his solo sonatas and concertos. There is reason to think that several other items which he omitted to record may be authentic; the catalogue may reflect a system distinguishing between music composed for a particular performance, particularly by himself (excluded from the catalogue), and music written for publication (included).

Five further catalogues of works with incipits in Boccherini's own hand are also preserved; he drew them up during his negotiations with Pleyel in 1796–7: (1) 1796: Nota delle opere non date ancora a Nessuno, 58 works, published by Bonaventura (Rome, 1931) (Sotheby's catalogue 1985); (2) 1796: Catalogo delle opere da me Luigi Boccherini cedute in tutta Proprieta al Sigr. Ignazio Pleyel (GB-Lbl); (3) 1797: Nota della musica mandata a Parigi l'anno 1790 o 1791 (F-Pn); (4) 1797: piano quintets op.56 (F-Prothschild); and (5) 1797: string quintets opp.40–43, with autograph note, In tutto 26. Pezze, che unite alle 84. dell'altro Catalogo formano pezze = 110 = (US-NYpm). Questions of authenticity and bibliographical matters are examined in Gérard's thematic catalogue (1969).

In his own catalogue, Boccherini adopted a conventional numbering system in which (with a few exceptions) six works of like kind were assigned to each opus. Each opus was ‘grande’ or ‘piccola’ according to whether the works were full-length (usually four movements) or short (usually two movements, sometimes called ‘quartettinos’ or ‘quintettinos’). Unfortunately, Boccherini's publishers used totally different numbering systems; and in some cases his publishers, notably Pleyel, confusingly regrouped his sets and later publishers used new numberings of their own, so that some works can be found under three or more numbers; and occasionally (as in the Berlin manuscripts) yet further opus numbers are appended to manuscript copies. In the discussion below Boccherini's opus numbers are preferred to Gérard numbers where their use clarifies the chronology.

A considerable part of the music preserved in autograph form derives from the extensive collection of L. Picquot, a tax collector who was a major biographer of Boccherini. On his death, a small part of this collection passed into the possession of the Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra in Paris, while the larger part of it (617 works, either printed or autographs) was sold at auction in Berlin in 1904 and 1922 (Ophee, 1981). The works written for Friedrich Wilhelm II are in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

3. Vocal and orchestral music.

The circumstances of Boccherini's life dictated that his main occupation would be the composition of chamber music; and it is clear that his gifts lay in the same direction. His music shows a constant concern with detail rather than with broad effect. His vocal works, including two operas, two oratorios, three cantatas and more than a dozen concert arias, are essentially marginal to his output; though the Stabat mater of 1781, revised in 1800 from a soprano solo setting to one for three voices, is by no means untypical with its intimate mood, its sighing appoggiaturas, and the warmth and graceful pathos of the F minor trio movements which flank the 1800 version. Such features may also be seen as in a clear line of descent from Pergolesi's Stabat mater.

His orchestral output is more important. Boccherini wrote several cello concertos. A group of four published in Paris (g477, 479–81; 1770–71) are straightforward works retaining many vestiges of late Baroque concerto form but not specially characteristic except in occasional melodic patterns. A concerto published about 1782 (g483), more elaborately orchestrated and less conservative in its treatment, is of greater interest. The best-known Boccherini cello concerto is one in B, familiar in the regrettable arrangement published by Friedrich Grützmacher in 1895: its outer movements are a conflation of a sonata (g565) and a concerto (g482), with Grützmacher's own glosses to the harmony, orchestration and solo figuration, and for its slow movement he chose the poetic Adagio of g480, the outstanding movement among the four Paris concertos. In all the authentic cello works Boccherini made extensive technical demands, using the tenor register frequently, with passage-work in high thumb positions, as well as rapid bowing across the strings and long passages in multiple stopping. The violin concerto g486, on which Mozart's k218 was long thought to have been modelled, shows no sign of being authentic and is probably a forgery by Henry Casadesus (see Lebermann, Acta mozartiana, 1967).

Boccherini composed at least 27 symphonies. His essentially lyrical gift and his feeling for melodic detail found less scope here than in chamber music; often a true sense of symphonic momentum is lacking. Yet his symphonies do not lack variety of expression. Several are in a conventionally festive and brilliant D major, including the first of the op.12 set, with bustling if inconsequential passage-work, and his last in that key, op.43, in Italian overture form, marred however by an excessive symmetry of phrase-structure. That Boccherini could construct a symphonic movement cogently is shown by (for example) the Symphony in F op.35 no.4, with its economically argued first movement, characteristically built on a brief, much repeated rhythmic figure. Boccherini's several minor-key symphonies are among his most interesting. They include one in C minor, op.41, with a Pastorale slow movement in a pathetic vein and a tarantella-like finale of considerable power; still more noteworthy is the use of material from the first movement in the Pastorale and particularly the minuet. Such essays at cyclic form are discussed below; one example occurs in the D minor symphony from op.12, where the same slow introduction is used for the first movement and the third (which is a parody of a movement from Gluck's ballet Don Juan, familiar as the ‘Air de furies’ in Orphée). Another D minor movement of particular individuality is the first of op.37 no.3, where D minor and major alternate, as do pp and ff, and where hints of contrapuntal treatment are set against explosive tuttis.

4. Chamber music.

Boccherini was a prolific composer of chamber music: he composed well over 100 string quintets, nearly 100 string quartets and over 100 other chamber works. His style became increasingly personal and even idiosyncratic over the 44 years in which he composed, to such an extent that in his late music he sometimes seems to be repeating himself (even if more subtly). The earliest trios and quartets (he was not called upon to use the rare quintet form until he settled in Spain) are in a standard Italian chamber music idiom, apart from their frequent use of the cello in its tenor register (natural in a virtuoso cellist) and an unusually ornate melodic style. Other features of rhythm and texture later to become significant characteristics are seen only in embryo. Early influences on Boccherini's style are hard to specify. He must have been acquainted with works by such Italian composers as G.B. Sammartini and Nardini; in Vienna he must have encountered the music of men like Wagenseil and M.G. Monn; in Paris he must have heard music by the Mannheim composers as well as such local men as Gossec and Schobert. But it would be hard to pinpoint the influence of such men on Boccherini's music, his chamber music in particular. By the works of 1769–70 his technique was fully assured; his style thereafter changed only gradually, gaining in freedom and unorthodoxy to a point where his latest works (from 1790 onwards) show little regard for conventions of form or tonal schemes. Some of the works of these late years suggest a growing inwardness of style, a leisureliness, a preoccupation with delicate effects of harmony, texture or rhythmic figuration at the expense of melody or formal integrity; and it is natural to think that Boccherini's isolation from the main musical cross-currents of Europe may be responsible. No doubt this increasing inwardness of style was in Fétis's mind when he suggested that a listener to a Boccherini work might imagine him to have known no music but his own (Fétis, 1829, p.536). There are features of his later music which might be regarded as Spanish, in particular the tendency to expand by direct repetition and the use of repeated syncopated notes and certain rhythmic tags characteristic of Spanish dances; though much of repetition and syncopation can be found in his earlier music too.

These syncopated rhythms, however, are an important mark of his style. Often they appear in an inner part, to maintain the vitality of an accompaniment or simply to enliven a texture; frequently they impart nervous energy to a melody or special emphasis to a cadence. They are closely allied to Boccherini's highly individual manner of phrasing, with slurs from a weak beat to a strong (ex.1), which by depriving a line of direct accentuation lends a certain softness and suavity to its melodic contours. This was undoubtedly the kind of effect Boccherini aimed at; the directions ‘soave’, ‘con grazia’ and ‘dolce’ or ‘dolcissimo’ are among the commonest in his music. Boccherini's performing instructions are often specific and individual: he sometimes coupled terms like ‘lentarello’, ‘malincolico’, ‘smorfioso’ and ‘con imperio’ with tempo directions. It is perhaps the pervading charm, gentleness or even effeminacy of his music, as well as its lack of firm direction, that drew from the violinist Giuseppe Puppo the well-known remark about Boccherini's being ‘Haydn's wife’. Often, however, particularly in his later music, this gentleness is contradicted by brief, explosive fortissimo passages (usually of a bar or less; see ex.2).

The most obvious characteristics of his melodic style are the repetition of short phrases, the use of triadic or scalic figuration, the symmetry of rhythmic structure and, above all, the delicate detail, with finely moulded lines much elaborated with trills, appoggiaturas, flourishes and other kinds of musical filigree work (ex.3). All these characteristics may also be noted in the famous minuet from the String Quintet op.11 no.5. To accommodate such florid writing, Boccherini's harmony is apt to be static during the enunciation of melodic material. But his harmonic range was wide for a composer of his time; he was well capable of using sudden shifts of harmony for a dramatic (as opposed to a structural) purpose, and in general his development sections are harmonically faster moving than his expositions.

‘Development’, however, is an uncertain word to use in referring to Boccherini's sonata-style movements. There is little thematic development in the Viennese Classical sense. He usually repeats some of his thematic material in related keys, and sometimes includes lengthy passages where instrumental figuration occupies the foreground while a harmonic scheme slowly unfolds. His tonal patterns are not always surely handled: a development section often ends in the wrong key, necessitating a clumsy switch at the recapitulation (particularly between major and minor: for example, opp.18 no.1, 24 no.2, 25 no.6). Boccherini's inclination towards a concertante style also counts against rigorous development. He wrote his chamber music for himself and for other virtuosos to play, always showing a sure grasp of string technique. The high, florid cello parts (which misled Einstein into thinking that they were intended for a second viola: Mozart, New York, 1945, p.189) and the elaborate violin parts inevitably represent a heterogeneous element texturally, no less so because Boccherini also assigned virtuoso passage-work to the viola and the second violin, and in quintets to the second cello.

Texture is a dynamic element in Boccherini's chamber music, as can be seen in ex.2, with its characteristic use of tremolando, open strings, double stops and syncopation. In a sensuous, wholly Latin way, he relished the sound of an ensemble of instruments for its own sake. He used bowed tremolandos extensively in inner parts, to lend movement and vibrancy to the music; he used double stops more for their enriching effect than from harmonic necessity, and triple or quadruple stops to create dramatic accents. Such other string devices as harmonics, flautato effects, sul ponticello, open notes or doubled open and stopped notes for emphasis, bariolage and shimmering tremolos across the strings are used with a freedom which would have been inappropriate to music conceived in more dialectical terms. In the arrangement and spacing of parts, too, Boccherini exercised a great deal of freedom, with much overlapping, particularly with two cellos (in the quintets) above the viola or with the first violin and first cello in 3rds or 6ths. The doubling of the two cellos to form a firm, resonant bass is characteristic; so are doubled octaves, either at the top of the texture or in the middle. In this context his imitation of non- or semi-musical sounds may be mentioned, for example, his bird-calls and music of shepherds' pipes and hunters' horns in the Quintet op.11 no.6, entitled ‘L'uccelliera’ (‘The Aviary’), his imitations of Madrid street sounds in the Quintet op.30 no.6, ‘La musica notturna della strade di Madrid’ (the publication of which he opposed because of its incomprehensibility to anyone unfamiliar with the city), his suggestion of the jew's harp in the Quintet op.36 no.6, and of ‘pifferi di montagna’ in the Quartet op.58 no.5.

Boccherini's interest in cyclic forms, referred to above, represents another individual development typical of a composer working in isolation. Sometimes it involved merely the linking of two movements with a common slow introduction; elsewhere entire movements or sections of movements are repeated, most usually so that a fast movement already heard reappears as a finale, or so that a central movement is presented with the same music following as preceding it. Sometimes even more complex schemes appear, for example in the Quintet op.39 no.1, where the material is arranged A–BCDB–EFE, or in the Quintet op.40 no.4, where the arrangement is A–BCBDB'CBDB' (B' represents a shortened version of B). These early ventures into cyclic schemes may be seen as an interesting attempt by a composer to impose an external unity on music lacking strong internal structure, or as an experiment by a composer of uncommon ingenuity and enterprise in the handling of musical materials, or both.

arrangements for guitar quintet

WORKS

Editions: Collection des quintetti de Boccherini pour deux violons, alto et deux violoncelles, pubd Janet and Cotelle (Paris, 1818–22); Collection de trios pour deux violons et basse, et pour violon, alto et basse composés par L. Boccherini, ed. Janet & Cotelle (Paris, 1824) [incl. numbering; JC]Le opere complete di Luigi Boccherini, ed. P. Carmirelli (Rome, 1970–85) [quintets; C]Luigi Boccherini: Sämtliche Sinfonien, ed. A. de Almeida (Vienna, 1977–95) [A]Luigi Boccherini: Edizione critica delle opere, ed. A. Pais (Padua, 1977–) [P]Catalogues: Y. Gérard: Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini (London, 1969) [G]Boccherini's autograph catalogue, ed. in Piquot (1851) and Boccherini y Calonje (1879) [B]g – ‘opera grande’ in Boccherini's autograph cataloguep – ‘opera piccola’ in Boccherini's autograph catalogue

Printed works were published in Paris unless otherwise stated; MS sources, for works not published during or in the years following Boccherini's lifetime (up to c1822), are specified only if not shown in Gérard (1969). Numbers of individual works within a set are shown after a slash, e.g. op.2/3 = op.2 no.3. References to individual movements are shown in small roman numerals.

string quintets

piano quintets

string quintets

for 2 violins, viola and 2 cellos unless otherwise stated

†	for 2 violins, viola, cello and double bass
‡	for 2 violins, 2 violas and cello



G	JC	Title and op. no. in B, key	Date	Edition	Remarks

265–70	1–6	6 quintetti, op.10 (g), A, E, c, C, E, D	1771	Ci
Publication/source : op.12 (1774)
		6 quintetti, op.11 (g)	1771	Cii
Publication/source : op.13 (1775)
271	7	B
272	8	A
273	9	C
274	10	f
275	11	E
276	12	D (‘L'uccelliera’)
277–82	13–18	6 quintetti, op.13 (g), E, C, F, d, A, E	1772	Ciii
Publication/source : op.20 (1776)
283–8	19–24	6 quintetti, op.18 (g), c, D, E, C, d, E	1774	Civ
Publication/source : op.17 (?1775)
289–94	25–30	6 quintetti, op.20 (g), E, B, F, G, d, a	1775	Cv
Publication/source : op.23 (1777)
		6 quintetti, op.25 (g)	1778	Cvi
295	37	d
Publication/source : op.36/1 (Vienna, ?1780)
296	38	E
Publication/source : op.36/2 (Vienna, ?1780)
297	39	A
Publication/source : op.36/3 (Vienna, ?1780)
298	72	C
Publication/source : op.47/9 (1813)
299	56	D
Publication/source : op.37/17 (1804)
300	68	a
Publication/source : op.47/5 (1813)
301–6	31–6	6 quintettini, op.27 (p), A, G, e, E, g, b	1779	Cvii, P
Publication/source : op.33 (Venice, c1782)
		6 quintetti, op.28 (g)	1779	Cviii
307	53	F
Publication/source : op.37/14 (1803)
308	47	A
Publication/source : op.37/8 (1799)
309	88	E
Publication/source : op.51/1 (?1822)
310	46	C
Publication/source : op.37/7 (1799)
311	89	d
Publication/source : op.51/2 (?1822)
312	54	B
Publication/source : op.37/15 (1803)
		6 quintetti, op.29 (g)	1779	Cix
313	75	D
Publication/source : op.47/12 (1813)
314	76	c
Publication/source : op.48/1 (1813)
315	77	F
Publication/source : op.48/2 (1813)
316	81	A
Publication/source : op.48/6 (1813)
317	74	E
Publication/source : op.47/11 (1813)
318	78	g
Publication/source : op.48/3 (1813)
		6 quintettini, op.30 (p)		Cx
319	—	B
Publication/source : ed. P. Carmirelli (Rome, 1956)
320	—	a
321	—	C
Publication/source : ed. P. Carmirelli (Rome, 1956)
322	—	E
Publication/source : ed. P. Carmirelli (Rome, 1956)
323	—	e
324	—	C (‘La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid’)
Publication/source : ed. W. Upmeyer (Hanover, 1921)
		6 quintetti, op.31 (g)	1780
325	80	E
Publication/source : op.48/5 (1813)
326	—	G
327	—	B
328	73	c
Publication/source : op.47/10 (1813)
329	—	A
330	79	F
Publication/source : op.48/4 (1813)
		6 quintettini, op.36 (p)	1784
331	—	E
332	—	D
333	—	G
334	—	a
335	—	g
336	—	F (‘Dello scacciapensiero’)
		3 quintetti, op.39 (g)	1787		ded. Duchess of Benavente-Osuna
337†	59	B
Publication/source : op.37/20 (1809)
338†	67	F
Publication/source : op.47/4 (1817)
339†	62	D
Publication/source : op.37/23 (1811)
		6 quintettini, op.40 (p)	1788
340	85	A			title ‘Les folies d'Espagne’ not authentic
Publication/source : op.50/4 (?1822)
341	83	D
Publication/source : op.50/2 (?1822)
342	84	D
Publication/source : op.50/3 (?1822)
343	82	C
Publication/source : op.50/1 (?1822)
344	86	e
Publication/source : op.50/5 (?1822)
345	87	B
Publication/source : op.50/6 (?1822)
		2 quintetti, op.41 (g)	1788
346	51	E
Publication/source : op.37/12 (1799)
347	61	F
Publication/source : op.37/22 (1811/12)
		3 quintetti (g), 1 quintettino (p), op.42	1789
348	58	f
Publication/source : op.37/19 (1809)
349	71	C
Publication/source : op.47/8 (1813)
350	—	b (‘Quintettino’)
351	52	g
Publication/source : op.37/13 (1803)
		2 quintetti (g), 1 quintettino (p), op.43	1790
352	—	E (‘Quintettino’)
353	—	D
354	66	F
Publication/source : op.47/3 (1813)
		4 quintetti, op.45 (g)	1792
355	57	c
Publication/source : op.37/18 (1804)
356	43	A
Publication/source : op.37/4 (1799)
357	64	B
Publication/source : op.47/1 (1813)
358	40	C
Publication/source : op.37/1 (1799)
		6 quintetti, op.46 (g)	1793
359	49	B
Publication/source : op.37/10 (1799)
360	65	d
Publication/source : op.47/2 (1813)
361	55	C
Publication/source : op.37/16 (1804)
362	41	g
Publication/source : op.37/2 (1799)
363	60	F
Publication/source : op.37/21 (1809)
364	42	E
Publication/source : op.37/3 (1799)
		5 quintetti, op.49 (g)	1794
365	50	D
Publication/source : op.37/11 (1799)
366	48	B
Publication/source : op.37/9 (1799)
367	70	E
Publication/source : op.47/7 (1813)
368	45	d
Publication/source : op.37/6 (1799)
369	44	E
Publication/source : op.37/5 (1799)
		6 quintettini, op.50 (p)	1795
370	91	A
Publication/source : op.51/4 (?1822)
371	92	E
Publication/source : op.51/5 (?1822)
372	—	B
373	93	E
Publication/source : op.51/6 (?1822)
374	90	C
Publication/source : op.51/3 (?1822)
375	—	B
		2 quintetti, op.51 (g)	1795
376	69	E
Publication/source : op.47/6 (1813)
377	63	C			beginning in C minor
Publication/source : op.37/24 (1811/12)
		[12 quintets]
379‡	—	e	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g407
380‡	—	F	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g408
381‡	—	E	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g410
382‡	—	a	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g412
383‡	—	D	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g411
384‡	—	C	1797–		arr. of Pf Qnt g409

385‡	—	d	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g416
Publication/source : (Bordeaux, 1816/17)
386‡	—	e	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g417
Publication/source : (Bordeaux, 1816/17)
387‡	—	B	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g414
Publication/source : (Bordeaux, 1816/17)
388‡	—	A	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g413
389‡	—	e	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g415
390‡	—	C	1799–		arr. of Pf Qnt g418
		6 quintetti, op.60 (g)	1801
391‡	—	C
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1962)
392‡	—	B
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1962)
393‡	—	A
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1962)
394‡	—	E			lost
395‡	—	G
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1962)
396‡	—	F
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1962)
		6 quintetti, op.62 (g)	1802		ded. Lucien Bonaparte
397‡	—	C
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1963)
398‡	—	E
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1963)
399‡	—	F
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1963)
400‡	—	B
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1964)
401‡	—	D
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1965)
402‡	—	E
Publication/source : ed. R. Sabatini (Vienna and Munich, 1964)
406‡	—	E			lost, listed in Liepmannssohn catalogue, 1904

piano quintets

all for piano, 2 violins, viola and cello



G	Title and op. no. in B, key	Date	Publication	Edition	Remarks

	6 quintetti, op.56 (g)	1797		P
407	e		op.46/4 (1803)
408	F		op.46/1 (1800)
409	C		op.46/6 (1803)
410	E		op.46/3 (1800)
411	D		op.46/5 (1803)
412	a		op.46/2 (1800)
413–18	6 quintetti concertati, op.57 (g), A, B, e, d, E, C	1799		P	ded. Fr. nation; orig. ded. ‘al Secretario della Rep[ubli]ca Francese’ deleted on autograph

arrangements for guitar quintet

for guitar, 2 violins, viola and cello unless otherwise stated



G	Title, key	Date	Original work

	6 quintéti	1798
Remarks : for F. Borgia, Marquis of Benavente
445	d		Pf Qnt g416
Publication : ed. R. Chiesa (Milan, 1973)
Remarks : Menuet from Str Qnt g385 added as iii
446	E		Pf Qnt g417
Publication : ed. R. Chiesa (Milan, 1973)
Remarks : Allegretto from Str Qnt g386 added as iii
447	B		Pf Qnt g414
Publication : ed. R. Chiesa (Milan, 1973)
448	D		str qnts g270, 341
Publication : ed. H. Albert (Leipzig, Riga and Berlin, 1925)
Remarks : iv = Fandango
449	D		str qts g232, 237, Str Qnt g411
Publication : ed. R. Chiesa (Milan, 1973)
450	G		Fl Qnt g531, Str Qtg240
Publication : ed. R. Chiesa (Milan, 1973)
451	[quintet], e	1799	Pf Qnt g407
Publication : ed. H. Albert (Leipzig, Riga and Berlin, 1925)
452	[4 qnts]	1799	pf qnts g408, 410–12
Remarks : lost
453	[quintet], C	1799	Pf Qnt g409
Publication : ed. H. Albert (Leipzig, Riga and Berlin, 1925)

string quartets



G	Title and op. no. in B, key	Date	Publication/source	Edition	Remarks

159–64	6 quartetti, op.2 (g), c, B, D, E, E, C	1761	op.1 (1767)
165–70	6 quartetti, op.8 (g), D, c, E, g, F, A	c1768	op.6 (1769)	P
171–6	6 quartetti, op.9 (g), c, d, F, E, D, E	1770	op.10 (1772)
177–82	6 quartetti, op.15 (p), D, F, E, F, E, c	1772	op.11 (1773)
183–8	6 quartettini, op.22 (p), C, D, E, B, a, C	1775	op.26 (?1776)
	6 quartetti, op.24 (g)	1776–8
189	D		op.27/5 (?1778)
190	A		op.27/4 (?1778)
191	E		op.27/1 (?1778)
192	C		op.27/3 (?1778)
193	c		op.27/6 (?1778)
194	g		op.27/2 (?1778)
195–200	6 quartettini, op.26 (p), B, g, E, A, F, f	1778	op.32 (Vienna, 1781)
201–6	6 quartetti, op.32 (g), E, e, D, C, g, A	1780	op.33 (Vienna, c1782)
207–212	6 quartettini, op.33 (p), E, C, G, B, e, E	1781	ed. P. Carmirelli (Rome, 1958)
213	Quartetto, op.39 (g), A	1787	op.39/8 (1799)
	2 quartetti, op.41 (g)	1788
214	c		op.39/6 (1798)
215	C		op.39/5 (1798)
216–17	2 quartettini, op.42 (p), A, C	1789
218–19	2 quartettini, op.43 (p), A, A	1790
	6 quartettini, op.44 (p)	1792
220	B
221	e
222	F
223	G (‘La tiranna’)		ed. W. Upmeyer (Kassel, 1952)
224	D
225	E
	6 quartettini, op.48 (p)	1794
226	F
227	A
228	b		ed. W. Upmeyer (Kassel, 1952)
229	E
230	G
231	C
	4 quartetti, op.52 (g)	1795
232	C		op.39/7 (1799)
233	D		op.39/4 (1798)
234	G		op.39/1 (1798)
235	f		op.39/9 (1799)
	6 quartettini, op.53 (p)	1796
236	E		op.40/2 (1798)
237	D		op.40/3 (1798)
238	C		op.40/4 (1798)
239	A		op.40/6 (1798)
240	C		op.40/1 (1798)
241	E		op.40/5 (1798)
242–7	6 quartetti, op.58 (g), C, E, B, b, D, E	1799	op.58 (c1803)
	6 quartetti, op.64 (g)	1804			set inc.
248	F			P
249	D			P	i only

Doubtful: g250–55, 6 Qts, op.54, 1796, arrs. of various chbr works by Boccherini; g256, 6 Qts, arrs. of str qnts g265–70

string trios

for 2 violins and cello unless otherwise stated

*	for violin, viola, cello



G	JC	Title and op. no. in B, key	Date	Publication	Edition

77–82	1–6	6 tercetti, op.1 (p), F, B, A, D, G, C	1760	op.2 (1767)	P
83–8	13–18	6 tercetti, op.4 (g), E, B, E, f, D, F	1766	op.4 (1768)
89–94	25–30	6 tercetti, op.6 (g), B, E, A, F, g, C	1769	op.9 (1771)
95–100*	31–6	6 tercetti, op.14 (g), F, c, A, D, E, F	1772	op.14 (1773)
101–6*	37–42	6 tercetti, op.34 (g), f, G, E, D, C, E	1781	op.35 (c1782)
107–12*	43–8	6 tercettini, op.47 (p), A, G, B, E, D, F	1793	op.38 (1799)
		6 tercetti, op.54 (g)	1796
113	52	D		op.44/6 (1798)
114	—	G		ed. W. Upmeyer (Hanover, 1930)
115	—	E		ed. W. Upmeyer (Hanover, 1941)
116	49	C		op.44/1 (1798)
117	51	d		op.44/3 (1798)
118	50	A		op.44/2 (1798)
Doubtful: g125–30, JC19–24, 6 conversazioni a tre, op.7 (Paris, 1770)

cello sonatas

for cello and continuo unless otherwise stated

Δ	extant in two versions, with the first two movements ordered differently

6 Sonatas (London, 1772), also arr. vn, bc (Paris, c1770)



G	Key	Publication/source	Edition

1	F	6 Sonatas, no.5	P
2Δ	c		P
4Δ	A	6 Sonatas, no.6	P
5Δ	G	6 Sonatas, no.3	P
6	C	6 Sonatas, no.2	P
8	B		P
9	F		P
Remarks : ? b part for str inst; i resembles Str Qt g178, i
10Δ	E	6 Sonatas, no.4	P
Remarks : also as Sonata, 2 vc, g75; i also in Vc Sonata g568, ii also in Vc Sonata g566
11	E		P
Remarks : extant in 2- and 3- movt versions; ii also as i in Vc Sonata g16
12	B		P
13	A	6 Sonatas, no.1	P
Remarks : i also in Vc Conc. g475
14	E		P
15	G		P
16	E		P
Remarks : extant in 2- and 3-movt versions; ii also in Vc Sonata g11
17	C		P
Remarks : ii also in Str Trio g95 and in Vc Conc., E, G—
18	c		P
Remarks : for va/vc, bc
19	F		P
563	G	formerly F. Spiegl's private collection, Liverpool
Remarks : see Sotheby's catalogue, 1985
564	D	formerly F. Spiegl's private collection, Liverpool
Remarks : see Sotheby's catalogue, 1985
565	B		P
Remarks : extant in 2 versions; also as Vc Conc. g482; iii resembles Vn Duet g57
566	E		P
Remarks : ii also in Vc Sonata g10; ii resembles Vc Conc., E, G—, i
568	E		P
Remarks : i also in Vc Sonata g10
569	C
580	D		P
—	C		P
—	A		P
—	E		P
—	A	ed. C. Speck (Mainz, 1994)	‘L'imperatrice’
—	a	ed. C. Speck (Mainz, forthcoming)
—	D	ed. C. Speck (Mainz, forthcoming)
—	c		(Mainz, c1997)
Doubtful: g3, at least i and iii by L.-A.-J. Janson); g7, attrib. G. Chiabrano in S-Uu; g562, 567 and a sonata in f, A-SEI, all attrib. P. Pericoli in pubn (Bologna, 1769): g565b, ii by J.-P. Duport

other chamber



G	Title and op. no. in B, key	Scoring	Date	Publication	Edition	Remarks

25–30	6 sonate, op.5 (g), B, C, B, D, g, E	pf, vn	1768	op.5 (1769)		ded. A.-L. Brillon de Jouy
56–61	6 duetti, op.3 (p), G, F, A, B, E, D	2 vn	1761	op.5 (1769)
63–8	6 duos	2 vn		op.46 bks 1–3 (1798)		arr., ?by Boccherini, of his trios and qnts
74	Sonata, C	2 vc			P
75	Sonata, E	2 vc		(1797)	P	also as Vc Sonata g10
419–24	6 quintettini, op.17 (p), D, C, d, B, G, E	fl/ob, 2 vn, va, vc	1773	op.21 (1775)	P
	6 quintettini, op.19 (p)	fl, 2 vn, va, vc	1774	op.25 (c1776)	P
425	E
426	g
427	C
428	D
429	B
430	D (‘Las parejas’)
431–6	6 quintetti, op.55 (p), G, F, D, A, E, d	fl/ob, 2 vn, va, vc	1797	op.45 (1799)	P
454–9	6 sestetti, op.23 (g), E, B, E, f, D, F	2 vn, 2 va, 2 vc	1776	op.24 (c1780)	P
461–6	Sestetti o divertimenti op.16 (g), A, F, A, E, A, C	fl, 2 vn, va, 2 vc, db ad lib	1773	op.15 (1775)	P
	5 sestetti e 1 ottetto, op.38 (p)		1787
467	Divertimento notturno, E	ob/fl, bn, hn, vn, va, db		op.42/2 (1799)	P
468	Divertimento notturno, E					lost
469	Divertimento notturno, E					lost
470	Divertimento notturno, G	ob/fl, bn, hn, 2 vn, va, vc		op.41 (1798)	P
471	Sestetto, E	hn, 2 vn, va, 2 vc		op.42/1 (1798)	P
472	Sestetto, B					lost
473	Notturno piccolo, op.42, E		1789			lost

Doubtful: g69, 70, 2 vn duets; g73, 6 fughe, 2 vc, P; g437–42, 6 wind qnts, E-Mp; g443–4, 2 wind qnts, F-Pc; g460, Sextet, 3 vn, va, 2 vc; g571–2, 2 sonatas, 2 vc, P; 2 sextets, 2 vn, va, db, 2 hn, A-KR; Qt, E, hn, vn, va, vc, ed. H. Pizka (Munich, 1979)
Spurious: g62, Duet, 2 vn, by F. Manfredi

symphonies



G	Title and op. no. in B, key	Scoring	Date	Publication	Edition

490	D	2 ob, 2 hn, str	?1765	(Venice, ?1775)	P, Ai
Remarks : as ov. g527 in oratg538, cant. g543; as ov. to N. Piccinni: La buona figliuola maritata, Aranjuez, 1769
491	Concerto grande a più stromenti obbligati, op.7, C	2 ob, bn, 2 hn, 2 solo vn, solo vc, str	by/before July 1769	op.8 (1770)	Aii
Remarks : arr. as Str Qnt g268 and Sym. g523
	6 sinfonie a più stromenti, op.21 (g)		1775	op.22 (?1776)
493	B	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Aix
494	E	2 fl, 2 hn, str			Ax
495	C	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Axi
496	D	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Axii
497	B	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Axiii
498	A	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Axiv
	6 concerti a grande orchestra, op.12 (g)		1771	op.16 (?1776)
503	D	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Aiii
504	E	2 ob, 2 hn, 2 solo vn, solo vc, str			Aiv
505	C	2 fl, 2 hn, str			Av
506	d	2 ob, 2 hn, str			Avi
Remarks : title ‘La casa del diavolo’ not authentic; iii = arr. of Gluck: ‘Enfer’ from Don Juan
507	B	2 fl, 2 hn, str			Avii
508	A	2 fl, 2 hn, str			Aviii
	6 sinfonie a più stromenti, op.35 (g), D, E, A, F, E, B	2 ob, 2 hn, bn ad lib, str	1782		Axv–xx, P
509–14	4 sinfonie a grande orchestra, op.37 (g)
515	C	2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1786	(1798)	Axxi
516	D	‘a più strom [enti] obl [igati]’	1786
Remarks : lost, formerly in Königliche Hausbibliothek, Berlin
517	d	fl, 2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1787		Axxiii
518	A	fl, 2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1787		Axxv
519	Sinfonia a grande orchestra, op.41 (g), c	2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1788		Axxvi
520	Sinfonia grande, op.42 (g), D	fl 2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1789		Axxvii
521	1 sinfonia, op.43 (g), D	2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1790	op.43 (1798)	Axxviii
522	1 sinfonia a grande orchestra, op.45 (g), d	2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, str	1792	(1798)	Axxix
523	Concertante, C	2 ob, 2 bn, 2 hn, solo gui, 2 solo vn, solo vc, str	1798		Axxx, P
Remarks : arr. of Sym. g491/Qnt g268 for F. de Borgia, Marquis of Benavente

Doubtful: g500, D, hn ad lib, str (Paris, 1767); g576, G, 2 hn, str, attrib. H.-F. Delonge in Breitkopf suppl., 1768

concertos



G	Key	Solo	Orchestral scoring	Date	Publication/source	Edition	Remarks

474	E	vc	2 ob, 2 hn, str			P
475	A	vc	2 hn, str			P
476	D	vc	2 fl, str			P
477	C	vc	str		(1770)	P	with 2 hn in some early sources
479	D	vc	str		(1770)	P
480	G	vc	str		(1770)	P
481	C	vc	2 hn, str		(1771)	P
482	B	vc	2 hn, str			P
483	D	vc	2 ob, 2 hn, 2 solo vn, str		op.34 (Vienna, c1782)	P
487	E	hpd	2 ob, 2 hn, str	?1768			?for A.-L. Brillon de Jouy
573	C	vc	2 ob, 2 tpt, str			P
574	F	vn	2 ob, 2 hn, str				solo part lost
575	D	fl	2 hn, str			P
—	E	vc	2 ob, 2 hn, str		ed. C. Speck (Mainz, 1994)	P

Doubtful: g478, D, solo vc, 2 ob, 2 hn, str, P, i = arr. of Vc Conc. g477
Spurious (only solo insts shown): g484, vc, arr. ed. P. Ruyssen, c1950; g485, vn; g486, vn, forgery, by H. Casadesus; g488, hpd; g489, fl, by F.X. Pokorny

other orchestral



G	Title and op. no. in B, key	Scoring	Date	Publication/source	Edition	Remarks

501	Serenata, D	2 ob, hn, str	1776	(1777)	(London, 1956)	for wedding of Infante Don Luis
525	Un gioco di minuetti ballabili, op.41 (g)	2 ob, 2 hn, bn, 2 vn, va, vc	1787			for Duchess of Benavente-Osuna

Doubtful: g502, 2 minuets, 2 ob, 2 hn, str (Venice, c1775), arr., ? by L. Mareschalchi, of Str Qt g164 and Str Trio g83

sacred vocal

all with orchestra



G	B

528	59	Messa a 4, 1800, lost
529	—	Ky with Sinfonia, B, SATB
530	—	Gl with Sinfonia, F, SATB
531	—	Cr, C, SATB
532	—	Stabat mater, f, S, solo vc, 1781 P; rev., with SAT, op.61, 1800 (Naples, 1801)
533	—	Dixit Dominus with Sinfonia, G, SATB
534	—	Domine ad adjuvandum, G, SATB
535	63	Cantata al Santo Natale di Nostro Sigñor Jesu-Cristo, solo vv, chorus, 1802, ded. Aleksandr I of Russia, lost
537	—	Gioas (orat, P. Metastasio), SSATTB, chorus, by 1767
538	—	Il Giuseppe riconosciuto (orat, Metastasio), SSAATTB, chorus, by 1767; sinfonia, g527, also in cant. g543 and as ov. to N. Piccinni: La buona figliuola; see Sym. g490
539	—	Villancicos al nacimento di n.tro señor Jesu-Christo, SATB, chorus, ?1783, P

Doubtful: g537, Cantata per il giorno di S Luigi, 4vv, orch

stage

524	Cefalo e Procri (ballo eroico-tragico-pantomimo), Mestre, aut. 1778, choreog. O. Viganò, lost
526	Ballet espagnol, c1772/3, Vienna, 1774, formerly D-DS, probably for Viganò
540	La Clementina (zar, 2, R. de la Cruz), 1786, Madrid, Puerta de la Vega, 1786, ov. ed. R. Sondheimer (Basle, Berlin and London, 1954)
541	Scena dell'Ines di Castro (recit, cavatine, aria), S, orch, by April 1798, F-Pc*
542	Nell'incerto, mio camino (aria, M. Coltellini), S, solo vc, orch, by early 1768, for G.F. de Majo: Almeria, lost
—	Dorval e Virginia (dramma semiserio, 2, G.M. Foppa), c1799, Turin, carn. 1799–1800, lost
Doubtful: Parto ma tu (aria, Metastasio, in Zenobia (?pasticcio), S-St

other vocal

all with orchestra

543	La confederazione dei Sabini con Roma, pt I (cant., P.A. Trenta/F. de' Nobili), STTTB, chorus, Lucca, Tasche, 9 Dec 1765; pt ii by G. Puccini, pt iii by L.I di Poggio; sinfonia,g527, also in orat g538; see Sym. g490 ed. C. Gianturco (Lucca, 1997)
544	Se veramente io deggio … Ah, non lasciarmi (recit and aria, P. Metastasio: Didone abbandonata, T (recit), S, ?1786–97, P
545	Se non ti moro (aria, Metastasio: Adriano in Siria), S/T, ?1786–1797, P
546	Deh, respirar lasciartemi (aria, Metastasio: Artaserse), S/T, ?1786–1797, P
547	Caro, son tua così (aria, Metastasio: L'olimpiade), S, ?1786–1797, P
548	Misera, dove son! … Ah, non son io (recit and aria, Metastasio: Ezio), S, ?1786–1797, P
549	Care luci che regnate (aria, Metastasio: Issipile), S/T, ?1786–1797, P
550	Infelice in van mi lagno (aria, Metastasio: Adriano in Siria), S, ?1786–1797, P
551	Numi, se giusti siete (Metastasio: Adriano in Siria), S, ?1786–1797, P
552	Caro padre (aria, Metastasio: Ezio), S, ?1786–1797, P
553	Ah! che nel dirti (aria, Metastasio: Issipile), ?1786–1797, P
554	Di giudice severo … Per quel paterno (recit and aria, Metastasio: Artaserse), S, T (recit), S/T, ?1786–1797, P
555	Tu di saper procura (aria, Metastasio: L'olimpiade), S, ?1786–1797, P
556	Mi dona, mi rende (aria, Metastasio: Ezio), S, ?1786–97, P
557	Se d'un amor tiranno (aria, Metastasio: Artaserse), S, solo vc, P; solo vc part as in Sextet g466, i, and Vc Sonata g4, i
558	Tornate sereni (aria, Metastasio: Achille in Sciro), S/T, P; sung by L. Fabris according to MS in I-Gl
559	La destra ti chiedo (duet, Metastasio: Demofoonte), S, T, 1792, P
Doubtful: g560, In ‘sto giorno d'allegro (duet); g561, Ah, che nel dirti (duet)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM (G. Salvetti)

FétisB

FétisBS

GerberL

GerberNL

C.L. Junker: Zwanzig Componisten: eine Skizze (Berne, 1776); repr. in Portefeuille für Musikliebhaber (Berne, 1792)

Obituary, Berlinische musikalische Zeitung, i (1805), 252

G. Bertini: Dizionario storico-critico degli scrittori di musica (Palermo, 1814–15)

[F.J. Fétis]: ‘Biographie: Boccherini’, Revue musicale, v (1829), 536–8

W. Beckford: Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, ii (London, 1834), 316–17

Castil-Blaze: ‘Esquisses biographiques et musicales: Alexandre Boucher’, Revue de Paris, nos.156–9 (1845)

L. Picquot: Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, suivie du catalogue raisonné de toutes ses oeuvres, tant publiées qu'inédites (Paris, 1851, enlarged 2/1930 by G. de Saint-Foix as Boccherini)

D.A. Cerù: Cenni intorno alla vita e le opere di Luigi Boccherini (Lucca, 1864)

D.A. Cerù: Cenni storici dell'insegnamento della musica in Lucca e dei più notabili maestri compositori che vi hanno fiorito (Lucca, 1871)

A. Boccherini y Calonje: Luis Boccherini: apuntes biograficos y catalogo de las obras (Madrid,1879)

F. Torrefranca: ‘Le origini dello stile mozartiano: Boccherini’, RMI, xxxiii (1926), 505–23

C. Bouvet: ‘Boccherini inconnu: inventaire des manuscrits autographes du maître, appartenant à la Bibliothèque de l'Opéra de Paris’,RdM, x (1929), 255–74

A. Bonaventura: Boccherini (Milan and Rome, 1931)

H. Searle: ‘Boccherini's Ballet Espagnol’, MMR, lxviii (1938), 171–3

J.M. Lindsay and W. Leggatt Smith: ‘Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805)’,ML, xxiv (1943), 74–81

F. Torrefranca: ‘Il problema della quartetto boccheriniano’, Musica, iii (1943)

N.A. Solar-Quintes: ‘Nuevos documentos sobre Luigi Boccherini’, AnM, ii (1947), 88–98

G. Barblan: ‘Boccheriniana’, RaM, xxix (1959), 123–8, 322–7; xxx (1960), 33–43

G. de Rothschild: Luigi Boccherini: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1962; Eng. trans., rev., 1965)

E. Barsham: ‘Six New Boccherini Cello Sonatas’, MT, cv (1964), 18–20

A. Bonnocorsi: ‘Boccherini’, Maestri di Lucca (Florence, 1967), 76–106

Y. Gérard: ‘Luigi Boccherini and Madame Sophie Gail’, Consort, xxiv (1967), 294–309

W. Lebermann: ‘Apokryph, Plagiat, Korruptel oder Falsifikat?’, Mf, xx (1967), 413–25

W. Lebermann: ‘“Boccherini” und Mozart: ein Diskussions-Beitrag’, Acta mozartiana, xiv/2 (1967), 6–13

G. Salvetti: ‘I sestetti di Luigi Boccherini’, Chigiana, xxiv, new ser., iv (1967), 209–11

E.I. Amsterdam: The String Quintets of Luigi Boccherini (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1968)

Y. Gérard: Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini (London, 1969)

E. Grossato: ‘Un “Notturno” inedito del Boccherini nell'archivio della Cappella musicale antoniana’, Il Santo, xi (1971), 353–5

G. Salvetti: ‘Luigi Boccherini nell'ambito del quartetto italiano del secondo settecento’,AnMc, no.12 (1973), 227–52

V. Terenzio: ‘Immagine di Boccherini’, Quadrivium, xiv (1973), 207–16

K. Fischer: ‘Einflüsse Haydns in Streichquartetten Boccherinis’, GfMKB: Berlin 1974, 328–32

A.M. Smith: A Performance Edition and Historical Documentation of an Unpublished Cello Sonata in E major by Luigi Boccherini (DMA diss., U. of Texas, 1977)

L. Della Croce: Le 33 sinfonie di Boccherini: guida e analisi critica (Turin, 1979)

M. Ophee: Luigi Boccherini's Guitar Quintets: New Evidence (Boston, 1981)

M.G. Scott: The Violoncello Sonatas of Luigi Boccherini (diss., U. of Otago, 1981)

M.G. Scott: ‘Boccherini's B flat Cello Concerto: a Reappraisal of the Sources’,EMc, xii (1984), 355–7

J.C. Griffith: Villancicos by Luigi Boccherini: an Edition (DMA diss. U. of Missouri, Kansas City,1985)

E. Grossato: ‘I concerti per violoncello di Luigi Boccherini: appunti per un approfondimento stilistico’, Rassegna veneta di studi musicali, i (1985), 113–33

C. Speck: ‘On the Changes in the Four-Part Writing in Boccherini's String Quartets’, España en la música de occidente: Salamanca 1985, ii, 129–31

C. Speck: Boccherinis Streichquartette Studien zur Kompositionsweise und zur gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung (Munich, 1987)

A. Gallego: ‘La Clementina, de Boccherini’, RdMc, x (1987), 633–9

R. Coli: Luigi Boccherini (Lucca, 1988, 2/1992)

L. Della Croce: Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua, 1988)

C. Speck: ‘Ein bisher unbekanntes Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester von Boccherini: zur Frage von Ausführung und Besetzung des Bratschenbasses in Boccherinis Konzerten für Violoncello’, Mf, xlii (1989), 20–36

C. Speck: ‘Mozart und Boccherini zur Frage der Italianità in Mozarts frühen Streichquartetten’, GfMKB: Baden, nr Vienna, 1991, 921–32

M. Tchernowitz-Neustadt: The String Trios of Luigi Boccherini (diss., Bar-Ilan U., 1991)

R. Barce: Boccherini en Madrid: primeros años: 1768–1779 (Madrid, 1992)

M. Parker: ‘Luigi Boccherini and the Court of Prussia’, CMc, no.52 (1993), 27–37

E. Sainati: ‘Boccherini: a Castilian Line of Descent’, The Strad, civ (1993), 925–6

Luigi Boccherini e la musica strumentale dei maestri italiani: Siena 1993 [Chigiana, new ser., xxiii (1993)]

G. Biagi Ravenni: ‘“Molti in Lucca si applicavano alla professione della musica”: storie di formazione e di emigrazione nella patria di Luigi Boccherini’, ibid., 69–109

A. Cattoretti: ‘1771–1773: gli ultimi quintetti per archi di Giovanni Battista Sammartini, i primi di Luigi Boccherini’, ibid., 193–229

B. Churgin: ‘Sammartini and Boccherini: Continuity and Change in the Italian Instrumental Tradition of the Classic Period’, ibid., 171–91

F. Degrada: ‘Luigi Boccherini e la musica strumentale dei maestri italiani in Europa fra Sette e Ottocento’, ibid., 363–75

C. Gianturco: ‘“La confederazione dei Sabini con Roma”: contributo di Luigi Boccherini alle “Tasche” di Lucca’, ibid., 27–47

L. Goretti: ‘La sonata n. 6 per violoncello e continuo: analisi di revisioni nel corso di due secoli’, ibid., 151–5

E. Grossato: ‘Boccherini e Venezia’, ibid., 135–50

G. Salvetti: ‘Camerismo sinfonico e sinfonismo cameristico: alla ricerca di un approccio analitico pertinente’, ibid., 337–52

C. Speck: ‘Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäischen Musikzentren des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts’, ibid., 111–34

M. Tchernowitz-Neustadtl: ‘Aspects of the Cycle and Tonal Relationships in Luigi Boccherini's String Trios’, ibid., 157–69

D. Heartz: ‘The Young Boccherini: Lucca, Vienna, and the Electoral Courts’, JM, xiii (1995), 103–16

L. Gallo: ‘Boccherini ucciso dalla tisi’, Il Tirreno (14 April 1996)

T.P. Noonan: Structural Anomalies in the Symphonies of Boccherini (diss., U. of Wisconsin, Madison,1996)

C. Gianturco, ed.: Luigi Boccherini: La confederazione dei Sabini con Roma (Lucca, 1997)

Bocedization [bocedigalomani; bobization].

A solmization system traditionally attributed to Hubert Waelrant (1516 or 1517–95), who is reputed to have introduced it in the Antwerp music school he founded in 1547. The seven syllable-names (voces belgicae) of the system add one more syllable to the range of the traditional ut–re–mi–fa–sol–la hexachord, to give bo–ce–di–ga–lo–ma–ni. This changed it into an octave series which could begin on C or F (with B). Johann Heinrich Alsted in his article ‘Musica’ for the Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (Herborn, 1630) attributed the system to another Netherlander, David Mostart (c1560–1615), citing a treatise of Mostart’s, Korte onderwysinghe van de musyk-konste (Amsterdam, 1598), which is now lost. Sethus Calvisius (1556–1615), the most enthusiastic champion of the system, called it ‘recently thought out’; he suggested using pa for B (and E) and ni for B (and E); his arguments in favour of bocedization appeared in Compendium musicae pro incipientibus (Leipzig, 1594), Exercitationes musicae duae (Leipzig, 1600) and, after a violent attack on the system by Hippolyte Hubmeier, in Exercitatio musica tertia (Leipzig, 1609). An equivalent system, though not known as bocedization, is solmization with the extended hexachord ut–re–mi–fa–sol–la–bi, also apparently favoured by Mostart, Erycius Puteanus and Alsted.

Bocham.

See Cordier, Jacques.

Bochmann, Christopher (Consitt)

(b Chipping Norton, 8 Nov 1950). British composer, teacher and conductor. He studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (1967), with whom he continued to work until 1971, and privately with Richard Rodney Bennett (1969–72). In 1968 he went to New College, Oxford (BA 1971, BMus 1972, MA 1976, DMus 1999). After teaching in a number of schools, including Cranborne Chase School and the Yehudi Menuhin School, Bochmann went to Brazil, where he taught at the Escola de Música de Brasília (1978–80). In 1980 he moved to Portugal where he has developed an extensive activity as a teacher at most of the important music schools, particularly the Instituto Gregoriano de Lisboa (1980–90) and the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa (from 1985), of which he is the present director and head of composition. In 1984 he became conductor of the Portuguese Youth Orchestra.

Bochmann has composed a large number of works in almost all genres except opera, and he has written regularly for young musicians and amateurs. Until the 1980s his music used many of the techniques of the avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s; subsequently, contact with musicians without specialist experience of contemporary music has resulted in greater technical and aesthetic clarity, with higher priority given to the listener's perception.

WORKS

(selective list)

instrumental

Orch: Nimbus, 1977; Aleofonia concertante I–III, chbr orch, 1984–6; Em homenagem, 1984; Epitaph, 1991; Metaphors, chbr orch, 1996; Monograph Expanded, pf, orch, 1997

Chbr: De profundis, vn, vc, pf, 1970; 3 Bagatelles, wind qnt, 1971; 3 str qts, 1972, 1976, 1986; Snakes of Silver Throat, wind octet, 1976; 3 wind qnts, 1978, 1979, 1992; Dialogue I, fl, perc, 1978; Vespers, cl, pf, 1978; Dialogue II, vc, pf, 1981; Mobiles for Alexandra, winds, 3 db, 1985; Boreas, 4 cl, 1988; Out of the Deep, va, vc, db, 1988; Gusts, fl, cl, 1989; Song for Elisabeth, 13 str, 1992; Movements, 4 sax, 1994; Metamorphoses, 11 insts, 1995; Mutations, 4 cl, 1996; Music for 2 Pf, 1988

Solo inst: 2 Pf Sonatas, 1971, 1976; 2 Partitas, vn, 1972, 1978; 10 Essays, various solo insts, 1980–93; Requiescat, wood perc, 1977; Elegy, fl, 1981; Snow on Distant Hills, cl, 1992; Monograph, pf, 1994; Monogram, cl, 1995

vocal

Vocal-orch: Plaint, spkr, SATB, chbr orch, 1987; Songs for Simeon, S, Bar, choruses, orch, 1992; Miserere mei, 5 spkrs, chbr orch, 1994

Unacc. chorus: O vos omnes, 7-pt chorus, 1980; O magnum mysterium, 12-pt chorus, 1987; Echoes, 12 female vv, 1991; Maria Matos Medley, 7 solo vv, 1997; Magnificat, 12 solo vv, 1998; My Monstrous, Mountain’d Walke (H. Vaughan), 1999

Other vocal: Complainte de la lune en province, T, gui, 1974; Epigrams, S, Bar, hpd, org, str qt, 1991; Epistle, 16vv, 4 sax, b cl, gui, vc, trbn, perc, 1991

Principal publisher: Musicoteca

SÉRGIO AZEVEDO

Bochsa, (Robert) Nicholas Charles

(b Montmédy, 9 Aug 1789; d Sydney, 6 Jan 1856). French harpist and composer. His father, Charles Bochsa (d 1821), a Czech oboist and composer, settled first in Lyons, and from about 1806 was established as a music seller in Paris. Nicholas studied music with his father, and was remarkably precocious as a performer on many instruments, and as a composer. At the age of 16 he composed an opera, Trajan, in honour of Napoleon's visit to Lyons. When his family moved to Bordeaux soon afterwards, he began to study composition formally with Franz Beck, under whom he wrote a ballet and an oratorio, Le déluge universel. In 1806 he entered the Paris Conservatoire to study harmony under Catel. He studied the harp under Naderman and Marin, and finally decided to make this his principal instrument, though throughout his life he was a skilful player of almost every known instrument. His reputation as a harpist owed much to his compositions for the harp, which immensely expanded its technical and expressive range; he was constantly discovering new effects, exploiting the full possibilities of Erard's new double action.

In 1813 Bochsa was appointed harpist to the emperor, and in 1816 to Louis XVIII. During this period he composed seven operas for the Opéra-Comique, one of which, La lettre de change (1815), had a long run and became known outside France. In 1816 he was commissioned to compose a requiem for Louis XVI, to be used at the ceremony of reinterment of the beheaded king's remains. It was an immense work in 15 movements, with accompaniments for wind band and percussion (since the music was to be used in procession); Whitwell has pointed out remarkable anticipations of Berlioz's Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, even to the title of the last movement, ‘Récitative et apothéose’.

Meanwhile Bochsa had been developing a lucrative business in forged documents of various kinds, and in 1817 he was compelled to leave the country. On 17 February 1818 the Paris Court of Assize condemned him, in his absence, to 12 years' imprisonment with a fine of 4000 francs, and to be branded with the letters ‘T.F.’ (‘travaux forcés’, or forced labour – the standard penalty for forgers). He took refuge in London, where he soon achieved a prominent position in the musical world as a harpist and conductor. On the founding of the RAM he was appointed professor of harp and general secretary, not without opposition. In the next few years he had to face mounting attacks on his character; his forgeries became known, it was rumoured that he had contracted a bigamous marriage with Amy Wilson (having a wife still living in France) and on 4 May 1824 he was declared bankrupt, his creditors receiving only 7d. in the pound. Accordingly on 26 April 1827 he was dismissed. In 1826, however, through the influence of the king, he had been appointed musical director at the King's Theatre, and he retained that post until 1830. There was serious trouble in 1829 when he reduced the salaries of the orchestral players and when, the principal players having resigned, he replaced them with inferior musicians.

During this time Bochsa composed three ballets for the King's Theatre, and gave annual concerts which were exceedingly popular, both for his own brilliance as a harpist and for the curious novelties he introduced. In the 1830s he played in London and the provinces with consistent success, often touring with Henry and Anna Bishop. In August 1839 he eloped with Anna Bishop, following her around Europe and the world on her various tours; at Naples he was appointed musical director of the Teatro S Carlo for two years. He arrived at Sydney from San Francisco late in 1855, became ill and died there. Many accounts state that he wrote a requiem for himself while on his deathbed, but a contemporary source states that he merely wrote down a ‘mournful refrain’ on a scrap of paper, which was used as the basis for a requiem at his funeral.

Bochsa was one of the most prolific of all composers for the harp: his music is not profound, but it is often adventurous and sometimes brilliant. His harp method was long regarded as a classic.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

stage

opéras comiques unless otherwise stated

POC	Paris, Opéra-Comique (Feydeau)
LKH	London, King's Theatre in the Haymarket

Le retour de Trajan, ou Rome triomphante (opéra, 2, St A. Despreaux), Lyons, 1805 (Bordeaux, 1807)

La dansomanie (ballet), 1806, mentioned by Fétis

L'héritier de Paimpol (3, C.-A. Sewrin), POC, 29 Dec 1813 (c1813)

Les héritiers Michau, ou Le moulin de Lieursaint (1, F.A.E. de Planard), POC, 30 April 1814

Alphonse de Aragon (3, J.M. Souriguière), POC, 19 Aug 1814

Le roi et la ligue, ou La ville assiégée (2, M. Théaulon and J. Dartois), POC, 22 Aug 1815 (c1815)

Les noces de Gamache (3, Planard, after M. de Cervantes: Don Quixote), POC, 16 Sept 1815

La lettre de change (1, Planard), POC, 11 Dec 1815 (c1815); as The Promissory Note, London, English Opera House, 29 June 1820, lib (London, 1820)

Un mari pour étrennes (1, Théaulon and Dartois), POC, 1 Jan 1816, vs (c1816)

Justine, ou La cruche cassée (ballet), LKH, 7 Jan 1825

Le temple de la concorde (ballet), LKH, 28 Jan 1825

La naissance de Vénus (ballet, 2), LKH, 8 April 1826

Le corsaire (ballet), LKH, 29 July 1837

orchestral, vocal-orchestral

Le déluge universel (orat), 1806, perf. as The Deluge, London, CG, 22 Feb 1822

Requiem, Paris, 12 Jan 1816 (c1816)

Symphony, c, London, Amateur Concerts, 20 Dec 1821

5 harp concs., 2 symphonies concertantes: mentioned by Fétis

chamber

Le souvenir, trio, pf, hp, vn/hn, op.47 (?1813)

Les pensées, 3me trio, pf, hp, vn, op.74 (c1818)

Grand trio concertant, (hp, pf)/(2 pf), hn/vc, op.88 (Bonn, ?1822)

6 nocturnes concertans, hp, vn (c1822), collab. R. Kreutzer

14 duos, hp, pf; 20 sonatas, hp, vn/fl/cl: mentioned by Fétis

harp

12 leçons élémentaires, op.16 (n.d.)

Méthode de harpe en 2 parties, op.60 (n.d.): pt 1 trans. as A History of the Harp, from Ancient Greece down to the Present Time (New York, ?1853); pt 2 trans. as General Course of Instruction for the Harp (London, c1820), incl. 50 lessons, 3 sonatas, 8 préludes, many transcrs.

15 Brilliant and Short Preludes, 2 sets (London, c1820)

Petite méthode pour la harpe … à l'usage des jeunes élèves, op.61 (?c1830)

Bochsa's Explanation of his New Harp Effects and Passages (London, 1832)

The Harp Preludist … 16 Lessons (London, ?1833)

Panorama Musical: a Fantastic Sketch intended to give an Idea of the Various Styles of Music from … 1500 down to the Present Time (London, n.d.)

Etude pour la harpe … 50 exercices, op.34; 25 exercices études, op.62; 40 études faciles, op.318: all (n.d.); ed. R. Martenot (1946–50)

Many variation sets and single pieces

20 sonatas, other works, mentioned by Fétis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

‘Royal Academy of Music’, The Harmonicon, i (1823), 21

Scrapbook of concerts by Bochsa and Anna Bishop, 1839–45 (MS, US-Bp 446.109)

A. Pougin: ‘Un musicien voleur, faussaire et bigame’, Le ménestrel (19 Jan 1907)

R. Northcott: The Life of Sir Henry R. Bishop (London, 1920), 63–6, 89–93

A. Carse: The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz (Cambridge, 1948/R), 166–71

B.R. Harvey: ‘Nicholas Charles Bochsa’, The Canon, xi (1957–8), 174–6

D. Whitwell: ‘A Possible Source for the Berlioz Symphony for Band’, The Instrumentalist, xxv/7 (1971), 37–8

P. John: Bochsa and the Biographical Dictionaries of Music and Musicians (Houston, 1990)

K. Moon: Robert Nicholas Bochsa (1789–1856): an Analysis of Selected Pedagogical Works for the Harp (diss., UCLA, 1990)

H.J. Zingel: Harfenmusik im 19. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven, 1976; Eng. trans., 1992)

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY (text), BRUCE CARR (work-list)

Bock

(Ger.: ‘goat’).

A German bagpipe of the western Slav type. See Bagpipe, §7(ii).

Böck.

German family of horn players and composers. The two brothers, Ignaz (b Stadtamhof, nr Regensburg, 1754; d Vienna, after 1815) and Anton (b Stadtamhof, 1757; d Vienna, after 1815), Böck were among the leading horn duettists of the late 18th century. By the age of ten both brothers were studying with Joseph Vogel, a horn player at the court of Thurn und Taxis. In 1775 they went to Vienna and were immediately engaged at the court of Prince Joseph of Batthyány. Though most sources indicate that the Böcks had begun touring as duettists by about 1778, court records show that one or both of them were playing in the Batthyány orchestra from 1778 to 1782 (see Meier). During the 1780s they made concert tours throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Russia, and from 1790 to 1814 they were employed as court musicians by Elector Karl Theodor in Bavaria. Cramer gave one of the most detailed records of a performance by any of the hand-horn virtuosos in a review of the Böcks’ concert at Berlin (1783): in additon to praising their tone he commented on an echo effect created with mutes and ‘an Adagio that they played in a most song-like manner’ in which the second horn sounded two tones at once (probably singing one and playing the other) in certain places. Cramer also mentioned that the Böcks wrote solo parts for concertos (now apparently lost) to which Antonio Rosetti added orchestral accompaniments.

The Böck brothers wrote ten charming duets with bass, op.6 (Leipzig, 1803). Their other works include O care selve for four men’s voices and two horns (Leipzig, n.d.), O Waldnachtgrün for four voices (Leipzig, n.d.) and two sextets for strings and horns, opp.7–8 (Leipzig, 1804); Fétis mentioned a Concertante and other works for horn duo. The Böcks’ chief contributions lay in their popularization of the horn duo and their use of the mute, which they adopted as early as 1775. After hearing the Böcks perform, Beethoven wrote the muted horn solo for the finale of his Pastoral Symphony, and his posthumous Rondino for wind instruments contains a passage for horn with the chromatic mute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

LipowskyBL

MGG1 (G. Karstädt)

C.F. Cramer: Magazin der Musik (Hamburg, 1783–6/R), 1400–03

A. Meier: Konzertante Musik für Kontrabass in der Wiener Klassik (Prien, 1969, 2/1979)

H. Fitzpatrick: The Horn and Horn-Playing and the Austro-Bohemian Tradition from 1680–1830 (London, 1970)

S. Murray: ‘The Double Horn Concerto: a Specialty of the Oettingen-Wallerstein Court’, JM, iv (1985–6), 507–34

R. Dahlqvist: ‘Corno and Corno da caccia: Horn Terminology, Horn Pitches, and High Horn Parts’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xv (1991), 35–80

HORACE FITZPATRICK/THOMAS HIEBERT

Bock, Jerry [Jerrold] (Lewis)

(b New Haven, CT, 23 Nov 1928). American composer. He composed amateur shows in high school and while studying music at the University of Wisconsin (1945–9). After college he joined up with Larry Holofcener, writing revues at Tamiment, an adult summer resort in Pennsylvania, where he met and worked with the Simon brothers, Danny and Neil. With the Simons and others he wrote songs and special material for television, most notably Sid Caesar’s ‘Your Show of Shows’, and contributed songs for a failed revue, Catch a Star (1955). His only successes with Holofcener were two songs from the Sammy Davis jr vehicle, Mr. Wonderful, the title song and ‘Too Close for Comfort’. In 1958 Bock began a fruitful collaboration with lyricist Sheldon Harnick (b Chicago, 30 April 1924), writing seven musicals in 12 years. An inauspicious but promising failure about a college-educated boxer, The Body Beautiful, nonetheless created the opportunity that resulted in their first critical and popular success the following year. This second musical, Fiorello!, based on the life of former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, received the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (the third musical so honoured). Their next collaboration, Tenderloin (1960), although it assembled many of the same illustrious creators and cast of Fiorello! and returned to New York City as its historical subject, was relatively unsuccessful critically and commercially, despite one of Bock’s most highly regarded scores. In 1963 they produced another fine score to accompany the intimate, modestly popular but still revived She Loves Me, the first musical to be directed by Hal Prince.

One year later Bock and Harnick’s phenomenally successful and critically lauded musical realization of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories set in the Russian village of Anatevka in 1905, Fiddler on the Roof, arrived on Broadway. Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins and produced by Prince, it ran for a record 3242 performances. Although both The Apple Tree (1966), a novel attempt to present three one-act musicals in a single evening, and The Rothschilds (1970), the story of the banker Meyer Rothschild and his five sons, ran over a year, neither show managed to capture the magic or popularity of Tevye the Dairyman and his five daughters in Fiddler. According to Harnick, personal conflicts that developed during the production of The Rothschilds led to the dissolution of the partnership, and although Bock completed at least two musicals and other works without Harnick, none has been performed professionally. In his most critically and popularly successful shows Bock was able to capture a convincing sound world for the subject at hand, including 1930s popular styles in Fiorello!, a pseudo-Hungarian style in She Loves Me, and, most effectively, Jewish vernacular musical idioms in Fiddler.

WORKS

(selective list)

unless otherwise stated, all are musicals, and dates are those of first New York performances; librettists are shown as (lyricist; book author)

Mr. Wonderful (L. Holofcener and G. Weiss; J. Stein and W. Glickman), Broadway Theatre, 22 March 1956 [incl. Mr. Wonderful, Too Close for Comfort]

Wonders of Manhattan (film score), 1956

The Body Beautiful (S. Harnick; Stein and Glickman), Broadway Theatre, orchd T. Royal, 23 Jan 1958

Fiorello! (Harnick; G. Abbott and J. Weidman), Broadway Theatre, orchd I. Kostal, 23 Nov 1959 [incl. Little Tin Box, ’Til Tomorrow, When did I fall in love?, Politics and Poker]

Tenderloin (Harnick; Abbott and Weidman), 46th Street, orchd Kostal, 17 Oct 1960

Never Too Late (play, Harnick; S.A. Long), Playhouse, 27 Nov 1962 [one song]

Man in the Moon (marionette show; Harnick; A. Burns), Biltmore, 11 April 1963

She Loves Me (Harnick; J. Masteroff, after M. Laszlo: The Shop Around the Corner), Eugene O’Neill, orchd D. Walker, 23 April 1963 [incl. Dear Friend; Ice Cream; She loves me]; television 1979

Fiddler on the Roof (Harnick; J. Stein, after S. Aleichem), Imperial, orchd Walker, 22 Sept 1964 [incl. Matchmaker, Matchmaker; Sunrise, Sunset; To Life]; film 1971

Generation (W. Goodhart), Morosco, 6 Oct 1965 [incid. music]

The Apple Tree (Bock, Harnick and J. Coopersmith, after M. Twain, F.R. Stockton and J. Feiffer), Schubert, orchd E. Sauter, 18 Oct 1966

The Canterville Ghost (television musical, Harnick), 2 Nov 1966

The Rothschilds (Harnick; S. Yellen), Lunt-Fontanne, orchd Walker, 19 Oct 1970

Songs in revues, incl. Catch a Star! (Holofcener; D. and N. Simon), Plymouth Theatre, 6 Sept 1955; The Ziegfeld Follies of 1956, Boston, Schubert, 16 April 1956

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Green: The World of Musical Comedy (New York, 1960, rev. and enlarged 4/1980)

A. Kasha and J. Hirschhorn: Notes on Broadway: Conversations with the Great Songwriters (Chicago, 1985)

S. Suskin: Show Tunes …: the Songs, Shows, and Careers of Broadway's Major Composers (New York, 1986, enlarged 3/2000)

GEOFFREY BLOCK

Bockelmann, Rudolf (August Louis Wilhelm)

(b Bodenteich, nr Lüneburg, 2 April 1892; d Dresden, 9 Oct 1958). German bass-baritone. He studied singing with Oscar Lassner and Karl Scheidemantel. He was engaged at the Leipzig Opera from 1921 to 1926, making his début as the Herald in Lohengrin; he was leading Heldenbariton at Hamburg (1926–32), and at the Berlin Staatsoper (1932–45). He sang regularly at Bayreuth from 1928, as the Dutchman, Gunther, Kurwenal, Sachs and Wotan. In 1930 he created the title role in Krenek's Leben des Orest at Leipzig. He sang at Covent Garden (1929, 1930 and 1934–8); and with the Chicago Civic Opera (1930–32). His Nazi sympathies made it difficult for him to resume his career after World War II, and apart from a few appearances at Hamburg and in the German provinces, he devoted his time to teaching in Dresden. Bockelmann had a beautiful voice of sympathetic quality, and he sustained with ease the long Wagnerian roles. His warm, mellow voice, his feeling for poetry and his artistry made him a notable Hans Sachs, as can be heard in his few recordings from the role.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.W. Wessling: Verachtet mir die Meister nicht! (Celle, 1963)

R. Bockelmann: ‘Die Rolle des Hans Sachs’, Arbeitsbericht zum fünfjährigen Bestehen der Abteilung darstellende Kunst an der Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz (Graz, 1968), 99–125

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Böckh, (Philipp) August

(b Karlsruhe, 24 Nov 1785; d Berlin, 3 Aug 1867). German scholar. He inaugurated the modern critical study of ancient Greek music almost incidentally, as part of an early work, De metris Pindari (Leipzig, 1811), being convinced that in Greek choral poetry words, music and dance formed an integrated whole. Among many gifts he had a strong mathematical bent and may have been led to the study of Greek music by an interest in the Pythagoreans. It was, however, appropriate that ancient Greek music should owe its modern study to the scholar who, above all others in the first half of the 19th century, directed scholarship towards the study of classical civilization as a whole, its history and antiquities as well as its literature. Böckh held chairs at Heidelberg (1807–11) and Berlin (1811–67).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.E. Sandys: A History of Classical Scholarship, iii (Cambridge, 1908/R, 3/1921)

U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: Geschichte der Philologie (Leipzig, 1921; Eng. trans., 1982, as History of Classical Scholarship)

G. Lehmann: Theorie und Geschichte der griechischen Harmonik in der Darstellung durch August Boeckh (Würzburg, 1935)

R. Pfeiffer: History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976), 181–2

R.P. WINNINGTON-INGRAM

Bockholdt, Rudolf

(b Amsterdam, 25 Feb 1930). German musicologist. He received practical musical training at Heidelberg University from 1950 and studied musicology with Georgiades, philosophy with H.-G. Gadamer and K. Jaspers and ecclesiastical history; he also studied musicology with Handschin in Basle (1952–3). He took the doctorate at Heidelberg in 1960 with a dissertation on the early masses of Du Fay. From 1960 to 1963 he carried out research on medieval music at the Heidelberg and Bavarian Academies of Sciences, and from 1962 he also lectured at Munich University, where he completed his Habilitation in musicology in 1970 with studies on Berlioz; he taught there from that year as a lecturer in musicology and was appointed professor in 1977. He retired in 1995. His research, which is concerned with source material (palaeography as well as analysis), covers music of the late Middle Ages, the Viennese Classics, the 19th and early 20th centuries, and musical-textual relationships.

WRITINGS

Die frühen Messenkompositionen von Guillaume Dufay (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1960; Tutzing, 1960)

‘Notizen zur Handschrift Trient “93” und zu Dufays frühen Messensätzen’, AcM, xxxiii (1961), 40–47

‘Semibrevis minima und Prolatio temporis: zur Entstehung der Mensuraltheorie der Ars Nova’, Mf, xvi (1963), 3–21

‘Zu Heinrich Besselers “Grundsätzliches zur Übertragung von Mensuralmusik”’, Mf, xvi (1963), 275–7

Berlioz-Studien (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Munich, 1970; Tutzing, 1979)

‘Eigenschaften des Rhythmus im instrumentalen Satz bei Beethoven und Berlioz’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 29–33

‘Französische und niederländische Musik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, Musikalische Edition im Wandel des historischen Bewusstseins, ed. T.G. Georgiades (Kassel, 1971), 149–73

‘Englische und franko-flämische Kirchenmusik in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, i, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Kassel, 1972), 418–37

‘Studien der Funktion des Rhythmus in der Musik seit dem 14. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xxix (1972), 275–84

‘Die idée fixe der Phantastischen Symphonie’, AMw, xxx (1973), 190–207

‘Die Hymnen der Handschrift Cambrai 6: zwei unbekannte Vertonungen von Dufay?’, TVNM, xxix/2 (1979), 75–91

‘Musikalischer Satz und Orchesterklang im Werk von Hector Berlioz’, Mf, xxxii (1979), 122–35

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonie Nr. 6, Pastorale (Munich, 1981)

‘Beethovens zweiundzwanzigste Diabelli-Variation’, Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Bonn 1984, 225–53

‘Gibt es eine Bach-Interpretation Strawinskijs?’, Alte Musik als ästhetische Gegenwart: Bach, Händel, Schütz: Stuttgart 1985, i, 204–11

ed.: Über das Klassische: Munich 1985 [incl. ‘Über das Klassische der Wiener klassischen Musik’, 225–9]

‘Proportion der Tempi und Metamorphose des Tempos im ersten Satz von Beethovens Vierter Symphonie’, Capella antiqua München, ed. T. Drescher (Tutzing, 1988), 127–43

‘Ein Mädchen, das auf Ehre hielt: eine “sehr gewöhnliche Geschichte”: der Erzählton in Liedern und Instrumentalmusik von Joseph Haydn’, Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Just and R. Wiesend (Tutzing, 1989), 185–202

‘Das “Crucifixus” der h-moll-Messe von Johann Sebastian Bach. Musik und Inhalt’, Die Trauben des Zeuxis, ed. H. Körner and others (Hildesheim, 1990), 141–64

‘Zum Andante cantabile des Trios op.97 und seiner Stellung im Werkganzen’, Beethovens Klaviertrios: Munich 1990, 185–97

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Klavierkonzert D-Dur KV 451 (Munich, 1991)

‘Zuna Mozarts Tonalitätsvorstellung. Variabilität des to len Sinnes thematischer Gestalten’, Mozart Congress: Salzburg 1991 [MJb 1991], 787–92

‘Auftritt, Wiederkehr und Beendigung: Rondo-Form und Konzert-Realität in den Schlusssätzen von Mozarts Klavierkonzerten’, Mozart Studien, i, (1992), 43–58

‘“Après une lecture du Dante”: De vulgari eloquentia: die Canzone als gesungene, als vorgetragene und als vertonte Dichtung’, Festschrift für Horst Leuchtmann, ed. S. Hörner and B. Schmid (Tutzing, 1993), 35–48

‘Gesungene Galliarden: über Versvortrag und Tanzrhythmus in einigen französischen, niederländischen, deutschen und englischen Kompositionen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’, From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders, ed. A. Clement and E. Jas (Amsterdam, 1994), 307–26

‘Der Schlusssatz von Mozarts Streichquintett in C-Dur, KV515: Bau in Grossen und Geschehen im Kleinen’, Mozarts Streichquintette, ed. C. Eisen and W.-D. Seiffert (Stuttgart, 1994), 103–26

‘Die Kunst, heim zu finden: über Schlüsse und Anschlüsse in Schuberts Instrumentalmusik’, Musiktheorie, xiii (1998), 145–56

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Dubowy and S. Meyer-Eller, eds.: Festschrift Rudolf Bockholdt (Pfaffenhoffen, 1990) [incl. list of writings, 425–8]

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/LORENZ WELKER

Böcklin von Böcklinsau, Franz Friedrich Siegmund August von, Reichsfreiherr zu Rust

(b Strasbourg, 28 Sept 1745; d Ettenheim, 2 June 1813). German composer and writer on music. He is reported to have studied composition with Jommelli and F.X. Richter. In his writings on music he stressed the importance of folksong and anticipated the Gesamtkunstwerk by advocating the communion of music, poetry and the dance. His Beyträge zur Geschichte der Musik besonders in Deutschland (Freiburg, 1790), written as a series of letters, provide valuable insight into musical events in various European cities and reveal an admiring contemporary's views of composers such as Mozart, Gluck, Salieri, Cannabich, Toëschi, Danzig, Lang and Wendling. His other writings on music were collected into a volume of Fragmente zur höhern Musik, und für aesthetische Tonliebhaber (Freiburg and Konstanz, 1811). Böcklin's views, however, were not universally respected; his musical opinions, as reported by Christmann, were severely criticized by Gerber (GerberNL).

WORKS

Ops (lost): Der Amtmann von Kleefeld, c1780; Der Zauberer, c1780; Die Wilddiebe, c1780; Das Orakel (after Gellert), c1783; Der Abend im Garten, c1783; Hüon und Armand, c1790; Phädon und Naide (J.G. Jacobi), c1790

Song collections: 24 Lieder für Junggesellen (Freiburg, 1775); [6] Neuen Lieder für Liebhaberinnen und Freunde des Gesangs und Klaviers (Strasbourg, 1789), lost; Lieder verschiedener Dichter (Heilbronn, 1790)

Miscellaneous: Amusement pour le beau monde, vn, vc, 2 gui, op.35 (Brunswick, n.d.); other songs and short kbd pieces in various anthologies and periodicals; syms., odes, church compositions, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

GerberNL

J.F. Christmann: ‘Reichsfreiherr Franz Friedrich Siegmund August von Boeklin von und zu Boeklinsau, Herr zu Rust und anderer Herrschaften, des Bayreuthischen Rothen Adler-Ordens Gross Kreuz und Brandenburg Anspachischer Geheimer Rath’, Musikalische Realzeitung (13, 20 May 1789)

M. Friedlaender: Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902/R), i/1, 221–2, 324

J. Müller-Blattau: ‘Ein alemannischer Musikfreund zu Goethes Zeit’, Jb der Stadt Freiburg im Breisgau, ii (1936), 156–72

SHELLEY DAVIS

Bockshorn, Samuel Friedrich.

See Capricornus, Samuel Friedrich.

Bocktremulant

(Ger.).

See under Organ stop (Tremulant). See also Tremulant.

Bocquain [Bocquam].

See Cordier, Jacques.

Bocquay, Jacques.

See Boquay, Jacques.

Bocquet, Mlle (Anne or Marguerite)

(b ?Paris, early 17th century; d Paris, after 1660). French lutenist and composer. She played ‘miraculously’ on the lute, according to Mlle de Scudéry, whose confidante she was and with whom from 1653 to 1659 she held a famous salon inspired by that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Here she was in touch with various artists and some of the founders of the Académie Française – Sarazin, Conrart, Pélisson and Chapelain among them. She very probably composed the music in a manuscript (F-Pn) containing 17 Préludes marquant les cadences and a Prélude sur tous les tons for the lute, which constitute a thorough exploration of various tonalities, taking the chromatic possibilities of the lute as their starting-point. Other lute pieces, which bear the name Bocquet and must be attributed to her, are found in French, German and English manuscripts of the second half of the 17th century. (All this music appears in M. Rollin and A. Souris, eds.: Oeuvres des Bocquet, Paris, 1972; see also M. Rollin: ‘Mademoiselle Bocquet’, ibid.)

MONIQUE ROLLIN

Bocquet, Charles

(b ?Paris, c1570; d ?Lorraine, before 1615). French lutenist and composer. His family came from Pont-à-Mousson, near Nancy; his father, Julien Bocquet (d 1592), was a lutenist and valet de chambre to Henri III. Between 1594 and 1606, while living in Pont-à-Mousson, he took part in the ballets given at the court of Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, notably in the one performed in 1606 to mark the marriage of Charles’s son, Henri de Lorraine, Duke of Bar, to the daughter of Vincenzo I, Duke of Mantua; he also wrote music for it, but it has not survived. For some time from 1599 he served the Elector Palatine Friedrich IV as a lutenist. According to Besard, Bocquet was one of the three best composers represented in his Thesaurus harmonicus (RISM 1603¹⁵); it contains 15 pieces by Bocquet. G.L. Fuhrmann’s anthology Testudo gallo-germanica (1615²⁴) contains five others, and he is also represented in various German manuscripts, in a manuscript at Uppsala (S-Uu) and in the manuscript lutebook (GB-Cfm) of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (these pieces are in M. Rollin and A. Souris, eds.: Oeuvres des Bocquet, Paris, 1972).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Jacquot: La musique à la cour de Lorraine (Paris, 1886)

F. Walter: Geschichte des Theaters und der Musik am kurpfälzischen Hofe (Leipzig, 1898/R)

F.G. Pariset: ‘Le mariage d’Henri de Lorraine’, Les fêtes de la Renaissance: Royaumont 1955, 153–89

M.M. McGowan: L’art du ballet de cour en France (1581–1643) (Paris, 1963)

M. Rollin: ‘Charles Bocquet’, Oeuvres des Bocquet (Paris, 1972)

MONIQUE ROLLIN

Bocquillon-Wilhem, Guillaume Louis.

See Wilhem, Guillaume Louis Bocquillon.

Bodanzky, Artur

(b Vienna, 16 Dec 1877; d New York, 23 Nov 1939). Austrian conductor. He studied the violin, and at 18 joined the orchestra of the Vienna Hofoper. In 1900 he made his début conducting Sydney Jones's The Geisha with the 18-man orchestra in České Budějovice. In 1903 he returned to the Vienna Opera as Mahler's assistant, soon making his way rapidly in theatres and concert halls in Vienna, Berlin, Prague and Mannheim. In 1914 he introduced Die Fledermaus to Paris and Parsifal to London, the latter making such an impression that he was named successor to Alfred Hertz at the Metropolitan Opera. He made his American début conducting Götterdämmerung in 1915; from then his career was centred on New York, at the Metropolitan (with a brief break in 1928) until his death; with the New SO, which he took over in 1919 from Varèse, until its merger with the Philharmonic in 1922 and with the Society of the Friends of Music from 1921, as successor to Stokowski, until 1931 when the society was dissolved.

Best known as a Wagnerian, Bodanzky was anything other than a narrow specialist. He was on the rostrum for Caruso's last Metropolitan evening, which was Halévy's La Juive, and his repertory there included Gluck, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Meyerbeer, Suppé and the American premières of Weinberger's Švanda the Bagpiper and Krenek's Jonny spielt auf. At the Friends of Music his repertory ranged from Dido and Aeneas to Pizzetti and Zemlinsky, and his many American premières included those of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Honegger's Le roi David, and Janáček's Glagolitic Mass. Physically, Bodanzky was like a much taller Mahler, from whom his ‘the facts, not the show’ attitude derived. The typical Bodanzky performance was fast, intense and heavily cut (however, he gave as well as taking away, composing recitatives and other additions for Oberon, Der Freischütz, Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio).

MICHAEL STEINBERG

Böddecker [Boedecker, Bedeckher], Philipp Friedrich

(b Hagenau, Alsace, bap. 5 Aug 1607; d Stuttgart, 8 Oct 1683). German composer, organist and bassoonist. The most important member of a large family of musicians, he received his earliest musical education from his father, Joachim Böddecker, and then from J. U. Steigleder in Stuttgart. He was organist and singing teacher at Buchsweiler, Alsace, from 1626 to 1629. He then went as bassoonist and organist to the court at Darmstadt and was also attached in the same capacity to the court at Durlach, near Karlsruhe. In 1638 he became organist of the Barfüsserkirche at Frankfurt. In 1642 he became organist of the cathedral at Strasbourg, where he was also director of music and organist of the university from 1648. From 1652 until his death he was organist of the collegiate church at Stuttgart and also taught music at the college. He hoped to become Kapellmeister to the Württemberg court at Stuttgart in 1657, but the post went to S.F. Capricornus, with whom in his disappointment he became locked in dispute.

Böddecker’s Melos irenicum, a setting for large forces of the Te Deum, is an interesting example of mid-17th-century south German sacred music: it has attractive themes which well convey the sense of the words, effective contrasts of sonority and rhythm, and contrapuntal and homophonic sections frequently alternate. The vocal music in the Sacra partitura shows the influence of Italian monody. The two sonatas, respectively for violin and bassoon with continuo, also included in the volume are among the earliest German examples of the genre. The violin sonata includes double stopping and a wide variety of passage-work; the last movement is a passacaglia on an extended theme (marked ‘alla francese’). The bassoon sonata, which is based on the monica, is entirely constructed as a passacaglia. Böddecker also wrote a treatise on thoroughbass, Manuductio nova, which his son Philipp Jakob Böddecker published with a preface in Stuttgart in 1701.

WORKS

Melos irenicum, 6 solo vv, 4vv, 2 vn, bn, 3 tbn (Strasbourg, 1650)

Sacra partitura (Strasbourg, 1651): 8 sacred concs., S, bc; 1 ed. in NM, lvii (1929), 1 ed. in Kipp; Sonata, vn, bc, ed. in Beckmann; Sonata sopra la monica, bn, bc, ed. in Organum, 3rd ser., xxiii (Leipzig, 1936), ed. W. Waterhouse (Vienna, 1989); [incl. pieces by G. Casati and Monteverdi]

Neuverstimbte Violenlust, 3 vn, bc (Frankfurt, 1652), lost

Other church works cited in Bopp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (E. Stiefel)

J. Sittard: ‘Samuel Capricornus contra Philipp Friedrich Böddecker’, SIMG, iii (1901–2), 87–128

A. Bopp: ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stuttgarter Stiftsmusik’, Jb für Statistik und Landeskunde 1910 (1911), 211–50

G. Beckmann: Das Violinspiel in Deutschland vor 1700 (Leipzig, 1918), 18, 52, 56

W. Kipp: ‘Die Böddecker aus Hagenau’, Bulletin de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Hagenau, ix–x (1928–9), 39–70

EBERHARD STIEFEL

Böddecker, Philipp Jakob

(b Frankfurt, 1642; d Stuttgart, 1 Feb 1707). German organist and composer. He was presumably trained as a musician by his father, Philipp Friedrich Böddecker. He also studied Protestant theology and from 1670 was deacon at Marbach am Neckar. On 25 April 1686 he took over the post of organist at the collegiate church at Stuttgart that his father had held until 1683. His request to be appointed a preacher as well as organist was not granted. According to contemporary reports, he did not always carry out his duties satisfactorily. As well as bringing out, with a preface, his father's Manuductio nova (Stuttgart, 1701) he published Höchst-schätzbares Seelenkleinod … oder Zway schöne geistreiche Lieder in einem doppelten (einfachen und fugirten) Contrapunkt (Stuttgart, n.d.) for soprano, alto, tenor, bass and continuo; only the title-page and dedication survive, together with a manuscript copy of the continuo part (D-Sl).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (E. Stiefel)

A. Bopp: ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stuttgarter Stiftsmusik’, Jb für Statistik und Landeskunde 1910 (1911), 211–50

W. Kipp: ‘Die Böddecker aus Hagenau’, Bulletin de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Hagenau, ix–x (1928–9), 39–70

EBERHARD STIEFEL

Bode, Harald (Emerich Walter)

(b Hamburg, 19 Oct 1909; d ?North Tonawanda, NY, 15 Jan 1987). American designer of electronic instruments and equipment, of German birth. He studied at the University of Hamburg and the Heinrich-Hertz Institut of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He pioneered a number of techniques that are now common in synthesizers and other electronic instruments. His first instrument was the Warbo Formant-Orgel (1937) in which he introduced the ‘assignment’ of notes on a partially polyphonic keyboard. Touch sensitivity was an important aspect of the monophonic keyboard of the Melodium (1938), developed with the assistance of Oskar Vierling, which also incorporated a pedal for vibrato control and a tuning-transposition knob. In the monophonic Melochord (1947), he pioneered the split keyboard as an alternative to the use of two manuals. A special two-manual studio version introduced the idea of a filter operated from one manual to control the timbre of notes played on the other.

From 1950 Bode undertook more conventional design work, including a series of electronic organs beginning with the Polychord (1950) and the Bode organ (1951); the latter was the basis for the Polychord III (1951), manufactured by Apparatewerk Bayern, and for the electronic organs made in the USA by the Estey organ co. from 1954. He also developed the Cembaphon (1951, an amplified harpsichord with electrostatic pickups), the portable Tuttivox electronic organ (1953) and the concert model of the Clavioline (1953). He emigrated to the USA in 1954, working as Estey's chief engineer, and in 1960 moved to North Tonawanda, where between 1960 and 1963 he designed a new model of the Wurlitzer electric piano.

In 1959–60 Bode developed a modular ‘signal processor’, which incorporated devices such as a ring modulator and elements of voltage control, and had some influence on the work of R.A. Moog and others. In 1963–4 he devised a frequency shifter and ring modulator which were originally manufactured by the R.A. Moog Co. Bode continued to design sound-processing modules, in particular a vocoder and an infinite ‘barbershop’ phaser; these and more recent models of the two earlier modules were manufactured by his own company, Bode Sound, in North Tonawanda. During the 1970s he also composed electronic music on tape for concerts and television commercials.

See also Electronic instruments, §I, 4(ii) and §IV, 5

WRITINGS

‘Bekannte und neue Klänge durch elektrische Musik-Instrumente’, Funktechnische Monatshefte (1940), no.5, pp.67–75; simultaneously pubd in Funk (1940), nos.9–10

‘Mehrstimmige und vollstimmige elektrische Musikinstrumente’, Das Elektron in Wissenschaft und Technik, iii/6 (1949), 211–17

‘European Electronic Music Instrument Design’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, ix/4 (1961), 267–9, 304 only

‘A New Tool for the Exploration of Unknown Electronic Music Instrument Performances’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, ix/4 (1961), 264–6

‘Sound Synthesizer Creates New Musical Effects’, Electronics, xxxiv (1961), 33

‘The History of Electronic Sound Modification’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, xxxii/10 (1984), 730–39

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Rhea: ‘Harald Bode's Four-Voice Assignment Keyboard (1937)’, Contemporary Keyboard, v/12 (1979), 89 only; repr. with the following in The Art of Electronic Music, ed. T. Darter and G. Armbruster (New York, 1984), 59–62

T. Rhea: ‘Bode's Melodium and Melochord’, ibid., vi/1 (1980), 68 only

T. Rhea: ‘Harald Bode's Frequency Shifters and Vocoders’, ibid., vi/2 (1980), 86 only

J. Lee: ‘Interview: Harald Bode’, Polyphony, vii/Sept–Oct (1981–2), 14–17

H.A. Deutsch: Electroacoustic Music: the First Century (Miami, 1993), 17–19

HUGH DAVIES

Bode [Bodé], Johann Joachim Christoph

(b Barum, Brunswick, 12 Jan 1730; d Weimar, 13 Dec 1793).German translator, publisher, performer and composer. His principal instrument was the bassoon, and in 1749 at Helmstedt he played the cello in J.C. Stockhausen’s collegium musicum. He moved to Celle in 1752 as an oboist and composer, and at the same time developed a strong interest in foreign languages and literature. In 1757 he settled in Hamburg as a music teacher and writer, and later became a publisher and dealer in books and music. During this period he edited the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent (1762–3), completed and published Lessing’s translation of Noverre’s Lettres sur la dance (1769) and published his own translation (with C.D. Ebeling, 1772) of Burney’s The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1773). He also translated oratorios by Metastasio, librettos to comic operas by Piccinni and Guglielmi, and novels by Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith and others. His published compositions include two collections of songs under the title Zärtliche und scherzhafte Lieder (Leipzig, 1754, 1757), six symphonies and six trios (both sets Paris, 1764), two further symphonies in Parisian periodic series and collections, a cello concerto (Leipzig, 1780) and a string partita; he also wrote other concertos for bassoon, violin and viola d’amore. Bode spent his last years, from 1778, as a diplomat in Weimar, a post that gave rise to the publication of a travel diary, Journal von einer Reise von Weimar nach Frankreich im Jahr 1787 (ed. H. Schuttler, Munich, 1994).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberL

GerberNL

JohanssonFMP

C.A. Boettiger: J.J.C. Bode’s literarisches Leben (Berlin, 1796)

E. Herrmann: Das Weimarer Lied in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1925)

E.A. Greeven: Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, ein Hamburger Übersetzer, Verleger und Drucker (Weimar, 1938)

HOWARD SERWER

Bodel, Jehan

(b c1165; d between 1 Oct 1209 and 2 Feb 1210). French trouvère. Though a poet by profession, he may have been attached to the magistracy of Arras as sergeant. He apparently enjoyed the protection of the mayor, Sauwalon Huchedieu, and other wealthy people. He was an original, versatile and influential writer whose works include the Chanson de Saisnes (a long epic dealing with Charlemagne), nine fabliaux, the Jeu de Saint Nicolas and the Congés (in which he bade farewell to his friends and native city after contracting leprosy in 1202, a circumstance that prevented his joining the Fourth Crusade). Of musical interest are a group of five pastourelles, ascribed to Bodel chiefly in the Manuscrit du Roi (F-Pn fr.844). However, owing to the loss of a folio in this source, most melodies are unica in the Chansonnier de Noailles (F-Pn fr.12615). Except for Les un pin verdoiant which is hexasyllabic, the poems are heterometric; Entre le bois and L’autre jour are complex, asymmetrical works, employing five and six different line lengths respectively. Despite the use of bar form in three works, there is a minimum of strict repetition. Considerable interest is displayed in variation and development; some materials appear in different guises in as many as four or five phrases.

WORKS

Edition: Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete and Comparative Edition, ed. H. Tischler, CMM, cvii (1997)

Entre le bois et la plaine, R.141

L'autre jour les un bosquel, R.571

L'autrier me chevauchoie, R.1702

Les un pin verdoiant, R.367

Contre le dous tens nouvel, R.578 (authorship uncertain)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Bartsch, ed.: Romances et pastourelles françaises des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Leipzig, 1870/R)

C. Foulon: L'oeuvre de Jehan Bodel (Paris, 1958)

For further bibliography see Pastourelle; Troubadours, trouvères.

THEODORE KARP

Bodenschatz, Erhard

(b Lichtenberg, Vogtland, 1576; d Gross Osterhausen, Thuringia, 1636). German music editor, composer and clergyman. He received his musical and academic education in the electoral choir school at Dresden, at Leipzig and at Schulpforta, where he was greatly influenced by Sethus Calvisius. In 1600 he became Kantor at Schulpforta and in 1603 pastor at nearby Rehausen and in 1608 at Gross Osterhausen, near Querfurt, where he remained until his death.

As a composer Bodenschatz remained within the bounds of contemporary practice. His masterly Magnificat and especially his 90 bicinia are nevertheless of considerable artistic merit and effectively combine an early Baroque inclination towards word-painting with supple vocal lines. His primary importance, however, lies in his Florilegium Portense, a motet anthology in two parts modelled on the unpublished anthologies of Calvisius. Intended to illustrate the practice of choral music at Schulpforta, it provides a valuable cross-section of German and Italian motet composition about 1600. The first part, published in 1603, was enlarged in 1618 to include 115 compositions by 48 composers and a continuo part supplied by the editor. Jacob Handl, with 19 works, is the best represented, followed by Lassus and Hieronymus Praetorius with nine each. The anthology favours German composers, including Bodenschatz himself, Calvisius, Erbach, Melchior Franck, Gumpelzhaimer, Hans Leo Hassler, Michael Praetorius, Vulpius, Friedrich Weissensee and many others. Notwithstanding the predominance of Latin motets and the absence of chorale variations, it affords a clear view of the compositional activity of the early 17th-century German Kantor. The second part (1621) exactly reverses the emphasis of the first, since Italian composers predominate – among them Agazzari, Giovanni Croce, Giovanni Gabrieli, Marenzio, Benedetto Pallavicino, Vecchi and Viadana – though the German Martin Roth, with 15 pieces, is the best represented composer. More than half the pieces had already been included in Schadaeus's anthology Promptuarium musicum (1611–17). Both parts contain mostly eight-voice pieces and thereby naturally favour double-chorus writing. The inclusion of a few five-voice pieces by Handl and Lassus and of Handl's four-voice Ecce quomodo moritur was probably consciously retrospective. The title-page of the 1621 volume and the frequent recurrence of certain clef combinations both point to the possibility of instrumental accompaniment. There were apparently no further editions of the Florilegium Portense, but the 1618 and 1621 editions were for long used, and frequently rebound, by schools at Bremen, Dresden, Grimma, Halle, Leipzig (where Bach used them at the Thomasschule), Lüneburg, Pirna and elsewhere.

WORKS

all published in Leipzig

Magnificat, 4vv (1599), incl. biographical details in preface

Psalterium Davidis, 4vv (1607); 1 melody in ZahnM

Harmoniae angelicae, das ist … Lieder und … Psalmen D. Martini Lutheri und anderer, 4vv (1608); 3 ed. in Winterfeld, ii, suppl., 1 melody in ZahnM

Bicinia XC. selectissima … praecipuorum festorum totius anni composita, 2vv (1615)

3 motets, 5, 8vv, 1603¹, 1621²

Lobet den Herren, 6vv, D-NAUw

Wol dem, der ein tugendsam Weib hat, 3vv, NAUw

EDITIONS

Florilegium selectissimarum cantionum praestantissimorum aetatis nostrae autorum … in illustri gymnasio Portensi ante et post cibum sumtum, nunc temporis usitatarum, 4–8vv (1603¹), incl. 2 motets by Bodenschatz

Florilegium selectissimorum hymnorum, 4vv (1606), arrs. of hymns by Calvisius

Florilegium Portense continens CXV selectissimas cantiones praestantissimorum aetatis nostrae autorum, 4–8vv, bc (org) (1618¹), rev. and enlarged edn of 1603; for list of contents see Grove2

Florilegii musici Portensis sacras harmonias sive motetas … pars altera … cum adjecta Basi Generali ad organa musicaque instrumenta accomodata, 5–10vv, bc (org) (1621²), incl. 1 motet by Bodenschatz; for list of contents see Grove2

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BlumeEK

MGG1 (‘Florilegium Portense’; O. Riemer)

WinterfeldEK

O. Riemer: Erhard Bodenschatz und sein Florilegium Portense (Leipzig, 1928)

K.H. Illing: Das Magnificat in der protestantischen Kirchenmusik (Kiel, 1933)

A. Schering: Johann Sebastian Bachs Leipziger Kirchenmusik: Studien und Wege zu ihrer Erkenntnis (Leipzig, 1936), 121ff

J. Roche: ‘Anthologies and the Dissemination of Early Baroque Italian Sacred Music’, Soundings, iv (1974), 6–12, esp. 10

Å. Davidsson: ‘“Een hoop Discantzböcker i godt förhwar”: något om Strängnäsgymnasiels musiksamling under 1600-talet’ [“A heap of discant books in safe custody”: on the music collection of the Strängnäs Gymnasium in the 17th century], Från bishop Rogge till Roggebiblioteket, ed. R. Lindström (Stockholm, 1976), 48–62

OTTO RIEMER/CLYTUS GOTTWALD

Bodeo, Joan

(fl 1549–54). Composer, presumably of Spanish birth, active in Italy. His single volume of four-voice madrigals (Venice, 1549), which survives incomplete, is written in a rhythmically supple, quasi-parlando style fashionable about 1550. Two more madrigals by him are included in an anthology (RISM 1554²⁸).

JAMES HAAR

Bodhrán.

Single-headed frame drum of Ireland. The membrane, which is normally goatskin but could be deer-, greyhound-, ass-, foal-, or horse-skin, is usually nailed to the frame. It is played either with the hand or, more commonly, a stick about 20 cm long, which is usually carved from ash, holly or hickory wood and is also known as a ‘tipper’ or cipín (‘little stick’). It may have a knob at one or both ends and a strip of leather is occasionally fastened to its centre to form a holding loop. A smaller stick (about 10 cm long) with a leather loop at one end and a carved knob at the other is sometimes used.

The term ‘bodhrán’ appears to be derived from bodhar, meaning ‘deaf’ or ‘dull-sounding’. The instrument was associated with folk ritual and was played in festival processions; it has survived primarily in association with the festival of St Stephen's Day. Until recently the construction of the bodhrán included a wooden cross at the back which enabled the player to hold the instrument while marching in processions; it was mainly an outdoor instrument. Performance technique was directly affected by this method of holding; there was no manipulation of the skin of the bodhrán, thus no variation in timbre could be achieved. The use of a skin tray or sieve (wecht, wight, dallan, boran) similar or identical in structure to the bodhrán was widespread right up to the 20th century; the tray served to hold corn or peat, while the sieve was used as a meal-sieve or winnowing tray. The links between the tray or sieve and the percussion instrument suggest that originally the bodhrán may have been used principally within the spring ritual of St Brigid's Feast.

The ritual ties of the bodhrán began to weaken with the advent of the Fleadhanna Ceoil (music festivals) in the 1950s, and the general resurgence of interest in traditional music in Ireland led to an increase in the popularity of the bodhrán. A major factor in this was its inclusion in Ceoltóirí Cualann (a concert band of traditional musicians) by Seán Ó Riada in the 1960s.

In the 1970s Johnny ‘Ringo’ McDonagh began to manipulate the skin of the bodhrán to produce different sounds. This technique was an important development in modern bodhrán playing, and McDonagh's recordings with the group De Danann during the 1970s were hugely influential. Both McDonagh and Tommy Hayes, who recorded with Stockton's Wing in the 1970s, continue to influence the development of bodhrán playing at the beginning of the 21st century.

Towards the end of the 20th century the bodhrán became increasingly important in the performance of Irish traditional music, and most traditional groups included a bodhrán player. Many performance styles evolved, and Gino Lupari, Colm Murphy and Mel Mercier were among those who contributed to the development of new playing techniques.

See also Ireland, §II, 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.E. Evans: Irish Folk Ways (London, 1957)

K. Danagher: The Year in Ireland (Cork, 1972)

M. Ó Súilleabháin: ‘The Bodhrán’, Treoir, vi (1974), no.2, p.4; no.5, p.6

G. Broderick: ‘The Dollan: a Traditional Manx Hand-Drum’, Béaloideas, Iris an Chamainn le Béaloideas Éireann, xlv–xlvii (1977–9), 27

M. O Súilleabháin: The Bodhrán: a Practical Introduction (Dublin, 1984)

D. Such: ‘The Bodhrán: the Black Sheep in the Family of Traditional Irish Musical Instruments’, GSJ, xxxviii (1985), 9–19

MÍCHEÁL O SÚILLEABHÁIN (with SANDRA JOYCE, NIALL KEEGAN)

Bo Diddley [McDaniel, Ellas]

(b McComb, MS, 30 Dec 1928). American rock and roll singer. He was taken to Chicago at the age of five, and soon after began violin lessons, which he continued for 12 years. He grew up with black gospel music and the delta blues players of Chicago’s southside, but he was most strongly influenced by Nat ‘King’ Cole, Louis Jordan and John Lee Hooker, whose Boogie Chillen inspired him to play guitar. He formed a street-corner band, which attracted enough attention to be granted an audition with Chess Records in 1954. In early 1955 Bo Diddley (Checker) was released as a single and reached number 2 in the rhythm and blues chart. It had bragging, nonsense lyrics, like many of his later songs, but its chief appeal lay in its shimmering rumba rhythm and violent, primitive guitar playing. Diddley stood outside the mainstream of rock and roll of the 1950s; he recorded unusual jazz instrumental pieces with weird sound-effects, doo-wop songs, blues, idiosyncratic rock and roll numbers and rambling insult battles with Jerome Green, his maracas player. Many of his songs are based on a distinctive syncopated rhythm (ex.1).

Diddley had few pop hits (only Say Man reached the top 20 in the 1959 US pop chart), but his influence on such performers as Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds was considerable; cover versions of his songs were recorded by many American and English groups. His stage name is derived from the instrument known as a diddley bow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB

N. Nite: Rock On (New York, 1974)

J. Miller, ed.: The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (New York, 1976, rev. 3/1992 by A. DeCurtis, J. Henke and H. George-Warren)

R. Denyer: The Guitar Handbook (London, 1982)

JOSEPH McEWEN

Bodigham, Jo.

Bodin, Lars-Gunnar

(b Stockholm, 15 July 1935). Swedish composer and administrator. He studied composition with L. Wenström (1956–60), but he is self-taught in his principal field of electro-acoustic music, in which he is one of the most important composers, teachers and administrators in Sweden. His background as a jazz musician, pictorial artist (including computer-generated images) and biochemist has contributed to a characteristic openness and enthusiasm for the crossing of the boundaries between different artistic genres which he has passed on to a younger generation of electro-acoustic composers. Following his début in the concert organization Fylkingen in 1962, he became one of the driving forces in creating a small electronic music studio there. Together with Bengt Emil Johnson he directed the text and sound festivals initiated in Stockholm in 1967; Bodin was also Fylkingen’s chairman from 1969 to 1972. He became a pioneer of instrumental theatre, organized now legendary happenings at the Modern Museum in Stockholm and brought John Cage and other leading modernists to Sweden. In 1972 he was composer-in-residence at Mills College, Oakland, California. In 1979 he became director of the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm and held this position for more than ten years.

With his multimedia works such as the 90-minute-long Clouds for picture projectors, singers and electro-acoustic sounds, with text-sound compositions such as For Jon I–III, ‘radio plays’ such as Wonder Void and Toccata, pure electro-acoustic works such as Traces I–II, Mémoires du temps d’avant la destruction and Notturno alla prima, and with his virtuoso technique and deep aesthetic and philosophical perspective, he has become an internationally significant artist with a distinct profile in these genres. As an administrator he is one of the driving forces within the ICEM, and in Sweden he has made important efforts on behalf of new music in the Society of Swedish Composers and STIM, the Swedish performing rights society. At the same time he has noted the ‘permanent schizophrenic condition’ that new music has reached in relation to the public and society. He speaks of the need for ‘internal immigration’ as a way out for the artist: ‘It is not a question about isolation in some ivory tower, but to work in a complete new dimension, in another “world”’.

WORKS

El-ac: Den heter ingenting, den heter nog Seance II [It has no name, the name is probably Seance II], text-sound composition, 1965; Seance III, 1965; Seance IV, inst theatre, tape, projections, live action, 1965; En aptitretare: inge hundar i Kina [An Appetizer: No Dogs in China], text-sound composition, 1965; My world – is your world, org, tape, 1966; Fikonsnackarna [The Pig-Latin Talkers], 1966; Place of Plays, ballet/sound composition, 1967; Winter Events – for M, 1967; Cybo I–II, text-sound composition, 1967; … from one point to any other point, sound composition, 1968, collab. B.-E. Johnson, M. Åsberg; … from one point to any other point, with Postludium, ballet, 1968; Toccata, 1969; Nattens ljud [Night Sounds], animated film for children, 1970; Traces I–II, 1970–71; Händelser och handlingar [Events and Happenings], TV, ballet/sound composition, 1971; Clouds, 1971; Dedicated to You I, org, tape, 1971; Dedicated to You II–III, text-sound composition, 1971; Från början till slut [From the Beginning to the End], 1973; Syner (jorden, himlen, vindarna) [Visions: the Earth, the Heaven, the Winds], 1973

Images, 1975; Prolog, 1976; Primary Structures, 1976; Clouds, 1976; Nästan [Almost], 1977; Plus, 1977; For Jon I: Fragments of a Time to Come, 1977, collab. Johnson, A. Mellnäs, J.W. Morthenson, L. Nilson; Stockholm Fireworks and Water Music 1978: a City Event, 1978; Epilogue: rapsodie de la seconde récolte, 1979; A Soundscape of Europe (Stockholm), 1979; For Jon III: they extricated their extremities, plus: for John, 1982; Mémoires du temps d’avant la destruction, 1982; For Jon II: Retrospective Episodes, 3 parts, 1983, rev. 1989; On Speaking Terms, 1984; Anima, 1984, rev. 1987; On Speaking Terms II, 1986; Dizkus, 26 passages, 1986, arr. wind; Dizcour: Royal Martin, 1987; Dizkus III, 1988; Wonder – Void, 1990; Divertimento för Dalle, 1991; Notturno alla prima, 1991; Pour traverser la membrane de l’espace/temps, 1992; God jul ’92 [Merry Christmas ’92], 1992; Hälsningar från syrenbersån [Greetings from the Lilac Arbour], 1994; Mare atlantica, acousmatic installation, 1995; Bobb, livsföreståndaren [Bobb, the Grocery Principal], 1997; Kalas på Bobb [Feast upon Bobb], 1997

Inst: Musik för 4 mässingsblåsare, brass, 1960; Arioso, pf, cl, trbn, vc, perc, 1962; Semicolon: Dag Knutson in memoriam, hn, trbn, elec gui, pf, Hammond org, 1963; För piano och semaforistkör [For Piano and a Chorus of Semaphorists], 1964; Seance I, pf, 1964; Primary Structures, bn, tape-delay, 1976; Anima, S, a fl, tape, 1984–7

Vocal: Enbart för Kerstin, Mez, tape, 1979

WRITINGS

with B.-E. Johnson: ‘Att hantera ljud’, Fylkingen Bulletin (1966), no.1, pp.12–15

‘Resande i svensk musik’, Årsskrift Kungliga musikaliska akademien (Stockholm, 1975), 86–95

‘Om elektronisk musik: en praktiserandes betraktelser’, Artes, ix/4 (1983), 37–58

‘A Short History of Electro-Acoustic Music in Sweden’, Electronic Music in Sweden (Stockholm, 1985), 5–12

‘ZEITGEIST Plumbing’, Literally Speaking: Sound Poetry and Text-Sound Composition, ed. T. Hultberg (Stockholm, 1993), 46–50

‘Mellan visionen av nuet och ett potatiskok’, Fylkingen (Stockholm, 1994), 117–28

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B.-E. Johnson: ‘Semikolon’, Nutida musik, ix/1–2 (1965–6), 39–41

J.H. Appleton: ‘Svensk elektronisk musik: en subjektiv profil’, Nutida musik, xiv/3 (1970–71), 14–17

M. Rying: ‘Vår musikkritik är meningslös’ [Our musical criticism is meaningless], Nutida musik, xvi/2 (1972–3), 24–8 [interview]

B.-E. Johnson: ‘Tiden, döden, nollpunkten’, Nutida musik, xix/2 (1975–6), 20–23 [on Clouds]

G. Møller-Pedersen: ‘Lars-Gunnar Bodin: en slags praesentation’, Bulletin/Dansk elektronmusikalisk selskab (1981), no.9, pp.6–16

G. Schönfelder and H. Åstrand, ed.: Contemporary Swedish Music through the Telescopic Sight (Stockholm, 1993)

C. Aare: ‘I livets centrifug majs musikverk’, Musik (1997), no.5, pp.38–40

ROLF HAGLUND

Bodinus [Bodino], Sebastian

(b c1700; d Pforzheim, 19 March 1759). German composer. All that is known of his early life is that he came from central Germany (probably from the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha) and that in his youth he must have had some relationship to the Duke of Saxe-Altenburg. About 1718 he entered the service of the Margrave Carl Wilhelm of Baden-Durlach as servant and musician. In 1723 he asked to be discharged in order to avoid being sent as oboist to the margrave's regiment in Italy. His main instrument was the violin, and when he moved to the Württemberg court he secured the post of first violinist. By 1728, having married in the meantime, he returned to Karlsruhe as Konzertmeister and his wife was engaged as a singer. In the years that followed, Bodinus developed a close relationship with his superior, the court Kapellmeister J.M. Molter.

In 1733, on the outbreak of the Polish War of Succession, the margrave disbanded the orchestra; Bodinus left, but returned to his former post in 1736. He now fulfilled the duties of Kapellmeister but did not obtain the title or the salary pertaining to it and his petitions reveal the dire poverty in which he and his family lived. After Carl Wilhelm's death in 1738 he was again dismissed.

When Molter, who had returned to Karlsruhe from Eisenach in 1742, reorganized the Baden court music in 1747, Bodinus, by then in Basle, was offered the post of Konzertmeister at a salary of 300 florins a year and payment in kind. For the fourth time Bodinus entered the service of the Baden court. He seems however to have been of unstable character, and in 1752 disappeared from Karlsruhe for reasons unknown. He subsequently received a letter of recommendation from the margrave, Carl Friedrich. At the beginning of 1754 he was in Darmstadt, where he apparently tried to get an appointment. In September 1758 he was admitted to the Buden-Durlach lunatic asylum at Pforzheim; he died there some months later.

Bodinus was one of the many working musicians employed by the German courts of the 18th century. His strength lies in chamber music. He wrote not only numerous solo and trio sonatas, but also quartet sonatas, whose clear but varied structure is partly derived from Bodinus's applications (under Molter's influence) of the concerto form and principle to chamber music. Suite elements are also found in his chamber works. His concertos and symphonies, though less important than his chamber music, combine neat and accomplished workmanship with imaginative melodic invention. In spite of distinct galant elements Bodinus's work belongs in style to the late Baroque period.

WORKS

the relationship of the manuscript works to those in printed collections has not been established

Musikalischen Divertissements, erster Theil (Augsburg, before 1726), Zweiter (–sechster) Theil (Augsburg, after 1726) [incl. 30 trio sonatas and 6 qt sonatas]

Acroama musicum … VI sonatas, vn, clvd (Augsburg, n.d.)

12 sonate, vn, b (n.d.) [without title-page]

Other inst works in D-DS, KA, ROu, SWl, S-Uu: incl. 6 sinfonias; 1 ov.; concs. for vn, fl, ob; qt and trio sonatas; sonatas for solo insts, incl. sonata, e, 2 fl, ed. G. Birkner (Celle, 1955); also ed. C. Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1960)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Schiedermair: ‘Die Oper an den badischen Höfen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 191–207, 369–449, 510–50

K. Häfner: Der badische Hofkapellmeister Johann Melchior Molter (1696–1765) in seiner Zeit (Karlsruhe, 1996)

KLAUS HÄFNER

Bodky, Erwin

(b Ragnit, East Prussia [now Neman, Belarus'], 7 March 1896; d Lucerne, 6 Dec 1958). American pianist and musicologist of German origin. He made his début as a pianist at the age of 12. After attending the Gymnasium in Tilsit, he went to the Musikhochschule in Berlin, where he studied with Dohnányi, Juon, Kahn and others. He twice received the Mendelssohn Prize and graduated in 1920. A fellowship from the Prussian government enabled him to continue piano studies with Busoni and composition with Strauss. Bodky’s compositions, which include a piano concerto, a chamber symphony, and chamber music, were written during these years and are apparently unpublished. Furtwängler helped his concert career by introducing him as a soloist in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Concerts. In the 1920s he taught the piano in Berlin at the Scharwenka Conservatory and from 1926 was associated with the Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik in Charlottenburg. From 1933 he taught at the Muzieklyceum in Amsterdam and he moved to the USA in 1938. He taught at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded the Cambridge Collegium Musicum (later the Cambridge Society for Early Music) in 1942. In 1949 he received the first music appointment at Brandeis University where he taught music history. His interest in early keyboard music included playing the harpsichord and clavichord as well as scholarship; from his early Der Vortrag alter Klaviermusik to the posthumously published study The Interpretation of Bach’s Keyboard Works, he sought ways of rendering the terraced effects of the harpsichord on the modern piano. In 1955 he presented the series ‘Roads to Bach’, one of the earliest programmes on music seen on American educational television. (H.S. Slosberg, M.V. Ullman and I.K. Whiting, eds.: Erwin Bodky: a Memorial Tribute, Waltham, MA, 1965)

WRITINGS

Der Vortrag alter Klaviermusik (Berlin, 1932)

Das Charakterstück (Berlin, 1933, 2/1960)

The Interpretation of Bach’s Keyboard Works (Cambridge, MA, 2/1960, 1960/R; Ger. trans., 1970)

WILLIAM D. GUDGER

Bodley, Nicholas Bessaraboff.

See Bessaraboff, Nicholas.

Bodley, Seóirse

(b Dublin, 4 April 1933). Irish composer. He received his early musical training at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and at University College, Dublin (BMus 1955), where he studied with Larchet. From 1957 to 1959, on a postgraduate scholarship from the National University of Ireland, he studied in Stuttgart with Johann Nepomuk David (composition) and Hans Müller-Kray (conducting). He was appointed to a lectureship at University College, Dublin in 1959 and received the DMus the following year. The first Macauley Fellowship in composition (1962) enabled him to study at the Darmstadt summer school for three consecutive years (1962–4). He served as the director of Folk Music Studies at University College, Dublin in 1964 and as the chair of the Folk Music Society of Ireland for many years. His research focuses on the stylistic analysis of traditional Gaelic singing and the development of a notation system for its rubato ornamentation. Active also as a pianist, conductor and adjudicator, he became a member of Aosdána in 1982. In 1984 he became associate professor at University College, Dublin, a post from which he retired in 1998.

Bodley’s compositional style has undergone considerable stylistic change. Between 1952 and 1962 his music was primarily tonal, employing occasional modal melodies that gave it a folk-like quality. The Symphony no.1, a large work featuring fugato-like motivic development, dates from this period. The composer’s visits to Darmstadt in the early 1960s led to a series of works employing elements of the middle-European avant garde. From 1963 to 1971 Bodley was the principal Irish exponent of post-serial compositional procedures. Orchestral works such as the Chamber Symphony no.1 (1964) and Configurations (1967), as well as a number of piano and chamber works, including the String Quartet no.1 (1968) and Scintillae (1968), are among his most abstract music. From 1972 to c1980, Bodley combined avant-garde techniques with traditional Irish music. Works such as The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1972) and A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland (1975) feature a creative conflict between the two traditions. From that time, Bodley has sought to develop a musical language that is recognizably Irish but maintains a cosmopolitan perspective. Works such as Phantasms (1989) and the String Quartet no.2 (1992) begin to unite a national and international voice.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin

dramatic

Film scores: From Ireland’s Past (RTÉ TV series), ob, hn, 2 tpt, trbn, tuba, str, 1978; Michael Davitt and the Land League (RTÉ TV documentary), fl, ob, hn, bn, timp, pf, str, 1979; James Joyce (BBC TV documentary), fl, cornet, trbn, pf, str, 1981; W.B. Yeats (BBC TV documentary), fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, trbn, perc, hp, pf, str, 1988

instrumental

Orch: Music for Str, 1952; Movt, 1955–6; Sym. no.1, 1958–9; Chbr Sym. no.1, 1964; Configurations, 1967; A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland, 1975; Sym. no.2 ‘I have Loved the Lands of Ireland’, 1980; Chbr Sym. no.2, 1982; Celebration Music, 3 tpt, orch, 1984; Sym. no.4, 1990–1; Sym. no.5, 1991; Pf Conc., 1996

Chbr and solo inst: 4 Little Pieces, pf, 1954 (1985); Sonata, vn, pf, 1957, rev. 1968; Prelude, Toccata and Epilogue, pf, 1963; Scintillae, 2 Irish hp, 1968; Str Qt no.1, 1969; In Memory of Séan Ó Riada, fl, pf, 1971; The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 2 pf, 1972, arr. pf, 1977; September Preludes, fl, pf, 1973; The Tight-Rope Walker Presents a Rose, pf, 1976; Aislingí [Dreams], pf, 1977; Trio, fl, vn, pf, 1986; Phantasms, fl, cl, vc, hp, 1989; Str Qt no.2, 1992; Ceremonial Music, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1995

vocal

Choral: An Bhlian Lán [The Full Year] (T. Ó Floinn), 1956; Cúl an Tí [The Back of the House] (S. Ó Riordáin), 1956; An Bás is an Bheatha [Life and Death] (Irish proverbs), SSATTB, 1959–60; Tri Aortha [3 Satires] (Irish proverbs), 1962; Mass of Peace, vv, org, 1976; A Chill Wind (B. Kennelly), 1977; Hymn to St. John of God (M. Hodgetts), SATB, vv, org, 1978; Mass of Joy, vv, org, 1978; ‘O’ Antiphones, SATB, org, 1978; Hymn to Our Lady of Knock (Hodgetts), SATB, org, 1979; Ps xcv, SATB, org, 1979; The Radiant Moment (T. MacGreevy), 1979; Sym. no.3 ‘Ceol’ [Music] (B. Kennelly), S, Mez, T, B, spkr, SATB, orch, 1980–1; A Concert Mass (S. Bodley), S, Mez, T, B, SATB, str, 1984; Fraw Musica (M. Luther, J. Walter), Mez, SATB, orch, 1996; Pax bellumque (W. Owen, T. McGreevy), S, fl, cl, vn, pf, 1997

Solo: Never to have Lived is Best (W.B. Yeats), S, orch, 1965; Ariel’s Songs (W. Shakespeare), S, pf, 1970; Meditations on Lines from Patrick Kavanagh, A, orch, 1972; Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ogáin [Mháire Ni Ogáin’s Quatrains] (M. Mac an tSaoi), S, orch, 1973; A Girl (B. Kennelly), Mez, pf, 1978; Transitions (Kennelly), Mez, 2 spkrs, pf, prep pf, 1978; The Banshee (Bodley), S, Mez, T, B, elec, 1983; A Passionate Love (Bodley), Mez/Bar, pf, 1985; The Fiddler (Bodley), spkr, str trio, 1987; The Naked Flame (M. Ó Siadhail), Mez/Bar, pf, 1987; Carta Irlandesa (A. González-Guerrero), Mez/Bar, pf, 1988; By the Margins of the Great Deep (G. Russell), Mez, pf, 1995

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Acton: ‘Interview with Seoirse Bodley’, Éire-Ireland [St Paul, MN], v/3 (1970), 117–33

M. Barry: ‘Examining the Great Divide’, Soundpost, iii/Oct-Nov (1983), 15–20

‘XXIII: Seóirse Bodley’, Education and the Arts (Dublin, 1987), 230–8 [pubn of Trinity College, Dublin]

Ó Cuinneagáin, Pádhraic: The Piano Music of Seóirse Bodley (MA thesis, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, 1992)

A. Klein: ‘Aber was ist heute schon noch abenteuerlich? Ein Portrait des irischen Komponisten Seóirse Bodley’, MusikTexte, no.52 (1994), 21–5

A. Klein: ‘Irish Composers and Foreign Education: a Study of Influences’, International Musicological Conference: Maynooth 1995, i (Dublin, 1996), 271–84

A. Klein: Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1996)

AXEL KLEIN

Bodoil, Jo. [?Johannes]

(fl c1420–50). Composer, possibly Welsh. He was contemporary with Dunstaple. I-TRmp 92 ascribes to him (as ‘Jo. Bo doil’ or, in the index, ‘Bo. doil’) the rather italianate three-voice Credo that is merely called ‘English’ in I-Bc Q15 and I-AO. A three-voice Gloria ascribed in I-Bc Q15 to Binchois (ed. P. Kaye, The Sacred Music of Gilles Binchois, Oxford, 1992), but uncharacteristic of his style, so clearly forms a pair with the Credo (ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg. xxxi, 1924/R) that we may assume the name is simply a misreading, or what the scribe intended as a correction, of the less familiar ‘Bodoil’. These interesting pieces, with their lively superius duets recalling Ciconia (see Kaye), were probably written in Italy as Strohm suggests. If they are indeed ‘English’, it may be possible to identify ‘Jo. Bodoil’ with John Blodvel or Blodwell, traceable as a priest from 1412 to 1462 (the year of his death), a Welshman of illegitimate birth who gained a doctorate of canon law in Bologna in 1424, held prebends in Lichfield (1432) and Hereford (1433), and then went to Rome as an abbreviator of Apostolic letters (see Mitchell).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmR

R.J. Mitchell: ‘English Law Students at Bologna in the Fifteenth Century’, English Historical Review, li (1936), 270–87, esp. 271

R. Bockholdt: Die frühen Messenkompositionen von Guillaume Dufay (Tutzing, 1960), i, 188–9

B.L. Trowell: Music under the Later Plantagenets (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1960), i, 13ff, 24, 47; ii, 176

S. Meyer-Eller: Musikalischer Satz und Überlieferung von Messensätzen des 15. Jahrhunderts: die Ordinariumsvertonungen der Handschriften Aosta 15 und Trient 87/92 (Munich, 1989)

BRIAN TROWELL

Bodorovà, Sylvie

(b České Budějovice, 31 Dec 1954). Czech composer. She was a piano and composition pupil at the conservatory in Bratislava, before studying at the Janáček Academy of Musical Arts in Brno (1974–9), with Ctirad Kohoutek, and at the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague. Further work with Donatoni at the composition course at Siena (1981) ensued. From 1987 she regularly attended Ton de Leeuw’s courses in Amsterdam. She has taught at the academy in Brno and at the College-Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati (composer-in-residence, 1994–6). She belongs to the group Quattro, founded in 1996, which consists of four composers of different generations but who share the view of art being an ‘ecology of the soul’. Her work, the structural simplicity of which tends towards a lyrical sonority, has been played on all continents; Homage to Columbus for guitar has even been performed in the Antarctic. She receives frequent commissions and has won several prizes (e.g. Mannheim, Czech Radio Prague). (ČSHS)

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Plankty Passion Plays, va, orch, 1982; Pontem video, org, str, perc, 1983; Jubiloso, chbr orch, 1984; 3 canzoni da suonare, gui, str, 1985; Slunečná suita [Sun Suite], 1986; Vn Conc. ‘Messagio’, 1989; Detva, chbr orch, 1990; Magikon, ob, str, 1990; Panamody, fl, str, 1992; Vn Conc., str, 1996, arr. vn, pf

Vocal: Jihočeske madrigaly [South Bohemian Madrigals], chorus, 1975; Songs for the Linha Singers, 1977; Canto di Lode, vv, orch, 1980; Zápas s andělem [Struggle with the Angel] (J. Seifert), 1 male v, str, 1982; Kale Bala, Mez, cl, va, pf, 1984; Dona nobis lucem, S, vn, gui, str, 1994; Terezín Ghetto Requiem, Bar, str qt, 1977

Chbr and solo inst: VÖně léta [Summer Scent]: Miniattaca, fl, pf, 1976; Musica slovacca, fl, 1977; Balticke miniatury [Baltic Miniatures], gui, 1979; Gil’a Roma!, va, 1980; Musica per due Boemi, b cl, pf, 1980; Saluti da Siena, cl, 1981; Models, pf trio, 1983; Anvils, b cl, pf, str qnt, 1984; Dignitas homini, str qt, 1987; Homage to Columbus, Elegy, gui, 1988; Sine dolore, vn, vc, 1989; Dža more, va, 1990; Sostar Mange, gui, 1990; Trio, ob, cl, vn, 1991; Ventimiglia, tpt, 6 perc, 1992; Una volta prima vera, sonata, vn, pf, 1992; La speranza, cl, vc, pf, 1993

Educational music and works for children, incl. Little Pool (ballet-op), 1976

Principal publishers: ČHF (Czech Music Fund), Classic, Panton, Quatro

ANNA ŠERÝCH

Body, Jack [John] (Stanley)

(b Te Aroha, 7 Oct 1944). New Zealand composer. He studied at the University of Auckland with Ronald Tremain, then, after an influential period working with Lilburn in the electro-acoustic music studio at Victoria University of Wellington, in Cologne with Kagel and at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht. He was a guest lecturer at the Music Academy, Yogyakarta (1976–7), and since 1980 has taught at Victoria University of Wellington. His work as a composer embraces orchestral, chamber, music-theatre and electro-acoustic forms, as well as audio-visual installations which include his own photographic material. The most profound influence on his work has been his immersion in musical traditions of Asia which, through extensive fieldwork, particularly in Indonesia and parts of China, has provided him with much of his compositional material. Use of field recordings from such sources has characterized his electro-acoustic music since Musik dari jalan (‘Music from the Street’) (1975), in which Javanese street sounds are presented in literal ‘documentary’ fashion, as well as being abstracted into new, more rarefied contexts. Subsequent works have focussed on transcription of non-Western musical sources for Western instruments, such as in Melodies for Orchestra (1983), Three Transcriptions (1987) for string quartet and the orchestral Pulse.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Alley (3, G. Chapple), 1997, Wellington, State Opera, 27 Feb 1998

Orch: 4 Haiku, prep pf, 21 solo str, 1967; 23 Pages, 1972; Hello François, 1976; Melodies for Orch, 1983; Little Elegies, 1985; Pulse, 1995

Vocal: Turtle Time (R. Haley), spkr, pf, hp, hpd, org, 1968; Pater noster, 4 solo vv, chorus, perc, 1973; Carol to St Stephen, 3 solo vv, chorus, 1975; Marvel not Joseph, 2 solo vv, chorus, 1976; Vox populi, chorus, tape, 1981; Love Sonnets of Michelangelo, S, Mez, 1982; Poems of Solitary Delights, 1v, orch, 1985; 5 Lullabies, SATB, 1988; Wedding Song for St Cecilia, SATB, 1993; Fours on my Teaching (L. Harrison), spkr, orch, 1997

Chbr: Resonance Music, 6 perc, elec gui, 1974; The Caves of Ellora, brass ens, 1979; Interior, ens, tape, 1987; 3 Transcriptions, str qt, 1987; Epicycle, str qt, 1989; African Strings, 2 gui, 1990, Arum maris, str qt, tape, 1991; Campus sori, str qt, Javanese musician, 1996; The Garden, ens, 1996

Tape: Kryptophones, 1973; Musik dari jalan [Music from the Street], 1975; Duets and Choruses, 1978; Musik anak-anak [Children's Music], 1978; Fanfares, 1981; Jangkrik genggong, 1985; Musik mulut, 1989; Vox humana, 1991

Pf: 4 Stabiles, 1968; 5 Melodies, 1982; 3 Rhythmics, pf duet, 1986; Sarajevo, 1996

Other: Encounters, tape, actors, participants, 1980

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.M. Thomson: Biographical Dictionary of New Zealand Composers (Wellington, 1990), 28–31

J. Body: ‘Musical Transcription as an Adjunct to Musical Composition: a Personal View’, Canzona, xiv/34 (1991), 9–15

N. Sanders: ‘Convocations, Evocations and Innovations: Jack Body, and his calling(s)’, Music in New Zealand, no.27 (1994–5), 20–24

JOHN YOUNG

Boeck, August de

(b Merchtem, 9 May 1865; d Merchtem, 9 Oct 1937). Belgian composer. He studied at the Brussels Conservatory in order to become organist at his native village. In 1889 he met the young Paul Gilson who became his teacher for orchestration and his close friend. Both were influenced by the Russian ‘Five’ (especially by Rimsky-Korsakov), and they introduced musical Impressionism into Belgium. De Boeck was organist in several churches, the last being that of the Carmelites in Brussels (1900–20), and he taught harmony and organ at the Royal Flemish Conservatory at Antwerp (1909–21) and harmony at the Brussels Conservatory until 1930. Until then he was also director of the Mechelen Conservatory. In 1930 August de Boeck retired to his birth-place. He is considered one of the most representative Belgian composers of his generation, his music being lyrical and spontaneous and spiced with a certain irony.

WORKS

Ops: Théroigne de Mérincourt, 1901; Winternachtsdroom, 1903; Rijndwergen, 1906; Reinaert de Vos, 1909; La Route d’Emeraude, 1921

Ballets: Cendrillon (ballet), 1895; La Phalène (ballet), 1896; Papa Poliet (operetta), 1914–18; Totole (operetta), 1929

Incid music: La Chevalière d’Eon (G. Eekhoud), 1894; Jesus de Nazarener (R. Verhulst), 1909

Choral: Gloria flori (cant., N. de Tière), and 12 other cants.; 38 motets; 3 masses; 17 spiritual songs

Songs: 54 on Flemish texts; 45 on French texts; 57 children’s songs

Orch: Rhapsodie Dahomeenne, 1893; Sym., G, 1896; Fantaisie op twee vlaamse volksliederen, 1923; In schuur, 1937

Inst: 50 compositions for pf; 5 compositions for org; 19 works for solo inst and pf

MSS in B-Brtb

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Corbet: ‘In Memoriam August De Boeck’, De Vlaamse Gids (Ghent, Nov 1937)

F. Rasse: A. De Boeck (Brussels, 1943)

CORNEEL MERTENS

Boedecker, Philipp Friedrich.

See Böddecker, philipp freidrich.

Boehm, Joseph

(b Pest, 4 March 1795; d Vienna, 28 March 1876). Hungarian violinist and teacher. He studied the violin with his father, leader of the Town Theatre orchestra, and later briefly with Rode, who influenced him decisively. In 1816 he made his début in Vienna, and in 1819 he was appointed professor of violin at the newly founded Vienna Conservatory, a post he held until 1848. He played in the imperial orchestra from 1821 to 1868, and during the 1820s enjoyed great popularity as a soloist and quartet player, rivalling Mayseder and Schuppanzigh; he was selected by Beethoven to play in the second performance of the String Quartet op.127 (23 March 1825). Boehm was also an early exponent of Schubert's chamber music and played in the première of the Trio op.100 (26 March 1828). Considered the father of the Viennese violin school, Boehm was the teacher of H.W. Ernst, Joachim, Jakob Dont, Reményi, Georg Hellmesberger and other eminent violinists. He imparted to his pupils not only a solid technical foundation but also a sense of style and Classical tradition. Joachim said of him: ‘Based on an unfailing left hand and ideally smooth bowing, Boehm possessed an art of phrasing that enabled him to realize anything that he envisioned or felt’. As a composer, Boehm left a number of violin compositions which follow the trend of his day but display an unusual command of all violin techniques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MoserGV

Autobiography (MS, 1828, A-Wgm),

E. Hanslick: Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna, 1869–70/R)

E. Forbes, ed.: Thayer's Life of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ, 1964, 2/1967)

BORIS SCHWARZ

Boehm, Theobald

(b Munich, 9 April 1794; d Munich, 25 Nov 1881). German flute maker, flautist, composer and inventor. He worked out the proportions and devised the mechanism which are the bases of the modern flute. Boehm was the son of a goldsmith, in whose craft he became fully skilled at an early age. In childhood he taught himself the flageolet and one-keyed flute; by the age of 16 he had already grown dissatisfied with the latter, and in 1810 made himself a copy of a four-keyed instrument by Grenser of Dresden. Around the same time he also made a nine-keyed flute with a movable golden mouth-hole, based on the ideas of Johann Nepomuk Kapeller (1776–1825), flautist in the royal court orchestra in Munich. In 1810 Boehm began flute lessons with Kapeller, who gave him formal instruction until 1812, admitting then that he had no more to teach him.

In that year Boehm was appointed flautist at the Isartortheater and during the next five years combined flute playing with his daily work as goldsmith. In 1818 he became a member of the royal court orchestra in Munich (first flute 1830–48), and between 1821 and 1831 he undertook extended concert tours throughout Europe. Boehm enjoyed considerable success as a virtuoso performer: he was praised for his musicality and the beauty of his tone, and Fétis, among others, considered him the best German flautist of his day. Boehm, who had studied with Peter Winter and Joseph Graetz, frequently performed his own compositions. His works, all written for the flute, include a concerto, and numerous virtuoso pieces – fantaisies, variations, potpourris and the like. He also made many arrangements for flute with piano and for alto flute with piano. His music, popular and well regarded in his own time but then forgotten, has experienced a revival since the mid-20th century, spurred by the interest of Marcel Moyse and his pupils. A complete edition of Boehm’s works is in preparation.

In 1828 Boehm opened a flute-making workshop (mark: th. boehm / a / munich) and in 1829 he received a patent for an improved conical-bore wooden flute. During a concert tour in 1831 he heard the flautist Charles Nicholson in London and was impressed by the powerful tone that the latter drew from his large-holed flute. Boehm later admitted (in a letter to W.S. Broadwood of 18 April 1871) that he could not match Nicholson’s power of tone and therefore set to work to remodel his own instrument. An experimental model was made in 1831 in the workshop of Gerock & Wolf in London, and a completely remodelled instrument emerged from the Munich workshop in 1832. On this conical-bore instrument, the ‘cone Boehm’ or ‘ring Boehm’ flute, the tone holes were newly placed to improve the tuning and a system of interlinking keys with ring touchpieces was employed to enable the player to open or close the 14 tone holes.

Boehm’s flute was awarded a silver medal at the Munich industrial exhibitions of 1834 and 1835, but it did not at first win much attention although Boehm demonstrated it in Paris and London; production was limited as he was chiefly occupied from 1834 to 1839 with introducing a procedure for the purification of steel in Bavarian factories. In 1837 he left an instrument with the flautist P.H. Camus in Paris; the instrument was presented to the Académie des Sciences and adopted by Camus, Vincent Dorus and Victor Coche. The firm of Godfroy l’aîné (V.H. Godfroy and Louis Lot) began to make flutes based on it, but with a closed G key (a modification suggested by Dorus) rather than the open key of Boehm’s model, an alteration intended to make the new system easier for players of the old system. In 1838 Coche, annoyed that Boehm would not collaborate with him, accused the latter of stealing ideas from James Gordon, an amateur flautist whom Boehm had met in London in 1831 and advised on flute construction in 1833–4; the injustice of this accusation has been proved. The new flute was promoted in London by John Clinton, who had acquired an instrument in 1841; with Boehm’s approval, Rudall & Rose of London began in 1843 to manufacture flutes based on his design. In the meantime Cornelius Ward in London and L.-A. Buffet in Paris (the latter assisted and advised by Coche) had seized on the unprotected design. In November 1838 Buffet received a patent for several alterations to the Boehm flute. J.D. Larabee made a Boehm flute in New York in 1844 and A.G. Badger began to manufacture the instrument there soon after.

In 1839 Boehm sold his workshop to Rudolph Greve (1806–62), who had been his foreman since 1829, in order to concentrate, by royal command, on improvements to the Bavarian iron and steel industry. Greve continued to manufacture flutes with the mark Boehm & Greve until 1846, when Boehm founded his second workshop. From about 1845 Boehm studied acoustics under the guidance of C.E. von Schafhäutl (1803–90), his collaborator in improvements to steel manufacturing. He established a new workshop in 1847 (marks: Th. Boehm / in / MÜNCHEN, Th. Boehm / MUNICH). With a fuller appreciation of the acoustics of the flute, in 1847 Boehm produced his second model, a metal flute with a cylindrical bore and a parabolic (tapered) head. The keywork of the 1832 model was adapted to the new instrument, including an ‘open’ G key, which had been part of the original concept and a source of some controversy. From 1848 the instrument had covered keys. Boehm determined by trial and error the dimensions and placing of the tone holes, incorporating them, once established, into a geometrical plan (the Schema), which has proved a useful tool in the design of flutes of all sizes. He sold patent rights for this instrument in France to Godfroy l’aîné(Louis Lot) and in England to Rudall & Rose. Since that time a number of optional alternative keys have been designed, notably a B thumb key devised by Boehm and altered by Giulio Briccialdi, but the essence of the design has remained unchanged. Boehm’s silver flutes were awarded gold and silver medals at the exhibitions in Leipzig (1850), London (1851) and Paris (1855). In 1854 Boehm began to make cylindrical wooden flutes and in 1858 he made an alto flute in G; the alto flute was his favourite instrument from then on. Boehm also developed prototype oboe (1851–5) and bassoon tubes (1855).

In 1860 the watchmaker Karl Mendler (1833–1914), who had joined the workshop in 1854, bought Boehm’s instrument-making equipment for 500 gulden; in 1862 he was granted a trading concession. From that year instruments were marked ‘Th. Boehm & Mendler / in / München’ or boehm & mendler / münchen. Boehm remained active in the firm until his death (at the age of 87), occupied with correspondence, playing and making small improvements. In 1888 Mendler’s son Karl (1862–1920) took over the workshop and in 1903 it was sold to E.R. Leibl (1871–1957) in Nuremberg. The workshop remained active until it was destroyed by bombing in 1944.

Besides the flute, Boehm was responsible for a wide variety of inventions including improvements to the manufacture of music boxes and the construction of pianos, a sparkproof locomotive chimney and a telescope for locating fires. Pupils closely associated with him have written of him as a gentle and agreeable man of undoubted integrity. He had seven sons and a daughter, all of whom inherited a measure of his artistic and organizing ability and were outstanding in their professional lives.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

Über den Flötenbau und die neuesten Verbesserungen desselben (Mainz, 1847/R); Eng. trans., 1882, as An Essay on the Construction of Flutes, ed. W.S. Broadwood [with correspondence and other documents]

Schema zur Bestimmung der Löcherstellung auf Blasinstrumenten (Munich, 1862/R)

Die Flöte und das Flötenspiel (Munich, 1871/R; Eng. trans., ed. D.C. Miller, 1908, enlarged 2/1922/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

LangwillI7

V. Coche: Examen critique de la flûte ordinaire comparée à la flûte de Boehm (Paris, 1838)

R. Carte: A Complete Course of Instruction for the Boehm Flute (London,1845)

J. Clinton: A School or Practical Instruction Book for the Boehm Flute (London, 1846)

K.E. von Schafhäutl: Theobald Böhm: ein merkwürdiges Künstlerleben (Leipzig, 1882)

C. Welch: History of the Boehm Flute (London, 1883, enlarged 3/1896/R as History of the Boehm Flute, with Dr. von Schafhäutl’s Life of Boehm … and an Examination of Mr. Rockstro’s Version of the Boehm–Gordon Controversy)

R.S. Rockstro: A Treatise on the Construction, the History and the Practice of the Flute (London, 1890, 2/1928/R)

M. Böhm: Zur Erinnerung an Theobald Böhm, k. bayer. Hofmusiker (Munich, 1898)

H.C. Wysham: The Evolution of the Boehm Flute (Elkhart, IN, 1898)

K. Böhm: Theobald Böhm: Auszug aus der Familienchronik (Munich, 1944)

K. Ventzke: Die Boehmflöte (Frankfurt, 1966)

P. Bate: The Flute: a Study of its History, Development and Construction (London, 1969/R)

N. Toff: The Development of the Modern Flute (New York, 1979/R)

M.H. Schmid: Die Revolution der Flöte: Theobald Boehm 1794–1881 (Tutzing, 1981) [exhibition catalogue]

K. Ventzke and D. Hilkenbach: Boehm-Instrumente: ein Handbuch über Theobald Boehm und über Klappenblasinstrumente seines Systems, i: Theobald Boehm 1794–1881: Hofmusiker, Flötenbauer, Eisenhüttentechniker in München (Frankfurt, 1982) [incl. list of writings]

K. Lenski and K. Ventzke: Das goldene Zeitalter der Flöte: die Boehmflöte in Frankreich 1832–1932: Durchsetzung, Gestaltung, Wirkung (Celle, 1992)

V. Schulze-Johnson: Boehm’s Cylindrical Flute of 1847: a Study of its Evolution, its Improved Performance Characteristics, and its Major Proponents (diss., New York U., 1992)

L. Böhm, ed.: Festschrift anlässlich des 200. Geburtstags von Theobald Böhm (Munich, 1994)

L. Böhm, ed.: Theobald Böhm und seine Flöte: eine Dokumentation (Munich, 1994–)

PHILIP BATE/LUDWIG BÖHM

Boehmer, Konrad

(b Berlin, 24 May 1941). Dutch composer and writer of German birth. He studied composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig (1959–61) and philosophy, sociology and musicology at the University of Cologne (PhD 1966); he also worked at the WDR electronic studio in Cologne (1961–3). In 1966 he settled in Amsterdam, where he worked until 1968 at the Instituut voor Sonologie, Utrecht University. He later served as the institute's director (from 1994). He was appointed professor of music history and theory at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, in 1972. As music critic for the weekly paper Vrij Nederland (1968–73), president of the Genootschap van Nederlandse Componisten, and a board member of BUMA, the Dutch performance rights society (from 1980), he established himself as a leading personality in Dutch musical life. His tape composition Aspekt (1964–6) won first prize at the Paris Biennale in 1968 and his music drama Doktor Faustus (1983) received the Rolf Liebermann prize. He has lectured extensively in Latin America, the USA and Europe.

In that his activities as a composer are inseparable from his work as an activist and theorist, Boehmer is an heir to the traditions of the Enlightenment and the avant garde. In the 1960s and 70s he published barbed attacks on Egk, Stockhausen, Kagel and others from a Marxist perspective. His compositions, which reflect this political agenda, characteristically employ serial organization or montage, particularly the combination of vocal sounds and percussion, and exhibit a high-strung, nervous tone that creates a fervent Expressionism. In the words of Richard Barrett, Boehmer's art suggests a ‘fearless response to the world as it is, and [an] encompassing … vision of a world transformed’. Many of his works, particularly Doktor Faustus (1983) and Apocalipsis cum figuris (1984), integrate influences from jazz and rock music, resulting in a self-critical investigation of the social role of the artist in a world ‘between serialism and pop’. In Canciones del camino (1973–4) and Lied uit de vert (1975) radical leftist songs serve as cantus firmi. An outstanding example of Boehmer’s response to the historicity of musical materials is Woutertje Pieterse (1987), a work that alienates and satirizes the bel canto style.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Weg, 4 actors, insts, 1970; Doktor Faustus (music drama, 2, H. Claus), 1983, Paris, 1985; Woutertje Pieterse (comic tragedy, 2, Boehmer, after Multatuli), 1987, Rotterdam, 1988

Vocal: Jugend, 12 solo vv, insts, 1968; Lied uit de verte (Ho Chi Minh), S, chbr orch, 1975; Je vis – je meurs (L. Labé), S, fl, perc, 1979; Canto in modo Nono, 6 S, 6 A, 6 T, 6 B, 1991; Un monde abandonné des facteurs (M. Robic), 4 Mez, 1996

Inst ens: Variation, orch, 1959; Zeitläufte, 1962; Information, 2 pf, perc, 1964–5; Canciones del camino, orch, 1973–4; Konzertstück ‘Il combattimento’, vn, vc, orch, 1990; Et in Arcadia ego, str qt, 1992; Kronos protos, 2 fl, 3 cl, eng hn, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, 2 pf, perc, 1995

Solo inst: Potential, pf, 1961; Adem, fl, 1975; Nico’s Sestina, ob, 1976; In illo tempore, pf, 1979

El-ac: Position (Kriwet), elec sounds, vocal sounds, orch, 1960–61; Aspekt, 1964–6; Schrei dieser Erde, 2-track tape, perc, 1979; Apocalipsis cum figuris, 2 pf, perc, 3 pop singers, 8-track tape, 1984; Logos protos (speech of the dead christ from the world building: there is no god), vv, perc, elecs, 1996

Principal publisher: Tonos

WRITINGS

Zur Theorie der offenen Form in der neuen Musik (Darmstadt, 1967, 2/1988)

Zwischen Reihe und Pop: Musik und Klassengesellschaft (Vienna, 1970)

Gehoord en ongehoord: opstellen over muziek (Utrecht, 1974) [selection of articles from Vrij Nederland]

Geboeide klanken: essays over de sociale geschiedenis van de muziek (Leuven, 1980)

ed. B. Söll: Das böse Ohr (Cologne, 1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (H. Sabbe)

M. van Amerongen: ‘De springstof van Konrad Boehmer’, Vrij Nederland (2 March 1974)

C. Pitt: ‘Konrad Boehmer's “Doktor Faustus”’, Opera, xxxvi (1985), 512–14

C. Zanesi: ‘Interview de Konrad Boehmer’, Ars Sonora (1 June 1995)

R. Barrett: Concerning Konrad Boehmer (Darmstadt, 1996) [Tonos catalogue]

HERMAN SABBE

Boekhout, Thomas

(b Kampen, 1666; d Amsterdam, 1715). Dutch maker of woodwind instruments. He was a pupil of Jan de Jager, whose son Frederik assisted him between 1694 and 1707, and whose niece he eventually married. Boekhout lived in Amsterdam, at first on Keizersgracht and from 1713 on Kerkstraat. He made recorders, flutes, oboes and bassoons, but was best known for his bass recorders. The Amsterdamsche Courant reported in 1713 that he ‘makes and sells all manner of flutes, oboes … bass recorders which give all the notes as on a normal recorder, and a new kind of bassoon, both invented by him’. A clarinet by Boekhout is preserved in the Musée Instrumental, Brussels (see Waterhouse-LangwillI).

ROB VAN ACHT

Boelke-Bomart.

American firm of music publishers. It was founded by Margot and Walter R. Boelke (d 25 Jan 1987) in New York in 1948 and moved to Hillsdale, New York, in 1951. Affiliated to ASCAP, the firm specializes in the publication of contemporary music, and under the general editorship (1952–82) of Jacques-Louis Monod, who succeeded Kurt List, built up a small but important catalogue. Among its composers are Arthur Berger, Lansky, Lerdahl, Perle, Roslavets, Schoenberg, Skrowaczewski and Claudio Spies. In 1975 a sister company, Mobart Music Publications (an affiliate of BMI), was founded; its composers include Babbitt, Gideon, Ives, Leon Kirchner, Leibowitz, Monod, Pollock, Shifrin, Ben Weber, Webern, Zemlinsky and Zwilich. The distributor for both companies in the USA and Canada is Jerona Music Corporation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Sturm: ‘Encounters: Walter R. Boelke’, MadAminA!: a Chronicle of Musical Catalogues, iv/1 (1983), 9–10

‘Walter R. Boelke’, MadAminA!: a Chronicle of Musical Catalogues, viii/1 (1987), 7 only [obituary]

ALAN POPE/R. ALLEN LOTT

Boëllmann, Léon

(b Ensisheim, Haut-Rhin, 25 Sept 1862; d Paris, 11 Oct 1897). French organist and composer. One of 14 children, he left his native Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War to enter the Ecole de Musique Religieuse et Classique (Ecole Niedermeyer) in Paris in 1871. There he studied music with Gustave Lefèvre (the director) and Eugène Gigout, both sons-in-law of the founder, Louis Niedermeyer. He became the preferred pupil of Gigout, and won first prizes in piano, organ, counterpoint, fugue, plainsong and composition. Upon his graduation in 1881 he was appointed sub-organist of St Vincent-de-Paul, Paris; he was later named organist of this church. In 1885 he married Louise Lefèvre, daughter of Gustave Lefèvre and niece of Gigout, in whose home the young couple went to live. Boëllmann then taught in Gigout’s recently founded school of organ playing and improvisation. The Boëllmanns’ eldest child, Marie-Louise Boëllmann-Gigout (b 1891), brought up by Gigout after the early death of both parents, maintained the family traditions as a well-known Parisian music teacher and coach.

In his short professional life, Boëllmann became known as a dedicated teacher, trenchant critic, gifted composer and successful performer – a talented improviser as well as a sensitive executant who coaxed pleasing sounds out of recalcitrant instruments. His critiques in L’art musical (signed ‘le Révérend Père Léon’ and ‘un Garçon de la salle Pleyel’) were not restricted to church and organ music; he also wrote for Le guide musical and La vérité. His best-known work remains the Suite gothique and, in particular, its concluding Toccata, of moderate difficulty but brilliant effect; the Variations symphoniques for cello and orchestra also gained international fame, and his Fantaisie dialoguée for organ and orchestra was played in the Queen’s Hall in London in 1897. Most typical, however, are the modal and liturgical organ works in Douze pièces op.16, and the two-staff Heures mystiques, in the austere counterpoint of which Boëllmann showed himself a true disciple of his teacher and in-law, Gigout.

WORKS

all works published in Paris

vocal

Sacred: 6 motets (?1887), nos.1–3, 1v, org, nos.4, 5, 2vv, org, no.6, 2vv, vn, org, hp/pf; Tantum ergo, motet, S/T, 4vv ad lib, org/hmn, vn ad lib, hp ad lib (c1900); Tantum ergo, motet, S, Bar, org/hmn, vn/vc, hp ad lib (c1900); Tantum ergo no.3, Mez, female chorus, org, hp ad lib (c1896); Laudate Dominum, S, A, T, B, org (1900); Veni Creator, T, Bar, 4vv, vn, vc, hp, org, db ad lib (c1900)

Songs, 1v, pf, unless otherwise indicated: Berceuse; Chanson mauresque; Conte d’amour (A. de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam), op.26 (?1896); L’étoile (P. Gille); Hymne; Je ne fay rien que requérir (C. Marot) (?1895); Lamento (P. Verlaine), op.34 (?1897); Ma bien-aimée (J. Lahor) (c1899); Mai (J. Tellier), op.33 (1896); Marguerite des bois; Noël (E. Guinand), 1v, org/pf (c1895); Notre amour (A. Silvestre), 1v, pf, vc (?1894); Récit d’une jeune fille de Béthléem (S. Bordèse); Réveil de Jésus (Bordèse); La rime et l’épée; Les roses (L. Paté) (1895); Sérénade; Sous bois (L. Tiercelin) (c1895)

Other vocal: Le calme (A. Dorchain), op.39 (?1897); Le chant du ruisseau (J.-B. Clément), 2 solo vv/chorus; Larmes humaines (P. Collin), op.32, 2vv female chorus (1896); Rondel dans le mode phrygien (J. Froissart) (?1891)

instrumental

Orch: Fantaisie sur des airs hongrois, vn solo, orch, op.7 (c1890); Variations symphoniques, vc solo, orch, op.23 (?1893), arr. vc, pf; Sym., op.24 (?1894), arr. pf 4 hands; Fantaisie dialoguée, org solo, orch, op.35 (?1897), arr. org solo, E. Gigout; 4 pièces brèves, str orch; Scènes du moyen âge

Chbr: Suite, vc, pf, op.6 (c1890); Pf qt, op.10 (c1890); Pf trio, op.19 (c1895); Prière à Notre Dame [movt of Suite gothique, op.25], arr. vn/vc, pf; 2 morceaux, vc, pf, op.31 (?1896); Vc sonata, op.40 (?1897)

Org: 12 pièces, org/pedal pf, op.16 (c1890); Suite gothique, op.25 (1895); Deuxième suite, op.27 (1896); Heures mystiques, org/hmn [2 staves], opp.29, 30 (1896); Offertoire sur des noëls (1898); Fantaisie (1906); others in The French Organist, ed. R.L. Bedell (New York, 1944)

Pf: Etude (1885); Intermezzo (1885); 3 pièces (?c1885); Prélude et fugue (?c1885); Valse, op.8 (c1890); Deuxième valse, op.14 (c1890); Valse: Carillon, op.20 (c1893); 10 Improvisations, op.28 (?1895); Nocturne, op.36 (1896); Ronde française, op.37 (1896); Sur la mer, op.38 (1897); Scherzo caprice; Valse alsacienne; Berceuse, pf 4 hands; pf transcrs. of works by Fauré, Saint-Saëns

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Locard: ‘Léon Boëllmann’, Revue alsacienne illustrée, iii (1901), 109–21

M. Morin: ‘Léon Boëllman’, Bulletin de l’association des anciens élèves de l’école Niedermeyer, i/2–3 (1906)

E. Sitzmann: Dictionnaire de biographie des hommes célèbres de l’Alsace depuis les temps les plus reculés (Rixheim, 1909–10)

P. Locard: ‘Souvenirs sur Gigout et Boëllmann’, L’orgue, nos.30–31 (1937), 71

N. Dufourcq: La musique d’orgue française de Jehan Titelouze à Jehan Alain (Paris, 1941, enlarged 2/1949)

C.R. Arnold: Organ Literature: a Comprehensive Survey (Metuchen, NJ, 1973)

FELIX APRAHAMIAN

Boëly, Alexandre Pierre François

(b Versailles, 19 April 1785; d Paris, 27 Dec 1858). French composer, organist and pianist. He was first taught music by his father, Jean François Boëly (1739–1814), a theorist, chorister and harp master to the Countess of Artois and Madame Elizabeth. At the age of 11 he entered the Paris Conservatoire and studied the violin (with Guérillot) and the piano (probably with Montgeroult, then Ladurner); however, he did not complete his studies. Boëly followed a solitary career and found the security of an official position only for a short time late in life. He was first made provisional organist at St Gervais-St Protias, Paris, from 1834 to 1838, and in 1840 became titular organist at St Germain-l’Auxerrois, where he had the organ fitted with a German pedalboard. There he gained a small but well-earned reputation in the musical world as a great virtuoso and subtle interpreter. He taught the piano at the choir school of Notre Dame Cathedral from about 1845 to 1850. During this time, however, his clergy and adherents tired of his musical style, which they found too austere, and in 1851 he had to resign his position at St Germain-l’Auxerrois to one of his pupils from the choir school.

Largely self-taught as an artist, Boëly cultivated his musical gifts and judgment by daily study of the works of the old masters. He acquired a musical education and knowledge of counterpoint that were outstanding for his time and was one of the first organists in France to promote the music of Bach; he was also a disciple of Haydn and Mozart, as well as an early admirer of Beethoven. His compositions include two three-part masses and a large repertory of piano, organ and chamber works. From his first works, he showed an unusual maturity combined with a lyricism which, in its romantic bravura, occasionally looked forward to Schumann. As the aesthetic of the organ in France changed during his career, so Boëly began to use it in a grander, more symphonic manner. His piano music also reflects the evolution in the dimensions and use of the instrument, derived from the 18th-century piano, which had taken different forms – upright, square, pedal and grand – via the researches of Erard and Pleyel.

Boëly holds an important, if unappreciated, position in French music, owing to the nobility of his thought and the innovations of his musical language, which was based on an audacious system of modulation and frequent chromaticism. Reacting against the frivolous, mediocre pieces that had become the vogue in the Paris salons during the July monarchy, he took refuge in a voluntary archaism, a kind of neo-classicism unique in France at the time. Living on the fringes of official musical life, he remained unknown to the public; but he won the trust and admiration of an élite group of friends, among them Marie Bigot, Baillot, Kalkbrenner and Cramer. He also attracted the attention of young artists such as Franck and Saint-Saëns, who regarded him as a guardian of the noble and pure classical organ tradition.

WORKS

MSS in F-V; printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

Vocal: 6 romances, 1v, pf, op.19 (1856); 2 messes brèves, 3vv, org, db ad lib, opp.25–6, 1844

Chbr: 2 sonatas, vn, pf, op.32, c1805 (1857); 7 variations, vn, pf, op.3 (c1819); 3 str trios, op.5, 1808 (c1830), ed. B. François-Suppey (1994); 2 str trios, opp.23–4, 1857; 4 str qts, opp.27–30, c1827

Pf solo: 2 sonatas, op.1 (1810), ed. B. François-Sappey (1981); 30 caprices ou pièces d’étude, op.2 (c1816); 30 études, op.6 (1830), ed. B. François-Sappey (1987); Caprice, op.7 (1843); 3ème livre de pièces d’étude, op.13 (1846), ed. B. François-Sappey (1987); 4 suites dans le style des anciens maîtres, op.16 (1854); 24 pièces, op.20 (1857); Fantaisie, op.21, 1829 (1858); 24 pièces, op.22 (1858); posth. works, opp.33–4, 46–56

Pf 4 hands: Duo, op.4 (c1830); 3 caprices (1 for pf 3 hands), op.8 (c1843); Sonata, op.17 (1855); arr. of str trio, op.23

Org: 4 offertoires, op.9 (1842); 14 morceaux qui pourront servir pendant l’office divin, op.10 (1842); Messe du jour de Noël, op.11 (1842), ed. E. Kooiman (Hilversum, 1981); 24 pièces, op.12 (1843); 12 morceaux pour l'orgue expressif, op.14 (c1846); 14 préludes sur des cantiques de Denizot, op.15 (1847); 12 pièces, op.18 (1856); posth. works, opp.35–45

Opp.1–22 pubd in Boëly’s lifetime; opp.23–56 pubd posthumously by Richault (Paris, 1859–60). Principal modern edns.: A. Guilmant: Pièces choisies pour orgue (Paris, 1912); M. Brenet: 41 pièces choisies pour le piano (Paris, 1913–15); A. Gastoué and N. Dufourcq: Oeuvres complètes pour orgue(Paris, c1958–74); N. Dufourcq and B. François-Sappey: Suite des oeuvres complètes pour orgue (Paris, 1974–85) K. Kooiman: Pièces d’orgue (Hilversum, 1979)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

S. Morelot: ‘Artistes contemporains: Alexandre Pierre François Boëly’, Revue de la musique religieuse, populaire et classique, ii (1846), 23–33

J. d’Ortigue: ‘Discours prononcé aux obsèques de Boëly’, La maîtrise (15 Jan 1859)

P. Fromageot: ‘Un disciple de Bach: Pierre François Boëly’, Revue de l’histoire de Versailles et de Seine-et-Oise, xi (1909), 193–203

M. Brenet: ‘Boëly et ses oeuvres de piano’, BSIM, x/4 (1914), p.1–10; no.5, p.20–26

G. de Saint-Foix: ‘Les premiers pianistes parisiens: A.P.F. Boëly (1785–1858)’, ReM, ix/7–11 (1927–8), 321–44

A. Gastoué: ‘A Great French Organist: Alexandre Boëly and his Works’, MQ, xxx (1944), 336–44

G. Favre: La musique française de piano avant 1830 (Paris, 1953/R)

N. Dufourcq: ‘Autour de Boëly’, RMFC, v (1965), 51

B. François-Sappey: Alexandre Pierre François Boëly (1785–1858): ses ancêtres, sa vie, son oeuvre, son temps (Paris, 1989)

G. Cantagrel, ed.: Guide de la musique d'orgue (Paris, 1991)

BRIGITTE FRANÇOIS-SAPPEY

Boen [Boon], Johannes

(b Noordwijk, early 14th century; d Rijnsburg, 1367). Dutch priest and music theorist. He attended university at Oxford and Paris, and after completion of studies in law became a priest. From 1358 to his death he was parish priest in Rijnsburg. He wrote two treatises. Ars [musicae], dating from the mid-14th century, concerns Ars Nova mensural music and the formation of intervals, with references to, and sometimes contradictions of, the teachings of Johannes des Muris; references to several well-known Ars Nova motets are included. The other treatise, Musica (c1355), outlines a doctrine of consonances after discussing pitch names and genera of proportions, names of intervals, divisions of the whole tone and alteration of pitches by use of accidentals. Boen was the only theorist of his generation to allow any note to be preceded by an accidental, including sharps on B and E and flats on C and F, but he did not admit double flats or double sharps. He clearly thought in terms of staff notation, rather than the Guidonian hand. The last part of the treatise contains a discussion per se, imperfect consonances and consonants per accidens. His remarks on the term subtilitas are very significant: he expected more ‘sublety’ in tuning and rhythm to lead to a more refined musical style in the future. This was in effect a predilection of the Ars Subtilior.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmR

W. Frobenius: Johannes Boens Musica und seine Konsonanzenlehre (Stuttgart, 1971)

F.A. Gallo, ed.: Ars (musicae) Johannis Boen, CSM, xix (1972)

K. Berger: Musica ficta (Cambridge, 1987)

W. Frobenius: ‘Numeri armonicii: die Zahlen der Timaios-Skala in der Musiktheorie des 14. Jahrhunderts’, Kontinuität und Transformation der Antike in Mittelalter [Freiburg 1987], ed. W. Erzgräber (Sigmaringen, 1989), 245–60

A.M. Busse Berger: Mensuration and Proportion Signs (Oxford, 1993)

See also Theory, theorists.

GORDON A. ANDERSON/ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER

Boerio, Francesco Antonio

(fl Naples, 2nd half of the 17th century). Italian composer. He was probably associated with the Oratorio di S Filippo at Naples. The two keyboard compositions of his included in the Cemino manuscript – an untitled canzona and a quasi-improvisatory toccata followed by an imitative ‘fugue’ – turn away from the traditions of the southern Italian organ school, towards a lighter, more tonally orientated idiom. His mass settings include only Kyrie and Gloria, or Kyrie, Gloria and Credo, following a common Neapolitan practice of the time.

WORKS

in I-Nf unless otherwise stated

Messa, 4vv, str, bc; Messa e credo, 4vv, bc; Messa, 5vv, bc

Hodie collaeantur (per l’Assunta), 3vv, bc; Introibo ad altarem Dei, 2vv, bc; Laudate pueri, 5vv, bc; Nisi Dominus, 5vv, va da gamba, archiliuto, org, ?1694; Salve regina, 5vv, str, bc, dated 1668

Il disperato innocente (melodrama per musica, B. Pisani), Naples, 1673, I-Nc Rari 6.7.3

Aria, Gl, probably from an op

Toccata in D sol re, kbd; untitled canzona, kbd: Nc Mus.str.73 (Cemino MS); transcr. in Oncley

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. di Giacomo: Catalogo delle opere musicali: Città di Napoli: Oratorio dei Filippini (Parma, 1918)

W. Apel: ‘Die süditalienische Clavierschule des 17. Jahrhunderts’, AcM, xxxiv (1962), 128–41

L.A. Oncley: The Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella Manuscript No.34.5.28: Transcription and Commentary (diss., Indiana U., 1966)

L. Bianconi: ‘Funktionen des Operntheaters in Neapel bis 1700 und die Rolle Alessandro Scarlattis’, Alessandro Scarlatti: Würzburg 1975, 13–116, esp. 63

ALEXANDER SILBIGER

Boerman, Jan

(b The Hague, 30 June 1923). Dutch composer. He studied the piano with Léon Orthel and composition with Hendrik Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. From 1959 he devoted himself almost exclusively to electronic music. In 1962, together with Raaijmakers, he set up a private studio, which five years later was to form the basis for the electronic studio of the Royal Conservatory. From 1974 he was a teacher of electronic music and piano at this same conservatory.

Boerman is regarded as the Dutch master of electronic music, and most of his output consists of tape compositions. He also wrote compositions for the combination of tape and live performers, as well as a number of instrumental works. His electronic music displays a lushness of colour and a dramatic power seldom heard in this medium. Never a dogmatist, he uses purely electronically generated sounds as well as microphonically recorded material, but the two are welded together to become an organic whole. His frequent re-use and reworking of sounds from earlier pieces gives his output a great inner cohesion and a decidedly recognizable palette of colours.

Beginning with Alchemie (1961), Boerman developed a method of composition based on the golden section ratio. This method, only employed in his electronic work, serves to determine temporal and formal proportions. Kompositie 1972, one of his most thoroughly organized works, is a fine example of the masterful way he fuses strict design and rich sound into music with a panoramic, strikingly human quality. His instrumental and vocal idiom is, by comparison, of a less innovative character. Still, these works, especially Die Vögel for choir, brass and tape (1989), contain moments of great drama and fierce beauty and only confirm that Boerman’s aim is to continue rather than to break with tradition.

WORKS

(selective list)

Elec: Musique concrète, 1959; Alliage, 1960; Alchemie, 1961; De zee I, 1965; De zee II, 1968; Kompositie 1972, 1972; Kompositie 1979, 1979; Maasproject, 1984; Kompositie 1989, 1989; Tellurisch, 1991; Kringloop I, 1994; Vocalise, 1994; Kringloop II, 1995; Ruïne, 1997

El-ac: Ontketening I, perc, tape, 1983; Ontketening II, perc, tape, 1984; Die Vögel (R. Hauerling), choir, brass, tape, 1989

Inst: Muziek, perc, orch, 1991; Cortège en scherzo, 2 pf, 1992–3; Introduction and Fugue, 2 pf, 1996

Principal publisher and recording company: Donemus

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Raaijmakers: ‘Jan Boerman and Electronic Composition’, Key Notes, v (1977), 45–9

R. de Beer: ‘The Voltage-Controlled Emotions of Jan Boerman’, Key Notes, xviii (1983), 12–19

P.U. Hiu and J. van der Klis, eds.: Het Honderd Componisten Boek (Bloemendaal, 1997)

FRITS VAN DER WAA

Boero, Felipe

(b Buenos Aires, 1 May 1884; d Buenos Aires, 9 Aug 1958). Argentine composer, teacher and choral conductor. After studying composition with Pablo Berutti, he won the Europa Prize (1912) and studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Paul Vidal and Fauré. He returned to Argentina in 1915 and founded the Sociedad Nacional de Música, which later became the Asociación Argentina de Compositores. In 1934 he was commissioned by the National Education Council to organize a choral concert in which 2000 singers took part. In 1935 he became a member of the Fine Arts Committee and was appointed professor and choral director of the Mariano Acosta teacher-training college and professor at the Manuel Belgrano Institute, Buenos Aires. Boero was one of the most distinguished opera composers in Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century. His Tucumán (1918) inaugurated a series of operas based on Argentine subjects with Spanish librettos. His greatest triumph was El matrero (1929), which uses indigenous songs, rhythms and dances. These and other operas combine Romantic and Impressionist tendencies with some touches of verismo.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops (all first perf. at the Colón, Buenos Aires): Tucumán (1, L. Díaz), 29 June 1918; Ariana y Dionysos (1, Díaz), 7 Aug 1920; Raquela (1, V. Mercadante), 26 June 1923; Las Bacantes (after Euripides, trans. L. Longhi), 19 Sept 1925; El matrero (3, Y. Rodríguez), 12 July 1929; Siripo (3, L. Bayón-Herrera, after J.M. de Labardén), 8 June 1937; Zincalí (3, A. Capdevila), 12 Nov 1954

Incid: El inglés de los ‘güesos’ (B. Lynch), 1938

Orch: Madrugada en la pampa, 1920–30; Suite de danzas argentinas, 1920–30; Suite argentin, 1940; 20 other works

Choral: E minor Mass, chorus, orch, 1918; Jesu ambulat super acquas, chorus, orch, 1920; 68 other unacc. choral works

Pf: Evocaciones, 1913; Impresiones de Toledo, 1913; Media caña, 1920; Aires populares argentinos, 1930–35; Estampas argentinas, 1948; 25 other works

62 works (1v, pf), children’s songs, school hymns

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (J.P. Franze)

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, ed. Pan American Union, xv (Washington, DC, 1969)

C. Boero de Izeta: Felipe Boero (Buenos Aires, 1978)

B.A. Tenenbaum: Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (New York, 1996)

SUSANA SALGADO

Boesch, Rainer

(b Männedorf, canton of Zürich, 11 Aug 1938). Swiss composer and pianist. Following a general education in Zürich, he settled in French-speaking Switzerland and obtained a diploma in piano, studying with Louis Hiltbrand and Harry Datyner at the Geneva Conservatory. In 1966 he left for Paris, where he studied composition with Messiaen and took a course with Schaeffer, Bayle and Reibel at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1968 he was awarded a first prize in composition at the Paris Conservatoire for Désagrégation: this was the first time an electro-acoustic work had been presented for one of the institution's competitions. On his return to Switzerland he directed the Lausanne Conservatory (1968–72), and undertook numerous activities in support of new music. He formed a duo partnership with the singer Kathrin Graf, and worked as a teacher and administrator at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Musicales (Crans/Montreux), and in Geneva at the Conservatoire Populaire, the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze and the Centre Suisse de Musique Informatique. He has also worked at IRCAM (1976–85), and has spent periods of teaching and research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1988) and at Stanford University (1992). In 1996 he was appointed professor at the Paris Conservatoire and given responsibility for a course in computer music at the composition class of the Geneva Conservatory. Boesch demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the manifold possibilities for musical expression offered by the computer, and its ability to enable composers to analyse their creative gestures more completely. His output covers a wide spectrum in both the instrumental and electro-acoustic fields.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Transparences, 1977; Schriftzeichen für Kathrin, conc., 1v, pf, orch, tape, 1977; Tissages, 1978; Kreise, wind orch, 1986

Vocal: Carcajous, female v, fl, 1967; Nada superflue/superfloue, S, pf, 1974; Klagelieder, S, cl, org, 1981; Lieder vom Tod (Zürcher Liederbuch), S, pf, 1987; Lob, 1v, spkr, 4 brass insts, perc, 1993; Es waren 2 Königskinder, female v, ob, vc, pf, 1993; Der Turm zu Babel, 24vv, inst ens, 1995; Pluralis, 12 solo vv, cl, vc, perc, tape, 1996

Chbr: Sinfonia del Nicolo Albaghi, 2 fl, vn, vc, pf, 1961; Désagrégation, 12 cl, 2 tuba, perc, tape, 1968; Etude sur la perspective II, 2 hpd, synth, tape, 1972; Fragmente, fl, hpd, 1980; Wind Qnt, 1980; Paysages III, inst ens, tape, 1988; A propos de quelques sons très doux, gui, str qt, db, 1992; Styx II, 8 fl, tape, 1993; Klara's Spiegel, 2 pf, 1995; Rondo, vn, cl, pf, 1997; Zaubersprüche, fl, pf, 1997

Tape: Chant de la nuit, 1967; Mécaniques, 1973; Exercise de traitement de son concret par microprocesseur, 1982; Charles River in the Winter, 1988; Trajectoires, encore!, 1996

El-ac: Object sonore (Paris Bienale), 1982; Clavirissima, pf, cptr, 1987; Pierres pour pierres, cptr, tape, 1990

JEAN-PIERRE AMANN

Boesmans, Philippe

(b Tongeren, 17 May 1936). Belgian composer. He studied piano at the Liège Conservatory, where Froidebise introduced him to the techniques of serial writing. In 1957 he came into contact with Pousseur, Souris and Célestin Deliège (the ‘Liège Group’, who were ardent defenders of post-serial music in Belgium), and it was under their influence that he began writing music as a self-taught composer. From 1962 he collaborated with Pousseur on the productions of the Centre de Recherches Musicales de Wallonie, and performed as a pianist at the concerts of the Ensemble Musique Nouvelle. In the same year the RTBF engaged him as a producer, and his work with the radio orchestra enabled him to complete his apprenticeship in writing and orchestrating music. Very quickly recognized as a talented composer, he was invited to many festivals abroad and won several prizes, including the 1971 Italia prize for Upon la-mi. In 1981 Gérard Mortier, who had become director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, offered him the post of musical adviser and then of composer-in-residence. The Opéra National commissioned three operas from him: La passion de Gilles (1982), on a libretto by the writer Pierre Mertens, and Reigen (1992), on a libretto by the theatrical director Luc Bondy from Arthur Schnitzler's novel. (This opera had several further productions on European stages.) Boesmans also wrote his Trakl-Lieder for La Monnaie, as well as the orchestration of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. A third opera, named Wintermärchen after Shakespeare's The Winter Tale, was premiered in 1999. His orchestral and instrumental music has also attracted much attention, in particular his Violin Concerto; its recorded version won him the Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros. His most recent works have been written as a result of various commissions, in particular for the Arditti Quartet and the Ensemble InterContemporain.

While serialism played an important part in his musical training, Boesmans very soon became aware of the necessity of transcending its constraints and exclusions. He took little interest in the idea of ‘pure music’ and has tried to reintroduce expressivity. Without repudiating the legacy of serialism he developed a very personal musical language in which such concepts as consonance, periodicity and rhythmics could find a place. Remote from neo-tonal or postmodern currents, Boesmans has nonetheless always sought to maintain links with musical tradition: ‘One must be able to go back in order to go forward’. This explains his interest in large-scale forms and instrumental virtuosity. Close to Berio, whose heir he can to some extent claim to be, Boesmans has gradually developed a style in which the instrument plays a determining part: this ‘methodical passion for instrumental virtues’ also of course includes the human voice, in which the composer has always been interested. His delight in sound itself transforms virtuosity into brilliance, the expression of a purely musical pleasure. Like Berio, Boesmans has often written works for instrumentalists to whom they are dedicated, thus seeking to preserve the personality of his musicians in his instrumental writing. Upon la-mi was written for the variety-show singer Claude Lombard, Surfing for the viola player Christopher Desjardins, and Summer Dreams for the Arditti Quartet.

Great liberty of writing, unbeholden to any system, is characteristic of the music of Boesmans, as it is of the compositions of his elders, Pousseur and Berio. He concentrates in particular on harmonic rhythm and speed, together with ideas of timbre which sometimes bring him close to Messiaen. His chords and aggregations of sound are always based on natural resonance, so that they have an almost voluptuous sonorous richness. Finally, the emotional and dramatic power of his works, so limpid on first hearing, conceals a structural, polyphonic and metrical complexity which makes Boesmans one of the outstanding composers of the late 20th century.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops (all perf. Brussels, La Monnaie): La passion de Gilles (3, P. Mertens), 1982, 18 Oct 1983; L'incoronazione di Poppea, 16 May 1989 [realization of work by Monteverdi]; Reigen (10 scenes, L. Bondy, after A. Schnitzler), 1992, 2 March 1993; Wintermärchen (4, L. Bondy and N.L. Bischofsberger, after W. Shakespeare), 1999, 10 Dec 1999

Orch: Impromptu, 23 insts, 1965; Sym., pf, orch, 1966; Verticales, 1969; Intervalles, 1973; Multiples, 2 pf, orch, 1974; Pf Conc., 1979; Vn Conc., 1980; Conversions, 1980

Other inst: Sonuances, 2 pf, 1964; Corrélations, cl, 2 ens, 1967; Explosives, hp, 10 insts, 1969; Fanfare I, 2 pf (1 player), 1972; Fanfare II, org, 1972; Sur mi, 2 pf, elec org, perc, 1974; Ring, elec org, ens, 1975; Doublures, pf, hp, perc, ens, 1975; Elements/Extensions, pf, ens, 1975; Cadenza, pf, 1979; Extases, pf, tuba, synth, ens, 1985; Fly and Driving, str qt, 1989; Surfing, va, ens, 1989; Daydreams, mar, elecs, 1990; Dreamtime, hp, tuba, ens, 1994; Summer Dreams, str qt, 1994; Smiles, 2 perc, 1995; Ornamented Zone, cl, pf, va, vc, 1996

Vocal: Upon la-mi, S, hn, 11 insts, elecs, 1971; Trakl-Lieder, S, orch, 1987; Love and Dance Tunes, Bar, pf, 1993–6

Principal publishers: Jobert, Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Deliège, B. Foccroule and C. Ledoux: Philippe Boesmans (Paris and Brussels, 1983)

P. Boesmans and S. Cambreling: ‘Monteverdi recrée: une dramaturgie du timbre’, L'avant-scène opéra, no.115 (1988), 138–42 [L'incoronazione di Poppea issue]

P. Boesmans: ‘La Ronde (Reigen)’, L'avant-scène opéra, no.160 (1994)

ERIC DE VISSCHER

Boësset, Antoine [Anthoine] (de), Sieur de Villedieu

(b Blois, 1586; d Paris, 8 Dec 1643). French composer. He was appointed Maître des enfants de la musique de la chambre du roy in 1613, Maître de la musique de la reine in 1617, Sécretaire de la chambre du roy in 1620, Surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roy in 1623 and Conseiller et maître d’hotel ordinaire du roy in 1634; he held most if not all of these posts simultaneously until his death. He was widely recognized as the leading composer of airs de cour, the first of which appeared in anthologies from 1608. Some 200 airs for four and five voices from his nine published books were intabulated for lute, and in 1689 J.-B.-C. Ballard produced collections of the polyphonic airs. Mersenne considered Boësset to be a master of song ornamentation and recommended all young composers to imitate him. The airs exhibit great melodic beauty, and the irregularity of polyphonic texture, conceived to give a certain theatricality to the poems, makes his works sound very modern. Contrasts of language, rhythm and scoring contribute to the expressiveness of the music, but the declamatory writing found in the works of Guédron has no place. From the seventh book of 1630 the instruction ‘basse continue pour les instruments’ appears several times, representing the first printed reference to basso continuo by a French composer. As Surintendant de la musique de la chambre Boësset wrote the music for many ballets, but there is no evidence that he composed sacred music; the motets and masses bearing his name can almost certainly be attributed to his son Jean-Baptiste. The inclusion of his works in late 17th-century manuscripts (in F-PN) and the reissue of his Airs de cour in 1689 suggest that he was still held in high regard some 50 years after his death.

WORKS

Airs de cour, 4–5vv, 9 bks (Paris, 1617–42); many intabulated for lute in Airs de différents autheurs mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille, 6 bks (Paris, 1608–15) and in Airs de cour mis en tablature de luth, 10 bks (Paris, 1617–43); 1, from vol.ix, ed. in Mw, xii (1961)

c22 Ballets, 1615–42 incl.: Ballet de la Reyne représentant le soleil (1621); Ballet des volleurs (1624); Ballet des fées de la Forêt Saint-Germain (1626); Ballet la Félicité (1642); Ballet triomphes (1642)

Parodies spirituelles in La pieuse alouette, 1619⁹

26 airs in La despouille d'Aegipte, 1629⁷

59 airs in F-PN ms VM7 501

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)

M. Cauchie: ‘Le dynastie des Boesset’, Bulletin de la Société française de musicologie, iv/6 (1920), 13–26

A. Verchaly, ed.: Airs de cour pour voix et luth (Paris, 1961)

A.B. Caswell: The Development of Seventeenth-Century French Vocal Ornamentation and its Influence upon Late Baroque Ornamentation Practice (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1964)

A. Verchaly: ‘La poésie française baroque et sa musique (1580–1645)’, Actes des journées internationales d’étude du Baroque III: Montauban 1968, 127–36

A. Cohen: ‘A Study of Notational and Performance Problems of an Early Air de cour: Je voudrois bien, ô Cloris (1629) by Antoine Boësset (c 1586–1643)’, Notations and Editions: a Book in Honor of Louise Cuyler, ed. E. Borroff (Dubuque, IA, 1974), 55–68

A. Verchaly: ‘A propos du récit français au début du XVIIe siècle’, RMFC, xv (1975), 39–46

G. Durosoir: L'Air de cour en France: 1571–1655 (Liège, 1991)

A. Verchaly and G. Durosoir, eds.: Catalogue bibliographique de l'air de cour (Versailles, forthcoming)

AUSTIN B. CASWELL/GEORGIE DUROSOIR

Boësset [Boëcet, Boisset, Bouesset], Jean Baptiste (de), Sieur de Dehault

(b Paris, 29 Feb 1614; d Paris, 25 Dec 1685). French composer, eldest son of antoine Boësset. He served the French court in various posts for nearly half a century. He inherited from his father the post of surintendant de la musique de la chambre, a half-yearly position which he shared with Auget, Cambefort and Jean-Baptiste Lully (i). Like his father he was Maître de la musique de la reine mère, until his demotion in favour of Cambert, and from 1662 Maître de musique de la chambre, Chantre and Maître des enfants, positions which he held until his death. He was also Gentilhomme de la chambre in 1646, Chevalier in 1648, Conseiller et maître d’hôtel du roi in 1651 and Maître de la musique de la reine in 1660; he sold this last title to Lorenzani in 1679. As well as four airs de cour, included in his father’s eighth book of Airs of 1632, he wrote two operas: La mort d’Adonis, performed for the king in 1678, and Alphée et Arétuse, given ‘at Fontainebleau in concert form’ shortly after his death in 1686 (see Mercure galant, November 1686). He also collaborated in 12 ballets de cour from 1653 to 1666. Loret describes him as a composer of motets and Brossard attributes seven motets to him which appear under the name of Boësset only in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Boësset’s son, Claude Jean Baptiste, Sieur de Launay, inherited the title of Maître de musique de la chambre du roi from his father but was ordered to sell it to Jean-Baptiste Lully (ii) in May 1695. Claude Jean Baptiste ensured the reissue by J.-B.-C. Ballard of works by his grandfather, Antoine Boësset, in 1689.

WORKS

4 airs de cour in A. Boësset: Airs de cour, 4–5vv, bk 8 (Paris, 1632)

Airs in Ballet de la nuit, 1653; Ballet du temps, 1654; Ballet des plaisirs, 1655; Ballet de Psyché, 1656; Ballet d’Alcidiane, 1658; Ballet de la raillerie, 1659; Ballet du triomphe de Bacchus, 1666; Paroles et musiques pour le concert de la chambre de la musique de la reyne (P. Perrin), 1667: some airs in F-Pn

La mort d’Adonis (op, Perrin), 1678, lost, lib, Pn

Alphée et Arétuse (op, M. Boucher), Fontainebleau, 1686, lost

Mass, 4vv, bc

Mass, 5vv, bc; Mass ‘du Tiers’, 4vv, bc, ed. D. Launay, Schola cantorum, lxix–lxxii (n.d.); Salve regina, 4vv, bc; Anna mater matris Redemptoris, 5vv, bc; De profundis, 4vv; all in F-Pn

Mag, 4vv, bc; Domine salvum fac Regem, 4vv, bc, ed. D. Launay, Anthologie du motet latin polyphonique en France (Paris, 1963)

Many sacred works in MSS, Pc, Pn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BenoitMC

LabordeMP

M. Cauchie: ‘Le dynastie des Boësset’, Bulletin de la Société française de musicologie, iv/6 (1920), 13

N. Dufourcq: Jean-Baptiste de Boësset (Paris, 1962)

M.-F. Christout: Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672 (Paris, 1967)

M. Benoit: Versailles et les musiciens du roi, 1661–1733 (Paris, 1971)

AUSTIN B. CASWELL/GEORGIE DUROSOIR

Boethius [Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius]

(b Rome, c480 ce; d Pavia, c524 ce). Roman writer and statesman. He was born into one of the foremost patrician families of Rome; following the death of his father in 487 ce he was taken into the home of Symmachus, another patrician. Boethius learnt Greek philosophy and the liberal arts from Symmachus and married his daughter. Both men were colleagues in later senatorial struggles.

Boethius’s erudition in both the practical and speculative arts attracted the attention of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, then ruler of Italy. Through Cassiodorus, Theodoric requested Boethius’s aid in various matters, including the selection of a kitharode for Clovis, King of the Franks. Cassiodorus, writing in his official capacity as quaestor, repeatedly praised Boethius’s learning. Boethius became consul in 510, and in 522 was called to Ravenna to become Theodoric’s magister officium. In 523 Cyprian, Theodoric’s referendary, brought charges of treason against a senator, Albinus, and Boethius argued in Albinus’s defence. Boethius was himself then charged and imprisoned with Albinus in Pavia, and ultimately executed.

The works of Boethius may be divided into four categories, in chronological order: didactic works, treatises on the mathematical disciplines probably written during the first decade of the 6th century; the logical works, in essence translations or commentaries on Aristotle, Cicero and Porphyry; the theological treatises, works expounding orthodox Christian doctrine according to philosophical methods; and the Consolatio philosophiae, a philosophical treatise written in the form of a Menippean Satire while Boethius was in prison.

Boethius’s first works, written at the request of Symmachus, and dedicated to him, treated the four mathematical disciplines of antiquity: arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Boethius described these disciplines as the ‘quadrivium’, the fourfold path to the knowledge of ‘essences’ – things unaffected by material substance (De inst. arith., preface). Of the four works covering these disciplines, only the De institutione arithmetica and the greater part of the De institutione musica survive, although contemporary sources and later evidence show that Boethius probably completed all four works.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Boethius did not merely repeat classical learning for rhetorical and encyclopedic purposes: he was a speculative thinker in the Greek philosophical tradition. Thus his mathematical works are not merely introductions to the fields of study with which the learned Roman should be acquainted; they are highly developed preparatory exercises for the study of philosophy in the neo-Pythagorean and neo-Platonic tradition. The work on arithmetic is a translation of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Introduction to Arithmetic; the treatise on geometry was a translation of Euclid’s Elements; and the De astronomia followed Ptolemy’s Almagest. Evidence in the extant musical treatise by Nicomachus (Manual of Harmonics) and in Boethius’s treatise itself suggests that the first four books of De institutione musica are a somewhat loose translation of Nicomachus’s lost work on music. The fifth book of De institutione musica, however, is based on the first book of Ptolemy’s Harmonics. Boethius’s treatise is incomplete, for it breaks off in the middle of book 5, and the last part of the work – probably comprising two further books (based on Ptolemy) after the lost final chapters of book 5 – seems to have disappeared not long after the work was written.

Music occupies an unusual position among the mathematical arts, according to Boethius, for it is related to ethical action as well as to pure reason (De inst. mus., 1, chap.1). Since human behaviour is potentially influenced by music, it is very desirable to understand and control the fundamental elements of music (e.g. tonal systems, genera, modes). Moreover, music, in the form of musica mundana, is an all-pervading force in the universe – determining the courses of the stars and planets, the seasons of the year and the combinations of the elements; and as musica humana it is the unifying principle for the human being – bringing the body and soul into harmony, and integrating the rational and irrational parts of the soul and the disparate members of the body into harmonious wholes. Music is also said to be found in instruments (musica instrumentalis), which are subdivided into strings, winds, and percussion (De inst. mus., 1, chap.2).

Boethius defines the true musician (musicus) as the scholar who can judge poetic compositions and instrumental performances by the application of pure knowledge; this scholar is to be distinguished from the poet, who composes songs more by instinct than by knowledge, and the instrumentalist, who is little more than a skilled craftsman (De inst. mus., 1, chap.34).

The ultimate goal of the study of music for Boethius was fixed and unchanging knowledge. If music is to be known, it must be quantified; the transient sounds perceived by the senses, quantitative in their very nature, must be translated into ratios that correspond to discrete musical intervals. Thus a system of numerical ratios (two terms) and proportions (three or more terms) is constructed, and the structure of musical systems (collections of pitches) is determined by those ratios considered the simplest and closest to unity (multiple and superparticular ratios). Musical intervals are considered consonant or dissonant according to the integrity and simplicity of their mathematical ratios. Only after the full exposition of an elaborate and sometimes tedious musical mathematics are the basic elements of music translated back into audible sound by means of the monochord, the instrument with which one can make audible the mathematical ratios as well as the genera and systems tempered by pure mathematics.

Several passages in Boethius’s De institutione musica are of particular import in the history of musical thought. A clear and perceptive theory of sound is found in book 1, chap.14. The final chapter of book 4 presents a distinction between interval (a relationship between successive sounds) and consonance (one between simultaneous sounds). Book 4, in chaps.14–17, discusses the basic elements of Greek modal theory with notational charts clearly illustrating the basic principles of that system.

The De institutione musica fell into virtual oblivion between the 6th century and the 9th, but emerged as an important work in the revival of the liberal arts during the Carolingian renaissance. Evidence in the manuscript tradition of Cassiodorus’s Institutiones places Boethius’s musical work in the court library of Charlemagne: two early 9th-century codices (D-KA CVI and CH-BEsu 212) preserve one of the earliest traditions (known as the Δ recension) of the second book of Cassiodorus’s Institutiones – that which discusses the seven liberal arts. Bischoff has argued that these codices as a whole preserve a textual tradition stemming from the court of Charlemagne. The same codices also contain a short treatise entitled Quantis cordis antiqui musici ubi sunt quorum Boethius in capitulo, de additione vocum, meminit quaeve sunt eorum nomina vel ordo (‘On how many strings were used by the ancient musicians, on which Boethius, in his chapter “On the addition of pitches”, recalls what they are, their names and their arrangement’). The title itself and the names of notes and genera recorded in this very brief treatise testify to a knowledge of Boethius’s work among Frankish scholars and scribes from the earliest decades of the 9th century.

The manuscript tradition of De institutione musica, preserved in over 150 codices containing the work or extracts from the work, represents the most extensive textual tradition of any musical treastise of the Middle Ages. The reception of the De institutione musica from the 9th to the 12th centuries can be traced in an extensive commentary, known as the Glossa maior, found in the margins of numerous manuscripts containing the work. The earliest layer of commentary, dating from the middle third of the 9th century, concentrates on philosophical, philological and mathematical aspects, and ignores any relationship between musica, the mathematical discipline, and cantus, the musical practice of the period. The philosophical commentary of these decades exhibits strong parallels with the Platonic thought of contemporary thinkers, particularly Johannes Scottus Eriugena (d c877). Only in the final third of the 9th century does the commentary begin to acknowledge a contemporary musical practice and cite specific examples from the plainchant repertory.

The epistemological emphasis of Boethius became a predominant theme in medieval music theory from its earliest flowering in the late 9th century. Extensive elements and literal quotes from De institutione musica are found in the Musica enchiriadis and in the treatises of Aurelian of Réôme, Regino of Prüm and Hucbald. During the 10th and 11th centuries the Pythagorean diatonic musical system espoused by Boethius formed the essential collection of pitches imposed on the repertory of liturgical chant and subsequently became the basis of musical notation – with relatively little concern for the many incongruities that existed between the chant melodies and Boethius’s highly restricted set of pitches. The distinction between the musicus and cantor, a dichotomy that clearly exercised a negative influence in the application of systematic musical thought to the innate nature of the repertory of chant, is ultimately rooted in Boethius’s philosophical position. Not until Guido of Arezzo (d after 1033) was Boethius candidly regrouped with philosophers rather than musical theorists; yet even Guido repeated the myth of Pythagoras and the smithy – a myth that espouses the essentially Pythagorean basis of musical thought. Although Boethius’s influence waned in the later Middle Ages as theory became more oriented toward musical practice, his work nevertheless remained an auctoritas of ultimate appeal in musical thought throughout the later Middle Ages and even well into the early 17th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

editions, translations

G. Friedlein, ed.: Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini Boetii De institutione arithmetica libri duo. De institutione musica libri quinque. Accedit Geometria quae fertur Boetii (Leipzig, 1867/R)

C.M. Bower, trans.: Fundaments of Music (New Haven, 1989) [incl. introd. and notes]; review by L. Gushee, JMTh, xxxviii (1994), 328–43

M. Bernhard and C.M. Bower, eds.: Glossa maior in institutionem musicam Boethii (Munich, 1993–6)

G. Marzi, ed.: An.M.T. Severini Boethii de institutione musica (Rome, 1990)

studies

H. Abert: Die Musikanschauung des Mittelalters und ihre Grundlagen (Halle, 1905)

R. Bragard: ‘L’harmonie des sphères selon Boèce’, Speculum, iv (1929), 206–13

G.W. Pietzsch: Studien zur Geschichte der Musiktheorie im Mittelalter: die Klassifikation der Musik von Boetius bis Ugolino von Orvieto (Halle, 1929/R)

G.W. Pietzsch: Die Musik im Erziehungs- und Bildungsideal des ausgehenden Altertums und frühen Mittelalters (Halle, 1932/R)

L. Schrade: ‘Die Stellung der Musik in der Philosophie des Boethius als Grundlage der ontologischen Musikerziehung’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, xli (1932), 368–400

O.J. Gombosi: Die Tonarten und Stimmungen der antiken Musik (Copenhagen, 1939/R)

M.F. Bukofzer: ‘Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music’, Speculum, xvii (1942), 165–80

R. Bragard: ‘Boethiana: études sur le “De institutione musica” de Boèce’, Hommage à Charles van den Borren: mélanges (Antwerp, 1945), 84–139

L. Schrade: ‘Music in the Philosophy of Boethius’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 188–200

J.M. Barbour: Tuning and Temperament: a Historical Survey (East Lansing, MI, 1951/R, 2/1953)

H. Potiron: La notation grecque et Boèce (Rome, 1951)

H. Potiron: Boèce: théoricien de la musique grecque (Paris, 1954)

N.C. Carpenter: Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman, OK, 1958)

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Die Musica in den Artes liberales’, Artes liberales: von der antiken Bildung zur Wissenschaft des Mittelalters, ed. J. Koch (Leiden, 1959), 33–49

E.J. Dehnert: ‘Music as a Liberal Art in Augustine and Boethius’, Arts libéraux et philosphie au Moyen Age: Montreal 1967, ed. J. Vrin (Paris, 1969), 987–91

D.S. Chamberlain: ‘Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius’, Speculum, xlv (1970), 80–97

J. Edmiston: ‘Boethius on Pythagorean Music’, MR, xxxv (1974), 179–84

C.M. Bower: ‘Boethius and Nicomachus: an Essay concerning the Sources of De institutione musica’, Vivarium, xvi (1976), 1–45

A. Barbera: ‘Arithmetic and Geometric Divisions of the Tetrachord’, JMT, xxi (1977), 294–323

C. Page: ‘The Earliest English Keyboard: New Evidence from Boethius’ De Musica’, EMc, vii (1979), 308–14

C.M. Bower: ‘The Role of the De Institutione Musica in the Speculative Tradition of Western Musical Thought’, Boethius and the Liberal Arts: a Collection of Essays, ed. M. Masi (Las Vegas, 1981), 157–74

J. Caldwell: ‘The “De Institutione Arithmetica” and the ‘De Institutione Musica”’, Boethius: his Life, Thought and Influence, ed. M. Gibson (Oxford, 1981), 135–54

H. Chadwick: Boethius: the Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981)

C.M. Bower: ‘The Modes of Boethius’, JM, iii (1984), 252–63

C.M. Bower: ‘Boethius' De institutione musica: a Handlist of Manuscripts’, Scriptorium, xlii (1988), 205–51

L. Vikárius: ‘A Boethius-Fragment: New Sources for Research into the Theoretical Musical Teaching in Medieval Hungary’, Cantus Planus III: Tihány 1988, 245–56

M. Bernhard: ‘Glosses on Boethius' “De institutione musica”’, Music Theory and its Sources, ed. A. Barbera (Notre Dame, IN, 1990), 136–49

M. Bernhard: ‘Überlieferung und Fortleben der antiken lateinischen Musiktheorie im Mittelalter’, Geschichte der Musiktheorie, iii: Rezeption des antikens Fachs im Mittelalter, ed. F. Zaminer (Darmstadt, 1990), 1–35

M. Bernhard: ‘Die musikalische Fachschrifttum im Lateinischen Mittelalter’, ibid., 37–103

A.C. and W.R. Bowen: ‘The Translator as Interpreter: Euclid's Sectio canonis and Ptolemy's Harmonica in the Latin Tradition’, Musical Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts: Toronto 1990, ed. M.R. Maniates (Toronto, 1997), 97–148

C.V. Palisca: ‘Boethius in the Renaissance’, Music Theory and its Sources, ed. A. Barbera (Notre Dame, IN, 1990), 259–80

J. Bofill i Soliguer: La Problemàtica del tractat De institutione musica de Boeci (Barcelona, 1993)

C.M. Bower: ‘Die Wechselwirkung von philosophia, mathematica und musica in der karolingischen Rezeption der “Institutio musicae” von Boethius’, Musik und die Geschichte der Philosophie und Naturwissenschaften im Mittelalter: Fragen zur Wechselwirkung von “musica” und “philosophia” im Mittelalter, ed. F. Hentschel (Leiden, 1998), 163–83

M. Hochadel: ‘Zur Rezeption der “Institutio musicae” von Boethius an der spätmittelalterlichen Universität’, ibid., 187–201

CALVIN BOWER

Boettcher, Wilfried

(b Bremen, 11 Aug 1929; d Saint Siffret (Gard), 22 Aug 1994). German conductor. A pupil of Arthur Troester, Pierre Fournier and Pablo Casals, he was a solo cellist in Hanover for two years before taking up a post at the Vienna Music Academy in 1958. A year later he founded the chamber orchestra the Vienna Soloists with which he travelled on concert tours throughout Europe and to the USA and Japan, and made many recordings. From 1965 to 1974 Boettcher was a professor at the Hamburg Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, where he took classes in cello, chamber music and orchestral training; from 1967 to 1971 he was principal conductor of the Hamburg SO and from 1970–73 resident conductor at the Hamburg Opera. He also conducted the New Philharmonia Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin PO, the Budapest PO and the Orchestre de Paris, and in 1986 was appointed principal guest conductor of the Northern Sinfonia. He conducted frequently at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, and at the Vienna Staatsoper, and appeared at the Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, Athens and Florence festivals. Boettcher’s repertory extended from Bach to Lutosławski, but his performances of Mozart were especially praised for their organic flow, flexibility and vigour.

HANS CHRISTOPH WORBS

Boetticher, Wolfgang

(b Bad Ems, 19 Aug 1914). German musicologist. He began his studies in musicology at the University of Berlin in 1933, where his teachers included Schering, Schünemann, Sachs, Moser, Blume and Osthoff. In 1939 he took the doctorate at Berlin with a dissertation on Schumann. He completed his Habilitation there in 1943 with a study of solo lute playing in the 16th and 17th centuries and taught as an external lecturer until 1945. In 1948 he took up teaching duties at Göttingen, first as a lecturer, then as professor in 1954, serving twice as director of the musicology institute (1958–60, 1976–79). In 1958 he also obtained a teaching post at the Technical University of Clausthal. He became professor emeritus in 1979, but continued to teach musicology courses at the University of Göttingen.

Boetticher specialized in the music of the Renaissance and the 19th century. His vast output, particularly on Lassus and Schumann, has made significant contributions to research in these areas; many of his articles have been published in Festschriften and congress reports. In the 1980s he became the centre of controversy when questions were raised about his involvement in the confiscation of property under German occupation during World War II, prompting investigations into his affiliation with Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and leading to his suspension from teaching in 1998.

WRITINGS

‘Robert Schumann in seinen Beziehungen zu Johannes Brahms’, Die Musik, xxix (1936–7), 548–54

‘Grenzen einer Philosophie der Musikgeschichte’, Die Musik, xxxi (1938–9), 672–7

Robert Schumann: Einführung in Persönlichkeit und Werk (diss., U. of Berlin, 1939; Berlin, 1941)

‘Zur Erkenntnis von Rasse und Volkstum in der Musik’, Musik im Volk, ed. W. Stumme (Berlin, 1939), 217–29

Robert Schumann in seinen Schriften und Briefen (Berlin, 1942)

‘Neue Mozartiana: Skizzen und Entwürfe’, Neues Mozart-Jb 1943, 144–84

Studien zur solistischen Lautenpraxis des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Berlin, 1943; Berlin, 1943)

‘Neue Lasso-Funde’, Mf, viii (1955), 385–97

‘Studien zur Musikgeschichte Münchens im Zeitalter der Spätrenaissance’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, xix (1956), 459–533

Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit, i: Monographie (Kassel, 1958); ii: Verzeichnis der Werke (Wilhelmshaven, 1997)

‘Über Entwicklung und den gegenwärtigen Stand der Gluck-Edition’, AcM, xxx (1958), 99–112

Von Palestrina zu Bach (Stuttgart, 1959, 2/1981)

‘Eine französische Bicinien-Ausgabe als frühmonodisches Dokument’, Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Regensburg, 1962), 67–76

‘Neue Materialen zu Robert Schumanns Wiener Bekanntenkreis’, SMw, xxv (1962), 35–55

Aus Orlando di Lassos Wirkungskreis (Kassel, 1963)

Neue Forschungsergebnisse im Gebiet der musikalischen Renaissance (Göttingen, 1964)

‘Zur Kompositionstechnik des späten Bruckner’, Bruckner Studien: Leopold Nowak zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. F. Grasberger (Vienna, 1964), 11–19

‘Über einige neue Werke aus Orlando di Lassos mittlerer Madrigal- und Motettenkomposition (1567–1569)’, AMw, xxii (1965), 12–42

‘Neue textkritische Forschungen an Robert Schumanns Klavierwerk’, AMw, xxv (1968), 46–76

‘Weitere Beiträge zur Lasso-Forschung’, Renaissance-muziek 1400–1600: donum natalicium René Bernard Lenaerts, ed. J. Robijns and others (Leuven, 1969), 61–70

‘Zum Problem der Entlehnungen im frühen Klavierwerk Robert und Clara Schumanns’, Speculum musicae artis: Festgabe für Heinrich Husmann, ed. H. Becker and R. Gerlach (Munich, 1970), 63–73

‘Über Stand und Aufgaben der Erforschung der Tabulaturen für Zupf- und Streichinstrumente’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 50–63

‘Zum Problem der letzten Streichquartette Beethovens’, MZ, ix (1973), 35–49

‘Anticipations of Dramatic Monody in the Late Works of Lassus’, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. F.W. Sternfeld, N. Fortune and E. Olleson (Oxford, 1975), 78–91

Robert Schumanns Klavierwerke: neue biographische und textkritische Untersuchungen, i–ii (Wilhelmshaven, 1976–84)

‘Neue Schumanniana’, MZ, xiv (1978), 64–72

‘Zur inhaltliche Bestimmung des für Laute intavolierten Handschriftenbestands’, AcM, li (1978), 193–203

ed.: Handschriftlich überlieferte Lauten- und Gitarrentabulaturen des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, RISM, B/VII (1978)

Briefe und Gedichte aus dem Album Robert und Clara Schumanns nach Quellen der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek Dresden (Leipzig, 1979, 2/1981)

‘Zur Kompositionstechnik und Originalfassung von R. Schumanns III. Sinfonie’, AcM, liii (1981), 144–56

Einführung in die musikalische Romantik (Wilhelmshaven, 1983)

‘Die frühe Göttinger Händelrenaissance: Versuch einer Würdigung’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, ii (1986), 207–20

‘Jacobus Gallus und Orlando di Lasso: Einige Betrachtungen zum Problem des Stilvergleichs in Motettenrepertoire’, MZ, xxii (1986), 5–13

Geschichte der Motette (Darmstadt, 1989)

‘Das Fortleben Händels in der Geisteswelt Robert Schumanns’, Georg Friedrich Händel: ein Lebensinhalt: Gedenkschrift für Bernd Baselt (1934–1993), ed. K. Hortschansky and K. Musketa (Kassel, 1995), 289–96

EDITIONS

Orlando di Lasso: Sämtliche Werke, neue Reihe, i: Lateinische Motetten, französische Chansons und italienische Madrigale aus wiederaufgefundenen Drucken 1559–1588 (Kassel, 1956, enlarged 2/1989); xix: Lectiones (Kassel, 1989)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Hüschen and D.-R. Moser, eds.: Convivium musicorum: Festschrift Wolfgang Boetticher (Berlin, 1974) [incl. list of pubns to 1974]

N. O’Regan: ‘The Early Polychoral Music of Orlando di Lasso: New Light from Roman Sources’, AcM, lvi (1984), 234–51

A. Dümling: ‘Wie schuldig sind die Musikwissenschaftler: zur Rolle von Wolfgang Boetticher und Hans-Joachim Moser im NS-Musikleben’, Neue Musikzeitung, xxxix/5 (1990), 9 only

W. de Vries: Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe (Amsterdam, 1996)

PAMELA M. POTTER

Boetzelaer [née van Aerssen], Josina Anna Petronella van

(b The Hague, 3 Jan 1733; d Ijsselstein, 3 Sept 1787). Dutch composer. She is one of the few 18th-century Dutch composers, and one of only two Dutch women composers of the period whose music survives. She was born a baroness and served as a lady of the court, first to Princess Anna of Hanover, wife of Stadtholder Willem IV, and later to her daughter Princess Caroline. Both princesses were accomplished musicians and van Boetzelaer may have participated in music-making in court circles. She later studied music with F.P. Ricci, who was regularly engaged as a violinist by the House of Orange, and published ariettas, canzonettas and arias. Her two surviving collections of arias with orchestral accompaniment, opp.2 and 4, set texts by Metastasio in an expressive mid-18th-century opera seria style. They are well-balanced, light and elegant pieces in shortened de capo or bipartite form with effective pictorialism and coloratura. Ricci played some of her pieces on a visit to Metastasio, probably in 1780.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

H. Metzelaar: ‘An Unknown 18th-Century Dutch Woman Composer: Josina Boetzelaer (1733–1797)’, TVNM, x1/2 (1990), 3–56

H. Metzelaar: From Private to Public Spheres: Exploring Women's Role in Dutch Musical Life from c.1700 to c.1880 and Three Case Studies (Utrecht, 1999)

HELEN METZELAAR

Boeuf, Georges

(b Marseilles, 21 Dec 1937). French composer. He studied composition at the Marseilles Conservatoire (where he was appointed professor of composition in 1988) and the organ with Pierre Cochereau in Nice. One of the founders of the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Marseille in 1969, he became the ensemble's director in 1974. As a composer, he has written electro-acoustic, vocal and instrumental works, all based on a similar aesthetic. Boucles (1979), the second of the Préludes, op.15 for piano, emphasizes the acoustic effects of attacks, while Les filles du sommeil (1987), an electro-acoustic work, recreates the impressionistic textures of a large orchestra. In the String Quartet (1996), contrapuntal passages alternate with sections in which the individuality of the instruments is lost in an indistinct mass of sound. While Boeuf has demonstrated a fondness for free pulsations in which harmonic blocks clash with a Stravinskian vigour, he is equally at ease with melodic invention, as the slower passages of Où il est question d'un coucher de soleil (1989), Le vol de Cornélius (1990) and the opera Verlaine Paul (1995) demonstrate. In other works, most notably Risées (1994), he has sought a harmonic climate of refined colouring focussed on powerful centres of attraction, but not alluding to tonality.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Verlaine Paul (F. Venaille), op.62, 1995, Nancy, 29 Oct 1996

Orch: Transparences, op.6, str, 1972; Où il est question d'un coucher de soleil, op.49, vc, orch, 1989; Risées, op.58, chbr orch, 1994; Orbes, op.64, str, 1997

Vocal: A la mystérieuse (R. Desnos), op.37, Mez, pf, 1986; Miroir/Absence (A. Bosquet), op.41, 12vv, 1987; Le pays pesant (E. Jabes), op.59, Bar, insts, 1993; L'écho de ton nom (E. Aubert), op.61, 4vv, 4 insts, 1995

Chbr and solo inst: Parallèles, op.2, sax qt, 1967; 7 préludes, op.46, pic, 1988; Le vol de Cornélius, op.49, basset hn, str qt, 1990; 6 chants pour la terre, op.55, 6 perc, 1991; WYW, op.60, wind qnt, 1995; Str Qt, op.63, 1996

Pf: Forme de l'absence, op.14, 1978; Préludes, op.15, 1979; 8 variations contrapuntiques, op.30, 1984; Nocturne, op.35, pf + sampler, 1985; Prélude ‘Forme’, op.48, 1989

Tape: Le départ pour la lune, op.5, 1972; Mémoire, op.4, 1972; Le sang des uns, op.7, 1973; Champs, op.9, 1975; Abyssi symphonia, op.18, 1980; Les filles du sommeil, op.39, 1987; Le chant de la nature, op.57, 1992

Principal publishers: CY, Billaudot, Leduc

GÉRARD CONDÉ

Bogard, Jean

(b Leuven, ?c1531; d Leuven, 17 Feb 1616). Flemish bookseller and printer. He worked initially at Leuven (1562–72) but by 1574 was settled in Douai, where he had moved to avoid political turmoil; in both towns his sign was the Bible d’Or. At Leuven he printed ‘with the authority of the University’ and at Douai he became University Printer, receiving in 1590 the freehold of his premises. Bogard returned to Leuven in 1586 to re-open the office there, leaving his son Jean (b Leuven, 29 March 1561; d Douai, ?July 1627) to manage the Douai office in his absence. Publication continued at Leuven until 1598; thereafter the firm operated only at Douai. In 1607 Bogard’s wife died, and shortly afterwards he retired to Leuven, marrying again in 1610 and spending his final years there. His son Jean succeeded him as head of the firm in 1607, a position he held for 20 years. In 1627 the business passed to his heirs. Jean (ii)’s son Pierre (b Douai, 22 March 1596; d Douai, ?c1638) continued to print at the Bible d’Or from 1628 to 1633, sometimes in partnership with his brother Martin (d 1636). Martin’s widow remarried in 1637 and Pierre’s in 1639, and the business declined; by 1655 debts owing to the firm of Phalèse (119 florins 12 stuivers) were written off as irrecoverable.

The Bogard family had close links with other printers and humanists, as well as extensive commercial dealings with the firms of Phalèse and Plantin. One of Jean (i)’s daughters married Balthazar Bellère, the son of Phalèse’s associate, Jean Bellère of Antwerp; Balthazar printed at Douai from 1593 to 1639. No music was published by Bogard at Leuven, in deference to Phalèse’s position there, but it was an important part of his operations at Douai. The firm’s output comprised about 500 books, mostly theology, literature and schoolbooks, but a tenth of the total was music. 20 volumes of masses, motets and chansons published between 1578 and 1633 have survived, and a further 34 are listed either in the Plantin archives (at B-Amp) or in the catalogues of the Frankfurt book sales and those published by Balthazar Bellère between 1598 and 1636. A wide range of composers is featured including Ath, Beauvarlet, Bournonville, Jean de Castro, Gallet, Handl, van Heymissen, Machgielz, Marissal, Maulgred, Pennequin, Pevernage, the Regnart brothers and Jan van Turnhout; Bogard also reprinted popular collections, such as Phalèse’s Livre 7 des chansons vulgaires and Gastoldi’s Balletti a 5 voci. Bogard appears to have acquired various printing materials from Phalèse. His 1578 publication of Pevernage’s Cantiones aliquot sacrae employs a title-page border typical of Phalèse, and with similar large decorative initials and is described as being printed ‘typis Phalesii’; the music type is identical to that used by Pierre Phalèse (i).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GoovaertsH

H.-R. Duthilloeul: Bibliographie douaisienne, i (Paris, 1842)

J.A. Stellfeld: ‘Het muziekhistorisch belang der Catalogi en Inventarissen van het Plantinsch Archief’, Vlaams jb voor Musiekgeschiedenis, ii–iii (1941), 5–50

J.A. Stellfeld: Andries Pevernage (Leuven, 1943) [with list of Bogard’s music pubns, p.144]

S. Bain: Music Printing in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974)

A. Rouzet: Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop, 1975)

A. Labarre: ‘Les catalogues de Balthasar Bellère à Douai 1598–1636’, Gutenberg Jb, lv (1980), 151–4

A. Labarre: ‘Les imprimeurs et libraires de Douai au XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Liber Amicorum Leon Voet, ed. F. de Nave (Antwerp, 1985), 241–60

G. Persoons: ‘Joannes I Bogardus, Jean II Bogard en Pierre Bogard als muziekdrukkers te Douai van 1574 tot 1633 en hun betrekkingen met de Officina Plantiniana’, De Gulden Passer, lxvi–lxvii (1988–89), 613–66 [With Fr. summary, and bibliography of all known and attrib. music pubns]

SUSAN BAIN

Bogatïryov, Semyon Semyonovich

(b Kharkiv, 3/16 Feb 1890; d Moscow, 31 Dec 1960). Russian musicologist and composer. He studied law at Khar'kiv University (1907–12) and composition at the St Petersburg Conservatory with Vītols, Kalafati and Steinberg (1912–15). He subsequently taught there, and at the Khar'kiv Conservatory (1917–19); he was rector and professor (1919–22) at the Kuban' Conservatory and a lecturer in theory and composition (1922–41) at the Kharkiv Institute of Music and Drama (later a conservatory). During World War II he worked at the Kiev Conservatory, which had been evacuated to Sverdlovsk; from 1943 he was a professor of composition and counterpoint, and also pro-rector and dean of the department of theory and composition at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1947 he took the doctorate with a work on double canon.

Bogatïryov’s work was chiefly concerned with the development of a theory of counterpoint, on which he was the USSR’s leading authority. He followed Taneyev’s ideas of a mathematicized process for discovering contrapuntal combinations. In Obratimïy kontrapunkt (‘Retrograde Counterpoint’), his most important work, he probed the natural laws of retrograde, mirror and (in part) cancrizans counterpoint, which were previously little studied. Although it offers solutions to the problems of reviving counterpoint in 20th-century European music, Bogatïryov himself had little taste for contemporary music, despite his intensive study of Hindemith and Schoenberg. As a composer he was stylistically close to Russian academicism of the late 19th century. He wrote a number of symphonic and chamber works. His editing and completion (1951–5) of the orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s E symphony (1892) has won recognition.

WORKS

Orch: Ov., 1916; Ov.-ballade, 1926; Scherzo-ov., 1927; Variations, 1932; Suite, 1956

Inst: 2 str qts, 1916; 1924; Suite, str qt, 1955; 2 pf sonatas, 1914, 1925; other inst works

Songs, choral songs

WRITINGS

Dvoynoy kanon [Double canon] (diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1947; Moscow, 1947)

Obratimïy kontrapunkt [Retrograde counterpoint] (Moscow, 1960)

ed. G.A. Tyumeneva and Yu.N. Kholopov: S.S. Bogatïryov: issledovaniya, stat'i, vospominaniya [Research, articles, reminiscences] (Moscow, 1972) [incl. articles on Bach, Rachmaninoff, Scarlatti, Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, SovM (1961), no.2, p.208 only

L.A. Mazel': ‘Oblik blagorodnogo cheloveka’ [The portrait of a noble person], SovM (1966), no.3, pp.32–5

V. Blok: ‘Vozrozhdyonnaya simfoniya Chaykovskogo’ [A resurrected symphony by Tchaikovsky], Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1976), no.20, pp.8–9

V.S. Tol'ba: ‘Moy uchitel'’ [My teacher], Stat'i, vospominaniya (Kiev, 1986), 1–13

L.M. BUTIR/LYUDMILA KORABEL'NIKOVA

Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian Mikhaylovich

(b Starozhilovka, nr St Petersburg, 17 July 1903; d Moscow, 13 May 1971). Russian critic and composer. His father was a leading laryngologist and specialist in the teaching of the deaf and dumb. His mother possessed literary gifts, and the whole family took a keen interest in the arts. However, on his father’s insistence Bogdanov-Berezovsky attended the Nikolayevsky military school (1914–17).

He began to compose in childhood, and on the advice of Ziloti, a friend of the family, took lessons with V.M. Belyayev (1918–19). He entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919 to study composition with Steinberg and piano with Daugovet. He studied counterpoint first with N. Sokolov and then with A. Lyapunov, and instrumentation with A. Zhitomirsky. His father’s death forced him to discontinue his piano studies at the Conservatory and take a job as a medical orderly on the ship Narodovlets. As a result, in 1924 he was dismissed from the Conservatory, but taken back in 1925 into Vladimir Shcherbachyov’s composition class.

As a student, Bogdanov-Berezovsky was a close friend of Shostakovich; the two saw each other daily and also corresponded – the former claimed to possess approximately a hundred letters from Shostakovich. The two were members of a student circle of composers. While Shostakovich exerted a strong compositional influence on Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the latter influenced his younger friend in literary matters.

During the late 1920s Bogdanov-Berezovsky struck up a friendship with Shaporin and Popov, corresponded with Boleslav Yavorsky, and was an accompanist at classes of the great ballerinas Ol'ga Spesivtseva and Lidiya Ivanova before the latter’s tragic death. He began critical work at this time and quickly established himself as one of Leningrad’s leading music critics; he began on the staff of the journal Rabochiy i teatr (‘The worker and theatre’). After graduating from the conservatory in 1927 he was an active propagandist for contemporary music, both Western and Soviet, and he worked closely with Asaf'yev and others in the Leningrad Association for Contemporary Music and with other professional music associations. He also completed important studies of Soviet opera and of Tchaikovsky’s stage works, and in 1940 he was appointed principal teacher of the history of Soviet music at the Leningrad Conservatory. Outstanding compositions of this period include the First Symphony, the Piano Concerto and the opera Granitsa (‘The Frontier’). Critics have seen in his music not only an adherence to older Russian musical traditions but also the impact of many of the leading figures of the 1920s.

Bogdanov-Berezovsky remained in Leningrad during the war as chairman of the board of the Leningrad Composers’ Union, replacing Shostakovich, who had left the city. He devoted himself to administrative and mass-cultural work, wrote the opera Leningradtsï and was among the first to receive the Medal for the Defence of Leningrad (1943). After the war he worked intensively in both composition and musicology. He collaborated in the Leningrad Institute for Scholarship and Research in the Theatre and Music from 1946, and in 1947 he obtained the degree of kandidat of arts. In addition he directed the repertory division of the Malïy Opera Theatre (1951–61) and the music-theatre section of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, later heading its musicology and criticism section.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Granitsa/Doch' Barmaka [The Frontier/Barmak’s Daughter] (Bogdanov-Berezovsky), op.20, 1936–40, perf. 1941; Leningradtsï [The Lenigraders] (V. Ketlinskaya), op.29, 1942–5; Nastas'ya Filippovna (Bogdanov-Berezovsky, after F.M. Dostoyevsky: The Idiot), op.50, 1963–4, concert perf. 1968

Ballets: Devushka s krïl'yami [The Girl with Wings] (R. Zakharov), op.37, 1950; Sïn polka [Son of the Regiment] (L. Del'-Lyubashevsky and B. Fenster), op.46, 1955; Chayka [The Seagull] (B. Glovatsky, after A.P. Chekhov), op.49, 1960; Rovesniki, unfinished

Inst: Allegro de concert, pf, orch, op.33, 1921; Sym. no.1 (V. Mayakovsky), op.14, 1932–40; Pf Conc., op.17, 1937; Vn Conc., op.23, 1940–48, rev. 1958; Russkiye peyzazhi [Russian Landscapes], op.27, pf, 1945; Portretï druzey [The Portraits of Friends], 24 preludes, op.33, pf, 1947–8, 1953–4; Pf Sonata, op.24, 1948, rev. as Pf Qnt, 1954; Vn Sonata, op.41, 1951, rev. as Sinfonietta-Concertino, 1957; Vc Sonata, op.40, 1951; Sym. no.2 ‘Povest' o geroye nashego vremeni’ [Story of a Hero of our Time], op.42b, 1952; Theme and Variations, va, pf, op.44, 1956; 10 Miniatures, op.33, orch, 1961; Sonata, op.51, 2 vc, 1964; Sym. no.3, unfinished

Many vocal works incl.: Basni Krï'lova [Krï'lov’s Fables], op.28, S, B, 1944; Gruzinskiye romantiki [Georgian Romantics], op.26, 1946; and songs to words by A.S. Pushkin, Mayakovsky and M. Lermontov

Principal publishers: Muzfond, Muzgiz, Sovetskiy Kompozitor, Triton

WRITINGS

Opernoye i baletnoye tvorchestvo Chaykovskogo [Tchaikovsky’s operas and ballets] (Leningrad and Moscow, 1940)

Sovetskaya opera (Leningrad and Moscow, 1940)

Galina Ulanova (Moscow, 1949, 2/1961; Eng. trans., 1952)

‘Tvorcheskiy oblik Rakhmaninova’ [The creative character of Rachmaninoff], Molodïye godï Sergeya Vasil'yevicha Rakhmaninova (Leningrad, 1949), 111–55

ed.: Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka: literaturnoye naslediye [Glinka’s literary heritage] (Leningrad, 1952–3)

Sovetskiy dirizhyor: ocherk deyatel'nosti Ye.A. Mravinskogo (Leningrad, 1956)

Leningradskiy gosudarstvennïy akademischeskiy teatr operï i baleta imeni S.M. Kirova (Leningrad, 1959)

Stat'i o muzïke [Essays on music] (Leningrad, 1960)

Stat'i o balete [Essays on ballet] (Leningrad, 1962)

ed.: Igor' Stravinsky: khronika moyey zhizni [Stravinsky: chronicles of my life] (Leningrad, 1963) [trans. of I. Stravinsky: Chronicles de ma vie, Paris, 1935/R, incl. introductory essay by Bogdanov-Berezovsky]

Stranitsï muzïkal'noy publitsistiki [Pages of music journalism] (Leningrad, 1963)

Aleksandr Moiseyevich Veprik: ocherk zhizni i tvorshestva [A.M. Veprik: a sketch of his life and work] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964)

ed.: Reyngol'd Moritsevich Glier: stat'i, vospominaniya, materiali [R.M. Glier: articles, reminiscences, materials] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1965–7)

ed.: Muzïkal'naya kul'tura Leningrada za 50 let: muzïkal'no-istoricheskiye ocherki [50 years of musical culture in Leningrad: musical-historical essays] (1967) [incl. introductory essay by Bogdanov-Berezovsky]

Vstrechi [Encounters] (Moscow, 1967) [memoirs]

Dorogi iskusstva [Paths of art], i (Leningrad, 1971) [memoirs]

Monographs on composers and performers, essays in periodicals and symposia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Gusin: Valerian Mikhaylovich Bogdanov-Berezovsky (Moscow and Leningrad, 1966)

Obituary, SovM (1971), no.9, p.144 only

L. Dan'ko: ‘Novaya opera na syuzhet Dostoyevskogo’ [A new opera on a subject by Dostoyevsky], Musïk i muzïkanti' Leningrada, ed. L.N. Raaben, Ye.A. Ruch'yevskaya and A.N. Sokhor (Leningrad and Moscow, 1972), 33–40

Yu. Vaynkop: ‘O Valeriane Mikhayloviche Bogdanove-Berezovskon, ushedshiye mastera’ [About V.M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, a departing master], Muzïka i zhizn', ii (1973), 231–41

V.M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky: stat'i, vospominaniya, pis'ma (Leningrad and Moscow, 1978)

L.M. BUTIR/LYUDMILA KOVNATSKAYA

Bogenflügel

(Ger.).

Bowed piano. See Sostenente piano, §1.

Bogenhammerklavier

(Ger.).

See Sostenente piano, §1.

Bogenharfe

(Ger.).

See Bow harp.

Bogenklavier

(Ger.: ‘bowed keyboard instrument’).

See Sostenente piano, §1.

Bogentantz [Bogentanz, Bewgintancz], Bernhard

(b?Liegnitz [now Legnica], c1494; d after 1527). German theorist. The family residence in Liegnitz is documented from 1381, but the name is absent from the town records begun in 1546. Bogentantz attended the Gymnasium in Goldberg, and in 1508 he matriculated in the faculty of arts of Cologne University, where he may have been the pupil of Cochlaeus and fellow student of Glarean. In 1516 he was granted the status of magister, and he probably taught there for two years in accordance with the faculty regulations. In 1525 he matriculated at Wittenberg University, perhaps to study theology; he returned to Liegnitz in 1527. No documents have been found to support Bauch’s theory that Bogentantz was rector of the parish school of St Peter and St Paul Liegnitz, from about 1530.

Bogentantz wrote a music treatise, Collectanea utriusque cantus … musicam discere cupientibus oppido necessaria (Cologne, 1515, 2/1519, 3/1528, 4/1535; the third and fourth editions were called Rudimenta utrius cantus). It is divided into two books: the first (six chapters) deals with musica plana, the second (13 chapters) with musica mensuralis. It is a typical humanistic school manual, and closely follows the pattern of other German examples by Rhau, Listenius, Sebald Heyden and Martin Agricola. For his sources Bogentantz used mainly Gaffurius’s Practica musice (Milan, 1496) and Cochlaeus’s Musica (Cologne, 3/1507), often quoting directly both text and music examples.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Pietzsch: ‘Zur Pflege der Musik an den deutschen Universitäten bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, AMf, v (1940), 65–83, vii (1942), 90–109, 154–64

H. Hüschen: Der Musiktraktat des Bernhard Bogentantz (diss., U. of Cologne, 1943)

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Zur Biographie des Kölner Musiktheoretikers Bernhardin Bogentantz’, Mitteilungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für rhein. Musikgeschichte, no.7 (1957), 98–109; no.8 (1957), 118–19

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Die Kölner Musiktheoretische Schule des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Renaissance-muziek 1400–1600: donum natalicium René Bernard Lenaerts, ed. J. Robijns and others (Leuven, 1969), 121–30

A.M. Busse Berger: Mensuration and Proportion Signs: Origins and Evolution (Oxford, 1993)

HEINRICH HÜSCHEN/R

Boghen, (Carlo) Felice

(b Venice, 23 Jan 1869; d Florence, 25 Jan 1945). Italian pianist, music scholar and composer. Having taken diplomas in piano and composition at the Bologna Liceo Musicale where he studied with Giuseppe Martucci, Gustavo Tofano and Alessandro Busi, he continued his training in Rome with Sgambati. Later he also studied the piano in Munich with Martin Krause and Bernhard Stavenhagen (both pupils of Liszt), and composition with Wolf-Ferrari. On his return to Italy he devoted himself to conducting and playing the piano in Viterbo, Carrara and Reggio nell’Emilia; he was also director of the school of music in Reggio nell’Emilia. In 1910 he became a teacher of harmony and score-reading at the Istituto Musicale in Florence. From that time onwards he increased his activity as a pianist, playing in the Florentine Trio (with Tignani and Coen) and with the Florentine Sextet for piano and wind which he founded in 1925. He was a member of the philharmonic societies of Bologna, Florence and Rome, and a member of the Société des Musicologues Français. As a Jew, he was forced by the racial laws to give up all his public posts in 1939. A meticulous scholar, Boghen worked mainly with early music. He made editions of old French songs, piano arrangements of pieces by Bach, Liszt, Marcello, Clementi, Frescobaldi, Domenico Scarlatti and Bernardo Pasquini, as well as arrangements for violin and piano of pieces by Tartini, Nardini and Veracini. His compositions include an unperformed opera Alceste, held in high regard by Sgambati and others, vocal and chamber works and many piano pieces; he also wrote books on keyboard technique and on the composers Pasquini and Busoni.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Alceste (op, U. Fleres), unperf.; Salutazione angelica, chorus (Florence, 1913); Maggiolata popolare (A. Poliziano), chorus (Milan, 1934); Missa puerorum, unison vv, org (Milan, 1936); Mnemosyne (G. Lesca), poemetto, 1v, pf; Stornelli patriottici, 1v, pf

Chbr: Fantasia, hp, pf (Milan, 1915); Notturno, vn/vc, pf (Rome, 1930); Sonata, vn, pf (Milan, 1933–4)

Pf: Forse che sì, forse che no: novelletta (Milan, 1910); 6 paesaggi musicali (Milan, 1910); Corale sopra un tema di G.S. Bach (Milan, 1912); Esempi per 6 studi delle modulazioni (Florence, 1914); 6 fughe (Milan, 1915); 3 preludi (Florence, 1923); Preludio satirico (Florence, 1931); Pastorale (Florence, 1936)

WRITINGS

with G. Sgambati: Appunti ed esempi per l’uso dei pedali del pianoforte (Milan, 1915)

‘Ancora a proposito di tecnica pianistica’, Il pianoforte, i/7 (1920), 6–8

L’arte di Pasquini (Milan, 1931)

L’italianità di Busoni (Florence, 1938)

EDITIONS

Fughe per clavicembalo o pianoforte di antichi maestri italiani (Milan, 1918)

G. Frescobaldi: 6 ricercari (Florence, 1918)

G. Frescobaldi: 15 capricci (Florence, 1919)

G. Frescobaldi: 6 madrigali a cinque voci (London, 1920)

G. Frescobaldi: 25 canzoni (Milan, 1922)

Partite e correnti per clavicembalo o pianoforte d’antichi maestri italiani (Milan, 1922)

D. Cimarosa: 32 sonates pour piano (Paris, 1925–6)

G. Frescobaldi: 7 toccate (Milan, 1928)

A. Scarlatti : Stabat mater (Milan, 1928)

G. Frescobaldi: 9 toccate (Paris, 1930)

with A. Bonaventura: G. Frescobaldi: Primo libro d’arie musicali (Florence, 1933)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella); NewmanSCE

L. Parigi: ‘Boghen’, Critica musicale, ii (1919), 92–3

A. Lualdi: Il rinnovamento musicale italiano (Milan, 1931), 84

R. Lunelli: ‘Felice Boghen: Missa puerorum’, RMI, xliii (1939), 480 only

G. DiMauro: ‘Italian Jewish Musicians in Western Musical Tradition, II’, Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy, xiii (1990–91), 24–32

DINA ZANETTI MASIELLO/CLAUDIO TOSCANI

Bogianckino, Massimo

(b Rome, 10 Nov 1922). Italian administrator, pianist and musicologist. He was a piano pupil of Casella at the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome, and of Cortot at the Ecole Normale de Musique, Paris; he also studied composition with Virgilio Mortari and musicology with Luigi Ronga at the University of Rome and P.M. Masson at the Sorbonne. After performing widely in Europe and the USA, he devoted himself to teaching and musicology, holding posts at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1948–51), the Pesaro Conservatory (1951–7), the Rome Conservatory (1957–67) and Perugia University (1967–94). In 1978 he founded the periodical Esercizi: arte musica spettacolo. His book L'arte clavicembalistica di Domenico Scarlatti, prompted by his own playing, was one of the first to approach the subject in the context of both historical background and stylistic criticism. In addition to serving as director of Enciclopedia dello spettacolo (1958–62) he has held a number of administrative positions as artistic director of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana (1961–3), the Teatro dell'Opera, Rome (1963–8), the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds (1968–71), the Accademia di S Cecilia concerts (1971), La Scala (1972–4) and Sagra Musicale Umbra (1994–5), general manager of the Teatro Comunale, Florence (1975–82, 1990–95) and general administrator of the Paris Opéra (1982–5). He has been active in reviving music of the past as well as presiding over the creation of contemporary music falling within the most significant 20th-century trends. He has acted as a catalyst for collaboration between composers, performers, designers, directors and choreographers.

WRITINGS

L'arte clavicembalistica di Domenico Scarlatti (Rome, 1956; Eng. trans., 1967)

Aspetti del teatro musicale in Italia e in Francia nell'età Barocca (Rome, 1967)

‘L’interpretazione scenografica del melodramma’, Esercizi: arte musica spettacolo, ii (1979), 81–102

‘Sui madrigali e sulle canzonette di Vincenzo Cossa, musicistra perugino’, Arte e musica in Umbria tra Cinquecento e Seicento: Gubbio and Gualdo Tadino 1979, 201–74

CAROLYN GIANTURCO/BIANCAMARIA BRUMANA

Boglhat, Johannes de.

See Buglhat, Johannes de.

Boglietti, Alexander de.

See Poglietti, Alessandro.

Bogoslovsky, Nikita Vladimirovich

(b St Petersburg, 9/22 May 1913). Russian composer. A nobleman by descent, he received private lessons in composition from Glazunov (1927–8) and was an external student at the Leningrad Conservatory where he studied composition with P.B. Ryazanov and theoretical disciplines with Kh.S. Kushnaryov, Shteynberg and Shcherbachyov (1930–34). He avoided taking up official posts in favour of creative work. He became vice-president of the USSR-France Society in 1965 and a People's Artist of the USSR in 1983.

Bogoslovsky gained popularity through his songs of which he wrote more than 500. The most popular of these date from the pre-war and war years. As a rule they were written for films (such as Istrebiteli (‘Fighter Planes’) of 1939 and Dva boytsa (‘Two Fighting Men’) of 1942), but afterwards they came into vogue on their own account. In these songs Bogoslovsky showed himself to be a talented melodist and a sincere lyricist; he also diplays a gift as a humorist, and frequently incorporates into his songs the slang and atmosphere of the Odessa criminal underworld. His large-scale works such as symphonies and operas bear the stamp of his songs. Thus, the second and third symphonies (in C minor, 1956, and G minor, 1959), and also the symphonic narrative based on Tvardovsky's Vasily Tyorkin (1950, rev. 1963) are linked, in terms of their themes and general musical character, to his work as a songwriter. ‘The Theatrical Symphony’ (his Fifth Symphony in A minor, 1980) reflects Bogoslovsky's attraction towards the theatricality of dramatic art. In the lyrical dramas Neznakomka (‘The Unknown Woman’) and Balaganchik (‘The Little Booth-Show’), after Aleksandr Blok, the reading of the poetical texts alternates with music which enhances their effectiveness and which provides a background commentary. Bogoslovsky also gained popularity as a gifted man of letters of a markedly satirical cast. He is the author of the roguish novel Zaveshchaniya Glinki [Glinka's Testaments] (published in 1993), Zametki na polyakh shlyapï [Notes on the Brim of a Hat], To bïlo i chego ne bïlo [What Happened and what did not Happen] (1996), and also numerous publications in newspapers and journals.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Sol' [Salt] (op, 2 scenes, B. Kornilov, after I. Babel'), 1932–80, The Moscow Chamber Theatre of Music, 1980; Neznakomka [The Unknown Woman] (lyrical drama, after A. Blok), 1972, The Moscow Chamber Theatre of Music, 1982; Balaganchik [The Little Booth-Show] (lyrical drama, after Blok), 1976; The Moscow Chamber Theatre of Music, 1982; 17 operettas and musical comedies, incl. Odinnadtsat' neizvestnïkh [11 Strangers] (V. Dïkhovichnïy, M. Slobodsky and B. Laskin), 1946; Allo, Varshava! [Hello, Warsaw!] (Ya. Ziskind), 1967; Vesna v Moskve [Spring in Moscow] (V. Gusev and V. Vinnikov), 1972

8 syms.: no.1, f, 1940; no.2, c, folk insts, 1956; no.3, g, folk insts, 1959; no.4, ‘Pastoral'naya’ [The Pastoral], D, 1979–80; no.5, ‘Teatral'naya’ [The Theatrical], a, 1980; no.6, E, 1983; no.7, C, 1983; no.8, c, 1986

Other orch: Vasily Tyorkin, sym. poem after A. Tvardovsky, 1950, rev. 1963

52 incid music scores, 59 film scores and 49 cartoon scores

c200 songs in five published collections

MSS in Russian State Archives for Literature and Art

Principal publishers: Kompozitor, Iskusstvo, Pravda, Vagrius

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDRSC

K. Tarnovsky: Kompozitor Nikita Bogoslovsky (Moscow, 1984)

MARINA NEST'YEVA

Bogotá.

Colombian capital city. It was founded in 1538 by the Spanish Conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada on the site of a Chibcha settlement. In 1564 Santa Fe de Bogotá became the seat of an archdiocese. Protected by the inaccessibility of its inland site at a height of 2640 metres, the cathedral of Bogotá preserved its colonial music treasure long after other South American cathedrals had been pillaged.

The first mestizo maestro de capilla, Gonzalo García Zorro (1548–1617), was succeeded from May 1584 to January 1586 by Fernández Hidalgo, the greatest South American composer of his epoch. Hidalgo’s surviving manuscripts at Bogotá consist of Vespers or compline music that bears comparison with the best works in the printed and manuscript collections by Morales, Guerrero, Rodrigo Ceballos, Victoria and other leading European composers that were purchased for Bogotá Cathedral during his epoch and later. The earliest Bogotá maestro de capilla of whom vernacular works survive was José de Cascante, active from about 1650 until his death in 1702. His successor was Juan de Herrera, the most prolific and talented colonial composer born in Bogotá. At least 25 other notable local musicians of the 18th century are known from Bogotá Cathedral documentation. Throughout the colonial epoch the local musical life reflected tastes in Europe, ranging from Renaissance a cappella music to Haydn and Neukomm masses. A special endowment for musicians was established by Archbishop Antonio Sanz Lozano in 1687, and income from his fund enabled the cathedral to continue hiring competent professionals after Colombia became independent in 1819.

In the 19th century Italian opera became popular among the cultured at Bogotá, as it did elsewhere in South America. The national anthem, Oh gloria inmarcesible!, was composed in 1887 by an emigrant Italian operatic tenor, Oreste Sindici (1837–1904), who reached Bogotá with a touring company in 1864. His masses and motets contain echoes of Rossini’s Tancredi and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Before the adoption of his national anthem, six others had temporarily been used. Henry Price (1819–63), who composed the music for the third, founded the Sociedad Filarmónica in 1847 with 55 orchestral players, but in 1854 political unrest drove him back to New York. Among his first violins was Juan de Jesús Buitrago, later the first teacher and the European travelling companion of E.A. MacDowell. Prominent musicians in 19th-century Bogotá also included Nicolás Quevedo Rachadell (1803–74), Eugenio Salas (1823–53), Julio Quevedo Arvelo (1829–97), Vicente Vargas de la Rosa (1833–98), Diego Fallón (1834–1905) and José María Ponce de León (1846–82), who was the first composer of Colombian operas (Ester, 1874, and Florinda, 1880). The first Colombian to publish theoretical works was Santos Cifuentes Rodriguez (1870–1932), whose Tratado de armonia was published in London by Novello (1892), and whose Teoria de la música appeared at Bogotá in 1907.

In 1882 J.W. Price founded the Academia Nacional de Música, which became the national conservatory in 1909. In 1936 Guillermo Espinosa founded the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, the name of which was changed to Orquesta Sinfónica de Colombia in 1952, upon the appointment of the Estonian Olav Roots as director. Others prominent in the musical life of Bogotá in the 20th century included Guillermo Uribe Holguín, José Rozo Contreras, Jesús Bermúdez Silva, Adolfo Mejía and Jesús Pinzón Urrea (b 1929). Well-known representatives of a later generation include Blas Emilio Atehortúa (b 1933) and Jacqueline Nova. In the 1960s Andrés Pardo Tovar was a prominent writer on musical subjects, and Otto de Greiff, of Swedish descent, a leading music critic. José Perdomo Escobar (1917–80), born at Bogotá, was the foremost Colombian music historian of his generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.V. Ortega Ricaurte: Historia crítica del teatro en Bogotá (Begotá, 1927)

R. Stevenson: ‘The Bogotá Music Archive’, JAMS, xv (1962), 292–315

J. Pinzon Urrea: ‘La música vernácula del Altiplano de Bogotá’, Boletín interamericano de música, lxxvii (1970), 15–30

R. Stevenson: ‘The First New World Composers: Fresh Data from Peninsular Archives’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 95–106

J.I. Perdomo Escobar: El Archivo Musical de la Catedral de Bogotá (Bogotá, 1976)

L.A. Escobar: La música en Santa Fe de Bogotá (Bogotá, 1987)

E. Bermúdez: Catedral de Bogotá, Sección de Musica: antología de música religiosa siglos xvi–xviii (Bogotá, 1988)

P. Riãno-Alcalá: ‘Urban Space and Music in the Formation of Youth Cultures: the Case of Bogotá’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, x (1991), 87–106

J. Duarte and M.V. Rodríguez: ‘La Sociedad Filarmónica y la cultura musical en Santafé a mediados del siglo XIX’, Boletín cultural y bibliográfico, xxix/31 (1992), 41–57

E.A. Duque: La música en las publicaciones periódicas colombianas del siglo XIX (1848–1860) (Bogotá, 1998)

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bogusławski, Edward

(b Chorzów, 22 Sept 1940). Polish composer. He studied composition with Szabelski at the Katowice State Academy of Music, where he returned as lecturer in 1966. His output is made up primarily of instrumental works, though he also achieved some success with his symphonically conceived opera, Sonata Belzebuba (1974). His works of the 1960s reflect a Polish tendency towards heightened, almost cataclysmic expression, especially when using voices. He has shown an increasing predilection for sustained lyricism, particularly in the concertos and in chamber works such as the Preludi e cadenza (1983). In 1968, with Per pianoforte, he began a long fascination with mobile structures and experimented with extended instrumental techniques. He is one of the few Polish composers to have retained serially derived pitch elements beyond 1970. Several pieces mark anniversaries of politico-historical events in 1944–5.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Sonata Belzebuba (op, 2, Bogusławski, after S.I. Witkiewicz), 1974, Wrocław State Opera, 19 Nov 1977

Vocal: Apokalypsis (J. Górec-Rosiński), spkr, chorus, orch, 1965; Canti (textless), S, orch, 1967; Sym., chorus, orch, 1969; Ewokacja [Evocation] (Z. Bieńkowski), spkr, B, orch, 1975; Gaude mater, S, chorus, orch, 1990; Requiem, S, chorus, org, perc, 1996

Inst: Intonazioni I, 9 insts, 1962; Sygnały [Signals], orch, 1966; Intonazioni II, orch, 1966–9; Metamorfozy, 5 insts, 1967; Conc., ob + ob d’amore + eng hn + musette, orch, 1968; Per pianoforte, 1968; Musica per ensemble MW2, fl, vc, 1–2 pf, 1970; [pięć obrazków [5 Pictures], fl, 1970; Trio, fl, ob, gui, 1971; Capriccioso notturno, orch, 1972; Impromptu, fl, va, hp, 1973; Pro Varsovia, orch, 1974; Musica concertante, sax, orch, 1979; Divertimento II, accdn qnt, 1981; Preludi e cadenza, vn, pf, 1983; Polonia, vn, orch, 1984; Gui Conc., 1991; Kompozycja, perc, 1994; Elegia, vc, pf, 1995; Org Conc., 1996

Principal publishers: Agencja autorska, Moeck, PWM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Kotyńska: ‘“Canti” Edwarda Bogusławskiego’, RM, xii/23 (1968), 8–9

ADRIAN THOMAS

Bogusławski, Wojciech

(b Glinno, nr Poznań, 9 April 1757; d Warsaw, 23 July 1829). Polish impresario, librettist, actor and singer. He was a central figure in the history of the Polish theatre. He studied in Kraków (1770–73), where he attended many theatrical and concert performances organized by Sierakowski, prompting him to change the direction of his career away from the army and towards the theatre. He probably completed his studies at the Piarist school in Warsaw. For a few months during 1778 he studied acting with L. Montbrun, a Warsaw theatrical impresario. Soon afterwards he made his début as an actor in N.T. Barthé’s comedy Zmyślona niewierność (‘Imaginary Infidelity’), and on 11 July 1778 as a singer and librettist in the première of Maciej Kamieński’s opera Poverty made Happy. In 1783 he became the director of the National Theatre in Warsaw, remaining in this position (with some breaks) until 1814. He also managed theatres: Dubno and Grodno (1784 and later years); Vilnius (1785–90); Warsaw (1790–95); in Lwów (1795–9); and Warsaw, for the third time (1799–1814). He gave guest performances elsewhere, including Łowicz, Poznań, Kalisz, Białystok, Kraków and Gdańsk, and from 1804 to 1806 also managed the German theatre in Warsaw. Bogusławski got into severe financial difficulties as a result of Poland’s loss of independence, the Napoleonic wars, and the consequent lack of financial support, to the theatre, from government funds. He built up enormous debts and had almost gone bankrupt when, on 30 April 1814, he passed control of the National Theatre to his son-in-law, L. Osiński, who was to continue to manage it until 1825. Bogusławski remained at the theatre as an actor, and also advised Osiński. He continued to travel widely, and created his own theatre companies in the provinces. He performed at the National Theatre for the last time on 20 November 1827 in J.A.M. Monperlier’s comedy Koszyk wiśni (‘The Cherry Basket’). In 1811 he opened the first Drama School in Poland, and for three years he supported this school himself. He also established the Foundation for Retired Actors.

His career as an actor-singer began in roles as the romantic lead, such as the part of Antek (tenor) in Poverty made Happy. His greatest successes came during the years 1790–95 in the cheerful yet sceptic roles of the ‘people’s philosopher’ (for example, the baritone role of Bardos in Jan Stefani’s opera The Supposed Miracle, or Kracowians and Highlanders), and in bass roles (basso caricato) in Italian operas. He translated about 80 stage works from Italian, French and German, including works by Diderot, Molière and Shakespeare (including five tragedies). He also translated about 30 opera librettos, including Paisiello’s La frascatana (1782), Salieri’s Axur, re d’Ormus (1793), and two of Mozart’s operas, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (23 November 1783, 16 months after its première in Vienna) and Die Zauberflöte (1802). He also wrote his own librettos, including three for Elsner. The best, with its highly patriotic sentiments, was that for Stefani’s The Supposed Miracle, or Kracowians and Highlanders. His other librettos (set by Józef Elsner) are Herminia, czyli Amazonki (‘Herminie, or The Amazons’; Lwów, 1797), Izkahar, król Guaxary (‘Iskahar, King of Guaxara’; Lwów, 1797) and Sydney i Zuma, czyli Moc kochania czarnej niewiasty (‘Sidney and Zuma, or The Power of a Black Woman’s Love’; Lwów, 1798). He was known as the ‘Polish Molière’, and after 1795 as the ‘father of [Polish] theatre’. He was aware of new stylistic trends in the arts and gave Polish theatre its first exposure to Romanticism.

WRITINGS

Dzieje Teatru Narodowego [The history of the National Theatre] (Warsaw, 1820/R)

Dzieła dramatyczne [Dramatic works] [12 vols.] (Warsaw, 1821–3)

Dramaturgia czyli Nauka sztuki scenicznej dia szkoły teatralnej [Dramaturgy, or the science of the stage arts], 1812 [3 pts, containing his lectures at the Drama School; i, pubd in Gazeta teatralna, nos.16–17, 19–20, 22–3, 29–30 (1843); ii, ed. J. Lipińsky and T. Sivert as Mimika (Warsaw, 1965); iii, abridged and ed. H. Małkowska, Pamiętnik teatralny, xv (1966), 365–9]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PSB (L. Simon)

SMP

J. Elsner: ‘Die Oper der Polen’, AMZ, xiv (1812), 323–31, esp. 325–7

H. Szletyński: ‘Szkoła dramatyczna Wojciecha Bogusławskiego’ [The Wojciech Bogusławski Drama School], Pamiętnik teatralny (1954), nos.3–4, pp.339–67

Z. Raszewski: ‘Teatr Narodowy w latach 1779–1789’ [The National Theatre in the years 1779–89], Pamiętnik teatralny (1966), 107–45

Z. Raszewski: Bogusławski (Warsaw, 1972, 2/1982)

Z. Raszewski, ed.: Słownik biograficzny teatru polskiego, i: 1765–1965 [Biographical dictionary of Polish theatre] (Warsaw, 1973), 47–9

A. Nowak-Romanowicz: ‘Bogusławski, Wojciech’, Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM, ed. E. Dziębowska, i (Kraków, 1979)

A. Żórawska-Witkowska: Muzyka na dworze i w teatrze Stanisława Augusta [Music at the court and theatre of Stanisław August] (Warsaw, 1995)

BARBARA CHMARA-ŻACZKIEWICZ

Boháč, Josef

(b Vienna, 25 March 1929). Czech composer. He received his musical education at the Brno Janáček Academy (1951–6), where his teachers included Petrželka (composition). Appointments followed as director of the music publishing house Panton (1968–71) and head of music broadcasting at Czechoslovak Television in Prague (1970–79); concurrently he worked for the Czech Music Fund and various national composers' associations. From 1984 to 1990 he was artistic director of the Prague Chamber Opera. In 1991 he co-founded the Český Krumlov international music festival.

In his early career Boháč composed mainly mass and variety songs; arrangements for the Brno Radio Ensemble of Folk Instruments (BROLN) and music for brass band. After the mid-1960s he embraced the classical tradition, producing a corpus of works inspired by his wife, the soprano Marta Boháčová, and other outstanding Czech performers, including Josef Suk, Lubomír Malý and the Due Boemi di Praga. Equally successful has been Boháč's contribution to opera, especially with regard to the one-act Námluvy (‘The Courtship’) and the full-length Goya. Both works have been frequently staged by Czech opera companies. Boháč's music mostly oscillates between extended tonality and serialism and is often cast in variation, sonata or rondo form. Awards he has received include the National Prize (1975), for his opera Oči (‘Eyes’), and the State Prize (1983), for Goya and the oratorio Osud člověka (‘Destiny of Man’). He was created Artist of Merit in 1979.

WORKS

(selective list)

operas

Námluvy [The Courtship] (comic op, 1, Boháč, after A.P. Chekhov: The Proposal), 1967, Prague, Academy of the Performing Arts Opera Studio, 18 March 1971

Oči [Eyes] (TV op, 1, Boháč, after M. Lane), Prague, Czechoslovak TV, 1974

Goya (3, Boháč, after L. Feuchtwanger), 1971–6, Ostrava, Nejedlý, 30 Sept 1978

Zvířátka a Petrovští [Little Animals and the Petrovští People], 1980, Czechoslavak TV, 1983

Zlatá svatba [The Golden Wedding] (comic op, 2, Boháč, after J. Mach), 1981, unperf.

Rumcajs (children's op, 2, V. Březa, after V. Čtvrtek), 1985, unperf.

Utajené slzy [Hidden Tears] (after Chekhov), 1994, unperf.

other works

Orch: Symfonická předehra [Sym. Ov.], 1964; Elegy, vc, chbr orch, 1969; Fragment, 1969; Suita drammatica, str, timp, 1969–70; Pf Conc., 1974; Concertino pastorale, 2 hn, orch, 1978; Vn Conc., 1978; Conc. for Orch, 1983; Suita capricciosa, str, 1986; 2 symfonické poémy, 1986; Sym., A, 1990; Malá symfonie [Little Sym.], 1992; Affresco, vn, orch, 1996; Partita concertante, 1996–7; Capriccio sinfonico, 1997

Vocal: Prstýnky [The Rings], SA, pf; Květy jasmínu [jasmine Blooms], song cycle, S, pf, 1964, orchd; Zní loutna má … [My Lute Resounds] (Petrarch), T, S, 10 insts, 1971; Déšť' na Bajkale [Rain of the Baikal Lake] (song cycle, Soviet poets), medium v, pf, 1974, orchd; Chorál mé země [Chorale of my Country] (cant., N. Mauerová), SATB, orch, 1976; Zpěvy samoty [Songs of Loneliness] S, b cl, pf, 1977; Osud člověka [Destiny of Man] (orat, M. Sholokhov), 1979; Sonata lirica, S, str, vib, 1982; Vokální poéma, S, A, T, B, chbr orch, 1987

Chbr (inst): Str Trio, 1965, Koncertantni etudy, b cl, pf, 1973; Sonetti per Sonatori, fl, b cl, perc, hp, pf, 1974; Preludium a toccata, pf, 1982; Sonata giovane, pf, 1983; Cantabile dolce, b cl, 1986; 3 + 5, wind qnt, 1993; 3 miniatury, b cl, pf, 1997

Principal publishers: Aprilia Orchestra, ČHF, DILIA, Panton, Supraphon, Victor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

Z. Candra: ‘Skladatel, který ví o svých posluchačích’ [Composer who is aware of his listeners], HRo, xxviii (1975), 268–70

P. Skála: ‘S Josefem Boháčem nejen o opeře’ [With Boháč, not only about opera], HRo, xxxii (1979), 116–18 [interview]

L. Síp: Česká opera a její tvůrci [Czech opera and its composers] (Prague, 1983), 342–7

I. Ruml: ‘O komorní opeře, SČSS a o vlastní tvorbě (rozhovor)’ [On chamber opera, the Czechoslovak Composers' Union and his own composition], HRo, xl (1987), 440–42 [interview]

MOJMÍR SOBOTKA

Bohdanowicz, Bazyli

(b eastern Małopolska, 1740; d Vienna, 23 Feb 1817). Polish composer and violinist. In 1775 he settled in Vienna, and for about 40 years worked as first violinist in the orchestra of the Leopoldstadt theatre; between 1785 and 1791 he also played the viola in the orchestra of the Tonkünstler-Societät. Together with his family (his wife and eight children) between 1785 and 1803 he organized numerous choral and orchestral concerts in Vienna’s theatres and local venues. Through these concerts he tried to stimulate the curiosity of the public by programming pieces with intriguing and humorous titles. This approach brought him wide success (his concerts were even attended by the emperor), but he was also accused of naivety, extravagance and ‘musical charlatanism’ (GerberNL). These works were not published, but included: Les prémices du monde, a violin sonata played on one instrument by three children; a three-movement Sinfonia vocale et originale senza parole, which used so-called ‘speaking pipes’, or Sprachtöne (simple tubes, apparently without mouthpiece), to imitate birds and illustrate hunting scenes; a concerto Europas Erstling sung by three of his sons accompanied by a whistle and orchestra and Die Geissböcke, a ‘carnival septet’. The eccentricity of Bohdanowicz’s work was satirized by Wenzel Müller in his Die unruhige Nachbarschaft (text by K.F. Hensler), performed in Vienna in 1803.

There was also, however, a more serious side to Bohdanowicz’s work. It is supposed that, in his youth, he may have been exposed to the influence of the progressive court of Stanisław Lubomirski at Łańcut near Rzeszów, where he would have heard much contemporary European music. Some evidence of this influence may be found in a piece written while he was still in Poland, an attractive five-movement Symphony in D major composed in an early Classical idiom, containing elements of Italian, Viennese and Mannheim styles. In Vienna he had some success with the publication of chamber and piano pieces (including polonaises), which provide evidence of early tendencies towards the evolution of a Polish national style.

WORKS

unpublished works without siglum in list are lost

vocal

Die Eroberung der Festung Raab (vaudeville), 1785

Sinfonia vocale et originale senza parole, 8 solo vv, chorus, 3 vc, db, Sprachtöne pipes, 1785, A-Wn

Non plus ultra, 3 female vv, str qt, 1795

Pastoral songs: Lycydyna, Merentula, Filomena, Tyturus, Damotas, 1v, chorus/mouth organ, 1795

Europas Erstling, 3vv, whistle, orch, 1798

Die Geissböcke, vocal septet, chorus, 1798

Arias and songs, 1v, pf, pubd in Blandiger for sang og claveer (Copenhagen, 1787)

instrumental

Sym, D, before 1775, PL-SA, ed. in Symfonie polskie, vi (Kraków, 1967), ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. F, vii (New York, 1982)

Obraz muzyczny: Die Hermanns-Schlacht (after F.G. Klopstock), 3 orch, c1806, unperf.

6 duos, op.1, 2 vn (Vienna, 1777); 2nd edn as 3 duos (Vienna, 1784)

12 polonoises avec 3 pièces à la façon des contredanses, pf (Vienna, 1780)

Daphnis et Philis avec un adieu, pf 4 hands (Vienna, 1797)

Polonoise, hpd/pf (Vienna, 1798)

Bagatela, pf, 1798

Rareté extraordinaire de la musique, andantino with variations, pf 8 hands, c1802

Grosse charakteristische Sonate: Das Andenken des Vaters an seine acht musikalischen Kinder, pf (Vienna, 1803)

2 mazurkas, C, D, pf, pubd in Muzyka Staropolska (Kraków, 1966)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

‘Grosse charakteristische Sonate’, AMZ, v (1803), 420–21

A. Nowak-Romanowicz: Preface to Symfonie polskie, ed. Z.M. Szweykowski, vi (Kraków, 1967)

G. Abraham: ‘Some Eighteenth-Century Polish Symphonies’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: a Tribute to Karl Geiringer, ed. H.C.R. Landon and R.E. Chapman (New York and London, 1970), 13–22, esp. 14–15, 20

A. Mrygoń: ‘Działalność Bazylego Bohdanowicza w Wiedniu’ [Bohdanowicz’s career in Vienna], Muzyka, xx/4 (1975), 83–94

A. Nowak-Romanowicz: ‘Bohdanowicz Bazyli’, Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM, ed. E. Dziębowska, i (Kraków, 1979)

BARBARA CHMARA-ŻACZKIEWICZ

Bohdanowicz, Michał

(b Vienna, 6 Nov 1779; d Vienna, 20 Jan 1830). Polish composer, violinist and pianist, son of Bazyli Bohdanowicz. Together with his younger brother, Franciszek, he sang as a boy in the choir of the Hofoper. Together with his parents and his seven siblings he took part in the entertainingly unconventional concerts and performances organized by his father in Viennese theatres, mainly in the Leopoldstadttheater. The main source of his income, however, came from his work as an imperial administrator and, from 1820, as cashier to Baron R. von Hackelberg-Landau who was married to Bohdanowicz's sister, Katarzyna, a singer at the imperial theatres and at the Theater an der Wien. He composed VIII variations pour le violin op.1 and 6 deutsche Gesänge op.2 (in A-Wgm).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Mrygoń: ‘Działalność Bazylego Bohdanowicza w Wiedniu’ [The activities of Bazyl Bohdanowicz in Vienna], Muzyka, xx/4 (1975), 83–94

B. Chmara-Żaczkiewicz: ‘Jeszcze o rodzinie Bohdanowiczów’ [More about the Bohdanowicz family], Muzyka, xxix/4 (1984), 88–90

A. Mrygoń and M. Burhard: ‘Katalog poloników muzycznych w zbiorach austriackich’ [Catalogue of Polish musical documents in Austrian collections], Szkice o kulturze muzyczne XIX w., ed. Z. Chechlińska, v (Warsaw, 1984), 223, 245

BARBARA CHMARA-ŻACZKIEWICZ

Böheim, Joseph Michael

(b Prague, c1748; d Berlin, 4 July 1811). German songbook compiler of Bohemian birth. After beginning his career as an actor and tenor in Hamburg and Breslau, he went to Berlin in 1779 to join Döbbelin’s theatrical troupe at the Theater am Gendarmenmarkt. Later he spent some time at the Thabor Theatre in Frankfurt, but returned to Berlin in 1789 to become a member of the Berlin National Theatre. In 1793, in collaboration with his countryman Joseph Ambrosch, he published a popular two-volume collection of Masonic lieder entitled Freymaurer-Lieder mit Melodien; a revised edition with a new third volume compiled by Böheim alone appeared in 1795. Included in these volumes were works by Mozart (including his Zauberflöte aria ‘In diesen heil'gen Hallen’), J.G. Nägeli, André and Bernhard Weber. In 1798–9 Böheim published his most important collection of Masonic music, Auswahl von Maurer-Gesängen mit Melodien der vorzüglichsten Componisten, with works by Haydn, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach, André, Salieri, Reichardt and others; a second edition, not significantly different from the first, was published in Berlin in 1817.

Böheim's daughter Charlotte Dorothee Marie (b Berlin, 6 March 1783 or 1785; d ?Frankfurt, 1831) was an outstanding singer and actress active in Berlin (from 1800), Stuttgart (from 1804) and Frankfurt (1811–18). She was married to the cellist Graff.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL

MGG1 (W. Bollert)

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin’s (Berlin, 1861/R)

R.M. Werner, ed.: A. Peiba [?J.J.A. vom Hagen]: Gallerie von teutschen Schauspielern und Schauspielerinnen nebst Johann Friedrich Schinks Zusätzen und Berichtigungen (Berlin, 1910)

RAYMOND A. BARR

Bohemia.

Region of central Europe, now part of the Czech Republic.

Bohemian Brethren.

A Czech religious sect which originated in Bohemia around 1450. Based on the doctrine of Petr Chelčický (c1390–c1460), a radical Taborite and eminent writer, the Bohemian Brethren initially represented an extreme type of the official Utraquism and as such were at first tolerated. Their basic beliefs included Chelčický's thesis concerning the equality of all mankind, and the primacy of the Bible in every argument and in the moral life of mankind (for whom the exercise of any form of power was sinful). Thus they did not recognize class distinctions and were consequently regarded by their contemporaries as enemies of the existing class-bound society. From 1460 until their expulsion from Bohemia and Moravia after 1618, they were persecuted, imprisoned and executed, by Catholics and Utraquists alike, especially after they had established an independent church and lay priesthood, but they succeeded in winning over some of the most influential figures of the day. They attached great importance to correct translations of the Bible and sought as collaborators adherents with good Greek and Hebrew. They formed alliances with the Lutherans in Germany, sent missions far abroad, and led active intellectual lives; they established printing presses and created their own document archive.

The Brethren's great interest in hymns is of decisive importance in the history of music. Singing formed an integral part of their daily life, in family circles and particularly in meetings in church and school. During the 16th century they compiled and published extensive hymnbooks which often ran to several editions. The earliest (1505 and 1519) were edited by Luke, their bishop; later editions were by Jan Roh (1541) and Jan Blahoslav (1561 and 1564); at least seven hymnbooks based on these appeared between 1576 and 1618. They were exceptionally comprehensive for the time: the edition of 1541 contained 308 hymns and that of 1561 nearly 750. In addition to large hymnbooks, the Brethren also published separate occasional pieces, such as hymns and dirges. The melodies reflected 15th-century Hussite songs and the remarkably careful editions showed a tendency towards simplification, elimination of complex liturgical melodies and careful correspondence of text and music. (The texts and their alterations reflect theological controversies within the brotherhood.) During the 16th century hardly any polyphonic singing existed among the Brethren. Only from illustrations is it known that schoolchildren were also taught part-singing.

The Brethren continued their publishing activities after their enforced emigration. Jan Amos Komenský, for example, published a hymnbook (Amsterdam, 1659) which broke with tradition and represented a new style of singing in the brotherhood. The Brethren tried to spread their publications still further in Bohemia and Moravia with hymnbooks printed in pocket-size editions intended for secret distribution. In these hymnbooks Czech translations of German Protestant hymns occupied a conspicuous place.

The Brethren's songs spread to Germany through the hymnbooks of the German Brethren, who formed a separate congregation after 1510. Their first hymnbook, compiled by Michael Weisse, appeared in 1531 (ed. K. Ameln, Gesangbuch der Böhmischen Brüder 1531, Kassel, 1957). It went into numerous editions, some printed on the Brethren's own presses and some elsewhere in Germany. The basic edition was the German version of the 1541 hymnbook brought out by Roh.

After the brotherhood was re-established in Herrnhut in 1722, a German Pietist congregation was formed to maintain traditional congregational singing, deriving its repertory almost entirely from the hymnbook of its first bishop, Count Zinzendorff. The count published many large hymnbooks, the first of which, containing 972 hymns, came out in 1735. By virtue of additions and supplements, the repertory increased to over 2200 hymns (1741), but all the hymnbooks were printed without tunes. The Herrnhut Brethren carried their love of spiritual songs with them when they emigrated to America in the 18th century, and their traditions have persisted there into the 20th century (see Moravians, music of the).

During the 19th century the Czech brotherhood was revived within the area of the present-day Czech and Slovak Republics, and it still exists. By dispensing with German-Lutheran influence it has attempted to remove the traditions of the original brotherhood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BlumeEK

MGG1 (W. Blankenburg)

repr. in Musik und Kirche, xxi (1951), 67–71

B. Stäblein: ‘Die mittelalterlichen liturgischen Weisen im Gesangbuch der Böhmischen Brüder von 1531’, Mf, v (1952), 138–44

J. Kouba: ‘Vzájemný poměr kancionálu Šamotulského a Ivančického’ [The relationship between the Šzamotuly and Ivančice hymnbooks], MMC, no.1 (1956), 25–32

D.M. McCorkle: ‘The Moravian Contribution to American Music’, Notes, xiii (1955–6), 597–604

K. Ameln: ‘Der Taufgesang der Böhmischen Brüder’, JbLH, iii (1957), 120 only

C. Schoenbaum: ‘Die Weisen des Gesangbuchs der Böhmischen Brüder von 1531’, Jb für Liturgik und Hymnologie, iii (1957), 44–61

J. Fojtíkowá: ‘Hudební doklady Husova Kultu z 15. a 16. století’ [The German influences on Czech song in the 16th century], MMC, no.29 (1981), 51–142

J. Kouba: ‘Nejstarší české písňové tisky do roku 1550’ [The oldest Bohemian songbooks, to 1550], MMC, no.32 (1988), 21–90

F. Schulz: ‘Singen wir heut einem Mund: hymnologisch-liturgische Studie zu einem Osterlied der Böhmischen Brüder’, Jb für Liturgik und Hymnologie, xxxii (1989), 29–71

A. Moeseritz: Die Weisen der Böhmischen Brüder von 1531: ein stil- und quellenkritische Untersuchung der nichtliturgischen Melodien des Gesangbuches von Michael Weisse (Bonn, 1990)

A. Marti: ‘Der Gesang der Böhmischen Brüder und die mittelalterlichen Anfänge des volkssprachlichen Gemeindegesangs’, Jb für Liturgik und Hymnologie, xxxiii (1990–91), 206–8

CAMILLO SCHOENBAUM/CLYTUS GOTTWALD

Bohle, David.

See Pohle, David.

Bohlin, Folke (Bernhard)

(b Uppsala, 21 Sept 1931). Swedish musicologist. He took a degree in theology (1960) and later took the doctorate in musicology (1970) under Bengtsson and Moberg at Uppsala University with a dissertation on liturgical song in Swedish churches in the 18th and 19th centuries. He was a reader at Lund University (1970) and was appointed lecturer there (1971), later becoming professor in musicology (1986–96). He conducted the Lund Student Choral Society (1972–85). Bohlin became an elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1982 (board member 1983–1990). His chief area of research is Swedish church music, particularly that after the Reformation.

WRITINGS

‘Två sångfragment från Johan III's tid’, STMf, xxxvii (1955), 133–45

‘En liturgisk sångbok i Attmars kyrkoarkiv’, Forum theologicum, xvii (1960), 14–48

Studier i den svenska reformationstidens psalmsång (Uppsala, 1965)

‘Ett liturgisk sånhäfte från Åbo’, Svenskt gudstjånstliv, xliii (1968), 35–63

‘Häffner och mässmusiken’, Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift, lxix (1969), 175–202

Liturgisk sång i svenska kyrkan 1697–1897 (diss., U. of Uppsala, 1970)

‘“Någrahanda sång”: kyrkoordningen 1571 och musiken’, Den svenska kyrkoordningen 1571–1971, ed. S. Kjöllerstrom (Lund, 1971), 294–301

‘Luthers Credo-Psalm och Den svenska mässan 1531’, Reformation i Norden: kontinuitet och förnyelse, ed. C.G. Andrén (Lund, 1973), 241–62

‘Medieval Music in Sweden: the Current State of Research’, Medieval Studies: Skara 1988, 31–6

‘Om kyrkomusik under frihetstiden’, Musiken i Sverige, ii (Stockholm, 1993), 123–41

Gregorianik (Uppsala, 1995)

‘Eine wichtige Quelle zur Geschichte des orgelbegleiteten Gemeindegesangs im Osterseeraum’, Musica baltica (Frankfurt, 1997), 311–16

EDITIONS

Olaus Ericis sångbok: en handskriven liber cantus i Gamla Uppsala kyrkoarkiv, Laurentius Petri sällskapets urkundsserie, viii (Uppsala, 1967)

Johan Lindells Mässan korteligen: Åbo 1784, Laurentius Petri sällskapets urkundsserie, ix (Uppsala, 1968)

Melodier till julepisteln i svensk tradition, Laurentius Petri sällskapets urkundsserie, xi (Lund, 1970)

En liten sonbook til at bruka j kyrkionne: Stockholm 1553, Laurentius Petri sällskapets urkundsserie, xii (Lund, 1977)

Franz Berwald: Choralbuch (unvollendet): Vorschlag zur Revision von J.C.F. Haeffners Choralbuch (Kassel, 1994)

VESLEMÖY HEINTZ

Bohlman, Philip V(ilas)

(b Boscobel, WI, 8 Aug 1952). American ethnomusicologist. He received the BM in piano at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975, and the MM in 1980 and the PhD in 1984 in musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Bruno Nettl and Alexander Ringer; he also studied for two years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with Amnon Shiloah, 1980–82. He was assistant professor at MacMurray College (1982–4) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1985–7) before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he was appointed professor in 1999. He was visiting professor at the University of Vienna, 1995–6. In 1997 he was awarded the Dent medal.

Bohlman's work may be characterized as a sustained critique of modernity, canon-formation and the monumentalization of 19th-century Austro-German musical practice through an ethnographic engagement with the ‘others’ of Europe, whether on, or within its margins. His earlier work investigated music-making among immigrant Jews in early 20th-century Palestine; his later work brings ethnographic critique back to the centre, exploring popular religious, street and folk musics in Vienna and elsewhere in Central Europe. Other areas of research include immigrant and ‘ethnic’ folk musics in America, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. In addition to extensive publications in these areas, Bohlman is editor of the series Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music and co-editor (with Bruno Nettl) of ‘Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology’.

WRITINGS

‘Central European Jews in Israel: the Reurbanization of Musical Life in an Immigrant Culture’, YTM, xvi (1984), 67–83

‘Deutsch-amerikanische Musik in Wisconsin: Überleben im Melting Pot’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xxx (1985), 99–116

‘R.G. Kieswetter's “Die Musik der Araber”: a Pioneering Ethnomusicological Study of Arabic Writings on Music’, AsM, xviii (1986), 164–96

‘The European Discovery of Music in the Islamic World and the “Non-Western” in Nineteenth-Century Music History’, JM (1987), 147–63

‘Missionaries, Magical Muses, and Magnificent Menageries: Image and Imagination in the Early History of Ethnomusicology’, World of Music, xxx/3 (1988), 5–27

The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Bloomington, IN, 1988)

‘Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of Ethnomusicology’, YTM, xx (1988), 26–42

‘Is all Music Religious?’, Criterion, xxviii/2 (1989), 19–25

‘The Land Where Two Streams Flow’: Music in the German-Jewish Community of Israel (Urbana, IL, 1989)

‘Ernest Bloch's “America”: Aesthetic Dimensions of a Swiss-American Auswandererbericht’, Yearbook of German-American Studies, xxv (1990), 35–54

ed., with B. Nettl: Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology (Chicago, 1991) [Incl. ‘Representation and Cultural Critique in the History of Ethnomusicology’, 131–51]

ed., with S. Blum and D. Neuman: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana, IL, 1991) [incl. ‘Of Yekkes and Chamber Music in Israel: Ethnomusicological Meaning in Western Art Music’, 254–67]

ed. with K.A. Bergeron: Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992) [incl. ‘Ethnomusicology's Challenge to the Canon, the Canon's Challenge to Ethnomusicology’, 116–36]

with others: Excursions in World Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992)

‘Viewpoint: On the Unremarkable in Music’, 19CM, xvi (1992–3), 205–18

The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, 1936–1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II (Oxford, 1992, 3/2000)

‘Musical Life in the Central European Rural Jewish Village’, Modern Jews and their Musical Agendas, ed. E. Mendelsohn (New York, 1993), 117–39

‘Music, Modernity and the Foreign in the New Germany’, Modernism/Modernity, i/1 (1993), 121–52

‘Musicology as a Political Act’, JM, xi (1993), 411–36

‘Die Pennsylvanische Sammlung von Kirchen-Musik (1840): ein Lehrbuch zur Deutsch-Amerikanisierung’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xxxviii (1993), 90–109

‘Afterword: Shireh 'Am, Shrireh Medinah (Folk Song, National Song)’, Israeli Folk Music: Songs of the Early Pioneers, ed. H. Nathan (Madison, WI, 1994), 39–64

‘Auf der Bima/auf der Bühne: zur Emanzipation der jüdischen Popularmusik um die Jahrhundertwende in Wien’, Vergleichend-systematische Musikwissenschaft: Beiträge zu Methode und Problematik der systematischen, ethnologischen und historischen Musikwissenschaft, ed. E.T. Hilscher and T. Antonicek (Tutzing, 1994), 417–49

‘Musik als Widerstand: jüdische Musik in Deutschland 1933–1940’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xl (1995), 49–74

Central European Folk Music: an Annotated Bibliography of Sources in German (New York, 1996)

‘Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past’, Shadows in the Field: New Directions in Ethnomusicological Fieldwork, ed. G.F. Barz and T. Cooley (New York, 1997), 139–62

‘The Final Borderpost’, JM, xiv (1996), 427–52

‘Pilgrimage, Politics and the Musical Remapping of the New Europe’, EthM, xl (1996), 375–412

‘Diaspora, Deuteronomy, and Myths of the Mediterranean’, Ethnomusicology Online, iii (1997) <research.umbc.edu/eol/>

‘Il Passato, il presente e i popli del Mediterranea senza storia musicale’, Musica e storia, v (1997), 181–204

‘World Music and World Religions: Whose World?’, Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions, ed. L.E. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 61–90

‘Ontologies of Music’, Rethinking Music, ed. N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford, 1999), 17–34

ed. with R.M. Radano: Music and the Radical Imagination (Chicago, 2000)

with O. Holzapfel: The Folk Songs of German- and Yiddish-Speaking Jews (Madison, WI, forthcoming)

‘Jüdische Volksmusik’: eine Geistesgeschichte Mitteleuropas (Vienna, forthcoming)

ed. with O. Holzapfel: Land Without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-American (Urbana, IL, forthcoming)

MARTIN STOKES

Böhm.

German firm of music publishers. It was established in Augsburg in 1803 by Andreas Böhm (1765–1834), and under his direction soon achieved prominence. In 1831 the ownership passed to Andreas's son Anton Böhm (1807–84). In 1871 the firm became known as Anton Böhm & Sohn, a name it has retained, when Anton's son Moritz Anselm Böhm (1846–96) joined as a partner; three years later he became sole proprietor. In 1893 M.A. Böhm established a branch in Vienna. Moritz Anselm's eldest son, Theodor (1879–1946), took over the running of the company in 1906. The firm was completely destroyed in World War II but was restored under the directorship of Friedrich Ballinger (1906–89) and his wife Johanna, Theodor Böhm's niece, and has since regained its previous importance. Following the Ballingers’ retirement, the running of the firm passed to its manager, Gerhard Über and then to Thomas Ballinger-Amtmann, the Ballingers' nephew and adopted son. Anton Böhm & Sohn has specialized in the publication of Catholic church and organ music, for which it has established a lasting reputation. The firm has also published standard editions of Haydn, Mozart and Schubert masses, many in its series Denkmäler liturgischer Tonkunst, and has begun to publish works by 20th-century composers including Otto Jochum, Siegl, Franz Philipp, Arthur Piechler, Lemacher, Genzmer and Koetsier.

ALAN POPE/R

Böhm, Georg

(b Hohenkirchen, nr Ohrdruf, 2 Sept 1661; d Lüneburg, 18 May 1733). German composer and organist. He is specially important for his influence on the young J.S. Bach and for his development of the chorale partite.

1. Life.

Böhm received his early musical training from his father, who was a schoolmaster and organist; it presumably involved visits to Ohrdruf, where the Kantor was Johann Heinrich Hildebrand. His father died in 1675, and he continued his education at the Lateinschule at Goldbach and then at the Gymnasium at Gotha, where he graduated in 1684. In both towns, especially at Gotha, which was a ducal seat, there were Kantors and organists who, like Hildebrand, had been trained by members of the Bach family, Heinrich of Arnstadt and Johann Christian of Erfurt, and who could further Böhm’s development. He matriculated at the University of Jena on 28 August 1684. By 1693 he had moved to Hamburg. There is no record of his filling any church position there, but as a well-educated man in a large, prosperous city he no doubt found other suitable employment while he completed a rather late musical apprenticeship. There was much to influence him in Hamburg: Kusser, a pupil of Lully, directed French and Italian works at the opera; at St Katharinen J.A. Reincken was master of a large, four-manual organ; he may also have heard Vincent Lübeck at nearby Stade, or Buxtehude at Lübeck. In 1697 Christian Flor, organist of the Johanniskirche at Lüneburg, died, and Böhm petitioned the town council for an audition, hinting that he did not have any regular employment. He was chosen unanimously and held the post until his death. He oversaw Matthias Dropa’s complete rebuilding of the Johanniskirche organ in 1712–14. The question of his successor was not without considerable unhappiness. Of his five sons, Jakob Christian showed great promise and might well have graced the position, but he died before his musical studies were complete. The authorities then selected Brand Tobias Ludolph, who, despite a physical handicap, was trained in music, but he died suddenly in May 1732. The position finally went to Böhm’s son-in-law, Ludwig Ernst Hartmann.

2. Influence on J.S. Bach.

Although a relationship between Bohm and the young Bach seems highly probable, C.P.E. Bach’s statement to Forkel in 1775 that his father ‘loved and studied the works of the Lüneburg organist Georg Böhm’ stands alone. No formal connection existed between Böhm’s church and the Michaelisschule, which Bach attended from 1700 to about 1703, and the Johanniskirche organ was in a bad state of repair for private lessons. Social and personal ties are tenuous. For example, Bach’s eldest brother and guardian in Ohrdruf from 1695 to 1700, Johann Christoph Bach, was the brother-in-law of another townsman, Johann Bernhard Vonhoff, who had attended the Gymnasium at Gotha with Böhm. However, as Walter Emery has pointed out, the fact that Bach named Böhm as the northern agent for the sale of his keyboard Partitas nos.2 and 3 implies that they had established a friendship, more likely in Lüneburg than later. Despite a lack of direct associations, Böhm exerted a strong influence on Bach’s chorale writing, especially in his partite.

3. Works.

Towards the end of the 17th century the liturgical organ chorale and the non-liturgical partita, or variation, were fused in the German chorale partite, in which a chorale melody replaced the secular dance or song formerly used as the basis of variations. The plural form of the term, partite (the singular form, ‘partita’, is erroneous), has generally been applied both to this new form and to chorale variations, but the two differ in several important respects. In particular, chorale partite are generally more homophonic and adhere more strictly to the phrase structure of the original melody. Böhm probably intended his chorale partite for domestic performance on the clavier or pedal clavier rather than for liturgical use on the organ; Ach wie nichtig, for example, descends below organ keyboard range to A'. He showed a strong liking for both partite and variations and used several different compositional techniques in a synthesis of different national styles. For example, the variations on Vater unser, a highly ornamented work in the style of French harpsichord music, presents a short variant of the chorale over a recurring bass. Bach also adopted this Italian motto device in his partite bwv766–8. (Spitta suggested that Böhm was the first composer to unify chorale settings by means of such theme transformations as well as the basic melody itself.) Buxtehude was also a direct influence on Böhm, particularly in keyboard figuration (see Jesu, du bist allzu schöne) and the use of dance forms (Auf meinen lieben Gott). In the saraband of bwv768 Bach followed the same practice. J.G. Walther’s partite on Jesu, meine Freude also shows a direct link. The copies he made of Böhm’s works suggest that Böhm wrote little keyboard music after 1705. He wrote only one chorale fantasia, Christ lag in Todesbanden. It is much more conservative than the fantasias of his contemporaries, with no echo sections and very little coloration. Bach chose the same melody for a fantasia (bwv718), which reflects Böhm’s practice. Except for an expressive, coloratura setting of Vater unser, the remaining organ chorales are virtually indistinguishable from Buxtehude’s. Erhalt uns, Herr (buxwv Anh.11) has in fact been ascribed to Böhm as well as to Buxtehude. Of Böhm’s three praeludia for organ, that in D minor is probably the earliest; it is in the five-part form that Buxtehude used – prelude, fugue, toccata-like middle section, 3/4 fugue and concluding toccata. The other two show an Italian influence totally absent from the praeludia of north German composers such as Bruhns and Lübeck; it is particularly evident in sequential episodes in the fugues.

It is Böhm’s keyboard works that reveal his strongest gifts. The extended Prelude, Fugue and Postlude in G minor, which successfully combines French grace and charm with north German intensity and depth of feeling, is one of the most important works of the period. Except for the great French Suite in D (and inconsistencies in the two suites in F minor, the second of which Schulze considers the work of Mattheson), Böhm’s 11 suites are in the four-movement form – allemand, courante, saraband and gigue – established by Froberger, and many of them also display Froberger’s subtle melodic charm. The Prelude in F, printed as an independent piece in the Sämtliche Werke, may well belong to the Suite in F, with which it shares strong thematic resemblances.

Böhm’s choral works are much more derivative than his instrumental music. His motets, for example, are indistinguishable from those by minor Thuringian composers of the time, and his cantatas look back to earlier 17th-century models. He based three of the six undoubtedly genuine cantatas wholly or in part on chorales. Apart from the songs he contributed to the collection of 1700, his arias are not influenced by Italian forms, though text and music are closely related. Marx argues convincingly that the St John Passion, long attributed to Handel and, in turn, Böhm, is the work of Christian Ritter.

WORKS

Edition:G. Böhm. Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. Wolgast, Veröffentlichungen des Kirchenmusikalischen Institut der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Landeskirche in Sachsen, i, iii (1927–32, rev. 2/1952–63 by G. Wolgast, vols. iii–iv by H. Kümmerling), 2 vols. rev. in 4 [W]

keyboard

Editions:G Böhm: Sämtliche Werke für Klavier/Cembalo, ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1985) [BK]G. Bohm: Sämtliche Orgelwerke, ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1986) [BO]

chorale partite and variations, for organ unless otherwise stated; all edited in W and BO

Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig, clavier; Auf meinen lieben Gott; Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir; Christe der du bist Tag und Licht; Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele, ? pedal clavier; Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ ?clavier; Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend; Jesu du bist allzu schöne, ?clavier; Vater unser im Himmelreich; Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, ?clavier

other chorales, all for organ and edited in W and BO

Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr; Christ lag in Todesbanden, fantasia; Christ lag in Todesbanden; Christum wir sollen loben schon; Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort (doubtful, ? by Buxtehude); Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ; Nun bitten wir den heilgen Geist; Vater unser im Himmelreich (two versions); Vom Himmel hoch

free forms, for clavier unless otherwise stated

Praeludia, C, d, a, org; W, BO

Prelude, F (possibly of Suite, F); W, BK

11 suites, c, D, d, d, E (doubtful), E, F, f, f, G, a; Capriccio, D; Chaconne, G (doubtful); Prelude, fugue and postlude, g, W, BK; Menuet, G (in Clavierbuchlein, ii, for Anna Magdalena Bach), W;

sacred vocal

cantatas

Ach Herr, komme hinab und hilfe meinem Sohne, 5vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc; W

Das Himmelreich ist gleich einem Könige, 5vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc; W

Ich freue mich, 1v, vn, bc, lost

Jauchzet Gott, alle Land, 5vv, 2 cornetts, 3 trbn, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc; W

Mein Freund ist mein, 4vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc; W

Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, 5vv, 3 trbn, 2 vn, bn, bc; W

Sanctus est Dominus Deus Sabaoth (probably by Friedrich Nicolaus Bruhns), 4vv, 2 vn, bn, bc; W

Satanas und sein Getümmel (probably by Friedrich Nicolaus Bruhns), 4vv, 2 ob/(2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc); W

Warum toben die Heiden (doubtful), 4vv, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 tpt, timp, 2 vn, va, bc; W

Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen, 4vv, 2 tpt, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc; W

motets

Auf, ihr Völker, danket Gott, 5vv; W

Jesus schwebt mir in Gedanken, 4vv, lost

Jesu, teure Gnadensonne, 4vv, lost

Nun danket alle Gott, 5vv; W

other sacred vocal

St Luke Passion, c1711, lost

23 sacred songs in Geistreiche Lieder (H.E. Elmenhorst) … auch in gewissen Abtheilungen geordnet von M. Johann Christoph Jauch (Lüneburg, 3/1700); ed. in DDT, xlv (1911/R)

Music for the dedication of the Haus der Barmherzigkeit, Grahl, Lüneburg, 5 Dec 1708, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

BlumeEK

FrotscherG

GerberNL

P. Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1873–80, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1884, 2/1899/R)

R. Buchmeyer: ‘Nachrichten über das Leben Georg Böhms’, BJb 1908, 107–22

H. Keller: Die Orgelwerke Bachs: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte, Form, Deutung und Wiedergabe (Leipzig, 1948/R; Eng. trans., 1967)

G. Fock: Der junge Bach in Lüneburg, 1700 bis 1702 (Hamburg, 1950)

C.L. Waldschmidt: Georg Böhm: his Life and Works (diss., Northwestern U., 1963)

H. Walter: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Lüneburg vom Ende des 16. bis zum Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1967)

R.A. Schuneman: ‘The Organ Chorales of Georg Böhm’, The Diapason, lxi/4 (1969–70), 12–14

C.A. Cumrine: The Keyboard and Vocal Settings of Georg Boehm: an Analysis of Style as Dictated by Text (diss., Syracuse U., 1972)

B. Baselt: ‘Händel und Bach: zur Frage der Passionen’, J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel: Halle 1975, 58–66

H. Müller-Buscher: Georg Böhms Choralbearbeitungen für Tasteninstrumente (Laaber, 1979)

H. Kümmerling: ‘“Difficile est satyram non scibere” oder: Über eine gewisse Passion eines so genannten weltberühmten Mannes’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums seit Händel: Festschrift Günther Massenkeil, ed. R. Cadenbach and H. Loos (Bonn, 1986), 57–69

G.G. Verkade: Georg Böhm: Vater unser im Himmelreich à claviers et pedal: the Concept of Order (diss., U. of Iowa, 1987)

H. Joelson-Strohbach: ‘Nachricht von verschiedenen verloren geglauben Handschriften mit barocker Tastenmusik’, AMw, xliv (1987), 91–140

H.J. Marx: ‘“… eines welt-berühmten Mannes gewisse Passion”: zur Herkurft der Handel zugeschriebenen Johannes-Passion’, Musica, xli (1987), 311–16

P.F. Williams: ‘A Chaconne by Georg Böhm: a Note on German Composers and French Styles’, EMc, xvii (1989), 43–54

G. Webber: North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford, 1996)

W. Syré: ‘The Art of the North German Organ’, Organists’ Review, lxxxiv (1998), 14–18, 100–04, 196–9, 328–31

HUGH J. McLEAN

Böhm, Johann(es Heinrich)

(b ? Moravia or Upper Austria, ?1740s; d Aachen, bur. 7 Aug 1792). Austrian theatre manager, actor and singer. He was engaged at Brünn (now Brno) in 1770, from the autumn of that year as director of the troupe. For long periods he toured in Austria, southern Germany and the Rhineland. In early summer 1776 he directed an opera season at the Kärntnertortheater, Vienna, in collaboration with Noverre: 14 works were given, almost all of them Singspiel adaptations of French operettas, many of which later became standard fare in Vienna. He was Joseph II’s original choice as producer for the new National Singspiel company, but his appointment was frustrated. However, he and his wife (Maria Anna [Marianne]; née Jacobs) appeared in his translation of the Sedaine-Monsigny Rose et Colas at the Burgtheater on 9 May 1778 and were with the company for the remainder of the season; their daughters appeared in minor roles.

Böhm then formed a new touring company, giving performances in Salzburg (where he got to know the Mozarts) and, from summer 1779 to May 1780, in Augsburg; the intervening winter was passed in Salzburg. From autumn 1780 he established his company at Frankfurt, though they also gave seasons at Mainz, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Aachen. From 1787 he was director of the Elector of Trier’s theatre at Koblenz, but he continued his association with Frankfurt, where Mozart met him again (they stayed at the same house) in September 1790. When Böhm died his wife succeeded him as director of the company.

The Böhms did much to further interest in Mozart’s works. They revived La finta giardiniera in German (1780) and frequently performed it in southern Germany; Mozart wrote of composing an ‘aria for Böhm’ in a letter to his cousin (24 April 1780) and in other letters there are references to Böhm and members of his troupe. Zaide may have been started with a production by Böhm’s company in mind; certainly he used parts of Mozart’s König Thamos music for performances of Plümicke’s play Lanassa, and Böhm chose Die Entführung to open the new theatre in Koblenz in 1787. Early performances of Don Giovanni and Figaro in the Rhineland were given by his company, and of Die Zauberflöte after his death. The repertory included many operas, ballets and plays. At a time when distinguished sedentary theatre companies were becoming established (Vienna, Hamburg, Mannheim), Böhm maintained a decent standard of touring performance in a valuable repertory over large areas of Germany and Austria.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (W. Kunze)

H.G. Fellmann: Die Böhmsche Theatertruppe und ihre Zeit (Leipzig, 1928)

H.F. Deininger: ‘Die deutsche Schauspielergesellschaft unter der Direktion von Johann Heinrich Böhm, einem Freunde der Familie Mozart, in Augsburg in den Jahren 1779 und 1780’, Augsburger Mozartbuch (Augsburg, 1942–3), 299–397

W.A. Bauer, O.E. Deutsch and J.H. Eibl, eds.: Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel, 1962–75)

O. Michtner: Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna, 1970)

E. Pies: Prinzipale: zur Genealogie des deutschsprachigen Berufstheaters vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Ratingen, 1973), 57–8

G. Rech: ‘Böhm und Schikaneder: zwei Salzburger Theaterimpresarios der Mozart-Zeit’, Festschrift Walter Senn, ed. E. Egg and E. Fässler (Munich, 1975), 188–95

L. Evertz: Mozart in Aachen (Aachen, 1978)

PETER BRANSCOMBE

Böhm, Karl

(b Graz, 28 Aug 1894; d Salzburg, 14 Aug 1981). Austrian conductor. He studied law, taking the doctorate at Graz University in 1919, and also music, first with private teachers in his native town and then from 1913 to 1914 with Eusebius Mandyczewski and Guido Adler in Vienna. Returning home, he coached singers at the Graz Opera, making his début as conductor in Nessler's Der Trompeter von Säckingen in 1917. He subsequently studied and conducted the major works of the repertory. He was strongly influenced by Carl Muck, who invited him to study the Wagner scores with him at Bayreuth, and Bruno Walter, who invited him to the Staatsoper in Munich in 1921. He left Munich after six years and in 1927 became Generalmusikdirektor at Darmstadt, where he frequently performed modern operas, including Wozzeck in 1931, a work he introduced to several musical centres. Böhm moved to Hamburg in 1931, succeeding Egon Pollak. The year 1933, when he first conducted the Vienna PO in opera and concert performances, turned out to be decisive for his further development. His initial success with Tristan und Isolde established a musical partnership that matured gradually over the following decades. Equally successful in his début at Dresden, Böhm accepted the invitation to succeed Fritz Busch as director of the Staatsoper in 1934. While never joining the Nazi party, he prospered in Hitler's Germany. He established a close friendship with Richard Strauss, whose devoted and inspired interpreter he remained throughout his career; he conducted the premières of two of Strauss's operas, Die schweigsame Frau (1935) and Daphne (1938), the latter being dedicated to him.

Two periods as director of the Vienna Staatsoper (1943–5 and 1954–6), and his artistic responsibility for the German seasons at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, from 1950 to 1953, were his last administrative commitments. He opened the rebuilt Vienna Staatsoper in 1955 with Fidelio, which he called his ‘Schicksalsoper’. He rapidly won a worldwide reputation as a freelance from 1956, conducting regularly at Salzburg, Bayreuth, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Milan, Paris and New York, where he made his Metropolitan début in 1957 with Don Giovanni. Böhm recorded almost every major piece by his favourite composers, including Mozart's complete symphonies and three versions of Così fan tutte, of which he was for many an ideal interpreter. He was widely honoured, and bore two exclusive titles: ‘Ehrendirigent’ of the Vienna PO and Austrian Generalmusikdirektor. He was also the president of the LSO.

Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss are the composers with whom his name is most closely associated, followed by Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Brahms and Berg. Böhm’s musical approach, expressed in strictly functional gestures, was direct, fresh, energetic and authoritative, avoiding touches of romantic sentimentality or self-indulgent virtuoso mannerisms – qualities finely displayed in his Bayreuth recordings of Tristan and The Ring. He was widely admired for his skilful balance and blend of sound, his feeling for a stable tempo and his sense of dramatic tension.

WRITINGS

Begegnung mit Richard Strauss, ed. F.E. Dostal (Vienna, 1964) [incl. Böhm's own discography and repertory listings]

Ich erinnere mich ganz genau, ed. H. Weigel (Zürich, 1968, 2/1974; Eng. trans., 1992)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Roemer: Karl Böhm (Berlin, 1966) [with discography]

F. Endler: Karl Böhm: ein Dirigentenleben (Hamburg, 1981)

H. Hoyer: Kart Böhm an der Wiener Staatsoper (1933–1981): eine Dokumentation (Vienna, 1981)

GERHARD BRUNNER/JOSÉ BOWEN

Böhme, Kurt

(b Dresden, 5 May 1908; d nr Munich, 20 Dec 1989). German bass. He studied with Kluge at the Dresden Conservatory, and made his début in 1929 as Caspar at Bautzen. He sang at the Dresden Staatsoper (1930–50), and in 1950 joined the Staatsoper in Munich. In Dresden he created Count Lamoral in Arabella, Vanuzzi in Die schweigsame Frau (in which he later became a famous interpreter of Sir Morosus), Capulet in Sutermeister’s Romeo und Julia (1940) and Prospero in his Die Zauberinsel (1942). At Salzburg he created Ulysses in Liebermann’s Penelope (1954) and Aleel in Egk’s Irische Legende (1955). Böhme first sang at Covent Garden with the Dresden company in 1936, and then regularly (1956–60) as Hunding, Hagen and Ochs; he last appeared there in 1972 with the Munich company as Sir Morosus. He made his début at Bayreuth in 1952 as Pogner, and at the Metropolitan in 1954 in the same role; he also sang at La Scala. His most famous role was Ochs, which he first sang in 1942 and repeated more than 500 times; in this role his rich voice and even richer sense of humour had full play, as can be heard in his recordings under Kempe and Böhm. He also recorded Rocco, Caspar and his Wagnerian roles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Blyth: Obituary, Opera, xlix (1990), 295–6

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Böhme, Oskar

(b Potschappel, nr Dresden, 24 Feb 1870; d ?Chkalov, Ural region, ?1938). German cornettist and composer. He is thought to have trained with his father, Heinrich Wilhelm Böhme (b 1843), a music teacher, and from 1885 he toured as a soloist. From 1894 to 1896 he played in the orchestra at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, Budapest. Between 1896 and 1897 he studied composition with Jadassohn at the Leipzig Conservatory. He then moved to St Petersburg, playing in the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra from 1897 to 1921, teaching in a musical college on Vasilyevskiy Island from 1921 to 1930, and playing in the Leningrad Drama Theatre orchestra from 1930 to 1934. Like many people of German origin, he was banished by Stalin to Chkalov (now Orenburg) and taught at a music school there from 1936 to 1938. The year of his death is uncertain; one eyewitness claims to have seen him at hard labour on the Turkmenian Channel in 1941. He composed 46 known works with opus numbers, including a lavishly Romantic concerto in E minor op.18 for trumpet in A (1899), which has remained in the repertory.

His brother Max William (1861–?1928) played in the Royal Hungarian Opera House orchestra from 1889 to 1908 and was the first professor for trumpet at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music from 1897 to 1908. He was also a member of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra between 1891 and 1901; in 1908 he returned to his birthplace of Potschappel to open a music school.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PazdírekH [with list of works]

L. Naess: Oskar Böhme: Konsert for trompet i e-moll, opus 18: den angivelig eneste trompetkonsert fra tidsrommet 1803–1900 (thesis, U. of Oslo, 1983) [with list of works]

E. Tarr: Solobuch für Trompete, iii (Hamburg, 1992) [with list of editions of the concerto]

F. Varasdy: ‘New Information on Oskar Böhme’, Euro-ITG Newsletter, no.2 (1993), 8 only

S. Bolotin: Ėntsiklopedicheskïy biograficheskiy slovar' musïkantov-ispolniteley na dukhovïkh instrumentakh [Biographical dictionary of Russian wind instrument players] (Leningrad, 1969, enlarged 2/1995), 30–31

E. Tarr: ‘The Böhme Brothers’, ITG Journal [International Trumpet Guild], xxii/1 (1997/8), 16–26

E. Tarr: East Meets West (Stuyvesant, NY, forthcoming)

EDWARD H. TARR

Bohn, Emil

(b Bielau, nr Neisse [now Nysa], 14 Jan 1839; d Breslau [now Wrocław], 5 July 1909). German musicologist, conductor and organist. At the University of Breslau he studied classical and oriental philology (1858–62). From 1862 to 1868 he studied music at the Akademisches Institut für Kirchenmusik. He was taught singing and choral direction by Julius Schäffer, and organ by Expedit Baumgart. While still a student Bohn directed the Breslau Akademischer Musikverein, and in 1868 became organist at the city's church of the Heilige Kreuz. He belonged to the generation of Eitner, the first to dedicate itself to investigating, classifying and ordering the musical heritage of the past, and which at the same time endeavoured to combine musical scholarship with performing practice. The Bohnsche Gesangverein, founded by Bohn in 1882, furthered these aims in its ‘historical concerts’, which numbered 100 by 1905, and another 16 by 1909. Each concert had a particular subject (e.g. concert no.84: ‘Spanish church music from the 16th century to the 19th’, and the concept ‘historical’ extended to the recent past in concert no.79: ‘Schumann as vocal composer’). Paralleling his work for the concerts, Bohn published catalogues of the rich musical holdings of the three Breslau libraries (the prints in 1883 and the manuscripts in 1890), and arranged in score 10,000 old German partsongs (25,000 pages), a collection which he left to the Breslau Stadtbibliothek. In 1884 the University of Breslau conferred upon him an honorary doctorate in acknowledgment of his services to music; he had taught at its Akademisches Institut für Kirchenmusik since 1881. He was made professor in 1895, and in 1908 honorary professor. He also taught singing for many years at the Catholic Gymnasium in Breslau. He was granted honorary membership of the Florentine Philharmonic Academy (1887), of the Accademia di S Cecilia in Rome (1891), and of the Vereeniging voor Noord-Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1892). In addition to his other musical activities, Bohn composed choral and solo lieder and from 1884 was music critic of the Breslauer Zeitung.

WRITINGS

Bibliographie der Musik-Druckwerke bis 1700, welche … zu Breslau aufbewahrt werden (Berlin, 1883/R)

Festschrift zur Feier des 25 jährigen Bestehens des Breslauer Orchestervereins (Breslau, 1887)

Die musikalischen Handschriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau (Breslau, 1890/R)

Fünfzig historische Concerte in Breslau, 1881–92, nebst einer bibliographischen Beigabe: Bibliothek des gedruckten mehrstimmigen weltlichen deutschen Liedes vom Anfange des 16. Jahrhunderts bis ca. 1640 (Breslau, 1893)

‘Julius Schäffer’, Chronik der Königlichen Universität zu Breslau, xvi (1902), 120 [obituary]

Hundert historische Concerte in Breslau, 1881–1905 (Breslau, 1905)

Die Nationalhymnen der europäischen Völker (Breslau, 1908)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NDB (F. Feldmann)

H.H. Borcherdt: Obituary, Schlesische Heimatblätter, ii (1909), 540

K. Bruchmann: Sechzehn historische Konzerte des Bohn'schen Gesangvereins in Breslau (Breslau, 1910) [suppl. to Bohn's Hundert historische Concerte]

O. Kinkeldey: Obituary, Chronik der Königlichen Universität zu Breslau, xxiv (1910), 192–5

J. Hübner: Bibliographie des Schlesischen Musik- u. Theaterwesens (Breslau, 1934)

R. Walter: Die Ausbildung von Kirchen- u. Schulmusikern am ‘Akademischen Institut für Kirchenmusik’ der Universität Breslau (Opole, 1997)

FRITZ FELDMANN/RUDOLF WALTER

Bohnen, Michael

(b Cologne, 2 May 1887; d Berlin, 26 April 1965). German bass-baritone. He studied at the Cologne Conservatory and made his début at Düsseldorf in 1910 as Caspar. Engagements followed at Wiesbaden (1912–13), the Berlin Hofoper (1914–18), the Metropolitan (1923–32) and the Deutsches Opernhaus, Berlin (1933–45). In 1914 he sang Hunding and Daland at Bayreuth, Ochs and Sarastro in the Beecham season at Drury Lane, and Heinrich der Vogler (his sole appearance) at Covent Garden. He created the title role of Rezniček’s Holofernes in 1923 in Berlin, and sang Caspar at Salzburg in 1939.

Bohnen had a large voice of extensive range which enabled him to take both bass and baritone parts. He was as much at home as Scarpia and Amonasro as he was singing Ochs and Méphistophélès. He was attracted by parts outside the standard repertory, and at the Metropolitan sang Francesco in the American première of Schillings’s Mona Lisa and the title role in Jonny spielt auf. From 1945 to 1947 he was Intendant of the Städtische Oper, Berlin, where in 1951 he made his farewell as Hans Sachs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GSL

GV (F. Zanetti)

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Böhner, (Johann) Ludwig [Louis]

(b Töttelstedt, Gotha, 8 Jan 1787; d Gotha, 28 March 1860). German pianist, conductor and composer. He was the model for E.T.A. Hoffmann's ‘Capellmeister Kreisler’ and thus of Schumann's Kreisleriana. He had his first keyboard, violin and composition lessons from his father, a local teacher and Kantor, and as a child showed an immense talent for music. Before he was ten he had set Schiller's Ode to Joy for soloists, chorus and orchestra and written many other works. His parents sent him to Erfurt to study at the Gymnasium and the teacher-training college; he graduated in 1805 and was sent immediately to Gotha for further instruction with Spohr, writing his first significant pieces at about this time. In 1808 he went to Jena, where he became a piano teacher and eventually joined the artistic circles of Hoffmann and Goethe. He made his first concert tour in 1811, the success of which won him the music directorship of the Nuremberg city theatre, a post he held shakily until 1815. Further concert tours followed, the last of which – to Copenhagen in 1819–20 – ended in a complete nervous breakdown which thoroughly destroyed his artistic career. He spent the last 40 years of his life lonely and deranged. He continued to compose, eking out a living from the pieces that he published, but these do not compare with his youthful work.

Hailed as the ‘Thuringian Mozart’ in his youth, Böhner won praise for his virtuoso piano pieces and his orchestral works. The influence of Spohr kept his style mainly along Classical lines, but he also anticipated Weber in a number of respects: in the concert overture (a genre that Böhner seems to have invented), in the use of the clarinet as a virtuoso solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment, and in the use of the elements of hunting, peasant life and the forest in opera (Böhner's Dreiherrenstein, 1810–13, anticipates Der Freischütz by almost a decade). Many of Bohner's works were published in his lifetime, and around the turn of the century many of his unpublished manuscripts were collected by a small Böhner Society in Gotha (now in D-GOl).

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal

Dreiherrenstein (op), op.107, unpubd (several numbers pubd separately); songs, incl. Drei Lieder, op.1 (1813), Drei Romanzen-Lieder, op.33 (1820); Preise Jerusalem, motet, 4vv, org/hns, op.64 (Leipzig, 1829); Der Herr ist gross (cant.), op.190 (1861)

instrumental

Orch: Fantasia and Variation, B, cl, orch/pf, 1813 (Leipzig, 1814/15); Concert Ov., D (Leipzig, 1816); 4 Variations on an Original Theme, e, vn, orch/pf (Leipzig, 1830/31); Grand Gallop brillant (à la Mozart), op.76 (Frankfurt, 1839), also version for pf; Concertino, pf, orch (1848); Concert Ov., C, 1805, arr. pf 4 hands (1862); 6 pf concs.: E, op.7 (1814), D, op.8 (1814), C, op.10/11 (1816), d, op.13 (1815), A, op.14 (1815), D, op.160 (1845)

Chbr: Pf Qt, C, op.4 (Leipzig, 1817); Sonatina, E, vn, pf, op.37 (Copenhagen, 1820); 3 fantasies, cl, pf, op.63 (1825), E, op.67 (1839), c, op.68 (1839); Fantasy and Variations on an Original Theme, vn, pf, op.94 (Leipzig, n.d.)

Solo pf: Sonata, E, op.15, 1813–14 (Leipzig, 1816); 6 Bagatelles, op.91 (Leipzig, 1822); 6 Bagatelles, op.92 (Leipzig, 1822); 4 caprices en forme de valses, op.74 (1839); Fantasie-Sonate, f, op.130 (1848); Sonata, C, op.188 (1851); Sonata, G, op.196 (1856); numerous fantasies, dances and sets of variations

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Motschmann)

J.L. Böhner: ‘Beiträge zu meiner Lebensgeschichte’, NZM, i (1834), 257–64

J.L. Böhner: Commentar und vollstäntiges Verzeichnis der Compositionen von J.L. Böhner, welcher seit 1820 bis 1840 u.s.f. im Druck erschienen sind (Gotha, 1842)

C. Melchior: Des Componisten, Orgel- und Klavier-Virtuosen J.L. Böhner Geburt und Jugendleben (Gotha, 1884)

A. Quantz: Böhner und seine Werke (Langensalza, 1910)

I. Amster: Das Virtuosenkonzert in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Klavierkonzertes (Wolfenbüttel, 1931) [incl. analysis of Pf Conc. op.13]

F.K. Bolt: Johann Ludwig Böhner, 1787–1860: Leben und Werk (Hildburghausen, 1940) [incl. complete list of works]

I. Preuss: Johann Ludwig Böhner, Veröffentlichungen der Landesbibliothek Gotha, vii (Gotha, 1960) [catalogue]

A. Beer: ‘Johann Ludwig Böhner: E.T.A. Hoffmanns Kapellmeister Kreisler?’, Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, ed. A. Beer, K. Pfarr and W. Ruf (Tutzing, 1997), 113–22

GEORGE GROVE/R (text), STEPHAN D. LINDEMAN (work-list)

Bohrung

(Ger.).

See Bore (i).

Boice, Thomas.

See Boyce, Thomas.

Boieldieu, (François-)Adrien

(b Rouen, 16 Dec 1775; d Jarcy, Seine et Oise, 8 Oct 1834). French composer. He was the leading opera composer in France during the first quarter of the 19th century and remains the central figure in the opéra comique tradition.

2. Achievements and influence.

GEORGES FAVRE/THOMAS BETZWIESER

1. Life.

The son of a clerk in the secretariat of the Rouen archdiocese, he received his earliest education from the Abbé Joseph-Jean-Pierre Baillemont, who was known by the townspeople for his profound knowledge of Virgil and for his enlightened approach to teaching Latin and French. His first music teacher, Urbain Cordonnier, maître de chapelle at Coutances and Evreux and from 1783 the children’s choirmaster at Rouen Cathedral, taught him solfège and singing technique, and before the boy learnt to read music he could sing by ear in cathedral performances of masses and motets: these included works by Bernier, Lalande, Campra, Brossard and Jommelli.

Boieldieu’s principal musical training came from Charles Broche (1752–1803), the cathedral organist at Rouen. A pupil of the previous organist, Desmasures, Broche had gone to Paris to study the organ with Nicolas Séjan and Armand-Louis Couperin before taking a post as organist at Lyons; subsequently he went to Italy and spent several years in Bologna studying with Padre Martini before returning to Rouen in 1777. He first taught Boieldieu the piano and the organ, later harmony and composition. Despite reports that he was a harsh taskmaster and a chronic alcoholic – E.-T. Maurice Ourry’s L’enfance de Boieldieu, an opéra comique produced in Paris in 1834, portrays Broche as a particularly contemptible character – he seems always to have held the respect of this gentle, timid pupil. Boieldieu made rapid progress as a keyboard player, and early in 1791 he was appointed organist at the church of St André in Rouen; about that time his earliest surviving compositions were written. Soon afterwards he was appearing as a concert pianist, performing his own sonatas, potpourris and Concerto in F.

One of the most important influences on the young Boieldieu was the musical theatre. The favoured theatrical genre in Rouen in the late 18th century was opéra comique, and Grétry’s Richard coeur de lion and Le rival confidant, Dalayrac’s Nina, La dot and Azémia, ou Les sauvages (Dalayrac was the most popular composer among the Rouennais) and Méhul’s Euphrosine et Coradin and Stratonice were only among the best of the numerous works which ran successfully at the Théâtre des Arts. Among the more enthusiastically received operas were Le Sueur’s La caverne and Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Le due contesse.

Boieldieu wrote his first opéra comique, La fille coupable, in 1793. It made a favourable impression on M. Cabousse, the intelligent and enterprising director of the Théâtre des Arts, and he produced it on 2 November. Although the libretto, written by the composer’s father, was unfavourably reviewed, the music was extremely well received at the première, and Boieldieu’s improvements in the declamation and orchestration, made the very next day, ensured an even greater success the second night. The following year he resumed his activities as a concert pianist and composer, and his first four sets of romances were published in Paris; but the success of La fille coupable encouraged him to begin work early in 1795 on a second opéra comique, Rosalie et Myrza, which was produced the following autumn. In the summer of 1796 he left the calm life of Rouen and moved to Paris, where his published romances had already made a name for him and where he hoped to enhance his reputation as an opera composer.

Boieldieu quickly earned a prominent place in the Paris musical world. Three one-act opéras comiques, La famille suisse, L’heureuse nouvelle and Le pari, all produced in 1797, ensured him from the outset a reputation as one of the leading French dramatic composers; and the three-act Zoraïme et Zulnar confirmed this reputation when it was staged with great success at the Salle Favart the following year. A series of operas produced over the next five years, including La dot de Suzette, Béniowski, Le calife de Bagdad and Ma tante Aurore, received the same measure of acclaim. In 1798 Boieldieu was nominated professor at the newly founded Conservatoire, where he taught the piano until June 1803; Fétis was a pupil of his in 1800 and noted that, during the composing of Le calife de Bagdad, the modest, lenient pedagogue would frequently play passages from the score and consult his pupils on it at their lessons...\Frames/F000684.html

In 1802 Boieldieu married Clotilde Mafleurai, a dancer of exquisite beauty and talent who, like many of her colleagues at the Opéra, had maintained a number of passionate involvements in her private life. He spent the first months of his marriage in perfect bliss, composing prolifically; but some time later Clotilde returned to a freer life, and this hurt the sensitive composer deeply and proved an embarrassment to his friends and family. He separated from her the following year and went to St Petersburg to take up a post in the Russian imperial court. Tsar Alexander I admired him, and he was made director of the French Opera and wrote several noteworthy opéras comiques and made a setting of the choruses in Racine’s Athalie. Having served for eight years in Russia he returned to Paris in April 1811, and after long deliberations he decided to decline the sumptuous, opulent life offered to him by the tsar; he submitted his formal resignation in February 1812.

On 4 April 1812 Boieldieu renewed contact with the Parisian public with Jean de Paris, for which he won great acclaim. This work justifies its success completely, possessing great charm, freshness and vigour. The tunefulness of the themes underlies the work’s inviting warmth and lasting cheerfulness. The following year he wrote the lightweight Le nouveau seigneur de village, and in 1816 he composed La fête du village voisin, which was a failure right from its first performance on 5 March; it is surprising that Boieldieu, who generally showed great care and gave evidence of good taste in choosing his librettos, should have agreed to set Charles-Augustin Sewrin’s text, a second-rate piece and nothing more than a poor imitation of Marivaux’s Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard.

Having re-established himself in the Paris musical world, Boieldieu was granted several official marks of recognition. He was appointed court composer and accompanist in 1815, and the following year he became a member of the advisory board to the nominating committee of the Académie Royale de Musique. Finally, in November 1817, he was awarded the most coveted mark of recognition: he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, succeeding Méhul as professor of composition. On 30 June 1818 Le petit chaperon rouge, an adaptation by Théaulon of Claude Perrault's fairytale, was produced at the Opéra-Comique. This was his richest, most inventive score yet, highly polished and at the same time showing great vision; in it Boieldieu gave evidence of an improvement and strengthening of his style.

For seven years after Le petit chaperon rouge Boieldieu wrote virtually nothing. His health was poor and he retired to his country house at Villeneuve-St-Georges to enjoy a quiet rural life. He revised the score of Les voitures versées (originally called Le séducteur en voyage), written in 1808 for St Petersburg, and had it performed on 29 April 1820; the gay and lively libretto and zestful music fired the imagination of the public, and the opera gained a lasting popularity. Various minor works followed: La France et l’Espagne (1823), Les trois genres, written for the reopening of the Théâtre de l’Odéon (1824) and Pharamond, written in collaboration with Berton and Rodolphe Kreutzer for the coronation of King Charles X (10 June 1825).

In the early 1820s a profound upheaval occurred in the musical life of France: Rossini’s operas were being produced in Paris and became the centre of musical attention, as well as the subject of heated debates. His L’italiana in Algeri had not won any great acclaim at its first performance in Paris in 1817, but productions at the Théâtre Italien in 1819 of L’inganno felice and Il barbiere di Siviglia marked the beginning of an enthusiasm on the part of the French public, which turned into a veritable fanaticism when Rossini made Paris his home in 1823. Under Rossini’s influence the musical styles of many French theatre composers were being transformed, and they had to take great care to prevent their identity from being engulfed by the wave of ‘rossinisme’.

Boieldieu was himself well aware of the qualities of these new trends, and he summarized his reaction to what he called ‘notre convulsion musicale’ in a letter to his friend the critic Charles Maurice (16 December 1823):

I am as much a ‘rossiniste’ as any of those yelping fanatics, and it is because I really like Rossini and am angry when I see his art degraded by bad imitations …. I believe that one can write very good music by imitating Mozart, Haydn, Cimarosa, etc., etc., but that one is only a cheap mimic if one imitates Rossini. Why? Because Mozart, Haydn, Cimarosa, etc., etc., always speak to the heart, the spirit; they always speak the language of sentiment and reason. But Rossini, whose music is filled with catchy ideas, with ‘bon mots’, cannot be imitated: one must steal from him outright or be altogether silent when one is incapable of inventing other ‘bon mots’, which would make for an entirely new creation.

In the face of this challenge from the Italian school, Boieldieu appeared as a staunch upholder of the French tradition when he produced La dame blanche, an opéra comique in three acts to a libretto by Scribe, on 10 December 1825 (fig.2). The work won an international success. Its cleverly constructed plot and the mysterious poetry of its libretto, based on a Scottish fable recounted by Walter Scott, kept the audience in breathless suspense. They adored the Romantic atmosphere of the story and were captivated as much by the delightful score and the tuneful originality of its themes as by the grace and expertise of the orchestration. Immediately after its resounding success in Paris there were triumphal productions of La dame blanche throughout Europe; it became one of the most notable successes in the history of opera and has been regularly revived.

A year after the success of La dame blanche Clotilde Mafleurai died. She and Boieldieu had been separated since he had left for St Petersburg. Boieldieu had been living with the singer Jenny Philis-Bertin for many years, and on 23 January 1827 he married her in the tiny church at Jarcy in the presence of his friends Catel and Cherubini. He settled down to write a new opera, Les deux nuits, which was eagerly awaited but not performed until 20 May 1829. Boieldieu’s admirers were rather baffled by the work at its première. It had too many ornate sets and elaborate orchestral numbers, too few songs and catchy tunes; all of this surprised the public, conservative as ever and unable to capture that enveloping feeling of mystery and romance which had been the overwhelming attraction of La dame blanche. After a favourable reception on opening night, the opera ran for a short time before being dropped from the repertory. This greatly distressed Boieldieu, who had taken considerable pains to give his style a new impetus. Both in harmony and in orchestration the score gives evidence of a more skilful and versatile composer, and despite imperfections in the libretto Les deux nuits remains one of Boieldieu’s most endearing opéras comiques and gives concrete indications of what might have come had his career continued into the 1830s.

Boieldieu then began a new work, Marguerite, to a libretto by Scribe, but serious worries about his health prevented him from finishing it; the work was completed in 1838 by his illegitimate son Louis Boieldieu. Persistent hoarseness brought on by consumptive laryngitis forced him to rest, and although he spent the summer of 1830 at Eaux-Bonnes in the Pyrenees and the following winter at Hyères, he did not fully recover his voice. On his doctors’ advice he spent the winter of 1832 in Italy. A further stay at Eaux-Bonnes in July 1834 brought no relief and gradually he lost the power of speech. He died peacefully on 8 October and was given a state funeral at the Invalides five days later. His body was taken to Rouen, and on 13 November he was buried in the Rouen cemetery, where his fellow citizens paid solemn tribute to his memory.

2. Achievements and influence.

Boieldieu’s contemporaries – Herold, Auber, Adam, Cherubini and Berlioz among them – all agreed that Boieldieu was indeed a gifted musician with exceptional creative ability. His work contains nothing artificial or affected, and the impetus and unquenchable spirit which he combined with freshness and grace could not fail to bring the listener under his spell.

The most exceptional feature of his style is its great melodic wealth and ease. He could compose melody only by singing, and these melodies therefore sound as if created spontaneously. He built on such basic materials as the diatonic and chromatic scales, the notes of a triad or dominant 7th chord, a large leap (10ths occur frequently and, as shown in ex.1, 12ths and 13ths are not exceptional in his vocal lines) or a dotted rhythmic pattern. He rarely ornamented the melodic line with coloratura passages, and these hardly ever exceeded two bars in length; he seldom wrote virtuoso passages for singers.

Boieldieu’s harmony, in keeping with his general style, never steps outside the normal confines of its time. Yet although he is best known for deft management of the simpler progressions, he could write harmony in the latest Parisian manner when the need arose; the original overture and several portions of Béniowski (1800) fully portray the emotions engendered by exile, treachery and exhaustion that this drama contains. He took his harmonic writing to a more advanced stage towards the end of his career, particularly in Les deux nuits, and made efforts to achieve greater polyphonic richness, but his music rarely attained the breadth of Méhul’s or Cherubini’s. He regarded the harmonic language of Beethoven’s symphonies, which he heard Habeneck conduct at the concerts of the Conservatoire, with a childlike wonder; and Berlioz’s student cantata Cléopâtre (1829) seemed to him to contain ‘chords of another world’ of which he ‘understood absolutely nothing’.

Boieldieu was at all times conscious of the value of orchestral colour; he used the whole range of instruments and exploited some of their rarer techniques, e.g. strings col legno in Le calife de Bagdad. Moreover, he was able to create special sound combinations and poetic effects that were completely his own. He had a faultless instinct and technique for his own type of instrumentation, and his scores stand as excellent examples of clear, rich and lively orchestral writing. To sum up, Boieldieu’s work is that of an individual, gifted poet and a sensitive, discriminating artist.

Boieldieu’s lifetime spanned the last quarter of the 18th century and the first third of the 19th, the end and beginning of two widely different eras, and he witnessed the passing of an entire generation of musicians. The changes in operatic style that were beginning to appear in the works of his own and younger generations – a shift of emphasis from the melodic to the harmonic aspect and an increased importance given to the orchestral accompaniment – are to some extent reflected in the evolution of Boieldieu’s style, and this qualifies him for a place at the head of a line of composers beginning with Herold, Auber and Adam and continuing with Gounod, Bizet and Chabrier. Insofar as his ideas sound fresh and spontaneous, his melodic lines clear, Boieldieu has sometimes been compared to Mozart, and it does indeed seem that his intelligent and lucid mind may have caught a spark from Mozart’s fire. Thus, even without pushing the comparison to extremes, the title Boieldieu was given by his compatriots, ‘the French Mozart’, can be considered the highest accolade that he has been granted.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

stage

first performed in Paris unless otherwise stated

SPH	Hermitage, St Petersburg

La fille coupable (oc, 2, J.F.A. Boieldieu), Rouen, Arts, 2 Nov 1793, F-R

Rosalie et Myrza (oc, 3, J.F.A. Boieldieu), Rouen, Arts, 28 Oct 1795, lost

La famille suisse (oc, 1, C. de Saint-Just [G. d’Aucourt]), OC (Feydeau), 11 Feb 1797, vs (1797)

L’heureuse nouvelle (oc, 1, Saint-Just and C. de Longchamps), OC (Feydeau), 7 Nov 1797, lost

Le pari, ou Mombreuil et Merville (oc, 1, Longchamps), OC (Favart), 15 Dec 1797, lost

Zoraïme et Zulnar (oc, 3, Saint-Just), OC (Favart), 10 May 1798, vs (1798)

La dot de Suzette (oc, 1, J. Dejaure, after J. Fiévée), OC (Favart), 5 Sept 1798, vs (1798)

Les méprises espagnoles (oc, 1, Saint-Just), OC (Feydeau), 18 April 1799, lost

Emma, ou La prisonnière (oc, 1, V. de Jouy, Saint-Just and Longchamps), Paris, Montansier, 12 Sept 1799, collab. Cherubini, lost except for frag., R

Béniowski, ou Les exilés du Kamtchatka (oc, 3, A. Duval, after A. von Kotzebue), OC (Favart), 8 June 1800, vs (1800), rev. for OC (Feydeau), 20 July 1824, vs (1824)

Le calife de Bagdad (oc, 1, Saint-Just), OC (Favart), 16 Sept 1800, vs (1800)

Ma tante Aurore, ou Le roman impromptu (oc, 2, Longchamps), OC (Feydeau), 13 Jan 1803, vs (1803)

Le baiser et la quittance, ou Une aventure de garnison (oc, 3, L.B. Picard, M. Dieulafoy and Longchamps), OC (Feydeau), 18 June 1803, collab. Kreutzer, Méhul, Isouard, Pn, B-Bc

Aline, reine de Golconde (oc, 3, J. Vial and E. de Favières), SPH, 5/17 March 1804, Pn, RUS-SPsc

La jeune femme colère (oc, 1, Claparède, after C.-G. Etienne), SPH, 18/30 April 1805, vs (1805); OC (Feydeau), 12 Oct 1812

Abderkan (oc, 1, Dégligny), St Petersburg, Peterhof Palace, 26 July/7 Aug 1805, F-R

Un tour de soubrette (oc, 1, N. Gersin), SPH, 16/28 April 1806, F-R, RUS-SPtob

Télémaque (oc, 3, P. Dercy), SPH, 16/28 Dec 1806, vs (St Petersburg, 1807), RUS-SPan

Amour et Mystère, ou Lequel et mon cousin? (oc, 1, J. Pain), St Petersburg, 1807, lost

Les voitures versées (oc, 2, E. Dupaty), SPH, 4/16 April 1808, RUS-SPtob, rev. for OC, 29 April 1820, vs (1820) [orig. called Le séducteur en voyage]

La dame invisible (oc, 1, ? A. Daudet and ?Pain), St Petersburg, 1808, F-R

Athalie (incid music, 5, J. Racine), St Petersburg, 1808, R, RUS-SPtob

Rien de trop, ou Les deux paravents (oc, 1, Pain), SPH, 25 Dec 1810/6 Jan 1811, vs (1811); OC (Feydeau), 19 April 1811

Jean de Paris (oc, 2, Saint-Just), OC (Feydeau), 4 April 1812, vs (1812)

Le nouveau seigneur de village (oc, 1, A.F. Creuzé de Lesser and Favières), OC (Feydeau), 29 June 1813, vs (1813)

Bayard à Mézières, ou Le siège de Mézières (oc, 1, A.R.P. Allisan de Chazet and Dupaty), OC (Feydeau), 12 Feb 1814, collab. Catel, Cherubini, Isouard, vs (1814)

Le béarnais, ou Henri IV en voyage (oc, 1, C. Sewrin), OC (Feydeau), 21 May 1814, collab. Kreutzer, lost

Angéla, ou L’atelier de Jean Cousin (oc, 1, G. Montcloux d’Epinay), OC (Feydeau), 13 June 1814, collab. S. Gail, Pn

Le troubadour (scène lyrique), 2 Feb 1815, lost [lib pubd 1815]

La fête du village voisin (oc, 3, Sewrin), OC (Feydeau), 5 March 1816, vs (1816)

Charles de France, ou Amour et gloire [Act I] (oc, 2, M.E.G.M. Théaulon de Lambert, A. d’Artois de Bournonville and de Rancé), OC (Feydeau), 18 June 1816, vs (1816); Act 2 by Herold

Le petit chaperon rouge (oc, 3, Théaulon de Lambert, after C. Perrault), OC (Feydeau), 30 June 1818, vs (1818)

Les arts rivaux (scène lyrique, 1, Chazet), Hôtel de Ville, 2 May 1821, collab. Berton, F-Pn

Blanche de Provence, ou La cour des fées (op, 3, Théaulon de Lambert and de Rancé), Tuiléries, 1 May 1821, collab. Berton, Cherubini, Kreutzer, Paer, Po

La France et l’Espagne (scène lyrique, 1, Chazet), Hôtel de Ville, 15 Dec 1823, lost

Les trois genres (scène lyrique, 1, E. Scribe, Dupaty and M. Pichat), Paris, Odéon, 27 April 1824, collab. Auber, frag. R

Pharamond (op, 3, F. Ancelot, P.-M.-A. Guiraud and A. Soumet), Opéra, 10 June 1825, collab. Berton, Kreutzer, vs (Paris, [1825])

La dame blanche (oc, 3, Scribe, after W. Scott), OC (Feydeau), 10 Dec 1825, vs (1825)

Les deux nuits (oc, 3, Scribe and J.-N. Bouilly), OC (Ventadour), 20 May 1829, vs (1829)

Marguerite (oc, 3, Scribe), inc., Act 1 sketched 1830, R

La marquise de Brinvilliers (oc, 3, Castil-Blaze [F.-H.-J. Blaze] and Scribe), OC (Ventadour), 31 Oct 1831, collab. Auber, Batton, Berton, Blangini, Carafa, Cherubini, Herold, Paer, vs (1831)

Les jeux floraux (op, 3), inc., frag. R

instrumental

Orch: Pf Conc., F, 1792 (1795); Hp Conc., C (1801); 6 Waltzes, small orch (1801); Galop, in Recueil de 6 galops composés pour les bals de l’Opéra (1834)

Chbr: Pf Trio, op.5 (c1800); Potpourri, on arias by Mozart, hp, vc, pf (London, n.d.); Potpourri, hp, vc, pf, D-Dl; 4 duos, hp, pf, no.1 (1796), no.2 (1796), no.3, with polonaise (c1800), lost, no.4 (1802); Air and 9 Variations, hp, pf (1803), lost; 6 vn sonatas, 3 as op.3 (1799), op.7 (c1807) [based on Duo no.4, hp, pf], 2 as op.8, pf/hp acc. (c1807) [no.2: vn ad lib]

Hp Sonata, in Journal de harpe, ii (1795), lost

9 pf sonatas, 3 as op.1 (1795), 3 as op.2 (c1795), 2 as op.4 (1799), op.6 (c1800); 6 Short Pieces and 8 Easy Exercises (?1800); Exercises, for A.L.V. Boieldieu, 1827, frag. F-R

choral

Le preux chevalier (Messence), masonic hymn, chorus, cls, bn, hn (c1810)

Hymne maçonnique (Messence), 4vv (c1810)

Cantata (E. Mennechet) (1821), lost

Les chasseurs d’Afrique (M. de Charlemagne), military scena (c1835)

Phoebé, nocturne, 2vv, ed. in Journal de musique (27 April 1878)

Je pense à toi, nocturne, 2vv, D. Janvier’s private collection, Paris

romances

for one voice, piano, unless otherwise stated

Romances published in collections

1er recueil de [6] romances, pf/hp acc. (1794): S’il est vrai; D’une espérance vaine; On me dit; La dormeuse; Tu vas donc t’éloigner; Les femmes justifiées

2ème recueil de [6] romances (Burgot) (1794): Je cherche loin de l’objet; J’aimais un objet; Je veux goûter; Je ne puis plus disposer; Romance sur la véritable Nina; Vous verrai-je toujours

3ème recueil de 6 romances (1794), lost, titles given in Pougin: Insensible aux attraits; L’innocente; De l’amitié, de sa douceur; Peu contente de ses attraits; L’amour et l’amitié; Les beaux yeux de Lucinde

4ème recueil de 6 romances (1794): En vous voyant; Je vous salue; Chant montagnard; Vous qui loin d’une amante; Pour la triste Amélie; Quand j’arrivai

5ème recueil de 6 romances (1795): Désirs brûlants; Mais réponds-moi méchante; Ah! que je suis heureux; Petits oiseaux; Unique objet de ma tendresse; Dans ces affreux déserts

6ème recueil de 6 romances (1795): Quand aux genoux; Charmants oiseaux; Loin de toi, cher objet; On tente peu; Je l’ai perdu, hélas!; Zelmire a trahi ma tendresse

6 romances, oeuvre VII (1795): Du rivage de Vaucluse (J.-F. Marmontel); Compagne tant chérie; Claire au tombeau (C. de Saint-Just); Tant doux plaisirs; Hélas! je voulais être aimé; Le sombre hiver (J.-F. de La Harpe)

8ème recueil de [8] romances nouvelles (1795)

1 ère suite (C. de Longchamps): Quand, par pudeur; Au sein des plaisirs; Dans mes ennuis; O toi qui sur notre existence

2ème suite: De la lune les lueurs sombres (Saint-Just), vn ad lib; Soldat qui garde ces créneaux, vn ad lib; Charmant objet; Ai trop caché le feu, 2 solo vv

6 romances nouvelles, oeuvre IX (1797), lost, announced in Le miroir (4 June 1797)

6 nouvelles romances, oeuvre X (1797), lost, announced in Journal de Paris (29 June 1797)

6 romances, oeuvre XI (1797): identical with 6 romances, oeuvre VII

Recueil de [6] romances, oeuvre XII (Longchamps) (1801): Bois muet, sombre asile; Adieu, bocage frais; Comment ne pas croire; Avant que de l’amour; O vous dont un amant aimable; Il faut partir, adieu ma Laure

13ème recueil de 4 romances (1801): Le pont de la veuve (J. de Florian); Stances (‘Tu plains mes jours troublés’) (C. Colardeau); Quinze ans, Myra (J. Legouvé); Tant douce amie (Saint-Just)

14ème recueil de romances (?1801), lost, announced in AMZ, iv (1801), Intelligenz-Blatt (1801), Sept, p.56

15ème recueil de 4 nouvelles romances (Longchamps) (1803); Quand laissant la cité voisine; Au premiers jours de mon printemps; L’amour, pour prix de ma défaite; Rondeau (‘Mon bon ami, je te conseille’), from Emma, ou La prisonnière

3 romances (1811): Longtemps je crus à la tendresse; Quelque gloire, beaucoup d’amour; Las d’espérer vainement le bonheur

Other romances

Dated: Le ménestrel (A. de Coupigny) (1795); L’absence (J. Lablée) (1796), Couplets à une demoiselle (‘Vous m’ennuyez’) (1796); L’attente (E. Jouy) (1798); Romance de Pinto (N. Lemercier) (1800); La chanson et la romance (E. Dupaty) (1800); Sous un saule au bord du rivage (Longchamps) (1802); Le billet consolateur de l’absence (Longchamps) (1802); Quoi! tu m’aimes et me délaisses (Longchamps) (1802); Romance tirée de Don Quichotte (trans. Florian) (1802); Vois ce vieux chêne (Longchamps) (1802); Eh! quoi, tu voulais me quitter (Longchamps), 2 solo vv (1802); Le vieux ménestrel (Mendouze) (1807); Ce que je désire (N. Ségur) (1807); L’abandon (Messence) (1811); A Zelmire (1812); Mon Dieu qui seul compte mes pleurs (C. Mollevaut) (1818); Plus d’illusion (Fontenelle) (1825); L’enfant perdu (Lorin de Belmontet) (1825); Te voilà roi! (A. Naudet) (1830); L’ange des premiers amours (M. Bétourné), 2 solo vv (1830); Le chemin de Lorette (Naudet) (1834)

Undated, pubd: Le brave à ses derniers moments (M. Commerson); Célestine; Ce que j’aime en toi; Depuis que j’ai quitté ces lieux; Les deux jours; François Ier (Ravrio); Le ménestrel et le guerrier (Bérard), 1/2vv; Le rencontre du soir (H. Georgeon)

Undated, unpubd: Adieu, charmant pays de France (P.-J. Béranger), F-Pn; Le besoin d’aimer, R; Ma bouche encore ne sait pourquoi (Longchamps), R; Fuyez, fuyez de mon âme attendrie, Pn; Laure à la fleur de sa jeunesse, R; O mon amante (Longchamps), R; Tu fuis, cruel (Florian), R

Lost: Je t’aime, c’est là mon bonheur; Peux-tu douter; Quand tu m’aimais (J.-E. Jouy): all 3 arr. 1v, gui by Lintant (n.d.); Couramé, announced in Journal général d’annonces (26 Aug 1825); Le père bien malheureux (Bouilly), text in J.-N. Bouilly: Le vieux glaneur (Paris, n.d.); Arbre charmant qui me rappelle; O toi que j’aime; Pauvre Blondel: all 3 mentioned in Gougelot

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisBS

A.L.V. Boieldieu: Relation de mon voyage en Italie (MS, 1832–3, F-R)

H. Berlioz: ‘Boieldieu’, Le rénovateur (14 Oct 1834)

L. Cherubini: Discours prononcé aux funérailles de M. Boieldieu (Paris, 1834)

F.-J. Fétis: ‘Boieldieu’, Revue musicale (19 and 26 Oct 1834)

F. Halévy: ‘Boieldieu’, Gazette musicale de Paris, i (1834), 325, 334–6, 343–5

Vicomte Walsh: Procès-verbal de la cérémonie funèbre en l’honneur de Boieldieu (Rouen, 1835)

J.-A. Delerue: Boieldieu et les honneurs rendus à ce célèbre compositeur par Rouen, sa ville natale (Rouen, 1836)

A.C. Quatremère de Quincy: Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Boieldieu (Paris, 1837)

J.-A. Réfuville: Boieldieu: sa vie, ses oeuvres (Rouen, 1851)

A. Adam: Souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris, 1857, many later edns)

A. Adam: Derniers souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris, 1859)

G. Héquet: A. Boieldieu: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1864)

A. Thurner: Les transformations de l’opéra-comique (Paris, 1865)

H. Berlioz: Mémoires (Paris, 1870/R; Eng. trans. ed. D. Cairns, 1969, 2/1970); ed. P. Citron (Paris, 1969, 2/1991)

J.-E. Bouteiller: Boieldieu à Rouen (Rouen, 1875)

A. Pougin: Boieldieu: sa vie, ses oeuvres, son caractère, sa correspondance (Paris, 1875) [with list of works]

E. Duval: Boieldieu (Geneva, 1883)

E. Hanslick: ‘Boieldieu’, Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1884), 254–67

J. Carlez: Notices sur quelques musiciens rouennais (Caen, 1885)

A. Jullien: ‘Boieldieu’, Musique: mélanges d’histoire et de critique musicale et dramatique (Paris, 1896), 143–55

L. Augé de Lassus: Boieldieu (Paris, 1908)

P.-L. Robert: ‘Lettres de Boieldieu (1830–1834)’, BSIM, v (1909), 899–918, 996–1007

P.-L. Robert: ‘Correspondance de Boieldieu’, RMI, xix (1912), 75–107; xxii (1915), 520–59

P.-L. Robert: ‘Lettres inédites d’Adrien Boieldieu’, ReM, vii/3–5 (1925–6), 111–30

G. de Saint-Foix: ‘Les premiers pianistes parisiens: Boieldieu’, ibid., 102–10

A. Schaeffner: ‘A propos de La dame blanche’, ibid., 97–101

R.-A. Mooser: L’opéra-comique français en Russie au XVIIIe siècle (Conches, 1932, enlarged 2/1954)

H. de Curzon: ‘Les opéras-comiques de Boieldieu’, ReM, no.140 (1933), 249–63

J. Tiersot: ‘La maison de Boieldieu à Jarcy’, Le temps (26 Sept 1935)

G. Favre: ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Boieldieu’, ReM, nos.185–7 (1938), 1–10

H. Gougelot: La romance française sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Melun, 1938–43)

G. Favre: ‘La danseuse Clotilde Mafleurai’, ReM, nos.195–6 (1940), 1–11

G. Favre: Boieldieu: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1944–5) [with complete bibliography]

G. Favre: ‘L’amitié de deux musiciens: Boïeldieu et Chérubini’, ReM, nos.198–202 (1946), 217–25

G. Favre: La musique française de piano avant 1830 (Paris, 1952)

A.-P. de Mirimonde: ‘Musiciens isolés et portraits de l’école française du XVIIIe siècle dans les collections nationales: III: Révolution et Empire’, Revue du Louvre, xvii/2 (1967), 81–8

D. Charlton: Orchestration and Orchestral Practice in Paris, 1789 to 1810 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1973)

K. Pendle: Eugène Scribe and French Opera of the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979)

J.-M. Bailbé: ‘La dame blanche, ou Le fantastique galant (Boieldieu et Nodier)’, Etudes normandes, ii (1984), 6–16

G. Favre: ‘Deux lettres d’Adrien Boieldieu’, Études normandes, ii (1984), 17–19

C. Goubault: ‘Adrien Boieldieu (1815–1883), compositeur d’opéras comiques: l’ombre de son père’, Etudes normandes, ii (1984), 42–56

J. Mongrédien: La musique en France des Lumières au Romantisme (1789–1830) (Paris, 1986)

S.J. Mantel: An Examination of Selected Opéras Comiques of Adrien Boieldieu (diss., U. of Illinois, 1985)

R. Gstrein: Die vokale Romanze in der Zeit von 1750 bis 1850 (Innsbruck, 1989)

F. Claudon, ed.: Dictionnaire de l’opéra-comique français (Berne, 1995)

R. Legrand and P. Taïeb: ‘L’Opéra-comique sous le Consulat et l’Empire’, Le Théâtre lyrique au XIXe siècle, ed. P. Prévost (Metz, 1995), 1–61

H. Schneider and N. Wild, eds.: Die Opéra comique und ihr Einfluss auf das europäische Musiktheater im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1997)

T. Betzwieser: ‘Der Sänger und sein Lied: Timbres im “genre troubadour”’, Timbre und Vaudeville: zur Geschichte und Problematik einer populären Gattung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Schneider (Hildesheim, 1999), 344–78

T. Betzwieser: Sprechen und Singen: Ästhetik und Erscheinungsformen der Dialogoper (Stuttgart, forthcoming)

Boieldieu, (Adrien) Louis (Victor)

(b Paris, 3 Nov 1815; d Quincy, 9 July 1883). French composer. The illegitimate son of Adrien Boieldieu and Thérèse Regnault, a singer at the Opéra-Comique, he was served both ill and well by his father’s fame. Following the death of his father in 1834 the French government allocated him an annual pension of 1200 francs.

His début as a stage composer was with a work left incomplete by his father, the opéra comique Marguerite, which Louis hastened to finish. However, it was a failure at the box office and none of his subsequent works achieved more than ephemeral notice. La fille invisible (1854) is representative of Boieldieu’s mature writing. It shows thorough acquaintance with the style of Donizetti and liberal use of modulations through 3rds; melodies are undistinguished. A waltz chorus provides local colour in the first two acts, a device used five years later by Gounod in Faust. L’opéra à la cour (1840), initially intended for the inauguration of a new building for the Opéra-Comique, is of interest as a particularly elaborate example of 19th-century French operatic pastiches. It includes musical materials from such diverse sources as Weber’s Der Freischütz, Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero and God Save the Queen.

All Boieldieu’s other works are vocal. His drawing-room romances are often misattributed to his father.

WORKS

stage works first performed in Paris unless otherwise stated

Marguerite (oc, 3, E. Scribe and F. de Planard), OC (Bourse), 18 June 1838 (Paris, c1838), collab. A. Boieldieu

L’opéra à la cour (oc, 4, Scribe and J.-H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges), OC (Favart), 16 July 1840, collab. Grisar

L’aïeule (oc, 1, Saint-Georges), OC (Favart), 27 Aug 1841

Le bouquet de l’infante (oc, 3, Planard and A. de Leuven), OC (Favart), 27 April 1847, vs (Paris, c1847)

La butte des moulins (oc, 3, J. Gabriel and P. Desforges), Lyrique, 6 Jan 1852, vs (Paris, c1852)

La fille invisible (oc, 3, Saint-Georges and H. Dupin), Lyrique, 6 Feb 1854, vs (Paris, c1854)

Le moulin du roi (oc, 2, de Leuven), Baden-Baden, 15 July 1858

Le chevalier Lubin (oc, 1, M. Carré and V. Perrot), Fantaisies-Parisiennes, 23 May 1866, vs (Paris, c1867)

La fête des nations (à-propos allégorique, 1, A. Pougin), Fantaisies-Parisiennes, 27 April 1867

La halte du roi (oc, 2, C.-L.-E. Nuitter), Rouen, Arts, 16 Dec 1875

Alain Blanchard (opéra, 3, J. Réfuveille), unperf.

Phryné, unperf.

Many romances, 1v, pf; masses; motets

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.L.V. Boieldieu: Relation de mon voyage en Italie (MS, 1832–3, F-R)

G. Chouquet: Histoire de la musique dramatique en France (Paris, 1873/R)

G. Favre: Boieldieu: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1944–5)

C. Goubault: ‘Adrien Boieldieu (1815–1883), compositeur d’opéras comiques: l’ombre de son père’, Etudes normandes, ii (1984), 42–56

STEVEN HUEBNER

Boileau, Simon.

See Boyleau, Simon.

Boileau Bernasconi, Alessio

(b Verona, 14 March 1875; d Barcelona, 27 Sept 1948). Italian music publisher of French origin. He began as a music printing apprentice with Ricordi, Milan, then went as a printer to Marcello Capra of Turin. In 1904 he became a printer for Vidal Llimona y Boceta of Barcelona, whose printing works he took over in 1906. He went straight into the publishing business, founding, in partnership with others, the firm Iberia Musical in Barcelona; in 1928 he absorbed its publishing assets with those of other publishing firms to form the Editorial Boileau. He was active for several decades, publishing the standard repertory and much other music; later the firm devoted itself almost exclusively to printing music for other firms. His most popular collection was the Edición Ibérica which contained both didactic works and piano repertory. His engraving workshop set works by most Spanish composers and musicologists of the time.

JOSÉ LÓPEZ-CALO

Boin, Henry Alphonse.

See Dalmorès, Charles.

Bois

(Fr.).

See Woodwind instruments.

Bois, Jean du.

See Bosquet.

Bois, Rob du

(b Amsterdam, 28 May 1934). Dutch composer. He studied piano with Hans Sachs and Hart Nibbrig-de Graeff, and law at the University of Amsterdam. As a lawyer he was legal adviser to the Dutch performing rights society until 1994. Nowadays he is free to spend all of his time composing. Hearing two symphonies by Vermeulen in 1949, he was so impressed that he decided to become a composer himself. As a composer he is self-taught, though guided as a young man by his older colleagues van Baaren and Ruyneman in the 1950s. From 1959 he was one of the composers fostered by the Gaudeamus Foundation. After he won the Visser-Neerlandia Prize (1966), his music was performed in the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Zagreb Biennale, the Witten Festival and at the 1967 ISCM Festival in Prague. In the 1960s free experimentation, sometimes with graphic notation, replaced the strict 12-note technique that had determined his musical thinking before 1960. He has worked with Dutch musicians like the bass clarinettist Harry Sparnaay, and frequently with his Romanian friends such as the viola player Vladimir Mendelssohn and the pianist Hrisanide. In 1991 a concert was held in Bucharest in his honour. His works are mostly for a variety of chamber ensembles, and his many works show a rare talent for musical comedy as well as a habit of boldly exploring the possibilities of avant-garde matter in a joyful manner.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Le concerto pour Hrisanide, pf, orch, 1971; Elegia, ob d'amore, str, 1995

Vocal: Une façon de dire, S, pf, perc, 1963; Inferno (Dante), S, 2 vn, vc, hpd, 1974; Vandaag is het morgen van gisteren (R. du Bois, W. Wegerif), S, spkr, youth chorus, orch, brass band, 1975

Chbr: Danses tristes, hn, va, 1954; Pastorale I, ob, cl, hp, 1960, rev. 1969; Music for Alto Rec, 1961; Chants et contrepoints, wind qnt, 1962; Mood Music, ob, org, 1965; Summer Music, a sax, vn, vc, 1967; Musique d'atelier, cl, trbn, vc, pf, 1968, rev. 1973; The Dog named Boo, cl, vn, pf, 1972; Because it is, cl qt, 1973; Melody, cl, str qt, 1974; His Flow of Spirits, fl, b cl, pf, 1979; Sonata, va, 1981; Str Qt no.3, 1981; Autumn Leaves, gui, hpd, 1984; Das Liebesverbot, 4 Wagner tubas, 1986; Symphorine, fl, vn, va, vc, 1987; 4 Indulgent Pieces, pf, 1988; The Independent, str qt, 1990; Gaberbocchus, 4 pf, 1996; Fleeting, cl ens, 1997

Principal publishers: Donemus, Moeck, Molenaar, Schott

HUIB RAMAER

Boismortier, Joseph Bodin de

(b Thionville, 23 Dec 1689; d Roissy-en-Brie, 28 Oct 1755). French composer. He spent his childhood in Thionville, and went to Metz about 1700. In 1713 he was receveur de la régie royale des tabacs for the Roussillon troops at Perpignan. On 7 November 1720 he married Marie Valette, the daughter of the city treasurer Guillaume Valette. He remained in Perpignan until about 1723, when he settled in Paris. In September 1724 he took out a royal privilege to engrave his works and began the process of publishing them, which ceased only on his death. From 1743 to 1745 he was sous-chef and then chef d’orchestre at the Foire St Laurent, and also, in 1745, at the Foire St Germain. He was a prolific composer of very profitable works, which according to the Mercure de France (October 1747) brought him over 500,000 écus, enabling him to live a life of fame and luxury without holding any official post. His Christmas motet Fugit nox (now lost), on themes from noëls, was popular at the Concert Spirituel from 1743 to 1770, with L.-C. Daquin and C.-B. Balbastre at the organ. His pastorale Daphnis et Chloé, to a libretto by Pierre Laujon, was well received when it was performed at the Opéra in September 1747, and was even parodied at the Comédie-Italienne under the title of Les bergers de qualité when it was revived on 4 May 1752. After his death his daughter continued to sell his available works, and also published several more.

Boismortier wrote a great deal of music. Many of his compositions, intended for amateur ensembles, require only average technical skill and envisage various possible combinations of instruments, as witness the Sonates pour une flûte et un violon par accords sans basse op.51 and the sonatas for two bassoons and four flutes. He also composed for such fashionable instruments of the time as the musette, hurdy-gurdy and transverse flute. This last was his favourite instrument, and he considerably extended its repertory. In his instrumental pieces he devoted equal attention to the various parts, which can consist simply of a series of imitations; in his earliest sonatas for keyboard and flute, op.91 (c1741–2), the two instruments are complementary, whereas it was usual in such works at the time for the harpsichord to dominate. Boismortier adopted the three-movement form favoured by Italian composers. He wrote concertos for many different instruments. Some, such as his VI concertos pour cinq flûtes traversières ou autres instruments sans basse op.15 (1727), are for unusual ensembles. These are not so much solo concertos as works in the French style of François Couperin’s Concerts royaux (1722) and Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert (1741).

Boismortier’s cantatas and motets skilfully mingle French and Italian elements, with ternary form dominating in the airs. The rather lightweight anonymous texts of his cantatas are typical of the period. He was most at ease in short forms, and after 1738 followed fashion by abandoning the cantata in favour of the cantatille. His agreeable melodies were designed to please the taste of his audience, and the virtuoso vocal writing in his motets is strongly influenced by the Italian style. In his stage works he collaborated with the great librettists of the period: Charles-Antoine Le Clerc de La Bruère (who also wrote the libretto of Rameau’s Dardanus), Pierre Laujon and Charles-Simon Favart. He composed to suit the taste of the time, as in his ballet-comique on a fashionable theme, Don Quichotte chez la duchesse, in which the music does not attempt any local Japanese colour but consists of lively, facile melodies.

Boismortier’s pedagogical works (tutors for the flute and the descant viol) are apparently lost, but the fact that he wrote them is evidence of a didactic concern also shown in such instrumental works as his Diverses pièces pour une flûte traversière seule … propres pour ceux qui commencent à jouer de cet instrument op.22 (1728), and his Quinque sur l’octave, ou Dictionnaire harmonique (1734).

Boismortier’s music demonstrates great facility, and one regrets that he wrote so few works on a large scale. It is difficult not to agree with La Borde, who said: ‘He will always be regarded by professionals as a good harmonist … anyone who will take the trouble to excavate this abandoned mine might find enough gold dust there to make up an ingot’.

WORKS

published in Paris unless otherwise stated

stage

Les voyages de l’Amour, op.60 (ballet, 4, C.-A. Le Clerc de La Bruère), Paris, Opéra, 26 April 1736 (1736)

Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, op.97 (ballet-comique, 3, C.-S. Favart), Paris, Opéra, 12 Feb 1743, F-Po; (1743); ed. R. Blanchard (1971)

Daphnis et Chloé, op.102 (pastorale, 4, P. Laujon), Paris, Opéra, 28 Sept 1747 (1747)

Unperf.: Daphné (tragédie lyrique, Pigné), unpubd

other vocal

†

lost

Cantates françoises [Les 4 saisons: Le printemps; L’été; L’automne; L’hyver], 1v, insts, bc, op.5 (1724), also pubd singly; ed. in ECFC, xvi (1991)

[1^er] (–14^e) Recueils d’airs à boire et sérieux, 1–3vv, opp.16 (1727), 36 (1732), †43 (c1733), 48 (1734), 54 (1735), 58 (1736), 62 (1737), 70 (1738), †76 (c1739), †82 (c1740), †89 (c1741), 93 (1742), †95 (after 1742), †98 (after 1742)

Motets, 1v, insts, b, op.23 (1728)

Exaudiat te Dominus (Ps xix), Motet à grand choeur 1730, F-Pn

Second livre de cantates [Vertumne; Actéon; Ixion; Les Titans], 1v, insts, bc, op.67 (1737), also pubd singly; ed. in ECFC, xvi (1991)

Hilas (cantatille), 1v, musette/vielle, b (1738)

Le buveur dompté (cantatille), basse taille, insts, bc (1740)

†Cantatilles, op.84 (c1740)

†Fugit nox (motet), 1741

†Cantate Domino (motet), 1743

instrumental

†

lost

op.

1	[6] Sonates, 2 fl (1724)
2	[6] Sonates, 2 fl (1724)
3	[6] Sonates, fl, b (1724)
4	[12] Petites sonates en trio, 2 fl, b (1724)
6	[6] Sonates, 2 fl (1725)
7	[6] Sonates en trio, 3 fl (1725/R)
8	[6] Sonates, 2 fl (1725)
9	[6] Sonates, fl, b (1725)
10	[6] Sonates, 2 viols (1725)
11	VI suites de pièces, 2 musettes/vielles/rec/fl/ob (1726)
12	[6] Sonates en trio, fls/vns/obs, b (1726)
13	[12] Petites sonates, 2 fl (1726)
14	VI sonates, 2 bn/vc/viols (1726)
15	VI concertos, 5 fl (1727)
17	VI suites, 2 musettes/vielles/rec/fl/ob (1727)
18	[6] Sonates en trio, 2 vn, b (1727)
19	[6] Sonates, fl, b (1727)
20	[6] Sonates, vn, b (1727)
21	Six concerto, fls/vns/obs, b (1728)
22	Diverses pièces … avec des préludes sur tous le tons, fl (1728)
24	Six concerto, fls/vns/obs, b (1729)
25	Six sonates, 2 fl (1729)
26	Cinq sonates … suivies d’un concerto, vc/viol/bn, bc (1729)
27	Six suites … suivies de 2 sonates, 2 vielles/musettes/rec/fl/ob (1730)
28	Six sonates en trio … suivies de 2 concerto, 2 ob/fl/vn, b (1730)
29	Six sonates à 2 dessus, obs/fls/vns (1730)
30	Six concerto, fls/vns/obs, b (1730)
31	Diverses pièces, viol, bc (1730)
†32	Six sonates suivie d’une chaconne, ob/fl/vn, b (1730), see Hyatt King
33	Six gentillesses en 3 parties, musette, vielle, b (1731)
34	Six sonates à 4 parties différentes et également travaillées, 3 fl/vn/other insts, b (1731)
35	Six suites de pièces, fl, b (1731)
—	XXIV menuets pour l’année 1731, fls/vns/obs/other insts, b (1731)
37	V sonates en trio, 1 tr inst, 2 b insts, suivies d’un concerto à 5, fl, vn, ob, bn, b (1732)
38	VI concerto, 2 fl/other insts (1732)
39	II sérénades ou simphonies françoises en 3 parties, fls, vns, obs (1732)
40	Six sonates … suivies d’un nombre de pièces, 2 bn/vc/viols (1732)
41	VI sonates en trio (fl, vn)/2 vn/2 fl, b (1732)
42	Six pastorales, 2 musettes/vielles/rec/fl/ob (1732)
44	Six sonates, fl, b (1733)
45	2^e livre de gentillesses en 3 parties, musettes/vielles/obs/vns/recs/fls, b (1733)
46	Six nuits saltimbanques en 3 parties, vns/obs/fls, b (1733)
47	Six sonates, 2 fl (1733)
—	Les fleurettes (Airs), vn, 5 vols. (c1733)
49	II divertissemens de campagne, musette/vielle/rec/fl/vn/ob, b (1734)
50	VI sonates, 2 vc/bn/viols (1734), no.6 with b
51	VI sonates, fl, vn (1734)
52	IV balets de village en trio, musettes/vielles/recs/vns/obs/fls (1734)
—	Quinque sur l’octave, ou Espèce de dictionnaire harmonique, 4 vn, b (1734)
†53	Six concerto en 7 parties (c1734)
†55	Six sonates de chambre en quatuor, fl, vn, vc/viol, b (c1734), see Hyatt King
†56	Huit sonates, 2 rec/fl (c1734), see Hyatt King
57	Six concerto, ou Gentillesses en 3 parties, fls/vns/tr viols/other insts, b (1735)
59	Quatre suites de pièces de clavecin (1736/R)
61	Six sonates, tr viol, b (c1736/R)
†63	Six sonates, tr viols (c1736)
†64	Six concerto, 3 fl (1737)
†65	Fragmens mélodiques, ou Simphonies en trio, vns/tr viols/other insts, b (1737)
66	[9] Petites sonates suivies d’une chaconne, 2 bn/vc/viols (1737)
68	Noels en concerto à 4 parties, musettes/vielles/vns/fls/obs (1737)
69	Fragmens mélodiques, ou Simphonies en 3 parties, musettes/vielles/fls/vns, b (1737)
†71	Duo de violons (c1737)
72	Six sonates, vielle/musette, b (1738)
†73	Fragmens mélodiques, ou Simphonies en 3 parties mêlées de trio, fls/vns, b, Livre III (c1739)
†74	Six concerto en 4 livres d’un nouveau genre, obs/fls/bns/hns/vns/vas/org, other insts (c1739)
†75	Trio, viol, fl, b (c1739)
77	Six sonates, vielle/musette/fl/vn, b (c1739)
78	[4] Sonates, 2 fl/other insts, b (1740)
†79	Quatre gentillesses, musettes/vielles/other insts, b (c1740)
†80	Six sonates, 2 fl (c1740)
†81	Six sonates, vn, b (c1740)
†83	Recueil de duo, 2 hn/other insts (c1740)
†85	Suites et sonates, fl (c1740)
†86	Trio (c1740)
†87	Balets en duo, 2 fl (c1740)
†88	Six concertino, vc/viol/bn, b (c1740)
†90	Principes de flutes, see Bowers
†90	Suites d’airs & sonates en duo … suivis d’un prélude sur chaque mode, 2 fl (c1740), see Hyatt King
91	Sonates, hpd, fl (c1741–2)
†92	Principes de pardessus (c1741 or later)
†94	Pantomines en trio (c1741 or later)
†96	Six sonates en trio (vielle/musette, vn)/other insts, b (c1741 or later)
†99	Noels avec leurs variations, vn, b (c1741 or later)
100	Nouvelles gentillesses, musette/vielle, vn/ob, b (c1741 or later)
†101	Duo, musette, vn (c1741 or later)
†—	Diverses pièces, 2 hn/tpt/fl/ob (n.d.)
—	Les loisirs du bercails, ou Simphonies, musette/vielle, vn (n.d.)
†—	Menuets, 2 fl (n.d.)
†—	Noëls en concerto (n.d.)
†—	Quatre petites suittes, 2 fl (n.d.)
†—	Recueil de menuets avec la basse (n.d.)
†—	Suite, 2 musettes (n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La BordeE

La LaurencieEF

[A. de Léris]: Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres (Paris, 1754, enlarged 2/1763/R)

L. de La Laurencie and G. de Saint-Foix: ‘Contribution à l’histoire de la symphonie française vers 1750’, Année musicale, i (1911), 1–123

L.L. Barbes: ‘Sur Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, musicien catalan’, Cahiers d’études et de recherches catalanes d’archives, xxx (1965), 325–7

C.R. Barnes: ‘Instruments and Instrumental Music at the “Théâtres de la Foire” (1697–1762)’, RMFC, v (1965), 142–68

M. Bert: ‘La musique à la Maison Royale Saint-Louis de Saint-Cyr: son rôle, sa valeur’, ibid., 102–5

H. Tribout de Morembert: ‘Bodin de Boismortier: notes sur un musicien lorrain’, RdM, liii (1967), 41–52

M. Pincherle: ‘A propos de Boismortier’, Journal musical français musica-disques, no.174 (1968), 22–3

J.M. Bowers: ‘A Catalogue of French Works for the Transverse Flute, 1692–1761’, RFMC, xviii (1978), 89–126

A. Hyatt King, ed.: Catalogue of the Music Library, Instruments and Other Property of Nicholas Selhof, Sold in the Hague: 1759 (Amsterdam, 1973)

P. Lescat: ‘Boismortier, Joseph Bodin de’, Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. M. Benoît (Paris, 1992), 78–9

PHILIPPE LESCAT

Boisseau.

French family of organ builders. Robert Boisseau (b Bordeaux, 9 March 1909; d Poitiers, 29 Feb 1979), after studying engineering in Nantes, set up an independent organ building workshop in Poitiers in 1931. During the difficult economic conditions of the postwar period he worked for Roethinger in Strasbourg until about 1960, after which, teaming with erudite organists such as Edouard and Léon Souberbielle, he took the lead in championing a return to pre-19th-century production methods, using hammered pipe metal and mixture compositions after Dom Bédos de Celles (Benedictine convent in Limon, near Bièvres, 1959; St Nicolas du Chardonnet, Paris, 1960; Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, 1962). Often overshadowed by more prolific, high-profile firms, Robert Boisseau’s work is nonetheless widely considered to be some of the finest examples of the ‘neo-classical’ or eclectic style, epitomized by his syncretic rebuild of the Isnard/Cavaillé-Coll organ in Pithiviers (1965) and by large new organs in Royan (1965), Monaco Cathedral, (1976) and Notre Dame, Cunault, near Angers (1976). Robert’s son Jean-Loup Boisseau (b Poitiers, 26 July 1940) worked for many years with a partner, Bertrand Cattiaux (b Paris, 26 Aug 1955); they moved the workshop to Bethines, near Poitiers in 1980. New organs in the pre-Revolution manner (Levroux, Le Mesnil-Amelot, near Paris, and Versailles) and prestigious restorations such as the organs at Houdan, Cintegabelle, St Denis basilica, near Paris, Notre-Dame-de-la-Daurade and St Sernin in Toulouse and Poitiers Cathedral have established them as leading exponents of historical styles in France. The Boisseau family has also been closely identified with Notre Dame in Paris, carrying out regular organ maintenance since 1965 as well as a major rebuilding in 1992. Cattiaux took over the firm in 1997, employing Jean-Loup’s son Jean-Baptiste Boisseau (b Poitiers, 22 April 1965). Jean-Loup himself has continued to contribute to projects on a freelance basis.

KURT LUEDERS

Boîte à musique

(Fr.).

See Musical box.

Boito, Arrigo [Enrico]

(b Padua, 24 Feb 1842; d Milan, 10 June 1918). Italian librettist, composer, poet and critic. He is best remembered for his one completed opera, Mefistofele, and for his collaborations as librettist with Verdi.

WILLIAM ASHBROOK

1. Life.

The son of a painter of miniatures and a Polish countess, he was brought up in Venice after his father deserted his wife and two sons. Between the ages of five and ten he received his first musical instruction from Luigi Plet and the brothers Antonio and Giovanni Buzzolla. There being no conservatory at Venice, he enrolled at the Milan Conservatory in 1853; after 1854 his course was subsidized by a grant. At first his teachers found him eccentric and lackadaisical, but when he began his lifelong friendship with another student, Franco Faccio, admitted in 1855, Boito's progress became marked. In September 1860 their joint cantata, Il quattro giugno, was performed at the conservatory. The title referred to 4 June 1859, the date of the Battle of Magenta in which one of their schoolmates was killed. Boito supplied the text and composed half of the music, and the work earned a notable success in the Risorgimental fervour of those days. In their graduation year, 1861, he and Faccio presented a second cantata, Le sorelle d'Italia, celebrating European peoples still under foreign domination.

Boito's principal teacher and advocate at the conservatory was Alberto Mazzucato, an opera composer and, from 1859 to 1868, principal conductor at La Scala. On the strength of Mazzucato's support and that of the Countess Maffei, Boito and Faccio were awarded grants for a year's travel abroad. In March 1862 they arrived in Paris, where they met Rossini and Verdi. There Boito wrote the text for Verdi's Inno delle nazioni, performed at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, on 24 May 1862. Boito was already at work on an opera on the Faust subject, which he had begun, according to Alberto Mazzucato's son Gian Andrea, while he was still a student. He was also planning another opera, Nerone, which he would never complete. In summer 1862 he visited relatives in Poland, orchestrating part of what would become Mefistofele and writing the libretto of Amleto for Faccio. He was back in Milan at the end of the year.

At a banquet following the première of Faccio's opera I profughi fiamminghi at La Scala on 11 November 1863, Boito declaimed his notorious ode All'arte italiana, wherein he advocated cleansing the altars of Italian art that had been stained like the external walls of a brothel, a sentiment that gravely offended Verdi. This was the period when Boito was associated with the Scapigliatura (‘the unkempt ones’), an iconoclastic and bohemian group dedicated to ridding the arts in Italy of their besetting provincialism. The conservatives of the day found the group's jaunty satire and propensity for derision offensive. At the première of Amleto in Genoa on 30 May 1865 the self-congratulatory antics of the scapigliati aroused antagonism, and the reviews made sardonic references to ‘the music of the future’, then a favourite cliché of disapproval. Boito's affinity for the Scapigliatura can be most clearly observed in the poems of 1862–5 (published in 1877 as the Libro de' versi) and in his fantastic fable Re Orso. Here in abundance are his ironical wit, his passion for exotic words and clever rhymes and, particularly in his poem Dualismo, the underlying ideas that he would later elaborate. These were also the years of his main activity as a music and drama critic. Most of these pieces appeared in La perseveranza, in the Giornale della Società del quartetto di Milano and in the short-lived Il Figaro, which he co-edited with Emilio Praga. In these articles, Boito, with great assurance and ready erudition, proposed abandoning the puerilities of the past for the grand simplicities of a mature art of the future.

Boito's work on his own opera was delayed by the enthusiastic reception of Gounod's Faust at La Scala on 11 November 1862. According to Leone Fortis, Boito had first determined upon a pair of operas, Margherita and Elena, derived from the two parts of Goethe's poetic drama (see P. Nardi, Vita di Arrigo Boito, 237). When he returned from service as a volunteer in Garibaldi's campaign of 1866 his friends urged him to take up his project again, and it was at this point that he decided to fuse the two parts into a single grandiose work. During 1867 he laboured over Mefistofele, which went into rehearsal in January 1868. Although he had originally designed the role of Faust for a tenor, he was persuaded for budgetary reasons to revise it for a baritone. This opera was the first at La Scala for which a composer was his own librettist, and Boito unprecedentedly circulated his printed libretto some weeks before the première. Late in the rehearsal period Mazzucato insisted upon making some cuts and withdrew when Boito refused to countenance them, leaving the inexperienced composer to conduct his own work.

The première of Mefistofele on 5 March 1868 was a historic fiasco, lasting until well past midnight with the opposing factions in the audience vociferously sustaining their positions; the only part to be well received was the prologue. A second performance was given, this time divided between two evenings, each prefaced by the prologue and completed by Dall'Argine's ballet Brahma. Both parts of the opera were scorned, but the ballet was much applauded. Boito withdrew his score, his self-confidence deeply shaken.

During the next few years Boito (frequently using the anagrammatic pseudonym ‘Tobia Gorrio’) devoted himself to writing articles, including many on opera (see Nardi, ed., Tutti gli scritti di Arrigo Boito), and to supplying Italian translations of German lieder, among them Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder. He also did hack-work for the rival publishing houses of Lucca and Ricordi. Among his tasks was the preparation of Italian versions of Armide, Der Freischütz, Ruslan and Lyudmila and Rienzi. He began work, too, on a libretto, Ero e Leandro, and started to compose it, but then consigned it first to Bottesini and then to Luigi Mancinelli. The idea of salvaging Mefistofele was prompted by a successful performance of the prologue at Trieste in 1871. He shortened the work, restoring the role of Faust as a tenor part, and also made a few additions; he submitted his amended orchestration to Cesare Dominiceti, whose suggestions he heeded. The revised Mefistofele was performed with a strong cast on 4 October 1875 at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna, a town more hospitable to novelty than Milan. Further material was added to the Prison Scene the following year at Venice. In this form Mefistofele made its way, particularly after its revival at Milan in 1881.

To the 1870s belongs most of Boito's activity as librettist of a number of all but forgotten operas, the single exception being Ponchielli's La Gioconda (1876, La Scala). His translation of Rienzi was given in 1874. Giulio Ricordi, a supporter of Boito from the mid-1860s, having learnt that Verdi was interested in the subject of Nerone, suggested that Boito relinquish his libretto to the elder composer, but Verdi, still smouldering over Boito's ode, refused it. After this episode Boito returned to the subject, working desultorily on Nerone, and to this period belongs the first level of music for it. In 1879, through the offices of Ricordi and Faccio, came the rapprochement with Verdi and the idea of a possible collaboration on Otello.

Before the end of 1879 Boito submitted a complete libretto, rather different in some respects from the final version, but Verdi was impressed with its quality. It was arranged that, as a trial, Boito would revise Piave's libretto for Simon Boccanegra for a La Scala revival in March 1881. This rifacimento was successful, particularly the new scene in the council chamber. Verdi then agreed to start on Otello, but the work progressed fitfully, and only Boito's patience and his readiness to modify his text kept the project afloat. The triumphant first performance, on 5 February 1887, set the seal upon Boito's friendship with Verdi, a relationship he regarded as the climax of his artistic life.

Their collaboration on Falstaff proceeded more smoothly, except for the tragic parenthesis when Boito assumed the directorship of the Parma Conservatory for his friend Faccio, so that Faccio, confined to an institution with paralytic syphilis, might continue to receive his salary until his death (July 1891). After the successful introduction of Falstaff in 1893 Boito started to sketch a libretto for a Re Lear for Verdi, but the composer realized he was too old to undertake this challenge. Boito continued to be a frequent visitor to Verdi's home and was present when he died.

Another important friendship of Boito's life, that with the actress Eleanora Duse, began shortly after the première of Otello. After an initial passion, their diverse careers kept them much apart. For her, Boito made an Italian acting version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, in which she triumphed in 1888; he also prepared a version of Romeo and Juliet for her, but this was apparently never staged. In 1894 Duse fell under the influence of D'Annunzio, and when she separated from him some ten years later, completely disillusioned, she found once more in Boito a selfless, intellectually challenging friend. It was during this second, platonic stage of their relationship that she began to refer to him as ‘il santo’.

In May 1891 Boito had read his libretto of Nerone to Verdi, who urged him to get on with his own career. Within a month of Verdi's death, Boito published his five-act libretto, which was received as a major literary event. Giulio Ricordi urged Boito to complete the score so that the opera could be given at La Scala in 1904 with Tamagno in the title role. Increasingly reluctant to confront the public, Boito began an extensive study of classical metres and the musical ethos of the ancients, as well as a detailed study of harmony, as his notebooks of the period testify. Persuaded by Ricordi to discard the fifth act, Boito continued to fiddle indecisively with the score until his death. Nerone, which had engaged Boito's attention irregularly for nearly 60 years, was finally performed six years after his death, on 1 May 1924 at La Scala (fig.2), in a version extensively revised by a committee consisting of Toscanini, Antonio Smareglia and Vincenzo Tommasini.

For much of his adult life Boito made a practice of helping struggling young composers, including Catalani and Puccini (at the time of Le villi). His attitude towards Puccini later changed. One of his closest friends was the dramatist Giuseppe Giacosa (to whom he suggested the plot of his play Tristi amori). With his ideals for the future of opera, Boito was opposed to Giacosa's participation in the libretto for La bohème, resenting both the subject and its composer's treatment of Giacosa. It is from this period that his coolness towards Puccini dates.

Boito's career also had an official side. In 1893, as substitute for Verdi, he was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University. He served on a national commission that supervised music education in Italy. In 1897 he was the author of a series of sensible proposals to improve conditions at La Scala. In 1912 he was named senator. The following year he was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the Museo Teatrale alla Scala.

It is clear from Duse's letters to her daughter that Boito in his last years lost the ability to concentrate. During the most discouraging days of World War I, he became almost a recluse, surrounded by the manuscript of his uncompletable Nerone. He developed a heart ailment and died in a Milanese clinic.

2. Librettos.

Boito acknowledged, painfully, that he was pulled in contrary directions by his literary and musical impulses, a polarity reflected in his intellectual constitution by his fixation with an irresolvable dualism. When his Libro de' versi was published, he put first the poem ‘Dualismo’, which concludes with a vision of a man high on a tight-rope, balanced between a dream of virtue and a dream of sin. The philosophical struggle between these opposites led him to write a libretto that attempted to grapple with both parts of Goethe's Faust. A similar polarity underlies Nerone.

The literary quality of Boito's librettos follows an ascending scale from those he wrote for composers other than Verdi, through Otello and Falstaff, to those he supplied for himself. It was consistent with his belief that a libretto should be notable as drama that his first effort, Amleto, for Faccio, was drawn from Shakespeare. Boito's strengths and weaknesses are already evident: his ability to simplify a complicated plot and the variety of his poetic language, as well as his penchant for obscure polysyllables, his faulty sense of overall proportion, and his tendency to overstress contrasts of good and evil. Ero e Leandro, originally intended for himself, experiments with classical metres and embodies considerable antiquarian lore. Semira, written for Luigi San Germano, was withdrawn in rehearsal and never performed. Basi e bote, a comedy in Venetian dialect, was first performed in 1927 by Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli. Iràm was intended for Cesare Dominiceti, who did not set it; it is a pithy comedy with foreshadowings of Falstaff (e.g. ‘Il mondo è un trillo’). Pier Luigi Farnese, for Costantino Palumbo (1843–1928), is more intense and more vividly characterized than the other librettos in this group. The best-known of Boito's texts for composers other than Verdi is that for Ponchielli's La Gioconda, loosely derived from Hugo's Angélo. Boito changed the setting to Venice and introduced a good deal of local colour, and the flamboyant melodramatic tone faithfully mirrors Hugo's style. The characterization is anything but subtle.

Otello, the first of Boito's completed librettos for Verdi, has perhaps been overpraised. While undeniably a formidable achievement, the reduction of Shakespeare's text to operatic proportions was not as skilful as is usually maintained. Boito drastically altered Iago's motivation; Rodrigo's participation in the plot is inadequately developed; and the decisive fact of Cassio's survival is glossed over. That the libretto is finely proportioned is due more to Verdi's influence than to Boito. Nor was Boito's treatment as Shakespearean as is sometimes claimed. (Francis Hueffer's translation in the Ricordi scores has deceived more than one critic.) Laws of heresy in Shakespeare's day forbade specific Christian references on stage, yet many of Boito's changes and additions (the ‘Credo’ and the ‘Ave Maria’) insert these once-proscribed references. Boito's Falstaff is more extraordinary, perhaps because he was working from a lesser play. His fondness for word-play, his knack for hitting upon an epigrammatic phrase and his mordant irony all found full scope. The libretto seems less strained than Otello, and the result is exhilarating and beautifully paced.

The 1868 libretto of Mefistofele is more interesting as a literary document than as a potential text for music. The condensed version of 1875 sheds most of its novel features but is full of verbal felicities. The prologue, common to both versions, is without precedent in Italian operatic dramaturgy for its metrical variety and grandiose scope. Nerone exists in two versions: in five acts, as in the printed libretto of 1901, and in four acts, as in the printed score. The excised fifth act, for which Boito sketched music, presents Nero playing Aeschylus's Orestes while Rome burns. The four-act version ends with the death of the Christian convert Rubria. All in all, Nerone possesses great originality, vividly contrasting pagan magic, imperial corruption and Christian caritas. It is arguably Boito's finest achievement.

3. Compositions.

Boito left only two operas (one of them incomplete), as well as a handful of minor works. Clearly, he lacked the necessary compulsion to compose. He approached musical composition with such self-criticism and with so little confidence, that he reduced himself to silence for years, even decades. Yet he was capable of producing two episodes of irresistible effect in the prologue and Prison Scene of Mefistofele.

As a student at the Milan Conservatory, he was criticized for his gravely deficient sense of rhythm and for his unnatural and artificial tastes in harmony. To some extent these weaknesses are apparent in his mature works. Hardly a scene in Mefistofele is free of occasional signs of thinness and uncertainty; passages that begin well, like Faust's apostrophe to Helen, often degenerate into a mechanical series of sequences. He has not been kindly treated by some Italian critics and this results from the discrepancy between the aesthetic of his own criticism and his actual performance as a composer. From his letters it is clear that he himself was painfully aware of this discrepancy.

It is impossible to reconstruct the original Mefistofele because the revisions were made in the autograph score and the excised pages removed. The 1875 revision reveals Boito's uncertainty as a composer and his difficulty in spinning out musical ideas. Although the music contains some allusions to Beethoven, the dominant influence is that of Meyerbeer, particularly in the arias of Mephistopheles. Two episodes keep the work on the fringes of the modern repertory: the prologue and the Prison Scene.

Boito's sketches and preparatory notebooks for Nerone survive; they bear eloquent witness to his extraordinary capacity for taking pains, but also reveal an increasing incapacity to come to practical grips with the opera. The peculiar eclecticism of Nerone arouses morbid fascination, but for all its grandiose spectacle and erudition the music contains little to move an audience, except in the scene of Rubria's death in the Spoliarium. In the lifelong struggle between literature and music that represents the true dualism of Boito's career, it was literature that proved supreme and in the end stifled his talent for composition.

4. Criticism.

Boito's music criticism dates mostly from the 1860s. Although a good deal of it was ephemeral, enough of permanent interest remains to form a quirky witness to Boito's interests and aspirations. In a famous passage (from Il Figaro, 21 January 1864) he declared that opera could attain its high destiny by the following steps: ‘the complete obliteration of formula; the creation of form; the realization of the vastest tonal and rhythmic development possible today; the supreme incarnation of drama’. This is a succinct statement of principles that he propounded at greater length in other articles.

Although Boito did not ignore other types of music, his chief concern was with the future of opera. He praised Mendelssohn, while regretting that he never achieved his dream of writing an opera on The Tempest. In another article he proclaimed that Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots had supplanted most Italian operas of the first half of the 19th century. On the whole, his articles treated Verdi with respect, finding particular merit in Les vêpres siciliennes, possibly because it is the most Meyerbeerian of Verdi's scores.

Boito was not the enthusiastic Wagnerian that has been alleged. As early as 1864, he blandly asserted that the days of Wagner's future were ‘already over’. At the time of the first Italian performances of Lohengrin (Bologna, 1871), Wagner addressed to him Ein Brief an einen italienischen Freund. Wagner apparently wrote this open letter at the suggestion of the publisher Giovannina Lucca, and Boito's translation of Wagner's gratitude to his Italian audience was widely reprinted. His compliance in this matter can scarcely be blown up into partisanship. On many later occasions he expressed his lack of enthusiasm for Wagner and, later still, his antipathy to the music of Richard Strauss.

While Boito's principal accomplishments were literary rather than musical, he must nevertheless be regarded as an incomplete rather than an inconsequential composer. He was a man of aristocratic fastidiousness, a scholar of perception and sensitivity, a man who had a genius for friendship. The mark he left on Italian music of his time is greater than the sum of his own accomplishments.

WORKS

operas

Mefistofele (prol, 5, epilogue, Boito, after J.W. von Goethe: Faust), Milan, Scala, 5 March 1868, excerpts (Milan, 1868); rev. version (prol, 4), Bologna, Comunale, 4 Oct 1875; rev. version, Venice, Rossini, 13 May 1876, I-Mr*, vs (Milan, 1876), fs (Milan, c1895)

Nerone, 1877–1915 (tragedia, 5, Boito), inc., completed V. Tommasini, A. Smareglia and A. Toscanini, Milan, Scala, 1 May 1924 (Milan, 1925)

other works

Il quattro giugno (cant. patria, 2 pts, Boito), Milan, Conservatory, 8 Sept 1860; I-Mc [music of pt 1 by F. Faccio]

Le sorelle d'Italia (mistero, prol, 2 pts, Boito), Milan, Conservatory, Sept 1861; Mc, vs (Milan, 1861) [music of prol, pt 1 by Faccio]

Do mi sol … La mi … (Boito), song, 1v, pf, 26 Jan 1865; autograph Toscanini Collection, New York, facs. (Milan, 1924)

La notte difonde (Boito: Ero e Leandro), barcarola, 4vv, pf (Milan, 1875)

Inno-marcia per l'Associazione Ginnastica Triestina (Boito), 1877; TSmt* (Trieste, n.d.)

All'arte italiana (ode, G. Giacosa), Turin, 1880, unpubd

other librettos

Inno delle nazioni (cant.), G. Verdi, 1862; Amleto (tragedia lirica), F. Faccio, 1865; Un tramonto (egloga, with E. Praga), G. Coronaro, 1873; La falce (egloga orientale), A. Catalani, 1875; La Gioconda (melodramma), A. Ponchielli, 1876; Ero e Leandro (tragedia lirica), G. Bottesini, 1879 (L. Mancinelli, 1896); Semira (tragedia lirica), unperf.; Pier Luigi Farnese (dramma lirico), C. Palumbo, 1891; Iràm (commedia lirica), unperf.; Simon Boccanegra (melodramma, after F. Piave), Verdi, 1881; Basi e bote (commedia lirica), R. Pick-Mangiagalli, 1927; Otello (dramma lirico), Verdi, 1887; Falstaff (commedia lirica), Verdi, 1893

WRITINGS

reviews

‘Cronaca musicale parigina’, La perseveranza (2 March 1862)

‘Cronache dei teatri’, Il Figaro (7, 21 Jan, 4, 11, 18 Feb, 10, 17, 24 March 1864)

‘Trattenimento musicale de Giovanni Noseda’, Il Figaro (28 Jan 1864)

‘Esperimenti della Società del Quartetto’, Giornale della Società del quartetto di Milano (29 June 1864, 8 Jan, 6 April, 7, 14 May 1865)

‘Il Freischütz davanti al pubblico della Scala’, GMM, xxvii (1872)

‘“Nella selva” sinfonia di Gioachino Raff’, GMM, xxvii (1872)

other writings

‘Mendelssohn in Italia’, Giornale della Società del quartetto di Milano (20 July–31 Dec 1864)

‘A Sua Eccelenza il Ministro della Istruzione Pubblica: lettera in quattro paragrafi’, Pungolo (21 May 1868)

‘La musica in piazza’, GMM, xxv (1870); xxvi (1871)

‘Dante e la musica’ [letter to Camille Bellaigue, 18 Jan 1902]

Tutti gli scritti di Arrigo Boito, ed. P. Nardi (Milan, 1942) [incl. all libs and writings]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

letters

R. de Rensis, ed.: Lettere di Arrigo Boito (Rome, 1932)

A. Luzio, ed.: Carteggi verdiani, ii (Rome, 1935) [Boito's letters to Verdi]

E. Vajro, ed.: Arrigo Boito nel trentennio della morte (Naples, 1950) [incl. previously unpubd letters]

M. Morini: ‘Lettere inedite di Arrigo Boito’, La Scala, nos.117–18 (1959), 26–30

F. Walker, ed.: Arrigo Boito: lettere inedite e poesie giovanili (Siena, 1959)

M. Medici and M. Conati, eds.: Carteggio Verdi-Boito (Parma, 1978; Eng. trans., 1994, as The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, ed. W. Weaver)

biography and criticism

DBI (E. Giachery)

G. Cesari and A. Luzio, eds.: I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913/R; Eng. trans., abridged, 1971, as Letters of Giuseppe Verdi)

B. Croce: La letteratura della nuova Italia, i (Bari, 1914, 6/1956)

I. Pizzetti: Musicisti contemporanei (Milan, 1914)

C. Bellaigue: ‘Arrigo Boito: lettres et souvenirs’, Revue des deux mondes, 6th period, xlvi (1918), 900–15

C. Ricci: Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1919, 2/1924)

P. Nardi: Scapigliatura da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi (Bologna, 1924, 2/1968)

L. Pagano [R. Giani]: La fionda di David (Turin, 1928)

F. Ballo: Arrigo Boito (Turin, 1939)

W. Pöschl: Arrigo Boito: ein Vertreter der italienischen Spätromantik (Berlin, 1939/R)

R. de Rensis: Arrigo Boito: anedotti e bizzarrie poetiche musicali (Rome, 1942)

R. de Rensis: Arrigo Boito: capitoli biografici (Florence, 1942)

P. Nardi: Vita di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1942, 2/1944)

P. Nardi, ed.: Arrigo Boito: scritti e documenti (Milan, 1948)

F. Walker: The Man Verdi (London, 1962/R)

G. Mariani: Storia della Scapigliatura (Rome, 1967)

C. Orselli: ‘Arrigo Boito: un riesame’, Chigiana, xxv (1968), 197–214

G. Mariani: Arrigo Boito (Parma, 1973)

G. Scarsi: Rapporto poesia-musica in Arrigo Boito (Rome, 1973)

G. Salvetti: ‘La Scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d'opera’, Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila (Turin, 1977), 567–604

G. Tintori, ed.: Arrigo Boito: musicista e letterato (Milan, 1986)

T.G. Kaufman: ‘Arrigo Boito’, Verdi and his Major Contemporaries (New York, 1990), 13–25

G. Morelli, ed.: Arrigo Boito: Venice 1994

individual operas

F. Filippi: ‘Il “Mefistofele” di Arrigo Boito’, La perseveranza (9, 16 March 1868)

G. Ricordi: ‘Analisi musicale del “Mefistofele” di Arrigo Boito’, GMM, xxiii (1868), 81–4

R. Giani: Il ‘Nerone’ di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1901); repr. in RMI, xxxi (1924), 235–392

J.G. Huneker: ‘Verdi and Boito’, Overtones: a Book of Temperaments (New York, 1904/R), 256–76

M. Risolo: Il primo ‘Mefistofele’ di Arrigo Boito (Naples, 1916) [incl. 1st version of lib]

A. Bonaventura: Mefistofele di Arrigo Boito: guida attraverso il poema e la musica (Milan, 1924)

G. Borelli: Linee dello spirito e del volto di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1924) [on Nerone]

G. Forzano: ‘La preparazione scenica del “Nerone”’, La Lettura (1924), March

V. Gui: Nerone di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1924)

R. de Rensis: L'Amleto di A. Boito (Ancona, 1927)

S. Vittadini: Il primo libretto del ‘Mefistofele’ di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1938)

D. Bianchi: ‘Intorno a “La Gioconda” di Arrigo Boito’, Studia ghisleriana, 2nd ser., i (1950), 81–103

A. Borriello: Mito poesia e musica nel ‘Mefistofele’ di Arrigo Boito (Naples, 1950)

J. Nicolaisen: ‘The First Mefistofele’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 221–32

W. Ashbrook: ‘Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele Libretto as a Reform Text’, Reading Opera, ed. R. Parker and A. Groos (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 268–87

O. Termini: ‘Language and Meaning in the “Prologue in Heaven”: Goethe's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele’, Music in Performance and Society: Essays in Honor of Roland Jackson, ed. M. Cole and J. Koegel (forthcoming)

Boivin.

See Boyvin.

Boivin, François

(b c1693; d Paris, 25 Nov 1733). French music seller and music publisher. He was the nephew of the double bass player and composer Montéclair, and brother of the string instrument maker Claude Boivin. On 15 July 1721 Boivin bought the music shop ‘A la règle d’or’ on the rue St Honoré, Paris, after the death of Henry Foucault who had owned it; he and his uncle went into partnership to trade there. In addition to selling scores he soon published music and bought two licences in 1728 and 1729. He published works by Montéclair, Jacques Loeillet and Quantz, among others. On 2 July 1724 he married Elizabeth Catherine Ballard, second daughter of Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard, who assisted him. As a result of their efforts, and the family connection with Montéclair and Ballard, ‘A la règle d’or’ became one of the foremost music shops in Paris. Works by Vivaldi, Corelli, P.A. Locatelli, Telemann and Quantz could be found there, but the mainstay of the stock was French, including cantatas by Nicolas Bernier and Clérambault, harpsichord works by François Couperin, Louis Marchand and Jean-François Dandrieu, violin sonatas by J.-M. Leclair and Senaillé, sonatas for flute by Louis Hotteterre, suites for viola da gamba by Marais and Caix d’Hervelois, motets by Lalande (see Lalande, fig.1), operas by Lully, Campra and Rameau, as well as brunettes and airs for amateurs. Boivin also associated with the Princess of Enghien, the Bishop of Reims, the Amsterdam publisher Le Cène, the London publisher Walsh and such composers as Daquin, Mouret, Boismortier, François Francoeur and P.D. Philidor.

After Boivin died his widow continued the business for 20 years, under the name ‘la Veuve Boivin’, assisted by her brother-in-law Claude Boivin and her father. The measure of her intelligent management is revealed by the value of the stock which increased unceasingly; worth 4500 livres in 1721 and 29,000 in 1724, its value had increased to 36,400 livres when trading ceased in 1753. She sold her shop to Marc Bayard on 2 March 1753 and died in Chartres on 13 February 1776.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEMF, i

Catalogue général des ouvrages publiés par Boivin (Paris, 1742)

S. Milliot: ‘Un couple de marchands de musique au XVIIIe siècle: les Boivin’, RdM, liv (1968), 105–13

SYLVETTE MILLIOT

Bokemeyer, Heinrich

(b Immensen, nr Lehrte, Lower Saxony, March 1679; d Wolfenbüttel, 7 Dec 1751). German composer and theorist. He was a friend of and frequent correspondent with J.G. Walther, who published Bokemeyer’s autobiographical sketch in the Musicalisches Lexicon. From it we learn the few facts known of Bokemeyer’s life. He was first educated in his home town and also in the neighbouring village, Burghof. From 1693 to 1699 he studied at the church school of St Martin and St Katharina in Brunswick, and in 1702–4 was at the university in Helmstedt. On 2 April 1704 he returned to Brunswick as Kantor at St Martin. Bokemeyer began composition lessons in 1706 with Georg Oesterreich, Kapellmeister and Kantor to the ducal court of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Between 1712 and 1717 Bokemeyer served as Kantor in Husum (Schleswig) where, he states, he learnt the ‘manner of singing alla siciliana’ from Kapellmeister Bartolomeo Bernhardi, who also asked Bokemeyer to sing some of his Italian cantatas in the presence of the King of Denmark. In 1717 he moved to Wolfenbüttel to assist the ailing cantor at the ducal palace, Jacob Bendeler, whom he succeeded in 1720, retaining the position until his death.

Bokemeyer was widely respected in Germany as a composer, teacher and theorist, and his name appears in the works of many 18th-century theorists including Mattheson, Adlung, Scheibe and Mizler. A lengthy correspondence with J.G. Walther, in which the two learned men explored various problems encountered by the former in the preparation of his Lexicon, partly survives in 35 letters from Walther to Bokemeyer (D-Bsb; ed. in Beckmann and Schulze). In 1739 Bokemeyer was invited by Mizler to join (together with C.G. Schröter, G.H. Stölzel and Telemann) his Societät der Musikalischen Wissenschaften, a Leipzig corresponding society of musical scholars and composers.

Bokemeyer pursued a fascinating polemical argument with Johann Mattheson regarding the importance of canon and the nature of melodic composition. Mattheson’s Critica musica (i, §§2–4), ‘Die canonische Anatomie’, contains Bokemeyer’s defence of canon, a musical craft he believed to be the highest peak of musical-poetical art, the basis of all fugues, imitation, double counterpoint and the a cappella style, as well as the actual basis of all music. Mattheson countered these conservative, scholastic and clearly non-Italian statements with his own more characteristic mid-18th-century viewpoint that canon was a fruitless, sterile artifice; furthermore, he proposed that it was melody, not canon, that served as the foundation of music. The two theorists pursued a second argument, developing out of Bokemeyer’s doctrine of how to write good melodies (in Critica musica, ii, as ‘Die melodische Vorhof’). In taking exception to almost everything Bokemeyer proposed, Mattheson formulated an extensive doctrine of melody that remains an important source of insight into the radical change of musical styles taking place in the mid-18th century.

Bokemeyer collected a remarkable library of books and music manuscripts (the Sammlung Bokemeyer) throughout his long life. On his death the collection was probably bequeathed to his son-in-law, the Celle organist J.C. Winter; it was subsequently purchased by J.N. Forkel, and in 1819 Forkel’s library was sold to the forerunner of the Königliches Akademisches Institut für Kirchenmusik, Berlin. In 1844 the entire collection was acquired and absorbed into the holdings of the Königliche Bibliothek (now D-Bsb). Kümmerling, in his study of this extraordinary source for the study of Baroque music history, showed the magnitude of the original collection which contained more than 1800 scores and books, with some 850 manuscripts of sacred music. About 300 composers are represented, including Albinoni, P. Agricola, Allegri, Bononcini, Buxtehude, Caldara, J.W. Franck, Förtsch, F. Gasparini, Keiser, J.P. Krieger, Kuhnau, Legrenzi, Lotti, V. Lübeck, Österreich, Pistochi, Polaroli, Rosenmüller, Schürmann, Steffani, G.P. Telemann, Theile and Zachow. The largest portion of the library belonged originally to Georg Österreich who, as Kapellmeister at the court of Gottorf, copied or supervised the copying of the music.

Bokemeyer’s own compositions, which must have been numerous, are almost entirely lost, although a considerable number of anonymous works in his own library could conceivably be his. A single cantata, Me miserum! miseriarum conflictu obruor, for two oboes and tenor solo, survives (D-Bsb); three brief didactic treatises in manuscript are in the same library: Kurtze und gründliche Anweisung wie ein einfacher Contrapunct in lauter Consonantien zu Setzen sey; Bokemeyers Elaboratio dissonantiarum, nach den Fundamental Regeln des sel. Herrn Theilen; and Elaboratio contrapuncti duplicis alla duodecimi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WaltherML

J. Mattheson: Critica musica (Hamburg, 1722–5/R)

J.A. Scheibe: Der critische Musikus (Hamburg, 1738–40, 2/1745/R)

L.C. Mizler: Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1739–54/R)

J. Adlung: Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit (Erfurt, 1758/R, 2/1783)

G. Schünemann: ‘J. Gottfried Walther und H. Bokemeyer’, BJb 1933, 86–118

H. Kümmerling: Katalog der Sammlung Bokemeyer (Kassel, 1970)

K. Beckmann and H.-J. Schulze: Johann Gottfried Walther: Briefe (Leipzig, 1987)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Bokes, Vladimir

(b Bratislava, 11 Jan 1946). Slovak composer. He studied the cello with Pospíši and composition with Kořínek at the Bratislava Conservatory (1960–65) before continuing his composition studies with Alexander Moyzes and Kardoš at the College of Performing Arts. His college graduation piece was the First Symphony (1970). From 1971 to 1975 he taught music theory at the conservatory, and thereafter was appointed lecturer in composition at the college, where he was made professor in 1993. In the same year he was elected president of the board of Melos-Ethos, the international festival of contemporary music held in Bratislava.

Bokes’s compositional style was first influenced by the Second Viennese School, by dodecaphony and serialism, and by the composition techniques of the postwar avant garde (see, for example, Sequenza, 1965, and the Piano Trio, 1967). Even later he remained faithful to rational methods of composition. (As a result of his orientation towards Western avant gardism, his works were not performed in Slovakia during the 1980s.) In his search for a personal style he has experimented with polyrhythms and even aleatorism, though the unifying element of his composition remains the use of the Golden Section and Fibonacci series, which he applies to both horizontal and vertical parameters of his music. In Línie (‘Lines’, 1978) for 12 voices he combines absolute control and organization with aleatory devices. Bokes is at his best writing for orchestra or chamber-instrumental ensembles. He has made arrangements of several works by Ján Levoslav Bella, and completed, in 1993, Kardoš’s Second Piano Concerto.

WORKS

(selective list)

instrumental

Orch: Madrigal, op.5, str, 1967; Mouvement, op.6, chbr orch, 1968; Sym. no.1, op.8, 1970; Ov., op.12, 1971; Symfonické variácie, op.14, 1972; Pf Conc. no.1, op.21, 1976; Sym. no.2, op.24, 1978; Sym. no.3, op.36, 1980; Suite, op.39, pf, str, 1982; Pf Conc. no.2, 1984; Sym. no.5, op.51, 1987; Haydn pri počitači [Haydn at the Computer], ov., chbr orch, 1992; Variácie na tému Josepha Haydna, op.66, 1996; see other works (Choral) [Sym. no.4, 1982]

Chbr: Sextet, fl, cl, tpt, vn, va, vc, 1963; Str Trio, 1963; Sequenza, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, tuba, vn, va, vc, 1965; Pf Trio, op.2, 1967; Sonatina no.1, op.9, 2 vn, 1970; Str Qt no.1, op.10, 1971; Wind Qnt no.1, op.11, 1971; Sonatina, op.16a, vn, pf, 1972; 3 tance [3 Dances], op.15a, 2 pf, 1973, arr. str/3 accdn/(vn, pf) [movts 1 and 2 also arr. as 2 Bagatelles]; 3 bagately [3 Bagatelles], op.15b, 1973; Kadencia na pamiatku P. Picassa [Cadenza in Memory of Picasso], op. 16b, fl, gui, 1973; Str Qt no.2, op.18, 1974; Wind Qnt no.2, op19, 1975; Nokturno, op.20, fl, gui, 1975; Sonata, op.27, cl/vn, pf, 1978; Coll’Age, op.28, pf qnt, 1979, rev. 1984; Sonata, op.34, vc, pf, 1980; Sonatina, vc, pf, 1982; Sonatina no.2, op.39, 2 vn, 1982; Kadencia II, op.40, fl, ob, bn, hpd, 1982; Sonata, op.41, 2 pf, 1982; Wind Qnt, op.42, 1982; Str Qt no.3, op.44, 1982; Inquieto, op.49, cl, pf, 1985; Music for Org and Brass, op.50, 1986; Sonata, op.52, va, pf, 1987; Variácie na tému J. Egryho [Variations on a Theme by Ergy], op.60, wind octet, 1994; Capriccio, op.64, fl, hpd/pf, 1995; Rondo, op.67, ob, bn, 1997

Solo: Piece I, pf, 1963; Sonatina giocosa, pf, 1964; Partita, op.1, pf, 1966; La follia, op.3, 1967; Sonata no.1, op.17, pf, 1973; Dobrý deň, Mr Fibonacci [Good Morning, Mr. Fibonacci], op.23, pf, 1977; Sonata no.2, op.29, pf, 1979; 3 miniatúry, op.33, gui, 1980; Sonata no.3, op.32, pf, 1980; Prelude and Fugue, op.37, org, 1981; Preludes and Fugues, op.53, pf, 1984–8; Sonata no.4, op.48, pf, 1985

other works

Choral: Confiteor, op.5, SATB, 1968; Línie [Lines], op.25, 12 vv, 1978; Sym. no.4 (J. Mihalkovič), op.38, solo vv, SATB, orch, 1982; Missa posoniensis, op.55, solo vv, SATB, orch, org, 1988–91; Prichádzame k tebe, Pane [We are Coming to you, O Lord], op.59, SATB, chbr ens, 1994 [arrs. of songs and spirituals]

1v, acc.: Spôsob ticha [A Way of Silence] (Mihalkovič, op.22, B, bn, hn, vc, pf, 1977; Na svoj spôsob [In their Own Way] (Mihalkovič), op.26, Mez, pf, 1978; Pater noster, op.56a, Bar, tpt, 1990; Ave Maria, op.56b, S, str qt, 1991; Commedia dell’arte, op.61, T, pf, 1995

Tape: 3 letné prelúdiá [3 Summer Preludes], 1982; Lied ohne Worte, 1993

Principal publishers: Slovak Music Fund, OPUS

WRITINGS

‘Metamorfózy komunikatívnosti’ [Metamorphoses of communicativeness], Hudba a totalita: Bratislava 1993, 222–5 [with Ger. Summary]

‘Cantate Domino Canticum Novum: sakrálna tvorba Igora Stravinského’ [The sacred works of Stravinsky], SH, xxi (1995), 38–53

‘Úvaha o komunikatívnosti’ [A Reflection on communicativeness], Hudobnýživot, xxx/14 (1998)

KATARÍNA LAKOTOVÁ

Bol, John [Jan].

See Bull, John.

Bolan, Marc [Feld, Mark]

(b London, 30 Sept 1947; d Barnes, London, 16 Sept 1977). English pop singer. Having worked as a fashion model in the early 1960s he formed the folk-influenced Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1968 and built up a sizeable cult following in the UK. However, it was not until he jettisoned the hippy-era whimsicality of his early work and replaced it with a more pop-orientated electric guitar sound that he achieved widespread success. The group changed its name to T. Rex and their single Ride a White Swan (1970) heralded an unbroken sequence of 11 UK top ten hits. Working with the American producer Tony Visconti, Bolan fashioned a commercial pop sound based on infectious riffs influenced by rhythm and blues and symphonic-like string arrangements. With his friend and rival David Bowie, Bolan made the transition from countercultural flower-power music to the glitter rock of the early 1970s, with the emphasis on visual daring and androgyny. However, unlike Bowie, he failed to refresh his music and his look, and as the decade progressed Bolan slipped into self-parody. He was also unable to transfer his British popularity to the USA. A talented and distinctive vocalist and, for a period, an excellent pop songwriter, Bolan was one of the most successful British pop stars of the 1970s, who with his band T. Rex helped codify glam rock. His work has remained popular, through reissues and re-packages, and he still has a British cult following. For further reading see M. Paytress: Twentieth Century Boy: the Marc Bolan Story (London, 1993).

DAVID BUCKLEY

Bolaños, César

(b Lima, 4 June 1931). Peruvian composer and musicologist. He studied music at the National Conservatory and at the Sas-Rosay Academy with Sas (1946–53). In Lima he founded the group Renovación together with Valcárcel and Escot. His studies continued at the Manhattan School of Music in New York (1959) and at the RCA Institute of Electronic Technology (1960–63); he finished his training at the Di Tella Institute, Buenos Aires with Ginastera, Nono, Messiaen, Dallapiccola and Maderna. There he helped to establish the electronic music laboratory and taught electronic composition (1964–70). He worked with the mathematician M. Milchberg on the calculation of probabilities and on the possibilities of using computers for composition. The seven years he spent in Argentina marked his most creative period. On his return to Peru he became director of the department of music and dance of the National Cultural Institute (1973–83), held teaching posts at the National Conservatory and at Lima University and continued his research, making important contributions to the study of ancient and traditional music instruments.

After 1963, Bolaños put aside previous references to popular music, and firmly positioned himself as part of the avant garde. His view of music as inseparable from its social context and as a form of ideological expression led to such music-theatre works as ESEPCO I and Divertimento III, both of which retain a clear sense of play. More personal characteristics are displayed in his two multimedia pieces: Alfa–Omega, a staged cantata with biblical texts, and I-10-AIFG/Rbt-1 in which the musicians remain hidden in darkness while the conductor is replaced by a system of automated light signals. The written word and the voice are central elements in Bolaños's compositions, as in Intensidad y altura (1964), his first electro-acoustic piece, in which the reading of a poem by César Vallejo, about the difficulty of verbal expression, is given dramatic treatment. This is again the case in Alfa–Omega, in which texts are fragmented and superimposed by the choir, making them incomprehensible, while the reciters speak in a theatrical manner and the written word becomes a visual element projected on slides. In Ñacahuasu (1970), the text is heightened by its simple, amplified presentation against an instrumental line which is fragmented between three instrumental groups positioned in different parts of the concert hall. Such spatial ideas have gone to form other works including, notably, the earlier Interpolaciones for electric guitar and tape (1961), in which the performer is echoed by recorded guitar sounds diffused through variously placed loudspeakers.

WORKS

Orch: Ensayo, str, 1956; Homenaje al cerro San Cosme, 1957

Vocal: Cant. Solar (R. Jodorowsky), A, Bar, B, chorus, orch, tape, 1963; Immanispatak (Quechua texts), mixed chorus, 1963; Variaciones (C. Vallejo), C, fl, cl, b cl, db, perc, 1963; Divertimento II, mixed chorus, fl, cl, pf, elec gui, perc, 1966; I-10-AIFG/Mn1-1 (various), 3 reciters, fl, vn, accdn, 2 perc, 1969; Ñacahuasu (Che Guevara: Diario de campaña), reciter, 21 or more insts, 1970; Sialoecibi (ESEPCO I), actor-reciter, pf, 1970

Chbr and solo inst: Nocturno, pf, 1952; Cuentos no.1, pf, 1952; Cuentos no.2, pf, 1953; Qt, fl, cl, vn, vc, 1953; Solo, fl, 1954; Cuentos no.3, pf, 1961; Variaciones, 2 pf, 1964; Divertimento I, fl, cl, b cl, tpt, hpd, pf, db, perc, 1966; Divertimento III, fl, cl, b cl, pf, perc, 1967; Pucayaku, pf, perc, 1984

El-ac: Interpolaciones, elec gui, tape, 1961; El ombú, tape, 1965; Intensidad y altura, tape, 1966 [after poem by Vallejo]; Alfa–Omega (Bible), 2 spkrs, chorus, elec gui, db, 2 perc, 2 dancers, lighting, 1967; I-10-AIFG/Rbt-1, 3 spkrs, hn, trbn, elec gui, perc, lighting, 9 slide projectors, 6 radios, tape, 1968; Flexum, ww, str, perc, tape, 1969; Canción sin palabras (ESEPCO II), pf 4 hands, tape, 1970

Music for film, theatre, dance

WRITINGS

Técnicas del montaje audiovisual (Sante Fe, 1969)

with F. García and A. Salazar: Mapa de los instrumentos de uso popular en el Perú (Lima, 1978)

‘La música en el antiguo Perú’, La música en el Perú (Lima, 1985)

Las antaras nazca (Lima, 1988)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, ed. Pan American Union (Washington, DC, 1955–72)

E. Pinilla: ‘Informe sobre la música en el Perú’, Historia del Perú, ix, ed. J. Mejía Baca (Lima, 1980), 589–95

G. Behage: La música en América Latina (Caracas, 1983)

E. Pinilla: ‘La música en el siglo XX’, La música en el Perú (Lima, 1985), 174–6

J. CARLOS ESTENSSORO

Bolcom, William (Elden)

(b Seattle, WA, 26 May 1938). American composer, pianist and author. He began composition studies with Verrall at an early age and continued with Milhaud at Mills College (1958–61) and with both Milhaud and Messiaen in Paris. After working with Leland Smith at Stanford University (1961–4), he taught at the University of Washington (1965–6) and Queens College, CUNY (1966–8). While in New York he developed a style of playing ragtime that, through concerts and recordings, placed him in the forefront of the ragtime revival. He has also composed original rags, among them Graceful Ghost. From 1968 to 1970 he was composer-in-residence at the Yale University Drama School and the New York University School of the Arts. He began to teach at the University of Michigan in 1973.

In 1975 Bolcom married mezzo-soprano Joan Morris with whom he began to develop programmes on the history of American popular song. Their recitals and recordings of songs by Henry Russell, Henry Clay Work and others have aroused much interest in parlour and music-hall songs of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Bolcom has also recorded solo albums of music by Gershwin, Milhaud and himself. He is the author with Robert Kimball of Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York, 1973) and has edited the collected writings of Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival: a Composer’s View of 20th-century Music (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984).

Bolcom began his career composing in a serial idiom; he particularly admired the work of Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio. In the 1960s, however, he gradually shed this academic approach in favour of a language that embraced a wider variety of musical styles. In most of his mature music he has sought to erase boundaries between popular and serious music. An intensely dramatic atonality may contrast with the song styles of World War I (as in the cabaret opera Dynamite Tonite), ragtime (Black Host), old popular tunes (Whisper Moon), or a waltz (Piano Quartet).

The dance suite Seattle Slew (1986), named after a famous racehorse, uses regular, formally predictable dances such as the tango, gavotte, and rag to evoke the old-fashioned atmosphere of a racetrack. The Fifth Symphony (1989) opens in a highly abstract, even Expressionistic style, featuring angular melodies and dissonant harmonies. Later the music mixes these in a collage-like manner with popular tunes and quotations from works such as Wagner’s Tristan prelude and Mahler’s horn fanfares. Bolcom’s ideology, rooted in the transcendentalism of William Blake, has inspired compositions concerned with momentous religious and philosophical themes. These concerns are expressed with intense, even flamboyant music of vivid illustrative power. Such qualities appear in Frescoes, for example, and most notably in the monumental setting of the 46 poems in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a work that stands as a summation of Bolcom’s achievements as a composer.

WORKS

stage

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (musical illumination, W. Blake), 1956–81; Dynamite Tonite (cabaret op, 2, A. Weinstein), 1963, New York, 1963; Greatshot (cabaret op, 2, Weinstein), 1966, New Haven, CT, 1969; Theatre of the Absurd (paraphrase, Bolcom), 1970, San Francisco, 1979; The Beggar's Opera (J. Gay), 1978, Minneapolis, 1979 [completion of adaptation begun by Milhaud, 1937]; Casino Paradise (music-theatre op, 2, Weinstein), 1986–90, Philadelphia, 1990; McTeague (op, 2, Weinstein and R. Altman, after F. Norris), 1991–2, Chicago, 1992; A View from the Bridge (op, 2), 1997–9

instrumental

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1957; Concertante, fl, ob, vn, orch, 1961; Conc. Serenade, vn, str, 1964; Sym. no.2 ‘Oracles’, 1965; Fives, vn, pf, str, 1966; Commedia, chbr orch, 1971; Summer Divertimento, 1973; Pf Conc., 1976; Humoresk, org, orch, 1979; Sym. no.3, chbr orch, 1979; Broadside, ceremonial, wind, 1981; Ragomania, 1982; Vn Conc., 1983; Conc., D, vn, orch, 1984; Fantasia Concertante, va, vc, orch, 1985; Liberty Enlightening the World, band, 1985; Seattle Slew, dance suite, 1986; Spring Concertino, ob, chbr orch, 1986–7; Sym. no.4 (T. Roethke), medium v, orch, 1986; Sym. no.5, 1989; Cl Conc., 1990; MCMXC Tanglewood, 1990; Lyric Conc., fl, orch, 1993; A Whitman Triptych (W. Whitman), Mez, orch, 1995; Gaea, 2 pf LH, orch, 1996; Gala Variation, 1996; Molto adagio, 1996 [from Sym. no.6]; Sym. no.6, 1996–7; A Gentle Little Fanfare, 1997; Classical Action Samba, 1997; 3 Delgado Palacios Dances, 1997 [arr. and orch of work by D. Palacios]

Chbr and solo inst: 7 str qts, 1950–61, Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1956, rev. 1984; Concert Piece, cl, pf, 1958; Décalage, vc, pf, 1961; Pastorale, vn, pf, 1961; Octet, fl, cl, bn, vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1962; Scherzo-Fantasy, wind qnt, pf, 1962; Session I, 7 insts, 1965; Str Qt no.8, 1965; Dream Music no.2, hpd, 3 perc, 1966; Phrygia, hp, 1966; Session II, vn, va, 1966; Black Host, org, perc, tape, 1967; Session III, E-cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1967; Session IV, 9 insts, 1967; Dark Music, vc, timp, 1969; Praeludium, org, vib, 1969; Duets for Qnt, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1971; Fancy Tales, vn, pf, 1971; Whisper Moon, a fl, cl, 2 vn, pf, 1971; Novella (Str Qt no.9), 1972; Duo Fantasy, vn, pf, 1973; Trauermarsch, fl, ob, elec hpd, elec vc, 1973; Seasons, gui, 1974; Pf Qt, 1976; Short Lecture, cl, 1976; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1978; Afternoon, rag suite, cl, vn, pf, 1979 [after Joplin, Lamb and Scott]; Graceful Ghost, concert variation, vn, pf, 1979; Brass Qnt, 1980; Aubade, ob, pf, 1982; Virtuosity Rag, 2 tpt, 2 hn, 2 trbn, 1982; Lilith, sax, pf, 1984; Orphee-Serenade, fl, cl, bn, vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1984; Capriccio, vc, pf, 1985; Little Suite of Four Dances, E-cl, pf, 1985; Five Fold Five, wind qnt, pf, 1987; Fairy Tales, va, vc, db, 1988; Str Qt no.10, 1988; Fanfare: Converging on the Mountains, brass, timp, perc, org, 1989; 3 Rags, str qt, 1989; Sonata, vc, pf, 1989; Sonata no.3, vn, pf, 1992; Suite no.1, c, vc, 1994–5; Trio, cl, vn, pf, 1994; 3 piezas lindas, fl, gui, 1995; Sonata no.4, vn, pf, 1995; Celestial Dinner Music, fl, hp, 1996; Fanfare for the Detroit Opera House, brass, 1996 ; Pf Qt no.2, 1996; Spring Trio, pf trio, 1996; Suite, vn, vc, 1997

Kbd (pf, unless otherwise stated): 12 Etudes, 1959–60; Romantic Pieces, 1959; Fantasy Sonata no.1, 1961; Interlude, 2 pf, 1963; Dream Music no.1, 1965; Brass Knuckles, 1968; Garden of Eden, suite, 1968; Chorale and Prelude, org, 1970 [after Abide with me]; 3 Ghost Rags, 1970; Seabiscuits Rag, 1970; Frescoes, pf + hpd, pf + hmn, 1971; Hydraulis, org, 1971; Raggin' Rudi, 1972; Mysteries, org, 1976; Revelation Studies, carillon [2 pfmrs], 1976; 12 New Etudes, 1977–86; Fields of Flowers, 1978; Gospel Preludes, org, 1979–84; Monsterpieces (and Others), 1980; The Dead Moth Tango, 1983–4; Cadenzas for Beethoven Conc. no.4, 1986; 3 Dance Portraits, 1986; Rag Tango (Homage to Ernesto Nazareth), 1988; Recuerdos, 2 pf, 1991; Dédicace: a Small Measure of Affection, pf 4 hands, 1992; Sonata, 2 pf, 1993; Haunted Labyrinth, 1994; 9 Bagatelles, 1996

vocal

Choral: Satires (Bolcom), madrigal ens, 1970; Vocalise, SATB, 1977 [from Songs of Innocence and of Experience]; Simple Stories (D. Hall), S, SATB, fl, cl, hn, vc, pf, 1979–91; Chorale on St Anne's Hymn, 1988; The More Loving One (W.H. Auden), men's vv, pf, 1989; Maha Sonnet (A. Weinstein), men's vv, pf, 1990; The Mask (T.R. Anderson III, G.B. Bennett, R. Bruce, P.L. Dunbar, C.C. Thomas), SATB, pf, 1990; Alleluia, SATB, 1992

Other vocal: Cabaret Songs (Weinstein), medium v, pf, 1963–96; Morning and Evening Poems (W. Blake), C/T/Ct, a fl, va, hp, pf, perc, 1966; Open House (Roethke), T, chbr orch, 1975; Cabaret Songs (Weinstein), medium v, pf, 1977–85; 3 Irish Songs (T. Moore), medium v, fl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1978; Mary (Blake), medium v, pf, 1978; 3 Songs (Hall), medium v, fl, cl, hn, vc, pf, 1979; Songs to Dance (G. Montgomery), dancer, medium v, pf, 1989; Villanelle (R. Tillinghast), medium v, pf, 1989; I Will Breath a Mountain (Amer. women poets), medium v, pf, 1990; The Junction, On a Warm Afternoon (H. Nemerov), S, Mez, T, Bar, B, pf, 1990; Vaslav's Song (E. Eichelberger), Bar, pf, 1991; Tillinghast Duo, S, pf, 1993; Let Evening Come (M. Angelou, E. Dickinson, J. Kenyon), S, va, pf, 1994; Briefly it Enters (Kenyon), S, pf, 1996; Turbulence: a Romance (A. Fulton), S, Bar, pf, 1996; see also orch [Sym. no.4, 1986; A Whitman Triptych, 1995]

Recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publishers: Edward B. Marks, Presser

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD; GroveA (A. Clarkson) [incl. further bibliography]

J. Hiemenz: ‘Musician of the Month: William Bolcom’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xxvi/9 (1976), 4–5

M. Wait: ‘Meet the Composer-Pianist: William Bolcom’, Piano Quarterly, no.142 (1988), 33–40

W. Bolcom: ‘Parallel Universes: One of America's Leading Composer Discusses his Experience in Musical Theater and Opera’, ON, lviii/1 (1993–4), 34–6

B. Holland: ‘Composing a Kinship Between Classical and Pop’, New York Times (18 Jan 1995)

STEVEN JOHNSON

Boldemann, Laci

(b Helsinki, Finland, 24 April 1921; d Munich, 18 Aug 1969). Swedish composer. He studied conducting with Wood and the piano at the Royal Academy of Music, London; then in 1939 he moved to Sweden and there took piano lessons with de Frumerie. Forced to join the German army in 1942, he served in Russia, Poland and Italy, where he deserted to join the partisans in the Abruzzi. After two years in an American prison camp he returned to Sweden in 1947. During the 1950s he supported himself as a timber measurer, and in the next decade he worked in music teaching and administration. As a composer he aimed at simplicity, purity and expressiveness, finding vocal music his ideal medium. He felt musically isolated in the Sweden of the 1950s, but his works achieved recognition in Germany. In later years he became increasingly concerned with composing for children. The opera Dårskapens timme, constructed from 20 leitmotifs, has a self-ironic tone, and Boldemann’s music is generally cheerful, direct and tuneful.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Svart är vitt – sa kejsaren (children’s op, prelude, 2, L. Hellsing, after K. Boldemann), op.20, 1963–4; Dårskapens timme (comic op, 3, epilogue, K. Boldemann, after A. Bonacci), op.21, 1965–6; John Bauer (children’s stage orat, Hellsing), op.23, solo vv, orch, 1967; … och så drömmer han om Per-Jonathan (scene, Boldemann), op.26, B, orch, 1969

Orch: La danza, sym. ov., op.4, 1949–50; Sinfonietta, op.11, str, 1954; Fantasia concertante, op.12, vc, orch, 1954; Pf Conc., op.13, 1956; Vn Conc., op.15, 1959; Sym. no.1, op.18, 1959–62

Vocal: Lieder der Vergänglichkeit (H. Michaud), op.8, Bar, str orch, 1951; Notturno (Michaud), op.14, S, orch, 1958; 5 other orch songs, c180 songs with pf incl. 112 children’s songs

Choral: 6 sånger (V. Ekelund), op.28, male vv, 1969

Inst: Canto elegiaco, op.19, vc, pf, 1962; pf pieces

Principal publishers: Nordiska musikförlaget

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bergendal: 33 svenska komponister (Stockholm, 1972)

R. Haglund: ‘Boldemann, Laci’, Sohlmans musiklexikon, ed. H. Åstrand (Stockholm, 2/1975–9) [incl. worklist]

G. Percy: ‘Laci Boldemann: ett försök till presentation’, Musikrevy, xxxi (1976), 179–82

L. Hedwall: Den svenska symfonin (Stockholm, 1983)

C.-G. Åhlén: ‘Laci Boldemann, ett tonsättarporträtt’, Tonfallet, xvii/1 (1985), 7–16

ROLF HAGLUND

Bolden, Buddy [Charles Joseph]

(b New Orleans, 6 Sept 1877; d Jackson, LA, 4 Nov 1931). American blues and ragtime cornettist and bandleader. The first of the New Orleans cornet ‘kings’, he was highly regarded by contemporary fellow black musicians in the city, who in their reminiscences embroidered his life with a great many legends and spurious anecdotes. He came relatively late to music, adopting the cornet around 1894 after completing his schooling, and emerged not from the brass marching-band tradition but rather from the string bands which played for private dances and parties. By 1895, while working as a plasterer, he was leading his own semi-professional group, and by 1901, when his name first appears in city directories as a professional musician, his group had stabilized into a six-piece unit with cornet, clarinet, valve trombone, guitar, double bass and drums. Bolden’s rise to fame coincided with the emergence of a black pleasure district – Black Storyville – at South Rampart and Perdido streets, where he played in the dives and tonks (but not the brothels). His fame was at its peak in 1905, when his group performed regularly in the city’s dance halls and parks, and undertook excursions to outlying towns. In the following year Bolden showed distinct signs of violent mental derangement, and his band rapidly disintegrated. In 1907, in a state of hopeless indigence and alcoholism, he was admitted to a mental institution in Jackson, where he spent his remaining years. His life formed the basis of M. Ondaatje’s novel Coming through Slaughter (New York, 1976).

Contemporary musicians universally praised the power of Bolden’s tone, his rhythmic drive and the emotional content of his slow blues playing. He reportedly found ingenious ways of ornamenting existing melodies, but recent research has cast doubt on his reputation as the first jazz musician.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Berger: ‘Early New Orleans Jazz Bands’, Jazz Record (1944), April, 6

D. Barker: ‘A Memory of King Bolden’, Evergreen Review, no.37 (1965), 66–74

D.M. Marquis: Finding Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz: the Journal of a Search (Coshen, IN, 1978)

D.M. Marquis: In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz (Baton Rouge, LA, 1978)

J.L. Collier: Jazz: the American Theme Song (New York, 1993), 198–9

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Boldon [Baldoni], Tomaso

(b Padua; fl 1598–1601). Italian composer. He was a priest. His surname ‘Boldon’ is probably a Paduan dialect version of the more common name ‘Baldoni’. His earliest known work, Volse Giove saper, was first published in a collection of five-voice madrigals composed by ‘diversi Eccellenti Musici di Padova’ (RISM 1598²). His Vesperi per tutte le solennità dell’anno (Venice, 1601) contains as well as the psalm settings a mass, a Te Deum for six voices, a falsobordone, a Gloria Patri and an eight-voice setting of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The dedication to Abbate G.F. Moresini indicates that the psalm settings had been composed in response to a request from Paduan clerics for pieces which could be performed ‘alla Bassa senza soprani & all’Alta senza Bassi’.

Bolero.

A Spanish popular dance or song. Its dancers are called boleros or boleras. Of the several possible etymologies considered by Suárez-Pajares (A1993), the most plausible are those deriving from the verb volar (‘to fly’) and from the name boleras, given to the Gypsy women ‘who were the first to dance it [and called so] because of the little gold-braided balls (bolitas de pasamanería) that adorned their dresses’. From its beginnings in Spain during the last third of the 18th century the bolero's popularity in the court and theatre persisted throughout the 19th century, and it has since been absorbed among the traditional dance and song genres of Andalusia, Castile and Mallorca.

Consensus among the early writers (Sor, A1835; El Solitario, A1847) points to the bolero’s having derived from the seguidilla, whose accompanying rhythm and movements it modified and to whose verse form it was sung. After the seguidilla had absorbed steps and movements from such other dances as the fandango, polo, tirana and cachucha, two types gained prominence: the seguidilla manchega (which later became the bolero) and the seguidilla murciana. The former was much quicker and began with two verses, whereas the latter began with one. Comparison of a typical bolero and seguidilla manchega (ex.1) reveals their similarity.

The bolero is in moderate tempo and triple metre. It is usually performed by a couple, but in theatrical performances was executed by four to eight couples. It comprises three equal sections (coplas), each beginning with a paseo (promenade). Only in the middle section is solo performance alternated with couple-dancing. The bien parado (a fixed pose with one arm arched over the head and the other crossed in front of the chest) closes each section and, sometimes, phrases within the section. Complicated steps, including the cuarta (kicking and crossing the feet while executing a leap) and battement (in which the lifted leg is struck against the standing leg), and fast movements characterize the solo sections. The dancers accompany themselves with singing (often a vocalise) and castanets, and sometimes also on the guitar and tambourine. Musically the Spanish bolero is usually in AAB form. The entry of the voice is preceded by at least one bar of sharply marked rhythm, and short instrumental interludes separate the sung couplets. The earliest rhythms (shown in ex.2) took on characteristics closely related to traditional polonaise rhythm (ex.3).

Varying interpretations of the dance are found in Mexico, Cuba and other Latin American countries, especially Colombia and Venezuela. The Cuban bolero is a duple-metre dance that exhibits closer relationships with the habanera and Afro-Cuban musical styles than with its Spanish counterpart. It is a binary song form that developed from such 19th-century forms as the conga, danzón and contradanza. Its often sentimental quatrains, sometimes as many as 20, are presented in two contrasting musical periods characterized by long, flowing melodies. Rhythm is characteristically complex and includes the use of the cinquillo (ex.4) and tresillo (ex.5) in the melody as well as in the accompaniment, which is for bongo, conga drum and claves.

According to Suárez-Pajares (A1993), the earliest use of the term ‘bolero’ was the dance Ramón de la Cruz specified for his sainete La hostería del buen gusto (1773). Dances were often incorporated in sainetes and in entremeses inserted between the acts of longer plays and lyrical dramas. Boleros were also included in many 18th- and 19th-century tonadillas and zarzuelas. J.A. Zamácola (1756–1826), a prominent Spanish folklorist and song collector who wrote under the pseudonym Don Preciso, attributed the dance's origin to Sebastián (Lorenzo) Cerezo or Zerezo, an acclaimed dancer from La Mancha. J.J. Rodríguez Calderón, writing in 1807, credited the Gypsy-born dancer Antón Boliche from Seville (d 1794) with having refined its movements and surmised that his surname possibly have earned him the nickname Bolero.

Among the foreign authors who kept journals of their travels in Spain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Englishman J. Townsend described the dance (volero) performed at a ball in Aranjuez, seeing in it some resemblance to the fandango. The German C.A. Fischer saw it performed in a theatre in Cádiz and described it in more detail, mentioning printed material available from bookstalls in the Puerta del Sol district in Madrid. These manuals and methods, bearing such titles as L'animas que manifiestan los varias pasos, y mudanzas de los seguidillas voleros y los trages mas proprios para esse bayle and Modo facil para aprender el ayre volero en la guitarra y arreglar la voz, may be the earliest sources of their kind. The poet Théophile Gautier described in contemptuous terms a performance he and a companion witnessed in a theatre in Vitoria, their first viewing of a national Spanish dance (baile nacional).

Around the beginning of the 19th century the Spanish dancer Requejo initiated reforms in bolero dancing in a successful collaboration with the Spanish violinist and composer Dámaso Cañada (d 1849), whose boleros teatrales were written as instrumental dances with the flute replacing the voice. (The Dance de Reguejo, arranged for flute and piano and possibly from Cañada's collection, is printed in Sor, A1835, p.91, and several boleros by Cañada can be found in Paz, B1813.) In Seville, which was not affected by Requejo's reforms, a theatrical form of the bolero took root, giving rise to the so-called bolero school (see Cairón, B1820). Curiously, the term ‘bolero’ was not included in the Diccionario de la lengua castellana, issued by the Real Academia Española, until the fifth edition (1817), where it was defined as requiring ‘much grace and elegance’ (mucho garbo y gentileza), clearly a reference to the elevated taste of the bolero school.

The bolero quickly found favour beyond Spain's borders. It was extremely popular in Paris, and was included in the repertory of the singer-composer Manuel García in his tours throughout Europe, the USA and Mexico. Along with the older fandango, seguidilla and tirana, the bolero became one of the most popular dances in the New World during the colonial period. The Cuban bolero, however, superseded the Spanish one in Latin America, entering the repertory of marimba bands in Central America and Mexico during the 19th century. Two types of bolero exist in Mexico: the romantico, danced and/or sung, which has an international music-hall character, and the ranchero, only sung, which is found only in Mexico and is accompanied by a mariachi consort using stylized bolero rhythms. In Colombia and Venezuela boleros are part of the popular song repertory.

Early examples of the bolero in art music are Sor's famous bolero for three female voices (ed. in Mitjana y Gordón, A1920, p.2335), dating from around the middle of the period of the dance's greatest popularity in Spain, and two of Beethoven's folksong arrangements with piano, violin and cello accompaniment: the ‘bolero a solo’ Una paloma blanca and ‘bolero a due’ Como la mariposa woo158a nos.19–20. Opera composers were also attracted to the form: Weber included a bolero in the incidental music to Preciosa (1820), and in Der Freischütz (1821) he employed its rhythm in the arietta ‘Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen’; further examples are found in the works of Méhul (Les deux aveugles de Tolède, 1806), Auber (La muette de Portici, 1828; Le domino noir, 1837), Berlioz (Benvenuto Cellini, 1838), Joaquín Gaztambide (the zarzuela El estreno de un artista, 1852) and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, 1855). Moritz Moszkowski composed boleros for violin and piano (op.16 no.2) and for piano solo (op.12 no.5). Chopin's Boléro op.19 more nearly resembles a polonaise, particularly in the allegro vivace. Ravel's Boléro (1928), initially conceived under the title Fandango, employs a consistently moderate and uniform tempo, as much in its melody and harmony as in its recurrent underlying rhythm, which suggests a fleeting relationship with the traditional dance (ex.6).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: general

Grove6 (‘Seguidilla’; J. Sage)

LaborD

MGG1 (W. Kahl)

J. Townsend: Journey Through Spain in the Years 1761–1787 (Dublin 1792)

C.A. Fischer: Reise von Amsterdam über Madrid und Cadiz nach Genua in den Jahren 1797 und 1798 (Berlin, 1799)

F. Sor: ‘Le bolero’, Encyclopédie pittoresque de la musique, ed. A. Ledhuy and H. Bertini (Paris, 1835)

T. Gautier: Voyage en Espagne/Tra los montes (Paris, 1843; Eng. trans., 1853, as Wanderings in Spain)

El Solitario [S. Estébanez Calderón]: Escenas andaluzas (Madrid, 1847); ed. A. González Troyano (Madrid, 1985)

F.A. Barbieri: Las castañuelas: estudio jocoso dedicados a todos los boleros y danzantes, por uno de tantos (Madrid, 1878/R)

F. Pedrell: Diccionario técnico de la música (Barcelona, 1894)

R. Mitjana y Gordón: ‘La musique en Espagne’, EMDC, I/iv (1920), 1913–2350

E. Cotarelo y Mori: Historia de la zarzuela, ó sea El drama lírico en España (Madrid, 1934)

M.N. Hamilton: Music in Eighteenth Century Spain (Urbana, IL, 1937/R)

G. Chase: The Music of Spain (New York, 1941, 2/1959)

J. Subirá: Historia de la música teatral en España (Barcelona, 1945)

L. Tozzi: Bolero: storia de un'ossessione (Rome, 1981)

R. Paz: ‘La escuela bolera’, Ritmo, no.564 (Madrid, 1986), 52

M.E. Cortizo: ‘El bolero español del siglo XIX: estudio formal’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi, 1993], 2017–26

H. Restrepo Duque: Lo que cuentan los boleros (Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, 1992)

E.D. Albanedo: ‘Iconography of the Bolero’, Studies in Dance History, ed. J. Suárez-Pajares and X.M. Carreira, iv/1 (1993), 39–59

N.L. Chalfa Ruyter: ‘La escuela bolera’, Dance Chronicle, xvi/2 (1993), 249–57

J. Suárez-Pajares: ‘Historical Overview of the Bolero from its Beginnings to the Genesis of the Bolero School’, Studies in Dance History, ed. J. Suárez-Pajares and X.M. Carreira, iv/1 (1993), 1–19

J. Rico Salazar: Cien años de boleros (Bogotá, 4/1994)

b: methods, collections

F.A. Florencio [J. Fernández de Rojas]: Crotalogía, o Ciencia de las castañuelas: instrucción científica del modo de tocar las castañuelas para baylar el bolero, y poder fácilmente, y sin necesidad de maestro, acompañarse en todos las mudanzas, de que está adornado este gracioso bayle español (Madrid, 1792) [according to Súarez-Pajares, not be taken seriously]

Don Preciso [J.A.I. Zamácola]: Colección de las mejores coplas de seguidillas, tiranas y polos que se han compuesto para cantar a la guitarra (Madrid, 1799, enlarged 3/1805, 1982/R)

J.J. Rodríguez Calderón: La bolerología, o Quadro de las escuelas del baile bolero, tales cuales eran en 1794 y 1795 en la corte de España (Philadelphia, 1807)

N. Paz: Collection des meilleurs airs nationaux espagnols: boleras et tiranas (Paris, 1813)

A. Cairón: Compendio de las principales reglas del baile traducido del francés por … y aumentado de una explicación exacta y método de ejecutar la mayor parte de los bailes conocidos en España, tanto antiguos como modernos (Madrid, 1820)

S. de Masarnau: Boleras, tirana, manchegas: 3 airs caractéristiques de danses nationales espagnoles (Paris, c1840)

c: the bolero in traditional music

J.M. Varela y Silvari: La música popular española (Mondoñedo, 1883)

R. Lappara: ‘La musique et la danse populaires en Espagne’, EMDC, I/iv (1920), 2353–400

A. Capmany: ‘El baile y la danza’, Folklore y costumbres de España, ed. F. Carreras y Candi (Barcelona, 1931–3), ii, 167–418

J. Crivillé i Bargalló: El folklore musical (Madrid, 1983)

P. Dueñas Herrera: Historia documental del bolero mexicano (Mexico City, 1990)

J. Loyola Fernández: El ritmo de bolero: el bolero en la música bailable cubana (Rió Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1996)

d: special studies

W. Hesse: ‘Beethovens “Bolero a solo”’, Die Musik, xxx (1937–8), 820–22

C. Lévi-Strauss: ‘“Bolero” de Maurice Ravel’, L'homme, xi/2 (Paris, 1971), 5–14

H. Schaarschmidt: ‘Der Bolero im Musikunterricht’, Musik und Bildung, xii (1980), 584–9

M. Pérez Gutiérrez: La estética musical de Ravel (Madrid, 1987)

La escuela bolero: Madrid 1992

J. Suárez-Pajares: ‘Collection of Texts [relating to the Bolero]’, ibid., 91–119

WILLI KAHL, ISRAEL J. KATZ

Bolet, Jorge

(b Havana, 15 Nov 1914; d Mountain View, CA, 16 Oct 1990). American pianist of Cuban birth. He studied with his sister Maria before entering the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1927, where he worked principally with David Saperton (Godowsky’s son-in-law). During this time he also played for Godowsky, Josef Hofmann and Moriz Rosenthal. In 1935 he spent nine months in Paris and London broadening his education before returning to the Curtis Institute to study conducting with Fritz Reiner. In 1937 Bolet won New York’s Naumburg International Piano Competition; his official New York début, given later that year, was attended by Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Mischa Elman, Piatigorsky and Godowsky. However, success followed slowly, and the 1940s and 50s were notably lean years supplemented by teaching as Serkin’s assistant at the Curtis Institute (1939–42) and Bloomington, Indiana (1968–77). In 1942 he was made military attaché for Cuba in Washington, DC, and in 1946, while serving in the US army in Japan, he conducted the first Japanese performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. During the 1970s he achieved greater recognition, beginning with his magisterial performances of Liszt’s transcriptions of Rigoletto and Lucia di Lammermoor at an International Piano Archive concert at New York’s Hunter College in 1970. The following year Bolet played Liszt’s Totentanz with the New York PO under Boulez to great critical success, and in 1974 his epic Carnegie Hall recital proved a turning-point in his career. A 1976 recital at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall confirmed his stature; in the same year he signed an exclusive contract with Decca, with whom he recorded the cornerstones of his repertory, principally music by Chopin, Schumann and, above all, Liszt. Although he disliked working in the studio, missing the stimulus of an audience, he recorded extensively and in 1984 he won a Gramophone Award for his disc of the first (Swiss) book of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage. While his repertory was essentially orientated towards the Romantics, it was surprisingly wide, and included such works as John La Montaine’s Piano Concerto, Norman Dello Joio’s Third Sonata and Joseph Marx’s Romantisches Klavier-Konzert. Acclaim came late to Bolet, but his very personal mastery and refinement are widely held in awe and affection.

BRYCE MORRISON

Bolgarskiy raspev

(Russ.: ‘Bulgarian chant’).

A term used for part of the Russian chant repertory from the mid-17th century. See Russian and Slavonic church music, §2.

Bolivia (Sp. República de Bolivia).

Country in South America; sharing borders with Brazil to the north and east, Paraguay and Argentina to the south, and Chile and Peru to the west.

3. Mestizos, folklore groups and ‘canto nuevo’.

GERARD BÉHAGUE (I), MAX PETER BAUMANN (II)

Bolivia

I. Art music

Until 1776 Bolivia formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, as ‘Audiencia de Charcas’ or ‘Alto Peru’; the early history of art music in Bolivia is therefore related to that of Peru. During the colonial period the capital, La Plata (or Chuquisaca, and since 1839 Sucre), was one of the important intellectual and artistic centres of Spanish America, particularly because of its S Francisco Xavier University and its cathedral. Founded in 1538 it became a bishopric in 1552 and as early as 1569 its first music school was established by the musicians Juan de la Peña Madrid and Hernán García, to teach the Indians singing and instrumental performance. The wealth and consequent musical development of La Plata Cathedral (whose liturgy was closely linked to that of Seville) during the 17th and 18th centuries is attested to by the substantial historical and musical archives at the cathedral, whose holdings dating from the Baroque period make it one of the richest South American archival centres. Manuscript copies of works by such European composers as Galuppi, Hidalgo, Durón and Michael Haydn have been little explored. Throughout this period the cathedral library expanded considerably, receiving works from Spain and the colonies, especially Mexico. At the same time works of composers active at the cathedral were copied locally: the manuscript copy made in Potosí in 1784 of a mass by Zipoli, active in Córdoba, Argentina, is in the cathedral archive. The cathedral chapter maintained an ensemble of singers and instrumentalists numbering 50 musicians by the beginning of the 18th century.

Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo (1553–1620), who had worked at Bogotá and Quito, became maestro de capilla at La Plata in 1598. None of his works has been found in Sucre but his vain attempts to have them published in Spain or France are documented (1607). The most important 17th-century composer in La Plata was Juan de Araujo, who was born in Spain and who studied at the University of S Marcos in Lima with Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco. He was maestro de capilla at La Plata Cathedral from 1680 until his death in 1712. Almost 200 of his works are in the music archive, and five more are in the archive of the Seminary of S Antonio de Abad in Cuzco, Peru. He wrote sacred and secular vernacular works, of a consistent quality, including Latin psalms, hymns, partsongs and polychoral villancicos. The music of another 17th-century maestro de capilla at the cathedral, Pedro Villalobos, is also in the Cuzco archive. The musical activity of the mining city of Potosí during the 17th century is well documented in local archives. Theatrical representations with music were predominant, but no music survives.

During the 18th century Manuel Mesa y Carrizo distinguished himself as the maestro de capilla at La Plata from 1761 to 1773. His numerous works, dating from the 1760s and 1770s, and now in the cathedral archive and in private libraries, include masses, psalm settings, hymns, villancicos, jácaras and juguetes.

The Jesuits developed significant musical activities in the missions of Moxos and Chiquitos where the Indians were taught singing, instrumental performance and instrument making. Historical documents attest to the ability of the Indians in mastering the European musical idiom. The S Ignacio de Moxos church and the Episcopal Archive of Concepción, in particular, hold fairly substantial collections of secular and sacred works (including copies of works by Juan de Araugo and Domenico Zipoli). Even after the expulsion of the Jesuits, the missions maintained this tradition of neo-European music, concurrently with the inclusion of native indigenous dances in various religious processions.

In contrast to the activity of the colonial period, music in Bolivia developed little in the 19th century after independence (1825). La Paz, the effective capital (Sucre being the nominal one), began organizing its musical life in the mid-19th century. The first pianos were introduced in the 1840s; some operas were produced in 1845. But musical organizations with some degree of continuity were not established until the early 20th century, when the foundation of the Military School of Music (1904), the National Conservatory of Music (1908), the Circle of Fine Arts (1910) and many similar institutions contributed considerably to La Paz’s musical life. The National Orchestra was established in 1940 under the direction of José María Velasco-Maidana, who was the foremost Bolivian nationalist composer of his time. His ballet Ameríndia (1934–5), first performed in Berlin in 1938, and many of his symphonic poems (Cuento brujo, 1935, Los Khuzillos, 1936) are based on Aymara-Quechua mythological subjects. The nationalist movement is also represented by Antonio González Bravo (1885–1961), Eduardo Caba (b 1890), Teófilo Vargas Candia (1886–1961) and Humberto Viscarra Monje (1898–1971). Caba, a native of Potosí, studied in Buenos Aires with Felipe Boero and with Turina in Madrid, and became director of the La Paz Conservatory in 1942. Most of his works, such as the tone poem Potosí, the ballet Kollana and the 18 piano pieces Aires Indios, are in a marked Indian idiom with modal and pentatonic structures and rhythms characteristic of music of the Bolivian plateau. Viscarra Monje mainly wrote piano miniatures, among which a Rondino became very popular in Bolivia. Simeón Roncal, a native of Sucre, wrote a series of 20 cuecas(Bolivia’s chief national dance) and other popular genre pieces in a Romantic virtuoso piano style. González Bravo, primarily a student of folk music, wrote numerous choral works for teaching purposes and orchestrated many Aymara folk tunes.

The younger generation of composers has further explored native music within neo-classical or neo-Romantic styles or else has experimented in advanced compositional idioms. Jaime Mendoza-Nava and Gustavo Navarre represent the former tendency, Hugo Patiño Thórrez, Atiliano Auza, Alberto Villalpando, Marvin Sandi, Florencio Pozadas Cordero and others the latter. Most of these composers studied abroad. Auza, Villalpando and Pozadas were fellows in the 1960s of the Di Tella Institute, Buenos Aires, under the direction of Ginastera, where they became aware of avant-garde techniques. Auza moved from a dissonant neo-classicism to serial and aleatory techniques in his works of the late 1960s. Villalpando chiefly used serialism, and wrote some successful scores for films. In general, however, opportunities for experimental composition in Bolivia have been slight. Younger composers active since the 1970s and 80s include Juan Antonio Maldonado, Willy Pozadas, Cergio Prudencio, Cesar Junaro, Oscar García and Augustín Fernández Sánchez.

See also Peru, §I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonRB

O. Mayer-Serra: Música y músicos de Latinoamérica (Mexico City, 1947)

G. Chase: Introducción a la música americana contemporánea (Buenos Aires, 1958)

A. Auza León: Dinamica musical en Bolivia (La Paz, 1967, 2/1985)

C.G. Muñoz and W.A. Roldán: Un archivo musical americano (Buenos Aires, 1972)

R. Stevenson: Latin American Colonial Music Anthology (Washington DC, 1975)

J. de Mesa and C. Seoane: ‘La música en Bolivia durante el siglo XIX’, Die Musikkulturen Lateinamerikas im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. R. Günther (Regensburg, 1982), 93–120

A. Auza León: Simbiosis cultural de la música boliviana (La Paz, 1989)

C. Seoane Urioste and A. Eichmann: Lírica colonial boliviana (La Paz, 1993)

Bolivia

II. Traditional music

1. Andean highlands.

2. Lowland Indians.

Bolivia, §II: Traditional music

1. Andean highlands.

The Andean highlands of Bolivia occupy more than a quarter of the country's entire area. By contrast with the more thinly populated lowlands of eastern Bolivia (Oriente) and the north-eastern Andean slope of the Yungas, the mountain plateaux and the high valleys are relatively densely inhabited. Members of Amerindian societies constitute more than half of the population. Most live in small rural settlements on the altiplano and in the valleys of the cordilleras at 2500 to 4500 metres above sea level, for which reason they are sometimes called ‘highland Indians’. The Spanish term ‘indio’ (Indian), a denomination from outsiders, refers today primarily to the feeling of semantic, cultural and social solidarity among these groups. The indios speak at least one Indian language as their mother tongue and feel bound to traditional Andean cultural heritage. Following the land reform of 1953, the term indio was replaced by the now customary term ‘campesino’ (peasant or farmer). Most of this rural population lives from farming and stockbreeding.

Numerically, the largest language groups of the Andean highlands are the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking farmers. Quechua is primarily spoken in the departments of Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí and Chuquisaca, as well as in some provinces of the department of La Paz. It is a vernacular language which has evolved from the classical Quechua of the Inca Empire (1438–1537). The Aymara language survives in the vicinity of the pre-Inca ritual sites at Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca. Indios or indigenous peoples who speak one of these languages are designated here as Quechuas or Aymaras. The Aymaras (or Kollas) live primarily on the altiplano in La Paz and Puno (Peru) as well as in relatively large areas of Oruro and Potosí. Many musical terms and concepts from the Aymara seem to have been transmitted to the Quechuas. In addition to the Aymaras and Quechuas, a smaller group of indios still survives in linguistic and cultural isolation near Lake Coipasa; their language, Chipaya, is spoken by fewer than a thousand people. It is assumed that these people, known as Chipayas, together with the Urus of Lake Titicaca were among the first settlers of the central Andes. Some 2000 of the Callawayas or Kallawayas, the Quechua-speaking provinces of Bautista Saavedra, Muñecas and parts of the provinces of Tamayo and La Paz use their own esoteric language, Machchaj-Juyai, (literally, ‘language of the compatriot or companion’); otherwise they generally speak Quechua. The Callawayas differ culturally from the Quechuas and Aymaras, although many reciprocal influences can be observed, especially in the realms of music and musical instruments.

(i) Musical ensembles.

The traditional music of the indios of the Bolivian central Andes uses a large variety of wind instruments, a smaller number of different kinds of drums and a few idiophones. Wind instruments hold the most important position within the Andean tradition of the campesinos, followed by drums (wankaras or bombos, tambores) which are used primarily as accompaniment. Unlike the urban folklore ensembles (conjuntos), in which acculturated string instruments are mixed with some or all of the three basic types of flutes, the rural ensembles of the indios (tropas) generally consist of a set of one type of melody instrument. The musical groups of the campesinos can usually be divided into three main types of flute ensemble, according to native categorization: panpipe ensembles (sikus), notched flute ensembles (kenas) and duct flute ensembles (pinkillos). Some include drum accompaniment.

Except for the one-string musical bow (arco selvatico, arco musical or arco de boca), no string instruments were known in pre-conquest South America. Various guitar types, such as vihuelas, lutes and bandurrias, spread throughout the affluent mining centres of Bolivia with Spanish colonization. Through the mediation of the mestizos, the guitarrillo, jitarrón and charango were also introduced to the campesinos of the altiplano and were adapted and transformed there.

Traditional instruments and ensembles often have particular regional and individual names, related to the areas in which they are played. This applies especially to terms used to classify the sizes or tonal registers of one generic type of instrument in a particular ensemble. In a duct flute ensemble from the Arque province, for example, the various pinkillos or charkas are divided into four categories according to their tonal register (similar to the choral divisions of soprano, alto, tenor and bass). Each instrument is assigned an individual name according to the register group to which it belongs: the deepest and longest flute is called charka machu, the instrument belonging to the next higher register (about a 5th higher) is called charka mala; next is the charka tara, pitched an octave higher than the charka machu. The instrument belonging to the highest register is called charka ch'ili, it is also the smallest instrument, sounding a 5th higher than the charka tara. Machu, mala (also malta), tara and ch'ili also symbolize the social hierarchy: machu means ‘honourable’ and, as a rule, is associated with the oldest and most experienced musicians; mala or malta means ‘intermediate one’, while ch'ili (‘smallest’) is usually played by the youngest and least experienced musician.

(ii) Musical characteristics.

In the Bolivian highlands, music, dance, song and ritual are closely intertwined. Dance is present in almost all group music-making. The Quechua term taki (song) encompasses not only the idea of sung language but also rhythmic melody and dance. The three key terms takiy (to sing), tukay (to play) and tusuy (to dance), each emphasize only one aspect of an integrated musical whole. These three complementary elements signify the inherent unity of structured sound, movement and symbolic expression.

Most instrumental and vocal melodies possess a pronounced anhemitonic pentatonic structure. Although certain flute types have a diatonic tuning and could theoretically be played diatonically, the scales actually played by the campesinos are predominantly pentatonic. These scales are more traditional and are played most often. Semitones do occur, in particular in melodies of wide range. Such melodies seem to be the result of a transposition by a 4th to a lower register or a 5th to a higher one; this occurs, for example, in some sikura panpipe ensembles. Such hexatonic and heptatonic scales can be explained as the combination of two anhemitonic pentatonic scales whose tonal centres are arranged in layers of a sequence of intervals built up first on the final and then on the upper fifth. Influenced by Western-type compositions such as national and regional anthems, and the urban folklore groups, traditional ensembles now more often adopt melodies in major and minor keys.

Generally speaking, the melodies produced by the various traditional panpipe types are performed in a playing technique of interlocking pairs (tinku or contrapunto). Each pair consists of a complementary set of female and male instruments (arka and ira, fig.1). The melody is simultaneously performed by several panpipe pairs in two to five parallel octaves. Parallel octaves also occur in some duct flute and some kena ensembles. In ensembles of double-row panpipes, as well as in some duct flute and notched flute ensembles, parallel octaves will often be embellished with parallel 5ths and/or 4ths or, somewhat less often, with parallel intervals approximating a tritone.

In formal terms, the traditional indio melodies are marked by phrases that are relatively short and few in number; these phrases are repeated individually within a melody which itself undergoes several repetitions. Instrumental pieces often begin with a drum introduction (qallaykuy); after the much repeated main section (tukana, kantu or wirsu) there is a shorter coda (tukuchana). Rhythmically, a binary character predominates, related to the countless forms of the wayñu dance (Sp. huayño).

The singing (takiy) of men and women is mostly accompanied by one or more charango players and is combined with particularly lively and rhythmic dances with their own stamping sequences (tusuna or zapateo). The most important traditional song genres include wayñu, tunada (tonada, copla), yaraví, bailesitu (bailecito) and kwika (cueca). These are now mainly performed in connection with the Christian festivals, such as Carnival, Easter, Holy Cross Day (3 May), All Saints' Day (1 November), and Christmas. Solo singers perform lari-wayñu and burruqhatiy songs, accompanying themselves on the charango while journeying through the countryside (fig.2); there is also ensemble singing (taki, tusuna) and antiphonal singing between two contesting singers or groups of singers (takipayanaku). The individual melodies (tunadas, wirsus) and types of instrumental ensembles (tropas) are tied to specific festivals: examples include the carnival music of the puka uma or pujllay ensembles (tonada del carnaval), the tonada de la Cruz and the cosecha wirsu (harvest melody).

Song, dance and music are associated with festive occasions such as the sowing and harvesting seasons, family celebrations, communal celebrations in honour of patron saints and other occasions particular to each group. The festivities and music-making reach their zenith when celebrating the various rites of offering, involving drinks, incense or animals, as well as during animal branding ceremonies. Music, song and dance are always an inseparable part of diverse fertility rites.

The basic figure of the dance ensemble is the circle formation, in which participants dance in single file, the oldest first, the youngest last. In traditional dance ensembles instruments are played by men while women take a leading role in dance and song, often waving coloured flags to the music. The dances always begin in an anticlockwise direction and after a certain time change symmetrically to clockwise; the musicians then make a half-turn on their own axis and continue dancing in the same formation, one behind another. This fundamental pattern can be observed in many dances such as the charangeada, the sikuriada, the ‘wild dance’ (chúkaru-baile) of the jula-julas panpipe ensemble and the ushnizatni of the Chipayas' duct flute (ch’utu) ensemble. The circle dance is also combined with dancing in single file, with serpentine movements in the jula-jula dances or with dancing in double rows, as in lichiwayu (kena) dances. The leader of the music group, the tata mayor, sometimes plays a pututu (signal horn) and holds a whip in his hand to signify his authority.

(iii) Ritual calendar, music and dance.

Traditional musical behaviour is always embedded in a particular context within the ritual and religious annual cycle. Music-making and singing are determined by the two halves of the agricultural cycle: the rainy season and the dry season. The seasons generally determine the kinds of musical instruments to be used and the melodies and dances to be performed.

The various festivals also need to be considered in connection with historical layers and traditional re-interpretations that have been superimposed. Often, for example, the old astronomical (or Inca) calendar, the Christian (or Gregorian) calendar and the annual agricultural cycle simultaneously influence such celebrations. Numerous festivals celebrated the earth deities. In these, offerings of smoke, drink and animal sacrifices are made, related to the tilling of the ground, the sowing of seeds, the growth of crops and prayer for a good harvest. Each has its own set melodies and musical instruments. Music and dance may also be expressions of joy as well as offerings to honour Father and Mother Earth (Pachatata and Pachamama).

The contemporary cosmological-religious world view of the altiplano indios seems to be partially syncretic. Traditional central Andean beliefs partly survive; some have mixed with Christian conceptions of faith and worship. The Virgin Mary is associated with the concept of Pachamama (pacha = earth, mama = mother) to the extent that Pachamama is generally interpreted as the Virgin Mary, manifesting herself on a local level in the form of individual virgins, such as the Virgen de Candelaria, Virgen de Copacabana, Virgen del Carmen and Mamita Asunta (Virgen de Asunción). More broadly speaking, the female concept of Pachamama is the timeless and female aspect of the Mother Earth. Throughout the centuries, incoming religious figures such as the Virgin Mary have been considered reincarnations of an element of this fundamental principle.

During the rainy season, in the department of Oruro, charka flutes are sounded in honour of Pachamama to give thanks for the first good harvest of the season. Charkas of various sizes are played by men to accompany dances, together with a cow horn or pututu, while unmarried girls sing ‘Takisun pachamamaman mañarisun’ (‘Let us sing and call to the Pachamama’) in a high falsetto voice.

Other duct flutes such as pinkillos, mohoceños or aymaras (fig.3), ch'utus, tokurus and tarkas or anatas are traditional to the rainy season, from All Saints' Day until the carnival season in February or March. These instruments belong to the ‘female’ cycle of the year. The distinction between ‘female’ and ‘male’ times of year can be related to the old Inca calendar. Wooden duct flutes symbolize the female principle of irrigation and fertility; they celebrate the sprouting seeds and the harvest. Their connection with water is emphasized by the fact that they are sometimes filled with water so that they can become saturated and airtight. Because of the superimposition of Christian religious concepts on the festivals, duct flutes are also closely related to the numerous festivals of the Virgin Mary in the rainy season, such as the feast of the Immaculate Conception (Fiesta de la Concepción; 8 December) or Candlemas (2 February). The instruments are also played to celebrate Christmas and the New Year.

By contrast with these instruments there are others (panpipes and notched flutes) made of hard bamboo and played predominantly during the dry season. These are closely tied to the ‘male’ festivals during this part of the year, such as Holy Cross Day (3 May) and Corpus Christi (end of May or beginning of June). They are also played during the numerous festivals honouring male saints. Such festivals are linked to the concept of Pachatata, Tatapacha or Apu. During this dry season the instruments used are predominantly notched flutes made of bamboo (kenas, chokelas, kena-kenas, lichiwayus, pusi-ppias) and different kinds of panpipes (sikus, sikuras, antaras, jula-julas, laqitas). These instruments are associated with the male principle, represented also by the sun, the dry season and the wind.

Bolivia, §II: Traditional music

2. Lowland Indians.

More than 30 large and small ethnic groups live in the tropical lowlands, particularly in the departments of Beni, Santa Cruz, Pando, La Paz, Cochabamba and Tarija. Indios of the savanna and forests, about 150,000 in number, belong linguistically to the Arawak, Tacana, Guaraní and Pano language groups. The languages of the Chiquitos, Chimanes, Movimas, Yaracarés, Itonamas, Canichanas and others also fall into these groups.

Melodies based on characteristic rhythmic patterns make up the most popular songs and instrumental pieces. Typically for music of the eastern lowlands these are extensively marked by the rhythms of the dance or dance-song genres taquirari, chobena, machichi, cumbia and polca. They are played by various ensembles as monophonic, biphonic or polyphonic melodies, from Rio Mamoré to deep in the vicinity of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. In their simplest form, these ensembles consist of a vertical or transverse flute (pífano or sibibire) and a large and a small drum. One or two calabash rattles (sonajes or caracachá) accompany the lively and strophically structured melodies. Two cymbals (platillos) may be added for extra rhythmical support. In the cities, groups of one to three guitars or mandolins with a matraca (rattle) as rhythmical accompaniment are preferred. String instruments have become popular and accompany one or more singers. Other instruments, such as home-made violins, bombo and tambor drums, accompany strophic songs for entertainment at church festivities.

There have been few ethnomusicological studies of the indios of eastern Bolivia. This also applies to those of the Chapare region in the department of Cochabamba, to the Yungas north of La Paz and indios in the Chaco area of the department of Tarija. The best documented indio groups, in musical terms, are the Mojos, Sirionós, Morés and Chimanes in Beni.

For almost 100 years, from 1675, the Mojos underwent the missionary influence of Jesuits in 21 missionary stations, receiving instruction in religious singing and church music. Indio dances were partly adapted by the priests, blended with Spanish dances and used in processions on patron saints' days. The machatero dances are famous examples (fig.4). Mojos, decorated with colourful head feathers and foot rattles (cascabales), perform a variety of dance steps, holding machetes fashioned from wood. In Trinidad (Bolivia) the dancers are accompanied by a six-hole bone flute (yópeque) and four drums, which might include a caja (large drum), one each of the smaller cajita mayor and cajita menor and a zancuti. In San Ignacio the melody is played on a transverse flute (sibibire). The ensemble can be expanded to include two panpipes (jerure). Almost all dances have been influenced by the Jesuits' missionary activities. Like the machateros, many traditional dances were functionally changed to become Christian and then allowed to be used in the church festivals and processions. These include the theatrical dances performed between Christmas and New Year including angelitos, barco (‘boot’), marcha de los reyes and dances for the saints' days such as toritos, achus (‘the old ones’), mascaritas (masked dancers) and sol y luna. A form of church music called coro de la capilla survives in San Ignacio, performed on feast days by singers and an ensemble of four violins, two transverse flutes, clarinet and large and small drum, with four bajones (trumpets) made of palm leaves, up to two metres long and arranged like panpipes. They are played in pairs using hocket technique and imitate the deep bass notes of a church organ.

The Morés, in the region along the border between Bolivia and Brazil, play various idiophones, bamboo trumpets, transverse flutes and panpipes (Snethlage, 1939). Among these is a two-string mouthbow (mapuíp), a relatively rare example of an autochthonous South American string instrument. Drums were a later introduction among the Morés. Although they are almost completely acculturated, the Morés formerly had numerous war dances as well as dances and songs honouring nature and the animal world.

Musical instruments were formerly unknown among the Sirionós in the high forests of eastern central Bolivia. The morning song (hibera) occupies an important position in their musical life. This is an individually inspired and improvised song sung by a single hunter before dawn; through it he magically enters the proper mood for the hunt. The hunter sings of the specific marsupial that he wants to hunt down, calling for luck in his endeavour. Singing the morning song is at the same time a rite of repentance for the necessity of hunting. The tyuruki songs accompanying group dances, performed in the evening, are differentiated from the morning songs in their performance style as well as content; they alternate between solo voice and chorus.

Songs are also performed by the Chimanes in the province of Ballivián (Beni), mostly before sleeping and immediately after daybreak. These songs are built on basic models of two or three pitches or on pentatonic sequences; they are characterized by mythological conceptions of the world of hunters and fishermen, and take as their topics both social relations and entertaining or ironic incidents. Shaman songs, on the other hand, refer to the act of creation.

Little is known about the shamanic songs of the Ayoreós, which are microtonally structured and are performed with the caracachá or paracará calabash rattle. Their healing power is used to calm natural forces and cast a spell on their evil elements.

There have been hardly any ethnomusicological investigations of the numerous mythical, social and work-related songs and dances of the Chiquitanos, Chiriguanos, Guarayús, Itonamas, Izozeños, Matacos, Movimas or Tacanas. Most of these groups have been influenced by missionaries of the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations to the extent that their Amerindian music has been almost completely suppressed. Secretly, and only in small circles, some traditional conceptions and musical practices still exist, but these have to fight, like most Bolivian lowland indio groups, for survival.

Bolivia, §II: Traditional music

3. Mestizos, folklore groups and ‘canto nuevo’.

In addition to the music of the indios and the sacred and secular music of Spanish descendants (the criollos, about 13% of the population) a unique branch has developed: the music of the mestizos (cholos). Mestizos comprise approximately 32% of the population. Their music, which has become urban, is marked by acculturated Spanish social dances (cueca, bailecito, carnavalito, vals, marcha, pasodoble, polca, pasacalle), as well as Indian forms that have been adapted in the urban areas (huayño, kacharpaya, kaluyos taquirari etc.). The mestizos are brought up bilingually and speak Spanish as well as at least one Amerindian language. Popular among them are coplas (song-forms) in the Quechua language, songs for swinging (columpios or wallunkas), takipayanaku antiphonal songs, villancicos and canciones that they themselves create. Many songs are performed for dancing and entertainment at social events. Numerous music cassettes and singles have been released with Quechua songs sung in a rural style by mestizo women. Famous female singers have established their own entertainment market. Their performances are often accompanied by an orquesta that usually contains one or two accordians and a set of percussion (batería).

Since the 1950s urban mestizo folklore has also developed in the cities of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Oruro, Sucre and Tarija, bringing thousands of people together at the large Fiestas del Gran Poder in La Paz, at the Carnaval de Oruro, at the Fiesta de Virgen de Urkupiña in Cochabamba at the Fiesta de San Roque in Tarija, and many others. Brass bands (bandas) have pushed traditional ensembles into the background. Choreographed dances are performed to trumpets, trombones, sousaphones, drums of various sizes and cymbals. Brotherhoods of musicians and dancers vow to perform a dance for a saint or the Virgin Mary as a feast day offering at a parade or a church procession. Among the best known of these show dances are the diablada, caporales, morenos, reyes morenos, morenada, kullawada, llamerada, toritos, waka tokoris, doctorcitos, chuntunquis and tobas.

The peñas folklóricas began to exert an influence on traditional music among the upper social classes in the early 1960s. These are urban folklore restaurants and performance locations catering for both Bolivians and tourists, in which ‘typical’ Andean ensembles can be heard. Such cunjuntos folklóricos link individuality and virtuosity with traditional genres and Indian musical instruments in an innovatory way. New melodies are created for a standard cunjunto instrumentation of guitar, charango, bombo, kena flute and zampoña panpipes with texts in Spanish or a mixture of languages. This folklore music establishes a connection between an aesthetic of concert presentation and Amerindian, Spanish and mestizo performance genres. Even Afro-Bolivian dances such as saya and tunduqui are integrated into this entertainment genre (música folklórica), which is considered typically Bolivian. The music is extensively supported by the harmonic progression I–IV–V–I. Música folklórica has consciously established itself as a form of commercialized folklore distinct from international pop and rock music, which, as every other form of pan-American entertainment music, has also found a wide audience through discotheques and the mass media in Bolivia.

As a result of contact with internationally famous singers such as Atahualpa Yupanqui, Mercedes Sosa (Argentina), Violeta Parra, Victor Jara (Chile) and Nicómedes Santa Cruz (Peru), a politically orientated movement called nueva canción or canto nuevo was formed at the beginning of the 1970s. This was associated with a more progressively minded younger generation which strove to move away from the ‘romantic clichés’ of the songs concerning the landscape or love. The songs, more direct in manner, using everyday language and showing commitment to social reform, were performed by musicians eager to confront contemporary life in their music. Traditional structures were still followed, but without excluding such international idioms as jazz, the avant garde, Latin American protest song or elements of rock and pop music. A cultural-political movement emerged which celebrated its first large assembly of singer-composers and poets of the new Bolivian song in 1983 at Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

a: general

MGG2 (M.P. Baumann)

J.D. Cortés: Bolivia (Paris, 1875)

M. Schmidt: ‘Die Paressí-Kabischí’, Baessler-Archiv, nos.4–5 (1914), 167–250

R. and M. d'Harcourt: La musique des Incas et ses survivances (Paris, 1925)

J. Mendoza: ‘Motivos folklóricos bolivianos’, Revista de la Universidad de Chuquisaca, no.20 (1930), 177

F. Quispe: ‘Historia y tradición: la música afroboliviana’, Reunión anual de etnologí (La Paz, 1933), 155–84

G. Durán: Recordings of Latin American Songs and Dances (Washington DC, 1942)

A. González Bravo: ‘Música, instrumentos y danzas indígenas’, La Paz en su IV centenario, 1548–1948, ed. Comité pro IV Centenario de la Fundación de La Paz (La Paz, 1948), 403–23

H. Sanabria Fernández: ‘Estudio preliminar sobre el cancionero popular de Vallegrande’, Universidad de San Francisco Xavier, xvi (1951), 51–122; continued as ‘Cancionero popular de Vallegrande’, xvi (1951), 400–35; xvii (1952), 109–66; xviii (1953), 60–118

J.F. Costas Arguedas: ‘El folklore negro en Bolivia’, Tradición: revista pervana de cultura, no.15 (1954), 58–69

B.A. Beltrán Heredia: El carnaval de Oruro y proceso ideológico e historia de los grupos folklóricos (Oruro, 1962)

J. Díaz Gainza: Historia musical de Bolivia: epoca pre-colonial (Potosí, 1962, 2/1977)

H. Sanabria Fernández: Música popular de Santa Cruz: los 25 mejores carnavales de ‘La Guardia Vieja’ (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 1964)

A. Olmos Agreda: ‘Cancionero popular en Cochabambo’, Archivos del folklore boliviano, ii (1966), 102–46

A. Paredes Candia: La danza folklórica en Bolivia (La Paz, 1966)

H. Ruíz Ruíz: ‘Fiesta patronal de San Pedro en la localidad de Achacachi’, Archivos del folklore boliviano, ii (1966), 164–81

L. Sierra Chávez de Méndez: ‘Vestimenta típica ordinaria y extraordinaria del Oriente boliviano: música, danzas, instrumentos musicales’, Archivos del folklore boliviano, ii (1966), 147–56

F. de M. Rodríguez de Ayestarán: ‘A proposito de la jota y de la cueca’, Boletín interamericano de música, no.63 (1968), 3–8

P. Díaz Machicao: Testificación de la cueca (La Paz, 1968)

J.E. Fortún: ‘Panorama del folklore boliviano’, Enciclopedía-Guía: Bolivia Mágica, ed. H. Boero Rojo (La Paz, 2/1976), 117–41

A. Paredes Candia: Fiestas populares de Bolivia (La Paz, 1976)

H. Boero Rojo, ed.: Carnaval de Oruro, Tarabuco y Fiesta del Gran Poder (La Paz, 1977)

A. Pizarroso Cuenca: La cultura negra en Bolivia (La Paz, 1977)

M.P. Baumann: ‘Der Charango: ‘Zur Problemskizze eines akkulturierten Musikinstruments’, Musik und Bildung, xi (1979), 603–12

A. Cachau-Hereillat: Recherches sur la musique populaire bolivienne: musiques jouées spontannément dans les provinces Camacho et B. Saaevdra du département de La Paz (diss., U. of Lyons, 1980)

J. de Mesa F. and C. Seoane U.: ‘La música en Bolivia durante el siglo XIX’, ed. R. Günther, Die Musikkulturen Lateinamerikas im 19. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1982), 93–117 [with Eng. summary]

M.P. Baumann: Sojta chunka qheshwa takis Bolivia llajtamanta/Sesenta canciones del Quechua boliviano (Cochabamba, 1983) [incl. cassette]

J.C. Paredes Ruíz: ‘La “nueva canción” boliviana con relación a la música tradicional’, Boletín andino de música, i (1984), 32–7

G. Wara Céspedes: ‘New Currents in música folklórica in La Paz, Bolivia’, LAMR, v (1984), 217–42

A. Auza León: Historia de la música boliviana (Sucre, 2/1985)

M.P. Baumann: ‘Saiteninstrumente in Lateinamerika’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis, viii, ed. E. Stockmann (Stockholm, 1985), 157–76

H.L. Goyena: ‘Expresiones musicales, religiosas y profanas tradicionales de la celebración de Semana Santa en el norte del departamento de Chuquisaca (Bolivia)’, LAMR, viii (1987), 59–93

E. Leichtman: ‘Musical Interaction: a Bolivian Mestizo Perspective’, LAMR, x (1989), 29–52

R. Gutiérrez Condori: ‘Instrumentos musicales tradicionales en la comunidad artesanal Walata Grande, Bolivia’, LAMR, xii (1991), 124–59

G. Wara Céspedes: ‘Huayño, Saya, and Chuntunqui: Bolivian Identity in the Music of “Los Kjarkas”’, LAMR, xiv (1993), 52–101

M. Guardia Crespo: Música popular y comunicación en Bolivia: las interpretaciones y conflictos (Cochabamba, 1994)

M. Rey: La saya como medio de comunicación y expresión cultural en la comunidad afroboliviano (diss., U. of San Andrés, 1998)

b: andean highlands

A.F. Bandelier: ‘La danse des “Sicuri” indiens Aymará de Bolivie’, Boas Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Papers, ed. B. Laufer (New York, 1906), 272–82

M. Rigoberto Paredes: El arte en la Altiplancie (La Paz, 1913, enlarged 2/1949 as El arte folklórico de Bolivia, 6/1981)

R. and M. d'Harcourt: ‘La musisque dans la sierra andine de La Paz à Quito’, Journal de la Société des américanistes, new ser., xii (1920), 21–53

M. Béclard d'Harcourt: ‘Le folklore musical de la région andine: Equateur, Pérou, Bolivie’, EMDC, I/v (1922), 3353–71

K.G. Izikowitz: ‘Les instruments de musique des indiens Uro-Chipaya’, Revista del Instituto de etnologíá de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, ii (1931–2), 263–91

A. Métraux: ‘Les indiens Uro-Čipaya de Carangas’, Journal de la Société des américanistes, new ser., xxvii (1935), 111, 325–415; xxviii (1936), 155–207, 337–94

R. Paredes: ‘Instrumentos musicales de los Kollas’, Boletín latino-americano de música, ii (1936), 77–82

A. González Bravo: ‘Kenas, pincollos y tarkas’, Boletín latino-americano de música, iii (1937), 25–32

G. Coimbra: ‘La música y la danza del pueblo aymara’, Revista geográfica americana, no.99 (1941), 331

H. Helfritz: ‘Música indígena del Altiplano’, Antártica, no.14 (1945), 94–6

A. González Bravo: ‘Clasificación de los sicus airmaras’, Revista de estudios musicales, i/1 (1949–50), 93–101

J.A. Vellard and A. Merino: ‘Bailes folklóricos del Altiplano’, Traveaux de l'Institut Français d'Etudes Andines, iv (1954), 59–132

M. and R. d'Harcourt: ‘La musique des Aymara sur les hauts plateaux boliviens’, Journal de la Société des américanistes, new ser., xlviii (1959), 5–133

E. Oblitas Poblete: Cultura callawaya (La Paz, 1963)

J.W. Bastien: Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in an Andean Ayllu (St Paul, MN, 1978)

X. Bellenger: ‘Les instruments de musique dans les pays andins (Equateur, Pérou, Bolivie)’, Bulletin de l'Institut français d'études andines, ix/3–4 (1980), 107–49; x/1–2 (1981), 23–50

M.P. Baumann: ‘Julajulas – ein bolivianisches Panflötenspiel und seine Musiker’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis, vii, ed. E. Stockmann (Stockholm, 1981), 158–63

M.P. Baumann: ‘Music, Dance and Song of the Chipayas (Bolivia)’, LAMR, ii (1981), 171–222

M.P. Baumann: ‘Manchaypuytu – Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtlichkeit’, Musik und Bildung, xiv (1982), 776–83

M.P. Baumann: ‘Music of the Indios in Bolivia's Andean Highlands’, World of Music, xxiv/2 (1982), 80–96

M.P. Baumann: ‘The Kantu Ensemble of the Kallawaya at Charazani (Bolivia)’, YTM, xvii (1985), 146–66

M.P. Baumann: ‘Das ira-arka-Prinzip im symbolischen Dualismus andinen Denkens’, Kosmos der Anden. Weltbild und Symbolik indianischer Tradition in Südamerika (Munich, 1994), 274–316

Cosmología y música en los Andes: Berlin 1992, ed. M.P. Baumann (Frankfurt, 1996) [icnl. ‘Andean Music, Symbolic Dualism and Cosmology’, 15–66]

c: lowland indians

D. del Campana: ‘Notizie intorno ai Ciriguani’, Archivo per l'antropologia e la etnologia, xxxii (1902), 17–144

B. de Nino: Etnografía chiriguana (La Paz, 1912), 254ff

R. Karsten: Indian Dances in the Gran Chaco (Helsinki, 1914–15)

E. Nordenskiöld: An Ethno-Geographical Analysis of the Material Culture of Two Indian Tribes in the Gran Chaco (Göteborg, 1919) [on the Chorote and Ashluslay Indians]

R. Karsten: Indian Tribes of the Argentine and Bolivian Chaco (Helsinki, 1932)

E.H. Snethlage: ‘Musikinstrumente der Indianer des Guaporégebietes’, Baessler-Archiv, no.10 (1939), 3–38 [north-eastern Bolivia]

R. Becerra Casanovas: Reliquias de Moxos: danzas música, instrumentos musicales y fiestas costumbristas del Beni con un epílogo sobre los silvícolas Sirionóy Moré, el Mamoré y las sublevaciones indígenas contra los blancos (La Paz, 1959, 2/1977)

H. Kelm: ‘Der Morgengesang der Sirióno’, Hermann Trimborn zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. G. Eckert (1961), 42–64

M. Key: ‘Music of the Sirionó (Guaranian)’, EthM, vii (1963), 17–21

R. de Ott: Danzas folkóricas y días especiales de los Ignacianos (Riberalta, Bolivia, 1971)

D.A. Olsen: ‘Música vesperal Mojo en San Miguel de Isiboro, Bolivia’, RMC, no.133 (1976), 28–46

J. Riester and B. Fischerman: En busca de la loma santa (La Paz, 1976)

K. Hahn-Hissink and A. Hahn: ‘Tanzfiguren der Chama-Indianer’, Amerikanistische Studien: Festschrift für Hermann Trimborn anlässlich seines 75. Geburtstages/Estudios americanistas: libro jubilar en homenaje Hermann Trimborn con motivo de su septuagesimoquinto aniversario, ed. R. Hartmann and V. Oberem, i (St Augustin, 1978), 194–8

J. Riester: Canción y producción en la vida de un pueblo indígena (Los Chimané: tribu de la selva oriental) (La Paz, 1978)

J. Riester: ‘Acerca de la canción de los Chimane’, Amerikanistische Studien: Festschrift für Hermann Trimborn anlässlich seines 75. Geburtstages/Estudios americanistas: libro jubilar en homenaje a Hermann Trimborn con Motivo de su septuagesimoquinto aniversario, ed. R. Hartmann and U. Oberem, ii (St Augustin, 1979), 199–206

M. Mendizábal: ‘La flauta pánica de los Guarayú del oriente boliviano: documentación organalógica y análisis de su repertorio musical’, Témas de etnomusicología, ii (Buenos Aires, 1986), 29–66

d: recordings

Folk Songs and Dances of Bolivia, coll. R. and S. Lipner, Folkways F-6871 (1959)

Instruments and Music of Bolivia, coll. B. Keiler, Folkways F-4012 (1962)

Música andina de Bolivia, coll. M.P. Baumann, Lauro LPLI/S-062 (1976)

Bolivia Panpipes, coll. L. Girault, rec. 1950–73, EMI-Italiana 3C/064-18528 (1981) [incl. notes by X. Bellenger], reissued as Panpipes: Syrinx of Bolivia, Auvidis/UNESCO D 8009

Musik im Andenhochland, Bolivien/Music in the Andean Highlands, Bolivia, coll. M.P. Baumann, Museum Collection Berlin MC 14 (1982)

Bolivia: Larecaja & Omasuyo, coll. X. Bellenger, GREM G 8901 (1989) [incl. notes by X. Bellenger and T. Saignes]

Bolivie: musique calendaires des vallées centrales/Bolivia: Calendar Music in the Central Valleys, coll. B. Fléty and R. Martínez, CNRS/Musée de l'Homme LDX 274 938 (1992) [incl. notes by R. Martínez]

Bolivie: charangos et guitarrillas du Norte Potosí/Bolivia: Charrango and Guitarillas from Norte Potosí, coll. F. Alvis and J.-M. Grassler, rec. 1991–3, Archives internationales de musique populaire, VDE CD-871 (1995) [incl. notes by F. Alvis]

Yagua Tairari: música y cantores de los Guarani (Bolivia), coll. W. Sánchez C. and A. Roca de la Reza, Centro pedagógico y cultural Simon I. Patino (1997) [CD with extensive notes and bibliography]

El tambor mayor: música y cantos de las comunidades negras de Bolivia, coll. W. Sánchez C. and A. Roca de la Reza, Centro pedagógico y cultural Simon I. Patino (1998) [CD with extensive notes and bibliography]

Bollioud-Mermet, Louis

(b Lyons, 13 Feb 1709; d Lyons, 31 Aug 1794). French academician andmusician. He was elected to membership in the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Lyons in 1736, and in the Académie des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres in 1739; when these bodies combined in 1758 he was appointed secrétaire perpétuel. Between 1736 and 1757 he read before both bodies a number of essays on music, five of which remain in manuscript. His single published work on music, De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise, added to the controversy between the supporters of Lully and those of Rameau. A conservative, he took issue with the musical novelties of the time, rejecting virtuosity in favour of a simple, natural and rational art based on models of an earlier period, particularly the works of Lully and Lalande. While in his works he praised the theories of Rameau, he questioned the practical application of those theories. He proposed two inventions intended for use by performers: the phtongomètre, an aid to tuning keyboard instruments, and the chronomètre harmonique, a means of regulating musical beats. According to La Borde and contemporary accounts he was a talented organist and singer, and by his own testimony (in the Athénée de Lyon retabli) he composed works for keyboard and chamber ensembles, a cantata and at least 40 motets. None of his compositions survives, although two sacred works by him were apparently published in Lyons.

WRITINGS

Dissertation sur la musique vocale, 1736; Dissertation sur la musique instrumentale, 1737; Mémoire sur la construction de l'orgue, 1738; Instrument pour fixer le tempérament dans l'accord de l'orgue et du clavecin, 1740; Mémoire sur le tempérament que les voix observent dans le chant, 1741 (MSS, Lyons, Bibliothèque de l'Académie)

De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise (Lyons, 1746/R) [Ger. edns (Altenburg, 1750) and in F.W. Marpurg: Des critischen Musicus an der Spree, i (Berlin, 1749/R), 321–47]

Athénée de Lyon retabli (MS, Lyons, Bibliothèque de l'Académie)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La BordeE

L. Vallas: ‘Bollioud de Mermet, un musicographe lyonnais du XVIIIe siècle’,Revue musicale de Lyon, iv (1907), 798–956 passim

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et de théâtre à Lyon 1688–1789 (Lyons,1932/R)

A. Cohen: ‘Rameau, Equal Temperament, and the Academy of Lyon: a Controversy Revisited’,French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. G. Cowart (Ann Arbor, 1989), 121–7

P. Barbieri: ‘Il “migliore” sistema musicale temperato: querelles fra Estève, Romieu e altri accademici francesi (c.1740–60)’, L'organo, xxvii (1991–2), 31–81

ALBERT COHEN

Bollius [Pollius], Daniel

(b Hechingen, Württemberg, c1590; d Mainz, c1638). German composer, organist and teacher. His father, Marcus Bollius, was vice-Kapellmeister of the Hohenzollern court at Hechingen. After attending the University of Dillingen he studied with Jakob Hassler and Christian Erbach and was then court organist at Sigmaringen – which was also under the Hohenzollerns – from 1613 to c1619. By 1626 he had moved to Mainz as organist to the elector, Archbishop Johann Schweikard von Kronberg, a keen supporter of learning and the arts, and he remained there until his death. From no later than 1631 he was Kapellmeister as well as organist. He was renowned in his time as composer, performer and teacher; he had several distinguished organ pupils.

Bollius is primarily important as the composer of one of the earliest examples in Germany of the Italian oratorio form. The Repraesentatio, based on St Luke’s account of the early life of John the Baptist, dates from between 1615 and 1625 and is thus contemporary with, or earlier than, Schütz’s Resurrection History. Planned along the lines of the conventional settings of the Passion story, it is distinguished by interludes for a variety of specified instruments, by the expressive, declamatory nature of most of the solo writing, by the characterization of each participant in the narrative and by the homophonic treatment of the turbae and eight-voice epilogue. Bollius’s other works, which were also of historical interest for their oratorical or concertato styles, included psalms and hymns and sacred dialogues and concertos; some manuscript copies, once thought to have been destroyed in World War II, survive (in PL-WRu). Except in the case of one motet, no printed copies are known to exist. Some vocal exercises, printed in Herbst’s Musica practica, demonstrate Bollius’s interest in the Italian ornamental style of singing; other evidence of this occurs in three of the arias in the Repraesentatio.

WORKS

Salve lux mundi, motet, 3vv, bc, in 1623²

Repraesentatio harmonica conceptionis et nativitatis S Joannis Baptistae, 4/4vv, insts, bc, PL-WRu

Nobis datus, nobis natus, conc., 6vv, 2 cornetts, bn, bc, WRu

Dialogus, Christus und der Hauptmann von Kapharnaum, 2vv, 6 insts, bc, WRu

Pastorale nel nascimento di Christo, 2vv, 2vn, bc, WRu

Lost, formerly in WRu: Dialogus sacro die assumptionis Beatae Mariae Virginis, 3vv, 3 insts, bc; Dialogus sacro die dedicationis templi, 4vv, bc; Dialogus de nativitate S Joannis, 4vv, insts, bc; Ps lxxxviii, vv, 3 bn, theorbo, bc

Gründliche und rechte Unterweisung uff jetzig italienisch Art zu singen, in J.A. Herbst: Musica practica (Nuremberg, 1642)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. von Winterfeld: Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter, ii (Berlin, 1834/R), 205ff, 228

E. Bohn: Die musikalischen Handschriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau (Breslau, 1890/R), 127–8

H.J. Moser: Die mehrstimmige Vertonung des Evangeliums, i (Leipzig, 1931/R, 2/1968) 47, 54ff

A. Gottron: ‘Gabriel Plautz, 1612–1641, Kapellmeister des Mainzer Erzbischofs Schweikard von Kronberg’, KJb, xxxi–xxxiii (1936–8), 67

A. Gottron: Tausend Jahre Musik in Mainz (Berlin, 1941), 13–14

A. Gottron: ‘Hofmusik unter Johann Schweikard von Kronberg: 1000 Jahre Stift und Stadt Aschaffenburg’, Aschaffenburg Jb, ii (1957), 693ff

A. Gottron: Mainzer Musikgeschichte von 1500 bis 1800 (Mainz, 1959)

G. Chew: The Christmas Pastorella in Austria, Bohemia and Moravia (diss., U. of Manchester, 1968)

A. LINDSEY KIRWAN/GREGORY S. JOHNSTON

Bologna.

City in Italy. As one of the chief musical centres of the peninsula, Bologna has maintained a practically uninterrupted outstanding tradition in the cultivation of many aspects of the musical arts. Its central geographic position allowed easy contact with other musical centres in Italy, which resulted in the distinctive cosmopolitan tinge that has characterized the activities of its musical institutions. As the trading and economic hub of Italy, the city remained for centuries a thriving commercial centre whose wealthy classes could patronize the arts. Second in importance only to Rome within the administration of the Papal States, it maintained numerous churches (over 150 in 1700) and religious communities which always played an important role in the city’s musical life. As a centre of learning, Bologna has always had an eminence unequalled in Italy and recognized throughout Europe. Its university, founded at the end of the 11th century, maintained for centuries a prominent tradition in the humanistic disciplines, attracting numerous students and scholars from various regions of the continent.

In this environment the study and advancement of music was characterized by a propensity to retain existing traditions while simultaneously promoting experimentation and discussion, thus making it a city of critics and connoisseurs. This tendency was confirmed by the institution of a chair of music at the university in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V. Since then the teaching of music at Bologna has been associated with many illustrious figures.

Ramos de Pareia probably expected an appointment as teacher in the new chair at the university during his decade in Bologna (1472–82). He was giving public lectures before publishing his Musica practica (printed in Bologna by Rubiera, 1482), a treatise that aroused a storm of academic controversies. In the 16th century, Spataro (a pupil of Ramos), Bartolomeo Spontone, Melone and Bottrigari were active there as theorists and teachers. At the turn of the century, the staunch conservative G.M. Artusi was at the centre of another controversy as the fanatical opponent of Monteverdi’s seconda prattica. At the same time Adriano Banchieri took an active part as theorist and teacher in promoting experimentation and defining the newest techniques of musical expression. Intellectual discussion was also fostered by the academies established in the first half of the 17th century. By the mid-century there was a flourishing school of string playing centred on S Petronio and in the 18th the city acquired a wide reputation as a training ground for opera singers who for many years dominated the major Italian and European theatres. The most important treatise on singing of the 18th century, P.F. Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, was published at Bologna in 1723. Academic conservatism was, however, evident in the didactic activities of the Accademia Filarmonica and of Padre Martini, both responsible for rigidly maintaining the practice of the earlier polyphonic style.

1. General history to 1500.

2. Religious institutions.

3. The academies and conservatory.

4. Societies and music publishing.

5. Theatres.

ELVIDIO SURIAN/GRAZIANO BALLERINI

1. General history to 1500.

The earliest evidence of musical life at Bologna is furnished by a manuscript (I-Ra 123) which includes a gradual-troper in diastematic notation that originated in the area about 1029–39. Moreover, from the first decades of the 11th century a presbiter-cantor seems to have played a vital role in the administrative structure of the Cathedral of S Pietro. In the 13th century various scholae puerorum were instituted by the Franciscan and Dominican orders. (Bologna was with Paris the leading Dominican centre in the 13th century.) The theorist Guido Faba, active at Bologna from about 1225 to 1240 as professor of rhetoric at the university, furnished useful information on the teaching of plainchant in the city in his treatise Ars musica (D-Bsb Theol.lat.Qu.261, f.36r, and I-PESo 1336, f.14r). The Bolognese musicians Jacopo and Bartolomeo da Bologna and Johannes Baçus Corregarius made notable contributions to the Ars Nova. By the beginning of the 15th century music at Bologna assumed an international character, as is shown by the Italian–French repertory of a manuscript (I-MOe Lat.568) that originated and was probably compiled there in 1410. Du Fay was living in Bologna from late February or March 1426 until August 1428, studying canon law at the university. His motets Juvenis qui puellam and Rite majorem Jacobum and the Missa Sancti Jacobi, written for the church of S Giacomo Maggiore, date from that period. Popular traditions of street vocal performances on Christmas night and during May were also maintained until the end of the 16th century. These street songs were later incorporated in the polyphonic villottas that were widely cultivated in Bologna during the 16th century. The three books of the Villotte del fiore, printed in Venice by Gardane in 1557, 1559 and 1569, contain mostly works by the Bolognese Filippo Azzaiolo, though other composers active at Bologna are represented as well: Gherardo da Panico, Francesco Caldarino, Bartolomeo Pifaro, Paolo Casanuova, Ghinolfo Dattari, Bartolomeo Spontone, G.T. Lambertini and Alfonso Ganassi.

A love of massed wind instruments in Bologna can be traced back to the 13th century, when town-criers, called ‘trombetti della signoria’, accompanied their notices ‘a son de trombe e de trombette’. By the beginning of the 15th century the number of players was increased to include eight trumpeters, three fifers and a drummer (also called naccarino) to form the nucleus of the Concerto Palatino della Signoria. This was a public body which not only performed for official university, civic and religious functions, but also appeared until the second half of the 18th century in evening concerts held on the terrace of the Palazzo della Signoria in Piazza Maggiore. On special occasions the size of the ensemble was greatly enlarged. At the marriage of Lucrezia d’Este to Annibale Bentivoglio (March 1487), the procession leading to S Petronio was preceded by ‘100 trombita e 70 pifari e trombuni e chorni e flauti e tamburrini e zamamele’. In the 16th century the Concerto Palatino became as famous throughout Italy as the concerted music at S Petronio. From 1537 onwards the number was standardized at 19 instrumentalists, though this number was occasionally augmented by other performers. Many of its musicians were also employed at S Petronio and their profession became a family tradition (e.g. in the 16th century various members of the Ganassi family, Zaccaria, Giovanni, Vincenzo and Alfonso, served in the ensemble).

2. Religious institutions.

The city’s musical life centred mainly on the numerous musical chapels found in most of the principal churches and monasteries. The most important of these was S Petronio. Begun in 1390 and planned to be one of the largest churches in Italy, it became, particularly in the 17th century, an influential centre of vocal and instrumental music, famous throughout northern and central Italy. Its magnificent acoustics favoured the employment of massive groups of performers which eventually contributed to the development of the Baroque concerto style. Moreover, the excellent musicians attached to its cappella musicale in the 17th century played a decisive role in the evolution of the Baroque solo sonata, making the formal structure of the sonata (especially in the order and number of movements and the distinctive character of each) increasingly precise. In the second half of the 17th century S Petronio was also associated with the music for trumpet and strings that contributed to the development of the concerto. The emphasis from the early 17th century on a basso continuo instrumental group and on a predominant top line caused a thinning of the harmonic fabric and a polarity between the melody and the bass – a characteristic Baroque texture.

The church has two organs facing each other, placed above the choir stalls, one built in 1470–75 (in cornu Epistolae) by Lorenzo di Giacomo da Prato and the other in 1596 (in cornu Evangelii) by Baldassare Malamini. The series of organists who held posts at S Petronio begins in 1450 with Don Battista di Nicolò, who remained there until 1475. Later organists (both first and second) include Gregorio di Maestro Zoane Tintore (1468–78), Ogerio di Borgogna (Roger Saignand, 1474–1522), Maestro Guglielmo (also called ‘navarrese’, 1522–9), Pier Francese (1529–62), Vincenzo Bertalotti (1562–96), Giambattista Mecchi (1596–1613), Ottavio Vernizzi (1596–1649), Lucio Barbieri (1614–59), Giulio Cesare Arresti (1649–61 and 1671–99), G.P. Colonna (1659–74) and C.D. Cossoni (1662–71).

The organization of the cappella musicale was officially instituted on 4 October 1436 by Pope Eugene IV. Its temporal affairs fell under the jurisdiction of the fabbriceria (vestry board) composed of six laymen, also members of the Bolognese senate, who selected the candidates aspiring for positions; this lay control demonstrates the interest of the citizens in the city’s musical affairs.

Giovanni Spataro was the first official maestro di cappella (1512–41). A post of magister cantus et gramaticae, however, was instituted in October 1466 and held successively by Simone di Pavia (1466–7), Robertus de Anglia (1467–74), Matteo Muzzi da Ferrara (1474–9), Giovanni da Manzolino (as substitute in 1479 and 1486) Giovanni Antonio Pecora da Milano (1479–85), Francesco de’ Freschi (as substitute, 1486) and Gabriele Lunerio da Milano (1487–1512). Furthermore, the following cantores were active in the basilica from about 1460 to 1480: Pietro de Alemania, Bernardo di Reggio, Guglielmo di Francia, Mariotto di Firenze and Tommaso de’ Marinasi. After Spataro, maestri di cappella included Michele Cimatore (1541–7), Domenico Maria Ferrabosco (1548–51), Nicolò Cavallari (1551–8), Giovanni Francesco Melioli (1558–70), Stefano Bettini (‘Il Fornarino’, 1570–77), Bartolomeo Spontone (1577–83), Andrea Rota (1583–97), Ghinolfo Dattari (as substitute in 1597–9), Pompilio Pisanelli (1599–1604), Girolamo Giacobbi (1604–28), Francesco Milani (1630–49), Alberto Bertelli (1650–57), Maurizio Cazzati (1657–71), Orazio Ceschi (as substitute in 1671–4), G.P. Colonna (1674–95), G.A. Perti (1696–1756), G.M. Carretti (1756–74), G.C.A. Zanotti (1774–1817), Stanislao Mattei (1817–25), Giuseppe Pilotti (1825–38), Luigi Palmerini (1838–42), Stefano Antonio Sarti (1842–55), Francesco Roncagli (1855–7), Gaetano Gaspari (1857–81), Luigi Mancinelli (1881–6), Raffaele Santoli (1886) and Giuseppe Martucci (1886–1902).

Instruments were added to the vocal ensemble early in the history of the cappella musicale and players from the Concerto Palatino often performed at S Petronio for special occasions (fragments of instrumental music dating from the 15th century and probably used on those occasions survive in the archives; see Hamm). However, the first regularly paid instrumentalists, besides organists, were added in the late 16th century. On special occasions (notably the feast of St Petronius on 4 October, anniversaries of Bolognese popes and Rogation Day) it was customary to hire extra musicians from the city’s other cappelle musicali and from surrounding areas. For the visit of James the Pretender on the feast of St Petronius in 1722, 107 musicians were hired in addition to the 34 regular members (fig.2).

A landmark in Bolognese musical life was the employment of Maurizio Cazzati at S Petronio in 1657. Under his direction, the cappella musicale placed special emphasis on developing instrumental music, notably by hiring distinguished performers from nearby areas. By 1661 the regular cappella employed 33 musicians, a size it maintained throughout Cazzati’s tenure (he was dismissed as the result of controversy over his compositions in 1671). He is especially noted for the repertory of music for trumpet and strings peculiar to the S Petronio cappella musicale which led to the concerto-like opposition of two styles (soloist contrasted with string ensemble), used to a greater extent by later S Petronio composers such as Perti and Torelli. Thanks to Cazzati and even more to his most famous pupil Giovanni Battista Vitali, who was active at the church as a singer and violoncino player, instrumental forms in general and the trio sonata in particular were developed, clarified and consolidated in architectural structure and thematic technique. A school of string playing flourished under Ercole Gaibara, Giovanni Benvenuti and Leonardo Brugnoli, and later under Pietro Degli Antonii, Bartolomeo Laurenti, D. Gabrielli and G.M. Jacchini. Torelli, a violetta player at S Petronio, contributed greatly to the form of the concerto grosso and violin concerto. Colonna (a pupil of Benevoli and Abbatini) succeeded Cazzati as director of the cappella, and elements originating in the Roman school were instilled in the Bolognese tradition. Colonna’s followers included Giovanni Bononcini, G.F. Tosi, F.A. Urio, G.M. Clari, G.C. Predieri and G.A. Silvani. From February 1696 to February 1701 the regular orchestra was dissolved and only the choir and the choirmaster, G.A. Perti, were maintained on the payroll. This forced many instrumentalists to leave, thus helping to make their style known outside Bologna, in Italy and abroad. After 1701 only string players and a choir were in the regular cappella, although this group was augmented for special occasions. The pupils of G.A. Perti, maestro di cappella from 1696 to 1756, included Torelli, Jacchini, P.P. Laurenti, G. Consoni, Aldrovandini, G.M. Alberti, F.A. Pistocchi, F. Manfredini and Padre Martini.

Although S Petronio dominated Bolognese sacred music, many other local churches had active cappelle musicali associated with them. From the end of the 13th century choirboys were instructed and employed in the singing of plainchant at S Francesco. The church’s expense registry between 1337 and 1430 reports the following names of monks in charge of singing there: Frate Paganino (1337), Antonius de Arimino (1356), Bartholomeus de Fantuciis (1380), Antonius de Ungaria (1386), Nicolaus Ungarus and Carluccius (1396), Johannes de Burgundia and Cristoforus de Alvernia (1423), Blasius Ungarus (1426), Joannes de Tibore and Petrus de Tuscanella (1430). The presence of an organ is documented from 1345; in 1621 a new organ was built by Antonio dal Corno.

A cappella musicale was officially instituted in 1537 and directed until 1540 by Bartolomeo da Tricarico; after this, however, the list of maestri di cappella is fragmentary. Among them were Bonifacio Pasquale (1567–9), Giuliano Cartari (1573–91 and possibly 1601–12), Bartolomeo Montalbano (1642–9), Felice Arconati (1660–67), Francesco Passarini (1667–73, 1681–91 and 1693–4), Domenico Scorpione (1674–5), Guido Montalbani (1675–80), Francesco Antonio Calegari (1700–02), F.A. Lazari (1702–5), Padre Martini (1725–70) and Stanislao Mattei (1770–97). After the suppression of convents by the French in 1797, a regular cappella musicale was never reactivated.

Musical activity at the Cathedral of S Pietro must have begun soon after its construction in the first decades of the 11th century when a presbiter-cantor was included in its administrative structure. A gradualtroper in diastematic notation (I-Ra 123), containing its liturgy, originated there during that period. Only fragmentary evidence of its musical life, however, is recorded until the 16th century. A post of magister cantus et gramaticae was officially sanctioned in 1439 by a Bull of Pope Eugene IV and reconfirmed in 1510 by another Bull of Pope Giulio II. In 1491 Ludovico di Gregorio Tintore was appointed organist. Giovanni Guidetti, associated with the assemblage and the revision of chant books for the Roman Church in the second half of the 16th century, had his formation in the schola of the cathedral. Among the composers who served as maestri di cappella there were Cimatore (1559), Domenico Micheli (1588–91), Paolo Magri (1591–5), Lorenzo Vecchi (1599–1611, 1624), Domenico Brunetti (1611–46), Vincenzo Pellegrini (1676–80), Giacomo Antonio Perti (1691–6), Angelo Antonio Caroli (1742–67), Vincenzo Fontana (1798–1820) and Giovanni Tadolini (1825–9). Organists included Lucio Barbieri (1610–20), Giacomo Predieri (1679–93) and Floriano Arresti (1713–17).

At S Maria dei Servi the earliest evidence of musical activity is given by 11 choirbooks from the 13th and 14th centuries (I-Bsm); only scant information, however, exists on the musical life of the convent in the following centuries. Maestri di cappella included Antonio d’Alessandria (1509), Arcangelo Gherardini (1615), Giacomo d’Alessandria (1642), Attilio Ottavio Ariosti (1695) and Domenico Barbieri (1769). In the 17th century performances sponsored by the nearby Accademia Filarmonica were held in the church. Vincenzo Carrati celebrated the founding of the Accademia with solemn services there on 18 July 1667. Musical academies with pastoral plays were held in the 18th century, for example Domenico Barbieri’s Sacrificio di Pane dio d’Arcadia, performed on 19 July 1758 in honour of the prior-general of the order. A cappella musicale was organized in 1934 by Luigi Artusi who was succeeded by Pellegrino Santucci in 1947; it gives orchestral and choral concerts. In 1967 the Crema organ builders Tamburini installed a new organ with mechanical action; seasonal organ recitals are given.

A Confraternita del Rosario governed by the city’s nobility was founded at S Domenico in 1596 and, after erecting a chapel for its devotions in 1592, began subsidizing concerts every Saturday as well as on the major feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A regular cappella musicale was instituted at the beginning of the 17th century and employed some of the illustrious musicians associated with S Petronio. The first maestro di cappella was Francesco Milani (1624–52), followed by Domenico Manzoli (1653–8), Cazzati (1658–71), G.B. Vitali (1671–4), G.C. Arresti (1674–1704), G.A. Perti (1704–55, replaced by G.M. Alberti from 1734), Giovanni Battista Gaiani (1792–1819) and Angelo Ottani (1820–27). A new organ was commissioned from Venetian builders in 1644–5; another organ was built in its place by Petronio Maria Giovagnoni in 1759–61.

In 1618 Pope Gregory XV granted the Filippine Fathers permission to use the church of the Madonna di Galliera as their devotional centre in Bologna; in the years that followed it became the city’s seat of oratorio performance. Previously the Congregazione dell’Oratorio, founded at Bologna in 1615, held its esercizi spirituali every Sunday at the small church of S Barbara. The oratorios written for the Madonna di Galliera in the first half of the century show the strong influence of the Roman style, for example those of G.P. Colonna, a pupil of Carissimi and maestro di cappella there from 1673 to 1688. Oratorio composition flourished at Bologna in the last decades of the century, with Vitali, Ariosti, Domenico Gabrielli, Pistocchi, degli Antonii and Perti. These masters departed from the conventional Roman oratorio and focussed their attention particularly on the brilliant instrumental ritornellos.

Detailed research is still to be carried out on musical activities at the many other churches which maintained a cappella on a more or less continuous basis, especially for particularly important liturgical celebrations, with contributions by musicians from both within and outside the city. At the basilica of S Paolo Maggiore, with its three organs (one installed in 1624, the other two in 1647), there is evidence that, from 1712 onwards, the polychoric music at the celebration of the feast of the Madonna of S Luca was particularly lavish. Among other maestri di cappella were three members of the Predieri family: Giacomo Cesare (1712–21, 1731), Luca Antonio (1725–9, 1733) and Giovanni Battista (c1748); and Lorenzo Gibelli (1760–1812), Carlo Rinieri (1812–31) and Luigi Bortolotti (1831–56).

3. The academies and conservatory.

The extraordinary flourishing of musical life at Bologna in the 17th century coincided with the establishment of musical academies to patronize, stimulate and consolidate all musical activities. Unlike most of the literary academies of the Renaissance and Baroque, the Bolognese academies, notably the Accademia Filarmonica, were institutions primarily under the control of professional musicians that intended to provide both theoretical and practical training for their members.

The first Bolognese academy to include music among its activities was the Accademia degli Ardenti, founded in 1558; it was renamed the Accademia del Porto when it moved in 1586. From 1581, however, it had functioned mainly as an institution for instructing young noblemen in science, literature and music. The first academy dedicated exclusively to musical activities was the Accademia dei Floridi, which held its meetings at S Michele in Bosco under the leadership of Adriano Banchieri. It was founded in 1615 for the spiritual and cultural education of its members. A description of its organization and accounts of its meetings are found in Banchieri’s Lettere armoniche (1628, pp.34ff, 141f). Its activity was interrupted in 1623–4, but was revived in 1625 under the name of Accademia dei Filomusi and sponsored by Girolamo Giacobbi. It had included among its members such composers as Banchieri, Monteverdi and Merula before it was dissolved in 1630 because of a plague. Another academy was formed in 1633, by Domenico Brunetti and Francesco Bertacchi, and called Accademia dei Filaschisi; it continued to prosper until 1666 when most of its members joined the Accademia Filarmonica.

The Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna was formally founded on 26 May 1666 by 50 musicians, meeting at the home of Count Vincenzo Maria Carrati, who had been encouraged to sponsor the academy by the local aristocracy. The first Regole capitolari (I-Baf vols. 1–3, n.244) divided the academicians into three orders: composers, singers and instrumentalists. The administrative officers were the principe, two consiglieri and two censori dei conti or auditors; the executive committee consisted of the president (elected each year from the composers residing at Bologna), the secretary and the advisers. The motto of the academy was ‘Unitate melos’ and its patron saint St Anthony of Padua, on whose feast day elaborate performances were prepared each year. The honorary office of founder and protector was hereditary and continued by a member of the Carrati family. New constitutions were drawn up in 1689–90 and 1721, and on 22 February 1749 Pope Benedict XIV granted the academy the same status as Rome’s Accademia di S Cecilia, including the authority to supervise performing musicians in all Bolognese churches.

Among the activities of the academy were the esercizi for composer members and the conferenze for the performing members. The esercizi were held twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, while the conferenze took place on Thursday evenings. The purpose of these meetings was to provide opportunities for discussing theoretical works and for the performance of members’ new works to be introduced and then analysed by the academicians. The academy was, therefore, in a strong position to determine taste and to exercise control over its members, thus helping to codify an acceptable and proper musical style.

The most important and influential of the members of the Accademia Filarmonica was Padre Martini, who was elected in 1758. He was maestro di cappella at S Francesco from 1725 to 1770 and lived all his life in Bologna, where he assiduously devoted himself to teaching, composing and collecting historical documents on music in preparation for his Storia della musica. His teaching of composition became famous, as did his expertise on the subject, and he conducted an extensive correspondence with most musicians throughout Europe (only a small number of his estimated 6000 letters have been published; many are in I-Bc). Among his pupils were J.C. Bach, Gluck, Grétry, Jommelli, Sarti, Abbé Vogler, Padre S. Mattei and Mozart (who submitted a setting of the antiphon Quaerite primum k86/73v for examination at the academy on 9 October 1770 after a period of study). During the 18th century and part of the 19th the academy remained the absolute dictator of the city’s musical life and the bestower of much coveted music diplomas eagerly sought by Italian and foreign musicians alike.

The Accademia Filarmonica declined in the first half of the 19th century, but revitalized itself in December 1853 by inaugurating a series of chamber music concerts; the series lasted until 1864 but was resumed in 1880. The programmes featured performances of string quartets that significantly included works by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Hummel and were the first such performances outside Bolognese private circles. The periodical L’arpa, published every five days beginning on 20 August 1853, became the main vehicle of information for the academy’s activities, such as meetings, elections and musical performances. Beginning with this period of renewed vigour, many illustrious figures were associated with the academy: Verdi (1868), Wagner (1876), Busoni (1882), Puccini (1899), Respighi (1910) and Ravel (1922). Special concerts and lectures were held in 1966 to celebrate the third centenary of the academy’s foundation.

At the end of the 18th century and early in the 19th three academies were active briefly at Bologna. The Armonici Uniti, whose statutes (see Sartori, p.147ff) were drawn up in 1784, emphasized performances by its amateur members as well as by outside professional musicians. In June 1806 the pianist and composer Maria Brizzi Giorgi founded the Accademia Polimniaca, which lasted until her death in 1811. The Bolognese nobility subsidized its concerts, held mainly at the home of the founder, and frequently featuring illustrious performers. Instituted in 1808 by Tommaso Marchesi and continuing its activities to about 1830, the Accademia dei Concordi functioned as a channel for diffusing the Viennese repertory, particularly Haydn’s works.

Before a teaching institution was firmly established on 30 November 1804, formal music instruction in Bologna took place at convents, churches and the academies. After the dissolution of the religious orders and corporations during the French invasion of 1796, the Liceo Filarmonico was founded on the site of the former monastery of S Giacomo to replace those that had been dispersed and establish a musical centre in the city. Initially, the Liceo was to absorb the Accademia Filarmonica, the chapel of S Petronio, the Filippini foundation, the libraries of Martini (about 17,000 volumes) and Mattei, as well as Martini’s portrait collection and all the various musical collections saved from the plunder of the churches, convents and monasteries. The holdings were reordered and expanded through new acquisitions by Gaetano Gaspari from 1856 to 1881; he also compiled a catalogue. The Liceo also houses manuscripts of sacred and secular polyphony from the 14th to the 16th centuries, and a substantial collection of opera librettos.

The Accademia Filarmonica refused to be absorbed into the Liceo; thus in the first few decades after its foundation a state of tension developed between the two institutions, eased only at the nomination of Rossini in 1839 as consulente perpetuo. During his directorship, which lasted until 1848, the musical life of the Liceo was bolstered by the institution of weekly recitals; however a new period of decline followed, until Luigi Mancinelli was appointed director in 1881. He was succeeded by Giuseppe Martucci (1886–1902) and Marco Enrico Bossi (1902–11). Under the leadership of these three men the Liceo had its greatest period, during which it influenced the musical life of the entire city. Bossi was succeeded by Mugellini (1911–12), Torchi (1912) and Busoni (1913–14), by which time the Liceo was equal to other recognized Italian conservatories; directors since Busoni have been G. Marinuzzi (1916–19), F. Alfano (1919–23), Guglielmo Mattioli (1923–4), Francesco Vatielli (1924–5), Cesare Nordio (1925–45), Guido Spagnoli (1945–7), Guido Guerrini (1947–50), Ettore Desderi (1951–63), Lino Liviabella (1950–51, 1963–4), Adone Zecchi (1964–74), Giordano Noferini (1974–6), Cesare Franchini-Tassini (1976–9), Gianni Ramous (1981–4), Lidia Proietti (1979–81, 1984–91) and Carmine Carrisi (1991–). In 1925 it was named Conservatorio di Musica G.B. Martini and in 1942 it came under state control. The library remained city property even after 1942 (although acquisitions after then belonged to the state); it was later named Biblioteca Musicale G.B. Martini and in 1959 renamed Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale. The university instituted classes in musicology in 1936 and today offers a wide variety of music courses, including ethnomusicology. Musicology periodicals currently published in Bologna include Quadrivium (since 1956) and Il Saggiatore musicale (since 1994).

4. Societies and music publishing.

The Casino dei Nobili was organized in 1787 at the Palazzo Amorini, where it sponsored performances of operas (e.g. Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste, 1788). During the French occupation (beginning in 1796) it was renamed Società degli Amici; in 1809–10 it was reorganized after moving to the Palazzo Lambertini and called Società del Casino, still maintaining its aristocratic character. From 1810 it took an active part in introducing works of the Germanic repertory (particularly Mozart and Beethoven) and performers of international fame (Paganini in 1811 and 1818) at its evening and Sunday afternoon concerts. In 1823 it moved to the Palazzo Salina Amorini and concentrated until the mid-century on performances by amateur soloists, although illustrious performers were occasionally featured (e.g. Liszt in December 1838). Its legacy has been continued by the Domino Club, founded in 1866, whose archives contain all the documents of the Società del Casino.

In spring 1877 Camillo Pizzardi began to organize chamber music concerts in his home, which led to the institution of the Società del Quartetto. It was publicly inaugurated on 24 November 1879 with an orchestral concert conducted by Luigi Mancinelli, artistic director until 1885. Both its orchestral and chamber music concerts were held at the Liceo Musicale until 1893 and at the Teatro Comunale thereafter. Martucci was director from 1886 to 1902, and frequently played the piano at its chamber concerts. Its repertory shows that the Bolognese public in the second half of the 19th century preferred Beethoven, works of the Classical Viennese school and chamber recitals; symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms were the mainstay of its programmes. Its activities were interrupted in 1937, but were resumed after World War II under the name Società Bolognese di Musica da Camera.

Other societies include the Società Wagneriana, founded by Martucci at the Liceo Musicale in 1887 to give annual concert performances of excerpts from Wagner operas, and the Società Corale G.B. Martini, founded by M.E. Bossi in 1902.

Music publishing flourished comparatively late at Bologna. Throughout the 16th century most Bolognese composers had their works printed in Venice. Among the earliest works printed at Bologna are Ramos de Pareia’s Musica practica (Rubiera; 1482) and Burtio’s Musices opusculum (Rugeriis; 1487). It was not until a century later, however, that the first volume of music was set by Giovanni Rossi, a Venetian residing in Bologna: Camillo Cortellini’s Il secondo libro de’ madrigali à cinque voci (1584). His son, Perseo Rossi, published Banchieri’s Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici and Ercole Porta’s Vaga ghirlanda op.3 in 1613. Subsequently, the flourishing musical life in Bologna supported several printing shops. From 1639 to 1688 Giacomo Monti established the most important printing press at Bologna, bringing out numerous editions of works for string instruments. He was succeeded by his son Pier Maria in 1689, who remained active until 1709 although the shop had been taken over in 1685 by Marino Silvani, the head of another prominent family of Bolognese printers. Silvani published from 1665 to 1726 under various names. Other printers at Bologna during the second half of the 17th century include Alessandro Pisarri, who published 10 volumes of works by Cazzati (1660–62); Evangelista Dozza’s heirs Carlo Manolesi and Pietro Dozza, who issued Cazzati’s opp.31–4 (1663–4); Cazzati, who probably established a shop in his home next to S Petronio in 1667; Giuseppe Micheletti, who printed sacred and instrumental works from 1683 to 1692; and Carlo Maria Fagnani, active particularly in 1695–6. From 1720 Lelio della Volpe issued elegantly printed musical and theoretical works (with engraved plates from 1744), including Martini’s Storia della musica (1751–81).

5. Theatres.

A deep interest in knowledge and culture has always characterized Bologna’s theatrical life. Its operatic history is marked by a predisposition to accept and assimilate the prevailing theatrical fashions, stimulated by and often in competition with the major operatic centres in Italy. Until the mid-17th century, opera at Bologna was characterized by a heterogeneity of performances organized and subsidized mainly by prominent aristocratic intellectuals: Nicolò Zoppio Turchi, Virgilio Malvezzi, Carlo Bentivoglio, Paolo Emilio Fantuzzi and Cornelio Malvasia, who depended mostly either on singers from nearby Modena or on Venetian itinerant companies. At the peak of its splendour in the 18th century the city had four major theatres, and operas were produced privately in palaces and suburban villas, convents, monasteries and boarding-schools, subsidized by such aristocratic families as the Bentivoglio, Marescotti, Pepoli, Orsi and Albergati. During this period the city acquired a reputation as a training-ground for opera singers who for many years dominated the major Italian and European theatres. An important 18th-century treatise on singing, P.F. Tosti’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, was published in Bologna in 1723. Such polycentrism assured a multiplicity, variety and autonomy of operatic initiatives. In the 19th century the Bolognese public was exposed to the newest currents in European opera, welcoming first the grand operas of Meyerbeer and then enthusiastically accepting for the first time in Italy Wagner’s music dramas. Important music periodicals published in the city contributed to this openess. Significantly Bologna’s operatic activity proceeded without interruption (except in 1750) from 1634 to 1792. As the city was not ruled by a court or potentate, public opinion played an important role in conditioning the vicissitudes of its theatrical life.

The Teatro del Pubblico (also known as the Teatro della Sala or Sala del Pallone), in the Palazzo del Podestà and on the Piazza Maggiore, designed by A. Chenda, was used for public spectacles from 1547. Opera performances were mounted from 1610, beginning with Giacobbi’s L’Andromeda (music lost); on 17 December 1623 it burnt down and was replaced by a wooden structure in 1624. The Teatro del Pubblico, like all Chenda’s theatrical buildings, was arranged in superimposed rows of boxes rather than graded seating (a design later imitated in most Italian theatres), making it accessible not only to the nobility but also to the bourgeois paying public. Later in the century important opera productions were mounted elsewhere and entertainment for lower social classes prevailed; it was demolished as a dangerous structure in 1767.

Formally opened in 1636, the Teatro Formagliari was also called Guastavillani and dei Casali until about 1660; in the last quarter of the 18th century it was also known as Teatro Zagnoni. In January 1636 members of the Accademia dei Riaccesi rented the palace of the Formagliari family to stage operatic performances and comedies. Soon afterwards Marchese Filippo Guastavillani commissioned the architect Sighizzi to renovate the small hall with ranges of boxes sloping down and projecting towards the stage, so that the entire audience had an excellent view. Privately managed by Guastavillani, it was frequented by the nobility and devoted mainly to serious opera. In 1640 the singer, composer and impresario Francesco Manelli introduced such works of the fashionable Venetian repertory as his own Delia and Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria in this theatre. Subsequently and well into the 18th century composers previously heard in Venice dominated its stage (Cavalli, Pallavicino, M.A. and P.A. Ziani). During the 18th century its two or three seasons favoured a diversified repertory that included numerous opere buffe as well as serious operas. It was renovated in 1776 by Francesco Tadolini, but burnt down in 1802; the Teatro del Corso was built on the same site in 1805.

The Teatro Malvezzi opened on 27 March 1653, built on a site bought in 1651 by Marchese Francesco Pirro Malvezzi. It was restored several times from 1681 to 1691 and enlarged and repainted by the Galli-Bibiena brothers in 1697. Although it staged fewer works, it replaced the Teatro Formagliari as the theatre favoured by the Bolognese aristocracy. Its repertory included works by the best Bolognese composers (D. Gabrielli, Ariosti, Aldrovandini, G.M. Orlandini and particularly Perti), performed by eminent singers (M.M. Musi, M. Scarabelli and Pistocchi), often using sets designed by members of the Galli-Bibiena family. It burnt down on 19 February 1745 and its leading position was taken over by the new Teatro Comunale.

The Marchese Silvio A. Marsigli-Rossi-Lombardi bought a large warehouse in 1709 and remodelled it to accommodate opera performances. As the Teatro Marsigli-Rossi it opened on 28 October 1710 with L.A. Predieri’s La Partenope, and after it was enlarged in spring 1711, it reopened on 28 October that year with Predieri’s Griselda. It remained a theatre of modest size in the shape of an open bell, with three tiers of boxes and an upper gallery circling as far as the proscenium. In keeping with the size of the theatre, performances of opere buffe and comedies, particularly by such local writers as G.M. Buini, were favoured, especially in the years 1722–36. During the French occupation it was renamed Teatro Civico, but was found to be a dangerous structure in 1821 and was demolished in 1825.

As a result of the destruction of the Teatro Malvezzi, a group of noblemen proposed in 1750 that a new theatre, the Teatro Comunale, be constructed. Financed by the papal government and the Bolognese senate, the building (designed and built by Antonio Galli-Bibiena; fig.3) was completed in 1757. The first season was delayed by financial difficulties, but the theatre eventually opened on 14 May 1763 with Gluck’s Il trionfo di Clelia, given its première under the composer’s supervision. It became the leading operatic institution in the city, giving up to three seasons annually. Nevertheless, its activity was at times interrupted for several years (no record of operatic performances has survived for the years 1780–87). During the French occupation it was renamed Teatro Nazionale and from 1820 the administration granted use of the theatre to impresarios on a deposit of 5000 scudi. From 1820 to 1860 the repertory included works of the major Italian composers of the time (Morlacchi, Mercadante, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and from 1843, Verdi); there were usually three seasons a year, each comprising up to four new productions that were often repeated 30 to 40 times. The theatre was renovated in 1818–20, 1853–4 and 1859. Angelo Mariani’s appointment as ‘maestro concertatore e direttore delle musiche’ in autumn 1860 inaugurated a splendid period for the theatre. Under his leadership, which lasted until 1872, the quality of the orchestra was greatly improved and the repertory notably revitalized with performances of operas by Meyerbeer, Verdi and Wagner; these included the Italian premières of L’Africaine (4 November 1865), Don Carlos (27 October 1867), Lohengrin (1 November 1871) and Tannhäuser (7 November 1872). Mariani’s successors (Marino Mancinelli, Franco Faccio, Luigi Mancinelli and Martucci) also expanded the repertory of the Teatro Comunale by channelling it within the mainstream of European musical life (for example Martucci directed the Italian première of Tristan and Isolde, 2 June 1888). At the beginning of the 20th century the theatre still featured performances of German operas and gave the Italian première of Parsifal (1 January 1914), conducted by Ferrari. From 1931 to 1935 it was closed, following a fire that destroyed its stage. After it reopened it established a regular opera season and continued to be one of the main centres of Italian musical life, organized as an autonomous institution with its own orchestra and chorus.

In June 1980 the theatre was closed because of an infestation of woodworm. A scrupulous restoration, which strengthened the original structure and renovated Bibiena’s characteristic white and gold decoration, enabled the theatre to reopen on 5 December 1981 with Aida. Contemporary works are given as well as the traditional repertory. Among world premières have been Giacomo Manzoni’s Per Massimiliano Robespierre (17 April 1975), Adriano Guarnieri’s Trionfo della notte (3 February 1987), Italian permières include Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (5 May 1979) and Henze’s The English Cat (20 April 1986), Fabio Vacchi’s Il viaggio (23 January 1990) and Flavio Testi’s La brocca rotta (30 May 1997). From 1986 to 1993 the principal conductor was Riccardo Chailly; his successors have been Christian Thielemann (1994–7) and Daniele Gatti (from 1997). During its season, lasting from December to June, the company takes its productions to other cities in the region and also makes foreign tours.

The opera house also organizes a series of orchestral concerts, chamber concerts, some in collaboration with ‘Musica Insieme’, ballets, and other activities aimed at young people and schools. In addition the theatre hosts the Feste Musicali devised by Tito Gotti, which, since 1967 have presented distinctive programmes, including modern revivals of rare works, using locations, instruments and music associated with Bologna, and unusual approaches to contemporary music. Notable events have included performances of the repertory of the chapel of S Petronio in 1967, and the inauguration of its restored organs in 1982 with new works by Franco Donatoni, Salvatore Sciarrino and Adriano Guarnieri. Another memorable event was John Cage’s ‘grand happening’, Three excursions for prepared train on a theme of Tito Gotti, in June 1978.

Designed by the architects Santini and Gasparini, the Teatro del Corso opened on 19 May 1805 with Ferdinando Paer’s Sofonisba, in the presence of Napoleon and with Rossini singing a minor role. The theatre was used for concerts (Paganini in 1818, Malibran in 1835), opera productions and plays. The première of Rossini’s L’equivoco stravagante was given there in 1811. Its status declined during the second half of the 19th century because of the strong competition of the Teatro Comunale; it was destroyed during the war in 1944.

The Teatro Contavalli, constructed by Marinetti and Nadi on the site of the S Martino convent, opened on 3 October 1814 with Carlo Coccia’s La Matilde. From 1815 to 1826, in 1840 and in 1843, Rossini supervised numerous performances of his works there. Operas by Donizetti (from 1830) and Verdi (from 1854) were among the most frequently performed. In 1938 the theatre was transformed into a film theatre.

(1) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (i)

Bologna, §5: Theatres

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A General. B Early history to 16th century. C Religious institutions. D The academies and conservatory. E Theatres.

a: general

G. Fantuzzi: Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1781–94/R)

G. Guidicini: Cose notabili della città di Bologna ossia Storia cronologica de’ suoi stabili sacri, pubblici e privati (Bologna, 1868–73/R); supple. by L. Breventani (Bologna, 1908/R)

I primi cento concerti: 1879–1896 (Bologna, 1897) [pubd of Società del Quartetto]

F. Bosdari: ‘La vita musicale a Bologna nel periodo napoleonico’, L’archiginnasio, ix (1914), 213–38

Lodovico Frati: ‘Musicisti e cantanti bolognesi del Settecento: notizie e lettere’, RMI, xxi (1914), 189–202

P. Wagner: ‘Die konzertierende Messe in Bologna’, Festschrift Hermann Kretzschmar (Leipzig, 1918), 163–8

F. Vatielli: ‘Cinquant’anni di vita musicale a Bologna (1850–1900)’, L’archiginnasio, xv (1920), 129–51; xvi (1921), 28–40, 120–33

Lodovico Frati: ‘Per la storia della musica in Bologna nel secolo XVII’, RMI, xxxii (1925), 544–65

F. Vatielli: Arte e vita musicale a Bologna (Bologna, 1927)

A. Sorbelli: Storia della stampa in Bologna (Bologna, 1929)

Lodovico Frati: ‘Donne musiciste bolognesi’, RMI, xxxvii (1930), 387–400

U. Sesini: ‘Lo studio bolognese nella storia musicale: Ad Lecturam Musicae’, Bologna: rivista del comune, xxi/8 (1934), 49–59

F. Vatielli: ‘Ferruccio Busoni a Bologna’, RaM, xi (1938), 417–26

F. Vatielli: ‘L’oratorio a Bologna negli ultimi decenni del Seicento’, NA, xv (1938), 26–35, 77–87

H.G. Mishkin: ‘The Solo Violin Sonata of the Bologna School’, MQ, xxix (1943), 92–112

S.E. Watts: The Stylistic Features of the Bolognese Concerto (diss., Indiana U., 1964)

G. Gaspari: Musica e musicisti a Bologna (Bologna, 1969)

R. Monterosso: ‘L'oratorio musicale in Bologna nel secolo XVIII’, Risultati e prospettive della ricerca sul movimento dei Disciplinati: Perugia 1969 (Perugia, 1972), 99–120

T. Gotti: ‘Beethoven a Bologna nell'Ottocento’, NRMI, vii (1973), 3–38, 352–87

M. Conati and M. Pavarani, eds.: Orchestre in Emilia-Romagna nell’Ottocento e Novecento (Parma, 1982)

R. Verti: ‘La presenza della musica nei periodici bolognesi dal 1800 al 1830’, Periodica musica, i (1983), 6–9

‘The Rise of the Emilian School of Instrumental Music in Late 17th-Century Italy’, IMSCR XIII: Strasbourg 1982, ii, 499–516

A. Pompilio, ed.: Padre Martini: Musica e cultura del settecento europeo (Florence, 1987)

L. Callegari, G. Sartini and G. Bersani Berselli, eds.: La librettistica bolognese nei secoli XVII e XVIII: catalogo e indici (Rome, 1989)

O. Gambassi: Il Concerto Palatino della Signoria di Bologna: cinque secoli di vita musicale a corte (1250–1797) (Florence, 1989)

For further bibliography see Martini, Giovanni Battista.

b: early history to 16th century

Lodovico Frati: La vita privata di Bologna dal secolo XIII al XVII (Bologna, 1900/R)

Lodovico Frati: ‘Per la storia della musica in Bologna dal secolo XV a XVI’, RMI, xxiv (1917), 449–78

Lodovico Frati: ‘Liutisti e liutai a Bologna’, RMI, xxvi (1919), 94–111

G. Vecchi: ‘Musica e scuola delle artes a Bologna nell’opera di Boncompagno da Signa (Sec. XIII)’, Festschrift Bruno Stäblein, ed. M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1967), 266–73

F. Piperno: Gli ‘eccellentissimi musici della città di Bologna’: con uno studio sull’antologia madrigalistica del Cinquecento (Florence, 1985)

S. Forscher Weiss: ‘Musical Patronage of the Bentivoglio Signoria, c.1465–1512’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 703–15

A. Fiori: ‘Linguaggi sonori e musicali in alcune fonti giuridiche bolognesi dal 1200 al 1350’, RIM, xxiii (1988), 3–37

A. Fiori: ‘Pratica musicale a Bologna nelle testimonianze di alcune fonti processuali dei secoli XIII e XIV’, Studi musicali, xix (1990), 203–57

A. Fiori: ‘Ruolo del notariato nella diffusione del repertorio poetico-musicale nel Medioevo’, Studi musicali, xxi (1992), 211–35

c: religious institutions

A. Gatti: ‘La cappella maggiore di S. Petronio’, Atti e memorie della R. Deputazione di storia patria per le provincie di Romagna, 3rd ser., ix (1891), 324–61

Luigi Frati: I corali della Basilica di S. Petronio in Bologna (Bologna, 1896)

O. Mischiati: ‘Per la storia dell’oratorio a Bologna: tre inventari del 1620, 1622 e 1682’, CHM, iii (1962–3), 131–70

L’organo di S. Maria dei Servi in Bologna nella tradizione musicale dell’Ordine (Bologna, 1967)

C. Hamm: ‘Musiche del Quattrocento in S. Petronio’, RIM, iii (1968), 215–32

A. Schnoebelen: ‘Performance Practice at San Petronio in the Baroque’, AcM, xli (1969), 37–55

V. Alce: ‘La cappella musicale del Rosario in S. Domenico di Bologna’, Strenna storica bolognese, xxiii (1973), 13–31

E. Enrico: The Orchestra at San Petronio in the Baroque Era (Washington DC, 1976)

O. Gambassi: ‘La scuola dei “pueri cantores” in S. Petronio (1436–1880 ca.)’, NA, new ser., iii (1985), 7–53

O. Mischiati: La prassi musicale presso i Canonici Regolari del SS.Salvatore nei secoli XVI e XVII e i manoscritti polifonici della Biblioteca musicale ‘G.B. Martini’ di Bologna (Rome, 1985)

O. Gambassi: La cappella musicale di S. Petronio: maestri, organisti, cantori e strumentisti dal 1436 al 1920 (Florence, 1987)

P. Da Col and A. Macinanti: ‘Cronache di musica e storia degli organi nella Basilica di S. Paolo Maggiore in Bologna’, Rivista internazionale di musica sacra, xii (1991), 145–92

C.A. Monson: ‘La pratica della musica nei monasteri femminili bolognesi’, La cappella musicale nell’Italia della Controriforma: Cento 1989, 143–60

M. Vanscheeuwijck: ‘La cappella musicale di San Petronio ai tempi di Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1674–1695): organizzazione esemplare di una istituzione musicale’, ibid., 303–24

J. Riepe: Die Arciconfraternita di S. Maria della Morte in Bologna: Beiträge zur Geschichte des italienischen Oratoriums im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Bonn, 1993; Paderborn, 1998)

C.A. Monson: Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, 1995)

d: academies and the conservatory

G.B. Martini: Serie cronologica de’ principi dell’Accademia de’ Filarmonici di Bologna (Bologna, 1776/R)

M. Medici: Memorie storiche intorno le accademie scientifiche e letterarie della città di Bologna (Bologna, 1852)

A. Bonora: Scuole, insegnanti-allievi del Liceo musicale di Bologna dal 1805 al 1923 (Bologna, 1924)

N. Morini: La R. Accademia filarmonica di Bologna: monografia storica (Bologna, 1930)

C. Sartori: Il Regio conservatorio di musica ‘G.B. Martini’ di Bologna (Florence, 1942)

G. Vecchi, ed.: L’Accademia filarmonica di Bologna (1666–1966): notizie storiche, manifestazioni (Bologna, 1966)

F.A. Gallo: ‘L’Accademia filarmonica e la teoria musicale attraverso i testi conservati nell’archivio’, Quadrivium, viii (1967), 93–9

F. Haberl: ‘Rapporti fra l’Accademia filarmonica di Bologna e la scuola di Ratisbona: lo stile palestriniano degli accademici filarmonici’, ibid., 87–91

J.G. Suess: ‘Observations on the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna in the 17th Century and the Rise of a Local Tradition of Instrumental Music’, ibid., 51–62

G. Vecchi: Le accademie musicali del primo Seicento e Monteverdi a Bologna (Bologna, 1969)

S. Durante: ‘Condizioni materiali e trasmissione del sapere nelle scuole di canto a Bologna a metà Settecento’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, ii, 175–89

O. Gambassi: ‘Vita artistica dell'Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna: l'annuale festa del Santo protettore S. Antonio di Padova’, Seicento inesplorato: Lenno, nr Como 1989, 127–84

M. Baroni: ‘Rigori e licenze dell'Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna negli anni di Padre Martini’, Studi in onore di Giuseppe Vecchi, ed. I. Cavallini (Modena, 1989), 67–76

C. Vitali: ‘“La scuola della virtù della Zitelle”: insegnamento e pratiche musicali fra Sei e Ottocento presso il Conservatorio degli Esposti di Bologna’, I Bastardini: patrimonio e memoria di un ospedale bolognese (Bologna, 1990), 105–37

L. Callegari Hill: L’Accademia filarmonica di Bologna 1666–1800: statuti, indici degli aggregati e catalogo degli esperimenti d’esame nell’archivio, con un’introduzione storica (Bologna, 1991)

G. Vecchi: ‘L'Accademia Filarmonica e le sue fonti storiche: Padre G.B. Martini … ridimensionato’, Studi e materiali, per la storia dell’Accademia Filarmonica, iii (1991), 3–15

O. Gambassi: L’Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna: fondazione, statuti e aggregazione (Florence, 1992)

N. Gallino: ‘Lo “scuolaro” Rossini e la musica strumentale al Liceo di Bologna: nuovi documenti’, Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi, xxxiii (1993), 5–55

e: theatres

ES G. Pardieri and R. Morara)

RicciTB

G. Giordani: Intorno al Gran teatro del comune e ad altri minori in Bologna (Bologna, 1855)

L. Bignami: Cronologia di tutti gli spettacoli rappresentati nel gran Teatro comunale di Bologna dalla solenne sua apertura 14 maggio 1763 a tutto l’autunno del 1880 (Bologna, 1880)

G. Cosentino: Un teatro bolognese del secolo XVIII: il Teatro Marsigli-Rossi (Bologna, 1900)

O. Trebbi: Il Teatro Contavalli (1814–1914) (Bologna, 1914)

L. Trezzini, S. Paganelli and R. Verti, eds.: Due secoli di vita musicale: storia del Teatro comunale di Bologna (Bologna, 1966–87)

L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454

M. Sergardi: ‘Bologna teatrale nel periodo giocobino’, Chigiana, new ser., xiii (1976), 265–81

C. Vitali: ‘Un fondo di musiche operistiche settecentesche presso l'Archivio di stato di Bologna (Fondo Malvezzi-Campeggi)’, NRMI, xiii (1979), 371–84

P. Mioli: ‘La scuola di canto bolognese nel Settecento’, Quadrivium, xxii (1981), 5–59

M. Sergardi: ‘Momenti del teatro d'avanguardia a Bologna (1920–1930)’, Avanguardie musicali e spettacolari italiane nell’Europa degli anni Venti: Siena 1978 [Chigiana, new ser., xv (1978)], 163–84

O. Gambassi: ‘Bologna: vita musicale a palazzo da un manoscritto del secolo XVIII’, Quadrivium, xxiii (1982), 49–68

E. Surian: ‘Organizzazione, gestione, politica teatrale e repertori operistici a Napoli e in Italia, 1800–1820’, Musica e cultura a Napoli dal XV al XIX secolo: Naples 1982, 317–68

M. Calore: Il teatro del Corso, 1805–1944 (Bologna, 1992)

R. Verti, ed.: Un almanacco drammatico: l'‘Indice de' teatrali spettacoli' 1764–1823 (Pesaro, 1996–8)

R. Verti: Il Teatro Comunale di Bologna (Milan, 1998)

Bologna, Bartolomeo da.

See Bartolomeo da Bologna.

Bolognese, Il.

See Sportonio, Marc’Antonio.

Bolognini, Bernardo

(b Bologna, ?c1570–80; d ?Naples, ?after 1605). Italian composer. He is called ‘Bolognese’ on the title-page of his only surviving music: Madrigali a cinque voci: il primo libro (Naples, 1604¹⁵), dedicated to Giovanni di Sangro, whose father, Fabrizio di Sangro, Duke of Vietri, had entrusted Bolognini with his son’s education. All 19 madrigal texts, except two by Marino, come from the 1601 book of madrigal poems by the Venetian poet Francesco Contarini, a member of the academies of the Olimpici, Ricovrati, Immaturi and Serafici. The music shows little influence of Gesualdo: with the exception of a French 6th, the few examples of chromaticism are of a type commonly found in the 1580s. Many of the motifs that Bolognini devised for imitative writing are also old-fashioned – square-rhythmed outlines of triads or alternations of descending 4ths and ascending 3rds – but they are sometimes combined in double subjects or with their inversions. He used phrase repetition, chordal textures and reduction of texture less than other Neapolitan madrigalists of the time. His collection also includes one piece by Scipione Dentice and one by Giovanni de Macque. The 1649 catalogue of the music library of King João IV of Portugal lists a second book of five-part madrigals by him (see JoãoIL p.544), but it seems to be lost.

KEITH A. LARSON

Bolon [bolombata, bolombato, bulumbata].

Large arched harp of the Manding peoples of West Africa, the Mandinka of the Gambia and Maninka of Guinea and Mali. The harp has a large, whole-calabash resonator with a rectangular soundhole in the side, a laced goatskin soundtable and three or four strings fastened to the handle by leather thongs (see illustration). Formerly used in warfare, when the resonator was beaten as a drum, the bolon is now played by professional musicians (mainly descended from slave caste) either as a solo instrument or, more commonly, to accompany singing.

See also Harp-lute (i), Mali, Gambia, Guinea.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.C. Boulton: disc notes African Music, FW 8852 (1957)

C. Nourrit and B. Pruitt, eds.: Musique traditionelle de l’Afrique noire, discographie Mali 1978 (Paris, 1978)

K.A. GOURLAY, LUCY DURÁN

Bolsena, Il.

See Adami da Bolsena, Andrea.

Bol'shoy raspev

(Russ.: ‘great chant’).

A category of melismatic Russian chant, attested from the late 16th century. See Russian and Slavonic church music, §2.

Bol'shoy Theatre.

Moscow theatre built in 1825. See Moscow, §§3–4.

Bolton, Thomas

(b ?London, c1770; d ?London, c1820). English music teacher and composer. The advertisements in his various publications show that he worked as a music teacher in London from the 1790s to about 1820. He advertised: ‘Ladies Instructed in Singing, with Accompaniment on the Piano Forte, Lute and Lyre – also Pupils Instructed for the Stage’. He composed many songs, of which those in The Village Fete (c1810) enjoyed particular popularity. His Treatise on Singing (1810, 2/1812) contains ‘anatomical observations by John Hunter on the management and delivery of the voice’. He wrote a three-page Instructions for the Tambourine (published in Joseph Mazzinghi’s Twelve Airs for the Pianoforte with Accompaniments for a Flute and Tambourine, 1799) and published collections of piano music: marches, rondos and other movements with percussion accompaniment (op.7, 1799), and airs, marches, dances and hymns (c1806).

Less common musical instruments in which he offered specialized tuition were the guitar and pianoforte guitar, for the players of which instruments he published his Twenty four Easy and Pleasing Lessons for the Guitar or Piano forte Guitar (c1790) and Six Rondeaus, three Songs, three Preludes composed; and three Songs, selected and adapted, with an Accompaniment for Guitar or Piano forte Guitar, op.3 (c1795). In addition to single songs and keyboard works he also published A Collection of Lessons, Songs, Marches, and Dances for harp, lute or lyre (c1810); and A Select Collection of Songs & Airs arranged for the harp or lute (c1815).

OWAIN EDWARDS

Boluda [Voluda], Ginés de

(b Hellín, c1545; d ?Seville, after 24 April 1604). Spanish composer. In 1578 he was maestro de capilla of Cádiz Cathedral; following the death in that year of Gabriel Gálvez he became maestro de capilla of Cuenca Cathedral from 10 September, with a salary of 200 ducats. Although he remained in this position for little more than a year, he obtained the lasting patronage of the then Bishop of Cuenca, Rodrigo de Castro. In August 1579 Boluda requested permission to apply for a vacancy in Sigüenza Cathedral, but he never took up the position. Shortly afterwards he abandoned his duties in Cuenca.

The death of Andrés Torrentes in September 1580 created a vacancy at Toledo Cathedral, and Boluda was selected to be maestro de capilla over such eminent composers as Francisco de Velasco, Sebastián Vivanco and Gabriel Harnández, beginning his 13-year tenure early in 1581. He was extremely ill-paid, however, despite the intercession of Rodrigo de Castro (by then Cardinal of Seville) with the Archbishop of Toledo, Gaspar de Quiroga. Most of Boluda's surviving works date from his time in Toledo, and he conspicuously augmented the cathedral's music library by recommending the purchase of seven volumes of music, most of which remain in the Toledo archives. They included Guerrero's motets of 1570, La Hèle's Octo missae (1578), Victoria's Missarum libri duo (1583), and an important manuscript copied by Fray Pedro Durán. Boluda's taste is implied by the predominance of Spanish composers in the volumes he selected.

In 1593 Boluda retired from his position in Toledo and apparently from the profession of music; four years later he was in Seville as almoner to Rodrigo de Castro. In 1601 he refused the position of maestro de capilla of the royal chapel in Granada as he no longer desired to practise that profession. He is last recorded in 1604, still residing in Seville.

All Boluda's compositions are sacred and most belong to Vespers. Though they are varied in style, all reveal a concern for the intelligibility of the words. The techniques employed range from strict fabordón to elaborate imitative counterpoint, and are combined to give polyphonic variety to psalmody, one of the most rigid genres of the Spanish Renaissance. Plainchant is present in all Boluda's compositions (sometimes as cantus firmus); drawn from the Spanish tradition rather than the Roman, it is never varied or embellished even when integrated into the polyphonic texture.

WORKS

Kyrie, 4vv, ed. in Aguirre Rincón

1 Mass antiphon, 4vv: Asperges me, ed. in Navarro

6 psalms: Qui habitat in adiutorio (Ps xc), 4vv; Laudate pueri, 8us tonus (Ps cxii), 4–5vv; Laudate Dominum 3us tonus (Ps cxvi), 4vv; Laudate Dominum 7us tonus (Ps cxvi), 4vv; Lauda Jerusalem 3us tonus (Ps cxlvii), 4vv, ed. in Tesoro sacro musical, lix/2 (1975), suppl.; Lauda Jersualem 8us tonus (Ps cxlvii), 4–6vvm (inc.): all ed. in Aguirre Rincón

3 hymns, 4vv: Ave maris stella, E-Tc; Iste confessor, ed. in Tesoro sacro musical, lvii/3 (1974), suppl.; Sanctorum meritis, ed. in Aguirre Rincón

doubtful works

3 hymns, 4vv: Exsultet coelum, Deus tuorum militum, Jesu corona virginum; all ed. in Tesoro sacro musical, lvii/3 (1974), suppl.

lost works

known from inventories and tables of contents

Missa ‘Ut re mi fa sol la’, 5vv, Tc

Et incarnatus est, Tc

2 psalms: In exitu Israel de Egypto (Ps cxiii), Tc; Lauda Jerusalem 1vs tonus (Ps cxlvii), GU

Coplillas de Navidad y Santos Reyes, Tc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSCM

H. Collet: Mysticisme musical espagnol au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1913)

F. Rubio Piqueras: Música y músicos toledanos (Toledo, 1923)

G.A. Trumpff: ‘Die Messen des Cristobal de Morales’, AnM, viii (1953), 93–151, esp. 121

R. Navarro: Polifonía de la Santa Iglesia Catedral Basílica de Cuenca: Alonso Lobo, Ginés de Boluda y Juan Muro (Cuenca, 1968)

D. Crawford: ‘Two Choirbooks of Renaissance Polyphony at the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora of Guadalupe’, FAM, xxiv (1977), 145–74

D. Preciado: Alonso de Tejeda (ca.1556–1628), polifonista español (Madrid, 1977)

R. Snow: ‘Toledo Cathedral Ms. Reservado 23: a Lost Manuscript Rediscovered’, JM, ii (1983), 246–77

M. Martínez Millán: Historia musical de la Catedral de Cuenca (Cuenca, 1988)

S. Aguirre Rincón: Ginés de Boluda (ca.1545–des.1604): biografía y obra musical (Valladolid, 1995)

F. Reynaud: La polyphonie toledane et son milieu: des premiers temoigneges aux environs de 1600 (Paris, 1996)

SOTERRAÑA AGUIRRE RINCÓN

Bolzoni, Giovanni

(b Parma, 15 May 1841; d Turin, 21 Feb 1919). Italian conductor, teacher and composer. He studied at the music school in Parma with Giuseppe del Maino (violin), Griffini (singing) and Giovanni Rossi (composition). After graduating in 1859 he became leader and assistant conductor at Reggio nell'Emilia (1864–6) and at the Teatro della Concordia, Cremona, under Ponchielli (1866–7). He was director of the Civica Scuola di Musica in Savona (1867–73), and then became conductor at the Teatro Francesco Morlacchi in Perugia (1874–5). From 1876 he directed the Liceo Musicale and conducted the orchestra at the Teatro Municipale in Piacenza. Recommended by Ricordi and Verdi, he became conductor at the Teatro Regio in Turin from 1884 to 1889, where he conducted Le Villi, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser and Verdi's Otello, among other operas; in 1885–6 he conducted the last symphonic concerts of the Concerti Popolari there. A strict and gifted teacher, he was, from 1887 to 1916, director and professor of composition at the Turin Liceo Musicale, which he began to reorganize with less emphasis on its strictly operatic tradition; he introduced new instrumental classes, including one for string quartets. As a composer he had technical ability and inventiveness; in a period dominated by opera he wrote mostly chamber and symphonic music, favouring musical sketches, short character-pieces, overtures in a rhapsodic and descriptive style and non-conventional combinations of instruments rather than more academic forms. Significant among his works for string quartet are more than two dozen romanze senza parole.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in Milan unless otherwise stated

Ops: Giulia da Gazzuolo (os, 3, V. Meinis), Florence, 1869; Il matrimonio civile (ob, 1, G. Schianelli), Parma, 11 Oct 1870; La stella delle Alpi (os, 4, Schianelli), Savona, 1871; Jella (os, 4, S. Interdonato), Piacenza, 30 July 1881; Venezia in Vienna (scena lirica), Vienna, 1899

Orch: 5 ovs. (‘sinfonie’): E, op.12, c1868, Giulio Cesare, op.34, 1873 (1875), Saul, op.30, 1874, op.31, 1875, e, op.43, 1880; Pot pourri sulla Messa da requiem di Giuseppe Verdi, 1878; Preludio sinfonico, op.46, 1880s; Idillio sul mare, op.62, c1885; Dafne e Cloe, bozzetto campestre, small orch, op.99, 1894 (1907); Suite drammatica, op.111, 1898; Fra i campi, capriccio sinfonico, 1902; I funerali di Girella, marcia funebre umoristica, 1907; Da Torino a Roma, march, wind band (1912); Elegia funebre, 1917; Armonie della sera; Elegia; Suita romantica; Tempesta in un bicchier d'acqua, pezzo caratteristico (Turin, n.d.); Vers Paris charmeur, march (n.d.)

Chbr: Pf Qnt, D, 1878; Str Qt, A, op.18, 1869 (1878); 8 romanze senza parole, str qt, 1885–9 (Turin, 1890s); 8 romanze senza parole, str qt, 1886–99 (1917); Sextet, ob, 2 cl, hn, 2 bn, 1903; Trio, 3 vc, op.141; Dialogo, vc, str; La savoiarda, sonata descrittiva, vn, pf; c10 other romanze senza parole, str qt; c40 str pieces; pieces for pf, org, other combinations

Vocal: Cant. della patria, del lavoro e dell' umanità, 1911; songs 1v, pf, 1919; choruses and cants., 3–4vv

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Filippi: ‘Bibliografia musicale’, GMM, xlii (1887), 44 only, 109 only

G. Depanis: I Concerti popolari ed il Teatro regio di Torino, ii (Turin, 1915), 287, 289, 292, 297–8, 305, 307

G. Fino: Il maestro Giovanni Bolzoni: commemorazione (Turin, 1923) [with list of works]

A. Basso: Il Conservatorio di Musica ‘G. Verdi’ di Torino: storia e documenti dalle origini al 1970 (Turin, 1971), 91–128

A. Basso: Storia der Teatro Regio di Torino, ii (Turin, 1976), 413ff

ANDREA LANZA

Boman, Petter [Pehr] Conrad

(b Stockholm, 6 June 1804; d Stockholm, 17 March 1861). Swedish music critic, historian and composer. He was a pupil of Per Frigel. He earned his living as a clerk in the Swedish Customs and was for many years music critic for the Post och inrikes tidningar. In 1849 he was elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, the library of which he helped to catalogue. In 1850 he translated Birch’s Darstellung der Bühnenkunst into Swedish. He lectured extensively on music history at the conservatory in 1852, and wrote articles for the Ny tidning för musik during the whole period of its existence (1853–7). The most important of these was ‘En blick på tonkonsten i Sverige’, a survey of Swedish music during the previous 50 years. Boman is considered one of the most reliable and important Swedish writers on music before Adolf Lindgren. (SBL, T. Norlind)

WORKS

all first performed and published in Stockholm

Byn i bergen [The Village in the Mountains] (Spl, 2, after A. von Kotzebue: Das Dorf im Gebirge), 1846, S-St; Ljungby horn och pipa [The Horn and Pipe in Ljungby] (Spl, 3, G.L. Silverstolpe), 1858, Skma, St; Gustaf Wasas dröm (cant., B. von Beskow), Skma

5 collections of songs (1828–38), other songs, Skma; pubd choruses and pf pieces

Edns: Valda svenska folksånger, folkdansar och folkleber (Stockholm, 1845) [with J.N. Ahlström]

WRITINGS

Läsning för tonkonstens vänner (Stockholm, 1839–40)

‘En blick på tonkonsten i Sverige’, Ny tidning för musik, v (1857)

Other articles in Stockholms musik-tidning (1843–4) and in Ny tidning för musik (1853–7)

KATHLEEN DALE/AXEL HELMER

Bombarde (i).

A term for various types of Shawm. See also Pommer.

Bombarde (ii).

A one-key or keyless oboe of Brittany. It takes the leading melodic role when coupled with the biniou; see Bagpipe, §6.

Bombarde (iii).

(Fr.).

See under Organ stop (Bombardon).

Bombardino [flicorno baritono]

(It.).

See Flicorno and Euphonium.

Bombardon (i).

(Ger., Fr.; It. bombardone; Sp. bombardón).

Tuba, especially in 12' F and 14' E, and particularly in a band (see Tuba (i)). The name was first used in Germany during the 1820s for various keyed bass brass instruments; from the 1830s onwards it was commonly applied to bass valved instruments. Thus the Bombardon Ophocleide [sic] exhibited by Pfaff of Kaiserslautern in 1851 was in fact a four-valved tuba, its name serving as a reminder that in German-speaking lands ‘ophikleide’ usually indicated a valved instrument rather than a keyed one (Heyde, 67–9).

‘Bombardon’ is the German name for the contrabass tuba (in BB or CC). ‘Bombardone’ is used in Italy for the flicorno basso-grave in F or E. The E and BB tubas are sometimes ‘bombardon contrabasse’ in France, ‘bombardón contrabajo’ in Spain. Care should be taken not to confuse these with bombardino, the Italian flicorno and Spanish fiscorn equivalent to the three-valved euphonium. The Italian four-valved euphonium equivalent is sometimes ‘bombarda a 4 pistoni’. All these terms represent band as opposed to orchestral use (for example, Verdi stage-bands, where bombardino and bombardone are found side by side). In English-speaking countries (although rarely in the USA) ‘bombardon’ has customarily been a term that is printed (as in some publishers’ E bass parts) rather than spoken; the word ‘bass’ is used among bandsmen. In 1840 Barth of Munich made a valved kontrastbombardon of which the distinguishing feature appears to have been its low register. Before 1845 Rivet of Lyons used the name ‘bombardon’ for a bass brass instrument of the Néo-alto family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Carse: The Life of Jullien (Cambridge, 1951)

H. Kunitz: Die Instrumentation, ix: Tuba (Leipzig, 1968)

C. Bevan: The Tuba Family (London, 1978)

H. Heyde: Trompeten, Posaunen, Tuben (Leipzig, 1980) [museum catalogue]

G. Zechmeister: ‘Vom Bombardon zur Wiener Konzerttuba/Du bombardon au tuba de concert viennois/From the Bombardon to the Vienna Concert Tuba’, Brass Bulletin, no.98 (1997), 46–55

CLIFFORD BEVAN

Bombardon (ii). [bombardone].

(It.)

A term for the bass or great bass Shawm.

Bombardon (iii).

See under Organ stop.

Bombardone [flicorno basso-grave]

(It.).

See Flicorno and Tuba (i).

Bombo (i)

(It.; Ger. Schwärmer, Schwermer).

A 17th- and 18th-century term for the string Tremolo – that is, rapid reiteration of a single note bowed either with individual bowstrokes or in groups of slurred tremolo as in portato. W.C. Printz (Musica modulatoria vocalis, Schweidnitz, 1678) illustrated bombi by the music shown in ex.1.

DAVID D. BOYDEN

Bombo (ii).

(1) Onomatopoeic and generic name for various forms of large, double-headed frame drums (see Drum, §I, 2(vi)) of Spain, Portugal and South America. Two main types of construction are common: (a) large diameter heads (e.g. 50–70 cm) and a relatively shallow body, such as the military or orchestral bass drum, where the skins are secured and tensioned using cords connected to wooden hoops (see illustration), and a long cylindrical body (e.g. 50–70 cm) and (b) small diameter heads, such as the Argentine bombo of Pan-Andean urban folklore ensembles, with or without cords and hoops for tensioning the skins.

Both large diameter and cylindrical forms are found in Argentina, the former referred to as bombo chato and the latter as bombo tubular. A further conical shaped instrument, of probable African origin, is also played in Argentina for the dance form candombe. Unlike other forms of bombo, which are usually played standing, walking or seated (see illustration), the player sits astride the instrument which he plays with his hands or two small sticks. Bombo playing techniques vary widely and hard sticks or soft headed beaters may be used (sometimes in combination with a hand) to strike various parts of the skin or shell. For example, in the Colombian song and dance form cumbia the single head of a large diameter instrument is played with two sticks, while in other traditions from the coast, both heads and the shell of a cylindrical or barrel-shaped drum are sounded. In the high, Bolivian Andes, where both large diameter and cylindrical forms of bombo are used to accompany wind ensembles, a large soft-headed beater is typically used to sound a single head.

(2) The bombo gulu or gulu is a double-headed bass drum of the Tonga people of the Inhambane region of Mozambique. The name of the drum and its form are of Portuguese derivation, and it is played to accompany dance.

HENRY STOBART

Bombo (iii).

Mouth bow of the Republic of the Congo. (1) Braced mouth bow of the Mamvu and Mari peoples. The string is fastened to the bow not only at both ends but also by means of a short cord part way along its length. This produces two unequal lengths of vibrating string, giving two different notes. Other names reported are: dumba, andobu, badingba (badinga), gedo, bongo-bongo, barikendikendi, kudungba, dingba, undemoü, kandiri kandiri, balu and guru.

(2) Unbraced mouth bow of the Andile, Andekaka, Mari, Daba, Andekote, Kilima, Andemanza, Obvango and Aïmeri peoples.

HENRY STOBART

Bombus

(Ger.).

See Ornaments, §8.

Bomhard [Bomhart] (i)

(Ger.).

A variant term for Pommer.

Bomhard [Bomhart] (ii)

(Ger.).

See under Organ stop (Bombardon).

Bommer, Johann Jakob

(fl c1720–67). Swiss organ builder. His family came from Weingarten, near Lommis, in the canton of Thurgau. Together with Speisegger he was one of the most important organ builders in eastern Switzerland in the first half of the 18th century. The only certain biographical date is that of his marriage on 15 October 1725 in Kutná Hora (Bohemia) to Anna Daussek of Plzeň. Stylistically Bommer had close links with the Swabian and south German organ builders, but some characteristics of his work probably reflect his years as a journeyman in Bohemia. He built organs in Switzerland at Unterägeri (1720), Fischingen Abbey (positive; 1727), the Cistercian convent at Kalchrain (positive; 1730), Fischingen (rebuild; 1736), the Dominican convent of St Katharinental (1736–41; still extant), Kirchberg (1750), the Iddakapelle at Fischingen (1750), Eschenbach (1761), the Laurenzenkirche, St Gallen (1761) and Frauenfeld (rebuild; 1767).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Jakob: Der Orgelbau im Kanton Zürich von seinem Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berne, 1969–71)

F. Jakob: ‘Geschichte und Restauration der Orgel von St. Katharinenthal bei Diessenhofen, Schweiz’, ISO Information, no.2 (1969), 109–16

FRIEDRICH JAKOB

Bomtempo [Buontempo], João Domingos

(b Lisbon,28 Dec 1775; d Lisbon, 18 Aug 1842). Portuguese pianist and composer. Son of the Italian oboist F.X. Bomtempo, who belonged to the royal chapel of Dom José I, he studied music with his father and was a pupil at the Patriarchal Seminary. A member of the brotherhood of St Cecilia from the age of 14, he replaced his father in the royal chapel a few years later, after the latter’s death in Brazil. But soon afterwards (1801) he left for Paris, where he became well known as a pianist and composer: his first two piano concertos and the Symphony no.1 were widely acclaimed in the Journal général de la France and the Courrier de l’Europe. His meeting and friendship with Clementi, who published many of his works, date from his first years in Paris. Because of the Napoleonic invasions he left for London in 1810, where he taught music to a daughter of the Duchess of Hamilton for a year. He returned to Lisbon in 1811 but went back to London five years later; in 1820, after another brief sojourn in Paris during which he composed the Requiem Mass in memory of Camões, he finally settled in Portugal. Besides teaching there he also organized concerts; to this end he founded the Philharmonic Society which in August 1822 initiated the first series of regular concerts in which works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were performed, as well as his own compositions. The Vilafrancada movement and the advent of the absolutist regime in 1828 interrupted the concerts and later led to the dissolution of the society itself, but the triumph of liberalism finally brought Bomtempo just reward for his abilities: in 1833 he was appointed the teacher of Dona Maria II and awarded the Order of Christ, and in 1835 he was made principal of the conservatory, which had been inaugurated the same year. He kept this position to the end of his life. Bomtempo was one of the principal reformers of Portuguese music, not only through his establishment of the conservatory, but also through the Philharmonic Society’s activities on behalf of instrumental, symphonic and chamber music, in a milieu then completely dominated by Italian opera. To Bomtempo also Portuguese music owes its first examples of native symphonies, and chamber music.

WORKS

printed works published in London, unless otherwise stated

Vocal: Hymno lusitano, solo vv, chorus, orch, op.10 (1811); also arr. as La virtù trionfante (cant.), and as March of Lord Wellington, pf 4 hands; A paz da Europa (cant.), 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, op.17 (1814); also arr. as O annuncio da paz; Messe de requiem consacrée à … Camões, 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, op.23 (Paris, 1819); Mass, 2 Tantum ergo, US-Wc; Miserere, 4 solo vv, chorus, str, P-Lcg; Credo, 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, La; Veni Sancte Spiritus, 3vv, org, Lc; Mattutine de morti, 4vv, pf, private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon; Libera me, ded. Dom Pedro, Duke of Bragança, 1835, chorus, orch,Lc; Alessandro in Efeso, op, inc., Lc; see op.22

Orch and Chbr: Pf Conc., no.1, op.2 (Paris, 1804); Pc Conc. no.2, op.3 (Paris, 1805); Pf Conc. no.3, op.7 (1809); Sym. no.1, op.11, P-Lc, pf 4 hands score (1810); Pf Conc. no.4, op.12 (1810); Pf Qnt [no.1], op.16 (n.d.); Grande fantaisie, pf, orch (Lisbon, n.d.); Sym. [no.2], private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon; 2 pf concs. [nos.5–6], Lc; Divertimento, pf, orch, Lc; Marcha de Dona Maria II, orch, Lc; Serenade, pf, fl, cl, bn, hn, Ln; Sextet, pf, 2 vn, va, vc, db, private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon; Pf Qnt [no.2], c1816–20, F-Pc; others, private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon

Pf: Grande sonate, op.1 (Paris, 1803); Fandango with Variations, op.4 (n.d.); Elogio aos faustissimos annos de S.S.D. Carlota Joaquina, op.5 (?1808); Introduction, 5 Variations and Fantasie on Paisiello’s Favourite Air, op.6 (n.d.); Capriccio and God Save the King, op.8 (1811); 3 Grand Sonatas, op.9 (n.d.); An Easy Sonata, pf, ad lib vn, op.13 (n.d.); Grand Fantasia, op.14 (n.d.); 2 Sonatas and a Popular Air with Variations, pf, ad lib vn, op.15 (n.d.); 3 Sonatas, pf, ad lib vn, op.18 (1816); Grande sonate, op.20 (Paris, 1818); Fantaisie et variations sur un air de Mozart, op.21 (Paris, n.d.); Air from Alessandro in Efeso, arr. pf, op.22 (n.d.); Waltz (n.d.); Fantasie and variations on a theme from La donna del lago, P-Lc

PEDAGOGICAL WORKS

Elementos de música de methodo de tocar piano forte, op.19 (London, n.d.)

Traité de composition musicale (MS, private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon)

Traité d’harmonie et de contrepoint (MS, private library of Ivo Cruz, Lisbon)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBMP

M.A. de Lima Cruz: Bomtempo (Lisbon, n.d.)

J.-P. Sarrautte: Catalogue des oeuvres de João Domingos Bomtempo (Lisbon, 1970, Port. trans., 1970)

F. de Souza: ‘João Domingos Bomtempo’, Encontro nacional de pesquisa em música II: São João del-Rei 1985, 31–40

J. Scherpereel: João Domingos Bomtempo: musicien portugais (XIXe siècle): témoignages inédits de sa célébrité pendant son premier séjour (1801–1810) (Paris, 1993)

FILIPE DE SOUSA

Bon [Boni], Anna (Lucia)

(b?Russia, ?1739/40). Italian composer and singer. She was the daughter of the (?Venetian) scenographer and librettist Girolamo Bon (Boni, Bonno, Bono, Bonn, Le Bon, Buon, Bunon) and the Bolognese singer Rosa Ruvinetti Bon. In 1743, at the age of four, she entered the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice as a pupil. She probably rejoined her parents at some time during their engagements at St Petersburg, Dresden, Potsdam and Regensburg between 1743 and late 1754. By 1755 she and her family were in Bayreuth in the service of Margrave Friedrich of Brandenburg Culmbach and his wife Wilhelmine, sister of Frederick the Great. After Wilhelmine’s death in 1758 music at Bayreuth declined. In 1759–60 the Bon family all sang in opera performances directed by Girolamo in Pressburg. On 1 July 1762 the three Bons were contracted to serve the Esterházy court of Prince Nicolaus at Eisenstadt, where Anna remained until at least 25 April 1765 (Haydn wrote several roles for her mother). By 1767 she was resident in Hildburghausen, married to the singer Mongeri.

WORKS

6 sonate da camera, fl, bc, op.1 (Nuremberg, 1756), ed. B.G. Jackson (Fayetteville, AR, 1989); 6 sonate per il cembalo, op.2 (Nuremberg, 1757), ed. J.S. Hettrick (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1997); 6 divertimenti, 2 fl, bc, op.3 (Nuremberg, 1759), ed. S.Fortino (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberL

GerberNL

H. Heussner: ‘Der Musikdrucker Balthasar Schmid in Nürnberg’, Mf, xvi (1963), 348–62

H.C.R. Landon: Haydn: Chronicle and Works (London, 1976–80)

G. Rostirolla: ‘L’organizzione musicale nell’Ospedale veneziano della Pietà al tempo di Vivaldi’, NRMI, xiii (1979), 168–95

S. Fortino: ‘Anna Bon’, Women Composers: Music through the Ages, ed. S. Glickman and M.F. Schleifer, iii (New York, 1998) 16–24

JANE SCHATKIN HETTRICK

Bon, Josephus Johannes Baptizta.

See Bonno, Giuseppe.

Bon, Maarten

(b Amsterdam, 20 Aug 1933). Dutch pianist and composer. He studied piano with Hans Sachs and at the Muzieklyceum in Amsterdam with Jaap Spaanderman and Theo Bruins, and bassoon with Brian Pollard. In Paris he continued his piano studies with Magda Tagliaferro, and accompaniment with the singer Noëmie Perugia. Back in the Netherlands, he started a duo with his wife, the violinist Jeannelotte Herzberger, and took lessons in composition with van Baaren. As pianist of the RPO of the Dutch Broadcasting Company (1970–93) he worked under composer-conductors like Berio, Stockhausen, Maderna and Otto Ketting. His lifelong fascination with Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps resulted in an arrangement of this piece for four pianos, which was authorized by the Stravinsky estate and Boosey & Hawkes (1983), on condition that Bon should be the only pianist entitled to perform the arrangement with his deputies. His use of the sustaining pedal is characteristic of his arrangements for piano. He founded the Amsterdam Piano Quartet (1983) and in 1997 the Amsterdam Piano Quintet. He also inspired other composers to write for these ensembles, like Ivan Fedele (Armoon per quattro pianoforti, 1984) and Rob du Bois’s Gaberbocchus for four pianos, 1996. Bon's Whistle for a Friend won a prize at the concourse for compositions for wind instruments (Ancona, 1980).

WORKS

(selective list)

Display IV, 6 pf, piano-tuner, 1980; Whistle for a Friend, fl, 1980; Boréal II, 2 pf, 1981; Display V, 12 vc, 1981; Nee, die idee(ë)n, pic, 1982; Solo for Clarinet, cl, 1985; 2 Dances, gui, bn, 1987; Gut und Böse … (m)einer Melodie, 6 fl, 6 va, 2 cel, 1989, rev. 1998; Persistent Patterns, wind ens, 3 perc, 2 pf, 1989; Self-Portrait, str qnt/4 pf [collab. Stephen Heller], 1990; 3 Sätze, fl, pf, 1993; De Aanslag (Toccata), pf, 1999

Arrs: C. Gesualdo: Canzon francese del principe, 4 sax, 1975; I. Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps, 4 pf, 1981; A. Schönberg: 5 Orchesterstücce, 6 pf, 1988–9; Scherzo à la russe, 20 pf, 1993; R. Wagner: Siegfried Idyll, pf, 1997; Petrouchka, 5 pf, 1998; M. Vermeulen: Sym. no.2, 5 pf, 1998

Principal publisher: Donemus

HUIB RAMAER

Bon, Willem Frederik

(b Amersfoort, 15 June 1940; d Nijeholtpade, Friesland, 14 April 1983). Dutch composer and conductor. He studied the clarinet at the Amsterdam Conservatory (1960–64), then composition with Van Baaren at the Hague Conservatory (1963–71). His principal conducting teachers were Louis Stotijn, Fournet, Van Otterloo and Dean Dixon. A versatile artist, he made a career as a musician, critic (on Het vrije volk, 1968–9), writer and broadcaster. In 1972 he succeeded Stotijn as conductor of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and in the mid-1970s founded De IJsbreker, a centre for modern music in Amsterdam, formally opened in 1979. He taught composition at the Groningen Conservatory (1973–83); among his students were Jacob ter Veldhuis and Frans Vuursteen. He was assistant conductor to the Concertgebouw Orchestra (1973–5) and appeared as a guest conductor with several European orchestras. His death was caused by a brain tumour. Both his brother Maarten Bon (b 1933) and his sister Marja Bon (b 1948) are concert pianists, the former also a composer and music editor.

Bon’s works reflect the serialism and atonality current in the 1960s and 70s, and are usually characterized by transparent, colourful and brilliant instrumentation; they can also on occasions reveal a sense of humour. His inspiration was often literary, and his later works are touched by a French, somewhat Impressionistic idiom, allowing a dramatic, neo-romantic expression which was hardly favoured at the time. In later life he professed a fascination for the music of Arnold Bax.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Requiem, op.15, vv, pf, str, 1967; Missa brevis, op.25, vv, wind insts, 1969; Le grand âge millième (Nostradamus), male chorus, 1974

Orch: Concertino, pf, orch, 1964, rev. Maarten Bon, 1988; Dialogen en monologen, pf, orch, 1967; Nocturnes, op.16, str, 1968; Sketches, op.21, wind, 13 str, 1968; Sweelinck Variaties, op.24, 1969; Concert, op.33, str, 1970; Games, 1970, Sym. no.2 ‘Les prédictions’, op.38, 1970; Usher Sym., op.29, 1970; To Catch a Heffalump, orch, elec org, tape, 1971; Aforismen, str, 1972; Circe, prelude, 1972; Passacaglia in Blue, wind band, db, 1972; Ob Conc., ob (4 types), str, 1974; Erik’s wonderbaarlijke reis (G. Bomans), reciter, orch, 1979, rev. 1980; Sym. for Strings, 1982

Solo vocal: 3 poèmes de Verlaine, op.10, Mez, fl, vc, pf, 1967; Jadis et naguère (P. Verlaine), Mez, cl, vn, pf, 1970; 1999: 4 Prophéties de Nostradamus (Nostradamus), S, orch, 1973; Les 4 Saisons de Verlaine (Verlaine), 1976–9: L’été, A, orch, L’automne, B, orch, Le printemps, S, orch, L’hiver, T, orch; Dag (P. van Ostaijen), Mez, perc, 1979; Songs of Nature (W. Wordsworth), Bar, pf, 1982

Chbr and solo inst: Spelen in het donker (film score, R. du Mée), str qt, 1965; Sonata, op.6, vc, pf, 1966; Wind Qnt no.1, op.13, 1966; Sunphoneion 1, op.22, fl + a fl, vib, pf, 1968; Wind Qnt no.2, op.26, 1969; Petite trilogie, tpt, 1970; Sonata, op.32, bn, pf, 1970; Sans paroles, cl, b cl, vn, va, vc, 1970; Riflessioni, fl, hp, 1971; Allégorie, hp, 1972; Sonata (3 Monogrammen), vn, pf, 1981; Trio saturnien, vn, vc, pf, 1981

Pf: Prelude no.1, pf LH, 1959; Prelude no.2, pf LH, 1961; 7 Preludes, op.14, 1961–8; Miniaturen, op.8, 1966; Prelude, 1978

Arr.: E. Satie: 3 gnossiennes, orch, 1976

Principal publishers: Donemus

WRITINGS

‘Erik’s wonderbaarlijke reis’, Mens en melodie, xxxvi (1981), 417–23

‘Continue golfbeweging en rijk kleurenpalet kenmerken Bax’ orkestmuziek: een rehabilitatie’ [Continuous wave motion and a rich palette of colours are characteristic of Bax’s orchestral music: a rehabilitation], Mens en melodie, xxxviii (1983), 16–20

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. van Houten: ‘Un bon été’, Mens en melodie, xxxii (1977), 15–17

S. Smit: ‘Eriks wonderbaarlijke reis’, Muziek en dans (1981), no.10, pp.16–19

R. Koning: ‘ Willem Frederik Bon’, Key Notes, xvii (1983), 47 only

H.J. van Royen, ed.: Historie en Kroniek van het Concertgebouw en het Concertgebouworkest, ii (Zutphen, 1989)

P.-U. Hiu and J. van der Klis, eds.: Het Honderd Componisten Boek (Bloemendaal, 1997)

THEODORE VAN HOUTEN

Bona, Giovanni

(b Mondovì, Piedmont, 10 Oct 1609; d Rome, 28 Oct 1674). Italian theologian and scholar. He was a cardinal, a member of the Benedictine order and later its head in Italy. He spent much of his life in Rome, where he was one of the highest placed and most influential theologians (for a summary of his life and works see DBI). One of his publications, Psallentis ecclesiae harmonia: tractatus historicus, symbolicus, asceticus de divina psalmodia eiusque causis, mysteriis et disciplinis, deque variis ritibus omnium ecclesiarum in psallendis divinis officiis (Rome, 1653, 2/1663 as De divina psalmodia), appeared in many editions until well into the 18th century, several times in complete editions of his writings. This work, a history of psalmody, is clear, learned and reliable. The comprehensive range of subjects that it considers includes the modes, the use of the organ and other instruments, and the training of singers, his opinions on which echo the Benedictine and Cistercian rules for church music.

Bona [Buona], Valerio

(b Brescia, c1560; d Verona, c1620). Italian composer. He was a Franciscan friar and had a particular connection with Milan and Venice, where some of his works were printed. He was probably a pupil of Costanzo Porta and became maestro di cappella at S Francesco in Vercelli in 1591. He can be traced as having been at S Francesco in Milan in 1596, in Monferrato in 1599, in Mondovi in 1601 and at S Francesco in Brescia in 1611. From 1613 until his death he was most probably at S Fermo Maggiore in Verona, where he was also active as Prefetto della musica and where he maintained a relationship with the Accademia Filarmonica.

He was a prolific composer of the Venetian school, working during the transition period between the prima and the seconda pratica. In strict polyphonic textures, principally in his masses, he adopted a style reminiscent of that of Palestrina, while in other types of composition, such as canzoni, he endeavoured to combine the Gabrieli style of writing for double choirs with monodic writing ‘con il partito delli Bassi modernamente composti’. In his theoretical work Regole del contraponto (1595) he relied largely upon Zarlino's Istitutioni harmoniche; he had already freed himself from exaggerated speculative elements in Zarlino's theory, but reproduced its practical elements, in somewhat haphazard form.

WORKS

sacred

Litanie et aliae laudes, 4vv (Milan, 1590)

Missa et sacrae cantiones, 8vv (Milan, 1591), ?lost, listed in EitnerQ

Missa et motecta, 3vv, Magnificat, 6vv (Milan, 1594)

Psalmi omnes ad Vesperas, 4vv (Venice, 1600)

Motectorum, liber I, 6vv (Venice, 1601), ?lost, listed in EitnerQ

Missarum et motectorum, liber secundus, 2 choirs (Venice, 1601)

Li dilettevoli introiti, 2 choirs, bc, op.18 (Venice, 1611)

Messa e Vespro, 4 choirs, bc, op.19 (Venice, 1611)

Lamentazioni, 8vv, org, op.22 (Venice, 1616)

11 pieces, 1619⁶

secular

Il secondo libro delle canzonette, 3vv (Venice, 1592) 12 3pt inst works ed. in IIM viii (1995)

Il quarto libro delle canzonette, 3vv (Milan, 1599¹⁴)

Madrigali et canzoni, libro primo, 5vv (Venice, 1601); 2 in 1616¹⁰

6 canzoni italiane, 2 choirs, bc, op.21 (Venice, 1614)

WRITINGS

Regole del contraponto et compositione brevemente raccolta da diversi autori (Casale, 1595)

Essempi delli passaggi delle consonanze et dissonanze, et d’altre cose pertinenti al compositore (Milan, 1596)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.G. Sbaraglia: Supplementum et castigatio ad scriptores trium ordinum S. Francisci a Waddingo aliisve descriptos (Rome, 1806, 2/1908–36), 683 [page nos. refer to first edn]

J.H. Lederer: Lorenzo Penna und seine Kontrapunkttheorie (diss., U. of Graz, 1970)

A. Cortellazzo: ‘Le Regole del contraponto et compositione di Valerio Bona’, Quadrivium, xii/1 (1971), 311–20

E. Apfel: Geschichte der Kompositionslehre von den Anfangen bis gegen 1700 (Wilhelmshaven, 1981), ii, 353–4

R.E. Murray: The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio (diss., U. of N. Texas, 1989)

JOSEF-HORST LEDERER

Bonaccorsi, Alfredo

(b Barga, 15 Dec 1887; d Florence, 12 May 1971). Italian musicologist. He studied at the Lucca Istituto Musicale (diploma 1913), and took courses in musicology under Heinitz at the University of Hamburg and in music criticism at the Hamburg Conservatory. He was music critic for the newspapers Il mondo, Avanti and (after 1944) La voce repubblicana. From 1952 to 1960 he was lecturer in music history and librarian at Pesaro Conservatory, where he edited the Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi (1954–60) and the Quaderni rossiniani; he also edited the four-volume Classici italiani della musica and many volumes for the Accademia Musicale Chigiana and the Quaderni della Rassegna musicale.

WRITINGS

Contributo alla storia del concerto grosso (Turin, 1932)

Spettacoli musicali lucchesi: ‘Le tasche’ (Turin, 1933)

Alfredo Catalani (Turin, ?1942)

Elementi di forme musicali (Milan, 1946)

‘Un nuovo codice dell’Ars nova: il Codice lucchese’, Atti dell’Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 7th ser., i (1948), 539–615

Giacomo Puccini e i suoi antenati musicali (Milan, 1950)

‘La battuta e la divisione della battuta nel secolo di Palestrina’, Rassegna musicale dei Lincei (1954), April

Nuovo dizionario musicale Curci (Milan, 1954)

Il folklore musicale in Toscana (Florence, 1956)

‘Catalogo con notizie biografiche delle musiche dei maestri lucchesi’, CHM, ii (1956–7), 73–95

‘Antonio Salieri e il suo “Falstaff, ossia Le Tre burle”’, Volti musicali di Falstaff, Chigiana, xviii (1961), 23–38

‘Il concerto’, Musiche italiane rare e vive da Giovanni Gabrieli a Giuseppe Verdi, Chigiana, xix (1962), 59–83

‘Filippo Manfredi’, Musiche italiane rare e vive da Giovanni Gabrieli a Giuseppe Verdi, Chigiana, xix (1962), 289–91

‘Luigi Boccherini e il quartetto’, Musiche italiane rare e vive da Giovanni Gabrieli a Giuseppe Verdi, Chigiana, xix (1962), 301–6

ed.: F. Torrefranca: Giovanni Benedetto Platti e la sonata moderna, IMi, new ser., ii (1963)

‘Giovanni Platti (precisazioni sul Settecento)’, Le celebrazioni del 1963 e alcune nuove indagini sulla musica italiana del XVIII e XIX secolo, ed. M. Fabbri, A. Damerini and G. Roncaglia, Chigiana, xx (1963), 66–72

‘Ricordiamo Meyerbeer’, Chigiana, xxi, new ser., i (1964), 91–9

ed.: F. Torrefranca: ‘Avviamento alla storia del quartetto Italiano’, Approdo musicale, no.23 (1966), 7–11

Maestri di Lucca: i Guami e altri musicisti (Florence, 1967)

ed.: Gioacchino Rossini (Florence, 1968) [incl. ‘Gioacchino’, 15–19; ‘Qualche aspetto dell’arte rossiniana’, 79–101; ‘Gli inediti’, 157–63]

FERRUCCIO TAMMARO

Bonachelli, Giovanni

(b Seravezza, nr Carrara; fl 1642). Italian composer. He is known only by a book of motets for one to five voices and continuo, op.1 (Venice, 1642). Some of the motets have parts for three instruments in addition to continuo, and the volume also includes three sinfonias for three and four instruments.

Bonadies Codex

(I-FZc 117). See Sources, MS, §IX, 12 and Sources of keyboard music to 1660, §2(i).

Bonaffino, Filippo

(b ?Messina; fl Messina, 1623). Italian composer. He published a book of Madrigali concertati (Messina, 1623; ed. in Micali). The title-page announces pieces for two to four voices, with continuo, but the book also contains two melismatic solo songs for bass and continuo. Bonaffino, who described himself as ‘from Messina’, dedicated it to ‘Signor Gioanni Watchin [John Watkin or Watkins], English gentleman’, for whom the two bass solos may specifically have been intended. In addition to these, the volume comprises seven pieces for two voices, four for three voices and five for four voices, all settings of Marinist texts of a high literary order by, among others, Angelo Grillo, Luigi Groto, G.B. Marino, Maurizio Moro and Ottavio Rinuccini. The collection includes one of the last settings of Ancidetemi pur, made popular in the previous century by Arcadelt, and four spiritual madrigals, one in honour of the canonization of the saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier in Messina in the previous year. All of the madrigals reflect some of the mannerist tendencies found in the concertato style of the period. The melodic writing is rather restrained, but the harmony includes repeated unprepared 2nds and 7ths and 4–3 progressions reflecting the more emotive words of the poems. A few of the pieces are in ternary form (AAB or ABB).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

SchmidlD

O. Tiby: ‘The Polyphonic School in Sicily of the 16th–17th Century’, MD, v (1951), 203–11

O. Tiby: I polifonisti siciliani del XVI e XVII secolo (Palermo, 1969), 98

L. Bianconi: ‘Sussidi bibliografici per i musicisti siciliani del Cinque e Seicento’, RIM, vii (1972), 3–38

G. La Corte Cailler: Musica e musicisti in Messina (Messina, 1982), 47

A. Micali: I madrigali di Filippo Bonaffino (diss., U. of Messina, 1995) [incl. edn of madrigals]

PAOLO EMILIO CARAPEZZA, GIUSEPPE COLLISANI

Bonagiunta [Bonagionta], Giulio

(b S Genesio, nr Macerata; d after 1582). Italian composer and editor. From 1561 to 19 April 1562, when he became a canon, he was a soprano at the Santa Casa, Loreto. In 1562 he became a singer at S Marco, Venice, where he stayed until 1567 or 1568. He was also employed as a singer, in exchange for board and lodgings, at the Augustinian convent of S Stefano (where his brother Andrea was a friar) for some months during 1565. In 1566 he accepted employment at Graz, but changed his mind shortly afterwards. By the end of the decade he was a singer and teacher to the Duke of Parma, with whom he remained until at least 1582. While in Venice, he edited two sets of three-voice canzone napolitane (RISM 1565¹² and 1566⁷), four books of madrigals (1566², 1566³, 1567¹³, 1567¹⁶) and a book of motets (1567³), all for the Scotto press. He was also the editor of a volume of madrigals dedicated to the memory of the poet Annibale Caro (1568¹⁶). These volumes contain several previously unpublished works by Lassus and Rore, as well as some works (mostly napolitane) by Bonagiunta himself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoetticherOL

EinsteinIM

E. Alfieri: La cappella musicale di Loreto dalle origini a Costanzo Porta (1507–1574) (Bologna, 1970)

H. Leuchtmann: Orlando di Lasso, i: sein Leben (Wiesbaden, 1976), 48, 78, 128

F. Grimaldi: La cappella musicale di Loreto nel Cinquecento (Loreto, 1981)

P. Fabbri: ‘Andrea Gabrieli e le composizioni su diversi linguaggi: la giustiniana’, Andrea Gabrieli e il suo tempo: Venice 1985, 249–72

G. Ongaro: ‘Sixteenth-Century Patronage at St Mark's Venice’, EMH, viii (1988), 81–115

L. Fava: ‘Nuove acquisizioni biografiche su Cesare Schieti maestro di cappella a Urbino nella seconda metà del Cinquecento’, Recercare, v (1993), 197–210

E. Quaranta: Oltre San Marco: Organizzazione e prassi della musica nelle chiese di Venezia nel Rinascimento (Florence, 1998), 78, 380

ANDREA MARCIALIS

Bonaiuto di Corsino [Bonaiutus Corsini]

(d Florence, ?1414). Italian craftsman and composer. He was a painter in Florence of wedding cassoni. Around 1379 he was a pupil of polyphonist Andreas de Florentia, and from 1375 to 1395 a leading member of the Compagnia dei Laudesi of S Zanobi. Bonaiuto had a wife and children but around 1402, probably ruined by gambling and by a life of pleasure, he became a priest, generating a scandal that is described in an anonymous sonnet of the period. His ballatas, which are stylistically comparable to Landini's, probably date from the period before his religious vocation, since he is referred to as pitor in the unequivocal attributions in GB-Lbl 29987; it is uncertain whether a similar attribution in the Florentine section of I-La 184, to a pitor whose name is illegible, refers to the same musician. Bonaiuto became rector of the church of S Remigio (where the composer Gherardello had been prior) and died during the Florentine residence of the antipope John XXIII.

WORKS

all ballatas for 2 voices

Editions: The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, ed. N. Pirrotta, CMM, viii/5 (1964) [complete edn]Italian Secular Music, ed. W.T. Marrocco, PMFC, x (1974) [complete edn]

Amor tu vedi ch'io per te

Donna non fu giammai

Piatà ti mova

S'avesse força [attrib. ‘… pitor’ in I-La 184]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Levi: ‘Botteghe e canzoni della vecchia Firenze’, Nuovi studi medievali, iii (1926–7), 93–110

R. Taucci: ‘Fra Andrea dei Servi’, Studi storici sull’Ordine dei Servi di Maria, ii (1934–5), 73–108, esp. 96

E. Li Gotti: ‘Per la biografia di due minori musicisti italiani dell' “ars nova”’, Restauri trecenteschi (Palermo, 1947), 99–105, esp. 103

K. von Fischer: Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento (Berne, 1956), 92

N. Pirrotta: Preface to CMM, viii/5 (1964), iii

K. von Fischer: ‘Quelques remarques sur les relations entre les Laudesi et les compositeurs florentins du Trecento’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento Convegno II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 247–52

J. Nádas and A. Ziino: The Lucca Codex (Codice Mancini): Introductory Study and Facsimile Edition (Lucca, 1990)

G. Di Bacco: ‘Alcune nuove osservazioni sul codice di Londra (British Library, MS Additional 29987)’, Studi musicali, xx (1991), 181–234

KURT VON FISCHER/GIULIANO DI BACCO

Bonaldi, Francesco.

See Bonardo Perissone, Francesco.

Bonamici, Ferdinando

(b Naples, 1827; d Naples, Sept 1905). Italian pianist and composer. He was secretary of the Naples Conservatory and later taught the piano there. He shared the interest, widespread in the 1860s, in raising the level of Italian musical culture by fostering an appreciation of instrumental music and the Classical composers. To this end he founded, on the model of the quartet societies of Florence and other centres, the Circolo Musicale Bonamici. This existed until 1867 and from January 1865 published (again on the model of the Florence Society) the Monitore del Circolo Bonamici, which periodically issued biographies of great musicians. He organized the first Italian music congress, which opened in Naples on 15 September 1864. His last years were devoted to teaching and composing. He composed three operas (1871–9), which were not performed, and a large number of piano works, including operatic transcriptions, fantasies and salon pieces typical of the time, a number of which (Momenti musicali, Romanze senza parole, Novellette) in their intimate and expressive style anticipated the art of Martucci later in the century. He was longest remembered, however, for his studies, especially those for the left hand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Panella)

G. Pannain: ‘La musica a Napoli dopo Bellini: saggi e note’, Ottocento musicale italiano (Milan, 1952)

R. Di Benedetto: ‘Beethoven a Napoli nell'Ottocento’, NRMI, v (1971), 3–21

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972)

SERGIO MARTINOTTI

Bonamico, Johann Franz.

?Austrian composer. See under his father Guetfreund, Peter.

Bonamico, Pietro.

See Guetfreund, Peter.

Bonamicus, Cornelius.

See Freundt, Cornelius.

Bonanni [Buonanni], Filippo

(b Rome, 11/16 Jan 1638; d Rome, 30 March 1725). Italian librarian and bibliographer. He seems to have been a Jesuit. He was chief librarian at the Collegio Romano from 1676; he was also in charge of the archives of the Museum Kircherianum, Rome, of which he compiled the catalogue (Rome, 1709). His other, more important work is the Gabinetto armonico pieno d'istromenti sonori indicati e spiegati (Rome, 1722, rev. and enlarged by G. Ceruti with 151 plates engraved on copper by A. van Westerhout, 1776). It is one of the principal documents for the history of 18th-century musical instruments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (P. Omodeo)

C. Sachs: Handbuch der Musikinstrumentenkunde (Leipzig, 1920, 2/1930/R)

G. Hilpert: F.B. und seine Gabinetto armonico (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1945)

SERGIO MARTINOTTI

Bonaparte.

French family of rulers and patrons. See under Napoleon i.

Bonard [Bonnard, Bonart], Laurent

(fl 1547–54). French composer. He was a priest and maître des enfants at Amiens Cathedral between 1547 and 1553. Five of his four-voice chansons were published in Paris by Nicolas Du Chemin between 1550 and 1552 and another, arranged for voice and guitar, was printed by Le Roy & Ballard in 1554. Most of the chansons are courtly huitains set in the suave homophonic idiom of Pierre Sandrin and his generation. It is not known whether he was related to the Bonard family of instrumentalists (Roland, his brother Vincent and his sons Nicolas and Pierre), active in Paris in the early 17th century. Alternatively he might be related to Francesco Bonardo Perissone or Iseppo Bonardo.

WORKS

Amour et mort ont faict une alliance (G. d'Avrigny), 4vv, 1550¹²; Amour voyant le travail, 4vv, 1551⁹; Au jour, au joli point du jour, Sup, gui, 1554³³; J'ay tant souffert pour ung plaisir avoir, 4vv, 1550¹²; Mort et amour un jour se rencontrent, 4vv, 1550¹²; Resve-je point, Dieu, 4vv, 1552⁴

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Durand: ‘La musique de la cathédrale d'Amiens avant la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie, xxix (1920–22), 329–457, esp. 362; repr. in La vie musicale dans les provinces françaises, i (Geneva, 1972), 1–131

FRANK DOBBINS

Bonardo, Iseppo

(fl 1588). Italian composer and instrumentalist. He was employed as a ‘sonatore’ in the service of the Venetian republic at the time of publication of his collection of three-voice villanellas, Il primo libro delle napolitane a tre voci (Venice, 1588).

FRANK DOBBINS

Bonardo [Bonard, Bonardi] Perissone, Francesco [Bonaldi, Bunaldi, Francesco]

(b ?1520–30; d after 1571). Flemish composer, active in Italy. He probably lived in Paris in the early 1550s. He was maestro di cappella at Padua Cathedral between 3 April 1565 and 18 March 1571. He was almost certainly a member of the Accademia dei Costanti in Padua, at least in 1565; his only known book of madrigals is dedicated to this academy. It resembles stylistically works of composers belonging within the Venetian orbit. One cannot eliminate the possibility of his being identical with Perissone Cambio, but this seems unlikely.

WORKS

Il primo libro di madrigali, 4–6vv (Venice, 1565)

3 chansons, 4vv, 1550¹²; 1 chanson, 4vv, 1551⁹; 1 chanson, 4vv, 1552⁴; 1 chanson, inc., GB-Lbl

2 greghesche, 4vv, 1564¹⁶; 4 napolitane, 3vv, 1565¹²; 2 giustiniane, 3vv, 1570¹⁷; greghesca ed. S. Cisilino (Padua, 1974)

1 madrigal, 6vv, 1570¹⁵; 1 madrigal, 3vv, 1586¹²; 1 madrigal, 5vv, 1589¹² (only S by Bonardo)

2 motets, 8vv, 1564¹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Draudius: Bibliotheca classica (Frankfurt, 1611, enlarged 2/1625)

R. Casimiri: ‘Musica e musicisti nella cattedrale di Padova nei sec. XIV, XV, XVI: contributo per una storia’, NA, xviii (1941), 1–31, 101–214; xix (1942), 49–92

C. van den Borren: ‘La contribution italienne au Thesaurus Musicus de 1564’, JRBM, i (1946–7), 33–46

JOANNA WIECKOWSKI/R

Bonarelli della Rovere, Prospero

(b Novellara, nr Reggio nell'Emilia, 5 Feb or Nov 1582; d Ancona, 9 March 1659). Italian dramatist. He spent his first years in Novellara with his relative Camillo Gonzaga. He was trained at the court of Ferrara and Modena where he lived with his brother Guidobaldo (a writer of tragedies) and then at the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia. Despite an offer of service with the Este family he established himself in Ancona (c1604), retaining his residency when he entered the service of the Medici in Florence. He was a member of various academies (including the Intrepidi of Ferrara, the Gelati of Bologna and the Umoristi of Rome); in Ancona he founded the Accademia dei Caliginosi (7 Jan 1624) and organized the activities of the public theatre of the ‘Arsenale’.

Bonarelli's works were performed in various Italian cities and in Vienna, for which court he provided opera-ballettos, pastorals, tornei and intermedi (c1630–38), some of them set to music by Lodovico Bartolaia, for example the torneo L’Antro dell’Eternità and the opera regia La Fidalma (both for Vienna, 1636). His reputed collaboration with Antonio Bertali is doubtful. Mention of his occasional activity as a composer is found in his Lettere (Bologna, 1636), which also contains evidence of his connections with other writers and musicians and sets out his ideas on contemporary dramaturgy. A collection of his dramas, Melodrami, cioè opere da rappresentarsi in musica, was published in Ancona in 1647. He may have written the music for the intermedi Esilio d’Amore (for Ancona, 1623), but none of his music seems to have survived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AlaleonaS

AllacciD

ES (C.E. Tanfani)

DBI (F. Angelini Frajese)

G.M. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d'Italia (Brescia, 1753–63), ii, 1154–7

A. La Torre: Notizie sulla vita e sulle opere di Prospero Bonarelli secentista anconetano (Matera, 1910)

R. Klein: ‘Die Schauplätze der Hofoper’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 371–6

G. Bonarelli: I Bonarelli d'Ancona (Gubbio, 1983)

G. Morelli and T. Walker: ‘Migliori plettri: “Il Medoro” di Aureli–Lucio (Venezia, 1658)’, introduction to DMV, iv (1984), ix–lvii, esp. xxv–xxxi [incl. Eng. summary]

H. Seifert: Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert (Tützing, 1985)

M. Salvarani: ‘Tornei ed intermedi all' “Arsenale” di Ancona (1608–1623)’, RIM, xxiv (1989), 306–29

R. Cincarelli: ‘Strategie teatrali di un dilettante nel Seicento’, introduction to Prospero Bonarelli: Il Solimano (Rome, 1992)

MARCO SALVARANI

Bonart, Laurent.

See Bonard, Laurent.

Bonastre i Bertram, Francesc

(b Montblanch, Tarragona, 20 April 1944). Catalan musicologist. While at the diocesan seminary in Tarragona he won the attention of music professor Francesc Tápies, achieving in 1963 distinction in a course at the Tarragona Conservatory. At the Universitat Autònoma, Barcelona, he became a licentiate (1967) and later gained the doctorate (1970) in Romance philology. Concurrently he directed the university Schola Cantorum. In 1973 he co-founded the Societat Catalana de Musicologia and in the same year became a corresponding member of the Real Academia de S Fernando, Madrid. In 1976, newly elected as professor of musicology in his home university, he won a Juan March Foundation's musicological prize enabling him to investigate Antonio Rodríguez de Hita's theoretical and creative enterprises.

In 1981 Bonastre i Bertram founded Recerca musicològica, a Barcelona university yearbook that in the double volume xi-xii, 1991–2 (1996), published research articles in Catalan, Spanish, English, Italian and French. Between 1972 and 1993 he discussed Catalonian topics in his articles for Anuario musical, and in 1983 began work editing a number of neglected Catalonian works from the 17th century to the 19th. These range from oratorios by Luis Vicente Gargallo, Josep Carcoler's Stabat mater and Bernat Beltran's Symphony in E (1798) to Pedrell's orchestral symphonic poem Excelsior.

WRITINGS

‘Pedrell, precursor de la reforma musical litúrgica de 1903’, AnM, xxvii (1972), 103–7

‘El órgano de Sta. Maria de Montblanc y sus organistas durante los siglos XVII-XVIII’, AnM, xxviii-xxix (1973–4), 243–67

‘La interpretación de las verbetas’, AnM, xxx (1975), 49–58

Felipe Pedrell: acotaciones a una idea (Tarragona, 1977)

Música y parámetros de especulación (Madrid, 1977)

‘Estudio de la obra teórica y práctica del compositor Antonio Rodríguez de Hita’, RdMc, ii (1979), 47–86

‘A l'entorn d'una cançó francòfoba del s.XVII’, AnM, xlii (1987), 105–10

‘L'obra de Fra Bartolomeu Triay a l'orgue de Torroella de Montgrí (1682)’, AnM, xliii (1988), 111–19

La Banda Municipal de Barcelona: cent anys de Música Ciutadana (Barcelona, 1989)

Francesc Bonastre, Oriol Martorell: conversa/transcrita per Xavier Febres (Barcelona, 1990)

‘L'oratori a Barcelona en el primer terç del segle XIX’, AnM, xlviii (1993), 207–16

Juan Pau Pujol: la música d'una época (Barcelona, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Reaney: ‘Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya, vol.10, 1982–1984’, ML, lxx (1989), 525 only

R. Stevenson: ‘Recerca musicològica, xi-xii, 1991–92 (1996)’, Inter-American Music Review, xvi/1 (1997), 97–101

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bonaventi, Giuseppe.

See Boniventi, Giuseppe.

Bonaventura da Brescia [de Brixia]

(fl Brescia 1487–97). Italian music theorist. He studied in Padua in 1487, but seems to have spent the rest of his life as a friar in the Franciscan convent in Brescia. At the request of a fellow friar he undertook a brief treatise on the fundamentals of music ‘for the use of poor and simple religious’. It was first published under the title Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497), but all subsequent editions bear the title Regula musicae planae. In 42 short chapters Bonaventura covered the Guidonian hand, the staff, note names, hexachords and their properties, clefs, mutation, the 13 species of intervals, modes and intonations. Although the chapter headings are in Latin, the treatise itself is mostly in Italian; this may account for its substantial popularity and success.

Bonaventura's classification of the modes and the discussion of three semitones show his dependence on Marchetto da Padova. This is made explicit in the Brevis collectio artis musicae (also called Venturina), the earlier manuscript version (1489) from which the printed version was distilled: it quotes extensively from Marchetto's Lucidarium and Nicolò Burzio's Florum libellus, and parts are taken from D.B. de Francia's treatise (I-Vnm lat. VIII. 64=1315). Bonaventura's treatise, however, is directed towards scholars, and acknowledges the correctness of the Pythagorean division of the tone.

WRITINGS

Brevis collectio artis musicae (Venturina) (MS, 15 Sept 1489, I-Bc A57); ed. A. Seay (Colorado Springs, 1980)

Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497, 2/1497/R and 19 later edns to 1550 as Regula musicae planae); ed. and Eng. trans by A. Seay as Rules of Plain Music (Breviloquium Musicale) (Colorado Springs, 1979)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SpataroC

A. Valentini: I musicisti bresciani e il Teatro grande (Brescia, 1894), 32

A. Sartori: Documenti per la storia della musica al Santo e nel Veneto (Vicenza, 1977), 14

F.A. Gallo: ‘La trattatistica musicale, III’, Storia della cultura veneta dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, iii (1981), 297–314, esp. 298

BONNIE J. BLACKBURN

Bonbarde.

See Perrinet.

Bonci, Alessandro

(b Cesena, nr Rimini, 10 Feb 1870; d Viserba, nr Rimini, 9 Aug 1940). Italian tenor. After study with Pedrotti and Felice Coen in Pesaro, and with Delle Sedie in Paris, he made his début in Parma (1896) as Fenton in Falstaff. In the early years of the new century he was for some time regarded as Caruso’s only serious rival, excelling in roles demanding lightness, agility and elegance rather than in the heavier and more dramatic parts. After some appearances at Covent Garden, he scored a great success in New York in 1906, singing in I puritani at the opening of Hammerstein’s new Manhattan Opera House; but for the next three seasons he transferred his activities to the Metropolitan, where he sang 65 performances of 14 roles. In World War I he served with the Italian Air Force; he made only sporadic appearances thereafter, devoting most of his time to teaching in Milan. In the older repertory he excelled by virtue of the sweetness of his tone and the finish of his phrasing, qualities that are especially evident in his earlier recordings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

T. Hutchinson: ‘Alessandro Bonci’, Record Collector, xi (1957), 148–62, 234–5 [incl. discography]

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR

Bond, Capel

(b Gloucester, bap. 14 Dec 1730; d Coventry, 14 Feb 1790). English organist and composer. A son of William Bond, a bookseller in Gloucester, he probably attended the Crypt school under his uncle, the Rev. Daniel Bond, before being apprenticed (for £2 10s.) to the cathedral organist, Martin Smith, at the age of 12. In 1749 he moved to Coventry, becoming organist of St Michael and All Angels and, from Easter 1752, organist of Holy Trinity. Both churches were large; St Michael’s, then said to be the second largest parish church in England and later to become Coventry Cathedral, housed an exceptionally fine three-manual organ by Thomas Swarbrück. Bond held both posts until his death in 1790, filling them with such distinction that from 1770, in consideration of his ‘superior merit and regular attendance’, he was given £10 per annum over and above his £30 salary for the Holy Trinity post, as a ‘Compliment’. Bond did much to develop musical life in the Midlands. He organized subscription concerts, and under his direction the Musical Society in Coventry became choral as well as instrumental; in 1760 it held a festival, giving Messiah and Samson with professional choristers from Worcester and Gloucester. Bond directed in the first Birmingham Festival (1768), and brought oratorio to other Midland towns.

The subscribers to Bond’s Six Concertos in Seven Parts (London, 1766/R) included many prominent musicians in the Midlands as well as 12 musical societies. The set has features in common with those published earlier by the Midlands composers Richard Mudge (1749) and John Alcock (1750). Indeed, Mudge’s no.1 and Bond’s no.1, both trumpet concertos, are closely related. Nos.2–5 in Bond’s set are concerti grossi of a more orthodox type, mixing elements of Geminiani, Handel, Stanley and Domenico Scarlatti as arranged by Charles Avison, while no.6, a galant bassoon concerto, has points of contact with the bassoon writing in ‘Softly rise, O southern breeze’ from Boyce’s Solomon (1742) and, perhaps, Boyce’s lost bassoon concerto of 1745. Nevertheless, Bond’s concertos have a quiet individuality and are attractive and fluent. The set is arguably the best produced by an English provincial composer, and two of them were played in the Concerts of Antient Music until 1812. Nos.1 and 6 have been edited by Gerald Finzi (London, 1957, 1964). Bond’s only other known music, Six Anthems in Score (London, 1769), belongs to the parish church repertory, but has much of the complexity and polish of contemporary cathedral music. It was reprinted five times (1769–77), and nos.2, 4 and 5 appeared in Robert Willoughby’s Sacred Harmony in Parts (London, 1799).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.W. Humberstone: ‘A New History, Coventry’s Story’, Coventry Herald and Free Press (an occasional Series, 1911; assembled in Coventry City Library, Coventry and Warwickshire Collections, qJN 900, pp.81, 82, 102)

J. Sutcliffe-Smith: The Story of Music in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1945)

‘A Forgotten Gloucester Composer’, Gloucester Citizen (2 Aug 1955)

N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979/R)

D. Lines: Capel Bond and his Six Concertos in Seven Parts (thesis, Colchester Institute, 1986) [incl. score of concs.]

W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1992)

OWAIN EDWARDS/PETER HOLMAN

Bond [Jacobs-Bond], Carrie

(b Janesville, WI, 11 Aug 1862; d Hollywood, CA, 28 Dec 1946). American composer and publisher. She showed early talent for improvising songs to her own words and in painting. Her only formal study was with local teachers and at 18 she married E.J. Smith, by whom she had one child. They separated in 1887 and in 1889 she married Frank Lewis Bond. She published her first songs in 1894. Frustrated by difficulties in getting further songs published, and displaying the enterprising spirit that characterized the rest of her life, she formed her own publishing company, Carrie Jacobs-Bond & Son. By performing her songs she cultivated influential contacts. The baritone David Bispham sang a recital exclusively of Bond songs in Chicago in 1901, and friends arranged for her to perform for President Roosevelt at the White House. She published about 175 songs, of which two were highly successful. I Love you Truly (1901) sold over a million copies, and A Perfect Day (1910) sold eight million copies of sheet music and over five million records. She designed her own music covers, and the wild rose was a prominent image. Her publishing company moved eight times in Chicago to accommodate the growing business, and in 1920 she moved it to Hollywood. In 1927 she published her autobiography The Roads of Melody; in 1928 she stopped composing for a time after her son's suicide. Her last song, Because of the Light, was copyrighted in 1944 when she was 82.

WORKS

(selective lsit)

most works published in Chicago

Songs (texts by Bond unless otherwise stated): 7 Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose (1901); California, the Land of Blossoms (1902); 2 Songs for Contralto: His Lullaby (B. Healy), Longing (1907); Love and Sorrow (P.L. Dunbar) (1908); A Perfect Day (1910); Half Minute Songs (1910–11); A Cottage in God's Garden (1917); Roses are in Bloom (1926); Because of the Light (F. Carlton) (1944)

Arrs. (transcr. M. Gillen and O. Chalifoux): Negro Spirituals of the South (1918); Old Melodies of the South (1918)

Pf: The Chimney Swallows (1897); Memories of Versailles (1898); Reverie (1902); Betty's Music Box (1917)

Principal publisher: Boston Music Co.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Jacobs Bond: ‘Music Composition as a Field for Women’, The Etude, xxxviii (1920), 583–4

Obituary, New York Times (29 Dec 1946)

P.R. Bruce: From Rags to Roses: the Life and Times of Carrie Jacobs Bond, an American Composer (thesis, Wesleyan U., 1980)

M. Good: Carrie Jacobs Bond: Her Life and Times (thesis, Butler U., 1984)

S. Leding Lawhorn: A Performer's Guide to Selected Twentieth-Century Sacred Solo Art Songs Composed by Women from the United States of America (diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, KY, 1993)

PAMELA FOX

Bond, Graham (John Clifton)

(b Romford, 28 Oct 1937; d London, 8 May 1974). English jazz, blues and rock musician. Already an established jazz saxophonist, having played with Don Rendell Quintet, Bond was a formative influence on the British Blues revival of the early 1960s, and played in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. He formed the Graham Bond Organisation with Ginger Baker (drums), Jack Bruce (bass) and John McLaughlin (guitar); McLaughlin left after a few months, and Baker and Bruce later formed Cream. The group's combination of blues, rock and jazz was innovative, marked by Bond's distinctive use of the Hammond organ and, later, the Mellotron. Their albums Sound of ’65 (Col., 1965) and There's a Bond Between Us (Col., 1966) were influential and presented original songs alongside covers. Bond moved to the USA, releasing the albums Mighty Graham Bond and Love is the Law (both Pulsar, 1968). They were not well received and Bond moved back to England in 1969, forming a new band, the Graham Bond Initiation. Despite further albums, notably with Pete Brown for Bond and Brown: Two Heads are Better than One (Chapter One, 1972), he never regained his early success. In 1973 Bond formed Magus with English folk singer Carolanne Pegg; it disbanded for financial reasons without recording. He died in a rail accident in 1974. Along with John Mayall and Alexis Korner, Bond was one of the great catalytic figures of 1960s rock. He has been called the ‘founding father’ of British rhythm and blues and the ‘father of British blues’. (H. Shapiro: Graham Bond: the Mighty Shadow, Enfield, 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Logan and B. Wooffinden: ‘Graham Bond’, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock (London, 1976/R), 37–8

Bond, Victoria (Ellen)

(b Los Angeles, 6 May 1945). American composer and conductor. She studied at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl and at the Juilliard School (MMA 1975, DMA 1977), where her teachers included Roger Sessions, Vincent Persichetti, Jean Morel, Sixten Ehrling and Herbert von Karajan; she was the first woman to be awarded the doctorate in orchestral conducting from Juilliard. After making her American conducting début at Alice Tully Hall, New York (1973), Bond became affiliate conductor of the Pittsburgh SO and music director of the New Amsterdam SO (1978–80). She made her European début with the RTÉ Orchestra, Dublin in 1982 and her Chinese début with the Shanghai SO in 1993. In 1985 she received an award from the National Institute for Musical Theater to assist Christopher Keene at the NYC Opera. She has also appeared with the Houston SO, the Buffalo PO and the Wuhan (China) SO, and held conducting posts with the Albany and Empire State (New York) SO Youth Orchestra (1984–7), the Roanoke (Virginia) SO (1986–95), the Bel Canto Opera Company, New York (1982–8), Opera Roanoke (1989–95) and the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Opera (from 1998).

Bond’s compositions combine Baroque forms (passacaglia, canon, fugue, etc.) and contemporary techniques such as dissonant counterpoint, 12-tone rows and metric complexity. Some works also show the influence of jazz and Asian music. Urban Bird, a programmatic work, quotes two jazz classics: Charlie Parker’s Au private and John Coltrane’s Blue Train. Variations on a Theme of Brahms, written during a residency at the Brahmshaus in Germany, is based on a theme from Brahms’ String Sextet, op.18. Other important works include the opera Travels and the string quartet Dreams of Flying.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Equinox (ballet), New York, 1977; Other Selves (ballet), 1979; Great Galloping Gottschalk (ballet), 1981, Miami, 1986; The Frog Prince (musical fairy-tale, after J.L. and W.C. Grimm), Albany, NY, 1985; What’s the Point of Counterpoint? (musical fable), nar, orch, Albany, NY, 1985; Everyone is Good for Something (musical for young audiences), Louisville, KY, 1986; Gulliver (after J. Swift: Gulliver’s Travels), Louisville, KY, 17 March 1988, rev. as Travels, c1994; Molly ManyBloom (monodrama), S, str qt, New York, 16 June 1991

Orch: Elegy, 1971; 4 Frags., 1972; Sonata, 1972; White on Black, conc., sax qt, concert band, 1983; Ringing, 1986; Black Light, conc., jazz pf, orch, 1988; Urban Bird, conc., a sax, orch, 1993; Thinking Like a Mountain, 1994; Variations on a Theme of Brahms, 1998

Vocal: Aria (Bond), S, str qt, 1970; Suite aux troubadours, S, inst ens, 1970; Peter Quince at the Clavier (W. Stevens), S, pf, 1978; Margaret (G.M. Hopkins), S, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1984; Scat (II), S, tpt, 1984; A Modest Proposal, T, orch, 1999

Chbr and solo inst: Qt, cl, vn, va, vc, 1967; Trio, hn, tpt, trbn, 1969; Can(n)ons, cl, vn, 1970; Recitative, eng hn, str qt, 1970; Ménage à trois, a fl, b cl, a sax, 1971; Sonata, vc, pf, 1971; C-A-G-E-D, str qnt, 1972; Conversation Piece, va, vib, 1975; Pf Trio, 1979; Sandburg Suite, pf, 1980; Batucada, pf, 1985; Notes from Underground, a sax, pf, 1985; Old New Borrowed Blues (Variations on Flow my Tears), perc, hpd, db, vib, 1986; Hot Air, wind qnt, 1991; Dreams of Flying, str qt, 1994

Principal publishers: Broude, Presser, G. Schirmer, Seesaw, Subito

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Apone: ‘Victoria Bond: Composer, Conductor’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xxix/4 (1979), 28–35

J.W. LePage: Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century, i (Metuchen, NJ, 1981)

J. Hoffman: ‘In Concert: Victoria Bond’s Baton Revives Symphony’, Wall Street Journal (9 June 1987)

SAM DI BONAVENTURA, BARBARA JEPSON/ADRIENNE FRIED BLOCK

Bondeman, Anders

(b Eksjö, 16 Feb 1937). Swedish organist. He studied at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (1953–9) and then abroad, with Helmut Walcha (Bach interpretation) and Cor Kee (improvisation). He won the international organ competition in improvisation in Haarlem in 1965. After serving as church musician at Bengtsfors (1960–62) and Eksjö (1962–71), he was appointed organist at the Jacobskyrka in Stockholm in 1971 and a teacher at the Royal University College of Music the same year, becoming a professor in 1995. A consummate organist, Bondeman has given numerous concerts in Sweden and abroad and has become known as a leading exponent of modern organ improvisation, which he has also taught at the Royal College of Music. He was made a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1989.

HANS ÅSTRAND

Bondeville, Emmanuel (Pierre Georges)

(b Rouen, 29 Oct 1898; d Paris, 26 Nov 1987). French composer. He studied the organ at Rouen Cathedral, deputizing for his teacher at the age of ten. Subsequently, he studied with Deré at the Paris Conservatoire, also benefiting from an association with Dupré, to whom he showed all of his works before publication. In the 1930s Bondeville produced orchestral epics and his first opera, L’école des maris. In 1936 he was appointed director of the Poste de Radiodiffusion de la Tour Eiffel, later becoming music director of the RTF. He held operatic appointments at Monte Carlo (1945), at the Paris Opéra-Comique (1949) and at the Opéra (1952–70); he was as well known for his administrative abilities as for his compositions. In 1959 he was elected to succeed Florent Schmitt at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, of which he was made secretary in 1964. While better known for his operatic works, Bondeville wrote a number of orchestral works. His Illustrations pour Faust, commissioned by Radio France and based on poems by Goethe, shows the influence of Fauré’s harmony. The Symphonie chorégraphique (1965) demonstrates his ability to combine traditional 19th-century forms with bolder musical elements.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: L’école des maris (oc, 3, J. Laurent, after Molière), Paris, OC (Favart), 15 June 1935; Madame Bovary (drame lyrique, 3, R. Fauchois, after G. Flaubert), Paris, OC (Favart), 1 June 1951; Antoine et Cléopâtre (3, Bondeville, after W. Shakespeare), Rouen, Théâtre des Arts, 8 March 1974

Incid music: Illustrations pour Faust (J.W. von Goethe, trans. P. Sabatier), RTF, 1942

Orch: Triptych after Les illuminations: Bal des pendus, scherzo, 1930; Ophélie, sym. poem, 1933; Marine, sym. poem, 1934; Gaultier Garguille, sym. poem, 1953; Symphonie lyrique, 1957; Symphonie chorégraphique, 1965

Other works incl. Pf Sonata, 1937; pf pieces, songs, motets

WRITINGS

Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Florent Schmitt (Paris, 1959)

Funérailles de Tony Aubin (Paris, 1981)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Aubert: ‘P.-O. Ferroud, Marcel Delannoy, Henri Tomasi, E. Bondeville’, Le théâtre lyrique en France (Paris, 1937–9) [pubn of Poste National/Radio-Paris], iii, 266–74

P. Landormy: La musique française après Debussy (Paris, 1943)

A. Machabey: Portraits de trente musiciens français (Paris, 1949)

A. Renaudin: Emmanuel Bondeville (Rouen, 1965)

Daniel-Lesur: Bondeville: 1898–1987 (Rouen, 1990)

ANDREA MUSK

Bondini, Pasquale

(b ?Bonn, ?1737; d Bruneck, Tyrol, 30/31 Oct 1789). Italian impresario and bass. He is first mentioned as a buffo bass in Cajetan Molinari’s opera company at Prague in the 1762–3 season. He was later a prominent member of Bustelli’s company in Prague and Dresden. In 1777 he became director of the Elector of Saxony’s new company at Dresden; he also assumed responsibility for Leipzig. Under J.C. Brandes and later J.F. Reinecke as heads of drama the company’s repertory also included plays by Shakespeare, Lessing and Schiller. Operas performed included works by virtually all the leading Italian composers of the day. In 1781 Bondini also took over direction of the theatre at Count Thun’s palace in Prague and shortly afterwards Count Nostitz’s theatre. His company performed at Leipzig mainly in the summer and gave Die Entführung there at Michaelmas 1783 and at Dresden on 12 January 1785. But because he and his personnel were so heavily extended by his many activities, Bondini was obliged to engage other troupes and managers. His most important assistant was Domenico Guardasoni, who in 1787 became his co-director and in 1788 or 1789 his successor as impresario of the operatic side of his companies. Johann Joseph Strobach became musical director in 1785, and though the opera ensemble was small, it was highly regarded and very popular.

In December 1786 Bondini mounted Figaro, and in January he invited Mozart and his wife to Prague to share in the triumph the opera was enjoying; during his stay Mozart conducted a performance. Before returning to Vienna in February he had been commissioned by Bondini to write Don Giovanni; after delays due to illness in the company, the work was first performed on 29 October 1787 with Mozart conducting. His letter to Gottfried von Jacquin of 15–25 October contains valuable but tantalizingly brief comments on Bondini’s ensemble and on the preparations for the work. Within a year of the première Bondini’s fortunes had waned; ill-health led him to make Franz Seconda responsible for the drama company, and in summer 1789 he handed over his remaining assets before setting off for a visit to Italy. He died at Bruneck on the way.

Bondini’s wife Caterina was a popular soprano in her husband’s company in the mid-1780s. She sang Susanna in the first Prague production of Figaro in early December 1786, and on 14 December a performance was given for her benefit; her praises were sung in poems distributed in the theatre. She created the role of Zerlina in Don Giovanni; from the rehearsals dates the anecdote that Mozart taught her to scream effectively during the abduction scene in the finale of Act 1 by grabbing her unexpectedly round the waist.

The Bondinis’ daughter Marianna (1780–1813) sang Susanna in the French première of Figaro and often appeared with her husband, the bass Luigi Barilli, who was later manager of the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS; ES (F. D’Amico); NDB (K. Richter)

E. Devrient: Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (Leipzig, 1848–61); ed. R. Kabel and C. Trilse (Munich, 1967)

O. Teuber: Geschichte des Prager Theaters, i (Prague, 1883), 354ff; ii (Prague, 1885), 127ff

R. Prochazka: Mozart in Prag (Prague, 1892, 4/1938, ed. P. Nettl as Mozart in Böhmen)

O.E. Deutsch: Mozart: die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1961, rev. 2/1981 by J.H. Eibl; Eng. trans., 1965, 3/1990)

E. Pies: Prinzipale zur Genealogie des deutschsprachigen Berufstheaters vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Ratingen, 1973)

A. Campana: La campagnia di Pasquale Bondini: Praga 1787 (thesis, U. of Rome, 1987–8)

Z. Pilková: ‘Prazstí mozartovstí pevci v drázdanskych pramenech’ [Dresden sources for Prague singers of Mozart], HV, xxviii (1991), 299–304

PETER BRANSCOMBE

Bondioli, Giacinto

(b Quinzano, nr Brescia, 1596; d Brescia, 1636). Italian composer. He was the uncle of Biagio Marini and prior of the Dominican monastery in Venice from at least 1618 to 1625; he subsequently occupied a similar position in Brescia. Six of the eight published volumes of his music have not survived. Two extant volumes of psalms (op.4, Venice, 1622; op.8, Venice, 1627) are respectively for four and five voices; antiphonal elements occur in the later set. The motets, settings of the Magnificat and canzonas of his Soavi fiori (Venice, 1622) are for two performers and continuo; the vocal works use the concertato techniques fashionable at the time, while the instrumental canzonas tend to be conservative in both length and style. Bondioli is also represented by a canzona for violin and trombone in Marini’s op.1 (1617) and by a motet in Leonardo Simonetti’s collection Ghirlanda sacra (Venice, 1625, 2/1636). He was almost certainly related to the composer Giovanni Bondioli (fl 1638), who was in holy orders and associated with Ferrara. A volume of his settings of litanies and Marian antiphons for four voices and continuo was published in 1638.

ELEANOR SELFRIDGE-FIELD

Bondon, Jacques (Laurent Jules Désiré)

(b Boulbon, Bouches-du-Rhône, 6 Dec 1927). French composer. He studied at the Ecole César Franck (1946–8) and at the Paris Conservatoire (1948–53) with Milhaud and Rivier (composition), Dandelot (harmony) and Koechlin (counterpoint and fugue). In 1962 he formed the Orchestre de Chambre de Musique Contemporaine which became the Ensemble Moderne de Paris in 1968. He has been a member of the ORTF music committee (1963–5) and the Commission Nationale de la Musique Populaire (since 1970). In 1981 Bondon became director of the Conservatoire de Paris 20e Arrondissement, Paris. A prolific composer, he has drawn on a wide range of tonal precedents, and also on ideas from science fiction. He was able, without fearing triviality, to write music for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, matching the setting in the brittle iciness of his orchestration. In 1972 he was awarded the prize of the Académie du Disque for Giocoso. In this three-movement work for violin and string orchestra, Bondon fuses folk and jazz elements with brief excursions into serialism. His percussion quartet Musique pour un jazz différent highlights his exploration of the rhythmic potentials of jazz, the use of pitched instruments allowing the rhythmic interplay to be supported by a tonal aspect.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: La nuit foudroyée (op, 4, Y. Mauffret), 1961–3, concert perf., Paris, 26 Nov 1964, staged Metz, 10 Feb 1968; Les arbres (chbr op, 1, Mauffret), 1964, ORTF, 6 March 1965; Mélusine au rocher (op, 1, S. Lanoux), Radio Luxembourg, 14 Nov 1968, ORTF, 30 Nov 1969; Ana et l'albatross (op, 4, Mauffret), 1970, Metz, 21 Nov 1970; 1–330 (op, 4, J. Goury after E. Zamiatine), 1974, Nantes, 20 May 1975

Orch: Essai pour un paysage lunaire, small orch, 1951; Le taillis ensorcelé, 1954; Ondes Martenot Conc., 1955; Concert de printemps, 1957; La coupole, 1957; Suite indienne, 1958; Le pain de serpent, small orch, 1959; Giocoso, vn, str, 1960; Musique pour un autre monde, 1962; Kaleidoscope, 14 insts, 1964, rev. 1971; Fleurs de feu, 1965; La Maya, small orch, 1965; Concerto de Mars, gui, orch, 1966; Concerto de molines, vn, orch, 1966; Ivanhoe, 1966; Suite pour les Xes jeux, chorus, orch, 1967; Sonate pour un ballet, small orch, 1968; Lumières et formes animées, str, 1970; Ouverture latine, 1972, rev. as Sym., 1973; Conc., 7 brass insts, orch, 1974

Chbr and solo inst: Les insolites, 1956; Str Qt no.1, 1959; Le soleil multicolore, fl, va, hp, 1969; Musique pour un jazz différent, perc qt, 1971; 3 nocturnes, gui, 1971; Swing no.1, fl, hp, 1972; Swing no.2, gui, 1972; Swing no.3, perc qt, 1973

Incid music, film music

Principal publishers: Choudens, Eschig, Heugel, Transatlantique

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.-A. Marcel: ‘Jacques Bondon’, Cahiers du sud, nos. 359–61 (1961), 304–13

J. Roy: ‘Jacques Bondon’, Présences contemporaines: musique française (Paris, 1962), 471–83

P. Ancelin: ‘Entretien avec Jacques Bondon’, Lettres françaises (1964), no.1050

M.-J. Chauvin: ‘Entretien avec Jacques Bondon’, Courrier musical, no.29 (1970), 3–13

PAUL GRIFFITHS/ANDREA MUSK

Bonds [née Majors], Margaret Allison [Jeannette]

(b Chicago, 3 March 1913; d Los Angeles, 26 April 1972). American composer, pianist and teacher. The daughter of a physician, Dr Monroe Alpheus Majors, and his second wife, Estelle C. Bonds, an organist, she first studied with her mother, whose home was a gathering place for black writers, artists and musicians, including the composers Will Marion Cook and Florence Price. In high school Bonds studied piano and composition with Price and later with Dawson; she received the BM and MM degrees from Northwestern University (1933, 1934). She moved to New York in 1939 and in 1940 married Lawrence Richardson, though she retained the surname ‘Bonds’ (her mother’s maiden name) throughout her life. At the Juilliard Graduate School she studied the piano with Djane Herz and composition with Starer; other teachers included Harris.

Bonds won the Wanamaker prize for her song Sea Ghost in 1932. In 1933 she was the first black soloist to appear with the Chicago SO, playing Price’s Piano Concerto at the World’s Fair. During the 1930s Bonds opened the Allied Arts Academy in Chicago, and was active as a pianist in Canada and the USA. In New York she taught and served as music director for music theatre institutions, and organized a chamber society to foster the work of black musicians and composers. Later, she worked at the Inner City Institute and the Inner City Repertory Theater in Los Angeles.

Bonds’s output consists largely of vocal music. Best-known are her spirituals for solo voice with or without chorus, but she also wrote large music theatre works, notably Shakespeare in Harlem, Romey and Julie and U.S.A. As a popular-song writer she collaborated with Andy Razaf, Joe Davis and Harold Dickinson; the most popular of their works are Peachtree Street and Spring will be so sad. Her works for orchestra and for piano are programmatic and reflect her strong sense of ethnic identity in their use of spiritual materials, jazz harmonies and social themes (e.g. Montgomery Variations, dedicated to Martin Luther King and written at the time of the march on Montgomery in 1965). Her last major work, Credo, was first performed a month after her death by the Los Angeles PO under Mehta. Some of her arrangements of spirituals were commissioned and recorded by Leontyne Price during the 1960s.

WORKS

Stage: Shakespeare in Harlem (music theatre, L. Hughes), Westport, CT, 1959; Romey and Julie (music theatre, R. Dunmore); U.S.A. (music theatre, J. Dos Passos); The Migration (ballet), perf. 1964; Wings over Broadway (ballet); 4 other music-theatre works

Orch: 4 works, incl. Montgomery Variations, 1965

Choral: The Ballad of the Brown King (Hughes), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1954; Mass, d, chorus, org, perf. 1959 [only Kyrie is extant; reconstructed score in Thomas, 1983]; Fields of Wonder (Hughes), song cycle, male chorus, pf, perf. 1964; Credo (W.E.B. Dubois) S, Bar, chorus, orch, perf. 1972; many other sacred and secular works

Songs: 42, incl. Sea Ghost, 1932; The Negro Speaks of Rivers (Hughes), 1941; To a Brown Girl, Dead (Hughes), 1956; 3 Dream Portraits (Hughes), 1959; The Pasture (R. Frost), 1958; Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening (Frost), 1963

Popular songs: 14, incl. Peachtree Street, collab. A. Razaf, J. Davis, 1939; Spring will be so sad when she comes this year, collab. H. Dickinson, 1940; Georgia, collab. Razaf, Davis, c1939

Spirituals (all or most arrs.): 5 Spirituals, perf. 1942 (1964); Ezekiel saw the wheel, 1v, pf (1959), arr. orch, 1968; I got a home in that rock, 1v, orch/pf (1959), rev. 1968; Sing Aho, 1v, pf (1960); Go tell it on the mountain, 1v/chorus, pf (1962); This little light of mine, S, chorus, orch; Standin’ in the need of prayer (1v, pf)/(S, chorus); He’s got the whole world in his hands, 1v, pf (1963); Ev’ry time I feel the spirit, 1v, pf (1970); I wish I knew how it would feel to be free, S, chorus, orch; Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass (1v, pf)/(S, mixed chorus); 6 others

Pf: 4 works, incl. Spiritual Suite, Troubled Water, 1967

Principal publishers: Beekman Music, Dorsey, Sam Fox, W.C. Handy, Mutual Music Society, Ricordi, Hildegard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveW (B.G. Jackson) [incl. further bibliography]

SouthernB

A. Tischler: Fifteen Black American Composers with a Bibliography of their Works (Detroit, 1981) [incl. list of works]

A.J. Thomas: A Study of the Selected Masses of Twentieth-Century Black Composers: Margaret Bonds, Robert Ray, George Walker and David Baker (diss., U. of Illinois, 1983)

H. Walker-Hill: ‘Black Women Composers in Chicago: then and now’, Black Music Research Journal, xii/1 (1992), 1–23

BARBARA GARVEY JACKSON

Bondt, Cornelis de

(b The Hague, 9 Dec 1953). Dutch composer. He studied with Jan van Vlijmen and Louis Andriessen at the Hague Conservatory, graduating there in 1984. Since 1988 he has been teaching music theory at this conservatory.

Apart from Andriessen, de Bondt is the foremost composer of what has been coined the Hague School – a direction in Dutch composition characterized by a penchant for loud, angular, percussive sound, a strong emphasis on harmony and rhythm and a Stravinskian objectivity. Typical composers in this never clearly defined group are Huib Emmer, Diderik Wagenaar, and to a lesser extent, Gilius van Bergeijk and Dick Raaijmakers.

De Bondt first attracted attention in 1979 with Bint, written for the group Hoketus. Bint was process music, a powerful grid of pulses, shifting gradually to ever higher gears. De Bondt’s subsequent works all share these qualities of power and process, and the processes soon became increasingly complex. De Bondt was one of the first Dutch composers to use the computer as a composing tool, devising programmes of his own making for ordering, sifting, shifting and controlling the building materials for his monumental compositions.

In the five-work cycle Het gebroken oor he explored the domain of ‘lost tonality’, in search of a dramatic power and a musical hierarchy that, in his view, had disappeared from music after the collapse of tonality. With this aim, he employed fragments of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Purcell, Beethoven and Stravinsky, torn to shreds, stretched in time, and changed beyond recognition.

Several later works feature the use of electronic equipment, with the aim of realizing note durations of extreme length. Among these, De tragische handeling (Actus tragicus, 1993), written for the ensemble LOOS, is the most striking example of De Bondt’s relentless, highly individual way of composing.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Dipl’ Ereoo [A twofold Tale] (Empedocles), SATB, 2 eng hn, 2 heckelphones, 2 basset-hn, 2 b cl, 4 hn, 2 vc, 2 db, 1990; Bloed II (Bible: Exodus, Euripides, Virgil), Ct, 2T, Bar, fl + a fl, eng hn, eng hn + ob d'amore, cl + basset-hn, cl + b cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, synth + cptr

Het gebroken oor, cycle in 5 parts: Het gebroken oor, fl, cl, b cl, eng hn, bn, hn, 2 pf, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1983–4; De deuren gesloten, 2 fl + pic, 5 sax, hn, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, 2 perc, 3 pf, 3 b gui, 2 synth, db, 1984–5; La fine d’una lunga giornata, fl + pic, pic cl + a sax, a sax, t + a sax, hn, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, pf, db, 1987; Grand Hotel, pf, 1985–8; Singing the Faint Farewell, fl, 3 sax, hn, 3 trpt, 3 trbn, 6 perc, pf, db, 1996

Other inst: Bint, 2 a sax, 2 b panflutes, 2 perc, 2 pf, 2 b gui, 1979–80; De namen der goden, 2 pf, elecs, 1992–3; De tragische handeling (Actus tragicus), A-pic cl + db cl + t sax, perc, pf, el gui, el b gui, elec, 1993; Dame blanche, rec, orch, elecs, 1995;

Principal publisher: Donemus

Principal recording company: Composers' Voice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. van der Waa and E. Wennekes: ‘Love, Death and the Pencil-Sharpener’, Key Notes, xxx (1996), 12–16

P.U. Hiu en J. van de Klis, eds.: Het HonderdComponistenBoek (Bloemendaal, 1997)

FRITS VAN DER WAA

Bonell, Carlos (Antonio)

(b London, 23 July 1949). British guitarist of Spanish parentage. He began to play the guitar at the age of five, learning with his father, and at ten made his first public appearance. He studied at the RCM with John Williams and Stephen Dodgson (1968–72), and made his London début in 1971. In 1972 he was appointed professor of guitar at the RCM. His international career began in 1975 with tours of Europe and the USA, and in 1978 he made his New York début. In 1983 he formed the Carlos Bonell Ensemble to perform Spanish and Latin American music.

Bonell is a virtuoso performer of sensitivity and refinement. He has a deep natural affinity with the Spanish Romantic repertory, which he interprets with warmth and precision, but is equally esteemed in the music of Ginastera, Britten, Petrassi and Berio. Many composers have dedicated works to him, including Ottavio Négro, Bryan Kelly, Michael Blake Watkins, Stephen Oliver and Douglas Young. He has recorded the complete guitar works of Walton and Britten, and in 1981 made the first digital recording of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. He has composed for his instrument, and also edited works by Sanz and Tárrega.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. de Camillis: ‘Carlos Bonell in Conversation’, Guitar, v/7 (1976–7), 14–17

G. Clinton: ‘Carlos Bonell’, Guitar International, xv/7 (1986–7), 23–7 [interview]

M.J. Summerfield: The Classical Guitar: its Evolution and its Players since 1800 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992)

GRAHAM WADE

Bonelli, Aurelio

(b Bologna, ?1569; d after 1620). Italian composer, organist and painter. According to Eitner and Gerber he was active at Milan about 1600. In 1602 he was organist of the monastery of S Michele in Bosco, Bologna, where between 1605 and 1616 he collaborated with his master Annibale Carracci on a series of frescoes and other paintings. He was still at Bologna in 1620, as organist of S Giovanni in Monte. Only his Primo libro de ricercari et canzoni (Venice, 1602) survives complete. Its contents, mostly in four parts, belong to the ‘classical’ Venetian tradition of instrumental music; they are also found, transcribed into German organ tablature and decked out with organ-style embellishments and diminutions, in a source in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, Turin (VIII, Giordano, 8), which dates from 1639–40. The two volumes by him that survive incomplete are Primo libro delle villanelle a tre voci (Venice, 1596) and Messe e motetti a quattro voci (Venice, 1620).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (O. Mischiati)

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

SartoriB

M.A. Swenson: The Four-Part Italian Ensemble Ricercar from 1540 to 1619 (diss., Indiana U., 1971)

COLIN TIMMS

Bones.

Concussion idiophones or Clappers. Instruments derived from the ancient use of animal ribs are commonly made of flat hardwood sticks, about 15 cm long and slightly curved. They are played in pairs (usually a pair in each hand); one ‘bone’ is held between the first and second fingers, pressed to the base of the thumb, and the other, held between the second and third fingers, is clacked against the first with a rapid flicking of the wrist. The bones produce a castanet-like sound capable of great rhythmic complexity. The bones were played in China before 3000 bce, in Egypt around that date, and in ancient Greece, ancient Rome and medieval Europe. There are occasional references to bones (as ‘knicky-knackers’) in 17th-century English sources. They are also known in sub-Saharan Africa. In the USA, they are associated primarily with black tradition and the minstrel show. It has been suggested that when the use of drums by slaves was banned in the 18th century the bones were used as a substitute. Their use by black Americans before the 1840s is little documented. In the early minstrel shows, however, the bones were an essential rhythmic constituent in the ensemble (fiddle, banjo, tambourine and bones); they also played solos, usually imitations of drums and horses. There has been a minor revival of interest in playing the bones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Logan: ‘The Ancestry of Brudder Bones’, Harper’s, lviii (1878–9), 687–98

H. Nathan: Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962/R)

S. Marcuse: A Survey of Musical Instruments (London, 1975)

D.J. Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977)

R.B. Winans: ‘Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex-slave Narratives’, Black Music Research Newsletter, v/5 (1982), 2–5

R.B. Winans: ‘Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852’, Musical Theatre in America, ed. G. Loney (Westport, CT, 1984), 71–97

ROBERT B. WINANS

Bonesi, Barnaba

(b Bergamo, 1745/6; d Paris, 25 Oct 1824). Italian theorist and composer. His first name has sometimes mistakenly been given as Benedetto. He studied singing under a pupil of Bernacchi, then composition for ten years under Giovanni Andrea Fioroni, maestro di cappella at Milan Cathedral. About 1778 he went to Paris, where he lived as a music teacher and composer (there is no evidence for Gerber's statement that he was maître de chant at the Comédie-Italienne). Choron was one of his pupils. He composed several operas of which Le rosier (Paris, c1788) had a good success at the Théâtre des Beaujolais in April 1788, as did his oratorio Judith at the Concert Spirituel (3 June 1781). He published in Paris Six quatuors concertans (c1779) and two collections of symphonies, both lost. He is best known for his Traité de la mesure, ou de la division du tems dans la musique et dans la poésie (Paris, 1806). Fétis praised Bonesi's erudition in this work, but criticized him for wrongly identifying musical measure with poetic metre and pointed out his indebtedness to Giovenale Sacchi for some of his ideas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

MGG1 suppl. (J. Gribenski)

Bonet, John.

See Benet, John.

Bonet (i Armengol), Narcís

(b Barcelona, 22 Jan 1933). Catalan composer. His musical training from 1940 to 1950 was undertaken with Joan Massià, María Carbonell, Joan Llongueres, Eduardo Toldrá and Nadia Boulanger, and he continued his studies in Paris with Igor Markevich (1966–8). In addition to his work as a composer and orchestral conductor, he has taught at the Conservatoire and acted as teaching adviser to the Schola Cantorum in Paris, at the National School of Music in Créteil and at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where he substituted for Boulanger. He was appointed president of the Joventuts Musicales de Catalunya and of the UNESCO International Music Council, and made secretary of Òmnium Cultural (an organization set up in Paris to promote Catalan culture) and of the Spanish Radio and Television SO and Choir. He has also produced a number of programmes for French radio.

His music has won several prizes and has been performed widely in Spain and France. It can readily be identified with 20th-century trends, without betraying its roots in Catalan folk music. He has a gift for communication, and his music's formal coherence reflects his absolute technical mastery. In Bonet’s style one can find correspondences with Stravinskian neo-classicism.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic and vocal

Dramatic: De nativitate Christi (retablo, 5 scenes, after T. de Villena: Vita Christi), 1957; L'Anunciació (misterio/op, 1, after de Villena: Vita Christi), 1971

Vocal-orch: Cançó de bressol de la Verge Maria [Lullaby of the Virgin Mary] (T. Garcés), mixed chorus, str, 1951; Missa in epiphania Domini, S, A, T, B, chorus, orch, 1957; Missa nova, chorus, fl, ob, bn, org, congregation, 1968; Ho sap tothom i és profecia [Everyone knows you are a prophet] (cant. de navidad, J.V. Foix), children's chorus, chorus, orch, 1972; Ps cl, chorus, orch, 1992

Unacc. chorus: Offertori (M. Bertran i Oriola), children's chorus, pf, 1948, rev. 1987; Quan em desvetllo a la nit (J. Maragall), 1949; Ave Maria, female chorus, 1951; Balada del bes (Maragall), 1951; 3 cançons populars catalanes, 1951; A la font gemada (Garcés), 1956; 7 gloses sobre melodies populars catalanes, 1956; Kyrie, Offertorium et Agnus Dei, 1957; Al torrent de Pareis (J. Alavedra), 1978; El camí de l'establia (Garcés), 4 children's vv, 1987

1v, ens: 4 cançons de bressol [Lullabies] (trad. texts), 1v, str qt, 1962; Le roi nu (cant. profana, E. Oudiette), S, fl, ob, eng hn, bn, tpt, hp, db, perc, 1975; He mirat aquesta terra (S. Espriu), S, fl, str orch, 1996

Songs for 1v, pf on texts by J. Maragall, R.M. Rilke and others

instrumental

Orch: La vaca cega, sym. poem, 1948; Suite de ballet, 1951; Suite, str, 1952; Homenatge a Gaudí, 1966; Vc Conc., 1966, rev. 1988; La pell del brau [The Hide of the Bull] (S. Espriu), nar, orch, 1967–77; La tramuntana, 4 studies, str, 1993; Le cimetière marin (P. Valéry), nar, orch, 1995; Tríptic de Sinera (Espriu), opt. S, fl, str, 1996; 7 cançons populars catalanes, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: 5 nocturns, pf, 1949–53; Danses llunyanes, vn, pf, 1952; Sonatina, va, pf, 1952; Sonatina, vn, pf, 1953; Preludi i dansa, pf, 1954; Homenatge a Beethoven, pf, 1956; Suite de Trufaldi, 2 cl, bn, str trio, 1956; Choral, org, 1959; Le pell del brau (S. Espriu), spkr, wind qnt, pf, db, perc, 1967; Divertimento, 3 tpt, 2 hn, 2 trbn, tuba, 1973; Homenatge a Emili Pujol, gui, 1973; Tricorde, fl, pf, 1990

WRITINGS

‘Actitud de nuestra juventud frente los problemas de la concienca y la responsibilidad ciudadana’, Criterion (Barcelona, 1960)

‘En Espagne’, ReM (1962), no.255, pp.111–20; no.262, pp.167–8 [issues devoted to light music and dance music]

Tratado de solfeo (Barcelona, 1983)

Òmnium cultural à Paris: XXV aniversarium 1961–1986, de Òmnium Cultural (Barcelona, 1986)

Principal publisher: Catalana d'Edicions Musicals

FRANCESC TAVERNA-BECH

Bonet de Paredes, Juan

(b Orihuela; d Toledo, 25 Feb 1710). Spanish composer. According to Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, he was sent to Madrid when he was still young. His first known musical post was maestro de capilla at the collegiate church in Berlanga de Duero (Soria); in 1680 he applied unsuccessfully for a similar position at Palencia Cathedral, but on 26 February 1682 he became maestro de capilla at Avila Cathedral. In September 1684 he successfully sought permission to be transferred to Segovia Cathedral following the death of Miguel de Irízar; he was later expelled for ‘angry words’ with a canon in the course of a procession. On 1 January 1687 he became maestro de capilla at the Monasterio de Encarnación, Madrid. According to Barbieri he acted as notary for the Toledo Inquisition in 1688, and from 1691 to 1706 he was maestro de capilla at the Descalzas Reales. On 5 November 1706 Bonet succeeded Pedro Ardanaz as maestro de capilla at Toledo Cathedral, where he remained until his death.

In 1694 Bonet de Paredes was involved in a dispute over a fragment of a composition by the then master of the Chapel Royal, Sebastián Durón, in which he resolved a sustained note, causing a series of dissonances.

Bonet, subscribing to the conservative wing, did not support Durón's stance. Later Manuel de Egüés, choirmaster of Burgos Cathedral, intervened, relating that ‘a heated debate occurred a few years ago between Maestros Paredes and Durón, and the other chapel masters of the principal churches did not approve. I wrote at length on that occasion, condemning Durón […] Whenever I see such positions being adopted, I shall consider them as opposed to the art of music, which consists of very clear and definite rules’.

Most of Bonet's works are in the archives of the cathedrals of Segovia, Segorbe, Burgos, Cuenca and Salamanca, and in the monasteries of El Escorial, Guadalupe and Santa Ana de Avila. He most often writes for two choirs, although there are also works for a solo choir of four voices. A small number of pieces (tonos, solos, duos or quartets) are for one or more soloists. His music generally falls within the old-style polychoral baroque style, with basso continuo. In carols such as Clarísimas luces he uses two choirs which, by the use of enjambment or by alternating, provide the basis of the musical discourse, whereas in the carols Ah de la selva and Si arrepentida vuelas he falls back on the contrast between the solo and the rest of the choir. From a formal point of view these carols consist of refrain-couplet, a structure inherited from the 16th century, which indicates Bonet's overall conservatism. While his works show a remarkable mastery of counterpoint and great skill in construction, the fact that he does not take liberties or use bold harmonies deprives his work of a certain freshness.

WORKS

selective

Vocal works, incl. 2 pss, E-Tc; Mag, SSAT, SATB, bc, El Escorial, Real Monasteria de S Lorenzo; 2 motets, SSAT, SATB, bc, Guadelupe, Real Monasteria de S Maria, Asa; 21 villancicos, incl. Ah de la selva, 5vv, bc, vle; Clarísimas luces, SSAT, SATB, org, vle; Si arrepentida vuelas, 3vv, bc, all ed. P. Capdepón (Madrid, 1998); Tono al Santísimo Sacramento, SSAT, bc, 1684, SEG

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LaborD

F. Pedrell: Catàlech de la Biblioteca musical de la Diputaciò de Barcelona, i (Barcelona, 1908), 60

F. Rubio Piqueras: Música y músicos toledanos (Toledo, 1923), 54

F. Rubio Piqueras: ‘El archivo musical de la catedral de Toledo’, TSM, xi (1927), 90–92; xii (1928), 1–2, 18–20, 35–6, 46–7, 53 only, 60–61, 68–9, 77–9, 84–5; xiii (1929), 12–14, 92 only

J. López-Calo: La música en la Catedral de Segovia: Catálogo del archivo de música, ii (Segovia, 1988–9), 196

P. Capdepón: La música en el Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales de Madrid (Madrid, 1990), 160

PAULINO CAPDEPÓN VERDÚ

Bonetti, Carlo

(fl 1648–62). Italian composer. He was an Augustinian monk. He may have received his musical education at Loreto: according to the title-page of his publication of 1662 he was ‘in alma aede Lauretana musicae praefectus’. This volume, which appeared in Rome, consists of motets for one to six, eight, nine and 11 voices, together with 12-voice litanies. He is also represented by a sacred piece in two anthologies (RISM 1648¹ (= 1649⁴) and 1661¹).

Boneventi, Giuseppe.

See Boniventi, Giuseppe.

Bonfichi, Paolo

(b Livraga, nr Lodi, ?6 Oct 1769; d Lodi, 29 Dec 1840). Italian composer and organist. The birthdate given is from his autobiographical sketch in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung; Fétis gave 16 October and others 17 December. He taught himself to play the harpsichord and organ before becoming a student at the university in Parma, where he also had lessons in figured bass. In 1787 he entered the order of the Servi di Maria and was obliged to give up music, but on being sent to Rome in 1790 for a course of theology, he also studied counterpoint under Guglielmi and began to compose. Returning to Parma after six years, he remained in his monastery until its suppression in 1805. He then settled in Milan as a singing teacher and composer. In 1807 he lost to Asioli in his candidacy for the posts of composition master and censore at the conservatory. In 1828 he failed to become maestro di cappella at S Petronio, Bologna, but from 1829 to 1839 he held that post at the Santa Casa of Loreto.

Bonfichi composed church music primarily, but also instrumental and vocal works and at least four operas (he admitted only to the two serious ones in his autobiographical sketch). He was best known for his sacred cantatas and oratorios, most of the latter first performed at Rome, either privately or in the Chiesa Nuova of the Filippini. These were highly regarded for their dramatic style, a quality that caused his church music to be condemned by the reformers later in the century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (F.C. Ricci)

EitnerQ

FétisB

MGG1 suppl. (A. Zecca Laterza) [incl. list of works]

‘Nachrichten’, AMZ, xxx (1828), 496–8 [biographical sketch based on material supplied by Bonfichi]

‘Biografia: Paolo Bonfichi’, I teatri (16 April 1829)

G. Oldrini: Storia musicale di Lodi (Lodi, 1883), 142–8

G. Tebaldini: L’archivio musicale della Cappella Lauretana (Loreto, 1921), 150

A.M. Vicentini: ‘Memorie di musicisti dell’Ordine dei Servi di Maria’, NA, viii (1931), 34–57

P. Branchesi: ‘Primi appunti bibliografici sui musicisti italiani dell’Ordine dei Servi (secolo xvi–xix)’, L’organo di S. Maria dei Servi in Bologna nella tradizione musicale dell’ordine (Bologna, 1967), 149–52

DENNIS LIBBY

Bonfigli, Lorenzo

(b Lucca, c1800; d Lucca, Jan 1876). Italian tenor. The year after his début in 1827 he created the title roles in Luigi Ricci's Ulisse in Itaca and Magagnini's Osmano Pascia at the Teatro S Carlo, Naples. In 1829 he sang in the premières of Persiani's Eufemio di Messina (Teodoto) and Constantino in Arles (title role), and the following year created Tebaldo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi at La Fenice, Venice. His arrogant nature, which on occasion offended Mercadante and Donizetti, nearly provoked a duel with Bellini, to whom Bonfigh complained about the specially written ‘È serbato questo acciaro’. He did, however, apologise to the composer following the Cavatina's considerable success.

In 1831 Bonfigli created the duke in Donizetti's Francesca di Foix and Nerestano in Mercadante's Zaira. He also sang in the premières of Mercadante's Francesca Donato (1835) and operas by Granara, R. Manna, Guglielmi, Combi and F. Ricci. His repertory also included Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (Almaviva), Otello (title role) and Bianco e Falliero (Contareno), Bellini's La sonnambula (Elvino) and Norma (Pollione), Donizetti's Gemma di Vergy and works by the young Verdi. His vocalism was florid and agile, but within a central tessitura suited to heroic parts. Initially a tenore di forza, he was among those (like Donizelli and Basadonna) who catalyzed the transition to the modern tenor voice. His career continued successfully until about 1847.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GSL

A. Amore: Vincenzo Bellini: vita, studi e ricerche (Catania, 1894)

S. Palermo: Saverio Mercadante: biografia, epistolario (Fasano, 1985)

RICCARDO LA SPINA

Bonfiglio [de Bonfiglio], Corrado

(fl Noto, Sicily, 1636–63).). Italian composer and organist. In August 1636 he was appointed organist of the church of the SS Crocifisso, Noto, for three years. Among the witnesses to the contract was Mario Capuana, who was probably his teacher. In 1639 and 1645 he was listed among the city's confessors and canons, and in 1647 he was invested with an ecclesiastical living. The title-page of his Madrigali spirituali concertati (Rome, 1663), for two to four voices and harpsichord continuo, describes him as ‘maestro di cappella del Senato della città di Noto’. Only one copy of this collection survives, in the museum of Mdina Cathedral. It was dedicated to the Baron of Belludìa, a nobleman of Noto, by the Roman Tomaso Giustiniano, who obtained the manuscript without the composer's knowledge during one of his trips to Sicily and decided to publish it after having ‘experienced its artifice in a performance by some of the most exquisite and best Roman musicians’.

The collection contains 22 motets on Italian verses (or spiritual Madrigals), four for two voices (one described as a villotta), 16 for three voices and two for four voices. The erotic nature of the texts, the sacred sublimations of secular love and the musical style, with its contrasting tempos, rhythm and dynamics, all derive from the madrigals of Capuana. The harmony, however, is even bolder and more dissonant than that of Capuana, with anticipations of the tonic above the seventh and the flattened supertonic (‘Sicilian leading-note’) above the seventh.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Ficola: ‘Stampe musicali siciliane a Malta’, Musica sacra in Sicilia tra Rinascimento e Barocco: Caltagirone 1985, 69–86, esp. 72–3

L. Buono: ‘Musiche barocche in onore di S. Corrado’, Corrado Confalonieri: la figura storica, l'immagine e il culto: Noto 1990, ed. F. Balsamo and V. La Rosa, 283–4

PAOLO EMILIO CARAPEZZA, GIUSEPPE COLLISANI

Bonfilio, Paolo Antonio

(b Vivegano, Sardinia, fl 1589). Italian composer. His only known publication, Canzonette alla napolitana a tre voci … libro primo (Ferrara, 1589, inc.), suggests that he was then established in northern Italy since it was published by Baldini, printer to the Duke of Ferrara. The pieces themselves are strophic, cast in the classic light manner with internal repetitions; the final setting, to a dialect text, is somewhat more elaborate and with its alternation of duple- and triple-time sections was perhaps conceived as a dance. Baldini issued Bonfilio's Canzonette in the small pocket-sized format favoured by other printers of this repertory, with text and music on facing pages.

IAIN FENLON

Bongos [bongo drums].

A pair of small Afro-Cuban single-headed drums with conical or cylindrical hardwood shells; one of the main drum types of Cuba, smaller than the tumbadora. They are classified as membranophones: struck drums. Bongos are made from hollowed tree-trunks. The shells, which are joined together horizontally, are of the same height but of different diameters. The heads (membrane or plastic material) are nailed or, in the tunable version, screw-tensioned, in which case the drums – invariably a pair – are tuned to clear high-sounding notes at least a 4th apart. In general, bongos are played with the bare hands, the fingers striking the heads like drumsticks.

Created in Cuba around 1900 to answer the needs of small ensembles, bongos remain integral instruments in Latin-American dance bands, rumba bands and jazz and pop bands. Here it is usual for the player to position the large drum to the right, a common practice in the history of drumming. Great virtuosity is possible, the players obtaining numerous subtle effects of tone control, including glissandos, by pressure from the fingertips, flat fingers and butt of the hand.

Many composers have included bongos in their scores, e.g. Varèse, Ionisation (1929–31); Orff, Astutuli (1953); and Boulez, Le marteau sans maître (1953–5, rev. 1957). Some have used sets larger than the basic pair: Boulez called for a run of six in Pli selon pli (1959–62) and a run of four in Figures–Doubles–Prismes (1963). With the development of sets of ‘concert toms’ (a sequence of eight single-headed drums from 15 cm to 41 cm in diameter) composers began to use them in place of bongos, as the sound is similar (see Tom-tom).

JAMES BLADES/JAMES HOLLAND

Bonhomme, Andrée (Marie Clémence)

(b Maastricht, 1 Dec 1905; d Brunssum, 1 March 1982). Dutch composer and pianist. After gaining a teaching certificate in 1927, she studied the piano with Maria Gielen and composition with Henri Hermans. She made her début with the Maastricht city orchestra (conducted by Hermans) in 1928, both as a soloist in Mozart's Piano Concertok488 and as a composer with her Drie schetsen for chamber orchestra. From 1929 to 1942 and from 1944 to 1947 she regularly performed with this orchestra. During World War II she refused to sign a ‘non-Jewish declaration’, and consequently resigned from the Maastricht city orchestra. In 1932 she was appointed teacher of theory and piano at the music school in Heerlen, where she worked until 1972. She travelled to Paris each summer from 1930 to 1937 to study with Milhaud.

Some of Bonhomme's compositions are late Romantic in style, showing the influence of Franck, others are French Impressionistic in harmony and instrumentation, reminding one more of Ravel and Roussel than of Milhaud. Her earliest works, such as the Berceuse, are introverted and delicately composed. Her mature orchestral works avoid heavy brass, but include a colourful array of percussion (Le tombeau d’Antar). From Milhaud she may have learned the use of polymelodic lines and chordal juxtaposition without modulating. She liked giving melodic lines to unusual combinations of woodwinds (Triptique, Quatre mélodies de Tristan Klingsor). She was often inspired by poetry, writing many songs, a number of which she orchestrated.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Als de stilte spreekt, op.33, 1927; Verlangen, op.27, 1927: Wiegeliedje, op.26, str, 1927; Paraphrase, op.73, 1931; Poème de l’extase, op.81, 1934; Xanthis (ballet), op.83, 1938; Triptique, 1958

Vocal: Avond (C.S. Adama van Scheltema), op.10, 1v, pf, 1925; Berceuse, Mez, pf, 1927; La mort des amants (C. Baudelaire), op.49, 1v, orch, 1928; Le tzigane dans la lune (J. Lahor), op.38, 1v, vn, pf, 1928; Lied (H. Swarth), op.52, 1v, orch, 1929; La flûte de jade (Li Bai), op.67, 1v, pf, 1930, arr. S, orch, 1931; Dansons la gigue (P. Verlaine), op.76, T, SATB, orch, 1932; Shéhérazade (T. Klingsor), op.89, Bar, orch, 1945; Lied (T. Gautier), 1953; Le tombeau d’Antar (Fr. trans. of Arabic poetry), T, male chorus, fl, 6 brass, pf, perc, 1953; De waterlelie (F. van Eeden), 1v, pf, 1953; 4 mélodies (Klingsor), T, orch, 1956; Recueillement (C. Baudelaire), female/male chorus, 1956; Destinow-liederen (I. Destinov [J. Viegen]), 1v, orch

Chbr: Berceuse, vn, pf, 1927; Erotic, vn, pf, 1931; Pièce en forme de sonate, op.86, vc, pf, 1943; Sonata, vn, pf, 1943; Prélude et fugue, str qt, 1956–7

MSS in NL-DHgm

Principal publisher: R. Sodenkamp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. van Dijk: ‘“Ik heb het altijd zelf weten op te knappen”: de Limburgse componiste Andrée Bonhomme (1905–1982)’, Harmonie en perspectief, ed. A. Annegarn and others (Deventer, 1988), 85–96

H. van Dijk: Andrée: biografische schets van het leven van Andrée Bonhomme, inventaris van haar oeuvre, inventaris van het archief Andrée Bonhomme (Utrecht, 1996)

HELEN METZELAAR

Bonhomme [Bonhomio, Bonhomius, Bonomi], Pierre

(b c1555; d Liège, shortly before 12 June 1617). Flemish composer. He received the tonsure in 1579, and from 1580 to 1584 he was duodenus mutatus at the cathedral of St Lambert in Liège. On 13 November 1594, while resident in Rome, he received from Pope Clement VIII a canonry at the collegiate church of Ste Croix in Liège. The litterae tonsurae which he presented to the Liège chapter on 26 January 1595 show that he was a native of the diocese of Liège, where he was educated and where he resided from 1595 until his death. His name figures regularly in the chapter records of Ste Croix, particularly in connection with the rebuilding of the organ (2 September 1604), his election as Grand Chantre (1608), a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto (2 September 1612), and the proving of his will (12 June 1617). He dedicated his two published works – the 38 Melodiae sacrae for five to nine voices (Frankfurt, 1603; Antwerp, 2/1627, with additional motet for ten voices) and the 13 Missae for six, eight, ten and twelve voices (Antwerp, 1616) – to the Prince-Bishop of Liège, Ferdinand of Bavaria. Four of his motets were printed in anthologies (RISM 1609¹ and 1613²).

In the richness of its harmony, the elegance of its counterpoint, the melodious quality of its vocal lines and particularly in its restrained word-setting, Bonhomme’s music is closely akin to that of the Roman school of Soriano and the Nanino brothers (whom he may have known while he was in Rome). His music was copied into several manuscripts (CZ-RO, D-Mbs, Rp, H-Bn, I-Rvat, PL-WRu, US-Wcu) and some motets were arranged for organ (D-Mbs).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

VannesD

AudaM

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Ein Musikalien-Inventar des fürstbischöflichen Hofes in Freising aus dem 17. Jahrhundert’, AMw, vi (1924), 471–83

J. Quitin: ‘Les maîtres de chant de la cathédrale Saint-Lambert à Liège aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, RBM, viii (1954), 5–18

J. Quitin: ‘Trois motets de Pierre Bonhomme’, Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, no.59 (1987), 12–16

J. Quitin: ‘Salve regina et Ave Maria à 8 voix de Pierre Bonhomme’, Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, no.76 (1992), 24–5

JOSÉ QUITIN/HENRI VANHULST

Boni, (Pietro Giuseppe) Gaetano

(fl 1st half of the 18th century). Italian composer. He has sometimes been thought to be the composer of the opera Il figlio delle selve, performed at Modena in 1700, but according to Schmidl this results from a confusion of his name with that of Cosimo Bani. He may have studied in Bologna, since he was recommended from there to Corelli in Rome in 1711 (only Corelli’s reply to the letter of recommendation is extant). It has been assumed that he remained in Rome for some time, since his 12 Sonate per camera a violoncello e cembalo op.1 were published there in 1717. That year, perhaps as a result of this publication, he was made a member of the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna. On the title-page of his Divertimenti per camera a violino, violone, cimbalo, flauto e mandola op.2 (Rome, n.d.) he is described as a priest. In 1719 he had a Cantata per la notte di Natale performed in Perugia; this may be the same piece as the Cantata per il SS natale di Nostro Signore Giesu Christo, for two voices and instruments, in manuscript at Manchester (GB-Mp). His opera Tito Manlio (text by Matteo Noris) was performed in Rome on 8 January 1720 and his oratorio S Rosalia at Bologna in 1726. In the libretto of this work he is referred to as abate. His 12 Sonate a violino e violone e cembalo op.3 were published in Rome in 1741. The set of manuscript sonatas (I-Bc) thought by Gaspari to be for keyboard has been shown by Newman to be for violin and continuo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GaspariC

NewmanSBE

SchmidlD

L. Torchi: La musica istrumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII (Turin, 1901/R), 169

GUIDO SALVETTI

Boni (da Cortona), Giovanni Battista

(d 1641). Italian harpsichord maker. He originated in Cortona but spent all of his working life in Rome. He was employed at various times by three nephews of Pope Urban VIII to maintain and supply harpsichords, and also to work on chamber organs. His successor in these establishments was Girolamo Zenti. Five surviving harpsichords (only two of which are signed) can reliably be attributed to Boni. Of the two virginals bearing his name (both in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC), only the 1602 instrument might be his work, the 1617 virginals having been made by Bolcioni (see Wraight, 1997). His instruments are chiefly of interest as examples of the Italian practice of using split sharps to provide enharmonically equivalent notes (see Enharmonic keyboard, esp. fig.1). One harpsichord of about 1619 (private collection) also has divided natural keys in the bass octave, being the earliest example of this.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoalchM

F. Hammond: ‘Some Notes on Giovanni Battista Boni da Cortona, Girolamo Zenti, and Others’, GSJ, xl (1987), 37–47

D. Wraight and C. Stembridge: ‘Italian Split-Keyed Instruments with Fewer than Nineteen Divisions to the Octave’, Performance Practice Review, vii (1994), 150–81

D. Wraight: The Stringing of Italian Keyboard Instruments c.1500–c.1650 (diss., Queen’s U. of Belfast, 1997), ii, 79–86

DENZIL WRAIGHT

Boni [Bony], Guillaume

(b St Flour, Auvergne; d after 1594). French composer. He was maître des enfants de choeur at Toulouse Cathedral and in 1565 participated in a reception for the French royal family and the court, at which were performed some motets and his new nine-voice ‘symphony’ which won King Charles IX's approbation. The six partbooks of his 1573 collection of 24 motets contain variously Boni's dedicatory epistle in Latin to Charles IX, a Latin eulogy on Boni's motets by the poet laureate Jean Dorat, and another Latin panegyric addressed to Boni by ‘Hurealdus’, an advocate from Saint-Siège. Three of the five-voice motets from the collection were reprinted in 1580 in Genevan anthologies. In 1576 Du Chemin published 35 four-voice settings by Boni of sonnets by Pierre de Ronsard, following the vogue for his verse among French and Dutch composers (e.g. Monte, Clereau, Castro, Bertrand and Maletty). This collection, edited by Henry Chandor and dedicated to the new king, Henri III, contained a number of errors and was disavowed in a privilege for reprinting granted on 15 September 1576 to Le Roy & Ballard; the latter's edition includes prefatory verses addressed to Boni by Jean Bert, Louis Du Pin and Jean Dorat. 23 more sonnets and a chanson by Ronsard were published in a Second livre. Le Roy & Ballard issued at least seven editions of the first book and four of the second between 1576 and 1624; after 1594 the editions of the second book include a sonnet signed by Boni himself, apologizing for publishing the work of his ‘tender years’ in an age when a ‘learned’ and new style of music prevailed, no doubt a reference to the musique mesurée of Le Jeune and Baïf's Académie. The popularity of Boni's settings was such that both books were provided with sacred contrafacta by the Protestant pastor Simon Goulart and published at Geneva in 1579. In 1576 Boni contributed a sonnet to the Premier livre des Amours de P. de Ronsard by Antoine de Bertrand, also active in Toulouse. As a composer ‘doucereau Bonin’ was mentioned (with Le Jeune, Lassus, Bertrand and others) in a hymn to music by the philosopher-poet J.F. Du Monin, and Le Fèvre de la Boderie's La Galliade (1578) referred to the ‘heavenly music of Boni and Costeley’.

The motets of 1573 are framed by the joyous five-voice psalms Cantate Domino and Exultate Jesu and are presented in modal order. The collection presents a sequence of psalms and responsories on the Lenten themes of penitence and redemption, culminating in the moving seven-voice cry for the resurrection of Lazarus, Fremuit Jesu. The motet textures are consistently imitative with judicious use of homophonic passages, where tessitura and rhythm (notably elongation and syncopation) are effectively used for word-painting. The tonally orientated modal harmony is occasionally inflected with melodic chromaticism (e.g. E–D–C, B–C–B in Adesto dolori meo, 1573) and the dramatic juxtaposition of mediant-related chords. The same tendencies are found in the Ronsard sonnets, but unlike the contemporary Italian madrigal and ‘mannerist’ chanson, chromatic or unusual chordal juxtaposition is often used for aural variety as much as for verbal expression. Imitation and homophony again alternate freely, but the style is predominantly slow, suave and syllabic. The sonnet structures are conventionally symmetrical, almost invariably using the same music for the initial quatrains and repeating that of the final tercet (A¹A²BCC); in the second book the initial repeat is often replaced with a written-out varied reprise, and the final reprise is sometimes modified or omitted. His texts were gleaned virtually unchanged from the editions of Ronsard's Oeuvres that appeared between 1567 and 1572. Like Bertrand, he rarely chose poems previously set by other musicians and the few exceptions show complete thematic independence from other settings; his choice of verses with much personal or mythological reference is unusual.

The 19 Psalmi Davidici (1582), also dedicated to Henri III, are composed in motet style and divided into two partes; they are generally rather simpler in texture than the motets, the six-voice writing encouraging syllabic clarity and sonority. The Quatrains (1582), dedicated to Henri's brother François d'Anjou, are settings of 126 moralistic strophes by Du Faur de Pibrac. They are presented as 21 separate groups each of six quatrains, the first two of which are for four voices, the next two for three and the last two for five (the final group is exceptional in having six voices for all six sections); in the preface the publisher, Adrian Le Roy described the arrangement ‘en dix douzaines et six de reste’ as following the order of the modes. Like the psalms, the Quatrains are largely syllabic, favouring verbal repetition but avoiding excessive word-painting. Boni's works show him as a restrained composer who shunned contemporary humanists' preoccupation with the chromatic and enharmonic genera, the syncopated fragmented rhythms of the note nere madrigal and the quantative metre of the more recent musique mesurée.

WORKS

published in Paris unless otherwise stated

Editions: Sonetz de Pierre de Ronsard mis en musique à quatre parties par Guillaume Boni, ed. F. Dobbins (Paris, 1987) [D]Guillaume Boni: Motets à 5, 6 et 7 voix (1573), ed. J. Brooks (Paris, 1998) [B]

sacred vocal

Primus liber [24] modulorum, 5–7vv (1573) [B]

Sonets chrestiens (2 vols.) (Geneva, 1579) [= sacred contrafacta by S. Goulart of Sonetz de P. de Ronsard]

[19] Psalmi Davidici novis concentibus, 6vv, cum oratione regia, 12vv (1582)

secular vocal

[35] Sonets de P. de Ronsard … reveus et corrigés par Henry Chandor, 4vv (1576, 2/1576 as Sonetz de P. de Ronsard mis en musique … premier livre) [D]

[24] Sonetz de P. de Ronsard second livre, 4vv (1576) [D]

Les [126] quatrains de Sieur de Pybrac, 3–6vv (1582–3); ed. M.-A. Colin (Paris, 1999)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Droz: ‘Guillaume Boni de Saint-Flour en Auvergne, musicien de Ronsard’, Mélanges offerts à M. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1936), 270–81

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian le Roy et Robert Ballard (Paris, 1955; suppl., RdM, xl (1957), 166–72)

F. Dobbins: ‘Les madrigalistes français et la Pléiade’, La chanson à la Renaissance: Tours 1977, 164–5

J. Brooks: ‘Music and Devotion in Renaissance Toulouse: the Motets of Guillaume Boni’, “ … La musique, de tous les passetemps le plus beau …”: hommage à Jean-Michel Vaccaro, ed. F. Lesure and H. Vanhulst (Paris, 1998), 17–31

FRANK DOBBINS

Bonifacio, Mauro

(b Milan, 9 March 1957). Italian composer and conductor. He studied composition with Corghi and the piano with Piero Rattalino at the Milan Conservatory. His conviction that composers should also perform led him to study conducting with Karl Österreicher (Verein Wiener Musikseminar, 1983) and Mario Gusella (Accademia Musicale Pescarese, 1985). He is one of the founders of AGON, a centre for electro-acoustic and computer music in Milan.

Bonifacio’s ordered process of construction is often based on a principle of opposition: between, for example, wind and string timbres (Ondes et cordes, 1990); suspended and agitated movement, as in Inquieto (1993), which sways between rarified sonorities aligned with a slow isorhythm and dense contrapuntal textures built out of rapid, irregular pulses; and, notably, notions of physical and metaphysical time and space, as in Mar de l’eterno (1995). In this work, and also in the Quattro studi (1998), electronics are used to vary the distance between the resonating sound source and the listening space, in so doing generating new regions of musical tension. Such tension is further achieved in Bonifacio’s work through the relationship between harmonic fields and linear chromaticism, at times combined with a use of historical forms and materials (Il frutto senza nome, 1994; Il dio cancellatore, 1997; La morte de Didon, 1999).

WORKS

Dramatic: Animali e suoni di Stranalandia (melologo buffo, S. Benni), 1993, Rome, 22 July 1993; Il frutto senza nome (teatro radiofonico, E. Isgrò), 1994, RAI, 15 Nov 1994; Tragedia di Roncisvalle con bestie (teatro radiofonico, G. Scabia), 1996, RAI, 29 July–23 Aug 1996; Il dio cancellatore (cycle), 1997: 1 Prologo, 2 Il ballo delle ihgrate [based on Monteverdi], 3 Didone (Isgrd), 4 Tirsi e Clori [based on Monteverdi]

Inst: Ondes et cordes, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1990; Al limite, 6 vn, 4 va, 3 vc, db, 1992; Trio, ob, vc, pf, 1992; Inquieto, fl + pic, ob + eng hn, cl + b cl, hn, pf, perc, vn, va, vc, 1993; Trio II, pf trio, 1993; L’isola delle voci, 2 tpt, xyl, vib, pf, 1994; Divertimento, ob + musette, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1995; Notte, fl, ob, 2 hn, str, 1995; 4 studi, vn, elecs, 1998; Nuages gris, fl + pic, ob, cl + b cl, hp, gui, pf, vib, vn, va, vc, db, elecs, 1999

Vocal: Tableaux de opus 89 (E. Sanguinetti), S, Bar, fl, db, elecs, 1989; Null’altro (M.M. Boiardo), S, cl, str, 1994; Mar de l’eterno (B. Marin), S, elecs, 1995; Vivo (S. Sigurtà), S, 1995; La mort de Didon (Metamorfosi da una cantata di Montéclair), 2 female vv, fl, ob, cl, bn, hp, gui, str qt, elecs, 1999

Principal publisher: Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Bonifacio: ‘Animali e suoni di Stranalandia’, Ricordi oggi (1993)

F. Leprino: ‘La dialettica degli opposti come ritmo formale: conversazione con Mauro Bonifacio’, Ricordi oggi, no.3 (1994), 7, 12

M. Bonifacio: ‘Quattro studi per violino e elettronica (1998)’, Agon Festival Regola Gioco 1998 (Milan, 1998), 28–9, 81–2 [programme notes]

MARINELLA RAMAZZOTTI

Bonighton, Ian (William George)

(b Beaufort, Victoria, 4 May 1942; d Norwich, 30 May 1975). Australian composer. After training as a teacher, he studied at the Melbourne University Conservatorium (1963–7), where he went on to hold a teaching position (1968–73). The following year he moved to England, where he taught at the University of East Anglia (1974–5). As curator of the Grainger Museum in Melbourne he was responsible for the reconstruction of aleatory works by Grainger, most notably Random Round, and with Keith Humble established one of the first electronic music studios at an Australian university. He is remembered for his innovative teaching style and for his introduction of avant-garde music to Australian audiences through the ISCM and the Melbourne Autumn Festival of Organ and Harpsichord. His compositions concentrate on chance elements within specific acoustic environments. After his accidental death, interest in his music was sustained through a series of commemorative recordings.

WORKS

Dramatic: Herod (theatre mosaic), 1971; film scores

Orch: Divertimento, chbr orch, 1965; Org Conc., 1967; Textures, 1967; Concerto grosso, chbr orch, 1968; 3 Pieces, ?1969; Concerto da camera, org, chbr orch, 1972; Variations, 1972; Ensembles, 1973

Choral: Missa brevis, 2vv, org, 1965; Ps lxvii, SATB/T, 1967; Music for Sleep, SSSAAATTTBBB, tape, 1969; Sequenza, SSAATTBB, tape, 1971; Missa sine nomine, SATB, org, 1972; 2 Psalms, SSAATTBB, 2 ob, tpt, str, 1974

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.2, 1968; Cloth of Gold, perc, tape, 1969; Variations, 2 gui, 1970; 3 Canons, str trio, ?1971–3; Reflections 2, 2–12 gui, perc, 1971; 3 Fanfares, 4 tpt, 4 trbn, 1972; Qnt, str qt, org, 1972; Cathedral Music 3, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, org, 1973; In nomine, perc, org, tape, ?1973; Madrigali, brass qnt, 2 org, 1973 [after C. Gesualdo]; Moments, 2 org, 1974; One, Two, Three, perc, 1974; Two plus Three, org, hpd, 1974; Cathedral Music 1, 3 tpt, 2 trbn, 2 org, 1975; works for solo inst, kbd

Edns: C. Monteverdi: Orfeo, 1966; J.S. Bach: Canon a 4, 1967; P. Grainger: Random Round, 1967; J. Haydn: La canterina, 1969); P. Grainger: Tribute to Foster, 1969; P. Grainger: The Sea-Wife, 1972; J.S. Bach: Musical Offering

MSS and sketches in AUS-PVgm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Murdoch: Australia’s Contemporary Composers (Melbourne, 1972)

P. Nunn: The Works of Ian Bonighton: a Revised Checklist and Bibliographical Essay (thesis, U. of Melbourne, 1986)

PHILIP NUNN

Bonini [Romano], Francesco

(b Rome; fl Bologna, 1630–66). Italian composer, singer, lutenist and theorbo player. He was employed as a theorbo player at S Petronio, Bologna, under the maestri di cappella Francesco Milani (1630–49), Alberto Bertelli (1650–57) and Maurizio Cazzati (1657–71). From 1631 he was also a lutenist in the Concerto Palatino, Bologna. He held both posts until 1666 but from 1661, due to ill-health, he was joined by his son Giovanni Battista, who succeeded him at S Petronio. His other son Antonio succeeded him at the Concerto Palatino.

Although Bonini's music is lost, three librettos survive. Cirillo tradito (Bologna, 1635), particularly notable for its instrumentation, states that Bonini composed the music, sang in the performance and was a member of the Accademia dei Filomusi, with the name ‘Il Raddolcito’. La Siringa, ovvero Gli sdegni d'amore (Bologna, 1646), performed at the Teatro Guastavillani during Carnival, was dedicated to Bonini's patron Odoardo Pepoli. Il Mida (Bologna, 1647) also bears a dedication to Pepoli, signed by Bonini and Camillo Cevenini.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GaspariC

RicciTB

SartoriL

G. Gaspari: ‘Dei musicisti bolognesi al XVII secolo e delle loro opere a stampa: ragguagli biografici e bibliografici’, Atti e memorie delle RR. Deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie dell'Emilia, new ser., v/2 (1880), 1–44, esp. 32

A. Caselli: Catalogo delle opere liriche pubblicate in Italia (Florence, 1969)

O. Gambassi: La cappella musicale di S. Petronio: maestri, organisti, cantori e strumentisti dal 1436 al 1920 (Florence, 1987)

O. Gambassi: Il Concerto Palatino della Signoria di Bologna: cinque secoli di vita musicale a corte (1250–1797) (Florence, 1989)

KATHRYN R. BECKETT

Bonini, Pietro [Pier’] Andrea

(b ?Florence, mid-16th century; d ? early 17th century). Italian composer. Schmidl suggested that he was born in or near Florence and lived to the end of the 16th century. The title-page of his Primo libro de madrigali a 5 voci (Venice, 1591) states that he was the maestro della musica at the cathedral at Belluno, in the Venetian Alps. He announced this volume as his first collection, though he had already contributed a three-part canzonetta to an earlier Venetian collection (RISM 1587⁷); it is also his only extant book. It contains 16 five-part works and a seven-part dialogue by him as well as two madrigals by Domenico Pace. Bonini also contributed single pieces to four important madrigal collections (1591²³, 1592¹¹, 1594⁶ and 1598⁹).

The text of Baci sospiri e voci (1591²³) seems to have been used again by Banchieri in his Zabaione musicale (1604) for the madrigal concluding the second act. His contribution to Il trionfo di Dori (1592¹¹) is a sensitive setting of Francesco Corazzini’s Quando lieta e vezzosa in which the textural and rhythmic contrasts (hemiola on several levels) are skilfully worked out. In the two German versions of this madrigal, Lucretiae ihr Tugend in 1613¹³ and Sihe wie fein und lieblich ist es in 1619¹⁶, music and text are less closely related.

E. HARRISON POWLEY

Bonini, Severo [?Jacopo, ?Luca]

(b Florence, 23 Dec 1582; d Florence, 5 Dec 1663). Italian composer, writer on music, organist and poet. His baptismal name may have been either Jacopo or Luca; he adopted the name ‘Severo’ when he became a monk. He received the habit of the Vallombrosan Benedictines on 3 December 1595 and was professed on 30 April 1598. In 1601 he left Vallombrosa to complete his humanistic and theological studies at the congregation's university at Passignano; he himself reported that young Benedictines at both Vallombrosa and Passignano also received training in plainsong and polyphony and on the organ. He was assigned first to the abbeys of Santa Trìnita (1605, 1609), Ripoli (1607) and S Pancrazio (1608), all in or near Florence. He apparently studied with Caccini during his earlier stay at Santa Trìnita, where he also acquired the patronage of the prior, Simone Finardi; his association with these two men won him entry into Florentine musical circles. During these early years of success he published four collections of music and a poem celebrating the wedding of Prince Cosimo de' Medici in 1608. In the same year he was elected scribe at S Pancrazio, and in 1611 he was appointed organist of Santa Trìnita. By 1613 he had left Florence and became organist of the abbey of S Mercuriale, Forlì; while there he published at least three more volumes of music. Under the patronage of Abbot Ilario Mortani he sang his works before aristocrats and ecclesiastics in the Romagna. In 1615 he was appointed camarlingo of the abbey of S Michele in Forcole, Pistoia, and he returned in a similar capacity to S Mercuriale in 1619. From 1623 to 1637 he was curate of S Martino in Strada, a parish in the environs of Forlì. He then spent two more years at S Mercuriale and returned in 1640 to Santa Trìnita, Florence, where he remained organist and maestro di cappella until his death.

As a composer Bonini succeeded in assimilating and combining a number of different styles. He was an early, enthusiastic devotee of the new monodic style and an admirer of Giulio Caccini, as is clear from his Discorsi e regole and the preface to his Madrigali e canzonette spirituali (1607); in this volume he applied Caccini's vocal style to the lauda tradition in setting strophic, vernacular, sacred texts as monodies. Two years later, with the concerted motet as a model, he published in his op.3 simple accompanied three-part polyphonic pieces enlivened by concertato motifs and embellishments. Also in 1609, his book of solo madrigals and motets displays a fusion of concerted motet and sacred monody. His setting of a long extract from Rinuccini's Arianna (1613), including Ariadne's lament, is one of a number of works at this period influenced by Monteverdi's setting of the lament. The interaction of styles culminated in the Affetti spirituali in – to cite the title-page – a ‘mixed style’ combining the techniques and formal clarity of the concerted motet with the affective language of the ‘Florentine style’. Some dialogue motets here are embryonic cantatas consisting of short, alternating sections of recitative and arioso, and the highly ornamented motets of the Serena celeste exhibit further experimenting with integrated structures. Bonini continued to write music but published no more. In a letter of 1649 lamenting lack of patronage he claimed a total of ten published and 12 unpublished works. The Vallombrosans had sustained the cost of publishing his music, but that support apparently ceased after 1615, and no manuscripts of his later music are extant.

Bonini's Discorsi e regole is traditionally thought to have been completed by 1649–50, although internal evidence (see Fabbri) prompts a later dating of 1651–5. It is an important source of information about the rise of monody and opera. This ambitiously designed treatise, which also encompasses such traditional questions as music's place in the universe and the origins of music and musical instruments, is informed by Bonini's prejudices and sermonizing tone. His manner is digressive and anecdotal and his heightened language borders alternately on poetry and farce. A number of marginal references to sources are misleading, for the discussion is almost entirely derived from Zarlino, Galilei, Caccini, Grégoire de Toulouse and various biblical commentaries. Bonini's principal aims were to defend the nobility of music against those who called it ‘buffoonery’, to prove the superiority of modern music (specifically the stile recitativo) over that of antiquity, to maintain that Caccini invented the stile recitativo and to endorse (with substantial reservations) the use of concerted music in church. Besides giving valuable information on contemporary Florentine musicians, he also discussed many composers of polyphonic music.

WORKS

Madrigali e canzonette spirituali, 1v, chit/spinet/other insts (Florence, 1607)

Il primo libro delle canzonette affettuose in stile moderno, 4vv (Florence, 1608), lost

Il primo libro de motetti, 3vv, org, insts, op.3 (Venice, 1609)

Il secondo libro de madrigali e motetti, 1–2vv, hpd, chit, org (Florence, 1609)

Lamento d'Arianna in stile recitativo, 1–2vv (Venice, 1613); ed. in ISS, i (1986)

Affetti spirituali, 2vv, op.7 (Venice, 1615)

Serena celeste, motetti, 1–3vv, op.8 (Venice, 1615)

WRITINGS

Discorsi e regole sopra la musica et il contrappunto (MS, I-Fr 2218, autograph); extract in A. Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R), 129–40; ed. L. Galleni Luisi, IMa, ii/5 (1975); ed. and trans. M. Bonino (Provo, Utah, 1979)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Galleni Luisi)

Corporazioni religiose soppresse (MS, I-Fas), Vallombrosan documents

B. Raballini: Vallisumbrosa perita (MS, Vallombrosa Abbey, before 1640), no.87

A. de La Fage: Essais de diphthérographie musicale (Paris, 1864), 167ff

T. Sala, ed.: Dizionario storico biografico di scrittori, letterati ed artisti dell'ordine di Vallombrosa, i (Florence, 1929), 87ff

H.E. Smither: ‘The Latin Dramatic Dialogue and the Nascent Oratorio’, JAMS, xx (1967), 403–33

L. Galleni Luisi: ‘Il Lamento d'Arianna di Severo Bonini (1613)’, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 573–82

M. Bonino: Don Severo Bonini (1582–1663): his ‘Discorsi e regole’ (diss., U. of Southern California, 1971) [incl. orig. and trans. of Discorsi e regole]

M. Fabbri, E. Garbero Zorzi and A.M.P. Tofani, eds.: Il luogo teatrale a Firenze: Brunelleschi, Vasari, Buontalenti, Parigi (Milan, 1975), 148

M. Fabbri: ‘La vicenda umana e artistica di Giovanni Battista Jacomelli “dell violino” deuteragonista della camerata fiorentina’, Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell'Europa del '500 (Florence, 1983), ii, 397–438, esp. 434

W.V. Porter: ‘Lamenti recitativi da camera’, ‘Con che soavità’: Studies in Italian Opera, Song, and Dance, 1580–1740, ed. I. Fenlon and T. Carter (Oxford, 1995), 73–110

MARYANN BONINO/R

Boninsegna, Celestina

(b Reggio nell’Emilia, 26 Feb 1877; d Milan, 14 Feb 1947). Italian soprano. She studied first with Guglielmo Mattioli at Reggio nell’Emilia, where at the age of 15 she sang Norina in Don Pasquale, then with Virginia Boccabadati at the Pesaro Conservatory, and in 1897 made her official début at Bari in Faust. Subsequently she sang Rosaura in the first Rome performance of Mascagni’s Le maschere, and made her first appearances at Covent Garden (1904), La Scala (1904–5), Madrid (1905–6) and the Metropolitan (1906–7). She also appeared in Boston (1909–10), Barcelona (1911–12) and St Petersburg (1914), but until her retirement from the stage in 1921 sang mostly in less important theatres in Italy and abroad. She then took up teaching.

Her rich, resonant voice with its wide compass was particularly suited to Verdi, as were her smooth delivery and the dignity and refinement of her vocal line; she was considered one of the finest interpreters of Aida, Amelia, and Leonora in both Il trovatore and La forza del destino. In an era of dynamic and passionate singing actresses (Bellincioni, Burzio, Carelli, Destinn, Krusceniski), her primitive acting and unfamiliarity with the verismo repertory, except for Cavalleria rusticana and Tosca, prejudiced her career. However, she scored a great success on gramophone records, being one of the first dramatic sopranos whose voice recorded well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (R. Celletti)

GV (R. Celletti; J.B. Richards and C. Williams)

C. Williams and J.B. Richards: ‘Celestina Boninsegna’, Record Collector, xii (1958–60), 4–33 [with discography]

C.G.S. de Villiers: ‘How I Met Boninsegna in Milan’, ibid., 257–8

W.R. Moran: ‘Celestina Boninsegna in the United States: Contemporary Critics Speak’, ibid., 267–83

M. de Schauensee: ‘The Enigma of Boninsegna’, ON (15 Feb 1969)

J.B. Steane: The Grand Tradition (London 1974/R), 136–7

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, i: To 1914 (London, 1977), 156–9

RODOLFO CELLETTI/VALERIA PREGLIASCO GUALERZI

Bónis, Ferenc

(b Miskolc, 17 May 1932). Hungarian musicologist. At the Budapest Academy of Music he studied composition with Szervánszky (1949–52) and musicology with Bartha, Kodály and Szabolcsi (1952–7), taking the doctorate there in 1958 with a dissertation on Mihály Mosonyi. He worked as an editor at Hungarian Radio (1950–52, 1957–70), where he was director of youth music programmes (1970–94). Concurrently he worked at the musicology institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1961–73); he was reader in musicology at the Budapest Academy of Music (1972–80). He was awarded the Erkel State Prize in 1973. He became president of the Ferenc Erkel Society (1989), and president of the Hungarian Kodály Society (1991). He was a guest lecturer at the University of Cologne.

Bónis is an outstanding scholar of Hungarian music history. As editor of the Magyar zenetudomány (from 1959), Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok (from 1968) and the collected writings of Bence Szabolcsi (from 1977) he has proved to be a many-sided representative of Hungarian musicology in the tradition of Bartók and Kodály. Of particular importance are the two volumes of Szabolcsi’s writings and three volumes containing all Kodály’s articles and studies (1964–89). Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok contains studies in virtually every sphere of musicology (including complete lists of works, bibliographies, correspondence data, cultural history, the history of music publishing companies and plate-number research). Bónis is also a leading authority on Bartók, particularly the iconography. He has recorded the reminiscences of Bartók and his contemporaries (Így láttuk Bartókot [Thus we saw Bartók] and Így láttuk Kodályt [Thus we saw Kodály]), which have become an important part of biographical research. Of equal importance are the facsimile editions, accompanied by large-scale studies, of Bartók’s Dance Suite and Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus.

WRITINGS

‘Csermák Antal kamarazenéje’ [Csermák’s chamber music], Új zenei szemle, iii/5 (1952), 10–15

Erkel Ferenc (Budapest, 1953, 2/1954)

‘Magyar táncgyűjtemény az 1820-as évekből’ [Hungarian dance collection from the 1820s], ZT, i (1953), 697–732

Bartók élete képekben (Budapest, 1956, 3/1961; Ger. trans., 1964; Fr. trans., 1964; Eng. trans., 1964 as Béla Bartók: his Life in Pictures)

‘A Vietórisz-kódex szvit-táncai’ [The Vietórisz Codex suite dances], ZT, vi (1957), 265–336

Mosonyi Mihály (diss., Budapest Academy of Music, 1958; Budapest, 1960)

‘A Nagy Iván-féle kézirat’ [The Ivan Nagy manuscript], Muzsika, ii/4 (1959), 42–4

‘Adalék Erkel műveinek bibliográfiájához’ [Data for a bibliography of Erkel’s works], Muzsika, iii/5 (1960), 8–11

‘Gustav Mahler négy levele Erkel Ferenchez’ [Mahler’s four letters to Ferenc Erkel], Magyar zene, i/1–6 (1960–61), 299–306; Ger. trans. in SMH, i (1961), 475–85

‘Liszt Ferenc kiadatlan levele Mosonyi Mihályhoz’ [Liszt’s unpublished letter to Mosonyi], Magyar zene, i/1–6 (1960–61), 524–30

‘Mosonyi Mihály magyar operái’ [Mosonyi’s Hungarian operas], ZT, ix (1961), 169–95; Ger. trans. in SMH, ii (1962), 139–87

‘Quotations in Bartók’s Music’, Liszt – Bartók: Budapest 1961, 355–82

‘Zoltán Kodálys Werke: Schriften’, SMH, iii (1962), 25–43

ed.: Z. Kodály: Visszatekintés [In retrospect] (Budapest, 1964–89; Eng. trans., abridged, 1974 as The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály)

‘Gemeinsame musikalische und wissenschaftliche Werke von Béla Bartók und Zoltán Kodály’, ‘Zoltán Kodály Schriften über Béla Bartók’, Documenta bartókiana, i (1964), 11–12, 13–15

‘Die ungarischen Tänze der Handschrift von Appony (Oponice)’, SMH, vi (1964), 9–23

Kadosa Pál (Budapest, 1964)

‘Ungarische Musik im XVII.–XVIII. Jahrhundert’, Musica antiqua Europae orientalis I: Bydgoszcz and Toruń 1966, 258–73

‘In memoriam Z.K.’, Magyar zene, viii (1967), 159–69

ed.: Írások Erkel Ferencről és a magyar zene korábbi századairól [Studies on Erkel and Hungarian music of earlier centuries] (Budapest, 1968) [incl. ‘Erkel Ferenc a Bánk bánról’ [Ferenc Erkel on Bánk bán], 63–74; Ger trans. in SMH, xi (1969), 69–89]

ed.: Tóth Aladár válogatott zenekritikái, 1934–1939 [Toth’s selected criticisms of music] (Budapest, 1968)

ed.: Szabolcsi Bence 70. születésnapjára [Szabolcsi’s 70th birthday] (Budapest, 1969) [incl. ‘Erkel “Hunyadi László”: jának meghúsult előadási kísérlete e bécsi Udvari Operaházban’ [The failure of the plans to present Erkel’s Hunyadi László at the Vienna Royal Opera House], 267–91; summaries in Eng., Ger., Russ.]

‘Beethoven und die ungarische Musik’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 121–7

‘Bartók und der Verbunkos’, Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971, 145–53; repr. in ÖMz, xxvii (1972), 588–95

‘Wie ist Ferenc Erkel Kapellmeister der Pester Ungarischen Theaters geworden’, SMH, xiii (1971), 321–31

Bartók Béla élete képekben és dokumentumokban (Budapest, 1972; Ger. trans., 1972, 2/1980; Eng. trans., 1972 as Béla Bartók: his Life in Pictures and Documents, 2/1982)

ed.: Mosonyi Mihály és Bartók Béla emlékére [In memory of Mosonyi and Bartók] (Budapest, 1973) [incl. ‘Erkel, Mosonyi és J.J. Abert’, 73–8 [with C. Landon]; ‘Erkel Ferenc vaskorona-rendje’ [Erkel’s Order of the Iron Crown], 85–101]

ed.: Kodály Zoltán emlékére [Kodály memorial volume] (Budapest, 1977)

Tizenhárom találkozás Ferencsik Jánossal [13 meetings with János Ferencsik] (Budapest, 1984)

Der Psalmus hungaricus von Zoltán Kodály (Budapest, 1987)

Hódolat Bartóknak és Kodálynak [Homage to Bartók and Kodály] (Budapest, 1992)

ed.:: Kodály Zoltán és Szabolcsi Bence emlétezete [In memory of Kodály and Szaboksi]

Bartók-Lengyel: A csodálatos mandarin [Bartók-Lengyel: The Miraculous Mandarin] (Békéscsaba, 1993)

Himnusz [Hymn] (Budapest, 1994)

Bartók Béla Tánc-szvitje [Bartók’s Dance Suite] (Budapest, 1998; Eng. trans., 1998; Ger. trans., 1999)

Mozarttól Bartókig [From Mozart to Bartók] (Budapest, 2000)

Béla Bartók’s second Violin Concerto (1937–1938)’, The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial, ed. J. Newsom and A. Mann (Washington DC, 2000)

EDITIONS

(selective list)

with B. Szabolcsi: Magyar táncok Haydn korából [Hungarian dances from the time of Haydn] (Budapest, 1959)

M. Mosonyi: Libera (Budapest, 1971)

P. Esterházy: Harmonia caelestis (Kassel, 1972–4)

JÁNOS DEMÉNY/ZSUZSANNA DOMOKOS

Bonis, Mélanie (Hélène) [Mel-Bonis]

(b Paris, 21 Jan 1858; d Sarcelles, Seine-et-Oise, 18 March 1937). French composer. She used the pseudonym Mel-Bonis. Born into a middle-class family, Bonis began piano lessons at an early age and made remarkable progress. A family friend, Professor Maury of the Paris Conservatoire, introduced her to César Franck in 1876. The following year she was admitted to the Conservatoire, where she studied harmony with Ernest Guiraud and the organ with Franck. She won second prize in harmony and accompaniment in 1879, and first prize in harmony a year later. Claude Debussy and Gabriel Pierné were also students during her years there.

Bonis married Albert Domange in 1883, and for about ten years devoted herself to raising a family. She began composing regularly in about 1894, writing more than 300 compositions, most of which were published. Among her works are 20 chamber pieces, 150 works for piano solo, 27 choral pieces, and organ music, songs and orchestral works. Her music was warmly praised by Camille Saint-Saëns, Célestin Joubert and Pierné. Already unwell, she suffered acutely the death in 1932 of her younger son; she died five years later. Her children assembled a memoir from her notebooks and published it as Souvenirs et réflexions (Paris, n.d.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker8

CohenE

GroveW (J.S. Tsou) [incl. work-list]

PazdirekH

N. Dufourcq: ‘Mélanie Domange Bonis (1858–1937) dite Mel Bonis’, L’orgue, no.185 (1983), 1–5

JUDY TSOU

Boniventi [Boneventi, Bonaventi, Beneventi], Giuseppe

(b Venice, ?1670–73; d ?Venice, after 1727). Italian composer. He was born some time between 1670 and 1673 according to several membership lists of a Venetian musicians' guild (I-Vas) and was no more than 20 years old when his first opera, Il gran Macedone, was staged at the Teatro S Cassiano, Venice, in November 1690. His composition teacher Legrenzi, under whom he may have sung at S Marco, had died earlier that year, but may have recommended Boniventi to the Mantuan court where he later found employment. His first opera was dedicated to Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and in 1708 the libretto for his Armida designated him maestro di cappella there, a position he may have assumed as early as 1702 but which ended with the duke's death in 1708. On 10 January 1712 he entered the service of the Margrave Karl III Wilhelm of Baden-Durlach as maestro di cappella. With an orchestra of 34 players (in 1715–16) he directed about six operas annually, although only one of his own was given (Armida al campo, 1717). His salary of 500 florins, plus expenses and a servant, far exceeded that of all other musicians including J.B. Trost and J.P. Käfer whose German operas dominated the Margrave's theatre. Court records show that, some time before 15 May 1718, when nearly all his Italian singers had been replaced by Germans, Boniventi left Durlach. His opera La virtù tra nemici was performed at Venice in the 1718 carnival season, so in all probability he had returned to Italy in 1717. However, the libretto of Filippo re di Macedonia (1720) still refers to him as the Margrave's maestro di cappella. He wrote operas for Turin and Venice during the next three years but no information about his subsequent career has come to light except the libretto for an opera, Bertarido, re dei Longobardi, composed for Venice in 1727.

WORKS

operas

drammi per musica in 3 acts and first performed in Venice, unless otherwise stated

Il gran Macedone (G. Pancieri), S Cassiano, Nov 1690, arias GB-Lbl, I-Rvat

Almerinda (Pancieri), S Cassiano, 20 Jan 1691

Almira (Pancieri), SS Giovanni e Paolo, aut. 1691

La vittoria nella costanza (F. Passarini), S Angelo, carn. 1702

Armida al campo (F. Silvani, after T. Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata), S Angelo, week before 28 Jan 1708

La Partenope (S. Stampiglia), Ferrara, Bonacossi, Ascension 1709, collab. A. Caldara

L'Endimione (tragicommedia, F. Mazzari), S Angelo, aut. 1709

Circe delusa (G.A. Falier), S Angelo, 29 Jan 1711

La virtù tra nemici (G.B. Abbati), S Moisè, carn. 1718

Arianna abbandonata (A. Schietti), S Moisè, aut. 1719; arias formerly D-Dl

Venceslao (A. Zeno), Turin, Carignano, 26 Dec 1720

Filippo re di Macedonia (D. Lalli), S Angelo, 27 Dec 1720 [Act 3 by Vivaldi]

L'inganno fortunato (B. Pavieri, after G.B. Sara), S Moisè, aut. 1721

Bertarido re dei Longobardi (after A. Salvi: Rodelinda), S Cassiano, aut. 1727

other vocal

Infelice Dorinda (cant.), Mez, bc, I-Vqs

Ingrata Lidia (cant.), S, bc, D-Bsb

Lascia, ben mio, lo sdegno (duet), 2vv, str, GB-Lbl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CaffiS

DBI (Anon.)

EitnerQ

GerberL

La BordeE

SchmidlD

SchmidlDS

L. Schiedermair: ‘Die Oper an den badischen Höfen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 191–207, 369–449, 510–50

R. Brockpähler: Handbuch zur Geschichte der Barockoper in Deutschland (Emsdetten, 1964), 147

U. Kirkendale: Antonio Caldara: sein Leben und seine venezianisch-römischen Oratorien (Graz, 1966), 31, 51

R. Freeman: ‘The Travels of Partenope’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 336–85

E. Selfridge-Field: ‘Annotated Membership Lists of the Venetian Instrumentalists’ Guild, 1672–1727’, RMARC, no.9 (1971), 1–52; no.12 (1974), 152–5

SVEN HANSELL (with OLGA TERMINI)

Bonizzi, Vincenzo

(b Parma; d Parma, 17 July 1630). Italian composer and instrumentalist. In Parma he studied the viola with Orazio Bassani and the organ with Claudio Merulo; his fellow students included Camillo Angleria and Girolamo Diruta. He was already in Ferrara, in the service of Lucrezia d'Este, Duchess of Urbino, when he published his first book of Motecta in 1595, and he may have been there from about 1582 when Lucrezia created her own concerto di dame, the members of which had been fellow students of Bonizzi. On 1 February 1599, soon after the death of Lucrezia, he moved to the Farnese court at Parma, where he stayed for many years as an organist and maestro di cappella. On 15 October 1610 he was appointed organist of Madonna della Steccata, a post once occupied by Merulo. He resigned on 25 April 1614 but resumed the position on 31 January 1619, when he was also appointed maestro di cappella. In July of the same year he was appointed organist of Parma Cathedral and in the summer of 1627 was also appointed maestro di cappella, holding both posts until his death.

Bonizzi was better known as a performer than as a composer. While his first book of Motecta, for four to eight voices (Ferrara, 1595), reflects the religious activities of Lucrezia and her circle in Ferrara, his only other surviving publication, Alcune opere di diversi auttori a diversi voci, passagiate principalmente per la viola bastarda, ma anche per ogni sorte di stromenti, e di voci (Venice, 1626¹⁵/R), contains the music he wrote for the three female viola da gamba virtuosos from the Avogadri family. The collection includes embellished madrigals and chansons by 16th-century composers. One of the madrigals, La bella e netta e igniuda mano, had appeared earlier in the Lezioni di contrappunto (MS, 1621–2, I-Bc) of F.M. Bassani, Orazio Bassani's nephew, but with different embellishments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Pelicelli: ‘Musicisti in Parma nei secoli XVI–XVII’, NA, viii (1931), 196–215, 217–46; ix (1932), 112–29; x (1933), 32–43, 116–26

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Cronistoria del concerto delle dame principalissime di Margherita Gonzaga d'Este (Florence, 1979)

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Introduction to V. Bonizzi: Alcune opere di diversi auttori (Florence, 1983)

ARGIA BERTINI/DINKO FABRIS

Bonizzoni, Eliseo

(fl 1569–74). Italian composer. In 1569 he was in the service of Sforza Pallavicino, then General of the Venetian Republic, and some time between this date and 1574 he took holy orders. Only two of his works are extant: Il primo libro delle canzoni a quattro voci (Venice, 1569) and Delli Magnificat a quattro voci … libro primo (Venice, 1574). The fact that the earlier of these is dedicated to Giovanni Francesco Sanseverini, Count of Colorno (near Parma), and that it contains three pieces by Pietro Taglia, then active in Milan, suggests Bonizzoni's wide-ranging contacts.

IAIN FENLON

Bonlini, Giovanni Carlo

(b Venice, 7 Aug 1673; d Venice, 20 Jan 1731). Italian amateur musician and writer. He published anonymously at Venice in 1730 a detailed catalogue of the operas performed in the city to that time: Le glorie della poesia e della musica contenute nell’estatta notizia de' Teatri della città di Venezia, e nel catalogo purgatissimo dei drammi quivi sin’hora rappresentati, con gl'auttori della poesia e della musica e con le annotazioni ai suoi luoghi propri. Drawing on earlier works by Leone Allacci and Cristoforo Ivanovich, Bonlini provided valuable information about the history of Venetian opera, and particularly about the works of Monteverdi and Cavalli. His work was continued by the Venetian Antonio Groppo, who published in 1745 a Catalogo di tutti drammi per musica recitati ne' teatri di Venezia dall'anno 1637 … fin all'anno presente 1745.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Piscitelli Gonnelli)

MGG1 (F. Fano)

M.A. Rossi, ed.: Novelle della Repubblica delle lettere dell'anno M.D. CCXXXI (Venice, 1730–61)

G.M. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d'Italia cioè notizie storiche e critiche intorno alle vite, e agli scritti dei letterati italiani, ii/3 (Brescia, 1760?–63), 1669

Bonmarché [Bonmarchié, Bon Marchier], Jean de

(b ?Douai, c1520–25; d ?Madrid, Sept 1570). Franco-Flemish composer. He may have been the Joannes Bonmarchié who took degrees at the universities of Leuven (1547) and Douai. Jean de Bonmarché was dean of Lille Cathedral and was appointed master of the choirboys at Cambrai Cathedral in 1560. Contemporary accounts describe him as an able composer over 40 years old with a poor singing voice. In a letter dated 30 November 1564, Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Parma and Regent of the Low Countries, offered him the position of master of Philip II’s Flemish chapel in Madrid, a post that had recently become vacant because of the death of Pierre de Manchicourt. Bonmarché accepted the post on either 17 or 26 December, left the southern Netherlands on 14 April 1565 and arrived in Madrid on 8 June. Philip wrote to the Duke of Alba on 16 September 1570 requesting a new master for his Flemish chapel because his own had died a few days earlier.

One motet by Bonmarché, Constitues eo principes, survives in a printed collection (RISM 1568⁷, ed. L.J. Wagner, Athens, OH, 1987). It is an impressive quadruple canon in which a notated four-voice choir gives rise to a canonic second choir. His remaining known works are now lost. The Cambrai Cathedral archives contain records of payments made to him in 1561 for a motet for the feast of St Anthony, one for the feast of St Claude and hymns and motets composed for the feast of St Luke. The cathedral also possessed a Te Deum with the title ‘Pater de Sainte-Claire’ and a seven-voice mass, both of which were copied in 1568. The 1597 inventory of choirbooks in the Palacio Real, Madrid, mentions a mass and a motet by him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (P. Becquart)

Vander StraetenMPB, viii, 71–96

L.J. Wagner: ‘Music of Composers from the Low Countries at the Spanish Court of Philip II’, Musique des Pays-Bas anciens – musique espagnole ancienne: Brussels 1985, 193–214, esp. 199–200

JOHN D. WICKS

Bonn.

German city in North Rhine-Westphalia. Drusus built a Roman stronghold on the existing settlement in 10 bce. In Frankish times two Christian settlements were formed round the respective centres of the Dietkirche (later the Stiftskirche) and the Cassiuskirche, the latter being named Villa Basilica c800 and Civitas Verona c1000; this Verona is mentioned in the sequence Majestati sacrosanctae (Analecta hymnica, lv, no.150). The Cassiuskirche had connections with the churches of St Gereon in Cologne and St Viktor in Xanten, all three dedicated to martyrs of the Theban legion. In 1244 Bonn was accorded civic rights; in 1257 it was designated the residence of the electors, which it remained until 1794. From 1949 to 1991 it was the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany.

At the Cassiuskirche Gregorian and German hymns were sung, but not polyphonic works. The oldest records, in the chapter rolls of 1568, mention the choirboys and their director as ‘Choralen’ and ‘Pincernatus’; by a contract of 8 October 1568 Servatius Christiani was appointed organist. Documents of 1595 refer to two organs. The choral manuscripts of Bonn are of little importance; apart from a few 18th-century processionals, those extant consist only of a gradual of the Poppelsdorfkirche with sequences and a gradual with tropes (1728) of the Engeltal monastery. The editor of the Theatrum musicae choralis (1782) was a Bonn chorister, Reiner Kirchrath. During the Reformation, the Protestant Bönnisches Gesangbüchlein (1544), an important source for hymns of both confessions, was compiled, and reprinted 31 times up to 1603.

Only a few names bear witness to musical life at the court in the 16th century: Jean Taisnier, Jacobus de Kerle, Antonius Gosswin and Jean de Castro. The heyday of the Hofkapelle, much influenced by Italian music, began during the first half of the 17th century under the Elector Ferdinand with the careers of Gilles Hayne, Francesco Foggia, Carlo Farina, Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde and Massimiliano Neri. Later reigning princes encouraged music and practised it themselves; the Elector Joseph Clemens attempted composition, and his successor Clemens August played the viola da gamba. Joseph Clemens's musicians included Johann Christoph Pez, and among those who served Clemens August were Gioseffo Trevisani, Hieronymus Donnini, Joseph Zudoli, Joseph Touchemoulin, Joseph-Marie-Clément Dall'Abaco, Joseph Karl Gottwald, Francesco Zoppis, Anton Raaff, Johann Ries, Johann Peter Salomon and Gilles van den Eeden. The last two electors, between 1761 and 1794, employed among others Andrea Lucchesi, Gaetano Mattioli, Josef Reicha and his nephew Antoine, and the two cousins Andreas and Bernhard Romberg. Beethoven’s grandfather Ludwig was conductor of the electoral orchestra, his father Johann a tenor, and Beethoven himself a viola player and organist. Throughout his life he maintained a warm friendship with the old violin teacher Franz Ries and his son Ferdinand, and also with Nikolaus Simrock, the horn player who founded the important music publishing firm.

During the electoral period the opera and theatre were dominated by companies from elsewhere – in 1745 Pietro Mingotti’s Hamburg company under J.B. Locatelli, and in 1757 and 1764 that of Angelo Mingotti. Between 1767 and 1771 smaller Italian companies appeared. In 1771 Lucchesi came with his ensemble; in 1779 Neefe worked with the Grossmann company at the Bonner Nationaltheater (opened 1778) with a repertory of opera buffa, opéra comique and Singspiel. In the post-electoral period the repertory was of vaudeville and theatre music resembling that of the Cäcilia Wolkenburg in Cologne; Peter Grabeler, Anton Mohr and Johanna Kinkel were the chief contributors. The theatre, destroyed during World War II, was replaced by the Theater der Stadt Bonn on another site in 1965.

In the late 18th century music in Bonn was fostered in the aristocratic houses of Metternich, Belderbusch and Hatzfeld. In the Zehrgarten in the market place the widowed Frau Koch and her attractive daughter Babette drew together an artistically minded circle of townspeople and students (to which Beethoven belonged, as did Eleonore von Breuning, her brothers, Franz Wegeler and the teacher Neefe), to whose Dilettanterien people paid subscriptions. The so-called ‘Minervalkirche von Stagira’, founded under Neefe’s leadership in 1781 as the Bonn branch of the Illuminati, was dissolved in 1785, but its intellectual interests were reasserted in the Bonn Lesegesellschaft (founded in 1787), which has continued as a literary and recreational society.

In the first half of the 19th century Heinrich Carl Breidenstein was the chief promoter of musical life; the Städtische Akademische Singverein, which he founded in 1823, continued until 1853, while a Musikverein bei der Lese- und Erholungsgesellschaft, which he forged from three existing societies in 1834, was dissolved the next year. A rival group of enthusiastic singers was immediately formed under Peter Grabeler in 1826–9; after his death in 1830 it was directed by the classical scholar Friedrich Heimsoeth, who had made his name by performances of early a cappella music in the Minorite church (now St Remigius). The rival academic and civic societies were reconciled for special occasions, such as the unveiling of Ernst Hähnel’s Beethoven memorial in 1845. The Concertverein (founded 1852) has continued since 1861 without interruption as the Städtische Gesangverein. During the years 1827 to 1848 a highly individual music circle was maintained by the gifted Johanna Mockel (later Mathieux and, from 1843, Kinkel), a keen composer, whose group of singers, the Bonner Gesangverein, gave performances of opera and oratorio with piano accompaniment. The Concordia, the oldest continuing men's choral society, was founded in 1846 out of the Liederkranz (founded in 1838). Instrumental music was fostered by the privately subsidized Orchesterverein (founded in 1843 by Breidenstein) and the Beethovenverein (founded in 1850 by Ludwig Bischoff) until in 1911 a permanent municipal orchestra was organized, the ground having been prepared from 1907 onwards by the appearances of Heinrich Sauer and musicians from Koblenz, who played in Bonn in the winter and in Bad Neuenahr in the summer. The post of municipal director of music, salaried from 1859, was held successively by Albert Dietrich, Joseph Brambach (1861), W.J. von Wasielewski (1869), Leonhard Wolff (1884), Hugo Grüters (1898), F. Max Anton (1922), Gustav Classens (1932), Otto Volkmann (1949), Volker Wangenheim (1957–79), Gustav Kuhn (1983–5), Dennis Russell Davis (1987–95) and Marc Soustrot (from 1995). Wolff and Grüters introduced Reger's works to Bonn.

Beethoven matriculated in the faculty of philosophy at the Academy (described by Braubach as the bulwark of the Enlightenment on the lower Rhine), which in 1786 was raised to the rank of university; the present university was founded in 1818. Bonn has the oldest institute of musicology in Germany, Breidenstein’s Musikalischer Apparat, established in 1823. Breidenstein completed his Habilitation in 1824 and was given a professorship in 1826. He was instrumental in gaining the Klein collection of 550 manuscripts and c150 18th-century publications for the university. His successors as professor have included Leonhard Wolff (1891), Ludwig Schiedermair (1915), under whose direction the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar was founded in 1919, Joseph Schmidt-Görg (1948), Günther Massenkeil (1966) and Eric Fischer (1992).

Since 1889 the Verein Beethoven-Haus has looked after Beethoven’s birthplace and its collections (see illustration); since 1890 the Verein has run a biennial series of concerts of chamber music. In 1956 it inherited a Beethoven collection from H.C. Bodmer of Zürich. On the centenary of Beethoven’s death (1927) the Beethoven Archives Research Institute was founded as the Stiftung beim Verein Beethoven-Haus under the direction of Schiedermair, whose successors have included Joseph Schmidt-Görg (1945–72), Martin Staehelin (1976–83) and Sieghard Brandenburg. In 1947 the Reger Institute began its activities as the Elsa Reger Foundation.

Schumann died at Bonn-Endenich in 1856, and the town of Bonn arranged the Schumann house as a memorial building. Schumann was buried in the old cemetery in the centre of the town, as was his widow; this was also the burial ground of Beethoven’s mother and of Mathilde Wesendonk and Elsa Reger.

The Johannes Klais firm of organ builders was founded in Bonn in 1882.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (J. Schmidt-Görg)

MGG2 (I. Forst, G. Massenkeil)

J. Heer: ‘Zur Kirchenmusik und ihrer Praxis während der Beethovenzeit in Bonn’, KJb, xxviii (1933), 130–42

J. Schmidt-Görg: ‘Musikgeschichtliches aus den ältesten Kapitelakten des Bonner Münsters’, Bonn und sein Münster: Festschrift für Johannes Hinsenkamp, ed. F. Nussbaum (Bonn, 1947), 177–92

T. Clasen: ‘Die musikalischen Autographen der Universitätsbibliothek Bonn’, Festschrift Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 60 Geburtstag, ed. D. Weise (Bonn, 1957), 26–65

T.A. Henseler: ‘Das musikalische Bonn im 19. Jahrhundert’, Bonner Geschichtsblätter, xiii (1959)

E. Ennen and D. Höroldt: Kleine Geschichte der Stadt Bonn (Bonn, 1967)

M. Braubach: Kleine Geschichte der Universität Bonn, 1818–1968 (Bonn, 1968)

H. Schmidt: ‘Die Beethovenhandschriften des Beethovenhauses in Bonn’, BeJb 1969–70, ix–xxiv, 1–43

M. Marx-Weber: Katalog der Musikhandschriften im Besitz des Musikwissenschaftlichen Seminars der Rheinischen Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (Cologne, 1971)

S. Brandenburg: ‘Die kurfürstliche Musikbibliothek in Bonn und ihre Bestände im 18. Jahrhundert’, BeJb 1971–2, 7–48

C. Valder-Knechtges: ‘Die Musikgeschichte’, Bonn als kurkölnische Haupt- und Residenzstadt 1597–1794, ed. D. Höroldt (Bonn, 1989), 449–514

HANS SCHMIDT

Bonnal, (Joseph) Ermend [Ermend-Bonnal, Joseph; Marylis, Guy]

(b Bordeaux, 7 July 1880; d Paris, 14 Aug 1944). French organist and composer. At the Paris Conservatoire, he studied piano with Charles-Wilfrid Bériot, organ with Guilmant and composition with Fauré. A disciple of Tournemire and Albert Périlhou, he sometimes deputized for them at Ste Clotilde and St Sévérin (where he met Saint-Saëns), while he was titular organist at St Médard in Paris and at Notre-Dame in Boulogne-sur-Seine. In 1920 he became director of the Bayonne Conservatory, which flourished under his leadership up until the occupation, while he also found the time for yet another post as organist of St André in Bayonne and for composition. His organ symphony Media Vita, first performed in 1932 at the competition of the Amis de l’orgue, drew attention to his music. In 1942 he succeeded his master Tournemire at Ste Clotilde, where he remained until his death in 1944.

He left a substantial number of works composed in a wide variety of genres, from popular dances (published under the pseudonym of Guy Marylis) to his oratorio Poèmes franciscains (1930). His organ music is an original body of work, indebted to the harmonic language of Vierne and to the modality and rhythmic freedom of Tournemire. Steeped in the atmosphere of the Basque country, his works are also characterized by a fondness for nature and the Impressionist nuances suggested by changing light. This is expressed in Bonnal’s organ music from the Paysage landais (1904) onwards, and above all in his evocative Paysages euskariens completed in 1931, which concludes with ‘Cloches dans le ciel’, a grand carillon reminiscent of similar pieces by Vierne.

WORKS

(selective list)

Kbd: Petite rhapsodie sur un thème breton, org, 1898; Esquisse, pf, 1899; Paysage landais, org, 1904; Reflets solaires, org, 1905; Pour mes petits amis, pf, 1910; Colinette, pf, 1913; Jacqueline, pf, 1913; J’ai cassé ma poupée, pf, 1913; La mazurka du crabe, pf, 1913; Petit menuet, pf, 1913; Toto sait danser, pf, 1913; Noël landais, org, 1918; A la manière de, pf, 1924; Menuet triste, pf, 1924; Noël désuet, pf, 1924; Pour bercer Nicole, pf, 1924; Soir aux Abatilles, pf, 1926; Paysages euskariens, org, 1930–31; Les carillons de Buglose, pf, 1931; ‘Media Vita’, sym., org, 1932; La cloche qui pleure et la cloche qui rit, pf, 1938; Monsieur le sénéchal, pf, 1938; Complainte pour l’enfant rêveur, pf, 1938; Noël pyrénéen, pf, 1938; La petite sabotière, pf, 1938; Itxas eta mendi [Sea and Mountain], pf

Orch: Suite basque, 1942; Ballet basque; Fantaisie landaise, pf, orch; 2 syms. (1 with v); Le tombeau d’Argentina

Choral: L’amour, 1926; L’étoile du soir, 1926; Poèmes franciscains (orat, F. Jammes), 1930; Je m’en vais jusqu’au marché, 1931; 4 chansons populaires basques, 4vv, 1933; Hymne au vin, 1936; 3 Noëls, S, SSAA/solo vv, mixed choir, 1937; 7 choeurs ou trios (F. Eon, A. Spire), 2 S, A, 1938; Adios ene maïtea, 3vv, 1944; Au pays des chansons, 1944; Ave Imperator, 1944; Maritchu-Maritchou, 4vv, 1944

Chbr: Légende, vn, pf, 1912: Str Trio, 1934; Str Qt no.1, 1928; Bosphore, vc, pf, 1937; Str Qt no.2, 1938

Solo vocal: Vaine prière, 1903; Le fiancé, 1908; La sago kaj la canto, 1v, pf, 1909; Chansons d’Agnoutine, 1v, pf, 1926, arr. 12 unacc. choirs; Quand les pins chanteront, 1v, pf, 1928; Adon-Olam, Hebrew ps, 1v, org, 1929; Chansons de l’aube et du soir, 1v, pf, 1936; Ma mère était une paysanne, 1v, pf, 1938; Flaïolet (13th-century text), 1v, pf, 1944

Under pseud. G. Marylis: many dances for orch ens incl.: Ayadé, 1893; Ariette d’un matin, 1927; Douglas One Step, 1927; Fatalidad, 1927; Hammourabi, 1927

Principal publishers: Durand, Eschig, Leduc, Salabert

WRITINGS

‘Saint-Saëns à Saint-Sévérin’, Bulletin des amis de l’orgue, no.24 (1935)

‘Charles Tournemire, l’homme et l’oeuvre’, L’orgue, no.40 (1939); no.41 (1940)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Dufourcq: La musique d’orgue française de Jehan Titelouze à Jehan Alain (Paris, 1941, 2/1949)

N. Dufourcq: ‘Ermend Bonnal’, L’orgue, no.42 (1947)

F. Sabatier: ‘Joseph Ermend-Bonnal’, Guide de la musique d’orgue, ed. G. Cantagrel (Paris, 1991)

F. Sabatier: ‘Une correspondance inédite entre Charles Tournermire et Joseph Ermend Bonnal’, L'orgue, no.244 (1997), 22–34

FRANÇOIS SABATIER

Bonnard, Laurent.

See Bonard, Laurent.

Bonnefond, Simon de

(fl Clermont-Ferrand, 1551–7). French composer. According to the title-page of his five-voice Missa pro mortuis (Paris, 1556), he was a canon and master of the choirboys at Clermont-Ferrand. Three four-voice chansons by him were included in anthologies also printed by N. Du Chemin in Paris (1551⁹ and 1557¹⁰). The Requiem includes the introit, Kyrie, Sarum gradual (Si ambulans), Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and communion. The five voices are retained throughout the polyphonic sections; the cantus firmus is occasionally presented in the upper voices, with the lower voices paraphrasing the chant in imitation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: ‘Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas Du Chemin (1549–1576)’, AnnM, i (1953), 268–373; iv (1956), 251–4; vi (1958–63), 403–6

FRANK DOBBINS

Bonnel, Pietrequin [Pierre].

See Pietrequin Bonnel.

Bonner, Eugene MacDonald

(b Washington, NC, 1889; d Taormina, Sicily, 8 Dec 1983). American composer and critic. He attended the Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore, where he studied composition with Brockway and the piano with Ernest Hutcheson. He went to England in 1911 and remained there until 1917, when he enlisted in the US Army. After the war Bonner worked in Paris, where he studied conducting under Albert Wolff, 1921–7. He then returned to New York and served as music critic for The Outlook magazine (1927–9) and several newspapers, including the Daily Eagle, Daily Mirror and New York Herald Tribune. In all Bonner composed five orchestral works, four chamber works and five operas. The orchestral piece Whispers of Heavenly Death (1925) and a suite from his opera La comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette (1923) were performed by the Baltimore SO.

The stylistic ferment in the musical world during Bonner’s lifetime had little, if any, effect on his work. His early compositions carry considerable Puccinian influence, a trait that has never fully left his scores. Although displaying an occasional chromatic tartness, his music for the most part remains conservative. It has been described as delicate and containing a sweetness not uncommon to works of the 18th-century Italian repertory.

WORKS

Ops: Barbara Frietchie, 1915–17; La comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette (after A. France), 1923, excerpts arr. as orch suite; The Venetian Glass Nephew (after E. Wylie), c1928; The Gods of the Mountain, 1936; Frankie and Johnnie

Orch: 3 Songs (W. Whitman), 1v, orch (1923); Whispers of Heavenly Death, 1925; White Nights, 1925; Taormina (1940); Concertino, pf, str

Chbr: Flûtes, Mez/Bar, fl, cl, bn, hp/pf, vc (1923); Pf Qnt, 1925; Suite sicilienne, vn, pf, 1926; Young Alexander, incid music, wind, hp, perc, 1929

MSS in Winthrop College MSS collection, Rock Creek, SC

Principal publishers: Chester, J. Fischer

CHARLES H. KAUFMAN

Bonnet, Jacques.

See Bourdelot family, (3).

Bonnet, John.

See Benet, John.

Bonnet, Joseph

(b Bordeaux, 17 March 1884; d Sainte Luce, PQ, 2 Aug 1944). French organist and composer, active in the USA and Canada. He studied first with his father, who was organist of Ste Eulalie in Bordeaux, and at the age of 14 became organist at St Nicolas at Bordeaux and then of St Michel, where he gave his first recital in 1901. He worked with Tournemire in Paris, then with Guilmant at the Conservatoire, gaining a premier prix in organ and improvisation in 1906. From 1906 to 1944 he was organist at St Eustache in Paris, and in 1911 was appointed organist of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Heir of Guilmant, he toured widely in France and Europe, and from 1917 in the USA and Canada, where he frequently appeared as teacher and recitalist. In 1921 he established the organ class at the University of Rochester, NY, and he contributed to the creation of the Institut Grégorien de Paris in 1923. In 1937 he succeeded Vierne as professor at the Ecole César Franck, and in 1940 founded the organ class at the Montreal Conservatoire. He was one of the first to record, in the 1930s, the works of Grigny and Marchand. His recital programmes, which covered organ repertory from the 12th century onwards, were published in six volumes as Historical Organ Recitals (New York, 1917–40). He was also involved in an edition of the works of Bach, and in one of Frescobaldi. A perfectionist and man of high ethics, Bonnet was also a Benedictine oblate. His works for organ, which include the Variations de concert, Poèmes d’automne and three volumes of Pièces d’orgue, opp.5, 7 and 10, are still played in recital; elegant in style, they are characterized by traditional harmony and rigorous counterpoint.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. de Miramon Fitz-James: ‘Joseph Bonnet (1884–1944)’, L’Orgue, no.43 (1947), 57–61

F. Sabatier: ‘Joseph Bonnet’, Guide de la musique d’orgue, ed. G. Cantagrel (Paris, 1991)

Joseph Bonnet, 1884–1944, L’orgue francophone (1995) [Special issue in Fr. and Eng.]

GILLES CANTAGREL

Bonnet, Pierre

(b ?Limousin; fl 1585–1600). French composer. He composed his first book of airs (Paris, 1585) while in the service of Georges de Villequier, gouverneur et lieutenant general of the Haute and Basse Marche, at Chauvigny in Poitou. Printed after the dedication (to his employer) are two poems in Bonnet’s praise, one by Jean Dorat and the other by J. Megnier, who wrote:

… Bonnet, qui de son art heureux
La passion, l’esprit & le coeur genereux
Esmeut, charme et ravit doucement par
l’oreille.

The collection contains 20 pieces for four voices, 16 for five, two for six and one for eight, mostly composed in the new homophonic style. Settings of amorous courtly verse by Desportes, Bertaut, Baïf and others found in earlier settings by Guillaume Tessier, Salmon and La Grotte alternate with more rustic villanelles in a dance-like vein; the collection ends with a noël for an angel solo and shepherds' chorus. An enlarged edition dated 1588 referred to Bonnet as ‘Chantre de la Royne mère du Roy’ (i.e. Catherine de’ Medici).

A second collection, Airs et villanelles for four and five voices, was dedicated to a new patron – Gaspard de Rochechouart, Marquis de Montemart. Its music reflects the new monodic trend with some interesting dialogues, in two of which a solo soprano alternates with a four-voice chorus (Le poète et les muses and the more melismatic Sonnet en dialogue sur la mort d’une demoiselle, ‘where the upper voice represents the lady and the answering chorus Charon’). There are written-out diminutions in the upper voice at some of the cadences, and, more unusually in this new declamatory style, dissonance is here and there treated with considerable freedom, notably with regard to accented passing notes and appoggiaturas, as in ex.1a and b.

WORKS

Premier livre d’airs, 4–6vv (Paris, 1585, 3/1588)

Airs et villanelles, 4, 5vv (Paris, 1600, 2/1610): 10 ed. in FCVR, v (1926/R); 1 ed. in Lesure, Anthologie de la chanson parisienne (Monaco, 1953); 1 ed. in Durosoir

10 sacred contrafacta, 1615⁹; 1 in 1619⁹; 3 in 1621⁹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Gérold: L’art du chant en France au XVIIe siècle (Strasbourg, 1921/R), 54ff

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d’Adrian le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955); suppl., RdM, xl (1957), 166–72

G. Durosoir: L'Air de cour en France (1571–1655) (Liège, 1991)

FRANK DOBBINS

Bonnet-Bourdelot, Pierre.

See Bourdelot family, (2).

Bonney, Barbara

(b Montclair, NJ, 14 April 1956). American soprano. She studied at the University of New Hampshire, then in Salzburg, where she sang with several choirs. In 1979 she joined Darmstadt Opera, making her début as Anne Page (Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor), also singing Blonde, Cherubino, Adina, Gretel, Gilda, Ilia, Massenet's Manon and Natalie (Henze's Prinz von Homburg). At Frankfurt (1983–4) she sang Aennchen (Der Freischütz), Norina, Marzelline and Papagena. In 1984 she made her débuts in Munich and at Covent Garden as Sophie (Der Rosenkavalier), a role she has also sung at the Vienna State Opera (1994). She sang Pamina at La Scala (1985) and in Zürich (1986), where she returned in 1989 as Susanna. Meanwhile, Bonney made her Metropolitan début in 1988 as Naiad (Ariadne auf Naxos), followed by Adèle (Die Fledermaus), Sophie, Nannetta (Falstaff) and Susanna. She sang Despina at San Diego (1991), Eurydice (Gluck's Orfeo) at Geneva (1995) and Alphise in Rameau's Les Boréades at the Salzburg Festival and the Proms (1999). As a concert singer she has appeared in works such as Brahms's German Requiem, Haydn's Creation, Handel's Acis and Galatea and Mahler's Fourth Symphony. She is also a fine lieder singer and has recorded songs by Purcell, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Wolf, Strauss, Grieg and Zemlinsky. Born with perfect pitch, she has a beautiful, pure-toned voice, a charming personality and sings with an assured sense of style. (J. Allison: ‘Barbara Bonny’, Opera, l (1999), 905–14)

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bonno, Giuseppe [Bon, Josephus Johannes Baptizta; Bono, Josef]

(b Vienna, 29 Jan 1711; d Vienna, 15 April 1788). Austrian composer of Italian origin. The son of an imperial footman from Brescia, he received his first musical instruction from the court composer and Kapellmeister of the Stephansdom, J.G. Reinhardt. In 1726 Charles VI sent Bonno to Naples, where he remained for ten years, studying composition (primarily of church music) with Francesco Durante and dramatic composition with Leonardo Leo; he also had singing lessons. In 1732 he made his début as a composer with the pastorale Nigella e Nise (text by G.C. Pasquini).

In February or March 1736 Bonno returned to Vienna. On 26 July of that year his festa di camera in one act, L’amore insuperabile, was performed to celebrate the name-day of the Archduchess Maria Anna, and on 1 October Trajano was performed, the first of several stage works written for the birthday of Charles VI. The following year he applied unsuccessfully for the post of court composer. Kapellmeister J.J. Fux, who judged him ‘as yet insufficiently trained in the rudiments of counterpoint’, recommended instead that he be appointed as a ‘court scholar in composition’, with himself providing the necessary instruction. On 6 February 1739 Bonno was made a court composer. With the oratorio Eleazaro, written the same year, he succeeded in capturing the taste of the Viennese public. On 25 January 1740 he married Elizabeth Staltzinger (1714–61); four children of the marriage survived. From about 1749 to 1761 Bonno was Kapellmeister to the household of Field Marshal Joseph Friedrich, Prince of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, in Schlosshof and Mannersdorf, where his fellow musicians included Gluck (1754–6) and Dittersdorf (1751–61). During the winter Bonno directed the prince’s Friday evening concerts at the Palais Rofrano (now the Palais Auersperg) in Vienna.

In 1774 Bonno succeeded F.L. Gassmann as Kapellmeister to the imperial court in recognition of his particular talent ‘in the composition of chamber music and stage works’. He was later assisted in this position by Antonio Salieri, his eventual successor, who conducted the Italian opera when Bonno was unable to do so. Bonno also succeeded Gassmann as conductor of the Tonkünstler-Societät, the benevolent society for musicians’ dependants, which he also served from 12 February 1774 as vice-president, and from 1775 as president, replacing Prince Khevenhüller. By 1781 or 1782 ill-health had forced him to give up his direction of the society’s concerts; on 1 March 1788 he relinquished his position as president, and at the same time retired from his court duties.

Bonno was a highly esteemed figure in Viennese musical life. He collaborated closely with Metastasio, composing the first settings of the poet’s Il natale di Giove, Il vero omaggio, Il re pastore, L’eroe cinese, L’isola disabitata and L’Atenaide, ovvero Gli affetti più generosi. Of Il re pastore, Metastasio wrote to Farinelli, ‘The music is so graceful, so well adapted and so lively, that it enchants by its own merit, without injuring the passion of the personage, and pleases excessively’. Bonno was also notable as a teacher: both Dittersdorf and Marianne von Martínez studied composition with him. Dittersdorf remarked that he had ‘an extraordinary gift for teaching singers’; his singing pupils included Therese Teyber, Karl Frieberth and Katharina Starzer.

Bonno composed principally operas, oratorios and, after his withdrawal from the operatic stage in 1763, church music. Stylistically he stands between the late Venetian Baroque style that survived in Vienna with Fux and Caldara and the Classicism of Gluck and Haydn. True to his Neapolitan training, he was not a reformer like Gluck; he thoroughly mastered the difficulties of opera and was generally content to work within the conventions of his time, though a growing concern for greater dramatic realism occasionally affected the melodic and rhythmic style of his recitative. His orchestration rises above the routine, showing a taste for colourful instrumentation and picturesque effects. Especially in his later operas he synthesized the Neapolitan style of his early training with the late Venetian style in Vienna; the arias have mellifluous Neapolitan melodies as well as contrapuntal forms. His oratorios contain French overtures and fugal arias, while his use of extended ritornellos and his preference for da capo form are striking. His church music reflects the increasingly secular approach of the time: the liturgical text is often subordinated to the music, giving rise to instances of incongruous word setting.

WORKS

operas

unless otherwise stated, first performed at Vienna at the Burgtheater, MSS in A-Wn; catalogue in Breitner 1961

L’amore insuperabile (festa di camera, 1, G.C. Pasquini), 26 July 1736

Trajano (festa di camera, 1, Pasquini), 1 Oct 1736

La gara del genio con Giunone (serenata, 1, Pasquini), Laxenburg, 13 May 1737

Alessandro Severo (festa di camera, 1, Pasquini), 1 Oct 1737

La generosità di Artaserse (serenata, Pasquini), 4 Nov 1737

La pace richiamata (festa di camera, Pasquini), 26 July 1738

La pietà di Numa (festa di camera, 1, Pasquini), 1 Oct 1738

La vera nobilita (festa di camera, Pasquini), 26 July 1739

Il natale di Numa Pompilio (festa di camera, 1, Pasquini), 1 Oct 1739

Il nume d’Atene (festa di camera), 19 Nov 1739

La generosa Spartana (serenata, 1, Pasquini), Laxenburg, 13 May 1740

Il natale di Giove (azione teatrale, 1, P. Metastasio), Vienna, Favorita, 1 Oct 1740

Il vero omaggio (componimento drammatico, 1, Metastasio), Vienna, Schönbrunn, 13 March 1743

Danae, 1744, ?unperf., lost

Ezio, 1749, ?unperf., lost

Il re pastore (dramma per musica, 3, Metastasio), Vienna, Schönbrunn, 27 Oct 1751

L’eroe cinese (dramma per musica, 3, Metastasio), Vienna, Schönbrunn, 13 May 1752

Didone abbandonata, 1752 (Metastasio), unperf., lost

L’isola disabitata (azione teatrale, 1, Metastasio), Aranjuez, 31 May 1753

L’Atenaide, ovvero Gli affetti più generosi, 1762 (azione teatrale, 2, Metastasio), unperf.

Il sogno di Scipione, 1763 (Metastasio), unperf.

Music in: Catone in Utica, 1742; L'Armida placata, 1750

oratorios

full thematic catalogue in Breitner, 1961

Eleazaro (azione sacra, 2, ?Pasquini), Vienna, Hofkapelle, 1739

San Paolo in Athene (azione sacra, 2, Pasquini), Vienna, Hofkapelle, 31 March 1740

Isacco figura del redentore (azione sacra, 2, Metastasio), Vienna, Palais Rofrano, 18 March 1759, ed. in IO, xxi (1987)

Il Giuseppe riconosciuto (azione sacra, 2, Metastasio), Vienna, Tonkünstlersocietät, 20 March 1774

sacred

thematic catalogue in Schienerl, 1925, and ‘Catalogo’, A-Wn

Masses: 23 in C, 3 in G, 2 in D, 2 in F, 1 in A, B, E; frags., D-Bsb, GB-Cfm; 2 Requiem, c, E

Grads: Benedicia; Domine praevenisti; Felix es; Lauda Sion salvatorem; O virgo tristissima; Propter veritatem; Requiem aeternam; Specie tua; Victime Paschali; Viderunt omnes fines

Offs: Assumpta est; Beata es virgo; Domine Jesu Christe; Haec dies; Sacerdotes; Sacerdotes Domini; Tui sunt coeli; Veni dilicta sponsa; Veni sponsa; Veritas mea

Other works: 2 TeD; 3 Litaniae de Beata Vergine, F, G, C; 50 Proprium songs; 3 Ambrosian hymns; 3 Mag ants; 3 vesper hymns; Asperges me; Magnificat; Pange lingua, I-Gl, Nc; Salve regina; Tantum ergo; Laudate Dominum; Vidi aquam, A-HE; Cum sancto spiritu, 5vv, in The Fitzwilliam Music, iii (London, 1825), 54; In tento terrae jubilo, CZ-Pak; Per campos colles portanta, Pak

other works

Arias (in A-Wgm, D-Dl, MÜp, SWl, GB-Lbl, I-Nc; catalogue in Breitner, 1961): Ah per voi la pianta umile; Amen se non poss’ sequie l’amato; Alla selva, al prato, al fonte; In pensar che men sdegnose; Odia la pastorella; Pastorella io giurei; So che la gloria perde; So che pastor son io; Tu sai come t’amo

Inst: Fl Conc., G, D-KA; Sinfonia a 4 a il giorno natalizo di Carlo VI, A-Wgm; Sinfonia a 3, G, I-Mc; Sym., D, D-Rtt; waltzes, I-PLcon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KöchelKHM

ScheringGO

Catalogo delle opere … le quali … Giusseppe II si compiacque di trasmettere nell’archivio di musica della Imperiale reale cappella (MS, A-Wn)

C.F. Pohl: Denkschrift aus Anlass des hundertjährigen Bestehens der Tonkünstler-Societät (Vienna, 1871)

E. Wellesz: ‘Giuseppe Bonno (1710–1788): sein Leben und seine dramatischen Werke’, SIMG, xi (1909–10), 395–442

A. Schienerl: Die kirchlichen Kompositionen des Giuseppe Bonno (diss., U. of Vienna, 1925; extracts in SMw, xv, 1928, p.62)

H. Kunz: ‘Der Wiener Theaterspielplan 1741–1765’, Jb der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 1953–4, 72–113

F. Hadamowsky: ‘Leitung, Verwaltung und ausübende Künstler … am Burgtheater (französisches Theater) und am Kärntnertortheater (deutsches Theater) in Wien 1754–1764’, Jb der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 1958–9, 113–33

K. Breitner: Giuseppe Bonno und sein Oratorienwerk (diss., U. of Vienna, 1961) [with extensive bibliography]

W. Vetter: ‘Italiens Musik im Lichte von Dichtung und bildender Kunst’, DJbM, viii (1963), 54–95

R. Meloncelli: ‘Un operista italiano alla corte di Vienna: Giuseppe Bonno (1710–1788)’, Chigiana, xxix–xxx (1975), 331–42

S. Kleindienst: ‘Marginalien zu Giuseppe Bonnos Requiem’, Musik am Hof Maria Theresias: in memoriam Vera Schwarz, ed. R.V. Karpf (Munich, 1984), 131–40

D. Heartz: Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School 1740–1780 (New York, 1995), 115–20

RUDOLPH ANGERMÜLLER/RON RABIN

Bonnus [van Bunnen, Bunnus, Bonnius], Hermann

(b Quakenbrück, 1504; d Lübeck, 12 Feb 1548). German evangelical theologian and hymn writer. In 1523 he entered Wittenberg University, where he was a pupil of Luther and Melanchthon, both of whom later became his friends. From 1525 he held various teaching posts in Greifswald (until 1527), Gottorf (the Danish prince’s household, in 1528), and Lübeck (1530) before being appointed first senior minister there in 1531 by Bugenhagen. Bonnus played an important part in promoting the Reformation in Lübeck, and in 1543 was also active in Osnabrück, where he drew up an evangelical liturgy in which he proposed that psalms should be sung in schools. Back in Lübeck he revised the Rostock hymnal, which Slüter had published in Low German in 1531. Bonnus added some of his own hymns in a second volume, Enchiridion: geistlike Lede und Psalmen (Lübeck, 1545), among which was Ach wir armen Sünder, still found in some German hymnals. Hymni et sequentiae, intended for school use, appeared posthumously (Lübeck, 1559). Bonnus may be regarded as the creator of the Low German hymn.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Spiegel: Hermann Bonnus (Leipzig, 1864, 2/1892)

J. Hennings and W. Stahl: Musikgeschichte Lübecks (Kassel, 1952)

W. Lueken: ‘Lebensbilder der Liederdichter und Melodisten’, Handbuch zum evangelischen Kirchengesangbuch, ed. C. Mahrehholz and O. Söhngen, ii/1 (Göttingen, 1957), 220–21

K.W. Niemöller: Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600 (Regensburg, 1969)

HANS-CHRISTIAN MÜLLER

Bono, Pietro.

See Pietrobono de Burzellis.

Bonomi, Pierre.

See Bonhomme, Pierre.

Bononcini [Buononcini].

Italian family of musicians.

(2) Giovanni Bononcini

(3) Antonio Maria Bononcini

(4) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (ii) [Angelo Bononcini]

LAWRENCE E. BENNETT (1), LOWELL LINDGREN (2–4)

(1) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (i)

(b Montecorone, nr Modena, bap. 23 Sept 1642; d 18 Nov 1678). Composer and theorist. He probably left his provincial home while still a boy to study in Modena with Marco Uccellini, who in 1641 had initiated an important tradition of Modenese violinist-composers (antedating the more famous Bolognese school by about 15 years). As to his other training, Bononcini himself reported in his treatise Musico prattico that he studied counterpoint with Padre Agostino Bendinelli. However, he was never a pupil of Colonna in Bologna, nor did he serve in the orchestra at S Petronio or as maestro di cappella at S Giovanni in Monte, as has sometimes been stated; these posts were held by his eldest son, (2) Giovanni. The confusion seems to have originated with a letter of 1686 from Giovanni to Colonna, which appears in the first volume of La Mara's Musikerbriefe aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Leipzig, 1886) with the incorrect date 1656. On 19 February 1662 Bononcini married Anna Maria Prezii. Of their eight children, only (2) Giovanni and (3) Antonio Maria survived; each was to enjoy an international career as a composer. After publishing three books of sonatas, Bononcini received a dual appointment in 1671 as violinist at the cathedral and chamber musician of the Dowager Duchess Laura d'Este. An intriguing sketch (c1670) drawn by Giovanni Antonio Pistocchi in a copy (I-Bc) of the violino primo part of Bononcini's Varii Fiori reveals that Bononcini also played the violoncello da spalla, a large instrument held over the shoulder and sometimes strapped to the chest.

Bononcini's predilection for counterpoint, perceptible in his earliest publications, became fully evident in the canons of op.3 (1669), which included a puzzle canon whose authorship was challenged by critics. Bononcini replied not only in the dedication of op.4 (1671) but also in the brief unpublished Discorso musicale (reproduced by Valdrighi and Klenz). In the dedication of op.4, Bononcini also indicated that he had finished preparing his Musico prattico, first printed in 1673, the year he succeeded Padre Mario Agatea as maestro di cappella of Modena Cathedral. Apparently a favourite of the duchess, he won her recommendation and was elected unanimously before the cathedral chapter received a message from her 13-year-old son, Francesco II, supporting Giuseppe Colombi. In the face of the fait accompli, the young duke acceded, but in the following year Colombi obtained the post as head of the votive chapel by applying before Bononcini. From op.6 on (1672–8) Bononcini used the title ‘Accademico filarmonico’. No records appear to document his membership in the celebrated academy, but Bononcini's ties with Bologna, especially to the publishers Monti and Silvani, suggest that his claim to the title was justified. His treatise circulated widely and may have served as a model for the academy.

Bononcini composed only instrumental music up to op.9 (1675), but in his last years he turned to vocal genres. Besides two sets of cantatas and a volume of madrigals, he produced I primi voli dell'aquila austriaca, a dramma da camera of which only the libretto is extant. He seems to have been the first to have used the term ‘cantata per camera’, and his cantatas were probably performed for occasional academic activities at Modena. He dedicated the chamber opera and madrigals, as well as Musico prattico, to Emperor Leopold I, which no doubt helped to prepare the way for the eventual engagement of both his sons at the Habsburg court.

Four months after the death of his first wife, on 29 June 1677, Bononcini married Barbara Agnese Tosatti. A son, (4) Giovanni Maria (ii) (called Angelo), was born on 18 November 1678, an hour after his father's death.

Bononcini's sonatas represent the highest achievement of the late 17th-century Modenese instrumental school. Along with north Italians such as Cazzati, he transformed the sectional, canzona-style sonata into one consisting of several distinct movements. His sonate da camera show many French characteristics, perhaps reflecting the taste of the duchess, who was Mazarin's niece. His dances include the most popular French and Italian types, as well as some that combine features of the two traditions, and are probably among the last examples to be used for actual social dancing. A cycle of dances known as the brando (branle) was common at the Modenese court; examples of such brando-suites appear in collections by Bononcini and contemporaries such as Colombi, Vitali and Uccellini. In Bononcini's opp.1 and 2 the brando consists of several sections followed by a gavotta and one or two correntes. Some flexibility with regard to the number of performing instruments can be seen in the sonate da camera; dances in four parts may be played a due by omitting the second violin and violone, leaving only the first violin and spinetta (the keyboard instrument preferred by Bononcini for the continuo in secular music). The forms of the sonate da chiesa of opp.1 and 6 are still closely related to the mid-17th-century canzona, but in the five mature pieces of op.9 Bononcini tended to alternate affective, homophonic movements with quicker contrapuntal ones in patterns that, like the brando-suites, anticipate Corelli.

Bononcini's harmony stands at the threshold of major–minor tonality. He seems to have been the first theorist to accept a tonal answer as ‘regolare’. Filled with the traces of modality and rapid tonal shifts that characterize much middle Baroque music, his sonatas nevertheless show awareness of basic key relationships, the cycle of 5ths and secondary harmonies. Bononcini rarely exploited mere technical virtuosity; he made only sparing use of the scordatura effect favoured by Uccellini, and he never required fingering above the 3rd position on the violin. For variety, he instead called upon his skill as a contrapuntist, and naturally excelled in the fugal movements of the sonate da chiesa. He occasionally demonstrated his contrapuntal skill by writing abstract compositions such as the canons of op.3 or the concluding sinfonia of op.5, which can be performed in retrograde. His influence on Purcell seems entirely plausible: Maria Beatrice, the daughter of Laura d'Este, married the Duke of York (the future James II) in 1673 and probably took the latest Italian instrumental music to England with her. Bononcini's sonatas continued to be printed in England by Walsh as late as the 1730s.

As a theorist, Bononcini conforms to the broad traditional format of Zarlino's Istitutioni harmoniche, but his rules for consonance and dissonance, recognition of freedoms in accordance with the seconda pratica and full acceptance of the tonal answer reveal his basic agreement with contemporary harmonic practice. The reprints of Musico prattico (Venice, 1678; Bologna, 1688) and its wide distribution (about 80 copies in libraries throughout Europe and the USA) attest to its influence in the decades after Bononcini's death. The second half of the manual appeared in a German translation (Stuttgart, 1701), which served as a model for chapters on the fugue in J.B. Samber's Manuductio ad organum (Salzburg, 1704), J.G. Walther's Praecepta der musicalischen Composition (Weimar, 1708) and Mattheson's Vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739).

WORKS

op.

1	Primi frutti del giardino musicale, 2 vn, bc (Venice, 1666); 10 sonate da chiesa, 5 dances ed. in Klenz (1962); sonata no.6 ed. in Hausmusik, cxxx (Vienna, 1952) and Diletto musicale, cdxlv (Vienna, 1969)
2	Delle sonate da camera e da ballo, 2 vn, bc (Venice, 1667); 8 dances in Klenz (1962)
3	Varii fiori del giardino musicale, overo Sonate da camera … aggiunta d'alcuni canoni, 2–4 str (2 vn/va/vle), bc (Bologna, 1669/R); 6 canons, 5 dances, 2 sonate in Klenz (1962); 1 canon, 12vv, in GMB
4	Arie, correnti, sarabande, gighe, & allemande, vn, vle/spinet (Bologna, 1671); ed. M. Abbado (Milan, 1968); 10 dances in Klenz (1962)
5	Sinfonia, allemande, correnti, e sarabande, 5–6 str (2 vn/tr viol/ a viol/t viol/vle), bc, aggiunta d'una sinfonia a quattro, che si può suonare ancora al contrario (Bologna, 1671); 6 dances in Klenz (1962)
6	Sonate da chiesa, 2 vn, bc (Venice, 1672/R); ?Eng. edn (?1721); see Smith (1948), no.604, and Smith (1968), no.224; 7 sonatas in Klenz (1962); 1 sonata ed. in Mw, vii (1954)
7	Ariette, correnti, gighe, allemande, e sarabande, 1–4 str (2 vn, va, vle) (Bologna, 1673); repr. as A Second Set of Bononcini's Aires, 2 fl, b (London, 1711); 6 dances in Klenz (1962)
9	Trattenimenti musicali, 2–3 str (2 vn/vle), bc (Bologna, 1675); 4 sonate da chiesa, 4 dances, 1 sonata da camera in Klenz (1962)
10	Cantate per camera a voce sola, libro primo, S and/or B, bc (Bologna, 1677/R)
11	Madrigali, 5vv, libro primo (Bologna, 1678)
12	Arie e correnti, 2 vn, vle (vc) (Bologna, 1678); as Ayres in 3 Parts, 2 vn, hpd (London, 1701); as Aires, 2 fl, b ad lib (London, 1705), with numerous transpositions, ed. F.J. Giesbert (Mainz, 1939) for 2 rec/a, bc; ? as Preludes, allemandes …, 2 fl/vn, bc (Amsterdam, n.d.); 3 dances in Klenz (1962)
13	Cantate per camera a voce sola, libro secondo, S/A/B, bc (Bologna, 1678)

I primi voli dell'aquila austriaca del soglio imperiale alla gloria (dramma da camera, V. Carli), Modena, Teatro di Corte, June 1677; only lib extant
Guidita (orat, Giardini), undated, possibly by Giovannini Bononcini, music lost, lib. I-MOs
1 sonata da chiesa, 2 vn, org, in 1680⁷; ed. in Klenz (1962)

theoretical works

Musico prattico che brevemente dimostra il modo di giungere alla perfetta cognizione di tutte quelle cose, che concorrono alla composizione de i canti, e di ciò ch'all'arte del contrapunto si ricerca, op.8 (Bologna, 1673/R; Ger. trans. of pt. ii, Stuttgart, 1701)

(2) Giovanni Bononcini

(b Modena, 18 July 1670; d Vienna, 9 July 1747). Composer and cellist, son of (1) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (i).

2. Works.

Bononcini: (2) Giovanni Bononcini

1. Life.

Giovanni Bononcini moved to Bologna when his father's death made him an orphan at the age of eight. There he studied counterpoint with G.P. Colonna at S Petronio; at the age of 15 he published three instrumental collections and was accepted into the Accademia Filarmonica on 30 May 1686. During the next two years he published three more collections, was engaged at S Petronio as a string player and singer, composed two oratorios which were performed in both Bologna and Modena, and succeeded G.F. Tosi as maestro di cappella at S Giovanni in Monte. For this church he wrote the double-choir masses that were printed as his op.7 in 1688. He composed a new oratorio for Modena in 1690, and in 1691 dedicated his op.8, consisting of well-wrought vocal duets, to Emperor Leopold I and played in the orchestra of the papal legate, the Roman Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili.

In 1691 Bononcini went to Rome, where he entered the service of Filippo Colonna, his wife Lorenza, and her brother Luigi della Cerda, the Spanish ambassador. The librettist Silvio Stampiglia had served the Colonnas since the 1680s, and from 1692 to 1696 he and Bononcini created six serenatas, one oratorio and three, possibly five, operas. The last of these, Il trionfo di Camilla, was produced at Naples after Luigi della Cerda became Spain's viceroy there. Bononcini was accepted into the Congregazione di S Cecilia by October 1695, and on 20 May 1696 he was one of the seven musicians proposed as founding members of a ‘chorus’, or performance wing, of the Arcadian Academy. Perhaps this ‘chorus’ performed at meetings, for on Bononcini's opera and oratorio librettos of 1737 he termed himself ‘Arcade e Filarmonico’. In Rome he taught young musicians, the evidence for which is a sonnet in praise of his teaching by Giuseppe Valentini. According to Geminiani, Camilla ‘astonished the musical world by its departure from the dry, flat melody to which their ears had until then been accustomed’. By 1710 it had been produced in 19 other Italian cities and in London. These productions were probably all based on Bononcini's setting, which should thus be regarded as a touchstone of Italian taste around 1700.

A few months after the death of his Roman patron Lorenza Colonna in August 1697, Bononcini was accepted into the service of Leopold I in Vienna. There he earned the unusually high salary of 5000 florins a year from 1698 to 1712. Between 1698 and 1705 Leopold's heir, Joseph, contributed 2000 florins to this salary, and Bononcini was clearly Joseph's favourite composer: six of his ten dramatic works performed at the court during Leopold's reign were dedicated to the heir or his wife. In 1702 the War of the Spanish Succession caused an interruption of musical festivities in Vienna, so Bononcini led a group of musicians to Sophie Charlotte's court in Berlin, where he became the centre of the queen's daily musical life and composed two ‘petites bagatelles’, Cefalo and Polifemo. He apparently went to Italy during the year of mourning for Leopold's death (May 1705 to June 1706): a new opera by him was produced at Venice during Carnival 1706.

By 1706 Bononcini was famous throughout Europe. Raguenet, who had seen the 1698 production of Camilla in Rome, declared in 1705 that more than 200 cantatas as well as entire operas by Bononcini were known in Paris, where he was the ‘modèle pour le gracieux’. In London 63 performances of Camilla were given from 1706 to 1709, an attempt was made to attract Bononcini himself in 1707, arias from his works were inserted into eight pasticcios produced during the period 1707–11, and he was regarded as ‘indisputably the first’ among cellists. Gasparini ended his 1708 treatise with praise for the ‘bizzaria, beauty, harmony, artful study and fanciful invention’ in Bononcini's cantatas, of which about 300 are extant. According to Benedetto Marcello, the standard cantata which singers gave at auditions was Bononcini's Impara a non dar fede.

During Joseph's reign (1705–11) Bononcini set seven operas and five shorter dramatic works. His great favour probably prompted Joseph to engage his brother (3) Antonio and his former librettist, Stampiglia. These three were not retained by Joseph's successor, Charles VI, though Stampiglia and Giovanni did write a serenata for the new empress's arrival at Milan in 1713. Giovanni Bononcini then entered the service of Charles's ambassador at Rome, Johann Wenzel, Count Gallas. His service began with a 1714 serenata and a 1715 opera, both written in collaboration with Paolo Rolli, and he remained musical director at the embassy until the count's death in July 1719. The predominant taste in Rome was conservative. Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Gasparini were still highly favoured, and the latter wrote in 1715 that Bononcini ‘had truly composed items worthy of paradise’.

In summer 1719 the Earl of Burlington was on his second trip to Italy, and it was he who was chiefly responsible for obtaining Bononcini as a composer for the Royal Academy of Music in London. Bononcini went to London in October 1720, and his first two seasons were outstandingly successful, perhaps largely because the ruling taste in London was as conservative as that in Rome: five of his works (including Muzio Scevola, for which he wrote only Act 2) accounted for 82 of the 120 performances given by the Royal Academy of Music; his Cantate e duetti were engraved with an impressive list of 238 subscribers; and his Divertimenti da camera appeared in two editions, a plain one for an accompanied treble instrument and an ornate edition for harpsichord alone. At the end of his second season he was commissioned by Francis Atterbury, dean of Westminster, to write the anthem for Marlborough's funeral and by the Duchess of Buckingham to set the choruses ending the acts of her late husband's play, Marcus Brutus.

The duchess was a notorious Jacobite, and Atterbury was imprisoned for treasonous Jacobite activities in August 1722. Mainly because of his Jacobite acquaintances and Italian Catholic heritage, Bononcini soon saw his London success ruined. Even though his operas had led the Royal Academy to its only profitable season in 1721–2, the directors apparently did not re-engage him in autumn 1722. His Erminia was produced in March 1723, but it seems to have been written mainly for a Parisian production, with singers from the Royal Academy, in July 1723; this production was cancelled, but Bononcini and at least Anastasia Robinson did perform in Paris during the summer. The Royal Academy re-engaged Bononcini for 1723–4, but cabals against him were strong, and he planned to leave London at the end of the season to accept a position offered him by the mistress of the first minister of France. He and several London singers, including Cuzzoni, spent summer 1724 in France, and for Cuzzoni he composed two pieces, probably the Veni Jesu sponse chare and the Laudate pueri in F, to be performed at the Fontainebleau chapel on 10 September. Then he returned to England.

His mind had been changed by an offer, made on 14 May 1724, of £500 a year for life from Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough. In return for this stipend, he directed performances of his own music at her private concerts until 1731, his only public venture during these years being Astianatte, the performances of which are infamous because of fighting between the partisans of Cuzzoni and Faustina. Although Astianatte was produced 20 years before his death, it virtually ended his career as a dramatic composer. Bononcini was an active member of the Academy of Ancient Music from 1726, and it was in 1727 or 1728 that his friend Maurice Greene introduced an unsigned manuscript of In una siepe ombrosa at a meeting. Bononcini apparently claimed to be the composer of this madrigal until, at the meeting on 14 January 1731, Bernard Gates directed a performance of the same work drawn from Lotti's Duetti, terzetti e madrigali (Venice, 1705). An unusually flagrant example of the age's ubiquitous custom of unacknowledged borrowing had been uncovered, and the academy's directors made a great noise about it in order to discredit Bononcini and Greene. Bononcini went to France for the summer of 1731. He apparently remained in the Duchess of Marlborough's service at least until November 1731, the date of a suite in honour of her daughter's eighth birthday; but they must have ended their relationship by 1732, when he published XII Sonatas dedicated to Henrietta's chief antagonist, her own mother Sarah, the dowager duchess. His final London venture was a performance on 24 June 1732; cabals prevented him from presenting the festa pastorale he had written for the occasion.

Bononcini, then aged 62, went to Paris, where he wrote vocal works for performances of the Concert Spirituel on 7 February and 2 April 1733, and published a Laudate pueri. He proceeded to Madrid in December 1733 and then to Lisbon, where he apparently stayed until 1736; in both cities he performed and wrote music, but nothing for the stage. He returned to Vienna in mid-1736 and set two operas and an oratorio for performance in 1737. The Empress Maria Theresa commissioned a Te Deum in 1741 and on 1 October 1742 increased his small pension to an amount which allowed him to spend his final five years in comfortable frugality. It is not known if his wife Margherita Balletti (who was in London from 1736 to 1738) was with him in Vienna during his last years, but their 22-year-old daughter died there on 10 May 1743.

Bononcini: (2) Giovanni Bononcini

2. Works.

Giovanni Bononcini was between 15 and 21 when the first eight prints of his music appeared. The first six each contain 12 instrumental works, each work typically including four movements with at least the last three in binary form; but instrumental music per se is a very small part of his output and his only later prints appeared in 1722 and 1732 in London. His op.7 contains five-movement, double-chorus masses in declamatory style; but religious music too made up a small part of his output and the only later works printed under his supervision were the 1722 anthem for Marlborough's funeral, written entirely in slow tempos and in keys from two to four flats, and the 1733 Laudate pueri, written in a ritornello structure with a well-balanced harmonic scheme and nicely varied instrumentation. His op.8 contains vocal duos, which were popular enough to be reprinted and then discussed by Le Cerf de la Viéville in 1705 and Riccati in 1787; these duos of 1691 show Giovanni's contrapuntal facility more clearly than any other works before his Ezechia (1737) and Te Deum (1741).

Contrapuntal artifice was not appreciated by the ruling taste, which was instead gratified by the very many solo cantatas and dramatic works which Giovanni Bononcini produced. His first dramatic works, written for Bologna from 1687 and for Rome from 1692, contain brief arias, mainly in da capo form and accompanied by continuo only. Handel extended several arias from Bononcini's Xerse of 1694 for use in his Serse of 1738 (see Powers, 1962); even after extension, the 1738 arias fall far short of usual Handelian length. Arias in Camilla of 1696 have been singled out (by Downes, 1961) for many elements which contribute to the later, galant style of Vinci, Leo, Pergolesi and others. Camilla's great success may well have caused various composers to adopt aspects of galant style. Chrysander and Dent have regretted the presence of such traits in works by Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti, citing Bononcini virtually as a scapegoat. Probably they have overemphasized his importance; he was more of a participant than a leader in the gradual changes of style around 1700.

Plaintive tunefulness, such as that of ‘Per la gloria d'adorarvi’ in Griselda (1722), was always a hallmark of Bononcini's dramatic works. Hawkins aptly found that ‘Bononcini's genius was adapted to the expression of tender and pathetic sentiments. His melodies, the richest and sweetest that we know of, are in a style peculiarly his own; his harmonies are original, and at the same time natural’. In the decades after 1700, however, when Bononcini's arias became markedly longer and more fully accompanied, their Handelian proportions were infrequently supported by the musical substance and inner propulsion which justifies such length in Handel's works or by the neutral, concerto-like figuration which maintains the momentum in Vivaldi's or Vinci's. Thus Burney was less complimentary in his assessment of Bononcini: ‘his melody was, perhaps, more polished and vocal, though not so new as that of his powerful Saxon rival’. It may indeed have seemed antiquated to partisans of new stars, such as Faustina and Farinelli, whose agility was astounding.

A secondary attraction was Bononcini's superb text setting, which the librettist Rolli lauded in 1724 as indescribably expressive of human passions. Such expressiveness was undoubtedly encouraged by his extensive work with noted Arcadian librettists, especially Stampiglia and Rolli. In his recitatives, according to Hawkins, ‘those manifold inflexions of the voice, which accompany common speech, with the several interjections, exclamations and pauses proper thereto, are marked with great exactness and propriety’. Burney concurred by stating that his recitative ‘was universally allowed to be the best of the time, and in the true genius of the Italian language’. Such expressiveness is best judged by Italian connoisseurs, and much of it must have passed unnoticed in Vienna and London, the cities for which Bononcini produced most of his dramatic works between 1699 and 1737.

Since Arcadian writers favoured the pastoral realm, it is not surprising that Bononcini's works typically feature sighing emotions and tender moods, which ‘Primcock’ (1728) contrasted with Handel's heroic emotions and tyrannical rage. In 1716 J.E. Galliard had termed Bononcini's style ‘agreeable and easy’, but by the late 1720s it was found to be lulling rather than exciting, and was derided by some ‘very fine Gentlemen for its too great Simplicity’ (The Craftsman, 10 June 1727). If we hear this ‘simplicity’ as both the final stages of 17th-century bel canto and the precursor of galant and pre-Classical melodies, it aptly becomes the touchstone of taste at the turning-point around 1700.

Bononcini: (2) Giovanni Bononcini

WORKS

music lost unless otherwise stated

†	attributed to Bononcini with no first name given

operas

3-act drammi per musica unless otherwise stated

Eraclea, o vero Il ratto delle Sabine (?S. Stampiglia, after N. Minato; pasticcio, with at least 20 arias by Bononcini), Rome, Tordinona, 12 Jan 1692, arias B-Bc, D-MÜs, I-Rsc, Rvat

Xerse (Stampiglia, after Minato), Rome, Tordinona, 25 Jan 1694, D-MÜs, GB-Lbl (facs. in Handel Sources, viii, 1986); arias B-Bc, D-MÜs, I-Tn

Tullo Ostilio (Stampiglia, after A. Morselli), Rome, Tordinona, c10 Feb 1694, arias B-Bc, D-MÜs, F-Pn, I-Rvat,Sc and Tn

Muzio Scevola [Act 2] (?Stampiglia, after Minato), Rome, Tordinona, 5 Feb 1695, arias D-MÜs, I-Bc, Mc, Rc, Rli,Rvat, REm, Sc and US-NY libin; Florence, 1696, arias F-Pn; Naples, S Bartolomeo, carn., 1698, comic scenes D-Dl, arias F-Pn, I-Nc and PAVu; Turin, Teatro Regio, 1700, arias Tn; as Le garre dell'amore eroico, o sia Il Muzio Scevola, Genoa, c1700; rev. Stampiglia and Bononcini as Mutio Scevola, Vienna, Hof, 30 June 1710, A-Wn

L'amore eroico fra pastori [Act 3] (favola pastorale for puppets, 3, P. Ottoboni), Rome, Palazzo della Cancelleria, Feb 1696 [Act 1 by C.F. Cesarini, Act 2 by G.L. Lulier]; rev. A. Scarlatti as La Pastorella, Rome, Venetian Embassy, 5 Feb 1705, arias GB-Lbl; rev. P.A. Motteux and V. Urbani as Love's Triumph, London, Queen's, 26 Feb 1708, 70 arias (London, 1708)

Il trionfo di Camilla regina de Volsci (Stampiglia), Naples, S Bartolomeo, 27 Dec 1696, D-Bsb, Dl, MÜs, F-Pc [Act 3 only], GB-ABu (facs. in IOB, xvii, 1978), Lbl (2 copies), I-MOe,Nc, US-AUS, Wc, comic scenes D-Dl, arias F-Pn,GB-Lbl, Ob, I-Mc, Nc, Rvat; as La rinovata Camilla regina de Volsci, Rome, Capranica, 18 Jan 1698, A-Wgm, GB-Cfm, CDp, Lbl [Acts 2 and 3]; arias D-MÜs, F-Pn

La clemenza d'Augusto [Act 3] (C.S. Capece), Act 3, Rome, Tordinona, 4 Feb 1697, E-Mn, arias GB-Ob [Act 1 by S. De Luca, Act 2 by C.F. Pollarolo]

Temistocle in bando [Act 3] (after Morselli), Rome, Capranica, Feb 1698, arias B-Br, F-Pn, GB-Lam, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, I-Bc, REm [Act 1 by Lulier, Act 2 by ? M.A. Ziani]

La fede publica (D. Cupeda), Vienna, Hof, 18 Jan 1699, A-Wn (Acts 1 and 3 only)

Gli affetti più grandi vinti dal più giusto (Cupeda), Vienna, Favorita, 30 Aug 1701, Wgm, Wn

Cefalo [Pastorella] (1, A. Guidi), Berlin, Lietzenburg (now Charlottenburg), spr. 1702, D-WD, GB-Lbl

Polifemo (1, A. Ariosti), Berlin, Lietzenburg, sum. 1702, D-Bsb

[Feraspe], Vienna, Hof, ?c1702, A-Wn (Acts 2 and 3 only)

La regina creduta re (M. Noris), Venice, S Angelo, carn. 1706, arias D-Bsb, SWl and GB-Lcm; as Semiramide, o vero La reina creduta re, Brunswick, 1708

Endimione (favola per musica, ?Stampiglia, after F. de Lemene), Vienna, Palais Belfonte, 6 July 1706, A-Wn; Vienna, July 1720

Etearco (Stampiglia), Vienna, Hof, carn. 1707, Wgm, Wn (2 copies; one lacks the act in GB-Cfm), D-WD, GB-Cfm (Act 1 only); Naples, Fiorentini, carn. 1708; rev. Haym, London, Queen's, 10 Jan 1711, ov., 36 arias (London, 1711); rev. version Rome, Pace, carn. 1719, arias B-Bc and F-Pc

Turno Aricino (Stampiglia), Vienna, Favorita, 26 July 1707, A-Wn, D-MEIr, GB-Lbl (2 copies); ov., 6 arias in Almahide (London, 1710)

Mario fuggitivo (Stampiglia), Vienna, Hof, 8 Feb 1708, A-Wgm, Wn, D-Dl, MEIr, W; Leipzig, 1709; Wolfenbüttel, 1710; Brunswick, c1710; 11 arias in Almahide (London, 1710)

Abdolomino (Stampiglia), Vienna, Hof, 3 Feb 1709, A-Wn; rev. F. Mancini, Naples, S Bartolomeo, 1 Oct 1711

Caio Gracco (Stampiglia), Vienna, Hof, 16 Feb 1710, D-W

Astarto (P.A. Rolli, after A. Zeno and P. Pariati), Rome, Capranica, Jan 1715, MÜs, arias I-Rsc; rev. version London, King's, 19 Nov 1720, arias GB-Lcm, ov., sym., 33 arias (London, 1721/R 1984 in BMB, section 4, xx)

Erminia (favola pastorale, 5, ‘d'un accademico Quirino’ [? D.O. Petrosellini]), Rome, Pace, carn. 1719; arias F-Pc, I-Rc, US-Wc; rev. version (favola boschereccia, 3, Rolli), London, King's, 30 March 1723, arias GB-Lbl, 5 arias (London, 1723)

Crispo (drama, 3, Lemer), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1721, arias B-Bc, D-MÜs, F-Pc and I-Rc; rev. version (Rolli, after Lemer, London, King's, 10 Jan 1722, arias IRL-Dam, 10 arias (London, 1722), 4 arias in Cyrus (London, 1722); rev. A. Pampino, Pesaro, Sole, carn. 1730

Muzio Scevola [Act 2] (drama, Rolli), London, King's, 15 April 1721, GB-Lbl (2 copies), arias D-Bsb; ov., 4 arias (London, 1721) [Act 1 by F. Amadei, Act 3 by G.F. Handel]; Hamburg, 7 Jan 1723

L'odio e l'amore [Cyrus] (drama, 3, Rolli), London, King's, 20 May 1721, arias IRL-Dam, US-SFsc, Wc; 2 arias (London, 1722); Brunswick, carn. 1724; as Ciro, Wolfenbüttel, Hof, 15 May 1724

Griselda (drama, 3, Rolli), London, King's, 22 Feb 1722; ov., 29 arias (London, 1722); London, 22 May 1733

Farnace (drama, 3 after L. Morani), London, King's, 27 Nov 1723, D-WD; 10 arias (London, 1724)

Calfurnia (N. Haym, after G. Braccioli), London, King's, 18 April 1724, arias GB-ABu, Er; 11 arias (London, 1724)

Astianatte (drama, 3, ?Haym, after Salvi), London, King's, 6 May 1727, arias Er, US-Wc; 7 arias, minuet (London, 1727); 1 aria in HawkinsH

Alessandro in Sidone (tragicommedia, 5, after Zeno and Pariati), Vienna, Kleines Hof, 6 Feb 1737, A-Wgm, Wn, arias D-MÜs

Zenobia (P. Metastasio), Vienna, Favorita, 28 Aug 1737

serenatas etc.

La nemica d'Amore (S. Stampiglia), 3vv, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 10 Aug 1692, arias F-Pn, I-Rvat

La nemica d'Amore fatta amante (Stampiglia), 3vv, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 10 Aug 1693, D-MÜs, US-Wc (facs. in ICSC, x, 1985); arias I-Rli

La costanza non gradita nel doppio amore d'Aminta (Stampiglia), 3vv, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 17 Aug 1694, D-Bsb, F-Pc (inc.), US-NH

La notte festiva (Stampiglia), 3vv, Rome, Piazza di Spagna, 5 Aug 1695, arias I-MOe

Amore non vuol diffidenza (Stampiglia), 3vv, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 10 Aug 1695, D-Bsb

Amor per amore (Stampiglia), 4vv, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 10 Aug 1696, MÜs

La gara delle quattro stagioni (D. Cupeda), 4vv, Vienna, Hof, 21 April 1699, A-Wn (2 copies)

Euleo festeggiante nel ritorno d'Alessandro Magno dall'Indie, 10vv, Vienna, Favorita gardens, 9 Aug 1699, Wn, F-Pn; Bologna, 1699; as La città di Sion festeggiante, Bologna, 1702 (see oratorios)

I varii effetti d'Amore (scherzo musicale, Cupeda, after Minato), 7vv, Vienna-Neustatt, 1700

Proteo sul Reno (poemetto drammatico, P.A. Bernardoni), 5vv, Vienna, Hof, 19 March 1703, A-Wn

Il fiore delle eroine (trattenimento, Cupeda), 7vv, Vienna, Hof, 10 July 1704, Wn

Il ritorno di Giulio Cesare vincitore della Mauritania (festa, Cupeda), 6vv, Vienna, Hof, Dec 1704 or early 1705, Wn

La nuova gara di Giunone e di Pallade terminata da Giove (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 5vv, for Vienna, Hof, 26 July 1705, perf. ?cancelled,Wn

Il natale di Giunone festeggiato in Samo (componimento, Stampiglia), 5vv, Vienna, Hof, 21 April 1708, Wn

Li sagrifici di Romolo per la salute di Roma (componimento, Stampiglia), 5vv, Vienna, Hof, 26 July 1708, Wn

Enea in Caonia (componimento, Stampiglia), 5vv, Vienna, Hof, 19 March 1711

L'arrivo della gran madre degli dei in Roma (componimento, Stampiglia), 4vv, Milan, Corte, 6 May 1713, Wn, D-MÜs

Sacrificio a Venere (P.A. Rolli), 4vv, Rome, Piazza de' SS Apostoli, 28 Aug 1714, A-Wn

Concerto di musica per il giorno della nascita di sua eccellenza il signor Gio. Wenceslao conte di Galasso ambasciatore (cant.), 4vv, Rome, 1718, text and music unknown

Amore per amor (festa pastorale), London, King's, 24 June 1732

Clori da te sol chiedo, 3vv, D-MÜs (attr. A. Bononcini), F-Pc, Pn; Così l'intendo o Filli, 4vv, GB-Lbl; Gelosia madre d'amore, 2vv, D-Bsb; Gl'amanti felici, 3vv, A-Wn; Non amo e amar desio, 2vv, Wn, D-Bsb, MÜs, F-Pc, I-Fc (reduced score); Silvio trionfante degl'amori di Dorinda e Clori, 3vv, D-Bsb

cantatas

for solo voice and continuo unless otherwise indicated

Edition:Cantatas by Giovanni Bononcini, ed. L. Lindgren, ICSC, x (1985) [facs.] [L]

[10] Duetti da camera, op.8 (Bologna, 1691) [1691]

4 in Cantate a voce sola (Lucca, c1700) [c1700]

[14] Cantate e duetti (London, 1721) [1721]

1 in Meslanges de musique latine, françoise et italienne (Paris, 1725) [1725]

MSS in A-Wgm, Wn; B-Bc, Lc; D-Bsb, Dl, LEm, Mbs, MEIr, MÜs, ROu, SHs, SWl, WD; E-Mn; F-Pc, Pn; GB-Cfm, CDp, Er, Lam, Lbl, Lcm, Lgc, Mp, Ob, Och; I-Ac, Bc, Bsp, Fc, Gl, Mc, MC, MOe, Nc, Pca, PAVu, PLcon, Pistoia, Biblioteca Antonio Venturi, Rli, Rsc, Rvat, REm, Tn; S-L; US-Cn, CAh, IDt, NH, Wc.

Acceso da bei lumi; Ad onta del timore, with 2 vn (lost); Ah non havesse non permesso il fato, L; Ai begli occhi del mio bene, with 2 vn; Alla beltà d'un volto (Le vicende d'amore); †Alle sue pene intorno, with vn; Allor che il cieco nume (Paglia); Allor che in dolce oblio; Allor che in mille petti; †Amai ed amo ancora; †Amarissime pene; Amato tesoro che dolce ristoro; Amo e l'ardor ch'io sento; Amo e ridir nol posso, L; Amo ma poco io spero; Amo peno gioisco, L

†Amor che far deggio; Amore e come mai d'un sguardo; Amore è quel tiranno; †Amor non ho più core; Amor tiranno amor; Amo sì ma non so dire; Anche i tronchi anche le rupi; Anima del cor mio; Antri romiti e solitarie selve; Api che raccogliete; †A piè della sua Clori; Arde il mio petto amante c1700; †Aure che sussurranti; Aure voi che mormorando; Aure voi che sì liete; †A voi che l'accendeste (Paglia); Barbara ninfa in grata, with 2vn, 1721; Bei crini d'oro, L; Belle labra porporine, with 2 vn; Bellezza fedde (Martelli) 2vv, 1691; Biondi crini chiome vaghe; Brama d'esser amante

Care fonti erbette e fiori; Care luci del mio bene, with 2 vn, 1721; †Celinda anima mia; Cento pastori e cento pianger; Che disce che amore, with fl; Che Dori è la mia vita; Che tirannia di stelle, L; Chi d'amor tra le catene (Resta), 2vv, 1691; Chi di gloria ha bel desio (Grapelli), 2vv, 1691; Chi non prova amor in petto; Chi non sa che sia tormento, L; Ch'io canti mi dicesti; Ch'io ti manchi di fede (Bella donna costante), Lz; Chi vide mai ch'intese; Cieco nume tiranno spietato, L

Clori bell'idol mio fido amator; †Clori bell'idol mio or che dura; Clori dunque mi lasci; Clori mio ben mia vita, L; Clori mi sento al core; Clorinda mio core; Clori perché mi fuggi, lost; †Clori saper vorrei qual sia; Clori svenar mi sento, with 2 fl; Col arco d'un ciglio (A. Ottoboni); †Combattuta alma mia; Come siete importuni; †Con che fasto in sen di Flora; †Con lusinghiero inganno; Con trasparente velo, 1702; Correa dietro a spocori; Corre dal monte al prato, with 2 vn

Da che Tirsi mirai; Dal dì ch'il ciel severo, 1696; Dal dì ch'io non vi veggio; †Dal geminio splendor di due pupille; Dal giorno fortunato (Paglia); †Dalisa, oh dio, Dalisa; Daliso m'intendi non voglio ti prendi; †Dall'incurvato ferro; †Dall'ingiuste querelle; Da quel dì che per voi; Da quel dì da quel ora; Da te che pasci ogni ora, 1721; Deh tu m'insegni amore; Della beltà, see Alla beltà; Del suo fedele e taciturno ardore; Del Tebro antico in su la verde sponda; Del Tebro in su la riva donzeletta

Di smiringa la bella; †Di sovrana bellezza (inc.); †Ditemi o care selve; †Di Venere dolente; Di virtude s'è armata raggione; †D'ogni puro candore; Dolente e mesta vo sospirando, 1721; Dopo lunga tempesta; Dove bambino rivo (Il pastore disperato); †Dove con ampio giro; Dove le pianto giro; †Dove sei mia bella Irene; D'un mirto all'ombra, c1700; È bella Irene e vanta; Ecco da me partita; Ecco Dorinda il giorno, with 2 vn, 1721; †È la rosa regina dei fiori; Entro d'ombrosa valle; †Erano ancora immote; È un martirio della costanza

Ferma Borea che tenti (B. Pamphili); †Ferma l'ardita prova; Filli del tuo partire, L; Fillide mia se t'amo; Filli mia mio bel tesoro; †Filli mio ben mia speme; Filli vezzosa oh dei; †Fissai caro mio bene; Fra catene haver il piede; Fra dubbiosi pensieri; Fra i raggi d'un bel volto; Gelosia so che t'affanna; Genio che amar volea, 2 settings; Giacea di verde mirto; Già fugana le stelle (A b[ella] d[onna] crudele) (Paglia); Già la ridente aurora (Diana e Apollo), with 2 vn; Già la stagion d'amore, 1721; Già tra l'onde il sol t'asconde (? by A. Bononcini); Già tutti i miei, see Tutti li miei; †Godea dolce sapore Tirsi

Il mio cor fu sempre mio (A. Ottoboni); Il nume d'amore (Berselli), 2 vv, 1691; †Il partir dal caro bene; Impara a non dar fede, 1725; †Incominciate a piangere; Incredule Amarilli, lost; In due luci vezzosette; Infelice quel cor che vi crede; Ingrata Lidia ai vinto; In siepe odorosa; In tante pene e incosì acerbo duolo; †In una valle amena; †Io che a Filli lontano; Io son lungi alla mia vita (Lontananza), 1701; Io vi chiedo o selve amene, with 2 vn/fl/ob; Irene idolo mio in questo a me fatale; Irene idolo mio Irene addio, L; †Irene mia che tanto bella

Langue accesa d'amore; Lascia di tormentarmi tiranna gelosia; Lasciami un sol momento, 1721; Le tenui ruggiade, with 2 vn, 1721; Lidia bell'idolo mio, lost; Lidia tu sai ch'io t'amo (Paglia); Lidio schernito amante di Lucilla; L'infelice Fileno assiso; L'infelice tortorella (? A. Bononcini) Lontananza crudel se tu pretendi, 1696; Lontan dal tuo bel viso (Paglia); Lo sapete occhi lucenti; Luci barbare spietate, 2vv, 1721; Luci belle pupille adorate, 1702; Luci siete pur quelle, L; Lumi vezzosi lumi (Costanza non gradita), L; Lunghi dalla mia Filli; Lunghi da te mio bene

Mai non s'udi cred'io, with 2 vn; Mai non vidi il sol più adorno; †Mentre l'ascoso ardor; Mercè d'amico raggio (Doglianze d'Irene); Misero e che far deggio, with 2 vn; Misero pastorello ardo di sete, with 2 vn, 1721; Nella stagion che di viole (La primavera), attrib. ‘Francesco Maria Bononcini’; Nelle scuole erudite; Nell'orror più profondo, with 2 vn; Nice mia cara Nice; Ninfe pastori ahimè, lost; Non ardisco pregarti anima bella; Non ho pace nel mio cor (Amor sfortunato); No no più non vi crede; †Non per anche disciolta; Non sa dir che pena sia; Non sarei dei fior reina (La rosa regina dei fiori) (Pamphili)

O che laccio sento al core (Paglia), 2vv, 1691; O d'affetto gentil figlia crudele (Gelosia) (A. Ottoboni); O Fileno filen crudele ingrato sì, O Fille amata Fille, with 2 vn; O foriera del giorno (Nel partire per restituirsi alla S.D.) (A. Ottoboni); Ohimè che mi risveglia; O Irene Iren, see O Fileno; O mesta tortorella, 1721; †O quanto omai diverso; †Or nel bosco or nel prato; O tu che sì fastosa; Partenza che parti in pezzi; †Partirò ma con quel core, with vc; †Parto sì parto mio bene; Passan i giorni e l'ore, lost; Pastor come diverso, with 2 vn; Pende dal sen di Fille; Peno e l'alma fedele (A Tirsi che pena e tace), L; Pensier che ti nutrisci

Perchè dar non ti posso; Perchè non dirmi un sì del cor tiranna; Per sollevar quest'alma; Per un colpo di sorte maligna (In morte d'un rosignuolo); Piango in van dall' idol mio; Pietoso nume arcier, 2vv, 1721; Più dell'Alpi gelato, L; Poiché Fille superba, with 2 vn; Poiché speme non v'è (Moderazione d'Amore), with 2 vn; Presso allo stuol pomposo (La violetta), L; Prigionier di bionde chiome; Prigionier d'un bel sembiante (Paglia), 2vv, 1691; Pur vi riveggio ancora, L

†Qual più cercando ai bella tiranna mia; Quando la finirai di tormentarmi; †Quando mai Cupido ingrato (Paglia), with 2 vn; Quando mai vermigli labri, 1702; Quando m'innalza amore; †Quando o bella io ti viddi; Quando parli e quando ridi (c1700); Quando voi amiche stelle, 2vv; Quanto è cara la libertà (Marchesi), 2vv, 1691; Quanto peno e quanto piango; Quanto piace a gl'occhi miei; Quanto sarei felice; Quella speranza o dio; Rompi l'arco rompi i lacci

†Sappia e pianga ogni core; Scherza meco il destino (Paglia); Sciolto in placidi umori; Sconsigliato consiglio; Se bella son'io son tutta per te (Resta), 2vv, 1691; Se dal Indiche arene; Se di Tantalo si dice; †Se ferir mi sapesti; Sei nata a farmi piangere; Sempre piango e dir non so (Pazzini), 2vv, 1691; Sento dentro del petto; †Se parti io morirò dolcemia vita (Partenza di Filli) (A. Ottoboni); Se per soverchio duolo (Non ardisce di scoprirsi amante) (Bernardoni); Se v’è chi amanti peni per bellezza, with 2 vn; †Sia tornava l'aurora; Siedi Amarilli mia, with 2 vn, 1721; †Si fugga si sprezzi (Berselli), 2vv, 1691; †S'io piango e tu non m'odi; Sì t'intendo tu vuoi ch'io non pensi; Soave libertade nasci è vero (Amor privo di libertà); †So d'essermi d'amor, with vn, vc

Son io barbara donna infida Clori; Sono amante e due tormente, with va da gamba; Son tradita e pur non moro; Sopra l'orme d'Irene; Sorge l'alba e torna il dì, L; †Sospirato ben mio; †Sovra il famoso fiume; Sovra un bel poggio assisa, L; Stanca di più penar Clori la bella, L; †Stanco del tuo gran duolo; Sulla sponda del mar stava Fileno (Conte di ?Chiaromonte); Sulla sponda d'un rio, c1700; †Sulla sponda odorosa; Sulle ripe dell'Ebro; Su tapeto odoroso d'erbe; Sventurato Fileno siedeva; †Sventurato Mirtillo e che farai; Sventurato pastor, with 2 vn, lost

†Titolo di costante non merta; Tormento del mio core; †Torna il giorno fatale (L'anniversario amoroso) (Pamphili), lost; Torna torna alla capanna; Torno a voi piante amorose, with 2 fl; Tortorella che priva; †Tra i smeraldi di prato gentile (Il giglio amante e sposo); Tra l'amene delitie (Eurilla dolente in un giardino), L; †Tra mille fiamme ardenti (Il Nerone); Tutti li miei pensieri (Contrasto di pensieri amorosi) (Bernardoni); †Tu volgesti altrove i vanni; †Un dì che nel mio core; Un dì tre pastorelle; Usignuol che col mio pianto

Va credi e spera, with 2 vn; Vado ben spesso cangiando loco, L; Vago augelletto al patrio nido, with 2 vn; Vago prato ben ristori; Vanne sì ruscelletto contento; Vantar alma di gelo, 1701; Variae pene d'amore; †Veggio la bella Dori; Vi conosco occhi bugiardi; Vidi in cimento due vaghi amori, L; Viver e non amar; Viver lungi dal suo bene (Lontananza); Voglio senza speranza; Voi carbon chi animati; Voi che tutto dolente, L; Voi ch'io dica che t'adoro

21 cantatas attrib. G. Bononcini and other composers (named in parentheses): †Arse lunga stagione (Mancini); Aure che qui d'intorno (Bigaglia, B. Marcello); Chi la speranza ha per nocchiera al core (Mancini); Come potesti mai lasiarmi infida (Bencini, Perti, A. Scarlatti); †Contentati mio core (Mancini); Dov'è Fill, dov'è? La chiamo e non rispondi, 1699 (Scarlatti); Ecco il sole ceppi di gelo (Pistocchi); È gran pena l'amare (Mancini, Scarlatti); Fuori di sua capanna (Fago, Greber); Mi tormenta il pensiero (Scarlatti); O felice/penosa lontananza, 2vv (Scarlatti); Peccai è ver fu grave il fallo mio, with vn (Bassani); †Per consolar mie pene (Tosi, Pistocchi); Per due vaghe pupille (Fregiotti); Rondinella vaga e bella (Bencini, Magini); †Schiera d'aspri dolori (Pasquini); Sentite o tronchi e sassi (Sarri, Scarlatti); †Sì begl'occhi ho da lasciarvi (Perti); Taci o cor non sei più misero (Benati); Va sospirando il core (Mancini); †Vuo morir già che la sorte, 1718 (Handel)

other secular vocal

4 arias, B, vc, bc, ?c1690: †L'amicizia si tradisce; †L'interesse sol prevale; †Non c'è affetto parentela; †Non si stimano che gl'ori; all in I-MOe

4 choruses in J. Sheffield and A. Pope, after W. Shakespeare: Marcus Brutus, London, Buckingham House, 11 Jan 1723, GB-NO

3 madrigals, ?c1727–30: Foss'io quel rossignuolo (Amante in usignuolo), canzona, scherzo pastorale, 5vv, bc; Mentre lungi ti stai (Lontananza), canzona, 4vv, bc; Quanto lessi d'amore, madrigal, scherzo, 4vv, bc; all in Cfm, Lam, Lbl

oratorios

La vittoria di Davidde contro Golia (P.P. Seta), Bologna, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 9 March 1687; Modena, Oratorio di S Carlo, Lent 1687

Giosuè (T. Stanzani), Bologna, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 25 March 1688; Modena, Oratorio di S Carlo, Lent 1688, I-MOe; 2 arias in Schering (1911)

La Maddalena a'piedi di Cristo (L. Forni), Modena, Lent 1690 and 1700, MOe; 1 aria in Roncaglia (1933)

S Nicola di Bari (S. Stampiglia), Rome, S Giacomo degli Spagnoli, Lent 1693, B-Br, GB-Lcm; Urbino, Priorato di S Paolo, 25 Jan 1697; Vienna, emperor's chapel, Lent 1699; Florence, Compagnia di S Niccolò detta del Ceppo, 1699; ?S Nicola vescovo di Mira, Lucca, S Maria Cortelandini, 30 Dec 1721

La conversione di Maddalena (? R. Rodiano), Vienna, emperor's chapel, Lent 1701, A-Wn, I-Fc; as La conversione di S Maria Maddalena, Bologna, Oratorio del SS Sacramento, April/May 1723

La città di Sion festeggiante nel ritorno di Davide dalla valle di Raffaim (A. Bianchi), Bologna, 1702 [retexting version of Euleo festeggiante nel ritorno d'Alessandro Magno dall'Indie; see serenatas etc.]

Ezechia (azione sacra, A. Zeno), Vienna, emperor's chapel, 4 April 1737, A-HE, Wgm, Wn; Würzburg, Lent, c1740

Arias in pasticcios: I trionfi di Giosuè (G.P. Berzini), Florence, Congregazione di Gesù Salvadore, Lent 1703 and 1708 (as Giosuè in Gabaon, Florence, Confraternita di S Sebastiano); La morte delusa, Milan, S Francesco, 1703 and 19 March 1709

liturgical

[4] Messe brevi, 8vv, 2 org ad lib, op.7 (Bologna, 1688)

Christe, Gl, g, 4 choirs, 2 orch, GB-Ob

When Saul was King … performed … at the funeral of … John, Duke of Marlborough, SATB, 2 vn, va, bc (London, 1722); ed. A. Ford (Sevenoaks, Kent, 1982)

Veni Jesu sponse chare, S, vn, bc, in Meslanges de musique latine, françoise et italienne, iv (Paris, 1728)

Laudate pueri, F, 5vv, orch (Paris, 1733)

Motet with vc obbl (Paris, 1740), mentioned in GerberNL

Te Deum, C, SSATB, orch, 15 Feb 1741, A-Wn; transposed to D, GB-Cfm, Lwa; 4 sections in The Fitzwilliam Music, i–iii (London, 1825), 1 of these in Ford (1970)

4 Laudate pueri: A, vc, bc, D-WD; SSBB, 2 vn, bc, Dl; †SSATB, 2 vn, va, bc, GB-Lam; SSATB, 2 vn, va, bc, Lcm

Responsori, g, T, B, bc; Christus factus est, F, 2 T, B, bc: both D-MÜs, GB-Lbl

instrumental

[12] Trattenimenti da camera, 2 vn, vle, hpd, op.1 (Bologna, 1685)

[12] Concerti da camera, 2 vn, vle, hpd, op.2 (Bologna, 1685)

[12] Sinfonie a 5, 6, 7, e 8; 8 str, bc (org); nos.5, 8–10 with 1–2 tpt, op.3 (Bologna, 1685)

[12] Sinfonie, 2 vn, vc, vle/theorbo (org), op.4 (Bologna, 1686)

[12] Sinfonie da chiesa, 2 vn, va, vc obbl (org), op.5 (Bologna, 1687)

[12] Sinfonie a due, vn, vc (org), op.6 (Bologna, 1687)

[8] Divertimenti da camera, vn/fl, bc (1722; 2/1733 as Sonatas or Chamber Aires op.7); ed. H. Ruf (Mainz, 1964–9); arr. hpd solo (London, 1722 (facs. in BMB, section 4, clxvi, 1969); 2/c1735 as Suites de pièces)

Musique pastorale, for the Birthday of the Sweet Angel, 2 vn, bc: 2 suites of 8 dances each, for birthdays of Lady Mary Godolphin, 23 Nov 1730 and 1731, US-STu

XII Sonatas for the Chamber, 2 vn, bc (London, 1732); nos.1–5 ed. F. Giesbert (Neuwied, c1948)

Solo, a, vc, bc, in Six Solos for Two Violoncellos (London, 1748); ed. H. Ruf (Mainz, 1967); facs. in RRMBE, lxxvii (1996)

(3) Antonio Maria Bononcini

(b Modena, 18 June 1677; d Modena, 8 July 1726). Composer and cellist, second son of (1) Giovanni Maria Bononcini. He worked alongside his more famous elder brother, (2) Giovanni, until 1713. By 1686 both were students of G.P. Colonna in Bologna. When Cardinal Pamphili was papal legate there during the period 1690–93 both played in his orchestra. Antonio composed a Laudate pueri with a florid obbligato for cello in 1693, and about the same time a set of 12 cello sonatas that employ the same kinds of patterned figuration. Only two cello sonatas preceded them, both by Gabrielli. In 1694 Bononcini was listed first among the cellists active in Rome; by November 1696 he had joined the Congregazione di S Cecilia; and during the years 1694–8 he or his elder brother played for six events sponsored by Cardinal Ottoboni. In 1698 he wrote La fama eroica, a work praising the Venetian Cardinal Giorgio Vivente Cornaro, who might have employed Antonio.

Around 1700 Antonio joined his brother in Vienna, and Telemann heard them perform at Berlin in summer 1702. Antonio was first commissioned to compose for the Viennese court in 1705, the year in which Joseph I became emperor. During Joseph’s reign Antonio was appointed Kapellmeister to Joseph’s brother, who was living in Spain as Charles III, claimant to the vacant throne. The emperor’s great favour for Giovanni Bononcini extended to Antonio, who provided the Viennese court with 13 richly scored cantatas, six festive serenatas, four two-part oratorios and a three-act opera. Only his brother and Joseph’s vice-Kapellmeister M.A. Ziani wrote a comparable number of works for the Viennese court between 1705 and 1711. Scores survive for all except the oratorio of 1705, and they are distinguished by intricate textures that incorporate contrapuntal artifice and extensive sequential development, underscored by the rapid harmonic movement characteristic of Corelli. Arias are mainly in minor keys, and they often feature dotted rhythms, angular melodic lines and chromatic harmonies that convey great pathos. Perhaps mainly on the basis of such style traits, Geminiani judged Antonio to be ‘much beyond his brother in point of depth and knowledge’. Joseph I must have appreciated their superb craftsmanship, for in 1710 he named Antonio a ‘composer to the emperor’, made the appointment retroactive to the beginning of 1707, provided a lucrative salary (equivalent to Ziani’s) and commissioned Antonio’s first opera, Tigrane. A year later Joseph died of smallpox, and his brother, Charles VI, did not retain the Bononcinis.

Antonio may have accompanied his brother to Rome when the two returned to Italy in 1713, but he settled in Modena, where his wife, Eleonora Suterin, bore him four sons and a daughter between 1715 and 1722. He subsequently achieved a modicum of fame throughout Italy with his settings of ten operas for Venice, Rome and cities ruled or dominated by the Austrian emperor. In these works his style resembles Vivaldi’s more than Corelli’s, since it features tuneful rather than angular lines, enticing syncopations rather than excruciating dotted notes, and doublings of voices rather than contrapuntal accompaniments for treble instruments. His acceptance of some galant features did not, however, suffice to make his dramatic works popular, for none of them received a second production. He also ‘directed’ (i.e. perhaps compiled the music for) L’enigma disciolto and Lucio Vero at Modena in October 1716 and Mitridate Eupatore at Reggio nell’Emilia in January 1723.

During his last five years Bononcini was maestro di cappella at the Modenese court, and this appointment presumably terminated his need to compose operas in order to earn a living. He presumably wrote his extant mass and Stabat mater during his final years, and the contrapuntal complexities in the latter were largely (and perhaps wholly) responsible for Padre Martini’s judgment of his style: ‘so elevated, lively, artful and delightful, that he is distinguished above most early 18th-century composers’.

WORKS

music lost unless otherwise stated

operas

three-act drammi per musica unless otherwise indicated

Tigrane, re d’Armenia (P. Bernardoni), Vienna, Favorita, 25 July 1710, A-Wgm, D-MEIr

I veri amici (after F. Silvani and D. Lalli), Naples, S Bartolomeo, 26 Nov/26 Dec 1715

Il tiranno eroe (after V. Cassani), Milan, Regio Ducal, 26 Dec 1715; arias, Dl

Sesostri, re di Egitto (after P. Pariati), Milan, Regio Ducal, 2 Feb 1716, Dl, arias CZ-Pk

La conquista del vello d’oro (after F. Parisetti), Reggio nell’Emilia, Pubblico, 29 April 1717; score, A-Wn, arias D-Dl

Astianatte (after A. Salvi), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, carn. 1718, arias, D-W

Griselda (after A. Zeno), Milan, Regio Ducal, 26 Dec 1718, A-Wgm, D-Bsb (facs. in IOB, xxi, 1977)

Nino (Act 3) (I. Zanelli), Reggio nell’Emilia, Pubblico, 29 May 1720, arias F-Pc and GB-Er [Act 1 by Capelli, Act 2 by F. Gasparini]

Merope (after Zeno), Rome, Pace, carn. 1721, arias, F-Pn

Endimione (pastorale in musica, 3, after F. de Lemene), Naples, S Bartolomeo, 14 May 1721, arias I-Mgallini

Rosiclea in Dania (melodrama, 3, after Silvani: L’oracolo in sogno), Naples, royal palace, 1 Oct 1721; S Bartolomeo, 4 Oct 1721, I-MC

serenatas

La fama eroica per la gloria immortale dell’antichissima e nobilissima casa Cornara (G. Andriani), 2vv, Rome, 1698

Arminio (poemetto drammatico, P. Bernardoni), 6vv, Vienna, Favorita, 26 July 1706, A-Wn, D-Dl

La Fortuna, il Valore e la Giustitia (cantata, ?Bernardoni), 3vv, Vienna, 4 Nov 1706, A-Wn

Andromeda (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 4vv, Vienna, 10 July 1707, D-Dl

La conquista delle Spagne di Scipione Africano il giovane (componimento drammatico, P. del Negro), 3vv, Vienna, 4 Nov 1707, A-Wn

La presa di Tebe (componimento per musica, S. Stampiglia), 5vv, Vienna, 1 Oct 1708, Wn, D-Dl

Hippolito (poemetto drammatico, Bernardoni), 5vv, Vienna, 19 March 1710, A-Wgm

Il trionfo dell’aquila e del giglio (introduzione per musica al balletto, Zanelli), 5vv, Modena, 14 June 1720

cantatas

for soprano and continuo unless otherwise stated

Amo Dorinda e tanto, I-Mc; Amo peno gioisco, Mc; Amore ingannatore, A, 2 fl, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Augelletti ruscelli, I-Nc; Cagnoletto vezzosetto, Nc; Che faremo o cor mio, S, fl, bc, F-Pc; Clori dal colle al prato, S/A, bc, A-Wn (attrib. G. Bononcini), GB-Cfm, Er (attrib. G. Bononcini), Lbl, I-Nc; Clori perché d’amore, A, bc, Nc; Con non inteso affanno, F-Pc; Direi che sei il mio bene, S, 2 vn, bc, D-Bsb, LEm, WD; Ecco Amor che mi segue, S, 2 vn, va, bc, A-Wn; E pure o Lidia e pure, A, bc, GB-Lam; E sarà vero o Filli, Lcm, I-Nc; Finché la bella Irene, A, bc, Nc; Già che al partir t’astringe, F-Pn; Già sul margo del rio, A, bc, GB-Lbl; Idol mio bel tesoro, S, fl, bc, I-Nc; In quelle luci care, S, B, bc, GB-Lbl; Mentre al novo apparir (Lontananza), A, 2 vn, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Mentre canta l’augelletto, I-Nc; Mentre in placido sonno, S, 2 fl, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Mira o Fille nel prato, I-Nc (3 copies)

Nell’augusta cittade, S, 2 vn, bc, D-Hs; Non anche avea natura, S, B, 2 vn, va, bc, I-Bc; Non è solo il tormento, B, bc, D-Mbs, I-Bc; Occhi del mio tesor, D-SHs; Occhi voi che mirate, S, 2 fl, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Quando lieta saria, D-SHs; Quando vedo a mille rose, A, 2 fl, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Sans cesse des tourmens, A, bc, I-Nc; Se avessi in mezzo al petto, A, 2 fl, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Selve placide selve, S/A, bc, I-Nc (2 copies); Sopra l’orme d’Irene, A, 2 vn, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Sul margine adorato, S, 2 vn, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Tanto avezzo ho il core a piangere, A, 2 vn, bc, 1708, Wn; Tortorella innamorata, I-Nc; Troppo rigore Clori, S, 2 vn, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Tutta fiamme e tutta ardore, S, 2 fl, bc, 1708, Wn; Voi vi partite ed io resto fra mille angoscie, GB-Lbl; Vorrei dirti addio, A, bc, F-Pc, GB-Lbl; Vorrei pupille belle, S, 2 vn, bc, 1708, A-Wn; Zingaretta che predici, S/A, bc, GB-Lbl, I-Nc

oratorios

La Maddalena, Vienna, Real Casa di Spagna, 1705

Il trionfo della grazia, overo La conversione di Maddalena (B. Pamphili), Vienna, emperor’s chapel, Lent 1707, A-Wn

La decollazione di S Gio. Batista (G. Filippeschi), Vienna, emperor’s chapel, Lent 1709, Wn

L’interciso (N. Stampiglia), Vienna, emperor’s chapel, Lent 1711, Wn

liturgical

Laudate pueri, B, S, vc obbl, bc, 19 Feb 1693, I-Bsp; Salve regina, B, A, vc obbl, bc, D-WD (inc.); Mass, g, 5vv, orch, I-Fc; Stabat mater, c, 4vv, orch, Bc, MOe (attrib. A.M. Paccioni), ed. P. Smith (Sevenoaks, Kent, 1974)

instrumental

15 sonatas, vc, bc: 12 sonatas, c1693, F-Psg; Sonata da camera detta la Comodina, D-WD; Sinfonia per camera, A-Wn, S-Uu; Sonatta a vc solo del sigr Bononcini, A-Wn; all ed. in RRMBE, lxxvii (1996)

(1) Johannes (Eduardus Gerardus) van Boom

(4) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (ii) [Angelo Bononcini]

(b Modena, 18 Nov 1678; d Rome, Nov 1753). Violinist and composer, son of (1) Giovanni Maria Bononcini (i). He was born one hour after his father’s death and was given the same name. Nothing is known of any association with his elder half-brothers, and the suggestion made by La Via that Ghezzi’s drawing of ‘Bononcino [and] nephew of Bononcino’ might represent (2) Giovanni and Giovanni Maria (ii) seems unlikely, although they both did work at Rome during the period 1714–19. In 1704 Giovanni Maria wrote from Venice to a friend in Modena; his other extant letters (in I-MOe) were written from Rome to Modena during the period 1707–15. In Rome he was employed as a professional violinist, by Cardinal Pamphili (1707–9), Prince Ruspoli (1707–15), the church of S Carlo ai Catinari (1715–36), Cardinal Ottoboni (1717–37), the Palazzo Apostolico (1725, 1733), the Oratorio di S Girolamo della Carità (1730) and the Collegio del Nazareno (1733, 1743, 1745). He joined the Congregazione di S Cecilia on 9 May 1710, ran unsuccessfully seven times for its post of ‘guardian’ of instrumentalists (1723–39), was elected guardian for a two-year term (1742–3), was twice elected an auditor (sindaco, 1745–6), and last appeared at a meeting on 16 Nov 1752 (I-Rsc, Atti della Congregazione di S Cecilia). He joined the musicians of Campidoglio as a trombonist in 1720 and played the organ for its communion services.

The few extant pieces by him include a cantata, Ohimè che veggio misero mio core (I-MOe), and a set of 11 motets for SSATTB almost certainly written in Rome, possibly for Ottoboni. Most of the motets begin chordally, proceed to a contrasting section and end with a fuga. The only extant copy (GB-Ob Tenbury 1218) has Latin text incipits but lacks Latin texts, presumably because it was intended to set the works to English texts, as was done for the first motet and part of the second.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

DBI (C. Frajese)

ES (E. Zanetti)

GerberNL

HawkinsH

SartoriL

WaltherML

J.E. Galliard: Preface to Six English Cantatas after the Italian Manner (London, 1716)

B. Marcello: Il teatro alla moda (Venice, c1720; Eng. trans., MQ, xxxiv, 1948, pp.371–403; xxxv, 1949, pp.85–105; Eng. trans. in O. Strunk, ed.: Source Readings in Music History, New York, 1950)

P.A. Rolli, ed. and trans.: Gliamanti interni: commedia inglese del Cavaliere Riccardo Steele (London, 1724)

A. Primcock [R. Samber]: The Touchstone (London, 1728)

G. Riccati: ‘Lettere … al … Giovenale Sacchi’, Nuovo giornale dei letterati d’Italia, xxxvi (1787), 172–200

Rees’s Cyclopaedia (London, 1819–20)

F. Chrysander: G.F. Händel, ii (Leipzig, 1860)

L.F. Valdrighi: ‘I Bononcini da Modena’, Atti e memorie delle RR. deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie dell’Emilia, new ser., vii/2 (1882), 23–67

E.J. Dent: ‘Italian Chamber Cantatas’, MA, ii (1910–11), 142–99

G. Roncaglia: ‘Di insigni musicisti modenesi (documenti inediti), ii: Su la famiglia dei Bononcini’, Atti e memorie della R. deputazione di storia patria per le provincie modenesi, 7th ser., vi (1930), 13–18

W.C. Smith: A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by John Walsh during the Years 1695–1720 (London 1948)

K. Hueber: ‘Gli ultimi anni di Giovanni Bononcini: notizie e documenti inediti’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti di Modena, 5th ser., xii (1954), 153–71

K. Hueber: Die Wiener Opern Giovanni Bononcinis von 1697 bis 1710 (diss., U. of Vienna, 1955)

G. Roncaglia: ‘Antonio Maria Bononcini e il suo Stabat mater’, Musicisti lombardi ed emiliani, Chigiana, xv (1958), 117–25

E.O. Downes: ‘The Neapolitan Tradition in Opera’, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, i, 277–84; ii, 132–4

W. Klenz: Giovanni Maria Bononcini of Modena: a Chapter in Baroque Instrumental Music (Durham, NC, 1962)

H.S. Powers: ‘Il Serse trasformato’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 481–92; xlviii (1962), 73–92

G.E. Dorris: Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London, 1715–1744 (The Hague, 1967)

W.C. Smith and C. Humphries: A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by the Firm of John Walsh during the years 1721–1766 (London, 1968)

A. Ford: ‘Giovanni Bononcini, 1670–1747’, MT, cxi (1970), 695–9

L. Lindgren: A Bibliographic Scrutiny of Dramatic Works Set by Giovanni and his Brother Antonio Maria Bononcini (diss., Harvard U., 1972)

H.S. Powers: ‘Il Mutio tramutato, i: Sources and Libretto’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 227–58

A. Ford: ‘Music and Drama in the Operas of Giovanni Bononcini’, PRMA, ci (1974–5), 107–20

L. Lindgren: ‘The Three Great Noises “Fatal to the Interests of Bononcini”’, MQ, lxi (1975), 560–83

L. Lindgren: ‘I trionfi di Camilla’, Studi musicali, vi (1977), 89–159

L. Lindgren: ‘Parisian Patronage of Performers from the Royal Academy of Musick (1719–28)’, ML, lviii (1977), 4–28

F. Della Seta: ‘Francesco Gasparini, virtuoso del Principe Borghese?’, Francesco Gasparini: Camaiore 1978, 215–43, esp. 225, 238

R. Strohm: Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven, 1979), 73–94 [on A.M. Bononcini’s Griselda]

L. Lindgren: ‘Camilla and The Beggar’s Opera’, Philological Quarterly, lix (1980), 44–61

L.E. Lindgren and C.B. Schmidt: ‘A Collection of 137 Broadsides Concerning Theatre in Late Seventeenth-Century Italy: an Annotated Catalogue’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xxviii (1980), esp. 220–24

L. Lindgren: ‘Il dramma musicale a Roma durante la carriera di Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725)’, Le muse galanti: la musica a Roma nel Settecento: Rome, 1982, 35–57

T. Griffin: The Late Baroque Serenata in Rome and Naples (diss., UCLA, 1983)

R. Steblin: ‘Did Handel Meet Bononcini in Rome?’, MR, xlv (1984), 179–93

M. Talbot and C. Timms: ‘Music and the Poetry of Antonio Ottoboni (1646–1720)’, Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma: Rome 1985, 367–438

L. Lindgren: ‘Antonio Maria Bononcini e La conquista del vello d’oro (Reggio Emilia 1717)’, Civiltà teatrale e Settecento emiliano (Bologna, 1986), 309–28

L. Bennett: ‘The Italian Cantata in Vienna, 1700–1711: an Overview of Stylistic Traits’, Antonio Caldara: Essays on his Life and Times, ed. B.W. Pritchard (London, 1987), 184–211

S. Franchi: Drammaturgia romana: repertorio bibliografico cronologico dei testi drammatici pubblicati a Roma e nel Lazio, secolo XVII (Rome, 1988)

F. Carboni, T.M. Gialdroni and A. Ziino: ‘Cantate ed arie romane del tardo Seicento nel Fondo Caetani della Biblioteca Corsiniana: repertorio, forme e strutture’, Studi musicali, xviii (1989), 49–192

L. Lindgren: Preface to Giovanni Bononcini: Camilla (London, 1706), MLE, E1 (1990)

L. Lindgren: ‘Musicians and Librettists in the Correspondence of Gio. Giacomo Zamboni (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Rawlinson Letters 116–138)’, RMARC, no.24 (1991), 1–194

S. La Via: ‘Il cardinale Ottoboni e la musica: nuovi documenti (1700–1740), nuove letture e ipotesi’, Intorno a Locatelli, ed. A. Dunning (Lucca, 1995), 319–526, esp. 489

H.D. Clausen: ‘Händels Admeto und Bononcinis Astianatte: antike Tragödie an der Royal Academy of Music’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, vi (1996), 143–70

Bononia, Bartholomeus de.

See Bartolomeo da Bologna.

Bonporti, Francesco Antonio

(b Trent, bap. 11 June 1672; d Padua, 19 Dec 1749). Italian composer. Of good family, he was educated in his native city and Innsbruck in philosophical and humanistic subjects appropriate to the clerical vocation he was to follow. While studying theology at the Collegio Germanico in Rome in 1691–5 Bonporti took music lessons (presumably not his first). Corelli is said to have instructed him in violin playing, and Pitoni in the composition of sacred vocal music, but there is only slender evidence of this. Bonporti returned to Trent ordained as a priest and obtained a minor office in the cathedral in 1697. His op.1, a set of ten trio sonatas (he consistently grouped his instrumental works in tens rather than twelves), had been published the year before. On the title-page the composer called himself ‘gentiluomo di Trento’, noting his non-professional status as a musician. 11 further sets followed, all except one (op.3) consisting of secular music with a bias towards da camera specifications; of these the majority appeared during the first decade of the 18th century, when there was an unprecedented boom in the publishing of Italian instrumental music both inside and outside Italy.

Bonporti regarded himself as primarily a priest rather than a composer, although, ironically, his clerical advancement was no more rapid than the spread of his musical renown. This explains the otherwise puzzlingly ‘secular’ nature of his musical output; for despite the care which he obviously lavished on even the least substantial of his compositions, music was for Bonporti a means towards a non-musical end: his appointment to a canonry at Trent or an equivalent clerical post elsewhere. Each new opus saw an increasingly desperate attempt to win the favour of a dignitary who might secure his advancement. Beginning modestly with dedications to local, mostly ecclesiastical potentates, he worked his way up the feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchy until in a letter of 1716 we hear of no less a person than George I of England being solicited. (In letters to the secretary of the Elector of Mainz written in 1715 Bonporti offered to forgo a year's salary if appointed chaplain to the emperor at Vienna.) Such gains as Bonporti made through these representations were merely titular. In 1721 he signed himself in a letter to Prince Schwarzenberg ‘maestro dei concerti di S. M[aes]tà Ces[are]a e Catt[oli]ca’, and in 1727 he was made an ‘aulic familiar’ by Charles VI. The canonry remained remote. It is known that rivalry between German and Italian speakers in the church hierarchy at Trent (where the former, associated by language and culture with the seat of the empire, enjoyed an advantage) prevented his appointment whenever vacancies arose. Embittered by this failure, Bonporti moved to Padua in 1740, lodging in the house of a fellow priest. A final appeal to Empress Maria Theresa in 1746, in which op.12 was enlisted, proved fruitless. He died three years later and was buried in Padua.

Bonporti's merits as a composer were first realized in modern times when it was announced in 1911 by Werner Wolffheim that four of his inventions for violin and continuo, op.10 nos.2, 5, 6 and 7, had been included by Alfred Dörffel in volume xlv of Bach's works following an incorrect attribution to Bach in a manuscript source. Not only may Bach have imitated Bonporti in his use of the unusual term ‘Invention’ as a title, but the third movement (‘Ecco’) of the tenth invention in Bonporti's op.10 may have provided Bach with a model for the corresponding movement, similar in conception, of his Ouverture in B minor for harpsichord (bwv831). The celebrated violinist F.M. Veracini is known to have included op.10 in his repertory on German tours in 1715. By then the work, which had originally appeared in 1712, was known as La pace, the composer having seized the opportunity afforded by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 to add this ingratiating sobriquet to later editions. (The ‘Triumph of the Grand Alliance’, opp.8 and 9, dating from c1710, betrays similar motives.)

In common with other north Italian instrumental composers of his generation, Bonporti based his musical language on Corelli. But whereas the main concern of many of his contemporaries, such as Dall'Abaco, was the expansion and clarification of form, Bonporti seems to have concentrated on the enhancement of melodic detail. (A limited parallel with Bach can be drawn here.) In the Recitativo movement of the first work in op.10 Bonporti offers what is in effect a copiously graced Adagio, entirely instrumental in idiom. But the similarly titled movement in the fifth concerto of op.11 (a very impressive publication in the domain of the concerto) introduces inflections of unmistakably vocal origin, highly original and effective in their unexpected context. Beneath the ‘extravagance’ (as contemporary writers would have termed it) of Bonporti's technically highly evolved writing for the violin a solid musical intention can be discerned; this is expressed through cogent, if not always highly systematized, forms, imaginative harmony and lively part-writing.

The present-day neglect of Bonporti's music owes something to the scarcity of surviving source material, something to the undervaluing of works in the chamber idiom and something to his non-adherence to any regional school of acknowledged historical importance, such as the Venetian. It does scant justice to his stature as a composer.

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise stated

op.

1	[10] Sonate a tre (1696)
2	[10] Sonate da camera a tre (1698)
3	[6] Motetti a canto solo con violini (1701)
4	[10] Sonate da camera a tre (1703)
5	Arie, baletti e correnti (c1704), lost
6	[10] Sonate da camera a tre (1705)
7	[10] Sonate da camera, vn, vle/hpd (1707)
8, 9	[100] Menuetti a violino e basso (c1710), lost (but see below)
10	[10] Invenzioni da camera, vn, vc/bc (Bologna, 1712; nos.2, 5, 6 and 7 pubd in the Bach Gesellschaft edn, xlv)

11	[10] Concerti a quattro (Trent, after 1727)
12	[10] Concertini e serenate con arie variate, siciliane, recitativi e chiuse, vn, vc/hpd (Augsburg, c1745)

Sonata, Aria cromatica, vn, vc/bc, 1720, B-Bc
E. Roger, having republished opp.8 and 9 as Le triomphe de la Grande Alliance, op.8, allotted the number 9 to a set of [4] Baletti, vn, vc/bc (Amsterdam, 1716)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Pironti)

DEUMM (T. Chini)

MoserGV

ScheringGIK

W. Wolffheim: ‘Bachiana’, BJb 1911, 37–46

G. Barblan: Un musicista trentino: F.A. Bonporti, la vita e le opere (Florence, 1940)

G. Barblan: ‘Conclusioni su Bonporti’, RaM, xix (1949), 118–122

O. Wessely: ‘Zur Lebensgeschichte von Francesco Antonio Bonporti’, KJb, xlii (1958), 95–7

A. Hutchings: The Baroque Concerto (London, 1961, 3/1973)

R. Lunelli: La musica nel Trentino dal XV al XVIII secolo (Trent, 1967)

G. Barblan, ed.: Francesco A. Bonporti nel 3⁰ centenario della nascita (Trent, 1972)

L. Feininger: Francesco Antonio Bonporti: catalogus thematicus operum omnium (Trent, 1975)

S. Martinotti: ‘Apporti strumentali degli allievi di Pitoni (Feo, Leo, Durante, Bonporti)’, Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni: Rieti 1981, 79–88

MICHAEL TALBOT/ENRICO CARERI

Bontempi [Angelini, Angelini-Bontempi], Giovanni Andrea

(b Perugia, 21 Feb 1625; d Brufa, nr Perugia, 1 July 1705). Italian composer, singer, librettist, historian and architect. Born Angelini, he studied under Sozio Sozi, father superior of the Oratorio dei Filippini at Perugia, in 1635, continuing in Rome as a protégé of Cesare Bontempi, a nobleman whose name he adopted. There he studied singing under Virgilio Mazzocchi and won the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. In 1641 he travelled to Florence for an apparently fruitless audition, but from 1643 to 1650 he was a singer at S Marco, Venice, under Monteverdi, Rovetta and Cavalli. In 1651 he entered the service of the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony in Dresden, where, after the elector's death and the amalgamation of the two Kapellen in 1656, he was appointed joint Kapellmeister along with Schütz and Vincenzo Albrici. The favour that Albrici enjoyed with Johann Georg II and the arrival in 1667 of Carlo Pallavicino were given by Bontempi, in the preface to his Historia della ribellione d’Ungheria (Dresden, 1672), as reasons why he turned his attention away from music; but he had already been appointed stage designer and master of the machines at the court theatre in 1664 (and was later inspector of the comedy house), and his first non-musical publication, a (lost) discourse on civil architecture, appeared before his Historien des durchlauchtigsten Hauses Sachsen (Dresden, 1666). From 1666 to 1670 he was in Italy, but by 1671 he was back in Dresden as designer and master of the machines. When Johann Georg II died in 1680, his musicians left Dresden and Bontempi returned to Italy, retiring to his villa near Perugia. He sang and composed for S Maria Maggiore at Spello, near Foligno, and was maestro di cappella there from January to July 1682, but he devoted most of his time to study and writing. Apart from his Historia musica (1695), the first history of music in Italian, he published an Historia dell'origine dei Sassoni (Perugia, 1697) and in the same year was elected to the Accademia degli Insensati of Perugia.

Bontempi is remembered for his two surviving operas and his Historia musica. Il Paride (1662), the first opera in Italian to be performed at Dresden, was given in the castle on the marriage of Erdmuthe Sophia, the daughter of the elector of Saxony, and Christian Ernst, Margrave of Brandenburg. The scenery was by Giacomo Torelli and the performance lasted five hours. The staging of the opera and the publication of the printed full score in celebration, a practice by then abandoned in Italy, suggest that Dresden was attempting to reproduce the atmosphere of the festive early Italian court operas. The action is in five acts and 39 scenes, with many minor roles and episodes revolving around the central plot. Stylistically it shows Venetian influence, of Monteverdi, Cavalli and Cesti, and is characterized by a predominance of arioso. In the text, however, 25 passages of ‘Rede’ (recitative) and ‘Lied’ (aria) are clearly indicated. Each act ends with a dance, the music of which does not appear in the score; there is only one chorus, of minor gods, but there are many numbers for two and three voices.

Il Paride has often been cited as a forerunner of Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, performed in Vienna six years later. They are on similar subjects and both are more lyrical than dramatic, showing a taste for Italian bel canto which in Bontempi is accentuated by the modest instrumentation (two violins and continuo). Ermillo's lament in Act 5, on a chromatic bass descending by a 4th, is an important example of a 17th-century operatic lament, although its comic context (the character wrongly believes he is wounded) modifies the dramatic tension, which is also affected by an interruption. Il Paride represents, along with Loreto Vittori's Galatea, a rare instance of a 17th-century opera for which the composer had sufficient classical background to be able to write his own libretto. Bontempi described the work as neither comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy nor drama but ‘erotopegnio musicale’.

Dafne (1671) and Jupiter und Io (1673), both in German, were written with the literary and possibly the musical collaboration of M.G. Peranda. Dafne was inspired by early Florentine opera, borrowing directly from Rinuccini's libretto which had been translated by Martin Opitz in 1627 for Schütz. Jupiter und Io, of which only the libretto survives, has many comic and grotesque moments deriving from the contrast between the ideal world of the gods and the humble condition of the peasants; the model appears to be A.M. Abbatini's Ione.

The Historia musica was apparently stimulated by the Sistema musico (Perugia, 1666) of Lemme Rossi. Bontempi devoted most of his work to the music of the ancients, arguing that Greek music was not polyphonic, but he also touched on the theory and practice of Baroque music. His interest in theory had already been manifested in his Nova … methodus (1660), dedicated to Schütz and described by Bukofzer as one of ‘the four outstanding treatises on counterpoint’ of the Baroque period; in the Historia he anticipated modern ideas on the nature of fugue. On the practical side, his account of the daily timetable of the pupils of Mazzocchi is justly famous: apart from singing practice it included music theory, counterpoint, letters and harpsichord playing or composition. Judged literally as a history of music, however, his book is less satisfactory: ‘Bontempi merely perpetuates the scholastic treatment of the subject as a mathematical discipline’ (Allen) and for doing so was scathingly censured by Burney and Hawkins.

WORKS

operas

all first performed in Dresden

Il Paride in musica (erotopegnio musicale, 5, Bontempi), Riesensaal, 3 Nov 1662 (Dresden, 1662/R); 1 recit and aria ed. in BurneyH; 1 aria ed. in R. Rolland: ‘Les origines de l'opéra allemand’, EMDC, I/ii (1921), 914–15

Dafne (5, Bontempi, collab. D. Schirmer and D.E. Heidenreich, after O. Rinuccini), 3 Sept 1671, collab. M.G. Peranda, D-Dl, Mbs (score, c1870), B-Bc (score, 1863); 1 aria ed. in H. Riemann: Musikgeschichte in Beispielen (Leipzig, 1912, 2/1921), 197

Jupiter und Io (Bontempi or C.C. Dedekind), 16 Jan 1673, collab. Peranda, music lost

Doubtful: Teseo (5, G.A. Moniglia), 27 Jan 1667, music anon.

other vocal

Ewiger Freudens-Triumph [Soll ich durch diesen harten Kampff], 1v, bc (Dresden, 1660)

Ruscelletto cui rigido cielo (cant.), I-Pca

Cor mundum crea, 1v, bc; Paratum cor meum, 3vv, bc: S-Uu

Vita e martirio di S Emiliano (orat), music lost, lib in Historia musica

WRITINGS

only those on music

Nova quatuor vocibus componendi methodus (Dresden, 1660/R)

Tractatus in quo demonstrantur occultae convenientiae sonorum systematis participati (Bologna, 1690), lost, mentioned in G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, ii (Rome, 1828/R), 52; according to Fürstenau, possibly It. edn of Nova … methodus

Historia musica (Perugia, 1695/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

FürstenauG

GerberNL

HawkinsH

J. Mattheson: Critica musica, i (Hamburg, 1722/R), 339

M. Fürstenau: Beiträge zur Geschichte der königlich sächsischen musikalischen Kapelle (Dresden, 1849)

G.B. Rossi Scotti: Di G.A. Bontempi di Perugia ricordo storico (Perugia, 1878)

H. Kretzschmar: Geschichte der Oper (Leipzig, 1919/R), 86, 101, 137

W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939, 2/1962), 26

L. Pomponi: ‘Memorie musicali della collegiata di S. Maria Maggiore di Spello’, NA, xvii (1940), 179–222, esp. 196–7

R. Engländer: ‘Il Paride in musica (1662) di G.A. Bontempi’, NA, xvii (1940), 39–53

R. Engländer: ‘Zur Frage der “Dafne” (1671) von G.A. Bontempi und M.G. Peranda’, AcM, xiii (1941), 59–77

M.F. Bukofzer: Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947), 3, 383, 391, 407

F. Briganti: Gio. Andrea Angelini-Bontempi (1624–1705), musicista, letterato, architetto: Perugia-Dresda (Florence, 1956)

R. Engländer: ‘Die erste italienische Oper in Dresden: Bontempis Il Paride in musica (1662)’, STMf, xliii (1961), 119–34

Y.F.-A. Giraud: La fable de Daphné (Geneva, 1968), 459ff

W. Jahns: ‘Il Paride von Andrea Giovanni Bontempi (1662): die erste italienische Oper in Dresden’, Dresdener Operntraditionen: Dresden 1985, 87–95

J.-L. Backes: ‘Bontempi et l'autre mythe’, Corps écrit, xx (1986), 89–94

O. Landmann: ‘Italienische Opernpraxis in Dresden’, Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nell'età Barocca: Como 1993, 23–30

F. Hammond: Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT, 1994), 80–81

G Ciliberti: ‘Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi e la diffusione dell'opera italiana nei Paesi di lingua tedesca nell'Europa centro-settentrionale’ In Teutschland noch gantz ohnbekandt: Monteverdi-Rezeption und Frühes Musiktheater im deutschsprachighen Raum, ed M. Engelgardt (Frankfurt, 1996), 77–104

BIANCAMARIA BRUMANA, COLIN TIMMS

Bonvicino [Bonvicini], Agostino

(d 1576). Italian composer and singer. He had entered the service of the Gonzaga family at Mantua in succession to Giacomo Buserachi, probably by 1563 and certainly before the appointment in 1565 of Wert as maestro di cappella of the recently completed ducal chapel of S Barbara. As the leader of a faction of the cappella that resented Wert’s preferment, he was active in a number of attempts to humiliate and discredit him. These included challenges to Wert’s musical competence and culminated in March 1570 in the disclosure of Bonvicino’s adultery with Wert’s wife, as a result of which both she and Bonvicino seem to have left the Mantuan court. Two masses by Bonvicino, Missa in festis semi duplicibus maioris and Missa in festis Beatae Marie Virginis, both for five voices, survive in manuscript (in I-Mc) and were presumably composed for S Barbara. The latter involves a good deal of contrapuntal elaboration and concludes with a seven-voice Agnus Dei.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BertolottiM

FenlonMM

Vander StraetenMPB

C. MacClintock: Giaches de Wert (1535–1596): Life and Works, MSD, xvii (1966), 33ff

G. Barblan, ed.: Catalogo della Biblioteca del Conservatorio di musica di Milano, Fondi speciali 1: Musiche della cappella di Santa Barbara in Mantova (Florence, 1972), 118–19

IAIN FENLON

Bonville, Jean.

See Bull, John.

Bon Voisin [Bon Voysin]

(fl 1537–44). French composer. He is known for five four-voice chansons, four of them printed by Attaingnant in Paris (RISM 1537⁴, 1538¹³, 1539¹⁶ and 1540¹¹) and one by Moderne in Lyons (RISM 1544⁹). Judging from the texts he seems to have been a specialist in ribald songs composed in the light, syllabic manner of Janequin, who set two of the same texts (Larras-tu cela and L'espous à la première nuyt).

SAMUEL F. POGUE/FRANK DOBBINS

Bony, Guillaume.

See Boni, Guillaume.

Bonynge, Richard (Alan)

(b Sydney, 29 Sept 1930). Australian conductor. He studied the piano at the NSW Conservatorium (Sydney) with Lindley Evans, formerly Melba’s accompanist, and in London with Herbert Fryer, and developed a special interest in vocal technique. Having known the soprano Joan Sutherland in Australia, he became her adviser in London and decisively influenced the direction of her vocal and artistic development; they were married in 1954. Although not formally trained as a conductor, he secured engagements to conduct many of his wife’s operatic performances, beginning with Faust in Vancouver in March 1963 following his début at a concert in Rome the previous year, and La sonnambula in San Francisco (September 1964). His Covent Garden début was in March 1964 with I puritani. In 1965 he and Sutherland returned to Australia on a joint tour, he as artistic director and chief conductor of the specially formed Sutherland/Williamson International Grand Opera Company. He made his Metropolitan Opera début in 1966 in Lucia di Lammermoor. He was artistic director of the Vancouver Opera, 1974–8, and of Australian Opera, 1975–86. He was made a CBE in 1977 and received the Order of Australia in 1983 and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1989.

Although his place on the rostrum had been secured through his wife, Bonynge soon demonstrated his positive abilities. On records as in the theatre he cultivated the revival of vocal ornamentation as it had flourished in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and he wrote Sutherland’s (and other singers’) cadenzas. His recording of Don Giovanni is notable for such ornamentation and for the prominence of its harpsichord continuo. In Handel, and also in Graun’s Montezuma (one of several Baroque rarities he revived on records), his ornamentation may have been excessive, but the alliance of his and his wife’s artistry helped to secure the public’s new acceptance of ornamentation as an expressive vocal art. Bonynge’s many other recordings, mostly with Sutherland, include previously unfamiliar operas by Shield, Massenet and Delibes and several ballet scores, notably the first complete Sylvia. He has done much to intensify interest in Bellini and Donizetti, and in French operas of the mid- and late 19th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Q. Eaton: Sutherland and Bonynge: an Intimate Biography (New York, 1987)

J.L. Holmes: Conductors: a Record Collector’s Guide (London, 1988), 48–9

S. von Buchau: ‘Bonynge on Bel Canto’, ON, lviii/9 (1993–4), 14–16

ARTHUR JACOBS/NOËL GOODWIN

Bonzanini, Giacomo

(b Mantua; fl c1616). Italian composer. His only known work, the Capricci musicali per cantare, e suonare a quattro voci (Venice, 1616), is dedicated to the Cardinal of Trent and contains 31 pieces including eight gagliarde and seven canzonas.

TIM CARTER

Boobams.

A series of small tunable drums introduced in the 1950s in the USA; they are classified as membranophones: struck drums. Boobams have a distinctive ‘dark’ tone quality. In the original form of the drum, a membrane drumhead about 11 cm in diameter was secured to the top of a long open stem of bamboo (hence boobam) which acted as a resonator. Later the heads and resonators were made of plastic and a three-octave chromatic range was available (C–c''). The pitch is governed by the frequency of the air column in the resonator and by the tension on the drumhead.

Boobams are played with timpani or vibraphone mallets or with the fingers. They are used in many types of music, usually in chromatic form, but sometimes as a set of four or five drums with definite or indefinite pitch. Henze used two octaves in Tristan (1974) and one octave in Voices (1973); Tippett used two octaves in The Mask of Time (1980–82). Boulez called for two players each with two boobams in Notations I–IV (1977–80).

Octobans, drums resembling boobams in sound and appearance but of indefinite pitch, were developed at the end of the 20th century.

JAMES BLADES

Boogie-woogie.

A percussive style of piano blues favoured, for its volume and momentum, by bar-room, honky-tonk and rent-party pianists. The term appears to have been applied originally to a dance performed to piano accompaniment, and its widespread use stems from the instructions for performing the dance on the recording Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie (1928, Voc.) by Pine Top Smith.

The boogie style is characterized by the use of blues chord progressions combined with a forceful, repetitive left-hand bass figure; many bass patterns exist, but the most familiar are the ‘doubling’ of the simple blues bass (ex.1) and the walking bass in broken octaves (ex.2).

Walking basses are reported to have been developed by ragtime pianists in the 19th century, and the first published example appears to be in Blind Boone’s Rag Medley no.2 (1909). Clay Custer used the same device on his recording The Rocks (1923, OK), which George Thomas may have made under this pseudonym, and which was one of the first recorded examples of a walking bass. The right-hand configurations played against the bass patterns were both rhythmic and melodic, with sharp ostinato passages and sequences in 3rds and 5ths. Some performances, such as Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis’s Bass on Top (1940, BN), display subtly shifting patterns, while Wesley Wallace’s train imitation No.29 (1930, Para.) employs 5/4 time in the bass and 4/4 in the treble. Such a feat is possible through the independence of the right-hand improvisations from the steady, rolling rhythm maintained by the left hand. Startling dissonances occur through the juxtaposition of the two strands, and cross-rhythms are also frequently created. Deliberate discords and rapid ‘crushed’ or ‘press’ notes, obtained by the striking of adjacent notes in rapid succession, are evident on Lewis’s Honky Tonk Train Blues (1927, Para.).

The first generation of boogie-woogie pianists – blues pianists who prominently featured walking bass and ‘eight-to-the-bar’ rhythms – included Romeo Nelson, Arthur Montana Taylor and Charles Avery, rent-party pianists who were forgotten in the Depression years. In 1938 a revival was initiated by the record producer and critic John Hammond, who sought out Albert Ammons and Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis, then working in Chicago as taxi drivers. With Pete Johnson from Kansas City and his singer Joe Turner, the Boogie Woogie Trio became popular at Café Society, New York, and, linked with the swing craze, boogie-woogie enjoyed a brief vogue. These authentic boogie pianists made a number of outstanding recordings, including Pete Johnson’s Goin’ Away Blues (1938, Voc.) with Big Joe Turner, and Albert Ammons’s Chicago in Mind (1939, BN). The brief but widespread popularity of boogie-woogie also led to the discovery of Jimmy Yancey and ‘Cripple’ Clarence Lofton, who brought singular rhythmic conceptions to their playing. The connection with swing is exemplified in such recordings as Boogie Woogie by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra (1938, Vic.) and Count Basie’s Basie Boogie (1941 OK).

In the late 1940s boogie-woogie reverted to the blues, becoming a standard element in every blues pianist’s playing. Chicago and Detroit pianists gained inspiration from the recordings of Big Maceo (Major Merriweather), whose Chicago Breakdown (1945, Bb) was a tour de force.

Boogie-woogie has proved to be one of the most enduring elements in blues performance, and has provided the background for scores of recordings by the Chicago blues bands of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Futhermore, it has permeated the rock and roll of pianists such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and was employed by pianists in many rhythm and blues bands. It was featured on stage by Winifred Atwell and other popular performers, and has persisted in Europe in the playing of Axel Zwingenberger and the ‘Austrian school’ of boogie-woogie pianists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCarthyJR

W. Russell: ‘Boogie Woogie’, Jazzmen: the Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men who Created it, ed. F. Ramsey and C. E. Smith (New York, 1939/R), 183–205

E. Borneman: ‘Boogie Woogie’, Just Jazz, ed. S. Traill and G. Lascelles (London, 1957), 13–14

M. Harrison: ‘Boogie Woogie’, Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World’s Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars, ed. N. Hentoff and A.J. McCarthy (London, 1959/R), 105–35

P. Oliver: The Story of the Blues (London, 1969/R)

E. Kriss: Barrelhouse and Boogie Piano (New York, 1974) [incl. transcrs. and discography]

PAUL OLIVER

Booker T. and the MGs.

American instrumental soul group. They formed in the summer of 1962 when the four original members Booker T. Jones (b 1944, keyboards), Steve Cropper (b 1941, electric guitar), Al Jackson (1935–75, drums) and bassist Lewie Steinberg were hired for a session at Stax records. That year they had their first hit with Green Onions which has since become the best-known soul instrumental of all time. With Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn replacing Steinberg in 1964 they achieved success in the rhythm and blues and pop charts with such singles as Bootleg (Stax, 1965), Groovin' (Stax, 1967), Hip hug-her (Stax, 1967), Soul Limbo (Stax, 1968), Hang 'em high (Stax, 1968) and Time is tight (Stax, 1969). Until 1969 they served (with Isaac Hayes occasionally replacing Jones or acting as a second keyboard player) as the rhythm section for virtually every record made at the Memphis-based Stax. The group originally stopped working together in 1971 when Jones became disenchanted with the ownership of the label. They reunited for an album and a tour in 1977 with former Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes drummer Willie Hall and again with various drummers in 1989. Three years later they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1994 they released a new album, That's the Way It Should Be (Sony).

As the primary architects of the ‘Stax sound’, they can be heard on such seminal soul recordings as Redding's (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay (Volt, 1968), Rufus Thomas's Walking the Dog (Stax, 1963), Sam and Dave's Soul Man (Stax, 1967), Carla Thomas's B-A-B-Y (Stax, 1966) and Johnnie Taylor's Who's making love (Stax, 1968). Often doubling bass and guitar, keyboard and guitar or keyboard and bass, Booker T. and the MGs were classicists who opted for a spare sound. To that end Jackson employed little cymbal work and rarely played fills when backing other artists. With Cropper, Jackson developed a characteristic groove in which both players would slightly delay the backbeat, one of the hallmarks of the Stax sound. Although Jones was accomplished on both piano and organ, with the MGs he generally preferred the Hammond B-3. Both he and Cropper were concerned with timbral coloration, employing a variety of complementary sounds from their instruments. While most bass players largely fulfilled rhythmic and harmonic functions, Dunn tended to play lines that also served as melodic counterpoint. In 1978, Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn joined the Blues Brothers with whom they preceeded to have chart success for the next three years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Hirshey: Nowhere to Run: the Story of Soul Music (New York, 1984)

P. Guralnick: Sweet Soul Music (New York, 1986)

R. Bowman: ‘Stax Records: a Musicological Analysis’, Popular Music, xiv (1995), 285–320

R. Bowman: Soulsville U.S.A.: the Story of Stax Records (New York, 1997)

ROB BOWMAN

Boom, van.

Dutch family of musicians.

(2) Jan [Johannes] van Boom

(3) Hermanus Marinus van Boom

JAN TEN BOKUM (1, 3), ROBERT LAYTON (2)

Boom, van

(1) Johannes (Eduardus Gerardus) van Boom

(b Utrecht, 17 April 1783; d Utrecht, 17 March 1878). Flautist and composer. The son of an artisan, he studied the flute with Louis Drouet and became solo flautist in the court of Louis Bonaparte at Utrecht from 1807. He later succeeded his teacher, and was also solo flautist of the Société Noble and the Collegium Musicum Ultrajectinum. He composed a Flute Concerto op.4, many variations and other virtuoso pieces for flute with piano, guitar or orchestral accompaniments, duets and trios for flute, waltzes for piano, all written in an early Romantic style, and some Dutch songs.

Boom, van

(2) Jan [Johannes] van Boom

(b Utrecht, 15 Sept 1807; d Stockholm, 19 March 1872). Pianist, teacher and composer, son of (1) Johannes van Boom. After studying with his father, he made concert tours and took lessons in piano with Hummel and Moscheles. He settled in Stockholm in 1825. His playing won some admiration there, and he accompanied Berwald on his Norwegian tour in 1827. By 1847 he had given up active concert work to concentrate on teaching. In 1849 he was appointed to the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, where his pupils included Ludvig Norman, Berwald’s protégée Hilda Thegeström and members of the royal family. He published a piano treatise Teoretisk och praktisk pianoskola in 1870. His compositions include sets of variations, operatic paraphrases, studies, short salon pieces and concertos for the piano, a piano quartet, a piano sonata in C minor, orchestral works, chamber music, violin duos and a number of songs. His opera Näcken, eller Elfspelet (‘The Watersprite, or The Elf-play’), produced in Stockholm in 1844, shows some influences of Swedish folk music. His music in general is in a virtuoso salon style with static harmonizations in the style of Thalberg.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

E. Grégoir: Biographie des artistes-musiciens néelandais des XVIII et XIXe siècles (Brussels, 1864)

H. Mendel and A. Reissman, eds.: Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1870–80, 3/1890–91/R)

T. Norlind: ‘Jan van Boom’, STMf, xxv (1943), 158–82

Boom, van

(3) Hermanus Marinus van Boom

(b Utrecht, 9 Feb 1809; d Utrecht, 5 Jan 1883). Flautist, son of (1) Johannes van Boom. He studied with his father and with Tulou in Paris (1826), then returned to Utrecht to teach and to study with Drouet. In 1830 he settled in Amsterdam, succeeding Drouet’s teacher Arnoldus Dahmen as first flute in the Felix Meritis orchestra. From 1841 he was also flautist in the Caecilia orchestra. The greatest Dutch flautist of his time, he was appointed solo flautist to King Willem III in 1863.

Boone, Charles

(b Cleveland, 21 June 1939). American composer. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music (1960–61), the University of Southern California (BM 1963) and San Francisco State College (MA 1968). During the 1960s he served as chair of the San Francisco Composer’s Forum and coordinator of the Mills College Performing Group and Tape Music Center. In the early 1970s he founded the San Francisco BYOP (Bring Your Own Pillow) concert series (now the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players). Under the auspices of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, he was composer-in-residence in Berlin from 1975 to 1977. He has written and lectured internationally on new music and its relationship to the other arts, and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Boone’s early works, inspired by Polish music of the early 1960s, employ static, slow-evolving sound blocks, a feature that became characteristic of later compositions as well. His early interest in bright instrumental colours, however, gave way to a more monochromatic palette. In his compositions, he has striven for what he calls a ‘complex simplicity’, exploiting complex juxtapositions of relatively simple formal and sonic structures expressed through timbral relationships and changing textures. While his music can be considered freely atonal, it contains tonal relationships of the kind found in the music of Webern, Ligeti and Lutosławski.

WORKS

Inst: Oblique Formation, fl, pf, 1965; Starfish, fl, cl, 2 vn, pf, 2 perc, 1966; The Edge of Land, orch, 1968; Qt, vn, cl, vc, pf, 1970; Vermilion, ob, 1970; Zephyrus, ob, pf, 1970; First Landscape, orch, 1971; Second Landscape, chbr orch, 1973, arr. orch, 1979; Raspberries, 3 perc, 1974; Linea meridiana, chbr ens, 1975; San Zeno/Verona, chbr ens, 1976; Shunt, 3 perc, 1978; Str Piece, str orch, 1978; Little Fl Pieces, 1979; Streaming, fl, 1979; Springtime, ob, 1980; Trace, fl, 10 pfmrs, 1981–3; The Watts Towers, perc, 1981; Weft, 6 perc, 1982; Drum Bug, mechanical woodblocks, 1983; Drift, octet, 1984–5; 3 Pieces, perc, 1989: Lightfall; Last Gleaming; Twenty-Seven Lines; Morphosis, 6 perc, 1997

Vocal: 3 Motets (e.e. cummings), SATB, 1962–5; Chinese Texts (trans. K. Rexroth), S, orch, 1971; Vocalise, S, 1972

El-ac: A Cool Glow of Radiation, fl, tape, 1966; The Khaju Bridge, S, tpt, db, elec org, perc, tape, 1984–6; Ellipse, vc, elecs, 1997

Principal publisher: Salabert

CHARLES SHERE

Boone, (Charles Eugene) Pat(rick)

(b Jacksonville, FL, 1 June 1934). American popular singer. With his clean-cut college boy manner and warm tenor voice, Boone briefly rivalled Elvis Presley as the favourite singer of American teenagers in the late 1950s. Guided by Randy Wood of Dot Records, Boone at first specialized in recording cover versions of songs already made famous by black rock and roll performers. In 1955–7 he had hit singles with songs from Fats Domino (Ain't that a shame), Little Richard (Tutti Frutti), the Flamingos (I'll be home) and Ivory Joe Hunter (I almost lost my mind). These invariably outsold the original recordings and caused Boone to be accused of unfairly exploiting the creativity of black singers, not least because his versions generally lacked the passion of the originals. If Boone had a more individual vocal personality, it was one best suited to the sentimental romantic ballads which provide many of his hit recordings, including Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love), Love Letters in the Sand (from the film Bernadine) and April Love. In the early 1960s he had two of his biggest hits with the uncharacteristic ‘death disc’ Moody River and the novelty number Speedy Gonzales. As a teenage idol, Boone had publicly proclaimed his conservative Christian beliefs, and in later years he performed country and gospel music with his Pat Boone Family Show whose members included his daughter Debby (b 1956), a minor pop star of the 1980s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Boone: Twixt Twelve and Twenty (New York, 1958)

C.E. Boone: Together: 125 Years with the Pat Boone Family (Nashville, TN, 1979)

C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)

DAVE LAING

Boosé, Carl

(b Darmstadt, 1 April 1815; d London, 30 Aug 1868). German bandmaster, active in Great Britain. At the age of 15 he entered the 1st Hessian Regiment as a bandsman, taking his discharge in 1832. After giving concerts at Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Strasbourg in 1833, he returned to Darmstadt and founded the Liedertafel in that city. Being a first-class clarinettist he was offered a post in London in 1835. He soon went to Liverpool and Edinburgh, and in the latter city played at the Theatre Royal for four years (1835–8), as well as at the concerts of the Edinburgh Society of Musicians (1836–41). In 1841 he accepted the post of bandmaster of the 9th (Queen’s) Lancers and in March 1842 was the successful candidate for a similar post in the Scots Guards, where his excellent band arrangements were much appreciated. Regimental bands were at that time constituted on no fixed pattern, and in this area Boosé exercised a deep influence by means of Boosé’s Military Band Journal, which he began in 1846 as the first publication of its kind in Britain, though Wessell’s brass band journal was the first to use the monthly subscription. The first issue was a selection from Verdi’s Ernani. For the earlier issues Boosé not only wrote the parts on stone for lithographing, but with the help of a friend printed them by hand.

Boosé’s journal was such a success that Boosey & Co. acquired and ran it until 1883 under the name Boosey’s Military Band Journal, retaining Boosé as editor until his death. Boosé’s supplemental Military Journal was issued in the series Jullien’s Journal for Military Bands (1858–1903). His instrumentation was based on that of Wieprecht (1802–72), the Prussian army-band reformer, and when British army bandmasters became subscribers to the journal they found it necessary to reconstitute their bands, gradually thus adopting the Prussian system of instrumental organization. Boosé, who was decorated by the Grand Duke of Hesse with the Order of Merit, transferred to the Royal Horse Guards Band in 1859, where he remained until his death. His son, George, was a violinist who played for the Philharmonic Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Dibdin: The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage (Edinburgh, 1888), 501

R.A. Marr: Music for the People: a Retrospect of the Glasgow International Exhibition 1888, with an Account of the Rise of Choral Societies in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1889), 88

J.A. Browne: ‘Jubilee of Boosey & Co.’s Military Journal’, British Musician, viii (1895), 179–80

H.G. Farmer: Handel’s Kettledrums and Other Papers on Military Music (London, 1950/R, 2/1960)

H.G. Farmer: Military Music (London, 1950)

H.G. FARMER/TREVOR HERBERT

Boosey & Hawkes.

English music publishers and instrument manufacturers. The Boosey family was of Franco-Flemish origin, and though the early family history is somewhat confused, it appears that the firm’s founder was the Thomas Boosey (i) who opened a bookshop in London in about 1792. This business continued until 1832, being known from 1819 as Boosey & Sons, or T. & T. Boosey. A separate music side of the business was started in 1816 under the control of the founder's son, Thomas (ii) (1794/5–1871). They began as importers of foreign music, but soon became the English publishers of composers such as Hummel, Mercadante and Rossini, and later of important operas by Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. The House of Lords' decision in 1854, which deprived English publishers of many of their foreign copyrights, severely affected the firm. Among the earliest publications of T. Boosey & Co. was an English translation of Forkel's life of Bach (1820).

From 1851 the firm also manufactured wind instruments, and in 1856 made arrangements with the flautist R.S. Pratten (1846–1936) to work out his new ideas on flutes. In 1868 the firm purchased the business of Henry Distin; this enabled it to develop the manufacture of brass instruments in which, among other innovations, the firm pioneered the widely acclaimed design for compensating valves developed by D.J. Blaikley in 1874.

In the latter part of the 19th century Boosey & Co., as the firm had become known, centred its publishing activities on the increasingly popular ballad; to promote sales the London Ballad Concerts were established in 1867 by John Boosey (c1832–93), son of Thomas (ii), at St James's Hall, and later at the new Queen's Hall; Clara Butt and Sims Reeves were among the artists. Among its successes were Sullivan's The Lost Chord and Stephen Adams's The Holy City. From around the end of the century the firm began to emphasize educational music. In 1930 the firm of Boosey & Hawkes came into being on the amalgamation with Hawkes & Son, a firm of instrument makers and publishers founded by William Henry Hawkes in 1865 as Hawkes & Co. (later Rivière & Hawkes) and particularly known for handling brass and military band music, a speciality which has been continued. Boosey & Hawkes developed greater artistic ambitions, and notable musical figures such as Erwin Stein and Ernst Roth, both formerly with Universal Edition in Vienna, helped it to secure the copyrights or agencies for an impressive array of composers, including Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók, Kodály, Copland, Mahler and Rachmaninoff, in addition to all of Benjamin Britten's output from 1938 to 1963. Maxwell Davies is the most prominent name among living English composers in the catalogue, and the firm's continuing interest in contemporary music is also reflected in the magazine Tempo, which it started in 1939. Boosey & Hawkes's scale of operation is now worldwide, with branches in five countries on four continents. The New York branch of the firm, established in 1892, has developed its own catalogue, which emphasizes the works of American composers including Elliott Carter, David Del Tredici, Walter Piston, Ned Rorem and Steve Reich.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

Waterhouse-LangwillI

W. Boosey: Fifty Years of Music (London, 1931)

C.G. Mortimer: ‘Leading Music Publishers: Boosey & Hawkes Ltd.’, MO, lxii (1938–9), 181–90

‘The Music Publisher of Tradition: the Booseys: Thomas and John; the Hawkes: William Henry and Oliver’, MO, lxv (1941–2), 68 only

J.N. Moore: Elgar and his Publishers (London, 1987)

D.J. BLAIKLEY/WILLIAM C. SMITH/PETER WARD JONES

Boot

(Dut. stevel; Fr. pied; Ger. Fuss, Stiefel).

The lower part of a reed pipe, into which the block fits (see Organ, fig. 19). The corresponding part of a flue pipe is called the foot (see Foot (iii)).

Booth [née Santlow], Hester

(b c1690; bur. Cowley, Middx, 21 Jan 1773). English dancer and actress. She made her début in 1706 at Drury Lane, London, where she was a leading dancer until she retired in 1733. John Weaver chose her for major roles in his innovative ‘dramatick entertainments in dancing’: Venus in The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Eurydice in Orpheus and Eurydice (1718), Andromeda in Perseus and Andromeda (1728, by Weaver and Roger) and Helen of Troy in The Judgment of Paris (1733). John Thurmond gave her dancing roles in his pantomimes for Drury Lane: both Daphne and a Nymph in Apollo and Daphne (1725), a Harlequin Woman in The Escapes of Harlequin (1722), Diana in the Masque of the Deities in Harlequin Doctor Faustus (1723) and Pomona in Harlequin's Triumph (1727). Mr Isaac and Anthony L'Abbé, dancing-masters at court and in the theatre, choreographed dances for her, seven of which were published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation (The Union, London, 1707; The Saltarella, London, 1708; four in L'Abbé's New Collection of Ball Dances, London, ?1725; and The Prince of Wales's Saraband, London, 1731). The passacaille and chaconne in L'Abbé's collection are to music from the operas Armide and Acis et Galatée by Lully.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

S.J. Cohen: ‘Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing: III Hester Santlow’, in I.K. Fletcher, S.J. Cohen, and R. Lonsdale: Famed for Dance: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing in England, 1660–1740 (New York, 1960), 49–58

A. Macaulay: ‘The First British Ballerina: Hester Santlow c1690–1773’, Dancing Times, xxxi (1990–91), 248–50

M. Goff: ‘Dancing, by Miss Santlow: the Recorded 18th-Century Dances of the Time of Hester Santlow’, Dancing Times, xxxii (1991–2), 646–8

P.W. Rader: ‘Harlequin and Hussar: Hester Santlow's Dancing Career in London, 1706–1733’ (thesis, CUNY, 1992)

M. Goff: ‘Serious, Grotesque, or Scenical? the Passagalia of Venüs and Adonis and Dancing on the London Stage 1700–1740’, On Common Ground: London 1996 (Bedford, 1996), 8–19

MOIRA GOFF

Bootleg.

An unauthorized copy of a recording of a concert or live broadcast. More recently the term has come to encompass recordings of rehearsals and Demo sessions. Music industry organisations distinguish between bootlegs, counterfeit recordings which are manufactured to resemble legitimate discs and tapes, and pirate copies which make no attempt to duplicate the packaging of legitimate releases. In all cases, the recordings are issued without the permission of the copyright owners of the music or the performance. The earliest bootleg recordings were said to have been made at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1901–3 and many subsequent bootleg discs were circulated in the USA before Congress granted copyright protection to sound recordings in 1951. Elsewhere, ineffective copyright laws in Italy (which protected performances for only 20 years) enabled the manufacture and export of numerous bootleg recordings of opera performances and radio broadcasts given by Maria Callas and other stars. In popular music, fanatical followers of such artists as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin have made recordings of hundreds of concerts and circulated them in a semi-clandestine manner. Some groups, notably the Grateful Dead, have actively encouraged audience members to make recordings of their concerts. See also C. Heylin: The Great White Wonders: a History of Rock Bootlegs (London, 1994).

DAVE LAING

Bop [bebop, rebop].

A modernist movement in jazz which had a deep influence on the genre’s history (see Jazz, §7). It was developed in Harlem, New York, during World War II by musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian and later Charlie Parker. Among other innovations, they superimposed on the harmonic structure of ‘standard’ songs melodic themes closer to the spirit of jazz improvisations, creating a new repertory. The improvisation became more searching than hitherto, and the speed of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic motion led to dense, compact performances. Instrumental sonority (without vibrato) became more tense and mobile. The rhythm section was thinned out, the guitar was often omitted, and the pianist spaced his accompanying chords more irregularly; the drummer explored the tension between a permanent beat on the cymbal (supported by a walking bass) and syncopated strokes divided among the snare, tom-tom and bass drums, often interacting closely with the implied polyrhythms of the solo line. The range of tempos became wider, with a tendency to the extremely fast (at times exceeding 360 crotchets per minute). After the death in 1955 of Parker, the most important bop soloist, many jazz musicians reacted against the refined intimacy of the ‘cool’ and West Coast styles in a movement known as hard bop.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Feather: Inside Bop (New York, 1949)

R. Russell: ‘Bop’, Record Changer (1948–9); repr. in The Art of Jazz, ed. M. Williams (New York, 1959)

A. Hodeir: ‘Charlie Parker and the Bop Movement’, Jazz: its Evolution and Essence (New York, 1956)

ANDRÉ HODEIR

Boquay [Bocquay], Jacques

(b c1680; d 19 May 1730). French violin maker. He ranks with Claude Pierray as the most important of the early Paris luthiers. His shop was in the rue d’Argenteuil from 1712 to 1725, and then in the rue de la Juiverie, near Notre Dame, until his death. He was half-brother to Louis Guersan. Like Pierray, he worked on an adaptation of the Amati model. His wood was usually that available locally; the fronts are not ideal tonally, but in the 18th century, as now, his instruments were in good repute among players. The varnish is Italian in appearance, if rather more brittle in consistency, and as a result his work is quite often seen with more illustrious names attached. In particular this is true of his cellos, which are fine instruments tonally.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Vannes: Essai d’un dictionnaire universel des luthiers (Paris, 1932, 2/1951/R as Dictionnaire universel des luthiers, suppl. 1959)

S. Milliot: Les luthiers parisiens du XVIIIe siècle (Spa, 1997)

CHARLES BEARE/SYLVETTE MILLIOT

Boquet.

See Bosquet.

Bor, Modesta

(b Juangriego, 1926; d Mérida, 7 April 1998). Venezuelan composer. She studied composition in Caracas with Vicente Emilio Sojo, graduating from the Conservatorio José Angel Lamas in Caracas (1959). She studied with Khachaturian at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moscow (1960–62). On her return she began a career in composing and teaching. She was musicologist for the Servicio de Investigaciones Folklóricas Nacionales (1963–4), director of children's choirs at the Juan Manuel Olivares Conservatorio (from 1965), director of cultural activities at the Central University of Venezuela (1974–90), then taught at the Centro Universitario de Artes, Mérida, until her death. She won five national composition prizes and the National Music Prize in 1991.

Bor's early works employed elements from Venezuelan folklore, with considerable attention to counterpoint, as part of the post-Impressionist language advocated by the school of Caracas. After 1962 she gradually adopted several modernist techniques, even atonal serialism, while retaining Venezuelan elements in an abstract form. A warm and unassuming aspect of her style is reflected in her many choral compositions and arrangements, now extremely influential in the development of choral singing in Venezuela, particular children's choirs.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Segundo ciclo de romanzas, A, pf, 1962; La mañana ajena, SATB, 1971; Mañana ajena, Valero mundo, Canto de paz, Locerita, Arcoiris, SATB, 1971; Jugando a la sombra de una plaza vieja (A. Machado), SATB, orch, 1972; Manchas sonoras, SATB, 1975; Tríptico sobre poesía cubana (N. Guillén), 1v, pf, 1979; Prisma sonoro, SATB, 1980; Barco de la medianoche, SATB, 1982; Romanzas, A, pf, 1984; Basta, basta, basta, SATB, 1986; Son venezolano, SATB, 1986; El maíz, sym. tale, SATB, orch, 1992

Inst: Juangriego, waltz, pf, 1954; Suite criolla, pf, 1954; Pequeño concierto, ob, hpd, 1958; Sonata, vn, pf, 1960; 3 piezas infantiles, pf, 1961; Suite infantil, pf, 1961; Obertura sinfónica, orch, 1963; Sonata, vn, pf, 1963; Genocidio, orch, 1970; Sarcasmos, pf, 1980; Conc., pf, orch, 1985; Acuarelas, str, 1986; Melancolía, gui, 1986; Homenaje a Neruda, orch, 1987; Variaciones sobre un tema Wahari, pf, 1989; 4 fugas, pf, 1992; Imitación serial, str; Movimiento, brass qnt; Prelude and Toccata, pf; Str Qt; Variaciones sinfónicas, orch

Other: many folksong arrs., chorus; many pieces in popular styles

MSS in Latin American Music Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Conservatorio José Angel Lamas, Caracas

Principal publishers: Fundación Vicente Emilio Sojo (Caracas), Dirección de Cultura (Central U. of Venezuela), Congreso de la República (Caracas)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Guido: Panorama de la música en Venezuela (Caracas, 1978)

G. Guilarte: Sincretismo afro-venezolano en las obras de Isabel Aretz y Modesta Bor (diss., Central U. of Venezuela, 1989)

N. Tortolero: Sonido que es imagen … imagen que es historia (Caracas, 1996)

CARMEN HELENA TÉLLEZ

Borbolla (Téllez), Carlo [Carlos]

(b Manzanillo, 1 Feb 1902; d Havana, 13 April 1990). Cuban composer and teacher. He studied harmony and composition with Aubert and the piano with Pierre Lucas in Paris (1927–31) and returned to his home town as a builder of dance organs. In 1950 he moved to Havana, where he worked as a private music teacher. His mildly advanced style, related to that of Ignacio Cervantes, employs Cuban white, mestizo and black folk rhythms in an elegant manner. Working in relative isolation, he never became directly involved with official Cuban music activities. Shortcomings he perceived in the work of professional Cuban performers prompted him to write four educational booklets (all unpublished) on syncopation in Cuban music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Pf: 25 Cuban Studies, 20 habaneras, 25 rumbas, 35 sones, 5 suites, Variations on Ma-Teodora, Variations on La Bayamesa; music for 2/3 pf

Other works: songs; 6 works, vn, pf; 3 bailables manzanilleros, str

Principal publisher: Borbolla

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Pérez Sanjurjo: Historia de la música cubana (Miami, 1986), 380–82

AURELIO DE LA VEGA

Borboni [Borbone], Nicolò

(b Pergola, c1591; d Rome, 20 Oct 1641). Italian composer, organist, organ builder and engraver. He probably spent his whole life in Rome and may have been related to the Roman painters Jacopo, Domenico and Matteo Borboni (the last of whom was also an engraver). He may have studied music with Ottavio Catalani and probably harpsichord and organ with Frescobaldi until 1614. He was organist of S Maria della Consolazione from 1623 to 1629, and of S Giovanni in Laterano from 1638 to 1641. In the intervening years he was possibly maestro di capella of the Seminario Romano. He also looked after the organs at S Maria della Consolazione (1623–41), S Giovanni in Laterano (1628–41), S Apollinare and S Maria Maggiore (both 1633–41). Doni called him an ‘excellent organist’ and praised a regal that he had made. Following Simone Verovio, whose pupil he may have been, he espoused the method of printing from engraved copper plates for a series of music books published between 1615 and 1637. The bulk of these comprised the various editions, seven in all, of Frescobaldi's two volumes of toccatas (and other pieces), in which the engraving of the frontispieces was done by Cristoforo Bianchi. Like all Borboni's productions, they are accurate and elegant, with attractive decoration, and no less fine than the work of Verovio himself.

Another of Borboni's productions, which he engraved himself, was his own Musicali concenti … libro primo (Rome, 1618 or perhaps 1619) for one and two voices and continuo, his only known collection of music. It contains 26 pieces, all but three for solo voice; they comprise six madrigals, eight canzonettas, six sonnet settings, three strophic-bass arias and three ottava settings over the romanesca, all forms popular in Italian vocal chamber music at the time. Since Borboni was an undistinguished melodist the canzonettas are the least interesting pieces, but many of the others, which depend less for their effect on melody, include a good deal of resourceful writing, in particular some imaginative, carefully written embellishments, which seem to have been influenced by those of Caccini. Some pieces include ritornellos for a keyboard instrument. A solo song and duet by Borboni also survive (in RISM 1622¹¹). He engraved the volumes of Salmi passeggiati (1615) by Francesco Severi, and perhaps also Michelangelo Rossi’s Toccate e correnti.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FortuneISS

A. Silbiger: ‘The Roman Frescobaldi Tradition c. 1640–1670’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 42–87, esp. 68

A. Silbiger: ‘Michelangelo Rossi and his Toccate e correnti’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 18–38, esp. 23, 28

J. Bulke: Musicians of S Maria Maggiore Rome, 1600–1700: a Social and Economic Study (Venice, 1984), 31, 101

C. Annibaldi: ‘Ancora sulle messe attribuite a Frescobaldi: proposta di un profittevole scambio’, Girolamo Frescobaldi: Ferrara 1983

J. Lionet: ‘La musique à Santa Maria delle Consolazione de Rome au 17ème siècle’, NA, new ser., iv (1986), 163–6

A. Morelli: ‘Nuovo documenti Frescobaldiani: i contratti per l’edizione del primo libro di Toccate’, Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 255–65

NIGEL FORTUNE/ARNALDO MORELLI

Borbonius [Bourbon], Nicolaus

(b Vendeuvre-sur-Barse, c1503; d Candé, nr Angers, after 1550). French poet and composer. After studies in Troyes he lived in Paris and later in London at the court of Henry VIII. Although his neo-Latin poetry was printed as early as 1517, his Nugae (Paris, 1533) is the best-known collection of his works. Because it aroused clerical opposition, he became tutor in 1539 of Jeanne d'Albert, daughter of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, who supported the reformers. Shortly thereafter he went to Candé. The name of Borbonius is connected with four compositions. He wrote the text of the ode Praedita vero, but not the music (as Eitner claimed); the composer is Johann Heugel. Borbonius is the poet and possibly the composer of Cur violas mittis, although the motet Quid ultra debui facere, usually assigned to him, is anonymous (both motets are in D-Rp A.R.940/41). The text of Huc me sydereo, made famous through Josquin's setting, has been attributed to him, but in fact is by the Milanese poet Maffeo Veggio, although published with a few alterations by Borbonius under his own name.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

K.-G. Hartmann: ‘Nicolaus Borbonius in der Oden- und Motettenkomposition des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 81–3

H. Osthoff: Josquin Desprez, ii (Tutzing, 1965), 331

E. Lowinsky: ‘Josquin des Prez and Ascanio Sforza’, Il duomo di Milano [Milan 1968], ed. M.L. Gatti Perer (Milan, 1969), ii, 17–22

CLEMENT A. MILLER

Borchgrevinck, Melchior

(b ?c1570; d Copenhagen, 20 Dec 1632). Danish composer, anthologist, organist and instrumentalist probably of Dutch origin. Bonaventura Borchgrevinck, who was possibly his father, took him with him as a treble when he was appointed director of music at the Danish court at Copenhagen on 1 January 1587. Bonaventura left six months later but Melchior stayed on as an instrumentalist and rapidly gained the respect and confidence of the new king, Christian IV. In 1593 his salary was almost doubled, making him, despite his youth, the best-paid musician at court. In 1596 he was sent to Danzig to buy instruments and engage choristers, and at Christmas of that year he was appointed an organist with a further rise in salary. The next year he travelled to England, again to buy instruments, with the party that was sent to bring back the late King Frederik II's Order of the Garter. In 1599 he led a party of Danish musicians, which included Mogens Pedersøn and Hans Nielsen, to Venice to study with Giovanni Gabrieli. On his return in 1600 he was promoted to court organist and given the care of four pupils, among them Pedersøn and Nielsen. Other gifts and honours were bestowed on him, including a canonry of Roskilde Cathedral. For the winter of 1601–2 he was again in Venice, where he seems to have enjoyed a high reputation: Orazio Vecchi praised him in the dedication (to Christian IV) of Le veglie di Siena (1604) and added the authority of Giovanni Gabrieli, who, he said, considered him ‘one of the most outstanding musicians of our time’. Borchgrevinck achieved the rank of principal instrumentalist in 1603. After Trehou was dismissed in 1611, he became the virtual leader of the court music, but it was not until 1618 that he was confirmed in the position as principal director. Circumstances forced the reduction of the musical establishment in 1627, and he appears to have retired to Roskilde. In 1631 he was reinstated in his musical duties.

Borchgrevinck was responsible for the first major music publications in Denmark: two collections, under the title Giardino novo bellissimo di varii fiori musicali scieltissimi (Copenhagen, 1605⁷ and 1606⁵; 20 ed. H. Glahn: 20 Italian Madrigals from Melchior Borchgrevinck ‘Giardino novo’ I–II, Copenhagen, 1983), of five-part madrigals, mainly by some of the most popular Italian composers of the day. He was up-to-date enough to include Cruda Amarilli from Monteverdi's fifth book (1605), but strangely he omitted Marenzio. He himself contributed the last madrigal in each volume, Amatemi, ben mio and Baci amorosi e cari respectively, and included in the second volume two other madrigals by Danish colleagues, one by Hans Nielsen (Giovanni Fonteio) and one (in two partes) by Nicolas Gistou (editions of the Danish madrigals, together with facsimiles of the title-pages, dedications to King Christian IV of Denmark and King James I of England respectively and tables of contents, in Dania sonans, iii, 1967). A Missa ‘Baci amorosi e cari’ for eight voices by Borchgrevinck, which survives incomplete in a manuscript (at DK–Ou), testifies further to the influence of his visits to Italy and of Gabrieli. Of his other church music, only a single chorale setting in four parts, adapted for use with a poem by Hans Møllen Koch published under the title En nye Viise om Guds Ord (Copenhagen, 1623) is known, whereas IX Davids Psalmer, med fire stemmer rimvis udsat (Copenhagen, 1607) – rhyming versions of the psalms set for four voices – is lost. Five five-part dances by him survive (three in RISM 1607²⁸ and two in 1609³⁰; ed. B. Engelke: Musik und Musiker am Gottorfer Hofe, i, Breslau, 1930 and J. Bergsagel: Music for Instrumental Ensemble, Copenhagen, 1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Hammerich: Musikken ved Christian den Fjerdes hof (Copenhagen, 1892)

H. Huldt-Nystrøm: ‘Et hittil ukjent koralarrangement av Melchior Borchgrevinck, kapellmester hos Christian IV’ [An unknown chorale arrangement by Borchgrevinck], viii (1982), 89–107

J. Bergsagel: ‘Foreign Music and Musicians in Denmark during the Reign of Christian IV’, Heinrich Schütz und die Musik in Dänemark: Copenhagen 1985, 19–24

E. Tonnesen: ‘Melchior Borchgrevinck: Kannik i Roskilde og kgl. hofkomponist’, Jul i Roskilde (1987), 49–52

JOHN BERGSAGEL

Borck, Edmund von

(b Breslau, 22 Feb 1906; d Nettuno, Italy, 16 Feb 1944). German composer and conductor. He studied composition, the piano and conducting in Breslau and at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and musicology at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. After brief employment as Kapellmeister at the Frankfurt Opera, Borck returned to Berlin to assume a post as teacher of theory and composition at the Kittel Conservatory. In 1940 he entered military service, and was killed in action. As a composer Borck is best known for his orchestral music. The successful première in 1933 of his Fünf Orchesterstücke op.8 at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam brought him to public attention, although his uncompromising polyphonic style, strongly influenced by Hindemith, aroused some suspicion among the more conservative members of the Nazi musical hierarchy. Borck's subsequent compositions further emphasized his contrapuntal skills, as well as his veneration for Baroque idioms – a trait which he shared with many other German composers of his generation. The most distinguished of his compositions include the Präludium und Fuge for orchestra (1934), the Piano Concerto (1941) and his last work, the opera Napoleon. It was performed in 1942 in Gera, and draws much inspiration from Handel. Borck was also a gifted conductor, making guest appearances at an early age with the Berlin PO and the Concertgebouw.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Conc., a sax, orch, op.6, 1932; 5 Orchesterstücke, op.8, 1933; Präludium und Fuge, op.10, 1934; Conc. for Orch, op.14, 1936; Concertino, op.15b, fl, str, 1936; Thema, Variationen und Finale, op.16, 1936; Präludium, op.17a; 2 Fantasiestücke, op.17b, 1940; Sinfonisches Vorspiel, op.18, 1940; Pf Conc., op.20, 1941; Orphika, op.21, c1942

Vocal: Ländliche Kantate, op.9 (Rich), chorus, str orch; 5 Lieder, op.13, A, pf; 3 Lieder, op.22 (R.M. Rilke), A, va, pf; Napoleon (op, C. Grabbe), Gera, 1942

Chbr: Sonata, op.7, vn, pf; Introduktion und Capriccio, A, op.11, vn/a sax, pf, 1935; Präludium, E, op.11/2, vn; Allegro ditirambico, op.12, pf; Sextet, op.15a, fl, str, 1936; Kleine Suite, op.19, fl, 1938; Ballade, op.23, pf, lost

Principal publishers: Balan, Borck, Schott, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Hübner)

K. Laux: ‘Edmund von Borck’, Musik und Musiker der Gegenwart, i (Essen, 1949), 39–41

K. Wörner: ‘Edmund von Borck’, Musica, v (1951), 402–5 [incl. list of works]

K. Wörner: ‘Edmund von Borcks “Napoleon” zum 10. Todestag des Komponisten’, Melos, xxi (1954), 42–4

H. Gressner: Edmund von Borck: ein fragment (Dülmen, 1989) [incl. list of works]

H.-J. Winterhoff and H. Loos, eds.: Fünf schlesische Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts, Deutsche Musik im Osten, iv (Bonn, 1994) [incl. list of works]

CHARLOTTE ERWIN/ERIK LEVI

Bord, Antoine-Jean Denis

(b Toulouse, 1814; d Paris, 1888). French piano maker. He started business in 1843 after learning the craft in Marseilles and Lyons. In 1843 he invented the capo tasto, a metal bar which exerts downward pressure on the strings, increasing their resistance to the up-striking hammers and also improving sonority. In 1846 he patented a double-escapement grand action, which is of interest because it employed a spiral spring, later embodied in modern upright actions. The firm’s early success, however, was primarily a result of Bord’s talent as an entrepreneur. Concentrating on the mass production of small robust uprights, he succeeded in cutting costs and establishing his ‘pianettes’, particularly in France and England, as the best available cheap instruments. Annual output was increased from 500 in 1850 to more than 2000 by the 1870s. A decade later their inherent limitations were becoming increasingly apparent in contrast with the new German overstrung iron-framed instruments. After Bord’s death his successors failed, despite a more diversified output, to re-establish the firm’s reputation outside France. In 1934 the business was taken over by Pleyel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1933/R, rev. 2/1978/R)

C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976, 2/1990)

CYRIL EHRLICH

Borda, Germán

(b Bogotá, 27 Jan 1935). Colombian composer. He studied philosophy and literature at the University of the Andes before attending the University of Vienna (1957–63, 1966–8), where he obtained a PhD in music theory and composition. He continued his postgraduate studies in 1970 with Alfred Uhl, whom he later acknowledged as his most important influence. Among his other teachers were Siegl, Cerha and Clemencic. Although he does not adhere to a particular school or style, his music, especially works such as A la busca del tiempo perdido (1973) and his Seis macroestructuras (1988) for string quartet is atonal and expressionistic. He has been active as a music critic and lecturer; his weekly television programme has played an important role in introducing classical music to the Colombian public. He is the author of two novels, one of which has proved a catalyst for musical compositions including the Oda a los Dioses (1995) for oboe, harp and percussion and Flumina 1 (1995) for string orchestra. His works have been performed in Italy, Japan and Russia, but above all in Germany, where several of his compositions have been recorded.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: A la busca del tiempo perdido (M. Proust), SATB, orch, 1973

Orch: Orquestal 1, 1968; Homenaje a Klee, 1970; Orquestal 2, 1970; Orquestal 3, 1971; Orquestal en 3 movimientos, 1971; Espacios, str, 1975; Estático y movimiento, str, 1975; Fanfarrias, 1975; Un amor de Swann (M. Proust), 1976; 6 microestructuras, 1976; Movimiento, str, 1976; 6 microestructuras, str, 1978; Visiones de la sabana, str, 1978; Espacial, 1980; Concertante, str, 1987; Conc., hpd, str, 1990; Conc., 3 hpd, str, 1991; Concertante, vc, str, 1992; Vc Conc., 1992; Bn Conc., str, 1995; Flumina 1, 1995; Dreydiana, fl, str, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: 3 microestructuras, tpt, perc, 1968; Str Qt, 1970; 6 microestructuras, pf, 1972; Pf Trio, 1972; Armonías, brass qt, 1976; 4 microestructuras, brass qt, 1976; Pequeño requiem, brass qt, 1976; 5 microestructuras, fl, vc, 1986; Cosmogénesis, ww, 1987; 6 microestructuras, fl, ob, 1987; Ww Qt, 1987; Homenaje a Bartók, str qt, 1988; 6 microestructuras, str qt, 1988; Concertante, str qt, 1990; Conc., pf, perc, 1990; Cuarteto del olvido, str qt, 1992; Cuarteto para el orígen de los tiempos, str qt, 1992; Quinteto del recuerdo, str qnt, 1994; Microestructuras y toccata, vn, va, vc, db, pf, 1995; Nubes, 10 vc, 1995; Oda a los Dioses, ob, hp, perc, 1995; Improvización y scherzo, vn, pf, 1996; 4 microestructuras, vn, pf, 1996; Taiyoo, vn, va, vc, 1996; Quinteto homenaje a Borges, brass qnt, 1998; Introducción y tempo de toccata, pf 4 hands

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Duque: ‘La cultura musical en Colombia, siglos diecinueve y veinte’, Gran enciclopedia de Colombia, ed. D.J. Agudelo, vi (Bogotá, 1993), 217–34

J.I. Perdomo Escobar: Historia de la música en Colombia (Bogotá, 1945, 5/1980)

SUSANA FRIEDMANN

Borde, Jean-Benjamin de la.

See La Borde, Jean-Benjamin de.

Bordeaux.

City in France, capital of the ancient province of Aquitaine and now capital of the département of Gironde. The earliest known composer there was Paulinus of Nola (353–431), bishop of Campania and hymn writer. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), the wife of Henry II, patronized the music of troubadours including Bernard de Ventadour. In the second half of the 14th century, musical life centred on the archbishop's court, led by his nephew, Pierre de la Mote. In about 1529, poets and musicians (including Eustorg de Beaulieu, author of the Gestes des solliciteurs, and Clément Janequin, who spent 25 years in Bordeaux, mostly in the entourage of Lancelot du Fau) gathered at the home of the king's lawyer Bernard de Lahet. Local violinists formed the Frayrie de Monsieur Saint Genès, founded within the church of Notre Dame de la Mercy, with a decree promulgated in Bordeaux on 5 February 1621. Pierre Trichet, a lawyer in the Parliament of Bordeaux, began work on a Traité des instruments de musique in about 1630. He owned an important collection of instruments and corresponded with Marin Mersenne.

The choir school at St André Cathedral was founded in 1463. In 1531 a new organ loft was built; Andrew Borde called the organ ‘the finest and biggest organ in the whole of Christendom’, and mentioned its ‘several appliances and giant mechanisms and stars that move their jaws and eyes as fast as the organist plays’. On 5 October 1650, Louis XIV was solemnly received with a Te Deum sung in the cathedral. For the funeral service for Queen Anne of Austria on 27 March 1666, the mass was performed by three choirs. The theorist and composer René Ouvrard was choirmaster at St André in about 1657; in 1686 Nicolas Jacquet, the elder brother of Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, gave harpsichord and organ lessons to the choristers. He was subsequently organist of St Projet and of St Pierre. The cathedral choir school was dissolved in 1792. Other important choir schools were at St Pierre (founded 1481), where Guillaume Piétrequin (also known for his chansons) was choirmaster from 1517, and at St Seurin. The latter school was dissolved in 1776, so much did the singers' voices ‘make the public laugh’.

The organ builder Valéran de Héman lived in Bordeaux from about 1623 to 1635, restoring the organs of St André, St Seurin and St Projet. During the 18th century the celebrated François Bédos de Celles worked on the organ of the church of Ste Croix for 20 years. Charles Levens (1689–1764), a choirmaster of the cathedral, published his Abrégé des règles de l'harmonie in Bordeaux (1743). He composed masses and motets (his Paratum cor meum was performed at the Concert Spirituel in Paris), and a cantatille of his was given in 1749 for the Infanta's visit.

In 1707 a group of amateur musicians formed the Académie des Lyriques. On 5 September 1712, Louis XIV issued letters patent for the founding of the Académie des Belles-Lettres, Sciences et Arts. An early director was Sarrau de Boynet (1685–1772), a pupil of Marin Marais and writer on music history and theory. Montesquieu praised his Dissertation sur l'ancienne musique française. Rameau was in touch with members of the Académie; he presented a copy of his Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie to President Barbot, a friend of Montesquieu. Dissolved during the French Revolution, the Académie was revived as the Académie Nationale des Sciences, Lettres et Arts (1796). It is no longer in existence. Other musical societies were the Musée Littéraire (established 1783), the Lycée (1787) and the Société Philomathique (1808), which replaced the Musée.

In 1785 Bordeaux had 12 makers of string instruments, four organ builders, 56 professional musicians and 15 dancing masters. Franz Ignaz Beck encouraged the development of musical life. He was organist at St Seurin and conductor of the orchestra of the Grand Théâtre; he introduced the symphonies of Haydn and of the Mannheim composers, as well as his own works (melodramas, opéras comiques, symphonies, chamber music and religious and patriotic pieces). The violinist Pierre Gaviniès, a native of Bordeaux, had a brilliant career as teacher, performer and composer in Paris. From 1817 Pierre Galin taught popular classes using a new method (Exposition d'une nouvelle méthode pour l'enseignement de la musique, 1818) called ‘méloplaste’, partly based on Rousseau's figured notation; his pupils were called ‘galinistes’.

The Société Ste-Cécile, founded in 1843 by Costard de Mézeray (1807–87), set up a symphony orchestra and a conservatory. From 1904, under Louis Pennequin, the conservatory made great strides, becoming a municipal body in 1920. The society also organized a competition; Saint-Saëns won the prize in 1857 with his Urbs Roma symphony (his public conducting début) and in 1863 with his overture Spartacus.

The Grand Théâtre, built by Victor Louis, was inaugurated on 7 April 1780 (see illustration). Racine's Athalie was performed there, with music and choruses by Beck, as was the allegorical prologue Le jugement d'Apollon. In the 19th century the great French operas were performed, and important modifications were made to the architecture and decoration. The theatre's heyday was from 1921 to 1939 under the management of René Chauvet and Georges Mauret-Lafage. Subsequent directors were Roger Lalande (1954), Gérard Boireau (1971) and Alain Lombard (1990–96). The music collection of the Grand-Théâtre, currently preserved at the municipal library, holds some 1500 works by Lully, Destouches, Campra, Haydn, Gluck, Donizetti and others.

In the 19th century the salons of the Samazeuilh brothers, Vieillard and Duval attracted such composers as Berlioz and Wagner. In January 1826 the 15-year-old Liszt gave six recitals, playing variations by Czerny as well as his own compositions on an Erard piano. Distinguished organists emerged in Bordeaux: Charles Tournemire, Ermend Bonnal (1880–1944), Joseph Bonnet and Fernand Vaubourgoin (1880–1952), also an esteemed composer. The cathedral organ was restored by Cavaillé-Coll and Barker in 1839. Other musicians born in Bordeaux were Charles Lamoureux, Edouard Colonne, Paul Taffanel, the violinist Jacques Thibaud, the pianist Dominique Merlet (b 1938) and the composers Roger-Ducasse, Barraud and Sauguet.

In 1926 Henri Bordes founded the Société de Musique de Chambre. The orchestra of Bordeaux, now known as the Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, was taken into municipal control in 1936. Its conductors have been Jules Pennequin, Croce Spinelli, Gaston Poulet, Jacques Pernoo, Roberto Benzi and Alain Lombard. Jacques Chaban-Delmas founded the Mai Musical festival in 1950. Contemporary music is played at the Sigma (since 1965) and at the Conservatoire National de Région, whose director since 1989 is Michel Fusté-Lambezat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (F. Lesure)

A. Detcheverry: Histoire des théâtres de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1860)

Archives historiques du département de la Gironde, xxiv (1884), 291–2, 378–83, 410–11, 508–9

E. Féret: Statistique générale du département de la Gironde Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1889)

R. Celeste: ‘Les sociétés de Bordeaux: les anciennes sociétés musicales’, Revue philomathique de Bordeaux et du Sud-Ouest (1899–1900/R)

F. Randier: ‘Les orgues et les organistes de l'église primatiale Saint-André de Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, xiv (1921), 82–91, 145–58, 223–33; xv (1922), 47–58, 91–105, 158–69

F. Randier: ‘Les orgues et les organistes de l'église Saint-Michel de Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, xix (1926), 105–18, 162–76, 215–21

F. Randier: ‘Les orgues et les organistes de l'église Notre-Dame de Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, xxv (1932), 24–34, 66–75

J. d'Welles: Le Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1950)

F. Aussaresses: ‘La musique à Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, new ser., 1 (1952), 77–90

D. Urvoy: ‘La psallette de l'église métropolitaine Saint-André de Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, new ser., xii (1963), 17–25

D. Urvoy: ‘La psallette de Saint-Seurin de Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, new ser., xv (1966), 5–15

H. Bordes: ‘Pierre Gaviniès, violoniste bordelais (1728–1800)’, Actes de l'Académie nationale des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Bordeaux, 4th ser., xxii/4 (1967), 53–64

C. Taillard: ‘Les orgues du XVIIIe siècle à Bordeaux’, L'orgue, nos.122–3 (1967), 86–121; no.131bis (1969), 1–48

J. de Feytaud: ‘L'académie de Bordeaux sous l'ancien régime’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, new ser., xxiii (1974), 71–86

D. Fallon: ‘Saint-Saëns and the Concours de composition musicale in Bordeaux’, JAMS, xxxi (1978), 309–25

L. Sawkins: ‘Rameau's Last Years: some Implications of Rediscovered Material at Bordeaux’, PRMA, cxi (1984–5), 66–91

H. Lagrave, C. Mazouer and M. Régaldo: La vie théâtrale à Bordeaux des origines à nos jours, i: Des origines à 1799 (Paris, 1985)

O. Laroza: ‘La musique religieuse en Gironde au XIXe siècle’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, new ser., xxxi (1985), 71–101

F. Chapelet and others, eds.: Orgues en Aquitaine, ii: Gironde (Aix-en-Provence, 1989)

E. Cardoze: Musique et musiciens en Aquitaine (Bordeaux, 1992)

L. Charles-Dominique: Les ménétriers français sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1994)

CATHERINE CESSAC

Borden, David (Russell)

(b Boston, 25 Dec 1938). American composer and keyboard player. He studied composition with Louis Mennini, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School (BM 1961, MM 1962) and with Billy Jim Layton, Leon Kirchner and Randall Thompson at Harvard University (MA 1965). He also studied at the Berkshire Music Center with Wolfgang Fortner (1961) and Gunther Schuller (1966); on a Fulbright fellowship with Boris Blacher at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1965–6); privately with jazz artists Jimmy Giuffre and Jaki Byard; and with Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer and other electronic instruments. After serving as the Ford Foundation's composer-in-residence for the Ithaca, New York, public school system (1966–8), he became composer and pianist in the dance department of Cornell University, where he later assumed the directorship of the digital music programme. He is perhaps best-known for his work with Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co., a performing group comprised of electronic keyboard instruments, synthesizers and voices (1969–91).

From 1967 Borden has used synthesizers in live performances, and, through the use of solo improvisations, wave-form manipulation and multi-track tape techniques, he has developed a personal polyphonic style. His music from the early 1980s is minimalist, characterized by a steady rhythmic pulse and running lines of quavers accompanied by melodic counterpoint. Later works comment on history by using an entire work by another composer as a cantus firmus. Notes From Vienna (1993–4), for example, borrows movements from Haydn and Beethoven's cello works.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Trbn Concertino, 1960; The Force, S, chbr orch, 1962; Cairn for JFK, orch, tape, 1965; All-American, Teenage, Lovesongs, wind ens, tape, 1967; Trudymusic, pf, orch, 1967; Variations, wind ens, tape, 1968; Infinity Variations, chbr orch, 1992; Notes from Vienna, elec gui, wind, 1993–4; Silent Stars, 2 pf, chbr orch, 1995

Chbr: 3 Pieces, ww qnt, 1958; 15 Dialogues, trbn, tpt, 1959–62; Short Trio, pf trio, 1964; Flatland Music, vc, elec gui, pf, perc, 1965; Pentacle & Epitaph, ob, va, hp, 1966; Omnidirectional Halo III, 2 S, 2 hpd, 2 vc, 1974; Counterpoint, fl, vc, hp, 1978; The Vermeer Variations, fl, ob, vc, hpd, 1985; Double Portrait, 2 pf, 1986; Gary McFarland (Boston Elegies), fl, ens, synth, 1986; Unjust Malaise, 2 pf, 1991

Synth ens: Cloudscape for Peggy, 1970; Easter, with tape, 1970; Endocrine Dot Pattern, with 2 brass, 1970; A. Art, with tape, 1971; Frank (i.e. Sin), with tape, 1971; Tetrahedron, 1971; All Set, 1972; Music, with tape, 1972; The Omnidirectional Halo, with wind ens, 1972; C-A-G-E, pts I–III, 1973–5; The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, pts 1–12, 1976–87; Anas platyrhynchos, 1977; Enfield in Winter, 1978; True Leaps, with 1v, wind, 1986; Dick Twardzik (Boston Elegies), with sax, 1987; Trains, with 1v, cl, 1987; Cayuga Night Music, with S, wind, 1988–90; The Satan Aria, with Bar, 1988; Angels, with vv, wind, 1989–90; Her Inner Lock, with b cl, 1989; Variations on a Theme of Philip Glass, 1991; Birthday Variations, with elec gui, sequencer, 1993; Perilous Night Companion, with chbr ens, 1997

Other elec: Technique, Good Taste and Hard Work, 3 tapes, 1969; Esty Point, Summer 1978, elec pf, 4 synth, opt. s sax, 1981; Anatidae, 1984: I, s sax, elec pf, 2 synth, tape; II, bar sax, elec gui, 2 synth, tape; Enfield in Summer, elec pf, 3 synth, 1984; The Heurtgen Forest, Germany, Jan 22 1945, elec pf, 3 synth, 1984; Infinity Variations 2, 2 amp pf, tape, 1994

Principal publishers: Lameduck

Principal recording companies: Cuneiform, Earthquack, Red

JOAN LA BARBARA

Bordes, Charles (Marie Anne)

(b Rochecorbon, nr Vouvray, 12 May 1863; d Toulon, 8 Nov 1909). French music scholar, teacher and composer. He was taught composition by Franck and the piano by Marmontel and was maître de chapelle and organist at Nogent-sur-Marne from July 1887 until March 1890 when the minister of education commissioned him to assemble a collection of early Basque music (published in 1897 as the Archives de la tradition basque). In 1890 he went to Paris where, as maître de chapelle at St Gervais-St Protais, he organized (1892) the Semaines Saintes de St Gervais, a series of musical services at which the best-known works of French and Italian Renaissance composers were performed by Bordes’ singers, the Chanteurs de St Gervais. Indeed, he dedicated most of his short life (sometimes at the expense of his other creative work) to the revival of sacred and secular Renaissance polyphony, much of which had been completely neglected for centuries, and to encouraging young musicians to look to the past for inspiration.

With the help of Guilmant and d’Indy, Bordes founded in 1894 the society for sacred music known as the Schola Cantorum, which was transformed (1896) into a school for the revival of old church music. As one of its professors, he promoted performances of Gregorian chant and the polyphonic music of Victoria, Josquin, Palestrina etc., and worked to create a modern repertory of vocal and instrumental liturgical music. He encouraged the leading French music scholars to write for his Tribune de Saint-Gervais, which became the school’s bulletin. In his eagerness to bring early French music to new audiences, Bordes took his singers on tour in the French provinces and in other European countries. In 1899 he founded the Schola Cantorum of Avignon, and in 1905 that of Montpellier, where he organized the first national Congrès du Chant Populaire in 1906, and a new staging of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.

Bordes’ musicological interests are reflected in his own compositions, which include a Suite basque and a Rhapsodie basque as well as 33 sacred and secular songs. He also published several collections of French folk music and edited numerous anthologies of early music.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

sacred vocal

Pie Jesu, op.10 (1889); O salutaris, solo v, chorus, op.12 (1889); Litanies de la très Sainte Vierge, 2 female vv, chorus, op.17 (1891); Tantum ergo, motet, S, T/(T, org), op.18 (1889); Le drapeau de Mazagran, chant de patronage (H. Hello) (1895); Mariale, cantique en l’honneur de la très Sainte Vierge (c1896); Cantique aux saints (Hello) (1897); Cantique de pénitence (Le Dorz) (c1897); 4 antiennes à la Sainte Vierge, 2vv: 1 Alma redemptoris, 2 Ave regina, 3 Regina coeli, 4 Salve regina (c1898); Beata viscera, antienne brève, 2vv, acc. (n.d.); Faux bourdons, 3vv (n.d.)

Salut au saint sacrement, 3vv: 1 Beata es, Virgo Maria, 2 Laudate dominum, 3 O sacrum convivium, 4 Tantum ergo (c1900); Verbum caro factum est, response to Sacrement, 4 male vv (c1900); Ave Maria, motet, 4vv (1897); Fili quid fecisti, dialogue spirituel, 4vv (?1899) [for foundation of the Schola Cantorum of Avignon, 1899]; Domine, puer meus jacet, dialogue spirituel (1900) [for inauguration of new location of Schola Cantorum in Paris]; Nunc dimittis, paraphrase of Cantique de Siméon (Hello), 1v, org (1909); Vierge lorraine, cantique à Jeanne d’Arc (Virolet) (1920)

songs

for solo voice and piano unless otherwise stated

Avril (A. Maudit) (1883); Chanson (M. Bouchor), 1883, in Oeuvres vocales révisées par Pierre de Bréville (1921); Pleine mer (V. Hugo), 1880–84, in Oeuvres vocales révisées par Pierre Bréville (1921); Soirée d’hiver (F. Coppée) (1883); Amour évanoui (Bouchor) (1883); Le temps des lilas (Bouchor), 1884; Paysages tristes (P. Verlaine) (1886): 1 Soleils couchants, 2 Chanson d’automne, 3 L’heure du berger, 4 Promenade sentimentale; Colloque sentimental (Verlaine), 1884 (1924); O triste, triste était mon âme (Verlaine), 1886 (1902); 3 Madrigaux amers (L. Valade), op.5, 1885, in Oeuvres vocales révisées par Pierre de Bréville (1921): 1 Profonds cheveux, 2 Le rire, 3 Sur la mer

Spleen (Verlaine), 1886 (1902); Green (Verlaine) (1887); Epithalame (Verlaine) (1888); 3 mélodies (J. Lahor), op.8 (1889): 1 Chanson triste, 2 Sérénade mélancolique, 3 Fantaisie persane; Pensées orientales (Lahor), ?1889 (1901); La bonne chanson (Verlaine) (1889); Dansons la gigue (Verlaine) (1890); Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois (Verlaine), 1888–96, in 19 oeuvres vocales revues d’après les manuscrits par P. de Bréville (1914); Paysage vert (Verlaine), 1894 (1902); Sur un vieil air (Verlaine), 1895 (1902)

Promenade matinale (Verlaine) (1896); La ronde des prisonniers (Verlaine), 1899 (1900); Mes cheveux dorment sur mon front (C. Mauclair) (1901); 4 poèmes (F. Jammes), 1901 (1902): 1 La poussière des tamis chante au soleil, 2 La paix est dans le bois silencieux, 3 Oh! ce parfum d’enfant dans la prairie, 4 Du courage? mon âme éclate de douleur; Petites fées, honnêtes gnomes (J. Moréas), 1901 (1902); O mes morts tristement nombreux (Verlaine) (1903); Paysage majeur (L. Payen) (1908); L’hiver (Bouchor), 2vv, op.18, 1886 (1903); Madrigal à la musique (W. Shakespeare: Henry VIII, trans. Bouchor), S, A, T, B (1895)

other works

Les trois vagues (drame lyrique, C. Bordes), 1890–1906, inc., F-Po

Orch: Pastorale, 1888; Ouverture pour le drame basque Errege Jan (1888); Trois danses béarnaises, op.11 (1888); Rhapsodie basque, pf, orch, op.9 (1889); Euskal Herria, musique de fête pour accompagner une partie de paume au pays basque: 1 Barcus, 2 Lequito, 3 Fuentarabia (1891); Divertissement, tpt, orch (1929)

Chbr: Suite basque, fl, 2 vn, vc, op.6 (1887); Caprice à cinq temps, pf (1891); 4 fantaisies rythmiques, pf, op.16 (1891); Divertissement sur un thème béarnais, 2 pf, 1904, in Album pour enfants, petits et grands (1905)

Versets pour les 2es vêpres de plusieurs martyrs (c1898)

editions

100 chansons populaires basques (n.d.)

10 cantiques populaires basques (n.d.)

12 Noëls populaires basques (1894)

Euskal Noelen/Lilia (1897)

Kantika espiritualak (1897)

10 danses, marches et cortèges populaires du Pays basque espagnol (1908)

12 chansons amoureuses du Pays basque français (1910)

11 chansons du Languedoc (1906)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. de Castéra: Dix années d’action musicale religieuse 1890–1900 (Paris, 1902)

G. Servières: ‘Lieder français: Charles Bordes’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 370, 394

R. Rolland: ‘Esquisse du mouvement musical à Paris depuis 1870’, Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1908; Eng. trans., 1915/R)

L. Llewellyn: ‘Bordes’s Life: Great Musical Inspiration of a Century’, Musical America, xi/9 (1909–10), 36–7

H. Fellot: ‘Le lied français: Charles Bordes’, Revue musicale de Lyon, vii (1909–10), 393–403

P. Dukas: ‘Charles Bordes’, ReM, v/9–11 (1923–4), 96–103

G. Samazeuilh: ‘Un drame basque de Charles Bordes: “Les trois vagues”’, ReM, v/9–11 (1923–4), 104–17 [with list of works, iconography and bibliography]

F.P. Alibert: Charles Bordes à Maguelonne (St Félicien, 1926)

P.M. Dowd: Charles Bordes and the Schola Cantorum of Paris (diss., Catholic U., Washington DC, 1969)

L. Davies: César Franck and his Circle (London, 1970/R)

B. Molla: Charles Bordes, pionnier du renouveau musical français entre 1890 et 1909 (diss., U. of Lyons, 1985)

ELAINE BRODY/PIERRE GUILLOT (text), PIERRE GUILLOT (work-list)

Bordes-Pène [née Pène], Léontine Marie

(b Lorient, 25 Nov 1858; d Rouen, 24 Jan 1924). French pianist, sister-in-law of Charles Bordes. She studied the piano at the Paris Conservatoire, winning a premier prix in Félix Le Couppey’s class in 1872. Franck dedicated his Prélude, aria et final to her, and she gave the first performance of his violin and piano sonata with Ysaÿe in Brussels. She was the pianist in the first performance of d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un thème montagnard, which was also dedicated to her. A sensitive interpreter of new French music, she promoted the works of Chabrier, Duparc, Chausson, Bordes, Bréville, Franck and Fauré. After suffering a paralytic stroke in 1890, she retired to Rouen, where she pursued a successful teaching career until her death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Samazeuilh: Obituary, ReM, v/9–11 (1923–4), 161–2

L. Vallas: César Franck (London, 1951/R; Fr. orig., Paris, 1955, as La véritable histoire de César Franck)

ELAINE BRODY

Bordewijk-Roepman, Johanna (Suzanna)

(b Rotterdam, 4 Aug 1892; d The Hague, 8 Oct 1971). Dutch composer. After studying English, she began to compose at the age of 25. Except for some lessons in orchestration with Eduard Flipse (1936–7), she was self-taught.

Bordewijk-Roepman's first major success was in 1940 with a performance of Les illuminations (based on three Rimbaud poems) by the Rotterdam PO conducted by Flipse. During World War II she refused to join the Kultuurkamer, as all Dutch composers were required to do. Her works were regularly performed during the 1940s and 50s and she received numerous government commissions, as well as a government prize for the Piano Sonata (1943).

Eclectic in style, Bordewijk-Roepman's works are mostly based on Classical formal principles and show a concern for solid construction and logical development. She wrote ten orchestral works and many pieces for men's chorus. Some of her choral works acknowledge the influence of Debussy, although others employ a close-harmony style. She was married to a well-known writer, Frans Bordewijk, who contributed texts for two works, the one-act opera Rotonde (1943) and the oratorio Plato's dood (1949). The latter work was first performed in 1990 by students at the University of Amsterdam.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic and vocal: Boeren seharleston (P. van Ostayen), 1937; [3] Bierbaum-Lieder, SATB, orch/pf, 1940; De lentewind, S, SATB, pf, orchd 1940; Melopee (P. van Ostayen), SATB, 1941; Rotonde (op, 1, F. Bordewijk), 1941; Pioniers (A. van Straten), SATB, 1942; Holland (E. Potgieter), A, orch/pf, 1944; Ik wensche U (G. Gezelle), S, str, 1944; Oranje May-lied (J. van den Vondel), S, orch, 1944; Plato's dood (static orat., Bordewijk), 1949; De heilige cirkel, male chorus, 1950

Orch: Poolsche suite, 1935; 3 stukken, str, 1938; Les illuminations (A. Rimbaud), S [2nd piece], orch, 1940; Pf Conc., 1940; Sym. no.1, 1942; Epiloog, orch, 1943

Inst: Pf Sonata, 1943; Praeludium en fuga, carillon, 1950; Thema met variaties, carillon, 1950; Triptiek, carillon, 1951; Debout, éveille-toi, pf, 1953; Impromptu, pf 1961

Solo v, pf: 6 Lieder, 1925; 3 chansons françaises, 1930; Sei getrost (O. Bierbaum), 1935; Uit het diepst van mijn hart (M. Stoke), medium v, pf, 1944; 5 Tempelzangen (C. van der Straeten, G.A. van Klinkenberg, J. Schreurs, P. Franssen, S. Vestdijk), medium/high v, pf, 1950; Moed (C.S. Adama van Scheltema), A, pf

Principal publishers: Alsbach, Donemus

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Paap: ‘Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’, Mensch en melodie, i (1946), 101–6

HELEN METZELAAR

Bordman, Gerald M(artin)

(b Philadelphia, 18 Sept 1931). American writer on musical theatre. He graduated from Lafayette College (BA) in 1952, then undertook graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania (MA 1953, PhD 1956). Although he has written on English folklore, his main work has been in the field of the American theatre, particularly the American musical. His American Musical Theatre: a Chronicle (1978, 2/1992) is an extensive and exhaustive summary from the origins of the form to 1978, and displays his characteristic chronicling of detail and thorough examination of narrative history. Consequently, his publications have proved invaluable in the early establishment of what is still a developing field of academic study. He has also published biographies of Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans.

WRITINGS

Motif-Index of the English Metrical Romances (Helsinki, 1963)

American Musical Theatre: a Chronicle (New York, 1978, 2/1992)

Jerome Kern: his Life and Music (New York, 1980)

American Operetta: from H.M.S. Pinafore to Sweeney Todd (New York, 1981)

American Musical Comedy: from Adonis to Dreamgirls (New York, 1982)

Days to be Happy, Years to be Sad: the Life and Music of Vincent Youmans (New York, 1982)

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York, 1984)

American Musical Revue: from the Passing Show to Sugar Babies (New York, 1985)

‘Jerome David Kern: Innovation/Traditionalist’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 468–73

The Concise Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York, 1987)

American Theatre: a Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914 (New York, 1994); 1914–1930 (New York, 1995); 1930–1969 (New York, 1996)

PAULA MORGAN

Bordogni, Giulio (Marco)

(b Gazzaniga, nr Bergamo, 23 Jan 1789; d Paris, 31 July 1856). Italian tenor. He studied with Simone Mayr in Bergamo and made his début in 1813 at the Teatro Re, Milan, as Argirio (Tancredi), a role he also sang at La Scala (1817) and other theatres. Engaged at the Théâtre Italien, he sang in the Paris premières of Paer’s Agnese (1819), Mercadante’s Elisa e Claudio (1823) and of ten Rossini operas: L’inganno felice (1819); Otello and La gazza ladra (1821); Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, La Cenerentola and Mosè in Egitto (1822); Ricciardo e Zoraide and La donna del Lago (1824); Semiramide and Zelmira (1826). He created the role of Libenskof in Il viaggio a Reims (1825). He retired in 1833 and taught singing in Paris; his pupils included Henriette Sontag, Giovanni Mario and Laure Cinti-Damoreau. His voice was small, though perfectly placed, while he sang with great elegance and style though his acting ability was restricted. He published a singing method and several collections of exercises.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bordón

(Sp.).

See Bourdon (i).

Bordon [Bourdon, Bordoen], Pieter

(b Ghent, ?1450; d after 1483). South Netherlandish composer. His parents were the Ghent singer Valeriaen Bordon and Margriete van Wijniersch. He was active as a singer in his home town for at least 12 years, holding appointments at the churches of St James (1466–9 and 1470–72) and St Michael (1471–4 and 1478); he then departed for Italy, where he briefly joined the choir of Treviso Cathedral in 1479–80, and was paid in September 1484 as ‘chonpositore de chanto figurato’ at Siena Cathedral. Although the accounts of the latter church mention his having composed ‘motets, Credos, and other mensural works for this church’ (probably on commission), no liturgical compositions have survived under his name. Bordon may, however, be responsible for the four-part arrangement of the anonymous Il sera pour vous/L'homme armé (attributed to ‘Borton’ in I-Rc 2856), as well as a three-part setting of De tous biens plaine ascribed in Petrucci's Odhecaton A to ‘Pe. Bourdon’, but elsewhere to Alexander Agricola.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. D'Alessi: ‘Maestri e cantori fiamminghi nella Cappella Musicale del Duomo di Treviso, 1411–1531’, TVNM, xv (1939), 147–65

H. Hewitt, ed.: Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A (Cambridge, MA, 1942)

F.A. D'Accone: ‘A Late 15th-Century Sienese Sacred Repertory: MS K.I.2 of the Biblioteca Comunale, Siena’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 121–70

R.C. Wegman: Born for the Muses: the Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994)

ROB C. WEGMAN

Bordone

(It.).

See Drone (i).

Bordoni [Hasse; Bordon Hasse], Faustina

(b Venice, 30 March 1697; d Venice, 4 Nov 1781). Italian mezzo-soprano. She was brought up under the protection of the brothers Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello and taught by Michelangelo Gasparini. For many years she was in the service of the Elector Palatine. She made her début in 1716 in C.F. Pollarolo’s Ariodante in Venice, where she sang until 1725, in operas by Albinoni, Lotti, M. and F. Gasparini, C.F. and A. Pollarolo, Orlandini, Giacomelli, Vinci and others. She appeared at Reggio nell’Emilia in 1717, 1719 (Gasparini’s Bajazet) and 1720, Milan in 1719, Modena in 1720, Bologna in 1721–2, Naples in 1721–3 (seven operas, including Leo’s Bajazete), Florence (1723) and Parma (1724–5, including Vinci’s Il trionfo di Camilla). She made her German début in 1723 at Munich in Torri’s Griselda, and enjoyed great success there during the 1720s; she was also a favourite at Vienna (1725–6), appearing in operas by Caldara, Fux and others.

Faustina (as she was commonly known) made her London début as Roxana in Handel’s Alessandro at the King’s Theatre in 1726, with Cuzzoni and Senesino in the other leading roles. In the next two seasons (1727–8) she created four other Handel parts – Alcestis in Admeto, Pulcheria in Riccardo Primo, Emira in Siroe and Elisa in Tolomeo – and sang in Ariosti’s Lucio Vero and Teuzzone, Giovanni Bononcini’s Astianatte and Handel’s Radamisto. Her rivalry with Cuzzoni, professional and personal, was notorious, and culminated in an exchange of blows on stage at a performance of Astianatte (6 June 1727), but despite this scandal they were both engaged for the following season. She sang at Florence, Parma, Turin, Milan, Rome, Naples and frequently at Venice in 1728–32; the operas included Orlandini’s Adelaide, two by Giacomelli, and Hasse’s Dalisa, Arminio, Demetrio and Euristeo. From her marriage to johann adolf Hasse (see Hasse family, (3)) in 1730 she was associated chiefly with his music, and in 1731 both were summoned to the Saxon court at Dresden, where she enjoyed great success in his Cleofide. Hasse was Kapellmeister there for more than 30 years and Faustina sang in at least 15 of his numerous operas between Caio Fabricio (1734) and Ciro riconosciuto (1751), but also paid many long visits to Italy, singing in Naples, Venice, Pesaro and other cities in operas by Vinci, Pergolesi and Porpora as well as Hasse. In all she sang in more than 30 operas in Venice. After retiring from the theatre in 1751 she kept her salary and her rank as virtuosa da camera until 1763. She and Hasse lived in Vienna until 1773, then in Venice; their two daughters were both trained as singers.

Faustina was universally ranked among the greatest singers of her age. Quantz described her voice as a mezzo-soprano, ‘less clear than penetrating’, with a compass of b to g'' (about a tone lower than Cuzzoni’s range). In her Handel parts it is c' to a''. She was a very dramatic singer, with equal power and flexibility, and a fine actress. Arteaga spoke of ‘a matchless facility and rapidity in her execution … exquisite shake [and] new and brilliant passages of embellishment’. Tosi contrasted her pre-eminence in lively arias with Cuzzoni’s gift for the pathetic, and considered the virtues of the two complementary. An observer in 1721 remarked that Faustina ‘always sang the first part of an aria exactly as the composer had written it but at the da capo repeat introduced all kinds of doublements and maniere without taking the smallest liberties with the rhythm of the accompaniment’. Burney emphasized her perfect intonation and exceptional breath control. His statement that ‘E was a remarkably powerful note in this singer’s voice, and we find most of her capital songs in sharp keys’, is confirmed by the fact that half the arias Handel composed for her are in A or E, major or minor. Quantz (translated by Burney) gives perhaps the clearest account of Faustina’s quality:

Her execution was articulate and brilliant. She had a fluent tongue for pronouncing words rapidly and distinctly, and a flexible throat for divisions, with so beautiful and quick a shake, that she could put it in motion upon short notice, just when she would. The passages might be smooth, or by leaps, or consist of iterations of the same tone, their execution was equally easy to her … She sung adagios with great passion and expression, but not equally well, if such deep sorrow were to be impressed on the hearer, as might require dragging, sliding, or notes of syncopation and tempo rubato. She had a very happy memory, in arbitrary changes and embellishments, and a clear and quick judgment in giving to words their full power and expression. In her action she was very happy; and as she perfectly possessed that flexibility of muscles and features, which constitutes face-playing, she succeeded equally well in furious, amorous, and tender parts; in short, she was born for singing and for acting.

Metastasio described her and Hasse in 1744 as ‘truly an exquisite couple’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

HawkinsH

SartoriL

P.F. Tosi: Opinioni de’ cantore antichi e moderni (Bologna, 1723; Eng. trans., 1742, 2/1743 as Observations on the Florid Song)

A. Niggli: Faustina Bordoni-Hasse (Leipzig, 1880)

M. Högg: Die Gesangskunst der Faustina Hasse und das Sängerinnenwesen ihrer Zeit in Deutschland (Berlin, 1931)

G.J. Buelow: ‘A Lesson in Operatic Performance Practice by Madame Faustina Bordoni’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor at Martin Bernstein (New York,1977), 79–96

E. Gibson: The Royal Academy of Music 1719–1728: the Institution and its Directors (New York, 1989)

G. Vio: ‘Documenti inediti relativi alla biografia di Faustina Bordon Hasse’, Venezia arti, iii (1989), 170–73

K. Vlaardingerbroek: ‘Faustina Bordoni Applauds Jan Alensoon: a Dutch Music-Lover in Italy and France in 1723–4’, ML, lxxii (1991), 536–51

WINTON DEAN

Bordun

(Ger.; Lat. bordunus).

See Drone (i).

Bore (i)

(Fr. perce; Ger. Bohrung).

The interior of a tubular wind instrument, whatever its material. Although some instruments are loosely described as cylindrical and others as conical or conoidal, the measured bores of wind instruments usually deviate significantly from these simple mathematical forms. The bore of an instrument determines the length and proportions of the contained Air column, and is the principal factor governing the pitches of the notes which may be sounded on it (see Acoustics, §IV). A relatively narrow bore may prevent the sounding of the fundamental frequency, while a wide one may make higher harmonics difficult to sound. The length of the bore in brass instruments may be varied by the use of valves to add or subtract supplementary tubing, while in woodwind the effective length is altered by opening or closing side holes. When the air column is vibrating, irregularities in the bore such as constrictions or the cavities under closed side holes, depending on their position relative to nodes and antinodes, may modify the frequency. Since the sounds of almost all wind instruments are complex, containing harmonic frequencies in varying proportion, the configuration of the bore affects the tone quality of every note. For further information see C. Karp: ‘Woodwind Instrument Bore Measurement’, GSJ, xxxi (1978), 9–28.

PHILIP BATE/MURRAY CAMPBELL

Bore (ii) [wind hole].

See Toe-hole.

Boree.

(It. borea). See Bourrée.

Borek, Krzysztof [Christophorus]

(d probably at Kraków, c1570). Polish composer and singer. From 1547 he worked at the Polish royal court, as a singer in Queen Bona's chapel. By 1558 he was praepositus of the Cappella Rorantistarum at Kraków Cathedral; he apparently held this post until his death. Two five-part masses by him survive (in PL-Kk, incomplete): Missa ‘Te Deum laudamus’ (ed. H. Feicht, Muzyka staropolska, Kraków, 1966) and an untitled mass (Sanctus, ed. Z.M. Szweykowski, Muzyka w dawnym Krakowie, Kraków, 1964). Both are for men's voices and were thus probably intended for the Cappella Rorantistarum. Two other masses attributed to him (in Kk) are of doubtful authenticity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SMP

Z. Jachimecki: ‘Kilka niekompletnych kompozycji polskich z XVI wieku’ [Some incomplete Polish compositions of the 16th century], KM, i (1911–13)

A. Chybiński: Słownik muzyków dawnej polski do roku 1800 [Dictionary of early Polish musicians to 1800] (Kraków, 1949)

M. Perz and E. Zwolińska: ‘Do dziejów kapeli rorantystów w XVI stuleciu oraz biografii Krzysztofa Borka’ [A history of the Cappella Rorantistarum in the 16th century and a biography of Krzysztof Borek], Muzyka, xvi/2 (1971), 34–47

W. Urban: ‘Notatki źródłowe o muzykach polskich w XVI wieku’ [Source-notes on Polish musicians of the 16th century], Muzyka, xxxii/1 (1987), 57–63

E. Gluszcz-Zwolińska: Muzyka nadworna ostatnich Jagiellonów [The court music of the last Jagiellonians] (Kraków, 1988)

ELŻBIETA GŁUSZCZ-ZWOLIŃSKA

Boresini, Antonio.

See Borosini family, (1).

Boretti, Giovanni Antonio

(b Rome, c1638; d Venice, 29 Dec 1672). Italian composer and singer. Much of the information concerning his brief career, spent primarily in Venice, derives from prefaces to librettos of operas he wrote in the late 1660s and early 70s. The preface to Alessandro amante (dated 1667) cites him as the composer of the opera and also as interpreter of one of the leading roles. His singing career had in fact begun somewhat earlier, but he is not the Guid’Antonio Boretti from Gubbio who was listed in the cast of La maga fulminata (1638, Venice) and who was a singer in the papal chapel (1619–46). He was a bass singer at S Antonio, Padua, between 1659 and 1661, when he was dismissed for being absent without leave. He probably moved to Venice in 1662, spending much of the next nine years there. However, his name appears in the cast-list of an opera performed in Turin in 1662, Le fortune di Rodope e di Damira by P.A. Ziani, and he was listed as a musico at the Savoy court there in 1663. The preface to a later libretto, Claudio Cesare (December 1671), mentions his recent appointment as maestro di cappella to the Duke of Parma, but he apparently did not take up a post there until April of the following year, and then it was only that of vicemaestro. He died in Venice several months later during preparations for his last opera, Domitiano. The only non-operatic works by Boretti to have survived are a cantata and the oratorio Ezzelino, for four voices and violins.

Except for the earliest known opera, La Zenobia, possibly first performed in Vienna on 18 November 1662, all Boretti’s operas received their premières in Venice, many of them appearing subsequently in other Italian cities. His musical language is richly varied and dramatically flexible, moving easily between recitative, arioso and aria. Yet the frequency and elaboration of the arias in several of his operas reflect the growing tendency to abandon the realistic musico-dramatic flow characteristic of early opera in Venice, notably Cavalli’s, in favour of the more static, hedonistic vocal exhibitionism demanded by Venetian audiences from about the mid-17th century onwards. His most attractive arias include laments accompanied by strings and pieces in which a running bass participates in communicating the emotions of the text.

WORKS

operas

La Zenobia (drama per musica, 3, M. Noris), Venice, S Cassiano, ded. 10 Jan 1666, possibly already perf. Vienna, 1662 [Act 3 of a Zenobia opera in A-Wn may be Boretti’s]

Alessandro amante (drama per musica, 3, anon. reworking of G.A. Cicognini: Gli amori di Alessandro Magno e di Rossane, 1651), Venice, S Moisè, ded. 28 Jan 1667

Eliogabalo (drama per musica, 3, A. Aureli), Venice, SS Giovanni e Paolo, ded. 10 Jan 1668, I-Vnm, 3 arias ed. in Rosand

Marcello in Siracusa (drama per musica, 3, Noris), Venice, SS Giovanni e Paolo, 1669/70, Vnm, 1 aria ed. M. Zanon (Milan, 1914)

Ercole in Tebe (drama per musica, 3, Aureli, after G.A. Moniglia), Venice, SS Giovanni e Paolo, ded. 12 Dec 1670, GB-Lbl (facs. in IOB, vi, 1977), I-Vnm, 1 aria ed. M. Zanon, Raccolta di 24 arie di vari autori del secolo XVII (Milan, 1914), 2 arias ed. in Rosand

Dario in Babilonia (drama per musica, 3, F. Beverini), Venice, S Salvatore, ded. 24 Jan 1671

Claudio Cesare (drama per musica, 3, Aureli), Venice, S Salvatore, ded. 27 Dec 1672 [1671], Nc, Vnm, 1 aria ed. M. Zanon (Milan, 1914), 1 aria ed. in Worsthorne

Domitiano (drama [per musica], 3, Noris), Venice, SS Giovanni e Paolo, ded. 27 Dec 1672

other vocal

2 arias, 1679⁶

Ezzelino (orat), 4vv, I-MOe

Cantata, 1v, bc, D-Mbs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S.T. Worsthorne: Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1954/R)

L. Bianconi: ‘“L’Ercole in Rialto”’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 259–72

M. Viale Ferrero: ‘Repliche a Torino di alcuni melodrammi veneziani e loro caratteristiche’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 145–72

E. Rosand: Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: the Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991)

N. Billio: ‘Contributo sugli inizi di carriera di Agostino Steffani, Antonio Draghi e Carlo Pallavicino, musicisti al Santo di Padova’, Musica, scienza e idee nella Serenissima durante il Seicento: Venice 1993, 55–61

ELLEN ROSAND/BETH L. GLIXON

Boretz, Benjamin

(b New York, 3 Oct 1934).American composer and theorist. He began composing at an early age and studied philosophy as well as music in high school and at Brooklyn College (BA 1954). He received the MFA in composition at Brandeis University (1957), where he was a pupil of Arthur Berger and Irving Fine. He also studied with Foss at UCLA and Milhaud at Aspen. In 1970 he received the PhD from Princeton, where he had been a pupil of Sessions and Babbitt. From 1973 he taught at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Among his awards have been the Fromm Composition Prize, 1956, a Fulbright scholarship, 1970–71, and a Princeton University Council of the Humanities fellowship, 1971–2.

His early work demonstrates concern for systematic design and the realization of complex and multiple networks of nested musical relationships. Later he explored contexts for improvisatory music making: scenarios and texts for group interaction, notational and gestural stimuli for performance, and so-called soundscores, i.e. taped sound intended as a ‘text’ for performance. Beginning in 1980 he taped many hundreds of episodes of ‘solo and collaborative soundmaking expression’.

Boretz's work as a writer and editor has had a particularly great impact. He was music critic for the Nation, 1962–9, and with Berger founded the journal Perspectives of New Music in 1962, of which he remained a co-editor (with Berger, Edward T. Cone and Elaine Barkin, in succession) until 1982. The lengthiest of his writings, Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundation of Musical Thought, which appeared in that journal in installments (1969–73), applies principles of empiricist philosophy in examining the possibility of discourse about music. In later writings, he investigated varieties of musical-verbal discourse in which the sonority of language, changes in narrative voice, and the graphic presentation of the text play a fundamental role. He has also written on other composers such as Sessions, Perle and Babbitt.

Boretz has continued his radical exploration and rethinking of the aspects of musical experience and has continued to extend the scope of his work, incorporating video and audio collaborations, extended ‘conversations’ between different texts (verbal and musical), and the discourses (and sonorities) of recent writing on gender, sexuality and identity. He has founded ‘“laboratories” for holistic music learning based on a fusion of experientially guided theory and theoretically informed practice’, designing the Music Program Zero at Bard, which he directed until 1996, and co-directing the Integrated Arts Program since 1996. He has also included the systems of music distribution among the aspects of musical life that he has critically reconsidered, co-founding (with Mary Lee Roberts) The Open Space, which produces and distributes printbooks, compact discs, and videotapes of his own work and that of numerous musicians. While his interests continue to broaden – and his work further breaks down traditional distinctions between varieties of texts, genres, and the modes and occasions of performance – a deep engagement with questions of the ontology of musical experience has remained a constant of Boretz's ongoing musical project.

WORKS

(selective list)

Conc. grosso, str, 1954; Partita, pf, 1955; Divertimento, ens, 1956, Vn Conc., 1956; Str Qt, 1957–8; 3 Donne Songs, S, pf, 1959–60; Brass Qnt, 1961–3; Group Variations I, chbr orch, 1964–7; Group Variations II, tape, 1968–71; Liebeslied, pf, 1974; (‘…my chart shines high where the blue milk's upset …’), pf, 1976; Language, as a Music: Six Marginal Pretexts for Composition, spkr, pf, tape, 1978; Soliloquy II, pf, 1979; Soliloquy III, kbd, 1980; -Forming, tape-recorded improvisations, 1980–; Musics for 2 Composers, pfmrs, 1981; Soliloquy IV, pf, 1981; Midnight Music, pfmrs, 1982; Soliloquy V, elec b gui, 1982

An Exercise (8 pf soundsessions), pf, 1985; The Dance, tape, 1987; Elie: forM, a music, tape, 1987; To Open (sociomusical occasion), pf, improvising ens, tape, 1987; Here are 5 texts conjoined for your reflection (sociomusical occasion), spkr, improvising ens, tape, slides, 1988; Lament for Sarah, pf, 1988; ‘I Say’, pf, 1990; 4 Pieces for Composers' Ens, 1991; my/your (in memoriam John Cage), 1992; The Purposes and Politics of Engaging Strangers (sociomusical occasion), phases I–IV: 1990, 1991, 1991, 1992; Flowchart for Composers, 1992; Piece in 25 Parts for 5 Players, 1993; music/consciousness/gender, live and pre-recorded spkrs, tape, videotape, 1994–5; Rhizome for Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaux, videotape, 1996; Camille, tape, videotape, 1997–8

WRITINGS

(selective list)

Language as a Music: Six Marginal Pretexts for Composition (New York, 1981)

Talk: If I am a Musical Thinker (New York, 1985)

ed. E. Barkin: Music Columns from ‘The Nation’, 1962–68 (Red Hook, NY, 1988)

‘Interface I–IV: Texts and Commentaries on Musical Life’, Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, ed. J. Rahn (New York, 1994)

Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (Red Hook, NY, 1995); repr. from PNM, viii/1 (1969–70), 1–74; viii/2 (1969–70), 49–111; ix/1 (1970–71), 23–42

with J.K. Randall: Being About Music (Red Hook, NY, 1998) [collected writings]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Rahn: ‘Aspects of Musical Explanation’, PNM, xvii/2 (1978–9), 204–24

F.E. Maus: ‘Recent Ideas and Activities of James K. Randall and Benjamin Boretz: a New Social Role for Music’, PNM, xxvi/2 (1988), 214–22

M. Brown and D. Dembster: ‘Evaluating Musical Analyses and Theories: Five Perspectives’, JMT, xxxiv (1990), 247–79

F.E. Maus: ‘Masculine Discourse in Music’, PNM, xxxi/2 (1993), 264–83

G. Don: ‘Goethe, Boretz, and the “Sensuous Idea”’, PNM, xxxiv/1 (1996), 124–39

MARTIN BRODY

Borg, Kim

(b Helsinki, 7 Aug 1919; d Copenhagen, 28 April 2000). Finnish bass-baritone and composer. He studied at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, and later in several cities abroad including Vienna, Rome and New York. He confined himself to concert work for three years and then made his operatic début in 1951 at Århus, Denmark, as Colline in La bohème. An international career opened up in 1956 when he sang at Salzburg and Glyndebourne, his roles there being Don Giovanni, Pizarro (1958) and Prince Gremin in Yevgeny Onegin (1968). He made his Metropolitan début in 1959 as Count Almaviva. From 1960 he was a member of the Swedish Royal Opera, also singing regularly in Hamburg where in 1966 he appeared in the world première of Schuller's The Visitation. His repertory included Boris and Pimen (sung in 1977 at Tel-Aviv), Baron Ochs, Méphistophélès and Osmin; he also sang Fafner and Hagen in the 1971 Stockholm Ring. Borg retired from the stage in 1980. From 1972 to 1989 he was professor of singing at the Copenhagen Conservatory. A fine linguist and a cultivated musician, he can be heard in many recordings from the 1950s and 60s (including The Dream of Gerontius with Barbirolli) when his firm, full-bodied voice was in its prime. Borg also composed a number of orchestral works (including two symphonies, and concertos for trombone and double bass), chamber music, songs and a setting of the Stabat mater.

J.B. STEANE/R

Borgatti, Giuseppe

(b Cento, Ferrara, 17 March 1871; d Reno di Leggiuno, Varese, 18 Oct 1950). Italian tenor. Of humble origin, he studied with Alessandro Busi at Bologna, and made his début in Gounod’s Faust at Castelfranco Veneto in 1892. During the following years he sang in Turin, Madrid and St Petersburg; at La Scala in 1896 he took the part of Andrea Chénier with great success in the opera’s first performance. Over the next ten years he appeared in the leading Italian theatres and in Spain, Portugal and Argentina, most notably as Des Grieux in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and as Cavaradossi. From 1906 he devoted himself to Wagner (having already sung Siegfried and Tristan at La Scala in 1899 and 1900 under Toscanini) with exceptional results. In 1914, after appearing in the Italian première of Parsifal at Bologna and La Scala, he was forced by glaucoma to retire from the stage, and in 1923 he became completely blind. He performed for the last time at a concert in Bologna in 1927, and subsequently devoted himself to teaching. His autobiography La mia vita d’artista was published in Bologna in 1927.

Borgatti’s voice was large, robust and of beautiful timbre; he could also, especially in his early years, sing with delicacy and sweetness. Driven, perhaps, by his intensely dramatic temperament, he was the first tenor to introduce into the performance of verismo operas a forcefully emphatic delivery and an incisive, vehement declamatory manner. This was in contrast to the lyrical approach and virtuosity still frequently shown by the tenors of the preceding generation, such as Stagno and De Lucia. These qualities, together with a strong physique, vigorous acting and remarkable insight into the character of his roles, made him an exceptional Heldentenor who did much to further the cause of Wagner’s operas in Italy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (E. Gara)

GV (E. Gara and R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

E. Gara: Cantarono alla Scala (Milan, 1975) 131–7

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, i: To 1914 (London, 1977) 133–4

G. Gualerzi and A. Orlandini, eds.: Un dì all’azzurro spazio: la figura e l’arte di Giuseppe Borgatti (Cento, 1993) [with discography by F. Battaglia]

RODOLFO CELLETTI/VALERIA PREGLIASCO GUALERZI

Borge, Victor [Rosenbaum, Borge]

(b Copenhagen, 3 Jan 1909). American pianist, musical humorist and conductor of Danish birth. After early training with his father, he gave a piano recital at the age of eight in Copenhagen, which won for him a scholarship to the conservatory; he later studied with Frederic Lamond and Egon Petri in Berlin. He performed in amateur musical revues in Copenhagen, but his satires of Hitler placed him in danger and he fled, first to Sweden and then to the USA, where he later became a citizen. In New York in 1940 he began regularly to appear on Bing Crosby’s ‘Kraft Music Hall’ radio series, which led to a radio show of his own. Starting in the autumn of 1953 he gave nearly 850 daily recitals under the title ‘Comedy in Music’ at the Golden Theater on Broadway. He has toured in many parts of the world and has appeared widely on radio and television and in films. His routines (which are partly improvised) are a mixture of verbal and musical humour, delivered at the piano; though his comic reputation is based on his continually forestalling and interrupting his own playing, he is an accomplished performer, as his elaborate musical jokes (such as the composite piano concerto consisting of well-known passages from the repertory skilfully run together) demonstrate.

When he was well past 60 Borge began to appear as a guest conductor with such orchestras as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the New York PO. He sang and played with Beverly Sills in the Opera Company of Boston production of Die Fledermaus (25 January 1980), and made his opera conducting début in Die Zauberflöte with the New Cleveland Opera Company (30 November 1979). He has written two books, My Favorite Intermissions (1971) and My Favorite Comedies in Music (1980), and made several recordings. Among his many honours are knighthoods conferred by Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. King: ‘Victor Borge, Comedy’s Music Man’, Music Journal, xxxv/10 (1977), 4–7

B. Wechsler: ‘Victor Borge: Conductor and Concert Pianist’, Music Journal, xxxviii/4 (1980), 35–6

J. Wagner: ‘Victor Borge: Clown Prince of Music’, Clavier, xx/6 (1981), 15–17

KAREN MONSON

Borges, Raúl

(b Caracas, 4 Feb 1882; d Caracas, 24 June 1967).Venezuelan guitarist,teacher and composer. He came from a family well known for its artistic leanings. Little is known about his musical education except that he was self-taught. He began with popular instruments, playing, in addition to the guitar, the cuatro, the bandola, the mandolin and, apparently, the harp. In 1912 he belonged to the Círculo de Bellas Artes, a group in which the plastic arts dominated and the first artistic group with modernist concerns in Venezuela. During those years he began his work as instrumental teacher. In the 1920s he wrote mostly guitar pieces in a nationalistic style, the first in Venezuela to be written for the guitar as a solo instrument. In 1926 he went to Paris as a diplomat. At the beginning of the 1930s he struck up a close friendship with Agustín Barrios Mangoré, and this led to the creation of a chair in classical guitar at the Caracas National Conservatory, established on 2 September 1932. From then on he devoted himself entirely to teaching. Among his most distinguished pupils are the composer Antonio Lauro, performers Alirio Díaz and Rodrigo Riera, and the teacher Manuel Enrique Pérez Díaz, who succeeded him in the chair for guitar in January 1960. He composed and arranged many pieces for guitar trio, these forming an essential part of the repertory of the group that bears his name, directed by Antonio Lauro.

WORKS

all for guitar solo, published New York, 1964

Canción antigua, D; Canción de cuna, D; Canción de cuna, G; El criollito (Waltz), A; Estudio, C; Fuente morisca (Trémolo), d; Marisol (Venezuelan Waltz), b; Melodía, D; Preludio, e; Sueño de opio (Fantasy on a Theme by Jervis-Scalisi), d; Valse sobre motivos franceses, D; Valse venezolano, a

ALEJANDRO BRUZUAL

Borgetti, Innocenzio

(b Piacenza; fl 1640). Italian composer. He was in holy orders. He was working at Bologna Cathedral in 1640, having previously been at Piacenza Cathedral, as he explained in his Salmi intieri per li vespri di tutte le feste dell’anno, for four voices and continuo, published in Venice in that year.

Borghese [Borghesi, Borghesy], Antonio D.R.

(fl late 18th century). French composer and theorist. He may have been born in Rome and seems to have travelled widely. The publication of his Six Sonatas op.1 in London about 1776 and a performance of his opera The Fair Venetian in Dublin in that year would seem to indicate his presence in the British Isles at that time. The Gazette de St Pétersbourg of 16 June 1780 carries a notice that a certain maître de chapelle Borghese had arrived in that city and wished to teach the piano and singing. His name next appears in connection with a performance of his opera Der unvermuthete glückliche Augenblick in Riga in 1783. He arrived in Paris no later than 1785, when his name was listed in the Tablettes de renommée des musiciens; this states that he composed several symphonies, sextets, quartets, trios, sonatas, concertos and harpsichord pieces, but none of these has been found. In December 1785 he received a privilege to publish his L’art musical ramené à ses vrais principes … traduites de l’italien, and in 1786 his opera La basoche was performed in Paris.

English editions of L’art musical appeared in London in 1790 and 1795, indicating that Borghese may have emigrated to England to escape the Revolution. The 1790 edition is a revision of the earlier French one, despite its claim to have been ‘translated from the original Italian’. Divided into three main sections (‘Theory’, ‘Practice’ and ‘Execution of Music’), with chapters on the nature and composition of harmony, the treatise deals mainly with the art of accompaniment, and is therefore concerned more with the harmonic implications of melody than with harmony per se. The preface to this edition shows Borghese’s apparent dissatisfaction at the earlier reception of his ‘system’ in France, where it had been unfavourably reviewed in the Mercure de France.

In 1799 Borghese was back in Paris, performing in a concert with his wife, the violinist and pianist Agathe-Elisabeth-Henriette Larrivée (the younger daughter of the singers Henri and Marie Jeanne Larrivée). Apart from his three operas and his treatise, Borghese wrote only a few minor instrumental and vocal pieces; his wife composed a set of three piano sonatas with violin and bass accompaniment.

WORKS

stage

The Fair Venetian (comic op), Dublin, Crow Street, 18 March 1776, unpubd, lost

Der unvermuthete glückliche Augenblick (operetta, 2, Borghese), Riga, City Theatre, 21 July 1783, lost

[Le roi de] La basoche (opéra comique, 1, ? E.A. Bignon), Paris, Beaujolais, 31 Oct 1786, unpubd, lost

other works

Vocal: 12 pièces, ou Chansons de table, arr. chorus, duo, canoni, madrigali etc., pubd; other works

Inst: 6 sonatas, pf/hpd, vn acc., op.1 (London, c1776); 6 sonatas, hpd, vn obbl, vn ad lib, op.2 (Paris, ?1780) [? also pubd Edinburgh]; 6 duos, 2 vn (Paris, n.d.); Trio italien; Air, vn, ob obbl, 1799, unpubd, lost; 6 variations on Paisiello: Nel cor più non mi sento, gui/lyre (Paris, c1803); other works

WRITINGS

L’art musical ramené à ses vrais principes, ou Lettres d’Antoine D.R. Borghese à Julie, traduites de l’italien par l’auteur (Paris, 1786; Eng. trans., rev., 1790, 2/1795)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

MGG1 suppl. (J. Gribenski)

MooserA, ii

Tablettes de renommée des musiciens (Paris, 1785/R)

[N. E.] Framery: ‘L’art musical ramené’, Mercure de France (March 1786), 169 [review]

M. Brenet: ‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790 d’après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66

KENNETH LANGEVIN

Borghi, Giovanni Battista

(b Camerino, Macerata, 25 Aug 1738; d Loreto, 25 Feb 1796). Italian composer. Early accounts often confuse him with the violinist Luigi Borghi and the harpsichordist Giovanni (or Giuseppe) Borghi. He studied at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini, Naples, from 1757 to 1759. He served first as maestro di cappella at Orvieto Cathedral from 1759 to 1778 and then at the Santa Casa of Loreto until his death, taking frequent leave to produce operas throughout Italy, principally in Venice, Florence and Rome.

During the first 15 years of his career he wrote an equal number of opere buffe and opere serie. Typical of the 1770s, his serious operas have arias of extreme length, short third acts, multiple exits following individual arias, long ballets as entr'actes, trios and duets concluding the first two acts and aria-length cavatinas late in Act 3. The comic operas open with short static introduzioni, proceed with a succession of recitatives and arias and conclude with finales with increasing numbers of personnel. Il filosofo amante stands out for its many short ensembles, including a quartet, a quintet and a trio involving some action.

After 1777 Borghi turned exclusively to opera seria. His operas of the 1780s show innovatory traits common in the works of the librettist Sertor, such as the ensemble that increases from duet to trio in Piramo e Tisbe. In his setting of Metastasio's Olimpiade (1784) violence appears on the stage, and he carved a multi-sectional finale from the final scene of Metastasio's text. Accompanied recitative becomes more prevalent; such scenes may encompass cavatinas and employ wind instruments for ‘ghost scenes’ and other special effects.

Borghi's arias show extreme textural contrasts: a thin string accompaniment sometimes follows the voice and sometimes provides rhythmic background, thickening abruptly with the addition of wind instruments and obbligato commentary during vocal caesuras and ritornellos. Nevertheless, his accompaniments are often denser than those of many of his contemporaries and his forms less clearly sectional. Though he was judicious in his use of wind, his harmonic vocabulary was at times chromatic, his orchestration programmatic and his ornamental vocal style virtuoso.

In the two operas of the 1790s the amount of accompanied recitative increases significantly to encompass entire scenes, particularly near the end of each act. The introduzione becomes a component of serious opera, and the chorus assumes a more important role, participating in ensembles and concluding arias. Arias incur commentary from other characters, the chorus and even a full military wind band. Borghi's most successful work, La morte di Semiramide, proved to be a herald of the decade. In this early example of the new Venetian style, pioneered by the librettist Sografi, the traditional stark delineations of form disappear in great scene complexes of continuous music moving seamlessly among the textural options of accompanied recitative, aria, ensemble and chorus. There are only 11 arias, and some are interrupted or overlaid with choral or solo interpolations; in one of Semiramide's a military wind quartet is heard, and public comments restore her tranquillity. There are extended continuous scenes as each act draws to its climactic conclusion: the ghost scene in Act 1, the mother–son confrontation in Act 2 and the tomb and death scene in Act 3. Other features of this opera soon to become common are the introduzione for duo and chorus, the giuramento for quartet and chorus and the nottorno for duo.

Borghi may have been best known for his sacred music. Its widespread use is suggested by the many manuscripts surviving in libraries and church archives. He also composed many oratorios and occasional pieces for ecclesiastical ceremonies. La Borde described Borghi as an original composer, highly regarded by connoisseurs, but ‘more esteemed than applauded, for lack of that naturalness so necessary in music to win the approval of the multitude’. Gervasoni praised Borghi's sacred works for their elegant melodic style and for their harmonic and contrapuntal correctness, but Tebaldini (1921) judged them as belonging to ‘the most decadent genre’, in which ‘the absolute virtuosity of the singer has taken the upper hand over the composer’.

WORKS

operas

dm	dramma per musica

Adriano in Siria (os, 3, P. Metastasio), Turin, carn. 1759, P-La

Il tutore deluso (intermezzo, 2, A. Gatta), Lucca, Pubblico, carn. 1762

Le nozze disturbate (farsetta, Gatta), Florence, Pallacorda, 1762

Merope (dm, A. Zeno), Rome, Dame, carn. 1768, La

Alessandro in Armenia (dm, 3, C. Doriano), Venice, S Benedetto, 26 Nov 1768, La

La schiava amorosa (farsetta, 2, M. Bernardini), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1770

L'amore in campagna [Le villanelle innamorate] (farsetta, P. Chiari), Rome, Capranica, 2 Jan 1771, D-Dl, I-Rdp

Siroe (dm, 3, Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, Jan 1771, P-La

Le avventure di Laurina (intermezzo, 2), Rome, Capranica, carn. 1772

Il trionfo di Clelia (dm, 3, Metastasio), Naples, S Carlo, 30 May 1773, I-Fc, Nc, P-La

Ricimero (dm, 3, F. Silvani), Venice, S Benedetto, aut. 1773, P-La(Act 1)

Il filosofo amante (farsetta), Rome, Valle, carn. 1774, La

Artaserse (dm, 3, Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, 26 Dec 1775, La

La donna instabile (dramma giocoso, 3, G. Bertati), Venice, S Moisè, carn. 1776, F-Pn, I-MOe

Gli tre pretendenti (dramma giocoso, 3, M. Rossi), Bologna, Rossi, May 1777

Creso, re di Lidia (dm, 3, G. Pizzi), Florence, Pergola, aut. 1777, Fc; rev. carn. 1784, mostly by Borghi

Eumene (os, 3, Zeno), Venice, S Benedetto, 27 Dec 1777, D-Bsb, P-La

Tito Manlio (dm, after G. Roccaforte), Rome, Argentina, carn. 1780

Quinto Fabio (dm, after Zeno: Lucio Papirio dittatore), Florence, Pergola, carn. 1781

Arbace (dm, 3, G. Sertor), Venice, S Benedetto, carn. 1782, F-Pn

Piramo e Tisbe (dm, Sertor), Florence, Pergola, aut. 1783, I-Fc

Olimpiade (os, Metastasio), Modena, Rongoni, 26 Dec 1784, Fc

La morte di Semiramide (tragedia, 3, S.A. Sografi, after P. Giovannini), Milan, Scala, 9 Feb 1791, Bc

Egilina (os, 3, A. Anelli), Milan, Scala, 26 Jan 1793, Mr

Arias in US-Wc

other works

Orats, componimentos and cants.: Giuseppe riconosciuto (orat, Metastasio), Orvieto, 1766; Componimento drammatico [Areta, Pertenio], Perugia, 1762; Il trionfo della fede, Rome, 1763; L'Eleazaro custode dell'Arca Santa (componimento drammatico, C. Gualterio), Orvieto, 1763; Il trionfo della fede in S. Tommaso apostolo (orat), Rome 1763; Isacco figura del Redentore (orat, Metastasio), Camerino, 1764; Componimento drammatico [Giove, Clemenza, Coro], Florence, 1766; Orat sacro, Arezzo, 1767; Lo sposalizio di Mosè (cant. sacra), Spoleto, 1772; Il trionfo di Mardocheo (orat), Rome, 1774; Neemia (componimento drammatico), Camerino, 1774; Il tempio della gloria (componimento drammatico, G.B. Tondini), Iesi, 1777; Il tempio di Gnido (azione drammatica, A. Scarpelli), Camerino, 1776; Orat … per l'arrivo del duca di Parma, Camerino, 1778; La gara delle virtù nella festa della BVM (orat), Rome c1780; La fortuna resa seguace del merito (cant. sacra, B. Bonavita), Ancona 1781; Temi (cant. Ab. P.Q.), Osimo, 1785; La morte di Abele, Fermo, 1789

Sacred vocal (in I-LT and mostly for 4vv and org/inst unless otherwise stated): Messa per l’aurora di Natale, F; Messa piena e breve; Messa, Nc; 5 Ky–Gl, D; Ky–Gl, C; Ky–Gl della Messa concertato in Partorale; Ky (1776), Vnm; Gl, 1776, Vnm; Cr, A solo, ripieno; 6 Cr, in G, a and C; 22 Ints; 13 Ints, 8vv, org; 27 Grads, 1 solo v, with Alleluias, 4vv; Grad e Sequenza per la Pasqua; Grad e Sequenza per la Pentecoste; Grad e Sequenza per il Corpus Domini, S, 4vv, org; Grad per la Festa di S Cecilia, 5vv, org; 67 Offs, 2vv, org; 4 Offs, 3vv, org; 5 Offs, 4/5vv, org; Confitebor, Vnm; Laudate pueri, SATB, 4vv, Nc; Laudate pueri, D, Bc, another in Vnm; Laudate Pueri; 9 Salmi concertati; 4 Mag concertati, in G, E, C and D; 22 Ants per i Vesperi Solenni, 2vv, org; 4 Marian Ants; 25 Marian Ants, 1v, org; 2 Marian Ants, 2vv, org; Ant per Domenica Palmarum; 29 Inni per i Vespri Solenni, 2 soli, 4vv, org; Improperii per Venerdì Santo, 8vv; TeD; Laetatus, Vnm; Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, ps, B, S, 4vv, insts, Bc; Laudate Dominum, C, VId; Dixit Dominus, D, 1759, Bc (? autograph), 2 others in Vnm; 3 Dixit, in A and C; Domine, Vnm; Lit, B, Nc, others in Bc, Md; Lit, 3vv, Vnm; 3 Lit concertate, in C and a; Lit concertato a Rondeau, B; Lit concertato, A, 5vv, org; Lit concertato, C, 8vv, org; Invitatorio per Natale; Risponsorii per Natale; Fera in Silva, motet (1767), Vnm*; Exaudiat te Dominus, motet; Jesu filii David, motet; Caro cibus, motet; Ex Sion; Deus manifeste veniet, motet; Suscipe Jesu, motet; Mottetto, 3vv, bc, Vnm; 6 Mottetti per l’Elevazione; 2 Mottetti per l’Elevazione, 2/3vv, org; Pater noster, S, kbd, D-Dl; 2 Stabat mater; Pange lingua; Vexilla Regis prodeunt per Venerdì Santo; Miserere, ps, 8vv; Tantum ergo, hymn, D, B, org, I-Vnm; Tantum ergo, S, A, org; Tantum ergo, S, A, 4vv, org; other works in A-Wgm, D-Bsb, Mbs, GB-Cfm, Lcm, Ob, I-Af, Bc, Bsf, Fc, Gl, Ls, Mc, Md, Nc, PAc, PS, Rsc

Inst: Vn conc., Vnm; 6 duetti, 2 vn, D-Dl

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La BordeE

C. Gervasoni: Nuova teoria di musica (Parma, 1812/R)

G. Tebaldini: L'archivio musicale della Cappella lauretana (Loreto, 1921)

G. Radiciotti: ‘Aggiunte e correzioni ai dizionari biografici dei musicisti’, Critica musicale, v (1922), 138–41

E. and D. Arnold: ‘Russians in Venice: the Visit of the Conti del Nord in 1782’, Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham, ed. M.H. Brown and R.J. Wiley (Ann Arbor and Oxford, 1985), 123–30

M. McClymonds: ‘La morte di Semiramide ossia La vendetta di Nino and the Restoration of Death and Tragedy to the Italian Operatic Stage in the 1780s and 90s’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, Free Papers, 285–92

M. McClymonds: ‘The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s’, I vicini di Mozart: Venice 1987, 221–40

C. Questa: Semiramide redenta (Urbino, 1989), 215–300

MARITA P. McCLYMONDS (with DENNIS LIBBY)

Borghi, Luigi

(b Bologna, ?1745; d London, c1806). Italian violinist and composer. He was a pupil of Pugnani and friend of Sir William Hamilton, and settled in London around 1769. A prominent orchestral violinist, he was leader of the second violins at the Handel Commemoration of 1784 and at the Professional Concert from 1785 until 1792, and played regularly with Cramer in quartets and other chamber music. He composed ballet music for the Italian opera, was assistant manager of O’Reilly’s opera company at the Pantheon in 1791 and, shortly afterwards, married the prima donna Anna Casentini (fl 1787–96). His works, among which the violin concertos are notable examples of the galant style, were published both in England and on the Continent.

WORKS

published in London unless otherwise stated

1	Six Solos, vn, bc (1772); 3 arr. hpd/pf, vn acc. (1775)
2	Six Concertos, vn (1775/R) [also pubd in Berlin as opp.2–3]; no.2 rev. as vc conc, D (Paris, c1785)
3	Sei Divertimenti, 2 vn (1777) [also pubd in Berlin as op.4]
4	Six Solos, vn, bc (1783) [also pubd in Berlin and Paris as op.5]
—	Six Trios, 2 vn, bc (Paris, c1785)
5	Six Duetts, vn, vc/va (1786) [also pubd in Berlin as op.6]
6	Six Overtures in 4 parts (1787)
7	Twelve Divertimentos, 1–3vv, harp/pf (1790)
10	Three Duetts, 2 vn (c1790)
11	Sixty-four Cadences or Solos, vn (c1790/R)
—	Six Duetts, 2 vn (c1800)

Pieces in Six Divertimentos, 2 vn, bc, by Pugnani, Borghi etc. (1772)
Ballet scores, incl. Il ratto delle Sabine, London, King’s Theatre, 12 Dec 1782, and Le tuteur trompé, King’s Theatre, 11 Jan 1783 in The Celebrated Opera Dances, 4 bks (London, 1783)
Songs pubd singly

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

M. Kelly: Reminiscences (London, 1826, 2/1826/R1968 with introduction by A.H. King); ed. R. Fiske (London, 1975), 15

C.F. Pohl: Mozart und Haydn in London (Vienna, 1867/R)

A. Schering: Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts (Leipzig, 1905, 2/1927/R)

A. Moser: Geschichte des Violinspiels (Leipzig, 1923, 2/1966–7)

F. Torrefranca: ‘Le origini dello stilo mozartiano’, RMI, xxxiii (1926), 321–42, esp. 322

H. Engel: Das Instrumentalkonzert (Leipzig, 1932, 2/1971–4)

S. McVeigh: The Violinist in London’s Concert Life, 1750–1784 (New York, 1989)

S. McVeigh: ‘The Professional Concert and Rival Subscription Series in London, 1783–1793’, RMARC, no.22 (1989), 1–135

C. Price: ‘Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century London’, JAMS, xlii (1989), 55–107

C. Price, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995)

JOHN A. PARKINSON/SIMON McVEIGH

Borgho [Borghi], Cesare.

See Borgo, Cesare.

Borgia, Giorgio

(fl 1580). Italian composer. According to his only extant work, Il primo libro delle canzoni spirituali (Turin, 1580) for three to five voices, he was maestro di cappella at Turin Cathedral in 1580. The work contains 37 compositions; Eitner wrongly gave 1586 as its date of publication, and Fétis incorrectly attributed it to Gregorio Borgia whom he described as an organist at Novara (EitnerQ; FétisB). A volume of Madrigali e canzonette for three and four voices is listed in the Giunta catalogue (MischiatiI).

PIER PAOLO SCATTOLIN

Borgiani, Domenico

(b Rome; fl 1646–78). Italian composer. He was maestro di cappella of Viterbo Cathedral in 1646 and for some years afterwards. He published two volumes of sacred music in the concertato style: Sacri concentus for two and five voices (Rome, 1646) and L’arpa di David accordata co’ sacri concerti for two to five voices (Rome, 1678); the latter survives incomplete.

Borgioli, Dino

(b Florence, 15 Feb 1891; d Florence, 12 Sept 1960). Italian tenor. He studied with Eugenio Giachetti, and made his début in 1914 as Arturo in I puritani at the Teatro Corso, Milan. More significantly he sang Fernand in La favorite under Serafin at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme in 1917. He was soon in demand for the lighter roles in other Italian theatres, and in 1918 began a long association with La Scala. His voice, of clear timbre but limited volume, was highly trained and well produced, and his elegant style made him a favourite in England, where he sang at Covent Garden (first in 1925, in Lucia and Il barbiere di Siviglia with Toti dal Monte and in Rigoletto with Norena; then in other roles, notably as Don Ramiro to the Cenerentola of Conchita Supervia in 1934–5) and at Glyndebourne (Don Ottavio 1937–9, Ernesto in Don Pasquale 1938). Borgioli also made some appearances in the USA, but settled in London as a teacher of singing, and acted as artistic director and producer to the Jay Pomeroy opera seasons of 1946–8 at the Cambridge Theatre. His recordings, which include complete versions of Il barbiere di Siviglia and Rigoletto, support his claim to be considered the best light tenor of his day after Schipa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

DESMOND SHAWE–TAYLOR

Borgo [Borgho, Borghi, Burgo, Burgho], Cesare

(b Milan, 2nd half of the 16th century; d ?Milan, March 1623). Italian composer and organist. He was a friar. According to a document quoted by dalla Libera, he lived in the parish of S Salvatore in Milan. In 1584 he became organist at S Pietro di Gessate in the province of Milan, and on 11 October 1590 he was appointed to play the new organ built by Valvassori at Milan Cathedral. On 10 June 1591 he applied to the cathedral chapter to play the old Antegnati organ, an appointment left vacant on the death of G.B. Morsellino; he succeeded to this post on 12 December with a salary of 400 imperial lire a year, and held it until his death. Borgo is important for his application of the Council of Trent directive concerning Ambrosian chant.

WORKS

vocal

[25] Canzonette … libro primo, 3vv (Venice, 1584, 2/1591 with 4 addl works)

Missae et Magnificat cum Gloria, motecta, et letaniae gloriosissime virginis … liber secundus, 8vv (Venice, 1602), inc.

1 madrigal, 1596¹¹; Latin works, 1608¹³, 1615¹³, 1619³, 1623³

Pater noster, 5vv, I-Mcap

instrumental

Canzoni per sonare, ed. G. Gentili Verona (Padua, 1985) (Venice, 1599)

2 lute arrangements, 1594¹⁹

24 canzonas, Tn (Ger. org tablature)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PitoniN

F. Picinelli: Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670), 137

F.S. Quadrio: Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia, ii (Milan, 1742), 324

G.M. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d’Italia, ii (Brescia, 1758–63), 1757 only

C. Sartori: La cappella musicale del duomo di Milano: catalogo delle musiche (Milan, 1957)

S. dalla Libera: ‘Musiche inedite di organisti milanesi dei secoli XVI e XVII’, Musica d’oggi (1959), 300–01

F. Mompellio: ‘La cappella del duomo di Milano dal 1573 al 1714’, Storia di Milano (Milan, 1962), 506–52

O. Mischiati: ‘L’intavolatura d’organo tedesca della Biblioteca nazionale di Torino’, L’organo, iv (1963), 1–54

M. Perz: ‘Le canzoni di Cesare Borgo nell’intavolatura di Pelplin’, Seicento inesplorato: Lenno, nr Como 1989, 53–64

M. Toffetti: ‘Per una bibliografia della canzone strumentale milanese’, Ruggiero Giovannelli e il suo tempo: Palestrina and Velletin 1992, 509–60

M. Toffetti: ‘Problemi di trascrizione nelle intavolature d'organo tedesche del primo Seicento: I Capricci, overo canzoni di Ottavio Bariolla (Milano 1594) e le Canzoni per sonare di Cesare Borgo (Venezia 1599)’, La critica del testo musicale: Metodi e problemi della filologia musicale, ed. M. Caracci Vela (Lucca, 1995), 155–80

PIER PAOLO SCATTOLIN

Borgstrøm, Hjalmar

(b Kristiania [now Oslo], 23 March 1864; d Oslo, 5 July 1925). Norwegian composer. He studied composition and theory with Johan Svendsen, L.M. Lindeman and Ole Olsen. From 1887 he studied for two years at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1890 he went to Berlin where he stayed until 1901. He settled in Kristiania in 1903.

Borgstrøm exerted a great influence on Norwegian music in the first quarter of the 20th century, both as a prolific composer (his most important works are five symphonic poems, written in a late Romantic idiom) and as a highly respected music critic (in Verdens gang 1903–13, and in Aftenposten 1913–25).

WORKS

MSS including autographs in N-Ou

Operas: Thora på Rimol [Thora from Rimol], 1894; Fiskeren [The fisherman], 1900

Sym. poems: Hamlet, pf, orch, 1903; Jesus in Gethsemane, orch, 1904; John Gabriel Borkman, orch, 1905; Die Nacht der Toten, pf, str, tpt, perc, 1905; Tanken [The Thought], orch, 1916

Orch: 2 syms., G, 1890, d, 1912; Pf Conc., C, 1910; Vn Conc., G, 1914

Chbr: Sonata, vn, pf, G, 1906; Cl Qnt, 1919; str qt, c, 1887

Choral works, incl. Hvem er Du med de tusene Navne [Who are you with a thousand names], cant, soloists, choir, orch, 1889; Reformasjonskantate, 1917

c45 songs, incl. 5 Gedichte aus Buch der Liebe; Svalerne [The swallows]; Rød valmue [Red poppy]; Frossen skog [Frozen forest]

c20 pf works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Gaukstad: ‘Hjalmar Borgstrøm og Hjalmar Jensen bibliografi’, Norsk musikkgranskning. Årbok 1954–5, 278–83

N. Grinde: A History of Norwegian Music (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1991), 277–9

A.O. Vollsnes and others, ed.: Norges musikkhistorie, iii (Oslo, 1999)

FINN BENESTAD

Borguñó (Pla), Manuel

(b Rubí, Barcelona, 5 May 1886; d Madrid, 23 Sept 1973). Spanish teacher, choirmaster and composer. After seven years at the Escolania of Montserrat under Guzmán, he went in 1900 to the Barcelona Municipal Music School, where he studied with Nicolau, Pellicer and Lamote de Grignon. In 1911 he was appointed assistant conductor of the Euterpe Choral Society, of which he was later conductor; subsequently he also conducted the Rubí Choral Society. He founded a notable choral society at Graus, Huesca (1914), a music academy at Barcelona (1918), a popular conservatory at Igualada, Barcelona (1921), and the Asociación de Amigos de la Educación Musical at Barcelona (1934). In 1942 he established the Coro de Santa Cecilia and the Instituto Musical de Pedagogía Escolar y Popular at Santa Cruz, Tenerife, where he reorganized the seminary’s Schola Cantorum, a choir which reached great heights under his direction. He also taught at the Córdoba Conservatory, Mexico (1948–9). An apostle of music education, he gave numerous demonstrations in several different countries of his ‘eurhythmic method’ of teaching singing and music. He was an honorary member of the Spanish Musicology Institute and represented Spain at international congresses on music education in Paris (1937), Brussels (1953) and Moscow (1970). From 1932 he taught musical education in Barcelona at the Institut-Escola and the French school groups.

His compositions include a ballet, La fiesta de la calle, staged in New York, sacred and secular choral pieces, songs and piano works. A large part of his output was intended for pedagogical use and consists of arrangements of popular music for amateur, especially children’s, choirs. Borguñó was also a prolific writer; among his several treatises on music education are La música y la escuela (Barcelona, 1924), La música, el cant i l’escola (Barcelona, 1933), Educación musical escolar y popular (Barcelona, 1950), ¿ Cómo salvar la educación musical?: un problema internacional (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1969) and La educación musical masiva en la escuela: apremiante llamada a los músicos (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1973).

A. MENÉNDEZ ALEYXANDRE/ANTONI PIZÀ

Bori, Lucrezia [Borja y Gonzáles de Riancho, Lucrecia]

(b Valencia, 24 Dec 1887; d New York, 14 May 1960). Spanish soprano. She studied first in Spain and then in Milan with Melchiorre Vidal and made her début in 1908 at the Teatro Adriano, Rome, as Micaëla. She gave a guest performance of Puccini’s Manon during the Metropolitan’s visit to Paris in 1910 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, and repeated the role in 1912 at her official Metropolitan début in New York. Between 1911 and 1914 she appeared at La Scala, notably as Octavian in the first Italian performance of Der Rosenkavalier and as Nannetta under Toscanini in the Verdi centenary performances of Falstaff, and at the Colón, Buenos Aires. She stopped singing in 1915 because of vocal problems but resumed her career in 1919. Except for the years 1916 to 1920, she continued to appear at the Metropolitan until 1936; she was elected a member of the Metropolitan board of directors in 1935 and in 1942 became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Guild.

Endowed with a voice of modest size, rather limited in the upper register, Bori used its clear and delicate timbre to draw characters of pathetic fragility (Mimì, Manon, Juliet); she imbued them with intense and passionate feeling and, in the comic repertory, with gentle and stylized charm. She may be considered a modern version of the ‘sentimental’ 18th-century prima donna.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (R. Celletti)

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

J.B. Richards: ‘Lucrezia Bori’, Record Collector, iii (1948), 161–6; iv (1949), 2–12, 98–9; ix (1954), 104–23; xxi (1973–4), 147–74 [with discography by H.M. Barnes and J.B. Richards]

R. Celletti: ‘Con un’espressione stilizzata e trasparente Lucrezia Bori plasmava l’interpretazione dei suoi personaggi’, Musica e dischi, no.107 (1955), 10 only [with discography by R. Vegeto]

J.F. Marion: Lucrezia Bori of the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 1962)

J.B. Steane: The Grand Tradition (London, 1974/R), 63–5

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, ii: 1914–1925 (London, 1979), 93–5

L. Rasponi: The Last Prima Donnas (London, 1982), 433–46

RODOLFO CELLETTI/VALERIA PREGLIASCO GUALERZI

Borisovsky, Vadim (Vasilyevich)

(b Moscow, 7/19 Jan 1900; d Moscow, 2 Aug 1972). Russian viola player and pedagogue. He studied the violin at the Moscow Conservatory with Mikhail Press but was encouraged by the viola professor Vladimir Bakaleynikov to take up that instrument and graduated in 1922 with a first prize in viola. From its foundation in 1923 until 1964 he played in the Beethoven Quartet and in 1927 he succeeded Bakaleynikov as professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Borisovsky, who played a large Gasparo da Salò instrument with ease, is considered the father of the modern Russian viola school; along with Yuri Kramarov (1929–82) at the Leningrad Conservatory he raised the standard of playing immeasurably. As early as 1927 he made important contacts with Hindemith and Wilhelm Altmann. With the latter he compiled a catalogue of viola repertory – the Literaturverzeichnis für Bratsche und Viola d’amour (Wolfenbüttel, 1937) – over a period of ten years. He himself was to contribute 253 editions or transcriptions to the literature. He also played a viola d'amore made for him by T.F. Podgorny and contributed to the instrument's revival in Russia. Many works were dedicated to him, notably Shostakovich's 13th Quartet. He left a handful of solo recordings in addition to many with the quartet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Riley: The History of the Viola (Ann Arbor, 1980), 260–6

T. Potter: disc notes, The Recorded Viola, vol.ii, Pearl GEMM CDS 9149

TULLY POTTER

Borja, Alonso Lobo de.

See Lobo, Alonso.

Borja, S Francisco de, Marquis of Lombay, 4th Duke of Gandía

(b Gandía, Valencia province, 28 Oct 1510; d Rome, 30 Sept 1572). Spanish administrator and composer. He came of an illustrious family and served the Emperor Charles V, who appointed him viceroy and captain-general of Catalonia in 1537; he became Duke of Gandía in 1543. In 1546, following the death of his wife, he joined the recently founded Jesuit order and became its general in 1556. He was beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1624 and canonized by Clement IX in 1671.

A competent musician, he was a forerunner of the great Valencian polyphonic school, whose most famous composer was J.B. Comes. His works include the Misa de Adviento y Cuaresma (ed. J. Climent, Tesoro sacro musical, lvi/1, 1973, suppl.), motets, the psalm Beati immaculati in via, music for a mystery play on the subject of the Resurrection (ed. in Baixauli and Ripollés Pérez), and secular cuatros and cantadas (some ed. in Soriano Fuertes); some of this music was formerly in the archives of the collegiate church at Gandía.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.E. Nieremberg: Vida del santo padre, y gran siervo de Dios el Beato Francisco de Borja (Madrid, 1644)

M. Soriano Fuertes: Historia de la música española desde la venida de los fenicios hasta el año 1850 (Madrid, 1855–9)

M. Baixauli: ‘Las obras musicales de San Francisco de Borja’, Razón y Fe, iv (1902), 273–83

J. Ruiz de Lihory: La música en Valencia: diccionario biográfico y crítico (Valencia, 1903), 191ff

V. Ripollés Pérez: El drama litúrgico (Valencia, 1928)

GUY BOURLIGUEUX

Borja y Gonzáles de Riancho, Lucrecia.

See Bori, Lucrezia.

Borjon de Scellery, Pierre

(b Pont-de-Vaux, Ain, 24 April 1633; d Paris, 4 May 1691). French lawyer and man of letters. He is often confused with his great-grandson, Charles-Emmanuel Borjon de Scellery (c1715–95). He was active in the law courts of both Dijon and Paris and is known chiefly for his writings on jurisprudence. He also composed poetry (noëls ‘en patois bressan’), published after his death and later set to music, and is credited with Traité de la musette, avec une nouvelle méthode, pour apprendre de soy-mesme à jouer de cet instrument facilement, et en peu de temps (Lyons, 1672, 2/1678/R), which describes an instrument in vogue throughout France at the time and includes examples of music collected by the author.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (M. Prevost)

P. LeDuc: Les noëls bressans de Bourg, de Pont-de-Vaux et des paroisses voisines (Bourg-en-Bresse, 1845)

C.-J. Dufaÿ: Dictionnaire biographique des personnages notables du département de l’Ain, ii (Bourg-en-Bresse, 1882), 116–17

J. Wolf: Handbuch der Notationskunde, ii (Leipzig, 1919), 245–7

ALBERT COHEN

Borkh, Inge [Simon, Ingeborg]

(b Mannheim, 26 May 1917). Swiss soprano. She began her career as an actress, before studying singing in Milan and making her début in 1940 at Lucerne as Czipra (Der Zigeunerbaron), followed by Agathe. She appeared in Zürich, Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna and Basle, where she sang Magda in the first German-language performance of The Consul (1951). She sang Freia and Sieglinde at Bayreuth (1952) and made her American début in 1953 at San Francisco as Strauss’s Electra, returning for Verdi’s Lady Macbeth. In 1954 she sang Eglantine (Euryanthe) at Florence and in 1955 created Cathleen in Egk’s Irische Legende at Salzburg. She took part in the American première of Britten’s Gloriana (1956, Cincinnati) and made her débuts at the Metropolitan (1958) and at Covent Garden (1959) as Salome. A notable exponent of 20th-century opera, she counted Turandot, Orff’s Antigone and Bloch’s Lady Macbeth among her roles, as well as the Dyer’s Wife (Die Frau ohne Schatten). Her voice, bright and incisive, was capable of great dramatic intensity. Her Turandot, Salome and Antigone are preserved on disc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (E. Stadler; R. Vegeto)

ALAN BLYTH

Bořkovec, Pavel

(b Prague, 10 June 1894; d Prague, 22 July 1972). Czech composer and teacher. His studies in philosophy at Prague University were unfinished when he entered military service in World War I. On his return he studied composition with J.B. Foerster and Jaroslav Křička. In 1925–7 he attended the masterclass of the Prague Conservatory under Suk. Bořkovec’s early compositions, with their late-Romantic orientation, had success with both audiences and critics; they included the symphonic poem Stmívání (‘Growing Dark’, 1920), the String Quartet no.1 (1924–5) and the Symphony no.1 (1927). At the end of the 1920s he developed an interest in contemporary musical trends. He became a member of the Mánes Music Group in Prague, thus becoming associated with composers such as Martinů and their response to the stimulus of European neo-classicism. In the years after World War II Bořkovec was professor of composition at the Prague Academy of Musical Arts (1946–64) and taught many eminent composers.

Pavel Bořkovec was one of the most important Czech composers in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the two decades following World War II. In the 1930s he was ranked beside Hába as an innovator. The development of his new style can be viewed in the symphonic allegro Start (1929), the Piano Concerto no.1 (1931), and the Partita (1936). Much of Bořkovec’s work is governed by neo-classical principles, with the use of individual timbres for dramatic effect. His concisely constructed forms are thus combined with an expressive lyricism. The most significant works of his maturity are the ballet Krysař (‘The Ratkiller’) (1939), the Nonet (1940), the Concerto grosso (1941), the opera Paleček (‘Tom Thumb’) (1947) and the String Quartet no.4 (1947). In the postwar years Bořkovec continued to refine his own idiom while striving for greater emotional intensity in works such as the String Quartet no.5 (1961), the Sinfonietta in uno movimento (1963–4) and Silentium turbatum (1965).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Satyr (op, after J.W. von Goethe), 1937–8; Krysař [The Ratkiller] (ballet), 1939; Paleček [Tom Thumb] (op, F. Kubka), 1945–7

Orch: Stmívání [Growing dark], sym. poem, 1920; Sym. no.1, 1927; Start, sym. allegro, 1929; Pf Conc. no.1, 1931; Vn Conc., 1931; Partita, 1936; Conc. grosso, 2 vn, vc, pf, orch, 1941; Sinfonietta no.1, chbr orch, 1945; Pf Conc. no.2, 1948–9; Vc Conc., 1951; Sym. no.2, 1955; Sym. no.3, 1959; Sinfonietta in uno movimento, 1963–4; Silentium turbatum (H. Prošková), A, elec gui, orch, 1965

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Qnt, 1922; Str Qt no.1, 1924–5; Str Qt no.2, 1928–9; Suita, pf, 1929; Sonata, va, 1931; Wind Qnt, 1932; Vn Sonata no.1, 1934; Partita, pf, 1937; Nonet, 1940; Str Qt no.3, 1940; Sonatina, vn, pf, 1942; Str Qt no.4, 1947; Vn Sonata no.2, 1956; Str Qt no.5, 1961

Vocal: Ze staré čínské poezie [From Old Chinese Poetry] (B. Mathesius), male chorus, 1925; Rozmarné písně [Capricious Songs] (J.W. von Goethe, F. Villon), pf, 1931–2; 7 písní (V. Nezval), pf, 1931; 5 písní (B. Pasternak), S, pf, 1935; Lidová říkadla [Popular Rhymes] (K.J. Erben), chorus, pf, 1936; 6 songs (J. Seifert), female/children’s chorus, 1949; 7 Madrigaly o čase [7 Madrigals about Time], SATB, 1958; Sny [Dreams] (H. Proškova), A, pf; Zvířata [Animals] (Prošková), A, pf, 1962; TeD, S, A, T, B, chorus, org, orch, 1962

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

J. Kasan, ed.: Pavel Bořkovec: osobnost a dílo [Bořkovec: personality and work] (Prague and Bratislava, 1964)

V. Holzknecht: Hudební skupina Mánesa [The music group ‘Mánes’] (Prague, 1968)

J. Havlík: Česká symfonie 1945–1980 [The Czech symphony 1945–80] (Prague, 1989)

A. Burešová: Pavel Bořkovec: život a dílo [Bořkovec: life and work] (Olomouc, 1994)

ALENA BUREŠOVÁ

Borkowski, Bohdan

(b Tęczynek, nr Kraków, 7 Nov 1852; d Warsaw, 6 Nov 1901). Polish composer. At the Music Institute in Warsaw he studied the piano with Nowakowski and harmony with Moniuszko. After graduating he continued to take private composition lessons with Moniuszko and then went to Vienna for further study under Louis Saar. On his return to Warsaw he devoted his time to composition and private piano tuition. He was primarily a composer of vocal music, and of religious music in particular – his Mass in C won a prize at the International Competition of the Carillon Society in Brussels in 1893. His choral works are marked by a sound assessment of the capabilities of different ensembles; secular pieces include Natarcie jazdy (‘A Cavalry Charge’), which received special mention at the Warsaw Music Society competition in 1887, and a folksong cycle which earned a similar distinction four years later. Borkowski’s songs have a prominent lyrical quality and show great care in the evocation of mood; the best is Drapieżna ptaszyna (‘The Little Bird of Prey’) which received a prize in the competition organized by the weekly paper Echo in 1895. The vaudeville Urwipołeć (‘The Scamp’) was staged at the Vaudeville Theatre in Warsaw in 1895, but with little success. (PSB, T. Ochlewski; SMP)

WORKS

most MSS lost, but some published in Warsaw

Stage: Urwipołeć [The Scamp] (vaudeville, Wołowski), Warsaw, 1895; Filius Chami (op, 4, B. Grabowski), 1899

Sacred: 3 masses, incl. Mass, C, 1893; Ave Maria; Salve regina; Sub tuum praesidium; Hymn na dzień Zwiastowania Najświętszej Marii Panny [Hymn for the Feast of the Annunciation of the BVM] (A. Mickiewicz), T, chorus, orch, 1894

Vocal: Natarcie jazdy [A Cavalry Charge], chorus, 1887; solo songs

Inst: Epizod, orch, 1893; Marsz radosny [March of Joy], orch, 1894; Polski kwartet; works for vn and pf, and solo pf

JERZY MORAWSKI

Borlasca [Parlasca, Perlasca, Burlasca, Barlasca, Borlasco], Bernardino

(b Gavio, nr Genoa, c1580; d in or after 1631). Italian composer, singer and instrumentalist. He was active mostly in Germany and Austria. There seems to be no documentary evidence to support Giazotto's claim that Borlasca was born about 1560; since his first published compositions appeared in 1609, a later date seems more plausible. By 1 July 1611 he was appointed vice-Kapellmeister at the Munich court of Maximilian I, and from 1612 until 1615 Borlasca had sole charge of the Bavarian music chapel. He also had contacts with the Habsburg court at Innsbruck, receiving money for travel in 1612. After Ferdinand de Lassus's return to Munich from studies in Italy, Borlasca shared the post of Kapellmeister with him. By 1617, however, Lassus had been appointed sole Kapellmeister, and Borlasca was relegated to the dual position of vice-Kapellmeister and Konzertmeister, with primary responsibility for the instrumentalists. In 1621, Borlasca dedicated pieces, now lost, to Emperor Ferdinand II, asking to be ennobled, a request that the emperor granted in 1623. Borlasca left Munich hurriedly in 1625 to avoid creditors, but maintained contacts with the Bavarian court, receiving a gift for Italian compositions in 1628. By 1629, Borlasca was an instrumentalist at the imperial court of Ferdinand II in Vienna, where his presence is documented in 1629 and 1630. He left the service of the emperor before 1637. The dedications to his Fioretti musicali (which survives in two manuscript copies with differing dedications, but identical contents) place him in Regensburg in February 1630 and in Frankfurt in 1631, after which there is no further trace of him.

Many of Borlasca's early works, including at least two collections of sacred music and the first book of canzonettas, are lost. His surviving compositions include two books of polychoral sacred music, but most of his works are in the newer few-voice concertato idiom. His earliest published compositions, the Scherzi musicali ecclesiastici (1609) dedicated to Cardinal Giustiniano, the papal legate in Bologna, show Borlasca's early importation of the recitative style into sacred music. These settings of texts from the Song of Songs are, according to the title-page, suitable for singing with ‘concerti gravi in stile rappresentativo’. The canzonettas of 1611 and the Fioretti musicali show that Borlasca could write light, strophic, three-voice canzonettas in a fluent but unremarkable style dominated by syllabic declamation, symmetrical sequences, and passages in parallel 3rds and 6ths. Many of these pieces recall the simpler passages of Monteverdi's three-voice canzonettas of 1584.

Several of Borlasca's published collections carry revealing prescriptions concerning performing practice. The foreword to his Cantica divae (1615) contains suggestions for the disposition of voices and instruments in polychoral compositions, and the Ardori spirituali (1617) includes advice to the singers concerning subtle changes in tempo and projection of the text.

WORKS

sacred

Scherzi musicali ecclesiastici, 3vv, bc (org) (Venice, 1609)

Cantica divae Mariae virginis, 8vv, insts, op.5 (Venice, 1615)

Scala Jacob, 8vv, insts, op.6 (Venice, 1616)

[24] Ardori spirituali, libro primo, 2–4vv, op.7 (Munich, 1617)

Motet, 1626²

Magnificat, 8–10vv, bc, lost, cited in MischiatiI

2 collections of sacred music, lost

secular

[21] Canzonette, libro secondo, 3vv, insts (Venice, 1611)

8 fantasias, a 3, 1646¹¹

Fioretti musicali leggiadri parte amorosi (18 canzonettas), 3vv, lutes, theorbo, other insts, bc, ded. 1630, D-Mbs

Fioretti musicali leggiadri (18 canzonettas), 3vv, lutes, theorbo, other insts, bc, ded. 1631, Bsb

Sinfonias, madrigals, motets: Gdańsk, city archives

Canzonette, libro primo, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

R. Giazotto: La musica a Genova nella vita pubblica e privata dal XIII al XVIII secolo (Genoa, 1951), 157–8, 169–70

W. Senn: Musik und Theater am Hof zu Innsbruck: Geschichte der Hofkapelle vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu deren Auflösung im Jahre 1748 (Innsbruck, 1954), 194–5

R. Schall: Die Kataloge des Ausburger Musikalien-Handlers Kaspar Flurschütz, 1613–1628 (Wilhelmshaven, 1974)

H. Leuchtmann: ‘Die Maximilianeische Hofkapelle’, Um Glauben und Reich: Kurfürst Maximilian I., ed. H. Glaser (Munich, 1980), 366–9

A. Scharnagl: ‘Musik um Kurfürst Maximilian I.: ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte Bayerns in den ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Capella Antiqua München, ed. T. Drescher (Tutzing, 1988), 240–41

M.R. Moretti: Musica & costume a Genova: tra cinquecento & seicento (Genoa, 1990), 178–84

S. Saunders: Cross, Sword, and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg (Oxford, 1995), 8, 227

STEVEN SAUNDERS

Borlet

(fl ?c1397–1409). French or Spanish composer. The name may be an anagram of Trebol, and there was a composer of that name in the service of King Martin I of Aragon from 1408 to 1409, when he moved into the service of King Martin of Sicily. He may be identifiable with Johan Robert, a singer in the chapel of Charles III of Navarre between 1397 and 1399; Robert may have been the composer known (also from the Chantilly Manuscript) as Trebor. The only known composition ascribed specifically to Borlet is the four-voice virelai He, tres doulz roussignol joly (F-CH 564; ed. in CMM, liii/1, 1970, and in PMFC, xix, 1982). The tenor Roussignoulet du bois was obviously a popular melody. A three-part variant of this piece exists anonymously with the title Ma tré dol rosignol.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.C. Gómez: ‘La musique à la maison royale de Navarre à la fin du Moyen-Age et le chantre Johan Robert’, MD, xli (1987), 128–51

GILBERT REANEY/R

Bornefeld, Helmut

(b Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, 14 Dec 1906; d Heidenheim, 11 Feb 1990). German composer and organist. He did not begin his studies at the Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik until 1928, where his principal teachers were Ewald Strässer, Hugo Holle, H. Roth (composition), A. Kreutz (piano) and Hermann Keller (organ). After 1935 he gave his full attention to church music. From 1937 to 1971 he was a choirmaster and organist, and from 1951 director of church music, in Heidenheim. Together with Siegfried Reda he founded the Heidenheim Arbeitstage für Neue Kirchenmusik (1946–60), and the two men had a strong influence in renewing Protestant church music by introducing techniques from the music of Hindemith, Bartók and Stravinsky, which had been banned during the Third Reich. Bornefeld was constantly at pains to abolish any barrier between new compositional techniques and the great mass of the listening public, and he tried to integrate the tonal melodic lines of the chorales with 20th-century harmonies. His compositional development began with a brief and impetuous period of experiment, after which he made a deep study of 16th- and 17th-century music (as his church music training required) and was influenced by such contemporaries as Distler and Orff, so evolving a style that was individual, deeply expressive and able to maintain extended forms. He stood apart from post-1950 developments in compositional procedure, while not rejecting them totally. Bornefeld was also active in organ restoration: he supervised the reconstruction of almost 100 instruments in Württemberg, and prepared the specifications for organs in other parts of Germany.

WORKS

(selective list)

Das Choralwerk, collection of liturgical music, 1930–64 and 1979–84

Other vocal works incl. Memento mori, 1v, org, 1954; Hirtenlieder, 1v, org, 1955–7; Siona, 1v, org, 1965; Psalm der Nacht, 1v, org; Patmos (J.C.F. Hölderlin), 1v, perc, 1969; Atlanta-Litanei, 1v, org, 1970–71; Das Buch Versammler, spkrs, chorus, org, 1971; Die Heimsuchung, S, T, ob, tpt, trbn, orgs, 1973

Inst music incl. Sonata, org, 1965–6; Introduction and Capriccio, org, brass, 1969; Trivium, rec, va da gamba, kbd, 1969; Canticum canticorum, org, perc, 1970; Melodram, fl, 1970; Epitaph, ob, org, 1971; Tanah, org, timp, 1972; Souvenirs, wind qnt, 1972; Barcarole (In memoriam Igor Strawinsky), org, hpd, cel, 1972–3; Psalmen ohne Worte, ww, hpd, perc, 1973; Chorea sacra, org, 1974

Arrs. for org of pieces by Bach, Bartók, Brahms, Busoni etc.

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Hänssler

WRITINGS

Das Positiv (Kassel, 1941)

Orgelbau und neue Orgelmusik (Kassel, 1952)

Orgelspiegel (Kassel, 1966)

Memorandum 1982 zu meiner Lebensarbeit für Orgel und Orgelmusik (Heidenheim, 1982)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Widman: ‘Psalm der Nacht’, Musik und Kirche, xxxvi (1966), 266–71

J. Schwab and L.J.Lübke: Bornefeld-Orgeln (Kassel, 1987)

J. Sarwas: Helmut Bornefeld: Studien zu seinem Choralwerk mit einem Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Frankfurt, 1991)

KLAUS KIRCHBERG

Borneman, Ernest

(b Berlin, 12 April 1915; d Scharten, Upper Austria, 4 June 1995). German writer on jazz. He studied privately with Hornbostel while attending school in Berlin. After leaving Germany in 1933 for political reasons he settled in London, where he came into close contact with jazz musicians and took advantage of the rich collections of the British Library to compile his first book on jazz in 1940. The 600-page manuscript and the separate 200-page bibliography remained unpublished due to the outbreak of war. Borneman was deported to Canada, where he joined the Canadian Film Board and he continued his studies with Melville J. Herskovits and Richard Waterman at Northwestern University. In 1947 he joined the UNESCO film department in Paris and he worked for the BBC in London, 1950–60. Between 1944 and 1960 he wrote numerous articles for journals such as Jazz, Jazz Hot, Jazz Illustrated, Jazz Journal, Jazz Music, Jazz Record and Melody Maker, making him one of the most influential writers in the field. He placed a special emphasis on the influence of Latin American music on jazz. He also wrote and produced radio shows on musical topics. He returned to Germany in 1960 and from then on focussed on psychology. In the late 1960s he planned to write a comprehensive history of Afro-American music, but the project was left incomplete. In 1975 he published his classic gender study Das Patriarchat, which made him a public figure in German-speaking countries. The Ernest-Borneman-Archive was established in 1995 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, to house his published and unpublished writings.

WRITINGS

Swing Music: an Encyclopedia of Jazz (MS, 1938–40)

A Bibliography of American Negro Music with a Short Introduction on African Native Music (MS, 1938–40)

American Negro Music: a Preliminary Inquiry into the Origin of Ring Shouts, Spirituals, Work Songs, Blues, Minstrelsy, Ragtime, Jazz and Swing Music (MS, 1945–6)

A Critic Looks at Jazz (London, 1946)

‘Black Light and White Shadow Notes for a History of American Negro Music’, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, ii (1970), 24–93

‘Black Light and White Shadow: after Black Power, What?’, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, iii–iv (1971–2), 11–34

WERNER GRÜNZWEIG

Borneo.

See Brunei; Indonesia, §VII, 1; and Malaysia, §§II–III.

Bornet l’aîné [first name unknown]

(fl 1762–90). French violinist and composer. He played the violin at the Paris Opéra from 1762 to 1790. His Journal de violon, consisting mostly of airs arranged for violin and various other instruments, was published from 1784 to 1788. He was best known for his Méthode de violon (1786), which the Mercure de France (7 Oct 1786) praised for its remarkable order and clarity; the method does, in fact, give precise instructions for achieving a good tone. Bornet’s compositions include pieces for one or two violins with basso continuo (primarily arrangements of operatic airs), the ballet Daphnis et Florise, performed in Paris in 1765, and ariettes for the comédie, Le laboreur devenu gentilhomme (1771), which was never performed.

Bornet's younger brother, Bornet le jeune (fl 1768–1807), was a member of the Opéra orchestra in 1768 and was probably the Bornet who played the violin in the orchestra of the Pantomime Nationale in Paris in 1797 and the Opéra-Bouffe as late as 1807.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

La LaurencieEF

J.W. von Wasielewski: Die Violine und ihre Meister (Leipzig, 1869, enlarged 8/1927/R by W. von Wasielewski)

E. van der Straeten: The History of the Violin (London, 1933/R)

A. Wirsta: Ecoles de violon au XVIIIème siècle d'après les ouvrages didactiques (diss., U. of Paris, 1955)

ARISTIDE WIRSTA

Borodin, Aleksandr Porfir'yevich

(b St Petersburg, 31 Oct/12 Nov 1833; d St Petersburg, 15/27 Feb 1887). Russian composer, by profession a medical doctor and professor of chemistry.

1. Early life.

2. After meeting Balakirev.

3. The Belyayev years.

4. The music.

ROBERT WILLIAM OLDANI

1. Early life.

Borodin was the illegitimate son of Prince Luka Stepanovich Gedianov (more correctly Gedianishvili) and his mistress Avdot'ya Konstantinovna Antonova. As was customary in such cases, he was registered and baptized as the son of one of his father’s serfs, Porfiry Ionovich Borodin. Thus in the eyes of the law he was born a serf himself, but thanks to Gedianov’s affection for his mother, the boy’s childhood was privileged nevertheless. He spent his first five years living with his parents in his father’s apartment in St Petersburg. Then in 1839, as a means of securing a respectable future for Avdot'ya and her son after his own death, the prince arranged a marriage for her with Christian Ivanovich Kleinecke, an elderly retired army physician, and even provided a dowry in the form of a four-storey house in St Petersburg. Kleinecke died within two years of the wedding; Borodin’s father died two years after that, at the age of 69, having first freed his son from serfdom.

Borodin’s mother educated him at home, along with a girl cousin who resided in the household. He seems to have been an imaginative child with a placid and gentle disposition, perhaps somewhat introverted. While still very young, he would play at pretending to be an organ grinder and enjoyed improvising stage plays for his mother and their housekeeper. His first composition, a polka for piano entitled ‘Hélène’, was written at the age of nine as the result of a case of puppy love. After the family moved to a new house near the Semyonovskiy Regiment’s parade ground, Borodin and his nurse often went out to listen to the regimental band, and upon returning home he would sit at the piano and pick out the tunes he had heard. Soon thereafter his mother hired a soldier from the band to give her son flute lessons at 50 kopecks a lesson. In 1846 she accepted a boarder of her son’s age, Mikhail Shchiglev (later a well-known musician and teacher), and the boys shared tutors and began a lifelong friendship. They took piano lessons from a German musician named Pormann, whom Shchiglev’s father had selected. When the boys found Pormann to be patient and painstaking, but dull, they began to play four-hand arrangements of symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn for their own pleasure, becoming particularly fond of Mendelssohn. They attended the university concerts in the winter, and in the summer travelled to Pavlovsk, in the suburbs, to hear the dance orchestra of the Hungarian conductor and composer Johann Gungl. In order to take part in chamber music, Shchiglev taught himself to play the violin, while Borodin taught himself the cello. In 1847 Borodin composed for them a ‘concerto’ for flute and piano and a trio for two violins and cello on themes from Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. Three pieces of salon music (Fantasia on a theme of Hummel, an étude entitled ‘Le courant’, and the ‘Adagio patetico’ in A) were published in 1849 and reviewed favourably in the newspaper Severnaya pchela, though there is reason to believe that the reviewer may well have been a friend of Borodin’s mother. As a teenager, Borodin also began to study chemistry, starting with experiments in making fireworks but progressing quickly towards a passion for science that rivalled – indeed, ultimately exceeded – his passion for music. Also in 1849, his mother, knowing how difficult it was for a freed serf to make his way in the world, registered her son as a merchant of the third guild, thereby assuring his access to educational and professional opportunities that otherwise would have remained closed to him. In 1850, just before turning 17, he entered St Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy, the training ground for physicians in the tsar’s service.

He began his studies with courses in the natural sciences and anatomy. Even in his first year, however, chemistry was his passion. He zealously attended the lectures of Professor Nikolay Nikolayevich Zinin, holder of the chair of chemistry, a brilliant scientist and science educator who believed that a thorough understanding of both chemistry and physics was basic to modern medicine. In the third year, Borodin approached Zinin to ask permission to work under his supervision in the professor’s chemistry laboratory, and once Zinin was assured of the young man’s seriousness he agreed to the request. At first surprised by the degree of Borodin’s interest, Zinin quietly watched his work, ever more pleased at his ability and diligence. At the same time, he was troubled by the enthusiasm which Borodin continued to show for music, even announcing in his lecture hall on one occasion: ‘Mr Borodin, busy yourself a little less with songs. I’m putting all my hopes in you as my successor, but all you think of is music: you can’t hunt two hares at the same time’ (Stasov, B1889).

As a relaxation from his scientific work, Borodin continued to play chamber music with Shchiglev. Soon the two friends added the brothers Kirillov to their circle – Petr, a good violinist, and Vladimir, a bass who afterwards sang at the Imperial Theatres under the name ‘Vasil'yev I’. These four began to attend chamber music evenings at the home of amateur cellist Ivan Gavrushkevich, where they played and heard octets by Gade and Spohr, as well as quintets by Boccherini, Onslow and Franz Xavier Gebel, a German many years resident in Russia. Gavrushkevich encouraged Borodin to attempt a string quintet of his own, but the resulting work, the String Quintet in F minor, was left with an incomplete finale and was first published only in 1960, in a completion by the Soviet composer Orest Yevlakhov. Perhaps to provide repertory for Gavrushkevich’s evenings of chamber music, Borodin arranged the two movements of Haydn’s Piano Sonata in D (h XVI:51) for flute, oboe, viola and cello (with alternative parts for two violins, replacing the winds). He fleshed out the arrangement with a slow movement and minuet of his own composition, though both original movements are slight. Of greater interest is a Trio in G minor for two violins and cello, based on the folksong Chem tebya ya ogorchila (‘How I did grieve thee’), a work which Shchiglev characterized as part German, part Glinka’s Life for the Tsar. Four songs, all written in 1852–5, are not very different from the salon romances by Aleksandr Gurilyov, Aleksandr Varlamov and Konstantin Villebois, which the young scientist-musician was accustomed to hearing and playing.

On 25 March/6 April 1856, Borodin graduated from the Medical-Surgical Academy ‘with exceptional distinction’ and was posted as an intern to the Second Military-Land Forces Hospital, where he first met Musorgsky, then a newly commissioned officer in the Preobrazhenskiy Regiment, when the two happened to be assigned together as duty physician and duty officer. That September he passed a series of preliminary examinations for the degree of Doctor of Medicine and was given a theme for his dissertation. The following summer he was sent abroad for four months, to make the acquaintance of foreign chemists, inspect foreign chemical laboratories and acquire chemical apparatus for the Academy, and to attend an international ophthalmological congress in Brussels. On his return to Russia, in autumn 1857, he ceased to practise as a physician, having concluded that his principal interests lay in chemical research and teaching. In March 1858 he presented a paper, ‘Report on the Action of Ethyl Iodide on Hydrobenzamide and Amarine and the Constitution of these Compounds’, to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg; this work was the first of more than 40 scientific publications. Then on 3/15 May 1858 he successfully defended his dissertation On the Analogy of Arsenic Acid with Phosphoric Acid in Chemical and Toxicological Behaviour and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine. In the autumn of 1859 he again met Musorgsky, who by then had resigned his commission to devote himself to music.

Also in autumn 1859, the governing board of the Medical-Surgical Academy voted to send Borodin abroad for further scientific study. He left Russia on 1/13 November 1859, travelling directly to Heidelberg, where he found a thriving Russian scientific community, centred socially in the home of the distinguished research chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev. Within a week of arriving in Heidelberg, he had settled into an apartment, attended a concert, hired a harmonium (for 4 gulden a month) and subscribed to rental libraries of books and music. From January 1860 he worked in the laboratory of the chemist Emil Erlenmeyer, travelling from time to time to other cities in Germany and even to Paris to acquire the apparatus he needed for his experiments. He also quickly found musicians with whom to enjoy his recreational pastime, writing to his mother (1 May 1860) that he was attending concerts, playing string quartets and quintets once a week, and playing piano and cello duets three times a week. Apparently for his own use on one of these occasions, he composed a Cello Sonata in B minor, the first and last movements of which derive their melodic material from the subject of the fugue in J.S. Bach’s Sonata in G minor for unaccompanied violin, bwv1001.

In the summer of 1860 Borodin travelled down the Rhine to Rotterdam, examining the chemistry laboratories in the university towns that he visited; when he returned to Heidelberg in August, his mentor Zinin was there, and soon the two of them, together with Mendeleyev, set off on a holiday tour of southern Germany and Switzerland, stopping in Freiburg to hear the large organ in the Cathedral. From Switzerland they travelled to Karlsruhe to attend an important international congress of chemists (3–6 September 1860). Then in late October Borodin and Mendeleyev set out on another short holiday, this time in Italy. After spending a tourist’s week in Rome – attending a mass celebrated by Pope Pius IX and viewing the city’s artworks – Borodin left for Paris by himself. Arriving in November 1860, he spent the rest of the winter attending lectures in physics, crystallography, bacteriology and physiology, and of course conducting laboratory work. At some time during these busy months, probably before leaving Heidelberg in October 1860, Borodin very likely began both the Piano Trio in D major, which survives lacking its finale, and the String Sextet in D minor, of which only the first two movements have been found.

Leaving Paris in April 1861, Borodin first returned to Italy on scientific business, then went on to Heidelberg, arriving on 8/20 May 1861. Although his Russian friends of the year before had dispersed, he soon made the acquaintance of a 29-year-old Russian pianist, Yekaterina Sergeyevna Protopopova, who had been sent to Germany for treatment of tuberculosis. An admirer of Chopin and particularly of Schumann, she quickly converted Borodin to her tastes. Because of their common interest in music, their friendship developed quickly, and at a concert in Baden-Baden they realized they were in love; he proposed on 10/22 August 1861. That summer, at Mannheim, they heard Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrinfor the first time and were astonished by the beauty of Wagner’s orchestration. Taking advantage of Yekaterina’s abilities as a pianist, Borodin wrote a pair of short piano duets in the summer of 1861, the Scherzo in E major and the Allegretto in D major.

In September, upon returning to Heidelberg from another chemical congress, Borodin found his fiancée gravely ill; her doctor insisted that she spend the winter in Italy, suggesting Pisa, and Borodin took a few days off to travel there with her and to find comfortable rooms for her. When she became distraught at the prospect of his returning to Germany and leaving her alone in a strange country, he arranged to conduct his scientific work in the laboratory of two distinguished Italian chemists, Sebastiano de Luca and Paolo Tassinari. For relaxation that winter he and Yekaterina played chamber music with other amateurs, attended the opera (hearing among other works Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda and Norma) and toured in the countryside. In May he began the most important chamber composition of his youth, the Piano Quintet in C minor, which was destined to be the last piece he would complete before meeting Balakirev. He worked intensely on the Quintet for a month, finishing it on 17 June 1862 at a villa in Viareggio, where he and Yekaterina had moved soon after his experiments were concluded. They left for Russia in August and crossed the frontier at Verzhbolovo on 20 September/2 October 1862.

As soon as he returned to St Petersburg, Borodin began to teach in the Medical-Surgical Academy, and on 8/20 December 1862 he was confirmed in the position of assistant professor of chemistry. Upon Zinin’s retirement from teaching 16 months later, in spring 1864, Borodin was elevated to the chair of chemistry, with the rank of full professor. From 1863 he also lectured on chemistry at the Forestry Academy, and in 1863–5 he earned additional income by translating scientific books for the publisher Vol'f. In October 1863 the Medical-Surgical Academy’s new laboratory, near the Aleksandrovsky Bridge, was opened, and Borodin, who had married Yekaterina the previous April, was given an apartment in the same building. There he lived for the rest of his life, except for summer vacations, and there for ten years he continued his investigation of the condensation products of valeraldehyde, enanthaldehyde and acetaldehyde.

2. After meeting Balakirev.

In October 1862, within a month of returning to Russia, Borodin met Mily Balakirev at a musical evening in the home of Dr Sergey Botkin, a colleague from the Medical-Surgical Academy. He quickly joined Balakirev’s musical circle, which already included Cui, Musorgsky (with whom he was delighted to renew acquaintance) and Rimsky-Korsakov (then a young naval officer away from St Petersburg on a three-year cruise). With Balakirev’s guidance and encouragement, Borodin immediately began a symphony in E and by December had completed the first movement, which he played for Yekaterina while visiting her in Moscow, at her mother’s home, before they were wed. According to Yekaterina’s memoirs, the remaining movements were composed over the next three years – a portion of the finale by May 1863, the scherzo in 1864, and the slow movement during a holiday at Graz in summer 1865 – but it seems likely that the movements were not committed to paper until well after they had taken shape in the composer’s mind. Although Borodin announced completion of the work in a letter to Balakirev thought to date from Christmas-time 1866, the symphony’s finishing touches were probably applied in 1867. On 24 February/7 March 1868, after Balakirev had become the conductor of the Russian Musical Society’s concerts, he played through the work at a closed rehearsal for the Society’s directors. Although the session went badly, because of many errors in the parts, Balakirev insisted upon programming the E Symphony anyway, and it received its first public performance the following season, on 4/16 January 1869. The public (and some critics) admired it, but others – owing as much to St Petersburg’s musical politics as to any absence of merit – disparaged it. Aleksandr Serov, for example, wrote that the ‘symphony by a certain Borodin pleased hardly anybody. He was warmly applauded and called onto the platform by his friends only’ (quoted in Lloyd-Jones, A1961).

Meanwhile, in 1867, Borodin had composed the first of his mature songs, Spyashchaya knyazhna (‘The Sleeping Princess’), to his own words, and had completed his first music for the theatre, the opera-farce Bogatïri(‘The Heroic Warriors’), with a libretto by the poet and playwright Viktor Krïlov. The work not only lampoons ‘Russian heroic opera’ – especially Aleksey Verstovsky’s Askol'dova mogila (‘Askold’s Grave’) and Serov’s Rogneda – but also pokes good-natured fun at ideas of operatic realism and ‘musical truth’ held dear within the Balakirev circle itself. The music is largely pastiche. About a quarter of the score is original; the rest is adapted from popular works by Offenbach, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Verdi, Hérold and (naturally enough) Verstovsky and Serov themselves. The Heroic Warriors was performed only once, at Moscow’s Bol'shoy Theatre, on 6/18 November 1867; it failed largely because its audience did not realize it was intended as a spoof. The composer, unidentified in the programme, was not present, having written to friends in Moscow that he would attend a performance at Christmas-time, ‘once The Heroic Warriors is going along successfully’.

During the summer and autumn of 1868 Borodin’s domestic life was disturbed when a 22-year-old married woman, Anna Kalinina, sister of the composer N.N. Lodïzhensky, developed an infatuation for him, which aroused Yekaterina’s jealousy. Although Borodin was touched by Anna’s affection, he deflected it by treating her paternally and remained devoted to his wife. Then in 1869 he and Yekaterina adopted a seven-year-old girl, Yelizaveta Gavrilovna Balaneva (subsequently the wife of Aleksandr Pavlovich Dianin, Borodin’s scientific pupil and colleague, and the mother of Sergey Aleksandrovich Dianin, the composer’s biographer and editor of his collected letters). Between December 1868 and March 1869, Borodin stood in for Cui (anonymously) as music critic of the Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti, while Cui was involved in the production of his opera William Ratcliffat the Mariinsky Theatre. His critiques are reprinted in Borodin (1982) and in German translation in Kuhn (1992).

Also in 1868 Borodin finished four more songs: Morskaya tsarevna (‘The Sea Princess’), Pesnya tyomnogo lesa (‘Song of the Dark Forest’), Fal'shivaya nota (‘The False Note’), all to his own verses, and a setting of Lev Mey’s translation of Heine’s Vergiftet sind meine Lieder. Between December 1869 and February 1870, he wrote another song, More (‘The Sea’), likewise to his own words, and in the winter of 1870–71, an additional setting of Heine, Aus meinen Tränen, again in Mey’s translation. Two men’s partsongs also belong to the 1870s, the first written as a joke for his musical friends, the second for the men’s amateur chorus at the Academy.

For about ten years after finishing the E Symphony and The Heroic Warriors, the only works Borodin brought to final completion were the songs listed above. Although he began several ambitious compositions in these years, he always seemed to find his progress stymied, either by waning interest, changing circumstances, or the press of his laboratory research and teaching duties at the Academy. The composer’s large-scale projects often remained ‘works in progress’ for years. Music created for one work was recycled into another, only to be recycled again into a third, or back whence it had come. Several pieces, for one reason or another, were never finished.

Thus in 1867, following a suggestion of Balakirev’s, Borodin began to sketch an opera based on Mey’s drama Tsarskaya nevesta (‘The Tsar’s Bride’); the opera was abandoned the following year, though some of the material later was put to use elsewhere. Thanks to the success of the E Symphony, Borodin began to think about writing a second symphony, in B minor, immediately after the performance of the first; he even seems to have written some music for it in the first months of 1869. All the while, however, he remained strongly drawn to opera (despite the false start of The Tsar’s Bride), and soon he found a new subject to excite his interest in a scenario by Vladimir Stasov based on the putative 12th-century epic Slovo o polku Igoreve (‘The Lay of the Host of Igor’), with supplementary material drawn from two medieval Kievan chronicles, the Ipatiyevskayaand the Lavrentiyevskaya. He thus set the B minor Symphony aside in the summer of 1869 and began to work on Knyaz' Igor' (‘Prince Igor’), gathering materials, studying literary sources, and visiting historical sites. He began composition in the late summer, writing words and music at the same time. The first number in Stasov’s scenario, ‘Yaroslavna’s Dream’, was completed in September 1869 and greeted enthusiastically within the circle; its music was adapted from material originally written for The Tsar’s Bride. But then, after sketching several more numbers (and probably recycling more of The Tsar’s Bride), Borodin decided to abandon Prince Igor in March 1870. We may find at least some of his reasons in his correspondence, where he characterized himself as ‘a lyricist and symphonist by nature’, fretted over his inability ‘to create a libretto which would satisfy both musical and scenic requirements’, and wondered whether ‘opera (undramatic in the strict sense) was an unnatural sort of thing anyway’. To these concerns we may add the circumstance that his work in chemistry was then at its peak, demanding more attention than ever before. In this very year, for example, he was involved in a sustained controversy with the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé concerning priority in research on valeraldehyde: on 2/14 October 1869, less than a month after completing ‘Yaroslavna’s Dream’, he presented a formal report on his research in progress to the Russian Chemical Society, in order to establish his own claim of priority and defend his integrity.

Soon after setting Prince Igor aside, Borodin returned to the B minor Symphony, assuring Stasov that the ‘materials’ already created for the opera would go into the newly revived symphony. He composed most of the first movement in April 1870, even though the movement was not written out in piano score until a year later, in spring 1871. Also in spring 1871 he sketched the scherzo and the Andante, that summer he orchestrated the first movement, and in October he drafted the finale. He interrupted his work on the symphony at the beginning of 1872, when the Director of the Imperial Theatres, Stepan Gedeonov, commissioned him, Cui, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to collaborate with the Theatres’ staff ballet composer Ludwig Minkus in a fantastic opera-ballet, Mlada, with a libretto by Viktor Krïlov. Drawing on more of the music left over from Prince Igor, Borodin embraced the project and quickly composed eight numbers for Act 4, his assigned act. Then Gedeonov cancelled Mlada because of high production costs; in time, Borodin would recycle five of his eight numbers back into Prince Igor.

With Mlada now abandoned, Borodin came back to the B minor Symphony once again, working on it as time permitted from spring 1872. In autumn 1872, after years of resistance, the tsar’s government finally authorized advanced medical courses for women, to prepare them for practice in obstetrics. Borodin eagerly took a leading part in these classes, volunteering at once to teach chemistry to the new women students and to supervise their work in the laboratory. He joined several societies for the aid of young students, especially women, and was even elected treasurer of one. Despite his many duties, he seems to have finished the B minor Symphony in piano score by May 1873. The following academic year, 1873–4, he made some progress with orchestrating the symphony’s final three movements (a task finally finished in 1875), but composed nothing new.

At about the same time, he became bitterly frustrated with the lack of support for his scientific work, and he decided no longer to pursue research in the condensation of aldehydes, leaving the field to better equipped, better financed and better supported western European chemists. In 1873 he published the last of his papers on the aldehydes and returned to his earlier subject, amarine. In 1874 he became director of the Medical-Surgical Academy’s laboratory facilities. From that year onwards his laboratory work consisted less of original research than of supervision of student work, a more difficult and less interesting task which took him, year after year, over much the same ground.

In October 1874, Borodin told Stasov that he had taken up Prince Igoragain. Slightly more than a year later, by the end of 1875, he had composed most of the Polovtsian music (including the well-known ‘Polovtsian Dances’, no.17 in the Belaïeff first edition), ‘Yaroslavna’s Lament’ from Act 4 (no.25), a ‘carousal chorus’ for Prince Galitsky’s followers (later the foundation for Act 1 scene i), a ‘chorus of praise’ to Prince Igor (now found in the Prologue, though originally planned for an Epilogue which itself was never realized), and the initial version of Igor’s aria in captivity, replaced in 1881 by the present no.13, ‘Ni sna, ni otdïkha izmuchennoy dushe’ (‘No sleep nor rest for my tormented soul’). For the sake of atmospheric verisimilitude, he drew on such exotica as an Arabian melody for the ‘Chorus of Polovtsian Maidens’, no.7, and a Chuvash melody for Konchak’s aria, no.15, justifying the latter’s use on the grounds that the Chuvash were the descendents of the Polovtsians. Also in 1875, before 15 April, Borodin sketched his String Quartet in A major ‘suggested by a theme of Beethoven’ (an interior fragment from the replacement finale of op.130). According to Yekaterina, he worked energetically on the quartet during the summer of 1877; he finally finished it in 1879.

In the autumn of 1876, Borodin learned that the Russian Musical Society wished to perform the B minor Symphony and discovered, to his dismay, that he had mislaid the full score. Though the two middle movements ultimately turned up, he had to reorchestrate the first and last movements, a job finally finished during a short illness. Eduard Nápravník conducted the work’s première on 26 February/10 March 1877; it enjoyed ‘very moderate’ success, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, largely because Borodin had written too heavily (and impractically) for the brass. In June he travelled to Germany in order to enroll his pupils Dianin and Mikhail Yul'yevich Goldstein in Jena University, where they intended to pursue doctorates in chemistry. Still at Jena in July, Borodin took the opportunity to visit Liszt in Weimar, who received him cordially and insisted on playing through both his symphonies with him in four-hand piano arrangements. Liszt’s verdict and his advice to Borodin was, ‘You are always lucid, intelligent and perfectly original … Work in your own way and pay no attention to anyone’. In November, word came from Paris that the singer Pauline Viardot was ‘wildly enthusiastic’ about the B minor Symphony and was introducing it in her salon. Later in the winter Borodin added two more pieces to Prince Igor, Vladimir’s recitative and cavatina, ‘Medlenno den' ugasal’ (‘Slowly the daylight fades’), and the love duet of Vladimir and Konchakova. As a joke, perhaps as early as 1874, he had written a polka for piano (three hands) based on a repetitive theme resembling ‘Chopsticks’. In 1878, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Lyadov produced a collection of these whimsical pieces which, with three more by Borodin himself, were published under the title Paraphrases. Liszt was so amused by the set that he added a short piece of his own to the second edition.

Borodin spent the summer of 1878 in the village of Davïdovo, east of Moscow, as the guest of Pavel Dianin, the father of his favourite pupil. Picking up Prince Igor once again (Act 1), he added Skula and Yeroshka, comic gudokplayers in the service of Prince Galitsky, modelling their music on the prose recitative of Varlaam and Misail in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Vacationing again at Davydovo, in the summer of 1879, Borodin finished most of Act 1 of the opera, including the vivid scene of Yaroslavna and the boyars with which the act concludes. In the winter between these two productive summers, Borodin revised the orchestration of the B minor Symphony, thinning out the brass parts and lightening the texture, and Rimsky-Korsakov successfully introduced the work in its new form at a Free Music School concert on 20 February/4 March 1879. Rimsky-Korsakov also used the concerts of the Free School of Music as a platform from which to launch excerpts from Prince Igor: the ‘Chorus of Praise’ from the prologue was heard on 23 March/4 April 1876, the ‘Polovtsian Dances’ and the ‘Final Chorus’ on 27 February/11 March 1879, and three further excerpts on 13/25 November 1879.

3. The Belyayev years.

In the winter of 1879–80, Borodin began to serve as chairman of the governing board of the St Petersburg Circle of Music Lovers, an amateur orchestral and choral society. At their meetings he met Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev, a wealthy timber merchant and music patron around whom a new circle of musicians and composers would gather in the 1880s, replacing the ‘Mighty Handful’ of the 1860s. (Belyayev’s publishing house, which he would establish in Leipzig in 1885 under the name M.P. Belaïeff, would publish posthumously not only Prince Igor, in Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov’s version, but also more than half a dozen of Borodin’s other works, some purchased for reissue from their original publishers.) Early in 1880 Borodin composed a short orchestral work V sredney Azii (‘In Central Asia’), one of 12 pieces commissioned from Russian composers to accompany a planned production of tableaux vivants celebrating the first 25 years of Aleksandr II’s reign. After an assassination attempt on the tsar inside the Winter Palace, the authorities cancelled this ‘grand scenic presentation’ just two weeks before it was to occur. In Central Asia finally received its première in April, at a concert of the contralto Darya Leonova, with Rimsky-Korsakov conducting. That summer Borodin wrote very little, merely drafting (for Act 1 of Prince Igor) a scene of rebellion for Prince Galitsky and his followers which, though restored in some recent productions, does not appear in the Belaïeff score.

Early in 1881, Borodin arranged an Arabian melody (from Alexandre Christianowitsch’s Esquisse historique de la musique arabe) in order to fulfil Leonova’s request for something special for her jubilee concert. Dissatisfied with giving her a mere arrangement, he withheld the Arabskaya melodiya and instead composed and quickly orchestrated a setting of Nekrasov’s satiric poem U lyudey-to v domu (‘At Some Folks’ Houses’), which he characterized as a ‘genre subject, popular and humorous’, written with Leonova’s talents in mind. In the summer he completed his String Quartet in D major, attended the festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in Magdeburg, and spent a few days with Liszt in Weimar, giving him there the dedication of In Central Asia, in gratitude for the warmth Liszt continually showed him. He had been deeply moved by Musorgsky’s death in March 1881 (as he had been by his mentor Zinin’s death the previous year), and in November, following a memorial concert of Musorgsky’s music, Borodin composed the song Dlya beregov otchiznï dal'noy(‘For the Shores of Thy Far Native Land’), to words by Pushkin, in memory of his friend.

During the 1880s it became increasingly difficult for Borodin to find time for music. His wife’s ever declining health preyed constantly on his mind. His duties at the Medical-Surgical Academy seemed always to increase, and he found himself forced to devote much time to committees, commissions and paperwork. In the wake of the assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II, the government tried to discontinue the medical classes for women, and Borodin and his colleagues invested enormous energy in saving them. All these obligations inevitably exacted a toll: after 1881 Borodin completed no major works. Although he continued to work intermittently on Prince Igor for the last five years of his life, and even began another symphony, in A minor, he was able to finish only a handful of relatively inconsequential occasional pieces. In 1882 he composed a quartet scherzo, in 5/8, for one of the evenings of chamber music at Belyayev’s home; in 1886 he collaborated with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov and Glazunov in a string quartet on the motive B–La–F, written as a gift to their patron Belyayev; and during the Christmas holidays of 1884–5 he completed the song Spes' (‘Pride’), to a text by A.K. Tolstoy, for the opera singer Anna Bichurina.

Also during the 1880s, Borodin was gaining stature in the West. As a consequence of their first meeting in 1877, Liszt had helped to arrange a performance of the E Symphony in Baden-Baden (20 May 1880). Thanks to the patronage of the Belgian Countess Louise de Mercy-Argenteau, whose admiration for the ‘New Russian School’ was encouraged by her friend Liszt, Borodin soon found himself celebrated in Belgium and France. To protect his copyrights, he joined the French Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique, and his works – including the A major Quartet, the E and B minor symphonies, In Central Asia, excerpts from Igor, and a few songs – were performed at Verviers, Liège, Antwerp, Brussels and Paris (1884–5). In gratitude he composed and dedicated to the Countess a Petite suite, for piano, and a song to French words, ‘Septain’ (both 1885); to her associate, the young Belgian conductor Theodore Jadoul, he dedicated the Scherzo in A for piano (also 1885).

Prince Igor and the A minor Symphony, by contrast, were destined to remain unfinished. In the late summer and autumn of 1883, Borodin fashioned the opera’s Prologue, recycling still more material from Mlada (including the eclipse music, originally the ‘Apparition of the Phantoms’ in the earlier work) and revising sections already prepared (such as the ‘Chorus of Praise’ from 1875). Having finished the task by late November, the composer then was obliged to set Igor aside until the summer of 1884, when he decided to build an additional act (Act 3 of the Belaïeff score) around Igor’s escape. Also in 1883–4, he began to plan the A minor Symphony and decided to use his quartet scherzo in 5/8 – with a new trio to be based on a theme discarded from Igor – as the symphony’s scherzo. In July 1884, while on holiday, he discovered a religious chant of the bezpopovtsï sect, which is thought to have been intended for the symphony’s slow movement, projected as a theme and variations. He took up the symphony in earnest in the autumn of 1886 and during the Christmas holidays of 1886–7, while visiting Yekaterina in Moscow, jotted down sketches for the first movement. He also continued to work on the opera at the same time, editing and assembling materials that had accumulated over nearly 20 years, while adding still more to the store. He may have considered the overture as late as January 1887, though it was Glazunov who composed it (in his own words) ‘roughly according to Borodin’s plan’. According to Aleksandr Dianin, he composed (at the piano) the finale of the A minor Symphony on 12–13/24–25 February. But it was too late. On the evening of 15/27 February 1887, Borodin attended a grand candlelight ball organized by the faculty of the Medical-Surgical Academy for their families and friends. Wearing Russian national dress, with dark red shirt, baggy blue trousers, and high boots, he was in high spirits, laughing and joking, when soon after completing a waltz with one of the ladies he collapsed and died of heart failure within seconds. Yekaterina survived him by less than six months.

4. The music.

Borodin’s earliest works were all chamber and salon pieces, written for use within his circle of friends. In this circumstance, we may find the roots of his lifelong affinity for chamber music, a genre in which the rest of the ‘Mighty Handful’ had little interest and little success. Many of these youthful works – the ‘Adagio patetico’ for piano, the early trios, the songs with cello obbligato – are slight, if at times charming. The best of them – the String Quintet in F minor, for example – reveal a well-formed, even precocious, musical personality. Like his great contemporary Musorgsky, Borodin was adept at learning to compose by absorbing the works of Western masters, in the quintet’s case Mendelssohn, whom Borodin continued to admire throughout his career and whose shadow falls across even such late works as the First String Quartet and the Third Symphony. The F minor String Quintet also provides an early paradigmatic instance of Borodin’s great misfortune: the difficulty he had in finding the time, owing to the press of his scientific work, to finish the remarkable music he had begun.

A greater degree of assurance and technical fluency, visible in the D minor String Sextet, came into Borodin’s music during his residency in western Europe, principally in Heidelberg in 1859–62. Though he later disparaged the sextet as ‘written to please the Germans’ among whom he was living, the idiomatic handling of the six instruments reveals his experience of playing chamber music. Moreover, his treatment of sonata form in the first movement already shows something of his flair for modifying the design. Having emphasized the first theme in the development, he omits it from the recapitulation, which begins with the second theme. Except for the insertion of 16 climactic new bars, the recapitulation parallels the exposition from the second subject onwards, but the material is redistributed among the instruments in order to enhance the interest of each part. The second movement, the only other one to have surfaced, is a set of variations.

The culminating work (and the one masterpiece) of the years spent abroad is the Piano Quintet in C minor, which illustrates several stylistic features that one meets repeatedly in Borodin’s later music. The first movement’s principal melody, a conjunct and diatonic tune of elegiac character, contains several ornamental grace notes. It is built by repeating similar melodic cells and rhythmic patterns in a manner suggestive of many Russian folksongs. Its phrases vary in length, and it is given rhythmic suppleness by shifting frequently from 3/4 to 2/4 metre. An underlying modal scale and modally inflected harmonies colour the second movement, the scherzo. The finale has as its main theme a broad diatonic melody, introduces short fragmentary motives as contrasting subjects, and then extends them all in a modified sonata form reaching its principal climax in the coda. Throughout the work, the piano writing is full and resonant (though not especially difficult) and the string writing idiomatic.

Though written under Balakirev’s supervision and manifestly not a chamber work, Borodin’s E Symphony nonetheless may be seen as a companion piece to the Piano Quintet, marking the end of his apprenticeship. Like the chamber works preceding it, the symphony exhibits a strong (and not entirely predictable) command of sonata form, a few fingerprints of Russian folksong and echoes of European models. The first movement is the most ingenious. Its principal melodic ideas are unfolded in brief fragments and then developed in an apparently clear sonata structure. Only at the end of the movement, in a quiet coda, are these mosaic-like fragments seen to have been the building blocks of a single cantilena; the psychological climax – the final synthesis of the entire melody – is thus shifted to the tranquil closing pages of the movement. The scherzo’s main section suggests Berlioz’s ‘Queen Mab’ from Roméo et Juliette, and its trio is redolent of folksong (alternating triple and duple metre, a repetitive melodic pattern, frequent rising or falling 4ths, a drone bass). The third movement offers another of Borodin’s lyrical expressive melodies, decorated by ornamental turns and grace notes. The finale is least successful; its main theme seems borrowed almost directly from the finale of Schumann’s D minor Symphony, as do details of the movement’s execution: melodic extension through sequence, obvious stress on the lowered seventh degree of the major scale, a transition built from material passed upward from low instruments to high. The symphony’s orchestration is Borodin’s despite the indication ‘revue par N. Rimsky-Korsakov et A. Glazunov’ in many editions. This phrase, together with several differences in musical text between the four-hand reduction of 1875 and the full score, led the French critic M.-D. Calvocoressi (D1924–2) to accuse Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov of improperly rewriting Borodin’s music after his death. In fact, the differences resulted from Borodin’s own revision of the work before publication of the first full score in 1882; the phrase hinting at posthumous collaboration by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov was added by the publisher Bessel simply in order to secure copyright (and royalties from performances) in western Europe.

The B minor Symphony is the most important large-scale work to be completed entirely by Borodin himself, and one of his greatest works. It is a close relative of both Prince Igor and the abortive Mlada, two theatre works which diverted the composer’s attention, off and on, during the symphony’s extended gestation period. According to memoirs of Nikolay Kashkin, the symphony’s striking opening theme originated in an abandoned chorus of Polovtsians, and Borodin’s principal Soviet biographer has cited several other instances of melodic congruence between Igor or Mladaand the symphony (see Dianin, B1963).

The first movement constitutes one of Borodin’s most imaginative sonata forms. Its opening theme, brusque and epigrammatic, combines both the major and minor 3rd above the tonic, and except for the E (an upper neighbour) constitutes an octatonic subcollection (see ex.1). Other instances of interplay between major and minor 3rd, found scattered throughout the symphony, may be traced to this terse opening theme. The four-note cell within the opening theme (marked ‘x’ in ex.1) occurs with enough frequency in Borodin’s music to constitute, in Gerald Abraham’s phrase, ‘the most personal of Borodin’s melodic mannerisms, one so peculiar to him … that it almost has the effect of placing his signature to any melody in which it occurs’ (Abraham, B1935). The lyrical second theme (first heard in the conventional key of D major) provides effective contrast and acts as a cyclic element in the symphony, easily recognized in the trio of the scherzo, more distantly echoed in the finale. In the recapitulation, Borodin begins this second theme in E, an enharmonic major 3rd above B, thereby creating a logical counterpoise to the theme’s statement in the exposition a minor 3rd above B and extending the interplay between major and minor 3rd to a structural level.

The mercurial scherzo, in F major, draws much of its effect from the rhythmic contrast between the two principal ideas, the first firmly on the beat, the second syncopated. The Andante begins with one of Borodin’s most serene melodies, its second phrase embodying the ornamental grace notes typical of his lyric tunes. This memorable melody is heard in varying orchestrations, in a free sectional design; some of the contrasting material subtly incorporates the interplay between minor and major 3rds found in the first movement. The finale is another sonata movement, freer than the first; perhaps its most striking moment is a whole-tone passage from the development, the theme of which is echoed in both Mlada and the prologue of Prince Igor. Borodin tinkered with the symphony one last time in 1886, while preparing the manuscript full score for the printer. At that time he incorporated a few further refinements suggested by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, in his capacity as posthumous proofreader, also supplied the score’s metronome markings, though these and Rimsky’s tempo indications in the Andante may stem from the work’s successful second performance, prepared by Rimsky-Korsakov under Borodin’s supervision.

The Third Symphony exists only as a torso. Its first movement, though played by Borodin for his musical friends, was never written down beyond a few fragmentary sketches prepared during his last school vacation. Within three months of the composer’s death, Glazunov had reconstructed the first movement from his memory of Borodin’s performance and the extant sketches, but it is impossible to say with conviction how much of it is Borodin, how much Glazunov. The principal tunes (which are deployed in a clear sonata form) strongly suggest folksong, exhibiting such characteristics as an underlying modal scale, recurring simple melodic patterns, and falling or rising 4ths. The main part of the scherzo is a brisk Mendelssohnian frolic in 5/8 metre, first written for string quartet in 1883. Glazunov orchestrated the quartet scherzo and composed the trio, executing the plan Borodin had said he would follow.

Borodin’s shortest orchestral work, the ‘musical picture’ In Central Asia, presents two distinctive tunes designed to combine with one another in counterpoint at the work’s climax. The first, simple and diatonically harmonized, is emblematic of Russia. The second – ornate, chromatically harmonized, and scored for english horn – portrays the East, that alluring ‘exotic other’ which so many 19th-century Russian composers found irresistable. Regarded in the 19th century as one of Borodin’s most successful works, In Central Asia pays homage to his benefactor Liszt (to whom, it will be recalled, the work is dedicated) by borrowing a distinctive scoring – pizzicato low and high strings, on and off the beat – from the first of Liszt’s Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust.

During the winter of 1874–5, with the E symphony successfully performed and only scoring of the B minor left to finish, Borodin returned at mid-career to chamber music. His First String Quartet, in A, is a work of consummate craftsmanship, utilizing all four instruments skilfully and idiomatically. Both the first and second movements demonstrate the composer’s contrapuntal ingenuity in combining themes; the capstone of the second is an extended fugato comprising the central section of a three-part design. The third movement is one of Borodin’s most brilliant gossamer scherzos, making effective use of harmonics and left-hand pizzicato, and the finale is rhythmically energetic. The more rhapsodic Second Quartet, in D, dedicated to the composer’s wife, is an affectionate and nostalgic evocation of their first months together in Heidelberg. Its third movement, the Nocturne, is one of Borodin’s best-known compositions; his own instrument, the cello, takes the leading role in presenting this lovely tune, imbued with characteristics familiar in his lyric melodies. The two pièces d’occasion for piano, which Borodin wrote as gifts for his Belgian patron the Countess de Mercy-Argenteau and her associate Jadoul, are negligible. Though the Scherzo in A is sprightly enough to have been used as a concert encore by Rachmaninov (who also recorded it), the Petite suite is simply salon music.

Borodin completed only 16 solo songs, writing the first four (salon romances all) while still a student at the Medical-Surgical Academy. He next took up the genre in 1867 with The Sleeping Princess, the first of three songs – the others are The Sea Princess and The False Note – to make striking use either of 2nds as harmonic coloration or of the whole-tone scale. His Song of the Dark Forest artfully evokes a folk idiom through its poetic metre (a modified kol'tsovskiy stikh), word repetition, and spare harmony which avoids the leading note. The seven songs composed between 1867 and 1871 conclude with Borodin’s second (and final) Heine setting, Iz slyoz moikh (‘From my Tears’), which is noteworthy for still further effects derived from 2nds. His last five songs belong to the 1880s and are less distinctive than the previous seven. The Arabian Melody is just an arrangement, and For the Shores of Thy Far Native Land, though beautifully poignant, echoes Schumann’s Ich grolle nicht(steadily moving quavers in the right hand, a more deliberate bass, the approach to the vocal climax). The most distinguished song in this group is At Some Folks’ Houses, Borodin’s most biting foray into satire and his only orchestral song.

The composer’s greatest work, the opera Prince Igor, was still far from finished at his death in 1887. Though he had composed many compelling and exotic pages since the work’s inception nearly 18 years earlier, he had never prepared a finished libretto to guide its completion. In spring 1885, hoping to push Borodin toward finishing the opera, Rimsky-Korsakov began to assemble a vocal score, bringing the music ‘into order’ by filling in missing compositional details himself. This circumstance, together with Rimsky-Korsakov’s help in preparing such excerpts as the ‘Polovtsian Dances’ for concert performance in the 1870s, made him the clear choice to serve as Borodin’s operatic executor. He enlisted Glazunov’s aid, and in short order the two of them prepared Prince Igor for performance and publication (fig.3), drawing upon and orchestrating Borodin’s manuscripts and filling in lacunae with new music of their own devising. The largest gap was in Act 3, to which Glazunov contributed 1252 bars. The opera finally received its première, in Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov’s version, on 23 October/4 November 1890 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, but was eclipsed at the time by the season’s other illustrious première, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. One year later Glazunov described the work he and Rimsky-Korsakov had done on Borodin’s behalf (see Abraham, B1939, for a translation), and there the matter of text rested until the 1940s. Then, to mark the 60th anniversary in 1947 of Borodin’s death, the Soviet musicologist Pavel Lamm prepared an ‘academic edition’ of the opera, collated from the known manuscripts. Although neither Lamm’s score nor his detailed report was published, his principal conclusion – that Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov had omitted about a fifth of Borodin’s existing music – became well known via a short summary (Lamm, C1948). As a result, a few theatres in recent years have produced new performing versions of Prince Igorbased in the old score but adding at least some of the missing music, in orchestrations prepared by new posthumous collaborators (for an example, see Malkiel and Barry, C1995). Though these scores have opened up many fine passages, they have also brought fresh controversies. Definitive resolution of the textual issues in Igor will be impossible until Lamm’s work is published in its entirety and may remain elusive even beyond.

When Borodin first began working on Prince Igor, the style of opera endorsed within his circle, principally in the writings of César Cui, was opéra dialogué, wherein the highest merit was said to lie in an unbroken recitative setting of an unaltered text. In an oft-quoted letter to the singer Lyubov Karmalina, dated 1/13 June 1876, Borodin set himself apart from Cui’s theoretical prescriptions:

… in my outlook on operatic matters I’ve always been at variance with many of my friends. A purely recitative style has always gone against my instincts and my character. I’m drawn to song and cantilena, not to recitative, although, according to the opinions of knowledgeable people, I’m not too bad at the latter. Besides that, I’m drawn to forms that are more closed, more rounded, grander scaled. My entire manner of treating operatic material is different. In my opinion, in an opera, as in its sets, tiny forms, details, and trifles must have no place; everything must be written in grand strokes – clearly, brilliantly, and as practically as possible for performance, both for voices and orchestra. The voices must be foremost, the orchestra secondary.

Virtually every number in Prince Igor embodies this credo, which also suggests Borodin’s grasp of lyricism’s role in establishing an opera’s tone. Richard Taruskin (GroveO) has identified two contrasting idioms in the opera, one based largely in Russian folksong and used to portray the Russian characters, the other an exotic ‘oriental’ idiom, featuring melismatic vocal lines, melodic augmented 2nds, chromatic passing notes, and double-reed wind timbre, used to portray the Polovtsians. The eclipse (and its supernatural significance as a heavenly omen) is depicted with octatonic chord successions, in this case 7th-chords with roots a minor 3rd or tritone apart. Perhaps the clearest European models for the work are French grand operas; like them Igor mixes dramatic tableaux (the prologue, the scene between the boyars and Yaroslavna), scenic tableaux (much of the Polovtsian music), and set pieces (Igor’s aria, Yaroslavna’s lament, Galitsky’s aria). The nearest parallel in Russian opera is Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, but echoes of Musorgsky are present too: tritones used to depict alarm bells in the scene between Yaroslavna and the boyars, the closing measures of Igor’s aria (suggesting the closing measures of Act II of Boris Godunov), the comic gudok players’ recitative. An extraordinary work created in nearly impossible conditions, Prince Igor clings to a place at the edge of the repertory owing to Borodin’s skill in realizing the ‘song and cantilena’ to which, by his own confession, he was drawn.

WORKS

published in St Petersburg unless otherwise stated

stage



Title	Genre, acts	Libretto	Composition	First performance	Sources	Remarks

Bogatïri [The Heroic Warriors]	opera-farce, 5	V.A. Krïlov	1867	Moscow, Bol'shoy, 6/18 Nov 1867	RUS-SPtob, US-Stu	about a quarter by Borodin; the rest loosely based on excerpts from operas by Rossini, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Serov, Verdi, Hérold and others; largely orchd by E.N. Merten; 2 choral excerpts ed. A. Nefedov (Moscow, 1977)
Tsarskaya nevesta [The Tsar’s Bride]	opera	Borodin, after L.A. Mey	1867–8			sketches only; lost
Mlada	opera-ballet, 4	Krïlov, after scenario by S.A. Gedeonov	1872		RUS-Mcm, SPil, SPsc	Act 4 by Borodin; other 3 acts by Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Musorgsky; finale (nos.5–7) arr. and orchd Rimsky-Korsakov (Leipzig, 1892); choral excerpt from finale ed. A. Nefedov (Moscow, 1977)
Knyaz' Igor' [Prince Igor]	opera, prol., 4	Borodin, after scenario by V.V. Stasov	1869–70, 1874–87	St Petersburg, Mariinsky, 23 Oct/4 Nov 1890	Mcm, SPsc; (Leipzig, 1888)	unfinished; completed and partly orchd by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov; 4 choral excerpts, not in orig. vs, ed. A. Nefedov (Moscow, 1977)

orchestral

Symphony no.1, E, 1862–7, score (1882), arr. pf 4 hands (1875)

Symphony no.2, b, 1869–76, score (1887), arr. pf 4 hands (1877) [score seen through press by Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, after Borodin’s death]

V sredney Azii [In Central Asia], musical picture, 1880 (Hamburg, 1882), arr. pf 4 hands (1882)

Symphony no.3, a, 1882, 1886–7 (Leipzig, 1888) [1st and 2nd movts only; completed from Borodin’s materials, orchd and arr. pf 4 hands by Glazunov]

chamber

Concerto, D-d, fl, pf, 1847, lost

Trio, G, 2 vn, vc, 1847, lost [based on themes from Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable]

Trio, G, 2 vn, vc, c1850–60, frag., RUS-SPit

Quartet, D, fl, ob, va, vc, 1852–6 (Moscow, 1949) [based on a Piano Sonata by Haydn, h XVI:51]

String Quintet, f, 1853–4, (Leningrad, 1960) [finale completed by O. Evlakhov]

Trio, g, 2 vn, vc, 1854–5, ed. P. Lamm (Moscow, 1946) [based on folksong ‘Chem tebya ya ogorchila’, ‘How I did grieve thee’]

Grand Trio, G, 2 vn, vc, 1859–62, 1st and 2nd movts (Moscow, 1949) [3rd movt unfinished]

Sonata, b, vc, pf, 1860, ed. M. Goldstein (Hamburg, 1982) [completed by Goldstein; based on a theme from Bach’s unacc. Vn Sonata bwv1001]

Piano Trio, D, 1860–61 (Moscow, 1950) [3 movts only]

String Sextet, d, 1860–61, 1st and 2nd movts, ed. P. Lamm (Moscow, 1946) [3rd and 4th movts lost; sketch for finale, SPsc]

Piano Quintet, c, 1862 (Moscow, 1938)

String Quartet no.1, A, 1874–9 (Hamburg, 1884)

String Quartet no.2, D, 1881 (Leipzig, 1888)

Scherzo, D, str qt, 1882 (Leipzig, 1899) [incl. as no.3 in the 2nd set of pieces for str qt ‘Les vendredis’, collab. Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov and others; also used in Sym. no.3]

Serenata alla spagnola, d, str qt, 1886 (Leipzig, 1887) [for the qt ‘B-la-f’, collab. Lyadov, Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov]

piano

for solo piano unless otherwise stated

for details of musical jokes and fragmentary pieces see S.A. Dianin (B1955, 2/1960)

Polka Hélène, d, pf 4 hands, 1843 (Moscow, 1946) [orig. for solo pf]

Adagio patetico, A, ?1849 (1849), ed. in Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii (Moscow, 1970)

Le courant, study, ?1849 (1849)

Fantasia on a theme of Hummel, ?1849 (1849)

Scherzo, b, 1852, lost

Allegretto, D, pf 4 hands, 1861, ed. V. Blok (Moscow, 1980) [adapted from str qnt, f, 3rd movt, trio]

Scherzo, E, pf 4 hands, 1861. ed. in Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii (Moscow, 1970)

Tarantella, D, pf 4 hands, 1862 (Leningrad, 1938)

Polka, Marche funèbre, Requiem and Mazurka, pf 3 hands, ?1874–8; 1st 3 pieces (1879), Mazurka pubd posth. (Leipzig, 1893) [for the collection Paraphrases, collab. Lyadov and others]

Petite suite, 1885 (1885), orchd Glazunov (1895)

Scherzo, A, 1885 (1885) [orchd Glazunov for inclusion in the Petite Suite]

vocal

for solo voice and piano unless otherwise stated

Misera me! Barbaro sorte (Anon.), T, B, pf, c1850–60, RUS-SPit, unfinished

Bozhe milostivïy [Merciful God], 1852–5, SPit, unfinished

Chto tï rano, zoren'ka [Why art thou so Early, Dawn?] (S. Solov'yov), 1852–5, freely adapted by P. Lamm (Moscow, 1947)

Krasavitsa-rïbachka [The Beautiful Fisher Maiden] (H. Heine, trans. D. Kropotkin), c1854 (Moscow, 1947) [with vc obbl]

Razlyubila krasna devitsa [The Pretty Girl no longer Loves me] (Vinogradov), c1854 (Moscow, 1947) [with vc obbl]

Slushayte, podruzhen'ki, pesenku moyu [Listen to my Song, Little Friend] (E. von Kruse), c1854 (Moscow, 1947) [with vc obbl]

Spyashchaya knyazhna [The Sleeping Princess] (Borodin), 1867 (Moscow, 1870), orchd Rimsky-Korsakov (Moscow, 1903)

Pesnya tyomnogo lesa [Song of the Dark Forest] (Borodin), 1867–8 (1873), arr. male chorus, pf, and orchd by Glazunov (1893)

Morskaya tsarevna [The Sea Princess] (Borodin), 1868 (1873)

Fal'shivaya nota [The False Note] (Borodin), 1868 (Moscow, 1870)

Otravoy polnï moi pesni [My Songs are Filled with Poison] (H. Heine, trans. L.A. Mey), 1868 (Moscow, 1870)

More [The Sea] (Borodin), 1869–70 (Moscow, 1870), orchd 1884, SPsc, unfinished; orchd Rimsky-Korsakov (Moscow, 1906)

Serenada chetïryokh kavalerov yednoy dame [Serenade of Four Cavaliers to One Lady] (Borodin), 4 male vv, pf, c1870 (Leipzig, 1889)

Iz slyoz moikh [From my Tears] (Heine, trans. Mey), 1870–71 (1873)

Vperyod, druz'ya [Forward, Friends] (?Borodin), 4 male vv, 1878

Arabskaya melodiya [Arabian Melody] (trad., trans. Borodin), 1881 (Leipzig, 1888)

Dlya beregov otchiznï dal'noy [For the Shores of thy Far Native Land] (A.S. Pushkin), 1881 (Leipzig, 1888), orchd Glazunov (Leipzig, 1912)

Na zabïtom pole bitvï [On a Forgotten Field of Battle] (Borodin), 4 male vv, 1881, unfinished, ed. in Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii (Moscow, 1970)

U lyudey-to v domu [At some Folks’ Houses] (N.A. Nekrasov), 1v, orch, 1881 (Leipzig, 1890), arr. 1v, pf by G.O. Dütsch (Leipzig, 1890)

Spes' [Pride] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1884–5 (Leipzig, 1890)

Septain (G. Collin), 1885 (Liège, 1885), trans. Borodin as Chudnïy sad [The Magic Garden] (1887)

Slava Kirillu! Slava Mefodiyu! [Glory to Kirill! Glory to Methodius!] (anon.), 4 male vv, ?1885, unfinished, ed. in Muzïkal'noye nasledtsvo, iii (Moscow, 1970)

(1) Antonio Borosini [Boresini, Borosino]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Letters, documents, memoirs. B Life and works. C Stage works: ‘Prince Igor’, ‘The Heroic Warriors’ and ‘Mlada’. D Instrumental music. E Songs.

a: letters, documents, memoirs

N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov: Letopis' moyey muzïkal'noy zhizni (St Petersburg, 1909, 9/1982; Eng. trans., 1924, 3/1942/R, as My Musical Life)

S.A. Dianin, ed.: Pis'ma A.P. Borodina: polnoye sobraniye, kriticheski sverenoye s podlinnïmi tekstami [Borodin’s letters: complete collection, critically compared with the authentic texts] (Moscow, 1927–50)

S.A. Dianin: Borodin: zhizneopisaniye, materialï i dokumentï [Biography, materials and documents] (Moscow, 1955, 2/1960; Eng. trans. [without the materials and documents but with an addl study of the music], 1963/R)

V.V. Yastrebtsev: Nikolay Andreyevich Rimskiy-Korsakov: Vospominaniya V.V. Yastrebtseva [N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov: Recollections of V.V. Yastrebtsev] (Leningrad, 1959–60; Eng. trans., abridged, 1985, as Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov)

V. Kiselyov and others, eds.: ‘Novïye pis'ma Borodina’ [Some new Borodin letters], Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii, ed. M. Alekseyev and others (Moscow, 1970), 208–39

A. Borodin: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. V. Protopopov (Moscow, 2/1982) [incl. Borodin’s concert reviews and reminiscences of Liszt; Eng. trans. of ‘List u sebya doma v Veimare’ [Liszt at home in Weimar] in D. Lloyd-Jones: ‘Borodin on Liszt’, ML, xlii (1961), 117–26]

G. Seaman: ‘Borodin’s Letters’, MQ, lxx (1984), 476–98

A. Zorina, ed.: A.P. Borodin v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov [Borodin in the recollections of his contemporaries] (Moscow, 1985)

b: life and works

V.V. Stasov: Obituary, Novoye vremya (17 Feb 1887); repr. in Stat'i o muzïke, ed. V. Protopopov, iv (Moscow, 1978), 15–17

A.P. Dianin: ‘K nekrologu A.P. Borodina’ [On Borodin’s obituary], Novoye vremya (19 Feb 1887) [addendum to Stasov’s obituary]

A.P. Dianin: ‘Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin: biograficheskiy ocherk i vospominaniya’ [Biographical essay and reminiscences], Zhurnal russkogo fiziko-khimicheskogo obshchestva, xx/4 (1888), 367–79

V.V. Stasov: Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin: yego zhizn', perepiska i muzïkal'nïye stat'i [His life, correspondence and articles on music] (St Petersburg, 1889); repr. in Stat'i o muzïke, ed. V. Protopopov, iv (Moscow, 1978), 107–53; Ger. trans. in Wladimir Stassow: Meine Freunde Alexander Borodin und Modest Mussorgski: die Biographien, ed. E. Kuhn (Berlin, 1993)

A. Habets: Alexandre Borodine d’après la biographie et la correspondance publiées par M. Wladimir Stassoff (Paris, 1893; Eng. trans., 1895/R as Borodin and Liszt)

G. Abraham: Borodin: the Composer and his Music (London, 1927/R)

G. Abraham: ‘Borodin as a Symphonist’, ‘Prince Igor’, Studies in Russian Music (London, 1935/R), 102–18, 119–41

C. Bronne: La comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau et la musique russe, avec des lettres inédites de Liszt, Borodine, César Cui, et six illustrations (Paris, 1935; 2/1945)

G. Abraham: ‘The Collective Mlada’, ‘The History of Prince Igor’, ‘Borodin’s Songs’, On Russian Music (London, 1939/R, 90–112, 147–68, 169–78

A. Dmitriyev: ‘Iz tvorcheskoy laboratorii A.P. Borodina’ [From Borodin’s creative laboratory], SovM (1950), no.10, pp.81–7

N. Figurovsky and Yu. Solov'yov: Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin (Moscow, 1950; Eng. trans., 1988, as Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin: a Chemist’s Biography)

B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye trudï [Selected works], iii: Kompozitorï ‘Moguchey kuchki’ [The composers of the ‘Mighty Handful’] (Moscow, 1954)

V. Yakovlev: ‘Borodin i Chaykovsky’, SovM (1954), no.1, pp.66–74

A. Sokhor: Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin: zhizn', deyatel'nost', muzïkal'noye tvorchestvo [Life, works, musical compositions] (Moscow, 1965)

A. Gozenpud: ‘Mirovaya slava poistine bessmertnogo khudozhnika’ [The world fame of a genuinely immortal artist], SovM (1983), no.12, pp.87–94

G. Kauffman and others: ‘Borodin: Composer and Chemist’, Chemical and Engineering News, lxv/7 (1987), 28–35

E. Kuhn, ed.: Alexander Borodin: sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schriften (Berlin, 1992)

V. Yakovlev: ‘Zhizn' muzïki Borodina’ [The life of Borodin’s music], Izbrannïye trudï o muzïke, ii (Moscow, 1971), 7–140; Ger. trans., abridged, in Kuhn (1992), 347–92

A. Gaub and M. Unseld: Ein Fürst, zwei Prinzessinnen und vier Spieler: Anmerkungen zum Werk Aleksandr Borodins (Berlin, 1994)

c: stage works: ‘prince igor’, ‘the heroic warriors’ and ‘mlada’

GroveO (R. Taruskin)

V.V. Stasov: ‘Po povodu Knyazya Igorya na Mariinskoy stsene’ [Concerning Prince Igor on the Mariinsky stage], Severnïy vestnik (1890), no.12, pp.137–47; repr. in Stat'i o muzïke, ed. V. Protopopov, iv (Moscow, 1978), 197–205

A. Glazunov: ‘Zapiska A.K. Glazunova o redaktsii Knyazya Igorya Borodina’ [A note on the editing of Borodin’s Prince Igor], RMG, ii (1896), 155–60; repr. in Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov: Pis'ma, stat'i, vospominaniya; izbrannoye, ed. M.A. Ganina (Moscow, 1958), 433–5; Eng. trans. in Abraham (1939), 165–8

C. Cui: ‘Knyaz' Igor' (Moskovskaya chastnaya opera)’ [Prince Igor (Moscow private opera)], Novosti i birzhevaya gazeta (23 March 1899)

P. Lamm and S. Popov: ‘Bogatïrï (Materialï i dokumentï)’ [The Heroic Warriors (materials and documents)], SovM (1934), no.1, pp.87–94

P. Lamm: ‘K podlinnomu tekstu Knyazya Igorya’ [On the genuine text of Prince Igor], Nauchno-tvorcheskaya rabota Vserossiyskogo teatral'nogo obshchestva, iii (1948), 33–6; repr., SovM (1983), no.12, pp.104–7

N. Listova: ‘Iz istorii sozdaniya operï Knyaz' Igor' A.P. Borodina’ [From the history of the composition of Prince Igor], Soobshcheniya Instituta istorii iskusstv, xv (1959), 36–75 [incl. fullest pubd edn of Stasov’s original scenario]

D. Lloyd-Jones: ‘The Bogatyrs: Russia’s First Operetta’, MMR, lxxxix (1959), 123–30

V. Kiselyov: ‘Pervaya postanovka Knyazya Igorya (stsenicheskaya istoriya)’ [The first performance of Prince Igor (stage history)], Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii, ed. M. Alekseyev and others (Moscow, 1970), 284–352

A.A. Gozenpud: Russkiy opernïy teatr na rubezhe xix–xx vekov i F.I. Shalyapin, 1890–1904 [Russian operatic theatre at the turn of the 20th century and F.I. Shalyapin] (Leningrad, 1974)

A. Sokhor: ‘Knyaz' Igor': izvestnïy i neizvestnïy’ [Prince Igor: the known and the unknown], SovM (1976), no.1, pp.63–9

A. Kandinsky: ‘Opït rekonstruktsii’ [An experiment in reconstruction], SovM (1977), no.3, pp.63–70 [on the new version of Prince Igor by Levashov, Fortunatov and Pokrovsky]

R. Taruskin: Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann Arbor, 1981) [incl. three numbers from Bogatïri and their sources in an appx]

M. Bobeth: Borodin und seine Oper ‘Fürst Igor’: Geschichte – Analyse – Konsequenzen (Munich, 1982)

I. Vïzgo-Ivanova andA. Ivanov-Ekhvet: ‘Yeshchyo raz ob istokakh Knyazya Igorya’ [Once more on the sources of Prince Igor], SovM (1982), no.4, pp.89–95

Yu. Levashov: ‘O zagadkakh operï Borodina i “Slova o polku Igoreve”’ [On the riddle of Borodin’s opera and the ‘Lay of the Host of Igor’], Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1995), no.13, pp.15–17; no.14, pp.15–17; no.15, pp.15–17

A. Ivanov-Ekhvet: ‘K prochteniyu Slova o polku Igoreve’ [On perusing the ‘Lay of the Host of Igor’], SovM (1987), no.5, pp.108–15

K. Bumpass and G. Kauffman: ‘Nationalism and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music: “The Five” and Borodin’s Prince Igor’, MR, xlviii (1988), 43–51

A. Dmitriyev: ‘K istorii sozdaniya operï A.P. Borodina Knyaz' Igor’ [On the history of Prince Igor’s creation], ‘A.P. Borodin v rabote nad operoy Knyaz' Igor’ [Borodin at work on Prince Igor], Issledovaniya, stat'i, nablyudeniya (St Petersburg, 1988), 130–43, 144–53

H. Robinson: ‘“If You’re Afraid of Wolves Don’t Go into the Forest”: on the History of Borodin’s Prince Igor’, OQ, vii/4 (1990–91), 1–12

Z. Domokos: ‘The Epic Dimension in Borodin’s Prince Igor’, SMH, xxxiii (1991), 131–49

R. Taruskin: “‘Entoiling the Falconet”: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context’, COJ, iv (1992), 253–80; repr. in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 152–85

M. Malkiel and A. Barry: ‘Authenticity in Prince Igor: Open Questions, New Answers’, Prince Igor, Philips 442537–2 (1995) [disc notes]

A. Gaub: Die kollektive Ballet-Oper ‘Mlada’: ein Werk von Kjui, Musorgskij, Rimskiy-Korsakow, Borodin und Minkus (Berlin, 1998)

d: instrumental music

M.D. Calvocoressi: ‘Après Moussorgsky, Borodine’, ReM, vi/2 (1924–5), 116–20; Eng. trans., MT, lxv (1924), 1086–9

S.A. Dianine and A. Rimsky-Korsakoff: ‘Borodine ou ses amis? A propos d’une découverte de MM. Lambert et Calvocoressi’,ReM, vii/3–5 (1925–6), 39–42 [with reply by Calvocoressi, 43–4]

L. Solovtsova: Kamerno-instrumental'naya muzïka A.P. Borodina [Borodin’s instrumental chamber music] (Moscow, 1952, 2/1960)

D. Lloyd-Jones: ‘Borodin in Heidelberg’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 500–08

G. Abraham: Foreword to A. Borodin: Symphony no.2, B minor, Edition Eulenberg, no.491 (London, c1961)

D. Lloyd-Jones: Foreword to A. Borodin: Symphony no.1, E major, Edition Eulenberg, no.490 (London, c1961)

D. Lloyd-Jones: Foreword to A.P. Borodin: Two Movements from the Unfinished Symphony no.3, A Minor, Edition Eulenberg, no.501 (London, 1962)

G. Golovinsky: Kamernïye ansambli Borodina [Borodin’s chamber music] (Moscow, 1972)

D. Lloyd-Jones: ‘Towards a Scholarly Edition of Borodin’s Symphonies’, Soundings, vi (1977), 81–7

E. Garden: ‘The “Programme” of Borodin’s Second Quartet’, MT, cxxviii (1987), 76–8

H. Halbreich: ‘Un chef-d’oeuvre inconnu: la première symphonie de Borodine’, Sonances, vii/1 (1987–8), 8–15

R. Threlfall: ‘A Borodin MS in London’, MT, cxxviii (1987), 74–6

e: songs

V. Vasina-Grossman: ‘Romansï Borodina’ [Borodin’s songs], Russkiy klassicheskiy romans XIX veka (Moscow, 1956), 214–27

G. Abraham: ‘Arab Melodies in Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin’, ML, lvi (1975), 313–18; repr. in Essays on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 93–8

P. Weber-Bockholdt: ‘Bylinen-Tradition bei Borodin und Mussorgskij’, Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Just and R. Wiesend (Tutzing, 1989), 347–69

Borodina, Olga

(b Leningrad, 29 July 1963). Russian mezzo-soprano. In 1987, while still a student at the Leningrad Conservatory, she joined the Kirov Opera, where her first role was Siebel. She quickly became one of the company’s leading members, and television relays of Boris Godunov and War and Peace, allied to early success in international competitions, brought her to attention in the West. Musorgsky’s Marina was also the role of her Paris (1992) and Metropolitan Opera (1998) débuts; she has recorded the part, along with such roles as Marfa (Khovanshchina), Hélène Bezukhova (War and Peace), Konchakovna (Prince Igor), Olga and Preziosilla (in the original version of La forza del destino), mostly with the Kirov. Further Russian parts include Lyubasha (The Tsar’s Bride), Laura (The Stone Guest) and the title role of Musorgsky’s Salammbô (in concert). She is admired in French repertory and since making her Covent Garden début in 1992 as Dalila has sung the part widely, and recorded it. Carmen is another of Borodina’s signature roles, and she has also sung Marguerite in La damnation de Faust. She sang Angelina (La Cenerentola) at Covent Garden (1994) and San Francisco (1995), has recorded Eboli, and undertook her first Amneris on stage in Vienna in 1998. She is also a regular on the recital platform (making her Wigmore Hall début in 2000) and has recorded an admired disc of Tchaikovsky songs. While she is not always specific in her characterizations, her rich, liquid tone makes her one of the most sought-after Russian singers of her generation.

JOHN ALLISON

Borodin Quartet.

Russian string quartet. It was founded at the Moscow Conservatory in 1945 by the viola virtuoso Rudolf Barshay, with the violinists Rostislav Dubinsky and Vladimir Rabeiy and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (soon replaced by Valentin Berlinsky). The ensemble gave its first concert in October 1946 as the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet. Barshay developed a close connection with Shostakovich and the group quickly established itself among the finest interpreters of that composer’s chamber music. In 1947 Nina Barshay became the second violinist but in 1952 she was replaced by Yaroslav Aleksandrov; and two years later Rudolf Barshay joined the new Tchaikovsky Quartet, making way for Dmitry Shebalin. In 1955 the group took Borodin’s name. At first its activities were curbed by the Soviet regime but in 1955 it was allowed to visit East Germany and Czechoslovakia and in the late 1950s it began to tour widely. Its technical skill and tonal sheen were widely admired, although reservations were expressed about the almost narcissistic quality of some of its interpretations and its blatant use of such devices as senza vibrata. In the Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Franck and Shostakovich piano quintets it was often joined by Svyatoslav Richter. Aleksandrov’s illness in 1974 caused his replacement by Andrey Abramenkov and in 1976 Dubinsky defected to the West, the new leader being Mikhail Kopelman. This formation was technically more vulnerable but musically more penetrating; and its interpretation of Shostakovich’s 15th Quartet – performed with the stage lit by candles, to focus the concentration of players and audience – was memorable. In 1990–92 the quartet was resident at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Yet another change of personnel in 1996 left Berlinsky as the sole survivor of the ensemble’s best days: Shebalin retired, to be replaced by Igor Naydin, and Kopelman joined the Tokyo Quartet, Ruben Aharonian coming in as leader. Since 1950 the ensemble has made many recordings, featuring music by Bach, Barber, Szymanowski, Stenhammar and Schoenberg alongside its specialities: Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Many of its recordings of the Viennese Classics and of French music have also been effective but sometimes it has given the impression of passing its interpretations down through the generations like holy writ. Works have been written for it by Vissarion Shebalin (father of its long-serving viola player), Mosey Wemberg, Anatoly Aleksandrov, Lev Knipper and Alfred Schnittke. In 2000 it began a project of playing the complete Beethoven and Shostakovich quartets in several major centres.

TULLY POTTER

Boronat, Olimpia

(b Genoa, 1867; d Warsaw, 1934).Italian soprano. She is believed to have studied with Franco Leoni in Milan and to have begun her operatic career in Italian provincial theatres, later singing in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. She was engaged at the Imperial Opera in St Petersburg from 1890 to 1893, when she married and left the stage. In 1901 she resumed her operatic career and sang in Russia and Poland until 1914. Her voice was exceptional for its crystalline purity and flexibility, ideally displayed in her repertory of lyric soprano roles, which included Thomas's Ophelia, Rosina, Gilda (whose ‘Caro nome’ she recorded with delicacy and technical brilliance), Violetta and Bellini’s Elvira.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Witten: ‘Olimpia Boronat Discography’, Record Collector, xx (1971–2), 160–63

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, ii (London, 1977), 143–4

J.B. Steane: The Grand Tradition (London, 1974/R), 108–9

HAROLD BARNES/ALAN BLYTH

Boroni [Baroni, Borroni, Buroni, Burroni], Antonio

(b Rome, 1738; d Rome, 21 Dec 1792). Italian composer. He studied with Martini in Bologna, then in 1757 at the Pietà dei Turchini Conservatory, Naples, with Abos and Lorenzo Fago. In 1758 he returned to Rome, where he gave music lessons to Clementi, to whom he was related. According to Schmidl, his earliest known work was L’unzione del reale profeta Davidde, to a text by Goldoni, at whose expense it was performed ‘in an apartment’ at Venice on 23 March 1760. In 1761 his first comic opera, La moda, was performed at Turin (revived Venice, 1769) and he wrote the recitatives and some of the arias for Demofoonte, performed in Senigallia in the same year. After producing six operas at Venice (1763–6) he went to Prague with the Bustelli opera company; two new operas by him were put on there (1767–8), and in 1768 the company went to Dresden, where his next opera was performed in 1769 (revived Venice, Carnival 1770).

On 6 May 1770 Boroni arrived in Stuttgart, where he succeeded Jommelli as Kapellmeister; his first contract ran from 18 June 1771 to 18 October 1774 and was renewed for four years. In 1770 a revision of his earlier comic opera L’amore in musica was staged there, but the Italian opera in Stuttgart was deteriorating, and while there he composed only opéras comiques and perhaps a setting of Metastasio’s L’isola disabitata (the evidence for this is a score in D-Bsb dated 31 December 1775). At the end of 1777 he returned to Rome, where his last opera was staged. On 21 March he was named maestro di cappella at S Pietro. Much of Boroni’s sacred music was composed during his tenure at S Pietro. According to the libretto of a cantata composed to a text by Vincenzo Monti for the birth of the dauphin in 1782, he was then also maestro di cappella at S Luigi dei Francesi. From about 1790 he also held that post at S Apollinare, the church of the Collegio Germanico.

Boroni’s career as an opera composer was relatively short and unprolific, but his comic operas were mostly very successful, particularly L’amore in musica, which was widely performed. Through a mistake in Gerber’s Lexicon several operas by G.B. Borghi (Alessandro in Armenia, Ricimero, La donna instabile, Eumene) have frequently been attributed to Boroni; because of their dates the second and third of these are sometimes stated to have been composed at Stuttgart.

WORKS

operas

Demofoonte (os, P. Metastasio), Senigallia, 1761 [incl. music not by Boroni]

La moda (dg, P. Cipretti), Turin, 1761, rev. Venice, 1769, D-Dl, I-MOe

L’amore in musica (dg, ? F. Griselini, after his La Reginella, o La virtuosa di musica), Venice, S Moisè, 15 Oct 1763, A-Wn, D-Dl, Wa, F-Pn, I-Fc, MOe, Nc, P-La

La pupilla rapita (dg), Venice, S Moisè, aut. 1763, collab. S. Laurenti

Sofonisba (dramma per musica, M. Verazi), Venice, S Salvatore, Ascension 1764, D-Dl, P-La

Siroe (dramma per musica, Metastasio), Venice, S Salvatore, 1764, D-Dl

Le villeggiatrici ridicole (dramma comico, A. Bianchi), Venice, S Cassiano, aut. 1765

La notte critica (dg, C. Goldoni), Venice, S Cassiano, carn. 1766, D-Dl, P-La

Artaserse (dramma per musica, Metastasio), Prague, Kotzen, Jan 1767, D-Dl

Didone (dramma per musica, Metastasio), Prague, Kotzen, carn. 1768, Dl

Il carnovale (dg, P. Chiari), Dresden, Hof, 1769, Dl, P-La

Le orfane svizzere (dg, Chiari), Venice, S Moisè, aut. 1770, D-Dl, F-Pn

Le contadine furlane (dg, Chiari), Venice, S Moisè, carn. 1771, D-Dl

Le déserteur; L’amour fraternel; Zémire et Azor (opéras comiques), Stuttgart, 1774–5

L’isola disabitata (int, Metastasio), ?Stuttgart, 31 Dec 1775, D-Bsb, Mbs, Rtt

Enea nel Lazio (dramma per musica, V.A. Cigna-Santi), Rome, Argentina, carn. 1778; ov. Hs, I-Rdp

other works

Sacred: numerous masses, motets, pss, lits, canticles, A-Wn, D-Bsb, MÜs, GB-Lcm, I-Bc, Gl, Nc, Rf, Rvat; Quid retribuam Domino, 2vv, org, Verbum caro, 2vv, org, Mag, 4vv, org, all in Pubblicazione periodica di musica sacra (Rome, 1878–81)

Other works: 1 ode in 6 ode di Oratio (London, c1775); Sym., D (Leipzig, 1772); Ov., D (Paris, n.d.) [perhaps same piece as preceding]; Fl Conc., formerly D-DS; Bn Conc., mentioned by Gerber; Rondeau (n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Simonetti)

EitnerQ

GeberL

SchmidlD

J. Sittard: Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am württembergischen Hofe (Stuttgart, 1890–91/R)

L. Kantner: Aurea Luce: Musik an St Peter in Rome 1790–1850 (Vienna, 1979)

DENNIS LIBBY, JAMES L. JACKMAN

Borosini.

Italian family of singers.

(2) Francesco Borosini [Borseni]

(3) Rosa Borosini [née d’Ambreville]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

SartoriL

E.J. Luin: ‘Antonio e Francesco Borosini, due celebri cantanti del XVIIe secolo’, RMI, xxxix (1932), 41–5

R. Strohm: ‘Francesco Gasparini, le sue opere tarde e G.F. Handel’, Francesco Gasparini: Camaiore 1978, 71–83; Eng. trans. in Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1985), 80–92

CARLO VITALI (1), WINTON DEAN (2, 3)

Borosini

(1) Antonio Borosini [Boresini, Borosino]

(b Venice or Modena, c1655; dVienna, after 1721). Tenor. He sang at S Marco, Venice, 1679–87, then moved to the ducal chapel at Modena, singing in oratorios and at the Teatro Fontanelli (1690, Legrenzi’s Eteocle e Polinice) and in Parma and Reggio nell’Emilia. In 1688 he was released at the request of the Elector of Hanover to sing in the première of Steffani’s Henrico Leone (30 January 1689); he returned to Hanover for Carnival 1696. He was appointed to the imperial court at Vienna in 1692 and retired in 1711 (or 1721, according to J.G. Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon, Leipzig, 1732). He sang at the S Bartolomeo, Naples (1700, 1706–7), in Turin (1698, 1702), in Venice (1704–7, in serenatas and operas by C.F. Pollarolo and Caldara), in Genoa (1691, 1705, Caldara’s Arminio) and at Pratolino (1707, Perti’s Dionisio). His last theatrical appearance may have been in Vienna, in Conti’s Alba Cornelia (1714). He was usually cast as heroic and solemn characters such as kings or military leaders. He was also a composer; some arias are extant (in I-MOe).

Borosini

(2) Francesco Borosini [Borseni]

(b Modena, c1690; d after 1747). Tenor, son of (1) Antonio Borosini. A pupil of his father, he probably made his début in Lotti’s Il vincitor generoso at Venice in 1709. He was engaged for the imperial court at Vienna from 1712 to 1731, and sang there in 11 oratorios by Caldara and a number of operas by Fux, the first (Orfeo ed Euridice) in 1715, and Conti. He was in the famous production of Fux’s Costanza e Fortezza in Prague (1723), and was for a time co-director of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna. He sang the title role in Gasparini’s Bajazet (1719, Reggio nell’Emilia), and appeared at Modena (1720) and Parma (1729). He made his London début as Bajazet in Handel’s Tamerlano at the King’s Theatre (1724); he collaborated in Handel’s treatment of this subject, and the part was rewritten for him before performance. Borosini sang Sextus (a soprano part rewritten with new music) in Giulio Cesare and was the original Grimoaldo in Rodelinda (1725); he also appeared in Ariosti’s Artaserse and Dario and the Vinci-Orlandini Elpidia. He returned in 1747 to sing in Paradies’s Fetonte and Terradellas’s Bellerofonte. A collection of One Hundred Cantici in Italian after the Manner of English Canons and Catches by ‘Signor Borosini’, published in London about this time, is attributed to him.

Borosini was the first great Italian tenor to sing in London. Quantz called him a splendid singer and a fine actor, with a voice ‘ausserordentlich biegsam und lebhaft’. The parts Handel composed for him were of exceptional quality and prominence, especially Bajazet, which has a compass of two octaves (A to a') and requires a wide range of expression and dramatic power. Gasparini’s parts for him extend down to G; Fux’s are notated in the bass clef. He excelled in a forceful style of singing, with wide leaps and energetic declamation.

Borosini

(3) Rosa Borosini [née d’Ambreville]

(b Modena, c1693; d after 1740). Soprano, wife of (2) Francesco Borosini. She was the daughter of the second maestro di cappella at Modena, and probably married Borosini in 1722. She sang in opera at Modena (1713–14, 1717 and 1720), Venice (1715–16), Mantua (1718) and Turin (1719). On 1 March 1721 she was engaged for Vienna at a salary of 1800 florins, retiring on a pension in 1740. She sang in a number of oratorios by Caldara and in Fux’s Costanza e Fortezza at Prague in August 1723. Her sister Anna (wife of the cellist Giovanni Perroni) sang at Bologna (1711), Modena (1713), Venice (1714 and 1726) and Milan (1728). She was engaged for Vienna at the same time as Rosa, but at a lower salary. Both singers sang in Vivaldi’s operatic undertakings in Venice and Mantua. Eleonora Borosini, a singer active at Innsbruck, Düsseldorf and Mannheim (1714–23), was not related to Rosa and Anna, but may have been related to (1) Antonio.

Borowski, Felix

(b Burton-in-Kendal, Cumbria, 10 March 1872; d Chicago, 6 Sept 1956). American composer, teacher and critic of British origin. He was educated in London and Cologne and began his career in Aberdeen. In 1897 he joined the Chicago Musical College as teacher of the violin, composition and history. He became president of the college (1916–25) and then moved to Northwestern University, first as special lecturer in history and form, then as professor of musicology (1937–42). His books The Standard Operas (Chicago, 1928) and The Standard Concert Guide (Chicago, 1932), republished together in 1936, were expansions of works by George P. Upton, whose role as Chicago’s leading music critic (for the Chicago Tribune) Borowski inherited. He was also responsible for building the music collection of the Newberry Library, beginning soon after his arrival in Chicago and continuing as a part-time staff member (1920–56).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Boudour (ballet), 1919; A Century of the Dance (ballet), 1934; Fernando del Nonsensico (op), 1935

Orch: Pf Conc., 1914; Allegro de concert, org, orch, 1915; Elégie symphonique, 1917; 3 peintures, 1918; Le printemps passionné, 1920; Youth, 1922; Ecce homo, 1923; Semiramis, 1924; 3 syms., 1931, 1933, 1938; The Mirror, 1953

Other works: 3 str qts, 1897, 1928, 1944; 3 org sonatas; short vn pieces, incl. Adoration; short vocal and pf pieces

DONALD W. KRUMMEL

Borowsky, Alexander [Aleksandr]

(b Mitau [now Jelgava, Latvia], 6/18 March 1889; d Waban, MA, 27 April 1968). American pianist of Russian birth. He received his first instruction from his mother, an accomplished pianist who had been a pupil of Safonov. Subsequently he pursued studies in law before entering the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied with Anna Esipova. In 1912 he was awarded the Rubinstein Prize and began his career as a soloist performing throughout Russia. Between 1915 and 1920 he taught masterclasses at the Moscow Conservatory, after which he toured extensively in Europe appearing as recitalist and soloist with most of the major symphony orchestras and conductors. In 1941 he settled in the USA, becoming professor of piano at Boston University in 1956.

Borowsky’s repertory was wide and unusually eclectic, ranging from 18th-century music (Bach remained a special preoccupation) to works by Hindemith, Schoenberg, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, as well as contemporary French composers. Throughout his career he maintained a keen interest in new developments, giving the première of Lopatnikoff’s Sonata in E op.29 in 1944 and often featuring works by Messiaen in his programmes. Ironically, his most extended series of recordings features the first 15 Hungarian rhapsodies of Liszt, a composer whose works he played comparatively rarely. The taste and refinement for which he was renowned, however, are evident here, as well as a distinctive tonal warmth and clarity of articulation.

CHARLES HOPKINS

Borrel, Eugène (Marie-Valentin)

(b Libourne, Gironde, 22 Aug 1876; d Paris, 19 Feb 1962). French violinist and musicologist. He began violin lessons with Garcin at the Paris Conservatoire in 1888 but left in 1890 to follow his parents to Turkey. On his return to Paris about 1900 he studied at the Ecole Niedermeyer with Lefèvre (harmony, counterpoint and fugue) and at the Schola Cantorum under Gastoué (plainchant) and d'Indy (composition). In 1909 he founded, with Félix Raugel, the Société Haendel, which by 1914 had brought to the notice of the Parisian public some 150 neglected works mainly by 18th-century composers; over half were first performances. As a violin teacher at the Schola Cantorum (1911–34), he revived the neglected music of the 18th-century French violin school and violin concertos by Vivaldi and Tartini. He founded the Confrérie Liturgique in 1912, became organist at St François-Xavier in Paris in 1920 and from 1935 to 1953 was professor of music history at the newly founded Ecole César Franck. From 1935 to 1948 he was secretary of the Société Française de Musicologie.

Borrel was at the same time an organist, a journalist (between 1911 and 1929 he published many articles of music criticism in the Tribune de Saint-Gervais), a teacher and a musicologist. Essentially his scholarly publications fall into two categories. On the one hand, he published a number of articles on Turkish music, of which he gained a good knowledge during his stay in Turkey. The majority of his work, however, is concerned with French music of the Baroque era (the term ‘baroque’ was not used in France at this time). L'interprétation de la musique française (de Lully à la Révolution) (1934) is founded on an extensive knowledge of this repertory, which Borrel compared with contemporaneous writings (for the time an entirely new approach). Borrel also contributed to making this music known to the public, as much by numerous concerts which he organized in Paris between the two world wars as by his writings. Among his shorter writings are articles in Jacques Chailley’s Précis de musicologie (Paris, 1958) and Roland-Manuel’s Histoire de la musique (ii, Paris, 1963) as well as in major encyclopedias (EMDC, ES, FasquelleE, Grove5, MGG1).

WRITINGS

Contribution à l'intérpretation de la musique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1914)

La réalisation de la basse chiffrée dans les oeuvres de l'école française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1920)

‘La question de la polyphonie en Orient’, Tribune de Saint-Gervais, xxii (1921), 57–64

‘La musique turque’, RdM, iii (1922), 149–61; iv (1923), 26–32, 60–70

‘Mélodies israélites recueillies à Salonique’, RdM, v (1924), 164–8

Solfège grégorien (Paris, 1926)

‘Contribution à la bibliographie de la musique turque au XXe siècle’, Revue des études islamiques, ii (1928), 513–27

‘Un paradoxe musicale au XVIIIe siècle’, Mélanges de musicologie offerts à M. Lionel de La Laurencie (Paris, 1933), 217–21

‘Un cours d’interprétation de la musique de violon au XIIIe siècle par Cambini’, RdM, xiii (1929), 120–24

L'interprétation de la musique française (de Lully à la Révolution) (Paris, 1934/R 1978, with new introduction, index and bibliography of Borrel's sources by E. Schwandt) [new edn of Contribution à l’interpretation and La réalisation de la basse chiffrée]

‘Sur la musique secrète des tribus turques Aléir’, Revue des études islamiques, viii (1934), 241–50

‘La Confrérie d'Ahi Baba à Tchankiri’, Revue des études islamiques, x (1936), 309–32

‘Les poètes Kizil Bach et leur musique’, Revue des études islamiques, xv (1947), 157–90

Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris, 1949)

La sonate (Paris, 1951)

‘La strumentazione della sinfonia francese del sec. XVIII’, L'orchestra (Florence, 1954), 7–22

La symphonie (Paris, 1954)

‘La vie musicale de M.-A. Charpentier d'après le Mercure galant (1678–1704)’, XVIIe siècle, nos.21–22 (1954), 433–41

‘Notes sur l'orchestration de l'opéra Jephté de Montéclair (1733) et de la Symphonie des Élements de J.-F. Rebel (1737)’, ReM, no.226 (1955), 105–16

‘L'orchestre du Concert Spirituel et celui de l'Opéra de Paris, de 1751 à 1800, d'après les “Spectacles de Paris”’, Mélanges d'histoire et d'esthétique musicales offerts à Paul-Marie Masson (Paris, 1955), 9–15

‘Remarques sur l'histoire de la musique au théâtre en France au XVIIe siècle’, RdM, xxxix (1957), 56–60

‘Du milieu du XVIIe siècle à la disparition de la basse continue’, ‘De la disparation de la basse continue à la mort de Beethoven’, Précis de Musicologie, ed. J. Chailley (Paris, 1958), 232–50, 257–61

‘La querelle des Bouffons’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, ii (Paris, 1963), 26–39

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (J. Gribenski) [incl. full list of writings and editions]

F. Raugel: ‘Eugène Borrel’, RdM, xlviii (1962), 207–8

FÉLIX RAUGEL/MALCOLM TURNER/JEAN GRIBENSKI

Borren, Charles van den.

See Van den Borren, Charles.

Børresen, (Aksel Ejnar) Hakon

(b Copenhagen, 2 June 1876; d Copenhagen, 6 Oct 1954). Danish composer. Early in life he became a pupil of Svendsen, whose orchestral genius permanently influenced him. He then studied in Germany and France (1902), and lived for the rest of his life as a freelance artist, though he contributed significantly to Scandinavian musical life as an administrator; he was, for instance, chairman of the Dansk Tonekunstner Forening (1924–49).

Even in his early orchestral works Børresen showed a confident sense of form and balanced orchestration, talents which were eventually to make him the principal Danish successor of Svendsen. His Second Symphony ‘Havet’ belongs to the Scandinavian tradition of ocean symphonies; it is outstanding more for its lyrical tone and superior orchestral treatment than for any originality. A lyrical, eclectic approach also marked most of his later orchestral and chamber music as well as his stage works. Partly influenced by the one-act operas of Strauss and of the verismo composers, his conversational opera Den kongelige gaest has a secure scenic layout, vocally idiomatic declamation and an accompaniment that constantly carries the work forwards – qualities which made the piece an immediate success and have established it as one of the most frequently performed Danish operas of the century. His second opera, Kaddara, on a theme from Greenland, did not achieve the same popularity; the rest of his dramatic compositions are less substantial.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Den kongelige gaest (op, S. Leopold, after H. Pontoppidan), Copenhagen, 1919; Kaddara (op, C.M. Normann-Hansen), Copenhagen, 1921; Tycho Brahes drøm (ballet, V. Cavling), Copenhagen, 1924; incid music

Orch: Sym. no.1, c, op.3, 1900; Sym. no.2 ‘Havet’, A, op.7, 1904; Vn Conc., G, op.11, 1904; Ov. ‘Normannerne’, op.16, 1912; Sym. no.3, C, op.21, 1925–6; Ov. ‘Hamlet’, op.25, 1937; Serenade, hn, str, timp, 1943

Choral: Farende sanger, chorus, orch, 1936

Chbr: Sextet, op.5, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, 1901; Sonata, a, op.9, vn, pf, 1907; Str Qt no.1, e, op.18, 1913; Str Qt no.2, c, 1939; pf and org pieces

Songs: Sange af J.P. Jacobsen, op.8, 1905; 3 sange, op.19, 1913

Principal publisher: Hansen

MSS in DK-Kk

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Hetsch: ‘Den kongelige gaest’, Musik, iii (1919), 163–5

G. Hauch: ‘En opera om Grønland og eskimoerne’, Ord och bild, xxx (1921), 381–4

S. Berg: ‘Hakon Børresens kompositioner’, DMt, xxi (1946), 78–80 [work-list only]

NIELS MARTIN JENSEN

Borri, Giovanni Battista

(b Bologna; fl 1665–88). Italian composer. His only published collection, Sinfonie (Bologna, 1688), consists of 12 sonatas for two violins, cello and organ continuo. Nine sonatas are in the four movements typical of the Corellian sonata da chiesa (slow–fast–slow–fast); the others are multi-sectional. Other works by him include the oratorio La Susanna (in I-Fn), and a mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo) for four and five voices, strings and continuo dated 1665 (in GB-Lcm and Ob). A Kyrie and Gloria for eight voices and strings (in Lcm) is also attributed to Borri, as are one or two other sacred pieces (in F-Pn and I-MOe). (NewmanSBE)

SANDRA MANGSEN

Borris, Siegfried

(b Berlin, 4 Nov 1906; d Berlin, 23 Aug 1987). German composer and teacher. He studied economics at the University of Berlin (1925–7) before entering the Berlin Musikhochschule to become one of Hindemith’s first composition students. In 1929 he was appointed lecturer in theory and aural training at the Musikhochschule and also began musicological studies under Schering at the University of Berlin (PhD, 1933). Borris then gave up his teaching position and for the next 12 years devoted himself to composition and private teaching. He returned to the Musikhochschule as professor in 1945 and until 1971 lectured on music history and led seminars on the analysis of new music, music education and the psychology of music; from 1967 he also served as director of the Julius Stern Institute. Central to Borris’s extensive and diversified compositional output are his ‘Spielstücke’ and other educationally orientated works – epigrammatic piano pieces, lively and colourful chamber and orchestral works, lieder and choral works in a traditional vocal style and youth operas to his own texts. His compositions sometimes bear the influence of Hindemith, but Borris often deliberately cultivates a clearer and simpler style in which folk music plays a role.

WORKS

(selective list)

orchestral

Suite, 1938; 5 syms., b, 1940, E, 1940, A, 1942, E, 1943, c, 1943; Aeolische Suite, str, 1943; Concertino, eng hn, str, 1949; Divertimento, 5 wind, str, 1951; 6 intrade serene, 1952; Conc., hpd, fl, bn, str, 1952; Concertino, fl, str, 1953; Concertino, accdn, orch, 1955; Conc., vas da gamba, 3 ww, str, 1957; Pf Conc., 1962; Conc. for Orch, 1964; Hymnus, ob, orch, 1964; Org Conc., 1965; Sax Conc., 1966; Hn Conc., 1967; Conc., str, 1968; Evolution, 19 wind, 3 db, harp, perc, 1972

chamber and instrumental

Ob Qt, 1938; Str Qt, 1938; Wind Qnt, 1938; Str Qt, 1941; Wind Octet, 1941; Str Qt, 1953; Octet, cl, bn, hn, str, 1960; Pf Qnt, 1960; Wind Sextet, 1966; 15 sonatas, 16 duos, 16 trios; other chbr works

Kbd: Pf Sonata, C, 1936; 5 Stücke, pf, 1936; 18 Variationen, pf, 1937; Variationen, 2 pf, 1939; 3 pf suites, 1943; 3 pf sonatas, 1944; 2 pf sonatinas, 1944; Das grosse Spielbuch, pf, 1948; Tierfabeln, pf, 1949; 9 Variationen, hpd, 1951; 9 Bagatellen, pf, 1955; 2 Fantasien, org, 1955; 3 canzonas, org, 1958; Concertino, 2 pf, 1960; Rhapsodie, pf duet, 1960; Partita, hpd, 1961

stage and vocal

Hans im Glück, radio op, 1947; Hirotas und Gerline, radio op, 1948; Frühlingsgesellen, Liederspiel, 1951; Die Rübe, Märchenoper, 1953; Ruf des Lebens, scenic cant., 1954; Das letzte Spiel, ballet, 1955

Missa ‘Dona nobis pacem’, 1953; Weihnachtsmotette, 1955; Lied der Stadt, chorus, orch, 1958; Ps cxxxv, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1963; Jolanthe, S, male chorus, 1964; 6 cants., 14 sets of lieder

Principal publisher: Sirius

WRITINGS

Kirnbergers Leben und Werk und seine Bedeutung im Berliner Musikkreis um 1750 (Kassel, 1933)

Praktische Harmonielehre (Berlin, 1938, 5/1972)

Beiträge zu einer neuen Musikkunde (Berlin, 1947–8)

Einführung in die moderne Musik (Halle, 1951)

Klingende Elementarlehre (Berlin, 1951, 2/1973)

Die Oper im 20. Jahrhundert (Wolfenbüttel, 1962–73)

Der Schlüssel zur Musik von heute (Düsseldorf, 1967)

Musikleben in Japan (Kassel, 1967)

Die grossen Orchester (Düsseldorf, 1969)

Kulturgut Musik als Massenware (Wiesbaden, 1978)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (U. Klein)

G. Schweizer: ‘Siegfried Borris: Wegbereiter neuer Musik’, ZfM, Jg.114 (1953), 272–6

O. Riemer: ‘Ruf des Lebens: zum Schaffen des Komponisten S.B.’, Musica, ix (1955), 151–4

R. Jakoby and C. Kühn, eds.: Festschrift für Siegfried Borris (Wilhelmshaven, 1982)

GEORGE W. LOOMIS

Borro, Johann Jacob.

See Porro, Giovanni Giacomo.

Borroff, Edith

(b New York, 2 Aug 1925). American musicologist and composer. The daughter of pianist Marie Bergersen and (Albert) Ramon Borroff, a tenor who sold carillons by trade, she was raised in a home of extraordinary musical and artistic talent. At the age of 16 she entered the American Conservatory of Music, Chicago (MusB 1946, MusM 1948), where she studied the piano with Louise Robyn and composition with Irwin Fischer. In 1958 she earned a PhD in music history from the University of Michigan. She was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1972–3 and in 1973 joined the faculty of SUNY-Binghamton, where she taught until her retirement in 1992. Noted for her work in early music, Borroff has also championed American music, women in music and liberal arts in the 20th-century. She is the author of more than 15 books, including the comprehensive Music in Europe and the United States: a History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971/R), and more than 100 articles on wide-ranging historical and theoretical topics. Her well-crafted compositions, which span a career of over 70 years, are marked by diverse compositional styles.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Spring over Brooklyn (musical), 1952; Pygmalion (incid music, G.B. Shaw), S, chbr chorus, ww qnt, 2 perc, 1955; La folle de chaillot (J. Giraudoux), S, perc, pf, 1960; The Sun and the Wind: a Musical Fable (op, 3 scenes, E. Borroff), 1977

instrumental

4 or more insts: Str Qt, c1942; Grande rondo, str qt, c1943; Str Trio, 1944, rev. 1952; Theme and Variations, vc, pf, c1944; Qnt, cl, str, 1945; Str Qt no.3, e, 1945; Minuet, str orch, 1946; Ww Qnt, D, c1947; Ww Qnt, C, 1948; Vorspiel über das Thema ‘In dulci jubilo’, 2 fl, 2 hn, pf, 1951; Variations for Band, 1965; Chance Encounter (Romp or Rehearsal?), str qt, 1974; Game Pieces, suite, ww qnt, 1980; Mar Conc., 1981; Suite: 8 Canons for 6 Players, perc, 1984; Mottoes, suite, 8 sax, 1989; 2 Pieces from the Old Rag Bag, sax qt, 1989

2–3 insts: Berceuse, rec, vc, pf, 1944; Song Without Words, va/vc, pf, 1944; Sonata, vc, pf, c1946; Sonatina giocosa, va, pf, 1952; Sonata, hn, pf, 1954; Variations and Theme, ob, pf, 1956; Voices in Exile: 3 Canons, fl, va, 1962; Ions: 14 Pieces in the Form of a Sonnet, fl, pf, 1968; Trio, t sax, perc, pf, 1982; Trio, vn, vc, pf, 1983; The Elements, sonata, vn, vc, 1987; Comic Miniatures, suite, vn, pf, 1988; 5 Pieces, va, pf, 1989; An Historical Anagram: 11 Duets, 2 rec, 1991; 32 Variations in the Form of a Sonata, cl, pf, 1991; Rondelay, 2 vn, 1992; Sonata, vc, pf, 1993; Sonata no.2, vn, vc, pf, 1995; Interactions, suite, 2 ob, 1996

Solo: Passacaglia, org, 1946; A Suite for Drukka, pf, 1948; Org Prelude, D, 1950; Rag no.1, pf, 1952; Rag no.2, pf, 1972; Divertimento, fl, 1980; 3 Chorale Preludes, 1981; Variations on 2 American Tunes, org, 1982; An American Olio, org, 1983; Sonata, gui, 1983; Diptych, org, 1985; Fantasy, 2 pf, 1985; Honors for His Name: a Celebration of Praises, org, 1985; Variations on a Trill, pf, 1985; Meditation and Toccata, org, 1989; Wings of Love, sonata, org, 1989 [Amer. hymn tunes]; Figures of Speech, hpd, 1990; Aria, org, 1993; International Suite: a Quodlibet, pf, 1994

vocal

Choral: 3 Madrigals (E. Borroff, M. Borroff), female chorus, 1953; A Psalm of Praise, SATB, 1972; The Poet (W. Shakespeare), tr vv, pf, 1973; Choral Trilogy (J. Rinka), SSAATTBB, 1983; Light in Dark Places (19th-century black women), SATB, pf, 1988; Love and Law (Pss, Bible: 1 John), anthem, TBB, 1990; A Holy Thing (T. Moore), TBB, 1991; A Joyful Noise (Bible, T. Moore), vv soloists, SATB, 3 tpt, pf, 1991

Songs: Summum Bonum (R. Browning), 1949; Feed my Sheep (M.B. Eddy), 1953; 7 Early Songs, 1957; Truth (Pss), 1973; Goodbye, Baby! (E. Borroff), rock song, 1978; Modern Love (song-cycle, J. Keats, P.B. Shelley), 7 lyrics, S, pf, 1979; A House of Love (G. Meyers), 5 songs, 1986; Food and Gladness (F. Farmer), 7 songs, 1986; The Querulous Music Teacher (Meyers), 1987; A Love Song of the 80s (E. Borroff), 1989; Changeling (F.B. Jacobs), S, ob, bn, pf, 1990; 5 Whitman Songs (W. Whitman), 1990

Other solo: Abelard’s Monologue, Bar, orch, 1948; Missa patrinae rerum Domini, solo v, org, 1961

editions

E.-C. Jacquet de La Guerre: Sonata in D major (1707) (Pittsburgh, 1961)

J.F. Rebel: Sonata in G minor (1713) (Pittsburgh, 1961)

J.-J. Cassanéa de Mondonville: Jubilate (Pittsburgh, 1961)

A. Rener: Missa dominicalis in L. Duyler: The Emperor Maximilian I and Music, ii (London, 1973)

MSS in US-CN

WRITINGS

An Introduction to Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre (Brooklyn, NY, 1966)

Music of the Baroque (Dubuque, IA, 1970)

Music in Europe and the United States: a History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971/R)

ed.: Notations and Editions: a Book in Honor of Louise Cuyler (Dubuque, IA, 1974/R)

with M. Irvin: Music in Perspective (New York, 1976)

Three American Composers (Lanham, MI, 1986)

American Operas: a Checklist (Warren, MI, 1992)

Music Melting Round: a History of Music in the United States (New York, 1995)

William Grant Still (forthcoming)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Franco: A Study in Selected Piano Chamber Works by Twentieth Century American Women Composers (diss., Columbia U., 1985)

J. Regier: The Organ Works of Edith Borroff (diss., U. of Oklahoma, 1993)

H.W. Heape: Sacred Songs and Arias by Women Composers (DMA diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1995)

JANET REGIER

Borromeo, Carlo

(b Arona, 2 Oct 1538; d Milan, 3 Nov 1584). Italian ecclesiastic. His career as churchman was spectacular. Born into a well-established Milanese family, he took a degree in theology and law at Padua in 1559. When his uncle Giovanni Angelo de' Medici (of the Milanese Medici family, not the Florentine) was elected Pope Pius IV in December 1559, the young Borromeo rose swiftly to high office. In January 1560 he was made papal secretary of state and cardinal; the next month he was appointed Archbishop of Milan. Within two years he proved himself an exceptional statesman, reviving the moribund Council of Trent and guiding it to a successful conclusion in 1563, 18 years after its beginnings. From 1560 to 1565, while at Rome, he was the foremost figure in the papal government after the pope. In 1610 he was canonized.

There is ample evidence of Borromeo's interest in sacred music. In 1561–2 an exchange took pace between Rome and the ducal court of Bavaria, organized by Borromeo, Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg and Cardinal Vitellozzo Vitelli; music by Lassus was sent to Rome, and masses by François Roussel and Palestrina were sent to Munich. Cardinal Truchsess reported that Lassus's music, particularly the Masses, ‘has pleased not only Vitelli in particular, and everyone here, but especially Cardinal Borromeo, who has had them copied and wishes to have them performed in the Papal Chapel’. There is no real evidence, however, that this exchange involved considerations of reform. In 1565 Borromeo and Vitelli were appointed by the pope to a commission to examine the papal choir with the object of correcting abuses. The commission examined individual singers and 13 were eventually expelled, chiefly for the poor quality of their voices. In April 1565 Borromeo and Vitelli called in the papal singers to try out some masses to ‘test whether the words could be understood’, as the chapel scribe put it. During the earlier part of 1565 Borromeo had written to his vicar in Milan to order the choirmaster of the cathedral, Vincenzo Ruffo, ‘to compose a mass which should be as clear as possible and to send it to me here’. He also suggested that a similar mass be written by ‘don Nicola della musica Cromatica’ – i.e. Nicola Vicentino – so that better comparison could be made of what he calls ‘intelligible music’. Whether Palestrina's famous Missa Papae Marcelli could also have been written at this time, and perhaps performed at this trial, is unknown, despite assertions of this point since Giuseppe Baini. On the other hand it is virtually certain that such a mass was provided in 1565 by Ruffo, as he later reported in the preface to his Missae quatuor (1570).

In 1565 Borromeo returned to Milan with the intention of reforming by example as resident archbishop. It was in the matter of music-making in female convents that his personal interference was most strongly felt. Initially he was motivated more by a desire to enforce strict enclosure than a distrust of music per se, but after an outbreak of plague in 1576 his attitude towards all frivolity, including music, hardened (Kendrick). Nevertheless, he was far from unappreciative of sacred music, over which he continued to exercise a strong influence. Ruffo remained as maestro at Milan Cathedral until 1572, and Borromeo's continuing influence on the composer is attested by Ruffo's posthumous masses, issued in 1592 under the title Missae Boromeae. Borromeo's broad personal tastes, as well as his eminent position, made him the recipient of a number of dedications, among them a volume of Magnificat settings by Simon Boyleau (1566) who succeeded Ruffo at the cathedral. Boyleau was in turn succeeded by Pietro Pontio and then Giulio Cesare Gabussi, who was hired for his musical virtues, in spite of Borromeo's desire for a maestro who was in holy orders. The cardinal gathered singers from the cathedral in his room on occasion for devotional singing and in 1584 his familia as archbishop included G.B. Bovicelli. Borromeo's importance for sacred music lies in the central role he played during the immediate post-Tridentine period, not just in fostering the strict chordal style of Ruffo's masses, but in encouraging reform of the liturgy, of church buildings and furnishings, and of choirs. All of these opened the way for a new vigour in Catholic sacred music from the 1580s onwards.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R)

Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Milan, 1890–97)

L. Lockwood: The Counter-Reformation and the Masses of Vincenzo Ruffo (Venice, 1970)

R. Sherr: ‘Competence and Incompetence in the Papal Choir in the Age of Palestrina’, EMc, xxii (1984), 607–29

E.W. Cochrane: ‘Counter Reformation or Tridentine Reformation? Italy in the Age of Carlo Borromeo’, San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. J.M. Headley and J.B. Tomaro (Washington DC, 1988), 31–46

R.L. Kendrick: Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996)

LEWIS LOCKWOOD/NOEL O'REGAN

Borroni, Antonio.

See Boroni, Antonio.

Borrono, Pietro Paolo [Pierre Paul]

(b Milan, c1490–95; d ?Milan, after 1563). Italian composer and lutenist. A ‘Pierre Paul dit l’Italien’ was listed among the valets de chambre of François I between 1531 and 1534; Brenet identified this man with Borrono, but Prunières disputed this on the grounds that ‘Pierre Paul’ was not a musician but a courtier who among other duties served the king as superintendent of works at the royal châteaux. Brenet’s hypothesis becomes more credible in the light of later Italian documents, which show that Borrono was not a professional musician but a gentleman amateur. In 1542–4 he is recorded as a diplomatic agent of Alfonso d’Avalos, marchese del Vasto, the imperial governor of Milan. In an undated document Avalos granted Borrono safe conduct to return to Milan to answer charges of maladminstration, which had resulted in his banishment. In November 1550 he was enlisted among the soldiers of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan on account of important services to the emperor. Although several letters from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in March 1551 state that Borrono had come to Rome ostensibly to print lute music but actually to organize an attempt on Farnese’s life, and that Borrono had betrayed the plans of his master Ferrante Gonzaga, governor of Milan, he in fact remained a trusted agent of the imperial government at least until the end of February 1552. Borrono and his son Giovanni Battista were associated in lawsuits in 1544 and 1559; in January 1564, ‘septuagenarian and infirm’, he protested having been arrested without a warrant even though the debt from the 1559 suit had been paid. He may still have been alive on 7 August 1573, when he was not called ‘late’ (quondam) in a deed referring to his son.

Borrono’s works first appeared in three collections: Castiglione’s Intabolatura de leuto (RISM 1536¹⁰) alongside Francesco da Milano, Alberto da Ripa, Marco dall’Aquila and G.G. Albuzio; Scotto’s Intabulatura di lauto … libro secondo (RISM 1546³⁰) together with Francesco; and a volume issued by both publishers in 1548, which Borrono also shared with Francesco. For Scotto this was Intavolatura di lauto … libro ottavo, and only Borrono was named, but Castiglione’s Intavolatura di lauto … libro secondo named Francesco first; it was dedicated and published by Borrono’s son Giovanni Battista, and Scotto’s version is probably a reprint. Borrono’s works comprise six fantasias and 18 dance-suites, typically consisting of a pavan followed by three saltarellos; some suites have only one or two saltarellos, and five of the suites in the 1536 anthology conclude with a toccata. One pavan and its first saltarello in the 1546 book have an optional part for a second lute. The 1548 collection contains intabulations of five chansons and two motets, ascribed to neither Francesco nor Borrono but almost certainly by the latter.

Borrono’s works were reprinted abroad, in the Netherlands by Phalèse as late as 1573, and in Germany by Gerle and Wyssenbach. The preface to the collection of 1546 contains instructions for reading tablature, and includes an interesting description of the finger technique to be used for sustaining one note while the other parts in the composition continue. The preface also introduces two different rhythmic symbols which are both common, but are rarely found in the same publication. Borrono undoubtedly knew Alberto da Ripa, who was at the French court from 1529; he may have met Cabezón, who, while on a visit to Italy and the Netherlands in 1549, attended entertainments given in the house of Ferrante Gonzaga.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GMB, no.95

M. Brenet: ‘Notes sur l’histoire du luth en France’, RMI, vi (1899), 1–44; pubd separately (Turin, 1899/R)

O. Chilesotti: ‘Note circa alcuni liutisti italiani della prima metà del Cinquecento’, RMI, ix (1902), 36–61, 233–63; pubd separately (Turin, 1902) [incl. edn of 1 dance from 1548]

T. Norlind: ‘Zur Geschichte der Suite’, SIMG, vii (1905–6), 172–203 [incl. edn of 1 dance suite from 1536¹⁰]

W. Tappert, ed.: Sang und Klang aus alter Zeit (Berlin, 1906) [incl. edn of 1 dance from 1536¹⁰]

H. Prunières: ‘La musique de la chambre et de l’écurie sous le règne de François Ier (1516–1547)’, Année musicale, i (1911), 215–51

E.T. Ferand: Die Improvisation in der Musik: eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche und psychologische Untersuchung (Zurich, 1938) [incl. edn of 1 dance and 1 toccata from 1536¹⁰)

G. Pistarino: ‘Un episodio della vita di Pietro Paolo Borrono’, RMI, li (1949), 299–305

E.A. Wienandt: Musical Style in the Lute Compositions of Francesco da Milano (diss., U. of Iowa, 1951)

L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956) [incl. edns of 7 dances from 1536¹⁰, 1 from 1546³⁰, 1 from 1548]

D. Heartz: ‘Les premières ‘Instructions’ pour le luth (jusque vers 1550)’, Le luth et sa musique: Neuilly-sur-Seine 1957, 77–92

G. Lefkoff, ed.: Five Sixteenth Century Venetian Lute Books (Washington DC, 1960) [incl. edn of 1563¹⁸ (abridged reprint of 1548): 4 dance suites, 1 fantasia, 5 chansons, 1 motet]

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy, ca. 1500–1550, with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1961) [incl. edns of 1 fantasia from 1536¹⁰ and 1 from 1548]

L.F. Bernstein: ‘La couronne et fleur des chansons a troys: a Mirror of the French Chanson in Italy in the years between Ottaviano Petrucci and Antonio Gardane’, JAMS, xxvi (1973), 1–68

A. Bollini: ‘L'attività liutistica a Milano dal 1450 al 1550: nuovi documenti’, RIM, xxi (1986), 31–60

JEANETTE B. HOLLAND/R, ARTHUR J. NESS/R

Borrowing.

Many musical compositions incorporate material from one or more earlier works. The procedures and significance of borrowing vary between repertories and over time. The history of borrowing in Western music has yet to be written, but its general outlines can be traced through the repertories that have been studied.

1. Types of borrowing.

2. Medieval monophony.

3. Polyphony to 1300.

4. 14th century.

5. Renaissance Mass cycles.

6. Other Renaissance sacred music.

7. Renaissance secular music.

8. The Baroque era.

9. Reworkings and issues of originality.

10. Late 18th century.

11. 19th century.

12. 20th-century art music to 1950.

13. Art music after 1950.

14. Popular music, jazz and film music.

15. Research on borrowing.

J. PETER BURKHOLDER

1. Types of borrowing.

A new piece may use or refer to existing music in various ways. It may feature qualities identified with another tradition, as when a modern symphonic work incorporates sounds and gestures from jazz or Baroque music. A piece for one instrument may use figuration typical of another, such as fanfares in a piano sonata. Within a tradition, a piece may use common melodic formulae and formal conventions. Most broadly, all music draws on the repertory of notes, scales, gestures and other elements available in that tradition, so that every piece borrows from earlier pieces in its own tradition. Thus in the widest sense the history of borrowing in music is the history of improvisation, composition and performance.

The study of borrowing in music focusses, not on this broadest level of interrelations, but on the use in a new composition of one or more elements from a specific piece. Musical borrowing has typically been studied as an issue related to a particular repertory or genre, such as the Renaissance mass or the 20th-century avant garde, or to a particular composer, such as Handel or Mahler. Yet the use of existing music as a basis for new music is pervasive in all periods and traditions, parallel to and yet different from the practices of borrowing, reworking and allusion that contribute to the formation of traditions and the creation of meaning in literature, architecture, painting and sculpture.

1. What is the relationship of the existing piece to the new piece that borrows from it?type
of the same genre, medium, style and musical tradition
of a different genre, medium, style or musical traditiontexture
a single-line melody used in a new monophonic melody
a single-line melody used in a polyphonic work
a polyphonic work used in a new polyphonic workorigin
by the composer of the new piece
from the same circle of musicians
by a contemporary from another place or circle
from a distant place
from an earlier time

2. What element or elements of the existing piece are incorporated into or referred to by the new piece, in whole or part?the full texture
a combination of parts that is less than the full texture
a melodic line, gesture or contour
a rhythmic figure
an aspect of harmony, such as a chord progression, striking sonority or pitch collection
the form or a formal device
texture
instrumental colour
other parameters

3. How does the borrowed material relate to the shape of the new piece?provides the structure, virtually unaltered, but other features are changed enough to create a new entity
contrafactum (change of text)
transcription or arrangement (change of performing forces)
intabulation or arrangement (change of medium and figuration)provides the structure and is varied or altered
melodic paraphrase
variation embellishment or ornamentationforms the basis of the structure or of a melodic line, with new material added or interpolated trope
refrainserves as a structural line or complex to which other parts are joined contrapuntally
organum (of every kind)
medieval motet
cantus-firmus composition
paraphrase (hymn paraphrase, paraphrase mass)
setting
arrangementused as a theme, including extension and development for variations

for a dance movement
for sonata form, rondo, fugue or other form
for a march
in a fantasia
for a cumulative setting
for improvisation, as in jazzprovides material (motifs, structural ideas, contrapuntal combinations etc.) that is freely reworkedused as a motif
appears once, marking a significant event in the form
appears once, in passing
combined linearly with other borrowed (and some new) material
linear quodlibet (successive, homophonic)
medley
patchworkcombined contrapuntally with other borrowed (and some new) material
polyphonic quodlibet (simultaneous)part of a collage involving borrowings from many works

4. How is the borrowed material altered in the new piece?complete and not altered
incomplete but otherwise not altered
minimally altered
embellished or ornamented
melodically paraphrased or restructured
substantially reworked
appears only in fragments
placed in a new context, changing its effect
used as a theme, perhaps not greatly altered when presented as a theme but elsewhere developed and fragmented as themes are
changed to conform to a new function (e.g. as a cantus firmus in long notes, or a folktune reworked as a theme)
disguised
only alluded to, with a similar gesture, without itself being incorporated

5. What is the function of the borrowed material within the new piece, in musical terms?served the composer as a starting initial point for composition (often literally, if the new piece begins like the model)structural
forms the basic structure of a single line
is incorporated as an element in a principal melodic line
is the structural basis for a polyphonic work
serves as one contrapuntal line among several
provides a model for the structure of the new piecethematic
serves as a theme or part of a theme
serves as a leading melody or part of a leading melody
serves as a motifother event
marks a major event, such as a culmination or highpoint
is a passing gesture, neither thematic nor structural

6. What is the function or meaning of the borrowed material within the new piece in associative or extra-musical terms, if any?motivated by a text or programme
represents a performance of the borrowed piece or a piece of its type
appears with its text, which has a particular extra-musical significance
appearance (without text) evokes part or all of the text with which it is normally associated, conveying an extra-musical meaning
symbolizes something or someone associated with it or with pieces of its general typedescriptive
lends a certain character to a passage, through the associations it carriesalludes to the source work or its composer
pays homage to its source (work or composer)
comments on or suggests parallels to its source
exemplifies or indicates competition between the composer of the new piece and the composer of the existing piece
critiques or negates its sourcepart of a collage
helps to create a stream-of-consciousness effectvaries with the listener
has special significance for certain groups or individuals and different or no associations for others
associations have changed over time

In order to cultivate a view of the subject that is not bound by individual traditions, periods or genres, it is useful to establish a typology based on a simple series of distinctions.Table 1 (adapted from Burkholder, 1994) offers a multidimensional system of categories delineated by the most fundamental questions about any instance of musical borrowing in new compositions or improvisations. Some answers are listed here; others are possible.

The table is framed in terms of relationships between one piece and another; it is the composer or improviser who creates these relationships and the listener who recognizes them. It is possible, even frequent, for composers to borrow material that listeners may not recognize and for listeners to hear similarities composers did not intend. Much of the scholarship on borrowing directly engages these issues of recognition and intent, identifying hitherto unsuspected relationships and presenting evidence to support the claim that borrowing has occurred, beyond subjective impressions.

Any piece that makes use of borrowed material may fit into more than one category, for most categories are not musically exclusive. For example, a distinctive instrumental timbre and texture, a melodic contour and a formal plan may all be borrowed from the same source, as in the slow movement of Ives's First Symphony (c1898–1908), whose english horn theme over sustained string chords paraphrases that of Dvořák's New World Symphony and whose form adapts that of the Dvořák movement.

Such a system allows the classification of both common and exceptional types, highlights important distinctions and facilitates interpretation of the borrowing's significance and meaning:

(a) The process of composition, when using a piece of the same tradition, genre, medium, style and texture as a source for a new piece, as when Monteverdi modelled his madrigal Non si levava ancor on Marenzio's Non vidi mai, is distinct from the process of using a piece that differs in these ways from the new composition, as in a lute intabulation of a polyphonic chanson or a symphonic movement based on a folktune. The significance of borrowed material depends in part on who or what is borrowed from: that may be the composer himself, as in several Mahler symphonies; other composers of the same circle, as when Clara Schumann and Brahms both wrote variations on a theme by Robert Schumann; music of a distant place, as when Puccini borrowed Chinese melodies for Turandot; or music of an earlier time, as in numerous works of Peter Maxwell Davies.

(b) Listeners respond differently and attribute different meanings to music that borrows the full texture of another piece, as does Stravinsky's Pulcinella; a melodic line, such as the Russian folktunes in his Petrushka; a texture, as in the evocation of Debussy's Nuages at the opening of Part II of The Rite of Spring; or an instrumental colour, such as the english horn in the latter at the ‘Ritual Action of the Ancestors’, again echoing Nuages. Distinctions between widely recognized broad categories of borrowing, such as quotation, allusion and modelling, often depend upon what elements of the source are present in the new piece.

(c) The process of composition and the structure of the resulting piece are vastly different if a borrowed tune forms the basis of a new melodic line with interpolated music, as in troped chant; if it creates a structural line to which other parts are joined contrapuntally, as in Notre Dame organum; if it is treated as a theme, as are the Russian tunes in Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartets, the popular tunes used in mid-19th-century American marches, or the hymn tune in Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; or if it appears once in passing, like the fragments of La Marseillaise in Debussy's Feux d'artifice and in the Beatles' All you need is love. The use of a standard genre or procedure of borrowing, such as contrafactum, cantus firmus, variations, quodlibet and others listed in Table 1, can clarify the composer's intent and compositional process and make the significance more apparent to the listener.

(d) The recognizability, character and effect of the borrowed material vary according to how it is adapted in the new piece, from the minimal alteration of a Bach chorale harmonization to the ornamentation of a chorale prelude, the free paraphrase of an aria based on a chorale or the use of a chorale as a cantus firmus against unrelated material.

(e) The relative importance of a borrowed element in musical terms is greater if it plays a structural role, such as a borrowed tune used as a cantus firmus or theme, than if it is a passing gesture, as are the folksongs briefly quoted in Bach's Goldberg Variations. In some genres, such as the 13th-century motet or the chorale partita, the borrowing is basic to the definition of the genre; in others, such as fugue, symphony or variations, a borrowed or paraphrased theme is possible but not required; in others, such as French grand opéra, overt borrowing is unexpected and constitutes a special effect, as in the appearance of ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.

(f) Finally, the extra-musical associations aroused by borrowed material may vary greatly in kind, from suggesting a performance of the borrowed piece, as in Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg, to lending a certain character to a passage, as in his use of folktunes in the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony; critiquing or negating the music that is borrowed, as Kagel deconstructs various Beethoven works in Ludwig van; or creating the effect of a stream of consciousness through a collage of numerous quotations, as in the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia. Often several effects are achieved at once; the chorale in Les Huguenots simultaneously establishes a historical period, sets a religious context and delineates character. Extra-musical associations will vary with the listener. Americans may hear Beethoven's Variations on God Save the King (1802–3) as variations on America, which uses the same tune, and the borrowings in Berg's Lyric Suite (1925–6) and Violin Concerto (1935) had particular resonance for the composer as part of a private programme. Associations can change over time; Haydn's variations on his own song Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser in his ‘Emperor’ Quartet op.76 no.3 would have been hard to hear during World War II without thinking of Deutschland über alles, the German anthem on the same melody, and the ideology of the Nazi government, lending the work potential meanings that Haydn could not have envisaged. The variety of associations listeners may have opens up music to new interpretations and can stimulate research to discover the meanings that may have been intended by the composer or perceived by the work's first audiences.

These questions also establish a basis for evaluating when borrowing has occurred:

(a) The case for borrowing is stronger when it can be proved that the composer knew or had access to the existing piece. This requires biographical evidence that will vary with the relationship of the new piece to the existing one, from establishing chronology within the composer's own works to showing contact with other musicians or knowledge of music the composer studied, performed or heard.

(b) What and how much is borrowed is an important factor in proving a relationship between two pieces. The more elements of an existing piece that are present in a new one, the more unusual or individual the elements that are shared, or the more extensive the similarity within a parameter, the more convincing will be a claim that borrowing has occurred. Non-musical factors such as textual quotations or similarities can provide further evidence.

(c) Evidence for borrowing will be evaluated differently, depending on what kind of relationship is being asserted. Some studies have demonstrated that what others have identified as a passing quotation is instead the most overt sign of a deeper structural relationship. The more the borrowing conforms to widely understood types and procedures, the more readily it is likely to be recognized and accepted. Indeed, in some genres borrowing is so frequent that it is assumed until disproved; in a medieval motet, for example, the appearance of a melody in the tenor is normally taken as evidence of its prior independent existence as a monophonic tune even if no other source has been found.

(d) The extent and exactness of the similarities between the new and older pieces affect judgments of whether borrowing has occurred. On the one hand, a thorough reworking, disguised borrowing or subtle allusion is more difficult to hear and to prove than a direct parallel; on the other hand, a work that changes its source very little may be heard as a performance, transcription or arrangement of the original, rather than as a new piece based on borrowing. (Since this distinction is not stable through time, the ensuing history of borrowing will include transcription and arrangement and will note ambiguities between borrowing and performance.)

(e) Proof of borrowing is incomplete until a purpose can be demonstrated. If no function for the borrowed material can be established, its use remains a mystery and the resemblance may be coincidental. Reliance on the borrowed material as a theme, structural element or point of prominence makes its function clear. When sketches or drafts are available, they may demonstrate that the composer used the existing music as a starting-point and may clarify the intended role of the borrowed material if it is disguised.

(f) Interpreting the associative or extra-musical meaning of the borrowing can also clarify its function and support a claim that borrowing has occurred. This is especially important when the borrowed material lacks a clear, purely musical function or seems to be introduced arbitrarily; indeed, these are often signs that an extra-musical interpretation is intended.

The questions in Table 1 centre on the piece itself, as is appropriate to a typology, but the context in which the borrowing occurs should also be considered in studying individual cases and in tracing a history of borrowing in music. Among important aspects to consider are contemporary attitudes towards various uses of existing music in new pieces; the sense of ownership, if any, attributed to the original composer of a piece, as opposed to those who rework the same material in performance or new compositions; the artistic purposes served by borrowing in a given genre or era; elements of the culture or of musical practice that encourage certain kinds of borrowing or discourage others; and what the use of a piece as a source for another and the way it is used might reveal about the reception of the earlier piece and the way it was regarded. Such questions move beyond a typology towards a fuller evaluation of borrowing within the history of music.

See also Allusion; Arrangement; Modelling;Quotation; and Transcription.

2. Medieval monophony.

The concept of borrowing elements from one piece to use in another depends on the idea of the piece itself. Accordingly, the traceable history of musical borrowing begins in the medieval repertories of liturgical chant for the Byzantine, Roman and Ambrosian rites, the first surviving large bodies of music in which individual pieces were fixed in notation.

Commonalities among chants within and across these repertories testify to ongoing processes of re-using and reworking melodic material that probably extend back to the earliest Christian observances and their Jewish predecessors. Similarities of contour in some chants of the same mode and function suggest that they were elaborated from an existing reciting formula, sometimes linked with characteristic melismas; this can be seen for example in Gregorian tracts, which are typically based on one of two melodic formulae. Other chants of the same mode and type share melodic figures, suggesting processes of improvisation or composition by combining existing units of melody, called centonization; this is common in melismatic chants such as the gradual and alleluia in the Gregorian repertory. Some melismas were relocated from one chant to another. Existing melodies were also adapted for new texts (e.g. for antiphons and hymns), and the different chant repertories have individual variants of melodies for certain texts, indicating adaptation either one from another or both from a common source.

In all these cases, the existing piece being adapted is of the same type as the new piece (although it does not always share the same liturgical function), has the same monophonic texture, and derives from an earlier period in the same broad tradition; the melodic substance of the earlier piece is taken over in whole or large part, providing the structure for all or part of the new melody, but is altered to suit the new text and circumstances and perhaps local stylistic preferences; re-use of melodic material is the standard procedure for creating new works; and ownership is not attributed to those who created the earlier piece, who are in most cases unknown, but is assumed by those who use the music and by the church it serves.

Chants composed after notation had standardized the repertory provide the earliest examples of borrowing in which both the new piece and the source are fixed in notation and thus can be studied. Processes of adaptation, re-use and reworking similar to those in the older layers of the repertory are apparent in newly composed tracts, graduals, office antiphons and other genres of chant. For example, the chants of the new Feast of Corpus Christi, first celebrated in 1247 and liturgically codified over the next several decades, were adapted from chants of the same type with different texts, drawn from more than a dozen other feasts; some were greatly altered, others changed only minimally (Mathiesen, 1983).

Authorized chants in the Gregorian rite were often augmented in the 9th to 13th centuries through the addition of melismas (sometimes borrowed from other chants), the application of new words to existing melismas or the addition of new words and music before a chant or before each of its phrases. The third type was called a trope, a term often used for the other two types as well. The added text elaborates on or explains the original text, like a gloss on scripture. The addition had practical uses, in explaining the relation of the liturgical text to the feast day or clarifying a theological issue, but adding music or poetry also lent greater artistry to the celebration of a feast. Some tropes borrow from or rework music and text from other tropes, in a process akin to the adaptation of chant. Not surprisingly, the practice of troping seems to have originated or to have been widely practised only after the texts and music were as fixed as the scriptural canon itself, especially in the areas in which the Gregorian rite had been standardized under Charlemagne. The addition of text and music was perhaps less an act of creating a new work through borrowing than it was the performance of an existing work with accretions, like an embellished opera aria or a concerto with a new cadenza, and like these it may have been an avenue to exhibit creativity in performing music that was otherwise fixed.

The account in Notker's preface to his Liber hymnorum (884) of the development of the sequence characterizes this form as a kind of trope, applying new text to the jubilus melismas of alleluias. But the actual relationship of Notker's and other early sequences to existing alleluias shows not a simple application of text but a reworking of the borrowed melody, often followed by or interpolating new material or involving internal repetition; ex.1 compares the first two verses of Notker's Christus hunc diem with its source, Alleluia, Dominus in Sina. Many sequence and hymn melodies were re-used or adapted for new texts in a process of contrafactum or for German translations of the original Latin.

Contrafacta also appear in the secular monophonic repertory. In some cases a new song borrows the melody and part of the text of an existing one, in an act of tribute or perhaps competition; for example, the melody and first line of Gautier de Coinci's Amours dont sui espris are taken from Blondel de Nesle's song of the same title. Raimbaut de Vaqeiras is said to have improvised his Kalenda maya to a melody he had heard played by jongleurs. Some German Minnelieder are contrafacta or adaptations of troubadour or trouvère songs, and secular melodies were often given sacred Latin texts. Other songs rework existing melodies more freely. Some French songs from the mid-12th to mid-14th centuries incorporate a refrain, an aphoristic text set to a short melody that appears in more than one song and may also appear alone or in a motet. In these secular repertories, it is unclear whether a melody was considered to belong with a certain text or to the poet-composer as its author; if so, the borrowing or adaptation of a melody may indicate that it was regarded as especially worthy of re-use and imitation. Alternatively, melodies may have been regarded as common property, available for reworking to suit new texts. Indeed, there may not yet have been a concept of authorship for music, as there was for poetry; manuscript attributions apparently refer to the poet rather than the composer, to judge from the many trouvère poems that survive with two or more different melodies yet with attributions to the same trouvère.

3. Polyphony to 1300.

The major forms of polyphony to 1300 – organum, discant and motet – were all based on existing melodies, usually chant. Thus the early history of polyphony is largely a history of musical borrowing. The polyphonic versus and conductus are the main exceptions, as they were not based on chant, but early polyphonic examples may have been adapted from monophonic versions, and some conductus borrowed from existing polyphony.

It has been suggested that liturgical polyphony was an extension of the idea of troping: an embellishment of the prescribed chant, adding music not before or between phrases of the chant but simultaneous with it. If true, this shows a conceptual commonality between two uses of existing music that might seem to have nothing in common in procedure or style.

If troping may be considered a performance of an existing work with accretions rather than the creation of a new work through borrowing, early polyphony was arguably also a manner of performance rather than a kind of borrowing. Singing a chant with a drone or in strict parallel octaves, 5ths or 4ths does not result in a new piece but rather in a different way of presenting an existing one. This is still true of the mixed parallel and oblique organum described in Musica enchiriadis (c850–900), whose rules generate the added voice or vox organalis almost automatically below the chant melody or vox principalis. In each of these styles, the polyphony enhances the presentation of the existing chant; the added voice lends greater resonance and thus weight and solemnity, and the use of a drone or oblique motion closing on a unison heightens the sense of melodic direction and cadential closure and thus clarifies the phrase structure.

11th-century organum suggests a tradition that could be conceived as either a method of improvised performance or a style of composition. The style of mixed parallel and oblique organum described in Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus (1025–6) opened more options to singers than that of Musica enchiriadis, requiring more choices to be made before performance if it was to be sung by a group. Practical sources such as the Winchester Troper (first half of 11th century) included pieces in this style that were fixed in notation, the first polyphony to appear outside treatises, apparently crossing the line from a manner of performance to a compositional method based on borrowing. The new style of free organum that emerged in the later 11th century, described in Ad organum faciendum (c1100), may still have been regarded as a style of performance, as a soloist could improvise a suitable organal voice (now above the chant and moving mostly in contrary motion with perfect consonances between the voices) by following the rules laid out in the treatise. But practical sources as early as the Chartres fragments (F-CHRm 4, 109 and 130, late 11th century) include written works in this style which may be viewed as pieces based on borrowed chant; so too may the examples recorded in the treatises, such as the setting of the troped Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens genitor’ from Ad organum faciendum (ex.2). The placement of the added voice above rather than below the chant makes the new melody more prominent, but it still adds resonance and clarifies the phrasing, now marked by more frequent cadences on unisons or octaves. It appears that this kind of polyphony was intended for soloists; for example, only the solo portions of Alleluia, Justus ut palma (the opening of the respond and all but the final word of the verse) are set in polyphony in Ad organum faciendum. From this point until well into the Renaissance, polyphony seems to have been reserved for soloists, although this is not clear in all instances. When the original chant was performed in alternation between soloists and choir (as in responsorial chants) or between half-choirs (as in Kyries and Kyrie tropes), the polyphonic setting alternates between polyphony and choral monophony, so that the form of the source tune continues to shape the new piece.

The subsequent development of polyphony based on chant moves decisively to a composed rather than improvised tradition, representing the creation of new pieces through borrowing rather than ways of performing existing music. Aquitanian polyphony, as shown in manuscripts from the early 12th century at the monastery of St Martial in Limoges, features the first known examples of florid counterpoint, in which several notes in the upper voice are sung against a single note in the lower voice. The Codex Calixtinus (c1170) from Santiago de Compostela includes a setting of Cunctipotens genitor in this style, excerpted in ex.3 (see Sources, MS, §IV, 3). A comparison between this and ex.2 shows a similar preference for perfect consonances, contrary motion and cadences at the unison or octave, but the greater freedom and faster motion of the upper voice now make it the focus of interest, instead of the slower-moving lower voice that carries the chant. The result is music in which more is new than old, and it is likely to be heard as a new piece based on borrowed material rather than as a performance of the chant with accompaniment. Here the new piece has the same liturgical function as the old, incorporates it whole and adopts its structure, while augmenting the durations of the original melody and cadencing more frequently. This reflects a context in which the chant was liturgically required but a polyphonic setting could be substituted, at least for those portions performed by soloists, and might be preferred over the naked chant because of its greater sonority and decorative beauty.

These same characteristics hold true for the Magnus liber created by Leoninus about 1163–82 and later revised by Perotinus and others of the Parisian Notre Dame school, which sets the solo portions of graduals, alleluias and responsories for the major feasts of the liturgical year in two-part counterpoint. This represents perhaps the first attempt to create a coherent repertory based on musical borrowing, embellishing the specially important services with the most elaborate polyphony yet heard. Here segments of florid organum alternate with sections of discant called clausulae, in which the lower voice borrowed from chant moves almost as rapidly as the upper voice or duplum. Later portions of the repertory clearly use the rhythmic modes, and the discant sections of Leoninus's settings use at least the 1st mode; the notation is ambiguous in the sections in organal style. In both organum and discant sections, cadences occur much more frequently than in the original chant, and the structure is more dependent on cadences between the voices and on the alternation of organum and discant style than on the original phrasing of the chant. In some of the discant sections, the chant is set in a repeating rhythmic pattern, and a segment of the melody may be repeated with new material in the duplum (see Magnus liber, ex.2), foreshadowing the isorhythmic procedures of the 14th century. This is the earliest application of abstract structural compositional principles to borrowed material, the first time in polyphony that the borrowed melody is reshaped to create a new form rather than determining the form of the music.

Within this repertory, we also see the earliest apparent tradition of refashioning polyphonic works, as later composers freely reworked Leoninus's music or substituted new sections of discant or organum for passages based on the same segment of chant. These include three- and four-voice settings by Perotinus and perhaps others. In some cases a third voice or triplum is added above an existing two-voice discant clausula, a form of reworking through addition that continued up to the 15th century. Some manuscripts contain several alternative settings of the same passage, so that the performance of a liturgical item in any year might draw on a different concatenation of sections in organum and discant, so long as the entire chant is present in the lower voice. This suggests a view of the Magnus liber as common property, a fund of possibilities to be used at the discretion of the singers and reworked at will.

These ideas of reworking existing polyphony and drawing on a common fund of polyphonic music continue in the early motet. The first motets were created (probably in the early 13th century) by fitting a poetic text to the duplum of a discant clausula, combining the traditions of polyphony and the textual trope. This represents at least two layers of borrowing, as the clausula borrows a segment of chant for its lower voice (and may borrow its rhythmic patterning from an earlier clausula on the same melody), and the motet borrows the entire musical fabric of the clausula, sometimes adjusting the notes to fit the text. Early motet texts often related to the theme of the chant or feast from which the tenor was taken and reflected the syllables of the original text through assonance, in the tradition of textual tropes, which shows the influence of the borrowed material on text as well as music. A motet may be reworked in turn, adding a third voice with the same or another text or replacing the first text with a new one; this occurred frequently as motets travelled to England, Germany, Italy and Spain over the course of the 13th century. In comparing related motets, it is not always clear which is the source and which the reworking, prompting some scholars to prefer the term ‘intertextuality’ to ‘borrowing’ for this repertory.

Once the motet was established as a genre, new ones were composed that were not derived from clausulae, typically featuring two voices, each with its own text, above a tenor taken from chant. Later texts might be secular or sacred and in French as well as Latin, and were less often related in subject or sound to the text of the tenor. Melodies for later motet tenors were borrowed from a range of chant, not solely the responsorial melismas of the discant clausulae; some even used French vernacular tunes in their original rhythm. Thus the motet grew away from its original context and became an independent genre based on a borrowed melody.

Borrowing was so intrinsic to the motet that it also occurred in the upper voices, which in some cases borrowed from refrains or chansons, sometimes requiring adjustments to the tenor. The refrain cento combined several refrains in a tenor or other part, while the motet enté was a subgenre in which a borrowed refrain (both text and melody) served as a point of departure for textual and musical expansion. Borrowing and reworking also ran in the other direction, as parts of some motets were reworked as chansons.

During the later 13th century the tradition of reworking existing motets as if they were common property gave way to the composition of new motets with individual features, spurred on by the more exact notation of Franco. Both the interest in novel tenors, such as the street cry ‘Fresh strawberries!’ in the anonymous On parole/A Paris/Frèse nouvele, and the heightened rhythmic complexity in the upper voices of motets in the style of Petrus de Cruce, suggest a concern for creating pieces based on borrowed material but marked by individuality.

Throughout the development of medieval polyphony, borrowing from chant was clearly a given, and the later borrowing of secular tunes for motet tenors or refrains was a variant on the long-established practice of using chant melodies. The medieval concept of music encouraged borrowing, in accord with related practices of glossing scripture and other texts, decorating manuscripts and revisiting common themes in art and architecture. Even in reworking polyphonic music to create a motet from a clausula or a new motet from an existing one, when the composer of the original may have been alive and known to the reworker, there was apparently no sense of ownership or deference to the music's original form to impede this process. The constant stream of new music based on old music testifies to a simultaneous regard for tradition and renewal.

4. 14th century.

In 14th-century Ars Nova motets, the chant is laid out in isorhythm, which codifies in the concepts of talea and color the repeating rhythmic patterns and melodic segments of earlier clausula and motet tenors. In the isorhythmic motet, the systematic use of borrowed material to create an abstract musical structure reaches its first peak. Vitry's taleas are often rhythmically complex and each motet is highly individual in structure and proportion.

Machaut and other composers used specific Vitry motets as models, emulating aspects of their structures while apparently seeking solutions that were equally individual. Machaut's Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/Fiat voluntas tua borrows the talea, color and structural elements of Vitry's Douce playsence/Garison/Neuma (Leech-Wilkinson, 1982–3). Often the later work expands upon a concept or plan used in the earlier one. This is an early instance of a tradition that endures to the present, of using a specific work as a model for a new one while simultaneously doing something new and different. Moreover, it shows that composers were beginning to borrow aspects of music other than melodies, in this case features of the isorhythmic design. Such borrowing between motets continued, along with the isorhythmic motet itself, until about 1440 (Allsen, 1992). The recognition of an individuality worth emulating in a particular piece by a particular composer suggests a radical change in the sense of ownership, at least in this repertory, from the common fund of musical material characteristic of Notre Dame organum and early motets to an attribution of certain musical ideas as belonging to an individual composer or work. This is confirmed by the increasing tendency of scribes and theorists in the 14th and 15th centuries to attribute works to particular composers in music manuscripts and treatises, in contrast to the longstanding general practice of anonymous transmission. The study of borrowing is marked from this point onward by the contrast, not always easy to map, between use of material that is collectively owned and available and emulation of ideas that are identified with a particular composer or work. What is particularly interesting here is that it is often the structure, not the melodies, that is seen as individual and worthy of emulation. In addition, some motets borrowed or quoted texts from earlier motets, and this may have been as significant as the musical borrowings in shaping the work.

The 14th century also saw the rise of polyphonic settings of texts from the Mass Ordinary, including the complete Ordinary cycle in Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame. Here the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Ite missa est are set in isorhythmic style with liturgically appropriate chants in the tenor (the Kyrie, excerpted in ex.4, uses the same chant melody as in exx.2 and 3); the Gloria and Credo are each in conductus style without borrowed material, closing with an isorhythmic Amen. Of the many other settings of Ordinary texts, some share musical material, suggesting in some cases an attempt at musical unification between movements of a mass now separated in the manuscripts, and in other cases borrowing through a combination of contrafactum and reworking. One of Ciconia's Gloria–Credo pairs is based on his motet Regina gloriosa, and Antonio Zacara da Teramo borrowed material from his secular songs in several mass movements, anticipating the cantus-firmus/imitation mass of the later 15th century.

Several 14th- and 15th-century treatises describe a distinctive English tradition of improvised discant applied to chant in note-against-note fashion. While this seems to have begun as a manner of performance rather than of composition with borrowed material (as discussed above in relation to early polyphony), it led in the 14th and early 15th centuries to discant compositions in three parts with the chant in the middle voice.

Outside the motet, secular polyphonic music of the 13th and 14th centuries was most often composed without borrowed material, but borrowing does occur. Contrafacta appear in the polyphonic as well as monophonic repertory; for example, many of Oswald von Wolkenstein's polyphonic lieder are contrafacta. In addition, some late 14th-century French chansons quote text and music from others, perhaps continuing a tradition stretching back to the troubadours of poems and songs that quote and respond to earlier ones; for example, Phiton, Phiton by Magister Franciscus quotes from Machaut's ballade Phyton, le mervilleus serpent, and Ciconia's Sus une fontayne quotes the beginnings of three ballades by Philippus de Caserta (Günther, 1972).

The 14th century also saw the earliest surviving instrumental works based on musical borrowing. These are intabulations of vocal music for keyboard, arrangements that normally include most or all voices of the model, sometimes redistributing notes or omitting an inner voice the better to fit the hands, and add melodic decorations, especially in the upper voice, apparently reflecting improvisatory practice. Intabulations may have arisen from a practice of transcribing vocal works, normally written in separate parts in choirbook format, into tablature, so that keyboard players could perform more than one part at a time; such transcriptions might be better considered a performing realization of the existing work rather than a new work based on borrowing. The earliest intabulations, three motets from the mid-14th-century Robertsbridge Manuscript (GB-Lbl Add.28550), already transcend these limits with the ornamentation of the upper voices and should be considered separate pieces based on reworking borrowed material (see Arrangement, ex.1). Examples from later in the century, such as those in the Faenza Codex (I-FZc 117) on French and Italian secular songs, are highly embellished, showing the skill of the composer and providing a challenge to the performer.

The uses of chant in the 14th century extend earlier practices of embellishment, and contrafacta and intabulations of vocal polyphony continue in new forms the longstanding tradition of reshaping existing music for a new use. But the growing recognition of the individual in 14th-century culture is reflected in the emergence of works that explicitly engage in dialogue with earlier works, in both the motet and chanson repertories. In attempting to outdo Vitry in an aspect of isorhythmic structure, Machaut acknowledged the individuality and craft of his predecessor and attempted to proclaim his own.

See also Arrangement; Ars Nova; Intabulation; Isorhythm; and Modelling.

5. Renaissance Mass cycles.

Isorhythmic motets, settings of texts from the Mass Ordinary and Proper, and works in English discant style continued to be composed up to the mid-15th century. But new genres based on borrowed music and new methods of reworking emerged in sacred and secular contexts, in both vocal and instrumental music, during the next two centuries.

Works of the early 15th century based on liturgical chant often place it in the superius rather than the tenor and present it in paraphrase, altered and embellished without obscuring the contour and phrasing of the original. Essentially, these are settings of the paraphrased chant with simple accompaniment. As in earlier polyphonic elaborations of liturgical chant, the new work serves the same liturgical function and takes its form from the chant, but adds resonance, solemnity and artistry; the placement of the chant in the upper part preserves its prominence, while the lower parts reinforce the cadences through directed contrapuntal motion. In Du Fay's setting of Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens genitor’ (ex.5, on the same chant as in exx.2–4), the superius is paraphrased from the chant and accompanied in the style of fauxbourdon, in which the tenor mostly parallels it a 6th below and a middle voice follows the superius a 4th below. Paraphrase was a new manner of treating chant. Previously chant had been the foundation, from organum to the isorhythmic motet, but here it is the melody, reshaped to fit the new melodic style, including Du Fay's typical rhythmic variety and cadential figuration. Reworking existing melodies through paraphrase became characteristic of the Renaissance and has continued as a prominent method of borrowing ever since, from the elaborations of Christ lag in Todesbanden in Bach's Cantata no.4 (see ex.11 below) to the recasting of folk and popular melodies as themes in the music of 19th- and 20th-century composers. In virtually every case, there is a stylistic gulf between the source, usually monophonic and often quite old, and the new work, embodied in the artistry with which the source is reworked into a melody suitable for the current style.

Musical borrowing reached a peak of interest and complexity in the polyphonic Mass Ordinary cycles of the 15th and 16th centuries. Although only the first two movements were performed without intervening chant or other music, these cycles were conceived as units, and composers sought methods to link the movements to one another. Polyphonic settings of liturgically appropriate chant, as in Machaut's Mass and Du Fay's early Missa Sancti Jacobi, were related only by similarities in number of voices, texture, sonority and style. Composers interested in linking movements more closely turned to musical similarities between movements, involving borrowing between movements and very often borrowing from an existing piece. One early solution was to begin each movement with similar music, referred to as a head-motif or motto.

Further unification, and perhaps new levels of meaning, resulted when each movement was based on the same borrowed music, as is true of the majority of 15th- and 16th-century masses. Essentially, two kinds of sources were used, monophonic and polyphonic, with two main forms of elaboration, based on cantus firmus practice or, beginning some time around 1500, the new style of pervasive imitation. Four main types of mass resulted, which have been termed the cantus-firmus mass (or tenor mass); the cantus-firmus/imitation mass; the paraphrase mass; and the imitation mass (or parody mass). Masses were normally titled by the source from which they borrowed.

The cantus-firmus mass uses the same monophonic melody, usually drawn from chant, as a cantus firmus in all movements, usually in the tenor and most often in longer note values than the other voices. The genre seems to have been inaugurated by English composers in the 1430s or 40s with works such as Dunstaple's Mass on the antiphon Rex seculorum and Power's Mass Alma Redemptoris mater and continued in numerous examples by Du Fay, Ockeghem and later composers. The choice of cantus firmus may have been motivated by the associations it carried, relating to its text, its place in the liturgy or the feast for which the mass was to be performed (as in the early English examples), but these reasons are now often obscure. The way the cantus firmus is treated varies widely and seems to have been a locus for composers to demonstrate their ingenuity. Sometimes this involves a proportional scheme or other procedures reminiscent of the isorhythmic motet; in other cases the cantus firmus is treated more freely, or the treatment may vary between movements. Certain melodies were used by many composers, such as Caput (from an antiphon in the English Sarum rite), and later masses on the same melody are sometimes modelled directly on one or more predecessors, suggesting a tradition of emulation and competition between composers; for example, the Ockeghem Missa ‘Caput’ is modelled on that attributed to Du Fay, and the Obrecht on both of them. Here two kinds of borrowing operate simultaneously, drawing the melody from a monophonic chant and rhythms, layout and other structural features from one or more polyphonic predecessors.

A large number of masses draw their cantus firmus from a voice, usually the tenor, of a polyphonic work, usually a secular song but sometimes an instrumental work or motet. The original rhythm of the cantus firmus is usually preserved, sometimes with proportional augmentation. While these have long been considered cantus-firmus masses, it has recently been shown that virtually all of them borrow to some extent from all voices of the polyphonic model, giving them some features of the imitation mass (Steib, 1992). Various terms have been proposed for this type, but none has yet been widely accepted; the term cantus-firmus/imitation mass will be used here. The first of this type appears to be Du Fay's Missa ‘Se la face ay pale’ (c1450), based on his own chanson, which uses the tenor of the chanson in the tenor of the mass and draws from all voices of the model near the end of the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus (ex.6). Here the inclusion of all voices highlights the growing recognizability of the source tenor, which in the Gloria is first presented in triple augmentation of its original durations, then in double, and finally at the same speed as in the chanson. Most composers who use polyphonic models borrow from all voices, but the extent of borrowing from voices other than the tenor varies from relatively little in the masses of Du Fay to a large amount in those of Johannes Martini. Along with variety in the extent of borrowing, there is a range of techniques, from direct borrowing of an entire polyphonic complex to realigning the counterpoint, rewriting some of the voices, compressing or extending phrases through paraphrase, enlarging points of imitation and writing new points of imitation on motifs that were not imitative in the source. Here too a tradition of competitive mass settings emerged, including multiple masses on Du Fay's Le serviteur and Hayne van Ghizeghem's Allez regretz and De tous biens plaine.

The paraphrase mass extends borrowing to some or all voices of the mass, yet draws only on a monophonic model, usually a chant. This type is anticipated in Martini's Missa domenicalis and Missa ferialis (c1470s–80s), in which chants from the Ordinary cycles for Sundays and weekdays respectively are paraphrased in the tenor and often anticipated in one or more voices, resulting in a point of imitation. In a mature paraphrase mass such as Josquin's Missa ‘Pange lingua’ (c1520, ex.7) and Missa ‘Ave maris stella’, all movements are based on the same chant, all voices are virtually equal in importance, and all paraphrase the chant to varying degrees in a series of points of imitation based on the successive phrases of the chant.

The imitation mass, so named from the use of the phrase ‘missa ad imitationem’ in the titles of 16th-century published masses of this type (Lockwood, D1966), borrows from all voices of a polyphonic model and is distinguished from the cantus-firmus/imitation mass in that no single voice is taken over complete as a cantus firmus. In an imitation mass, composers may borrow the entire contrapuntal fabric of a phrase or some part of it, such as the primary motif or a series of chords. Changes may include writing new points of imitation on borrowed motifs, emphasizing motifs that were not prominent in the original or de-emphasizing motifs that were, changing melodic details, changing the alignment of the parts, changing the order in which motifs appear, repeating ideas and omitting ideas. The opening and closing phrases of the model frequently open and close each movement of the mass, as suggested by the descriptions of the imitation mass in Pietro Pontio's Ragionamento di musica (1588) and Pietro Cerone's Il melopeo y maestro (1613). Mouton's Missa ‘Quem dicunt homines’ (c1515), on a motet by Richafort, is typical in beginning each movement with a new reworking of the motet's opening point of imitation, achieving considerable variety while clearly linking movements to each other and to the source (ex.8). The imitation mass became the leading type in the 16th century and continued into the 17th, gradually being displaced by types not based on borrowed material.

The purposes and meanings of the borrowings in all four types of mass are subjects for debate. It seems clear from the comments of Pontio and other theorists that musical unity was a goal, and using the same source for each movement guarantees it. Some works based on chant were apparently associated with the feast day on which the chant was performed, but this is not certain in all cases; in the same way, some masses based on motets may have been intended for performance in the same service as the motet. Reworking existing music was central to the centuries-old tradition of liturgical polyphony, and the introduction of new sources and new methods of elaboration was part of that tradition. Masses based on polyphonic works or written in apparent competition with earlier masses on the same source suggest a concept in music akin to that of imitation in rhetoric. There is evidence for this concept in the 16th century, since Aaron, Zarlino and other theorists use the rhetorical term imitatio for the reworking of a polyphonic model, and masses on polyphonic models are often titled with the formula ‘Missa ad imitationem’ followed by the title of the model. Whether it can be applied to the 15th century is in dispute (Brown, 1982; Perkins, 1984; Burkholder, 1985; Wegman, 1989; Meconi, JM, 1994), and the large number of masses in both centuries based on the composer's own composition suggests purposes other than the emulation of a revered model that is at the heart of rhetorical imitation. The words of secular songs or motets may have carried significance. Josquin's Missa ‘Di Dadi’ is based on Morton's chanson N'aray je jamais mieulx que j'ay, but presents only the first line of the chanson, asking a question (‘Will I never have better than I have?’) that has spiritual as well as secular meanings, until the whole cantus firmus appears at the ‘Osanna’ during the elevation of the host, symbolizing the answer in salvation through Christ (Long, 1989). In addition, it has been suggested that some masses quote or allude to chansons other than that used in the tenor, evoking their texts in order to enrich the meaning of the mass text (Reynolds, 1992). Such a reference to music in order to bring its text to the mind of the listener was apparently new in the 15th century, and later became a significant aspect of programmatic borrowing.

6. Other Renaissance sacred music.

Other liturgical vocal music of the Renaissance used borrowed material in ways similar to masses. Motets were often based on existing chants with the same texts and used a variety of approaches. A comparison of settings of Alma Redemptoris mater shows the frequent and varied use of paraphrase, including Du Fay's paraphrase of the chant in the superius, Ockeghem's use of the chant as a paraphrased cantus firmus and Palestrina's use of paraphrase in all voices in points of imitation. Some motets drew a cantus firmus from a chant other than that from which its text was borrowed, as in the motets of Johannes Regis, or from a secular song, linking the two texts; Josquin's Stabat mater uses as a cantus firmus the tenor of the widely known chanson Comme femme desconfortée, whose words (though probably not sung in the motet) provide a poignant commentary to the Latin text through their depiction of a woman disconsolate at the death of a beloved. Some 16th-century motets reworked a polyphonic model in the manner of an imitation mass movement (Macey, 1993). Others relied on an existing motet as a structural model, with little or no melodic borrowing (Fromson, 1992). But many motets used no borrowed material, and this became standard by the late 16th century.

Hymns and Magnificat settings, long performed antiphonally, were from about the 1430s onwards often set in alternating plainchant and polyphony. Du Fay's complete cycle of hymns for the important feasts of the liturgical year established the pattern of alternating plainchant in the odd-numbered verses with a three-voice setting used for all of the even-numbered verses of a hymn. Later composers varied this pattern, using four voices, setting the odd-numbered verses, alternating two polyphonic settings, or providing a new polyphonic setting for each even- or odd-numbered verse. The last was standard for Magnificat settings and became so for hymns by the 1490s. One of the challenges of the form was providing a different setting for each verse, particularly for the formulaic canticle tones of the Magnificat.

Du Fay's and other early 15th-century settings paraphrased the chant in the superius. Hymns from the late 15th century to the 16th use the chant as a cantus firmus, at first in long, even notes accompanied by active counterpoint in the other voices, later often paraphrasing the hymn in one or more of the other voices, generally before its appearance as a cantus firmus (see Hymn, §III, 1 and 2, ex.8 and ex.9). In 16th-century settings, the pervasive imitation of motifs from the hymn and the closeness in style of the cantus firmus to the other voices makes the texture similar to that of the paraphrase mass or motet. 16th-century composers wrote Magnificat settings using the same approaches to borrowing and reworking as for hymns, but they also adapted methods familiar from the mass. These include settings with pervasive imitation, often paraphrasing the initio and terminatio of the canticle tone in points of imitation, as in the Magnificat settings of Palestrina, and parody or imitation Magnificat settings based on secular works or motets, including almost 40 by Lassus. Imitation Magnificat settings are among the few settings from the Renaissance not to be based on the plainchant canticle tones. There are also a few based on other cantus firmi, similar in style to cantus-firmus mass movements.

Parallel to polyphonic vocal settings of hymns and the Magnificat are settings for organ of hymns, canticles, psalm tones and antiphons, performed in alternation with plainchant. Descriptions of such alternatim performances date back to the 14th century, but the earliest extant examples of organ settings are a hymn and Magnificat in the Faenza Codex from the early 15th century (I-FZc 117). This is also the earliest source of organ versets for the mass, which treat items of the mass in the same manner, for example by alternating phrases of the Kyrie between organ and voices. Organ versets were often improvised, but many were written down, and several organ masses or other collections of liturgical organ settings were published in the 16th century. Until the mid-17th century, organ hymns, Magnificat settings and versets were almost invariably cantus-firmus settings of the appropriate segment of chant. From the mid-16th century, some composers introduced elements from parallel vocal genres, such as anticipating the cantus firmus with points of imitation derived from it.

The Lutheran Reformation in the early 16th century led to the creation of a new repertory of sacred music based on the chorale. Chorales were initially sung by the congregation in unison and unaccompanied. Most were adapted from chant, from German devotional songs (many of which were themselves reworkings of chant) and from secular songs, or were composed using conventional melodic types and formulae. Techniques of adaptation ranged from simple contrafactum to ingenious reworkings, such as Luther's reshaping of the Gregorian hymn Veni Redemptor gentium as the chorale Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (ex.9). Chorales in turn were arranged in polyphonic settings in varying styles. Early settings present the chorale in the tenor, either harmonized in chordal style or treated as a cantus firmus in long notes, sometimes preceded by imitation in the other parts; later settings include harmonizations with the chorale in the top voice and a style of chorale motet in which each line of the chorale is treated in imitation by all voices. Organists probably improvised chorale settings for alternatim performance with the choir or congregation, but few survive from before the 1570s and 80s, when several collections were published of settings for organ in mostly chordal style, some perhaps intabulations of vocal settings. Tunes for singing metrical translations of the psalms in the Calvinist and other Reformed churches were also sometimes adapted from chant or from secular songs. Psalm tunes were in turn reworked for new translations of the psalms into Dutch, German, English and other languages and were used in polyphonic settings in cantus-firmus style, imitative counterpoint or simple harmonizations, by Bourgeois, Goudimel, Sweelinck and others. The French noël repertory (Catholic but non-liturgical) included melodies adapted from popular songs, polyphonic chansons, and hymns, tropes and other chants.

7. Renaissance secular music.

The importance of liturgical chant and a long tradition of basing new works on existing music may partly explain the centrality of borrowing for sacred music in the Renaissance. Yet borrowing in various forms is almost as pervasive in secular repertories, suggesting that it was part of the period's basic concept and practice of music.

Polyphonic German songs from about 1450 to about 1550 are often settings of monophonic lieder, treating the existing tune as a cantus firmus accompanied by two or three independent contrapuntal lines. Isaac's two settings of Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen represent variants of this tradition, the first treating the tune as a cantus firmus in canon in the inner voices (a setting that Isaac re-used in the Christe of his Missa carminum, a borrowing of a borrowing) and the second placing the tune in the cantus over a largely homophonic harmonization. Both approaches also appear in polyphonic settings of French popular monophonic tunes, as in the chansons rustiques (Brown, D1959).

The chanson repertory of Josquin's time is replete with different polyphonic versions based on the same tune and text. Some of these are settings of monophonic tunes, often in cantus-firmus style. But many are reworkings of polyphonic chansons, and some chansons were adapted dozens of times. The variety of techniques used is exemplified by Hayne van Ghizeghem's De tous biens plaine, one of the most frequently adapted: one reworking adds a fourth voice si placet; three substitute a new contratenor; two retain two voices of the original and add two new voices; 28 borrow the superius, tenor or contratenor as a cantus firmus and add one to three new voices (in three cases with a new added text); two combine one voice from this chanson with one from another existing chanson and two new voices; and one reworks parts of all voices of the model (Meconi, JRMA, 1994). Reworkings appear to begin about 1450 with numerous alternative versions of O rosa bella and become increasingly common in the second half of the century. This coincides with or soon follows the practice of basing mass cycles on polyphonic secular works; the two are almost certainly related, with many of the same composers active in both traditions. Yet there are differences in the two practices, most notably that the secular reworkings tend to present the borrowed voice or voices without transposition or significant alteration, in the same voices and rhythmic values as in the original. Such a reworking may have served several purposes, such as bringing an older work up to date by adding a fourth voice or smoothing out the contratenor; providing a fresh version of a familiar favourite, akin to ‘covers’ of hit recordings in late 20th-century popular music; or demonstrating the skill of the composer in recasting a well-known model, a combination of ‘emulation, competition, and homage’ (Brown, 1982). Some reworkings seem to have been written by students, to judge from their lesser quality, their preservation anonymously in only one source and, in rare cases, evidence of correction and revision; it seems likely that imitation of a model chanson was a frequent mode of instruction in composition. The tendency to return repeatedly to the same models, such as Fors seulement and Fortuna desperata, suggests that composers were conscious of engaging in a tradition involving competition with each other and a search for new and individual ways of treating common material. In contradistinction to the 19th and 20th centuries, when inventing a distinctive melody or style came to be valued most highly, Renaissance musicians seem to have regarded the reworking of existing material as a test of compositional skill, demonstrating one's inventiveness not in what one starts with but in what one does with it.

Chanson reworking continued throughout the 16th century, partly in response to the demand for published music for amateurs. Attaingnant and others recast four-voice chansons for three or two parts or for voice and instruments and published them repeatedly, often without attribution (Heartz, 1971). The most popular songs, such as Didier Lupi Second's Susanne un jour (Levy, 1953), Sandrin's Doulce memoire (Dobbins, 1969–70) and Sermisy's Jouyssance vous donneray, were reworked for fewer parts, for instruments, as contrafacta, in new chansons based on cantus firmus or paraphrase, as psalm tunes or dance melodies, and in other ways, normally without attribution to the original composer. Both the frequency of re-use and the frequent lack of attribution suggest a musical culture in which reworking was undertaken primarily for utilitarian reasons, to adapt music to a new function or performing ensemble, and in which ownership of music lay with the user as much as or more than with the originator.

Frottolas often quoted or alluded to text and music of other frottolas or earlier works. By contrast, Italian madrigals seldom drew from existing works and were in turn reworked less often than chansons or frottolas, primarily in arrangements for two or three voices or voice and instruments. Interest in correct declamation, expressive inflection and vivid illustration of the words inspired invention of new music uniquely suited to the text and made emulation less satisfying, even when composers set the same poem. But at least some madrigal composers drew on earlier works as models for procedures or effects, usually without melodic borrowing; for example, some of Monteverdi's early madrigals are modelled on ones by Luzzaschi, Marenzio and Wert (Watkins and La May, 1986; Tomlinson, 1987). English madrigal composers used Italian works as models; for example, Morley borrowed directly, reworking several ballettos of Gastoldi and canzonets and madrigals of other composers, while Weelkes used works of Salamone Rossi as models for his first madrigal collection, borrowing points of imitation, melodic contours, rhythms and textures (Cohen, 1985).

The Renaissance also saw the development of genres based on quotation (rather than reworking or modelling), in which recognizing the quoted material is part of the game. The quodlibet, practised mostly in Germany from the 15th century to the mid-18th, combined quotations from several songs, usually with humorous intent. Successive or homophonic quodlibets, the most common type, present a patchwork of brief musical and textual fragments in one voice, including folksongs and street cries, accompanied by voices without quotation. Simultaneous or polyphonic quodlibets combine in counterpoint two or more such patchwork voices, two or more complete borrowed melodies, or a mixture of both types. Related forms in other nations include the ensalada (Spain), fricassée (France) and incatenatura or misticanza (Italy). The English medley tends to present a series of complete songs rather than fragments. The Latin American ensaladilla was a quodlibet villancico comprising a series of existing villancicos strung together with linking passages.

Much instrumental music of the Renaissance was based on borrowing. Intabulations of vocal music continued throughout the Renaissance and into the 17th century. Numerous keyboard intabulations appear in German manuscripts, notably the Buxheimer Orgelbuch (see Arrangement, ex.2). The rise of music printing and of amateur interest in performance in the early 16th century led to many published collections of intabulations for keyboard, lute, vihuela and other plucked string instruments, with varying degrees of embellishment (see Arrangement, ex.3). Such transcriptions testify both to the popularity of the vocal originals, ranging from motets to madrigals and villancicos, and to the readiness of musicians to rework existing music to suit new circumstances. The more elaborate reworkings display the compositional and performing virtuosity of the intabulator, and essentially constitute variations on the vocal model.

The canzona began as an instrumental arrangement of a polyphonic chanson, like the four in M.A. Cavazzoni's Recerchari motetti canzoni (1523). His son Girolamo Cavazzoni's canzona on Josquin's Faulte d'argent (published 1543) considerably reworks its model, eliminating the canon between contratenor and quinta pars, rewriting the opening point of imitation (whose original imitation at the unison would be ungraceful on the organ), adjusting the rhythm, compressing the opening phrases of five and seven bars respectively to four each, and making similar changes throughout to create a substantially new work on the same motivic ideas and formal and harmonic plan (ex.10). Later canzonas were composed using newly invented material in a similar style, and many ensemble canzonas were transcribed for keyboard or lute before the newly composed keyboard canzona was established around 1600. Thus the canzona, like the motet, began as a genre defined by its use of borrowed material and evolved by the early 17th century into an independent work, normally free of borrowing.

Another genre originally derived from vocal models was the instrumental setting of chant or other melody in cantus-firmus style, apparently not intended for liturgical use. Most striking is the English tradition of In Nomine compositions for consort or keyboard. The practice originated in instrumental performances and intabulations of the ‘In nomine Domini’ section of Taverner's Mass on the Sarum antiphon Gloria tibi Trinitas, which uses the chant as a cantus firmus. Later English composers borrowed the cantus firmus for new instrumental works, which became known as ‘In Nomine’, and some also adapted motifs from Taverner's other voices. Akin to the Caput mass tradition, In Nomines involved direct borrowing of a monophonic tune coupled with emulation of previous polyphonic works based on that tune, resulting in a chain of competitive composition in which the way one worked with borrowed material while introducing something new was part of demonstrating one's skill as a composer.

Dance music was often improvised over a given cantus firmus. Numerous tunes for the basse danse were drawn from French chansons. Other dances were based on repeating basses or chordal schemes such as the passamezzo and folia, which served both as schemes for improvisation, like the 12-bar blues in the 20th century, and as material to be borrowed and reworked into compositions for lute, keyboard or instrumental consort.

The most significant use of borrowing in instrumental music was the new genre of variations. Borrowing and variation are clearly related; most types of borrowing in the Renaissance, from paraphrased hymns and instrumental intabulations to the imitation mass, resemble one or more free variations on the source, and embellishing a newly composed theme is similar to reworking an existing piece. But pieces conceived as sets of variations first appear in the 16th century, especially in Italy, Spain and England, in works for lute, vihuela or keyboard. Spanish and Italian variation sets were often based on repeating basses or harmonic frameworks commonly used for improvisation. Examples of these, including the passamezzo, folia, romanesca, Ruggiero and Spagna, appear in Mudarra's Tres libros de musica en cifras para vihuela (1546) and the Tratado de glosas (1553) by Diego Ortiz. Other works presented a cantus firmus in a succession of varied settings, as in the diferencias (variations) on O gloriosa Domina by Luys de Narváez (1538), or combine melodic variations with a repeating bass, as in the latter's variations on Guárdame las vacas. English composers wrote variations on short repeated ground-bass figures, sometimes borrowed, and cantus-firmus variations on hymns and other liturgical chant. In the closing decades of the 16th century and the early 17th century, English composers for virginal such as Bull and Byrd cultivated all current types of variations, including variations on traditional bass patterns, cantus-firmus variations, melodic variations on popular songs and fantasias on borrowed motifs such as the diatonic hexachord and other commonly used solmization figures. Writing variations on a borrowed theme remains one of the most prominent uses of musical borrowing down to the present day; indeed, it is so common that it is seldom thought of as a kind of borrowing.

This survey of borrowing in the Renaissance from the mass to secular instrumental music shows how widespread borrowing practices were, how often new music depended on reworking older material, how habitual borrowing was for composers, and how varied and often masterly were their methods of adaptation. Within repertories that included music on newly invented subjects and music on borrowed ones, such as motet, chorale and canzona, there appear to have been few distinctions between works that borrowed and those that did not in how the musical material was used and the work was structured. Clearly the focus of composition was on skilful elaboration, not originality in invention. Luther's famous comment that Josquin was ‘the master of the notes’, which ‘must do as he wills’, confirms that mastery lay not in the material but in what the composer did with it. The frequent return to the same melodies and models for reworking, from O rosa bella to Susanne un jour and the romanesca, suggests that these formed part of a core repertory for one or more generations, as familiar as the Beethoven symphonies to 19th-century concertgoers and as jazz standards to 20th-century fans, and that part of the pleasure of music was to hear the familiar in a new guise.

8. The Baroque era.

Early 17th-century composers continued many of the borrowing practices of the previous century. Monteverdi's Vespers (1610) included cantus-firmus settings of psalms and two of the Magnificat, an instrumental sonata on the litany melody Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis and an imitation mass on a Gombert motet. Frescobaldi wrote variations on the Ruggiero, romanesca and other popular tunes; capriccios on La sol fa re mi, the ascending and descending hexachord, and other frequently used subjects; keyboard settings of hymns and the Magnificat; and, in the organ masses of Fiori musicali (1635), settings of plainchant Kyrie sections to be performed alternatim with chant, including Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens genitor’.

Yet several forms of borrowing declined in significance after 1600. Settings of Latin liturgical texts such as hymns and the Magnificat were less likely to incorporate the original chant, partly because the modern style differed radically from the old modal tunes and from earlier styles of elaborating them. By the 18th century, when the chant appeared as a cantus firmus, as in the ‘Confiteor’ of Bach's Mass in B minor (c1747–9), it was a rhetorical gesture, an evocation of an archaic style regarded as especially dignified and sacred. An intense focus on the proper declamation and expression of texts, both secular and sacred, promoted a search for individual solutions rather than extensions of tradition. Composers after about 1630 tended to avoid parody, paraphrase and cantus firmus procedures in their masses and Latin motets in favour of devising a unique musical treatment appropriate to the text and the circumstances of performance. Similarly, instrumental sonatas, canzonas, toccatas, ricercares and other forms relied primarily on new musical material.

Composers did not cease imitating each other, but they tended to borrow styles and conventions more often than melodies or polyphonic complexes. Monteverdi's stile concitato, invented for Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), was imitated by Grandi and Schütz, and his Lamento della ninfa (published 1638) helped establish a tradition of laments over a descending tetrachord ostinato, including laments by Cavalli, Cesti, Purcell and Handel. Lully's overtures and concertos by Corelli and Vivaldi likewise set a pattern for later composers. Once such styles and conventions were established, however, any number of works might have served as models, making borrowing from any particular piece difficult to trace.

Still, borrowing in the Baroque era was frequent, in three main arenas: music on standard harmonic or bass patterns; genres based on borrowing, such as variations, chorale settings, organ mass and quodlibet; and reworking existing music, either one's own or another's, for a new purpose. The last of these began to raise issues of originality and plagiarism for critics in the 18th century and later (see §9, below).

Dances, vocal and instrumental settings, and variations continued to be composed on bass patterns and melodies inherited from the 16th century, and new ones entered the repertory. Strophic songs, duets and instrumental variations on the romanesca and ruggiero reached their peak in the first third of the 17th century. The folia melody and bass was current in Spain and Italy through the 1670s and a variant form (‘Folies d'Espagne’) remained popular up to 1750, especially in France and England. The opening chorus of the final dance of the Florentine intermedi of 1589, by Cavalieri, became well known as the Ballo del Gran Duca or Aria di Fiorenza and was adapted in over 100 dances, intabulations and other compositions (Kirkendale, 1972). The chaconne began as a Mexican dance-song imported to Spain and Italy, where its repeated harmonies developed into ostinato bass patterns used across the Continent for variations; passacaglia basses had a similar evolution from harmonic formulae used as guitar ritornellos for Spanish songs. Variation sets on these chord progressions or bass patterns, such as Frescobaldi's Partite sopra passacagli (1627), were imitated by later composers in a tradition that culminated in the orchestral and choral chaconnes and passacaglias of Lully, Purcell and others. Variations on bass ostinatos and harmonic patterns were popular all over Europe. As the century continued, direct borrowing decreased as conventional patterns and figures emerged. These conventional basses and harmonic progressions are in some respects comparable to melodic formulae in early chant; in both cases, the music that survives in notation appears to have resulted in part from a tradition of improvising new realizations of a familiar formula. The overlap between using a convention and emulating a particular work is illustrated by Bach's Passacaglia in C minor for organ, which drew on broad generic traditions, borrowed the first half of its bass ostinato from an organ passacaglia by André Raison and emulated textures and procedures from Buxtehude's Passacaglia in D minor.

Many variations in the first half of the 17th century were composed on original material, including the new forms of strophic variations, variation canzona, variation sonata and variation ricercare, but borrowed material continued to be used. Northern composers from Sweelinck to Bach wrote variations on chorales, usually in a series of cantus firmus settings, and Sweelinck, Scheidt and later composers also wrote melodic variations for keyboard on secular songs, often treating the melody less as a line to be decorated than as a general framework.

While the use of Latin chants in new works decreased, compositions based on chorales proliferated in Lutheran Germany. These included four-part harmonizations with the chorale in the upper voice; chorale motets using cantus-firmus procedure or imitation of each phrase in all voices; the chorale concerto practised by Praetorius, Schein and Scheidt, which introduced chorale melodies into the new concerted Italian vocal genres; the chorale ricercare, an organ counterpart of the chorale motet in which each line of the chorale was treated in fugal imitation; the chorale fugue, in which only the first or first two lines were imitated fugally; chorale variations (or chorale partita) for organ; the chorale fantasia, a large organ work that freely developed a chorale, often presenting each line in more than one manner; and the chorale prelude, a setting of the chorale tune in embellished form with simple accompaniment or as a cantus firmus above or amid imitative or figurative counterpoint, played on the organ to introduce the tune before the congregation sang a chorale.

Most elaborate was the chorale cantata, which set one verse of the chorale text in each movement and borrowed its tune for some or all movements, using a variety of methods from cantus firmus to paraphrase and imitative polyphony and usually ending with a chordal setting of the chorale melody for chorus, sometimes decorated with obbligato instrumental parts. Bach's Cantata no. 4, on Christ lag in Todesbanden (?1708), is a late but well-known example, with a different approach in each movement (ex.11). The first verse is in chorale motet style with the chorale as a cantus firmus in long notes in the soprano, motifs paraphrased from it in other voices and the chorale's opening auxiliary-note figure echoing throughout the texture. The second verse features a paraphrase of the chorale in the soprano, anticipated and accompanied by several statements of the descending step that opens the chorale. After other types of settings in later movements, the final verse is a straightforward four-part harmonization. More numerous than pure chorale cantatas were cantatas that incorporated a chorale in one or more movements, interspersed with biblical verses or other poetry set as recitatives and arias. Chorale settings were also interpolated into other sacred works, as in Bach's Passions. Movements on other texts, especially for chorus, often incorporated a chorale as a cantus firmus in either voices or instruments; Bach's Kyrie in F bwv233a uses Christe du Lamm Gottes in this way. The ingenuity with which composers used and transformed chorales is impressive. All types of chorale reworking linked the music heard to tunes and texts familiar to the congregation, reinforcing the didactic message of the chorale while introducing artistry and variety.

Many organ masses were composed and published in Italy in the first half of the 17th century and in France in its last third. The Italians continued to use chant, usually in cantus-firmus style, but French composers such as Raison and François Couperin tended more often to paraphrase or even omit the chant. The popularity of singing noëls at Midnight Mass at Christmas led Charpentier to include several noël melodies in his Messe de minuit pour Noël for voices and orchestra; organists composed numerous settings of noëls and, beginning in the 18th century, messes en noëls, in which each verset was based on a noël melody.

Such works exploited the listener's pleasure in recognizing familiar tunes in a new context. The same was of course true of the quodlibet, medley and similar forms, which continued through the 17th and 18th centuries, and of stage works that incorporated borrowed music. Familiar songs, sometimes with altered or new texts, were sung in the plays of Shakespeare and in Jacobean city comedies in the early 17th century (Austern, 1985). The French comédie en vaudevilles and the English and North American ballad opera, both especially popular in the first half of the 18th century, were comic plays with numerous interpolated songs that set new words to familiar traditional or popular melodies.

9. Reworkings and issues of originality.

The type of borrowing practised in the Baroque era that has seemed most foreign to later centuries was the re-use or reworking of entire pieces. 19th-century notions of originality regarded reworking one's own music as unoriginal and taking another's work without due credit as plagiarism. These ideas began to emerge during the 18th century, and their gradual acceptance led to a fundamental change in attitudes towards and practices of borrowing.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, music was designed for a particular circumstance, sometimes for a single occasion, and music that was not recast for a new use would often not be heard again. It is therefore no surprise that composers felt free to re-use or rework their own music to suit a new purpose, occasion or audience. Monteverdi rewrote the lament from his opera L'Arianna (1608) as a madrigal sequence for five voices to include in his sixth book of madrigals (1614) and later created a sacred contrafactum of it as Pianto della Madonna, published in Selva morale e spirituale (1641); similarly, he reworked his canzonetta Chiome d'oro as a motet, Beatus vir. Lully recast his tragédie-ballet Psyché (1671) as an opera (1678). Purcell re-used earlier music frequently in his incidental music for plays and often excerpted and adapted solo songs and duets from larger works. Vivaldi re-used arias in later operas, and his instrumental and vocal works often share ritornello material. Rameau arranged instrumental music from Les Indes galantes as a series of harpsichord pieces titled Quatre grands concerts (1735) and borrowed phrases and refrains from his harpsichord pieces in his operas. Bach recast many of his secular cantatas as sacred cantatas and reworked individual cantata movements in new cantatas, the Christmas Oratorio and the Mass in B minor; he also adapted several violin and other concertos as harpsichord concertos for his own concerts. Handel frequently re-used or reworked earlier compositions, most famously in Messiah (1742) and in many of his operas. Most of these adaptations made available for new performances or for publication music that otherwise would no longer have been performed, and the others made the music usable in new contexts, such as for religious services or home performance. Many also represent new and sometimes ingenious extensions for musical ideas the composer had already worked with, demonstrating both the hitherto unrealized potential in the material and the skill of the composer. Often a similarity of wording, affect, subject or dramatic situation makes the earlier music appropriate for a new text and helps to explain why the composer was reminded of a particular piece and chose it for reworking.

Composers also frequently adapted music by others, and often for the same reasons. Monteverdi reworked Caccini's monodic setting of Sfogava con le stelle as a five-voice madrigal, perhaps as an answer to Caccini's criticism in the preface to Le nuove musiche of the new style of polyphonic madrigals championed by Monteverdi (Horsley, 1978). Aquilino Coppini wrote and published three books of sacred contrafacta of madrigals by Monteverdi and others (1607–9), making works in the new style available for worship and devotions. Lutenists, guitarists and keyboard performers transcribed or recomposed music for voices or other instruments for their own. In the New World, Spanish and French missionaries appropriated tunes of the indigenous peoples for Christian texts. Schütz reworked secular duets by Monteverdi and motets by Gabrieli and Grandi. Lully's operas were parodied at the Théâtre Italien, with comic texts set to his music.

By the late 17th century, any opera being revived with new singers in a different city was likely to be presented as a pasticcio to some degree, as singers routinely substituted arias they already knew or that better suited their voices; in the 18th century, impresarios often assembled pasticcios by adapting existing arias by diverse composers to an existing or a new libretto. Several Handel operas were pasticcios in whole or part; he reworked pieces by Stradella, Kerll, himself and others in his oratorio Israel in Egypt (1739); he drew extensively on Muffat and to a lesser extent on Telemann and Domenico Scarlatti in his instrumental works; and he frequently used motifs from existing works in new contrapuntal contexts. Bach transcribed concertos by Vivaldi, Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, Telemann and others for organ or harpsichord, arranged sonatas and a fugue by Reincken for keyboard and pieces by Telemann and Couperin for organ, and wrote fugues on themes by Albinoni, Corelli and Legrenzi. His late motet Tilge, Höchster, mein Sünden (1741–6) was based on Pergolesi's Stabat mater. The motives for these reworkings included competition for Monteverdi, studying and absorbing another composer's style for Schütz and Bach, practicality and profit for Coppini and the opera impresarios, and the challenge of composing a new work on a given model, and almost all made the existing music usable in new circumstances.

The most interesting reworkings also improved on the source in some way, in accord with Mattheson's advice in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739): ‘Borrowing is permissible; but one must return the object borrowed with interest, i.e., one must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived’. In some cases, the original composer was identified or would have been known to listeners. That composers did not always identify their sources is not surprising for an era in which music was valued for its usefulness as entertainment, as accompaniment to worship or as expressive vehicle for a text, rather than as an art practised for its own sake. More artisan than artist, a composer of this time was expected to provide appropriate music that was fresh but not necessarily original.

Composers in the Baroque sought recognition for their innovations and credit for their compositions, as did Gesualdo and François Couperin in publishing music that had circulated without their permission, but they seldom claimed ownership of musical material when it was reworked by others. Cavalieri strongly asserted his priority as first to use the stile rappresentativo, but there is no sign that he or anyone was as concerned that he was the composer of the music that became known as Ballo del Gran Duca, subject of so many compositions in the early 17th century. Imitation of existing material was accepted and skilful reshaping lauded in music as in literature and the other arts, as had been true for centuries. The occasional complaints of plagiarism or misappropriation from the 16th century to the early 18th usually concerned the attribution of entire works, not the borrowing of musical material for reworking (Pohlmann, A1962).

But in English critical writings of the mid-18th century there began to emerge a new concern for originality as superior to imitation in literature (Buelow, 1987 and 1988). Edward Young wrote in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759):

An Imitator shares his crown, if he has one, with the chosen Object of his Imitation; an Original enjoys an undivided applause. An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.

Within two generations, originality and genius were considered central to the creative process, and direct borrowing from a model – part of imitation in literature since Quintilian – risked accusations of plagiarism. Writers on music soon adopted the same attitudes, and by the early 19th century the invention of new melodies and new effects had replaced the skilful manipulation of given material as the sign of a great composer. Only in the training of young composers did overt imitation still meet approval. Romanticism has no more profound source than this change in emphasis from the continuity and collectivity of a tradition sustained through imitation of exemplary models to the individualism of an artistic culture that prized genius, inspiration and innovation.

As a sign of the change in values, by the early 19th century Handel stood accused of plagiarism (Horncastle, E1822) for practices that seem today like particularly excellent examples of what had been a long and distinguished tradition of creatively reshaping borrowed material, using a wide range of procedures (Harris, 1990; Winemiller, 1994 and 1997; Risinger, 1996). Handel has been a focus for studies of borrowing for two centuries, because of the historical irony that he was the most significant composer associated with England, where the critical emphasis on originality began, yet he reworked his own music and borrowed from others more often than his contemporaries. Indeed, the issue is so significant in Handel scholarship that there is a modern publication of his sources (Roberts, 1986–8).

See also Parody (ii) and Pasticcio.

10. Late 18th century.

The late 18th century can be seen as a time of transition between old attitudes towards borrowing and new ones. Some forms of borrowing common in the Baroque era were still practised, some declined in popularity and some changed, while new types appeared. Operatic pasticcios were staged in Italy and London until the end of the century and (under the name ‘quodlibet’) in Vienna early in the 19th century. Ballad operas appeared in England and North America into the early 19th century, and a German adaptation of one helped to launch the German Singspiel. French comic operas were translated and adapted as far away as Sweden, and Mozart's early Singspiel Bastien und Bastienne (1768) was modelled on Rousseau's Le devin du village. Medley continued in England, where Richard Charke introduced the medley overture. Arrangements and transcriptions continued, including arrangements of operatic excerpts for wind ensembles and transcriptions of ensemble music for keyboard. Arrangements of Haydn's instrumental themes for voice and keyboard with English words testify to the popular demand for his music in England. On the other hand, elaborate compositions on chorale tunes appeared less frequently, replaced by modest functional music designed to support congregational singing. Variations on ostinato basses and chorales virtually disappeared after 1750. Melodic variations became the predominant type throughout Europe, with the theme presented first, the harmony preserved in each variation (sometimes with a change to the parallel minor for some middle variations) and the melody elaborated with changing figuration yet always recognizable. Composers turned out hundreds of variation sets, often on borrowed themes, for sale to amateur performers on the piano, guitar, flute, violin and other instruments. Mozart's variations for piano on popular songs, opera arias and dances by other composers were among his most popular works. In his later sets the final variation was often an expanded fantasia on material from the theme.

In the realm of reworkings, composers occasionally reshaped their own music into new guises. Mozart recast music from his Mass in C minor k247/417b as the oratorio Davidde penitente k469 (1785) and converted several of his serenades into symphonies. He frequently re-used melodic cells from his own earlier works, often in other genres. Haydn adapted movements of symphonies nos.63 and 73 from the overtures to his comic operas Il mondo della luna and La fedeltà premiata and movements of three late symphonies from chamber works, and he recast his orchestral piece on the seven last words of Christ (?1786) for string quartet (1787) and then as an oratorio (1796–7). Imitation of models was still practised, particularly as a means of instruction, but the extensive borrowing seen in Handel or Bach was rare among mature composers. The young Mozart's first four keyboard concertos, composed at the age of 11, were compiled from keyboard works by Raupach, Honauer and others, and five years later he reworked three J.C. Bach piano sonatas as piano concertos, a year before his first concerto on original themes (no.5, k175, 1773); a gradual development is evident from straightforward arrangement in the first group through freer reworking in the second to increasing independence from models in the last. Later he learnt styles through emulation, but with overt borrowing restricted to brief phrases of melody and aspects of procedure and form, as in the second movement of his quartet k168, modelled on a quartet movement by Ordonez (Brown, F1992). Even in his last months, Mozart modelled parts of his Requiem (1791) on Michael Haydn's C minor Requiem in instrumentation, style, texture, form and text setting, while avoiding more direct references.

New uses of borrowed material that continued into the 19th century appeared in music of Mozart and Haydn, especially late in their careers. At the bidding of publishers in London and Edinburgh, Haydn arranged hundreds of Scottish, Irish and Welsh folksongs for voice accompanied by violin and continuo or violin, cello and keyboard, helping to establish a tradition of folksong settings. He paraphrased folksongs as themes in symphonies and other instrumental works, perhaps to suggest a folkish atmosphere or create a national impression, as in the finale of his London Symphony no.104 (1795), whose theme echoes a London street song. During the supper scene in the Act 2 finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787), an onstage band (wind octet with cello) plays excerpts from operas by Martín y Soler and Sarti as well as his own Le nozze di Figaro, just as might occur at an aristocratic dinner. This is an early instance of using quotation in an opera or programmatic work to represent a performance of a particular piece of music; Biber's Battalia (1673) is a rare precedent, with its quodlibet of eight different folksongs in five different keys, representing the songs of the soldiers encamped before the battle. Mozart arranged Bach and Handel fugues for string trio or quartet (1782) and reorchestrated Messiah and three other vocal works by Handel (1788–90) to bring them closer to current taste for performances sponsored by Baron van Swieten, inaugurating a tradition of Bach arrangements and Handel reorchestrations that continued for a century and a half.

See also Variations, §6.

11. 19th century.

Despite increasing emphasis on originality, some traditional forms of borrowing continued into the 19th century, some forms that had lapsed were revived and new ones appeared. The range of sources from which composers borrowed expanded with the growing interest in nationalism, exoticism and historicism. The revival of older music and the emergence of a permanent repertory of musical classics meant that new works were presented side by side with works of the past, and it was natural that composers would reflect on music of the past through borrowing in various forms, including reviving earlier styles of borrowing. Paradoxically, borrowing itself became a method for achieving individuality; by infusing folksongs or other national or exotic elements into their music, or by invoking music of past centuries through quotation or use of characteristic procedures within a modern style, composers were able to set their music apart from the contemporary mainstream and find a niche in the new marketplace for music.

French organ composers continued to write ‘messes en noëls’ and settings of Gregorian chant for alternatim performance until alternatim organ music was banned from services in 1903. Most chorale settings were simple and utilitarian, but new interest in Bach's organ music led several composers to use chorales in more complex works intended for organ recitals, not for use in church. Three of Mendelssohn's Six Sonatas for organ op.65 (1844–5) incorporate chorales, sometimes in novel ways, and the last is a chorale partita. Also notable are Brahms's chorale preludes (1896) and Reger's chorale fantasias (1898–1900). The Bach revival also brought new interest in the chorale cantata and chorale motet and in including chorale movements in German oratorios. Mendelssohn wrote five chorale cantatas (1827–32, not published in his lifetime), Brahms a chorale motet (c1860) and Reger four chorale cantatas (1903–5), and Mendelssohn interpolated chorales in his St Paul (1836), on the model of the Bach Passions. All of these look to Bach in reviving genres that had declined or disappeared after his death, in their use of chorales, and in the ways they treat the melody, from cantus firmus to paraphrase. Similarly, the interest in music before Bach and the effects of the Cecilian Movement led to a renewal of Gregorian chant as a source and of traditional ways of adapting it, especially among composers active in France, from Liszt to d’Indy. Others from Bruckner to Satie used melodic formulae and fragments from chant to suggest an ancient sacred style.

Variations continued, now more often on original than on borrowed themes and including the new types of character variations, virtuoso variations and fantasia variations. Some variation sets featured elaborate introductions that gradually revealed the theme to be used, as in Chopin's Variations on Mozart's ‘Là ci darem la mano’ for piano and orchestra (1827), which also interpolated a ritornello between the variations. The interest in music of the past as both subject and model is clear in Liszt's revival of Baroque ostinato variations in his prelude, variations and chorale for piano on Bach's Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (1859) and in Rhapsodie espagnole for piano (c1867) on the Folies d'Espagne, best known to the 19th century in Corelli's variation set. Brahms also drew on the past for themes and procedures, ending his variations on a theme of Handel (1861) with a fugue and those on a theme attributed to Haydn (1873) with extended development over a bass ostinato.

The spread of musical literacy and inexpensive manufacture of instruments, especially pianos, led to a mass market for sheet music for amateurs to play at home. Transcriptions and arrangements flourished in this market; in the century before recordings, it was through transcriptions for two or four hands at the piano that many first heard or played for themselves the symphonies and opera excerpts of the day. Some transcriptions were faithful to the original and thus might be considered a new version rather than a new work; others involved some reworking or elaboration. Freer still was the new form of the operatic paraphrase for piano, as practised by Liszt and other virtuosos; his Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) reorders the excerpts he draws from Mozart's Don Giovanni and adds interludes and further development to create a new dramatic outline that implies Don Giovanni's triumph rather than defeat (Riethmüller, 1984). The same range between strict transcription and free paraphrase can be found in operatic and other works arranged for wind bands and dance orchestras. Popular for both piano and band or orchestra was the potpourri, a series of melodies taken from one or more operas or other sources and strung together by linking passages.

Folksongs and other national melodies were frequently used by 19th-century composers, in accord with the Romantic interest in common folk, regional characteristics and the exotic, and with nationalist movements in culture and politics. Composers from Beethoven to Brahms, Tchaikovsky and d’Indy wrote settings for folksongs; those active at the end of the century concentrated on songs of their own nation, while Beethoven, like Haydn, specialized in British and Irish songs. Liszt wrote keyboard works on Hungarian, French, English, German, Czech, Polish, Russian and other national themes. In tribute to the lands in which he travelled and performed, Gottschalk wrote caprices and paraphrases for piano on melodies from Spain, the USA and Latin American nations, often incorporating several tunes in one piece. Many composers borrowed or paraphrased folk melodies as themes, from the Russian tunes Beethoven included in his Razumovsky quartets (1805–6) in honour of his Russian patron to the Russian and Ukrainian folksongs in Tchaikovsky's first two symphonies and the Amerindian motifs in MacDowell's Second (‘Indian’) Suite for orchestra (1891–5). Such use of folk melodies in themes lent a national or exotic flavour to the music, depending on whether one was borrowing music of one's own people or that of another. But this flavour could also be achieved through stylistic evocation, which is more common than direct borrowing; for example, Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar (1834–6) incorporates only two existing melodies, and the Russian character owes more to his frequent use of melodic formulae drawn from Russian tunes.

The precise associations carried by certain tunes made them useful for programme music. Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg (1813) and Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture (1880) are just two of many battle pieces to quote national hymns; in some cases, a tune represents a performance of it by the soldiers or their band, while in others it more abstractly represents one of the opposing armies. More numerous are works that use borrowed tunes to create a certain atmosphere rather than to relate a series of events. Brahms's Academic Festival Overture paraphrases four German student songs to evoke university life, in honour of the occasion for which it was composed, his receipt of an honorary degree at the University of Breslau in 1880. Some quotations are intended to suggest their texts. Beethoven added quotations of ‘Notte e giorno faticar’ from Don Giovanni and a waltz titled Keine Ruh bei Tag und Nacht to variation 22 of the Diabelli Variations (1819–23) as a sly response after Diabelli pressed him to finish the work more quickly. Strauss quoted several of his own pieces in Ein Heldenleben (1897–8) to signify his protagonist's ‘works of peace’.

Two brief motifs, B–A–C–H and the opening of the Dies irae chant, became perhaps the most frequently quoted ideas in classical music, partly because of their strong associations. J.S. Bach used the subject B–A–C–H (B, A, C, B) in the unfinished final fugue of The Art of Fugue; the 19th-century Bach revival brought fugues on the subject by Schumann, Liszt, Reger and others, and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other composers used it in other genres. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that ‘Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it’; indeed, it is the first quoter that makes a statement into a quotation, which can then be quoted repeatedly. Thus Berlioz's use of the Dies irae, the sequence from the Mass for the Dead, in the last movement of his Symphonie fantastique (1830) as a signifier of death and the diabolical spawned hundreds of others, including Liszt's Dante Symphony and Totentanz, Musorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre, Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini and later works by Rachmaninoff and many other 20th-century composers, which often shortened the chant to its first eight or four notes. Its meaning depended as much on earlier quotations as on its original associations.

As in centuries past, composers often re-used their own music to suit new circumstances or reveal hitherto unrealized potential. More than a third of Beethoven's compositions reworked his existing music in some way, such as the transcription of his own Piano Sonata in E op.14 no.1 as a string quartet in F; the use of a theme from the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1800–01) in a contredanse and as the theme of the Eroica Variations for piano (1802) and the variation finale of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony (1803); and the reshaping of a humorous canon into the theme of the finale of his last string quartet (Lutes, 1975). Rossini recast numbers from earlier operas to create new ones, adapting arias to suit the new words, plot situations and singers. Schubert, Brahms and Mahler borrowed from their own songs in their instrumental works. Berlioz and Bizet re-used passages from earlier works that had been set aside or left unfinished. Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder served as studies for Tristan und Isolde (1857–9). Bruckner used material from his masses in his later symphonies. Fauré returned in his late works to themes drawn from earlier songs (Nectoux, 1979). Composers’ re-use of their own music was surprisingly common for a century that so highly valued originality. In some cases, this continued earlier forms of re-use and reworking for a new audience or occasion, as when Rossini recast an aria from an earlier work for a new opera in a different city; in other cases, such as a song in an instrumental work, the composer may have expected listeners to recognize the reference and recall the original text or emotional content.

Recent scholarship on borrowing in the 19th century has often centred on influence between composers, sometimes emphasizing what one piece shares with its model, sometimes focussing on how the new piece transforms or transcends the model. Some studies have applied Harold Bloom's theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’, which describes artistic creation as an oedipal struggle to overcome the potentially overwhelming impact of an artistic forefather and achieve originality and asserts that a strong younger artist ‘misreads’ an older work in order to create space for his own art (Bloom, 1973; Korsyn, 1991; Yudkin, 1992; Bonds, 1992 and 1996). This may be too narrowly Freudian, even patriarchal (see the critique in Whitesell, 1994), but has the advantages of reflecting the 19th-century emphasis on originality and individuality and of seeing influence not only in similarity but also in the choice to depart from a model.

Composers emulated works in the same genre in order to learn from their predecessors, as an act of homage, or out of rivalry. Beethoven's dependence on Mozart's String Quartet in A k464 in composing his own Quartet in A op.18 no.5 (1799–1800) shows some of each, as he adopts procedures from the model but seeks to surpass it; his late String Quartet in A minor op.132 (1825) achieves a sublimation of the same model. Schubert's late piano sonatas borrowed from or were modelled on Beethoven, and his sonata forms in turn became a model for those of Brahms. Brahms's op.9 variations (1854) use the theme of Schumann's own op.9 and refer to other piano works of both Robert and Clara Schumann, in a gesture of homage towards his friends and advocates. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was a model for Mahler's Second and Fifth Symphonies in both musical elements and narrative conception. Most scholarship has focussed on Austrian and German composers, but recent studies have demonstrated the influence of Meyerbeer on Verdi's operas of the 1840s, of Gade's C minor symphony and E minor piano sonata on those of Grieg in the same keys, and of Liszt's B minor Sonata on MacDowell's Eroica Sonata.

Composers have often adopted models from earlier generations in order to forge a connection with the past. Beethoven's Missa solemnis (1819–23) drew on Handel's Messiah and Mozart's Requiem, and Mendelssohn's oratorios were modelled on those of Handel and Haydn and on the Bach Passions. The finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony (1884–5) is historicist on many levels, reviving the old form of chaconne variations, adapting a bass ostinato from the finale of Bach's Cantata no.150, and using as models for form, procedure and numerous details Bach's chaconne for solo violin (which Brahms had transcribed for piano left hand), the finale of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Buxtehude's E minor Ciacona, and Beethoven's Piano Variations in C minor (Burkholder, 1984; Knapp, 1989). This overlapping of historical models from three centuries (and of different ways of borrowing from a model) anticipated the free mixing in the 20th century of elements drawn from the entire sweep of music history.

It has often been argued that references to existing music create meaning. References to songs or other vocal music can suggest their texts, which may give an implied programme to an apparently ‘absolute’ instrumental work or may add new levels of meaning to a texted one. Thus Brahms's echo of his song Regenlied in Nachklang (respectively nos.3 and 4 of his op.59, 1873) heightens the ironic reversal of image in the latter, as rain turns to tears, and his use of their shared opening phrase as the main theme of the finale of his Violin Sonata in G op.78 (1879) suggests his expressive intentions for the sonata (Parmer, 1995). Mahler's lengthy reference in the last of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883–5, rev. 1891–6) to a scene from Donizetti's opera Don Sebastian, in which a man witnesses his own funeral, conveys the feelings of Mahler's protagonist with stunning clarity for those who recognize the allusion (Ringer, 1988). Schumann's Second Symphony (1845–6) alludes to both instrumental and vocal music while tracing the same evolution from struggle to triumph as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; perhaps the work was intended to convey Schumann's own struggle to come to terms with the Viennese Classical tradition, symbolized by the opening reference to Haydn's last symphony, and make it his own, as suggested by the gradual emergence of a melody from Beethoven's song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (one that Schumann had borrowed earlier in his Piano Fantasy op.17), so that the Beethoven theme seems to result from Schumann's own compositional effort (Newcomb, 1984). Such interpretations have become more common in recent studies, as scholars seek to identify relationships between works and understand their significance.

Several mutually reinforcing trends dramatically changed musical culture in the 19th century, including a growing market for sheet music and public performances, a new level of connoisseurship, the notion of music as an art practised for its own sake, identification of the composer as an artist (no longer an artisan) with an individual voice, the rise of a permanent repertory of musical classics and the resulting split between art music and popular music. These changes brought with them greater interest in the composer as a personality and, at least in art music, a greater tendency than ever before to ascribe ownership of a musical work to its composer rather than to those who commissioned, performed or heard it. This was codified in more favourable copyright laws and in a new scrupulousness in playing the notes the composer wrote rather than allowing the performer leeway for embellishment and adaptation. In these circumstances, originality grew in importance. Borrowing was fully accepted for genres in which it was traditional, from variations to potpourris, and for conveying through music the flavour of a national or ethnic group, exotic culture or past era by borrowing music that was essentially foreign to the current musical idiom. These had in common the understanding that the composer was placing existing music in a new and very different context. But emulation of earlier works of the same genre, the lifeblood of musical tradition, became problematic, although still used in the training of composers. Too close a similarity to another composer's work in melody or style could bring criticism for unoriginality or plagiarism; only sly allusion, like a wink to the connoisseur, or addressing the same musical issues in a new and original way could allow the younger composer to reach a level equal with his predecessors.

12. 20th-century art music to 1950.

Given the increasing emphasis on originality in art music, it is remarkable how frequently 20th-century composers incorporated existing music. As in the 19th century, borrowing was often used to give music a national or regional flavour or to evoke the past. Composers continued to use traditional types of borrowing, reworking their own music, drawing on models and writing variations on borrowed themes. A new element was the growing gulf in musical style and language between modern music, now often post-tonal, and the folk, popular or pre-modern art music most often used as a source. Whereas in the 19th century the borrowed material often sounded exotic or unusual in idiom in comparison to the work in which it was used, the complex and relatively unfamiliar idioms of many modernist and avant-garde composers reversed this, so that the borrowed tonal material, whether recognized or not, was perceived as the most familiar element. Composers, especially after World War II, exploited this to achieve effects from comfort and nostalgia to shock and alienation.

Interest in folk music increased in the early 20th century. Vaughan Williams, Kodály, Bartók, Canteloube, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger and many others made significant contributions to ethnomusicology by collecting, transcribing and providing accompaniments for folksongs from their nation or region, often aided by the new recording technologies, before the traditional societies that gave birth to the music withered under the impact of modern life. Folksongs were presented in elaborate orchestral settings, such as Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne (1923–30) and Copland's Old American Songs (1950–52), as well as in arrangements for chorus or for solo voice and piano, in settings for piano or instrumental ensemble and in instrumental suites, such as Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy (1940) for band. Vaughan Williams and others adapted folksongs as hymn tunes, continuing a tradition of sacred contrafacta that extended back to medieval times.

To some modern composers, 19th-century forms seemed inadequate for concert music on folk and other national tunes. Schoenberg criticized ‘folkloristic’ composers for using folktunes as symphonic themes, for they were complete in themselves and thus unsuited for development: ‘there never remains in popular tunes an unsolved problem, the consequences of which will show up only later’ (Schoenberg, 1975). Yet those committed to using national melodies found solutions to this concern through new approaches to form. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1911–13) and Bartók's Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs op.20 (1920) used tunes so brief and motivically constructed that they seem to demand repetition, treated them in continuous variation, and derived harmonies, figuration and linking passages from their elements. Vaughan Williams's Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus for strings and harp (1939) was not a set of variations, but a free treatment of five different versions of a tune he and others had collected, linked with imitative and developmental passages based on melodic ideas extrapolated from the tune. This was concert music that was formally innovative in the Romantic tradition but also true to its source, a folktune with many authentic variants. Among the most effective solutions to the problem Schoenberg identified was cumulative form, used by Ives in his Third Symphony (c1908–11) and four violin sonatas (c1908–17), in which the borrowed theme (almost always a hymn tune) appeared in full only at the end of the movement and was preceded, not followed, by development of its motivic fragments and variants (Burkholder, 1996). This formal reordering made full use of ‘developing variation’ (in Schoenberg's term) while capitalizing on the sense of completion offered by the culminating statement of the entire borrowed tune. Other composers used similar strategies, such as the black American composer Nathaniel Dett in his choral fantasy The Chariot Jubilee (1921), based on the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

Such use of folk and national melodies helped to convey a national, ethnic or exotic character, seen also in Falla's use of Andalusian folk music and Spanish Renaissance music, Gershwin's borrowings from blues by W.C. Handy, Jewish scales and motifs in works of Bloch, Schoenberg and Bernstein, Villa-Lobos's use of Brazilian popular music, American folksongs in works of Copland, Harris and Schuman, Busoni's and Beach's use of Amerindian melodies, Japanese music in Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904) and Holst's Japanese Suite (1916), Mexican Indian materials in Chávez's Sinfonía india (1935–6) and Balinese melodies in McPhee's Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936) and Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas (1956). Methods of adaptation range widely, from direct quotation to more distant paraphrase.

The music of Ives illustrates the variety of borrowing procedures composers used in the first half of the century, including traditional techniques such as variation, arrangement, setting, paraphrase, cantus firmus, medley, quodlibet and programmatic quotation. The effect or meaning conveyed varies as much as the methods used, from depicting the performance of music and thus the situation in which it was heard (like the bugle playing Taps at a memorial service in Decoration Day, c1915–20) to meditations on the musical material itself, with many gradations in between. In addition to cumulative form, Ives's most striking invention was collage, in which a swirl of quotations and paraphrased tunes is added to the musical fabric. He used this effect in orchestral works such as Washington's Birthday (c1915–17) and The Fourth of July (c1914–18) to convey a sense of remembering past events, here respectively a barn dance and a festive celebration. Each borrowed tune is related by type or motif to his main theme, and one tune will suggest another that resembles it in melody or rhythm or is of a similar genre or character, in an apt evocation of the way remembering an event, person or thing can bring others to mind involuntarily through association or resemblance. He achieved a similar stream-of-consciousness effect in several songs through ‘patchwork’, a technique he adapted from Tin Pan Alley songwriters (see §14 below), stitching together fragments from songs of the past to suggest memories of The Things our Fathers Loved (1917) and from Civil War and patriotic tunes in He is There! (1917) to suggest that the American entry into World War I continued the idealism of the crusade against slavery.

Awareness of the past resulted in numerous works that referred to or incorporated music of previous centuries. Composers continued to use the Dies irae and B–A–C–H motifs, which now evoked not only the original source but a long tradition of quotation. The B–A–C–H motif suited the ‘back to Bach’ movement between the world wars and the chromatic language of many modernists, and it was incorporated into 12-note series in works by Schoenberg, Webern, Piston and others as an act of homage and in assertion of a link to the great tradition. Other uses of the past also served to make a statement. English composers seeking to establish a distinctive national music used works from 16th- and 17th-century English composers as themes, as in Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) for strings and Britten's Young Person's Guide (Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, 1946) for orchestra; Britten's Nocturnal (1963) for guitar adapted cumulative form in presenting a series of variations that only gradually reveal their theme, a Dowland air stated in full at the end. Pfitzner's opera Palestrina (1912–15) used the legend that Palestrina had saved polyphony at the Council of Trent by composing the Missa Papae Marcelli to argue by analogy that there was still merit in the older Romantic style; in the climactic scene, Palestrina is urged to write the mass in the old style by the spirits of past composers and inspired by angels singing melodies from it (some actual quotations, others intended to suggest it). Satie made a statement of a different sort in his satirical piano pieces, mocking some of the most popular works in the piano repertory by citing Chopin's Funeral March (identified in the music as ‘la célèbre mazurka de Schubert’) at a tearful point in the second of his Embryons desséchés (1913) and recasting Mozart's Turkish rondo as a slow (but ‘très turc’) ‘Tyrolienne turque’ in the first of his Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois (1913).

Many composers prepared transcriptions of older works, such as Respighi's three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances, Elgar's, Henry Wood's and Stokowski's orchestrations of Bach organ works and Britten's Purcell realizations; some transcriptions, such as Ravel's orchestration of Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1922), have become more familiar than the originals. When executed by composers identified with modern atonal styles, some such works transcend the genre of transcription and become ‘recompositions’ that impose a post-tonal musical structure on a tonal model. Webern's orchestration of the six-part ricercare from Bach's Musical Offering (1934–5; see Arrangement, ex.6) divides each line among several instruments to create an effect of pointillism or Klangfarbenmelodie and to highlight atonal set relationships, all typical of Webern's music. In Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960), Stravinsky used instrumentation to fragment Gesualdo madrigals into a Stravinskian juxtaposition of opposing groups characterized by different timbres and tonal areas. Stravinsky's reworkings of 18th-century music in Pulcinella and Tchaikovsky's in The Fairy's Kiss and Schoenberg's recompositions of Handel in the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra similarly reinterpret the older music by emphasizing in it what is most congruent with the modern composer's style and by adding motifs, gestures and procedures typical of his most characteristic music. This reversal has been interpreted variously as a ‘misreading’ in the terms of Harold Bloom's ‘anxiety of influence’ (Straus, 1990) and as a comment on the irretrievable distance of the past tradition (Auner, H1996). As scholars have developed the view that modern music is engaged in a dialogue with the past, such recompositions, once seen as oddities, have assumed fresh significance as the most overt expression of the ambivalence composers feel towards the past.

As in the 19th century, composers frequently relied on specific models. Often these were works of immediate predecessors, such as Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (Abbate, 1981), Ravel's Rhapsodie espagnole for Stravinsky's Firebird or Debussy's Syrinx for Varèse's Density 21·5 (Baron, 1982). But sometimes composers reached back further, as when Schoenberg modelled the first movement of his 12-note String Quartet no.3 (1927) on that of Schubert's String Quartet in A minord804, Stravinsky drew on Verdi and on treatments of the Oedipus story by Mendelssohn and Purcell for his Oedipus rex (1927) and on Mozart for The Rake's Progress (1951), and Britten modelled aspects of his War Requiem (1961) on the requiem settings of Mozart and Verdi. These suggest a deliberate engagement with the past tradition, combining homage or competition with a recognition of the gulf between common-practice tonality and modern idioms. Some cases imply broader meanings; Bartók's use of the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ movement from Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor op.132 as a model for the middle movement of his Third Piano Concerto (1945) drew a parallel between their lives, for Beethoven wrote the quartet movement as an expression of thanks after recovering from an illness, and Bartók too felt that he was regaining his strength after years of ill-health.

Programmatic quotation was as frequent in the 20th century as in the 19th. Debussy quoted God Save the King to convey the Englishness of his subject in Hommage à S. Pickwick, Esq. P.P.M.P.C. and La Marseillaise to link fireworks to patriotism in Feux d'artifices (both in Préludes for piano, book 2, 1912–13). Quotations of folkish tunes, both imagined and real, in Berg's Wozzeck (1917–22) and Lulu (1929–35) comment ironically on the action on stage. Hindemith's overture to Mathis der Maler (1934–5), re-used as the first movement of the symphony he extracted from the opera, depicts a ‘Concert of Angels’ and states the chorale Es sungen drei Engeln three times in succession near the beginning and again near the end. Often, what seems to be a quotation has a more pervasive presence in the music. The Bach chorale Es ist genug, which appears near the end of Berg's Violin Concerto (1935) in fulfilment of its programme as a Requiem, is foreshadowed from the beginning, its opening notes embedded in the work's 12-note series. Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen (1945), a mournful meditation on the effects of war, culminates in the theme from the funeral march of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony after having developed its motifs and gestures.

See also Collage.

13. Art music after 1950.

After World War II, some composers were anxious to reject the past and insist on the new. Serial composers such as Babbitt and Boulez avoided the references to the past common in Berg and Schoenberg and created a wholly self-referential music through serialization of rhythm, dynamics and articulation as well as pitch. The early chance music of Cage likewise focussed on present experience and avoided the familiar. In this context, the re-emergence of overt quotation seemed radically new and daring, especially when entire pieces began to be made out of borrowed music, much of it tonal. The belated diffusion of Ives's music provided one model, Stravinsky's recompositions another, as did Joyce's novels in literature, and collage, pop art and postmodern architecture in the visual arts. Composers rediscovered the pleasure of reworking existing material, but now the subject of their music was frequently their relationship to the past tradition.

Peter Maxwell Davies turned to chant and English Renaissance music early in his career, basing his wind sextet Alma Redemptoris mater (1957) on the chant and its setting by Dunstaple. Subsequent works drew on chant, English carols, the sacred music of Gesualdo, early motets and other sources, especially the In Nomine of Taverner, reworked in two fantasias (1962 and 1964) and in his opera on Taverner's life (1962–70). Characteristically, the borrowed material is distorted and subjected to modern techniques of manipulation, emphasizing the distance from the past. George Rochberg turned away from serialism after the death of his son in 1964 and in Contra mortem et tempus and Music for the Magic Theater (both 1965) juxtaposed passages quoted or derived from earlier composers with his own music, seeking to evoke ‘the many-layered density of human existence’. His Nach Bach (1966) for harpsichord was a ‘commentary’ on Bach's Partita no.6 in E minor, interspersing fragments and transformations of the Bach with free atonal passage-work, and his Ricordanza (1972) for cello and piano is a hyper-Romantic work based on Beethoven's Cello Sonata op.102 no.1. B.A. Zimmermann's Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu (1966) was a ‘collage’ of music from the Renaissance to the modern era. Lukas Foss described his Baroque Variations (1967) as ‘not so much “variations” on three familiar pieces of baroque music as they are “dreams” about these pieces’; the three movements take respectively works by Handel, Domenico Scarlatti and Bach and distort them by making parts inaudible, fading in and out, echoing passages in different rhythms, changing note placement, adding and subtracting notes and using clusters, indeterminacy and other effects associated with the contemporary avant garde (ex.12). In the third movement of his Sinfonia (1968–9), Berio took the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony (itself adapted from a Mahler song), subtracted some parts and passages, and overlaid it with quotations from over 100 works from the Baroque to the 1960s; each quotation is linked in some way to the Mahler or to texts spoken over the music, including excerpts from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, resulting in a vast, dream-like stream of interconnected ideas. In all of these, the appearance of the older music and the way it is treated is surprising and novel, but the quoted music itself is often familiar. This meant that listeners could follow the progress of a work more easily than they could in serial or avant-garde music, where themes (if they existed at all) were too unfamiliar to grasp, and as a result works with borrowed material have often had a wider appeal than a composer's other music. At the same time, the contrasts between the borrowed material and the often strange ways it was transformed or juxtaposed with quite different music could be fascinating and expressive, commenting by implication on the fragmented, pluralistic culture and music of the modern era, the gulf separating the present from the past or the modern sense of time, space and simultaneity.

Other works took an even more radical stance towards music of the past. Tape pieces from Cage's Imaginary Landscape no.5 (1952) to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) and Telemusik (1966) subjected recorded music to tape and electronic manipulation, treating it in some cases as equivalent to other recorded sounds used for musique concrète. In Cheap Imitation (1969), Cage followed the melodic line of Satie's Socrate and transposed segments of varying lengths into different keys using chance operations. (The work was written when the copyright owner refused permission to perform the Satie in conjunction with a dance already choreographed to fit its rhythm, so Cage changed the pitches to create music no-one could claim to own: hence the title). In Hymns and Variations (1979) for voices and Some of The Harmony of Maine (1978) for organ he took partsongs of Billings and Belcher and deleted portions, again using chance. These works challenge received ideas of authorship, ownership and the integrity of the musical work. So did Kagel's Ludwig van (1969), a jumble of individual lines extracted from Beethoven and superimposed, composed as a kind of anti-homage. Schnittke often borrowed existing music, as in the passages from Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, jazz, the Dies irae and his own earlier works in his Symphony no.1 (1969–72). His cadenza (1983) for Beethoven's Violin Concerto, first movement, quotes five later violin concertos, those by Bartók (both), Berg, Shostakovich and Brahms; in the context of the familiar concerto, his modern style is jarring and the quotations doubly so, bringing into consciousness the peculiar contradiction between our identification of each work with its historical moment (and our insistence on its stylistic purity) and our concert repertory in which music from many eras appears side by side, as if time did not matter.

Many others have used borrowed material prominently, including Tippett, Henze, Crumb, Schnebel, Schafer, Schat, Rzewski, Louis Andriessen and Holloway. Methods and goals have varied widely, but most works have dramatized the distance between current aesthetics, idioms and procedures and those of the past. Borrowing has often provided a way to reintroduce tonality without renouncing newer procedures. In contrast to the cult of originality earlier in the century, the hermeticism of serialism and the ideology of musical progress, this turn to the familiar and to the past opened up possibilities and paved the way for a new pluralism extending from neo-romanticism to minimalism.

In the 1980s and 90s borrowing took on a gentler aspect. The rise of neo-romanticism lessened the gulf between current and earlier idioms and between concert and popular music, and composers often borrowed to represent a blending of idioms rather than disjunction. John Corigliano's Symphony no.1 (1990) commemorates musician friends lost to AIDS by incorporating music they played. Philip Glass based his Low Symphony (1992) on themes drawn from the experimental pop music recording Low by David Bowie and Brian Eno, drawing their work into the world of the symphony. Christopher Rouse and Claude Baker are among the American composers who borrow in much of their work. Rouse's Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma, makes a conspicuous citation from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, and his Piano Concerto (1999), written for Emanuel Ax, uses Schumann's as a point of departure. Baker's The Mystic Trumpeter (1999), written for the St Louis SO, interweaves material from Ives's The Unanswered Question, Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus, Rochberg's Music for the Magic Theater (itself based on borrowed material) and Reis glorios by the medieval troubadour Giraut de Bornelh to convey images from the Whitman poem that gives the work its title and programme. For the listener who recognizes none of the references, the character of the music suffices to suggest the programme. The smooth integration of borrowed and new music lends a sense of narrative unity quite the opposite of the disjunctions between context and quotation so often felt in music of the 1960s.

For some commentators in the 1960s and after, the extensive use of borrowing in 20th-century avant-garde works raised issues concerning the autonomy of the musical artwork. Seen in historical perspective, the concept of the autonomous musical artwork is so young that this seemed like a return to normality. While many works juxtaposed fragments, as in a collage, stressing the disjunction with the past, others sought a synthesis, recognizing that modern listeners know many kinds of music and seeking to bring them together in a unified vision. Parallels with borrowing and allusion in other arts have been explored; music scholars have begun to apply to music the rich literature on intertextuality and allusion in literature and postmodernism in the arts.

14. Popular music, jazz and film music.

Musical borrowing in American and European popular music has only recently begun to be studied, but it is clear that borrowing plays a major role. In the 17th and 18th centuries, popular tunes and famous airs were frequently re-used for newly composed texts, in such genres as the vaudeville, broadside ballad and ballad opera. Numerous collections of ‘parodies’ in France made music composed for the stage or the aristocracy available to the middle class in new arrangements and with new texts. Contrafactum continued to be a frequent practice in 19th-century popular music, including such famous examples as the American national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner (1814), with new words by Francis Scott Key to John Stafford Smith's tune for the English drinking-song To Anacreon in Heaven (c1775). German street songs were often adaptations of melodies from popular marches, dances or songs from operettas or Singspiele, with new, usually sentimental or humorous words (see Gassenhauer). Melodies of 19th-century American popular songs and hymns are often related, as if a songwriter began with a fragment of a familiar tune and extended it. Thus the American Civil War songs The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1862, itself a contrafactum of William Steefe's Glory, Hallelujah of c1856 and John Brown's Body of c1859), The Battle Cry of Freedom (1862) and Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1864) all have phrases with very similar melodic contour (ex.13) and were all published in the same key. The composer of the last two, George Frederick Root, probably intended an allusion to be heard, at least unconsciously. His earlier song heightens its patriotic appeal by recalling the most popular rallying song in the North. His later song, on the Union soldiers languishing in Southern prisons, poignantly echoes the songs that inspired so many to volunteer, and the chorus evokes images of marching (from The Battle Hymn) and the flag, the boys and freedom (from The Battle Cry), reminding the families at home of the noble cause their loved ones were serving.

The recasting of existing music into new arrangements for new media is a constant feature of popular music, a tradition in which musicians and audiences continued to regard music as belonging to the user rather than the composer far longer than in the art-music tradition. Thus Stephen Foster arranged popular songs and Italian opera excerpts for one to four instruments in his collection The Social Orchestra (1854), and J.P. Sousa included his own potpourri on Sullivan's The Sorcerer and his Carmen March based on melodies from Bizet's opera in his collection Evening Pastime: a Selection of Favorite Duets (1879). Arrangements were generally received as versions of the original work, although some were rather distant from it, but variation sets, paraphrases and other works based on familiar tunes are more clearly instances of borrowing. 19th-century brass bands and military bands often played arrangements of popular songs. In the USA a genre of march emerged at the middle of the century that incorporated a popular song in one strain or presented a medley of several tunes. In the 20th century, medleys arranged from folksongs, Christmas songs, musicals, film scores or other familiar sources were a staple of the band repertory. Music for the quadrille was often arranged from popular songs or stage works, as in the quadrilles by Johann Strauss the younger on operas by Balfe, Flotow, Verdi, Meyerbeer and Auber. Chabrier's Souvenirs de Munich for piano four hands (1885–6) is a pleasantly satirical quadrille on themes from Tristan und Isolde whose humour derives from the incongruous appearance of Wagner's serious themes in a most unserious form; Fauré took the Chabrier as a model for his similar quadrille Souvenirs de Bayreuth (?1888) on themes from the Ring cycle.

Songs for the British music hall and the continental cabaret sometimes quoted or parodied familiar music for satirical effect, as did American minstrel shows and operatic troupes. John Brougham's burlesque extravaganza Pocahontas (1855) borrowed a wide range of music, from Bellini and Verdi operas to Stephen Foster songs. In Vienna, J.N. Nestroy and his collaborators parodied operas by Rossini and Meyerbeer (music by Adolf Müller) and Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin (music by Carl Binder). Arthur Sullivan often used stylistic parody in his operettas, as in the Handelian music for the entrance of the judge in Trial by Jury (1875), and also used direct quotation; The Mikado (1885) borrows two Japanese songs to establish the locale, then quotes Bach's G minor organ fugue when the Mikado's song refers to Bach.

American Tin Pan Alley songwriters from the 1890s to the 1920s frequently quoted a familiar song just before the final cadence of the chorus, as in George M. Cohan's The Story of the Wedding March (1901), which quotes Mendelssohn's wedding march, or Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911), which quotes Foster's Old Folks at Home. The musical reference is normally alluded to in the text, which may borrow words from the quoted song or describe a performance of the quoted music. Cohan's The Yankee Doodle Boy (1904) quotes Yankee Doodle like this in the chorus, but the verse is a patchwork of patriotic tunes, including Yankee Doodle, Dixie, The girl I left behind me and The Star-Spangled Banner. Other songwriters wrote such patchworks and Ives adopted the format for several of his art songs. Quotation for humorous effect or in relation to a text continued in popular songs throughout the 20th century; the Beatles’ Glass Onion (1968) referred to their earlier Strawberry Fields Forever and The Fool on the Hill in the text and quoted short motifs from each, and a 1992 country song recorded by Pam Tillis used the much-quoted ‘Hootchy-Kootchy Dance’ of Little Egypt to suggest an Egyptian milieu for the singer's comment that she is ‘the Queen of Denial’ (i.e. ‘the Nile’). Frank Zappa used borrowed material in most of his music, ranging from The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the march from Aida to the Twilight Zone theme and fragments of Varèse and Webern, almost always as a comment on the text.

Re-use, reworking and extension of existing music are basic elements of West African musical practice and continued in black American music of the 19th and 20th centuries. The concept of borrowing, developed in the study of European written repertories, is less appropriate to these traditions than the concept of sharing materials and traditions. This avoids implications of ownership, singularity and originality, and acknowledges that there is often no distinct entity from which to borrow. Recent scholarship has introduced the term ‘signifying’ for the characteristic approach of black American musicians; the materials of music are considered common property, and anyone who engages with those materials in an expressive way is ‘signifying’ on them. As slaves were converted to Christianity, they adapted work-songs to Christian texts and improvised new songs on similar material to create a new tradition of spirituals (Epstein, 1977). Blues and jazz involved improvisation and composition based on existing harmonies, melodies and bass patterns, and similar practices continued into popular music derived from black American traditions, including rhythm and blues and rock and roll.

Jazz improvisation is typically based on existing pieces but has been viewed as a performance of a piece rather than a new work based on borrowing. However, improvisers from Louis Armstrong onwards often quote familiar tunes in the middle of a solo as a joke, comment or meaningful allusion, and soloists from Charlie Parker onwards borrow passages from recorded solos by other artists as a homage or other gesture. In the early 1940s, bop artists wrote numerous ‘contrafacts’, new jazz melodies to the chord ‘changes’ (harmonic progressions) of popular tunes, such as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's Anthropology (on the chord progression of Gershwin's I got rhythm, the most frequent source for contrafacts) and Parker's Ornithology (on Morgan Lewis's How High the Moon). This practice, like the use of the traditional 12-bar blues, allowed the artists to create melodies in the new jazz style yet continue to improvise on familiar harmonic patterns. This facilitated the learning of new repertory, challenged musicians' creativity and provided a site for competition between artists using the same material. The parallels to the 16th- and 17th-century practice of improvising and composing new melodies and variations over familiar bass lines and harmonic patterns are obvious, with a new twist: a new tune and title meant that no royalties or performing fees were due on the songs from which the harmonic progressions were borrowed. This again asserted the traditional African concept of music as common property within a music industry that tended to devalue and underpay black American musicians.

New forms of borrowing emerged with the development of recording technology in the late 20th century. Pop musicians sometimes borrowed recorded material from their own songs or from other music, overlaying new and borrowed elements in the recording studio. An early example was Simon and Garfunkel's Save the life of my child on their Bookends album (1968), in which the opening of their first hit The Sound of Silence (1965) was dubbed in with electronically enhanced echo as part of an interlude. Black American musicians devised new genres based on the manipulation of recorded material, drawing both on technology and on black American traditions of re-using existing music. In the late 1970s, disco artists frequently used previously recorded bass and rhythm tracks as a backing for new songs. Rap emerged from a practice of improvising rhymed poetry over instrumental passages from existing slow disco or funk recordings; the first rap recording to reach the top 40 in the pop charts, Rapper's Delight (1979) by the Sugar Hill Gang, used excerpts from Chic's slow disco hit Good Times (1979). Scratching was a technique of rotating a record manually under a stylus to produce rhythmic, percussive sounds, first practised live by disc jockeys at parties, then used on recordings, beginning with Adventures in the Wheels of Steel (1981) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The invention of digital sampling made manipulation of recorded material easier, and rap recordings began to include many more ‘samples’, digitally recorded snippets of music, speech or sounds; Public Enemy's Night of the Living Baseheads (1988) includes numerous samples, each of which adds meaning and resonance to the song's anti-drug and anti-racist message. Clarification of copyright law in the early 1990s forced rappers to ask permission to use samples and to give credit, stimulating them to reduce the number of samples and to diversify their sources to include classical music, where permissions were often easier and less expensive to obtain. Samples have been used by many others besides rap musicians, notably in the Plunderphonics (1989) of John Oswald, which directly engages issues of ownership.

Throughout the 20th century, musicians in popular traditions have reworked or quoted classical music. Some Tin Pan Alley songs were expressly about classical music; Berlin's That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune (1909) described the romantically intoxicating powers of Mendelssohn's ‘Spring Song’ (Song without Words op.62 no.6) and interleaved its opening figure with new material in ragtime style. Ragtime orchestras arranged classical works in ragtime style, as in performances by Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra based on Mendelssohn's Wedding March and a Rachmaninoff prelude (1918–19). Opera was a presence in jazz; Fletcher Henderson's Araby (1924) was based on Valentine's aria ‘Avant de quitter ces lieux’ from Gounod's Faust, and Louis Armstrong inserted quotations from Rigoletto, Pagliacci and other operas into his improvised solos alongside popular tunes. The opening theme from Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto became a popular hit song as Tonight we Love (1941), and Robert Wright and George Forrest's musical Kismet (1954) was based on melodies by Borodin. Duke Ellington adapted Tchaikovsky and Grieg for jazz band in his Nutcracker Suite and Peer Gynt Suite (1960), and Stan Kenton did the same for Wagner. Emerson, Lake and Palmer reworked Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man as rock music in an attempt to raise rock to the level of art music. Barry Manilow framed his song Could it be Magic (1975) with the beginning and end of Chopin's C minor prelude. The disco version of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, titled A Fifth of Beethoven, was a novelty number, but Malcolm McLaren's songs Madam Butterfly, Death of Butterfly and Carmen on his 1984 album Fans were intriguing retellings of the operas’ stories in pop style, woven around the heroines’ most famous arias. The motivations for borrowing from classical sources have ranged from recycling good melodies for a new audience to humour, irony or commentary, often exploiting the perceived distance between the ‘high’ culture of art music and the broad-based popular culture.

Film music has relied on existing music from the beginning. Early silent films were accompanied by music that was improvised or assembled by a pianist or organist, who matched emotionally appropriate music to the events on the screen. After 1905, publishers printed collections of music, keyed by situation, drawing mostly on classical instrumental works, and cue sheets were issued for particular films suggesting which pieces to use for each segment; the result was a pastiche. From the 1910s, orchestral scores were created for some larger films, again drawing on existing music; Joseph Carl Breil's score for Birth of a Nation (1915) included excerpts from symphonic works and Civil War songs appropriate to the dramatic action. When technological advances made sound films possible in the late 1920s, early sound films such as The Jazz Singer (1927) continued to incorporate existing music. As original scores were commissioned, composers changed from direct borrowing to the use of models or the adaptation of music with strong associations. Max Steiner's music for King Kong (1933) adopted Wagner's leitmotif system and echoed the Fasolt and Fafner motif from Das Rheingold in King Kong's leitmotif; Steiner's score in turn was subject to endless imitation. Composers adapted ethnic materials to set a scene, as in Steiner's use of Jewish melodies in Symphony of Six Million (1932) and Herbert Stothart's use of English folk melodies in David Copperfield (1935). Later film scores draw on all of these traditions. Some are pastiches of existing music, such as 2001 (1968), which uses classical works from Johann Strauss to Ligeti, and American Graffiti (1973), which uses American pop music of the 1950s to convey time, place and situation. Some are modelled on existing works; John Williams's score for Star Wars (1977) relies heavily on Holst's The Planets, and Takemitsu's battle scene for Ran (1985) is modelled directly on the first section of ‘Der Abschied’ from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, conveying profound sorrow through sound, style and musical reference. Film composers often reworked their scores into concert music, as in Prokofiev's cantata Alexander Nevsky (1938–9), Copland's suite from The Red Pony (1948) and Korngold's Violin Concerto (1945, using themes from his 1930s film scores). Cartoons often use or parody classical music for comic effect, as in Scott Bradley's The Cat Concerto (1947) on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 and Carl Stalling's skewering of Wagner in the Bugs Bunny classic What's Opera, Doc? (1957). Another realm for musical borrowing is underscoring advertisements, in which familiar music, from Vivaldi's ‘Four Seasons’ to the Beatles’ Revolution, can be used to lend certain associations to a product.

15. Research on borrowing.

This survey of borrowing in the Western musical tradition from the Middle Ages to the present shows that the use of existing pieces in new works is both more varied and more pervasive than has usually been acknowledged. At some times and in some repertories borrowing is the rule, at other times the exception, and at still other times a possibility that carries particular significance. Extent and methods vary, but every composer or improviser borrows and reworks existing music, and procedures of borrowing are as important a part of a composer's equipment as counterpoint, harmony, texture and form. Until the 20th century, it was normal for composers to be trained through the imitation of models and the manipulation of borrowed material; this is still true in popular genres.

Scholars have studied aspects of borrowing in music since the emergence of musicology as a field, and there is now a vast literature on the subject. Early research was hampered to some extent by the cult of originality that arose in the 19th century. Writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries often felt obliged to address the morality of borrowing or distinguish legitimate forms of borrowing from plagiarism, and this was still occasionally a theme in the later 20th century (Noé, 1963 and 1985; Carroll, 1978; Rosen, 1980–81). Each era, genre or composer tended to be treated as some kind of special exception from a presumed norm of artistic autonomy; even in Renaissance studies, where borrowing became a subject of central importance, there developed largely separate traditions of scholarship on vocal and on instrumental music. This made similarities, differences and historical connections between borrowing practices of various eras and repertories difficult to see or evaluate. New discoveries were generally couched in terms of older ones, so that the same instance might be described as parody, quotation, borrowing or plagiarism, depending on whether the writer was acquainted with the literature on the Renaissance mass, 20th-century music or Handel.

The popularity of quotation and collage in art music since the 1960s and the growing interest in the same period in scholarship of music of the 19th and 20th centuries have stimulated a flood of new research on borrowing in music since Beethoven and reconsiderations of borrowing in earlier eras. There have been many attempts to clarify terminology and make the distinctions necessary for categorizing and describing borrowing practices. With an increasing awareness of the extent of borrowing in every period, scholars are beginning to identify which practices overlap and which are unique to certain repertories or composers. Approaches to influence, borrowing, allusion and intertextuality in the parallel fields of art history and literary criticism are bringing fresh insights to the study of borrowing in music and to the relationships between the arts. The expansion of research is making it possible for the first time to see all the uses of existing music, from contrafactum, organum and cantus firmus to collage, jazz contrafacts and digital sampling, as aspects of a single field that crosses historical periods and research specializations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: general

b: medieval monophony

c: medieval polyphony

a: general

MGG2 (‘Zitat’; G. Gruber)

W. Tappert: Wandernde Melodien: eine musikalische Studie (Leipzig, 1868, 2/1889/R)

C. von Sternberg: ‘On Plagiarism’, MQ, v (1919), 390–97

H.A. Scott: ‘Indebtedness in Music’, MQ, xiii (1927), 497–509

W. Steinecke: Die Parodie in der Musik (Wolfenbüttel, 1934)

H.-G. Hein: Das Plagiat in der Tonkunst (diss., U. of Cologne, 1937)

R.U. Nelson: The Technique of Variation: a Study of the Instrumental Variation from Antonio de Cabezón to Max Reger (Berkeley, 1948/R)

H. Pohlmann: Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts 1400–1800 (Kassel, 1962)

G. von Noé: ‘Das musikalische Zitat’, NZM, Jg.124 (1963), 134–7

Z. Lissa: ‘Ästhetische Funktionen des musikalischen Zitats’, Mf, xix (1966), 364–78

G. Gruber: ‘Das musikalische Zitat als historisches und systematisches Problem’, Musicologica austriaca, i (1977), 121–35

C.M. Carroll: ‘Musical Borrowing: Grand Larceny or Great Art?’, College Music Symposium, xviii (1978), 11–18

R. Falck: ‘Parody and Contrafactum: a Terminological Clarification’, MQ, lxv (1979), 1–21

R. Stephan: ‘Zum Thema “Musik über Musik”’, Studia musicologica: aesthetica, theoretica, historica, ed. E. Dziębowska and others (Kraków, 1979), 395–404

C. Rosen: ‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 87–100

V. Karbusicky: ‘Intertextualität in der Musik’, Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität, ed. W. Schmid and W.-D. Sternpel (Vienna, 1983), 361–98

J. Spitzer: Authorship and Attribution in Western Art Music (diss., Cornell U., 1983)

F. Escal: Le compositeur et ses modèles (Paris, 1984)

R. Hatten: ‘The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies’, American Journal of Semiotics, iii (1984–5), 69–82

G. von Noé: Die Musik kommt mir äusserst bekannt vor: Wege und Abwege der Entlehnung (Vienna, 1985)

J.H. Blezzard: Borrowings in English Church Music, 1550–1950 (London, 1990)

J.P. Burkholder: ‘The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field’, Notes, l (1993–4), 851–70

A. Giger: ‘A Bibliography on Musical Borrowing’, Notes, l (1993–4), 871–4

J.P. Burkholder, A. Giger and D. Birchler, eds.: Musical Borrowing: an Annotated Bibliography 〈www.music.indiana.edu/borrowing〉

For further bibliography see Contrafactum; Quotation; and Variations.

b: medieval monophony

F. Gennrich: ‘Internationale mittelalterliche Melodien’, ZMw, xi (1928–9), 259–96, 321–48

F. Gennrich: ‘Refrain-Studien’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, lxxi (1955), 365–90

R. Weakland: ‘The Beginnings of Troping’, MQ, xliv (1958), 477–88

E. Jammers: ‘Der Vers der Trobadors und Trouvères und die deutschen Kontrafakten’, Medium Aevum vivum: Festschrift für Walther Bulst, ed. H.R. Jauss and D. Schaler (Heidelberg, 1960), 147–60

P. Evans: ‘Some Reflections on the Origin of the Trope’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 119–30

T. Karp: ‘Borrowed Material in Trouvère Music’, AcM, xxxiv (1962), 87–101

H.-J. Holman: ‘Melismatic Tropes in the Responsories for Matins’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 36–46

R.H. Perrin: ‘Descant and Troubadour Melodies: a Problem in Terms’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 313–24

F. Gennrich: Die Kontrafaktur im Liedschaffen des Mittelalters, SMM, xii (1965)

R.L. Crocker: ‘The Troping Hypothesis’, MQ, lii (1966), 183–203

R.L. Crocker: The Early Medieval Sequence (Berkeley, 1977)

D.A. Bjork: ‘The Kyrie Trope’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 1–41

T.J. Mathiesen: ‘“The Office of the New Feast of Corpus Christi” in the Regimen animarum at Brigham Young University’, JM, ii (1983), 13–44

M.E. Fassler: ‘The Role of the Parisian Sequence in the Evolution of Notre Dame Polyphony’, Speculum, lxii (1987), 345–74

G. Le Vot: ‘La tradition musicale des épîtres farcies de la Saint-Etienne en langues romanes’, RdM, lxxiii (1987), 61–82

G. Le Vot and R. Lug: ‘Imitations poétiques et adaptations mélodiques chez les “Minnesänger”’, Perspectives médiévales, xvi (1990), 19–34

M.A. Leach: ‘On Re-Creation in Medieval Music: some Melodic and Textual Relationships among Gloria Tropes’, Ars lyrica, vii (1993), 25–46

For further bibliography see Alleluia; Centonization; Gradual (i); Gregorian chant; Old Roman chant; Refrain; Sequence (i); Tract; and Trope (i).

c: medieval polyphony

F. Gennrich: ‘Trouvèrelieder und Motettenrepertoire’, ZMw, ix (1926–7), 8–39, 65–85

J. Handschin: ‘Zur Frage der melodischen Paraphrasierung im Mittelalter’, ZMw, x (1927–8), 513–59

F. Gennrich: ‘Refrain-Tropen in der Musik des Mittelalters’, Studi medievali, xvi (1943–50), 242–54

L. Schrade: ‘A Fourteenth-Century Parody Mass’, AcM, xxvii (1955), 13–39; repr. in De scientia musicae studia atque orationes, ed. E. Lichtenhahn (Berne, 1967), 241–82

K. von Fischer: ‘Kontrafakturen und Parodien italienischer Werke des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento’, AnnM, v (1957), 43–59

R. Jackson: ‘Musical Interrelations between Fourteenth Century Mass Movements (a Preliminary Study)’, AcM, xxix (1957), 54–64

U. Aarburg: ‘Ein Beispiel zur mittelalterlichen Kompositionstechnik: die Chanson R.1545 von Blondel de Nesle und ihre mehrstimmigen Vertonungen’, AMw, xv (1958), 20–40

G. Schmidt: ‘Zur Frage des Cantus firmus im 14. und beginnenden 15. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xv (1958), 230–50

S. Clercx-Lejeune: ‘Les débuts de la messe unitaire et de la missa parodia au XIVe siècle et principalement dans l'oeuvre de J. Ciconia’, L'Ars nova italiana del Trecento I: Certaldo 1959, 97–104

W.G. Waite: ‘The Abbreviation of the Magnus liber’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 147–58

D. Harbinson: ‘Isorhythmic Technique in the Early Motet’, ML, xlvii (1966), 100–09

R. Flotzinger: Der Discantussatz im Magnus liber und seiner Nachfolge (Vienna, 1969)

H.H. Eggebrecht and F. Zaminer: Ad organum faciendum (Mainz, 1970)

U. Günther: ‘Zitate in französischen Liedsätzen der Ars Nova und Ars Subtilior’, MD, xxvi (1972), 85–100

K. Hofmann: Untersuchungen zur Kompositionstechnik der Motette im 13. Jahrhundert durchgeführt an den Motetten mit dem Tenor ‘In seculum’ (Stuttgart, 1972)

R.L. Huestis: Contrafacta, Parodies, and Instrumental Arrangements from the Ars Nova (diss., UCLA, 1973)

D. Leech-Wilkinson: ‘Related Motets from Fourteenth-Century France’, PRMA, cix (1982–3), 1–22

M. Everist: ‘The Refrain Cento: Myth or Motet?’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 164–88

D. Leech-Wilkinson: Compositional Techniques in the Four-Part Isorhythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and his Contemporaries (New York, 1989)

N.E. Smith: ‘The Earliest Motets: Music and Words’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 141–63

B.J. Evans: ‘The Textual Function of the Refrain Cento in a Thirteenth-Century French Motet’, ML, lxxi (1990), 187–97

J.M. Allsen: Style and Intertextuality in the Isorhythmic Motet 1400–1440 (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1992)

S.E. Clark: The Concept of Refrain Citation in the 13th Century: a Study of Motets from Fascicle V of the Montpellier Codex (diss., U. of London, 1992)

J.M. Allsen: ‘Intertextuality and Compositional Process in Two Cantilena Motets by Hugo de Lantins’, JM, xi (1993), 174–202

Hearing the Motet: Washington DC 1994

S. Huot: Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: the Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford, CA, 1997)

For further bibliography see Magnus liber; Mass, §II; Motet, §I; Musica enchiriadis, Scolica enchiriadis; and Organum and discant: bibliography.

d: renaissance

K. Hennig: Die geistliche Kontrafaktur im Jahrhundert der Reformation (Halle, 1909/R)

P. Pisk: ‘Das Parodieverfahren in den Messen von Jacobus Gallus’, SMw, v (1918), 35–48

A. Einstein: ‘Die Parodie in der Villanella’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 212–24

H.O. White: Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1935/R)

C. van den Borren: ‘De quelques aspects de la parodie musicale’, Académie royale de Belgique: bulletin de la classe des beaux-arts, xx (1938), 146–63

J. Daniskas: ‘Een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der parodietechniek’, TVNM, xvii/1–4 (1948–55), 21–43

J. Ward: ‘The Use of Borrowed Material in 16th-Century Instrumental Music’, JAMS, v (1952), 88–98

K.J. Levy: ‘“Susanne un jour”: the History of a 16th Century Chanson’, AnnM, i (1953), 375–408

H.M. Brown: ‘The chanson rustique: Popular Elements in the 15th and 16th Century Chanson’, JAMS, xii (1959), 16–26

H.M. Brown: ‘The chanson spirituelle, Jacques Buus, and Parody Technique’, JAMS, xv (1962), 145–73

A. Clarkson: The Rationale and Technique of Borrowing in Franco-Flemish Parody-Compositions of the High Renaissance (diss., Columbia U., 1963)

R.L. Marshall: ‘The Paraphrase Technique of Palestrina in his Masses Based on Hymns’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 347–72

E.H. Sparks: Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963/R)

L. Lockwood: ‘A View of the Early Sixteenth-Century Parody Mass’, Queens College Department of Music Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Festschrift, 1937–1962, ed. A. Mell (New York, 1964), 53–77

L.F. Bernstein: ‘Claude Gervaise as Chanson Composer’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 359–81

J. Caldwell: ‘Keyboard and Plainsong Settings in England, 1500–1660’, MD, xix (1965), 129–53

J.M. Ward: ‘Parody Technique in Sixteenth-Century Instrumental Music’, The Commonwealth of Music, in Honor of Curt Sachs, ed. G. Reese and R. Brandel (New York, 1965), 208–28

P. Gossett: ‘Techniques of Unification in Early Cyclic Masses and Mass Pairs’, JAMS, xix (1966), 205–31

L. Lockwood: ‘On “Parody” as Term and Concept in 16th-Century Music’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 560–75

W. Nitschke: Studien zu den Cantus-Firmus-Messen Guillaume Dufays (Berlin, 1968)

H. Hewitt: ‘Fors seulement and the Cantus Firmus Technique of the Fifteenth Century’, Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. G. Reese and R.J. Snow (Pittsburgh, 1969/R), 91–126

T.N. Rive: ‘An Examination of Victoria's Technique of Adaptation and Reworking in his Parody Masses, with Particular Attention to Harmonic and Cadential Procedure’, AnM, xxiv (1969), 133–52

F. Dobbins: ‘“Doulce mémoire”: a Study of the Parody Chanson’, PRMA, xcvi (1969–70), 85–101

M.R. Maniates: ‘Combinative Chansons in the Dijon Chansonnier’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 228–81

D. Heartz: ‘Au pres de vous: Claudin's Chanson and the Commerce of Publishers' Arrangements’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 193–225

R.V. Shalley: A Comparative Study of Compositional Techniques in Selected Paraphrase Masses of Cristobal de Morales and Tomas Luis Victoria (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1972)

E. Kovarik: Mid-Fifteenth Century Polyphonic Elaborations of the Plainchant Ordinarium Missae (diss., Harvard U., 1973)

L. Lockwood: ‘Aspects of the “L'homme armé” Tradition’, PRMA, c (1973–4), 97–122

M.R. Maniates: ‘Combinative Chansons in the Escorial Chansonnier’, MD, xxix (1975), 61–125

H.E. Gudmundson: Parody and Symbolism in Three Battle Masses of the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Michigan, 1976)

C. Adams: ‘Some Aspects of the Chanson for Three Voices during the Sixteenth Century’, AcM, xlix (1977), 227–50

Q.W. Quereau: ‘Sixteenth-Century Parody: an Approach to Analysis’, JAMS, xxxi (1978), 407–41

I. Godt: ‘Renaissance Paraphrase Technique: a Descriptive Tool’, Music Theory Spectrum, ii (1980), 110–18

C. Santarelli: ‘Quattro messe sul tenor Fors seulement’, NRMI, xiv (1980), 333–49

H.M. Brown: ‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 1–48

Q.W. Quereau: ‘Aspects of Palestrina's Parody Procedure’, JM, i (1982), 198–216

A.F. Block: ‘Timbre, texte et air, ou Comment le noël-parodie peut aider à l'étude de la chanson du XVIe siècle’, RdM, lxix (1983), 21–54

W. Haass: Studien zu den ‘L‘homme armé’-Messen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1984)

L.L. Perkins: ‘The L'homme armé Masses of Busnoys and Okeghem: a Comparison’, JM, iii (1984), 363–96

J.P. Burkholder: ‘Johannes Martini and the Imitation Mass of the Late Fifteenth Century’, JAMS, xxxviii (1985), 470–523

J. Cohen: ‘Thomas Weelkes's Borrowings from Salamone Rossi’, ML, lxvi (1985), 110–17

R. Orlich: Die Parodiemessen von Orlando di Lasso (Munich, 1985)

F. Dobbins: ‘Lassus – Borrower or Lender: the Chansons’, RBM, xxxix–xl (1985–6), 101–57

J. Reif: ‘Music and Grammar: Imitation and Analogy in Morales and the Spanish Humanists’, EMH, vi (1986), 227–43

R. Taruskin: ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L'homme armé Tradition’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 255–93

G. Watkins and T. La May: ‘Imitatio and Emulatio: Changing Concepts of Originality in the Madrigals of Gesualdo and Monteverdi in the 1590s’, Claudio Monteverdi: Festschrift Reinhold Hammerstein, ed. L. Finscher (Laaber, 1986), 453–87

G. Tomlinson: Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987)

G.R. Boyd: ‘The Development of Paraphrase Technique in the Fifteenth Century’, Indiana Theory Review, ix (1988), 23–62

D. Flanagan: ‘Some Aspects of the Sixteenth-Century Parody Mass in England’, MR, xlviii (1988), 1–11

M.P. Long: ‘Symbol and Ritual in Josquin's Missa Di dadi’, JAMS, xlii (1989), 1–22

R. Strohm: ‘Messzyklen über deutsche Lieder in den Trienter Codices’, Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Just and R. Wiesend (Tutzing, 1989), 77–106

R.C. Wegman: ‘Another “Imitation” of Busnoys' Missa L'homme armé – and some Observations on Imitatio in Renaissance Music’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 189–202

C.J. Cyrus: Polyphonic Borrowings and the Florentine Chanson Reworking, 1475–1515 (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1990)

M. Fromson: ‘A Conjunction of Rhetoric and Music: Structural Modelling in the Italian Counter-Reformation Motet’, JRMA, cxvii (1992), 208–46

C.A. Reynolds: ‘The Counterpoint of Allusion in Fifteenth Century Masses’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 228–60

M. Steib: Imitation and Elaboration: the Use of Borrowed Material in Masses from the Late Fifteenth-Century (diss., U. of Chicago, 1992)

A.S. Edahl: The Use of Pre-Existing Material in the Early Tudor Mass Cycle (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1993)

P. Macey: ‘Josquin as Classic: Qui habitat, Memor esto, and Two Imitations Unmasked’, JRMA, cxviii (1993), 1–43

D. Crook: Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich (Princeton, NJ, 1994)

C.A. Elias: Imitation, Fragmentation, and Assimilation of Chansons in the Masses of Gombert, Clemens, and Crecquillon: a Kaleidoscopic Process (diss., U. of Chicago, 1994)

H. Meconi: ‘Art-Song Reworkings: an Overview’, JRMA, cxix (1994), 1–42

H. Meconi: ‘Does Imitatio Exist?’, JM, xii (1994), 152–78

T.E. Sullivan: Chanson to Mass: Polyphonic Borrowing Procedures in Italian and Austro-Italian Sources, c.1460–1480 (diss., Northwestern U., 1994)

F. Luisi: ‘In margine al repertorio frottolistico: citazioni e variazioni’, Musica e storia, iv (1996), 155–87

S.D. Nehrenberg: Orlando di Lasso's Missae ad imitationem: an Examination and Comparison of the Treatment of Borrowings from Self-Composed versus External Models (diss., U. of Oregon, 1996)

M. Steib: ‘A Composer Looks at his Model: Polyphonic Borrowing in Masses from the Late Fifteenth Century’, TVNM, xlvi (1996), 5–41

V. Franke: ‘Borrowing Procedures in the Late 16th-Century Imitation Masses and their Implications for our View of “Parody” or “Imitation”’, SMw, xlvi (1998), 7–33

H. Meconi, ed.: Early Musical Borrowing (forthcoming)

For further bibliography see Cantus firmus; Chorale; Chorale settings; Hymn; Incatenatura; In Nomine; Magnificat; Mass, §§III; Motet, §II; Organ hymn; Organ mass; Parody (i); and Quodlibet.

e: baroque

J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R; Eng. trans., 1981)

F.W. Horncastle: ‘Plagiarism’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, iv (1822), 141–7 [on Handel]

S. Taylor: The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers: a Presentation of Evidence (Cambridge, 1906/R)

P. Robinson: Handel and his Orbit (London, 1908/R)

A. Schering: ‘Über Bachs Parodieverfahren’, BJb 1921, 49–95

K.G. Fellerer: Beiträge zur Choralbegleitung und Choralverar-beitung in der Orgelmusik des ausgehenden 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Strasbourg, 1932/R)

H.S. Powers: ‘Il Serse trasformato’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 481–92; xlviii (1962), 73–92

W. Braun: ‘S. Scheidts Bearbeitungen alter Motetten’, AMw, xix-xx (1963), 56–74

W. Neumann: ‘Über Ausmass und Wesen des Bachschen Parodieverfahrens’, BJb 1965, 63–85

F.B. Zimmerman: ‘Musical Borrowings in the English Baroque’, MQ, lii (1966), 483–95

N. Carrell: Bach the Borrower (London, 1967)

P. Brainard: ‘Bach's Parody Procedure and the St. Matthew Passion’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 241–60

W. Kirkendale: L'aria di Fiorenza, id est Il ballo del Gran Duca (Florence, 1972)

F. Blume: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs weltliche Kantaten und Parodien’, Syntagma musicologicum II: Gesammelte Reden und Schriften 1962–1972, ed. A.A. Abert and M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1973), 190–204

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Johann Sebastian Bachs Konzertbearbeitungen nach Vivaldi und anderen: Studien oder Auftragswerke?’, DJbM, xviii (1973–7), 80–100

R. Strohm: ‘Händels Pasticci’, AnMc, no.14 (1974), 208–67

B. Baselt: ‘Zum Parodieverfahren in Händels frühen Opern’, HJb 1975–6, 19–39

E. Cross: ‘Vivaldi's Operatic Borrowings’, ML, lix (1978), 429–39

I. Horsley: ‘Monteverdi's Use of Borrowed Material in Sfogava con le stelle’, ML, lix (1978), 316–28

D. McKay: ‘The Fashionable Lady: the First Opera by an American’, MQ, lxv (1979), 360–67

G. Sadler: ‘Rameau's Harpsichord Transcriptions from Les Indes galantes’, EMc, vii (1979), 18–24

C.H. and A.K. Russell: ‘El arte de recomposicion en la música española para la guitarra barrocca’, RdMc, v (1982), 5–23

R.M. Cammarota: ‘The Sources of the Christmas Interpolations in J.S. Bach's Magnificat in E-flat major’, CMc, no.36 (1983), 79–99

G. von Dadelsen: ‘Anmerkungen zu Bachs Parodieverfahren’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 52–7

E. Derr: ‘Handel's Procedures for Composing with Materials from Telemann's Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst in Solomon’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, i (1984), 116–47

S. Leopold: ‘Israel in Egypt: ein missglückter Glücksfall’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, i (1984), 35–50

J.H. Roberts: ‘Handel's Borrowings from Telemann: an Inventory’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, i (1984), 147–71

M.A. Rorke: ‘Sacred Contrafacta of Monteverdi Madrigals and Cardinal Borromeo's Milan’, ML, lxv (1984), 168–75

L.P. Austern: ‘Musical Parody in the Jacobean City Comedy’, ML, lxvi (1985), 355–66

G.J. Buelow: ‘Handel's Borrowing Techniques: some Fundamental Questions Derived from a Study of Agrippina (Venice, 1709)’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, ii (1986), 105–28

J.H. Roberts: ‘Handel's Borrowings from Keiser’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, ii (1986), 51–76

J.H. Roberts, ed.: Handel Sources: Materials for the Study of Handel's Borrowing (New York, 1986–8)

Das Parodieproblem bei Handel: Bologna 1987 (IMSCR XIV Study Session) [Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, iii (Kassel, 1989)]

K. Häfner: Aspekte des Parodieverfahrens bei Johann Sebastian Bach: Beiträge zur Wiederentdeckung verschollener Vokalwerke (Laaber, 1987)

J.H. Roberts: ‘Why did Handel Borrow?’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. S. Sadie and A. Hicks (London, 1987), 83–92

G.J. Buelow: ‘Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in the English Criticism of the Eighteenth Century’, Florilegium musicologicum: Hellmut Federhofer zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. C.-H. Mahling (Tutzing, 1988), 57–66

A. Mann: ‘Bach's Parody Technique and its Frontiers’, Bach Studies, ed. D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989), 115–24

G. Sadler: ‘A Re-Examination of Rameau's Self-Borrowings’, Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. J.H. Heyer (Cambridge, 1989), 259–89

H.J. Schulze: ‘The Parody Process in Bach's Music: an Old Problem Reconsidered’, Bach, xx (1989), 7–21

E.T. Harris: ‘Integrity and Improvisation in the Music of Handel’, JM, viii (1990), 301–15

C. Wolff: ‘Vivaldi's Compositional Art, Bach, and the Process of “Musical Thinking”’, Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 72–83

J.W. Brown: ‘Con nuove arie aggiunte’: Aria Borrowing in the Venetian Opera Repertory, 1672–1685 (diss., Cornell U., 1992)

J.T. Winemiller: Handel's Borrowing and Swift's Bee: Handel's ‘Curious’ Practice and the Theory of Transformative Imitation (diss., U. of Chicago, 1994)

J.W. Brown: ‘On the Road with the “Suitcase Aria”: the Transmission of Borrowed Arias in Late Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera Revivals’, JMR, xv/1–2 (1995), 3–23

M.P. Risinger: Handel's Compositional Premises and Procedures: Creative Adaptation and Assimilation in Selected Works, 1733–44 (diss., Harvard U., 1996)

J.T. Winemiller: ‘Recontextualizing Handel's Borrowing’, JM, xv (1997), 444–70

For further bibliography see Ballad opera; Chaconne; Chorale settings; Folia; Lamento; Passacaglia; Pasticcio; Romanesca; Ruggiero; and Vaudeville.

f: late 18th century

H. Keller: ‘Mozart and Boccherini: a Supplementary Note to Alfred Einstein's Mozart: his Character, his Work’, MR, viii (1947), 241–7

A.H. King: ‘The Melodic Sources and Affinities of Die Zauberflöte’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 241–58

J. LaRue: ‘Significant and Coincidental Resemblance between Classical Themes’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 224–34

K. Hortschansky: Parodie und Entlehnung im Schaffen Christoph Willibald Glucks (Cologne, 1973)

G.A. Chew: ‘The Night-Watchman's Song Quoted by Haydn and its Implications’, Haydn-Studien, iii (1974), 106–24

G. Knepler: ‘Ein Instrumentalthema Mozarts’, BMw, xviii (1976), 163–73

J.A. Eckelmeyer: ‘Two Complexes of Recurrent Melodies Related to Die Zauberflöte’, MR, xli (1980), 11–25

F. Escal: ‘Les concertos-pastiches de Mozart, ou La citation comme procès d'appropriation du discours’, IRASM, xii (1981), 117–39

B.A. Brown: ‘Le pazzie d'Orlando, Orlando paladino and the Uses of Parody’, Italica, lxiv (1987), 583–605

J.T. Poland: ‘Michael Haydn and Mozart: Two Requiem Settings’, American Choral Review, xxix/1 (1987), 3–14

J.C. Girdham: Stephen Storace and the English Opera Tradition of the Late Eighteenth Century (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1988)

G.A. Wheelock: ‘Marriage à la Mode: Haydn's Instrumental Works “Englished” for Voice and Piano’, JM, viii (1990), 357–97

G. Knepler: ‘Mozart als Herausforderung’, BMw, xxxiii (1991), 111–25

A.P. Brown: ‘Haydn and Mozart's 1773 Stay in Vienna: Weeding a Musicological Garden’, JM, x (1992), 192–230

C. Clark: ‘Intertextual Play and Haydn's La fedeltà premiata’, CMc, no.51 (1993), 59–81

S. Dahms: ‘Entlehnungspraktiken in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und zur Balletmusik aus Mozart's Ascanio in Alba’, MJb 1993, 133–43

g: 19th century

H.F. Gilbert: ‘Folk-Music in Art-Music: a Discussion and a Theory’, MQ, iii (1917), 577–601

H.M. Sambeth: ‘Die gregorianischen Melodien in den Werken Franz Liszts mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Kirchenmusik-Reformpläne’, Musica sacra, lv (1925), 255–65

R. Köppel: Die Paraphrase: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der virtuosen Klaviertechnik (diss., U. of Vienna, 1936)

F. Biron: Le chant grégorien dans l'enseignement et les oeuvres musicales de Vincent d'Indy (Ottawa, 1941)

A.H. King: ‘Mountains, Music, and Musicians’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 395–419

W.S. Smith: ‘Mahler Quotes Mahler’, Chord and Discord, ii/7 (1954), 7–13

W. Dean: ‘Bizet's Self-Borrowings’, ML, xli (1960), 238–44

H. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz's Self Borrowings’, PRMA, xcii (1965–6), 27–44

E.T. Cone: ‘Schubert's Beethoven’, MQ, lvi (1970), 779–93

H. Goldschmidt: ‘Zitat oder Parodie?’, BMw, xii (1970), 171–98 [on Beethoven]

P. Gossett: The Operas of Rossini: Problems of Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Opera (diss., Princeton U., 1970)

W. Kirkendale: ‘New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa solemnis’, MQ, lvi (1970), 665–701

Z. Roman: Mahler's Songs and their Influence on his Symphonic Thought (diss., U. of Toronto, 1970)

M. Tibbe: Über die Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers (Munich, 1971)

H. Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (London, 1973, 2/1997)

W. Klenz: ‘Brahms, Op.38: Piracy, Pillage, Plagiarism or Parody?’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 39–50

W.R. Maust: The Symphonies of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861) Based on American Themes (diss., Indiana U., 1973)

R. van Hoorickx: ‘Schubert's Reminiscences of his Own Works’, MQ, lx (1974), 373–88

L.K. Lutes: Beethoven's Re-Uses of his Own Compositions, 1782–1826 (diss., U. of Southern California, 1975)

J.-M. Nectoux: ‘Works Renounced, Themes Rediscovered: “Eléments pour une thématique fauréenne”’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 231–44

R. Gauldin: ‘Wagner's Parody Technique: “Träume” and the Tristan Love Duet’, Music Theory Spectrum, i (1979), 35–42

J. Webster: ‘Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 18–35; iii (1979–80), 52–71

C. Floros: Brahms und Bruckner: Studien zur musikalischen Exegetik (Wiesbaden, 1980)

N. Temperley: ‘Schubert and Beethoven's Eight-Six Chord’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 142–54

J. Budden: ‘Verdi and Meyerbeer in Relation to Les vêpres siciliennes’, Studi verdiani, i (1982), 11–20

M. Conati: ‘Verdi et la culture parisienne des années 1830’, Music in Paris in the 1830s: Northampton, MA, 1982, 209–25 [with Eng. summary]

S. Döhring: ‘Reminiscences: Liszts Konzeption der Klavierparaphrase’, Festschrift Heinz Becker, ed. J. Schläder and R. Quandt (Laaber, 1982), 131–51

C. Wolff: ‘Schubert's “Der Tod und das Mädchen”: Analytical and Explanatory Notes on the Song D.531 and the Quartet D.810’, Schubert Studies, ed. E. Badura-Skoda and P. Branscombe (Cambridge, 1982), 143–72

C. Floros: ‘Die Zitate in Bruckners Symphonik’, Bruckner-Jb 1982–3, 7–18

A. Wilheim: ‘Erik Satie's Gregorian Paraphrases’, SMH, xxv (1983), 229–37

O. Neighbour: ‘Brahms and Schumann: Two Opus Nines and Beyond’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 266–70

A. Newcomb: ‘Once More “Between Absolute and Program Music”: Schumann's Second Symphony’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 233–50

B.B. Hong: ‘Gade Models for Grieg's Symphony and Piano Sonata’, DAM, xv (1984), 27–38

A. Riethmüller : ‘Franz Liszts “Réminiscences de Don Juan”’, Analysen: Beiträge zu einer Problemgeschichte des Komponierens: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, ed. W. Breig, R. Brinkmann and E. Budde (Wiesbaden, 1984), 276–91

M.K. Whaples: ‘Mahler and Schubert's A-Minor Sonata D.784’, ML, lxv (1984), 255–63

J.P. Burkholder: ‘Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 75–83

P. Dennison: ‘Elgar and Wagner’, ML lxvi (1985), 93–109

C. Floros: Gustav Mahler, iii: Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden, 1985; Eng. trans., 1993)

C.A. Reynolds: ‘A Choral Symphony by Brahms?’, 19CM, ix (1985–6), 3–25

J. Daverio: ‘Schumann's “Im Legendenton” and Friedrich Schlegel's Arabeske’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 150–63

G. Stanley: ‘Bach's Erbe: the Chorale in the German Oratorio of the Early Nineteenth Century’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 121–49

D. Pesce: ‘MacDowell's Eroica Sonata and its Lisztian Legacy’, MR, xlix (1988), 169–89

A.L. Ringer: ‘“Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”: Allusion und Zitat in der musikalischen Erzählung Gustav Mahlers’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 589–602

F. Brancaleone: ‘Edward MacDowell and Indian Motives’, American Music, vii (1989), 359–81

D. Brodbeck: ‘Primo Schubert, Secundo Schumann: Brahms's Four-Hand Waltzes, op.39’, JM, vii (1989), 58–80

H.J. Dill: ‘Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 172–95

K.R. Hull: Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the Instrumental Music of Johannes Brahms (diss., Princeton U., 1989)

R. Knapp: ‘The Finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony: the Tale of the Subject’, 19CM, xiii (1989–90), 3–17

M. Spada: ‘Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra di Gioachino Rossini: fonti letterarie e autoimprestito musicale’, NRMI, xxiv (1990), 147–82

D.C. Birchler: Nature and Autobiography in the Music of Gustav Mahler (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1991)

K. Korsyn: ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, MAn, x (1991), 3–72

W. Kuhnen: ‘Die Botschaft als Chiffre: zur Syntax musikalischer Zitate in der ersten Fassung von Bruckners Dritter Symphonie’, Bruckner-Jb 1991–3, 31–43

M.E. Bonds: ‘Sinfonia anti-eroica: Berlioz's Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven's Influence’, JM, x (1992), 417–63

J. Yudkin: ‘Beethoven's Mozart Quartet’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 30–74

B.R. Barry: ‘The Hidden Program in Mahler's Fifth Symphony’, MQ, lxxvii (1993), 47–66

A.P. Brown: ‘The Creation and The Seasons: some Allusions, Quotations, and Models from Handel to Mendelssohn’, CMc, no.51 (1993), 26–58

B. Cooper: Beethoven's Folksong Settings (Oxford, 1994)

R.L. Todd: ‘On Quotation in Schumann's Music’, Schumann and his World, (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 80–112

L. Whitesell: ‘Men with a Past: Music and the “Anxiety of Influence”’, 19CM, xviii (1994–5), 152–67

C.A. Reynolds: ‘Florestan Reading Fidelio’, Beethoven Forum, iv (1995), 135–64

D. Parmer: ‘Brahms, Song Quotation, and Secret Programs’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 161–90

M.E. Bonds: After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA, 1996)

T. Browner: ‘“Breathing the Indian Spirit”: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the “Indianist” Movement in American Music’, American Music, xv (1997), 265–84

R. Knapp: ‘Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion’, JMR, xviii/1 (1998), 1–30

P. Thissen: Zitattechniken in der Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Sinzig, 1998)

W.C. Petty: ‘Chopin and the Ghost of Beethoven’, 19CM, xxii (1998–9), 281–99

h: 20th century

F.W. Sternfeld: ‘Some Russian Folksongs in Stravinsky's Petrouchka’, Notes, ii (1944–5), 95–107

L. Harrison: ‘On Quotation’, MM, xxiii (1946), 166–9

D. Newlin: ‘The Later Works of Ernest Bloch’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 443–59

H. Bittel: Der Cantus firmus in der zeitgenössischen geistlichen Chormusik (diss., U. of Munich, 1950)

F. Bonis: ‘Quotations in Bartók's Music: a Contribution to Bartók's Psychology of Composition’, Liszt-Bartók: Budapest 1961, 355–82

E. Roseberry: ‘Britten's Purcell Realizations and Folksong Arrangements’, Tempo, no.57 (1961), 7–28

L. Morton: ‘Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky: Le baiser de la fée’, MQ, xlviii (1962), 313–26

M. Boyd: ‘Britten, Verdi and the Requiem’, Tempo, no.86 (1968), 2–6

C.W. Henderson: Quotation as a Style Element in the Music of Charles Ives (diss., Washington U., 1969)

U. Kraemer: ‘Das Zitat bei Igor Strawinsky’, NZM, Jg.131 (1970), 135–41

H. Levin: ‘Gershwin, Handy and the Blues’, Clavier, ix (1970), 10–20

A. Knapp: ‘The Jewishness of Bloch: Subconscious or Conscious?’, PRMA, xcvii (1970–71), 99–112

C. Kühn: Das Zitat in der Musik der Gegenwart, mit Ausblicken auf bildende Kunst und Literatur (Hamburg, 1972)

Z. Lissa: ‘Historical Awareness of Music and its Role in Present-Day Musical Culture’, IRASM, iv (1973), 17–32

A. Schoenberg: ‘Folkloristic Symphonies’, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. L. Stein (London and New York, 1975), 161–6

K. Velten: Schönbergs Instrumentation Bachscher und Brahmsscher Werke als Dokumente seines Traditionsverständnisses (Regensburg, 1976)

P. Altmann: Sinfonia von Luciano Berio: eine analytische Studie (Vienna, 1977)

B. Marschner: ‘Stravinsky's Le baiser de la fée and its Meaning’, DAM, viii (1977), 51–83

G. Perle: ‘The Secret Programme of the Lyric Suite’, MT, cxviii (1977), 629–32, 709–13, 809–13

B. Sonntag: Untersuchungen zur Collagetechnik in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1977)

P. Andraschke: ‘Das revolutionär-politische Zitat in der avantgardistischen Musik nach 1965’, Musik und Bildung, xi (1979), 313–18

C. Ballantine: ‘Charles Ives and the Meaning of Quotation in Music’, MQ, lxv (1979), 167–84

S. Feder: ‘Decoration Day: a Boyhood Memory of Charles Ives’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 234–61

R. Taruskin: ‘Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 501–43

M.A. Radice: ‘Bartók's Parodies of Beethoven: the Relationship between opp.131, 132 and 133 and Bartók's Sixth String Quartet and Third Piano Concerto’, MR, xlii (1981), 252–60

C. Abbate: ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 117–40

M. Hicks: ‘Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia’, PNM, xx/1–2 (1981–2), 199–224

C.K. Baron: ‘Varèse's Explication of Debussy's Syrinx in Density 21.5 and an Analysis of Varèse's Composition: a Secret Model Revealed’, MR, xliii (1982), 121–34

P. Griffiths: Peter Maxwell Davies (London, 1982)

S. Husarik: ‘John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969’, American Music, i/2 (1983), 1–21

C.A. Toniger: Pre-Existent Music in the Works of Peter Maxwell Davies (diss., U. of Kansas, 1983)

M. Hicks: The New Quotation: its Origins and Functions (diss., U. of Illinois, 1984)

J.P. Burkholder: ‘“Quotation” and Emulation: Charles Ives's Uses of his Models’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 1–26

D. Osmond-Smith: Playing on Words: a Guide to Luciano Berio's ‘Sinfonia’ (London, 1985)

E.W. Partsch: ‘Dimensionen des Erinnerns: musikalische Zitattechnik bei Richard Strauss’, Musicologica austriaca, v (1985), 101–20

R. Cadenbach: ‘“Das Werk will nur Musik sein”: Zitate in Max Regers Kompositionen’, Reger-Studien, ii (1986), 73–104

C.-H. Combe: ‘Les citations d'hymnes nationaux chez Debussy’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxix (1986), 19–27

L.L. Gingerich: ‘A Technique for Melodic Motivic Analysis in the Music of Charles Ives’, Music Theory Spectrum, viii (1986), 75–93

A.M. Gillmor: ‘Musico-Poetic Form in Satie's “Humoristic” Piano Suites (1913–14)’, Canadian University Music Review, viii (1987), 1–44

W. Ruf: ‘Zimmermann und Jarry: zur Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu’, Zwischen den Generationen: Cologne 1987, 205–20

B.S. Brook: ‘Stravinsky's Pulcinella: the “Pergolesi” Sources’, Musiques – signes – images: liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. J.-M. Fauquet (Geneva, 1988), 41–66

H. Danuser: ‘Musikalische Zitat- und Collageverfahren im Lichte der (Post)Moderne-Diskussion’, Jahrbuch: Bayerische Akademie der schönen Kunste, iv (1990), 395–409

J.N. Straus: Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1990)

R. Mueller: ‘Bali, Tabuh-Tabuhan, and Colin McPhee's Method of Intercultural Composition’, JMR, x (1991), 127–75; xi (1991), 67–92

J.D. Dixon: George Rochberg (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992)

U. Krämer: ‘Quotation and Self-Borrowing in the Music of Alban Berg’, JMR, xii/1–2 (1992), 53–82

S.M. Bruns: ‘“In stilo Mahleriano”: Quotation and Allusion in the Music of George Crumb’, American Music Research Center Journal, iii (1993), 9–39

G. Watkins: Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA, 1994)

J.P. Burkholder: All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT, 1995)

J. Auner: ‘Schoenberg's Handel Concerto and the Ruins of Tradition’, JAMS, xlix (1996), 264–313

G. Block: Ives Concord Sonata: Piano Sonata no.2 (Cambridge, 1996)

G. Block and J.P. Burkholder, eds.: Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (New Haven, CT, 1996)

D.M. Hertz: ‘Ives's Concord Sonata and the Texture of Music’, Charles Ives and his World, ed. J.P. Burkholder (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 75–117

L. Viens: ‘Stratégies citationelles dans Die Soldaten de Bernd Alois Zimmerman’, Canadian University Music Review, xvii (1996), 1–19

For further bibliography see Collage.

i: popular music

L. Richter: ‘Parodieverfahren im Berliner Gassenlied’, DJbM, iv (1959), 48–81

D.J. Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977/R)

J. Finson: ‘Music and Medium: Two Versions of Manilow's “Could it be Magic”’, MQ, lxv (1979), 265–80

W. Brooks: ‘Pocahontas: her Life and Times’, American Music, ii/4 (1984), 19–48

C. Gorbman: Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN, 1987)

N. Cooke: American Psalmodists in Contact and Collaboration, 1770–1820 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1990)

L. Meintjes: ‘Paul Simon's Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning’, EthM, xxxiv (1990), 37–74

J.P. Murphy: ‘Jazz Improvisation: the Joy of Influence’, BPM, xviii/1 (1990), 7–19

K. Gabbard: ‘The Quoter and his Culture’, Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz, ed. R.T. Buckner and S. Weiland (Detroit, 1991), 92–111

J. Berrett: ‘Louis Armstrong and Opera’, MQ, lxxvi (1992), 216–41

R. Walser: ‘Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity’, Popular Music, xi (1992), 263–308

S. Frith, ed.: Music and Copyright (Edinburgh, 1993)

C. Krasnow: ‘Fear and Loathing in the 1970s: Race, Sexuality and Disco’, Stanford Humanities Review, iii/2 (1993), 37–45

A. Bartlett: ‘Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics’, African American Review, xxviii (1994), 639–52

T. Rose: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH, 1994)

C. Smith: ‘Broadway the Hard Way: Techniques of Allusion in the Music of Frank Zappa’, College Music Symposium, xxxv (1995), 35–60

K. Holm-Hudson: ‘John Oswald's Rubiayat (Elektrax) and the Politics of Recombinant Do-Re-Mi’, Popular Music and Society, xx/3 (1996), 19–36

I. Monson: Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago, 1996)

S. DeVeaux: The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History (Berkeley, 1997)

For further bibliography see Film music and Popular music.

Borry.

See Bourrée.

Borsai, Ilona

(b Cluj, 10 April 1924; d Budapest, 8 July 1982). Hungarian ethnomusicologist. She took degrees in Latin, ancient Greek and French at the Hungarian University of Cluj (1946); in 1949 she moved to Budapest, where she studied music education and choir training (1949–51) and musicology (1956–61) at the Academy of Music. Her teachers included Kodály, Szabolcsi and Bartha. In 1961 she became an assistant at the folk music research group (from 1974 the musicological institute) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her main research topics were folksongs of northern Hungary (the ‘Palots’ [Polovetz] ethnic group), Hungarian children’s songs (games and chanted rhymes), Egyptian folksongs and Coptic liturgical music. She conducted many field expeditions in Hungary and Hungarian-speaking areas of Romania as well as several expeditions to Egypt (1966–7, 1969, 1971), recording many thousand items from each area; she published the results in about 20 studies in specialist journals, mostly with transcriptions and analyses of the recorded examples. Besides co-editing several books of children’s songs and Hungarian and Slovakian folksongs, she lectured at various international congresses, mainly on Coptic music.

WRITINGS

with B. Csillag and E. Hegyi: Bartók egynemű korusainak előadásáról [On performing Bartók’s non-mixed choral works] (Budapest, 1956)

‘Díszítés és variálás egy mátrai falu dalaiban’ [Ornamentation and variation in the songs of a village in the Mátra mountains, north Hungary], Ethnographia, lxx (1959), 269–90 [with Ger. summary]

‘Gagliarde-dallamok Th. Arbeau Orchésographie c. művében’ [Galliard melodies in Arbeau’s Orchésographie], Tánctudományi tanulmányok (1963–4), 149–90 [with Fr. summary]

‘A la recherche de l’ancienne musique pharaonique’, Cahiers d’histoire égyptienne, xi (1968), 25–42

‘Mélodies traditionelles des égyptiens et leur importance dans la recherche de l’ancienne musique pharaonique’, SMH, x (1968), 69–90 [transcr. with M. Tóth]

‘Summásdalok/Lieder der Saisonarbeiter’, A parasztdaltól a munkásdalig, ed. I. Katona, J. Maróthy and A. Szatmári (Budapest, 1968), 95–227

‘Az egyiptomi zenei szájhagyomány vizsgálatának szerepe az ó-egyiptomi dallamok kutatásában’ [The role of the study of the Egyptian oral tradition in music in the research into ancient Egyptian melodies], MTA nyelv- és irodalomtudományi osztályának közleményei, xxvi (1969), 388–99

‘Variations ornementales dans l’interprétation d’un hymne copte’, SMH, xi (1969), 91–105 [transcr. with M. Tóth]

‘Melody Types of Egyptian Wedding Songs’, Acta ethnographica, xix (1970), 65–81 [transcr. by M. Tóth]

‘Caractéristiques générales du chant de la messe copte’, Studia orientalia christiana aegyptiaca, xiv (1971), 411–42

‘Un type mélodique particulier de hymnes coptes du mois de Kiakh’, SMH, xiii (1971), 73–85

‘Le tropaire byzantin “O Monogenés” dans la pratique du chant copte’, SMH, xiv (1972), 329–54

‘Die musikhistorische Bedeutung der orientalischen und afrikanischen christlichen Riten’, SMH, xvi (1974), 3–14

‘Y a-t-il un “octoéchos” dans le système du chant copte?’, Studia aegyptiaca (1974), 39–53

Magyar népi játékok és mondókák [Hungarian folk games and proverbs] (Kecskemét, 1977)

‘A palóc menyasszonyfektető dallamának nyugati és keleti kapcsolatai’ [Western and eastern connections in the melody of the Palóc wedding night song], Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1978 (Budapest, 1979), 159–76

‘A magyar népi gyermekmonóka műfaki sajátosságai’ [Genre characteristics of Hungarian childrens’ folk proverbs], Népi kultúra – népi társadalom, ed. G. Ortutay (Budapest, 1980), 545–78

‘Népdalstrófák komplex vizsgálata’ [A detailed examination of folksong verses], Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1979 (Budapest, 1980), 225–34

‘A “Mátrai képek” dalai’ [The songs of Scenes of Mátra], ‘Bartók, Kodály és a summások’ [Bartók, Kodály and farm workers], Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1982 (Budapest, 1983), 159–82, 233–50

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Vikár: ‘Borsai Ilona távozására’ [On the passing of Ilona Borsai], Muzsika, xxv/10 (1982), 10 only

IMRE OLSVAI/R

Borsaro, Arcangelo

(b Reggio nell'Emilia; fl 1587–1616). Italian composer. He was a Franciscan monk; despite his active life as a composer, mainly of church music, he seems not to have held a church post. His earliest collections are in the lighter forms; at least three seem to have been lost. The spiritual Pietosi affetti (1597) was popular enough to be reprinted in 1616 with continuo added. The surviving secular volumes contain pieces in a playful style, mainly for three voices, the lowest of which is usually an alto. After 1600 he was one of the many north Italian composers who imitated Viadana's small-scale concertato style, though for mass and Office music, such as the Requiem music of 1608 and the liturgical items in the Concerti of 1605, he retained a transitional polyphonic or double-choir style. Some of his double-choir motets are unified by a triple-time refrain: an example is Sit nomen Domini (1605), whose interludes are for groups of soloists drawn from both choirs. If the liberal selection of his motets found in contemporary German anthologies is representative, he seems to have been fond of sonorous, low-pitched textures (TTBB) when writing for four voices. His collections of 1611 and 1615 show a more experimental mixture of voices and instruments: the latter contains a Quem vidistis for soprano or tenor and four instruments, which, for presumably provincial church music, is an early example of such scoring.

WORKS

all except anthologies published in Venice

Il primo libro delle villanelle … 3vv (1587)

Secondo libro delle canzonette, 3–4vv (1590), lost

Pietosi affetti: il primo libro delle [21] canzonette spirituali, 4vv (1597, rev. 2/with bc (hpd/chit/other inst), 1616)

Il quarto libro delle canzonette, 3–4vv (1598)

Vespertina psalmodia, 8vv, … duoque cantica … addito psalmo 139 (1602)

Concerti ecclesiastici … si contengono mottetti, 1–8vv: Domine ad adiuvandum, Dixit Dominus, falsi bordoni, Mag, 5vv; una Compieta, 8vv; messa, 8vv; litanie che si cantano nella Santa Casa di Loreto, 8vv, bc (org), op.9 (1605)

Sacri sacrificii per gli deffonti … 8vv, op.10 (1608)

Novo giardino de concerti, 8vv/insts, bc … li contengono alquante Antifone del cantico della Beata Virgine … et altri motetti, op.11 (1611)

Odorati fiori: concerti diversi, 1–3vv, bc (org), con altri da concertare, vv, insts … con un capriccio da sonare, op.12 (1615)

Secondo libro dell'odorati fiori, concerti diversi, 1–3vv, bc, (org), op.13 (1616)

27 motets in 1611¹, 1612³, 1613², 1621², 1622², 1623², 1626², 1627¹, 1627²; 4 motets in D-Bsb, PL-WRu; according to EitnerQ, 2 motets in Liegnitz, Bibl. Rudolfina, and 2 canzonettas in 1570¹⁹ (attrib. Arcangelo da Reggio)

JEROME ROCHE

Borsdorf, Friedrich Adolf

(b Dittmannsdorf, Saxony, 25 Dec 1854; d London, 15 April 1923). German horn player and teacher. He studied with Lorenz and Oskar Franz at the Dresdner Konservatorium (1869–74), later playing in a military band. On gaining a contract at Covent Garden, he moved to London in 1879. After various engagements in the provinces, including one with August Manns in Glasgow, he settled in London, playing the horn for Hans Richter and in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. He resigned from the latter over the dispute about deputies, becoming a founder-member of the LSO, whose widely admired horn section became known as ‘God’s Own Quartet’.

On arrival in England Borsdorf was obliged to discard his German horn in favour of the widely used French model. Borsdorf’s instrument was made in 1821 by L.-J. Raoux for Giovanni Puzzi, the Italian player active in London in the mid-19th century. His performance was a revelation, being marked by a sure attack (rare at the time), excellent phrasing, breath control and dynamic range. His example, as well as that of his German contemporary Franz Paersch, who was also in England at the same time, had a vitalizing effect on British horn playing.

Not only an outstanding orchestral and chamber player, Borsdorf also had considerable influence as a teacher. In 1882 he became a professor at the Royal College of Music, and also at the Royal Academy of Music in 1897. His many successful pupils included Alfred and Aubrey Brain (his successor at the RAM) and Frank Probyn (his successor at the RCM). He also taught his three sons: Oskar, who emigrated to the USA; Emil, who was a member of various London and British provincial orchestras; and Francis Bradley, who held principal positions with the LPO and the orchestra of Sadler’s Wells Opera (later the English National Opera), retiring in the early 1980s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Morley-Pegge: The French Horn (London, 1960, 2/1973)

S. Pettitt: Dennis Brain (London, 1976, 2/1989)

B. Tuckwell: Horn (London, 1983)

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Borseni, Francesco.

See Borosini family, (2).

Borstwerk.

See Brustwerk.

Bortio, Carlo.

See Borzio, Carlo.

Bortkiewicz [Bortkievich], Sergei [Sergey] Eduardovich

(b Kharkiv, 28 Feb 1877; d Vienna, 25 Oct 1952). Austrian pianist and composer of Russian origin. He studied at the Kharkiv Music School with Bensch (piano) and at the St Petersburg Conservatory (1896–9), where his teachers included van Ark (piano) and Lyadov (theory). In 1900 he entered the Leipzig Conservatory to study for two years with Reisenauer (piano) and Jadassohn (composition). From 1904 to 1914 he lived in Berlin, where he taught for a year at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. Although he won some renown as a pianist, he became better known as a composer and performer of his own works. His greatest success of that period was the Piano Concerto no.1. At the outbreak of World War I he returned to Russia, but was forced to emigrate in 1919. He settled first in Constantinople, and then in Vienna where he lived from 1922 until his death; he became an Austrian citizen in 1926. Although a Bortkiewicz Society was founded in Vienna in 1947, Bortkiewicz’s adherence to 19th-century ideals of virtuosity meant that he was soon virtually forgotten.

Bortkiewicz’s piano style was quite typical of the post-Romantic Russian tradition: based on Liszt and Chopin, influenced by Tchaikovsky and Russian folklore, and virtually unaffected by 20th-century musical trends in western Europe. His craftsmanship was meticulous, his imagination colourful and sensitive, his piano writing idiomatic; a lush instrumentation underlines the essential sentimentality of his melodic invention. The grandiloquent sweep of the Piano Concerto no.1 is, at times, faintly reminiscent of Rachmaninoff; the Concerto no.2, for left hand alone, was made known by Wittgenstein, for whom it was written. Bortkiewicz mastered the skills of the past without adding anything distinctly personal or original, though Walter Niemann (Das Klavierbuch, Leipzig, 1910) warned against underestimating him.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Akrobaten, op.50, c1938

Orch: Pf Conc. no.1, op.16, perf. 1912; Othello, sym. poem, op.19; Vc Conc., op.20, 1922; Vn Conc., op.22, 1923; Pf Conc. no.2, op.28, left hand, perf. 1930; Pf Conc. no.3 ‘Per aspera ad astra’, op.32 (1927); Oesterreichische Suite, op.51; Sym. no.1, op.52, c1940; Ov., op.53; Sym. no.2, op.55, c1940; Jugoslawische Suite, op.58

Chbr and solo inst: Vn Sonata, op.26, 1924; 3 sets, opp.18, 31, 59, pf duet; 24 sets, opp.3, 4, 8, 10, 11–15, 17, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48, 54, 65, pf; 2 pf sonatas

Songs (P. Verlaine and others)

Principal publishers: Kistner, Rahter

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Bortkiewicz: Die seltsame Liebe Tschaikowskys und der Madame von Meck (Berlin, 1938)

S. Bortkiewicz: ‘Erinnerungen’, Musik des Ostens, vi (1971), 136–69

R. Feldmann: ‘Musikwissenschaftliche Anmerkungen zu Sergei Bortkiewicz’, Musik des Ostens, vi (1971), 170–84

BORIS SCHWARZ/SIGRID WIESMANN

Bortnyans'ky [Bortniansky], Dmytro Stepanovych [Bortnyansky, Dmitry Stepanovich]

(b Hlukhiv, Ukraine, 1751; d St Petersburg, 28 Sept/10 Oct 1825). Ukrainian composer, singer and music director, active in Russia. He began his musical training early, possibly at the Hlukhiv choir school, and in 1758 went to sing in the Russian imperial court chapel in St Petersburg, where he became one of Empress Elizabeth's favourite choirboys. Singled out for his unusual talent, he was trained in opera and eventually performed major roles in court productions: in 1764 he played the role of Admetus in H.F. Raupach's Al'tsesta.

During this period he studied composition with Galuppi. In 1769, after Galuppi had left for Venice, Catherine the Great sent Bortnyans'ky to further his studies there, with Galuppi. His first extant compositions date from his years in Italy: he composed three opere serie, two of them, Creonte (1776) and Alcide (1778), for Venice and the third, Quinto Fabio (1778), for Modena, several settings of Roman Catholic texts including an Ave Maria (1775), a Salve regina (1776) and a multi-movement Gloria. His setting of the entire Catholic Mass Ordinary in German, Nemtskaya obednya (German Liturgy), may also have originated during this period.

In 1779 Bortnyans'ky was recalled to the Russian court. Initially he was engaged only as a staff composer and assistant director at the imperial court chapel, but when Paisiello left Russia in 1783, Catherine the Great awarded Bortnyans'ky one of Paisiello's former posts, as Kapellmeister to her son Paul at the Maliy Dvor (Lesser Court). Until 1796, Bortnyans'ky continued to compose sacred music for Catherine, producing probably the bulk of his Orthodox choral music during this period. For Paul he meanwhile composed secular music reflecting the taste of his court, notably three operas: La fête du seigneur (1786), Le faucon (1786) and Le fils rival, ou La moderne Stratonice (1787). All are in the style of opéra comique, with short musical numbers simple enough to be performed by amateur visitors. Performances of the operas were sometimes followed by choral cantatas, presumably composed by Bortnyans'ky as well. Bortnyans'ky also taught the harpsichord and piano to the royal family and wrote several keyboard and chamber works. His collection of French romances (1793) is the earliest known one by an Eastern Slavonic composer.

After the death of Catherine the Great in 1796, Paul I assumed the throne and appointed Bortnyans'ky director of the imperial court chapel, making him the first native Slavonic composer to hold that post. Bortnyans'ky apparently composed rather little after this (a few large-scale occasional cantatas for court events, hymns and chant harmonizations), and directed his attention to improving the musical standards and living conditions of the singers. During his tenure, the chapel increased its membership to 108 singers and expanded its repertory to include Western works such as Haydn's Creation (performed 1802), Mozart's Requiem (1805), Handel's Messiah (1806) and Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge (1813). His weekly open choral rehearsals and concerts became central to the cultural life of St Petersburg.

Bortnyans'ky now exerted an influence well beyond St Petersburg. In 1815, aiming to standardize musical practice throughout the Russian Orthodox Church, he compiled and published a liturgical cycle in the style of prostoye penie (plainchant) that was distributed throughout Russia. Through a government ukaz (decree) of 1816, Bortnyan'sky and the imperial court chapel won the exclusive right to print sacred music in the Russian Empire, a monopoly that continued into the late 19th century. However, Bortnyans'ky did not use his powers to promote his own choral concertos; he began to revise them for publication only late in life (they were published posthumously in the 1830s and reprinted by Rezelius of St Petersburg in 1834; see Kuzma, 1996). According to legend, his favourite choral concerto, Vskuyu priskorbna yesi, dusha moya? (‘Why are you mournful, O my soul?’), was sung at his deathbed.

Regarded by both Russians and Ukrainians as a central figure in their music histories, Bortnyans'ky is credited with developing their genre of the sacred choral concerto to its highest forms. These multi-movement a cappella works may be described as Mozartean in their melodic content and Beethovenian in their symphonic treatment of the choral texture. Each of the concertos (which include at least 35 for four-voice chorus and ten for double chorus) explores various and unusual combinations of solo and tutti voices. During the 19th century Bortnyans'ky's choral concertos and hymns gained popularity across Western Europe; some copies of concertos preserved in the library of the Hofkapelle in Vienna date from as early as 1780. Berlioz, who heard the concertos in Russia in the 1840s, praised the ‘incredible freedom’ of their approach to choral sonority (Les soirées de l’orchestre, Paris, 1852) and included Bortnyans'ky's music in several of his own concerts in Paris. Several works, notably the Izhe Kheruvimï (Cherubic Hymn) no.7 and Kol' slaven nash Hospod' (‘How great is our Lord’), were translated into Latin and German and widely published in Western anthologies; some still appear in Western hymnals. Closer to home, Bortnyans'ky's death perhaps marked the end of the era of Westernization in Eastern Slavonic music history. His music was criticized first by Glinka for its sentimental nature and later by the nationalist school for its italianate style. Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, called the sacred music ‘one continuous mistake in the understanding of Russian church style’, and A.N. Serov a ‘weak echo of the Italians of the Mozartean era’ (see Kuzma, 1992, 1996). In the Soviet era, music historians traced a folk idiom in the music, attempting thereby to restore Bortnyans'ky's legitimacy as a native Slavonic composer. Despite shifting critical perceptions of his style, his sacred works have remained staples of the Russian Orthodox repertory. The post-Soviet subsequent reopening of churches in Russia and Ukraine has stimulated a concurrent revival of Bortnyans'ky’s music.

Bortnyans'ky, Dmytro Stepanovych

MARIKA KUZMA

WORKS

only those extant

Editions: Polnoye sobraniye dukhovno-muzïkal'nïkh sochineniy Dm. Bortnyanskago [Complete collection of Bortnyans'ky's sacred music], ed. P. Tchaikovsky (Moscow, 1881–2) [T; some works with pf acc. by Tchaikovsky]Dukhovnïe konserti na chetïre sochinennïe Dmitriem Bortnyanskim [Sacred concertos for four voices composed by Bortnyans'ky], ed. D.M. Bortnyans'ky, repr. (St Petersburg, 1834)

sacred choral concertos

for SATB unless otherwise stated; numbering follows both editions; all in T iiA

1 Vospoyte Hospodevi pesn' novu [Sing unto the Lord a new song]; 2 Torzhestvuyte dnes' [Celebrate this day], 1st movt for SSATB; 3 Hospodi, siloyu tvoyeyu vozveselitsya tsar' [O Lord, in thy strength the king shall be glad]; 4 Voskliknite Hospodevi, vsya zemlya [Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands]; 5 Uslyshit tya Hospod' v den' pechali [May the Lord hear thee in the day of trouble]; 6 Slava vo vyshnikh Bohu [Glory to God in the highest]; 7 Priidite vozraduyemsya Hospodevi [Come let us rejoice in the Lord]; 8 Milosti tvoya, Hospodi, vo vek vospoyu [Of thy mercies, O Lord, shall I sing for ever]; 9 Sei den', yeho zhe sotvori Hospod' [This is the day which the Lord hath made]

10 Poyte Bohu nashemu, poyte [Sing praises to our God, sing praises], also in version for 5vv according to Rïtsareva (1979); 11 Blahosloven Hospod', yako uslysha hlas moleniya moyeho [Blessed is the Lord, for he hath heard the voice of my supplication], also in version for 8vv according to Rïtsareva (1979); 12 Bozhe, pesn' novu vospoyu tebe [O God, a new song shall I sing unto thee]; 13 Raduytesya Bohu, pomoshchniku nashemu [Rejoice in God, our helper]; 14 Otryhnu serdtse moye slovo blaho [My heart overflows with a good word]; 15 Priidite, vospoim lyudiye [Come, let us sing, o ye people]; 16 Voznesu tya, Bozhe moy, Tsaryu moy [I will exalt thee, O my God, my king]

17 Kol' vozlyublenna seleniya tvoya, Hospodi [How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord]; 18 Blaho yest' ispovyedatisya Hospodevi [It is good to give praise unto the Lord]; 19 Reche Hospod' Hospodevi moyemu [The Lord said unto my Lord]; 20 Na Tya Hospodi, upovakh' [In thee, O Lord, have I trusted]; 21 Zhiviy v pomoshchi Vyshnyaho [He that dwelleth in the help of the Most High]; 22 Hospod' prosvyeshcheniye moye [The Lord is my light]; 23 Blazheni lyudiye vedushchii voskliknoveniye [Blessed are the people who know jubilation]; 24 Vozvedokh ochi moi v hory [I will lift up mine eyes to the mountains]; 25 Ne umolchim nikohda, Bohoroditse [We will never be silent, Mother of God]; 26 Hospodi, Bozhe Izrailev [Lord, God of Israel]

27 Hlasom moim ko Hospodu vozvakh [With my voice unto the Lord have I cried]; 28 Blazhen muzh, boyaysya Hospoda [Blessed is the man, that feareth the Lord]; 29 Voskhvalyu imya Boha moyeho [I will praise the name of my God]; 30 Uslyshi, Bozhe, hlas' moy [Hear, O God, my voice]; 31 Vsi iazytsy vospleshchite rukami [O clap your hands, all ye nations]; 32 Skazhi mi, Hospodi, konchinu moyu [O Lord, make me to know mine end]; 33 Vskuyu priskorbna yesi, dusha moya? [Why art thou cast down, O my soul?]; 34 Da voskresnet Boh [Let God arise], also in version for 8vv according to Rïtsareva (1979); 35 Hospodi, kto obitayet v zhilishchi Tvoyem? [Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle?]

for SATB, SATB; numbering follows both editions; all in T iiB

1 Ispovemsya Tebe, Hospodi [I will confess to thee, O Lord]; 2 Khvalite, otrotsï, Hospoda [Praise the Lord, ye servants of the Lord]; 3 Priidite i vidite dela Bozhiya [Come and see the works of the Lord]; 4 Kto vzïdet na horu Hospodnyu? [Who shall see the Lord's mountain?]; 5 Nebesa povedayut' slavu Bozhiyu [The heavens are telling the glory of God]; 6 Kto Boh veliy, yako Boh nash? [Who is so great a God as our God?]; 7 Slava v vïshnikh Bohu [Glory to God in the highest]; 8 Vospoite, lyudiye, boholepno v Sionye [O people, sing joyfully in Zion]; 9 Se nïnye blahoslovite Hospoda [This day praise the Lord]; 10 Utverdisya serdtse moye o Hospode [Strengthen thyself my heart, in the Lord]

c23 others: 20 for 4vv, 1 for 6vv, 2 for 8vv, unauthenticated/lost

liturgical settings and sacred hymns

for 4vv unless otherwise stated; all in T i:1–3

Obednya [Liturgy], SSA: Slava i nynyey; Izhe kheruvimï (Glory to thee) [Cherubic Hymn]; Vyeruyuï (I believe); Tebye poem (We sing to thee); Dostoyno yest' (It is truly meet); Otche nash [Our Father]; Khvalite Gospoda [Praise the Lord];

Prostoe penie (arr. of liturgy), 2vv, 1814

Arkhanhel'skiy hlas [Song of the Archangel], 3 solo vv, 4 vv (for feast day of the Annunciation); Blahoobraznïy Iosif [The noble Joseph]; Da ispravitsya molitva moya [Let my prayer arise], 4 settings, 1 F, 2 d, 3 g, 4 d, all for 3 solo vv; Da molchit vsyakaya plot' cheloveka [Let all mortal flesh keep silence] SATB, SATB; Dostoyno yest' [It is truly meet]; Himn Spasiteliu [Hymn to the Saviour] (D.I. Khvostov), 1v, pf; Hospodi, siloyu tvoyeyu vovzeselitsya Tsar' [O Lord, in thy strength the king shall be glad]; Is polla ye ti, desnota [Many years to you, O master], 3 solo vv, chorus; Izhe Kheruvimï [Cherubic Hymn], 7 settings for SATB/(1v, pf), 1 E, 2 d, 3 F, 4 C, 5 F, 6 F, 7 D (RUS-SPit), 2 settings for SATB, SATB, 1 c, 2 B; Khavalite Hospoda s nebes [Praise God from the heavens] (communion ant), 2 settings, 1 F, 2 C; Kol' slaven nash Hospod' [How great is our Lord] (M.M. Kheraskov), 2 versions 1 for 1v, 1 for SATB; Mnohaya lyeta [Many years], 2 versions, Bol'shoye [Greater], Maloye [Lesser]; Molitvy pered obyedom i uzhinom [Prayers before meals]; Nadezhda i predstatel'stvo [Hope and intercessor], 3 solo vv, chorus; Otche nash [Our Father], RUS-SPsc*; O tebye raduyetsya, Blahodatnaya, vsyakaya tvar [In thee, O blessed one, all creation rejoices] Predvyechniy i neobkhodimïy [Pre-eternal and uncircumscribed (God)] (IU.A. Isledinsky-Meletsky), 1v, pf; Raduytesya pravednii o Hospodye [Rejoice ye righteous ones in the Lord], SATB, SATB; Slava i nïnye, Yedinorodnïy Sïne [Glory to thee, only-begotten son], SATB, SATB; Slava tebye, Bozhe nash [Glory to thee, our God]; Tebye Boha Khvalim [We praise thee O God], 4 settings for SATB, 1 F, 2 C, 3 F, 4 B; 10 settings for SATB, SATB, 1 D, 2 C, 3 C, 4 B, 5 C, 6 C, 7 C, 8 D, 9 C, 10 B; Tvoryay anhelï svoya dukhi [Thou makest thine angels spirits], SATB, SATB; Vecheri tvoyeya [Thy supper] (communion ant), SATB, SATB; Vkusite i vidite [Taste and see] (communion ant), 3 settings, c, for SATB, SATB (later arr. for SATB), E, c, both for SATB; Voskresniey Bozhe [Rise up, O God], 2 versions, both for 3 solo vv, chorus; Vo vsyu zemlyu [Of all the earth], 2 settings, 1 C, 2 C, both SATB, SATB; V pamyat' vyechnuyu [In eternal memory], 2 settings, E, B, both SATB, SATB; Yavisya blahodat' Bozhiya [The grace of God has appeared], 4 settings, 1 A, 2 E, 3 G, 4 E, all for SATB, SATB;

other sacred choral

for 4vv unless otherwise stated; all in T i:1–3

Chant harmonizations and arrs.: Anhel vopiyashe [The angel announced] (Gk. chant); Arkhanhel'skiy hlas [Song of the Archangel] (znamennïy chant), 3 solo vv, chorus; Chertoh Tvoy [Thy bridal chamber] (Kievan chant); Da ispolnyatsya usta nasha [Let our mouths be filled] (Kievan chant); Nïnye silï nebesnïya [Today the powers of heaven], 3 settings, E, A (Kievan chant), also in version for SATB, SATB; Pod tvoyu milost' [Under your mercy] (Kievan chant); Pomoshchnik i pokrovitel' [Helper and protector] (Gk. chant); Priidite, ublazhim Iosifa [Come, let us bless Joseph] (unknown chant source); Slava i nïnye, Dyeva dnes' [Glory be, today the Virgin] (Bulg. chant); Slava i nïnye, Yedinorodny Sïne [Glory be, only-begotten son] (Kievan chant); Tyelo Khristovo priimite [Receive the body of Christ] (Communion ant, Kievan chant)

Lat. texts: Ave Maria, S, A, 2 hn, str, bc, 1775, RUS-SPit*; Salve regina, A solo, 2 ob, 2 hn, str, bc, 1776, Glinka Cappella library, St Petersburg; Gl; Dextera domini fecit virtutem, SPit, doubtful

Ger. text: Nemetskaya obednya [German Liturgy], SPit*

operas

Creonte (dramma per musica, 2, after M. Coltellini: Antigone), Venice, S Benedetto, 26 Nov 1776, P-La

Quinto Fabio (dramma seria, 3, after A. Zeno: Lucio Papirio dittatore), Modena, Ducale, 26 Dec 1778, RUS-Mcm, Glinka Cappella library, St Petersburg

Alcide (dramma per musica, 3, after P. Metastasio: Alcide al bivio), Venice, 1778, GB-Lbl; ed. M. Berdennikov (Kiev, 1985)

La fête du seigneur (comédie mêlée d'aires et des balets, 1, G.I. Chernïshev, A.A. Musin-Pushkin and A.F. Viole, after C.-S. Favart: Annette et Lubin), Pavlovsk Palace, sum. 1786, RUS-SPia, Bolshoya Filarmonia library, St Petersburg; 12 nos. in Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, iii (Moscow, 1970), 411–57 [music suppl.]

Le faucon (oc, 3, F.-H. Lafermière, after G. Boccaccio and M.-J. Sedaine), Gatchina Palace, 11/22 Oct 1786, GB-Lbl, RUS-SP-Lit*, Ltob; ed. A. Rozanov (Moscow, 1975)

Le fils-rival, ou La moderne Stratonice (oc, 3, Lafermière), Pavlovsk Palace, 11/22 Oct 1787, GB-Lbl, RUS-SPit*, SPtob

other secular vocal

Recueil de romances et chansons, 1v, pf (St Petersburg, 1793), edn (Kiev, 1976)

Pesnosloviye, TTB, 1797, RUS-SPsc*

Pevets vo stane russkikh voynov [Bard in the Encampment of Russian Warriors] (V.A. Zhukovsky), 1v, choir, orch, 1813

instrumental

Chbr: Qnt no.2, C, vn, va da gamba, vc, hp, pf, 1787, ed. B. Dobrokhotov (Moscow, 1951) [Qnt no.1 lost]; Concert Sym., B, 2 vn, va da gamba, vc, hp, bn, pf, 1790, edn (Moscow, 1953)

Wind insts: ‘Gatchinsky’ March, B, 1787

Hpd sonatas: no.1, B, ed. V.A. Natanson and A.A. Nikolayev, Russkaya fortepiannaya muzïka, i (Moscow, 1954), 43–8; no.2, C, ed. in IRMO, i (1968), 233–47; no.3, F, ed. L.A. Barenboym and V.I. Muzalevsky, Khrestomatiya po istorii fortepiannnoy muzïki Rossii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949), 29–37

Doubtful: Hpd Conc., ?lost

Bortnyans'ky, Dmytro Stepanovych

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (R. Taruskin)

MooserA

F.V. Bulgarin: ‘Nekrologiya deystvitel'nogo statskogo sovetnika Dm.S. Bortnyanskogo’ [Necrology of state councillor Bortnyans'ky], Severnaya pchela (1825), no.118

A.F. L'vov: ‘Biographie de Bortniansky: conseiller d'état actuel, et directeur de la Chapelle impériale des chantres de la cour de Russie’, Monde musical/Muzïkal'nïy svet, viii/Aug (1855), 1–2

D. Dolgov: ‘D.S. Bortnyans'ky: biografichesky ocherk’ [Bortnyans'ky: a Biographical sketch], Nuvellist: literaturnoe pribavlenie (March 1857), 17 only

N.I. Kompaneysky: Ital'yanets li Bortnyans'ky? [Is Bortnyans'ky an Italian?] (St Petersburg, 1908)

B.V. Dobrokhotov: D.S. Bortnyansky (Moscow, 1950)

P. Matsenko: Dmytro Stepanovych Bortnyans'ky i Maksym Sozontovych Berezovs'ky (n.p., 1951)

G.R. Seaman: ‘D.S. Bortnyansky’, MR, xxi (1960), 106–13

L. Khivrych: ‘Fugatni formy v khorovykh kontsertakh D. Bortnyans'koho’ [Fugal forms in the choral concertos of Bortnyans'ky], Ukraïns'ke muzykoznavstvo, vi (1971)

M. Rïtsareva: ‘O stile khorovïkh sochineniy D.S. Bortnyanskogo [On the style of Bortnyans'ky's choral works] (diss., N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory, Leningrad, 1973)

M. Rïtsareva: Kompozitor D. Bortnyansky: zhizn' i tvorchestvo [The composer Bortniansky: life and works] (Leningrad, 1979)

V. Ivanov: Dmytro Bortnyans'ky (Kiev, 1980)

V. Morosan: Choral Perforamnce in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, 1986)

M. Kuzma: Dmitrii Stepanovich Bortnianskii (1751–1825): an Introduction to the Composer through an Edition of his Choral Concertos Priidite vospoim and Glasom moim (diss., Indiana U., 1992)

M. Kuzma: ‘Bortniansky à la Bortniansky: an Examination of the Sources of Dmitry Bortniansky's Choral Concertos’, JM, xiv (1996), 183–212

Bortolotti, Mauro

(b Narni, Terni, 26 Nov 1926). Italian composer. He studied with Caporali, Germani and Petrassi at the Rome Conservatory (1944–56), receiving diplomas in the piano, the organ and composition. In addition he attended the Darmstadt summer courses (1957–68) and in 1967, having developed an interest in electronic music, he worked with Grossi in Florence and Pisa. He was a founder-member of the Rome-based contemporary music group Nuova Consonanza (1961) and in 1968 he won a special award in the Casella composition competition. A one-time contributor to Italian radio, he also taught music history at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza, Rome, and composition at the Frosinone and Rome conservatories. In 1995 he was appointed artistic director of the Orchestra Regionale Lazio.

Rather than encouraging him to adopt a serial method which he himself had not fully absorbed, Petrassi advised his pupil to acquire established techniques (cf the Bartókian Concerto for Orchestra of 1955–6). Bortolotti began to explore newer procedures only after his attendance at Darmstadt. In his subsequent concern with total serialism, aleatory processes and electronic music (exemplified respectively by Toute sa vie, Frammenti 5 and Motetto), he avoided any extreme or dogmatic approach. And the progressively increasing anti-discursiveness of Studi per trio, Studio per e.e. cummings no.2, Transparencias and E tuttavia … did not inhibit the urge to communicate which he inherited from the realistic tendencies in postwar Italian culture. On the other hand, though he could still work in harmony with that culture during the 1950s (as in the Tre poesie of 1957), he later had to realize the divergence between his poetic aims and his technical evolution, which tended to accept no possibilities but irrationality and radical abstraction. Hence the imbalance between instrumental refinement and colloquial affability in such works as Paréntesis para cinco and the emergence of a deep unease, intellectual and existential, in Contre 2 and Grazie per essere venuti!.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

E tu? (‘nondramma’, 1, A. Giuliani, A. Porta, E. Sanguineti), 1971–3; Berryman: Lettur Azione (J. Berryman), 1981

vocal

Cant. (T.S. Eliot), T, orch, 1954–5, 1957; 3 poesie (R. Scotellaro), 1v, cl, pf, 1957; 4 poesie (P. Eluard), 1v, cl, vc, 1959 –78; Studio per e.e. cummings, S, fl, cl, 3 perc, 1963; Toute sa vie (Eluard), chorus, orch, 1962–4; Contre 2, S, 5 insts, 1965–7, rev. 1993: Grazie per essere venuti! (G. Leopardi, A. Moles), spkr, pf trio, 1970; Motetto, 1v, cptr, 1971; Sine nomine, 1v, fl, trbn, vc, perc, 1974; Room 231: Something Black (Berryman), S, str qt, 1980; Nell’impoetico mondo (E. Sanguineti), S, 6 insts, 1989; Grandes misterios habitam (F. Pessoa), S, orch, 1992, transcr. S, chbr orch; I pesci di vento (A. Giuliani), S, fl, pf, 1991; Se un altro giorno saluto (E. Pecora), Tr chorus, 1994; Carlotta a Weimar (T. Mann), spkr, S, 10 insts, 1995

instrumental

4 or more insts: Conc. for Orch, 1955–6; Episodi concertanti, chbr orch, 1961; Frammenti 5, various combinations, 1961, rev. 1966; Studio per e.e. cummings no.2, 11 insts, 1964; Paréntesis para 5, cl, bn, vn, vc, db, 1968; Transparencias, str, hpd, 1968; Links, vn, db, str, 1969; … alcune variazione, fl, 18 insts, 1971; E tuttavia …, str, 1972; Studio del vero, 15 insts/orch, 1975; Sinfonia ‘Est animum’, orch, 1985; Recitativo obbl, cl, 5 str, 1986; Bacco adoro e amo, 4 cl, 1990; I pesci di vento, 11 winds, 1991; Uccello profeta (da Schumann), 11 wind, 1991

1–3 insts: Studi, cl, hn, va, 1960; Pour le piano, 1960–69; Combinazione libere, va, pf, 1965; Paréntesis, cl, bn, pf, 1967; 4 momenti, bn, pf, 1970; Appunti per un trio, various combinations, 1972; A in Pan, rec, pf, 1974; Pour le piano, pf 4 hands, 1974–5; Scherzo, vn, 1980; Poema ‘Omaggio a Tarkowsky’, hp, 1982; Musica per una scena, str trio, 1984; Improvviso-Carillon, pf, 1987; L’homme armé, b cl, db, 1988; Dizem? Esquecem-Nao dizem? Fatal, fl, perc, 1989; Canzon e Finale per Egisto, fl, 1993

Principal publishers: Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni, Edi Pan

WRITINGS

ed. M. Bacigalupo and C. De Mari: ‘Testo cantato/testo parlato’, Poesia in pubblico, parole per musica: Genoa 1979 and 1980, 162–3

ed. C. Bologna, P. Montefoschi and M. Vetta: ‘Musica e Poesia’, Chi l’avrebbe detto, arte, poesia e letteratura per Alfredo Giuliani (Milan, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Zaccaro: ‘Profilo di giovani musicisti: Mauro Bortolotti’, Avanti (8 March 1962)

A.M. Bonisconti: ‘Contre 2 di Mauro Bortolotti’, Il veltro, xi (1967), 320–23

S. Ragni: ‘Incontro con Mauro Bortolotti’, La nazione [Perugia] (21 Dec 1974)

M. Bortolotti and E. Valente: ‘Gli archi di Mauro Bortolotti’, Paesaggi intravisti, Edipan PAN PRC S20 (1986) [disc notes]

D. Tortora: ‘Poesia e musica nell’opera di Mauro Bortolotti’, Avanguardia, v (1997)

STEFANO LEONI

Borton.

See Morton, Robert and Bordon, Pieter.

Börtz, Daniel

(b Hässleholm, 8 Aug 1943). Swedish composer. He studied the violin and theory with Fernström in Lund and composition privately with Rosenberg before attending the Stockholm Musikhögskolan (composition, Blomdahl and Lidholm). He also studied electronic music with G.M. Koenig at the University of Utrecht. He was a permanent member of the Swedish Composers’ Society (1971–9) and its secretary from 1972 to 1979. He teaches orchestration at the Musikhögskolan, Stockholm, and is a member of the Royal Academy of Music.

Börtz's extensive output is dominated by ten Sinfonias, which are mostly cast in a single movement in order not to disrupt the symphonic process; also prominent are his eleven Monologhi, created to elicit the emotional and expressive qualities of different solo instruments or the human voice. During the 1970s he composed two church operas and a chamber opera, but it was not until the 1990s that he became recognized as one of the leading Swedish opera composers. He won a substantial success on the operatic stage when his two-act opera Backanterna (‘The Bacchantes’), after Euripides, was given at the Stockholm Opera, with Ingmar Bergman as director. This opera, the story of the misfortune of the last great matriarchy, was written on Bergman’s initiative and designed to show the foolishness of all kinds of fundamentalism.

WORKS

Stage: Muren – Vagen – Ordet [The Wall, the Way, the Word] (church op, 3, B.V. Wall), unperf.; Den heliga Birgittas dod och mottagande i himlen [The Death of St Bridget and her Acceptance in Heaven] (church op, 2, Wall), Lund, 7 Oct 1973; Landskab med flod [Landscapes with a River] (chbr op, 2, J. Ljungdahl, after H. Hesse: Siddhartha), U. of Århus, 1974; Backanterna [The Bacchantes] (op, 2, J. Stolpe and G.O. Eriksson, after Euripides), Stockholm, Kungliga, 2 Nov 1991; Marie Antoinette (C. Fellbom), Stockholm, Folkoperan, 21 Jan 1998

Vocal: Josef K (F. Kafka), recit, 8 vv, SATB, tape, orch, 1969; Nightflies (T. Tranströmer), Mez, cl, trbn, 3 perc, pf, org, vc, 1973; Introitus och evangeliemotett (Bible), Bar, 3 choruses, orch, 1975–6; Gryningsvind [Dawn Wind] (P. Bergman), male chorus, 1977; Monologhi 5, vocalise, S, 1977; Fläcker av liv [Spots of Life] (J. Werup), 2 recit, 2 S, A, T, Bar, SATB, orch, 1979–80; Solsignaler [Sun Signals] (Werup), male chorus, brass, perc, 1980; Bråddjupa nätter [Precipitous Nights] (I. Moberg), 8-part SATB, 1983; Var inte förskräckta [Don’t be afraid] (Bible), SATB, 1984; Sinfonia 8 (Tranströmer), Mez, Bar, orch, 1987–8; Collaudamus (A. Henrikson), S, male chorus, orch, 1990–91; Backanternas kör [The Choir of the Bacchantes] (Euripides), SATB, 1992; [4] Mörka sånger om ljuset [Dark Songs of the Light] (Tranströmer, G. Seferis), (1v, pf)/(S, gui), 1992–4; Sånger om döden [Songs of Death] (trans. N. Rådström), S, orch, 1992–4; Vi bär varandra [We carry each other] (G. Henrikson), male chorus, 1994

Orch: 10 Sinfonias (1973–92); Conc., vn, bn, chbr orch, 1974; Night Clouds, str orch, 1975; Conc. grosso, 2 cl, 2 tpt, pf 4 hands, vn, vc, str octet, 1977–8; Prelude for Brass, 4 tpt, 4 hn, 4 trbn, tuba, 1978; October Music, str, 1978; In memoria di …, 1978; Conc., bn, wind, perc, cel, hp, 1978–9; Vc Conc., str, 1981; Conc. grosso no.2, hn, tpt, trbn, wind, perc, 1981; Conc., pf, perc, chbr orch, 1981–2; Summer Elegy, fl, str, 1983; Follow the Leader into my Song, fl, ob, hn, 7 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, db, 1984; Vc Conc., 1985; 4 bagateller för stråkar, str orch, 1985; Ob Conc., 1986; Parados, 1987; Intermezzo, 1989–90; Strindberg Suite, 1993–4; Tpt Conc.: sånger och danser, 1994–5; Vn Conc. no.2, 1995–6

Chbr: 11 Monologhi, solo inst/s, 1966–84; Str Qt no.2, 1971; Dialogo 1, vc, pf, 1976; Dialogo 2, 2 va, 1978; Dialogo 3, 2 pf, 1978; Cento battute extra, 2 pf, 1980; Winter Pieces, tuba, pf, perc, 1981–2; Winter Pieces 2, wind qnt, 1982; Ritual, 5 perc, 1982–3; Winter Pieces 3, brass qnt, 1982–3; Pezzo brillante, fl, db, pf, 1984; 3 Reductions, gui, pf, 1984; Str Qt no.3, 1985–7; Kithairon, ob, 1989–91; Canto desolato, org, 1993; Ett porträtt, gui, 7 insts, 1993; Pf Sonata, 1994–5; Backanterna, fl, 2 perc, 1995; Bilder, cl, str qt, 1996

WRITINGS

‘Min studietid hos Hilding Rosenberg’, Upptakt, Jan/Feb (1976–7), 18–19

‘Manskvartett i många stämmor’, Annorlunda manskör (Uppsala, 1978), 67–72 [on Dödens metaforer]

with J. Werup and G. Oddner: ‘Fläckar av liv’, Artes, vii/2 (1981), 84–92

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Hedman: ‘Tonsättaren Daniel Börtz presenteras’, Musikrevy, xxxii (1977), 240–44

P.-A. Hellquist: ‘Daniel Börtz: förkunnare av stora mått’, Konsertnytt, xix/4 (1983–4), 16–19

H. Åstrand: ‘Sinfonia 7 – Hommage a Helena Viera da Silva’, Nutida musik, xxxi/1 (1987–8), 12–15

C.-H. Larsén: ‘Börtz, Bergman och Euripides’, Operan (1991–2), no.6, pp.12–23

‘Daniel Börtz-Festival’, Konsertnytt, xxviii (1992–3) [special issue]

G. Schönfelder and H. Åstrand, eds.: Contemporary Swedish Music through the Telescopic Sight: 9 Analytical Studies (Stockholm, 1993)

ROLF HAGLUND

Borumand, Nur Ali

(b Tehran, 1905; d Tehran, 1976/7). Iranian musician and music teacher. He was brought up in a household frequented by musicians, poets and artists. His formal musical training started at the age of 12 in the form of tār lessons with Qolam Hossein Darvish Khan (1872–1926). In 1922, Borumand was sent to Germany where he attended secondary school. There he became familiar with European music and learnt the piano for two years. He continued to pursue his interest in Iranian music while studying medicine. However, failing eyesight and eventual blindness forced him to return to Iran in 1938, and after this he devoted his life to Iranian music. Over the next 30 years he led a secluded existence, studying tār and setār with a number of prominent masters, including Esmail Qahremani (b 1907), Mussa Ma'rufi (1889–1964) and Habib Somai (1901–46), with whom he also studied the santur.

In the mid-1960s Borumand began to take on a more public role and started to teach at the newly established music department at Tehran University. He later taught at the Centre for the Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music established in Tehran in 1971. Many of his students became prominent musicians. Borumand was not primarily a performer, and for this reason was little known by the general public, but he was highly regarded as a teacher because of his excellent knowledge of the traditional classical repertory (radif). He became known outside Iran through the writings of two of his non-Iranian pupils, the ethnomusicologists Bruno Nettl and Jean During.

Borumand was a somewhat controversial figure because of his rather idiosyncratic view of the classical Iranian tradition and his conservative attitude to many of the changes that the tradition underwent, particularly from the 1950s onwards (including the introduction of staff notation). However, he was highly respected among many musicians of the late 20th century and his legacy lives on in the music and writings of those who studied with him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Nettl: ‘Nour-Ali Bouroumand, a Twentieth Century Master of Persian Music’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis, iii (1974), 167–71

B. Nettl: The Radif of Persian Music: Studies of Structure and Cultural Context (Champaign, IL, 1987), 142–5

S. Behroozi: Chehrehā-ye musiqi-e Iran [Profiles of Iranian musicians], i (Tehran, 1988), 370–74

J. Sarami: ‘Borumand, hāfez va ostād-e musiqi’ [Borumand, guardian and master of music], Ādineh, nos.43/44 (1990), 50–52

J. During: La répertoire-modèle de la musique iranienne: radif de tār et setār de Mirza Abdollah, version de Nur ‘Ali Borumand (Tehran, 1991)

LAUDAN NOOSHIN

Borup-Jørgensen, (Jens) Axel

(b Hjørring, 22 Nov 1924). Danish composer. In 1927 his family moved to Sweden, where in 1944 he took his student's examination, in Linköping. After the war he was accepted at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen and in 1950, after studying with Anders Rachlew, he passed the music teacher's examination in piano. As a composer, apart from studies in instrumentation with Schierbeck and Jersild, he is self-taught.

Borup-Jørgensen's earliest compositions, for example Lille serenade op.1 for string quartet op.1 (1948) and Marine skitser (‘Marine Sketches’) for piano op.4b (1949), are inspired by an impressionistically coloured Swedish romance tradition. His works of the first half of the 1950s moved towards Expressionism. This, in Music for Percussion and Viola op.18 (1955–6), was punctuated by sections of a motoric character reminiscent of Bartók. He was partly influenced by the condensed language of the Finnish-Swedish lyricist Gunnar Björling, which led him to work with increasingly reduced material; the Winter Pieces for piano op.30b (1959) are in an atonal, pointillist style.

When Danish musical life became receptive to Central European influences, about 1960, Borup-Jørgensen was among the first musicians to attend the summer courses in Darmstadt (1959 and 1962). This did not bring about a stylistic reorientation, but his encounter with Ligeti's early orchestral works and the works of the Swedish composer Bo Nilsson left traces in his output from the 1960s, primarily in the orchestral work Marin (‘Marine’) op.60 (1963–70), one of his more notable compositions. In this 25-minute symphonic suite, which depicts the sea in suggestive images, harmonic clusters, random principles and untraditional performance methods are integrated in music that is highly differentiated in sound. Yet although Central European music of the 1950s was of great significance to Borup-Jørgensen, he has not used serial or structuralist principles of composition; his music is fundamentally intuitive in concept. The use of avant-garde elements is governed by his unique sensitivity towards differentiation in sound, rhythm and dynamics. As a natural extension of this, he constantly investigates alternative forms of instrumental expression and has developed his own notation, often graphically based.

The works after 1970 have an added depth in harmony and overall sound. At the same time, the pointillist type of composition is replaced by more cohesive formal structures, as in Sirenernes kyst (‘The Coast of Sirens’) for seven instruments and tape (1985), in which quiet, refined sound effects overlie a multi-track tape of women's singing. The solo works from this period focus on forms of expression specific to the instrument, as in Thalatta! Thalatta! for piano op.127 (1987), which expresses the piano's ‘singing’ resonance in the treble register. Nature, Nordic light and the seasons are persistent sources of inspiration for Borup-Jørgensen, and in the works inspired by nature he often reaches the outer limits of his universe of expression, for example the statically lyrical in Nordisk sommerpastorale op.51 (1964) and the eruptively dramatic in Musica autumnalis op.80 (1977).

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Chbr Conc., op.9, vn, small orch, 1951; Sommersvit [Summer Suite], op.24, str, 1957; Cretaufoni, op.37, 1960–61; Insulae, op.40, str, 1961–2; Marin [Marine], op.60, 1963–70; Nordisk sommerpastorale, op.51, 1964; Musica autumnalis, op.80, wind insts, perc, elec org, 1977; Déjà-vu, op.99, gui, str, 1982–3

Chbr: Lille serenade, op.1, str qt, 1948; Sonata, op.14, va, pf, 1952–3; Partita, op.15, va, 1953–4; Improvisations, op.17, str qt, 1955; Music for Perc and Va, op.18, 5–7 perc, va, 1955–6, rev. va, 2 perc, pf, 1993 [as op.148]; Mikroorganismer, op.20b, str qt, 1956; Sonatina, op.29, 2 vn, 1958; Mobiles after Alexander Calder, op.38, va, mar, pf, 1961; Torso, op.54, str qt, tape, 1965; Vinterdagbog, op.64, fl, str qt, pf, 1970–72; Malinconia, op.68, str qt, 1972–4; Praeambula, op.72, gui, 1974; Praeludien für Guitarre, op.76, 1976; Carambolage, op.79, pf, elec gui, perc, 1976–7; Pf Qnt, op.85, 1977–8; Notenbüchlein für Anna Elisabeth, op.82, descant rec, 1977–9; Favola, op.89, fl, hp, 1979–80; Solo for Perc, op.88, 1979–80; La primavera, op.97, 2 perc, 1982; Sirenernes kyst [The Coast of Sirens], op.100, fl, cl, perc, gui, pf, vn, vc, tape, 1983–5; Favola II, op.112, cel, 1984; Winter Music, op.113 no.1, brass qnt, perc, 1984; Rhapsodie, op.114, va, 1984–95, 3 arrs.; Nachtstück, op.118, t rec, 1986–7; Musica nigra, op.123, cembalo, db, 1987–8; Tarocco per il cembalo, op.124, 1987–8; Pièce en concert, op.130, hp, 1989–90

Vocal: Af ‘Duineser Elegier’ (R.M. Rilke), op.19, Mez, fl, vc, 1955–6; Hjemkomst (Chin.), op.21, Mez, fl, cl, va, vc, 1956; Som gräs och blad (G. Björling), op.28, lv, pf, 1958; Vereinsamt (F. Nietzsche), op.34, B, pf, 1959–60; Cant. (Rilke), op.42, A, fl, cl, bn, perc, pf, va, vc, 1962–3; 2 sange [2 Songs] (Rilke), op.44, Mez, pf, 1963; 3 sange (Storm), op.48, Mez, pf, 1963–4; 2 sange (T.W. Storm), op.46, Mez, pf, 1963–4; Winterelegie (J.C.F. Hölderlin), op.55, S, Mez, fl, ob, bn, 2 perc, pf, 2 vn, va, 1966–8; 2 Movts, op.62, speaking chorus, 1971–2; Songs (O. Sarvig), op.104, S, gui, 1983–5

Pf: Marine skitser [Marine Sketches], op.4b, 1949; Winter Pieces, op.30b, 1959; Sommerintermezzi, op.65, 1971; Epigrammes, op.78, 1976; Thalatta! Thalatta!, op.127, 1987–8; Raindrop Interludes, op.144, 1992–4

Org: For Org IV, op.106, 1983–4; Calligraphies, op.116, 1985–7; Winter Music, op.113 no.2, org, perc, 1986–7; For Org XI, op.141, 1991–4

Principal publishers: Edition Borup-Jørgensen, Engstrøm & Sødring, The Society for Publication of Danish Music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Borup-Jørgensen: ‘Ny musik i Darmstadt’, DMt, xxxiv (1959), 195–8

I. Nørholm: ‘Vocale aspekter’, DMt, xxxvii (1962), 104–8

B. Johnsson: ‘Axel Borup-Jørgensen og hans Cretaufoni’, Nutida musik, vi/5 (1962–3), 9–13

A. Borup-Jørgensen: ‘Prisma parafrase’, DMt, xli (1966), 86–7

B. Wallner: Vår tids musik i Norden från 20-tal till 60-tal (Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, 1968)

K. Ketting: ‘Axel Borup-Jørgensen’, DMt, lii (1977), 45–7

N. Schiørring: Musikkens historie i Danmark, iii (Copenhagen, 1978), 345–6

H. Nørgaard: ‘Axel Borup-Jørgensen – øbo i flimrende lys, med telefon’, DMt, lix (1984–5), 190–91

NIELS ROSING-SCHOW

Borwick, Leonard

(b Walthamstow, 26 Feb 1868; d Le Mans, 17 Sept 1925). English pianist. As a youth he was sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he studied under Clara Schumann. He made his début at Frankfurt (1889) with a performance of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, and in May 1890 appeared in London at a Philharmonic Society concert as soloist in the Schumann Concerto. After this he built up a reputation as a pianist of distinction, especially in works from the standard repertory. Although much in demand for solo engagements, Borwick also took part in chamber concerts with the Joachim Quartet; from 1893 he collaborated with the Irish tenor Harry Plunket Greene, and for ten years the two artists gave joint recitals. Before World War I he travelled widely, performing in various European countries as well as in Australia and America.

At a time of intense international competition, Borwick was able to demonstrate with ease that an English pianist of calibre could equal his foreign rivals on the concert platform. His interpretations of Schumann and Chopin were regarded as outstanding, although he also included Bach, Mozart, Liszt and Brahms in his programmes. He later developed an enthusiasm for Ravel and Debussy, and made brilliant transcriptions of Debussy’s Fêtes and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. He defended the practice of adaptation on the ground that the pianist could lend a special ‘colouring’ to musical ideas originally conceived with other instruments in mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.P. Greene: ‘Leonard Borwick: Some Personal Recollections’, ML, vii (1926), 17–24

E.D. MACKERNESS

Borzio [Bortio, Borri], Carlo

(b Lodi, nr Milan; fl c1656–95). Italian composer. A member of the clergy, he was maestro di cappella of Lodi Cathedral and later of the Philippine Congregation there. His output includes operas and oratorios, many to texts by his friend Francesco de Lemene, who was also from Lodi; about 1656 Borzio performed in improvised comedies at the poet’s house. His most important work is Il Narciso, which was revived for Queen Christina of Sweden at Rome in March 1679. The music includes a wealth of short, rhythmically regular arioso passages and a remarkable number of arias, justified by the opera’s pastoral theme.

WORKS

Gratitudine umana (C.M. Maggi), Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore, theatre of Count Vitaliano Borromeo, Dec 1670, collab. P. Magni, rev. as Affari ed amori, Milan, Regio, 1675; I-IBborromeo, inc.; lib Gu, Mb, Mc, Rn

Il Narciso (favola boschereccia, F. de Lemene), Lodi, 29 Sept 1676, IBborromeo, Rvat, Vnm; 1 aria ed. M. Zanon, Raccolta di 24 arie (Milan, 1914)

Il secolo trionfante (versi musicali), Lodi, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 1695

Il cuore di S Filippo Neri (dialogo musicali), Lodi, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri

La carità (orat, Lemene), Lodi, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri

I quatro novissimi, ed altre centate (Lemene)

Dialogo pastorale (Lemene)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

F.S. Quadrio: Della storia, e della ragione d’ogni poesia (Milan, 1744)

C. Vignati: ‘Francesco de Lemene e il suo epistolario inedito’, Archivio storico lombardo, xix (1892), 345–76, 629–70, esp. 357, 635

G. Barblan: ‘Il teatro musicale a Milano nei secoli XVII e XVIII’, Storia di Milano, xii (Milan, 1959), 947–96 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milan]

LORENZO BIANCONI (with JENNIFER WILLIAMS BROWN)

Bos, Coenraad Valentijn

(b Leiden, 7 Dec 1875; d Mount Cisco, NY, 6 Aug 1955). Dutch pianist. He studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Julius Röntgen and then at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, but left during his first year there to accompany the baritone Eugen Gura on tour. Among the singers he subsequently accompanied were Raimund von Zur Mühlen, Anton van Rooy, Frieda Hempel, Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Julia Culp. In 1896 he accompanied Anton Sistermans in the first performance of Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, in Vienna. Bos, called by Gerald Moore ‘the doyen of accompanists’, also performed with many celebrated instrumentalists, including Joachim, Kreisler, Sarasate, Casals and, in 1929, the young Menuhin. He made a number of recordings of lieder: Schubert with Elisabeth Rethberg, Brahms and Schumann with Elena Gerhardt and Wolf with Alexander Kipnis and Gerhard Hüsch, among others. From 1934 to 1952 he taught accompaniment at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.V. Bos: The Well-Tempered Accompanist, ed. A. Pettis (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1949)

G. Moore: Am I Too Loud? Memoirs of an Accompanist (London, 1962/R)

A. Reinders: ‘Coenraad Valentijn Bos, Meesterbegeleider’, Dutch EPTA Bulletin, no.2 (1989), 20–25

ANK REINDERS

Bosca, Matteo

(fl 1526). Italian composer. Otherwise unknown, he entered into a contract with the printer Niccolò de’ Giudici on 5 March 1526 to print 500 books of canzoni at a cost of 27 ducats; 50 more copies were printed in October. The publication can be identified with the Libro primo de musica de la salamandra (Rome, 1526) that Ferdinand Columbus bought in Rome in 1530. No copy survives. (B.J. Blackburn: ‘The Printing Contract for the Libro primo de musica de la salamandra (Rome, 1526)’, JM, xii (1994), 345–56)

BONNIE J. BLACKBURN

Bosch, Maura (Louise) [Hess, Marjorie Ann]

(b Reading, PA, 8 Aug 1958). American composer. She studied at the Hartt College of Music (BM 1978) and Princeton University (MFA 1982), where her teachers included Alexander Lepak, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone and Peter Westergaard. She believes that all of her works ‘arise from a basic premise of performing music as theatre’ and should be presented in ‘[their] own theatrical space’, away from traditional venues of concert and opera. In 1990 she co-founded Corn Palace Productions, a music theatre company in Minneapolis, to perform her operatic works. Mirabell's Book of Numbers, a surrealistic opera based on poems by James Merrill, was completed in 1991.

Bosch’s eclectic style draws on both acoustic and electronic instruments. Although she has written for a variety of media, her compositions share a common focus on words. Her Light Self (1997), an ‘electro-acoustic collage’, features phrases of text performed in canon with a recorded recitation of the same material. The ZELDA songs (1997), on feminist texts by the composer, are rooted in popular music idioms that provide a wide range of musical expression. Her instrumental works also originate with texts that provide descriptive imagery or expressive intent.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: The Disappearance of Luisa Porto (M. Strand), 1989; Mirabell’s Book of Numbers (J. Merrill), 1991; The Damnation of Felicity, 1994

Vocal: Theatre Piece (Merrill), 1v, 1984; How She Was (Bosch), 1v, tape, 1988; The Oxen (T. Hardy), SATB, hp, 1993; 3 Hymns (Bosch), SATB, org, 1995; My Purity (Bosch), S, A, T, B, SATB, org, 1995; Bronte Songs (E. Bronte, Bosch), 1v, cl, vc, pf, 1996; Her Light Self (Bosch), 1v, accdn, tape, 1997; The Crossing (M.C. Wright), SATB, 1997; ZELDA (Bosch), 1v, ens, 1997

Inst: Santuario, orch, 1992; About the Night, str qt, 1993; Sing to the Sun, nar, ob, str qt, mand, 1995

Principal publisher: Davidge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Freese: ‘Tradition be Damned: Corn Palace Reinvents Opera’, Minnesota Women’s Press (7 Sept 1994)

K. Pendle: ‘For the Theatre: Opera, Dance and Theatre Piece’, CMR, xvi (1997), 69–80

KARIN PENDLE

Bosch, Pieter Joseph van den.

See Van den Bosch, Pieter Joseph.

Bosch Bernat-Verí [de Bernat-Veri], Jorge

(b Palma de Mallorca, 8 Nov 1737; d Madrid, 2 Dec 1800). Spanish organ builder. He built the organs for the chapels of the Dominican and Franciscan convents in his native town and trained his pupil, Gabriel Thomás, who built a number of organs on Mallorca. Later King Carlos III summoned Bosch Bernat-Verí to Madrid, where he completed the magnificent instrument begun by Leonardo Fernández Dávila for the royal palace of Oriente. He subsequently built an important organ for the metropolitan church of Seville, which was placed in the chancel on the south side of the altar but was destroyed at the end of the 19th century. Antonio Ponz described this instrument in glowing terms in his Viage de España (Madrid, 1774–87). Bosch Bernat-Verí may be considered the most famous Spanish organ builder of the second half of the 18th century. After his death his work was continued by his brother-in-law Juan Debono.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bourligueux: ‘Leandro Garcimartín et l’orgue des Carmes Chaussés de Madrid (documents inédits)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, iv (1968), 349–70

A. Reinés i Florit: ‘Inventario de los órganos históricos y actuales de las Islas Baleares’, El órgano espagñol II: Madrid 1986, 265–84

L. Jambou: Evolución del órgano espagñol: siglos xvi–xviii (diss., U. of Oviedo, 1988)

GUY BOURLIGUEUX

Boschetti, Gerolamo

(b Mantua; fl 1591–1611). Italian composer and singer. He is documented as maestro di cappella at the Madonna dei Monti, Rome, in 1591 and from 1593 to 1594. He occupied a similar position at the Santa Casa, Loreto, between 25 May 1594 and 20 April 1595, and from 1 November 1608 until 31 July 1611 he is recorded as a contralto in the Cappella Giulia in Rome. During his years in Rome he was patronized by Carlo Trotti, an ecclesiastic; the second book of madrigals, which is warmly dedicated to Trotti, also contains a piece in his honour, Ornasti voi signor.

WORKS

Il primo libro di madrigali, 4vv (Venice, 1591), ?lost, cited in FétisB

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 4, 6vv, con un eco nel fine, 8vv (Venice, 1593)

Modulationum sacrarum, seu hymnorum rythmicorum (vulgo motecta dictorum) anni totius solemnioribus festis deservientium, 8vv (Rome, 1594)

Motet in 1600²

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Canal: Della musica in Mantova (Venice, 1881/R)

A. Cametti: ‘Girolamo Frescobaldi in Roma: 1604–1643’, RMI, xv (1908), 701–52

G. Tebaldini: L’archivio musicale della Cappella lauretana (Loreto, 1921)

IAIN FENLON

Boschetti, Giovanni Boschetto

(b Viterbo; d Loreto, 22 May 1622). Italian composer. That he came from Viterbo is stated by Paolo Agostini in his fourth book of masses (1627). He was probably maestro di cappella at the Seminario Romano in 1619, and in 1620 he acted temporarily as maestro di cappella of Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, in place of Cesare Zoilo. On 17 March 1622 he became maestro of the Santa Casa, Loreto, but died just over two months later. He wrote the five intermedi Strali d'amore for a performance of a comedy at Viterbo on 14 February 1616. The published extracts consist of a few choruses, recitatives and arias, all rather innocuous, prefaced by a long description of the action (reproduced by Ambros, 415–21, in German with several music examples). Of the other music in the same volume the two solo madrigals and the solo sonnet setting are the most striking; the latter, False gioie, is, like one of the madrigals, extravagantly embellished and is not dissimilar to certain pieces in Caccini's Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (1614). Like several composers of the Roman school, however, Boschetti seems to have been less happy in the most up-to-date styles, an impression also conveyed by the rather routine concertato motets of his 1616 and 1620 volumes.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Rome, 1613); 1 in G.O. Pitoni: Guida armonica … libro I (Rome, c1690)

Sacrae cantiones … liber I, 2–4vv, bc, op.2 (Venice, 1616)

Sacrae cantiones … liber II, op.3 (1616–18), lost

Strali d’amore: favola recitata in musica per intermedij … con alcuni madrigali, dialoghi, e villanelle, 1–3vv, bc, op.4 (Venice, 1618)

Sacrae cantiones … liber III, 2–5, 8vv, bc, op.5 (Rome, 1620)

l motet, 3vv, 1621³

2 solo songs, 1 duet 1621¹⁵, 1622¹⁰

2 villanellas, 3vv, I-MOe

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

G. Tebaldini: L'archivio musicale della Cappella lauretana (Loreto, 1921), 101–2

R. Casimiri: ‘“Disciplina musicae” e “mastri di cappella” dopo il Concilio di Trento nei maggiori istituti ecclesiastici di Roma Seminario romano – Collegio germanico – Collegio inglese (sec. XVI–XVII)’, NA, xv (1938), 49–64

A. Allegra: ‘La cappella musicale di S. Spirito in Saxia di Roma’, NA, xvii (1940), 26–38, esp. 31

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

NIGEL FORTUNE

Boschi, Francesca.

See Vanini, Francesca.

Boschi, Giuseppe Maria

(b Viterbo; fl 1698–1744). Italian bass. He married the contralto Francesca Vanini, probably in 1698, but does not appear in cast lists until 1703, when he sang the role of Oronte in Francesco Gasparini’s Il più fedel fra i vassali at Casale Monferrato. He appeared in Venice in four operas by Gasparini and two by Lotti in 1707, and was re-engaged there in 1708–9 and 1713–14, singing in five further operas by Lotti and others by Caldara, Handel (Agrippina, 1709) and C.F. Pollarolo. He sang at Vicenza in 1707, Ferrara and Vienna in 1708, Bologna in 1709, 1717 and 1719, Verona in 1715, and Genoa in 1717. He made his London début with the Queen’s Theatre company in Mancini’s Idaspe fedele (1710), sang in Giovanni Bononcini’s Etearco and created Argante in Handel’s Rinaldo (1711). From 1714 he was a member of the choir at S Marco, Venice, but was allowed frequent leave of absence. He was at Dresden from 1717 to 1720, singing in Lotti’s Giove in Argo (1717), Ascanio (1718) and Teofane (1719). Handel engaged him from 1720 to 1728 in London where he sang in all 32 operas produced by the Royal Academy, including 13 by Handel and seven each by Bononcini and Ariosti. He reappeared in Venice in 1728–9 in three operas, two by Porpora, and was still living there in 1744.

Boschi’s voice had a compass of G to g' and the tessitura of a high baritone. James Miller’s line ‘And Boschi-like be always in a rage’ points to the style in which he excelled. He usually played villains or tyrants, and the power and agility of his voice encouraged Handel to accompany many of his arias with energetic counterpoint, though the voice is often doubled by the instrumental bass. In 15 operas Handel scarcely ever allowed him a slow aria. Lotti wrote very similarly for him in Teofane.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

SartoriL

O. Termini: ‘Singers at San Marco in Venice: the Competition between Church and Theatre (c1675–c1725)’, RMARC, no.17 (1981), 65–96

WINTON DEAN

Boschot, Adolphe

(b Fontenay-sous-Bois, 4 May 1871; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1 June 1955). French writer and music critic. From an early age he devoted all his spare time to music, though except for private violin and piano lessons he never studied formally. He was nevertheless a very fine amateur player on the violin and piano. After his baccalauréat (1889) and military service (1889-90), he studied literature at the Sorbonne. On leaving there in 1895, he associated with several people of the Paris literary world (notably Huysmans and E. de Goncourt). In 1897 he completed his first work, Essai sur la crise poétique. At the same time, Boschot began contributing articles on literary criticism, art and music to the Revue bleue and other periodicals; from 1910 he was music critic of the Echo de Paris, and from 1919 of the Revue bleue. He was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Institut de France) in 1926, and in 1937 succeeded Widor as permanent secretary.

Besides his writings on music, Boschot published several essays on literature (principally Théophile Gautier) and the arts. It was perhaps his literary background, breadth of sympathies and, in the best sense of the word, amateur approach to music, that made him an early champion of two (at that time) neglected composers: Mozart (he founded the Société Mozart with Wyzewa and Saint-Foix in 1901) and Berlioz. He was led to the latter by his study of the Romantic movement and devoted half a century to gathering material for his monumental and constantly revised biography of the composer. His shorter writings include contributions to Histoire du théâtre lyrique en France (Paris, c1936) and Norbert Dufourcq's La musique des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1946).

WRITINGS

L'histoire d'un romantique [Berlioz] (Paris, 1906–13, 2/1946–50)

Le Faust de Berlioz (Paris, 1910, 3/1945)

Une vie romantique: Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1919, 2/1951/R, 3/1965) [abridged version of L'histoire d'un romantique]

Chez les musiciens: du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1922–6)

La lumière de Mozart (Paris, 1928, 2/1952)

Le mystère musical (Paris, 1929)

La musique et la vie (Paris, 1931)

Mozart (Paris, 1935)

Musiciens-poètes: Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Chopin (Paris, 1937, 2/1951)

La vie et les oeuvres de Alfred Bruneau (Paris, 1937)

Maîtres d'hier et de jadis (Paris, 1944)

Portraits de musiciens (Paris, 1946–7)

libretto translations

Mozart: Don Giovanni (1933, 2/1949), Le nozze di Figaro (1939, 2/1948), Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1951), Così fan tutte (1954)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Boschot: Souvenirs d'un autre siècle (Paris, 1946) [autobiography 1876–1900]

N. Dufourcq: ‘Adolphe Boschot’, Journal musical français, no.41 (1955)

R. Dumesnil: ‘Adolphe Boschot’, L'Opéra de Paris, no.12 (1956), 63

ERIC BLOM/MALCOLM TURNER/JEAN GRIBENSKI

Bosco, Johannes de.

See Bosquet.

Bosco, Mwenda Jean [Mwenda wa Bayeke]

(b Bunkeya, 1930; d nr Lubumbashi, 22 Sept 1991). Congolese composer and guitarist. He began to play guitar at the age of 16 in Jadotville (now Likasa) in the Belgian Congo, and within a few years, by the 1950s, he had developed a highly individual style, the Katanga guitar style which he maintained, throughout his nearly 40-year career. He was discovered by South African musicologist Hugh Tracey on a field-trip to the Congo and was first recorded in Jadotville in 1952. That same year he received the first prize of the newly established Osborn Awards for the ‘best African music of the year’ for his composition Masanga njia. He began a full-time professional career, and by the late 1950s he was one of the most acclaimed composers of guitar-songs in Central Africa. From 1952 to 1962 Bosco recorded approximately 156 pieces for the Gallotone Company of South Africa. In 1959 he spent six months in Nairobi. In 1969 he took part in the Newport Folk Festival and undertook an extensive concert tour throughout Europe in 1982 (see illustration). Bosco’s premature death in a car accident was a shock to his admirers throughout the world.

Bosco’s most famous guitar compositions include Masanga njia, Bombalaka, Sokochomale zikita, Mwàámi, Namlia ee, Kitambala moja and Bibi mupenzi (all included on the CD Mwenda Jean Bosco, 1997). The first study, including transcriptions of Bosco’s music, was carried out by David Rycroft and published in 1961 and 1962. Rycroft compared the dual F–G tonality in Masanga njia to William Byrd’s The Woods So Wild. Bosco’s unique music influenced many contemporaneous guitarists in Central and East Africa, including John Mwale in Kenya and Faustino Okello in Uganda, among others. Kenyan-born English musicologist John Low studied guitar in Lubumbashi with Bosco in 1979, and his book Shaba Diary is an account of Bosco’s personality and music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

D. Rycroft: ‘The Guitar Improvisations of Mwenda Jean Bosco, Part I’, AfM, ii/4 (1961), 81–9

D. Rycroft: ‘The Guitar Improvisations of Mwenda Jean Bosco, Part II’, AfM, iii/1 (1962), 86–101

J. Low: Shaba Diary: a Trip to Rediscover the ‘Katanga’ Guitar Styles and Songs of the 1950s and ’60s, Acta Ethnologica et Linguistica, liv (Vienna, 1982)

K. wa Mukuna: ‘The Genesis of Urban Music in Zaire’, AfM, vii/2 (1992), 72–84

recordings

African Guitar: Solo Fingerstyle Guitar Music, Composers and Performers of Congo/Zaire, Uganda, Central African Republic, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia, videotape, Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop (New Jersey, 1995) [incl. notes by G. Kubik]

Mwenda Jean Bosco (1930–1990): Songs with Guitar, Shaba/Zaire, Museum Collection Berlin MC 21 (1997) [incl. notes by G. Kubik]

GERHARD KUBIK

Boscoop, Cornelius Symonszoon.

See Buscop, Cornelis Symonszoon.

Bose, Fritz

(b Messenthin, Stettin, 26 July 1906; d Berlin, 16 Aug 1975). German musicologist. From 1925 to 1933 he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied ethnomusicology with Hornbostel, organology with Sachs, music history with Abert and Schering, the psychology of sound with Stumpf, psychology with W. Köhler and ethnography with K.T. Preuss. He took the doctorate in Berlin in 1934 with a dissertation on the music of the Uitoto people of Colombia, and completed the Habilitation at the same institution in 1939 with a study on musical style as a racial trait. With the Nazi regime's dismissal of Hornbostel, Bose became director of the Berlin University's acoustics institute in 1934; in 1941 he was appointed a regular assistant lecturer, covering folk music, ethnomusicology, acoustics and musical phonetics. From 1935 he also served as music consultant for the Race and Resettlement Office of the SS. In 1953 he became director of the history department in the Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin, and in 1966, as head scientific adviser, became director of its folk music department. He held a teaching post at the Technical University in Berlin from 1963 and an honorary professorship from 1967. He retired in 1971.

Embarking on his career in the first years of the Nazi regime, Bose's early work focussed on developing a scientific approach for relating music and race. Thereafter, his work centred largely on organology, folk music and ethnomusicology. In 1966 he founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musik des Orients, which he directed until 1972; from 1956 to 1972 he initiated and led a research commission into song, music and dance in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volksliedkunde. Editor of the Jahrbuch für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde (1963–), he contributed to MGG1 and wrote all the ethnomusicological articles for the 12th edition of Riemann's Musik-Lexikon.

WRITINGS

‘Das Rassiche in der Musik’, Unser Wille und Weg, iv (1934), 110–12

‘Die Musik der aussereuropäischen Völker’, Atlantisbuch der Musik, ed. F. Hamel and M. Hürlimann (Berlin, 1934, 9/1959), 937–82

Die Musik der Uitoto (diss., Humboldt U., Berlin, 1934; Berlin, 1934)

‘Neue Aufgaben der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft’, ZMw, xvi (1934), 229–34

Lieder der Völker (Berlin, 1936) [gramophone records of the Institut für Lautforschung, Berlin University]

‘Musik und Musikinstrumente des Balkans’, Atlantis, x (1938), 625–32

‘Typen der Volksmusik in Karelien’, AMf, iii (1938), 96–118

Klangstile als Rassenmerkmale (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Berlin, 1939; Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde, xiv, 1943–4)

Musikalische Völkerkunde (Freiburg, 1953)

‘Anna Amalie von Preussen und Johann Philipp Kirnberger’, Mf, x (1957), 129–35

‘Law and Freedom in the Interpretation of European Folk Epics’, JIFMC, x (1958), 29–34

‘Die Musik der Chibcha und ihrer heutigen Nachkommen’, International Archives of Ethnography, xlviii (1958), 149–98

‘Musikgeschichtliche Aspekte der Musikethnologie’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 239–51

‘Rabindranath Tagore und die moderne indische Musik’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 565–70

‘Volkslied – Schlager – Folklore’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, lxiii (1967), 40–78

‘Vorstudien zu einer Musikgeschichte Afrikas’, Speculum musicae artis: Festschrift für Heinrich Husmann, ed. H. Becker and R. Gerlach (Munich, 1970), 75–83

‘Pibroch, schottische Kammermusik für Dudelsack’, Musica cameralis: Brno VI 1971, 325–35, 533 only

‘Zur Quellensituation für das Volkslied des Mittelalters’, Festschrift für Ernst Pepping zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. Poos (Berlin, 1971), 332–41

‘Die Musik der Tukano und Desana’, Jb für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde, vi (1972), 9–50

‘Tonale Strukturen in primitiver Musik’, Jb für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde, vii (1973), 18–45

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, Mf, xxviii (1975), 376

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/PAMELA M. POTTER

Bose, Hans-Jürgen von

(b Munich, 24 Dec 1953). German composer. He studied at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule with Hans Ulrich Engelmann (composition) and Klaus Billing (piano), among others. In 1974 he attended the Darmstadt summer courses for the first time and signed a publishing contract with Schott in Mainz. Two years later he discontinued his studies and moved to Munich to work as a freelance composer. In the period immediately thereafter, he wrote the large-scale work Morphogenesis (first performed in 1976 by the Südwestfunk SO under Ernest Bour) and the one-act opera Das Diplom. Commissions from the Hamburger Staatsoper (for the one-act opera Blutbund, 1974) and the Berlin Festival (for the String Quartet no.2, 1976–7) followed. The ballet Die Nacht aus Blei (1981), written during his first residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome (1980), greatly increased his professional recognition. He soon received commissions from the Berlin PO for Idyllen (1982–3), in celebration of the orchestra's centenary, and Ensemble Modern for Sappho-Gesänge (1983). He devoted his second visit to the Villa Massimo (1985) mainly to the completion of his first full-length opera, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. During these years he also became a regular visitor to Ireland, acquiring a cottage in 1984 where he could devote himself to composition.

In 1989 Bose became composer-in-residence to the Sharoun Ensemble of Berlin. In the years that followed, his work as a teacher became increasingly important, first at the Hitzacker Summer Festival and the ‘Jugend componiert’ Weikersheim courses, and later with a short-term appointment at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1991). In 1992 he was appointed professor of composition at the Munich Musikhochschule. Music drama now featured more prominently in his output, eventually influencing his writing in instrumental genres as well. The piano concerto Salut für Billy Pilgrim (1986), for example, has close links with the opera Schlachthof V and the Fourth String Quartet (1998) includes quotations from Franz Kafka. His numerous awards include the Heinrich Strobel Stiftung of Südwestfunk, the Mozart Stiftung, the Berlin Art Prize (1977), the Hessische Cultural Prize, the Munich Förderpreis für Musik, the Stuttgart Förderpreis (1987), the BMW prize for music drama (for 63: Dream Palace), the composition prize of the Fondacion Prince Pierre de Monaco (for 63: Dream Palace), the Schneider Schott Music Prize (1988), the Christoph und Stephan Kaske Stiftung (1998) for his activities as a teacher, and membership in the Berlin Academy of Arts (1986) and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (1986).

Bose's works, at least from the 1990s, attempt to reconcile postmodern tendencies and the modernist tradition. His structural and temporal concepts are founded largely on the work of individualists such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Ligeti. Through his study of astrophysics, neurobiology and chaos theory, he has developed a concept of musical and temporal structure free from conventional linearity. Even in early works, such as the first two string quartets (1973, 1976–7), his inclination towards the layering and serial organization of complex, tonally differentiated areas is evident. In the spirit of modernism, his predetermined structural plans and their realization in sound engage in a dialectical relationship. Although the label ‘new simplicity’ (which was applied to the String Trio after its Darmstadt première in 1978) is inappropriate to Bose's works, it does indicate an essential factor of his composition: there is always a pronounced and important semantic dimension. This intimate, concealed layer is often articulated in concrete sensuous sound patterns and in drama that can be directly experienced. Structural complexity is not employed for its own sake, but as a vehicle for direct sensuous perception against an autobiographical background.

Bose has increasingly supplemented his interlocking and overlapping of semantically laden tonal areas with microtonal material and electronic techniques, such as sampling. In his works from the opera 63: Dream Palace (1989) onwards, and in a spirit of reflective postmodernism, he has enriched the process of temporal layering and serial organization with different stylistic elements from the past and present. Music drama, in particular, has become the scene for structurally heterogeneous musical material, seldom involving direct quotation and never constituting a collage merely for outward show. Different semantic and historical layers are used as opportunities for musical scene-setting and characterization, an ideal he recognizes in Mozart's operas (such as in the ball scene in Don Giovanni). It is not surprising, then, that the modern classics he most admires have been works by Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, whose complex melodic ornamentation and playfully mobile music drama he has increasingly employed as a model. In his combination of structural modernism and polystylistic postmodernism, he suggests that composition at the beginning of the 21st century should reject a polarization of trends and ideologies and instead develop technical variety by linking various processes together.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage and vocal

Stage: Blutbund (op, 1, R. del Valle-Inclán), 1974; Das Diplom (comic op, 1, L. Pirandello), 1975; Die Nacht aus Blei (ballet, 6 scenes, H.H. Jahnn), 1981, rev. 1988; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (lyric scenes, 2, intermezzo, F. Sanjust and Bose, after J.W. von Goethe), 1983–4; Chimäre (musical scene, F. García Lorca), 1986; Werther-Szenen (ballet, 2 pts), 1988; 63: Dream Palace (op, Bose, after J. Purdy), 1989; Medea-Fragment (op), perf. 1994; Schlachthof V (op, Bose, after K. Vonnegut), Munich Opera Festival, 1996

Choral: Todesfuge (P. Celan), Bar, chorus, org, 1972; Sym. Fragment (F. Hölderlin), T, Bar, B, chorus, orch, 1979–80; … im Wind gesprochen (various), S, 2 spkrs, chorus, org, chbr ens, 1984–5; 4 Madrigals, 5-pt chorus, 1985; Karfreitags-Sonett (A. Gryphius), 1986

Solo vocal: 5 Kinderreime, A solo, 5 rec, tpt, cl + E cl + b cl, va, db, 1976; 3 Songs (M. Drayton, P. Sidney, anon.), T, chbr ens, 1977; Guarda el canto (M.A. Bustos), S, str, qt, 1981–2; Sappho-Gesänge (J. Schickel), Mez, chbr orch, 1983; Sonet XLII (W. Shakespeare), Bar, str qt, 1985; 5 Gesänge (García Lorca), Bar, fl, ob, cl + b cl, bn, hn, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1986; Omega (García Lorca) (1v/vv), pf/gui, 1986; 4 Lieder (G. Britting, H.M. Enzenberger), S, fl + pic, ob, cl + b cl, bn, hn, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1988; Achalm, S, 7 insts, 1989; Ein Brudermord (F. Kafka), Bar, accdn, vc, 1990; Love after Love (D. Walcott), S, orch, 1990–91; 7 textos de M.A. Bustos, S, accdn, vc, 1991

instrumental

Orch: Morphogenesis, 1975; Sym. no.1, 1976; Musik für ein Haus voll Zeit, 1978; Travesties in a Sad Landscape, 1978; Variations, str, 1980–90; Idyllen, 1982–3; Symbolum, org, orch, 1985; Salut für Billy Pilgrim, pf conc., 1986; Labyrinth I, 1987; “ … other echoes inhabit the garden”, ob, orch, 1987; Prozess, 1987–8; Suite, 1988; 2 Studies, 1989; Concertino per H.W.H., chbr orch, 1991; In hora mortis (T. Bernhard), spkr, str, 1991

Chbr and solo inst: Threnos-Hommage a Bernd Alois Zimmermann, va, vc, 1975; Vn Sonata, vn solo, 1975; Str Qt no.1, 1973; Str Trio, 1978; Solo, vc, 1978–9; Str Qt no.2, 1976–7; … vom Wege abkommen, va, 1981–2; 3 Little Piano Pieces, 1982; Parerga, chbr ens, 1984; 3 Studies, vn, pf, 1986; Str Qt no.3, 1986–7; 3 Epitaphs, wind sextet, 1987; Labyrinth II, pf, 1987; Die Menagerie von Sanssouci, fl, a sax, vc, perc, 1987–8; Befragung, cl, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1988; Nonett, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, vn, va, vc, db, 1988; Edge, vn, 1989; Origami, pf 4 hands, 1991; Str Qt no.4, 1998

Principal publishers: Schott, Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Burde: ‘Junge Komponisten in der Bundesrepublik’, Universitas, xxxix (1984), 559–67

S. Schibli: ‘… die sinnliche Qualität von Musik hinüberretten: der Komponist Hans-Jürgen von Bose und seine neuesten Werke’, NZM, Jg.149, nos.7–8 (1988), 30–39

H. Danuser: ‘Postmodernes Musikdenken: Lösung oder Flucht?’, Neue Musik im politischen Wandel: Darmstadt 1991 (Mainz, 1991), 56–66

S. Mauser: ‘Mozart und die Tendenzen der neuesten Kompositionsgeschichte’, Mozart in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts: formen ästhetischer und kompositionstechnischer Rezeption, ed. W. Grätzer and S. Mauser (Laaber, 1992), 261–74

SIEGFRIED MAUSER

Boselli [Bosello], Constantino.

See Baselli, Constantino.

Bösendorfer.

Austrian firm of piano makers. Ignaz Bösendorfer (b Vienna, 28 July 1796; d Vienna, 14 April 1859) founded the firm in 1828 after an apprenticeship with Joseph Brodmann. He recognized the need for an instrument that could respond to the demands for volume and pitch stability made by the virtuosos of the 1830s. In a legendary incident only a Bösendorfer piano survived an evening of Liszt's playing. In 1830 Bösendorfer received the first ‘kaiserlich und königlich’ designation granted to a piano maker. The firm reached its technological zenith and greatest fame under Ignaz's son Ludwig (b Vienna, 15 April 1835; d Vienna, 9 May 1919), who trained with his father. Ludwig's patents from the early 1860s concentrated on improvements to the Viennese action. He was staunchly conservative on issues of piano design, resisting the innovations made by Steinway and Chickering between the 1860s and the 1890s in both the use of metal and the technique of framing. Ludwig moved and expanded the factory but retained an artisan system of production. The output between the 1860s and 1909 (when Ludwig sold the company) never exceeded 423 instruments per year, mostly grands. More than a third were sold in Vienna and most of the remainder within the Habsburg empire. By 1909 only 7% were purchased abroad. Bösendorfer despised the piano's rise in popularity and modern factory methods of manufacture. He railed against marketing schemes and insisted on maintaining an early 19th-century Viennese sound, spurning the fashion set by Steinway. In the early 1900s Bösendorfer still offered a choice between Viennese and Erard action. In the 1870s he declared the Steinway duplex scale a fraud and attacked the aliquot system pioneered by Blüthner, advances which had enhanced the sonority of the grand piano through the addition of sympathetic string lengths. Yet in the late 1890s he publicized a design for an ‘Imperial’ piano (see Pianoforte, fig.34). This 2·9-metre concert grand, still manufactured more than a century later, adds eight notes on the bass (C'''–G''') placed under a black removable flap. Bösendorfer believed he had thus outsmarted his competitors by creating not mere passive resonance but new sounds, which were used by such composers as Busoni.

Ludwig Bösendorfer opened the 500-seat Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna in 1872; most major Viennese chamber music premières from Brahms to Schoenberg took place there until its closure in 1913. Bösendorfer was a lifelong patron and director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and supplied the conservatory with pianos. He became a legendary personality in Vienna, a symbol of the anti-modern ‘Alt-Wiener’. Having sold the firm to the Hutterstrasser family in 1909, he died in obscurity and relative poverty. In 1936 the Bösendorfer became the piano of the BBC studios. The Hutterstrassers sold the firm in 1966 to the Kimball piano company. By the late 20th century the Bösendorfer firm was producing between 200 and 300 pianos a year. They occupy a market niche as a prestigious alternative to Steinway and Yamaha instruments. The firm makes six grands (lengths 1·7, 2·0, 2·25, 2·75 and 2·9 metres). Rebuilt Bösendorfers appear as period instruments used for 19th-century repertory, and the Imperial grand is still used in concert. The Bösendorfer piano has a sweet and mellow sound, though it fails to project brilliance. It has a loyal but limited following among pianists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Bösendorfer: ‘Das Wiener Clavie’, Die Grossindustrie Österreichs (Vienna, 1898)

L. Bösendorfer: Mittheilungen über Neuerungen im Klavierbaue i, ii (Vienna, n.d.) [incl. ‘Anwendung des Eisens beim Klavierbau’, ii, pp.2–4]

C. Hutterstrasser: Hundert Jahre Bösendorfer (Vienna, 1928)

C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976/R)

D.S. Grover: The Piano: its Story, from Zither to Grand (London, 1976)

Die Geschichte eines Flügels (Vienna, c1978) [Bösendorfer pubn]

A. Liversidge: ‘Of Wood and Iron Wrought: the Making of Bösendorfer’, The Lives of the Piano, ed. J.R. Gaines (New York, 1981), 75–99

L. Botstein: Music and its Public: Habits of Listening and Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914, iii (diss., Harvard U., 1985)

LEON BOTSTEIN

Bosio, Angiolina

(b Turin, 22 Aug 1830; d St Petersburg, 1/13 April 1859). Italian soprano. She studied in Milan, making her début there in 1846 as Lucrezia in I due Foscari. Two years later she appeared for the first time in Paris, again as Lucrezia, and then went on an extended tour of North America. She made her London début in 1852 at Covent Garden as Adina (L’elisir d’amore). The following year she sang Gilda in the first London performance of Rigoletto. Other Verdi operas in which she appeared were Ernani, Luisa Miller, Il trovatore and La traviata. Engaged for the winter season of 1855–6 in St Petersburg at a salary of 100,000 francs, she died suddenly in Russia at the age of 28.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Boskop, Cornelius Symonszoon.

See Buscop, Cornelis Symonszoon.

Boskovitch, [Boskovics, Boskowitch, Boskovich], Alexander [Sándor] Uria

(b Kolozsvár [now Cluj-Napoca], 16 Aug 1907; d Tel-Aviv, 5 Nov 1964). Israeli composer and music critic of Hungarian origin. He grew up in a highly religious family – some of his forebears were Hassidic rabbis – which originated from the Moravian town Boskovice. Educated at the Jewish lyceum Tarbut in Cluj during the period in which it briefly flourished before forced Romanization and repression of the Jews in Transylvania, he studied the piano with Hevesi Piroska and then in Vienna with Victor Ebenstein. In 1927 he took advanced studies in Paris with Lazar Levi (piano), Dukas (composition) and Boulanger, which shaped his predilection for French music, in particular Debussy and Milhaud. Back in Cluj, he became, in 1930, one of the conductors of the State Opera and founded a fine Jewish amateur orchestra named after Karl Goldmark. In 1937 he contributed to a volume on Jewish topics with a study of contemporary Jewish music, the revival of which he related to the Russian influence on music after Wagner. He followed Sabaneyev’s example in regarding the collection and publication of Jewish folksong as a prerequisite for the emergence of such a music, stressing the linear, non-harmonic nature of Jewish musical expression. Concurrent with the essay, he composed Chansons populaires juifs (1936), a suite on Jewish folksongs which he had heard during a fieldwork expedition to villages in the Carpathian mountains.

The rise of fascism brought an end to his work at the opera. In 1938 the newly founded Palestine Orchestra invited Boskovitch to attend the première of his folksong suite under Dobroven, following which he settled in Tel-Aviv. His parents stayed in Cluj and perished in the holocaust, an event which was to have a lasting effect on his personality. After a few years of hardship, Boskovitch was one of the founders of the Tel-Aviv Academy of Music (1944), where he taught theory and composition. From 1944 to 1951 he also composed incidental music for the theatre, and in 1956 he became music critic of the influential daily Ha’aretz.

There is a direct link between Boskovitch’s ideological thought, as expressed in his essays and reviews, and the stylistic traits of his works. He considered any good music as context dependent, i.e. representing the specific time and place of its composition; thus, for example, the melos of eastern European Jewish folksong that he had used in 1936 did not suit the style he wished to see emerge in the newly formed Israel. He expected a number of attitudes from the Israeli composer: to undertake the role of collective leader and spokesman, to avoid any personalized Romantic expression, to derive inspiration from the static desert landscapes and powerful sunlight and even more from the ‘dynamic landscape’ of biblical and modern spoken Hebrew, as well as from Arabic, both language and music. In the early 1940s he composed four songs for the Yemenite singer Bracha Zephira and made arrangements of Arabic instrumental music originally played by three Iraqi Jews for the dancer Yardenah Cohen; he also transcribed the full gamut of Arabic maqāmāt. Yet he maintained the use of Western instruments; and his coupling of Western art music and local elements typifies ‘Mediterranean music’, a term he coined. The second movement of his Oboe Concerto, for instance, is based on the improvisatory nature of a taqsīm, with the oboe imitating the zurna, gradually expanding the maqām range over a recurring orchestral rhythmic ostinato with no harmonic evolution (ex.1). At the same time, a Western conception of closed form is retained, articulated through melodic and registral recapitulation. The Semitic Suite displays the most consistent application of Boskovitch’s ideology: discarding the harmonic parameter (with the exception of the last movement), the suite is based on dance rhythms, mostly asymmetric, that move monodically or in heterophonic textures.

After 1946 Boskovitch fell into a long period of silent reappraisal – partly due to family reasons and teaching pressure, partly due to studies of Jewish and Indian mysticism – broken only by the composition of some incidental music, the source of a few moving folklike songs such as Dudu. When he resumed composition fully with Shir hama’alot (‘Song of Degrees’) in 1959, it was in a style still related to the Semitic Suite. But soon after he abruptly adopted serialism, which he still considered ideally suited to his non-Romantic, non-harmonic thought. In the Concerto da camera, for example, oriental, ornamental motivic fragments are serially unified and organized into a structure modelled on the Baroque toccata, while his last major work, Ada’im (‘Ornaments’), continued to develop this approach in large-scale orchestral form. Outspoken, articulate and highly committed, Boskovitch’s ostensible inconsistencies and shifts of direction are representative of an intensive period of change in Israeli society. He fulfilled a major role in the first generation of Israeli art music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Cantique d’été, 1936; Chansons populaires juifs (Sharsheret ha’zahav) [The Golden Chain], pf, orch, 1936; Ob Conc., 1942, rev. 1960; Vn Conc., 1942; Suita Shemit (Semitic Suite), pf, orch, 1945, rev. 1959; Suita ze’ira (Piccola Suite), fl, snare drum, str, 1956; Shir hama’alot [Song of Degrees], 1959; Ada’im [Ornaments], fl, orch, 1964

Vocal: 2 hatulim (Alharizi), 1v, pf, 1942; Adonai ro’i [The Lord is my Shepherd], A, orch, 1943; Dudu (H. Hefer), 1v, orch/pf, 1948; Bat Yisrael [Daughter of Israel] (H.N. Bailik), T, SATB, orch, 1961

Chbr: Psalms, vn, pf, 1942, rev. 1957; Conc. da camera, vn, fl, a fl, cel, hp, hpd, va, vc, perc, 1961; Kina [Lament], vn/vc, pf, 1962

Pf: Chansons populaires juifs (Sharsheret ha’zahav) [The Golden Chain], 1936 [from orch Chansons populaires juifs]; Pieces for the Young, 1945; Semitic Suite, 1945 [from orch Semitic Suite]

Mss in IL-J

Principal publishers: Israeli Music Institute

WRITINGS

‘Kelet es Nyugat Kozott’ [The problems of Jewish music], A Zsido Diakesegelyzo Kiadas (Cluj, 1937)

‘Beayat Hamusica Hamekorit beYsrael’ [The problem of original music in Israel], Orlogin, ix (1953), 285–94

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Brod: Die Musik Israels (Tel-Aviv, 1951, rev. 2/1976 with 2nd pt ‘Werden und Entwicklungen der Musik in Israel’ by Y.W. Cohen)

A. Tischler: A Descriptive Bibliography of Art Music by Israeli Composers (Warren, MI, 1989)

J. Hirshberg: ‘Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style’, Modern Jews and their Musical Agendas, ed. E. Mendelsohn (New York, 1993), 92–109

J. Hirshberg: Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: a Social History (Oxford, 1995)

J. Hirshberg and H. Shmueli: Alexander Uriyah Boskovich, Hayav, Yetzirato, Haguto [His life, works and thought] (Jerusalem, 1995) [incl. a Hebrew edn of Boskovitch’s principal essays]

JEHOASH HIRSHBERG

Boskovsky, Alfred

(b Vienna, 9 Feb 1913; d Vienna, 2 July 1990). Austrian clarinettist. He first learnt the violin, playing in string quartets at home. It was only when he entered the Vienna Music Academy, at 16, that he took up the clarinet, studying with Leopold Wlach from 1929 to 1936. In 1936 Weingartner engaged him for the Staatsoper, and in 1937 he joined the Vienna PO, becoming principal clarinet in 1941. In 1940 he was appointed to teach at the Academy. Boskovsky played throughout the world with the Vienna Octet, which was founded in 1947 by his brother Willi. His tone was remarkably clear, his interpretations strictly classical.

PAMELA WESTON

Boskovsky, Willi

(b Vienna, 16 June 1909; d Visp, 21 April 1991). Austrian conductor and violinist. He studied at the Vienna Music Academy from the age of nine and won the Kreisler Prize there at 17. His début at a concert given by the Vienna Railway Company marked the beginning of a solo career that continued alongside his orchestral and chamber music activities. He joined the Vienna PO in 1932 and was made one of the orchestra's four leaders by Knappertsbusch in 1939. He remained at the front desk of the Vienna PO and the Vienna Staatsoper orchestra until 1971. He was also head of the violin school at the Vienna Academy (from 1935) and founder of the Vienna Octet (in which his brother, Alfred, played the clarinet) and the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet. He conducted the Vienna New Year's Day Concert from 1954 to 1979, as well as the Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra, which he re-formed in 1969. He was unsurpassed in his intuitive feeling for the music of Johann Strauss and his contemporaries, and was also much admired in Mozart, whose complete dances and marches he recorded with the Vienna Mozart Ensemble. He made distinctive recordings of several operettas, including Die Fledermaus, Zeller's Der Vogelhändler and Lehár's Paganini, as well as numerous discs of waltzes and polkas by Strauss and other composers. He was awarded the Mozart medal from both Salzburg and Vienna, and the Austrian Ehrenkreuz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Werba: ‘Die Wiener Philharmonische Familie’, ÖMz, xix (1964), 36 only

C. Hellsberg: ‘Der Sonderbotschafter der Wiener Philharmoniker: zum Tod unseres Ehrenmitglieds Willi Boskovsky’, Musikblätter der Wiener Philharmoniker, xlv (1990–91), 270–71

LESLIE EAST

Bosmans, Henriëtte (Hilda)

(b Amsterdam, 6 Dec 1895; d Amsterdam, 2 July 1952). Dutch pianist and composer. Her father, Henri Bosmans, had been principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, while her mother, Sara Benedicts, taught piano for 40 years at the Amsterdam Conservatory. Henriëtte studied the piano with her mother, gaining a piano teaching certificate cum laude from the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst in Utrecht at the age of 17. By the 1920s her career as a pianist was firmly established. She appeared with leading European conductors such as Monteux, Mengelberg and Ansermet, with a repertory including Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Grieg, Franck and Debussy. Between 1929 and 1949 she performed 22 times as soloist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. She was also active in a number of chamber music ensembles.

She began composing in her teens, studying harmony and counterpoint with Jan Willem Kersbergen and, later, instrumentation with Cornelis Dopper (1921–2). Many of her works were inspired by musicians with whom she performed. Her friendships with the cellists Marix Loevensohn and Frieda Belinfante resulted in several works for cello, including two concertos and Poème for cello and orchestra. Until 1927 her music was characterized by broad, lyrical lines, with clearly discernible Romantic influences. In the years she studied with Pijper (1927–30), her style quickly became less Romantic and the instrumentation more transparent and colouristic, suggestive of the techniques and atmosphere of Debussy and Ravel. The Concertino for piano and orchestra, which was selected for the ISCM festival in Geneva in 1929, is harmonically related to Debussy. In 1934 Bosmans became engaged to the violinist Francis Koene, who died the following year. The Concertstuk for violin and orchestra, intended for Koene, was given its first performance by Louis Zimmerman in 1935 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Mengelberg. It received many performances at home and abroad, including the USA. Koene's death, together with the impending war, were probably the main reasons that Bosmans stopped composing until after the war. During the war Bosmans refused to become a member of the Kultuurkamer, which was required of all Dutch musicians. At the end of August 1942, performance of her music was banned. She earned an income playing in private concerts. After the war Bosmans concentrated almost solely on vocal compositions. She wrote the passionate Doodenmars (‘March of the Dead’) to a text by Clara Eggink, and a more hopeful orchestral song, Lead, kindly light (1945), to a poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman, first performed on 3 November 1945 by the soprano Jo Vincent and the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult. In the last years of her life Bosmans formed a duo with the French singer Noëmie Perugia, who inspired her to write a large number of songs, mostly on French texts. Her songs vary strikingly in character and have a high degree of expressive tension. Many are narrative and ballad-like, the music artfully underlining the text. She was equally skilled in setting both French and German poetry, such as Heine's Das macht den Menschen glücklich. After the war she also regularly contributed articles on music to various Dutch newspapers and periodicals. She received a posthumous knighthood.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch, vocal-orch: Vc Conc. no.2, 1923; Poème, vc, orch, 1926; Pf Concertino, 1928; Concertstuk, fl, chbr orch, 1929; Concertstuk, vn, orch, 1934; Belsazer, A, orch, 1936; Doodenmarsch, nar, orch, 1946; Lead, Kindly Light (H.C. Newman), 1v, orch, 1946

Chbr and solo inst: 6 préludes, pf, 1917–18; Sonata, vc, pf, 1919; Pf Trio 1921; Str Qt, 1927

Songs: 3 liederen op Duitse tekst: Liebestrunken (Li Bai), Der Kaiser (Thu-Fu), Schmied schmerz (O.J. Bierbaum), 1927; Im Mondenglanz ruht das Meer (H. Heine), 1933; Receuil, 10 songs, 1933–51; Die heil'gen drei Könige aus Morgenland (Heine), 1935; The Artist's Secret (O. Schreiner), 1948; Les deux enfants du roi (E. Verhaeren), 1949; Aurore (A. Verdet), 1950; La chanson du chiffonnier (J. Jouy), 1950; Chanson des escargots qui vont à l'enterrement (J. Prévert), 1950; On frappe (Prévert), 1950; Verzen uit Maria Lécina (J.W.F. Werumeus Buning), 1950; Das macht den Menschen glücklich (Heine), 1951; On ne sait rien (H. Vacaresco), 1951

MSS in NL-DHgm

Principal publishers: Broekmans & Van Poppel, Donemus

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Paap: ‘Nederlandsche componisten van onzen tijd: IX. Henriëtte Bosmans’, Mens en melodie, ii (1947), 72–6

N. van der Elst: ‘Henriëtte Bosmans als liedercomponiste’, Mens en melodie, vii (1952), 173–5

E. Looyestijn: ‘Henriëtte Bosmans’, Zes vrouwelijke componisten, ed. H. Metzelaar (Zutphen, 1991), 119–63

H. Metzelaar: ‘Postwar Eggs from Holland: Benjamin Britten and Henriëtte Bosmans’, Musiek & wetenschap, vi (1997–8), 233–7

HELEN METZELAAR

Bosnia-Hercegovina

(Serb.-Croat Republika Bosna i Hercegovina).

Country in eastern Europe. Located in the Balkan peninsula, it has an area of 51,129 km² and a population of 4.34 million (2000 estimate). It emerged as an independent state in the late 12th century, becoming a kingdom in 1377. It was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in the second half of the 15th century and remained under the Ottoman rule until 1878 when, following the decision of the Berlin Congress, it was occupied by Austria-Hungary and then officially annexed in 1908. At the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, it became a part of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1945, on the formation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it became one of its constituent republics. Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, it was proclaimed an independent state in 1992.

3. Urban vocal folk music.

BOJAN BUJIĆ (I), ANKICA PETROVIĆ (II)

Bosnia-Hercegovina

I. Art music

Little is known about the cultivation of music in medieval Bosnia. Its territory was exposed to the influences of both Western and Eastern Christianity, Catholicism being, on the whole, better represented. Catholicism was more efficient, particularly after the 1340s under the influence of the Franciscans, while Orthodox monasticism lacked the organizational force of its Catholic counterpart. In addition, a Bosnian form of dissenting Catholicism, the Bosnian Church, attracted a sizeable following, including some members of the ruling class. Nothing is known about the specific musical aspects of worship in the Bosnian Church. There are only a few surviving fragments of chant in late Byzantine notation that refer to dignitaries of the Orthodox church in Bosnia. Though small in number, fragments of Western chant are more numerous and have survived through the efforts of the Franciscans who, throughout the period of Ottoman domination, were the custodians of the Bosnian medieval heritage.

Although no sources of secular music survive, the activity of various musicians, especially instrumentalists in the service of the king and various aristocratic families, is well documented in Dubrovnik archival sources of the first half of the 15th century. The sources mention ‘piffari’, ‘lautarii’ and ‘tubicines’ who often came to play at important festivities in Dubrovnik and were paid for their services. Likewise, Dubrovnik musicians are mentioned taking part at Bosnian state occasions. A late 15th-century inventory of the household belongings of a refugee Bosnian aristocratic family, Hranić, includes an ‘organić’ (a portable organ). It is not known whether the composer of lute ricercars and Petrucci's editor Franciscus Bossinensis (Francis of Bosnia) came to Italy as an already educated musician, but it is safe to assume that he belonged to the wave of Bosnian refugees who settled in Dalmatia and Italy during the late 15th century.

During the period of Ottoman rule, from the late 15th century to 1878 (for details of which see Ottoman music and Arab music), musical activity of both the Catholic and Orthodox communities was severely restricted. Nevertheless, since the Franciscans tended to receive at least some of their education, including musical education, in Italy, there is some evidence of the continuity of musical activity among them. In 1687 Matheus Bartl (Mato Banjalučanin) wrote his Regulae cantus plani pro incipientibus, and during the 18th century several Franciscans wrote mass settings (Marijan Aljinić, Augustin Soljanin, Vice Vicić). Stjepan Marjanović continued this tradition in the 19th century with his Missae novissimae sanctorum (1846). The first modern organ in Bosnia was installed by the Franciscans in Fojnica in 1801.

Although mainstream Islam discouraged music as a part of the religious ceremony, a particular contribution to music among the Bosnian Muslims was made by the Sufi dervishes. The Qadiri, Naqshabandi, Mevlevi and other orders were active in Bosnia and their religious songs, referred to by the slavicized Turkish term of Arabic provenance ilahija, represent a tradition, still insufficiently researched, that stands halfway between the provinces of folk and art music. Some poetry for the ilahije was written in Turkish, but a great deal of it also in Serbo-Croat, especially since the late 18th century by, among others, Abdurrahman Sirri, Muhamed Mejli and Omer Humo.

The Austro-Hungarian administration after 1878 ushered in a period of lively cultural and musical activity and opened links with the other parts of the Dual Monarchy. At first the backbone of organized musical life was provided by numerous military bands, which, apart from their traditional duties, acted as centres of musical activity in civilian circles, often transforming themselves according to need into full symphony orchestras. Some of the military bandmasters left a broader impact as conductors and educators in the areas in which they served. Among those were Franz Lehár, father of the composer of operettas, the popular composer of marches and waltzes Julius Fučik, active in Sarajevo between 1897 and 1900, and, especially, Alexander Zellner and Josip Chládek. Frequently they were Slavs from other parts of the monarchy who, in addition to discharging their regular duties, felt the need to contribute to Bosnian culture inspired by a sense of Slavonic solidarity. Visiting artists started appearing in the 1880s; the young Fritz Kreisler gave his first recital in Sarajevo in 1893.

The first opera performance dates from 1882, when the company of the Deutsches Sommer-Theater in Sarajevo performed Flotow's Alessandro Stradella. This was followed in the 1880s and 90s by the seasons provided by the troupes directed by Julius Schulz, Emil Berle and Leon Bauer. After that opera performances were given mainly by visiting companies from Zagreb and Osijek. The Sarajevo Männergesangverein was founded in 1886 and continued its activity until 1929. Local communities, divided on religious grounds, founded their own choral societies. Among the earliest were the Serbian societies ‘Njeguš’ in Tuzla (1886), ‘Sloga’ in Sarajevo and ‘Gusle’ in Mostar (both founded in 1888), the Croatian societies ‘Trebević’ in Sarajevo (1894), ‘Majevica’ in Tuzla (1896) and ‘Nada’ in Banja Luka (1898), the Muslim ones, ‘Jedinstvo’ in Derventa and ‘Gajret’ in Sarajevo (both 1903), and the Jewish society ‘La Lira’ in Sarajevo (1900). The first music school was opened by Franjo Matějovský in 1908.

The impetus created during the Austro-Hungarian period continued after the formation of the kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918, although the period between the two World Wars was comparatively less vibrant. A belated copy of the Central European music societies, the Sarajevo Philharmonic Society, founded in 1923, was the main organizer and inspirer of concert activity, supporting chamber ensembles and maintaining a semi-professional symphony orchestra. The society, along with the Sarajevo Music School and the Sarajevo National Theatre (founded in 1921), were the only bodies that disregarded the division along the national grounds which continued to be made by the choral societies. These societies achieved a considerable degree of artistic maturity, but on the whole the Croatian and Serbian ones tended to cultivate music by the composers of their national groups active outside Bosnia, which had a detrimental effect on the development of Bosnian composers. This established a pattern that persisted until after World War II, whereby the musical life of Sarajevo, and of Bosnia-Hercegovina in general, was characterized by a high level of achievement in the areas of instrumental and vocal performance which was not adequately matched by the activity of local composers. In addition, during the Austro-Hungarian period, as well as during the kingdom of Yugoslavia, music was seldom seen as an art in its own right, having been taken mainly as a vehicle for the advancement of various national causes.

After the slow development during the inter-war period, musical life received a considerable boost when in 1945 Bosnia and Hercegovina became one of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia. The socialist state discouraged the activity along the lines of religious denominations and the stress was laid on the state support of central musical institutions. The Sarajevo Opera became a permanent company in 1946 and within a short period of time established a wide repertory under the directorship of Cvjetko Rihtman and Tihomir Mirić. Its orchestra formed the nucleus of the National SO, founded in 1948 (renamed the Sarajevo PO in 1953). Sarajevo RSO was founded in 1962. While the Philharmonic concentrated predominantly on the standard international repertory, the orchestra of the radio inclined towards a more modern repertory and the new Yugoslav music.

Several music colleges were founded – in Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Tuzla – and the Sarajevo Music Academy established itself from its foundation in 1955 as the main centre of artistic and academic excellence. A number of composers and conductors who had already established their reputations elsewhere in Yugoslavia, primarily in Zagreb, settled in Sarajevo and greatly contributed to the lively and diverse musical activity. Boris Papandopulo, Mladen Pozajić and Ivan Štajcer raised Sarajevo Opera to a standard comparable to the older Yugoslav companies. Though not neglecting the standard repertory, during the 1950s and 60s the opera and its affiliated ballet ensemble became particularly known for its attention to contemporary repertory, performing works by Britten, Egk, Menotti, Shostakovich and Henze, as well as giving first performances of operas and ballets by contemporary Yugoslav composers.

Croatian composers Boris Papandopulo, Ivan Brkanović, Mladen Stahuljak, Ruben Radica, and Schoenberg's Berlin pupil Miroslav Spiler, the Serb Božidar Trudić and the Slovene Dane Škerl were all active in Sarajevo at various times between 1940s and the 1970s. The concentration of talent and of performing forces in Sarajevo tended to diminish the activity in other centres, although Banja Luka and, especially, Mostar succeeded in maintaining permanent ensembles.

For a while after World War II the presence in the region of composers from outside Bosnia tended to overshadow the activity of local composers, among whom several nevertheless demonstrated individual voices. Vlado Milošević (1901–91) was inspired by folk music to which he added a dose of neo-classicism. Avdo Smailović (1917–84) started with a nationalist inspiration and gradually assimilated more modern tendencies; a similar shift from neo-classicism to modernism is evident in the work of Nada Ludvig-Pečar (b 1929). Vojin Komadina (1933–97) combined a variety of influences ranging from a modified 12-note system to aleatory techniques and created an individual style in which discreet suggestions of Bosnian folk music were transformed into musical utterances firmly based in an avant-garde idiom. From the mid-1960s Sarajevo gained within Yugoslavia the reputation of a centre of pop and rock music, and several Sarajevo-based bands developed individual experimental styles.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the destruction caused by the war of 1992–5 dealt a severe blow to the musical life and institutions in the whole of Bosnia, and especially in Sarajevo and Mostar. In addition, unique documents for the study of the country's musical past were lost with the burning of the National Library in Sarajevo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Z. Kučukalić: The Development of Musical Culture in Bosnia-Hercegovina (Sarajevo, 1967)

Z. Kučukalić: ‘Bosansko-hercegovačka muzika’, Muzička enciklopedija, ed. K. Kovačević (Zagreb, 2/1971), 230–33

H.C. Ryker: ‘New Music in Yugoslavia’, Numus-West, i/3 (1973), 37–45

B. Bujić: ‘Pedeset godina Sarajevske filharmonije’ [50 years of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Society], Zvuk (1973), no.3, 288–96

Z. Kučukalić: ‘Počeci razvoja profesionalne muzičke djelatnosti u Bosni i Hercegovini’ [The beginnings of the development of professional musical activities in Bosnia-Hercegovina], MZ, xvii (1981), 61–8

Z. Miletić: ‘Iz biblioteke franjevačkog samostana u Kraljevoj Sutjesci’ [From the library of the Franciscan monastery in Kraljeva Sutjeska], Sveta Cecilija, liii (1983), 8–9

S. Strik: ‘Ilahije’, Šebi Arus, xviii (1987), 149–52

T. Polomik: ‘Quellen zur Erforschung der Tätigkeiten und Rollen von Militärorchestern in Bosnien und Herzegowina zur Zeit der österreichisch-ungarischen Verwaltung (1878–1918)’, SMH, xxxii (1990), 383–408

T. Polomik [Polomiková]: ‘Českí hudebníci v Bosně a Hercegovině’ [Czech musicians in Bosnia-Hercegovina], OM, xxiii (1991), 68–71

B. Habla: ‘Das Repertoire von Militär-Blasorchestern von dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Gezeigt am Notenbestand der “bosnisch-herzegowinischen” Infanterie-Regiments Nr.4’, Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Suppan, ed. B. Habla (Tutzing, 1993), 349–76

N. Bekić: ‘Zapisi o muzici u mostarskoj “Zori” (1896–1901)’ [Essays on music in the Mostar periodical Zora], Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku, nos.16–17 (1995), 203–12

Bosnia-Hercegovina

II. Traditional music

1. Introduction.

2. Rural folk music.

4. Musical instruments.

5. Muslim religious chant.

6. Sephardic Jewish music.

7. Newly composed folksongs.

1. Introduction.

This subsection examines the traditional music of Bosnia and Hercegovina before the beginning of the 1992–5 war. It does not consider the drastic effect of the extermination of traditional music forms or the musical trends provoked by the recent war, ‘ethnic cleansing’, forced migrations of Bosnian ethnic groups and the destruction of countless cultural artefacts. While attempting to highlight the relevant socio-cultural processes that have influenced the development of particular forms, genres and repertories of folk and popular music, it is not yet possible to analyse the turbulent changes in musical expression and the redefinition of musical forms by the national groupings still in conflict.

Cultural sources from the medieval period are scanty, offering insufficient information to promote serious discussion or to draw conclusions about the music of the time. During the long rule of the Ottoman Turks in Bosnia and Hercegovina (from 1463 to 1878), the musical traditions of the region included religious chant of the three major ethnic-religious groups: the Roman Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims.

During the Austro-Hungarian annexation (from 1878 to 1914), Bosnia and Hercegovina began to follow Western mainstream cultural trends. The Bosnian people have, however, retained a definite propensity for their traditional musical styles.

The music of Bosnia and Hercegovina is best understood in the light of a multicultural heritage, with divergent older and more recent folk music styles. Although some Bosnian traditions are very specific in origin and style compared to others (such as Sephardic Jewish practice), all of them can be recognized as parts of a complex cultural entity. Cultural confluences and tolerance, which existed until recently, were the result of long-lasting multi-religious and multi-ethnic life. The recent nationalistic efforts to separate strictly ethnic cultures and musics have no historical foundation.

A major divergence can be observed between the forms, repertories and stylistic features of rural and urban musical practices of the area. Further distinctions of style and repertory may be drawn between different ethnic groups and the sexes, specific regions (most relevant for rural music forms) and older and newer forms and genres. There are also many differences between the secular and religious musical traditions of existing religious-ethnic groups.

2. Rural folk music.

Because of the geographical and socio-economic isolation of the area, the rural music of Bosnia and Hercegovina is generally regarded as the oldest and most conservative in the entire region. It retains very rudimentary stylistic features and is mostly associated with archaic ritual functions. Some of the most typical archaic musical elements reveal similarities with the traditional music of other parts of the Balkans: Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and northern Greece.

Village people of all ethnic groups performed music in a similar style. Only some ritual forms associated with particular ceremonies, for example the Muslim wedding, were stylistically distinct from the ceremonial songs of other ethnic-religious groups. An example to the contrary involves songs and rituals of pagan-Christian origin for St George’s Day, which survived until recently in both Christian and Muslim tradition. Until 1992, differences in traditional rural music styles were based on regional rather than ethnic-religious lines. These usually corresponded with the dialect regions of the Serbo-Croat language and with other specific factors of traditional social, economic and cultural life, including folk costumes, folk architecture etc.

Vocal forms dominate the rural musical tradition. They are the sole form of musical expression for rural women of all ages. In the past, many musical forms were related to particular annual and life-cycle rituals, especially those of the pastoral population, which dominated the central part of the Dinaric Alps. Ritual music forms were experienced as more codified and less exposed to change, which explains why they were considered the most conservative and ‘ancient’ music forms in the region. In the 20th century, especially after World War II, most of the ‘ancient songs’ disappeared as the corresponding rituals and contexts vanished. Some of them continued to be performed outside their original function, surviving in the memories and reminiscences of the older performers.

The most numerous ritual music forms were svatovske pjesme or wedding songs. They were sung by either women or men but always separately. Female wedding songs were very distinctive in character, function and musical-poetic features, and they covered the most ritualistic actions of the ceremony. An omission of some part of the ritual would require the elimination of the corresponding wedding songs.

The various forms of the female wedding repertory were performed by groups of girls or women. In Hercegovina, they were named kolarice after the kolo circle dance performed while singing. Male wedding songs were usually sung as zdravice (‘toasting’ songs) and putničke pjesme (‘travelling’ songs; ex.1). In Bosnia and western Hercegovina these songs were performed by a group, while in eastern Hercegovina they were sung alternately by two individuals using an extended and trembling singing style. This typical male style was named potresanje (‘trembling’), ojkanje (singing with an emphasis on the exclamation ‘oj’) or turčijanje (singing in an extended Turkish-like style). A similar vocal style was applied to travellers’ songs and kiridžijske pjesme, the songs of travelling merchants (fig.1). These forms disappeared in the 1930s along with the activities they accompanied.

Other ritual songs were part of Christian and pre-Christian ceremonies, including lazaričke pjesme (St Lazarus songs), čarojičarske and vučarske (songs of the masked rituals). Lazaričke pjesme were performed by groups of women on St Lazarus Saturday, eight days before Orthodox Easter. In the 1980s, these songs were only performed by Karavlah women (a marginal group of Romanian-Roma origin) for Serbian people in several villages in north-eastern Bosnia. The other two ritual forms were performed exclusively by groups of men in the winter season and during weddings, and they disappeared shortly after World War II.

Many other traditional rural songs accompanied or followed certain communal activities, including vlačiljske, žetela’ke and kosa’ke pjesme (flax combers’, women reapers’ and haymakers’ songs respectively). The textual content of these songs was directly connected to the corresponding action, but only vla’iljske were performed during work, while the other two song types were performed before and after it.

Uspavanke (lullabies) and tužbalice (laments) were very common forms of female music expression. Muslim women, however, did not perform laments because of their religious and philosophical attitude to death. These song types were intimately connected to ritual situations, yet some Muslim lullabies were elaborated into more lyric and musically expressive forms. Laments were performed by either female family members or professional mourners and they included narrative text which was improvised in performance. Accordingly, their musical structure was limited to short repetitive formulas with occasional opportunities for variation and the presentation of contrasting musical patterns that closely followed the dramatic textual content. Similar compositional principles were used in other narrative songs, that is in female ballads and male epics.

Lyrical rural songs, female and male, mainly performed within single-sex groups, were the most common and appropriate for entertainment. Various rural music forms were recognized and named according to their functions, formal structure, polyphonic vocal organization and their use of specific kinds of melismatic notes. Different stylistic factors were recognized in particular regions as the crucial stylistic determinate in naming of song types. Singing style might be further distinguished according to gender designation, territorial characteristics, association with a specific geographic or former administrative-political region, or even with a single village.

Melodies are based on descending diatonic or chromatic note rows whose range rarely exceeds a 4th or a 5th. Their narrow melodic intervals do not correspond to the tempered system. Tonal relationships are generally unstable.

Melismatic notes are used liberally and with great diversity. The most typical are grace notes, here named sjecanje or jecanje (cutting or sobbing). They are recognized as an important characteristic of the ganga (ex.2), the most common song type of Hercegovina and south-western Bosnia. Upward- and downward-moving ‘slicing’ notes at the end of melodic lines or strophes are common in the older songs, especially when performed by women. Extended melismatic groups were also used in male wedding, travelling and toasting songs. Melisma is considered an essential feature in rural music practice and the most important factor in defining song genres and specific musical forms.

Polyphonic singing in two or, more rarely, three parts, within single-sex groups of two to five singers is most common. Within the polyphonic structure the interval of the major 2nd is the most characteristic. It is used at the ends of phrases and as the most dominant vertical interval at cadences. Aesthetically, the major 2nd is experienced as a consonant interval, as opposed to the treatment of the same interval as a dissonance in the Western musical tradition.

The metre of the verses and the rhythm of the music are adaptable. Rural people recognize two major kinds of rhythm in their music: podkorak, with a fixed rhythmic unit; and uravan, in which the rhythm is flexible. The most common verses in rural folksong are based on lines of eight (5+3, 4+4) or ten (6+4, 5+5) syllables.

Formally, vocal music is divided into kratke and duge pjesme, or songs with ‘short’ and ‘long’ musical lines. Kratke are songs with a narrative character. Musical interpretation is subordinate to poetic expressiveness and verses are usually sung to a short, repetitive musical line. Occasionally, exposed and contrasting musical lines are added to make the musical structure more dynamic. The most typical forms based on kratke are epics performed by males, ballads and laments performed by females, and potrkuše, or ‘running’ songs. This latter type is typical for northern Bosnia and is performed polyphonically with two interdependent parts creating an unbroken flow of sound. Unlike kratke, the textual component of duge pjesme is subordinate to the musical expression. These ‘long’ songs may be very short in textual content, but extremely elaborate musically. They normally involve the exposition and repetition of refrains, exclamations, and one or two verses made up of repeated shorter verse units and repeated single words.

Emphatic dynamics are used for outdoor singing and for artistic communication across large distances. The middle voice register is predominant in both male and female vocal styles. Only grace notes and melismatic slicing upwards may be performed in the upper register, in a falsetto voice.

All these stylistic features are typical of starinske pjesme (‘ancient’ songs), which survived until recently. However, some newer forms including the ganga have absorbed these older stylistic components and shaped them in a new and original manner. Na bas, or bećarac, is an example of a new kind of polyphonic song that explores a wider melodic frame than the older forms. This singing style rapidly spread from Croatia into the rural environments of Bosnia and Hercegovina before and after World War II, replacing many of the older polyphonic songs and songs with ritual functions like wedding songs. As a result, the interval of a minor 3rd is slowly replacing the major 2nd, and the perfect 5th has become an obligatory final resolution for na bas songs.

3. Urban vocal folk music.

During the period of Ottoman Turkish rule, urban folksongs with an oriental character became a specific genre in the newly established urban environments. In the cities of Sarajevo, Jajce, Mostar, Travnik and Banja Luka, transplanted elements of oriental-Islamic culture strongly influenced the formation of specific attitudes towards all aspects of life and culture, and the Ottoman model became generally accepted and locally expressed among Islamicized south Slav people. Musically, this Ottoman influence meant the introduction of new stylistic elements, forms and instruments to the previous local cultural traditions. It also led to the formation of new urban attitudes about music distinct from the experiences and values of rural people, both Christians and rural Muslim converts, who maintained a cultural distance from the Muslim mainstream

Bosnian music and musical interpretations adapted to fit the more intimate atmosphere of indoor urban performances. Vocal music of a lyrical character became the preferred and predominant form. These Muslim lyric songs were called turčija, meaning a song in Turkish style, but they different significantly in style and form from the rural turčija. At the beginning of the 19th century the urban term was replaced by sevdalinka (pl. sevdalinke), from the Turkish word ‘sevdah’, meaning passion, love and amorous yearning. Sevdalinka songs have a wide melodic range and a modal character related to the Turkish makam (pl. makamlar), including hidžaz, usak and nahvan. They are performed by a solo singer in mainly free and asymetric (aksak) rhythm, allowing for considerable melismatic interpretation. Sevdalinke with very elaborate melismatic formulas at the beginning and the end of the melostrophes are called ravne pjesme, or ‘plain’ songs, and they require a very soft dynamic and timbral presentation (ex.3).

During the Ottoman era, this type of music was favoured by local Muslims. Near the end of the 19th century, the sevdalinka was a shared musical heritage for most Bosnian urban populations, and it remains one of the strongest Bosnian cultural symbols and one of the most popular traditional song types. However, the general socio-cultural changes of the 20th century transformed sevdalinka performance practice in significant ways. The oriental, non-tempered modal system of the early sevdalinka was replaced by the Western tonal system, and the melodic and rhythmic structure of songs became more fixed and less conducive to elaborate melismatic interpretations. The intimate nature of early sevdalinka performance – solo or voice accompanied by saz, a long-necked lute – was augmented with the modern instrumental accompaniment of tamburica orchestras or Western instrumental ensembles.

In the 1950s the sevdalinka found wide popularity through radio and television programmes and concert performances. The most successful modern interpreters of the sevdalinka were Zaim Imamović, Nada Mamula, Himzo Polovina, Safet Isović, Zehra Deović and Emina Zečaj.

4. Musical instruments.

The traditional instruments and instrumental music of Bosnia and Hercegovina may also be divided along rural and urban social lines. The drastic differentiation between the sexes in all traditional society created a taboo against women playing or even handling musical instruments, although listening to instrumental music by women was accepted.

Rural instrumental music was performed as accompaniments to dance and song or as improvisational forms. Interestingly, until the 1940s there existed in rural practice a unique phenomenon called nijema kola, or ‘silent’ dances, that had no instrumental or vocal accompaniment. Only the jingling sounds of women’s jewellery and the steps of the dancers provided rhythmic accompaniment for the ‘silent’ dances for different functions.

Instrumental improvisations were named čobanska svirka, literally ‘shepherds playing’. Aerophones were the most common type of instrument used in traditional pastoral culture for improvisations, including a variety of end-blown flutes: svirala, slavić, jednojka (all single flutes) and dvojnice (double flute). Also common was a single-reed droneless bagpipe with a double chanter, called a diple. The placement of finger-holes on these instruments reflected the specifics of local tonal practice rather than definite pitch relationships. The instruments with two melody pipes, dvojnice and diple, followed the patterns of local polyphonic practice (fig.3).

These aerophones were commonly used by indigenous peoples of all ethnic-religious origins. Only the zurna, a double-reed instrument introduced by the Ottoman Turks, was played exclusively by gypsy and local Muslim professional musicians of the lowest social class. An ensemble of two zurne and drum often played during Muslim weddings and other festive occasions. In the period after World War II, these ensembles were found only in a few Muslim villages in north-east and north-west Bosnia. The zurne used in Bosnia were about 30cm long and tuned to the same pitch, but they played different parts according to the local rural polyphonic practice.

The most outstanding bowed string instrument was the gusle, with one or rarely two strings. The singing of epics accompanied by the gusle, referred to as guslarske pjesme (guslar songs), was a common tradition among all indigenous ethnic groups until the 1930s. Later, the guslar songs became identified as the exclusive cultural heritage of the Serbs. Consequently, most epic singers of Muslim origin had to abandon their tradition since their historical interpretations of the epics did not conform to the official construction of historical events dictated by the Serbs.

A variety of long-necked lutes, generically referred to as tambura, reached Bosnia from the East during the Ottoman period. Examples of these instruments, with from two to eight strings, include the tamburica (the smallest type of tambura), bugarija, karadžuzen, šargija and saz. The saz was the most elaborate of these lutes and was used exclusively in urban Muslim practice to accompany the sevdalinka. The pivačka tambura (‘singing tambura’) was used to accomany epic singing. Until the middle of the 19th century, the tambura was played primarily by Muslim people to accompany songs and dances. Near the end of the Ottoman period, Christians adopted the practice as well. In the second half of the 19th century, the tambura spread from Bosnia to Croatia and to Vojvodina, the northern province of present-day Serbia. Soon after the tambura was transplanted to these regions, it was adjusted to the Western tempered system and fashioned in many different sizes and registers. These adjustments led to the formation of tambura orchestras, or tamburaški orkestri. At the end of the 19th century, the tambura became the most popular instrument in Croatia and one of the strongest national symbols. In Bosnia, however, the tambura remained in the local tuning and continued to accompany rural songs and dances. In the 20th century, rural people of northern Bosnia added the violin to form an ensemble that included tambura and šargija.

Most membranophones were imported by Turkish military bands, or mehterhane, and were predominantly in Muslim musical practice. Small kettledrums called talambas or dulbas were often played at public occasions to announce important events. The bubanj was the traditional drum to accompany zurne. Female Muslims and Sephardic Jews used a narow frame drum with or without jingles, call def or daire by Muslims and pandero or panderico by the Sephardim, in their musical traditions. The members of the Bosnian Sufi orders Naqshabandi and Kadiri also played a kind of small kettledrum and frame drum with rings, called kudum and binbir halka respectively.

Large and small cymbals, called zile, were also imported with the Turkish military bands and were used extensively in Muslim wedding ceremonies. Several kinds of idiophone were also played by children, but they were generally treated as toys rather than as musical instruments.

The Austro-Hungarian annexation introduced many Western instruments into the region, including the accordion, the clarinet, the violin, and the guitar and bass guitar. These instruments were used by professional and semi-professional groups to perform kola folkdances, instrumental accompaniments for the sevadalinka and newer popular songs. Some effects of this Western influence on local performance practice included the adoption of Western tempered tuning and harmonic progressions, the amplification of the musical sound, the creation of new musical mannerisms, which diminished the creative role of the solo singer, and a tendency towards virtuoso playing by the leading instruments, with the accordion usually having the most prominent role.

5. Muslim religious chant.

Islamic religious chant was introduced during the process of Islamization in the early period of the Turkish occupation. It was the first musical genre of an Islamic-oriental character to serve as a basic model for the development of Bosnian Muslim music, both religious and secular.

The Bosnian mekam, the Bosnian version of Islamic religious chant, underlies the total local musical complex much like the Turkish makam or Arabic maqām. However, the Bosnian form was exclusively applied to the forms of religious chant: the cantillation of sura (chapters from the Qur’an; the interpretation of ezan (call to prayer); and the chanting of dova (prayer or blessing), kasida (ode) and ilahija (hymn). The parallel musical term for secular Muslim songs was kajda. Some concepts of the Bosnian mekam have also been applied to the religious chants of the Bosnian Sephardim.

The modal concept of mekam (or makam) was known among Bosnian urban Muslims and Sephardim until the beginning of the 20th century. Bosnians living on the periphery of the Islamic world, however, used only a small number of makams. Conservative chanters nowadays still base their chants in some degree on the Turkish makam, but they have no theoretical knowledge about the modal system. Younger Muslim clergy who received their religious education in Arab countries have adopted to some degree the Arabic maqāmāt, but it has not been widely accepted.

All religious chants are performed in Arabic, except the religious hymns of ilahije, which are sung in the Bosnian and Turkish languages. Ilahije were popular within the existing Sufi brotherhoods of Naqshabandi, Kadiri and Mevlevi. They were also sung in secular situations, primarily by women, as long narratives. Mothers would often sing ilahije instead of lullabies to their children in the cradle (ex.4). Many ilahije melodies become so popular that they were transplanted to Bosnian Sephardic liturgical chants and to sevdalinke.

The Muslim chants of Bosnia, however, were not unified in style and treatment. Chants in the villages were more influenced by the rural folk tradition. Urban people with more religious education performed more elaborate styles of chant but referred to them exclusively as čitanje, or readings. Rural Muslims, however, treated their style of chant drenched in local performance practice as a true form of musical expression.

6. Sephardic Jewish music.

From the 16th century until World War II, Sephardic Jewish music had a distinctive tradition in Bosnia, existing alongside indigenous musical styles. Bosnia was an important site for Sephardic Jewish music within the Sephardic diaspora during this time. After World War II, Jews were almost completely assimilated with other local ethnic groups, and most of their musical traditions were lost. Only a few Sephardic interpreters of Bosnian origin living abroad – hazan Eliezer Abinun (1912–92), who lived in England and Israel, and singer Flory Jagoda (b1924), who lives in the USA – maintained through their interpretations a Bosnian version of Sephardic sacral chants and secular singing. Some older Bosnian Sephardic Jews kept these music idioms alive in memory, but they did not perform them.

Bosnian Sephardic music is primarily urban. Bosnian Sephardim first settled in Sarajevo and by the 18th century they had populations in several other cities, including Travnik, Doboj and Višegrad. Religious music was performed in Hebrew exclusively by men, while secular songs were sung by women in the Judeo-Espanjol language (locally named Djideo), which is now called Ladino.

Both religious and secular Sephardic music practised until the beginning of the 20th century was strongly influenced by local Muslim music. Only the cantillation of the Bible retained a fixed musical presentation, although it absorbed some local musical nuances. The local dialect of Bosnian Sephardic religious music, expressed in psalms, hymns, bakhashots and piyyutim, incorporated many aspects of the modal patterns, elaborated melismas (ex.5), predominantly free rhythm, and nasal timbre of Muslim music in general. Songs from Sephardic secular repertory (romances, wedding songs and lyric songs) were also strongly influenced by Bosnian Muslim music.

In the 20th century, Bosnian Sephardim became exposed to socio-cultural changes in Central Europe. They found new musical models in the religious chants of rival Ashkenazi Jews, who started to settle in Bosnia after the Austro-Hungarian annexation. Younger Bosnian Sephardim also came into contact with reformed Judaism and modernized chants during their education abroad in Vienna, Graz, Budapest and Prague. At this time, Westernised Sephardic chants coexisted with traditional Bosnian style chants, which remained important among the older and more orthodox Bosnian Sephardim.

Secular Sephardic songs also came into contact with external musical influences at this time. In the 1930s, the Sephardic upper class and intelligentsia introduced into their romancero and song lyrics elements of popular Spanish and Latin-American music (e.g. a tango rhythm). The Western guitar began to accompany female songs, which previously had had only pandero (tambourine) accompaniment. Its introduction brought with it many non-traditional, Western-influenced melodic and rhythmic patterns.

7. Newly composed folksongs.

The massive urban migration of rural populations after World War II created a certain disorientation in musical expression in Bosnia, Hercegovina and Serbia. Resettled people lost their ties to rural musical culture and were confronted with unfamiliar urban and Western-influenced musical styles. Only after the 1960s did the new musical phenomenon called muzika u narodnom duhu (‘music in the folk spirit’) or later novokomponovana narodna muzika (‘newly-composed folk music’) compensate for the previous loss of rural musical forms. In style, it was a selective hybrid of rural and urban songs, reflecting a search for a new urban identity. These songs signalled a break from ‘authentic’ folk music, which is communally composed and transmitted, since the authors of these songs – poets, composers and arrangers – were individuals seeking profit and fame.

Oficially judged by policy supervisors as a corrosion of traditional music culture or as an unwanted subculture, the commercial success of this newly composed folk music genre since the 1970s has been both surprising and controversial. The major venues and media channels for this music are cafés, music festivals, recordings and, most recently, radio and TV programmes.

Since the 1980s, this musical trend has moved further towards internationalization through the linkage of contemporary Near Eastern music (predominantly Turkish) with Western pop music and Bosnian sevdalinka. In the most recent conflict in Bosnia and Hercegovina, this Bosnian-oriental idiom of ‘newly composed folk music’ was heralded as the most appropriate musical expression for the endangered Bosnian Muslims.

3. The Boston SO to World War I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Kuhač: ‘Turski živalj u pučkoj glazbi Hrvata, Srba i Bugara’ [Turkish elements in the folk music of the Croats, Serbs and Bulgarians], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Bosni i Hercegovini, x (1898), 175–217

L. Kuba: ‘Pjesme i napjevi iz Bosne i Hercegovine’ [Songs and melodies from Bosnia and Hercegovina] (Sarajevo, 1906–9, 2/1984, ed. C. Rihtman) xviii (1906), 183, 355, 499; xix (1907), 103, 244, 405, 629; xxi (1909), 303, 581; xxii (1910), 513

C. Sachs: ‘Über eine bosnische Doppelflöte’, SIMG, ix (1907–8), 313–17

M. Murko: ‘Die Volksepik der bosnischen Mohammedaner’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, xix (1909), 13–30

M. Murko: Bericht über eine Bereisung von Nordwestbosnien und der angrenzenden Gebiete von Kroatien und Dalmatien behufs Erforschung der Volksepik der bosnischen Mohammedaner (Vienna, 1913)

M. Murko: Bericht über phonographische Aufnahmen epischer, meist mohammedanischer Volkslieder im nordwestlichen Bosnien im Sommer 1912 (Vienna, 1913)

M. Murko: Bericht über eine Reise zum Studium der Volksepik in Bosnien und Herzegowina im Jahre 1913 (Vienna, 1915)

M. Murko: Bericht über phonographische Aufnahmen epischer Volkslieder im mittleren Bosnien und in der Herzegowina im Sommer 1913 (Vienna, 1915)

G. Gesemann, ed.: Erlangenski rukopis starih srpskohrvatskih narodnih pesama [The Erlangen manuscript of old Serbo-Croat folksongs] (Sremski Karlovci, 1925)

G. Gesemann: Studien zur südslavischen Volksepik (Reichenberg, 1926)

M. Murko: La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXème siècle (Paris, 1929)

B. Širola: Fućkalice: sviraljke od kore svježeg drveta [Pipes made from the bark of green wood] (Zagreb, 1932) [with Ger. summary]

B. Širola: Sopile i zurle (Zagreb, 1932) [Two oboe-like folk instruments]

L. Kuba: Cesty za slovanskou písní, 1885–1929 [In search of Slavic song 1885–1929], ii (Prague, 1935, 2/1953)

T. Maretić: ‘Metrika muslimanske narodne epike’ [The metre of Muslim folk epics], Rad JAZU, no.253 (1935), 181–242; no.255 (1936), 1–76

B. Marić: Volksmusik Bosniens und der Herzegowina (Vienna, 1936)

P. Brömse: Flöten, Schalmeien und Sackpfeifen Südslawiens (Brno, 1937/R)

G. Gesemann: ‘Prolegomena povodom gramofonskog snimanja bosanske narodne pesme’ [Introduction to the gramophone recording of Bosnian folksongs], Prilozi proučavanju narodne poezije, iv (1937), 222–40

A. Schmaus: ‘Pevanje uz tepsiju’ [Singing to the rolling of a metal tray], ibid., 240–55

B. Širola: Sviraljke s udarnim jezičkom [Wind instruments with a beating reed] (Zagreb, 1937)

B. Bartók and A.B. Lord: Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951)

M. Murko: Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike [On the trail of Serbo-Croat epic songs] (Zagreb, 1951)

C. Rihtman: ‘Čičak Janja, narodni pjevač sa Kupresa’ [Čičak Janja, folksinger from Kupres], Bilten Instituta za proučavanje folklora u Sarajevu, i (1951), 33–63 [incl. 92 musical exx.]

C. Rihtman: ‘Polifoni oblici u narodnoj muzici Bosne i Hercegovine’ [Polyphonic forms in the folk music of Bosnia and Hercegovina], ibid., 7–20 [incl. 51 musical exx.]

C. Rihtman: ‘Narodna muzika jajačkog sreza’ [Folk music of the Jajce district], Bilten Instituta za proučavanje folklora u Sarajevu, ii (1953), 5–102

A. Schmaus: Studije o krajiškoj epici [Studies of the epic in north-west Bosnia] (Zagreb, 1953)

V. Milošević: Bosanske narodne pjesme [Bosnian folksongs] (Banja Luka, 1954–64)

V. Milošević: Krajiške borbene pjesme [The fighting songs of Krajina] (Banja Luka, 1959–61)

C. Rihtman: ‘Muzička tradicija Neuma i okoline’ [The musical tradition of Neum and the surrounding area], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu: N.S. etnologija, xiv (1959), 209–306

A.B. Lord: The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA, 1960/R)

M. Braun: Das serbokroatische Heldenlied (Göttingen, 1961)

V. Milošević: ‘Tambura i harmonika u bosanskom varoškom pjevanju’ [The tambura and accordion in Bosnian urban singing], Zbornik Krajiških muzeja, i (1962), 132–5

C. Rihtman: ‘Tradicionalna muzika Imljana’ [The traditional music of Imljani], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu: N.S. etnologija, xvii (1962), 227–73

C. Rihtman: ‘Oblici kratkog napjeva u narodnoj tradiciji Bosne i Hercegovine’ [Forms of the short melody in the folk tradition of Bosnia and Hercegovina], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu: N.S. etnologija, xviii (1963), 61–75

V. Milošević: Sevdalinka (Banja Luka, 1964)

C. Rihtman: ‘Narodna muzička tradicija Žepe’ [The folk music tradition of Žepa], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu: N.S. etnologija, xix (1964), 237–305

C. Rihtman: ‘Formes polyphoniques dans la musique traditionelle Yougoslave’, Radovi Naučnog društva Bosne i Hercegovine, xxvi (1965), 205–11

C. Rihtman: ‘Orientalische Elemente in der traditionellen Musik Bosniens und der Herzegowina’, Das orientalische Element am Balkan (Grazer Balkanologen-Tagung II) [Graz, 1966], ed. W. Wünsch and H.J. Kissling, Grazer und Münchener balkanologisch Studien (Munich, 1967), 97–105

J. Hadžisalihović: ‘“Ravna” u malovaroškoj tradiciji Jajca’ [Ravna (song in speech rhythm) in the urban tradition of Jajce], Kongres Saveza udruženja folklorista Jugoslavije XV: Jajce 1968, 61–4

C. Rihtman: Zbornik napjeva narohnid pjesama Bosne i Hercegovine, i: Dječije pjesme [Collection of folksongs from Bosnia and Hercegovina: Children’s songs] (Sarajevo, 1974)

D. Rihtman: ‘Narodna muzička tradicija lističkog područja’ [Folk music tradition of Listica district], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine: N.S. Etnologija, xxiv/xxv (Sarajevo, 1976)

C. Rihtman: ‘Yugoslav Folk Music Instruments’, The Folk Arts of Yugoslavia: Pittsburgh 1977, ed. W.W. Kolar (Pittsburgh, 1976), 211–27

D. Christensen: ‘Kategorien mehrstimmiger Lieder des Dorfes Gabela, Herzegovina’, Essays for a Humanist: an offering to Klaus Wachsmann, ed. C. Seeger and B. Wade (New York, 1977), 105–20

B. Krader: ‘A Bosnian Urban Love Song: the Sevdalinka’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 29–35

A. Petrović: ‘Fenomen vokalnog stila u seoskoj muzičkoj praksi Bosne i Hercegovine’ [Phenomena of vocal style in the rural musical practice of Bosnia and Hercegovina], Zvuk, 2 (1978), 15–22

A. Petrović: ‘Sacred Sephardic Chants in Bosnia’, World of Music, xxiv/3 (1982), 35–51

D. Rihtman: ‘Narodna muzička tradicija Drežnice’ [Folk music tradition of Drežnice], Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine, Etnologija, N.S. 37 (Sarajevo, 1982), 137–64

M. Baralić: ‘Interpretacija ezana u Bosni i Hercegovini’ [Interpretation of adhān in Bosnia and Hercegovina], Zvuk (1983), 52–8

V. Milošević: Ravna pjesma [‘Plain’ song] (Banja Luka, 1984)

A. Petrović: ‘Tradicija i kompromisi u muzičkom izrazu sefardskih Jevreja u Bosni’ [Tradition and compromises in the musical expressions of the Sephardic Jews in Bosnia], Traditional Music of Ethnic Groups – Minorities [Zagreb 1985], ed. J. Bezić (Zagreb, 1986), 213–21

A. Petrović: Traditional Music from the Soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina (sound recording and booklet), Diskoton LP 8149 (Sarajevo, 1986)

A. Petrović: ‘Paradoxes of Muslim Music in Bosnia and Hercegovina’, Asian Music, xx/1 (1988), 128–47

A. Petrović: ‘Lokalni idiomi u obrednim napjevima sefardskih Jevreja u Bosni’ [Local idioms in the religious tunes of the Sephardic Jews in Bosnia], Prvi javni sastanak Medjuakademijskog Koordinacionog odbora za ispitivanje tradicionalne narodne religiozne obredne muzike u Jugoslaviji (Sarajevo, 1989), 57–85

A. Petrović: ‘Women in the Music Creation Process in the Dinaric Cultural Zone of Yugoslavia’, Music, Gender and Culture, ed. M. Herndon and S. Ziegler (Wilhelmshaven, 1990), 71–84

A. Petrović: ‘Correlation between the Musical Content of Jewish Sephardic Songs and Traditional Muslim Lyrics sevdalinka in Bosnia’, World Congress of Jewish Studies: Jerusalem 1989 ii (Jerusalem, 1990), 165–71

A. Petrović: ‘Les techniques du chant villageois dans les Alpes Dinariques (Yugoslavie)’, Cahiers de musique traditionnelle, iv (1991), 103–15

L. Vidić Rasmussen: ‘Gypsy Music in Yugoslavia: Inside the Popular Culture Tradition’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, i/2 (1991), 127–39

Bosnia: Echoes from an Endangered World: Music and Chant of the Bosnian Muslims, ed. T. Levin and A. Petrović, Smithsonian/Folkways Records, CD SF 40407 (1993)

R.P. Pennanen: ‘The God-Praising Drums in Sarajevo’, Asian Music, xxv/1–2 (1993–4), 1–7

L. Vidić Rasmussen: ‘From source to commodity: newly-composed folk music of Yugoslavia’, Popular Music, xiv/2 (1995), 241–56

A. Petrović: ‘Perceptions of ganga’, World Music, xxxvii/2 (1995), 60–71

Bosquet [Boquet]

(fl late 14th century; d before 30 Nov 1406). French composer. He is probably identifiable with Johannes de Bosco (Boscho, Bosquo) or Jean du Bois, a cleric and singer from Tournai who can be traced from about 1364 to 1406. In 1371, while rector of Ascq (near Lille), Johannes de Bosco received a canonicate at St Pierre, Lille. He served Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Bishop of Nîmes (vicar-general in Avignon under Gregory XI), as cubicularius until 1379 (and probably for the previous 15 years), together with Richardus de Bozonvilla, who later became magister capellae in Avignon (1394–1405). From 1391 to 12 December 1404 Bosco was a singer in the chapel of the antipope Clement VII; in 1393 he received a papal grant as a musician to Duke Louis II of Anjou, a title he must have acquired before 1390. In 1394 Bosco and 13 other singers, including the composers Hasprois and Haucourt, swore allegiance to the new pope, Benedict XIII. Bosco renewed his oath after the pope’s flight from Avignon in 1403; the next year he followed Benedict to the abbey of St Victor at Marseilles, but he did not accompany the pope to Italy at the end of 1404. (A Catalan cleric with the very common name Johannes de Bosco, traceable during the siege of the papal palace in 1398, must have been a different person.) Johannes de Bosco, the papal singer, seems to have spent the last two years of his life at the Bourges palace of Jean, Duke of Berry (the uncle of Louis II of Anjou). The name Johannes de Bosco or Jehan du Bois appears as a vicar of the Ste Chapelle at Bourges from the time of its dedication in 1405 to 1406, next to those of three other composers: Pierre Fontaine, Guillaume le Grant and Paullet. He must have died shortly before 30 November 1406, since petitions for the reversion of his benefices in Le Mans and Reims are recorded from this date.

Two compositions survive with ascriptions to Bosquet or Boquet: a three-voice Gloria (which appears with an additional contratenor in Coussemaker’s copy of F-Sm 222), and a four-voice Gloria (which has a different contratenor and a longer Amen in I-Bu 2216, where it is attributed to ‘Nicolaus de Capoa’). Both settings are copied in the important early 15th-century manuscript I-Bc Q15 (ed. in CMM, xi/2, 1959, and PMFC, xxiii, 1989–92) and have two syllabically texted upper voices which often exchange phrases and sometimes imitate one another, accompanied by one or two slower textless voices. Although the four-voice Gloria has identical passages in the lower parts, there are no isorhythmic patterns in the upper voices. Certain fragments attributed to ‘Jean du Bois’, apparently sketches of polyphonic compositions, in the Archives Départementales du Cher in Bourges, are almost certainly by the singer at the Ste Chapelle.

A ‘Johannes de Bosco alias Peliçon’ is cited among the canons of Nevers Cathedral in 1399; and papal documents (Di Bacco) show that he was a cleric of the diocese of Nevers as early as 1378, with a document of 1394 petitioning for the Nevers canonry and stating that he held a chaplaincy in the diocese of Auxerre. He is almost certainly the composer of the three-voice Gloria and Credo attributed to ‘Peliso’ (Pelison, Pellisson, Pellissonus) in the Apt Manuscript (F-APT 16bis) and other sources (ed. in CMM, xxix, 1962, and PMFC, xxiii). Tomasello has argued that this name is alluded to in the list of papal singers from 1396, but Günther has suggested that the reference is simply to Johannes de Bosco. In contrast to the ‘Bosquet’ Glorias, the ‘Pelison’ pieces use major prolation, have only one texted voice and seem to come from an earlier generation. It is unclear whether they ought to be regarded as earlier pieces by the same composer or as the work of a different man. The Pelison compositions resemble those of Hasprois and Haucourt, with whom Johannes de Bosco is associated in the Avignon documents; the Bosquet pieces are more like those of Césaris, Fontaine, Guillaume Legrant and Paullet, who all served in the Ste Chapelle of Bourges from 1405–6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Günther: ‘Zur Biographie einiger Komponisten der Ars Subtilior’,AMw, xxi (1964), 172–99, esp. 174–85

A. Tomasello: Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon 1309–1403) (Ann Arbor,1983), 153, 235–6, 260–63

P. Higgins: ‘Music and Musicians at the Sainte-Chapelle of Bourges Palace, 1405–1515’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 689–701, esp. 692

U. Günther: ‘Composers at the Court of the Antipopes in Avignon: Research in the Vatican Archives’, Musicology and Archival Research: Brussels 1993, 328–37

G. Di Bacco: ‘Documenti Vaticani per la storia della musica durante il grande Scisma (1378–1417)’, Quaderni storici, no.95 (1997), 374–8

URSULA GÜNTHER (with GILBERT REANEY)

Bossa nova.

In Brazilian popular music, a movement that originated about 1958–9 and effected radical stylistic changes in the classical urban Samba. The word ‘bossa’, from Rio de Janeiro slang, means loosely ‘special ability’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘astuteness’ and the like. The term ‘bossa-nova’ first appeared in Antônio Carlos Jobim’s song Desafinado (1959) whose melody with complex intervals (diminished 4ths, minor 6ths) and a rather tortuous shape was intended to suggest the idea of a singer with a certain vocal insecurity. Its melodic and harmonic complexity was justified by the song text as ‘bossa nova’. The originators of the new style included Jobim himself as a composer and João Gilberto primarily as a singer and guitarist. Their first important recording was Chega de Saudade (March 1959). Although the samba figured prominently in their repertory it was not their exclusive genre.

One of the features of the new style, affecting popular music in general, and the samba in particular, was a deliberate avoidance of the predominance of any single musical parameter. Before bossa nova the melody was generally strongly emphasized, to satisfy the basic requirement of an easily singable tune; bossa nova, however, integrates melody, harmony and rhythm. The performer has a vital role in this integration, but heavy emphasis on the singer’s personality is altogether avoided. Strongly contrasting effects, loudness of voice, fermatas or scream-like high pitches are generally excluded from a proper bossa nova singing style; the singing should flow in a subdued tone almost like the normal spoken language. The characteristic nasal vocal production of bossa nova is a peculiar trait of the cabaclo folk tradition of north-eastern Brazil, but was rare in earlier urban music. As a soloist the interpreter no longer opposes the accompanying ensemble: they are reconciled. The guitar as an accompanying instrument is emphasized and, whether as a solo or accompanying instrument, may present a harmonic structure with two functions: one of traditional harmonic support, and the other a percussive function, stressing the rhythmic strokes chordally. Both functions are frequently integrated in the same chord entity, as shown in many performances of Baden Powell, Brazil’s foremost guitarist in the 1960s. Certain harmonic formulae have almost become clichés since the advent of bossa nova, such as the shifting of major and minor modes in a tonic–dominant relationship (e.g. A minor to D major). The pattern of modulations is the opposite of those in jazz, which usually follow an ascending order in the circle of 5ths and have greater harmonic tension. Except for certain processes of chord formation (particularly altered chords) there is less jazz influence than some early critics believed. A trait traceable to jazz and perhaps related to bebop is the highly improvised style on an implied theme of some bossa nova instrumental pieces. The most remarkable innovation of bossa nova music is in its rhythmic structure, which affects the very foundation on which the samba was built. The rhythmic structure of the bossa nova samba possibly had its origin in both the folk and the classical samba formulae (ex.1). João Gilberto was mainly responsible for extracting and isolating those elements that constitute his famous guitar stroke, called in Portuguese ‘violão gago’ (‘stammering guitar’; ex.2). Many variants of that basic rendering have developed, their common trait being the predominance of ternary divisions against the binary one which occurs only once (exx.3a, b and d) or not at all (ex.3c). These variants have been the point of departure for many ingenious drummers and guitarists towards a previously unknown rhythmic versatility. Bossa nova song texts are also innovatory, and are valued not only for their expressive content but also for the sonorous individuality of their words. Some affinity has been noticed between bossa nova texts and Brazilian concrete poetry. In several examples the lyrics seem to have been conceived together with the music, so close are the verbal rhythm and the melodic (cf Jobim’s Samba de uma nota só, Desafinado and A garota de Ipanema).

During the early to mid-1960s bossa nova became linked with a social protest movement. Musically the introduction of international pop styles, especially rock music from England and the USA, gave rise to a dynamic hybrid style which reached its peak with the group Tropicália.

See Latin America, §IV, and Brazil, §II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ramalho Neto: Historinha do desafinado (Rio de Janeiro, 1965)

J.R. Tinhorão: Música popular: um tema em debate (Rio de Janeiro, 1966)

A. de Campos, ed.: Balanço da bossa (São Paulo, 1968)

B. Rocha Brito: ‘Bossa nova’, Balanço da bossa, ed. A. de Campos (São Paulo, 1968), 13

G. Béhague: ‘Bossa and Bossas: Recent Changes in Brazilian Urban Popular Music’, EthM, xvii (1973), 209–33

M. Budds: Jazz in the Sixties (Iowa City, IA, 1978)

J.S. Roberts: The Latin Tinge (New York, 1979, 2/1999)

J.S. Roberts: Latin Jazz (New York, 1999)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Bossard [Bossart, Bosshart].

Swiss family of organ builders. They were active especially in German-speaking Switzerland, but also in French-speaking Switzerland, Alsace and southern Germany, and were one of the most important organ-building families in the country in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Their heyday was undoubtedly the first two-thirds of the 18th century, in the time of their founder Josef Bossard (b Baar, 1665; d 1748) and of his son Viktor Ferdinand Bossard (1699–1772); the masterpiece which they constructed at the monastery of St Urban, Switzerland (1716–21), was never surpassed nor even equalled by any of their organ-building descendants. The Bossards are known to have built 62 new organs; 41 building contracts for these are in the Bossard family archives (now in the Zug town archives) and about a dozen instruments survive (in some instances only cases and fronts).

As a rule their organs comprise Hauptwerk, Rückpositiv and Pedal, with mechanical slider-chests and continuous casing. Their method of construction was based entirely on the south German Baroque ideas of the 18th century, but with some French and Italian influences. The treble stop Suavial 8' (only from c'), which is located at the front of the case, is a typical feature and, like the Italian Voce umana, is tuned to vibrate against the Prinzipal 8'. The tierce stops and the reeds show French influence.

The Bossards did not adopt the innovations in European organ building which took place about the 1840s (such as the sliderless wind-chest and the abandonment of the Rückpositiv). Because of this, the last work of Franz Josef Remigius Bossard (1777–1853), in the Augustinerkirche, Zürich (1845), met with scathing criticism, the Neujahrsblatt der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft Zürich of 1860 describing it as ‘furnished with devices which remind one of earlier times and which are a far cry from the achievements of recent years’.

Franz Josef Remigius's father, Karl Josef Maria (1736–95), the son of Viktor Ferdinand, was also an organ builder; Franz Josef's son, Franz Bossard (1804–68), was an assistant in the craft.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Bieler: ‘Die Orgelbauer Bossard von Baar’, Zuger Neujahrsblatt (1951), 50

E. Schiess: ‘Die Orgeln der Bossard von Baar’, Zuger Neujahrsblatt (1951), 61

B. Edskes: Die Orgeln in der Klosterkirche Muri (Muri, 1970)

FRIEDRICH JAKOB

Bossi [Bossi-Urbani, Vegezzi-Bossi, Balbiani-Vegezzi-Bossi, Brondino-Vegezzi-Bossi].

Italian family of organ builders. The founder of the firm, Antonio Bossi, was born in Mendrisio, Switzerland, and began organ building around 1550. The family later moved to Como in Italy, and in 1635 Gabriele Bossi (b 1604) established his workshop in Bergamo and in the same year built an organ for S Salvatore, Venice. His son, Giovanni Antonio Bossi, was responsible for the organ of Bergamo Cathedral between 1729 and 1738. His son, Angelo Bossi (1707–76) built organs in Lombardy whose children, Giuseppe (1738–1803) and Francesco (1742–1816), started independent firms. Giuseppe built a quarter-tone enharmonic organ at the Malmaritate, Milan (1780), and the organ at S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo. His son Carlo (d 1836) moved to Lodi and built organs in Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Switzerland. Carlo's two sons also worked independently: Felice Bossi settled in Piedmont, building the organ for Turin Cathedral (1874), while Adeodato Bossi (1805–91) remained in Bergamo, changing the family name to Bossi-Urbani. This branch of the family's activities was continued by Luigi Balicco and later Angelo Piccinelli.

Felice adopted Giacomo Vegezzi, re-naming the firm Vegezzi-Bossi. Giacomo's son Carlo Vegezzi-Bossi (i) (1858–1927) built organs in the Liceo Filarmonico, Bologna (1908, demolished 1931), and the church of S Carlos, Buenos Aires (1910), Argentina. On the marriage of Carlo's daughter Alessandra to Celestino Balbiani (1919), the firm Balbiani-Vegezzi-Bossi was formed. In 1865 Giacomo, who had lost his wife, married an organ builder, Annetta Vittino (1816–86), who was the daughter of Carlo Vittino, an organ builder in Centallo, near Cuneo. Their son, Francesco Vegezzi-Bossi (1870–1943) inherited the Vittino workshop in 1908 and the firm was continued by Francesco's son Carlo Vegezzi-Bossi (ii) (1900–77), grandson Francesco Vegezzi-Bossi (1937–84) and great-grandson Enrico Vegezzi-Bossi (b 1960). Enrico went into partnership with Bartolomeo Brondino (b 1961) under the name Brondino-Vegezzi-Bossi.

Carlo Vegezzi-Bossi (i) was a skilled pipe-voicer. His organs had a warm sonority and an enchanting late-Romantic, symphonic quality. The Bossi organs before him were built in the typical Lombardic style: majestic ripieno and a wealth of colourful ‘da concerto’ stops (reeds and flutes) throughout the range of the instrument.

UMBERTO PINESCHI

Bossi, Marco Enrico

(b Salò, Lake Garda, 25 April 1861; d Atlantic Ocean, 20 Feb 1925). Italian composer, organist and pianist. Born into a family of organists, he studied with his father, Pietro Bossi (1834–96), then at the Liceo Musicale, Bologna (1871–3), and at the Milan Conservatory (1873–81), where his teachers included Ponchielli. In 1881 he was appointed organist at Como Cathedral, and in due course he won worldwide renown as one of the finest organists of the day. He moved to Naples in 1890 as teacher of harmony and the organ at the conservatory, later becoming director of the Licei Musicali in Venice (1895–1902) and Bologna (1902–11) and of the Liceo (Conservatorio from 1919) di S Cecilia, Rome (1916–23). He died at sea while returning from New York.

Bossi’s few completed operas had little success; but he won lasting respect, mainly in Italy, for his instrumental and choral compositions. Internationally he is remembered largely for his organ pieces, the best of which (e.g. the widely performed G minor Scherzo op.49 no.2) are still very effective. However, the Canticum canticorum was particularly highly praised in its time, in Germany as well as Italy. Today the work perhaps impresses more by sincerity and solid craftsmanship than originality, but the opening pages of Il paradiso perduto – a representation of chaos, with pulseless rhythms, bare 5ths and flattened 7ths – show that Bossi was capable of vivid poetic evocation, while Giovanna d’Arco, the most dramatic of his choral works, suggests that he had more sense of the theatre than his operas revealed. Among his orchestral pieces, a vigorous if slightly academic Organ Concerto and the elegant rather Wolf-Ferrari-like Intermezzi goldoniani have continued to be revived occasionally in Italy; and of the chamber compositions, the two violin sonatas have proved especially worthy of renewed attention: the profoundly expressive, subtle-textured slow movement of the second is one of Bossi's most inspired utterances.

With Martucci and Sgambati, Bossi led the revival of Italian non-operatic music at the turn of the century, and, like them, he turned to northern Europe for the main sources of his style: there are signs of the influences – not always fully assimilated – of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Brahms and (in more adventurously chromatic pieces such as the Konzertstück op.130) Reger. In his last years he showed little sympathy with the radical young; but such new departures as the very refined chromaticism of the Five Pieces for piano op.137 (1914), or the ladders of perfect 4ths in Santa Caterina da Siena, reveal that he was not wholly unreceptive to the new sounds of the 20th century.

WORKS

(selective list)

most dates are those of publication

operas

Paquita (i), unpubd, Milan, Conservatorio, 1881

Il veggente (1, G. Macchi), op.69, Milan, Dal Verme, 4 June 1890; rev. as Il viandante (lib rev. C. Zangarini), Mannheim, 7 Dec 1906

Malombra (R. Simoni), conceived 1904, posthumously completed from sketches by R. Bossi [music] and L. Orsini [lib]

2 others, unperf., 1 unfinished

vocal

Messa da Requiem, op.90, male vv, str, hp, hmn/org, 1892–3; Messa da Requiem, op.83, chorus, org ad lib, 1893, later rev.; Mossa d’Averno (cant., Leo XIII), op.87, 4vv, pf, hmn/org, 1893; Il cieco (G. Pascoli), op.112, Bar, chorus, orch, 1898; Canticum canticorum cantata biblica, op.120, Mez, Bar, chorus, orch, org, 1900; Il paradiso perduto (poema sinfonico-vocale, L.A. Villanis, after J. Milton), op.125, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1902; Giovanna d’Arco (mystery, L. Orsini), op.135, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1914

Much other church music, incl. at least 6 masses, mass movts and smaller pieces; smaller choral works, songs and partsongs

instrumental

Orch: Conc., op.100, org, hns, timp, str, 1895 (1900); Suite, op.126, 1904; Intermezzi goldoniani, op.127, str, 1905; Konzertstück, op.130, org, brass, timp, str, 1908, rev. 1910, also version for org solo; Theme and Variations, op.131, 1908; Fantasia sinfonica, op.147, org, brass, hp, timp, str, 1923

Chbr: Vn Sonata [no.1], op.82, 1893; Pf Trio [no.1], op.107, 1896; Vn Sonata [no.2], op.117, 1899; Pf Trio [no.2], op.123, 1901; Santa Caterina da Siena, op. posth., sketched for vn, pf, 1924, posth. realized by R. Bossi for composer’s intended instrumentation of vn, hp, cel, str qt, org

Kbd: over 30 op. nos. for org, other org pieces, c30 op. nos. for pf, other pf pieces, pf duet music, hmn pieces

Principal publishers: Bertarelli (Milan), Breitkopf & Härtel, Capra (Turin), Carisch, Dahlström, Euterpe, Izzo (Naples), Kistner, Leuckart, Peters, Pisano (Naples), Pizzi (Bologna), Ricordi, Senff

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Agostini)

L. Torchi: ‘Il cantico dei cantici’, RMI, vii (1900), 780–821

G.M. Gatti: Giovanna d’Arco, mistero di Marco Enrico Bossi (Turin, 1914)

L. Orsini, ed.: Marco Enrico Bossi: fascicolo commemorativo (Milan, 1926)

R. Bossi: ‘Profilo di M.E. Bossi’, Como: rivista mensile del comune, iv (1933), no.6, pp.5–6; no.7, pp.5–11

G.C. Paribeni, L. Orsini and E. Bontempelli: Marco Enrico Bossi: il compositore, l’organista, l’uomo (Milan, 1934) [incl. list of works and bibliography]

F. Mompellio: Marco Enrico Bossi (Milan, 1952) [incl. list of works and bibliography]

F. Abbiati: ‘Marco Enrico Bossi, trent’anni dopo’, Ricordiana [Milan], new ser., i (1955), 289–91

F. Mompellio: ‘Marco Enrico Bossi, compositore’, I grandi anniversari del 1960 e la musica sinfonica e da camera nell’Ottocento in Italia, Chigiana, xvii (1960), 119–31

S. Martinotti: ‘Profilo di Marco Enrico Bossi’, Musica d’oggi, new ser., v (1962), 98–103

A. Picchi: Marco Enrico Bossi: organista e compositore (Como, 1966)

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972), esp. 519–22

S. Zaccaria: 10 organisti italiani (Rome, 1983)

R. Zanetti: La musica italiana nel Novecento (Busto Arsizio, 1985), 191–8

JOHN C.G. WATERHOUSE

Bossi, (Rinaldo) Renzo

(b Como, 9 April 1883; d Milan, 2 April 1965). Italian composer, son of Marco Enrico Bossi. After studying in Leipzig (1902–4) he became an opera conductor, later teaching composition in Parma, Milan and Venice. As a young man he associated himself with progressive trends: in 1911 he was a member of Bastianelli's short-lived pressure group known as the Lega dei Cinque or I ‘Cinque Italiani’ and in some works he rejected thematicism in favour of an instinctive, free-ranging succession of musical images. But his modernity seldom went beyond the free use of 9th and 11th chords, progressions derived from the whole-tone scale, frequent unrelated triads and 7ths, and occasional excursions into simple bitonality. At his best he used such resources with pungent wit, reinforced by vivid, kaleidoscopic instrumentation – the amusing Pinocchio is an outstanding example, as, to a lesser extent, is his most successful opera Volpino il calderaio. He was also capable of such errors of taste as the garishly pictorial Le sagre d'Italia, but the almost total neglect of his more ambitious works may be unfair. Though never staged, his opera Nell'anno mille has a striking subject: the widely held belief that the world was about to end in ad 1000.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Passa la ronda! (op, 1, L. Orsini, after R. Francheville), op.20, 1913, Milan, Lirico, 3 March 1919; Nell'anno mille (op, prol, 3 scenes, G. Pascoli and Orsini), op.25, 1915–16, rev., RAI, 1956; Volpino il calderaio (op, 1, Orsini, partly after W. Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew), 1923, Milan, Carcano, 14 Nov 1925; Burla valdostana (ballet), op.33, 1925, San Remo, 20 Feb 1935; I commedianti alla corte di Francia (op, 3, G. Adami), op.37, 1930, unperf.; Rosa rossa (op, 1, Bossi, after O. Wilde), op.18, RAI, 9 Aug 1938, staged Parma, Regio, 9 Jan 1940; Il principe felice (radio op, 1, Bossi, after Wilde), op.52, RAI, 11 Oct 1951; La crociata degli innocenti (poema francescano in 3 sequenze e 4 quadri, E. Possenti, after G. d'Annunzio's film scenario), op.53, RAI, 1962; 2 other ballets, ?unperf

Orch: Sym., op.11, 1904–5; Vn Conc., op.15, 1905; Bianco e nero, op.21, 1913, arr. vc, orch, 1934; Pinocchio, op.29, 1921–2, arr. pf, orch, 1935; Le sagre d'Italia, 3 sym. poems: Il palio di Siena, op.39, 1933, Il miracolo di San Gennaro, op.40, 1934, La festa del Redentore, op.41, 1935; Trilogia cristiana, op.47, vc, orch, 1939

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt, op.28, 1921; Sonata intima, op.31, vn, pf, 1922, music for pf and org

Choral pieces

Principal publishers: Bongiovanni (Bologna), Carisch, Chester, Edizioni Internazionali, Euterpe, Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Hogarth: ‘A Composer of Young Italy: Renzo Bossi’, Scottish Music Magazine, xii (1930–31), 42–3

A. Ferloni: Note biografico-critiche su Renzo Bossi; guida alla commedia lirica ‘Volpino il calderaio’ (Milan, n.d. [1933]) [incl. list of works]

F. Mompellio: Appendix on Renzo Bossi, Marco Enrico Bossi (Milan, 1952), 271–90 [incl. list of works]

S. Pintacuda: Renzo Bossi (Milan, 1955) [incl. list of works and bibliography]

A. Cataldo: ‘Un dramma musicale di Pascoli e Renzo Bossi’, La scala, no.78 (1956), 56–8 [on Nell'anno mille]

E. Scampini: ‘Gli ottant'anni di Renzo Bossi’, Como: rivista mensile del comune (1963), no.1, pp.41–4

B. Bettinelli: ‘Renzo Bossi’, Conservatorio di musica G. Verdi di Milano: almanacco dell’anno accademico 1964–65 (Milan, 1965), 241–6

J.C.G. Waterhouse: The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940) (diss., U. of Oxford, 1968), 185, 194, 603–6

JOHN C.G. WATERHOUSE

Bossinensis, Franciscus

(b ?Bosnia; fl 1510). Italian arranger and composer of lute music. His only known works are two collections of frottolas for voice and lute printed by Petrucci in 1509 and 1511. Altogether they contain 126 frottolas and 46 ricercares. The frottolas are transcriptions of four-voice models by Tromboncino, Cara, Pesenti, F. d’Ana, F. de Luprano, A. Capriola and others, of which all but 16 had already appeared in Petrucci’s frottola publications. (Some of the others may have been taken from Petrucci’s tenth book, now lost.) Bossinensis intabulated the tenor and bass parts for the lute, omitting the altus, and set the vocal line above the tablature in mensural notation. Lute tunings in D, E, G and A are implied by the relation between the tablature and the vocal notation. The Italian lute tablature is explained in the ‘Regula per quelli che non sanno cantare’ which appeared in all Petrucci’s lute publications. The two books offer a broad selection of frottolas, incorporating many types from the simpler odes, barzellette, frottolas and strambotti to settings of ottava rime and Petrarch canzoni, but his method of transcription is for the most part mechanical, adding none of the improvisatory melodic decorations which are found in the vocal intabulations in Petrucci’s earlier lutebooks. Bossinensis reproduced the parts faithfully, making modifications for some musica ficta and occasionally adding a note to a chord. By omitting the altus part, which often contributed little of linear interest, he underlined the essentially three-part texture of the genre. In the strambotto Amiando e desiando by the celebrated poet and improviser Cariteo, he for once departed from his usually strict intabulation, supplying a more idiomatic and florid lute part than the model in Petrucci’s ninth book (the two versions are printed in Disertori, 1957). In both Bossinensis’s books the frottolas are followed by a collection of unpretentious ricercares of his own which are associated with the various frottolas by a system of letter symbols, indicated on the title-page. The ricercares, which were probably played before (or after) their respective frottolas, are related to them by modality and not by any thematic content.

WORKS

Editions: F. Bossinensis: 20 recercari da sonar nel lauto, ed. B. Disertori (Milan, 1954) [edn. of bk.2]Le frottole per canto e liuto intabulate de Franciscus Bossinensis, ed. B. Disertori (Milan, 1964) [complete edn.]

Tenori e contrabassi intabulati col sopran in canto figurato … Libro primo (Venice, 1509/R)

Tenori e contrabassi intabulati col sopran in canto figurato … Libro secundo (Venice, 1511/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

C. Sartori: ‘A Little-Known Petrucci Publication: the Second Book of Lute Tablatures of Francesco Bossinensis’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 234–45

B. Disertori: ‘Contradiction tonale dans la transcription d’un “strambotto” célèbre’, Le luth et sa musique: Neuilly-sur-Seine 1957, 37–42

R.M. Murphy: ‘Fantasie et recercare dans les premières tablatures de luth du XVIe siècle’, ibid., 127–42

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy, ca. 1500–1550, with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1961)

K. Jeppesen: La frottola, i (Århus and Copenhagen, 1968), 114ff

K. Kos: ‘Bossiensis, Antico i instrumentalna glazba njihova vremena’ [Bossinensis, Antico and the instrumental music of their time], Muzicke ceceri u Donatu (Zagreb, 1983), 37–53

P. Pozniak: ‘Problems of Tonality in the Ricercars of Spinacino and Bossinensis’, JLSA, xxiii (1990), 63–79

JOAN WESS/R

Bossler, Heinrich Philipp Carl

(b Darmstadt, 22 June 1744; d Gohlis, nr Leipzig, 9 Dec 1812). German music printer and publisher. Around 1769 he worked as a copper engraver and in 1779 invented a machine which simplified music engraving. He founded his publishing firm in Speyer in 1781; in 1785 another branch (Krämer & Bossler) was established in Darmstadt, where the company moved in 1792. By 1796 almost 300 titles had been published. Bossler settled in Gohlis, near Leipzig, in 1799. The publishing house, later directed by his son Friedrich Bossler, closed in 1828. Bossler’s publications included works by south German composers and Beethoven’s three Kurfürstensonaten woo47 (1783), as well as the periodical Musicalische Realzeitung (1788–90). (H. Schneider: Der Musikverleger Heinrich Philipp Bossler (1744–1812), Tutzing, 1985)

HANS-MARTIN PLESSKE

Bosso [Bossius], Lucio

(b Lodi; fl 1600–10). Italian composer and organist. He was an organist at Lodi when his Motectorum quinque vocum liber primus (Venice, 1600) was published, a work known to Eitner but no longer extant (see EitnerQ). His other known works are the Motectorum senis vocibus liber primus (Venice, 1606) and the madrigal Ardon le chiome d’oro. The latter was included in Antonio Savetta’s Madrigali a cinque, a sette, et a otto voci (Venice, 1610), a collection assembled in honour of the marriage of Lancilotto Corradi and Claudia Carminati and dated from Lodi on 20 June 1610.

Bossu, Adan le.

See Adam de la Halle.

Bostel, Lucas von

(b Hamburg, 11 Oct 1649; d Hamburg, 15 July 1716). German librettist. From 1670 he studied law at Heidelberg and Leiden and received a doctorate. In 1674 he undertook an educational tour of Europe lasting five years and on his return to Hamburg became connected in some capacity with the newly founded opera. Approximately two years later his first libretto was performed, Vespasianus (Hamburg, 1681), with music by J.W. Franck, for whom he wrote another four texts: Diocletianus (Hamburg, 1682), Attila (Hamburg, 1682), Der glückliche Gross-Verzier Cara Mustapha (Hamburg, 1686) and Der unglückliche Cara Mustapha (Hamburg, 1686); he also provided texts for operas by Förtsch (Der hochmütige, gestürzte und wiedererhobene Crösus, Hamburg, 1684, and Der unmöglichste Ding, Hamburg, 1684), and by Strungk (Theseus, translated from a text by P. Quinault, Hamburg, 1683). In 1687 he became Syndicus to Hamburg, on whose behalf he took part in a number of diplomatic missions, including, in 1697, attendance at the conference that led to the Peace of Ryswick. In 1709 he was elected mayor of Hamburg.

Bostel was the most important poet in the early years of the Hamburg opera: his seven texts are superior in every way to the librettos of C. Richter, Elmenhorst and Förtsch. His Cara Mustapha is a landmark in the first decade of the Hamburg opera; in it Bostel realized an effective clear development of the plot through highly imaginative language. He had a preference for the alexandrines typical of 17th-century French poetry and employed dramatic nuances of language, especially in the frequent alterations of rhythm contributing to the dramatic climaxes of many scenes. His Der hochmütige … Crösus retained its popularity longer than almost any other libretto written during the first decades of the Hamburg opera: as well as the initial setting by Förtsch there are two different settings by Keiser (the second as late as 1730) and an adaptation for the Brunswick court opera with music by Schürmann.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.C. Wolff: Die Barockoper in Hamburg (1678–1738) (Wolfenbüttel, 1957)

H. Becker, ed.: Quellentexte zur Konzeption der europäischen Oper in 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel, 1981)

W. Braun: ‘Cara Mustapha oder die zweite Eröffnung des Hamburger Schauplatzes’, SMw, xxxv (1984), 37–64

W. Braun: Vom Remter zum Gänsemarkt: aus der Frühgeschichte der alten Hamburger Oper (1677–1697) (Saarbrücken, 1987)

H.J. Marx and D. Schröder: Die Hamburger Gänsemarkt-Oper: Katalog der Textbucher (Laaber, 1995)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Boston (i).

Ameican city, capital of Massachusetts. Settled in 1630, it is the principal city of the region of the six north-eastern states called New England. Distinguished by the breadth and intensity of its musical life, Boston has long been a leading centre for composition, performance, music citicism and music education, and an important seat of music publishing and instrument manufacture. Several politically independent municipalities, among them Cambridge and Wellesley, are here considered parts of ‘Greater Boston’.

1. Early history.

2. Concert life to 1881.

4. Concert life after World War I.

5. Opera and musical theatre.

6. Choruses.

7. Other ensembles and performers.

8. Theatres and concert halls.

9. Instruments.

10. Education and libraries.

11. Writers on music.

12. Printing and publishing.

LEONARD BURKAT/PAMELA FOX (1, 5–12), JOSEPH HOROWITZ (2–4)

1. Early history.

In 1620 separatists from the Church of England left the Netherlands and landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. They carried with them the psalter that Henry Ainsworth published in Amsterdam in 1612, which contained the psalms in English prose and verse, with the music of 39 tunes (borrowed from English, French and Dutch psalters). In 1630 a Puritan group established the Massachusetts Bay Colony at Boston and quickly organized a complex society that, within ten years, founded Harvard College and a book press. They too restricted their music to songs based on the psalms, preferring Sternhold and Hopkins (London, 1562) and music from Ravenscroft’s psalter (1621).

A group of 30 clergy from the colony devised new rhymed, metrical translations of the psalms, resulting in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first North American book in English. The first edition known to include music was the ninth (1698), but meanwhile this American book had also been printed in England and was in relatively wide use there. The 13 tunes in the 1698 edition are from John Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick.

By the mid-1660s the psalm tunes originally learned by rote were performed on both sides of the Atlantic by ‘lining out’, a practice in which a precentor sang or declaimed a single line of text which the congregation then repeated in solo. After the turn of the century the feeling arose that lining out had outlived its usefulness and should be replaced by musically literate singing according to the rules of art music. New England clergy led the way toward reform through polemical tracts appearing in Boston from 1720. Singing schools were organized to teach it, and the appetite for music they created gave rise in turn to the ‘first New England School’ of American composers; chief among the Yankee tunesmiths of the later 18th century was William Billings.

2. Concert life to 1881.

The earliest documented public concert in America took place in Boston on 30 December 1731, in ‘Mr Pelham's Great Room’. Among the city's leading musicians in subsequent decades was the organist William Selby, who came from England in 1771 and directed a performance of Handel's ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus (accompanied by the 64th Regimental Band) two years later. A seminal figure was the German-born Gottlieb Graupner, who arrived in 1797 having served as oboist in Haydn's London orchestra. As conductor, publisher, and music and instrument dealer, Graupner was an entrepreneurial force. His Philo-Harmonic Society, begun in 1809 and lasting at least until 1824, resembled a club as much as a pioneering orchestra; its repertory included Haydn alongside many now forgotten composers. Graupner was also in 1815 a founding member of the Handel and Haydn Society, America's oldest enduring oratorio society. George K. Jackson, the first doctor of music to settle in America (in 1797), was another significant Boston proponent of Handel and the religious choral literature.

The centrality of sacred music, crowned by Messiah, was reinforced by Lowell Mason, Boston's leading music educator and a successful fashioner of hymns. Although Mason disdained the secular, the Boston Academy of Music (which he co-founded with George James Webb in 1833) formed an orchestra directed by Webb; it introduced Boston to seven Beethoven symphonies as well as to symphonies by Mozart and Mendelssohn. This group was succeeded, from 1839 to 1847, by a musicians' cooperative, the Boston Musical Fund Society.

The prevailing calibre of performance may be gleaned from an anecdote told by Thomas Ryan, an expert chamber musician who took part in a single abortive rehearsal of Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream overture as a member of the Musical Fund Society conducted by Webb; the work was abandoned as unplayable. An orchestra that specialized in Mendelssohn's overture was the Germania Musical Society, which first appeared in Boston in 1849 and later settled there before disbanding in 1854. This group of 25 youthful Germans not only set unprecedented performance standards throughout the USA, but dispersed influential musicians to individual American cities. In Boston the leading Germania alumnus was Carl Zerrahn, a conductor less progressive than New York's Carl Bergmann (also a former Germanian), but a constructive and inspirational force, disciplined and unflappable, as leader of the Handel and Haydn Society (1854–98).

A post-Germania landmark in orchestral performance was the 50th anniversary of the Handel and Haydn Society in 1865, for which an orchestra of 100, including former Germanians, was assembled under Zerrahn. In its wake, the Harvard Musical Association created for Zerrahn a semi-professional orchestra about half as large; begun in 1866 and discontinued in 1882, it was the primary local ensemble prior to the Boston SO. But Zerrahn's orchestra, however indispensable, was far from the polished group with which Theodore Thomas had begun to tour. An 1869 Boston visit by Thomas's orchestra was remembered by William Foster Apthorp for inflicting ‘humiliating lessons in the matter of orchestral technique’. (But Thomas brought the Handel and Haydn Society to New York in 1873 when he needed an expert chorus for Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.) A jolt of another kind, also in 1869, was the five-day National Peace Jubilee and Musical Festival, for which Patrick S. Gilmore assembled an orchestra of 1000 and 10,000 choristers. The programme for the opening concert listed (in the following order): a Lutheran chorale, the Tannhäuser overture (with a ‘select orchestra of 600’), a Mozart Gloria, the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria (with ‘the violin obbligato played by two hundred violinists’), The Star-Spangled Banner (with bells and cannon), an ‘American hymn’, the William Tell overture, ‘Inflammatus’ from Rossini's Stabat mater, the Coronation March from Le prophète, the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore (with 100 anvils played by Boston firemen) and My Country 'Tis of Thee (with ‘the audience requested to join in singing the last stanza’). A popular and financial success, attended by President Grant and other dignitaries, the festival spawned a less successful sequel in 1872.

A presiding influence on local musical growth, and a major factor in the evolution of musical high culture nationally, was the Transcendentalist and one-time Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight. Dwight considered great music ‘religious’ and called Beethoven ‘sacred’. He campaigned to purify ‘classical’ music of such influences as Gilmore, Gottschalk and Stephen Foster. His principal vehicles were Dwight's Journal of Music (1852–81), the leading American periodical of its kind, and the Harvard Musical Association, on whose committee he served. The Association's programming philosophy – to be ‘above all need of catering to low tastes’, to promote ‘only composers of unquestioned excellence, and … nothing vulgar, coarse, “sensational”, but only such as outlives fashion’ – embodied Dwight's severe conservatism; his enthusiasms stopped with Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin.

If the Handel and Haydn Society, which resisted Berlioz and Brahms, reinforced local purism, other important Boston influences, notably the Wagnerite conductor B.J. Lang and Thomas Ryan's Mendelssohn Quintette Club, welcomed the music of the moment. Dwight had served to refine taste and promote appreciation, but by the 1880s was a retarding force; compared to New York, Boston was slow to accept Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt and Wagner. In 1881 Dwight confessed: ‘What challenges the world as new in music fails to stir us to the same depths of soul and feeling that the old masters did and doubtless always will. Startling as the new composers are, [they] do not bring us nearer heaven’. He added: ‘We revenge ourselves with pointing to the unmistakeable fact, that in the concert-giving experience of to-day, at least in Boston, the prurient appetite for novelty … seems to have reached its first stage of satiety’. Apthorp, in a shrewd eulogy for Dwight, summed up: ‘What he was, he was genuinely and thoroughly; fashion had no hold on him.’

3. The Boston SO to World War I.

Boston's need for a more professionalized, cosmopolitan and focussed musical community resulted in 1881 in the formation of the Boston SO. This was the brainchild of Henry Lee Higginson, a financier whose lifelong passion was music. Resolving to give Boston a ‘full-time and permanent’ orchestra that would ‘offer the best music at low prices’, Higginson created an ensemble soon regarded as peerless in the USA and comparable to the best abroad. He paid all salaries and deficits, but conferred artistic control on his conductors. Some recent accounts of his philanthropy stress the Gilded Age plutocrat rather than the cultural democrat. It is true that Higginson forbade his musicians to form a union or to play popular music on days they rehearsed or performed (a Wednesday-to-Saturday prohibition sometimes wrongly characterized as full-time); that his own musical tastes were relatively conservative; that his orchestra was a Brahmin cultural stronghold. At the same time, he reserved ‘rush seats’ for non-subscribers and began ‘popular concerts’ – the future Boston Pops.

The Boston SO offered 20 concerts and 20 public rehearsals in its first season, 26 concerts and rehearsals a season later. The first conductor, George Henschel (1881–4), was replaced by an Austrian disciplinarian, Wilhelm Gericke, whom Higginson heard in Vienna, and it was Gericke who polished and refined Boston's orchestra (1884–9). His successor, Arthur Nikisch (1889–93), was a Romantic in outlook and temperament, and less interested in precision; his interpretative liberties in Beethoven's Fifth caused a furore. The orchestra moved to Symphony Hall, its current home, in 1900. Nikisch was replaced by Emil Paur (1893–8), after which Gericke returned (1898–1906).

Boston had by 1900 fostered a vigorous school of composers, to which the Boston SO was notably receptive. John Knowles Paine, whose professorship in music at Harvard University was unprecedented in the USA, was a father figure whose two symphonies (1875, 1879) pay homage to Beethoven and Schumann; but his late opera Azara (1883–98) is Wagnerian. Of Paine's progeny, G.W. Chadwick, whose music resonates with hymns, fiddle tunes and popular song, may be considered America's first significant nationalist composer; his works were played 78 times by the Boston SO between 1881 and 1924. Other ‘Boston boys’ (Chadwick's term) included Amy Beach, Arthur Foote and Horatio Parker. The most progressive Boston composer was the German-born Charles Martin Loeffler, whose influences included the French symbolists. A true community, influential in its day, the pre-World War I Boston composers cannot be fairly described as ‘classicists’ or Germanic clones; their worth is still not recognized. At the same time, Boston's discomfort with Dvořák's ‘New World’ Symphony and ‘American’ String Quartet, rebuked by local critics and composers (1893–4) for absorbing ‘barbaric’ plantation songs and Amerindian chants, revealed a strain of élitist conservatism not evident in New York.

With the arrival of Carl Muck in 1906, the Boston SO obtained a world-class conductor who combined Gericke's efficiency with energy and power; his Boston recordings, the orchestra's first, document an interpretative personality more restrained than Nikisch's (as documented by the latter's recordings in Berlin). Muck was followed by Max Fiedler (1908–12), but thereafter returned, only to fall foul of anti-German war hysteria; interned as an enemy alien, he left the USA in 1918 vowing never to come back. The same year, Higginson relegated control of the orchestra to a group of nine citizens, incorporated as the Trustees of the Boston SO. Postwar Germanophobia insured that the orchestra would not have another German-born music director for decades to come; it also impugned the music of Chadwick and other German-trained local composers, whose works faded from the repertory.

4. Concert life after World War I.

Muck's successors, Henri Rabaud (1918–19) and Pierre Monteux (1920–24), presided over a transitional period. In 1920 more than 30 players who wished to affiliate with the Boston Musicians' Protective Association, the local union of the American Federation of Musicians, went on strike and were replaced by musicians of Monteux's choice. (The Boston SO was the last important American orchestra to join the union, in 1942.) The glamorous Sergey Koussevitzky (1924–49) influentially championed the music of Copland and such other postwar Americans as Barber, Bernstein, Hanson, Harris, Piston and Schuman. It was under Koussevitzky that the orchestra took over the Berkshire Music Festival, acquired Tanglewood and in 1940 opened the Berkshire Music Center (renamed the Tanglewood Music Center in 1985; see Tanglewood). In the meantime, in 1929 Arthur Fiedler, a member of the orchestra since 1915, organized the Esplanade Concerts as free, outdoor programmes of symphonic and light music in the band shell on the banks of the Charles River. In 1930 Fiedler succeeded Alfredo Casella as conductor of the Boston Pops, a position he held until his death in 1979. In 1980 he was succeeded by John Williams, who in turn was followed by Keith Lockhart in 1995. For the Boston SO's 50th anniversary season (1930–31) Koussevitzky commissioned Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Hindemith's Konzertmusik and works by Copland, E.B. Hill, Honegger, Prokofiev, Respighi and Roussel. Koussevitzky's successors were Charles Münch (1949–62), Erich Leinsdorf (1962–9), William Steinberg (1969–72) and Seiji Ozawa (from 1973).

5. Opera and musical theatre.

Puritan traditions slowed the development of theatre in Boston, but an anti-theatre law of 1750 did not prevent ‘readings’ of English ballad and comic operas. Over 150 ballad operas had been performed in Boston before 1800. In the late 1820s the resident opera company of New Orleans performed its French repertory in Boston, but Italian opera was not patronized by the upper classes in Boston to the extent that it was in New York. Therefore no serious attempts to promote Italian opera in Boston occurred before 1847, when an Italian company based in Havana played the first of two seasons in the Howard Anthenaeum. Travelling companies continued to visit during the next two decades, and opera in English opened at the new Boston Theatre in 1860. The Strakosch and Mapleson touring companies and others played in Boston, and a week-long Wagner festival in 1877 presented three early works and Die Walküre. The American première of HMS Pinafore was given in Boston in 1878, and in 1883 the new Metropolitan Opera company of New York began its annual visits to Boston. The Boston Ideal Opera Company (the Bostonians) was highly successful throughout America between 1879 and 1905.

In 1895–6 a season of opera, mostly light, French works sung in English by young Americans, was presented at the Castle Square Theatre by C.E. French. Charles A. Ellis, manager of the Boston SO, also presented an opera season early in 1899, with the New York SO in the pit and Walter Damrosch as both a business partner and conductor. Wagner enthusiasm peaked in Boston in the 1890s: Damrosch brought Wagner to the Boston Theatre, and B.J. Lang presented a concert version of Parsifal in 1891.

Increased public demand finally spurred the musical élite to push for Boston’s first permanent opera company. Henry Russell and the department-store magnate Eben D. Jordan, jr founded the city’s first important resident company, the Boston Opera Company. Jordan invested more than $1 million in the new Boston Opera House and guaranteed the company’s deficit for three years. The first season opened on 8 November 1909 with Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, starring Lillian Nordica in the title role. In 1914 a costly spring season in Paris resulted in bankruptcy in 1915. During the next two seasons Max Rabinoff mounted the Boston Grand Opera Company, but thereafter there were only annual tours by the Chicago Opera between 1917 and 1932 and later the San Carlo Opera. The building was demolished in 1958.

There was no important local opera production again until Boris Goldovsky established the New England Opera Theatre in 1946. Goldovsky’s former protégée Sarah Caldwell (with James Stagliano and Linda Cabot Black) formed a new company in 1958 first known as the Boston Opera Group and later as the Opera Company of Boston. It presented significant American and world premières.

In 1975 a number of the city’s smaller companies joined to form the Boston Lyric Opera, initially to provide performance opportunities for resident singers. In 1991 the Boston Opera Theater was formed by Caldwell’s associates, performing in the Colonial Theater, known for pre-Broadway trials of musicals. Peter Sellars and the conductor Craig Smith, working with locally based singers, rehearsed their bold, updated productions of Handel and Mozart in Boston.

6. Choruses.

The earliest choral singing in Boston was the first settlers’ congregational psalm singing, which continued through later times of controversy over the relative virtues of the old style and the cultivated new style promoted in the singing schools. Church and community choirs were formed throughout New England from the 1750s. The work of George K. Jackson, who in 1812 organized a concert of Handel’s music, was instrumental in broadening the musical repertory of Boston’s churches.

The Handel and Haydn Society was formed for the purpose of ‘cultivating and improving a correct taste in the performance of sacred music, and also to introduce into more general practice the works of Handel, Haydn, and other eminent composers’. It gave its first concert on 25 December 1815 and served as the prototype for similar organizations in other cities. At Christmas 1818 the society gave its first performance of the complete Messiah; on 16 February 1819 The Creation followed. The first edition of The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, anonymously edited by Lowell Mason (president of the society 1827–32), was published in 1822. Christopher Hogwood has directed the society since 1986, completing the transformation of the organization into a professional chorus accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra, expanding the group’s reputation through recordings and tours, and fostering collaborative projects with other art forms (including jazz).

Several English-style glee clubs were the ancestors of three long-lived choral societies: the Apollo Club of about 50 male voices, founded in 1871 and led by B.J. Lang; the Boylston Club, founded in 1873 as a male-voice group devoted to relatively light music and converted in 1877 into a chorus of mixed voices with a serious repertory; and the Cecilia Society, established in 1874 under Lang to perform with the orchestra of the Harvard Musical Association. In 1877 it separated from the association, and under Lang presented the Boston or American premières of 105 works. In 1889 it gave the first of more than 100 peformances with the Boston SO. Arthur Fiedler became its conductor in 1930, but the chorus declined after his departure until Donald Teeters assumed the conductorship in 1968.

The periods of greatest activity of these groups overlapped with current choral societies, many of which are affiliated with educational institutions. In 1912 A.T. Davison of the Harvard faculty took over direction of the glee club, and in 1913 he also took over the Radcliffe (College) Choral Society. In the late 1940s the Chorus Pro Musica was founded by Alfred Nash Patterson, and the New England Conservatory Chorus came under the direction of Lorna Cooke de Varon. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus was established in 1970 under John Oliver to perform with the Boston SO at Tanglewood and in Boston. Numerous other professional and amateur choral societies are currently active in Boston.

7. Other ensembles and performers.

(i) Smaller ensembles.

In 1844 the Harvard Musical Association began a series of six annual chamber music concerts that continued for five years. The public performance of chamber music acquired an important place in musical life with the founding of the Mendelssohn Quintette Club in 1849 under the leadership of Thomas Ryan. The German pianist and composer Otto Dresel (1826–90), a pupil of Hiller and Mendelssohn, settled in Boston in 1852 and was much admired for his tireless efforts on behalf of J.S. Bach, Schumann and Robert Franz. In 1858 B.J. Lang, who had been a member of the Liszt circle in Europe, returned to Boston to start an active career that included conducting the world première of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto (1875) at Music Hall, with Hans von Bülow as soloist. The Euterpe Society was founded in 1879 as a membership subscription scheme for the presentation of chamber concerts and recitals.

The stability and skills of the Boston SO provided a new kind of community artistic resource. Franz Kneisel, who became leader in 1885, founded the Kneisel Quartet, which made its reputation during its 20 years in Boston. The success of the Longy Club, established in 1900, developed a new taste for French wind music, which was later featured by the Boston Flute Players Club, founded in 1920 under the direction of Georges Laurent. In the late 19th century Boston led America in the popular Victorian custom of ‘at homes’, small-scale concerts in private residences.

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players were founded by the orchestra’s management in 1964. A large variety of chamber organizations and series have prospered in the 20th century. The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, a professional cooperative founded in 1978, is one of the few musician-run groups in the USA. Concert series of broad general interest are presented under various auspices.

The ‘early music movement’ has a long history in Boston. Interest in ‘original instruments’ dates back to well before 1905, when Arnold Dolmetsch began to make them for the Chickering company. Ruth Charlotte Dana introduced Gregorian chant at Boston’s Church of the Advent in the 1840s. On 22 January 1875 in Boston’s Mechanics Hall, the first of ‘Four Historical Concerts’ was presented by George Osgood and F. Boscowitz, featuring Josquin’s Tu pauperum refugium, madrigals by Le Jeune and Morley, J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto and other keyboard works by Bull, Byrd, Rameau and Kuhnau performed on a harpsichord provided by Chickering.

In 1938 a group of string players from the orchestra formed the Boston Society of Ancient Instruments under Alfred Zighera. Bodky’s Collegium Musicum, founded in 1942 and succeeded by the Cambridge Society for Early Music, established standards of performance nearer to those achieved today, and eventually the Boston Camerata, founded in 1954 by Narcissa Williamson and directed from 1968 by Joel Cohen, became one of the country’s best-known groups of this kind. Martin Pearlman’s Boston Baroque, founded in 1973 as Banchetto Musicale, has acquired an international reputation. The Boston Museum Trio plays period instruments from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition, first held in 1981, has continued its highly successful biennial sessions presenting early music groups and instrument makers from Boston and around the world.

Influential contemporary music groups in Boston are Collage, founded in 1972 and drawing its players from the Boston SO; Boston Musica Viva (founded 1969), which gave the premières of 72 works written for the group in its first 20 years; Dinosaur Annex (founded 1975); and the Alea III (founded 1978).

(ii) Vernacular traditions.

Popular entertainment music was an important feature of Boston musical life, although its influence has been played down. The popular English songwriter and entertainer Henry Russell lived in Boston for a while in the 1830s, and with the founding of Kendall’s Boston Brass Band in 1835 a continuous tradition of significant band activities was initiated. B.F. Keith’s ‘mother house of vaudeville’ opened in 1894 in Boston’s main entertainment district, Scollay Square (now Government Center). This mecca was in the Tin Pan Alley of Boston where Irving Berlin played in the basement of Woolworth’s. Fred Allen, who started as a juggler in a Scollay Square vaudeville house, called the amusement mecca ‘the hot foot applied to the high-button shoe’.

By 1915 many noted black musicians were active in area night clubs. In the 1920s the pianist Sid Reinherz contributed to the change in style from late rag to early stride, and Leo Reisman led a fine jazz-style big band in the Brunswick Hotel. Mal Hallett’s popular band had a distinguished membership that in 1933 included Gene Krupa and Jack Teagarden. The bandleader Vaughan Monroe began his career as a singer with the Jack Marshard ‘society orchestra’ in 1936. Other similar groups were led by Meyer Davis, Eddy Duchin and Ruby Newman.

Distinguished individual jazz musicians from the area included Serge Chaloff, Bobby Hackett and Max Kaminsky. George Wein, who began his career as a jazz pianist after leaving Boston University, became internationally known as a jazz impresario. Joan Baez began her career as a folksinger at Boston University. Gunther Schuller’s New England Ragtime Ensemble, with players from the New England Conservatory, was one of the principal participants in the rediscovery of ragtime music in the early 1970s. Joshua Rikfin, while a faculty member at Brandeis University, also arranged and produced recordings by Judy Collins, and, as a pianist, made some of the first recordings in the Scott Joplin revival. Boston continues to be a fertile ground for the development of rock music. The J. Geils Band (formed in 1967) and the band called Boston (1975) attained great popularity, and in the 1990s a new generation of musicians, producers and studio agents promoted numerous new groups, many of whom have been honoured at the SKC Boston Music Awards.

8. Theatres and concert halls.

Early public performances of music were organized in private homes, coffee houses and religious meeting houses. A law of 1750, re-enacted in 1785, prohibited theatrical entertainments of all kinds, but it was commonly circumvented by billing such events as ‘lectures’ or ‘readings’. In 1792 the New Exhibition Room was opened for ‘lectures, moral and entertaining’ with a ‘gallery of portraits, songs, feats of tumbling, and ballet pantomine’ but it was promptly closed in 1793.

Public demand brought swift change, and in 1793, the Boston Theatre, designed by Charles Bulfinch to be one of the grandest in the USA, was opened. It was often called the Federal Street Theatre, especially after the Haymarket Theatre opened in 1796, and spoken drama and ballad opera were popular on both stages. Graupner later had a concert room in the same building as his home and shop. His Philharmonic concerts took place in Pythian Hall and later the Pantheon. The Handel and Haydn Society’s early performances were given in churches such as Stone Chapel and then Boylston Hall. From 1835 to 1843 the Boston Theatre, remodelled and renamed the Odeon, was the home of the Academy of Music.

In 1827 the Tremont Theatre was built. After a fire, it was reopened as the Baptist Tremont Temple, which survives as rebuilt in the 1870s after another fire. The Lion Theatre of 1836, built for ‘dramatic and equestrian performances’, taken over in 1839 by the Handel and Haydn Society and renamed the Melodeon, was the successor to the Odeon as Boston’s leading concert hall.

In 1845 the Millerite Tabernacle was refitted as a theatre, the Howard Athenaeum, which in 1847 saw Boston’s first important season of Italian opera. It was closed in 1953, after long years of service as the Old Howard, a famous burlesque house, and was destroyed by fire in 1961. In the 1840s the Chickering firm’s showrooms were the site of such serious musical events as the Harvard Musical Association’s chamber concerts, and by the 1850s there was a Chickering Hall. Minstrel shows played at the Adelphi (opened 1847) and the Lyceum (1848). The Harvard Musical Association raised a construction fund of $100,000 for a new hall, and on 20 November 1852 they opened the 2700-seat Music Hall, which provided a new rallying point for the city’s musical life.

In 1854 the New Boston Theatre opened, and from 1860 various operas were produced there. The Continental Theatre opened in 1866 and prospered with a long run of the musical The Black Crook. In 1876 Harvard’s Memorial Hall had appended to it the 1400-seat Sanders Theatre, which became the university’s principal auditorium and was the site of the Boston SO’s Cambridge concert series for about 80 years. In 1896 the little Steinert Hall was opened by the Steinert Piano Co.

In the spring of 1893 Henry Lee Higginson said that he would discontinue maintenance of the Boston SO unless the Music Hall, endangered by planned street and subway construction, could be replaced within little more than a year. The estimated cost of $400,000 was quickly subscribed and McKim, Mead & White designed the New Boston Music Hall, later named Symphony Hall. The collaboration of Wallace C. Sabine, then a young member of the Harvard physics department, made this the first scientifically designed auditorium.

Jordan Hall (cap. 1019), built in 1908 at the New England Conservatory, is well suited to solo recitals and performances by smaller groups. In 1909 the 2700-seat Boston Opera House opened, its acoustic design also by Sabine. A theatre-building boom occurred in Boston at the opening of the 20th century; in 25 years eight new playhouses and 16 movie theatres were constructed, with most theatres featuring live orchestras. The Metropolitan Theatre, opened in 1926 as a splendid vaudeville and movie palace and later used as an opera and ballet house (sometimes called the Music Hall or the Metropolitan Center), was closed in 1982. The Hatch Memorial Shell was built in 1940 for free outdoor concerts given on the Charles River Esplanade by Arthur Fiedler and members of the Boston SO. Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened its fine 1238-seat, general-purpose Kresge Auditorium in 1955.

9. Instruments.

Before American independence almost all musical instruments used in Boston had been imported from England and later from the Continent; but by the mid-19th century Boston was exporting instruments to Europe and South America. Collections are owned by the Boston Public Library, the Boston SO, Boston University, Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts and the New England Conservatory.

The first organ in New England, probably the second in the Colonies, was installed in the home of Thomas Brattle by 1711, and the first locally built organ was left unfinished by Edward Bromfield. A contemporary report of the period 1810–15 said that only six Boston churches then had organs. Among early organ builders were William Goodrich, the firms of Hayts, Babcock & Appleton and Hook & Hastings, and John Rowe. In 1854 a successful organ business was begun by Henry L. Mason and Emmons Hamlin, with financial backing from Lowell Mason and Oliver Ditson. Its products became well known in Europe, and its profits helped to finance the manufacture of the fine Mason & Hamlin pianos, begun in 1883, which eventually outweighed the reed-organ business in importance and resulted in its sale in 1911.

In 1855 a committee of citizens raised $10,000 to build an organ in the Music Hall. Ordered from the German firm of Walcker in Ludwigsburg, the organ was finally dedicated on 2 November 1863 by John Knowles Paine, B.J. Lang and others. It was the largest organ in North America and one of the three or four largest in the world. It had fallen into disrepair by the early 1880s, however, and was eventually removed.

A spinet built by John Harris in 1769 was probably the first keyboard string instrument made in the Colonies. Benjamin Crehore, originally a cabinet maker, was building harpsichords and string instruments by 1792, and by 1797 he had begun to make pianos. Jonas Chickering made his first piano in 1823 and took out several important patents during the 1840s. The prospering Chickering company opened its new factory in 1855 as the second largest building in the country, exceeded in size only by the US Capitol. In 1927 the company moved to East Rochester, New York, as part the American Piano Company. In addition to Mason & Hamlin, several other Boston makers produced good pianos for home and school use, most of them ultimately absorbed by the Aeolian Corporation. Boston continues to support makers of fine harpsichords and other early keyboard instruments. William Dowd and Frank Hubbard, who established a joint workshop in 1949, worked independently from 1958. The Eric Herz workshop began operations in 1954. Jeremy Adams, who worked with Dowd, became an independent maker, restorer and rebuilder in 1968.

A few early 17th-century settlers are believed to have brought viols to America. Within 50 years prosperous individuals were importing string instruments; Benjamin Crehore began to make them in Boston during the 18th century. George Gemunder, who trained in Paris under Vuillaume, and his brother August opened their shop in Boston in 1847, but moved to New York in 1851. The firm of J.B. Squier, established in 1886, was later remembered principally as a manufacturer of strings.

William Callender began to make wind instruments in 1796, and others continued the trade through the 19th century, though with little distinction until William S. Haynes started his flute company in 1900. Haynes and his foreman Verne Q. Powell were influential in establishing the silver flute in the USA. Powell started his own firm in 1926 and made Boston a leading centre of flute making; in 1961 he sold it to a group of his employees. Brannen Brothers, founded in 1977, was joined in 1978 by the English flute maker Albert K. Cooper. In 1901 Cundy-Bettoney started to build woodwind instruments that were destined for the educational market, and in 1925 the firm began to produce what were said to be the first metal clarinets.

Boston became a centre of brass-instrument manufacture after the establishment of Edward Kendall’s Boston Brass Band in 1835. The firms of E.G. Wright and Graves & Co. combined about 1869 to form the Boston Musical Instrument Manufactory, known for its fine band instruments during the late 1880s. In 1884 Thompson and Odell founded the Standard Brass Instrument Co., which also made guitars and banjos; it was later taken over by the Vega company. George B. Stone started his business in percussion instruments in 1890. The Zildjian family’s cymbal business, founded in Constantinople in 1623, moved to the Boston area in 1929.

10. Education and libraries.

(i) Education.

Early settlers were concerned with musical education, and devotional singing is said to have had a place in the original curriculum at Harvard College, founded in 1636. The first published musical teaching material is the ‘admonition to the reader’, in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, and the instructive introductions to 18th-century tune books extended this practice. By 1720 the traditional ‘old way of singing’ came under attack from those who favoured musically literate ‘regular singing’, and singing schools were established. A century of Yankee tunesmiths wrote and published the psalm settings and hymns that were their teaching pieces, but early 19th-century hymnodic reformers sought to replace earlier American psalmody with ‘scientific’ European models.

Lowell Mason studied the methods of Swiss educational theorist Pestalozzi and applied them to the children’s music classes that he taught in churches and private schools. In the Boston Academy of Music he held teacher-training classes in addition to its concerts. In 1837 he introduced music to the curriculum in the Boston public schools at his own expense, and in the following year the Boston school board created the first programme of free, public-school instruction in music under his direction.

Harvard University, in Cambridge, was the first college in the USA, founded to train young men for the ministry. Its evolution into a secular university was slow, and music at first had a place there only in connection with religion. As early as 1808 there was interest enough in music among Harvard undergraduates for them to form the Pierian Sodality, whose members formed the basis of the Harvard Musical Association in 1837 (though the name was not assumed until 1840). It had no formal connection with the college but acted as a alumni advisory group, and in 1838 recommended that instruction in music be added to the curriculum. Its efforts had no effect, however, until 1862, when Harvard appointed John Knowles Paine to the post of college organist and instructor in music. In 1875 he became a full professor of music. During his long tenure (until his death in 1906), Paine taught many important composers and music historians during the height of the ‘Second New England School’ of composers. Walter Piston taught several generations of composers at Harvard until his retirement in 1960.

The Perkins Institute and Massachusetts School for the Blind (founded in 1832) added music to its programme in 1833, with Mason as teacher. Two new music schools opened in February 1867: the Boston Conservatory (founded under the direction of violinist and composer Julius Eichberg) and the New England Conservatory (founded by Eben Tourjée). The College of Music at Boston University was founded by Tourjée in 1872. In 1916 Georges Longy opened the school bearing his name, to offer instruction in solfege and theoretical subjects as taught in France. Schoenberg taught for one year at the Malkin Conservatory, which functioned from 1933 to 1954. The Berklee College of Music was founded by Lawrence Berk in 1945 to train professional musicians for work in jazz and other non-classical traditions. Among its graduates are Keith Jarrett, Quincy Jones and Branford Marsalis.

There are many other institutions of higher education in which music has an important place, including Brandies University (in nearby Waltham, founded in 1948 as the only non-religious Jewish-sponsored university in the USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Tufts University and Wellesley College.

There is a long-standing tradition of community music schools in the Boston area. The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts is a highly valued institution in the black community, and earlier music schools were maintained by the city’s Italian, Jewish and Lithuanian communities.

(ii) Libraries.

The principal music libraries in Boston proper are the collection (begun in 1859) at the Boston Public Library, whose enormous archival value can hardly be assessed from the admirable published catalogues (of 1910 and 1972), and those at Boston University, the Harvard Musical Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Boston Athenaeum. In Cambridge, Harvard’s holdings are principally in the Houghton Library, the Isham Memorial Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. Wellesley College also has a fine music library. At some distance from the city but of great importance for their collections of Americana are the Essex Institute in Salem and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. A librarians’ informal discussion group that first met in 1974 became a productive consortium of 16 institutions called Boston Area Music Libraries, which in 1983 issued the monumental publication The Boston Composers Project.

11. Writers on music.

The first book-length work of general musical literature published in the USA was probably John Rowe Parker’s A Musical Biography or Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Eminent Musical Characters, Interspersed with an Epitome of Interesting Musical Matter (Boston, 1824). His The Euterpiad, or Musical Intelligencer (1820–23) was the city’s first musical periodical. Dwight’s Journal of Music (1852–81) covered local, national and international musical issues. Dwight and other early 19th-century Boston-based writers promoted abstract instrumental music’s elevation from mere entertainment to a vehicle of moral enrichment and led America in establishing high-art idealism and the classical canon.

The Ditson firm, which published Dwight’s Journal from 1868 and then several lesser journals, also published important books. Near the end of the 19th century L.C. Page began to publish some handsome editions of books by the Elsons, Lahee and Rupert Hughes. From 1872 Boston’s first woman journalist to write on musical issues, Sallie White, regularly reported in the Boston Post.

William Foster Apthorp, who began publishing musical criticism in the Atlantic Monthly in 1872, became the programme annotator for the Boston SO in 1892, an influential position in forming public opinion. His successors have included Philip Hale, John N. Burk, Michael Steinberg and Steven Ledbetter. Among the Boston newspaper critics were Olin Downes, H.T. Parker and Richard Dyer. Recent scholars at Harvard, Boston University, Wellesley College and Brandeis have made important contributions to music scholarship, while William Schwann began publishing his authoritative catalogues of recordings in 1949.

(2) Katharina Louise Bott

12. Printing and publishing.

The first music known to have been printed and published in North America appeared in the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book (Boston, 1698), in which 13 tunes are printed from woodblocks. The next appeared in two instruction books, one by John Tufts (1721 or earlier), the other by Thomas Walter (also 1721), which was probably the first North American music printed from engraved metal plates. Two collections by Josiah Flagg (1764 and 1766) and at least part of William Billings’s The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770) were engraved by Paul Revere. The first American set of type for printing music was cast in Boston by William (or possibly John) Norman, first used in the Boston Magazine in 1783.

Between 1798 and 1804 P.A. von Hagen (father and son) issued about 100 publications. Graupner was Boston’s principal music publisher for about 25 years, beginning in 1802. The Handel and Haydn Society, which he helped form, paid him five cents per page, then a considerable sum, for the music of Haydn’s The Creation. James Hewitt published in Boston from about 1812 to 1817. There were many other firms, and Ditson expanded and absorbed dozens before being absorbed itself by Theodore Presser in 1931.

In 1876 Arthur P. Schmidt founded a new firm that energetically published works by many American composers, including Beach, Bird, Chadwick, Foote, Hadley, MacDowell, Paine and others. The Schmidt catalogue is now owned by Summy-Birchard. Cundy-Bettoney, dating back to 1868 and specializing in wind music, is now part of Carl Fischer; the Wa-Wan Press, founded in 1901 by Arthur Farwell, was acquired by G. Schirmer in 1912. Specialist publishers include the firm of Robert King (established 1940), which was devoted to brass music until its expansion in 1982. Two remaining older firms are the Boston Music Company (founded 1885) and E.C. Schirmer (founded 1921), which is especially strong in choral music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Hood: A History of Music in New England (Boston, 1846/R)

The Great Organ in the Boston Music Hall, being a Brief History of the Enterprise (Boston, 1865)

J.S. Dwight: ‘Music in Boston’, The Memorial History of Boston, ed. J. Winsor, iv (Boston, 1881–3), 415–64

C.C. Perkins and others: History of the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, 1883/R)

M.A. de W. Howe: The Boston Symphony Orchestra: an Historical Sketch (Boston,1914, enlarged 2/1931/R with J.N. Burk as The Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881–1931)

W.A. Fisher: Notes on Music in Old Boston (Boston, 1918/R)

J.H. Railey: The New England Conservatory of Music, 1867–1927 (Boston,1927)

W.R. Spaulding: Music at Harvard: a Historial Review of Men and Events (New York, 1935/R)

C.M. Ayars: Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston, 1640 to 1936 (New York, 1937/R)

A. Foote: ‘A Bostonian Remembers’, MQ, xxiii (1937), 37–44

H.C. McCusker: Fifty Years of Music in Boston, Based on Hitherto Unpublished Letters in the Boston Public Library (Boston, 1938)

H.W. Foote: ‘Musical Life in Boston in the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, new ser., xlix (1939), 293–313

H.E. Johnson: ‘Early New England Periodicals Devoted to Music’,MQ, xxvi (1940), 153–61

H.E. Johnson: Musical Interludes in Boston 1795–1830 (New York,1943/R)

L. Burkat: ‘Music in the Berkshires’, Tempo, no.5 (1947), 18–21

L. Burkat: ‘Current Chronicle United States: Boston’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 249–52

H.E. Johnson: Symphony Hall, Boston (Boston, 1950/R)

L. Burkat: ‘Boston Symphony Orchestra’, ReM, no.212 (1952), 43–6

J.W. Thompson: Music and Musical Activities in New England, 1800–1838 (diss., Peabody College for Teachers, 1962)

Q. Eaton: The Boston Opera Company (New York, 1965/R)

H.E. Johnson: Hallelujah, Amen: the Story of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (Boston, 1965/R)

B. Owen: The Organs and Music of King’s Chapel, 1713–1964 (Boston, 1966)

P.E. Paige: Musical Organizations in Boston, 1830–1850 (diss., Boston U., 1967)

C.R. Nutter: History of the Harvard Musical Association, 1837–1962 (Boston, 1968)

H.E. Dickson: ‘Gentlemen, More Dolce Please!’: an Irreverent Memoir of Thirty Years in the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston, 1969)

Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection (Boston, 1972–) [pubn of Boston Public Library]

L.J. Clarke: Music in Trinity Church, Boston, 1890–1900: a Case Study in the Relationship between Worship and Culture (diss., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1973)

B.D. Wilson: A Documentary History of Music in the Public Schools of the City of Boston, 1830–1850 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1973)

J. Baker-Carr: Evening at Symphony: a Portrait of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston, 1977)

L. Snyder: Community of Sound: Boston Symphony and its World of Players (Boston, 1979)

B. Owen: The Organ in New England (Raleigh, NC, 1980)

D.A. Wood: Music in Harvard Libraries: a Catalogue of Early Printed Music and Books on Music in the Houghton Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library (Cambridge, MA, 1980)

B. Lambert, ed.: Music in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1820 (Boston, 1980–85)

P. DiMaggio: ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston’, Media, Culture and Society, iv (1982), 33–50, 303–22

The Boston Composers Project: a Bibliography of Contemporary Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983)

S. Ledbetter: 100 Years of the Boston Pops (Boston, 1985)

D. McKay: ‘Opera in Colonial Boston’, American Music, iii/2 (1985), 133–42

A.W. Hepner: Pro bonum artium musicarum: the Harvard Musical Association, 1837–1987 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1987)

O.F. Saloman: ‘Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841–46’, American Music, vi (1988), 428–41

D. Whitwell: The Longy Club: a Professional Wind Ensemble in Boston (1900–1917) (Northridge, CA, 1988)

M. Broyles: ‘Music of the Highest Class’: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, CT, 1992)

J. Wright: ‘Black Women in Classical Music in Boston during the Late Nineteenth Century: Profiles in Leadership’, New Perspectives in Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J. Wright and S.A. Floyd (Warren, MI, 1992), 373–408

P. Fox: ‘Rebellious Tradition and Boston’s Musical Spirit of Place: Elitism, Populism, and Lives Apart’, MQ, lxxx (1994), 220–45

B. McPherson and J. Klein: ‘Measure by Measure: a History of New England Conservatory from 1867 (Boston, 1995)

Boston (ii)

(Fr. valse Boston).

A slow ballroom dance related to the waltz. It originated in the USA during the 1870s and quickly spread to England, but did not become popular on the Continent until after 1900. It was the first modern ballroom dance requiring the feet to be kept pointing straight forward rather than turned out and to be done mostly with the feet flat on the floor rather than on the toes. In its period of greatest international popularity the Boston was danced with the hands on the partners’ hips, the man’s feet outside the woman’s, and using fewer swirling motions across the floor than the waltz. Unlike the waltz (with three steps to a bar) or the valse à deux temps (with two steps to a bar in a minim-crotchet rhythm), the Boston’s steps were of equal duration, three in two bars, accompanied by a hemiola ostinato; the tempo was about 44 bars per minute. After World War I the Boston regained popularity, particularly in Germany as the ‘English waltz’ with sentimental melodies, and as a ‘hesitation’ waltz with frequent suppressions of beats or whole bars in the accompaniment. The Boston was used in several concert pieces, including Hindemith’s Suite 1922, Schulhoff’s Esquisses de jazz (1927) and Conrad Beck’s Zwei Tanzstücke (1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Silvester and P.J.S. Richardson: The Art of the Ballroom (London, 1936)

Boston Musical Instrument Manufactory.

American firm of band instrument makers. It was formed in the late 1860s when a group of brass instrument makers working at 71 Sudbury Street, Boston, combined their skills and resources. The original group included George M. Graves, William E. Graves, E.G. Wright, Henry Esbach, Louis F. Hartman and William G. Reed. All were partners and workmen in the firms of E.G. Wright and Graves & Co. A case of musical instruments exhibited in September and October 1869 at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association fair won the new company a silver medal. It became a leading producer of band instruments, notably ‘three star’ cornets and trumpets during the late 1880s. The company made instruments for several of the leading band soloists as well as for hundreds of community bands across the country. It was reincorporated in 1913 as the Boston Musical Instrument Company and was sold to Cundy Bettoney in 1919. Instruments by this firm are found in most American collections, notably the John H. Elrod Memorial Collection, Germantown, Maryland; the Janssen Collection, Claremont, California; America’s Shrine to Music Museum, University of South Dakota; and the Essig Collection, Warrensburg, Missouri.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

C.M. Ayars: Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston, 1640 to 1936 (New York, 1937/R)

ROBERT E. ELIASON

Bostridge, Ian (Charles)

(b London, 25 Dec 1964). English tenor. He read history and philosophy at both Oxford and Cambridge (and later published a work on witchcraft in the 18th century) before he embarked on singing studies with various teachers, at the Britten-Pears School at Aldeburgh, and finally with Fischer-Dieskau. Bostridge made his recital début at the Wigmore Hall in London in 1993, and his opera début at Covent Garden as the Fourth Jew in Salome (1995). He sang a much acclaimed Peter Quint with the Royal Opera at the Barbican Theatre in 1997, made his ENO début, as Tamino, in 1996, and returned to the Royal Opera as Vašek (The Bartered Bride) in 1998. He was also much praised for his Hylas in concert performances of Les Troyens, under Sir Colin Davis, in London (1993). In recital he has become a leading exponent of lieder (in particular Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise) and of the songs of Britten, and is also a penetrating interpreter of the Evangelist in both Bach Passions. His recordings include Sellem and Tom Rakewell in different sets of The Rake’s Progress, Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise (in a film made for television), Dichterliebe and Britten’s Serenade. All disclose his peculiarly attractive, silvery tenor and his innate gift for pointing every facet of a text.

ALAN BLYTH

Bosworth.

Firm of music publishers. The company was founded in 1889 in Leipzig by an Englishman, Arthur Edwin Bosworth (1858–1923), assisted initially by Thomas Chappell and Carl Kratochwill. The aim was to protect the copyrights of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in Austria, since at that time there was no copyright agreement between Britain and Austria. Zeller's operetta Der Vogelhändler was published in 1891 and was the most successful individual work published by the firm. Bosworth opened branches in London (1892), Paris (1896), Zürich (1908) and Brussels (1914); the latter survived until 1955 and published works by Belgian composers such as Joseph and Léon Jongen, Vreuls and Absil. His most far-reaching achievement was founding a publishing house in Vienna (1902) and acquiring the Austrian music publishers Kratochwill and Chmél. By doing so he obtained important copyrights, including Lehár's Gold und Silber waltz. Bosworth’s sons, Laurence Owen Bosworth (1886–1952) and Arthur Ferdinand Bosworth (1893–1959), succeeded him when he died. By World War II several more German and Austrian catalogues had been acquired, most importantly that of Roehr of Berlin. Meanwhile, in England, Bosworth’s publications of Beringer’s piano tutor, Ševčik’s violin method and many of Moszkowski’s works were having great success, and the British Empire rights to the Steingräber catalogue and the Catholic church music catalogue of Joseph Laudy & Co. were acquired. International success was achieved with the publication of Albert Ketèlbey’s works. After the Leipzig premises were destroyed in the war, a new German firm was established in Cologne because of the difficulties in operating a business in the Russian sector of Germany. Since then the firm has published more choral and educational music. Curt Gräfe took over after the Bosworth brothers died and was followed by Fritz Hartmann between 1961 and 1968. Reimar Segebrecht became director in 1969. The Cologne, London and Vienna branches maintained independent publishing programmes until 1996 when the Vienna branch closed. In February 1998 Bosworth became part of the Music Sales group.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘The House of Bosworth’, London Musical Courier, xxxvi/18 (1913), 236–7

E. Schwager and A. Beck: Bosworth 1889–1989: ein internationaler Musikverlag im Spiegel des Zeitgeschehens (Cologne, 1989)

ALAN POPE/R

Bote & Bock.

German firm of music publishers. It was founded in Berlin on 1 February 1838 when Eduard Bote and Gustav Bock (b Berlin, 2 March 1813; d Berlin, 27 April 1863) purchased C.W. Froehlich & Co. The Berlin firms of Moritz Westphal and Thomas Brandenburg were acquired in 1840 and 1845 respectively. In 1847 Eduard Bote withdrew from the business. From 1863 to 1871 Bock’s brother Emil Bock (b Berlin, 17 March 1816; d Berlin, 1 April 1871) directed the firm, followed by Gustav’s son Hugo Bock (b Berlin, 25 July 1848; d Berlin, 12 March 1932), who acquired the publishing firm of Lauterbach & Kuhn in Leipzig in 1908. He was supported by his sons Gustav Bock (b Berlin, 17 July 1882; d Wiesbaden, 6 July 1953) from 1908 and Anton Bock (b Berlin, 7 Nov 1884; d Hildesheim, 28 Jan 1945) from 1911. The publishing house was completely destroyed in 1943, then under the direction of one of Hugo Bock’s grandsons, Kurt Radecke (b Freiburg, 7 July 1901; d Berlin, 16 June 1966). The firm was a family limited partnership, and from 1966 was under the management of Dieter Langheld (b Darmstadt, 2 May 1911; d Berlin, 3 March 1998) and Kurt Radecke’s son, Hans-Jürgen Radecke (b Berlin, 25 Aug 1932); in 1948 a subsidiary in Wiesbaden was established. In 1996 Bote & Bock was acquired by Boosey & Hawkes; the combined business now operates under the name of Boosey & Hawkes – Bote & Bock GmbH & Co.

Under Gustav Bock the publishing firm began by issuing light music and salon music of Berlin (e.g. Gustav Lange and August Conradi), as well as inexpensive new editions of works by classical composers. In the second half of the 19th century it became the leading firm in northern Germany for opera publication (e.g. Gounod’s Faust, entitled Margarethe, Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine and operas by Flotow, Brüll, Mascagni, Kienzl and Smetana). It also acquired the rights to all Offenbach’s operettas and Johann Strauss’s Waldmeister. Through the purchase of Lauterbach & Kuhn much of Reger’s work became the property of Bote & Bock. Besides further operas (e.g. d’Albert’s Die toten Augen and Tiefland and Respighi’s La campana sommersa) the firm also published important instrumental works by Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Dvořák, Paderewski, Mahler and Richard Strauss (Symphonia domestica).

After 1945 the firm continued to publish editions of early music (C.P.E. Bach, Caldara and Alessandro Scarlatti), but much of Boris Blacher’s work was acquired and the firm now concentrates mainly on new music (Wagner-Régeny, Klebe, Gottfried von Einem, Paul Dessau, Kelterborn, Yun, Nabokov, M.C. Redel, Glanert, Oehring and F.M. Beyer).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DeutschMPN

Vollständiges Verzeichnis der im Verlage Ed. Bote & G. Bock während des 75-jährigen Bestehens erschienenen Musikalien (Berlin, 1914, suppl. 1921)

Musikverlag Bote & Bock, Berlin 1838–1938 (Berlin, 1938)

H. Kunz: 125 Jahre Bote & Bock (Berlin, 1963)

Musikverlage in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in West-Berlin (Bonn, 1965)

H.-M. Plesske: ‘Bibliographie des Schrifttums zur Geschichte deutscher und österreichischer Musikverlage’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, iii (1968), 135–222

150 Jahre Bote & Bock, Musikverlag und Musikalienhandlung in Berlin, 1838–1988 (Berlin, 1988)

RUDOLF ELVERS

Boteler, Charlotte.

See Butler, charlotte.

Botelero, Enrrique.

See Butler, henry.

Bothy ballad [bothy song].

A type of folksong originating in, or concerned with life in, Scottish farm bothies (the living quarters of unmarried male farmhands during the 19th and early 20th centuries). Bothy workers themselves frequently classed any folksong as a bothy ballad. See Scotland, §II, 5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Greig: Folk Song of the North-East (Peterhead, 1909–14/R)

H. Henderson: ‘Scottish Tradition, i: Bothy Ballads, Music from the North-East’, TNGM 109 [disc notes]

P.A. Hall: ‘The Language of the Bothy Ballad’, Aspects of Language and Signification: Sheffield 1981, ed. S. Lander and K. Reah (Sheffield, 1986), 29–38

Botkin, Vasily Petrovich

(b Moscow, 27 Dec 1811/8 Jan 1812; d St Petersburg, 10/22 Oct 1869). Russian writer and critic. He is sometimes known under his pseudonym, Vasily Fortep'yanov. His brother Sergey Petrovich (1832–89) was a distinguished chemist and a pioneer in Russian medicine. Vasily was the oldest son of a family of tea merchants, and for some time directed the firm. However, when still in his 20s he wrote articles on music for journals and newspapers, including Teleskop and Moskovskiy nablyudatel'. As a widely travelled and cultured man he made substantial contributions throughout his life to important learned journals. He made a detailed study of aspects of Shakespeare’s plays and also published papers on German and Russian literature. In December 1839 an article by him on Italian and German music (‘Ital'yanskaya i germanskaya muzïka’) appeared in Otechestvennïye zapiski, and in 1848 and 1849 he published an account of Italian opera in St Petersburg, Sanktpeterburgskaya ital'yanskaya opera v techeniye dekabrya 1848 i yanvarya 1849; both articles are included in V.P. Botkin, Literaturnaya kritika, publitsistika, pis'ma, ed. B.F. Yegorov (Moscow, 1984). Further articles on Italian opera appeared in the journal Sovremennik, ‘Ital'yanskaya opera’ (no.1, 1850) and ‘Ital'yanskaya opera v Peterburge v 1849’ (no.2, 1850). Botkin was actively associated with the Zapadniki, or Westernizers, the group of Russian writers and intellectuals which included Granovsky, Belinsky, Herzen, Stankevich and Botkin’s close friend Turgenev, and which opposed the policies of Nicholas I, holding the view, in contradistinction to the Slavophiles, that Russia should attempt to absorb what it could from western European culture and should adopt progressive European ideas in all spheres of life. It followed that Botkin tended to concentrate his writings almost exclusively on the literature and music of the West. A three-volume collected edition of his works (Stat'i o muzïke) was published in St Petersburg (1890–93).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.B. Bernandt and I.M. Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke [Writers on music], i (Moscow, 1971) [incl. complete list of writings]

D. Offord: Portraits of Early Russian Liberals (Cambridge, 1985), 79–105

GEOFFREY NORRIS

Botoler, Charlotte.

See Butler, charlotte.

Botstein, Leon

(b Zürich, 14 Dec 1946). American conductor and music historian. He moved to New York with his family in 1949 and subsequently attended the University of Chicago and Harvard University, studying the violin with Roman Totenberg and conducting with Richard Wernick and Harold Farberman. In 1975 he was appointed president of Bard College, where he holds the Leon Levy Professorship of the Humanities. Named music director of the American SO in 1992, Botstein has restored the ensemble to prominence through thematic concerts, performances of rare repertory and innovative educational programmes. He became music director of the American Russian Youth Orchestra in 1995, and has appeared extensively as a guest conductor in Europe, Asia and South America. In 1990 he founded the Bard Music Festival, which has presented pairs of weekends focussing on Brahms, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Schumann, Dvořák, Bartók, Ives, Haydn and Tchaikovsky, with accompanying volumes of essays devoted to each composer. Sceptical of inherited performing traditions, Botstein is most at home in late 19th-century repertory, but is also firmly committed to the music of living composers. His recordings include such 19th-century rarities as Bruch’s Odysseus and Joachim’s Violin Concerto, as well as music by contemporary American composers. In 1992 he was appointed editor of The Musical Quarterly. Many of his writings place music in a larger cultural context, often revealing links with intellectual history as well as other arts such as painting and architecture.

WRITINGS

Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der deutschen und österreichischen Kultur 1848–1938 (Vienna, 1991)

Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (New York, 1997)

ed.: The Compleat Brahms (New York, 1998)

RICHARD WILSON

Botstiber, Hugo

(b Vienna, 21 April 1875; d Shrewsbury, 15 Jan 1942). Austrian writer on music and administrator. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Robert Fuchs and subsequently had private lessons from Zemlinsky. At the same time he attended Adler’s musicology course at Vienna University and graduated with a dissertation on the organ and keyboard works of Pachelbel. In 1896 he was appointed assistant to Mandyczewski in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Four years later he was made secretary of the newly founded Wiener Konzertverein in which post he contributed greatly to making its orchestra the second most important in Vienna and to encouraging its modern orientation. From 1904 to 1911 he was editor of the Musikbuch aus Österreich. In 1905 he became administrative director of the conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. From 1913 to 1938 Botstiber was the general secretary of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, which took its name from its headquarters in the Konzerthaus. With his talent as an organizer he succeeded in raising the new institution to a level at which it was able to compete with the century-old Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in promoting first-rate concerts. In 1938 he was forced by the political upheaval in Austria to emigrate to England. Besides his administrative work Botstiber was active as a writer on music.

WRITINGS

with F. Artaria: Joseph Haydn und das Verlagshaus Artaria (Vienna, 1909)

Geschichte der Ouvertüre und der freien Orchesterformen (Leipzig, 1913/R)

Beethoven im Alltag: ein Beitrag zur Jahrhundertfeier (Vienna, 1927)

Joseph Haydn, iii (Berlin, 1927) [completion of C.F. Pohl’s biography]

ed.: Sinfonie und Suite: von Berlioz bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 7/1932) [rev. and completion of A.F.H. Kretzschmar: Führer durch den Konzertsaal, ii (Leipzig, 1887)]

EDITIONS

with M. Seiffert: Johann Pachelbel: 94 Kompositionen: zumeist Fugen über das Magnificat für Orgel oder Klavier, DTÖ, xvii, Jg.viii/2 (Vienna, 1901/R)

Wiener Klavier- und Orgelwerke aus der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, DTÖ, xxvii, Jg.xiii/2 (Vienna, 1906/R)

Josef Strauss: Drei Walzer, DTÖ, lxxiv, Jg.xxviii/2 (Vienna, 1931/R)

MOSCO CARNER

Botswana, Republic of.

Country in southern Africa. It has an area of 581,730 km² and a population of 1·62 million (2000 estimate). Its main inhabitants are the Tswana who are related to the Sotho of Lesotho and the Pedi of South Africa. Other peoples in Botswana include the Kalanga peoples of the north, who are related to the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe and the Khoisan of the Kalahari desert, who were formerly called ‘Bushmen’ (and many of whom still prefer to be so-called) and later referred to as ‘San’, a term that is now considered by some to be even more derogatory. Variations in the terrain, climate and vegetation have tended to mould and modify the tribal styles of music-making to suit both the environment and the temperament of local peoples. Vegetation further restricts the construction of instruments to those types for which the raw materials can be found locally, so that drums are generally found in forest areas, flutes where there are reeds and unaccompanied choral singing in open grass plains. These types of music-making are all found in Botswana.

1. Tswana musical traditions.

Among the Tswana, golletsa is the term applied to the production of sound by playing an instrument with the hands or mouth. Varieties of musical bow are the most common instruments. The kwadi or losiba is the Tswana successor of the Gora, which was a stringed wind instrument of the Khoikhoi (Hottentots). Like the lesiba of Lesotho, this instrument consists of a shaft of hollow river reed about 1 metre long. A string made from sinew or wire is secured to a strip of quill attached to the stave at one end and to a small tuning peg at the other. The instrument is played mainly by males, both young and old, and is often carried by travellers and herdboys. The sekokwane is a bow of solid wood without an attached resonator: it is fitted with a wire string, traditionally of either sinew or hair from a cow's tail, which is struck with a reed. An empty milk sack of dried skin or a wooden vessel is used as a temporary resonator. Other musical bows include the letlhaka, made from a river reed, and the lekope. Both are played by women and employ harmonics that resonate within the player's mouth cavity. The segankuru (segaba in some districts) is made from a stout piece of wood, approximately 1 metre long, with a trough hollowed out of it nearly all the way along its uppermost surface (fig.1). It has a wire string attached to a tuning peg and is played with a very small bow strung with animal hair, nowadays often from the tail of a cow. A resinous tree gum is applied to the bow to help grip the string. The segankuru exists in various forms, and it normally uses a 5-litre can placed over the upper end as a resonator, but a version using the mouth as a resonator has also been observed.

The Tswana are famous for their stopped-flute ensembles (similar to those of the Khoikhoi). Approximately 13 ditlhaka (dithlaka) (flutes) make up the ensemble (fig.2). In the 1970s the flutes were preferably made of unjointed lengths of metal tubing. Each flute yields a single pitch, and they are played in hocket fashion. The mothlabi, the teacher and tuner of the ensemble, conducts the ensemble on ceremonial occasions. Only men play the flutes, dancing while they play; this activity is called gobina ditlhaka (‘to dance to the flutes’).

Women may beat drums, clap hands and occasionally utter megolokwane (ululations) to encourage the players. Meropa (plural of moropa) are single-headed conical wooden drums with their heads pegged in position; women beat them with their hands on ceremonial occasions. Matlho (Mathlo) dancing rattles made from cocoons filled with small stones or seeds and threaded on a thong, are wound round the ankles of the dancers. Mapapata (animal horns) are essentially ceremonial instruments and are used as signal trumpets, while diburuburu (bullroarers) are now merely children's toys. The setinkane, a lamellophone resembling the Shona mbira, was introduced into Botswana from countries further north. It normally resonates by resting on a small tin can or other hollow vessel.

Known collectively as gobina, singing and dancing are regarded as virtually synonymous. The songs are composed by ordinary people, as well as by professional songmakers, and deal with topical subjects. They include rain songs, circumcision songs and triumph songs known as dikoma. The social function of local songs is to amuse, praise and maintain group loyalties. Tswana vocal music is primarily pentatonic, whether or not it has instrumental accompaniment. Tswana is a tonal language, therefore the melodic line of the song is flexible, being largely controlled by the requirements of semantic tone.

Traditional Tswana praise-poetry is often called ‘praise-singing’. This is misleading, since unlike the pina (song), the leboko (praise-poem) is not sung in the ordinary way. On important ceremonial occasions, the praise-poet displays his oratory by delivering his poetry in a high-pitched voice and with very rapid articulation. Thus the boundary between song and oral literature is blurred, and its study calls for cooperation between linguists and ethnomusicologists.

2. Khoisan musical traditions.

The Khoisan speaking ‘Bushmen’ (or San) live in the Kalahari region of southern Africa, comprising most of Botswana, a large part of Namibia and extending into southern Angola and northern areas of South Africa. It is estimated that there are more than 55,000 Khoisan speakers altogether, and possibly as many as 70,000. Their short stature and similarities in their life style have led people to compare their music to the Central African ‘pygmies’. Until recently, they maintained their own culture as hunter-gatherers, living in small groups of 30–50 people related either directly or by marriage. The group existed without a leader, and close cooperation among its members was vital. They were nomadic when it was necessary to follow game, often travelling long distances and setting up temporary camps along the way. More recently, large areas of land have been fenced off for cattle grazing, preventing natural game migration. As a result, the Bushmen have been forced to settle and become farmers, a way of life that does not come easily to them.

The music of the Khoisan developed along different lines from that of the Tswana and other neighbouring peoples, with the exception of the Nama ‘Hottentots’ to whom they are closely related. However, there are many instruments and musical styles adopted by the Khoisan from these peoples, and the reverse is also true. Vocal music is most important, and it is a vital part of an event central to their lives, the Healing Dance, at which 50–70 people may be present (fig.3). On such occasions women sing, accompanied by their own clapping and the sound of leg rattles worn by men who dance in a circle around them. The singing is highly polyphonic, involving the use of head tones (yodel effects), wide intervals and interweaving of melodic lines. Here, as in their traditional existence, cooperation is necessary. Some of the dancers eventually achieve a state of trance, and in this condition, according to Khoisan beliefs, they are able to perform acts of healing by laying their hands on people to draw out the cause of suffering. The same songs are sung on quite different and more casual occasions, for instance as a lullaby or during work. Much of their instrumental music is also based on the healing song melodies.

The mouth bow (g!oma or goma, n!ao or nao etc.) has been used possibly for as long as the Khoisan have used bows as hunting weapons (see Musical bow). Wire is nearly always substituted for the gut string of the hunting bow, perhaps because it produces a more distinct tone. One end of the bow is held against the player's mouth, while tapping the string with a light stick. The two sounds produced are a low-pitched fundamental note from the string and a range of harmonics resonated within the player’s mouth cavity. A common practice is to tie a piece of cord around the bow-stave and the string, dividing it into two slightly unequal sections, thus producing two fundamentals, and two sets of harmonics normally three semitones apart. They have a variety of instruments that use the bow as a basis; some of these use resonators other than the mouth, such as metal, wooden or plastic vessels.

Another instrument associated with the Khoisan over a long period of time is the kwashi (//kwashi) or joma (zhoma), a pluriarc. The resonator originally consisted of a hollowed-out log, perhaps 40 cm long, with four or more bow-like extensions protruding from holes in one end. Gut strings ran between the ends of these extensions and the far end of the log, and were plucked with the thumbs and fingers. In contemporary Botswana, the wooden body is replaced by a 5-litre can and the strings are wire. The instrument is normally used to accompany solo songs about a variety of everyday matters.

The lamellophone became popular among the Khoisan in the 1950s, when it was introduced via greater contact with the Tswana and other neighbouring peoples. The Khoisan dongo is frequently used to imitate Healing Songs. It can be used either as a solo instrument or to accompany one or two voices. Other instruments adopted in a similar way are the segankuru and drums similar to those found in the north of the country. Guitars are increasingly common and are played in the style of popular music common throughout southern Africa, as well as used to play traditional melodies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

P.R. Kirby: ‘The Gora and its Bantu Successors: a Study in South African Native Music’, Bantu Studies, v (1931), 89–69

P.R. Kirby: ‘The Recognition and Practical Use of the Harmonics of Stretched Strings by the Bantu of South Africa’, Bantu Studies, vi (1932), 31–46

P.R. Kirby: The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (London, 1934, 2/1965)

P.R. Kirby: ‘A Study of Bushman Music’, Bantu Studies, x (1936), 205–52

P.R. Kirby: ‘Musical Practices of the /?Auni and K/omani Bushmen’, Bantu Studies, x (1936), 373–432

P.R. Kirby: ‘The Musical Practices of the Native Races of South Africa’, The Bantu-Speaking Tribes of South Africa, ed. I. Schapera (London, 1937, rev. 2/1974 by W.D. Hammond-Tooke), 271–89

C. Ballantine: ‘The Polyrhythmic Foundation of Tswana Pipe Melody’, AfM, iii/4 (1965), 52–68

N. England: ‘Bushman Counterpoint’, JIFMC, xix (1967), 58–66

L. Marshall: ‘The Medicine Dance of the !Kung Bushmen’, Africa, xxxix (1969), 347–81

E. Wood: ‘The Use of Metaphor and Certain Scale Patterns in Traditional Music of Botswana’, AfM, vi/3 (1983), 107–14

J.S. Brearley: ‘A Musical Tour of Botswana’, Botswana Notes and Records, xvi (1984), 45–57

E. Wood: ‘Traditional Music in Botswana’, BPM, xiii (1985), 13–30

Å. Norborg: A Handbook of Musical and Other Sound Producing Instruments from Namibia and Botswana (Stockholm, 1987)

J.S. Brearley: ‘Music and Musicians of the Kalahari’, Botswana Notes and Records, xx (1988), 77–90

N.M. England: Music among the Zu'/’wa-si and Related Peoples of Namibia, Botswana, and Angola (New York, 1995) [incl. companion disc]

J.S. Brearley: ‘The Segankuru: a “Bush Fiddle” or a Bowed Bow?’, Botswana Notes and Records, xxviii (1996), 121–44

recordings

Botswana: Tswana/Ngwaketse, coll. H. Tracey, International Library of African Music AMA TR 108, Series: Sound of Africa

Bushman Music and Pygmy Music/Musique Bochiman et Musique Pygmee, Musée de l'Homme Collection LD9 (1956) [incl. notes by Y. Grimaud]

Healing Dance Music of the Kalahari San, Ethnic Folkways Records FE 4316 (1968, 2/1982)

Instrumental Music of the Kalahari San, Ethnic Folkways Records FE 4315 (1982)

Traditional Music of Botswana, Africa, Ethnic Folkways Records FE 4371 (1983, 2/1993)

Music of the Kalahari, rec. J. Brearley, cassette K1

Kalahari 2, rec. J. Brearley, cassette K2

‘Tsisi ka Noomga’/Songs for Healing, KCD 004

FELICIA M. MUNDELL/JOHN BREARLEY

Bott.

German family of musicians.

(1) Anton Bott

(3) Jean Joseph Bott

SERGIO MARTINOTTI/CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bott

(1) Anton Bott

(b Gross-Steinheim, nr Mainz, 24 Dec 1795; d Kassel, 19 Dec 1869). He was the younger brother of Johann Joseph Bott, a musician in the Darmstadt Kapelle who wrote many dances and variations, mostly for guitar. Anton trained as a military musician and became a friend of Spohr, through him obtaining a position as oboist in a regimental band at Kassel. He was also an unpaid violinist in the Kassel Kapelle. From 1854 he supported himself solely as a music teacher. Among his compositions are 6 caprices pour le violon seul d’après la manière de jouer de Paganini (Leipzig, 1834).

Bott

(2) Katharina Louise Bott

(b Darmstadt, 1824; d after 1881). Pianist, niece of (1) Anton Bott and daughter of Johann Joseph Bott. She studied with her father and made her first public appearance in Darmstadt at the age of nine. She performed in the Netherlands (1835), London (1838) and later in New York, where she eventually settled and was still teaching the piano in 1881; she also composed some piano pieces.

Bott

(3) Jean Joseph Bott

(b Kassel, 9 March 1826; d New York, 28 April 1895). Violinist, pianist, conductor and composer, son of (1) Anton Bott. He received his first music lessons from his father, then (1840–42) studied the violin and composition with Spohr and theory with Moritz Hauptmann. His first public performance as a violinist and pianist at the age of ten was followed by four tours between 1838 and 1846. At 15, through Spohr’s influence, he received (for four years) the first stipend given by the Frankfurt Mozartstiftung. In 1846 he joined the orchestra of the Kassel Kapelle, becoming leader in 1849 and second Kapellmeister to Spohr in 1852. He left Kassel in summer 1856, and in autumn 1857 became Kapellmeister at Meiningen. He greatly improved the orchestra, which had both Spohr and Liszt as occasional guest conductors, and in 1861 organized the first music festival there. In 1865 he took a similar position in Hanover, where he stayed for 12 years until he was forced to retire after falling off the podium in a state of intoxication while conducting Liszt’s oratorio Die heilige Elisabeth in the presence of the composer (who quickly came to the rescue by completing the performance). From then on he lived in Magdeburg as director of the newly founded conservatory and continued his concert career. In 1885 he settled in New York, where he became director of the Long Beach Badekapelle and a private teacher. His compositions owe much to his mentor Spohr, whose favourite pupil he was. Indeed Spohr went so far as to describe Bott as ‘perhaps another Mozart’, but this promise was never fulfilled.

Other musicians in the family, all children of (1) Anton Bott, were Jacob, violinist in the Kassel Kapelle, who composed some dances and variations for piano; Marie Louise, music teacher in Kassel and, after Jean Joseph’s death, in New York; and perhaps Nikolaus, a timpanist in Kassel.

WORKS

Vocal: Der Unbekannte (op, 3, E. Biberhofer, after L. Angely: Die beiden Galeerensklaven), Kassel, 20 Aug 1854, lost; Actäa, das Mädchen von Corinth (op, 4, J. Rodenberg), Berlin, Kgl, April 1862, D-Ksp*; pubd pieces for male vv

Inst: 2 syms., 1850, 1870, lost; 4 ovs., 1843–51, 2 in Km; 3 vn concs.; 2 vn concertinos; numerous pubd pieces, vn, pf/orch; numerous pubd études, dances, salon pieces, pf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (W. Brennecke)

E. Rosendahl: Geschichte der Hoftheater in Hannover und Braunschweig (Hanover, 1927), 107, 130

H. Heussner: J.J. Bott (1826–1895), Geigenkünstler und Komponist (Marburg, 1958)

C. Brown: Louis Spohr (Cambridge, 1984), 326ff

Bott, Catherine

(b Leamington Spa, 11 Sept 1952). English soprano. After studying at the GSM with Arthur Reckless she spent several years as a member of Swingle II. In 1980 she began to appear regularly in the New London Consort, and subsequently worked with other British period-instrument ensembles in Europe, Latin America and the USSR. She has established herself as a leading virtuoso in 17th-century music, from Caccini and Monteverdi to Blow and Purcell, of whose mad songs she is a noted exponent. Her recordings, which include Salome in Stradella's San Giovanni Battista, Handel arias and Fauré's Requiem, reveal her acute dramatic perception and distinctive sensuality. As Purcell's Dido, which she recorded with Christopher Hogwood in 1994, Bott exhibits a brooding nobility which has won many plaudits.

JONATHAN FREEMAN-ATTWOOD

Bottaccio, Paolo

(fl 1609–15). Italian composer. According to the title-pages of his publications of 1609 he was maestro di cappella of Como Cathedral. His small surviving output shows that he was versatile within the limits of a provincial post; he published vesper psalm settings for double choir (a fairly conventional sort of liturgical music for this period) and madrigals in the usual five parts as well as some double-choir ones; his two motets in the volume edited by Francesco Lucino (Milan, 1617²) are in an up-to-date concertato manner. His canzonas show that he belonged to a flourishing school of composers of instrumental ensemble music based in Milan and headed by G.P. Cima. (J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi, Oxford, 1984)

WORKS

I sospiri con altri madrigali a 5 et 8 voci … libro primo (Venice, 1609)

Il primo libro delle canzoni da suonare a 4 e 8 voci (Venice, 1609)

Psalmodia vespertina … 8 vocibus … liber primus, op.4 (Milan, 1615)

4 works in 1617²; 1 mass in 1623¹; 21 compositions in the Pelplin Tablature, Culm Diocesan Seminary Library

JEROME ROCHE

Bottarelli [Botarelli], Giovanni Gualberto

(fl 1762–79). Italian librettist. He was house poet at the King’s Theatre in London in the 1760s and 70s and author or adapter of more than 25 opera texts. A poet of the same name wrote librettos set by Graun at Berlin in the early 1740s, but whether this is the same person is doubtful. The London Bottarelli was chiefly employed in piecing together pasticcios based on frequently revived works of Goldoni, Calzabigi, Petrosellini, Pizzi and others. He also provided new librettos for J.C. Bach, including Orione (1763), Zanaida (1763), and probably Carattaco (1767) and La clemenza di Scipione (1778), as well as Leucippo e Zenocrita (1764) for Mattia Vento. Among Bottarelli’s more important adaptations are Orfeo ed Euridice (1770), based on Gluck with additional music by Bach, and a reworking of Galuppi’s Li tre amanti ridicoli as Il filosofo di campagna (1768). His wife was a singer, and his son F. Bottarelli also worked at the King’s Theatre as translator.

CURTIS PRICE

Bottazzari, Giovanni

(b probably Mantua; fl 1663). Italian composer and guitarist. One published collection of his music for guitar survives: Sonate nuove per la chittarra spagnola (Venice, 1663/R; 1 ed. in Hudson). In the preface he stated that he was giving no pedagogical details because he was not a teacher and because his book is not for beginners. The music is quite complex, using the battute and pizzicate styles found in the works of Foscarini, Corbetta and Granata and advanced techniques such as campanellas and imitation. In addition to the standard allemandes, courantes and sarabandes, the book contains four preludes, three passacaglias, three toccatas and two gigues, all grouped by key into suites. Bottazzari seems to have been particularly concerned with exploring new sonorities on the guitar: the first eight suites use bar chords for their tonic, and the other suites are written with six different scordatura tunings (including two unique to this book).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Hudson: The Folia, the Saraband, the Passacaglia, and the Chaconne, MSD, xxxv (1982)

G.R. Boye: Giovanni Battista Granata and the Development of Printed Guitar Music in Seventeenth-Century Italy (diss., Duke U., 1995), 139, 157–60

GARY R. BOYE

Bottazzi, Bernardino

(b Ferrara; fl 1614). Italian composer, theorist and organist. He was an Observant Franciscan friar and is known only by the first book of his Choro et organo … in cui con facil modo s’apprende in poco tempo un sicuro methodo per sonar su l’organo messe, antifone, & hinni sopra ogni maniera di canto fermo (Venice, 1614). It is a didactic work dealing with the liturgical duties of the choirmaster and organist. Under 18 headings Bottazzi set out the principal rules of counterpoint and provided guidance that would enable the organist to respond in the correct mode and with good counterpoint to the plainchant of the choir. The intabulations of the organ responses are printed. The volume includes several organ works by Bottazzi: three masses, two Credo settings, hymns for the whole year, Marian antiphons and a ricercare cromatico. Although clearly didactic in character, they are not lacking in a liveliness and musicality characteristic of the Ferrara organ school: the ricercare is a notably poetic and well-constructed piece and the hymns, which are among the last examples of the genre, are also interesting. Bottazzi was a minor representative of the Ferrara organ school, but his book is of particular interest for the light it sheds on the traditions, forms, and manner of performance of Italian organ music based on plainchant in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

L. Schrade: ‘“Choro et organo” di Bernardino Bottazzi’, RMI, xxxvi (1929), 516–32

E. Schaefer: ‘Bernardino Bottazzi’s Choro et Organo and the Italian Organ Mass of the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Organ Yearbook, xviii (1987), 46–77 [with music exx.]

ADRIANO CAVICCHI

Bottée de Toulmon, Auguste

(b Paris, 15 May 1797; d Paris, 22 March 1850). French music historian and librarian. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique, thereafter receiving a degree in law. However, being of independent means, he was able to devote himself to music. An amateur cellist, he received compositional and theoretical training in music from Desvignes, Cherubini and Reicha, as a result of which he composed several pieces (none of which was published), including two string quartets, a Passion, a ballet, several masses, and an opéra comique performed c1820 at the Hôtel Lambert. Fétis claimed the credit for turning Bottée towards ‘l’archéologie musicale’ in 1827; however, Choron and Perne were also influential.

In 1826 Bottée travelled to Italy, Germany and Austria, meeting Kiesewetter in Vienna; thereafter they maintained lifelong correspondence. In 1831 he began unsalaried work as librarian at the Paris Conservatoire, restoring order after Fétis’s departure; he remained in the post until 1848, when he suffered a mental breakdown. During his tenure he expanded the library’s holdings of 15th- and 16th-century repertory with his own copies (in over 90 volumes) of manuscripts held in the libraries of Munich and Vienna. Determined to acquire copies of hitherto inaccessible manuscripts in the Cappella Sistina for Paris, he pressed the bibliophile Fortunato Santini to work on his behalf: however, his political naivety combined with Santini’s lack of specialist knowledge ensured that Baini’s archive remained closed to both men. Cherubini respected Bottée’s work, lobbying for two years to secure him membership of the Légion d’Honneur, which he was granted in 1838.

As a member of the Société Royale des Antiquaires and the Comités Historiques de l’Instruction Publique, Bottée regularly presented academic papers and gained governmental support for major projects, such as the publication of L’homme armé and De Beata Virgine masses spanning three centuries, and a multi-volume collection of unpublished documents relating to the history of French music from 1200 to 1700. However, like other large-scale projects (he tried several models for a general history of music and nearly finished a history of post-Gregorian music in Europe), these remained incomplete. His published output is slim: a few short pamphlets of uneven quality. More important historiographically are the numerous boxes of private notes and drafts conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, which reveal a questioning intellect, though not a first-class historian.

WRITINGS

De la chanson en France au Moyen-Age (Paris, 1836)

L’art musical depuis l’ère chrétienne jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1836)

Instruments de musique en usage au Moyen-Age (Paris, 1838)

Des Puys de Palinods au Moyen Age, en général, et des Puys de musique en particulier (Paris, 1838)

Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de la France (Paris, 1839)

Observations sur les moyens de restaurer la musique religieuse dans les églises de Paris (Paris, 1841)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBF (M. Vilpelle)

L.F. Bourquelot and C. Louandre: ‘Bottée de Toulmon, A.’, La littérature française contemporaine (Paris, 1842–57/R), ii, 365

A.J.H. Vincent: ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M.A. Bottée de Toulmon’, Annuaire de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (1851), 70–84; pubd separately (Paris, 1851)

KATHARINE ELLIS

Bottegari, Cosimo

(b Florence, 27 Sept 1554; d Florence, 31 March 1620). Italian lutenist and composer. He was in Munich at the court of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria by 1573, when he was appointed a gentleman of the chamber (gentiluomo della camera). He edited an anthology of works by Munich court composers, Il secondo libro de madrigali a cinque voci de floridi virtuosi del Serenissimo Ducca di Baviera (RISM 1575¹¹), himself contributing two madrigals (ed. in DTB, new ser., iv/7, 1981). Bottegari was a favourite of the duke and not above courtly intrigue; in particular he entered into a competitive rivalry with the Kapellmeister, Lassus. An engraving inscribed ‘Cosomus Bottegarius Tenor’ (in I-Bc) shows him wearing the gold necklace given to him by Duke Albrecht in 1573 (reproduced in Kirkendale, plate VIII).

Bottegari visited Florence several times between 1576 and 1578, probably on diplomatic missions, and in 1579, following the death of Duke Albrecht, he returned permanently to Florence, marrying shortly afterwards. With the succession of Ferdinand de' Medici in 1588 he entered the court rolls, not as a salaried performer but as a gentleman of independent means; he was a member of the order of St Stephen and pursued various commercial enterprises. In 1595 he sent a musical ‘capriccio’ on the Este coat of arms to Duke Alfonso II in Ferrara. He later named Duke Cesare d'Este as his executor, bequeathing to him his books, including his manuscript lutebook (I-MOe, Mus. C 311; ed. in WE, viii, 1965). The manuscript is decorated on the frontispiece with the coat of arms of the dukes of Bavaria. Dates scattered through the volume suggest that it was in use from 1573 until after 1600. It contains 127 works for voice and lute and a few dances and fantasias for lute solo. About 40 of the compositions are by Bottegari, including madrigals, motets and miscellaneous strophic works, along with a number of devotional works in Latin and Italian. Motets by Pietro Vinci, Wert and Lassus appear, along with arrangements by Bottegari for voice and lute of madrigals by Rore, Lassus, Vincenzo Ruffo, Striggio (i), Palestrina, Malvezzi, Fabrizio Dentice and Nola, and villanellas and canzonettas by Vecchi, Primavera, Conversi and Giovanni Ferretti. The manuscript is the principal (often unique) source of the surviving works of Ippolito Tromboncino, a Venetian singer and lutenist active about 1550. The most recent repertory includes two stanzas of Caccini's Fere selvaggie (from Il rapimento di Cefalo, Florence 1600, and printed in Le nuove musiche in 1601/2).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI(G.L. Dardo)

L.-F. Valdrighi: Il libro di canto e liuto di Cosimo Bottegari (Florence, 1891)

C. MacClintock: ‘A Court Musician's Songbook: Modena MS C 311’, JAMS, ix (1956), 177–92

H.M. Brown: ‘The Geography of Florentine Monody: Caccini at Home and Abroad’, EMc, ix (1981), 147–68

D. Nutter: ‘Ippolito Tromboncino, cantore al liuto’, I Tatti Studies, iii (1989), 127–74

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 251–5

R.K. Falconer: The Late Sixteenth-Century Repertory of Florentine Lute Songs (diss., SUNY, Buffalo, 1997), 153–226

DAVID NUTTER

Bottesini, Giovanni

(b Crema, 22 Dec 1821; d Parma, 7 July 1889). Italian double bass player, conductor and composer. His father Pietro, a clarinettist and composer, taught him the rudiments of music at a very early age. Before he was 11 he had sung in choirs, played the timpani with the Teatro Sociale in Crema and neighbouring towns, and had studied the violin with Carlo Cogliati, a friend of his father and one of the town’s leading players. In 1835 his father applied to the Milan Conservatory, where the only remaining scholarships were for bassoon and double bass. Within a few weeks young Bottesini had learnt enough about the double bass to satisfy the governors, and on 1 November he began to study at the Conservatory with Luigi Rossi (to whom he dedicated his early Tre grande duetti per contrabbasso). His professors for harmony, counterpoint and composition were P. Ray, Nicola Vaccai and Francesco Basili.

So rapid was his progress that in 1839 he left the conservatory with a prize of 300 francs for solo playing. He put the money towards a fine instrument by Carlo Giuseppe Testore which he is reputed to have found lying in a puppet theatre under a heap of rubbish. He preferred his instrument to have three strings, which he tuned a tone higher than was usual; his bow was of the so-called French style commonly used in England today. His highly successful concert début at the Teatro Comunale, Crema, in 1840 led to many engagements in Italy and in Vienna. He was appointed principal bass at the Teatro S Benedetto, Venice, where he met Verdi, whose I due Foscari was being performed there. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Bottesini was successful also in other directions. In 1846, together with his colleague Arditi, he went to Havana, as principal bass at the Teatro de Tacón. There he conducted the première of his first opera, Cristoforo Colombo. Concert tours and engagements followed, taking him to New Orleans, New York, London and all over Europe. His début in London on 26 June 1849 at Ella’s Musical Union astounded the audience. He played some solos and took the cello part in a quintet by Onslow. He was nicknamed the ‘Paganini of the double bass’, and contemporary writings bear witness to his extraordinary agility, purity of tone, intonation and exquisite phrasing: ‘How he bewildered us by playing all sorts of melodies in flute-like harmonics, as though he had a hundred nightingales caged in his double-bass!’. The following year he was made an honorary member of the Philharmonic Society of New York. He went to Mexico in 1853, St Petersburg in 1856 and then again to Paris where he directed the Italian Opera (1855 and 1857). He became musical director of the Real Teatro Bellini, Palermo, from 1861 to 1863 and held similar appointments in Spain (Barcelona and Madrid) and in Portugal.

Bottesini soon devoted an increasingly large part of his life to composing and conducting. From 1862 to 1865 he subscribed to the Società del Quartetto di Firenze; his D major String Quartet was published in a miniature score and performed at the Concorso Basevi in 1862. In 1870 his opera Vinciguerra ran for 40 performances in Paris and in January of the following year his comic opera Alì Babà was presented at the Lyceum Theatre, London, where he was musical director for the season. On 24 December 1871 he was in Cairo to direct the first performance of Aida, which was being given at the Teatro Kediviale in honour of the opening of the Suez Canal. 1879 saw the production of his opera Ero e Leandro (libretto by Arrigo Boito, who had intended it for his own use). Critics who thought Ero e Leandro a ‘charming work’ were less impressed by La regina di Nepal which followed at Turin in 1880. The opera, they said, did not meet ‘with anything like an enthusiastic reception’. It was not so much the music as the libretto that caused disappointment. The last of his many visits to England was in 1887, when his Garden of Olivet was given at the Norwich Festival. On 20 January 1889, after a proposal by Verdi, he was nominated director of the Parma Conservatory, where he died barely six months later.

Remarkable though Bottesini was as a musical director, it is for his contribution to the technique of the double bass that he is best remembered. He extended the range of the instrument beyond its recognized compass, and even today his many double bass compositions are seldom performed on account of their great difficulty.

WORKS

MSS mainly in I-PAc

operas

only vocal scores published

Cristoforo Colombo (R. de Palma), Havana, Teatro Tacón, 31 Jan 1848

L’assedio di Firenze (4, F. Manetta, C. Corchi), Paris, Italien, 21 Feb 1856 (Milan, 1860)

Il diavolo della notte (4, L. Scalchi), Milan, S Radegonda, 18 Dec 1858 (Milan, 1859)

Marion Delorme (A. Ghislanzoni, after V. Hugo), Palermo, Bellini, 10 Jan 1862

Vinciguerra il bandito (1, E. Hugot and P. Renard), Monte Carlo, Casino, 22 Feb 1870 (Paris, 1870)

Alì Babà (comic op, 4, E. Taddei), London, Lyceum, 18 Jan 1871 (London, 1871)

Ero e Leandro (3, A. Boito), Turin, Regio, 11 Jan 1879 (Milan, 1879)

Cedar, completed Naples, 2 Oct 1880

La regina di Nepal (B. Tommassi), Turin, Regio, 26 Dec 1880

Also Azeale (or La figlia dell Angelo); Graziella; La torre di Babele

sacred

Messa da Requiem, Turin, Regio, 1880

The Garden of Olivet (or Gethsemane) (J. Bennett), Norwich Festival, 12 Oct 1887, vs (London, 1887)

Najadi ed Angeli, 3vv, orch

orchestral

Marcia funebre, 1878

L’alba sul Bosforo, ov., Naples, 18 March 1881

Contrabass Polka (London, 1887)

Margherita, ov.

Preghiera, 1874; Notti arabe: Il Nilo, Il deserto, Rêverie, 1880; Promenade des ombres, 1881; Also Capriccio, 1889; Sinfonia caratteristica

double bass

Concerto, f, db, pf (London, 1892)

Capriccio bravura, db, pf (Vienna, 1950)

Concerto no.2, b, db, pf (Vienna, 1950); also as Concertino, C, db, str qt, I-PAc

Concerto di bravura, db, pf (Vienna, 1950)

Grande allegro di concerto, db, pf, op.posth. (Vienna, 1956)

Gran duo concertante, vn, db, pf/orch (Paris, 1880); also as Concerto, 2 db, Mc, and Gran duo, cl, db, pf acc.

Also Concerto per contrabasso nell’opera Beatrice di Tenda, db, pf; Concerto, 2 db; Capriccio, 2 db; Fantasia, 2 db; Introduction and Variations (Le carnival de Venise), db, pf/orch; Fantasia (Cerrito), db, pf; Fantasia (Lucia di Lammermoor), db, pf/orch; Fantasia (I puritani), db, pf/orch; Fantasia (La sonnambula de Bellini), db, orch/pf; Passione amorose, 2 db, pf [from Concerto di bravura]; Tre grandi duetti, 2 db; Tutto il mondo serra, S, db, pf; Bolero, db, pf/orch; Variazioni: Nel cor più non mi sento (Paisiello), db, pf/orch; many short works, db, pf/orch

miscellaneous

Gran quintetto, 2 vn, va, vc, db (Milan, 1850)

11 str qts; several str qnts; many songs, 1v, pf; 3 polkas, pf; misc. arrs.

theoretical works

Metodo completo per contrabbasso (Milan, n.d.; Fr. trans., 1869; Eng. trans., 1880)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Pironti)

C. Lisei: ‘Giovanni Bottesini’, GMM, xli (1886), 122, 140

F. Warnecke: Ad Infinitum: der Kontrabass (Hamburg, 1909), 36–42

A. Carniti: In memoria di Giovanni Bottesini (Crema, 1921/R)

A. de Angelis: Giovanni Bottesini: il Paganini del contrabbasso (Rome,1922)

A. Planyavsky: Geschichte des Kontrabasses (Tutzing, 1970, enlarged 2/1987 with H. Seifert), 271ff

T. Martin: ‘In Search of Bottesini’, International Society of Bassists, x/1 (1983), 6–12; x/2 (1984), 6–24; xi/2 (1985), 25–39

L. Inzaghi and others: Giovanni Bottesini: virtuoso del contrabbasso e compositore (Milan, 1989), 191ff

RODNEY SLATFORD

Bottini [née Motroni Andreozzi], Marianna

(b Lucca, 7 Nov 1802; d Lucca, 25 Jan 1858). Italian composer and harp teacher. Her parents were the nobleman Sebastiano Motroni Andreozzi and his wife Eleonora Flekestein. She studied the piano and counterpoint with Domenico Quilici. In 1820 she was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna as ‘Maestra compositrice onoraria’ on account of a Stabat mater and a Messa da Requiem written in 1819 in memory of her mother. In 1823 she married Lorenzo Bottini, a marquis and prominent figure in Luccan political life. Most of her output dates from her early years, from the ages of 13 to 20. It includes arias, duets, romanze and other pieces composed for the refined salons of the Luccan nobility, and contrapuntal sacred works. She was the only woman to provide compositions for the traditional Luccan festival in honour of St Cecilia in 1822, 1825, 1828, 1832, 1834 and 1840.

WORKS

all unpublished; MSS in I-Li

Op: Elena e Gerardo (2), 1822, unperf.

Cants.: In sacri cantici, 3vv, wind insts, bc, 1819; Briseide (C. Moscheni), 3vv, chorus, orch, 1820; Cantiamo, cantiamo, 5vv, orch

Other vocal: Motet, 1v, orch, 1818; Qui tollis, 1v, chorus, orch, 1818; Messa da requiem, 4vv, orch, 1819; Motet, 1v, orch, 1819; Quoniam, 1v, orch, 1819; Qui tollis, 1v, orch, 1819; Stabat mater, 3vv, 1819; TeD, 3vv, 1819; Stabat mater, 3vv, 1820; Mass, 4vv, orch, 1822; Motet, 1v, orch, 1822; Mag, 4vv, orch, after 1823; Miserere, 3vv, bc, 1824; Crucifixus, 2vv, bc; Dixit dominus, 5vv, orch; Domine ad adjuvandum, 4vv, orch; other works for v/vv and insts, incl. 3 arias, 1 duet, 2 notturni, 4 romanze, 2 canzonette

Orch: Cl Conc.; Pf Conc.; 2 syms.; 1 ov.

Other inst: Qt, cl, hn, pf, hp; Trio, vn, bn, pf; Duet, pf, hp; Il mulinaro (ballo); other works for pf, hp and other insts, incl. 10 contradanze inglesi, 9 monferrine, 39 quadrilles, 15 sets of variations, 18 waltzes; 26 other works, incl. studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisBS

SchmidlD

L. Nerici: Storia della musica in Lucca (Lucca, 1880), 323–4, 355–71

D. Sansone: Il ‘Fondo Bottini’dell’Istituto Boccherini di Lucca (thesis, U. of Pisa, 1989–90)

M.S. La Pusata: Marianna Bottini (1802–1858), compositrice lucchese: biografia e catalogo tematico delle sue musiche (thesis, U. of Pisa, 1989–90)

M.S. La Pusata: ‘Una compositrice lucchese da scoprire: la Marchesa Marianna M.A. Bottini’, I tesori della musica lucchese, ed. M.P. Fazzi (Lucca, 1990), 49–56

D. Sansone: ‘La biblioteca di Marianna Bottini’, ibid., 57–69

MARIA SABRINA LA PUSATA

Botto (Vallarino), Carlos

(b Viña del Mar, 4 Nov 1923). Chilean composer. He studied the piano and composition at the National Conservatory of the University of Chile in Santiago and then with Dallapiccola in New York. From 1952 he taught the piano and theory at the National Conservatory, whose director he eventually became. He was appointed a composition teacher at the Catholic University (1969). Several of his works have won important prizes, including numerous awards at festivals of Chilean music. In 1996 he was awarded a National Arts Prize.

Botto shows a preference for chamber music, including solo piano. His compositional style is personal and eclectic, avoiding the extremes of the avant garde and sustained by a solid compositional technique. His piano music shows a high degree of idiomatic writing for the instrument combined with a strong sense of expression. Most of his compositions have been performed and appear regularly in concert programmes.

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal

Choral: 3 canciones (J. Guzmán Cruchaga), op.20, 1965–6; Canciones (anon., A. Machado, C. Botto, Guzmán Cruchaga, E. de la Cerda), op.32, children's chorus, 1979

Solo vocal: 7 cantos al amor y la muerte (Chinese poems), op.8, T, str qt, 1956; 4 cantares quechuas, op.11, 1v, pf, 1959; Poemas de amor y soledad (J. Joyce), op.12, S, pf, 1959–62; Academias del jardin (P. de Medina), op.16, S, pf, 1962; Raquel (R. Blaustein), op.34, Bar, fl, ob, hp, 1984; Tiempo (G. Mistral), op.43, A, cl, vc, pf, 1993–4

instrumental

Orch: Divertimento, op.7, str, 1955

Chbr: Str Qt, op.5, 1951–3; Tonada, op.35, fl, gui, 1984; 3 caracteres, op.53, str qt, 1996

Pf: 10 preludios, op.3, 1952; Sonatina, op.9, 1958; 3 caprichos, op.10, 1959; 3 piezas íntimas, op.13, 1952–9; Partita, op.22, 1967; Scherzo, op.31, 1978; Partita no.2, op.36, 1984–5; Sonatina pastoral, op.38 no.1, 1986; Homenaje a Liszt, op.38 no.2, 1986; Scherzo no.2, op.40, 1992; Sonata, op.42, 1992; Evocación, op.45, 2 pf, 1994; 8 prelustudios, op.47, 1995; Sonata no.2, op.49, 1996; Humorada, op.54, pf 4 hands, 1997; Estampa sureña, op.55, 1997; Partitas, op.22 and 36

Other solo inst: 6 miniaturas, op.19, hpd, 1956–65; Fantasía, op.25, gui, 1974; 9 bagatelas, op.26, rec, 1974; Capricho, op.29, cl, 1974; Fantasía no.2 sobre el nombre de Bach, op.37, gui, 1985; Soliloquio, op.48, cl, 1995; 3 preludios, op.52, gui, 1996

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Grandela del Río: ‘Carlos Botto Vallarino: compositor y maestro’, RMC, no.157 (1982), 65

I. Grandela del Río: ‘Carlos Botto Vallarino: Premio Nacional de Arte en Música, 1996’, RMC, no.187 (1997), 11–26 [incl. catalogue]

INÉS GRANDELA

Bottrigari, Ercole

(b Bologna, 24 Aug 1531; d Sant’Alberto, nr Bologna, 30 Sept 1612). Italian scholar, mathematician, architect, music theorist, composer and poet. The illegitimate son of Giovanni Battista Bottrigari, a wealthy Bolognese aristocrat, and Cornelia (alias Caterina) de' Chiari of Brescia, he was legitimized on 16 August 1538 and then raised in his father's house at Sant’Alberto, near Bologna. On 7 March 1542 Bottrigari was selected by the Bolognese senate as one of a group of 12 young aristocrats deputed to welcome the new Cardinal Legate, Gasparo Contarini, to the city. Evidently Bottrigari distinguished himself in the recitation of poetry and orations on this occasion; he was duly rewarded by Contarini who invested him with the titles of Knight of the Holy See and Lateran during a solemn pontifical mass in Bologna Cathedral on 9 April 1542. As a young man he studied classical languages with Francesco Lucchino of Trent, perspective and architecture with Giacomo Ranuzzi and mathematical sciences with Nicolo Simo, professor of astronomy at Bologna University. Bottrigari also studied music with Bartolomeo Spontone with whom he remained in close contact for many years; their friendship is acknowledged by Spontone in the dedications to both his Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci (Venice, 1558), and Libro terzo de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1583). In 1546 Bottrigari, supported by his father, established a private press in the centre of Bologna, probably modelled on the ‘Tipografia bocchiana’ loosely connected to the Accademia Hermatena. Just nine editions are known to have been printed there, all quite short and in small formats; their extreme scarcity probably reflects short press-runs.

In May or June 1551 Bottrigari began his political career when he was elected a member of the Consiglio degli Anziani in Bologna, and at the end of that same year he married a wealthy Bolognese, Lucrezia Usberti (d 1591). In 1576, as a result of a legal dispute over his wife's inheritance, Bottrigari fled to Ferrara where he remained for the next 11 years. During this time, as can be seen from his most important music treatise, Il Desiderio, overo de' concerti di varii strumenti musicali, he became acquainted with the rich musical life at the court of Alfonso II d'Este, and also came to know a number of poets and intellectuals including Tasso who addressed three sonnets to him. Following his return to Bologna, some time after 12 October 1586, Bottrigari moved to the family house at Sant’Alberto. There he established himself as a private scholar, surrounded by his books and manuscripts and in contact with like-minded scholars (including Zarlino) in other parts of Italy. During these years he became an intimate friend of the Bolognese musician and scholar Annibale Melone who eventually moved into Bottrigari's house where he acted as an amanuensis and was able to consult Bottrigari's writings and translations of ancient theory, which were still unpublished. The first edition of Il desiderio was published under the pseudonym Alemanno Benelli (an anagram of Anniballe Meloni) in an attempt to strengthen Melone's application for the post of maestro di cappella at S Petronio in Bologna; it was only after Melone's death (in April 1598), that the treatise was finally published under Bottrigari's name.

Bottrigari was essentially a humanist in the mould of Glarean, Mei and Zarlino; like them his interest in music was just one consequence of a consuming interest in the classical past, an interest characterized by his fondness for the dialogue form in his treatises, and by his preoccupation with Greek mathematics, astronomy and music theory. Bottrigari's first publication about music, Il Patricio (1593), takes issue with Francesco Patrizi's explanation of the Aristoxenian division of the tetrachord. In the following year Il Desiderio appeared. Cast, like Il Patricio, in the form of a dialogue, it is rich in information about contemporary musical instruments and paints a vivid portrait of musical life at the Estense court in Ferrara during the last decades of the 16th century. Il Melone, discorso armonico … et il Melone secondo is concerned with speculative theory and includes a long account of the Greek genera and the first published transcription of a Greek musical text. It also attacks Gandolfo Sigonio's Discorso sopra i madrigali and takes up the cause of modern composers and theorists, in particular Nicola Vicentino. One important work which remained in manuscript, the Mascara, overo della fabbrica de' teatri (1598), is a detailed discussion of the history and physical structure of theatres, and a valuable source of information about Renaissance practice. Bottrigari's surviving papers and manuscripts remain in Bologna, divided between I-Bu (MS.326) and I-Bc (MSS.B43–B46). A small group of books from his library (in I-Bc) include his copies of Vicentino and Zarlino, with autograph marginal glosses and annotations; these show a familiarity with the writings of ancient authors including Boethius, Ptolemy and Euclid.

Although he had played a wide range of instruments since the age of 11, Bottrigari never considered himself to be a practical musician or composer in any significant way. One of his three madrigals for five voices, ‘Come il candido pie per l'erba fresca’ was, according to the Trimerone, plagiarized by Philippe de Monte in his madrigal ‘Amor, che sol i cor leggiadri invesca’, published in 1582. A four-voice madrigal, ‘Il canter novo’ (which appears in Il Melone) experiments with chromatic writing. Bottrigari's poems are scattered throughout various printed and manuscript collections of the time; he also wrote a comedy, Il mercatante, and introduced, together with Bartolomeo Spontone's son Ciro, the 11-syllable line into Italian poetry (see Il Bottrigaro).

WRITINGS

on music

Il Patricio, overo de tetracordi armonici (Bologna, 1593/R1969 in BMB, section 2, xxvii)

Il desiderio, overo de' concerti di varii strumenti musicali: dialogo di Allemanno Benelli (Venice, 1594/R1969 in BMB, section 2, xxviii, 2/1599/R1924 with preface by K. Meyer, 3/1601; Eng. trans., MSD, ix, 1962)

Il Melone: discorso armonico … e il Melone secondo: considerationi musicali (Ferrara, 1602/R)

other writings

Trattato della descrittione della sfera celeste in piano di Cl. Tolomeo, trans. E. Bottrigari (Bologna, 1572/R)

Tyberiadis, D. Bartoli … tractatus de fluminibus, ed. E. Bottrigari (Bologna, 1576/R)

Opere di Orantio Fineo … Et gli specchi, trans. E. Bottrigari (Venice, 1587)

C. Spontone: Il Bottrigaro, overo del nuovo verso enneasillabo (Verona, 1580); incl. poems by Bottrigari

La mascara, overo della fabbrica de' teatri et dello apparato delle scene tragisatiricomiche, 1598; Trimerone de fondamenti armonici, 1599; Lettera di Federico Verdicelli, 1602; Aletelogia di Leonardo Gallucio, 1604; Enimma di Pitagora, 1609; translations of many classical authors, incl. Boethius: De musica: all I-Bc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (O. Mischiati)

HawkinsH

Enrico Bottrigari: Notizie biografiche intorno agli studi ed alla vita del Cavaliere Erc. Bottrigari (Bologna, 1842)

U. Sesini: ‘Studi sull' umanesimo musicale: Ercole Bottrigari’, Convivium, xiii (1941), 1; repr. in Monumenti di teoria musicale tra umanesimo e rinascimento, ed. G. Vecchi (Bologna, 1966)

R. Giazotto: ‘“Il Patricio” di Hercole Bottrigari dimostrato praticamente da un anonimo cinquecentesco’, CHM, i (1953), 97–112

C.V. Palisca: ‘The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy’, The Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1968, 2/1985 as The New Monteverdi Companion), 127–58; repr. in C.V. Palisca: Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994), 54–87

C.V. Palisca: Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (London and New Haven, 1985)

C.V. Palisca: ‘Boethius in the Renaissance’, Music Theory and its Sources, ed. A. Barbera (Notre Dame, 1990), 259–80; repr. in C.V. Palisca: Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994), 259–80

M. Ilari: ‘Ercole Bottrigari traduttore del De Musica di Boezio’, Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, ed. F. Luisi (Rome, 1990), 179–91

M.R. Maniates: ‘Bottrigari versus Sigonio: on Vicentino and his Ancient Music adapted to Modern Practice’, Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. N.K. Baker and B.R. Hanning (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 79–107

M.R. Maniates: ‘The Cavalier Ercole Bottrigari and his Brickbats: Prolegomena to the Defense of Don Nicola Vicentino against Messer Gandolfo Sigonio’, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. C. Hatch and D.W. Bernstein (London and Chicago, 1993), 137–88

IAIN FENLON

Botzen.

Danish family of organ builders. Johan Petersen Botzen (c1641–1719) and his younger brother, Peter Petersen Botzen (c1661–1711), were sons of the organ builder Peter Karstensen Botz. They were also organists, the latter in the church of Our Lady, Copenhagen, where the brothers built a marvellous instrument during the years 1686–90. Between 1696 and 1699 they built another big instrument in the church of Our Saviour, Copenhagen. The sumptuous Baroque façade of this instrument survives; its gold-decorated front pipes (restored in 1965) offer a rare example of the sound of a 17th-century Danish organ. The family is discussed in N. Friis: Orgelbygning i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1949, 2/1971).

OLE OLESEN

Bouasse, Henri (Pierre Maxime)

(b Paris, 16 Nov 1866; d Toulouse, 15 Nov 1953). French physicist and acoustician. He studied physics at the Sorbonne (1883) and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1885–8). After teaching at the Collège de France and the Lycée at Agen, in 1892 Bouasse joined the staff of the University of Toulouse and obtained his doctorate in mathematics. In 1897 he gained the degree of doctorate in physical sciences and was appointed to the physics chair at Toulouse, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. Retiring in 1937, he continued to work in his laboratory until two years before his death. His research interests ranged widely and he made many discoveries of great importance to musical acoustics. In particular, his studies of woodwind and brass instruments provided the essential foundation for the modern understanding of how sound is generated in these instruments. Bouasse's work has been unjustly neglected outside France, partly because he published little in conventional journals. Instead, he wove his own theories and experiments into a 45-volume library of textbooks on classical physics, the Bibliothèque scientifique de l'ingénieur et du physicien, which includes seven volumes on acoustics. The last of these, published posthumously in 1962, contains a personal memoir of Bouasse by G.F. Herrenden Harker.

WRITINGS

Acoustique générale (Paris, 1926/R)

Cordes et membranes (Paris, 1926/R)

Verges et plaques, cloches et carillons (Paris, 1927/R)

Tuyaux et résonateurs (Paris, 1929/R)

Instruments à vent (Paris, 1929–30/R)

Critique et réfutation des theories exposées dans tuyaux et résonateurs (Paris, 1948/R)

Compléments de dynamique des fluides et d'acoustique (Paris, 1962)

MURRAY CAMPBELL

Boubers, Jean-Louis de.

See De Boubers, Jean-Louis.

Boubert

(fl c1460). Franco-Flemish composer. He is known only from an added ascription in the Nivelle de la Chaussée chansonnier (F-Pn Rés.Vmc57) above the three-voice rondeau L'omme enragé (also in Dm 517; ed. in Perkins, 200–01). He was castigated by Tinctoris (CSM, xxii/2a, 1978, p.49) for using the sign of major prolation to signify augmentation, which must refer to a lost work, probably a mass. The composer may have been Jean Boubert, succentor of St Donatian, Bruges, from 1452 to 1461; about 1461 a Hans Boubay, perhaps the same man, joined the chapel of Frederick III, King of the Romans. Alternatively, he may have been Johannes Bouvart of Maastricht (a nephew of Constans Breuwe), who joined the Burgundian court chapel in 1454 as a sommelier, becoming a clerc in 1465. L'omme enragé is most remarkable for illustrating its text, describing someone who has lost his mind, by tonal means: while the chanson generally demonstrates the ‘Lydian’ mode on F, it ends with a cadence on A.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.C. de Schrevel: Histoire du Séminaire de Bruges, i (Bruges, 1895), 155–7

L.L. Perkins: ‘Modal Species and Mixtures in a Fifteenth-Century Chanson Repertory’, Modality in the Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. U. Günther, L. Finscher and J. Dean, MSD, xlix (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1996), 171–3, 177–201, 204, esp. 198

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999), 261, 682 [incl. further bibliography]

JEFFREY DEAN

Boublil, Alain.

French lyricist. See underSchönberg, Claude-Michel.

Boucan.

See Cordier, Jacques.

Bouchard, Linda

(b Val-d’Or, PQ, 21 May 1957). French-Canadian composer andconductor. She studied composition with Henry Brant at Bennington College, Vermont (BA 1979), and pursued graduate studies at the Manhattan School (MMus 1982). During the period 1985–90 she was the assistant conductor of the Children’s Free Opera, New York, as well as the conductor of several new music ensembles, including Essential Music, the New Music Consort, New York New Music Ensemble and her own group, Abandon. Upon her return to Canada she was appointed composer-in-residence for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Ottawa (1992–5). She has taught regularly at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Bouchard’s primary compositional interests are timbre, structure and spatialization. The specific position of the performers is of the utmost importance in large-scale works such as Triskelion (1982), Revelling of Men (1983) and Oracles (1996). Experimentations with form and the use of a wide variety of contrasting materials led her to the development of ‘flexible structures’, compositional plans that produce a kind of aleatory music. Works such as Pourtinade (1983), Muskoday (1988) and Ressac (1991) use ‘flexible structures’ by leaving the specific order in which sections are played up to the performers or the conductor.

WORKS

stage

Triskelion (op), 1982

instrumental

Orch: Essay 1, pf, perc, hp, str, 1979 [withdrawn]; Docile Demon, E tpt, perc, str, 1986 [withdrawn]; Fanorev, hpd, perc, str, 1986; Elan, pf, perc, hp, str, 1990; Marche, 2 a sax, 2 t sax, perc, timp, str, 1990 [withdrawn]; Ressac, pf, perc, str, 1991; Ire, 2 ens, 1992; Exquisite Fires, perc, str, 1993; Vertige, perc, str, 1994; Eternity, perc, str, 1995

Large chbr ens: Quican, fl ens, 1978 [withdrawn]; Of a Star Unfolding, 8 perc, prep pf, 1979 [withdrawn]; Rocking Glances, fl, ob, vn, va, vc, gui, mand, perc, 1979 [withdrawn]; Before the Cityset, ob, hn, 8 va, perc, 1981 [withdrawn]; Revelling of Men, 6 trbn, str qnt, 1983; Second Revelling, 6 trbn, 3 perc, 1984; Frisson ‘La vie’, fl, va, str ens, 1992; Compressions, 2 hn, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, pf, perc, hp, str qt, 1996; Oracles, 3 str qt, 1996

Small chbr ens: Aspect d’un couloir, str trio/2 str, 1979 [withdrawn]; Chaudière à traction, fl, pf, 1979 [withdrawn]; Ma lune maligne, fl, va, hp, perc, 1981; Stormy Light, str qt, 1981; Viennese Divertimento, ob, va, vc, pf, perc, 1982; Circus Faces, fl, va, vc, 1983; Pourtinade, va, perc, 1983; Tossing Diamonds, brass qnt, tuba, 1983; Web-Trap, fl, bn, va, db, 1983; 5 Grins, fl, ob, vc, hpd, 1984; Icy Cruise, pic, tpt, va, vc, bn, hp, 1984; Propos III, 3 tpt, 1984; Propos IV, tpt qt, 1984; Forest, fl, cl, vc, pf, perc, 1985; Propos II, 2 tpt, 1985; Pulsing Flight, 2/4 pf, 2 taped pf, 1985; Rictus en miroir, fl, ob, vc, pf, perc, 1985; Possible Nudity, va, vc, bn, hp, perc, 1987, rev. va, vc, pf, 1988; Transi-blanc, fl, tpt, trbn, va, pf, perc, 1987, rev. fl, tpt, va, bn, hp, perc, 1987; Delicate Contract, fl, tpt, va, vc, bn, hp, perc, 1988; Muskoday, fl + a fl, va, vc, bn, hp, perc, 1988; Propos nouveaux, tpt, va, vc, bn, 1988; Amuser le temps, fl, ob, cl, vn, vc, db, pf, 1989; Le scandale, vn, va, vc, db, hp, perc, 1989; Swift Silver, hpd, cel, hmn, 1989; Lung ta, str qt, 1992; Réciproque, vn, vc, pf, 1994; 7 couleurs, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1994; Traces, str qt, 1996

Solo inst: Glances, vc, 1980 [withdrawn]; Propos, tpt, 1983; Tokpela, perc, 1988

vocal

Tout ça as thought (G. Beaudet), S, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1977 [withdrawn]; L’homme qui change (Beaudet), Bar, vc, bn, 1978 [withdrawn]; Anticipation of Priscilla (L. Bouchard), S, fl, vn, va, vc, pf, perc, 1980 [withdrawn]; Cherchell, nar, fl, vn, va, pf, 1982; Minotaurus, nar, fl + a fl, (s sax, va, vc, bn, hp)/(ob, bn, pf), perc, 1988; Black Burned Wood, S, vn + va, pf, perc, 1990; Mr Link, nar, pf, perc, timp, hp, str, 1993; Ocamow, Bar, gui, vc, perc, 1993; Risky, S, pf, db, 1993; Songs for an Acrobat, Bar, perc, str, 1995; Pilgrims’ Cant, S, B, SATB, hpd, perc, 2 hp, str

Principal publishers: CMC, Doberman-Yppan

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMC2 (D. Olds)

H. Plouffe: ‘Linda Bouchard’, Music Scene, no.338 (1984), 13 only

SOPHIE GALAISE

Bouché

(Fr.).

A term used in horn music to specify hand-stopping; it affects the tone of the instrument and the pitch. It is sometimes denoted by ‘+’, and it is countermanded by ‘ouvert’ or ‘o’. See Horn, §3(ii).

Bouche fermée

(Fr.).

Wordless singing with the mouth closed. See Bocca chiusa.

Boucher, Alexandre-Jean

(b Paris, 11 April 1778; dParis, 29 Dec 1861). French violinist and composer. His father was a musician in Louis XV’s Mousquetaires Gris. As a child Alexandre-Jean performed in salons and was presented at court, and is said to have performed a concerto by Giornovichi at the Concert Spirituel. He studied with Subrin de Sainte-Marie, Gaviniès and Guillaume Navoigille, and attended Mme de Mortaigne’s Lycée des Arts. During the Revolution Boucher took part in the storming of the Bastille, and in February 1790 he joined the Garde Nationale. He played in the orchestra of the Théâtre du Palais (1792), and subsequently in that of the Théâtre Feydeau.

Compromised by the events of 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795), Boucher went to Spain, where he was presented to Charles IV, played in the royal orchestra, and was advised by Boccherini. Returning to Paris, he performed for private music societies, where opinion was divided on his talents, and gave his first public concert at the Théâtre Olympique on 22 March 1804. In 1806 he married the harpist Céleste Gallyot, with whom he toured. On 4 April 1806 he performed at Angelica Catalani’s first concert in Paris, where his mannerisms and banter caused Spohr to write, ‘Boucher was an exceptional violinist, but also a great charlatan’. In 1808 or 1811 he was in Marseilles, and in 1813 in Berne; in 1814 he performed in London with Bernhard Romberg. He was in Paris during the Hundred Days, when his physical resemblance to Napoleon caused some misunderstandings.

Criticized for his performance of a Viotti concerto on 5 December 1816 at the Théâtre des Italiens, Boucher replied: ‘I consecrated the adagio to the stricter sort of connoisseurs, but in the cadenzas I wished to show that the passage of ten years has not yet extinguished the ardour I possessed at twenty-five, and I knew in advance that this decision was bound to bring down on me accusations that I was incorrigible’.

Between 1819 and 1825 Boucher and his wife toured Belgium, Austria (in 1822, meeting the young Liszt and Beethoven, who dedicated the seven-bar Kleines Stück woo34 for two violins to him), Germany (where he met Mendelssohn and performed with Weber) and Russia. In the 1840s he played in the string quartets of Charles Javault and Antoine Bessems; according to the Baron de Trémont, Boucher overloaded quartets with ‘disfiguring ornamentation’.

Boucher retired to Orléans in 1858. His final concert in Paris was at the Salle Pleyel on 3 May 1859. His works (some manuscripts in F-Pc) include two violin concertos (‘Mon caprice en mi’, 1810; ‘L’Orage’, c1844), a Grand duo concertant for two violins (1839) and a Serment napoléonien (1853).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

L. Picquot: Notice sur la vie et les oeuvrages de Luigi Boccherini (Paris,1851, enlarged 2/1930 by G. de Saint-Fox as Boccherini)

L. Spohr: Selbstbiographie (Kassel, 1860–61; Eng. trans., 1878/R)

M.M. von Weber: Carl Maria von Weber: ein Lebensbild (Leipzig,1864–6, abridged 2/1912 by R. Pechel; Eng. trans., 1865/R)

G. Vallat: Etudes d’histoire, de moeurs et d’art musical: Alexandre Boucher et son temps (Paris, 1890)

T. von Frimmel: ‘Beethoven und der französische Geiger Alexander Boucher’, Beethoven-Studien, ii (Munich, 1906), 71–81

M. Pincherle: ‘Alexander Boucher’, ReM, nos.106–9 (1930), 302–21

E. van der Straeten: The History of the Violin (London, 1933/R)

J.-M. Fauquet: Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restauration à 1870 (Paris, 1986), 216

HERVÉ AUDÉON

Boucherie, Jean-Joseph

(d Brussels, 4 May 1776). Flemish bookseller and music printer. He was the principal music seller in Brussels from 1745 to 1770. As the official printer for the Théâtre de la Monnaie he printed librettos for opéras-comiques and comédies mêlées d'ariettes performed there by composers such as Duni, Monsigny and Philidor, some with a musical supplement. His publications were covered at first by a privilege of impression and sale (1757–66) which applied only to works that had not yet been staged at Brussels, and then by another which allowed Boucherie to print and sell all theatre works. Under this later privilege, he forged Parisian editions (such as Toinon et Toinette by Gossec, with the false address ‘Paris, Veuve Duchesne’) and was involved in the production of two engraved editions of the works of C.-J. van Helmont. Boucherie was the Brussels distributor for Benoit Andrez of Liège, as well as of a large number of essentially Parisian editions of instrumental music, opera librettos and music journals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Raspé and H. Vanhulst: ‘L'édition musicale’, La musique en Wallonie et à Bruxelles, ed. R. Wangermée and P. Mercier (Brussels, 1980), i, 301–5

M. Cornaz: ‘Jean-Joseph Boucherie et Jean-Louis de Boubers: deux imprimeurs de musique à Bruxelles dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, RBM, xlvi (1992), 179–88

M. Cornaz: ‘La contrefaçon musicale à Bruxelles au XVIIIe siècle: l'exemple de Toinon et Toinette de Gossec’, Nouvelles annales Prince de Ligne, ix (1995), 237–41

M. Cornaz: ‘La Monnaie et le commerce des ouvrages lyriques à Bruxelles’, Le théâtre de la Monnaie au XVIIIe siècle, ed. M. Couvreur (Brussels, 1996), 275–97

M. Cornaz: L'édition et la diffusion de la musique à Bruxelles au XVIIIe siècle (diss., U. Libre de Bruxelles, 1996)

MARIE CORNAZ

Boucheron, Raimondo

(b Turin, 15 March 1800; d Milan, 28 Feb 1876). Italian composer and theorist. As a composer he was largely self-taught, his musical interest having been discouraged by his father who died in 1817. After a period in Turin, where he was befriended by Bernardo Ottani, he became a music teacher in Milan and in 1822 went to Voghera as music director and conductor at the Teatro Civico (according to his pupil Edoardo Perelli he was also maestro di cappella at the church there). In 1829 he became maestro di cappella at Vigevano Cathedral and in 1842 applied for the same post, then vacant, at Milan Cathedral. He received the Milan appointment only in 1847, after having in 1844 become maestro at Casale Monferrato Cathedral, and remained there until his death.

Boucheron composed two operas (Ettore Fieramosca and Le nozze al castello) and some farces, none of them performed. Three of his songs and an organ fantasia were published by Ricordi, and four symphonies are in the Milan Cathedral archives. His Inno per le cinque giornate, to a text by Pasquale Contini, was well known during the period of the struggle against Austria. His main output was church music, a large amount of which in all genres is in the cathedral archives of Voghera and, especially, Milan. In this music Boucheron held to a Classical ideal, avoiding the two extremes of the Palestrina style and the 19th-century operatic. He was generally considered a skilled composer (in 1869 he was invited to contribute to the abortive Requiem organized by Verdi in memory of Rossini), but he was also criticized for a lack of inspiration and originality. Pougin, in the supplement to Fétis, described his music as being of ‘une banalité désespérante’. Fétis himself was slightly kinder to his treatise on aesthetics, Filosofia della musica o estetica applicata a quest'arte (Milan, 1842, 2/1875): ‘Although the author … has neither the profound insight nor the wide knowledge necessary for such a work, one finds in it perceptions that are not without justness’. This work attempts to reassert the concept of the imitation of nature as the basis of music, starting from the premise that ‘all the other arts [except architecture] draw their power and importance from the analogy that they have with the phenomena of life’. Boucheron also published a harmony treatise, La scienza dell'armonia spiegata dai rapporti dell'arte coll'umana natura (Milan, 1856), some Esercizi d’armonia (Milan, 1871) and solfeggios. At his death he was at work on a counterpoint treatise. He was a member of the academies of Bologna, Rome and Florence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Piscitelli Gonnelli)

DEUMM (S. Martinotti)

FétisB

FétisBS

SchmidlD

E. Perelli: ‘Raimondo Boucheron: cenni biografici’, GMM, xxxi (1876), 97–9, 113–14

C. Sartori: La cappella musicale del duomo di Milano: catalogo delle musiche dell'archivio (Milan, 1957), 107–41

A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961), 549–50

F. Mompellio: ‘La cappella del Duomo dal 1714 ai primi decenni del '900’, Storia di Milano, xvi (1962), 553–88, esp. 568–9

G. Vecchi: ‘Idee estetyczno-muzyczne we Włoszech w pierwszej połowie xix wieku a Estetyka P. Lichtenthala (1831) i R. Boucherona (1842)’ [The notion of music aesthetics in Italy in the early 1800s and the Estetica of P. Lichtenthal (1831) and R. Boucheron (1842)], Pagine, iv (1980), 11–38 [incl. It. summary]

M. Girardi: ‘I compositori della Messa per Rossini’, Messa per Rossini: la storia, il testo, la musica, ed. M. Girardi and P. Petrobelli (Parma, 1988), 151–60

DENNIS LIBBY/EMANUELE SENICI

Boucon, Anne Jeanne

(b Paris, 1708; d Paris, 4 Feb 1780). French harpsichordist, wife of Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville.

Boucourechliev, André

(b Sofia, 28 July 1925; d Paris, 13 Nov 1997). French composer and musicologist of Bulgarian birth. In 1946 he entered the Sofia Conservatory to study the piano with P. Pelischek. A French Government bursary enabled him to move to Paris in 1949, where he studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique with Reine Gianoli (piano) and Georges Dandelot (harmony); he also took private lessons in counterpoint with Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger. After obtaining his concert diploma in 1951, he taught the piano for eight years at the Ecole Normale de Musique. While pursuing a career as a pianist, he attended the Darmstadt summer courses, and started to compose in 1954, though most of these early works have been withdrawn. Boucourechliev's first work to attract attention was Musique à trois (1957), played, as was his Piano Sonata (1959), at one of the Domaine Musical concerts. He then worked with Berio and Maderna at the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan (1957–8), where he composed Texte I, a 5-minute work featuring elements of spontaneous performer choice involving pitch and dynamics, and rhythmic aperiodicity. The slightly shorter Texte II, composed at the GRM studio in Paris in 1959, introduces an aleatory element in that the two tapes start independently of each other.

During a 6-month spell in the USA (1963–4), Boucourechliev became acquainted with the work of American avant-garde figures such as Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Cage and Earle Brown. Wary of Cage's use of chance, he found greater affinity with the open forms of Brown's works (cf. Available forms, 1962) in which chance is rejected in favour of choice. Boucourechliev saw especially the link between serialism and what Umberto Eco in Opera aperta calls the ‘poetics of indeterminacy’, serialism being a particular, determinate case in an indeterminate universe.

These ideas of openness, and the opportunities they afford for performers and (to an extent) audiences to participate in the form-building process, came to fruition in the now classic Archipels (1967–71), a series of five works which established the composer's reputation. The scores consist of large sheets, on which the musical structures constituting the work are laid out like an archipelago on a naval chart. The performer navigates freely from one ‘island’ to another, each being ‘open’ in that certain elements of it are determined only at the moment of performance. In later works, Boucourechliev developed this idea replacing ‘islands’ with ‘seamarks’ (Amers, 1972–3, in which the elements are laid out in the form of a compass rose), or with ‘constellations’ and ‘satellites’, as in Six Etudes d'après Piranèse (1975) and Orion I (1979).

Most of Boucourechliev's works since 1977 incorporate ‘archipelagos’ into an otherwise fully notated structure. Ombres (1970) is an especially powerful homage to Beethoven which incorporates fragments of the latter's string quartets, and in the extraordinary Miroir II (1990) Boucourechliev shows he has no fear of the simplest of intervals and of relatively straightforward counterpoint. The erstwhile pianist comes to the fore in the tempestuous fireworks of the Piano Concerto or the joyous exuberance of Orion III, while the works that include the soprano voice reveal Boucourechliev's particularly intense lyricism (Lit de neige, 1984; Le miroir, 1987) and his fine sense of dramatic tension, as in Grodek (1963, rev. 1969) and the opera Le nom d'Oedipe (1977).

Boucourechliev's activity as a thinker and writer has always gone hand in hand with his practice as a composer. He contributed music criticism and many articles to such journals as the Nouvelle revue française, Réforme and Preuves, the most significant of which have been collected in Dire la musique (1995). He also published important studies of Beethoven, Schumann, Stravinsky and Chopin, as well as a fundamental text on musical language, Le langage musical (1993). His teaching activities included a period as assistant to Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire (1974–6), and seven years teaching musicology at the University of Aix-en-Provence (1977–84). He was subsequently guest professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris for seminars on contemporary music (1986–7). He was a producer for Radio France and the author of television programmes. His awards included the Grand Prix Musical de la Ville de Paris (1976) and the Grand Prix National de la Musique (1984). He was also made Commandeur des Artes et des Lettres and, in 1994, was admitted to the Légion d'Honneur.

WORKS

Stage: Le nom d'Oedipe (op, H. Cixous), 1977

Orch or large ens: Ombres (Hommage à Beethoven), 12 str, 1970; Faces, 2 orch groups, 1971–2; Amers, 19 insts, 1972–3; Conc., pf, orch, 1974–5; La chevelure de Bérénice, 20 inst, 1988

Chbr and solo inst: Musique à trois, fl, cl, hpd, 1957 [unpubd]; Sonata, pf, 1959 [unpubd]; Archipel 1, 2 pf, ad lib 2 perc, 1967; Archipel 2, str qt, 1968; Archipel 3, pf, 6 perc, 1969; Archipel 4, pf, 1970; Anarchipel, hpd, hp, org, pf, 2 perc, 1970–71; Archipel 5a, 1/2 hp, Archipel 5b, 1/2 hpd, Archipel 5c, org, Archipel 5d, pf, Archipel 5e, 1/2 perc; Tombeau – à la memoire de Jean-Pierre Guézec, cl, perc/pf, 1971; 6 études, pf, 1975 [after Piranèse]; Orion I, org, 1979; Ulysse, fl, perc. 1981; Orion II, pf, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, 2 perc, 1982; Orion III, pf, 1982; Nocturnes, cl, pf, 1984; Miroir II, str qt, 1990; Quator III, str qt, 1995

Vocal: Grodek (G. Trakl), S, fl, 3 perc, 1963 [rev. 1969]; Lit de neige (P. Celan), S, 19 insts, 1984; Le miroir (J.-P. Burgart), Mez, orch, 1987; 3 fragments de Michelangelo, S, fl, pf, 1995

Tape: Texte I, 1958; Texte II, 2 tape, 1959; Thrène (S. Mallarmé), tape (chorus, 2 nar), 1973–4

Other works withdrawn by composer

Principal publishers: Universal, Leduc, Salabert, Transatlantique

WRITINGS

(selective list)

Schumann (Paris, 1956, 2/1996; Eng. trans., 1959)

Chopin: eine Bildbiographie (Munich, 1962; Eng. trans. 1963)

Beethoven (Paris, 1963, 2/1996)

Stravinsky (Paris, 1982; Eng. trans., 1987)

Essai sur Beethoven (Arles, 1991)

Le langage musical (Paris, 1993)

Dire la musique (Paris, 1995) [contains previously pubd articles]

Regards sur Chopin (Paris, 1996)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Encyclopaedia universalis (Paris, 1968–1974, 4/1996), B. Massin: ‘Boucourechliev’

A. Girardot: Esthétique de Boucourechliev à travers ses ‘Archipels’ (diss., U. of Paris VIII, 1974)

F. Bayer: ‘Sous le signe du virtuel: autour d'Archipel IV d'André Boucourechliev’, Musique en jeu, no.33 (1978), 95–108

F. Escal: Le compositeur et ses modèles (Paris, 1984)

B. Chevassus: ‘Ombres’, Entretemps, no.6 (1988), 5–15

J. Ducharme: L'un et l'autre dans la musique d'André Boucourechliev (diss., Ecole de hautes études sociales, 1996)

JEREMY DRAKE

Bouffons, Les

(Fr.: ‘comedians’).

15th- and 16th-century costumed dancers who performed the Moresca or Matachin. See also Querelle des Bouffons.

Bouffons, Querelle des.

See Querelle des Bouffons.

Boughton, Rutland

(b Aylesbury, 23 Jan 1878; d London, 25 Jan 1960). English composer and writer. He was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School (although musically self-taught) and apprenticed in 1892 to a London concert agency. His early compositions, while immature and derivative, drew sympathetic interest, and a fund was raised to pay for a brief period of study under Stanford and Walford Davies at the RCM. He endured great poverty after he left, but gradually he made his way as a composer. He married in 1903. In 1905 Granville Bantock offered him a teaching post at the Midland Institute School of Music, Birmingham, where he remained until 1911, working as a singing teacher, conductor and composer of choral and orchestral music. Socialism, of the William Morris variety, and the principles of Wagnerian music drama now combined to play a crucial part in his development. Together with the poet Reginald Buckley he declared his aims in a booklet entitled Music Drama of the Future (1911). He left Birmingham in the same year, driven out by the gossip surrounding his relationship with the artist Christina Walshe. After a further period of hack-work in London, Boughton and his two collaborators (Buckley and Walshe) announced plans for a festival, to take place at Glastonbury in 1913. His aims were to create a commune of artists, living and working together; to compose music drama along Wagnerian lines, but with a specifically English choral bias (he coined the term ‘choral drama’); and to centre his work on a cycle of Arthurian dramas, of which the first, The Birth of Arthur, had already been written.

Gossip again confounded his plans, but in 1914 he was able to mount the first Glastonbury Festival. It had as its main event the first performance of The Immortal Hour. The practical difficulties of financing and operating a series of festivals soon modified Boughton’s schemes. Wagnerian grandeur gave way to something much simpler, practical and individual (folksong being the purifying musical influence). The Glastonbury Assembly Rooms did duty as a theatre, with a grand piano for orchestra. Friends and pupils, local and imported, amateur and professional, did everything else. Miraculously the venture prospered, and, save for a brief interruption during Boughton’s military service, festivals were given several times each year until 1926. The festivals included some 350 staged performances (including productions of six full-scale operas by Boughton himself and the revival of relatively unknown works by Gluck, Purcell, Blow, Matthew Locke and others), together with more than 100 chamber concerts. From 1920 the Glastonbury Players made regular tours, and in 1924 the Glastonbury Festival Players introduced Laurence Housman and his cycle of Little Plays of St Francis. The entire venture was concluded in July 1927, partly as a result of Boughton’s extra-marital adventures (he was now married to his third and last wife) and partly because he had involved the company in active political support of the 1926 General Strike. However, by this time he was famous. Barry Jackson staged The Immortal Hour at his Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1921, and in London in the following year. The work received 216 consecutive performances, a revival of 160 performances in 1923, and further successful revivals in 1926 and 1932. In 1924 Alkestis was produced at Covent Garden.

With the collapse of plans at Glastonbury, Boughton moved to a small farm in Gloucestershire. Two more festivals were held – at Stroud (1934) and at Bath (1935) – but their success was limited. Boughton retired from public activities and spent his time in farming, writing and composing, eventually completing the Arthurian cycle in 1945. He remained politically active, as a member of the Communist Party (1926–9, 1945–56), and often incorporated his ideas in books on music (Bach, 1930; The Reality of Music, 1934) and the many articles he contributed to The Sackbut. He was granted a civil list pension in 1937.

Only Boughton’s early music can be called Wagnerian. From The Immortal Hour onwards he married a strong vein of simple melody, much influenced by folksong, to a quasi-symphonic orchestral style and a bold use of the chorus, derived partly from oratorio and partly from the operas of Gluck. Though his musical ideas are striking and apt, they tend to resist effective symphonic development and so those works that are simpler in style (Bethlehem, for example) are more successful. Nevertheless, his capacity to develop his ideas grew and in The Queen of Cornwall came near to mastery. Boughton’s harmonic vocabulary, like his melodic style, remained conservative. The harmony is particularly simple in Alkestis, which was intended partly as a protest against the merely fashionable use of dissonance. His handling of the orchestra is at all times imaginative and shows a practical concern for an effect. In this respect the published vocal scores of his operas reveal little. Bethlehem and The Immortal Hour, however, are available in full score. Though his elaborate use of the chorus can sometimes impede the dramatic flow, it can also lend his operas an uncommon degree of dignity.

Boughton’s operatic shortcomings are most apparent where he wrote his own texts (as in the Arthurian cycle). Passages of effective theatre are nullified by passages that are irredeemably static, and made to appear all the more inadequate by painful lapses of literary taste. The Arthurian cycle has never been performed as a whole. Composed between 1908 and 1945 it is not surprising that it fails to hang together as a unity. The largely irrelevant central episode, The Lily Maid, stands out as a moving story clothed in exceptionally fine music. Paradoxically, for all his political didacticism, it was only when Boughton was concerned with a human drama with which he could identify personally that his considerable, and highly individual, operatic skills sprang to life.

The formation of the Rutland Boughton Music Trust (1977) has led to a series of recordings on Hyperion, including The Immortal Hour, Bethlehem, the Third Symphony, Oboe Concerto no.1, Flute Concerto, Concerto for String Orchestra and string quartets nos.1 and 2. These have radically changed for the better the received image of his music and relative importance.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

first performed at Glastonbury, Assembly Rooms, unless otherwise stated

Eolf (op, 3, Boughton), 1901–3, unorchd, unperf.

The Chapel in Lyonesse (dramatic scene, Boughton, after W. Morris), 1904; Aug 1914 [later used in Galahad]

The Birth of Arthur [Uther and Igraine] (choral drama, 2, R. Buckley and Boughton), 1908–9; 16 Aug 1920 [no.1 of the Arthurian cycle]

The Immortal Hour (music drama, 2, after F. Macleod), 1912–13; 26 Aug 1914, vs (London, 1920)

Bethlehem (choral drama, 2, Boughton, after Coventry Nativity Play and trad. carols), 1915; Street, Crispin Hall, 28 Dec 1915, vs (London, 1920)

The Round Table (music drama, prol., 3, Buckley and Boughton), 1915–16; 14 Aug 1916 [no.2 of the Arthurian cycle]

Agincourt (dramatic scene, after W. Shakespeare: Henry V), 1918; 26 Aug 1924 (London, 1926)

The Moon Maiden (choral dance, 1, after Jap. noh play, trans. M. Stopes), 1918; 23 April 1919 (London, 1926)

Alkestis (music drama, 2, Boughton, after G. Murray's trans. of Euripides), 1920–22; 26 Aug 1922 (London, 1923)

The Seraphic Vision (dramatic scene, L. Housman), 20 Aug 1924

The Queen of Cornwall (music drama, 2, Boughton, after T. Hardy), 1923–4; 21 Aug 1924 (London, 1926)

The Ever Young (music drama, 5 scenes, Boughton), 1928–9; Bath, Pavilion, 9 Sept 1935

The Lily Maid (music drama, 3, Boughton), 1933–4; Stroud, Church Room, 10 Sept 1934 [no.3 of the Arthurian cycle]

Galahad (music drama, 4 scenes, Boughton), 1943–4; unperf. [no.4 of the Arthurian cycle, scene ii consists of The Chapel in Lyonesse]

Avalon (music drama, 2, Boughton), 1944–5; unperf. [no.5 of the Arthurian cycle]

2 ballets; incidental music for 16 Little Plays of St Francis (L. Housman)

orchestral

Sym. no.1 ‘Oliver Cromwell’, 1904; Sym. no.2 ‘Deirdre’, 1927; Conc., c, ob, str, 1936; Conc., g, ob, str, 1936; Conc., fl, str, 1937; Conc., str orch, 1937; Sym. no.3, b, 1937; Conc., tpt, str, 1943; Reunion Variations, 1945

Also 4 sym. poems, 4 ovs.

chamber and instrumental

Celtic Prelude, vn, vc, pf, 1917; Sonata, vn, pf, 1921; Str Qt no.1, A, 1923; Str Qt no.2, F, 1923; Trio, fl, ob, pf, 1925; Ob Qt no.1, 1930; Str Trio, 1944; Ob Qt no.2, 1945; Pf Trio, 1948; Sonata, vc, pf, 1948

choral

The Skeleton in Armour (H. Longfellow), chorus, orch, 1898; The Invincible Armada (Bulwer-Lytton, after F. von Schiller), chorus, orch, 1901; Midnight (E. Carpenter), chorus, orch, 1907; The City (H.B. Binns), SATB, 1909

6 Spiritual Songs, SATB, 1910; 6 Celtic Choruses, SATB, 1914

The Cloud (P.B. Shelley), SSA, pf, 1923; Pioneers (W. Whitman), 4vv, orch, 1925; Child of Earth (Binns), 4vv, unacc., 1927

Also 8 large-scale works for chorus, orch; c30 partsongs

songs

4 Songs (E. Carpenter), 1v, pf, 1907; 5 Celtic Songs (Macleod), 1v, str/ pf, 1910; Songs of Womanhood (C. Walshe), 1v, pf, 1911; 3 Songs (Carpenter), 1v, pf, 1914; Symbol Songs (M. Richardson), 1v, str/pf, 1920

Also 5 song cycles, 66 other songs

MSS in GB-Lbl, Lcml

Principal publishers: Curwen, Joseph Williams, Stainer & Bell, Novello

WRITINGS

Bach (London, 1907, 3/1927)

The Self-Advertisement of Rutland Boughton (London, 1911)

with R. Buckley: Music Drama of the Future (London, 1911)

The Death and Resurrection of the Music Festival (London, 1913)

The Glastonbury Festival (London, 1917)

Parsifal: a Study (London, 1920)

The Glastonbury Festival Movement (London, 1922)

‘Festivalediction III’, The Sackbut, xi (1930–31), 135–40

John Sebastian Bach (London, 1930)

The Reality of Music (London, 1934/R)

‘The Immortal Hour’, Philharmonic Post, iv/1 (1949), 6–10

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (S. Banfield), 569–70

P. Scholes: ‘Music Drama in Somerset’, Music Student, ix (1916–17), 55–6

S. Grew: Our Favourite Musicians (Edinburgh and London, 1922), 105–222

J. Holbrooke: Contemporary British Composers (London, 1925), 108–20

D. Brook: Composer’s Gallery (London, 1946), 29–34

E.W. White: The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951/R), 148–59, 195–6

M. Hurd: Immortal Hour: the Life and Period of Rutland Boughton (London, 1962, enlarged 2/1993 as Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals)

M. Hurd: ‘The Glastonbury Festivals: 1914–1926’, Theatre Notebook, xvii (1962–3), 51–61

M. Hurd: ‘The Queen of Cornwall’, MT, civ (1963), 700–01

M. Hurd: ‘Rutland Boughton, 1878–1960’, MT, cxix (1978), 31–3

E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983), 392–402

M. Hurd: ‘The Glastonbury Festivals’, MT, cxxv (1984), 435–7

M. Saremba: Elgar, Britten & Co. (Zürich, 1994), 212–43

MICHAEL HURD

Bouhy, Jacques(-Joseph-André)

(b Pepinster, 18 June 1848; d Paris, 29 Jan 1929). Belgian baritone and singing teacher. He studied at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège and in Paris, where he made his début at the Opéra in 1871 as Méphistophélès in Faust. At the Opéra-Comique, where he was first heard as Mozart’s Figaro (1872), he created the title role of Massenet’s Don César de Bazan the same year, sang Hoël in Le pardon de Ploërmel (1874) and Escamillo at the première of Carmen (3 March 1875). At the Théâtre-Lyrique he took part in Massé’s Paul et Virginie (1876) and Salvayre’s Le bravo (1877), both first performances. Returning to the Opéra (1878–9), he sang Alphonse (La favorite), Thomas’ Hamlet and Don Giovanni. In 1880 at St Petersburg he sang Méphistophélès in Gounod’s Faust and the title role in Boito’s Mefistofele, and in 1882 he appeared at Covent Garden in Faust and Carmen. After some years in the USA, where he founded and directed the National Conservatory of Music in New York, he returned to Paris to sing the High Priest in the first staged performance there of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (Eden-Théâtre, 1890). From 1904 to 1907 he was again in the USA, and later he taught singing in Paris. His voice was praised by Massenet early in the singer’s career, and his rendering of the Toreador’s Song always evoked the warmest applause, even at the first, unsuccessful, performance of Carmen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Wolff: Un demi-siècle d’opéra-comique, 1900–1950 (Paris, 1953)

S. Wolff: L’Opéra au Palais Garnier (1875–1962) (Paris, 1962/R)

ELIZABETH FORBES

Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas

(b La Coudraye, nr Tours, 23/24 Jan 1763; d Paris, 25 April 1842). French librettist. He was born shortly after his father’s death, but was lovingly raised by his mother and his stepfather, a lawyer and professor of natural philosophy. Though aware of the boy’s talent for writing, the stepfather recommended law and Bouilly was duly presented at the bar of the Paris Parlément in 1787. The outbreak of the Revolution caused him to return to Tours, where he practised law and began to write theatre pieces. His first libretto, Pierre le Grand, found favour with the administration of the Opéra-Comique and with Mme Dugazon, a leading singer, who helped persuade Grétry to set it. Though the work had a successful première, its royalist sentiments later caused its banishment from the stage. Bouilly became engaged to Grétry’s daughter, Antoinette, but she died of tuberculosis before the wedding could take place.

At the period of the Terror, Bouilly returned to Tours, where he became head of the Military Commission. In the course of his duties he was involved in the supposedly true incidents that formed the bases of his best-known librettos, Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal (set by Gaveaux, later transformed into Beethoven’s Fidelio) and Les deux journées (Cherubini). In 1795 he returned to Paris, where he worked for the Committee of Public Instruction but left after three years to devote himself to writing. He began to branch out from opéra comique, producing several plays and vaudevilles (most successful was Fanchon la vielleuse, 1801, a collaboration with Joseph Pain). Two collections of moral tales for children were often reprinted, and his memoirs, Mes récapitulations, provide an interesting if idealized picture of his life and times.

Sedaine recognized in Bouilly a kindred spirit and referred to the younger man as his successor. Indeed Pierre le Grand, Bouilly’s first libretto, is already marked by the kind of dramatic truth and realism that made Sedaine the leading 18th-century French librettist. The cast presents a cross-section of society, characterized not only by their actions and costumes but also by their manners of speaking. Bouilly’s writing is always clear in its moral purpose and sentimental enough to have earned him the title poète lachrymal. Pierre teaches that a king need not have riches to be happy, while Léonore is a tale of virtue rewarded and Les deux journéesa picture of the simple goodness of working people. Bouilly could also produce delightful comedy, as Une folie demonstrates, and his qualities were sought out by leading composers. Though his manner of sensibilitéwent out of style by the second decade of the 19th century, he was nevertheless respected as a skilled writer and a sure dramatic craftsman.

WORKS

Pierre le Grand (oc), Grétry, 1790; La famille américaine (oc), Dalayrac, 1796; Le jeune Henri (oc), Méhul, 1797; La mort de Turenne (pièce historique, with J. V. A. Cuvellier), G. J. Navoigille, 1797; Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal (fait historique), Gaveaux, 1798 (It., Paer, 1804; It. Mayr, 1805; Ger., Beethoven, 1805, as Fidelio, rev. 1806, 1814); Les deux journées, ou Le porteur d’eau (comédie lyrique), Cherubini, 1800 (It., Mayr, 1801); Teniers (comédie, with M. J. Pain), 1800 (A.-P. M. G. Peellaert, 1826); Zoé ou La pauvre petite (comédie), Plantade, 1800; La haine aux femmes (vaudeville, with Pain), J. D. Doche and others, 1800; Une folie (comédie), Méhul, 1802 (Du Puy, 1806)

Fanchon la vielleuse (vaudeville, with Pain), Doche and others, 1803; Héléna (oc), Méhul, 1803; Le désastre de Lisbonne (drame), L. A. Piccinni, 1804; L’intrigue aux fenêtres (opéra-bouffe, with L. E. F. C. M. Dupaty), Isouard, 1805; Cimarosa (oc), Isouard, 1808; Françoise de Foix (oc, with Dupaty), Berton, 1809; La belle au bois dormant (féerie, with T. M. Dumersan), Doche, 1811; Le séjour militaire (oc, with Dupaty), Auber, 1813; Les jeux floraux, P. L. F. Aimon, 1818; Valentine de Milan (drame lyrique), Méhul, completed Daussoigne, 1822; Jenny la bouquetière (with Pain), Kreubé and Pradher, 1823; Agnes Sorel (comédie, with Dupaty), Peellaert, 1823; Les deux nuits (oc, with E. Scribe), Boieldieu, 1829

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. N. Bouilly: Mes récapitulations (Paris, 1836–7)

J.–X. Carré de Busserolle: Bouilly (Jean-Nicolas) (Tours, 1875) [with list of writings]

M. Ruhnke: ‘Die Librettisten des Fidelio’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1975), 121–40

D. Galliver: ‘Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763–1842), Successor of Sedaine’, SMA, xiii (1979), 16–33

J. Warrack: ‘Bouilly and his “fauvette”’, Opera, xxxiv (1983), 595–8

D. Charlton: Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge, 1986)

KARIN PENDLE (text), K. M. KNITTEL (work-list)

Bouissou, Sylvie

(b Noisy-le-Sec, Seine-St-Denis, 8 July 1956). French musicologist. She received her musical training at the Versailles Conservatory (1974–81) and then at the Paris Conservatoire (1980–86), where she studied analysis, the history of music, and musicology. Concurrently, she studied music, and later musicology, with Jean Mongrédien at the University of Paris IV, gaining her doctorate in 1986 with a thesis on Rameau’s Les Boréades. From 1985 to 1987 she held an Académie de France research scholarship at the Villa Medici, Rome, and in 1987 was appointed to teach at Tours University. In 1988 she became a researcher at the CNRS and in 1996 director of the Institut de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musical en France.

Bouissou’s chief area of research is French Baroque opera, particularly the works of Rameau. Her role in French musicology, however, goes further by virtue of two major enterprises she has undertaken. In 1991 she founded the Société Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose main aim is to publish Rameau’s Opera omnia (work began on the projected 38 volumes in 1996), and in 1993 she initiated plans for Musica gallica, a collection of critical editions of French musical heritage, becoming its director in the same year. The originality of this series is that it brings together a number of public institutions and private patrons, thus playing a fundamental role in music publishing of a scholarly nature in France.

WRITINGS

“‘Les Boréades” de J.-P. Rameau: un passé retrouvé’, RdM, lxix (1983), 157–85

‘Les tendances des réécritures de Rameau dans “Les surprises de l'amour” (1748, 1757–1759)’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, 827–38

‘Au-delà de l’imaginaire et de la spéculation la musique d'orchestre de Claude Ballif’, La musique: du théorique au politique, ed. H. Dufourt and J.-M. Fauquet (Paris, 1991), 155–80

Jean-Philippe Rameau: ‘Les Boréades’ ou la tragédie oubliée (Paris, 1992)

‘Le phénomène de la catastrophe naturelle dans l’opéra baroque français, 1671–1774', IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 3004–16

‘Les fonctions dramatico-musicales de la tempête et de l’orage dans l'opéra français, 1674–1764’, Penser l'opéra français de l’âge classique, ed. C. Kintzler (Paris, 1993), 89–103

‘Mécanismes dramatiques de la tempête et de l’orage dans l’opéra français à l’âge baroque’, D’un opéra l’autre: hommage à Jean Mongrédien, ed. J. Gribenski (Paris, 1996), 217–30

Principes éditoriaux ou Petit traité d'édition critique (Paris, 1997)

Vocabulaire de la musique baroque (Paris, 1996)

‘L’impact social de la catastrophe naturelle dans l'opéra baroque français’, Sillages musicologiques: hommages à Yves Gérard, ed. P. Blay and R. Legrand (Paris, 1997), 201–25

EDITIONS

C. Vivier: Samarkand, pf, wind qnt (Paris, 1989)

Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville: De profundis, Musica gallica (Paris, 1993)

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les surprises de l'amour, Opera omnia, ser. 4, xxvii/1 (1996)

with R.Fajon: Jean-Philippe Rameau: Acanthe et Céphise, Opera omnia, ser. 4, xxi (1997)

J.-J.C. de Mondonville: Venite exultemus (Paris, 1998)

JEAN GRIBENSKI

Boukoliasmos [boukolika]

(Gk., from boukolikos: ‘pertaining to keepers of cattle’).

See Pastoral, §2.

Boul, John [Jan].

See Bull, John.

Boulanger, (Marie-Juliette Olga) Lili

(b Paris, 21 Aug 1893; d Mézy, 15 March 1918). French composer. She grew up in a musical household, with both parents (Raïssa Mischetzky and Ernest Boulanger) and her sister Nadia trained or active as composers and performers. Her immense talent was recognized at the age of two, and she received a musical education from early childhood on. In 1895 she fell ill with bronchial pneumonia, after which her immune system was severely weakened. For the rest of her life she was almost constantly ill, with either passing infections or outbreaks of the chronic condition of intestinal tuberculosis which led to her death in 1918. Her frail health conditioned her life, through the need of constant care, and her musical career, as she had to rely on private composition and instrumental tuition rather than a full musical education at the Conservatoire. In December 1909, after her sister gave up her attempts to win the Prix de Rome, she decided to compete for the prize (her father Ernest Boulanger had won it in 1835). She prepared for the competition studying privately with Georges Caussade and, from January 1912, with Paul Vidal when she entered his composition class at the Conservatoire. After an unsuccessful first attempt in the 1912 competition, she won the Prix de Rome in 1913 with the cantata Faust et Hélène. Her success made the international headlines, as she was the first woman to win the prize for music. As a result, she was able to sign a contract with Ricordi that offered her an annual income in return for the right of first refusal on publication of her compositions.

Boulanger’s first sojourn in the Villa Medici in Rome was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. In Rome she finished several compositions, including the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel. On her return to Paris she founded the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National, an organization which offered material and moral support to musicians fighting in the war. In 1916 she again spent several months in Rome, working on her five-act opera La princesse Maleine, the Vieille prière bouddhique and her large-scale settings of Psalms cxxix and cxxx. She had to return home because of a rapid deterioration in her health. In the final two years of her life she concentrated her energies on trying to finish compositions begun earlier, in particular La princesse Maleine. In February and March 1918 she dictated to her sister her last composition, Pie Jesu for soprano, string quartet, harp and organ. She was buried in Montmartre cemetery.

Boulanger’s choice and setting of texts shows her concern with social and political issues of her time. The outbreak of World War I is reflected in her choice of La princesse Maleine (a fairy tale with war as its central theme) and in the texts of her choral compositions: Psalms xxiv, cxxix and cxxx, and the prayer for peace, Vieille prière bouddhique (the eclectic mix reflects her fervent but open-minded Catholicism). Her text-setting followed earlier models of clear prosody as developed by Massenet, Fauré and Debussy. But whereas here and in terms of musical form she relied on such models, her quest for harmonic and instrumental colour encouraged innovative experiments, which are also reflected in her sketches. In her final works, in particular the Pie Jesu, Boulanger began to explore polytonality. Her imaginative use of orchestral colours, as at the beginning of her setting of Psalm 129 with its dissonant organ rumble from which the melodic line emerges, was later to influence composers such as Honegger in his Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1934–5).

WORKS

stage

La princesse Maleine (op, 5, M. Maeterlinck and T. Ricordi), 1911–18, unfinished

vocal

Choral: Ps cxxix ‘Ils m’ont assez opprimé’, Bar, male chorus, orch, 1910–16; Ps cxxx ‘Du fond de l’abîme’, A, T, chorus, org, orch, 1910–17; Les sirènes (C. Grandmougin), Mez, chorus, pf, 1911; Sous bois (P. Gille), chorus, orch, 1911; Soleils de Septembre, chorus, pf, 1911–12, inc.; Renouveau (A. Silvestre), chorus, 4 solo vv, pf/orch, 1911–13; Hymne au soleil (C. Delavigne), A, chorus, pf/orch, 1912; Le soir, chorus, pf/orch, 1912; Soir d’été, chorus, pf, 1912, inc.; La source (C. Leconte de Lisle), chorus, orch, 1912; La tempête (Pendant la tempête) (T. Gautier), chorus, pf, 1912; Pour les funérailles d’un soldat (A. de Musset), Bar, chorus, orch, 1912–13; Soir sur la plaine (A. Samain), S, T, chorus, orch, 1913; Vieille prière bouddhique (Buddhist prayer from Visuddhimagga, trans. S. Karpelès), T, chorus, orch, 1914–17; Ps xxiv ‘La terre appartient à l’Eternel’, T, chorus, org, orch, 1916

Other vocal: Maïa (cant., F. Beisser), S, T, B, pf, 1911; Reflets (M. Maeterlinck), 1v, pf/orch, 1911; Frédégonde (cant., C. Morel), S, T, B, pf, 1911–12, inc.; Attente (Maeterlinck), 1v, pf, 1912; Le retour (G. Delaquys), 1v, pf, 1912 [orig. version: La nef légère, chorus, pf, 1912]; 2 vocal fugues, 4vv: 1912, 1913; Faust et Hélène (cant., E. Adenis, after J.W. von Goethe), Mez, T, Bar, orch, 1913; Clairières dans le ciel (F. Jammes), cycle of 13 songs, T, pf, 1913–14 [nos. 1, 5–7, 10–13 orchd, 1915–16]; Dans l’immense tristesse (B. Galéron de Calone), 1v, pf, 1916; Pie Jesu, S, str qt, hp, org, 1918

instrumental

Valse, E, pf, 1905–6, inc.; Nocturne, fl/vn, pf/orch, 1911 [orig. Pièce courte]; Prélude, B, pf, 1911; Prélude, D, pf, 1911; Morceau de piano: thème et variations, pf, 1911–14; Cortège, (vn/fl, pf)/pf, 1914; D’un jardin clair, pf, 1914; D’un vieux jardin, pf, 1914; D’un matin de printemps, (vn/fl, pf)/orch, 1917–18; D’un soir triste, (str trio/vc, pf)/orch, 1917–18

lost or destroyed works

La lettre de mort (E. Manuel), 1v, pf, 1906; Pss cxxxi, cxxxvii, solo vv, orch, 1907; Ave Maria, 1v, org, 1908; Apocalypse, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1909, inc.; 1 Corinthians xiii, chorus, orch, 1909; 5 études, pf, 1909; Pss i, cxix, chorus, orch, 1909; 3 études, pf, 1911; 2 études, pf 4 hands, 1912; Sonate, vn, pf, 1912–16; Alyssa (cant.), S, T, B, orch, 1913; Pièce, vc, pf, 1914; Pièce, ob, pf, 1914; Pièce, tpt, small orch, 1915; Poème symphonique, orch, 1915–16, inc.; Marche funèbre, small orch, 1916; Marche gaie, small orch, 1916; Sicilienne, small orch, 1916; Les pauvres (E. Verhaeren), 1v, pf, inc.; Ps cxxvi, chorus, orch, incl.

MSS in F-Pn and Archives de La Fondation Nadia et Lili Boulanger, Paris

Principal publishers: Durand, Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveW (R. Orledge) [incl. further bibliography]

M. Piré: En recueillement (Paris, 1920)

C. Mauclair: ‘La vie et l’oeuvre de Lili Boulanger’, ReM, ii/9–11 (1921), 147–55

C. Koechlin: ‘Evolution de l’harmonie: période contemporaine depuis Bizet et César Franck jusqu’à nos jours’, Encyclopédie du Conservatoire de Paris, ed. A. Lavignac and L. de la Laurencie (Paris, 1925), 591–760

P. Landormy: ‘Lili Boulanger’, MQ, xvi (1930), 510–15

H.-E. Reeser: ‘Lili Boulanger’, De muziek, vii (1933), 210–21, 264–79

R. Dumesnil: Portraits de musiciens français (Paris, 1938), 11–23

L. Rosenstiel: The Life and Works of Lili Boulanger (Rutherford, NJ, 1978)

E. Weissweiler: Komponistinnen aus 500 Jahren: eine Kultur- und Wirkungsgeschichte in Biographien und Werkbeispielen (Frankfurt, 1981), 325–46

J. Chailley: ‘L’oeuvre de Lili Boulanger’, ReM, nos.353–4 (1982), 15–44

S. Croguennoc: ‘Les mélodies de Lili Boulanger’, Autour de la mélodie française: Rouen 1984, 99–122

A. Fauser: ‘Die Musik hinter der Legende: Lili Boulangers Liederzyklus Clairières dans le ciel’, NZM, Jg.151, no.11 (1990), 9–14

B. Stiévenard-Salomon: Lili Boulanger: l’oeuvre retrouvée (Paris, 1993)

B. Dopp: ‘Numerology and Cryptography in the Music of Lili Boulanger: the Hidden Program in Clairières dans le ciel’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 556–83

S. Giesbrecht-Schutte: ‘Lili Boulanger: Clairières dans le ciel – ästhetischer Ausdruck und musikalische Form’, MF, xlvii (1994), 384–402

J. Brooks: ‘The Fonds Boulanger at the Bibliothèque Nationale’, Notes, li (1994–5), 1227–37

A. Fauser: ‘Lili Boulanger’s La Princesse Maleine: a Composer and her Heroine as Literary Icons’, JRMA, cxxii (1997), 68–108

A. Fauser: ‘La guerre en dentelles: Women and the Prix de Rome in French Cultural Politics’, JAMS, li (1998), 83–129

ANNEGRET FAUSER (work-list with ROBERT ORLEDGE)

Boulanger, (Juliette) Nadia

(b Paris, 16 Sept 1887; d Paris, 22 Oct 1979). French teacher, conductor and composer, sister of Lili Boulanger. Her father, Ernest Boulanger (1815–1900), was a composer (winner of the Prix de Rome in 1836) and singing teacher at the Paris Conservatoire; her mother, of Russian origin, had been one of his students. Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten, studying harmony with Paul Vidal and composition with Widor and Fauré; she also studied the organ privately with Vierne and Guilmant. She first came to public attention in 1908, when she wrote an instrumental fugue in a preliminary round for the Prix de Rome, rather than the vocal fugue required, resulting in a scandal. She progressed to the final round, however, and was placed second with her cantata La sirène.

Boulanger was promoted as a concert pianist and organist by the virtuoso pianist Raoul Pugno; from 1904 until his death in 1914, they often appeared on the same platform. They also collaborated as composers on a song cycle, Les heures claires (1909), and a four-act opera, La ville morte, to a libretto by D'Annunzio. A complete vocal score of the opera and the orchestration of Acts 1 and 3 survive, and the work was to have been staged in 1914, though due to Pugno's death and the events leading up to World War I, it was never performed. Boulanger's works as a solo composer include over 30 songs, chamber music and a Fantaisie variée (1912) for piano and orchestra, written for Pugno. Her musical language is often highly chromatic (though always tonally based), and Debussy's influence is apparent in her fondness for modally-inflected melodic lines and parallel chordal progressions.

Boulanger stopped composing in the early 1920s. She was greatly affected by the premature death of her sister Lili, whom she considered to be more gifted than herself, and throughout her life, Boulanger assiduously promoted her sister's music. It is likely that her lack of confidence in her own ability as a creative artist and her self-critical attitude (the Fantaisie variée bears signs of extensive revision and is not performable in its present state) led her to concentrate on teaching. Nadia Boulanger is remembered as one of the foremost composition teachers of the 20th century and one of the first professional female conductors. She taught privately from the age of 16 until shortly before her death; her first pupils included her sister, who studied fugue with her in the summer of 1911.

Boulanger's first official post was as a teacher of piano and piano accompaniment at the Conservatoire Femina-Musica in Paris (1907). Later she was one of the first staff members of the Ecole Normale de Musique, where she taught harmony, counterpoint, music history, analysis, organ and composition (1920–39), and keyboard harmony (from 1957). She was a founder member of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in 1921, becoming its director in 1948. She was also professor of piano accompaniment at the Paris Conservatoire (1946–57). She was renowned as a charismatic lecturer and penetrating analyst.

Boulanger was also an important figure in American musical life in the 20th century. She toured the country as an organist in 1925, giving the première of Copland's Symphony for organ and orchestra, and lived there during World War II, conducting the Boston SO, Philadelphia Orchestra and New York PO and teaching at Wellesley College, Radcliffe College and the Juilliard School. After the war, she often returned to the United States for lecture tours. Her American students at Fontainebleau, or at her Wednesday afternoon classes in her Paris home, included Bernstein, Carter, Copland, Harris and Virgil Thomson. Although Boulanger made her conducting début in 1912, directing her own music, it was not until 1934 that she made her first public appearance as a conductor in Paris. In 1936 she became the first woman to conduct the LPO. She often promoted the music of her sister and pupils, and had a particular fondness for Stravinsky's works, conducting the première of his Dumbarton Oaks in Washington (1938). In 1936, she founded a vocal ensemble (featuring both professional and amateur performers) whose repertory ranged from 16th-century French music to works by contemporary composers. They recorded madrigals by Monteverdi in 1937 with Boulanger at the piano, a disc which was the most comprehensive survey of his music then on record. Their other recordings included Brahms's Liebeslieder waltzes, accompanied by Boulanger and one of her young protégés, Dinu Lipatti.

Boulanger was named maître de chapelle to Prince Pierre of Monaco (an honorary post) in the late 1940s, remaining in this post during Prince Rainier's reign; she was also president of the Prince Pierre composition competition, and frequently appeared as an adjudicator for international piano competitions. Despite increasing deafness and failing sight, she continued working almost until the end of her life. Among many honours and decorations, Boulanger received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Harvard, and an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Music, she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Grand Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, and she was presented with the Order of St Charles of Monaco and the Order of the Crown of Belgium.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal: Allons voir sur le lac d'argent (A. Silvestre), 2vv, pf, 1905; Ecoutez la chanson bien douce (P. Verlaine), 1v, orch, 1905; Les sirènes (C. Grandmougin), female chorus, orch, 1905; A l'aube (Silvestre), chorus, orch, 1906; A l'hirondelle (A. Sully Prudhomme), chorus, orch, 1908; La sirène (E. Adenis/Desveaux), 3vv, orch, 1908; Dnégouchka (G. Delaquys), 3vv/orch, 1909

Over 30 songs for 1v, pf, incl.: Extase (V. Hugo), 1901; Désepérance (P. Verlaine), 1902; Cantique de soeur Béatrice (M. Maeterlinck), 1909; Une douceur splendide et sombre (A. Samain), 1909; Larme solitaire (H. Heine), 1909; Une aube affaiblie (Verlaine), 1909; Prière (Bataille), 1909; Soir d'hiver (N. Boulanger), 1915; Au bord de la nuit, Chanson, Le couteau, Doute, L'échange (C. Mauclair), 1922; J'ai frappé (R. de Marquein), 1922

Chbr and solo inst: 3 pièces, org, 1911, arr. vc, pf; 3 pièces, pf, 1914; Pièce sur des airs populaires flamands, org, 1917; Vers la vie nouvelle, pf, 1917

Orch: Allegro, 1905; Fantaisie variée, pf, orch, 1912

With Raoul Pugno: Les heures claires (E. Verhaeren), 8 songs, 1v, pf, 1909; La ville morte (op, 4, G. d'Annunzio), 1910–13

MSS in F-Pn

Principal publishers: Hamelle, Heugel, Ricordi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Letters to Nadia Boulanger in F-Pn

A. Kendall: The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger, A Life Devoted to Music (London, 1976)

R. Orr: ‘A Note on Nadia Boulanger’, MT, cxx (1979), 999 only

B. Monsaingeon: Mademoiselle: entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger (Luynes, 1980; Eng. trans., 1985)

‘Lili et Nadia Boulanger’, ReM, nos.353–4 (1982) [Boulanger issue, incl. list of N. Boulanger's pupils]

L. Rosenstiel: Nadia Boulanger: a Life in Music (New York, 1982)

D.G. Campbell: Master Teacher: Nadia Boulanger (Washington DC, 1984)

J. Spycket: Nadia Boulanger (Lausanne, 1987)

CAROLINE POTTER

Boulez, Pierre

(b Montbrison, Loire, 26 March 1925). French composer and conductor. Resolute imagination, force of will and ruthless combativeness secured him, as a young man, a position at the head of the Parisian musical avant garde. His predecessors, in his view, had not been radical enough; music awaited a combination of serialism with the rhythmic irregularity opened up by Stravinsky and Messiaen. This call for a renewed modernism was widely heard and widely followed during the 1950s, but its appeal gradually weakened thereafter, and in the same measure his creativity waned. He began to be more active as a conductor, at first specializing in 20th-century music, but then, in the 1970s, covering a large and general repertory. Towards the end of that decade he turned his attention to an electro-acoustic music studio built for him in Paris, where he hoped to resume the effort to create a new musical language on a rational basis. After a brief hiatus, though, conducting became again his principal means of expressing his independence and clarity of vision.

1. Compositional career.

2. Conducting.

3. Compositional style.

G.W. HOPKINS/PAUL GRIFFITHS

1. Compositional career.

As a boy Boulez divided his attention between music and mathematics. He sang in the choir of his Catholic school at St Etienne, he enjoyed playing the piano; but his early aptitude for mathematics marked him out – at least in the eyes of his father, a steel industrialist – for a career in engineering. On leaving school in 1941, he spent a year attending a course in higher mathematics at Lyons with a view to gaining admission to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. During that year he made what progress he could with music, cultivating his proficiency as a pianist and acquiring a grounding in theory.

It was the latter which stood him in good stead when he moved to Paris in 1942 and, against his father's wishes, opted for the Paris Conservatoire rather than the Ecole Polytechnique; he had failed the pianists' entrance examination. After three years he took a premier prix in harmony, having attended Messiaen's famous harmony class. Along with some of his contemporaries in Messiaen's class, he took exception to the hidebound curriculum of the Conservatoire and looked beyond its walls for instruction in counterpoint. This he studied privately with Andrée Vaurabourg, the wife of Arthur Honegger.

It was in Messiaen's class that Boulez, respected as well as encouraged by his teacher, first gave proof of exceptional abilities as a music analyst. Quick to detect genuine originality of craftsmanship, he equally quickly lost patience with music whose renown rested on anything less substantial. He viewed composition as a form of aesthetic research and demanded that it be conducted on stringently scientific (that is, logical) lines; in this light, the cult of personal stylistic development – a hangover from Romanticism – counted for nothing. Infected by a common zeal, Boulez and a number of his fellow pupils demonstrated their protest vocally at performances of works whose modernity they considered a facile and arbitrary disguise; not even the personal reputation of Stravinsky was sacrosanct, and many a lesser one was mercilessly deflated.

His own aesthetic researches at the time had led him to ‘a very clear awareness of the necessity for atonality’. When Schoenberg's pupil Leibowitz began to introduce dodecaphonic music to the French public, Boulez readily applied to him for instruction in serial techniques. Within a year his earliest published compositions (Notations, the Flute Sonatina, the First Piano Sonata, Le visage nuptial) had taken shape; his inventive energies had taken the route suggested by Schoenberg's Wind Quintet op.26 (which he had heard in 1945) and by the later works of Webern. Again, Boulez was subsequently to write: ‘Any musician who has not felt … the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is OF NO USE (‘Eventuellement …’, 1952, in Boulez, 1966)

On the recommendation of Honegger, Boulez was appointed musical director of the new Compagnie Renaud-Barrault in 1946. He thus laid the solid foundations of his career as a conductor with performances of theatre music, including specially composed scores by Auric, Poulenc and Honegger himself. (Roger Desormière, from whom he received guidance, could be considered his one ‘teacher’ of conducting.) Boulez was in charge of Milhaud's music for Claudel's Christophe Colomb when the company's production of the play was recorded on disc, and in 1955, the penultimate year of his association with the company, Boulez himself wrote the incidental music for their production of the Oresteia at the Bordeaux Festival.

The first works that made Boulez's reputation as a composer were those that came after his début pieces: the Second Piano Sonata and Le soleil des eaux. The latter, first given as a cantata in Paris in July 1950, grew out of some incidental music Boulez wrote for a radio production of Char's work of the same name, broadcast in April 1948. The music of the original version, reworked, became ‘Complainte du lézard amoureux’, and Boulez added to this a second movement, ‘La sorgue’. The scoring of the cantata, both impressionistically delicate and violent, has a hallucinatory clarity which accords well with Boulez's surrealist intentions.

In contrast with the one-movement Sonatina and the two-movement First Sonata, Boulez's Second Sonata is a monumental work in four movements. Avowedly modelled on Beethoven, its movements follow a sufficiently Classical pattern for the many facets of Boulez's style to be systematically deployed. The work's reputation grew less from relatively obscure early performances by Yvette Grimaud and Yvonne Loriod than from circulation of the score, which was published in 1950. This composition, more than any other, first spread Boulez's fame abroad: its first performance in Darmstadt (by Loriod in 1952) was one of the most eagerly awaited musical events of the postwar years, and through the advocacy of Tudor it reached the ears of the American avant garde.

Immediately afterwards came the Livre pour quatuor, which foreshadows much of the later development of Boulez's musical thinking. The work is in the form of a collection of movements, and it is left to the later development of Boulez's musical thinking. The work is in the form of a collection of movements, and it is left to the performers to select which will be given at any one performance. Thus the Livre anticipates those works of the late 1950s in which the performer is allowed to choose his own path through the music. Its immediate significance, however, was as a pointer towards the technique of ‘total serialization’. Stimulated by the last works of Webern and by Messiaen's Quatre études de rythme (1949–50), Boulez sought to develop a technique whereby the principles of serialism could be made to govern the timbre, duration and intensity of each sound, as well as its pitch. Some of the movements of the Livre pour quatuor may be considered as first sketches towards such a technique.

By 1951 Boulez had arrived at a stage where he could commit his first essays in the new technique to paper – and to magnetic tape. The resources of the studio for musique concrète run by Schaeffer under the auspices of French radio enabled Boulez to compose two Etudes in which the precise organization of timbres, durations and intensities could remain immune from the hazards of human performance. These hazards proved to be a real stumbling-block in Polyphonie X for 18 soloists (1950–51), which was composed for and performed at the 1951 Donaueschingen Festival. The last, and most successful, of Boulez's essays in total serialization was Structures I for two pianos (1951–2). Organization of timbres was here replaced by that of ‘modes of attack’, and the treatment of durations in particular became more flexible in the last two of the work's three sections. The first section was performed at a Paris concert in 1952 by Messiaen and the composer.

At the same time Boulez completed a first revision of his early cantata, Le visage nuptial. Originally written for two vocal soloists and a chamber ensemble, the work was reorchestrated for very much larger forces including a women's chorus. Densely orchestrated and richly polyphonic, the work reaches towards lyrical paroxysm and its style shares certain features with both Messiaen and the Expressionism of Berg. In two of its five movements (each a setting of a poem by Char) Boulez freely used quarter-tones (though he expunged these from his revision of 1986–9). It was not until December 1957 that the five-movement version was given its first performance, under the composer's direction, in Cologne.

The next five years saw a marked slowing down in Boulez's production as a composer. It was a period in which much of his musical thinking found expression in articles on technique and aesthetics, many of which are to be found in the collection Relevés d'apprenti. Perhaps the most notorious of all these writings was his ‘obituary’ in Score (1952) ‘Schönberg est mort’, in which he continued his protest against what he considered the inadequate working-out of musical discoveries. But this was also a period during which Boulez won wide and even popular acclaim for a work which very soon came to be thought of as a keystone of 20th-century music, a worthy companion to The Rite of Spring and Pierrot Lunaire: Le marteau sans maître (1953–5).

Unlike Boulez's earlier settings of Char's poetry, Le marteau sans maître is scored for a small ensemble; its contralto soloist is complemented only by alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, percussion, guitar and viola (fig.2). Char's three poems are embedded in a nine-movement structure of interlacing settings and related instrumental movements. Recalling the cellular style of late Webern, Boulez cultivated a certain rhythmic monotony, emphasized by his use of the percussion in some of the movements. This is offset by abrupt tempo transitions, passages of broadly improvisatory melodic style, and – not least of all – the fascination of exotic instrumental colouring, underlining the work's basically static conception.

In 1954, supported by the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault and by the patronage of Suzanne Tézenas, Boulez was able to found the Domaine Musical series of concerts. New works were given carefully prepared performances in programmes which included only those works of the past thought to be of special relevance to contemporary music. These ‘composers's concerts’ found an enthusiastic following in Paris, and set a pattern which has since been widely and successfully imitated. The Domaine Musical gave European premières of works by Stravinsky, Messiaen and many younger composers of different nationalities. Its concerts became a regular feature of Parisian musical life, and in 1967 Boulez was succeeded as musical director by Amy.

Following the success of Le marteau sans maître, Boulez began to be in considerable demand as a teacher of composition. He taught at Darmstadt annually from 1954–6 and four times again between 1960 and 1965; he was also professor of composition at the Basle Musik-Akademie (1960–63), a visiting lecturer at Harvard University (1963) and an active private teacher. It was at Darmstadt that he gave the series of lectures which were to become Penser la musique aujourd'hui. The book outlines in systematic fashion the developments of serial technique which followed Boulez's preoccupation with total serialization; in particular, it relates to the group of works (the Third Piano Sonata, Poésie pour pouvoir, Doubles, Structures II, Pli selon pli) he composed between 1957 and 1962.

By now the broadening of his serial techniques had led Boulez to an interest in the possibilities of open form. At one level, individual works were increasingly to be seen as parts of a greater whole, a ‘work in progress’, to be taken up again and reworked as the larger entity came to assume its own shape. The two Improvisations sur Mallarmé for soprano and percussion ensemble (1957) in this way became parts of Pli selon pli (1957–62), which then underwent intermittent change during a period of 30 years; an early version of its opening section, Don, gave rise to Eclat (1965), another continuing project; and Doubles, commissioned by the Lamoureux Orchestra for performance in 1958, was later expanded as Figures–Doubles–Prismes (1963), which is also in principle unfinished. But more far-reaching was the freedom Boulez now tended to give the performer. There are, for example, passages in Improvisation sur Mallarmé II that are marked ‘senza tempo’, leaving the soloist and conductor free to judge durations for themselves.

In the Third Sonata the performer has considerably more freedom of choice. Within certain limits, the order of the work's five movements may be freely selected; within movements themselves, the performer is offered a number of alternative routes, and must choose which passages to perform and which to omit. However, the composer's planned scheme of options represents a much firmer control over the work's identity than is to be found in such aleatory music as Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI. Only two of the sonata's movements have so far been published, the remainder having been withdrawn into the category of ‘work in progress’. Completed works of the period include Poésie pour pouvoir for orchestra and tape, and Structures II for two pianos. The former, based on a text by Michaux, continues the spatial exploitation of orchestral sound which Stockhausen inaugurated with his Gruppen. Structures II (1956–61) complemented the studies in serialism of 1951–2 with examples of a more developed and freer serial technique.

The extent of Boulez's new freedom is perhaps most amply demonstrated in Pli selon pli, a work for soprano and large orchestra in five movements, sub-titled ‘portrait de Mallarmé’. Extended passages in which the registers of notes remain fixed make for a new simplicity of style, particularly in the vocal writing of the three Improvisations which form the work's central core. The density of instrumental textures varies from the use of the full orchestra in the outer movements to the delicate chamber ensemble which accompanies the second Improvisation. The frequently ornate vocal style of the work does not preclude a somewhat expressionistic treatment of Mallarmé's text, but Boulez's real homage to the poet lies deeper, in the formal correspondences between his music and Mallarmé's poetic syntax.

Eclat for 15 instruments (1965) heralded a group of compositions in which Boulez turned his attention to variously constituted chamber ensembles of moderate size. This work, featuring an important solo piano part among the nine non-sustaining instruments of its original version, finally grew into Eclat/Multiples for orchestra. In cummings ist der Dichter for 16 solo voices and 24 instruments (1970, rev. 1986), Boulez invented a new type of chamber cantata; more concise than Pli selon pli, the work is another portrait of a poet, and is again built around a central ‘improvisatory’ section in which sustained notes alternate with violent vocal ejaculations.

The possibilities of open forms continued to exercise his imagination. In Domaines, for clarinet alone or with 21 instruments (1961–8), as in Poésie pour pouvoir and Figures–Doubles–Prismes, Boulez emphasized the role of spatial location in the distribution of the ensemble; the solo clarinettist moves among the work's six instrumental groups. The freedom given to the performers in determining the work's form is allotted alternately to the soloist and to the ensemble, under the leadership of the conductor. The original plan (1971) for ‘… explosante-fixe …’ sets out a wide range of possible forms for selection by the players involved, whose number and instruments Boulez does not prescribe. He returned in 1968 to his ‘work in progress’ then of longest standing, the Livre pour quatuor he had embarked on 20 years previously; he prepared a new version (Livre pour cordes) for full string orchestra of two of its movements which, in a further revision in 1988, were to become one.

The recomposition of older pieces became a major part of Boulez's creative life. Le soleil des eaux had already been revised in 1965; a version of Notations for enormous orchestra was begun in 1978; and in the 1980s several works were rethought, from Le visage nuptial through Pli selon pli to cummings ist der Dichter. Boulez – who has spoken also of amending Polyphonie X, Poésie pour pouvoir and Domaines, and has started at least the last of these tasks – felt that his growing experience allowed him to improve or extend what he had written in his twenties and thirties, but he was also committed to an aesthetics of proliferation, to a belief that, within the centreless universe of serialism, musical ideas held limitless potential for development. Hence the difficulty, too, of bringing pieces to a conclusion: major works that seem destined to remain unfinished include the Third Piano Sonata, Figures–Doubles–Prismes, Eclat/Multiples, ‘… explosante-fixe …’ and Répons, of which the last was designed to exploit the possibilities of digital sound manipulation that were being developed at Boulez's research facility, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, which started to come into operation towards the end of the 1970s.

Proliferation is important also to the textures and forms of Boulez's later works, most of which are based either on the ‘… explosante-fixe …’ kit (a group including the orchestral Rituel, which is unusual for this composer in its monumental conception, in having been instantly completed and in having resisted change) or on a sequence of harmonies derived from a musical spelling of Paul Sacher's surname (Messagesquisse, Répons, the Dérive series).

More ambiguous is Boulez's commitment to the electronic medium. His hopes for IRCAM, expressed in manifestos, were that it would be a meeting-place for scientists, composers and performers, a laboratory in which the musical adventure of the 20th century could at last be continued – not the sophisticated electro-acoustic music studio it quickly became. If, nevertheless, he took advantage of what he had, and created Répons partly to show off IRCAM’s digital machinery for storing and transforming sounds in live performance, the electronic aspect here is perhaps less central than the opposition that had generated Eclat/Multiples, between tuned percussion (six soloists, amplified and altered) and a chamber orchestra of wind and strings (untransformed). Dialogue de l'ombre double (1982–5), a recomposition of Domaines, shows a far more integrated use of electronic voice-change, applied to a solo clarinet, and the development of ‘…explosante-fixe…’ into a concerto for MIDI flute (1991–3) does the same, within music characteristically caught between thrill and desperation. But the works of this period that show most inventiveness and control in terms of timbre are the extensions for large orchestra of the piano Notations (1945), from which Boulez had come to date his career as a composer.

2. Conducting.

Boulez's conducting career began with the Domaine Musical concerts, where he conducted many new works by young composers as well as his own Le marteau sans maître. In 1957, at the invitation of Scherchen, he conducted the first performance of Le visage nuptial in Cologne; during the next year, he not only conducted the première of Doubles in Paris, but participated with Rosbaud and the Grosses Orchester der SWF in the first performance of Poésie pour pouvoir. He was again invited to conduct the same orchestra when an early version of Pli selon pli was introduced in Cologne in 1960; meanwhile, he had become a guest conductor with the orchestra, and had taken up residence in Baden-Baden, partly as a gesture of revolt against French musical conservatism. (The German spa town remained his principal home for 20 years, until he returned to Paris to take charge of IRCAM and assume a position at the Collège de France.) Although always primarily concerned with the performance of 20th-century music, and notably that of Debussy, Stravinsky, Webern and Messiaen, he extended his repertory during this time to include a number of earlier works (by Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and others) with which he felt a special affinity.

After some years of alienation from the official musical world in Paris, Boulez returned there triumphantly in 1963 to conduct the first Paris Opéra production of Wozzeck. Very quickly he came to be in demand for a wide variety of occasions in many different countries. In 1964 he conducted a special concert performance of Hippolyte et Aricie for the Rameau bicentenary celebrations in Paris, in 1965 he was at the Edinburgh Festival to conduct Pli selon pli and in 1966 he was entrusted with Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival. In 1967 he became a guest conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra, with whom he made a number of recordings, and four years later he was appointed principal conductor of both the BBC SO and the New York PO. He relinquished these posts in 1974 and 1977 respectively. In 1976 he conducted the Ring at Bayreuth, in Patrice Chéreau's controversial production, and in 1979 at the Paris Opéra he had charge of the first production of Berg's Lulu in complete form. After this he reduced his conducting commitments drastically, but by the 1990s he was performing and recording frequently again, mostly in his favourite 20th-century repertory, but with some new acquisitions (Bruckner, Strauss).

Boulez's performances are primarily noted for their analytical clarity of sound: every note, even in complex scores, makes its point as a contribution to the whole. This proved an invaluable feature of Boulez's pioneering performances of new music, even though at first they were often hampered by some aridity in orchestral sonority. Given superior orchestras, the freshness of his approach gave particularly successful results in his performances of Debussy's scores, presenting a stark contrast with a long-standing tradition of impressionist cloudiness. A certain deliberacy of forward propulsion, admirably suited to many of the modern scores he performs (The Rite of Spring, for instance), can at other times impede the flow or overload the beat: the sensitivity of his musical ear is widely and justly renowned; the suppleness of his ‘muscle’ is less likely to claim such regard. He brings a composer's insight to the shaping of structure and form, and imagination to his interpretation of a work's aesthetic. This insight and imagination is also displayed in his verbal introductions to many of the works he performs, for he has continued, both in the concert hall and through the mass media, to be a most active propagandist and spokesman for the music of the 20th century.

3. Compositional style.

Boulez's famous phrase about ‘organized delirium’ (‘Son et verbe’, 1958, in Relevés d'apprenti, 1966) is a most useful starting-point for examining his style and aesthetics. ‘Delirium’ situates the music's essential poetics: it points to the post-Expressionist colouring of individualist subjectivism in which the humanism of Boulez's music has its deepest roots; and it directs the listener's attention to the unique inflections of the composer's voice. ‘Organization’, on the other hand, speaks of the effort to exteriorize expression in universal terms: it indicates the nature of the Platonic model to which Boulez relates his work, and instructs one to seek out the logic in its workings. Composers of Boulez's generation have commonly seen the inseparability of style and logic as a criterion of musical excellence; and it is within such terms as theirs that critical analysis of Boulez's music has most often been conducted.

With rare exceptions (notably in the Third Piano Sonata), Boulez's music displays its firmest foundations in linear, melodic thinking. In adopting and imaginatively developing the principles of Schoenbergian serialism in his organization of pitches, Boulez rapidly evolved a melodic manner of wide-ranging flexibility. The freedom with which he uses every possible tempered melodic interval is restrained only by a recurrent tendency of these intervals to fall into ‘characteristic’ aggregations, somewhat in the manner of Webern. This gives rise to melodic ‘cells’, which can be used in an overtly thematic manner, as in the early sonatas and in the Sonatina, whose form is modelled on that of Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie op.9, and from which the following examples are taken. Ex.1 shows a principal theme of the work and some of its later appearances. The figure x, taken from a characteristic opening flourish (ex.2), is later used, together with its inversion (x'), retrograde (x'') and retrograde inversion (x''') forms, as the basis of an extended development section (ex.3). The use of repeated notes in this example anticipates their appearance in the first movement of the Second Piano Sonata, where they help to articulate the motivic content.

In the works with orchestra of the late 1940s, instrumental overlapping tends to create a more obvious continuity of melodic line and there is correspondingly less emphasis on chiselled melodic-rhythmic cells. Even in those works of 1951–2 where Boulez was applying a technique of total serialization, there is not the marked discontinuity of horizontal line which characterizes the ‘point’ (isolated note) composition of Stockhausen's contemporary works (e.g. Punkte for orchestra). Melodic passages are given to individual instruments in Polyphonie X; indeed, in the first piece of Structures I, the use of constant dynamic levels and modes of attack does much to emphasize the continuous conception of each polyphonic strand. (The wide leaps in register between notes do not affect this fundamental continuity: they had been part of Boulez's melodic thinking for the piano since the time of the First Piano Sonata, as that work's second movement clearly shows.)

The broader serial thinking of subsequent years produced a distinctly more improvisatory melodic style – sometimes highly embellished, sometimes circling round a central note or group of notes. As an example of this, the writing for solo clarinet in Domaines is interesting – often a single note is decorated in a manner suggesting, in Boulez's own phrase, ‘a polyphony which remains latent’ (Boulez on Music Today, p.137). The opening of Improvisation sur Mallarmé I (ex.4) demonstrates the effect of a fixed ‘constellation’ of registers in melodic writing of this kind. Another, more incidental, feature of certain works of this period is the use of preponderant intervals, usually by means of a careful shaping of the registral scheme in an appropriate way; thus, much of Le marteau sans maître shows a preponderance of minor 3rds (see ex.5), and Improvisation sur Mallarmé II is likewise marked by major 9ths.

The fixing in register of a field of pitches over a comparatively long stretch of music is a rather sporadic phenomenon in Boulez, though he continues to resort to this technique in ‘… explosante-fixe …’. The static, decorative effect to which it gives rise is particularly evident in certain passages of Boulez's writing for the piano (in Structures II and Eclat, for instance); and in Don, the opening section of Pli selon pli, it notably draws the attention from the pitch structure to details of instrumental timbre. By contrast, Boulez went to the other extreme in his early works. Here he consistently avoided fixity of register by maintaining a steady flow of transpositions, even in the slower passages of orchestral writing occurring in Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux. Sometimes, indeed, the flow is so fast as blatantly to contravene the Schoenbergian guiding principle of octave avoidance (see exx.1d and 3).

Boulez's polyphonic thinking, unlike Webern's, is allied to a harmonic style of some density which has its roots not only in Schoenberg but in Messiaen too. This is evident in Boulez's richly sounding vertical aggregates and instrumental voicing, in his cluster effects, in his treatment of the extreme registers of the piano, and in his occasional use of organum-like parallel chord movement (see ex.1d; more complex examples are to be found in later works such as Eclat). Less obvious, although no less effective than parallel homophonic movement, are those passages dominated by preponderant harmonic intervals. The third movement of the Second Piano Sonata is haunted by major 2nds; and the character of Le marteau sans maître owes much to the deployment, both melodically and harmonically, of 3rds and 6ths (ex.5).

This example demonstrates one of the methods most commonly used by the serialists in their attempts to bring about a fusion between horizontal and vertical pitch structures. The melodic line in ex.5a contains a full range of intervals, yet for the most part it is developed from the sort of chordal spacing suggested in ex.5b, which is exclusively occupied with the minor 3rd and its inversion. (In the transcription of this example, certain details are omitted, notably the part for percussion.) It should be noted, however, that this type of fusion leaves the typical melodic and harmonic textures unaltered. The harmonic writing here is obstinately in four parts; and only the slight hint of ‘latent polyphony’ in the vocal line shows Boulez moving towards the textural fusion which marks the Third Piano Sonata.

The procedures Boulez came to use in order to produce suitably mobile pitch structures from serial premises are described in Penser la musique aujourd'hui. In the example he gives there, a melodic series is broken up into polyphonic segments (one- to three-part writing), each of which is thickened by ‘multiplication’ – that is, by transposing the same interval or chord onto each of its notes. (For example, if the segment F–G–B is multiplied by the interval C–E, the result is F(–A)–G(–B)–B(–D), i.e. F–G–A–B–B–D.) It is this technique of multiplication that represents the true ‘diagonal’ between melody and harmony. It is possible that Boulez had been consciously seeking this path from the very start; rapid flourishes using equal durational values (e.g. ex.2) frequently appear in the early works and may have been conceived, if naively so, as a fusion between vertical and horizontal writing. But it is only the later technique that represents a truly serial approach to textural density, offering a solution which had eluded Boulez at the time of his research into the possibilities of total serialization.

A way into the serialization of rhythm came from the arithmetical series of durational values in Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d'intensités. Boulez favoured the same approach (see Structures Ia), and his subsequent conception of musical time owes much to it. However, the ‘global’ organization of time and the performance of rhythms within time require greater differentiation than the exclusive use of such durational series offers. In Structures Ib, Boulez introduced regular subdivisions of the larger temporal units, and soon (see ‘Eventuellement …’, 1952) he was finding ways of incorporating a flexibility of rhythmical movement commensurate with that of his early works.

These works were firmly founded on a form of cellular rhythmic motivicism which derived from the practice of Messiaen. Small rhythmic groups could be varied and developed by using simple procedures of permutation, augmentation, diminution, extension and elision; in this way, a very small number of rhythmic ideas could engender enough rhythmic forms to sustain an extended composition. There are some simple examples of this in the Sonatina. The values marked x' in ex.1b are a regular diminution of the first three notes of ex.1a; and the first four values of ex.1b appear in a reversed form in ex.3 (x and x'; retrograde in x'' and x'''). As a means of articulating the thematic content of sonata forms, the technique has many advantages, and it corresponds admirably to the use of recurrent pitch aggregates.

A similar correspondence can be found in nonthematic music, where passages of varying rhythmic regularity can be set off against highly regular or highly irregular passages; this parallels the musical characterization that can be achieved by the control of pitch structures. The extreme regularity of the subdivisions in Structures Ib continues to represent one type of characterization, as, for example, in Domaines (see the writing for trombones in their ‘Miroir’ section). The harmonic example of Le marteau sans maître (ex.5b) shows how regularity of values can link up with motivic thinking. Irregular durations are generally formed by introducing ‘irrational’ subdivisions (a technique Boulez took over from Varèse and Jolivet) or by adding fractional values in the manner of Messiaen (ex.1 contains simple instances of both techniques). From the first, these rhythmic techniques were an important factor in the suppleness of Boulez's melodic style, especially in his writing for the voice. Ex.5a is a typical example of the masterly way in which he welds together rational and irrational, regular and irregular elements.

In many of his works, Boulez's approach to problems of musical form has been guided by a poetic text. In Le visage nuptial the relationship between text and musical form is particularly transparent: it is a curiosity of the final version of this work that, for all the vast orchestral resources Boulez could call upon, there are amazingly few bars of vocal inactivity. The text very closely determines the form of the music, even when (as in the fourth movement, ‘Evadné’) it is merely declaimed relentlessly in unpitched semiquavers. Le soleil des eaux shows a marked advance on this, and its instrumental interludes and wordless vocalise anticipate the commentary movements in Le marteau sans maître. In the later vocal works, the texts become ‘sources of irrigation’, the ‘centre and absence’ of the musical conceptions Boulez builds around them (‘Poésie – centre et absence – musique’, 1963, in Boulez, 1981). They continue to suggest forms, without dominating them.

The instrumental forms preferred by Boulez in the late 1940s are only superficially affiliated with the neo-classical movement. Sonata forms provided the merest skeleton, a pretext for thematic presentation and development at a time when Boulez's serial language was superbly equipped to follow those lines. His later forms are both more freely conceived and more sectional. Serial organization on a broad scale stimulates the invention of forms whose constituent parts are related only to one another, rather than to a pre-existing model. It also provides general criteria for linking structures in a number of alternative ways, thus clearing the way for the open forms Boulez used in, for example, the Third Piano Sonata and Domaines. In the Sonata the five movements, or ‘formants’, can be played in a number of different orders, always grouped round the central ‘Constellation’; the order and choice of sections within formants is similarly variable. In Domaines there are 12 sections to be played through in two groups of six, the order being chosen once by the soloist, once by the conductor.

To have gained a perspective in which serialism implies, and even logically entails such freedom, is one of the triumphs of Boulez's imagination. Yet the earlier works are far too convincing in themselves to be dismissed as preparatory exercises. Some critics have shown concern at the vast difference in character between early Boulez and post-1952 Boulez. The ‘musical scientist’ may indeed have satisfied his thirst for a system; but, so long as that system remains an open one, he is still free to go on making discoveries.

WORKS

vocal–orchestral

Le soleil des eaux (R. Char), S, T, B, chbr orch, 1950 [after incid music], Joachim, Mollet, Peyron, Orchestre National, cond. Desormière, Paris, 18 July 1950, unpubd; rev. S, T, B, STB, orch, 1958, Nendick, Krebs, Rehfuss, Hesse Radio Chorus and SO, cond. Bour, Darmstadt, 9 Sept 1958; rev. S, SATB, orch, 1965, Gayer, Berlin Philharmonic Choir and PO, cond. Boulez, Berlin, 4 Oct 1965

Le visage nuptial (Char), S, A, female chorus, orch, 1951–2 [after chbr work], Steingruber, Bornemann, Cologne Radio Chorus and SO, cond. Boulez, Cologne, 4 Dec 1957; rev. 1986–9, Bryn-Julson, Laurence, BBC Singers, BBC SO, cond. Boulez, London, 25 Jan 1988 [inc.], same perfs., Metz, 16 Nov 1989 [complete], unpubd

Pli selon pli (S. Mallarmé), S, orch, 1957–62:

1 Don, S, pf, 1960; Rogner, Bergmann, Cologne, 13 June 1960 [first perf. of Pli selon pli], unpubd; new version, S, orch, 1960–62, Rogner, SWF SO, cond. Boulez, Amsterdam, 5 July 1962; rev. 1989–90, Tuomela, Finnish RSO, Eötvös, Helsinki, 18 April 1990, unpubd

2 Improvisation sur Mallarmé I: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui, S, hp, tubular bells, vib, 4 perc, 1957; Hollweg, members of NDR SO, cond. Rosbaud, Hamburg, 13 Jan 1958; arr. S, orch, 1962, Rogner, SWF SO, cond. Boulez, Donaueschingen, 20 Oct 1962

3 Improvisation sur Mallarmé II: Une dentelle s'abolit, S, cel, hp, pf, tubular bells, vib, 4 perc, 1957; Hollweg, members of NDR SO, cond. Rosbaud, Hamburg, 13 Jan 1958

4 Improvisation sur Mallarmé III: A la nue accablante tu, S, orch, 1959; Rogner, SWF SO, cond. Rosbaud, Donaueschingen, 10 June 1959; rev. 1983–4, Bryn-Julson, BBC SO, cond. Boulez, London, 23 Feb 1984; both versions unpubd

5 Tombeau: S, orch, 1959; Rogner, Domaine Musical Ens, cond. Boulez, Donaueschingen, 17 Oct 1959, unpubd; rev. version, Rogner, SWF SO, cond. Boulez, Cologne, 13 June 1960

cummings ist der Dichter, 16 solo vv/mixed chorus, chbr orch, 1970; Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, Stuttgart RSO, cond. Boulez, Gottwald, Ulm, 19 Sept 1970; rev. 1986, Stockholm Chamber Choir, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Boulez, Strasbourg, 23 Sept 1986

orchestral

full

Symphonie concertante, pf, orch, 1947, lost 1954

Doubles, orch, 1957–8; Lamoureux Orch, cond. Boulez, Paris, 16 March 1958; extended as Figures–Doubles–Prismes, orch, 1963, SWF SO, cond. Boulez, Basle, 10 Jan 1964; further extended, 1968, Residentie Orch, cond. Boulez, The Hague, 3 March 1968; all versions unpubd

Poésie pour pouvoir (H. Michaux), 5-track tape, 3 orch groups, 1958; SWF SO, conds. Rosbaud, Boulez, Donaueschingen, 19 Oct 1958; unpubd

Livre pour cordes, Ia, Ib, str, 1968; Ia, New Philharmonia, cond. Boulez, London, 1 Dec 1968; with Ib, same perfs., Brighton, 8 Dec 1968; rev. in 1 mvt 1988, BBC SO, cond. Boulez, London, 17 Jan 1989

Rituel: in memoriam Bruno Maderna, orch, 1974–5 [related to ‘…explosante-fixe…’], BBC SO, cond. Boulez, London, 2 April 1975

Notations, 1978– [developed from pf pieces]; I–IV, Paris Orch, cond. Barenboim, Paris, 18 June 1980; VII, Chicago SO, cond. Barenboim, Chicago, 14 Jan 1999, unpubd

chamber

Notations, 11 nos., 1946, unpubd [arr. of pf pieces]

Polyphonie X, 18 insts, 1950–51; SWF SO, cond. Rosbaud, Donaueschingen, 6 Oct 1951; unpubd, withdrawn

Domaines, cl, 21 insts in 6 groups, 1961–8; Boeykens, RTB SO, cond. Boulez, Brussels, 20 Dec 1968; unpubd except for cl pt performable as cl solo

Eclat, 9 perc, 6 insts, 1965 [related to original Don and Strophes]; members of Los Angeles PO, cond. Boulez, Los Angeles, 26 March 1965; extended as Eclat/Multiples, 9 perc, orch, 1970, BBC SO, cond. Boulez, London, 21 Oct 1970, inc., unpubd

Répons, 2 pf, hp, vib, glock, cimb, orch, elecs, 1980–84; Ensemble InterContemporain, IRCAM technicians, cond. Boulez, Donaueschingen, 18 Oct 1981; extended version, same perfs., London, 6 Sept 1982; further extended version, Turin, 22 Sept 1984; all versions unpubd

‘…explosante-fixe…’, version for MIDI fl, orch, elecs, 1991–3, Valade, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Robertson, Turin, 13 Sept 1993 [Transitoire VII]; Valade, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Boulez, New York, 11 Nov 1993 [Transitoire VII, Transitoire V, Originel]; both versions unpubd

unaccompanied choral

Oubli signal lapidé (A. Gatti), 12 solo vv, 1952; Ensemble Vocal Marcel Couraud, Cologne, 3 Oct 1952; unpubd; material used in cummings ist der Dichter

chamber and solo instrumental

vocal

Le visage nuptial (Char), S, A, 2 ondes martenot, pf, perc, 1946 [2 movts]; Paris, 1947, unpubd

Le marteau sans maître (Char), A, a fl, gui, vib, xylorimba, perc, va, 1953–5; Plate, members of SWF SO, cond. Rosbaud, Baden-Baden, 18 June 1955

3–11 instruments

Quartet, 4 ondes martenot, 1945–6; unpubd

3 essais, perc, 1950, unpubd

Livre pour quatuor, str qt, 1948–9: Ia, Ib, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV (unpubd), V, VI; Ia, Ib, II, Marschner Qt, Donaueschingen, 15 Oct 1955; V, VI, Hamann Qt, Darmstadt, 9 Sept 1961; IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, Parrenin Qt, Darmstadt, 8 July 1962

Pour le Dr Kalmus, fl, cl, va, vc, pf, 1969, private perf., London, 16 May 1969, unpubd

‘…explosante-fixe…’, version for fl, cl, tpt, London Sinfonietta, London, 17 June 1972; version for fl, cl, tpt, hp, vib, vn, va, vc, elecs, New York PO, New York, 5 Jan 1973; rev., BBC SO, Rome, dir. Boulez, 13 May 1973; rev., Musique Vivante, dir. Masson, La Rochelle, 6 July 1974; all versions unpubd

Messagesquisse, solo vc, 6 vc, 1976; Claret, members of the jury of the Rostropovich Competition, La Rochelle, 3 July 1977

Dérive I, fl, cl, pf, vib, vn, vc, 1984; London Sinfonietta, cond. Knussen, London, 31 Jan 1985; related to Répons

Mémoriale, fl, 8 insts, 1985 [after fl pt of 1972–4 ‘…explosante-fixe…’], Cherrier, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Boulez, Paris, 29 Nov 1985; rev. in 1991–3 version of ‘…explosante-fixe…’

Initiale, brass, 1987, Houston, 4 June 1987; extended, 1992, members of Chicago SO, cond. Boulez, Chicago, 20 Nov 1992; both versions unpubd

Dérive II, 11 insts, 1988–93; Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Boulez, Milan, 21 June 1990; rev. version, same perfs., London, 7 Feb 1993; both versions unpubd

sur Incises, solo pf, 2 pf, 3 hp, 2 vib, mar, 1995–8 [after pf work Incises], Vassilakis, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Boulez, Basle, 27 April 1996; extended, 1998, Vassilakis, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. Robertson, Edinburgh, 30 Aug 1998; both versions unpubd

1–2 instruments

Sonatina, fl, pf, 1946; private perf., Boterdael, Mercenier, Brussels, 1947; first public perf., Gazzelloni, Tudor, Darmstadt, 1956

Domaines, cl, 1961–8; Deinzer, Ulm, 20 Sept 1968

Dialogue de l'ombre double, cl, elecs, 1982–5 [after Domaines]; Damiens, Florence, 28 Oct 1985; version for bn, elecs, 1995, Gallois, Paris, 3 Nov 1995

‘…explosante-fixe…’, version for vib, elecs, 1986, Forestier, Basle, 2 Sept 1986

Anthèmes, vn, 1991 [after vn pt of 1972–4 ‘…explosante-fixe…’], Arditti, Vienna, 18 Nov 1991; Anthèmes II, vn, elecs, 1997, Hae Sun Kang, Donaueschingen, 19 Oct 1997

piano

Nocturne, pf, 1944–5, unpubd

Prelude, Toccata and Scherzo, pf, 1944–5, unpubd

3 psalmodies, pf, 1945; Grimaud, Paris, 1945; unpubd

Theme and Variations, pf left hand, 1945, unpubd

Notations, 12 pieces, pf, 1945; Grimaud, Paris, 1945; orch versions, 1946, 1978–

Sonata no.1, 1946; Grimaud, Paris, 1946

Sonata no.2, 1947–8; Grimaud, Paris, 29 April 1950

Structures, livre I, 2 pf, 1951–2; Messiaen, Boulez, Paris, 4 May 1952 [Ia only]; Grimaud, Loriod, Cologne, 13 Nov 1953 [complete]

Sonata no.3: Antiphonie, Trope, Constellation (also retrograde version Constellation-Miroir), Strophe, Séquence, 1955–7; Boulez, Darmstadt, 26 Sept 1957; rev. 1963; unpubd except for Sigle (fragment of Antiphonie), Trope and Constellation-Miroir

Structures, livre II, 2 pf, 1956–61; Loriod, Boulez, Donaueschingen, 21 Oct 1961

Incises, pf, 1994; Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, Milan, 21 Oct 1994

tape

2 Etudes, tape, 1951–2

incidental music

Le soleil des eaux (radio play, Char), S, orch, 1948; ORTF, April 1948, unpubd

Orestie (stage play, Aeschylus, trans. A. Obey), 1955; Renaud-Barrault Company, cond. Boulez, Bordeaux, 1955; unpubd

Symphonie mécanique (film, dir. J. Mitry), tape, 1955

Le crépuscule de Yang Koueï-fei (radio play, L. Fauré), 1957; Paris, RTF, 5 July 1957; unpubd; related to Improvisations sur Mallarmé I–II

Mon Faust (stage play, P. Valéry), 1962, unpubd

Ainsi parla Zarathoustra (stage play, J.-L. Barrault, after F. Nietzsche), v, inst ens, 1974; Renaud-Barrault Company, Paris, Oct 1974; unpubd

plans and projects

Un coup de dès (Mallarmé), chorus, orch, 1950, unpubd

Strophes, fl, insts, 1957, inc., unpubd, related to Orestie

Marges, perc ens, 1962–4, sketches only, unpubd

‘…explosante-fixe…’, compositional plan, 1971; various realizations listed above

Also op projects with J. Genet, 1960s and H. Müller, 1980s

juvenilia

1942–3: songs (C. Baudelaire, R.M. Rilke); Berceuse, vn, pf

editions and arrangements

Chansons de Bilitis, reconstruction of cel part for work by Debussy, ?1954

Frontispice, after Ravel, small orch, 1987

ed. with M. Chimènes: C. Debussy: Jeux, Oeuvres complètes, v/8 (Paris, 1988)

MSS (incl. unpubd works) in CH-Bps

Principal publishers: Universal (most works), Amphion (works of 1946), Heugel (works of 1946–9)

WRITINGS

most of the composer's articles, essays and lectures have been published in volume form; only uncollected items are listed separately

Musikdenken heute (Mainz, 1963/R; Fr. orig., Paris, 1964/R, as Penser la musique aujourd'hui; Eng. trans., 1971, as Boulez on Music Today)

Relevés d’apprenti (Paris, 1966; Eng. trans., 1968, as Notes of an Apprenticeship and, 1991, as Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship)

‘Technology and the Composer’, Times Literary Supplement (6 May 1977)

‘Through Schoenberg to the Future’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, (1976–7), 121–5

Points de repère (Paris, 1981; Eng. trans., 1986, as Orientations)

‘Le timbre et l’écriture’, Le timbre: métaphore pour la composition: Paris 1985, 541–9; Eng. trans. in CMR, ii (1987), 161–71

‘Necessité d'une orientation esthétique (II)’, Canadian University Music Review, (1986), 46–79 [part I in Points de repère]

‘Maestro Computer: Erforschung der neuen Tongrenzen’, Computermusik, ed. G. Batel, G. Kleinen and D. Salbert (Laaber, 1987), 37–47

with others: IRCAM: Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Paris, 1987)

‘The Composer and Creativity’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, xi (1988), 107–22

with A. Gerzso: ‘Computers in Music’, Scientific American, no.258 (1988), 44–50

Jalons (pour une décennie) (Paris, 1989)

Le pays fertile: Paul Klee (Paris, 1989)

‘The Vestal Virgin and the Fire-Stealer: Memory, Creation and Authenticity’, EMc, xviii (1990), 355–8

with J. Cage: Correspondance et documents, ed. J.-J. Nattiez (Winterthur, 1990; Eng. trans., 1993, as The Boulez-Cage Correspondence

‘L'autodidacte volontaire’, Acanthes an XV: composer, enseigner, jouer la musique d'aujourd'hui, ed. C. Gilly and C. Samuel (Paris, 1991), 113–22

‘Zukunftsmusik: avenir de la musique’, Circuit, iii/1 (1992), 7–22

with others: Recherche et création vers de nouveaux territoires (Paris, 1992)

with A. Schaeffner: Correspondance 1954–1970, ed. R. Pereira de Tugny (Paris, 1988)

(1) Pierre Bourdelot [Michon]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

interviews

M.D. Hastings: ‘M. Boulez’ Press-Conference’, MO, lxxxix (1965), 21–7

J. Buzga: ‘Interview mit Pierre Boulez in Prag’, Melos, xxxiv (1967), 162–4

‘Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!’, Der Spiegel (25 Sept 1967); Eng. trans. in Opera, xix (1968), 440–50

G. Harewood: ‘Whither Opera?’, Opera, xx (1969), 922–31, 1026–31

M. Cotta and S. de Nussac: ‘L'express va plus loin avec Pierre Boulez’, L'express, no.979 (1970), 144

H. Pousseur: ‘Pierre Boulez’, VH 101, no.4 (1970–71), 6–11

M. Kendergi: ‘Pierre Boulez interrogé’, Cahiers canadiens de musique/Canada Music Book, no.2 (1971), 31–48

U. Stürzbecher: Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne, 1971), 46–57

O. Tomek: ‘Lösungen für unsere Zeit finden! Gespräch’ NZM, JG.132 (1971), 62–8

J. Bornoff: ‘Music, Musicians and Communication: 2. Pierre Boulez’, Cultures, i/1 (1973), 123–35

M. Stegmann: ‘Gespräch mit Pierre Boulez – Komponist und Dirigent’, Musik und Medizin, no.3 (1975), 49–53

Z. Peskó: ‘Gespräch mit Pierre Boulez’, Melos, xl (1973), 274–9; Eng. trans. in Tempo, no.127 (1978), 2–9

Par volonté et par hasard: entretiens avec Célestin Deliège (Paris, 1975), Eng. trans. as Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London, 1976)

B.A. Varga: Muzsikusportrék (Budapest, 1979)

J. Cott: ‘Sur l'état de la musique aujourd'hui’, Débat, no.33 (1955), 140–51

J. Beckman: ‘Et rum fuld af spelje: interview med Pierre Boulez’, DMt, lx (1985–6), 16–20

D. Gable: ‘Ramifying Connections: an Interview with Pierre Boulez’, JM, iv/1 (1985–6), 105–13

C. Gehlhaar: ‘Entretien avec Pierre Boulez – Paris, le 19 décembre 1985’, Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basle, 1986), 351–8

‘“Messieurs, faites vos jeux”: Michel Foucault – entretien avec Pierre Boulez’, Débat, no.41 (1986), 179–88

P.M. Menger: ‘Du Domaine musical à l'Ircam’, Le Débat, no.50 (1988), 257–66; Eng. trans. in PNM, xxviii (1990), 6–19

P. Aradi: ‘Csak az igazán fontos dolgokat kell megőrizni’ [We should remember only what is really important], Kritika, no.6 (1989), 26–9

P. McCallum: ‘An Interview with Pierre Boulez’, MT, cxxx (1989), 8–10

Conversations de Pierre Boulez sur la direction d'orchestre avec Jean Vermeil (Paris, 1989); Eng. trans. as J. Vermeil: Conversations with Pierre Boulez: Thoughts on Conducting (Portland, OR, 1996)

J. Häusler: ‘Ich biege ein Stück Holz und plötzlich bricht es: Pierre Boulez im Gespräch’, ÖMz, xliv (1989), 290–95

L. Bayle: ‘Imagination ou bureaucratie: entretien avec Pierre Boulez’, InHarmoniques, no.6 (1990), 30–35

M. Lodge: ‘Pierre Boulez’, Canzona, no.33 (1990), 2–7

A. Ford: Composer to Composer: Conversations about Contemporary Music (London, 1993)

P. Szendy: ‘Le texte et son prétexte’, Genesis, no.4 (1993), 135–48

monographs and symposia

A. Goléa: Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris, 1958/R)

M. Cadieu: Boulez (Madrid, 1977)

J. Peyser: Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (London, 1977)

P. Griffiths: Boulez (London, 1978)

M. Stahnke: Struktur und Ästhetik bei Boulez: Untersuchungen zum Formanten ‘Trope’ der Dritten Klaviersonate (Hamburg, 1979)

D. Jameux: Pierre Boulez (Paris, 1984; Eng. trans., 1991)

M. Andersen and M. Wenzel Andreasen, eds.: Pierre Boulez: komponist – dirigent – utopist (Copenhagen, 1985)

J. Fernández Guerra: Pierre Boulez (Madrid, 1985)

J. Häusler, ed.: Pierre Boulez: eine Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag am 26. März 1985 (Vienna, 1985)

T. Hirsbrunner: Pierre Boulez und sein Werk (Laaber, 1985)

W. Glock, ed.: Pierre Boulez: a Symposium (London, 1986)

J. Häusler, ed.: Über ‘Répons’: ein Interview – Variation über das Echo eines Schreis: eine Analyse (Kassel, 1986)

C. Samuel, ed.: Eclats/Boulez (Paris, 1986)

P.F. Stacey: Boulez and the Modern Concept (Aldershot, 1987)

D. Jameux and others: Répons/Boulez (Paris, 1988)

Boulez at the Barbican, London, 1989 [programme of BBC concert series]

L. Koblyakov: Pierre Boulez: a World of Harmony (Chur, 1990)

J. Häusler: Pierre Boulez in Salzburg (Salzburg, 1992)

J.-J. Nattiez, ed.: ‘Boulez au Canada: portrait d'impact’, Circuit, iii/1 (1992) [whole issue]

T. Muller, ed.: Jeux de Boulez (Rotterdam, 1994)

Pierre Boulez, Musik-Konzepte, nos.89–90 (1995)

Pierre Boulez II, Musik-Konzepte, no.96 (1997)

general studies

M. Scriabine: ‘Pierre Boulez et la musique concrète’, ReM, no.215 (1952), 14–15

J. Barraqué: ‘Rythme et développement’, Polyphonie, nos.9–10 (1954), 47–73

R. Craft: ‘Boulez and Stockhausen’, The Score, no.24 (1958), 54–64

A. Hodeir: La musique depuis Debussy (Paris, 1961; Eng. trans., 1961)

S. Bradshaw and R.R. Bennett: ‘In Search of Boulez’, Music and Musicians, xi (1962–3), no.5, pp.10–13; no.12, pp.14–18, 50

K. Boehmer: Zur Theorie der offenen Form in der neuen Musik (Darmstadt, 1967, 2/1988), 84ff

A. Whittall: ‘After Webern, Wagner: Reflections on the Past and Future of Pierre Boulez’, MR, xxviii (1967), 135–8

A.H. Cross: ‘The Significance of Aleatoricism in Twentieth-Century Music’, MR, xxix (1968), 305–22

G.W. Hopkins: ‘Debussy and Boulez’, MT, cix (1968), 710–14

B. Canino: ‘Boulez prima e dopo’, NRMI, iii (1969), 672–83

J.-P. Derrien: ‘Dossier Pierre Boulez’, Musique en jeu, no.1 (1970), 103–32

J. Häusler: ‘Fruchtland der Synthese: der Komponist Pierre Boulez’, Musica, xxiv (1970), 239–41

M. Fink: ‘Pierre Boulez: a Selective Bibliography’, CMc, no.13 (1972), 135–50

D. Hamilton: ‘The Prospective Encounters at the Philharmonic: Aims and Achievement’, Musical Newsletter, ii/4 (1972), 3–8

P. Wapnewski: Richard Wagner: die Szene und ihr Meister (Munich, 1978)

S. de Nussac and F. Regnault, eds.: Historie d'un ‘ring’: ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (L'anneau de Nibelung) de Richard Wagner – Bayreuth 1976–1980 (Paris, 1980)

F. Bayer: De Schönberg à Cage: essai sur la notion d'espace sonore dans la musique contemporaine (Paris, 1981)

R. Craft: ‘Stravinsky Pre-Centenary’, PNM, xix (1981), 464–77

J.-E. Marie: ‘Inverse Function: Differentiation and Integration in Messiaen and Boulez’, Sonus, ii/1 (1981), 26–33; v/1 (1984), 36–60

‘Dossier Pierre Boulez’, L'avant-scène opéra, no.36 (1981), 162–97

J. Ardoin: ‘A Ring Diary’, OQ, i (1983), no.2, pp.4–10; no.3, pp.25–32

J.-J. Nattiez: Tétralogies: Wagner, Boulez, Chéreau (Paris, 1983)

R. Craft: Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ii (London and New York, 1984)

H. Dufourt: ‘De Schönberg à Boulez: logique et dialectique de la création musicale’, Esprit, no.99 (1985), 21–36

M. Foucault: ‘Pierre Boulez: l'écran traversé’, Silences, no.1 (1985), 11–15; repr. as preface to P. Boulez: Jalons (pour une décennie) (Paris, 1989), 19–22

I. Founberg: ‘“Serialisten” Pierre Boulez’, DMt, lix (1984–5), 120–37, 231–46, 351–62

G. Schubert: ‘Werkidee und Kompositionstechnik zur seriellen Musik von Boulez, Stockhausen und Ligeti’, Die Musik der fünfziger Jahre, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1985), 48–71

C. Deliège: Invention musicale et idéologies (Paris, 1986)

H. Dufourt: ‘Pierre Boulez: musicien de l'ère industrielle’, Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung, ed. F. Meyer, J.M. Jans and I. Westen (Basle, 1986), 371–80

J. Häusler: “‘Boulez selon Boulez”: fragmentarische Bemerkungen zu den theoretischen Schriften’, Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung, ed. F. Meyer, J.M. Jans and I. Westen (Basle, 1986), 359–70

D. Jameux: ‘Gustav Mahler et Pierre Boulez: Parallèlisme/Divergences’, Gustav Mahler: Paris 1985, 73–82

J.-F. Pioud: ‘Pierre Boulez: l'énergie créatrice’, Etudes, no.364 (1986), 497–508

D. Jameux: ‘Mallarmé, Debussy, Boulez’, Silences, no.4 (1987), 191–202

F. Leclère: Premières pierres (Paris, 1987)

J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Chanter le Ring’, Canadian University Music Review, viii (1987), 78–133

R. Kapp: ‘Die Schatten des Urbilds des Doubles: vorsichtige Annäherung an eine Figur – René Leibowitz’, Musiktheorie, ii (1987), 15–31; Eng. trans. as ‘Shades of the Double's Original: René Leibowitz's Dispute with Boulez’, Tempo, no.165 (1988), 2–16

R. Cogan: ‘Science, Music Values and the Study of Music: Mozart, Tibetan Chant, Boulez II’, Sonus, viii/2 (1987–8), 16–35

E. Costère: ‘Dialectique des hauteurs chez Schönberg et Boulez’, Revue internationale de musique française, no.27 (1988), 83–100

K.-K. Hübler: ‘Errungenschaften des Serialismus: Pierre Boulez und die zahmen Wilden der Neuen Musik’, MusikTexte, no.23 (1988), 3–5

A. Padilla: ‘Partir hacia lo desconocido, con pasión: el pensamiento estético-musical de Pierre Boulez’, Araucaria de Chile, no.42 (1988), 139–55

A. Edwards: ‘Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation’, Tempo, no.169 (1989), 4–15

D. Gable: ‘Boulez's Two Cultures: the Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition’, JAMS, xliii (1990), 426–56

S. Galaise: ‘Pierre Boulez: les cours de Bâle’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, iii (1990), 9–10

E. Humbertclaude, ed.: (Re)lire Souvtchinski (La Bresse, 1990)

H. Dufourt: Musique, pouvoir, écriture (Paris, 1991)

J. Aguila: Le Domaine Musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine (Paris, 1992)

‘Sammlungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, v (1992), 1–12

G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)

M. Breatnach: Boulez and Mallarmé: a Study in Poetic Influence (Aldershot, 1996)

A. Williams: New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, 1997)

S. Heinemann: ‘Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Theory and Practice’, Music Theory Spectrum, xx/1 (1998), 72–96

R. Nemecek: Untersuchungen zum frühen Klavierschaffen von Pierre Boulez (Kassel, 1998)

studies relating to particular works

G. Ligeti: ‘Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia’, Die Reihe, iv (1958), 38–63; Eng. trans. in Die Reihe, iv (1960), 36–62

H. Michaux: ‘Genèse des trois “Poésies pour pouvoir”’, Melos, xxv (1958), 308–10

M. Wilkinson: ‘Some Thoughts on Twelve-Tone Method (Boulez: Structure Ia)’, Gravesaner Blätter, no.10 (1958), 23–9

G. Ligeti: ‘Zur III. Klaviersonate von Boulez’, Die Reihe, v (1959), 38–40; Eng. trans. in Die Reihe, v (1961), 5–8

K. Stockhausen: ‘Musik und Sprache’, Die Reihe, vi (1960), 36–58; Eng. trans. in Die Reihe, vi (1964), 40–64 [on Le marteau sans maître]

M. Butor: ‘Mallarmé selon Boulez’, Melos, xxviii (1961), 356–9

G.W. Hopkins: ‘Le soleil des eaux’, Tempo, no.68 (1964), 35–7

H.U. Lehmann: ‘Figures–Doubles–Prismes’, Tempo, no.68 (1964), 34–5

R. Henderson: ‘Le soleil des eaux’, MT, cvi (1965), 673–4

M. Chanan: ‘Boulez's Eclat/Multiples’, Tempo, no.95 (1970–71), 30–33

J. Grimm: ‘Formaspekte der 2. Klaviersonate von Boulez’, SMz, cxii (1972), 201–5

I. Stoïanowa: ‘Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé’, Musique en jeu, no.11 (1973), 75–98

R. Gehrlach: ‘Pierre Boulez und Stéphane Mallarmé: ein Fragment über das Artfizielle’, Über Musik und Sprache, ed. R. Stephan (Mainz, 1974), 70–92

R. Stephan: ‘Bemerkungen zu Pierre Boulez's Komposition von René Chars Klage der verliebten Eidechse’, Zur musikalische Analyse, ed. G. Schuhmacher (Darmstadt, 1974), 441–51

I. Stoïanowa: ‘La Troisième sonate de Boulez et le projet mallarméen du Livre’, Musique en jeu, no.16 (1974), 9–28

I. Stoïanowa: ‘Verbe et son “centre et absence”’, Musique en jeu, no.16 (1974), 79–102

A. Cross: ‘Form and Expression in Boulez' Don’, MR, xxxvi (1975), 215–30

A. Trenkamp: ‘The Concept of “Aléa” in Boulez's “Constellation-Miroir”’, ML, lvii (1976), 1–10

L. DeYoung: ‘Pitch Order and Duration Order in Boulez Structure Ia', PNM, xvi/2 (1977–8), 27–34

R. Febel: Musik für zwei Klaviere seit 1950 als Spiegel der Kompositionstechnik (Herrenberg, 1978)

U. Siegele: Zwei Kommentare zum ‘Marteau sans maître’ von Pierre Boulez (Tübingen, 1979)

R.T. Piencikowski: ‘René Char et Pierre Boulez: esquisse analytique du Marteau sans maître’, Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, iv, ed. J. Stenzl (Stuttgart, 1980), 193–264

M. Beiche: ‘Serielles Denken in Rituel von Pierre Boulez’, AMw, xxxviii (1981), 24–56

C. Deliège: ‘Deux aspects de l'univers boulezien: Structures pour deux pianos à quatre mains’, Critique, no.408 (1981), 478–84

M.J. Worton: ‘Archipel et labyrinthe: l'importance de la poésie de René Char pour la musique de Pierre Boulez’, Interférences, no.13 (1981), 55–69

R. Black: ‘Boulez's Third Piano Sonata: Surface and Sensibility’, PNM, xx (1982), 182–98

M. Denhoff: ‘Rituel von Pierre Boulez: Anmerkungen zur Raum- und Zeit-Konzeption’, Festschrift Emil Platen zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff (Bonn, 1986), 208–19

S. Goldet: Quatuors du 20ème siècle (Paris, 1986)

S.D. Winick: ‘Symmetry and Pitch-Duration Association in Boulez' Le marteau sans maître’, PNM, xxiv (1986), 280–321

A. Bonnet: ‘Ecriture and Perception: on Messagesquisse by Pierre Boulez’, CMR, ii/1 (1987), 173–209

F. Jedrjzewski: ‘La mise en oeuvre du principe dodécaphonique dans la 1e sonate de Pierre Boulez’, Analyse musicale, no.7 (1987), 69–76

J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Repons et la crise de la “communication” musicale contemporaine’, InHarmoniques, no.2 (1987), 193–210

C. Deliège: ‘Moment de Pierre Boulez: sur l'introduction orchestrale de Répons’, InHarmoniques, no.4 (1988), 181–202

J. McCalla: ‘Sea-Changes: Boulez's Improvisations sur Mallarmé’, JM, vi (1988), 83–106

W.G. Harbinson: ‘Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez's Third Sonata’, Tempo, no.169 (1989), 16–20

A. Baltensperger: ‘Marginalien zu einem Manuskript von Pierre Boulez’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, iii (1990), 15–22

U. Mosch: ‘Disziplin und Indisziplin: zum seriellen Komponieren im 2. Satz des Marteau sans maître von Pierre Boulez’, Musiktheorie, v (1990), 39–66; responses by T. Bösche, ibid., 253–70, and G.F. Haas, ibid., 271–3

W. Wentzel: ‘Dynamic and Attack Associations in Boulez's Le marteau sans maître’, PNM, xxix (1991), 142–70

P. McCallum: ‘Deuxième Sonate – Que me veux-tu? Sonata Form in the First Movement of Boulez's Second Piano Sonata’, SMA, xxvi (1992), 62–84

A. Piret: ‘Pierre Boulez: Troisième sonate pour piano’, Analyse musicale, no.29 (1992), 61–74

B. Ramaut: ‘Dialogue de l'ombre double de Pierre Boulez: analyse d'un processus citationel’, Analyse musicale, no.28 (1992), 69–75

H. Sandroff: ‘Realizing the Spatialization Processing of Dialogue de l'ombre double by Pierre Boulez’, Inernational Computer Music Conference: San Jose, CA 1992, 202–5

A. Edwards: ‘Boulez's Doubles and Figures–Doubles–Prismes: a Preliminary Study’, Tempo, no.185 (1993), 6–18

J.S. Lee: ‘Mimesis and Beyond: Mallarmé, Boulez, and Cage’, Writings about John Cage, ed. R. Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor, 1993), 180–217

R. Nemecek: ‘Tendenz und Kontinuität im frühen Klavierschaffen von Pierre Boulez’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, vi (1993), 18–22

R. Pereira: ‘La Troisième sonate de Pierre Boulez’, Dissonanz, no.36 (1993), 4–7

R.T. Piencikowski: ‘“Assez lent, suspendu, comme imprévisible”: quelques aperçus sur les travaux d'approche d'Eclat’, Genesis, no.4 (1993), 51–67

A. Williams: ‘Répons: Phantasmagoria or the Articulation of Space’, Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. A. Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 195–210

P. O’Hagan: Pierre Boulez: Sonate “que me veux-tu”: an Investigation of the Manuscript Sources in Relation to the Third Sonata and the Issue of Performer Choice (diss., U. of Surrey, 1997)

S. Chang: Boulez’s “Sonatine” and the Genesis of his Twelve-Tone Practice (Ann Arbor, 1998)

Bouliane, Denys

(b Grand-Mère, Quebec, 8 May 1955). French Canadian composer and conductor. He studied at the Université Laval (BMus 1977, MMus 1979), where his composition teachers included Jacques Hétu, Alain Gagnon and José Evangelista. While a student he served as programme director of the Association de Musique Actuelle de Québec and participated in many radio programmes on contemporary music. Grants from the Quebec and Canadian governments enabled him to pursue further study at the Darmstadt summer courses (1980), in Kagel's Neue Musik Theater class at the Cologne Musikhochschule (1980) and with Ligeti at the Hamburg Musikhochschule (1980–85). From 1980 to 1994 Bouliane lived primarily in Cologne, where he worked as a sound technician for the Ensemble Köln, and founded and directed the contemporary music ensemble Serie B. He has served as composer-in-residence of the Quebec SO (1992–5) and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Heidelberg (1995–6). In 1995 he was appointed professor of composition at McGill University, Montreal, where he conducts the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble. He founded the Rencontres de Musique Nouvelle at the Domaine Forget, Charlevoix in 1995 and co-founded the Quebec festival Musiques au Présent in 1998.

Bouliane writes in a postmodern style. His music has been described by Peter Niklas Wilson as ‘music of magical realism, a game of critical virtuosity, written in the wake of Jorge-Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Boris Vian’. Compositions such as Le cactus rieur et la demoiselle qui souffrait d'une soif insatiable (1986) transform traditional formal models into illusive, mystical creations. His numerous honours include the Förderpreis for music of the city of Cologne (1985), the Jules-Léger prize for chamber music (1987; for A propos … et le baron perché?), first prize in the WDR's Forum Junger Komponisten (1989) and the Serge Garant prize of the Emile-Nelligan Foundation (1991). In 1999 he was named Personality of the Year by the Prix Opus Gala of the Quebec Music Council.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: 12 tiroirs de demi-vérités pour alléger votre descente, pf, orch, 1981–2, rev. 1984; Une foire imaginée, 4 solo perc, orch, 1982, rev.; Le cactus rieur et la demoiselle qui souffrait d’une soif insatiable, 1986; Conc. for Orch (Variations without a Theme), 1988–95; Entre chien et loup, ob, str, 1994–6; Passacaglia ohne Thema, 1995; Pf Conc., 1995–7; Trbn Conc., 1997

Vocal: 4 Chants (E. Nelligan, St-Denys Garneau, Grandbois), S, vc, pf, 1974–5; Jappements à la lune, SATB, orch, 1982; Das Affenlied (G. Benn), S, 1988; Manche haben Trompinetten, S, cl, 1989–90; De Sophie à Léon, S, vn, orch, 1993; Epilogue à Anna Karénine, S, vn, orch, 1993; Dessiner l’écoulement du temps, SATB, 1995–6

Chbr: Wind Qnt, 1976; Climats, 14 insts, 1978; Jeux de société, wind qnt, pf, 1979–80, rev. 1981; Comme un silène entr'ouvert, pic, ob, cl, trbn, hp, pf, db, tape, 1983–5; Rituel lapidaire, en souvenance …, eng hn, vib, 1984, rev. 1985; A propos … et le baron perché?, 2 cl, 2 dbn, 2 hn, tpt, 2 trbn, db, 1985; A Certain Chinese Cyclopaedia, fl, eng hn, cl, hn, bn, 1986; 9 résidus, 2 elec pf, 1986–7; 5 petits simiodrames, cl, vn, va, vc, perc, 1990; Paysage qu …, 2 cl, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, 2 perc, vn, va, vc, db, 1992; Dt. Landschaft …, 2 cl, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, 2 perc, vn, va, vc, db, 1992–3; Des caresses …, fl, vn, va, vc, perc, 1994; Appels-rappels, 3 tpt, 4 hn, 3 trbn, tuba, perc, 1994–5; Du fouet et du plaisir, fl, ob, 2 cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, pf, perc, str qt, db, 1996–7

Tape: Paraphrase en pente douce sur le Hareng Saur de Charles Cros, 1984; Pilu, wou bist du?, 1985; Organum, tape, slides, 1985; Woyzeck (incid music, G. Büchner), 1993–4; Pour parer la parade, 1994; Lulu (incid music, F. Wedekind), vn, pf, tape, 1995–6

Principal publishers: Silène, Centre de musique canadienne au Québec

WRITINGS

‘A propos … québécitude, musique et postmodernité’, Circuit: revue nord-américaine de musique du Xxe siècle, iii/2 (1992), 69–80

‘L’image fécondante du silène, d'une incursion du doute, du rire et de l'ironie dans le musical: souvenirs, réflexions, autoréflexions’, Circuit: revue nord-américaine de musique du Xxe siècle, ix/2 (1998)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.N. Wilson: ‘Musik des magischen Realismus: ein Porträt des Komponisten Denys Bouliane’, MusikTexte, no.21 (1987), 16–21

P.N. Wilson: ‘Die Wahrheit der Illusion: Denys Bouliane und sein elektro-akustiches Ensembles Serie B’, NZM, Jg.152, no.12 (1991), 23–7

J.M. Boulay: ‘Le labyrinthe visité: “Le cactus rieur et la demoiselle qui souffrait d'une soif insatiable”’, Canadian University Music Review, xv (1995), 126–53

SOPHIE GALAISE

Boult, Sir Adrian (Cedric)

(b Chester, 8 April 1889; d London, 22 Feb 1983). English conductor. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took the DMus degree in 1914, and where the main influence on him was Hugh Allen. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, 1912–13, and had the opportunity to observe Nikisch at work. In 1914 he joined the music staff at Covent Garden, and during the war he gave concerts at Liverpool. In 1918 Holst asked him to conduct the first performance of The Planets, at a privately organized concert in Queen's Hall, London. In 1919 he joined the teaching staff of the RCM (where he remained until 1930), and was chief conductor for the autumn season of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Operatic experience embraced performances with the British National Opera Company (including Parsifal), a further spell in 1926 at Covent Garden as assistant musical director, and chamber opera in Bristol, Birmingham and London. From 1928 to 1931 he was musical director of the Bach Choir. In 1923 he conducted the first season of children's concerts organized by Robert Mayer. Further participation in these was prevented by his appointment as conductor of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society, and subsequently as musical director of the City of Birmingham Orchestra (1924–30).

In 1930 Boult was appointed music director for the BBC and asked to form a new orchestra. He secured the best players and for the next decade largely met his goal of setting the standard for English orchestras. He became permanent conductor at the end of the first season and visiting conductors like Toscanini and Walter were impressed with his training of the orchestra. He took the BBC SO to Europe in 1936 (where they were especially well received in Vienna), 1937 and 1947. He became an international figure, visiting Vienna (1933), Boston and Salzburg (1935), New York (NBC SO 1938, New York PO during the World's Fair, 1939), Chicago (1939) and Amsterdam (1945). He was associate conductor of the Proms from 1942 to 1950. After reaching the official retirement age in April 1949, he was finally forced to retire from the BBC in 1950 after making 1536 broadcasts. The LPO immediately made him music director (1950–57) and together they toured West Germany in 1951 and the Soviet Union in 1956. In 1957 he went into nominal retirement, continuing to make guest appearances at home, in Europe and in the USA, and occasionally taking charge of the Royal Opera House Orchestra for Royal Ballet performances of Job or Enigma Variations. He became musical director of the CBSO again in 1959–60 and returned to the RCM to teach from 1962 to 1966. In the late 1960s Boult began re-recording the Elgar symphonies and the complete Vaughan Williams symphonies for EMI. His premières, performances and previous recordings of Vaughan Williams were already highly regarded, but his last cycle became the definitive one for many years. He continued recording with Job, the Enigma Variations, the Elgar oratorios, Wagner excerpts, an acclaimed Brahms cycle and Schubert's Ninth Symphony. He was almost 90 when he made his final public appearance and his final recording (of music by Parry) in 1978.

Of the leading British conductors of his time, Boult was the least sensational but not the least remarkable. He made no attempt to cultivate a public image. He was neither oracle, orator nor professional wit, but he expressed himself with trenchancy, and his gentlemanly self-control was occasionally ruffled by storms of anger. He was a keen observer of other conductors: Nikisch impressed him, less as an interpreter than for his rehearsal methods, his concentration on essentials without fatiguing the players, his conjuring of the essence of the music with the point of his stick. Boult was the most considerate and unselfish of colleagues. ‘He is so generous, so integer, that one feels it must almost be a limitation of his interpretative range’ (Andrew Porter). His creed was one of service to the composer, and he performed countless scores simply because he was asked and they deserved to be heard. In spite of a well-deserved reputation for reliability, there were nights when the physical impact of his conducting was low, and there was little beyond faithfulness to the notes. There were others when precise, sensitive stick technique, loyalty to the composer, selflessness and ability to see the music as a whole, produced results equally satisfying in the classics and the British music he understood so well. In his BBC days he introduced much new music to London, with concert performances of Berg's Wozzeck (1934) and Busoni's Doktor Faust (1937), and works by Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern and American composers. The British composer found in Boult a steady, unprejudiced champion. By giving not just premières but repeat performances of works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Walton, Holst, Delius, Tippett and others, he nutured a healthy and sophisticated musical culture in Britain. He wrote two valuable handbooks on conducting, and his principles of conducting technique were the subject of a 27-minute film, Point of the Stick, made in 1971. He was knighted in 1937, was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society gold medal in 1944 and the Harvard Medal (with Vaughan Williams) in 1956, and became president of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in 1959. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1969.

WRITINGS

‘Arthur Nikisch’, ML, iii (1922), 117–21

A Handbook on the Technique of Conducting (Oxford, 1922, 7/1949, rev. edn 1968)

‘The Orchestral Problem of the Future’, PMA, (1922–3), 39

‘Casals as Conductor’, ML, iv (1923), 149–52

‘Nikisch and the Method of Rehearsal’, MR, xi (1950), 122–5

‘Rosé and the Vienna Philharmonic’, ML, xxxii (1951), 256–7

Thoughts on Conducting (London, 1963)

My Own Trumpet (London, 1973) [autobiography, with appx of first perfs. etc.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Shore: The Orchestra Speaks (London, 1938/R)

A. Porter: ‘The Quiet Knight: a Fanfare for Sir Adrian Boult’, High Fidelity, vii/4 (1957), 40–42, 117–19

F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming: ‘Sir Adrian Boult: the Man and the Records’, Music Yearbook 1973–4, 170–86 [discography]

J.N. Moore, ed.: Music and Friends: Seven Decades of Letters to Adrian Boult (London, 1979)

M. Kennedy: Adrian Boult (London, 1987)

J. Hunt: Musical Knights: Wood, Beecham, Boult, Barbirolli, Goodall, Sargent (London, 1995) [discography]

RONALD CRICHTON/JOSÉ BOWEN

Boulton [née Craytor], Laura

(b Conneaut, OH, 1899; d Bathesda, MD, 16 Oct 1980). American ethnomusicologist. After studying singing at Western Reserve University, she took the degree at Denison University and gained the doctorate at the University of Chicago. From 1929 to 1979 she participated in 40 expeditions in which she recorded music of the peoples of Africa, South America, Alaska, Eastern Europe and the South Pacific; her travels were sponsored by various institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Chicago and the Carnegie Institute. She taught at the University of Chicago (1931–3) and the University of California (1946–9), was a founder-member of the Society for Ethnomusicology and was director of the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music at Columbia University (1967–72) and the Laura Boulton Collection of World Music and Musical Instruments at Arizona State University (1972–7). She produced documentary films for the National Film Board of Canada and a number of recordings of traditional music for Folkways, and her writings include The Music Hunter: the Autobiography of a Career (New York, 1969) and Musical Instruments of World Cultures (New York, 1972).

Her instrument collection is housed in Mathers Museum at Indiana University, and her recordings and correspondence are located at the same university in the Archives of Traditional Music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Gunderson: ‘Laura Boulton as Musical Raconteur, 1935–1941’, Resound: a Quarterly of the Archives of Traditional Music, xv (1996), 1–9

PAULA MORGAN/FRANK GUNDERSON

Bour, Ernest

(b Thionville, 20 April 1913). French conductor. Son of an organist who founded and conducted amateur choirs and orchestras, he studied classics at the University of Strasbourg, and the piano, the organ and theory at the Strasbourg Conservatoire. There he also studied conducting with Fritz Münch and from 1933 to 1934 was a pupil of Hermann Scherchen. He made his débuts as a chorus master for Geneva radio and Strasbourg radio. After a year teaching the piano at the conservatoire, he was appointed conductor of the Orchestre de Mulhouse in 1941 and director of the conservatoire there in 1945. He was a regular guest conductor for Radio Paris as well as at the festivals of Strasbourg and Aix-en-Provence, and toured Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Germany. In 1950 he went back to Strasbourg, where he became conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique and, in 1955, of the Strasbourg Opera, together with Fritz Adam. From 1964 to 1979 he was principal conductor of the SWF SO in Baden-Baden, and from 1976 to 1987 permanent guest conductor of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.

Bour’s career and musical personality were marked by his interest in contemporary music. As early as 1934 he worked with the composer Fritz Adam to organize chamber concerts of contemporary music in Strasbourg. Later, he conducted the French premières of foreign 20th-century works, including Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and many world premières, among them works by Ligeti, Górecki (Symphony no.3, 1977), Bussotti, Ferneyhough, Reimann, Rihm and Xenakis. Bour owed his success in this field to his precision and sense of organization, which, while limiting his gestures to simple and terse signs, enabled him to grasp the most complex scores. Notable among his many recordings are a classic performance of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and choral and orchestral works by Ligeti.

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/R

Bourbon.

French and later Spanish family of rulers and patrons of music. The Vendôme branch of the family – descended from Louis le Boiteux, for whom the Bourbon duchy was created in 1327 – acquired the Kingdom of Navarre through marriage in 1548 and the French crown in 1589, following the extinction of the Valois at the death of Henri III. In addition to the throne of France, it obtained the crowns of Spain and the Two Sicilies in the period following 1700, as well as the duchies of Luxembourg, Parma, Plaisance, and Guastalla. Henri IV, who secured the throne in 1594, employed a number of distinguished musicians, including Du Caurroy and Guédron. His marriage in Florence in 1600 to Maria de’ Medici was celebrated with a number of musical works, among them Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo. His son, Louis xiii, was a more active patron of music and indeed a composer himself. He encouraged Formé and shared a taste for court airs with his brother, Gaston d’Orléans, who had hired Moulinié. Italian composers, who had already won fame in France under the regency of Maria de’ Medici, were called on even more extensively under the regency of Anne of Austria, and the works of Sacrati, Luigi Rossi and Cavalli were performed in Paris. Of all the Bourbons it was Louis xiv, a guitarist and excellent dancer, who had the most direct influence on the music of his time. As an absolute monarch he ensured a state-controlled music policy and in 1664 the Plaisirs de l’ile enchantée set the tone for a period of intense musical activity. Pierre Robert, Henry Du Mont and J.-B. Lully secured the services of well-known poets Benserade, Perrin and Quinault and contributed to the establishment of the grand motet and the tragédie en musique. Louis’s desire to establish a national style also led to the creation in 1672 of the Académie de Musique. Sacred music in the royal chapel was reorganized in the 1680s around François Couperin and Lalande.

The descendants of Louis XIV proved equally enthusiastic about music. The Grand Dauphin, who frequently attended the Académie de Musique, was a discriminating lover of music and opera, and an excellent dancer. He possessed his own musical establishment, which was directed during the 1680s by M.-A. Charpentier, and passed on his love of music to his children, particularly the Duke of Anjou, who later became Philip V of Spain. Louis’s illegitimate children were also true music-lovers: the Princess of Conti (Marie-Anne) was the student of J.-H. d’Anglebert and of François Couperin; the Duke of Maine (Louis Auguste de Bourbon) was the protector of Couperin and organizer of the Grandes Nuits of Sceaux; while the Count of Toulouse (Louis Alexandre de Bourbon) studied with Couperin. During the Regency, Paris experienced an intense musical life thanks to the influence of Philippe of Orléans, who was a student of Loulié and Charpentier, and himself a composer. Louis XV, by contrast, was not particularly attracted to music. He became more involved in it after his marriage to Marie Leczińska, whose concerts were organized by Destouches and Collin de Blamont, and he encouraged the musical education of his children, particularly his daughters, all of whom were musicians. Louis XV was more interested in architecture, and he deserves particular credit for his unconditional support of Gabriel in the construction of his opera house in Versailles, which was inaugurated in May 1770. His reign was nevertheless marked by financial worries, as is attested by the edict of 1761 by which Musique de la chambre and Musique de la chapelle were merged.

Although Louis XVI had no particular interest in music, he encouraged his wife’s tastes, especially that for comic opera. It was for Marie-Antoinette that he built the Little Trianon theatre, where she organized musical spectacles in which she sometimes participated. A former student of Gluck, Marie-Antoinette played the harp, which she had learnt under P.-J. Hinner and Coelestin Hochbrucker.

Bourbons also held the Spanish throne almost uninterruptedly from 1701 until the later 19th century. Philip V immediately hired Henry Desmarets, probably because he longed to reproduce the musical atmosphere he had known at the court of Louis XIV. Philip was particularly fond of Italian music, as was his son Ferdinand VI; it was at their court that Farinelli and Domenico Scarlatti gained distinction. From 1748 Philip V also reigned over the Duchy of Parma where he encouraged artistic activity, especially music. It was during his reign that C.I. Frugoni and Tommaso Traetta undertook to reform opera at Parma. Among the Bourbons of Naples, Charles de Bourbon built the San Carlo theatre, which was inaugurated in 1737 by the performance of Sarro’s Achille in Sciro and Ferdinand I, back in Naples after the troubles of the Napoleonic period, created a new Academy of Music and Ballet. Until their removal in 1860–61, the Bourbons of Parma and Naples attracted and retained the most illustrious artists and encouraged the flourishing of a rich and varied musical life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Jullien: La cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI: Marie-Antoinette et Sacchini, Salieri, Favart et Gluck (Paris, 1878)

R. Cotte: ‘Louis XIII musicien’, La vie musicale, iv (1952), 6–7

M. Antoine: Henry Desmarets (1661–1741) (Paris, 1965)

M. Le Moël: ‘La Chapelle de musique sous Henri IV et Louis XIII’, RMFC, vi (1966), 5–26

M. Benoit: Versailles et les musiciens du roi: étude institutionnelle et sociale (1661–1733) (Paris, 1971)

M. Benoit: Les Musiciens du roi de France (1661–1733) (Paris, 1982)

B. Lespinard: ‘La Chapelle royale sous le règne de Louis XV’, RMFC, xxiii (1985), 131–75

S. Hoog: La Généalogie des Bourbons (Paris, 1986)

K. Béguin: Les Princes de Condé: rebelles, courtisans et mécènes dans la France du Grand Siècle (Seyssel, 1999)

FRANK DOBBINS/ANNE-MADELEINE GOULET

Bourbon, Nicolaus.

See Borbonius, Nicolaus.

Bourdelot [Bonnet-Bourdelot, Bonnet].

French family of physicians and music historians.

(2) Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot

(3) Jacques Bonnet

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.C. Vischer: Der Musikgeschichtliche Traktat des Pierre Bourdelot (Berne, 1947)

R. Wangermée: ‘Lecerf de la Viéville, Bonnet-Bourdelot et “l’Essai sur le bon goust en musique” de Nicolas Grandval’, RBM, v (1951), 132–46

D. Yannou: Die ‘Geschichte der Musik’ (1715) von Bonnet und Bourdelot (Regensburg, 1980)

P. Vendrix: Aux origines d’une discipline historique: la musique et son histoire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Geneva, 1993)

JAMES R. ANTHONY/PHILIPPE VENDRIX

Bourdelot

(1) Pierre Bourdelot [Michon]

(b Sens, 2 Feb 1610; d Paris, 9 Feb 1685). Son of the surgeon Maximilien Michon, he was placed under the guardianship of his uncle Jean Bourdelot, whose name he took. He studied medicine in Paris. In 1634, he entered the service of the Duke of Noailles, whom he followed to Rome. On returning to France in 1638, he worked for the Duke of Condé. From 1639 to 1642 he wrote three dissertations on medicine which enabled him to qualify as a doctor. After a period of service with the Queen of Sweden, he returned to France and entered the abbey at Massay. An enthusiastic amateur of the fine arts, Bourdelot gathered about him a coterie of artists, musicians and literati. With his nephew, Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot, he began to compile material for books dealing with the history of music and of dance.

Bourdelot

(2) Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot

(b Paris, 1654; d Sèvres, 20 Dec 1708). Nephew of (1) Pierre Bourdelot. He also studied medicine in Paris and was awarded a diploma in 1676. In 1694 he was appointed physician to Louis XIV. He inherited his uncle’s library and manuscripts and succeeded in completing the history of music, but it remained unpublished at his death.

Bourdelot

(3) Jacques Bonnet

(b Paris, 1644; d Paris, 1723). Brother of (2) Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot. He was treasurer of the hunt and adviser to the king. In 1691 he was ‘receiver and payer of wages to the officers of parliament in Paris’. As Jacques Bonnet-Bourdelot, he published L’Histoire de la musique et de ses effets in Paris in 1715. The work is a compilation of texts written by all three members of the family; the role of collation may be attributed to Jacques, who inherited the documents of his brother and uncle. (2) Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot wrote most of the text, (1) Pierre Bourdelot wrote several sections (notably on Hebrew music), and Jacques updated some of the information and added a chapter for the 1725 edition. Concentrating on the collection of documents rather than on their organization, the work covers such diverse subjects as Chinese music, Persian music, and the sensitivity that animals have for music. Ancient music occupies a third of the space and there is a comparison of Italian and French music. A sensitive ear for language (‘One can say that Italian music resembles a pleasing Coquette’) and a sharp eye for observation (notably in the chapters dealing with fêtes) compensate for the lack of depth. The Histoire de la musique was reprinted several times, and in Amsterdam (1721, 1725, 1726) and The Hague and Frankfurt (1743) it included without acknowledgment Le Cerf de la Viéville’s treatise Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française. In 1723 Jacques Bonnet published a Histoire générale de la danse sacrée et profane.

Bourdeney Manuscript

[F-Pn Rés.Vma.851]. See Sources, MS, §IX, 9 and Sources of instrumental ensemble music to 1630, §2.

Bourdin, Roger

(b Levallois, 14 June 1900; d Paris, 14 Sept 1973). French baritone. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire with André Gresse and Jacques Isnardon, he made his début at the Opéra-Comique as Lescaut in Manon (1922) and sang there regularly until the mid-1960s in a wide range of roles, creating parts in operas by Pierné, Ibert and Marcel Bertrand. His début at the Opéra, as Mârouf, was in 1942, and he created the title role of Milhaud’s Bolivar there in 1950. His only appearance at Covent Garden was as Pelléas to the Mélisande of Maggie Teyte in 1930. He was a notable French interpreter of non-French parts, including Beckmesser, Scarpia and Mozart’s Figaro. He sang Athanaël to the Thaïs of his wife, the soprano Geori Boué, at the Opéra during the 1940s. His voice was a warm, mellifluous, typically French baritone, as can be heard on his many recordings.

ALAN BLYTH

Bourdon (i)

(Fr.).

(1) A term analogous to the English ‘burden’ and used of the lowest drone on the hurdy-gurdy and also of the free vibrating strings of the larger lutes and bowed instruments like the lira da braccio.

(2) On a guitar with courses, a bourdon (Sp. bordón) is the lower and thicker of the two strings of a course.

(3) A term applied to the lowest partial (or ‘hum note’) of tower bells.

(4) See under Organ stop.

Bourdon (ii).

A term used by Besseler in an attempt to explain the invention of the term Fauxbourdon (c1425–30). He posited a special use of ‘bourdon’, by then established in French usage as meaning a drone bass, a low note or organ pipe, and in English as the lowest voice in a three-part composition. Besseler isolated a group of low contratenor parts by Du Fay and others, many of which were written on a six-line staff and apparently composed for instrumental performance, and argued that the word ‘bourdon’ referred either to contratenors such as these or to the parts of a lower voice that functioned as a bass. A ‘faux’ (false) bourdon was therefore so designated because it was a contratenor which throughout its course lay above the tenor.

No contemporary evidence has yet been found to support this special usage and, if Besseler was right, it is surprising that such words as ‘bourdon’, ‘burdo’ or ‘bordunans’ are not found among the many new terms coined during the 15th century to describe the contratenor bassus. Although most later writers have not accepted Besseler’s hypothesis, his ingenious analyses established several important lines of new inquiry and retain an independent value.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Besseler: Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (Leipzig, 1950, rev., enlarged 2/1974 by P. Gülke), i, chaps.1–5, theses 15–16

M.F. Bukofzer: ‘Fauxbourdon Revisited’, MQ, xxxviii (1952), 22–47, esp. 26–9

BRIAN TROWELL

Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis (Albert)

(b Nantes, 2 Feb 1840; d Vernouillet, Yvelines, 4 July 1910). French scholar and composer. He was a nephew of Billault, the famous minister of the Second Empire, and prepared for a career in law, but entered Ambroise Thomas’ class at the Conservatoire in 1859, a year after his comic opera L’atelier de Prague had been performed in Nantes. He won the Prix de Rome in 1862 with his cantata Louise de Mézières, and during his subsequent visit to Italy developed an interest in both the music of Palestrina’s time and folk music. In 1868 he moved from Nantes to Paris and shortly thereafter founded the Société Bourgault-Ducoudray, an amateur choral group which performed the works of Lassus, Palestrina, Janequin, Bach and Handel among others. He was also one of the founders of the Société Nationale de Musique. In 1874 he travelled to Greece to study ancient and popular Greek music; this journey resulted in several writings and the publication of collections of Greek folksongs, harmonized by himself. He subsequently became interested in the music of Brittany, collecting folksongs from local singers in a published collection and harmonizing them with sensitivity, adding a copious description of his methods, the modal structure of the music and its performance practice. From 1878 he taught music history at the Conservatoire, where he introduced his students to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky as early as 1880 and offered a course on Russian music in 1903. He was named an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1888.

Bourgault-Ducoudray’s many interests led to a wide range of activities. His compositions, produced at a steady rate, include cantatas, numerous songs, orchestral works and five operas, some of which reflect his study of folk music. His Dans la lande: esquisse d’après nature for piano combines folk dance and folksong with a more adventurous piano style than is found in the transcriptions, while the Rhapsodie cambodgienne for large orchestra incorporates Cambodian melodies. His folksong collections, in which he tended to use modal harmonizations, are classics of their kind and helped to stimulate interest in folk music in France. His operas show considerable skill: La conjuration des fleurs is through-composed and contains many delightful effects; Thamara reflects the composer’s oriental interests, and uses Eastern modality; Myrdhin, his other full-length opera, is an Arthurian epic.

Bourgault-Ducoudray’s writings have been more influential than his music; his books, which cover topics from Greek modes to Schubert, demonstrate a higher level of scholarship than was common among 19th-century French writers on music. His interests also extended to modern symphonies and operas, and he enthusiastically supported many contemporary composers. The first Paris performances of two of Balakirev’s works owed much to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s support. It is possible that his interests in chant, Russian music, oriental music and the theories of Rousseau regarding recitative may have influenced Debussy, who studied with Bourgault-Ducoudray at the Conservatoire. His philosophy is well expressed in a lecture he delivered at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1878:

No element of expression existing in a tune of any kind, however ancient, however remote in origin, must be banished from our musical idiom. All modes, old or new, European or exotic, insofar as they are capable of serving an expressive purpose, must be admitted by us and used by composers. I believe that the polyphonic principle may be applied to all kinds of scales. Our two modes, the major and the minor, have been so thoroughly exploited that we should welcome all elements of expression by which the musical idiom may be rejuvenated.

His ideas for broadening musical expression were important in the modern revival of French music and prepared the way for Bordes, d’Indy and the new school of ‘regional’ composers – Ladmirault, Huré, Ropartz, Canteloube and Séverac. His pupil Maurice Emmanuel regarded his own Histoire de la langue musicale (Paris, 1911) as an extension of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s work, and dedicated it to his teacher.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise indicated

stage

Adieu Jeanette (pastorale, T. Botrel), 2 solo vv, n.d.

L’atelier de Prague (oc, 1, G. Derrien), Nantes, Graslin, Oct 1858, vs (1859)

La conjuration des fleurs (petit drame satirique, 2 scenes), solo vv, female chorus, orch/pf, Paris, Salle Herz, 27 Jan 1883, vs (1883)

Michel Colomb (oc, 1, L. Gallet, E. Bonnemère), Brussels, Turkish Embassy, 7 May 1887

Anne de Bretagne (op, 4, composer), 1888; Nantes, Société Musicale Concordia, Dec 1892

Thamara (op, 4 scenes, Gallet), Paris, Opéra, 28 Dec 1891, vs (1892); rev. version Opéra, 23 Jan 1907

Le songe de Vasco de Gama (scene, S. Arnaud) (1898)

Myrdhin (op, 4, Arnaud), 1905; Nantes, Graslin, 28 March 1912 (1919)

vocal

Choral: Louise de Mézières (E. Monnais), cant., 1862; Françoise d’Amboise, cant., 1866 (1898); Stabat mater (G. Benedetti), solo vv, chorus, vc/db, harp, trbn, org, 1868 (1874); Dieu notre divin père, cantique, chorus, pf/harmonium (1872); Symphonie religieuse ‘Vivus resurgit Christus’, 5vv (1878); Chants d’éducation et de récréation, 8 songs, female (1883); Le psaume de la vie (after Longfellow), male 4vv (1884); Jean de Paris, cant., male 4vv (1894); Hymne à la Patrie, orat; Jeanne Hachette, cant.; others

Songs: 3 mélodies (Musset) (1869); 30 mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’orient (trans. M.A. de Lauzières), harmonized (1876); 30 mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne (trans. F. Coppée), harmonized (Paris and Brussels, 1885); 6 mélodies (1885); Les chansons de France, harmonized (Paris, 1907–13); 14 mélodies celtiques (écossaises, irlandaises, galloises), harmonized (trans. Mme C. Chevillard) (1909); Mélodies du pays de Galles et d’Ecosse (1909); 18 mélodies (n.d.); La chanson de la Bretagne, 7 songs (n.d.); others, incl. pedagogical works, 1v, 2vv, 3vv, pf

Recitatives (A. Silvestre) in E.N. Méhul: Joseph (1899)

instrumental

Orch: Fantaisie, c (1874); L’enterrement d’Ophélie, marche funèbre, after Shakespeare (1877); Rhapsodie cambodgienne, sym. poem (1882), arr. pf by C. Chevillard (n.d.); Suite

Chamber: Sous les saules, vn/vc/cl, pf (1881); Sur les lagunes, vn, pf (1881); Anisykhia (Inquiétude), oriental melody transcr. vn, pf (1881); mélodies, vn, pf (1883) Abergavenny: suite de thèmes populaires gallois, fl, str qt (c1900); Les bergers à la crèche, eng hn, pf (1913); Berceuse, vc, pf (n.d.); Fantaisie, bn, pf (n.d.); others

Org: Adagio (1884)

Pf: Le carnaval d’Athènes, Greek dances, pf 4 hands (1881), orchd (1881); Fumées, suite (1888); Air de danse dans le style ancien (1900); Berceuse tendre (1905); Dans la lande: esquisse d’après nature, in suppl. to L’Illustration, no.3343 (1907); 3 pièces (n.d.); gavottes, minuets etc.

WRITINGS

Souvenirs d’une mission musicale en Grèce et en Orient (Paris, 1876, 2/1878)

Etudes sur la musique ecclésiastique grecque: mission musicale en Grèce et en Orient (Paris, 1877)

Conférence sur la modalité dans la musique grecque (Paris, 1879) [lecture given at the Exposition universelle internationale, Paris, 7 Sept 1878]

Preface to B. Marcello: Le théâtre à la mode au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1890)

Schubert … biographie critique (Paris, 1908)

‘César Franck’, Journal de l’Université des Annales (5 Oct 1909)

Preface to H. Woollett: Histoire de la musique depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1913)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gringoire: L’oeuvre de L.-A. Bourgault-Ducoudray (Nantes, 1898)

R. Rolland: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1908, many later edns; Eng. trans., 1915/R)

M. Emmanuel: Eloge funèbre de Bourgault-Ducoudray (Paris, 1911)

M.D. Calvocoressi: ‘Bourgault-Ducoudray: a Memory’, MMR, liii (1923), 37–8

M.D. Calvocoressi: Musicians Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (London, 1933, 2/1934/R as Music and Ballet)

E. Lockspeiser: Debussy: his Life and Mind (London, 1962–5/R)

S. Baud-Bovy: ‘Bourgault-Ducoudray et la musique grecque ecclésiastique et profane’, RdM, lxviii/1–2 (Paris, 1982), 153–63 [Schaeffner Fs issue, ed. J. Gribenski and J.-M. Nectoux]

K. Brambats: ‘Louis Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray and Baltic Folk Song Research’, Journal of Baltic Studies, xv/4 (1984), 270–81

R. Marot: Les compositeurs bretons: les sources de leur inspiration (Nantes, 1988)

ELAINE BRODY/R. LANGHAM SMITH

Bourgeois, Derek (David)

(b Kingston upon Thames, 16 Oct 1941). English composer. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge (1959–63), where his teachers included Leppard, Willcocks and Dart, and studied composition with Howells and conducting with Boult at the RCM (1963–5). While at Cambridge, the acclaimed première of his Symphony no.1 (under Willcocks) brought him to public notice. Initially assistant director of music at Cranleigh School, he took the DMus at Cambridge and was appointed lecturer in music at Bristol University in 1971. He has conducted the Sun Life Band, served as chairman of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, and from 1984 to 1993 was musical director of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain; in 1988 he founded the National Youth Chamber Orchestra. He was appointed artistic director of the Bristol Philharmonia in 1990 and director of music at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London, in 1994. Of his considerable output, best known are his outstanding brass and wind band pieces and his works for schools.

His style, strongly influenced by Britten, Walton, Strauss and Shostakovich, is accessible, full of atmosphere and often cast on a large canvas. His eclectic idiom is broadly tonal yet infused at times with biting dissonance and chromaticism; he is fond of bold gestures and brilliant, sometimes opulent orchestration. Among his many successful television and film scores are those for Barchester Chronicles (1981) and Mansfield Park (1983), two popular BBC productions.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Rumpelstiltskin (op, 2, D. Selwyn), op.43, 1974; A Portrait of Miranda (musical, 2, E. Dryden and D. Taylor), op.135, 1993; Christmas on the Underground (op), op.150, girls’ vv, orch, 1996

Choral: Jabberwocky (L. Carol), op.18, Bar, chorus, orch, 1963; The Pied Piper of Hamelin (R. Browning), op.28, S/Tr, SSA, pf duet, perc, 1968; Triumphal March (T.S. Eliot), op.59, T, chorus, orch, 1978; Cant. Gastronomica (W. Cowper, A. Pope and others) op.63, Mez, chorus, orch, 1979; Kubla Khan (S.T. Coleridge), op.95, S, T, chorus, brass band, orch, 1985; Armada (H. Newbolt, A. Tennyson and others), op.104, Mez, chorus, orch, 1987

Syms.: no.1, op.10, 1961; no.2, op.27, 1968; no.3, op.57, 1977; no.4 ‘A Wine Symphony’, op.58, 1978; no.5, op.68, 1980; no.6 ‘A Cotswold Symphony’, op.109, 1988; no.7 ‘The First Two Thousand Years’, op.158, T, chorus, orch, 1999

Other orch: Sym. Variations, op.19, 1964; The Globe, op.29, 1969; Tuba Conc., op.38, 1972; Cl Conc., op.51, 1976; Conc., op.56, 3 trbn, str, perc, 1977; Db Conc., op.62, 1979; Chamber of Horrors, op.66, 1980; Sinfonietta, chbr orch, op.93, 1984; Org Conc., op.101, 1986; Trbn Conc., op.114, 1988; Euphonium Conc., op.120, 1990; Hn Conc., op.121, 1990; Happy and Glorious, concert march, op.128, orch, opt. chorus, 1992, arrs. band, 1992; Conc., op.138, str qt, orch, 1994; Perc Conc., op.143, 1995; A Dorset Celebration, op.159, 1998

Band: Conc. for Brass Band no.1, op.44, 1974; Conc., brass qnt, brass band, op.47, 1975; Conc. for Brass Band no.2, op.49, 1976; Blitz, op.65, brass band, 1980; Conc. grosso, op.61a, brass band, 1980; Sym. of Winds, op.67, 1980; Aspirations, op.82, brass band, 1982; Diversions, op.97, brass band, 1985, arr. op.97a, concert band, 1987; Forest of Dean, op.126, brass band, 1991; The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, op.131, 1992; Conc., op.136, brass sextet, concert band, 1994; Perchance to Dream, wind orch, 1998

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt, D, op.12, 1962; Brass Qnt no.1, op.21, 1965; Serenade, op.22, org, 1965; Brass Qnt no.2, op.39, 1972; Sonata, op.46, cl, pf, 1974; Sym., op.48, org, 1975; Trio, op.70, hn, vn, pf, 1980; Qnt, op.90, fl, str trio, hp, 1983; Cl Qnt, op.147, 1995; Sonata, op.156, trbn, pf, 1998

Principal publishers: Brass Wind, Chesters, OUP, R. Smith

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Scott-Sutherland: ‘The Six Symphonies of Derek Bourgeois’, British Music Society Newsletter, nos.78–9 (1998)

MALCOLM MILLER

Bourgeois [Bourgeoy, Bourgeoys, Bourgoys, Bourjois], Loys [Loïs, Louis]

(b Paris, c1510–15; d1559). French composer and theorist. He is chiefly remembered for his contribution to the monophonic Calvinist Psalter in which he supervised, with others (including Guillaume Franc and Pierre Davantes), the adaptation of popular chansons and old Latin hymns as well as composing new melodies for the new metrical French translations of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze. He also published harmonizations of these psalm melodies in simple syllabic homophony for four voices and rather more elaborate versions for four voices or instruments. As the author of Le droict chemin de musique he adapted the traditional solmization system by giving the letter names of each note a new definition consistently following the soft–natural–hard hexachord order: thus C sol fa ut became C sol ut fa, G sol re ut became re sol ut etc.

1. Life.

Bourgeois first appears as the composer of three four-voice chansons, published in Lyons by Moderne (RISM 1539²⁰). On 14 July 1545 his name appears in the records of the Geneva council as a singer paid 60 florins a year to perform the new psalms and to teach the choristers at St Pierre. From December 1545 he was paid 40 florins to fulfil similar functions at the church of St Gervais, and thus received the full annual salary of 100 florins that had been accorded to his predecessor Guillaume Franc in 1543–4. In April 1546, in collaboration with the city's preachers, he drew up a table announcing the psalms to be sung each Sunday, which was to be printed and posted on the church doors. In 1547 the Beringen brothers of Lyons published two collections of Bourgeois' four-voice settings of Marot’s psalms. In the same year he married, and on 24 May was granted Genevan citizenship; until November 1549 he lived in a house, provided by the city, which served as a choir school attached to St Pierre.

In April 1550 the council rewarded Bourgeois for a ‘certaine feuille pour apprendre à chanter’, and in May Calvin authorized him to print a short music treatise at his own expense. On 5 September 1550 he was granted two months’ leave, but he was back in Geneva by the following January, requesting remuneration for ‘improving the psalm tunes’: these improvements may have been reflected in the 83 psalms translated by Marot (49) and Bèze (34) printed with melodies in Geneva by Jean Crespin in 1551 and reissued every year until 1554. At all events on 3 December 1551 Bourgeois was imprisoned for having, without a licence, ‘changed the tunes of some printed psalms’, an action troubling those who had learnt the old tunes that had already been printed. He was released the following day after Calvin's personal intercession, but the controversy continued: the council complained further that the faithful were disorientated by the new melodies, and ordered Crespin to burn the prefatory epistle to the reader in which Bourgeois claimed that not to sing was commination. In July 1552 a minister from Lausanne warned the Geneva council that his town might not accept Bourgeois' changes to the tunes of the old psalms by Marot or his settings of the more recent psalm translations of Bèze. The frustrated composer had also suffered from financial difficulties through the reductions in salaries from May 1551 paid to Genevan functionaries, and after being granted three months' leave in August 1552, to visit Lyons and Paris to publish his psalm settings, he did not return but requested a further eight-week extension. The council refused and terminated his employment. In May 1553 Bourgeois’ wife was paid five florins to join her husband in Lyons where, the following year, Beringen printed a revised and augmented edition of Bourgeois' first book of four-voice psalms. Around the same time the composer wrote a scathing attack on the ignorance of the publisher and musician Simon Gorlier, invoking the names of Layolle, Jambe de Fer, Roussel and other maîtres de chapelle to support his contention that it was advantageous to a good musician to study mathematics. In 1557 he was described as ‘maître musicien’ living in Lyons, but by May 1560 he had moved to Paris and his daughter Suzanne was baptized in the Catholic church of St Côme. Two months earlier Nicolas Du Chemin had printed Si je vivois deux cens mille ans (RISM 1560^3a), the first secular chanson by Bourgeois to appear in over 20 years.

2. Works.

The popularity of Bourgeois' psalm settings persisted after his death, for Antoine Du Verdier (La bibliothèque d'Antoine Du Verdier, Lyons, 1585, p.792) mentioned Quatre-vingt-trois psaulmes de David (Paris, 1561). This volume, printed by Antoine Le Clerc, is now lost but was probably a revised version of the Lyons edition of 1554, expanded to include five-, six- and eight-voice pieces. Du Verdier explained that the psalm melody was in the tenor so that the amateur singer could join in at the unison or octave while the other parts were more elaborate, a scheme that epitomizes Bourgeois' role as a popularizing pedagogue, attempting to reconcile professional (and Catholic) polyphony with congregational (and Calvinist) monody. The meeting-point was homophony, illustrated by the 50 four-voice psalm settings ‘à voix de contrepoinct égal consonante au verbe’, published in Lyons by the Beringen brothers in 1547. The book’s dedicatory epistle faithfully echoes Calvin’s attitude to music, expressing disdain for ‘dissolute chansons’; yet it attempted to justify polyphony, or at least the addition of note-against-note harmony. The epistle also explains, somewhat apologetically, that a second volume is freer: this refers to Le premier livre des pseaulmes … en diversité de musique, also published by the Beringens in 1547. Of the 24 settings only three use the simple homophonic method of retaining the cantus firmus unaltered; 13 introduce paraphrase or parody techniques and eight completely abandon the orthodox Genevan melodies.

As maître des enfants at Geneva, Bourgeois had to train choristers to lead congregational singing rather than to entertain a silent audience. However, his missionary zeal for music proved stronger than that for Calvinism and his Le droict chemin (Geneva and Lyons, 1550) was the first didactic manual in French on singing and sight-reading. Though indebted to Glarean, Gaffurius, Sebald Heyden, Frosch, Listenius, Ornithoparchus and others, the book showed considerable simplification in theory and practice, introduced the concept of solfège and abandoned the archaic Guidonian hand. It contains clear explanations and demonstrations of tactus, proportion, syncopation and even of the convention later known as notes inégales.

The Protestant administration in Switzerland did not generally favour instrumental music, mainly because of its ‘lascivious’ connection with dancing and secular entertainment. But Bourgeois was eager to establish its acceptability and insisted that the psalms of 1547, 1554 and 1561 were most suitable for instruments; moreover, according to the preface of Le droict chemin, he intended to write a book on instrumental performance.

Bourgeois' early chansons comprise a courtly épigramme, Si par faveur, set in the manner of Sermisy, an erotic anecdote, Ung soir bien tard, in the more animated syllabic style of Janequin and a curiously late and extended example of a complete rondeau cinquain, Ce moys de may, with the entire text (including rentrements) underlaid. Here, as in many of the psalms, he showed a conservative predilection for modal harmony, but a freer and more adventurous attitude in his rhythm and in his preference for superius melodies over tenor ones.

Bourgeois' precise contribution to the compilation, revision and composition of the orthodox melodies of the Huguenot Psalter (which evolved between 1539 and 1562) is difficult to assess, but documentary evidence in Genevan archives underlines his creative involvement in the 1551 version, now lost.

WORKS

vocal

[50] Pseaulmes de David … à voix de contrepoinct égal consonante au verbe, 4vv (Lyons, 1547); 37 ed. K.P. Bernet Kempers, 37 Psalmen … van Loys Bourgeois (Delft, 1937)

Le premier livre des [24] pseaulmes … en diversité de musique, 4vv (Lyons, 1547); ed. in SMd, iii (1960)

Pseaulmes LXXXIII de David, 4vv (Lyons, 1554) [rev. of 1547 edn]

Quatre-vingt-trois psaulmes de David … dont le basse contre tient le sujet, 4–6, 8vv (Paris, 1561), lost [?rev. and enlarged version of 1554 edn]; cited in A. Du Verdier, La bibliothèque d'Antoine Du Verdier (Lyons, 1585), and FétisB

4 chansons, 4vv, 1539²⁰, 1560^3a; 3 ed. in SCC, xxvi (1993)

theoretical works

Le droict chemin de musique (Geneva, 1550/R); ed. and trans. B. Rainbow (Kilkenny, 1982)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Bovet: Histoire du psautier des églises réformées (Neuchâtel, 1872)

O. Douen: Clément Marot et le psautier huguenot (Paris, 1878–9/R)

P.-A. Gaillard: Loys Bourgeois: sa vie, son oeuvre comme pédagogue et compositeur (Lausanne, 1948)

P.-A. Gaillard: ‘Le matériel mélodique employé par Loys Bourgeois dans son Premier livre des pseaulmes’, SMz, xcii (1952), 413–14

U. Teuber: ‘Notes sur la rédaction musicale au Psautier Genevois (1542–1562)’, AnnM, iv (1956), 113–28

P. Pidoux: Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle, i–ii (Basle, 1962)

F. Dobbins: The Chanson at Lyons in the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Oxford, 1972), i, 150–54; ii, nos.43–5

L. Guillo: Les éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise (Paris, 1991)

F. Dobbins: Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992)

FRANK DOBBINS

Bourgeois, Martin.

Franco-Flemish chaplain and music scribe. He was active at the courts of Margaret of Austria, Philip the Fair and Emperor Charles V from 1498 to 1514. See Alamire, Pierre.

Bourgeois, Thomas-Louis [Joseph]

(b Fontaine-L'Evêque, 24 Oct 1676; d Paris, Jan 1750 or 1751). French composer and singer. His name first appears as a composer in 1701 when two volumes of Pièces en trio were published in Paris by Ballard. He is next heard of as maître de musique at Strasbourg Cathedral where he worked from 1703 to 1706. According to the title-page of his ballet Les plaisirs de la paix (1715) he at some time held a similar position at Toul. From 1708 to 1711 he sang at the Paris Opéra; La Borde spoke highly of his countertenor voice. Bourgeois' last major appointment was as surintendant de la musique to the Duke of Bourbon in whose service he worked from 1715 to 1721, after which he seems to have led a professional life that took him from one provincial city to another, including Lille, Lyons, Poitiers and Dijon, and also to Belgium and the Netherlands. His last years are obscure and he died in poverty.

Bourgeois contributed significantly to the 18th-century French cantata. His first works in this genre appeared only a few years after those of Morin and Bernier. Research has revealed that he wrote many more cantatas and cantatilles than have been ascribed to him. Of his 40 such works only 19 appear to be extant; they attest a fine lyrical gift and sensitive imagination, and a range of moods from gentle pastoralism to energy and considerable power. His Le berger fidèle from his first book of cantatas (1708) is perhaps his most characteristic work. His cantatas may be taken as representing his most important contribution to the music of his day.

He also wrote ballets and divertissements, two of which, Les amours déguisés and Les plaisirs de la paix, were performed at the Paris Opéra. Bourgeois contributed to the Duchess of Maine's celebrated entertainments known as Les nuits de Sceaux with his divertissement Le comte de Gabalis (1714), and collaborated with Jacques Aubert in Diane, performed at court in 1721. Some of his divertissements were written and performed in the provinces where he worked, but few have survived.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris

Cants.: bk 1, Borée, Le berger fidèle, Hippomène, Ariane, Les Sirènes, Céphale et Aurore (1708); bk 2, Zéphire et Flore, Psiché, Phèdre et Hipolitte, L'Amour et Psiché (1718)

Cantates françoises anacréontiques ou musique de chambre: La lyre d'Anacréon, Tirranique, L'enfant de Vénus (after 1715)

Separate cants. and cantatilles: Règne amour sur mon âme (1713), L'époux imprudent (1721, F-Pn), L'Amour médecin (c1740), L'Amour prisonnier de la beauté (before 1742), L'Amour peintre (1744), Diane et Endimion (1744), L'Amour musicien (1744); for a list of 21 cants. no longer extant see Tunley

Stage works: Les amours déguisés (opéra-ballet, prol, 3, L. Fuzelier), Paris, Opéra, 22 Aug 1713 (1713); Le comte de Gabalis et les peuples élémentaires (divertissement, 2, P.-F.G. de Beauchamps), Sceaux, Cháteau de Sceaux, Oct 1714; Les plaisirs de la paix (opéra-ballet, prol, 3, A. Menesson), Paris, Opéra, 29 April 1715 (1715); Diane (divertissement, A. Danchet), Chantilly, 8 Sept 1721 (1721) [vocal music only], sym. by J. Aubert; Les peines et les plaisirs de l'amour, 1730 (ballet-héroïque, prol, 3, P. de Morand), unperf.; L'idylle de Rambouillet (divertissement) (1735)

Other works: Pièces en trio (1701); 1 bk of airs (c1705), lost; separate airs in Ballard's Recueils (1706, 1707, 1713); 2 motets à grand choeur, lost; Le Clerc's retrospective catalogue (1742) lists a Trio pour les musettes et vielles, 1^re Suite [? = Pièces en trio, 1701]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO

La BordeE

E. Titon du Tillet: Le Parnasse françois, suppl.ii (Paris, 1755)

L.C. de la Baume le Blanc: Ballets, opéra, et autres ouvrages lyriques (Paris, 1760/R)

C. Lyon: ‘Thomas-Louis-Jos. Bourgeois’, L'éducation populaire (Charleroi, 1882), 1–6

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)

M. Couvreur: ‘Marie de Louvencourt: librettiste des Cantates françoises de Bourgeois et de Clérambault’, Revue belge de musicologie, xliv (1990), 25–40

DAVID TUNLEY

Bourgois [Burgois]

(fl c1440). Composer, possibly French. His works, known only from the Trent codices, comprise two rondeaux, Quant je remire and Fortune qui mains (both ed. in DTÖ, xxii, Jg.xi, 1904/R, pp.72–4) and a Gloria Spiritus et alme (ed. in DTÖ, lxi, Jg.xxxi, 1924/R, p.67). The Gloria, paraphrasing the melody in Mass IX, is preceded in I-TRmp 88 by a Kyrie de beata virgine also using a melody from Mass IX. Whether this conjunction represents a scribe's attempt to pair liturgically related works or to put together two works by one composer cannot be determined. Most of the trope text in the Gloria appears in all three voices, whereas the remaining text is set only under the top voice. This procedure is also found in Glorias by Du Fay and Ciconia. The trope is further distinguished by the use of three high voices marked ‘pueri’. Two phrases of the text are set for these high voices combined with a tenor or contratenor.

Quant je remire is for three voices with only the top voice texted, and uses imitation at beginnings of phrases. Fortune qui mains has five written parts and can be performed by two combinations of three voices or by four voices.

TOM R. WARD/DAVID FALLOWS

Bourgoys [Bourjois], Loys.

See Bourgeois, Loys.

Bourgue, Maurice

(b Avignon, 6 June 1939). French oboist. After receiving a premier prix at the Paris Conservatoire in 1958 and winning first prizes at competitions in Birmingham, Prague and Budapest, he was appointed solo oboist in the Orchestre de Paris, a position he held until 1979. As well as playing in the orchestra, Bourgue founded a wind octet with other members of the Orchestre de Paris. In 1979 he joined the staff of the Paris Conservatoire, teaching alongside Pierre Pierlot, and in 1993 was appointed to the faculty of the Geneva Conservatoire. His numerous solo recordings include Albinoni concertos, Vaughan Williams’s Oboe Concerto and discs of 20th-century French oboe music. Bourgue has played frequently with Heinz Holliger, with whom he has made recordings of Zelenka and Handel trio sonatas. He also plays much contemporary music, and gave the premières of Berio’s Chemins IV and Ligeti’s Double Concerto. In recent years Bourgue has begun to develop a parallel career as a conductor.

GEOFFREY BURGESS

Bourguignon

(fl 1533–40). French or Franco-Flemish composer. Records from Lille show that a certain François Bourguignon, countertenor (haute-contre), travelled from Flanders to Madrid in 1542 to join the imperial chapel of Charles V. Whether this is the same person as the composer Bourguignon is not known. All of Bourguignon's compositions, four chansons and a Latin motet, appeared in Attaingnant's prints in Paris between 1533 and 1539; one of the chansons was reprinted by Moderne in Lyons in 1540. All four chansons are courtly quatrains set in the ‘Parisian’ manner of Sermisy and Sandrin.

WORKS

all for 4 voices

Regina caeli, 1535⁴; ed. in Treize livres de motets parus chez Pierre Attaingnant en 1534 et 1535, xii (Paris, 1963)

Asseurez-vous de mon cueur, 1539^15-16, D-Mbs Mus.ms.1508; Continuer je veulx ma fermeté, 1538¹⁴; O desloialle dame, Chansons musicales à quatre parties (Paris, 1533); Or n’ay-je plus crainte d’estre surpris, 1538¹²

SAMUEL F. POGUE/FRANK DOBBINS

Bourguignon, Francis de

(b Saint-Gilles, Brussels, 29 May 1890; d Brussels, 11 April 1961). Belgian composer, pianist and critic. He studied at the Brussels Conservatory, where in 1908 he won a first prize for piano in De Greef's class. Wounded in World War I, he was evacuated to England and then moved to Australia, where he became Melba's accompanist. After several international tours he settled in Brussels in 1925. He abandoned his career as a virtuoso pianist to study composition with Gilson and joined the ‘Synthétistes’ group. At the same time he launched into music criticism, giving proof of a caustic wit. Until 1955 he taught harmony (assistant professor 1939, professor 1943) and counterpoint (from 1949) at the Brussels Conservatory. A fluent composer, he began with works describing his memories of travel. He attempted to renew the symphonic poem by choosing modern subjects, as in Le jazz vainqueur, op.33. After 1937 he composed in a neo-classical style, often writing fugally, though retaining the lyrical quality of his music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: La mort d'Orphée (ballet), op.29, 1928; Congo (radio play), op.46, 1936; Le mauvais pari (chbr op, 1, R. Avermaete, after a Renaissance farce), 1937; Floris l'incomparable (op comique, 1, F. Waldner), op.110, 1959; film music

Orch: Sym., op.42, 1934; Suite, op.67, va, orch, 1940; Conc. grosso, op.82, 1944; Vn Conc., op.86, 1947; Récitatif et ronde, op.94, tpt, orch, 1951; Pf Conc., op.89, 1949; 2 pf concertinos, other concertante pieces, 11 sym. poems/suites

Chbr: Pf Trio, op.37, 1929; Str Trio, op.49, 1936; Ob Qnt, op.100, 1952; 2 str qts; many other pieces

12 pf pieces, c30 songs, orat and other choral music

Principal publishers: Buyst, CeBeDeM, Durand, Eschig, Sénart

MSS in B-Bcdm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

A. Vandernoot: Francis de Bourguignon (Brussels, 1949)

Catalogue des oeuvres de compositeurs belges: Francis de Bourguignon (Brussels, 1953) [CeBeDeM publication]

A. Vander Linden: ‘Francis de Bourguignon’, Annuaire du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, lxxxiv (1961), 58–61

HENRI VANHULST

Bourke, Sonny.

See Sun Ra.

Bourligueux, Guy

(b Metz, 15 Nov 1935). French musicologist. He studied at the universities of Rennes (1954–9) and Poitiers (1959–60), taking his licence ès-lettres (1956), Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures in Spanish language and literature (1957) and agrégation (1960). He taught at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris (1963–5) before joining the scientific section of the Casa de Velázquez at Madrid (1965–8). Then, after a year as junior lecturer at the Sorbonne, he was appointed lecturer in Spanish language and literature at the University of Nantes (1969), where he was also appointed lecturer in the history of music and musicology in 1971. He was appointed lecturer in the history of music at Nantes conservatory (1972) and at the Institute of European Studies there (1973). From 1975 he was a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in Madrid. In 1977 he was named an honorary scientific collaborator at the Instituto Español de Musicología (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Barcelona).

Bourligueux's literary interests centre on the Spanish golden age, and most of his musicological publications concern various aspects of religious music in Spain and France (particularly in the towns of Vannes and Rennes): organs, church choirs, composers, organists and choirmasters. He has contributed to the major music dictionaries.

WRITINGS

Aspectos del intercambio musical entre España e Italia en los siglos XV y XVI (Rennes, 1957)

‘Le mystérieux Daniel Daniélis (1635–1696)’, RMFC, iv (1964), 146–78

‘Un musicien oublié: Charles-Joseph Le Sueur, maître de chapelle à Vannes’, RMFC, v (1965), 84–90

‘Orgues et organistes de la cathédrale de Vannes’, L'orgue, no.113 (1965), 43–8; no.114 (1965), 85–9; nos. 122–3 (1967), 68–79

‘Autour des orgues de l'ancienne cathédrale de Rennes’, L'orgue, no.117 (1966), 43–8; no.118 (1966), 55–62

‘Géry de Ghersem, sous-maître de la chapelle royale d'Espagne (documents inédits)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, ii (1966), 163–78

‘Claude Hermant de Saint-Benoist, maître de chapelle à Vannes, de 1749 à 1790’, RMFC, vi (1966), 189–96

‘Recherches sur la musique à la cathédrale d'Oviedo (des origines au début du XIXe siècle)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, iii (1967), 115–46

‘La vie quotidienne à la psallette de la cathédrale de Rennes au XVIIe siècle’, RMFC, vii (1967), 205–16; viii (1968), 207–27

‘Les grandes orgues du Monastère royal de l'Escurial’, L'orgue, no.127 (1968), 101–21

‘Leandro Garcimartín et l'orgue des Carmes Chaussés de Madrid (documents inédits)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, iv (1968), 349–70

‘La psallette de la cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Vannes: notes historiques et documents inédits’, RMFC, ix (1969), 115–31

‘La maîtrise de la cathédrale de Vannes au XVIIIe siècle’, Bulletin de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Bretagne (1969–70), 34–48

‘Antoine Fel, organiste de la cathédrale de Rennes’, Mémoires de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Bretagne, l (1970), 55–74

‘Antonio de Cabezón: nota bibliográfica en su cuarto centenario’, Boletín de la Institución Fernán González, xlviii (1970), 142–50

‘El compositor Don Ramón Cuéllar y Altarriba, organista de la catedral de Santiago de Compostela (1777–1833)’, Compostellanum, xv (1970), 155–77

‘Quelques aspects de la vie musicale à Avila: notes et documents (XVIIIe siècle)’, AnM, xxv (1970), 169–209

‘Recherches sur les organistes de la Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Vannes, de 1475 à 1790’, Bulletin de la Société polymathique du Morbihan, xcvii (1970), 149–72

‘Unas oposiciones al magisterio de capila de la catedral de Oviedo a principios del siglo pasado’, Boletín del Instituto de estudios asturianos, xxiv (1970), 3–17

‘Apuntes sobre los maestros de capilla de la catedral de Oviedo (1724–1823)’, Boletín del Instituto de estudios asturianos, xxv (1971), 659–712

‘Juan Bros y Bertomeu (1776–1852), un maestro de capilla de la catedral de Léon: semblanza biográfica’, Archivos leoneses, xxv (1971), 183–99

‘François Lacodre, dit Blin (1757–1834)’, RMFC, xvi (1976), 71–113

‘Charles Levens, maître de chapelle de l'église cathédrale de Vannes’, Bulletin de la Société polymathique du Morbihan, ciii (1976), 121–35

with M.C. Didier: L'orgue au Chili (Paris, 1978)

‘Los organistas de la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Monteñedo desde el siglo XVII’, AnM, xxxvi (1981), 131–47

‘Un gran violinista español de Nantes: Pascual Juan Carriles’, AnM, xxxviii (1983), 93–136

Le grand orgue Debierre de la cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Vannes (Vannes, 1985)

‘Les organistes de Notre-Dame de Paris au XIXe siècle’, Revue internationale de musique française, no.16 (1985), 51–74

‘Un hermano del Padre Antonio Soler, fagotista de la Real Capilla madrileña’, RdMc, viii (1985), 83–95

with E. Cal Pardo: ‘Los maestros de capilla de la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Mondoñedo, I’, Estudios Mondonienses, ii (1986), 11–82; iv (1988), 265–307

‘El violinista Pascual Juan Carriles, su familia y sus amigos’, AnM, xlii (1987), 189–228

‘L'enseignement au Collège des petits chanteurs de la Chapelle royale de Madrid, de 1700 à 1833’, Ecole et Eglise en Espagne et en Amérique latine: aspects idéologiques et institutionnels (Tours, 1988), 91–100

‘La música en la Real Capilla de Madrid durante el siglo XVIII: apuntes bibliográficos’, Homenaje a José Simón Díaz, ed. K. and R. Reichenberger (Kassel, 1988), 115–25

‘L'oeuvre de Pie Meyer-Siat’, L'orgue, no.222 (1992), 23–40

‘Un musicien madrilène [Pablo Rosquellas] à travers le nouveau monde’, Mélanges offerts à Paul Roche, ed. N. Perera San Martín (Nantes, 1992), 183–97

‘Autour de Franck, Benoist et Scheyermann’, RBM, xlvii (1993), 213–28

‘L'“impérialisme” musical dans le Rió de la Plata à l'heure de l'indépendance (1810–1830)’, Mémoire des empires, Empire de la mémoire, ed. J.-P. Barbe (Nantes, 1994), 91–107

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/JEAN GRIBENSKI

Bournemouth.

Town in Dorset on the south-west coast of England. In 1893, Dan Godfrey, under contract to Bournemouth Corporation, began a season of concerts with a band of 30 wind players. A winter engagement followed, when 25 players doubling on other instruments interspersed classical with lighter music. The weekly symphony concerts which continue today began two years later. In 1896 Godfrey became permanent musical director of an augmented orchestra, and the following year the Corporation took over the orchestra, which became the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra; Godfrey also became manager of the Winter Gardens and intermingled variety acts with the concert repertory. He championed British music, performing 842 works by British composers, 160 of whom conducted, including Elgar, German, Mackenzie, Stanford and Parry. He pioneered performances of new music and gave the first English performances of Lalo’s Cello Concerto, the ballet music from Borodin’s Prince Igor, and Tchaikovsky’s first and second symphonies.

From the beginning the expenditure on the orchestra met with opposition, but Godfrey worked hard and successfully towards its continuance. In 1911 he formed the Bournemouth Municipal Choir (now the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus), which still performs regularly with the orchestra. At the 1923 Easter Festival 157 works were given in 34 concerts, and of the 93 British composers represented, 22 conducted their own works. In 1927 a concert was devoted entirely to works by British women composers. In 1929 the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra moved to the newly built Pavilion, where it provided music for stage shows and gave open-air bandstand concerts as well as weekly symphony concerts.

In 1934 Richard Austin became director of the orchestra, by which time its reputation had been increased by broadcasting; the Corporation drastically cut the number of musicians in 1940 and Austin resigned. The remaining players, under Montague Birch, continued giving concerts at the Pavilion. Meanwhile a new orchestra, the Wessex Philharmonic, was established; it performed under Reginald Goodall and many eminent visiting conductors.

Rudolf Schwarz was appointed in 1947 to conduct a new Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra of 60 players, who returned to a rebuilt Winter Gardens and continued performing British music and new works. Charles Groves continued this policy when he took over in 1951. Constantin Silvestri, conductor from 1961 until his death in 1969, established an international reputation for the orchestra. George Hurst was artistic adviser until Paavo Berglund was appointed permanent conductor in 1972, taking the orchestra on tours to easterm Europe and Asia. He was followed by Uri Segal (1980) and Rudolf Barshay (1982). Andrew Litton, appointed in 1987, took the orchestra on a centenary tour to the USA in 1994; Yakov Kreizberg became principal conductor in 1995.

By 1954, financial pressures had forced the Corporation to give up control of the orchestra. With the support of the Arts Council and local authorities in the south and west, it became the Bournemouth SO, managed by the Western Orchestral Society (from 1991 Bournemouth Orchestras). A pattern of regional touring was established.

A chamber orchestra of about 35 players, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, was formed in 1968, mainly to perform in smaller venues where there was no concert hall. The first conductor was Kenneth Montgomery, followed by Maurice Gendron, Ronald Thomas, Norman Del Mar, Roger Norrington, Tamás Vásáry and Alexander Polianichko. In 1995 the Sinfonietta ceased to be a salaried orchestra; it was dissolved in 2000. The home base of the Bournemouth orchestras moved from Bournemouth to a new Arts Centre in Poole in 1985 and an enterprising educational programme was undertaken.

The organist and composer Percy Whitlock was appointed municipal organist at the Pavilion in 1932; he gave frequent recitals and broadcasts on the four-manual Compton organ until his early death. Since 1913 the town has had a specialist music library controlled by Dorset County Council.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Watkins, ed.: The Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra … Twenty-One Years of Municipal Music, 1893–1914 (Bournemouth, 1914)

D. Godfrey: Memories and Music: Thirty-Five Years of Conducting (London, 1924)

G. Miller: The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (Sherborne, Dorset, 1970)

E.A. George: Music in Bournemouth: a Brief Survey of Professional Music (Bournemouth, 1979)

S. Upton: Sir Dan Godfrey and the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra: a Biographical Discography (West Wickham, 2/1979)

S. Street and R. Carpenter: The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, 1893–1993: a Centenary Celebration (Wimborne, Dorset, 1993)

BETTY MATTHEWS

Bournonville.

French family of musicians.

(1) Jean de Bournonville

(2) Valentin de Bournonville

(3) Jacques de Bournonville

DENISE LAUNAY/JAMES R. ANTHONY

Bournonville

(1) Jean de Bournonville

(b Noyon, ?c1585; d Paris, 27 May 1632). Composer. The date of his birth shown here is that given by Fétis and repeated by Gomart, but it is not corroborated. He was director of music at the choir school of the collegiate church at Saint Quentin in 1612, when he published his Octo cantica. He seems to have sought a similar post at Cambrai in 1613, when he offered the cathedral chapter there a bound volume of his masses; it is now lost, although it may have been a first edition of the Missae tredecim. A Latin poem in praise of him, printed in that collection in 1619, tells us that he had received the first prize at the ‘puys de musique’ held at Rouen, Evreux and Abbeville, and on the title-page he is described as ‘maître de musique’ to the choirboys of Amiens Cathedral; Fétis states that he had left Saint Quentin in 1618 and had served briefly in a similar capacity at Abbeville before moving to Amiens in 1619. At the end of 1631 he was appointed director of the choir school of the Ste Chapelle, and on 3 January 1632 he was installed there ‘in the lower stalls on the right hand side, not being a priest’. That he, as a layman, was appointed to such a post was a tribute to his standing as a composer, but within five months he was dead. His contemporaries praised his gentle behaviour as much as his talents as a musician, and more than ten years after his death Gantez cited him as an example. His pupils included his son Valentin and Aux-Cousteaux.

Bournonville composed principally a cappella church music to Latin texts for liturgical use – masses, psalms, hymns, antiphons to the Virgin, Magnificat settings and motets – but he also, in the Cinquante quatrains, published settings of French moral adages. He was an excellent contrapuntist and handled imitative writing with ease, even elegance, notably in his masses and in the Cinquante quatrains: his counterpoint is lively and spontaneous, and his melodic lines, which are generally syllabic, are very like those found in chansons, especially Janequin's. The masses in Missae tredecim are sometimes based on a Gregorian cantus firmus (Ave maris stella, Ave Maria, Heu mihi, In nomine Jesu), and sometimes on the melody of a chanson (Le rossignol, Dessus le marché d'Arras, and even La guerre françoise, which was inspired by La bataille de Marignan by Janequin): the latter procedure clearly infringed the recent decrees of the Council of Trent. In the psalms and Magnificat settings which are in fauxbourdon style, the music for a given work is used for every verse, the note values being adapted to the quantities of the Latin text in accordance with the then new ideas of the humanists.

WORKS

8 cantica virginis matris, qua vulgo Magnificat dicuntur, cum hymnis communibus pene totius anni … Vesperae secundum ritum romanus, 4, 5vv (Paris, 1612; enlarged 2/1625)

Missa ad imitationem moduli ‘Ave maris stella’, 4vv (Paris, 1618)

Missae tredecim, quarum ultima pro defunctis, 4–6vv: ad libitum, ‘Ave Maria’, ‘Ave maris stella’, ‘Heu mihi’, septimi toni, 4vv; in cantu peregrinorum S Jacobi, ‘In nomine Jesu’, ‘Le rossignol’, ‘Nunc dimittis’, 5vv; ‘Ad nutum’, ‘Dessus le marché d'Arras’, ‘La guerre françoise’, pro defunctis, 6vv (Douai, 1619)

50 quatrains du sieur de Pybrac, 2–4vv (Paris, 1622)

2 masses, ‘Par un matin d'été’, ‘Sappi, madonna’, 4vv; 3 masses, ‘J'ay senti les doux maux’, Luscinia, ‘Narcisse’, 5vv: lost, cited in FétisB

Bournonville

(2) Valentin de Bournonville

(b ?Saint Quentin, c1610; d ? Paris or Chartres, Dec 1663 or later). Composer, son of (1) Jean de Bournonville. He was a priest and from 1653 canon of St Jean-le-Rond, Paris. He received his musical education at the choir school of Amiens Cathedral under his father's direction and remained there when his father left, eventually for Paris at the end of 1631. He was appointed to his father's former post of maître de musique to the choirboys at Amiens Cathedral in 1634, when Aux-Cousteaux, who had succeeded his father, in turn left for the Ste Chapelle. On 27 August 1646 he succeeded François Cosset in a similar position at Notre Dame, Paris, and he remained there until 20 March 1653; Jean Cathala deputized for him when he was absent. From Paris he went to Chartres, where he directed the cathedral choir school from 28 April 1653 to 1662, but he was back at Notre Dame from October to 1 December 1663, when he was replaced, perhaps because he had died. According to La Borde, several masses by Bournonville were printed in Paris by Ballard in 1646, and indeed two four-part masses, Salve regina and Videant amici, which were listed in a catalogue of Ballard's for 1707, survive at the Petit Séminaire de Quebec (ed. E. Schwandt in Complete Works, Valentin de Bournonville, Victoria, BC, 1981). Lost works include Missa … ad majorem Dei gloriam, which is listed in a catalogue of Ballard's at the back of the mass Laudate pueri by Pierre Hugard (1744), and some unspecified sacred works bought by Rouen Cathedral choir school in 1657.

Bournonville

(3) Jacques de Bournonville

(b ?Amiens, c1675; d ?Paris, after 1753). Harpsichordist, teacher and composer, grandson or great-grandson of (1) Jean de Bournonville. He was a pupil of Nicolas Bernier, who was highly esteemed as a teacher of the harpsichord and accompaniment, and according to La Borde he himself became ‘the best master of accompaniment of his time’. Moreover during his lifetime his reputation as a teacher of harpsichord accompaniment was equal to that of Rameau. He was even called ‘the famous Bournonville’. In 1711 he published a collection of motets for one and two voices and continuo, some with other instruments too: they are in the concertante style (one of the motets is also in a manuscript at F-Pn). This book was to have been followed by a second, but it seems never to have appeared. In addition it is thought that he composed two four-part masses about 1720.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrenetM

FétisB

La BordeE

A. Gantez: L’entretien des musiciens (Auxerre, 1643); ed. with commentary by E. Thoinan (Paris, 1878/R

S. de Brossard: Catalogue des livres de musiques, théorique et prattique, vocalle et instrumentalle (MS, 1724, F-Pn)

C.-H.-E. de Coussemaker: Notice sur les collections musicales de la Bibliothèque de Cambrai et des autres villes du Département du Nord (Paris, 1843/R)

C. Gomart: Notes historiques sur la maîtrise de Saint-Quentin et sur les célébrités musicales de cette ville (Saint Quentin, 1851/R)

A. Collette and A. Bourdon: Histoire de la maîtrise de Rouen (Rouen, 1892/R)

F.L. Chartier: L'ancien chapitre de Notre-Dame de Paris et sa maîtrise (Paris, 1897/R)

J.A. Clerval: L’ancienne maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Chartres du Ve siècle à la Révolution (Chartres, 1898/R)

G. Durand: ‘La musique de la cathédrale d'Amiens avant la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie, xxix (1920–22), 329–457; repr. in La vie musicale dans les provinces françaises (Geneva, 1971)

A.M. Yvon-Briand: La vie musicale à Notre-Dame de Paris (diss., Ecole des Chartes, Paris, 1949)

E. Schwandt: ‘Some 17th-Century French Unica in Canada: Notes for RISM’, FAM, xxvii (1980), 172–4

D. Launay: La musique religieuse en France du concile de Trente à 1804 (Paris, 1993)

Bournonville, Auguste (Antoine)

(b Copenhagen, 21 Aug 1805; d Copenhagen, 30 Nov 1879). Danish dancer and choreographer. See Ballet, §2(ii).

Bourrée [bourée]

(Fr.; It. borea; Eng. boree, borry).

A French folk dance, court dance and instrumental form, which flourished from the mid-17th century until the mid-18th. The word was generally ‘bourée’ in French; the preferred current spelling may in fact be of German origin. As a folkdance it had many varieties, and dances called bourrée are still known in various parts of France; in Berry, Languedoc, Bourbonnais and Cantal the bourrée is a duple-metre dance, while in Limousin and the Auvergne it is commonly in triple metre. Many historians, including Rousseau (1768), believed that the bourrée originated in the Auvergne as the characteristic Branle of that region, but others have suggested that Italian and Spanish influences played a part in its development. It is not certain if there is a specific relationship between the duple French folkdance and the court bourrée.

Specific information on the bourrée as a court dance is available only for the 18th century, whence at least 32 choreographies entitled bourrée, bourée, boree or ‘bouree time’ are extant, both for social dancing and for theatrical use (see Little and Marsh). The bourrée was a fast duple-metre courtship dance, with a mood described variously as ‘gay’ (Rousseau, Dictionaire de musique, 1768) and ‘content and self-composed’ (Mattheson, Der vollkommene Kapellmeister, 1739). The step pattern common to all bourrées, which also occurred in other French court dances, was the pas de bourrée. It consisted of a demi-coupé (a plié followed by an élevé on to the foot making the next step), a plain step, and a small gentle leap. These three steps occurred with the first three crotchets of a bar, whether in the duple metre of a bourrée or the triple metre of a sarabande, where the pas de bourrée was also used. If the small leap was replaced by a plain step, the pattern resulting was called a fleuret. The pas de bourrée preceded the fleuret historically, and is somewhat more difficult to execute; by the early 18th century, however, the two steps seem to have been used interchangeably, according to the dancer’s ability. The bourrée as a social dance was a mixture of fleurets, pas de bourrées, leaps, hops and the tems de courante (a gesture consisting of a bend, rise and slide; see Courante) at places of repose. Ex.1 shows the opening phrase of the Bourrée d’Achille (Little and Marsh, no.1480), a popular ball dance from 1700 which was actually part of a suite of three dances (bourrée–minuet–bourrée) from the Prologue to the Lully-Collasse opera Achille et Polyxène (1687). Each of the first two bars contains a pas de bourrée, the third has a hop and two plain steps, and the fourth a tems de courante. Thus the rhythmic shape of the phrase is that of three active bars followed by a point of arrival at the beginning of the fourth bar and a subsequent relaxation of effort. A complete bourrée consisted of two strains, each containing one or more four- or eight-bar phrases with a rhythmic shape as described. Each dance, however, had a separate choreography with a unique mixture of the possible steps.

Some form of the bourrée was danced at French court festivals by natives of the Auvergne as early as the mid-16th century. It was eventually also used, probably in a more refined form, in the ballet de cour. The Philidor Collection contains a ‘Bourrée d’Avignon’ (i, 51–2) which was probably a dance accompaniment, and the Ballet de la delivrance de Renaud (1617) also contains a bourrée for dancing. Collections of airs de cour such as L’élite des airs de cour (1608) and Le recueil des plus belles chansons (1615) include texts for sung bourrées, showing the growing popularity of the dance’s characteristic rhythms. Under Louis XIV the bourrée came into fashion both as a social dance at balls and as a theatrical dance. Lully included bourrées in many of his ballets and operas, such as Les amours déguisés (1664), La naissance de Vénus (1665) and Phaëton (1683), and he composed one for the dancing-lesson scene in Act 1 of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). Later French composers for the stage, including Charpentier, Destouches, Campra and Rameau, continued to use bourrées in dancing-scenes and occasionally in overtures.

As stylized dance music, the Baroque bourrée was characterized by duple metre (a time signature of 2 or ) with an upbeat of a crotchet, a moderate to fast tempo (minim = c80–92) and phrases built out of four-bar units with a point of arrival at the beginning of the fourth bar (seventh minim). A performance style in which quavers were inégales (stepwise-moving passages of quavers unmixed with other values to be played unevenly over a steady beat) is thought to have been common for the bourrée, particularly in France. These characteristics also apply to the Rigaudon, and indeed Quantz virtually equated the dances, but the two types can be distinguished because the rigaudon was slightly more vigorous and tended to have more angular melodies than the bourrée. Moreover, 18th-century writers (Rousseau, Mattheson etc.) consistently mentioned a crotchet–minim syncopation used to emphasize the third or seventh beat of a phrase as characteristic of the bourrée, a trait which would easily distinguish a bourrée from a rigaudon. Ex.2, Lully’s bourrée for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, shows the characteristic syncopation, phrase structure and homophonic texture.

The stylized bourrée flourished as an instrumental form from the early 17th century. Praetorius’s Terpsichore (1612) included a few examples, all with quite simple phrasing and a homophonic texture. The Kassel Manuscript (ed. J. Ecorcheville, Vingt suites d’orchestre, 1906/R) also contains a number of bourrées, often placed as the second dance in a suite. As the order of dances in a suite became conventionalized into the familiar allemande–courante–sarabande group (see Suite, §5), the bourrée continued to be included fairly often, coming after the sarabande with other less serious dances like the minuet and the gavotte. In that position it was included in orchestral suites by J.C.F. Fischer, Johann Krieger, Georg Muffat and J.S. Bach. Three of Bach’s orchestral suites include pairs of bourrées, in which the first is to be repeated (‘bourrée da capo’) after the second is played, a common treatment of the so-called popular dances in the suite. Other bourrées occur in his English and French suites for keyboard, in two of the solo suites for cello, and in the Partita for solo flute (see Little and Jenne). Handel’s Water Music includes a bourrée that hardly seems at all stylized.

Baroque keyboard versions of the bourrée often took liberties with the original simplicity of the dance form. Such composers as Lebègue, D’Anglebert, Purcell, Gottlieb Muffat, Bach and Domenico Scarlatti wrote bourrées, many highly ornamented with some idiomatic display of keyboard technique. Yet even those like ex.3 (from Muffat’s Componimenti musicali, 1690) which show no trace of the bourrée’s characteristic crotchet–minim syncopation retain a fairly simple homophonic texture and a clear phrase structure based on four-bar units. Bourrée style persisted well into the late 18th century, as the opening movement of Mozart's G minor Symphony well illustrates. In the 19th and 20th centuries some composers wrote pieces entitled bourrée, apparently as a reference to the French folkdances rather than to the Baroque court dance and instrumental form: Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque, in its fast duple metre and strict adherence to four-bar phrases, suggests that the composer may have sought to evoke the court bourrée; the movement labelled ‘bourrée’ in Roussel’s Suite pour piano op.14, however, a rapid triple-metre dance with asymmetrical phrases, bears no resemblance to the Baroque form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Taubert: Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister (Leipzig, 1717)

P. Rameau: Le maître à danser (Paris, 1725; Eng. trans., 1931/R)

J. Canteloube: ‘La danse d’Auvergne’, Auvergne littéraire, artistique et historique, iv (1936)

L. Horst: Pre-Classic Dance Forms (New York, 1937/R)

C. Sachs: Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (Berlin, 1933; Eng. trans., 1937/R)

W. Hilton: Dance of Court and Theater (Princeton, NJ, 1981/R)

B. Mather: Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 214–20

M. Little and N. Jenne: Dance and the Music of J.S. Bach (Bloomington, IN, 1991), 35–46

M. Little and C. Marsh: La danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, MA, 1992)

F. Lancelot: La belle dance: catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1996)

MEREDITH ELLIS LITTLE

Bousset, Jean-Baptiste (Drouard) de [du]

(b Asnières, nr Dijon, 1662; d Paris, 3 Oct 1725). French composer and singer. After studies with Jacques Fargeonnel, maître de musique at the Ste Chapelle in Dijon, he moved to Paris in the early 1690s. Some time before 1700 he became maître de musique to the Académie Française, with the main duty of composing and conducting a motet each year for the feast of St Louis (25 August), celebrated with a mass held in the chapel of the Louvre. By 1702 he was maître de musique also to the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions, who celebrated the feast of St Louis jointly in the church of the Oratoire. For his work for the académies Bousset received a royal pension of 600 livres tournois, of which half was reimbursement for monies paid to the musicians he had engaged.

Little of Bousset's sacred output has survived, however, and his main achievements lay elsewhere. About 1692 he emerged as the leading composer of airs sérieux et à boire of his generation. According to Laborde ‘his manner of singing was so delightful that he made a large fortune in Paris, singing airs which no-one composed better than he did’. In the dedication of his last collection of Airs nouveaux (1725) to the Duchess of Orléans, the composer wrote that the taste of the ‘greatest princesses’ of France had shaped his Muse, and that their support had ensured his continuing reputation. Most of the 875 airs sérieux et à boire Bousset published during his composing life of 35 years are for one or two voices with continuo. Titon Du Tillet (Le Parnasse François, 1732) commented with justice upon Bousset's true expression of the words, his noble, natural and pleasing melody, and his variety, astonishing given the size of his output. Bousset followed tradition in keeping mainly to binary form, and his rhetorical approach to text setting shows the influence of both Lully and Lambert. He made use of double technique not only to provide a written-out variation for the whole of a second verse in 46 airs composed between 1690 and 1716, but also throughout his career, to vary repeats of single phrases of text, often combining it imaginatively with techniques of melodic development assimilated from late 17th-century Italian practice. Other italianate features found in his work are chromaticism and sequential writing. Bousset was among the first Frenchmen to experiment with the ritornello principle as a means of unifying an air (1696), and he preceded Campra by two years as the first cantata composer in France to juxtapose French-style recitative with da capo form in airs (1706). His three Eglogues (two of which were published singly as well as in collections) are novel attempts to group solo songs and duets into quasi-dramatic scenas; book 5 of the Airs nouveaux includes a cantata, L'impatience amoureuse.

The notion that Bousset was the son-in-law of Christophe Ballard (who printed all his music issued up to 1701), put forth by Papillon in 1742 and repeated in many later accounts of his life, is unfounded: in 1695 Bousset married Marie Marguerite de Séqueville, whose sister was the wife of Chirstophe Ballard’s brother Pierre.

WORKS

Airs sérieux et à boire, 37 bks (Paris, 1690–99)

Airs nouveaux sérieux et à boire, 21 bks (Paris, 1702–25) [bks 1–18 also pubd Amsterdam]

Airs in anthologies: 16 in Ballard's Recueils d'airs sérieux et à boire (Paris, 1698–1701); 2 in Ballard's Airs spirituels des meilleurs autheurs, ii (Paris, 1701)

[3] Cantates françoises (before 4 April 1710): Le prunier; La rose; Ixion

Grand motet, Deus noster refugium, F-LYm

Petit motet, Quae est ista, V [copied by Philidor in 1697]

Instrumental trio Pn [copied by Philidor in 1695]

Beati omnes qui timent Dominum; Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei; Domine ne in furore; Domine salve fac regem; Exaudiat; Laudate Jerusalem Dominum; Notus in Judea Deus; Super flumina Babylonis; Te Deum: all lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La BordeE

Laborde MP

S. de Brossard: Catalogue des livres de musique (MS 1724, F-Pn), 279

Abbé Papillon: Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1742)

P.-L. D'Aquin: Siècle littéraire de Louis XV, ou Lettres sur les hommes célèbres (Amsterdam, 1753)

M. Benoît and N. Dufourcq: ‘Documents du Minutier central: musiciens français du XVIIIe siècle’, RMFC, vii (1967), 219–20

G. Garden: ‘A Little Known Contributor to the Early French Cantata: Jean-Baptiste de Bousset’, Liber amicorum John Steele, ed. W. Drake (New York, 1997), 355–75

GREER GARDEN

Bousset, René Drouard [Drouart] de

(b Paris, 11 Dec 1703; d Paris, 19 May 1760). French composer and organist, son of Jean-Baptiste de Bousset. He received his professional training from Nicolas Bernier and the organist Calvière. On his father’s death he was nominated, as was customary, for his father’s position as maître de musique at the Académies des Sciences et des Inscriptions. In 1740 he was appointed organist at St André-des-Arts. Of a highly impressionable nature, he was gradually drawn towards an extreme religious sect, the Convulsionists. According to P.L. Boisgelou (Catalogue des livres de la Bibliothèque du Roi, MS, 1803, F-Pn) Bousset died of paralysis, which took over after he had played the organ at Notre Dame for the consecration of Cardinal de Rohan. It is significant that he was one of the very few French composers who wrote cantatas on religious texts. The cantatas Judith and Le naufrage du Pharaon (in book 1) are fine works in a dramatic and descriptive style, whereas the Odes are in a lighter, more graceful style.

WORKS

2 bks of airs sérieux et à boire (Paris, 1731)

2 bks of cantates spirituelles (Paris, 1735, 1740)

6 concertos en trio pour les vieles et musettes, qui se peuvent jouer sur les flûtes traversières et à-bec, hautbois et violon (Paris, 1736)

8 odes de Rousseau tirées de psaumes (Paris, 1740, 1744)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La BordeE

E. Titon du Tillet: Le Parnasse françois (Paris, 1732/R)

J. Lacombe: Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts (Paris, 1753)

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)

DAVID TUNLEY/CATHERINE CESSAC

Boutade

(Fr.: ‘jest’, ‘whim’).

A term variously applied in the 17th and 18th centuries to a lively choreographed dance, a capricious poem, an improvisatory solo for viol and a short fantasia for solo keyboard. Pierre Richelet attributed its invention to Jacques Cordier, a dancing-master during the reign of Louis XIII (1601–43), and explained that, as a dance, the boutade was so called ‘because it began in a somewhat abrupt, lively and startling manner’ (Nouveau dictionnaire françois, 1719). The correspondence of Vincent Voiture (Les oeuvres de Monsieur Voiture, 1734) reveals that the boutade was a popular social dance around the middle of the 17th century. As an improvisatory movement in a suite of instrumental dances, the boutade was cultivated by French viol players of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Examples by Marin Marais, Jaques Morel, Jean-Féry Rebel and Louis de Caix d'Hervelois almost invariably avoid binary-repeat structure and consist of dance rhythms and sequential passages of block chords that may have been elaborated in improvisatory figuration. Such pieces correspond to Mattheson's definition of the boutade as a composition or improvisation ‘bound to nothing but the imagination’ (Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, 1713). In the 18th century the term was occasionally applied to a type of keyboard fantasia. The earliest example is found in Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin (ninth suite, first movement, London, 1714); its minor key, dissonances, improvisatory broken-chord texture and extreme brevity exemplify the composer's description of the genre as ‘an impetuous movement; a caprice; a rapid, sudden idea’ (Das beschützte Orchestre, 1717). Gigue-like triplet quavers in quadruple metre point to a continued connection with dance, while the affection of the piece is aptly characterized by Richelet's definition of the boutade as a ‘fit of rage’. Since the term ‘fantasia’ was increasingly employed in the later 18th century for all forms of improvisatory keyboard piece, boutades, so called, are rarely met. Nonetheless, the term persisted as late as Türk's Clavierschule (1789) and Koch's Musicalisches Lexikon (1802) and could be applied to such aphoristic, moto perpetuo works as C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia in D minor (h195, 1765–6).

MATTHEW HEAD

Bouteiller, Jean le.

See Le Bouteiller, Jean.

Bouteiller, Louis

(b Moncé-en-Belin, nr Le Mans, bap. 3 Feb 1648; d Le Mans, 7 Feb 1725). French composer and church musician, not related to Pierre Bouteiller. He became maître de musique at Le Mans Cathedral in 1663 after winning several competitions. In 1672 he won motet competitions at Angers and Rouen, and in 1673 and 1678 at Caen. By virtue of his reputation he was nominated to succeed the deceased Jean Gilles at St Etienne, Toulouse, in 1705, but he refused the position and remained in Le Mans for the rest of his life. He apparently composed a great many motets; at his death an inventory of them was made and placed in the treasury of the cathedral, but both the inventory and the works are now lost. The Brossard collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale contains the motet Ad te, Domine, clamabo, for soloists, three choirs and orchestra, which Bouteiller entered in the Versailles royal chapel competition of 1683. It is devoid of melismas and polyphonic sophistication and resembles the homophonic passages in Lully’s motets. Two airs attributed to ‘Bouteiller le cadet’ in a Recueil d’airs (Paris, 1705) may also be by him. A letter from him is in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. de Brossard: Catalogue des livres de musique (MS, 1724, F-Pn), 298

Biographie et bibliographie du Maine et du département de la Sarthe (Le Mans, 1828), 114

J. Carlez: Le puy de musique de Caen (1671–1685) (Caen, 1886), 10, 14

R. Machard: ‘Les musiciens de la cathédrale Saint-Etienne de Toulouse (1682–1790)’, Annales du Midi, lxxxvi (1974), 297–320

M. Leroux: ‘La musique religieuse de Pierre Bouteiller’, RMFC, xxvi (1988–90), 51–82

JOHN HAJDU HEYER, MARTIAL LEROUX

Bouteiller [Bouteillier, Boutellier], Pierre

(b c1655; d after March 1717). French composer and church musician, not related to Louis Bouteiller. He served as maître de musique at Troyes Cathedral from 1687 to 1694 and again from 1697 to 1698. During the interim he served the cathedral at Châlons-sur-Marne. His last years were probably spent in Paris, where in 1698 he was mentioned as a ‘maistre joueur of the viol and other instruments’. In 1704 the Parisian coopers had a Te Deum by him performed in the church of St Leu and St Gilles. Bouteiller's extant works, all sacred, are not in the style of the Versailles grand motet, the most popular sacred form of the time, but are short pieces for one to five voices. They are in a highly imitative polyphonic style with continuo and without concertato effects.

Several secular songs in publications by Ballard and Neaulme are attributed to ‘Bouteiller l'aîné’, but there is nothing to indicate that these are by Pierre Bouteiller.

WORKS

sacred

all MS works in F-Pn

Edition: Motets et chants sacrés de différents auteurs, ed. A. Lafitte (Paris, 1859) [L]

Missa pro defunctis, 5vv, bc

13 motets: Ante oculos tuos, 3vv, bc; Consideratio de vanitate mundi, 1v, 2 str, bc; Credidi propter quod locutus sum, 3vv, bc; O amor, o gaudium, 2vv, bc; O felix et dilecte conviva, 1v, 2 str, bc; O fidelis et dilecte commensalis, 1v, 2 str, bc; O mysterium humilitatis, 3vv, bc; O salutaris hostia, 1v, 2 str, bc, L; Pater noster, 2vv, bc, L; Pater noster, 4vv, bc; Quis loquetur potentias Domini, 3vv, bc; Super flumina Babylonis, 3vv, bc; Tantum ergo, 1v, 2 str, bc, L

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.-E. Prévost: Histoire de la maîtrise de la cathédrale de Troyes (Troyes, 1906; repr. in La vie musicale dans les provinces françaises, i, Geneva, 1972)

M. Leroux: ‘La musique religieuse de Pierre Bouteiller’, RMFC, xxvi (1988–90), 51–82

JOHN HAJDU HEYER, MARTIAL LEROUX

Bouteillophone

(Fr.) [musical bottles] (Ger. Flaschenspiel; It. suono di bottiglia).

A series of tuned bottles sounding in the high treble register. The pitch is governed in the first instance by the size or thickness of the bottle and adjusted by adding water as required. The bottles, which are usually suspended (by the neck) in a frame, are arranged according to the required scale, or hung in two rows in keyboard fashion. They are struck with small hard beaters such as those used on the orchestral glockenspiel or xylophone.

The bouteillophone is used in Satie's ballet Parade (1917) and Honegger's Le dit des jeux du monde (1918), and occasionally in later compositions. Kolberg has three octaves available (c''–c''''').

JAMES BLADES/JAMES HOLLAND

Boutelou [Bouteloup], Antoine

(b c1665, d 4 March 1740). French haute-contre singer. The son of Jean Boutelou (d 13 May 1709), an ordinaire of the Académie royale de musique, he was ordinaire de la musique de la chapelle from 1707 and chantre de roi. He also sang in many stage works at Court under both Louis XIV and Louis XV, including Lalande's Les folies de Cardenio (1720) and Lalande and Destouches's Les Élémens of 1721 (in the roles of Arion and Le Vertumne) and in comic roles in works such as Le bourgeois gentilhomme of Molière and Lully (Fontainebleau, 1707 and Versailles, 1729). Despite notoriety for his dissolute lifestyle, his abilities as a comic actor-singer made him one of Louis XIV's favourite performers. (BenoitMC)

LIONEL SAWKINS

Boutmy.

Flemish family of organists, harpsichordists and composers.

(1) Josse [Charles Joseph Judocus, Joos] Boutmy

(2) Guillaume Boutmy

(3) Jean (Baptiste) Joseph Boutmy

(4) Laurent François Boutmy de Katzmann

SUZANNE CLERCX-LEJEUNE/LEWIS REECE BARATZ

(1) Josse [Charles Joseph Judocus, Joos] Boutmy

(b Ghent, 1 Feb 1697; d Brussels, 27 Nov 1779). Organist, harpsichordist and composer. Both his father and grandfather were organists at Ghent churches, and his brother, Jacques (Judocus) Adrien Boutmy (1683–1719), was the organist at the collegiate church of St Michel and Ste Gudule, Brussels. Josse Boutmy arrived in Brussels before 1720, gaining citizenship there in 1729. He served the Prince of Thurn and Taxis from 1736, and from 1744 to 1777 he was the organist at the Brussels court chapel. He was also the harpsichord teacher of the Princess of Arenberg and of ‘tous les jeunes Seigneurs et Dames de la Cour’ of Charles of Lorraine, brother-in-law of Empress Maria Theresa and governor-general of the southern Netherlands. Married twice, he had 16 children. He left a Livre de raison (still extant), in which he recorded significant family events from 1721 to 1759 but did not mention his music.

Boutmy is best known for his three books of harpsichord music. French influence is apparent in the first, which contains two suites comprising character-pieces (L’Agnès, La fanfarinette, La brillante, L’obstinée), personal tributes (La Dandrieux, La Saumis) and stylized movements such as overtures, allemandes, courantes, menuettes, and gigues; the music adheres closely to the later French tradition of Dandrieu, Rameau and Duphly in both harmonic language and extensive ornamentation, particularly the port de voix and coulé. He was, however, a cosmopolitan composer and frequently interspersed movements in the Italian style as well as airs and miscellaneous movements containing sequential passage-work and harmonic writing that indicates familiarity with the keyboard music of Handel. The second and third books are more dramatic, retaining the structure of the suite but having a greater number of descriptive or character titles. Some pieces are in sonata form, though rudimentary; in the third book influence of Domenico Scarlatti is evident as well as an attempt at the newer galant style.

WORKS

Vocal: cantata, c1749

Hpd: Première livre de pièces (Paris, 1738); Second livre de pièces (Paris, c1740–44); Troisième livre de pièces (Brussels, c1750) [parts of 1st and 3rd bks ed. in MMBel, v (1943)]

(2) Guillaume Boutmy

(b Brussels, 15 June 1723; d Brussels, 22 Jan 1791). Organist, harpsichordist and composer, son of (1) Josse Boutmy. He spent his entire life in Brussels where, like his father, he worked for the Prince of Thurn and Taxis; from 1752 he served as a postal official and organ builder and restorer, and from 1760 to 1776 he taught the organ and harpsichord at the court. It was probably during this period that he composed his only known works, six harpsichord sonatas, published in Brussels and Liège.

Boutmy’s sonatas reflect Italian influence, having three movements and using only tempo indications for titles. Some use a sonata form which is frequently ternary but not elaborate. Certain galant characteristics in these works may have resulted from Boutmy’s visits to Regensburg, an important relay station in the prince’s postal network. His music owes something to Scarlatti, whose influence, together with a French flavour, may have been transmitted through his father.

(3) Jean (Baptiste) Joseph Boutmy

(b Brussels, 29 April 1725; d Kleve, after 1799). Organist, harpsichordist, pianist and composer, son of (1) Josse Boutmy. By 1746 he was teaching the harpsichord in Metz, but returned to the Austrian Netherlands in 1755 and taught in Ghent. In 1757 he became the organist at the Ghent cathedral of St Baaf (St Bavo). He travelled to Paris in 1759 but returned to Ghent shortly after. Boutmy moved to The Hague in 1764 to serve as organist for the Portuguese ambassador; six years later he departed for Kleve, where he served as resident pianist and directed his own orchestra.

Boutmy’s compositions include six divertissements for harpsichord with optional violin accompaniment, and six harpsichord concertos. The divertissements were written for his pupils, perhaps while he was in The Hague, and are in the style of the Italian sonata. They all have three movements: the slow middle movements display the mannerisms of the galant style and the finales take the form of a minuet and trio, or rondo. The clear, melodic keyboard writing limits the independence of the violin part. The idiomatic language of the concertos reflects his position as a court pianist in that they are better suited to the new instrument. They display a simple, pre-Classical sonata form with symmetrical themes and development passages built on sequences. The finales are rondos or minuets, and are written in a precise, graceful idiom somewhat lacking in invention. The style is more elaborate than that of the divertissements, but even the cadenzas, which are mostly written out, do not require great virtuosity. Boutmy also published a Traité abrégé de la basse continue (The Hague, 1769/1770), which appeared in a bilingual French/Dutch edition and clearly illustrates a synthesis of the French late-baroque continuo tradition with the freer italianate style.

(4) Laurent François Boutmy de Katzmann

(b Brussels, 19 June 1756; d Brussels, 3 Nov 1838). Organist, harpsichordist, pianist and composer, son of (1) Josse Boutmy (sometimes incorrectly known as Antoine Laurent François). He studied music with his father, who attempted unsuccessfully to arrange for Laurent François to succeed him as organist at the court chapel. He went to Rotterdam in 1779 but returned to Brussels in 1783. From 1789 to 1793 he was in Ermonenville, France; because of the Revolution he left for London, where he taught the harpsichord and the piano. Later he moved to Holland and became Princess Marianne’s piano teacher. King William awarded him a pension which was, however, withdrawn when Belgium declared its independence in 1830.

Boutmy’s compositions are light and skilfully handled, but lack originality. The keyboard pieces are better suited to the piano than the harpsichord. His book Principes généraux de musique shows the influence of Grétry and is described by Fétis as ‘obscure in ideas and even more obscure in style’.

WORKS

Vocal: Le naufrage, lyric scene, chorus, orch, 1806, B-Bc; 3 ballads, 1v, harp acc.; Armide, ou Les statues (opera, 4, J.F. Marmontel), B-Br

Inst: Partant pour la Syrie, romance variée, pf (Rotterdam, n.d.); arrs. for pf of 4 ovs. by Sarti, Paisiello, Salieri, in Pianoforte Magazine, vii (1799), pubd separately as 4 ouvertures, arr. hpd/pf [nos.1–3, vn acc., no.4 fl acc.], op.2 (London, n.d.); 3 sonatas, pf/hpd, vn acc., op.4 (London, n.d.); Military March, c1795, arr. fl, pf (London, c1795); other works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

Vander StraetenMPB

J.N. Forkel: Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland … 1783 (Leipzig, 1782/R)

X.V.F. van Elewyck: Preface to Collections d’oeuvres composées par d’anciens et de célébres clavecinistes flamands (Brussels, 1877), ii

Wildeman: Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het geslacht Boutmy (The Hague, 1915)

H. Liebrecht: Histoire du théâtre français à Bruxelles au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1923)

S. Clercx: ‘Les Boutmy: une dynastie de musiciens belges au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, xiii (1943)

S. Clercx: Preface to Josse Boutmy: Werken voor klavecimbel, MMBel, v (1943)

S. Clercx: ‘Le dix-septième et le dix-huitième siècle’, La musique en Belgique du Moyen Age à nos jours, ed. E. Closson and C. van den Borren (Brussels, 1950), 145–233

A. Corbet: ‘De anonieme “Verhandeling over de muziek” uitgegeven door J.A. Bouvink te ’s-Gravenhage in 1772’, Miscellanea musicologica Floris van der Mueren (Ghent, 1950), 67–74

E.J.C. Boutmy: ‘Bijdrage tot de genealogie van het geslacht Boutmy-Boutmy de Katzmann en aanverwante families’, Nederlandsche Leeuw, xci/1–2 (1974), cols. 8–24

P. De Ridder: ‘Joos Boutmy, organist van de kapittelkerk van Sint-Michiel en Sint-Goedele te Brussels (1719-1733)’, RBM, xxxvi-xxxviii (1982–4), 128–32

L.R. Baratz: ‘The Basso Continuo According to Jean Joseph Boutmy’, Early Keyboard Journal, xiii (1995), 39–80

Boutry, Innocent

(b before 1637; d after 1667). French composer. He was maitre de musique at Tours Cathedral, 1657–61, at Notre Dame, Paris, from August 1662 to October 1663, and at Le Mans Cathedral by 1664. He left the cathedral in 1671 for the church of St Pierre in Le Mans, where he remained until 1680. He is last heard of in 1688 as a prebendary at St Calais. Boutry was a prize-winner at puys held in Le Mans in 1657 and Evreux in 1666. However, his only known work is the four-part mass Speciosa facta es, published in Paris by Robert Ballard in 1661 (ed. L. Gautier, Versailles, 1996). A Ballard catalogue lists another four-part mass, Magnus et mirabilis, which seems not to have survived. Speciosa facta es is a perfect example of ‘modernised counterpoint, imbued with tonality, appropriate for the polyphonic religious liturgy of the mid-century’ (Launay).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.A. Anjubault: La Sainte-Cécile du Mans de 1633 à 1784 (Le Mans, 1862)

F.L. Chartier: L’ancien chapitre de Notre-Dame de Paris et sa maîtrise d’après les documents capitulaires (1326–1790) (Paris, 1887/R)

L. Froger: Histoire de Saint-Calais (Mayenne, 1885)

D. Launay: La musique religieuse en France du Concile de Trente à 1804 (Paris, 1993)

JEAN-CHARLES LÉON

Boutry, Roger

(b Paris, 27 Feb 1932). French composer, pianist and conductor. At the age of 11 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied until 1954, his teachers including Tony Aubin, Jean Doyen and Nadia Boulanger. He showed outstanding ability in many disciplines, and was awarded eight premiers prix, including those for piano, conducting, fugue and composition, the latter awarded in 1954 for his Rapsodie for piano and 16 wind instruments. The same year he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata On ne badine pas avec l’amour. During the 1950s he embarked on a career as a pianist, studying with Marguérite Long (1955–8). He has toured widely as both pianist and conductor in Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan and the former USSR. He was appointed professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire in 1962 and has published a didactic study of harmony. His many pedagogical works include virtuoso studies for trumpet, trombone, horn and harp, and studies in atonal composition for bassoon. He has contributed much to the brass and woodwind repertory, including concertos and various pieces for ensemble, wind and military band. Following composition of the Marche solenelle for the Grenoble Winter Olympic Games in 1968 and the official anthem for the Confédération Musicale de France, he was appointed musical director of the Garde républicaine in 1973 where, as a colonel, he remained until 1996. His music avoids serial techniques, and is notable for its expressive melodies and colouristic textures.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballet: Chaka, 1966

Orch: Pf Conc., 1955; Ouverture pour Don, 1955; Reflets sur Rome, 1956; Sérénade, sax, orch, 1957; Passacaille et danse profane, 1958; Conc. for Orch, 1964; Tubaroque, conc., tuba, orch, 1966; Fantasia, trbn, orch, 1985

Wind band/military band: Burlesque, 1958; Ouverture-tableau, 1959; En avant, 1964; Ouverture des chants du monde, 1967; Hymne officiel de la Confédération Musicale de France, 1968; Marche solenelle des Xème jeux olympiques d’hiver, 1968; Tripdique 51, 1970

Vocal: On ne badine pas avec l’amour (cant., Escalada), 1954; Le rosaire des joies (orat) S, nar, SATB, orch, 1962

Numerous chbr pieces, incl. Vn Sonata, 1965, pf works and Conservatoire competition pieces, 1955–72

Principal publishers: Billaudot, Editions France Musique, Eschig, Leduc, Salabert

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Petiot: ‘Roger Boutry et ses envois de Rome’, Journal de la Confédération musicale de France et de l’Union française (April 1963), 1–3

J. Brun: ‘Interview: Le Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Boutry’, Artistes et variétés: Revue de l’accordeoniste, nos.296–7 (1973), 5–6

C. Chamfray: ‘Roger Boutry’, Courrier musical de France, no.55 (1976), 125–6

CAROLINE RAE

Bouts

(Fr. échancrures; Ger. Bugel; It. fasce).

The curves of the outline or Ribs of a bowed string instrument, particularly of the violin and viol families. The bouts are usually divided into three sections: outward curving upper bouts, inward curving middle or ‘C’ bouts, and lower bouts, also outward curving. The concave middle bouts provide the narrow waist necessary for the free passage of the bow across the outermost strings, and give the distinctive hourglass shape of most bowed instruments. In the violin family the bouts are joined by outward pointing corners (for illustration see Violin, fig.4). The bouts of the viol family usually meet at obtuse angles, but the upper or lower bouts are not always distinguished from the middle bouts, and may vary in appearance, sometimes having complex lobed or festooned shapes (see Viol, fig.1). Attempts were made in the early 19th century by Felix Savart and François Chanot in Paris to design a violin without corners (see Violin, §I, 5); Savart’s instrument was trapezoidal (straight sides – without bouts), and Chanot’s of guitar shape (bouts with no corners). Measurements given to describe string instruments are in all cases taken from the widest point across the upper and lower bouts, and the narrowest point of the middle bouts.

JOHN DILWORTH

Bouvard, François

(b Lyons, c1683; d Paris, 2 March 1760). French composer, teacher and opera singer. The main source of information about him is the Parfaict brothers’ Dictionnaire des théâtres, which states that Bouvard entered the Opéra at a very young age to sing soprano parts, with a ‘voice of such a range that its like had never been heard’. After his voice broke, when he was about 16, he spent a couple of years in Rome. He was back in Paris by February 1701, where his first (Italian) air appeared in a collection published by Ballard. In 1702, thanks to the patronage of M. de Francine, the Académie Royale de Musique performed his first opera, Médus, with great success, but in 1706 Cassandre, composed in collaboration with Bertin de La Doué, was a failure. Throughout the years 1701–11 Bouvard regularly published airs in Ballard’s collections, initially airs sérieux or airs italiens, and from 1706 onwards airs à boire, which became one of his specialities. These publications suddenly ceased in 1711, and we have no trace of the musician from that date until 1723. A remark in Boisgelou’s Table biographique suggests that he spent a long time abroad, mainly in Italy. A second Italian sojourn would explain why his death certificate (in the Archives de la Seine, fonds Bégis) names him as ‘knight’ and ‘count of St John Lateran’ and why two of his cantatas, L’énigme and L’époux indifférent, as well as his last air (1756), are signed ‘Bouvard, chevalier romain’. It has been suggested that there were two Bouvards, one of them a count of St John Lateran, composer of the violin sonatas, and the other an ordinary maître de musique, responsible for the other works, but inferences to be drawn from the publications themselves contradict this. In 1723 Bouvard published in Paris his Premier livre de sonates à violon seule et la basse continue, and after that date he seems to have concentrated on his activities as a teacher and freelance composer, with considerable success to judge from the number of editions and some of their dedications. In 1742 he dedicated his sixth collection of airs to Madame la Présidente Fraguier, thanking her for his appointment as her sons’ music teacher, and one of his last cantatas, L’énigme, was dedicated to Madame de Pompadour. After 1750 his activities as a composer seem to have been greatly reduced, and he died in Paris poor and forgotten.

Bouvard’s large body of work is notable for its diversity and the sudden breaks in his composing activity. His career at the Opéra, beginning brilliantly with Médus in 1702, came to an end in 1706 with the failure of Cassandre, and his first book of violin sonatas was never followed by a second. He did, however, continue to write stage music in the form of divertissements for the aristocracy and the court, and these works are evidence of his high reputation, in particular L’école de Mars, written in 1738 probably as the result of a royal commission. The Idylle spirituelle sur la naissance de N[otre] S[eigneur] J[ésus] C[hrist] (1734) was highly praised in the Mercure de France, but it is difficult to form any idea of these stage works today, since the music is lost. Bouvard’s sacred music was confined to 11 motets of no great originality. The titles of 32 cantatas and cantatilles are known, but only 12 survive complete. Some acquired a certain celebrity in their time, among them the expressive and dramatic Le retour de tendresse. The airs divide naturally into three categories: the airs à boire are the most numerous, written for one or two voices and often concluding with long melismas on words associated with drinking; the airs sérieux the most diverse group, include the airs sérieux proper (as well as musettes and ariettes), celebrating love in a pastoral context, and others (brunettes, vaudevilles, chansonettes and chansons gauloises) of a more popular character, including also airs paysans (settings of dialect texts) and several chansons à danser (gavottes and minuets); and the airs italiens, with instrumental accompaniment and vocal writing inspired by opera and cantata, were intended for a more cultivated public. After his early operas Bouvard stood apart from the major musical genres, and also from the musical disputes, of his time, and for this reason he is an interesting representative of French musical society in the first half of the 18th century.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

Médus, roi des Mèdes (tragédie en musique, prol, 5, F.-J. de Lagrange-Chancel), Paris, Opéra, 23 July 1702 (1702)

Cassandre (tragédie en musique, prol, 5, Lagrange-Chancel, after C. Boyer: Agamemnon), Paris, Opéra, 22 June 1706 (1706), collab. Bertin de La Doué

Le triomphe de l’amour et de l’hymen (divertissement, 1, L.R. de Saint-Jorry), lib pubd (1729), lost

Idylle spirituelle sur la naissance de N[otre] S[eigneur] J[ésus] C[hrist] (P. de Morand), Paris, Communauté de l’enfant Jésus, 14 Feb 1734, lib pubd (1743), music lost

Trois frères rivaux (prol, de Morand, and divertissement, M. Parfaict), Paris, 21 Feb 1734, lost except for extracts from prol lib pubd in Mercure de France, Feb 1734, p.370

L’école de Mars (divertissement, 1, de Morand), Paris, 1738, lib pubd (1743)

Diane et l’amour (idylle héroïque, 1, de Morand), lib pubd (1743)

vocal

Cants.: L’amant heureux, 1v, insts (1728); L’amour aveuglé par la folie, 1v, vns, bc (1728); L’amour champêtre, B, ?bc, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Ariane (P. de Morand), lost; L’énigme, 1v, vn, fl, bc, after 1748; L’époux indifférent, 1v, vn, fl, bc (n.d.); La feste de Cloris, 1742, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; L’hommage du coeur, 1751, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Le jour (text in Mercure de France, July 1740), lost; Léandre et Héro, 1v, vc, bc (1729); Le retour de tendresse (T. L’Affichard), 1v, vns, bc (1730); Maximes du temps, 1742–51, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; La nymphe de la Seine, 1737–42, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Le retour de tendresse (L’Affichard), 2nd version (1742); Les talents de la beauté (de Morand), 1742–51, lost, listed in Hue catalogue; Le temple de Bacchus, B, bc (n.d.)

Cantatilles: L’absence (M. Rolland), M (1728); L’absence (de Morand), lost; L’amant fidèle et malheureux (Moraine, text in Mercure de France, July 1730), 1v, insts, lost; Le bouquet de Cloris, 1v, bc; Le choix des fleurs et des filles, 1v, bc; L’été, c1740, lost, listed in Hue catalogue; La fausse alarme (L’Affichard), 1v, bc; La feste de Thérèse (text in Mercure de France, Feb 1744), lost; Le hibou, le moineau et la tourterelle, 1v, bc; L’hiver, 1742, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; L’isle de Cythère, 1742–51, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Nanette, before 1742, lost, listed in Hue catalogue; Narcisse (de Morand), lost; Le printemps, 1734–7, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Le serment de fidélité, c1741, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Le temple de l’Hymen, 1742–51, lost, listed in Le Clerc catalogue; Thérèse (L’Affichard, text in Mercure de France, June 1741), lost

Motets: Beata Dei genetrix Maria, 1v, bc; Domine miserere, 1v, vn/fl, bc; Domine, non sum dignus, 1v, fl, bc; Exaudi Domine vocem meam, 1v; In convertendo Dominus, 1v, vn; Jam satis luctus; Laetare Anna mater, SS, bc; O salutaris hostia, 1v, fl, ob/vn, bc; Panis angelicus, 1v, fl, bc; Psallite domino, 1v, vn, bc (1729); Usque quo, lost, cited in Mercure de France, Feb 1742

19 airs in Recueils d’airs sérieux et à boire de différents auteurs (1701–24)

165 airs, in Meslanges de musique latine, française et italienne divisés par saisons (1727–32)

127 airs in [1er] (–9me) Recueils d’airs sérieux et à boire … de M. Bouvard … les paroles sont de M. L’Affichard (1730–49); 2me and 8me recueils lost

4 airs, 1v, fl, bc, in Printemps, airs nouveaux (1737)

Les délices de Comus, 10vv (1750)

2 airs in Nouvelles poésies morales (n.d.)

58 airs pubd in Mercure de France (1729–44)

instrumental

1er livre de [8] sonates, vn, bc (1723)

Menuets italiens … recueillis par Mr. Bouvard, vn, bc (n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (P. Weller)

La LaurencieEF

C. and F. Parfaict: Dictionnaire des théâtres de Paris (Paris, 1756/R), i, 489ff; ii, 59ff; iii, 370ff

P.L.R. de Boisgelou: Table biographique des auteurs et compositeurs de musique dont les ouvrages sont à la Bibliothèque nationale (MS, c1803, F-Pn Res Vm8 22 and 23)

P. de Morand: Théâtre et oeuvres diverses (Paris, 1751)

D. Tunley: The Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974)

ROBERT FAJON

Bouville, Jean.

See Bull, John.

Bouzignac, Guillaume

(b ?Saint-Nazaire-d'Aude, nr Narbonne, c1587; d after 1642). French composer. He contributed substantially to the repertory of sacred music during the reign of Louis XIII, and in so doing helped to free the provincial French style from royal conservatism by incorporating Italian and Spanish styles.

MARTIAL LEROUX

1. Life.

The Bouzignac family had lived in Saint-Nazaire-d'Aude since at least 1536, some of its members being consuls and provosts of the seigneurial district. Guillaume Bouzignac studied at the cathedral of St Just in Narbonne shortly before Etienne Moulinié was there. In 1604, at the end of his apprenticeship, he probably became sous-maître of Narbonne, having been appointed to a benefice in the cathedral. The motet O mors, ero mors tua, with which he completed his studies, was composed ‘at the age of 17’. As his financial situation was not good, he left the Languedoc area and became a chorister and sous-maître of Angoulême Cathedral after spending some time in the service of the royal provost, Gabriel de La Charlonye, in Angoulême. In 1634 the provost praised him highly in an exchange of correspondence with Mersenne.

Bouzignac left the Charente in 1608 to return to his native heath and (thanks to his younger brother Antoine) to pay off the debts he had contracted earlier. His real career as a musician travelling from one choir school to another began in 1609, when he signed his admission to the collegiate church of St André, Grenoble, as maître de musique. Attracted by other ventures, he stayed in the Dauphiné for only three months, and then seems to have left France entirely. He does not reappear until 1624, when he was appointed maître de musique of Bourges Cathedral. Possibly he went to Italy and came into contact there with concertante music for double chorus, and with the scènes sacrées that preceded the rise of oratorio. Or perhaps he made short visits to different parts of France in search of an ever more desirable post before leaving for Spain, where musicians were beginning to introduce innovations. There is nothing to support either hypothesis, but in 1624, by virtue of the edicts of the council of 1584, Bouzignac was ordained priest in Bourges. Taking advantage of various periods of leave granted him as a special favour, he went to Paris in 1625 ‘on business’ and, despite finding favour with the canons, left the Berry in 1626. Three years later he was appointed maître de musique at the cathedral of Notre Dame, Rodez, but in 1632 he resigned, and nothing further is known of him until 1643, when he was described as ‘maître des enfants de choeur and an expert in the art of music’ at Clermont-Ferrand Cathedral.

Bouzignac is not mentioned in any subsequent archival document, but in 1643 Annibal Gantez praised him, as Mersenne had done some seven years earlier in his Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636–7, iii, bk 7). In 1665 Jacques Le Clerc, sub-prior of the church of La Trinité in Vendôme, mentioned a composition by Bouzignac in a theoretical compilation entitled Méthode facile et accomplie pour apprendre le chant de l'Église sans l'aide d'aucune gamme (F-Pn manuscrits français 19103, f.101). The chapter in question deals with the accentuation of the spoken language and its musical transcription as follows: ‘In a single trio by the sieur Bouzignac, master of the choir school at Clermont in the Auvergne, containing only six little lines, I will show that syllables which are short when spoken are made long here in over 20 places’. The wording suggests that Bouzignac was still alive at the time.

Despite strong presumptions, largely supported by his paraliturgical works (in which he did not hesitate to introduce references to topical and newsworthy events), there is nothing to provide definite confirmation that Bouzignac went to the Atlantic coast in 1628 (although the taking of La Rochelle is explicitly described in Cantate Domino, omnis Francia), that he served Henri, Duke of Montmorency, the governor of Languedoc (as would seem to be shown by the words ‘pax pro principi Henrico’ quoted in the Tours version of Dum silentium, or that he was at Carcassonne during the episcopate of Vital de l'Estang (as suggested by the words ‘pax pro inclito Vitali’ added to the end of the same work in the Paris version). However, we cannot ignore the fact that such dedicatory apostrophes were current coin at the time, a tribute paid to a local patron, whether religious or secular. Thus the ‘Bernardinus’ in Jesu propitius esto may have been addressed to Bernardin de Corneilhan, Bishop of Rodez from 1614 to 1648, a period into which Bouzignac's stay at Rodez fell. It seems even more likely that he was in Tours in summer 1641, when the city was organizing celebrations of the transfer of the relics of the 3rd-century bishop St Martin from Cluny Abbey. Several sacred works by Bouzignac refer to this ceremony (Praesulum chorus; Cantate Domino, o Turonenses; Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, ecclesia Turonensis), suggesting that Bouzignac was maître de musique in Tours, but there is no documentary evidence to support the hypothesis. The same must be said of Bouzignac's links with Paris. The fact that two of his compositions were in the repertory of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires does not prove that he himself was attached to any parish in the capital.

2. Works.

136 works make up the catalogue of Bouzignac's compositions today. Consisting mainly of sacred Latin works, they also include four secular pieces in a style which combines the severity of 16th-century writing with the imitative, madrigalesque manner of the Italian school, the whole being coloured by the popular air de cour. The works survive principally in two manuscript collections, one in Tours (F-TOm 168), the other in the Brossard collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Rés Vma 571). To these must be added two motets also in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Ego vox clamantis and Assumpta est Maria.

Only 11 works can be definitely authenticated as Bouzignac's; they include the chansons Quel espoir de guarir and Que doulce est la violence with which he won a puy de musique. To these should perhaps be added the six-part Ignis vibrante lumine, attributed to him by Brossard. However, stylistic comparison between several works that appear in both the Tours and the main Paris collections led Launay to identify 125 further works as almost certainly by Bouzignac.

Bouzignac's sacred pieces juxtapose, in an original and skilful manner, episodes inspired by the scriptures and topical events, allowing us to date his works as a whole to the period between 1628 (the taking of La Rochelle) and 1641 (the ceremonies devoted to St Martin at Tours), or later if we agree that Bouzignac died during the reign of Louis XIV. There was, however, a didactic purpose behind the way that contemporary events were projected onto the biblical narratives. Bouzignac's sacred works were undoubtedly intended to educate the congregation. Using simple means (perhaps thought up by some unknown writer), such as the telling in brief of a Christian story (the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, the Passion etc.), the paraphrasing of divine words or the creation of free texts likely to arouse emotion and feeling among the assembled flock, Bouzignac acted as a teacher of the uneducated masses in the same way as did the builders of cathedrals or the sculptors of medieval capitals. His paraliturgical works can be divided according to their texts into three main genres, deriving from the old motet. One of these is the dialogue, descended from the Venetian practice of cori spezzati, which consists exclusively of verbal and musical exchanges within a choir or between choirs. Then there is the scène sacrée, a precursor of the oratorio in the manner of Carissimi; this adopts the idea of exchanges found in the dialogue but allots particular roles, expressed in direct speech, to different voices, distinguishing between soloists (soliloquentes) and the crowd (turba) as interpreter of the passions, often with a narrator (historicus) as well. Finally there is the motet proper, which Bouzignac used for intimate reflection – a polyphonic essay without choral dialogues and portrayal of characters, and with no place for soliloquentes.

Bouzignac's originality is dazzling in the music of these paraliturgical works, which are not an integral part of the Office but might serve as sorties at the end of a ceremony, to add solemnity to an occasion such as a wedding or a funeral and, more probably still, to drive home a preacher's sermon, particularly during Holy Week, in those parts of France where religious observance was close to Spanish practice. Bouzignac made repeated use of melodic or rhythmic formulae (as a code tacitly understood by everyone) to arouse sentiments or conjure up images: descending chromaticism for grief; trochees or rapid choral exchanges to simulate joy; empty bars to convey the silence of night (ex.1).

Sometimes the musical discourse comes close to verbal language (ex.2). Bouzignac was also quick to follow Du Caurroy and Formé in their use of a double chorus, in the interests not so much of acoustic splendour as of dramatic verisimilitude in the play of question and answer. His taste for Manichaeism is shown in the way a homophonic double chorus might take over from a melismatic or simply declaimed solo passage (ex.3), and he gave free rein to his imagination when he grouped his voices into two masses of sound in the Venetian manner, sometimes carrying on the discourse in semichoruses in order to fragment the vocal forces into a constellation of tessituras. Bouzignac rarely used counterpoint (except to express the idea of searching or affliction, as in Vulnerasti cor meum), preferring to reserve it for sections treated as couplets within homophonic choruses.

Bouzignac's art is purely vocal (without the aid of any theatrical artifice), but he made his musical resource serve the cause of the drama, never allowing it to be merely a redundant addition to the text. Although the compositions attributed to him in the four manuscript collections mentioned above rarely stipulate the use of basso continuo, there is little doubt that it was employed, not only because the practice was by then firmly established but also, and principally, because the works often include long solo passages which must have called for continuo support.

The majority of Bouzignac's works belong to paraliturgical genres to some extent influenced by Monteverdi's seconda pratica; but three masses, two mass sections (a Christe eleison and a Credo) and a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah exemplify the composer's engagement also with music intended to adorn the Office of the Church. In these works the music is often more severe and rigid, employing a note-against-note style and betraying the conservative stranglehold that prevailed in all parts of France when liturgical tradition took precedence over paraliturgical endeavours. Only in the latter sphere could freedom of expression be exercised.

WORKS

MS numbers given for anonymous sources only

Editions:Oeuvres françaises du temps de Richelieu et du XVIIème siècle, ed. B. Loth, F. Raugel and D. Launay (Paris, n.d.) [L]Anthologie du motet latin polyphonique en France (1609–1661), ed. D. Launay (Paris, 1963) [A]

sacred

Assumpta est Maria, 8vv, F-Pn fonds latin 16831

Dum silentium, 6vv, TOm 168 f.56v, Pn, L, ed. in Quittard (1904–5)

Ecce festivitas amoris, 5vv, TOm 168 f.67v, Pn, L

Ego vox clamantis, 5vv, Pn lat. 16830

En [O] flamma divini amoris, 6vv, TOm 168 f.80v, Pn, L

Jesu ubertate domus tuae, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.108; attrib. in Brossard

Noé, noé, pastores, 5vv, TOm 168 f.79v, Pn, L

O mors, ero mors tua, 5vv, TOm 168 f.37v

Prima lamentationum Jeremiae, 3vv, Pn, L

secular

Que doulce est la violence (text: ? P. Desportes), 5vv, TOm, L

Quel espoir de guarir, 4vv, TOm, Pn, L, ed. in Quittard (1905)

DOUBTFUL WORKS

anonymous, almost certainly by Bouzignac

liturgical

Missa duarum vocum alternis cum organo vel choro versibus, 2vv, TOm 168 f.84v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.113

Missa, 5vv, TOm 168 f.98v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.115v

Missa, 7vv, TOm 168 f.82v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.100v, L

Christe eleison, 4vv, TOm 168 f.46

Credo, 5vv, TOm 168 f.128v

Te Deum, 8vv, TOm 168 f.1

Psalmi vesperarum duarum vocum alternis ad organo vel choro versibus, 2vv: Dixit Dominus, Beatus vir, Magnificat, TOm 168 f.87v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.105

Psalmi vesperarum, 4vv: Dixit Dominus, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, Laetatus sum, TOm 168 f.91v

Psalmi vesperarum, 5vv: Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, TOm 168 f.103, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.100

Psalmi vesperarum, 7vv: Dixit Dominus, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, Lauda Jerusalem, TOm 168 f.90v

paraliturgical

Ad arma fideles, 5vv, TOm 168 f.63v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.98v; Ad nutum Domini, 5vv, TOm 168 f.76, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.121v; Adjuva me, Domine, 6vv, TOm 168 f.56v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.93; Alleluya, Deus dixit, 5vv, TOm 168 f.72v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.118v, A; Alleluya, Dicant nunc Judaei, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.28, A; Alleluya, Filiae Jerusalem, 5vv, TOm 168 f.42; Alleluya, Fundite rores, 6vv, TOm 168 f.58v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.95, L; Alleluya, Nova sint omnia, 5vv, TOm 168 f.80, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.124; Alleluya, Venite amici, 5vv, TOm 168 f.66v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.106v, L; Ave cujus conceptio, 5vv, TOm 168 f.68v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.111, L; Ave Maria, 5vv, TOm 168 f.46v, L, ed. in Quittard (1904–5)

Beati mortui, 5vv, TOm 168 f.47v, L; Beati omnes, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.43; Benedic anima mea Dominum, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.86; Benedicite omnia opera Domini, 7vv, Pn Rés. Vma 57 f.23v; Candens flos, 5vv, TOm 168 f.76v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.122; Cantate Domino, omnis Francia, 5vv, ?1628, TOm 168 f.127, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.125 (inc.), A; Cantate Domino, O Turonenses, 6vv, ?1641, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.60v, Christus natus est, 5vv, TOm 168 f.98; Clamant clavi, 5vv, TOm 168 f.77, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.122v L; Coetus omnes angelici, 6vv, TOm 168 f.26v; Descendit dilectus noster, 7vv, TOm 168 f.45v; Deus dixit, Abraham respondit, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.83; Deus propitius esto, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.16; Dic, Maria, quid vidisti, 5vv, TOm 168 f.110; Dilectus meus mi, 5vv, TOm 168 f.120v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.98; Domine salvum fac regem, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.47; Duas habes nativitates, 5vv (inc.), Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.85; Ducitur turma nobilis, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.6

Ecce aurora, 5vv, TOm 168 f.54v, L; Ecce homo, 5vv, TOm 168 f.107v, L; Ecce Maria, evolet, 5vv, TOm 168 f.53v; Ecce Maria, navis de longe, 5vv, TOm 168 f.65v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.106, L; Ecce panis angelorum, 6vv, TOm 168 f.23v; Ecce sacerdos magnus, 6vv, TOm 168 f.25v; Ecco mirabile, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.63; Ego flos campi, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.14v; Ego gaudebo in Domino, 5vv, TOm 168 f.38, L; Ex ore infantium, 9vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.17v, A

Fasciculus myrrhae, 5vv, TOm 168 f.104, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.123v; Flores, flores, liliae, violae, 5vv, TOm 168 f.39; Flos in floris tempore, 5vv, TOm 168 f.37, L; Fuge dilecte mi, 5vv, TOm 168 f.105v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.105v, A; Gaudeamus omnes in die Assumptionis, 8vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.2, A; Gaudete et exultate, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.42; Gloria, laus et honor, 6vv, TOm 168 f.60, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.96; Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, ecclesia Turonensis, 7vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.3, A; Ha [Ah] morior, 5vv, TOm 168 f.108v, A; Ha, plange, 5vv, TOm 168, f.70v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.114, L, A; Heu suspiro, 5vv, TOm 168 f.106v; Hodie cum gaudio, 5vv, TOm 168 f.118, L

Ignis vibrante lumine, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.34; Ignis vibrante lumine, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.39v, attrib. in Brossard; Impetum fecerunt unanimiter, 6vv, TOm 168 f.35v; In exitu Israel, 4vv, TOm 168 f.33v; Infantem vidimus, 4vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.64v; Inimicos ejus in dura confusione, 4vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.41v; In pace in idipsum, 4vv, TOm 168 f.13 v, L; Invocabo nomen tuum, Domine, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.58; Irruerunt in me fortes, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 ff.27, 58; Jesu propitius esto, 5vv, TOm 168 f.74, Pn Rés Vma 571 f.119v; Jesus nova fecit omnia, alleluia, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.60; Jubilate Deo, 5vv, TOm 168, f.124, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.9; Jubilate Deo, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.109; Lauda Syon, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.142v; Libera me Domine, 5vv, TOm 168 f.48 v; Miles mirae probitatis, 8vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.65v; Multiplicati sunt, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.85v; Nihil insolentiae, 5vv, TOm 168 f.50; O lilia gratiarum, 5vv, TOm 168 f.69v, Pn Rés Vma 571 f.113; Omnes gentes, plaudite, 5vv, TOm 168 f.125v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.7v; Omnes gentes, plaudite, 9vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.77; Omnia flumina intrant in mare, 5vv, TOm 168 f.104v; Omnium sanctorum, 5vv, TOm 168 f.115, L

O quam gloriosus es, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.5v; O salutaris hostia, 4vv, TOm 168 f.97; O Sapientia, O Adonaï, O Radix Jesse, O Clavis David, O Oriens, O Rex Gentium, 2vv, TOm 168 f.89v; Osculetur me, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.12v; Popule meus, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.11; Praesulum chorus, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.25v; Quae est ista, 5vv, TOm 168 f.114; Quaeram quem diligit, 5vv, TOm 168 f.77v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.123, L; Quare fremuerunt Judaei, 5vv, TOm 168 f.71v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.114v; Quasi cedrus exaltata sum, 6vv, TOm 168 f.20v; Quasi stella matutina, 6vv, TOm 168 f.22; Quomodo sedet sola civitas, 5vv, Pn Rés, Vma 571 f.75; Regina coeli, 5vv, TOm 168 f.113, L; Regnum mundi, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.74; Rorate coeli, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.85

Sacrae Coeciliades, 5vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.62; Sagittae Domini, 5vv, TOm 168 f.65, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.104; Salve Jesu piissime, 5vv, TOm 168 f.72, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.115, L; Senex puerum portabat, 5vv, TOm 168 f.119v, L; Sicut laetantium, 6vv, TOm 168 f.61v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.97; Sicut malus, 4vv, TOm 168 f.14, attrib. by Quittard; Solem justitiae, 5vv, TOm 168 f.75, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.120v; Spargite flores, filii amici, 6vv, TOm 168 f.62, Pn Rés. Vma 57 f.124v; Stella refulget, 5vv, TOm 168 f.43v, L, ed. in Quittard (1904–5); Stirps Jesse virgam produxit, 5vv, TOm 168 f.75v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.121; Surgam et circuibo civitatem, 5vv, TOm 168 f.44v; Surge, amica mea, 6vv, TOm 168 f.123; Surge, Aquila, veni Auster, 5vv, TOm 168 f.41; Tota pulchra es, 4vv, TOm 168 f.82v, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.97v, L; Tu quis es, 8vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.6v, A

Ubi est rorida luna, 5vv, TOm 168 f.45v; Unus ex vobis, 5vv, TOm 168 f.19, L, ed. in Quittard (1904–5); Vadam et videbo, 5vv, TOm 168 f.64, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.102v; Veni Sancte Spiritus, 5vv, TOm 168 f.16; Veni, veni, Maria, veni in coelum, 5vv, TOm 168 f.52v; Vidi turbam magnam, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571 f.78 v; Virgo Dei genitrix, 5vv, TOm 168 f.49v, L; Visitat Maria Elisabeth, 6vv, Pn Rés. Vma 571, f.1; Vulnerasti cor meum, 4vv, TOm 168 f.12v, L

secular

Heureux séjour de Parthénisse, 4vv, TOm 168 f.1, L, ed. in Quittard (1904–5)

Ruisseau qui cours (St-Amant [M.-A. Girard]), 4vv, TOm 168 f.27v

III. Non-Western instruments

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Gantez: L'entretien des musiciens (Auxerre, 1643); ed. with commentary by E. Thoinan (Paris, 1878/R)

J. Le Clerc: Traité sur le chant de l'église (MS, F-Pn)

S. de Brossard: Catalogue des livres de musique, théorique et prattique, vocalle et instrumentalle (MS, 1724, F-Pn)

H. Quittard: ‘Un musicien oublié du XVIIème siècle français: Guillaume Bouzignac’, SIMG, vi (1904–5), 356–417

H. Quittard: ‘Un musicien français inconnu: Guillaume Bouzignac’, RHCM, iii (1905), 75–6

D. Launay: ‘Guillaume Bouzignac’, Musique et liturgie, no.21 (1951), May–June

D. Launay: Introduction to Anthologie du motet latin polyphonique en France (1609–1661), PSFM, 1st ser., xvii (1963)

J.L. Bonnet: Bouzignac, Moulinié et les musiciens en pays d'Aude, XVIème–XVIIème siècles (Béziers, 1988)

M. Leroux: ‘Guillaume Bouzignac’, Guide de la musique sacrée et chorale profane: l'âge baroque (1600–1750), ed. E. Lemaître (Paris, 1992), 196–207

M. Leroux: Guillaume Bouzignac (ca. 1587–ca. 1643) (Béziers, 1993)

Bouzouki.

Greek long-necked lute, also found in Ireland. The 19th-century bouzouki was indistinguishable from the Turkish bozuk with its carved wood or carvel-built bowl resonator, movable gut frets and wooden tuning-pegs. By the end of the 20th century it was exclusively carvel-built with fixed metal frets and metal machine tuning-heads. The instrument has three or four double courses of metal strings tuned e–b–e' and d–g–b–e' respectively and is played with a plectrum. The version with four courses of strings has developed since World War II.

During the first half of the 20th century the bouzouki and its smaller relations the tzouras and baglamas were used principally for virtuoso improvisation and for accompanying the Rebetika (songs associated with an urban low-life milieu). Their strong associations with the criminal underworld and hashish smoking led to official disapproval and even persecution of the instrumentalists. During the 1930s, however, the bouzouki, aided partly by the release of commercial recordings, began to reach a wider audience.

The earlier practice of improvisation was derived from the Turkish modal system (makam) and the melodic repertory drew extensively on the traditional music of Asia Minor, but since the 1940s Western musical influence has become more marked: Western major and minor scales have displaced the oriental makam as the framework for composition. The traditional bouzouki with three courses is unsuitable for playing chords (the bass strings are mostly struck open to provide a drone), while the bouzouki with four courses has widened the possibility of introducing Western-style chords. Both types of bouzouki are now played; the traditional performance style is maintained by some veteran musicians and has been taken up by some younger exponents.

The bouzouki has become the Greek urban instrument par excellence and is played throughout the Greek-speaking world. Greek composers trained in Western music, such as Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis, have used the bouzouki in their works, drawing on the old repertory of the instrument for melodic and rhythmic inspiration.

In the late 1960s the bouzouki was adopted by traditional musicians such as Johnny Moynihan and Donal Lunny who were involved in the folk revival in Ireland. Ballad bands such as Sweeney's Men and Planxty were among the first groups to use the instrument in Irish music, initially to accompany traditional and contemporary folksong and later to provide a chordal accompaniment for traditional Irish dance music. The construction of the instrument was modified in this rapid acquisition; the Irish bouzouki has a shorter neck than its Greek counterpart and a flat back rather than a rounded one. A variety of tunings have been used, the most popular being g–d'–a'–d''. The bouzouki has become one of the most important instruments used to accompany Irish traditional music.

See also United states of america, §II, 1 (iii) (f).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

J. Cowdery: ‘Exploring the Bouzouki’, Back Porch, no.1001 (1981) [incl. cassette]

W. Spires: ‘The Bouzouki: its Evolution and Modern Transformation’, Frets, vii/3 (1985), 24–9

N.N. Fhíonaghaile: The Adoption and Transformation of the Greek Bouzouki in Irish Music Tradition (thesis, London U., 1990)

N. O'Connor: ‘Instruments and Players: Bouzouki and Guitar’, World Music: the Rough Guide, i: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, ed. S. Broughton and others (London, 1999), 175 only

M. Dubin and G. Pissalidhes: ‘Rembétika’, World Music: the Rough Guide, i: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, ed. S. Broughton and others (London, 1999), 128–32

recordings

The Storm, perf. Moving Hearts, Son

Planxty, Shanachie (1973)

Musique pour bouzouki solo et orchestre, perf. L. Karnesis and Orchestre Théodorakis, Galata/Le Chant du Monde GAL–503 (1978)

‘Orchestreca’: the Magic of the Greek Bouzouki, perf. M. Terzis, ARC Music EUCD 1206 (1992)

For further bibliography and recordings see Greece, §IV and Rebetika.

R. CONWAY MORRIS (with SANDRA JOYCE, NIALL KEEGAN)

Bovell, Dennis [Blackbeard]

(b St Peter, Barbados, 1953). English reggae guitarist, bandleader and producer. He grew up in London where in the early 1970s he co-founded Matumbi, one of the first reggae groups in Britain, and also ran the Jah Sufferer sound system. Although he recorded with such rock and punk bands as the Pop Group and the Slits, his true strength was dub music which he recorded under the name Blackbeard (Strictly Dub Wize, Tempus, 1978). Brain Damage (Fontana, 1981), released under his own name, provides an overview of Bovell's creative production, with its shrieks, deep echo effects and syncopated hi-hats. In 1979 Matumbi recorded Point of View which placed traditional reggae toasting in a big band setting. Bovell is perhaps best known for his collaborations, in the studio and on tour, with the political dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Among their best work is Dread Beat an' Blood (Virgin, 1977), LKJ in Dub (Island, 1980), In Concert with the Dub Band (Shanadine, 1985), and More Time (LKJ Records, 1999). Bovell has remained active as a producer, writer and bandleader.

ROGER STEFFENS

Bovicelli, Giovanni Battista

(b Assisi; fl 1592–4). Italian music theorist and singer. He is known only as the author of Regole, passaggi di musica, madrigali et motetti passeggiati (Venice, 1594/R). His skill as a composer and improviser of ornamental passaggi was attested by Damiano Scarabelli, vice-maestro di cappella at Milan Cathedral, in the dedication of his Liber primus motectorum (Venice, 1592). Bovicelli's treatise is a valuable source of information on improvised vocal ornamentation and virtuoso singing in Italy in the early Baroque period. The book follows the usual format for such manuals; it gives lists of common diminutions of melodic intervals and passages, followed by versions of the soprano lines of several well-known motets, madrigals and falsibordoni, showing how the ornaments were to be applied. The composers represented in the treatise are Palestrina, Rore, Victoria and Claudio Correggio. Their works are so heavily embellished that the lines of the original compositions are at times difficult to detect. In his Nuove musiche (Florence, 1601/2), Caccini sought to reform this extravagantly ornamented style and sanctioned only one of Bovicelli's figures – the accento; nevertheless, many early 17th-century sacred and secular monodies incorporated the type of elaborate passage-work advocated by Bovicelli, and the improvisation of ornaments in performance undoubtedly continued.

The first section of the treatise deals with the resetting of the text in the ornamented version. In a passage of fast notes of the same value there should be no syllable change until there is a change to longer notes, and the same is true for trills and similar rapid passages; a repeated note should have a syllable change. In a passage of varied note values the syllables may be changed at any time, provided the short and long syllables are properly set. Bovicelli stressed that ornaments should be appropriate to the voice and included suggestions about vocal articulation. In scale passages of demisemiquavers each note should be articulated separately, but a pair of demisemiquavers in a passage of semiquavers should not be articulated but passed over smoothly. He also discussed the treatment of melodic leaps in different situations; although he considered a series of leaps to be more instrumental than vocal in style, he maintained that they would sound well if the upper notes were taken lightly. In these and other instructions, and in a final exhortation on proper breathing in ornamented singing, there is evidence of the new virtuoso style of singing that was to dominate the Baroque cantata and opera.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Goldschmidt: Die italienische Gesangsmethode des XVII. Jahrhunderts (Breslau, 1890, 2/1892/R)

H. Goldschmidt: ‘Verzierungen, Veränderungen und Passagien im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’, MMg, xxiii (1891), 111–26, esp. 113

N. Bridgman: Editorial notes to Giovanni Battista Bovicelli: Regole, passaggi di musica (Venice 1594), DM, 1st ser., Druckschriften-Faksimiles, xii (1957)

H.M. Brown: Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music (London, 1976)

G. Rostirolla: Introduction to Giovanni Battista Bovicelli: Regole, passaggi di musica (Venice, 1594) (Rome, 1986)

IMOGENE HORSLEY

Bovina, Giuseppe Maria.

See Buini, Giuseppe Maria.

Bovio, Angelo

(b Pavia, 1824; d Varenna, 1909). Italian harpist and composer. He studied the harp under Curzio Marcucci in Florence and from 1850 to 1878 taught the harp at the Milan Conservatory. He presented many performances and was known for his virtuosity. His leading pupils included Luigi M. Tedeschi, L.M. Magistritti (1887–1956) and F. Godefroid. Bovio wrote four books of harp studies and about 50 pieces and transcriptions for the harp.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PazdírekH

B. Bagatti: Arpa e arpisti (Piacenza, 1932), 64

M.G. Scimeca: L’arpa nella storia (Bari, 1938), 130

A.N. Schirinzi: L’arpa storia di un antico strumento (Milan, 1961), 74

H.J. Zingel: Neue Harfenlehre, ii (Leipzig, 1967), 101

ALICE LAWSON ABER-COUNT

Bovy-Lysberg [Lysberg], Charles Samuel

(b Geneva, 1 May 1821; d Geneva, 14 Feb 1873). Swiss pianist and composer. Son of Antoine Bovy, a well-known engraver, he received his first musical training in his native town. In 1835 he went to Paris, where he became a pupil of Chopin. He also studied composition under Marmontel and met Liszt, who encouraged both his composing and playing and secured a publisher (Richault) for Bovy-Lysberg’s op.1, a set of waltzes for piano entitled Suissesses. He soon became a renowned piano teacher, but after the February Revolution in 1848 returned to Geneva, where he taught the piano at the conservatory (1848–9, 1870–73). In 1848 he married Alice Fazy (niece of the revolutionary Genevan statesman James Fazy), and the following year they settled at her castle at Dardagny, near Geneva. There and in neighbouring musical centres he gave frequent recitals, sometimes playing his own works; he also organized an annual series of concerts in Geneva. His compositions, which number more than 160, are mostly short, often brilliant piano pieces in various styles, which achieved great popularity in the salons of Geneva; many of them were published in Leipzig. He also wrote a comic opera La fille du carillonneur, which was performed with some success in Geneva in 1854, and a cantata Les Alpes, composed in 1860 to a text by A. Richard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RefardtHBM

SML

P. Long: ‘Charles Samuel Bovy-Lysberg 1821–1873’, Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, iii (1928), 140–54

F.R. BOSONNET

Bow

(Fr. archet; Ger. Streichbogen; It. arco).

A flexible stick of wood or a tube (bamboo) held under tension by a string or strings, usually of horsehair, used to draw sound from a string instrument.

I. History of the bow

II. Bowing

WERNER BACHMANN (I, 1–2), ROBERT E. SELETSKY (I, 3), DAVID D. BOYDEN/JAAK LIIVOJA-LORIUS (I, 4), DAVID D. BOYDEN/R (I, 5–6), PETER WALLS (II), PETER COOKE (III)

Bow

I. History of the bow

1. Origins.

2. The bow in Europe to c1625.

1. Origins.

The use of the bow can be traced back to the 10th century, when the bow was known throughout Islam and in the Byzantine empire. No evidence has been found either in the parts of Europe not then under Byzantine or Arab rule, or in eastern and south-eastern Asia, of string instruments which were bowed before the year 1000. Theories of a north European or Indian origin for the bow have proved groundless. The bow is frequently mentioned in 10th-century literature and is clearly depicted in a number of illustrations. The majority of references in Arabic literature come from important scholars and competent authorities on music, such as Al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Zayla and Ibn Khaldūn. In connection with the classification of chordophones ‘whose strings are made to sound by rubbing them with other strings [awtār] or a string-like fabric’, these writers mentioned instruments ‘whose notes can be prolonged [mumtadd] and combined [muttasil] at will’.

The available sources indicate that bowing originated in central Asia. At the time, rods for plucking, beating or rubbing the strings were used as well as the bow to produce sound from chordophones. The hypothesis of the central Asian origin of the bow is supported by a mural in the palace of the governor of Khuttal at Hulbuk (now Kurbanshaid, south Tajikistan). Among other subjects, it shows women playing musical instruments, among them a bowed string instrument (fig.1). Since this palace was destroyed in the 11th century, and the mural was whitewashed over at the end of the 10th, the painting must date from the 10th century at the latest. Several 10th- and 11th-century Byzantine illustrations show string instruments – with the strings attached to a transverse string-holder and arranged in a fan formation, with lateral pegs being used in conjunction with extremely long bows.

2. The bow in Europe to c1625.

The bow was first introduced into Europe in the 11th century via Islamic Spain and Byzantium. The earliest occidental references to it are in miniatures from northern Spain and Catalonia, dating from the first half of the 11th century. By 1100 the bow was used throughout western Europe. The oldest bow that has been preserved, although only in a fragmentary state, dates from the middle of the 11th century. It was found during excavations at Christchurch Place in Dublin, together with the tuning pegs of a string instrument. The wooden stick, broken off at the handle end, is 57 cm long and shows the bow to have been convex. It runs in a slight curve from the break and is distinctly bent towards the tip, where there is a notch. The horsehair stringing would have been fixed to the stick at the notch with a knot.

The bow in the early centuries, up to about 1600, had certain characteristics common to all specimens, notwithstanding the great variety of forms. Bows were always convex, like drawn hunting-bows. The hair, which was horsehair or a ‘string-like material’, was strung on a shaft of elastic wood or bamboo, bent in an arc. The bowstick was much weaker than on modern bows, so the hair gripped the strings less firmly. The hair was affixed directly to the stick, not to an adjustable nut which would have permitted alterations to the tension. Iconographic sources have yielded a great variety of bow shapes from around the end of the 10th century, ranging from the large, strongly arched, almost semicircular bow, held in the middle of the stick as in fig.2, to the flat bow, hardly curved at all, with its hair almost touching the wood (fig.3). The curve of some bows described a uniform arc; others were sharply curved at one end but otherwise fairly straight. There were also bows whose stick extended well beyond the end of the hair; this projection served as a handle and in early specimens was often exactly the same length as the part used for bowing (fig.4). In some illustrations the hair of the bow is apparently no more than about 20 to 30 cm long, allowing only very short bowing movements, while in others the bow has a total length of more than twice that of the instrument and is manipulated chiefly with the arm at full stretch. The pictorial sources thus demonstrate that many different types of bow were tried out in the 10th and 11th centuries; this experimentation suggests that the bow was then at an early stage of its development, lacking forerunners. It was not until the late Middle Ages that uniform types gradually evolved, between 50 and 80 cm long and moderately curved. Where there was no projecting handle the player held not only the stick but also the end of the hair, and was therefore able to vary the tension of the bow while playing by pressing the hair with the fingers. In order to keep the hair and the stick apart on the flat type of bow, various forms of (non-adjustable) nut were introduced from the 13th century onwards: a natural bifurcation of the wood could be exploited, one of the branches being cut down to a stump; or the player could insert a piece of wood or a finger between the hair and the stick, a method illustrated as early as the 11th century. Until the 14th century the bow was generally held in the clenched fist, which made for a powerful stroke and greater pressure on the strings but precluded a loose wrist and therefore elasticity at the change of stroke. Illustrations of the bow being held with the fingertips occur as isolated instances at first, and become more frequent only in the late Middle Ages (fig.5). There is a distinction to be made between the grip at some point along the stick and that at the very end of the stick: the former is found principally with the strongly arched semicircular bow; but the latter, ensuring to a certain degree the evenness of stroke essential when the instrument has more than one string, gradually prevailed in Europe as the less arched bow came into general use. Almost without exception the instrument was held in the left hand and the bow in the right, as is usual today. Certain norms developed at an early date in the method of holding the instrument and in the technique of bowing. When the player held the instrument slanting upwards or sideways from the body the bow was held in an overhand grip, but when the instrument was supported on the knee (a gamba), the bow was held in an underhand grip (fig.6; see also Viol, fig.10). A common exception to this rule was that when the bow was strongly curved it was often held overhand, even if the instrument was supported on the knee. Occasionally, when the instrument was held with the strings almost vertical, the underhand grip was also found, principally in 10th- to 12th-century Byzantine illustrations.

Research has shown that the spread of bowing in Europe can be linked with the widespread medieval convention of bourdon accompaniment or with parallel organum or very early forms of medieval polyphony. The construction of the medieval fiddle with its bridge meant that the bow generally produced sound from more than one string at a time; the bourdon strings accompanying the melody created a drone background. The principle behind the sound production of the fiddle and that of the hurdy-gurdy was thus the same in the early phases. Only with the further evolution of bowing technique did the separate sounding of individual strings and the differentiation of angles in the bow’s movement gradually develop. The polyphonic playing of string instruments was, however, still widespread during the Renaissance, at least on the lira da braccio, contributing to the development of chordal polyphony; this kind of playing required bows with a relatively wide gap between the hair and stick, a characteristic of both types of bow illustrated in the 15th and 16th centuries (i.e. the bow with strongly curved stick and the type with a flatter arc and a nut).

3. c1625–c1800.

By about 1625 players began to require weightier bows for crisper articulation, increased volume, and a more complex sound. Iconographic sources indicate that until then the hair was attached at the point as it still is in traditional bows of many cultures: it was slipped through a hole or slit, then knotted and wrapped, as shown in Guido Reni's St Cecilia Playing the Violin of 1606 (fig.7). Probably about 1625, the point was thickened into a ‘pike’ head, the hair knotted and curled inside a rectangular (or later, trapezoidal) mortise cut in the head, secured by looping over a snugly fitting wooden plug (fig.8).

At this time, bows were generally constructed of tropical hardwoods; the few extant 17th-century bows are all made of snakewood (specklewood, letterwood; Lat. piratinera guianensis), a remarkably dense, strong and beautiful material. Ebony and ironwood bows from the 18th century are extant, but although these woods are dense, their elasticity necessitates exaggerated thicknesses and weights to strengthen them; they seem to have been reserved for the appropriately heavier bows intended for use on large instruments.

17th-century iconography reveals an aesthetic preference for matching the lengths of bows with their instruments. Representations of bows for violone, cello and bass viol seem substantially longer than later examples, although with actual bows adherence to the aesthetic was limited by practicality. Braccio instruments and their bows, however, were often conveniently matched, as, for example, in Peter Lely's Man Playing a Violin (late 1640s) and a vanitas by Pieter Claesz (c1597–1660; fig.9). A rare late 17th-century violin bow is 58 cm in total length; another extant short bow, of a later date, is just over 64 cm in length, roughly the outer limit for this type of violin bow (Powerhouse Museum, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, Australia). Hawkins, in his General History of 1776, observed that the ‘sonata’ bow as late as 1720 was about 24 inches (61 cm) in total length, the ‘common bow’ even shorter. While it is impossible to generalize about the weights of short bows, extant examples weigh between 37 and 42 grams.

The hair was attached at the shank of the stick with a second mortise, and a removable frog (nut) separating the stick from the hair was fitted to a depression carved in the stick and held in place by hair tension. Although it precluded fine adjustments of hair tension, this method nevertheless seemed perfectly adequate; some adjustment could be made by placing slips of paper or other material between hair and frog. Early experiments with tension-regulating devices, such as the dentated crémaillère, where the frog is attached by a metal loop to a small ratchet affixed along the top of the stick (see fig.11b below) seem not to have generated much interest until much later. (The date of 1694 on the eyelet-and-screw frog of a well-known bow formerly in the Hill collection in London is spurious.) On the few surviving 17th-century bows that retain their original frogs, the hair channel measures as much as 8 mm.

To circumvent perceived lack of responsiveness in the upper portion of a pike-head bow, where the distance between the hair and the stick was small, the stick was often heated and bent (or perhaps carved) slightly outward in its uppermost few centimetres. The resulting increased distance between hair and stick made the bow very flexible and responsive throughout its length, lending weight to the advice in Bartolomeo Bismantova's Compendio musicale (1677–9) that ornaments are best played with separate bowstrokes at the tip of the bow. In any case, with the frog ‘clipped’ in place under playing tension, 17th-century bows appear somewhat convex.

Performers were evidently satisfied with the short violin bow well into the 18th century. However, about 1720, reportedly at the instigation of Tartini, Italian luthiers developed a substantially longer violin bow, between 69 and 72 cm in total length and generally weighing between 45 and 56 grams. In another modification later credited to Tartini as well, the mild convexity near the tip was replaced by a slightly more elevated head, frequently resulting in a distinct ‘swan-bill’ profile, while the stick remained straight; however, Tartini's long bow, although straight, has a small, somewhat elevated pike head rather than a ‘swan-bill’ (Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Tartini, Trieste). The new bows were known as ‘long bows’, sometimes as ‘Tartini bows’. Under playing tension, long bows still always appear slightly convex; moreover, many 18th-century long bows were still built with low pike heads, or even swan-bill heads, that retain the convex ‘hump’ at the upper end of the stick. Not infrequently the shank of the stick was reeded – that is, carved with up to 24 shallow, narrow flutes – either for better grip, or for decoration. The bow in fig.8b, probably of English provenance, c1725, is 71·7 cm long and weighs 54·5 grams; its original ‘clip-in’ frog is intact, and the grip area and end of the stick are reeded.

Long bows did not supplant the short bows. G.B. Somis (1686–1763), a disciple of Corelli (1653–1713), continued to use a short bow; and P.A. Locatelli (1695–1764), arguably the most brilliant virtuoso of the 18th century, was reported by English observer Benjamin Tate in 1741 to be adamant in his preference for the short bow, perhaps because its greater ease of handling and quicker response complemented his fiery performance style. The slight sagging of the long bow on initial string contact suited the prevailing 18th-century italianate cantabile style and continuous on-string passagework, but not certain types of crisp articulation.

In an effort to reduce their mass without a compromise in strength, long bows, not infrequently, had their upper two thirds fluted; a number of fluted 18th-century examples are extant. Many of these show few signs of use, their preservation possibly due to their craftsmanship or costly materials rather than their playing characteristics. Indeed, the prevailing perception of bows as accessories meant that most ordinary, if well-playing, short and long bows were ultimately discarded, while aesthetically pleasing long bows survived without regard for their musical efficacy. Fluted bows never seem to appear in iconographical sources; perhaps their reduced mass also reduced their richness of sound or stability, diminishing their attractiveness to professional players. Indeed, short bows, invariably unfluted, had achieved increased strength and reduced mass with a stick that was slightly higher than wide; it was carved with an oval cross-section in its verticle axis.

The short bow continued in common use until at least 1750. Catalogues of mid-18th-century luthiers still include them, and many 18th-century paintings show them in use, among them Carle Vanloo’s Sultan Giving a Concert to his Mistress (fig.10; c1737) and Hogarth's Enraged Musician (1741), whose principal figure was identified by Charles Burney as the virtuoso violinist Pietro Castrucci. Still, the long bow eventually did replace the short bow, at least for most soloists: J.-M. Leclair performed with a long bow; so did F.M. Veracini, as illustrated on the frontispiece of his Sonate accademiche of 1744. The aesthetic of matching instrument and bow lengths was abandoned: bows for viola, cello and bass viol were now shorter than those for violin.

While the ‘clip-in’ frog was still adequate for most players, some evidently felt that the increased hair span of the long bow made it more sensitive to changes in humidity and that it required a means of implementing minute hair-tension adjustments. The screw-adjustable frog and eyelet, with the hair inserted into a mortise cut in the frog's hair channel rather than the stick itself, probably made its appearance about 1740. However, most long bows, and even the transitional/classical types that began to appear by about 1760, were still built with clip-in frogs for several decades: two bows owned by Tartini (Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Tartini, Trieste), one long bow and one transitional type have such frogs. Small adjustments of hair tension were apparently not deemed critical enough for most mid-18th-century players to consider the added expense of the screw frog. Moreover, early eyelets may not have been reliable, their few threads stripping after modest use. As is the case with short bows, the frogs on many extant long bows have wider hair channels than was once assumed: 8·5 mm is not unusual. Probably during the third quarter of the 18th century, a number of clip-in long bows were re-cut to accept screw frogs. A well-known example is the elaborate pandurina-shaped frog, probably of French provenance, c1770, on an anonymous fluted long bow, c1740 (Music Department, University of California, Berkeley). This bow was erroneously dated c1700 and attributed to Antonio Stradivari; its stick, probably of ironwood, was formerly thought to be pernambuco.

The long bow persisted until the end of the 18th century, overlapping with the transitional/classical bows. Transitional bows continued the long bow’s pattern of development in further raising the head, creating ‘hatchet’ or ‘battle-axe’ profiles, and not infrequently, a modified swan-bill head that was foreshortened and extremely high; a number of fluted transitional bows with the latter are extant (fig.12b). The stick was heated and bent strongly inwards to counter the extended distance between stick and hair, and to add spring and resistance. One occasionally encounters incurved high-headed transitional bows built with the old convex ‘hump’ near the head, for added flexibility in that area. Many transitional models are shorter than the long bows, usually lighter, despite thicker graduations, and frequently have narrower hair widths (compare figs.13b and c below), although as the century progressed they became longer and heavier with wider hair channels. Pernambuco and, less commonly, ironwood were generally used for these thicker concave sticks rather than snakewood: pernambuco because it is lighter, ironwood because it is less stiff. The elasticity of these materials could be circumvented by the inward cambre, and pernambuco was also less expensive than snakewood.

In his Méthode pour le violon (c1798), the Parisian violinist Michel Woldemar (1750–1818) presented four accurate illustrations tracing the history of the bow: short (‘Corelli’), long (‘Tartini’), transitional (‘Cramer’) and Tourte (‘Viotti’). Reputed to own bows of each type, Woldemar claimed that the model associated with the virtuoso Wilhelm Cramer, active in London during the 1770s and 80s, was ‘adopted in his [Cramer's] time by a majority of artists and amateurs’. With mirrored peak and throat on its ‘battle-axe’ head, and a delicate ivory frog of typical French design, similarly hollowed on both sides (fig.8d), the ‘Cramer’ bow is one of many extant variations by builders working in Paris and London, the two centres of bowmaking: in Paris, Duchaine, Tourte (père) bows stamped ‘Tourte L.’, and ‘Meauchand’, among them; in London, Edward, John and James Dodd, Thomas Smith, and others. Few bows of the period were stamped, those stamps that exist were as likely to identify firms for which the maker worked, especially in Britain, such as ‘Banks’, ‘Betts’, ‘Forster’, ‘Longman & Broderip’ and ‘Norris & Barnes’.

The bounced bowstrokes in music of the Mannheim school, Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries seem to have been responsible for the introduction of springy transitional bows, which performed these effects more naturally than long bows. Interestingly, a transitional bow of about 1770, attributed to Tourte père, is yet another ascribed to Tartini's ownership; if he was indeed its owner, he acquired it at the end of his life. However, it is the long bows, which smoothly sink into the string, that are better suited to what Hubert Le Blanc, in his Défense de la basse de viole of 1740 recognized as the Italian violinist's ‘endless stream of seamless bow changes’. A pen-and-wash drawing (c1800), shows G.B. Viotti, widely – if anecdotally – considered the early champion of the new François Tourte bow, holding what appears to be a long bow with a swan-bill head. Many surviving long bows had inward cambre added at a later date, presumably to facilitate bouncing strokes, but they ultimately fell into disuse with the radical changes in musical style in the late 18th century. With the late 20th-century interest in period-instrument performing practice, surviving long bows have been widely copied, although usually constructed with an inward curve that regrettably masks their genuine responses and strengths.

The model of François Tourte originating in the 1780s, is, at 74 or 75 cm, 2 to 4 cm longer than either long bows or many transitional bows. With even stronger graduations and cambre, and a closed frog with slides and a metal ferrule (figs.11c and 13c), it is, at 56 to 60 grams, slightly heavier than some of the long bows; the ‘hatchet’ head is similar to transitional models, but without mirrored peak and throat. Although this model eventually eclipsed all previous types, various transitional designs were made well into the 19th century throughout Europe, notably by the many members of the Dodd family in England. Cost was generally the motivation: frogs with mother-of-pearl slides and silver ferrules are more expensive to produce than plain open-channel ones. A Bégas lithograph of c1820 clearly shows Paganini using a transitional bow of the Edward Dodd type, with a ‘battle-axe’ type head.

4. The Tourte bow.

About 1785 François Tourte (1747–1835) succeeded in producing in Paris a bow so remarkably satisfactory (see fig.8c) that it became the model in his own time and, with a few changes of detail, has continued as such. The superiority of Tourte’s bows was acclaimed by Louis Spohr (Violin-Schule, 1833), who spoke of ‘the trifling weight with sufficient elasticity of stick’, of ‘the beautiful and uniform bending, by which the nearest approach to the hair is exactly in the middle between the head and the frog’ and of ‘the extremely accurate and neat workmanship’. In effect Tourte combined the significant innovations of the transitional bows – including the concave bowstick and the higher, more massive head – in a final form that joined supreme playing qualities to incomparable grace. Although a legend in his own lifetime, he never stamped his bows; in a few cases he inscribed his name, age and the date on a piece of paper inserted in the slot holding the frog.

According to Fétis, Tourte fixed the length of the violin bow at 74 to 75 cm, the playing hair at 65 cm and the balance point at 19 cm above the frog. The viola bow was slightly shorter (74 cm); and the cello bow shorter still: overall length 72 to 73 cm, playing hair 60 to 62 cm and balance point 17·5 to 18 cm above the frog. The weight of a violin bow averaged about 56 grams, and the thicker viola and cello bows weighed correspondingly more. Tourte’s bowsticks, invariably of pernambuco wood and finished as round or octagonal, tapered slightly from frog to head, being slimmer at the head end (for a mathematical formulation see Fétis, pp.125ff). He achieved the concave curvature by heating the stick completely through and then bending it while hot, rather than by cutting at once to the desired bend. The band of hair was widened to about 1 cm and comprised 150 to 200 hairs from white horses. To prevent it from bunching into a round mass, Tourte (according to Fétis, at Viotti’s suggestion) spread the hair into a uniform ribbon by means of a ferrule, generally of silver; he covered the surface from the ferrule to the end of the frog with a mother-of-pearl slide (Fr. recouvrement). Although claimed as Tourte’s innovation, the ferrule and slide had probably been introduced earlier. (The details of the modern frog and its mechanical action of tightening the hair are shown in fig.11c, from which may be noted the rectangular form of the frog – generally made of ebony – and the squared-off screw button.)

Tourte selected a hatchet form of head, facing it with a protective plate, generally of ivory. The ‘hatchet’ head was heavier than the earlier ‘pike’s’ head or even than most transitional designs; balance was restored at the frog end by the extra weight of the metal ferrule and by the added weights of the inlay (‘eye’) of the frog (fig.8c), the back-plates and the screw button. Even so, the balance of the Tourte bow was farther towards the centre of the bow than in earlier examples. Tourte and his followers also adorned their best bows by using such precious materials as tortoiseshell for the frogs, gold for the ferrule, back-plate and screw button, and occasionally mother-of-pearl for the face of the head.

John Dodd (1752–1839), Tourte’s contemporary in London, was likely aware of the pioneering work of the Tourte family. He may have perfected the bow about the same time as François Tourte, arriving at very similar solutions. Dodd’s bows, however, are not of such uniformly high quality, and many of them are slightly shorter. To judge by the text and the bows illustrated in Baillot, Viotti may have used a Dodd bow about 2·5 cm shorter than the Tourte model.

Only one later addition to the Tourte bow proved of functional importance: the underslide (Fr. coulisse), a piece of metal affixed to the part of the frog that comes in sliding contact with the bowstick, its purpose being to minimize wear from friction and to reinforce the delicate edges. Tourte had left this surface of the wooden frog without protection; the invention of the underslide is generally attributed to François Lupot (1774–1837).

The 19th century produced a vast number of distinguished bowmakers; among the most celebrated were Dominique Peccatte, F.N. Voirin, Lupot, Maire, Pageot, Persois, Henry and Simon in Paris, and the Dodd and Tubbs families in London. In Germany Ludwig Bausch attained sufficient fame to be called the ‘German Tourte’.

Both Peccatte and Voirin worked at first for J.-B. Vuillaume, the most celebrated French violin maker and dealer of the early 19th century. Many of the early bows of Peccatte and Voirin (among others) were stamped with the name of Vuillaume, who while not a bowmaker himself spent much time studying Tourte’s work so that he was able to direct the work of his own makers. Vuillaume also invented new models, such as his hollow-steel and self-hairing bows, neither of which proved of lasting importance. Bowmakers after Tourte (such as Peccatte, Henry, Persois and Maire), while otherwise generally adhering to the Tourte model, tended to make the bowstick about 1 cm longer, and aimed at 60 grams as the ideal weight.

5. Double-bass bows.

The double-bass bow is sometimes constructed like a modern cello bow and sometimes like a combination of cello and viol bow. The cello-type bow, played ‘overhand’, is called the ‘French’ or ‘Bottesini’ bow (after a renowned player). It has the concave curvature, modern frog and ‘hatchet’ head of the cello bow, although the stick is thicker, heavier, somewhat shorter and more sharply curved inwards (fig.14a).

The other type of bow is called the ‘German’ or ‘Simandl’ bow (after a famous Viennese teacher; fig.14b). A combination of the French bow and the early viol-type bow (the ‘Dragonetti’, now obsolete), the ‘Simandl’ uses the modern ‘hatchet’ head and the incurve of the French bow but with a greater space between hair and stick at the frog, which is also somewhat different. The ‘Simandl’ bow and its predecessor the ‘Dragonetti’ were never played underhand like the early viol, but were grasped endways, almost like a saw, the palm enclosing the frog so that the two middle fingers went round the frog parallel to the stick, the little finger below the slide, the forefinger below the stick, and the thumb resting above and exerting pressure on the stick (fig.15).

The French and German double-bass bows were both introduced relatively late in the 19th century.

6. The ‘Bach’ bow.

In the 20th century a so-called Bach bow was created to play the Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas ‘precisely as written’. This goal was based on the misconception that the chords in these works were intended to be sustained as written. The existence of a highly arched bow on which the hair could be loosened and tightened was postulated by Arnold Schering and Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the century and such a bow was built by Rolf Schröder in 1933. It is of very high arch, as much as 10 cm separating the bowstick and the hair at the highest point. By a mechanical lever, worked by the thumb, the player can tighten the hair at will to play on individual strings and loosen it to encompass all the strings, thus sustaining multiple stops continuously (fig.16).

1. Distinctive aspects of bowing before Tourte.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SachsH; VannesE

J.C. Weigel: Musicalisches Theatrum (Nuremberg, c1722/R1961 in DM, 1st ser., xxii)

F.-J. Fétis: Antoine Stradivari, luthier célèbre (Paris, 1856; Eng. trans., 1864/R)

J. Rühlmann: Die Geschichte der Bogeninstrumente (Brunswick, 1882/R)

H. Saint-George: The Bow: its History, Manufacture and Use (London, 1896/R, 2/1909)

F.W. Galpin: Old English Instruments of Music: their History and Character (London, 1910/R, rev. 4/1965/R by T. Dart)

O. Andersson: Stråkharpan (Helsinki, 1923; Eng. trans., 1930/R, as The Bowed-Harp)

H. Panum: Middelalderens strenginstrumenter, ii–iii (Copenhagen, 1928–31; Eng. trans., rev., c1940/R)

G. Hayes: Musical Instruments and their Music, 1500–1750, ii: The Viols, and Other Bowed Instruments (London, 1930/R)

E.S.J. van der Straeten: The History of the Violin (London, 1933/R)

F. Wunderlich: Der Geigenbogen: seine Geschichte, Herstellung und Behandlung (Leipzig, 1936, 2/1952)

H.-H. Dräger: Die Entwicklung des Streichbogens (Kassel, 1937)

V. Denis: De muziekinstrumenten in de Nederlanden en in Italië naar hun afbeelding in de 15e-eeuwsche kunst (Antwerp, 1944); partial Eng. trans. in GSJ, ii (1949), 32–46

W. Friedrich: Die älteste türkische Beschreibung von Musikinstrumenten aus dem Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Breslau, 1944)

L.S. Ginzburg: Istoriya violonchel' novo iskusstva, i–iii (Moscow, 1950–65)

F. Hamma: ‘Der Bogen zum Streichinstrument’, IZ, viii (1953–4), 25 only

A. Koenig: Le violon et ses ancêtres (Liège, 1954)

J. Roda: Bows for Musical Instruments of the Violin Family (Chicago, 1959)

B.A. Struve: Protsess formirovaniya viol i skripok (Moscow, 1959)

D. Droysen: Die Saiteninstrumente des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (Halsinstrumente): Darstellung der Instrumententypen anhand ikonographischer und literarischer Quellen sowie romanischer und frühgotischer Plastik (diss., U. of Hamburg, 1961)

E. Halfpenny: ‘The Double Bass’, Musical Instruments through the Ages, ed. A. Baines (Harmondsworth, 1961/R, 2/1966/R), 137–43

R. Hammerstein: Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des Mittelalters (Berne and Munich, 1962, 2/1990)

W. Bachmann: ‘Das byzantinische Musikinstrumentarium’, Anfänge der slawischen Musik: Bratislava 1964, 125–38

W. Bachmann: Die Anfänge des Streichinstrumentenspiels (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1966; Eng. trans., 1969, as The Origins of Bowing and the Development of Bowed Instruments up to the 13th Century)

W.C. Retford: Bows and Bow Makers (London, 1964)

J. Ling: Nyckelharpan: studier i ett folkligt musikinstrument (Stockholm, 1967)

C. van Leeuwen Boomkamp and J.H. Van der Meer: The Carel van Leeuwen Boomkamp Collection of Musical Instruments (Amsterdam, 1971)

K. Kos: Musikinstrumente im mittelalterlichen Kroatien: Beitrag zur allgemeinen Organographie der Musikinstrumente und zur mittelalterlichen Musikgeschichte (Zagreb, 1972)

R. Millant: J.B. Vuillaume (London, 1972)

B. Geiser: Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Violine (Berne and Stuttgart, 1974)

L.C. Witten: ‘Apollo, Orpheus and David: a Study of the Crucial Century in the Development of Bowed Strings in North Italy 1480–1580’, JAMIS, i (1975), 5–55

E. Vatelot: Les archets français (Paris, 1976)

N. Dolmetsch: ‘Bows and Bowing’ [viola da gamba], JVdGSA, xiv (1977), 53–60

S. Monosoff and others: ‘The Baroque Bow Past and Present’, Violin Convention V: New York 1977 [Journal of the Violin Society of America, iii/4 (1977)], 35–77

D. Pershing: ‘The Bach Bow Controversy’, Journal of the Violin Society of America, iii/2 (1977), 72–81

D. Boyden: ‘The Violin Bow in the 18th Century’, EMc, viii (1980), 199–212

M.A. Downie: The Rebec: an Orthographic and Iconographic Study (diss., U. of West Virginia, Morgantown, 1981)

L. Malusi: L’arco degli strumenti musicale: storia, tecnica, costruttori, valutazioni (Padua, 1981)

B. Ravenel: Vièles à archet et rebecs en Europe, au moyen âge (diss., U. of Strasbourg II, 1982)

D. Gill: The Book of the Violin (New York, 1984) [esp. chap. by J. Liivoja-Lorius]

I. Woodfield: The Early History of the Viol (Cambridge, 1984)

W.L. Monical: ‘Bow’, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. D. Randel (Cambridge, MA, 1986)

M. Remnant: English Bowed Instruments from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor Times (Oxford, 1986)

C. Brown: ‘Discovering Bows for the Double Bass’, The Strad, ci (1990), 39–45

P. Walls: ‘Mozart and the Violin’, EMc, xx (1992), 7–29

R.E. Seletsky: ‘New Light on the Old Bow’, EMc (forthcoming)

Bow

II. Bowing

2. Bowstrokes to c1780.

3. Bowstrokes after c1780.

1. Distinctive aspects of bowing before Tourte.

Although the violin bow changed markedly between about 1600 and the second half of the 18th century, there are two features common to all bows from this period which have a direct impact on the way they are used and consequently on the sounds they produce. First, the distance between bow hair and stick is less at the point than at the heel. It follows from this that such bows have a lighter head than late 18th-century models, a balance point which is closer to the player’s hand, and a convex stick – or at least one which is predominantly so. (Many early 18th-century bows have quite complex curves.) Secondly, no pre-Tourte bow has a ferrule (that is, the band of metal – usually silver – which clamps the hair as it passes out from the frog).

The first of these features means that the tendency for up-bows to be lighter than down-bows is considerably more marked on early bows than on a Tourte-style bow. (As we shall see, it is one of the achievements of late 18th-century bow design that it becomes a relatively simple matter for players to disguise the difference between up- and down-bows.) The second feature, the absence of a ferrule, means that there is nothing to hold the ribbon of hair flat if pressure is exerted at the heel while the bow is held at a slight tilt. This makes it unsuitable for modern-style martelé (see §II, 3(v) below).

To put this in a more positive way, early bows serve an expressive ideal which places great value on an articulate and inflected bowing style. The concepts on the one hand of a seamless legato with inaudible bow changes and on the other of a sudden attack with an initial hard ‘consonant’ seem to have no place in 17th- and 18th-century music.

Ways of holding the bow are described in a number of sources. In the early Baroque period, the thumb was placed on the hair at or near the frog. The change to placing the thumb on the underside of the stick was initiated by the Italians. In France, the thumb-on-hair method persisted into the 18th century; it is the grip described by Montéclair (1711–12). Not until Corrette’s L’école d’Orphée (1738) is the thumb-on-stick grip offered as an alternative (and it is still identified as an Italian practice). According to Roger North, Nicola Matteis persuaded the English ‘out of that awkwardness’; yet in 1693, 20 years after Matteis’s arrival, John Lenton (1693) advocated holding the bow ‘half under the nut [i.e. the frog], half under the hair from the nut’. The Italian bow hold may not have seemed such an obvious improvement to all who encountered it. Georg Falck (1688) describes the French grip in terms of its positive qualities, saying that it produces a good deep stroke.

The Italian grip is carefully discussed in terms of the subtleties of tone production by Geminiani (1751), Leopold Mozart (1756), Herrando (1756) and L’abbé le fils (1761). What they describe is very different from the prevalent modern bowing style. All insist that the parts of the body closest to the bowstick are the most active; flexible wrist and finger movements are vital, then a freely moving lower arm and, finally, an upper arm which will become involved only in the broadest strokes. L’abbé le fils comments on the flexibility of the fingers which, he says, ‘will naturally make imperceptible movements which contribute a great deal to the beauty of sound’. A low elbow which allows the weight of the arm to be brought to bear in a relaxed way is fairly consistently advocated in Baroque and Classical treatises. Lenton advises players to ‘hold not up your Elbow, more than necessity requires’. The most precise statement about elbow position comes from Herrando who also stresses the role of the wrist, and lower-arm movement:

The right arm is raised naturally, the elbow separated from the body about the distance between the extended thumb and forefinger, without movement from the elbow up, for the movement must come from the elbow forward with freedom of the wrist and evenness in the bow.

Mozart, too, warns against a right arm that is held too high, and, like Herrando, refers his readers to the engravings in his treatise; the contrast in elbow positions between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ pictures is marked (fig.17).

The bow could be held some distance from the frog. Corrette claims that the Italians ‘hold it three-quarters of the way down the stick’. Berlin (1744) says: ‘imagine that the length of the bow is divided into three parts, and put your hand in the middle of the first part’. Geminiani advises players to use the whole bow ‘from the Point to that Part of it under, and even beyond the Fingers’, implying that the hand is not at the frog. Corrette, Herrando and L’abbé le fils all recommend tipping the bow slightly towards the fingerboard, but Mozart, typically concerned with achieving greater strength of tone, disapproves of this. For the same reason, he (and L’abbé le fils) advocate having the second or middle joint of the index finger (rather than the first joint) on the stick.

(i) Preliminary definitions.

2. Bowstrokes to c1780.

(ii) The rule of the down-bow.

(iii) Bowing inflections.

(iv) Special bowings: problems of terminology and notation.

(v) Use of slurs.

(vi) Tremolo.

(vii) Staccato bowings.

(viii) Ondulé, ondeggiando, bariolage.

(ix) Arpeggiando, batterie.

(x) Mixed bowings.

(xi) Multiple stops, chords and special effects.

(i) Preliminary definitions.

On instruments of the violin family, ‘down-bow’ (Ger. Abstrich; Fr. tirer; It. [arcata] in giù, tirare) refers to the action of pulling the bow downwards so that the point of contact moves from the frog towards the tip, whereas in an ‘up-bow’ (Ger. Aufstrich; Fr. pousser; It. [arcata] in su, spingere) the player pushes the bow upwards from the tip towards the frog. The down-bow is more heavily weighted than the up-bow, partly because of the downward force of gravity and partly because of the weight exerted on the bow stick by holding it from above by the hand in a palm-down position. The natural weight of the arm is also a factor. From the late 18th century to the late 20th, violinists have toiled to equate the aural effect of down-bow and up-bow when it is musically desirable to do so, but the natural difference in emphasis favours the use of a down-bow for an accented beat (or part of beat) and up-bow for unaccented ones. This distinction was embodied in the fundamental ‘rule of the down-bow’ formulated by the Italians in the late 16th century (see below).

These distinctions apply to all members of the violin family. The basic cello strokes, though still called down- and up-bow might more accurately be described as ‘out-bow’ (away from the player) and ‘in-bow’ (towards the player). While gravity contributes less to the strength of the down-bow on the cello than it does on the violin or viola, the overhand grip nevertheless ensures that the application of weight to the string is much more direct at the start of a down-bow (when the hand at the heel of the bow is directly above the string) than at the start of an up-bow.

The viol bow is held underhand (see Viol, fig.10); the in-stroke and out-stroke are nearly equalized with respect to gravity and pressure. Viol players nevertheless consider the push (in-bow) stroke somewhat more naturally weighted than the pull (out-bow). Thus the principles of viol bowing run exactly counter to those of the violin family. This is recognized in the earliest treatises to consider both families of instruments, and writers on viol playing from the late 16th century to the mid-18th give rules designed to produce push strokes (up-bows) in metrically stressed positions. (The viol’s underhand grip was used by a number of cellists in the 17th and 18th centuries.)

(ii) The rule of the down-bow.

The earliest explanations of how to organize bowing enshrine the basic principle later to become known as the ‘rule of the down-bow’ – that strong beats should be played on down-bows. Riccardo Rognoni (1592) gave a few rules in the introduction to his treatise on diminution. His son Francesco developed these in his Selva de varii passaggi (1620). They and Gasparo Zanetti (1645) insist on placing down-bows on strong beats.

The rule of the down-bow dominates French bowing in the 17th century. It is neatly summarized by Mersenne in 1636, and it forms the basis for Lully’s bowing principles which were so meticulously documented by Georg Muffat (1698). The most distinctive of the Lullists’ ways of achieving a down-bow at the beginning of each bar is the use of a down-up-down/down bowing sequence in slow triple time as an alternative to the more facile down-up-up/down (to divide – craquer – the up-bow is possible at all but the very fastest of tempos). Muffat, in describing how Lully bowed a minuet, contrasts the strict adherence of the French to the down-bow principle with the Italians’ greater willingness to use alternate bows in triple time (ex.1a). According to Muffat, only fast courantes, gigues and canaries might be played by the French with continuously alternating bows. Of the rapid ornamental notes found so often at the end of a beat in the opening section of a French overture, Muffat says only that they can be bowed separately, or slurred ‘for greater sweetness’. His brief example throws the whole question back on to the performers’ taste (ex.1b). The ‘Rules’ which make so much sense of this Versailles-court dance-orientated style, are corroborated by other writers, notably Montéclair (1711–12) and Dupont (1713). Dupont, described on the title page of his treatise as ‘Maître de Musique et de Danse’, stands in a tradition of violinist-dancing masters which goes back to the origins of the instrument.

Bow management in the later 18th century might be summarized as a very free interpretation of the rule of down-bow with various writers stressing that players needed to develop the ability to make up-bows sound strong when needed. Since Geminiani and Quantz both make this point, it clearly precedes (or at least goes hand in hand with) the development of a more substantial head to the bow.

(iii) Bowing inflections.

It seems that in the pre-Tourte era many players were concerned as violinists are today with producing a good strong tone throughout the length of the bow. Bremner (1777, see Zaslaw, 1979, p.46) passes on an old (but plausible?) anecdote about Corelli’s demands:

I have been informed that Corelli judged no performer fit to play in his band, who could not, with one stroke of the bow, give a steady and powerful sound, like that of an organ, from two strings at once, and continue it for ten seconds.

The ability to play a long, even stroke was, according to Muffat, one which transcended national boundaries: ‘all the finest masters, regardless of their nationality, agree with each other that the longer, steadier, sweeter, and more even the bow-stroke is, the finer it is considered’. Montéclair, too, claimed that ‘it is essential first of all to get used to playing up- and down-bows evenly from one end of the bow to the other without making the string produce an ugly sound’. His words are echoed by Corrette (1738), Geminiani (1751) and Mozart (1756).

In this period, however, a basic element in producing a strong sound was to make the string speak without a percussive consonant at the beginning of the note. According to Mozart:

Every note, even the strongest attack, has a small, even barely audible, softness at the beginning of the stroke; for it would otherwise be no note but only an unpleasant and unintelligible noise. This same softness must be heard also at the end of each stroke.

The point is reinforced by Tartini (1771):

To draw a beautiful tone from the instrument, place the bow on the strings gently at first and then increase the pressure. If the full pressure is applied immediately, a harsh scraping sound will result.

As late as 1791 Galeazzi was giving similar advice about the basic bowstroke:

In guiding the bow across the strings, one must place it lightly at the very beginning of the stroke, gradually adding weight until the middle, and then again releasing the weight until the tip, in such a way that the volume of tone must be least at the ends of the bow and maximum in the middle. This rule must be inviolably observed not only in long notes and notes of like length but also proportionately in shorter notes.

Interestingly this advice is retained in the 1817 second edition of his treatise, after the Tourte bow had gained widespread acceptance.

It is clear that the bow, to a much greater extent than in modern playing, became the primary source of expressive inflection. (This was true for viol as well as violin playing: Christopher Simpson (1659) talks about gracing ‘by the bow’ and Loulié (1700, see Cohen, 1966) describes the enflé or swell – a device indicated in Marais scores by the letter e.) The malleable quality of a violin’s sound is compared by Le Blanc (1740) with (among other things) clay on a potter’s wheel. Roger North also has some fine images for bowing of a kind which he says the Italians brought to perfection:

Learn to fill and soften a sound as shades in needlework, in sensation so as to be like also a gust of wind, which begins with a soft air and fills by degrees to a strength as makes all bend, and then softens again into a temper and so vanish. And after this to superinduce a gentle slow wavering, not into a trill, upon the swelling the note.

Geminiani (1751) calls this kind of dynamically modulated bowing ‘one of the principal Beauties of the Violin’.

There are a few more specific indications of how inflected bowing might be used. Matthew Locke’s storm music for The Tempest contains the directions ‘lowder by degrees’ and ‘soft and slow by degrees’. Piani (Sonate op.1, 1712), and Veracini (Sonate accademiche op.2, 1744) have prefaces explaining the use of signs for a swell, a diminuendo and a combination of the two. The swell sign features in Geminiani’s violin treatise, and in the earlier volumes A Treatise of Good Taste (London, 1749) and Rules for Playing in a True Taste (London, c1748). These signs were taken up and used by other French and English composers. Geminiani’s pupils Festing and Avison made extensive and generally straightforward use of them. Avison, for example, uses combinations of these marks to show a natural phrasing off at cadences (ex.2). Sometimes the swell sign seems to require a rather unspecific interpretation, an expressive accent perhaps.

J.-B. Cupis, in his celebrated Menuet (before 1742), uses large versions of these signs to indicate that the swell or diminuendo may be spread over several bars.

William Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford, was contemptuous of Geminiani’s habit of giving specific ornament and phrasing instructions to performers, claiming that he was ‘paying his Brethren of the String but an ill Compliment’. The attitude that, at best, explicit markings are patronizing may help to explain why they are found in relatively few scores.

(iv) Special bowings: problems of terminology and notation.

It has always been recognized that the violin’s expressiveness is intimately connected with the way in which the bow is used. The kind of bowing – whether sustained, gently articulated under a slur, detached but on the string, or lifted – will determine the expresssive character of a particular passage. An accepted vocabulary for describing a standard range of special bowings was not finally consolidated until well into the 19th century. Terminology for bowstrokes in the 18th and (more particularly) the 17th centuries was, to say the least, unstable. The point can be illustrated by sampling some of the ways in which staccato notes played in a single up- or down-bow have been described. Francesco Rognoni (1620) described this as ‘il lireggiare affettuoso’, Muffat (1698) as a pétillement (‘crackling’), Piani (1712) as ‘notes égales et articulées d’un même coup d’archet’ (repeated verbatim by Corrette in 1738), Herrando (1756) as picada (‘pricking or biting’), while L’abbé le fils (1761) called it a ‘coup d’archet articulé’, an expression applied by Bailleux (1779) to an ordinary detached stroke. Galeazzi describes it as ‘note picchettate’ and adds that many, believing that the technique was developed by Tartini, refer to ‘note Tartiniate’. Cambini (1803) described it as martellement (a term which had already been used by L’abbé le fils and others for a mordent). This lack of agreement about terminology can in some cases make it quite difficult to know whether a type of bowing now identified by a 19th-century label was in fact part of earlier violinists’ expressive armoury.

The other aspect of this problem is that, historically, notation for special bowings has never been able to reflect adequately the range of distinctions described or implied by violin treatises. The choice of dots, dashes, strokes, daggers and squiggles on their own or combined with slurs can suggest to modern eyes a more precise notational vocabulary than is in fact the case. When in 1954 the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung ran a musicological competition for essays which could establish the significance of wedges, strokes and dots in W.A. Mozart’s works they fuelled a long-standing debate which, if nothing else, demonstrates the impossibility of giving consistent, universally-applicable answers to these questions. In the musical examples below it is often the case that the same notation could imply a range of different bowstrokes.

(v) Use of slurs.

Slurs (to indicate that more than one note is to be played in a single bowstroke) are relatively few and far between in early violin music, though this may tell us more about the limitations of movable type as a way of printing music than about performing practice. Gabriele Usper in a contribution to his uncle Francesco Usper’s Compositione armoniche op.3 (Venice, 1619) writes ‘ligate’ explaining his placing of groups of four notes under a slur. Rognoni (1620) uses the term ‘Lireggiare’ to describe the technique of playing two, three, or more notes in a single bow (emphasizing that in order to do this successfully the player must save bow and exert pressure with the wrist). Uccellini makes frequent use of slurs, some spanning quite long groups of demisemiquavers. By the end of the century, with bows about one and a half times as long as those being used in the 1620s, players were taking sweeps of notes into a single bow. We see this captured on the engraved plates of the Roger edition of Corelli’s Sonatas op.5 (1710), for example. Burney tells us, too, that Pietro Castrucci came in for a certain amount of ridicule for advertising in 1731 that, in one of his own solos, he would execute ‘twenty-four notes with one bow’ (BurneyH, ii, 770).

(vi) Tremolo.

Before the end of the 18th century the term tremolo is ambiguous. (It is, for example, one of the terms used for vibrato.) Tremolo is never used in the Baroque period to indicate a rapid reiteration of a single note with individual bowstrokes. Monteverdi does, of course, describe a measured version of this as a crucial device for projecting a sense of agitation in the stile concitato. But tremolo itself refers usually to the pulsing of the same note in a single bowstroke. It is used in this way by Gabriele Usper (1619) and Tarquinio Merula (Canzoni da suonare à tre, 1639). The name derives, it seems, from the resemblance of this effect to an organ Tremulant. Marini’s sonata ‘La Foscarina’ (1617) calls for a tremolo with the bow in the violin parts at the same time as the basso continuo player is instructed to engage the tremulant stop (ex.3). Farina has a ‘tremulo’ section in Capriccio Stravagante (1627) with a foreword directing the player to use a pulsating bow hand to imitate an organ tremulant (in the basso part ‘Der tremulant’ is given as a translation of ‘Il tremulo’). Andreas Hammerschmidt’s Musicalischer Andachten dritter Theil (1662) contains the direction ‘play four notes in one stroke with your bow (like the tremulants in an organ)’. The last piece in J.J. Walther’s Hortulus chelicus (1688), includes a section in which the violin imitates an ‘Organo Tremolante’ by pulsing double-stopped minims in a single bow. Roger North talks about dividing long notes into shorter ones in the same bow ‘as in the Italians tremolo’ and he too likens the effect to ‘the shaking stop of an organ’. Brossard (2/1705) states categorically that the device is intended to imitate the tremulant stop on the organ. Bailleux (1779) calls this ‘balancement’ and, noting the Italians call it ‘tremolo’, says that it produces the effect of an organ tremulant.

Sometimes the device has a programmatic function – most famously in the winter scenes of Lully’s Isis (1677) and Purcell’s King Arthur (1691) (ex.4). Another ‘orchestral’ example of the device occurs in Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro (Act 4 scene iv). Most often it is simply intended as a kind of bowed vibrato. It is one possible explanation for the markings ‘con affetti’, ‘affetti’ or ‘affetto’ which appear above long notes in sonatas by Marini, Buonamente and Scarani, especially in situations where faster movement in other voices seems to rule out improvised embellishment. Right at the end of the 18th century Galeazzi expressed a preference for this kind of tremolo over left-hand vibrato as a way of being expressive. (Incidentally, he used the term ‘tremolo’ for both devices.)

The device was not restricted to the violin family. Francesco Rognoni (1620) wrote enthusiastically of the viol being played ‘con bella archata accentata, con i suoi tremoli’ (‘with fine accented bowing, with its tremoli). Christopher Simpson (1659), however, had some reservations: ‘Some also affect a Shake or Tremble with the Bow, like the Shaking-Stop of an Organ, but the frequent use thereof is not (in my opinion) much commendable’.

(vii) Staccato bowings.

The term staccato is the past-participle of staccare, itself a shortened form of distaccare ‘to detach’. It was used twice by Johann Walther in his Scherzi da Violino solo (1676) in contexts that imply short separated strokes. Brossard (2/1705) defined staccato as ‘approximately the same thing as spiccato, that is to say that on all bowed instruments the bowstrokes should be dry and very detached or with each note separated from the others without being drawn out’. He gave Picqué and Pointé as French synonyms (see Piquer and Pointer). (Note that he associates staccato particularly with bowed instruments; tronco, on the other hand, is a word which he says applies equally to voices and instruments.) At about the same time Roger North described ‘Stoccata or stabb’ as ‘a peculiar art of the hand upon instruments of the bow’. He recommended it especially as a way of producing expressive contrasts, citing the example of Matteis who ‘used this manner to set off a rage, and then repentance; for after a violent stoccata, he entered at once with the bipedalian [i.e. 2' long] bow, as speaking no less in a passion, but of the contrary temper’. Interestingly, although the Matteis Ayres abound in quite complex slurred bowings, there are no explicit detached-bowing staccato markings and just one group of ten semiquavers slurred with dots. Leopold Mozart defines Stoccato or Staccato as ‘struck; signifying that the notes are to be well separated from each other, with short strokes, and without dragging the bow’.

Eventually, dots placed above or below the notehead became the accepted way of indicating staccato playing. But since dots of this kind were also a normal way of specifying notes égales, their presence in Baroque scores is somewhat ambiguous. One of the earliest examples of (apparently staccato) dots above noteheads appears in G.A. Pandolfi’s Sonate a violino solo op.3 (1660). Two Bolognese publications, Pirro Albergati’s Pletro armonico op.5 (1687) and Bartolomeo Bernardi’s Sonate da camera a trè op.1 (1692) have ‘spicco’, a term which F.O. Manfredini (Concerti op.3, 1718) uses in conjunction with dots. Antonio Veracini uses short vertical strokes to indicate staccato in several sonatas of his op.1 (1692). Presumably, the separation of notes by rests in much 17th- and early 18th-century music is designed to achieve a staccato effect (as in the Vivace opening of Corelli’s op.6 no.8 which is contrasted a few bars later with a Grave marked ‘Arcate sostenuto e come stà’). Leopold Mozart uses the term Abgestossen (see Abstossen) when explaining the significance of little strokes written above or below the notes. The terms Absetzen (used by Quantz), Aufheben (Löhlein and Reichardt) and Erheben (Leopold Mozart) imply a lifted off-the-string stroke.

A variety of slurred staccato bowings formed part of accomplished violinists’ techniques well before 1750 even if, as we have seen (see §II, 2(iv) above), there was little agreement about what label to give these bowings. Complex staccato bowings seem to have been regarded as a particularly violinistic form of virtuosity: Rousseau (1687) remarks disdainfully that the dessus de viole is above such vulgar display: ‘It is never necessary [on the dessus] to practise those passages called Ricochets which we endure so reluctantly in violin playing’.

Groups of demisemiquavers with both slurs and dots appear in J.J. Walther’s Hortulus chelicus (1688; ex.5). Many virtuoso examples appear in 18th-century sonatas. Castrucci (op.2 no.10, 1734) has a group of 22 quavers with dots under a slur with the direction ‘Tutti in un Arcata’ (judging from the advertisement referred to above, virtuoso slurred bowings must have been a Castrucci speciality). In 1777 W.A. Mozart praised the playing of Ignaz Fränzl for its ‘beautiful staccato, played with a single bowing, up or down’.

(viii) Ondulé, ondeggiando, bariolage.

Walther uses the term ondeggiando (It: ‘undulating’) in his Scherzi da violino solo (1676) to describe a slurred oscillation between two strings. He had earlier called for the same effect (but without using the term) in Hortulus chelicus (1688). The sixth of Biber’s ‘Mystery Sonatas’ (c1676) has an extended passage using this bowing which starts with alternating unisons (here facilitated by the scordatura tuning) – an effect which Baillot was later to call Bariolage (ex.6). This is yet another instance of rather unstable terminology: Tartini and Löhlein use ‘ondeggiamento’ to refer to wavering of pitch in vibrato.

(ix) Arpeggiando, batterie.

There are many instances in early violin music of arpeggiando bowings – and the term itself appears in various sources (meaning to arpeggiate chords using slurred bowings). Walther has ‘arpeggiando con arcate sciolte’ written above broken-chord figurations in his Scherzi da violino solo. Earlier in this volume he had used ‘Harpeggiato’ above what appear to be a continuation of a rather different kind of bowing pattern. There are many later examples. Vivaldi, in the Concerto in B minor from L’estro armonico op.3 (1712) has a Larghetto section in which all four solo violins are given different articulations and bowing patterns; the first violin is instructed to arpeggiate in demisemiquavers, the 2nd and 4th violins are given legato slurrings, while the 3rd violin is given a staccato pattern (ex.7).

Rousseau, in his Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), identifies a continuous arpeggio played with separate bows as a ‘batterie’, and Corrette in L’art de se perfectionner dans le violin (Paris, 1782) provides several models for translating notated chords into batteries. The Bach Chaconne from the Partita in D minor (bwv1004) provides obvious instances of chords which need to be treated in this way (ex.8).

(x) Mixed bowings.

Several types of bowstroke might be combined in the execution of a particular passage. Ex.9, for instance, contains slurred staccatos, slurs within slurs, and the same pattern played both down-bow and up-bow. In addition, the bowing pattern creates a cross-rhythm since it consists of four quavers in 3/4.

(xi) Multiple stops, chords and special effects.

Double stops (bowing several notes simultaneously) and chords feature in violin literature from early in the 17th century (see Multiple stopping).

It is probable that violinists had discovered the expressive possibilities of effects like Sul tasto or sulla tastiera (to bow, or occasionally pluck, near or over the fingerboard, resulting in an ethereal tone; see also Flautando, and §II, 3(xii) below) and Sul ponticello (to bow close to the bridge of the instrument) long before they were formally described in any treatises (though it is interesting that Quantz warns against playing too close to the bridge without acknowledging the potential for this to be used as a special effect). Tobias Hume has the instruction ‘drum this with the back of your bow’ in The First Part of Ayres (London, 1605) – the first documented instance of Col legno. Farina calls for this effect in Capriccio Stravagante. The novelty of such a device stands out in the way something which can now be invoked with a simple, conventional direction is here explained fully: ‘Qui si batte con il legno del archetto sopra le corde’ (‘Here the wood of the bow is tapped on the strings’).

3. Bowstrokes after c1780.

This section is divided from the previous one by ‘c1780’ as a rough chronological marker. The inference that the widespread use of bows having more features in common with the Tourte model (perfected in the mid-1780s) than with the ‘Baroque’ bows is a crucial step. This development was accompanied (and promoted) by a different ethos about the basic stroke (parallel to the changing concept of the ‘ordinary’ touch for keyboard players) and by an expansion of the range of special bowings. There was a movement away from a naturally articulated stroke towards a more legato style. The new ideal is stated very directly at the end of the 18th century by Galeazzi: ‘in playing an adagio, the aim above all is to produce evenness, not just in the left hand but also in bowing, joining everything even more than seems possible … changing the bow as imperceptibly as possible demands considerable little skill’.

A case could be made for placing the turning point later than 1780. The Tourte bow took some time to gain universal acceptance (though in his edition of Leopold Mozart’s Méthode (Paris, c1804), Woldemar described it as ‘the only one in use’) and it is only in the treatises of the 19th century that we find a significantly different perspective on the management of bowstrokes.

In the period leading up to the development and acceptance of the Tourte bow, it is clear that there was considerable variety in the types of bow used by players. Leopold Mozart tries to accommodate this in his description of how to play up-bow staccato: ‘The weight of a violin bow contributes much, as does also in no less degree its length or shortness. A heavier and longer bow must be used more lightly and retarded somewhat less; whereas a lighter and shorter bow must be pressed down more and retarded more’.

Despite the abundance of systematic instruction addressed to advanced players published in the 19th century, much ambiguity surrounds the notation of certain kinds of bowings. In particular, there is considerable inconsistency in the use of dots, strokes and horizontal lines in conjunction with slurs to indicate varying degrees of separation from portato to flying Spiccato.

A low right elbow remained a distinctive feature of violin technique after 1800. It finds its most extraordinary expression in the recommendation by Campagnoli (1824) that players practise with a cord around their elbow linked to their clothing to prevent the elbow from rising too far away from the body. It can be seen in many 19th-century depictions of violinists such as the drawing of Joseph Joachim in fig.18.

(i) Down-bow and up-bow.

Much greater freedom in ways of organizing bowing is obvious in 19th-century repertory and there is considerable emphasis on cultivating an up-bow which could be as forceful as a down-bow. Nevertheless, for ensemble playing the old ‘rule of the down-bow’ continued to provide a basis for uniformity. Spohr (1833) emphasized this: ‘the orchestral player must conform strictly to the old rule which prescribes: take the strong beats in the bar with the down-bow, the weak beats with the up-bow, and thus begin every bar with a down-bow and end it with an up-bow’.

(ii) The legato slur.

Possibly the most conspicuous musical characteristic of the Tourte bow is its ability to produce a seamless legato. A preference for this kind of bowing is evident in many early 19th-century treatises beginning with the Méthode produced by Baillot, Rode and Kreutzer for the Paris Conservatoire in 1803. Stowell (1985, p.197) has made the point that comparison of the original editions of Haydn quartets with early 19th-century editions indicates that the use of legato slurs was on the increase.

(iii) Portato (It.; Fr. notes portées, louré).

This expressive re-articulation or pulsing of notes joined in a single bowstroke was described by Galeazzi as ‘neither separate nor slurred, but almost dragged’. A similar stroke had earlier been described by Leopold Mozart though he does not use the term portato. Baillot emphasizes that portato achieves a kind of undulation of the sound (rather than separated notes). He gave two alternative methods of notating the effect: firstly, a wavy line (also used to indicate vibrato which Baillot considered a related device) and secondly, dots under a slur. (Brahms was later to criticize the ambiguity of this notation.) Later in the 19th century it became common to indicate portato with lines under a slur. Heinrich Dessauer’s 1903 annotated edition of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor uses both (ex.10).

There are other, less gentle, ways in which slurred notes can be articulated, such as saccadé, in which the second of the two notes under a slur is sharply accented. Described in detail by Baillot (1834), it is similar to what Spohr (1833) called ‘the Viotti bowing’.

(iv) Détaché.

The term détaché simply means ‘separated’ and it can be applied to any notes not linked by a slur. Baillot’s comprehensive survey of détaché strokes subdivided them into muted détaché (such as the grand détaché and martelé) where stopping the bow on the string deadens the vibrations and thus creates a ‘muted’ accent, elastic détaché which covered off-the-string strokes, and dragged détaché (détaché traîné) where smooth bow changes leave no audible gap between each note.

(v) Martelé.

The literal meaning of this term is ‘hammered’, referring to a percussive on-string stroke produced by an explosive release following heavy initial pressure (‘pinching’) on the string, and a subsequent stop of the arm (and tone) before next ‘pinching’. The result is a sharp, biting sforzando-like attack and a rest between strokes. The early bow, with its comparatively gentle attack, cannot produce this stroke effectively. Martelé can be played in any region of the bow, but is best between middle and point. However, it cannot be executed in excess of a certain speed because of the preparation required for each stroke. Martelé may be indicated by dots or by arrow-head strokes as in ex.11.

(vi) Staccato.

As noted in §II, 2(vii) above the term Staccato literally means ‘detached’ and does not necessarily imply anything about whether this effect is achieved with separate or slurred bowings. In string playing from the late 18th century on, however, it was more generally applied to notes separated from each other in the same bowstroke, normally (or at least, more manageably) up-bow (see ex.12). Baillot classified this with the ‘muted détaché’ strokes.

(vii) Sautillé.

This is a rapid detached stroke played in the middle of the bow so that the bow bounces of its own volition. Sautillé is indicated by dots (sometimes by arrow-headed strokes). Classified by Baillot as one of the ‘elastic détaché’ strokes.

(viii) Spiccato.

Although this term was originally a synonym for staccato (see §II, 2(iv) above), by the early 19th century it was consistently used for a short off-the-string stroke, sometimes a synonym for sautillé.

(ix) Ricochet, jeté, flying staccato, staccato volante, flying spiccato.

In this bowstroke the bow is thrown on the string, making contact in its upper half, so that it will bounce or ‘ricochet’ off the string from two to six or more times. These terms are rarely used as a direction, the bowing being implied by context and indicated, as in ex.13, by dots within a slur (like other forms of staccato).

(x) Tremolo.

The modern tremolo bowstroke is generally used in the orchestra but also (after the mid-19th century) in some chamber music and solo playing: the same note is reiterated very rapidly with very little bow at the point. The notation is as in ex.14.

(xi) Multiple stops.

There is considerable variety in performing triple and quadruple stops: they can be spread (evenly, or in pairs of notes) or struck as a single chord in so far as the curve of the bridge allows. Obviously the latter is more possible for 3-note chords than for those involving all four strings. Baillot gives instructions for playing passages of triple stops. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries it seems that placing the bottom of a chord on the beat and then spreading it upwards was still favoured. That, at least, is the method described by Galeazzi. Spohr is the first person to describe the modern practice of breaking a chord in two with the upper notes coming on the beat.

Many passages notated as chords are intended to be arpeggiated in some way. This may be indicated through having the first in a series of chords spelled out as an arpeggiation or through an instruction such as arpeggiando. 19th-century writers stress the importance of finding interesting ways of arpeggiating – through varied bowing patterns, picking out the bass or the top of the chord, or bringing out a melody (see also Multiple stopping.

(xii) Special effects.

Sul ponticello, bowing very close to the bridge to produce a glassy timbre, is called for by both Haydn and Boccherini but throughout the 19th century continued to be regarded as a special effect. Galeazzi mentions it as evidence of the ‘ridiculous extremes’ some players would go to for novelty. Sul tasto, or bowing over the fingerboard, produces a softer, more diffuse sound. This device is mentioned by Galeazzi and described in detail by Baillot. Paganini called for it in the 24 Caprices specifically to imitate the flute (ex.15). Flautando or flautato is the flute-like sound produced by using very little weight with a fast bowstroke. The effect is made more pronounced by playing near the fingerboard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MersenneHU

MoserGV

R. Rognoni: Passagi per potersi essercitare nel diminuire terminatamente con ogni sorte di instromenti (Venice, 1592); lost, MS copy by F. Chrysander, US-SFsc

F. Rognoni Taeggio: Selva de varii passaggi secondo l’uso moderno per cantare e suonare con ogni sorte de stromenti (Milan, 1620/R)

G. Zanetti: Il scolaro … per imparar a suonare di violino, et altri stromenti (Milan, 1645)

C. Simpson: The Division-Violist, or An Introduction to the Playing upon a Ground (London, 1659/R, 2/1667 [dated 1665]/R as Chelys: minuritionem artificis exornata/The Division Viol, 3/1712)

J. Rousseau: Traité de viole (Paris, 1687/R); Eng. trans. in The Consort no.33 (1977), 225–36; no.34 (1978), 302–11; no.36 (1980), 365–70; no.37 (1981), 402–11; no.38 (1982), 463–6

G. Falck: Idea boni cantoris, das ist Getreu gründliche Anleitung (Nuremberg, 1688)

J. Lenton: The Gentleman's Diversion, or The Violin Explained (London, 1693, 2/1702 as The Useful Instructor on the Violin)

G. Muffat: Florilegium secundum (Passau, 1698; ed. in DTÖ, iv, Jg.2/ii, 1895/R)

S. de Brossard: Dictionaire de musique (Paris, 1703/R, 3/c1708/R); ed. and trans. A. Gruber (Henryville, PA, 1982)

M.P. de Montéclair: Méthode facile pour apprendre à jouer du violon (Paris, 1711–12)

P. Dupont: Principes du violon par demandes et réponce (Paris, 1713, 3/1719/R, 4/1740)

M. Corrette: L’école d’Orphée (Paris, 1738/R, enlarged 2/1779, ?3/1790)

H. le Blanc: Défense de la basse de viole (Amsterdam, 1740/R)

J.D. Berlin: Musikalske elementer (Trondheim, 1744); ed. B. Korsten (Bergen, 1977)

F. Geminiani: The Art of Playing on the Violin (London, 1751); ed. D.D. Boyden (London, 1952)

J.J. Quantz: Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (Berlin, 1752/R, 3/1789/R; Eng trans., 1966, 2/1985, as On playing the Flute)

J. Herrando: Arte y puntual explicación del modo de tocar el violin (Paris, 1756; Eng. trans., 1974)

L. Mozart: Versuch eine gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756/R, 4/1800; Eng. trans., 1948, 2/1951/R)

L’abbé le fils: Principes du violon (Paris, 1761/R, 2/1772)

G. Tartini: Traité des agréments de la musique (Paris, 1771) [trans of Regole per arrivare a saper ben suonar il violono, MS, before 1756, I-Vc]; ed. and trans E.R. Jacobi, MQ, xlvii (1961), 207–23

G.S. Löhlein: Anweisung zum Violinspielen (Leipzig and Züllichau, 1774, enlarged 3/1797 by J.F. Reichardt)

J.F. Reichardt: Über die Pflichten des Ripien-Violinisten (Berlin and Leipzig, 1776)

F. Galeazzi: Elementi teorico-pratici di musica, i (Rome, 1791, enlarged 2/1817); Eng. trans., ed. A. Franscarelli (DMA diss., Eastman School of Music, U. of Rochester, 1968); ii (Rome, 1796); Eng. trans. of pt 4, section 2, ed. G.W. Harwood (thesis, Brigham Young U., 1980)

G.M. Cambini: Nouvelle méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris, c1795/R)

A. Bailleux: Méthode raisonée pour apprendre à jouer du violon (Paris, 1798/R)

M. Woldemar: Méthode pour le violon (Paris, 1798, 2/c1800 as Grande méthode ou étude élémentaire pour le violon)

P. Baillot, P. Rode and R. Kreutzer: Méthode de violon (Paris, 1803/R)

B. Campagnoli: Nouvelle méthode de la mécanique progressive du jeu de violon (Leipzig, 1824; It. trans., n.d.; Eng trans., 1856)

L. Spohr: Violin-Schule (Vienna, 1833)

P. Baillot: L’art du violon (Paris, 1834/R; Eng. trans., 1991)

M. Greulich: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Streichinstrumentenspiels im 16. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Berlin, 1934)

S. Babitz: ‘Differences between 18th-Century and Modern Violin Bowing’, The Score, no.19 (1957), 34–55, pubd separately, rev. (Los Angeles, 1970)

J. Wilson, ed.: Roger North on Music (London, 1959)

I. Galamian: Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962, 2/1985)

K. Marx: Die Entwicklung des Violoncells und seiner Spieltechnik bis J.L. Duport (1520–1820) (Regensburg, 1963)

D.D. Boyden: The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965/R)

A. Cohen: ‘An Eighteenth-Century Treatise on the Viol by Etienne Loulié’, JVdGSA, iii (1966), 17–23

K. Cooper and J. Zsko: ‘Georg Muffat’s Observations on the Lully Style of Performance’, MQ, liii (1967), 220–45

B.G. Seagrave and J. Berman: The A.S.T.A. Dictionary of Bowing Terms (Urbana, IL, 1968)

N. Zaslaw: ‘The Compleat Orchestral Musician’, EMc, vii (1979), 46–57

J. Hsu: A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique (New York, 1981)

R. Stowell: Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985)

C. Brown: ‘Bowing Styles, Vibrato and Portamento in 19th-Century Violin Playing’, JRMA, cxiii (1988), 97–128

C. Brown: ‘Dots and Strokes in Late 18th- and 19th-Century Music’, EMc, xxi (1993), 593–610

M. Smith: ‘The Cello Bow Held the Viol-Way: Once Common but now Almost Forgotten’, Chelys, xxiv (1995), 47–61

P. Allsop: ‘Violinistic Virtuosity in the Seventeenth-Century: Italian Supremacy or Austro-German Hegemony?’, Il saggitore musicale, iii (1996), 233–58

R. Riggs: ‘Mozart’s Notation of Staccato Articulation: a New Appraisal’, JM, xv (1997), 230–77

Bow

III. Non-Western instruments

The variety of bows used throughout the world reflects the musical requirements of and sometimes the symbolism associated with the many different bowed instruments. A distinction may be made between bows where the hair is kept taut either by an adjustable frog mechanism (European-type frogs have recently been adopted for many Japanese and Chinese bow types) or by the tension inherent in the bending of the bowstick when the bow hair is attached, and those where the bow hair is normally slack but the player uses one or more fingers curled around the hair to control tension during play. Examples of the last type are used in playing the Indonesian rebab and the Japanese kokyū. Bow hair lasts longer when it is not permanently under tension; thus some bows are shaped by carving, others by heating, and only tensioned when in use. Horsehair is usually the preferred material for bow hair, but in parts of Africa lengths of sisal suffice. 10th-century Chinese sources suggest that string instruments were sounded using a thin strip of bamboo (i.e. a friction stick) before horsehair was employed.

The length of the bow is related to musical needs. The non-melismatic and very rapid syllabic playing style of the Ganda endingidi (of Uganda) calls for an extremely short bow (about 18 cm), as do the brief, rhythmic but melismatic, phrases characteristic of the masenqo, played by the Ethiopian azmari (minstrels). The generally longer bows associated with Oriental traditions are obviously suited to longer melismatic phrases. The thickness of the bow is related to musical pitch (as in European usage). Heavy and therefore lower-pitched strings of instruments like the Rajasthani rāvanhatthā (fig.20) and the North African ribāb require more solidly-built bows. However, some thinner and therefore lighter bows are shaped so that there is adequate weight in the stick nearer the point of the bow (e.g. the Okinawan kūchō and Sundanese and Malaysian rebabs). In Kelantan, Malaysia, the elegant carving of the bow complements the rich decoration of the instrument and the costumes of the dancers and singers.

Other distinguishing features include the use of bells and other jingling devices attached to the bow to give a rhythmic accompaniment during play (e.g. the rāvanhatthā of Rajasthan and Gujarat and the Cretan lira). Bows may also be differentiated by the method of attaching the hair to the stick, which ranges from knotting directly onto the bowstick (notches are often carved in the stick to prevent slippage), knotting the hair after passing it through a hole in the stick, binding the hair onto an attachment cord, and using various types of frog.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.G. Farmer: Studies in Oriental Musical Instruments, i (London, 1931/R)

L.E.R. Picken: ‘Early Chinese Friction-Chordophones’, GSJ, xviii (1965), 82–9

J. Jenkins and P.R. Olsen: Music and Musical Instruments in the World of Islam (London, 1976)

F. Koizumi, Y. Tokumaro and O. Yamaguchi, eds.: Asian Musics in an Asian Perspective (Tokyo, 1977)

U. Wegner: Afrikanische Saiteninstrumente (Berlin, 1984)

Bowen, Eugene (Everett)

(b Biloxi, MS, 30 July 1950). American composer and performer. After studies at the California Institute of the Arts with Budd, Subotnick, Leonard Stein and Mel Powell (1970–72), he taught electronic music at Moorpark (California) College from 1975 to 1980. His compositional style combines simplicity and lyricism with an understated use of electronics. He has collaborated with Budd and Daniel Lentz both in performance and on recordings such as Budd’s Abandoned Cities and Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror. Bowen’s Longbow Angels, written for the double bass player Buell Neidlinger, took second place in a competition sponsored by the International Society of Bassists (1977). Bowen has been involved with folk and regional music; he has travelled extensively in Mexico and in 1971 was a lecturer on modern American music at the University of Guadalajara. His recording Traditional Folk Music in Ventura County (1977) employs both Mexican and Anglo performers. Mexican, African and North American folk musics have been significant in his work, particularly The Vermilion Sea (1994), which combines an American minimalism with the most advanced electronic and acoustic processes. Bowen has also composed music for film and collaborated with performance artists.

WORKS

Casida del llanto (F.García Lorca), 2 solo vv, elecs, 1971; Longbow Angels, 5 db, 1974; Junkyard Pieces, perc ens, 1976; Jewelled Settings, S, pf, vib, vc, elecs, 1980; Desert’s Edge, tape, vib, Chinese bells, synth, 1981; Steal Away, pf, 1981; The Vermilion Sea, mexican hp, elecs, 1994; Pillar of Fire, vc, elecs, 1995

Principal publishers: Soundings, Sespe Music

PETER GARLAND

Bowen [Bowin], James [Jemmy]

(b c1682; d after 1701). English singer. Jemmy Bowen was ‘the boy’ who sang Purcell’s ‘Lucinda is bewitching fair’ in Abdelazer in April 1695 at the reopening of Drury Lane Theatre. Purcell then gave him a series of demanding pieces in other stage works including The Indian Queen, Timon of Athens, The Libertine, The Rival Sisters and Oroonoko. Anthony Aston told of Purcell’s defence of the boy against interfering advice on the ornamentation of a song: ‘O let him alone … he will grace it more naturally than you, or I, can teach him’. After Purcell’s death Jeremiah Clarke, Daniel Purcell and Raphael Courteville (i) wrote for Bowen, notably duets with ‘the girl’ Letitia Cross. We last hear of him performing a Daniel Purcell song in Richard Steele’s The Funeral (?December 1701). Roger North saw him as on a par with the star performers of the day, writing that amateur singers aspired ‘to be Mr. Abell, Fideli, or Jemmy Bowen’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Aston: A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq., his Lives of the Late Famous Actors and Actresses (London, c1747); repr. in An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber … Written by Himself, ed. R.W. Lowe (London, 1889), ii, 312

M. Chan and J.C. Kassler, eds.: Roger North’s Cursory Notes of Musicke (Kensington, NSW, 1986)

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Purcell’s Stage Singers’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 105–29

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Bowen, (Edwin) York

(b London, 22 Feb 1884; dLondon, 23 Nov 1961). English composer and pianist. Already a talented pianist at the the age of eight, he studied at the Blackheath Conservatoire, then won an Erard Scholarship to the RAM, where he studied piano and composition (1898–1905), winning all the piano and composition prizes. He taught at the Tobias Matthay Piano School and was appointed a professor at the RAM in 1909.

Thereafter he embarked on a career both as a pianist and as a composer. He performed regularly at the Queen’s Hall and later at the Royal Albert Hall. His piano playing was recognized for its technical and artistic excellence. He formed duos with the viola player Tertis and the pianist Harry Isaacs. He could also play many orchestral instruments, a fact which contributed to the mastery of his orchestral writing. During World War I he played the horn in the band of the Scots Guards.

Bowen composed over 160 works, which show a blend of Romanticism and strong individuality. Several received their premières before 1914, and his Third Symphony (1951) and Fourth Piano Concerto (1929) were performed throughout his lifetime. He won the Sunday Express Prize for March RAF (1919), Chappell’s Orchestral Suite Prize and the Hawkes and Co. Prize for Intermezzo (1920). Saint-Saëns thought him the finest of English composers, and Sorabji expressed his admiration for the piano writing of the 24 Preludes, op.102 (1938). He is commemorated by a York Bowen Prize at the RAM, and some recordings of his music have appeared on the Hyperion label.

WORKS

for detailed list see Watson

Many orch works, incl. 4 pf concs., Vn Conc., 4 syms., tone poems

Sonatas for cl, fl, hn, ob, rec, va, vc, vn

Many pf works, incl. 24 Preludes, op.102, 1938

WRITINGS

Pedalling the Modern Pianoforte (London, 1936)

The Simplicity of Piano Technique (London, 1961)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.A. Forsyth: ‘York Bowen’, R.A.M. Club Magazine, no.80 (1928), 3–6

G. Beechey: ‘The Music of York Bowen (1884–1961): a Preliminary Catalogue’, MO, cvii (1983–4), 313–5

M. Watson: York Bowen: a Centenary Tribute (London, 1984) [incl. list of works]

MONICA WATSON

Bower, John Dykes.

See Dykes bower, john.

Bow harp.

A term used (after the German Bogenharfe) particularly in the classification of African instruments for a form of ‘arched harp’ (see Harp, §§I and 6) where the strings are at one end attached to the resonator and at the other to an onbuilt curved neck. Some organologists have however proposed the term as applicable to a chordophone on which the strings are attached to either end of a curved, bow-shaped stick or neck, where the resonator is attached to the neck in a way sufficiently permanent to justify the term ‘harp’ (as opposed to a Musical bow with attached resonator); it has been applied to ancient Indian harps (see Vīnā) and its modern survivors in Afghanistan and India.

Bowie [Jones], David (Robert)

(b Brixton, London, 8 Jan 1947). English rock singer, songwriter and producer. His career has witnessed a large number of musical changes. His influence on a succession of styles and their attendant subcultures – glam and punk in the 1970s, new romanticism in the 1980s and Britpop in the 1990s – has made him arguably the most important British recording artist since the Beatles.

He began recording in the mid-1960s as Davy [Davie] Jones, heading a succession of short-lived rhythm and blues and mod groups. In 1966 he changed his name to Bowie in order to avoid confusion with Davey Jones of the Monkees. His early work, influenced by Anthony Newley, had little in common with the dominant rock styles of the day and was largely overlooked. In 1969, in the guise of a hippy singer-songwriter, he achieved his first hit with the single Space Oddity (Phillips), a tale of space-age alienation released to coincide with the recent Apollo moon-landing. His 1971 album, the rock-orientated The Man who Sold the World (Mercury), which fictionalized the schizophrenia that plagued his step-brother and many of his relatives, heralded a decade of remarkable creativity. Hunky Dory (RCA, 1971) was a more conventionally melodic work, with sweeping orchestral arrangements, piano and acoustic guitar. It contains many of Bowie’s best-known songs, including Life on Mars?, a parody of Sinatra’s performances of My Way, and Changes. However it was not until The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (RCA, 1972) that he achieved mainstream recognition. The first English pop star to declare openly his bisexuality, he set his fey vocals against the hard rock of his band, the Spiders From Mars. On stage, he developed the alter ego of Ziggy Stardust, a fictitious alien rocker dressed in Japanese Kabuki-style clothes (see illustration), and his performances introduced a level of theatricality which was new to pop.

By 1973 Bowie was opening up his music to other influences, inluding avant-garde jazz on Aladdin Sane (RCA, 1973), while his most successful album in artistic terms, Diamond Dogs (RCA, 1974) – in part based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 – incorporated disco, rhythm and blues and chanson. In the mid-1970s Bowie moved to the USA and achieved success with Young Americans (RCA, 1975) and Station to Station (RCA, 1976). These albums mixed contemporary American dance music with European melodic structures and helped to popularize black styles with the white mainstream. Low (RCA, 1977), ‘Heroes’ (RCA, 1977) and Lodger (RCA, 1979), recorded with Brian Eno and co-produced by Tony Visconti, are Bowie’s most innovatory albums. Low is particularly important in the history of pop; half electronic pop and half extended instrumental pieces which incorporate ambient and mood musics, this album democratized the synthesizer after the excess of progressive rock, paving the way for a wave of British bands such as Joy Division, Human League, the Eurythmics and Soft Cell.

Scary Monsters (and Supercreeps) (RCA, 1980) was outstanding and included the inventive work of the guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson). Bowie’s melodic genius is highlighted on songs such as Ashes to Ashes, which was the sequel to Space Oddity and possessed one of the finest pop videos. The pop album Let’s Dance, (EMI, 1983) brought greater commercial success, but as Bowie attempted to appease his mainstream audience throughout the rest of the decade, his music lost its edge and several poor albums ensued. It was not until the mid-1990s that Bowie regained his inventive touch. Reunited with producer Brian Eno, on Outside (RCA, 1995) he almost completely abandoned conventional song structures on tracks such as the haunting The Motel, while 1997’s innovatory album, Earthling (RCA), mixes grunge and drum and bass to good effect. The album hours … (Virgin, 1999) was a return to a more conventionally melodic pop sensibility.

Despite his commercial success (eight number one albums and 23 top ten singles in the UK alone), Bowie remains something of a cult artist who opens up mainstream pop to avant-garde ideas. He also represents a British tradition of irony and artifice within popular music. By adopting a variety of alter egos (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke), Bowie destroyed the mythical status of the performer within pop, and showed that what the singer sang or how he or she looked was not neccessarily a true reflection of the performer’s real identity. In addition to being an underrated singer (live Bowie has a powerful, open-throated singing style with plenty of vibrato and an avowedly English sound with none of the Americanisms adopted by Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart), he is a brilliant songwriter and talented musician, arranger and producer (he relaunched the careers of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in the early 1970s). Bowie has also involved himself in extra-musical activities such as video, film, mime, theatre, writing, painting, sculpting and wallpaper design. In 1998 he set up Bowienet, becoming the first pop star to run his own website simultaneously as an internet service provider. His cultural significance has been enormous: he appealed to the sexually and emotionally dispossessed and the suburban intellectuals who saw in him the epitome of cool. In the 1990s artists such as Morrissey, Pulp, Blur and Suede in the UK and the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails and Madonna in the USA have cited Bowie as a major influence. Even the classical composer Philip Glass has written two symphonies for full orchestra (released on Point Music in 1993 and 1997 respectively) based on Bowie’s Low and ‘Heroes’ albums. In 1999 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Berklee College of Music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Brazier: ‘Bowie: Beauty before Outrage’, Melody Maker (4 Sept 1976)

R. Carr and C.S. Murray: David Bowie: an Illustrated Record (London, 1981)

E. Thomson and D. Gutman, eds.: The Bowie Companion (London, 1981/R)

K. Cann: David Bowie: a Chronology (London, 1983)

S. Frith: ‘Only Dancing: David Bowie Flirts with the Issues’, Zoot-Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: an Anthology of Fashion and Music, ed. A. McRobbie (Basingstoke, 1983/R), 132–40

I. Chambers: Urban Rhythms (London, 1985)

K. Pitt: Bowie: the Pitt Report (London, 1985)

R. Taylor: The Death and Resurrection Show: from Shaman to Superstar (London, 1985)

P. and L. Gilman: Alias David Bowie (London, 1986/R)

A.F. Moore: Rock: the Primary Text (Buckingham, 1993)

D. Buckley: The Complete Guide to the Music of David Bowie (London, 1996)

D. Buckley: Strange Fascination (London, 1999)

DAVID BUCKLEY

Bowin, James [Jemmy].

See Bowen, James.

Bowles, Michael

(b Riverstown, Sligo, 30 Nov 1909). Irish radio producer, conductor and composer. He joined the Army School of Music in 1932 as an officer cadet under Brase. As part of his training he completed a degree in music at University College, Dublin, where he studied with Larchet and O'Dwyer. In 1940 he became the director of music and the principal conductor of the national broadcasting service. He expanded the station orchestra and instituted a series of public concerts for the ensemble; he also founded the Radio Éireann Concert Orchestra and the choral group, Cór Radio Éireann. Bowles resigned from his post in 1948, responding to pressure brought about by extensive expansions in broadcasting. He subsequently taught and conducted in New Zealand and the USA before returning to Ireland in 1970. His publications include a number of articles and a book, The Art of Conducting (New York, 1959). Sacred choral settings and songs number among his compositions.

JOSEPH J. RYAN

Bowles, Paul

(b Jamaica, NY, 30 Dec 1910; d Tangier, Morocco, 18 Nov 1999). American composer and writer. As a young man he studied with Copland in New York, Berlin and Paris. In 1931 they travelled to Morocco, where he completed his first chamber and solo piano works. He continued his studies with Nadia Boulanger, Roger Sessions, Virgil Thomson and Israel Citkowitz. Further travel to Guatemala, Mexico, Ceylon, southern India and the Sahara enabled him to explore indigenous musical styles which were to influence his own compositions. In 1937 he met the writer Jane Auer, whom he married the following year; together they travelled to Mexico, where he visited Silvestre Revueltas, whose compositional style had a considerable influence on his own.

Upon his return to New York, Bowles joined the musical milieu of Henry Brant, David Diamond, Citkowitz and other members of the League of Composers. Between 1936 and 1963 he wrote several ballet scores for the American Ballet Caravan and incidental theatre music for Orson Welles, John Houseman, William Saroyan and primarily Tennessee Williams. He also composed under the aegis of the Work Projects Administration and the Federal Theatre Project. In 1943, Leonard Bernstein conducted the première of the zarzuela The Wind Remains, choreographed and danced by Merce Cunningham, at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Several Latin-inspired orchestral works followed. Under the guidance of Virgil Thomson, Bowles began writing music criticism for the New York Herald Tribune (from 1942), covering jazz and folk, as well as art music; he also contributed articles on these topics to Modern Music.

Increasingly dissatisfied with his role as a composer of Gebrauchsmusik, Bowles left New York for Tangier in 1947. There he completed his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (London, 1949), the success of which encouraged him to become more active as a writer and translator. Despite his decision to leave the world of music and devote himself to prose, he composed one additional opera, Yerma (1948–55) for torch-singer Libby Holman, and continued to write songs throughout his life. His honours included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1941) and a Rockefeller grant (1959), which enabled him to pursue ethnomusicological research and record traditional music in Morocco. His collection now resides in the Archive for Folk culture at the Library of Congress.

Bowles's compositional style is witty, aphoristic and tuneful. He wrote almost exclusively in short forms that evoke, particularly in the solo piano works, American jazz and folk elements, Latin American dance rhythms and Spanish harmonies. His operas are constructed as series of separate songs, each of which is unfailingly idiomatic. His orchestral music, which tends to be at once concise and kaleidoscopic, employing collage-like juxtapositions, displays little thematic development. Despite his fame as a writer, Bowles always thought of himself primarily as a composer. Even though many of his compositions remained unpublished at the time of his death, his music enjoyed a renaissance during the final decade of his life, inspiring numerous recordings and performances.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Stage: Yankee Clipper (ballet), 1936; Denmark Vesey (op, C.H. Ford), 1939; Pastorela (ballet), 1941; The Wind Remains (zarzuela, after F. García Lorca), 1941–3, New York, 1943; Colloque Sentimental (ballet), 1944; Yerma (op, after García Lorca), 1948–55

Incid music: Doctor Faustus (C. Marlowe), 1936; Horse Eats Hat (M. Labiche), 1936; My Heart's in the Highlands (W. Saroyan), 1939; Love's Old Sweet Song (Saroyan), 1940; Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare), 1940; Watch on the Rhine (L. Hellman), 1941; South Pacific (D. Heyward and H. Rigby), 1943; ‘Tis the Pity She's a Whore (J. Ford), 1943; Liberty Jones (P. Barry), 1944; Jacobowsky and the Colonel (F. Werfel), 1944; The Glass Menagerie (T. Williams), 1945; Summer and Smoke (Williams), 1948; In the Summer House (J. Bowles), 1953; Edwin Booth (M. Geiger), 1958; Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams), 1959; The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (Williams), 1963; c15 other incid scores; c11 film scores

instrumental

Ens and solo: Sonata, ob, cl, 1931; Suite, small orch, 1931–2; Scènes d'Anabase (St J. Perse), T, ob, pf, 1932; Sonata, fl, 1932; Mediodia: Grupo de danzas Mexicanas, fl, cl, tpt, 7 strings, pf, 1937; Music for a Farce, cl, tpt, perc, perc, 1938; Romantic Suite, 6 wind, str, pf, 1938; Pastorela ‘First Suite’, orch, 1947; Conc., 2 pf, wind, perc, 1947, orchd 1949

Pf: Tamanar, 1931; La femme de Dakar, 1933; Guayanilla, 1933; Impasse de Tombouctou, 1933; Nocturne, 2 pf, 1935; 2 Portraits, 1935; Prélude pour Bernard Suarès, 1936; Folk Preludes, 1939; Huapango I-II (El sol), 1939; Suite, 2 pf, 1939; El bejuco, 1943; El indio, 1943; La cuelga, 1946; Orosí, 1946; Sayula, 1946; Iquitos (Tierra mojada), 1947; Carretera de Estepona, 1947; 6 Preludes, 1947; Sonatina, 1947; Night Waltz, 2 pf, 1948; Dance, 1949; Sonata, 2 pf, 1949; Cross Country, 2 pf, 1976

vocal

Songs (for medium v, pf, unless otherwise stated): In the Platinum Forest (P. Bowles), 1931; Danger de mort (G. Linze), 1933; Scenes from the Door (G. Stein), 1933; Memnon (J. Cocteau), 5 songs, 1934–5; Green Songs (R. Thomas), 1935; Rain Rots the Wood (Ford), 1935; 6 American Folk Songs, 1939; 12 American Folk Songs, 1939; Love like Wildfire, 4 songs; [Untitled] (R. Hepburn), 1941; A Little Closer, Please (Saroyan), 1941; Two Skies (J. Bowles), 1942; Night Without Sleep (Ford), 1943; Sailor's Song (Ford), 1943; 5 Spanish Songs (García Lorca), 1943; An American Hero (A. Law, N. Niles), 1944; 3 Songs from the Sierras (old Sp.), 1944; A Quarreling Pair (J. Bowles), 2 songs, 1945; David (F. Frost), 1945; In the Woods (P. Bowes), 1945; Baby, Baby (Saroyan), 1946; Blue Mountain Ballads (Williams), 4 songs, 1946; Once a Lady was Here (P. Bowles), 1946; Song of an Old Woman (J. Bowles), 1946; Letter to Freddy (Stein), 1947; On a Quiet Conscience (Charles I), 1947; Three (Williams), 1947; c20 others

Other vocal: Par le détroit, S, 4 male vv, hmn, 1933; Tornado Blues, SATB, pf, 1939; 3 Pastoral Songs (anon., Canon Dixon, S. O'Sullivan), T, str qt, pf, 1944; A Picnic Cantata (J. Schuyler), 4 solo vv, 2 pf, perc, 1953

MSS at Harry Ransom Research Center for the Humanities, Austin

Principal publishers: G. Schirmer, Theodore Presser

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Glanville-Hicks: ‘Paul Bowles: American Composer’, ML, xxvi (1945), 88–96

P. Garland: ‘Paul Bowles and the Baptism of Solitude’, Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture, 1973–1980 (Santa Fe, 1982), 186–218

J. Miller: Paul Bowles: a Descriptive Bibliography (Santa Barbara, CA, 1986)

G. Dagel Caponi: ‘A Nomad in New York: the Music of Paul Bowles, 1933–48’, American Music, vii/3 (1989), 278–314

C. Swan, ed.: Paul Bowles: Music (New York, 1995)

IRENE HERRMANN

Bowlly, Al(bert Alick)

(b Laurenço Marques [now Maputo], 7 Jan 1899; d London, 17 April 1941). British popular singer. His father was Greek, his mother was Lebanese. Bowlly was brought up in South Africa and joined Edgar Adeler’s leading dance band in 1922, touring South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, East Africa and the Far East. He left Adeler in 1924 and took up a residency at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. In 1927 he went to Germany and made his first recording, Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies. A prestigious engagement lasting one year followed at the Savoy Hotel, London, with the bandleader Fred Elizalde. He had a major break in 1930 when he joined a recording studio band led by Ray Noble, with whom he made the original versions of songs which have become standards. These, all by Noble, included The Very Thought of You, Love is the Sweetest Thing, The Touch of your Lips and Goodnight Sweetheart. In 1931 he joined Roy Fox’s and subsequently Lew Stone’s band at the newly opened Monseigneur restaurant in Piccadilly. This was Bowlly’s most productive period, with recording, radio, theatre dates and regular engagements at top society venues. In 1934 Bowlly went to New York. He was soon in the American recording studios and on the radio, and made a big impression as ‘the new British singer’ with Ray Noble’s new band at the Rainbow Room. By the end of 1936, however, he had returned to England where he toured in variety and worked freelance with several major dance orchestras. At the outbreak of war he toured with vocalist Jimmy Mesene, recording Berlin’s When that Man is Dead and Gone (1941), a song about Hitler, Bowlly’s last record. Two weeks later he was killed in his London flat by the blast of a bomb.

Since Bowlly’s death his reputation has grown, and he has been the subject of many radio tributes and one television tribute. His major legacy is his recorded output of more than 1100 titles issued on just over 600 78 r.p.m. discs, with the majority of titles reissued on LP and CD. They are still frequently heard on the radio, in shops and restaurants and as the background to films and plays. Modern Style Singing (Crooning) (London, 1934) was published under his name.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.M. Harvey and B.A.L. Rust: The Al Bowlly Discography (London, 1964)

S. Colin and T. Staveacre: Al Bowlly (London, 1979)

R. Pallett: Goodnight Sweetheart: Life and Times of Al Bowlly (Tunbridge Wells, 1985) [incl. complete discography]

RAY PALLETT

Bow lute.

See Pluriarc.

Bowman, Euday L(ouis)

(b Fort Worth, TX, 9 Nov 1887; d New York, 26 May 1949). American ragtime composer. He reportedly worked as an itinerant black pianist, beginning in ‘Hell's Half Acre’, the former bordello district of Fort Worth. Bowman commemorated four streets in this district with piano rags. In 1914 he published the 12th Street Rag at his own expense, then sold it to the music publisher J.W. Jenkins' Sons in Kansas City, Missouri. Its theme-and-variations structure (unusual for ragtime) and use of a repeating three-note motif (sometimes called ‘secondary rag’) made the piece catchy and easy to play, and under the Jenkins imprint it became a major hit. Words were added, and it was issued in numerous arrangements, becoming an enduring standard among bandleaders, pianists, broadcasters, and the record-buying public. More than 120 versions were recorded on 78 r.p.m. records alone, and until the ragtime revival in the 1970s it ranked as the most popular rag of all time. Bowman recorded the piece in 1924 for Gennett and again in 1938 for ARC, but the recordings were never issued. Following Pee Wee Hunt's extraordinarily successful recording of the rag in 1948, Bowman tried to capitalize on its renewed popularity and issued his own recording of it, but he died soon after.

WORKS

(selective list)

all for piano

12th Street Rag (1914); Sixth Street Rag, 1914; Tenth Street Rag, 1914; Petticoat Lane (1915); Shamrock Rag (1916); Eleventh Street Rag (1917); Chromatic Chords, 1926

Principal publishers: J.W. Jenkins' Sons Music Company, Enday L. Bowman

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA

L. Laird: ‘The 12th Street Rag Story’, Kansas City Times (23 Oct 1942); repr. in Rag Times, xiii (May 1979), 1–2

D.A. Jasen and T.J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978)

JOHN EDWARD HASSE

Bowman, Henry

(fl c1669–85). English composer and music copyist. He seems to have lived and worked exclusively in Oxford, and was presumably related to the booksellers Francis and Thomas Bowman of the parish of St Mary the Virgin. His Songs for 1 2 & 3 Voyces (Oxford, 1677) was published by Thomas, though he apparently engraved the music himself. He was a prolific copyist, and compiled or contributed to at least 18 manuscripts (now in GB-Lbl, Ob and Och) between about 1669 and 1685, copying a range of Italian vocal music from Monteverdi to Carissimi and English vocal and instrumental music from Orlando Gibbons and Coprario to Blow and Purcell, as well as his own music. He does not seem to have been a professional musician; there is no evidence that he held a musical post in Oxford, and he described himself as ‘Philo-Musicus’ in his Songs. Nevertheless he wrote three suites for two violins and bass for a meeting of the Oxford Music School on 5 February 1674, and a concerted act song by him was prepared for performance in the Sheldonian Theatre on 10 July 1680. It was not performed then, but two other undated works of this type also seem to have been written for Oxford academic ceremonies.

The 1677 book went through four editions, though the music is competent rather than inspired. It was successful probably because it was engraved rather than type-set, and because Bowman had better literary taste than most Restoration composers: it includes settings of Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, Sir John Denham, Michael Drayton, Sir George Etherege, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, Henry Noel, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Thomas Stanley and Aurelian Townsend. It also broke new ground in that four of the 28 songs have short ritornellos for two violins and continuo; they have been the model for the symphony songs of Blow and Purcell. Apart from one song with four-part chorus (SSTB), they all require 3 voices (SSB), and this scoring is used in seven additional songs and four Italian motets in GB-Lbl Add. 30382 and other autograph manuscripts. The autographs also include two English devotional duets, a funeral anthem and a sacred dramatic dialogue. Like similar works by George Jeffreys, Locke and Blow, the religious music reflects the influence of the corpus of mid-17th century Italian music that circulated in Restoration Oxford. Bowman copied part of GB-Och Mus.1003, containing keyboard music by William Lawes, Blow, John Roberts, Christopher Gibbons and others, though it is not clear whether he composed any of the unascribed items.

WORKS

[28] Songs for 1 2 & 3 Voyces, 3–4vv, 2vn, b, bc (Oxford, 1677, 4/1683)

5 Lat. motets, 3vv, bc: Cantate Jehovah, GB-Ob; In te Domine speravi, Lbl, Ob, Och; Miserere mei Deus, Lbl, Ob, Och; Tribulare ego, Lbl, Ob; Usquequo Domine, Lbl, Ob

2 devotional songs, 2vv, bc, Lbl: Close thine eyes; Hark! how he groans

3 anthems, 5vv, bc: Sing unto the Lord O ye saints (‘Funerall Anthem’), Ctc, Lbl; Wake sleeping ones (‘A Dialogue between the Angel and the Soul at the Judgement Day’), Lbl; Give to the king thy judgements, inc., Ctc

7 songs, 3vv, bc, Lbl

3 act songs, Ob: My Lesbia, let us live and love, 3vv, 2vn, b, bc, 1680; Non usitata ac tenui ferar, 4vv, inc.; Stay, shepherd, stay [rev. of piece in Songs], 4vv, 2 vn, b, bc

While vulgar beauty, 1v, bc, inc., Lbl; How long wilt thou forget, 5vv, bc, Och: anon., attrib. Bowman

3 suites (g, a, D), 2 vn, b, bc, 1674, Ob

Kbd pieces, Lbl, Och: anon., attrib. Bowman

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Day-MurrieESB; DoddI; KrummelEMP

P. Holman: ‘Original Sets of Parts for Restoration Concerted Music at Oxford’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 9–19, 265–71

J. Wainwright: Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England: Christopher, First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997)

PETER HOLMAN

Bowman, James (Thomas)

(b Oxford, 6 Nov 1941). English countertenor. He studied at Oxford University and made his stage début in 1967 at Aldeburgh as Britten’s Oberon, a role he has sung at Covent Garden, Strasbourg, Sydney, with the WNO and at Glyndebourne, where he made his début in 1970 as Endymion in Cavalli’s Calisto. He created the Priest-Confessor in Maxwell Davies’s Taverner (1972), his Covent Garden début; the voice of Apollo in Death in Venice (1973, Aldeburgh Festival); Astron (with Anne Wilkens) in Tippett’s The Ice Break (1977, Covent Garden); and sang Ridout’s Phaeton for BBC Radio. Britten dedicated his fourth Canticle, Journey of the Magi, to him, Pears and Shirley-Quirk. Bowman is a noted Handelian, and for the Handel Opera Society sang Otho, Scipio, Xerxes and Justinian, as well as Polinesso (Ariodante) which he repeated at Geneva and Buxton. His other Handel roles include Julius Caesar (Barber Institute), Ptolemy (San Francisco and the ENO), Goffredo in Rinaldo (Reggio nell’Emilia and Paris) and Orlando (Scottish Opera). He has also sung many other Baroque roles, including Lidio in Cavalli’s Egisto at Santa Fe, Ruggiero in Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso at Verona and Dallas, Monteverdi’s Otho at Spitalfields and Epaphus in Jommelli’s Fetonte at La Scala. Bowman has been partly responsible for the present wide acceptance of the countertenor voice in modern and Baroque opera. He also sings often in oratorio and solo recitals, and is a specially fine interpreter of Elizabethan lute-songs. His voice is expressive and individual in timbre and he uses it to highly dramatic effect. His extensive recording career has included operatic roles ranging from Orlando and Julius Caesar to Britten’s Oberon and voice of Apollo, lute-songs, choral works by Purcell, Bach and Handel, and songs by Britten.

ALAN BLYTH

Bowman, John

(b c1660; d London, 23 March 1739). English bass and actor. He entered the Duke’s Company as a boy and was a member of the Royal Private Musick from 1684. Cibber related that as a youth ‘fam’d for his Voice’ he sang before Charles II at Nell Gwynn’s lodgings. He was a soloist in Purcell’s court odes Sound the Trumpet (1687) and Celebrate this Festival (1693) and was Purcell’s principal stage bass from 1680, when he sang as Atticus in Theodosius (a part he last played in 1733). He took the important acting and singing role of Grimbald in King Arthur (1691) and played Cardenio in Don Quixote (1694), with the famous mad song ‘Let the dreadful engines’. As Lord Froth in William Congreve’s The Double Dealer he sang ‘Ancient Phyllis’, and Thesaurus Musicus (RISM 1694⁷) states that he composed it. He remained on stage, acting his stock roles and singing a little, until a few months before his death, when the London Magazine described him as the oldest actor and singer in England, erroneously giving his age as 87.

In August 1692 he married Thomas Betterton’s adopted daughter, Elizabeth Watson (d 1707), a popular actress and singer. Their son, ‘young Bowman’ (fl 1712–58), and Mrs Bowman (fl 1716–56), probably his wife, sang and acted on the London stage and in the provinces.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, i, ii, viii

BDA

C. Cibber: An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (London, 1740); ed. R.W. Lowe (London, 1889)

C.A. Price: Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984)

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Purcell’s Stage Singers’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 105–29

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Bowsher, John (Michael)

(b London, 26 August 1933). English physicist and acoustician. He obtained a BSc in physics from Imperial College, London, later gaining the doctorate there with research into high-amplitude stress waves. After holding a research fellowship at the electronic music laboratory of the Canadian National Research Council in Ottawa, he worked for five years in the acoustics section of the UK National Physical Laboratory, where he carried out research on the psycho-acoustic perception of short duration and very low frequency sounds. In 1966 he was appointed to a lectureship in acoustics at the University of Surrey, where, in collaboration with colleagues in the US, Europe, Israel and Australia, he established a group which became noted for its research into the acoustics of wind instruments and their subjective assessment. He played a major part in the establishment there of the Tonmeister course in music and applied physics. An accomplished trombonist, his most notable research has been in the acoustics of brass instruments, where he supplemented and elucidated physical measurements by applying psychological testing procedures to the assessment of brass instrument tone quality. He developed a non-invasive technique which allows the bore of an instrument to be reconstructed by injecting acoustic pulses into one end and recording the reflections.

WRITINGS

with R.L. Pratt: ‘The Subjective Assessment of Trombone Quality’, Journal of Sound and Vibration, no.57 (1978), 425–35

with R.L. Pratt: ‘The Objective Assessment of Trombone Quality’, Journal of Sound and Vibration, no.65 (1979), 521–47

with S.J. Elliott: ‘Reverberation in Brass Wind Instruments’, Journal of Sound and Vibration, no.83 (1982), 181–217

‘Brass Instruments’, Encyclopedia of Acoustics, ed. M.J. Crocker (New York, 1997), 1643–51

MURRAY CAMPBELL

Bowyer, Kevin (John)

(b Little Wakering, Essex, 9 Jan 1961). English organist. He was a student at the RAM from 1979 to 1982, studying with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, a champion of avant-garde organ music, and the harpsichordist Virginia Black. Then for two years he studied with the leading English organist David Sanger. During his student days he first demonstrated his powers in undertaking mammoth organ recital projects, when he played the complete organ symphonies of Widor, Vierne and Dupré. Bowyer's début recital was at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1984, the year following his success in winning the St Albans International Organ Festival competition. In 1990 he won no less than four competitions: Dublin, Odense, Paisley (joint winner) and Calgary. Gifted with a powerful intellect, he has given convincing performances of highly demanding 20th-century works, including the epic First Symphony of Sorabji. He has also edited organ symphonies by Sorabji.

IAN CARSON

Boxberg, Christian Ludwig

(b Sondershausen, 24 April 1670; d Görlitz, 1 Dec 1729). German composer and librettist. He studied at the Leipzig Thomasschule between 1682 and 1686, presumably receiving music instruction from the Kantor, Johann Schelle. In 1692 he accepted a position as organist in Grossenhain, north of Dresden, which he retained until 1702. However, his early career was centred on Leipzig where he was active as librettist, singer and opera composer. He was a student of Nikolaus A. Strungk, director of the Leipzig Opera, 1688–92, whose opera Amyntas und Phyllis, now lost, was completed after his death by Boxberg and given at Leipzig in 1700. Boxberg wrote at least five librettos for operas by Strungk and sang in performances of those works. He seems also to have been active at the court of Ansbach during 1697–8 where his most important operas (for which he also wrote librettos) were first performed: Orion, Die verschwiegene Treue and Sardanapolus. Only the last score is extant (D-AN). In 1702 he gave up his operatic career to become organist at the church of Sts Peter und Paul in Görlitz. He wrote a number of cantatas during this period (35 in S-L, 13 in D-Dl, 4 in MÜG and 3 in LUC), including both choral works and solo cantatas for soprano and trio sonata accompaniment.

WRITINGS

‘Ausführliche Beschreibung der grossen neuen Orgel in der Kirchen zu St Petri und Pauli allhie zu Görlitz’: appx to Einweihungs-Predigt, welche bey Einweihung der neuen Orgel in der Haupt-Kirche SS Petri und Pauli zu Görlitz … von M. Gottfried Kretschmarn (Görlitz, 1704)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Mersmann: Christian Ludwig Boxberg und seine Oper ‘Sardanapolus’ (Ansbach, 1698) (diss., U. of Berlin, 1914)

S. Sørensen: ‘Über einen Kantatenjahrgang des Görlitzer Komponisten Christian Ludwig Boxberg’, Natalicia musicologica Knud Jeppesen Septuagenario collegis oblata, ed. B. Hjelmborg and S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1962), 217–42

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Box organ.

See Barrel organ.

Boxslide.

A type of Jackslide of one-piece construction, commonly used in Italian harpsichords, bentside spinets and Italian virginals.

Boy Bishop, feast of the.

See Feast of Fools.

Boyce [Boice, Boyes, Boys], Thomas

(fl early 17th century; d ? Nov 1643). English composer. He took the BMus at Oxford in 1603; he may be the Thomas Boyce who was buried in Canterbury Cathedral on 3 Nov 1643. A Short or ‘Whole’ Service survives (GB-Cp, DRc, GL, Lbl, Lcm and Ob); the Te Deum from this service also survives in a Latin adaptation (Cp). A full anthem, Give Sentence with me, is listed in the indexes to Lcm 1049 and 1051, but the music itself is lost. The composer may be related to the William Boys, acting organist at Lincoln in 1597, whose three-part Paven is in the manuscript Lcm Add.1145, and John Boyce, of New College, composer of the full anthem If ye love me (Och and US-NYp).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music, 1549–1660, EECM, suppl.i (London, 1972)

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

PETER LE HURAY/JOHN MOREHEN

Boyce, William

(b London, bap. 11 Sept 1711; d London, 7 Feb 1779). English composer, organist and editor. Though formerly best known for some of his anthems and his editing of Cathedral Music (1760–73), the significant contribution he made to instrumental music, song, secular choral and theatre music in England is now widely recognized.

1. Early career.

2. Middle years.

3. Later years.

4. Style and reputation.

IAN BARTLETT (text), ROBERT J. BRUCE (work-list, bibliography)

1. Early career.

Boyce’s family came from Warwickshire, where his grandfather was a farmer. His father, John, the youngest of five sons, came to London in 1691 to be apprenticed to a joiner. He settled in the City of London, as a joiner and cabinetmaker, and married Elizabeth Cordwell in 1703. They were living in Maiden Lane (now Skinners Lane) when William, the last of their four children, was born. In 1723 John Boyce was appointed resident beadle for the Joiners’ Company, whose headquarters were situated close to his house. Joiners’ Hall became William’s home for the next 30 years or so.

According to Hawkins, who was acquainted with Boyce, it was William’s father who became aware of his son’s ‘delight in musical sounds’ while he was still in his infancy. Given the proximity of St Paul’s Cathedral to the family house it was natural to seek a place in the music school, where he was admitted in about 1719. There he began his musical education under the Master of the Choristers, Charles King, and on entering the cathedral choir he came under the guidance of the organist, Maurice Greene, who was to become his lifelong mentor, advocate and friend. When his voice broke, in about 1727, he became an articled pupil of Greene for seven years; he continued to act as Greene’s music copyist at least until 1736. Boyce also studied in the 1730s with J.C. Pepusch, who made a lasting impression on Boyce’s outlook, nurturing his interest not only in the theory of music but also in early music, particularly that of the greatest English and Italian composers from the Renaissance onwards. Boyce’s first professional engagements were as a harpsichord teacher in schools and as an organist of the Oxford Chapel (now St Peter’s), Vere Street (1734), a post he relinquished on becoming organist of St Michael Cornhill, in 1736. These early steps in his career were achieved in spite of the onset of deafness during his studies with Greene.

Boyce’s earliest compositions began to emerge in the early 1730s. A number of songs appeared in songsheet publications and periodicals, and four were included in George Bickham’s highly regarded song collection, The Musical Entertainer (London, 1737). By 1736 more than a dozen anthems by Boyce were in the repertory of the Chapel Royal. The sacred cantata David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan is the first of his large-scale works whose early history is now well established. Its first performance took place in April 1736 at the Apollo Academy, which promoted a number of other important works by Boyce in the late 1730s, including the two St Cecilia odes, The charms of harmony display and See famed Apollo and the nine, the texts of which were printed in A Miscellany of Lyric Poems … performed in the Academy of Music (London, 1740). It can be assumed that Boyce’s first theatrical work, the masque Peleus and Thetis, was performed by 1740, since its libretto also appears in the Miscellany. No evidence has come to light, however, to support Hawkins’s suggestion that an earlier first performance of Peleus and Thetis was undertaken in London by the Philharmonic Society.

Public recognition of Boyce’s talents came with the first of his royal appointments as a Composer to the Chapel Royal, on the death of John Weldon in May 1736. His contract stipulated that he should also share some of the duties of the newly appointed second organist, Jonathan Martin. The close association with Greene continued here, for his former teacher was now the senior composer and organist of the chapel. From 1737 until at least 1756 Boyce conducted the Three Choirs Festival. In 1738 he undertook the first of a number of commitments to charitable organizations when he subscribed as a founder-member, alongside Handel, Greene, Festing and many other prominent musicians, to the Fund for the Support of Decay’d Musicians and their Families (later the Royal Society of Musicians).

By the end of the decade Boyce’s reputation had reached Dublin. When his impressive St Cecilia ode See famed Apollo was performed by the Philharmonic Society of Dublin on 17 December 1740, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal reported that it ‘was allowed, by several of the best Judges here, to be one of the grandest Performances that hath been heard’, a warmth of response to be exceeded in Dublin at this time only by that inspired by the première of Handel’s Messiah in April 1742. Other works by Boyce given there during the early 1740s were the orchestral anthem Blessed is he that considereth the sick, commissioned for the benefit of Mercer's Hospital, David’s Lamentation, the ode Gentle lyre, begin the strain and the serenata Solomon.

2. Middle years.

It was through Solomon that Boyce achieved his first notable success as a composer in the early 1740s. Burney’s assessment in 1789 that it was ‘not only long and justly admired, as a pleasing and eloquent composition, but still affords great delight to the friends of English music whenever it is performed’, though not as fulsome as some other accounts, confirms its reputation and its survival in the repertory until the end of the century. Significantly, in Thomas Hudson’s later painting of the composer (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Boyce is depicted holding a copy of Solomon. Though outwardly a cantata-like work for two vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra with a text based on the biblical ‘Song of Solomon’, it was one of the few English works to be designated from the outset by the Italian term ‘serenata’. The librettist, Edward Moore, was resident in Ireland during its composition, and he may well have envisaged a first performance there; however, it was first heard at the Apollo Academy in autumn 1742. While the Dublin Journal refers to a private performance by the Philharmonic Society of Dublin in 1744, evidence from the surviving manuscript sources of the work points to an earlier performance by the society. John Walsh’s publication of Solomon on behalf of the composer early in 1743 was enthusiastically received. Unusually for a work of its kind, it was issued complete and in full score, thus facilitating the first public performances at Ruckholt House, Essex, in summer 1743 and later that year in London. Two further editions in score were published (1760 and c1790) and there were numerous publications of the most popular airs and duets throughout the 18th century.

In 1745, having established his public reputation, Boyce received a royal licence to print and publish his music, offering him protection, in principle if not always in practice, from unauthorized publication of his music for 14 years. This may explain why it was not until the 1760s that some of his most admired songs began to be adapted and introduced into various pasticcio productions in the theatres.

The publication of Boyce’s Twelve Sonatas for Two Violins and a Bass in 1747 met with unprecedented success for a work of its kind. The first edition attracted 487 subscribers for 631 copies, and two further editions soon followed. These sonatas, in the direct line of descent from Corelli’s classic models, were soon to be recognized as the most distinguished English contributions to the genre. They were, as Burney later observed, ‘not only in constant use, as chamber Music, in private concerts, for which they were originally designed, but in theatres, as act-tunes, and public gardens, as favourite pieces, during many years’. As is implicit here, like many trio sonatas of their time, they were doubtless accommodated, through the insertion of soli–tutti markings, to performance by larger ensembles as quasi-concerti grossi. Later the same year Boyce brought out two collections of songs, duets and cantatas entitled Lyra Britannica, which eventually ran to six volumes (1747–59). The contents embrace simple strophic ballads and more sophisticated through-composed songs, many of them known to have been performed in the pleasure gardens, three items from Boyce’s setting of Dryden’s Secular Masque (c1746), vocal pieces composed for various plays produced by Garrick in the 1750s, and in each book except one an extended solo cantata.

In 1749 Boyce accepted an invitation to become organist at All Hallows the Great and the Less, the parish church of Joiners’ Hall. It has been assumed that he married in about 1748 and moved from Joiners’ Hall to Quality Court, Chancery Lane; however, while a number of details must remain speculative, it now seems that he may not have moved until after his father’s death in November 1752, and that his marriage to Hannah Nixon at St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, did not take place until 9 June 1759. Whatever Hannah’s relationship (if any) with the composer at the time, we know from Boyce’s will that Hannah gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth in April 1749. His son William, subsequently to be active in London as a double bass player and singer, was born in March 1764.

A highlight of Boyce’s career occurred at Cambridge on Saturday 1 July 1749, when his ceremonial ode Here all thy active fires diffuse, the text of which had been submitted by William Mason only ten days earlier, was performed at the Senate House on the installation of the Duke of Newcastle as Chancellor of the university. The next day his doctoral exercise, the orchestral anthem O be joyful in God, was performed at St Mary the Great. Following the ceremony on 3 July, when he received the degrees of bachelor and doctor of music, a two-day festival of his music was mounted during which Peleus and Thetis, the Secular Masque, the Pythian Ode (Gentle lyre, begin the strain) and Solomon were presented. These performances were given by a large contingent of leading musicians from London, probably at the instigation of Greene, who was professor of music at the university. In 1752 the two works written for Cambridge were printed for the composer in one volume, O be joyful thus becoming the only anthem by Boyce to be published in his lifetime.

In 1746 he received an isolated commission from John Rich to set the dirge in Cymbeline at Covent Garden, but it was David Garrick at Drury Lane who eventually provided him with the opportunity to make his mark in the theatre. Given the tensions between Garrick and Thomas Arne, it is not surprising that he turned to Boyce; Burney’s observation that Arne and Boyce ‘were frequently concurrent at the theatres and in each other’s way’ must refer to the situation in the early 1750s. Garrick initially invited Boyce to set a musical entertainment by Moses Mendez, The Chaplet. First performed in December 1749, this all-sung pastoral afterpiece, with its witty exploitation of the popular ballad style, was an immediate success and held its place in the repertory until the 1780s. A second Mendez-Boyce collaboration, The Shepherd’s Lottery (1751), was clearly calculated to capture the same market, but enjoyed only short-lived popularity.

In autumn 1750 Boyce became involved in the longstanding rivalry between London’s two patent theatres. Both houses announced productions of Romeo and Juliet to open on the same night. At Covent Garden an additional scene, ‘the funeral procession of Juliet’, was introduced into Act 5, for which Arne had composed a solemn dirge. Thus upstaged, Garrick responded by inserting a funeral scene in his own adaptation. Boyce’s setting of the dirge ‘Rise, rise, heart-breaking sighs’, was heard at Drury Lane only three days later; but the heated public debate on the relative merits of these productions focussed on the acting of the eponymous hero and heroine rather than on the musical settings of the dirges. Boyce continued to provide music for Garrick from time to time throughout the 1750s. In December 1759 he contributed two songs to an innovative Garrick pantomime, Harlequin’s Invasion, which turned out to be his farewell to the theatre. His setting of ‘Heart of Oak’, a topical song inspired by a series of British naval victories, captured the mood of its time perfectly, and subsequently established itself as a national song with which Boyce’s name will always be associated.

On the death of Greene in December 1755, Boyce succeeded him as Master of the King’s Musick. In addition to supervising the king’s band, he was expected to set the birthday and New Year odes written by the poet laureate in honour of the king. Owing to Greene’s ill-health Boyce had already composed the birthday ode in October 1755, but, probably as a consequence of political preoccupations at court, he was not formally sworn in until June 1757. Having for some years deputized for Greene as conductor of the annual charity concert held in April or May at St Paul’s Cathedral in aid of the Sons of the Clergy, Boyce now took on this responsibility as well. His much admired orchestral anthem Lord, thou hast been our refuge, composed for this event in April 1755, and his earlier anthem for Dublin, Blessed is he that considereth the sick (with its title adroitly amended to refer to ‘the poor’ rather than ‘the sick’) were now featured regularly in these concerts, alongside various works by Handel. In June 1758, on the death of John Travers, he was also appointed to one of the posts of organist at the Chapel Royal.

Problems doubtless stemming from the multiplicity of Boyce’s activities, perhaps exacerbated by increasing deafness, begin to emerge around this time in connection with his parish church duties. On 5 January 1758 the vestry minutes at All Hallows reveal discontent, ostensibly in relation to the deputy organist, upon whom Boyce must often have relied. Matters came to a head in March 1764 when Boyce himself was dismissed. Nevertheless, he remained at St Michael’s until 1768, when churchwardens lodged a formal complaint that ‘the playing of the organ did not give that satisfaction to the parish which they had a right to expect’. Boyce’s reply on 7 April was taken as a letter of resignation. These events appear, however, as minor blemishes in an otherwise irreproachable career.

During his last years Greene had been planning to publish a collection of English anthems and services for use in cathedral worship. He was generously assisted by John Alcock (i), who passed on to him materials he had originally gathered for a similar scheme of his own. Greene clearly had confidence in Boyce’s ability and willingness to bring these plans to fruition, for in his will he bequeathed his ‘friend William Boyce … (he having promised not to publish any of my works) all my collection of music whether MSS or printed’. Boyce advertised his intention to complete Greene’s work as early as September 1756. When Cathedral Music was eventually published (1760–73), it established a canon of English church music ranging from Tallis and Tye to Boyce’s immediate predecessors Croft and Weldon. The preface identifies its primary purpose to preserve the music of past masters ‘in its original purity’, at the same time to make such music available in score as a replacement for the often faulty manuscript partbooks then generally in use. Cathedral Music retained its place in cathedral usage into the 20th century, and has been justly described as ‘a landmark in the history of musicology, and a fitting monument to his industry and scholarly enterprise’ (Johnstone, 1975).

Boyce’s Eight Symphonys (1760) was a retrospective collection of orchestral overtures originally written for a variety of works dating from as early as 1739 to 1756. Apart from one independently conceived piece, the so-called Worcester Overture, written for the Three Choirs Festival, they are taken from four of the odes, two stage works and Solomon. The set presents the four works modelled on the more progressive Italian sinfonia first, followed by those based on the traditional French overture style. Boyce himself later issued a second set of orchestral works, Twelve Overtures (1770), which consists mainly of overtures to court odes composed between 1761 and 1768. These were not as well received as the Eight Symphonys. Cast in an essentially late Baroque idiom, they must have seemed old-fashioned as compared with the now-familiar continental symphonies in the early Classical style, in particular those of the fashionable German composers J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel, both active in London by this time.

Perhaps the climax of Boyce’s public career came when, as the senior composer to the Chapel Royal, he was called upon to provide the music for the great ceremonies of state which took place in 1760–61. Had it not been for Handel’s death in 1759, however, it seems unlikely that he would have been granted these opportunities. As Greene had discovered in 1727, where the funeral of George I and the coronation of George II were concerned, and in 1737, when Queen Caroline died, the Georgian monarchy preferred, on the basis of an appointment effectively to the court rather than to the chapel in 1723, to rely on the genius of their illustrious compatriot for major state occasions. As it was, Boyce provided an imposing and deeply felt orchestral anthem, The souls of the righteous, for the funeral of George II on 11 November 1760, and a splendid setting of The King shall rejoice for the wedding of George III and Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg on 8 September 1761. For the coronation on 22 September he composed eight anthems, ranging from the unpretentious, homophonic, a cappella anthem I was glad, sung as the queen entered Westminster Abbey, to four extensive orchestral anthems, including an invigorating double-choir setting of My heart is inditing. Boyce was clearly conscious of the earlier achievements of Handel in responding to these challenges, so much so that he declined to reset Zadok the Priest for the coronation service in deference to Handel’s inimitable work.

3. Later years.

Boyce continued to live at Quality Court in the city at least until 1763, when his address as one of the ‘Masters and Professors of Music’ was quoted in Mortimer’s London Universal Directory. By March 1764 he and his family had moved to his final residence at 3 Kensington Gore, to the west of London. Though now in semi-retirement, he continued to fulfil his royal duties, including the composition of court odes, to produce anthems and accept the occasional commission and, above all, to prepare the second and third volumes of Cathedral Music for publication. He also took a keen interest in, and undoubtedly exerted an influence over, the development of the younger generation of English musicians. Among those that he taught or to whom he offered guidance were Jonathan Battishill, the brothers Samuel and Charles Wesley, Thomas Linley (ii), John Stafford Smith, who shared his antiquarian interests, and Marmaduke Overend, who corresponded with him in his last years on aspects of harmonic theory and acquired Boyce’s treatise after his death.

The public response to Boyce’s death was exceptional for an English musician. The immense personal and professional standing he had acquired was reflected in the impressive burial service organized in his honour, and attended by a large congregation, at St Paul’s on 15 February 1779. The service, which included his anthem If we believe that Jesus died, was sung by the combined choirs of the cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal. Boyce was interred in the crypt of St Paul’s, where his epitaph can still be read.

Some reparation for the fact that, apart from O be joyful (1752), none of Boyce’s anthems had been printed in his lifetime was made by Philip Hayes, who edited and published, on behalf of Boyce’s widow, Fifteen Anthems by Dr Boyce (1780) and A Collection of Anthems (1790). Boyce’s extensive music library was auctioned by Christie and Ansell (14–16 April 1779), but Hannah Boyce retained his manuscripts, of which many were later acquired by Philip Hayes for the Music School at Oxford (now in GB-Ob). Others were bought by private individuals and sometimes found their way into the libraries of music societies. A residue of manuscripts kept by the family were eventually sold, after the death of Boyce’s son, by W.P. Musgrave (29–31 March 1824). In addition to the major collection of autograph manuscripts at the Bodleian, there are significant holdings at the Royal College of Music and the British Library.

4. Style and reputation.

Boyce must be ranked as the most technically accomplished and versatile English composer of the 18th century, rivalled only by Thomas Arne. His output was uneven; at times his muse shone brightly, but when he was required to produce anthems as a matter of routine, or to set uninspiring panegyric texts as in the court odes, the outcome often tended to be dull. However, his professionalism is always apparent. In the course of his training under Greene, and as an inevitable consequence of the musical environment of London, he naturally absorbed the fundamentally italianate lingua franca of the late Baroque style. The influence of the compact, flowing lines of Corelli’s contrapuntal idiom is most evident in the trio sonatas, but later developments as exemplified by Handel are reflected in the more flexible themes and varied textures of Boyce’s fugal choruses. While he clearly set out to emulate Handel’s grand manner in the orchestral anthems for George III’s coronation, almost inevitably in view of the monarch’s fervent enthusiasm for Handel’s music, he generally maintained his independence from his great contemporary. As Burney put it, he ‘neither pillaged nor servilely imitated him’. Boyce’s absorption of the newer Italian symphonic style associated with the Milan school is manifest in the opening allegros of the first four symphonies of the 1760 set.

Boyce’s harmonic language is essentially diatonic and deliberately constrained, reflecting his view that ‘the skill of the artist is best shewn, not in departing from the original key, but in keeping within it, and producing, by the interchanges of its own consonances, all that variety of harmony of which it may be capable’. Consequently, when Boyce was stimulated by a dramatic situation or a striking image in the text, his resort to chromatic harmony is all the more telling. The potency of his imaginative response to the exigencies of the text may be illustrated, for example, in the vividly evocative tenor air with bassoon obbligato ‘Softly rise, O southern breeze’ (Solomon), in the palpable dramatic tension of some of the ensembles in Peleus and Thetis, or in the remarkable scena for tenor soloist in the second part of the ode See famed Apollo and the nine.

The esteem in which Boyce held earlier English traditions, doubtless reinforced by his studies with Pepusch, may be seen in the occasional echoes of Purcell’s style, for example in the duet ‘Arise, my fair’, from Part 3 of Solomon, where the evocation of winter recalls the ‘frost scene’ in Act 3 of King Arthur, or in the anthem, O where shall wisdom be found?, where more generalized Purcellian traits appear. He sometimes drew on much earlier models. The Gloria from the Nunc dimittis in the Short Service of Orlando Gibbons (a work Boyce was later to include in Cathedral Music), based on a two-part canon in the upper voices, is quoted and transformed by Boyce into a four-part canon setting the same text in the Jubilate of his Service in A. Boyce’s Englishness may also be felt in those themes that seem to be inspired by the indigenous popular song tradition, or that convey a nautical or country dance character.

While Boyce may not have shared Arne’s essentially lyrical genius, at his best he had ‘a remarkable facility for writing fresh melodies, both apt to the feeling of the words and fitting their metre like a glove’ (Colles, 1910). These qualities are evident, for example, in the earlier setting of the anthem Turn thee unto me, especially in the poignant central duet, and in the exuberant O sing unto the Lord a new song. The wide stylistic range embraced by Boyce’s melodies may be seen on the one hand in the gracefully eloquent soprano air ‘Tell me, lovely shepherd’ from Solomon, and on the other in the simplicity and directness of expression of ‘Heart of Oak’ from Harlequin’s Invasion.

Apart from the Eight Symphonys, Boyce’s finest works, such as Solomon, See famed Apollo and the nine, the trio sonatas and some of the anthems, remain relatively little known. However, the distinctive qualities of his music were appreciated by Burney:

There is an original and sterling merit in his productions, founded as much on the study of our own old masters, as on the best models of other countries, that gives to all his works a peculiar stamp and character of his own, for strength, clearness, and facility, without any mixture of styles, or extraneous and heterogeneous ornaments.

His personal attributes were equally well summed up by Hawkins:

He was endowed with the qualities of truth, justice, and integrity, was mild and gentle in his deportment, above all resentment against such as envied his reputation, communicative of his knowledge, sedulous and punctual in the discharge of the duties of his several employments, particularly those that regarded the performance of divine service, and in every relation of life a worthy man.

His reputation in the 20th century has frequently suffered from a partial view. Ernest Walker (1907), for example, categorized him as ‘a primarily ecclesiastical musician’, though well aware of evidence to mitigate this view; moreover, even in his assessment of the anthems he regarded as among Boyce’s best, he was inclined to be lukewarm or to damn with faint praise. In 1941 Fellowes, recognizing stylistic affinities with Purcell in Boyce, and confronted with the unquestionable disparity in quality between his commonplace anthems and the ‘subtle artistry’ of O where shall wisdom be found? or I have surely built thee an house, advanced the theory that such works might not be entirely the work of Boyce, but ‘possibly adaptations of Restoration compositions’. No sources for Boyce’s putative arrangements are cited, nor, indeed, have any been subsequently identified.

By this time, however, the early stages of the modern Boyce revival were under way, for Constant Lambert had already published his pioneering edition of Eight Symphonys (Oxford, 1928), which drew public attention for the first time to the qualities of Boyce’s orchestral music. The preface describes these pieces as ‘among the finest compositions of their time, not only in England but in Europe’. Some time later these views were reinforced by W.S. Newman (NewmanSBE), who, having surveyed Boyce’s trio sonatas, concluded that ‘today the almost total neglect of such a capable composer can only be a matter of astonishment’. Boyce’s standing as a composer has been further enhanced by the advocacy of scholars such as Gerald Finzi, Stanley Sadie, Charles Cudworth and Roger Fiske. There has also been a steady growth in the quantity of music available in modern editions or facsimile reprints, and doctoral dissertations covering most aspects of Boyce’s output have been undertaken. The Boyce bicentenary in 1979 was celebrated by broadcast performances of Solomon and David’s Lamentation, and in 1982 the first modern performance of See famed Apollo and the nine was relayed by the BBC. Apart from the various anthems, songs and overtures by Boyce which have for some time been available in commerical recordings, Solomon, The Secular Masque, the Twelve Sonatas for Two Violins and Bass, and Peleus and Thetis along with a selection of smaller theatre pieces, have also recently become accessible on CD, while several different recordings of the now much admired and popular Eight Symphonys have been issued. Thus Boyce's contribution to music in 18th-century England is now widely recognized, and his status as ‘a minor English master’ (Westrup) may soon be fully acknowledged.

WORKS

principal sources: GB-Cfm, Ckc, Lbl, Lcm, Ob

Lbl†

Chapel Royal Choirbooks

Editions:W. Boyce: Services and Anthems, ed. V. Novello, i–iv (London, 1846–9) [N]William Boyce: Overtures, ed. G. Finzi, MB, xiii (1957) [F]

18th-century collections:8 Symphonys in 8 Parts, op.2 (London, 1760) [S]12 Overtures in 7, 9, 10 and 12 Parts (London, 1770) [O]15 Anthems by Dr Boyce, ed. P. Hayes (London, 1780) [H]A Collection of Anthems and a Short Service, ed. P. Hayes (London, 1790) [PH]Cathedral Music, ed. S. Arnold (London, 1790) [A]

services

Te Deum, G, verse, c1725, Ob, N

Te Deum and Jubilate, A, verse, c1740, GB–Lbl†, Lcm*, H, N

Te Deum and Jubilate, A, short, c1750, Ckc, Lbl†, Ob, A, N

Te Deum and Jubilate, C, full, c1760, Cfm, Lbl†, Ob, A, N

Kyrie, A, Lbl†, N

Sanctus, A/G, Lbl†, Lbl, N

Burial Service, e, 4vv, for Captain T. Coram, 3 April 1751, ed. J. Page, Harmonia sacra (London, 1800), N

anthems

Begin unto my God, verse, 1769 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems used in His Majesty's Chapel Royal (London, 1769)

Behold O God our defender, full, coronation of George III, 1761, GB-Ob*

Be thou my judge, verse, 1749 or earlier, Cfm, Ckc, Lbl†, Ob, H, N

Blessed is he that considereth the poor, verse, PH, N

Blessed is he that considereth the sick, verse, with orch, 1741 (London, 1802), IRL-Dcc, Dmh, GB-H, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, N

Blessed is the man, verse, 1736 or earlier, PH, N

Blessing and glory, verse, 1769 or earlier, A, N

By the waters of Babylon, verse, c1740, Cfm, Ckc, Lbl†, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, H, N

Come Holy Ghost, full, coronation of George III, 1761, Ob*

Give the king thy judgements, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lcm*, Ob

Give the king thy judgements, verse, c1755, Ckc, Lbl†, H, N

Give unto the Lord, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, N

Great and marvellous, full, 1769 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems used in His Majesty's Chapel Royal (London, 1769)

Hear my crying, verse, c1740, Lbl*, WO, N

Hear my prayer, full, with orch, c1760, Gu

Help me, O Lord, full, 1726, Lcm

How long wilt thou forget me, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, N

How long wilt thou forget me, verse, c1740, Cfm* (inc.)

I cried unto the Lord, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, N

If we believe, verse, c1745, Ckc, Lbl†, Lbl, Ob, H, N

I have set God alway before me, verse, 1749 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, N

I have surely built thee an house, verse, for reopening of St Margaret's, Westminster, 1759, Lbl†, US-Wc*, PH, N

I was glad, full, coronation of George III, 1761, GB-Ob*

I will alway give thanks, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, Ob, Och, N

I will magnify thee, verse, 1749 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, ed. J. Page, Harmonia sacra (London, 1800), N

Let my complaint, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, ed. J. Page, Harmonia sacra (London, 1800), N

Let my prayer come up, full, coronation of George III, 1761, Ob*

Like as the hart, verse, c1740, Lbl†, Lbl, N

Lord, teach us to number our days, verse, c1750, Cfm, Lbl*, A, N

Lord, thou hast been our refuge, verse, with orch, Festival of the Sons of the Clergy, 1755 (London, 1802), Lcm (inc.), N

Lord, what is man that thou art mindful, verse, c1740, Lbl†, Lbl* (inc.), Lbl, A, N

Lord, what is man that thou shouldest visit, verse, c1770, Cfm, Lbl†, Lbl, A, N

Lord, who shall dwell, verse, 1749 or earlier, Lbl†, PH, N

My heart is fixed, verse, 1749 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems … now performed in His Majesty's Chapel Royal (London, 1749)

My heart is inditing, verse, with orch, coronation of George III, 1761, Ob*

My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, verse, 1769 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems used in His Majesty's Chapel Royal (London, 1769)

O be joyful in God, verse, c1735, Cfm* (inc.)

O be joyful in God, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl*, H, N

O be joyful in God, verse, with orch, for MusD, 1749, Lbl (inc.) (London, 1752), N

O give thanks unto the Lord and call, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, Ob, PH, N

O give thanks unto the Lord for he is gracious, verse, for the birth of Prince George, 1762, Lbl†, Lbl (inc.), Ob, H, N

O praise the Lord, verse, c1763, Lbl†, H, N

O sing unto the Lord, verse, c1740, Cfm, Lbl†, H, N

O sing unto the Lord, verse, 1749 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems … now performed in His Majesty's chapels Royal (London, 1749)

O where shall wisdom be found?, verse, 1769 or earlier, Lbl†, PH, N

Ponder my words, verse, 1745 or earlier, IRL-Dcc, A, N

Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem, full, with orch, coronation of George III, 1761, GB-Ob*

Praise the Lord, ye servants, verse, 1749 or earlier, Cfm, Lbl†, H, N

Save me, O God, full, c1735, Cfm, A, N

Sing, O heavens, verse, c1763, Lbl†, H, N

Sing praises unto the Lord, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lcm*, H, N

Sing unto the Lord, verse, 1736 or earlier, Ckc, Lbl†, Lbl, Ob, Och, PH, N

Teach me, O Lord, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl, Ob, H, N

The heavens declare, verse, Cfm, Lbl†, PH, N

The King shall rejoice, verse, with orch, marriage of George III, 1761, Ob*, ed. in RRMBE, viii (1970)

The King shall rejoice, full, with orch, coronation of George III, 1761, Ob*

The King shall rejoice, verse, with orch, Festival of the Sons of the Clergy, 1766, Lcm* (inc.), Ob*

The Lord is a sun, full, with orch, coronation of George III, 1761, Ob*

The Lord is full of compassion, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl (inc.), PH, N, 2 versions

The Lord is King and hath put on glorious apparel, verse, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Lbl (inc.), PH, N

The Lord is King be the people never so impatient, verse, thanksgiving for the Peace of Paris, 1763, Lbl†, PH, N

The Lord is my light, verse, 1749 or earlier, Ckc, Lbl†, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, PH, N

The Lord liveth, verse, 1769 or earlier, Lbl†, US-LAuc, H, N

The souls of the righteous, full, with orch, funeral of George II, 1760, GB-Lbl, Ob*, ed. in RRMBE, vii (1970), symphony ed. in F

Turn thee unto me, full, 1736 or earlier, Lbl†, Ob, H, N

Turn thee unto me, verse, 1749 or earlier, Lbl†, A, N

Unto thee, O Lord, verse, 1749 or earlier, lost, text pubd in A Collection of Anthems … now performed in His Majesty's chapels Royal (London, 1749)

Wherewithal shall a young man, verse, 1749 or earlier, Lbl†, H, N

other sacred

Chant, D, Divine Harmony (London, 1770), doubtful, attrib. Mr Davis

Chant, F, GB-Lcm, Ob

David's Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan (sacred cant., J. Lockman), solo vv, 4vv, orch, 1736, Lcm (partly autograph), Ob*

Hither ye sons of Harmony (‘Monumental inscription to … Mr. Gostling’), partsong (J. Hawkins), c1777, Cfm, US-NYp*

O how perverse is flesh and blood, partsong, c1725, GB-Lcm

12 hymns pubd in 18th-century anthologies

stage

LDL	London, Drury Lane

Peleus and Thetis (masque, G. Granville, Lord Lansdowne), by 1740, GB-Ob*, ov. in F

Secular Masque (J. Dryden), c1746, Bu* (inc.), Lcm, Ob, ov. in O

The Chaplet (musical entertainment, 2 pts, M. Mendez), LDL, 2 Dec 1749 (London, 1750), ov. in S

The Shepherd's Lottery (musical entertainment, 2 pts, Mendez), LDL, 19 Nov 1751 (London, 1751/R1990 in MLE, C4), 2 songs, Ob*, ov. in S

The Tempest (masque, D. Garrick, after W. Shakespeare), LDL, 20 Oct 1757, Lcm, Ob*

Harlequin's Invasion, or A Christmas Gambol (pantomime, Garrick), LDL, 31 Dec 1759, 2 songs pubd (London, 1760, c1767), collab. M. Arne and T. Aylward

music in other stage works

Dirge in Cymbeline (tragedy, W. Shakespeare), London, CG, 7 April 1746, GB-Ob*

2 songs in Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades (farce, D. Garrick), LDL, 2 Jan 1749

Music in The Roman Father (tragedy, W. Whitehead), LDL, 24 Feb 1750, lost

Pastoral interlude in The Rehearsal, or Bays in Petticoats (comedy, C. Clive), LDL, 15 March 1750, Ob*

Dirge in Romeo and Juliet (tragedy, Garrick, after Shakespeare), LDL, 1 Oct 1750, Ob*

Song in The Conscious Lovers (comedy, R. Steele), c1752

Song in The Gamester (tragedy, E. Moore), LDL, 7 Feb 1753, Ob*

Incid music in Boadicea (tragedy, R. Glover), LDL, 1 Dec 1753, lost

Music for animating the statue, 3-pt song in Florizel and Perdita, or The Winter's Tale (comedy, Garrick, after Shakespeare), LDL, 21 Jan 1756, Ob*

2 songs, duet in Amphitryon (comedy, J. Hawkesworth, after J. Dryden), LDL, 15 Dec 1756, DRc

2 odes in Agis (tragedy, J. Home), LDL, 21 Feb 1758, Lcm*, Lcm

Other songs by Boyce adapted in: The Temple of Peace (masque, N. Pasquali), Dublin, Smock Alley, 9 Feb 1749; Midas (comedy, K. O'Hara), Dublin, Theatre Royal, Crow Street, 22 Jan 1762; Love in a Village (I. Bickerstaff), London, CG, 8 Dec 1762; The Royal Chase, London, CG, c1765; The Summer's Tale (R. Cumberland), London, CG, 6 Dec 1765; The Disappointment, or The Force of Credulity (comic op, A. Barton), New York, 1767; Tom Jones (J. Reed), London, CG, 14 Jan 1769; Harlequin's Museum, or Mother Shipton Triumphant (pantomime), London, CG, 20 Dec 1792

court odes

Pierian sisters, for the king's birthday, 1755, GB-Ob*, ov. in F

Hail! hail! auspicious day, New Year's Day, 1756, Ob*, ov. in S

When Caesar's natal day, for the king's birthday, 1756, Ob*, ov. in S

While Britain, New Year's Day, 1757, Ob*

Rejoice, ye Britons, for the king's birthday, 1757, Ob*

Behold, the circle forms, New Year's Day, 1758, Ob*, ov. in F

When Othbert left, for the king's birthday, 1758, Lcm, Ob*, ov. in F

Ye guardian powers, New Year's Day, 1759, Lcm, Ob* [1st 2 movts of ov. the same as those of Behold, the circle forms, 1758]

Begin the song, for the king's birthday, 1759, Lcm, Ob*

Again the sun's revolving sphere, New Year's Day, 1760, Lcm, Ob*, ov. in F

Still must the muse, New Year's Day, 1761, Ob*

'Twas at the nectar'd feast, for the king's birthday, 1761, Ob*, ov. in O

God of slaughter, New Year's Day, 1762, Ob*, ov. in O

Go, Flora, for the king's birthday, 1762, Ob*, ov. in O

At length th' imperious god of war, New Year's Day, 1763, Ob*, ov. in O

Common births, for the king's birthday, 1763, Ob*

To wedded love, for the king's birthday, 1764, Ob*, ov. in O

Sacred to thee, New Year's Day, 1765, Ob*, ov. in O

Hail to the rosy morn, for the king's birthday, 1765, Ob*, ov. in O

Hail to the man, for the king's birthday, 1766, Ob*, ov. in O

When first, New Year's Day, 1767, Ob*, ov. in O

Friend to the poor, for the king's birthday, 1767, Ob*

Let the voice, New Year's Day, 1768, Ob*, ov. in O

Prepare, prepare your songs, for the king's birthday, 1768, Ob*, ov. in F

Patron of arts!, for the king's birthday, 1769, Ob*, ov. in F

Forward, Janus, New Year's Day, 1770, Ob*, ov. in F

Discord, hence!, for the king's birthday, 1770, Ob*, ov. in F

Again returns, New Year's Day, 1771, Ob*, ov. in F

Long did the churlish east, for the king's birthday, 1771, Ob*, ov. in F

At length the fleeting year, New Year's Day, 1772, Ob*, ov. in F

From scenes of death, for the king's birthday, 1772, Ob*, ov. in F

Wrapt in stole, New Year's Day, 1773, Ob*

Born for millions, for the king's birthday, 1773, Ob*

Pass but a few, New Year's Day, 1774, Ob*

Hark! or does the muse's ear, for the king's birthday, 1774, Ob*

Ye powers who rule, for the king's birthday, 1775, Ob*, ov. in F

On the white rocks, New Year's Day, 1776, Ob*, ov. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. E, i (New York, 1984)

Ye western gales, for the king's birthday, 1776, Ob*

Again imperial winter's sway, New Year's Day, 1777, Ob*

Driven out, for the king's birthday, 1777, Ob*, ov. in F

When rival nations, New Year's Day, 1778, Ob*

Arm'd with her native force, for the king's birthday, 1778, Ob*

To arms, to arms ye sons of might, New Year's Day, 1779, Ob* [ov. the same as that for Pierian sisters, 1755]

other odes

The charms of harmony display (P. Vidal), St Cecilia's Day, c1738, Ob*, ov. in F

See famed Apollo and the nine (J. Lockman), St Cecilia's Day, 1739, GB-Ob*, US-Wc, ov. to 1p. in S, ov. to 2p. in F

Gentle lyre, begin the strain (The Pythian Ode; W. Hart, after Pindar), 1740, Ob*, Ob, ov. in S

Here all thy active fires diffuse (W. Mason), for installation of Duke of Newcastle as Chancellor of University of Cambridge, 1749 (London, 1752), Cu*

Strike, strike the lyre, birthday of Frederick, Prince of Wales, ?1750, Ob* (facs. in MLE, F4, 1989)

Who but remembers yesterday (Britain's Isle), on death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1751, Ob*

Let grief subside, birthday of George, Prince of Wales, 1751, Ob* (facs. in MLE, F4, 1989)

Another passing year is flown (W. Havard), birthday of George, Prince of Wales, 1752, Ob* (facs. in MLE, F4, 1989)

Titles and ermine fall behind (Havard), in commemoration of Shakespeare, Drury Lane, 1756, Bu*, Ob

Cetra dè canti amica; Degli amor la madre altera: 2 odes in Del canzoniere d'Orazio di Giovan Gualberto Bottarelli (London, 1757)

Arise, immortal Shakespeare rise (D. Garrick), ?1759, Ob*

See, white-robed peace (D. Mallet), for the end of the Seven Years War, 1763, Ob*, ov. in O

Lo, on the thorny bed of care (Ode to Charity; sacred ode, J. Cradock), for Leicester Infirmary, 1774, Lcm, Ob, US-Wc*, ed. W.H. Cummings (London, 1908–9)

Vital spark of heavenly flame (The Dying Christian to his Soul; sacred ode, A. Pope), GB-Ob

In elder time, lost, MS listed in catalogue of sale of W. Boyce the younger

other vocal

Ah whither, whither would Achilles flee (Deidamia's parting with Achilles upon the siege of Troy), 1v, orch, c1735, GB-Ob

Gentle zephyrs smoothly rove (serenade), 1v, orch, c1735, Lcm*

Through flowery meads (cant.), 2vv, orch, c1735, Lcm*

When the celestial beauties strove (cant.), 2vv, c1735, Lcm*

Young Damon fired with amorous heat (cant.), 2vv, c1735, Lcm*

Solomon (serenata, E. Moore), 2vv, 4vv, orch (London, 1743), Lcm*, US-Wc (partly autograph), ed. in MB, lxviii (1996), ov. in S

Long with undistinguished flame (cant., C. Smart), in Lyra britannica, i (London, 1747), GB-Ob*

Tell me ye brooks (cant., W. Congreve), in Lyra britannica, ii (London, 1747)

Blest in Maria's friendship (cant.), in Lyra britannica, iii (London, 1748)

Did you not once Lucinda vow (dialogue), 2vv, orch, c1750, Ob*

Thus on a bed of dew bespangled flowers (Thyrsis; cant.), c1750, Ob*

Danae (cant.), 1v, orch, c1750, Ob*

Blate Jonny (A Scots Cantata; A. Ramsay), in Lyra britannica, v (London, 1756)

Haste, haste every nymph (dialogue), 1v, orch, in Lyra britannica, vi (London, 1759)

Thou rising sun (The Lapland Cantata; A. Philips), in Lyra britannica, vi (London, 1759)

Noah (orat), lost, set of pts sold at auction, Puttick and Simpson, 4 May 1850

3 glees, 7 catches and rounds, 4 two-pt songs, c76 solo songs pubd singly and in 18th-century anthologies

instrumental

12 Sonatas, 2 vn, vc/hpd (London, 1747), GB-CKc*, Lbl*, nos.1–6, 8–9, 12, ed. S. Sadie (London, 1961–79)

8 Symphonys in 8 Parts, op.2 (London, 1760), ed. M. Goberman (Vienna, 1964), ed. R. Platt (London, 1994) [ovs. from other works above]

12 Overtures in 7, 9, 10 and 12 Parts (London, 1770), ed. R. Platt (London, 1970–71) [ovs. from other works above]

10 voluntaries, org/hpd (London, 1779/R)

Concerto, d (The Worcester Overture; Symphony no.8), Lcm, S

Concerto grosso, b, Lbl

3 concerti grossi, Ob*: B, d (inc.), e

Concerto, bn, lost, perf. Castle Tavern, London, 11 Aug 1742

3 sonatas, 2 vn, bc, c1740, Cfm

Ov., C, c1740, Ob* (kbd score)

editions and arrangements

Cathedral Music, being a Collection in Score of the Most Valuable and Useful Compositions for That Service, by Several English Masters of the Last 200 Years, i (London, 1760); ii (London, 1768); iii (London, 1773) [for contents see Grove5 and A. Heyer, Historical Sets, Collected Editions and Monuments of Music: a Guide to their Contents (Chicago, 3/1980)]

M. Locke: The Original Songs, Airs and Choruses … in the Tragedy of Macbeth (London, 1770)

G.F. Handel: As pants the hart (verse anthem), Moses and the children of Israel (anthem, 8vv), from Israel in Egypt, excerpts from Messiah: all ed. J. Page, Harmonia sacra (London, 1800)

H. Purcell: Te Deum and Jubilate, D, GB-Ob, ed. V. Novello, The Cathedral Services, Anthems, Hymns and Other Sacred Pieces … by H. Purcell (London, 1828–44)

theoretical works

Treatise on Harmonic Theory (MS, Ob*)

5. Final years and legacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

BurneyH

GroveO (I. Bartlett)

NewmanSBE

T. Mortimer: The Universal Director (London, 1763); repr. as ‘An Eighteenth-Century Directory of London Musicians’, GSJ, ii (1949), 27–31

T. Busby, ed.: An Universal Dictionary of Music (London, 1783–6)

J[ohn] H[awkins]: ‘Memoirs of Dr. William Boyce’, Cathedral Music, i (London, 2/1788), pp.i–ix; repr. with introduction and notes by G. Beechey, MQ, lvii (1971), 87–106

W. Bingley: Musical Biography (London, 1814)

T. Busby: A General History of Music (London, 1819)

Rees's Cyclopaedia (London, 1819)

G.J. Stevenson: Memorials of the Wesley Family (London, 1876), 447–55

F.G. Edwards: ‘Dr. Boyce’, MT, xlii (1901), 441–9

E. Walker: History of Music in England (Oxford, 1907, enlarged 3/1952 by J.A. Westrup)

J.S. Bumpus: A History of English Cathedral Music 1549–1889 (London, 1908/R)

H.C. Colles: ‘The Chamber Music of William Boyce’, MT, li (1910), 11–13

H.C. Colles: ‘William Boyce’, ibid., 697–700

F.A. Hadland: ‘Dr. William Boyce’, MMR, xliii (1913), 284–5

R. Griffin: An Account of Two Volumes of Manuscript Anthems Once in the Barrett Collection (privately printed, 1929)

J.B. Trend: ‘Jonathan Battishill’, ML, xiii (1932), 264–71

J.A. Westrup: ‘A Minor English Master’, The Listener, xxiv (18 July 1940)

E.H. Fellowes: English Cathedral Music (London, 1941, rev. 5/1969 by J.A. Westrup)

J.F. Russell: ‘The Instrumental Works of William Boyce’, MO, lxxii (1948–9), 635–7

E. Taylor: ‘William Boyce and the Theatre’, MR, xiv (1953), 275–87

C.L. Cudworth: ‘The Symphonys of Dr. William Boyce’, Music, ii (1953), 27–9

J.R. van Nice: The Larger Sacred Choral Works of William Boyce (diss., U. of Iowa, 1956)

G. Finzi: Preface toWilliam Boyce: Overtures, MB, xiii (1957)

C. Cudworth: ‘Boyce and Arne: the Generation of 1710’, ML, xli (1960), 136–45

C. Haywood: ‘William Boyce's “Solemn Dirge” in Garrick's Romeo and Juliet Production of 1750’, Shakespeare Quarterly, xi (1960), 173–87

J. Herbage: ‘Arne and Boyce: the 250th Anniversary of their Birth’, Canon, xiii (1960), 273–4

S. Sadie: ‘The Chamber Music of Boyce and Arne’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 425–36

W. Shaw: ‘William Boyce’, MT, ci (1960), 479–82

C. Cudworth: ‘Songs and Part-Song Settings of Shakespeare's Lyrics, 1660–1960’,Shakespeare in Music, ed. P. Hartnoll (London, 1964), 51–87

D. Dawe: ‘New Light on William Boyce’, MT, cix (1968), 802–7

R. Fiske: ‘Boyce’s Operas’, MT, cxi (1970), 1217–18

P.W. Sims: The Non-Orchestral Anthems of William Boyce: a Stylistic and Formal Study (diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1970)

R. McGuinness: English Court Odes 1660–1820 (Oxford, 1971)

R.J. Bruce: ‘William Boyce: some Manuscript Recoveries’, ML, lv (1974), 437–43

H.D. Johnstone: ‘The Genesis of Boyce's “Cathedral Music”’, ML, lvi (1975), 26–40

G. Beechey: ‘William Boyce, 1711–1779: a Bicentenary Tribute’, MO, cii (1978–9), 429–30, 434 only

N. Kenyon: ‘William Boyce (1711–1779)’, Music and Musicians, xxvii/6 (1978–9), 24–7

I. Bartlett: ‘Boyce and Early English Oratorio’, MT, cxx (1979), 293–7, 385–91

R.D. McIntosh: The Dramatic Music of William Boyce (diss., U. of Washington, 1979)

J.R. Goodall: English Through-Composed Solo Song and Chamber Cantata, 1660–c1785 (diss., U. of Oxford, 1979); repr. in Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities (New York and London, 1989)

I. Bartlett and R.J. Bruce: ‘William Boyce's “Solomon”’, ML, lxi (1980), 28–49

M. Laurie: ‘The Chapel Royal Part-Books’, Music and Bibliography: Essays in Honour of Alec Hyatt King , ed. O. Neighbour (London, 1980), 28–50

I. Bartlett: ‘Boyce's Homage to St Cecilia’, MT, cxxiii (1982), 758–61

P.E. Daub: Music at the Court of George II (r. 1727–1760) (diss., Cornell U., 1985)

F.H. Ford: The Court Odes of William Boyce (1711–1779) (diss., SUNY, Buffalo, 1990)

M.E. Atkinson: Orchestral Anthems in Eighteenth-Century England, 1700–1775 (DMA, diss., U. of Illinois, 1991)

E.A. Le Grove: The Anthems and Services of William Boyce (diss., U. of Wales, Bangor, 1991)

Boyd, Anne (Elizabeth)

(b Sydney, 18 April 1946). Australian composer. She studied at the NSW Conservatorium, with Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney (BA 1969), where she won the Frank Albert Prize, and, through the award of a Commonwealth Overseas Scholarship, with Mellers and Rands at York University, England (DPhil 1972). She was subsequently appointed lecturer in music at the University of Sussex. From 1977 to 1980 she lived at Pearl Beach, north of Sydney, devoting herself exclusively to composition. She has particular interests in the musical cultures of Asia and the Pacific, and in music education. In 1981 she was appointed reader and founding head of the music department at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1990 became professor of music at the University of Sydney. She holds the rare distinction for a foreigner of being admitted to the Hong Kong Composers’ Guild and of lecturing on her own work at the Shanghai Conservatory. In 1996 she was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for her services to music as a composer and educator. Her compositional style is sparse, disciplined and cogent, placing contemporary techniques at the service of a personal and individual manner.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: As Far as Crawls the Toad (theatre piece), 5 young perc players, 1970, rev. 1972; The Rose Garden (theatre piece), Mez, chorus, ens, 1972; The Little Mermaid (children’s op, 2, R. Lee, after H.C. Andersen), 1977–8; The Beginning of the Day (children’s op, 3 scenes, 2 interludes), 1980

Orch: The Voice of the Phoenix, 1971; Black Sun, 1989; Conc. for Flute and Strings, 1992; Grathawai, 1993

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1 ‘Tu dai oan’ [The Fourth Generation], 1968, rev. 1971; The Metamorphosis of the Solitary Female Phoenix, wind qnt, pf, perc, 1971; As It Leaves the Bell, pf, hp, perc, 1973; Str Qt no.2, 1973; Angklung, pf, 1974; Bencharong, str ens, 1976; Goldfish through Summer Rain, fl, pf, 1978; Angklung 2, vn, 1980; The Book of Bells, pf, 1980; Red Sun, Chill Wind, fl, pf, 1980; Cloudy Mountain, fl, pf, 1981; Songs from Telegraph Bay (J. Kemp and J. Spencer), unspecified insts, 1984; Kakan, a fl, mar, pf, 1984; Wind across Bamboo, wind qnt, 1984; Bali Moods no.1, fl, pf, 1987; Str Qt no.3, 1991; Ullaru Mourns, vc, 1996; A Vision: Jesus Reassures His Mother, pf, 2000 [unrelated to other works of same title]

Vocal: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, 12vv, 1975; Summer Nights, Ct, hp, str, perc, 1976; As All Waters Flow, 5 female vv, ens, 1976; The Death of Captain Cook (D. Kim), orat, 1978; My Name is Tain (Kim), cycle, S, fl, va, hp, perc, 1979; Coal River (Kim), choral sym., Bar, children’s vv, SATB, brass band, orch, 1979; Cycle of Love (Kim), cycle, Ct/C, a fl, vc, pf, 1981; The Last of his Tribe (H. Kendall), SSA, 1979; Song of Rain (C.J. Dennis), children’s choir, 1986; Revelations of Divine Love, 2 S, A, T, 2 B, 1994; Jesus Reassures His Mother, S, A, T, B, SATB, 1996 [unrelated to other works of same title]; Meditation on a Chinese Character, Ct, fl, vc, 2 pf, hp, shakuhachi, perc, 1996; Last Songs of the Kamakazi (M. Williams), Ct, 6 vn, pf, perc, 1997; Dreams for the Earth: a Youth Cantata, T, SSTB handbell choir, SSA (female), SSA (male), SATB (chamber male), SATB, pf, 12 obbl tpt, orch, 1998; A Vision: Jesus Reassures His Mother, S, Mez, A, 2 T, B, 1999 [unrelated to other works of same title]

Principal publisher: Faber Music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.W. LePage: Women Composers, Conductors and Musicians of the Twentieth Century: Selected Biographies, iii (Metuchen, NJ, 1988), 37–55

A. Boyd: ‘A Solitary Female Phoenix Reflects on Women in Music’, CMR, xi (1994) 39–43

THÉRÈSE RADIC

Boyd, (Charles) Malcolm

(b Cardiff, 24 May 1932). British musicologist. He studied music at Durham University (1950–53) where his teachers included Arthur Hutchings and A.E.F. Dickinson. After teaching music at Hemsworth Grammar School (1956–9), he became lecturer (later senior lecturer) at Cardiff College of Music and Drama (later the Welsh College of Music and Drama). From 1973 until his retirement in 1992 he was lecturer (later reader) in music at University College, Cardiff. Boyd’s main areas of research are the music of J.S. Bach and Italian music of the early 18th century. His publications include standard studies of the life and works of Bach (1983) and Domenico Scarlatti (1986), and he has edited several cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti (ICSC, xiii, 1986).

WRITINGS

‘Form and Style in Alessandro Scarlatti’s Chamber Cantatas’, MR, xxv (1964), 17–26

‘The Songs of Nicolas Medtner’, ML, xlvi (1965), 16–22

Harmonizing ‘Bach’ Chorales (London, 1967)

Bach’s Instrumental Counterpoint (London, 1967)

‘Britten, Verdi and the Requiem’, Tempo, no.86 (1968), 2–6

‘Dies irae: Some Recent Manifestations’, ML, xlix (1968), 347–56

‘La solitudine: a Handel Discovery’, MT, cix (1968), 1111–14

‘English Secular Cantatas in the 18th Century’, MR, xxx (1969), 85–97

‘John Hughes on Opera’, ML, lii (1971), 383–6

‘Music Manuscripts in Cardiff’s Mackworth Collection’, ML, liv (1973), 133–41

Palestrina’s Style (Oxford, 1973)

‘John Stanley and the Foundling Hospital’, Soundings [Cardiff], v (1975), 73–81

‘New Light on Stanley, II: Clandestine Marriage’, MT, cxvii (1976), 812–14

William Mathias (Cardiff, 1978)

‘Benjamin Britten and Grace Williams: Chronicle of a Friendship’, Welsh Music, vi/6 (1980–81), 7–38

Grace Williams (Cardiff, 1980)

‘Metner and the Muse’, MT, cxxi (1980), 22–5

with J. Rayson: ‘The Gentleman’s Diversion: John Lenton and the Earliest Violin Tutor’, EMc, x (1982), 329–32

Bach (London, 1983, 2/1990; Ger. trans., 1984; Sp. trans., 1985; Hebrew trans., 1990; Finnish trans., 1991, 2/1994)

‘Scarlatti Sonatas in some Recently Discovered Spanish Sources’, Chigiana, new ser., xx (1985), 57–67

Domenico Scarlatti, Master of Music (London, 1986)

‘Domenico Scarlatti’s Cantate da Camera and their Connexions with Rome’, Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma: Rome 1985, 251–64

‘Handel’s Italian Cantatas: some New Sources’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. S. Sadie and A. Hicks (London, 1987), 246–53

‘Die Kirchenmusik von Domenico Scarlatti’, KJb, lxxii (1988), 117–25

ed.: Music and the French Revolution: Cardiff 1989

Bach: the Brandenburg Concertos (Cambridge, 1993)

‘Rome: the Power of Patronage’, Man and Music/Music and Society: The Late Baroque Era: from the 1680 to 1740, ed. G.J. Buelow (London, 1993), 39–65

‘The Music Very Good Indeed: Scarlatti’s Tolomeo et Alessandro Recovered’, Studies in Music History Presented to H.C. Robbins Landon, ed. O. Biba and D.W. Jones (London, 1996), 9–20

‘Handel’s Chamber Music’, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. D. Burrows (Cambridge, 1997), 182–92

‘The Bach Family’, The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. J. Butt (Cambridge, 1997), 9–16

ed., with J.-J. Carreras: Music in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1998)

ed.: Oxford Composer Companions: J.S. Bach (Oxford, 1999)

ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Boydell, Brian

(b Dublin, 17 March 1917). Irish composer and musicologist. His early education at Rugby was followed by a period in Heidelberg pursuing general musical studies. He graduated with a first class degree in natural sciences from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1938 and began studies in composition with Hadley and Howells at the RCM (1938–9) and with Larchet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin (1940–42). He took the BMus (1942) and DMus (1959) at Trinity College, University of Dublin. Boydell taught singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1944–52) and held the chair of music at Trinity College (1962–82) where he was subsequently elected fellow emeritus. His musicological research during that time culminated in two important books on the music of 18th-century Dublin, A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700–60 and Rotunda Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin. He was also active as a conductor, directing the Dublin Orchestral Players (1942–67) and the Dowland Consort (1958–69), and as an adjudicator and frequent broadcaster. He served on the Irish Arts Council (1961–83), was a founder member of the Music Association of Ireland and his many awards include an honorary DMus from the National University of Ireland (1974), the Commendatore della Repubblica Italiana (1983), membership of Aosdána (Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists) and an honorary fellowship of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1990).

His eclectic influences include such diverse composers as Vaughan Williams, Bartók, Sibelius, Bloch, Berg, Stravinsky and Hindemith. In the 1940s he eschewed the prevalent ‘Celtic Twilight’ school of Irish Romanticism in order to develop a more progressive and personal style by integrating free octatonicism, modality and extended tonality into a coherent compositional language. This was to remain almost unchanged throughout his career, exemplified by the four works for string quartet composed between 1949 and 1991. Neo-classical techniques are evident too in his motivic and thematic treatment and his choice of genres and forms.

A lifelong pacifist, Boydell was inspired to compose the funereal In memoriam Mahatma Gandhi (1948) for orchestra after Gandhi’s assassination. Other works which also demonstrate his command of orchestral techniques include the intensely expressive Violin Concerto (1953–4), the Megalithic Ritual Dances (1956), Symphonic Inscapes (1968) and Masai Mara (1988) which uses the tenor recorder in novel ways to recreate the atmosphere of the Kenyan national park of that name. As a singer himself, he was intimately acquainted with the potential of the human voice; this is reflected in his many vocal works, such as the settings of texts by Joyce and Yeats, the cantata A Terrible Beauty is Born, written for the 50th anniversary of the 1916 uprising, and the polysyllabic Mouth Music for Ten Voices, composed for the International Choral Festival in Cork in 1974. Boydell has also written incidental music for a number of Irish films and plays as well as occasional ceremonial pieces.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: In memoriam Mahatma Gandhi, 1948; Vn Conc., 1953; Elegy and Capriccio, cl, str, 1956; Megalithic Ritual Dances, 1956; Symphonic Inscapes, 1968; Partita concertante, 1978; Masai Mara, 1988

Vocal: The Feather of Death (T. Connolly), Bar, fl, str trio, 1943; 5 Joyce Songs, Bar, pf/chbr orch, 1946–8; Timor mortis, T, SATB, org, 1952; Shatter me, Music (R.M. Rilke), SSATB, 1952; Mors et vita (Dunbar, anon.), S, T, B, SATB, orch, 1960–61; Come Sleep (J. Fletcher), SSATB, 1963; I Loved a Lass (G. Wither), SATB, 1964; A Terrible Beauty is Born (W.B. Yeats, F. Ledwidge, T. McDonagh, A.E. Sigerson, Kettle), spkr, S, A, B, SATB, orch, 1965; 4 Yeats Poems, S, orch, 1965; 3 Madrigals (P. Sidney, anon.), SATB and SSATB, 1967; Mouth Music (Boydell), 4 S, 2 A, 2 T, 2 Bar, 1974; The Small Bell (Old Irish), SATB, fl, hp, str qt, 1980; The Carlow Cant. (The Female Friend), S, T, Bar, SATB, orch, 1985; I Will Hear What the Lord Will Speak (Ps lxxxv), anthem, SATB, org, 1988

Chbr and solo inst: Str Trio, 1943–4; Sonata, vc, pf, 1945; Str Qt no.1, 1949; Str Qt no.2, 1957; Qnt, fl, hp, str trio, 1960, rev. 1966, 1980; Str Qt no.3, 1969; A Pack of Fancies for a Travelling Harper, Irish hp, 1970; 6 Mosaics, vn, hp/pf, 1972–8; 5 Blows, brass qt, 1984; Adagio and Scherzo, str qt, 1991; The Maiden and the Seven Devils, pf, 1992; Viking Lip-Music, brass ens, 1996

MSS in IRL-Dc

WRITINGS

ed.: Four Centuries of Music in Ireland (London, 1979)

T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan, eds.: ‘Music and Society up to 1850’, A New History of Ireland, iv (Oxford, 1986), 542–628

A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700–60 (Dublin, 1988)

Rotunda Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Dublin, 1992)

Articles in Grove6 and GroveI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC1 (A. Fleischmann)

KdG (A. Klein)

C. Acton: ‘Interview with Brian Boydell’, Éire-Ireland, v/4 (St Paul, MN, 1970), 97–111

G. Cox: ‘Octatonicism in the String Quartets of Brian Boydell’, International Musicological Conference: Maynooth, 1995 (Dublin, 1996), 263–70

A. Klein: Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1996)

GARETH COX

Boyden, David D(odge)

(b Westport, CT, 10 Dec 1910; d Berkeley, 18 Sept 1986). American musicologist. He studied at Harvard (AB 1932, MA 1938) where he was especially influenced by Archibald T. Davison. From 1938 to 1975 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was assistant professor (1943–9), associate professor (1949–55) and full professor (1955–75); he also served as chairman of the music department (1955–61). He published three textbooks (including the widely used An Introduction to Music), but most of his work has been on the history of string instruments and string playing. His book A History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 is a major work of scholarship informed by practical experience as well as scholarly judgment. He was working on its sequel up to the time of his death. He was twice vice-president of the American Musicological Society (1954–6, 1960–62), a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford (1963) and three times the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1954, 1967 and 1970).

WRITINGS

A Manual of Counterpoint Based on Sixteenth-century Practice (New York, 1944–6, 2/1953)

‘Ariosti’s Lessons for Viola d’Amore’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 545–63

‘The Violin and its Technique in the 18th Century’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 9–38

‘Prelleur, Geminiani, and Just Intonation’, JAMS, iv (1951), 202–19

Introduction to F. Geminiani: The Art of Playing on the Violin (London, 1952) [facs. of 1751 edn]

An Introduction to Music (New York, 1956, 2/1970)

‘Dynamics in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music’, Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 185–93

‘When is a Concerto not a Concerto?’, MQ, xliii (1957), 220–32

‘The Violin and its Technique: New Horizons in Research’, IMSCR VII: Cologne 1958, 29–38

‘Monteverdi’s Violini Piccoli alla Francese and Viole da Brazzo’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 387–402

‘Geminiani and the First Violin Tutor’, AcM, xxxi (1959), 161–70; xxxii (1960), 40–47

‘The Missing Italian Manuscript of Tartini’s Traité des agrémens’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 315–28

‘The Violin’, Musical Instruments through the Ages, ed. A. Baines (Harmondsworth, 1961/R, 2/1966/R)

‘Francesco Geminiani: a Reappraisal’, Lucca – Rassegna del Comune, vi (1962), 3–8

‘The Tenor Violin’, Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. W. Gerstenberg, J. LaRue and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1963), 273–9

Review of a recording of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas by S. Monosoff, MQ, xlix (1963), 397–404

‘The “Hill” Lira da Braccio’, The Strad, lxxv (1964–5), 86–9

A History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965)

Catalogue of the Hill Collection of Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (London, 1969)

‘Nicholas Bessaraboff’s Ancient Musical Instruments (1941)’, Notes, xxviii (1971–2), 21–7

‘The Corelli “Solo” Sonatas and their Ornamental Additions by Corelli, Geminiani, Dubourg, Tartini, and the “Walsh Anonymous”’, Musica antiqua III: Bydgoszcz 1972, 591–607 [incl. Pol. summary]

‘Corelli’s Solo Violin Sonatas “Grac’d” by Dubourg’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 113–25

‘Der Geigenbogen von Corelli bis Tourte’, Violinspiel und Violinmusik: Graz 1972, 295–310

with others: The New Grove Violin Family (New York, 1989)

PHILIP BRETT

Boyd Neel Orchestra.

London orchestra founded in 1932 by Boyd Neel. See London, §VII, 3(i) and especially Neel, (louis) boyd.

Boyer, Charles-Georges

(d after 1807). French music publisher. He was an écuyer du Roi when he married Marie-Rose-Jeanne Le Menu in February 1775. In January 1778 Boyer’s wife went into partnership with her mother, Madame Le Menu, in their music publishing business under the name of ‘A la Clé d’Or’, in the rue du Roule in Paris. The firm had been founded by Christophe Le Menu in 1758. The partnership of the ‘Dames Lemenu et Boyer’ lasted until 1783. In May of that year, Boyer, who had bought his mother-in-law’s interest in the firm on 21 January 1779, invested in the business himself. He set up shop at 83 rue Neuve des Petits Champs (between May 1783 and December 1784), then in the rue de Richelieu (or rue de la Loi) in the former café de Foy (between January 1785 and August 1796), and after 1785 he used the name ‘A la Clé d’Or’ for his own establishment. The catalogues he issued under his own name feature both new works and works previously published by Madame Le Menu. From a comparison of the Venier and Boyer catalogues, it would seem that Boyer bought the firm of Jean Baptiste Venier in 1784. Until August 1790 Boyer used the shop in the rue du Roule as a subsidiary outlet for his own publications. In 1796 he sold his business to the publisher Jean-Henri Naderman, who subsequently described himself as his successor.

The published repertory embraced everything then in fashion: symphonies, symphonies concertantes, concertos, chamber music, arrangements of opéra-comique overtures, airs variés and ariettas. Italian composers such as Boccherini, Cambini, Clementi, Lorenziti and Sarti featured side by side with composers from German-speaking countries such as Haydn, Vanhal, Rodolphe Kreutzer and Sterkel. French composers were in a minority on the list. Like many of his contemporaries, he also published periodicals of music including Journal de pièces de clavecin (1784–94), Journal d'ariettes choisies dans les meilleurs opéras (1791–2) and Les Variétés à la mode. (DEMF, i; JohanssonFMP)

ANIK DEVRIÈS

Boyer, Jean

(b before 1600; d Paris, before 16 May 1648). French composer and viol player. He composed airs for several ballets de cour: Ballet des forgerons (1617), Ballet de M. de Nemours (1618) and Ballet de la folie (1618). He dedicated his Airs (1621) to the Duchess of Nemours, whose husband helped develop the ballet de cour; perhaps Boyer was in the employ of the Nemours family. He may have been the Boyer who went to Savoy in 1628 with three other Parisian musicians to serve the court there; he is less likely to have been the Boyer who was director of music at the collegiate church of St Agricol at Avignon from 1626 to 1629. The latter Boyer, apparently Catholic, wrote an eight-part antiphonal Passion motet, Ecce homo, and another motet, Crux fidelis; and Jean, apparently Protestant, published a psalm and two prayers, as well as his many secular airs. On 29 January 1636 Jean Boyer succeeded Gabriel Caignet as viol player in the royal chamber, a position he maintained until his death. Some time after taking up the post he became secretary of the chamber and ordinaire of music of the king and queen. His instrument collection at the time of his death included lutes, theorbos and guitars as well as viols.

Boyer’s early airs are rhythmically much more interesting than the later bawdy drinking- and dance-songs. The solo airs are accompanied by a simple lute part; the drinking-songs are for two voices (treble and bass), and the dance-songs are all monophonic. All the songs are strophic and syllabic.

WORKS

Airs à 4 parties (Paris, 1619)

Airs de Ian Boyer Parisien, mis en tablature de luth par luy mesme, 1v, lute (Paris, 1621), 19 airs, 2 dialogues, 1 psalm, 2 prayers; 2 airs ed. A. Verchaly, Airs de cour pour voix et luth (1603–1643) (Paris, 1961)

Recueil de chansons à boire et dancer, 1–2vv (Paris, 1636)

II. livre des chansons à danser et à boire, 1–2vv (Paris, 1642)

9 airs, 1v, lute, 1618⁹/R

40 airs, 1v, 1619¹⁰, 1623⁵, 1628⁹

8 airs, 1v, 1621¹³ [sometimes wrongly listed as in 1620¹⁰]

12 sacred contrafacta, 1v, bc, 1632³

Airs by ?Boyer in 1617⁹, 1626¹¹

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.-A. Durand: ‘Les instruments dans la musique sacrée’, RdM, lii (1966), 73–87, esp. 83

M. Jurgens: Documents du minutier central concernant l’histoire de la musique, 1600–1650 (Paris, 1967–74)

M.-T. Bouquet: ‘Quelques relations musicales franco-piémontaises au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles’, RMFC, x (1970), 5–18, esp. 14

JOHN H. BARON

Boyer [Boyé], Pascal

(b Tarascon, 20 Jan 1743; d Paris, 7 July 1794). French writer and composer. He succeeded Gauzenargues as maître de chapelle at Nîmes Cathedral from 1759 to 1765. After a visit to Italy, he spent the rest of his life in Paris writing, composing and teaching singing and the guitar. He apparently wrote much additional music to operas and ballets, at least one motet, and perhaps three trio sonatas, published by Gaveaux; but only a few airs in Cailhava’s comédie-ballet Les étrennes de l’amour (1769) and guitar accompaniments to the collection Suites des soirées de la Comédie italienne (c1783) are extant. He is important principally for his writings, which show him to have been an intelligent polemicist with Encyclopaedist sympathies and a good theoretical grounding. Involved from the early 1780s in political journalism, he was arrested as a reactionary and died on the guillotine.

WRITINGS

Lettre à M. Diderot, sur le projet de l'unité de clef dans la musique et la réforme des mesures, proposés par M. l'Abbé La Cassagne dans ses ‘Eléments du chant’ (Paris, 1767)

‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Pergolèse’, Mercure de France (July 1772), ii, 185–92

L'expression musicale mise au rang des chimères (Amsterdam, 1779) [attrib. Boyer]

Journal des spectacles (1793) [also attrib. J. Boyer-Brun]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB (also suppl., ‘Gluck’)

GerberL

GerberNL

La BordeE, iii

MGG1 suppl. (H.-A. Durand and J. Gribenski)

J. van Biezen: ‘Maatsoorten en tempo in de eerste helft van de 18de eeuw, in het bijzonder in de orgelwerken van Johann Sebastian Bach’ [Times and tempo during the first half of the 18th century, especially in the organ works of J.S. Bach], Bachs ‘Orgel-Büchlein’ in nieuw perspectief: Groningen 1985, 157–239 [with Eng. summary]

JULIAN RUSHTON

Boyes, Thomas.

See Boyce, Thomas.

Boykan, Martin

(b New York, 12 April 1931). American composer. He studied with Piston at Harvard University (BA 1951), and with Hindemith, first at the University of Zürich (1951–2) and then at Yale University (MM 1953). In 1953 he went to Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship, and in 1957 he joined the faculty of Brandeis University, where he was appointed professor in 1976. He has also lectured at Columbia University and Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His numerous grants and commissions include those from the Fromm Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the NEA, the MacDowelly Colony, the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Despite the tonal orientation of his principal teachers, Boykan's mature style is atonal and reflects the influences of Webern and the late music of Stravinsky, the respective subjects of his two most important articles (‘“Neoclassicism” and the late Stravinsky’, PNM, i/2, 1963, p.155, and ‘The Webern Concerto Revisited’, Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers, iii, 1970, p.74). His String Quartet no.1 (1967) is partly serial; his later works use 12-note techniques. A characteristically American feature of his music is the long line, which for him is rhythmically flexible and extends across a wide registral range. He favours long works for small ensembles; a notable exception is his Symphony for orchestra and solo baritone (1989).

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal-inst: Epithalamion, Bar, vn, hp, 1987; Sym., Bar, orch, 1989; Voyages (H. Crane), S, pf, 1992; 3 Pss, S, pf, 1993; Sea Gardens (Crane, W. Whitman, W. Shakespeare), S, pf, 1993; Ps xxi, S, str qt, 1997

Choral: Ps cxxviii, 1965; Shalmon Rav, Bar, chorus, org, 1985; Màariv Settings, chorus, org, 1995; 3 Shakespeare Songs, 1996

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1967; Conc., 13 insts, 1971; Str Qt no.2, 1974; Pf Trio no.1, 1975; Elegy, S, fl, cl, vn, vc, db, pf, part i (J.W. von Goethe, G. Leopardi, G. Ungaretti), 1979, part ii (C.M. Brentano, E. Dickinson, Li He), 1982; Str Qt no.3, 1984; Pf Sonata no.1, 1986; Pf Sonata no.2, 1990; Eclogue, fl, hn, va, vc, pf, 1991; Nocturne, vc, pf, perc, 1991; Echoes of Petrarch, fl, cl, pf, 1992; Sonata, vc, pf, 1992; Impromptu, vn, 1993; Pastorale, pf, 1993; Sonata, vn, pf, 1994; Str Qt no.4, 1995–6; City of Gold, fl, 1996; Pf Trio no.2, 1997; Unsurpations, pf, 1997

Principal publisher: C.F. Peters

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

J. Harbison and E. Cory: ‘Martin Boykan: String Quartet (1967), Two Views’, PNM, xi/2 (1973), 204–48 [incl. score]

E. Cory: ‘Martin Boykan: String Quartet No.1 (1967)’, MQ, lxii (1976), 616–20

H. Pollack: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and his Students from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Lanham, MD, 1992)

STEVEN E. GILBERT

Boyko, Rostislav Grigor'yevich

(b Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 1 Aug 1931). Russian composer. He studied at the Glinka Choral Capella in Leningrad (1939–44) and at the Moscow Choral School (1944–50). He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory (1957) as a choral conductor and composer, having studied with Khachaturyan and Vladimir Stepanov.

Among Boyko's 80 opuses, written largely before 1983, there are three symphonies, more than 100 choruses, many solo and choral songs. Most of his works have been published, many have been recorded. Boyko's compositions for children, including four operas, continue the tradition established by Lyadov, Grechaninov and Rebikov. Choral music is his most widely represented genre, combining the professionalism of a composer and chorus master. This is typified by a song style which relies on the European classical tradition and on folklore, with the subordination of individual means of expression to traditional musical conventions. The music is characterized by clarity of form, by elegant part-writing, a natural singing style, and by its expressiveness and memorability. Particularly successful are the choruses on verses by A.S. Pushkin (1978) and his romances and songs set to poems by Yesenin, Isaakian and Heine. Boyko is one of the first Russian composers to produce whole compositions based on melodies from around the world and from various parts of the former USSR. His choral arrangements, op.17, and the 32-song Cycle of Children's Songs in the Style of Music of the Peoples of the World, op.68, are notable in this respect.

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal

Vocal-orch: Sym. no.1 ‘1917’ (E. Bagritsky, V.V. Mayakovsky), op.13, solo vv, chorus, perc, 1958; Ot Volgï do Karpaf [From the Volga to the Carpathians] (vocal-choreographic suite, 5 scenes, I. Dryomov), op.25, solo vv, choruses, Russ. folk inst orch, 1967; Vyatskiye pesni [Vyatka Songs] (trad.), op.47, B, chorus, Russ. folk inst orch, 1976, 1982; Vasily Tyorkin (orat, 11 scenes, A. Tvardovsky), op.21, Bar, S, chorus, orch, 1981; Sym. no.3, op.72, female v, chorus, orch, 1986

Choral: Svobodnïye obrabotka narodnïkh pesen [Free Arrs. of Folk Songs] (K. Ryleyev, L. Derbenyov, O. Bolotin, T. Sikorskaya), op.17, chorus, 1964; Khorï na stikhi russkikh i sovetskikh poėtov [Choruses on Verses by Russ. and Soviet Poets] (Y. Serpin, S.A. Yesenin, V. Semernin, Tvardovsky, L. Vasil'yeva, A. Pokrovsky), op.17b, 1969; A cappella Choruses (Yesenin, M. Tank, A. Dement'yev, Mayakovsky, Semernin, anon.), op.40, 1972; Choruses (A.S. Pushkin), op.51, 1978

1v, pf: Romances (Yesenin), op.26, 1976; 2 Romances (H. Heine, trans. W. Sorgenfrei, Blok), op.27, 1976; Vesenniy mirazh [A Spring Mirage] (A. Isaakian, trans. T. Spendiarova and others), song cycle, op.23, 1983

instrumental

Sonata, op.12, vn, pf, 1960; Sonatina, op.18, pf, 1975; Sym. no.2, op.64, orch, 1982

music for children

Ops: Stantsiya Zavalyayka [Zavalyaka Station] (2, M. Plyatskovsky), op.32, Tr, S, T, B, children's chorus, orch, 1970; Kvartet [Quartet] (1, I. Krïlov, V. Semernin), op.59, solo vv, pf, 1981; Pesenka v lesu [Song in the Forest] (1, Y. Akim, Boyko), op.20, solo vv, children's chorus, orch, 1981; Skazka o smeyantsakh [Tale about the Comedians] (1, G. Sapgir, Boyko), op.58, solo vv, children's chorus, variety orch, 1981

Other: Children's a cappella choruses (M. Sadovsky, V. Tatarinov), op.33, 1972; Children's a cappella choruses (V. Kotov, M. Svetlov, Sadovsky, L. Kondrashenko, N. Gil'yen, trans. O. Savich, A.S. Pushkin, M. Lermontov; H. Heine, trans. S.A. Yesenin and others), op.46, 1974, 1982; Zvonï [Ringing], op.36, pf, 1975; Tsikl detskïkh pesen v stile muzïki narodov mira [Cycle of Children's Songs in the Style of Music of the Peoples of the World] (V. Viktorov), op.68, 1v/chorus, pf, 1982

Principal publishers: Muzïka, Prosveshchenye, Sovetskiy kompozitor (all Moscow)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Viktorov: Rostislav Boyko: mongraficheskiy ocherk [A monographic essay] (Moscow, 1985)

T. Karïsheva: ‘Rostislav Grigor'yevich Boyko’, Oni pishut dlya detey, xi (Moscow, 1978), 137–78

M. Kartavtseva: ‘Muzïka vospitïvayet cheloveka’ [Music educates a person], SovM (1979), no.8 pp.34–7

V. Paskhalov: ‘ Na avtorskom kontserte R. Boyko’ [At a concert of works by Rostislav Boyko], SovM (1983), no.6, pp.32–3

YURY IVANOVICH PAISOV

Boyle, George Frederick

(b Sydney, 29 June 1886; d Philadelphia, 20 June 1948). Australian-American pianist, composer and teacher. He was first taught the piano by his mother and then, from 1901, by Sydney Moss. In the same year he made a concert tour of more than 280 towns and cities in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; further tours followed. From 1905 to 1910 he studied in Berlin with Busoni. During these years of intensive study he performed extensively throughout Europe and conducted orchestras in the UK. After he settled in the USA in 1910, such notable pianists as Mark Hambourg, Ernest Hutcheson and Backhaus continued to play his compositions in Europe. From 1910 until his death Boyle performed, taught and composed in America. He held positions at three major American conservatories: the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, as head of the piano department (1910–22), the Curtis Institute (1922–4) and the Institute of Musical Art, soon renamed the Juilliard School of Music (1922–40). In addition, he was on the faculty of Chestnut Hill College (1944–8) and was coordinator of the Boyle Piano Studios in Philadelphia from 1926 until his death in 1948.

Boyle composed in a late Romantic style. The works of his early period (1902–10) are short, small-scale pieces, characterized by simple harmonies, rhythms and melodies. Many of them are dances in binary, ternary or rondo forms. The 1909 Ballade for piano anticipated his middle period (1910–22), in which forms become larger, and rhythms and harmonies more daring in the manner of Debussy and Ravel or the later Rachmaninoff. Rich, often non-functional harmony and striking pianistic effects such as tremolos, long trills, alternating octaves and fast repeated chords characterize such works as the Piano Concerto (1912), the Piano Sonata (1921) and the Habanera for piano. In Boyle's final period (1922–48), he returned to smaller forms, but now free-composed and with the advanced harmonies, chromatic melodies and more complex rhythms of the middle period compositions. He wrote many pedagogical pieces during these later years.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: The Black Rose (operetta), unfinished

Orch: Pf Conc., d (New York, 1912); Slumber Song and Aubade, 1915; Sym. Fantasy (Philadelphia, 1916); Vc Conc., 1918; Pf Concertino, 1935; Holiday Ov.

Chbr: Canzone scherzoso, 1904; Quartette, str qt, 1916; Va Sonata, 1919; Vc Sonata, 1928; Ballade élégiaque, pf trio, 1931; Vn Sonata, 1933; other chbr music

Pf: Ballade, 1909; Nocturne (London, 1910); Morning: a Sketch for Pf (New York, 1911); 3 pièces (1911): 1 La prima ballerina, 2 In tempo di mazurka, 3 La gondola; Pf Sonata, B, 1915; Habanera (1919); Caprice, 1928; Obsession, 1928; Suite, 2 pf, 1931–2; numerous other pf pieces

Vocal: The Pied Piper of Hamelin (cant., R. Browning) (London, 1911); Don Ramiro (H. Heine), 1916; c50 songs (1909–43), incl. 6 Songs (Heine: New Spring), S, pf (London, 1909), La bonne chanson (P. Verlaine), 1v, pf (New York, 1911)

Principal publishers: Carl Fischer, Composers' Music Corp., Elkan-Vogel, Novello, G. Schirmer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I.W. Peery: George F. Boyle: Pianist, Teacher, Composer (diss., Peabody Conservatory of Music, 1986)

IRENE WEISS PEERY

Boyle, Ina [Selina]

(b Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, 8 March 1889; d Enniskerry, 10 March 1967). Irish composer. As well as studying the violin and the cello, she took composition lessons with George Hewson and Charles Kitson in Dublin and, by correspondence, with her cousin Charles Wood. In 1920 her Soldiers at Peace was performed with great success and The Magic Harp received a Carnegie Award. The latter was published and performed in London, as were some partsongs and some orchestral and choral works. In 1928 she studied in London with Vaughan Williams; she continued to have occasional lessons with him until the late 1930s.

Although Vaughan Williams's influence can be heard in Boyle's music, her own musical personality, predominantly serious but with moments of wit and passion, is always evident. She drew her inspiration usually from poetry, and her particular affinity with Edith Sitwell's work is demonstrated in two of her finest works, From the Darkness and Still Falls the Rain. Her 15 Gaelic Hymns remain her most popular choral work. Of her orchestral compositions Wild Geese and the Overture are the most frequently performed, revealing an accomplished technique and skilful orchestration. Drama and wit are displayed through a quintessentially Irish voice. Boyle led a quiet, isolated life in Ireland and although she wrote prolifically, it was with little opportunity for performance.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Virgilian Suite (ballet), 1930–31; The Dance of Death (masque for dancing, after H. Holbein woodcuts), 1935–6; The Vision of Er (mimed drama/ballet, after Plato: Republic), 1938–9; Maudlin of Paplewick (op, after B. Jonson: The Sad Shepherd), 1964–6

Orch: The Magic Harp, 1919; Colin Clout, 1921; Glencree (In the Wicklow Hills), sym., 1924–7; Psalm, vc, orch, 1927; The Dream of the Rood, sym., 1929–30; Overture, 1933/4; Vn Conc., 1935; Wild Geese, 1942

Vocal-orch: Soldiers at Peace, chorus, orch, 1916; Hellas (Gk. epitaphs, trans. J.W. Mackail), S, chorus, orch, 1941; The Prophet (A.S. Pushkin, trans. M. Baring), Bar, orch, 1945; From the Darkness, (sym., E. Sitwell), C, orch, 1946–51; No Coward Soul is Mine (E. Brontë), S, str, 1953

Unacc. choral music, incl. Gaelic Hymns (1923–4); works for solo v, str qt, incl. Still falls the Rain (Sitwell), C, str qt (1948); songs; chbr music

MSS in IRL-Dtc

Principal publishers: Chester, Novello, Stainer & Bell

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Maconchy: Ina Boyle: an Appreciation with a Select List of her Music (Dublin, 1974)

SARAH M. BURN

Boyleau [Boileau, Beaqua], Simon

(fl Milan and Turin, c1544–after 1586). French composer. He is not to be identified with ‘Boyleau’ to whom a motet in the Medici Codex (I-Fl Magl.666) of 1518 is ascribed. In his first madrigal book (1546) he is called ‘nobile francese’, and in the dedication (to Marguerite of Savoy, daughter of François I) of a manuscript collection of madrigals he wrote ‘esser anch’io di nation francese’. His origins are unknown, but he seems to have spent his career in northern Italy. His earliest works were published in the Veneto: the Madrigali a quatro voci (1546) was published at Padua, by Fabriano and Bindoni (probably on commission of Girolamo Scotto) and not in Milan as previously thought. Venetian influence is evident in the dedications to his Motetta of 1544 and the Madrigali of 1546; it appears from these dedications that he spent his First Italian years in Venice.

From 1551 to 1557 Boyleau was maestro di cappella of Milan Cathedral; he was replaced by Bartolomeo Torresani in January 1558. From at least the end of 1562 he was active, still in Milan, as maestro at S Maria presso S Celso, where he remained through at least January 1569. The works of these years were published in Milan and dedicated to figures in Lombardy. In this same period he assembled (and perhaps copied himself) the set of four-voice madrigals dedicated to Marguerite of Savoy. The collection includes settings of sonnets addressed to Marguerite and her husband, Duke Emanuele Filiberto, as well as an eight-section setting of a canzone by Sannazaro. The manuscript is undated but must come from between 1559, the date of the dedicatee’s marriage, and her death in 1574.

In February 1572 Boyleau returned to Milan Cathedral as coadiutor to the titular maestro, Vincenzo Ruffo; he resumed his previous position of maestro a few months later when Ruffo left Milan for Pistoia. Boyleau’s service as maestro di cappella continued until his final dismissal in March 1577. Perhaps thanks to his preceding rapport with the Savoy court, at the end of 1582 he joined the cappella of Turin Cathedral, where he became maestro in April of the following year. Dismissed at the end of 1585, he nevertheless remained some months in the city and in June 1586 was paid by Duke Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy for having instructed a page and for some music.

Boyleau’s music is competent if unadventurous. The Magnificat settings, dedicated to Carlo Borromeo, are alternatim works of modest dimensions. The motets, conservative in character, were enough esteemed to be intabulated by the Spanish vihuelist Estaban Daza and to be included in anthologies by Berg and Neuber (RISM 1555¹¹, 1555¹², 1556⁹). His first madrigals represent the Venetian style of the 1530s and 40s. Subsequent collections show him to have been familiar with more recent trends, drawing on the new chromatic possibilities and experimenting with a counterpoint more rhythmically varied and complex. A section of Gesner’s Pandectae (1548) mentions a treatise ‘Simonis Boyleau Galli Musica’ (now lost).

WORKS

sacred vocal

Motetta … nunquam hactenus impressa, 4vv (Venice, 1544)

Modulationes in Magnificat ad omnes tropos … addito insuper concentu, vulgo falso bordon nominato, ad omnes tonos accomodato, 4–6vv (Milan, 1566)

1 mass, Salve Regina, 2 motets, 4vv, I-Tn, Ris Mus ii 4

secular vocal

Madrigali … novamente composti et coretti, 4vv (Padua, 1546)

Il secondo libro dei madrigali et canzoni, 4vv (Milan, 1558)

Madriali, 4–8vv (Milan, 1564)

5 madrigals, 4vv, I-Tn, Ris Mus iv 32 (one pubd, 1564)

2 books of madrigals (‘terzo e quarto libro’) 4vv, lost, MischiatiI

1 book of madrigals, 3vv, lost, MischiatiI

2 madrigals, S-Uu, doubtful

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.A. Villanis: ‘Alcuni codici manoscritti di musica del secolo XVI posseduti dalla Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino’, Congresso internazionale di scienze storiche [III]: Roma 1903, viii, 319–60

L. Torri: ‘Quattro sonetti musicati per le nozze e in onore di Emanuele Filiberto e Margherita di Francia’, Studi pubblicati dalla regia Università di Torino nel iv centenario della nascita di Emanuele Filiberto (Turin 1928), 479–92

G. d’Alessi: ‘Una stampa musicale dell’ 1566 dedicata a San Carlo Borromeo’, NA, ix (1932), 3–4, 255–9

F. Mompellio: ‘La cappella del Duomo da Matthias Hermann di Vercore a Vincenzo Ruffo’, Storia di Milano, ix (1961), 749–85

F. Mompellio: ‘La cappella del Duomo dal 1573 ai primi decenni del ’900’, Storia di Milano, xvi (1962), 507–88

L. Bernstein: ‘The Bibliography of Music in Conrad Gesner’s Pandectae (1548)’, AcM, xlv (1973), 119–63, esp. 145

J.A. Bernstein: ‘The Burning Salamander: Assigning a Printer to Some Sixteenth-Century Music Prints’, Notes, xlii (1985–6), 483–501

R. Moffa: ‘Musica, poesia e spettacolo alla corte di Torino tra xvi e xvii secolo’, Claude le Jeune et son temps: Chambery 1991, ed. M.-T. Bouquet-Boyer and P. Bonniffet (Chambey and New York, 1996), 169–76

L. Marchi: Simon Boyleau: studio biografico ed edizione critica dei Madrigali a quatro voci (1546) (thesis, U. of Pavia, 1996)

J.A. Bernstein: Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: the Scotto Press (1539–1572) (New York, 1998)

JAMES HAAR, LUCIA MARCHI

Boy Monachus, Hugo

(fl c1400). North Netherlandish composer. He was probably from Dordrecht, where the name occurred frequently at the time, though never as a monk’s, and he may be the priest Hugh who was appointed as a singer to the court of Holland at The Hague in 1395. He left one three-voice Dutch song Genade Venus, vrouwe tzart in the fragments NL-Lu 2720 (ed. van Biezen and Gumbert). Only the cantus is complete. It follows the more complex ballade style of the late 14th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrohmR

H. Wagenaar-Nolthenius: ‘De Leidse Fragmenten’, Renaissance-muziek 1400–1600: donum natalicium René Bernard Lenaerts, ed. J. Robijns and others (Leuven, 1969), 303–15

J. van Biezen and J.P. Gumbert, eds.: Two Chansonniers from the Low Countries: French and Dutch Polyphonic Songs from the Leiden and Utrecht Fragments (Early 15th Century), MMN, xv (Amsterdam, 1985)

A. Janse: ‘Het Muziekleven aan het Hof van Albrecht van Bieren (1358–1404) in Den Haag’, TVNM, xxxvi (1986), 136–57

GILBERT REANEY

Boys, Thomas.

See Boyce, Thomas.

Boyvin [Boivin]

(fl c1540–50). French composer. 12 four-voice chansons published in collections in Paris by Attaingnant (RISM 1544^7-8, 1545^12-13, 1547¹⁹ and 1549²⁰) and a three-voice motet (Levavi oculos meos) printed by Le Roy & Ballard (1565²) are ascribed to him. Fétis identified the composer with Jean Boyvin, a singer (basse-taille) in the chapel of the dauphin, Duke Henri of Orléans, in 1539; he might, however, be identified with Anthoine Boyvin who was organist to Henri in 1543. Most of the chansons use courtly decasyllabic épigrammes of eight or ten lines, and the musical settings faithfully reflect the poetic form with regular caesuras after the fourth syllable. Their style is generally suave and homophonic and akin to that of Sandrin. Two, Je sens l'affection and Je cherche autant amour (both ed. in SCC, ix, 1994), became favourites and were reprinted and intabulated for guitar and lute several times. Another, Mort sans soleil (ed. F. Lesure, Anthologie de la chanson parisienne, Monaco, 1953), sets Marot's translation of Petrarch's Lasciato hai morte, and represents one of the first complete sonnet settings in France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

FétisB

D. Heartz: Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley, 1969)

FRANK DOBBINS

Boyvin, Jacques

(b Paris, c1653; d Rouen, 30 June 1706). French organist and composer. He received his first schooling at the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts, a Parisian institution for the blind (where his father was an inmate), and held the post of organist there from 1663 to 1674. In July 1674 he became organist at Notre Dame Cathedral, Rouen, after winning a competition in both performance and composition; he remained there until his death. Between 1686 and 1689 he oversaw the building there by Robert Clicquot of a magnificent organ to replace the previous instrument, destroyed by a storm in 1683. A letter of 1689 reflects his enthusiasm for the new instrument, with more than 40 ranks, four manuals and manual-to-pedal couplers. He also served at St Herbland from 1697 to 1702.

Each of Boyvin’s books contains eight suites arranged according to the church modes. There are fewer individual pieces in book 2 than in book 1 (51 as against 69), but they tend to be longer and more elaborate. There are no liturgical designations. The music of both books is predominantly secular and colouristic, and exploits the registers of the new Clicquot instrument through such forms as the prelude or plein jeu, fugue, duo, trio, ornamented solo and dialogue. The Cymbale of the Echo organ made possible a Pleins-jeux à trois choeurs and Boyvin introduced other innovations in Dessus de tierce en vitesse et accords, Concerts de flûte and Dialogues de récits. The dialogues, which conclude most of the suites, are among the longest movements and are often multisectional. The preface to book 1 (translated by F. Douglass) includes a detailed discussion of registration, and the Traité abrégé de l’accompagnement contains interesting material on the realization of figured basses; it has been translated into several other languages.

WORKS

Edition:J. Boyvin: Oeuvres complètes d’orgue, ed. A. Guilmant and A. Pirro, Archives des maîtres de l’orgue, vi (Paris, 1905/R)

Premier livre d’orgue contenant les huit tons à l’usage ordinaire de l’Eglise (Paris, 1689–90); ed. J. Bonfils (Paris, 1969)

Second livre d’orgue contenant les huit tons à l’usage ordinaire de l’Eglise (Paris, 1700); ed. J. Bonfils (Paris, 1977)

Traité abrégé de l’accompagnement pour l’orgue et pour le clavessin (pubd as preface to Second livre d’orgue; later separate edns, Paris, 1705, and Amsterdam, n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

FrotscherG

P. Hardouin: ‘Quatre Parisiens d’origine: Nivers, Gigault, Jullien, Boyvin’, RdM, xxxix–xl (1957), 73–8

P. Hardouin: ‘La jeunesse de Boyvin’, RdM, lii (1966), 208–10

F. Douglass: The Language of the French Classical Organ (New Haven, CT, 1969)

N. Dufourcq: Le livre de l'orgue français, 1589–1789, iv: La musique (Paris, 1972)

N. Gorenstein: ‘Jacques Boyvin, Gaspard Corrette: deux grands organistes rouennais’, La tribune de l'orgue: revue suisse romande, no.1 (1991), 21–30; no.2 (1991), 12–22; no.3 (1991), 2–11; no.4 (1991), 2–9

F. Sabatier: ‘Jacques Boyvin’, Guide de la musique d'orgue, ed. G. Cantagrel (Paris, 1991), 188–92

ALMONTE HOWELL

Boyvin, Jean.

A French singer. He was a singer in the chapel of the dauphin, Duke Henri of Orléans, in 1539; he was identified by Fétis with the French composer Boyvin.

Božan, Jan Josef

(b Frýdek, 1644; d Chroustovice, nr Chrudim, 1 July 1716). Czech priest and hymnologist. A priest of Chroustovice, he collected sacred songs over a long period. His hymnal, Slaviček rajský na stromě života slávu tvorci svému prozpěvující (‘A nightingale of paradise, perched on The tree of life, singing glory to its creator’; Hradec Králové, 1719), which bears a dedication to Count František Antonín Sporck, was published posthumously with the count’s support. It contains both old and new hymns from Bohemia and other lands, and with about 930 texts and 470 melodies is one of the larger Catholic collections of the period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Konrád: ‘Božanův kancionál’ [Božan's hymnal], Cecilie, iv (1877), 46–7, 67–8

J. Bužga: ‘Slaviček rajský Jana Josefa Božana’ [Božan's A nightingale of paradise], Časopis slezského musea, v (1956), 31–46

C. Schoenbaum: ‘Jan Joseph Božans Slavíček rájský (Paradiesnachtigall, 1719) und die tschechischen Katholischen Gesangbücher des XVII. Jahrhunderts’, Studia Hieronymo Feicht septuagonario dedicata, ed. Z. Lissa (Kraków, 1967), 252–68

JOHN CLAPHAM

Bozay, Attila

(b Balatonfűzfő, 11 Aug 1939; d Budapest, 14 Sept 1999). Hungarian composer. He studied at the Békéstarhos College of Music and graduated from the Liszt Academy, Budapest, as a pupil of Farkas in 1962. In the following year he taught harmony at the Szeged Conservatory; from 1963 to 1966 he worked in the music section of Hungarian radio. A UNESCO Scholarship took him to Paris for six months in 1967, and after his return to Hungary he devoted his time to composition. He became professor of instrumentation and composition at the Liszt Academy in 1979, also directing the Hungarian state concert agency (1990–93). He was awarded the Erkel Prize (1968, 1979), the Bartók-Pásztory Prize (1988) and the Kossuth Prize (1990). He first came to international notice when his String Quartet no.1 was performed at the 1967 International Rostrum of Composers and at the ISCM Festival of the same year.

His use of 12-note technique, the basis of all his music up to 1967, gave prominence to melodic writing, but his stay in Paris led him to a less rigorous serial practice, and to a preoccupation with clusters and timbre. In the 1970s his music was characterized by a combination of its strength of construction and the use of freely organized, aleatory techniques, as in the series of Improvisations (1972–8). Aleatoricism is particularly evident in his compositions for Hungarian zither and recorder, both of which he has played at international festivals. In the opera Csongor és Tünde (1979–84), which marks a decisive turning-point in his career, he used a 10+2-note system which has remained significant in his subsequent works. In the sonatas which follow the opera traditional forms are followed, and the classical elements that began to appear in the opera become more apparent. This classicism informs the orchestral works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, though his vocal music of the same period is freely expressive.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Csongor és Tünde [Csongor and Tünde] (3, Bozay, after M. Vörösmarty), op.31, 1979–84; Az öt utolsó szín [The Last Five Scenes] (3, Bozay, after I. Madách), op.42, 1998–9

Orch: Pezzo concertato no.1, op.11, va, orch, 1965; Pezzo sinfonico no.1, op.13, 1967; Pezzo d’archi, op.14, str, 1968, rev. 1974; Pezzo concertato no.2, op.24, zither, orch, 1974–5; Pezzo sinfonico no.2, op.25, 1975–6; Gyermekdalok [Children’s Songs], op.26, chbr orch, 1976; Variations, op.29, 1977; Improvisations no.3, op.30c, prep pf, str, 1978, rev. 1987; Concertino, op.36, hn, str, 1988–9; Pezzo concertato no.3, op.37, fl, orch, 1990

Chbr: Duo, op.1, 2 vn, 1958; Episodi, op.2, bn, pf, 1959; Str Trio, op.3, 1960, rev. 1966; Wind Qnt, op.6, 1962; Str Qt no.1, op.9, 1964; Tételpár [2 Movts], op.18, ob, pf, 1970; Sorozat [Series], op.19, ens, 1970; Str Qt no.2, op.21, 1971; Malom [Mill], op.23, ens, 1972–3; Improvisations no.2, op.27, rec, str trio, 1976; Tükör [Mirror], op.28, zither, cimb, 1977; Sonata, op.34, vn, pf, 1987–8; Sonata, op.35, vc, pf, 1988–9; Str Qt no.3, op.40, 1996–7

Solo inst: Bagatelles, op.4, pf, 1961; Ritornelli, op.7, vn, 1963; Pf Variations, op.10, 1964; Intervalli, op.15, pf, 1969; Formazioni, op.16, vc, 1969; Improvisations no.1, op.22, zither, 1972; 2 Sonatas, op.33, pf, 1986–7; educational pieces for pf

Vocal: Papírszeletek [Paper Slips] (M. Radnóti), op.5, S, cl, vc, 1962; Kiáltások [Outcries] (A. József), op.8, T, ens, 1963; Trapéz és korlát [Trapeze and Parallel Bars] (cant., J. Pilinszky), op.12, S, T, chorus, orch, 1967; Lux perpetua (A. Károlyi), op.17, chorus, 1969; Két tájkép [2 Landscapes] (A. Fodor), op.20, Bar, fl, zither, 1970–71; 24 Children’s or Female Choruses (M. Vörösmarty, S. Petőfi, J. Arany, J. Vajda), 1985; Pezzo sinfonico no.3 (D. Berzsenyi), op.38, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1991–5; Meggyfa [Cherry Tree] (A. Fodor), op.39a, S, pf, 1992; Szegény Yorick [Poor Yorick] (I. Kormos), op.39b, Bar, pf, 1992–3; 8 Choruses (B. Balassi, I. Gyöngyösi), op.41, 1997; educational pieces for children’s chorus

Principal publisher: Editio Musica

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Földes, ed.: Harmincasok: Beszélgetések magyar zeneszerzőkkel [Those in their thirties: conversations with Hungarian composers] (Budapest, 1969), 9–27, 199–201

G. Kroó: Ungarische Musikgeschichte – gestern und heute (Budapest, 1980), 260–73

B.A. Varga, ed.: Contemporary Hungarian Composers (Budapest, 5/1989), 47–51

JÁNOS KÁRPÁTI/PÉTER HALÁSZ

Božič, Darijan

(b Slavonski brod, 29 April 1933). Slovenian composer and conductor. He attended the Ljubljana Academy of Music, completing studies with Škerjanc (composition) in 1958 and with Švara (conducting) in 1961. He joined the Pro Musica Viva group of composers and in 1962 won the Prešern Award of the Ljubljana Academy. He was assistant conductor of the Slovenian National Theatre opera company in Ljubljana (1968–1970) and then artistic director of the Slovenian PO (1970–74). He was professor of composition at the Universities of Ljubljana and Maribor until 1995, when he was appointed artistic director of the Slovene National Opera. He was a founder of the Slovene Music Days festival (Ljubljana) in 1974 and the University of Maribor Jazz Centre in 1992.

Božič's music has been strongly influenced by jazz and a keen sense of musical drama. His early concertos for trumpet, trombone and saxophone and his Sonatas in Cool show clearly the jazz influence (similar to that on Tippett), and his use of extended tonality and traditional forms. From 1963 he adopted new methods, including a form of serial working and free rhythmic coordination, but with no loss of melodic interest. His frequent use of speakers is well illustrated by the collage tape work Trije dnevi Ane Frank (‘Three Days in the Life of Anne Frank’), Polineikes and Jago, a musico-dramatic characterization derived from Shakespeare. Even in chamber works such as Kriki (‘Screams’) and Collage sonore, speakers are included in the ensemble.

The development of his dramatic interest into full-scale opera has been achieved by stages. Ares-Eros with its collage technique acted as a preparatory study for the opera Lizistrata 75, and various short Shakespeare-derived music dramas led him to set King Lear (Kralj Lear, 1985) and scenes from Hamlet, the title word reversed in Telmah (1989). Although Božič has made only modest use of electronic sounds, he frequently uses collage rather than musique concrète tape techniques, as in the bitterly ironical but magnificent reinterpretation of the funeral rite in his Requiem of 1969.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

librettos by the composer unless otherwise stated

Humoreske (op, R. Dorgeles), 1958

Spoštovanja vredna vlačuga [Honoured and Deserving Prostitute] (op), 1960

Jago (happening for 8 performers and tape, after W. Shakespeare and W. Heinrich), 1968; Ljubljana, 20 April 1970

Ares-Eros (music drama, after Aristophanes: Lysistrata and other classical texts), 1970; Ljubljana, 12 May 1971

Lizistrata 75 (op, 2, S. Rozman, after Aristophanes), 1975; Maribor, 14 Nov 1980

Kralj Lear [King Lear] (op, after Shakespeare), 1985; Maribor, 20 June 1986

Telmah (musico-dramatic montage, after Shakespeare and R. Bolt), 1989; Opatija, 5 Nov 1990 [abridged version]; Ljubljana TV, 15 June 1991 [complete]

Ballets: Baletska jednočinka [Balletic One-Act Play], 1957; Mali prodajalci [Little Seller], 1957; Gluha okna, 1967

Concert dramas: Bela krizantema [White Chrysanthemum], nar, S, Bar, och, 1976; Maximilien Robespierre, 2 nar, chorus, 2 perc, 1977–8; Štirinajsta [The 14th], 4 nar, chorus, solo vc, orch, tape, 1973–80; Slovenska visoka pesem [Slovene Art Song], 2 actors, chorus, orch, tape, 1980–83

Orch: Pf Conc., 1956; A Sax Conc., 1958; Humoreska, hn, orch, 1959; Trbn Conc., 1960; Tpt Conc., 1961; Improvizacije, 6 groups, 1963; Sym. no.1, 1964–5; Audiografika, cl, trbn, pf, perc, str, 1970; Audiospectrum, 1972; Audiostructurae, pf, orch, 1973; Koncertantna glasba [Concertante Music], 1983; Sicut laudaret Gallus [Festive Ov.], actor, orch, 1987; Concert for 2, sax, chbr orch, synth, tape, 1994; Sym no.2, 1994

Vocal: Ciganske pesme [Gipsy Songs] (cant.), reciter, solo vv, chorus, ens, 1962; Sedmina, 4 reciters, orch, 1966; Šesta pesma iz ciklusa Blaznost [Madness] (G. Strniša), reciter, b cl, tpt, str qnt, 1965; Collage sonore (S. Makarovič), 2 spkrs, cl, tpt, str qnt, 1966; Kriki [Screams] (T. Šalamun), spkr, brass qnt, tape, 1966; Polineikes (D. Smole), 5 reciters, orch, tape, 1966; Slovenske pesmi (cant.), 2 spkrs, Mez, orch, 1973, rev. 1975; Čenčarija [Drivel], youth chorus, chbr orch, 1977; Listi iz dnevnika [Leaves from a Diary] (cant.), 2 narrs, youth chorus, pf, org, db, 1978; Iz pesniske zbirke Mladost [From the Cycle of Poems Youth] (cant., T. Pavčka), (), actor, chorus, ens, 1984

Chbr: Conc. grosso, ens, 1960; Sonata in Cool no.1, fl, pf, 1961; Sonata in Cool no.2, cl, pf, 1962; 5 Sketches, tpt, pf, db, 1963; Sonata in Cool no.3, fl, b cl, hp, 1965; Elongacije, pf, ens, 1967; Polyrhytmia, wind qnt, 1968; Pop Art I, pic, str qt, 2 metronomes, watch, 1969; 3D, tpt, hn, trbn, 1972; ABA 72, cl, pf, 1972; Pop Art III, str qt, 1973; Audiogem I–IV, str qt, 1974; Quaterni, trbn, pf, metronome, 1976; To Duke, cl, pf, synth, 1991

El-ac: Trije dnevi Ane Frank [3 days in the Life of Anne Frank], reciter, 6 insts, elec, all on tape, 1963; Requiem spominu umorjenega vojaka – mojega očeta [Requiem to the Memory of a Murdered Soldier – my Father] (R. Roždestvenski), 5 reciters, chorus, ens, all on tape, 1969; Pop Art II, str qt, tape, 1971; 5 Croquis, 2 pf, audiographic score for 2 pf, computer, 1995; 3 Pieces of Music for Gerry Mulligan, 5 sax, computer, 1996

Principal publishers: Društvo slovenskih skladateljev (Ljubljana), Breitkopf & Härtel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Božič: ‘Vertikalne strukture savremene muzike’ [Vertical structures in contemporary music], Zvuk, no.67 (1966), 163–88; no.68 (1966), 297–321

A. Rijavec: ‘Sinteza Darijana Božiča’, Zvuk, no.99 (1969), 405–13

T. Reich: Susreti sa suvremenim kompozitorima Jugoslavije [Meetings with contemporary Yugoslav composers] (Zagreb, 1972), 30–31

N. O'Loughlin: Slovenian Music since the First World War (diss., U. of Leicester, 1978)

A. Rijavec: ‘Razseznosti snovanja Darijana Božiča’ [Dimensions of Božič's creativity], MZ, xiv (1978), 114–23

A. Rijavec: Slovenska glasbena dela [Slovene musical works] (Ljubljana, 1979), 26–34

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Bozza, Eugène

(b Nice, 4 April 1905; d Valenciennes, 28 Sept 1991). French composer and conductor. He studied with Büsser, Rabaud, Capet and Nadaud at the Paris Conservatoire where he won premiers prix for the violin (1924), conducting (1930) and composition (1934), and also the Prix de Rome with La légende de Roukmāni (1934). From 1938 to 1948 he conducted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and in 1951 he was appointed director of the Ecole Nationale de Musique, Valenciennes, an appointment he held until his retirement in 1975. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1956. Though his large-scale works have been successfully performed in France, his international reputation rests on his substantial output of chamber music for wind. This displays at a high level the qualities characteristic of mid-20th-century French chamber music: melodic fluency, elegance of structure and a consistently sensitive concern for instrumental capabilities.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: La légende de Roukmāni (fantaisie lyrique, 1, C. Orly), 3vv, orch, 1934, Paris, Institut de France, 30 June 1934; Léonidas (fresque antique, 2, G. de Teramond), RTF, 1947; Beppo ou Le mort dont personne ne voulait (opéra bouffe, 1, J. Bruyr), Lille, Opéra, 1963; La duchesse de Langeais (drame lyrique, F. Forté, after H. de Balzac), Lille, Opéra, 27 April 1967

Ballets: Fêtes romaines (de Teramond), Lille, 1939; Jeux de plage (Bruyr), Lille, 1945

Choral: La tentation de St Antoine (A. Machabey, after G. Flaubert), orat., 1948; Requiem, STB, 1950; Messe de Sa Sainteté Pie XII, 1955; La passion de Jésus (Forté), spkr, chorus, orch, 1963; Messe de requiem, chorus, orch, 1971

Orch: Vn Conc., 1937; Ballade, trbn, orch, 1944; Rapsodie niçoise, 1944; Pax triumphans, sym. poem, 1945; Prélude et passacaille, 1947; Sym., 1948; Concertino, tpt, chbr orch, 1949; Pf Conc., 1955; Conc., str trio, wind, hp, db, 1955; Concertino da camera, fl, str, 1964; 5 movts, str, 1970; Messe solennelle de Ste Cécile, brass, timp, org, hp

Chbr: Sonatine, fl, bn, 1938; Str Qt no.1, 1939; En forêt, hn, pf, 1941; Agrestide, fl, pf, 1942; Andante et scherzo, sax qt, 1943; Variations sur un thème libre, wind qnt, 1943; Pièce sur le nom d’Edouard Nanny, db, pf, 1946; Sonatine, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1951; 3 pièces pour une musique de nuit, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1954; Jour d’été à la montagne, 4 fl, 1954; Symphonie da camera, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn, 1960; Ricercare, vn, vc, 1964; Suite française, 2 tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 1967; Concertino, pf, wind; Concertino da camera, gui, str qt; Divertissement, 3 bn; Giration, brass; Luciolles, 6 cl; Nuages, sax qt; Pentaphonie, wind qnt; Serenade, wind qt; Suite, 4 hn; Trilogies, brass; Diptyque, a sax, pf, 1970; Sonata, ob, pf, 1971; Etudes sur des modes karnatiques, fl, ob, cl, bn, tpt, trbn, 1972–3; Suite no.6, cl, pf, 1973; Graphismes, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, 1975–6

Numerous education pieces for solo insts

Principal publisher: Leduc

PAUL GRIFFITHS

Bozzi [Bozi, Bozio], Paolo

(b Bovolone, nr Verona, c1550; d ?Venice, c1628). Italian composer and dramatist. His name first occurs in archival records in Verona from May to June 1574 and again a year later, with the ecclesiastic title ‘Don’, in the parish registers of S Maria in Organo, Verona; he probably received his early training in music there with Giammateo Asola. Between 7 February and 16 May 1584 he was assistant chaplain at S Biagio, Bovolone; he then moved to Mantua where he was maestro di canto at the ducal chapel of S Barbara from June 1584 to August 1587. By 1588 he was in Venice where he was retained by the patrician Pietro Pasqualigo in whose house he wrote the tragedy Eutheria (1588); he dedicated his Canzonette (1591) to Pasqualigo’s eldest son, Vettor. The text of one of these, Non mi doglio d’amore, appears in Bozzi’s pastorale Fillino (1597) where it is sung at the end of Act 3 by Fillino, Silvia and Filli. According to Bozzi’s preface, the play had been performed six years earlier by the ‘Confederati, e da Costanti Academici’ in Verona.

After the death of Zarlino, Bozzi was elected a chaplain at S Severo, Venice, where he joined his former mentor and colleague Asola; his signature appears in the baptismal records between 4 July 1591 and 16 December 1627. In Venice he maintained close ties with the printer Amadino, for whom he edited the madrigal anthologies Novelli ardori (RISM 1588¹⁸) and Giardinetto di madrigali et canzonette (1588¹⁹), dedicated respectively to Duke Alfonso Gonzaga and Marco Verità; the latter, a member of the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, was referred to by Bozzi as ‘my patron and master’ in the dedication to his tragedy Cratisiclea (1591). Both Bozzi’s surviving books of madrigals were likewise dedicated to members of the academy, and in 1602 he sent a mass for 12 voices, now lost, to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the academy; it was not performed until 1 May 1604, when Bozzi was rewarded with the gift of a necklace. Bozzi’s sacred works comprise Vesper psalms in anthologies and two eight-voice motets in Asola’s Sacro sanctae Dei laudes (1600³), supplied with organ bass; he is also the author of several sacre rappresentazioni published in Venice.

WORKS

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1587)

Canzonette, 3vv (Venice, 1591)

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 6vv (Venice, 1599)

Secular works in 1588¹⁸, 1588¹⁹, 1589¹⁰, 1592¹¹, 1593⁵, 1597¹⁵, 1598⁶

Sacred works in 1590⁷, 1592³, 1600³

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

MGG1 (E. Paganuzzi)

MischiatiI

G. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d’Italia (Brescia, 1762)

E.A. Cicogna: Delle inscrizioni veneziane (Venice, 1827)

E.A. Cicogna: Saggio di bibliografia veneziana (Venice, 1847/R)

G. Turrini: L’Accademia filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico (Verona, 1941), 191

P.M. Tagmann: ‘La cappella dei maestri cantori della basilica palatina di Santa Barbara a Mantova (1565–1630): nuovo materiale scoperto negli archivi mantovani’, Civiltà mantovana, iv/24 (1970), 376–400

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Documenti veronesi su musicisti del XVI e XVII secolo’, Scritti in onore di Mons. Giuseppe Turrini (Verona, 1973), 543–75, esp. 555

E. Paganuzzi and others: La musica a Verona (Verona, 1976), 163

DAVID NUTTER

B quadratum.

See B mi and Accidental, §1.

Brabant, Lambertus

(fl c1430). Composer, presumably Franco-Flemish. His two known works are found only in I-AO 15: a Gloria (ascribed ‘l. Brabant’ in the index as well as over the music) and a Credo (ascribed ‘lamberti brabant’ in the index only); they are edited in Cobin. Both are for two voices in the same range (an unusual texture, see Virilas), and it is plain from their placing in the manuscript that the copyist viewed them as a pair (though the Gloria cadences on A, the Credo on G).

He may well be the Johannes Lamberti Brabant who was paid as a singer at Cambrai Cathedral from 1439–40 and a canon from 1442, who died in 1464–5 (Houdoy, 264, 391). The Johannes Lamberts who sang at St Donatian, Bruges, in 1461 is surely too late to be the composer; but it is marginally possible that he is to be identified with Jehan Lambert, dit de la Bassee, a singer in the Burgundian Court chapel paid from 1436 until the end of 1467 (on a list wrongly dated 1468 in Marix, p.260).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Houdoy: Histoire artistique de la Cathédrale de Cambrai (Lille, 1880/R)

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg, 1939)

M.W. Cobin: The Aosta Manuscript: a Central Source of Early-Fifteenth-Century Sacred Polyphony (diss., New York U., 1978)

S. Meyer-Eller: Musikalischer Satz und Überlieferung von Messensätzen des 15. Jahrhunderts: die Ordinariumsvertonungen der Handschriften Aosta 15 und Trient 87/92 (Munich, 1989)

DAVID FALLOWS

Bračanin, Philip

(b Kalgoorlie, 26 May 1942). Australian composer. After completing a BA in music and mathematics at the University of Western Australia (1962), he undertook research into the music of Seiber (MA, 1968) and Webern (PhD, 1970), at the same institution. In 1970 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Queensland, where he later became senior lecturer, then reader.

Bračanin's first compositions date from the early 1970s and arose through a desire to find more vital ways of teaching harmony and counterpoint. His Trombone Concerto (1977, rev. 1988) is now recognized as the first of his mature works; it launched him in the genre by which, through some dozen works, he has become best known. In 1994 he turned his attention to writing symphonies, of which by 1996 he had composed three. Bračanin’s style represents a reaction against his own doctoral studies in atonality and serialism. His works of the 1980s and 90s feature both luscious late Romantic and elegant neo-classical textures. He has occasionally sought inspiration in the Dalmatian Croatian musical heritage of his forebears. Particularly distinctive is his flexible use of modal fragments, owing much to Seiber, and of slow-moving bass lines, which derive from Mahler and a variety of Slavonic influences. His concerto writing reveals two dominating mood types: mellow, sentimental, even melancholic in slow, middle movements; motoric and vibrantly colouristic in the faster, outer movements. Bračanin's symphonies show an increasing integration of styles and mood types, the choral Symphony no.2 (1994) incorporating texts on the theme of time by Judith Wright and W.H. Auden.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Trbn Conc., 1977, rev. 1988; Heterophony, 1979; Rondellus Suite, str, 1980; Because we have no Time, Bar, orch, 1981; Sinfonia mescolanza, 1982; Vn Conc., 1983; Pf Concertino, 1983; A Picture of RC in a Prospect of Blossom, Bar, orch, 1985; Conc. for Orch no.1, 1986; Cl Conc., 1986; Divertimento, chbr orch, 1986; Throw me a Heaven around a Child, Bar, chbr orch, 1987; Tpt Concertino, 1988; 200 for Orch, 1988; Muzika za Viganj (Dalmation Sojourn), chbr orch, 1988; Conc. for Orch no.2, 1989; Vc Conc., 1990; Dance Poem, chbr orch, 1990; Ob Conc., 1991; Va Conc., 1991; Gui Conc., 1991; Conc., a sax, orch, 1991; Elysian Voyage, str, 1992; Conc., fl, gui, orch, 1993; Dance Tableaus, chbr orch, 1993; Sym. no.1, 1994; Sym. no.2 (J. Wright and W.H. Auden), S, vv, orch, 1994; Sym. no.3, 1995

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1971; Str Qt no.2, 1977; Sonata mescolanza, pf, 1978; Mescolanza, vc, pf, 1978; Mescolanza, str trio, 1980; Toccata mescolanza, org, 1980; Boutade, trbn, pf, perc, 1981; 5 partite, fl, vc, hpd, 1981; 7 Bagatelles, pf, 1983; 4 Preludes, gui, 1985; Ob Qt, 1986; 3 affetti musicali, fl, gui, 1989; 4 Diversions, gui, 1990; Dances Soulful and Sanguine, cl, va, vc, 1990; Str Qt no.3, 1993; Pf Trio, 1996

Vocal: From the Roundabout Singing Garden, vv, org, 1977; Scherzi musicali, vv, cl, pf, db, 1977; A Woman's Question, S, pf, 1982; Lost in a Long Dream, SATB, 1987; A Quiet Quick Catch of Breath, vv, 1987; Time Flows not You, SATB, 1991; Psalm cxxx, SATB, 4 hn, 1996; 3 Shakespeare Sonnets, SATB, 1996

Principal publisher: Maecenas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Gillies: ‘The Flight of the Muse’, Essays in Honour of David Evatt Tunley, ed. F. Callaway (Perth, 1995), 165–75

MALCOLM GILLIES

Braccini, Luigi [Roberto]

(b Florence, ?1755–6; d Florence, 1791). Italian composer. He was ten when he entered the monastery of SS Annunziata in Florence as a boarding student on 1 July 1766. Having returned home on 13 April 1771, he re-entered the monastery as a novice on 20 August 1772 and assumed the name Luigi. He took orders as deacon in December 1777, and on 2 January 1778 he was sent to the monastery of S Giuseppe in Bologna where he apparently studied with Padre Martini. There he was ordained a priest, and he returned to SS Annunziata on 28 June 1779 to take on the duties of maestro di cappella. He provided the church with a large quantity of well-written music in strict style, much of it a cappella, before returning to secular life on 9 September 1790 for reasons of health.

WORKS

Ave maris stella, 1780; Credo degli angioli, 2vv; 4 laudi spirituali; Miserere, 4vv, wind insts; Motetto, 6vv, per l’Elevasione, 1792; Responsi dei morti, 3vv; Vexilla, 3vv, insts, 1779: all I-Fc

Benedicamus Dominus Deus Israel, 4vv, insts, Bc; Responsi del secondo notturno per la notte del S Natale; Sequenza per la Pasqua di Resurrezione, 4vv, insts; 3 Crucifixus: all Fa

12 madrigali, 3vv, 1790; 6 terzetti, insts, 1788; Raccolta di varie canzonette, 1790: all Fc

Lost: Tantum ergo, 3vv, cited in EitnerQ; Miserere, 4vv, and Victimae paschali, 2 S, T, cited in FétisB

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Fedeli: ‘La cappella musicale della SS Annunziata di Firenze’, Conferenze e prose varie (Siena, 1911), 242

A.M. Vicentini: ‘Memorie di musicisti dell'ordine dei Servi di Maria’, NA, vi (1931), 34–57

JOHN WALTER HILL

Brace.

The curved bracket that joins some or all of the staves of a system (see System) at the left-hand end. In 17th- and 18th-century usage a brace was placed to the left of a complete system, even of orchestral music. Some 19th-century composers (e.g. Schubert and Brahms) used it thus in songs and other chamber music, but by then it was customary to mark off orchestral sections (woodwind, brass, strings) with separate braces. In the 20th century a straight bracket was normally used to distinguish orchestral sections, the brace being reserved for single instruments (piano, celesta, harp) or groups of similar instruments (horns, trombones, first and second violins, divisi cellos) using two or more staves. The brace is also used for the solo piano, harp etc. and for the manual staves of organ music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Winternitz: Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith (Princeton, NJ, 1955, enlarged 2/1965)

G. Read: Music Notation (Boston, MA, 1964, 2/1969)

RICHARD RASTALL

Bracegirdle, Anne

(b Northampton, bap. 15 Nov 1671; d London, 12 Sept 1748). English actress and soprano. She was brought up in the family of Thomas Betterton and was London’s leading actress from 1688 until her retirement in 1707. Her roles often included songs by John Eccles and verses in praise of her performance of his mad song ‘I burn’ in Don Quixote were set by both Purcell and Finger. Dryden described her singing with Doggett in The Richmond Heiress (1693) as ‘wonderfully good’ and Congreve wrote that she performed Venus in Eccles’s setting of his Judgment of Paris (1701) ‘to a miracle’. She was the second female lead in Giuseppe Fedeli’s all-sung opera in the Italian style, The Temple of Love (1706). She is buried in the east cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

DNB (J. Knight)

J. Downes: Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708); ed. J. Milhous and R.D. Hume (London, 1987)

C. Cibber: An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (London, 1740); ed. R.W. Lowe (London, 1889)

J.H. Wilson: All the King’s Ladies (Chicago, 1958)

C.A. Price: Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge,1984)

E. Howe: The First English Actresses (Cambridge, 1992)

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Brachrogge, Hans

(fl Copenhagen, 1602–38). Danish composer and singer. He is first heard of in 1602, when he was one of a group of Danish musicians sent by King Christian IV to Venice to study with Giovanni Gabrieli. After his return in 1604 he was in the charge of Melchior Borchgrevinck until in 1611 he was appointed a singer at court. In the same year he was sent with three others (Mogens Pedersøn, Jacob Ørn and Martinus Otto) to England, where for three years they served Queen Anne, the Danish king's sister. Brachrogge is known to have paid another visit to Italy in 1619 and to have been rewarded with a benefice from Roskilde Cathedral in 1621. He figures in the court accounts until 1638, after which nothing is heard of him. His only known music is Madrigaletti a III voci, libro primo (Copenhagen, 1619¹³), a set of 21 pieces, including two by Pedersøn (ed. in Dania sonans, ii, 1966). Brachrogge's works are attractive, eminently singable examples of Italianate canzonets, with slightly more serious overtones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Hammerich: Musikken ved Christian den Fjerdes Hof (Copenhagen, 1892)

J. Bergsagel: ‘Foreign Music and Musicians in Denmark during the Reign of Christian IV’, Heinrich Schütz und die Musik in Dänemark: Copenhagen 1985, 19–24

JOHN BERGSAGEL

Brack [Brakkher, Brachius], Georg [Jörg]

(fl 1507–17). German composer. In 1507 he was court composer in Duke Ulrich of Württemberg’s chapel in Stuttgart. At the same time he held the post of Kapellmeister, at least until Heinrich Finck joined the court chapel in 1510. Brack was apparently retained after the dissolution of the chapel on 11 June 1514, living at this period in a house in Stuttgart that the duke had given him. Probably during 1515 he was visited there by Ornithoparchus, who dedicated to him the second book of his Musicae activae micrologus (Leipzig, 1517). In the dedication he referred to Brack (who had given him advice) as ‘Ducalis cantoriae Wirtenbergensis ductor primarius’, praising him and ranking him with Obrecht, Josquin, Isaac and Finck. When the chapel was re-established in 1517 Siess was appointed Kapellmeister, so Brack may already have died.

Five four-voice German songs by Brack survive in printed anthologies, but they do not warrant Ornithoparchus’s praise; hence it would appear that the main part of his work has been lost. Ich rew und klag enjoyed a wide circulation and was included in Jan z Lublina’s tablature. It is remarkable for its good melody and elegant writing; the parallel movement of the individual voices in the manner of Hofhaimer and Finck is especially striking.

WORKS

Erst hebt sich Not und Jamer an, 4vv, 1513², ed. in Cw, xxix (1934/R); Ich hoff es sei fast wol müglich, 4vv, 1513², ed. in Cw, xxix (1934/R); Ich rew und klag, 4vv, 1519⁵, ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xx (1942); Mein Dienst und Will, 4vv, 1513², ed. in Cw, xxix (1934/R); On Zweifel gar, 4vv, 1513², ed. in Cw, xxix (1934/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Eitner: ‘Das alte deutsche mehrstimmige Lied und seine Meister’, MMg, xxv (1893), 183–204, esp. 195

G. Bossert: ‘Die Hofkapelle unter Herzog Ulrich’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, new ser., xxv (1916), 383–430

M. Ruhnke: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Hofmusikkollegien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1963)

HANS-CHRISTIAN MÜLLER

Braconnier, Jean [‘Lourdault’]

(d shortly before 22 Jan 1512). French singer and composer. Several musicians were known by this sobriquet. Braconnier ‘dit Lourdault’ was a member of three important musical establishments of the late 15th and early 16th century. He entered the service of Duke René II of Lorraine no later than 1478, and was paid as a singer and canon of the ducal chapel of St Georges, Nancy, between 1485 and 1506. His service to René was not continuous, however, for in 1496 he was employed as a ténoriste in the chapel of Archduke Philip the Fair of Burgundy, whom he accompanied on his voyages to Spain in 1501 and 1506. By April 1507, after Philip’s death, Braconnier had joined the entourage of King Louis XII of France, who then was campaigning in northern Italy. French and papal documents from 1510–12 identify Braconnier as a singer and chaplain of the French royal chapel. He obtained numerous ecclesiastical benefices both in France and in the Low Countries, and his date of death may be estimated from records pertaining to the benefices left vacant by his demise.

Braconnier was highly esteemed as a basse-contre singer during his lifetime. A lament on his death was written by the poet Guillaume Crétin (Oeuvres poétiques de Guillaume Crétin, Paris, 1932/R, ed. K. Chesney, 210–16) in which he is called ‘maistre Jehan Braconnier, dit Lourdault, chantre’. Crétin’s poem, which also mourns the death of the French composer Antoine de Févin, indicates that his nickname Lourdault (‘clod’) is derived from a chanson, undoubtedly the song Lourdault, lourdault surviving both in monophonic form and in a four-voice arrangement printed in Petrucci’s Canti B (RISM 1502²), where it is attributed to Compère; it is ascribed in other sources to Ninot le Petit and Josquin.

The only known composition attributed to Braconnier is the chanson Amours me trocte par la pancé; it is found in Canti B ascribed to ‘Lourdoys’ and in the Strozzi chansonnier (I-Fc Basevi 2442) under the name ‘Lourdault’. This piece exemplifies a type of chanson commonly known as a ‘four-part arrangement’; it shows effective control of the simpler four-part chanson style popular about 1490–1510, alternating two- and three-part homophony with unadorned diatonic counterpoint of no great complexity.

Other musicians of the period with similar names are a singer Lourdiel, who was among the petits vicaires of Cambrai Cathedral in 1484 (according to Pirro); Jean Lourdel, who entered the Cappella Giulia in Rome in 1514 and is identifiable with the Zoanne Lordello in the service of Cardinal Ippolito I d’Este of Ferrara in 1516–17, and who, together with Willaert, accompanied Ippolito to Hungary in October 1517; and ‘Iaco. Bracqueriers’, whose motet Cantemus Domino is extant (in RISM 1555⁸).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Pirro: ‘Notes sur Jean Braconnier dit Lourdault’, ReM, ix/7–11 (1927–8), 250–52

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

H. Hewitt: Preface to Ottaviano Petrucci: Canti B Numero Cinquanta, MRM, ii (1967)

H. Brown: ‘The Music of the Strozzi Chansonnier’, AcM, xl (1968), 115–29

L. Lockwood: ‘Jean Mouton and Jean Michel: New Evidence on French Music and Musicians in Italy, 1505–1520’, JAMS, xxxiii (1979), 191–246, esp. 201, 208

R. Freedman: Music, Musicians, and the House of Lorraine during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1987)

R. Sherr: ‘The Membership of the Chapels of Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne in the Years preceding their Deaths’, JM, vi (1988), 60–82, esp. 65–6

LEWIS LOCKWOOD/JOHN T. BROBECK

Bracquet [Braquet], Gilles [Egidius]

(fl 1551–9). Flemish composer and priest. He was employed by the town of Ypres as a priest and singing master; his name can be found in the town payrolls between 1551 and 1555. He received 12 livres as a Sunday school instructor and music teacher at St Maartens Cathedral. He also received payments for some masses and motets that he had composed, besides incidental gratuities in consideration of certain unspecified services. He is last mentioned in these accounts as maître de chant of St Maarten. He may also have worked in Aire-sur-la-Lys, the town celebrated in his motet Aria precelsis urbs. In 1559 he was employed as maître de chant at Notre Dame in Paris. One of his chansons in the Parisian style, Venez, venez mon bel amy, was intabulated for lute and published by Pierre Phalèse (i) (Theatrum Musicum, Leuven, 1563). Bracquet’s works are extant only in anthologies.

WORKS

2 motets: 1556⁴, A-Wn, B-BRs

7 chansons: 1556¹⁷, 1556¹⁸, 1557⁹, 1557¹², E–V

1 Sp. song

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vander StraetenMPB, ii

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: ‘Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin’, AnnM, i (1953), 269–373

H. Vanhulst: Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse et ses fils 1545–1578 (Brussels, 1990)

R.L. Weaver: A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalog of the Music Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de Laet (Warren, MI, 1994)

H. Vanhulst: ‘Le manuscrit 41 des archives communales de Bruges’, Le concert des voix et des instruments à la Renaissance: Tours 1991, 231–42

JOSÉ QUITIN/HENRI VANHULST

Bradbury, William Batchelder

(b York, ME, 6 Oct 1816; d Montclair, NJ, 7 Jan 1868). American church musician, composer, teacher and editor. He was born into a musical family with early opportunities to sing and to play various musical instruments. After his family moved to Boston in 1830 Bradbury studied music with Sumner Hill, attended Lowell Mason's Boston Academy of Music and sang in Mason's Boudoin Street Church Choir. During the 1830s he also gained experience as an organist and teacher, including 18 months as a teacher at singing schools in Machias, Maine. In 1840 Bradbury moved to New York, becoming music director of the First Baptist Church, Brooklyn. During 1841 he became music director of the Baptist Tabernacle of New York, began singing classes for children similar to those of Mason in Boston and published his first collection, The Young Choir (compiled with Thomas Hastings, with whom he also collaborated in four later collections). Annual festivals directed by Bradbury with as many as 1000 singing children led to the introduction of music in New York's public schools.

Bradbury spent two years (1847–9) in Europe, mostly in Leipzig, studying the piano with Wenzel, singing with Boehme, harmony with Hauptmann and composition with Moscheles. He wrote letters from Europe to the New York Observer and the New York Evangelist. Following his return to the USA Bradbury continued teaching music to children, composing and compiling numerous collections of music. His tune book The Jubilee (1858) reportedly sold over 200,000 copies. For Sunday schools Bradbury pioneered small collections with cheerful titles, such as The Golden Chain (1861) and Fresh Laurels (1868), whose sales were reported at 2,000,000 and 1,200,000 copies respectively. Bradbury's most popular Sunday school tune is his setting of Jesus loves me. He also composed music for such hymns as Just as I am without one plea, Sweet hour of prayer and He leadeth me, all of which remain in the repertory of most American evangelical churches. He composed several cantatas, the most popular which was Esther (1856). In 1854 Bradbury, his brother Edward G. Bradbury and a German piano maker formed the firm which became the Bradbury Piano Company. Bradbury's pianos received the endorsement of Theodore Thomas, William Mason, Gottschalk and others. Following Bradbury's death the firm was controlled by F.G. Smith and was later absorbed into the Knabe Piano Company.

WORKS

59 publications include at least 2 cants., 812 hymn tunes, 28 anthems, 10 motets, 9 glees, 78 secular songs, 5 qts, 10 patriotic choruses and songs, 13 sacred sentences, introits and responses

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (S. Salter)

Obituary, New York Musical Gazette, ii (1867–8), 25

‘William Bradbury’, New York Musical Gazette, vii (1873), 65

F.J. Metcalf: American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (New York, 1925/R), 274ff

L. Ellinwood: ‘Bradbury, William Batchelder’, The Hymnal 1940 Companion (New York, 1949), 385–6

A.B. Wingard: The Life and Works of William Batchelder Bradbury (1816–1868) (diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY, 1973)

E.J. Porter: ‘William B. Bradbury, the Campmeeting Spiritual, and the Gospel Song’, The Hymn, xxxiv (1983), 34–40

HARRY ESKEW

Brade, William [Wilhelm]

(b 1560; d Hamburg, 26 Feb 1630). English string player and composer, active mainly in Germany and Denmark. He was about 30 when, like several other leading English instrumentalists of the time, he left his native country to earn his living in Germany. He was employed at the Brandenburg court until, from 3 November 1594 to 29 September 1596, he served in King Christian IV’s court chapel in Copenhagen. He then returned to the Brandenburg court before undertaking another period of service at the Danish court, from 6 September 1599 to 24 February 1606; he visited Berlin in 1603. From 1606 to 1608 he was employed by the Brunswick court at Bückeburg. He also became known in Hamburg, for 16 dances by him appeared there in 1607 in an anthology published by the civic musicians Zacharias Füllsack and Christian Hildebrand, and he himself was a city musician at Hamburg from Easter 1608 to midsummer 1610. He then entered the service of Count Ernst III of Holstein-Schaumburg at Bückeburg, with an annual salary of 400 thalers and a clothing allowance. When he demanded an annual salary of 1000 thalers and threatened to return to Hamburg if he did not receive it, the count instructed his bailiff at Pinneberg, Holstein (in a letter of 16 April 1612), to advise the Hamburg authorities not to tolerate this ‘mischievous, wanton fellow’ in their city. Brade did, however, become a Hamburg musician again at Easter 1613, moreover as first violinist and thus leader of the entire body of instrumentalists. His annual salary of 52 thalers and six ells of clothing was no greater than that of the other players, but engagements to play for the sumptuous festivities of the well-to-do burghers were a source of considerable extra income. In the summer of 1615 he again left Hamburg and went first to Copenhagen. In 1618 he stayed at Halle, where he described himself as ‘Kapellmeister by appointment to the Prince of Magdeburg’; and he held a similar appointment at Güstrow with the Duke of Mecklenburg. In 1619–20 he was in Berlin again, as court Kapellmeister to the Elector Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg, with an annual salary of 500 thalers, and from 23 August 1620 to 29 September 1622 he worked yet again at the Danish court. During this period he probably visited Gottorf, seat of Duke Friedrich III of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1622 he was appointed director of the Hofkapelle there and held the post until 1625. When the Thirty Years War spread to north-west Germany he took refuge in neutral Hamburg, where he spent his last years without holding any official post. When he died, eight funeral songs were published in his memory.

Brade was one of the most important and prolific composers working in Germany and Scandinavia in the early seventeenth century. He began by publishing elaborate five-part pavans and galliards in the English idiom established by John Dowland, Peter Philips and others, though he experimented in his 1609 collection with suite-like sequences of pavan, galliard and courante or allemande, and included several italianate canzonas – the earliest by an Englishman. In the six-part 1614 collection he ostensibly returned to writing conventional pavan and galliard pairs, though most of them are dances in name only, and have the sharp contrasts of rhythm and character associated at the time with contrapuntal genres. The emphasis in the 1617 and 1621 collections is on functional dance music: the former contains a number of pieces derived from the repertory of English masque dances, while the latter mainly consists of light social dances in the French style, including settings of several popular courantes. Although he advertised his collections as being suitable for various types of instruments he increasingly used an energetic, homophonic idiom particularly suitable for violin consorts. His virtuosic ‘coral’, a set of divisions on a ground, is ostensibly the earliest solo violin piece by an Englishman, though it is only attributed to him in a late source, and part of it was published in 1684 attributed to the otherwise unknown ‘Cornel[i]o Van Smelt’.

WORKS

[45]	Newe ausserlesene Paduanen, Galliarden, Canzonen, Allmand und Coranten … auff allen musicalischen Instrumenten lieblich zu gebrauchen, a 5 (Hamburg, 1609); ed. B. Thomas (London, 1982)
[36]	Newe ausserlesene Paduanen und Galliarden … auff allen musicalischen Instrumenten und insonderheit auff Fiolen lieblich zu gebrauchen, a 6 (Hamburg, 1614); ed. B. Thomas (London, 1992)
[52]	Newe ausserlesene liebliche Branden, Intraden, Mascharaden, Balletten, All’manden, Couranten, Volten, Aufzüge und frembde Tänze … insonderheit auff Fiolen zu gebrauchen, a 4, a 5 (Hamburg and Lübeck, 1617²⁵); ed. B. Thomas (London, 1974)
[46]	Melodieuses paduanes, chansons, galliardes, a 5 (Antwerp, 1619; ?lost) [?repr. from Newe ausseslesene Paduanen (1609)]
[34]	Newe lustige Volten, Couranten, Balletten, Padoanen, Galliarden, Masqueraden, auch allerley arth newer frantzösischer Täntze, a 5 (Berlin, 1621); ed. B. Thomas (London, 1997)
18 dances, a 5, 1607²⁸, 1609³⁰; both vols. ed. H. Mönkemeyer (Celle, 1986)
Variations, g, vn, b, S-Uu; ed. in Huber [shortened version attrib ‘Cornel[i]o Van Smelt’, The Division Violin (London, 1684, 2/1685¹⁰)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Oberst: Englische Orchestersuiten um 1600 (Leipzig, 1928)

B. Engelke: Musik und Musiker am Gottorfer Hofe (Breslau, 1930)

L. Krüger: Die hamburgische Musikorganisation im XVII. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1933, 2/1981)

E.H. Meyer: Die mehrstimmige Spielmusik des 17. Jahrhunderts in Nord- und Mitteleuropa (Kassel, 1934)

P.E. Mueller: The Influence and Activities of English Musicians on the Continent during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (diss., Indiana U., 1954)

C.R. Huber: The Life and Music of William Brade (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1965)

W. Braun: Britannia abundans (Tutzing, 1977)

P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)

P. Walls: Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604–1640 (Oxford, 1996)

KURT STEPHENSON/PETER HOLMAN

Bradford.

City in England. It is musically distinguished by a strong choral tradition and was an important centre of brass band activity. Its earlier prosperity was due to the wool trade and to rapid and varied development during the Industrial Revolution. In 1786 a three-manual organ by Donaldson of Newcastle upon Tyne was installed in the 15th-century parish church of St Peter as a necessary preliminary to performing Handel’s oratorios. On 30 June 1802 Edward Miller of Doncaster conducted a festival of Handel’s works in the church. Bradford singers as well as three instrumentalists took part in the first Yorkshire Musical Festival in 1823, by which time a large choral society – described as a ‘Musical Friendly Society’ – had been in existence for two years. This organization was formed from the choirs responsible for the performance of hymns and Handel choruses at Sunday School anniversaries. When various ameliorative factory acts were passed there was more opportunity for workers to participate in choral music, and by the mid-19th century choral music was flourishing; in addition to the (Old) Choral Society, formed from the Friendly Society in 1843, there were the Classical Harmonists, the Gentlemen’s Glee Club, the Church Choral Society and a male-voice Choral Union. For Mendelssohn’s Elijah singers were brought in from Leeds.

In 1815 Peter Wharton, a woollen manufacturer, formed a brass and reed band from among his employees. Five years later a group of players known by the old title of ‘waits’ was licensed to perform in Bradford. The John Foster & Son Black Dyke Mills Band, directly descended from Wharton’s band, was formed in 1855; a century later it had become one of the best bands in the country. George Haddock, a skilled amateur violinist and collector of old instruments, was host to distinguished performers including J.D. Loder and Ole Bull at his country house, Newlay Hall. Later resident in Bradford, he participated in choral concerts, gave violin lessons and formed a string quartet that performed in the Mechanics’ Institute and the old Exchange Buildings.

In 1846 wealthy German immigrants active in the wool trade and resident in Bradford (among them Delius’s father, Julius) founded a Liedertafel similar to that already established in Manchester; its activity was short-lived, although it enjoyed a brief renascence in conjunction with the local Schiller-Verein under the direction of Emil Schlesinger. On 31 August 1853 the new St George’s Hall (containing a fine Hill organ) was opened, filling the need for a building adequate for large-scale musical performances. The first significant Bradford music festival then took place, conducted by Costa, with a chorus of 220 and an orchestra of 85. Three years later there was a second festival, resulting in the formation of the Festival Choral Society; the first conductor was the chorus master William Jackson of Masham. The qualities of this chorus were so highly regarded that in 1858 they were invited to sing before the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, and to participate in concerts at the Crystal Palace and St James’s Hall. A year later the third and last Bradford music festival took place. The Festival Choir nevertheless continued to exist along with the Old Choral Society, and in 1860, supported by local instrumentalists, undertook a two-day Handel Festival in Durham Cathedral. Frederic Cliffe was accompanist to the Festival Choir from 1873 to 1876. With the advent of the ‘prize singing’ for glee singers, held in 1864 in the Temperance Hall, a competitive spirit was introduced into local choral activity. In 1875 a Glee Union and in 1882 a St Cecilia Society were founded. The feeling that large-scale performances were excellent in themselves gave rise to numerous oversized choirs, none more so than the body estimated to have comprised 30,000 which, to the accompaniment of 5000 instrumentalists, took part in a ceremony in Peel Park in 1880. 500 Bradford singers were part of the chorus engaged for the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925.

Concerts of a more general kind were organized by the Harmonic Society in 1818. Until the building of St George’s Hall, concerts took place in the Court House, the Mechanics’ Institute, or the hall of the Exchange Buildings (1828), where concerts of the short-lived Philharmonic Society (1831–7) were given. In 1847 an interest in chamber music was stimulated by the String Quartet Party, keenly promoted by the German community. However, as a result of the xenophobia rampant in 1914, the Germans were compelled to reduce their activity in local affairs, and Samuel Midgley, a local musician, took on the organization of chamber music concerts from 1911 until 1924. Six years later the Bradford Music Club, responsible for recitals in the Midland Hotel ballroom, was founded by Keith Douglas. Recitals take place from time to time in the university, and in 1976 a chamber orchestra, the Yorkshire Sinfonia, was formed under the violinist Manoug Parikian.

The opening of St George’s Hall in 1853 raised hopes that there might be a significant provision of music for the poorer citizens. On 28 April 1858 the Bradford Amateur Musical Society, conducted by Schlesinger, gave a concert ‘for the relief of the unemployed poor of Bradford’. The Hallé Orchestra from Manchester first played in Bradford in 1858 and its association with the town remained firm thereafter, to the disadvantage of those who attempted to establish an independent professional orchestra in Bradford (e.g. the failure of the Permanent Orchestra, originally formed from an earlier group of professional players that disbanded in 1892). When the Hallé Orchestra gave the first performance in Bradford of Delius’s Appalachia in 1913, the Musical Times commented that ‘it seemed a rather belated introduction of the composer to his native place’. Bradford, however, was well served when the Subscription Concerts were established in 1865; the committee included Julius Delius. In 1926 St George’s Hall became a cinema and until its restoration and acquisition by the municipality in 1952–3 the Eastbrook Hall was used for concerts. Opera had a sporadic existence: companies from London visited the town in 1856 and 1861, and on 17 April 1876 the Carl Rosa Company gave the opening performance of the Prince’s Theatre. On 6 February 1923 Beecham’s British National Opera Company began its career with a performance of Aida in Bradford.

As a result of its cultivation in the early Sunday schools and in churches, music was given a prominent place in education. Religious music suitable for teaching purposes was available from publishers in other Yorkshire towns; Bradford contributed through the issue of Lyra ecclesiastica in 1844. Bradford was one of the first towns to provide elementary schools with pianos. In 1892 a national conference on the subject of school songs was held and in 1908 a syllabus for vocal music was issued by the education committee. 20 years later Charles Hooper, music adviser to the education committee, was promoting a wider view of school music by arranging for pupils in the city schools to have the opportunity for instrumental tuition. In 1919 St Peter’s church was made the cathedral of a new diocese; Hooper became its organist in 1938. In 1966 the University of Bradford was founded; it supports a music fellowship. In partnership with the firm of J. Wood & Sons Ltd, the Bradford computing organ was developed there.

A week-long festival to honour the 50th anniversary of Delius’s death was held in Bradford in May 1985, postponed from 1984 on account of the refurbishment of St George’s Hall.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradford Harmonic Society Rules (Bradford, 1818)

[W. Cudworth]: Musical Reminiscences of Bradford, Reprinted from the ‘Bradford Observer’ (Bradford, 1885)

G. Haddock: Supplement to Leeds College of Music Quarterly News (April 1898)

G.F. Sewell: A History of the Bradford Festival Choral Society (Bradford, 1907)

J.S. Smith: The Life of William Jackson of Masham, the Miller Musician (Leeds, 1926)

Bradford: the Growth and Development of a Great City 1847–1947 (Bradford, 1947)

G. Weerth: Streitleiter auf Old England (Leipzig, 1963)

T.L. Cooper: Brass Bands of Yorkshire (Clapham, Yorks., 1974)

PERCY M. YOUNG

Brady, Tim(othy Wesley John)

(b Montreal, 11 July 1956). Canadian composer and guitarist. He studied composition with Alan Crossman at Concordia University, Montreal (BFA 1978) and with W.T. McKinley at the New England Conservatory, Boston (MMus 1980), and guitar with Mick Goodrick in Boston (1978–80). Brady divided his early career in Toronto (1980–86) between composition and jazz performance; Visions (1984), recorded by the jazz cornet and flugelhorn player Kenny Wheeler with a string orchestra, signalled the convergence of these activities. Brady returned to Montreal in 1987 and in 1989 established his own chamber ensemble, Bradyworks, and began performing as a solo guitarist in electro-acoustic settings. In the latter capacity, which effectively supplanted his work in jazz, he has performed at new music and guitar events in Canada, the USA and Europe, and has recorded his six-movement Strange Attractors (1994–7) and several shorter pieces. His larger works attest to an inquisitive yet pragmatic mind. He has moved unapologetically between styles, from the free atonality of Chamber Concerto (1985) to the minimalism of The Songline (1989–91). Eventually he began to employ compositional techniques suggested simply by the material at hand (e.g. Revolutionary Songs, 1993–4).

WORKS

(selective list)

Music for dance: Inventions (choreog. J. West), elec gui, pf, perc/synth, vc, sax/fl, 3 jazz pfmrs, tape, 3 dancers, 1988–9

Orch: Concertino, 1982; Variants, 1982; Visions, improvising soloist, str, 1984; Loud, elec gui conc., 1992, rev. 1993; The Body Electric, elec. gui conc., 1997; String Theory, solo gui, 6-track tape, elecs, 15 pfmrs, 1998

Chbr: Str Qt no.1, 1980; Chbr Conc., pf solo, fl, cl, bn, 2 perc, str qt, db, 1985; … in the wake …, fl + a fl + perc, vc + perc, pf + perc, 1985, rev. 1988; Doubling, 2/4/6 kbd/perc/elec gui, 1988; Shadow Painting, fl + a fl, cl + b cl, 2 hn, flugelhorn, perc, hp, va, vc, 1989; The Songline, elec gui, pf, perc, vc, sax, 1989–91; Circling, fl, vib, 1990–91, rev. s sax/cl, vib, 1993; Unison Rituals, sax qt, 1991; Dance me to the End of Love, str qt, elec gui, elecs, 1996

Solo inst: Lyric, pf, 1983; Tessituras, cl, 1983; Sym. in 2 Pts, elec gui, tape, 1989; Dead of Winter, elec gui, elecs, 1991; Time Lapse Exposure, elec gui, digital delay, 1992; Strange Attractors, 6 movts, elec gui, elecs, tape, 1994–5

Vocal: Ranei te take (K. Hulme: The Bone People), S, elec gui, pf/synth, perc, 1988; Revolutionary Songs (A. Blok and others), S, elec gui, pf, perc, sax, vc, tape, 1993–4

MARK MILLER

Braein, Edvard Fliflet

(b Kristiansund, 23 Aug 1924; d Oslo, 30 April 1976). Norwegian composer and conductor. His grandfather Christian Braein (1837–1912) was a composer and organist, and his father Edvard Braein (1887–1957) was an organist, composer, conductor and folk music collector: he published Folkemusikk på Nordmöre (Oslo, 1938). Braein studied the organ with Sandvold, harmony and counterpoint with Steenberg and composition with Cleve at the Oslo Conservatory (1942–5); he also had composition and conducting lessons with Brustad and Grüner-Hegge, and he was a composition pupil of Rivier at the Paris Conservatoire (1950–51). His music may be characterized as humorous, gay and tuneful.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Anne Pedersdotter, 1971; Den stundeslöse (H. Kristiansen, after L. Holberg), 1974

Orch: 3 syms.; Ov., 1949; Serenade, 1952; Adagio, str, 1953; Capriccio, pf, orch; Fl Concertino

Chbr: De glade musikanter, cl, str trio, 1948; other pieces

Vocal: many choral works and songs

Principal publisher: Musikkhuset

PETER ANDREAS KJELDSBERG

Braeunich [Braeunig], Johann Michael.

See Breunich, Johann Michael.

Braga, (Antônio) Francisco

(b Rio de Janeiro, 15 April 1868; d Rio de Janeiro, 14 March 1945). Brazilian composer. After attending the Asilo dos Meninos Desvalidos he studied the clarinet, harmony, counterpoint and fugue at the Imperial Conservatory. He came to the attention of the provisional republican government in 1889, when he entered a competition for a new national anthem. Although the piece finally adopted was that of Leopoldo Miguéz, Braga was awarded a scholarship for further study in Europe. He studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire (1890–94) with Massenet (an influence on the works he wrote at this time) and published several salon pieces in Paris. In 1896 he settled in Germany, becoming a Wagnerian in attitude and technique. It was in Germany that he wrote the symphonic poems Marabá and Episódio sinfônico (Rio de Janeiro, 1900), the former treating a Brazilian subject, but without reference to local music. During a short stay in Italy Braga completed his first opera, Jupira, which received its première at the Teatro Lírico on his return to Rio in 1900. He was very active as a conductor in Rio and São Paulo, and then took a position as professor of composition at the Instituto Nacional de Música (1902–38). For nearly 20 years he conducted the regular concerts of the Rio Sociedade de Concertos Sinfônicos, founded in 1912. As a composer he followed late Romantic European models, sometimes taking thematic material from national sources, as in the minuet O contratador de diamantes (Rio de Janeiro, 1906). Orchestral works form the backbone of his output, but he also left a considerable quantity of church music, chamber works and an unfinished opera, Anita Garibaldi; he is best remembered in Brazil as the composer of the patriotic Hino à Bandeira (‘Hymn to the Flag’).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. de Souza Rocha: Perfil biográfico do Maestro Francisco Braga (Rio de Janeiro, 1921)

I.Q. Santos: Francisco Braga (Rio de Janeiro, 1952)

V. Mariz: História da música no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1981, 4/1994)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Braga, Gaetano

(b Giulianova, nr Teramo, 9 June 1829; d Milan, 21 Nov 1907). Italian cellist and composer. He entered the Naples Conservatory in 1841 to study the cello with Ciandelli and composition with Mercadante, indicating talent in both disciplines. He left in 1852 with the title ‘Maestrino di violoncello’ and made many concert tours of Europe and the USA. In Vienna he was briefly a member of the Mayseder Quartet.

In 1853 his first opera, Alina, was produced at Naples. Over the next 20 years, during which he made Paris and London his principal homes, he composed another eight; though some were staged in Vienna, Paris and Lisbon as well as in Italy, they scarcely fulfilled his early promise, and none remained in the repertory. In 1868 La Scala turned down his Ruy Blas in favour of Marchetti’s version; it remained unperformed and unpublished, colouring his decision to remain abroad for some 30 years, continuing a successful solo playing career besides composing. As a voice teacher Braga was much sought after; he coached Erminia Frezzolini, towards the end of her career, and Adelaide Borghi-Mamo, for whom he also wrote salon works. Braga’s other compositions include orchestral, chamber and vocal music, fantasias on well-known operatic themes, two cello concertos and a method (1878), and salon pieces that enjoyed popularity during his lifetime. Still known is his Leggenda valacca, under the name ‘La Serenata’ or ‘The Angel’s Serenade’, originally a song with cello or violin obbligato; despite describing it themselves as a ‘cloying melody’, in 1914 HMV listed no fewer than four recordings of it made by such prominent artists as Gluck and Zimbalist, and McCormack and Kreisler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (L. MacGregor)

V. Bindi: Gaetano Braga, da’ ricordi della sua vita (Naples, 1927)

A. De Angelis: ‘Gaetano Braga’, RMI, xxxvi (1929), 282–304

LYNDA MacGREGOR

Bragard, Roger

(b Huy, 21 Nov 1903; d Etterbeek, 15 Dec 1985). Belgian musicologist. After concurrently studying Romantic philology at the University of Liège and the history of music at the Liège Conservatoire Royal, he obtained the doctorate in 1926 with a dissertation on the sources of the De institutione musica of Boethius. Together with André Pirro at the Sorbonne and with Amédié Gastoué and d’Indy at the Schola cantorum, he was instrumental in improving musicology in Paris. In 1934 he became vice-president of the Société Liégeoise de Musicologie. The following year he replaced Closson as professor of the history of music at the Brussels Conservatory and in 1939 became professor of the same subject at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth. In 1957 he was elected director of the Brussels Musical Instruments Museum, which under his management gained a dynamic and international reputation. In 1965 he was appointed to teach the history of musical instruments, Latin texts of medieval musicology and music paleography at the Free University of Brussels. He became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy in 1980. Bragard’s research was concerned with the music theorists Boethius and André de Pape, and also native musicians of the Low Countries, for example Lambert de Sayve of Liège. His study of manuscripts enabled him to rediscover in the Terry collection (B-Lc) the Livre d’orgue of Lambert Chaumont. While his Histoire de la musique is an invaluable reference book for all Belgian musicians, his most important work is indisputably his monumental edition of the treatise Speculum musicae of Jacques de Liège.

WRITINGS

Les sources du ‘De institutione musica’ de Boce (diss., U. of Liège, 1926)

‘Le prétendu Traité de Musique du Codex Parisinus Latinus 7221’, Le Musée belge, xxxi (1927), 125–33

‘L’Harmonie des Sphères, selon Boce’, Speculum, iv (1929), 206–13

André de Pape (contribution à l’histoire de la musique au pays de Liège) (Liege, 1934)

Lambert de Sayve (1549–1614): étude biographique et bibliographique (Liège, 1934)

with F. Monfort: Histoire de la musique (Brussels, 1950)

‘Le Speculum musicae du compilateur Jacques de Liège’, MD, vii (1953), 59–104; viii (1954), 1–17

ed.: Jacobi Leodiensis, Speculum musicae, CSM, iii (1955–73)

with F.J. de Hen: Les instruments de musique dans l’art et l’histoire (Rhode-St-Gense, Belgium, 1967; Eng. trans., 1968)

EDITIONS

Lambert Chaumont: Livre d’orgue (1695), Monumenta Leodiensium musicorum, ser.A, i (Liège, 1939)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RBM, xxxiv–xxxv (1980–81) [Festschrift issue; incl. N. Meeùs: ‘Roger Bragard: biographie’, 9–12; P. Raspé: ‘Bibliographie de Roger Bragard’, 13–15]

MARIE CORNAZ

Braga Santos, (José Manuel) Joly.

See Santos, Joly Braga.

Bragg, Billy [Stephen William]

(b Barking, 20 Dec 1957). English singer and songwriter. At school he listened to both rock and folk music, and in the 1970s was influenced by the punk band, the Clash. After playing with his own punk band Riff Raff and spending a brief spell in the army, he became a soloist, playing electric guitar and singing with a characteristic East End accent. He pioneered a distinctively English style that combined the raw energy of punk with the older tradition of political folk music. His first album Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy (Utility, 1983) included ‘A New England’, which became a hit for Kirsty MacColl. His second album, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg (Go! Discs, 1984) was followed by the EP Between the Wars (Go! Discs, 1985), which showed how his staunchly left-wing views had been influenced by his campaign work during the British miners' strike. In 1986 he founded Red Wedge, a group of rock musicians who supported the Labour Party, and who aimed to involve British youth in politics. It was, however, most successful for its own rousing tours, in which Bragg was joined by other well-known musicians such as Paul Weller. Subsequent albums included Talking with the Taxman about Poetry (Go! Discs, 1986), Workers Playtime (Go! Discs, 1988) and Don't Try This at Home (1991) which included the thoughtful and witty ‘Sexuality’. In 1998 he was invited to write new melodies for lyrics written by the American folksinger and activist, Woody Guthrie. The resulting album, Mermaid Avenue (1998), showed Bragg's widening musical interests, including American soul, country and rock, but retained his English sense of humour.

ROBIN DENSELOW

Braglia, Onorato.

See Viganò, Onorato.

Braham, David

(b nr London, 1834; d New York, 11 April 1905). American composer and conductor of English birth. In 1856 he went to New York, where he was an orchestral leader and composer for Pony Moore’s Minstrels, at Tony Pastor’s Opera House (from 1865) and at the Theatre Comique (from 1871). During these years he also wrote variety-show songs. In 1872 he set some lyrics for The Mulligan Guard by the playwright Edward Harrigan; the resulting march-song, sold to the publisher William A. Pond for only $50, became known worldwide and established the pair as a songwriting team. When Harrigan leased the Theatre Comique in 1876 Braham became his permanent orchestra leader.

Braham’s music complemented Harrigan’s scripts, which found humour in the mundane life of the urban ethnic neighbourhoods of New York. His deceptively simple harmonies, rhythms and melodies, his small details of variety and his long-term association with a single lyricist and a single publisher made him the best-known American theatre composer of the 1870s and 80s. He produced about 200 published songs for voice and piano. Braham’s brother Josef as well as his sons Harry and George were also conductors and songwriters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (D.L. Root)

E.J. Kahn: The Merry Partners (New York, 1955)

C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)

R. Moody: Ned Harrigan (Chicago, 1980)

D.L. Root: American Popular Stage Music, 1860–1880 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

DEANE L. ROOT

Braham, John

(b London, 20 March 1774; d London, 17 Feb 1856). English tenor and composer. His origins are obscure: both parents (his father is variously described as a German or Portuguese Jew) died when he was young. At the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place the boy’s voice attracted the attention of the singer Leoni (Meyer Leon) and of the financier Abraham Goldsmid. Leoni, sometimes described as Braham’s uncle, trained him and introduced him as a boy soprano at Covent Garden on 21 April 1787, when he sang Arne’s The Soldier, Tir'd of War's Alarms, from Artaxerxes, and later at the Royalty Theatre, Wellclose Square. When Leoni went to the West Indies and Braham’s voice broke, with Goldsmid’s help he became a piano teacher. After his voice had settled he spent three years at Bath studying with Venanzio Rauzzini. He made some appearances there, and met Nancy Storace, a former pupil of Rauzzini. As a result he was engaged in 1796 to sing at Drury Lane in her brother Stephen’s opera Mahmoud, left unfinished when Storace died that year, but completed by her. He appeared at the Italian Opera in Grétry’s Zémire et Azor, also at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester, before leaving with Nancy Storace for a tour of the Continent. The couple gave concerts in Paris on the way to Italy. In 1798 they reached Florence, where Braham was heard at the Teatro della Pergola. Two years were spent at Milan, where they appeared together at La Scala in Nasolini’s Il trionfo di Clelia, and where Braham emerged victorious from a contest with Mrs Billington. At Genoa he took lessons in composition. At Livorno he was befriended by Nelson. At Venice Cimarosa wrote Artemisia for him, but died in 1801 before completing it (the opera was performed, however, and Braham sang in it). At Trieste he appeared in Martín’s Una cosa rara.

Braham’s foreign success was noted in England. In Vienna he received offers to return to London, and did so by way of Hamburg. Towards the end of 1801 he made his adult début at Covent Garden in The Chains of the Heart, soon followed by The Cabinet; for this he wrote the music of his own part (see illustration), a procedure he followed for some years, and by which he became the collaborator of various composers, including Bishop and Attwood. His ballads, duets and patriotic songs, especially The Death of Nelson in The Americans (1811), won great popularity. Between 1804 and 1806 he appeared in Italian opera at the King’s Theatre, notably in the latter year as Sesto in La clemenza di Tito. Braham was a showman who gave his various audiences what they wanted, whether singing of high quality, stirring patriotic sentiment or florid, tasteless ornament. His voice was a magnificent, durable instrument, with a range of A to e'', the scale so even that the change to falsetto was said to be imperceptible. Scott declared him ‘a beast of an actor but an angel of a singer’. His diction was generally agreed to be excellent. In a letter (1816) Mary Russell Mitford wrote:

He is the only singer I have ever heard in my life who ever conveyed to my very unmusical ears any idea of the expression to which music is susceptible; no one else joins any sense to the sound. They may talk of music as married to immortal verse, but if it were not for Braham they would have been divorced long ago.

‘Braham … can be two distinct singers’, wrote Richard, Earl of Mount-Edgcumbe, who had reservations about him during the early part of his career, but on hearing him sing Handel during the 1834 Festival in Westminster Abbey was impressed not only by the undiminished brilliance of the voice but by the singer’s ‘most perfect taste and judgment’. He impressed Weber, who wrote the part of Sir Huon in Oberon (1826) for him (and at Braham’s insistence wrote the aria, ‘O, 'tis a glorious sight to see’ to replace ‘From boyhood trained’, and added the Preghiera ‘Ruler of this awful hour’); Braham had already sung Max in the first English adaptation of Der Freischütz at the Lyceum in 1824.

Braham’s liaison with Storace lasted until 1816, when he married Frances Elizabeth Bolton. His worldly success was considerable. The Duke of Sussex was godfather to one of his sons. George IV, on a private occasion when his singing had been especially brilliant, was with difficulty restrained from knighting him on the spot. Braham made a large fortune, but his wife persuaded him to put money into two unsuccessful ventures, the purchase in 1831 of the Colosseum (an entertainment palace designed by Decimus Burton) in Regent’s Park, and the building of St James’s Theatre in 1836, and he was forced to resume his public career. As his voice had become lower, he appeared at Drury Lane in the baritone title roles of William Tell (1838) and Don Giovanni (1839). In 1840–42 he made a tour of North America with his son Charles that was only partly successful. In England he continued to sing at concerts in London and the provinces until his final public appearance at one of the popular Wednesday Concerts in March 1852, when he was well over 70. The Brahams had six children. Three sons, Charles, Hamilton and Augustus, became singers. The daughter, Frances, Countess Waldegrave, was a leading social and political hostess of the Victorian era. Braham’s illegitimate son by Nancy Storace took holy orders and became a minor canon of Canterbury, in 1851 changing his name to Meadows.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (W.B. Squire)

‘Memoir of John Braham, Esq.’, The Harmonicon, x/1 (1832), 1–4

R. Edgcumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe: Musical Reminiscences (London, 1824, 4/1834/R)

H. Phillips: Musical and Personal Recollections (London, 1864)

J.M. Levien: The Singing of John Braham (London, 1945)

J.M. Levien: Six Sovereigns of Song (London, 1948)

O. Wyndham Hewett: Strawberry Fair: a Biography of Frances, Countess Waldegrave, 1821–1879 (London, 1956)

J. Warrack: Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1968, 2/1976)

RONALD CRICHTON

Brahe, May [Mary] Hannah

(b Melbourne, 6 Nov 1884; d Sydney, 14 Aug 1956). Australian composer. She studied in Melbourne with Alicia Rebottaro and Mona McBurney. The majority of her 290 published songs were composed in England, where she lived from 1912 to 1939, and published by Allans, Enoch and Boosey. Her most enduringly popular songs (and two of her three musicals) were written in collaboration with Helen Taylor, notably I Passed by Your Window (1916) and Bless This House (1927–32). She wrote under nine pseudonyms, namely Stanley Dickson (Thanks Be to God), Mervyn Banks, Donald Crichton, Alison Dodd, Stanton Douglas, Eric Faulkner, Wilbur B. Fox, Henry Lovell and George Pointer. Her discography lists some 300 performances of 52 compositions, recorded by many great performers. It is however dominated by three songs: I Passed by Your Window, Down Here, and especially Bless This House, which continues to figure prominently in world record catalogues and appears to have attained a permanent place in the repertory. Brahe also wrote two operettas for children and four piano pieces.

MSS, published scores and other materials in AUS-PYgm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AusDB, vii (M. Colligan)

M. Colligan: ‘May Brahe: Composer Australian’, Lip (1978–9), 114–5

K. Dreyfus: ‘Capturing the Ear of the Populace: May Brahe and the Domestic Song Market, 1912–1953’, One Hand on the Manuscript: Music in Australian Cultural History 1930–1960, ed. N. Brown (Canberra, 1995), 45–54

K. Dreyfus and P. Burgis: ‘May Brahe Composition Discography: a Prototype for Australian Composer Discographies’, Australasian Music Research, i (1996), 167–91

KAY DREYFUS

Brahms, Johannes

(b Hamburg, 7 May 1833; d Vienna, 3 April 1897). German composer. The successor to Beethoven and Schubert in the larger forms of chamber and orchestral music, to Schubert and Schumann in the miniature forms of piano pieces and songs, and to the Renaissance and Baroque polyphonists in choral music, Brahms creatively synthesized the practices of three centuries with folk and dance idioms and with the language of mid- and late 19th-century art music. His works of controlled passion, deemed reactionary and epigonal by some, progressive by others, became well accepted in his lifetime.

6. Influence and reception.

7. Piano and organ music.

8. Chamber music.

9. Orchestral works and concertos.

10. Choral works.

11. Lieder and solo vocal ensembles.

GEORGE S. BOZARTH (1–5, 10–11, work-list, bibliography), WALTER FRISCH (6–9, 10, work-list, bibliography)

1. Formative years.

Brahms was the second child and first son of Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen (1789–1865) and Johann Jakob Brahms (1806–72). His mother, an intelligent and thrifty woman simply educated, was a skilled seamstress descended from a respectable bourgeois family. His father came from yeoman and artisan stock that originated in lower Saxony and resided in Holstein from the mid-18th century. A resourceful musician of modest talent, Johann Jakob learnt to play several instruments, including the flute, horn, violin and double bass, and in 1826 moved to the free Hanseatic port of Hamburg, where he earned his living playing in dance halls and taverns. In 1830, as a condition for gaining citizenship (Kleinbürger), he joined the local militia as a horn player; he also became a member of a sextet at the fashionable Alster Pavilion. Later he played the double bass and occasionally the flute in the Hamburg Philharmonie, obtaining a regular position as a bass player in 1864 through the influence of his son.

Brahms's parents were married in 1830. His elder sister, Elise (1831–92), experienced poor health throughout her life and was supported generously by Brahms, even after her marriage in 1871. The youngest child, Fritz (1835–86), became a musician; after attempting a career as a concert pianist and living in Venezuela, he settled in Hamburg as a music teacher. Although Brahms was not born into abject poverty, circumstances were precarious, because of Johann Jakob's inability to handle the family's hard-earned income sensibly. The family moved frequently, but their living quarters, though cramped and offering little privacy, were always in respectable working-class neighbourhoods. Tension over money, exacerbated by the great difference in the parents' ages, led Brahms's father to leave his elderly wife in 1864.

Despite personal difficulties, both parents were devoted to their children, a feeling reciprocated by Brahms. Both sons were sent to good private elementary and secondary schools, where their studies included history, mathematics, French, English and Latin. The young Brahms became a voracious reader, borrowing books and buying second-hand volumes. His well-used library of over 800 titles (preserved in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna) including poetry, fiction, drama, history, art, philosophy, religion and travel, testifies to an abiding love of learning.

Brahms was given lessons on the piano, cello and horn (the family owned a piano and bought him a cello). From the age of seven he studied the piano with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. Within a few years he was accepted for instruction in the piano and music theory, free of charge, by one of Hamburg's leading teachers, the pianist and composer Eduard Marxsen, who conveyed to his young pupil a love and knowledge of the music of Bach and the Viennese Classical composers.

Brahms's first documented performance was as a pianist in a chamber concert in 1843; he played an étude by Henri Herz and took part in a Mozart piano quartet and in Beethoven's Wind Quintet op.16. His first two solo recitals (in 1848 and 1849) included Bach and Beethoven, and fashionable bravura pieces; the second performance received a laudatory press notice. To contribute to the family's income after leaving school, Brahms gave piano lessons, earned reasonable fees playing popular music at private gatherings and in Schänken (respectable working-class places for eating and entertainment), and accompanying in the theatre; he also made arrangements for brass bands and the Alster sextet, and for four-hand piano (some of the last, Anh.IV/6, were published, under the common pseudonym G.W. Marks, by Cranz in Hamburg). The influence of folk and popular music, apparent in his own compositions, had its roots in these activities. (The allegation that Brahms was sent as a boy to play the piano in sailors' bars has been called into question by the recent research of Kurt Hofmann; comments allegedly made by Brahms to Max Friedlaender and Siegfried Ochs provide a basis for this assertion, but testimony from those who knew the young Brahms and his family well speaks to the contrary; laws closely regulating these establishments forbade employment at such a young age.)

The enthusiasms of Brahms's formative years were the poetry of the German romantics, the novels of Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann, and the music of Bach and Beethoven. He immersed himself in the poetry of Eichendorff, Heine and Emanuel Geibel; he adopted as his pseudonym ‘Johannes Kreisler, jun.’, after the archetypal emotionally erratic young composer in Hoffmann's Kater Murr and Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier whose music is fragmentary, bizarre and painfully expressive; and he included in his first solo concerts a Bach fugue and Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, the latter a work that, together with the Hammerklavier Sonata, informs the opening phrases of his C major Piano Sonata op.1 (1853). In the early 1850s Brahms assembled his favourite remarks on life, art and music by prominent poets, writers, philosophers and musicians in a series of chapbooks he entitled the Schatzkästlein des jungen Kreislers.

Brahms's love of folklore – including folk poetry, tales and music – began during these early years. By the late 1840s he had begun to compile manuscript collections of European folksongs; a notebook of German folk maxims dates from 1855. Linked to this interest was his liking for poems and tales from the age of chivalry. Over the years he acquired popular books such as Tieck's Die schöne Magelone and the old German legends of Faust and Siegfried; Herder's collections of folksongs, Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and several volumes by J.L. and W.C. Grimm; the Nibelungenlied and the Edda; Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio's Deutsche Volkslieder (the source for the majority of the folklike tunes he arranged for choir and as solo songs); collections of old English, Scottish and Danish ballads; and popular literature from around the world in German translation. The slow movement of the Piano Sonata in C op.1 was based on a German folksong recast by Brahms as a Minnelied; the comparable movement in the F minor Piano Sonata op.2 (1852) was inspired by a genuine Minnelied poem by Count Kraft von Toggenburg.

When Hungarian political refugees on their way to the USA passed through Hamburg after the suppression of the revolutions of 1848, Brahms was exposed to the style hongrois, a blending of Hungarian musical gestures and gypsy performing style. His lifelong fascination with the irregular rhythms, triplet figures and use of rubato common to this style can perhaps be traced to his encounter at this time with the Hungarian expatriate violinist Ede Reményi. Another lasting impression was made by Joachim's performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Hamburg orchestra in 1848. Two other works that greatly interested Brahms were Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Although Brahms's first extant works (the song Heimkehr op.7 no.6 and the E minor Scherzo for piano, op.4) date from 1851, he began composing several years earlier. Evidence exists of a Piano Sonata in G minor (mid-1840s), a Fantasia ‘on a beloved waltz’ for piano (by 1849), at least one piano trio and a ‘Lied-Duet’ for cello and piano (by 1851). During vacations in Winsen an der Luhe in 1847–8 he wrote several choral works and arranged folksongs for the men's choir he conducted. His musical confidante, Luise Japha, recalled many songs. By autumn 1853, in addition to the sonatas and songs that were his first published works, his portfolio included a string quartet in B minor and a violin sonata in A minor. All these youthful efforts fell victim to Brahms's intense self-scrutiny, which he continued to exercise throughout his life. As late as 1880 he destroyed the first movement of a newly composed piano trio in E after showing it to friends.

Brahms as a youth in Hamburg was recalled by acquaintances as shy and reserved, thoughtful and self-effacing; but he was candid and already very much his own person. Slender, with delicate features, long fair hair, radiant blue eyes and a high voice, he projected a somewhat androgynous image. One also discerns a dual nature in his early works: sensitive settings of poems about the problems of young maidens co-exist with highly energetic instrumental allegros and scherzos suggestive of the athletic prowess of the teenage boy.

2. New paths.

1853 marked a turning point in Brahms's personal and professional life. On returning from the USA, Reményi resumed his collaboration with Brahms with a recital in January and a concert tour in northern Germany from April to June. Among other places, they visited Göttingen, where Brahms began a lifelong friendship with Joseph Joachim, and Weimar, where he met Liszt, who played the Scherzo op.4 at sight. Brahms's stay at the Altenburg, however, was brief (12–24 June). ‘I soon discovered that I was of no use there’, he later told Richard Heuberger; ‘this was just at [Liszt's] most successful time when he was writing the “symphonic poems” and all that stuff, and soon it all came to horrify me’. Brahms considered himself a ‘musician of the future’, and his music embodied much that was progressive, but he viewed the path to the future differently.

Brahms returned to Göttingen to spend the summer with Joachim, who recognized his genius and encouraged him to meet other prominent musicians, especially Schumann. At the end of August, Brahms departed on a long walking tour in the Rhineland, making the acquaintance of several musicians (including Wasielewski, Ferdinand Hiller and Franz Wüllner). At the country estate of the financier Deichmann in Mehlem he studied Schumann's music, which a few years earlier he had dismissed, and on 30 September he presented himself at the home of Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf.

To the Schumanns it seemed as if Brahms had ‘sprung like Minerva fully armed from the head of the son of Cronus’, as Robert observed in his laudatory essay on Brahms, ‘Neue Bahnen’ (NZM, xxxviii/Oct, 1853, pp.185–6). The ‘young eagle’ showed the Schumanns pieces for piano (including the op.4 Scherzo, the andantes from the sonata op.5 and the sonatas opp.1 and 2), duos for violin and piano, piano trios, string quartets and numerous songs, ‘every work so different from the others that it seemed to stream from its own individual source’. Brahms's playing of his compositions was on a grand scale; Schumann remarked how the piano became ‘an orchestra of lamenting and loudly jubilant voices’, making his sonatas sound like ‘veiled symphonies’.

In October Brahms completed the Piano Sonata in F minor op.5 and contributed the scherzo woo2 to the ‘F–A–E’ violin sonata written with Schumann and Albert Dietrich for Joachim. During the next two months he went twice to Leipzig, preceded by enthusiastic letters of recommendation from Schumann, to present his compositions to publishers and oversee their printing; while there he performed the sonatas opp.1 and 4 in public and met Julius Otto Grimm, Ferdinand David, Moscheles, Berlioz and, again, Liszt. When he returned to Hamburg for Christmas he was able to report the acceptance of his first four opuses by Breitkopf & Härtel and the next two by Bartolf Senff.

The new year found Brahms at work on the B major Piano Trio op.8. In March, on learning of Schumann's nervous breakdown, suicide attempt and removal to a sanatorium at Endenich, Brahms returned to Düsseldorf to assist Clara Schumann with the care of her family, the running of the household and the organization of her husband's library and business dealings concerning his music. He remained there throughout Schumann's protracted illness, attending to matters in Düsseldorf while she resumed her career as a concert pianist and reporting to her from Endenich on the condition of her husband, whom she was not allowed to visit. At the same time he conceived a strong romantic passion for her, despite the great difference in their ages. To him Clara Schumann, as wife, mother and musician, represented all that was ideal in womanhood. In June 1854 he dedicated to her his newly composed Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann op.9; the theme, from Bunte Blätter op.99, is joined by variations that draw upon other works by Schumann (as well as a melody by Clara) and are initialled in Brahms's manuscript variously by the calm, introspective ‘Brahms’ and the mercurial ‘Kreisler’. For her part, Clara drew sustenance from Brahms's creativity, which filled a void in her life after the sudden end of her husband's activity as a composer. On a personal level, though feeling a certain proprietary right to his affection, she viewed him much as a mother would a devoted older son.

After the death of Schumann in July 1856, Clara and Brahms took a trip together along the Rhine and into Switzerland during which they no doubt discussed their future and after which they went their separate ways, henceforth to remain the closest of friends, despite occasional intense disagreements. Brahms shared his joys and sorrows with her, and sought but did not always heed her assessments of his new compositions. He also never forgot the debt he owed to Robert Schumann, and in the roles of composer, performer, arranger and editor he strove to perpetuate the legacy of the man who had championed his music.

The ‘two natures’ of Brahms's personality, revealed musically in the Schumann Variations and acknowledged by Brahms in a letter to Clara Schumann in August 1854, were described by Joachim as ‘eine kindlich, genial, vorwiegend … eine dämonische auflauernde’. This duality is also evident in the contrasts between the demonic scherzos and the gentler trios of the early piano sonatas and the Ballades op.10, composed at this time. Two letters from 1854 offer vivid accounts of Brahms the self-styled, now confident young Romantic who let nothing interfere with his art. In April, Julius Grimm wrote to Joachim:

Br— Kr—… is full of crazy ideas – as the Artist-Genius of Düsseldorf he has painted his apartment full of the most beautiful frescoes in the manner of Callot, i.e., all kinds of grotesque visages and faces of Madonnas.

(The reference is to the engravings of Jacques Callot and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier.) The following October Joachim characterized Brahms as

egoism incarnate, without himself being aware of it. He bubbles over in his cheery way with exuberant thoughtlessness … the things that do not arouse his enthusiasm, or that do not fit in with his experience, or even with his mood, are callously thrust aside … He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations – he will not play in public because of his contempt for the public, and because it irks him – although he plays divinely.

Brahms's withdrawal from the broader stage of German musical life in the later 1850s was nearly complete. After the publication of his Ballades op.10 in February 1856, he released no other works until the end of 1860. In the 1855–6 season, in need of money, he resumed concert activities, playing solo and chamber works and for the first time with orchestra, in Mozart's Piano Concerto k466 and Beethoven's fourth and fifth Concertos. But during the rest of the decade his appearances were sporadic. In autumn 1857 he accepted a well-paid, three-month position as piano teacher, pianist and conductor of the amateur choral society at the court in Detmold, a post to which he returned the following two autumns. In 1859 he founded an amateur women's choir in Hamburg which he conducted for the next three years. Otherwise the mid- and late 1850s were a time of intense self-scrutiny and musical study. Schumann's mental deterioration caused Brahms to ponder the relationship between creativity and insanity. His romantic involvement with Clara Schumann and, in autumn 1858, with Agathe von Siebold (a professor's daughter in Göttingen), forced him, at least to his own way of thinking, to choose (as his hero Kreisler had) between the married life of ‘die guten Leute’ and the existence of ‘echte Musikanten’, who draw inspiration from the veneration of idealized women but must forgo normal intimate relations. During the summer of 1855, with little to show from recent efforts at composition, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann that he felt he no longer knew ‘at all how one composes, how one creates’. But an exchange of polyphonic exercises and compositions with Joachim soon sharpened his contrapuntal skills; renewed study of early music and folksong for his own edification and in conjunction with his conducting duties grounded his art in tradition and enriched his melodic, rhythmic and textural vocabularies; and work on his Sturm und Drang Piano Concerto in D minor op.15 and the two neo-classical Serenades opp.11 and 16 (written for Detmold) initiated him into the art of orchestration.

Products of Brahms's studies of counterpoint and early music included Baroque-style dance pieces, preludes and fugues for organ, and neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque choral works (motets and a canonic mass); the variation set in the B String Sextet op.18 (1860), which extends the tradition of the folia, likewise testifies to his knowledge and love of earlier styles. Inspired by Agathe von Siebold, Brahms composed a number of songs and duets in 1858; for his women's choir in Hamburg he wrote many original works and arrangements of folksongs. The Variations on an Original Theme op.21 no.1 and on a Hungarian melody op.21 no.2 (both for solo piano) and the passionate opening movement of the Piano Quartet in C minor op.60 also come from this decade. In July 1862 Brahms sent Clara Schumann the prototype of what became the first movement of his C minor Symphony op.68 (at that time without a slow introduction).

The composition that occupied Brahms most during the 1850s was the D minor Piano Concerto. The opening of the first movement was written in spring 1854 as part of the opening Allegro of a two-piano sonata. Realizing that its gestural language exceeded the capabilities of two pianos, he attempted to orchestrate the movement during the summer, with the assistance of Grimm, Joachim and Marxsen. It was not until February 1855 that he thought to recast the symphonic movement as a concerto, and not until autumn 1856 that recomposition was completed. The Rondo-Finale was finished soon after, and the Adagio, which Brahms described as a ‘gentle portrait’ of Clara Schumann and whose opening melody he underlaid in his manuscripts with the text ‘Benedictus, qui venit, in nomine Domini!’ (from over the entrance to the monastery in Hoffmann's Kater Murr, where Kreisler finally found peace), was written late in December. But form and orchestration were still being settled even after the first public performances at Hanover and Leipzig in January 1859. After the investment of so much energy, it was a keen disappointment for Brahms that the concerto's première in the Leipzig Gewandhaus was greeted with hostility by both audience and critics. ‘The work … cannot give pleasure’, observed Edward Bernsdorf, the conservative critic of Signale für die musikalische Welt; ‘save its serious intention, it has nothing to offer but waste, barren dreariness truly disconsolate … one must … swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds’. Although Brahms tried to appear philosophical about the fiasco, a note of pain sounded forth in his letter to Joachim:

my concerto here was a brilliant and decided – failure …. The first movement and the second were heard without a sign. At the end three hands attempted to fall slowly one upon the other, at which point a quite audible hissing from all sides forbade such demonstrations…. In spite of all this, the concerto will please some day, when I have improved its construction…. I believe it is the best thing that could have happened to me; it makes one pull one's thoughts together and raises one's courage…. But surely the hissing was too much?

Instead of establishing him as a composer of the first rank, the Leipzig performance cast a pall over his career, jeopardizing prospects with publishers. When Breitkopf & Härtel rejected a group of works in 1860, including the piano concerto, Brahms turned to the small Swiss publishing house of Jakob Rieter-Biedermann, which accepted the concerto and subsequently published many songs and choral works, including the German Requiem, and to the German firm Simrock, which eventually became Brahms's major publisher.

During the 1850s Brahms's opposition to the literary-orientated music of Liszt and his circle grew. In March 1860, enraged by an editorial in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik claiming that all serious musicians of the day subscribed to the cause of the New German School, Brahms collaborated with Joachim to draft a manifesto deploring the ‘Music of the Future’ (i.e. that of Liszt, but not Berlioz and Wagner) as running ‘contrary to the inner spirit of music’, that is, to the need of music to progress according to its own logic. Prematurely leaked to the press while still being circulated for the signatures of other like-minded musicians, the document, published over the names of only Brahms, Joachim, Grimm and Bernhard Scholz, was soundly ridiculed and became an embarrassment to Brahms, who never again expressed his position on artistic matters in such a public manner.

3. First maturity.

During the first half of the 1860s Brahms produced an illustrious series of chamber works (two string sextets, a piano quintet, two piano quartets, a horn trio and a cello sonata) and piano pieces (variations on themes by Schumann, Handel and Paganini), as well as numerous songs and solo vocal ensembles (including the Platen and Daumer lieder op. 32 and most of the Magelone Romances op.33), and, on the lighter side, dance music (the Waltzes op.39). Brahms's study of his musical heritage now encompassed both the larger forms and the short popular dances of Schubert. In instrumental music the imaginative Lisztian thematic transformations that had animated and unified the highly Romantic early piano sonatas were replaced by a balance of emotional and intellectual elements achieved through motivic and thematic projection (termed ‘developing variation’ by Schoenberg); bold tonal shifts and large climaxes are reminiscent of Beethoven, but long, evolving melodies and major-minor inflections recall Schubert; ländler rhythms and folkmusic drones at times introduce a popular element. The style Brahms developed during this period is in evidence for the rest of his career.

In autumn 1862 Brahms made his first trip to Vienna, where, with introductions in hand from Clara Schumann and other friends, he was rapidly accepted into the foremost musical circles and performed a series of solo and chamber concerts. His repertory included two works with special appeal for his Viennese audiences (both completed in 1861): the Handel Variations op.24, with evocations of variation sets by Bach and Beethoven, and the G minor Piano Quartet op.25, with a rondo-finale imitating the cimbalom and fiddle playing of the gypsies. Among new acquaintances were the pianist Julius Epstein, the violinist Joseph Hellmesberger (with whose string quartet Brahms performed his two piano quartets), Otto Dessoff, director of the Philharmonic Concerts, the piano maker J.B. Streicher, and the pianist Carl Tausig, with whom Brahms shared a special interest in the music of Wagner.

Brahms had long coveted the conductorship of the Hamburg Philharmonische Konzertgesellschaft, but in autumn 1862 he was passed over in favour of the baritone Julius Stockhausen (the post eluded him again in 1867). In spring 1863 he accepted the directorship of the Vienna Singakademie, which he conducted for the 1863–4 season, presenting a cappella Renaissance works; a Bach cantata, portions of another and the Christmas Oratorio; and works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and pieces of his own.

In the autumn of 1862 Brahms met Wagner, who listened appreciatively to his playing of the Handel Variations. Much has been written about the differences between these two strong musical personalities; from the late 1860s Wagner wrote a number of highly critical remarks about Brahms's music. Critics such as Eduard Hanslick, having little sympathy for Wagner and his music, adopted the banner of Brahms as their standard. For his part, Brahms considered himself a supporter of Wagner, telling friends that he understood Wagner's music better than anyone. He even helped the avid Wagnerites Carl Tausig and Peter Cornelius prepare performing materials for Wagner's concerts in Vienna during the 1862–3 season; in 1870 he attended the first productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Munich. Although Brahms possessed a keen dramatic instinct and ventured to compose such works as the cantata Rinaldo and the Alto Rhapsody, he never found a libretto to his liking.

During the summer of 1864, while on vacation in Baden-Baden, Brahms became friendly with the conductor Hermann Levi, who remained one of his closest musical confidants into the mid-1870s, when their friendship foundered over personal and artistic differences. He also renewed his acquaintance with the engraver and photographer Julius Allgeyer. Allgeyer introduced him to the work of Anselm Feuerbach, whose coolly classical paintings were among Brahms's favourites. For five more summers during the years 1865–72 Brahms returned to Baden-Baden, taking rooms in the village of Lichtenthal, a short distance from the small house occupied by Clara Schumann and her family, in order to compose amidst the natural beauty of the Black Forest. In future summers he retreated to country settings in Germany, Switzerland and Austria for the same purpose.

Although Brahms continued to spend as much time as possible in Vienna, financial problems prompted him to undertake lengthy concert tours in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Denmark and the Netherlands during the years 1865–9. His repertory was extensive, ranging from Bach to his own compositions, including works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, and many lesser-known pieces by Scarlatti, Couperin, Rameau, Gluck, Bach's sons and Clementi. In addition to solo concerts, he performed frequently with Joachim and, with Stockhausen, pioneered the full presentation of the song cycles of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.

In February 1865 Brahms was profoundly shaken by the death of his mother. Soon afterwards he worked on the German Requiem op.45, completing six movements by the end of the summer of 1866 (there is no definite evidence that the work was conceived in the 1850s after the death of Schumann or that the texts of these movements were assembled in 1861). After a performance of the first three movements in Vienna to mixed reactions on 1 December 1867 and the première of the six movements in Bremen to tumultuous applause on Good Friday 1868, a seventh movement, the soprano solo ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’, was added and the complete work received its première at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 18 February 1869. The critical acclaim that it received and its progress through Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England and even as far as Russia established Brahms as a composer of major significance. In 1868 he completed Rinaldo op.50, a lengthy cantata for tenor, male chorus and orchestra (on a text by Goethe) that he had begun in 1863. Other works for choir and orchestra followed: the Alto Rhapsody op.53 (1869, also Goethe), a personal response to the marriage of Julie Schumann, for whom Brahms had secretly harboured an affection; the Schicksalslied op.54 (completed 1871, Hölderlin); the Triumphlied op.55 (1870–71, biblical texts), an expression of strong patriotic feelings after the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War and dedicated to Emperor Wilhelm I; and later Nänie op.82 (completed 1881, Schiller) and Gesang der Parzen op.89 (1882, Goethe), the former a response to the premature death of Feuerbach.

Brahms also continued to work in the intimate genres. In 1868 he supplemented the songs gathering in his portfolio since at least 1856 to issue five collections totalling 25 songs (opp.43, 46–9). The Liebeslieder Walzer op.52 (1869, on lyrics by Georg Friedrich Daumer, one of Brahms's favourite poets) express the joyous expectation of love fulfilled; the Lieder und Gesänge op.57 (1871, also on poems by Daumer) is perhaps his most sensual collection of songs. Such pieces as the piano waltzes op.39, the Liebeslieder Walzer, the first two books of Hungarian Dances, and the Wiegenlied op.49 no.4 endeared Brahms to music-making amateurs.

During the 1860s Brahms's affections were captured by several young women. As well as his infatuation with Julie Schumann in 1869, he had almost proposed to Ottilie Hauer, a Viennese girl with whom he spent many hours in 1863 reading Schubert's songs and his own; and his attraction to Elisabet Stockhausen (later married to the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg) was so strong that he withdrew from giving her piano lessons. In the end, though, he maintained his personal freedom, in the service of his musical aspirations. His father's case was quite different: a little over a year after his wife's death, he married Caroline Schnack, a widow 18 years his junior. Brahms appreciated her care of his father and respected her as he had his own mother, and in later years provided her with regular financial assistance.

4. At the summit.

In November 1872 Brahms conducted his first programme as director of the concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, a position he retained for three years. He had long restrained himself from accepting any sort of official position, in order to protect his freedom to compose; his work in Detmold had left most of his year free, and his tenure with the Singakademie had lasted only one year. In 1870 he had declined nomination as conductor of the Gesellschaft orchestra, but two years later, after the death of his father and as he approached his 40th birthday, he accepted the directorship of both orchestra and choir. Earlier that year he moved into lodgings at Karlsgasse 4, near the Musikverein, where he remained for the rest of his life, living first in two modest rooms, later in three.

As music director Brahms reorganized the Gesellschaft orchestra, replacing amateurs with professionals from the court opera orchestra, and demanded extra rehearsal time. He brought to his Viennese audiences a rich repertory of ‘early music’: works by J.G. Ahle, Eccard, Isaac and Jacob Handl; four Bach cantatas (bwv4, 8, 34 and 50) and the St Matthew Passion; and Handel's ‘Dettingen’ Te Deum, the Organ Concerto in D minor,. the ode Alexander’s Feast and the oratorios Saul, Alexander's Feast and Solomon. Also presented were symphonies by Haydn, Mozart's oratorio Davidde penitente, Cherubini's C minor Requiem, Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and Missa solemnis, and works by Mendelssohn, Schubert, Ferdinand Hiller, Volkmann and Schumann (Des Sängers Fluch, music to Manfred, Fantasy for violin) and by Brahms's contemporaries Bruch (Odysseus), Dietrich, Goldmark, Joachim and Rheinberger. Of his own works he conducted the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody, the Schicksalslied and the Triumphlied. The critics commented on the seriousness of his programmes and the choir initially resisted his repertory. However, his departure from the post was amicable and he remained on good terms with the Musikverein for the rest of his life.

For many years Brahms had struggled to master two genres dominated by Beethoven: the string quartet and the symphony. In the summer of 1873 he completed the first two string quartets (op.51, in C minor and A minor) that he considered worthy of publication. During the winter of 1873–4 he added the final movements to the Piano Quartet in C minor op.60, which he had begun in the mid-1850s and continued to polish through 1875. After three serious chamber works in minor keys the joyous and bucolic String Quartet in B op.67, written while he was on vacation in Ziegelhausen near Heidelberg in 1875, provided a welcome contrast.

Brahms resumed the composition of purely orchestral music in 1873 with the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, working in the extended form with which he felt most comfortable (the piece was first drafted in its version for two pianos). No less than a ‘grand symphony’ was now expected of him, and in summer 1876 he brought to completion the Symphony no.1 in C minor, which had occupied him at least since 1862. Such was his striving for perfection that even after it had been performed for an entire season, to ever-mounting acclaim, he recast the slow movement before allowing publication.

The Symphony no.2 in D soon followed (1877), its pastoral mood standing in clear distinction to the dark ruminations and mighty forces of its predecessor. Another pair of contrasting orchestral works date from the summer of 1880: the jocular Academic Festival Overture, based on student songs (for the occasion of the conferral on Brahms of an honorary doctorate by the University of Breslau), and the Tragic Overture, whose completion might have been prompted by the death of the painter Feuerbach in January (although, from the handwriting, sketches can be dated as pre-1872). The summers of 1883–5 were also devoted to orchestral composition, yielding Symphony no.3 in F (1883) and no.4 in E minor (1885). Three concertos complete Brahms's mature orchestral works: the Violin Concerto in D (1878), composed for and in close collaboration with Joachim; the Second Piano Concerto in B (1881), dedicated to Marxsen; and the Double Concerto for violin and cello (1887), written for Joachim and Robert Hausmann.

While completing the Violin Concerto Brahms began work on the Violin Sonata no.1 in G, which he finished during the following summer. An illustrious series of six chamber works followed: Piano Trio no.2 in C and String Quintet no.1 in F (both completed in 1882); the Cello Sonata no.2 in F, the Violin Sonata no.2 in A, and the Piano Trio no.3 in C minor (all 1886); the Violin Sonata no.3 in D minor (1886–8); and the String Quintet no.2 in G major (1890). During the 1870s and 80s Brahms added to the works for solo piano the eight Klavierstücke op.76 (1871 and 1878) and the two Rhapsodies op.79 (1879), and continued to compose choral music (both with and without piano accompaniment), quartets and duos for solo voices with piano (most notably the Neue Liebeslieder Walzer op.65 and Zigeunerlieder op.103), and solo lieder.

1874 marked the resumption of Brahms's travels as concert pianist and the beginning of invitations as guest conductor. The works performed were most often his own. Compositions written in spring and summer would receive trial performances the following autumn and winter – only then were they sent to the publisher. Over the next two decades Brahms appeared in all the major cities in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and in Budapest, Prague and Kraków. From 1881 he developed a special relationship with the court orchestra at Meiningen, first under Bülow, later under Fritz Steinbach. This highly trained ensemble of 49 players gave Brahms an opportunity to hear Nänie, the Second Piano Concerto and the Fourth Symphony before their official premières. Brahms was welcomed as an honoured guest by Duke Georg III and his wife, and was presented with the Meiningen Commander's Cross and Grand Cross, yet court etiquette was waived so that this man of the people could reside there as simply and agreeably as possible. He expressed his gratitude by dedicating the Gesang der Parzen (op.89) to the duke. In 1882 Brahms toured with Bülow and the Meiningen orchestra, presenting his two piano concertos and the Academic Festival Overture to audiences in Berlin, Kiel and Hamburg (with Brahms and Bülow sharing soloist duties); subsequent tours took them to Budapest, Graz and Vienna in 1884 (with the piano concertos and the Third Symphony) and to the Rhineland and the Netherlands in 1885 (with the Fourth Symphony). Brahms's performing schedule was at times extremely intense during the 1880s; in the 1881–2 season, for example, he played his Second Piano Concerto 22 times in as many cities during a three-month period.

As his fame spread across the Continent and on to England and the USA, Brahms was repeatedly honoured by his peers and aristocratic admirers. In addition to the awards from Breslau and Meiningen, he received the Bavarian Order of Maximilian for science and art (1873, with Wagner), the Gold Medal of the Philharmonic Society in London (1877), a knighthood in the Prussian Order ‘Pour le Mérite’ for science and art (1887), the honorary presidency of the Tonkünstlerverein in Vienna (1886), the Knight's Cross of the Imperial Austrian Order of Leopold (1889), the freedom of Hamburg (1889), honorary membership of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn (1889), and the Austrian Order for Art and Science (1895). In 1876 he declined an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge because he was unwilling to travel to England.

With the income from concert appearances and sizable honoraria from the sale of compositions Brahms had more than enough money to support his modest style of life, and he amassed a substantial fortune that, in later years, he allowed his publisher Simrock to invest for him. Since there was no longer any need for an official position, he turned down offers, including that of music director in Düsseldorf (1876) and head of the Cologne Conservatory (1884). Brahms was generous with his money, helping his family and aspiring young musicians, and underwriting scholarly projects of Gustav Nottebohm and Friedrich Chrysander. His most extravagant expenditure on himself was for eight lengthy trips to Italy between 1878 and 1893 in the company of various friends and colleagues. Otherwise he lived frugally, taking his main meal at the favourite gathering place for Vienna's musicians, the inn Zum roten Igel.

Young composers with whose music Brahms felt empathy also received assistance. As an adjudicator, he recommended that Dvořák should be awarded the Austrian State Stipendium for several years, encouraged Simrock to publish his works, offered financial support to him and his family, and even helped with the proofreading of his scores. He also recommended to Simrock the music of Walter Rabl and Gustav Jenner, the latter Brahms's only composition pupil (1889–95).

Brahms's large circle of friends included musicians, writers, artists, scholars and music-loving members of the professional and wealthy business classes. In the years 1874–92 Elisabet von Herzogenberg in Leipzig emerged as one of Brahms's most trusted musical advisers, who – as well as Clara Schumann and Theodor Billroth – offered him sensitive and frank assessments of his works; he dedicated the Rhapsodies op.79 to her. Brahms's relationships with the composers Karl Goldmark and Johann Strauss the younger were always cordial; he travelled in Italy with Goldmark and spent vacations in Bad Ischl near the Strausses. In the 1870s the baritone George Henschel was often in close contact with Brahms; in later years the young composer Richard Heuberger was a regular member of Brahms's Vienna circle. Both friends wrote important memoirs.

With the poet Klaus Groth, several of whose lyrics he set to music, Brahms could share an enjoyment of the Low German dialect of their common ancestral Ditmarsch homeland; with the Swiss poet and writer Josef Victor Widmann, who unsuccessfully tried to supply Brahms with an opera libretto, he could enter into discussions of literature, current events, scientific progress and religion, and enjoy travelling in Italy. The German poet and novelist Paul Heyse (who was later a Nobel prizewinner) and the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller were also friends of Brahms, who set their poems.

In addition to Feuerbach, the artists associated with Brahms included the celebrated Berlin painter and illustrator Adolf Menzel, the psychological interpreter of classical mythology Arnold Böcklin, and the painter, engraver and sculptor Max Klinger, who illustrated title-pages for several of Brahms's works and was inspired by his music to create a series of etchings, engravings and lithographs entitled Brahms-Phantasie (1894; fig.4). The Bach biographer Philipp Spitta, the Handel scholar Friedrich Chrysander, the Beethoven specialist Gustav Nottebohm, and the music archivists C.F. Pohl (biographer of Haydn) and Eusebius Mandyczewski (editor of Haydn and Schubert) were all friends of Brahms, who took an interest in their research. The professional men in Brahms's circle included the surgeon Theodor Billroth and the physiologist T.W. Engelmann, both capable amateur musicians (and the dedicatees of the String Quartets opp.51 and 67 respectively).

From the business and industrial community Brahms had the friendship and support of Richard Fellinger (of Siemens Brothers), whose wife, Maria, sculpted and photographed Brahms; the industrialist Arthur Faber, who with his wife, Bertha (a special friend of Brahms's since the days of his women's choir in Hamburg), cared for Brahms like a family member; and the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, whose musical sisters sang in Brahms's Singakademie and whose daughter Margaret Stonborough amassed the largest private collection of Brahms manuscripts in the 1920s and 30s (now in the Library of Congress, Washington). Although Brahms lived simply and was wary of being lionized, he enjoyed the attention and fine food lavished on him by his wealthy admirers. Those sharing his company were regaled by his repartee and reaped the benefits of an inquiring mind with broad interests and knowledge.

The prickly side of Brahms's personality, usually directed against those who invaded his privacy or lacked modesty or sincerity in their dealings with him, was experienced by close acquaintances as well. Clara Schumann, who confessed that even after 25 years he remained a riddle to her, was wounded more than once by his gruffness. But Brahms could be a true and loyal friend, as when he supported Amalie Joachim in her divorce proceedings in 1881, writing a letter highly critical of her jealous husband. Brahms's relationship with Joachim, whose nature was so different from his own, was suspended, until he tendered the Double Concerto (1887) as a peace offering. Brahms also had a special love of children, whom he accepted unconditionally and enjoyed teasing and spoiling.

In his later years Brahms's bachelor existence was brightened by infatuations with two young singers. He met the contralto Hermine Spies, a student of Julius Stockhausen, in 1883. This gifted, quick-witted woman from the Rhineland invigorated the 50-year-old composer with her merry nature and spirited renderings of his songs. Brahms's changed mood was discerned by Billroth in the songs of opp.96 and 97. For her part, she openly confessed her ‘Johannes passion’, but by this time in his life marriage was not a serious option. The artistry and beauty of another contralto, Alice Barbi, captured Brahms's attention in 1890, and they greatly enjoyed each other's company (fig.5). But Brahms was also capable of treating less talented and less intelligent women with rudeness.

Throughout his career Brahms devoted much energy to preparing arrangements for piano four hands or for two pianos. His transcriptions of Schumann's Piano Quintet and Piano Quartet, three overtures by Joachim and most of his own chamber and orchestral works demonstrate a special affinity for this medium, which was important for the dissemination of music before the age of the gramophone. He also made keyboard arrangements of works by Bach, Chopin, Gluck, Schubert and Weber; composed keyboard realizations for vocal duets and trios by Handel; orchestrated six songs by Schubert; and made piano reductions of the orchestral accompaniments to Schubert's Mass in E (d950) and many of his own choral works.

Brahms's study of early music led him to oversee editions of works by C.P.E. and W.F. Bach and François Couperin. He anonymously prepared an edition of Mozart's Requiem for the collected works and brought out previously unpublished works by Schubert and Schumann. He also edited Schubert's nine symphonies for the Gesamtausgabe, provided editorial assistance for Chopin's collected works and helped prepare Clara Schumann's collected edition of her husband's music.

Brahms's extensive collection of musical autographs and rare editions reflects the depth of his historical interests, as well as his tastes in more recent music. Choice items included early editions and manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas; more than 60 sheets of Beethoven sketches; and autographs of Haydn's string quartets op.20, Mozart's Symphony no.40, several Schubert songs and his Quartettsatz d703, Berlioz's La mort d'Ophélie, Chopin's E minor Mazurka and A Prelude, the original version of Schumann's D minor symphony (no.4), and excerpts from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Das Rheingold. Brahms copied out music that he could not acquire in manuscript or print, assembling large collections of European folk music and Renaissance and Baroque art music. He was also an inveterate collector of passages in the music of his predecessors containing parallel octaves and 5ths.

Brahms's historical awareness found resonance in his own music. His choral music drew heavily on the models of Renaissance and Baroque polyphony, uniting old methods with modern musical language in works that represent a peak in musical historicism. Such syntheses are found in his instrumental music as well. The double variations (à la Haydn) that comprise the slow movement of the String Quintet in F (op.88), for example, are based on two neo-Baroque dances (a saraband and a gavotte) that he had composed in the mid-1850s. His Haydn Variations op.56 culminate with a set of variations on a ground bass, and a grandly scaled passacaglia closes the Fourth Symphony. Folk music as well informs Brahms's mature instrumental compositions. Austrian ländler-style movements are often encountered, and the style hongrois continues to exert its influence.

5. Final years and legacy.

During the 1890s death took a terrible toll on Brahms's circle of friends. In 1892 Elisabet von Herzogenberg died at the age of 45 and in the following year Hermine Spies succumbed at 36; in 1894 Billroth, Bülow and Spitta all died within a three-month period. Brahms himself was beginning to feel his age. Though in robust health, late in 1890 and again early in 1894 he declared his work as a composer at an end; at least two symphonic movements were sketched but left incomplete. At both times the artistry of Richard Mühlfeld, clarinettist of the court orchestra in Meiningen, stirred him from his lethargy, inspiring a rich harvest of chamber works with clarinet (opp.114, 115 and 120), the last issued in 1895. In 1891 Brahms collected and published 13 canons composed from the 1850s onwards, and in 1894 he gathered in seven volumes his arrangements for voice and piano of 49 German folksongs. His four collections of short piano pieces opp.116–9 seem to represent a similar activity, though evidence suggests that most if not all the pieces were recently composed.

Brahms's music continued its triumphant progress through Europe. In January 1895 his chamber and orchestral works were surveyed in a festival of three concerts in Leipzig, with Eugen d'Albert playing both piano concertos. The following September a similar event took place over three days in Meiningen. In October the Triumphlied was performed with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to open the new Tonhalle in Zürich. In January 1896 Brahms made his last appearance on the podium, conducting his two piano concertos in Berlin, again with Albert as soloist.

In May 1896, with the death of Clara Schumann imminent, Brahms set his reflections on the meaning of life and death to music in the Vier ernste Gesänge op.121. In the wake of her passing (20 May) he wrote his final compositions, the 11 Chorale Preludes for organ (op. posth.122). At this time Brahms first came to realize that his own days were numbered. To friends he dismissed his sallow complexion as ‘bourgeois jaundice’, but he surely recognized the alarming symptom of cancer of the liver, the disease of which his father had died. Brahms was cared for during his final months by his landlady, Celestine Truxa, and by loyal Viennese friends. At one of his last appearances in public, a performance of the Fourth Symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter (7 March 1897), he received an ovation after each movement. He died on 3 April 1897 and was buried in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, in a grave of honour near the remains of Beethoven and Schubert.

Because Brahms did not leave a valid will, a lengthy legal dispute over his estate ensued. Private correspondents were allowed to reclaim their letters; the remaining letters to Brahms, most of his books and music, and all the important manuscripts were acquired by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, as was his wish.

6. Influence and reception.

‘Brahms is everywhere’, observed the critic Walter Niemann in 1912 when assessing the composer's posthumous influence on contemporary piano music in Europe. Indeed, from about 1880 Brahms's music was a powerful model for younger composers. The Brahms ‘fog’, as Wilhelm Tappert disparagingly called this influence around 1890, had permeated the major conservatories in Austria and Germany, where Wagner's music was, at least officially, disapproved of. Furthermore, the external elements of Brahms's style – such as two-against-three rhythms, thick chords, and triadic melodies – lent themselves readily to imitation.

Composers such as Heinrich von Herzogenberg or the more talented Robert Fuchs had difficulty developing beyond the Brahmsian idiom. Other, mostly younger, composers, including Zemlinsky, Reger, Schoenberg, Busoni, Hindemith and Weill, absorbed Brahms's techniques with greater originality into styles that became the earliest manifestations of musical modernism.

Brahms's music also had a profound influence outside Austria and Germany, especially in England, on Hubert Parry, Stanford, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Brahms is audible as well in French music, for example in the rhythmic and textural aspects of Fauré. Further to the east, Sergey Taneyev, who produced symphonic and chamber music with a strong Brahmsian stamp, was dubbed ‘the Russian Brahms’.

Well into the later 20th century a diverse array of composers acknowledged their indebtedness to Brahms. The complex motivic and rhythmic structures of Babbitt seek to extend Brahmsian precepts to their logical limits. Ligeti's lyrical Horn Trio (1982) is a direct homage to Brahms's trio op.40. Berio orchestrated the Clarinet Sonata op.120 no.1 (1984–6), adding a few introductory bars of his own to the first two movements. His effort recalls the earlier one of Schoenberg, who in 1937 arranged the Piano Quartet op.25 for large orchestra.

The critical reception of Brahms's music was unique among the major Classical and Romantic composers. Schumann's 1853 encomium of Brahms as the one destined to ‘give expression to his age in an ideal fashion’ had powerful repercussions, both negative and positive. For many years afterwards, he was judged by the standards and hopes expressed by Schumann. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not, Brahms became a lightning rod in the major musical-aesthetic tempest of the later 19th century. He was cast in direct opposition to the Lisztians and Wagnerites; his preferred genres of chamber music, lieder and symphony were set against the more modern forms of music drama and symphonic poem.

An unusual paradox became apparent in reactions to Brahms's music from about the period of the German Requiem. Even as he was acknowledged as a master, and his works entered the standard repertory and then the canon, there were strong reservations about his music. His technical prowess was never in doubt, but his music was felt to lack true originality and expressiveness. These views were held even by such staunch allies as Hanslick and Kalbeck.

Beethoven was the yardstick against which Brahms was constantly measured. For Louis Köhler in 1880, Brahms would never rise above epigonal status; without spiritual qualities he could be ‘no kind of Beethoven’. In 1918 Paul Bekker advanced one of the main theories of Brahms reception, which had already been adumbrated as early as 1879 by Wagner: Brahms was essentially a composer of chamber music. For Bekker, Brahms's was a small-scale, bourgeois mentality, incapable of the ‘society-forming’ (gesellschaftsbildend) impulse that led Beethoven to write the Ninth Symphony. Brahms's symphonies were to Bekker no more than ‘monumentalized chamber music’.

Some years later, Theodor Adorno, and after him Carl Dahlhaus, radically inverted the Wagner-Bekker characterization from a defect to a virtue. The chamber-music qualities of Brahms's symphonic music were now deemed to be the most forward-looking aspect of his work. According to this view, the intricate textures and continuous motivic variation were harbingers of 20th-century music, especially that of the Schoenberg school. For Adorno, writing in 1940, Brahms's music represented the first time in Western music that the ‘subjective’ elements of thematic development determined ‘objective’ formal structures.

Adorno anticipated a better-known articulation of this position, an essay by Schoenberg that, beside Schumann's article, is the most renowned piece of Brahms reception. In ‘Brahms the Progressive’, originally prepared as a radio talk for the Brahms centenary of 1933 and revised in 1947, Schoenberg admired the compact richness of his harmonic language and his ability to spin themes, sections and even entire compositions from a few small motifs. For Schoenberg, these procedures of Stufenreichtum (abundance of scale degrees) and ‘developing variation’ paved the way towards an ‘unrestricted musical language’ of the 20th century.

Half a century after the appearance of Schoenberg's article (in Style and Idea, 1950), such special pleading for Brahms no longer seems necessary. His works continue to be mainstays on the concert stage and in recordings. There have been impressive achievements in documentary, historical and analytical research, and in performing practice, partly resulting from activities of the Brahms anniversary years 1983 and 1997. All this activity suggests that the special combination of beauty and integrity in his music continues to exert considerable appeal in a postmodern age.

7. Piano and organ music.

Brahms's early works are dominated by the piano, the instrument on which he, like most composers of the period, received his training. As both recitalist and composer he seemed from the start intent on transcending the virtuoso and salon traditions that dominated Europe in the 1830s and 40s.

The first group of piano works, opp.4, 2, 1 and 5, completed (in that order) between 1851 and 1853, display an impressive command of the kind of motivic development and large-scale structures Brahms studied in Bach and Beethoven, a talent for the thematic transformation and colouristic harmony of Liszt and Chopin, and a strongly poetic-literary inclination like that of Schumann. The first movement of the F minor Piano Sonata op.5 draws imaginatively on all these traditions: the sonata form is built by subjecting a concise motif to a series of metamorphoses and wide-ranging modulations, so that we seem to be hearing the ‘story’ of a theme. In the Scherzo op.4 Brahms sought to compensate for the inherently sectional nature of the form by forging close thematic interrelationships between the sections.

The slow movements of the three piano sonatas are character pieces, or songs without words. They reflect the predilection for folk materials also evident in Brahms's early lieder. The theme of the Andante of op.1 is ‘Verstohlen geht der Mond auf’, whose text Brahms reproduced under the notes and identified as ‘an old German Minnelied’ (though the melody is a recasting of one probably invented by Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, the modern compilers of Brahms's source). The Andante theme of op.2 bears no words, but Brahms told his friend Dietrich that it was inspired by the text of the German Minnelied Mir ist leide. In op.5 both andantes are related to poems by C.O. Sternau, and portions of the movements may have been inspired by a folklike melody by Silcher, set to a text attributed to Wilhelm Hauff.

The slow movements of opp.1 and 2 are also significant for being Brahms's first mini-experiments in variation form; each consists of only a few variations on a short theme. Both themes also have a dialogic or call-and-response structure exploited with great freedom and imagination, as when near the end of the second variation in op.1, a laconic four-note motif in the middle register, in a homophonic choral style, is answered by a sprinkling of pianistic filigree from on high.

Brahms returned to variation form in the summer of 1854 for the more extended Variations on a Theme by Schumann op.9. Not surprisingly, the broad range of pianistic idioms owes much to Schumann's own works, to which there are also many allusions. The mood shifts dramatically among the 16 variations as a reflection of the two different personas implied in the music (‘Brahms’, slower, more meditative; ‘Kreisler’, faster, more impulsive) and made explicit in the autograph manuscript, where Brahms extended the double bars into either a ‘B’ or ‘Kr’.

Brahms's first set of smaller piano pieces, the Ballades op.10, share the interest in folk sources (the first is based on the Scottish ballad Edward) and Schumannesque style evident in the sonatas and op.9. A retrenchment sets in with the pairs of gavottes, gigues and sarabands that comprise woo3–5 and were probably intended as parts of complete suites in the manner of Bach. The A minor Saraband woo5 is an exquisite miniature in rounded binary form closely modelled on the analogous number in Bach's English Suite in G minor, and yet it shows how well Brahms could absorb the essence of Bach's structures into his own developing style.

The retrospective trend of the mid-1850s continues in four organ works (woo7–10), some of which originated in the course of Brahms's counterpoint exchange with Joachim. The Fugue in A minor (woo8), the gem of the group, is a masterful synthesis of Baroque and Romantic principles. A slow, highly chromatic subject undergoes strict contrapuntal treatment by inversion, augmentation, diminution and stretto, as it simultaneously embarks on remote harmonic journeys that could only have been charted in the mid-19th century. Also dating from this time is the masterly Chorale Prelude on the Passion chorale O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid (woo7), to which Brahms later added an imposing fugue.

The two sets of Variations in D (op.21 nos.1 and 2) from 1856–7 show that Beethovenian influences were beginning to temper Brahms's Romantic approach to this form. The Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel (op.24), which look still further back into the musical past, are the supreme manifestation of this neo-classical or neo-baroque tendency. The composer himself valued this set highly, calling it his ‘Lieblingswerk’. Even Wagner, who heard Brahms play the variations in Vienna in 1862, is reported to have expressed admiration ‘for what may still be done with the old forms’. The Handel Variations take Bach's Goldberg and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations as the starting point for building a monumental and variegated structure upon a theme of the utmost simplicity, here the Air from Handel's suite in B. From the viewpoint of piano technique, the Handel Variations are the work of a composer who had for his time an exceptional understanding of earlier keyboard idioms.

The Schumann Variations op.23, based on a melody Schumann had written down not long before his suicide attempt, maintain a more restricted range of expression and character than the earlier op.9 set and as such may be said to partake of Brahms's neo-classicism of the 1860s. The final variation is a major-mode funeral march into which is ingeniously woven a return of the original theme.

By comparison with almost every other keyboard work of Brahms, the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (op.35) place an emphasis on extreme virtuosity. (Clara Schumann called them ‘witch variations’ and regretted they were beyond her capacity.) The more didactic nature of the set is suggested by its principal title: ‘Studies for the Piano’. As with the études of other great composers, however, including Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, technique is always allied with powerful and widely ranging musical expression.

A complete contrast to the variation sets is offered by the piano works of the 1860s based on popular genres. The exuberant set of 16 Waltzes op.39, written for piano four hands and adapted almost immediately for two hands, were composed in the spirit and on the scale of Schubert's dances, some of which (the Ländler d790) Brahms had recently edited for publication. Dedicated to Hanslick, the op.39 set also constitutes Brahms's affectionate tribute to the dance form most closely identified with his adopted city Vienna. These miniatures, mostly in rounded or recapitulating binary form, unfold a great variety of expression, from the propulsive style hongrois to Biedermeier sentimentality.

The 1860s also saw Brahms paying more concentrated homage to the gypsy style: in 1869 Simrock issued the first two of what were to be four books of Hungarian Dances for piano four hands woo1. (Brahms later arranged ten of the dances for solo piano and three for orchestra.) The dances are large-scale sectional works based mainly on pre-existing gypsy tunes, some of which Brahms may have known as early as 1853, when he toured with the violinist Ede Reményi. Brahms managed to combine folk and high art as effortlessly as he blended divergent historical periods in other works.

With the eight Klavierstücke op.76, mainly composed in 1878, Brahms entered the late phase of his writing for piano, dominated by shorter character pieces. This set alternates between works labelled ‘Capriccio’ and ‘Intermezzo’. The former tend to be faster (sometimes marked agitato), with continuous rhythmic motion; the latter are more lyrical, but with a melodic style that is economical rather than expansive.

The two Rhapsodies op.79 are Brahms's largest independent, single-movement piano works after the Scherzo op.4. Despite the implications of the title, both pieces have clear formal designs. On the largest scale, no.1 in B minor has a ternary form, while no.2 in G minor is in a fully fledged sonata form. The G minor Rhapsody begins with one of the most striking (and most analysed) gestures in all of Brahms's music, a kind of deceptive cadence in which deception comes not in the bass, which behaves properly (D–G), but in the melody, whose D–E resolution sends the piece spiralling off into a bold harmonic sequence.

Among the late collections opp.116–19, Brahms's last works for piano, the Fantasien op.116, dubbed a ‘multi-piece’ by one critic, have the strongest claim to be considered as a coherent whole because of thematic, harmonic and stylistic connections. The set, divided like op.76 between intermezzos and capriccios, begins and ends with energetic pieces in D minor; in the interior there is a group centred on E major/minor. The Intermezzo in E op.116 no.4 shows how fluid Brahms's conception of structure had become. The three main thematic units fall into neither conventional ternary nor recapitulating binary form, but rather are varied continuously so that one is justified in speaking of what Schoenberg called ‘musical prose’, a discourse that unfolds without patterned repetition.

In a letter to his friend Rudolf von der Leyen, Brahms called the three Intermezzos op.117 ‘Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen’ (‘lullabies of my sorrow’). In the first piece the association with the lullaby is made explicit: the rhythm is a softly rocking 6/8 and Brahms prefaced the music with a pair of lines from a Scottish ballad, as translated by Herder, beginning ‘Schlaf sanft mein Kind’ (‘Sleep softly, my child’). It has been suggested that the other two intermezzos in the set are also related to Scottish ballads.

In Brahms's late piano pieces we begin to see a breakdown of the traditional distinction between melody and harmonic support, between ‘above’ and ‘below’. The Intermezzo in F minor op.118 no.4 unfolds as a canon, sometimes free, sometimes strict, between the hands. The thematic material is extraordinarily compressed: in the middle section, the canon at the octave is based on nothing more than a sustained chord followed by a single note. A still stricter spatial symmetry characterizes the harmony and texture of the Intermezzo in E minor op.116 no.5. The triad played by each hand in the first six bars is an exact mirror of that in the other hand. Moreover, each chord appears on a weak beat and resolves to bare, two note dissonances on strong beats. Brahms thus reversed the traditional metrical procedure of associating the succession weak–strong with dissonance–consonance.

The 11 Chorale Preludes for organ, composed in May and June 1896, were published posthumously in 1902 as op.122. Intimations of the composer's mortality are clear from his choice of chorales, including two settings of O Welt, ich muss dich lassen. The models for this set are the preludes of Bach's Orgelbüchlein, described by Reger as ‘symphonic poems in miniature’, in which the chorale melody remains mostly in the top part. Reger's description could apply equally well to Brahms. The expressive seems inseparable from the structural in moments like the achingly sustained half-diminished 7th chord that precedes the final cadence in the first O Welt prelude, or in the complex motivic development that supports the guileless melody of O Gott, du frommer Gott. These last works capture the unique synthesis of historical and modern that lies at the core of Brahms's musical personality.

8. Chamber music.

Brahms revived chamber music after the death of Schumann, one of its greatest Romantic practitioners, and defined it for the later 19th century. Across 40 years, from the Piano Trio op.8 (1854) to the Clarinet Sonatas op.120 (1894), ranges a corpus of 24 complete works that is arguably the greatest after Beethoven. For many commentators, chamber music captures Brahms's basic creative personality, as the music drama does Wagner's.

A good number of compositions, all destroyed or lost, preceded the B major/minor Piano Trio op.8, which in its original version is an ambitious, somewhat uneven attempt to synthesize Classical and Romantic traditions. The main theme of the first movement has a breadth and tunefulness reminiscent of Schubert; the hymn-like theme of the Adagio seems inspired by Beethoven; and the propulsive Scherzo is Mendelssohnian in spirit. Into the mix comes Baroque counterpoint: the large second group of the first movement begins with a Bach-inspired chromatic theme which in the recapitulation becomes the subject of an elaborate fugato.

Written during Brahms's earliest and most intense involvement with the Schumanns, the trio is also replete with allusions. The second theme of the finale seems based on the last song of Beethoven's cycle An die ferne Geliebte, a work which also had particular significance for Schumann. Brahms's slow movement includes an apparent reference to the song Am Meer (from Schubert's cycle Schwanengesang), whose text by Heine about frustrated love may have had special resonance for Brahms at the time.

In 1889, after Simrock bought from Breitkopf & Härtel the publishing rights for this and other early works, Brahms took the opportunity to revise op.8 extensively. He excised the fugato, removed the most obvious allusions and tightened up the formal structures. This process included writing a new contrasting theme for the slow movement and a new second theme for the finale. Brahms's revisions, although not greeted with enthusiasm by some in his circle, bring the trio more into the style of his later chamber works.

The B String Sextet op.18 (1859–60) stands at the head of a group of seven chamber works, extending to the Horn Trio op.40 (1865). Together they comprise what Donald Tovey called Brahms's ‘first maturity’, in which the influences of his predecessors, especially Beethoven and Schubert, were absorbed into a style of great originality.

The B Sextet represents a consolidation in the spirit of the contemporaneous orchestral serenades and the Handel Variations for piano. The main theme of the first movement is as tuneful as that of op.8, but more compact and restrained. Brahms adopted a streamlined version of the ‘three-key’ model of Schubert's sonata forms: the traditional dominant, F major, is delayed by a modulation from the initial tonic to a remote key (A major). The slow movement, whose dour theme and chaconne-like bass recall Beethoven's 32 piano variations in C minor (woo80), tempers the Romantic approach to variation form characteristic of the early piano works.

By contrast with the Sextet, the piano quartets in G minor op.25 and A op.26 are unabashedly innovative. Both are massive in scale, lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour in performance. The exposition of the first movement of op.25 has no fewer than five thematic groups, which trace a path from the sombre opening to an exuberant D major close. In a striking tonal reversal that may owe something to the first movement of Schubert's G major String Quartet d887, the recapitulation begins in G major with the middle rather than the initial segment of the tripartite first theme. In the Intermezzo of op.25, Brahms for the first time substituted for the expected scherzo or minuet a gentler movement that became a hallmark of his works. The fiery rondo-finale ‘alla Zingarese’ constitutes the earliest appearance of the style hongrois (and one of the most successful) in Brahms's chamber music.

The first movement of the A major Piano Quartet is remarkable for the way in which a profusion of lyrical melodies is generated by the kind of small-scale motivic manipulation that Schoenberg called ‘developing variation’. The slow movement is full of striking timbral effects, among them an episode (reminiscent of Schubert's Die Stadt, from Schwanengesang) in which the piano's sweeping diminished 7th arpeggios confront an impassive four-note motif in the strings.

The F minor Piano Quintet op.34 originated in 1862 as a string quintet with two cellos (in imitation of Schubert's identically scored work) and was also arranged as a two-piano sonata (op.34b). It is perhaps the most tightly integrated work of Brahms's first maturity, especially in the way harmonic and melodic details determine large-scale structure. The note D, prominent in the opening theme (and representing the flattened sixth degree), is projected on to the tonal scheme of the three-key exposition, which moves to C minor, then to its enharmonic parallel D major. A D–C motivic figure and its transpositions permeate the scherzo, especially the energetic final cadences. The coda of the finale begins in C minor and returns to the tonic area with a prominent descent in the bass from D to C.

Also important in the F minor Quintet is the technique of thematic transformation, whereby themes retain their basic contour and length but are altered in mood or character. In the development section of the first movement, the sinuous main theme, originally played in stark octaves, is adjusted in rhythm and texture to yield, in Tovey's apt phrase, ‘the lilt of an ancient ballad’.

The first movement of the G major Sextet op.36 is justly admired for its elegant tonal and motivic symmetries. The main theme swiftly outlines keys that lie a major 3rd on either side of the tonic: E and B major. The taut fugal finale of the E minor Cello Sonata op.38, based on a theme that recalls the two mirror fugues (Contrapunctus nos.16 and 17) of Bach's Art of Fugue, shows how far Brahms had advanced since the Piano Trio op.8 in the integration of strict contrapuntal technique and sonata form.

Brahms wrote the Horn Trio op.40 for the natural or Waldhorn, whose timbre and capabilities lend the work an unforgettable sound and unique formal qualities. For the only time in the first movement of an instrumental work Brahms abandoned sonata form, as if sensing that a relaxed rondo structure might allow the horn a broader range of expression. The Horn Trio is also characterized by motivic connections, and even direct thematic recalls, among the four movements.

After an eight-year hiatus in chamber music – a period marked mainly by large choral works – Brahms returned to it in 1873 with the revision and completion of the two string quartets op.51, in C minor and A minor, begun some years earlier. The C minor Quartet reflects a new stylistic phase, characterized by motivic density and formal compactness. The first movement churns with chromatic turbulence, rarely settling down into stable key areas or broad themes. Its language resembles that of the First Symphony in the same key, which was gestating at this time. The movements are linked thematically in a way that lends the work a breathless unity. The A minor Quartet is more overtly lyrical, but still concentrated in technique. The Andante, whose theme is generated from the constant rhythmic-metric displacement of the interval of a 2nd, was justly singled out by Schoenberg as a miracle of musical economy.

In 1875 Brahms attacked more unfinished chamber music with the Piano Quartet in C minor op.60, begun in 1855 in C minor. The early date of at least the first movement may account (as with the original version of the B major Trio) for the oddly experimental treatment of sonata form. The second group, in the key of E, is built as a quasi-independent theme and variations. In the recapitulation, in a case probably unique in the history of sonata form, this group is transposed not to the expected tonic, but to the dominant, G major.

In the last String Quartet (no.3 in B, op.67) Brahms's writing for the medium becomes especially transparent. Formal and thematic structures are correspondingly lucid, and often innovative. In the first movement, the sonata exposition is articulated not only by conventional harmonic and melodic procedures but also by metrical ones. The main theme is cast in a buoyant 6/8, the second in a more hesitant 2/4. The transition between them is made by a series of striking hemiolas. The finale represents the first time Brahms ended a multi-movement work with a set of variations, here exploited to create a new kind of cyclic unity. After the sixth variation, the opening theme of the first movement returns suddenly and manages as if by magic to integrate itself into the variation structure. In the final bars it is combined with the original variation theme in seemingly effortless counterpoint.

In the interregnum between his symphonic periods, Brahms completed three chamber works, the Violin Sonata in G op.78, the Piano Trio in C op.87 and the String Quintet in F op.88. The pastoral first movement of the Violin Sonata represents a kind of expressive overflow from the first movement of the Second Symphony. As in the symphony, a more sombre tone is struck by the slow movement, especially the funeral march in the più andante episode, and by the finale, which begins in the minor mode with a citation of Brahms's song Regenlied, and into which the main theme of the slow movement momentarily reasserts itself.

In the String Quintet op.88 Brahms innovated a three-movement format in which a central rondo structure combines the functions of a slow movement and scherzo. The theme of the Grave ed appassionato, adapted from a keyboard saraband of 1854 (woo5), alternates with an Allegretto vivace based on a gavotte from the same period (woo3). Like the finale of the Cello Sonata op.38, the Quintet's last movement integrates sonata and contrapuntal form, here in a more jovial spirit. The first group is a fugal exposition, with a Baroque-style subject in busy quavers. For the second group, the subject retreats to an inner part to accompany an expansive melody.

Brahms achieved a remarkable new level of economical lyricism in the next four works, the Cello Sonata op.99, the Second Violin Sonata op.100, the Third Piano Trio op.101 and the Third Violin Sonata op.108. The opening theme of op.99 consists essentially of a two-note figure (C–F) whose intervallic and rhythmic structure (semiquaver–minim) evolves rapidly by means of developing variation. The process is so continous that it also envelops the second group, derived from the same material. In all four works the highly concentrated approach makes for very brief structures: the four movements of op.108 altogether last just over 20 minutes, barely longer than the first movement of the F minor Piano Quintet.

The first movement of the G major String Quintet op.111, a work with which Brahms initially thought to take leave of composition, seems to press against the limits of chamber music. The powerful opening tremolos announce a symphonic manner, and the main theme, introduced by the cello, is one of the most expansive in all Brahms, with an ambitus and harmonic scope that invite comparison with the athletic melodies of Richard Strauss.

Very different in mood are those in the final group of chamber works: the Clarinet Trio op.114, the Clarinet Quintet op.115 and the two Clarinet/Viola Sonatas op.120. Although the timbre of the clarinet imparts a reflective quality – critics have used the word ‘autumnal’ – there is nothing retrospective about the compositional techniques. Structural fluidity is especially evident in the first movements, where the conventional boundaries of sonata form become blurred. With the exception of the Clarinet Quintet, the expositions are not repeated. Brahms built complex thematic groups, in which the opening ideas, harmonically and formally ambiguous, are at the same time introductory in nature and integral to the exposition. In op.120 no.1 the initial unison flourish could be in either F minor or D major. When the first theme reappears at the end of the the development, it is harmonized in the remote key of F minor. The recapitulation proper begins with the appearance on the tonic of what was the contrasting part of the first group. With these kinds of techniques, the late chamber works achieve both continuity and clarity in a way that is unique in the history of music.

9. Orchestral works and concertos.

In his article ‘Neue Bahnen’, Schumann hinted that it was Brahms's destiny to compose for orchestra. By the time of Brahms's death in 1897, this prediction had been fulfilled with the creation of two serenades, four concertos, a set of variations, two overtures and four symphonies.

The D minor Piano Concerto is one of the most powerful statements after Beethoven in what Carl Dahlhaus called the ‘symphonic style’, which aimed for monumental effects achieved by orchestral means – a symphony could not be merely the transcription of a sonata – and was defined by moments like the opening of the Ninth Symphony. The first theme of the concerto recalls Beethoven's Ninth in its angularity, rhythmic energy and use of a throbbing timpani pedal point. Brahms also explored the tonal relationship between D minor and B major characteristic of the Ninth. The first movement of the Concerto (marked Maestoso) is distinctive for the ample dimensions of the orchestral exposition, its harmonic range and piano writing that, unlike that of most concertos of the period, is virtuoso without being flashy.

The turbulent first movement has often been associated with Schumann's attempted suicide. The Adagio movement, in broad ternary form, is a reflective counterpart: Brahms called it a ‘gentle portrait’ of Clara Schumann. Strikingly, it is in the same unusual time signature as the first movement, 6/4, and there are clear thematic links. The rondo-finale shows a very different spirit. Its formal structure is modelled closely, even slavishly, on the finale of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto in a way that might be called neo-classical.

It is this neo-classical impulse that comes to the fore in the next orchestral works. In the first movement of the First Serenade op.11, written (after several metamorphoses of medium) for ‘full [grosses] orchestra’, the angry D pedal point of the First Concerto has given way to a pastoral drone; the ferocious trills and chromaticism yield to a theme bouncing gently among the notes of the D major scale. The models for the First Serenade are in Haydn and in early Beethoven (especially the Second Symphony, in the same key). The apparent simplicity of the work, however, conceals sophisticated Brahmsian techniques of motivic development and flexible phrase structure. The Serenade includes two scherzos and a pair of exquisite minuets. In the minuets the origin of the Serenade as a chamber work is especially apparent. The expansive slow movement is the only one in Brahms's works to use full sonata form.

Unlike its D major counterpart, the Second Serenade op.16 in A was conceived for a ‘small’ orchestra, distinctive (like the first movement of the German Requiem) in having no violins, a scoring that gives prominent melodic roles to the wind instruments and violas. The Second Serenade has five movements, including two inner dance movements, a scherzo and a minuet. The darkly hued slow movement is noteworthy for its rich counterpoint, expansive ternary form and harmonic adventurousness.

In 1862 Brahms plunged back into the symphonic style with the first movement of what eventually became his C minor Symphony. But once again the symphonic engine stalled. He seems to have made no substantial progress with the work over the next 14 years. In 1873 he returned to orchestral writing with virtually simultaneous versions for two pianos and for orchestra of the Variations on a Theme of Haydn op.56, based on the St Anthony chorale for wind instruments (a piece no longer firmly attributed to Haydn). The Haydn Variations is the first orchestral work in which Brahms may be said to have assimilated fully earlier models and influences. There are eight variations, plus a finale in the form of a passacaglia with 17 variations and a coda. Although the techniques owe much to Brahms's forebears, what is new and genuinely symphonic is the way the counterpoint is realized through the orchestra, not only in the strict devices of canon and invertible counterpoint but also in the polyphonic movement of the parts. A passage like the Presto (eighth variation), with its eerie pedal points spread out over six octaves, also indicates a new level of sophistication in Brahms's orchestration.

The completion and première of the First Symphony in 1876 was a milestone for Brahms and for symphonic music generally in Austro-German lands. Although it was not universally loved, the symphony was acknowledged as the most significant since Schumann. It adheres to the standard four-movement format and as such was sometimes considered to contribute little to the development of the genre after Beethoven's Ninth. In fact, Brahms adapted with great originality the model of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which likewise progresses from struggle in C minor towards triumph in C major by means of links between the individual movements. In Brahms, these techniques include thematic-motivic connections involving especially the figures of a descending 4th and a chromatic rising 3rd, as well as a harmonic-tonal scheme in which the keys of the successive movements depart from and return to C by major 3rds: C–E–A–C.

From Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Brahms took over the idea of giving both outer movements slow introductions. The introduction to the finale revisits the turbulent mood of the first one, then brings forth two new elements (a horn-call and a chorale-like passage) that point towards resolution, which comes with the famous first theme of the movement proper, a C major melody reminiscent of Beethoven's Ode to Joy theme.

The First Symphony is special in its combination of contrapuntal density, fluid phrase structure, and soaring lyricism. The main ‘theme’ of the first movement is actually a complex of three different motifs presented simultaneously, then immediately developed. The phrases generated are of irregular, constantly changing lengths. At certain moments – and their rarity makes them especially powerful – the momentum of this motivic style lets up to yield broader melodies, as in the G tune in the development of the first movement and, more prominently, in the C major theme of the finale.

The Second Symphony in D op.73, composed less than a year after the completion of the First, is often described as its sunny counterpart. The work indeed radiates a warmth and tunefulness absent in parts of the earlier work. But as Brahms himself acknowledged, the Second Symphony also has a ‘melancholy’ side. The lyrical opening theme of the first movement unravels almost at once into a dark passage for timpani and trombones. The voice of melodic continuity is reasserted often in this movement, however, first by the violin melody that follows the unravelling and again by the second group and the large coda. The pensive slow movement, in B major and in a modified sonata form, is dominated by a motivically rich, metrically ambiguous main theme remarkable for its combination of tunefulness and developing variation.

The second half of the symphony distinctly brightens in mood, although it too contains sombre moments – often involving the trombones – that evoke the expressive world of the first two movements. The Allegretto recasts the traditional scherzo–trio alternation into a rondo-like structure that is one of Brahms's most original creations. Although the finale ends the symphony in a jubilant blaze of D major, it glances back at the mood of the earlier movements, especially in the haunting passage at the end of the development section (whose chains of descending 4ths Mahler recalled his First Symphony) and in the syncopated episode for brass in the coda.

Two concertos and two overtures separate the first two symphonies from the second pair. Temperamentally, the Violin Concerto op.77 is in many respects a companion piece to the Second Symphony, with which it shares the key of D and a first movement in 3/4 time built from triadically orientated themes that furnish energetic development as well as gentle lyricism. The elegiac opening ritornello of the Adagio, scored for woodwind and solo oboe, introduces one of Brahms's most classically poised slow movements. The exuberant rondo is one of Brahms's greatest essays, and certainly his most virtuoso, in the style hongrois.

The Academic Festival Overture op.80 and the Tragic Overture op.81 are counterparts to each other, somewhat like a satyr play and a tragedy. In the Academic Festival Overture about half a dozen popular tunes and student songs, including the Rákóczi March and Gaudeamus igitur, are woven into a sophisticated large-scale binary form consisting of a three-key exposition and a recapitulation that incorporates developmental elements. Beyond its title, the Tragic Overture has no specific programme or narrative. This imposing movement is in the spirit of D minor predecessors, including Beethoven's Ninth and Brahms's own First Piano Concerto. It is in a broad sonata form, in which the recapitulation begins with the transition to the second group. The overture is remarkable for its motivic concentration, especially the way in which all the thematic material seems to be generated from the bold opening ‘motto’ of a descending 4th.

The B Piano Concerto op.83 is the Olympian successor to Brahms's first effort in the genre. (His friend Theodor Billroth remarked that the two works stood in the relationship of youth to man.) The interpenetration of solo and orchestral parts, as well as the addition of a scherzo to the normal three-movement design, brings op.83 closer to the genre of symphony than any other major concerto of the 19th century.

The piano makes an early appearance (as in Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Concertos), responding to an evocative horn-call, then embarks on a fully fledged cadenza. All of this is a prelude to Brahms's most expansive concerto movement. The scherzo is an intense, compact sonata form in D minor, which flows into a radiant trio in D major: it is as if the worlds of the earlier D minor Concerto and the more recent Violin Concerto are put side by side. A masterpiece of tone painting, the Andante is almost a double concerto for solo cello and piano. The piano never takes up the cello's opening melody directly, responding instead with apparently improvisatory garlands of figuration that (being by Brahms) are in fact thematic. The finale, a sonata-rondo, encompasses a great range of moods, from the gypsy swagger of the first episode to the clownish romp of the coda.

With his Third Symphony op.90 Brahms achieved a new level of coherence in a large-scale orchestral work. It is the shortest of the four symphonies, lasting only half an hour in most performances. The durations of the individual movements are closer to being equal than in any of the others. The compact dimensions and balanced proportions seem intended to point up processes that extend over the entire work. These include the most direct thematic recall in any symphonic work by Brahms: the opening motto and theme return transfigured at the end of the finale. Coherence is also imparted by harmonic devices, such as the frequent juxtaposition of F major and F minor. The tonal scheme is unique in the genre: outer movements centred on F and inner movements on C, thus creating a plateau of harmonic tension in the dominant that implies a large-scale sonata form over the whole work.

In many ways the Fourth Symphony op.98, composed soon after the Third, represents the summit of Brahms's achievement in the genre. The finale, in the form of a passacaglia with a terse eight-bar theme and 30 variations, is his most thoroughgoing attempt to synthesize historical and modern practice. While observing the strictures of the ostinato subject, he created continuity by arranging the variations in groups according to figuration, thematic style, dynamics and harmony.

As in the Third Symphony, tonal relationships, here involving E and C, extend over the entire work at both larger and more detailed levels. The four movements are in E minor, E major, C major and E minor, respectively. At the beginning of the recapitulation in the first movement, a C major triad that had been only a discreet harmony at the opening becomes a broad arpeggio under the sustained fourth note of the theme. In the Andante, the Phrygian inflections of the theme continually bring C (as flattened sixth) into play. In the finale, whose ostinato theme suggests a single harmonic framework, variations 26–8 are brought deftly into the key of C major.

The Fourth Symphony is also remarkable for what Edward T. Cone called ‘harmonic congruence’, whereby the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the music are fashioned from the same basic material. This principle is adumbrated by the descending chain of melodic 3rds that shapes the main theme. Here and elsewhere in the first movement, the augmented triad forms a significant element on both the thematic and the harmonic axes. Congruence of this type foreshadows remarkably Schoenberg's concept of the unity of musical space, in which ‘there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward’.

Brahms's final work involving orchestra is the much underrated Concerto for Violin and Cello op.102, which was composed in 1887 in part as a gesture of reconciliation with Joachim after a long period of cool relations. There is no apparent precedent for the use of these two instruments in a concerto, though Brahms's work is clearly indebted to Mozart's Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola k320d and to Beethoven's Triple Concerto. The opening of the first movement is dominated by two cadenzas, one for each instrument, corresponding to the two main themes of the exposition. Because of the subsequent interpenetration of solo and orchestra, the dialogic aspect of the solo parts and the nature of the thematic material, the standard demarcation points in the sonata form are blurred to an even greater degree than is normal in Brahms. The central Andante movement is built from one of Brahms's most expressive melodies, which, when played by the two soloists in octaves, almost takes on a Puccinian intensity. The finale is a sonata-rondo in the gypsy style.

The many orchestras that played Brahms's music in his lifetime, often under his baton, varied widely in size. The largest was the Vienna Philharmonic, which had about 100 players at the time of the premières of the second and third symphonies. The smallest were the court orchestras at Karlsruhe and Meiningen, which gave the premières of the First and Fourth, respectively; they had 49 players, with only nine or ten first violins. Especially in these smaller groups, the balance between strings and woodwind brass was more even than is common today.

Two basic trends in interpretation of Brahms's orchestral music can be gleaned from surviving evidence. One was that of Hans Richter, conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, whose straightforward, more literal approach was inherited in part by Felix Weingartner. The other was the heavily nuanced style, with rhythmic inflection and tempo fluctuation, of Hans von Bülow, passed on to Fritz Steinbach. Although not always content with either Richter or Bülow, Brahms approved of both Weingartner and Steinbach. This suggests that he had no fixed idea of how his symphonies should sound, putting his trust in the musicianship of the best conductors.

10. Choral works.

Large-scale works for chorus and orchestra occupy a significant niche in Brahms's output. At the head of this group – for many it stands at the centre of Brahms's entire output – is the German Requiem op.45, composed mainly between 1865 and 1867, with the fifth movement added in 1868.

The German Requiem was the first work in which Brahms fulfilled Schumann's mandate (made in the article ‘Neue Bahnen’) to ‘direct his magic wand where the massed forces of chorus and orchestra may lend him their power’. Schumann's own contributions to the choral-orchestral tradition, composed within the last decade of his life and including such works as Szenen aus Goethes Faust, served as inspirations for Brahms, who likewise turned for his texts to high-quality German poetry and to the scriptures.

Although it falls into the tradition of the sacred oratorio, the Requiem, which employs baritone and soprano soloists, belongs to no established genre. It is not a conventional requiem mass, since it avoids the liturgical Latin text. Brahms assembled his texts for the seven movements from 15 passages in Martin Luther's translation of the Bible. The focus is less on death than on consolation for the living. The texts are striking for avoiding altogether the notion of redemption through Christ, who is not mentioned at all. The religious sentiment is thus more universal – Brahms said it could be called a ‘human’ requiem – than denominational.

The choral writing in the Requiem displays great diversity and historical awareness. At one textural extreme is the stark, sombre homophony at the opening of the second movement (‘Denn alles Fleisch’); at the other, the elaborate neo-Handelian fugues that close the third and sixth movements (at ‘Herr, du bist würdig’ and ‘Der Gerechten Seelen’, respectively). The first part of the fourth movement (‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen’) evokes the lilt of a Viennese waltz (fig.10). In the sixth movement, at ‘und der Zeit der letzten Posaune’ and ‘Tod, wo ist dein Stachel?’, Brahms composed passages as explosively declamatory as anything in the 19th century.

In many ways the Requiem set the stylistic parameters for the choral-orchestral works that followed. The Triumphlied op.55 (1871), which employs double chorus and a baritone soloist, is often called neo-Handelian because of its contrapuntal textures, broad sequences and frequent interjections of ‘Hallelujah’. Such a label tends to mask the original features of this seldom-performed work, including the sophisticated polyphonic writing and the mastery of timbre evident in Brahms's deployment of the massed forces. The nationalistic, celebratory Triumphlied is, however, the anomaly among the post-Requiem works, which otherwise deal with the general theme of the alienation felt by an individual (or by humanity) towards the higher powers that control existence.

Between them, the Alto Rhapsody op.53 (1869) and Rinaldo op.50 (completed 1868) may provide the closest approximation of how an opera by Brahms would have sounded. In the Rhapsody, Brahms shaped three stanzas from Goethe's Harzreise im Winter into a compact, quasi-theatrical scena. An orchestral ritornello is followed by a recitative and aria (or arioso) for contralto, who is then joined by a men's choir for a chorale-like finale. The psychological evolution of the protagonist from solitary despair to the prayer of consolation in the ‘Father of Love’ is traced by the increasing regularity of the phrase structure and melodic style, and by a harmonic trajectory from a chromatically inflected C minor towards a radiant C major.

Rinaldo, which Brahms called a ‘cantata’, is a setting of a still more overtly dramatic poem by Goethe, itself based on an episode from Torquato Tasso about a Crusader knight (solo tenor) who is persuaded by his crew (men's chorus) to leave the enchantress Armida and return to war. Brahms skilfully interwove rounded forms – such as Rinaldo's recitative and large-scale ternary aria – with more open-ended ones that convey the hero's increasing doubts.

Friedrich Hölderlin's poem Hyperions Schicksalslied, set by Brahms as Schicksalslied op.54 (1868–71), may be said to reverse the pattern of the Harzreise fragment: here, the trouble-free life of the gods on high (stanza 1) is contrasted with the tormented existence of mortals below (stanzas 2–3). To avoid ending in the darker mood, Brahms brought back the music of the elegiac orchestral introduction. The tonal scheme of the Schicksalslied, E major–C minor–C major, is distinctive in Brahms as an example of progressive tonality.

For the text of Nänie op.82 (1881), a musical memorial to his friend the neo-classical painter Anselm Feuerbach, Brahms turned to a distinguished earlier neo-classicist, Schiller. Like the other shorter choral-orchestral works, this one touches on the theme of human destiny, here the ephemeral nature of beauty. Since the tone is more uniformly elegiac, one of Brahms's remarkable achievements in Nänie was to create so much variety of expression. This was done in part through strongly contrasting choral textures and key areas: the fugal opening and closing sections in D enclose a central, more homorhythmic segment in the 3rd-related key of F.

The Gesang der Parzen op.89 (1882), whose chromatic and turbulent D minor tonality seems to revisit the worlds of Beethoven's Ninth and Brahms's First Piano Concerto, is a setting for six-part chorus (with divided altos and basses) of a monologue from Goethe's drama Iphigenie auf Tauris. As in the Schicksalslied, the mortals and immortals are separated by an unbridgeable gulf. The overall form is a rondo, achieved by repeating the opening stanza and its music in the middle of the work. The coda contains one of Brahms's most striking harmonic passages, a cycle of major 3rds (D–F–B–D) in which each step functions as an augmented 6th chord of the next. (Webern admired this progression as the beginning of ‘the chromatic path’ to the 20th century.)

Brahms also composed numerous smaller-scale sacred and secular works for women's, men's and mixed choirs. The earliest extant compositions, written for his choirs in Detmold, Hamburg and Vienna, reflect his interests in historical styles and his exchange of counterpoint exercises with Joachim. The fragmentary Missa canonica woo18 (1856) and the two Latin pieces for Good Friday, O bone Jesu and Adoramus te op.37 nos.1 and 2 (1859), were inspired by late Renaissance music. In the independent Kyrie woo17 (1856) a basso continuo accompanies Baroque-style polyphony. The Geistliches Lied op.30 (1856) combines chorale-like melody with strict canonic procedures, Classical closed form and a free polyphonic accompaniment. In the Regina coeli op.37 no.3 (1863) a melody employing 18th-century dance rhythms is sung in duet with its inversion and is punctuated by choral responses. The techniques of early music occur as well in the Two Motets op.29 (1856–60): in no.1, Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, a four-part chorale is succeeded by an elaborate fugal variation on the chorale melody; in no.2 the first and third parts of Brahms's setting of verses from Psalm li are canonic (a stile antico augmentation canon and a ‘group’ canon in siciliano style), the second and fourth parts fugal (angular Bachian versus triumphant Handelian/Beethovenian).

Two works from autumn 1858 employ orchestral forces. In the Ave Maria op.12 sweetly flowing passages of parallel 3rds in 6/8 recall earlier Marian settings, but the structure is that of a miniature sonata movement. In the majestic Begräbnisgesang op.13 Brahms marshalled an impressive array of historical textures: darkly hued solo chorale singing with choral response, instrumental ostinato accompanying choral psalmody and canonic trio sonata texture with obbligato winds reminiscent of Bach's cantatas, all united by ritornellos of woodwind and low brass into a Classical rondo structure.

Forest mystery and the rippling music of wind and water infuse the Vier Gesänge op.17 for women's choir, harp and horns (1860), a cycle of Romantic tone sketches that opens with a movement in C major that is more essence than substance and culminates with a fateful dactylic dirge in C minor replete with howling hounds, restless ghosts and sweeping wind. In between are two more songs of love and death, an Andante and a scherzo-like Allegretto, both in E. Chiastic tonal planning and a final chorale-like song on the theme of human redemption in the seven strophic Marienlieder op.22 (1859) may have been inspired by Bach's cantatas.

Brahms's love of folksong is evident in the 14 arrangements of traditional secular and sacred tunes for mixed voices published in the Deutsche Volkslieder woo34 (1864) and in the Lieder und Romanzen op.44 (1859–60), original compositions on folksong texts and folk-influenced poetry. Though cast in ‘simple’ strophic form, these miniatures abound in artifice, moving at times as close to madrigal as to folksong.

Among the eight opuses published between 1874 and 1891 most of the 13 Canons op.113, two of the seven Lieder op.62 (nos.6 and 7) and the richly contrapuntal chorale motet O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf op.74 no.2 were composed between 1858 and 1869. The motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben op.74 no.1 (1877), one of Brahms's finest a cappella works, draws extensively on material originally composed for the Missa canonica of 1856, set to an assemblage of biblical passages crafted by Brahms. Anxious homophonic queries (‘Warum?’) punctuating a densely chromatic fugal texture give way to imitative entries ascending in six parts, as humankind lifts its hands to God. A steadily progressing melody underlaid with imitative voices effectively conveys the patience of Job. The motet closes peacefully with a cantional setting of the Lutheran chorale Mit Fried und Freud.

Inspired by the polychoral compositions of Schütz, the three Fest- und Gedenksprüche op.109 (completed 1889), intended as celebratory pieces for the commemoration of German ‘national festival and memorial holidays’, reveal Brahms's fear of the divisions between ‘Volk’ and ‘Reich’ increasing in Germany at the time and his abiding faith in the ‘strong armed man’ Bismarck, who ‘keepeth his palace in peace’. Simple chorale singing juxtaposed with more learned responses in the first piece suggests disparate cultural levels, but eventually all are united in a strong society blessed by the Lord with peace. In the second number polyphonic disunity leading to dissonant desolation is countered by confident, militaristic order. With the final piece Brahms warned his fellow Germans against forgetting the lessons of history. An elaborate sevenfold Amen, each statement entering on a different diatonic pitch, celebrates the diversity of future generations, before closing on a unified plagal cadence. In the triptych of Motets op.110 a central four-part cantional hymn deriving from the chorale Es ist genug is flanked by two pieces for double choirs. The situation here is personal rather than communal: the wretched, sorrowful man, deceived by the false riches of the world, faces death, seeking comfort and salvation in God.

The seven lieder for mixed choir op.62 (1873–4) employ cantional texture and strophic form, as befits their legendary and folk themes. Each of these seemingly simple songs is characterized by one or two very sophisticated devices, for example, the restricted chordal movements of the delicately budding young heart that is gradually opened by Love in a series of tenderly blossoming canonic hemiolas in Dein Herzlein mild (no.4), and the anxious lament of the wind's bride in parallel 6–3 chords over intoned octaves in Es geht ein Wehen (no.6).

Brahms's final two sets of secular choruses mingle traditional Rhenish, Bohemian and Serbian verses with refined lyrics by Goethe, Rückert, Achim von Arnim, and Klaus Groth. While glimmers of hope can still be found in the Lieder und Romanzen op.93a (1883), the theme of the Fünf Gesänge op.104 (1886–8) is resigned acceptance of the realities of a lonely old age. Unfolding in strophic variation exquisitely tailored to reflect the changing nuances of their texts, these miniatures demonstrate Brahms's deftness in creating apt tonal analogies; for example, the close canon that portrays leaves gliding down one upon the other in Letztes Glück (no.3), and the double-dotted rhythms, hollow 5ths and chromaticism tempered only by a fleeting moment of resigned waltz in the poignant Im Herbst (no.5).

11. Lieder and solo vocal ensembles.

Brahms was a prolific composer of song. Over a period of 43 years (1853–96) he published 190 solo lieder, 5 songs for one or two voices, 2 songs with obbligato viola, 20 duets and 60 vocal quartets for solo voices, all with piano accompaniment. His earliest extant solo song, the exuberant Heimkehr op.7 no.6, dates from May 1851, his final work in this genre, the profound Vier ernste Gesänge op.121 for bass and piano, from May 1896. The published songs, though, represent only a portion of his total output. Supressed were many youthful settings of poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff, Emanuel Geibel, Adalbert von Chamisso and Heinrich Heine, as well as mature songs on poems by Geibel, Friedrich Halm, Heine and Paul Heyse, and possibly Georg Friedrich Daumer, J.W.L. Gleim, Hans Schmidt and Friedrich Rückert as well.

The opus number of a Brahms song is not always a good indication of its chronological position. Typically he would compose songs singly or in small clusters, as he became interested in a particular volume of poetry or the verses of a certain poet. Some songs might be published soon, others would be consigned to his portfolio, where they could reside for many years before being selected, revised and positioned in a carefully ordered collection (characterized by Brahms as ‘bouquets of songs’). He might also write a large number of songs within a relatively short period, for example, the 18 Liebeslieder waltzes of 1868–9 for solo quartet. Other concentrated outpourings occurred during autumn 1858 and summer 1864, and in March 1877. But many of the songs traditionally attributed to what Kalbeck called the ‘Liederjahr of 1868’ cannot be dated precisely, and others published then were written earlier, even as far back as 1853. Brahms's one extended cycle of solo songs, the Magelone Romances op.33, consists of pieces composed during at least three different times over an eight-year period (1861–9).

Brahms has often been criticized for the mediocre quality of his texts. Besides setting poems by leading writers such as Eichendorff, Goethe, Heine, Ludwig Hölty, Mörike, Rückert and Theodor Storm, he also settled upon lyrics by minor versifiers, fashionable in his time, such as Daumer (54 settings, including the two sets of Liebeslieder waltzes), Carl Candidus, Halm, Carl Lemcke, Adolf Friedrich von Schack and Max von Schenkendorff. The tendency cannot be explained by poor education or lack of literary taste. Like most cultured people of his day, Brahms was an avid reader of poetry by both established masters and contemporaries. Rather, the criterion he applied when selecting texts was whether the poem left room for enhancement by a musical setting. In 1876 he told George Henschel that all Goethe's poems seemed to him ‘so perfect in themselves that no music can improve them’. The mood and substance of the poem must have some special quality that lends itself naturally to music and the poem must affect the composer spontaneously, though not so strongly as to destroy the objective detachment that Brahms felt necessary for the act of composing. Once attracted to a poem, Brahms would recite it aloud until he felt he could achieve in his musical setting a declamation so effortless and natural that its metre, rhythm and form would seem inevitable (in this regard Schubert was his ideal). Yet Brahms, especially in the early songs, did not hesitate to alter poems, even to delete whole stanzas, in order to adapt the text to his musical interpretation.

On occasion Brahms's choice of poem was the result of external circumstance or event. Hermann Levi called his attention to Goethe's late masterpiece Dämm'rung senkte sich von oben, and after he had produced a setting of his own rather too reminiscent of one of Brahms's early songs, Brahms accepted the challenge and composed one of his finest songs, op.59 no.1. Similarly, he wrote the quartet O schöne Nacht op.92 no.1 as a corrective to a setting by Heinrich von Herzogenberg, even borrowing his colleague's opening bars to make the point clear. At times the mood and content of his texts clearly reflected his own feeling at the time of composition. Many of the 14 songs and duets that poured from his pen in autumn 1858 seem to be exploring aspects of his relationship with Agathe von Siebold. His infatuations with other singers, including Ottilie Hauer and Hermine Spies, certainly would have lent a personal meaning to songs written for them to sing. The five Ophelia songs of 1873 woo22 posth. were written with stage performance by the actress Olga Precheisen in mind. Brahms's most famous ‘occasional’ piece is the celebrated Wiegenlied op.49 no.4, composed in 1868 to mark the birth of Bertha Faber's second son and employing in its accompaniment an Austrian folksong that the child's mother had sung to Brahms many years before. Likewise, the Geistliches Wiegenlied op.91 no.2 for alto, viola and piano, which employs as cantus firmus the old Catholic song Josef, lieber Josef mein, was written to celebrate a birth, that of the first child of the alto Amalie Joachim and her violinist/violist husband Joseph Joachim in 1864.

Although Brahms could evoke lighter moods – as in the perennial favourite Vergebliches Ständchen op.84 no.4, the muscular Der Schmied op.19 no.4, the more convivial of the vocal ensemble pieces and Unüberwindlich op.72 no.5, a jocular excursion into the realm of opera buffa – most of his songs explore such serious themes as the passion of love, the true heart unrewarded, the loneliness of the solitary human, the longing for home and the passing of life. Some of his finest songs animate Nature with the emotions of the human heart. Among the early songs several express the viewpoint of young women in emotional distress (for example, Liebestreu op.3 no.1, Die Trauernde op.7 no.5 and Agnes op.59 no5), while others evoke scenes from the age of chivalry in their texts and archaic musical gestures (Vom verwundeten Knaben and Murrays Ermordung op.14 nos. 2 and 3 and Das Lied vom Herrn von Falkenstein op.43 no.4). With advancing age an autumnal tone is sounded, lost opportunities in love are lamented and the spectre of death is faced (Gestillte Sehnsucht op.91 no.1, Mein Herz ist schwer and Kein Haus, keine Heimat op.94 nos.3 and 5, and Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer and Auf dem Kirchhofe op.105 nos.2 and 4). As a culmination along this path, yet unique in Brahms's output – and indeed in the repertory of art song – are the Vier ernste Gesänge op.121, on scriptural texts assembled by Brahms himself. Composed in expectation of the death of Clara Schumann, this austere cycle harks back to Baroque sacred monody to explore the meaning of human existence.

The sketches for Brahms's songs confirm an approach to texture that is also obvious in the finished works. Fluent, expressive and essentially diatonic melodies are supported by strong basses that rival the vocal part in vitality and often engage it in contrapuntal interplay. The interior voices, indicated in the sketches mostly by figured bass symbols and left to be worked out in detail at a later stage, enrich the miniature with further counterpoint and chromatic inflection. Such a texture, as well as Brahms's predilection for simple as well as varied strophic forms and for melodic formulations that are found in folktunes, reveals the deep roots of his lyrical art in the folksong ideal embraced by poets and composers since the Enlightenment. At times it is difficult to distinguish his artless folklike songs from his artful arrangements of folk melodies. Brahms's original setting of the Lower Rhenish folk poem Dort in den Weiden op.97 no.4, for example, is in much the same vein as his arrangement of this poem using the ‘folk’ melody conveyed in the Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-Weisen of Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, one of his favourite collections of folktunes. (That Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio heavily edited and rewrote many of their songs did not concern Brahms, who had little use for the authentic but inartistic collections of such folktune preservationists as Franz Böhme and Ludwig Erk.) In some songs, such as Magyarisch op.46 no.2 and Sonntag op.47 no.3, the folk melody with which the setting opens is wedded seamlessly to the original material that forms its completion. Brahms's first efforts at providing folktunes with piano accompaniments, dating from the 1850s and 60s, were inspired by the arrangements of Friedrich Silcher and Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold. The seven-volume set of 49 Deutsche Volkslieder woo33 (1894), which marks the culmination of a lifelong involvement with the study of folk idioms, presents Brahms's solution to the 19th century agenda of uniting folk simplicity with urban amateur music-making.

Despite a preference for poems cast in ‘Volksliedstrophe’ and a dedication to strophic song, Brahms also welcomed the challenge of more complex structures. Worthy of special note is the song Die Mainacht op.43 no.2, a setting of an Asclepiadean ode by Hölty. The song's first stanza demonstrates Brahms's seemingly effortless command of an intricate metrical scheme. A developmental central section follows the poem's structure less strictly, as does the varied and climactic close of the musical reprise. Such a form, allowing for continuing development as the poem unfolds, unites features of strophic song, developing variation and ternary form. (In this case, though, balance is achieved only by the deletion of the Hölty's second stanza.) Brahms also set to music a sonnet (the beautifully delicate Die Liebende schreibt op.47 no.5), a Sapphic ode (op.94 no.4) and a number of ghazals (in op.32). The extended ballads among the Magelone Romances (op.33) posed special difficulties for the creation of musical continuity and unity.

Brahms's songs up to the 1860s can be classified into three periods. As a whole the 18 songs published in 1853–4 (opp.3, 6 and 7) can be distinguished from later ones by their highly expressive vocal writing, bold though not always purposeful chromaticism and sometimes melodramatic accompaniments. On the other hand, the tension between musical means and structure is well controlled in such pieces as Volkslied and Die Trauernde (op.7 nos.4 and 5), based on traditional texts, and in the finest song of the group, Liebestreu op.3 no.1, which Brahms placed at the head of his first published set of songs. Three of the Eichendorff settings (op.3 no.6 and op.7 nos.2 and 3) evoke not only their texts but also the contexts of the poems in the novels from which they were drawn.

During the second period (1858–9), which yielded most of the songs in opp.14 and 19 and the duets op.20, Brahms focussed on folk and folk-inspired poems from Herder, Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, Karl Simrock and J.L. Uhland. The original versions of two Mörike songs – the poignant Agnes op.59 no.5, with folk-style mixed metres, and the ironic duet Die Schwestern op.61 no.1, with a bow to the style hongrois – also date from this period, together with three settings of Goethe: Die Liebende schreibt op.47 no.5, Trost in Tränen op.48 no.5 and the quartet Wechsellied zum Tanze op.31 no.1. Strophic form predominates, and the excesses of the earlier songs are dispelled by simpler melodies and accompaniments. The influence of Brahms's study of early music is at times evident in his harmonic language and use of counterpoint. The first of the folksong arrangements – 28 Deutsche Volkslieder (woo32 post.) given to Clara Schumann and 14 Volks-Kinderlieder (woo31) dedicated to the Schumann children – were prepared at this time.

A clear stylistic shift is apparent in the early 1860s, during Brahms's ‘first maturity’. The ambitiously scaled songs of the nine Lieder und Gesänge op.32 on poems by August von Platen and Daumer and the 15 Romances op.33 from Tieck's Magelone reveal operatic aspirations in their proportions, interior shifts of tempo and style, illustrative writing, strong harmonies, forays into quasi-recitative and ‘orchestral’ piano parts. Such songs as Wie bist du, meine Königin op.32 no.9 and Von ewiger Liebe op.43 no.1, however, strike a more balanced pose and point the way to the future. Although Brahms indulged in the grand scale again in the early 1870s with the tempestuously passionate and intensely sensual eight Lieder und Gesänge op.57 on poems by Daumer, most of his later songs fall within the parameters of the ‘volkstümliches Kunstlied’ established by Schubert.

unaccompanied choral works

WORKS

Editions:Johannes Brahms sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Gál (i–x) and E. Mandyczewski (xi–xxvi) (Leipzig, 1926–7/R) [BW]Johannes Brahms: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Munich, 1996–) [NA, ser./vol.]

accompanied choral works

solo songs

index to the solo songs

folksong arrangements

other arrangements

orchestral



Op.	Title	Composed	Published	Remarks	BW	NA

11	Serenade no.1, D	1857–8	1860/61	orig. for small orch	iv, 1	i/5
First performance : Hanover, 3 March 1860
15	Piano Concerto no.1, d	1854–9	1861/2 (pts), 1874 (fs)		vi, 1	i/7
First performance : Hanover, 22 Jan 1859
16	Serenade no.2, A	1858–9, rev. 1875	1860, rev. 1875/6	for small orch (without vns)	iv, 85	i/5
First performance : Hamburg, 10 Feb 1860
56a	Variations on a Theme by J. Haydn, B	1873	1874	St Anthony Variations, also for 2 pf, see op.566; theme probably not by Haydn	iii, 63	i/6
First performance : Vienna, 2 Nov 1873
68	Symphony no.1, c	1862–76	1877		i, 1	i/1
First performance : Karlsruhe, 4 Nov 1876
73	Symphony no.2, D	1877	1878		i, 87	i/2
First performance : Vienna, 30 Dec 1877
77	Violin Concerto, D	1878	1879	written for and ded. J. Joachim	v, 1	i/9
First performance : Leipzig, 1 Jan 1879
80	Akademische Festouverture [Academic Festival Overture], c	1880	1881	written for U. of Breslau	iii, 1	i/6
First performance : Breslau, 4 Jan 1881
81	Tragische Ouverture [Tragic Overture], d	1880	1881		iii, 37	i/6
First performance : Vienna, 26 Dec 1880
83	Piano Concerto no.2, B	1881	1882	ded. E. Marxsen	vi, 92	i/8
First performance : Budapest, 9 Nov 1881
90	Symphony no.3, F	1883	1884		ii, 1	i/3
First performance : Vienna, 2 Dec 1883
98	Symphony no.4, e	1884–5	1886		ii, 87	i/4
First performance : Meiningen, 25 Oct 1885
102	Concerto, a, vn, vc	1887	1888	written for J. Joachim and R. Hausmann	v, 67	i/10
First performance : Cologne, 18 Oct 1887
woo 1	Three Hungarian Dances, no.1, g, no.3, F, no.10, F	arr. 1873	1874	arr. from orig. version for pf 4 hands	iv, 143	i/6
First performance : Leipzig, 5 Feb 1874

chamber

8	Piano Trio no.1, B	1853–4, rev. 1889	1854, rev. 1891	Danzig, 13 Oct 1855	rev. version perf. Budapest, 10 Jan 1890	ix, 1	ii/6
18	Sextet no. 1, B, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 vc	1859–60	1861/2	Hanover, 20 Oct 1860		vii, 1	ii/1
25	Piano Quartet no.1, g	1861	1863	Hamburg, 16 Nov 1861	ded. Baron R. von Dalwigk	viii, 69	ii/5
26	Piano Quartet no.2, A	1861	1863	Vienna, 29 Nov 1862	ded. E. Rösing	viii, 154	ii/5
34	Piano Quintet, f	1862	1865	Leipzig, 22 June 1866	ded. Princess Anna of Hesse; orig. composed as str qnt; also arr. for 2 pf	viii, 1	ii/4
36	Sextet no.2, G, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 vc	1864–5	1866	Zürich, 20 Nov 1866		vii, 45	ii/1
38	Cello Sonata no.1, e	1862–5	1866	Leipzig, 14 Jan 1871	ded. J. Gänsbacher	x, 96	ii/9
40	Trio, E, vn, hn/vc, pf	1865	1866	Zürich, 28 Nov 1865	written for natural horn	ix, 209	ii/7
51	Two String Quartets, c, a	?1865–1873	1873	Vienna, 11 Dec 1873 (no.1); Berlin, 18 Oct 1873 (no.2)	ded. T. Billroth	vii, 186	ii/3
60	Piano Quartet no.3, c	1855–75	1875	Vienna, 18 Nov 1875	orig. composed in c	viii, 236	ii/5
67	String Quartet no.3, B	1875	1876	Berlin, 30 Oct 1876	ded. T.W. Engelmann	vii, 238	ii/3
78	Violin Sonata no.1, G	1878–9	1879	Bonn, 8 Nov 1879		x, 1	ii/8
87	Piano Trio no.2, C	1880–82	1882	Frankfurt, 29 Dec 1882		ix, 121	ii/6
88	Quintet no.1, F, 2 vn, 2 va, vc	1882	1882	Frankfurt, 29 Dec 1882		vii, 95	ii/2
99	Cello Sonata no.2, F	1886	1887	Vienna, 24 Nov 1886		x, 124	ii/9
100	Violin Sonata no.2, A	1886	1887	Vienna, 2 Dec 1886		x, 31	ii/8
101	Piano Trio no.3, c	1886	1887	Budapest, 20 Dec 1886		ix, 171	ii/6
108	Violin Sonata no.3, d	1886–8	1889	Budapest, 21 Dec 1888	ded. H. von Bülow	x, 57	ii/8
111	Quintet no.2, G, 2 vn, 2 va, vc	1890	1891	Vienna, 11 Nov 1890		vii, 123	ii/2
114	Trio, a, cl/va, vc, pf	1891	1892	Berlin, 12 Dec 1891	written for R. Mühlfeld	ix, 249	ii/7
115	Quintet, b, cl/va, str qt	1891	1892	Berlin, 12 Dec 1891	written for R. Mühlfeld	vii, 152	ii/2
120	Two Sonatas, f, E, cl/va, pf	1894	1895	Vienna, 11 Jan 1895 (no.1) and 8 Jan 1895 (no.2)	written for R. Mühlfeld	x, 153	ii/9
woo2 posth.	Scherzo, c, vn, pf	1853	1906	Düsseldorf, 28 Oct 1853	ded. J. Joachim; movt for a Sonata in a, collab. R. Schumann and A. Dietrich	x, 88	ii/8
Anh.IV/5	Piano Trio, A	—	1938	1925	?authentic	—	ii/6
Anh.III/1	Hymne, trio, A, 2 vn, db/vc	1853	1976	—	humorous piece for J. Joachim	—	ii/3

piano solo

1	Sonata no.1, C	1852–3	1853	Leipzig, 17 Dec 1853	ded. J. Joachim	xiii, 1	iii/4
2	Sonata no.2, f	1852	1854	Frankfurt, early Dec 1855	ded. C. Schumann	xiii, 29	iii/4
4	Scherzo, e	1851	1854	Hanover, 8 June 1853	ded. E.F. Wenzel	xiv, 1	iii/6
5	Sonata no.3, f	1853	1854	Leipzig, 23 Oct 1854 (movts 2–3); Magdeburg, early Dec 1854 (complete)	ded. Countess I. von Hohenthal	xiii, 55	iii/4
9	[16] Variations on a Theme by R. Schumann, f	1854	1854	Berlin, 12 Dec 1879	ded. C. Schumann	xiii, 87	iii/5
10	[4] Ballades, d ‘Edward’, D, b, B	1854	1856	Vienna, 21 March 1860 (nos.2–3) and 23 Nov 1867 (nos.1, 4)	ded. J.O. Grimm	xiv, 13	iii/6
21	[Two variation sets]		1862			xiii, 103	iii/5
	[11] Variations on an Original Theme, D	1857		Hamburg, 17 Nov 1865		xiii, 103	iii/5
	[13] Variations on a Hungarian Song, D	by 1856		London, 25 March 1874
24	[25] Variations and Fugue on a Theme by G.F. Handel, B	1861	1862	Hamburg, 7 Dec 1861		xiii, 125	iii/5
35	[28] Variations on a Theme by Paganini, a	1862–3	1866	Zürich, 25 Nov 1865	based on Caprice op.1 no.24	xiii, 147	iii/5
39	[16] Waltzes	1865	1867	Hamburg, 15 Nov 1868	ded. E. Hanslick; arr. of version for pf 4 hands	xiv, 33	iii/6
76	[8] Klavierstücke		1879	Vienna, 22 Oct 1879 (no.2); Berlin, 29 Oct 1879 (complete)		xiv, 61	iii/6
	1 Capriccio, f	1871
	2 Capriccio, b	1878
	3 Intermezzo, A	?by 1878
	4 Intermezzo, B	?by 1878
	5 Capriccio, c	1878
	6 Intermezzo, A	1878
	7 Intermezzo, a	1878
	8 Capriccio, C	1878
79	Two Rhapsodies, b, g	1879	1880	Krefeld, 20 Jan 1880	ded. E. von Herzogenberg	xiv, 89	iii/6
116	[7] Fantasien	by 1892	1892	Vienna, 30 Jan 1893 (nos.1–3) and 18 Feb 1893 (no.7); London, 15 March 1893 (no.6)		xiv, 105	iii/6
	1 Capriccio, d
	2 Intermezzo, a
	3 Capriccio, g
	4 Intermezzo, E
	5 Intermezzo, e
	6 Intermezzo, E
	7 Capriccio, d
117	Three Intermezzos, E, b, c	1892	1892	London, 30 Jan 1893 (no.1); Vienna, 30 Jan 1893 (no.2); Hamburg, 27 Nov 1893 (no.3)		xiv, 129	iii/6
118	[6] Clavierstücke	by 1893	1893	London, 22 Jan 1894 (nos.3, 5) and 7 March 1894 (nos.1–6)		xiv, 141	iii/6
	1 Intermezzo, a
	2 Intermezzo, A
	3 Ballade, g
	4 Intermezzo, f
	5 Romance, F
	6 Intermezzo, e
119	[4] Clavierstücke	by 1893	1893	London, 22 Jan 1894 (nos.2, 4 and 1 or 3) and 7 March 1894 (nos.1–4)		xiv, 163	iii/6
	1 Intermezzo, b
	2 Intermezzo, e
	3 Intermezzo, C
	4 Rhapsody, E
woo1	[10] Hungarian Dances	by 1872	1872	—	arr. of nos.1–10 from orig. version for pf 4 hands	xv, 65	iii/7
woo3	[2] Gavottes, a, A	by 1855	1979	Göttingen, 29 Oct 1855		—	iii/7
woo4 posth.	[2] Gigues, a, b	1855	1927	—		xv, 53	iii/7
woo5 posth.	[2] Sarabandes, a, b	1854–5	1917	Danzig, 14 Nov 1855 and Vienna, 20 Jan 1856		xv, 57	iii/7
—	Theme and Variations, d	1860	1927	Frankfurt, 31 Oct 1865	ded. C. Schumann; arr. of slow movt of Sextet no.1, op.18	xv, 59	iiA/1
woo6	51 Exercises	1850s–93	1893	—		xv, 126	iii/7
woo11–15	Cadenzas to concertos by Bach (d, bwv1052), Beethoven (G, op.58) and Mozart (G, k453; d, k466; c, k491)	?1855–61	1907, 1927	—		xv, 101	iii/7
Anh. Ia/1	[5] Studies for the Piano					xv, 1	ix/2
	1 Study after Frédéric Chopin, f	after sum. 1862	1869	Hamburg, 11 or 15 Nov 1868	arr. of op.25 no.2
	2 Rondo after C.M. von Weber, C	1852	1869	Vienna, 4 Dec 1883	arr. of finale of Sonata no.1, op.24
	3–4 Presto after J.S. Bach, g (2 versions)	?1877	1878	—	arr. of finale of bwv1001
	5 Chaconne by J.S. Bach, d, pf left hand	?1877	1878	Vienna, 8 Dec 1881	arr. of chaconne from bwv1004
Anh. Ia/2	arr. of Gavotte by Gluck, A	by 1868	1871	Hamburg, 11 Nov 1868	ded. C. Schumann; from Iphigénie en Aulide (Act 2)	xv, 42	ix/2
Anh.Ia/6	arr. of 4 Ländler by Schubert, E, A, c, C	by 1869	1869	—	from d814 nos.1–9	—	ix/2
Anh.Ia/7	arr. of Scherzo by Schumann, E	1854	1983	—	from Pf Qnt, op.44	—	ix/2
Anh.III/4	Piano piece, B	—	1979	—	—	—	iii/7
Anh.III/6	Variation on a Theme by Schumann, f	by 1868	1902	—	same theme as in Brahms’s variations op.9	—	iii/7
Anh.III/9	arr. of H.C. Litolff: Maximilian Robespierre, ov., op.55, physharmonika, pf	1852	—	—	MS in US-NYpm	—	ix/1
Anh.III/10	arr. of Rákóczi March, a	?1850s	1995	—	—	—	iii/7
Anh. IV/2	Study for the Left Hand, E	—	1927	—	arr. of Schubert’s Impromptu d899 no.2, ?authentic	xv, 44	ix/2
Anh IV/7	Cadenza to Beethoven: Piano Concerto, c, op.37	—	—	—	sometimes attrib. Brahms, by Moscheles	—	—

piano four hands

23	Variations on a Theme by R. Schumann, E	1861	1863	Hamburg, Oct 1863	ded. Julie Schumann	xii, 2	iii/2
39	[16] Waltzes	1865	1866	Oldenburg, 23 Nov 1866	ded. Hanslick	xii, 26	iii/2
52a	[18] Liebeslieder, Waltzes	1874	1874	Vienna, 14 Nov 1874	arr. from orig. version for 4vv, pf 4 hands	xii, 48	iii/2
65a	[15] Neue Liebeslieder, Waltzes	1875	1877	—	arr. from orig. version for 4vv, pf 4 hands	xii, 80	iii/2
woo 1	[21] Hungarian Dances					xii, 106	iii/3
	Books 1–2 (10 dances)	1868	1869	Oldenburg, 1 Nov 1868
	Books 3–4 (11 dances)	1880	1880	Mehlem, nr Bonn, 3 May 1880
Anh. Ia/3	arr. of J. Joachim: Hamlet Overture, op.4	1853–4	—	—	MSS in A-Wgm	—	ix/1
Anh.Ia/6	arr. of 16 Ländler by Schubert	by 1869	1869	—	from d366 (nos.1–6)	—	ix/1
Anh.Ia/8	arr. of R. Schumann: Piano Quartet, op.47, E	1855	1887	—	—	—	ix/1
Anh. IV/6	Souvenir de la Russie	by 1852	by 1852	—	pubd under the pseudonym G.W. Marks	—	iii/3
	1 Hymne national russe de Lvoff, F
	2 Chansonette de Titoff, a
	3 Romance de Warlamoff, a
	4 Le Rossignol de A. Alabieff, d
	5 Chant bohémien, G
	6 ‘KOCA’ chant bohémien, G

two pianos

34bis	Sonata, f	1864	1871	Vienna, 17 April 1864	ded. Princess Anna of Hesse	xi, 1	iii/1
39	[5] Waltzes	1867	1897	Vienna, 17 March 1867	nos.1, 2, 11, 14, 15 arr. from orig. version for pf 4 hands; also no.8, unpubd	—	iii/1
56b	Variations on a Theme by J. Haydn, B	1873	1873	Vienna, 10 Feb 1874	‘St Anthony’ Variations, also for orch, see op.56a; theme probably not by Haydn	xi, 78	iii/1
Anh. Ia/4	arr. of J. Joachim: Demetrius Overture, op.6, D	1856	—	—	MSS in Wgm	—	ix/1
Anh.Ia/5	arr. of J. Joachim: Heinrich IV Overture, op.7, C	1855	1902	—	MSS in Wgm	—	ix/1

organ

122 posth.	Eleven Chorale Preludes	1896, ? some earlier	1902	Berlin, 24 April 1902	xvi, 28	iv
	1 Mein Jesu, der du mich
	2 Herzliebster Jesu
	3 O Welt, ich muss dich lassen
	4 Herzlich tut mich erfreuen
	5 Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele
	6 O wie selig seid ihr doch
	7 O Gott, du frommer Gott
	8 Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
	9 Herzlich tut mich verlangen
	10 Herzlich tut mich verlangen
	11 O Welt, ich muss dich lassen
woo 7	Chorale Prelude and Fugue on O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid, a	prelude by 1858, fugue by 1873	1882	Vienna, 2 Dec 1882	xvi, 22	iv
woo 8	Fugue, a	1856	1864	Leipzig, 16 April 1873	xvi, 17	iv
woo 9–10	[2] Preludes and Fugues, a, g	1856, 1857	1927	Berlin, 15 Nov 1929	xvi, 1	iv

canons



Op.	Title, scoring	Composed	Published	BW	NA

113	Thirteen Canons, 3–6 female vv		1891	xxi, 179	viii/2
	1 Göttlicher Morpheus, 4vv	by 1859–62
Text : J.W. von Goethe
	2 Grausam erweiset sich Amor an mir, 3vv	—
Text : Goethe
	3 Sitzt a schöns Vögerl aufm Dannabaum, 4vv	—
Text : trad. Austrian, in A. von Kretzschmer and A.W. von Zuccalmaglio: Deutsche Volkslieder
	4 Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf!, 3vv	—
Text : trad. Westphalian, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio
	5 Wille wille will, 4vv	—
Text : trad. Westphalian, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio
	6 So lange Schönheit wird bestehn, 4vv	—
Text : Gk., trans. Hoffmann von Fallersleben
	7 Wenn die Klänge nahn und fliehen, 3vv	by 1868
Text : J. von Eichendorff
	8 Ein Gems auf dem Stein, 4vv	by 1859–62
Text : Eichendorff
	9 Ans Auge des Liebsten, 4vv	by 1870
Text : F. Rückert, after Hariri
	10 Leise Töne der Brust, 4vv	by 1859–62
Text : Rückert
	11 Ich weiss nicht was im Hain die Taube girret, 4vv	by 1859–62
Text : Rückert
	12 Wenn Kummer hätte zu töten Macht, 3vv	by 1859–62
Text : Rückert, after Hariri
	13 Einförmig ist der Liebe Gram, 6vv	—
Text : Rückert, after Hāfis
woo24 posth.	Grausam erweiset sich Amor, 4 female vv	by 1863	1927	xxi, 190	vii/2
Text : Goethe
woo25	Mir lächelt kein Frühling, 4vv	by 1877	1881	xxi, 189	vii/2
Text : —
woo26 posth.	O wie sanft, 4 female vv	?late 1860s – early 1870s	1908	xxi, 191	vii/2
Text : G.F. Daumer
woo27 posth.	Spruch (In dieser Welt des Trugs und Scheins), 1v, va	?1854–5	1927	xxi, 192	vii/2
Text : Hoffmann von Fallersleben
woo28	Töne, lindernder Klang, 4vv (2 versions)	by 1861/by 1871	1938, 1872/1876	xxi, 156	vii/2
Text : K.L. von Knebel
woo29	Wann? (Wann hört der Himmel auf), S, A	by 1881	1885	xxi, 192	vii/2
Text : L. Uhland
woo30 posth.	Zu Rauch, 4vv (2 versions)	?1860s–70s	1927/unpubd	xxi, 157/—	vii/2
Text : Rückert, after Hariri
Anh.III/2	Instrumental canon, f	1864	1979	—	x
Text : —
Anh.III/3	Circle canon	?late 1850s	—	—	x
Text : —
Anh.III/5	Canon on R. Schumann: Papillon, op.2 no.7	—	—	—	iii/7
Text : —

vocal quartets

for S, A, T, B, and piano unless otherwise stated



Op.	Title	Text	Composed	Published	BW	NA

31	Three Quartets			1864	xx, 17	vi/1
	1 Wechsellied zum Tanze	Goethe	1859
Incipit : Komm mit, o Schöner
First performance : Vienna, 18 Dec 1863
	2 Neckereien	trad. Moravian, trans. J. Wenzig	1863
Incipit : Fürwahr, mein Liebchen
First performance : Vienna, 11 Jan 1864
	3 Der Gang zum Liebchen	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	1863
Incipit : Es glänzt der Mond nieder
First performance : Karlsruhe, 3 Nov 1865
52		trad., trans. in Daumer: Polydora	1868–9	1869	xx, 61	vi/1
Incipit : [18] Liebeslieder, Waltzes, S, A, T, B, pf 4 hands
First performance : Vienna, 5 Jan 1870
	1 —	Russ.
Incipit : Rede, Mädchen, allzu liebes
	2 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Am Gesteine rauscht die Flut
	3 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : O die Frauen
	4 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Wie des Abends schöne Röte
	5 —	Russ.
Incipit : Die grüne Hopfenranke
	6 —	Hung.
Incipit : Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel
	7 —	Pol.
Incipit : Wohl schön bewandt
	8 —	Pol.
Incipit : Wenn so lind dein Auge mir
	9 —	Hung.
Incipit : Am Donaustrande
	10 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : O wie sanft die Quelle sich
	11 —	Pol.
Incipit : Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen
	12 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Schlosser auf
	13 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Vögelein durchrauscht die Luft
	14 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar
	15 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Nachtigall, sie singt so schön
	16 —	Hung.
Incipit : Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe
	17 —	Hung.
Incipit : Nicht wandle, mein Licht
	18 —	Hung.
Incipit : Es bebet das Gesträuche
	(arr. for 4vv, pf 2 hands)			1875	—	vi/1
First performance : —
	(nos.1, 2, 4–6, 8–9, 11 arr. for 4vv, orch)		1869–70	1938	—	vi/1
First performance : Vienna, 14 Nov 1874
64	[3] Quartets			1874	xx, 35	vi/2
	1 An die Heimat	C.O. Sternau	1864
Incipit : Heimat! Heimat!
First performance : Vienna, 7 April 1867 (1st version)
	2 Der Abend	F. Schiller	1874
Incipit : Senke, strahlender Gott
First performance : Vienna, 24 Feb 1875 (nos.1–2)
	3 Fragen	Turk., trans. in Daumer: Polydora	by 1874
Incipit : Mein liebes Herz
First performance : Mannheim, 13 Feb 1875
65	[15] Neue Liebeslieder, Waltzes, S, A, T, B, pf 4 hands	nos.114 trad., trans. in Daumer: Polydora	1869–74	1875	xx, 107	vi/1
First performance : Karlsruhe, 8 May 1875
	1 —	Turkish
Incipit : Verzicht’, o Herz
	2 —	after Hāfis
Incipit : Finstere Schatten der Nacht
	3 —	Latvian-Lith.
Incipit : An jeder Hand die Finger
	4 —	Sicilian
Incipit : Ihr schwarzen Augen
	5 —	Russ.
Incipit : Wahre, wahre deinen Sohn
	6 —	Sp.
Incipit : Rosen steckt mir an die Mutter
	7 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Vom Gebirge
	8 —	Russ.-Pol.
Incipit : Weiche Gräser im Revier
	9 —	Pol.
Incipit : Nagen am Herzen
	10 —	Malayan
Incipit : Ich kose süss
	11 —	Pol.
Incipit : Alles, alles in den Wind
	12 —	Serb.
Incipit : Schwarzer Wald
	13 —	Russ.
Incipit : Nein, Geliebter
	14 —	Russ.
Incipit : Flammenauge
	15 Zum Schluss	Goethe
Incipit : Nun ihr Musen, genug!
	(no.9 arr. for 4vv, orch)		1869–70	1938	—	v/1
First performance : Vienna, 14 Nov 1874
	(no.4 arr. for 1v, pf)			—	—	vi/1
First performance : —
92	[4] Quartets			1884	xx, 147	vi/2
	1 O schöne Nacht	Daumer	by 1877
Incipit : O schöne Nacht
First performance : Krefeld, 28 Jan 1885
	2 Spätherbst	H. Allmers	by 1884
Incipit : Der graue Nebel tropft
First performance : Frankfurt, 4 Feb 1889
	3 Abendlied	F. Hebbel	by 1884
Incipit : Friedlich bekämpfen
First performance : —
	4 Warum?	Goethe	by 1884
Incipit : Warum doch erschallen
First performance : Frankfurt, 4 Feb 1889
103	[11] Zigeunerlieder	trad. Hung., trans. H. Conrat	1887–8	1888	xx, 165	vi/2
First performance : Berlin, 31 Oct 1888
	1 —
Incipit : He, Zigeuner, greife
	2 —
Incipit : Hochgetürmte Rimaflut
	3 —
Incipit : Wisst ihr, wann mein Kindchen
	4 —
Incipit : Lieber Gott, du weisst
	5 —
Incipit : Brauner Bursche führt zum Tanze
	6 —
Incipit : Röslein dreie in der Reihe
	7 —
Incipit : Kommt dir manchmal
	8 —
Incipit : Horch, der Wind klagt
	9 —
Incipit : Weit und breit schaut niemand
	10 —
Incipit : Mond verhüllt sein Angesicht
	11 —
Incipit : Rote Abendwolken ziehn
	(nos.1–7, 11 arr. for 1v, pf)			1889	xxvi, 66	vii/6
112	Six Quartets			1891	xx, 193	vi/2
First performance : —
	1 Sehnsucht	F. Kugler	?1888
Incipit : Es rinnen die Wasser
	2 Nächtens	Kugler	?1888		Meiningen, 28 Sept 1895
Incipit : Nächtens wachen auf die irren
	3 Vier Zigeunerlieder, no.1	trad. Hung., trans. Conrat	by 1891
Incipit : Himmel strahlt so helle und klat
First performance : (nos.3–6) Hamburg, 21 Nov 1892
	4 Vier Zigeunerlieder, no.2	trad. Hung., trans. Conrat	by 1891
Incipit : Rote Rosenknospen
	5 Vier Zigeunerlieder, no.3	trad. Hung., trans. Conrat	by 1891
Incipit : Brennessel steht an Weges Rand
	6 Vier Zigeunerlieder, no.4	trad. Hung., trans. Conrat	by 1891
Incipit : Liebe Schwalbe
woo 16 posth.	Kleine Hochzeitskantate	G. Keller	1874	1927	xx, 226	vi/2
Incipit : Zwei Geliebte, treu verbunden
First performance : sum. 1874

vocal duets

20	Three Duets, S, A, pf				1862	Lucerne, 10 March 1864 (no.1 or 2) and Munich, 30 Nov 1889 (no.3)	xxii, 1	vi/3
	1 Weg der Liebe, i	Über die Berge	trad. Eng., from Percy: Reliques, trans. in Herder: Volkslieder	1858
	2 Weg der Liebe, ii	Den gordischen Knoten	trad. Eng., from Percy: Reliques, trans. in Herder	1858
	3 Die Meere	Alle Winde schlafen	trad. It., in W. Müller: Volksharfe	1860
28	[4] Duets, A, Bar, pf				1863	Vienna, 18 Dec 1863 (nos.1–2) and 5 March 1869 (nos.3–4)	xxii, 17	vi/3
	1 Die Nonne und der Ritter	Da die Welt zur Ruh gegangen	Eichendorff	1860
	2 Vor der Tür	Tritt auf, tritt auf	Old Ger. folksong, in Hoffmann von Fallersleben	1862
	3 —	Es rauschet das Wasser	Goethe	1862
	4 Der Jäger und sein Liebchen	Ist nicht der Himmel so blau?	Hoffmann von Fallersleben	1860
61	Four Duets, S, A, pf				1874		xxii, 39	vi/3
	1 Die Schwestern	Wir Schwestern zwei	E. Mörike	by 1860, rev. after 1871		Vienna, 24 April 1880
	2 Klosterfräulein	Ach, ach, ich armes Klosterfräulein	J. Kerner	1852		Merseburg, 21 Feb 1895
	3 Phänomen	Wenn zu der Regenwand	from Goethe: West-östlicher Divan	1873–4		Basle, 5 Feb 1884
	4 Die Boten der Liebe	Wie viel schon der Boten	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	1873–4		Basle, 5 Feb 1884
66	Five Duets, S, A, pf				1875		xxii, 59	vi/3
	1 Klänge, i	Aus der Erde quellen Blumen	K. Groth	before 1875		—
	2 Klänge, ii	Wenn ein müder Leib begraben	Groth	before 1875		—
	3 Am Strande	Es sprechen und blicken die Wellen	H. Hölty	1875		Hamburg, 13 March 1882
	4 Jägerlied	Jäger, was jagst du die Häselein?	C. Candidus	1875		—
	5 Hüt du dich!	Ich weiss ein Mädlein hübsch und fein	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn	by 1873		Vienna, 24 April 1880
75	[4] Balladen und Romanzen				1878		xxii, 79	vi/3
	1 Edward, A, T, pf	Dein Schwert, wie ists von Blut so rot?	trad. Scottish, from Percy: Reliques, trans. in Herder: Volkslieder	1877		Vienna, 17 Dec 1879
	2 Guter Rat, S, A, pf	Ach Mutter, liebe Mutter	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn	1877		—
	3 So lass uns wandern!, S, T, pf	Ach Mädchen, liebes Mädchen	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	1877		Berlin, 7 March 1880
	4 Walpurgisnacht, 2 S, pf	Lieb Mutter, heut Nacht	W. Alexis	1878		Vienna, 14 Feb 1881
84	[5] Romanzen und Lieder, 1/2vv, pf (see solo songs)				1882		xv, 81	vii/5

accompanied choral works



Op.	Title	Incipit	Text	Composed	Published	BW	NA

12	Ave Maria, 4 female vv, orch/org	Ave Maria, gratia plena	Bible	1858	1860/61	xix, 113	v/1
First performance : Hamburg, 2 Dec 1859
13	Begräbnisgesang, 5vv, wind insts, timp	Nun lasst uns den Leib begraben	M. Weisse	1858	1860/61	xix, 124	v/1
First performance : Hamburg, 2 Dec 1859
17	[4] Gesänge, 3 female vv, 2 hn, hp			1860	1861	xix, 135	v/1
First performance : Hamburg, 15 Jan 1861
	1 —	Es tönt ein voller Harfenklang	F. Ruperti
	2 Lied von Shakespeare	Komm herbei, komm herbei	from W. Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, trans. A.W. von Schlegel
	3 Der Gärtner	Wohin ich geh und schaue	Eichendorff
	4 Gesang aus Fingal	Wein’ an den Felsen	Ossian, trans. Herder
27	Psalm xiii, 3 female vv, org/pf, str ad lib	Herr, wie lange willst du mein so gar vergessen?	Bible, trans. Luther	1859	1864	xx, 1	v/1
First performance : Hamburg, 19 Sept 1859
30	Geistliches Lied, 4vv, org/pf	Lass dich nur nichts nicht dauern	P. Flemming	1856	1864	xx, 13	vi/1
First performance : Chemnitz, 2 July 1865
45	Ein deutsches Requiem, S, Bar, 4vv, orch, org ad lib		Bible, trans. Luther	1865–8	1869	xvii, 3	v/2
First performance : Vienna, 1 Dec 1867 (movts 1–3), Bremen, 10 April 1868 (movts 1–4, 6–7) and Leipzig, 18 Feb 1869 (complete)
	1 —	Selig sind, die da Leid tragen	Matthew v.4; Psalm cxxvi, 5–6
	2 —	Denn alles Fleisch	1 Peter i.24–5; James v.7; Isaiah xxxv.10
	3 —	Herr lehre doch mich	Psalm xxxix.5–8; [Lutheran Psalter]; after Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon iii.1
	4 —	Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen	Psalm lxxxiv.2–3, 5 [Lutheran Psalter]
	5 —	Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit	John xvi.22; Ecclesiasticus li.35; Isaiah lxvi.13
	6 —	Denn wir haben hier	Hebrews xiii.14; 1 Corinthians xv.51–2, 54–5; Revelation iv.11
	7 —	Selig sind die Toten	Revelation xiv.13
50	Rinaldo (cantata), T, 4 male vv, orch	Zu dem Strande	Goethe	1863–8	1869	xviii, 92	v/3
First performance : Vienna, 28 Feb 1869
53	Rhapsodie, A, 4 male vv, orch	Aber abseits, wer ist’s?	from Goethe: Harzreise im Winter	1869	1870	xix, 1	v/3
First performance : Jena, 3 March 1870
54	Schicksalslied, 4vv, orch	Ihr wandelt droben im Licht	F. Hölderlin	1868–71	1871	xix, 22	v/4
First performance : Karlsruhe, 18 Oct 1871
55	Triumphlied, Bar, 8vv, orch	Halleluja! Halleluja!	Bible: Revelation xix	1870–71	1872	xviii, 1	v/4
First performance : Bremen, 7 April 1871 (movt 1), Karlsruhe, 5 June 1872 (complete)
82	Nänie, 4vv, orch	Auch das Schöne muss sterben	F. Schiller	1880–1	1881	xix, 60	v/4
First performance : Zürich, 6 Dec 1881
89	Gesang der Parzen, 6vv, orch	Es fürchte die Götter	from Goethe: Iphigenie auf Tauris	1882	1883	xix, 86	v/4
First performance : Basle, 10 Dec 1882
93b	Tafellied, 6vv, pf	Gleich wie Echo frohen Liedern	Eichendorff	1884	1885	xx, 218	vi/2
First performance : Krefeld, 28 Jan 1885
Anh.Ia/14	arr. of F. Schubert: Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, d583, for unison male vv, orch	Horch, wie Murmeln des empörten Meeres	Schiller	by 1871	1937	—	ix/5
First performance : Vienna, 8 Dec 1871
Anh.Ia/17	arr. of Schubert: Ellens Gesang II, d838, for S, 3 female vv, 4 hn, 3 bn (see also other arrangements)	Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd!	from W. Scott: The Lady of the Lake, trans. A. Storck	by 1873	1906	—	ix/5
First performance : Vienna, 23 March 1873
Anh Ia/18	arr. of Schubert: Mass no.6, E, d950, 4vv, pf	Kyrie; Gloria; Credo; Sanctus; Benedictus; Agnus Dei	liturgical	1865	1865	—	ix/5
First performance : —

unaccompanied choral works

22	[7] Marienlieder, 4vv			1859 (nos.1–2, 4–7), by 1860 (no.3)	1862		xxi, 1	v/5
	1 Der englische Gruss	Gegrüsset Maria	trad., Lower-Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio: Deutsche Volkslieder			Munich, 1 Dec 1873
	2 Marias Kirchgang	Maria wollt zur Kirche gehn	trad., Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio			Vienna, 17 April 1864
	3 Marias Wallfahrt	Maria ging aus wandern	trad., Lower Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zucculmaglio			Leipzig, 13 May 1874
	4 Der Jäger	Es wollt gut Jäger jagen	trad., in L. Uhland, ed.: Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder			Hanover, 5 Dec 1863
	5 Ruf zur Maria	Dich, Mutter Gottes, ruf’ wir an	trad., in Uhland			Vienna, 17 April 1864
	6 Magdalena	An dem österlichen Tag	trad., in Uhland			—
	7 Marias Lob	Maria, wahre Himmelsfreud	trad., Lower Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio			—
	(nos.1, 2, 4–7 arr. for female vv)			1859–62	1940	—	—
29	Two Motets, 5vv				1864		xxi, 11	v/5
	1 —	Es ist das Heil uns kommen her	P. Speratus	by 1860		Vienna, 17 April 1864
	2 —	Schaffe in mir, Gott	Psalm li.12–14	1856–60		—
37	Three Sacred Choruses, 4 female vv		liturgical		1865	Hamburg, 19 Sept 1859 (nos.1–2)	xxi, 159	v/5
	1 —	O bone Jesu		by 1859
	2 —	Adoramus te, Christe		by 1859
	3 —	Regina coeli laetare		1863
41	Fünf Lieder, 4 male vv			1861–2	1867		xxi, 193	v/6
	1 —	Ich schwing mein Horn ins Jammertal	Old Ger., in Uhland: Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder			Vienna, 8 Dec 1871
	2 —	Freiwillige her!	C. Lemcke			Vienna, 11 March 1893
	3 Geleit	Was freut einen alten Soldaten?	Lemcke			Vienna, 4 March 1891
	4 Marschieren	Jetzt hab ich schon	Lemcke			Vienna, 27 Nov 1867
	5 —	Gebt acht! Gebt acht!	Lemcke			Vienna, 8 Dec 1871
	(no.1 also for 4 female vv)				1968	—	—
	(no.2 also for 4 female vv)			1959–62	1938	—	—
42	Drei Gesänge, 6vv				?1868		xxi, 79	v/6
	1 Abendständchen	Hör, es klagt die Flöte wieder	C. Brentano	1859		Vienna, 17 April 1864
	2 Vineta	Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem Grunde	trad., in W. Müller: Volksharfe	1860
	3 Darthulas Grabesgesang	Mädchen von Kola, du schläfst!	Ossian, trans. in Herder: Stimmen der Volker in Lieder	1861		Munich, 1 Feb 1874
	(no.2 also for 4 female vv)			1859–62	1938	—	—
44	Zwölf Lieder und Romanzen, 4 female vv, pf ad lib			1859–60	1866		xxi, 164	v/6
	1 Minnelied	Der Holdseligen sonder Wank	J.H. Voss			Hamburg, 15 Jan 1861
	2 Der Bräutigam	Von allen Bergen nieder	Eichendorff			Hamburg, 15 Jan 1861
	3 Barcarole	O Fischer auf den Fluten	trad. It., trans. K. Witte			Hamburg, 8 Nov 1873
	4 Fragen	Wozu ist mein langes Haar mir dann	trad. Slavonic, trans. A. Grün			Basle, 4 March 1869
	5 Die Müllerin	Die Mühle, die dreht ihre Flügel	A. von Chamisso			—
	6 Die Nonne	Im stillen Klostergarten	Uhland			Zürich, early Feb 1868
	7 —	Nun stehn die Rosen in Blüte	nos.7–10 from P. Heyse: Der Jungbrunnen			Vienna, 11 March 1885
	8 —	Die Berge sind spitz				Vienna, 11 March 1885
	9 —	Am Wildbach die Weiden				Vienna, 11 March 1885
	10 —	Und gehst du über den Kirchhof				Basle, 4 March 1869
	11 Die Braut	Eine blaue Schürze	W. Müller			Vienna, 2 Feb 1895
	12 Märznacht	Horch! wie brauset der Sturm	Uhland			—
	(no.1 arr. for 3 female vv)			1859–62	1968	—	—
	(nos.5–6 arr. for mixed chorus)			1859–62	—	—	—
	(no.9 arr. for 3 female vv)			1859–62	1952	Kiel, 24 April 1899	—
62	Sieben Lieder, 4–6vv			1873–4	1874		xxi, 95	v/6
	1 Rosmarin	Es wollt die Jungfrau früh aufstehn	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn			—
	2 Von alten Liebesliedern	Spazieren wollt ich reiten	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn			Vienna, 8 Nov 1874
	3 Waldesnacht	Waldesnacht, du wunderkühle	nos.3-6 from P. Heyse: Der Jungbrunnen			Vienna, 8 Nov 1874
	4 —	Dein Herzlein mild				Vienna, 8 Nov 1874
	5 —	All meine Herzgedanken				Hamburg, 9 April 1886
	6 —	Es geht ein Wehen				Munich, 4 Jan 1877
	7 —	Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil	Old Ger., in F. Mittler: Deutsche Volkslieder			—
	(no.6 arr. for 4 female vv)			1859–62	1938	—	—
	(no.7 arr. for S, 4vv)			1859–62	—	—	—
74	Two Motets, 4–6vv				1878		xxi, 29	v/5
	1 —	Warum ist das Licht gegeben	Bible (trans. Luther) and Luther	1877		Vienna, 8 Dec 1878
	2 —	O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf	F. von Spee	1863–4		Hamburg, 30 Jan 1880
93a	[6] Lieder und Romanzen, 4vv			1883	1884	Hamburg, 9 Dec 1884 (nos.1, 3–5); Krefeld, 27 Jan 1885 (complete)	xxi, 105
	1 Der bucklichte Fiedler	Es wohnet ein Fiedler zu Frankfurt	trad. Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio
	2 Das Mädchen	Stand das Mädchen	trad. Serb., trans. S. Kapper
	3 —	O süsser Mai	A. von Arnim
	4 —	Fahr wohl, o Vöglein	F. Rückert
	5 Der Falke	Hebt ein Falke sich empor	trad. Serb., trans. Kapper
	6 Beherzigung	Feiger Gedanken	Goethe
104	Fünf Gesänge, 4–6vv				1888	Hamburg, 25 March 1887 (no.5, 1st version); Hamburg, 29 March 1889 (nos.2, 5); Vienna, 3 April 1889 (complete)	xxi, 117	v/6
	1 Nachtwache, i	Leise Töne der Brust	Rückert	by 1888
	2 Nachtwache, ii	Ruhn sie?	Rückert	by 1888
	3 Letztes Glück	Leblos gleitet Blatt um Blatt	M. Kalbeck	by 1888
	4 Verlorene Jugend	Brausten alle Berge	trad. Bohemian, trans. J. Wenzig	by 1888
	5 Im Herbst	Ernst ist der Herbst	K. Groth	1886, rev. by 1888
109	Fest- und Gedenksprüche, 8vv		Bible, trans. Luther	?1888–9	1890	Hamburg, 9 Sept 1889	xxi, 61	v/5
	1 —	Unsere Väter hofften auf dich	Psalm xxii.5–6; Psalm xxix.11
	2 —	Wenn ein starker Gewappneter	Luke, xi.21, 17
	3 —	Wo ist ein so herrlich Volk	Deuteronomy iv.7, 9
110	Three Motets, 4–8vv			by 1889	1890	Hamburg, 15 Jan 1890 (no.3); Cologne, 13 March 1890 (complete)	xxi, 47	v/5
	1 Ich aber bin elend	Ich aber bin elend	Psalm lxix.30, Exodus xxxiv.6–7
	2 Ach, arme Welt	Ach, arme Welt	old sacred song
	3 Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein	Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein	P. Eber
woo 20 posth.	Dem dunkeln Schoss der heilgen Erde	Dem dunkeln Schoss der heilgen Erde	from Schiller: Das Lied von der Glocke	by 1880	1927		xxi, 155	v/6
woo 34	[14] Deutsche Volkslieder, arr. 4vv		in C.F. Becker (no.1), Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio (nos.2–3, 9–11, 13), D.G. Corner (nos.4–5, 7, 12, 14), K.S. Meister (no.6); from F.W. Arnold (no.8)	by 1864	1864		xxi, 127	viii/1
	Book 1
	1 —	Von edler Art
	2 —	Mit Lust tät ich ausreiten
	3 —	Bei nächtlicher Weil
	4 Vom heiligen Märtyrer Emmerano, Bischoffen zu Regenspurg	Komm Mainz, komm Bayrn
	5 Täublein weiss	Es flog ein Täublein
	6 —	Ach lieber Herre Jesu Christ
	7 Sankt Raphael	Tröst die Bedrängten

	Book 2
	8 —	In stiller Nacht
	9 Abschiedslied	Ich fahr dahin
	10 Der tote Knabe	Es pochet ein Knabe
	11 —	Die Wollust in den Maien
	12 Morgengesang	Wach auf, mein Kind
	13 Schnitter Tod	Es ist ein Schnitter
	14 Der englische Jäger	Es wollt gut Jäger jagen

woo 35 posth.	[12] Deutsche Volksleider, arr. 4vv		in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio (nos.1–2, 4–12); from Arnold (no.3)	?1863–4 (nos.9–12), ?1858 (nos.1–8)	1926–7		xxi, 144	viii/2
	1 Scheiden	Ach Gott, wie weh tut Scheiden
	2 Wach auf!	Wach auf, meins Herzens Schöne
	3 —	Erlaube mir, feins Mädchen
	4 Der Fiedler	Es wohnet ein Fiedler
	5 —	Da unten im Tale
	6 —	Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehn
	7 Wach auf!	Wach auf, meins Herzens Schöne
	8 —	Dort in den Weiden
	9 Altes Volkslied	Verstohlen geht der Mond auf
	10 Der Ritter und die Feine	Es stunden drei Rosen
	11 Der Zimmergesell	Es war einmal ein Zimmergesell
	12 Altdeutsches Kampflied	Wir stehen hier zur Schlacht bereit
woo 17 posth.	Kyrie, 4vv, bc	Kyrie eleison	liturgical	1856	1984	Vienna, 16 Oct 1983	—	vi/2
woo 18 posth.	Missa canonica, 5vv	Sanctus; Benedictus; Agnus Dei/Dona nobis pacem	liturgical	1856	1956, 1984	Vienna, 16 Oct 1983	—	v/2
woo 19 posth.	Dein Herzlein mild		Heyse: Jungbrunnen (see op.62 no.4)	1860	1938	—	—	v/6

solo songs

for 1 voice and piano unless otherwise stated



Op.	Title	Text	Key	Composed	Published	BW	NA

3	Sechs Gesänge, T/S, pf				1853	xxiii, 1	vii/1
	1 Liebestreu	R. Reinick	e	1853
Incipit : O versenk, o versenk dein Leid
	2 Liebe und Frühling, i (2 versions)	Hoffmann von Fallersleben	B	1853, rev. 1882	2/1882
Incipit : Wie sich Rebenranken schwingen
	3 Liebe und Frühling, ii	Hoffmann von Fallersleben	B	1853
Incipit : Ich muss hinaus
	4 Lied aus dem Gedicht ‘Ivan’	F. Bodenstedt	e	1853
Incipit : Weit über das Feld
	5 In der Fremde	J. von Eichendorff	f	1852
Incipit : Aus der Heimat
	6 Lied	Eichendorff	A	1852
Incipit : Lindes Rauschen in den Wipfeln
6	Sechs Gesänge, S/T, pf				1853	xxiii, 20	vii/1
	1 Spanisches Lied	Sp., trans. P. Heyse	a	1852
Incipit : In dem Schatten meiner Locken
	2 Der Frühling	J.B. Rousseau	E	1852
Incipit : Es lockt und säuselt um den Baum
	3 Nachwirkung	A. Meissner	A	1852
Incipit : Sie ist gegangen
	4 Juchhe!	Reinick	E	1852
Incipit : Wie ist doch die Erde so schön!
	5 —	Hoffmann von Fallersleben	B	1853
Incipit : Wie die Wolke nach der Sonne
	6 —	Hoffmann von Fallersleben	A	1853
Incipit : Nachtigallen schwingen lustig
7	Sechs Gesänge				1854	xxiii, 38	vii/1
	1 Treue Liebe	E. Ferrand	f	1852
Incipit : Ein Mägdlein sass am Meeresstrand
	2 Parole	Eichendorff	e	1852
Incipit : Sie stand wohl am Fensterbogen
	3 Anklänge	Eichendorff	a	1853
Incipit : Hoch über stillen Höhen
	4 Volkslied	trad., in G. Scherer: Deutsche Volkslieder	e	1852
Incipit : Die Schwälble ziehet fort
	5 Die Trauernde	trad., in Scherer	a	1852
Incipit : Mei Mueter mag mi net
	6 Heimkehr	L. Uhland	b	1851
Incipit : O brich nicht, Steg
14	[8] Lieder und Romanzen			1858	1860/1	xxiii, 50	vii/1
	1 Vor dem Fenster	trad., in K. Simrock: Die deutschen Volkslieder	g–G
Incipit : Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen
	2 Vom verwundeten Knaben	trad. Ger., in J.G. Herder: Volkslieder	a
Incipit : Es wollt ein Mädchen früh aufstehn
	3 Murrays Ermordung	trad. Scottish, from T. Percy: Reliques, trans. in Herder	e
Incipit : O Hochland und o Südland!
	4 Ein Sonnett	attrib. Count Thibault (13th century), trans. in Herder	A
Incipit : Ach könnt ich, könnte vergessen sie
	5 Trennung	trad., in A. Kretzschmer and A.W. von Zuccalmaglio: Deutsche Volkslieder	F
Incipit : Wach auf, wach auf, du junger Gesell
	6 Gang zur Liebsten	trad., in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	e
Incipit : Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehn
	7 Ständchen	trad., in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	F
Incipit : Gut Nacht, gut Nacht
	8 Sehnsucht	trad., in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	e
Incipit : Mein Schatz ist nicht da
	(no.8 arr. for 3 female vv)			1859–62	1968	—
19	Fünf Gedichte				1862	xxiii, 67	vii/1
	1 Der Kuss	L. Hölty	B	1858
Incipit : Unter Blüten des Mai’s
	2 Scheiden und Meiden	Uhland	d	1858
Incipit : So soll ich dich nun meiden
	3 In der Ferne	Uhland	d–D	1858
Incipit : Will ruhen unter den Bäumen
	4 Der Schmied	Uhland	B	1859
Incipit : Ich hör meinen Schatz
	5 An eine Äolsharfe	E. Mörike	a–A	1858
Incipit : Angelehnt an die Epheuwand
32	[9] Lieder und Gesänge			1864	1865	xxiii, 79	vii/1
	1 —	A. von Platen	f
Incipit : Wie rafft ich mich auf in der Nacht
	2 —	trad. Moravian, trans. G.F. Daumer	d
Incipit : Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen
	3 —	Platen	d
Incipit : Ich schleich umher
	4 —	Platen	c
Incipit : Der Strom, der neben mir verrauschte
	5 —	Platen	b
Incipit : Wehe, so willst du mich wieder
	6 —	Platen	c
Incipit : Du sprichst, dass ich mich täuschte
	7 —	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	F
Incipit : Bitteres zu sagen denkst du
	8 —	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	A
Incipit : So stehn wir, ich und meine Weide
	9 —	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	E
Incipit : Wie bist du, meine Königin
33	[15] Romanzen (Magelone-Lieder)	from L. Tieck: Wundersame Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone und des Grafen Peter aus der Provence			1865 (nos.1–6), 1869 (nos.7–15)	xxiii, 107	vii/2
	1 —		E	1861
Incipit : Keinen hat es noch gereut
	2 —		c	1861
Incipit : Traun! Bogen und Pfeil sind gut für den Feind
	3 —		A	1861
Incipit : Sind es Schmerzen, sind es Freuden
	4 —		D	1861
Incipit : Liebe kam aus fernen Landen
	5 —		F	1862
Incipit : So willst du des Armen
	6 —		A	1862
Incipit : Wie soll ich die Freude
	7 —		D	by 1864
Incipit : War es dir
	8 —		G	by 1865?
Incipit : Wir müssen uns trennen
	9 —		A	by 1868
Incipit : Ruhe, Süssliebchen
	10 Verzweiflung		c	by 1866
Incipit : So tönet denn
	11 —		f	by 1869
Incipit : Wie schnell verschwindet
	12 —		g	1862
Incipit : Muss es eine Trennung geben
	13 Sulima		E	1862
Incipit : Geliebter, wo zaudert
	14 —		G	May 1869
Incipit : Wie froh und frisch
	15 —		E	May 1869
Incipit : Treue Liebe dauert lange
43	Vier Gesänge				1868	xxiv, 1	vii/2
	1 Von ewiger Liebe	trad. Wendish., trans. Hoffmann von Fallersleben	b–B	1864
Incipit : Dunkel, wie dunkel
	2 Die Mainacht	L. Hölty	E	1866
Incipit : Wann der silberne Mond
	3 —	Old Ger., in C.F. Becker: Lieder und Weisen vergangener Jahrhunderte	B	by 1860
Incipit : Ich schell mein Horn ins Jammertal
	4 Das Lied vom Hern von Falkenstein	trad. Westphalian (15th century), verses from Herder, Uhland (Alte … Volkslieder) and others	c	1857
Incipit : Es reit der Herr von Falkenstein
46	Vier Lieder				by 1868	xxiv, 18	vii/3
	1 Die Kränze	ancient Gk., trans. in Daumer: Polydora	D	—
Incipit : Hier ob dem Eingang
	2 Magyarisch	trad. Hung., trans. Daumer	A	by 1868
Incipit : Sah dem edlen Bildnis
	3 Die Schale der Vergessenheit	L. Hölty	E	—
Incipit : Eine Schale des Stroms
	4 An die Nachtigall	Hölty	E	by 1868
Incipit : Geuss nicht so laut
47	Fünf Lieder				1868	xxiv, 32	vii/3
	1 Botschaft	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	D	1868
Incipit : Wehe, Lüftchen
	2 Liebesglut	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	f–F	by 1868
Incipit : Die Flamme hier
	3 Sonntag	in Uhland: Alte … Volkslieder	F	by 1859/60
Incipit : So hab ich doch die ganze Woche
	4 —	P. Flemming	D	by 1868
Incipit : O liebliche Wangen
	5 Die Liebende schreibt	Goethe	E	1858
Incipit : Ein Blick von deinen Augen
	(no.3 arr. for 3 female vv)			1859–62	1968	—
48	Sieben Lieder				1868	xxiv, 48	vii/3
	1 Der Gang zum Liebchen	trad. Bohemian, trans. J. Wenzig	e	1859–62
Incipit : Es glänzt der Mond nieder
	2 Der Überläufer	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn	f	1853
Incipit : In den Garten wollen wir gehen
	3 Liebesklage des Mädchens	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn	B	by 1859/60
Incipit : Wer sehen will
	4 Gold überwiegt die Liebe	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	e	by 1868
Incipit : Sternchen mit dem trüben Schein
	5 Trost in Tränen	Goethe	E–e	1858
Incipit : Wie kommt’s dass du so traurig bist
	6 —	Old Ger., in F.L. Mittler: Deutsche Volkslieder	d	by 1859/60
Incipit : Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil
	7 Herbstgefühl	A.F. von Schack	f	1867
Incipit : Wie wenn im frostgen Windhauch
	(no.1 arr. for 3 female vv)			1859–62	1968	—
49	Fünf Lieder				1868	xxiv, 64	vii/3
	1 —	It., trans. P. Heyse	e	by 1868
Incipit : Am Sonntag Morgen zierlich angetan
	2 An ein Veilchen	G.B.F. Zappi, trans. Hölty	E	by 1868
Incipit : Birg, o Veilchen
	3 Sehnsucht	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	A	by 1868
Incipit : Hinter jenen dichten Wäldern
	4 Wiegenlied	from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and in Scherer	E	1868
Incipit : Guten Abend, gut Nacht
	5 Abenddämmerung	Schack	E	1867
Incipit : Sei willkommen, Zwielichtstunde!
57	[8] Lieder und Gesänge			by 1871	1871	xxiv, 80	vii/3
	1 —	Daumer	G
Incipit : Von waldbekränzter Höhe
	2 —	Hāfis, trans. Daumer	E
Incipit : Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst
	3 —	anon. Sp., trans. Daumer	B
Incipit : Es träumte mir, ich sei dir teuer
	4 —	Daumer	f
Incipit : Ach, wende diesen Blick
	5 —	Daumer	e
Incipit : In meiner Nächte Sehnen
	6 —	Daumer	E
Incipit : Strahlt zuweilen auch ein mildes Licht
	7 —	anon. Ind., trans. Daumer	B
Incipit : Die Schnur, die Perl an Perle
	8 —	Daumer	E
Incipit : Unbewegte laue Luft
58	[8] Lieder und Gesänge				1871	xxiv, 109	vii/3
	1 Blinde Kuh	Sicilian, trans. A. Kopisch	g	by 1871
Incipit : Im Finstern geh ich suchen
	2 Während des Regens	Kopisch	D	by 1871
Incipit : Voller, dichter tropft ums Dach da
	3 Die Spröde	Calabrian, trans. Kopisch, rev. Heyse for later edns	A	by 1871
Incipit : Ich sahe eine Tigrin
	4 —	M. Grohe	F	by 1871
Incipit : O komme, holde Sommernacht
	5 Schwermut	C. Candidus	e	by 1871
Incipit : Mir ist so weh ums Herz
	6 In der Gasse	F. Hebbel	d	by 1871
Incipit : Ich blicke hinab in die Gasse
	7 Vorüber	Hebbel	F	by 1871
Incipit : Ich legte mich unter den Lindenbaum
	8 Serenade	Schack	a	1867, rev. by 1871
Incipit : Leise, um dich nicht zu wecken
59	[8] Lieder und Gesänge				1873	xxiv, 134	vii/3
	1 —	Goethe	g	1870/71
Incipit : Däm’rung senkte sich von oben
	2 Auf dem See	K. Simrock	E	1873
Incipit : Blauer Himmel, blaue Wogen
	3 Regenlied	K. Groth	f	1873
Incipit : Walle, Regen, walle nieder
	4 Nachklang	Groth	f	1873
Incipit : Regentropfen aus den Bäumen
	5 Agnes	Mörike	g	?1858, rev. by 1873
Incipit : Rosenzeit, wie schnell vorbei
	6 —	Russ., trans. Daumer	a	1873
Incipit : Eine gute, gute Nacht
	7 —	Groth	e–E	1873
Incipit : Mein wundes Herz verlangt
	8 —	Groth	E	1873
Incipit : Dein blaues Auge hält so still
63	[9] Lieder und Gesänge				1874	xxiv, 164	vii/4
	1 Frühlingstrost	M. von Schenkendorf	A	1874
Incipit : Es weht um mich Narzissenduft
	2 Erinnerung	Schenkendorf	C	1874
Incipit : Ihr wunderschönen Augenblicke
	3 An ein Bild	Schenkendorf	A	1874
Incipit : Was schaust du mich
	4 An die Tauben	Schenkendorf	C	1874
Incipit : Fliegt nur aus
	5 Junge Lieder, i	F. Schumann	F	1873
Incipit : Meine Liebe ist grün
	6 Junge Lieder, ii	F. Schumann	D	1874
Incipit : Wenn um den Holunder
	7 Heimweh, i	Groth	G	by 1874
Incipit : Wie traulich war das Fleckchen
	8 Heimweh, ii	Groth	E	1874
Incipit : O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück
	9 Heimweh, iii	Groth	A	by 1874
Incipit : Ich sah als Knabe Blumen blühn
69	Neun Gesänge			1877	1877	xxv, 1	vii/4
	1 Klage, i	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	D
Incipit : Ach mir fehlt
	2 Klage, ii	trad. Slovak, trans. Wenzig	a
Incipit : O Felsen, lieber Felsen
	3 Abschied	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	E
Incipit : Ach, mich hält der Gram
	4 Des Liebsten Schwur	trad. Bohemian, trans. Wenzig	F
Incipit : Ei, schmollte mein Vater
	5 Tambourliedchen	Candidus	A
Incipit : Den Wirbel schlag ich
	6 Vom Strande	anon. Sp., trans. Eichendorff	a
Incipit : Ich rufe vom Ufer
	7 Über die See	C. Lemcke	e
Incipit : Über die See, fern über die See
	8 Salome	G. Keller	C
Incipit : Singt mein Schatz
	9 Mädchenfluch	trad. Serb., trans. S. Kapper	a–A
Incipit : Ruft die Mutter
70	Vier Gesänge				1877	xxv, 35	vii/4
	1 —	Lemcke	g	1877
Incipit : Im Garten am Seegestade
	2 Lerchengesang	Candidus	B	1877
Incipit : Ätherische ferne Stimmen
	3 Serenade	Goethe	B	1876
Incipit : Liebliches Kind
	4 Abendregen	Keller	a/A–C	1875
Incipit : Langsam und schimmernd
71	Fünf Gesänge			1877	1877	xxv, 46	vii/4
	1 Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze!	H. Heine	D
Incipit : Die Wellen blinken und fliessen dahin
	2 An den Mond	Simrock	b
Incipit : Silbermond, mit bleichen Strahlen
	3 Geheimnis	Candidus	G
Incipit : O Frühlingsabenddämmerung!
	4 Willst du, dass ich geh?	Lemcke	d
Incipit : Auf der Heide weht der Wind
	5 Minnelied	Hölty	C
Incipit : Holder klingt der Vogelsang
72	Fünf Gesänge				1877	xxv, 63	vii/4
	1 Alte Liebe	Candidus	g	1876
Incipit : Es kehrt die dunkle Schwalbe
	2 Sommerfäden	Candidus	c	1876
Incipit : Sommerfäden hin und wieder
	3 —	C. Brentano	A	1877
Incipit : O kühler Wald
	4 Verzagen	Lemcke	f	1877
Incipit : Ich sitz am Strande
	5 Unüberwindlich	Goethe	A	1876
Incipit : Hab ich tausendmal geschworen
84	[5] Romanzen und Lieder, 1/2 vv, pf (nos.1–3 female vv, nos.4–5 female and male vv)				1882	xxv, 81	vii/5
	1 Sommerabend	H. Schmidt	d–D	?1881
Incipit : Geh schlafen, Tochter
	2 Der Kranz	Schmidt	g–G	?1881
Incipit : Mutter, hilf mir armen Tochter
	3 In den Beeren	Schmidt	E	?1881
Incipit : Singe, Mädchen, hell und klar
	4 Vergebliches Ständchen	trad. Lower-Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	A	by 1882
Incipit : Guten Abend, mein Schatz
	5 Spannung	trad. Lower Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	a–A	by 1882
Incipit : Gut’n Abend, gut’n Abend
85	Sechs Lieder				1882	xxv, 100	vii/5
	1 Sommerabend	Heine	B	1878
Incipit : Dämmernd liegt der Sommerabend
	2 Mondenschein	Heine	B	1878
Incipit : Nacht liegt auf den fremden Wegen
	3 Mädchenlied	trad. Serb., trans. Kapper	a	1878
Incipit : Ach, und du mein kühles Wasser!
	4 Ade!	trad. Bohemian, trans. Kapper	b	by 1882
Incipit : Wie schienen die Sternlein so hell
	5 Frühlingslied	E. Geibel	G	1878
Incipit : Mit geheimnisvollen Düften
	6 In Waldeseinsamkeit	Lemcke	B	1878
Incipit : Ich sass zu deinen Füssen
86	Sechs Lieder, low v, pf				1882	xxv, 116	vii/5
	1 Therese	Keller	D	1878
Incipit : Du milchjunger Knabe
	2 Feldeinsamkeit	H. Allmers	F	by 1882
Incipit : Ich ruhe still
	3 Nachtwandler	M. Kalbeck	C	1877
Incipit : Störe nicht den leisen Schlummer
	4 Über die Heide	T. Storm	g	by 1882
Incipit : Über die Heide hallet
	5 Versunken	F. Schumann	F	1878
Incipit : Es brausen der Liebe Wogen
	6 Todessehnen	Schenkendorf	f–F	1878
Incipit : Ach, wer nimmt von meiner Seele
91	Zwei Gesänge, A, va, pf				1884	xxv, 132	vii/5
	1 Gestillte Sehnsucht	F. Rückert	D	1884
Incipit : In goldnen Abendschein
	2 Geistliches Wiegenlied	Lope de Vega, trans. Geibel	F	1863–4
Incipit : Die ihr schwebet um diese Palmen
94	Fünf Lieder, low v, pf				1884	xxv, 149	vii/5
	1 —	Rückert	b	1883
Incipit : Mit vierzig Jahren ist der Berg ersteigen
	2 —	F. Halm	e	1883
Incipit : Steig auf, geliebter Schatten
	3 —	Geibel	g	by 1884
Incipit : Mein Herz ist schwer
	4 Sapphische Ode	Schmidt	D	by 1884
Incipit : Rosen brach ich Nachts
	5 —	Halm	d	by 1884
Incipit : Kein Haus, keine Heimat
95	Sieben Lieder				1884	xxv, 161	vii/5
	1 Das Mädchen	trad. Serb., trans. Kapper	b–B	1883
Incipit : Stand das Mädchen
	2 —	Halm	A	by 1884
Incipit : Bei dir sind meine Gedanken
	3 Beim Abschied (2 versions)	Halm	D	by 1884
Incipit : Ich müh mich ab
	4 Der Jäger	Halm	F	by 1884
Incipit : Mein Lieb ist ein Jäger
	5 Vorschneller Schwur	trad. Serb., trans. Kapper	d–D	by 1884
Incipit : Schwor ein junges Mädchen
	6 Mädchenlied	It., trans. Heyse	F	by 1884
Incipit : Am jüngsten Tag
	7 —	Turkish, trans. in Daumer: Polydora	f	by 1884
Incipit : Schön war, das ich dir weihte
96	Vier Lieder			by 1885	1886	xxv, 180	vii/5
	1 —	Heine	C
Incipit : Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht
	2 —	Hung., trans. in Daumer: Polydora	D
Incipit : Wir wandelten, wir zwei zusammen
	3 —	Heine	b
Incipit : Es schauen die Blumen
	4 Meerfahrt	Heine	a
Incipit : Mein Liebchen, wir sassen beisammen
97	Sechs Lieder			by 1885	1886	xxv, 192	vii/5
	1 Nachtigall	C. Reinhold	f
Incipit : O Nachtigall, dein süsser Schall
	2 Auf dem Schiffe	Reinhold	A
Incipit : Ein Vögelein fliegt
	3 Entführung	W. Alexis	d
Incipit : O Lady Judith
	4 —	trad. Lower Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	D
Incipit : Dort in den Weiden
	5 Komm Bald	Groth	A
Incipit : Warum denn warten
	6 Trennung	trad. Swabian, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	F
Incipit : Da unten im Tale
105	Fünf Lieder, low v, pf				1888	xxvi, 1	vii/6
	1 —	Groth	A	1886
Incipit : Wie Melodien zieht es mir
	2 —	H. Lingg	c–D	1886
Incipit : Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer
	3 Klage	trad. Lower Rhenish, in Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio	F	by 1888
Incipit : Feins Liebchen, trau du nicht
	4 Auf dem Kirchhofe	D. von Liliencron	c–C	by 1888
Incipit : Der Tag ging regenschwer
	5 Verrat	Lemcke	b	1886
Incipit : Ich stand in einer lauen Nacht
106	Fünf Lieder				1888	xxvi, 15	vii/6
	1 Ständchen	F. Kugler	G	by 1888
Incipit : Der Mond steht über dem Berge
	2 Auf dem See	Reinhold	E	1885
Incipit : An dies Schifflein schmiege
	3 —	Groth	a	by 1888
Incipit : Es hing der Reif
	4 Meine Lieder	A. Frey	f	by 1888
Incipit : Wenn mein Herz beginnt zu klingen
	5 Ein Wanderer	Reinhold	f	1885
Incipit : Hier wo sich die Strassen scheiden
107	Fünf Lieder				1888	xxvi, 31	vii/6
	1 An die Stolze	Flemming	A	1886
Incipit : Und gleichwohl kann ich
	2 Salamander	Lemcke	a–A	1888
Incipit : Es sass ein Salamander
	3 Das Mädchen spricht	O.F. Gruppe	A	1886
Incipit : Schwalbe, sag mir an
	4 Maienkätzchen	Liliencron	E	by 1887
Incipit : Maienkätzchen, erster Gruss
	5 Mädchenlied	Heyse	b	by 1888
Incipit : Auf die Nacht in den Spinnstubn
121	Vier ernste Gesänge [Four Serious Songs], B, pf			1896	1896	xxvi, 44	vii/6
	1 —	Bible: Ecclesiastes iii.19–22	d
Incipit : Denn es gehet dem Menschen
	2 —	Bible: Ecclesiastes iv.1–3	g–G
Incipit : Ich wandte mich, und sahe an alle
	3 —	after Apocrypha: Ecclesiasticus xli.1–2	e–E
Incipit : O Tod, o Tod, wie bitter bist du
	4 —	Bible: 1 Corinthians xiii.1–4, 12–13	E
Incipit : Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelzungen redete
woo 21	Mondnacht	Eichendorff	A	by 1853	1854	xxvi, 62	vii/6
Incipit : Es war, als hätt der Himmel
woo 22 posth.	[5] Ophelia-Lieder, S, pf ad lib	from W. Shakespeare: Hamlet, trans. A.W. von Schlegel		1873	1935	—	vii/6
	1 —		g
Incipit : Wie erkenn ich dein Treulieb
	2 —		D–b
Incipit : Sein Leichenhemd weiss
	3 —		G
Incipit : Auf morgen ist Sankt Valentins Tag
	4 —		F
Incipit : Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss
	5 —		d
Incipit : Und kommt er nicht mehr zurück?
woo 23 posth.	Regenlied	Groth	g	by 1872	1908	xxvi, 64	vii/6
Incipit : Regentropfen aus den Bäumen
Anh.III/7	[Aphorismus], 1v	Goethe	C	1891			x
Incipit : Doch was hör ich?
Anh.III/13	Die Müllerin [frag.]	A. von Chamisso	e	early 1850s	1983	—	vii/6
Incipit : Die Mühle, die dreht ihre Flügel
See also other arrangements

index to the solo songs

Abenddämmerung, 49/5; Abendregen, 70/40; Abschied, 69/3; Ach könnt ich, könnte vergessen sie, 14/4; Ach mich hält der Gram, 69/3; Ach, mir fehlt, 69/1; Ach, und du mein kühles Wasser!, 85/3; Ach, wende diesen Blick, 57/4; Ach, wer nimmt von meiner Seele, 86/6; Ade!, 85/4; Agnes, 59/5; Alte Liebe, 72/1; Am jüngsten Tag, 95/6; Am Sonntag Morgen, 49/1; An den Mond, 71/2; An die Nachtigall, 46/4

An dies Schifflein schmiege, 106/2; An die Stolze, 107/1; An die Tauben, 63/4; An ein Bild, 63/3; An eine Äolsharfe, 19/5; An ein Veilchen, 49/2; Angelehnt an die Epheuwand, 19/5; Anklänge, 7/3; Ätherische ferne Stimmen, 70/2; Auf dem Kirchhofe, 105/4; Auf dem Schiffe, 97/2; Auf dem See, 59/2, 106/2; Auf der Heide weht der Wind, 71/4; Auf die Nacht in den Spinnstubn, 107/5; Auf morgen ist Sankt Valentins Tag, woo22/3; Aus der Heimat, 3/5

Bei dir sind meine Gedanken, 95/2; Beim Abschied, 95/3; Birg, o Veilchen, 49/2; Bitteres zu sagen denkst du, 32/7; Blauer Himmel, blaue Wogen, 59/2; Blinde Kuh, 58/1; Botschaft, 47/1; Dämmernd liegt der Sommerabend, 85/1; Dämmrung senkte sich von oben, 59/1; Das Lied vom Herrn von Falkenstein, 43/4; Das Mädchen, 95/1; Das Mädchen spricht, 107/3; Da unten im Tale, 97/6

Dein blaues Auge hält so still, 59/8; Denn es gehet dem Menschen, 121/1; Den Wirbel schlag ich, 69/5; Der Frühling, 6/2; Der Gang zum Liebchen, 48/1; Der Jäger, 95/4; Der Kranz, 84/2; Der Kuss, 19/1; Der Mond steht über dem Berge, 106/1; Der Schmied, 19/4; Der Strom, der neben mir verrauschte, 32/4; Der Tag ging regenschwer, 105/4; Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, 96/1; Der Überläufer, 48/2; Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehn, 14/6; Des Liebsten Schwur, 69/4

Die Flamme hier, 47/2; Die ihr schwebet um diese Palmen, 91/2; Die Kränze, 46/1; Die Liebende schreibt, 47/5; Die Mainacht, 43/2; Die Mühle, die dreht ihre Flügel, Anh.III/13; Die Müllerin, Anh.III/13; Die Schale der Vergessenheit, 46/3; Die Schnur, die Perl an Perle, 57/7; Die Schwälble ziehet fort, 7/4; Die Spröde, 58/3; Die Trauernde, 7/5; Die Wellen blinken, 71/1; Dort in den Weiden, 97/4; Du milchjunger Knabe, 86/1; Dunkel, wie dunkel, 43/1; Du sprichst, dass ich mich täuschte, 32/6

Ein Blick von deinen Augen, 47/5; Eine gute, gute Nacht, 59/6; Eine Schale des Stroms, 46/3; Ein Mägdlein sass am Meeresstrand, 7/1; Ein Sonett, 14/4; Ein Vögelein fliegt, 97/2; Ein Wanderer, 106/5; Ei, schmollte mein Vater, 69/4; Entführung, 97/3; Erinnerung, 63/2; Es brausen der Liebe Wogen, 86/5; Es glänzt der Mond nieder, 48/1; Es hing der Reif, 106/3; Es kehrt die dunkle Schwalbe, 72/1

Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze!, 71/1; Es lockt und säuselt um den Baum, 6/2; Es reit der Herr von Falkenstein, 43/4; Es sass ein Salamander, 107/2; Es schauen die Blumen, 96/3; Es träumte mir, ich sei dir teuer, 57/3; Es war, als hätt der Himmel, woo21; Es weht um mich, 63/1; Es wollt ein Mädchen früh aufstehn, 14/2; Feins Liebchen, trau du nicht, 105/3; Feldeinsamkeit, 86/2; Fliegt nur aus, 63/4; Frühlingslied, 85/5; Frühlingstrost, 63/1

Gang zur Liebsten, 14/6; Geheimnis, 71/3; Geh schlafen, Tochter, 84/1; Geistliches Wiegenlied, 91/2; Geliebter, wo zaudert, 33/13; Gestillte Sehnsucht, 91/1; Geuss nicht so laut, 46/4; Gold überwiegt die Liebe, 48/4; Guten Abend, gut Nacht, 49/4; Guten Abend, mein Schatz, 84/4; Gut’n Abend, gut’n Abend, 84/5; Gut Nacht, gut Nacht, 14/7; Hab ich tausendmal geschworen, 72/5; Heimkehr, 7/6; Heimweh, 63/7, 8, 9; Herbstgefühl, 48/7; Hier, ob dem Eingang, 46/1; Hier, wo sich die Strassen, 106/5; Hinter jenen dichten Wäldern, 49/3; Hoch über stillen Höhen, 7/3; Holder klingt der Vogelsang, 71/5

Ich blicke hinab in die Gasse, 58/6; Ich hör meinen Schatz, 19/4; Ich legte mich unter den Lindenbaum, 58/7; Ich müh mich ab, 95/3; Ich muss hinaus, 3/3; Ich rufe vom Ufer, 69/6; Ich ruhe still, 86/2; Ich sah als Knabe, 63/9; Ich sahe eine Tigrin, 58/3; Ich sass zu deinen Füssen, 85/6; Ich schell mein Horn ins Jammertal, 43/3; Ich schleich umher, 32/3; Ich sitz am Strande, 72/4; Ich stand in einer lauen Nacht, 105/5; Ich wandte mich, und sahe an alle, 121/2; Ihr wunderschönen Augenblicke, 63/2

Im Finstern geh ich suchen, 58/1; Im Garten am Seegestade, 70/1; Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer, 105/2; In dem Schatten meiner Locken, 6/1; In den Beeren, 84/3; In den Garten wollen wir gehen, 48/2; In der Ferne, 19/3; In der Fremde, 3/5; In der Gasse, 58/6; In goldnen Abendschein, 91/1: In meiner Nächte Sehnen, 57/5; In Waldeseinsamkeit, 85/6; Juchhe!, 6/4; Junge Lieder, 63/5, 6; Keinen hat es noch gereut, 33/1; Kein Haus, keine Heimat, 94/5; Klage, 69/1, 2, 105/3; Komm bald, 97/5

Langsam und schimmerend, 70/4; Leise, um dich nicht zu wecken, 58/8; Lerchengesang, 70/2; Liebe kam aus fernen Landen, 33/4; Liebesglut, 47/2; Liebesklage des Mädchens, 48/3; Liebestreu, 3/1; Liebe und Frühling, 3/2, 3; Liebliches Kind, 70/3; Lied, 3/6; Lied aus dem Gedicht ‘Ivan’, 3/4; Lindes Rauschen in den Wipfeln, 3/6; Mädchenfluch, 69/9; Mädchenlied, 85/3, 95/6, 107/5; Magyarisch, 46/2; Maienkätzchen, erster Gruss, 107/4

Meerfahrt, 96/4; Mei Mueter mag mi net, 7/5; Meine Liebe ist grün, 63/5; Meine Lieder, 106/4; Mein Herz ist schwer, 94/3; Mein Liebchen, wir sassen, 96/4; Mein Lieb ist ein Jäger, 95/4; Mein Schatz ist nicht da, 14/8; Mein wundes Herz verlangt, 59/7; Minnelied, 71/5; Mir ist so weh ums Herz, 58/5; Mit geheimnisvollen Düften, 85/5; Mit vierzig Jahren, 94/1

Mondenschein, 85/2; Mondnacht, woo21; Murrays Ermordung, 14/3; Muss es eine Trennung geben, 33/12; Mutter, hilf mir, 84/2; Nachklang, 59/4; Nachtigall, 97/1; Nachtigallen schwingen lustig, 6/6; Nacht liegt auf den fremden Wegen, 85/2; Nachtwandler, 86/3; Nachwirkung, 6/3; Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen, 32/2

O brich nicht, Steg, 7/6; O Felsen, lieber Felsen, 69/2; O Frühlingsabenddämmerung!, 71/3; O Hochland und o Südland!, 14/3; O komme, holde Sommernacht, 58/4; O kühler Wald, 72/3; O Lady Judith, 97/3; O liebliche Wangen, 47/4; O Nachtigall, dein süsser Schall, 97/1; O Tod, o Tod, wie bitter bist du, 121/3; O versenk, o versenk dein Leid, 3/1; O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück, 63/8; Parole, 7/2

Regenlied, 59/3, woo23; Regentropfen aus den Bäumen, 59/4, woo23; Rosen brach ich Nachts, 94/4; Rosenzeit, wie schnell vorbei, 59/5; Ruft die Mutter, 69/9; Ruhe, Süssliebchen, 33/9; Sah dem edlen Bildnis, 46/2; Salamander, 107/2; Salome, 69/8; Sapphische Ode, 94/4; Scheiden und Meiden, 19/2; Schön war, das ich dir weihte, 95/7; Schwalbe, sag mir an, 107/3; Schwermut, 58/5

Schwor ein junges Mädchen, 95/5; Sehnsucht, 14/8, 49/3; Sein Leichenhemd weiss, woo22/2; Sei willkommen, Zwielichtstunde!, 49/5; Serenade, 58/8, 70/3; Sie ist gegangen, 6/3; Sie stand wohl am Fensterbogen, 7/2; Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss, woo22/4; Silbermond, mit bleichen Strahlen, 71/2; Sind es Schmerzen, sind es Freuden, 33/3; Singe, Mädchen, hell und klar, 84/3; Singt mein Schatz, 69/8; So hab ich doch die ganze Woche, 47/3; Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen, 14/1

Sommerabend, 84/1, 85/1; Sommerfäden hin und wieder, 72/2; Sonntag, 47/3; So soll ich dich nun meiden, 19/2; So stehn wir, ich und meine Weide, 32/8; So tönet denn, 33/10; So willst du des Armen, 33/5; Spanisches Lied, 6/1; Spannung, 84/5; Ständchen, 14/7, 106/1; Stand das Mädchen, 95/1; Steig auf, geliebter Schatten, 94/2; Sternchen mit dem trüben Schein, 48/4; Störe nicht den leisen Schlummer, 86/3; Strahlt zuweilen auch ein mildes Licht, 57/6; Sulima, 33/13

Tambourliedchen, 69/5; Therese, 86/1; Todessehnen, 86/6; Traun! Bogen und Pfeil sind gut, 33/2; Trennung, 14/5, 97/6; Treue Liebe, 7/1; Treue Liebe dauert lange, 33/15; Trost in Tränen, 48/5; Über die Heide hallet, 86/4; Über die See, fern über die See, 69/7; Unbewegte laue Luft, 57/8; Und gleichwohl kann ich, 107/1; Und kommt er nicht mehr zurück?, woo22/5; Unter Blüten des Mai’s, 19/1; Unüberwindlich, 72/5

Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil, 48/6; Vergebliches Ständchen, 84/4; Verrat, 105/5; Versunken, 86/5; Verzagen, 72/4; Verzweiflung, 33/10; Volkslied, 7/4; Voller, dichter tropft ums Dach da, 58/2; Vom Strande, 69/6; Vom verwundeten Knaben, 14/2; Von ewiger Liebe, 43/1; Von waldbekränzter Höhe, 57/1; Vor dem Fenster, 14/1; Vorschneller Schwur, 95/5; Vorüber, 58/7

Wach auf, wach auf, 14/5; Während des Regens, 58/2; Walle, Regen, walle nieder, 59/3; Wann der silberne Mond, 43/2; War es dir, 33/7; Warum denn warten, 97/5; Was schaust du mich, 63/3; Wehe, Lüftchen, 47/1; Wehe, so willst du mich wieder, 32/5; Weit über das Feld, 3/4; Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst, 57/2; Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelzungen, 121/4; Wenn mein Herz beginnt, 106/4; Wenn um den Holunder, 63/6; Wer sehen will, 48/3; Wie bist du, meine Königin, 32/9; Wie die Wolke nach der Sonne, 6/5; Wie erkenn ich dein Treulieb, woo22/1; Wie froh und frisch, 33/14

Wiegenlied, 49/4; Wie ist doch die Erde so schön!, 6/4; Wie kommt’s dass du so traurig bist, 48/5; Wie Melodien zieht es mir, 105/1; Wie rafft ich mich auf in der Nacht, 32/1; Wie schienen die Sternlein, 85/4; Wie schnell verschwindet, 33/11; Wie sich Rebenranken schwingen, 3/2; Wie soll ich die Freude, 33/6; Wie traulich war das Fleckchen, 63/7; Wie wenn im frostgen Windhauch, 48/7; Will ruhen unter den Bäumen, 19/3; Willst du, dass ich geh?, 71/4; Wir müssen uns trennen, 33/8; Wir wandelten, 96/2

folksong arrangements

woo31: [15] Volks-Kinderlieder, arr. for 1v, pf, 1857 (1858), BW xxvi, 176; NA viii/1

1 Dornröschen

2 Die Nachtigall

3 Die Henne

4 Sandmännchen

5 Der Mann

6 Heidenröslein

7 Das Schlaraffenland

8a Beim Ritt auf dem Knie (Ull Mann wull riden)

8b Beim Ritt auf dem Knie (Alt Mann wollt reiten)

9 Der Jäger in dem Walde

10 Das Mädchen und die Hasel

11 Wiegenlied

12 Weihnachten

13 Marienwürmchen

14 Dem Schutzengel

15 Sommerlied (unpubd)

woo32 posth.: 28 deutsche Volkslieder, arr. for 1v, pf, 1858 (1926), BW xxvi, 191; NA viii/2

1 Die Schnürbrust

2 Der Jäger

3 Drei Vögelein

4 Auf, gebet uns das Pfingstei

5 Des Markgrafen Töchterlein

6 Der Reiter

7 Die heilige Elisabeth an ihrem Hochzeitsfeste

8 Der englische Gruss

9 Ich stund an einem Morgen

10 Gunhilde

11 Der tote Gast

12 Tageweis von einer schönen Frauen

13 Schifferlied

14 Nachtgesang

15 Die beiden Königskinder

16 Scheiden

17 Altes Minnelied

18a Der getreue Eckart

18b Der getreue Eckart

19 Die Versuchung

20 Der Tochter Wunsch

21 Schnitter Tod

22 Marias Wallfahrt

23 Das Mädchen und der Tod

24 Es ritt ein Ritter wohl durch das Ried

25 Liebeslied

26 Guten Abend, mein tausiger Schatz

27 Die Wollust in den Maien

28 Es reit ein Herr und auch sein Knecht

woo33: 49 deutsche Volkslieder, arr. for 1v, pf, by 1893–4 (1894), BW xxvi, 81; NA viii/2

Book 1

1 Sagt mir, o schönste Schäfrin mein

2 Erlaube mir, feins Mädchen

3 Gar lieblich hat sich gesellet

4 Guten Abend, mein tausiger Schatz

5 Die Sonne scheint nicht mehr

6 Da unten im Tale

7 Gunhilde lebt gar stille und fromm

Book 2

8 Ach, englische Schäferin

9 Es war eine schöne Jüdin

10 Es ritt ein Ritter

11 Jungfräulein, soll ich mit euch gehn

12 Feinsliebchen, du sollst mir nicht barfuss gehn

13 Wach auf, mein Hort

14 Maria ging aus wandern

Book 3

15 Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein

16 Wach auf mein Herzensschöne

17 Ach Gott, wie weh tut Scheiden

18 So wünsch ich ihr ein gute Nacht

19 Nur ein Gesicht auf Erden lebt

20 Schönster Schatz, mein Engel

21 Es ging ein Maidlein zarte

Book 4

22 Wo gehst du hin, du Stolze?

23 Der Reiter spreitet seinen Mantel aus

24 Mir ist ein schöns brauns Maidelein

25 Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund

26 Ach könnt ich diesen Abend

27 Ich stand auf hohem Berge

28 Es reit ein Herr und auch sein Knecht

Book 5

29 Es war ein Markgraf überm Rhein

30 All mein Gedanken

31 Dort in den Weiden steht ein Haus

32 So will ich frisch und fröhlich sein

33 Och Moder, ich well en Ding han!

34 Wie komm ich denn zur Tür herein?

35 Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen

Book 6

36 Es wohnet ein Fiedler

37 Du mein einzig Licht

38 Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehn

39 Schöner Augen schöne Strahlen

40 Ich weiss mir’n Maidlein hübsch und fein

41 Es steht ein Lind

42 In stiller Nacht, zur ersten Wacht

Book 7 (1v, small choir SATB)

43 Es stunden drei Rosen

44 Dem Himmel will ich klagen

45 Es sass ein schneeweiss Vögelein

46 Es war einmal ein Zimmergesell

47 Es ging sich unsre Fraue

48 Nachtigall, sag was für Grüss

49 Verstohlen geht der Mond auf

woo36 posth.: [8] deutsche Volkslieder, arr. for 3 and 4 female vv, 1859–62 (1938)

1 Totenklage/In stiller Nacht

2 Minnelied/So will ich frisch und fröhlich sein

3 Der tote Knabe/Es pochet ein Knabe

4 Ich hab die Nacht geträumet

5 Altdeutsches Minnelied/Mein Herzlein tut mir gar zu weh!

6 Es waren zwei Königskinder

7 Spannung/Guten Abend

8 Drei Vögelein/Mit Lust tät ich ausreiten

woo37 posth.: [16] deutsche Volkslieder, arr. for 3 and 4 female vv, 1859–62 (1964); NA viii/2

1 Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein

2 Ich hörte ein Sichlein rauschen

3 Der Ritter und die Feine/Es stunden drei Rosen

4 Ich stand auf hohem Berge

5 Gunhilde

6 Der bucklichte Fiedler/Es wohnet ein Fiedler

7 Die Versuchung/Feinsliebchen, du sollst mir nicht barfuss gehn

8 Altes Minnelied/Ich fahr dahin

9 Die Wollust in den Maien

10 Trennung/Da unten im Tale

11 Der Jäger/Bei nächtlicher Weil

12 Scheiden/Ach Gott, wie weh tut Scheiden

13 Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz

14 Wach auf mein Hort

15 Der Ritter/Es ritt ein Reiter

16 Ständchen/Wach auf, mein’s Herzens Schöne

woo38 posth.: [20] deutsche Volkslieder, arr. for 3 and 4 female vv, 1859–62 (1968); NA viii/2

1 Die Entführung/Auf, auf, auf!

2 Gang zur Liebsten/Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehn

3 Schifferlied/Dort in den Weiden steht ein Haus

4 Erlaube mir, feins Mädchen

5 Schnitter Tod/Es ist ein Schnitter

6 Die Bernauerin/Es reiten drei Reiter

7 Das Lied vom eifersüchtigen Knabe/Es stehen drei Sterne am Himmel

8 Der Baum in Odenwald/Es steht ein Baum in Odenwald

9 Des Markgrafen Töchterlein/Es war ein Markgraf übern Rhein

10 Die stolze Jüdin/Es war eine stolze Jüdin

11 Der Zimmergesell/Es war einmal ein Zimmergesell

12 Liebeslied/Gar lieblich hat sich gesellet

13 Heimliche Liebe/Kein Feuer, keine Kohle

14 Altes Liebeslied/Mein Herzlein tut mir gar zu weh!

15 Dauernde Liebe/Mein Schatz, ich hab es erfahren

16 Während der Trennung/Mein Schatz ist auf die Wanderschaft hin

17 Morgen muss ich fort von hier

18 Scheiden/Sind wir geschieden

19 Vor dem Fenster/Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen

20 Ständchen/Verstohlen geht der Mond auf

other arrangements

vocal works by other composers

op.

Anh.Ia/9	J.S. Bach: Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid bwv3 (chorale), S, pf (realized figured bass), by 1877 (1877), NA ix/4
Anh.Ia/10	Seven Duets and Two Trios by Handel, 2/3 vv, pf (realized figured bass), by 1870 (1870, 2/1880), NA ix/4: 1 Caro autor hwv183, 2 S; 2 Quando in calma ride il mare hwv191, S, B; 3 Tacete, ohimè, tacete hwv196, S, B; 4 Conservate, raddoppiate hwv185, S, A; 5 Tanti strali al semi scocchi hwv197, S, A; 6 Langue, geme hwv188, S, A; 7 Se tu non lasci amore hwv193, S, A; 8 Se tu non lasci amore hwv201, S, S, B; 9 Quel fior che all’alba ride hwv200, S, S, B
Anh.Ia/11	Six Duets by Handel, 2vv, pf (realized figured bass), by 1880 (1880), NA ix/4: 1 Quel fior che all’alba ride hwv192, 2 S; 2 Nò, di voi non vo’ fidarmi hwv189, 2 S; 3 Nò, di voi non vo’ fidarmi hwv190, S, A; 4 Beato in ver chi può hwv181, S, A; 5 Fronda leggiera e mobile hwv186, S, A; 6 Ahì, nelle sorti umane hwv179, 2 S
Anh.Ia/12	Schubert: An Schwager Kronos (Spute dich Kronos!) d369, B, orch, 1862 (1933), NA ix/5
Anh.Ia/13	Schubert: Memnon (Den Tag hindurch nur einmal) d541, 1v, orch, 1862 (1933), NA ix/5
Anh.Ia/15	Schubert: Geheimes (Über meines Liebchens Äuglein) d719, 1v, hn, str, 1862 (1933), NA ix/5
Anh.Ia/16	Schubert: Greisengesang (Der Frost hat mir bereifet) d778, B, orch, 1862, NA ix/5
Anh.Ia/17	Schubert: Ellens Gesang II (Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd!) d838, S, 4 hn, 3 bn, ?1862, NA ix/5 (see also accompanied choral works)
Anh.III/8	So bello non (Neapolitan canzonetta), D, 1v, pf, 1882, NA vii/2

Brahms’s own instrumental and choral works

for pf, vn, vc: Double Concerto op.102

for pf, vn: Clarinet Sonatas op.120; Vn Conc. op.77

for 2 pf: Pf Concs. opp.15, 83; Syms. opp.90, 98

for pf duet: Pf Conc. op.15; Pf Qts opp.25, 26; Ovs. opp.80, 81; Requiem op.45; Serenades opp.11, 16; Str Sextets opp.18, 36; Str Qts opp.51/1–2, 67; Str Qnts opp.88, 111; Syms. opp.68, 73, 90 (arr. R. Keller, ed. and corrected Brahms), 98; Triumphlied op.55

for pf: Str Sextet op.18 (2nd movt)

for chorus, pf: opp.12, 13, 17, 29/1–2, 42, 45, 50, 53, 54 (arr. H. Levi, corrected Brahms), 55, 82, 89

a: catalogues and bibliographies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Catalogues and bibliographies. B Iconographies and exhibition catalogues. C Letters and other documents. D Facsimiles and musical sources. E Memoirs. F Collections of studies. G Life and works, other biographical studies. H Reception. I Style and analysis. J Keyboard music. K Chamber music. L Orchestral music, concertos. M Choral music. N Lieder, solo vocal ensemble. O Brahms’s library, historical interests and editorial activities. P Cultural world and political life. Q Folk music. R Performing practice. S Editorial issues.

b: iconographies and exhibition catalogues

c: letters and other documents

d: facsimiles and musical sources

e: memoirs

f: collections of studies

g: life and works, other biographical studies

h: reception

i: style and analysis

j: keyboard music

k: chamber music

l: orchestral music, concertos

m: choral music

n: lieder, solo vocal ensemble

o: brahms’s library, historical interests and editorial activities

p: cultural world and political life

q: folk music

r: performing practice

s: editorial issues

a: catalogues and bibliographies

R. Keller, ed.: Thematisches Verzeichniss der bisher im Druck erschienenen Werke von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1887, enlarged 1897/R as Thematisches Verzeichniss sämmtlicher im Druck erschienenen Werke von Johannes Brahms, 4/1907; Eng. trans., ed. J. Braunstein, 1956)

A. Orel: ‘Ein eigenhändiges Werkverzeichnis von Johannes Brahms’, Die Musik, xxix (1936–7), 529–41

K. Hofmann: Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1975)

S. Kross: Brahms-Bibliographie (Tutzing, 1983)

M.L. and D. McCorkle, eds.: Johannes Brahms: thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (Munich, 1984)

T. Quigley: Johannes Brahms: an Annotated Bibliography of the Literature through 1982 (Metuchen, NJ, 1990)

T. Quigley and M.I. Ingraham: Johannes Brahms: an Annotated Bibliography of the Literature from 1982 to 1996, with an Appendix on Brahms and the Internet (Lanham, MD, 1998)

b: iconographies and exhibition catalogues

M. Fellinger: Brahms-Bildermappe (Leipzig, 1900, enlarged 2/1911 as Brahms-Bilder)

V. von Miller zu Aichholz and M. Kalbeck, eds.: Ein Brahms-Bilderbuch (Vienna, 1905)

A. Comini: ‘The Visual Brahms: Idols and Images’, Arts Magazine, lii (1979), 123–9

O. Biba: Johannes Brahms in Wien, Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, 19 April – 30 June 1983 (Vienna, 1983) [exhibition catalogue]

J. Draheim and others: Johannes Brahms in Baden-Baden und Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe, 1983) [exhibition catalogue]

C. Jacobsen, ed.: Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werke (Wiesbaden, 1983)

O. Biba: ‘Es hat mich noch Weniges so entzückt’: Johannes Brahms und Franz Schubert, Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, 27 Jan – 15 April 1997 (Vienna, 1997) [exhibition catalogue]

O. Biba: ‘… in meinen Tönen spreche ich.’: Für Johannes Brahms 1833–1897, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 5 Sept – 2 Nov 1997 (Hamburg, 1997) [exhibition catalogue]

J. Draheim and U. Reimann, eds.: Johannes Brahms in den Bädern Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Bad Ischl, Karlsbad, Alten Dampfbad Baden-Baden, 23 March – 17 April 1997 (Baden-Baden, 1997) [exhibition catalogue]

c: letters and other documents

Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, i–xvi (Berlin, 1907–22/R) [Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft edn]; new ser., xvii–xix (Tutzing, 1991–5)

C. Krebs, ed.: Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein: Aussprüche von Dichtern, Philosophen und Künstlern (Berlin, 1909)

Johannes Joachim and A. Moser, eds.: Briefe von und an Joseph Joachim (Berlin, 1911–13; Eng. trans., abridged, 1914/R)

B. Litzmann: Clara Schumann: ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen, i (Leipzig, 8/1925/R); ii (7/1925/R); iii (6/1923/R)

B. Litzmann: Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896 (Leipzig, 1927; Eng. trans., abridged, 1927/R)

K. Geiringer: ‘Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Eusebius Mandyczewski’, ZMw, xv (1932–3), 337–70

O. von Balassa: Die Brahmsfreundin Ottilie Ebner und ihr Kreis (Vienna, 1933)

K. Stephenson, ed.: Johannes Brahms’ Heimatbekenntnis in Briefen an seine Hamburger Verwandten (Hamburg, 1933, enlarged 2/1948)

O.G. Billroth, ed.: Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel (Berlin, 1935/R)

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms and Wagner, with Unpublished Letters’, MQ, xxii (1936), 178–89

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms and Chrysander’, MMR, lxvii (1937), 97–9, 131–2, 178–80; lxviii (1938), 76–9

E.H. Müller von Asow, ed.: Johannes Brahms und Mathilde Wesendonck: ein Briefwechsel (Vienna, 1943)

V. Pauls, ed.: Briefe der Freundschaft: Johannes Brahms, Klaus Groth (Heide, 1956, 2/1997 by D. Lohmeier)

A. Holde: ‘Suppressed Passages in the Brahms–Joachim Correspondence, Published for the First Time’, MQ, xlv (1959), 312–24

A. Spengel, ed.: Johannes Brahms an Julius Spengel: unveröffentlichte Briefe aus den Jahren 1882–1897 (Hamburg, 1959)

K. Stephenson, ed.: Johannes Brahms und Fritz Simrock: Weg einer Freundschaft: Briefe des Verlegers an den Komponisten (Hamburg, 1961)

A. Orel: Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer: eine Künstlerfreundschaft in Briefen (Tutzing, 1964)

K. Stephenson, ed.: Johannes Brahms in seiner Familie: der Briefwechsel (Hamburg, 1973)

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s Lieder Inventory of 1859–60 and other Documents of his Life and Work’, FAM, xxx (1983), 98–117

M. Martin, ed.: Johannes Brahms: Briefwechsel mit dem Mannheimer Bankprokuristen Wilhelm Lindeck 1872–1882 (Heidelberg, 1983)

M. Struck: ‘Revisionsbedürftig: zur gedruckten Korrespondenz von Johannes Brahms und Clara Schumann’, Mf, xli (1988), 235–41

Á. Gádor, ed.: ‘In fliegender Eile möchte ich Ihnen sagen … ’: Johannes Brahms, 22 Briefe nach Ungarn (Mürzzuschlag, 1993)

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Johannes Brahms’s Collection of Deutsche Sprichworte (German Proverbs)’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 1–29

H.J. Hinrichsen, ed.: Hans von Bülow: die Briefe an Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1994)

G.S. Bozarth and W. Martin, eds.: The Brahms-Keller Correspondence (Lincoln, NE, 1996)

S. Avins, ed.: Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford, 1997)

d: facsimiles and musical sources

facsimiles

Johannes Brahms Autographs: Facsimiles of Eight Manuscripts in the Library of Congress [opp.18, 34, 39, 40, 87, 118/1, 119/1]: introduction, J. Webster, commentary, G.S. Bozarth (New York, 1983)

Three Lieder on Poems of Adolf Friedrich von Schack [opp.49/5, 48/7, 58/8]: introduction, G.S. Bozarth (Washington DC, 1983)

Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit (German Requiem, op.45, 5th movt): introduction, F. Grasberger (Tutzing, 1968)

Alto Rhapsody, op.53: introduction, W. Frisch (New York, 1983)

Variations on a Theme by J. Haydn (St Anthony Variations), 2 pf, op.56b: preface, E. Hilmar (Tutzing, 1989)

Symphony no.1, c, op.68: introduction, M.L. McCorkle (New York, 1986)

Violin Concerto, D, op.77: introduction, Y. Menuhin, foreword, J. Newsom (Washington DC, 1979) [autograph score with corrections by Joachim]

Feldeinsamkeit (Ich ruhe still im hohen grünen Gras), op.86 no.2: commentary, E. Herttrich (Munich, 1983)

String Quintet no.1, F, op.88 (Baden-Baden, 1994)

Symphony no.4, e, op.98: introduction, G. Birkner (Adliswil, 1974)

Fantasias, pf, op.116: afterword, B. Stockmann (Munich, 1997)

Intermezzos, pf, op.119 nos.2–3: afterword, F.G. Zeileis (Tutzing, 1975)

Vier ernste Gesänge, op.121 (Munich, 1923)

Regenlied (Regentropfen aus den Bäumen), without op. no.: foreword, H. Stange (Berlin, 1908)

sources

P. Mies: ‘Aus Brahms’ Werkstatt: vom Entstehen und Werden der Werke bei Brahms’, Simrock-Jb, i (1928), 42–63

P. Mies: ‘Der kritische Rat der Freunde und die Veröffentlichung der Werke bei Brahms’, Simrock-Jb, ii (1929), 65–83

H. Schenker, ed.: Johannes Brahms: Oktaven und Quinten u. a. aus dem Nachlass (Vienna, 1933; Eng. trans., ed. P. Mast, Music Forum, v, 1980, pp.1–196)

S. Kross: ‘Brahmsiana: der Nachlass der Schwestern Völckers’, Mf, xvii (1964), 110–51

P. Dedel: Johannes Brahms: a Guide to his Autograph in Facsimile (Ann Arbor, 1978)

Piano Quartet no.2, A, op.26: Patrimonia, liii (Berlin, 1993)

German Requiem, op.45: Patrimonia, lxxx (Berlin, 1994) [Stichvorlage of pf score]

32 Stichvorlagen von Werken Johannes Brahms’: Patrimonia, cvii (Kiel, 1995)

e: memoirs

K. Groth: ‘Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms’, Die Gegenwart, li (1897), 295–9, 307–10, 327–9; repr. in H. Miesner: Klaus Groth und die Musik (Heide, 1933)

A. Dietrich: Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms in Briefen besonders aus seiner Jugendzeit (Leipzig, 1898, 2/1899; Eng. trans., 1899)

J.V. Widmann: Johannes Brahms in Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1898, 3/1910; Eng. trans., 1899); ed. W. Reich (Basle, 1947, rev. 1980 by S. Geisen)

J.V. Widmann: Sizilien und andere Gegenden Italiens: Reisen mit Johannes Brahms (Frauenfeld, 1898, 3/1912)

A. Door: ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Brahms’, Die Musik, ii/3 (1902–3), 216–21

G. Jenner: ‘Brahms als Mensch, Lehrer und Künstler’, Die Musik, ii/3 [no.15] (1902–3), 171–98, 389–403; pubd separately (Marburg, 1905, 2/1930/R); part Eng. trans. in Brahms and his World, ed. W. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 185–204

R. von der Leyen: Johannes Brahms als Mensch und Freund (Düsseldorf, 1905)

G. Henschel: Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms (Boston, 1907/R)

E. Smyth: Impressions that Remained (London, 1919/R, rev. 1923)

G. Ophüls: Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1921/R)

C. Derenburg [I. Eibenschütz]: ‘My Recollections of Brahms’, MT, lxvii (1926), 598–600

H. Schenker: ‘Erinnerungen an Brahms’, Deutsche Zeitschrift, xlvi (1932–3), 475–82

R. Fellinger: Klänge um Brahms: Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1933, enlarged 1997 by I. Fellinger)

H. Miesner, ed.: Klaus Groth und die Musik: Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms (Heide, 1933)

M. Graf: ‘Recollections of Johannes Brahms’, Legend of a Musical City (New York, 1945/R), 97–114

E. Rudorff: ‘Johannes Brahms: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen’, SMz, xcvii (1957), 81–6, 139–45, 182–7

H. von Beckerath: ‘Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms: Brahms und seine Krefelder Freunde’, Die Heimat: Zeitschrift für niederrheinische Heimatpflege, xxix (1958), 81–93

R. Heuberger: Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms: Tagebuchnotizen aus den Jahren 1875 bis 1897, ed. K. Hofmann (Tutzing, 1971, 2/1976)

K. Hofmann: ‘Brahmsiana der Familie Petersen: Erinnerungen und Briefe’, Brahms-Studien, iii (1979), 69–105

K. Hofmann: Johannes Brahms in den Erinnerungen von Richard Barth: Barths Wirken in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1979)

R. Kahn: ‘Erinnerungen an Brahms’, Brahms-Studien, x (1994), 43–51

f: collections of studies

Brahms-Studien, i–xi (1974–97)

Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983

Brahms-Kongress: Vienna 1983

Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983

Brahms und seine Zeit: Hamburg 1983 [HJbMw, vii (1984)]

R. Pascall, ed.: Brahms [1]: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge, 1983)

M. Musgrave, ed.: Brahms 2: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge, 1987)

Aimez-vous Brahms ‘the progressive’?, Musik-Konzepte, no.65 (1989)

W. Frisch, ed.: Brahms and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1990)

D. Brodbeck, ed.: Brahms Studies, i–ii (Lincoln, NE, 1994–8)

H.-W. Heister, ed.: Johannes Brahms, oder Die Relativierung der ‘absoluten’ Musik (Hamburg, 1997)

Brahms-Kongress: Hamburg 1997

g: life and works, other biographical studies

H. Deiters: Johannes Brahms (Leipzig, 1880–98/R; Eng. trans., 1887)

W. Nagel: Brahms als Nachfolger Beethoven’s (Leipzig, 1892)

P. Spitta: ‘Johannes Brahms’, Zur Musik (Berlin, 1892/R), 385–427; Eng. trans. in R. Grey, ed.: Studies in Music (London, 1901/R), 1–44

H. Reimann: Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1897, rev. 3/1911 by B. Schrader, 6/1922)

W. Hübbe: Brahms in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1902)

R. Barth: Johannes Brahms und seine Musik (Hamburg, 1904)

M. Kalbeck: Johannes Brahms, i (Vienna, 1904, 4/1921/R); ii (Berlin, 1908–9, 3/1921/R); iii/1 (Berlin, 1910, 3/1922/R); iii/2 (Berlin, 1912, 2/1931/R); iv (Berlin, 1914, 2/1915/R)

F. May: The Life of Johannes Brahms (London, 1905, 2/1948/R)

J.A. Fuller-Maitland: Brahms (London, 1911/R)

P. Landormy: Brahms (Paris, 1920, 5/1948)

W. Niemann: Brahms (Berlin, 1920, 15/1933; Eng. trans., 1929/R)

R. Specht: Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werk eines deutschen Meisters (Hellerau, 1928; Eng. trans., 1930)

E. Michelmann: Agathe von Siebold: Johannes Brahms’ Jugendliebe (Stuttgart, 1930)

P. Mies: Johannes Brahms: Werk, Zeit, Mensch (Leipzig, 1930)

A. von Ehrmann: Johannes Brahms: Weg, Werk und Welt (Leipzig, 1933/R)

K. Stephenson, ed.: Johannes Brahms’ Heimatbekenntnis in Briefen an seine Hamburger Verwandten (Hamburg, 1933, enlarged 2/1948)

K. Geiringer: Johannes Brahms: Leben und Schaffen eines deutschen Meisters (Vienna, 1935, enlarged 2/1955; Eng. trans., 1936, enlarged 3/1982 by I. Geiringer)

R. Gerber: Johannes Brahms (Potsdam, 1938)

P. Latham: Brahms (London, 1948)

H. Gál: Johannes Brahms: Werk und Persönlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1961; Eng. trans., 1963/R)

J. Clapham: ‘Dvořák’s Relations with Brahms and Hanslick’, MQ, lvii (1971), 241–54

E. Sams: ‘Brahms and his Clara Themes’, MT, cxii (1971), 432–4

E. Sams: ‘Brahms and his Musical Love-Letters’, MT, cxii (1971), 329–30

P. Weston: ‘“Meine Primadonna”: Mühlfeld’, Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London, 1971), 209–35

B. James: Brahms: a Critical Study (London and New York, 1972)

J. Chissell: Brahms (London, 1977)

B. Jacobson: The Music of Johannes Brahms (London and Rutherford, NJ, 1977)

K. Stephenson: Johannes Brahms und die Familie von Beckerath (Hamburg, 1979)

C. Floros: Brahms und Bruckner: Studien zur musikalischen Exegetik (Wiesbaden, 1980)

I. Fellinger: ‘Johannes Brahms und Richard Mühlfeld’, Brahms-Studien, iv (1981), 77–93

O. Biba: ‘Brahms, Wagner und Parteiungen in Wien: Texte und Beobachtungen’, Musica, xxxvii (1983), 18–22

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms the Ambivalent’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 1–4

R. and K. Hofmann: Johannes Brahms: Zeittafel zu Leben und Werk (Tutzing, 1983)

K. Kropfinger: ‘Wagner und Brahms’, Musica, xxxvii (1983), 11–17

C.M. Schmidt: Johannes Brahms und seine Zeit (Laaber, 1983)

C. Wolff: ‘Brahms, Wagner, and the Problem of Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 7–11

W.G. Zimmermann: Brahms in der Schweiz (Zürich, 1983)

HJbMw, vii (1984) [R. Hofmann: ‘Johannes Brahms im Spiegel der Korrespondenz Clara Schumanns’, 45–58; I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms und die Neudeutsche Schule’, 159–69; R. Pascall: ‘Brahms und die Kleinmeister’, 199–209; O. Biba: ‘Brahms in Wien’, 259–71]

K. Hofmann: Johannes Brahms und Hamburg (Reinbek, 1986)

O. Biba: ‘New Light on the Brahms Nachlass’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 39–47

I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms’s “Way”: a Composer’s Self-view’, ibid., 49–58

M. MacDonald: Brahms (London, 1990)

P.F. Ostwald: ‘Johannes Brahms, Solitary Altruist’, Brahms and his World, ed. W. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 23–35

N. Reich: ‘Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms’, ibid., 37–47

R. and K. Hofmann: Johannes Brahms in Baden-Baden (Karben, 1996)

C. Floros: Johannes Brahms ‘Frei, aber einsam’: ein Leben für eine poetische Musik (Zürich, 1997)

S. Kross: Johannes Brahms: Versuch einer kritischen Dokumentar-Biographie (Bonn, 1997)

J. Swafford: Johannes Brahms (New York, 1997)

M. Musgrave: A Brahms Reader (New Haven, 2000)

h: reception

A. Schubring: ‘Schumanniana Nr.8: Die Schumann’sche Schule, IV: Johannes Brahms’, NZM, lvi (1862), 93–6, 101–04, 109–12, 117–19, 125–8

H. Schenker: ‘Johannes Brahms’, Die Zukunft, xix (1897), 261–5; Eng. trans. in American Brahms Society Newsletter, ix/1 (1991), 1–3

W.F. Apthorp: ‘Brahms’, By the Way (Boston, 1898), ii, 31–43

J. Huneker: ‘The Music of the Future’, Mezzotints in Modern Music (New York, 1899/R), 1–80

M. Graf: ‘Brahms-Studie’, Wagner-Probleme, und andere Studien (Vienna, 1900), 100–08

D.G. Mason: ‘Two Tendencies in Modern Music: Brahms and Tchaikovsky’, Atlantic Monthly, lxxxix (1902), 175–84

A. Schering: ‘Johannes Brahms und seine Stellung in der Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, JbMP 1932, 9–22; repr. in A. Schering: Von grossen Meistern der Musik (Leipzig, 1940), 153–84

G. Adler: ‘Weiheblatt zum 100. Geburtstag des Johannes Brahms: Wirken, Wesen und Stellung’, SMw, xx (1933), 6–27; Eng. trans., MQ, xix (1933), 113–42

H.L. Mencken: ‘Brahms (1833–97)’, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York, 1949), 532–5

A. Schoenberg: ‘Brahms the Progressive’, Style and Idea, ed. D. Newlin (New York, 1950, enlarged 2/1975 by L. Stein), 398–441

I. Fellinger: ‘Das Brahms-Bild der “Allgemeinen Musikalischen Zeitung” (1863 bis 1882)’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikkritik, ed. H. Becker (Regensburg, 1965), 27–54

M. Musgrave: ‘Brahms the Progressive: Another View’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 291–4

M. Musgrave: ‘Schoenberg’s Brahms’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 123–37

W. Frisch: ‘Brahms and Schubring: Musical Criticism and Politics at Mid-Century’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 271–81

A. Horstmann: ‘Die Rezeption der Werke op.1 bis 10 von Johannes Brahms zwischen 1853 und 1860’, HJbMw, vii (1984), 33–44

J.P. Burkholder: ‘Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 75–83

A. Horstmann: Untersuchungen zur Brahms-Rezeption der Jahre 1860 bis 1880 (Hamburg, 1986)

S. Kross: ‘The Establishment of a Brahms Repertoire 1890–1902’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 21–38

M. Musgrave: ‘Brahms and England’, ibid., 1–20

W. Frisch: ‘The “Brahms Fog”: on Analysing Brahmsian Influences at the fin-de-siècle’, Brahms and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 81–99

F. Krummacher: ‘Reception and Analysis: on the Brahms Quartets, op.51, nos.1 and 2’, 19CM, xviii (1994–5), 24–45

H.A. Platt: ‘Jenner versus Wolf: the Critical Reception of Brahms’s Songs’, JM, xiii (1995), 377–403

N. Meurs: Neue Bahnen? Aspekte der Brahms-Rezeption 1853–1868 (Cologne, 1996)

Das ‘Reichs-Brahmsfest’ 1933 in Hamburg: Rekonstruktion und Dokumentation (Hamburg, 1997)

H. Platt: ‘Hugo Wolf and the Reception of Brahms’s Lieder’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 91–111

i: style and analysis

V. Urbantschitsch: ‘Die Entwicklung der Sonatenform bei Brahms’, SMw, xiv (1927), 265–85

I. Fellinger: Über die Dynamik in der Musik von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1961)

A. Mitschka: Der Sonatensatz in den Werken von Johannes Brahms (Gütersloh, 1961)

W.F. Korte: Bruckner und Brahms: die spätromantische Lösung der autonomen Konzeption (Tutzing, 1963)

H. Truscott: ‘Brahms and Sonata Style’, MR, xxv (1964), 186–201

W. Czesla: Studien zum Finale in der Kammermusik von Johannes Brahms (diss., U. of Bonn, 1966)

J. Wetschky: Die Kanontechnik in der Instrumentalmusik von Johannes Brahms (Regensburg, 1967)

K. Stahmer: Musikalische Formung in soziologischem Bezug, dargestellt an der instrumentalen Kammermusik von Johannes Brahms (diss., U. of Kiel, 1968)

R. Pascall: Formal Principles in the Music of Brahms (diss., U. of Oxford, 1972)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Zur Problemgeschichte des Komponierens’, Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974), 40–73; Eng. trans. (Berkeley, 1980), 40–78

R. Pascall: ‘Some Special Uses of Sonata Form by Brahms’, Soundings, iv (1974), 58–63

J. Webster: ‘Schubert’s Sonata Form and Brahms’s First Maturity’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 18–35; iii (1979–80), 52–71

C. Rosen: ‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 87–100

J. Dunsby: Structural Ambiguity in Brahms: Analytical Approaches to Four Works (Ann Arbor, 1981) [opp.24, 60, 98, 119/1]

Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983 [D. Lewin: ‘Brahms, his Past, and Modes of Music Theory’, 13–27; J. Webster: ‘The General and the Particular in Brahms’s Later Sonata Forms’, 49–78; E.R. Sisman: ‘Brahms’s Slow Movements: Reinventing the “Closed” Forms’, 79–103; C. Rosen: ‘Brahms the Subversive’, 105–19; E.T. Cone: ‘Harmonic Congruence in Brahms’, 165–88; J. Rahn: ‘D-Light Reflecting: the Nature of Comparison’, 399–404; S. Kross: ‘Thematic Structure and Formal Processes in Brahms’s Sonata Movements’, 423–43]

R. Brinkmann: ‘Anhand von Reprisen’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 107–20

P. Gülke: ‘Sagen und Schweigen bei Brahms’, ibid., 12–32

C. Floros: ‘Brahms: der zweite Beethoven?’, HJbMw, vii (1984), 235–58

W. Frisch: Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley, 1984)

M. Musgrave: The Music of Brahms (London, 1985)

M. Rohn: Die Coda bei Johannes Brahms (Hamburg, 1986)

C. Wintle: ‘The “Sceptred Pall”: Brahms’s Progressive Harmony’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 197–222

P. Gülke: Brahms, Bruckner: zwei Studien (Kassel, 1989)

K.R. Hull: Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the Instrumental Music of Johannes Brahms (diss., Princeton U., 1989)

J. Thalmann: Untersuchungen zum Frühwerk von Johannes Brahms: harmonische Archaismen und die Bedingungen ihrer Entstehung (Kassel, 1989)

R. Jordan and E. Kafalenos: ‘The Double Trajectory: Ambiguity in Brahms and Henry James’, 19CM, xiii (1989–90), 129–44

D. Beveridge: ‘Non-Traditional Functions of the Development Section in Sonata Forms by Brahms’, MR, li (1990), 25–35

E. Sisman: ‘Brahms and the Variation Canon’, 19CM, xiv (1990–91), 132–53

K. Korsyn: ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, MAn, x (1991), 3–72

R. Laudon: ‘The Debate about Consecutive Fifths: a Context for Brahms’s Manuscript Oktaven und Quinten’, ML, lxxiii (1992), 48–61

W. Mahrt: ‘Brahms’s Distortions of Classic Conventions’, Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. W. Allanbrook, J. Levy and W.P. Mahrt (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 75–112

P. Smith: ‘Liquidation, Augmentation, and Brahms’s Recapitulatory Overlaps’, 19CM, xvii (1993–4), 237–61

D. Brodbeck: ‘The Brahms-Joachim Counterpoint Exchange, or Robert, Clara, and “the Best Harmony between Jos. and Joh.”’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 30–80

J. Dubiel: ‘Contradictory Criteria in a Work of Brahms’, ibid., 81–110

P. Smith: ‘Brahms and Schenker: a Mutual Response to Sonata Form’, Music Theory Spectrum, xvi (1994), 77–103

J. Bellman: ‘Aus alten Märchen: the Chivalric Style of Schumann and Brahms’, JM, xiii (1995), 117–35

D. Parmer: ‘Brahms, Song Quotation, and Secret Programs’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 161–90

A.B. Scott: ‘Thematic Transmutation in the Music of Brahms: a Matter of Musical Alchemy?’, JMR, xv (1995–6), 177–206

P. Smith: ‘Brahms and Motivic 6/3 Chords’, MAn, xvi (1997), 175–217

L. Bolstein, ed.: The Compleat Brahms (New York, 1999)

j: keyboard music

W. Niemann: ‘Johannes Brahms und die neuere Klaviermusik’, Die Musik, xii/1 (1912–13), 38–45

W. Nagel: Die Klaviersonaten von Joh. Brahms: technisch-ästhetische Analysen (Stuttgart, 1915)

H. Schenker: ‘Brahms: Variationen und Fuge über ein Thema von Händel, op.24’, Der Tonwille, nos.8–9 (1924), 3–46

W. Siegmund-Schultze: ‘Chopin und Brahms’, The Works of Frederic Chopin: Warsaw 1960, 388–95

F.E. Kirby: ‘Brahms and the Piano Sonata’, Paul A. Pisk: Essays in His Honor, ed. J. Glowacki (Austin, 1966), 163–80

J.A. Bernstein: ‘An Autograph of the Brahms “Handel Variations”’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 272–81

S. Testa: ‘A Holograph of Johannes Brahms’s Fugue in A-flat Minor for Organ’, CMc, no.19 (1975), 89–102

R. Pascall: ‘Unknown Gavottes by Brahms’, ML, lvii (1976), 404–11

E.T. Cone: ‘Three Ways of Reading a Detective Story – or a Brahms Intermezzo’, Georgia Review, xxxi (1977), 554–74; repr. in idem: Music: a View from Delft: Selected Essays, ed. R.P. Morgan (Chicago, 1989), 77–93

B. Newbould: ‘A New Analysis of Brahms’s Intermezzo in B minor, op.119 no.1’, MR, xxxviii (1977), 33–43

D. Matthews: Brahms Piano Music (London, 1978)

D. Lewin: ‘On Harmony and Meter in Brahms’s Op.76, No.8’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 261–5

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s Lieder ohne Worte: the “Poetic” Andantes of the Piano Sonatas’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 345–78

H. Danuser: ‘Aspekte einer Hommage-Komposition: zu Brahms’ Schumann-Variationen op.9’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 91–106

J. Dunsby: ‘The Multi-Piece in Brahms: Fantasien op.116’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 167–89

O. Neighbour: ‘Brahms and Schumann: Two Opus Nines and Beyond’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 266–70

C. Cai: Brahms’ Short, Late Piano Pieces, Opus Numbers 116–119: a Source Study, an Analysis and Performance Practice (diss., Boston U., 1986)

D. Kraus: Johannes Brahms als Klavierkomponist (Wilhelmshaven, 1986; Eng. trans., 1988)

V.W. Goertzen: The Piano Transcriptions of Johannes Brahms (diss., U. of Illinois, 1987)

G. Hartmann: ‘Zur Orgelfuge in as-Moll von Johannes Brahms’, Brahms-Studien, vii (1987), 9–19

R. Snarrenberg: ‘The Play of différence: Brahms’s Intermezzo, op.118, no.2’, In Theory Only, x/3 (1987–8), 1–25

A. Cadwallader: ‘Echoes and Recollections: Brahms’s Op.76, No.6’, Theory and Practice, xiii (1988), 65–78

A. Cadwallader: ‘Foreground Motivic Ambiguity: its Clarification at Middleground Levels in Selected Late Piano Pieces of Johannes Brahms’, MAn, vii (1988), 59–91

D. Brodeck: ‘Primo Schubert, Secondo Schumann: Brahms' Four-Hand Waltzes, Op.39’, JM, vii (1989), 58–80

W. Horne: ‘Brahms’s Düsseldorf Suite Study and his Intermezzo, opus 116, no.2’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 249–83

W. Frisch: ‘Brahms: from Classical to Modern’, Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, ed. R.L. Todd (New York, 1990), 316–54

I. Braus: ‘An Unwritten Metrical Modulation in Brahms’s Intermezzo in E minor, op.119, no.2’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 161–9

W. Horne: ‘Brahms’s op.10 Ballades and his Blätter aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers’, JM, xv (1997), 98–115

D. Parmer: ‘Brahms and the Poetic Motto: a Hermeneutic Aid?’, JM, xv (1997), 353–89

k: chamber music

H.C. Colles: The Chamber Music of Brahms (London, 1933/R)

D.G. Mason: The Chamber Music of Brahms (New York, 1933/R)

F. Brand: Das Wesen der Kammermusik von Brahms (Berlin, 1937)

E. Bücken: ‘Ein neuaufgefundenes Jugendwerk von Johannes Brahms’, Die Musik, xxx (1937–8), 22–5

F. Brand: ‘Das neue Brahms-Trio’, Die Musik, xxxi (1938–9), 321–7

D.F. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, [vii]: Chamber Music, ed. H.J. Foss (London, 1944/R) [opp.25, 26, 60]

D.F. Tovey: Essays and Lectures on Music, ed. H.J. Foss (London, 1949), 220–70

W.G. Hill: ‘Brahms’ opus 51: a Diptych’, MR, xiii (1952), 110–24

H.F. Redlich: ‘Bruckner and Brahms Quintets in F’, ML, xxxvi (1955), 253–8

C.M. Schmidt: Verfahren der motivisch-thematischen Vermittlung in der Musik von Johannes Brahms, dargestellt an der Klarinettensonate f-moll, Op.120, 1 (Munich, 1971)

I. Keys: Brahms Chamber Music (London, 1974)

R. Pascall: ‘Ruminations on Brahms’s Chamber Music’, MT, cxvi (1975), 697–9

R. Häfner: Johannes Brahms: Klarinettenquintett, Meisterwerke der Musik, xiv (Munich, 1978)

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Brahms und die Tradition der Kammermusik’, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980), 210–17; Eng. trans. (Berkeley, 1989), 252–62

E. Herttrich: ‘Johannes Brahms: Klaviertrio H-dur Op.8, Frühfassung und Spätfassung: ein analytischer Vergleich’, Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. M. Bente (Munich, 1980), 218–36

J. Webster: ‘The C sharp minor Version of Brahms’s op.60’, MT, cxxi (1980), 89–93

R. Wilke: Brahms, Reger, Schönberg: Streichquartette (Hamburg, 1980)

A. Forte: ‘Motivic Design and Structural Levels in the First Movement of Brahms’s String Quartet in C minor’, MQ, lxix (1983), 471–502; repr. in Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 165–96

N. Meurs: ‘Das verstellte Frühwerk: zum H-dur-Trio Op.8 von Johannes Brahms’, Musica, xxxvii (1983), 34–9

C. Wolff: ‘Von der Quellenkritik zur musikalischen Analysen: Beobachtungen am Klavierquartett A-Dur Op.26 von Johannes Brahms’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 150–65

M. Musgrave and R. Pascall: ‘The String Quartets op.51, no.1 in C minor and no.2 in A minor: a Preface’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 137–43

A. Whittall: ‘Two of a Kind? Brahms’s op.51 Finales’, ibid., 145–64

G.S. Bozarth: ‘“Leider nicht von Johannes Brahms”: the Authenticity of the Brahms D major Cello Sonata’, The Strad, xcix (1988), 146–50

R.C. Graybill: ‘Harmonic Circularity in Brahms’s F major Cello Sonata: an Alternative to Schenker’s Reading in Free Composition’, Music Theory Spectrum, x (1988), 43–55

F. Zaunschirm: Der frühe und der späte Brahms (Hamburg, 1988)

M.A. Notley: ‘Brahms’s Cello Sonata in F major and its Genesis: a Study in Half-Step Relations’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 139–60

K. Korsyn: ‘Directional Tonality and Intertextuality: Brahms’s Quintet op.88 and Chopin’s Ballade op.38’, The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. W. Kinderman and H.M. Krebs (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 45–83

C. Lawson: Brahms: Clarinet Quintet (Cambridge, 1998)

M.A. Notley: ‘Discourse and Allusion: the Chamber Music of Brahms’, Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, ed. S.E. Hefling (New York and London, 1998), 242–86

P. Smith: ‘Brahms and the Neapolitan Complex: II, VI, and their Multiple Functions in the First Movement of the F-minor Clarinet Sonata’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 169–208

l: orchestral music, concertos

G. Jenner: ‘Zur Entstehung des d-moll Klavierkonzertes Op.15 von Johannes Brahms’, Die Musik, xii/1 (1912–13), 32–7

W. Vetter: ‘Der erste Satz von Brahms’ e-moll Symphonie: ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis moderner Symphonik’, Die Musik, xiii/3 (1913–14), 3–15, 83–92, 131–45

A. Orel: ‘Skizzen zu Johannes Brahms’ Haydn-Variationen’, ZMw, v (1922–3), 296–315

D.F. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, i: Symphonies (London, 1935/R) [opp.11, 16, 68, 73, 90, 98]; ii: Symphonies (II), Variations and Orchestral Polyphony (1935/R) [opp.56a, 80, 81]; iii: Concertos (1936/R) [opp.15, 77, 83, 102]; vi: Supplementary Essays (1939/R) [op.81]

J. Harrison: Brahms and his Four Symphonies (London, 1939/R)

A. Forte: ‘The Structural Origin of Exact Tempi in the Brahms-Haydn Variations’, MR, xviii (1957), 138–49

C. Dahlhaus: Johannes Brahms: Klavierkonzert Nr.1 d-moll, Op.15, Meisterwerke der Musik, iii (Munich, 1965)

J. Horton: Brahms Orchestral Music (London, 1968)

L. Finscher: ‘Kampf mit der Tradition: Johannes Brahms’, Die Welt der Symphonie, ed. U. von Rauchhaupt (Hamburg and Brunswick, 1972; Eng. trans., 1973), 165–74

D. Epstein: ‘Ambiguity in Brahms’s Second Symphony’, Beyond Orpheus (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 162–75

G. Weiss-Aigner: Johannes Brahms: Violinkonzert D-dur, Meisterwerke der Musik, xviii (Munich, 1979)

R. Pascall: ‘Brahms’s First Symphony Slow Movement: the Initial Performing Version’, MT, cxxii (1981), 664–7

R. Bailey: ‘Musical Language and Structure in the Third Symphony’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 405–21

A.P. Brown: ‘Brahms’ Third Symphony and the New German School’, JM, ii (1983), 434–52

F. Haas: ‘Die Erstfassung des langsamen Satzes der ersten Sinfonie von Johannes Brahms’, Mf, xxxvi (1983), 200–11

S. Kross: ‘Johannes Brahms: der Sinfoniker’, Brahms-Studien, v (1983), 65–89; Eng. trans. in Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 125–45

M.L. McCorkle: ‘The Role of Trial Performances for Brahms’s Orchestral and Large Choral Works: Sources and Circumstances’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 295–328

M. Musgrave: ‘Brahms’s First Symphony: Thematic Coherence and its Secret Origin’, MAn, ii (1983), 117–33

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘The Retreat from Dynamism: a Study of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 147–65

C. Schachter: ‘The First Movement of Brahms’s Second Symphony: the Opening Theme and its Consequences’, MAn, ii (1983), 55–68

B. Schwarz: ‘Joseph Joachim and the Genesis of Brahms’s Violin Concerto’, MQ, lxix (1983), 503–26

C. Spies: ‘“Form” and the Tragic Overture: an Adjuration’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 391–8

W. Steinbeck: ‘Liedthematik und symphonischer Prozess: zum ersten Satz der 2. Symphonie’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 166–82

J. Webster: ‘Brahms’s Tragic Overture: the Form of the Tragedy’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 99–124

C. Reynolds: ‘A Choral Symphony by Brahms?’, 19CM, ix (1985–6), 3–25

L. Litterick: ‘Brahms the Indecisive: Notes on the First Movement of the Fourth Symphony’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 223–35

R. Pascall: ‘Genre and the Finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony’, MAn, viii (1989), 233–45

R. Knapp: ‘The Finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony: the Tale of the Subject’, 19CM, xiii (1989–90), 3–17

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s First Piano Concerto op.15: Genesis and Meaning’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross, ed. R. Emans and M. Wendt (Bonn, 1990), 211–47

I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms und die Gattung des Instrumentalkonzerts’, ibid., 201–9

R. Brinkmann: Johannes Brahms, die zweite Symphonie: späte Idylle, Musik-Konzepte, no.70 (1990; Eng. trans., 1995, as Late Idyll: the Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms)

D. Brodbeck: ‘Brahms, the Third Symphony, and the New German School’, Brahms and his World, ed. W. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 65–80

H. Kretzschmar, trans. S. Gillespie: ‘The Brahms Symphonies’, Brahms and his World, ed. W. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 123–43; Ger. orig. in H. Kretzschmar: Führer durch den Konzertsaal, i (Leipzig, 1887, rev. 7/1932 by F. Noack and H. Botstiber)

H. Weber: ‘Melancholia: Versuch über Brahms’ Vierte’, Neue Musik und Tradition: Festschrift Rudolf Stephan, ed. J. Kuckertz and others (Laaber, 1990), 281–95

M. Mäckelmann: Johannes Brahms: IV. Symphonie e-moll, Op.98, Meisterwerke der Musik, lvi (Munich, 1991)

R. Pascall: Brahms’s First Symphony Andante, the Initial Performing Version: Commentary and Realisation (Nottingham, 1992)

R. Fink: ‘Desire, Repression, & Brahms’s First Symphony’, Repercussions, ii/1 (1993), 75–103

S. McClary: ‘Narrative Agendas in “Absolute” Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R.A. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 326–44

U. Mahlert: Johannes Brahms: Klavierkonzert B-dur Op.83, Meisterwerke der Musik, lxiii (Munich, 1994)

G. Schubert: ‘Themes and Double Themes: the Problem of the Symphonic in Brahms’, 19CM, xviii (1994–5), 10–23

D. Beller-McKenna: ‘Reconsidering the Identity of an Orchestral Sketch by Brahms’, JM, xiii (1995), 508–37

M.E. Bonds: ‘The Ideology of Genre: Brahms’s First Symphony’, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 138–74

W. Frisch: Brahms: the Four Symphonies (New York, 1996)

D. Brodbeck: Brahms: Symphony no.1 (Cambridge, 1997)

D. Brodbeck: ‘Brahms’, The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D.K. Holoman (New York and London, 1997), 224–72

R. Knapp: Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (Stuyvesant, NY, 1997)

M. Notley: ‘Volksconcerte in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony’, JAMS, l (1997), 421–53

W. Frisch: ‘“Echt symphonisch”: on the Historical Context of Brahms’s Symphonies’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 113–33

K. Hull: ‘Allusive Irony in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony’, ibid., 135–68

K. Hull, ed.: Johannes Brahms Symphony No.4 in E minor, op.98, Norton Critical Scores (New York, 2000)

m: choral music

H. von Herzogenberg: ‘Johannes Brahms in seinem Verhältnis zur evangelischen Kirchenmusik’, Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, ii (1897), 68–71

G. Ophüls: ‘Die fünfte Strophe des “Gesanges der Parzen” von Goethe in der gleichnamigen Kantate, Op.89, von Johannes Brahms’, ZfM, Jg.92 (1925), 8–13

D.F. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, v: Vocal Music (London, 1937/R) [opp.45, 53, 54]

S. Drinker: Brahms and his Women’s Choruses (Merion, PA, 1952)

S. Kross: Die Chorwerke von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1958, 2/1963)

W.S. Newman: ‘A “Basic Motive” in Brahms’s German Requiem’, MR, xxiv (1963), 190–94

A. Liebe: ‘Zur “Rhapsodie” aus Goethes “Harzreise im Winter”’, Musa – mens – musici: im Gedenken an Walther Vetter (Leipzig, 1969), 233–42

K. Blum: Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem von Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1971)

W. Berry: ‘Text and Music in the Alto Rhapsody’, JMT, xxvii (1983), 239–53

A. Forte: ‘Motive and Rhythmic Contour in the Alto Rhapsody’, JMT, xxvii (1983), 255–71

A.S. Garlington: ‘Harzreise als Herzreise: Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody’, MQ, lxix (1983), 527–42

V.L. Hancock: Brahms’s Choral Compositions and his Library of Early Music (Ann Arbor, 1983)

F. Krummacher: ‘Symphonie und Motette: Überlegungen zum “Deutschen Requiem”’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 183–200

A. Nowak: ‘“Ein deutsches Requiem” im Traditionszusammenhang’, ibid., 201–9

H.M. Beuerle: Johannes Brahms: Untersuchungen zu den A-cappella-Kompositionen (Hamburg, 1987)

V. Hancock: ‘Brahms’s Links with German Renaissance Music: a Discussion of Selected Choral Works’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 95–110

R. Pascall: ‘Brahms’s Missa canonica and its Recomposition in his Motet “Warum” op.74 no.1’, ibid., 111–36

C. Debryn: ‘Kolorit und Struktur: Bachs Concerto O ewiges Feuer (bwv34) in Brahms’ Bearbeitung’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross, ed. R. Emans and M. Wendt (Bonn, 1990), 249–71

J. Daverio: ‘The Wechsel der Töne in Brahms’s Schicksalslied’, JAMS, xlvi (1993), 84–113

D. Beller-McKenna: Johannes Brahms’s Later Settings of Biblical Texts, 1877–1896 (diss., Harvard U., 1994)

M. Ingraham: Brahms’s ‘Rinaldo’ op.50: a Structural and Contextual Study (diss., U. of Nottingham, 1994)

F. Krummacher: ‘Eine meiner politischen Betrachtungen über dies Jahr: eschatologische Visionen im Triumphlied von Brahms’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte: eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, ed. A. Laubenthal and K. Kusan-Windeh (Kassel, 1995), 635–54

D. Beller-McKenna: ‘The Great Warum?: Job, Christ, and Bach in a Brahms Motet’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 231–51

M. Musgrave: Brahms: A German Requiem (Cambridge, 1996)

H.C. Stekel: Sehnsucht und Distanz: theologische Aspekte in den wortgebundenen religiösen Kompositionen von Johannes Brahms (Frankfurt, 1997)

D. Beller-McKenna: ‘Brahms’s Motet “Es ist das Heil uns kommen her” and the “Innermost Essence of Music”’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 31–61

C. Hess: ‘“Als wahres volles Menschenbild”: Brahms’s Rinaldo and Autobiographical Allusion’, ibid., 63–89

n: lieder, solo vocal ensemble

G. Ophüls: Brahms-Texte (Berlin, 1898, 3/1923); ed. K. Wachinger (Munich, 1983)

H. Riemann: ‘Die Taktfreiheiten in Brahms’ Liedern’, Die Musik, xii/1 (1912–13), 10–21

M. Friedlaender: Brahms’ Lieder (Berlin, 1922; Eng. trans., 1928/R)

P. Mies: Stilmomente und Ausdrucksstilformen im Brahms’schen Lied (Leipzig, 1923)

R. Gerber: ‘Formprobleme im Brahmsschen Lied’, JbMP 1932, 23–42

L. Misch: ‘Kontrapunkt und Imitation im Brahmsschen Lied’, Mf, xi (1958), 155–60

K. Giebeler: Die Lieder von Johannes Brahms: ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (diss., U. of Münster, 1959)

A. Clarkson and E. Laufer: ‘Analysis Symposium: Brahms Op.105/1’, JMT, xv (1971), 2–57

M. Harrison: The Lieder of Brahms (London, 1972)

E. Sams: Brahms Songs (London, 1972)

C. Jacobsen: Das Verhältnis von Sprache und Musik in ausgewählten Liedern von Johannes Brahms, dargestellt an Parallelvertonungen (Hamburg, 1975)

T. Boyer: ‘Brahms as Count Peter of Provence: a Psychosexual Interpretation of the Magelone Poetry’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 262–86

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s Duets for Soprano and Alto, op.61: a Study in Chronology and Compositional Process’, SMH, xxv (1983), 191–210

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms's “Liederjahr of 1868”’, MR, xliv (1983), 208–22

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Synthesizing Word and Tone: Brahms’s Setting of Hebbel’s “Vorüber”’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 77–98

I. Fellinger: ‘Cyclic Tendencies in Brahms’s Song Collections’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 379–88

L. Finscher: ‘Brahms’s Early Songs: Poetry versus Music’, ibid., 331–44

L. Finscher: ‘Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier’, ‘Lieder für verschiedene Volkalensembles’, Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werk, ed. C. Jacobsen (Wiesbaden, 1983), 139–43, 153–9

C.M. Schmidt: ‘Überlegungen zur Liedanalyse bei Brahms’ “Die Mainacht” Op.43, 2’, Brahms-Analysen: Kiel 1983, 47–59

H. Schwab: ‘Brahms’ Kompositionen für zwei Singstimmen mit Pianofortebegleitung’, ibid., 60–80

A. Whittall: ‘The Vier ernste Gesänge Op.121: Enrichment and Uniformity’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 191–207

I. Braus: ‘Brahms’s Liebe und Frühling II, Op.3, No.3: a New Path to the Artwork of the Future?’, 19CM, x (1986–7), 135–56

I. Braus: ‘Poetic-Musical Rhetoric in Brahms’s Auf dem Kirchhofe, Op.105, No.4’, Theory and Practice, xiii (1988), 15–30

D. Brodeck: ‘Compatibility, Coherence, and Closure in Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes’, Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. E. Narmour and R.A. Solie (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988), 411–37

H. Siegel and A. Maisel, eds.: ‘Heinrich Schenker: Graphic Analysis of Brahms’s Auf dem Kirchhofe, Op.105, No.4’, Theory and Practice, xiii (1988), 1–14

J. Daverio: ‘Brahms’s Magelone Romanzen and the ‘‘Romantic Imperative”’, JM, vii (1989), 343–65

P. Jost: ‘Brahms und die romantische Ironie: zu den “Romanzen aus L. Tieck’s Magelone” Op.33’, AMw, xlvii (1990), 27–61

M.-M. Langner: Brahms und seine schleswig-holsteinischen Dichter (Heide, 1990)

R.E. Atlas: ‘Text and Musical Gesture in Brahms’s Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano’, JM, x (1992), 231–60

P. Jost, ed.: Brahms als Liedkomponist (Stuttgart, 1992)

H.A. Platt: ‘Unrequited Love and Unrealized Dominants’, Intégral, vii (1993), 119–48

D. Beller-McKenna: ‘Brahms on Schopenhauer: the Vier ernste Gesänge, Op.121, and Late Nineteenth-Century Pessimism’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 170–88

H.A. Platt: ‘Dramatic Turning Points in Brahms Lieder’, Indiana Theory Review, xv/1 (1994), 69–104

L. Stark: A Guide to the Solo Songs of Johannes Brahms (Bloomington, IN, 1995)

J. Daverio: ‘The Song Cycle: Journeys through a Romantic Landscape’, German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Hallmark (New York and London, 1996), 279–312

V. Hancock: ‘Johannes Brahms: Volkslied/Kunstlied’, ibid., 119–52

L. Stark: Brahms’s Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano (Bloomington, IN, 1998)

E. Sams: The Songs of Johannes Brahms (New Haven and London, 2000)

o: brahms’s library, historical interests and editorial activities

A. Orel: ‘Johannes Brahms’ Musikbibliothek’, Simrock-Jb, iii (1930–34), 18–47

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms as a Reader and Collector’, MQ, xix (1933), 158–68

I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms und die Musik vergangener Epochen’, Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik, ed. W. Wiora (Regensburg, 1969), 147–63

S. Helms: ‘Johannes Brahms und Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb 1971, 13–81

I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms zur Edition Chopinscher Klavierwerke’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 110–16

K. Geiringer: ‘Schumanniana in der Bibliothek von Johannes Brahms’, Convivium musicorum: Festschrift Wolfgang Boetticher, ed. H. Hüschen and D.-R. Moser (Berlin, 1974), 79–82

K. Hofmann: Die Bibliothek von Johannes Brahms: Bücher- und Musikalienverzeichnis (Hamburg, 1974)

Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983 [V. Hancock: ‘Brahms and Early Music: Evidence from his Library and his Choral Compositions’, 29–48; D. Brodbeck: ‘Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Schubert Ländler: an Essay in Criticism’, 229–50; L.C. Roesner: ‘Brahms’s Editions of Schumann’, 251–82]

I. Fellinger: ‘Brahms’s View of Mozart’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 41–57; enlarged Ger. trans. ‘Brahms und Mozart’, Brahms-Studien, v (1983), 141–68

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms as a Musicologist’, MQ, lxix (1983), 463–70

V. Hancock: ‘The Growth of Brahms’s Interest in Early Choral Music, and its Effect on his own Choral Compositions’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 27–40

R. Pascall: ‘Brahms and Schubert’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 286–91

V. Hancock: ‘Brahms’s Performances of Early Choral Music’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 125–41

J. Daverio: ‘From “Concertante Rondo” to “Lyric Sonata”: a Commentary on Brahms’s Reception of Mozart’, Brahms Studies, i, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 111–38

D. Brodbeck: ‘Brahms’s Mendelssohn’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 209–31

W. Frisch: ‘Bach, Brahms, and the Emergence of Musical Modernism’, Bach Perspectives, iii (1998), 109–31

p: cultural world and political life

K. Geiringer: ‘Brahms’ zweites “Schatzkästlein des jungen Kreisler”’, ZfM, Jg.100 (1933), 443–6

P. Gay: ‘Aimez-vous Brahms?: on Polarities in Modernism’, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978), 231–56

S. Kross: ‘Brahms and E.T.A. Hoffmann’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 193–200

K. Mayer-Pasinski: Max Klingers Brahmsphantasie (Frankfurt, 1982)

M. Musgrave: ‘The Cultural World of Brahms’, Brahms [1], ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 1–26

L. Botstein: ‘Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna’, Brahms and his World, ed. W. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 3–22

L. Botstein: ‘Brahms and Nineteenth-Century Painting’, 19CM, xiv (1990–91), 154–68

M.A. Notley: ‘Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna’, 19CM, xvii (1993–4), 107–23

T.K. Nelson: ‘Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie and the Cultural Politics of Absolute Music’, Art History, xix (1996), 25–43

q: folk music

M. Friedlaender, ed.: Neue Volkslieder von Brahms (Berlin, 1926)

W. Wiora: Die rheinisch-bergischen Melodien bei Zuccalmaglio und Brahms: alte Liedweisen in romantischer Färbung (Bad Godesberg, 1953)

W. Morik: Johannes Brahms und sein Verhältnis zum deutschen Volkslied (Tutzing, 1965)

S. Helms: Die Melodiebildung in den Liedern von Johannes Brahms und ihr Verhältnis zu Volksliedern und volkstümlichen Weisen (Berlin, 1968)

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Johannes Brahms und die Liedersammlungen von David Gregor Corner, Karl Severin Meister und Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold’, Mf, xxxvi (1983), 177–99

H. Becker: ‘Das volkstümliche Idiom in Brahmsens Kammermusik’, HJbMw, vii (1984), 87–99

J. Bellman: ‘Brahms’, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston, 1993), 201–13

G.S. Bozarth: ‘The Origin of Brahms’s In stiller Nacht’, Notes, liii (1996–7), 363–80

r: performing practice

W. Blume: Brahms in der Meininger Tradition: seine Sinfonien und Haydn-Variationen in der Bezeichnung von Fritz Steinbach (Stuttgart, 1933)

D. Epstein: ‘Brahms and the Mechanisms of Motion: the Composition of Performance’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 191–226

J. Finson: ‘Performing Practice in the Late Nineteenth Century, with Special Reference to the Music of Brahms’, MQ, lxx (1984), 457–75

W. Crutchfield: ‘Brahms, by those who knew him’, Opus [Harrisburg, PA], ii/5 (1985–6), 12–21, 60

C. Cai: ‘Brahms’s Pianos and the Performance of his Late Piano Works’, Performance Practice Review, ii (1989), 58–72

R. Pascall: Playing Brahms: a Study in 19th-Century Performance Practice (Nottingham, 1991)

N. Del Mar: Conducting Brahms (Oxford, 1993)

J. Berger and C. Nichols: ‘Brahms at the Piano: an Analysis of Data from the Brahms Cylinder’, Leonardo Music Journal, iv (1994), 23–30

B.D. Sherman: ‘How Authentic is Early Music Brahms?’, Early Music America, iii/1 (1997), 33–9

B.D. Sherman: ‘Tempos and Proportions in Brahms: Period Evidence’, EMc, xxv (1997), 462–77

G.S. Bozarth and S.H. Brady: ‘Johannes Brahms and his Pianos’, Piano Technicians Journal, xlii/7 (2000), 42–55

(1) Aubrey (Harold) Brain

s: editorial issues

R. Pascall: ‘Brahms and the Definitive Text’, Brahms [1] (Cambridge, 1983), 59–75

R. Pascall: ‘The Publication of Brahms’s Third Symphony: a Crisis in Dissemination’, Brahms Studies: Washington DC 1983, 283–94

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s Posthumous Compositions and Arrangements: Editorial Problems and Questions of Authenticity’, Brahms 2, ed. M. Musgrave (Cambridge, 1987), 59–94

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Brahms’s Organ Music: a New Critical Edition’, American Organist, xxii/6 (1988), 50–59

G.S. Bozarth: ‘Editing Brahms’s Music’, Brahms Studies, ii, ed. D. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 1–30

Braille notation

(Ger. Blindennotenschrift; Punktmusikschrift).

1. General.

Louis Braille (1809–52), blind from the age of three, became a pupil at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris in 1819. From 1828 to the time of his death he held a professorship there. He was also organist of a Paris church. In 1829 he devised a tactile system of expressing both music notation and literary text by means of dots embossed into thick, stiff paper, to be deciphered by touch.

The originator of the idea of embossed dots was a French officer, Charles Barbier, who between 1819 and 1825 had invented an ingenious embossed-dot system whereby speech-sounds could be recorded. He also invented a frame and embossing awl which enabled blind people to write in that system; but although his method undoubtedly introduced (in rudimentary form) certain new and scientific principles destined to be the basis of what is now known as ‘braille’, his embossed characters were elaborate and difficult to decipher and understand. Each sign was derived from a pattern of twelve dots arranged in two vertical columns of six, and the outline was too extended to range itself under the fingertip. Louis Braille overcame this disadvantage by reducing the cell to two columns of three dots. By applying the method to musical notation as well he became the first to render it possible for blind people to write music for themselves. The dots may conveniently be numbered in two columns, counting downwards: 1–2–3 on the left, 4–5–6 on the right.

Braille did not live to see the general acceptance of the principles of his system; indeed his method was not officially adopted at the Paris Institution until about the time of his death, after which its adoption in Europe and America followed rapidly. Meanwhile John Alston (1777–1846) issued a Musical Catechism with Tunes for the Blind (Glasgow, 1838), followed by a Selection of Scottish Songs (Glasgow, 1844).

In 1868 the British and Foreign Blind Association, London (now Royal National Institute for the Blind), was founded by Dr T.R. Armitage (1824–91), himself blind, who, with his blind colleagues on the council, set to work to investigate the various methods of embossing reading material for blind people, ultimately deciding to adopt the Braille system. In 1871 a short ‘key’ to Braille music notation was published by the British and Foreign Blind Association, said to be the first published explanation in any language.

2. The system.

At the outset it is important to mention that whereas printed music is graphical (pictorial), braille music notation is linear, with both the note and its value represented by a series of dots. The Braille method is founded on ten basic signs derived from the four upper dots of the complete cluster of six, as shown at the top of Table 1. Seven of these are assigned the pitch names C–B with the value of quavers. The addition of dot no.6 to any of these renders it a crotchet in value, the addition of dot no.3 a minim, and the addition of both dots a semibreve. The corresponding rests are also shown in Table 1. While only four time values of notes and rests are represented, each sign also stands for a note, or rest, of 1/16th its original duration (ex.1). A moment’s reflection will suffice to convince any musician that the possibility of ambiguity is generally remote. However, where such ambiguity arises there are ways of distinguishing long and short note values.

Pitch is indicated by seven ‘octave signs’, which represent the particular octave in which a note appears. All notes from c' to b', for instance, are said to belong to the fourth octave, and so on. These pitch or ‘octave’ signs are shown in Table 2. Thus a crotchet c would be represented as the third octave sign followed by the pattern of dots for crotchet C. Pitch signs precede the notes; however, in general, in order to reduce the signs to a minimum, it is unnecessary to restate the pitch for melodic steps of a 2nd or 3rd; for 4ths and 5ths only when the melodic leaps are into adjacent octaves; while skips of 6ths and wider leaps always necessitate fresh pitch signs.

Accidentals are formed by adding dot no.6 to the ordinary alphabetical characters for A, B and C (see Table 3). Key signatures are shown by quoting simply the number of flats or sharps. C major and A minor are implied by the absence of any statement as to key.

Intervals (for the notating of chords) are written as shown in Table 4. For compound intervals, the combination of two minims G and d' would be described in the form ‘second-octave G minim with fourth-octave 5th’, and the combination of three crotchets c, g and e' in the form ‘third-octave C crotchet with 5th and 3rd’.

Besides the signs described, there are many others available to convey information contained in a printed score.

During the last few years, much work – on an international basis – has been carried out to ensure a uniformity of signs. However, while these are regarded as international, a wide range of formats is used for the layout of scores, so for the user to derive maximum benefit it is necessary to be conversant with as many as possible.

Because of the special demands of music from the 20th century, it has been necessary to devise appropriate signs to represent it. Where braille is not thought to be the best vehicle to convey aspects of some contemporary notations, it is possible to use either raised diagrams, or a combination of conventional braille with additional information in either a diagrammatic or spoken form.

The way in which braille music is transcribed from printed music notation has evolved considerably since the earliest days. At the outset each dot was embossed by hand; later, to facilitate duplication, power-driven machines were used, enabling the dots required for each cell to be depressed at once, the master copies of the music then being stored on zinc plates. In another method of duplication, an original master could be created using a domestic brailling machine, the dots for each cell being formed by one depression of keys. The dots could then be transferred by a heat process onto a plastic sheet.

During more recent years, computer technology has greatly assisted with production as the dots can be replicated on the screen by using a program that redefines the letters F, D, S, J, K and L for dots 1 to 6 respectively. It will be readily recognized that this system offers much more flexibility for editing a score and storing completed items. Current developments centre upon investigation of an automated process of converting print music notation directly into its braille equivalent. For many years this has been recognized as a possiblity; however, it is still at an early stage. To date, the use of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files offers a partial solution, by which basic elements of a musical score can be reproduced from the input of musical sound from a music keyboard or synthesizer (see Computers and music, §II). Another avenue of exploration is to take an already existing print music publishing program and to create a front-end package to undertake the translation, a process more complex than may at first be realized. For high quality production to be effected in an automated manner a program will need to take into account that the rules of braille music may be interpreted depending on a number of factors, and that the two systems are very different in their presentation. As a considerable amount of work is being undertaken to define standards with computer codes, this may well prove beneficial in the long term by solving some of the existing difficulties for an unlimited supply of automated high quality production of braille music.

As the heart of music is sound, combining sound alongside a tactile representation may again offer some future opportunities for making music accessible in a new and original way.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Watson, ed.: Elementary Lessons and Exercises in the Revised 1922 ‘Braille’ Music-Notation: a Students’ Manual (London, 1926, rev. 1994 as A Guide to Braille Notation)

S. Logan: Music for Sight Singing (London, 1947)

Characters in Staff Notation with Braille Guide (London, 1958)

A. Burrows: Music Through Braille (Edmonton, AB, 1987)

R. Bowden: Beginning Braille Music (Canberra, 1989)

B. Krolick: New International Manual of Braille Music Notation (Amsterdam, 1996)

A. Ockelford: Music Matters (London, 1996)

R. Firman: ‘Braille Music Notation (1): an Overview’, Beyond MIDI: the Handbook of Musical Codes, ed. E. Selfridge-Field (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 321–32

B. Krolick: How to Read Braille Music: an Introduction (San Diego, 2/1998)

EDWARD WATSON/H.V. SPANNER/ROGER FIRMAN

Brăiloiu, Constantin

(b Bucharest, 13/25 Aug 1893; d Geneva, 20 Dec 1958). Romanian ethnomusicologist, active in France. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1956. He studied music in Lausanne, then with Gédalge at the Paris Conservatoire (1912–14) and later in Romania. Initially he worked as a composer and music critic, publishing some piano pieces in Lausanne (1911), followed by other works in Paris and Bucharest, but he soon turned to the study of musical folklore; he served as professor of music history and aesthetics at the Académie Royale de Musique (appointed 1921) and taught at the Académie de Musique Religieuse de la Sainte Patriarchie (1929–35). From 1926 he was secretary-general of the Society of Romanian Composers and in 1928 founded and organized its folklore archives, which later became the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore. With a team of sociologists he did fieldwork in several Romanian provinces (1929–32). In 1938 he was appointed cultural adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Romania and later worked in Berne (1943–6) as attaché to the Romanian Legation; with Eugène Pittard, director of the Museum of Ethnography, he founded the Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire (AIMP) in Geneva (1944). On settling in Paris (1948) he became a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and in this capacity worked in the ethnomusicology department of the Musée de l'Homme and at the Sorbonne Institute of Musicology.

Brăiloiu was one of the leading ethnomusicologists of his generation. All his work was inspired by the conviction that music in the oral tradition should be considered as being governed by a system, and that the principal task of the ethnomusicologist is to define this system, possible only through an adequate method of analysis. These ideas led to his important methodological, critical and theoretical writings. His principles of the ‘synoptic’ transcription of music (‘Schiţa unei metode de folklore muzical’, 1931) are an important contribution to ethnomusicological method and have been widely applied in Romania and France. His theories about the pentatonic system (‘Sur une mélodie russe’, 1953), rhythm in children's songs (‘Le rythme enfantin’, 1954), the aksak rhythm and Romanian popular sung verse are each fundamental developments in the history of ethnomusicology. However, he was not only a theoretician. Like Bartók, he did extensive fieldwork, and his collections of Romanian folksongs (particularly those for funerals, marriages and Christmas) are models of ethnomusicological description.

Brăiloiu was greatly concerned with the production of records, convinced that whatever the quality of the musical transcription, nothing could replace sound recording. He was responsible for 33 records published by the Society of Romanian Composers (Bucharest, 1930–43), 19 for the Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire (Geneva, 1948–9), four for the Musée de l'Homme (Paris, 1950) and 40 published by UNESCO and the Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire in the Collection Universelle de Musique Populaire Enregistrée (Paris and Geneva, 1951–8). A complete re-edition of these 40 records was published on a set of six LPs by the Musée d'Ethnographie of Geneva in 1984 with the original accompanying texts in French and English, an introduction by Laurent Aubert and a study of Brăiloiu's work by J.-J. Nattiez. Brăiloiu's collection of ‘Musique populaire suisse’ was similarly reissued in 1986 on two LPs. Earlier records of Romanian popular music, made between 1930 and 1940, were transferred on to three CDs in 1988 by the Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire of Geneva, with a foreword by Aubert and commentaries by Esperanţa Rădulescu. Thus, the important part of Brăiloiu's historical work as a collector is more readily available.

WRITINGS

E. Comişel, ed. and trans.: C. Brăiloiu: Opere, i–v (Bucharest, 1967–81) [O]

ed. G. Rouget, with foreword: Problèmes d’ethnomusicologie (Geneva, 1973/R; Eng. trans., 1984) [PE]

‘Schiţa unei metode de folklore muzical’, Boabe de grîu, ii/4 (1931), 204–19; Eng. trans. as ‘Outline of Method of Musical Folklore’, EthM, xiv (1970), 389–417 [PE]

Despre bocetul dela Drăguş/Note sur la plainte funèbre du village de Drăguş (district de Făgăraş) (Bucharest, 1932)

Patru muzicanti francezi: Fauré–Duparc–Debussy–Ravel [Four French musicians] (Bucharest, 1935)

‘Ale mortului’ din Gorj [‘About the dead’ in Gorj] (Bucharest, 1936)

with H.H. Stahl: Vicleiui dîn Targu-Jiu [Nativity rites in Targu-Jiu] (Bucharest, 1936)

‘Bocete din Oaş’ [Mourning-chants in Oaş], Grai si suflet, vii (Bucharest, 1938), 1–90

Nunta la Feleag [Wedding at Feleag] (Bucharest, 1938)

Nunta in Someş [Wedding in Someş] (Bucharest, 1941)

‘A román népzene’ [Popular Romanian music], Emlékkönyv Kodály Zoltán hatvanadik születésnapjára, ed. B. Gunda (Budapest, 1943), 300–07

Poeziile soldatului Tomut din razboiul 1914–1918 [War poetry of the soldier Tomut] (Bucharest, 1944)

Sur une ballade roumaine (la Mioritza) (Geneva, 1946) [PE]

‘Béla Bartók folkloriste’, SMz, lxxxviii (1948), 92–4

‘Le giusto syllabique: un système rythmique propre à la musique populaire roumaine’, Polyphonie, ii (1948), 26–57 [PE; O, i]; also in AnM, vii (1952), 117–58, 153–94

‘Le folklore musical’, Musica aeterna (Zürich, 1949), 277–332 [PE; O, ii]

‘Le rythme aksak’, RdM, xxx (1951), 71–108 [PE; O, i]

‘Sur une mélodie russe’, Musique russe, ed. P. Souvtchinsky, ii (Paris, 1953), 329–91 [PE; O, i]

‘Elargissement de la sensibilité musicale devant les musiques folkloriques et extra-occidentales’, Domaine musical, i (1954), 94–101 [O, ii]

‘Le rythme enfantin: notions liminaires’, [Ethnomusicologie I]: Wégimont [I] 1954, 64–96 [PE; O, i]

‘Un type mélodique méditerranéen’, ‘Melodie, ritmi, strumenti e simboli delle danze mediterranee’, Musiche popolari mediterranee …: Palermo 1954, 59–60, 101–13

‘Le vers populaire roumain chanté’, Revue des études roumaines, ii (1954), 7–74 [PE; O, i]

‘Un problème de tonalité: la métabole pentatonique’, Mélanges d'histoire et d'esthétique musicales, offerts à Paul-Marie Masson, i (Paris, 1955), 63–75 [PE; O, i]

‘Pentatonismes chez Debussy’, Studia memoriae Belae Bartók sacra, ed. B. Rajecky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956, 2/1957), 385–426 [PE; O, i]

‘L'ethnomusicologie, ii: étude interne’, Précis de musicologie, ed. J. Chailley (Paris, 1958, 2/1984), 41–52 [O, ii]

‘Musicologie et ethnomusicologie aujourd’hui’, IMSCR VII: Cologne 1958, 17–28 [PE; O, ii]

‘Réflexions sur la création musicale collective’, Diogène [Paris], xxv (1959), 83–93 [PE; O, ii]

‘La vie antérieure’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, i (Paris, 1960), 118–27 [O, ii]

Vie musicale d'un village: recherches sur le répertoire de Drăguş (Roumanie 1929–1932) (Paris, 1960)

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

Treizeci cântece populare [30 popular songs] (Bucharest, 1925)

Colinde şi cântece de Stea [Christmas carols and songs from Stea] (Bucharest, 1931)

Cântece bătrâneşti din Oltenia, Muntenia, Moldova şi Bucovina [Old songs from Oltenia etc.] (Bucharest, 1932)

G. Cucu: 200 colinde popular [200 popular Christmas carols] (Bucharest, 1936)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Schaeffner: ‘Bibliographie des travaux de Constantin Brăiloiu’, RdM, xliii (1959), 3–27

G. Ciobanu: ‘Aportul lui Constantin Brăiloiu la lărgirea conceptului de sistem tonal’ [Brăiloiu's contribution to broadening the concept of the tonal system], Revista de etnografie şi folclor, xiii (1968), 481; repr. in CMz, ii (1970), 159–69 [with Eng. summary]

‘Omagiu lui Constantin Brăiloiu’, CMz, ii (1970), 15–273 [incl. tributes by I.D. Chirescu, E. Comişel, M.G. Andricu, G. Ciobanu, T. Alexandru]

A. Benkő: ‘Bartók Béla levelei Constantin Brăiloiuhoz’ [Letters of Bartók and Brăiloiu], Bartók-dolgozatok, ed. F. Lászlo (Bucharest, 1974), 191–239

J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Brăiloiu, a Structuralist and Comparativist Collector: a Contribution to the History of Ethnomusicology’, Collection universelle de musique populaire enregistrée, VDE-Gallo 30 425–30 430 (1984), 11–27 [disc notes]

E. Comişel: Constantin Brăiloiu (1893–1958) (Bucharest, 1996) [incl. bibliography, 95–102; discography, 103]

GILBERT ROUGET

Brailowsky, Alexander

(b Kiev, 4/16 Feb 1896; d New York, 25 April 1976). American pianist of Ukrainian birth. His first teacher was his father, who had been a professional pianist. He then went to study with Pukhal'sky at the Kiev Conservatory, before moving to Vienna in 1911, where, along with an equally talented sister, he became a pupil of Leschetizky. He continued his studies with Busoni in Zürich following the outbreak of World War I and after the Armistice settled in France, making his début at the Salle Gaveau, Paris, in 1920. An exceptionally successful international career was to follow. In the summer of 1923 Brailowsky retreated to Annecy, where, over a period of eight weeks he devised a cycle of the complete solo works of Chopin (in six recitals), which was presented first in Paris in 1924 and later in New York (twice), Buenos Aires, Brussels, Zürich and Mexico City. His repertory, however, encompassed many of the big virtuoso works of the Romantics. He was particularly admired in Liszt. Brailowsky's interpretations, many of which were recorded, were noted for their extreme clarity of texture, cleanly articulated phrasing and technical panache. By no means an original artist, his warm personality and discernment in presenting effective recital programmes ensured a lasting success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Blaukopf: Grosse Virtuosen (Teufen, 1954), 217ff

JAMES METHUEN-CAMPBELL

Brailsford, Humphrey.

See Bralesford, Humphrey.

Brain.

English family of instrumentalists.

(2) Alfred Brain

(3) Leonard Brain

(4) Dennis Brain

REGINALD MORLEY-PEGGE/NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

(1) Aubrey (Harold) Brain

(b London, 12 July 1893; d London, 20 Sept 1955). Horn player. The son of a horn player, he studied at the RCM under Borsdorf. In 1911 he became principal of the New SO, and in 1912 he toured the USA with the LSO under Nikisch; in 1913 he was principal horn for Beecham’s adventurous touring opera company. Ethel Smyth wrote her Concerto for violin, horn and orchestra for Brain, who gave its first performance in 1927 in London and later played it in Berlin. After being first horn at Covent Garden, he became principal of the BBC SO, remaining until 1945 when he retired prematurely because of ill-health. He was also professor of horn at the RAM from 1923 until his death. Brain had an astonishing mastery of the horn, an exceptionally fine tone and a restrained and pure style. With his marked preference for the French instrument, he normally played a Labbaye hand horn built in 1865, with English-made valves added. While with the BBC SO he appeared frequently as a soloist and made several notable recordings, that of Mozart’s Concerto k447 being particularly fine.

(2) Alfred Brain

(b London, 24 Oct 1885; d Los Angeles, 29 March 1966). Horn player, brother of (1) Aubrey Brain. He was principal horn in Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra for many years and after World War I was invited by Beecham to play in the orchestra at Covent Garden. He emigrated to the USA in 1923, where he was principal horn of the New York SO (from 1923) and, for 14 years, of the Los Angeles PO. He became manager of the Hollywood Bowl concerts and from 1943 until his retirement played in the film studio orchestras of MGM and 20th Century Fox.

(3) Leonard Brain

(b London, 11 April 1915; d London, 10 Nov 1975). Oboist, son of (1) Aubrey Brain. He studied at the RAM (1937–9), and on the outbreak of World War II joined the RAF Central Band. During the war he played in various orchestras under, among other conductors, Beer, Cameron, Wood and Sargent. He was a member of the Philharmonia Orchestra (1945–6), the RPO (1946–73) and the Dennis Brain Wind Quintet and Ensemble (from 1946). In 1963 he became professor of oboe at the RAM.

(4) Teresa [Teresina] Brambilla-Ponchielli

(4) Dennis Brain

(b London, 17 May 1921; d Hatfield, 1 Sept 1957). Horn player, son of (1) Aubrey Brain. At the RAM he studied the horn with his father and the organ with G.D. Cunningham. After his début in 1938 he played much chamber music, including performances with the Lener, Griller and Busch quartets, and during World War II was principal horn in the RAF Orchestra. Afterwards, he performed frequently in Britain and on the Continent, and was the original principal horn of the RPO and later principal of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Works composed for him include Britten’s Serenade and concertos by Lutyens, Gordon Jacob, Malcolm Arnold and Hindemith.

At first he used a French horn, on which his tone was full and round, but in 1951 he changed to a German double horn to produce a more robust sound. On both instruments he had an astonishing mastery of the entire compass; he played with great delicacy of execution in rapid staccato passages and with very subtle phrasing. In addition to his famous recording of Mozart’s horn concertos with Karajan, he recorded concertos by Strauss and Hindemith, various chamber works, and Britten’s Serenade with Pears and the composer. Like his father, he set a standard of horn playing that is difficult to surpass. He was killed in a car accident.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Legge: ‘Dennis Brain (1921–57)’, Gramophone, xxxv (1957–8), 209–10

N. Del Mar: ‘Dennis Brain’, Gramophone Record Review, no.60 (1958), 951 [with discography by F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming]

R. Morley-Pegge: The French Horn (London, 1960, 2/1973), 168

S. Pettitt: Dennis Brain: a Biography (London, 1976, 2/1989) [incl. discography]

B. Tuckwell: Horn (London, 1983)

Brainard, Paul

(b Binghamton, NY, 18 April 1928). American musicologist. He attended the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, receiving the BA in 1949 and the MA in 1951. He continued his studies in Germany, working at Heidelberg University in 1954 and at Göttingen University under Gerber from 1954 to 1960; he received the PhD at Göttingen in 1960 with a dissertation on Tartini. After teaching at Ohio State University from 1960 to 1961 he was appointed to the faculty of Brandeis University, where he was chairman of the school of creative arts (1965–7) and chairman of the department of music (1969–72). In 1981 he was named Scheide Professor of music history at Princeton University; he was director of graduate studies there from 1982 to 1984. He was Tangemann Professor of Musicology at Yale University Institute of Sacred Music from 1987 until his retirement in 1993. Brainard's principal interest is the music history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has written on the violin sonatas of Giuseppe Tartini and the sacred vocal music of J.S. Bach. A Festschrift has been published in his honour (Critica musica: Essays in Honour of Paul Brainard, ed. J. Knowles, Amsterdam, 1996). His wife Ingrid, also a musicologist, specializes in dance music, ranging from the 15th-century Hoftanz to 17th- and 18th-century dance treatises.

WRITINGS

Die Violinsonaten Giuseppe Tartinis (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1960)

‘Tartini and the Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 383–93

‘Zur Deutung der Diminution in der Tactuslehre des Michael Praetorius’, Mf, xvii (1964), 169–74

‘Bach's Parody Procedure and the St. Matthew Passion’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 241–60

‘Le Sonate a tre di Giuseppe Tartini’, RIM, vi (1971), 102–26

‘Cantata 21 Revisited’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R.L. Marshall (Kassel and Hackensack, NJ, 1974), 231–42

Le sonate per violino di Giuseppe Tartini: catalogo tematico (Padua and Milan, 1975)

Giuseppe Tartini: la raccolta di sonate autografe per violino (Padua, 1976)

‘Über Fehler und Korrekturen der Textunterlage in den Vokalwerken J.S. Bachs’, BJb 1978, 113–39 [with Eng. summary]

‘The Aria and its Ritornello: the Question of “Dominance” in Bach’, Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr, ed. W. Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 39–51

‘Aria and Ritornello: New Aspects of the Comparison Handel/Bach’, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, ed. P. Williams (Cambridge, 1985), 21–34

‘The Regulative and Generative Roles of Verse in Bach's “Thematic” Invention’, Bach Studies, i, ed. D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989), 54–74

‘Proportional Notation in the Music of Schütz and his Contemporaries’, CMc, no.50 (1992), 21–46

‘“Wie ernst Händel das Wort nimmt”: Adaptations, “Outtakes”, and Other Matters in Scipione’, De musica et cantu: Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper: Helmut Hucke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. P. Cahn and A.-K. Heimer (Hildesheim, 1993), 495–511

ed., with R. Robinson: A Bach Tribute: Essays in Honour of William H. Scheide (Kassel, 1993) [incl. ‘The “Non-Quoting” Ritornello in Bach's Arias’, 27–44]

ed.: Reflections on the Sacred: a Musicological Perspective (New Haven, CT, 1994) [incl. ‘Bach as Theologian?’, 1–7]

EDITIONS

Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke: II/7: Oster-Oratorium (Kassel, 1977); II/8: Himmelfahrts-Oratorium (Kassel, 1978); I/16: Kantaten zum 2.–3. Sonntag nach Trinitatis (Kassel, 1981) [with G.S. Bozarth and R. Moreen]

Italienische Violinmusik der Barockzeit, i (Munich, 1985)

PAULA MORGAN

Brainard, Silas

(b Lempster, NH, 14 Feb 1814; d Cleveland, OH, 8 April 1871). American music publisher. He moved to Cleveland in 1834 and with Henry J. Mould opened a music shop, Brainard and Mould, two years later. By 1845 the company was known as S. Brainard and in that year began to publish music; this business (known as S. Brainard & Sons from 1866) became one of the most important in the country. Brainard published popular music, mostly pieces for piano and songs for solo voice with piano accompaniment, but also a few sacred hymns and quartets. Also in 1845 Brainard bought Watson Hall (built 1840, known as Melodeon Hall, 1845–60, and then Brainard’s Hall until 1872), where many musical events took place. Brainard was a flautist who participated in and arranged works for musical organizations in Cleveland. The company opened branches in New York, Louisville and Chicago (where it was eventually based), and in 1864 established an influential journal, Western Musical World, which became Brainard’s Musical World in 1869. Brainard married Emily Mould in 1840. Two of their seven children, Charles Silas Brainard and Henry Mould Brainard, assumed responsibility for the firm on their father’s death, changing its name to S. Brainard’s Sons. The firm ceased in 1931.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dichter-ShapiroSM

K. Merz: ‘Silas Brainard’, Brainard’s Musical World, viii/May (1871)

L.A. Brainard: The Genealogy of the Brainard-Brainard Family in America 1649–1908, i (Hartford, CT, 1908), 326

S.P. Orth: A History of Cleveland, Ohio (Chicago and Cleveland, 1910), 111, 200

M.H. Osburn: Ohio Composers and Musical Authors (Columbus, OH, 1942)

E.C. Krohn: Music Publishing in the Middle Western States before the Civil War (Detroit, 1972)

J.H. Alexander: It must be Heard: a Survey of the Musical Life of Cleveland, 1836–1918 (Cleveland, 1981)

D.D. van Tassel and J.J. Grabowski, eds.: The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, IN, 1987, 2/1996)

H.R. Witchey and J. Vacha: Fine Arts in Cleveland: an Illustrated History (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

J.H. ALEXANDER

Brakkher, Georg.

See Brack, Georg.

Bralesford [Brailsford], Humphrey

(b Southwell, Notts., 29 Feb 1658; d Southwell, 1733). English composer. He was a chorister at Southwell Minster, 1672–4, and took the BA (1679) and MA (1682) at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He held positions as minor canon at the cathedrals in Peterborough (1681), Rochester (1682) and Canterbury (1684–92), and also served successively as rector of Wouldham, St Mildred’s, Canterbury, and (from 1708) Hawksworth in his native county. On 21 April 1721 he was admitted to a prebend at Southwell Minster. His efforts to better his standing within the church are extensively documented, as is the disdain in which he was held by many, including the Southwell organist William Popeley.

Except for the anthem Praise the Lord O my soul, which survives incomplete at Lincoln Cathedral in copies dated 1719, Bralesford’s compositions probably stem from his time in Canterbury. His service in C minor, probably his best work, is strongly treble-orientated but also includes many three-part verses for men’s voices; it continued to be copied at Canterbury until the 1760s and was listed among its repertory in 1824. The verse anthem God standeth in the congregation includes some gauche attempts at contrapuntal writing for two or three solo voices. The sacred song Full of Wrath was erroneously attributed to Henry Purcell and included in that composer’s collected works. Bralesford’s services, like his other works, are deliberately ‘modern’ in style, with prominent use of triple metre, hemiola and an active basso continuo line. He was no contrapuntist, and his harmonies, perhaps meant to be expressively italianate, are often jarring.

WORKS

Morning and Evening Service (TeD, Jub, Mag, Nunc), c, GB-CA

Evening Service (Mag, Nunc), B, CA (inc.)

Anthems: God standeth in the congregation, CA (inc.); Praise the Lord O my soul, LI (inc.); 1 other (lost)

Full of wrath his threat’ning breath (J. Taylor), S, bc, *Lbl, pubd in The Works of Henry Purcell (London, 1878–1965, 2/1964–81), xxx

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Lists of Services in the Several Ecclesiastical Libraries in England’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, vi (1824), 21–7, 310–17

R. Ford: ‘A Sacred Song not by Purcell’, MT, cxxv (1984), 45–7

R. Ford: Minor Canons at Canterbury Cathedral: the Gostlings and their Colleagues (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1984)

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995)

ROBERT FORD

Brall.

See Branle.

Brambilla.

Italian family of singers.

(1) Marietta Brambilla

(2) Teresa Brambilla

(3) Giuseppina Brambilla

ELIZABETH FORBES

(1) Marietta Brambilla

(b Cassano d’Adda, 6 June 1807; d Milan, 6 Nov 1875). Contralto. After studying at the Milan Conservatory with Secchi, she made her début in 1827 at the King’s Theatre, London, as Arsace in Rossini’s Semiramide. During the season she sang two more travesty roles, Adriano (Meyerbeer’s Il crociato) and Romeo (Zingarelli’s Romeo e Giulietta), becoming a specialist in such parts. She sang Paolo at the first performance of Generali’s Francesca di Rimini in 1828 at La Fenice. At La Scala (1838) she sang Cherubino and Arsace (Semiramide). Donizetti composed two trouser roles for her, Maffio Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia, first given at La Scala in 1833, and Pierotto in Linda di Chamounix, which had its première at the Kärntnertortheater, Vienna, in 1842. He also adapted the second tenor role of Armando di Gondi in Maria di Rohan for her, adding an extra number, when the opera was performed at the Théâtre Italien in Paris (1843). She also sang Pippo in La gazza ladra and Smeton in Anna Bolena. In 1848 she retired. Her voice, a true contralto, ranged from g to g''.

(2) Teresa Brambilla

(b Cassano d’Adda, 23 Oct 1813; d Milan, 15 July 1895). Soprano, sister of (1) Marietta Brambilla. She made her début in Milan in 1831 and sang throughout Italy with great success for 15 years. In 1846 she appeared in Paris as Abigaille in Nabucco. She sang Gilda at the first performance of Rigoletto at La Fenice (1851), while other Verdi operas in which she appeared included Luisa Miller and Ernani.

(3) Giuseppina Brambilla

(b Cassano d’Adda, 1819; d Milan, 1903). Contralto, sister of (1) Marietta Brambilla. She made her début in Trieste in 1841 and sang in Rome, Milan and Barcelona; then in 1846 she was engaged at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, where she appeared as Maffio Orsini, the part created by her eldest sister. In 1853 she sang Maddaleno (Rigoletto) at La Scala.

(2) Cornelis Alijander Brandts Buys

(4) Teresa [Teresina] Brambilla-Ponchielli

(b Cassano d’Adda, 15 April 1845; d Vercelli, 1 July 1921). Soprano, niece of (1) Marietta Brambilla. She studied with her aunts Marietta and Teresa. She made her début in 1863 as Adalgisa at Odessa, afterwards singing in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, St Petersburg and Italy. In 1872 she sang in the revised version of Ponchielli’s I promessi sposi at the Teatro dal Verme, Milan, and two years later married the composer. She was a famous interpreter of the title role of La Gioconda, and sang Paolina in a revival of Donizetti’s Poliuto at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome (1883). Other roles that she sang included Leonora (Il trovatore and La forza del destino), Aida and Elsa (Lohengrin). She retired in 1889.

Brameley, Richard.

See Brimle, Richard.

Bramley, John.

See Brimley, John.

Bramston [Smyth], Richard

(b c1485; d Wells, 1554). English musician and composer. He was admitted as a probationary vicar-choral of Wells Cathedral in January 1507. At that time Richard Hygons was about to retire as master of the choristers and organist; in July 1507 the chapter agreed that Bramston should take over Hygons's duties, in the first instance until September 1508. However, Bramston soon fell foul of the cathedral authorities. He was admitted permanent vicar-choral in January 1508 on condition that he be more diligent at his job in that year, but in May he was prematurely relieved of the duties of organist and master of the choristers, and in September 1509 was warned that unless he took sub-deacon's orders by Christmas he would be dismissed. He left Wells, and became master of the Lady Chapel choir at St Augustine's Abbey, Bristol; he scandalized the chapter at Wells by returning in February 1510 ‘in privy and disguised apparel’ on an apparently successful mission to kidnap Farr, ‘one of our best choristers’, presumably to strengthen the Bristol choir.

Nevertheless, he was back at Wells as a vicar-choral by 1515, and remained there for the rest of his life, occupying a stall that did not necessitate his entering holy orders. His earlier exploits did not prevent him from being reinstated as organist and master of the choristers, offices which he seems finally to have given up in 1531. (At this date he appears also to have been known as Richard Smyth.) As well as being vicar-choral, he occupied a variety of administrative posts at the cathedral until he died, a man of considerable substance, in 1554.

Only two of his compositions survive. His Recordare Domine testamenti tui (GB-Lbl Add.17802–5), for four men's voices, is a setting of the responsory sung during the Historia regum (the readings from the books of Kings at Matins on the Sundays following Pentecost). An incomplete five-part Marian antiphon, Marie virginis fecunda viscera (ed. N. Sandon, Moretonhampstead, 1996) is in GB-Cu Peterhouse 471–4. He was said by Morley to have been one of the ‘Practicioners’ whose works he consulted during the preparation of his Plaine and Easie Introduction (1597); however, his surviving compositions demonstrate no conspicuous degree of either fluency or skill.

ROGER BOWERS

Branca, Giovanni Giacomo

(b ?Rome, c1620; d Rome, after 1694). Italian violinist and composer. Probably the younger brother of the alto singer Cesare Branca, he first appeared as a violinist for the Nativity of the Virgin Mary at S Maria della Consolazione, Rome, on 8 September 1650. From 1658, under the name ‘Jacomo violino’, he was second violin (to Carlo Caproli and then to Carlo Manelli) for the festival at Saint-Louis des français, the French church at Rome. In February 1675 he was first violin of the concerto grosso for the performance of Antonio Masini’s oratorio S Eustachio at the Pietà, Florence. On this occasion Corelli was last violin.

Only sacred vocal works by Branca survive, all in manuscript and mostly autographed, including three antiphons, an alleluia, offertory, psalm and canticle, and four motets (all I-Rvat in the music collection of the Cappella Giulia). Some bear dates (the earliest 1662 and the latest 1680) and most are ‘per Sant’Apollonia’, a convent in Trastevere where he was probably giving music lessons on a regular basis. In the antiphons and alleluia particularly, for two sopranos and basso continuo, one can detect the influence of instrumental, especially violin, technique.

JEAN LIONNET

Branca, Glenn

(b Harrisburg, PA, 6 Oct 1948). American composer and performer. After studying theatre at Emerson College, Boston, he went to New York City (1976). With the composer and musician Jeffrey Lohn, he formed the experimental rock band Theoretical Girls (1977–9); even more extreme was Branca's other band, the Static (1978–9), with whom he delved more deeply into the densities and loudness of electric guitars. He began creating longer, more austere and challenging works for ensembles of electric guitars and the drummer Stefan Wischerth. Such landmark compositions as The Spectacular Commodity (1979) and The Ascension (1980) introduced a visceral, high-volume, ecstatic music unknown to rock or the avant garde. The harmonics of amplified electric guitars interacted and generated new kinds of sometimes unpredictable or uncontrollable acoustic phenomena. He developed larger ensemble works, such as 1981's 10-guitar Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses, or Symphony no.1, which combined guitars and drums with keyboards, brass and percussion. For his Symphony no.2 (1982), he devised mallet guitars that gave the musicians more open strings. His research into the harmonic series led him to develop new tunings and new instruments, and he designed several keyboard instruments which were used to unique effect in his symphonies nos.3 (1983), 4 (1983) and 5 (1984). His notable later guitar works include symphonies nos.6 (1988), 8 and 10 (1994) and 12 (1998). A self-taught composer, Branca began receiving orchestral commissions in 1989, with his Symphony no.7. Although restrained in its loudness, his instrumental music can create sound fields of a hallucinatory density that rivals his guitar music. Among his orchestral works are the dance scores The World Upside Down and Les honneurs du pied, and the symphonies nos.9 (1994) and 11 (1998), both for chorus and orchestra.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sym. no.7, 1989; Shivering Air, 1989; Freeform, 1989; Harmonic Series Chords, 1989; The World Upside Down, dance score, 1990; Vacation Overture, 1991; Les honneurs du pied, dance score, 1991; Sym. no.9 (L'eve future), vv, orch, 1994; Sym. no.11 (The Nether Lands), Die Genenfeld, Part I, vv, orch, 1998

Gui/new-inst ens: (Instrumental) for Six Guitars, 1979; The Spectacular Commodity, 1979; Dissonance, 1979; Lesson no.1, 1979; The Ascension, 1980; Light Field, 1980; Lesson no.2, 1981; Mambo Diabolique, 1981; Sym. no.1 (Tonal Plexus), 1981; Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses, 1981; Music for Bad Smells, dance score, 1982; Sym. no.2 (The Peak of the Sacred), 1982; Sym. no.3 (Gloria), 1983; Acoustic Phenomena, 1983; Sym. no.4 (Physics), 1983; Sym. no.5 (Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere), 1984; Chords, 1986; Music for the Murobushi Company, 1986; Hollywood Pentagon, 1986; Music for Edmond, theatre score, 1986; Sym. no.6 (Angel Choirs at the Gates of Hell), 1987, rev. 1988 as (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven); Syms. nos.8 and 10 (The Mysteries), 1994; Movement Within, 1997; Sym. no.12 (Tonal Sexus), 1998

Other works: Anthropophagoi (music theatre), 1975, collab. J. Rehberger; Percussion, Electronics, and Mouth [5], 1975; What Actually Happened (music theatre), collab. Rehberger, 1976; Ballet Continuo, movement piece, 1976; Shivering Tongue Fingers Air (music theatre), 1977; 14 Songs for Theoretical Girls, 1977; Cognitive Dissonance, theatre, 1978; 20 Songs for the Static, 1978; Inspirez/Expirez, 1978; In Passions Tongue, op, 1986 [scene]; The Belly of an Architect (film score), str orch, 1986; Gates of Heaven, vv, 1989; Str Qt no.1, 1991; The Tower Opera, 1992, unperf.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Gagne: ‘Glenn Branca’, Sonic Transports (New York, 1990), 15–78

C. Gagne: ‘Glenn Branca’, Soundpieces 2 (Metuchen, NJ, 1993), 1–21

B. Duckworth: ‘Glenn Branca’, Talking Music (New York, 1995), 418–43

COLE GAGNE

Branche, Charles-Antoine

(b Vernon, Eure, 31 March 1722; d after 1779). French violinist, composer and teacher. He was the son of Nicole Picot and Antoine Branche, a dancing-master and possibly the musician who was active in Lyons in 1732. In 1748 Branche dedicated his Première livre de sonates à violon seul et basse (Paris) to his patron, the Marquis de Caraman. The following year he was first violinist at the Comédie-Française, playing with, among others, Piffet, Chartier, Perrin, Sénéchal and Blondeau until his retirement in 1764. He continued to teach the violin until 1779 after which his name no longer appears. He had contemporaries with the same surname: a first violinist in a 1767 concert at Orleans, and a woman who in 1771 published a book of airs and a sonata for harpsichord; it is not clear whether they were related.

Although the accompaniment to Branche’s Concerto à violon principal (F-Pc) is lost, his debt to the Italian school and especially to Albinoni can be seen from the violin part. His 12 violin sonatas, filled with challenging double stops, ornamentations and syncopation, are graceful and natural in effect. Boisgelow, who made a catalogue of the king’s library in 1787, said of them: ‘These sonatas, in which one finds melody, harmony and excellent workmanship, have not had the success they deserve’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LaurencieEF

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et de théâtre à Lyon 1688–1789 (Lyons, 1932/R)

ELIZABETH KEITEL

Branciforte [Branciforti], Girolamo [Hyeronimo]

(b Palermo, c1560; d Palermo, c1620). Italian composer and poet. He was Count of Cammarata (or Camerata), Duke of S Giovanni and Knight of the Order of Alcantara, and the head of one of the most powerful noble families in Sicily. According to Micheli, Branciforte was in Rome during 1593, when his household included Sebastián Raval (whom he afterwards took with him to Sicily), Francesco Soriano and G.M. Nanino. In the preface to Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali (1607), Giulio Cesare Monteverdi mentioned the ‘Conte di Camerata’ among several other eminent composers who had adopted the seconda pratica; this reference is to Branciforte. He is also mentioned by Cerone in a list of ‘illustrious persons whose musical compositions are clearly excellent’. Like Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, Branciforte had his Madrigali a cinque voci, libro primo (Palermo, 1603) published with a dedication to himself, signed by the poet Luigi d’Heredia, who claimed that the pieces were childhood compositions, probably because social convention considered the profession of music unsuitable for a nobleman. The texts (see Caruso) are all erotic epigrams by Tasso, Guarini and their followers, including Livio Celiano; the music is lost. Branciforte’s only other known compositions were three madrigals in the collection Infidi lumi (Palermo, 1603) which no longer survives. This collection consisted of five-part settings of madrigal texts by Luigi d’Heredia (see Razzoli Roio). All the poems end with the same line, borrowed from Tasso’s Aminta: ‘Specchi del cor fallaci, infidi lumi’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.C. Monteverdi: Preface to C. Monteverdi: Scherzi musicali (Venice, 1607); ed. D. de’ Paoli, Claudio Monteverdi: Lettere, dediche e prefazioni (Rome, 1973), 398; Eng. trans. in O. Strunk: Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950/R), rev. edn by L. Treitler (forthcoming)

P. Cerone: El melopeo y maestro (Naples, 1613/R), 150

R. Micheli: Musica vaga et artificiosa (Venice, 1615), 7

F. Mugnos: Teatro genealogico delle famiglie nobili … di Sicilia, i (Palermo, 1648)

G.B. Caruso, ed.: Rime degli accademici accesi di Palermo (Palermo, 1726), ii, 177ff [incl. texts of Branciforte’s works]

O. Tiby: ‘The Polyphonic School in Sicily of the 16th–17th Century’, MD, v (1951), 203–11

O. Tiby: I polifonisti siciliani del XVI e XVII secolo (Palermo, 1969), 81ff

A.M. Razzoli Roio, ed.: La fucina poetica: madrigalisti siciliani del Seicento (Parma, 1987), 7–20, 79–84

P.E. Carapezza: ‘Il Cardinale del Monte tra il Caravaggio e Le risa a vicenda’: introduction to Le risa a vicenda, MRS, xii (1993), pp.ix–xxxix

PAOLO EMILIO CARAPEZZA, GIUSEPPE COLLISANI

Branco, Luís (Maria da Costa) de Freitas

(b Lisbon, 12 Oct 1890; d Lisbon, 27 Nov 1955). Portuguese composer, teacher, musicologist and critic. He studied composition in Lisbon privately with Augusto Machado and Tomás Borba, then with Désiré Pâque and Luigi Mancinelli. He also studied the piano and the violin. He completed his studies in Berlin with Humperdinck and Pâque (1910) and in Paris with Grovlez (1911). After his marriage he lived on Madeira for two years, returning to Lisbon in 1914. He taught at the Lisbon Conservatory (1916–39), later becoming its assistant director (1919–24). There he worked with Mota in the major reforms which began in 1918. At the same time he established himself as a composer, musicologist, critic and lecturer and slowly rose to a position of fundamental importance in Portuguese musical life. As a teacher, he also played an important role in the preparation of a new generation of composers. In the 1930s, he began to have difficulties with the political authorities and in 1939 he was forced to abandon all his official duties and to retire from public life. He dedicated his last years mainly to composition, the investigation of Portuguese early music and the publication of several books and articles. He also wrote music criticism in several newspapers and was the director of the periodicals Arte musical and Gazeta musical.

The first stage of Branco’s evolution is, perhaps, the most interesting. After the first songs, he wrote a succession of symphonic poems where the influence of Debussy’s Impressionism is present. Vathek (1913), constructed in the form of contrasting variations, also has some Expressionist touches and some quite atonal passages. On the other hand, the piano and chamber music of this period and the Violin Concerto (1916), in a Classical style, show the influence of Franck. After a period where national themes (traditional or literary) dominated his vocal and instrumental work, he returned to Classical forms with the First Symphony and to a new modal-diatonic language, found in the Madrigais camonianos and in songs like the cycle A ideia. As a musicologist, his contribution to the study and propagation of early Portuguese music was significant. Whatever the period and the field, all his work shows his technical assurance and wide culture.

WORKS

Choral: Manfredo (dramatic sym., L.F. Branco, after Byron), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1905; Tentações de S. Frei Gil (orat, C. de Oliveira), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1911; Tantum ergo (liturgical texts), 3vv, 1912; Lembrança (J. de Deus), 4vv male chorus, 1931; Marcha militar (C. Queirós), 4vv male chorus, 1935; 10 madrigais camonianos, chorus, 1935, rev. 1943; Noemi (cant., Branco, after Bible), solo vv, chorus, org, 1937; 2 redondilhas (L. de Camões), 4vv female chorus, 1943; 6 canções populares portuguesas, chorus, 1943; 5 redondilhas (Camões), female chorus, 1943–8; Cançao da pastora (Branco), solo v, 2vv male chorus, 1949; Dança pastoral (Branco), 4vv female chorus, 1949; 11 redondilhas (Camões), 3/4vv male/female chorus, 1949; 2 sonetos (Camões), male chorus, 1949; Cançao da pedra (A. Duarte), chorus, 1950; Roma não é mais senhora (F. Mouga), solo v, 2vv chorus, pf, 1950; Só te cantamos a ti (J. G. Ferreira), solo v, unison chorus, pf, 1950

Songs (1v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Aquela moça (A. Lima), 1904; Contrastes (J. Vasconcelos e Sá), 1904; A formusura (Camões), 1907; Canção portuguesa (trad.), 1907; Trilogie de la mort (C. Baudelaire), 1909; A elegia das grades (M. Beirão), 1911; La glèbe s’amollit (J. Moréas), 1912; O salutaris, 2vv, org, 1912; Sub tuum praesidium, 2vv, org, 1912; Tota pulchra es, 1v, org, 1912; Veni Sancte Spiritus, 1/2vv, org, 1912; 3 sonnets (M. Maeterlinck), 1913; 2 sonnets (S. Mallarmé), 1913; Minuete (Sardinha), 1915; O motivo da planície (A. Sardinha), 1915; Soneto dos repuxos (Sardinha), 1915; Soneto (L. de Camões), 1916; O canto do mar (A. Monsaraz), 1v, orch, 1918; Despedida (G. d’Annunzio), 1920, orchd 1949; Frivolidade (S. Teles), 1920; 2 poemas (L. Stechetti), 1920; Hino à razão (de Quental), 1934; Idílio (de Quental), 1934; A sulamita (A. de Quental), 1934; Conquista pois (de Quental), 1937; Sonho oriental (de Quental), 1941; A ideia (de Quental), 1943; 27 canções populares portuguesas, 1943, 8 canções populares portuguesas, 1v, orch, 1951; Cá nesta Babilónia (L. de Camões), 1951

Orch: Depois de uma leitura de Antero de Quental, sym. poem, 1908; Depois de uma leitura de Júlio Dinis, sym. poem, 1908; Depois de uma leitura de Guerra Junqueiro, fantasy, 1909; Os paraísos artificiais, sym. poem, after T. de Quincey and C. Baudelaire, 1910; As tentações de S. Frei Gil, sym. fragment after C. de Oliveira, 1911; Vathek, sym. poem, after W. Beckford, 1913; Minuete, 1915; O motivo da planície, 1915; Viriato, sym. poem after H. Raposo, 1916; Vn Conc., 1916; Balada, pf, orch, 1917; Cena lírica, vc, orch, 1917; Suite alentejana no.1, 1919; Sym. no.1, 1924; Sym. no.2, 1926; Suite alentejana no.2, 1927; 1640, sym. ov., 1939; Sym. no.3, 1943; Solemnia verba, sym. poem after A. Quental, 1951; Sym. no.4, 1952

Chbr and solo inst: Albumblätter, pf, 1907; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1907; Mirages I e II, pf, 1911; Str Qt, 1911; Ária, org, 1913; Coral, org, 1913; Sonata, vc, pf, 1913, rev. 1927; Luar, pf, 1916; 3 peças, pf, 1916; 2 danças, pf, 1917; 10 prelúdios, pf, 1918; Sonatina, pf, 1930; Rapsódia portuguesa, org, 1938; Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1938; 4 prelúdios, pf, 1940

Film scores: Douro, faina fluvial (M. de Oliveira), 1934; Gado bravo (A. Lopes Ribeiro), 1934; Frei Luís de Sousa (Lopes Ribeiro), 1950; Algarve de além-mar (Lopes Ribeiro), 1952

Principal publishers: Pabst, Sassetti, Valentim de Carvalho

WRITINGS

Elementos dessciências musicais (Lisbon, 1922)

A música em Portugal (Lisbon, 1929)

A vida de Beethoven (Lisbon, 1943)

A personalidade de Beethoven (Lisbon, 1947)

Tratado de harmonia (Lisbon, 1947)

D. João IV, músico (Lisbon, 1956)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Braga Santos: ‘Luís de Freitas Branco: compositor’, Arte musical, x (1960), 297–301

J.F. Branco: Alguns aspectos da música portuguesa contemporânea (Lisbon, 1960)

J.B. Santos: ‘Luís de Freitas Branco: o compositor e a sua mensagem renovadora’, Colóquio/Artes, xxiii/June (1975), 54–6

J.F. Branco: ‘Luís de Freitas Branco: aspectos menos conhecidos duma mentalidade e de ume evolução’, Colóquio/Artes, xxiii/June (1975), 42–53

J. de F. Branco: Luís de Freitas Branco (Lisbon, 1975)

A. Latino: ‘Luís de Freitas Branco’, Boletim da Associação Portuguesa de Educação Musical, lxiv/Jan (1990), 3–5; lxiv/April (1990), 3–8

R.V. Nery and P.F. Castro: Sínteses da cultura portuguesa: história da música (Lisbon, 1991)

ADRIANA LATINO

Brâncuşi, Petre

(b Brădiceni/Peştişani, Gorj district, 1 June 1928; d Bucharest, 27 Feb 1995). Romanian musicologist. At the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory (1950–55) he studied music history with George Breazul, theory with Victor Iusceanu and Dragoş Alexandrescu, harmony with Ion and Gheorghe Dumitrescu, musical form with Tudor Ciortea and folklore with Sabin Drăgoi. After a period as a music editor with various firms (1951–9) and as the director of Editura Muzicală (1959–62), he became music director of Romanian radio and television (1968–72). Concurrently he was professor of music history (1959–95) and rector (1972–82) at the conservatory. He was president of the Composers' Union (1977–82) and director of Opera Română (1982–9). His publications include educational handbooks, studies of Romanian music and two books on Breazul. He was awarded the prize of the Romanian Academy in 1965 and received the prize of the Composers' Union on numerous occasions.

WRITINGS

with N. Călinoiu: Muzica în România după 23 August 1944 (Bucharest, 1964–5)

with O.L. Cosma and G. Constantinescu: Curs de istoria muzicii româneşti [Course in Romanian music history] (Bucharest, 1968–9)

Istoria muzicii româneşti: compendiu (Bucharest, 1969)

‘Muzica românească azi: sinteze şi perspective’ [Contemporary Romanian music: synthesis and perspectives], Studii de muzicologie, v (1969), 5–20

with N. Călinoiu: Muzica în România socialistă (Bucharest, 1973)

George Breazul şi actualitatea operei sale [George Breazul and the contemporary significance of his work] (Bucharest, 1974)

George Breazul şi istoria nescrisă a muzicii româneşti [George Breazul and the unwritten history of Romanian music] (Bucharest, 1976)

Muzica româneasca şi marile ei primeniri [Romanian music: its extensive renewal] (Bucharest, 1978–80)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România (Bucharest, 1989), 181–5

C. Brâncuşi: ‘In memoriam Petre Brâncuşi’, Muzica, viii/2 (1997), 97–106

VIOREL COSMA

Brand, Dollar.

See Ibrahim, Abdullah.

Brand [Brandt], Jan.

See Brant, Jan.

Brand, Max(imilian)

(b Lemberg [L'viv], 26 April 1896; d Langenzersdorf, nr Vienna, 5 April 1980). Austrian composer, active in the USA. Following military service during World War I, he became a pupil of Schreker in Vienna (1919) and Berlin (1920); Krenek was a fellow student. He also studied with Alois Hába and came to know Erwin Stein. Initially employed as a teacher in Salzburg, Brand returned in 1924 to Vienna, where he heard a performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, op.26. This inspired him to compose five settings of Else Laske-Schüller’s Hebraische Balladen (1913) using the 12-note method. He was the first composer outside of Schoenberg’s circle to employ the 12-note technique.

From 1926 to 1927 Brand wrote music for communist cultural productions. The success of his ballet-pantomime Tragödietta was crowned by the triumph of his opera Maschinist Hopkins (1929), a work that, although written out of economic necessity, confirmed Brand as a self-professed ‘Theatermensch’. First performed in Duisburg, the opera appeared in 37 other venues and was performed in at least four languages until 1932 when fascism, of which it can be read as a parody, began to take hold. The opera was applauded for its multi-faceted contemporary references and its impassioned blend of Schrekerian lyricism and Neue Sachlichkeit. With its agenda of political confrontation between workers and the authority of human and technological power, Brand’s dramatic and sonorous mélange of Expressionism and constructivism made comparisons with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Brecht and Weill’s Dreigroschenoper and Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf inevitable. The work’s popularity with audiences was matched by serious regard from contemporary composers. Its selection as the best operatic work of 1929 by a committee of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein that included Alban Berg led to its initial production.

In the early 1930s Brand founded the Mimoplastisches Theater für Ballett, and became co-director of the Wiener Opernproduktion at the Raimundtheater, the first Austrian company to perform (in a condensed version) Brecht and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. He also worked on experimental films in the same studio as Hanns Eisler, writing prize-winning music for Der zerbrochene Krug. Plans for a new work, Requiem, for the Berlin Staatsoper under Karl Böhm, were abandoned in 1933 for political reasons. The well-advanced score was lost in Prague, presumably when Brand, condemned as a Jew, was forced to flee Vienna in 1937. He travelled in 1939 to Brazil, where he worked briefly with Villa-Lobos, before settling in 1940 in the USA, where he became a naturalized citizen.

Brand’s American career was characterized by participation in émigré musical life, continued involvement in music theatre, an enduring interest in popular culture and a commitment to electro-acoustic composition. He became co-director of the music and theatre wing of the Caravan of East and West, and was vice-president of the American League of Authors and Composers from Austria. The Gate (1944), a ‘scenic oratorio’ symbolic of his international perspective as a new American citizen, was given its première at the Metropolitan Opera. With Notturno brasileiro (1959), a composition facilitated by one of the first Moog synthesizers, Brand dedicated himself to exploring the musical potential of electronics. The Astronauts: an Epic in Electronics (1961) is a veritable paean to technological achievement incorporating recordings of John Glenn’s conversations with NASA alongside Brand’s own voice. His last large-scale electronic work, Ilian 4 (1974), was one of a series based on Greek myths. His decision to return to Austria secured the future of electronic composition in Vienna; since his death his sound studio has become a living memorial where musical activities and performances continue to take place.

WORKS

Dramatic: Musik zum Zauberspiel ‘Wrecken von Nijmegen’ (incid music), 1924, Vienna, 1924; Die Wippe (ballet), 1925; Tragödietta (ballet), 1926, Stuttgart, Opernhaus, 1927; Maschinist Hopkins (3, M. Brand), op.11, Duisburg, Stadttheater, 13 April 1929; 3 Kurzfilme (film score) 1932–3, ?lost: Ausflug; Nächtliche Ruhestörung; Hände Hoch!; Requiem (1, Brand), 1932–3, lost; Der zerbrochene Krug (film score), 1933; Kleopatra (1, Brand), 1934–7, unfinished; Die Zauberreise (musical comedy, 3, R. Goetz), 1934; Die Chronik (scenic cant., Brand) 1938, unfinished; A Musical Feud (Spl, 1, Brand), 1941; The Gate (scenic orat, 2, Brand, M.A. Sohrab, J. Chanler), 1941–3, New York, Metropolitan, 23 May 1944; Stormy Interlude (1, Brand), 1955

Vocal: 3 Lieder (Lao Tse), S, pf, 1922; Nachtlied (F. Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra), S, orch, 1922; 3 Lieder (J. Ringelnatz), 1924; 5 Balladen, op.10, 1v, 6 insts, 1927; 4 Lieder (F. Hölderlin), 1935; Kyrie Eleison, SATB, 1940; The Ballad of Lidice, 1v, pf, 1942; On the Day of Victory (L. Hughes), 1v, pf; Sehnsucht der Menscheit (G. Beer), 1v, pf

Inst: Suite and Fugue, pf, 1920; 3 Stücke, pf, 1921; Eine Nachtmusik, op.5, chbr orch, 1922, rev. 1931; Str Trio, 1923; 5 Dances, orch, 1926 [from Tragödietta]; Peca, fl, pf, 1940; United Nations, march, brass band, 1942; Turkey’s Holiday, 3 cl; The Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay, orch, 1946; Night on the Bayous of Louisiana, tone poem, 1953; other pf works

El-ac: Triptych, ?1960; The Astronauts: an Epic in Electronics, 1961; Folksongs, 1v, elec, 1962; Ilian 1–2, 1966; Ilian 4 (elec ballet)

WRITINGS

‘Mechanische Musik und das Problem der Oper’, Musikblätter des Anbruchs, viii (1926), 356–9

‘Die bewegte Opernbühne’, Musikblätter des Anbruchs, ix (1927), 2–6

‘Über die Situation der Oper’, Blätter der Staatsoper Berlin, x (1930), 7–9

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.L. Stahl, ed.: Das Prisma: Blätter der Vereinigten Stadttheater Duisburg-Bochum, Jg.5 (1929) [Brand issue]

M. Wagner: ‘Max Brand zum Gedenken’, ÖMz, xxxv (1980), 302–4

J. Warren: ‘Ernst Krenek and Max Brand: Two Austrians at the “Court” of Weimar’, German Life and Letters, xli (1987–8), 467–78

M. Hanitsch: Kompositionstechnik und Dramaturgie in Max Brands Oper ‘Maschinist Hopkins’ (diss., U. of Wurzburg, 1994)

T. Brezinka: Max Brand (1896–1980) (Munich, 1995)

CHARLOTTE PURKIS

Brand, Michael.

See Mosonyi, Mihály.

Brandão, Paulo (José Rebelo)

(b Lisbon, 21 Jan 1950). Portuguese composer and horn player. He studied at the Fundação Musical dos Amigos das Crianças (1954–64). From 1965 he studied at the Lisbon Conservatory and at the Academia de Amadores de Musica, with professors Adácio Pestana, Artur Santos, Elisa Lemos, Capdeville and Álvaro Salazar, graduating in 1979. In 1976 he attended the composition courses in Darmstadt and also seminars with Heinz Henings, Peter Sefcik, Corboz, Vassili Arnaudov and others. He has directed the Coral Publia Hortensia, which he also founded, since 1973 and the Grupo Coral Arsis since 1989. As a horn player he has often played his own compositions and from 1968 until 1994 he was the soloist in the Portuguese navy's brass band. He has been awarded various prizes for composition and has taken part in selection panels for composition and choir competitions. He has been a professor at the Lisbon Conservatory since 1985. His activity as composer is not restricted to the concert hall, but he has also composed extensively for cinema, radio, television and theatre. His early music shows the influence of the Second Viennese School and of Peixinho, but in later pieces the influence of Morton Feldman is increasingly evident.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Orfeu (ballet), 1981; 1^o Fausto (ballet), 1985; O fim, uma opera portuguesa (op, after A. Patrício), 1987, unperf.; Há um tubo dentro do Sol que sopra os ventos (op, R. Natálio), 1997–8, unperf.

Vocal: Xazecivoru, SATB, fl, cl, bn, hn, 1973; Primavera e sono (J. Ruas), S, fl, hn, gui, hp, 2 perc, 1981; Canto rouco (E. de Andrade), S, gui, 1985; Tríptico, SATB, 1989; Canto para Beatriz (D. Alighieri), S, fl, cl, tpt, gui, hp, perc, va, vc, 1991; Kyrie, SATB, 1991; Teofania, SATB, 1992; Visão (F. Pessoa), SATB, 1994; O meu coração é árabe (Al-Muhammed), Bar, fl, pf, 1997

Chbr: Biálogo, hn, gui, tape, 1976; Seistento, fl, tpt, gui, perc, pf/synth, va, 1979; Estigma, gui, 1983; Antropos, fl, cl, tpt, gui, hp, perc, pf, vn, va, vc, 1985; Ne vas pas au jardin des fleurs, 4 cl, 1986; Nocturno, fl, cl, tpt, gui, perc, pf, va, vc, 1987; Colibri, cl, 1989; Glosa, fl, 2 cl, tpt, gui, hp, cel, perc, pf, vn, va, vc, 1993; Violáceo, 2 fl, pf, 1995

Film scores: Antes a sorte que tal morte, 1975–83; Dina e Django, 1980; Memmet, 1982; Saudades para Dona Genciana, 1983

Incid music: Ah Kiu, 1976; Dom Quixote e Sancho Pança, 1985; A Castro, 1992; Othelo, 1993; O fim atroz de um sedutor, 1997

Principal publishers: Al Puerto, Schott

SÉRGIO AZEVEDO

Brande.

See Branle.

Brandenstein, Johann Konrad

(b Kitzingen, c1695; d Regensburg, 21 Nov 1757). German organ builder. He was presumably a son of Johann Adam Brandenstein, an organ builder of Kitzingen. He settled at Stadtamhof, near Regensburg, and from 1725 built a considerable number of organs in the old Bavarian region, including those in Rohr (1725), Metten (1726), Weltenburg (1728), Regensburg Upper Minster (1744) and Frauenzell (1752). Most of his organs are very imposing structures; his greatest stood in the church of the former Cistercian abbey in Waldsassen (1738). Brandenstein's status as an organ builder was equivalent to that of König in Ingolstadt and Egedacher in Passau. His pupils included Ferdinand Stiefel (1737–1818) and his own two sons-in-law Johann I.P. Hillebrand (1710–44) and Johann Michael Herberger, who after Brandenstein’s death succeeded him as head of his workshop.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Quoika: Über die altbayerische Orgel: 1000 Jahre Geschichte der Orgel in Altbayern (Berlin, 1968), 46, 52–3

H. Fischer: ‘Die Beziehungen Mainfrankens zu anderen Orgellandschaften’, Acta organologica, iii (1969), 13–68, esp. 62

R.W. Sterl: ‘Johann Konrad Brandenstein, organarius et civis pedepontanus’, Musik in Bayern, xvii (1978), 17–25

H. Fischer and T. Wohnhaas: ‘Der Orgelmacher Johann Konrad Brandenstein’, Jb für fränkische Landes forschung, xxxix (1979), 87–108

H. Fischer and T. Wohnhaas: Lexikon süddeutscher Orgelbauer (Wilhelmshaven, 1993)

THEODOR WOHNHAAS

Brandis Quartet.

German string quartet. It was formed in 1976 by members of the Berlin PO: Thomas Brandis, Peter Brehm, Rainer Moog (soon replaced by Wilfried Strehle) and Wolfgang Boettcher. That year Boettcher left the Berlin PO to devote more time to solo work and teaching, and Brandis followed suit in 1983, but Brehm and Strehle were still playing in the orchestra in 1999. The ensemble’s fine tone and strong structural sense are best heard in the Viennese Classics and in music by such 20th-century composers as Hindemith, Weill and Schulhoff. Much of its repertory has been recorded, including the Concerto for string quartet and orchestra by Martinů. It has given the premières of works by Frank Michael Beyer, Gottfried von Einem, Giselher Klebe and Helmut Eder.

TULLY POTTER

Brandmüller, Theo

(b Mainz, 2 Feb 1948). German composer and organist. He studied composition with Klebe in Detmold (1970–75), with Kagel in Cologne (1976–7), with Cristobal Halffter in Madrid, and with Messiaen in Paris (1977–8), where he also studied the organ with Litaize. In 1979 he was appointed professor of composition at the Saarbrücken Musikhochschule and in 1982 accepted the post of honorary organist at the Ludwigskirche, Saarbrücken. His honours include the Villa Massimo Rome prize (1979) and the Saarland grand arts prize (1986). Brandmüller's extensive body of work was influenced early on by Skryabin, Kagel and the music of the French school. Initially eclectic with elements of both humour and ritual, his music became more economical after 1990. Although constructed of highly concentrated materials, these later works display a powerful lyricism.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Die Bluthochzeit (incid music, F.García Lorca), 1974, Wiesbaden, 31 May 1974

Orch: Ach trauriger Mond, perc, str, 1977; Org Conc., 1981; Zeit-Enden, 1982; Si j’etais Domenico, hpd, str, 1984; U(h)rtöne, 1985; Fred-Astaire-Music str, 1986; Cis-Cantus III ‘Lorca-Kathedralen’, 1987; Antigone, 1988; Imaginations, va, orch, 1989; OrganuM-zart, 1991; Und der Mond heftet ins Meer ein langes Horn aus Licht und Tanz, va, vc, db, orch, 1993; Chimères, sax qt, orch, tape, 1997

Vocal: Passionsszene, 2 spkrs, boys’ choir, chorus, perc, 1979–80; Cis-umsungend (Brandmüller), S, chorus, orch, 1996

Chbr: Missa Morgenstern, fl, b cl, vn, va, vc, pf, perc, 1978; Traumtanztango, 12 vn, 1982; Str Qt no.1, 1983; Str Qt no.2 ‘Le jardin suspendu’, 1985–6; Cis-Cantus II, va, vc, db, 1986; Enigma, vn, org, 1989

Kbd (org, unless otherwise stated): Hommage à Pérotin, 1978; 5 Strophen, 1979; Innenlicht, 1982; All’Italia, pf, 1986; Appellation (De profundis), 1997

Principal publishers: Bote & Bock, Breitkopf & Härtel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Dorfmüller: ‘Impulse von Perotin bis Messiaen. Zum Schaffen Theo Brandmüllers für und mit Orgel’, Musica sacra [Regensberg], c (1980), 316–9

J. Oehrlein: ‘Theo Brandmüller. Ein Komponist von Dichtern beeinflusst’, Neue Musikzeitung, xxxii (1983), 28

T. Brandmüller: Arrièregarde – Avantgarde, Texte zur Musik (Saarbrücken, 1998)

FRIEDRICH SPANGEMACHER

Brando

(It.: ‘branle’).

Generally, the 16th-century Italian equivalent for Branle. The word also designated a particular kind of social and theatrical set dance only tenuously related to it. Castiglione and G.B. Doni mentioned the brando as a social dance, agreeing that its most important distinguishing feature was that it was best performed in costume. Like the moresca, the brando was often part of a mascherata or intermedio.

The dancing-master Cesare Negri described both social and theatrical brandos in Le gratie d'amore (1602), including ‘la musica della sonata con l’intavolatura del liuto del brando’. Negri consistently referred to brandos together with ‘balletti’ and ‘balli’, all multi-sectional dances reminiscent of or directly incorporating individual dances such as the corrente, pavan or gagliarda; the musical accompaniments to his choreographies are not labelled, so that one must read the dance descriptions to ascertain which sections are thought to be ‘in corrente’, which ‘in gagliarda’ and so on. In addition to describing social brandos for sets consisting of two to four couples with four to nine musical sections, Negri mentioned three theatrical brandos he created. Two were part of a mascherata staged in 1574: a brando for the kings and queens of each of the four elements was the first of a series of allegorical dances and madrigal performances, ultimately culminating in a brando for the entire masked company of 82 performers. Rather more detail (and a musical accompaniment) is given for a brando that followed the last intermedio to a performance of G.B. Visconti's pastoral comedy Armenia, given in Milan in 1599 for the Infanta Donna Isabella of Spain and Archduke Albrecht of Austria. The brando, for four couples, is not pantomimic as has been suggested, but simply an extended version of the court dance, with the performers costumed as shepherds and nymphs. Both the detailed choreography and the 11 sections of the ‘sonata del brando’ were re-created by M. Dolmetsch (Dances of Spain and Italy from 1400 to 1600, London, 1954/R).

Few pieces specifically called ‘brando’ survive in 16th- and 17th-century collections of dance or chamber music. Those included in Megalaniscus's Suonate da camera a tre, published by Hendrik Aertssens (iii) in 1692 (incorrectly attributed to Corelli), are straightforward binary dances in duple metre, mostly cast in two repeated eight-bar strains. The brandos in Salvatore Mazzella's Balli, correnti, gighe, sarabande, gavotte, brande e galiarde (1689) are rather more interesting historically, for the triple-metre dances called ‘brande’ in the title are each called ‘minuetta’ in the print itself, lending some credence to the often debated idea that the minuet derived from the branle.

For bibliography see Branle.

Brandram, Rosina (Moult)

(b Southwark, London, 2 July 1845; d Southend, 28 Feb 1907). English contralto. She was engaged by Richard D'Oyly Carte as an understudy for Isabella Howard Paul in the original production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer (1877) and filled her place towards the end of the run. She played Kate in the New York première of The Pirates of Penzance (1879), and assumed the principal contralto parts in Carte's London company, beginning with Lady Blanche in Princess Ida (1884). Brandram was intimately connected with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, remaining with the D'Oyly Carte company for well over 20 years. She created Katisha in The Mikado (1885) and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers (1889) and took principal roles in Sullivan's later comic works, including Dancing Sunbeam in The Rose of Persia (1900), and in Edward German's Savoy operas.

She performed only in comic opera, nearly always in roles written for her, and seldom appeared outside London. Although typecast in matronly, sometimes unsympathetic roles, Brandram was not unattractive. Her deep, rich voice was characterized by Gilbert (in a speech to the O.P. Club, 30 December 1906) as ‘full-bodied burgundy’.

FREDRIC WOODBRIDGE WILSON

Brandt, Aleksander.

See Bandrowski-Sas, Aleksander.

Brandt [Brant, Prant, Prantner], Jobst [Jodocus, Jost] vom [zum]

(b Waldershof, nr Marktredwitz, Upper Franconia, 28 Oct 1517; d Brand, nr Marktredwitz, 22 Jan 1570). German composer and administrator. He came from an Upper Palatinate family of landed gentry and administrators, traceable back to the early 13th century. He matriculated at the Palatinate University of Heidelberg in 1530 at the age of 12. At about the same time he evidently became a pupil at the electoral choir school where, together with Georg Forster and Caspar Othmayr, he received his musical training under Lorenz Lemlin. After further studies, possibly in law, he entered electoral service under Ludwig V (d 1544). Early in 1545 the Elector Friedrich II appointed him his personal servant and in 1548 installed him as the official in charge of the monastery at Waldsassen, Upper Palatinate (a post formerly held by his father) and as a judge in the district of Liebenstein, where Waldsassen was situated. He must have lost the former position between July 1553 and June 1555. In the latter, which he seems to have held until 1561 or 1562, he and other employees of the monastery were affected by the aspirations of Count Palatine Ottheinrich (Elector 1556–9) in the cause of the Reformation: from March to June 1556 he was kept in custody, first at Amberg, then at Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate, though, like the others, he continued to be involved in religious controversy until the end of 1557. By March 1558 he was again back at his official duties in Liebenstein. After about 1562 he seems to have held no official position and to have retired to his family estates at Brand, where he devoted himself to the management of his properties and fiefs and to composition. He was a Lutheran by confession, perhaps from as early as 1545. Towards the end of 1569 he lay ill for several weeks at Eger (now Cheb), Bohemia, as Clemens Stephani, the editor of his Geistliche Psalmen (1572–3), stated in his preface. When there was no improvement in his condition he returned to Brand and died shortly afterwards.

Most of Brandt's known secular music was published relatively early in his life, nearly all his sacred music posthumously. The fact that there are no pieces by him in the first two parts (RISM 1539²⁷, 1540²¹) of Forster's large song collection suggests that the two childhood friends came together again only after they had been published. Brandt was certainly composing by the early 1540s, for ten pieces by him are listed in the so-called Heidelberg Chapel Inventory (1544). Forster evidently had a high opinion of him, for of the 382 pieces in his collection no fewer than 51 (in the third, fourth and fifth parts) are by him (ascribed with the initials ‘J.V.B.’) – more than there are by Forster himself, Lemlin, Othmayr, Senfl or Zirler; moreover, Forster dedicated the third part (1549) to him. In 1572 Stephani, a representative of conservative opinion, praised him as an ‘excellent composer’ and declared his Geistliche Psalmen a ‘masterpiece’. Like his Heidelberg companions Forster, Othmayr and Zirler, he remained an amateur, considering perhaps that professional status would have been inappropriate for a man of his high birth. Even so, he was a notably competent composer. His pieces show great formal variety, for example in the construction of opening and – in many cases expanded – closing sections, as well as in the location of the cantus prius factus in polyphonic textures. His basic approach was clearly that of a composer of polyphonic songs in motet style. His music abounds in imitation, there are ostinato contrapuntal motifs and even here and there strict canons, as well as ‘quodlibet’ movements based on the simultaneous statement of pre-existing melodies. One of the more progressive features of his music is the flexibility with which the cantus firmus is used: in five pieces it actually appears in the treble, and other pieces are based on double cantus firmi. Brandt also liked full textures: more than half of his secular pieces are in five parts, and one, which contains a canonic duo, is in eight.

The works in Brandt's Geistliche Psalmen are less well known; the vagans partbook is lost, so not all of them have survived complete. In addition to 35 complete four-part pieces, the collection includes five pieces in five parts, six in six, and one each in seven and nine, besides one in three parts (despite the title-page there are none in eight). Brandt generally went far beyond the technique of earlier composers of such music, for example Johann Walter, though in some of the six-part (all of which include strict canonic writing) and seven-part works he used a conservative technique in which the cantus firmus is stated in relatively long note values; more often than not it is in the treble. The counterpoint is rich in imitation; chordal writing and chromaticism occur infrequently. Of particular note is the nine-part work that concludes the collection; at several points it involves the use of cori spezzati technique, and it has no cantus firmus. Nor do Brandt's two Latin motets, which stand on the periphery of his output.

WORKS

complete list in Haase, 1967

sacred vocal

Der erste Theil geistlicher Psalmen und teutscher Kyrchengeseng, 4–9vv, insts (incl. trbns) (Eger, 1572–3)

Motet, 6vv, 1558⁴

Hymn, 5vv, lost, cited in Aller meinss genedigen Herrn Gesang, inventirt und beschriben Anno [MD] XLIIII (Heidelberg Chapel Inventory, 1544), D-HEu, codex Pal.Germ.318

secular vocal

51 songs, 4, 5, 8vv, 1549³⁷, 1550²³, 1552²⁸, 1556²⁸, 1556²⁹, 1558²⁰; 3 ed. W. Lipphardt, Gesellige Zeit (Kassel, 1933–5); 1 ed. in MMg, xxvi (1894)

5 Songs, lost, cited in Aller meinss genedigen Herrn Gesang, inventirt und beschriben Anno [MD] XLIIII (Heidelberg Chapel Inventory, 1544), D-HEu, codex Pal.Germ.318

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Kade: ‘Eine vereinzelte Discantusstimme vom Jahre 1573 … in Güstrow’, MMg, xv (1883), 124–35

R. Eitner: ‘Das alte deutsche mehrstimmige Lied und seine Meister’, MMg, xxv (1893), 149, 164, 173; xxvi (1894), 1–135

R. Eitner: ‘Das deutsche Lied im mehrstimmigen Tonsatze aus der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts im Druck und Manuskript’, MMg, xxxvii (1905), 1–7, 17–19, 34–42, 49–60, 73–88, 107

H. Osthoff: Die Niederländer und das deutsche Lied (1400–1640) (Berlin, 1938/R)

C.P. Reinhardt: Die Heidelberger Liedmeister des 16. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1939)

H. Albrecht: ‘Die deutschen Psalmen und Kirchengesänge des Jobst vom Brandt’, AMf, vii (1942), 218–28

H. Albrecht: Caspar Othmayr: Leben und Werk (Kassel, 1950)

S. Hermelink: ‘Ein Musikalienverzeichnis der Heidelberger Hofkapelle aus dem Jahr 1544’, Ottheinrich: Gedenkschrift zur 400 jährigen Wiederkehr seiner Kurfürstenzeit (1556–1559), ed. G. Poensgen (Heidelberg, 1956), 247–60

K. Gudewill: ‘Identifizierungen von anonymen und mehrfach zugewiesenen Kompositionen in deutschen Liederdrucken aus der 1. Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, FAM, iv (1957), 89–97

H. Haase: ‘Die Einwirkung des Isaakschen Innsbruck-Liedes auf das Schaffen Kilians und Jobst vom Brandts’, Mf, xvii (1964), 15–22

H. Haase: Jobst vom Brandt (1517–1570): ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte Deutschlands im 2. Drittel des 16. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1967)

HANS HAASE

Brandt, Marianne [Bischoff, Marie]

(b Vienna, 12 Sept 1842; d Vienna, 9 July 1921). Austrian mezzo-soprano. She studied in Vienna and in Baden-Baden with Viardot, making her début at Olmütz in 1867 as Rachel (La Juive). She first appeared in Berlin in 1868 as Azucena, and was engaged there until 1882. After making her London début at Covent Garden in Fidelio (1872), she sang Amneris in the first Berlin performance of Aida (1874) and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung during the first Bayreuth Festival (1876). At Bayreuth she also sang Kundry at the second performance of Parsifal (1882). Her other Wagner roles included Brangäne, which she sang at the first Berlin (1876), London (1882) and New York (1886) performances of Tristan und Isolde, Ortrud, Fricka (Die Walküre), Magdalene, Adriano (Rienzi) and Erda (Siegfried). The extensive compass (g to d''') of her large and well-projected voice enabled her to sing both soprano and mezzo-soprano parts; at the Metropolitan, where she appeared from 1884 to 1888, her roles included Leonore, Fidès (Le prophète), Siébel (Faust), Astaroth, in the American première of Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (1885), and Eglantine, which she sang at the first American performance of Weber’s Euryanthe (1887). After her retirement in 1890 she taught in Vienna.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ehrlich [A. Payne], ed.: Berühmte Sängerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1895)

W.H. Seltsam: Metropolitan Opera Annals (New York, 1947, 2/1949)

H. Fetting: Die Geschichte der Deutschen Staatsoper (Berlin, 1955)

G. Skelton: Wagner at Bayreuth (London, 1965, 2/1976/R)

ELIZABETH FORBES

Brandt, Willy [Vasily] (Georgiyevich)

(b Coburg, 1869; d Saratov, 2 Feb 1923). German trumpeter, conductor and composer. He studied at the Coburg Music School with Carl Zimmermann. In the summer seasons of 1887 and 1888 he played in the spa orchestra of Bad Oeynhausen, and in the winter seasons 1887–90 in the Helsinki Orchestral Association under Kajanus. From 1890 to 1909 he was first trumpeter (from 1903, first cornettist) in the Bol'shoy Theatre Orchestra in Moscow. He was professor of trumpet from 1900 to 1912 at the Moscow Conservatory and from 1912 to his death at the Saratov Conservatory, where he also managed and conducted the orchestra. Brandt had a powerful tone and is regarded as one of the founders of the Russian school of playing; one of his most influential pupils was Mikhail Tabakov. His cornet survives in the Bad Säckingen Trumpet Museum. His compositions include two Konzertstücke in F minor op.11 and E op.12 (1910), which are still in the repertory, short pieces for cornet, as well as 34 orchestral studies for trumpet and 23 solo studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PazdírekH

A. Selianin: ‘V.G. Brandt’, Brass Bulletin, no.26 (1979), 59–68

S. Bolotin: Ėntsiklopedicheskïy biograficheskïy slovarý musïkantov-ispoiniteley na dukhovïkh instrumentakh [Biographical lexicon of Russian wind instrument players] (Moscow, 1995), 38–9

E. Tarr: ‘Willy (Vasily Georgiyevich) Brandt: the Early Years’, Journal of the International Trumpet Guild, xx/4 (1996), 55–60

E. Tarr: East Meets West (Stuyvesant, NY, forthcoming)

EDWARD H. TARR

Brandts Buys [Buijs].

Dutch family of musicians.

(1) Cornelis Buys

(3) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys [Buijs] (i)

(4) Ludwig Felix (Willem Cornelis) Brandts Buys

(5) Henri (François Robert) Brandts Buys

(6) Jan (Willem Frans) Brandts Buys [Buijs]

(7) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys [Buijs] (ii)

(8) Hans [Johann] (Sebastian) Brandts Buys [Buijs]

WRITINGS

Het Wohltemperirte Clavier van Johann Sebastian Bach (Arnhem, 1942, 4/1984)

De passies van Johann Sebastian Bach (Leiden,1950)

Johann Sebastian Bach: 48 praeludia (Haarlem,1950, 2/1969)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NNBW (C. von Gleich)

W. Paap: ‘In memoriam Hans Brandts Buys’, Mens en melodie, xiv (1959), 65–8

JAN TEN BOKUM

(1) Cornelis Buys

(bap. Amsterdam, 17 June 1757; d Zaltbommel, 2 March 1831). Organist and carillonneur. He was appointed to positions in Kampen (1783) and Zaltbommel (1791).

(2) Cornelis Alijander Brandts Buys

(b Zaltbommel, 3 April 1812; d Deventer, 18 Nov 1890). Organist, carillonneur, conductor and composer, son of (1) Cornelis Buys. He succeeded his father in Zaltbommel (1834) and from 1840 played an important role in musical life in Deventer. He composed chamber music, male choruses, orchestral works and piano pieces in a Mendelssohnian style. An edition by M. Degenkamp and D. van Heuvel of his Scherzo op.22 was published in the series Nederlandse Orkestmuziek (Arnhem, 1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.G.A. ten Bokum: Muziek in de IJsselsteden (Utrecht, 1988)

J.G.A. ten Bokum: ‘Componeren in Deventer in de tweede helft van de 19e eeuw’, Deventer jaarboek 1990, 9–23 [incl. list of works]

(3) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys [Buijs] (i)

(b Deventer, 31 Oct 1840; d Eerbeek, 13 Jan 1911). Organist, conductor and composer, son of (2) Cornelis Alijander Brandts Buys. In 1864 he was appointed organist in Zutphen, where he gave a series of historical recitals in 1869.

(4) Ludwig Felix (Willem Cornelis) Brandts Buys

(b Deventer, 20 Nov 1847; d Velp, 29 June 1917). Organist, conductor and composer, son of (2) Cornelis Alijander Brandts Buys. He was conductor of the Rotterdam Male-Voice Choir (1874–91) and was best known for the Sieben Lieder op.21 (1876–7), his chromatic Latin psalms for male chorus, and for his national songs.

(5) Henri (François Robert) Brandts Buys

(b Deventer, 20 April 1850; d Ede, 16 Oct 1905). Conductor and composer, son of (2) Cornelis Alijander Brandts Buys. His Wagnerian concert drama Albrecht Beiling (1881) was performed as an opera in Amsterdam in 1891.

(6) Jan (Willem Frans) Brandts Buys [Buijs]

(b Zutphen, 12 Sept 1868; d Salzburg, 7 Dec 1933). Composer, son of (3) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys (i). After studying the organ, piano and theory with his father he became organist at the Protestant Broederenkerk (1884–9), also giving organ recitals and playing the piano in chamber concerts. He then studied at the Raff Conservatory in Frankfurt, with Anton Urspruch as his composition teacher. In 1892 he moved to Vienna, where he worked for the publishers Cranz, Universal Edition (from 1901) and Doblinger (from 1902). In 1899 he won second prize to Ernő Dohnányi in the Bösendorfer competition with his Piano Concerto op.15. Influenced by Dohnányi’s example, he wrote some chamber works for strings, which received performances from 1901. From 1907 the Wiener Concert-Vereinorchester, with which he had appeared as a keyboard soloist, gave the premières of several of his compositions. In 1910 he settled near Bozen (Bolzano), but he returned in 1914 to Vienna to consolidate his success as a composer. Disappointed at the passing of old Viennese society, however, he moved in 1920 to Loznica, near Dubrovnik, finally returning to Austria in 1928 and settling in Salzburg.

Jan Brandts Buys composed in a generally conservative style that bears traces of influence from several of his slightly older contemporaries, although some more up-to-date elements are found in such works as the Sizilianische Serenade for string quartet op.28 (c1911) and the serious opera Der Eroberer (1917). Most of his other operas belong to the undramatic comic ‘Spieloper’ type, the most successful being Die Schneider von Schönau (1915), in which leitmotif and folklike melodies are used. The orchestration is light, with flute and glockenspiel predominating. Wagnerian traits are revealed in Das Veilchenfest (1905) and in the orchestral Illyrische Ballade op.24 (1907). The songs with flute or string accompaniment are of special interest, but after 1920 the quality of his works declined.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in A-Smi and NL-DHgm; opus numbers 1–4 are duplicated

Stage: Schluck und Jau (incid music, G. Hauptmann), c1901; Das Veilchenfest (comic op, V. Heindl), 1905, Berlin, Komische, 3 Dec 1909 (Vienna, 1905); Glockenspiel (comic op, prol, 1, B. Warden and J.M. Welleminsky), 1912, Dresden, Kgl, 4 Dec 1913 (Leipzig, 1913); Die Schneider von Schönau (comic op, 3, Warden and Welleminsky), 1915, Dresden, Kgl, 1 April 1916 (Mainz, 1916); Der Eroberer (serious op, 3, Warden and Welleminsky), 1917, Dresden, Kgl, 14 Jan 1918 (Munich, 1917); Der Mann im Mond (comic op, 3, Warden and Welleminsky), ?1918, Dresden, Staatsoper, 18 June 1922 (Mainz, 1921); Micarême (comic op, 1, Warden and Welleminsky), 1919, Vienna, Ronacher, 4 Nov 1919 (Vienna, 1920); Traumland (comic, 3, Brandts Buys), 1927, Dresden, Staatsoper, 24 Nov 1927 (Leipzig, 1927); Hero und Leander (serious, 5, F. Grillparzer) 1929; Ulysses (comic op, 8 scenes, W. Solander) (Starnberg, n.d.)

Vocal (1v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Chanson and Berceuse, 1v, vc, pf (V. Hugo, H. Chantavoine), ?1889; 6 Lieder, op.2 (Frankfurt, 1891); 6 liederen (Utrecht, ?1891); 4 Nachtliedjes (F. van Eeden) (Amsterdam, 1892); Die Liebe, Bar, SATB, orch, op.6 (Hamburg, 1897); Der Abend kommt (M. Kalbeck) (Vienna, 1899); Die Nachtigall, 1v, fl, hp; 6 Lieder, op.18 (Vienna, 1901); 4 Lieder, op.22 (Vienna, 1908); 3 Lieder, 1v, fl, pf, op.20 (Munich, 1911); 3 Lieder, 1v, 2 vn, va, vc, op.33 (Leipzig, 1916); 6 Lieder, op.30 (J. von Eichendorff) (Leipzig, 1917); 6 Hafislieder, op.38 (Leipzig, 1917); 4 Lieder, op.42 (Vienna, 1925); Bergpsalmen, 1v, orch, op.52 (J. von Scheffel)

Orch: Konzertstück, pf, orch, op.3 (Hamburg, 1894); Des Meeressang (Hamburg, 1895); Suite, hp, hn, str, op.7 (Hamburg, 1897); Ov., op.12 (Leipzig, 1899); Pf Conc., op.15 (Berlin, 1899); Vorspiel Neidhart Fuchs, 1905; Illyrische Ballade, op.24, 1907; Tancred, vc, orch, op.35 (Leipzig, 1916); Oberon, op.27 (Leipzig, 1919); Bilder aus dem Kinderleben (Mainz, 1922); Dyptichon, op.57, 1930, ed. (Starnberg, 1961); Poetischer Spaziergang, op.50 (Cologne, 1931); Aus der spanischen Reitschule, op.55, c1930, ed. (Starnberg, 1961); orch piece, op.58, c1930; Salzburger Serenade, op.51 (Cologne, 1933)

Chbr: Herfstzang, va, pf, 1889; Pf Trio, op.1 (Frankfurt, 1891); Qnt, fl, 2 vn, va, vc (Vienna, 1903); Suite im alten Stil, str qt, op.23 (Vienna, 1908); Romantische Serenade, str qt, op.25 (Vienna, 1910); Sonata, vn, pf, op.26 (Vienna, 1910); Str Qt, op.19 (Munich, 1911); Sizilianische Serenade, str qt, op.28 (Leipzig, 1917); Aus dem Westöstlichen Divan, 2 vn, va, vc, pf, op.32 (Leipzig, 1917); Sextett, 3 vn, 2 va, vc, op.40 (Leipzig, 1917); Suite, vn, pf, op.43 (Vienna, 1925)

Pf: 6 lyrische Stückchen und Variationen, op.1 (Zutphen, 1883); Sonata, b; Variationen, G, 1890; Aus dem Lande Rembrandt’s, op.5 (Frankfurt, 1894); 3 Klavierstücke, op.9 (Hamburg, 1896); 5 Characterstücke, op.11 (Leipzig, 1897); Moderne Studien, opp.13 and 14 (Brussels, 1899); Tänze und Weisen (Leipzig, 1900); 3 pieces for Alma, 1912–21; 3 Klavierstücke, op.29 (Leipzig, 1917/R); Ave Samobor, op.37 (Leipzig, 1917); Capriccio fugato (Leipzig, 1917)

Org: Orgel en harmonium, op.3 (Zutphen, 1889); Nieuw Leven (Zutphen, 1889); Onze koraalboeken (Zutphen, 1890–92); Toccata en Fuge, g (Zutphen, 1891); Choral, 1915; Hochzeitsmarsch (Leipzig, 1917); Patria, op.36 (Leipzig, 1917)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Korngold: ‘Jan Brandts-Buys: Die Schneider von Schönau’, Die romanische Oper der Gegenwart: kritische Aufsätze (Vienna, 1922), 222–32

G. Verhey and G. Schlimme van Brunswijk: Jan Brandts Buys (Zutphen, 1980)

J.G.A. ten Bokum: Muziek in de IJsselsteden (Utrecht, 1988)

J.G.A. ten Bokum: Jan Brandts Buys, Komponist, ein Holländer in Österreich (forthcoming)

(7) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys [Buijs] (ii)

(b Zutphen, 9 Nov 1874; d Velp, 21 July 1944). Conductor and composer, son of (3) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys (i). As conductor of the Arnhem section of Toonkunst (1915–42) he gave annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion from 1923. His compositions include Singspiele for children and a Requiem voor de gevallenen for chorus and orchestra. He published a book on analysis, Muzikale vormleer (Arnhem, 1934), and some articles on the art of carillon playing.

(3) (Johann) Friedrich Braun

(8) Hans [Johann] (Sebastian) Brandts Buys [Buijs]

(b Warnsveld, 28 June 1905; d Hilversum, 21 Feb 1959). Conductor, composer and writer on music, son of (7) Marius Adrianus Brandts Buys (ii). His music teachers included Sem Dresden and Johan Wagenaar. From 1930 to 1933 he studied the harpsichord. He conducted student ensembles in Amsterdam (from 1930), Utrecht (1942) and Hilversum (1943), and gave private performances of Bach cantatas during World War II. From 1945 he directed the Arnhem section of Toonkunst and from 1955 the Hilversum section as well. He taught at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum from 1938 and the Rotterdam Conservatory from 1949, and was appointed director of the Goois Muzieklyceum Hilversum in 1951. He specialized in the performance of Baroque works with small, non-professional forces; like his father, he put on Bach’s St Matthew Passion each year in Arnhem, in performances noted for their sprightly tempos. He also promoted the music of his contemporaries. As a scholar he was best known for his analytical writings on Bach; he also published editions of the keyboard suites of Rynoldus Popma van Oevering (UVNM, xlvi, 1955) and Pieter Hellendaal’s Six Grand Concertos op.3 (MMN, i, 1959). Among his compositions theatre music predominates: he wrote the music for the first Dutch sound film, Terra nova, in 1931.

Brandukov, Anatoly Andreyevich

(b Moscow, 22 Dec 1856; d Moscow, 16 Feb 1930). Russian cellist. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Cossmann and Fitzenhagen from 1868 to 1877; he also studied music theory with Tchaikovsky. From 1878 to 1905 he lived in Switzerland and France, spending much time in Paris, where Turgenev introduced him into Pauline Viardot’s salon. In Paris he played in Martin Marsick’s string quartet and performed Saint-Saëns’s A minor Concerto under the composer’s direction. Visiting Russia almost every year, he appeared with such artists as Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. In 1906 he was appointed director and professor at the Moscow Philharmonic School of Music and Drama, and from 1921 he was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. He nevertheless continued to perform as a soloist – he was noted for his stylish interpretations, his refined temperament and his beautiful, expressive tone – and as a chamber music player, and conductor. Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo capriccioso for cello and orchestra op.62 (1888) and Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata (1901) were both dedicated to him. A number of Brandukov’s own cello pieces were published in Moscow and Paris; the manuscripts of his concertos are in the Tchaikovsky Museum at Klin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Ginzburg: A.A. Brandukov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1951)

L.S. Ginzburg: Istoriya violonchel'nogo iskusstva [History of the art of the cello], iii (Moscow, 1965), 353–97

LEV GINZBURG

Brandus.

French firm of music publishers. It was established in Paris in January 1846 as Brandus et Cie when Louis Brandus (b Kremmen, 28 March 1816; d Paris, 30 Sept 1887) purchased the firm of Maurice Schlesinger. Brandus took over Schlesinger’s premises at 97 rue Richelieu, Paris; in December 1848 a move was made (or the house was renumbered) to 87 and later, in January 1851, to 103 rue Richelieu. In October 1850 Louis’s younger brother, Gemmy (b Berlin, 3 Jan 1823; d Paris, 12 Feb 1873), became a partner, and the firm of Troupenas (with which Brandus had for more than a year occasionally published) was acquired; for a time Troupenas’ premises at 40 rue Vivienne were retained. In 1854 Sélim-François Dufour (b Cherbourg, 18 March 1779; d Paris, 25 July 1872), who had previously been manager of Brandus’ outlet in St Petersburg (in existence 1853–5), was taken into partnership, the firm becoming known from August as G. Brandus, Dufour & Cie and, in February 1858, as G. Brandus & S. Dufour. When Dufour died in July 1872 the firm reverted to the name Brandus & Cie, and on Gemmy’s death the next year the direction was re-assumed by Louis Brandus. In October 1887, after the latter’s death, Philippe Maquet acquired the firm, giving it his own name; in 1899 Maquet’s business was taken over by C. Joubert & Cie, which remained in existence until 1971.

Brandus took care to maintain Schlesinger’s contacts with Berlioz, Chopin, Halévy and Meyerbeer. The firm published the first editions in score of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie, Roméo et Juliette and the Te Deum, and the piano-vocal score of Béatrice et Bénédict. It published Chopin’s opp.59–65, the last of his works to appear in his lifetime, Meyerbeer’s last four operas, from Le prophète (1849) to L’africaine (1865), and, before Halévy transferred his allegiance elsewhere, seven of his operas. It also printed (though probably not always for general sale) full scores and orchestral parts of operas and operettas by Auber, Flotow, Lecocq, Maillart and Offenbach; together with its stock of earlier Schlesinger and Troupenas publications it was able in 1867 to offer performing materials of no fewer than 65 works for the stage; by 1887, excluding reissues, it had put out piano-vocal scores of a total of about 80 new stage works, including 15 by Offenbach and 25 by Lecocq. In the field of instrumental music it concentrated particularly on the piano music of Blumenthal, Victor Duvernoy, Heller and Liszt, the dance music of Musard and Labitzky, and violin works by Vieuxtemps. It published Schlesinger’s Revue et gazette musicale until 31 December 1880, when the final number appeared. Brandus continued Schlesinger’s chronological series of plate numbers, starting at 4293 in 1846 and continuing to 13,167 in 1887. A gap of about 3400 numbers (1851) may be explained partly by the acquisition of Troupenas’ stock (to which Brandus probably allocated new numbers).

Catalogues (selective list): Catalogue général (Paris, c1846 [Maurice Schlesinger pubns to 30 June 1845], suppls. 1848–50); Catalogue général (Paris, 1850–51, suppl. 1852); Piano, instrumental and vocal music (Paris and St Petersburg, 1853); Catalogue de G. Brandus et S. Dufour (Paris and St Petersburg, 1855, supps 1856–8) [piano, instr and vocal music]; Catalogue de G. Brandus et S. Dufour (Paris, 1858–9/R) [piano, instr and vocal music]; Catalogue de Brandus et Cie (Paris, c1873, suppl. c1875) [piano, instr and vocal music]; Catalogue des partitions (Paris, 1882/R, suppl. 1883)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEMF [incl. a list of plate nos.]

HopkinsonD

Catalogue de Brandus et Dufour (Paris, 1867–9)

C. Hopkinson: A Bibliography of the Musical and Literary Works of Hector Berlioz (Edinburgh, 1951, rev. 2/1980 by R. Macnutt), 195–7

O.E. Deutsch: Musikverlags Nummern (Berlin, 1961), 22

A. Devriès: ‘La maison Brandus’, RdM, lxxii (1984), 51–82

RICHARD MACNUTT

Brândus, Nicolae

(b Bucharest, 16 April 1935). Romanian composer and pianist. Drawn to music from childhood, he studied piano at the Bucharest Conservatory (1952–7). He also had lessons in composition from Martian Negrea. Between 1960 and 1969 he worked as a solo pianist with the Filharmonica in Ploieşti, during which time he also gave concerts in Romania and elsewhere which displayed his virtuoso technique. In 1968–81 he taught chamber music at the Academy of Music in Bucharest. In order to develop his understanding of new music, he attended courses in Darmstadt (1969–80) and during 1985 he worked at IRCAM. His doctoral dissertation (Cluj Academy of Music, 1981) is indicative of his interests: Bases of a Formal Analysis of Musical Language. In 1991 he returned to the Bucharest Academy, working as a doctoral supervisor. He became involved in the Romanian branch of the ISCM and was also elected to its executive commitee.

His composition is centred on orchestral and chamber music, and is notable for its development of new techniques, though he has never lost sight of his traditional training as a composer. His musical language is dense and complex, and he uses a wide range of musical devices: modal, serial, improvisational and random compositional techniques are all to be found in his work. He also composes for the theatre and has written an opera-pantomime The Betrothal (1966) and an opera With the Gipsy Girls (1985). He has composed several works for ‘instrumental theatre’, usually for voice and instruments (including tape).

WORKS

(selective list)

Sonata, 2 pf, 1963; Ballad sym., vv, orch, 1964–78; 7 Psalms (T. Arghezi), solo vv, inst ens, 1965; The Betrothal (op-pantomime, M. Eminescu), 1966, Bucharest, 9 Feb 1975; Domnişoara Hus [Miss Hus] (cant., Barbu), 1968; Antiphonia, str orch, 1971; Vagues, pf, vn, va, vc, cl, perc, 1972; Polyphony IV, chbr orch, tape, 1973; Kitsch-N, fl/sax, tape, 1974; Infrarealism (I. Barbu), 1v, cl, pf, 1975; Dialogos–Divagues [Pf Conc. no.1], 1978; Languir me fais [I am kept Waiting], solo perc, 1979; Rhythmodia, conc., solo perc, 1982; With the Gipsy Girls (op, M. Eliade), 1985, Bucharest, 19 June 1987; Sineuphonia I, 2 org, orch, tape, 1987; Ouvedennerode, db sax, tape, 1993; Pf Conc. no.2, 1993

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Herman: Formă şi stil în noua creatie muzicală românescă [Form and Style in New Romanian Music] (Bucharest, 1977)

F. Popovici: ‘Nouvelles musicales de Romanie: Nicolae Brândus’, Muzica, xxxiii (1983), 371

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Romanian Musicians] (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Brandus Posnaniensis.

See Brant, Jan.

Branle [brande, brawl, brall, brangill].

A sideways step or movement in the 15th- and 16th-century Basse danse; a variety of French dances of popular character that were widely cultivated over several centuries. Some branles are still danced in France, and branle-like dances (line and circle dances) are popular in many cultures. A group dance, the branle, involves several couples disposed in a circle, in a single-file line (fig.1) or in a line of couples. Randle Cotgrave vividly defined in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611):

Bransle: a totter, swing, or swindge; a shake, shog, or shocke; a stirring, an uncertain and inconstant motion; … also, a brawl, or daunce, wherein many (men, and women) holding by the hands sometimes in a ring, and otherwise at length, move all together.

The music was often provided by the singing of the participants, and the characteristic motion was a step to the side. Visual illustrations of the dance go back to medieval times, but the term ‘branle’ is relatively recent, being rarely encountered before 1500 except as a designation for one of the steps of the basse danse. Branle music occasionally echoed the solo verse and choral refrain structure of the old French carole. An example of this primitive type may be found as late as the branle J’avois pris mes pantouflettes collected by J.-J. Rousseau and printed posthumously in his Consolations des misères de ma vie (1781). In this piece a ‘choeur’ singing in unison echoes the words and music of a solo ‘choryphée’. In his Dictionnaire of 1768 Rousseau gave a corresponding definition, which must be based on his observations of rural practices: ‘Branle: Sorte de danse fort gaie qui se danse en rond sur un Air de cour et un Rondeau, c’est à dire avec un meme refrain à la fin de chaque couplet’. Thus defined, the musical characteristics of the branle shared some affinities with the vaudeville; indeed, several 16th-century voix de villes were labelled ‘chanson-branle’.

The Carole was also a round dance. Illustrations of Le roman de la rose frequently depict it as such in medieval manuscripts. When translating Boccaccio’s Decamerone into French in the first half of the 16th century, Antoine Le Maçon replaced ‘carolette’ (little carole) with ‘branle’.

In his macaronic treatise on dancing, Ad suos compagnones, written in about 1519, Antonius de Arena described three kinds of branles: double, simple and coupé. Thoinot Arbeau, describing the practices of the mid-16th century in his Orchesographie (1588), mentioned four types of branle that were characteristically employed to begin the dancing at any festival. These may be tabulated according to general character, metre and musical phrase structure as illustrated in Table 1.

table 1

Double	Simple	Gay	Burgundian


sedate	sedate	lively	very lively
duple	duple	triple	mixed
2 + 2 bars	2 + 1 bars	regular	irregular

The last category corresponds to Arena’s branles coupés (mixed and mimed branles) and were also known as ‘branles de Champagne’, to Arbeau. Characteristic of branle simple was its three-bar phrase structure, resulting from the choreographic feature of a simple step (half as long) alternating with a double. This phraseological feature marks much French music not specifically identified with the branle, but surely deriving ultimately from the branle simple, or from the verse structure of texts that were made up to accompany its strains. The branle gay had a typical rhythmic pattern which is also often encountered in music not specifically so labelled (ex.1; cf ‘Fear no danger to ensue’ in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas).

The mixed branles included many regional varieties. The ‘branles d’Escosse’ were popular in France in the 1560s. The ‘triory’ and the passepied were the characteristic branles of Brittany, just as the bourrée typified the Auvergne and the gavotte Dauphiné. The branle de Poitou was distinguished by its 9/4 metre, although sometimes it was in 6/4, or even 6/4 in alternation with 9/4. There are examples of all three possibilities in the earliest source that contains extensive examples of the branle types, Dixhuit basses dances (Paris, 1530) for lute, printed by Attaingnant (ed. D. Heartz, 1964). The typical suite of branles of about 1600 added four more dances to the four types of Arbeau: the branle de Poitou (in 9/4), the branle double de Poitou (in 6/4), the branle Montirandé (related to Arbeau’s branle du Haut Barrois, which he said is ‘sur l’air d’un branle de Monstierandel’) and the gavotte. Such is the order found in Anthoine Francisque’s lute tablature, Le trésor d’Orphée (Paris, 1600), in the Terpsichore (1612) of Michael Praetorius, the Apologie de la danse of De Lauze (1623; ed. J. Wildeblood, London, 1952) and the Harmonie universelle of Mersenne (1636–7). The initial branle double is lacking in both De Lauze and Mersenne and the former called the ‘Montirandé’ the ‘5e branle’. The ‘branle de Poitou à mener’ is the ancestor of the minuet, to which it bequeathed the possibilities of phrasing in 2 x 3 beats or in 3 x 3 beats. Pieces called ‘amener’, often found in 17th-century suites, belong to the same complex.

The diverse localities represented in the family of branles had characteristic instrumental accompaniments associated with them as well. According to the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois the people of Burgundy and Champagne danced ‘avec le petit hautboys, le dessus de violon et tambourins de village’, and this is corroborated by Arbeau, who lived at Langres in Champagne. Regarding the branle de Poitou, Marguerite de Valois referred to ‘Les Poitevines avec la cornemuse’. Indeed, drone effects are a frequent feature of the branle de Poitou, lending it a character even more rural than other types. The many illustrations showing simple country people dancing out of doors in a chain or a circle to the accompaniment of a bagpipe may actually represent the branle de Poitou (fig.1 shows a 15th-century miniature of shepherds and shepherdesses dancing in a line with the characteristic sidewise step of the branle, accompanied by a bagpipe). In the 16th century rustic pipes were used even at the highest level of society. An anonymous painting at the Louvre, one of several commemorating festivities that took place in connection with the wedding of the Duke of Joyeuse in 1581, shows several elaborately dressed and gowned courtiers dancing in a circle, evoking the typical sideways motion of Arbeau’s branle (fig.2). Watching at the side is King Henri III with his mother, Catherine de Medici, and his queen, Louise de Lorraine, who is seated. On a raised platform behind the dancers are depicted one or more bagpipes and what looks like a shawm.

The variety of branle that Arbeau called ‘mimed’ (morgué) falls partly within the sphere of his mixed branles (branles de Champagne). Some took their origin from the commonplace: peas, clogs, horses and washerwomen. Others came from court masquerades, such as the ‘branles de Malte’, a veritable ballet of several movements that can be traced to an actual event at the French court in 1551. To this variety of mimed branle is related the Italian Brando, which designated a variety of entertainments related in character to the moresca (Cesare Negri described a ‘brando’ he staged in 1574). ‘Brando’ was also the general Italian title for branle tunes imported from France, just as ‘brawl’ was the most usual anglicization. With its adaptability to theatrical use and its tendency to form suites of like dances, or of contrasting dances, the branle was an important forerunner of the ballet de cour. One of the best early 16th-century illustrations of a branle is precisely that of a stage dance, a round executed by several couples representing the rejoicing of the Jews in the Mystère de la vengeance de Jésus-Christ (fig.3). This painting shows an ensemble of shawms, sackbut, fiddle and tabor that is close in its make-up to the characteristic ensemble of Champagne mentioned above.

With more abundant musical sources for stage dances in the early 17th century the debt owed by the ballet to the rhythmically variegated branle family becomes more apparent. In the movements of the Ballet des chevaux of 1610, for example, as it survives in the Philidor collection and as intabulated in Robert Ballard (ii)’s Deuxième livre for lute (1614), it is possible to identify by phrase structure a branle simple (Chant 3e) and a branle de Poitou in 9/4 (Chant 6e). Branles remained close to an easily singable, syllabic tune, and never lost this folklike quality, even in the more elaborate instrumental settings of later French ballet music. Rameau, for example, reveals in his music a sensitive ear for the rhythms of traditional and provincial dances.

Increasingly fewer dances entitled ‘branle’ were recorded in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, despite the fact that branles were almost ritually danced at the opening of court balls (fig.4). The few choreographic examples set down in Feuillet-Beauchamps notation are danses à deux, or resemble contredanses.

The fascination of the branle over the centuries has been largely the nostalgia of city dwellers for country pleasures, but urban civilization required ever newer fashions. By 1800 contredanses (akin to English country dances, which in turn resemble branles) and waltzes were the most popular dances in the French ballroom. Yet it is still possible to witness a variety of branles danced in regions of France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (G. Tani)

SartoriB

J. Ecorcheville: Vingt suites d’orchestre du XVIIe siècle français (Paris, 1906/R)

H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)

P. Coirault: Recherches sur notre ancienne chanson populaire traditionnelle (Vannes, 1928)

C. Sachs: Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (Berlin, 1933; Eng. trans., 1937/R)

J. Gregor: Kulturgeschichte des Balletts (Vienna, 1944) [p.18 shows a sung round-dance, ‘La karole au dieu d’amours’ from an early 15th-century MS of Roman de la rose (A-Wn 2568)]

M. Dolmetsch: Dances of Spain and Italy (London, 1954)

D. Heartz: Sources and Forms of the French Instrumental Dance in the Sixteenth Century (diss., Harvard U., 1957)

J.-M. Guilcher: La tradition populaire de danse en Basse-Bretagne (Paris, 1963, 3/1995)

M.M. McGowan: L’art du ballet de cour en France 1581–1643 (Paris, 1963/R)

D. Heartz: ‘Un ballet turc à la cour d’Henri II: les branles de Malte’, Contribution à l’étude des origines de l’opéra: Montauban 1970, 17–23

J. Mrácek: Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Instrumental Dance Music in Uppsala University Library (Instr. mus. hs 409) (Stockholm, 1976)

J. Challet-Haas, ed.: Dances from the Marais Nord Vendeen: kintograms et music (St Peter, Jersey, 1977)

J.-M. Guilcher: La tradition de danse en Béarn et Pays Basque français (Paris, 1984)

J. Rimmer: ‘Dance Elements in Trouvère Repertory’, Dance Research, iii/2 (1985), 23–34

G. Roy: ‘Rondes et branles de Champagne’, Folklore de Champagne, cx (1988), 10–29

P. Holman: Introduction to: Matthew Locke: the Rare Theatrical: New York Public Library, Drexel MS 3976 (London, 1989)

J. Rimmer: ‘Carole, rondeau and branle in Ireland, 1300–1800’, Dance Research, vii/1 (1989), 20–46; ix/2 (1991), 97

R. Semmens: ‘Branles, Gavottes and Contredanses in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Dance Research, xv/2 (1997), 35–62

DANIEL HEARTZ (with PATRICIA RADER)

Brannenburger, Reinmar der.

See Reinmar von Brennenberg.

Brannigan, Owen

(b Annitsford, Northumberland, 10 March 1908; d Newcastle upon Tyne, 9 May 1973). English bass. He studied part-time at the GSM, London, and won its gold medal in 1942. He made his début in 1943 with the Sadler’s Wells Opera as Sarastro, and sang with the company until 1948, and again from 1952 to 1958. As well as specializing in Mozart and buffo characters, he created Britten’s Swallow (Peter Grimes), Collatinus (The Rape of Lucretia) and Superintendent Budd (Albert Herring); Britten later composed Noye and Bottom for him; in the latter role he remains unsurpassed, as can be heard in his recording under the composer. Brannigan also created roles in operas by Malcolm Williamson and John Gardner. He performed at Glyndebourne from 1947 and at Covent Garden from 1948, as well as appearing frequently in oratorio and concerts in Britain and abroad. With a voice of expressive tone and ripe verbal inflection, he gained a wide popularity in radio and television programmes of Northumbrian and other folksongs, many of which he recorded. Brannigan’s other recordings include roles in Purcell’s Fairy Queen (under Britten), Cavalli’s La Calisto (with Leppard), operas by Britten, and several by Gilbert and Sullivan (with Sargent). He was made an OBE in 1964. In 1972 he was involved in a road accident from which he never fully recovered.

NOËL GOODWIN

Branscombe, Peter (John)

(b Sittingbourne, 7 Dec 1929). English musicologist. He studied at Oxford, where he was influenced by Jack Westrup and Egon Wellesz. He later took the PhD at London University with a dissertation The Connections between Drama and Music in the Viennese Popular Theatre from … 1781 to … 1855 (1976). In 1959 he was appointed to teach German at the University of St Andrews, becoming Professor of Austrian Studies (1979), and later professor emeritus. Branscombe’s work, in studies of the Classical period and of the German Romantics, has a strong literary basis (for example in his work on the 18th-century Viennese theatre and his studies of Hofmannsthal’s librettos for Strauss), but he is also a perceptive and judicious critic, especially of opera and of singing generally. He has written particularly valuably on Die Zauberflöte, in a number of studies of its literary and theatrical context as well as its music, culminating in a Cambridge opera handbook (1991); Haydn, Wagner and Strauss are among the composers on whom he has worked, as well as Schubert – he co-edited Schubert Studies (Cambridge, 1982) with Eva Badura-Skoda, contributing a chapter on the melodrama. Branscombe has written many articles and chapters for collective works and dictionaries, chiefly on German and Italian opera of the Classical period.

Branscombe, Gena

(b Picton, ON, 4 Nov 1881; d New York, 26 July 1977). American composer and conductor. She studied at the Chicago Musical College with Rudolph Ganz (piano) and Borowski (composition), twice winning the gold medal for composition (1901, 1902). After a year of further study in Germany, which included lessons with Humperdinck, she moved in 1910 to New York and in the 1920s studied conducting with Chalmers Clifton and Stoessel. She was active in women’s arts organizations and as a choral conductor, notably of the Branscombe Choral (1933–54), a women’s chorus for which she composed and arranged many works and commissioned works by other women composers.

A tireless advocate of contemporary music, she was awarded the annual prize of the League of American Pen Women for the best work produced by a woman composer (Pilgrims of Destiny, 1928, concerning the pilgrim fathers). Many of her songs and other choral works were also inspired by historical events. Textual expression is of prime importance in her works and is achieved through an emphasis on late Romantic, richly textured harmony. Branscombe’s most important orchestral work is Quebec Suite, drawn from The Bells of Circumstance.

WORKS

texts of vocal works by Branscombe unless otherwise stated

Vocal, orch: The Bells of Circumstance (op), 1920s, unfinished; Dancer of Fjaard, SSA, orch, 1926; Pilgrims of Destiny, S, B, chorus, 1928; Quebec Suite, T, orch, 1930; Youth of the World, SSA, chbr orch, 1932; c35 works, mostly choral arrs.

Songs (1v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Serenade (R. Browning), 1905; Autumn Wind, 1911; A Lute of Jade (Chin. poets), song cycle, 1911; The Sun Dial (K. Banning), song cycle, 1913; I bring you heartsease, 1915; 3 Unimproving Songs for Enthusiastic Children, 1922; Hail ye tyme of holiedayes (Banning), 1924; Wreathe the holly, SSAA, pf, 1938; Coventry’s Choir, SSAA, pf, 1944; Bridesmaid’s Song, SSAA, pf, 1956; A Joyful Litany, SSAA, pf, 1967; c100 others; c70 choral arrs.

Chbr and solo inst: Concertstück, pf, 1906; Sonata, vn, pf, 1920; Procession, tpt, pf, 1930; Pacific Sketches, hn, pf, 1956; American Suite, hn, pf, 1959; c20 ens works; c30 pf works; c15 vn pieces

Principal publisher: Arthur P. Schmidt

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.A.E. Marlow: Gena Branscombe (1881–1977) (diss., U. of Texas, 1980)

LAURINE ELKINS-MARLOW

Brant, Henry (Dreyfuss)

(b Montreal, 15 Sept 1913). American composer of Canadian birth. The son of a violinist, he developed his experimental attitude towards music in boyhood: at the age of nine he was composing for his own home-made instruments and organizing performances with them. He studied at the McGill Conservatorium, Montreal (1926–9), the Institute of Musical Art in New York (1929–34) and the Juilliard Graduate School (1932–4), also taking private lessons from Riegger, Antheil and Fritz Mahler (conducting) during the 1930s. Having settled in New York, he earned his living by composing, conducting and arranging for radio, film, ballet and jazz groups, working for Benny Goodman, Andre Kostelanetz and others. In the 1950s and 60s he extended his work in commercial music to Hollywood and Europe. He also taught composition and orchestration at Columbia University (1945–52), the Juilliard School (1947–54) and Bennington College (1957–80). His honours include two Guggenheim Fellowships (1947, 1956), and the distinction of being the first American composer to win the Italia Prize (1955). In 1979 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

From early on Brant was attached to unusual timbres and unconcerned with stylistic consistency. His Music for a Five and Dime (1932) is scored for E clarinet, piano and kitchen hardware, while The Marx Brothers (1938) features a tin whistle, accompanied by a chamber ensemble. For a while he explored the idea of writing for multiples of the same instrument (a technique he returned to in later years), modifying instruments, when necessary, to obtain a smooth continuum of instrument sizes. His 1931 flute concerto, Angels and Devils, uses three piccolos, five normal flutes and two alto flutes; his Consort for True Violins (1965) is written for the eight instruments of the New Violin Family, in whose conception and musical development he played a seminal role.

Brant is most closely associated, however, with spatial music, or music for spatially separated groups, a genre that he pioneered. Although inspired by the thick counterpoint of Charles Ives (and the angular melodic style of Carl Ruggles), he found that when he wrote 12 contrapuntual lines to be played simultaneously ‘you really couldn’t identify the details in the compound result …. But there didn’t seem to be a necessary reason why music should be limited to even twelve horizontal events at once. Why not more than twelve? The ear never said, “I refuse to listen”’. Taking a cue from Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and also from Teo Macero’s Areas for five separated jazz ensembles (1952), Brant found a solution to his perceptual problem in separating players from each other at distances of more than several yards. Space became, for Brant, music’s ‘fourth dimension’, after pitch, rhythm and timbre.

A breakthrough came with Antiphony I (1953) for five widely separated orchestral groups, a work that predated the signal European spatial work, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, by three years. Unlike Stockhausen, Brant developed Ives’s ideas of stylistic contrast, and in most of his spatial works wrote music quite diverse in style, texture and timbre for spatially separated groups. Achieving spatial separation often required the relinquishment of close rhythmic synchronization, so Brant began to explore controlled improvisation, often giving detailed instructions for register and timbre, but not pitch and rhythm. Because of the size of their forces and the logistical problems of placing ensembles around an auditorium, such mammoth Brant works as Kingdom Come for orchestra, circus band and organ (1970), or Orbits (1979) for high soprano, organ and 80 trombones (each of which plays an independent part, the coincidence of which often results in quarter-tone clusters), are staged only rarely, and recordings fail to capture the music’s essentially spatial nature. Brant’s frequent outdoor performances can also be difficult; a 1972 New York performance of The Immortal Combat was obliterated by traffic noise, a thunderstorm and the fountain at Lincoln Center.

As early as 1950, Brant wrote that he had ‘come to feel that single-style music … could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit’. In the 1980s he expanded his concept of stylistic diversity to include the musics of non-Western peoples; Meteor Farm (1982) is scored for Indonesian gamelan ensemble, jazz band, three South Indian soloists and West African chorus with percussion, as well as conventional European performing forces. Steel drum bands and jazz bands began to appear regularly in his works. His 500: Hidden Hemisphere, commissioned to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery, positioned a steel drum band in one corner of Lincoln Center's outdoor courtyard and concert bands in the other three corners. In addition to using non-Western ensembles, Brant has increasingly turned to improvisational scoring. When writing for jazz band, gamelan, or African ensemble, he has explained that ‘I listen to their repertory and ask if I can have this piece or that, and they play at a certain point in their usual manner. I prefer to do that than modify the traditional music’.

As Brant gained recognition in his later years as a pioneer of both spatial music and multi-cultural style-mixing, he received more commissions for large works. He continued to eschew amplification of any kind (even refusing to use a microphone to lecture), and dreamed of developing larger, louder acoustic instruments similar to foghorns. In the 1980s he worked at designing a concert hall with movable plywood walls, which could be repositioned during a performance to make the acoustics of the room one of the changing components of the composition; though he toured with a cardboard model in search of support, the space was not made a reality.

Also recognized as a fine orchestrator, Brant laboured for 30 years on the ultimate orchestral challenge, the scoring of Ives’s dense Concord Sonata for orchestra, a project he completed in 1995.

WORKS

(selective list)

for fuller list of works composed before 1978 see GroveA

with spatial separation

Antiphony I, 5 orch groups, 1953, rev. 1968; Ceremony, triple conc., solo ob, solo vn, solo vc, S, A, T, B, wind, pf 4 hands, 4 perc, 1954; Millennium II, S, brass, perc, 1954; Conclave, Mez, Bar, tpt, trbn, pf, hp, timp, glock, 1955; December, spkrs, S, T, choruses, orch groups, 1955; Encephalograms II, S, 7 insts, 1955; Labyrinth I, 20 solo str, 4 female vv ad lib, str orch, 1955; Labyrinth II, 4 female vv ad lib, wind, 1955; The Grand Universal Circus (theatre piece), 8 solo vv, 32vv, 16 insts, 1956; On the Nature of Things (after Lucretius), solo ww, str, glock, 1956; Hieroglyphics I, distant vv, va, timp, chimes, cel, org, hp, 1957; Millennium III, 6 brass, 6 perc, 1957; The Children's Hour, 6 solo vv, chorus, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, org, perc, 1958; In Praise of Learning, 16 S, 16 perc, 1958; Joquin, pic, 6 insts, 1958; Mythical Beasts, S/Mez, 16 insts, 1958; The Crossing, T, ob/s sax, glock, vn, vc, 1959

Atlantis, antiphonal sym., spkr, Mez, chorus, band, orch, perc, 1960; The Fire Garden, T/S, small chorus, pic, hp, pf, perc, 1960; Quombex, va d'amore, distant music boxes, org, 1960; Barricades, T, ob/s sax, cl, bn, trbn, pf, xyl, 4 str, 1961; Conc. with Lights, vn, 10 insts, lights, 1961; Feuerwerk (Brant), spkr, ww, chimes, timp, hpd, 2 vn, 2 va, 1961; Fire in Cities (Brant), choruses, orch groups, 2 pf, 8 timp, 1961; Headhunt, trbn, b cl, bn, vc, perc, 1962; The Fourth Millennium, 2 tpt, hn, euphonium, tuba, 1963; Underworld, sax, pipe org, 1963; Voyage Four, orch, 1963; Dialogue in the Jungle, S, T, 5 ww, 5 brass, 1964; Sing O Heavens, S, A, T, Bar, chorus, tpt, trbn, pf, perc, 1964; Odyssey – Why not? fl, fl obbl, 4 small orch groups, 1965; Hieroglyphics II, vn, cel, perc ad lib, pf ad lib, 1966; Verticals Ascending, 2 wind ens, 1967; Chanticleer, cl, str qt, pf, perc, 1968; Windjammer, pic, ob, hn, b cl, bn, 1969

Crossroads, tr vn, s vn, mez vn, a vn, 1970; Kingdom Come, circus band, orch, org, 1970; The Immortal Combat, 2 bands, 1972; An American Requiem, 5 wind groups, brass, perc, org, bell groups, church bells, opt. S, 1973; Divinity: Dialogues in the Form of Secret Portraits, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, hn, hpd, 1973; Sixty, 3 wind ens, 1973, rev. as 60/70, 1982; Nomads, solo v, solo brass, solo perc, orch/wind ens, 1974; Prevailing Winds, wind qnt, 1974; Six Grand Pianos Bash plus Friends, 2 brass, pics, pfs, perc, 1974; Solomon's Gardens, 7 solo vv, chorus, 3 insts, 24 handbells, 1974; A Plan of the Air, S, A, T, B, 10 wind and perc groups, Baroque org, 1975; Curriculum, Bar, b fl, b cl, va, vc, db, pf, timp, mar, 1975; Homage to Ives, Bar, 3 orch groups, pf obbl, 1975; American Commencement, 2 brass and perc groups, 1976; American Debate, wind and perc in 2 groups, 1976; American Weather, 8 solo vv, chorus, tpt, trbn, chimes, glock, 1976

Spatial Conc. (Questions from Genesis), 8 S, 8 A, orch groups, pf, 1976; Antiphonal Responses, 3 solo bn, 8 isolated insts, orch, 1978; Cerberus, S, pic, mouth org, db, 1978; Curriculum II, small orch groups, 1978; The $1,000,000 Confessions, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, 1978; Trinity of Spheres, 3 orch groups, 1978; Orbits, high S, 80 trbn, org, 1979; The Glass Pyramid, E-cl, eng hn, bn, dbn, 11 str, chimes, 1980; The Secret Calendar, 1v, solo insts, orch groups, org, 1980; Horizontals Extending, solo drum kit, 2 fl, 2 cl, 2 sax, brass qnt, timp, glock, 1982; Inside Track, solo pf, 1v, sax, 4 ww, hn, tpt, trbn, 7 str, perc, drum kit, 1982; Meteor Farm, 2 S, 3 South Indian pfmrs, 2 choruses, West African chorus, jazz band, gamelan, 2 perc ens, 1982; Revenge before Breakfast, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf/accdn, 2 perc, 1982; Desert Forest, 7 orch groups, pf ad lib, 1983; Litany of Tides, solo vn, 4 S, wind, 2 pf, mand, hp, perc, 1983

Lombard Street, org, chimes, vib, glock, 1983; Vuur onder Water [Fire under Water], planned improvisation, SATB, 4 fl, 2 vn, 4 vc, 4 hp, 4 mar, 1983; Bran(d)t aan de Amstel [Burning/Brant on the Amstel], environmental piece, 3 SATB, 100 fl, 3 bands, 4 hurdy-gurdys, 4 drum kits, 4 carillons, 1984; Mass in Gregorian Chant, 5 pic, 40 fl, 1984; Western Springs (Brant), 2 SATB, 2 jazz combo, 2 orch, 1984; Knot-Holes, Bent Nails, & a Rusty Saw, vn/mand, vib/mar, pf/hpd, 1985; Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities (Brant), 5 solo vv, choruses, bagpipe ens, jazz band, concert band, orch, perc ens, 1985; Autumn Hurricanes (Brant), 2 S, Bar, SA, TB, wind ens, str ens, jazz ens, 2 pf 4 hands, org 4 hands, perc ens, 1986; Four Mountains in the Amstel, 4 SATB, 4 tpt, 4 trbn, 4 perc, 1986; An Era Any Time of Year (L. Zukofsky), Bar, pf with perc mallets, timp, vib, chimes, 1987; Ghost Nets, solo db, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn obbl, 2 str qt, 1988

Flight Over a Global Map, 50 tpt, 3 perc, 1989; Rainforest (Moore), solo vv, SATB, wind qnt, tpt, trbn, hp, pf, perc, 11 str, 1989; Rosewood, 50 gui, 1989; Pathways to Security (G. Zrad), Bar, fl + pic, cl + b cl, timp + chimes + vib, pf, accdn, vn, va, vc, db, opt. hp, 1990; Skull & Bones (Brant), 5 solo vv, SATB, fl ens, jazz band, orch, org, perc ens, 1990; The Old Italians Dying (L. Ferlinghetti), spkr, 2 orch, 1991; 500: Hidden Hemisphere, 3 concert bands, steel drum band, 1992; Fourscore (Brant's 80th Birthday), 4 pieces, vn, va, t vn, vc, 1993; Homeless People, str qt, accdn, pf with perc mallets, 1993; If You Don't Like Comets, Get Out of the Solar System, 2 groups of fire truck sirens; Trajectory (silent film score, F. Diamand), S, A, T, B, 2 solo fl, cl, tpt, trbn, vn, va, vc, db, 2 accdn, 10 perc, 1994; Dormant Craters, perc orch, 1995; Plowshares and Swords, 9 orch groups, 1995; Jericho, 16 tpt, drums, 1996; Festive Eighty, concert band, 1997

other works

Orch: Angels and Devils, fl conc., 3 pic, 5 fl, 2 a fl, 1931, rev. 1956, 1979; Cl Conc., 1938; Fisherman's Ov., 1938; Whoopee in D, 1938; City Portrait (ballet), New York, 1940; Fantasy and Caprice, vn, orch, 1940; The Great American Goof (ballet excerpts), 1940; Rhapsody, va, orch, 1940; Vn Conc., 1940; Downtown Suite, 1942; Sym., 1942 [1st and 2nd movts withdrawn, last movt entitled An Adventure]; The 1930s, sym., 1945; Dedication in Memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1945; Statements in Jazz, cl, dance orch, 1945; Jazz Cl Conc., cl, jazz band, 1946; The Promised Land, sym., 1947; Street Music, wind, perc, 1949; Origins, sym., 20 perc, org, 1950; Galaxy II, wind, timp, glock, 1954; Consort for True Violins, tr vn, s vn, mez vn, a vn, t vn, bar vn, b vn, cb vn, 1965

Choral: The 3-Way Canon Blues, unacc. vv, 1947; Credo for Peace, spkr, vv, tpt, 1948; County Fair, vv, 10 insts, 1949; Madrigal en casserole, vv, pf, 1949; A Plan of the Air II, SATB, 13 insts, 1979; Atlantis II, SATB, 10 insts, 1979

Arr.: Ives: Concord Sonata, orch, 1995

Chbr music, works for solo insts, film scores

MSS in CH-Bps; recorded interviews in US-NHoh

WRITINGS

‘Space as an Essential Aspect of Musical Composition’, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. E. Schwartz and B. Childs (New York, 1967), 221–42

‘Spatial Music Progress Report’, Quadrille, xii/3 (1979), 20–22

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD; GroveA (K. Stone); VintonD (J. Vinton)

S. Sankey: ‘Henry Brant's “Grand Universal Circus”’, Juilliard Review, iii/3 (1956), 21–37

K. Brion and J.E. Brown: ‘The Spatial Wind Music of Henry Brant’, The Instrumentalist, xxx/6 (1976), 36–9

D. Drennan: ‘Henry Brant's Choral Music’, Choral Journal, xvii/5 (1977), 27–9

C. Gagne and T. Caras: ‘Henry Brant’, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1982), 54–68

K. Gann: ‘Isn't that Spatial’, Village Voice (15 Sept 1992)

K. Gann: ‘Space Master’, Village Voice (15 Aug 1995)

K. Gann: ‘Now in Technicolor’, Village Voice (12 March 1996)

D. Sykes: ‘Henry Brant: Spatialman’, Musicworks, no.64 (1996), 42–8

KYLE GANN (with KURT STONE)

Brant, Jan [Brand, Brandt, Brandus Posnaniensis, Brantus]

(b ?Poznań, 1554; d Lwów [now L'viv], 27 May 1602). Polish composer and theologian. In 1571 he entered the Jesuit order, and after his ordination in 1578 he went to Rome to undertake further theological studies. He returned to Poland in 1584 and carried out various duties while attached to convents at Kraków, Poznań, Vilnius and Pułtusk. In 1599 he again went to Rome. On his return in 1601 he was appointed superior of the Jesuit college at Lwów, and he held the position until his death. He was a notable Jesuit of the Counter-Reformation period and an outstanding theologian and preacher. His collection Pieśni różne pospolite o różnych pobożnych potrzebach roku 1601 (‘Popular songs for various festive occasions in the year 1601’) mentioned in certain older bibliographies is lost, but works by him survive among the manuscripts in the library of Uppsala University, notably in the 1620 organ tabulature that had belonged to the Jesuit college at Riga. These are the four-voice Celestes merces, an incomplete Christus natus est nobis for five voices and organ, and settings for three to six voices of nine verses of the hymn Jesu dulcis memoria (all ed. in ZHMP, xxiv, 1974); they may come from the lost collection of 1601. They are sonorous examples of late Renaissance polyphony and include frequent homophonic passages and, in the five- and six-voice pieces, the use of contrasting vocal groups. One or two features, notably the rhythmic independence of the organ bass in Christus natus est nobis, are typical of the period around 1600, and Brant’s works may be considered as the earliest intimations of the Baroque style in Polish music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

WaltherML

S. Starowolski: Scriptorum polonicorum hekatontas (Frankfurt, 1625, 4/1733; Pol. trans., 1970), 76

P. Ribadeneira and P. Alegambe: Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Jesu (Antwerp, 1643, enlarged 2/1676/R by N. Sotuellus), 230

K. Estreicher, ed.: Bibliografia polska, xiii (Kraków, 1894), 320

Z.M. Szweykowski: ‘Jan Brant (1554–1602) i jego nowo odkryta twórczość muzyczna’ [Jan Brant (1554–1602) and his newly discovered music], Muzyka, xviii/2 (1973), 43–72 [with Eng. summary]

K. Morawska: Historia muzyki polskiej, ii: Renesans (Warsaw, 1994), esp. 194–6, 202, 205

MIROSŁAW PERZ

Brant, Jobst vom.

See Brandt, Jobst vom.

Brant, Per

(b Uppland, Dec 1714; d Stockholm, 9 Aug 1767). Swedish violinist, copyist, composer and poet. He was active in Stockholm from 1727, and was employed as a member of the royal chapel from 1735; in 1738 he became Konzertmeister and in 1745 Kapellmeister. He succeeded his teacher, J.H. Roman, as chief court Kapellmeister from 1758 until at least 1765.

Brant contributed energetically to Stockholm’s musical life, particularly during the 1730s and 40s, organizing, for example, a series of subscription concerts (1738–41) in which young amateur noblemen and members of the court chapel worked together. He also planned with Roman an educational institution (or ‘seminarium’) for music, which did not materialize.

Brant was one of the most capable and successful music copyists in Sweden during the mid-18th century. He also had a good knowledge of languages and wrote some poems which reflect the spirit of the age. His position as a composer is difficult to establish: while one contemporary account states that he had ‘shown his knowledge in composition’ (J. Wellander), another noted that he had written only a few small ‘occasional pieces’ (J.F. Hallardt). Although 18 extant works have been attributed to him (three to four symphonies, a sonata for flute and basso continuo, two cantatas and a few solo songs), Bengtsson has shown that only one work (a song published in 1768) is authenticated beyond doubt. Several songs are ascribed in other sources to Roman, as are all of the symphonies. Stylistic comparisions have proved inconclusive. The Cantata vid Nyåret 1754, however, may be an authentic representation of the ‘occasional’ works noted by Hallardt.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Nyblom: ‘Per Brant och Frihetstidens musikliv’, STMf, iii (1921), 93–125

I. Bengtsson: ‘Anteckningar om Per Brant’, STMf, xlv (1963), 5–32; xlvii (1965), 7–49; xlviii (1966), 5–61 [with complete bibliography and thematic catalogue]

L. Jonsson and A. Johnson: Musiken i Sverige, ii: Frihetstid och Gustaviansk tid, 1720–1810 (Stockholm, 1993)

INGMAR BENGTSSON/BERTIL H. VAN BOER

Branzell, Karin (Maria)

(b Stockholm, 24 Sept 1891; d Altadena, CA, 14 Dec 1974). Swedish contralto. She studied in Stockholm and sang with the Swedish Royal Opera (1912–18), then the Berlin Staatsoper (1918–23), where she was the Nurse in the Berlin première of Die Frau ohne Schatten under Strauss. She sang Kundry in Vienna, and made her American début at the Metropolitan as Fricka in Die Walküre (1924), singing major contralto roles there, including Amneris and Delilah, until 1942 and returning in 1951–2; her range was such that she could also sing the Walküre Brünnhilde. She sang at Bayreuth in 1930 and 1931 and at Covent Garden under Beecham in 1935, 1937 and 1938, and made other guest appearances at leading houses. Branzell’s voice was rich and sumptuous, and her tall figure with its aura of the grand manner fitted her ideally for the big Wagnerian roles, which she recorded extensively, most vitally Waltraute’s Narration. She was also a significant lieder interpreter, as her recordings confirm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV [with discography by L. Riemens]

P. Jackson: Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met (New York, 1992)

MAX DE SCHAUENSEE/ALAN BLYTH

Brânzeu, Nicolae

(b Piteşti, 28 Dec 1907; d 7 March 1983). Romanian composer and conductor. He studied music from a young age in his home town, then from 1926 to 1931 at the Bucharest Conservatory. After graduating in law from Bucharest University, in 1931, he completed his education at the Schola Cantorum in Paris (1931–4), studying composition with Guy de Lioncourt. Brânzeu worked as chorus master and conductor at the Romanian Opera in Bucharest (1946–7) and from 1948 to 1972 as professor of music and conductor at the Arad State Philharmonic.

His compositions combine neo-Romantic stylistic elements with folk music, augmented by linear polyphonic elements. Although he composed songs and choral works, his preferred genres remained symphonic music and opera. After Monna Vana (1934, rev. 1976), an opera based on Maeterlinck, he went on to enjoy critical success with his one-act musical drama Sǎptǎmîna luminatǎ (‘Shrovetide’) which was first performed in Bucharest in 1943. Other works followed, including Cruciada Copiilor (‘Crucifixion of the Children’, 1961). His orchestral and chamber works are loosely based on classical structures and include three symphonies and a series of instrumental sonatas.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Monna Vana (op, after M. Maeterlinck), 1934, rev. 1976; Sǎptǎmîna luminatǎ [Shrovetide] (op, 1, C. Pavel after M. Sǎulescu), Bucharest, Opera, 29 April 1943; Cruciada copiilor [Crucifixion of the Children] (op, 3, after L. Blaga), 1961; Dragostea triumfǎ [Love Conquers] (comic op, 3, G. Haiduc), 1968

Choral: Hymne (C. Baudelaire), 1934; Cântecul bradului [Song of the Fir Tree] (folk verse), cant., 1940; Copilǎrie sfântǎ [Sacred Childhood] (V. Voiculescu), 1947; Mesterul Manole [Master Manole] (cant., V. Alecsandri), 1966; Luceafǎrul [Venus], (orat., M. Eminescu), 1972

Orch: Fantezie simfonicǎ, 1934; 2 schiţe simfonice [Sym. Sketches] 1940; Suita simfonicǎ, C, 1950; Sym. no.1, 1954; Rapsodia românǎ no.1, 1958; Simfonia concertantǎ, pf, orch, 1959; Sym. no.2 ‘Pentre pace’ [For Peace], D, 1963; Chbr Sym., str, 1965; Uvertura sportivǎ ‘U.T.A.’ [U.T.A. Sports Ov.], 1970; Sym. no.3, c, 1977

Chbr and solo inst: Pf Qt, 1935; Qnt, pf, wind, 1957; Sonata, cl, pf, 1961; Sonata, hn, pf, 1965; Sonata, pf, 1965; Sonata, vn, 1966; Sonata, vc, pf, 1970

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Romanian Musicians] (Bucharest, 1989)

G.W. Berger: Muzica Simfonicǎ [Symphonic Music], iv: 1930–50, (Bucharest, 1976), v: 1950–70 (Bucharest, 1977)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Braquet, Gilles.

See Bracquet, Gilles.

Brase, (Wilhelm) Fritz (Anton)

(b Egestorf, 4 May 1875; d Dublin, 1 Dec 1940). German composer and conductor. He studied with Carl Reinecke, Hans Sitt and Salomon Jadassohn at the Leipzig Hochschule. In 1893 he enlisted in the military band at Bückeburg. After a further period of study with Joseph Joachim and Max Bruch at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin, he was appointed to the prestigious post of conductor of the Kaiser Alexander Garde Grenadier Regiment 1. In 1922 he accepted an invitation to establish a music school for the Irish army. He created and conducted the Army no.1 Band and three other bands. In addition, he co-founded the Dublin Philharmonic Society (1926).

A prolific composer, Brase’s works are coloured by a rich chromatic palette. Many orchestral works survive, such as the Symphony in D Major (1905), as well as an impressive body of music for military band that includes a set of six Irish rhapsodies.

WORKS

(selective list)

Militär-Festouvertüre, military band, 1900; Dramatische Ouvertüre, orch, 1902; Heimatlos Suite, orch, 1902; Symphony, D, orch, 1905; Heil Danzig, military band, 1910; Grosse Zeit, neue Zeit, 1911; Mondnacht in Venedig, 1921; Herbst, 1923; Irish Fantasia no.1, 1923; Little Moira, 1925; Irish Dances, orch, 1938

JOSEPH J. RYAN

Brashovanov, Stoyan

(b Ruse, 14 Sept 1888; d Sofia, 16 Oct 1956). Bulgarian musicologist. During his schooling in Ruse he learnt the piano, violin and viola. In 1907 he left for Germany, studying philosophy in Jena and Berlin under Stumpf, Friedlaender and Max Dessoir and musicology, aesthetics and teaching methods in Berlin and Leipzig under Riemann and Johannes Volkelt. During the Balkan War (1912–13) and World War I, Brashovanov returned to Bulgaria, but in 1922 he returned to Leipzig to take his doctorate under Abert, the first DPhil in musicology awarded to a Bulgarian. On his return to Bulgaria in 1923 he began lecturing on music history, aesthetics and teaching methods at the State Musical Academy in Sofia; in 1933 he became reader there and in 1937 professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1951. In 1927 and 1936 he studied further in Switzerland under Kurth and Handschin. On his return he became director of the State Musical Academy in Sofia (1937–40). He held many important musical posts and was deputy president of the Union of Folk Choirs for about 20 years and editor of its periodical Rodna pesen (1931–44). In 1948 he was appointed deputy president of the Union of Bulgarian Composers, Musicologists and Performers for one year. He contributed to many foreign journals and dictionaries and was a frequent lecturer both in Bulgaria and abroad.

WRITINGS

Über die Rhythmik und Metrik des bulgarischen Volksliedes (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1923)

‘Muzika i tsarkva: muzikalno-istorichen pogled varhu Reformatsiyata’ [Music and the church: a musico-historical view of the Reformation], Balgarska misal, vi (1931), 543–9, 620–25

‘Sotsiologichni razmishleniya varhu narodnata pesen’ [Sociological reflections on folksong], Filosofski pregled, iii/4 (1931), 3–13

‘La musique bulgare contemporaine’,Revue internationale des études balkaniques, iv (1936), 595–600

‘Das bulgarische Volkslied als Brauchtum und Kunst’, Jb des Auslandsamtes der deutschen Dozentenschaft, i (1942), 76–82

Istoria na muzikata [History of music] (Sofia,1946)

‘Vasil Stoin’, IIM, ii–iii (1956), 351–94

Muzikata kato sotsialno izkustvo [Music as a social art] (Sofia, 1982)

LADA BRASHOVANOVA

Brashovanova(-Stancheva) [Stancheva-Brashovanova; Braschowanowa], Lada

(b Sofia, 11 Feb 1929). Bulgarian musicologist, daughter of Stoyan Brashovanov and the Swiss pianist Mathilde Kurz. She studied the piano with Dimiter Nenov and Lyuba Encheva at the Bulgarian State Music Academy in Sofia, graduating in theory (1951) and performance (1953). She began to publish musicological articles in 1949, and until 1965 also taught the piano. From 1967 she worked as a music editor and has lectured at international music conferences, universities and music schools and on the radio in Bulgaria and abroad (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Poland). Her chief subjects are the history of music in Bulgaria (particularly the Middle Ages) and western European music history; she has written books on Handel, Mozart and Berlioz, and is a contributor to the major music encyclopedias. She continues to work as a freelance music critic and publicist.

WRITINGS

Mozart (Sofia, 1958)

Berlioz (Sofia, 1959, 2/1964)

Haendel (Sofia, 1959)

‘Prouchvaniya varkhŭ zhivota i deynostta na Ioan Kukuzel’ [Studies about Joannes Koukouzeles], IIM, vi (1959), 13–38

Bulgarskata muzika od 1830 to 1914 (Kassel, 1962)

Pesenta: lyubim drugar na mladeshta [The song: beloved friend of youth] (Sofia, 1963)

with P. Stoyanov: Khrestomatiya po musikalna literatura s analizi [Textbook of musical literature with analyses] (Sofia, 1964, 2/1972)

‘Bulgarien: ein Land reicher Volksmusiktraditionen’, Die Welt der Slaven, x (1965), 439–53

‘Die Volksmusiktradition in Bulgarien’, Österreichische Osthefte, vii (1965), 47–52

‘Muzyka bułgarska od roku 1815 do 1914’, Muzyka, xiii/2 (1968), 39–48

Bulgarische Instrumentalisten (Sofia, 1969)

Bulgarische Musikkultur (Sofia, 1973) [also in Eng., Fr., Russ.]

Die mittelalterliche bulgarische Musik und Joan Kukuzel (Vienna, 1984)

Marin Goleminov 80jährig (Sofia, 1988)

Karl Orf (Sofia, 1993)

Prof. d-r Stoian Brashovanov, purviiat bulgarski muzikolog [Prof. Dr Stoyan Brashovanov, the first Bulgarian musicologist] (Sofia, 1993)

‘Zukunftsprobleme bei der Erforschung der neumierten altbulgarischen Musikhandschriften’, Traditionen – Neuansätze: für Anna Amalie Abert (1906–1996), ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1997), 101–7

RAINA D. KATSAROVA/MAGDALENA MANOLOVA

Brasolini [Brassolini], Domenico

(b Rovigo; fl 1689–1707). Italian violinist and composer. His Suonate da camera a tre (Bologna, 1689), his ‘primo componimento musicale’, reveals that he was a native of Rovigo and in the employ of the Accademia della Morte in Ferrara. This collection, his only known publication, strongly favours balletto–corrente–giga groupings without prelude, and the twelfth sonata calls for scordatura. The scoring for two violins and ‘clavicembalo ò violoncello’ is somewhat unusual in placing the keyboard instrument as the first option. Fètis affirms that Brasolini served as maestro di cappella in Pistoia and that in 1707 he produced an opera in Modena, Il trionfo dell'umilità (FètisB).

PETER ALLSOP

Braşov

(Hung. Brassó; Ger. Kronstadt).

Town in Romania. It is on the southern edge of the Carpathians, and the main town of southern Transylvania. It was a Roman citadel when the area was part of the province of Dacia (107–275 ce). The earliest documentary reference dates from 1234; the town was subsequently known as Corona, Barasu, Brasu, Braso, Braşov, Brassov, Brassó, Kronstadt and Krunen-Kronen. The German name Kronstadt was officially used up to 1918, when the town became Romanian; there still exists a large German (Saxon) minority in Braşov. The main churches are St Bartholomew's, the ‘Black’ Church (c1385–c1476), and St Nicholas in the Schei quarter.

As early as 1533 it was a centre of Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon printing; Honterus and Gheorghe Coressi printed religious and secular texts and music (Odae cum harmoniis, 1548). The virtuoso lutenist Bálint Bakfark was born in Braşov in 1507; he performed at the courts of Poland, France, Austria and Transylvania, and composed dances and fantasies based on Transylvanian folk music. The town was well known as a centre of culture and education particularly because of the Schola Coronensis (founded in 1544), a humanist school with strong musical traditions. Subsequent outstanding schools of music were the Şcoala de Psaltichie Rumânească (Romanian psalm school, 16th century, the first school to teach in Romanian), the Kronstädter Gesang-Schule (founded in 1845 by J.L. Hewig) and the Astra Conservatory (founded in 1928 by C. Bobescu). Since World War II the Faculty of Music, the Music Lyceum and the Popular Art School have been the main centres of musical education. The organ school of the ‘Black’ Church has long been a feature of the musical life of Braşov; among the many musicians associated with it are Wolfgang (15th century), Hieronimus Ostermayer (1500–61), Georgius Ostermayer (1530–71), Michael Hermann (17th century), Daniel Croner and, in the 20th century, Rudolf Lassel (1895–1964), Adolf Weiss, Klaus Fogarascher, Eckart Schlandt and Valentin Gheorghiu.

In the 18th century instrumental bands (the Turnerii and a collegium musicum) grew up in the town and in 1815 a theatre was founded which was visited by Italian, German, Romanian and Hungarian troupes. In 1882 the Romanian operetta Crai Nou (‘Morning Star’) by Porumbescu had its première in Braşov. Musical activity flourished in 19th-century Braşov under the auspices of the many societies, which included the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (founded in 1834), the Stadt-Kapelle, the Kronstädter Männergesangverein (1859), the Reuniunea Română de Gimnastică şi Cîntări (Romanian Group of Gymnastics and Singing, 1868), the Reuniunea Sodalilor Români (1869), the Deutscher Lieder Kranz (1885), the Brassói Magyar Dalárda (Hungarian Choral Society), the Societatea Română de Muzică and, above all, the Kronstädter Philarmonischen Gesellschaft (1878), which survives as the Gheorghe Dima State PO. In the 19th century Braşov was visited by a number of virtuosos, including Brahms and Joachim.

Musical institutions active in the 20th century are the Teatrul Muzical (which produces opera, operetta, ballet and variety shows), the Pro Musica chamber group, a folk music orchestra and the Gheorghe Dima and Paul Richter choirs. Braşov is the home of the Cerbul de Aur international light music festival, the Muzica de Cameră festival and a national string quartet contest. In 1995 the company of the Teatrul Muzical made a successful tour of Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

Noted musicians associated with Braşov since the early 19th century are Anton Pann, Gheorghe Dima, Iacob Mureşianu, Ciprian Porumbescu, Tiberiu Brediceanu, Radu Lupu, Christiom Mandeal, Horia Andreescu and Ilarion Ionescu-Galaţi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Kronstadt (Braşov, 1886–1926)

E. Hajek: Die Musik (Braşov, 1927)

V. Bickerich: ‘Muzica de orgă în România’, Studii de muzicologie, ii (1966), 209–17

A. Cornel: ‘Focar de cultura muzicală’ [A centre of musical culture], Astra (1968), no.5, p.14

G. Zinveliu: ‘File din trecutul muzical al Braşovului’ [Pages from the musical past of Braşov], Astra (1968), no.11; (1969), no.12; (1970), nos.1, 3

V. Bickerich and N. Petri: ‘Johannes Brahms în Transilvania’, Studii de muzicologie, vi (1970), 259–81

I. Moruş: Cărturari braşoveni (sec.XV–XX) [Scholars from Braşov: 15th-20th centuries] (Braşov, 1972) [bibliographical guide]

V. Cosma: România muzicală (Bucharest, 1980)

VIOREL COSMA

Brassart [Brassar, Brassaert, Brasart, Brassant], Johannes

(b ?Lowaige [now Lauw], Belgium, c1400–05; d before 22 Oct 1455). South Netherlandish composer and singer. The fact that he celebrated his first mass as a priest in 1426 suggests a date of birth of about 1400–05, while the designation ‘de Ludo’ sometimes appended to his name is thought to indicate that he was born in the village of Lowaige in the province of Limburg. Throughout his career he had close ties with Liège, where he held benefices at several churches. His earliest and most important connections were with the church of St Jean l'Evangeliste (from c1422) and the cathedral of St Lambert (from 1428), at each of which he for a time held the post of succentor. His associations with both institutions continued into the 1430s, and several of his motets were apparently composed for them. He visited Rome in the mid-1420s, and in 1431 he was listed, with Du Fay, as a singer in the papal chapel; two years later he was admitted to the Council of Basle. It was probably in Basle that he met Emperor Sigismund and began his lengthy spell in imperial service (1434–43), during which he occupied the positions of rector capelle under Sigismund and cantor or rector principalis under his successors Albrecht II and Friedrich III. How continuous this service was is uncertain, but Brassart evidently maintained strong ties with his homeland. From 1442 he served in turn as canon and cantor at the church of Our Lady in Tongeren, but in 1445 apparently exchanged the latter post for that of canon at the collegiate church of St Paul in Liège. Brassart appears to have resided in Liège while continuing his association with Tongeren. A supplication to Pope Calixtus III for the benefice of St Paul confirms that he had died shortly before 22 October 1455.

All of Brassart's works are sacred, many of them are liturgical, and all but one set Latin texts. More than half are items for the Ordinary or Proper of the Mass. Most of the Ordinary settings appear to be freely composed (only the two Kyries and the Sanctus are known to be chant-based). They include paired as well as single movements: one indisputable Gloria–Credo pair is firmly attributed to Brassart, and another has been ascribed to him on the basis of manuscript and stylistic evidence; both are strongly unified through the use of common material. The Proper settings do not belong to an established tradition: Brassart's introits are among the earliest extant polyphonic settings. Each one follows a pattern of alternating plainchant and polyphony, with the psalm verse and doxology partly set to fauxbourdon and the discantus paraphrasing the chant more lightly in these sections than in the antiphon. Though musically linked, the introits do not constitute a liturgically cohesive group.

The remaining compositions are all classified as motets in Mixter's edition. In fact one of these is a hymn, another a cantio and a third a Leise, leaving a total of ten complete motets (the lament for Albrecht II, Romanorum rex, long believed to be by Brassart, is now known to be by Johannes de Sarto). Approximate dates can be assigned more easily to the motets than to the mass music, partly because half of them are located in layers of the manuscript I-Bc Q15 datable to the 1420s and early 1430s, but also because several can be linked, with varying degrees of certainty, to particular individuals or institutions. Fortis cum quevis, in honour of St John the Evangelist, and Cristi nutu sublimato and Lamberte vir inclite, both in honour of St Lambert, were probably intended for the churches at which Brassart worked; Te dignitas presularis is thought to date from around the time of his membership of the papal choir; and O rex Fridrice must have been composed for either the accession (1440) or the coronation (1442) of Friedrich III as King of the Romans.

Three complete isorhythmic motets and the tenor of a fourth survive. O rex Fridrice, arguably the finest of these works, has a stylistic grandeur befitting the kind of occasion for which it was conceived, and is particularly striking on account of its tenor's unique proportional scheme (6:4:2:1, with rests omitted from the final statement) and its simultaneous use of different mensurations. The seven non-isorhythmic motets divide into four-part works with an equal pair of upper voices and three-part works in which the discantus is to a greater or lesser extent the dominant voice. O flos fragrans, an appropriately florid tribute to the Virgin, is the outstanding composition in this group. Ex.1 illustrates the fluent, expressive quality of its discantus line, characterized by distinctive turns of phrase and varied rhythmic pacing. Du Fay's Flos florum is the model here, but Brassart's motet appears to have been itself influential, as can be seen by comparison with two of de Sarto's works.

WORKS

Edition: Johannes Brassart: Opera omnia, ed. K.E. Mixter, CMM, xxxv/1–2 (1965–71) [M]

mass ordinary

Gloria, Credo, 3vv, M i

Gloria, Credo, 3vv, attrib. and ed. in Wright (1994)

Kyrie ‘De apostolis’, 3vv, M i

Kyrie, 3vv, M i

Gloria, with trope ‘Et Sancte Spiritus’, 3vv, M i

Gloria, 3vv, M i

Credo, 3vv, dubious MS pairing with preceding Gloria, M i

Sanctus, with trope ‘Genitor summi Filii’, 3vv, M i

Agnus Dei, 3vv, M i

introits

Cibavit eos, 3vv, M i (Corpus Christi)

De ventre matris mee, 3vv, M i (Nativity of St John the Baptist)

Dilexisti justiciam, 3vv, M i (Common of a Virgin not a Martyr)

Gaudeamus omnes, 3vv, M i (Assumption of the BVM; attrib. Johannes de Sarto in I-AO 15)

Nos autem, 3vv, M i (Finding of the Holy Cross)

Salve sancta parens, 3vv, M i (BVM)

Sapienciam sanctorum, 3vv, M i (Common of Two or More Martyrs)

Spiritus Domini replevit, 3vv, M i (Pentecost; attrib. Johannes de Sarto in AO 15)

motets

Ave Maria/O Maria, 4vv, M ii (to the BVM; isorhythmic)

Cristi nutu sublimato, 4vv, M ii (to St Lambert)

Fortis cum quevis actio, 4vv, M ii (to St John the Evangelist)

Lamberte vir inclite, 4vv, M ii (to St Lambert; attrib. in Hamm, 1962)

Magne deus potencie/Genus regale esperie, 4vv, M ii (? for Pope Martin V; isorhythmic)

O flos fragrans, 3vv, M ii (to the BVM)

O rex Fridrice/In tuo adventu, 4vv, M ii (accession (1440) or coronation (1442) of Friedrich III; isorhythmic)

Regina celi, with trope ‘Alle, Domine’, 3vv, M ii (troped Marian ant)

Summus secretarius, 4vv, M ii

Te dignitas presularis, 3vv, M ii (to St Martin; probably also addressed to Pope Martin V)

Hoc jocundum dulce melos (isorhythmic tenor; see SpataroC, 662)

other sacred

Crist ist erstanden, 3vv, M ii (Leise for Easter)

Gratulemur Cristicole, 3vv, M ii (cantio for Christmas)

Sacris solemniis, 3vv, M ii (hymn for Corpus Christi)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SpataroC

StrohmM

S. Clercx: ‘Jean Brassart et le début de sa carrière’, RBM, vi (1952), 283–5

C. Hamm: ‘Manuscript Structure in the Dufay Era’, AcM, xxxiv (1962), 166–84

K.E. Mixter: ‘Johannes Brassart: a Biographical and Bibliographical Study’, MD, xviii (1964), 37–62; xix (1965), 99–108

K.E. Mixter: ‘Isorhythmic Design in the Motets of Johannes Brassart’, Studies in Musicology: Essays in Memory of Glen Haydon, ed. J.W. Pruett (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 179–89

L. Cuyler: The Emperor Maximilian I and Music (London, 1973)

J. Quitin: ‘Notes sur Johannes Brassart de Ludo, c. 1400 – après 1444’, Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, ix (1974), 7–10

F. Dangel-Hofmann: Der mehrstimmige Introitus in Quellen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1975)

S. Meyer-Eller: ‘Johannes Brassart und seine Verbindung mit Johannes de Ragusa’, Mf, xxxix (1986), 148–52

C. Turner: ‘Proportion and Form in the Continental Isorhythmic Motet c.1385–1450’, MAn, x (1991), 89–124

P. Wright: ‘Johannes Brassart and Johannes de Sarto’, PMM, i (1992), 41–61

P. Starr: Letter to the editors, PMM, i (1992), 215–16

R. Nosow: The Florid and Equal-Discantus Motet Styles of Fifteenth-Century Italy (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1992)

E. Schreurs: ‘Music at the Collegiate Church of Tongeren and the School of Liège in the Late Middle Ages’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992, 2476–94

P. Wright: ‘A New Attribution to Brassart?’, PMM, iii (1994), 23–43

M. Bent: ‘Early Papal Motets’, Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome: Washington DC 1993, 5–43

PETER WRIGHT

Brass band.

A type of wind band, consisting solely of brass instruments and percussion, which originated in the 1820s. See Band (i), §IV.

Brassicanus, Johannes [Kraut, Johann]

(b Murau, Styria, c1570; d Regensburg, bur. 22 Sept 1634). Austrian composer and poet. He may have attended the grammar school at Murau. His title of ‘Magister’ indicates that he must have studied at a Lutheran university in Germany. Until the beginning of the Counter-Reformation he taught in Styria and then, in 1603, became Kantor at Regensburg; from 1606 he was also Präzeptor at the Gymnasium Poeticum there. In 1609 he was appointed Kantor at the Protestant district school at Linz. After its closure in 1624 he remained there, apparently without employment, until the autumn of 1627, when he returned to the Gymnasium Poeticum, Regensburg; he was employed first as superintendent of the boarders and from 1628 until his death as Kantor and teacher. His musical output consists mainly of Latin motets for six to eight voices, most of which are lost, and numerous chorales (with the melody in the top voice) in the style of Hans Leo Hassler and Michael Praetorius. The melody of the Protestant psalm Gleich wie der Hirsch nach frischem Wasser schreit, usually ascribed to Michael Altenburg, is found as early as 1615 in Brassicanus's output (in Similia Davidica); it may thus have originated with him. The five-part quodlibet Was wölln wir aber heben an?, a synthesis of German and Italian song fragments, is all that remains of his secular music. Numerous vernacular poems and aphorisms by him were published posthumously by Martin Zeiller in his Wunderbare und traurige Geschichten (Ulm, 1648).

WORKS

Similia Davidica, das ist Gleichnus Text auss dem Psalter Davids zusammen getragen, 4vv (Nuremberg, 1615)

2 funeral laments: 1 in C. Anomaeus: Zwo Christliche Leichenpredigten uber … Hans Christoffen, Herrn von Gera (Regensburg, 1610); Amen! Deo nostro in saecula, 7vv (Augsburg, 1619) [on the death of W.W. von Wolckerstorff; extract repr. in MGG1]

76 hymns, 4vv: all in D. Hitzler: Musicalisch figurierte Melodien (Strasbourg, 1634); 5 in L. Erhardi: Harmonisches Chor- und Figural-Gesangbuch (Frankfurt, 1659)

Other works in D-Rp; 1 quodlibet and 6 chorales ed. in MAM, ii (1954)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WinterfeldEK

MGG1 (O. Wessely)

H.J. Moser: Die Musik im frühevangelischen Österreich (Kassel, 1954)

O. Wessely: ‘Die ständischen Bescheidbücher des oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs als musikgeschichtliche Quelle’, SMw, xxxiv (1983), 141–234

K. Schwämmlein: ‘“Johannes Brassicanus, ein feiner Poet und Musicus”: ein österreichischer Exulant in Regensburg’, Oberpfalz: Heimatszeitschrift für den ehemaligen Bayerischen Nordgau, lxxviii (1990), 171–9

K. Schwämmlein: ‘Musikalische Verbindungen zwischen Regensburg und dem reformatorischen Österreich’, Jb für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich, cvii–cviii (1991–2), 80–108

OTHMAR WESSELY

Brassin [de Brassine].

Belgian family of musicians.

(1) Louis Brassin

(2) Leopold Brassin

(3) Gerhard Brassin

MARIE-THÉRÈSE BUYSSENS

Brassin

(1) Louis Brassin

(b Aix-la-Chapelle, 24 June 1840; d St Petersburg, 17 May 1884). Pianist and composer. Son of the principal baritone at the Leipzig Stadttheater (active 1847–59) and nephew of the flautist and composer Louis Drouet, he received his first piano lessons from a family friend. While still very young he made his début at the Thalia-Theater, Hamburg, and two years later, at Stade, the eight-year-old Louis was applauded both as performer and teacher, when he introduced his five-year-old brother Leopold. At the age of 12 he went on a concert tour with his brothers. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Moscheles and in 1866 became a piano teacher at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. Between 1869 and 1878 he was professor of the piano at the Brussels Conservatory and in 1878 accepted a similar post in St Petersburg. His compositions are chiefly piano works, including two concertos and salon pieces. He made piano transcriptions of excerpts from Wagner's Ring, among them a popular version of the Magic Fire Music from Die Walküre, and also wrote songs and two German operettas, Der Thronfolger (Brussels, 1865) and Der Missionar. He was the author of an Ecole moderne du piano.

Brassin

(2) Leopold Brassin

(b Strasbourg, 28 May 1843; d Constantinople, May 1890). Pianist, brother of (1) Louis Brassin. He first learnt the piano from his older brother. He appeared in public at the age of five, studied under Moscheles at Leipzig, and undertook many concert tours with his violinist younger brother, (3) Gerhard Brassin. In 1862 he became pianist to Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later establishing himself as a piano teacher at Berne. He composed concertos and other piano pieces.

Brassin

(3) Gerhard Brassin

(b Aix-la-Chapelle, 10 June 1844; d ?Constantinople, after 1885). Violinist, brother of (1) Louis and (2) Leopold Brassin. In 1863 he was a violin teacher at Berne; he was for a time orchestral conductor at Göteborg and in 1874–5 taught at the Stern Conservatory, Berlin. In 1875 he became the director of a musical society at Breslau; after 1880 he lived in St Petersburg and then in Constantinople. His compositions include works for solo violin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Pinsart: ‘Louis Brassin et les Concerts populaires de Bruxelles (1868–1878)’, RBM, xxxii–xxxiii (1978–9), 198–207

Brass instruments

(Fr. cuivres; Ger. Blechbläser; It. ottoni).

The family of lip-reed instruments, including brasswinds (see Brasswind). A brass instrument is essentially tubular, sounded by the player exhaling through vibrated lips applied to one end of the tube. The term ‘brass instrument’ does not denote the material of construction, which is most commonly metal but can be of wood, plastic, etc. or composite. For further information, see entries on individual instruments; see also Instruments, classification of (in the system of Sachs and Hornbostel a brass instrument is classified as an Aerophone).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Baines: Brass Instruments: their History and Development (London, 1976/R)

H. Heyde: Das Ventilblasinstrument: seine Entwicklung im deutschsprachigen Raum von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1987)

Historic Brass Society Journal (1989–) [incl. bibliographies: the bibliographies appear with supplementary material as on-line database Historic Brass Society Brass Bibliography (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University, D. Lasocki)]

M. Fasman: Brass Bibliography: Sources on the History, Literature, Pedagogy, Performance, and Acoustics of Brass Instruments (Bloomington, IN, 1990)

T. Herbert and J. Wallace, eds.: The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (Cambridge, 1997)

Brassó

(Hung.).

See Braşov.

Brassolini, Domenico.

See Brasolini, Domenico.

Brass quintet

(Fr. quintette de cuivres; Ger. Blechbläserquintett, Blechquintett; It. quintetto di ottoni).

A composition for two trumpets, horn, trombone and tuba or bass trombone, or a group performing such a composition. During the 16th and 17th centuries numerous European composers wrote five-part consort music played by two cornetts and three sackbuts; five-part Turmmusik was written and performed by German Stadtpfeifer (town musicians). J.C. Pezel, a well-known Leipzig Stadtpfeifer wrote 116 pieces for five-part brass ensemble. Five-part works for brass instruments in the 19th century and the early 20th include compositions by Ludwig Maurer, Alexander Aliabev, Victor Ewald and Anton Simon. Although these were written for conical bore instruments (cornets, E horns, B horns, tuba), they are treasured by modern brass quintet ensembles for their musical and historical value, receiving frequent performances. Five-part brass writing is also found in European and American brass band music of the 19th century.

Chamber music ensembles flourished in New York in the years immediately following World War II, especially among students at the Juilliard School. Around 1947 the flautist Samuel Baron, founder of the New York Woodwind Quintet, helped to organize the loosely-structured New York Brass Ensemble, which performed primarily as a brass quintet and was the template for the modern ensemble. In 1954 two of its members, the trumpeter Robert Nagel and the tuba player Harvey Phillips, set up the New York Brass Quintet as a professional entity. The American Brass Quintet, organized in 1960 by the trombonist Arnold Fromme (also a member of the New York Brass Ensemble), uses a bass trombone instead of a tuba. These two groups, along with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble in Britain and the Annapolis Brass Quintet in the USA, have been the leading force in establishing the brass quintet as a standard chamber ensemble. They have collectively commissioned over 300 musical works and have inspired the formation of scores of professional ensembles. Over 900 composers have written music for brass quintet since 1954, among them Malcolm Arnold, Jan Bach, Leslie Bassett, Richard Rodney Bennett, Leonard Bernstein, William Bolcom, Eugène Bozza, Elliott Carter, John Cheetham, Ingolf Dahl, Peter Maxwell Davies, Jacob Druckman, Alvin Etler, Eric Ewazen, Lukas Foss, William Mathias, Vincent Persichetti, Ned Rorem, David Sampson, Gunther Schuller, Richard Wernick and Charles Wuorinen. These works can be loosely categorized into three types: those in sonata form; suites, that is, collections of dances or scenes, some in divertimento form and many emulating the dance rhythms of early consort music, Turmmusik and the Baroque suite; and single-movement works, varying greatly in style and length and including tonal and serial pieces.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O.W. Metcalf: The New York Brass Quintet: its History and Influence on Brass Literature and Performance (DMA diss., Indiana U., 1978)

M.H. Tunnell: A Comprehensive Performance Project in Trumpet Literature (DMA diss., U. of Southern Missisippi, 1982) [incl. list of brass quintets by American composers, 1938–80]

S. Baron: ‘Reminiscences of a Golden Age: New York City (1946–51)’, The Instrumentalist (1987–8), 19–24

R.G. Lindahl: Brass Quintet Instrumentation: Tuba versus Bass Trombone (diss., Arizona State U., 1988)

M. Shakespeare: ‘The American Brass Quintet: Still Shining (from Sea to Sea) after Thirty Years’, Chamber Music America, viii/1 (1991), 18–27

F.K. Sherman: The American Brass Quintet: Values and Achievements (DMA diss., U. of Oklahoma, 1992)

W.L. Jones: An Historical and Stylistic Survey of the Brass Quintet (DMA diss., U. of Kentucky, 1998)

BILL JONES

Brasswind.

Term used to denote ‘European’ brass instruments, including those made in the European tradition on other continents, but excluding instruments used purely for signalling and those of folk traditions that have not been integrated into the mainstream of ‘art’ music. Brasswind instruments generally have compasses of between one and four octaves. They are designed to comply with the prevailing conventional framework of pitch standards and temperament, and are normally said to be pitched ‘in’ a key, such as B. The term ‘brasswind’ is used in much the same way as ‘woodwind’.

ARNOLD MYERS

Brätel, Ulrich

(b c1495; d Stuttgart, 1544 or 1545). German composer. From a letter that he wrote from Stuttgart on 27 September 1538 to the humanist Joachim Vadian it is clear that he had been Vadian’s pupil in Vienna 23 or 24 years earlier, together with the composer Ludovicus Haydenhammer (see RISM 1537¹) and the theorist Wenzeslaus Philomates. The three probably studied privately with Vadian, since their names do not appear in the Vienna university register. According to the letter Brätel later spent much time travelling in distant lands ‘with king and princes’ as a composer and performing musician, specifically with the Polish court: in the song Ich denck offt vil there is a reference to Polowitz castle, near Kraków. He may also have stayed in Hungary and Heidelberg. Moser’s theory that Brätel belonged to Hofhaimer’s circle in Vienna, and was perhaps even taught by him, is possible but remains unproved. From 1534 Brätel was in the service of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who had just introduced the Reformation movement to his land, so Brätel must have been converted to Protestantism by that time at least. Although he was mainly active as a composer from 1534 until his death, he was also a member of the privy council as secretary of the divorce court (1534–40). As a musician his chief duty was to build up a new repertory of service music that was compatible with the doctrine of the Reformed Church; he also wrote instrumental and secular vocal music. Most of his surviving compositions dated from 1533 to 1542 seem to have been written for the court at Stuttgart.

Opinion of Brätel’s music bears the stamp of Eitner’s verdict, ‘dry and workmanlike’; this may have some connection with the social-critical texts of many of his songs, which were not in keeping with the lighter fare being offered by Georg Forster’s collections. Brätel has left posterity in no doubt as to his musical models, naming them in the song So ich betracht und acht der alten Gsang as Ockeghem, La Rue, Josquin, Finck and Agricola. He is represented by seven motets in D-Kl 4⁰ 24; the manuscript, compiled by the Kassel Kapellmeister Johannes Heugel (who seems to have been a friend of his), contains 21 works by or attributed to Josquin as well as compositions by a dozen lesser composers, and thus provides evidence of a contrapuntal school following on from Josquin. The historical tendency is in keeping with that of the Reformation: a sense of national identity achieved through adherence to an established international tradition.

WORKS

sacred

printed

Lat.: Misericordiam et iudicium, 4vv, 1539⁹; Ex aequo vivant sit pax, 5vv, 1545²; Ecce quam bonum, 8vv (Augsburg, 1548); Deus noster refugium, 4vv, 1553⁴; Deo dicamus gratias, 4vv, 1567¹

Ger.: Wohlauf mein Kron, 4vv, 1540⁷; In Gottes Namen fahren wir, 8vv, broadsheet (1542), copy in D-Mbs Mus.pr.156; Der höchste Schatz Gott selber ist, 4vv, 1544²¹, ed. in DDT, xxxiv (1908/R)

MS

†	in private collection, Utrecht (see Elders)

Audi tellus, audi magni, 4vv, D-Z 73; †Audi verba mea Domine; †Confitemini Domine, 5vv, Kl 4⁰ 24; Domine ne quaeso in ira, 5vv, Kl 4⁰ 24; Dulces exuviae, 6vv, Kl 4⁰ 38; Ego autem in te Domine speravi, 5vv, Kl 4⁰ 24 (also listed in HEu Pal.Germ.318, lost); †Et in furore tuo, 4vv, Kl 4⁰ 24; Exaudi nos Domine, 5vv, Z 73; Gaude Maria virgo, 4vv, Z 73; Homo quidam fecit coenam, 4vv, Sl 33; †Iacta in Dominum curam tuam, 5vv; †Iacta in Dominum curam tuam, 8vv; In manibus tuis, 4vv, Sl 34; Iter natos mulierum, 4vv, Sl 33

†Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, 4vv, Kl 4⁰ 24 (also listed in HEu Pal.Germ.318, lost); Miserere mei Deus, 5vv, Sl 34; †O beatum hominem, 4vv, Kl 4⁰ 24, Z 73; †O Deus iustitia mea, 4vv, Z 73; †Quam multi sunt o Domine, 4vv, Z 73; †Qui confidunt, 5vv, Dlb 1/D/3; Regnum mundi, 4vv, Z 73, H-BA 22; Summe Trinitatis simplice, 4vv, D-Z 73, H-BA 22; Te Deum laudamus, 4vv, BA 23; †Ut frendunt gentes, 4vv, D-Kl 4⁰ 24, Z 73; Verbum caro factum est, 6vv, Sl 3, Z 73; Verbum Domini manet, 6vv, D-Mbs 1503b; Victimae paschali laudes, 4vv, H-BA 22

Lost, listed in D-HEu Pal.Germ.318: Accessit ad pedes, 5vv; Canam te Domine, 4vv; Da pacem, 5vv; Dixit Dominus effundam, 6vv; Dominum …, 3vv; Jhesu quadragenarie, 6vv; Memento mei Deus, 4vv; Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist, 7vv; Proba me Domine, 4vv; Recordare Domine, 4vv; Tribulatio et angustia, 5vv; Veni Sancte Spiritus, 8vv; Wir glauben all an einen Gott, 5vv

secular

Edition:65 deutsche Lieder … nach dem Liederbuch von Peter Schöffer und Mathias Apiarius [1536⁸], ed. H.J. Moser (Wiesbaden, 1967) [M]

Ach seltsam es gewesen ist, 4vv, M 56–8; Ein jeder will jetzt edel sein, 4vv, M 41; Ein leppisch Man, der narren kan, 4vv, M 81; Es ist kommen die Zeit, 4vv, 1567¹; Ich denck offt vil, 4vv, M 113; Kein Gelt, kein Gsell, es stell sich einer, 4vv, M 155; So ich betracht und acht der alten Gsang, 5vv, M 207; Wann ich lang klag, 4vv, M 76; Weil ich gross Gunst trag zu der Kunst, 5vv, ed. in MMg, xxvi (1894), 29, M 1; Welt hin, Welt her, ich sich nit mehr, 4vv, M 86; Zwischen Berg und tiefen Tal, 4vv, D-Bsb 40026

Lost, listed in D-HEu Pal.Germ.318: Ach Jeger gut, 4vv; Das ich bisher; Freud und Mudt; Huld Gunst und Gnad, 6vv

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bossert: ‘Die Hofkapelle unter Herzog Ulrich’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, new ser., xxv (1916), 383–430

H.J. Moser: Paul Hofhaimer (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1929, enlarged 2/1966)

M. Bente: ‘Ulrich Brätel: über Leben und Werk des ersten württembergischen Hofkomponisten der Reformationszeit’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 63–74 [incl. full list of works]

W. Elders: ‘Ein handschriftlicher Liber psalmorum aus der deutschen Überlieferung’, Formen und Probleme der Überlieferung mehrstimmiger Musik im Zeitalter Josquins Desprez: Wolfenbüttel 1976, 47–69

G. Bonorand: Vadians Humanistenkorrespondenz mit Schülern und Freunden aus der Wiener Zeit (St Gallen, 1988), 43 [letter from Brätel to Vadian]

C. Gottwald: ‘Johannes Heugel als Musiksammler’, Litterae medii aevi: Festschrifte für Johanne Autenrieth, ed. M. Borgolte and H. Spilling (Sigmaringen, 1988), 315–27

WILFRIED BRENNECKE/CLYTUS GOTTWALD

Bratislava

(Ger. Pressburg; Hung. Pozsony).

Capital city of Slovakia. An important Slavonic centre in the 9th-century Great Moravian Empire, Bratislava fell later under Hungarian rule. The Hungarian defeat at the battle of Mohács (1526) opened Hungary to the Turks and in 1536 Bratislava replaced Buda as the capital and in 1653 as the coronation city of Hungary. This, and the removal of the Archbishop of Esztergom, had a long-lasting impact on Bratislava as a cultural centre and contributed to its population growth in the 18th century. In 1784, with the Turkish threat over, the National Assembly and adminstration returned to Buda and Bratislava’s cultural importance diminished accordingly. This was reversed only after 1918, first as part of the new Czechoslovak Republic, then as the capital of a Slovak state (1939–45) during the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, and in 1993 as capital of an independent Slovakia.

Bratislava’s musical past was active and international in outlook. It was the birthplace of the lutenist Hans Neusidler, of J.N. Hummel and Ernő Dohnányi; composers who studied there include the Hungarians, Erkel (1822–5) and Bartók (1892–3, 1894–9). The list of foreign musicians who have appeared in the city includes Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Bülow, Clara Schumann, Bruno Walter and Richard Strauss.

Bratislava’s contribution to music in central Europe was already important in the Middle Ages (the city charter dates from 1291). Until the 17th century the city’s musical life centred on the 14th-century cathedral of St Martin (which had a cantor and a choir school from 1302) and the Franciscan church, founded in 1397. The music collections of both churches show that vocal polyphony was cultivated, as well as Gregorian chant. The most important medieval manuscript in the cathedral collection is the so-called Bratislava notated missal (Missale Notatum Strigoniense), in neumatic notation, of 1341, which contains the whole Hungarian repertory of medieval mass chants (see illustration). The manuscript of Anna Schumann (1571), from the cathedral library, contains 239 compositions – mainly hymns, responses and antiphons – in two to six parts. The city pipers, who took part in services until the 18th century, are first mentioned in records in 1448. The first Protestant church was consecrated in 1638, and until its closure and the banning of Protestant services in 1672 regular performances of Viadana, Michael Praetorius, Schütz, Schein, Hammerschmidt, Giovanni Valentini, Carissimi and others were heard under Samuel Friedrich Capricornus (1651–7) and Johann Kusser (1657–72), the father of J.S. Kusser. The church repertory, like those at the residences of the Esterházy and Grassalkovich families, later became strongly influenced by Viennese Classical works. Important musicians active in Bratislava between 1770 and 1830 included the organist and composer Anton Zimmermann, the pianist and teacher F.P. Rigler, the composer Georg Druschetzky and the double bass player Johannes Sperger. The Pressburger Zeitung (founded 1764) was one of the leading newspapers in Central Europe and carried influential music criticism. Artists who performed at the concerts organized by the St Martin’s Church Music Society (1833–1945) included Liszt (the society’s first patron) and Anton Rubinstein.

The first performances of secular dramatic works in the city were in the so-called Weiten Hof in 1609. The Imperial Hofkapelle in Vienna gave frequent guest performances in Bratislava Castle from 1637 to 1688. A theatre was built in 1764, and 12 years later an opera house on the site of the present Slovenské Národné Divadlo (Slovak National Theatre). From 1791 twice-weekly Italian opera performances were recorded, in a temporary theatre. But most performances were given in German or Hungarian until 1919, and the repertory included works by Haydn, Mozart, Dittersdorf, Boieldieu, Rossini, Weber, Lortzing, Verdi and Puccini. Operettas were performed from 1859. The Bratislava Opera Theatre (renovated 1969–72) was completed in 1886.

In 1919 Bratislava became part of the republic of Czechoslovakia, and within a decade the Czech and, especially, Slovak population had increased markedly. The first performance of an opera in Slovak was given in Bratislava on 10 December 1919 (The Bartered Bride), but Smetana’s The Kiss on 1 March 1920 marked the real beginning of the Slovak National Opera, founded in 1919. During the inter-war years the company developed a wide international repertory as well as supporting native composers such as J.L. Bella, Viliam Figuš-Bystrý and Mikuláš Schneider-Trnavský, in addition to Smetana, Dvořák, Fibich and Janáček. Two outstanding opera conductors and directors of the period were the composer Oskar Nedbal (1923–30), and his nephew Karel Nedbal (1931–8). Important musicians associated with the Slovak National Theatre after its nationalization in 1945 have been the Croatian composer Krešimir Baranovič, Zdeněk Chalabala, Ladislav Holoubek, himself a prolific composer of operas, Tibor Frešo, Juraj Hrubant and Ondrej Lenárd. A golden age was Zdeněk Košler’s tenure as chief conductor (1971–6). The Slovak National Opera in Bratislava presents standard repertory and contemporary works as well as the Slovak opera repertory. Its many first performances of Slovak operas have included the première of Suchoň’s Krútňava (‘The Whirlpool’, 1949). The orchestra of the theatre, the Bratislava SO, in the thirties gave orchestral concerts presenting the standard repertory and new music. Native and foreign Singspiele, operettas and musicals are given at the Nová Scéna.

Until 1918 there was no permanent orchestra in Bratislava, and even the first Slovak Philharmonic Society founded in 1920 was really an amateur group of local government officials. However, through the efforts of their chief conductor, Zdeněk Folprecht (1920–33), the orchestra performed, before 1938, works by contemporary Slovak composers (Bella, Schneider-Trnavský, Lauko, Alexander Moyzes, Suchoň) as well as such works as Haydn’s The Creation and Verdi’s Requiem. The Bratislava RO (founded in 1926) reached its peak under František Babušek (1939–49). The professional Slovak PO was founded in 1949 and has its headquarters in Bratislava. Its conductors have included Václav Talich, Ludovít Rajter, Ladislav Slovák, Libor Pešek, Bystrík Režucha and Ondrej Lenárd. It comprises an orchestra of 100 and a choir of 80 and gives regular concert series in addition to undertaking tours throughout Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia as well as abroad. The Slovak Chamber Orchestra (founded 1960), which specializes in Baroque music for strings, and the Slovak Madrigal Choir (founded 1964) are both composed principally of members of the Slovak Philharmonic Society. Other ensembles in the city include Musica Aeterna, which concentrates on early music, the Moyzes Quartet, successor to the Slovak Quartet (founded 1948), the municipal chamber orchestra Musica Istropolitana (1984), the New Slovak Wind Quintet and the Veni Ensemble, which specializes in new music. There were many choral societies during the 19th century. At the turn of the 21st century a number of amateur choirs perform to a high standard and often collaborate with professional orchestras. Ensembles like the professional SĽUK (Slovak Folk Art Group) and the youth ensemble Lúčnica (both founded in 1949) devote themselves to the performance of Slovak dances and other folk music.

The Bratislava Festival was founded in 1965; it is held for two weeks each October and includes exhibitions, opera, ballet, orchestral and chamber music concerts, solo recitals and a musicological congress. It later included a series of concerts by young performers in association with UNESCO. Since the fall of the communist regime in 1989 several smaller festivals have been established, notably the biennial Melos-Ethos Festival (which focusses on contemporary works), the Bratislava Jazz Days and the Early music festival held each November. Two important competitions have also been inaugurated: the Hummel International Piano Competition and a singing competition in memory of the soprano Lucia Popp, who studied in Bratislava.

The Bratislava radio station provides both regional and national services and has an electronic studio. The television studio in Bratislava was opened in 1954 and regularly transmits opera, concerts and other music programmes.

Bratislava has ten elementary schools of music, a state conservatory (founded in 1919 as a music school, renamed the Music and Drama Academy in Slovakia in 1928 and made into the State Conservatory in 1941) and the High School of Musical Arts (founded 1949). Following the political changes of 1989 a school of church music and several private music schools were founded in the city. Musicology is studied at the department of philosophy of the Comenius University (founded 1919). The Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (founded 1951) comprises three departments (history of music, ethnomusicology, and contemporary music and music theory) and is concerned primarily with the study of Slovak music. Many of the principal monuments of Slovak music, including rare music prints, manuscript collections and a valuable collection of musical instruments, are held in the music department of the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava. A museum commemorating the life and work of Hummel is housed in the composer’s birthplace. The Slovak state music publisher OPUS, which published scores by native composers and books on music, became privately owned in 1989; in the following years a number of small music publishers were founded in the city. The Bratislava Music Information Centre (founded 1965) promotes contemporary Slovak music abroad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Knauz: A pozsonyi káptalannak kéziratai [Manuscripts of the Bratislava Chapter] (Esztergom, 1870)

T. Ortvay: Geschichte der Stadt Pressburg (Pressburg, 1903)

A. Heppner: A pozsonyi német színeszet története a XVIII. században [A History of the German theatre in Bratislava] (Pressburg, 1910)

K. Benyovszky: Das alte Theater: Kulturgeschichte aus Pressburgs Vergangenheit (Bratislava, 1926)

D. Orel: Hudební památky františkánske knihovny v Bratislavě [Musical remains of the Franciscan library in Bratislava] (Bratislava, 1930)

P. Polák: ‘Orchestrálne združenie Slovenská filharmónia za prvej republiky’ [The Slovak PO in the first Czechoslovak Republic], Hudobnovedný sbornik, ii (1954), 64–109

D. Lehotská: Hospodársky, politický a kultúrny rozvoj Bratislavy [The development of Bratislava’s economic, political and cultural life] (Bratislava, 1960)

Z. Hrabussay: ‘Výroba a výrobcovia hudobných nástrojov v Bratislave’ [Manufacture and musical instrument-makers in Bratislava], Hudobnovedné štúdie, v (1961), 197–238

Z. Nováček: Významné hudobné zjavy a Bratislava v 19. storoči [Significant musicians and Bratislava in the 19th century] (Bratislava, 1961)

A. Kovářová: Slovenská filharmónia [Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra] (Prague, 1966)

J. Květ: Hudobný život v Bratislava [Musical life in Bratislava], ed. J. Potúček (Bratislava, 1969)

M. Holubicová and V. Horváth: Cirkevný hudobný spolok v Bratislave [Church Music Society in Bratislava] (Bratislava, 1971)

M. Paudi and F. Schmidt: ‘Musik zur Zeit Haydn und Beethoven in der Pressburger Zeitung’, Haydn Yearbook 1971, 165–293

L. Kresánková: Múzeum Jána Nepomuka Hummela [The Johann Nepomuk Hummel Museum] (Bratislava, 1972)

R. Rybarič: ‘Z dejín viachlasnej hudby v Bratislave v 17. storočí’ [On the history of 17th-century polyphony music in Bratislava], Bratislava, viii–ix (1972–3), 137–69

Hudobné tradície Bratislavy a ich tvorcovia: Bratislava 1974–1991

I. Ferenczi: ‘Mehrstimmige Sammlung aus dem 16. Jahrhundert in Pressburg’, SMH, xvii (1975), 59–165

A. Tauberová: Franz Liszt a jeho bratislavski priatelia [Liszt and his Bratislava friends] (Bratislava, 1975)

M. Cesnaková: ‘Operná spoločnost' grófa Erdödyho v Bratislave’ [The opera society of Count Erdödy in Bratislava], Hudobný život, x/7 (1978), 14–16

A. Meier: ‘Die Pressburger Hofkapelle des Fürstprimas von Ungarn, Fürst von Batthányi in den Jahren 1776 bis 1784’, Haydn Yearbook 1978, 81–9

Z. Nováček: Hudba v Bratislave [Music in Bratislava] (Bratislava, 1978)

V. Horvath, ed.: Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra (Bratislava, 1980)

D. Múdra: ‘Odraz hudobného života Bratislavy obdobia klasicizmu v Pressburger Zeitung’ [Musical life in Bratislava during the Classical period, as reflected in the Pressburger Zeitung], Musicologica slovaca, viii (1982), 59–87

J. Lengová: ‘Romantická pieseň v tvorbe bratislavských skladateľov’ [Romantic song in the works of Bratislava’s composers], Musicologica slovaca, xv (1990), 145–80

A. Tauberová, ed.: Schöpfer der Musikstadt Bratislava (Bratislava, 1992)

J. Lengová: ‘Vojenská hudba a hudobný život Bratislavy v 19. storočí’ [Military music and musical life in Bratislava in the 19th century], SH, xix (1993), 458–80

D. Múdra: ‘Bratislavskí hudobníci v úlohe interpretov-skladateľov (1760–1830)’ [Musicians from Bratislava as performers-composers (1768–1830)], SH, xxi (1995), 263–84

D. Múdra: ‘Pressburg in der Zeit der Klassik’, Ethnologische, historische und systematische Musikwissenschaft: Festschrift zum Oskár Elschek 65. Geburtstag, ed. F. Födermayr and L. Burlas (Bratislava, 1998), 335–48

RICHARD RYBARIČ/ĽUBOMÍR CHALUPKA

Bratsche

(Ger.).

See Viola.

Bratu, Teodor

(b Draghiceanu-Gogoşari, Ilfov, 20 Jan 1922). Romanian composer. He began studies in music late, after working as a schoolteacher (1945–50). He took courses at the Bucharest Academy of Music (1950–57), studying composition with Alfred Mendelsohn. From 1950 he was secretary of the Music Fund of the Composers' Union, later moving to the Ministry of Culture as a consultant and instructor (1958–82). All of his music is accessible and undemanding. His output is centred on dramatic works and vocal-orchestral music, especially choral, ranging from patriotic occasional pieces and madrigals to arrangements of folk music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Stejarul din Borzeşti [The Oak Tree from Borzeşti] (op, 4 tableaux, Bratu, after folk legend), 1968, Iaşi, State Opera, 15 April 1969; Punguţa cu doi bani [The Purse with Two Pennies] (children’s op, 4 tableaux, after I. Creanga), 1970, Iaşi, State Opera, 1971; Dreptul la dragoste [The Right to Love] (op, 3, E. Lazar and Bratu), 1971, Bucharest, 1975; Din vremea Unirii [From the Time of the Union] (lyric-dramatic fresco, 3, S. Popescu and C. Ghinea), 1978, Iaşi, Opera, 1979; Tudor din Vladimiri [Tudor of Vladimiri] (op, 3, Bratu), 1982, Craiova, Liric, 1983

Choral: La joc [At Play], 1947; Minirii (suite, Bratu, P. Ghelmez, I. Meitoiu), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1957; 1907, 1957; Floare dobrogeana, 1961; Peste vârfuri, 1964; Cuvantul romanesc, 1974; Arc peste vremi [Arc over Time], 1981; 20 cântece, 1v/2 equal vv, 1981

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (V. Cosma) [incl. fuller list of ops]

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Romanian Musicians] (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Brauchli, Bernard

(b Lausanne, 5 May 1944). Swiss clavichord player and musicologist. After piano studies in Lausanne (1963–7) and Vienna (1968–9), he became increasingly attracted to the clavichord and its repertory. He made his European début at Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1972 and his American début at Marlboro College, Vermont, in 1973. He studied musicology at the New England Conservatory with Julia Sutton (MMus 1976) and began research in early Iberian clavichord music with Macario Santiago Kastner in Lisbon in 1977. He regularly tours Europe and North America, performing and recording a wide repertory of Renaissance and Baroque clavichord music, with an emphasis on Iberian composers. He has won high praise as a sensitive and tasteful performer. In contrast to most other modern clavichord players, he restricts himself to the fretted form of the instrument. Brauchli has given summer courses in many European countries, has lectured at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and was appointed professor of clavichord at the New England Conservatory in 1983. In 1993, in collaboration with Christopher Hogwood, he began the International Clavichord Congress that meets biennially in Magnano, Italy. His publications, most important among them The Clavichord (Cambridge, 1998), include articles on the clavichord, its history and iconography.

HOWARD SCHOTT

Braudo, Yevgeny Maksimovich

(b Riga, 8/20 Feb 1882; d Moscow, 17 Oct 1939). Russian musicologist. He studied at the Riga Music School (1891–7) before taking piano lessons with B. Mellersten. He took a philology degree at St Petersburg University, graduating in 1911, after which he studied music history with Hugo Riemann and Hermann Kretzschmar in Germany. He was active as a music critic from the 1890s, and as a lecturer from 1903. He was appointed lecturer at the Petrograd Institute of Art History in 1922 and lecturer at Moscow University in 1924. As a representative of modernist music – he was a great admirer of Nikolay Roslavets's work – he was frequently disparaged by the proletarian camp in the 1920s, and although his many writings on western European music are considered important, his work on music of the 1910s and 20s is particularly revealing. His criticism displays a keen sense of style as well as aesthetical competence, profound knowledge and a most elegant manner of writing.

WRITINGS

‘Neizdannïye proizvedeniya Skryabina’ [Unpublished works by Skryabin], Apollon (1916), nos.4–5, pp.41–7

‘Muzika i zhivopis': istoricheskiye parallelï’ [Music and painting: historical parallels], Stolista i usad'ba, no.58 (1916), 7–11

Aleksandr Porfir'yevich Borodin: yego zhizn' i tvorchestvo [Life and works] (Petrograd, 1922)

Iogann Sebastian Bakh: opït kharakteristiki [An attempt at a description] (Petrograd, 1922)

Nitsshe filosof-muzïkant [Nietzsche as a philosopher and musician] (Petrograd, 1922)

Rikhard Vagner: opït kharakteristiki [An attempt at a description] (Petrograd, 1922)

Vseobshchaya istoriya muzïki [A general history of music] (Moscow, 1922–7)

Vagner i Rossiya (novïye materialï k yego biografii) [Wagner and Russia (new materials for his biography)] (Petrograd, 1923)

‘Na konsertakh (O Roslavtse i G. Kreyne)’ [In concerts (about Roslavets and G. Krejn)], Novïy zvitel', no.113 (1924), 14 only

Osnovï material'noy kul'turï v muzïke [The foundations of material culture in music] (Moscow, 1924)

‘Organizator zvukov: N. Roslavets’ [Tone-organizer: N. Roslavets], Vestnik rabotnikov iskusstv, no.12 (1925), 14 only

‘Avtorskiy vecher N. Roslavtsa’ [N. Roslavets’s recital], Isvestiya (17 Feb 1926)

with A.N. Rimsky-Korsakov: ‘Boris Godunov’ Musorgskogo (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927)

Betkhoven i yego vremya [Beethoven and his time] (Moscow, 1927)

‘Kontsertï N. Metnera’ [N. Medtner’s recitals], Muzïka i revolyutsiya, no.3 (1927), 33 only

Istoriya muzïki (szhatïy ocherk) [The history of music (a compact study)] (Moscow, 1928/R 1935)

Frants Shubert (Moscow, 1939)

MARINA LOBANOVA

Bräuer, Ferenc

(b Pest, 20 Oct 1799; d Pest, 15 April 1871). Hungarian conductor, teacher and composer. He studied the piano with János Skrobák and Joseph Czerny and, at the same time, the violin, which enabled him to play in János Bihari’s gypsy orchestra during the carnival season of 1809. In 1812 he became a pupil of Hummel in Vienna, and in 1815 he conducted the residential orchestra of the Kállay family in Nagykálló. For over 50 years he worked in Pest, first as a music teacher (his most famous pupil was Stephen Heller), later as choirmaster of the Inner City Parish Church (1833) and as assistant director of the Singing School (later the Conservatory) of the Pestbuda Society of Musicians (from 1845). Together with Erkel he conducted the orchestral concerts of the Musical Society in 1847; this activity led to the founding of the Pest Philharmonic Society in 1853.

Bräuer was a characteristic figure in Hungarian musical life during the ‘Age of Reform’ which preceded the Revolution of 1848. His sacred compositions are in the Classical Viennese tradition, while the spirit of early German Romanticism is combined rather unusually with the new Hungarian national verbunkos style in his instrumental works.

WORKS

MSS in H-Bn

Sacred (chorus, orch): 2 masses; 2 offertories, 1 for double chorus; 2 graduals; Tantum ergo

Instrumental: Jubel Ouverture à la hongroise, orch, 1865; Variations brillantes, on a Hungarian theme, pf qnt (Vienna, 1829); Allemande mélancolique, pf (Vienna, ?1830); Waltzes, pf, before 1838; Allegro all’ungherese, pf, n.d.

Vocal: Rejtsd előlem [Dissemble before me] (K. Kisfaludy), before 1832

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Mátray: ‘A muzsikának közönséges története’ [A general history of music], Tudományos Gyűjtemény (Pest, 1828–32)

I. Bartalus: ‘Jelesebb zenetanítóink, Bräuer Ferenc’ [One of our famous music teachers, Bräuer], Ország Tükre (Pest, 1862)

E. Vajdafy: A Nemzeti Zenede története [The history of the National Conservatory] (Budapest, 1890)

FERENC BÓNIS

Braun.

German family of musicians. Active between 1760 and 1860, the family included instrumental virtuosos in three generations, and several female members had significant singing careers. The family's activities extended to Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden; its members had close relations with the Kunzen and Türrschmidt families.

(1) Anton Braun

(2) Johann Braun

(4) Moritz Braun

(5) Carl (Anton Philipp) Braun

(6) Wilhelm (Theodor) Braun

WERNER BRAUN

(1) Anton Braun

(b Oberbeisheim, nr Kassel, 20 Jan 1729; d Kassel, 26 April 1798). Instrumentalist. After a period of study (probably with a town musician in Kassel) and a period as a military oboist in Hesse, he was employed as a first violinist in the Kassel court orchestra from 1760 until his retirement in 1785. There are no surviving works to suggest that he was active as a composer. He had five sons (whom he taught the violin) and one daughter: (2) Johann; (3) (Johann) Friedrich; (4) Moritz; Maria (Louise) (b Kassel, 22 Oct 1762; d Munich, 7 April 1834); (Johann) Daniel (b Kassel, 24 June 1767; d Berlin, 16 June 1832); and (Johann) Andreas (b Kassel, 22 Feb 1771; d Waltershausen, 27 July 1833). Maria was active as an opera singer in Kassel. Daniel began his career as a violinist and tenor in Kassel but turned to the cello, and after studying with J.-P. Duport became a chamber musician to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, whom he accompanied on campaigns in 1793–4; he was briefly married to the singer Catharina Brouwer (b The Hague, 7 March 1778; d Amsterdam, 14 April 1855), a niece of Christian Ernst Graf, and had a daughter, Auguste (b Berlin, 20 Nov 1800; d Berlin, 7 Sept 1866), who married Carl Nicholas Türrschmidt, a son of the famous horn player Carl Türrschmidt. Auguste had a career as a singer and was contralto soloist in Mendelssohn's Berlin performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion.

(2) Johann Braun

(b Kassel, 29 Aug 1753; d Berlin, 1 Jan 1811). Violinist and composer, son of (1) Anton Braun. As a child he was sponsored by Landgrave Friedrich II of Hessen-Kassel; he studied the violin with K.A. Pesch and composition with J.G. Schwanenberger in Brunswick. In the Trios op.2 (c1769) he described himself for the first time as ‘musicien de la chambre’ of the Landgrave. After the Landgrave's death and the disbanding of the orchestra in 1785, Braun remained as music tutor to the young Crown Prince Wilhelm. On 1 January 1788 Queen Friederike of Prussia (formerly Princess of Hessen-Darmstadt) appointed him her music director in Berlin. With F.L.A. Kunzen, the brother-in-law of his brother (3) Friedrich Braun, and other colleagues, he promoted some well-attended weekly concerts during Lent 1791 and 1793 at the Hotel Stadt Paris (‘Nachricht von merkwürdigen Tonkunstlern’, Musikalische Monathsschrift (1792), 23 only; repr. in Studien für Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde, ed. Kunzen and J.F. Reichardt, Berlin, 1793/R, ii). He may well have given up solo playing after the turn of the century; in the aftermath of war, the irregular and reduced payment of his pension (1806–9) caused him hardship.

Johann Braun's trios are composed in a cantabile idiom and each consists of a movement in sonata form, followed by a rondo or set of variations. In the Cello Concerto op.4 no.2, which was dedicated to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, the solo cello part emphasizes the top register of the instrument. The concertos for two horns became famous particularly through performances by Johann Palsa and Carl Türrschmidt.

WORKS

Orch: Simphonie concertante, 2 hn, orch (Zürich, n.d.); 2 vc concs., op.4, no.1 (Berlin, c1790), no.2 (Berlin, c1792); Conc., cl, 2 hn, D-Bsb

Chbr: 3 Str Trios, op.2 (Berlin, c1769); 3 Str Trios, op.3 (Berlin, c1783)

Lost: 18 concs. (11 for 2 hn, 7 for hn, bn, fl, vc), 12 hn trios, works for wind insts, all cited in GerberNL

(3) (Johann) Friedrich Braun

(b Kassel, 15 Sept 1759; d Ludwigslust, 15 Sept 1824). Oboist and composer, son of (1) Anton Braun. He studied the oboe with C.S. Barth in Kassel and (thanks to the support of Landgrave Friedrich II) with Carlo Besozzi in Dresden. From June 1777 he served as an oboist and violinist in the Mecklenburg court orchestra at Ludwigslust; he also went on concert tours to cities including Hamburg (1784), Copenhagen (1786, 1793), Berlin (1792, 1800) and Breslau (1801).

As an oboist, Friedrich Braun strove to achieve a cross between Barth's expressive and cantabile style of playing and Besozzi's brilliant style. His own compositions, which are somewhat routine in character, exemplify this approach, which he also followed when teaching his pupils.

Friedrich Braun married in 1786 Louise Friederica Ulrica Kunzen (b Lübeck, 15 Feb 1765; d Ludwigslust, 4 May 1839), the daughter of Adolph Carl Kunzen. She was engaged as a court singer there in 1787 and was active until 1837.

WORKS

Orch.: Sinfonia a 8, D-SWl; 5 ob concs., SWl, solo parts only

Chbr: Duo concertante, va, vc (Hamburg, n.d.), ed. B. Päuler (Winterthur, 1976); 24 exercises, ob, pf (Leipzig, 1825); Einige Übungsstücke in den schwereren Tonarten, ob, pf, Bsb

Doubtful: Concerto-potpourri, ob, pf, attrib. Braun, SWl, possibly by C.A.P. Braun; Ob Conc., cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1781, attrib. Braun

Lost: Conc., 2 ob, Adagio and Rondo, va, mentioned in L. Massonneau's diary, see Meyer

(4) Moritz Braun

(b Kassel, 1 May 1765; d Würzburg, 16 Nov 1828). Violinist and bassoonist, son of (1) Anton Braun. By 1777 he was already serving in the Kassel court orchestra as a violinist; however, because of an injured finger, he changed to the bassoon a few years later, studying in Kassel and with Franz Anton Pfeiffer in Ludwigslust (1782). After a brief period in Silesia, he was appointed as a court and chamber musician at the archiepiscopal court in Würzburg in 1785. His concert tours took him in 1783–5 and 1787–9 to various German cities and courts. At the end of 1787, his father recommended him to Duke Friedrich Franz I of Mecklenburg-Schwerin as a successor to Pfeiffer, who had recently died. However, he decided to remain in Würzburg, where he had started a family in 1790, and received a rise in salary in 1791. In the following year, encouraged by Prince-Bishop Franz Ludwig von Erthal, he again took up the violin, and he was sent for further training to Bamberg. Braun was now regarded as a violin virtuoso; his pupils included (Franz) Joseph Fröhlich, who secured his involvement in the royal music school founded in 1804. His only surviving work is a piece for 12 instruments (D-SWl).

Two of Moritz Braun's children became musicians. Catharina Maria Louise [‘Cathinka’] (b Würzburg, 14 March 1799; d Ludwigslust, 8 June 1832), after initial success as a pianist, became a prominent opera singer; she married her cousin (6) Theodor Braun, and went with him to Ludwigslust in 1825. Joseph Braun (b Würzburg, 1804; d Würzburg, 6 April 1861), a bassoonist, worked as a chamber musician at the Donaueschingen court, also touring as a virtuoso and composing pieces for his instrument.

(5) Carl (Anton Philipp) Braun

(b Ludwigslust, 26 Dec 1788; d Rommehed, Sweden, 11 June 1835). Oboist and composer, son of (3) Friedrich Braun. He was taught the oboe by his father and made his début in 1806 at the Mecklenburg court. From 1 August 1807 he was engaged under his uncle and composition teacher F.L.A. Kunzen as a musician at the royal court in Copenhagen. He made a long concert tour in 1811, and in 1812 he played in Munich, where he met Meyerbeer. After returning to Copenhagen, he left for Stockholm and joined the court orchestra there at a higher salary in 1815; later he became music director of various regiments stationed there. He also organized subscription concerts (1817) and military concerts (from 1826).

Carl Braun's output, which is centred on his own instrument, was well received by German critics, and his mastery of humorous writing, as in the finale of the Sonata for oboe and piano, was widely acknowledged. However, his attempt in the Fourth Symphony to develop his compositional style was criticized by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1813.

WORKS

Incid music: Hytten i Schwarzwald (N.T. Bruun), Copenhagen, 1814; Axel och Valborg (A. Oehlenschlager), S-St, ov. arr. kbd (Stockholm, n.d.); ov. to Jenny Mortimer, St; ov. and entr'acte to Skulden, Stockholm, 1830, St; ov. and entr'acte to Wallensteins död (after F. von Schiller), Stockholm, 8 Dec 1831, St

Vocal: 14 sångstycken, 4vv (Stockholm, n.d.); 6 sångstycken, with pf (Stockholm, 1822); 6 canzonette, with pf (Stockholm, n.d.); Hymn den 8 januari 1830, Skma

Orch: 4 syms.: no.1, f, 1810, Skma, no.2, E, St, ?no.3, c, St, no.4, D, 1810 (Leipzig, 1812), ?2 further syms. (see GerberNL); Fl Conc., op.2 (Leipzig, n.d.); Ov., c (Leipzig, n.d.); Ov. im alten Stil, Hochzeitsouverture im alten Stil, both Skma; 2 ovs., St; 6 polonaises, Trauermarsch, D-SWl; marches and works for brass insts

Qts: 1 for 2 fl, 2 hn, op.1 (Leipzig, n.d.); 2 for fl, ob, hn/basset-horn, bn (Leipzig, c1819); 1 for fl, vn, va, b, op.6 (Leipzig, n.d.); 2 str qts, S-Skma; Fuga, Allegro, 2 vn, va, db, Skma

Other chbr: Duo, ob, bn (Augsburg, 1812), lost; Sonata, ob/fl/vn, pf (Leipzig, c1812); 2 Ob Duos, op.3 (Leipzig, c1813); 18 Caprices, ob (Leipzig, c1816), ed. A. Geissberg (Leipzig, 1949); 2 Fl Duos (Copenhagen, n.d.); Potpourri, ob, pf (Leipzig, n.d.); vn duo, canons a 2–14, AMZ, xxxiv (1832), suppls. i, iii, and xxxv (1833), suppls. iii–iv; Duetto, 2 basset-horns, Vn Duo, both Skma; Concerto-potpourri, ob, pf, 3 other MS works, attrib. Braun, D-SWl, possibly by J.F. Braun; 40 canons, DK-Kk*; c20 canons, Km

Pf: 6 ganz leichte Variationen (Copenhagen, n.d.); Diverses bagatelles (Stockholm, n.d.); Theme and Variations

Lost: other works, mentioned in L. Massonneau's diary (see Meyer) and contemporary pubns (see SBL, Nisser)

(6) Wilhelm (Theodor) Braun

(b Ludwigslust, 20 Sept 1796; d Schwerin, 12 May 1867). Oboist, son of (3) Friedrich Braun. He was a pupil of his father and by 1809 had been engaged by the royal orchestra in Berlin (Ledebur). From here he went on concert tours (1814, 1817–18, 1821), and in 1824 he married his cousin Catharina Maria Louise [‘Cathinka’] Braun. At Easter 1825 he became a member of the court orchestra in Ludwigslust, succeeding his father, and his wife was appointed a court singer there. At the change of government in 1837, he was transferred to Schwerin, and he retired there in 1856.

Wilhelm Braun took up the sensitive galant style of his father's oboe playing and applied it to the Romantic idiom of the day, producing a varied, expressive tonal quality (AMZ, xxv, 1823, 18–20). A similiar approach is evident in the Concertino op.12, with its frequent changes of tempo, its use of minor keys and its deliberate lack of symmetry. In his essay ‘Bemerkungen über die richtige Behandlung und Blasart der Oboe’ (AMZ, xxv, 1823, cols.165–72) Braun attempted to perpetuate the era of the oboe virtuoso, but by 1823 this had come to an end and courtly musical life was in decline. Braun now turned his attention to music for domestic entertainment, in particular the string quartet medium, for which he arranged keyboard works by Bach and Mozart and composed his own attractive pieces in a similiar but simpler idiom.

WORKS

unpublished works in D-SWl, most autograph

Orch: Cl Conc. (Leipzig, n.d.); Ob Conc.; Divertimento, ob, orch, op.3 (Berlin, n.d.); Concertino, ob, op.12 (Leipzig, n.d.); Ob Conc.; 6 ovs., incl. 3 dated 1826–8, Fest-Ouverture, 1835

Chbr: 6 Ob Duos, op.1 (Leipzig, n.d.); 2 Str Qts, op.13 (Leipzig, n.d.); Grand quatuor, str qt, op.14/19, Berlin; 6 fugues du … J.Seb. Bach, arr. str qt (Leipzig, c1821); Deuxième suite (arrs. for str qt) (Berlin, n.d.); Ob Duo, 1822; 6 str qts, 1823–58; Duo, vn, va, op.20 (Leipzig, n.d.), ed. H. Freudenthal (Munich, 1985); Grand duo, 2 ob, op.23 no.1 (Leipzig, n.d.); 3 Ob Duos, op.23 no.2 (Hamburg, n.d.); Divertimento, fl, str qt, op.27 (Hamburg, n.d.); 16 qts arr. from pf works by Mozart; Adagio, ob, str qt, Adagio and rondo, va, str qt, 1854

Kbd: Sonata, op.17 (Hamburg, n.d.); Variations, op.24 (Leipzig, n.d.); Ov. arr. 4 hands, op.25 (Hamburg, n.d.); Introduction et polonaise, op.26 (Hamburg, n.d.); Ov., C, arr. pf, op.28 (Hamburg, n.d.)

Vocal: Andante, 1v, pf, 30 June 1822; Mass, 4vv, orch, 1830; Festcantate (L.M. Holm), perf. 1828; Geistliche Lieder, 4vv; Der Trost, S, pf, op.22 (Berlin, n.d.); Adagio, 1v

Lost: other works, mentioned in L. Massonneau's diary (see Meyer) and contemporary pubns

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberL

GerberNL

SBL (C.A.P. Braun; N. Personne, T. Norlind)

C.F. Cramer, ed.: Magazin der Musik, i (Hamburg, 1783/R), 145–7

D.A. von Apell: Gallerie von der vorzüglichsten Tonkünstler und merkwürkigen Musik-Dilettanten in Cassel (Kassel, 1806), 13–14

Obituary [J.F. Braun], AMZ, xxvi (1824), 698 only

C. von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin's (Berlin, 1861/R)

O. Kade: Die Musikalien-Sammlung des Grossherzoglichen Mecklenburg-Schweriner Fürstenhauses, i (Schwerin and Wismar, 1893), 184–7

C. Meyer: Geschichte der Mecklenburg-Schweriner Hofkapelle (Schwerin, 1913)

H. Kummer: Beiträge zur Geschichte des … Hoforchesters … zu Kassel (diss., U. of Frankfurt, 1922)

C. Nisser: Svensk instrumentalkomposition 1770–1830 (Stockholm, 1943), 66–78

H. Erdmann: ‘Die Musikerfamilie Braun’, Mf, xii (1959), 184–6

W. Kirkendale: ‘More Slow Introductions by Mozart to Fugues of J.S. Bach?’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 43–65

W. Braun: ‘Entwurf für eine Typologie der “Hautboisten”’, Der Sozialstatus des Berufsmusikers vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Salmen (Kassel, 1971), 43–63; Eng. trans. (New York, 1983), 123–58

W. Braun: ‘Musikgeschichtliches aus dem Hamberger-Nachlass in München’, Musik in Bayern, xviii–xix (1979), 15–41

Braun, Jean.

See Lebrun, Jean.

Braun, Johann Georg Franz

(b Ubthal, ?Bohemia, before 1630; d Eger, Bohemia [now Cheb, Czech republic], after 1675). German composer from Bohemia. The title-page of his 1675 songbook gives his place of birth as Ubthal, a place that cannot now be identified. According to the prefaces to his songbooks he was cantor and choirmaster of St Nicolai, Eger, from at least 1658 until at least 1675. The two songbooks that he issued in 1664 are important contributions to the development of the sacred song with continuo. The Marianischer Psalter was produced for a Marian fraternity founded by the Jesuits in Eger, of which he was a member. Most of the 72 poems it contains are from Curtz’s Harpffen Davids (1659) and 28 of them have melodies with continuo (including a little figuring). One of the melodies is from Georg Joseph’s Heilige Seelenlust (1657); all the others are by Braun. His other songbook of 1664 is known only from a much enlarged edition of 1675. It was produced for the people of Eger and contains 206 poems and 150 melodies with continuo. 58 of the melodies are new, and most of these are certainly by Braun himself: they include both simple tunes of a popular nature and songs in the style of Joseph. For the remainder Braun drew on the following sources: Schlindel’s Catholisches Gesangbuch (1631), Spee von Langenfeld’s Trutznachtigall (1649), Angelus Silesius’s Heilige Seelenlust (1657), the Prague songbook of 1652, the Rheinfels songbook of 1666 and the collection Keusche Meerfräulein (Würzburg, 1649/R1983). In some 30 songs the original melody is radically altered, and this is even truer of the original basses. (W. Lipphardt: ‘Das generalbassbegleitete deutsche geistliche Lied in Böhmen 1650–1750’, Musica cameralis: Brno VI 1971, 118–19)

WORKS

Odae sacrae, 1–2vv, 1–2 vn, op.1 (Innsbruck, 1658)

Marianischer Psalter, das ist, Siben grosse und kleine Tagzeiten der … Jungfrawen Mariae, 27 hymn tunes, 1v, bc (Amberg, 1664) [texts by A. Curtz, Angelus Silesius and others]

Echo hymnodiae coelestis, Nachklang der himmlischen Sing-Chör, das ist, Alte und neue Catholische Kirchen-Gesänge, c58 melodies, 1v, bc (Sulzbach, 1675) [enlarged edn of songbook (1664), lost; shortened version incl. orig. preface, Eger, 1701]

Omnes gentes, plaudite, 2vv, 2 viols, S-Uu

WALTHER LIPPHARDT/JIŘÍ SEHNAL

Braun, Joachim

(b Riga, 11 Aug 1929). Israeli musicologist of Latvian origin. He was banished to Siberia with his family (1941–6), which influenced his career in the former USSR. He was educated at the State Conservatory, Latvia (1948–52, MA), studying the violin with Karl Brueckner and at the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory (1958–64), where he gained the doctorate with a dissertation on violin art development (1964), studying with Lev Ginzburg (history of musical instruments and performing practices) and Dmitry Tsiganov (violin). His career began as a violinist with the Latvian Broadcasting SO (1952–60) and he taught the violin at E. Darzina Music School, Riga (1958–60). He was active as a music critic in the periodical press and professional journals (1960–70), but when he applied for emigration to Israel (1970) he was forbidden to publish. After emigrating in 1972 he joined the music department of Bar-Ilan University in 1974, becoming professor of musicology (1987), and later head of department (1992–4). He was made professor emeritus in 1997. Braun has been visiting professor at universities worldwide, including Indiana University, Bloomington (1981) and Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (1997). He was appointed chair of the RILM committee, Israel in 1991. His writings have focussed on sociology and hermeneutics, archaeology and iconography, Baltic music, ancient Israel and the Near East and Jewish music.

WRITINGS

‘No latviešu-połu mūzikas sakaru vēstures’ [From the history of Latvian-Polish musical interrelationship], Latviešu mūzika, iii (1964), 121–54

Vijołmākslas attīstība Latvijā [The development of violin art in Latvia] (Riga, 1962; diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1964)

‘Richards Vāgners Rīgā: 1837–1839’ [Richard Wagner in Riga: 1837–1839], Latviešu mūzika, v (1966), 287–312

Vijołspēles metodika [The methodic of violin playing] (Riga, 1969)

‘Die Anfänge des Musikinstrumentenspiels in Lettland’, Musik des Ostens, vi (1971), 88–125

‘Beethoven's Fourth Symphony: a Comparative Analysis of Recorded Performances’, Israel Studies in Musicology, i (1978), 54–76

‘The Sound of Beethoven's Orchestra’, Orbis musicae, vi (1978), 59–90

‘Musical Instruments in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts’, EMc, viii (1980), 312–27

‘National Interrelationship and Conflict in the Musical Life of 17th- and 18th-century Riga’, Journal of Baltic Studies, ix/1 (1980), 62–70

‘Ein Gerichtsverfahren in Sachen des Königsberger Kaufmans Shirach Sternberg wider Musikdirektor Richard Wagner’, Musik des Ostens, viii (1982), 113–27

‘Zur Hermeneutik der sowjetisch-baltischen Musik’, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, i (1982), 76–93

‘Jews in Soviet Music’, Jews in Soviet Culture, ed. J. Miller (London, 1984), 65–106

‘Shostakovich's Song Cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry”: Aspects of Style and Meaning’, Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. M.H. Brown (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1984), 259–86

‘The Double Meaning of Jewish Elements in Dmitri Shostakovich's Music’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 68–80

‘Aspekte der Musiksoziologie in Israel’, Hamburger Jb für Musikwissenschaft, xi (1986), 85–103

with T. Bensky and U. Sharvit: ‘Towards a Study of Israeli Musical Culture: the Case of Kiryat Ono’, AsM, xvii/2 (1986), 186–209

‘The Unpublished Volumes of Moshe Beregovsky’, Israel Studies in Musicology, iv (1987), 125–44

Shostakovich's Jewish Songs: From Jewish Folk Poetry, op.79. Introductory Essay with Original Yiddish Text Underlay (Tel-Aviv, 1989)

‘Die Musikikonographie des Dionysoskultes im römischem Palästina’, Imago musicae, viii (1991), 109–33

‘“ … die Schöne spielt die Pfeife”: zur Nabatäisch-safaitischen Musikpflege’, Festschrift W. Suppan, ed. B. Habla (Tutzing, 1993), 167–84

‘Archaeo-Musicology and Some of its Problems: Considerations on the State of the Art in Israel’, La pluralidisciplinarite en archeologie musicale, i (1994), 137–48

‘Biblische Musikinstrumente’, MGG2

ed., with V. Karbusicky and H. Hoffmann: Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1995)

with J. Cohen: ‘Jüdische Musik’, MGG2

‘The Lute and Organ in Ancient Israeli and Jewish Iconography’, Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, ed. A. Beer, K. Pfarr and W. Ruf (Tutzing, 1997), i, 163–88

‘Musical Instruments’, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. E.M. Meyers, iv (New York, 1997), 70–79

ed., with U. Sharvit: Socio-Musical Sciences: Congress Report of HISM-88 (Ramat-Gan, 1997)

Die Musikkultur Altisraels/Palästinas: Studien zu archäologischen, schriftlichen und vergleichenden Quellen (Fribourg and Göttingen, 1999)

Braun, Peter Michael

(b Wuppertal, 2 Dec 1936). German composer and pianist. He studied at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik (1956–9) with Frank Martin, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and others, at the Detmold Hochschule für Musik, where his teachers included Giselher Klebe (1959–61), and with Herbert Eimert in Cologne (1965–8). He also attended several Darmstadt summer courses (1958–66); his early works were influenced by Boulez, Pousseur and Cage. He has taught at Darmstadt, for the Goethe Institute (1973–4) and at the Heidelberg-Mannheim Hochschule für Musik (from 1978). An active performer of his own works, he has appeared as both pianist and conductor. His honours include a residency at the Villa Massimo, Rome (1976), and awards from the city of Cologne (1971) and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (1991–2).

Braun’s early works explore atonal (Piano Trio, 1958) and serial (Disposition, 1958–60) techniques, sometimes linking these with principles that anticipate minimalism (Interstellar, 1959) or aleatory ideas (4 Aphorismen, 1956; Quanta, 1958–67). His orchestral works of the 1960s emphasize instrumental timbre and explore the variable states of sound complexes. Transfer (1965–8), one of his best-known works, features static sound planes that function both as autonomous blocks with interior development, and as foils for foreground figuration. In the early 1970s he turned towards tonality and melodic simplicity. Later compositions synthesize stylistic elements from past and present. In Reise in die Zeit (1977–83), for example, medieval dance rhythms are reflected against an impressionistic backdrop; other passages of the work adopt a late Romantic style, or refer to North American musical idioms such as folk music, jazz and minimalism.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Eichendorff (op, after J. von Eichendorff: Die Freier), 1974–92; Die schöne Lau (musical fairy tale, H.U. Carl, after E. Mörike), 1984–6, rev. 1987; Die Juden (chbr op, after G.E. Lessing), 1994–5

Inst: 4 Aphorismen, pf, 1956; Disposition, vn, 1958–60; Pf Trio, 1958; Quanta, cycle, chbr orch, 1958–67; Interstellar, orch, 1959; Terms, cl, tpt, vn, va, vc, hp, pf, perc, 1962–71; Thesis, pf, 1962, rev. 1967; Transfer, orch, 1965–8; Varieté, orch, 1965–9; Ambiente, orch, 1974–6; Junctim, str orch, 1974–5, rev. 1988; Serenata palatina, orch, 1975–82; The Sleeping Beauty, vc, 1976–7; Reise in der Zeit, cycle, pf, 1977–83; Recherche, orch, 1983–5

Vocal: Entelechie (R.M. Rilke), vv, orch, 1972; Genug ist nicht genug! (C.F. Meyer), SATB, 1973–4; Arie (Eichendorff), S, orch, 1977–80; Kashima kiko (Matsuo Bashō), A/Bar, str, 1977; Neue Welt (F. Hölderlin), SATB, 1983; Dans le silence, spkr, SATB ad lib, fl, cl, hn, pf, gui, str qt, 1996

El-ac: Ereignisse, 1966–8; Klangsonden, 1976

RAINER KÖHL

Braun, Victor (Conrad)

(b Windsor, ON, 4 Aug 1935). Canadian baritone. He studied with Lilian Watson and at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto. He joined the Canadian Opera Company in 1961, making his début as Escamillo. In 1963 he joined the Frankfurt Opera and in 1968 the Staatsoper in Munich. He made his Covent Garden début in 1969 as Hamlet in the first London performance of Searle’s opera and also sang there as Count Almaviva and Yevgeny Onegin and in several Verdi roles. At Santa Fe he sang Jupiter in Die Liebe der Danae (1982), Mandryka in Arabella (1983), the General in We Come to the River (1984) and Holofernes in the American première of Matthus’s Judith. His repertory also included Wolfram, which he sang at La Scala and the Metropolitan and recorded under Solti. In the later part of his career he became a noted Hans Sachs, Wozzeck, Dr. Schöw and Golaud. Braun’s voice, accomplished if not particularly individual, was enhanced by his gifts as an actor.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Braun, Werner (Hermann Georg)

(b Sangerhausen, 19 May 1926). German musicologist. From 1946 he attended the University of Halle, Wittenberg, where he studied musicology with Max Schneider and music teaching with Fritz Reuter (state examination, 1950). He received the doctorate from Halle in 1952 with a dissertation on Mattheson. From 1951 to 1958 he was assistant lecturer at the musicology department of Halle University, where in 1958 he completed the Habilitation in musicology with a work on the central German chorale Passion. In addition to his teaching commitments in Halle, he was entrusted with the project of cataloguing music documents from central Germany. From 1961 he was assistant lecturer in the musicology institute of Kiel University, becoming an external lecturer in 1965 and supernumerary professor in 1967. In 1968 he became a research fellow at Saarbrücken University, where he was appointed professor in 1972; he retired in 1994. In his numerous writings Braun has brought to light and interpreted previously undiscovered 17th- and 18th-century sources, predominantly from central and north Germany. His other areas of research include reception history, particularly of early opera, Handel, church music history, and the relationship between historical perspective and methodology.

WRITINGS

Johannes Mattheson und die Aufklärung (diss., U. of Halle, 1952)

‘B.H. Brockes “Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott” in den Vertonungen G.Ph. Telemanns und G.F. Händels’, HJb 1955, 42–71

Die mitteldeutsche Choralpassion im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Halle, 1958; Berlin, 1960)

‘Die alten Musikbibliotheken der Stadt Freyburg (Unstrut)’, Mf, xv (1962), 123–45

Musik am Hof des Grafen Anton Günther von Oldenburg (1603–1667) (Oldenburg, 1963)

‘Die evangelische Kontrafaktur’, JbLH, xi (1966), 89–113

‘Musikalische Inspiration: zwischen systematischer und historischer Forschung’, Mf, xxiii (1970), 4–22

‘Altpolnische Tänze in nordwestdeutscher Überlieferung’, Musik des Ostens, vi (1971), 33–47

‘Entwurf für seine Typologie der “Hautboisten”’, Der Sozialstatus des Berufsmusikers vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Salmen (Kassel, 1971; Eng. trans., rev., 1983)

Musikkritik: Versuch einer historisch-kritischen Standortbestimmung (Cologne, 1972)

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerti grossi op.8, Nr. 1–4: Die Jahreszeiten (Munich, 1975)

‘Operist als Typ und Möglichkeit’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1975), 13–24

Britannia abundans: deutsch-englische Musikbeziehungen zur Shakespearezeit (Tutzing, 1977)

Das Problem der Epochengliederung in der Musik (Darmstadt, 1977)

‘Sans basse, senza accompagnamento, ohne Clavier: Formen kunstvoller Einstimmigkeit zwischen 1680 und 1780’, AMw, xxxvi (1979), 254–78

‘Symphonie mit obligatem Klavier: zur Rolle des Topos im Musikschrifttum’, Über Symphonien: Beiträge zu einer musikalischen Gattung: Festschrift Walter Wiora zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. C.-H. Mahling (Tutzing, 1979), 41–52

Die Musik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1981)

Der Stilwandel in der Musik um 1600 (Darmstadt, 1982)

‘“Die drey Töchter Cecrops”: zur Datierung und Lokalisierung von Johann Wolfgang Francks Oper’, AfM, xl (1983), 102–25

‘Cara Mustapha oder die zweite Eröffnung des Hamburger Schauplatzes’, SMw, xxxv (1984), 37–64

‘Romantische Klavierchoräle: in memoriam Karl-Heinz Ilting’, HJbMw, viii (1985), 119–42

‘Schütz als Kompositionslehrer: “Die Geistlichen Madrigale” von Gabriel Mölich’, Schütz-Jb 1986, 69–92

Vom Remter zum Gänsemarkt: aus der Frühgeschichte der alten Hamburger Oper 1677–1697 (Saarbrücken, 1987)

‘Äthiopisches bei Scheidt (1621)’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 355–72

‘Georg Friedrich Händel und Gian Gastone von Toskana’, HJb 1988, 100–21

‘Hammerschläge und Daktylen: zur Überlieferung einer Courante von John Bull’, Studien zur Instrumentalmusik: Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. A. Bingmann and others (Tutzing, 1988), 65–83

‘Melancholie als musikalisches Thema’, Die Sprache der Musik: Festschrift Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J.P. Fricke and others (Regensburg, 1989), 81–98

Samuel Michael und die Instrumentalmusik um 1630 (Saarbrücken, 1990)

‘Musiksatirische Kriege’, AcM, lxiii (1991), 168–99

Die Musiktheorie des 15. und 17. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, ii: Von Calvisius bis Mattheson (Darmstadt, 1994)

‘Die Coburger “Treu”: zur Traditionsgeschichte einer frühdeutschen Oper’, Georg Friedrich Händel: ein Lebensinhalt: Gedenkschrift für Bernd Baselt (1934–1993), ed. K. Hortschansky and K. Musketa (Kassel, 1995), 423–41

‘Berliner Kirchenmusik im letzten Drittel des 17. Jahrhundert: zur Sammelhandschrift Koch aus der ehemaligen Sing-Akademie’, JbSIM 1996, 166–93

‘Konzertante Kanzonette und Musiktheater’, ‘In Teutschland von gantz ohnbekandt’: Monteverdi-Rezeption und frühes Musiktheater im deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. M. Engelhardt (Frankfurt, 1996), 283–306

‘“Kunstmässig” und “Anmuthig”: zur Dichotomie des musikalischen Hörens im 17. Jahrhundert’, Perspektiven einer Geschichte abendländischen Hörens, ed. W. Gratzer (Laaber, 1997), 137–50

‘Scharlatanbühne und Musik: zu einem vernachlässigten Kapitel der Theatergeschichte’, Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, ed. A. Beer, K. Pfarr and W. Ruf (Tutzing, 1997), 189–202

EDITIONS

H. Schütz: Unser Herr Jesus Christus in der Nacht da er verraten ward (Kassel, 1961, 2/1964)

J.V. Meder: Die beständige Argenia, EDM, 1st ser., lxviii (1972)

J. Walter: Das christlich Kinderlied D. Martin Lutheri ‘Erhalt uns Herr’ 1566, Sämtliche Werke, iv (Kassel, 1973)

Johann Gottfried Müthel: Klavierkonzerte, Denkmäler norddeutscher Musik, iii–iv (Munich, 1979) [incl. E.G. Müthel: Klavierkonzert B-Dur]

J. Löhner: Die triumphierende Treue, DTB, new ser., vi (1984)

Johann Wolfgang Franck: Hamburger Opernarien (Saarbrucken, 1988)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Frobenius, N. Schwindt-Gross and T. Sick, eds.: Akademie und Musik: Festschrift für Werner Braun (Saarbrucken, 1993) [incl. list of pubns, 347–58]

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/HERBERT SCHNEIDER

Braun, Yehezkel

(b Breslau, 18 Jan 1922). Israeli composer. His parents settled in Palestine in 1923. After studying at the Israel Academy of Music with Alexander Boskovitch, among others, he was appointed to teach there when it merged with Tel-Aviv University in 1966. In 1975 he completed the MA in classical studies at the University, and studied Gregorian chant with Dom Jean Claire at Solesmes. He has served as a jury member for prizes in Gregorian chant at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, Paris (1990, 1996, 1997).

In his early works Braun adopted the ideology of a national Israeli music, merging folklike dance patterns with cantillation motifs and modal chromaticism, as in his transparent Piano Sonata (1957). During the late 1950s and 1960s he composed several 12-note compositions, such as the Prelude and Passacaglia for harp (1967), retaining his predilection for simple melodic lines and consonant harmonies within the dodecaphonic context. Later works are more stylistically diverse. His Piano Trio no.1 (1988) is related to French neo-classicism, while Hexagon (1998), commissioned for inclusion on the same programme as Brahms's Sextets, was conceived as a nostalgic commentary on Brahms's musical language.

Much of Braun's prolific output has been inspired by the folk music of Israel. ‘Iturim limgilat Ruth (‘Illuminations to the Book of Ruth’, 1983) unfolds in a sequence of dance tunes and monophonic cantillation motifs in which diminished 4ths and pentatonic scales predominate. His interest in Hebrew poetry has led him to favour vocal writing. Kinnoro shel David (‘King David's Lyre’, 1990), a large-scale cantata setting verses from the book of Psalms and the Mishnah, combines psalmodic tones, traditional formulas for learning the Mishnah and dance tunes in folk style. He has also contributed to the repertory of Jewish reform congregations in the USA, such as in his Hallel (‘Praise Ye’, 1984), commissioned by Bnei Yeshurun in Minneapolis. This work is based on Ashkenazi and Sephardi cantillation motifs combined with rich and festive choral harmonies. He has also arranged numerous traditional tunes for children's chorus.

WORKS

(selective list)

Principal publisher: Israeli Music Institute

vocal

Choral: Mahmad levavi [The Sweetheart of my Heart] (S. Levi) SATB, 1964 [after trad. Yemenite melody]; Sabbath Evening Service, Bar, SATB, org, 1971; Shir Ha-shirim pereq Gimel (Cantici canticorum caput III), SATB, 1973; Hilkhot teqi‘at shofar [Festive Horns] (cant., Mishnah), SATB, wind octet, 1980; Hallel [Praise Ye] (cant.), cantor, SATB, orch, 1984; 3 Ancient Songs on Classical Greek Children's Rhymes (Braun, after ancient Gk and Hebrew), chorus, 1987; Kinnoro shel David [King David's Lyre] (orat, Pss, Midrash), Tr, children's choir, orch, 1990; Alkman (Alkman, trans. Braun), TTBB (1996); Mi-shirei Itzik {itzik's Songs] (I. Manger, Y. Orland), SSA, pf, 1997; c150 arrs. trad. songs

Song cycles: Ahavatah shel Therese du Meun [The Love of Therese du Meun] (L. Goldberg), S/Mez/A, pf/(fl, hp, db), 1962; Shirei ha-yona veha-shoshan [Songs of the Dove and the Lily] (Goldberg) Mez, pf, 1956, arr. Mez, orch, 1996

instrumental

Orch: Conc., fl, str orch, 1959; Mizmor [Psalm], str orch, 1960; Serenade, chbr orch, 1972; Iturim limgilat Ruth [Illuminations to the Book of Ruth], 1983; Cl Conc., 1987; Fantasia lirica, gui, orch, 1998

Chbr and solo inst: Piyyutim qetanim {Little Charms], pf, perc, 1965; Sonata, pf, 1957; Davshot be-hufshah {Pedals on Vacation], hp, 1966; Prelude and Passacaglia, hp, 1967; Pf Trio no.1, 1988; Pf Trio no.2, 1996; Hexagon, divertimento, str sextet, 1998

JEHOASH HIRSHBERG

Brauneis, Walther

(b Vienna, 27 Feb 1942). Austrian music historian. After studying at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, he was employed as an engineer at the Bundesdenkmalamt, where he was appointed director of the department of historical instruments in 1984. His numerous publications on the history and topography of the city of Vienna include articles on composers of the Viennese Classical period, in particular the results of his Mozart research have attracted interest. He was made secretary of the Wiener Beethoven-Gesellschaft in 1970.

WRITINGS

‘Gluck in Wien: seine Gedenkstätten, Wohnungen und Aufführungsorte’, Gluck in Wien: Vienna 1987, 42–61

‘Die Familie Ditters in Wien und Umgebung’, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf: Eichstätt 1989, 39–60

‘Exequien für Mozart’, Singende Kirche, xxxvii (1991)

‘… Wegen schuldigen 1435f 32xr: neuer Archivfund zur Finanzmisere Mozarts im November 1791’, MISM, xxxix (1991), 159–63

‘Das Frontispiz im Alberti-Libretto von 1791 als Schlüssel zu Mozarts Zauberflöte’, MISM, xli (1993), 49–59

‘“Wir weihen diesen Ort zum Heiligtum”: Marginalien zur Uraufführung von Mozarts Kleiner Freimaurer-Kantate’, ÖMz, xlviii (1993), 12–16

‘Die Wiener Freimaurer unter Kaiser Leopold II: Mozarts Zauberflöte als emblematische Standortbestimmung’, Studies in Music History Presented to H.C. Robbins Landon, ed. O. Biba and D.W. Jones (London, 1996), 115–51

‘“… Composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo”: Beethovens “Eroica” als Hommage des Fürsten Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz für Prinz Louis Ferdinand von Preussen’, Jb des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, lii–liii (1996–7), 53–88

RUDOLF KLEIN

Braunfels, Walter

(b Frankfurt, 19 Dec 1882; d Cologne, 19 March 1954). German composer. At an early age he demonstrated strong musical gifts which were encouraged by his mother, a pianist who was a great-niece of Louis Spohr and a friend of Liszt and Clara Schumann. Braunfels began studying the piano at the age of 12 with James Kwast at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. He studied law and economics at the University of Munich, but after hearing a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde under Mottl he decided to devote his energies to music. In 1902 he went to Vienna to study the piano with Leschetizky and after a year attained a level of virtuosity sufficient to enable him to pursue a successful career as a concert pianist for many years. He returned to Munich to study composition with Thuille, and also served under Mottl at the Nationaltheater. In 1925 he became co-director of the newly constituted Cologne Hochschule für Musik with the conductor Hermann Abendroth. A determined opponent of the Nazis, Braunfels was removed from this post in 1933 on account of being half-Jewish. Although his music was officially proscribed during the Third Reich, Braunfels refused to leave Germany, withdrawing instead into self-imposed exile at Lake Constance where, in isolation, he continued to compose. In 1945 he was again summoned to Cologne in order to rebuild the Hochschule, and was made professor emeritus in 1950.

Like many composers of his generation, Braunfels was profoundly influenced by Wagner. But he was equally inspired by the orchestral virtuosity and fantasy of Berlioz’s music to which he paid homage in the orchestral piece Phantastische Erscheinungen eines Themas von Hector Berlioz (1917). His first breakthrough came with the opera Prinzessin Brambilla which enjoyed a successful première under Schillings in Stuttgart in 1909. The work, based on a story by Hoffmann, is a typical post-Wagnerian fairy tale opera in the manner of such contemporaries as Humperdinck, Klose and Pfitzner. A greater individuality is manifested in his second staged opera Die Vögel (1920), based on Aristophanes’ comedy. Here the romantic ardour and the sense of longing for unearthly spiritual values struck a chord in a Germany trying to recover from World War I. Enthusiastically championed by Bruno Walter in Munich, it quickly established a place in many German opera houses during the early 1920s. Further success came with his next opera Don Gil von den grünen Hosen (1924), a work distinguished for its skilfully conceived sequence of through-composed ensemble scenes coloured with elements of Spanish folklore.

By 1925 Braunfels ranked with Strauss and Schreker as one of the most popular of contemporary German opera composers. But his non-operatic compositions also gained considerable respect. Influential conductors such as Furtwängler performed the Phantastische Erscheinungen and the brilliant Don Juan: eine klassich-romantische Phantasmagorie (1923), while Abendroth gave the immensely successful premières of the Te Deum (1921) and the Grosse Messe (1926). In the latter works, Braunfels moved away from the late Romantic language of the early operas to a more austere neo-Baroque style, the massive sonorities of which almost recall those of Bruckner. This austerity became even more pronounced after Braunfels had been removed from his post in Cologne in 1933. During this period he was increasingly drawn to religious and mystical subjects, collaborating for example with the poet Paul Claudel on the opera Verkündigung, composed during the first years of the Nazi regime but first performed only in 1948. Near the end of World War II Braunfels turned to chamber music, composing three string quartets and a string quintet, works of great formal concentration which reveal the profound influence of Beethoven.

Although Braunfels was rehabilitated after 1945, his music no longer enjoyed the same level of esteem as in the 1920s. Considered old-fashioned and reactionary in the context of postwar musical developments, his work was quickly forgotten. However, a revival of interest in Braunfels took place during the 1990s with performances of Die Vögel in Bremen (1991) and Berlin (1994), and a subsequent recording of the opera released in 1996.

WORKS

stage

Fallada (Feerie, K. Wolfskehl), op.3, 1905, unperf.

Der goldne Topf (op, after E.T.A. Hoffmann), op.6, 1906, inc., unperf.

Prinzessin Brambilla (heitere Oper, 2, Braunfels, after Hoffmann), op.12, Stuttgart, 25 March 1909

Ulenspiegel (3, C. de Coster), op.23, Stuttgart, 4 Nov 1913

Die Vögel (lyrisch-phantastisches Spiel, 2, Braunfels, after Aristophanes), op.30, Munich, National, 30 Nov 1920

Don Gil von den grünen Hosen (musikalische Komödie, 3, Braunfels, after T. de Molina), op.35, Munich, National, 15 Nov 1924

Der gläserne Berg (Weihnachtsmärchen, J. Elstner-Örtel), op.39, Krefeld, 1928

Galathea (griechischen Märchen, 3, Braunfels, after S. Baltus), op.40, Cologne, 26 Jan 1930

Verkündigung (Mysterium, 4, P. Claudel), op.50, 1933–5, Cologne, 4 April 1948

Der Traum ein Leben (3, Braunfels, after F. Grillparzer), op.51, 1934–7, Frankfurt, HR, 22 March 1950

Szenen aus dem Leben der heiligen Johanna (Braunfels), op.57, 1939–41, unperf.

Der Zauberlehrling (TV ballet), op.71

Das Spiel von der Auferstehung (Alsfeld Passion Play, after H. Reinhart), op.72, 1938–54, Cologne, WDR, 1954

Incid music

vocal

Large-scale vocal: Offenbarung Johannis Kap. VI, op.17, T, double chorus, orch, 1909; 3 chinesische Gesänge (H. Bethge: Die chinesische Flöte), op.19, S/T, orch, 1914; Auf ein Soldatengrab (H. Hesse), op.26, Bar, orch, 1922; 2 Gesänge (F. Hölderlin), op.27, Bar, orch, 1922; Die Ammenuhr, op.28, boys’ chorus, orch, 1919; TeD, op.32, S, T, chorus, orch, org, 1921; Grosse Messe, op.37, S, A, T, B, boys’ chorus, chorus, org, 1926; Introitus and Graduale, op.37b, S, A, T, B, boys’ chorus, org, 1926; Conc., op.38, org, boys’ chorus, 4 brass, str orch, 1928; 2 Männerchöre, op.41; Adventskantate, op.45, Bar, chor, orch, 1933; Weihnachtskantate, op.52, S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1937; Die Gott minnende Seele (M. von Magdeburg), op.53, S, chbr orch (1947); Passionskantate, op.54, Bar, chorus, orch, 1943; Osterkantate, op.56, S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1944; Romantischer Gesänge (C. von Brentano, J. Eichendorff), op.58, S, orch, 1947; Der Tod des Kleopatra, op.59, S, orch (1946); Von der Liebe süss und bittrer Frucht (Jap.), op.62, S, orch (1947); Trauer, Tanz- und Weiselieder, op.65, coloratura S, chbr choir, chbr orch, hpd, lost

Songs: 6 Gesänge (Wolfskehl, W. Wenghöfer, S. George), op.1; Lieder in Volkston, op.2; 6 Gesänge (Hölderlin, F. Hebbel, F. Hessel, J.W. von Goethe, Des Knaben Wunderhorn), op.4; Fragmente eines Federspiels (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), op.7, v, pf; Nachklänge Beethovenscher Musik (Brentano), op.13; Gesänge (Goethe), op.29; 2 Gesänge (H. Carossa), op.44

instrumental

Orch: Hexensabbath, op.8, pf, orch, 1906; Sym. Variations on an old French children’s song, op.15, 1909; Ariels Gesang, op.18, 1909 [from incid music to W. Shakespeare: The Tempest]; Serenade, E, op.20, chbr orch, 1909; Pf Conc., A, 1911; Carnaval Ov. to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla, op.22, 1912; Phantastische Erscheinungen eines Themas von Hector Berlioz, op.25, 1917; Don Juan: eine klassich-romantische Phantasmagorie, op.34, 1923; Prelude and Fugue, op.36, 1926; Suite from Der gläserne Berg, op.39b, chbr orch, 1928; Divertimento, radio orch, op.42, 1930; 2 Weihnachtsmärchen, op.43, school orch, 1931; Schottische Fantasie, op.47, va, orch, 1932–3; Orchester Suite, op.48, 1933–6; Conc., op.49, vc, orch, inc.; Konzertstück, c, op.64, pf, orch, 1946; Musik, op.68, vn, va, 2 hn, str orch, 1947; Symphonia brevis, op.69, 1948; Hebriden-Tänze, op.70, pf, orch, 1950–51

Chbr: Str Qt, a, op.60, 1944; Str Qt, F, op.61, 1944; Str Qnt, f, op.63, 1944–5; Str Qt, e, op.67, 1946–7

Kbd: Bagatelles, op.5, pf; Scherzo, op.9, 2 pf, 1905; Studies, op.10, pf; Lyrischer Kreis, 7 pieces, op.16, pf; Kleine Stücke, op.24, pf 4 hands; Vor- und Zwischenspiele, op.31, pf; 14 Preludes, op.33, pf; Toccata, op.43, org; Variations, op.46, 2 pf; Kleine Kette, 6 pieces, op.55, pf

Principal publishers: Gerig, Leuckart, Rahter, Ries & Erler, Tischer & Jagenberg, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PEM (M. Schwarz)

P. Bekker: Klang und Eros (Stuttgart, 1922)

W. Nieman: Die Musik der Gegenwart der letzten Vergangenheit bis zu den Romantikern, Klassizisten und Neudeutschen (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1922), 18–20

H.J. Moser: Geschichte der deutschen Musik, ii/2 (Stuttgart, 1924, 2/1978/R)

K.H. Wörner: Musik der Gegenwart (Mainz, 1949)

W. Reich: ‘Prinzessin Brambilla – ein musikalisches Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier’, Die Tribune, xxiii/12 (1953–4), 133–7

M. Braunfels: ‘Braunfels, Walter’, Rheinische Musiker, i, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1960)

U. Jung: Walter Braunfels (1882–1954) (Regensburg, 1980)

F.X. Ohnesorg, ed.: Der Komponist zeitlos unzeitgemäss: der Komponist Walter Braunfels 1882–1954: eine Ausstellung der Kölnmusik (Cologne, 1992)

J. Wolff: ‘“Ein luftiges Phantasiespiel”: Anmerkungen zu Walter Braunfels und seiner Oper Die Vögel’, Zwischen Aufklärung und Kulturindustrie: Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum 85. Geburtstag, ed. H.-W. Heister, K. Heister-Grech and G. Scheit (Hamburg, 1993), 185–90

ERIK LEVI

Bräunich, Johann Michael.

See Breunich, Johann Michael.

Braunschweig

(Ger.).

See Brunswick.

Braupner [Brautmer, Brautner], Jan.

See Praupner, Jan.

Braupner [Brautmer, Brautner], Václav [Venceslaus] (Josef Bartoloměj).

See Praupner, Václav.

Bräutigam, Helmut

(b Crimmitschau, 16 Feb 1914; d nr Ilmensee, 17 Jan 1942). German composer. He began music studies in 1934 at the Leipzig Hochschule für Musik. In 1938 he became instructor at the Leipzig Musikschule für Jugend und Volk and was active simultaneously as assistant director of the Saxon Folksong Archive and as associate of the youth music section of Leipzig radio. He entered military service in 1938 and was killed in action.

Bräutigam’s early association with the German youth movement in music (the ‘Jugendmusikbewegung’), as well as his unequivocal commitment to National Socialism, was decisive for his career. He assembled folk songs from central Germany and Swabia and composed in a distinctly popular vein. His music is tonal, melodious and technically undemanding, intended for amateur performers: the instrumental pieces require lightness and rhythmic precision in their execution, and the numerous choral works, which include a large proportion of songs and folksong settings, are social in nature, composed for youth groups and for comrades-in-arms. Bräutigam also wrote poetry, including a volume Den Freunden (Bad Godesberg, 1941), novellas and essays.

WORKS

(selective list)

Vocal (songs, cants., choral pieces): Kume, Geselle min, 1932; 4 kleine Weihnachtsmotetten, chorus, 1935; Kommt, ihr G'spielen, 1937; Mein Sommerliederbuch, 1937; Rundadinella, 1937; Ach, bittrer Winter, 1938; Das grosse Sauffe- und Fastnachtsquodlibet, 1–8vv, 1938; Die Patengabe, children's songs, 1938; 3 Gesänge nach altgriechischen Dichtungen, chorus, 1938; Gottes Glocke, 3 choruses, 1938; Ich spring in diesem Ringe, 1939; 7 Mädchenlieder (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), female chorus, 1939; Guten Abend euch allen, 1940; Kleine Weihnachtsfeier, 1940; Lebenslust (J.W. von Goethe), chorus, 1940; Der Krieg stösst in sein Horn (soldiers' cant., M. Barthel, O. Wöhrle), 1941; Deutsche Volkslieder aus dem jugoslawischen Batschka, 1941

Inst: Kleine Musik, str, 1935; Toccata, org, 1935; 2 kleine Weihnachtsmusiken, rec, pf, 1936; Pf Sonata, 1936; Kleine Jagdmusik, wind, 1938; Musik, fl, str orch, 1938; Orchester-Musik, 1938; Conc., fl, ob, bn, 2 hn, str orch, 1939; Festliche Musik, wind, str, 1939; Fröhliche Musik, fl, ob, 3 vn, 1939; Märsche und Tänze aus Sachsen, 1940; Tänzerische Spielmusik, 1940; Sonata, vn, pf, 1941; Tänzerische Suite, 1941

Folksong collections and arrs., soldiers’ songs

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Kallmeyer, Kistner & Siegel, Nagel, Schott, Tonger, Voggenreiter

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Wagner: ‘Dem Gedanken meines toten Freundes Helmut Bräutigam’, ZfM, Jg.102 (1942), 152 only

O. Treibmann: Helmut Bräutigam (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1966)

G. Berger: ‘Helmut Bräutigam’, Jb der deutschen Musik, i (1943), 145–50

CHARLOTTE ERWIN/ERIK LEVI

Brautigam, Ronald

(b Haarlemmermeer, 1 Oct 1954). Dutch pianist. He studied with Jan Wijn at the Sweelinck Conservatory, Amsterdam, and continued his studies at the RAM, London, and in the USA with Rudolf Serkin. He made his solo concerto début with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1979, and has played with all the major orchestras in the Netherlands, and internationally with such orchestras as the Bavarian RSO, the Oslo PO, the Orchestre National de France and the English Chamber Orchestra. Brautigam made his Japanese début in 1988, playing with the orchestras of Osaka, Sapporo and Nagoya, and has since been a regular visitor to Japan and south-east Asia. In 1992 he first played at the Salzburg Festival, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Frans Brüggen. He also appears widely in chamber music, often in partnership with the violinist Isabelle van Keulen, with whom he has recorded works ranging from Mozart to Poulenc and Shostakovich. Other notable recordings include an award-winning coupling of Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin and Schumann's Second Sonata, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto no.1 and works by Hindemith and Martin.

As a result of his collaborations with musicians such as Brüggen and Ton Koopman, Brautigam has developed a particular interest in the fortepiano. He regularly gives recitals on this instrument, has played concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and has made stylish and imaginative recordings of the complete Haydn and Mozart sonatas, and the complete piano music of Mendelssohn.

RICHARD WIGMORE

Bravničar, Matija

(b Tolmin, Slovenia, 24 Feb 1897; d Ljubljana, 25 Nov 1977). Slovenian composer. He studied in Gorizia and later with Kogoj at the Ljubljana Conservatory (1932). He was active in Ljubljana as a member of the opera orchestra (1919–45), a composition teacher at the academy of music (until 1968) and co-editor of the Slovenska glasbena revija. He was also a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Although he made use of Slovenian folk elements, his music is fundamentally expressionist, with some application of 12-note techniques. He is important above all for his orchestral pieces, which display an aptitude for symphonic construction, and for his operas.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Pohujšanje v dolini Šentflorjanski [Scandal in the Valley of St Florian], 1930; Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica [Bailiff Jernej and his Rights], 1941

Orch: Hymnus slavicus, ov., chorus, orch, 1931; Kralj Matjaž [King Matjaž], ov., 1932; Slovenian danse burlesque, 1932; Belokranjska rapsodija, 1938; Sym. Antithesis, 1940; Sym. no.1, 1947; Sym. no.2, 1951; Dance Metamorphoses, 1954; Sym. no.3, 1958; Vn Conc., 1961; Hn Conc., 1967; Fantasia rapsodica, vn, orch, 1968; Sym. Dances, 1969; Sym. ‘Simfonija Faronika’, 1973

Vn, pf: Tango mouvement, 1936; Bagatelle agitée, 1937; Danse improvisation, 1938; Berceuse interrompue, 1940; Elegia nocturna, 1940; Fantazija, 1942; Suonata in modo antico, 1949

Sonata, vn, 1966; songs, choruses, pf pieces, film scores

Principal publisher: Edicije DSS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Bergamo: ‘Glasbeno avtonomno in glasbeno funkcionalno na primeru opere Hlapec Jernej Matije Bravničarja’ [The musical autonomy and functionality of Bravničar's opera Hlapec Jernej], Opera kot socialni ali politični angažma?/Oper als soziales oder politisches Engagement?, ed. P. Kuret (Ljubljana, 1992), 36–43

ANDREJ RIJAVEC/IVAN KLEMENČIČ

Bravura

(It.: ‘skill, bravery’).

The element of brilliant display in vocal or instrumental music that tests the performer’s skill. The term was particularly common in the 18th century with the aria di bravura, also known as the aria d’agilità. John Brown (Letters on Italian Opera, 2/1791) remarked that such arias were ‘composed chiefly – indeed, too often – merely to indulge the singer in display’; and Mozart said of the aria for Constanze, ‘Ach, ich liebte’ in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ‘I have tried to express her feelings, as far as an Italian bravura aria will allow it’ (letter dated 26 September 1781).

OWEN JANDER

Bravusi, Paolo

(b 1586; d Modena, Oct 1630). Italian composer. He spent his life in Modena and was a pupil – possibly a foster-son – of Orazio Vecchi. From 1626 until his death from the plague he was one of Vecchi's successors as maestro di cappella of Modena Cathedral. He had already been assistant maestro to Gemignano Capilupi from 1606 to 1614, and in 1608 directed an ensemble of three cornetts and five trombones in the city square for the entry into the city of Isabella of Savoy. He saw through the press Vecchi's first book of masses for six and eight voices (Venice, 1607), and included a mass of his own; Vecchi's Dialoghi for seven and eight voices (Venice, 1608), another posthumous publication, also includes a work by Bravusi, as does Missae … Horatio Vecchio (Antwerp, 1612). His only other known works are four motets in another volume that he saw through the press, the posthumous large-scale Concerti ecclesiastici (Venice, 1621) of Capilupi. Bravusi's contributions are in the mixed concertato style pioneered by Giovanni Gabrieli. One 12-part piece is scored for six soloists and six instruments, with a vocal and instrumental tutti, and includes a sinfonia in the manner of Gabrieli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Roncaglia: La cappella musicale del duomo di Modena: catalogo delle musiche dell'archivio (Florence, 1957)

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE

Brawl.

See Branle.

Braxton, Anthony (Delano)

(b Chicago, 4 June 1945). American alto saxophonist, contrabass clarinettist and composer. In his teens he pursued the study of jazz and European art music, eventually reading philosophy and composition at Roosevelt University (1966–8). After army service (1963–6) he returned to Chicago, where he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and in 1967, with Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith, he formed a trio which performed and recorded in New York as the Creative Construction Company. Along with other AACM members, the trio travelled to Paris in 1969 in an attempt to find steady work, but Braxton himself was not well received. He left Paris for New York in 1970 and joined the Italian improvisation ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva, then played with Chick Corea in the cooperative free-jazz quartet Circle (1970–71). From 1972, following the delayed success of For Alto, the first album for unaccompanied saxophone ever recorded, he was invited to present numerous solo concerts. He also appeared frequently from 1971 to 1976 as the leader of his own quartets, which included the other members of Circle, Dave Holland (see illustration) and Barry Altschul, and a brass player – either Kenny Wheeler or George Lewis (ii); at times Phillip Wilson or Jerome Cooper replaced Altschul. Braxton performed and recorded with Derek Bailey and Company in London (1974–7) and with the Globe Unity Orchestra in Germany (1975).

Braxton has continued to record regularly into the new century as a soloist, composer and leader. He was based in New Haven, Connecticut, for two years from 1983 before securing a position as a professor of music at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1985; in this last year he formed a long-standing quartet consisting of the pianist Marilyn Crispell, the double bass player Mark Dresser, and the drummer Gerry Hemingway (d 1994). He also toured Europe with the double bass player Adelhard Roidinger and the drummer Tony Oxley in 1989, and from 1990 he taught at Wesleyan University. A prestigious MacArthur Foundation award in 1994 enabled Braxton to start a corporation, the Tri-Centric Foundation, which organized ensembles to perform his musical, multimedia and interdisciplinary works in New York, beginning with a series of concerts in 1995, and in October 1996, the première of Shala Fears for the Poor, the third in his projected series of 12 three-act operas sharing 12 central characters. In 1996 he began giving concerts of Ghost Trance Music, lengthy performances involving an intricate dialectic between notated and improvised materials. In 1997, with Velibor Pedevsky, he established the record company and label Braxton House, to issue examples of Ghost Trance Music and other projects. In addition to these principal activities, he also played in a duo with an African percussionist, led a sextet devoted to interpretations of Charlie Parker's legacy, wrote a two-act musical in which he joined the ensemble as a pianist rather than a wind player, and edited an edition of his piano music, among other projects.

A virtuoso on all members of the saxophone and clarinet family, Braxton is a leading figure in the merger of free jazz and contemporary art music, but he is equally comfortable in these separate fields, whether improvising in free-jazz contexts and interpreting jazz standards, or writing compositions which may draw from aleatory, atonal, or electronic music, or musique concrete. Braxton's diversity emerges in many other ways, not the least that he may be extremely funny, or deadly serious; the former quality manifests itself in delightfully unexpected sounds, and in this sometimes whimsical and cartoonish approach to musical notation, and the latter in many pieces of music, and in his notoriously impenetrable publications, Tri-Axium Writings (on the philosophical underpinnings of his music; n.p., 1985) and Composition Notes (on the material and structure of 330 of his compositions; n.p., 1988).

WORKS

(selective list)

many compositions untitled or with graphic titles

Dramatic: Composition no.102, orch, puppet theatre, 1982; Trillium Dialogues A: … After a Period of Change Zaccko Returns to his Place of Birth …, op, 6 solo vv, 6 insts., dancers, vv, orch, 1985; Trillium dialogues M: Joreo's vision of Forward Motion, op, 6 solo vv, dancers, vv, pf, orch, 1986; Trillium dialogues R: Shala Fears for the poor, op, solo vv, solo inst, dancer, vv, orch, 1991

Orch: Composition no.7, 1969; Composition no.24, 1971; Composition no.27, 1972; Composition no.82, 4 orch, 1978; Composition no.83, 1977; Composition no.96, orch, 4 slide projectors, 1978; Composition no.137, 1989

Chbr: Composition no.2, 4 insts, 1968; Composition no.17, str qt, 1971; Composition no.37, 4 sax, 1974; Composition no.64, 2 ww insts, 1976; Composition no.129, 5 ww insts, 1986; Composition no.147, 3 cl, chbr ens, 1989; Composition no.148, cl, pf, cb, perc, 1989; Composition no.160, cl, pf, cb, perc, 1991; Composition no.161, b-cl, pf, cb, mar/vib, 1991

Solo pf: Piano Piece no.1, 1968; Composition no.5, 1968; Composition no.10, 1969; Composition no.30, 1973; Composition no.31, 1973; Composition no.33, 1974; Composition no.139, 1988

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson2

KdG (P.N. Wilson)

J. Litweiler: The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958 (New York, 1984), 271–8

G. Lock: Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music (London and New York, 1988) [incl. work-list, discography and bibliography]

R.M. Radano: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago, 1993) [incl. discography, pp.285–95]

BARRY KERNFELD/R

Bray, John

(b England, 19 June 1782; d Leeds, 19 June 1822). English actor, composer and arranger. He was active in Philadelphia, New York and Boston from 1805 to 1822. He went to Philadelphia in 1805 as a member of Warren and Reinagle’s theatre company, and also acted in Charleston, New York, Richmond and Baltimore. In 1815 he moved to Boston, where he remained active until the onset of his final illness, when he went back to Leeds.

Most of Bray’s compositions are songs for the stage, patriotic songs and sacred works. His most important work is the ‘Operatic Melo Drame’ The Indian Princess, based on the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas; this was issued in 1808 in a vocal score which, besides songs and choruses, included the overture and instrumental background pieces for the scenes in melodrama – an unusually complete publication for the period. Bray’s musical style is less polished than that of his American contemporaries Reinagle, Graupner and Taylor; although his melodies are graceful and full of rhythmic variety, his piano textures often lack clarity.

WORKS

(selective list)

published in Philadelphia unless otherwise stated; estimated dates given for works published without date

Stage: The Indian Princess, or La belle sauvage (opera-melodrama, 3, J.N. Barker), Philadelphia, 6 April 1808, vs (1808); 5 melodramas, 7 ops and pantomimes, lost, listed in Parker

Songs, 1v, pf, unless otherwise stated: Soft as yon silver ray that sleeps (?1807); The Rose (?1807); Il ammonitore dell’amore, or Love’s Remembrance, 6 songs (1807); Henry and Anna (?1807); Aurelia Betray’d! (?1809); Looney M’Gra (?1809); The Heath this Night (c1812); Hull’s Victory (?1812/R); Our Rights on the Ocean, or Hull, Jones, Decatur & Bainbridge (?1813); The Cypress Wreath (?1813); Columbia, Land of Liberty! (?1815); The Columbian Sailor (?1816); Where can peace of mind be found, 2vv, pf (Boston, 1821)

Sacred: God is There!, 1v, pf (Boston, ?1818); Peace and Holy Love, 1v, pf (Boston, 1820); Child of Mortality, 2 solo vv, 4vv (Portsmouth, c1824)

Inst: General Harrison’s Grand March, pf (?1812); Madison’s March, pf, fl/vn, in Musical Olio, no.3 (1814), 25

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.R. Parker: ‘Mr. Bray’, The Euterpeiad, i/3 (1820), 11 only [incl. list of stage works]

H.W. Hitchcock: ‘An Early American Melodrama: The Indian Princess of J.N. Barker and John Bray’, Notes, xii (1954–5), 375–88

R. Wolfe: Secular Music in America, 1801–1825: a Bibliography (New York, 1964)

H.S. Hitchcock, ed.: The Indian Princess (New York, 1972)

V.F. Yellin: disc notes, Two Early American Musical Plays, New World 232 (1978)

A.D. Shapiro: ‘Action Music’, American Music, ii/4 (1984), 49–71

ANNE DHU SHAPIRO

Braye Manuscript.

See Sources of instrumental ensemble music to 1630, §7.

Brayssing, Grégoire [Gregor]

(b Augsburg; fl 1547–60). German instrumentalist and composer, active in France. He left Germany after the defeat of the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony by Charles V at Mühlberg in 1547. A note in the Paris archives dated 1553 describes him as a lutenist, and other documents of 1556 and 1560 (in F-Pn) attest his friendship with Estienne Du Tertre and Loys Bourgeois. Adrian Le Roy's Quart livre de tablature de guitarre (Paris, 1553) contains six fantasias (3 ed. D. Kennard, London, 1956; facs. Monte Carlo, 1979) ‘composed by M. Gregoire Brayssing deaugusta’, as well as intabulations of five psalms and seven chansons by Janequin, Sandrin, Maillard and others with a frottola by Sebastiano Festa. The final piece, entitled La guerre, faitte à plaisir, includes a marginal note in German referring to the Battle of Mühlberg.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrownI

F. Lesure: ‘La guitare en France au XVIe siècle’, MD, iv (1950), 187–95

FRANK DOBBINS

Brazhnikov, Maksim Viktorovich

(b St Petersburg, 19 March/1 April 1902; d Kiev, 23 Oct 1973). Russian musicologist. The founder of medieval music studies in modern Russia, he studied the piano at the Leningrad Conservatory with L.V. Nikolayev, graduating in 1925, and completed a second degree in theory and composition (with V.P. Kalafati) and early Russian musical notation (with A.V. Preobrazhensky) in 1927. Until 1935 he taught at the conservatory and the Institute of the History of the Arts, Leningrad, and worked as a draughtsman and technician at a Leningrad pipe-casting factory, giving concerts to workers; he was then appointed research assistant at the department of musical instruments of the Hermitage. In 1940 he requested permission from Stalin to conduct research in his area of specialization, early Russian chant, and was appointed research assistant at the Leningrad State Research Institute of Theatre and Music. Forced to evacuate to Kirov in 1941, he defended his Kandidat dissertation on polyphony in sign notation scores at the Moscow Conservatory in 1943. In 1945 he returned to Leningrad, where he continued to work at the Institute of Theatre and Music until he was dismissed in 1953 for investigating early Russian sacred chant. He then worked in the manuscript department of the Leningrad Academy of Religion until 1960; and taught at the Moscow Institute for the History of the Arts during the 1960s. In 1968 he defended his doctoral thesis on early Russian musical theory and he was appointed professor in 1970 at the Leningrad Conservatory, where, renewing a tradition that had been suspended for 40 years, he lectured on the palaeography of early Russian sacred chant and church singing, preparing students for further studies in the field.

Brazhnikov is known principally for his pioneering work in the history and theory of early Russian sacred chant, and his descriptions of Russian manuscripts from the 12th to the 19th centuries, his deciphering of their notation, and his publication of monuments of Early Russian chant are remarkable academic achievements. He also composed concertos for piano and orchestra and for violin and orchestra using themes from early Russian znamennïy chant, wrote poems and diaries (which are extant), and painted.

The Brazhnikov Archive, which houses most of his papers, is in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg; the Brazhnikov Collection, which contains the chant manuscripts he collected, is held at the Institute of Russian Literature, St Petersburg. The bulk of his work, including his Kandidat dissertation, his Blagoveshchenskiy kondakar' (‘The kondakar' of the Annunciation’), Slovar' drevnerusskikh muzïkal 'nïkh terminov (‘Glossary of Early Russian Musical Terms’) and descriptions of a large number of manuscripts of early Russian sacred chant, remains unpublished.

WRITINGS

Mnogogolosiye znamennïk partitur [Polyphony in sign notation scores] (diss., Moscow Conservatory, 1943)

Puti razvitiya i zadachi rasshifrovki znamennogo raspeva XII–XVIII vekov: primeneniye nekotorïkh staticheskikh metodov k izucheniyu muzïkal'nïkh yavleniy [Directions of progress and problems in the deciphering of the notation of znamennïy chant of the 12th–18th centuries: an application of some statistical methods in the study of musical phenomena] (Leningrad, 1949)

‘Pevcheskiye rukopisi sobraniy D.V. Razumovskiy i V.F. Odoyevskiry’ [Chant manuscripts in the Razumovsky and Odoyevsky Collections], Sobraniya D.V. Razumovskogo i V.F. Odoyevskogo: arkhiv D.V. Razumovskogo: opisaniya, ed. I.M. Kudryavtsev (Moscow, 1960), 6–22

‘Rasshifrovki obraztsov znamennogo mnogogolosiya iz notnogo prilozheniya k rabote M. Brazhnikova “Mnogogolosiye znamennïkh partitur”’ [Decipherings of patterns of znamennïy polyphony from the music examples in the appendix to Brazhnikov's work ‘Polyphony in znamennïy Scores’], Drevnerusskoye pevcheskoye iskusstvo, ed. N. Uspensky (Moscow, 1965)

Novïye pamyatniki znamennogo raspeva [New monuments of znamennïy chant] (Leningrad, 1967)

‘“Azbuka” Aleksandra Mezentsa’ [The ‘alphabet’ of Mezenets], SovM (1968), no.6, pp.101–4

‘Rasshifrovki obraztsov bol'shogo raspeva i znamennogo mnogogolosiya’ [Decipherings of patterns of bolshoy (‘great’) chant and znamennïy polyphony], Obraztsï drevnerusskogo pevcheskogo iskusstva, ed. N. Uspensky (Leningrad, 1968)

‘Drevnerusskiye uchebniki muzïki’ [Early Russian musical textbooks], SovM (1970), no.11, pp.87–92

‘Raskopki v muzïke’ [Excavations in music], Nauka i zhizn' (1970), no.9, pp.15–159

‘Rasshifrovki dvukh- i tryokhgolosnogo strochnogo peniya’ [Decipherings of two- and three-part neumatic chant] Drevnerusskoye pevcheskoye iskusstvo, ed. N. Uspensky (Moscow, 2/1971), 233–63

Teoriya drevnerusskoy muzïki (po rukopisnïm materialam XV–XVIII vekov) [Early Russian musical theory (on the basis of manuscript materials of the 15th–18th centuries)] (Leningrad, 1972)

‘Kratkiye metodicheskiye ukazaniya i skhemï po opisaniyu drevnerusskikh pevcheskikh rukopisey’ [Short methodological indications and outlines for the description of Early Russian chant manuscripts], Metodicheskoye posobiye po opisaniyu slavyansko-russkikh rukopisey dlya Svodnogo kataloga rukopisey, khranyavshikhsya v SSSR, ed. L.P. Zhukovskaya and others, i (Moscow, 1973), 132–63

ed.: Fyodor Krest'yanin: stikhirï [Fyodor Krest'yanin: canticles] (Moscow, 1974) [incl. Eng. summary]

Pamyatniki znamennogo raspeva, ii (Leningrad, 1974)

‘Russkaya pevcheskaya paleografiya i yeyo aktual'nïye zadachi’ [The palaeography of Russian religious chant and its present tasks], SovM (1975), no.4, pp.114–19

Stat'i o drevnerusskoy muzïke [Articles on early Russian music] (Leningrad, 1975)

‘Mnogogolosiye znamennïkh partitur (chastichnaya publikatsiya)’ [Polyphony in znamennïy scores (partial publication)], Problemï istorii i teorii drevnerusskoy muzïki, ed. A.S. Belonenko (Leningrad, 1979), 5–61

ed. and trans., with G. Nikishchov: Khristofor: klyuch znamennoy [Khristofor: the znamennïy clef] (Moscow, 1983)

ed. N. Seryogina and A.N. Kryukov: Litsa i fitï znamennogo raspeva [Figures and fitï of znamennïy chant] (Leningrad, 1984)

‘Muzïkal'nïye rasshifrovki’ [Musical decipherings], Pamyatniki russkoy dukhovnoy muzïki: tïsyacha let russkoy tserkovnoy muzïki, ed. V. Morozan (Washington DC, 1991)

Bol'shoy znamennïy rospev: yevangel'skiye stikhirï [Great znamennïy chant: hymns on the Gospels] (Moscow, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edition

N. Andreyevich, ed.: Rimsky-Korsakov: Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, xlvi/1: Duėtï i trio (Moscow, 1949), xxiv, lxiv: Kantatï (Moscow, 1952–3)

Studies

N.S. Seryogina: ‘M.V. Brazhnikov’, Muzïka i zhizn', iii (1975), 3–5

A.S. Belonenko: ‘Spisok nauchnïkh rabot M.V. Brazhnikova’ [List of scholarly writings by Brazhnikov], ‘M.V. Brazhnikov: issledovatel' drevnerusskoy professional'noy muzïki’ [Brazknikov: investigator of early Russian professional music], Problemï istorii i teorii drevnerusskoy muzïki, ed. A.S. Belonenko (Leningrad, 1979), 62–72, 73–98

D.S. Likhachyov: ‘Slovo ob avtore’ [A word about the author] in M. Brazhnikov: Litsa i fitï znamennogo raspeva, ed. N. Seryogina and A.N. Kryukov (Leningrad, 1984), 3 only

N.S. Seryogina: ‘M.V. Brazhnikov: instrumentoved’ [Brazhnikov: instrumental historian], Voprosï instrumentovedeniya, ed. I.V. Matsiyevsky (St Petersburg, 1993), 21–2

N.S. Seryogina: ‘Prazdnik obreteniya’ [Holiday of discovery], MAk (1995), no. 4–5, p.116 only [on Brazhnikov's piano concerto]

N.S. Seryogina: ‘Kolumb drevnerusskoy muzïki: 95-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya Maksima Viktorovichayo: Brazhnikova: uchnogo, kompozitora (1902–1973)’ [The Columbus of early Russian music: on the 95th anniversary of the birth of Maksim Viktorovich Brazhnikov: scholar and composer (1902–1973)], Zhurnal lyubiteley iskusstva (1997), nos.8–9, pp.24–6

NATAL'YA SEMYONOVNA SERYOGINA

Brazil

(Port. República Federativa do Brasil).

Country in South America. It is bordered by all other South American countries except Chile and Ecuador, and by the Atlantic Ocean to the east. It was colonized by Portugal after 1500, but the culture of the indigenous peoples survived. São Paulo, the largest centre of production in Latin America, is its financial capital, and Rio de Janeiro its cultural capital. The official language is Portuguese.

3. Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions.

III. Popular music

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Brazil

I. Art music

1. Colonial period (to 1822).

Relatively little is known about art music activities and composition during the first two centuries of Brazilian history. The substantial documentation attesting to important musical activities in Pernambuco (Olinda, Recife) and Salvador, Bahia, was not compiled and studied until the mid-20th century. Throughout the colonial period most music-making related directly to church services, and surviving colonial music is therefore mainly sacred. The regular clergy was responsible for first organizing Christian religious life in Brazil. The Franciscans started using music in the conversion of the Amerindians, but it was the Jesuits who had the strongest influence on the musical life of the colony, and as early as 1550 the Jesuit Nóbrega had initiated musical instruction at Bahia. Instrument making did not flourish, however, until the 18th century. Organs and other instruments were built in Pernambuco and Minas Gerais.

The first extant colonial composition, a recitative and aria in the vernacular for soprano, first and second violins and continuo, was written at Bahia in 1759, but the attribution of the authorship to Caetano de Mello Jesus, mestre de capela at Bahia Cathedral, appears unfounded. Another early work is a Te Deum (c1760) for mixed chorus and continuo by Luiz Álvares Pinto, a mulatto composer who was mestre de capela at S Pedro dos Clérigos, Recife, and founder in that city of the important Irmandade de S Cecília dos Músicos, a musicians’ guild. In addition, he wrote a theoretical treatise, Arte de solfejar, whose manuscript is in the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon.

An exceptional musical life developed during the latter part of the 18th century in Minas Gerais province, in response to the socio-economic boom there. According to the musicologist F.C. Lange, who first uncovered the primary sources of that repertory, there were about 1000 musicians active in Minas Gerais between about 1760 and 1800, particularly in the cities of Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto), Sabará, Mariana, Arraial do Tejuco (now Diamantina) and São João del Rei. Most of them were mulatto and associated with various local brotherhoods (irmandades), musical guilds that were relatively independent of the clergy. Composers whose works are known include Lobo de Mesquita, Coelho Neto, Gomes da Rocha and Parreiras Neves. They all cultivated a prevailingly homophonic style in sacred works for mixed chorus with orchestral accompaniment including violins, viola, horns, occasionally oboes and flutes and continuo. Most of the compositions that have been discovered are liturgical (masses, motets, antiphons, novenas etc.). The only work with a vernacular text is Parreiras Neves’s Oratoria ao Menino Deos para a Noite de Natal (1789), discovered in Mariana in 1967; only its soprano and instrumental bass parts have survived. It is remarkable that this tradition of colonial church music has survived continuously in the city of São João del Rei, with the Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos and the Lira Sanjoanese, thanks to the efforts in the late 20th century of musicologist-conductor José Maria Neves and others. These organizations involve local amateur musicians as vocalists and instrumentalists.

The Bahian Damião Barbosa de Araújo (1778–1856) was an active composer of sacred music and left about 23 works. Of the various mestres de capela at São Paulo Cathedral, André da Silva Gomes was particularly notable, not only as a prolific composer of sacred music but also as an influential teacher. In the interior of the state of São Paulo, the town of Mogi das Cruzes was also a centre of sacred music; the manuscripts of 11 compositions, almost certainly dating from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, were discovered in 1984.

In the early 18th century the musical comedies of Antonio José da Silva (1705–39), nicknamed ‘O Judeu’, enjoyed great success in the colony as well as in Lisbon. Musical life at Rio de Janeiro was greatly stimulated by the transfer to that city of the Portuguese royal court in 1808. In the same year King João VI created the royal chapel to which he appointed as musical director and mestre de capela the mulatto composer Nunes García, who is rightly considered one of Brazil’s finest musicians. 237 of his works are extant, among them a multitude of masses, motets, and pieces for Holy Week and other feast days. His earlier sacred pieces have a devotional character while his later ones, like those of contemporary Europe, show the influence of opera in both choral sections and arias. His Requiem (1816), written on the death of Queen Maria I, and Missa de Santa Cecília (1826) are generally considered his masterpieces.

Professional European composers began to migrate to Brazil during João VI’s residency in Rio de Janeiro. Most notably, the Portuguese opera composer Marcos Portugal settled there in 1811, adding great prestige to the musical life of the city. The Austrian Sigismund Neukomm was employed by the court from 1816 to 1821 to teach the young Prince Pedro; he wrote the Missa para o dia da Aclamação de João VI and earliest known Brazilian piano piece (1819), using a tune from a Brazilian popular song.

2. After independence.

The 19th-century musical scene was dominated by opera and salon music. After independence the former Royal Theatre became the Imperial Theatre. The reign of Pedro II was characterized by the cultivation and official protection of Italian opera; Bellini’s Norma in particular was often performed. In the government-subsidized theatres in Rio (e.g. S Pedro de Alcântara, and later Provisório) the principal operas of Rossini, Verdi and their contemporaries were produced. Manuel da Silva, remembered today as the composer of the Brazilian national anthem, attempted to stimulate the use of the vernacular in the operatic repertory. In 1847, under the auspices of the emperor, an institution was created with that aim, the Imperial Academy of Music and National Opera. After that date the first native operas were presented; their composers included Álvares Lôbo, Alves de Mesquita and, above all, Carlos Gomes who had the most brilliant career of any composer of the southern hemisphere in the 19th century. He studied at Milan Conservatory, and with the première of Il Guarany at La Scala in 1870 reached the climax of his career.

Regular concert life developed particularly in Rio de Janeiro, but only during the last three decades of the 19th century. Concert societies and clubs were founded which promoted the appearance in Brazil of some of the most celebrated performers of the time (Thalberg, Napoleão, Gottschalk). Concurrently several composers, such as Miguéz and Oswald, cultivated the prevailing European styles, particularly those of Wagner and the early Impressionists. Francisco Braga, an influential teacher of composition, fostered a local adaptation of Wagnerian Romanticism.

The first ‘nationalist’ composition was published in 1869 by Itiberê da Cunha, an amateur musician and an accomplished pianist. His piano piece A Sertaneja attempts to recreate in various ways the atmosphere of urban popular music, and quotes a characteristic popular tune. Alexandre Levy wrote his most typically national compositions in 1890, among them the Tango brasileiro for piano, and the Suite brésilienne for orchestra, the first of many such pieces produced by later nationalist composers. The last movement, ‘Samba’, can be considered the first decisive step towards musical nationalism; it draws on urban popular dance rhythms, such as those of the maxixe and the Brazilian tango, rather than on the characteristics of the folk samba.

By the beginning of the 20th century art music in Brazil began to display definite individuality. The composer Alberto Nepomuceno played a primary role in the creation of genuine national music: many of his compositions present folk or popular material or simply draw directly on popular music. The last movement (‘Batuque’) of his Série brasileira (1892) for orchestra is symptomatic of the discovery of the rhythmic basis of popular music, and anticipates similar accomplishments in 20th-century compositions.

After about 1920 the most important figure of Brazilian art music was Villa-Lobos. He wrote about 1000 works (including arrangements) in a wide variety of genres and media. The Week of Modern Art in São Paulo, in 1922, led by Mario de Andrade and others, was a great stimulus to Villa-Lobos’s exploration of musical nationalism. Among his most important works of the 1920s the nonet Impressão rápida de todo o Brasil, the series of Choros, inspired by urban popular music of the early years of the century, and piano works, such as Rudepoema, Prole do bebê nos.2 and 3 and Cirandas, reveal the various facets of his creativity. His final productive period (1930–57) includes the nine Bachianas brasileiras, 13 string quartets out of a total of 17, seven symphonies out of a total of 12, numerous solo songs etc. The Bachianas were intended as homage to J.S. Bach, and were written as dance suites beginning generally with a prelude and ending with a fugal or toccata-like movement. Actual Baroque compositional techniques are seldom used; the use of the fugue as a formal principle is a neo-Baroque device, resulting in clear horizontal movement and systematic imitation. Other neo-classical devices – ostinato figures and long pedal notes – are also used.

Of Villa-Lobos’s contemporaries Oscar Lorenzo Fernândez, Luciano Gallet and Francisco Mignone were typical of the orientation towards native styles. Mignone, a pianist, flautist and conductor, cultivated a national style relying heavily on urban popular and folk idioms, as in his four Fantasias brasileiras for piano and orchestra and in the series of piano pieces Lendas sertanejas, Valsas de Esquina and Valsas-choros.

The most important composers of the next generation included Camargo Guarnieri, Luiz Cosme, Radamés Gnatalli and José Siqueira. Guarnieri, a prolific composer, achieved an international reputation. Cosme’s works include the ballet Salamanca do Jaráu (1933), and Novena à Senhora da Graça (1950), written in a free 12-note technique. Gnatalli cultivated both popular and art music, with an inclination in his later works towards neo-classical idioms.

The younger composers first active in the 1940s (e.g. Claudio Santoro and César Guerra Peixe) alternated between musical nationalism and prevalent European techniques, particularly Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic theories, first introduced in Brazil by the German composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter. Edino Krieger, after incursions into strict atonality, found some interesting compromises within a modern neo-classical style (e.g. in his First String Quartet, 1956). Serial and experimental techniques have been used by younger composers who became known during the 1960s, when São Paulo became the centre of the Brazilian avant garde; the Música Nova group there included Gilberto Mendes, Damiano Cozzella, Willy Corrêa de Oliveira and Rogério Duprat. The subsequent focus of new music, the Bahia Group of composers, founded in 1966, included Ernst Widmer, Jamary Oliveira, Lindembergue Cardoso, Fernando Cerqueira, Walter Smetak and Milton Gomes, all wholly committed to the contemporary artistic world. Under the leadership of Widmer, the Bahia Group remained quite distinctive in the eclecticism of its members, who stressed individuality rather than fashionable trends. In spite of the limited means of the Brazilian musical scene, by the 1970s most composers advocated the use of new musical resources and techniques, thus breaking completely with the predominant trend of musical nationalism. For example, Mendes’s Nascemorre is a setting for voices (using microtones), percussion and tape of a text by the concrete poet Haroldo de Campos. The major figures who emerged in the 1970s and 80s included Marlos Nobre, Jorge Antunes, Almeida Prado, Aylton Escobar, Ricardo Tacuchian, Jocy de Oliveira, Raul do Valle, Ronaldo Miranda and Vasconcellos Corrêa. During the period 1975–97, the Bienal de Música Brasileira Contemporânea, organized in Rio mainly by Edino Krieger, represented a much-needed encouragement for Brazilian composers, while the Sociedade Brasileira de Música Contemporânea, especially during the tenure of the pianist Belkiss Carneiro de Mendonça, was influential in creating a sense of community. By the 1980s studios for electro-acoustic composition had been established in major universities in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Brasília and Bahia. In the 1990s the most promising Brazilian composers included Paulo Costa Lima, Agnaldo Ribeiro, Luis Carlos Csekö, Marisa Rezende, Tim Rescala, Flo Menezes, Cirlei de Hollanda, Rodolfo Coelho de Souza, José Augusto Mannis, Vânia Dantas Leite, Rodrigo Cicchelli Velloso and Roberto Victorio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. de Melo: A música no Brasil desde os tempos coloniais até o primeiro decênio da República (Bahlia, 1908, 2/1947)

R. Almeida: História da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1926, enlarged 1942)

V. Cernicchiaro: Storia della música nel Brasile, dai tempi coloniale sino ai nostri giorni (1549–1925) (Milan, 1926)

M. de Andrade: Ensaio sôbre a música brasileira (São Paulo, 1928)

M. de Andrade: Pequena história da música (São Paulo, 1929, 8/1977)

M. de Andrade: Música, doce música (São Paulo, 1934)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: Relação das óperas de autores brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1938)

M. de Andrade: Música do Brasil (Curitiba, 1941)

N. Slonimsky: Music of Latin America (New York, 1945, 3/1949/R1972 with new foreword and addenda)

R. Almeida: Compêndio de história da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1948, 2/1958)

V. Mariz: Dicionário bio-bibliográfico musical (brasileiro e internacional) (Rio de Janeiro, 1948, enlarged 2/1985 as Dicionário biográfico musical: compositores, intérpretes e musicólogos, 3/1991)

V. Mariz: Figuras da música brasileira contemporânea (Oporto, 1948, enlarged 2/1970)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: Música e músicos do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1950)

M. de Sampayo Ribeiro: A música no Brasil (Lisbon, 1950)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo, C. Person de Matos and M. de Moura Reis: Bibliografia musical brasileira (1820–1950) (Rio de Janeiro, 1952)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: 150 anos de música no Brasil (1800–1950) (Rio de Janeiro, 1956)

F.C. Lange: A organização musical durante o período colonial brasileiro (Coimbra, 1966)

R. Stevenson: ‘Some Portuguese Sources for Early Brazilian Music History’, YIAMR, iv (1968), 1–43

G. Béhague: The Beginnings of Musical Nationalism in Brazil (Detroit, 1971)

B. Kiefer: História da música no Brasil (Porto Alegre, 1976)

M. Marcondes, ed.: Enciclopédia da música brasileira, erudita: folclórica, popular (São Paulo, 1977, 2/1998)

G. Béhague: Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979)

V. Mariz: História da música no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1981, 4/1994)

J.M. Neves: Música brasileira contemporânea (São Paulo, 1981)

Brazil

II. Traditional music

1. Introduction.

2. Amerindian music.

4. Afro-Brazilian folk music traditions.

(ii) Cultural and musical areas.

1. Introduction.

(i) History.

(iii) General musical characteristics.

(iv) Organology.

(i) History.

The folk and traditional music of Brazil has been studied from various angles since the beginning of the 20th century; however, although the collecting of substantial folk and popular music repertories has improved during the last four decades of the 20th century, it remains limited. The samples collected are relatively recent and have not undergone adequate analytical examination. Historical studies of folk or popular musical genres do not, for the most part, rely on sound documentary evidence. With few exceptions, historical archives in both Brazil and Portugal have not been sufficiently scrutinized to enable us to reconstruct the history of folk music in Brazil. Such archival documents include, most importantly, travellers' chronicles describing songs and dances, and valuable ethnographic data. Several Brazilian writers have pointed out the almost total absence of notated examples in Brazil or Portugal of folk and popular music during the colonial period (16th century to early 19th). Our knowledge of this music is therefore necessarily limited to certain song and dance genres and the various socio-cultural contexts in which they function. Collected examples of such genres date only from the late 19th century. Substantial field collections of folk music were first made in the 1930s. The study of continuity and change in Brazilian folk and popular traditions can therefore be contemplated only for a fairly recent past in well-determined areas.

As with most Latin American countries, it is difficult to make a clear distinction between Brazilian popular music and folk music. Until the 1930s, with a few exceptions, clear distinctions between rural and urban areas could hardly be made in Brazil, since the culture of most cities and towns was strongly rural-orientated. The continuous growth of urban centres since the 1940s, however, makes the distinction easier as a large urban market for popular musical genres has developed. Concurrently the migratory movement from the rural areas has activated a substantial amount of folk music-making and consumption in the cities. Mass media and the greater mobility of the rural population have had inevitable consequences on certain repertories and folk music genres, especially choreographic genres used in a social secular context. Such important changes have, however, hitherto received minimal attention.

Brazilian folk music reflects its varied cultural origins. Since the country was colonized by the Portuguese, Luso-Hispanic folk music constitutes the basis of Brazilian folk music. Portuguese material has, in most cases, undergone essential modifications throughout Brazilian history but certain stylistic characteristics, such as Iberian folk polyphony, have been retained. Portuguese melodies, especially in children's songs, can still be found. Melodies built on the older European modes, ‘gapped’ scales and altered modes can easily be related to Portugal. The harmonic system prevailing in most folk and popular genres is likewise a European heritage. The rich variety of Luso-Hispanic instruments, particularly string instruments, has also penetrated the country.

The slave trade with Africa lasted for almost four centuries. While at first most of the Africans originated from Angola and the Congo area, Yoruba and Fon-Dahomeans predominated during approximately the last 150 years of the slave trade. Yet most Afro-Brazilian songs and dances show a clear Bantu origin, with the exception of certain cycles of songs functioning in some Afro-Brazilian religions. Specific scales frequent in Brazilian folk music have been attributed to an African origin: pentatonic scales, major diatonic with a flattened seventh and major hexatonic without the seventh degree. African rhythmic traits, such as the hemiola rhythm, form the basis of many rhythmic intricacies of Brazilian folk music. While not as sophisticated as its African counterpart, drum music among Afro-Brazilians exhibits similar complexity. Specific instruments have been inherited from the Africans, as well as certain performance features, such as responsorial singing and vocal style.

The third major ethnic group that contributed to the early formation of Brazilian folk music is the Amerindian group. Tropical Indian cultures in Brazil are by no means homogeneous, and knowledge of tribal music is restricted to a few scattered enclaves. Vestiges of this music in the main folk traditions of Brazil can at best be revealed through the retention of certain types of instruments, mainly rattles of the maraca type, certain choreographic genres and performance characteristics.

It is clear, however, that the most substantial contribution to the origin and development of Brazilian music comes from Portugal. The predominance of white people and their influence on Amerindians and Afro-Brazilians and the reverse acculturative process have created an essentially mestizo culture, the components of which are the result of that amalgamation. Thus genuine Brazilian folk musical traditions are mestizo traditions.

(ii) Cultural and musical areas.

Although Brazilian folk music cannot be considered homogeneous because of its varying socio-cultural patterns, there is a large enough corpus of music in the various geographical areas for the general characteristics to be described. There have been several attempts to define cultural areas in Brazil, but the criteria of classification have neglected musical traits. Maynard de Araújo (1964), for example, has proposed the following division: Amazon area, cattle herding area, mining area, agricultural area, fishing area, with subdivisions, all according to techniques of subsistence. Joaquim Ribeiro was the first to propose, in 1944, a set of four musical areas, based on musical genres: embolada (north-east); moda (south); jongo (several zones of Bantu influence); aboios (cattle herding zone of the hinterland or sertão). Azevedo (Grove's Dictionary, 1954) based his own more comprehensive classification on the distribution of musical genres and instruments. He distinguished nine musical areas and one song cycle: Amazon area; cantoria area (north-east); côco area (north-eastern coastal area); area of the autos (throughout the country, with specific nuclei in Sergipe and Alagoas); samba area (from the states of Bahia to São Paulo); moda-de-viola area (from Goiás, Mato Grosso to northern Paraná); fandango area (southern coastal area); gaúcho area (cattle zone of Rio Grande do Sul); modinha area (including mostly the oldest urban areas); and the cycle of children's songs found in all areas (fig.1). This classification is useful as a main working tool, but omits Brazilian indigenous music as a result of the extremely limited attention that this has received. In addition, it has had to disregard the numerous overlappings of distribution of folk genres.

(iii) General musical characteristics.

Cultural syncretism of various kinds (Amerindian with Portuguese, Amerindian with Spanish, Amerindian with African, Portuguese with African, Spanish with African, and the fusion of syncretism among all of these with native black Brazilian) has created a substantial diversity of folksongs and dances. Within that diversity, certain stylistic elements unify the various repertories.

Melodic organization tends to follow patterns associated with Europe, such as arched melodies, conjunct motion and melodic gravity. Antecedent and consequent strains occur frequently in Brazilian folksongs. Short and symmetrical phrasing is also generally observed. Melodic tension created by intervallic leaps tends to occur at the beginning of a song, followed by a typically conjunct descending motion, or a static phrase made up of repeated notes. This markedly descending tendency has been attributed to western European and West African influences in Brazilian music. But a similar characteristic has been shown to exist also in the music of the Nambicuara Indians of Mato Grosso, among other Amerindian groups. Very frequently the descending motion follows an undulating design. Melodic sequence abounds. Songs more closely associated with Iberian folk traditions exhibit a predominantly triple metre (3/4) or compound metres (6/8, 9/8). Duple metre prevails in genres of a clearer Afro-Brazilian folk origin, though quite often there is a duple-triple composite in actual performance, creating the hemiola rhythmic effect.

A large proportion of cadences end on the dominant or the mediant and masculine endings predominate, as the result of Portuguese prosody. In addition, there is a great deal of recitative-like singing, with little or no metric structure, and with some ornamentation. Plainsong has been considered an important influence on Brazilian folk melodic characteristics. From the 16th century onwards missionary work carried the well-established Iberian tradition of singing Gregorian melodies. Furthermore some aspects of Portuguese folk music implanted in Brazil already had Gregorian chant characteristics in melody, modes and rhythms. Mário de Andrade was the first to call attention to rhythmic traits and melodic cadences related to chant. Later, Oneyda Alvarenga (1950), Tavares de Lima (1954) and Father José Geraldo de Souza (1960–63) provided examples from various areas. Ex.1, a lundu melody collected in Ceará, illustrates Gregorian characteristics, such as beginning on the dominant and ending on the tonic; cadential diatonicism; and the seventh or G mode. Examples of true recitatives and types of cantillation occur frequently. The amensural nature of ex.2 is typical. Besides this rhythmic freedom in melodic phrasing, melodies and cadences are frequently based on the church modes, such as the A mode shown in ex.3, a reisado from Rio Grande do Norte; the D mode in ex.4, a lullaby from Pará; the F mode in ex.5, a mendicant blind man's cry from the north-east; and the E mode in ex.6 in a pagelança song from Pará.

Despite these instances of modes, melodies tend to be mainly diatonic and tonal (or major/minor). Anhemitonic pentatonic scales prevail in certain repertories. The range in Brazilian folk music varies a great deal: generally, songs have a narrower range than strictly instrumental pieces; while many songs exceed the octave in their range, most do not.

The melodic material is organized in several forms, predominantly stanza-refrain alternation and strophic form with slight variations. Through-composed songs occur to a much lesser extent. Literary forms inherited from Spain and Portugal, such as quatrains and décimas (ten-line verse), common in the romances, or ballads, have naturally determined their musical forms. In songs and dances of a more specifically Afro-Brazilian stock, the stanza-refrain pattern often shows textual and musical improvisation in the stanza (performed by a soloist) with a set choral refrain.

Of all the musical elements rhythm is certainly the most difficult to generalize about. In theory, the Iberian heritage has provided Brazilian folk music with triple and compound metric structures (3/4, 6/8, 9/8), and the clear stressing of downbeats. Simple isometric figures abound. Dotted figures (ex.7a) or compound triple time (ex.7f) are quite common. The peculiar rhythmic characteristic of Brazilian music, however, is syncopation, either by irregular accentuation or anticipation. Syncopations are generally contrasted with a steady rhythmic pulsation (often represented as semiquaver units). Exx.7a–f give some indication of the frequent rhythmic patterns occurring in mestizo folk music. Numerous variant possibilities, however, are present in performance. The rhythmic practices most commonly associated with Afro-Brazilian folk music reveal a subtle duple-triple ambivalence, as illustrated in exx.7i and 7j, which show two different renderings of rhythmic patterns. The characteristically African hemiola rhythm is often found. Irregular rhythmic structures and amensural or free-rhythm melodies occur in certain song types, such as the typical aboios (cattle herding songs) of the north-eastern states.

Polyphonic parallelism prevails. The most common type of folk polyphony inherited from the Iberian peninsula involves singing in parallel 3rds and 6ths, either by two or more soloists or more commonly in responsorial singing. This type of polyphonic practice is also present in instrumental music. Parallel 4ths and 5ths, although rare, are found more readily in songs of a soloistic nature. Singing and playing at the octave are relatively common. Imitative types of polyphony are rare and are not systematized. Song types such as the desafio and embolada, which involve alternate singing, are not polyphonic. Overlapping commonly occurs with responsorial singing. Contrapuntal textures abound in certain instrumental types of urban popular music, such as the choro.

(iv) Organology.

Indigenous, African and European instruments are played in Brazil, although it is not always possible to determine the origin of each with accuracy.

It is generally accepted that Amerindians did not have chordophones at the time of the conquest. In Brazil the rare examples described in the literature are post-colonial or even 20th-century. The musical bow, called urucungo in the south and berimbau (or berimbau de barriga) in the north and north-east, with or without resonator, is much in use in such dance-games as the Bahian capoeira. Of African provenance, the berimbau is still played in an African manner: the string is struck with a wooden stick and a metal coin serves as a bridge. Timbre may be changed by manipulating the resonator against or away from the body of the performer. Generally a small basket rattle, called caxixi in Bahia, accompanies the strokes of the stick, as shown in fig.2.

The majority of string instruments came from Europe, particularly from the Iberian peninsula. Most important in the various folk musical expressions of Brazil is the viola, a type of guitar with five double courses made of wire or steel. There are various sizes, the standard one being somewhat smaller than the Spanish classical guitar. There are at least five types of viola distributed throughout the country: the viola paulista, cuiabana, angrense, goiana and nordestina. The differences are mostly in size, in number and material of strings, and in tunings. The variety of tunings is considerable. In São Paulo alone some 25 tunings are known, such tunings being used according to the particular function of the instrument. To accompany the song genre known as moda, for example, the tuning A–D–G–B–E, known as quatro pontos, is considered most suitable. Viola players give each tuning a special name. Thus, in São Paulo and southern Brazil in general, D–G–B–D–G is termed cebolão, E–B–E–G#–B cebolinha simples, D–G–B–E–A cana-verde or cururu, D–G–C–F–A# oitavado or pontiado-do-Paraná. The instrument may be used to accompany both singing and dancing, but it is also played solo and frequently in duets. Myths and legends involving the viola attest to its paramount importance among the Brazilian people. The personalization of the instrument has created certain magic secular rituals designed to prevent ‘diseases’ affecting the viola. A special type of viola is the viola de cocho, known as the ‘Brazilian lute’, with five single strings, a short neck and no soundhole. It is used in Mato Grosso in the cururu festivities.

In conjunction with the viola, the Portuguese rabeca, or fiddle, tuned A–D–D–G, is still used in popular religious feasts, dramatic and secular dances. In the 1920s it began to decline in popularity, only to regain some of its former importance in the 1980s. The Spanish guitar is also widely played in Brazil, particularly in the urban areas. The cavaquinho is of Portuguese origin and has gained a wide popularity in the cities since the late 19th century. It has four metallic strings tuned d'–g'–b'–d''. The machete is similar to the cavaquinho and possibly comes from Madeira Island. Other chordophones in Brazilian folk music are the mandolin (Port. bandolim) and the banjo, the latter introduced in the 1930s.

The majority of the many types of idiophone are of Amerindian and African derivation. The maraca and the various types of chocalhos are the most widespread of the shaken rattles. The pre-Columbian Amerindian maraca (mbaracá) is made of a calabash filled with dry seeds. Chocalho has become the generic term for shaken and struck rattles made of different materials and varying in shape and size (fig.3). They are often known by their onomatopoeic names, such as xaque-xaque, xeque-xeque, xequerê, xexerê etc. The ganzá (or canzá) often appears as a two-headed chocalho, usually made of metal. Though generally considered to be of African origin, because the Amerindians had no metal idiophones when the first African slaves were brought to Brazil, it is strikingly similar to the maraca and, as with other rattles, there is not enough evidence for one to be certain of its origin. The afoxê (or afuxê), called xequerê in Bahia and more generally piano-de-cuia, is another widespread type of rattle. Instead of the calabash being filled with seeds, it is covered with threaded beads or cowrie shells, as in West Africa. The instrument is played by rotating the calabash from the handle with the right hand while the beads are held firmly with the left hand. Basket rattles are known among both Amerindians and Afro-Brazilians. The caxixi, mentioned above in connection with capoeira, has its counterpart in the angóia of the jongo and batuque dances. The most widespread struck idiophone is the agogô, a cowbell of African provenance. Usually a double bell, it is struck with a metal rod and used on different occasions. The single-bell instrument called gan is preferred among the more traditional Afro-Brazilian religious groups. In the same groups the adjá, similar to the agogô, fulfils a more specifically liturgical function. The African marimba (xylophone) has lost its former importance as a solo instrument or an accompanying instrument for singing. In modern times it is used only to accompany such dramatic dances as the congada. The two types of marimba still in use are portable and have six and 11 keys respectively, which are struck with wooden sticks. The African lamellophone is practically extinct in Brazil.

A popular type of scraped idiophone is the reco-reco (also known as raspador, casaca or catacá; fig.4); it is used in traditional rural dances such as the congada, cururu, cana-verde and folk samba, as well as in modern urban dances such as Carnival sambas and marches. Numerous types of membranophone of European and African origin are used in Brazilian folk and popular music. The conical single-headed drum, similar to the Afro-Cuban conga drum, is known throughout the country under the generic terms atabaque and tambor. Of African derivation are the various drums accompanying Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies. There the atabaques are generally played in threes, each of different size, and are known in Bahia, from the largest to the smallest, as rum, rumpí and lê (fig.5). These drums are played with sticks, with hand and stick or with the hands alone, depending on the particular religious group or particular song repertory. In the north-eastern provinces, especially Pernambuco and Ceará, cylindrical single-headed drums are known by the Yoruba name of ilu, although the same term was formerly used for double-headed barrel-shaped drums. Tambu designates a similar cylindrical single-headed drum, especially in the southern-central and southern regions where it plays an important role in the jongo and the batuque dances. The candongueiro or candongueira is a small tambu used in the jongo and usually played with the fingers only. A still smaller and higher-pitched drum in the jongo is the cadete. Another African drum still used in the batuque is the mulemba or quinjengue which has a funnel-like shape, giving it a higher pitch. The skin of all these drums is traditionally attached to the body either by pegs or by wedges, but modern mass-produced conga-type drums use screw devices. The ‘talking drums’ of West Africa with their typically varying pitch are unknown in modern Brazil.

A characteristic drum known throughout the country is the cuíca or puíta, a friction drum with remarkable pitch range. Its origin is difficult to determine. Introduced in Brazil probably by Bantu slaves, it has also been known in Spain for centuries and it is believed to have been brought to Africa by Muslims. It is used in numerous folk and urban popular dances. The tambourine is known in Brazil with and without jingles. The oldest type is the adufe, a square tambourine, usually without jingles, of Arab origin, but brought to Brazil by the Portuguese and still much in use in Portugal. The standard tambourine is known as pandeiro and since the early 20th century has become one of the most widely accepted drums in popular music. The instrument known in Portuguese as tamborim is a small (30 cm long and 15 to 18 cm in diameter) cylindrical drum percussed with a stick, used in dramatic dances such as the congada and moçambique and in the percussion ensembles of Carnival bands.

Double-headed drums of European origin include snare drums (known as caixa) of various sizes (the smaller is often referred to as tarol, the larger as caixa-surda or surdo). The zabumba, variously called bombo, bumba and tambor grande, is a bass drum played with a beater, popular in the north-eastern states where it leads ensembles consisting of two or three fifes, as in the Beira province of Portugal. The zabumba accompanies rural sambas, congadas and other dances. Double-headed drums are the most common types among Brazilian Indians.

Amerindian tribes have a wide variety of flutes, trumpets and whistles. The flutes include transverse flutes made of reed, slit tubes, nose flutes, and reed panpipes such as the aviraré of the Aweti Kamaiurá of the High Xingu area (fig.6). Aerophones in Brazilian folk and popular music are mostly modern European instruments, from simple fifes to valve trumpets, trombones and saxophones. The modern flute and the piccolo have been cultivated in urban popular music since the advent of the urban samba in the second decade of the century. Both button and piano keyboard accordions (sanfona) are widely used in folk and popular music throughout the country. In folk music wind instruments generally play a lesser role than percussion and string instruments.

2. Amerindian music.

Brazilian Indians belong to the tropical forest type of indigenous culture. This has been classified according to the relative degree of integration with the main national (i.e. Luso-Brazilian and mestizo) socio-cultural groups. Most Indians, however, have had sporadic or no contact with white and mestizo Brazilians. In such cases they maintain cultural autonomy. Those who have had permanent contacts have been, or are in the process of being, integrated into the mainstream of Brazilian society. Four main indigenous linguistic families have traditionally been distinguished: Tupi, Arawak (Aruak), Carib and Gê, with several subdivisions. 11 indigenous culture areas have been proposed by Darcy Ribeiro and others (fig.7). The music of the Taulipang Indians from the northern Amazon area (between Rio Negro and the coast) was collected by Theodor Koch-Grünberg from 1911 to 1913 and subsequently studied by Hornbostel, who outlined the following traits: existence of solo and choral singing; melodies of medium range, generally less than an octave (ex.8 has a range of a minor 7th); conjunct and descending melodic motion; predominantly ternary divisions of fixed rhythmic patterns. Dance music seems to prevail in the collected repertory, but curing songs and other songs for ritual ceremonies, such as hunting magic, are also common among the Taulipang. Hornbostel observed that the motivic organization of most Taulipang songs is simple and that the motifs are frequently interrelated. Ex.8 provides a good illustration of the strophe arrangement. According to Hornbostel they ‘fall into two halves of three motives each a b d/e f c: the 4/2 groups of the first part become the 3/2 in the second, and the final tactus through omission of the pause is further shortened to 5/4. The motive g–f–e is expanded to 4/2 cadence, and is repeated in b as 2/2 and in d as 1/4. (Such progressive abridgements are generally characteristic of the form of the Indian style.)’ Music from the Jeruá-Purus area, south-west of the Amazon River, has not yet been collected and studied.

The music of the Nambicuara Indians of the Guaporé area was first collected and studied by Roquette Pinto. He observed among them war and festive dances, and two types of flute: the nose flute with three holes (studied by Izikowitz and Halmos; fig.8) and the double flute. Ex.9, collected by Roquette Pinto in 1912, shows a clear tonal centre (e'), conjunct motion, and the narrow range of a minor 3rd. Isometric rhythmic structure is also evident. Material collected by Lajos Boglár in 1959 and studied by Halmos shows that the neighbouring Paressí Indians sing melodies similar to those of Nambicuara. Halmos was able to characterize Nambicuara melody as having a small range and frequently repeated motifs. But melodic structures do not always appear to be simple. They consist in general of stanzas, ‘the totality of which form the melody’. The number of stanzas in sung melodies is constant while ‘there is no regularity in the length of the melodies performed on instruments’. The 28 melodies analysed reveal a descending motion, a medium average range (out of the 28 only four extend to a 7th), and the presence of a basic final on which the stanzas always end.

From the Tapajós-Madeira area, lying approximately between the two rivers, western Pará and eastern Amazonas, little of the music of the Mura-Pirahã Indians is known. The oldest example, collected and transcribed by Spix and Martius in the early 19th century, reveals the same general characteristics of Brazilian indigenous music: six-note scale with a tonal centre; melodic range of a minor 6th; prevailing conjunct motion; motifs related in an ABCD organization; and isometric rhythm (ex.10).

In the High Xingu area in the state of Mato Grosso, between the rivers Paranatinga, Ronuro and Culuene, the Parque Indígena do Xingu, a large reservation, has brought together numerous tribes. Traditionally, the principal groups of this area are the Kamaiurá (Tupi), the Mehinaku and Yawalapiti (Arawak) and the Trumai. Kamaiurá music has been studied by Menezes Bastos. Kamaiurá Indians have giant flutes (up to 2·5 metres in tube length) known as uruá, with ritual functions. The aviraré (four- or five-tube panpipes, up to 50 cm in tube length; fig.6) are used as an introduction to the mastering of the uruá, but while they can be played by one person only, the uruá requires two players (fig.9). Ex.11 illustrates Kamaiurá vocal dance music. A characteristic feature is the microtonal sliding of the voice followed by a wide-range descending glissando. The isometric rhythmic figures emphasize the beginning of each phrase, stressing the long note values. The noticeable exhaling and harsh aspiration corresponding to this beginning of phrases was pointed out by Hornbostel as a typical feature of Amerindian vocal style. In addition, there is a direct relationship between tension and pitch, d being the tension point. As indicated in the studies of Menezes Bastos (1978, 1986, 1988), Kamaiurá music functions as a form of knowledge and communication in very specific ways. An elaborate system of taxonomy reveals the presence of an ethnotheory that explains the cognitive processes differentiating and integrating music, speech and language, and the various levels of music-making in which musical instruments and human voices take on particular meanings. Such a theory, elucidated primarily through linguistic analyses, also clarifies the close connections between such concepts as musical substance and elaboration and the culture's political, economic and basic social structures.

The music of the Suyá Indian community, also from the High Xingu, has been the subject of extensive study by Anthony Seeger (1987). Here also one finds specific native categories of forms of sound production. For example the Suyá term ngére refers to song (and by extension music, since they only know songs), sangére to invocation (curing songs), sarén to instruction or telling and kapérni to speech. There are significant relationships between these vocal forms: music and speech are not separated, rather they operate in a continuum determined by contexts. What seems to distinguish song from the other forms is first ‘the priority of melody over text, the fixed mode of its presentation, the extensive use of textual repetition, the fixed length of its phrases, the fixed relations among pitches, and the authority of its fixed texts’ (Seeger, 1987). There are, however, different genres of song. The akia (‘shout song’ or call) designates individual songs performed by adult men or boys ‘until they have several grandchildren’, while ngére (‘unison song’), distinct from akia, designates song usually performed in unison and in a lower register by men, women, boys or girls. The functions of these songs are numerous but their most significant aspects are associated with social relations and identity. Thus akia reaffirms social ties to sisters and mothers and expresses emotions. Ngére is used ‘to reaffirm the identity of the collectivity’ and the invocation would serve ‘to instill a particular animal trait into the body of the patient so that a desirable physical change could take place’. The integration of song performance within Suyá cosmology reveals the degree to which songs represent the very centrality of Suyá existential essence.

The Tocantins-Xingu area, between the two rivers, in south-eastern Pará and northern Goiás, is inhabited by Kayapó Indians, of whom the Gorotire are a sub-group belonging to the Gê linguistic family. They apparently know only three types of instrument: gourd rattle, stamping tubes and a small trumpet; the last is thought to be the result of outside influence. Much of the collected music reveals the predominance of choral monophonic pieces with pentatonic melodies.

The Pindaré-Gurupi area, between the two rivers, extends to the Guamá and Capim rivers in the west and to portions of the Grajaú and Mearim rivers in the east. The music of the Urubu-Kaapor Indians (of the Tupi family) from this area has been studied by Helsa Cameu. Although this music reveals tritonic to pentatonic scales, simple polyphonic singing occurs, perhaps the result of intermittent contact with mestizo culture.

In the Paraguay area, to the south of the swamp region of Mato Grosso, the Kadiweu Indians are an integrated group. The Kadiweu song shown in ex.12, collected in the late 1940s, is accompanied by the maraca. Its characteristics are: tetratonic scale (d–e–g–a), predominant arched melodic motion and isometric rhythm.

The Paraná area, on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, is inhabited by Guaraní Indians. The Kaiwa, for example, belong to this group and are now found in various areas of the states of Paraná and São Paulo. Their choral music exhibits parallel polyphony; ex.13 illustrates parallel 4ths. (For further discussion of Guaraní music see Paraguay.)

In the Tietê-Uruguay area, between the two rivers, comprising much of the hinterland of the states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and portions of Rio Grande do Sul, the Caingang or Coroados of the Gê family are examples of integrated Amerindian groups. Their culture, therefore, does not at present have many Amerindian characteristics, though an example of their music collected in the early 19th century by Spix and Martius reveals the same general traits of Amerindian music: tetratonic scale, predominantly descending melodic motion by conjunct degrees and isometric rhythm.

The north-east area includes various groups scattered through the states of Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Bahia and Minas Gerais. The Kariri from Mirandela (Bahia), who form one of these groups, represent an integrated indigenous culture, reflected in their music. Style and genres are those of the caboclo (mestizo) folk tradition of the area.

(iii) Bailados or dramatic dances.

3. Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions.

(i) Social contexts.

(ii) Dances.

(iv) Song genres.

Brazil, §II, 3: Traditional music: Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions

(i) Social contexts.

Cycles of folk festivities of a secular or religious character take place throughout the year in the various regions of the country. These festivities include rituals of thanksgiving to nature and protective rites for future harvests, and provide an opportunity for social solidarity. Music is an integral part of such occasions, whether in well-determined functions or in less structured ones. Besides fixed song repertories accompanying given aspects of the festivities (as described below), dance is undoubtedly the most important element of social recreation and interaction. Brazil possesses a very large number of folkdance types and folk dramatic dances of different kinds and function. The main cycles of folk and popular feasts recognized by most folklorists include the Festa do Divino (Feast of the Divine Being), and feasts of the winter and summer solstices. These rituals, which may be religious in character, are directly associated with the Roman Catholic feasts and the commemoration of saints’ days, which constitute cycles of syncretic feasts, among which Carnival is the most widespread. Again, most of these are also musical occasions on which social cohesion and cooperation are induced.

Of the southern winter solstice feasts, that of St John is the most popular. There are considerable regional differences, especially in the type of food consumed and the songs and dances. Christmas is, of course, the most important feast of the summer solstice cycle. The folias (or folias de reis) represent the festive activities of this time (from 24 December to 6 January or 2 February, which is Purification day). They are primarily popular representations of the Nativity and the journey of the Three Kings. In Minas Gerais, numerous communities have organized folias groups whose members sing inside the church, in front of the Nativity scene, in typical parallel polyphony, accompanied by accordion, guitars and percussion. While such feasts retain their religious character in southern Brazil, those of the north and north-east are more secular. The baile pastoril, a folk play depicting the visit of shepherds to the Bethlehem stable, accompanied by songs and dances, is also an important festivity on Christmas night. Such plays take place either on a public platform or in houses, in front of the Nativity scene. Dances are set in sequences. Most are in a waltz-like rhythm. Ex.14, the first song accompanying the first dance of a baile pastoril from Bahia, shows traits (triple metre, four-bar phrase, heptasyllabic line) that relate it to folksong of Portugal from which the pastoril originated.

Other important musical occasions are the Easter cycle, and especially the period of Holy Week. Besides certain religious ceremonies such as processions, pilgrimages and folk representations of the Passion, the cycle includes the traditional beating and burning of Judas. For this purpose songs associated with urban Carnival merrymaking are used in the large cities such as São Paulo, since specific songs for the ceremony have become rare. Another ancient European custom observed in Luso-Brazilian folklore is the recommendation of souls during the Lent period. Members of religious groups shroud their heads with white cloths and go at night from house to house to sing and pray for wandering souls believed to be suffering in purgatory or hell. In the hinterland of São Paulo such groups are known as ternos and include children, men and women. They accompany themselves with a matraca (rattle) and a berra-boi (noisemaker) to command attention and to accent the singing. Most typically there are several soloists answered by a chorus, both groups singing in constant parallel 3rds or 6ths.

In addition to the fixed folk festivities, music-making arises in many other social contexts. The large repertory of children's play songs is mostly of Portuguese, Spanish and French origin. Dances and songs accompany all sorts of games and other forms of adult recreation. Similarly, the life-cycle ceremonies for birth, marriage and death are marked by rituals with music, most of which is of Portuguese derivation. Finally, many song repertories arise out of labour activities, such as cattle herding and fishing, cotton, coffee and tobacco picking songs.

Brazil, §II, 3: Traditional music: Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions

(ii) Dances.

Any classification of the many Luso-Brazilian folkdances is necessarily arbitrary. This section does not include dramatic dances, or bailados as they are known in Portuguese, which are discussed in §(iii) below. The traditional classification distinguishes between religious, secular and ‘war’ or fighting dances, although exceptions must be made in the case of dances such as the cateretê, which could be interpreted as semi-religious or semi-secular, without being a fighting dance. Moreover, certain dances cannot be said to belong exclusively to white or mestizo Brazilians rather than to blacks, and vice versa. The determination of the origin of folkdances is virtually impossible in most cases owing to lack of written documentation and as a result of the close interaction of social and ethnic groups. Thus, the looseness of ethnic boundaries should again be borne in mind in discussing folkdances.

Among religious dances the most widespread are the dança de São Gonçalo, dança de Santa Cruz (of the Holy Cross) and cururu. The secular dances, which are more numerous, include the fandango, quadrilha, lundu, jongo, batuque, côco, baianá, carimbó, corta-jaca and the rural samba. Since many of these are more usually associated with blacks they are discussed in §4 below. The fighting dances consist primarily of the Afro-Brazilian capoeira and maculelê. Others in this category are part of dramatic dances, such as the congada, moçambique or cayapó.

The dança de São Gonçalo appears to be one of the most representative of all Brazilian folkdances. St Gonçalo (do Amarante) is a popular saint in the rural areas. Although Portuguese in origin, he has acquired different attributes in Brazil, where he is the patron of viola players and, as a player himself, is always represented with a guitar in his hands. His miraculous function is to promote marriage. The active participants in the dance are generally those who have made a promise to the saint. The performance requires an altar on which is placed a clay statue of St Gonçalo, flanked by two lighted candles. Generally two men sing the prayers and accompany themselves on the viola. The mestre (master), as a rule the oldest man, sings the main melodic line, accompanied in parallel motion by the contramestre at intervals including the unison, 3rd, 4th and 5th. Several couples participate in the dance, forming two lines, men to the left, women to the right, facing the altar. The mestre stands in front of the men's line and the contramestre in front of the women's. In São Paulo state the dance is divided into five parts. For each part, five or six quatrains (usually in heptasyllabic lines) are sung. Each quatrain is accompanied by corresponding choreographic figures, including shoe-tapping. The prayers (Salve regina and an Ave Maria) are sung in alternation between the mestre on the one hand and the contramestre and dancers on the other. The last part of each prayer, including the Amen, is sung by all. The first song (ex.15) is typically in AABB form, A corresponding to the first two lines of text and B to the last two. The most prominent characteristics of this song (also applicable to Luso-Brazilian singing in general) include: predominance of parallel 3rds, transposition to the upper 4th for the B section, anacrusis and isometric phrase structure, and medium melodic range. The Salve regina melody is sung monophonically in a responsorial fashion (ex.16). The Ave Maria collected in São Paulo (ex.17) is typical in its conjunct motion and its rhythmic figures, but atypical in its asymmetrical phrase structure. In most of the São Gonçalo dances (whether from Piauí and Maranhão or Minas Gerais and São Paulo) percussion instruments are rarely used; they are considered unsuitable because the São Gonçalo dance is a ‘dance of respect’. There is no set date for the performance of the dance. Generally, it results from a thanksgiving to a saint in a house or church. In Goiás state, the accompanying ensemble features violin (rabeca), violas, guitars and berimbaus.

Dances and processions for the Holy Cross originate in the Iberian tradition. The whole festivity, which takes place in May, includes secular and religious events, the latter including prayers and the dance known as the dança de Santa Cruz. Crosses are displayed near the entrance door of each house of a village or town and the dance is performed in front of these crosses. While mestre and contramestre with their violas lead the singing, they are accompanied by two adufe (tambourine) players, and sometimes even by an additional cuíca and güiros. All the percussionists also sing. The dance is a circle-dance arranged in two rings, each headed by a viola player. Men and women take their position in each ring without any predetermined order. In São Paulo state, where the dance is most widespread, the musical sequence is in three parts: the ‘greeting’, the round-dance itself, and the closing ‘farewell’. Ex.18 illustrates a greeting song. A particularly characteristic feature of caipira (from the interior of São Paulo state) singing is the final interjection (shown in the last two bars) in which both dancers and audience participate. Most of the songs used in the dance and ‘farewell’ portions of the festivity are similar in melodic contour and rhythm. The rhythmic accompaniment of the violas and adufes varies slightly from one section to another, as shown in ex.19.

Both the dança de Santa Cruz and the dança de São Gonçalo frequently end with the performance of the cururu, a religious dance, which is generally performed at night, and accompanied by desafios, songs with improvised texts (see §(iv) below). Although improvised, these songs follow a given model referred to as carreira or linha. Here the viola is again the essential instrument. The desafios are not exclusive to the cururu, but the religious content of the song texts seems to be peculiar to that dance. There is a general view, advanced by Mário de Andrade, that the cururu was originally an indigenous dance adopted by the Jesuits in the late 16th century in their missionary work among the Indians. Cururu is believed to be a Tupi-Guarani word meaning ‘toad’, perhaps alluding to certain jumping figures of the dance. The dance takes place in a room adorned with an altar; it is a round-dance, in which the participants follow the musicians (viola, tambourine and reco-reco players) in the circle. In the middle of the circle stands the pedreste, whose function is to initiate the singing, the first part of which consists of toadas de licença (songs of permission, or entrance songs), followed by songs of praise to the saints on the altar and to the owner of the house. The pedreste, however, does not participate in the alternate singing between the cururueiros. The second part involves the singing of carreiras or words serving as models for rhymes, frequently suggested by the pedreste. The improvised lines may have a secular or religious character. The most frequently used carreiras include ‘Divino, Senhor Amado’ or ‘Sagrado, Jesus Amado, Cruz Pesada, Nosso Senhor’ and ‘São João’. It is up to the pedreste to indicate to the two or more improvisers when a subject seems to have been exhausted. Since the singers' attention is concentrated on improvising the text, the melodies of the cururu songs tend to be simple, strictly tonal, avoiding chromaticism, and rhythmically regular in binary (2/4) time. The melodic range is small and melodic contour fairly homogeneous, consisting primarily of conjunct degrees with many repeated notes. The singing is always in duet between the canturião (the main singer) and his segunda (or assistant) who echoes almost simultaneously the improvised words of the canturião. Thus parallel singing in 3rds (ex.20) is a constant feature of the cururu. The instrumental accompaniment, which includes the viola, played rasgueado (strumming), rabecas and reco-recos, stresses dotted rhythms and syncopations.

The cateretê or catira, a dance of probable Indian origin used for conversion purposes by the Jesuits, is another popular religious dance. It is found in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Mato Grosso, Goiás and several north-eastern states. Two viola players and an even number of exclusively male dancers participate. In certain communities only female dancers are present. The dance takes place generally at night and indoors. Once more the mestre and contramestre sing in duet. Typically the singing is accompanied by regular hand-clapping and shoe-tapping. The choreography comprises four main sections: two facing rows headed by each viola player; an orderly circling around of all participants; a crossover from one row to the other; and finally the hand-clapping and shoe-tapping figures. The songs are known as moda-de-viola, that is, they are narrative and historical in character, always in parallel 3rds and most of the time in a 2/4 metre, with frequent syncopated figures or triplets (ex.21).

The fandango, although a well-known Spanish dance, has been cultivated in Portugal since the 18th century or earlier. In the Brazilian southern states (especially in the Ubá cultural area) the term ‘fandango’ is used generically to designate popular revelry with dances. Thus in Rio Grande do Sul dances associated with the fandango include the anu, balaio, chimarrita, chula, pericom, rancheira de carreira, tatu and tirana. They are all round-dances with hand-clapping, shoe-tapping and finger-snapping. Often castanets are used by female dancers. The songs of most of these dances present the same basic characteristics observed in other dances of Luso-Brazilian folklore, in particular singing in parallel 3rds, as illustrated in ex.22, as well as conjunct, sequential and continuous descending melodic motion, the isometric rhythmic formula with syncopations and feminine cadences and the alternation of stanzas and refrain. The viola is the main accompanying instrument, with an adufe and pandeiro stressing the rhythm. In Rio Grande do Sul, the accordion, locally called gaita, tends to be the main melodic instrument.

In the northern and north-eastern provinces the term ‘fandango’ designates a dramatic dance, otherwise known as nau catarineta or marujada.

The most widespread dance of the fandango in the São Paulo hinterland is the cana-verde, also known in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. It originated in the Portuguese caninha verde, although it is quite different in character. Generally the dancing and singing are accompanied by violas, reco-reco and tambourine. The song texts in quatrains of heptasyllabic lines and the melodies often starting on an anacrusis are clearly Portuguese traits. Duple metre and eight-bar phrases predominate in the cana-verde songs. The rhythmic structure tends to be very regular, with occasional syncopations.

Brazil, §II, 3: Traditional music: Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions

(iii) Bailados or dramatic dances.

‘Dramatic dances’ is a term used by Mário de Andrade (1959, 2/1982) for all dances that develop a dramatic action and for collective (group) dances that ‘conform to the formal principle of the suite, that is, the musical work formed by a series of several choreographic parts’. In the late 1940s, Brazilian folklorists also introduced the terms folguedo and auto to designate these dances. Most such dances or bailados were probably introduced or developed by the Jesuits during their missionary work. Thus the subject matter of most dramatic dances is conversion and resurrection. Conversion is the main theme of such dances as congada, marujada and moçambique; while quilombo, cayapó, guerreiros, cabocolinhos and lambe-sujo are concerned with resurrection. Both themes, however, are found in some congadas and marujadas. Although religious in subject matter, these dances include non-religious dramatis personae and secular action. The most general native categories of such dances permit a division into three groups: the baile pastoril, already mentioned as part of the Christmas cycle of folk feasts; the cheganças, used to celebrate Iberian traditions of fights between Christians and Moors and events from Portuguese seafaring history; and the reisados, of varying regional meaning, associated mostly with the Christmas and the Epiphany period. Bumba-meu-boi, the last dramatic dance of the reisados cycle, is the only one truly alive in modern Brazil.

Some dramatic dances are known throughout the country while others are specific to certain regions. In addition, they cut across ethnic boundaries, because as a form of popular theatre developed by missionaries for instructional purposes they affected Amerindians, black slaves and mestizos throughout the colonial period. Indeed their main characteristics combine Iberian and African traditions with Amerindian recollections. With the exception of the baile pastoril, women do not participate in most dramatic dances.

Most bailados comprise two major parts: a danced parade and a dramatic representation referred to in some dances as embaixada (‘embassy’). Both parts include singing and dancing. The maracatu and the taieiras of the north-eastern coastal area, however, omit the embaixada.

In spite of black participation in the congada dance (also known as congos) and the presence of remnants of customs from the slavery period, such as the coronation of black kings, the congada is not considered to be of African origin but simply an adaptation by the catechist of the Chanson de Roland. Throughout Latin America medieval epic poems came to be transformed into folk dramas in the old Iberian tradition of popular theatre. The congada is thus based on the traditional battles between Christians and Moors. As observed in the state of São Paulo, congadas often take place at the celebration of festivities such as the feast of the Divine Holy Spirit (in the last few days of June). They include greeting songs of the ‘Congo’ groups, parade of the ‘battalions’ of the congada and the representation proper. The dramatis personae are numerous. The central characters are the King of Congo or Charlemagne, the General of the Moors, the first and second secretaries, the Moor Ferrabrás, the Christian Duque, Roldão, the prince and the ambassador. The representation is developed in memorized spoken parts as well as solo, duet and choral numbers. Drums accompany the various songs and dances of the ceremony, providing the general rhythm shown in ex.23a. In some congadas from São Paulo a small portable marimba is used in conjunction with an atabaque and a tamborim. Violas and rabeca (fiddle) complete the accompanying ensemble. Responsorial singing predominates. The chorus often includes young boys' voices (an octave higher than the men's). Falsetto singing is quite frequent. There is parallel polyphony in 3rds in many songs. Exx.23b and c illustrate two songs of embaixada, the first one used after the defeat of the Moors, the second to celebrate peace on the occasion of the conversion of the Moors. It is common also to hear songs of praise to St Benedict and St Raphael, the former being the traditional patron saint of Afro-Brazilians.

The marujada (or nau catarineta), a bailado, is known throughout the country by a variety of names, including the erudite terms chegança or chegança de marujos, rarely used by the people themselves. The marujada dramatizes the struggles of the Portuguese in their conquest of the sea, and originates from the period of maritime exploration (late 15th and early 16th centuries). This tradition was transferred to Brazil where an associated song repertory developed, and the dance is still performed in a limited number of rural communities in the northern or south-central regions. The sequences of songs and their melodic traits are fairly homogeneous. In São Paulo the dance was observed during the 1950s and 60s in two coastal towns only. The large number of characters includes a general or admiral, an English captain, a priest, a Moorish king, a prince, a pilot, commanding officers etc. All wear uniforms for the dance. Christians (also called Portuguese or sailors) and Moors (the infidels) are also represented, showing the syncretism of various Iberian traditions. The accompanying instruments are percussion (snare drum and a larger double-headed drum) and fiddles. The singing alternates between soloists (main characters) and chorus (sailors and infidels). The various ‘journeys’ of the dramatization include different types of song and spoken dialogue. The first ‘journey’ is a parade of all the participants hauling a large ship, mounted on wheels for the occasion. Sailor songs (some of Portuguese origin) praising their courage, or warning against pirates and Moors, form the repertory of that first ‘journey’. Loas and romances (respectively, praises and ballads) are either recited or sung in the remaining ‘journeys’. One of the journeys of the marujada depicts a scene of hunger on board. The sailors deplore the situation and sing a celebrated song Triste vida dos marujos (ex.24), so well known that it even appeared in print around the middle of the 19th century. The melody is typical of Portuguese folksong in its 6/8 metre, isometric rhythm, minor mode, range and contour.

As observed in the state of Bahia, the marujada, performed entirely by Afro-Brazilians, stresses responsorial performance style, with harmonized choral responses (a typical Luso-Brazilian tradition) from singers accompanying themselves with small hand drums. Despite its name, the music accompanying the moçambique dance has no African traits and its origin is obscure, although some scholars believe it is of Afro-Brazilian provenance. In northern Portugal there were formerly festivities honouring Our Lady of Rosario, during which blacks danced in front of the church and in the streets, with decorated sticks in their hands, like the present-day Brazilian moçambiqueiros. These are predominantly black groups dedicated to the cult of St Benedict (they called themselves ‘companies of Moçambique’), performing their dance during the feasts of Our Lady of Rosario and the Divine Holy Spirit. In the 1930s, Mário de Andrade (1959) observed that the moçambique had no dramatic action, and in this respect was like the maracatus from Pernambuco. Subsequent field studies in the 1940s and 50s, however, have revealed embaixada among several ‘companies of Moçambique’, most likely as the result of fusion with elements of other dramatic dances. Choreographically it resembles the battle dances of the congadas. In São Paulo the dancers in opposing lines include stick-fight dancing among the soloists and among all those in the opposing lines. There is responsorial singing between the leader of the dance and the remaining dancers. Percussion dominates the accompanying ensemble. The instruments include snare drum, reco-reco, xique-xique (rattles) and cuíca, in Minas Gerais; in São Paulo the largest ensembles of moçambique groups include violas, guitars, cavaquinhos and fiddles, in addition to tambourines and several rattles of the chocalho types. The dancers often wear jingles (known as paiá or pernamguma) on their feet or legs. The fighting sticks may also have a rhythmic function. Some ‘companies’ seem to follow a certain order in the presentation of their songs, called linhas, or pontos.

The bumba-meu-boi (or boi-bumbá) is the most characteristic caboclo (mestizo) dramatic dance. Because its central figure is a bull (boi), some have interpreted it as a totemistic retention of Amerindian or African cultures. Others have attributed its origin to the old European folk tradition of the bull and donkey in the Nativity scene. Known mostly in the north-east (where it is the most popular dramatic dance) and in the Amazon regions, it is performed during the Christmas season and the St John cycle, respectively. The main characters include the bull, whose head is made of cardboard and worn by a dancer; two or three cattle herders (one of whom, Mateus, is always black); the captain; and a black woman, Catarina. Other animals and fantastic creatures take part in the representation. Only characters representing humans sing. Small ensembles comprise viola, guitar, cavaquinho, accordion, piccolo, fife, clarinet, fiddle and percussion such as zabumba, tambourine, ganzá and maraca. A female chorus introduces and dismisses the characters. Unlike those in most bailados, the vocal parts are generally taken by women. Before the drama begins conventional songs of praise are presented. According to Mário de Andrade (1959), the dance includes both fixed elements consisting of the entrances and dances of the main characters, including the bull, and variable elements, being those of the secondary characters. Specific songs, often similar to cowboys' chanting while herding cattle, are sung to call the bull. Most of the bumba-meu-boi songs exhibit some of the more characteristic elements of mestizo folk music, as in ex.25, which accompanies the dance of the bull: four-bar phrases, descending motion ending on the dominant, isometric rhythm and syncopations. The bumba-meu-boi is perhaps one of the most nationally widespread of the extant dramatic dances. From its figures, costumes, song texts and musical style to its historical evocations and connections, it is the most aesthetically and socially significant folk dramatic expression of Brazil. Several reisados (pastorinha, zé-do-vale, cavalo marinho, burrinha and others) have been incorporated into the bumba-meu-boi.

Other dramatic dances of indigenous origin, but now rarely performed, include the caiapó, cabocolinhos and some with clearly African features such as the taieira (still known in Sergipe), the quilombo and the lambesujo, all more specifically from the north-eastern states.

Brazil, §II, 3: Traditional music: Luso-Brazilian folk music traditions

(iv) Song genres.

There is a large repertory of monodic songs with a variety of functions in Luso-Brazilian folk music, such as work songs, street-vendors' chants, ballads, love-songs, lullabies, children's songs and laments for the dead. Only a few will be described.

The word romance, of Iberian origin, designates narrative poetry or singing in general. Brazil inherited a rich Iberian romanceiro, or ballad repertory, the majority dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. These ballads seem to have originated mainly in the Minho region of Portugal. They are often used as lullabies, children's game songs, and modinhas. These song genres therefore share many musical traits with the Iberian romances, such as predominating triple metre and minor mode, literary origin, traditional song texts set in quatrains and heptasyllabic lines with consonant rhymes. Ex.26, collected in 1949 in São Paulo state, illustrates the ‘Bela infanta’ theme common in the Iberian ballad. Notable features are the anacrusis and the symmetrical phrase length corresponding to each line of the quatrain. Ballads which deal with animals or celebrated outlaws are quite common, especially in the north-eastern regions. In the romances concerning the cangaceiros (north-eastern bandits) the strength and courage of the characters are always particular subjects of praise. The narrative in such ballads is told in the third person. In the animal cycle, however, the animal is personified and becomes the story-teller. In the romance of the bull Surubim (ex.27) the rhythm, with its syncopations, triplets and dotted figures, is more clearly Brazilian, though it retains some Iberian melodic features.

Many other forms of narrative singing, such as the modas, modas-de-viola, abecês, décimas or xácaras, are closely related to the Iberian ballad. The moda and moda-de-viola are sung as duets in parallel 3rds with viola accompaniment. The singers (modistas) are also viola players. One of the main differences between the southern and northern modistas is that the latter, as part of the cantoria (singing contest) tradition, rely more on improvisation. In addition, the southerners tend to use falsetto more frequently.

The genres known as desafio and embolada, although often appearing as part of dances, are more properly song types. Desafio (literally ‘challenge’) is a song genre (also common in southern Europe), in which two or more singers compete to show their skill in improvisation. The contest lasts until one of the singers can no longer respond or gives up. Text improvisation is considered the primary point of interest of the desafio, while the melody is subordinate. The textual form is generally the quatrain, the last line of which often becomes the first of the respondent's quatrain. The melodic structure of desafios tends to be simple, with melodic sequences and isometric rhythm, to allow proper attention to text improvisation and delivery. Desafios are particularly popular in the north-eastern hinterland, the area of cantoria (singing contest) par excellence.

Embolada, a musical-poetic form often associated with northern dances such as the cocos, alternates a fixed refrain with stanzas (sometimes improvised). It consists of a recitative-like melody with small intervals, repeated notes and small note values. The text, often comic and satirical, stresses onomatopoeia and alliteration which, with a fast tempo, enhance the rhythm of the song. The embolada is also frequently associated with other contexts involving singing but not dance, such as the desafio. A large repertory of children's game songs is found throughout the country. Many have retained Portuguese, Spanish and French melodies. One of the most traditional round-games is the ciranda or cirandinha, similar to the ‘Ring-a-Ring of Roses’ game, accompanied by the melody shown in ex.28, known with slight variants in both Brazil and Portugal. Other songs for round-games exhibit more typically Brazilian traits such as systematic syncopated rhythm.

Although the modern age of machinery has partially modified the custom of singing at work, radio music often taking its place, some work songs continue to be sung. The aboios (cattle herding songs) are quite widespread, as are the songs of river-boat workers, fishermen and those who work on rice, coffee and cotton plantations.

There are two types of aboio: the aboio de roça and the aboio de gado. The former is always sung in duet, to a text in the form of statement and answer, when one or more cowboys lead the herd and the others follow behind it. The latter is a solo song, sung to a single syllable, to quieten the cattle in the corral. The north-eastern aboios are characterized by ornamental melodic lines, wide range and frequent use of falsetto.

Of the various death rites, the velório or wake is the most important. In the northern states wake songs or laments are known as incelências or excelências, and are of Portuguese origin. They are sung around the dead body and are believed, in some areas, to help the departed enter heaven. Up to 12 lines are sung, unaccompanied and generally in unison. Wake prayers, however, such as those for cleaning and dressing the corpse, are in parallel 3rds. Other wake songs function as a ‘farewell’ to the dead.

(i) Dances and dramatic dances.

4. Afro-Brazilian folk music traditions.

The main geographical zones of Afro-Brazilian culture include the states of Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, southern Goiás, Rio de Janeiro and northern São Paulo. It is practically impossible to point out specific African cultural origins of most Afro-Brazilian musical genres, since several African cultures were in close contact from the outset of the slave trade. It is generally recognized, however, that most Afro-Brazilian secular music is of Bantu origin, while Yoruba and Fon influences are particularly noticeable in religious beliefs and music. Just as blacks participate in most of the dramatic dances already described, there are likewise specifically black festivities in which mestizos and whites also take part. While black music in Brazil has stylistic features which can be traced to West Africa, the actual repertories were, in all probability, created locally. African counterparts have been found for only a few religious melodies, though it is possible that Brazil may have retained African songs which have since disappeared in Africa itself.

In spite of its heterogeneous cultural origins, black folk music in Brazil became homogeneous during its four centuries of history. What developed during the slavery period into a new black culture resulted from the conditions of plantation slave quarters. The new form of black and anti-white solidarity which emerged out of these conditions helped to preserve cultural traits that still survive. Thus religious beliefs and practices in Brazil are still the most truly ‘African’ to be found in the Western hemisphere.

(ii) Song genres.

(iii) Religious music.

Brazil, §II, 4: Traditional music: Afro-Brazilian folk music traditions

(i) Dances and dramatic dances.

The black contribution to and influence on Brazilian folkdances is paramount. This is reflected not only in the large number of Afro-Brazilian dances, both rural and urban, but also in the assimilation and resulting transformation of European dances. Choreographic elements of such dances include round formation, usually with soloists, and a particular trait known as umbigada (from Portuguese umbigo: ‘navel’). This is an ‘invitation to the dance’ symbolized by the touching of the couples' navels. It may be taken as an indication of the origin of the dances.

Because music and dance are often inseparable the name of a dance is also applied to the music it accompanies, thus becoming a generic term, of which batuque and samba represent the most obvious examples. Both have come to designate genres of secular dance and music of Brazilian blacks. The caxambu, jongo, côco, baiano (baião) and formerly the lundu and sarambeque, with numerous regional names, are among the most important other dance genres. Generally considered a round-dance of Angolese or Congolese origin, the batuque is no longer performed and the term has acquired the more general connotation of Afro-Brazilian dance accompanied by heavy percussion. In São Paulo state it is a dance of Afro-Brazilian fetishistic cults, without any apparent liturgical function. The accompanying instruments include drums (tambu, quinjengue) and rattles (matraca, guiaiá). The dance itself is not a round-dance, but consists of umbigadas between two facing lines of dancers, males on one side, females on the other. Individual couples dance between the rows. Responsorial singing accompanies the dance. The singers are called modista or carreirista according to the type of song they improvise. The modista sings quatrains referring to community events or gossip, while the carreirista's songs, called porfias, are hostile and challenging. Improvisation and responsorial singing are not necessarily opposed practices, since the chorus tends to repeat literally or with slight variants the improvised two lines of the quatrain. Before the dance begins, the song is rehearsed collectively for 10 to 20 minutes. In addition, the modista or carreirista and the chorus all consult together regarding the general outline of song text and method of performance.

There are many varieties of samba. As a folkdance it has lost its former importance in most parts of the country, having been replaced by the urban samba. The folk samba in the southern-central regions is known as samba-lenço, samba de roda and samba campineiro. The samba-lenço involves dancers with a kerchief in their hand; the choreographic arrangement is similar to that of the batuque. At the beginning of the dance two singers, accompanied on snare drums and tambourines, sing in parallel 3rds. The songs are usually eight bars long, in duple metre, with an anacrusis, a range of up to an octave, descending motion with repeated notes and isometric rhythm (ex.29). Syncopations often associated with black music prevail here in the accompaniment alone. Song texts are in the form of quatrains.

The samba campineiro was studied by Mário de Andrade (1937), who preferred the simple designation ‘Paulista rural samba’. Andrade observed that in São Paulo the samba is defined by its choreography rather than by its musical structure. This dance does not include the umbigada and is thus essentially collective in character. Apart from the instrumentalists (who also dance) the participants are women. The main instrument is the bombo (large drum), often accompanied by tambourine, snare drum, tamborim, cuíca, reco-reco and guiaiá. Structurally this samba shows the following traits: arched melody in 2/4 metre; characteristic rhythmic figuration (ex.30); strophic form and variable text form; repetition of words or lines to conform to the melodic length; and relative importance of improvisation.

The samba de roda in São Paulo has lost its former importance, but in the north-eastern region (especially the state of Bahia) it is still the most popular type of folkdance. As the name indicates, it is a round-dance involving soloists; its function is purely recreational. The instrumental ensemble includes atabaques played with the hands, tambourines, cowbell and occasionally guitars. Traditionally singing precedes the dance itself, but the song has now become an integral part of the dance. The most typical samba de roda songs display an unmistakably Brazilian flavour, characterized by four- or eight-bar phrases, repeated notes, isometric rhythmic figures and abundant syncopations in the accompaniment. The tunes frequently end on the mediant or dominant. Two different types of samba de roda are shown in ex.31.

Another genre of samba particular to the Bahian region (specifically the recôncavo, the area around the Bay of Todos os Santos), is the samba de viola, studied by R.C. Waddey and T. de Oliveira Pinto. As the name indicates, the viola is the main instrument. The presence of this instrument in a most typical Afro-Bahian genre, performed by Afro-Bahians, shows that the instrument of Portuguese origin has become equally Afro-Brazilian. The Bahian viola is hand-made in two sizes: three-quarter (90 cm long) and the machete (76 cm long), both with five double courses of metal strings. As a rule, the percussion of the ensemble includes two ot three tambourines, a small drum and sometimes the prato-e-faca, a common plate (preferably enamelware), held in one hand and scraped with a table knife. Instrumentalists (all male) also participate in the singing. The songs (both melodies and song texts are referred to as chulas) are performed in parallel 3rds and in a very high tessitura. The dancers tend to be exclusively women.

Jongo, a dance of African origin (from Angola according to some authors), survives in a few places in the southern-central states, where there was formerly a large black slave population. It is social and recreational. Men and women participate in both solo dancing and round-dancing (always anticlockwise). The singing and the texts are referred to as pontos, as in several Afro-Brazilian religious groups. The dance is usually accompanied by the same instruments used for the batuque and the rural samba. In São Paulo state the singing is performed by a cantador, sometimes helped by a second voice (in parallel 3rds), and answered by the chorus consisting of the dancers themselves. Most of the pontos seem to be improvised; these include the pontos de desafio (challenging songs) with enigmatic texts and the pontos de visaria or songs to accompany the dance. Pontos may have one or two voltas (two-line verses). The most common traits of jongo songs include two-bar repeated isometric phrases, prevailing conjunct motion, parallel singing and syncopated percussion accompaniment (ex.32).

The côco is a dance of the poorer people in northern and north-eastern Brazil, and is so called because it is commonly accompanied by hand-clapping with hands cupped to create a lower sound, like that of two halves of a coconut shell sounded against each other. Occasionally a drum or a rattle may be used, in which case the dance is named after the instrument: côco-de-canzá, côco-de-mugonguê etc. In the northern states different names refer to the type of song associated with the côco, such as côco-de-décima, côco-de-embolada, côco-desafio. The choreography dictates the alternation of stanza and refrain in the song, as a solo dancer in the middle of the circle improvises a stanza and is answered by the other dancers. A common trait of côco song melodies is the peculiar rhythm of short note values (generally semiquavers in 2/4 time) repeated continually, resulting in a sort of moto perpetuo.

The maracatu dance–procession is specifically associated with Carnival in the city of Recife in Pernambuco. Its origin seems to be related to the festivities for the coronation of black kings, first mentioned in 1711. Formerly maracatu was purely religious and was closely related to the Afro-Brazilian cult of Xangô, but this function seems to have been lost, for it now consists of an organized group of Carnival street-dancing merrymakers. The main characters include the king, queen, princes, ambassador, dama-do-paço (‘court lady’) and the baianas, or female dancers. The ‘court lady’ is the central figure of the royal parade, as she carries the calunga, a small doll dressed in white, which represents a relic of fetishistic cult and a symbol of authority or priestly power. The various toadas (songs) of the dance and procession frequently allude to African deities. Songs and dances are related to the calunga on which the attention of all participants is focussed. The accompanying ensemble consists of percussion instruments, various types of drum (tarol, caixas, zabumbas) and the gonguê or agogô (cowbell); the different timbres enhance the polyrhythmic texture of the ensemble. The rhythm of the songs also displays systematic syncopation, as illustrated in ex.33. Probably of similar origin to the maracatu is the afoxé from Bahia which, however, retains more clearly African elements, such as singing in Yoruba language (Nagô), and typically Afro-Brazilian ritual practices in the preparation of the dance-parade.

Although considered primarily as an athletic game and a martial art by some authors, the capoeira angola – a mock fight involving several dance figures – also has ritual overtones. Most capoeiristas (fighters) are cult men and observe their prescribed ritual behaviour in the practice of capoeira. The various dance figures or ‘strokes’ are accompanied by songs in responsorial fashion and by an instrumental ensemble consisting of two or more berimbaus (musical bows), caxixi (basket rattle), reco-reco or ganzá, tambourines and conga drum. Specific rhythmic patterns, with names such as São Bento grande, São Bento pequeno, Benguela, Cavalaria, Santa Maria, Angola etc., correspond to specific ‘strokes’ of the dance. About 139 songs of the capoeira game have been collected in Bahia, but not all belong to the traditional repertory of the dance, many having been borrowed from children's round-game songs or samba de roda song repertories. In these songs it is not uncommon to find the same type of syncopation applied to both vocal line and instrumental accompaniment. In the latter, the harmonic support of the musical bows is notable; since each instrument is capable of producing two adjacent notes, three bows can provide parallel harmonies repeated at will (ex.34). In the 1960s capoeira performances were limited to about a dozen songs, as the performance venues became restricted to restaurants and other tourist attractions. Another Afro-Brazilian fighting dance is the maculelê, strongly reminiscent of black African stick-fighting dances. The sticks are used as mock weapons and as a percussion instrument.

Brazil, §II, 4: Traditional music: Afro-Brazilian folk music traditions

(ii) Song genres.

It is difficult to isolate specific song genres peculiar to the Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage. Most of the songs described in §3(iv) are also sung by blacks and mestizos. In addition, there are a few song genres that are autonomous, that is, existing outside their function in a given dance or dramatic dance. Among these song types are work songs, lullabies and, above all, songs related to Afro-Brazilian religions. Fishermen's songs in the fishing area of the north-eastern coast reveal some stylistic traits which could be attributed to an African origin. These include pentatonic scales, E modes, descending or undulating melodic movement and frequent syncopations. The songs of the puxada da rêde or xaréu (the pulling of the fishnet), on the other hand, have the same general characteristics observed in Brazilian mestizo music. Ex.35 shows the same anacrusis, repeated notes, isometric rhythm and tonal feeling of so many other song types mentioned above.

Brazil, §II, 4: Traditional music: Afro-Brazilian folk music traditions

(iii) Religious music.

The extremely rich and varied repertory of religious music is primarily of Afro-Brazilian origin. Although it is in a sacred context that African musical elements are most strongly preserved, syncretism has affected not only religious beliefs and practices but also the music associated with them. Among the most African cults are the Ketu (or Nagô) and Jesha (Yoruba), the Gêge (Fon of Benin) and the Congo-Angola, found in the northern and north-eastern states. The least African groups are the Caboclos (derived from some Amerindian beliefs combined with those of other cult groups), Pajelança, and the Umbanda and Quimbanda, found mainly in the central and southern regions, though Umbanda has now penetrated practically everywhere.

Candomblé is the term used specifically in Bahia to designate various religious groups of African origin. As a result of the contact of several prevailing African cultures in Bahia, candomblé became a sort of cultural synthesis of the West African mythological world. Most candomblé houses in Bahia worship the major Yoruba and Fon deities (orixás and voduns) as opposed to the West African practice in which a religious centre (and sometimes an entire village) is dedicated to the worship of one particular orixá or vodun. The earliest establishment of the Yoruba slaves' religious organization in Bahia is difficult to determine accurately. According to local oral sources it was around 1830 that the first cult centre was founded in Salvador by three African priestesses. This centre, of Ketu affiliation, was known as Ilê Iyá Nassô, and from it originated the largest and best-known houses of worship during the 20th century, especially the Engenho Velho (also known as Casa Branca), the Gantois, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá and the Alaketo.

The most obvious stylistic trait common to the music of all these groups is monophonic singing and the predominant use of call and response patterns. In addition, the singing is accompanied by an ensemble usually consisting of three drums (atabaques of varying sizes) and an agogô (cowbell) or a shaken rattle. Leader and chorus often sing the same tune, sometimes related tunes. Quite often soloist and chorus overlap. Melodies are often anhemitonic pentatonic in the most traditional repertories, and diatonic (heptatonic) in the most acculturated ones. The ranges of the melodies are not uniform. The Gêge and Ketu cults of Bahia, for example, have many songs with a wide range of more than an octave, while those of the Angola and Jesha cults in the same area average less than an octave. Melodic contours tend to be descending in all repertories, with undulating movements also characteristic of the Ketu and Gêge repertories. Almost all the songs in all the groups are strophic.

Cycles of songs are performed in a ritual order, dictated by their function. There are food-offering songs, sacrificial songs, plant songs, initiation songs, death songs etc. A multitude of songs addressed to the many deities of West African mythology form the bulk of the repertories. Song texts appear in many languages, from Yoruba (Nagô), Fon and various Congo dialects to Portuguese, and a combination of all of these.

Drumming constitutes one of the most important musical elements of Afro-Brazilian religious music. Drums are considered sacred instruments and undergo ‘baptism’ by means of animal sacrifices and food-offering. Since they are believed to have the power to communicate with the deities, the drum's axé (or spiritual force) is ritually renewed at least once a year. There is a great deal of drum music for drums alone. Besides providing the basis for the many ritual dances, drum music ‘calls’ the gods and brings on spirit ‘possession’. In the Ketu cult specific rhythmic patterns are associated with certain deities, such as the alujá of Xangô, the opanijé of Omolú, the aguerê of Iansã and Oxossi, and the igbim of Oxalá. Cross-rhythms and polyrhythms predominate. The metres are most commonly duple but often also triple, with frequent hemiolas; a subtle duple-triple ambivalence is also characteristic. The master drummer playing the largest drum (rum) of the trio improvises upon the characteristic rhythms and at the same time controls the choreographic development of the ritual dances. Exx. 36 and 37 illustrate some of the characteristics of Afro-Brazilian cult songs. Few of these songs are known in West Africa, although their style is unmistakably African. Among the most acculturated groups (Caboclo, Umbanda) the repertories seem to be constantly changing and tend to be heavily influenced by urban popular music.

Brazil

III. Popular music

Since the latter part of the 19th century Brazil has developed one of the richest and most varied and unique traditions of popular music in Latin America. Several trends and genres since the 1960s have become an integral part of the international world music market and have influenced the USA, Portugal and other European countries, as well as some African countries. There is no single Brazilian popular music but various expressions associated with specific social classes, regions and historical periods. The main sources of such musics are predominantly European, Afro-Brazilian and mestizo. Influences from American Tin Pan Alley songs, dance music, jazz, rock and more specific black American genres, as well as Caribbean popular music (especially from Cuba, Dominican Republic and Jamaica) have been felt in Brazil

1. Early styles.

2. Urban sambas and related genres.

3. Bossa nova.

4. Tropicália.

5. Milton nascimento.

6. Dance music of the north and north-east.

1. Early styles.

The belle époque of Brazilian popular music took place in and around the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia, from about 1870 to about 1920, when the 1888 abolition of slavery led to wholesale migration from the rural areas to the towns. During this 50-year period, an increasing diversification of musical forms, rhythms and social contexts for popular music consumption resulted in the emergence of the most important vocal, instrumental and dance genres developed during the first half of the 20th century.

Salon music of the 19th century was represented by the sentimental song known as Modinha, the stylization of the lundu, an earlier dance of Afro-Brazilian origin, as lundu-canção (lundu-song) and the adaptation of a number of European fashionable dances, especially the polka, waltz, schottish and quadrille. Modinhismo was the term used by Mário de Andrade to encompass the repertory of romantic, sentimental songs of European derivation which remained visible in numerous subsequent genres of popular songs. Besides Domingo Caldas Barbosa, composer of famous modinhas and lundus, some of the most celebrated 19th-century popular composers included Domingos da Rocha Mussurunga, José de Souza Aragão (‘Cazuzinha’), Xisto de Paula Bahia, Francisco Magalhães Cardoso, Joaquim Manoel, José Pereira Rebouças and especially Cândido Inácio da Silva. Their works were frequently performed in the aristocratic salons and in popular theatres (teatro de revista) of the period, which represented one of the major venues for the dissemination of popular music among the urban middle class.

From about 1850 the European waltz and polka became ‘brazilianized’, the former under the influence of the modinha and the latter combining with certain rhythmic traits of the lundu to form the hybrid polca-lundu, the source of the tango brasileiro and the Maxixe. Waltzes, polkas and quadrilles written for the piano were frequently adapted for plays and comedies, notably by the pianist-composer Antonio F. Cardoso de Menezes e Sousa. Likewise, the generic canção and cançoneta (which represented the lyric, romantic song) was hybridized with tango-habanera rhythmic accompaniment as tango-cançoneta. Popular singers of the early 20th century, especially Mário Pinheiro (c1880–1923), Baiano (Manuel Pedro dos Santos, 1870–1944), Cadete (Evênio da Costa Moreira, 1874–1960) and Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919), began recording many of these vocal genres, some as early as 1902. Later singer-idols of various songs, operettas and fashionable urban sambas were Vicente Celestino (1887–1968) and Francisco Alves (1898–1952).

The most successful and prolific composer of theatre pieces (operetta, burlesque, vaudeville and musical comedy), polkas, waltzes, songs, modinhas, tangos and choros was Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847–1935), who overcame the prejudices against female musicians and composers both of her family and more generally the period. Together with Joaquim Antônio da Silva Calado and Ernesto Nazareth, she contributed substantially to the nationalization of European dances. Her polka Atraente (1877), for example, effectively imitated the type of picturesque improvisation associated with popular strolling musicians known as chorões (‘weepers’) and their instrumental ensembles (Choro). This improvisatory style was made up of typical running figures including broken-chord patterns with repeated notes, descending chromatic notes in the accompaniment and isometric figures. She also systemized the use of the habanera rhythmic pattern, with subtle variations and syncopated patterns (such as the semiquaver–quaver–semiquaver pattern in a 2/4 metre), characteristic of later dance music genres. Chiquinha Gonzaga wrote the first carnival dance of national interest in 1899 for the black Carnival society Rosa de Ouro. This was the march O abre alas! which for several decades symbolized Rio de Janeiro's carnival.

It was, however, with the works of the pianist-composer Ernesto Nazareth that a deeper transformation of European dances into genuinely Brazilian popular genres was achieved.

2. Urban sambas and related genres.

Although the first acknowledged successful commercial recording in Brazil of an urban Samba is generally said to have been Pelo Telefone (1917) by the composer Donga (Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos, 1891–1974), the antecedents of the most typical urban dance–song of Brazil date from the turn of the 20th century. At that time, however, ‘samba’, as labelled by leaders of small town brass bands, did not differ markedly from the tango or the maxixe, except to imply a more systematically syncopated accompanimental rhythm. Pelo telefone, a hit of the 1917 Carnival celebration, while registered as ‘samba’, still had the shuffling rhythmic feel associated with the maxixe. It is quite likely that the folk samba, a round dance involving dancing couples performing the umbigada in typical round choreographic figures (especially associated with Rio de Janeiro and Bahia), was the model developed in the urban areas. The call-and-response performing style and corresponding stanza and refrain alternation cultivated in the samba de morro (from the poor hill areas of the city, known as favelas) and the partido alto (brought to Rio from Bahia at the beginning of the century) subsequently influenced numerous urban samba styles developed in the 1920s. As a generic type of urban music, the samba is essentially a vocal dance genre, with a few exclusively instrumental subgenres such as the samba-choro and samba de gafieira. The urban samba became established in Rio during the 1920s, especially through the compositions of Sinhô (José Barbosa da Silva, 1888–1930), the ‘king of samba’, Caninha (Oscar José Luiz de Morais, 1883–1961), Ismael Silva (1905–78) and Pixinguinha (Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho, 1898–1973). All represented a professionalized group of lower middle-class black composer–performers who were well acquainted with the musical traditions of the poorer sections of the city. Sinhô composed the greatest carnival hits of the late 1910s and the 1920s, such as the sambas Quem São Eles (1918), Confessa, meu bem (1919), Fala, meu louro (1920), Amor sem dinheiro (1926), Ora, vejam só! (1927) and Amar a uma só mulher (1928), in addition to carnival marches. Caninha's sambas Me leve, me leve, seu Rafael and Esta nêga quer me dar were among the hits of the 1920 and 1921 carnival seasons, respectively. As a composer, flautist, saxophonist, bandleader and arranger, Pixinguinha had an enormous influence. His bands Os Oito Batutas (first organized in 1919), Orquestra Típica Pixinguinha-Donga (1928) and Guarda Velha (1931) brought together some of the best popular musicians of the period and contributed to unique performance styles that became classic. Guarda Velha put more emphasis on brass and achieved a perfect balance between virtuoso solo performances and deeper concern for ensemble playing.

During the 1930s a number of white middle-class professional composers contributed to the development of the urban samba. Particularly significant and creative were Ari Barroso (1903–64), Noel Rosa (1910–37), Lamartine Babo (1904–63) and João de Barro (Alberto Ferreira Braga, b 1907, also known as ‘Braguinha’). Not only did they all compose sambas and marches for carnival that enjoyed lasting popularity but they also created some of the most famous tunes associated with the sophisticated samba-choro, samba-canção (samba-song of sentimental character) and ballroom or nightclub sambas. This was the period during which the samba became more diversified as a result of its acceptance by the various local strata. Noel Rosa especially excelled in reflecting some of the typical attributes and feelings of urban popular figures, as in Feitiço da vila, Palpite infeliz and Fita amarela. Among other genres, he especially cultivated and developed the samba de breque (samba brecado), a subgenre of the urban samba involving everyday colloquial lyrics with a characteristic break (breque) and a corresponding interruption of the melodic line, that appears to be extemporized on a humorous or joking note. Notable examples include De babado, Conversa de botequim and Três apitos. The 1930s represented the golden period of the classic urban samba, followed by the creation of other subgenres beginning in the 1940s, such as the strictly instrumental, highly syncopated samba de gafieira, created by dance orchestras in gafieiras (popular dance halls) and cabarets. While large jazz-like orchestras performing arrangements of classic samba tunes for dance occasions developed in the 1940s and 50s, the influence of modern jazz small combos was particularly felt in the so-called samba–jazz of the 1950s. The best-known performers of the classic commercial samba from the 1930s to the 1950s were Carmen Miranda (1909–55), Francisco Alves, Mário Reis (1907–81), Sílvio Caldas (1908–98), and Elizeth Cardoso (1920–90).

The co-existence of various samba subgenres, from the samba de morro and samba-enredo, associated with Carnival and the samba school, to the [samba de partido alto], samba-canção, sambolero and sambalada, among others, clearly manifested the social acceptance of the samba, in its varied expressions, as the national dance music. It also reflected the strong social stratification prevailing in the large cities of the post-World War II era. In Rio de Janeiro especially, urban geography created a pronounced social separation, with the poor living in the northern areas and hilly ghettos and the rich along the southern beach districts from Leme to Leblon, where the famous bossa nova movement was born in the late 1950s.

3. Bossa nova.

It is important to remember that Bossa nova does not constitute a special genre of Brazilian popular music, but rather a characteristic performance style of established genres. The very first recording (1952) in Rio by João Gilberto (b 1931), one of the early and most influential bossa nova figures, originally from the interior of the state of Bahia, comprised two pieces in the samba-canção genre, composed by musicians of the younger generation. In the late 1950s and early 60s, most of the bossanovistas were in their late teens and early twenties and belonged to the middle and upper-middle classes. Their musical tastes gave preference to a combination of samba-canção as performed by the great female vocalists Dolores Duran, Maysa and Sylvinha Telles (the creators of the so-called Brazilian blues); the music of various jazz figures, especially the voices of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, the cool style of Miles Davis and the sophisticated and subtle harmonies of Joe Mooney; and some of the classic sambas of the 1930s. The bossanovistas looked to innovatory expressions that would renovate and modernize Brazilian popular music. Young jazz enthusiasts in Rio and São Paulo were involved at that time in the creation of a ‘samba jazz’ tradition, in a jazz combo format, which represented a natural ingredient of the bossa nova movement. This was not, however, a simple imitation of American jazz or, as José Ramos Tinhorão has reiterated since 1966, the capitulation of Brazilian musicians faced with international market pressure for fashionable and commercially viable genres and styles. To interpret bossa nova as a repudiation of the heritage of the popular samba and the result of socio-cultural alienation suggests a short-sighted perspective on the motivation for musical change. In effect, bossa nova represented a revolutionary innovation only in its new rhythmic rendition of the samba beat, the nature and quality of its lyrics and its general performance practice.

In the opinion of some critics, the poetic sophistication of bossa nova song texts alienated the cultivators of the new style from popular cultural roots. Thematically, however, the subject matter of early bossa nova songs differed little from previous songs, covering amatory topics (e.g. Jobim's O nosso amor, written with the great poet Vinicius de Morais for the 1958 film Orfeu da Conceição [‘Black Orpheus’]), devotion to nature mixed with romantic introspection (Jobim's Corcovado), philosophical commentaries (Jobim's Chega de Saudade, Desafinado, Discussão and Samba de uma nota só) and narratives describing typical local figures or dances in the context of urban life (Jobim's Garota de Ipanema and Samba do avião). Traditional romantic love themes continued to represent by far the majority of bossa nova songs, which inherited such themes from previous popular genres, especially the samba-canção.

But if the thematic categories did not change radically, the poetic substance and treatment involved drastic innovations. Beginning in the 1950s with poets of the calibre of Vinicius de Morais, bossa nova music of the 1960s and 70s counted on the unprecedented poetic refinement and creative originality of such composer-poets as Newton Mendonça, Chico Buarque, Capinam, Torquato Neto, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. The deliberately intimate character of bossa nova expression called not only for simplicity of language (reinforced by colloquialism), but also for the specific sound effects of the words, showing some affinity with Brazilian concrete poetry of the 1960s. This remarkable preoccupation with the language's sounds was also reflected in the close relationship of text and melody in many songs, where the lyrics do not seem to have been conceived separately from the music itself. Of all bossa nova composers, Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927–94) was the most creative and internationally successful.

Until 1964, the year of the military take-over in Brazil, bossa nova aesthetic ideals remained unchanged. After that time, however, a new social awareness developed among bossa nova musicians. The best example of a musician–poet with enormously creative powers and a vivid social consciousness is Chico Buarque (b 1944), the son of one of Brazil's most noted historians. In 1965 his first songs Pedro Pedreiro, and Sonho de um carnaval brought him public recognition. Sonho de um carnaval, more than any song of the bossa nova repertory at that time, established a clear and clever link with the traditional samba of the 1930s and 40s and carnival music in general. Pedro Pedreiro, on the other hand, initiated among bossa nova musicians the trend towards social participation and protest. Other songs of the same year (e.g. João do Vale's Carcará which launched the singing career of Maria Bethania) also belonged to this general category of social protest songs, but most frequently the protest took the form of exposing some of the social problems of under-development, hunger and injustice in the distant hinterland of the north-east. With Pedro Pedreiro Chico Buarque took issue with the urban conditions of north-eastern migrant workers in large southern cities, revealing an understanding of the conditions of the urban working class. The concentrated poetic language full of emotional impact exhibited in this song became highly sophisticated in later songs, particularly Construção of 1971.

Chico Buarque's position in the ‘modern’ movement of Brazilian popular music (referred to as MMPB for Moderna Música Popular Brasileira) has been variously interpreted, most critics arguing that his ability with lyrics rather than his actual music is the source of his popularity. He is, however, unique as a composer of the second bossa nova generation in that he succeeded in assimilating and maintaining the essential melodic and rhythmic aspects of the classic sambas of Noel Rosa, and thus established the continuity of the tradition, in contrast to the first generation of bossa nova musicians. In many of his later songs he advocated in lyrical and poetic ways a subtle action of subversion and anarchy as the only response to Brazil's contemporary problems, which led to the censorship of so many of his songs by the military regimes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

4. Tropicália.

Around the mid-1960s a group of musician-poet-performers known as Tropicália, mostly from Bahia, emerged on the Brazilian scene. Including such different personalities as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, José Carlos Capinam, Torquato Neto, Tom Zé, the bossa nova singer Nara Leão and the composer-arranger Rogério Duprat, the group's essential common denominator came from the adherence of its members to the basic concepts of modernismo set forth in the 1920s by such literary philosophical figures as Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade. In the words of Caetano Veloso, the theoretical spokesman and leader of the group, Tropicália or tropicalismo was neo-cultural cannibalism or anthropophagism. Influenced by the French Dadaists whose manifesto was written ten years earlier and consisted of a violent attack on Western thought, Oswald de Andrade's own manifesto (Manifesto antropofágico, 1928) appeared as a tropical adaptation of Dadaist dissension, questioning the imposition of the European element in Brazilian culture and the ensuing destruction of native cultural values. The question was whether or not one should return to native cultures still found in a state of purity, or whether one should acquire the tools and skills of other cultures. While Andrade attempts no clear-cut answer, he points out the apparent contradictions and contrasts of the Brazilian reality. For the Tropicália musicians, this was a justification of the absorption of foreign musical experience adapted to the needs of the moment and a recognition of the international dimension of Brazilian popular culture of the period. Such a recognition, however, neither implied a simple imitation of foreign models nor resulted from the influence of international mass culture, as several critics believed at the time (Tinhorão, 1974, p.234). For the Tropicália group, modernism not only signified revitalization through innovations of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) , but also the definite involvement of its members in prevailing socio-political conditions. Setting out to shock deliberately and to concertedly denounce the contradictions in Western thought, their aim was to awaken the consciousness of the middle class to the Brazilian tragedy of poverty, exploitation and oppression and to point out the true nature of modern Brazil.

Musically, the movement brought about the widening of the Brazilian musical horizon through adherence to and adaptation of musical trends of the 1960s: the rock and Beatles phenomena and the experimental new musics of the electronic age. Rock music penetrated the Brazilian scene during the period 1964–6 and had, in Roberto Carlos, the local translator of that youth movement. The ‘iê, iê, iê’ style, as it was known in Brazil (from the famous refrain of the Beatles' song She loves you), revealed the prevailing strong prejudices against international pop music, and its popularity among the Brazilian Jovem guarda (‘Young Guard’) was seen as a threat to the traditional values of popular music. This in itself stimulated the early recognition by the tropicalistas of the validity of the Young Guard as an integral part of modern Brazilian popular culture. Roberto Carlos himself has pointed to the influence of the ‘iê, iê, iê’ style on Caetano Veloso's music of the 1960s, particularly in his incorporation of electric and bass guitars as well as his imitation of some rhythmic and arrangement models. Tropicália, with its musical and textual sophistication, however, had no counterpart in Brazilian rock music.

As one of the musical goals of Tropicália was to liberate Brazilian music from a restrictive system of prejudice by creating the appropriate conditions for freedom and experimentation, all music sources relevant to contemporary Brazil were drawn together: Luso-Brazilian, Afro-Brazilian folk music expressions, bossa nova samba of the early phase, ‘iê, iê, iê’ and elements of jazz and experimental musics. Simultaneously occurring musical quotations, collages of sound associations and sound montages, all techniques previously deemed to be irreconcilable and meaningless, essentially constituted the empirical approach of the Tropicália musicians to music composition. The language of the song texts is frequently telegraphic, fragmentary and based on quotations, associations or deliberate distortions of famous examples of Brazilian belles-lettres. Representative early examples are Veloso's Alegria, alegria, Tropicália, Baby and Gilberto Gil's Domingo no parque and Geléia geral, the latter with text by Torquato Neto. Most of these songs were first released on the 1968 Tropicália manifesto album entitled Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis. By about 1972 the Tropicália group no longer existed but most of its members continued to be active.

5. Milton nascimento.

A highly distinctive and individual figure among popular musicians of his generation is Milton Nascimento (b 1942), whose powerful and remarkably versatile virtuoso voice and the uniqueness of his compositions won him international acclaim in the 1970s and 80s. His music combines many different elements: from the folk music traditions of Minas Gerais (where he was brought up) and other regions of Brazil and Latin America, to classic and bossa nova sambas, colonial church music, classical music compositional processes, Gregorian chant and soft rock, all with kaleidoscopic rhythms and polychromatic orchestration. In addition to the poetic and spiritual evocation of the history and culture of Minas Gerais, his songs frequently address social relationships, issues of repression and liberty at the time of the military regime (although his is never an overt protest music), questions of justice and self-determination in sister countries in Latin America (especially Chile and Cuba), international brotherhood and the oppression, persecution and liberation of Afro-Brazilians (as in his famous Missa dos Quilombos).

6. Dance music of the north and north-east.

Beginning in the late 1940s, several north-eastern dance music genres, especially from the states of Pernambuco, Ceará and Bahia, became part of the national popular music scene thanks to extraordinary figures such as Luiz Gonzaga (1912–89), Dorival Caymmi (b 1914), Jackson do Pandeiro (José Gomes Filho, 1919–82), João do Vale (1934–96), Alceu Valença (b 1946) and Geraldo Azevedo (b 1945), among others. Gonzaga popularized the baião dance–song in the late 1940s and the 1950s, with its typical instrumentation of keyboard accordion, triangle and zabumba (bass drum), akin to the folk ensemble known as terno de zambumba or banda de pífano, without the flute or fife. Out of the baião developed the forró (originally a variation of the baião) which became the generic north-eastern style of dance music, a sort of lively and faster baião. Gonzaga also cultivated the xaxado (a male dance style with shuffling rhythm) attributed to the legendary outlaw Lampião (1898–1934). Gonzaga's songs Baião (1946), Paraíba (1950) and especially the toada (tune, song) Asa branca (1947) have remained some of the most memorable tunes in Brazilian popular music. Likewise, the many songs of Dorival Caymmi, whether modinhas, sambas, fishermen's songs or candomblé-inspired songs, represent the fountain-head of 20th-century Bahian popular music.

Dance music has taken different forms of expression since the 1970s. Particularly significant has been a new and special type of Carnaval music in Salvador, coming out of the afoxé tradition: the bloco afro of the 1980s, associated with a cultural and political movement of black consciousness among young Bahians. Like the afoxés, the blocos afro were carnival organizations that stressed their Afro-Brazilian roots and their relationships to Africa. Ilê Aiyê, the first to be established in 1974, was followed in the early 1980s by Olodum, Badauê, Muzenza, Araketu and others. Their songs evoked the afrocentricity of their origins, stressed the issues of racism and socio-economic injustice, and, in general, described the history and problems of the black world. Their style involved an imitation and transformation (often invented or imagined) of African and Afro-Caribbean models of music, especially Jamaican reggae. Instrumentation was limited to drums and other percussion, accompanied by a responsorial vocal structure. Olodum, in particular, developed new drumming patterns labelled ‘samba-reggae’ by the mid-1980s. The success of the latter was such that commercial bands, such as Banda Mel and Reflexu's, began to specialize in synthesized renditions of the style. Bahian mass-mediated popular music ended up establishing a trend dubbed ‘axé music’, combining various Afro-Bahian styles, bloco afro samba, samba-reggae, ijexá afoxé and occasionally even lambada, best represented in the recordings of Margareth Menezes and Daniela Mercury. In the early 1990s another development coming out of the bloco afro was the so-called timbalada (featuring the timbre of the timbau), which the musician Carlinhos Brown turned into a national style of music.

In the late 1980s many black Brazilian musicians adapted North American pop music trends, such as funk, rap and hip hop. In the mid-1990s, the ‘kings’ of rap in Rio de Janeiro were Willian Santos and Duda (Carlos Eduardo Cardoso Silva), whose raps dealt with the life and conditions of the city's favelas, including drug dealing. The more radical types of funk and rap, however, have served mostly for socio-political messages of local, regional or national issues, as with the rap groups Câmbio Negro (opposed to hip hop) and Chico Science, developing what they called rap consciência (consciousness-rap).

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east., Bibliography

a: general

Grove5 (‘Folk music: Brazilian’; L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo)

F.J. de Santa-Anna Nery: Le folklore brésilien (Paris, 1889)

A.J. Mello Moraes jr, ed.: Cantares brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1900)

R. Almeida: História da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1926, 2/1942)

M. de Andrade: Ensaio sôbre a música brasileira (São Paulo, 1928/R)

M. de Andrade: Pequena história da música (São Paulo, 1929, 8/1977)

J.B. von Spix: Brasilianische Volkslieder und indianische Melodien: Musikbeilage zu Dr. v. Spix und Dr. v. Martius: Reise in Brasilien (Munich, ?1931)

L. Gallet: Estudos de folclore (Rio de Janeiro, 1934)

R. Pinto: Rondônia (São Paulo, 1938)

L. da Câmara Cascudo: Vaqueiros e cantadores (Pôrto Alegre, 1939)

M. de Andrade: Música do Brasil (Curitiba, 1941)

J. Ribeiro: Folclore brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1944)

O. Alvarenga: Melodias registradas pro meios não-mecânicos (São Paulo, 1946)

V. Mariz: A canção brasileira (Oporto, 1948, 4/1980)

H.R. Fernandes Braga: Peculiaridades rítmicas e melódicas do cancioneiro infantil brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1950)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo, C. Person de Matos and M. de Moura Reis: Bibliografia musical brasileira (1820–1950) (Rio de Janeiro, 1952)

A. Maynard Araújo: ‘Instrumentos musicais e implementos: achegas ao folclore paulista’, Revista do Arquivo municipal [São Paulo], no.157 (1953), 147–78

L. da Câmara Cascudo: Dicionário do folclore brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1954, 4/1979)

R. Tavares de Lima: Melodia e rítmo no folclore de São Paulo (São Paulo,1954)

M.A. Corrêa Giffoni: Danças folclóricas brasileiras e suas aplicações educativas (São Paulo, 1955, abridged 3/1973)

M. de Andrade: Danças dramáticas do Brasil (São Paulo, 1959, 2/1982)

D. Martins Lamas: ‘Subsídios para o estudo do cancioneiro sulino’, Revista C.B.M. [Conservatório Brasileiro de Música], nos.9–20 (1960), 246

T. Brandão: Folguedos natalinos em Alagoas (Maceió, 1961, 2/1973)

M. de Andrade: Música de feitiçaria no Brasil (São Paulo, 1963)

J.G. de Souza: ‘Contribuição rítmica modal do canto gregoriano para a música brasileira’, Revista C.B.M. [Conservatório Brasileiro de Música], nos.21–32 (1963), 17–50

M. de Andrade: Aspectos da música brasileira (São Paulo, 1964, 2/1975)

A. Maynard Araújo: Folclore nacional (São Paulo, 1964, 2/1967)

R. Tavares de Lima: ‘Estudos sôbre a viola’, Revista brasileira de folclore, nos.8–10 (1964), 29

W. Ribeiro: Folclore musical (São Paulo, 1965)

R. Tavares de Lima: ‘Música folclórica e instrumentos musicais do Brasil’, Boletín interamericano de música, no.49 (1965), 3–22

J.G. de Souza: Folcmúsica e liturgia (Petrópolis, 1966)

J.G. de Souza: Características da música folclórica brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1969)

R. Tavares de Lima: O folclore do litoral norte de São Paulo, i: Congadas (Rio de Janeiro,1969, enlarged 2/1981)

C. Guerra Peixe: ‘Zabumba, orquestra nordestina’, Revista brasileira de folclore, x (1970), 15–38

B. do Nascimento: Bibliografia do folclore brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1971)

R. Tavares de Lima: Folclore das festas cíclicas (Rio de Janeiro, 1971)

R. Tavares de Lima: Romanceiro folclórico do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1971)

E. Carneiro: Folguedos tradicionais (Rio de Janeiro, 1974)

R.J. de Menezes Bastos: ‘Las músicas tradicionales del Brasil’, RMC, no.125 (1974), 21–77

L. Mota: Violeiros do norte (Brasília, 1976)

L. Rangel: Bibliografia da música popular brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1976)

B. Kiefer: História da música brasileira (Porto Alegre, 1977)

C.A. Colonelli: Bibliografia do folclore brasileiro (São Paulo, 1979)

G.S. Neves: Bandas de congos (Rio de Janeiro, 1980)

V. Salles: A música e o tempo no Grão-Pará (Belém, 1980)

J. de Andrade: Cocho mato-grossense: um alaúde brasileiro (São Paulo, 1981)

D. Mendoza de Arce: ‘A Structural Approach to the Rural Society and Music of the Río de la Plata and Southern Brazil’, LAMR, ii (1981), 66–90

R. Tavares de Lima: O folclore do litoral norte de São Paulo (Rio de Janeiro, 1981)

G. Béhague: ‘Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Brazilian Ethnomusicology: a General View’, LAMR, iii (1982), 17–35

M. Veiga: ‘Marcos aculturativos na etnomusicologia brasileira’, Art: revista da escola de musica e artes cênicas da UFBA, no.6 (1982), 9–50; no.7 (1983), 9–56

V. Mariz: Três musicólogos brasileiros: Mário de Andrade, Renato Almeida, Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo (Rio de Janeiro, 1983)

J.G. de Souza: ‘Os precursores das pesquisas etnomusicais no Brasil’, Boletim da Sociedade Brasileira de Musicologia, i (1983), 53–67

E.B. Basso: A Musical View of the Universe (Philadelphia, 1985)

G. Rouget: Music and Trance: a Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (Chicago, 1985)

V. Salles: Sociedades de Euterpe: as bandas de música no Grão-Pará (Brasília,1985)

K. Setti: Ubatuba nos cantos das praias (São Paulo, 1985)

G. Béhague: ‘Musical Change: a Case Study from South America’, World of Music, xxviii/1 (1986), 16–25

T. de Oliveira Pinto, ed.: Brasilien: Einführung in Musiktraditionen Brasiliens (Mainz, 1986) [incl. E. Travassos: ‘Die Musik der Kayabi: Schamanen- und Kriegslieder’, 14–47; J.M. Tenório Rocha and T. de Oliveira Pinto: ‘Bandas-de-Pífanos, die Instrumental-Ensembles des Nordostens’, 89–107; G. Kubik: ‘Afrikanische Musikkulturen in Brasilien’, 121–47; R.L. Segato and J.J. de Carvalho: ‘Musik der Xangô-Kulte von Recife’, 176–92]

M. de Andrade: Dicionário musical brasileiro (Belo Horizonte, 1989)

G. Béhague: ‘Reflections on the Idealogical History of Latin American Ethnomusicology’,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 56–68

L.N. Crook: Zabumba Music from Caruaru, Pernambuco: Musical Style, Gender, and the Interpenetration of Rural and Urban Worlds (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1991)

J.P. Murphy: Performing a Moral Vision: an Ethnography of Cavalo-Marinho, a Brazilian Musical Drama (New York, 1994)

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east., Bibliography

b: amerindian

K.G. Izikowitz: Musical and Other Sound Instruments of the South American Indians (Göteborg,1934/R)

L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: Escala, ritmo e melodia na música dos indios brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro,1938)

H. Camêu: ‘Música indígena’, Revista brasileira de folclore, no.4 (1962), 23

I. Halmos: ‘Melody and Form in the Music of the Nambicuara Indians, Mato Grosso, Brazil’, SM, vi (1964), 317–56

E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Music of the Makuschi, Taulipang and Yekuana’, Inter-American Music Bulletin, no.71 (1969), 4–42

D. Ribeiro: Os indios e a civilização (Rio de Janeiro, 1970)

M. de L. Bandeira: Os Kariris de Mirandela: um grupo indígena integrado (Salvador, 1972)

H. Camêu: Introdução ao estudo da música indígena brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1977)

R.J. de Menezes Bastos: A musicológica Kamayurá (Brasília, 1978)

A. Seeger: ‘Sing for your Sister: the Structure and Performance of Suyá akia’,The Ethnography of Musical Performance, ed. N. McLeod and M. Herndon (Norwood, PA, 1980), 7–42; repr. in A Century of Ethnomusicological Thought, ed. K. Kaufman Shelemay (New York, 1990), 269–304

D. Aytai: ‘A música instrumental Xavante’, LAMR, ii (1981), 103–29

M. Veiga: Toward a Brazilian Ethnomusicology: Amerindian Phases (Los Angeles, 1981)

D. Aytai: O mundo sonoro Xavante (São Paulo, 1985)

L. Graham: ‘Semanticity and Melody: Parameters of Contrast in Shavante Vocal Expression’, LAMR, v (1986), 161–85

R.J. de Menezes Bastos: ‘Música, cultura, sociedade no Alto-Xingu: a teoria musical dos indios Kamayurá’, LAMR, vii (1986), 51–81

A. Seeger: Why Suyá Sing: a Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge,1987)

V. Fuks: ‘Music, Dance, and Beer in an Amazonian Indian Community’, LAMR, ix (1988), 150–86

R.J. de Menezes Bastos: A festa de Jaguatirica, dos indios Kamayurá do Alto-Xingu: uma partitura crítico-interpretativa (diss., U. of Sao Paulo, 1988)

J.M. Beaudet: ‘Les turè, des clarinettes amazoniennes’, LAMR, x (1989), 92–115

S.A. Reily: ‘Macunaíma's Music: National Identity and Ethnomusicological Research in Brazil’, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the Musical Construction of Place, ed. M. Stokes (Oxford and Providence, RI, 1994), 71–96

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east., Bibliography

c: luso-brazilian

R. Gallop: Cantares do povo português (Lisbon, 1937)

J. Cortesão: O que o povo canta em Portugal (Rio de Janeiro, 1942)

A. Mello Moraes jr and others: Bailes pastorís na Bahia (Salvador, 1957)

C. Guerra-Peixe: ‘Os cabocolinhos do Recife’, Revista brasileira de folclore, vi/15 (1966), 135; repr. in Antologia pernambucana de folclore, ed. M.S. Maior and W. Valente (Recife, 1988), 101–30

M. Veiga jr: ‘Portuguese Chroniclers: Caminha's Letter as an Ethnomusicological Document’, Art: revista da escola de musica e artes cênicas da UFBA, no.9 (1983), 3–61

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east., Bibliography

d: afro-brazilian

A. Ramos: O folk-lore negro do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1935)

M. de Andrade: ‘O samba rural paulista’, Revista do Arquivo municipal [São Paulo], no.41 (1937), 37–116

M.J. Herskovits: ‘Drums and Drummers in Afro-Brazilian Cult Life’, MQ, xxx (1944), 477–92

O. Alvarenga: ‘A influência negra na música brasileira’, Boletín latino-americano de música, vi (1946), 357–407

M.J. Herskovits and R.A. Waterman: ‘Música de culto Afrobahiana’, Revista de estudios musicales, i/2 (1949), 65–128

A.P. Merriam: Songs of the Afro-Bahian Cults: an Ethnomusicological Analysis (diss., Northwestern U., 1951)

C. Guerra Peixe: Maracatús do Recife (São Paulo, 1956, 2/1980)

A.P. Merriam: ‘Songs of the Ketu Cult of Bahia, Brazil’, AfM, i/3 (1956), 53–67

E. Carneiro: Samba de umbigada (Rio de Janeiro, 1961)

A.P. Merriam: ‘Songs of the Gêge and Jesha Cults of Bahia, Brazil’, Jb für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde, i (1963), 100–35

G. Binon: ‘La musique dans le candomblé’, La musique dans la vie, ed. T. Nikiprowetsky, i (Paris, 1967), 159–207

W. Rego: Capoeira Angola (Salvador, 1968)

L. Almeida da Anunciação: ‘O berimbau da Bahia’, Revista brasileira de folclore, xi (1971), 24–33

V. de Oliveira: Frevo, capoeira e ‘Passo’ (Recife, 1971)

B.G. Dantas: A taieira de Sergipe: uma dança folclórica (Petrópolis,1972, abridged 2/1976)

G. Béhague: ‘Notes on Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Cult Music’, Tradition and Renewal, ed. M.H. Forster (Urbana, IL, and London, 1975), 68–80

G. Béhague: ‘Some Liturgical Functions of Afro-Brazilian Religious Music in Salvador, Bahia’, World of Music, xix/3–4 (1977), 4–14

K. Shaffer: O berimbau-de-barriga e seus toques (Rio de Janeiro, c1977)

K. wa Mukuna: Contribuição Bantu na música popular brasileira (São Paulo, c1978)

G. Kubik: Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil (Lisbon, 1979)

R.C. Waddey: ‘Viola de Samba and Samba de Viola in the Recônçavo of Bahia (Brazil)’, LAMR, i (1980), 196–212; ii (1981), 252–79

G. Béhague: ‘Patterns of Candomblé Music Performance: an Afro-Brazilian Religious Setting’, Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, ed. G. Béhague (Westport, CT,1984), 222–54

J.J. de Carvalho: ‘Music of African Origin in Brazil’, Africa in Latin America, ed. M.M. Fraginals (New York and Paris, 1984), 227–48

J.J. de Carvalho: Ritual and Music of the Sango Cults of Recife, Brazil (diss., Queen's U. of Belfast, 1984)

J.J. de Carvalho and R.L. Segato: El culto Shangó en Recife, Brasil (Caracas, 1987; Eng. trans., 1992)

G. Kubik: Extensionen afrikanischer Kulturen in Brasilien (Aachen, 1989)

A. Lühning: Die Musik im candomblé nagô-ketu: Studien zur afrobrasilianischen Musik in Salvador, Bahia (Hamburg, 1990)

T. de Oliveira Pinto: Capoeira, Samba, Candomblé: Afro-Brasilianische Musik im Recôncavo, Bahia (Berlin, 1991)

Music and Black Ethnicity: the Caribbean and South America: Miami 1992 [incl. J.J. de Carvalho: ‘Black Music of all Colors: the Construction of Black Ethnicity in Ritual and Popular Genres of Afro-Brazilian Music’, 187–206; K. wa Mukuna: ‘Sotaques: Style and Ethnicity in a Brazilian Folk Drama’, 207–24]

J.L. Lewis: Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (Chicago, 1992)

T. de Oliveira Pinto: ‘Musical Difference, Competition and Conflict: the Maracatu Groups in the Pernambuco Carnival, Brazil’, LAMR, xvii (1996), 97–119

Brazil, §III, 6: Popular music, Dance music of the north and north-east., Bibliography

e: popular music

J. de Brito Mendes: Canções populares do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1911)

M. de Andrade: Modinhas imperiais (São Paulo, 1930/R)

A. Gonçalves Pinto: O choro: reminiscências dos chorões antigos (Rio de Janeiro, 1936)

M. Lira: Chiquinha Gonzaga: grande compositora brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1939)

O. Alvarenga: Música popular brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1950, 2/1982)

Almirante [H. Foreis]: No tempo de Noel Rosa: a verdade definitiva sobre Noel e a música popular (São Paulo, 1963, 2/1977)

M. de Araújo: A modinha e o lundu no século XVIII (São Paulo, 1963)

E. de Alencar: O carnaval carioca através da música (Rio de Janeiro, 1965, enlarged 5/1985)

J.R. Tinhorão: Música popular: un tema em debate (Rio de Janeiro, 1966, 2/1969)

K. Real: O folclore do carnaval do Recife (Recife,1967, 2/1990)

B. Siqueira: Ernesto Nazareth na música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1967)

E. de Alencar: Nosso sinhô do samba (Rio de Janeiro, 1968, 2/1981)

H.L. Alves: Sua excelência o samba (São Paulo, 1968)

G. Béhague: ‘Biblioteca da Ajuda (Lisbon) MSS 1595/1596: Two 18th-century Anonymous Collections of Modinhas’,YIAMR, iv (1968), 44–81

J.R. Tinhorão: O samba agora vai … a farsa da música popular no exterior (Rio de Janeiro, 1969)

C. Passos: Vultos e temas da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1972)

J.R. Tinhorão: Música popular de indios, negros e mestiços (Petrópolis,1972)

J.R. Tinhorão: Música popular: teatro & cinema (Petrópolis, 1972)

G. Béhague: ‘Bossa and Bossas: Recent Changes in Brazilian Urban Popular Music’,EthM, xvii (1973), 209–33

A. de Campos: Balanço da bossa e outras bossas (São Paulo, 1974, 5/1993)

J.R. Tinhorão: Pequena história da música popular: da modinha à canção de protesto (Petrópolis,1974, 2/1986, rev. and enlarged 6/1991 as Pequena …: da modinha à lambada)

B. Kiefer: A modinha e o lundu (Porto Alegre,1977)

M. Marcondes, ed.: Enciclopédia da música brasileira: erudita, folclórica, popular (São Paulo, 1977, 2/1998)

J.R. Tinhorão: Música popular: os sons que vêm da rua (Rio de Janeiro, 1977)

A. Vasconcelos: Panorama da música popular brasileira na ‘belle epoque’ (Rio de Janeiro, 1977)

A. Vasconcelos: Raizes da música popular brasileira (1500–1889) (São Paulo,1977, 2/1991)

L.A. Milanesi and Corrêa Barone: Bibliografia da música popular brasileira (São Paulo, 1978)

J.B. Siqueira: Origem do termo samba (Rio de Janeiro, 1978)

Jota Efegê [J. Ferreira Gomes]: Figuras e coisas da música popular brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1978–80)

E. de Alencar: O fabuloso e harmonioso Pixinguinha (Rio de Janeiro, 1979)

S. Cabral: ABC do Sérgio Cabral: um desfile dos craques da MPB (Rio de Janeiro, 1979)

C.F. Favaretto: Tropicália: alegoria, alegria (São Paulo, 1979, 2/1996)

J.S. Roberts: The Latin Tinge: the Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York, 1979, 2/1999)

G. Béhague: ‘Brazilian Musical Values of the 1960s and 1970s: Popular Urban Music from Bossa Nova to Tropicália’,Journal of Popular Culture, xiv (1980), 437–52

A. Vasconcelos de Silva: A poética e a nova poética de Chico Buarque (Rio de Janeiro,1980)

A. Risério: Carnaval Ijexá (Salvador, Bahia, 1981)

F. de Goes: O país do carnaval elétrico (São Paulo, 1982)

A. Risério, ed.: Gilberto Gil: Expresso 2222 (Salvador, 1982)

P. Scarnecchia: Musical populare brasiliana (Milan, 1983)

T. de Souza: O som nosso de cada dia (Porto Alegre, 1983)

A. Schwab: Bibliografia da MPB (Curitiba, 1984)

G. Béhague: ‘Popular Music’, Handbook of Latin American Popular Culture, ed. H.E. Hinds and C.M. Tatum (Westport, CT, 1985), 3–38

G. Béhague: ‘Recent Studies on the Music of Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, xx (1985), 218–27

C.A. Perrone: ‘An Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography and Discography of Brazilian Popular Music’, LAMR, vii (1986), 302–40

L. Tatit: A canção: eficácia e encanto (São Paulo, 1986)

G. Béhague: ‘The Effects of Tourism on Afro-Bahian Traditional Music in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil)’,Come Mek Me Hol' Yu Han': the Impact of Tourism on Traditional Music, ed. A. Kaeppler and O. Lewin (Kingston, Jamaica, 1988), 57–66

A. Risério: Gilberto Gil: o poético e o político e outros escritos (Rio de Janeiro, 1988)

H. Vianna jr: O mundo funk carioca (Rio de Janeiro, 1988)

C.A. Perrone: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965–1985 (Austin, TX, 1989)

S. Cabral: No tempo de Almirante: uma história do rádio e da MPB (Rio de Janeiro,1990)

R. Castro: Chega de saudade: a história e as histórias da bossa nova (São Paulo, 1990)

J.R. Tinhorão: História social da música popular brasileira (Lisbon, 1990)

C. McGowan and R. Pessanha: The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil (New York, 1991, 2/1998)

R.C.L. Morelli: Indústria fonográfica: um estudo antropológico (Campinas, 1991)

F.O. Garcia: Samba: a Bibliography with Introduction (Albuquerque, NM, 1992)

A. Risério: Caymmi: uma utopia de lugar (São Paulo, 1993)

C. Schreiner: Música brasileira: a History of Popular Music and the People of Brazil (New York,1993)

G. Guerreiro: Retratos de uma tribo urbana: rock brasileiro (Salvador, 1994)

H. Vianna: O mistério do samba (Rio de Janeiro, 1995)

Break.

In jazz, a brief solo passage occurring during an interruption in the accompaniment, usually lasting one or two bars and maintaining the underlying rhythm and harmony of the piece. Breaks appear most frequently at the ends of phrases, particularly the last phrase in a structural unit (e.g. a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar song), or at the end of a 16-bar unit of a multi-thematic piece (e.g. a march or rag).

In rock vernacular any solo instrumental passage can be termed a break, such as a guitar break.

BARRY KERNFELD

Breakbeat [break, beat].

A solo drum pattern usually played on the kick, snare and hi-hat and lasting for one or two bars; it is often distinguished by an emphasis on syncopation on the snare. In the 1980s rap artists began using breakbeats as the rhythmic basis for their music. The original and best known is Clyde Stubblefield’s break in James Brown’s Funky Drummer (1970); it has been sampled by a number of rap (Public Enemy) and dance music artists as well as more mainstream pop performers such as Madonna and George Michael. English indie bands of the late 1980s and early 90s, such as the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, influenced by Stubblefield-like breaks, often employed similar shuffling drum patterns in their music. In all these types of music, breakbeats were generally employed as part of the rhythmic background. By the mid-1990s certain strains of English dance music, including jungle and drum and bass, employed electronically composed, as well as sampled breaks (often at high speeds) as the main focus of the music and the primary structural element. On Photek’s album, Modus Operandi (Science, 1997) the drum beats are developed through rhythmic and timbral variation over cyclic bass lines and impressionistic synthesized chords and effects. The term breakbeat is often used to describe any electronic music using drum breaks.

CHARLIE FURNISS

Breakdown.

(1) A black American folk and spectacular dance characterized by rhythmic patterns created by the feet hitting the floor. It became a theatrical dance in the middle of the 19th century principally through the influence of William Henry Lane, who performed under the name ‘Juba’. The dance often concluded the song-and-dance numbers in late 19th-century minstrel shows, and seems to be related to the ‘break’ sections in these numbers, which consisted of short, two- or four-bar interludes of danced rhythmic patterns between the solo verse and the chorus. Both the dance itself and the idea of performing dance between the sections of a song influenced tap dance in the 20th century.

(2) A riotus dance or gathering (see also Hoedown). The fiddle or banjo music accompanying such dances, particularly in the white-American folk tradition from the late 19th century, often has rapid figurations, arpeggios, and triplets added to vary the melody, suggesting something like the 16th- and 17th-century English practice of Breaking. S.P. Bayard, in his Hill Country Tunes (Philadelphia, 1944/R), suggests that some animated pieces in the repertories of Applachian fiddlers and fifers were played not as dance accompaniments but as ‘broken-down dance tunes’.

(3) A synonym for Reel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Magriel, ed.: Chronicles of American Dance (New York, 1948)

L.F. Emery: Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, CA, 1972)

PAULINE NORTON

Breaking.

A term used in England from the 16th century to the 18th to describe the ornamentation of a pre-existing melodic line by substituting groups of short notes for most of the longer notes, especially in improvised performance. Christopher Simpson (The Division-Violinist, 1659) refers particularly to ‘Breaking the Ground’ as ‘dividing its Notes into more diminute notes’. He also refers to ‘the Breaking of a Note’ as a thing ‘very necessary (sometimes) in Composition … to make a smooth or sweeten the roughness of a Leap, by a graduall Transition to the Note next following [ie. by adding passing notes and other embellishments]’ (Compendium of Practical Musick, 1667). (See also Division and Improvisation, §II, 1(ii).)

Breaking back.

[repeating]. A rank of organ pipes that at some point skips back to a lower pitch, normally by an octave or fifth. Such ranks are usually part of a Compound stop (See Mixture stop), but sometimes, especially in Italian organs, single ranks of very high pitch break back near the top of their compass. A ‘repeating Zimbel’ breaks back at a full octave at every octave, but certain other mixture stops break more gradually or irregularly. See Organ stop (Zimbel).

Bream, Julian (Alexander)

(b Battersea, London, 15 July 1933). English guitarist and lutenist. He was taught by his father, and played to the Cheltenham Guitar Circle at the age of 14. He then studied at the RCM, working privately at the guitar, which at that time was not taught there. He made his London début in 1950, and was soon playing throughout Britain to audiences for whom hearing the classical guitar in public was a new experience. Recitals in Switzerland in 1954 led to European tours. In 1956 he met Villa-Lobos, and the following year gave the first British performance of his Guitar Concerto. His American début was in 1958, and soon after he made his first tours of the Far East and south-east Asia.

In 1950 Bream began to study the Renaissance lute, on which he quickly became a leading performer. His collaboration with Peter Pears in Elizabethan lute-songs led to a revival of interest in this music and influenced Berkeley, Britten, Henze and Tippett, among others, to write for voice and guitar. In 1959 he formed the Julian Bream Consort, initially to perform Morley’s First Book of Consort Lessons; the group’s success did much to stimulate the subsequent popularity of early consort music. Bream has also inspired composers to write substantial works for the guitar, both solo and with orchestra, including Arnold (Guitar Concerto, Fantasy), Bennett (Guitar Concerto, Impromptus, Sonata), Lennox Berkeley (Guitar Concerto, Sonatina, Theme and Variations), Britten (Nocturnal after John Dowland), Brouwer (Concerto elegiaco, Sonata), Henze (Royal Winter Music), Rawsthorne (Elegy), Takemitsu (All in Twilight), Tippett (The Blue Guitar) and Walton (Five Bagatelles).

In international recitals and recordings Bream has collaborated with various artists, including George Malcolm (lute and harpsichord) and John Williams (guitar duo). On television he has conducted a series of masterclasses, and presented a history of the Spanish vihuela and guitar. In a prolific recording career he has consistently matched the breadth of his recitals with recordings covering the entire spectrum of the guitar and Elizabethan lute repertories.

Bream’s stature as one of the greatest masters of the guitar has been established for many years. The deep intensity of his playing, the sheer beauty of his tone control, and his profound empathy with a great range of music, have enabled him to achieve a radical extension of the guitar repertory and to reach the widest possible audience for half a century. Moreover, through his enthusiastic advocacy of the Elizabethan repertory he has pioneered early music in recital and brought the lute into the world’s concert halls. In 1976 he received the Villa-Lobos Gold Medal from the composer’s widow; he has been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Sussex and Leeds, and fellowships of the RCM and RNCM. He was made an OBE in 1964 and a CBE in 1985.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘On Playing the Lute: Julian Bream in Conversation with J.M. Thomson’, EMc, iii (1975), 348–51

G. Wade: Traditions of the Classical Guitar (London, 1980)

T. Palmer: Julian Bream: a Life on the Road (London, 1982)

Guitar International, xiii/12 (1984–5) [Bream issue]

M.J. Summerfield: The Classical Guitar: its Evolution and its Players since 1800 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992)

C. Kilvington: ‘The Guitar is the Music of the Streets: Julian Bream in Conversation’, Classical Guitar, xi (1992–3), no.12, pp.11–16; xii (1993–4), no.1, pp.16–22

A. Kozinn: ‘Julian Bream on Record: a Complete Discography’, Guitar Review, no.96 (1994), 26–36

G. Walters: ‘Julian Bream at 60: an Interview’, Guitar Review, no.96 (1994), 2–15

S.W. Button: Julian Bream: the Foundations of a Musical Career (Aldershot, 1997)

PETER SENSIER/GRAHAM WADE

Breazul, George

(b Amărăştii de Jos, Dolj district, 14 Nov 1887; d Bucharest, 3 Aug 1961). Romanian musicologist. He studied in Bucharest at the Central Seminary (1899–1907), and at the conservatory (1908–12) with D.G. Kiriac, Ion Nonna Otescu and Alfonso Castaldi; at Berlin University (1922–4) he studied with Fleischer, Schäffer, Abert, Hornbostel, Sachs, Stumpf, Wolff and Friedlaender. After teaching music at secondary schools in Cîmpina, Tîrgovişte (the Military Academy, 1920–22) and Bucharest (1922–6, including a period at the Central Seminary), he accepted the first Romanian chair of music literature and music education, created for him at the Bucharest Conservatory (1926–39), where he later became professor of theory and solfège (1940–55) and professor of music history (1955–61). Concurrently he served as honorary professor of aesthetics, acoustics, music education and music psychology at the Bucharest Academy of Religious Music (1928–36), general inspector of secondary education (1932–40) and professor of Romanian music history at the Bucharest School of Military Music (1941–5). He was co-editor of the Bucharest periodical Muzica (1921–5); he also founded the Phonogram Archive of the Ministry of Arts (1927) for the collection of Romanian folktunes, and Melos (1939–41), a series of studies in Romanian music history. He prepared editions of the works of Kiriac-Georgescu and Musicescu.

Breazul was the founder of Romanian musicology. His studies are remarkable for the breadth of their historic scope (covering antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and later periods) and for the diversity of their subject matter (folk, sacred, popular and art music), and are characterized throughout by profound knowledge and scrupulous scholarship. Besides pioneering research in Romanian folk music he investigated the origins and development of Romanian music from Thracian times, drawing on psychology, sociology and ethnology in a comparative cultural history. He had a strong belief in the power of musical experience to create an ordered personality and stimulate national consciousness. Through his programme for music education folk music became more important in the Romanian curriculum.

WRITINGS

‘Observaţiuni relative la învăţămîntul muzical în şcoala secundară’ [On musical education in secondary schools], Muzica, ii/10–11 (1919–20), 1–19

George Georgescu: schiţă biografică’, ‘Alphonso Castaldi: note biografice’, Muzica, iii (1921), 64–7, 165–9

‘O arhivă fonogramică în ţara noastră’ [Phonogram archives in our country], Muzica, vi (1925), 3–11; pubd separately as Archiva fonogramică (Bucharest, 1932)

‘Folclorul muzical românesc’, Boabe de grîu, v (1935), 506–10

Die Musikerziehung in Rumänien (Bucharest, 1936); also in Archives pour la science et la réforme sociale: organe de l'Institut social roumain, xiii (1936), 47–95

‘Muzica românească la Praga’, Gîndirea, xv (1936), 314–17; pubd separately (Bucharest, 1936)

with M. Costin: Metodă de vioară [Violin teaching] (Craiova, 1937)

Un capitol de educaţie muzicală (Bucharest, 1937)

Muzica românească de azi [Romanian music of today]; ed. P. Niţulescu (Bucharest, 1939), 21–592

‘Cîntece şi obiceiuri de primăvară’ [Songs and spring customs], România, v/4 (1940), 17–24

Colindele … întîmpinare critică [Carols … a critical welcome] (Craiova, 1940)

Patrium Carmen: contribuţii la studiul muzicii româneşti (Craiova, 1941)

‘Invăţămîntul muzical în principatele româneşti de la primele începturi pînă la sfîrşitul sec. al XVIII-lea’ [Musical education in the Romanian principalities from the first beginings until the end of the 18th century], Anuarul Conservatorului din Bucureşti 1941–1942 (1943), 3–42

with I.D. Chirescu and V. Popovici: ‘D.G. Kiriac: la 50 de ani de la înfiinţarea soc. corale Carmen’, Muzica, i/5 (1951), 59–66; ii/8–9 (1952), 91–117

‘Tudor Vladimirescu, oratoriu istoric: frescă a revoluţiei de la 1821, de G. Dumitrescu’, Muzica, ii/7 (1952), 65–78

‘Relaţii muzicale româno-ruse’, Muzica, iv (1954), suppl. 11–12; see also vi/1–2 (1956), 34–42, and xi/7 (1961), 31–3

La bicentenarul naşterii lui Mozart: 1756–1956 (Bucharest, 1957)

‘Bucureşti: 1a a 500-a aniversare de existenţă documentară: contribuţii la cunoaşterea trecutului muzicii noastre’, Muzica, ix/11 (1959), 23–33

‘Unirea tărilor române şi muzica’ [The union of the Romanian principalities and music], Muzica, ix/2 (1959), 14–24; enlarged 2/1966 in Pagini din istoria muzicii românesti, i (Bucharest, 1966)

Gavriil Musicescu: schiţă monografică (Bucharest, 1962)

‘Idei curente în cercetarea cîntecului popular: moduri pentatonice şi prepentatonice’ [Ideas in the research of folksongs: pentatonic and pre-pentatonic modes], Studii de muzicologie, i (1965), 7–61; pubd separately (Bucharest, 1965)

Pagini din istoria muzicii românesti, i, ed. V. Tomescu (Bucharest, 1966); ii, ed. G. Firca (Bucharest, 1970); iii, ed. G. Firca (Bucharest, 1974); iv (Bucharest, 1977) [collection of earlier writings]

ed. T. Moisescu: D.G. Kiriac (Bucharest, 1973)

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

with S.V. Dragoi: Carte de cîntece pentru clasa, I, II, III, IV secundară [Song collection for the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th forms] (Craiova, 1931–3)

Cîntările sfintei liturghii, pentru şcuolă şi popor [The songs of the holy liturgy, for school and popular use] (Craiova, 1936)

with N. Saxu: Carte de cîntece [Book of songs] (Craiova, 1937)

with I.D. Chirescu: Colecţie de coruri [Collection of choruses] (Craiova, 1937–8)

Colinde [Carols] (Bucharest, 1938)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Breazul: Pagini din istoria muzicii românesti, i (Bucharest, 1966) [incl. extensive list of writings and bibliography, 561–94]

G. Ciobanu: ‘Aportul lui G. Breazul la dezvoltarea folcloristicii muzicale româneşti’ [Breazul's contribution to the development of Romanian musical folklore studies], Revista de folclor, xi (1966), 519–34

N. Parocescu: ‘George Breazul educator’, Etudes de musicologie, v (1969), 155–85

P. Brâncuşi: George Breazul şi actualitatea operei sale [George Breazul and the contemporary significance of his work] (Bucharest, 1974)

P. Brâncuşi: George Breazul şi istoria nescrisă a muzicii româneşti [George Breazul and the unwritten history of Romanian music] (Bucharest, 1976)

V. Cosma: Musicieni din România, i (Bucharest, 1989), 187–95

PETRE BRÂNCUŞI

Brebis, Johannes

(fl late 15th century; d before 12 Feb 1479). French singer and composer, active in Italy. In November 1471 he was listed under the name ‘fra Zoane de Franza cantadore’ among the first singers hired by Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara for his newly founded court chapel. In the following year he is listed in court records as ‘fra Zoanne Biribis, maestro de cappella’. In 1473 Johannes Martini joined the Ferrarese chapel and took over the position of cantadore from Brebis. It is known that in 1472 Brebis was in debt to the Ferrara court exchequer, and that in 1475 a debt of this kind was partly cancelled through the intervention of Duke Ercole. He remained in service at the court until 1478, in which year Ercole made him archpriest of the parish church of Coccanile, in the Ferrarese contado. A notarial document of 12 February 1479 shows that Brebis died shortly before that date.

Brebis was active in Ferrara, northern Italy, as a singer and composer, and probably as coadjutor to Martini in the running of the ducal musical forces during the 1470s. A motet by him in honour of Duke Ercole, Hercules omni memorandus aevo, probably written in summer 1472, is copied as a later addition in the large manuscript I-MOe α.X.1.11. An as yet undetermined portion of the contents of the double-choir psalms, hymns and other sacred music for Lent and Holy Week contained in the large choirbooks I-MOe α.M.1.11 and α.M.1.12 are indicated in court records as being by Johannes Martini and Johannes Brebis. Four hymns and a Magnificat are attributed directly to Brebis and a few works to Martini, while the many unattributed works may have been written by either. Whereas the motet for Ercole is a skilful polyphonic composition, these double-choir works are written in a deliberately simple, homophonic style; they are among the earliest of all known double-choir music of the north Italian tradition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LockwoodMRF

L.F. Valdrighi: ‘Capelle, concerti e musiche di Casa d’Este dal secolo XV al XVIII’, Atti e memorie delle RR. Deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, 3rd ser., ii/1 (1884), 415–95

B. Disertori: Preface to Johannes Martini: Magnificat e messe, AMMM, xii (1964)

M. Kanazawa: ‘Martini and Brebis at the Estense Chapel’, Essays in Honor of Myron P. Gilmore, ed. S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus (Florence, 1978), 421–32

LEWIS LOCKWOOD/DAVID M. KIDGER

Brebos.

Flemish family of organ builders. Like the Moors family, the Brebos originated from the town of Lier in the ancient Duchy of Brabant (now in the province of Antwerp); Gomaar Brebos was an organ builder at Lier.

Gomaar’s son Gillis Brebos (b Lier; d Spain, 6 July 1584) became a citizen of Antwerp on 23 June 1559. From 1559 to 1567 his name appears regularly in the accounts of the church of Our Lady (later the cathedral) at Antwerp as mender and tuner of the organs. After 1567, when these instruments were destroyed by the Iconoclasts, there was no need for a tuner until 1573, when Brebos provided a new organ, having been recommended by a special commission of experts working under the guidance of the well-known composer and choirmaster Geert van Turnhout. From that year Brebos’s name appears in the accounts until 1579. In the meantime he had delivered a new organ to St Jakobskerk, Leuven, in 1560, completely renovated the organ at Averbode Abbey in 1562, repaired that of St Joris, Antwerp, in 1563, and delivered a new organ for the Lady Chapel in Antwerp Cathedral and a second one for St Jakobskerk, Leuven, in 1572. The two last-named instruments are of smaller size and almost identical. From 1579 until his death Brebos was in Spain, where at the command of Felipe II, he completed the four organs at El Escorial. In his Memorias following Brebos’s death, Fra Juan de S Gerónimo called him ‘the best organ builder in Europe’.

Brebos was assisted in the Escorial undertaking by his three sons, Gaspar Brebos (d Madrid, 1588), Michiel Brebos (d Madrid, 13 Feb 1590) and Jan Brebos (d Madrid, 1609). Jan, the youngest, is known to have repaired an organ at Toledo in 1592 and to have delivered a new instrument to the royal chapel of the Alcázar. He has been confused with Hans Brebos (Brebus) (d Copenhagen, 1603), who was probably a son of Gomaar and brother of Gillis Brebos. Hans went to Denmark in 1568 or 1569, and about 1570 built an organ for St Olai, Elsinore. He was soon appointed organ builder to the royal court, and in 1582 he built an instrument for the chapel of Kronborg Castle. Only a small number of organ stops and a single façade in St Peders Kirke, Naestved (1585–6), survive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.A. Stellfeld: ‘Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Antwerpsche clavecimbel- en orgelbouwers in de XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen’, Vlaamsch jb voor muziekgeschiedenis, iv (1942), 3–110

N. Friis: Orgelbygning i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1949, 2/1971)

M.A. Vente: Die Brabanter Orgel (Amsterdam, 1958, enlarged 2/1963)

R. Reuter: ‘Zur Baugeschichte der Orgeln des Escorial’, Ars musica, musica scientia: Festschrift Heinrich Hüschen, ed. D. Altenburg (Cologne, 1980), 378–84

G. Persoons: De orgels en de organisten van de Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk te Antwerpen van 1500 tot 1650 (Brussels, 1981)

C. Bordas Ibáñez: ‘Nuevos datos sobre los organeros Brebos’, Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, ed. M.F. Cídrais Rodrígues, M. Morais and R.V. Nery (Lisbon, 1992), 51–67

AUGUST CORBET/OLE OLESEN

Brecher, Gustav

(b Eichwald [now Dubí, Czech Republic], nr Teplitz [now Teplice], 5 Feb 1879; d Ostend, May 1940). German conductor. He was a protégé of Richard Strauss, who gave the first performance of his pupil’s symphonic poem Rosmersholm (op.1) in Leipzig in 1896 (and, later on, other works). Brecher began his conducting career as Korrepetitor at the Leipzig Stadttheater. In 1901–2 he was a colleague of Mahler at the Vienna Hofoper, and the next season he was Kapellmeister of Olomouc. He was musical director at the Hamburg Stadttheater, 1903–11, giving the first performances of operas by Siegfried Wagner, d’Albert and Franckenstein, and in 1912 of Busoni’s Die Brautwahl (dedicated to him). From 1911 to 1916 he was chief Kapellmeister of the Cologne Opera, and from 1916 to 1920 at the Frankfurt Opera. He became general music director and opera director at the Leipzig Opera in 1923, where he conducted the first performances of Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf in 1927 and Leben des Orest in 1930 and of Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1930. Nazi persecution forced him to abandon his career, and eventually drove him and his wife to suicide.

Brecher was a brilliant and spirited conductor of opera. He endeavoured always to provide a faithful rendering of the work, and sought to transcend the routine artistic practices of his time by intensive musical and dramatic rehearsal. His Opernübersetzungen (Berlin, 1911) and his own translations of operas by Verdi (Otello), Gounod (Faust), Bizet and Puccini (Tosca) served the same ends. He was a particularly fine conductor of Wagner and Strauss, and a noted interpreter of Romantic and modern operas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Driesch: ‘Erinnerung an G. Brecher’, Neue Musikzeitschrift, iv (1950), 318–20

H.-J. Irmen: Gustav Brecher, Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte, lxxx (Cologne, 1969), 27ff

J. Schebera: ‘Die Ära Brecher/Brügmann an der Leipziger Oper 1923–1932’, Theater der Zeit, ii (1989), 49–52

J. Schebera: Gustav Brecher und die Leipziger Oper 1923–1933 (Leipzig, 1990) [incl. H. Creutzburg: ‘Erinnerungen an Gustav Brecher’]

DIETER HÄRTWIG

Brecht, Bertolt (Eugen Friedrich)

(b Augsburg, 10 Feb 1898; d Berlin, 14 Aug 1956). German playwright. His career divides into three periods. The first is the pre-Marxist period, whose two landmarks were the premières of his play Trommeln in die Nacht (1922), which made his name generally known in literary circles, and of his and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), which was and remains an outstanding popular success. The second period began in 1930 with his wholehearted commitment to Marxism. It included 16 years of exile and relative obscurity, and saw the creation of most of his finest plays. The third period began with his return to East Berlin in 1949 and culminated in the triumphs of 1954 and 1955, when his company, the Berliner Ensemble, was acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest, and he was recognized internationally as a major figure in 20th-century theatre. Since then his international reputation, like his influence, has far outstripped that of any other playwright of his generation.

Brecht’s relationship to music is twofold. As a poetic source for composers and as a theatrical innovator whose ideas inevitably influence librettists, he is in the same position as any major poet-dramatist before him. But he was also directly involved with music through his collaborations with composers, notably Weill, Hindemith, Eisler and Dessau. His relationship to music was prompted at first by a natural musicality (he began his career as a highly effective songwriter-busker) and from then on by his own creative interests and requirements. In the first and most celebrated of his musical collaborations (with Kurt Weill, 1927–30), he had no experience of working with a composer and consequently found himself perilously close to performing the normal functions of a librettist. The need to assert himself led him in 1930 to publish the dogmatic and ill-considered tract ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”’ as a means of dissociating himself from Weill’s ideas about opera in general and Mahagonny in particular. In his subsequent collaborations, apart from the brief and doomed one with Hindemith, he was in a much stronger position. By far the most important was the one with Hanns Eisler, which lasted from 1930 until the end of his life. Their first venture, Die Massnahme (a Lehrstück or ‘didactic play’), was definitive for his later collaborations in that the music is a subordinate though highly effective partner.

No less influential than Brecht’s body of writings were his contributions to the theory of stage performance. His name is inseparably associated with the ‘alienation effect’ (any theatrical device designed to prompt a critical detachment in the spectator), the ‘separation of elements’ (in which the ingredients of acting conflict rather than coalescing into a unified whole), the ‘didactic play’ (in which the performers and, to a lesser extent, the audience are meant to undergo a learning process) and ‘epic theatre’ (in which, simply put, the Aristotelian unities are suspended in favour of free narrative and characterization). All four of these concepts, transferred to music, have left a lasting imprint on 20th-century stage composition, as have Brecht’s predilections for billige Musik (‘tawdry music’) and that combination of untutored music-making and sound effects which he later referred to as Misuk. Brecht was also the spiritual godfather of Regieoper, a style of opera production in which his theatrical principles are applied to works of the past. Many important practitioners of this school learnt their craft in direct contact with Brecht’s productions in East Berlin.

The fall of the Iron Curtain inevitably tarnished Brecht’s canonical reputation in many circles and occasioned a critique of his achievement, most notably the alleged intellectual exploitation of his female assistants and a depreciation of his more doctrinaire Lehrstücke. Yet the theatre has always been a collaborative enterprise with liberal notions of intellectual property, and all the works published in Brecht’s name bear the indelible impress of his artistic personality. Moreover, his ideas have established themselves as common currency in the musical and spoken theatre, even among artists far removed from his world-view. Altogether, the scores written for or based on his plays may be said to constitute the most distinctive and coherent body of theatre music in the 20th century.

WORKS WITH MUSIC

(selective list)

play with music unless otherwise stated; dates in parentheses indicate original version of play

for fuller list see Lucchesi and Shull (1988)

Weill: Mahagonny (Songspiel), 1927; Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (op), 1927–9; Die Dreigroschenoper (collab. E. Hartmann), 1928; Das Berliner Requiem (cant.), 1928; Der Lindberghflug (radio cant.), 1929, collab. Hindemith [rev. as concert version by Weill]; Happy End, 1929 [song texts only]; Der Jasager (school op), 1930; Die Sieben Todsünden (ballet chanté), 1933

Hindemith: Lehrstück, 1929; Der Lindberghflug (radio cant.), 1929, collab. Weill, withdrawn

Eisler: Die Massnahme (didactic play), 1930; Die Mutter (after M. Gorky), 1930–32; Kuhle Wampe (film), 1931; Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (after W. Shakespeare: Measure for Measure), 1934; Deutsche Sinfonie (cant.), 1936-7; Hangmen also Die (film), 1942; Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1935–41), 1945; Leben des Galilei (1938–9), 1947; Die Tage der Commune (1948–9), 1950; Die Geschichte der Simone Machard (1941–3), 1957 [probably begun during Brecht’s lifetime]; Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (1942–3), 1959 [begun during Brecht’s lifetime]

Dessau: Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1938 [Fr. version]; Deutches Miserere (orat.), 1944–7; Die Reisen des Glücksgotts (op), 1945, inc.; Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1938–9), 1946; Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (op), 1947; Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1938–41), 1947; Die Ausnahme und die Regel (didactic play, 1930), 1948; Wie dem Deutschen Michel geholfen wird (clown play), 1949; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1940–41), 1949; Herrnburger Bericht (cant.), 1951; Mann ist Mann, 1951 [and later versions]; Die Erziehung der Hirse (cant.), 1952; Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (1943–5), 1953–4; Coriolan (after Shakespeare), 1964

Hosalla: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941), 1958; Leben Eduards des II. (after C. Marlowe), 1959; Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, 1961; Der Brotladen, 1967; Turandot oder Der Kongress der Weisswäscher, 1973–81

Others: Die Ausnahme und die Regel, Nisimov, 1931; Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, Burkhard, 1941; Pauken und Trompeten (after G. Farquhar: The Recruiting Officer), Wagner-Régeny, 1955; Die Horatier und die Kuratier (didactic play, 1932–4), Schwaen, 1955; Das Stundenlied (cant.), Einem, 1958

Ops based on plays by Brecht: The Trial of Lucullus (trans. H.R. Hays), Sessions, 1947; Puntila, Dessau, 1957–9; Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, Pironkov, 1965; Eine Fahne hab’ ich zerrissen (after Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar), Forest, 1971; Baal, Cerha, 1976–8; Hakiboku no wa (after Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis), Hayashi, 1978

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Willett: The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London, 1959, 3/1967)

S. Unseld, ed.: Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenbuch (Frankfurt, 1960, 2/1978)

E. Hauptmann, ed.: B. Brecht: Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1967) [plays in vols.i–vii, essays on theatre in vols.xv–xvii]

B. Brecht: Arbeitsjournal (Frankfurt, 1973; Eng. trans., 1993)

H. Ramthun, ed.: B. Brecht: Tagebücher 1920–1922, Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen 1920–1954 (Berlin, 1975; Eng. trans., 1979)

G. Seidel: Bibliographie Bertolt Brecht (Berlin, 1975)

M. Wyss: Brecht in der Kritik: Rezensionen aller Brecht-Uraufführungen (Munich, 1977)

F. Henneberg, ed.: Brecht-Liederbuch (Frankfurt, 1984)

A. Dümling: Lasst euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (Munich, 1985)

J. Lucchesi and R. Shull: Musik bei Brecht (Berlin, 1988)

H.O. Münsterer: The Young Brecht (London, 1992)

P. Thomson and G. Sacks, eds: The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge, 1994)

DAVID DREW/J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Brechtel [Brechtle, Brechtl, Prechtel], Franz Joachim

(b Nuremberg, bap. 9 Dec 1554; d Nuremberg, bur. 20 Sept 1593). German amateur composer. He was a grandson of Sebald Heyden and followed his father’s professions of calligrapher and gunsmith in his native town. His German dance- and social songs were popular in amateur circles in Nuremberg before 1585 but were only published later (some of them posthumously), at the instigation of the music printer Paul Kauffmann. The three-part compositions in the style of the Italian villanella (1589) are indebted to Jacob Regnart and the older tricinium. The titles of the collections of four- and five-part songs (1590 and 1594) introduced the term ‘canzonetta’ to Germany, and the influence on their contents of Marenzio and other Italian models is more marked than in the 1589 volume. In the sphere of the German social song of the late 16th century Brechtel may be considered with Leonhard Lechner as one of the most important forerunners of Hans Leo Hassler, Valentin Haussmann and Melchior Franck.

WORKS

Neue kurtzweilige teutsche Liedlein nach Art der welschen Villanellen, 3vv (Nuremberg, 1589); 3 ed. W. Herrmann, Deutsche Madrigale aus dem 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1927)

Neue kurtzweilige teutsche Liedlein nach Art der welschen Canzonetten, 4, 5vv (Nuremberg, 1590²⁷)

Kurtzweilige neue teutsche Liedlein nach Art der welschen Canzonetten, 4, 5vv (Nuremberg, 1594)

2 sacred vocal works, 5vv, D-Bsb (org tablature)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

NDB (R. Wagner) [incl. fuller bibliography]

H.J. Moser: ‘Das deutsche Chorlied zwischen Senfl und Hassler’, JbMP 1928, 43–58

L. Hübsch-Pfleger: Das Nürnberger Lied im deutschen Stilwandel um 1600 (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1942)

FRANZ KRAUTWURST

Brechung (i)

(Ger.).

See Arpeggiation (ii).

Brechung (ii)

(Ger.).

See Battery.

Brecker, Michael [Mike]

(b Philadelphia, 29 March 1949). American tenor saxophonist. He played the clarinet and alto saxophone as a youth, then took up the tenor saxophone at school; bop and the music of John Coltrane were formative influences. While attending Indiana University he worked mainly in rock groups, then in 1969 he moved to New York, where he played rhythm and blues; the same year he formed the jazz rock band Dreams with his brother, the trumpeter Randy Brecker (b Philadelphia, 27 Nov 1945), and Billy Cobham. After working with Horace Silver (1973–4) and briefly with Cobham again (1974) he led the Brecker Brothers with Randy. Some Skunk Funk (from the album The Brecker Brothers, 1975, Arista), epitomizes Michael’s preference for virtuosic, starkly angular, chromatically tinged melody placed into an aggressive, syncopated, jazz-funk setting; a later album title described the style as Heavy Metal Bebop (1978, Arista). The group disbanded in 1982. Concurrently from 1979 Michael established the group Steps (known from 1982 as Steps Ahead) with Mike Mainieri. From 1970 Brecker also worked frequently as a session musician with a number of jazz and rock artists including Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Little Feat, Pat Metheny, David Sanborn and Frank Zappa. In 1987 he toured the USA and Japan as a member of Herbie Hancock’s quartet and recorded his first album as a sole leader, on which he may be heard playing a synthesizer controller, the Electronic Wind Instrument. Greatly reducing his studio work, he toured widely as a leader and as a sideman with Paul Simon (1991–2), re-formed the Brecker Brothers (1992–5) and performed and recorded with McCoy Tyner, though in this setting Tyner’s majestically flowing approach to phrasing and Brecker’s meticulous articulation sounded somewhat mismatched. Brecker’s style has been, after that of Coltrane, one of the strongest influences on young jazz tenor saxophonists. His characteristic playing is perhaps best captured on Pat Metheny's album 80/81 (1980, ECM), which also offers an exquisitely beautiful example of Brecker’s ballad playing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveJ

R. Palmer: ‘Sneakin’ up the Charts with the Brecker Brothers’, Down Beat, xlii/16 (1975), 12–13, 41

H. Mandel: ‘Steps Ahead’, Down Beat, l/8 (1983), 18–21

D. Demsey: ‘Michael Brecker’, Saxophone Journal, xi/4 (1987), 22–8 [incl. discography]

B. Milkowski: ‘The Brecker Brothers: Boogie out of Africa’, Down Beat, lix/10 (1992), 16–18, 20

BRENDA PENNELL/R

Bredemers [Bredeniers], Henry

(b Namur, c1472; d Lier, 20 May 1522). South Netherlandish organist and music teacher. In 1488 he was a singer at the church of Our Lady, Antwerp, and in 1491–2 served as organist at Jacobskerk in that city. In 1493 he became organist in the chapel of the Confraternity of Our Lady at Our Lady's church. In January 1501 he entered the chapel of Philip the Handsome as organist and journeyed with the court to Spain in 1501–3 and 1505–6. In September 1506 Philip died at Burgos, and Bredemers arranged for the transport of the chapel's missals and music books to Antwerp.

In August 1507 Bredemers became organist in the domestic chapel of Philip's seven-year-old son Charles, under the regency of Philip's sister, Margaret of Austria. At her court in Mechelen, Bredemers taught the young Charles and his sisters to play the clavichord and other instruments. He was also charged with the musical instruction of choirboys and court entertainers, and with the purchase and maintenance of instruments. Between 1513 and 1515 he made two trips to Antwerp to test new organs at the church of Our Lady, and during the period 1515–17 again went to Spain, this time with Charles, now King of Spain.

After his retirement to Lier in 1518 he continued to serve at court on special occasions, assisting in Margaret's private chapel in 1519 and accompanying Charles on journeys to England and Germany in 1520–21. During the visit to England, Bredemers was host at a banquet given at Canterbury for the singers of Henry VIII's Chapel Royal. He probably attended the imperial coronation of Charles V at Aachen in October 1520; he was listed among the members of Charles's chapel in June 1521. In May of that year he was named provost of the chapter of St Aubain, Namur, but he resigned this post in April 1522, a month before he died.

Bredemers served with distinction in one of the most important court chapels of the Renaissance, where he associated with such prominent musicians as Agricola and La Rue. Two compositions by Bredemers were reported by Fétis, but they have not been found.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (G.Pietzsch)

Vander StraetenMPB, iii, vii

G. van Doorslaer: ‘Herry Bredemers, organiste et maître de musique, 1472–1522’, Annales de l’Académie royale d’archéologie de Belgique, lxvi (1915), 209–56

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

G. Persoons: De orgels en de organisten van de Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk te Antwerpen van 1500 tot 1650 (Brussels, 1981), 59–62

MARTIN PICKER

Bredemeyer, Reiner

(b Velez, Columbia, 2 Jan 1929; d Berlin, 5 Dec 1995). German composer. In 1931 his family moved to Breslau (now Wrocław). He learnt the piano and the violin, and in 1949 began studying composition at the Akademie für Tonkunst, Munich. His encounters with Karl Amadeus Hartmann and with Paul Dessau, whom he met in 1951, were an important influence on him. In 1954 he moved to East Berlin, where he studied at the Akademie der Künste with Wagner-Régeny. He became music director of the Theater der Freundschaft in 1957 and of the Deutsches Theater in 1961. He became a member of the Akademie der Künste in 1978.

From 1954 onwards Bredemeyer composed a great deal of incidental music for the stage, and also film scores, music for radio and television drama, and several works of his own for music theatre. Over the years he turned increasingly to vocal, orchestral and chamber music. Bredemeyer employed a non-narrative, non-developmental musical language, unique of its kind in the DDR. Often starting out from a specific dramatic impulse, his music makes use of tonal, modal, atonal and sometimes even minimalist materials and styles. The dense musical language that results can be sharp-edged as well as remarkably laconic and polemical, having certain satirical and parodic traits, while also capable of great tenderness and transparency.

Many of Bredemeyer's compositions for the concert hall were written in series, for instance his piano pieces (from 1955), his Schlägstücke (1960 onwards), his trios (1962 onwards), serenades (1966 onwards) and the pieces with titles beginning ‘Piano and’ (1970 onwards). His most frequently performed work, Bagatellen für B. (1970) for piano and orchestra, written for the Beethoven bicentenary year, is a brilliant collage of quotations from the ‘Eroica’ symphony and fragments of two bagatelles (opp. 119 no.3 and 126 no.2). In the Serenade 3 für H.E. (1972), he takes Eisler's Solidaritätslied as his point of departure, making use of an additive procedure to create contrast. On the other hand, the Oboe Concerto (1979) is fundamentally abstract in conception, though written with remarkable virtuosity.

After several smaller-scale music-theatre works, Bredemeyer achieved success with his full-scale opera Candide, a ‘speculative philosophical parable’, which uses Voltaire's tale as a playful critique of the enforced optimism and narrowly provincial attitudes of DDR society. Despite the seriousness of its message, the work has genuine charm and wit, and is strongly characterized. Other works involve a return to historically familiar territory: these include Die Winterreise (1984), a lieder cycle for baritone, piano and horn, based on the same cycle of Wilhelm Müller poems set by Schubert, and the 1990 setting of Brecht's didactic drama Der Neinsager as a two-act school opera, designed to counter and complement Weill's setting of Brecht's Der Jasager. This chamber opera, an independent piece despite its occasional stylistic references to Weill, is perhaps the most characteristic work of Bredemeyer's final period.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Candide (op, 5, G. Müller, after Voltaire), 1981–2, Halle, Landestheater, 12 Jan 1986; Der Neinsager (school op, 2, after B. Brecht), 1990, Würtemberg, Staatstheater, 1994; music-theatre works, incid music, film scores, TV scores, radio scores

Vocal: An meine Landsleute (Brecht), 1959; Karthago (Brecht), chorus, chbr ens, 1961; 4 Chöre (Mao Tsetung), 1963; Canto (Brecht), A, male chorus, 10 insts, 1965; Berichte (after H. Müller), 1966; Besteigen hoher Berge (V. Lenin), 1970; 13 Heine-Lieder, v, gui/(v, cl/sax, gui, perc, org), 1974; Synchronisiert: asynchron (N. Guillén), S, ob, bn, vc, pf, perc, tape, 1975; 6 Balladen (F. Villon), Bar, hpd, perc, 1976; Die Musse (F. Hölderlin), 1977; Das Alltägliche (K. Mickel), S, T, orch, 1980; Die Winterreise (W. Müller), Bar, hn, pf, 1984; Einmischung in unsere Angelegenheit (M. Gorbatschow, Lenin), 1985; Die schöne Müllerin (Müller), Bar, str qt, hn qt, 1986; Verheerende Folgen mangelnden Anscheins innerbetrieblicher Demokratie (V. Braun), 1990

Orch: Integration, orch, 1961; Komposition, 56 str, 1964; Schlagstücke no.3, orch, 3 perc groups, 1966; Bagatellen für B., pf, orch, 1970; Spiel zu 45, orch, 1970; Piano und …, pf conc., 1972; Sym., 1974; anfangen – aufhören, orch, 1974; Auftakte, 3 orch groups, 1976; Ob Conc., 1979; Hn Conc., 1986

Other inst:. Pf Pieces, 1955–7; Ww Qnt, 1959; Schlagstücke no.1, perc, 1960; Schlagstücke no.2, pf, perc, 1965; 6 serenades, various insts, 1966–80; Schlagstücke no.5, pf, perc, 1970; 8 Pieces, str trio, 1971; Piano und …⁵, pf, fl, hn, trbn, vc, db, perc, 1976; Piano und …⁶, pf, 2 vc, wind inst, 3 perc, 1977; Sextet, 1980; Str Qt, 1983; Trio (84), pf trio, 1987; Aufschwung OST, pf, ob, perc, tuba, 1993

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Schneider: Momentaufnahme: Notate zu Musik und Musikern der DDR (Leipzig, 1979)

F. Schneider: ‘Diskurse heiterer Vernunft: neuere Kammermusik von Reiner Bredemeyer’, MusikTexte, nos.33–4 (1990), 89–92

F. Schneider: ‘“Vorwärts nicht vergessen!” In memoriam Reiner Bredemeyer’, MusikTexte, no.64 (1996), 29–33

R. Bredemeyer: ‘Ich wendete mich nicht: Einige persönliche Gedanken und Überlegungen zu meiner “Winterreise”’, MusikTexte, no.64 (1996), 33–6

R. Oehlschlägel: ‘Rechts und linkshändig komponieren: Reiner Bredemeyer im Gespräch’, MusikTexte, no.64 (1996), 37–45

REINHARD OEHLSCHLÄGEL

Brediceanu, Tiberiu

(b Lugoj, 20 March/2 April 1877; d Bucharest, 19 Dec 1968). Romanian composer, folklorist and administrator. He studied privately in Lugoj with Josif Czegka and Sofia Vlad-Rădulescu, in Blaj with Iacob Mureşianu, in Sibiu with Hermann Kirchner and in Braşov with Paul Richter. Extremely active in the musical life of Romania, he participated in the foundation of the Romanian Opera, the Romanian National Theatre (1919), the Dima Conservatory, Cluj (1920), the Society of Romanian Composers (1920) and the Astra Conservatory, Braşov (1928); during this period he directed the opera houses in Cluj and Bucharest. He collected more than 2000 folksongs, recorded on 214 cylinders, and made use of them in his ten books of Doine şi cântece poporale (‘Doinas and Other Folksongs’) and in eight books of instrumental pieces published as Jocuri populare româneşti (‘Romanian Folkdances’); he also published a scholarly collection, 170 melodii populare româneşti din Maramureş (Bucharest, 1972). All of his music remained close to folksong: his operas La şezătoare (‘At a Village Sitting’), Seara mare (‘Great Evening’) and La seceriş (‘Harvest’) explore the life of the Romanian villages using simple, moving tunes and a supple orchestration which sometimes approaches that of a gypsy band.

WORKS

stage

La şezătoare [At a Village Sitting] (1, C.S. Aldea and I. Borcea), Sibiu, 15 June 1908

Seara mare [Great Evening] (3, Brediceanu, after A. Maniu), Cluj, 26 Dec 1924

La seceriş [Harvest] (1, Brediceanu, after N.I. Moldoveanu), Blaj, 20 Sept 1936

other

Jocuri populare românesti [Romanian Folk Dances], pf, 1928; 4 dansuri româneşti [4 Romanian Dances], orch, 1951; 2 suites, vn, pf, 1951; 6 doine şi cântece româneşti [6 Doinas and Romanian Songs], 4vv, pf, 1953; Mioritza [The Ewe], 4vv, pf, 1955; Suita, cl, pf, 1958

WRITINGS

Muzica si compozitorii români ai Transilvaniei (Kishineu, 1926)

Histoire de la musique en Transylvanie (Bucharest, 1938)

Scrieri [Writings] (Bucharest, 1976)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Sbârcea: Tiberiu Brediceanu: in slujba muzicii româneşti [Tiberiu Brediceanu: at the service of Romanian music] (Bucharest, 1967)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni români: lexicon (Bucharest, 1970)

T. Bălan: Prietenii mei muzicieni [My friends, the musicians] (Bucharest, 1976)

F. Lászlo: ‘Colaborarea lui Tiberiu Brediceanu cu Béla Bartók’, Muzica, xxvii/12 (1977)

M. Popescu: Repertoriul general al creaţiei româneşti [General repertory of Romanian composition] i (Bucharest, 1979); ii (1981)

I. Datcu: Dicţionarul folcloriştilor, ii (Bucharest, 1981)

G. Sbârcea: Intâlniri cu muzicieni ai secolului XX (Bucharest, 1983)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România, i (Bucharest, 1989)

VIOREL COSMA

Bree, Johannes [Joannes] Bernardus van

(b Amsterdam, 29 Jan 1801; d Amsterdam, 14 Feb 1857). Dutch composer, conductor and violinist. He learnt the violin first with his father, acting as his accompanist in dance lessons after the family’s move to Leeuwarden in 1812. There he taught music to the children of a local nobleman (1815–19). After returning to Amsterdam (1820) he continued his violin studies and played in the orchestras of the Théâtre Français (until 1821) and the Felix Meritis society. In 1828 he founded and conducted a choral society; in 1836 it was absorbed into the Amsterdam section of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst, which van Bree directed. In 1830 he was appointed conductor of the Felix Meritis orchestra, a post he held until his death. Van Bree formed a string quartet in 1838 that specialized in works by Beethoven and Spohr. From 1841 he achieved his greatest fame as director of the newly founded Caecilia orchestra, with programmes consisting exclusively of Classical and early Romantic symphonies and overtures. The conductor of three Roman Catholic church choirs, he introduced Haydn masses into church services; with the Toonkunst choir he performed oratorios from Handel to Schumann as well as 16th- and 17th-century works. After the success in the 1830s of his operas Saffo and Le bandit, and of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, he was appointed music director of the Hollandsche Schouwburg in 1840–41. He served as president of Toonkunst (1849–50) and from 1853 until his death directed the Amsterdam section’s newly founded music school.

Van Bree’s compositions, which mark him, together with J.W. Wilms, as one of the first important Dutch composers of the 19th century, remained close to the prevailing French style of the cavatine and romance, although rhythmic and dramatic flair are in evidence in Le bandit; a more polyphonic Germanic style is apparent only in some piano pieces and his string quartets, above all the Allegro for four string quartets. In Britain he was known to choral societies through R.R. Terry’s arrangements for mixed voices of three masses for men’s voices, and a cantata for St Cecilia’s Day.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in NL-At unless otherwise stated

Sacred choral: Missa, A, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch (Rotterdam, 1834); 3 masses, 3 male vv, org (Amsterdam and London, 1837), arr. SATB by R.R. Terry (London, 1905); Missa festiva, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1840; Mass, 3 male vv, org (The Hague, 1840–45); Inwijdingsmis S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1841; Cant. for St Cecilia’s Day (London, 1846); Requiem, TTB, org (Amsterdam, 1848); Ps lxxxiv, T, SATB, orch (Amsterdam, 1852); Mass, 3 male vv, org (Amsterdam, 1856)

Stage: Neemt U in acht (Dutch operetta, 1, H.J. Foppe), Amsterdam, 1826, unpubd; De heldendood van J.C.J. van Speijk (declamatorio, J. Kinker), Amsterdam, 1831, unpubd; Saffo (Dutch Spl, 5, J. van Lennep), 1832–4, Amsterdam, 22 March 1834, unpubd; Le bandit (oc, 4, Margaillant after M.-E.-G. Théaulon), Amsterdam, 22 Dec 1835, NL-DHgm, ov. ed. in Nederlandse Orkestmuziek (Arnhem, 1995); Esmeralda (ballet, choreog. A.P. Voitus van Hamme), Amsterdam, 1848, unpubd

Orch: 2 syms.; Fantaisie en forme de symphonie (Amsterdam, 1845); 5 vn concs.; concs. for hn, bn, cl; 5 ovs.; Introductie en marsch, military band, 1832; Duo concertant, 2 fl

Chbr: Str Qt no.1 (Bonn, 1834); Str Qt no.2 (Amsterdam, 1840); Allegro, 4 str qt (Amsterdam, 1846), ed. J. Rodenburg (Utrecht, 1965); Str Qt no.3 (Amsterdam, 1848); Air varié, (vn, pf)/str qt (Amsterdam, n.d.); Str Qt no.4, unpubd

Pf: 3 valses brillantes (Amsterdam, 1831); 3 nocturnes (Amsterdam and London, 1837), ed. J. ten Bokum (Utrecht, 1989); Haarlemmer spoorwegwals (Amsterdam, 1839); Promenade champêtre (Amsterdam, 1841); 3 scherzi (Amsterdam, 1854)

Other works: songs, 1v, pf; arrs. for str of works by Spohr, Méhul, Mendelssohn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

F.C. Kist: Obituary, Caecilia [Utrecht], xiv (1857), 225–9 [with list of works]

E. Reeser: Een eeuw Nederlandse muziek (Amsterdam, 1950, 2/1986)

JAN TEN BOKUM

Breeches part

[trouser role, pants role (Amer.)] (Fr. travesti; Ger. Hosenrolle; It. travestito).

A term used to define an operatic or theatrical male role played by a woman; the French and Italian terms apply equally to the converse (see Travesty). It is not defined in traditional dictionaries but its use is recorded by 1865 (A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7/1970/R).

In the 17th and 18th centuries important male roles intended for Castrato singers were in some instances sung by women, and some male roles were written expressly for female singers. Male roles written by Handel for women include Goffredo (Rinaldo, 1711), Dardano (Amadigi, 1715) and the title role in Radamisto (1720). In Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (1791) the secondary male part was written for a soprano. As the castrato gradually disappeared, his mantle fell initially on the prima donna contralto (or more rarely soprano) who inherited his title of ‘musico’ (see Primo musico). Several of Rossini’s breeches parts fall into this category, for example the title role in Tancredi (1813) and Arsace in Semiramide (1823); the last important Italian breeches part is that of Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), written for Giuditta Grisi.

From early times, boys and ‘beardless youths’, especially pages, were often written as breeches parts. Examples include Telemachus (Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 1640) and Sextus (Handel’s Giulio Cesare, 1724; later rewritten for a tenor). The convention of the breeches part is used to special purpose in operas where an adolescent boy is the wooer of a woman inadequately appreciated by her husband, such as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro or Oktavian in Der Rosenkavalier. In these instances, and elsewhere (Isolier in Rossini’s Le comte Ory), the comedy and eroticism inherent in the convention are intensified when the ‘male’ character is induced to don female costume. Other important breeches parts in Italian opera include Oscar in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (1859) and Walter in Catalini’s La Wally (1892). Outside Italy, breeches roles are usually confined to pre-adult characters. Examples include, in French opera, Ascanio in Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838), Siébel in Gounod’s Faust (1859) and Nicklausse in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (1881); in German opera, Hänsel in Humperdinck’s opera (1893) and the Composer in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916); in Russian opera, Fyodor in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1868–9); and in operetta, Orlofsky in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1874). Breeches parts are less common in modern opera: recent examples are Caliban in Eaton’s The Tempest (1985) and Cherubino in Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991, a sequel to Le nozze di Figaro).

Operatic situations where female characters disguise themselves in male costume (such as Leonora in Fidelio or Gilda in Rigoletto) are not true breeches parts, although the woman’s ability to pass unrecognized by the other characters is made more credible by the existence of the historical convention.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.E. Blackmer and P.J. Smith, eds.: En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York, 1995)

OWEN JANDER, ELLEN T. HARRIS

Bregi, Hugues de.

See Hugues de Berzé.

Brehm, Alvin

(b New York, 8 Feb 1925). American composer, conductor and double bass player. He studied double bass with Fred Zimmerman and orchestration with Vittorio Giannini at the Juilliard School (1942–3) before becoming a composition student of Wallingford Riegger at Columbia University (1946–52). He has been a member of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble (1969–73), the Group for Contemporary Music (1971–3) and the Philomusica Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has also performed with the Guarneri, Budapest, Emerson, St Petersburg and Composers string quartets, the New York PO, the Pittsburgh SO, and as a recitalist. He has conducted the premières of more than 50 works, both in guest appearances and with the Composers Theatre Orchestra, which he co-founded with John Watts in 1967. His honours include commissions from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, grants from the Naumburg and Ford foundations, and a conducting residency at the American Academy in Rome. He has taught at SUNY, Stony Brook (1968–75), the Manhattan School of Music (1969–75) and SUNY, Purchase (from 1972), where he became Professor Emeritus in 1996.

Once described as a ‘Heifetz of the big box’, Brehm has allowed his virtuosity as a double bass player to inform both his conducting and his composing. His haunting and dramatic song cycle on a text by García Lorca hints at the influence of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. His piano works, including the striking Metamorphy, are particularly powerful. Critics have remarked on the intensity, clarity of linear movement and lyricism of his compositions. One of his primary interests is the energy that derives from conflicts between harmonic rhythm and melodic stress. Many of his works have been recorded.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Hephaestus Ov., 1966; Concertino, vn, str, 1975; Pf Conc., 1977; Db Conc., 1982; Tuba Conc., 1982

Chbr and solo inst: Theme, Syllogism, Epilogue, pf, 1951; Divertimento, tpt, hn, trbn, 1962; Dialogues, bn, perc, 1964; Divertimento, wind qnt, 1965; Variations, vc, 1965; Brass Qnt, 1967; Variations, pf, 1968; Consort and Dialogues, fl, tpt, vc, pf, perc, 1973; Colloquy and Chorale, bn qt, 1974; Sonata, vc, pf, 1974; Quarks, fl, bn, str qt, pf, 1976; Sextet, str, pf, 1976; A Pointe at his Pleasure, Renaissance insts, 1979; Metamorphy, pf, 1979; AYU Variations, fl, gui, 1980; 3 canzoni, va, pf, 1980; La bocca della verità, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1984; Children’s Games, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1984–5; By the Numbers, pf, 1994; Circles, pf, 1995; Lion’s Den, vn, perc, 1995; Lament for the Victims of AIDS, str qt, 1996

Vocal: Cycle of 6 Songs (F. García Lorca), 1965

Principal publishers: General Music, Piedmont

MARGUERITA S. PUTNAM

Brehme, Hans (Ludwig Wilhelm)

(b Potsdam, 10 March 1904; d Stuttgart, 10 Nov 1957). German pianist and composer. From 1922 to 1926 he studied the piano and composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In 1928, after further piano study with Kempff, he became instructor in piano instructor at the Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik. From 1936 he also taught composition there and was appointed professor in 1940. Except for the years 1945 to 1949, when he taught at the Hochschulinstitut für Musikerziehung in Trossingen, Brehme remained at Stuttgart until his death.

Brehme first won recognition at the 1933 Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein festival in Dortmund after the première of his Partita for string quartet which, like many subsequent works, places modern harmonies and rhythms within the context of Baroque models. His First Piano Concerto received notable performances under van Kempen in Dresden and Furtwängler in Berlin during the mid-1930s, while his second opera Der Uhrmacher von Strassburg had a warm reception in the Nazi press as a Volksoper in the tradition of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Pfitzner's Palestrina and Haas's Tobias Wunderlich. After the war Brehme attempted to come to terms with a new cultural climate, adopting 12-note procedures in his Second Symphony and Second Piano Concerto; his reputation, however, had been tarnished by his prominent position in musical life during the Third Reich.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Der Tod und der Tod (chbr, after H. von Hofmannstahl), op.14, 1928, unperf.; Deutschland Aufbricht (stadionspiel, G. Goes), perf. 1933; Der Uhrmacher von Strassburg (3, P. Ginthum), op.36, Kassel, 25 Feb 1941 (Mainz, 1941); Liebe ist teuer (3, F. Clemmens, K.E. Jaroscheck, after E. Raupach), op.39, 1949, Münster, 1950

Orch: Sym., c, op.10, 1925; Cl. Conc., op.15, 1927–8; Conc. sinfonico, op.21, 5 wind, str, perc, 1930; Pf Conc., op.32, 1936; Triptychon (Fantasie, Choral und Finale über ein Thema von Händel), op.33, 1936; Variationen über eine mittelalterliche Weise, op.38, 1937; kammerkonzert, op.43, pf trio, orch, 1946; Fl Conc., op.50, 1946; Sym., c, op.51, 1950; Symphonisches Vorspiel, op.53, accdn, orch, 1952; Pf Conc., op.58, 1954

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, C, op.3, 1923, arr. wind qnt; Pf Sonata, op.17, 1929; Partita, op.23, str qt, 1931; Str Qt no.2, op.22, 1931; Sonata, op.25, a sax, pf, 1932, rev. as op.60, 1957; Sextet, op.30, fl, cl, hn, str trio, 1935; Konzert-Suite, op.37, pf, 1943; Sonata, op.41, vn, pf, 1945; Carmen nuptiale, op.44, vc, pf, 1946; Rondo, op.34, vc, pf, 1946; Pf Sonata no.2, op.45, 1946; Cl Qnt, op.46, 1947; music for pf, org, accdn

Vocal: Feierliche Abendmusik (H. Hesse), op.4, Bar, cl, hn, hp, str qt, 1923; Das hohe Lied vom Fliegen (cant. C. Elwenspock), op.29, T, Bar, SATB, orch, 1934; 3 Balladen, op.31, Bar, pf, 1935–7; 5 Gesänge, op.35, SATB, 1937–9

Principal publishers: Müller, Schott, Simrock

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (E. Klemm)

K. Laux: Musik und Musiker der Gegenwart, i (Essen, 1949), 43–55

E. Klemm: ‘Hans Brehme zum Gedächtnis’, Mitteilungen an die Freunde der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, vii (1958), 9ff [with list of works]

WILLIAM D. GUDGER/ERIK LEVI

Brehy [Breÿ], Petrus Hercules [Hercules, Petrus, Hercules Petrus, Hercule-Pierre]

(bap. Brussels, 13 Sept 1673; d Brussels, 27 Feb 1737). Flemish composer and organist. There has been much confusion concerning his name and linguistic affiliation. Though bilingual, he most often wrote in Flemish; the French form of his given names occurs only in notarial documents from 1707, while his autograph is always ‘PHB’ or ‘P.H. Brehÿ’, with the initials intertwined, and never ‘Bréhy’. His father may have been from Artois and became attached to the court of Brussels before the 1660s. He most likely received his musical education from his godfather, Hercule de Lagrené (1597–1682), who as a young man had been dancing-master to the Infanta Isabella, and the other musicians of the Confraternity of St Job, based at the parish church of St Nicolas, Brussels.

He was 13 years of age when he became organist of St Nicolas (21 May 1687), where he remained until at least March 1702. On 16 November 1705 he became zangmeester of the collegiate church of St Michel and Ste Gudule, serving there exclusively until his death; his music, however, was known posthumously in several churches around Brabant and East Flanders. He lived in the choraelhuis and maintained responsibility for the church's six choirboys, teaching them singing, music theory, the organ, the harpsichord, the violin, the viola da gamba and the cello. Among his pupils were Charles-Joseph van Helmont, who became zangmeester following the death of Joseph Hector Fiocco, Brehy's immediate successor. Brehy was survived by his second wife and two of his three daughters.

A number of his compositions can be dated, particularly some of the masses, which span from 1699 to 1729, and a few of the motets for four voices, which span from 1703 to about 1736. Most of his surviving motets for solo voice are scored for two violins and continuo; several, however, are scored for an obbligato wind or string instrument, violin and continuo. The motets for four voices and the one for five voices were probably written for two or three singers per part, as indicated by performance rubrics. Italianate figurations predominate in the solo and duo motets; the ensemble motets and the masses contain similarly embellished passage-work, but are underpinned by French structures, especially the older works, which are sectionalized and exploit the French solo–ripieno design. His motet texts are mostly adapted from liturgical sources, with additional texts contrived by local clergy. The violin sonatas are early compositions and reflect the prevalent style of the late 17th century. His music survives only in manuscript, with the exception of the violin parts of the Symphoniae duodecim, published in Antwerp in 1700

WORKS

in B-Bc unless otherwise stated

vocal

9 masses, 2 for double chorus, 1 in B-Br

54 motets: 22, SATB, str, bc, 6 in Br; 15, S, insts, bc, 2 in Br; 6, A, insts, bc; 5, 2vv, insts, bc; 4, B, insts, bc, 1 in Br; 1, SSATB, str, bc; 1, T, insts, bc

5 Lenten offertories, SATB, bc, 3 in Br

Tantum ergo, SATB, bc, ?1735/6, Br

2 sets of Lamentations for Holy Week

Other motets, lost, see Baratz

instrumental

12 sonatas, 2 vn, va, basso va, org cont, c1700

12 symphoniae, str, bc (Antwerp, 1700)

Pieces, org, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Wangermée: Les maîtres de chant à la collégiale des SS. Michel et Gudule (Brussels, 1950)

L.R. Baratz: The Concert Motets of Petrus Hercules Brehy (1673–1737) (diss., Case Western Reserve U., Cleveland, 1993)

LEWIS REECE BARATZ

Breig, Werner

(b Zwickau, 29 June 1932). German musicologist. He attended the Kirchenmusikschule in Berlin-Spandau, where he took classes with Pepping (1950–55) and then studied musicology with Husmann and Fritz Feldmann at Hamburg and Eggebrecht and Stäblein at Erlangen. He took the doctorate at Erlangen in 1962 with a dissertation on the organ works of Scheidemann after being made a research assistant in the department of musicology at Freiburg the previous year. He completed the Habilitation at Freiburg in 1973 with a study of the origins of Wagner’s Ring while holding a lecturing post at Karlsruhe (from 1972). He was appointed professor of musicology at the Karlsruhe Hochschule für Musik in 1974 and director of the institute of musicology at the university in 1975; he was appointed professor at Wuppertal University in 1979 and moved to Bochum University in 1988. He was also a committee member of the Internationale Heinrich Schütz-Gesellschaft and editor of the Schütz-Jahrbuch, 1979–96. He retired from his university duties in 1997 and that same year was made chief editor of the collected edition of Wagner’s letters. Within his area of research, music history from the 16th century to the 20th, Breig has concentrated on Schütz, Wagner, and the history of early keyboard and organ music, particularly of Bach.

WRITINGS

‘Der Umfang des choralgebundenen Orgelwerkes von Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’, AMw, xvii (1960), 258–76

Die Orgelwerke von Heinrich Scheidemann (diss., U. of Erlangen, 1962; Wiesbaden, 1967)

‘Die Lübbenauer Tabulaturen Lynar A1 und A2’, AMw, xxv (1968), 96–117, 223–36

‘Das Schicksalskunde-Motiv im “Ring des Nibelungen”: Versuch einer harmonischen Analyse’, Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1970), 223–33

Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Wagners ‘Ring des Nibelungen’ (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Freiburg, 1973)

‘Bachs Goldberg-Variationen als zyklisches Werk’, AMw, xxxii (1975), 243–65

‘Bachs Violinkonzert d-moll: Studien zu seiner Gestalt und seiner Entstehungsgeschichte’, BJb 1976, 7–34

ed., with H. Fladt: Dokumente zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Bühnenfestspiels Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, xxix/1 (Mainz, 1976)

‘Der “Rheintöchtergesang” in Wagners “Rheingold”’, AMw, xxxvii (1980), 241–63

‘Bachs “Kunst der Fuge”: zur instrumentalen Bestimmung und zum Zyklus-Charakter’, BJb 1982, 103–23

‘Wagner und Chopin’, Deutsch-polnische Musikbeziehungen: Nuremberg 1982, 54–70

‘Zur Chronologie von Johann Sebastian Bachs Konzertschaffen: Versuch eines neuen Zugangs’, AMw, xl (1983), 77–101

‘Die erste Fassung des Beckerschen Psalters von Heinrich Schütz’, Schütz-Jb 1985–6, 22–49

‘Bachs freie Orgelmusik unter dem Einfluss der italienischen Konzertform’, Bach-Studien, ix (1986), 29–43

‘Schütz und Wagner: Musik und deutsche Sprache’, Heinrich Schütz im Spannungsfeld seines und unseres Jahrhunderts: Dresden 1985 [Jb Peters 1986–7], 67–79, 174–6

‘Zu den Turba-Chören von Bachs Johannes-Passion’, JbMw, viii (1985), 65–96

‘Zur Werkgeschichte der Kleinen geistlichen Konzerte von Heinrich Schütz’, Heinrich Schütz und die Musik in Dänemark: Copenhagen 1985, 95–116

‘The “Great Eighteen” Chorales: Bach’s Revisional Process and the Genesis of the Work’, J.S. Bach as Organist: his Instruments, Music, and Performance Practices, ed. G. Stauffer and E. May (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 102–20

‘Wagners kompositorisches Werk’, Wagner-Handbuch, ed. U. Müller and P. Wapnewski (Stuttgart, 1986), 353–470

‘Grundzüge einer Geschichte von Bachs vierstimmigen Choralsatz’, AMw, xlv (1988), 165–85, 300–19

‘Heinrich Schütz’ “Musikalische Exequien”: Überlegungen zur Werkgeschichte und zur textlich-musikalischen Konzeption’, Schütz-Jb 1989, 53–68; Eng. trans. in Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and its Contexts in Seventeenth-Century Germany, ed. P. Walker (Ann Arbor, 1990), 109–25

‘Eine hypothetische Frühfassung von Heinrich Schütz’ geistlichem Konzert “Siehe, es erschien der Engel des Herren” SWV 403: ein Beitrag zum Thema “Analyse und Werkgeschichte”’, Schütz-Jb 1990, 59–72

‘Textbezug und Werkidee in Johann Sebastian Bachs frühen Orgelchorälen’, Musikkulturgeschichte: Festschrift für Constantin Floros, ed. P. Petersen (Wiesbaden, 1990), 167–82

‘Zur Gestalt von Johann Sebastian Bachs Konzert für Oboe d’amore A-dur’, Tibia, xviii (1993), 431–48

‘Arnold Schönbergs “Verklärte Nacht” und das Problem der Programmusik’, Die Semantik der musiko-literarischen Gattungen: Methodik und Analyse: eine Festgabe für Ulrich Weisstein, ed. W. Bernhart (Tübingen, 1994), 87–115

‘Richard Wagner an Ferdinand Heine: der Brief vom 18. Januar 1842 als Problem der Wagner-Briefedition’, AMw, li (1994), 190–212

‘Versuch einer Theorie der Bachschen Orgelfuge’, Mf, xlviii (1995), 14–52

‘Zum Werkstil der “Geistlichen Chormusik” von Heinrich Schütz’, Schütz-Jb 1996, 65–81; xx (1998), 77–94

‘The Instrumental Music’, ‘Composition as Arrangement and Adaptation’, The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. J. Butt (Cambridge, 1997), 123–35, 154–70

ed., with M. Geck: Bachs Orchesterwerke (Dortmund, 1997) [incl. ‘Zur Werkgeschichte von Bachs Cembalokonzert bwv 1056’, 265–82]

‘Bach und Marchand in Dresden: eine überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studie’, BJb 1998, 7–18

with M. Dürrer and A. Mielke: Chronologisches Verzeichnis der Briefe von Richard Wagner (Wiesbaden, 1998)

‘Zur Überlieferung des Briefwechsels zwischen Richard Wagner und Mathilde Wesendonck’, ‘Neues zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Wagners “Lohengrin”: das wiedergefundene Blatt 14 der Kompositionsskizze’, Mf, li (1998), 57–63, 273–30

EDITIONS

Heinrich Schütz: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, xxvii–xxviii: Einzelne Psalmen (Kassel, 1970–71); xxxi: Trauermusiken (Kassel, 1970); xxxii: Choralkonzerte und Choralsätze (Kassel, 1971); xviii–xx: Symphoniae Sacrae III (Kassel, 1989–96); xl: Der Beckersche Psalter [1628] (Kassel, 1988); xxiii–xxvi: Psalmen Davids 1619 (Kassel, 1994)

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/KONRAD KÜSTER

Breil, Joseph Carl

(b Pittsburgh, 29 June 1870; d Los Angeles, 23 Jan 1926). American singer and composer. He began to study music at the age of 11. After attending Pittsburgh College, St Fidelis College (Butler, Pennsylvania) and Curry University (Pittsburgh), he was sent to Leipzig to study law. In Leipzig he also studied music at the Conservatory and took singing lessons with Ewald; these were followed by singing lessons in Milan and Philadelphia (with Giuseppe del Puente). He toured as principal tenor of the Emma Juch Opera Company (1891–2) before returning to Pittsburgh to teach singing and to direct the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral (1892–7). From 1897 to 1903 he was music director for several theatre companies, and from 1903 to 1910 he worked as a reviser and music editor, also composing many songs. He first gained recognition as a composer in 1909 with his incidental music to The Climax, which included the ‘Song of the Soul’, a popular selection on vocal recitals for several years.

During the next decade Breil became prominent in the new field of film music. In 1912 and 1913 he composed and conducted scores for films produced by Famous Players. Most ambitious and influential were his scores for D.W. Griffith’s landmark epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Both scores combined segments from operatic, symphonic and popular song repertories with original music by Breil; both were heard across the USA as well as in England, and were highly praised for their dramatic aptness. In 1916 Breil became head of the first studio music department, at Triangle Films in Los Angeles.

A change of direction came in 1919 when Breil’s one-act opera The Legend was produced as part of an ‘American Triptych’ at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Despite the work’s poor critical reception, Breil continued to figure prominently in musical circles in both New York and Los Angeles, and was often cited as a leading film composer. None of his later efforts, however, received more than passing attention. Poor health (including at least one nervous breakdown) hastened his decline after 1923.

WORKS

(selective list)

Film scores (unpubd, unless otherwise stated: Queen Elizabeth (dir. H. Desfontaines and L. Mercanton), 1912; In the Bishop's Carriage, 1913; The Prisoner of Zenda, 1913; Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1913; ?Cabiria, 1914 [inconclusive attribution]; The Birth of a Nation (dir. D.W. Griffith), 1915, pubd; Double Trouble, 1915; The Lamb, 1915, pubd, collab. J. Nurnberger; The Lily and the Rose, 1915, collab. J.A. Raynes; The Martyrs of the Alamo, 1915, pubd; Los penitentes, 1915, pubd; Intolerance (dir. Griffith), 1916, pubd; The Wood Nymph, 1916, pubd; Dramatic Music for Motion Pictures Plays, 1917; The Garden of Allah, 1917; The Birth of a Race, 1918, pubd; The Betrayal, 1919; The Lost Battalion, 1919; Tess of the Storm Country, 1922; The Green Goddess, 1923, collab. A. Pesce; The White Rose, 1923, pubd; The White Sister, 1923; America (dir. Griffith), 1924, pubd, collab. A. Finck; (The Dramatic Life of) Abraham Lincoln, 1924; The Phantom of the Opera (dir. R. Julian), 1925

Ops: Love Laughs at Locksmiths (Breil), 1910; The Legend (J. Byrne), 1917, New York, 1919; Der Asra (Breil, after H. Heine), 1925

Incid music: The Climax (E. Locke), 1909; The Seventh Chord (A. Miller), 1913; The Sky Pilot (F. Mandel and G.H. Brennan), 1917; The Phantom Legion (A.P. Kelly), 1919

Other works: Over There, concert ov., orch (1920); Egyptian Sketches, suite, orch (1922); sacred works, incl. 2 masses, solo vv, SATB; songs

MSS and memorabilia in US-LAuc; printed works in US-Wc, GB-Lbl

Principal publishers: Chappell, G. Schirmer

WRITINGS

‘Moving Pictures of the Past and Present and the Music Provided for Same’, Metronome, xxxii/11 (1916), 42

‘Making the Musical Adaptation’, Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry, ii (1922/R), 85–7

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (K.K. Preston, M. Marks) [incl. further bibliography]

‘J.C. Breil’, Music News (18 March 1910)

P.F. Boller: ‘The Sound of Silents’, American Heritage, xxxvi/5 (1985), 98–107

M. Marks: Music and the Silent Film (New York, 1997)

KATHERINE K. PRESTON, MARTIN MARKS

Breisiger [Briesger, Bryssiger], Peter

(b ?Saffig, nr Koblenz; fl 1516–42). German organ builder. He is sometimes referred to as ‘Schöffe und Bürger von Koblenz’. His significant work can be traced in the regions of the Lahn (Weilburg), the Mosel (Trier Cathedral) and the Rhine (Liebfrauenkirche, Andernach; Liebfrauenkirche, Dominican church and Florinskirche, Koblenz), and also in the Netherlands (Dominican church, Maastricht; Onze Lieve Vrouw, Tongeren; and St Amor, Munsterbilzen). Breisiger was a member of a distinguished family, and was himself a highly cultured man. As an organ builder he took a lead in the development of ‘new’ stops (narrow-scaled flue stops, various types of flute, Cornet V or VI, reeds with full-length resonators, Pedal flutes of 2' or 1' pitch), and at the same time made technical innovations in key actions and coupling. His work attracted great interest in the Netherlands. He wrote the most important and informative 16th-century instructions for registration, which are still consulted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Klotz: Über die Orgelkunst der Gotik, der Renaissance und des Barock (Kassel, 1934, 3/1986), 94ff, 120ff

H. Klotz: ‘Niederländische Orgelbaumeister am Trierer Dom’, Mf, ii (1949), 36–49

M.A. Vente: Proeve van een repertorium van de archivalia betrekking hebbende op het Nederlandse Orgel (Brussels, 1956), 170ff

M.A. Vente: Die Brabanter Orgel: zur Geschichte der Orgelkunst in Belgien und Holland im zeitalter der Gotik und der Renaissance (Amsterdam, 1958, enlarged 2/1963), 46ff

H. Klotz: Rheinische Musiker, iv, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1966), 10

HANS KLOTZ

Breitenbacher, Antonín

(b Jarošov, nr Uherské Hradiště, Moravia, 12 Feb 1874; d Kroměříž, 8 Aug 1937). Czech historian and archivist. After studying at the theological faculty in Olomouc (1892–6), he was ordained priest in 1896; for two years he was a student prefect in the archiepiscopal seminary in Kroměříž. He began studying history in 1898 at the University of Innsbruck and took his doctorate there in 1903. On his return he taught history at the archiepiscopal Gymnasium in Kroměříž until 1924. He became librarian in the archbishop’s palace in Kroměříž in 1915 and archivist in 1921; he performed both functions with great zeal and devotion until his death.

From 1927 Breitenbacher began to build up the music archive in Kroměříž Castle, gradually acquiring the music collections of the Olomouc bishops between 1664 and 1831 and the musical archives of the churches of the Panna Marie and St Mořic at Kroměříž and the Piarist college there. The leading Czech music historians of the time, Helfert, Trolda and Vetterl, assisted him in classifying and cataloguing the music. The archives established by Breitenbacher have become a basic source for music of the Viennese cultural circle from 1650 to 1700 and from 1760 to 1810; they contain many works by Czech composers. Breitenbacher published several of the catalogues of these collections.

WRITINGS

‘Ke stému výročí Beethovena’ [On Beethoven’s centenary], Časopis vlasteneckého spolku musejního v Olomouci, xxxix (1927), 134–49

‘Hudební archiv kolegiátního kostela sv. Mořice v Kroměříži’ [The music archives of the collegiate church of St Mořic in Kroměříž], Časopis vlasteneckého spolku musejního v Olomouci, xl (1928), suppl.; xli–xlii (1929), suppl.; addns in xliii (1930); xlviii (1935)

‘Hudební archiv z děkanského kostela P. Marie v Kroměříži’ [The music archives of the diaconal church of the Virgin Mary in Kroměříž], Časopis vlasteneckého spolku musejního v Olomouci, xliv (1931), 3–48

‘Hanácká opera z r. 1747’ [An opera in the Haná district from the year 1747], Časopis vlasteneckého spolku musejního v Olomouci, xlv (1932), 159–91

Hudební archiv z bývalé piaristické koleje v Kroměříži [The music archives of the former Piarist college in Kroměříž] (Kroměříž, 1937)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

I. Vlčková-Butulová: ‘Dr. Antonín Breitenbacher a Kroměříž’,Vlastivědný věstník moravský, xxii (1970), 321–32 [incl. list of writings and bibliography]

J. Sehnal and J. Pešková: Caroli de Liechtenstein-Castelcorno episcopi Olomucensis operum artis musicae collectio Cremsirii reservata (Prague, 1998)

JIŘÍ SEHNAL

Breitengraser, Wilhelm [Breyttengraserus, Guilielmus]

(b Nuremberg, c1495; d Nuremberg, bur. 23 Dec 1542). German composer. From 1514 he studied at Leipzig University, but did not obtain a degree. About 1520 he became headmaster of the Lateinschule at the Benedictine monastery of the Egidienkirche, Nuremberg. His initially precarious financial situation improved somewhat when, after the onset of the Reformation in 1523, the abbot handed over the monastery in 1525 to the town council. In 1529 Breitengraser received ten gulden for partbooks which he had presented to Emperor Charles V. At about this time he joined the humanist circle around Helius Eobanus Hessus; his energetic participation in its lighthearted, convivial activities, together with his determination to pursue his creative work unhindered, led to neglect of his pedagogic duties which resulted in frequent serious admonishments from the town council for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless he was always held in high esteem as a composer. As early as 1534 Hans Ott included 16 vocal pieces in four or five parts in his Hundert und ainundzweintzig newe Lieder (RISM 1534¹⁷), giving Breitengraser an extremely honourable place as the third-best-represented composer, after Senfl and Arnold von Bruck. Petreius too singled him out by printing a four-part mass in Liber quindecim missarum (1539¹) – the only work by a German in a collection otherwise entirely devoted to important Franco-Flemish composers. Early in 1542 the Nuremberg town council paid him 40 gulden for a large choirbook containing eight of his masses (unfortunately now lost). ‘J. H.’ (probably Joachim Heller, Breitengraser’s successor at the Egidienkirche) wrote epitaphs on his death, and Othmayr composed a piece in his memory.

Breitengraser’s sound basic musical training is evident from his works. They owe much to the best Netherlands models and embrace practically every genre of the time; their wide dissemination shows that he was one of the most popular of the more conservative German masters of the first half of the 16th century.

WORKS

Mass, 4vv, 1539¹

Mass Proper, 4vv, D-ERu 473, 3

Te Deum, 11 psalms, 10 responsories, 1 occasional motet: Z 73 (4 dated 1530, 1539, 1540)

Hymn, 5vv, H-BA 23; hymn, 4vv, 1542¹²; hymn, 1558²⁰ (intabulation)

6 psalms, Polinski Collection 564 (intabulations)

19 songs, 4–5vv, 1534¹⁷, [1536]⁸, 1544²⁰; 3 songs, lost

8 masses, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H. Albrecht)

MGG2 (F. Brusniak)

R. Wagner: ‘Wilhelm Breitengraser und die Nürnberger Kirchen- und Schulmusik seiner Zeit’, Mf, ii (1949), 141–77

FRANZ KRAUTWURST

Breitkopf & Härtel.

German firm of music publishers and printers. It was probably established on 27 January 1719 by the printer Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf (b Clausthal, 2 March 1695; d Leipzig, 23 March 1777), who married into the Leipzig firm of printers and type founders J.C. Müller. In 1725 Breitkopf published a Hebrew Bible, the firm's first important publishing venture. His friendship with the poet Johann Christoph Gottsched led to the expansion of the firm's literary publications, with musical editions initially playing a secondary role. Well-known works produced during this period include the Schemellische Gesangbuch (1736) and second editions of parts of Sperontes's Singende Muse an der Pleisse (1740–41).

Under Bernhard's son Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf (b Leipzig, 23 Nov 1719; d Leipzig, 28 Jan 1794), one of the most versatile figures in the history of German publishing and printing, the firm achieved greater importance. In 1745 he took over his father's printing works and soon derived considerable financial benefits from his typographical inventions (see Printing and publishing of music, §§I, 3(iii) and II, 3). His divisible and movable types, introduced in 1754–5, improved the system of printing notation so decisively that music could henceforth be published in much larger editions. His printing office had a staff of over 100. Besides pieces by Telemann, Marpurg, Mattheson, Leopold Mozart, Haydn, Carl Stamitz and Reichardt, Breitkopf published works by C.P.E. Bach and J.A. Hiller, both friends of his. Virtually all notable composers of the second half of the 18th century attempted to have at least a few works printed or published by the Breitkopf firm. Marketing difficulties caused by the Seven Years War (1756–63) resulted in surplus stocks, whereupon Breitkopf published catalogues of all available works (R1966), including a thematic index (see illustration). These catalogues, brought out between 1760 and 1787, are invaluable to music bibliography. The firm also sold musical instruments and, for a time, made playing cards, fancy papers and wallpaper. Breitkopf included among his friends notable scholars and musicians of the time, a fact attested by his letters addressed to Lessing and Winckelmann, among others; the young Goethe, during his student days in Leipzig, was also drawn to the Breitkopfs' hospitable home. After 1770 Breitkopf began to devote himself to scholarly research and to publishing articles. On his death he was praised as a ‘sage and philanthropist’.

Breitkopf's two sons, Bernhard Theodor (1749–c1820) and Christoph Gottlob (1750–1800), did not consider themselves capable of developing their father's achievements, so Gottfried Christoph Härtel (b Schneeberg, 27 Jan 1763; d Cotta, nr Leipzig, 25 July 1827), who had studied law and had planned a diplomatic career, joined the firm as an associate in 1795. The next year he bought the firm and took over the running of the publishing house, now known as Breitkopf & Härtel; he was also appointed Breitkopf's sole heir. Härtel, who was equally gifted as an artist, scientist and economist, was commercially far-sighted. In 1806 he applied Alois Senefelder's invention of lithography to the printing of music, and published the ‘Oeuvres complettes’ of Mozart, Haydn, Clementi, Dussek and Cramer, forerunners of the later complete critical editions. In 1803 Härtel published the full score of Handel's Messiah and in 1827 produced the first of Bach's church cantatas to be printed after his death (Ein’ feste Burg). He corresponded with Haydn and negotiated with Mozart’s widow, Constanze, in connection with her husband’s works. He eagerly courted Beethoven’s friendship with the result that the firm was able to publish the first editions of 25 of his works (opp.29, 34, 35, all works between Symphony no.5, op.67 and the Mass in C, op.86, and the posthumously published opp.136 and 137). Härtel founded the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1798–1848), which became the leading voice in music criticism in the first half of the 19th century. It was also through Härtel that the Leipziger Literaturzeitung (1812) was initiated. In 1807 he began manufacturing pianos; these were used by Mendelssohn, Liszt, Clara Schumann and Wagner, among others.

After Härtel's death, his nephew Florens Härtel took over the firm until his sons Raymund (b Leipzig, 9 June 1810; d Leipzig, 9 Nov 1888) and Hermann (b Leipzig, 27 April 1803; d Leipzig, 4 Aug 1875) entered the business in 1832 and 1835 respectively. It was these two members of the Härtel family who subsequently greatly expanded the firm and determined its development for the next 40 years. Hermann Härtel was greatly interested in the Italian visual arts and in 1828 had taken a doctorate of law. He was one of the co-founders of the Leipziger Kunstverein and served in numerous honorary positions connected with music. Raymund Härtel, a Leipzig city councillor, was more practically inclined and fostered the firm's technological development. Hermann Härtel was friendly with Mendelssohn and Schumann, and it was at Schumann's instigation that he published Schubert's hitherto unknown C major Symphony ten years after the composer's death. He also acquired the rights in Brahms's early works, and in music by Chopin and Berlioz, besides giving Liszt extensive support. The firm particularly encouraged stage works; it was the first to publish operas by Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Donizetti, Bellini, Méhul, Auber, Adam, Ambroise Thomas, Marschner and Lortzing, but collaboration with Wagner did not produce the expected gains. One of the climaxes of the 19th-century Bach revival was the issuing of the complete edition by Breitkopf & Härtel. The Beethoven edition, which required more than 13,400 plates, came out within only four years (1862–5). The adjoining book publishing division produced some of the most important standard 19th-century musicological works. With its publication of cheap, popular editions, the ‘Rote Bände’, the firm competed with other German publishing houses. On Hermann Härtel's death the firm's catalogue comprised 15,000 items. The Härtel brothers were largely responsible for its leading position in music publishing.

Raymund and Hermann Härtel left no male heir and the firm accordingly passed to their nephews, Wilhelm Volkmann (b Leipzig, 12 June 1837; d Leipzig, 24 Dec 1896) and Oskar von Hase (b Jena, 15 Sept 1846; d Leipzig, 26 Jan 1921), who considerably expanded the firm's programme in meeting the demands of contemporary political and economic conditions. Ludwig Volkmann (b Leipzig, 9 Jan 1870; d Leipzig, 10 Feb 1947) took over his father’s responsibilities when the latter died. The Volkmann family dealt primarily with the technical processes of typesetting and printing. Oskar von Hase initiated the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst and Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Bayern. In the years between 1850 and 1912 more than 20 complete critical editions were begun, including those of Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Schütz, Berlioz, Schein, Liszt, Haydn and Wagner, as well as Bach and Beethoven.

Oskar von Hase systematically expanded the collection of concert material, and established libraries to house full scores, as well as orchestral, choral and chamber music. This fundamental reorganization of the firm's stock lasted for decades. Eugene d'Albert, Busoni and above all Sibelius were the contemporary composers whom the firm promoted. Its books on music, including collections of individual composers' correspondence, were unsurpassed in their range. The firm collaborated with leading contemporary music scholars, including Eitner, Riemann, Kretzschmar, Friedrich Ludwig, Johannes Wolf, Abert and Schering. The book division also published works on theology, medicine and aesthetics. From 1883 the firm maintained branches abroad and concluded sales agreements with almost 50 foreign publishing houses.

World War I and the ensuing economic crises were a turning-point in Breitkopf & Härtel's history. Not only Ludwig Volkmann, but also Hellmuth von Hase (b Leipzig, 30 Jan 1891; d Wiesbaden, 18 Oct 1979), who entered the business in 1919, together with Martin von Hase (1901–71) and Wilhelm Volkmann (1898–1939), all recognized that only by means of far-sighted changes in publishing could they reconcile their traditional duties with modern needs in music and musical scholarship. Between 1926 and 1928 the works of Brahms were published in 26 volumes. Numerous composers, all of them in the mainstream of international musical life, were published by the firm, including Schoeck, Atterberg, Kilpinen, Zilcher, Kurt Thomas, Johann Nepomuk David, Raphael, Hugo Distler and Bräutigam. The music textbook division produced standard reference works, and Breitkopf & Härtel also devoted themselves to the publication of music journals.

The publishing works were destroyed in a bombing raid during December 1943, and valuable autographs and archive material were lost. Part of what was saved from the archives was bought by the Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek in Darmstadt in 1951; another part, including copybooks and correspondence dating from about 1895, was given to the Leipzig State Archives in 1962, and the private collection of Hermann Härtel went to the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin (now D-Bsb). Reconstruction work began slowly in 1945, and the firm was in effect divided into two, with one independent section in East Germany and one in West. The technical side of the business in Leipzig was separated from the publishing house, which became nationally owned in 1952. The firm of VEB Breitkopf & Härtel Leipzig has an extensive and systematically developed publishing programme. Besides publishing the well-known classics, the firm promotes the works of such composers from the former East Germany as Eisler, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Dessau, Wilhelm Weismann, Georg Trexler, Finke, Fritz Geissler, J.P. Thilman, Otto Reinhold, Siegfried Kurz and Zechlin. Gunter Hempel (b Annaberg, 7 June 1932) was appointed head of the publishing division in 1974, when he took over from the music scholar and publisher Helmut Zeraschi (b 1911). The West German part of the firm was refounded in Wiesbaden in 1945 by Hellmuth and Martin von Hase and was later run by Lieselotte Sievers (b Leipzig, 18 April 1928) and Joachim Volkmann (b Leipzig, 30 Nov 1926). Apart from the collected edition of Reger's works, begun in 1954, the firm is responsible for the series Collegium Musicae Novae, and also publishes such contemporary composers as Driessler, Eimert, Knab, Christian Lahusen, Marx and Rohwer. The remaining archive of the Leipzig firm, containing about 3000 books and 22,000 musical works, was integrated into the Wiesbaden stocks in 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (F. Reinisch)

O. von Hase: Breitkopf & Härtel: Gedenkschrift und Arbeitsbericht (Leipzig, 4/1917–19, enlarged 5/1968 by H. von Hase)

Pasticcio auf das 250 jährige Bestehen des Verlages Breitkopf & Härtel: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Hauses (Leipzig, 1968)

R. Elvers: Breitkopf & Härtel 1719–1969: ein historischer Überblick zum Jubiläum (Wiesbaden, 1968)

H.-M. Plesske: ‘Bibliographie des Schrifttums zur Geschichte deutscher und österreichischer Musikverlage’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, iii (1968), 135–222

R. Elvers: ‘Breitkopf & Härtels Verlagsarchiv’, FAM, xvii (1970), 24–8

J. Kallberg: ‘Chopin in the Marketplace: Aspects of the International Music Publishing Industry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Notes, xxxix (1982–3), 535–69, 795–824

G.B. Stauffer, ed.: Bach Perspectives, ii: J.S. Bach, the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-Century Music Trade (Lincoln, NE, 1996)

M. Twyman: Early Lithographed Music (London, 1996), 308–21

HANS-MARTIN PLESSKE

Brel, Jacques (Romain Georges)

(b Brussels, 8 April 1929; d Paris, 8 Oct 1978). Belgian singer and songwriter. He began writing chansons in 1950, started performing them in Paris (1953) at the the theatre Les trois baudets and became internationally known from 1957. He made his American début at Carnegie Hall in 1963, subsequently touring the USA and USSR (1965); he retired from concert appearances in 1966 in favour of recordings. Brel adapted the Broadway hit show Man of La Mancha for Paris (1968), taking the leading role himself, and wrote the lyrics for a musical, Le voyage dans la lune, which was cancelled shortly before its première at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels (1969). He made his first appearance in a major film in Les risques du métier (1967) and later directed Franz (1971). Many of his songs were included in a retrospective revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris that ran for three years on Broadway from 1968. Despite major surgery in 1974 he died of cancer in 1978.

Brel’s lyrics, often bitingly satirical of modern and social morals, are set to rather sophisticated music, often with insistent rhythms and the cumulative effect of repetition as in Amsterdam (1964) and La chanson de Jacky (1965). His work influenced such writers and performers as Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and, most notable for his interpretations of Brel’s songs, Scott Walker. Several of Brel’s songs have become chart successes in translation, for example Le moribund (1961) as Seasons in the Sun, while his Ne me quitte pas has become a standard as If You Go Away, recorded by such performers as Dusty Springfield and Shirley Bassey.

WORKS

(selective list)

all music and lyrics by Brel; dates those of publication

Many individual popular songs, incl. Quand on n’a que l’amour, 1956; La Dame Patronesses, 1959; Les flamandes, 1959; Ne me quitte pas [If You Go Away], 1959; Seul, 1959; Le valse à mille temps, 1959; Les bourgeois, 1962; Le moribund [Seasons in the Sun], 1961; Amsterdam, 1964; Jef, 1964; La chanson de Jacky, 1965; Fille sauvage, 1966; J’arrive, 1968; La quête, 1968

Songs for films (film in parentheses): Pourquoi faut-il que les hommes s’ennuient (Un roi sans divertissement, 1964); Les coeurs tendres (Un idiot à Paris, 1967); Buvons un coup, Pour mourir, Porteurs de rapières (Mon Oncle Benjamin, 1970); La chanson de Van Horst (Le bar de la fourche, 1972); L’enfance (Far West, 1973)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Clouzet and J. Vassall: Jacques Brel (Paris, 1964)

J.Y. Richard: Jacques Brel (Montreal, 1968)

J. Brel: L’oeuvre intégrale (Paris, 1982, 2/1986) [complete lyrics]

O. Todd: Jacques Brel: une vie (Paris, 1984) [incl. discography and bibliography]

S. Hirschi: Chant contre silence (Paris, 1995)

A. Clayson: Jacques Brel (Leatherhead, 1996)

Brelet, Gisèle (Jeanne Marie Noémie)

(b Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée, 6 March 1915; d Sèvres, 21 June 1973). French musicologist and pianist. She studied the piano at the conservatories of Nantes (under G. Arcouet) and Paris (under Lazare Lévy), and biology and philosophy at the Sorbonne (doctorat d'Etat in philosophy 1949). From 1950 she directed the Bibliothèque Internationale de Musicologie, and in 1952 was appointed solo pianist to the RTF for whom she also lectured and produced musical programmes. She published extensively in the aesthetics of music, with special emphasis on the status of music as the art of time and on the privileged role of the virtuoso performer.

Brelet's work elaborates the view of music borrowed from Pierre Souvtchinsky by Igor Stravinsky, to whom she assigns the central place in 20th-century music. Her three books develop a single argument. The first contrasts the traditional poetics of music, according to which a system of intervals forms the basis of harmonic and melodic structures, with an alternative poetics of temporal form. The second book elaborates this theme into an encomium on music. Since time is the form of the inner life, music must be the most perfect art, for it directly imparts formal perfection to experience itself. From this standpoint, modern non-tonal music appears as aberrant, since the absence of a tonal centre eliminates expectation and thus makes significant temporal form impossible. The third book uses this view of music to prove that the virtuoso performer is the only true musician. Music, being a form of temporal experience, can exist only as and when it is performed. The composer merely provides possibilities which he leaves to performers to actualize in various ways. It follows that performers should not strive to recreate the original effect of a work, or respect a composer's intentions: historical fidelity is not aesthetic fidelity.

In her articles of the 1960s Brelet withdrew her claim for the normality of a tonal centre, conceding that temporal structures can have their three dimensions without pre-established points of rest.

WRITINGS

‘Musiques exotiques et valeurs permanentes de l’art musical’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger, cxxxvi (1946), 71–96

Esthétique et création musicale (Paris, 1947)

Le temps musical (Paris, 1949)

L'interprétation créatrice (Paris, 1951)

‘Essence de la musique russe’, Musique russe, ed. P. Souvtchinsky (Paris, 1953), 45–79

‘Philosophie et esthétique musicale’, Précis de musicologie, ed. J. Chailley (Paris, 1958), 389–423

‘Le problème du temps dans la musique nouvelle’, Revue internationale de philosophie, xvi (1962), 413–31

‘Béla Bartók’, ‘Musique contemporaine en France’, Histoire de la musique, ii, ed. Roland-Manuel (Paris, 1963), 1036–74, 1093–275

‘Musique et structure’, Revue internationale de philosophie, xix (1965), 387–408

‘Musicalisation de l'espace dans la musique contemporaine’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 495–500

‘L'esthétique du discontinu dans la musique nouvelle’, Revue d'esthétique, xxi (1968), 253–77

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Wiora: ‘Musik als Zeitkunst’, Mf, x (1957), 15–28

A. Briner: ‘Eine Zeitästhetik der Musik: zu den Schriften von G. Brelet’, SMz, xcviii (1958), 424–7

E. Fubini: ‘G. Brelet e il problema dell'interpretazione musicale’, Rivista di estetica, v (1960), 81–94

F.E. SPARSHOTT

Brema, Marie [Fehrman, Minny]

(b Liverpool, 28 Feb 1856; d Manchester, 22 March 1925). English mezzo-soprano of German-American parentage. She began serious musical study only in 1890 with George Henschel, and made her début, under the name of Bremer, in 1891 singing Schubert's Ganymed at a London Popular Concert. The same year she made her operatic début as Lola in the first performance in England of Cavalleria rusticana at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. In 1894 she was engaged by Cosima Wagner for Bayreuth, the first British-born singer to appear there, where she sang Ortrud in the first Bayreuth Lohengrin, and Kundry. She returned in 1896 and 1897 to sing Fricka, and was again heard as Kundry. She toured the USA with the Damrosch Opera Company (1894–5), singing Ortrud, Brangäne and the Walküre Brünnhilde; she joined the Metropolitan Opera, for the 1895–6 season, where, in addition to appearing in the Wagner repertory, she sang Amneris and Orpheus. She made her Covent Garden début in 1893 as Siebel in Faust, returning there several times between 1897 and 1907, and creating Beatrice in Stanford's Much Ado About Nothing (1901). She often sang in Paris, where she was the Brangäne of the first Tristan there under Charles Lamoureux in 1899 (in French), and the first Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung under Richter in 1902; she also appeared successfully as Marcelline in Alfred Bruneau's L'attaque du moulin.

In 1910 she organized the first of three seasons of opera in English at the Savoy Theatre, London, singing Orpheus in her own production of Gluck's opera, and the title role in the first production in England of Emanuel Moór’s La Pompadour. In addition to her operatic appearances she sang regularly at the important English festivals and created the part of the Angel in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius at the Birmingham Festival in 1900. After leaving the stage, she was for many years director of the opera class at the RMCM. Photographs indicate that she had an imposing stage presence, and contemporary critics praised her expansive singing and committed acting.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Bremberger, Reinmar der.

See Reinmar von Brennenberg.

Bremen.

Town in Germany located on the river Weser. It is the country’s oldest port. It was the centre of the north-eastern bishopric established in 787 by Charlemagne against the Saxons; as the residence of the archbishops of Hamburg and Bremen it was noted at an early date for its musical connections. It became part of the Hanseatic League in 1358. The earliest example of church music associated with Bremen is probably the Willehad-Antiphon from the Vicelinus Codex of about 1050 (now in D-MÜsa). The teaching of singing at the cathedral school is mentioned in the second half of the 10th century, and a famous choirmaster named Guido was invited to Bremen by Archbishop Hermann (1032–5). In 1231 Pope Gregory IX confirmed the organization of a Bremen archdeaconry with Kantors, and donations show that about 1350 an organ was used for services in the cathedral and in the chapter of St Ansgarius (now the Neue St Ansgarii-Kirche). For many years after the Reformation, bitter disputes between Lutherans and Calvinists hindered the consolidation of the new relationships and new forms of worship. The Reformed Church eventually established itself in 1568; after an interruption of almost 30 years, organ playing, choral singing and instrumental music were accorded a secure, if limited, place in worship. Like the preachers and instructors, musicians in ecclesiastical and municipal appointments were now brought in predominantly from northern and eastern parts of Friesland: the Knop brothers from Emden, Paul as organist of St Stephani (1584) and Johannes as municipal director of music (1600); Thomas Janssen, also from Emden and probably a pupil of Sweelinck, as organist of St Ansgarius (1619); Johannes Eitzen from Appingedam as organist at St Martini (1614); and as municipal director of music (1620–27) Johann Sommer. The descendants of the Knops, Eitzen and Janssen held comparable musical positions for several generations, among them Lüder Knop (d 1665), Samuel and Johannes Eitzen (who left Bremen in 1668 and 1697 respectively) and Johann Janssen (d 1736). After the Thirty Years War there was a Pietist movement fostered by the writer of sacred songs Joachim Neander (1650–80) and the younger Kantor Christoph Knipping (1620–75) to which the preacher Marcus Steffens in 1687 contributed the polemic Geistliche Gedanken gerichtet auf die Beschaffenheit der christlichen Gesänge und Kirchenmusik.

The cathedral was closed by the town council from 1561 to 1638, and thereafter it was always an enclave of Lutheranism, first archiepiscopal, then Swedish and finally English, until in 1803 it was incorporated into the city of Bremen. During this period it had its own musical arrangements, independently of the municipality. Its most distinguished Kantors were Laurentius Laurenti (1684–1722), a native of Husum who was also a productive writer of sacred songs, and the versatile Thuringian Wilhelm Christian Müller, who did much to bring Bremen musical life up to date in the early 19th century; its organists included Theodor Rauschelbach (from 1790), a pupil of C.P.E. Bach and reputedly a composer and improviser in the manner of Abbé Vogler. Among the surviving organs, that of St Martini (case from 1603/4) and the Gottfried Silbermann positive organ (1734) in the cathedral are most noteworthy.

The first evidence of secular music dates from about 1300, when the Minnesinger Frauenlob is said to have visited Archbishop Giselbrecht (1275–1306). In 1303 an official regulation limited the number of musicians allowed to play at weddings to eight. The first document referring to a Ratstrompeter (civic trumpeter) is dated 1339; 50 years later three reed players accompanied the archbishop of Bremen when he travelled to Hamburg. There are no reliable accounts of music-making among the middle classes until after 1405, when the town hall was built, the city gained in prosperity and the townspeople began to assert their power in opposition to that of the archbishop. Only towards the end of the 15th century do reliable sources begin to appear, and these in general reveal an already established order of things. By the 17th century the structure of the municipal organization of music had become outmoded, and the engagement as directors of the municipal band of sound musicians such as Ernst Othmar Abel (1662) and the 60-year-old violinist Clamor Heinrich Abel (1694) could only sporadically halt the decline of music-making in the city. Opera was first given in about 1695; regular performances began a century later, first in the Komödienhaus auf dem Reithof and then in the Schauspielhaus (destroyed in the 1940s).

In the wake of the new dispositions for the town's music about 1800 the Gesellschaft für Privatkonzerte came into being in 1807; it had grown out of amateur performances in the Gewandhaus (later Gewerbehaus) built in 1674 for the use of guilds and families, and led in 1815 to the founding of the Singakademie. The founding of the Bremer Liedertafel in 1827 was followed in 1831 by that of the Bund der Nordwestdeutschen Liedertafeln. W.C. Müller, who was friendly with Beethoven, directed local interest in contemporary music towards an early and lively cultivation of Beethoven's works, to which the Bremen poet Carl Iken contributed as one of the first compilers of poetical programmatic interpretations of them. The works of the Romantics too were widely appreciated early on. A theatre was opened in 1843 and in 1856 became the city's official opera house. After the first performance in Bremen of Tannhäuser (1853) Wagner held a firm place in the opera's repertory, as did Brahms in the concert hall after the first performance of his German Requiem (1868). Meanwhile, even after the waning of the church's reservations about the theatre (which were still influential in the mid-18th century) and despite the work of Heinrich Bulthaupt (1849–1905), opera took second place to concert-giving in the city's musical life. The leading personalities of this period were Wilhelm Friedrich Riem (d 1857) and Karl Reinthaler (d 1896). After Reinthaler's retirement as director of the orchestral concerts (1887), the Singakademie (1890) and the choir of the cathedral, where he had also been the organist (1892), the link he had revived between the directorship of municipal and sacred music was not renewed.

Under Max Erdmannsdörfer (1888–95) the secular musical forces consolidated into a Philharmonische Gesellschaft, which became a vital factor in the city's concert life under Ernst Wendel (1909–35); at the same time Eduard Nössler, as conductor of the cathedral choir (1893–1930), laid the foundations of a reputation which was to spread beyond regional bounds under Richard Liesche (1930–57) and Hans Heintze (appointed in 1958), especially with its performances in the German Bach Festivals of 1934, 1939, 1951 and 1971. After a period during which Fritz Rieger had been appointed by the council to the position of general musical director for concerts and opera (1944–5), Helmut Schnackenburg, who had been engaged as Wendel's successor in 1937, took up this position, but then in 1953 became director of the Bremen Musikschule. The last general musical director, Paul van Kempen (1953–5), was followed by a series of guest conductors at the Philharmonische Gesellschaft over a number of years, and by Heinz Wallberg (1955), Hans Walter Kämpfel (1961) and Hans Wallat (1965) as directors of the opera. In 1968 Hermann Michael became principal conductor of concerts and the opera. At the Theater am Goetheplatz (opened 1950) each season usually includes at least one rarely performed work. The biennial festivals Pro Musica Antiqua and Pro Musica Nova are organized by Bremen Rundfunk. The annual Musikfest Bremen features a broad and varied repertory. Music is taught at the Hochschule für Künste, while its Akademie für Alte Musik (founded 1986) teaches the performing practice of early music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (S. Sonntag)

MGG2 (A.B. Kersting)

W. von Bippen: Geschichte der Stadt Bremen (Bremen, 1892–1904)

A. Arnheim: ‘Aus dem Bremer Musikleben im 17. Jahrhundert’, SIMG, xii (1910–11), 369–416

F. Wellmann: ‘Der Bremer Domkantor Dr. Wilhelm Christian Müller’, Bremisches Jb, xxv (1914), 1–137

F. Piersig: ‘Die Orgeln der bremischen Stadtkirchen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Bremisches Jb, xxxv (1935), 379–425

A. Kissling: ‘Die Oper von 1918–1943’, Studien zur bremischen Theatergeschichte, ed. H. Tardel (Bremen, 1945), 163

F. Piersig: ‘Ostfriesische Musikerfamilien im Bremischen Musikleben des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Jb der Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst und vaterländische Altertümer zu Emden, xxx (1950), 61–76

K. Blum: ‘Musikleben in Bremen’, Geistiges Bremen (Bremen, 1960), 177–206

I. Peters: Theater, Rundfunk und Musik in Bremen: eine Bibliographie (Bremen, 1963)

F. Piersig: ‘Kleine bremische Orgelkunde’, Ars organi, xlii (1964), 57–62

K. Blum: Musikfreunde und Musici: Musikleben in Bremen seit der Aufklärung (Tutzing, 1975)

K. Blum: ‘Frühe mittelalterliche Neumen aus Bremen: ein Bericht über erste musikalische Funde aus dieser Stadt’, Bremer Jb, lxiv (1986), 237–47

G. Kappner: Singet und spielet dem Herrn: Bremer Beiträge zur Kirchenmusik (Bremen, 1987)

O. Rosteck: Bremische Musikgeschichte von der Reformation bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bremen, 1999)

FRITZ PIERSIG/DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Bremner, Robert

(b ?Edinburgh, c1713; d London, 12 May 1789). Scottish music publisher. He established his business in Edinburgh in mid-1754, and had considerable early success: his first issues included Niccolo Pasquali’s excellent Thorough-Bass Made Easy (1757); his own The Rudiments of Music (1756, 3/1763), an instruction book commissioned by the Edinburgh town council for newly formed church choirs; and reprints of the fiddle variations on Scottish tunes by the locally celebrated William McGibbon. Bremner also profited from a fashionable boom in guitar playing, publishing a guitar arrangement of Twelve Scots Tunes (c1760) and Instructions for the Guitar (1758, 2/1765), which was probably written by his son Robert who had been sent to London to study the guitar with Geminiani. From 1755 Bremner supplied sheet music regularly to the influential Edinburgh Musical Society, and travelled to London and Dublin to act as its agent. In 1761 he issued the Six Overtures op.1 of Lord Kelly, the first orchestral pieces in the Mannheim style ever composed in Britain.

These successes enabled Bremner to move his business to London in 1762 (the Edinburgh shop was maintained under a manager, John Brysson). His business continued to flourish; a notable venture was the Periodical Overtures in Eight Parts, a quarterly series of new works for amateur orchestral societies. In 1764 he bought plates from John Simpson, in 1777 most of the stock and plates of john Johnson (ii), and in 1779 some plates from the firm of Welcker. His own music was neatly engraved and printed on high-quality paper. After Bremner’s death his London stock, plates and copyrights were bought by Preston & Son, who described their purchase as ‘not only the most extensive, but also the most valuable list of works ever exhibited in this kingdom’.

Bremner owned the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book for some years from 1762. He bought it for ten guineas at the sale of Pepusch’s library and subsequently presented it to Lord Fitzwilliam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KidsonBMP

An Additional Catalogue of Instrumental and Vocal Music, Printed and Sold by Preston & Son … Late the Property of that Eminent Dealer, Mr. Robert Bremner (London, 1790)

J. Glen: The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music, i (Edinburgh, 1891), p.vii

H.G. Farmer: A History of Music in Scotland (London, 1947/R), 293–4

D. Wyn Jones: ‘Robert Bremner and The Periodical Overture’, Soundings, vii (1978), 63–83 [incl. incipit catalogue]

D. Johnson: Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th Century (Edinburgh, 1984), 70–72

DAVID JOHNSON

Brémond, François

(b Nîmes, 1 Nov 1844; d Houilles, nr Paris, 15 July 1925). French horn player, tenor and teacher. At an early age, he went to live with his uncle Joseph Rousselot, then solo horn at the Opéra. While in Paris he met Dauprat, whom he revered. In 1868 he entered the Conservatoire, studied the horn with Mohr, and won the premier prix after one year. While at the Conservatoire, he joined the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, and in 1872 joined the faculty of the Ecole de Musique at Lyons. In 1875 he returned to Paris to play first horn at the Opéra Populaire, the Concerts du Châtelet and, later, the Opéra National Lyrique (1877). In 1878 he became principal horn at the Société des Concerts and at the Opéra-Comique, remaining with both until 1898 and continuing with the latter a few years longer as second horn. He was appointed professor at the Conservatoire on 1 May 1891, and taught there until 1922. He also possessed a light tenor voice, and early in life sang leading parts in provincial theatres, including Lyons, Nîmes and Dijon.

The focus of Brémond’s training was on the natural horn, but seeing that the valve horn had supplanted it everywhere else, he became the motivating force for the adoption of the modern instrument in France. For the first time since Meifred’s retirement (1864), the valved horn reappeared in classes and sight-reading examinations at the Conservatoire in 1897. He phased in its adoption over five years, and by 1903 it was the official instrument. He remained prejudiced to the natural instrument, however, and in that spirit convinced Massenet to write the solo that accompanies ‘Comme l’oiseau qui chante’ in Manon for horn crooked in F. According to Morley-Pegge, he used an 1823 Raoux cor solo with a detachable set of valves, and extra valve tubes for lower crooks. He also preferred an ascending third valve which, because of his influence, remained popular in France well into the 20th century. He was left-handed and used that hand in the bell, reasoning (and teaching) that players should finger the valves with the right hand like all other valved brass instruments. Instrument makers, however, remained unconvinced. He was noted for his magnificent tone, beautiful phrasing and trills. He warned pupils against smoking, shaving the upper lip and eating fried foods, which he considered bad for the lip. These very precautions, however, did not prolong his own career; he stopped playing altogether shortly after 1900. He composed a few contest solos and compiled several books of exercises for study which included Exercices journaliers pour cor à pistons (Paris, 1900), and four others that borrowed from Dauprat, Mohr and Gallay.

EDITIONS

252 exercices pour le cor de Dauprat (Paris, 1894)

Exercices et études tirés de la méthode de J. Mohr (Paris, 1900) [adapted for cor à pistons]

Exercices et études: extraits de la méthode de Gallay … pour cor à pistons (Paris, 1903/R)

Dauprat: Méthode de cor (Paris, n.d.) [revised and adapted for both horn-types]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Pierre: Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation (Paris, 1900)

B. Coar: A Critical Study of the Nineteenth-Century Virtuosi in France (De Kalb, IL, 1952)

R. Morley-Pegge: The French Horn (London, 1960, 2/1973)

R. Gregory: The Horn (New York, 1961, 2/1969)

JEFFREY L. SNEDEKER

Brendel, Alfred

(b Wiesenberg, Moravia, 5 Jan 1931). Austrian pianist, of German, Italian and Slavonic descent. He studied the piano first in Zagreb and later in Graz, where he gave his début recital in 1948. He was also a student of conducting and composition; having composed as a young man, he has remained strongly interested in new music, although it has not featured in his playing career. He completed his piano studies with Paul Baumgartner, Edward Steuermann and above all with Edwin Fischer, who, in Brendel's words, ‘led two generations of young pianists “away from the piano, and to themselves”’. The award of a prize at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano in 1949 encouraged him to commit himself to a pianist's career when other options might still have claimed him.

Brendel's early recordings for Vox and Vanguard soon brought him international attention. From the wide repertory he cultivated then, they included not only Mozart and Schubert but Busoni, the Schoenberg Concerto (which he still champions), and a selection of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies played with irresistible relish and verve. But it was a compendious recording for Vox of Beethoven's piano music that prompted his choice of path from then on and established him as an interpreter of the Austro-German repertory in the line of Fischer and Kempff. Undertaken between 1958 and 1964, it provided the spur for his first public cycle of all the Beethoven sonatas, given at the Wigmore Hall in London in 1962. This was the first of many. 30 years later he began another, linking it to his third complete recording of the sonatas (Philips, 1992–6), and giving it over an extended period in several European and American cities. He intends these cycles to be his last, although not his last word on some of the sonatas. He has recorded the Beethoven concertos four times, most recently with the Vienna PO and Sir Simon Rattle (1998).

The young Brendel had an easy bravura and a dash and spontaneity that perhaps came less readily to the fore later on; although that could be said of many performers. A characteristic he shares with only the greatest is that he has kept his music-making young. He has done so through a continuous renewal of his vision, either in the form of evolution or of rediscovery. He played Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata for more than 40 years: the concentration and power of the outer movements in his first recording (1957) are still to be admired in his last (1995, deriving from a concert performance); but the fusion of sound and sense in the later one leads the listener ineluctably on a journey through the entire work and a more profound exploration of the interior world of the slow movement. There has been a comparable growth in his interpretation of the Diabelli Variations, another late Beethoven work with which he has been much associated; the advance there has been to convey its multifariousness, and its astonishing flow of invention as seemingly improvised into life. His insights have not been confined to the late works, and he has revealed the earlier piano music as no less masterly and characteristic than the rest. A special achievement has been to bring out the moments of ‘profound levity’ in Beethoven, and not only in the late sets of Bagatelles. Other Beethoven interpreters may be as grand, or as adept at reaching areas of deep feeling, but in matters of wit and musical daring Brendel has often appeared in a class of his own.

While Brendel has won a place among the most admired pianists for his interpretations of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart (whose complete piano concertos he has recorded, several more than once), the works of Haydn, Schumann and Liszt have also remained central to his repertory. In all these composers his playing is bonded to the music's expressive life. It has never been his style to push back boundaries arbitrarily. Rather his aim is to ‘put life into the music without doing damage to it’ (one of Edwin Fischer's precepts) and to avoid false sentiment. In pursuing it, he has continually shown the ability to surpass himself and to surprise his listeners. His playing is not detached in manner: on the contrary, it is highly eventful, essentially vocal in feeling, sometimes quite fiercely declamatory, often nervy and passionate. In Schubert, his all-seeing vision has conveyed the assaults of fever and delusion that are as menacing in some of the sonatas as in the songs. He has successfully projected, too, aspects of the last three sonatas as ‘disguised’ string quintets, and has helped to establish a view of Schubert as a more complex composer and a greater writer for the piano than was widespread before. In Schumann he has been a master of narrative line. In Haydn he has held up a mirror to the wit, revelled in the drama and given a sharp profile to the acuteness of expression. In a wide range of music by Liszt he has shown that there need be no ‘effects without causes’ and that a poetic core is everywhere paramount. At his best, Brendel conveys a sense of emotional and intellectual coherence in whatever he touches. A spirit of learning and adventure come together, and he has shown himself capable of winning through to that ‘second simplicity’ where the listener has the sensation of music ‘not being played, but happening by itself’.

Writing has also been important to Brendel. He expresses himself with clarity and style in words as well as music and has brought to his articles, essays and occasional lectures the same intellectual power, sensibility and liveliness that distinguish his playing. He has also published two collections of humorous German prose poems, a selection of which is available in an English translation. Since the 1970s he has made his home in London.

WRITINGS

(selective list)

Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (London, 1976)

‘Schubert's Last Sonatas’, New York Review of Books (2 Feb 1989), 32–6

Music Sounded Out (London, 1990)

‘On Playing Schoenberg's Piano Concerto’, New York Review of Books (16 Feb 1995), 27–9

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Plaistow: ‘Mainly for Pleasure’, Gramophone, lxxiii Feb (1996), 14–17

STEPHEN PLAISTOW

Brendel, (Karl) Franz

(b Stolberg, Harz, 26 Nov 1811; d Leipzig, 25 Nov 1868). German writer on music. The son of a mining engineer, he moved after several semesters at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin to the mining academy of Freiberg. Apart from some rudimentary early instruction at Freiberg from A.F. Anacker, Brendel had little formal musical training although he was for a time a piano pupil of Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig. At Leipzig he was introduced to the fundamentals of Hegel’s philosophical thought through C.H. Weisse, and further through H.G. Hotho and F.A. Gabler in Berlin. He completed his studies in Freiberg with the publication of a thesis (1840) in ‘medicinal philosophy’. After that, his interests in the history and aesthetics of music took the upper hand and between 1841 and 1844 he lectured in Freiberg and Dresden on the history of music. These lectures, along with the Grundzüge der Geschichte der Musik (1848), formed the basis of his Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich (1852, with three revised editions in Brendel’s lifetime). Brendel lectured as a professor at the University of Leipzig, throughout the 1850s and 60s. At the beginning of 1845 he took over from Schumann the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. While his editorial and critical styles were very different from Schumann’s, he was able to maintain the pre-eminence of the Neue Zeitschrift among German musical journals throughout his tenure, which lasted up to his death. Between 1856 and 1861 he also edited the Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft, with Richard Pohl, another critic sympathetic to the progressive tendencies of Berlioz, List and Wagner. In addition to his idealistic philosophical and aesthetic views, Brendel was concerned with practical social issues pertaining to musical life; he was founder of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, a kind of early musicians’ union, in 1861 and its first president. Its annual meetings, the Tonkünstler-Versammlungen, which began in 1859, were the occasion for important concerts of new music as well as public discussions and editorials by Brendel on the state of music and musicians in Germany and Austria. Brendel’s involvement with the Musikverein also produced a series of articles on the role of city and state government in the administration of musical schools, concert organizations, theatres and other institutions (collected as Die Organisation des Musikwesens durch die Staat, 1865). Although Brendel neither performed nor composed, his wife (Elisabeth Tautmann) was a concert pianist who had studied with Ludwig Berger and John Field.

Brendel’s most significant independent monograph is his Geschichte der Musik, as testified by its numerous editions up to 1906. It differs from most histories written up to that time in the emphasis given to the recent past and even the present; this reflects the author’s principal vocation as journalist and critic rather than historian. Nor was he an antiquarian and collector, as most other writers on music history had been. In addition to a basic, often fairly sketchy compilation of names, dates and works, he views music as a product of historical, cultural and social developments and as a manifestation of the unfolding Hegelian ‘world-spirit’. Brendel’s committment to current notions of historical progress in material as well as social and spiritual domains is evident throughout, and while his methodology is far from sophisticated, the work remains an interesting early document of modernist consciousness in musical historiography and criticism.

The same can be said of Brendel’s journalism. While he seldom says much about individual works, he was instrumental in framing the critical debates in the 1850s and 60s over programme music, the Lisztian symphonic poem and the Wagnerian music drama. His coining of the term ‘Neudeutsche Schute’ (as an alternative to the pejorative ‘Musik der Zukunft’) in his address to the first Tonkünstler-Versammlung in 1859 represents a signal moment. The 1854 monograph Die Musik der Gegenwart und die Gesammtkunstwerk der Zukunft and the 1859 pamphlet Franz Liszt als Symphoniker (both largely deriving from material published in the Neue Zeitschrift) elevate Wagner and Liszt, respectively, as figures whose music and ideas define the cultural moment in far-reaching ways. The short-lived Anregungen coincides with the period of Brendel’s most intensive critical activity and influence in the years around 1860. The journal’s broad scope is characteristic of Brendel’s underlying project of integrating music into the concerns of contemporary society, politics and culture at large. In addition to promoting the cause of musical progress and the New German School, Brendel’s contributions to the Anregungen addressed a variety of literary and social topics such as classical and contemporary drams, painting and sculpture, ballet, musical institutions, school and university curricula, ‘Art and Morality’ (1856), ‘Progress in the Area of Religion’ (1856), ‘The Servant Class’ (1857) ‘The Present and Future of the Female Sex’ (1857) and of course the role of the critic. He also helped to perpetuate Schumann’s posthumous reputation. The revolutionary events of 1848–9, when Brendel had just come to prominence as an editor and critic, were decisive for his sense of political engagement (in March 1848 he drafted a petition to Frankfurt Volksparlament advocating that music be emancipated from its status as a ‘luxury of the educated classes’). Despite the interest of his critical and historical writings as an index of contemporary intellectual preoccupations and their bearing on musical life, they suffer from a lack of concrete musical detail or any extended engagement with specific works. Beyond that, he often demonstrates an exasperating facility for abstract speculation and a penchant for empty phrase-spinning (as his contemporaries noted), formulaic ‘even-handedness’ and constant deferral of substantial discussion or analysis to ’some other occasion’. For these reasons, among others, he did not always receive the full approbation of those whom he sought to champion, such as Liszt and Wagner (who in particular had harsh words for him). All the same, he did more than perhaps any other single figure to set the tone of critical debate on musical-cultural issues across the centre of the 19th century, and his conviction in the increased role of critical reflection in the production and reception of music since Beethoven makes him a characteristic ideological spokesman for the early stages of European modernism.

WRITINGS

Grundzüge der Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1848, 4/1855)

Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1852, 5/1875, ed. F. Stade, 6/1878, ed. F.C. Schilde, 7/1889, ed. W.H. Voigt, 8/1906, ed. R. Hövker)

Die Musik der Gegenwart und die Gesammtkunstwerk der Zukunft (Leipzig,1854)

Franz Liszt als Symphoniker (Leipzig, 1859)

Die Organisation des Musikwesens durch den Staat (Leipzig, 1865)

Geist und Technik im Clavier-Unterricht (Leipzig, 1867)

Articles and editorials in NZM (1839, 1845–68), Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft; collected articles pubd as Zur Geschichte und Kritik der neueren Musik (Leipzig, 1888)

For list of writings and index of letters, see Ramroth, 1991

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADB (A. von Dommer); NDB (G. von Dadelsen)

R. Pohl: ‘Betrachtungen über F. Brendel’s Schrift Die Musik der Gegenwart und die Gesammtkunst der Zukunft’, NZM, xlii (1885), 13–26, 21–5

J. Besser: ‘Die Beziehungen Franz Brendels zur Hegelschen Philosophie: ein Beitrag zur Musikanschauung des Schumann-Kreises’, Robert Schumann: aus Anlass seines 100. Todestages, ed. H.J. Moser and E. Rebling (Leipzig, 1956), 84–91

B. Meier: ‘Zur Musikhistoriographie des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik, ed. W. Wiora (Regensburg, 1969), 169–206

B. Sponheuer: ‘Zur ästhetischen Dichotomie als Denkform in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: eine historische Skizze am Beispiel Schumanns, Brendels und Hanslicks’, AMf, xxxvii (1980), 1–31

C. Dahlhaus: Musikalischer Realismus: zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982; Eng. trans., 1985), 29–43

J. Thym: ‘Schumann in Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik from 1845–1856’, Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on their Music and its Context, ed. J.W. Finson and R.L. Todd (Durham, NC, 1984), 21–36

J. Deaville: ‘Franz Brendel: ein Neudeutscher aus der Sicht von Wagner und Liszt’, Liszt-Studien, iii (1986), 36–47

F.W. Riedel: ‘Die neudeutsche Schule: ein Phänomen der deutschen Kulturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Liszt-Studien, iii (1986), 13–18

C. Dahlhaus: Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988) [esp. chaps ‘Klassizität, Romantik, Modernität’ [1969], 256–72; ‘These über Programmusik’ [1975], 365–85; ‘Musik als Sprachkritik [1981], 278–85]

R. Determann: Begriff und Ästhetik der “Neudeutschen Schule” (Baden-Baden, 1989)

P. Ramroth: Robert Schumann und Richard Wagner im geschichtsphilosophischen Urteil von Franz Brendel (Frankfurt etc., 1991) [incl. bibliography of writings by Brendel, 9–34, and index of letters, 35–46]

E. Reimer: ‘Nationalbewusstsein und Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland, 1800–1850’, Mf, xlvi (1993), 17–31

I. Bent: Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, II: Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge, 1994)

K.M. Stevenson: The Music Criticism of Franz Brendel (diss., Northwestern U., 1994)

S.F. Pederson: Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism 1800–1850 (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1995

THOMAS S. GREY

Brendler, (Frans Fredric) Eduard

(b Dresden, 4 Nov 1800; d Stockholm, 16 Aug 1831). Swedish composer. He was taught by his father, Johann Franz Brendler, a flautist in the Swedish Royal Opera in Stockholm. His first dated composition is the Serenade for 12 wind instruments (1827), though it is likely that he had already composed romances and other small piano pieces for the Harmoniska Sällskap, a society of musicians and singers associated with Crown Prince Oscar. His first printed compositions, three songs to texts by Stangelius, appeared in 1828; these were followed by a set of piano pieces, Flores (1830) and his best-known song, Amanda (1831). Brendler achieved prominence with his melodramas Spastaras död (1830) and Edmund och Clara (1831), and as a result of these successes was commissioned to write an opera, Ryno (to a libretto by Bernhard von Beskow), for the inauguration of the restored Royal Opera. The three acts comprise 14 numbers: Brendler composed eight and orchestrated six before his sudden death; his friend Prince Oscar completed the remaining six numbers, and J.F. Berwald the rest of the orchestration (which is preserved in S-Skma). It was performed at the Royal Opera, Stockholm, to great acclaim in May 1834 and was revived 20 times in the following four years. Brendler’s work is unique in Swedish musical history as he was the only exponent there of central European early Romanticism. He exploited the connection between lyric intensity and dramatic characterization, most notably in the opera. In form and harmony the influence of Weber, Marschner and particularly Spohr is apparent, even in as early a work as his Serenade. He used colourful orchestration within free musical forms. His advanced musical language did not, however, leave any lasting traces in Swedish music of the 19th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SBL (T. Norlind)

F.A. Dahlgren: Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel uppförda på Stockholms theatrar 1737–1863 [Catalogue of Swedish stage works performed in Stockholm theatres 1737–1863] (Stockholm, 1866)

J.M. Rosén: Några minnesblad (Stockholm, 1877) [reminiscences]

W. Bauck: Sjelfbiografisk skizz 1872 (Stockholm, 1878)

E. Åkerberg: Musiklifvet inom Par Bricole, 1779–1890 (Stockholm, 1910)

N. Personne: Svenska teatern, vii (Stockholm, 1925)

A. Wiklund: Eduard Brendlers opera Ryno: Källkritik-analys-edition (diss., U. of Göteborg, 1991)

ANDERS WIKLUND

Brendner [Brendtner], Johann Joseph Ignaz.

See Brentner, Johann Joseph Ignaz.

Brenes (Candanedo), Gonzalo

(b Panama, 1906). Panamanian composer, researcher and teacher. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Sigfrid Karg-Elert. On his return from Germany, Narciso Garay’s Tradiciones y cantares de Panamá may have stimulated his interest in Panamanian folk music. He undertook research in the province of Los Santos y Herrera, where he collected tonadas and information on instrumental music and popular rhythms. He taught music at various schools in Panama (1933–40) and Costa Rica (1943–8) and at the request of the writer and social activist Carl Luis Saenz founded and directed a choir of Costa Rican workers and peasants. He was elected an MP and served as secretary of culture for Panama. He continued to compose and to teach at the National University of Panama into his nineties.

His research into folk music resulted in some important works, for example La cucarachita mandinga (with a libretto by Rogelio Sinan) and Tondas del trópico niño (Panama City, 1955), a collection of more than 70 songs based on texts by Latin American poets and designed for use in schools and colleges. The composer himself introduced these songs, which clearly reflect the influence of Panamanian folk music, into the repertory of the Panamanian and Costa Rican schools in which he worked, thereby transforming the way music was taught. Some of the songs have also been sung by professional singers. In 1994 Brenes attended the 6th Caribbean Composers’ Forum held in San José, when his Soliloquio for oboe solo, Elegía al pájaro dela for oboe and piano, and Romanza for violin and piano were performed. He is the author of Desarrollo musical de Panamá a partir de la República (Panama City).

JORGE LUIS ACEVEDO VARGAS

Brenet, Michel [Bobillier, (Antoinette Christine) Marie]

(b Luneville, 12 April 1858; d Paris, 4 Nov 1918). French music critic and writer. An only child, she lived in many places (including Strasbourg and Metz) because of her father’s military career; she finally settled in Paris in 1871, where an attack of scarlet fever made her an invalid, thus influencing her early decision to devote her life to research. Her first publication, Histoire de la symphonie à orchestre (1882), won a prize in a Brussels competition. From then on she achieved an increasingly high reputation among French musicologists and abroad. She gathered an immense amount of information from the most reliable sources; her working methods were extremely precise and her interests wide. Certain official connections made it possible for her to gain access to primary sources. Her publications included writings on Ockeghem, Goudimel, Palestrina, Sébastien de Brossard, Handel, Haydn, Grétry and Berlioz. The last book issued during her lifetime was La musique militaire (1917), but a Dictionnaire pratique et historique de la musique, completed by Amédée Gastoué, was published in 1926. Her Notes sur l’histoire du luth en France opened the way to investigators in that field. Her main works, Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais, Les concerts en France sous l’ancien régime and La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, give evidence of her great erudition and competence as a music historian. She wrote numerous articles, historical and critical, for Revue musicale, Revue de musicologie, Rivista musicale italiana, Musical Quarterly, Année musicale (of which she was a founder) and many other journals. Although her interests were broad, she particularly emphasized French music and attempted to show French composers in a better perspective. Her unflagging energy was entirely devoted to musical research until her sudden death. Her remaining papers and documents were donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale (Département des manuscrits).

WRITINGS

Histoire de la symphonie à orchestre: depuis ses origines jusqu’à Beethoven inclusivement (Paris, 1882)

Grétry: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1884)

Deux pages de la vie de Berlioz: les oeuvres de Berlioz en Allemagne; le premier opéra de Berlioz (Paris, 1889)

Jean de Ockeghem: maître de la chapelle des rois Charles VII et Louis XI, étude bio-bibliographique, d’après des documents inédits (Nogent-le-Rotrou, 1893)

Sébastien de Brossard: prêtre, compositeur et bibliophile (165..–1730): d’après ses papiers inédits (Nogent-le-Rotrou, 1896)

Claude Goudimel: essai bio-bibliographique (Besançon, 1898)

‘La musique dans les couvents de femmes depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à nos jours’, Tribune de Saint-Gervais, iv (1898), 25, 58, 73; pubd separately (Paris, 1898)

‘Notes sur l’histoire du luth en France’, RMI, v (1898), 637–76; vi (1899), 1–44; pubd separately (Turin, 1899/R)

La musique sacrée sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1899)

Les concerts en France sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1900/R)

‘La jeunesse de Rameau’, RMI, ix (1902), 658–93, 860–87; x (1903), 62–85, 185–206; pubd separately (Turin, 1902)

‘Deux comptes de la chapelle-musique des rois de France’, SIMG, vi (1904–5), 1–31; pubd separately (Leipzig, 1904)

Palestrina (Paris, 1906/R)

‘La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, d’après les registres de privilèges’, SIMG, viii (1906–7), 401–66; pubd separately (Leipzig, 1907)

La plus ancienne méthode française de musique (Paris, 1907)

Haydn (Paris, 1909, 2/1910; Eng. trans., 1926/R)

Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais: documents inédits, recueillis et annotés par Michel Brenet (Paris, 1910/R)

Musique et musiciens de la vieille France (Paris, 1911/R)

Haendel: biographie critique illustrée de douze planches hors texte (Paris, 1912, 2/1930)

Musiciens d’autrefois (Paris, 1912)

‘Bibliographie des bibliographies musicales’, Année musicale, iii (1913), 1–152; repr. separately (New York, 1971)

La musique militaire: étude critique, illustrée de douze planches hors texte (Paris, 1917)

Dictionnaire pratique et historique de la musique (Paris, 1926) [completed by A. Gastoué]

Articles in BSIM, MQ, RdM, RHCM, RMI, Année musicale, Archives historiques, artistiques, littéraires, Correspondant, Courrier musical, Guide du concert, Journal musical, Le ménestrel, Tribune de Saint-Gervais, Grand encyclopédie and EMDC.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (A. Dieudonné) [incl. extensive list of articles]

L. de La Laurencie: Obituary, RdM, i (1917–19), 199–202

C. Goubault: La critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva and Paris, 1984)

MARIE LOUISE PEREYRA/JEFFREY COOPER

Brenet, Thérèse

(b Paris, 22 Oct 1935). French composer. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where she obtained first prizes in harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition; among her teachers there were Rivier, Dutilleux, Duruflé and Milhaud. She won the Prix de Rome in 1965 and has since received several other international awards; she became a professor at the Conservatoire in 1970.

Her output is eclectic, relying on an atonal, non-serial musical language into which aleatory techniques are frequently incorporated. She is sensitive to instrumental timbres created by bold superimpositions, and her exploration of microtonal intervals, extended instrumental techniques (such as woodwind multiphonics), and non-standard instruments (notably the celtic harp) bears witness to a continuing desire to expand her music's range of sonority. She is particularly drawn to writing for voices: Clamavit, a work for narrator, chorus and orchestra commissioned by French Radio, was chosen to represent France at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and has since been widely performed abroad.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Conc. ‘pour un poème inconnu’, pf, str, opt. ondes martenot, 1966; 6 pièces brèves, 1966; Fragor, poem, 2 pf, orch, 1969; Sidérales, after Lucretius: De rerum natura, opt. spkr, orch, 1970; Hapax, 4 songs after F.W. Nietzsche: Nocturne, 1977; Moires, 6 ondes martenot, str, 1983; Vibration, celtic hp, str, 1983; Des grains de sable d'or aux mains, conc. after E.A. Poe, gui, str, 1988; Aeterno certamine, va, vc, str, perc, 1990; Odi et amo, vn, orch, 1992; Chimères, conc., mand, str, 1993; Poème, vn, orch, 1994; Le retour de Quetzalcoatl, vc, orch, 1995; see also vocal works

Vocal: Aube morte (after Le Conte de Lautréamont [I.L. Ducasse]: Les chants de Maldoror), poème lyrique, Bar, orch, 1964; Clamavit (Bible: Job), S, spkr, chorus, orch, 1965, It. version, 1968; 7 poèmes chinois (F. Toussaint: La flûte de jade), Bar, chbr orch, 1966; Hommage à Signorelli (after P.-J. Jouve: La résurrection des morts), S, pf, ondes martenot, 2 perc, 1967; Le chant des mondes (Evren dile geldi) (Celaleddin Rumi: Masnavi), sym. poem, spkr, pf, orch, 1968; Les mains (M. Saint-Lo: Mains du temps), S, 3 spkrs, 4 S, 4 A, 4 tpt, 4 perc, 4 vc, 1970; Incandescence, Bar, sax, pf, 1984

Chbr and solo inst: Inter silentia, tpt/cornet, pf, 1969; 6 pièces, tpt, pf/org, 1972; Pantomime, fl, 1974; Tétrapyle, sax qt pf, 1978; Caprice d'une chatte anglaise, after H. de Balzac, 2 gui, 1979; Ce que pensent les étoiles, 4 perc, 1980; Accordance, ob, celtic hp, 1981; Calligramme, a sax + s sax, 1981; Cristaux, mand, celtic hp, 1982; Suite fantasque, after P. Verlaine: Clair de lune, celtic hp, 1982; Boustrophédon, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1986; Océanides, pf LH, 1986; Phoinix, a sax, 1986; Plus souple que l'eau, after frag. by Sappho, ondes martenot, perc, 1986; Madrépore, celtic hp, 1987; Née du rire de l'éclair, after frag. of Rig-Veda, gui, 1987; Vision flamboyante, vn, pf, 1987; Tout l'azur pour émail, after J.-M. de Heredia: Blason céleste, mand, gui, 1988; Le fascinateur (J.-P. Luminet), spkr, celtic hp, perc, 1989; Le tambour des dunes, after G. de Maupassant: La peur, celtic hp, mand, gui, 1989; Petite suite pour M. Ré Dièse et Mlle Mi Bémol, after J. Verne, 12 sax, 1989; Aréthuse, a fl, celtic hp/hp, 1994

DANIEL KAWKA

Breni, Tomaso

(b Lucca, 1603; d c1650). Italian composer. He became a priest and spent the later part of his life at his birthplace, taking an organist's post and teaching at the seminary of S Martino. His only surviving publication is his Mottetti for two, three and six voices, violin and organ continuo (Lucca, 1645). It shows that he was a talented melodist, integrating ornaments into a forceful melodic line, and capable of writing attractive triple-time sections. There is a clear distinction between the latter and his declamatory writing in 4/4 time, which is harnessed in the duet Vide, Domine to contrasts of mood: the opening 4/4 breathes a spirit of abasement, the ensuing 3/2 one of renewed hope. Some duets open with solo sections for one of the voices, and two are written for the rare scoring of one voice, one violin and continuo, mainly in a dialogue style. In the six-part motets Breni follows the fashion of contrasting a chordal tutti section with little movements for smaller forces – here for one, two or four voices. He was also active as an opera composer: his La Psiche (librettist F. di Poggi) was produced at Lucca in 1645. (NericiS)

JEROME ROCHE

Brenneberger, Reinmar der [Brennenberg, Reinmar von].

See Reinmar von Brennenberg.

Brenner, Georg.

See Prenner, Georg.

Brenntner, Johann Joseph Ignaz.

See Brentner, Johann Joseph Ignaz.

Brent, Charlotte [Mrs Pinto]

(b London, 17 Dec 1734; d London, 10 April 1802). English soprano. The daughter of the fencing-master Charles Brent (1692/3–1770), she was taught by Thomas Arne and made her stage début as Liberty in his Eliza in Dublin on 29 November 1755, appearing frequently at the Smock Alley Theatre until the following May. Arne then returned with her to London, abandoning Mrs Arne in Dublin. He tried to get his pupil taken on at Drury Lane, but Garrick refused because of her unprepossessing appearance; she joined Covent Garden where, with John Beard as Macheath, she triumphed as Polly in The Beggar’s Opera in October 1759. Charles Dibdin remembered her at this time: ‘Her power was resistless, her neatness was truly interesting and her variety was incessant’. At Covent Garden she created the roles of Sally in Arne’s Thomas and Sally, Rosetta in his pasticcio Love in a Village and Mandane in his Artaxerxes(1762), a bravura role including ‘The soldier tir’d’, which became an exhibition aria for English sopranos. In 1765 she was the first Patty in The Maid of the Mill, with music arranged by Arnold. She sang in summer seasons at Vauxhall Gardens from 1760, appeared at Ranelagh, 1762–4, and was a soloist at the Three Choirs Meetings, 1765–7. By 1765 her popularity was such that her name was used for a collection of over 400 song lyrics, The Brent; or, English Syren.

In 1766, to Arne's scorn, she married the violinist Thomas Pinto, a gifted but lazy musician who took over the running of Marylebone Gardens in 1769 for one disastrous season. Four of their children, including twin boys, died between April 1769 and March 1770. To escape creditors they moved first to Edinburgh where Sylas Neville found her ‘grown so ugly’, and then to Dublin where ‘the ruins of the once celebrated Miss Brent’ (Thomas Snagg) sang Urganda in Michael Arne’s Cymon (1773). Pinto died in December 1782 or January 1783, leaving her penniless, and she returned to London to live with her stepdaughter, whose musically gifted son, George Frederick Pinto, she taught. There were a few final stage appearances in 1785 and 1786, when she sang Polly, as well as ‘The soldier tir’d’ and ‘Sweet echo’ from Arne’s Comus. The echo was played on the oboe by W.T. Parke, who remembered that she was loudly applauded: ‘her voice possessed the remains of those qualities for which it had been so much celebrated – power, flexibility, and sweetness’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

DNB (W.B. Squire)

‘A Parallel between Mrs. Vincent and Miss Brent’, The British Magazine (1760), 348–50

H. Kelly: Thespis, ii (London, 1766, 2/1767)

C. Dibdin: A Complete History of the English Stage, v (London, 1800

W.T. Parke: Musical Memoirs (London, 1830)

B. Cozens-Hardy, ed.: The Diary of Sylas Neville, 1767–1788 (London, 1950)

T. Snagg: Recollections of Occurrences (London, 1951)

T.J. Walsh: Opera in Dublin 1705–1797 (Dublin, 1973)

B. Boydell: A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700–1760 (Dublin, 1988)

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Brenta, Gaston

(b Schaerbeek, Brussels, 10 June 1902; d Schaerbeek, 30 May 1969). Belgian composer and critic. Brenta received his musical education from Gilson and together with other disciples he founded the Synthétistes group in 1925. Having worked for Belgian radio since 1931, he was director of French music broadcasts from 1953 to 1967. He was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy in 1966. In 1968 his Second Piano Concerto was the set work for the Queen Elisabeth International Competition. Brenta was a Romantic composer, giving pride of place to amply developed and expressive melodic line. He usually employed conventional forms, and his tonal harmony included unexpected use of dissonance. From Gilson he received a taste for the exotic, notably in evidence in his opera Le khadi dupé, and he owed to him a consummate mastery of orchestration. Brenta's orchestral palette developed in the direction of a finesse which embraced some astonishingly novel sonorities, notably in the Farandole burlesque.

WORKS

(selective list)

Le khadi dupé (op, Brenta), 1929; 3 ballets, incid and film scores

Orch: Nocturne, chbr orch, 1934; Arioso e moto perpetuo, 1940; Sym., 1946; Farandole burlesque, 1951; Matinée d'été, 1967; 2 pf concs.; concertinos for tpt, a sax, perc; 3 works for brass band

Str Qt, 1939; Suite, w qnt, 1952; pieces for pf; vn, pf; bn, pf; hp

Songs, choral works

Principal publishers: Buyst, CeBeDeM, Universal, Leduc

WRITINGS

Paul Gilson (Brussels, 1965)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

Catalogue des oeuvres de compositeurs belges: Gaston Brenta (Brussels, 1955)

R. Wangermée: La musique belge contemporaine (Brussels, 1959)

R. Bernier: ‘Notice sur Gaston Brenta’, Annuaire de l'Académie royale de Belgique, cxl (1974), 301–13

HENRI VANHULST

Brentano[-von Arnim], Bettina [Bettine, Elisabeth]

(b Frankfurt, 4 April 1785; d Berlin, 20 Jan 1859). German writer, editor, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist and patron of young artists. Although known today primarily for her writing and her illustrious associates, Bettine was also a talented musician. She composed songs in a simple folk style, choosing texts by poets she knew and loved, including Goethe, Achim von Armin, and her brother, Clemens Brentano. She helped gather songs for Armin and Brentano’s influential collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–8) and decades later published a fourth volume based on their notes (ed. Ludwig Erk, 1854). From 1808 to 1809 she studied singing and composition with Peter von Winter and the piano with Sebastian Bopp in Munich. Her first two songs appeared under the pseudonym ‘Beans Beor’ (‘blessing I am blessed’) with Arnim’s literary works. After her crucial meeting with Beethoven in Vienna (May, 1810), she mediated between him and Goethe.

Settling in Berlin after her marriage to Arnim in 1811, Bettina sang briefly in the Berliner Singakademie and composed settings of Hellenistic poems by Amalie von Helvig, however her musical activities were curtailed by the responsibilities of raising her seven children. Widowed in 1831, she reflected on her life and revised some early letters and compositions for publication. In three autobiographical books based on her youthful correspondence with Goethe (Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, 1835), Karoline von Günderrode (Die Günderode [sic], 1840) and her brother (Clemens Brentano’s Frühlingskranz, 1844), she portrayed herself as a naturally talented musician without the need for theoretical knowledge. Her writings have been collected and published in a number of editions in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Werke und Briefe, ed. W. Schmitz and S. von Steinsdorff (Frankfurt, 1986–95). In 1842 she published a collection of seven songs as a public sign of support for the beleaguered Prussian Music Director, Gaspare Spontini (Dedié à Spontini …). An anonymous reviewer criticized ‘a certain dilettante naivety’ about the songs, which remain outside the mainstream (AMZ, xlv (1843), 103).

The recent evaluation of Bettina’s music manuscripts reveals that she conceived many more songs than were published during her lifetime. She was one of the first composers to set poems by Hölderlin. She approached composition from a literary viewpoint, allowing the text spontaneously to inspire her settings. Unconvential features, such as a wide range, large melodic leaps and unusual harmonic progressions, rhythms and phrase lengths, can be traced to the songs’ literary and improvisational origins.

Young virtuosos and composers such as Franz Liszt, Joseph Joachim, Peter Cornelius, Johanna Kinkel and Robert Schumann admired her as a friend of Goethe and Beethoven. Bettina’s influence on young musicians of her day, and on the Romantic view of Beethoven remain, beside her writings and compositions, of lasting importance.

WORKS

MSS in US-NYpm, D-WRgs; for a complete list of extant and lost compositions see Lemke ‘Bettine’s Song’ (1998)

BB – pubd under pseud. ‘Beans Beor’

BA – pubd under ‘Bettine Arnim’

Editions: Bettina von Arnims Kompositionen, ed. M. Friedlaender, in Bettina von Arnim: sämtliche Werke, ed. W. Oehlke (Berlin, 1920–22), iv, 253–306Bettine von Arnim: Lieder und Duette für Singstimme und Klavier: Handschriften, Drucke, Bearbeitungen, ed. R. Moering (Kassel, 1996)Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche: Goethe-Vertonungen für Singstimme und Klainer, ed. R. Moering and R. Schmiedel (Kassel, 1999)

Faust (J.W. von Goethe), – ov. and several nos., 1808–10, lost, except for songs

Romanze (A. von Arnim), music suppl. to Armut, Reichthum, Schuld und Busse der Gräfin Dolores by A. von Arnim (Berlin, 1810), BB

Lied des Schülers (A. von Arnim), v, pf, music suppl. to Isabella von Ägypten by A. von Arnim (Berlin, 1812), BB

Das Frühlingsfest (A. von Arnim), frag., solo vv, choruses, acc., c1822, US-NYpm

Dedié à Spontini, Directeur général de la musique et premier maître de chapelle de S.M. le Roi de Prusse. etc. etc. (A. von Arnim, Goethe, St John of the Cross), 5 songs, v, pf; (A. von Arnim) 2 duets, A, T, pf (Leipzig, 1842), BA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Moering: ‘Bettines Liedvertonungen’, Herzhaft in die Dornen der Zeit greifen…: Bettine von Arnim 1785–1859, ed. C. Perels (Frankfurt, 1985), 178–201

A. Willison: ‘Bettines Kompositionen: zu einem Notenheft der Sammlung Heineman’, Internationales Jb der Bettina-von-Arnim-Gesellschaft, iii (1989), 183–208

R. Moering: ‘Bettines Liedvertonungen’, ‘Der Geist muss Freiheit geniessen…!’: Studien zu Werk und Bildungsprogramm Bettine von Arnims, ed. W. Schmitz and S. von Steinsdorff, Bettina von Arnim-Studien, ii (Berlin, 1992), 67–75

A. Willison: ‘Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: the Unknown Musician’, Bettina Bretano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, ed. E. Frederiksen and K. Goodman (Detroit, MI, 1995), 304–45

R. Moering: ‘Bettines Melodien als Inspirationsquelle’, Salons der Romantik: Beiträge eines Wiepersdorfer Kolloquiums zu Bettine von Arnim und Rahel Varnhagen, ed. H. Schultz (Berlin, 1997), 343–66

A.W. Lemke: Bettine’s Song: the Musical Voice of Bettine von Arnim, née Brentano (1785–1859) (Ann Arbor, 1998)

A.W. Lemke: ‘Bettine von Arnim (1785–1859)’, Women Composers: Music through the Ages, ed. S. Glickman and M.F. Schleifer (New York, 1998), iv: 382–95 [incl. edns of 4 songs]

E.F. Jensen: ‘Schumann at Endenich: Buried Alive’, MT, cxxxix (1998), March, 10–18; April, 14–23

ANN WILLISON LEMKE

Brentano, Clemens (Wenzeslaus Maria)

(b Ehrenbreitstein, 9 Sept 1778; d Aschaffenburg, 28 July 1842). German poet. One of the leading figures of the younger Romantic generation (which included the Grimm brothers, Fouqué, Arnim, Chamisso and Eichendorff), he was a versatile writer whose modern reputation rests on his lyric poetry, the story Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (1817), the fairy tale Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (1811) and the collection of folk poetry which he edited with Achim von Arnim under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (i, 1805). His rich imagination was matched by great melodiousness of expression, which led Nietzsche to call him the most musical of German poets; but he could also demonstrate a purely verbal ingenuity and wit of a high order.

In 1803 Brentano wrote a Singspiel, Die lustigen Musikanten, which was set to music by E.T.A. Hoffmann and given its première in Warsaw in 1805, though without much success. A cantata text, Kantate auf den Tod Ihrer Königlichen Majestät, Louise von Preussen (1810), was set to music by Reichardt and performed in Berlin in 1811. Dissatisfied with Reichardt’s setting, Brentano tried in vain to persuade Beethoven to undertake a fresh setting of the text. A second cantata, Universitati litterariae: Kantate auf den 15ten Oktober 1810, was likewise set to music by Reichardt. In 1814 Brentano attempted to write a libretto for Weber on the Tannhäuser theme (after Tieck); the work was never completed and remains unpublished. Then, in 1815–16, Brentano sketched a plan for a second opera Phaon et Sappho, the manuscript of which contains a detailed description of the overture. He is also said to have toyed with the idea of turning the story of Cinderella into an opera.

Many of Brentano’s lyric poems were set to music by major composers. His primary importance to music, however, lies in his co-editorship of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. This anthology, which salvaged a legacy of folk poetry from old printed sources and oral tradition, exercised great influence on 19th-century lyric poets and inspired scholarly research into the Volkslied. Although the compilers modernized, ‘improved’ and sometimes even rewrote the originals (Arnim more often than Brentano), their contemporaries felt that the songs sounded authentic. Poems from the collection have frequently been set to music; Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wolf, Strauss and even Webern and Ives wrote songs to these texts, and Mahler’s orchestral settings are especially well known.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Mallon: Brentano-Bibliographie (Berlin, 1926/R)

P.H. Gehly: ‘Ein romantisches Singspiel E.T.A. Hoffmanns’, ZfM, Jg.100 (1933), 1103–5

W. Pfeiffer-Belli: Clemens Brentano: ein romantisches Dichterleben (Freiburg, 1947), 154–5 [two opera sketches]

H. Plard: ‘Le “Wunderhorn” en musique’, Etudes germaniques, xv (1960), 361

F. Kemp, ed.: Clemens Brentano: Werke (Munich, 1963–8)

J.F. Fetzer: Music in the Life and Works of Clemens Brentano (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1965)

H. Walldorf: Clemens Brentano: a Bibliography to Supplement Mallon, 1926 (Johannesburg, 1971)

C. Brentano and L.A. von Arnim: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: alte deutsche Lieder, ed. H. Rölleke (Stuttgart, 1975–7)

H. Schultz, ed.: Clemens Brentano, 1778–1842, zum 150. Todestag (Berne and New York, 1993) [incl. bibliography]

CEDRIC WILLIAMS

Brentner [Brenntner, Brendner, Brendtner, Prentner], Johann Joseph Ignaz

(b Dobřany, 3 Nov 1689; d Dobřany, 28 June 1742). Bohemian composer. His father was mayor of Dobřany. From about 1717 to 1720 Brentner lived in Prague, where he published several of his works. He seems to have been connected with the religious brotherhood of St Nicholas in the Malá Strana, Prague, for which he wrote his German mourning motets. His Offertoria solenniora op.2 was dedicated to his patron Raymund Wilfert, abbot of the Premonstratensian monastery at Teplá.

Brentner’s music is in late Baroque concerto style, with occasional simple songlike motifs. Many of his arias are in da capo form, and those of Hymnodia divina are remarkable for their concertante treatment of accompanying solo instruments, especially the violin. Brentner’s works continued to be performed at the monastery at Strahov, Prague, until the 1840s.

WORKS

printed works published in Prague

Harmonica duodecatometria ecclesiastica seu [12] Ariae, op.1 (1717)

[6] Offertoria solenniora, SATB, 2 vn, org, op.2 (1717)

Hymnodia divina [12 arias], S, 2 vn, va, org (before 1725) [?same as op.1]

Horae pomeridianae seu [6] Concertus cammerales, vn/ob/fl, va, vc, op.4 (1720)

Laudes matutinae (n.d.), lost, cited in Dlabacž

At least 16 Motetta pro defunctis, SATB, 2 vn, org, most lost; 4 autograph in CZ-Pnm [Himmels Sonne; Jesu, du mein treuer Hirt; O Jesu mein; Sag an, was ist diese Welt] all ed. in EDM, 2nd ser., Sudetenland, Böhmen und Mähren, iv (1943)

Offertories, motets, vespers, psalms, litanies, responsories in A-GÖ, Wgm, CZ-Bm, ME, Pnm, Pak, Prague Cathedral, Loreto Church, Prague, see Stefan and Pulkert; lost sacred works listed in inventories of Kosmonosy Piarist College, 1712–, Osek Monastery, 1720, and Rajhrad Monastery, 1725: see Culka and Straková

Doubtful works: Pastorella, G, 2 vn, va, org, 1730, A-Wgm, new score CZ-Pnm; Partita, F, 2 ob, tpt, va d’amore, db, D-Dl, new score CZ-Pnm; Partita, F, va d’amore, ob, hn, vn, b, lost, cited in Breitkopf catalogue; Partita, G, lute, ob, 2 vn, b, lost, cited in Breitkopf catalogue

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

ČSHS

DlabacžKL

C. Schoenbaum: ‘Die “Opella ecclesiastica” des J.A. Plánický’, AcM, xxv (1953), 39–79, esp. 62, 74

H. Konečná: J.J. Brentner a jeho Hymnodia divina (diss., U. of Brno, 1967)

Z. Culka: ‘Inventáře hudebních nástrojů a hudebnin piaristické koleje v Kosmonosích’ [Inventories of music instruments and music of the Piarist college in Kosmonosy], Příspěvky k dějinám české hudby, ii (Prague, 1972), 5–43, esp. 15

T. Straková: ‘Rajhradský hudební inventář z roku 1725’ [Music inventory from Rajhrad dated 1725], ČMm, lviii (Brno, 1973), 217–46, esp. 225

O. Pulkert: Domus lauretana pragensis: catalogus (Prague, 1973)

J. Stefan: Ecclesia metropolitana pragensis: catalogus (Prague, 1983)

MILAN POŠTOLKA

Brero, Giulio Cesare

(b Milan, 20 Dec 1908; d Milan, 18 Dec 1973). Italian composer and administrator. In Milan he studied with Anfossi (piano), Delachi and Paribeni (composition), continuing his studies with Dukas and Roussel in Paris. There he was in close contact with the circle of musicians associated with the Revue musicale. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1936 and also took a degree in law. In 1940 he settled in Argentina, where he organized concerts and taught at the Buenos Aires Conservatory (1944–7). After returning to Italy in 1957 he founded the Opera da Camera di Milano, which gave performances in Europe, the USA and Japan. His compositions clearly display neo-classical influences from his years in France.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Porto felice (ballet, choreog. M. Wallmann), Buenos Aires, 1943; Béatitudes (ballet, choreog. A. Sakharoff), Buenos Aires, 1945; Novella (chbr op, after Boccaccio), Bergamo, 1953

Other works: Cant., spkr, chorus, 11 insts, 1954; Le roi des gourmets, chbr orch, 1954 [after Rossini], Er testamento de Meo del Cacchio (C.A. Trilussa), Bar, 15 insts, 1954; concs., other orch works, choral music, songs, chbr and pf pieces

editions

C. Monteverdi: Orfeo, A. Salieri: Arlecchinata

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM

ES (suppl.)

‘Voci aggiunte di un dizionario dei musicisti italiani contemporanei’, RaM, x (1937), 19ff, esp. 23

‘Brero, Giulio Cesare’, Enciclopedia della musica, ed. C. Sartori (Milan, 1972)

ALBERTO PIRONTI/ROBERTA COSTA

Brescia.

City in Lombardy, Italy. From the 13th century the cathedral had a choir with a schola cantorum, whose first known cantor was Oldofredo da Leno (1287–?1315). During the 16th and 17th centuries there was a distinguished succession of maestri di cappella and organists. The former included Giovanni Contino (1551–61), who began his career there as a chorister, and Lelio Bertani (1574–91), who spent much of his life in his native Brescia. Claudio Merulo was organist in 1556–7, and was succeeded by his pupil Florentio Maschera (1557–84), the composer and organ builder Costanzo Antegnati (1584–1620) and Francesco Turini (1620–56), who ended his career in Brescia. Other less important musical establishments in the city’s churches were supported during the 16th century by wealthy families.

The city was ruled by the Venetian Republic from 1428 to 1797 and never experienced the musical life afforded by the patronage of an independent court. The only record of such activity relates to a group of musicians in the train of Pandolfo Malatesta, who conquered Brescia in 1406. 15th-century manuscripts contain the names of Brescian musicians such as Matheus de Brixia and Prepositus Brixiensis; both of them were active elsewhere, as were later musicians born in the city. These included Luca Marenzio; Biagio Marini, who was briefly organist to the Brescian Accademia degli Erranti in 1620; the opera composer F.G. Bertoni (1725–1813); and the violinist and instrumental composer Antonio Bazzini (1818–97). As Chamberlain (camerlengo) of Brescia by appointment of the Venetian Republic, Benedetto Marcello spent the last year of his life in Brescia and died there while working on the unfinished L’universale redenzione.

Theatrical activity was initiated by the Jesuits, who built a theatre that was active between 1658 and 1681, occasionally including musical performances. The main theatre is the Teatro Grande, a sumptuous 18th-century building, which originated in a theatre built in 1664 as the Teatro dell'illustrissima Accademia degli Erranti. The first opera performed there was Cavalli's Eritrea (1665) and regular opera performances were subsequently given during Carnival and the summer fair seasons up to the end of the 18th century. The theatre was renamed Teatro Nuovo and later, during the Napoleonic regime, Teatro Nazionale. In 1810 it was enlarged to 108 boxes and was reopened in 1811 as the Teatro Grande with Mayr’s Il sacrifizio di Ifigenia. During the 19th century seasons of opera and of spoken drama alternated regularly. Besides premières (Mayr’s Egeria, 1816) and important revivals (Ponchielli’s revised Marion Delorme, 1885, and the three-act version of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 1904), one of the first performances in Italy of Parsifal was given there (1914). A second theatre, the Teatro Sociale, was built of wood in 1851; it was known as the Teatro Guillaume until 1905, when it was rebuilt and reopened with a performance of Giordano’s Siberia. In the second half of the 20th century it has been used for operetta, variety shows and spoken drama. At the end of the 1990s the theatre was restored to its original form.

Concert life began at the end of the 18th century when the Società Filarmonica Apollo gave musical evenings in the Apollo Hall of the Martinengo Palace. Concerts have been given in the hall of the Bargnani Palace and the transept of S Luca, but now the Pietro da Cemmo Hall of the conservatory, the S Carlino room and the Ridotto Hall of the Teatro Grande are more often used. 20th-century instrumental ensembles have included the Trio Bresciano (1931–40) and the Complesso del Vittoriale (1931–8), founded on the initiative of Gabriele d’Annunzio; the C. Quaranta Mandolin Society (1916); the permanent orchestra of the Venturi Concerts, instituted in 1959 for educational purposes; the Gasparo da Salò Chamber Orchestra (1963) and I Cameristi Lombardi (1972). Important choral groups have included those named after Bazzini (1911–38) and Marenzio (1919–24), the Coro del Seminario (1939–65) and that of S Gregorio Magno (founded 1923). In the last decades of the 20th century various choral groups in the city and provinces became active, among them the Città di Brescia choir and La Rocchetta choir of the Palazzolo. Concerts are promoted by various organizations: the Società dei Concerti da Camera (1868); the Società i Concerti Sinfonici S Cecilia (1938); the Gruppo Musicale G. Frescobaldi, founded in 1952 to make use of the city’s early organs; and the Giovani Interpreti Associati, active from 1969. The Festival Pianistico Internazionale di Brescia e Bergamo is held annually; it was initiated in 1964 by Agostino Orizio, with the collaboration of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and since 1969 has been held in conjunction with a festival known as the Rassegna Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea, which specializes in contemporary piano music. The Settimana di Musica Barocca is held biennially in the churches and palaces of Brescia. Since 1974 the Associazione Amici della Pace has promoted organ and chamber recitals.

From the 15th century Brescia was a centre of instrument manufacture; some viols were made anonymously for Isabella d'Este in the last years of the 15th century, and the violin maker Gasparo da Salò (1540–1609), worked there. Other instrument makers active in Brescia were G.P. Maggini (1580–?1630–1631), Giovita Rodiani (?1568–?1624) and Matteo Benti (c1580–after 1661); during the 17th century there was a link between this school and the instrument makers of Cremona. The lute maker Giuseppe Scarampella (1838–1902) was also a noted craftsman. The Antegnati family had their firm in Brescia and dominated Italian organ building from the mid-15th century to the mid-17th; many of their excellent instruments are still in use in the city and province.

Brescian printers of books on music theory were active as early as the end of the 15th century; the Britannico family was particularly noted for its publications throughout the 16th century, for instance Lanfranco’s Scintille di musica (1533). The most important music printers were the Tini brothers. The Banda Civica, instituted in 1798, has followed the history of the city. Disbanded in the fascist period it resumed its activities at the beginning of the 1950s with the name Associazione I. Capitanio and, under G. Ligasacchi, in the 1960s began a period of important development. Since the 1980s, together with intense concert activity, the Associazione has been dedicated to educational activities: composition courses, performance studies and editorial work; the publication Brescia Musica, launched in 1985, is unique in its genre of culture and musical information.

In 1971 the Istituto Musicale Antonio Venturi, founded in 1866 on the initiative of individual patrons and eminent musicians, became the Conservatorio Statale di Brescia. It was later named after Marenzio. It was considerably extended in the early 1970s and since the 1990s has promoted chamber and orchestral concerts. In 1978 the Fondazione ‘Romano Romanini’ inaugurated a series of competitions for string players. Composers active in Brescia in the 20th century included Franco Margola and Camillo Togni.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyFI; DEUMM (R. Zanetti); GroveO (O. Termini); MGG2 (M.T.R. Barezzani) [incl. further bibliography]

P. Guerrini: ‘I canonici cantori della cattedrale di Brescia’, NA, i (1924), 82–4

P. Guerrini: ‘Di alcuni organisti nella cattedrale di Brescia nel Cinquecento’, NA, iii (1926), 246–56

P. Guerrini: ‘Gli organi e gli organisti delle due cattedrali di Brescia’, NA, xvi (1939), 205–25

G. Bignami, ed.: Enciclopedia dei musicisti bresciani (Milan, 1963/R)

V. Brunelli: ‘Musica e musicisti a Brescia’, Storia di Brescia, iii (Brescia, 1964), 907–40

R. Zanetti: Un secolo di musica a Brescia: il primo centenario della Società dei concerti (Milan, 1970)

L. Arruga, ed.: La musica a Brescia (Brescia, 1979)

M. Sala: Catalogo del fondo musicale dell'Archivio capitolare del Duomo di Brescia (Turin, 1984)

O. Termini: ‘Organists and Chapel Masters at the Cathedral of Brescia (1608–1779)’, NA, new ser., iii (1985), 73–90

O. Mischiati: Bibliografia delle opere dei musicisti bresciani pubblicate a stampa dal 1497 al 1740 (Florence, 1992)

CARLO PERUCCHETTI

Brescianello [Bressonelli], Giuseppe Antonio

(b Bologna, c1690; d Stuttgart, 4 Oct 1758). Italian violinist and composer. He first appears in documents when in 1715 the Elector of Bavaria brought him from Venice to Munich as a violinist. In October 1716, after the death of his predecessor Pez, he became musique directeur, maître des concerts de la chambre at the Württemberg court in Stuttgart, and in 1717 chief Kapellmeister. Between 1717 and 1718 he wrote the pastoral opera La Tisbe, which he dedicated to his employer Archduke Eberhard Ludwig. Hoping this opera would be produced at the Stuttgart Opera, Brescianello wrote in his Präparationen that he had suited its melodies to the theatre taste: but that did not gain him a performance. From 1719 to 1721 he had to face heated battles with his rival Reinhard Keiser, who sought unsuccessfully for Brescianello’s position. In 1731 Brescianello became Rath und Oberkapellmeister. When the court’s finances collapsed in 1737, the Stuttgart opera troupe was dissolved and Brescianello lost his post, which spurred him on to increased activity as a composer. In 1738 (according to EitnerQ) he wrote 12 concerti e sinphonie op.1 and other works, and somewhat later ‘18 Piecen fürs Gallichone’.

When the regency of the generous artistic patron Duke Carl Eugen began in 1744, Brescianello was reinstated as Oberkapellmeister ‘on account of his particular knowledge of music and excellent competence’, and until his retirement he brought the opera and court music to renewed fame. He was pensioned off on 29 November 1751 according to Sittard, on St James’s Day 1755 according to other sources. His successor was Ignaz Holzbauer, then Jommelli.

In his two decades as Kapellmeister, Brescianello helped to put his stamp on the musical life of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg. His importance lies in his compositions, which mainly follow the conventions of his time (sequences and imitations, influences of the galant style, generally in loosened suite form). Apart from Tisbe, two cantatas and a mass (occasional and commissioned works), Brescianello wrote mainly chamber music using the violin, with which he was most acquainted through his training as a violinist: these works are thus among his most successful.

WORKS

vocal

La Tisbe (op pastorale), 1717–18, D-Sl

Missa solenne, 4vv, insts, Bsb

2 cants.: Sequir fera che fugge; Core amante di perche: both S, orch, ROu

instrumental

12 concerti et sinphonie, vn solo, 2 vn, va, vc/hpd, op.1 (Amsterdam, 1738)

I concerti a 3, 2 vn, bc, I-Fc, 6 ed. in HM, lxvi–lxviii (1950–51)

6 trios, 2 vn/rec, bc; 3 trios, 2 fl, bc; 5 ovs., 2 vn, va, vc, bc; Chaconne, 2 vn, 2 va, vc, bc; Chaconne, 2 vn/fl, b: all D-ROu

18 suites, colascione, Dlb; transcr. gui by R. Chiesa (Milan, 1981)

Sinfonia a 4, 2 vn, va, hpd, SWl

Conc., vn, bn, insts; 4 concs.; Sinfonia, 2 vn, va, b; 4 concs.; 2 vn, insts: all formerly DS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

J. Sittard: Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am württembergischen Hofe, i–ii (Stuttgart, 1890–91/R)

R. Lück: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Colascione und seiner süddeutschen Tondenkmäler im 18. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Erlangen, 1953)

A. Damerini: ‘Sei concerti a tre sconosciuti di G.A. Brescianello’, SMw, xxv (1962), 96–104

J.H. Mitchell: The Works of Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1962)

RUDOLF LÜCK

Bresgen, Cesar

(b Florence, 16 Oct 1913; d Salzburg, 7 April 1988). Austrian composer of German origin. He studied composition, the organ, the piano and conducting at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst (1930–36), where his teachers included Emmanuel Gatscher, Siegmund von Hausegger, Gottfried Rüdinger and Joseph Haas. In 1936 he was awarded the Felix Mottl Prize for composition and was subsequently employed in Bavarian Radio’s music division for which he wrote several Hörspiele. In 1939 he moved to Salzburg where he founded a youth music school and was invited by Clemens Krauss to teach composition at the Mozarteum. He was awarded the City of Munich Music Prize in 1941 and the Salzburg Kulturpreis in 1942. After military service during the war he became a church organist and choir director at Mittersill. There he became acquainted with Webern whose death in 1945 moved him to compose his haunting Requiem für Anton Webern (revised into a more extended work in 1972). From 1947 Bresgen resumed his career as composition professor in Salzburg. During this period he undertook further studies with Hindemith (1947 and 1950) and also experimented with 12-note technique under the tutelage of Jelinek and Krenek. He received numerous awards during the latter part of his life including the Österreichischer Staatspreis (1954 and 1968), the Grosser Österreichischer Staatspreis (1979), the Carl Orff Medal (1981) and the Grosser Preis der Deutschen Akademie für Kinder- und Jugendtheaterschaffen.

Bresgen’s compositional development was stimulated by three important influences. First, his work as a répétiteur with the Mary Wigman Dance School (1932–4) gave him an unrivalled experience in the art of theatrical improvisation, as well as a deep understanding of dance forms. Second, his folksong studies, coupled with an interest in pre-Classical German music, provided the basis for a flexible musical style. Finally, his intensive association with youth music movements, which initially included active participation in the Hitler Youth, resulted in a lifelong commitment to writing Gebrauchsmusik. This trend was already demonstrated in the 1930s with a sequence of politically conceived choral and orchestral works, many of which were commissioned for public occasions organized by the Nazis. During this period Bresgen also composed orchestral works which were championed by some of Germany’s most distinguished conductors including Abendroth, Konwitschny and Elmendorff. His Singspiel Dornröschen, first performed under Rosbaud in Strasbourg, enjoyed stagings at several other German theatres, although more ambitious operatic projects such as an adaptation of the old Bavarian legend Goggolore remained incomplete, and the full-length Paracelsus, composed for the Dresden Staatsoper, was never produced after an air raid destroyed all performance materials.

After the war Bresgen remained extremely productive in all genres of music, composing such fine works as the Totentanz for two pianos, inspired by the woodcuts of Holbein, and the Requiem für Anton Webern. It was his stage music, however, which attracted the greatest attention beyond Austria. Of particular note are the children’s operas Der Igel als Bräutigam (1948, revised 1951) and Der Mann im Mond (1959). Both were written in collaboration with the publisher Ludwig Andersen and both received numerous performances in Germany. They exemplify Bresgen’s ability to juxtapose various levels of scenic representation – including descriptive music, spoken text, dance and pantomime – in one composition. This polymorphous approach is also perceived in other works such as his scenic cantatas and oratorios, which were designed for performance in either concert hall or opera house (a trend influenced by Carl Orff). The major work in this genre is the Visiones amantis (Der Wolkensteiner), based on the texts and melodies of the 15th-century Tyrolean Minnesinger Oswald von Wolkenstein. With its skilful exploitation of Hebrew chant, the late opera Der Engel von Prag (1974–7), based on Leo Perutz’s story of the 16th-century Austrian Emperor Rudolf II, who neglected the government of his country in pursuit of his love for Esther, the wife of Prague’s richest Jew, is also a notable manifestation of Bresgen’s gifts as a musical dramatist.

Although for a time Bresgen pursued 12-note technique (Piano Concerto, 1951), the most significant musical influences on his style remained Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók and Orff. His pedagogical activities, which included editing several collections of folk music and writing theoretical books and articles, were much admired in the German-speaking world.

ERIK LEVI

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Der Goggolore (Bayerisches Spl, 5, O. Reuther), 1937–9, inc.

Die Freier (incid music, J. Eichendorff); Heidelberg, 1938

Das Kindlfest (scenic cant.), 1940

Dornröschen (Spl, 4, Reuther), 1940–41, Strasbourg, Stadt, 15 April 1942

Drischleg (scenic cant.), 1941

Das Urteil des Paris (musikalische Komödie, 1, Reuther), 1941–2, Göttingen, Stadt, 31 Jan 1943

Paracelsus (op, 5, L. Strecker and Bresgen, after Paracelsus), 1942–3, unperf.

Die schlaue Müllerin (Tanzsingspiel, 1, S. Korty), Essen, 1943

Der Igel als Bräutigam (Kinderoper, 5 scenes, Bresgen and L. Andersen), 1948, Esslingen, Stadt, 3 Nov 1948; rev. version, Nuremberg, Städtische Bühnen, Opernhaus, 13 Nov 1951

Sternenkind (incid music, O. Wilde), Brunswick, Staatstheater, 1949

Visionen des Münch von Salzburg (scenic orat), 1950

Dyll, der Narr (Tanzspiel, G. Pichl), Brunswick, June 1950

Der Struwelpeter (scenic cant.), 1950

Visiones amantis (Der Wolkensteiner) (ludus tragicus, 6 scenes, E. Gärtner, after O. von Wolkenstein), 1951, Salzburg, 1952

Brüderlein Hund (Kinderoper, 3 scenes, Andersen), 1953, Nuremberg, 12 Nov 1953

Nino fliegt mit Nina (Insektkomödie, 5 scenes, Bresgen), 1953, Munich, Jugendbühne, 14 May 1953

Der ewige Arzt (Mysterienspiel, 6 scenes, P. Kamer, after Grimm), Schwyz, 10 Feb 1956

Die alte Lokomotive (scenic cant., 1, Bresgen and Gärtner), 1955, Munich, Theater der Jugend, 7 Oct 1960

Ercole (op breve, H.H. Vogl), Hamburg Radio, 1956

Christkindl-Kumedi (geistlisches Komödiespiel, Gärtner, after old Bavarian texts), Salzburg, 1960

Der Mann im Mond (musikalisches Märchenspiel, 6 scenes, Andersen and Bresgen), 1959, Nuremberg, 22 May 1960

Armer, kleiner Tanzbär (scenic cant.), 1959

Das verlorene Gewissen (ballet, Pichl, after A. Saltykow), 1961, Brunswick, May 1962

Die Schattendiebe (Ali und der Bilderliebe) (Spl, 5 scenes, K. Kraska), 1961, Vienna, Theater der Jugend, 13 April 1962

Bastian der Faulpelz (musikalische Pantomime, after H. Hoffmann), Hamburg, 1966

Die Hüte (pantomime, G. Hess), 1967, London, 1969

Zal und Roudabé (altpersisches Tanzdrama), 1967, Tehran, 1967

Apollon und Masyras (ballet, A. Maletić), 1969, rev. 1975

Urständ Christi (Osterspiel), 1969

Trubloff (Spl, 3, E. Dittrich, after J. Burningham), 1970

Der Engel von Prag (op, Bresgen, after L. Perutz), 1974–7, Salzburg, Kleines Festspielhaus, 25 Dec 1978; rev. 1985

Pilatus (incid music, G. Fussenegger), 1978, Ossiach, 2 Aug 1980

Das Spiel vom Menschen (scenic orat), 1982

Krabat (Spl, O. Preussler), Hamburg, c1982

Die Stadthüpfer, 1985

Der verlorene Sohn, 1986

Albolina, oder Der Kampf der Geister um die Morgenrote (Musikmärchen, after F. Wolff), Villach, 12 July 1987

vocal

choral

with instruments

Wir singen den Maien ein, chorus, insts, 1936; So treiben wir den Winter aus, chorus, small orch, 1936; Die Bauernhochzeit (cant., A. Teuber), solo vv, chorus, chbr orch, 1937; Auf auf zum fröhlichen Jagen, chorus, orch, 1937; Wir zogen in das Feld, male chorus, orch, 1937; Laterne, Laterne, children’s chorus, recs, 4 vn, 1937; Das Lumpengesindel, vv, children’s chorus, recs, str qt, 1937; Trariro, der Sommertag is do, children’s chorus, recs, str trio, 1937; Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, Weihnachtskantate, chorus, recs, str qt, 1937; Maihymnus (cant., old hymn texts), S, chorus, orch, org, 1939; Schneidri, Schneidra, Schneidrum – zum Lob des Handwerks, spkr, children’s chorus, recs, str trio, 1939

Lichtwende – Winterkantate, chorus, orch, 1939; Havele Hahne, children’s chorus, orch, 1939; Sommer und Winter, children’s chorus, insts, 1940; Der Strom (orat, H. Baumann), 4 solo vv, chorus, orch, 1941; Das Riesenspiel, children’s chorus, recs, vns, perc, 1941; Wir tragen den Sommerbaum, children’s chorus, rec, str trio/pf, 1941; Trilogie (H. Carossa), 2 solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1946; Die Bettlerhochzeit, children’s chorus, recs, perc, 1947–62; Musik zu Ludwig Thomas ‘Heilige Nacht’, Bar, female chorus, rec, ob, str trio, hpd, 1950; Von der Unruhe des Menschen (cant., G. Trakl, Bible: Job, Bresgen), S, T, chorus, chbr orch, 1953; Sonne, Sonne scheine, children’s and youth chorus, Orff insts, 1953; Uns ist kommen ein liebe Zeit (cant., N. von Reuental), children’s chorus, insts, 1954

Das Schlaraffenland (old Ger. verses), youth chorus, recs, perc, 1955; Chorbuch des Münch I/II, chorus/(chorus, insts), 1957; Das dreifache Gloria, Weihnachtsgesänge, mixed vv, vn, org, 1957; Der Goldvogel, alte und neue Kinderlieder zum Singen und Spielen, vv, Orff insts, 1957; Singt und spielt zur Weihnacht, chorus, insts, 1958; Niemand tauget ohne Freude (cant., T. Reuther), solo v, chorus, orch, 1961; Ruf und Mahnung, Glockenlieder-Kantate, chorus, str, fl, pf, 1962; Salzburger Passion (Loferer Handschrift), spkr, 5 solo vv, mixed chorus, youth chorus, orch, dancers, 1963–4, rev. 1982; Eberhardus Princeps, chorus, wind ens, 1965; Ja, wir sind Widerhall (cant., W. Shakespeare, Carossa), S, Bar, youth chorus, str qt, org, 1968; L’Europe curieuse (cant.), spkr, children’s chorus, insts, 1968

Kleine deutsche Orgelmesse, chorus, org, 1969; Missa secunda, chorus, org, 1970; Fronleichnamsequenz des Münch von Salzburg, 4- to 6-pt chorus, org, 1970; Surrexit Dominus, Auferstehungskantate, spkrs, 3 solo vv, 2 choruses, 6 wind, perc, org, 1970 [concert version of Urständ Christi]; Grossgmainer Kindermesse, children’s chorus, org, 1971; Totenmesse (H. Oosterhuis), chorus, org, 1971–2; De tempore (orat, St Augustine, Paracelsus, Michelangelo), 3 solo vv, chorus, orch, 1973, rev. 1982; Die zwölf Monate (cant. profana), S, T, chorus, children’s chorus, orch, perf. 1974; Der Herr ist mein Licht (cant.), S, Bar, chorus, orch, 1977; Tiertanzburlesken (E. Rechlin), children’s chorus, pf, 1979; Kantate von Bauern (G. Bauer), youth chorus, insts, 1981; Deutsche Marienmesse, chorus, org, 1982; Salzburger Dommesse, chorus, org, 1982; Lumen (orat, J. Lusseyran), spkr, S, T, chorus, org, chbr orch, 1984–5; Erler Totentanz (P. Kamer), spkr, solo vv, chorus, wind orch, perc, org, dance ens, 1988

unaccompanied

mixed chorus unless otherwise stated

Lobet die Tage, 1940; Der Blinde (orat, Bresgen), 1945; Kleines Requiem, 1945, rev. and enlarged as Requiem für Anton Webern, solo vv, chorus, str orch, org, 1972; Chorbuch, 5 vols., 1946–7; Maria durch ein Domwald ging, 11 Marienlieder und Rufe, 3-pt female chorus, 1948; Alpenländisches Chorbüchlein, 1949–53; Der Münch, orat, 1950; Vita Mariae (orat, Lat. and Ger. texts), S, Bar, chorus, 1950–53; Nulla vita sine musica, motet, 6-pt chorus, 1954, rev. chorus, str qt, 1973; Es blühen die Maien, 1957

Alle gute Gabe, male chorus, 1957; Wenn sich junge Herzen heben (H. Grahl), male/mixed chorus, 1959; Das improvisierte Chorlied, 1960; An der Grenze, male chorus, 1962; Abschied, male chorus, 1962; 6 Eichendorff-Lieder (F. Biebl), 1965; 9 tschechoslowakische Volkslieder, 1967; 2 Eichendorff-Lieder, 1968; 7 ungarische Chöre, 1969; 5 Chorsätze nach ungarischen Weisen, female chorus, 1978; Der Sünder hat es leicht (D. Larese), male chorus, 1980; Die Äxte stehn im Schuppen (H.C. Artmann), 1981; 3 Balkan Lieder, 1984; Alpenländisches Weihnachts-Chorbuch, bks 1–3

other vocal

Kleiner Weltspiegel, song cycle after G.P. Telemann, Bar, wind qnt, lute, 1935; Eichendorfflieder, T/chorus, pf, other inst, 1938; Lieder vom Högel I/II (Bresgen), high v, pf, 1940–41; Liederbuch ‘Trariro’, 44 alte und neue Kinderlieder, 1941; Hochzeitslieder, 3-pt vv, 1944; Georg Trakl-Mappe, 12 songs, 1v, pf, 1945, rev. 1982; Blumenlieder (J. Weinheber), Bar/A, pf, 1946, rev. 1972; 3 Segens-Sprüche, T, vc, org, 1955, rev. 1978; Rumänische Liebeslieder, T, ob, vc, pf, 1956–7; Wanderschaft (H. Hesse), 3vv, 1959

4 Gesänge nach afro-amerikanischer Negerlyrik, Bar, cl, db, perc, pf, 1965; Träume der Blinden (cant., Shakespeare, F. Hölderlin, R.M. Rilke), S, Bar, chbr orch, 1966; Birkenlieder, 1967; Rumänische und Tschechoslowakische-Suite, low v, gui, 1967; Katechismus (Bresgen), Bar, pf 6 hands, perc, 1968; Zyklus II, A, pf, 1972; 3 Gesänge (H. Moldenhauer), Bar, str qt, 1972; Les consolations, S, vc, org, 1977; 3 Liebeslieder (L.S. Senghor), S, fl, hp, 1977; Von Wäldern und Zigeunern (Artmann), song cycle, Sprechstimme, gui, 1980; Musik zur Erler Passion, vv, insts, 1980; 2 Lieder (Trakl), 1v, gui, 1987

orchestral

Heitere Suite, 1934; Kammerkonzert, fl, cl, hn, str, pf, perc, 1934; Choralsinfonie, 1935; Conc. grosso, 1935; Dorfmusikanten, chbr orch, 1935; Conc., 2 fl, str qnt, timp, 1935; Sinfonische Suite, 1936; Sinfonischer Konzert, pf, orch, 1936–7; Totenfeier, 1937; Mayenkonzert, pf, chbr orch, 1937; Feiermusik I, 1937; Festliche Rufe, brass, 1938; Venezianisches Konzert, d, vc, orch, 1938; Jagdkonzert, vn, 10 wind, db, 1939; Pfeifersuite nach altdeutschen Spielmannsweisen, chbr orch, 1940; Hollersbacher Suite, chbr orch, 1940, arr. pf, 1941; Conc., trbn, str orch, 1940; Intrada, str orch, 1944; Sym., c, 1944; Pf Conc., 1951; Frescobaldi-Sinfonie, 1953; Zorzikos, ballet suite after Baskisch Rhythms, 1954, rev. 1974; Rumänische und griechische Suite, 1955–6; Tänze vom Schwarzen Meer, 1956; Totentanz nach Holbein, pf, orch, 1958; Hn Conc., 1962

Kammerkonzert, gui, chbr orch, 1962; Intrada, 1964; Konzert für Orchester, 1965; Der Benzenauer, toccata, org, brass, timp, perc, 1971; Visionen, fl, hp, str orch, 1972; Concertino, vn, vc, chbr orch, 1972; Concertino, fl, bn, str orch, 1973; Concerto piccolo, fl, ob, cl, str orch, 1975; Tres retratos, 1976; Elegie und Capriccio, fl, str orch, 1977; Samiotissa, griechische Tänze, 1978; Elenka, double conc., balalaika, hp, orch, 1979; Cl Conc., 1979; Double Conc., 2 vc, chbr orch, 1979; Concert Spirituel – Marginalien zu Mozartbriefen und Skizzen, 1980; Media in vita, 3 Hymnen, 1980; Ballade, vn, 13 str, hpd, 1981; Conc., a trbn, orch, 1982; Bilder einer Landschaft, sinfonietta, 1982; Impressioni nella notte, 1982; Metamorphosis I, str orch, 1983; Magnalia Dei, Sym. Metamorphosis on ‘Paracelsus’, spkr, orch, 1986; Metamorphosen nach Webern, str orch, 1987

chamber

2 sonatas, vc, pf, 1934, 1946; 3 sonatas, va, pf, 1934, 1937, 1946; 2 trios, fl, vc, pf, 1944–5, 1960; 3 str qts, 1948, 1970, 1971

Other works: Divertimento, cl, vc, pf, 1933, rev. 1965; Pf Trio, g, 1933; Wind Qnt, 1933; Tanzsuite, E, vn, pf, 1934; 3 Sonatas, vn, pf, 1934; Intraden, 6 brass, 1935; 2 Sonatinas, rec, pf, 1935–6; O du stille Zeit, str qt, 1938; Tanz mir nicht mit meiner Jungfer Käthen, fl, cl, bn, 1939; Sonatine über altdeutsche Liebeslieder, 2 rec, pf, 1939; Tagesmusik, rec qt, 1939; Sonata, 2 vn, pf, 1940; Blockflöten-Büchlein, 2 rec, 1940; Sonata, fl, pf, 1944; Toccata und Trauermusik, vn, org, 1946; Totentanz nach Holbein, 2 pf, 1946–7; Pf Trio II, 1948; 4 Pantomimen, vn, pf, 1949; Serenade, fl, hn, hp, 1949; Sonatine, s rec, pf, 1951

Kuckucksduette, 2 rec, 1952; Conc., f, 2 pf, 1954; Rumänische Suite, vn, pf, 1956; Divertimento, vn, ob, cl, trbn, pf, 1957; Tanzsuite nach indischen Weisen, perc, pf, 1959; Morgenmusik, rec ens, perc, 1963; Albanische Suite, fl, cl, vn, vc, perc, 1963; Die kleinen Tag- und Nachtstücke, vn, pf, 1964; Salzburger Divertimento, wind qnt, 1965; Umrem, umrem (nach einem mährischen Totentanz), pf qt, 1966; Bilder des Todes, Suite nach Holbein, 2 pf, timp, perc, 1966; Prager Sonatine I/II, s rec, pf, 1967; Studies II/III, cl, pf, 1968; Studies IV, fl, pf, 1968; Studies V, vc, pf, 1968

Capriccios, fl, hp, 1970; Trio, vn, vc, pf, 1972; Trio II, fl, va, pf/hp, 1974; Musica matutina, rec qt, 1974; Geigenheft für Klausi, vn, pf, 1975; Elegia appassionata, 12 vc, 1977; Lacrimae sunt rerum, Trauermusik, org, fl, brass, timp, perc, 1978; Sonata a cinque, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1980; 4 pezzi, 2 vn, pf, 1981; Ossiacher Fantasie, vc, hpd, c1984; Elegie, fl, org, 1985; Triosonate, fl, tpt, org, 1985; Fantasia, 2 gui, 1985; Dreistimmige weihnachtliche Bläsersätze, 3 tpt, 3 hn, 3 trbn, 3 t hn; Vierstimmige weihnachtliche Bläsersätze, 3 tpt, 2 hn, 2 tuba, 2 t hn; Fünfstimmige weihnachtliche Bläsersätze, 3 tpt, 2 hn, 2 trbn, 2 t hn; 24 weihnachtliche Bläsersätze, wind, brass

solo instrumental

Scarlatti-Variationen, pf, 1933; Kleine Suite, pf, 1933; Volkslied-Sonatinen, pf, 1934; Variationen und Rondo ‘Auf der Alm is koa Bleibn’, pf, 1943; Sonata, pf, 1944; Holbein-Suite, pf, 1946; 10 Pf Pieces, 1953; Sonata, e, pf, 1961; Toccata Paschalis, org, 1968; Malinconia, gui, 1968; Studies I, pf, 1968; Studies VII – Romanesca, pf, 1968–71; Hosanna Filio David, Choralfantasie, org, 1969; 2 Epitaphe, org, 1970–73; Nachruf für eine Amsel, rec, 1976; Suite classique, balalaika, 1977; Alpha es et O, org, 1979; Orgelbuch in drei Teilen, 1979–80; Diabelli 81 – 3 Veränderung, pf, 1981; Sacris solemnniis, fantasy, org, 1982; Fantasia, vn, 1984

Many folksongs arrs.

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Doblinger, Gerig, Gravis, Kallmeyer, Kistner, Leuckart, Littolf, Merseburger, Moeck, Möseler, Otto Müller, Peters, Schott, Süddeutscher Verlag, Tonger, Vieweg, Voggenreiter, Zimmermann

Bresgen, Cesar

WRITINGS

‘Mein Erlebnis der Hitler-Jugend’, ZfM, Jg.105 (1938), 1106–7

ed.: Eberhard Preussner: Schriften, Reden, Gedanken (Salzburg, 1969)

Der Komponist und die Volksmusik (Vienna, 1970)

Die Improvisation (Wilhelmshaven, 1975)

Musik-Erziehung? Ein kritisches Protokoll (Wilhelmshaven, 1975)

Passionslied in Salzburg (Salzburg, 1975)

In Anfang war der Rhythmus (Wilhelmshaven, 1977)

ed.: Europäische Liebeslieder aus acht Jahrhundert in Originalsprache und Übertragungen mit den dazugehörigen Melodien (Munich, 1978)

Der Künstler, stellvertretend für die Gesellschaft: die soziologische Funktion der zeitgenössischen Musik (Vienna, 1978)

‘Cesar Bresgen aus eigener Sicht’, MZ, xxxiv/7–8 (1979), 362–4

Die Improvisation in der Musik (Wilhelmshaven,1983)

Mittersill 1945 – ein Weg zu Anton von Webern (Vienna, 1983)

Bresgen, Cesar

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Valentin: ‘Cesar Bresgen’, ZfM, Jg.105 (1938), 841–7

D. Larese: Cesar Bresgen (Amriswil, 1968)

R. Lück: Cesar Bresgen (Vienna, 1974)

H.K. Smith: Selected Chamber Operas of Cesar Bresgen Adapted for Use in American Schools (diss., U. of Arizona, Tucson, 1974)

G. Brosche, ed.: Musikalische Dokumentation Cesar Bresgen (Vienna, 1982)

J. Sulz: ‘Interview mit Cesar Bresgen’, Zeitschrift für Musikpädagogik, no.24 (1983), 59–74

F. Zaunschirm: ‘Cesar Bresgen – Requiem für Anton Webern: Cesar Bresgen zum 70. Geburtstag’, Musica, xxxvii (1983), 525–8

J. Sulz: ‘In memoriam Cesar Bresgen (1913–1988)’, Musikerziehung, xlii/5 (1988), 235–7

E. Würzl: ‘Zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand: Österreichs Musiker während der NS-Okkupation’, Österreichische Musiker im Exil: Vienna 1988, 54–65

I. Schmid-Reiter: Das musikdramatische Werk Cesar Bresgens (Vienna, 1989)

Breslau

(Ger.). See Wrocław.

Bresnick, Martin

(b New York City, 13 Nov 1946). American composer. He studied at the University of Hartford, the Vienna Music Academy (1969–70) and Stanford University (DMA 1972). His principal teachers included Einem, Cerha, Ligeti and Chowning. After serving on the faculties of the San Francisco Conservatory (1971–2) and Stanford (1972–5), he began a long and fruitful appointment as professor of composition at Yale University (1976). His many honours and awards include the Prix de Rome (1975), three NEA awards (1975, 1979, 1980), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1977), the Premio Ancona (1980), Lincoln Center’s Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music (1996) and the Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998). His commissions include works for the Koussevitsky and Fromm foundations.

Bresnick’s early compositions are characterized by refined textures that develop through linear interplay. Dense webs of repeated and subtly varied interlocking melodic cells are manifest in such works as Wir weben, wir weben (1978) and the String Quartet no.2 ‘Bucephalus’ (1984). With the Piano Trio (1988) he instilled in his increasingly lean contrapuntal writing a new harmonic discipline based on symmetrical sequences of melodic intervals. Throughout his oeuvre unmistakable intellect undergirds dark expressivity; complex inspirations lie behind frequently abstract programmatic titles. In the early 1990s, Bresnick invented the rubric Opera della musica povera to unite a series of pieces including Follow Your Leader, Pigs and Fishes, The Bucket Rider and BE JUST! These works, which impose severe limitations on musical material, embody longstanding trends in the composer’s musical style, while hinting, from a detached perspective, at the progressive politics which have long played a role in his work.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Stoneground, 1974; Ants (theatre piece, M. Bresnick, R. Myslewski), S, Mez, T, B-Bar, ww qnt, str qt, db, perc, 1976; Arthur and Lillie (film score, J. Else), 1976; The Day after Trinity (film score, Else), 1980; Der Signal, 1982; Cadillac Desert (film score, Else), S, Mez, ens, spkr, 1996

Orch: Ocean of Storms, 1970; Wir weben, wir weben, 1978, arr. str sextet, 1980; One, 1986; Pontoosuc, 1989; Angelus novus, 1992

Chbr and solo inst: Trio, 2 tpt, perc, 1965; B.’s Garlands, 8 vc, 1973; Conspiracies, 5 fl/(fl, tape), 1979; Bag O’Tells, mand, 1984; Bread and Salt, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 sax, 2 hn, vc, db, 1984; Str Qt no.2 ‘Bucephalus’, 1984; Just Time, ww qnt, 1985; Pf Trio, 1988; Str Qt no.3, 1992; The Bucket Rider, cl, vc, db, elec gui, perc, pf, 1995; BE JUST!, cl, vc, db, elec gui, perc, pf, 1995; **, cl, va, pf, 1997

Vocal: Alyosha (F. Dostoyevsky), Bar, pf, 1964; Where is the Way (Bible: Job), SATB, 1970; 3 Choral Songs, SATB, 1986 (Y. Amichai); Falling (D. Bottoms and K. Stripling Bayer), Mez, orch, 1994

El-ac: PCOMP, tape, 1968; Lady Neil’s Dumpe, synth, cptr, 1988

Principal publishers: Bote & Bock, CommonMuse

EDWARD HARSH

Bressan, P(eter)

(b Bourg en Bresse, 27 May 1663; d Tournai, 21 April 1731). French wind instrument maker. He was baptized Pierre Jaillard. His father (a waggoner) and his paternal grandfather (tenant farmer and bourgeois of Châtillon-les-Dombes) died when he was four, and in 1678 he was apprenticed to a woodturner in Bourg for two years; he then left Bourg, but it is not known where he learnt instrument making, although this was most probably in Paris. His treble recorders are similar to those of his contemporary Jean-Jacques Rippert; indeed they may both have served under a common master. He came to England in 1688, and is first mentioned as Brazong or Bresong in English archives in 1691 as one of the ‘hautboys’ who accompanied William III to Holland. He had abandoned the name Jaillard, but even Bressan proved difficult for some English scribes. The James Talbot Manuscript (GB-Och Music 1187, c1695; see Baines) shows that he was already a leading London maker of flutes, recorders and oboes.

In 1703 he married Mary Margaret Mignon, daughter of Claude Mignon, formerly an apothecary to Queen Henrietta Maria in Paris and London. Bressan lived in the Mignon house from at least the time of his marriage. The Bressans had three children, who were baptized in the Savoy Church; for two of them the surname is given as Zillard and Jaillard, alias Bressan. Claude Mignon died in 1714 and Bressan became the ratepayer of the house, in Somerset House Yard on the east end of the palace. In the 16th and 17th centuries it had been the town house of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, although by Bressan’s day it had been divided up; this explains the use of the red rose of Lancaster in his mark (P I/Bressan/cinquefoil rose).

By 1721 j.j. Schuchart was very probably working for Bressan; his mark was a direct imitation of Bressan's. Bressan was a friend of James Paisible, who in 1721 appointed him an executor of his estate in England (the other was Peter La Tour, later Bressan's principal creditor). Bressan was a Catholic and appears in papist returns of 1715 and 1716. In 1721 Bressan took his wife and her financial adviser to court; they had accumulated debts from the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. Bressan was granted letters of denization in 1723.

Bressan published violin sonatas by Castrucci (1718) and violin or flute sonatas by Barsanti (1724). He subscribed to J.C. Gillier’s Receuil d’airs françois (1723) and to J.E. Galliard’s Hymn of Adam and Eve (1728). His house contained a room large enough for exhibitions; in 1728 ‘The Grand Theatre of the Muses, just finished by Mr. Pinchbeck, musical clock maker was to be seen at Mrs. Bressan’s Great Room’. In 1725 John Byrom, author of the epigram on Handel and Bononcini, bought a flute from Bressan, which cost five guineas. In 1730, aged 67, Bressan left his wife and went to live in Tournai. The London newspapers of about 6 May 1731 report his death, describing him as ‘that celebrated artist in making flutes’. An inventory of his house shows that he made all the contemporary wind instruments, and indicates his interest in the fine arts, itemizing some 76 pictures, prints, portraits and busts.

As to Bressan’s instruments, some three flutes and 48 recorders survive (see Recorder, fig.5); these should be compared with Thomas Stanesby senior’s surviving output (eight recorders, five oboes and most of a bassoon). Stanesby was only about five years younger than Bressan, and the difference in the number of surviving recorders may be significant, implying that Bressan was the more successful in catering for gentleman amateurs. The evidence of his recorders, when not tampered with, disproves Hawkins’s disparaging remarks about the tuning of their upper octave. Two of the flutes have the earlier-style single centre joint, and one is handsomely decorated with silver picqué (possibly the work of Peter Simon, Bressan’s brother-in-law, a silversmith). The recorders consist of one 4th flute (B), 20 trebles (F), ten voice flutes (D), 11 tenors (C) and six basses (F). Except for the basses most are scaled in total external length in the ratios B: ¾; F: 1; D: 6/5; and C: 4/3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveI

HawkinsH

A. Baines: ‘James Talbot’s Manuscript, 1: Wind Instruments’, GSJ, i (1948), 9–26

E. Halfpenny: ‘The Bass Recorders of Bressan’, GSJ, viii (1955), 27–31

E. Halfpenny: ‘Biographical Notices of the Early English Woodwind-making School, c.1650–1750’, GSJ, xii (1959), 44–52

M.A. Byrne: ‘Bressan’, GSJ, xxxvi (1983), 2–28; xxxvii (1984), 102–11

E. Hunt: ‘Left-Handed Recorders by Bressan’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 121 only

D. Higbee: ‘A Left-Handed “Voice Flute” by Bressan’, GSJ, xxxviii (1985), 143 only

B. Haynes: ‘Bressan, Talbot and the “Galpin” Oboe’, GSJ, xliii (1990), 112–23

W. Waterhouse: ‘A Case of Flutes by Mr Bressan’, GSJ, xlvi (1993), 162–3

MAURICE BYRNE

Bressand, Friedrich Christian

(b Durlach, c1670; d 4 April 1699). German poet and librettist. He was the son of a cook in the household of the Margrave of Baden-Durlach. Following the early death of his parents he was sent to the court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, where his literary talents were encouraged and he became a secretary to Duke Anton Ulrich. He was a prominent literary figure at the court and an important influence in the history of German opera, which was extensively developed there from 1690. From that year until his death he was overall director of festive entertainments as well as stage director. Bressand's published descriptions of several of these festivities (see Smart) document invaluable details regarding the lavish and politically orientated nature of these royal entertainments.

During his brief career Bressand wrote most of the librettos for operas performed at court, supplying texts for such distinguished composers as Kusser, Keiser, J.P. Krieger, Schürmann, Mattheson, Erlebach and Georg Bronner. Many of these operas were repeated at Hamburg; he also wrote a few librettos specifically for Hamburg. His literary taste was determined to some degree by the French dramatists, and he was among the first to introduce to Germany through his own translations the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine. His librettos show a preference for the French alexandrine, which many Hamburg librettists had already discarded as unsuitable for opera, and also for exceedingly long recitatives. Nevertheless they are fine works, with dramatic, affect-laden arias and splendid ballet scenes. Like his more famous contemporary Postel, Bressand was an imaginative craftsman of considerable sensitivity who worked within the conventions of German Baroque poetry. He contributed manifestly to the remarkable growth of Baroque opera in north Germany during its richest period, around 1700.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (G. Buelow) [with list of librettos]

H. Degen: Friedrich Christian Bressand: ein Beitrag zur Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel Theatergeschichte (diss., U. of Brunswick, 1935)

H.C. Wolff: Die Barockoper in Hamburg 1678–1738 (Wolfenbüttel, 1957)

D.I. Lindberg: Literary Aspects of German Baroque Opera: History, Theory and Practice (Christian H. Postel and Barthold Feind) (diss., UCLA, 1964)

W. Braun: Vom Remter zum Gänsemarkt: aus der Frühgeschichte der alten Hamburger Oper (1677–1697) (Saarbrücken, 1987)

S. Smart: Doppelte Freude der Musen: Court Festivities in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 1642–1700 (Wiesbaden, 1989)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Bressonelli, Giuseppe Antonio.

See Brescianello, Giuseppe Antonio.

Bretan, Nicolae

(b Năsăud, 25 March 1887; d Cluj, 1 Dec 1968). Romanian composer, singer, director and conductor. He began formal studies in Năsăud and continued in 1906 at the conservatory in Cluj (then Kolozsvár). In 1908 he entered the Vienna Music Academy, where he studied singing with Gustav Geiringer and Julius Meixner. After a temporary disruption he enrolled at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, studying this time with József Sík. He graduated in 1912, having also earned his licentiate in law from the University of Cluj in 1910.

Bretan’s professional career began at the Bratislava Opera in 1913, followed by a position at the Oradea Opera. In 1917 he settled permanently in Cluj, fulfilling responsibilities as singer, stage director and even briefly director-general (Romanian Opera, 1944–5) for the various resident Hungarian and Romanian opera companies there, until political circumstances forced his retirement in 1948. His compositional focus was almost exclusively vocal. His musical idiom – tuneful melodies and lush harmonies – is marked occasionally by modal incursions and folk-like characterization.

WORKS

(selective list)

Luceafărul [The Evening Star] (op, 1, Bretan, after M. Eminescu), 1921, Cluj, Romanian Opera, 2 Feb 1921

Colem Lásadása [The Revolt of the Golem] (music drama, 1, Bretan, after I. Kaczér), 1924, Cluj, Hungarian, 23 Dec 1924

Eroii de la Rovine [The Heroes of Rovine] (op, 1, Bretan, after Eminescu: Scrisoarea III [The Third Letter]), 1934, Cluj, Romanian Opera, 24 Jan 1935

Horia (op, 3, Bretan, after G. Popp), 1937, Cluj, Romanian Opera, 24 Jan 1937

Arald (op, 1, Bretan, after Eminescu: Strigoii [The Ghosts]), 1939, Iaşi, State Opera House, 1982

Stranie seară de Sedar [An Extraordinary Seder Evening] (mystery play, 1, Haggadah), 1952, perf. 1974

c230 songs, 9 sacred vocal works, c12 inst pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (D. Griffioen)

J. Bretan LeBovit and S.B. Huetteman: ‘The Music of Nicolae Bretan: its Posthumous Discovery’, American Music Teacher, xxvi/2 (1976), 16—20

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din Romania: lexicon, i (Bucharest, 1989)

DAVID GRIFFIOEN

Bretel, Jehan

(b c1210; d Arras, 1272). French trouvère. His grandfather, Jacques, was ‘sergent héréditaire’ of the abbey of St Vaast in Arras at the turn of the 13th century, one of eight officials supervising the water rights to the river Scarpe within the abbey's domain; his father (also named Jehan) held this position at least from 1241 until his death in 1244. The poet is cited among the ‘sergens iretavles de la riviere Saint-Vaast’ in a document of 1256. He and his brother were apparently well-to-do property owners.

Seven of an original series of eight chansons courtoises by Bretel survive in the Vatican (I-Rvat Reg.lat.1490), but jeux-partis form his main contribution. He was apparently a participant in 89 such works, nearly half of the surviving total. Often these are without rubrics, and the names of the participants are revealed in the poems. (The attribution to Bretel of a few poems addressed merely to ‘Sire’ or ‘Sire Jehan’, while probably correct, is not certain.) Some 40 poets active around Arras in the mid-13th century appear either as participants or judges in these jeux-partis; among the more prominent are Adam de la Halle, Jehan de Grieviler, Jehan le Cuvelier d'Arras, Lambert Ferri, Perrin d'Angicourt, Gaidifer d'Avion, Adam de Givenchi, Jehan de Renti, Robert de la Piere and Robert de Castel. The jeux-partis between Bretel and Adam de la Halle are normally grouped among Adam's works in the manuscripts even though most are initiated by Bretel, whereas some jeux-partis between Bretel and lesser trouvères are placed within sections devoted to Bretel even though in these he is only the respondent. A chanson by Bretel (Li miens chanters) is dedicated to Countess Beatrice of Brabant, sister of Henri III. Seven works by Jehan le Grieviler, Jehan Erart, Jaques le Vinier, Colart le Boutellier and Mahieu de Gant are dedicated to Bretel. At some time during the height of his fame he was designated ‘Prince’ of the Arras puy.

Most of the poems written solely or partly by Bretel have heterometric strophes. Five are built on three line lengths, including Grieviler, deus dames sai, the only known example of a pedes-plus-cauda construction beginning with an 11-syllable line. Most heterometric poems combine lines of seven and ten syllables; a few intermingle heptasyllabic lines with lines of one other length. With only two exceptions, isometric strophes are either heptasyllabic or decasyllabic. Normally the poems begin with two pedes, each rhyming ab, but 19 begin with an abba pattern. Bretel had a strong penchant for continuing with one or more sets of paired rhymes, and this characterizes four of the five unusual rhyme schemes used.

A delineation of Bretel's musical style is hampered by the fact that not only the chansons but more than half of the jeux-partis survive with music only in one source each. When multiple musical readings are available there are normally two or more unrelated melodies. Which, if any, may have been by Bretel is difficult to decide unless there is corroboration between two sources. One might speculate that each of the participants in the jeux-partis contributed his own melody, but this would not explain why six poems survive with three settings each. The origins of melodic unica are thus doubtful. Most melodies are in bar form, although a few are non-repetitive. Repetitions of entire phrases are generally avoided in the concluding sections, and the varied return of phrases six and seven as phrases nine and ten in Onques nul jour is exceptional. All the chansons and more than three-quarters of the jeux-partis with rubrics to Bretel are cast in authentic modes; in most of the exceptions there are only one, two or three notes below the sub-final. There is normally a strong sense of tonal centre in these melodies. The jeux-partis not attributed by rubrics present a more varied picture: a greater number of plagal melodies, melodies of extended ranges and melodies with either unusual or unexpected finals. None of the melodies survives in mensural notation and there are few clear hints of modal rhythms.

WORKS

(nm)

no music

Editions: The Lyric Works of Adam de la Hale, ed. N. Wilkins, CMM, xliv (1967) [W]Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition, ed. H. Tischler, CMM, cvii (1997)

chansons courtoises

Jamais nul jour de ma vie, R.1225

Je ne chant pas de grant joliveté, R.463a

Li grans desirs de deservir amie, R.1100

Li miens chanters ne puet plaire, R.168

Mout liement me fait Amours chanter, R.781

Onques nul jour ne chantai, R.64

Poissans Amours a mon cuer espiié, R.1091

jeux-partis

Adan, amis, je vous dis une fois, R.1833 (with Adam de la Halle), W 37

Adan, amis, mout savés bien vo roi, R.1675 (dialogue with Adam de la Halle), W 38

Adan, a moi respondés, R.950 (with Adam de la Halle), W 33

Adan, d'amours vous demant, R.331 (with Adam de la Halle), W 31

Adan, li qués doit mieus trouver merchi, R.1066 (with Adam de la Halle), W 42

Adan, mout fu Aristotes sachans, R.277 (with Adam de la Halle), W 36

Adan, qui aroit amee, R.494 (with Adam de la Halle), W 34

Adan, se vous amiés bien loiaument, R.703 (with Adam de la Halle), W 33

Adan, s'il estoit ensi, R.1026 (with Adam de la Halle), W 30

Adan, si soit que ma feme amés tant, R.359 (with Adam de la Halle), W 41

Adan, vauriés vous manoir, R.1798 (with Adam de la Halle), W 30

Adan, vous devés savoir, R.1817 (with Adam de la Halle), W 35

Avoir cuidai engané le marchié, R.1094 (with Adam de la Halle), W 43

Biaus sire tresorier d'Aire, R.155 (proposed jointly by Bretel and Lambert Ferri to the Tresorier d'Aire and Cuvelier d'Arras)

Compains Jehan, un gieus vous vueil partir, R.1443 (with Adam de le Halle), W 40

Conseilliez moi, Jehan de Grieviler, R.862

Cuvelier, dites moi voir, R.1824 (with Cuvelier d'Arras) (nm)

Cuvelier, vous amerés, R.909 (with Cuvelier d'Arras)

Ferri, il sont dui fin loial amant, R.298 (with Lambert Ferri) (nm)

Ferri, se ja Dieus vous voie, R.1774 (with Lambert Ferri)

Ferri, se vous bien amiés, R.1340 (with Lambert Ferri)

Gaidifer, d'un jeu parti, R.1071 (with Gaidifer d'Avion)

Gaidifer, par courtoisie, R.1121 (with Gaidifer d'Avion)

Grieviler, deus dames sai d'une beauté, R.403 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, deus dames sont, R.1925 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, dites moi voir, R.1824 (with Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Grieviler, feme avés prise, R.1637 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, ja en ma vie, R.1230 (with Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Grieviler, par quel raison, R.1890 (with Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Grieviler, par vo bapteme, R.618 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, s'il avenoit, R.1838 (with Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Grieviler, un jugement, R.693 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, vostre ensient, R.668 = 667 (2 melodies) (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, vostre pensee, R.546 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

J'aim par amours et on moi ensement, R.664 (proposed by Audefroi)

Jehan Bretel, respondés, R.942 (proposed by Perrot de Neele)

Jehan Bretel, un chevalier, R.1263 (proposed by Jehan de Renti) (nm)

Jehan Bretel, vostre avis, R.1523 (proposed by Jehan de Grieviler)

Jehan de Grieviler, deus dames sai, R.101 (nm)

Jehan de Grieviler, sage, R.39

Jehan de Grieviler, une, R.2083

Jehan de Grieviler, un jugement, R.694 (nm)

Jehan Simon, li quieus s'aquita mieus, R.1354 (2 melodies)

Je vous demant, Cuvelier, espondés, R.928 (with Cuvelier d'Arras) (nm)

Lambert Ferri, li quieus doit mieus avoir, R.1794

Pierrot de Neele, amis, R.1518 (with Perrot de Neele) (nm)

Prince del Pui, mout bien savés trouver, R.899 (proposed by Jehan de Grieviler)

Respondés a ma demande, R.258 (2 melodies) (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Robert du Chastel, biaus sire, R.1505 (with Robert de Castel)

Sire Audefroi, qui par traïson droite, R.1850

Sire Bretel, je vous vueill demander, R.841 (proposed by Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Sire Bretel, vous qui d'amours savez, R.951 (proposed by Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Sire Jehan, ainc ne fustes partis, R.1584 (proposed by Adam de la Halle), W 32

Sire Jehan Bretel, conseill vous prie, R.1200 (proposed by Robin de Compiegne) (nm)

Sire Jehan Bretel, vous demant gié, R.1092 (proposed by Lambert Ferri) (nm)

Sire Jehan, vous amerez, R.1042 (proposed by Gerart de Boulogne) (nm)

works of probable joint authorship

Adan, du quel cuidiés vous, R.2049 (with Adam de la Halle), W 45 (nm)

Amis Lambert Ferri, vous trouverés, R.952 (with Lambert Ferri)

Amis Pierot de Neele, R.596 (with Perrot de Neele)

A vous, Mahieu li Taillere, R.1335

Cuvelier et vous, Ferri, R.1042 (with Cuvelier d'Arras, Lambert Ferri and Jehan de Grieviler)

Cuvelier, or i parra, R.8 (with Cuvelier d'Arras)

Cuvelier, s'il est ainsi, R.1025 (2 melodies) (with Cuvelier d'Arras)

Entendés, Lambert Ferri, R.1041 (with Lambert Ferri)

Ferri, a vostre ensïent, R.666 (with Lambert Ferri)

Ferri, il sont doi amant, R.295 (with Lambert Ferri)

Grieviler, a ma requeste, R.955b (with Jehan de Grieviler) (nm)

Grieviler, del quel doit estre, R.958 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, par maintes fies, R.1351 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, se vous aviés, R.1341 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Grieviler, se vous quidiés, R.1346 (with Jehan de Grieviler)

Jehan Bretel, par raison, R.1888 (2 melodies) (proposed by Lambert Ferri)

Jehan Bretel, une jolie dame, R.203 (proposed by Jehan de Grieviler)

Jehan de Grieviler, s'aveuc celi, R.1034 (nm)

Jehan de Vergelai, vostre ensïent, R.669

Lambert Ferri, drois est ke m'entremete, R.978 (nm)

Lambert Ferri, je vous part, R.375

Lambert Ferri, s'une dame orgeilleuse, R.1021

Lambert, il sont doi amant, R.296 (with Lambert Ferri)

Lambert, se vous amiés bien loiaument, R.704 (with Lambert Ferri)

Lambert, une amie avés, R.915

Maistre Jehan de Marli, respondés, R.947 = 916

Perrin d'Angicourt, respondés, R.940

Pierot, li ques vaut pis a fin amant, R.297 (with Perrot de Neele)

Prince del Pui, selonc vostre pensee, R.547 (proposed by Lambert Ferri)

Prince del Pui, vous avés, R.918 (proposed by Perrin d'Angicourt)

Robert de la Piere, repondés moi, R.1672 (with Robert de la Piere)

Sire, assés sage vous voi, R.1679 (proposed by Adam de la Halle), W 44 (nm)

Sire Bretel, entendés, R.927 (proposed by Lambert Ferri)

Sire Prieus de Boulogne, R.1776 (nm)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (F. Gennrich)

G. Raynaud: ‘Les chansons de Jehan Bretel’, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des chartes, xli (1880), 195–214

A. Långfors, A. Jeanroy and L. Brandin, eds.: Recueil général des jeux-partis français (Paris, 1926)

M. Gally: ‘Jehan Bretel, poète et mécène’, Figures de l'écrivain au Moyen Age: Amiens 1988, 125–38

THEODORE KARP

Brethren of Purity.

See Ikhwān al-Safā’.

Bretón (y Hernández), Tomás

(b Salamanca, 29 Dec 1850, d Madrid, 2 Dec 1923). Spanish composer and conductor. At the age of 12 he was earning his living as a violinist in his native city. He then moved to Madrid, where he studied the violin at the conservatory and took part in zarzuela and circus orchestras. While appearing as a conductor and instrumentalist in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, he pursued composition studies under Arrieta at the Madrid Conservatory, where he took the first prize for composition in 1872. He also studied in Rome, Milan, Vienna and Paris. Back in Spain he founded and conducted the Unión Artístico-Musical, which performed a large number of new Spanish and foreign works. In 1891 his friend Albéniz took him to London and there he conducted two successful concerts of Spanish music. Later he was a teacher and director at the Madrid Conservatory and conductor of the Sociedad de Conciertos and of the Madrid SO in its early years. He was a member of the Royal Academy of S Fernando and a recipient of the crosses of Carlos III and Alfonso XII.

Bretón struggled tirelessly for the establishment of a sophisticated Spanish lyric drama, but his own operas met with little favour. Los amantes de Teruel was an ephemeral succès de scandale; it was taken as an act of youthful rebellion against Spanish music, and Bretón’s music continued to be attacked for a lack of Spanish character. Nonetheless, the cheerful tunes of Aragon enrich La Dolores, which was the most successful of his operas and was staged in Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Vienna and Prague. He found still greater popularity with the lively farce La verbena de la paloma, where the street atmosphere of Madrid is painted in vivid colours.

WORKS

stage

zarzuelas unless otherwise stated, in order of first performance; for more detailed list see GroveO

El alma en un hilo, 1874; Los dos caminos, 1874; El viaje de Europa, 1874, collab. Valverde padre; El inválido, 1875; El 93, 1875; Guzmán el bueno (ópera), 1876; Un chaparrón de maridos, 1876; Maria, 1876; Vista y sentencia, 1876 or 1886; Cuidado con los estudiantes, 1877; Los dos leones, 1877

El campanero de Begoña, 1878; El bautizo de Pepín, 1878, collab. F. Chueca and Valverde; Bonito pais, 1878; Corona contra corona, 1879; El barberillo de Orán, 1879; Los amores de un príncipe, 1881; Las señoritas de Conil, 1881; El grito en el cielo, 1886; Los amantes de Teruel (ópera), 1889; Garín, l’eremita di Montserrat (ópera), 1892

La verbena de la paloma, ó El boticario y las chulapas (sainete lírico), 1894; El domingo de Ramos, 1895; La Dolores (ópera), 1895; Al fin se casa la Nieves, 1895; El guardia del corps, 1897; El reloj de curo, 1898; El puente del diablo, 1898; El clavel rojo, 1899

Ya se van los quintos madre, 1899; La cariñosa, 1899; Raquel (ópera), 1900; Covadonga, 1901; Farinelli (ópera), spr. 1901 or June 1902; El caballo de señorita, 1901; Botín de guerra, 1902; La bien planta, 1902

El certamen de Cremona (ópera), 1906; La generosa, 1909; Piel de oso, 1909; Al alcance de la mano, 1911; Las percheleras, 1911; Tabaré (ópera), 1913; Don Gil (ópera), 1914; Los húsares del czar, 1914; Salamanca (ópera), 1916; Las cortes de amor, 1916; La guitarra del amor, 1916, collab. J. Giménez

other works

Orat: El apocalipsis, Madrid, 1882

Orch: 6 syms; En la Alhambra; Elegia y añoranzas; Escenas andaluzas; Los galeotes; Salamanca; Vn Conc.

Chamber: 3 str qts; Str Trio; Pf Qnt; Sextet, pf, wind qnt

Many songs and choral pieces

Principal publisher: Dotesio

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO

‘Bretón y Hernández (Tomás)’, Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeoamericana (Barcelona, 1907–30)

A. Sánchez Salcedo: Tomás Bretón: su vida y sus obras (Córdoba, 1924)

J. de Montillana: Bretón (Salamanca, 1952)

A. Fernández-Cid: Cien años de teatro musical en España (1875–1975) (Madrid, 1975)

J. Arnau and C.M. Gomez: Historia de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1979)

R. Alier and others: El libro de la zarzuela (Barcelona, 1982, rev. 1986 as Diccionario de la zarzuela)

C. Gómez Amat: Historia de la música española: el siglo xix (Madrid, 1984, 2/1988)

CARLOS GÓMEZ AMAT, ANDREW LAMB

Brett, Charles (Michael)

(b Maidenhead, 27 Oct 1941). English countertenor. He began his career as a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and made his London concert début in 1965 in Bach’s Magnificat. He subsequently became one of Britain’s leading countertenors, admired for his clear, mellifluous tone and unmannered style. Brett’s career centred on the Baroque choral repertory; his limited operatic appearances included Gluck’s La clemenza di Tito and Britten’s Oberon, which he first sang in Aachen in 1987. In 1983 he co-founded the Amaryllis Consort, of which he was director. Among his recordings are Purcell’s Fairy Queen (under Britten) and birthday odes, Bach’s B minor Mass and several Handel oratorios.

DAVID CUMMINGS/R

Brett, Philip

(b Edwinstowe, Notts., 17 Oct 1937). English musicologist, active in the USA. He was at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1955 to 1962, taking the BA in 1958 and the MusB in 1961. He then spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a Fellow of King’s College and university assistant lecturer in 1963. He took the doctorate (Cambridge, 1965) with a dissertation on Byrd’s songs. In 1966 he returned to Berkeley as assistant professor, becoming associate professor in 1971 and professor in 1978. Brett, who became a naturalized American citizen, was appointed professor of music at the University of California, Riverside, in 1991.

At Cambridge he studied with Philip Radcliffe and Thurston Dart, and collaborated with Dart in revising Fellowes’s series the English Madrigalists. He also revised one volume in the Collected Works of William Byrd, and subsequently undertook new editions of a number of volumes. His thorough examination of the sources has shown many of the pieces accepted by Fellowes to be of doubtful authenticity; his presentation of the texts and scores is useful to both performer and scholar. In 1973 he became general editor of a new edition of Byrd’s music. He has also specialized in the performance of Handel’s music, as conductor and as harpsichordist; as conductor of the University Chorus and Chamber Chorus at the University of California at Berkeley, he took part in several recordings of Baroque and contemporary music. Brett was co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group (1989–90) of the AMS, and many of his more recent writings have discussed gender issues in music and musicology.

WRITINGS

with T. Dart: ‘Songs by William Byrd in Manuscripts at Harvard’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xiv (1960), 343–65

‘The English Consort Song, 1570–1625’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 73–88

‘Edward Paston (1550–1630): a Norfolk Gentleman and his Musical Collection’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, iv (1964–8), 51–69

The Songs of William Byrd (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1965)

‘Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd’, PRMA, xcviii (1971–2), 47–64

‘English Music for the Scottish Progress of 1617’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 209–26

‘Homage to Taverner in Byrd’s Masses’, EMc, ix (1981), 169–76

‘Facing the Music’, EMc, x (1982), 347–500

ed.: Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes (Cambridge, 1983)

‘Text, Context, and the Early Music Editor’, Authenticity and Early Music, ed. N. Kenyon (Oxford, 1988), 83–114

‘Grimes and Lucretia’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987)

‘Handel and the Sentimental: the Case of Athalia’, ML, lxviii (1987), 112–27

‘Homosexuality and Music: a Conversation with Philip Brett’, in L. Mass: Homosexuality as Behavior and Identity: Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution, ii (New York, 1990), 36–54

‘Britten's Bad Boys: Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw’, Repercussions, i/2 (1992), 5–25

‘Britten's Dream’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R.A. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 259–80

‘Pitch and Transposition in the Paston Manuscripts’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections presented to O.W. Neighbour, ed. C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (London, 1993), 89–118

ed., with E. Wood and G.C. Thomas: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (London, 1994) [incl. ‘Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet’, 9–26; ‘Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas’, 235–56]

ed., with S.-E. Case and S.L. Foster: Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality

‘Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire’, 19CM, xxi (1997–8), 149–76

EDITIONS

John Taverner: The Western Wind Mass (London, 1962)

Consort Songs, MB, xxii (1967, 2/1974)

Thomas Tallis: The Lamentations of Jeremiah (London, 1969)

William Byrd: Consort Songs for Voice and Viols, The Collected Works, xv (London, 1970)

William Byrd: The Byrd Edition, xvi: Madrigals, Songs and Canons (London, 1976); iv: The Masses (London, 1981), v: Gradualia I (1605): the Marian Masses (London, 1989); vi/1: Gradualia I (1605): All Saints and Corpus Christi (London, 1991); vi/2: Gradualia I (1605): other Feasts and Devotions (London, 1993)

DAVID SCOTT/PAULA MORGAN

Breuer, János

(b Budapest, 8 June 1932). Hungarian musicologist. He studied conducting and later musicology at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest (1950–58). He worked on the journal Magyar zene from 1961, and was its managing editor (1970–96). From 1962 he was also a music critic for the daily newspaper Népszabadság. He was an academic member of the Hungarian Musicians’ Union (1958–9), a member and later secretary of the board of directors of the European Regional Group of the International Music Council (1983–9) and a member of the Hungarian Music Council (1990–97). He has specialized in 20th-century Hungarian music history and the pattern of international connections in Hungarian music throughout the century.

WRITINGS

‘Prokofjev Magyarországon’ [Prokofiev in Hungary], Magyar zene, i (1960–61), 508–15

Dávid Gyula (Budapest, 1966)

ed., with J. Ujfalussy: Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971 [incl. ‘Die zeitgenössische ungarische Musik auf dem Pfade Bartóks’, 163–7]

‘Adatok a “Két arckép” keletkezéséről’ [Some facts on the origins of Two Portraits], Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok, iii (1973), 279–88 [on Bartók’s op.5; summaries in Eng., Ger.]

Petőfi und die Musik (Budapest, 1973)

‘Kodály Zoltán és Franciország’ [Kodály and France], Magyar zene, xiv (1973), 258–70, 373–82; Fr. trans. in Nouvelles études hongroises, ix (1974), 189–202

Harminc év magyar zenekultúrája [30 years of Hungarian musical culture] (Budapest, 1975; Ger. trans., 1975)

‘Kolinda Rhythm in the Music of Bartók’, SMH, xvii (1975), 39–58; Hung. orig. in Zeneelmélet, stíluselemzes: a Bárdos Lajos 75. születésnapja alkalmából tartott zenetudományi konferencia anyaga (Budapest, 1977), 84–102

ed.: In memoriam Dmitrij Sosztakovics (Budapest, 1976) [incl. ‘Sosztakovics Művei Magyarországon és a nagyvilágban: korai előadások dokumentumaiból’ [Compositions by Shostakovich in Hungary and the world: from the documents of early performances], 51–66]

ed.: Kodály-dokumentumok, i (Budapest, 1976)

‘Kodály műveinek visszhangja az 1920-as évek nemzetközi sajtójában’ [Echoes of Kodály’s works in the international press in the 1920s], Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok Kodály Zoltán emlékezetére, ed. F. Bónis (Budapest, 1977), 190–209

Bartók és Kodály: tanulmányok századunk magyar zenetörténetéhez [Bartók and Kodály: studies towards the history of Hungarian music in our century] (Budapest, 1978)

Tizenhárom óra Kadosa Pállal [13 hours with Pál Kadosa] (Budapest, 1978)

ed.: A Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság Zenekarának 125 esztendeje [125 years of the Budapest PO] (Budapest, 1978) [incl. ‘A Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság Zenekara a felszabadulás után’ [The Budapest PO after liberation], 33–46]

ed., with I. Bontinck: Institutionen des Musiklebens in Europa: Vienna 1978

Hagyomány és korszerűség a mai magyar zenében [Tradition and modernity in Hungarian music today] (Budapest, 1979)

‘Kodály Zoltán: I. szimfónia: a mű keletkezésének dokumentumaiból’ [Kodály’s First Symphony: some notes on the work’s origins], Magyar zene, xx (1979), 300–19

Kurze Geschichte der ungarischen Musikkultur (Budapest, 1981) [also in Eng., Fr., Russ.]

‘Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno: Texte über Béla Bartók’, SMH, xxiii (1981), 397–426

‘Béla Bartók: Der wunderbare Mandarin: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Kölner Uraufführung’, Jb Peters 1981–2, 43–61

‘Die Beziehungen zwischen Bartók und Milhaud’, SMH, xxiv (1982), 283–94

Kodály-kalauz [A guide to Kodály] (Budapest, 1982; Eng. trans., 1990)

ed.: Kodály-mérleg 1982: tanulmányok [An assessment of Kodály 1982: studies] (Budapest, 1982)

‘Kodály in England: a Documentary Study’, Tempo, no.143 (1982), 2–9; no.144 (1983), 15–20

‘Kodálys Korrektionen in seinen veröffentlichten Kompositionen’, Kodály Conference: Budapest 1982, 24–32; Hung. orig. in Kodály Zoltán és Szabolcsi Bence emlékezete, ed. F. Bónis (Kecskemét, 1992), 188–202

‘Anton von Webern dirigiert Kodály: zur Wiener Erstaufführung des Psalmus hungaricus’, SMH, xxv (1983), 111–29

‘Emerich Balabán, Schönbergs erster Wegbereiter in Ungarn: zur Frühgeschichte der ungarischen Schönberg-Rezeption’, Die Wiener Schule in der Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Vienna 1984, 134–41

‘Jemnitz Sándor és Arnold Schoenberg kapcsolatai’ [Connections between Sándor Jemnitz and Arnold Schoenberg], Magyar zene, xxv (1984), 3–13

‘Marosszéki táncok’ [Dances of Marosszék], Utunk Kodályhoz, ed. F. László (Bucharest, 1984), 97–104

‘15 Bartók-levél’ [15 Bartók letters], Magyar zene, xxvi (1985), 296–325

Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája [40 years of Hungarian musical culture] (Budapest, 1985)

Szovjet zene Magyarországon, 1920–1944 [Soviet music in Hungary] (Budapest, 1987)

‘Bartók and Schoenberg’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.112 (1988), 189–98

Fejezetek Lajtha Lászlóról [Chapters on László Lajtha] (Budapest, 1992)

‘Bartók im Dritter Reich’, SMH, xxxvi (1995), 263–84; Eng. trans. in New Hungarian Quarterly, no.140 (1995), 134–40

AGNES GÁDOR

Breunich [Breunig, Brauenig, Bräunich, Breuenich], Johann Michael

(b early 18th century; d Dresden, after 1756). German composer. By 1727 Breunich was a Jesuit priest and Kapellmeister at Mainz Cathedral. By 1735 he had moved to Bohemia, probably to the Jesuit church in Prague, where an oratorio by him was performed that year. In 1745 he succeeded Zelenka as church composer to the court at Dresden, perhaps as a result of a commission he had executed for some members of the Saxon royal family who had visited Bohemia in 1737. In Dresden Breunich composed mainly church music; he wrote some secular pieces which were performed when the court visited its secondary residence at Warsaw, but could not get them performed in Dresden, where J.A. Hasse had a virtual monopoly in opera and other secular vocal music.

Breunich's published masses are more elaborate in style than most of the church music being published by German composers at the time – not unnaturally, as his musical horizons were wider than those of most of his contemporaries in this field. In his preface he expressed a wish to emulate the Italian style, which he did by writing more, and more elaborate, vocal solos, and more independent and idiomatic violin parts, than was usual in published church music of the 1720s; the technical difficulties, however, are not great. A distinctive feature of this publication is the clarino writing: the clarinos play almost continuously in many of the choral movements, and in the fugal movements their parts are often thematically integrated in a way attempted by few other church composers.

WORKS

VI Masses, 4vv, 2vn, org, op.1 (Mainz, 1727)

1 mass, 4vv, 1728, D-WD; 3 masses, 6 psalms, 1 Mag, 1 litany, 11 offertories, 13 Marian antiphons, 4 vesper settings, A-KR; 1 litany, D-Dl

Oratorio, Poenitentia secunda … qua S. David in inquieto reae conscientiae multum jactatus, Prague, St Salvator in the Clementinum, 8 April 1735, lib CZ-Pu

2 ops: Astrea placata (componimento drammatico), ?1742, D-Dl; Davide penitente, 1742, Dl

Aria, O Roma infelice, Dl

Conc., fl, 2 vn, bc, KA; Concertino, 2 fl, bc, F-Pc; Trio, 2 vn, bc, B-Bc; Sonata no.7, 2 fl, bc, D-WD; 2 kbd sonatas, Dl

ELIZABETH ROCHE

Breuning, Stephan von

(b Bonn, 17 Aug 1774; d Vienna, 4 June 1827). German poet. Born into a prominent Bonn family, he had some musical training as a young man and went on to study law at Bonn and Göttingen. His acquaintance with Beethoven dates from about 1784, and despite several rifts the two remained lifelong friends. Settling in Vienna around 1800, he was appointed to the war council and in 1818 became a court councillor. When in 1805–6 Beethoven needed help in revising Fidelio he turned to von Breuning, who ‘remodelled the whole book for him, quickening and enlivening the action’ by reducing the opera to two acts and reordering events in Act 1. Although some of his ministrations were crude, he did much to remedy one of the major failings in the libretto: its slow, uneventful first act. Von Breuning was also the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto op.61; Beethoven's later piano arrangement of this work was dedicated to von Breuning's first wife, Julie Vering (d 1809). Von Breuning was appointed an executor of Beethoven's will and guardian of his nephew; von Breuning died only a few months after Beethoven himself. His son, Gerhard (1813–92), Beethoven’s constant companion during his final illness, published a memoir, Aus dem Schwarzspanierhause (Vienna, 1874; Eng. trans., 1992, as Memories of Beethoven: from the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards), which remains the best account of the composer’s last months.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.G. Wegeler and F. Ries: Biographische Notizen über Ludwig von Beethoven (Koblenz, 1838/R; Eng. trans., 1987)

W. Hess: Beethovens Oper Fidelio und ihre drei Fassungen (Zürich, 1953; enlarged 2/1986 as Das Fidelio-Buch)

W. Hess, ed.: Leonore: Oper in zwei Aufzügen: zweite Bearbeitung (1806), L. von Beethoven: Supplemente zur Gesamtausgabe, xiii/3 (Wiesbaden, 1970) [complete 1806 lib]

M. Ruhnke: ‘Die Librettisten des Fidelio’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1975), 121–40

A. Tyson: ‘Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838): the History of his Contribution to Beethoven Biography’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 209–21

K.M. KNITTEL

Bréval, Jean-Baptiste Sébastien

(b Paris, 6 Nov 1753; d Colligis, Aisne, 18 March 1823). French composer and cellist. He studied with Jean-Baptiste Cupis, and may also have received lessons from Berteau, one of whose sonatas is included in Bréval's tutor. By 1774 he was an active cello teacher and the following year he published his op.1, Six quatuors concertants. In 1776 he became a member of the Société Académique des Enfants d’Apollon. He made his début at the Concert Spirituel in 1778, playing one of his own sonatas; thereafter, solo appearances and performances of his works at this concert were frequent, and from 1781 to 1791 he was a member of its orchestra. His music was also performed by various Paris concert societies. On the temporary cessation of the Concert Spirituel, he joined the Théâtre Feydeau orchestra from 1791 to 1800. Afterwards he assumed the administration of the Concerts de la rue de Cléry and became a member of the Paris Opéra orchestra, a position from which he retired in 1814. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1801) and Fétis state that he taught at the Conservatoire. Although such tenure is not verified by the Conservatoire documents, examination reports indicate that Bréval's compositions were used for instruction.

Bréval’s compositions, written between 1775 and 1805, consist mostly of instrumental music and reflect contemporary Parisian musical taste: graceful melodies are propelled by energetic rhythms and supported by an unobtrusive harmonic structure. The works written up to 1783 (all for strings, mainly for chamber groups) are usually either two- or three-movement compositions employing sonata and rondo form, or one-movement works using variation techniques. Works within the same opus usually follow the same procedure. Short, elegant and technically undemanding, they rely on lyrical melodic gestures and their subsequent elaboration. He was ranked among the best composers for amateur musicians by his contemporaries.

Bréval's later works, such as the superb Symphonie concertante for clarinet, horn and bassoon op.38 (c1795), are characterized by diversity and experimentation. In this middle period he wrote for many instrumental combinations and employed larger forms, such as the concerto, symphonie concertante and opera, which, through their melodic, harmonic and structural expansion, show his maturation as a composer. The chamber works of this period reveal a more complex sonata form, demand greater technical virtuosity and often have three movements. His concertos, written for his own performance, were structurally influenced by Giovanni Battista Viotti: precise thematic organization interspersed with bravura passage-work.

As a performer, Bréval was overshadowed by Jean-Louis Duport and J.-B. Janson, and later by Bernhard Heinrich Romberg. This was partly due to the fact that his technique did not progress much beyond his early training. Subsequently perceived as old-fashioned, he did not publish any works after the introduction of his Traité du violoncelle op.42 (1804), which was not well received (see Correspondance des amateurs musiciens). It overlooked technological advances to the instrument and the corresponding changes to performance technique, and was soon eclipsed by the more cohesive treatises of the Conservatoire (1805) and Duport (1806), although it still provides interesting insights into the French Classical style for modern players.

Bréval’s brother, Stanislas-Laurent Bréval (b Paris, 1760), was a violinist in the service of the Count of Ogny and played in the orchestras of the Paris Opéra and the Concert Spirituel.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris, unless otherwise stated

orchestral

Symphonies concertantes (only solo insts listed): 2 as op.4 (1777), no.1, 2 vn, va obbl, vc in Andante, no.2, 2 vn, vc obbl; 2 as op.11 (1783), no.1, 2 vn, no.2, 2 vn, vc; 1 as op.30, ob, hn (c1789), lost; 1 as op.31, fl, bn (c1790), ?arr. by Devienne of op.30; 1 as op.33, vn, va (c1792), lost; 1 as op.38, cl, hn, bn (c1795); 1 for vn, vc, perf. Paris, Concert Spirituel, 1787; 1 for 2 vc, perf. Paris Conservatoire, 1800

Vc concs.: no.1, A, op.14 (1784); no.2, G, op.17 (1784); no.3, F, op.20 (1785); no.4, C, op.22 (1786); no.5, op.24 (1786); no.6, C, op.26 (1786); no.7, A, op.35 (c1794)

chamber

Qts: 6 quatuors concertants, 2 vn, va, b, op.1 (1775); 6 quatuors concertants et dialogués, vn/fl, vn, va, b, op.5 (1778); 6 quatuors concertants et dialogués, 2 vn, va, b, op.7 (1781); 6 quatuors concertants et dialogués, 2 vn, va, b, op.18 (1785); Quatuors in dis, bn, va, vc, db, CZ-Pnm

Trios: 6 trios concertants et dialogués, vn, va, vc, op.3 (1777); 6 for (fl, vn, vc)/(2 vn, b), op.8 (1782); 6 trio … concertants et dialogués, vn, va, vc, op.27 (c1786), ? 3 as op.32 (London, n.d.); 3 for vn, vc obbl, db, op.39 (c1795)

Duos, 2 vn: 6 as op.6 (1780), arr. 2 vn/vn, vc (London, n.d.); 6 as op.10 (1783), arr. 2 vn/vn, vc (London, n.d.); 6 for 2 vn/vn, vc, op.19 (1785); 6 for 2 vn/vn, vc, op.23 (1786), lost, arr. 2 vn/vn, vc (London, n.d.); 6 as op.29 (c1783), lost; 6 as op.32 (c1791); 6 as op.34 (c1794), ?lost, arr. 2 vn/(vn, vc)/2 vc as op.35 (London, n.d.); 6 as op.37 (c1795), lost; 6 duos concertantes, 2 vn/vn, vc, op.41 (c1798), nos.3, 5, 6 as duetts (London, n.d.)

Other duos: 6 for 2 vc, op.2 (1783); 6 for vn, va, op.15 (1784); 6 for 2 fl, op.16 (1784); 6 duos faciles, vn, vc/bn, op.21 (1785), ? also as 6 duos, vn, vc, op.1 (Berlin, n.d.); 6 duos … pour faciliter l’étude des différentes clefs, 2 vc, op.25 (1786)

Sonatas, vc, b: 6 for vc/vn, b, op.12 (1783), also as op.2 (Berlin and Amsterdam, n.d.), ? also as 6 solos, op.10 (London, n.d.); 6 as op.28 (1787); 6 as op.40 (c1795)

other works

Inès et Léonore, ou La soeur jalouse (oc, 3, Gautier, after Caldéron), Versailles, 14 Nov 1788 (1789); ov. arr. pf, J.B. Cramer (1790)

A ma marraine, air populaire avec paroles nouvelles, 1v unacc., F-Pn

Airs variés: Les nocturnes, ou 6 airs variés, vn, vc, op.9 (1782), as 6 Favorite Airs with Variations (London, n.d.); Air de Marlborough (vc, db)/(vn, vc) op.13 (1783); Petits airs variés, hpd, op.36 (c1795), lost; 12 petits airs, vc (1799), ?arr. of op.36

Pedagogical: Traité du violoncelle, op.42 (1804), partial Eng. trans. (?1810)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

FétisB

GerberL

GerberNL

MGG1 (J. Gribenski)

AMZ, ii (1801), 411–12

[article on cello], Correspondance des amateurs musiciens (19 Nov 1803)

Review of J.-B.S. Bréval: Traité du violoncelle (Paris, 1804), Correspondance des amateurs musiciens (20 June 1804)

T. Lassabathie: Histoire du Conservatoire impérial de musique et de déclamation (Paris, 1860)

E.G.J. Gregoir: Bibliothèque musicale populaire (Brussels, 1877–9)

M.H. Decourcelle: La Société académique des enfants d’Apollon (Paris, 1881)

M. Brenet: Les concerts en France sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1900/R)

M. Brenet: Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais: documents inédits, recueillis et annotés par Michel Brenet (Paris, 1910/R)

H. Burton: ‘Les académies de musique en France au XVIIIe siècle’, RdM, xxxvii (1955), 122–47

C. Johansson: French Music Publishers’ Catalogues of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Stockholm, 1955)

B.S. Brook: La symphonie française dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1962) [incl. list of early sources]

J.M. Stoltie: A symphonie concertante Type: the Concerto for Mixed Woodwind Ensemble in the Classical Period (diss., U. of Iowa, 1962)

K. Marx: Die Entwicklung des Violoncells und seiner Spieltechnik bis J.L. Duport (1520–1820) (Regensburg, 1963)

D.A. Klein: La naissance du quatuor à cordes en France (diss., U. of Paris, 1971)

S. Milliot: Le violoncelle en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1985)

V. Walden: An Investigation and Comparison of the French and Austro-German Schools of Violoncello Bowing Techniques, 1785–1839 (diss., U. of Auckland, 1993)

V. Walden: One Hundred Years of Violoncello: a History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840 (Cambridge, 1998)

BARRY S. BROOK, RICHARD VIANO/VALERIE WALDEN

Bréval, Lucienne [née Schilling, Berthe]

(b Mannendorf, nr Zürich, 4 Nov 1869; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, 15 Aug 1935). Swiss soprano. She studied the piano at Lausanne, then singing at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she made her début as Sélika in L’Africaine in 1892. She remained as principal soprano at the Opéra until 1919, during which time she sang in many world premières including those of Massenet’s Grisélidis, Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleu and Février’s Monna Vanna. She was also Kundry in the first French performance of Parsifal. In 1901 she made her début at the Metropolitan in Le Cid, singing also in Die Walküre and the American première of Reyer’s Salammbô. Her only appearances at Covent Garden were as Gluck’s Armide in 1906. In 1910 she sang Lady Macbeth in the première of Bloch’s Macbeth, which he dedicated to her, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. At Monte Carlo in 1913 she created the title role in Fauré’s Pénélope; her other title roles there had been in Isidore De Lara's Amy Robsart and in Carmen.

Despite her great reputation in France she had limited success elsewhere: the New York critics found her acting ‘semaphoric’ and her singing lacking in polish. Her only recordings are the primitive cylinders made during a performance of L’Africaine with Jean de Reszke, where the high notes are impressive.

J.B. STEANE

Breve

(Lat. brevis: ‘short’; Fr. carrée, double-ronde; Ger. Doppelganze-Note).

In Western notation a note half the value of a long and twice that of a semibreve. In American usage it is called a double whole note. It was the shorter of the two notes of early mensural music and theory, hence its name. It had its origins in the punctum, one of the two single-note neumes of pre-mensural notation, and is first found in early 13th-century sources. Before about 1600 its value was a half or a third of a long, and it was usually shown as in ex.1a; its rest was shown as in ex.1b. The breve has survived in occasional use in the forms shown in ex.1c.

See also Notation, §III, 2–3 and Note values.

JOHN MOREHEN/RICHARD RASTALL

Brevi, Giovanni Battista

(b Bergamo, c1650; d Milan, after 1725). Italian composer and organist. He was organist of S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, by 1679 and choirmaster and organist at the cathedral there from 1680 to 1693. From 1695 he was choirmaster at S Maria del Carmine and S Francesco, Milan, and he also held a similar post at the Jesuit church of S Fedele there. In his publication of 1725 he was still described as choirmaster of many notable churches in Milan. In Novara in 1711 he took part as an organist in the ceremonies held in connection with the transfer of the relics of St Gaudentius. His music shows the influence of several of his important contemporaries, among them G.B. Vitali, Legrenzi and Bassani. His vocal works are distinguished by the noble, austere expressiveness of their ariosos and recitatives.

WORKS

oratorios

Il trionfo della gloria nelle mestitie del Brenno, Bergamo, 1685

Il trionfo di S Antonio da Padoa contro il vizio, la morte e il demonio, Bergamo, 1685

L'innocenza patrocinata dal miracoloso santo di Padoa, Milan, 1696

I funerali del Redentore, Milan, 1706

L'innocenza difesa dal gran santo di Padoa, Milan, 1708

Concerto di dolori tra il figliuolo e la madre, la passione di Gesù ed il pianto di Maria, Milan, 1709

Davide a Tibirinto, Milan, 1709

Il martire di desiderio, Milan, S Francesco, 1717, full score (Milan, 1717)

other works

Le forze d'amore: cantate, libro I, 1v, bc, op.1 (Bologna, 1691)

Metri sacri: motetti, libro I, 1v, bc, op.2 (Venice, 1692); 3 cants. ed. R. Ewerhart, Cantio sacra, xxv, xxxiv (Cologne, 1957–61)

Bizzarie armoniche, overo Sonate da camera, libro I, a 3, bc, op.3 (Bologna, 1693)

I delirii d'amor divino: cantate morali, libro I, 1v, bc, op.5 (Modena, 1695; enlarged 2/1706)

La catena d'oro: [24] ariette da camera, libro II, 1v, bc, op.6 (Modena, 1696)

Cantate, ed' ariette da camera, libro IV, 1v, bc, op.7 (Modena, 1696)

L'Etna festiva: introduttione di ballo (Milan, 1696)

La devotione canora: motetti, libro II, 1v, bc, op.8 (Modena, 1699)

[6] Tantum ergo, libro I, 1v, bc, op.9 (Venice, 1725)

3 Lat. sacred works, ed. R. Ewerhart, Cantio sacra, xi, xxv, xxxiv (Cologne, 1957–61)

Primi elementi di musica per li principianti (Venice, 1699)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Donati-Petteni: L'arte della musica in Bergamo (Bergamo, 1930)

A. Geddo: Bergamo e la musica (Bergamo, 1958)

SERGIO MARTINOTTI

Breviary

(from Lat. breviarium: ‘abridgment’).

Liturgical book of the Western Church for the services of the Divine Office. Particularly when it includes notation, the breviary is virtually an Antiphoner augmented by the additional elements necessary for the complete recitation of the Divine Office (i.e. psalms, lessons and prayers).

1. Definition.

2. Early development of the breviary.

3. The development of the official Roman breviary.

4. Early local printed breviaries.

5. Format.

6. Notated chants.

MICHEL HUGLO

1. Definition.

The term ‘breviarium’ was applied in the sense of ‘abridgment’ before the 12th century to volumes as different as the summary of laws ascribed to Alaric (Breviarium Alarici) and the 11th-century summary (Breviarium de musica) of the Epistola de harmonica institutione by Regino of Prüm (d 915). The first liturgical breviaries appeared in the early 11th century and were books grouping together all the elements necessary for the complete recitation of the Office (whether in choir or in private), but with considerably shortened lessons. In certain breviaries for use in choir the lessons remained fairly long, but in many others, particularly breviaries for travelling clergy, the lessons were reduced to a few lines and were sometimes shorter than the responsories that followed them. The breviary was the only single book from which the Divine Office could be recited complete (even if in a shortened form), and this recitation was an obligation of travelling monks according to the Rule of St Benedict (chap.50); it was more complete than the diurnal (a book containing only the day Offices).

2. Early development of the breviary.

It might appear, therefore, that the breviary was designed for the needs of travelling monks. Nevertheless, nine of the 12 surviving 11th-century breviaries in French libraries, and 33 of the 39 surviving 12th-century breviaries, originated in monasteries; according to Ehrensberger’s catalogue, the proportion is the same for the breviaries now in the Vatican. It seems likely, indeed, that the breviary (originally always noted with neumes) was designed for the sake of convenience in the recitation of the Office in choir. Many different liturgical books had previously been required: chant books (antiphoner, psalter, hymnary), books of lessons (homiliaries, lectionaries, passionaries, etc.), books of chapters (capitularies, collectaria) and books for the ordering of the services (ordinals). Now a single book contained the whole liturgical library for the Office.

In some early breviaries, as in some early missals, the liturgical books were juxtaposed rather than amalgamated; this occurred in certain Swiss breviaries (see Gy, 1963), and in some breviaries in Beneventan script, for example the Breviary of Oderise, Abbot of Monte Cassino (F-Pm 364; see M. Huglo: Les tonaires: inventaire, analyse, comparaison, Paris, 1971, pp.118–19). This arrangement must have been very inconvenient, and it disappeared during the 12th and 13th centuries, except in a few cases (e.g. the late 13th-century breviary of Apt, GB-Ob lat.lit.d.7 (33086)), in favour of the arrangement usual ever since. In this, the liturgical material, whether chanted, read or recited, is presented in the order in which it occurs in the liturgy.

Some 11th- and 12th-century manuscripts include both the breviary (with material for the Office) and the missal (with material for the Mass). These manuscripts were compiled for the sake of convenience, for use in small priories or modest parish churches. Sometimes chants from the Mass were included within the breviary proper, inserted between the Offices of Terce and Sext (see Salmon, 1967, pp.64ff).

3. The development of the official Roman breviary.

At the papal court (i.e. the curia), the Divine Office was by the 13th century no longer sung publicly, and its private recitation had necessitated a shortening of the lessons. An abridgment or breviary known as the breviary of the curia, corresponding to the new requirements, was drawn up, apparently under the direction of Innocent III (1198–1216).

This breviary was adopted by the Franciscans after St Francis imposed it on his first followers, even for recitation in choir, in his third Rule of 1223. (Square notation – ‘nota quadrata’ – became compulsory after 1254 for Franciscan breviaries, although it is not always found in earlier Franciscan breviaries such as I-Ac 694, dating from 1224, which has central Italian neumes on staves; see illustration).

The curial breviary was revised in 1241, with the approval of Gregory IX (Cardinal Ugolino), and in 1260. In 1277 Nicholas III ordered it to be used in the Roman basilicas, although the Lateran adopted it only under Gregory XI (1370–78).

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, especially while the popes were at Avignon, legends and apocryphal material were introduced into the lessons of the breviary, private devotions were magnified at the expense of the traditional service, and the Proper of the Saints became more important in it than the Proper of the Time. As early as the 15th century, in consequence, the question of the reform of the breviary was raised.

Reform was envisaged either as a radical recasting of the breviary or as a restoration in the spirit of antiquity. The former alternative was favoured for some time under humanist pressure, particularly during the papacies of Nicholas V (1447–55) and Leo X (1513–21), though not under Paul II (1464–71). Paul III (1534–49) favoured the breviary drawn up on humanist lines by Cardinal Quiñonez, titular of the Roman basilica of S Croce in Gerusalemme (which gave his breviary its alternative name of the Breviary of the Holy Cross). This breviary appeared in 1535, but its use was restricted to the private recitation of the Office. It was reprinted in 1536 at Cologne, Lyons and Paris (where there were three separate editions), and was published in 40 different places before 1544 even though Paul IV suspended it for a time. Despite the sensible redistribution of the Psalter contained in it, Quiñonez’s breviary was considered too radical; it incurred the censure of the Sorbonne, and St Francis Xavier refused to read it. Nevertheless, it did not go nearly as far as Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer of 1549 (modelled on it in numerous respects, such as the arrangement of the lessons, and the Preface) in simplifying and shortening the medieval Offices.

The second solution, a restoration of the breviary in the spirit of antiquity, was proposed by the Theatines, but it was finally achieved only under Pius V (1566–72), to whom the Council of Trent had entrusted the revision of the breviary. His breviary (the ‘Pianum’) was imposed in 1569.

The hymnary within the breviary continued to be revised; one such revision, by Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Naples, was authorized for private recitation under Clement VII (1523–34). In another, under Clement VIII (1592–1605), the text of the hymnary was ‘corrected’ along classical lines by four Jesuits. But the Vatican basilica at Rome, and the religious orders, retained the old hymnary.

The Roman breviary was adapted to monastic use by a commission (including the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine) under Paul V (1605–21). This Romano-Benedictine breviary, in which the hymnary remained unrevised, was approved in 1609 and imposed in 1616.

New projects of reform came to fruition under Benedict XIV (1740–58); in France, during the preceding 50 years, a succession of neo-Gallican breviaries entirely recast on new lines had appeared. The last and best known of these, Vintimille’s Paris breviary, appeared in 1736.

The breviary was once again thoroughly reformed by Pius X (1903–14), particularly in the distribution of the recitation of the Psalter over the week. Since the Second Vatican Council, a vernacular breviary has been granted to the clergy, with very short services and no traces of the forms of choral origin that had rendered private recitation unnecessarily cumbersome. With it, the traditional links with the past were definitely severed.

4. Early local printed breviaries.

Printing of the breviary began about 1490. More than 520 different editions are known to have been printed before 1500; nearly 90 of these are of the Roman breviary, and 14 are of the Sarum breviary. The latter was very frequently printed on the Continent, at Rouen, Cologne, Paris and Venice. The first English edition was published in London in 1500, but it nevertheless continued to be printed in Paris until 1556.

Printed breviaries preserve many of the special liturgical characteristics of individual churches, such as their calendars, the special order in which they present optional pieces and so on. The canons of a chapter would have chosen one of their best manuscripts for the edition of their breviary, and would have collated and corrected it before sending it to the printer. The printed breviaries are thus excellent evidence of local practice. For some churches, the printed breviary may be the sole evidence for special chants, the ordering of antiphons and responsories, and rubrics.

After the Council of Trent (1545–63) local breviaries became progressively romanized, except in France from 1670, where neo-Gallican breviaries gradually displaced the breviaries of Paris and other French churches.

5. Format.

At the beginning of the 11th century the breviary, like the antiphoner, was small in format but much thicker than the antiphoner owing to the greater volume of material it contained. In consequence, it was often divided into two parts (winter and summer or, less frequently, the Proper of the Time and the Proper of the Saints). The breviary was placed in the centre of the choir for the readings: some manuscripts still bear traces of wax from the candles. The psalms, antiphons and responsories were chanted from memory: memorization (‘recordatio’) took place outside the choir with the assistance of the tonary, the antiphoner or the breviary.

In the 13th century and particularly in the 14th, however, all the chants began to be sung at sight from books that became increasingly large. Many 13th- and 14th-century breviaries are in folio format rather than the earlier quarto. Examples are the noted breviary from St Martial at Limoges (F-Pn lat.785), which is very large (40·5 cm × 29·5 cm), and two Parisian noted breviaries (Pn lat.10482 and 15181–2; the latter measures 49·5 cm × 34·5 cm). In folio books the staves are wider and the square notes larger than those in smaller books: often a breviary from this period has fewer musical staves on a page than a small 12th-century noted breviary.

Books of more traditional size did not disappear at this time, however: an example of a smaller book is the Sorbonne breviary (F-Pn lat.15613), which was chained in 1328 so that it could not be removed.

6. Notated chants.

Notated breviaries contain the antiphons and responsories for the whole liturgical repertory, and also notated lessons such as the excerpts from Lamentations for the end of Holy Week, the chant for the Sibylline prophecy at Christmas, and occasionally the chant for the genealogy of Christ sung at Christmas (in the version from Matthew) and Epiphany (in the version from Luke).

Another piece occasionally encountered is the Visitatio sepulchri or Easter play. A Parisian breviary from the mid-13th century (F-Pn lat.15613) contains an interesting Representatio sepulchri of this type which was performed at the end of the night Office for Easter. (For an edition of the text, see Leroquais, 1934, iii, pp.262–3; and of the melody, A. Gastoué: ‘Les origines du chant liturgique dans l’église de Paris’, Revue du chant grégorien, xi, 1902–3, pp.155–6.) Many further examples are to be found in the classic work by K. Young: The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933/R).

For further illustration, see Antiphoner, fig.2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: history of the breviary

P. Batiffol: Histoire du bréviaire romain (Paris, 1893, 3/1911; Eng. trans., 1912)

S. Bäumer: Geschichte des Breviers (Freiburg, 1895; Fr. trans., 1905/R)

P. Salmon: L’office divin: histoire de la formation du bréviaire (Paris, 1959)

P. Salmon: L’office divin au Moyen-Age: histoire de la formation du bréviaire du IXe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1967)

b: catalogues of breviaries

MGG1 (B. Stäblein)

W.H. Frere: Bibliotheca musico-liturgica (London, 1894–1932/R)

H. Ehrensberger: Libri liturgici bibliothecae apostolicae Vaticanae manu scripti (Freiburg, 1897/R)

H. Bohatta: Liturgische Bibliographie des XV. Jahrhunderts mit Ausnahme der Missale und Livres d’Heures (Vienna, 1911/R) [incl. list of early printed breviaries]

O. Gatzweiler: Die liturgischen Handschriften des Aachener Münsterstifts (Münster, 1926)

V. Leroquais: Les bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (Paris, 1934)

H. Bohatta: Bibliographie der Breviere, 1501–1850 (Vienna, 1937/R)

S.J.P. Van Dijk and J.H. Walker: The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy (London, 1960)

K. Gamber: Codices liturgici latini antiquiores (Freiburg, 1963, 2/1968; suppl. ed. B. Baroffio and others, 1988)

L. Eizenhofer and H. Knaus: Die liturgischen Handschriften der hessischen Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek Darmstadt, ii (Wiesbaden, 1968)

P. Salmon: Les manuscrits liturgiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, i (Rome, 1968)

c: editions of individual breviaries

F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, eds.: Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum (Cambridge, 1879–86/R)

S.W. Lawley ed.: Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesie Eboracensis [York Breviary of 1476] (Durham, 1880–83)

W.H. Frere and L.E.G. Brown, eds.: The Hereford Breviary [1505] (London, 1904–15)

S. de Vries, ed.: Bréviaire Grimani de la bibliothèque de S. Marco à Venise (Leiden, 1904–10) [facs. edn.]

T.R. Gambier-Parry, ed.: The Colbertine Breviary [Paris, 1679] (London, 1912–13)

J.B.L. Tolhurst, ed.: The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, Winchester (London, 1932–42)

Breviarium ad usum ritu[m]q[ue] sacros[an]cte nidrosien[sis] eccl[es]ie (Oslo, 1964) [facs. edn of Breviarium nidrosiense (Paris, 1519)]

A.J. Collins, ed.: The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey: from the MS. with English Rubrics F. 4. 11 at Magdalene College, Cambridge (Worcester, 1969)

C. Waddell, ed.: The Old French Paraclete Ordinary, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms français 14410, and the Paraclete Breviary, Chaumont, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 31 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1983–5)

C. Waddell, ed.: The Summer-Season Molesme Breviary: Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, manuscrit 807 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984–5)

J. Szendrei, ed.: Breviarium notatum strigoniense (s. XIII.) (Budapest, 1998) [facs. of CZ-Pst DE. I.7]

d: studies of individual breviaries

V. Leroquais: Le bréviaire de Philippe le Bon: bréviaire parisien du XVe siècle (Brussels, 1929)

V. Leroquais: ‘Un bréviaire manuscrit de St Victor de Marseille’, Mémoires de l’Institut historique de Provence, viii (1931), 1–34

C. Gaspar: Le bréviaire du Musée van den Bergh à Anvers (Brussels, 1932)

V. Leroquais: Le bréviaire-missel du prieuré clunisien de Lewes [GB-Cfm 369] (Paris, 1935)

R. Blum: ‘Maître Honoré und das Brevier Philipps des Schönen’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekwesen, lxii (1948), 225–30

A. Dold: Lehrreiche Basler Brevier-Fragmente des 10. Jahrhunderts (Beuron, 1954)

G. Abate: ‘Il primitivo breviario francescano’, Miscellanea francescana, lx (1960), 47–240

P.-M. Gy: ‘Les premiers bréviaires de St Gall: deuxième quart du XIe siècle’, Liturgie: Gestalt und Vollzug (1963), 104–13

D.H. Turner: ‘The Penwortham Breviary’, British Museum Quarterly, xxviii (1964), 85–8

H. Reifenberg: Stundengebet und Breviere im Bistum Mainz seit der romanischen Epoche (Münster, 1964)

P. Salmon: ‘Un bréviaire-missel du XIe siècle’, Mélanges Eugéne Tisserant (Vatican City, 1964), 327–43

J. Lemarié: Le bréviaire de Ripoll [F-Pn lat.742] (Montserrat, 1965)

R.G. Calkins: ‘The Master of the Franciscan Breviary’, Arte lombarda, xvi (1971), 17–36

M. Meiss: The Master of the Breviary of Jean sans Peur (Oxford, 1971)

G.-H. Karnowa: Breviarium passaviense: das Passauer Brevier im Mittelalter und die Breviere der altbayerischen Kirchenprovinz (St Ottilien, 1983)

S. Holder: ‘The Noted Cluniac Breviary-Missal of Lewes: Fitzwilliam Museum Manuscript 369’, JPMMS, viii (1985), 25–32

M. Czernin: Das Breviarium Monasticum Codex 290 (183) der Bundesstaatlichen Studienbibliothek in Linz: eine quellenkritische Untersuchung des ältesten erhaltenen Breviers aus dem Benediktinerstift Kremsmünster (diss., U. of Vienna, 1992)

D. Chadd: ‘An English Noted Breviary of circa 1200’, Music in the Medieval English Liturgy, ed. S. Rankin and D. Hiley (Oxford, 1993), 205–25

M. Czernin: A Monastic Breviary of Austrian Provenance: Linz, Bundesstaatlichen Studienbibliothek 290 (183) (Ottawa, 1995) [complete inventory]

Renaissance Liturgical Imprints: a Census, homepage <www-personal.umich.edu/davidcr>

Bréville, Pierre (Eugène Onfroy) de

(b Bar-le-Duc, 21 Feb 1861; d Paris, 24 Sept 1949). French composer. Having completed preparatory schooling for a diplomatic career (Ecole Bossuet, Collège Stanislas and Faculté de Droit), he decided in favour of music. After studying briefly at the Conservatoire in the harmony class of Dubois, he left to become a pupil of Franck. He studied counterpoint, fugue and composition with Franck for only two years, but remained an ardent member of ‘la bande à Franck’.

Bréville attended the première of Parsifal, met Bruckner and Liszt at Wahnfried, and Fauré, Debussy and other French pilgrims at the 1888 Bayreuth Festival. He visited Grieg during his Scandinavian tour in 1889 and travelled to Constantinople probably in 1894, a journey which was reflected in his music. From 1898 until 1902 Bréville taught counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum and he directed the Conservatoire chamber music class (1917–19). He devoted much time to the Société Nationale de Musique as a member, then secretary and finally president of its governing board. His critical writings are numerous, well written and occasionally witty.

Bréville considered the opera Eros vainqueur to be among his most important works. Commissioned by the Opéra-Comique in 1900, it was not performed there until 1932; its 1910 première was at La Monnaie, with Claire Croiza in the title role. Van den Borren and others wrote that it was one of the most significant operas of the period.

Bréville’s songs also received critical acclaim. 105 are known to have been written between 1879 and 1945, of which 23 were never published. The early songs were clearly influenced by Wagner and the later ones by Fauré and Debussy. They are all skilfully written, with rhythmic inventiveness, meticulous prosody and sensitivity to the poetry. Occasionally the harmonic control weakens; at other times the harmonic-contrapuntal organization is masterly. The songs, chamber music and orchestral works were presented principally by the Société Nationale in Paris and the Libre Esthétique in Brussels. Although most of Bréville’s compositions were publicly performed during his lifetime, in recent years his music has been all but forgotten.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

La princesse Maleine (M. Maeterlinck), ov., 1891; Sept princesses (M. Maeterlinck), ov. and incid music, 1895; L’anneau de Çakuntalâ (comédie-héroïque, Kâlidâsa, trans. A.F. Herold), incid music, 1896; Le pays des fées (J. Lorrain), acc. to the recitation of 5 sonnets, ?1900; Eros vainqueur (conte lyrique, 3, Lorrain), 1905; St François d'Assise (op, T. de Wyzewa), unfinished

sacred vocal

Mass in 3 parts, S, T, B, chorus, str qt, hp, org, 1883–6; Ave verum, Mez/Bar, org, c1884; Introit for nuptial mass: Deus Israel, T, chorus, hp, org, c1885; Ste Rose de Lima (scène mystique, F. Naquet), S, female chorus, orch, 1886; Laudate dominum, Bar, chorus, hp, org, db, 1889

Inviolata, Mez, T, org, c1892; Cantique de 1re Communion (H. Gauthier-Villars), S, vn, org, 1898; Salut (O Salutaris, Sancta Maria, Tantum ergo, Jubilate), female chorus, org, c1898; Tantum ergo, Mez, female chorus, org, c1898

Messe brève, solo or unison vv, org, 1925; La Noël (P. Fort), SATB chorus, 1940; Les cèdres du Liban (Lamartine), TB chorus, wordless female chorus, 1941; Cantique en l’honneur de St Louis de Gonzague (R.P.H. Couvreur), chorus, org; Latin motets

secular vocal

L’ondine et le pêcheur (T. Gautier), S, orch, 1884; Hymne à Venus (de l’Isle Adam), 2 female vv (duo/chorus), va, fl, ob, cl, bn, hp, 1889; Médeia (A.F. Herold), S, female chorus, orch, 1892; Aimons nous (T. de Banville), Mez, T, orch/pf, 1894; Chant des divinités de la forêt, S, T, female chorus, orch, 1896 [from incid music L’anneau de Çakuntalâ]

Quatre rondels de Charles d’Orléans, 3 female vv (trio/chorus), 1930; La marelle (M. Gevers), 2vv (duo/chorus), pf, 1935; Roi-pepin (E. Vitta), 2vv (duo/chorus), pf, 1936; numerous choruses, vocal qts, duos, etc.

songs

† also exists with orchestration by Bréville

Harmonie du soir (C. Baudelaire), 1879

Elégie (M. Bouchor), 1883; Chanson d’amour (Bouchor), 1883; Chanson triste (Bouchor), 1883; Extase (V. Hugo), 1883

La forêt charmée (J. Moréas), 1891; Le Rhin (Moréas), 1891; Après la mort (G. Trarieux), 1892; Dormir (F. Colonna), 1893; Bernardette† (E. Pouvillon), 1894; Les lauriers sont coupés (T. Klingsor), 1895; Il ne pleut plus bergère (Klingsor), 1895; La belle au bois (J. Lorrain), 1896; La mort des lys (Lorrain), 1896; Le furet du bois joli (J. Benedict), 1896; Les fées (H. Gauthier-Villars), 1896; Petits litanies de Jésus (Klingsor), 1896; La tour, prends garde (E. Cottinet), 1897; Nuit de jardin (C. Morice), 1897; Baiser† (Cottinet), c1898; La petite Ilse (Lorrain), 1898; Variante sur l’air: Au clair† (C. Morice), 1898; Sur le pont (Cottinet), 1898; Prières d’enfant (Le signe de la croix, Notre Père, Je vous salue Marie, Souvenez-vous), 1899; Childe Harold (H. Heine), 1899; Epitaphe sur l’anagrame de … Damoiselle Marie Dupuis (anon.), 1899

Prière pour la France† (F. Coppée), 1900; Maneh, chanson de Caĭckji sur le Bosphore (vocalise), 1907

Litanies pour ceux qui ne sont plus (anon.), 1910; Sur une tombe† (V. Hugo), 1911; Venise marine (H. de Régnier), 1911; Une jeune fille parle† (J. Moréas), 1911; Berceuse (Régnier), 1912; Sous les arches de roses (C. Van Lerberghe), 1912; Choses en allées (Moréas), 1912; Le secret (Régnier), 1912; Héros, je vous salue† (Régnier), 1915; France† (Régnier), 1916; L’Ondine† (R. Vivien), 1916

La terre (F.-R. Chateaubriand), 1920; Sainte (S. Mallarmé), 1922; Cantique pour le tricentenaire de Molière (Molière), T, org/pf, 1922; La cloche fêlée† (C. Baudelaire), 1924; La terre, les eaux va buvant (P. Ronsard), 1925; Bonjour, mon coeur (Ronsard), 1925; O mon ange gardien (F. Jammes), 1925; 4 sonatines vocales (J. Moréas), 1927–8: Printemps, Fleurs, Automne, Océan; Adieu vous dy (F. Villon), 1928; Le souvenir de vous me tue (?Villon), 1928

Douze rondels de Charles d'Orléans (Je ne prise point telz baisiers; Mon seul amy; Jeunes amoureux nouveaulx; Le trouveray-je jamais; Gardez le trait de la fenestre; Chantez ce que vous pensés; Petit mercier, petit pannier; Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain; Quant n’ont assez fait dodo; Les fourriers d’Esté sont venus; Riens ne valent ses mirlifiques; En yver, du feu, du feu), 1928–9

J’allais dans la campagne (J. Moréas), 1931; L’heure mystique (P. Fort), 1932; Les deux enfants de Roi (E. Verhaeren), 1932; Coeur ardent (Verhaeren), 1932; Tu me donnas ton coeur (J. Lahor), 1933; over 20 unpubd songs

instrumental

Orch: La nuit de décembre, sym. poem, 1887; Stamboul, rythmes et chansons d'Orient, 1895; Sans pardon, sym. poem, 1929 [transcr. from Poème dramatique]

Sonatas, vn, pf: no.1, c, 1918–19; no.2, 1927; no.3, 1942; no.4, 1943; no.5, 1947

Other chbr and solo inst works: Fantaisie (Introduction, fugue, finale), pf, 1888; Portraits de maîtres [Fauré, d'Indy, Chausson, Franck], pf, 1891–2; Méditation, pf, str, hp, org, c1893; Suite brève, org/hmn, c1896; Procession, pf 4 hands, 1905; Impromptu et chorale, pf, 1912; Une flûte dans les vergers, fl, pf, 1920; Suite brève no.2, org, 1922; Prelude and fugue, pf/org, 1922; Pf Sonata, D, 1923; Poème dramatique, vc, pf, 1924 [orchd version as Sans pardon, 1929]; Sonatine, ob/fl/vn, pf, 1924; Esquisses, pf, 1925; Sonata, vc, pf, 1930; Sérénade, 10 str, c1933; Fantaisie appassionata, vc, pf, 1933; Un songe, pf, 1939; Préambule, nocturne, intermède, final, pf, 1940; Sonatine, ob, cl, bn, 1943; Sonata, va, pf, 1944; 3 pièces, fl, vn, va, vc, hp, 1945; Concert à 3, vn, vc, pf, c1945; Prélude, interludes et postlude, 4 sax, c1946

Principal publishers: Rouart–Lerolle, Heugel, also Durand, Hamelle, Art Catholique, Bornemann, Eschig, Schola Cantorum

WRITINGS

‘Revue du mois: musique’, Mercure de France (Feb 1898–July 1901)

‘Ernest Chausson’, Mercure de France, xxxi (1899), 687–94

with H. Gauthier-Villars: Fervaal: étude thématique et analytique (Paris, 1909)

‘César Franck’, EMDC, II/i (1925), 176–82

‘Henri Fouques-Duparc’, La musique française, ii (1933), 83–96

‘Les fioretti du père Franck’, Mercure de France, cclxii (1935), 244–63; cclxv (1936), 80–91; cclxxvii (1937), 302–15; cclxxxi (1938), 81–98

‘L’oeuvre dramatique de César Franck’, Le théâtre lyrique en France depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, c1938), ii, 170–84

‘Quelques souvenirs’, ReM, nos. 198–202 (1946), 226–30

‘Ernest Chausson’, Euterpe, vi (1949), 122–5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (M.S. Daitz) [incl. further bibliography]

T. Klingsor: ‘Les musiciens et les poètes contemporains’, Mercure de France, xxxvi (1900), 430–44

M. Ravel: ‘Le mois: Concert Lamoureux’, BISM, vii (1912), 62–3

L. Rohozinski, ed.: Cinquante ans de musique française de 1874 à 1925 (Paris, 1925)

M.O. Maus: Trente années de lutte pour l’art 1884–1914 (Brussels, 1926)

P. Landormy: La musique française après Debussy (Paris, 1943)

G. Samazeuilh: Musiciens de mon temps (Paris, 1947)

A. Vander Linden: ‘Lettres de Pierre de Bréville à Octave Maus’, RBM, xxiv (1970), 96–117

M.S. Daitz: The Songs of Pierre de Bréville (1861–1949) (diss., New York U., 1974)

M.S. Daitz: ‘Grieg and Bréville: “Nous parlons alors de la jeune école française”’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 233–45

M.S. Daitz: ‘Pierre de Bréville’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 24–37

MIMI S. DAITZ

Brewaeys, Luc

(b Mortsel, 25 Aug 1959). Belgian composer. He studied composition with André Laporte and conducting with Ronald Zollman at the Flemish-speaking section of the Brussels Conservatory, and continued his studies with Donatoni in Siena and Ferneyhough in Darmstadt. Between 1980 and 1984 he maintained regular contact with Xenakis. After completing his studies he became Tonmeister with BRTN, the Belgian Flemish-speaking radio and television station, while continuing to be active as a pianist and conductor. Brewaeys began writing for orchestra while still very young, and won many international prizes. He was awarded third prize in the European Young Composers’ Competition in 1986 for ‘ … e poi c'era … ’ , while ‘Komm, hebe dich’ won him first prize in the same competition in 1989. The former work also won first prize in the Young Composers category of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 1986. His Third Symphony was awarded first prize in the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Sinfonica di Trieste in 1991. A prolific composer, he has also explored chamber music, including the string quartet. Steeped in spectral music (in particular the music of Murail and Grisey), Brewaeys adds to it an innate sense of musical drama and expressivity. His research into sonority has led him to integrate non-musical items and sound from electronic sources into the orchestra.

WORKS

(selective list)

Chbr op: Antigone, 1991

Vocal-orch: Réquialm, S, orch, 1989; Non lasciate ogni speranza, S, sax, orch, 1990

Orch: Sym no.1 ‘ … e poi c'era … ’, 1985; Sym. no.2 ‘Komm, hebe dich’, 1987; Sym. no.3 ‘Hommage’, 1991; Kientzyphonie, sax, sym. band, 1992; Sym. no.5 ‘Laphroaig’, 1993

Other inst: Trajet, pf, 11 insts, elec, 1982; Aouellaouellaouelle!, vn, pf, 1989; Str Qt, 1989; Knockando, perc, pf, 1991; Jocaste’s (Grand-) Daughter, 2 perc, tape, 1992; Talisker, cl chorus, 8 perc, 1993; Le chant de la sirène, bn, 1994; Str Qt no.2 ‘Bowmore’, 1995; Oban, ens, 1995

Principal publishers: CeBeDeM

Recordings: Oeuvres Symphoniques, Cyprès-Crédit, Communal

ERIC DE VISSCHER

Brewer, Sir (Alfred) Herbert

(b Gloucester, 21 June 1865; d Gloucester, 1 March 1928). English organist, conductor and composer. He was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral (1877–80), and studied with C.H. Lloyd, organist of the cathedral. After holding organ appointments in succession at two Gloucester churches he succeeded Parratt as organist of St Giles’s, Oxford, in September 1882. The following April he gained the first open organ scholarship at the RCM in London, where he studied with Parratt. In December 1883 he obtained the organ scholarship of Exeter College, Oxford, which he held concurrently with the post at St Giles’s. He took the MusBac at Dublin in 1897, and in 1905 the Lambeth MusDoc was conferred on him.

Brewer was elected organist of Bristol Cathedral in December 1885 but held this post for only a few weeks. He returned to Oxford until, in September 1886, he became organist of St Michael’s, Coventry. In September 1892 he was appointed organist and music master at Tonbridge School; this post he held until December 1896, when he succeeded C. Lee Williams as organist and choirmaster of Gloucester Cathedral.

Brewer’s most important public work was his direction of eight of the Three Choirs Festivals at Gloucester from 1898 onwards, where he introduced many new works and showed great enterprise in the drawing up of programmes. He founded the Gloucester Orchestral Society in 1905 and gave much-appreciated organ recitals for schoolchildren.

Brewer was an assiduous composer; his long list of works ranges from festival cantatas to secular songs. Among the former Emmaus (Gloucester, 1901) and The Holy Innocents (Gloucester, 1904) represent his serious aspirations, but such lighter works as Three Elizabethan Pastorals for voice and orchestra (Hereford, 1906), Summer Sports, a suite for chorus and orchestra (Gloucester, 1910), and the song cycle Jillian of Berry (Hereford, 1921) represent him more favourably. As a composer, indeed, he seemed happier in the concerts of the Shire Hall than in the cathedral. He was made an FRCO (1897) and an honorary RAM (1906), and was knighted in 1926.

WRITINGS

Church Music: a Lecture (London, 1918)

Memories of Choirs and Cloisters (London, 1931)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (H.N. Howells)

‘Gloucester Cathedral’ MT, xlii (1901), 668–72 [portrait]

Obituaries: The Times (2 March 1928); Gloucester Journal (3 March 1928); The Times (7 March 1928); MT, lxix (1928), 315–16

H.W. Shaw: The Three Choirs Festival: the Official History of the Meetings of the Three Choirs of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, c1713–1953 (Worcester and London 1954)

B. Still, ed.: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Three Choirs Festival (Gloucester, 1977)

L. Foreman: From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900–1945 (London, 1987)

A. Boden: Three Choirs: a History of the Festival (London, 1992)

J. Dibble: C. Hubert H. Parry: his Life and Music (Oxford, 1992)

F.G. EDWARDS/H.C. COLLES/DUNCAN J. BARKER

Brewer, Thomas

(b London, 1611; d ?c1660). English viol player and composer. He was the son of Thomas Brewer, a poulterer, and educated at Christ’s Hospital. Admitted to the school at the age of three, he remained there until 1626, when he was apprenticed to one Thomas Warner. From 1638 he was ‘song-schoolmaster’ at Christ’s Hospital, but was dismissed in 1641 for marrying (contrary to the terms of his employment) and for various misdemeanours. It was probably later that he became a musician in the household of Sir Nicholas Lestrange, who quoted the following anecdote in his Merry passages and Jests (GB-Lbl Harl.6395):

Thom: Brewer, my Mus: servant, through his Pronenesse to good-Fellowshippe, having attaind to a very Rich and Rubicund Nose; being reproved by a Friend for his too frequent use of strong Drinkes and Sacke; as very Pernicious to that Distemper and Inflammation in his Nose – Nay, faith, says he, if it will not endure sacke, it’s no Nose for me.

There is no evidence that Brewer survived beyond the Restoration.

He composed two psalms of thanksgiving ‘to be sung by the Children of Christ’s Hospital on Monday [and Tuesday] in the Easter Holy-dayes’, the melodies of which were published singly in 1641. His best-known song is probably the glee Turn, Amaryllis, to thy swain, but another song, O that mine eyes (printed, along with Mistake me not, I am as cold as hot, in MB, xxxiii, 1971), is extremely interesting because of the declamatory style employed and the ornamental treatment it receives in several sources. Playford chose it as an example of an English song to which his ‘Directions for Singing after the Italian Manner’, translated from Caccini’s preface to Le nuove musiche (1601/2) and included in his Introduction to the Skill of Musick (1664), could be applied.

WORKS

28 airs a 4, GB-Lbl (inc.), Ob

6 fantasias a 4, IRL-Dm, GB-Lbl (inc.), Ob

7 catches, 1652¹⁰, 1663⁶, 1667⁶, 1673⁴

6 songs, 1653⁷, 1659⁵, Gu, Lbl, US-NYp

2 psalms: Great God direct our tongues, Our hearts we raise (pubd singly, London, 1641) [melody only]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SpinkES

S. Jeans: ‘The Easter Psalms of Christ’s Hospital’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 45–60

IAN SPINK

Brewster [Brusser, Bruster, Brusters]

(fl mid-16th century). English composer. Brewster wrote two In Nomines (ed. in MB, xliv–xlv, 1979–88). Both seem to have been conceived in a somewhat spare four-part texture, but all sources for the first work include a filler fifth part. In the only source of the second, staves for the fifth part are blank. A pavan for lute also survives (ed. in D. Lumsden, An Anthology of English Lute Music (16th Century), London, 1954).

ANDREW ASHBEE

Brewster, W(illiam) Herbert

(b Somerville, TN, 2 July 1897/1899; d Memphis, 14 Oct 1987). American composer of gospel songs. He attended Roger Williams College in Nashville (BA 1922), then moved to Memphis to become dean of a proposed black seminary which, however, did not materialize, and in 1928 he accepted the pastorate of the East Trigg Baptist Church in Memphis. He also served on the Education Board of the National Baptist Convention and as dean of Shelby County General Baptist Association, and founded and directed the Brewster Theological Clinic at Memphis. Brewster is best known as a composer who made use of sophisticated biblical texts. His first song, I'm leaning and depending on the Lord, was written in 1939; subsequently he contributed over 200 works to the repertory. Of these, Move on up a little higher (1946) and Surely, God is able (1949), were the first black gospel recordings to sell over a million copies. Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Queen C. Anderson and his own group, the Brewster Ensemble, popularized most of his songs. Brewster also composed more than 15 biblical music dramas, one of which, Sowing in Tears, Reaping in Joy, was presented at the Smithsonian Institution (1982).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Retrospective of Gospel Music Composer Reverend William Herbert Brewster (Washington DC, 1982)

H.C. Boyer: ‘William Herbert Brewster: The Eloquent Poet’, We'll Understand it Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers, ed. B.J. Reagon (Washington DC, 1992), 211–31 [incl. list of works]

A. Heilbut: ‘“If I Fail, You Tell the World I Tried”: William Herbert Brewster on Record’, ibid., 233–44

B.J. Reagon: ‘William Herbert Brewster: Pioneer of the Sacred Pageant’, ibid., 185–209

W.H. Wiggins: ‘William Herbert Brewster: Rememberings’, ibid., 245–51

H.C. Boyer: How Sweet the Sound: the Golden Age of Gospel (Washington DC, 1995)

HORACE CLARENCE BOYER

Brewster Jones, Hooper

(b Orroroo, S. Australia, 29 June 1887; d Adelaide, 8 July 1949). Australian pianist and composer. A member of a notable pioneer musical family, he was taught the organ by his father and gave his first public recital at the Adelaide Town Hall at the age of seven. In 1899 he was accepted as a student by Bryceson Treharne at the Adelaide Conservatorium of Music, where he won an Elder overseas scholarship to the RCM. There he studied the piano with Franklin Taylor and composition (1905–8) with Bridge, Clutsam and Stanford. He gave piano recitals in Paris, Germany and London, specializing in the 20th-century French repertory. On his return to Adelaide, he became a private teacher, wrote music criticism (1935–40), and formed a symphony orchestra in 1918 to introduce contemporary music into the standard Adelaide concert repertory. He continued to give solo recitals through the Australian Broadcasting Commission network on its inception in 1930, occasionally performing his own works such as the Australian Concerto no.2 for piano and orchestra with Sir Bernard Heinze (1945). He was also a music examiner and adjudicator throughout Australia, and polemicized with his colleagues Marshall-Hall, Grainger and Tate in support of a national musical identity.

Brewster Jones was a prolific composer with almost 600 works to his credit. Keyboard music accounts for over half of this total; prominent here are five piano concertos and 73 solo piano pieces entitled Australian Bird Call Impressions, most of which are based on transcriptions he made of bird calls from the bushland. Principal compositions in other genres include three symphonies (1921–6), the symphonic poem Australian Felix, six (mainly unfinished) operas and ballets (1915–25), 170 songs, 32 pieces for various instruments and piano, and 15 chamber works. In general, Brewster Jones's music reflects some of the more forward-looking aspects of European music before World War I. Sonata form is prevalent in the outer movements of his larger instrumental compositions, with thematic material distinctive in melodic shape and well contrasted. The music is always tonal, although on occasion he dispenses with key signatures (as in the opening movements of the string quartet of 1919). Despite the evident quality of Brewster Jones's best work and his importance in the development of music in South Australia, little is heard of his music today. His manuscripts and sketches are held in the Elder Music Library, University of Adelaide.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Brewster Jones: ‘Pioneers and Problems; South Australia's Musical History’, Australian Musical News, xxvii/3 (1936–7), 1–3, 28–33

H. Brewster Jones: ‘Sponsored Music Publication’, Meanjin, viii/3 (1949), 155–7

H. Davies: Untitled recollections of H. Brewster-Jones (MS, AUS-ADum)

A.D. McCredie: ‘Hooper Brewster Jones 1887–1949: a Post Centennial Tribute’, MMA, xvi (1989), 19–34

ELIZABETH WOOD/ADRIAN A. THOMAS

Breyttengraserus, Guilielmus.

See Breitengraser, Wilhelm.

Brian, Albertus.

See Bryne, Albertus.

Brian, [William] Havergal

(b Dresden, Staffs., 29 Jan 1876; d Shoreham, Sussex, 28 Nov 1972). English composer. Despite his working-class origins and his lack of formal academic training, he dedicated his long life to music with the utmost tenacity of a sardonic, idiosyncratic and original mind. In his early years his larger works were balanced by many songs and partsongs; after the age of 50 he concentrated on the genres of music drama and symphony.

MALCOLM MACDONALD

1. Life.

The son of pottery workers, he was a chorister and assistant organist at St James’s School, Longton, and showed early talent on the violin, cello and piano. His formal schooling, however, ceased at the age of 12; thereafter he tried a variety of trades (carpentry, office clerk, timber buyer) while essaying to become a professional musician. Christened William, he assumed the name Havergal in his teens, presumably in reference to the hymn composer W.H. Havergal. He studied theory with Theophilus Hemming and gained local celebrity as a church organist, holding positions at Holy Trinity, Meir and All Saints, Odd Rode, on the Cheshire border. He also played the piano and cello in a dance band. The 1896 Staffordshire Triennial Festival, which included performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the première of Elgar’s King Olaf, diverted Brian’s ambitions from organ playing to composition. Fortified by encouragement from Elgar and George Halford, he produced his first acknowledged works. He became an Elgar supporter and, drawing on his numerous contacts among the Potteries’ choirs and instrumentalists, helped to bring about critically successful English performances of The Dream Of Gerontius by the North Staffordshire District Choral Society in Hanley and Westminster Cathedral (1903).

In 1907 Henry Wood gave the first performances of Brian’s English Suite and For Valour overture during the Queen’s Hall Prom Season, a turning-point in the young composer’s career. Resident in Stoke-on-Trent, Brian was increasingly recognized as a promising figure among younger British composers. Patronage from the pottery magnate Herbert Minton Robinson relieved him of the need to teach or continue as an organist and he befriended and gained the support of Frederick Delius, Thomas Beecham, Henry Wood, Ernest Newman and Granville Bantock, who became a lifelong friend. Brian’s short choral compositions soon became staple test pieces at regional competitions and his early cantatas and orchestral works were published by Breitkopf & Härtel. Also active as a critic, he wrote for The Musical World (1905–8), Staffordshire papers and the Musical Times.

In 1913, after the break-up of his first marriage, Brian moved to London. Over the next 14 years he struggled to support his growing second family, taking a succession of clerking and writing jobs and producing a stream of small compositions, especially songs and partsongs, for quick sale to publishers. On the outbreak of war he joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a private, but, after sustaining injury, was consigned to civilian desk jobs from 1915. After the war he worked as a music copyist for various publishers; apart from a single term at the RCM, he did little teaching. In 1927, he became assistant editor of Musical Opinion, a post he held until 1940. Constant writing, reviewing and interviewing kept him in close contact with a wide range of music, and he expressed sometimes pioneering enthusiasm for Handel operas and the music of Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg and others. Although the burlesque opera The Tigers and the symphony The Gothic, the last of his major compositions published during his lifetime, appeared in the early 1930s, they remained unperformed for several decades. He continued to compose large-scale works, but was virtually forgotten as a composer.

During World War II Brian worked as a clerk for the Ministry of Supply, remaining in the Civil Service until his retirement in 1948. From that year, possibly partly in response to the publication of Reginald Nettel’s Ordeal by Music: the Strange Experience of Havergal Brian (1945), an extraordinary period of creativity ensued. He produced, among other works, four operas and 27 symphonies. Largely due to the efforts of composer and producer Robert Simpson, Brian’s works began to receive occasional broadcasts by the BBC, beginning with the première of Symphony no.8 in 1954. This revival of interest in his music was accelerated by the first professional performance of The Gothic at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966 in celebration of his 90th birthday. At the age of 91 he was awarded an honorary DMus from Manchester University and in 1972 he was recognized as Composer of the Year by the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. A Havergal Brian Society was founded shortly after his death.

Brian, Havergal

2. Works.

Brian’s mature music is simultaneously monumental and subversive, written in a style influenced both by late-Romanticism and an Elgarian love of pageantry. His output, like Elgar’s, relates directly to the Austro-German choral and symphonic tradition, but often responds to traditional large-scale genres in unconventional ways. The early orchestral and choral compositions fall into two categories: one deeply serious and grandiose (to which the choral works and In Memoriam belong) and the other inhabiting a world of human comedy and satire, ranging from the naturalistic depiction of carnival events and characters in English Suite no.1 to the conceptual comedy of Doctor Merryheart, an overture that parodies Strauss’ symphonic poems. These two streams fuse in The Tigers, which opens with a quasi-naturalistic depiction of a bank holiday carnival at the beginning of World War I and proceeds to chronicle the misadventures of an enlisted regiment training on the home front. Elements of parody, farce and music-hall entertainment are juxtaposed with far more serious orchestral inventions (extracted as the Symphonic Dances).

The most profound music in The Tigers, a dream sequence danced by angels and gargoyles atop a cathedral tower, contains the germ of The Gothic, a symphony known for its length and enormous forces. Inspired by Goethe’s Faust and Gothic cathedral architecture, this two-part work follows three instrumental movements with a Latin setting of the Te Deum. This second section, itself an hour in duration, is increasingly free in form and spans a stylistic gamut from neo-Renaissance polyphony to 1920s Expressionism. Although a conscious extension of the choral symphony tradition, The Gothic becomes a wild critique of the form and ends in a spirit of personal anguish.

The large-scale symphonies of the 1930s and the spacious Violin Concerto continue this process of creative critique with varying success. Symphony no.4 ‘Das Siegeslied’, contemporary with the rise of Nazism in Germany, is a violent setting of a Lutheran psalm text. Prometheus Unbound, a setting of the first two acts of Shelley’s poetic drama, is on an even larger scale than The Gothic and requires similarly enormous forces. The loss of the full score has rendered the work unperformable; the extant vocal score, however, shows a harshly dramatic first act answered by a second act of striking lyricism.

From quite early in his career, Brian counterbalanced the harmonic opulence of his Romantic and chromatic vocabulary with a muscular polyphony inspired by Bach and Handel. By 1948 his discourse had become relentlessly contrapuntal, although still within an expanded tonal context. Many symphonies mimic traditional three- or four-movement designs, but there is often a sense that musical ideas are not contained within these boundaries and single-movement forms are common. Though sonata, rondo and ternary forms appear, his preference was for continuous development; several subjects are often pursued simultaneously by means of intercutting episodes with little or no repetition of material.

Contrast on all levels is the life-force of Brian’s music. Sometimes exteriorized in instrumental drama (such as the off-stage trumpet in Symphony no.10), more commonly it exists in the music itself, activity giving way without warning to stasis, heavy tuttis suddenly reduced to small instrumental ensembles, martial percussion music interspersed with lyric string solos. Brian’s polyphonic lines, fragmented by his personal species of Klangfarbenmelodie, engage in the continuous development of motivic cells, while unexpected interruptions in the musical flow create dramatic juxtapositions of ideas. Symphony no.8, for example, proceeds through a series of motivic, textural, tonal and rhythmic oppositions. Generally the later symphonies show an increasing concentration. Paradoxically, while they appear to remain within a broadly traditional tonal framework, their forms and thought have an obliquity and density more readily associated with serial or post-serial music. Whatever their apparent discontinuities, they are above all inventive to a remarkable degree. This quality of striking orchestral invention is shared by the late operas, whose appeal is complicated by the relentlessly unlyrical quality of their word-setting – perhaps another Brianesque critique of a chosen genre.

Brian, Havergal

WORKS

operas

The Maiden and the Flower-Garden (children’s operetta, G. Cumberland), vv, pf, 1914, lost

The Tigers (burlesque op, prol., 3, Brian), 1917–19, orchd 1928–9, prol. reorchd 1969, unfinished; BBC, 3–8 Jan 1983

Deirdre of the Sorrows (after J.M. Synge), ?1947, projected, ?sketched

Turandot, Prinzessin von China (tragikomisches Märchen, 3, C. Gozzi, trans. F. von Schiller), 1949–51; unperf.

The Cenci (8 scenes, after P.B. Shelley), 1951–2; concert perf., London, Queen Elizabeth, 12 Dec 1997

Faust (prol., 4, after J.W. von Goethe), 1955–6; BBC, 9 March 1979 [prol. only]

Agamemnon (1, Aeschylus, trans. J.S. Blackie, addns by Brian), 1957; London, St John’s, Smith Square, 28 Jan 1971

Oedipus Coloneus (Sophocles, trans. G. Young), 1967, sketches only, lost

orchestral

Syms. (nos.1–6 reflect Brian’s 1967 renumbering): A Fantastic Sym., E, 1907–8, rev. 1908–9 as Humorous Legend on Three Blind Mice [movt 1 pubd as Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme, movt 3 pubd as Festal Dance]; no.2, e, 1930–31; no.3, c, 1931–2; no.6 ‘Sinfonia tragica’, 1947–8; no.7, C, 1948; no.8, b, 1949; no.9, a, 1951; no.10, c, 1953–4; no.11, 1954; no.12, 1957; no.13, C, 1959; no.14, f, 1960; no.15, A, 1960; no.16, 1960; no.17, 1960–61; no.18, 1961; no.19, e, 1961; no.20, c, 1962; no.21, E, 1963; no.22 ‘Symphonia brevis’, 1964–5; no.23, 1965; no.24, D, 1965; no.25, a, 1965–6; no.26, 1966; no.27, C, 1966; no.28, c, 1967; no.29, E, 1967; no.30, b, 1967; no.31, 1968; no.32, A, 1968; see also vocal orch [no.1 ‘The Gothic’, no.4 ‘Das Siegeslied’, no.5 ‘Wine of Summer’]

Concs.: Vn Conc. no.1, 1933–4, lost [recomposed as Vn Conc., C, 1934–5]; Conc. for Orch, 1964; Vc Conc., 1964

Other orch: Tragic Prelude, c1900–02, lost; English Suite no.1, op.12, ?1902–4; Pantalon and Columbine, romance, op.2, small orch, ?1902–3, lost [rev. as movts 2 and 3 of English Suite no.1]; Burlesque Variations and Ov. on an Original Theme, op.2, 1903; Legende, op.4, ?1903–4, lost; For Valour, ov., op.7, 1904, rev. 1906; Hero and Leander, sym. poem, op.8, 1904–6, lost; In memoriam, tone poem, 1910; Dr Merryheart, comedy ov., 1911–12; 3 Dances, small orch, 1914, lost [from The Maiden and the Flower-Garden]; Red May, march, 1914, lost; English Suite no.2 ‘Night Portraits’, 1915, lost; Legend, 1915, lost; [Title unknown], 1915, lost

3 Comedy Dances, 1916, lost [arr. of 3 Illuminations, pf]; Razamoff, sym. drama, 1916, unfinished, lost; English Suite no.3, 1919–21; Tales of Olden Times, 3 preludes, small orch, 1919, destroyed; Ov., early 1920s, unfinished, lost [inspired by B. Keaton]; Fanfare from ‘The Grotesques’, brass, perc, 1921; 5 Sym. Dances, 1921–2 [from The Tigers]; Sym. Variations on ‘Has Anybody here seen Kelly?’, 1921–2 [from The Tigers]; English Suite no.4 ‘Kindergarten’, 1924; The Battle Song, sym. poem, brass band, 1930–31; The Tinker’s Wedding, comedy ov., 1948; Prelude tragico, 1952 [ov. to The Cenci]; English Suite no.5 ‘Rustic Scenes’, 1953; Elegy, sym. poem, 1954; The Jolly Miller, comedy ov., 1962; 3 Pieces, 1962 [from Turandot]; Sym. Movt, 1964, unfinished, destroyed; Festival, Fanfare, brass, perc, 1967

vocal orchestral

Requiem, Bar, chorus, orch, c1899, lost

Psalm xxiii, op.9, T, chorus, orch, c1904; full score reconstructed 1944–5

By the Waters of Babylon, op.11, Bar, chorus, orch, 1905, rev. 1908–9; vocal score pubd, full score lost

Carmilhan (H.W. Longfellow), ballad, op.14, solo vv, chorus. orch, ?1906, lost

Let God Arise (Psalm lxviii), op.15, solo vv, chorus, orch, ?1906; ?unfinished, lost

The Vision of Cleopatra (G. Cumberland), tragic poem, op.15, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1907–8; vocal score pubd, full score lost

The Soldier’s Dream (T. Campbell), vv, orch, 1908–9, lost

[Title unknown] (W. Scott), chorus, orch, 1908–9, lost

Go, Happy Rose (R. Herrick), SSAA, orch/pf, 1911, lost

Requiem for the Rose (Herrick), SSAA, orch/pf, 1911

The Hag (Herrick), SSAA, orch/pf, 1911

Pilgrimage to Kevlaar (H. Heine, trans. Todhunter), ballad, chorus, orch, ?1912–13; lost

2 Scenas (C.R. Barber), Bar, orch/pf, 1918, lost

Sym. no.1 ‘The Gothic’ (Te Deum), d, S, A, T, B, quadruple chorus, children’s chorus, brass bands, orch, 1919–27

Sym. no.4 ‘Das Siegeslied’ (Ps lxvii, Ger. trans.), S, SSAATTBB, orch, 1932–3

Sym. no.5 ‘Wine of Summer’ (A. Douglas), Bar, orch, 1937

Prometheus Unbound (P.B. Shelley), lyric drama, solo vv, double chorus, semichorus, orch, 1937–44; full score lost

choral

With pf: A Child’s Prayer (M. Betham-Edwards), SA, pf, 1914; And will he not come again? (W. Shakespeare), SSAA, pf, 1914; A Song of Willow (Shakespeare), SSA, pf, 1914; The Dream (W. Blake), SSA, pf, 1914; The Fly (Blake), unison vv, pf, 1914; Goodbye to Summer (W. Allingham), SA, pf, 1914; Grace for a Child (R. Herrick), SA, pf, 1914; If I had but two little wings (S.T. Coleridge), SA, pf, 1914; Infant Joy (Blake), SSA, pf, 1914; The Lamb (Blake), SSS/SSA, pf, 1914; Laughing Song (Blake), SSA, pf, 1914; The little boy lost, the little boy found (Blake), SA, pf, 1914

Little White Lily (G. Macdonald), SSA, pf, 1914; The Moon (G. Cumberland), SA, pf, 1914; The Mountain and the Squirrel (R.W. Emerson), SA, pf, 1914; The River (Cumberland), SA, pf, 1914; Robin Redbreast, unison vv, pf, 1914, lost; Spring – Sound the Flute (Blake), SSA, pf, 1914; Summer has Come (Cumberland), SA, pf, 1914; Violets (Herrick), SSA, pf, 1914; What does little birdie say? (A. Tennyson), unison vv, pf, 1914; The Fairy Palace (M. Drayton), SSA, pf, 1915; Ah! County Guy! (W. Scott), serenade, 2 equal vv, pf, 1919, lost; A Wish, 2vv, pf, 1919–21, lost

Fair pledges of a fruitful tree (Herrick), SA, pf, 1919; It was a lover and his lass (Shakespeare), 3/4vv, pf, 1919; Mine be a cot beside the hill (S. Rogers), SA, pf, 1919, lost; Pack, clouds away (J. Heywood), SSA, pf, 1919; Spring, the sweet spring (T. Nashe), SA, pf, 1919; To Daffodils (Herrick), SA, pf, 1919; Under the greenwood tree (Shakespeare), SSA, pf, 1919; Full Fathom Five (Shakespeare), SSAA, pf, 1921; Come away, come away, Death (Shakespeare), TBarB, pf, 1925

Unacc.: Anthem, ?1896, lost; Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (W. Shakespeare), SATB, 1903; Stars of the Summer Night (H.W. Longfellow), op.1, SSAATTBB, ?1905; Come o’er the Sea (T. Moore), SATB, 1906; Lullaby of an Infant Chief (G. Byron), op.10, SATB, 1906; Rondel: In a Fairy Boat (B. Weller), SSAA, 1906; Soul Star (H. Bantock), SATB, 1906; Tell me, thou Soul of her I love (J. Thompson), op.13d/1, SATB, 1906; Twilight, op.13d/2, SATB, ?1906, lost; Fairies' Song (G. Cumberland), SSAA, 1908; Daybreak (Longfellow), SATB, 1910; A Gipsy Song (B. Jonson), SSAA, 1914, lost

He was a rat, SATB, 1914; Hie upon Hielands (trad.), male vv, 1914, lost; Legend of Altenahr, male vv, 1914, lost; Meg Merrilies (J. Keats), male vv, 1914, lost; O Mistress Mine (Shakespeare), ?1915, lost; The Owl, female vv, 1914, lost; Pastoral ‘The Shepherd’ (W. Blake), SSA, 1914; The Sands of Dee (trad.), SATB, 1914, lost; Ye spotted snakes with double tongue (Shakespeare), SSAA, 1914; The Phantom Wooer (T.L. Beddoes), SATB, 1918; Absence, SSAA, 1919; Fear no more the heat of the sun (Shakespeare), SATB, 1919; Blow, blow, thou winter wind (Shakespeare), SATB, 1925

Introit–Amen, canon, SATB, 1925; O happiness, celestial fair (H. More), canon, SSAA, ?1925; Shall I then be spared? (More), canon, SATB, 1925; Sweet Solitude, thou placid queen (More), canon, SSAA, 1925; Tell me where is fancy bred (Shakespeare), SSAA, 1925; Vital spark of heavenly flame (A. Pope), canon, SSAA, 1925; other missing titles, presumed to be partsongs, incl. Clown’s Song (Shakespeare); The Curate and the Mulberry Tree; The Knight’s Leap; Marching Along; The Sweetest Dream; Sympathy; Love’s Remorse; Will You Buy Any Rope?

songs

Canadian Boat Song (anon.), c1892, lost; I shot an Arrow (H.W. Longfellow), c1899, lost; [Title unknown] (G. Hadath), c1899; Today and Tomorrow (Hadath), c1899, lost; Wanderer’s Night Song (J.W. von Goethe, trans. H. Morley), c1899, lost; 3 Songs (S. Daniel, J. Donne, R. Heber), op.6, A/Bar, pf, 1904–5; A Faery Song, op.13c (W.B. Yeats), 1906; Soliloquy upon a Dead Child (G. Cumberland), op.13a, 1906 [rev. as Little Sleeper (Hāfiz, trans. R. Le Gallienne), 1972]; 4 Songs (Cumberland), 1906, 1 lost; A Night Piece (R. Herrick), 1910; The Mad Maid’s Song (Herrick), 1910; Why dost thou wound, and break my heart? (Herrick), 1910; The Blossom (W. Blake), 1914

The Chimney Sweeper (Blake), 1914; The Echoing Green (Blake), 1914; The Lost Doll (C. Kingsley), 1914; Piping down the valleys wild (Blake), 1914; 2 Scenas (C.R. Barber), 1918, lost; 5 Songs (T. Keble), 1918–19; The Soul of Steel (C.M. Masterman), 1918; The Defiled Sanctuary (Blake), 1918–19; The Birds (Blake), 1919; Call for the Robin Redbreast (Webster), 1919, lost; Care-Charmer Sleep (S. Daniel), 1919; Hymn to Diana (B. Jonson), 1919, lost; The Land of Dreams (Blake), 1919; Music when soft voices die (P.B. Shelley), 1919, lost; On a Poet's Lips I Slept (Shelley), 1919, lost; The Poet’s Dream, 1919, lost; Sonnet ‘My Lute’ (W. Drummond), 1919, lost

When icicles hang by the wall (Shakespeare), 1919; A proposal, c1922–3, lost; Far from thee (F. Taylor) c1922–3, lost; Go happy rose (Herrick), c1922–3, lost; I know, and you! (F. Bowles), c1922–3, lost; Since love is dead (Bowles), c1922–3; Stars of Destiny, c1922–3, lost; The Twilight House (Bowles), c1922–3, lost; Where shadows flee, c1922–3, lost; Take, oh take those lips away (Shakespeare), 1925; 3 Songs (Hadath), ?1926, lost

other works

Chbr and solo inst: Movts, str qt, ?1903–4, lost; [Untitled], vc, pf, perf. 1907, lost; 3 Illuminations, opt. spkr, pf, 1916; 4 Miniatures, pf, 1918–20; Legend, vn, pf, ?1919; Suite, pf, 1919–21, lost [arr. of English Suite no.3]; Prelude and Fugue, d-D, pf, 1924; Prelude and Fugue, c, pf, 1924; Double Fugue, E, pf, 1924; Prelude ‘John Dowland’s Fancy’, pf, 1934; Legend, vc/b cl, pf, ?1944, lost; Adagio e dolente, vc, pf, ?1947, frag.; Flourish, 4 tpt, 1952 [from The Cenci]

Many arrs./transcrs., incl. works by Arne, J.C. Bach, J.S. Bach, Berlioz, Elgar, Glinka, Gluck, Handel, Spontini, Vaughan Williams, Wagner

Principal publishers: Augener, Breitkopf & Härtel, Chester, Cranz, Curwen, Enoch Havergal Brian Society, Novello United

Brian, Havergal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 [incl. further bibliography]

‘Havergal Brian, Composer’, Musical Standard (21 Sept 1907)

R. Nettel: Ordeal by Music: the Strange Experience of Havergal Brian (London, 1945)

R.L.E. Foreman, ed.: Havergal Brian: a Collection of Essays (London, 1969)

M. MacDonald: Havergal Brian: Perspective on the Music (London, 1972)

M. MacDonald: The Symphonies of Havergal Brian, i (London, 1974) [covers syms. 1–12]

K. Eastaugh: Havergal Brian: the Making of a Composer (London, 1976)

L. Foreman: Havergal Brian and the Performance of his Orchestral Music: a History and a Sourcebook (London, 1976)

R. Nettel: Havergal Brian and his Music (London, 1976)

M. MacDonald: The Symphonies of Havergal Brian, ii (London, 1978, rev. 1991) [covers syms. 13–29]

H. Truscott and P. Rapoport: Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony (Potter’s Bar, 1978) [incl. repr. of autobiographical article]

M. MacDonald: The Symphonies of Havergal Brian, iii (London, 1983) [covers syms. 30–32, also incl. survey and conclusion]

M. MacDonald, ed.: Havergal Brian on Music (London, 1986)

L. Foreman: From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900–1945 (London, 1987)

R. Matthew-Walker: Havergal Brian: Reminiscences and Observations (St Austell, 1995)

J. Schaarwaechter, ed.: HB: Aspects of Havergal Brian (Aldershot, 1997)

Briant, Denis

(fl 1535). French composer. His sole surviving piece is the four-voice motet Dilexi quoniam exaudiet Dominus (1535¹; arr. for lute, 1558²⁰, anon.; ed. in A. Smijers and A.T. Merritt: Treize livres de motets parus chez Pierre Attaingnant en 1534 et 1535, ix, Monaco, 1962). The motet is rather undistinguished, but Attaingnant thought it worthy to open his collection. Eitner was almost certainly incorrect in assigning to Briant the works of Denis Brumen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

J. Dean: ‘Johannes Brunet and Nato canunt omnia’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2656–72

JEFFREY DEAN

Briard, Etienne

(b Bar-le-Duc; fl Avignon, 1530–35). French type designer. He designed the first music type with round note heads, used in publications by Jean de Channey of works by Carpentras. Briard’s elegant notes are beautifully proportioned and teardrop-shaped, and he did not use ligatures (see Printing and publishing of music, fig.7).

Briccialdi, Giulio

(b Terni, 2 March 1818; d Florence, 17 Dec 1881). Italian flautist and composer. Although his father, the flautist and composer Giovanbattista Briccialdi, gave him some flute lessons he was essentially self-taught. After his father’s death in 1830 his family wanted him to enter the church, but Briccialdi fled to Rome, where he became a flautist in a theatre orchestra. He also took composition lessons with a singer from the Vatican chapel named Ravagli. On 1 March 1833 he was made a member of the Accademia di S Cecilia. Moving to Naples in 1836, he was chosen as flute teacher in 1837 by the king’s brother, the Count of Syracuse. He gave concerts throughout Europe and in America. In the 1840s he lived in London, where he advised the firm of Rudall & Rose in constructing for him a flute with a B key; this key, invented by Boehm, became known as the ‘Briccialdi B’ after its most active proponent. The invention was the target of some criticism (cf the controversy in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, xxix (1874), 273–4, 290–92, 306–9, 315 and 332–3). An important figure in the development of the flute, Briccialdi had technical improvements incorporated in instruments made for him by Emilio Piana in Florence, where he was flute professor at the Istituto Musicale from 1870 and founded a workshop for the construction of flutes to his own patent. Briccialdi composed one opera, the unsuccessful Leonora de’ Medici (Milan, Carcano, 11 August 1855, text by F. Giudi), one symphony and a large amount of flute music, including several concertos and many operatic fantasies. Several of his pedagogical works are still in print. Many autograph manuscripts and first editions are in the Istituto Musicale G. Briccialdi in Terni.

WRITINGS

‘Il flauto e i suoi moderni perfezionamenti’, Atti dell’Accademia del R[egio] Istituto Musicale di Firenze, xii (1874), 79–91

‘Ancora del flauto Briccialdi’, Atti dell’Accademia del R[egio] Istituto Musicale di Firenze xiii (1875), 80-94

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI; FétisB; LangwillI7

A. Montignani: ‘La grande esposizione di Londra’, GMM, ix (1851), 100–01

G. Vitali: ‘Il vecchio flauto e i suoi riformatori’, GMM, ix (1851), 197–8

E. Cianchi: ‘Cenni necrologici’, Atti dell’Accademia del R[egio] Istituto Musicale di Firenze, xx (1882), 19–23

H.M. Fitzgibbon: The Story of the Flute (London, 1914, 2/1929), 69, 203

F. Sconzo: Il flauto e i flautisti (Milan, 1930), 109–10

R. Giraldi: ‘Giulio Briccialdi musicista umbro’, Il musicista, ix (1942), 193–4

A. Pozzi: Ternani del passato (Terni, 1942)

N. Gallini and F. Gallini: Catalogo del ‘Museo degli strumenti musicali’ nel Castello Sforzesco di Milano (Milan, 1963)

V. Gai: Gli strumenti musicali della corte medicea a il Museo del Conservatorio ‘Luigi Cherubini’ di Firenze (Florence, 1969), 196–200, 258

F. Cagianelli and D. Della Croce: Giulio Briccialdi e il suo tempo (Terni, 1980) [incl. work-list]

FABIO BISOGNI/MARCO BEGHELLI

Brice, Fanny [Fannie; Borach, Fannie]

(b New York, 29 Oct 1891; Hollywood, CA, 29 May 1951). American actress and singer. She began singing in her parents’ saloon, then worked on the burlesque circuit playing comic roles, where she came to the attention of Ziegfeld. He gave her a part in his Follies of 1910, in which her performance of Berlin’s ‘Good-bye Becky Cohen’ and Joe Jordan’s ‘Lovie Joe’ stopped the show. She appeared in eight more editions of the Follies as well as numerous other Broadway musicals. She was known particularly for her performance of comic songs with a Yiddish accent, for example ‘I’m an Indian’ from the Follies of 1920, and ‘Old Wicked Willage of Wenice’ in Fioretta (1929; libretto by Earl Carroll, music by George Bagby and G. Romilli). She was also a superb torch-singer, and became associated with such ballads as James F. Hanley’s Rose of Washington Square and Maurice Yvain’s My Man. Brice was less successful in film roles, but won her widest recognition playing the brattish Baby Snooks on radio; she first presented the character on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, performed it on the radio in the CBS programme ‘Ziegfeld Follies of the Air’ in 1936 and continued to play it on various programmes until her death. She was married to the producer and songwriter Billy Rose. Funny Girl, a highly successful musical based on her life, was first staged in 1964, with music by Styne. It was filmed in 1968, with its own film sequel, Funny Lady, appearing in 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Katkov: The Fabulous Fanny: the Story of Fanny Brice (New York, 1953)

S. Green: The Great Clowns of Broadway (New York, 1984)

H.G. Goldman: Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl (Oxford, 1992)

GERALD BORDMAN

Briçeño [Brizeño], Luis de

(fl early 17th century). Spanish composer and guitarist. Regional word forms in his Metodo mui facilissimo suggest that he was of Galician origin. He was in Paris by 1614, when he contributed an introductory sonnet to Moulère's Vida y muerte de los cortesanos in praise of rustic life. His two sons, by his wife Anne Gaultier, were baptized in February 1627 at St Sulpice there. His Metodo mui facilissimo para aprender a tañer la guitarra a lo español (Paris, 1626/R1972) is dedicated to Madame de Chales, who was probably Denise Naturel, granddaughter of Louis XIII’s counsellor, Jean Godon. The wording of the title suggests that it was intended to introduce into France the Spanish manner of playing the five-course guitar in the rasgueado style of strummed chords. It includes popular Spanish dances (españoleta, villano, chacona, zarabanda, hachas), some with Spanish verses, indicating that they were intended to be sung. There are also several romances. Vocal parts are not supplied for the texted works. The earliest known source of music using Castillian rasgueado notation, the chords are represented by the numbers 1 to 9, the sign + and the letter P. Briçeño added five more chords; three are transpositions of standard chords and one is an added 6th chord. Semibreves and minims are used to indicate the direction of the strummed chords but they probably have no rhythmic significance. Tuning instructions indicate the re-entrant tuning without bourdons on either the fourth or fifth courses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Castro Escudero: ‘La méthode pour la guitare de Luis Briçeño’ [with appx by D. Devoto: ‘Sur le séjour de Briçeño à Paris’], RdM, li (1965), 131–48

H. Charnassé: ‘A propos d'un recent article sur “La méthode pour la guitare” de Luis Briçeño’, RdM, lii (1966), 204–7

M.J. Yakeley and M. Hall: ‘El estilo castellano y el estilo catalan: an Introduction to Spanish Guitar Chord Notation’, Lute, xxxv (1995), 28–61

BARTON HUDSON/MONICA HALL

Bridge (i)

(Fr. chevalet; Ger. Steg; It. ponticello).

In string instruments, a species of wedge, bar or other shaped object inserted between the belly or soundboard and the strings. The material used varies widely, from hardwood (as is the case with the violin family) to bone, ivory, metal, plastic, vegetable pith or even hair (as is the case with some African fiddles). A bridge serves the purpose of raising strings to the required distance above the soundtable or fingerboard and transmitts vibrations to the body of the instrument. The bridge often serves also as one of two terminal points of the vibrating length of the string, the other being either another bridge or a raised ridge next to the pegbox (this ridge is generally called the ‘nut’ in the case of European bowed instruments). The bridge may be solid, as in the lute bridge (fig.1a), or it may be open in design with cut-out portions for reasons of flexibility or resonance, or to fit a curved belly. The violin bridge, for instance, is cut away leaving ‘feet’ that are fitted to the arched belly (fig.1b). The strings are often kept in place, and a fixed distance apart from each other, by notches along the edge of the bridge.

Bridges differ in form, function and manner of fixing in place, and these factors depend on the character of the particular instrument. In lutes and guitars, for example, where the belly is flat, the strings are in the same plane and uniformly low above the belly, and the longitudinal tension on the strings is relatively slight. Consequently, the bridge is a low, solid bar of wood (or sometimes ivory), flat on top (fig.1a). This type of bridge may serve also to attach the strings at the lower end because the bridge can be glued to the body strongly enough (sometimes fixed with pins as well) to bear the relatively small longitudinal tension of the strings. This type of bridge is sometimes called a ‘tension bridge’.

In viols and violins, on the other hand, a thin, wedge-type bridge is used, and it must be fairly high to meet the high point of the strings, as determined by the angle of the fingerboard, above the centre of the soundholes where the bridge is customarily placed. Moreover, the top of the bridge must be arched since the player bows each string in a different plane. This type of bridge, sometimes called a ‘pressure bridge’, is kept in position by the considerable tension from the strings which, unlike those of the lute and guitar, pass over the bridge and are fastened to the lower end of the instrument by a tailpiece or other device. In this arrangement, the bridge bears the considerable downward pressure of the strings, transmitting the pressure to the belly. The latter is vaulted for extra strength and, in the case of instruments of the viol and violin family, may be supported additionally by the soundpost and the bass-bar. Some Asian and African instruments with soundtables of skin may be given instead the extra support of platforms under the bridge to spread the downward pressure, or, as in the case of the sārangī, a leather strap fitted around the belly.

There are obvious difficulties in tracing the development in violin bridge design before the 19th century. Very few old bridges survive, and it is often not possible to give a precise date for those that do. In 1786 G.A. Marchi observed somewhat ruefully that he could not comment on the old masters approach to bridges because he had not seen any (he nevertheless provided some quite interesting notes on his own priorities as a maker). The late 17th-century Talbot and early 18th-century Brossard manuscripts give a few (slightly puzzling) dimensions for bridges. There are a few bridges attributed to Stradivari, including a beautiful ink-decorated viola bridge (see Violin, fig.5). Moreover, there are numerous drawings for bridge designs among the Stradivari relics which Count Cozio di Salabue acquired. Also, a number of paintings depicting apparently carefully-observed violins show the design of the bridge. On the basis of this kind of evidence, it can be said that 17th- and 18th-century bridges were decoratively cut (with a more sculpted waist and an arch between the feet) in a way which left less wood than was later to become standard. They were also fractionally lower than modern bridges (inevitable given the alignment of the neck on early violins). These features contribute to the characteristic (less penetrating) sound of ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’ violins. Bridges may also have been a little thinner than the modern standard. There has been some speculation that in the early history of the violin, bridges were less curved, but this seems improbable.

Differing aesthetic preferences throughout the world have lead to a variety of modifications to the basic functions of bridges. Certain Indian instruments (notably the sitār, vīnā and classical sārangī) are given bridges with a wide, flat upper surface, gently curved so that the strings leave the bridge at a fine angle and remain in grazing contact when they are activated, producing a shimmering, slightly buzzing timbre rich in high harmonics. In the case of instruments such as the Viola d'amore, hardanger fiddle and some oriental instruments including the sārangī and the Afghan rabāb, which are fitted with sympathetic strings, a bridge may be pierced with small holes so as to lead them in a rank below the melody strings (fig.1c). Some instruments with drone strings which are unfingered may be given extra bridges on either side of the main bridge (e.g. the hurdy-gurdy). The bridge of the West African kora is notched on both sides so as to carry two ranks of strings in a plane perpendicular to the sound table thus dividing out the scale between the two hands (see Kora, esp. fig.4). The bridges of the Polish mazanki (fiddle) and some Bulgarian gadulkas have one foot extended to pass through a soundhole and rest on the inner back of the soundbox (fig.1f): this is an attempt to increase sound volume while making a soundpost unnecessary. In the trumpet marine the bridge is shaped like an inverted U, and its left foot, shorter than the right, remains free to vibrate against the soundboard, from which a drumming sound results (fig.1d).

Bridges of densely strung zithers (e.g. dulcimers) have to allow for other strings to be stretched past them in interlocking planes, so each string may often have its own narrow free-standing bridge. In some dulcimers the bridges may be long narrow bars, perforated to allow other strings to pass through without touching (seeDulcimer fig.4). An important advantage of using individual bridges for each string is that they can be moved for the purpose of fine tuning. The Japanese koto (fig.1e) exemplifies this.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.A. Marchi: Opera che tratta del modo ed ordine per fabricare stromenti cive', violino, violoncello, e contrabasso (Bologna, 1786); trans. and ed. N. Sbarra and J. Guthrie (Bologna, 1986)

W.H. , A.F. and A.E. Hill: Antonio Stradivari: his Life and Work (1644–1737) (London, 1902/R, 2/1909)

I.A. Cozio di Salabue: Observations on the Construction of Stringed Instruments and their Adjustment, 1804, 1805, 1809, 1810, 1816, ed. and trans. A. Dipper and D. Woodrow (Taynton, 1987)

W.L. Monical: Shapes of the Baroque: the Historical Development of Bowed String Musical Instruments, Library & Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, 22 March – 10 June 1989 (New York, 1989) [exhibition catalogue]

M. Flemming: ‘A Bridge to the Past’, EMc, xxvii (1999), 235–47

DAVID D. BOYDEN/PETER COOKE, PETER WALLS

Bridge (ii).

In popular music and jazz a term applied to a passage in which a formal transition is made. In popular music it is used of the penultimate section in the refrain of a popular song, leading to the final repeat of the opening section (section b in the form aaba); the bridge provides a contrast, often tonal as well as harmonic and melodic, with the opening section. In ragtime and early jazz the bridge is a short section, normally of four or eight bars, that links the separate strains of multithematic compositions; it often incorporates a change of key. In the modal vamps of soul jazz and funk the bridge may simply be an alternative section, typically on the subdominant or dominant, without necessarily having such formal connotations. Rock musicians may call any different section that appears once within an otherwise repeating form the bridge or middle eight.

Bridge, Frank

(b Brighton, 26 Feb 1879; d Eastbourne, 10 Jan 1941). English composer, violist and conductor. He studied the violin and composition at the RCM, where a scholarship won in 1899 enabled him to work under Stanford for four years. He quickly made a professional reputation as an outstanding conductor and chamber music player. In 1906 he took the place of the indisposed violist Wirth in the Joachim Quartet, and later joined the English String Quartet, of which he was a member until 1915. During this period he also undertook many important conducting engagements, presiding over repertory rehearsals for the newly founded New SO, conducting opera at the Savoy Theatre (1910–11) and at Covent Garden (1913), and appearing with such major orchestras as the LSO. Bridge’s musicianship made it possible for him to take on the most difficult programmes at short notice, and Henry Wood called on him for Promenade Concerts when he himself was incapacitated. In 1923 Bridge visited the USA to conduct his own music in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and New York. He was also a remarkable teacher, though Britten was his only composition pupil.

During the first decade of the century Bridge composed a large quantity of chamber music and songs; he quickly developed a masterly technique, and a flair for tailoring his music both to the taste of his audience and the capabilities of his performers. If songs like the well-known ‘E’en as a lovely flower’ are no more than drawing-room ballads, Bridge’s true abilities are evident in such pieces as the Phantasie Quartet in F minor and the First String Quartet. Although his strong individuality still had to develop, these works are expansive in form and warm in expression, the language being a personal extension of the Brahms-Stanford idiom, then common coin, but lightened by a Gallic clarity gleaned possibly from Fauré. The finest of his early chamber pieces is the Phantasie Piano Quartet (1910). Like the other phantasies, it was written for Cobbett who wished to revive in new dress the single-movement fancy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Each of the pieces in this form seeks to embrace the variety of mood and texture of a traditional four-movement structure. For example, the Piano Trio replaces the development of a sonata by a ternary slow movement, the centrepiece of which is a scherzo; in the simpler form of the Piano Quartet, main andante sections flank a central Allegro whose relaxed middle section refers to the work’s opening. These arch-shaped forms were to remain a preoccupation throughout the composer’s career.

Bridge’s chamber music is the one genre which affords a complete view of his extraordinary development, but he also composed for larger forces: during this early period he wrote a number of orchestral works, including the Dance Poem (a large symphonic waltz) and the brilliant and energetic Dance Rhapsody. The peak of his first style was attained with the exquisitely poised Suite for strings (1908) and The Sea (1910–11), one of his few orchestral works to have entered the British repertory. The Sea is a spacious four-movement suite which is typical of Bridge in combining poetic evocation with fine clarity of line and texture. It has something in common with the Bax of Tintagel and November Woods, and might even have influenced the harmony of these pieces, but Bridge’s music is polyphonically cleaner and freer, the harmony less dense. Bridge does not equal the intensity of Bax at this time, but a revolution of style was to avail him of a much greater power.

The orchestral work Summer shows his increased maturity, and if Bridge appears to have become committed here to an almost Delian Englishness, there is still a distinctive control of form and texture. Significantly, the most ecstatically Delian moments unfold in textbook polyphony, Bridge’s mastery of traditional techniques being now firmly wedded to his poetic expression. Summer’s haunting quality also informs the delicately beautiful Two Poems of Richard Jefferies, miniatures of refined subtlety which were completed in the following year. At this time Bridge was also engaged on the powerful two-movement Cello Sonata and the Second String Quartet, the first major chamber work of his maturity. Several traits of later Bridge characterize these pieces, particularly in turns of melody and in the increased chromaticism, but their easy-going romanticism is still far from the searing intensity of his postwar style.

In the following years he concentrated on smaller forms in songs and piano pieces, although the opera The Christmas Rose was also sketched at this period. Bridge’s next major work, the Piano Sonata, marked a crisis in his development. The achievement of this sonata distinguishes him from most of his British contemporaries. Previously his music had been comfortable, even conservative, as he explored with increasing depth and mastery a world not far removed from that of Bax and Ireland. The Piano Sonata suggests that he felt this world to be valid no longer, a view that may well have been precipitated by a deeply disturbing experience. Like many of his contemporaries, he must have been emotionally affected by World War I, particularly so because of his strong pacifist convictions. The radical change ushered in by the Piano Sonata was to some extent prefigured in earlier extensions of his language, but the new style may be related to a profound change in Bridge’s personality. The realist, who had formerly recognized the need to write within a convention acceptable to his potential audience, now with equal clear-mindedness saw the necessity to go beyond previous conventions.

But the Piano Sonata, and the masterly works which followed it, did not break all links with Bridge’s surroundings. It contains something of Ireland’s grim heroic feeling, and some chordal aggregations are not unlike those of Ireland and Bax. The great difference lies in Bridge’s recognition of the inherent bitonality of these aggregates, and his harmonic development is quite individual and far more radical. Whereas the harmony of Ireland and Bax frequently sounds like a dissonant decoration of fundamentally simple chords, Bridge’s harmony grows from the interval structure of his chords, as shown in ex.1, from the Piano Sonata. At the same time Bridge saw the need for a new flexibility of rhythm and form to embody his splintered tonality: moods, textures and tempos fluctuate rapidly, trains of thought are initiated by a free association, and expansive sections give the impression of continuous evolution, reinforced by Bridge’s tendency to avoid exact repetition.

All of his major works after the Piano Sonata exhibit these qualities to a greater or lesser degree, and the majority are of exceptional quality. The more private field of chamber music gave most opportunity for pursuance of the new style, and in the Third and Fourth String Quartets Bridge approached the early works of the Second Viennese School. There is the same determination to keep all 12 chromatic notes in play, the same pervasiveness of motivic relationships. Yet Bridge’s essential Englishness is always somehow in evidence, particularly in his sensuous use of harmony, and although his admiration for Berg is often evident, his own personality remains strongly individual. The magnificent Piano Trio no.2 and the last two quartets are among the pinnacles of 20th-century English chamber music, while the Violin Sonata is possibly the finest of his instrumental pieces, a superbly sustained single movement of characteristically ambivalent feeling.

The proportions of these works are grand, the range wide, and Bridge was concurrently writing outstanding orchestral music on a large scale. Enter Spring has a main Allegro of brilliant urgency and a hypnotically lovely pastoral episode; both contrast strongly with the sombre plangency of the short orchestral impression There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook (1928). Bridge’s orchestral work is distinguished from his more extensive output of chamber music by the prominence of tone-painting. He clearly saw the chamber ensemble as a medium for purely abstract discourse, perceiving in the greater colouristic resources of the orchestra opportunities to use the evocative power and sensuous impact of texture. But for all its programmatic basis, the orchestral music is cogently argued, as always with Bridge. Single-movement forms predominate and the freely evolving structures move some way from the sonata matrices of the Third and Fourth Quartets. There is a Willow progresses through a chain of sections with very little repetition, finding a perfect close in the final threnody. Enter Spring displays mercurial changes of direction in a search for a definitive statement, and emphasis is thus thrown on the settled quality of the pastoral section. During the last decade of his life Bridge produced two outstanding concertante works: Phantasm for piano and the single-movement cello concerto Oration, a monumentally grand structure whose sustained contrapuntal energy and lyricism bring his preoccupation with the fantasy arch form to its culmination. His last complete work was the brilliant Rebus Overture, which combines the distinctive strains of energy, lyricism and emotional ambivalence within a harmonically simpler style.

The isolation of English musical life from far-reaching developments abroad was an obstacle to the recognition of Bridge’s later works. After his death his music fell into almost complete neglect, though interest was subsequently revived. The poetic insight and consummate technique of his work promise it a permanent place in the repertory.

1. Childhood, adolescence, 1913–30.

ANTHONY PAYNE (work-list with PAUL HINDMARSH, bibliography with LEWIS FOREMAN)

Bridge, Frank

WORKS

stage

The Two Hunchbacks (E. Cammaerts), incidental music, 1908

The Pageant of London, wind orch, male chorus, 1911

In the Shop, ballet, 1921

Threads (F. Stayton), incidental music, 1921

The Christmas Rose (opera, after children’s play, M. Kemp-Welch and Cotterel), 1919–29

orchestral

Berceuse, 1901; Coronation March, 1901; Valse-Intermezzo, str, 1902; 3 Orchestral Pieces: Chant de tristesse, Chant d’espérance, Chant de gaité, 1902; Serenade, 1903; Symphonic Poem, 1903; Norse Legend, 1905, 1938; Dramatic Overture, c1906; Isabella, sym. poem, 1907; An Irish Melody, str, 1908, 1936; Dance Rhapsody, 1908; Suite, str, 1908; 5 Entr’actes (The Two Hunchbacks), 1910; The Sea, suite, 1910–11; The Pageant of London, suite, wind orch, 1911; [Coronation] March, 1911; Dance Poem, 1913: Summer, sym. poem, 1914; Lament, str, 1915 [also for pf]; 2 Poems of Richard Jefferies: The Open Air, The Story of my Heart, 1915; 2 Intermezzi (Threads), 1921, 1936; Sir Roger de Coverley, Christmas dance, str, 1922 [also for orch, str qt]; Enter Spring, rhapsody, 1927; There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook, small orch, 1928; Oration, Concerto elegiaco, vc, orch, 1930; Phantasm, pf, orch, 1931; 2 Entr’actes, 1936; Vignettes de danse, small orch, 1938 [arr. 3 pf works, 1925]; Rebus Overture, 1940; Symphony, str, 1940–41, inc.

chamber

3 Dances, vn/vc, pf, 1900; Str Qt, B, 1900; Scherzo Phantastick, str qt, 1901; Str Qnt, e, 1901; Cradle Song, vn/vc, pf, 1902; Pf Qt, c, 1902; Scherzetto, vc, pf, c1902; Con moto, vn, pf, 1903; Serenade, vn/vc, pf (1903); Tempo di Mazurka, vc, pf, 1903; Elégie, vc, pf (1904); Novelletten, str qt, 1904; Romanze, vn, pf, 1904; Souvenir, vn/vc, pf, 1904; Vn Sonata, E, inc, 1904; Allegretto, va, pf, 1905; Amaryllis, vn, pf, 1905; Norse Legend, vn, pf, 1905; Pensiero, va, pf, 1905; Phantasie Quartet, f, str qt, 1905; Three Idylls, str qt, 1906; Str Qt ‘Bologna’, e, 1906; Valse Fernholt, str, pf, 1906; Miniatures, 3 sets, pf trio, 1906–7; Phantasie Piano Trio, c, 1907; Gondoliera, vn, pf, 1907; Allegro appassionato, va, pf (1908); An Irish Melody (Londonderry Air), str qt, 1908; Phantasie Piano Quartet, f, 1910; Cradle Song, vn, pf, 1910; Mélodie, vn/vc, pf, 1911; Pf Qnt, 1904–12; Str Sextet, 1906–12; 4 Short Pieces: Meditation, Spring Song, Lullaby, Country Dance, vn, pf [nos.1 and 2 also for vc, pf] (1912); Str Qt, g, 1915; Vc Sonata, 1913–17; Sally in our Alley, Cherry Ripe, str qt, 1916 [also for pf duet]; Morning Song, vc, pf (1919); Heartsease, vn, pf (1921) [arr. pf 1921]; Sir Roger de Coverley, str qt, 1922 [also for str orch, orch]; Str Qt no.3, 1926; Trio, rhapsody, 2 vn, va, 1928; Pf Trio no.2, 1929; Vn Sonata, 1932; Str Qt no.4, 1937; Divertimenti, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1934–8

songs

Berceuse (Wordsworth) [also with orch acc.], 1901; When most I wink (Shakespeare), 1901; 2 Songs: The Primrose (Herrick), If I could choose (T. Ashe) (1902); Blow, blow thou winter wind (Shakespeare), 1903; The Devon maid (Keats) 1903; Music when soft voices die (Shelley) [also with va obbl], 1903; Where e’er my bitter teardrops fall (Heine), 1903; 4 Lyrics [also with orch acc.]: E’en as a lovely flower (Kroeker, after Heine), 1903, Dawn and Evening (C.A., after Heine), 1903, The Violets Blue (J. Thomson, after Heine), 1906, All things that we clasp (E. Lazarus, after Heine), 1907; Go not, happy day (Tennyson) [also with orch acc.], 1903

3 Songs: A Dirge (Shelley), 1903, Night lies on the silent highways (Kroeker, after Heine), 1904, A Dead Violet (Shelley), 1904; Cradle Song: What does little birdie say? (Tennyson), 1904; Remembrance (Shelley), c1904; Adoration (Keats) [also with orch acc.], 1905; Fair Daffodils (Herrick), 1905; Lean close thy cheek against my cheek (Heine), 1905; So perverse (Bridges) 1905; Tears, idle tears (Tennyson), 1905; Come to me in my dreams (Arnold), 1906; Far, far from each other, va obbl, 1906; My pent up tears oppress my brain, 1906; ‘Where is it that our soul doth go? (Kroeker, after Heine), va obbl, 1906

Love is a rose (L. Durand), 1907; Dear, when I look into thine eyes (Heine), 1908; Isobel (D. Goddard-Fenwick), 1912; O that it were so (Landor) (1913); Strew no more red roses (Arnold), 1913; Love went a-riding (M. Coleridge) [also with orch acc.], 1914; Where she lies asleep (M. Coleridge) [also with orch acc.], 1916; Go not, happy day (Tennyson) (1916); Thy hand in mine (M. Coleridge), 1917

Mantle of blue (P. Colum) [also with orch acc.], 1918; Blow out you bugles (Brooke) [also with orch acc.], 1918; So early in the morning (J. Stephens), 1918; The last invocation (Whitman), 1918; When you are old (Keats), 1919; Into her keeping (D. Lowry), 1919; What shall I your true love tell? (F. Thompson), 1919; Tis but a week (G. Gould), 1919; 3 Songs (Tagore) [also with orch acc.]: Day after day, 1922, Speak to me my love, 1924, Dweller in my deathless dreams, 1925; Golden Hair (Joyce), 1925; Journey’s End (H. Wolfe), 1925

other vocal

The Hag (Herrick), Bar, orch, 1902; Autumn (Shelley), SATB (1903); Music when soft voices die (Shelley), SATB (1904); 2 Songs (Bridges: I praise the tender flower, Thou didst delight my eyes), Bar, orch, 1905–6; Hilly-ho, hilly-ho (Moore), SATB, 1909; O weary hearts (Longfellow), SATB, 1909; The Bee (Tennyson), SATB, 1913; A Prayer (à Kempis), chorus, orch, 1916–18; For God, and King and Right (V. Mason), chorus (1916); The Graceful Swaying Wattle (Mason), 2-part chorus (1916); Lullaby (Mason), 3-part chorus (1916); Peter Piper, 3 equal vv (1916)

A Litany (P. Fletcher), 3-part chorus, 1918; Sister awake, close not your eyes (T. Bateson), 2-part chorus, 1918; Lay a garland on my hearse (Beaumont and Fletcher), 2-part chorus, 1918; Lantido Dilly (anon. 17th century), 3-part chorus, pf, 1919; Variations sur Cadet Rousselle (trad.), 1920 [with Bax, Goossens and Ireland]; The Fairy Ring, 3-part chorus, pf ad lib, 1922; A Spring Song (M. Howitt), unison, str ad lib, 1922; Pan’s Holiday (J. Shirley), 2-part chorus, str, pf, 1922; Evening Primrose, 2-part chorus (1923); Golden Slumbers (Dekker), 3-part chorus (1923); Hence Care (anon. 16th century), 3-part chorus (1923)

piano

Berceuse, 1901; Pensées Fugitives, I, 1902; Scherzettino, 1902; Moderato, 1903; Capriccio no.1, a, 1905; Etude rhapsodique, 1905; 2 Piano Solos: A Sea Idyll, Capriccio no.2, f, 1905; Dramatic Fantasia, 1906; 3 Sketches: April, Rosemary, Valse capricieuse, 1906; 3 Pieces: Minuet, Columbine, Romance, 1912; 3 Poems: Solitude, Ecstasy, Sunset, 1913–14; Arabesque (1914); Lament, 1915 [also for str orch]; 4 Characteristic Pieces: Water Nymphs, Fragrance, Bittersweet, Fireflies, 1915; Sally in our Alley Cherry Ripe, duet, 1916 [also for str qt]; 3 Miniature Pastorals, 3 sets, 1917–21; A Fairy Tale Suite: The Princess, The Ogre, The Spell, The Prince, 1917; The Turtle’s Retort (1919)

3 Improvisations for the Left Hand: At Dawn, A Vigil, A Revel, 1918; The Hour Glass: Dusk, Dew Fairy, Midnight Tide, 1919–20; Miniature Suite, 1921; In the Shop, suite, pf duet, 1921; Sonata, 1921–4; 3 Lyrics: Heartsease, 1921; 1921, Dainty Rogue, 1921, The Hedgerow, 1924; In Autumn: Retrospect, Through the Eaves, 1924; 4 Pieces: Carmelita, Niccollette, Zoraida, En fête, 1925 [nos.2, 3 and 1 arr. orch as Vignettes de danse]; Winter Pastoral, 1925; Canzonetta, 1926; A Dedication, 1926; Graziella; Hidden Fires, (1927); Gargoyle, 1928

organ

Adagio ma non troppo, 1901; 3 Pieces: Andante moderato, c, Adagio, E, Allegro con spirito, B (1905); Organ Pieces, Book 1: Allegretto grazioso, Allegro commodo, Allegro marziale, 1905; Organ Pieces, Book 2: Andante con moto, Andantino, Allegro ben moderato, 1912; In memoriam C.H.H.P., 1918; Minuet, 1939; Prelude, 1939; Processional, 1939

arrangements

Easter Hymn, v, pf (1912) [also for chorus (1930)]

A. Corelli: Christmas Concerto, orch (c1920)

J.S. Bach: Komm süsser Tod, pf, 1931 [also for str orch, 1936]

Principal publishers: Stainer & Bell, Boosey & Hawkes

MSS in GB-Lcm

Bridge, Frank

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Evans: ‘Modern British Composers: 1 - Frank Bridge’, MT, lx (1919), 55–61

H. Antcliffe: ‘Frank Bridge’, Sackbut, v (1925), 286–8

J. Holbrooke: Contemporary British Composers (London, 1925)

E. Evans: ‘Frank Bridge’, Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, (London, 1929), 188–95

H. Howells: ‘Frank Bridge’, ML, xxii (1941), 208–15

I. James: ‘Obituary: Frank Bridge’, RCM Magazine, xxxvii (1941), 22–4

J.A. Westrup: ‘Frank Bridge’, British Music of our Time, ed. A. L. Bacharach (Harmondsworth, 2/1951), 74–80

T. Souster: ‘Frank Bridge's Cello Sonata’, The Listener (23 Dec 1965)

B. Britten: ‘Early Influences - a tribute to Frank Bridge (1879–1941)’, Composer, no.19 (1966), 2–3

R.M. Keating: The Songs of Frank Bridge (diss., U. of Texas, 1970)

P.J. Pirie: Frank Bridge (London, 1971)

A. Payne and L. Foreman: Frank Bridge (London, 1976)

P.J. Pirie: ‘Frank Bridge’s Piano Sonata’, Music and Musicians, xxiv/5 (1976)

P. Pears: ‘Frank Bridge (1879–1941)’, Recorded Sound, nos.66–7 (1977), 666–8

L. Foreman, E. Hughes and M. Walker: ‘Frank Bridge (1879–1941): a Discography’, Recorded Sound, ibid., 669–73

T. Bray: ‘Frank Bridge and Mrs Coolidge’, Music and Musicians, xxvi/2 (1977–8), 28–30

S.S. Dale: ‘Contemporary Cello Concerti LXIII: Bridge [Oration]’, Strad, lxxxviii (1978), 1151–61

P. Hindmarsh: ‘Frank Bridge: a Centenary Survey’, Music Teacher, lviii/7 (1979), 15–18, lviii/8 (1979), 11–13

P. Hindmarsh: Frank Bridge: a Thematic Catalogue 1900–1941 (London, 1983)

A. Payne: Frank Bridge: Radical and Conservative (London, 1984)

T. Bray: ‘Frank Bridge and his Quasi-Adopted Son’, MR, xlv (1985), 135–8

S. Banfield: ‘Frank Bridge’, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century (Cambridge, 1985), 68–74, 343–50

S. Banfield: ‘“Too much of an Albion?”: Mrs Coolidge and her British Connections’, American Music, iv/1 (1986), 59–88

J.A. Galant: The Solo Piano Works of Frank Bridge (diss., Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1987)

K.R. Little: Frank Bridge: a Bio-bibliography (Westport, CT, 1991)

Bridge, Sir (John) Frederick

(b Oldbury, 5 Dec 1844; d London, 18 March 1924). English organist, composer and writer. In 1850 the Bridge family moved from the Midlands to Rochester, the father to be a vicar-choral and the son, Frederick, a probationary chorister in the cathedral choir. At 14 the boy was articled to the cathedral organist, John Hopkins, and during the term of his articles he held successively the post of organist at two nearby churches. At the end of his apprenticeship he became organist at Holy Trinity Church, Windsor (1865–9), and also studied with John Goss, taking his FRCO and the Oxford BMus.

In 1869 Bridge was appointed organist of Manchester Cathedral. By 1872 he was teaching harmony at Owens College and in 1874 he took his Oxford DMus. An important event during his Manchester days was the installation of a four-manual organ by Thomas Hill in the cathedral. Bridge became deputy organist to James Turle at Westminster Abbey in 1875 and succeeded him as organist in 1882.

After using the Hill instrument in Manchester, it is not surprising that Bridge found the abbey organ an inconvenient and ‘very old-fashioned affair’, and as soon as possible he set about getting it restyled. He showed great aptitude for fund-raising and persuaded many friends to contribute new stops until in 1884 the organ was completely rebuilt by Hill & Son with 54 stops, tubular-pneumatic action and a gas-driven blower. In 1895 a fifth manual – a celestial organ – was installed in the triforium, making a total of 79 speaking stops. Apart from the ordinary abbey services, Bridge provided music for many important occasions including Queen Victoria's jubilees in 1887 and 1897 (when he received a knighthood) and the coronations of King Edward VII and King George V, when he received the MVO and CVO respectively. He also organized music festivals in honour of former Abbey organists Orlando Gibbons and Henry Purcell, whose festival raised about £1100 towards new organ cases by Pearson. Bridge retired from the abbey in 1918. He was a notoriously indifferent organist, but for 20 years he had the advantage of an outstandingly brilliant assistant, Walter G. Alcock.

Bridge taught at the National Training School of Music and then at the RCM from the inceptions of each institution, but accounts of his teaching are not complimentary. He was elected Gresham Professor of Music (1890), King Edward Professor of Music in the University of London (1903) and chairman of Trinity College of Music. His compositions were mainly choral, including church music, many works for the provincial festivals (Birmingham, Three Choirs) and some music for choral societies which he conducted (Highbury Philharmonic, 1878–86, Royal Choral Society, 1896–1922).

WORKS

(selective list)

all published in London

sacred choral

Mount Moriah (The Trial of Abraham's Faith) (orat) (1974); He giveth his Beloved Sleep (meditation, E.B. Browning) (1890); The Repentance of Nineveh (orat, J. Bennett) (1890); The Cradle of Christ: Stabat mater speciosa (canticle, J.M. Neale) (1894); St Star of the East (Christmas fantasy, Lady Lindsay) (1922)

secular choral

Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni (cant., G.E. Troutbeck), chorus, orch (1880); Callirhoë: a Legend of Calydon (cant., W.B. Squire), chorus, orch (1888); The Inchape Rock (ballad, R. Southey), chorus, orch (1891); The Flag of England (ballad, R. Kipling), S, chorus, orch (1899); The Forging of the Anchor (dramatic scene, S. Ferguson), B, chorus, orch (1901); The Lobster's Garden Party (cant., S. Wensley), vv, pf (1904); A Song of the English (ballad, R. Kipling), Bar, chorus, orch (1911)

WRITINGS

Samuel Pepys, Lover of Musique (London, 1903)

A Westminster Pilgrim (London, 1918)

Twelve Good Musicians from John Bull to Henry Purcell (London and New York, 1920)

Several Novello Primers

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary, MT, lxv (1924), 305–6

W.G. Alcock: ‘A Personal Tribute’, MT, lxv (1924), 306–7

GUY WARRACK/CHRISTOPHER KENT

Bridge [Bridges], Richard

(b ?London; d London, 7 June 1758). English builder of organs, harpsichords and spinets. He married Esther (or Hester) Brown on 29 December 1720 at St James’s, Clerkenwell, London. Handel, in a letter to Jennens dated 30 September 1749, wrote, ‘I very well approve of Mr. Bridge who without any Objection is a very good Organ Builder’.

Bridge’s largest organ, built in 1730 for Christ Church, Spitalfields (see Organ, fig.38; specification no.23 in Sumner) had, besides two Open Diapasons, two Principals on the Great, a Larigot, four reeds on the Great, three on the Swell and four on the lower set of keys including a French Horn from d, a stop introduced by Renatus Harris in his design for St Dionis Backchurch in 1722. This stop, the variety of reed stops, the Larigot, the regular use of a Tierce, the chorus mixtures with from five to eight ranks, the five-rank Cornet on the Great and the use of communication derive directly from the French style of Harris and it is almost certain that Bridge was apprenticed to him. Much of the original Christ Church organ survives, despite a rebuild in the 19th century, and in 1997 a thorough restoration of the instrument was begun by William Drake. Bridge frequently used two standard contemporary designs for his cases: the beautiful ‘curtain flat’ design with ogee-shaped flats in plan view, as at Spitalfields, Deptford, St George-in-the-East and Enfield, and the design with two gable-shaped upper flats, as at Old Street (now St Giles Cripplegate) and Shoreditch. On a number of occasions between 1733 and 1742 he appears to have built and worked on organs in collaboration with Abraham Jordan (Old Street and Exeter Cathedral). After his death in 1758, the business was continued at the same address by his son-in-law George England.

Bridge built organs in the following locations now in the London area: St Luke’s, Chelsea (1720; case now in Holsworthy Parish Church, Devon); Christ Church, Spitalfields (1730; cost £600; case, some chests, action and much pipework survive); St Paul’s, Deptford (1730; case survives); St Bartholomew-the-Great (1731); St George-in-the-East (1733; destroyed 1940); St Luke’s, Old Street (1733, with Jordan; the remains incorporated into the new organ at St Giles Cripplegate); Cuper’s Gardens, Lambeth (1738–40); the Hall of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks (1737; a virtually unaltered organ until its destruction in World War II); Marylebone Gardens (1740); St Anne’s, Limehouse (1741; burnt 1851); St Andrew’s, Enfield (1752–3; empty case survives); St Leonard’s, Shoreditch (1757; badly damaged during World War II; original console with black keys and sandwich sharps still in west gallery; case restored and organ rebuilt with electric action and detached console by Mander, 1951); Spa Fields Chapel, Clerkenwell; St James’s, Clerkenwell (moved to Beccles, Suffolk, in 1796); and the parish churches of Paddington and Eltham. He also built organs at St Mary of Charity, Faversham, Kent (1754; case survives); Trinity Church, Newport, Rhode Island (1733; case survives; console survives in the Newport Historical Society collection); and the King’s Chapel, Boston (1756; case survives; some pipework is found in the rebuilt organ of the Methodist church, Schuylerville, New York); and (with Jordan) he completely rebuilt the organ at Exeter Cathedral within the Loosemore cases (1742). He also did a major rebuilding of the organ at Worcester Cathedral (1752), and built an entirely new organ within the Pease cases at Canterbury Cathedral (1752–3; cost £480).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Russell: ‘The Organs of Christ Church, Spitalfields’, The Organ, xix (1939–40), 113–17

A. Niland: ‘The Organ at St. Luke’s Church, Old Street, London’, The Organ, xxxi (1951–2), 180–85

W.L. Sumner: The Organ: its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use (London, 1952, enlarged 4/1973/R)

B. Matthews: The Organs and Organists of Exeter Cathedral (Exeter, 1964)

B. Owen: ‘Two Richard Bridge Organs in New England’, The Organ, lxviii (1989), 113–23

N.M. Plumley: The Organs of the City of London (Oxford, 1996)

GUY OLDHAM, NICHOLAS PLUMLEY

Bridge Harp.

A type of harp, limited to West Africa, with four to 21 strings. Made with a calabash resonator and straight or slightly curved neck spiked through the resonator, the instrument has a profile similar to that of a lute. For this reason, bridge harps were classified by Hornbostel and Sachs as ‘harp-lutes’ (see Chordophone). The plane of the strings, however, is not parallel to the soundtable like on a lute, but perpendicular to it: one of the defining characteristics of a harp as specified by Hornbostel and Sachs (see Harp, §I). In performance, the neck is pointed away from the performer's body (not across it like a lute). The performer plucks the strings with fingers of both hands, one on either side of the strings, again like most harpists of the world. A rectangular, vertical bridge stands on the soundtable and is perpendicular to it. Rather than having notches on the top of the bridge, as is true of the lute family, the bridge is either notched on both sides of its length or drilled with two rows of holes, both types thus accommodating two ranks of strings. The strings, which are fastened to the neck usually via braided leather rings, run from the neck and pass over or through the bridge before being tied, usually, to a metal ring or a small metal arch nailed to the protruding end of the neck.

Because these instruments are far more harp-like than lute-like, both in structure and performing practice, they were re-classified by DeVale as a sub-class of a new category of African harp: ‘harps with vertical string holders or bridges: spike harps: bridge harps’. The term ‘bridge harp’ was first used by Knight. The best known bridge harp, and the largest, is the Kora of the Mande people of The Gambia.

For further discussion of its organology, description and illustration, see Harp, §III.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Knight: ‘Toward a Notation and Tablature for the Kora’, African Music, v/1 (1971), 23–6

S.G. Pevar: ‘The Construction of a Kora’, African Arts, xi/4 (1978), 66–72

R. Knight: ‘The Style of Mandinka Music: a Study in Extracting Theory from Practice’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, v (1984), 3–66

S.C. DeVale: ‘African Harps: Construction, Decoration and Sound’, Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments, ed. M.-T. Brincard (New York, 1989), 53–62

E.S. Charry: ‘West African Harps’, JAMIS, xx (1994), 5–53

SUE CAROLE DeVALE

Bridge passage.

A transition section leading from one theme to another, usually applied to a passage which effects a modulation from the first subject to the second in the exposition of a movement in sonata form (see Sonata form, §3(i)). The expression is avoided by writers who view the exposition as establishing two contrasting tonalities and accordingly divisible into two parts, not three; for them, any ‘bridge passage’ would belong to one of these parts, called a ‘subject group’.

See also Bridge (ii).

Bridgetower [Bridgtower], George (Augustus) Polgreen

(b Biała, Poland, 11 Oct 1778; d Peckham, London, 29 Feb 1860). English violinist. The son of a West Indian father and a European mother, he may have lived at Eszterháza during the 1780s and studied with Haydn. He made his début as a violinist at the Concert Spirituel in Paris at the age of ten (11 April 1789). Father and son then moved to England, where the young prodigy was marketed as the ‘son of the African Prince’. He appeared at court in Windsor, and at concerts in Bath and Bristol, before making his London début at the Drury Lane Theatre oratorio on 19 February 1790. His concerto performances here attracted the notice of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV), who took him under his patronage and had him taught the violin by Barthélemon and composition by Attwood. During the next decade he played at many prestigious London concerts, appearing alongside Haydn at Salomon's series and elsewhere; his repertory was based on the concertos of Giornovichi and Viotti, though he is also known to have played the unaccompanied sonatas of Bach. From 1795 to 1809 he was first violinist in the Prince of Wales's private orchestra. Bridgetower had clearly transcended his childhood celebrity to become a respected member of London's musical community, even if his career as a soloist did not fulfil all its early promise.

In 1802 he obtained permission to visit his mother in Dresden; there he gave two concerts (24 July 1802 and 18 March 1803) that were received so enthusiastically that he was given letters of introduction to the highest aristocratic circles in Vienna. It was through Prince Lichnowsky that Bridgetower met Beethoven in the spring of 1803 and that their famous concert (in the Augarten, on 24 May) was financed. Earlier that year Beethoven had begun sketching two movements for violin and piano; and when the concert with Bridgetower was arranged, he quickly finished them and added a previously composed finale (originally intended as the last movement of the Sonata op.30 no.1) to make up a three-movement sonata in A. There was not enough time to have the violin part of the second movement copied before the performance, and Bridgetower was obliged to read it from Beethoven's manuscript; nevertheless the work was a brilliant success, the audience unanimously calling for an encore of the second movement.

There is no question that Beethoven, who spoke highly of Bridgetower both as a soloist and as a quartet player, intended to dedicate this sonata to the young violinist; on a rough composing score of the work he entered the humorous inscription: ‘Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico’. But the two men later fell out of favour with one another, allegedly after a quarrel over a girl, and Beethoven subsequently dedicated the sonata (published in 1805 as op.47) to the eminent French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.

After this Bridgetower returned to England for a number of years, taking the degree of MusB at Cambridge in 1811 and playing with the Philharmonic Society during its first season. He then went abroad, living in Rome and Paris for many years, and is known to have visited England once (in 1843) before returning to spend his last years there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

F.G. Edwards: ‘George P. Bridgetower and the Kreutzer Sonata’, MT, xlix (1908), 302–8

E. Anderson, ed. and trans.: The Letters of Beethoven (London, 1961/R)

E. Forbes, ed.: Thayer's Life of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ, 1964, 2/1967)

B. Matthews: ‘George Polgreen Bridgtower’, MR, xxix (1968), 22–6

S. Brandenburg, ed.: Beethoven: Werke für Klavier und Violine, ii; Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, v/2 (Munich, 1974), p.vii

J.R.B. Wright: ‘George Polgreen Bridgetower: an African Prodigy in England, 1789–99’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 65–82

D. Kühn: Beethoven und der schwarze Geiger (Frankfurt, 1990)

GEORGE GROVE/SIMON McVEIGH

Bridgman, Nanie

(b Angoulême, 2 Feb 1907; d Paris, 2 May 1990). French librarian and musicologist. She studied arts subjects at the Sorbonne (1926–32) where she was a student of Pirro and took a degree in 1930. Then she studied singing at the Conservatoire (1932–6) in Claire Croiza's class. She obtained the Diplôme de l'Institut d'Art et d'Archéologie in 1944, the Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures (1946, prepared at the University of Strasbourg under the direction of Rokseth), and a diploma in Serbo-Croat, after studying at the Ecole des Langues Orientales (1947–9). She became a keeper in the music department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, in 1945. As a musicologist she was interested in Italy and France during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and published many valuable articles in specialist journals as well as in the major music dictionaries and encyclopedias. From 1969 to 1971 she was editor of the review Musique de tous les temps. A member of the council of the IMS (1972–7), she was president of the Société Française de Musicologie (1974–7).

WRITINGS

L'activité musicale à la cour d'Henry VIII (diss., U. of Paris, 1946)

‘L'établissement d'un catalogue par incipit musicaux’, MD, iv (1950), 65–8

‘Eustorg de Beaulieu, Musician’, MQ, xxxvii (1951), 61–70

‘La frottola et la transition de la frottola au madrigal’, Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle: Paris 1953, 63–77

‘Un manuscrit italien du début du XVIe siècle à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Département de la musique, Rés. Vm⁷ 676)’, AnnM, i (1953), 177–267; iv (1956), 259–60

‘Quelques éditions rares de musique italienne des seizième et dix-septième siècles dans les bibliothèques de France’, Musiche popolari mediterranee: Palermo 1954, 215–20

‘Christian Egenolff, imprimeur de musique (à propos du recueil Rés. Vm⁷ 504 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris)’, AnnM, iii (1955), 77–177

‘Giovanni Camillo Maffei et sa lettre sur le chant’, RdM, xxxviii (1956), 3–34

‘Les échanges musicaux entre l'Espagne et les Pays-Bas, au temps de Philippe le Beau et de Charles Quint’, La Renaissance dans les provinces du nord: Arras 1954, 51–61

‘Les 2 livres de madrigaux de Diego Personè’, CHM, ii (1956–7), 97–109

‘L'aristocratie française et le ballet de cour’, Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, no.7 (1957), 9–21

‘La participation musicale à l'entrée de Charles Quint à Cambrai, le 20 janvier 1540’, Fêtes et cérémonies au temps de Charles Quint: Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Liège 1957, 235–55

with F. Lesure: ‘Une anthologie “historique” de la fin du XVIe siècle: le manuscrit Bourdeney’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés, i (Barcelona, 1958–61), 151–72

‘Charles Quint et la musique espagnole’, RdM, xliii (1959), 44–60

‘La musique dans la société française de l'Ars Nova’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento I: Certaldo 1959, 83–96

‘The Age of Ockeghem and Josquin’, Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300–1540, NOHM, iii (1960/R), 239–302

‘La musique religieuse de Dufay à Josquin des Prés: Ockeghem et son époque’, ‘La messe et le motet chez les Franco-Flamands après la mort de Josquin’, ‘La frottola et le madrigal en Italie’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, i (Paris, 1960), 975–83, 1072–85, 1086–116

with F. Lesure: Collection musicale André Meyer (Abbeville, 1961, suppl. 1963)

‘Mécénat et musique’, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, ii, 19–30

‘Fêtes italiennes de plein air au Quattrocento’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 34–8

La vie musicale au Quattrocento et jusqu'à la naissance du madrigal (1400–1530) (Paris, 1964)

‘Un manuscrit milanais (Biblioteca nazionale Braidense Cod. AD. XIV. 49)’, RIM, i (1966), 237–41

‘Manuscrits clandestins: à propos du Ms. Res.862 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, fonds du Conservatoire’, RdM, liii (1967), 21–7

‘Chansons tant musicales que rustiques’, NRMI, ii (1968), 43–53

‘Latin Church Music on the Continent: the Franco-Flemings in the North’, The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, NOHM, iv (1968), 218–311

ed.: ‘Carlo Gesualdo’, Musique de tous les temps, xlix (1969)

‘Les illustrations musicales des oeuvres de Boccaccio dans les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris’, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento II: Certaldo 1969 [L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)] 105–30

‘André Pirro et les pays latins’, Quadrivium, xii/2 (1971), 376–86

‘On the Discography of Josquin and the Interpretation of his Music in Recordings’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 633–41

‘Les thèmes musicaux de l'Apocalypse’, Musica e arte figurativa nei secoli X–XII: Todi 1972, 197–222

‘France and Burgundy: 1300–1500’, Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, A History of Western Music, i, ed. F.W. Sternfeld (London, 1973), 145–73

‘L'album di Gesina Ter Borch’, Studi musicali, ii (1973), 257–65

La musique italienne (Paris, 1973)

‘Geneviève Thibault, comtesse de Chambure’, RdM, lxii (1976), 195–203 [obituary]

‘De l'attribution à Tinctoris des exemples musicaux du Liber de arte contrapuncti’, A Festschrift for Albert Seay, ed. M.D. Grace (Colorado Springs, CO, 1982), 33–43

La musique à Venise (Paris, 1984)

‘Paroles et musique dans le manuscrit latin 16 664 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris’, Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. U. Günther and L. Finscher (Kassel, 1984), 383–409

‘Portraits de musiciens: le dernier avatar de Monteverdi’, Imago musicae, iv (1987), 161–9

‘L'homme-Monteverdi d'après sa correspondance et le jugement de quelques-uns de ses contemporains’, Musiques – signes – images: liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. J.-M. Fauquet (Geneva, 1988), 33–40

ed.: Manuscrits de musique polyphoniques XVe et XVIe siècles (Munich, 1991)

EDITIONS

G.B. Bovicelli: Regole passaggi di musica 1594 (Kassel and Basle, 1957) [facs. edn]

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/JEAN GRIBENSKI

Briegel, Wolfgang Carl

(b Königsberg, nr Coburg, May 1626; d Darmstadt, 19 Nov 1712). German composer and organist. He attended the grammar school at Nuremberg and was a treble at the Frauenkirche there under J.A. Herbst. He was strongly influenced by Kindermann, S.T. Staden and J.M. Dilherr. After studying for four terms at Altdorf University he became organist of St Johannis, Schweinfurt, and teacher at the grammar school there. At the end of 1650 Duke Ernst the Pious summoned him to his court at Gotha as cantor and music tutor to his family, and he allowed him to rise gradually to the post of Kapellmeister. His work there made him widely known, and through it he got to know J.R. Ahle and members of the Bach family. Duke Ernst's eldest daughter, who was married to Landgrave Ludwig VI of Hessen-Darmstadt, called Briegel to Darmstadt as Kapellmeister in 1671; he held this post until his death, although in his later years he was assisted by J.C. Graupner and E.C. Hesse.

At Gotha Briegel attracted attention with the publication of his Evangelische Gespräch, dialogue cantatas for the liturgical year in varied forms made up of solos, choruses and chorales. His Evangelischer Blumengarten, on the other hand, consists of motets and meditative choral songs. Among his solo songs his settings of odes by Andreas Gryphius is the only set of German Baroque songs that might be regarded as a cycle. At Darmstadt he produced several stage works. None of the music has survived, but his dramatic dialogues and lively Tafelkonfekt possibly give an idea of what some of it was like. As soon as Briegel arrived at Darmstadt the landgrave and his wife gave him the task of renewing their church music, which had been allowed to lapse. He accordingly brought out cantatas for the liturgical year for the choirs of the towns and villages, which showed that he was willing to restrict himself to a simple medium. His settings of J.S. Kriegsmann, Christian Rehefeld and J.G. Braun are short, but the Trostquelle and Lebensbrunn comprise cantatas in several movements deployed in new formal groupings. Here as in other works his gift for devising clear and eloquent melodies is evident. Das grosse Cantional, written at the request of the landgravine, is an essentially traditional collection. Briegel's late works, such as the Busspsalmen and the Concentus apostolico-musicus, include contrapuntal choruses which are direct forerunners of those of Bach. His music enjoyed an extraordinarily wide circulation throughout Germany and in Scandinavia.

WORKS

stage

librettos only extant

Von den freien Künsten, ballet, 2 July 1661, Gotha; Musikalischer Freudenwunsch, ballet, 1 Oct 1665, Gotha; Wedding ballet, 5 Dec 1666, Gotha; Das verliebte Gespenst, op, 1673, Darmstadt; Triumphierendes Siegespiel der wahren Liebe (comédie, 1, J. Mylius), 8 June 1673, Darmstadt; Das verbesserte Parisurteil, opera-ballet, 6 Jan 1674, Darmstadt; Die beglückwünschte Majorennität des Fürsten, 22 June 1676, Darmstadt; Quadriga activa, festival piece, 25 Jan 1677; Bewillkommende Frühlingsfreude, ballet, 6 May 1683; Das Band der beständigen Freundschaft, singspiel, 8 May 1683, Darmstadt; Die siegende Weisheit, 8 Jan 1686; Die wahren Seelenruhe oder gekrönte Eustathia, tragi-comedy, May 1686, Darmstadt; Die triumphierende Tugend, opera-ballet, 29 July 1686, Darmstadt; L'enchantement de Medée, ballet, 11 Nov 1688, Darmstadt; Tugendgespräch, allegorical comedy, 19 Nov 1700

Other ballets and incidental music for plays, 1683, 1687, 1700, ?1705

cantatas

Evangelische Gespräch I–III, 5–10vv (Mühlhausen and Darmstadt, 1660–81); no.6 of vol.iii ed. F. Noack, Kirchenmusik der Darmstädter Musiker des Barock, iii (Berlin, 1955)

Evangelischer Blumengarten I–IV, 4vv, bc (Gotha, 1660–69); 6 pieces ed. K. Ameln and H. Kümmerling, Biblische Motetten für den Kirchengesang (Kassel, 1970)

J.S. Kriegmanns Evangelisches Hosianna, 1–5vv, insts, bc (Frankfurt, 1677); no. 5 ed. F. Noack, Vier kleine Kantaten (Wolfenbüttel, 1961), no.25 ed. E. Noack, Drei kleine Kantaten (Berlin, n.d.)

Musicalische Trostquelle, 4vv, 2/4 vn, bc (Darmstadt, 1679)

Musicalischer Lebensbrunn, 4vv, 4 insts, bc (Darmstadt, 1680)

Christian Rehefelds evangelischer Palmenzweig, 1–5vv, 2–5 insts, bc (Frankfurt, 1684); nos.15, 44, 56 ed. F. Noack, Vier kleine Kantaten (Wolfenbüttel, 1961)

J.G. Braunens … Cithara Davido-Evangelica, 4vv, 2 vn, bc (Giessen, 1685); no.62 ed. E. Noack, Drei kleine Kantaten (Berlin, n.d.)

Concentus apostolico-musicus, 3, 4vv, 2 vn, bc (Giessen, 1697)

MSS cants., D-Bsb, S-Uu

sacred vocal

Psalter Davids … Teil I, 4vv (Gotha, 1654)

Geistlicher musikalischer Rosengarten, 1–5vv, insts (Gotha, 1658)

Geistlicher Arien … Teil I, 1, 2vv, 2 and more vn, bc (Gotha, 1660)

Geistlicher Arien … Teil II, 1, 2vv, 2 and more vn, bc (Mühlhausen, 1661)

Die Verschmähete Eitelkeit [songs after J. Rist] (Gotha, 1669), lost

Geistliche Oden Andreae Gryphii, 1v, 2 vn, bc (Gotha, 1670); facs. in Thomas

12 madrigalische Trostgesänge, 5, 6vv (Gotha, 1670–71)

Geistliche Gespräche und Psalmen, 6vv, bc (Gotha, 1674)

Das grosse Cantional oder Kirchen-Gesangbuch (Darmstadt, 1687) [ed., with H. Müller]

Des Königs und Propheten Davids sieben Busspsalmen, 6vv/4vv, 2 vn, bc (Gotha, 1692)

Letzter Schwanen-Gesang, 4, 5vv, bc ad lib (Giessen, 1709)

10 wedding and funeral songs, 2–6vv, insts (Gotha, 1653–70)

1 funeral song, 4vv (Darmstadt, 1678)

3 funeral songs, 5vv (n.p., 1664–79)

Several occasional songs in collections (see Noack, 1963)

instrumental

10 Paduanen, 10 Galliarden, 10 Balletten, 10 Couranten, a 3, 4 (Erfurt, 1652)

Intraden, Sonaten, a 4, 5 (Leipzig and Erfurt, 1669)

Allemanden und Couranten (Jena, 1664); facs. edn 1970

Musikalisches Tafelkonfekt, 4vv, 2 vn, bc (Frankfurt, 1672)

Musikalischer Erquickstunden, 4vv, str, bc (Darmstadt, 1679); lost

MSS organ works, D-Dl; 8 fugues, ed. W. Krumbach, Die Orgel, ii/19 (Leipzig, 1962)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

E. Pasqué: Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am Hofe zu Darmstadt (Darmstadt, 1853–4/R)

J. Fölsing: Biographisches von Briegel bis 1712 (Darmstadt, 1853)

K.F. Hirschmann: Wolfgang Carl Briegel (Giessen, 1934)

H. Kaiser: Barocktheater in Darmstadt (Darmstadt, 1951)

A. Fett: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Gotha (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1952)

E. Noack: Wolfgang Carl Briegel: ein Barockkomponist in seiner Zeit (Berlin, 1963)

R.H. Thomas: Poetry and Song in the German Baroque (Oxford, 1963)

M. Geck: Die Vokalmusik Dietrich Buxtehudes und der frühe Pietismus (Kassel, 1965)

F. Krummacher: Die Überlieferung der Choralbearbeitungen in der frühen evangelischen Kantate (Berlin, 1965)

E. Noack: Musikgeschichte Darmstadts vom Mittelalter bis zur Goethezeit (Mainz, 1967)

F. Krummacher: Die Choralbearbeitung in der protestantischen Figuralmusik zwischen Praetorius und Bach (Kassel, 1978)

H. Huldt-Nystrøm: ‘What did the Pupils at the Christiana Cathedral Sing in the Seventeenth Century?’, Studia Musicologica Norvegica, v (1979), 27–48

H.M. Balz: ‘Orgelbau und Orgelmusik in Südhessen’, Ars Organi, xxvii (1979), 511–24

J. Scheitler: Das Geistliche Lied im deutschen Barock (Berlin, 1982)

M. Märker: Die protestantische Dialogkomposition in Deutschland zwischen Heinrich Schütz und Johann Sebastian Bach (Cologne, 1995)

ELISABETH NOACK/DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Briesger, Peter.

See Breisiger, peter.

Bright, Colin (Michael)

(b Sydney, 28 June 1949). Australian composer. Largely self-taught as a composer, he studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration in Sydney with Mary Egan and Christopher Nicholls. In 1975 he attended seminars with Rands and Berio and the following year was assistant to Sculthorpe and the composer and pianist with the improvisatory group Axis. From 1976 to 1977 he studied at the Aboriginal Studies Institute at Canberra; he later received an international fellowship from the Performing Arts Board of the Australian Council to study with Ton de Leeuw (1982–5). In 1986 he was guest composer at the New Music Festival in Buffalo, USA. Bright has received numerous commissions from Australia’s leading ensembles, and performances and broadcasts of his music have been given worldwide.

As a pianist, organist and songwriter for rock bands and cabaret, Bright has had a continued interest in many aspects of popular music, while his deep and continuing involvement in Aboriginal arts and social issues has provided the individual focus of his work. His experience as a specialist music teacher in disadvantaged primary schools in Sydney (1980–87) drew him closer to the plight of the underprivileged in society and the urban Aborigines in particular. Several dance and theatre pieces pay tribute to traditional Aboriginal singing and didgeridu playing against the persistent presence of an underlying and suggestive rhythmic murmur combined with melodic pattern weaving. These include The Dreamtime (1981), a work for music theatre on the subject of the Aranda Dreamtime, in support of Aboriginal land rights. Earth Spirit (1982) for four didjeridus and orchestra, Red Earth (1985) for chamber orchestra and the extended song cycle for voice and amplified instruments Midnight Tulips (1988) are among many other works which reflect Aboriginal and social concerns. Bright has also organized large-scale music events such as Narabeen Lakes: Echoes Now and Then, involving 190 musicians, writers, actors and broadcasters, and Fire on the Lake, a music-theatre piece for voice, electronics, didgeridu, dance and visuals for outdoor performance at three simultaneous sites.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: The Dreamtime (music theatre), 1981; Fire on the Lake (music theatre, C. and D. Bright), 1989; The Journey (op, J. Marsden), 1991; The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior (op, 1, A. Stewart), 1994

Orch: Earth Spirit, 1982; Young Green Tree (A Song of the Republic), conc., db, orch, 1992; Prelude to the Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, 1995; Oceania, orch suite, 1999 [from op The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior]

Chbr: Str Qt, 1977; Per Qt, 1980; Earth, Wind and Fire, sax qt, 1981; Tulpi-stick Talk, perc, 1984; Long Reef, ww qnt, str qnt, 1984; Red Earth, fl, cl + b cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1985; Music for Db Octet and Didjeridu, 1986; Kakadu, fl, vn, 1987; Midnight Tulips, v, fl, ob, cl, vn, vc, 2 synth, 2 b gui, perc, amp, 1988; Kakadu, fl, vn, 1987; Sun is God, str qt, 1989; Tales of the Big Bang, 3v, 2 synth, vc, perc, 1990; The Butcher’s Apron, 4 perc, 1991; El Niño Dances, kbd, sax/b cl/trbn, vn, elec gui, db, perc/sampler, amp, 1994

Vocal: Sun Woman: Kardin-Hilla said, S, S, A, A, 1994; War and Peace, 2 S, A, T, B, B-Bar, 1994

Mixed media: Places Alien, didjeridu, vv, elec, visuals and slide installation

Pf: Earth-flowering Time, 1987

Principal publisher: Sounds Australian

WRITINGS

‘An Australian Sound?’, Sounds Australian, no.23 (1989), 13–16, 19

‘Defining the Culture’, Sounds Australian, no.26 (1990), 23–4

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Southwood: Interview, ABC Radio 24 Hours (1993), May, 70–73

CHRISTINE LOGAN

Bright [Knatchbull], Dora (Estella)

(b Ecclesall Bierlow, York, 16 August 1862; d London, 16 Nov 1951). English composer, pianist and critic. She studied composition and the piano at the RAM (1881–9); together with Edward German she was a member of a group of young composers known as ‘The Party’, and frequently appeared at student concerts as a pianist and composer. Notable early works include the Air and Variations for string quartet, which in 1888 won the first Charles Lucas Medal to be awarded to a woman, and a Piano Concerto in A minor which she performed herself to critical acclaim at a variety of London concerts.

After leaving the RAM, Bright established herself as a pianist in Britain and Europe and promoted the music of British composers in her annual series of piano recitals and chamber concerts in London. Among the continuing high-profile performances of her works was an 1892 Philharmonic Society Concert, when her Fantasia in G minor for piano and orchestra was given. After her marriage to Wyndham Knatchbull in 1892, she gradually curtailed her public performances, though she continued to compose and hear her music played at important venues, including the Promenade Concerts. She turned increasingly to dramatic works and composed several mime dramas and ballets, developing a close working relationship with the dancer Adeline Genée. In her later years Bright worked as a music critic, producing reviews coloured by her resolute dislike of most contemporary music.

Her own distinctive musical style remained firmly rooted in clear-cut forms, appealing melodies and rich harmonies. Her published works, mostly piano pieces and songs, are accomplished and effective. Particularly drawn to variation form, her skill at extracting a range of emotions and moods from her material is displayed in works such as the Variations for piano and orchestra (1909).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Uncle Silas (incid music, S. Hicks and L.S. Irving after S. LeFanu), 1893; Scrooge (incid music, J.C. Buckstone after C. Dickens), 1901; The Dryad (pastoral fantasy) (1909); The Portrait (dance play, Bright), 1910; The Faun (ballet), 1911; The Abbé’s Garden (mimodrama), 1911; La Camargo (ballet), 1912; In Haarlem There Dwelt (music drama, Bright, after P. van der Meer), 1912; La Danse (ballet), 1912; The Princess and the Pea (ballet-pantomime), 1915; A Dancer’s Adventure (ballet), 1915; The Love Song (ballet), 1932; The Dancing Girl and the Idol (ballet); Quong Lung’s Shadow (op)

Orch: Concertstück, c, pf, orch, 1885; Pf Conc, a, 1888; Air with Variations, 1890; Suite, 1891; Fantasia, g, pf, orch, 1892; Pf Conc no.2, d, 1892; Liebeslied, 1897; Variations, pf, orch, 1909; Concertstück, 6 timp, orch, 1915; Suite Bretonne, fl, orch, 1917; Suite of Eighteenth-Century Dances, pf, orch; Suite of Russian Dances; Variations on an Original Theme; Vienna

Chbr: Air and Variations, str qt, 1888; Romance and Seguidilla, fl, pf (1891); Suite of 5 Pieces, vn, pf (1891); Qt, D, pf, vn, va, vc, 1893; 2 Pieces, vn/vc, pf (1934)

Pf: 2 Sketches, 1883; Theme and Variations, f, 2 pf, 1886; Suite, g, 1886; Variations on a Theme of Purcell’s, 2 pf, 1887; Variations on an Original Theme of Sir G.A. Macfarren’s, 2 pf (1894); Romanza and Scherzetto (1889); 3 Pieces (1895), arr. fl, pf; 4 Dances (1912) [from La Camargo, 1912]

Songs: Whither? (H.W. Longfellow) (1882); To Daffodils (R. Herrick), 1884; The Song of the Shirt (T. Hood), 1884; 12 Songs (Herrick, W. Shakespeare and others) (1889); 6 Songs from the Jungle Book (R. Kipling) (1903); The Ballad of the Red Deer (F. H.) (1903); Messmates (H. Newbolt) (1907); I know a lady sweet and kind (Herrick) (1913); The Orchard Rhymes (collab. E. Boyce) (1917); The Donkey (G.K. Chesterton) (1936)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FullerPG

D. Bright: ‘What has Happened to Music?’ MO, lxv (1941), 37–8

I. Guest: Adeline Genée: a Lifetime of Ballet under Six Reigns (London, 1958)

S. Fuller: Women Composers during the British Musical Renaissance (diss., U. of London, 1998)

SOPHIE FULLER

Brighton Festival.

The first event described as a festival in this seaside resort on the English south coast was in 1870, when a series of oratorio concerts at the Dome was organized on a subscription basis by Wilhelm Kuhe, a pupil of Tomášek and Thalberg, who came to England in 1847 and settled in Brighton as conductor, pianist and teacher. He organized annual choral festivals from 1871 until 1882, when mounting financial deficits caused them to be abandoned. A similar festival idea was briefly resumed in 1911 by Joseph Stainton, who engaged Elgar, Edward German and Coleridge Taylor as guest conductors, but this failed to take root.

Festivals under the artistic direction of Ian Hunter began in 1967 with a concert by the City of Warsaw PO. In the following year the range was extended by the formation of the Brighton Festival Chorus of 150 voices under László Heltay. An association was established with Alexander Goehr; new orchestral works of his were given in 1968 and 1972, and his Music Theatre Ensemble gave several experimental works by him in the years 1968–71. Classical opera has formed part of most festivals since 1971, mostly by British companies but also by visiting ones from Drottningholm, Sweden (1972 and 1987), Ludwigsburg (1976), the Warsaw Chamber Opera (1984), Poznań State Opera, who gave the British première of Penderecki's Die schwarze Maske in 1990, and the Moscow Chamber Opera in its UK début (1993). New Sussex Opera, formed in 1978, has contributed several ad hoc productions, including the first European performances of Weill's Lost in the Stars in 1991.

The scope of the festival greatly expanded under Gavin Henderson as artistic director (1983–94). Frequent appearances by leading British orchestras, performing mainly but not exclusively standard repertory, have been supplemented by others from abroad. Those making UK débuts at the festival have been the San Francisco SO (1973), the Australian Chamber Orchestra (1988), Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra (1991) and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra of Minnesota (1993). In 1995 Christopher Barron was appointed artistic director.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Henderson: ‘Brighton Festivals of the 19th Century’, Brighton Festival 1970 [programme book], 7

A. Dale: The Theatre Royal Brighton (Stocksfield, 1980)

NOËL GOODWIN

Brihuega [Viruega], Bernaldino de

(fl c1488–c1516). Iberian composer. A native of the town of Brihuega, north-east of Madrid, he was appointed a singer in the Aragonese royal chapel of Ferdinand V on 22 September 1510 and served there until the choir was disbanded following the king's death in January 1516. In 1488–9 a singer by the name of Brihuega was paid by the queen's personal treasurer for taking care of the keyboard instruments at court, and in 1492 an ‘hombre de camara’ called Bernaldino de Brihuega was remunerated for transporting two organs from Cordoba to Granada. It seems likely that at least the first of these payments was made to Rodrigo de Brihuega who served as a singer and organist in the Castilian royal chapel from 23 April 1464; he received many favours, and continued to serve Isabella for over 40 years, his name only disappearing from the records after her death in 1504. Whether Rodrigo and Bernaldino were related is not clear, but, given the strong family ties among musicians at court, it must be a strong possibility. It is not clear which one of them was the composer of two songs attributed to ‘Brihuega’ in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio. Bernaldino is perhaps the more likely candidate given the relatively late inclusion of the songs in the cancionero and given that the musical idiom displays all the hallmarks of the post-Encina villancico of the first decades of the 16th century. The bucolic dialogue Domingo, fuese tu amiga (ed. in MME, v, 1947, no.69), with its lively rhythms and strong characterization, is markedly in the Encinian mould; ¿Que vida terná sin vos? (ed. in MME, v, 1947, no.222) is a conventional but nonetheless elegant setting of a courtly love poem by Quirós.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StevensonSM

F. Asenjo Barbieri, ed.: Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, 1890/R), 25

T. Knighton: Music and Musicians at the Court of Fernando of Aragon, 1474–1516 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1984), i, 258

E. Casares, ed.: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri: Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles, Legado Barbieri, i (Madrid, 1986), 100

TESS KNIGHTON

Brillante

(It.: ‘sparkling’, ‘glittering’).

An indication of mood found as early as Brossard's Dictionaire (1703) and in most subsequent dictionaries. Allegro brillante is found, for instance, in Boccherini; and Verdi marked the opening scene of La traviata with the superlative: allegro brillantissimo e molto vivace. In the 19th century brillante and its French equivalent, brillant, became fashionable for titles of virtuoso pieces, as in Weber's Rondo brillante op.62 and Chopin's Variations brillantes op.12.

For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.

DAVID FALLOWS

Brille, Joachim

(fl mid-17th century). French composer. He was maître de musique at Soissons Cathedral when the publisher Robert Ballard issued his only known work, Missa … ad imitationem moduli Nigra sum sed formosa (Paris, 1668). For four voices without instrumental support, it employs chiavette and demonstrates a skilful command of imitative counterpoint resembling that of Le Prince.

JEAN-CHARLES LÉON

Brillenbass

(Ger.: ‘spectacles bass’).

A German term for a notational abbreviation in music; it occurs where two alternating notes (or chords) are to be repeated several times (see Abbreviations, ex.2).

Brillon de Jouy, Anne Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt

(b Paris, 13 Dec 1744; d Villers-sur-Mer, Calvados, 5 Dec 1824). French harpsichordist, pianist and composer. Both her father and her husband were financial officers for the crown, and her wealth allowed her to maintain salons in the Marais district of Paris and down the Seine at Passy. She was the musical star of these soirées, which Benjamin Franklin dubbed his ‘opera’ during his years in Passy (1777–85). The violinist André-Noël Pagin was a member of her entourage, and Johann Schobert, Luigi Boccherini, Ernst Eichner and Henri-Joseph Rigel all dedicated sonatas to her (opp.6, 5, 3 and 7 respectively). In 1770, Charles Burney reported that

she had not acquired her reputation in music without meriting it. She plays with great ease, taste and feeling – is an excellent sightswoman. … She likewise composes and she was so obliging as to play several of her own pieces both on the harpsichord and piano forte accompanied with the violin by M. Pagin.

She possessed an English piano sent by J.C. Bach, a German piano and a harpsichord, and she specified this instrumentation in two keyboard trios.

The surviving library of her own music and scores by other composers is the only such collection associated with a French harpsichordist, almost all of it from the 1760s to the early 80s. In addition, Franklin preserved her voluminous correspondence. The music documents the transition from harpsichord to piano in France, demonstrating that although the differences between the two instruments were appreciated by performers and listeners, they were not yet exploited by composers. Her compositions have the charm of galant simplicity, and although there are occasional technical lapses, she displays both taste and originality. Her signature tune was a Marche des insurgents, written to celebrate the American victory at Saratoga (1777).

WORKS

most MSS in US-PHps; catalogue in Gustafson (1987); revised in Gustafson 1999

Marche des insurgents, orch

44 kbd sonatas: 1 unacc.; 38 with vn [incl. 1 doubtful], 1 ed. in Women Composers: an Historical Anthology, v (New York, 1998); 3 with vn, vc/b; 1 with 2 vn, vc; 1 with fl [doubtful]

6 sonatas for multiple kbd or hp, kbd [incl. 1 doubtful], ed B. Gustafson, Madame Brillon: Multiple Keyboard Works (Madison, WI, forthcoming); 1 ed. B. Garvey Jackson (Fayetteville, AR, 1993)

Vocal: 35 songs, incl. romances, canzonettas, pastorals, marches with kbd acc.; 1 aria and 1 cantatille with orch acc.; 5 ed. B. Garvey Jackson, Songs of Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy and Maria Cosway (Fayettevill, AR, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

FétisB

GerberL

SainsburyD

L. de La Laurencie: ‘Benjamin Franklin and the Claveciniste Brillon de Jouy’, MQ, ix (1923), 245–59

C.-A. Lopez: Mon Cher Papa, Benjamin Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, CT, 1966; rev. 1990 as Le sceptre et la foudre: Benjamin Franklin à Paris)

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, xxiii– (New Haven, CT, 1983–)

B. Gustafson: ‘The Music of Madame Brillon: a Unified Collection from Benjamin Franklin’s Circle’, Notes, xliii (1986–7), 522–43

B. Gustafson and D.Fuller: A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780 (Oxford, 1990)

B. Gustafson: ‘Madame Brillon et son salon’, RdM, lxxxv (1999), 297–332

BRUCE GUSTAFSON

Brimle [Brameley, Bramley], Richard

(fl c1558–66). English church musician and composer. He contributed 11 harmonizations to John Day’s The Whole Booke Psalmes (1562), and may have been related to John Brimley, organist of Durham Cathedral before and after the Reformation.

Brimle is probably to be identified with the ‘Brameley’ who appears in the lists of ‘singing-men’ at King’s College, Cambridge, for the Michaelmas quarter 1558–9 and who from 1560 to 1573 was also instructor choristarum there. (During the following two quarters he was paid for ‘gettynge songes and pryckynge them’.) In 1562–3 he was appointed magister choristarum at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there until the end of the Lent term 1566. Presumably he held the two Cambridge posts in plurality. An incomplete five-part Miserere by ‘Bramley’ in the Royal College of Music, London (GB-Lcm 1882), may be by Brimle or John Brimley. (W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538, Oxford, 1991)

PETER LE HURAY/JOHN MOREHEN

Brimley [Bramley, Brimlei, Brymley], John

(b c1502; d Durham, 13 Oct 1576). English organist and composer. He was the last lay cantor (and thus also organist) at Durham Priory before the liturgical Reformation of 1549; he served at Durham Cathedral until his death. He appears to have continued to adhere to the Catholic faith after the Reformation.

Brimley's liturgical works are few, and survive only in manuscripts. They comprise a Te Deum and Benedictus (of which the tenor part is found in GB-DRc C13) and a five-part setting of the Responses to the Commandments intended for use in conjunction with the Creed from Sheppard's Second Service (GB-DRc E4–E11, E11a and C13). He also composed a five-part instrumental Miserere (GB-Lcm 2049). Brimley is buried in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral, where his epitaph can still be seen. A Richard Brimle, who may have been related to John Brimley, contributed 11 harmonizations to John Day's The Whole Psalmes in Foure Partes (RISM 1563⁸).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le HurayMR

A Description or Briefe Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites and Customes belonginge or beinge within the Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression (MS, 1593); ed. J. Raine (London, 1842)

C.W. Eden: Organs Past and Present in Durham Cathedral (Durham, 1970)

B. Crosby: Durham Cathedral: Choristers and their Masters (Durham, 1980)

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

JOHN MOREHEN

Brind, Richard

(d London, March 1718). English musician. He was a chorister of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, presumably under John Blow and Jeremiah Clarke. Following Clarke’s death he was admitted vicar-choral (1708) and succeeded him as organist, while Charles King took over the post of Master of the Choristers. According to Hawkins, Brind was ‘no very celebrated performer’, and, although five anthems are listed in Divine Harmony (London, 1712), none of his compositions survives. He is chiefly remembered as the teacher of Maurice Greene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HawkinsH

H.W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists (Oxford, 1991), 176

WATKINS SHAW/IAN SPINK

Brindis de Salas, Claudio José Domingo

(b Havana, 4 Aug 1852; d Buenos Aires, 1 June 1911). Cuban violinist. He was the son of the violinist, composer and dance orchestra conductor Claudio Brindis de Salas (1800–72) and received his early musical training from him and from another black musician, José Redondo. His talent came to light at an early age, and he became a pupil of the Belgian José Van der Gucht, who played first violin in several groups in Havana. In 1869 Brindis de Salas travelled to Paris and entered the Conservatoire, where he studied with Charles Dancla, David, Sivari and Léonard, and won a premier prix. He subsequently travelled to Milan, Berlin, St Petersburg and London. In 1875 he toured various cities of Central and South America, reappearing in Havana in 1877 to great critical acclaim. His success prompted the coining of such nicknames as ‘the Black Paganini’ and ‘the King of the Octaves’. He was much in demand in European and American concert halls, and occasionally returned to Cuba. From 1880 to 1900 he lived in Berlin, where he served Emperor Wilhelm II of Prussia, who made him a baron. He wrote a few pieces for violin, including a Barcarola, but did not achieve recognition as a composer. His performances were noteworthy for their brilliance and subtlety, his agility in portamentos, his powerful and flexible bow and perfect rendition of virtuoso passages. In later life his performing abilities declined, and he died in poverty.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Carpentier: La música en Cuba (Mexico City, 1946, 2/1979)

E. Martín: Panorama histórica de la música en Cuba (Havana, 1971)

N. Guillén: Brindis de Salas (Havana, 1979)

VICTORIA ELI RODRÍGUEZ

Brindisi

(It., ? from Sp. brindis, from Ger. bring dir’s).

An invitation to a company to raise their glasses and drink; a song to this effect. Such songs, usually solos with choral response, are common in 19th-century opera; well-known examples occur in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Verdi’s Macbeth, La traviata and Otello and Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.

ANDREW PORTER

Brindle, Reginald Smith.

See Smith brindle, reginald.

Brindley, Charles.

English organ builder. He established a business in Sheffield in 1854. A follower of Edmund Schulze, he built solid instruments with powerful choruses using Vogler’s Simplification system. Pipes placed in chromatic order on the soundboards allowed for a simple and reliable key action and permitted similar stops to share the same bass; this kept both space and cost to a minimum. The Swell organ was often mounted above the Great as an Oberwerk in the German manner. Brindley went into partnership with Foster in 1884 and began to manufacture more complex pneumatic mechanisms for stop combinations; he also concentrated on the production of orchestral effects. The business was absorbed by Willis in 1939. An unspoilt example of Brindley’s work dating from 1863 survives in Christ Church, Market Drayton, Shropshire. A full discussion of the works of Charles Brindley is given in J.R. Knott: A Study of Brindley & Foster, Organbuilders of Sheffield, 1854–1939 (Bognor Regis, 1974, 2/1985).

MICHAEL SAYER

Briner, Andres

(b Zürich, 31 May 1923). Swiss musicologist and music critic. He studied at Zürich Conservatory and at Zürich University, where he took the doctorate with Hindemith in 1955 with a dissertation on the concept of time in music. After working for a short time at Radio Zürich, he served as assistant professor of music history and music theory at the University of Pennsylvania (1955–64). In 1964 he was appointed music critic of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the following year succeeded Willi Schuh as its music editor. He retired in 1988. Like his predecessor, Briner based his critical judgments of the works being performed on a detailed analysis of the score. Briner is known primarily for his work on Hindemith, having written one of the first comprehensive studies on the composer ever published (1971); he has also examined 20th-century Swiss composers and the music history of Zürich. He was appointed president of the Paul Hindemith Foundation in 1985 and in 1995 Yale University awarded Briner the Certificate of Merit for his contributions to Hindemith scholarship.

WRITINGS

Versuch über die musikalische Zeitgestalt und ihre Wandlung in der europäischen Musik seit der mensuralen Mehrstimmigkeit (diss., U. of Zürich, 1955; Zürich, 1955 as Der Wandel der Musik als Zeit-Kunst)

Das Musikbild und die Hausorgel im Landgut ‘Zur Schipf’ in Herrliberg-Zürich (Zürich, 1961)

‘Friedrich Nietzsche als Musiker’, SMz, cii (1962), 271–6

‘Ein anonymer unvollständiger Musiktraktat des 15. Jahrhunderts in Philadelphia, USA’, KJb, l (1966), 27–44

Musikgeschichte aus der Perspektive Zürichs: die Neujahrsblätter der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft Zürich 1813–1965 (Zürich, 1966)

Paul Hindemith (Zürich and Mainz, 1971)

‘Hindemith und Adornos Kritik des Musikaten’, Hindemith-Jb 1971, 26–42

‘Die erste Textfassung von Paul Hindemiths Oper “Die Harmonie der Welt”’, Festschrift für einen Verleger: Ludwig Strecker, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1973), 203–41

‘Paul Hindemith et l’idée d’une communauté musicale’, Hindemith-Jb 1973, 20–39

‘Zu Gottfried von Einems Dürrenmatt-Oper Der Besuch der alten Dame’, Views and Reviews of Modern German Literature: Festschrift for Adolf D. Klarmann, ed. K.S. Weimar (Munich, 1974), 251–7

ed.: Briefe Busonis an Edith Andreae (Zürich, 1976)

with others: Briefe an Volkmar Andreae: ein halbes Jahrhundert Zürcher Musikleben, ed. M. Engeler (Zürich, 1986)

‘Die Unvernunft der Muse in Othmar Schoecks Kompositionen’, Auseinandersetzung mit Othmar Schoeck: Berne 1986, 19–33

with D. Rexroth and G. Schubert: Paul Hindemith: Leben und Werk in Bild und Text (Zürich, 1988)

‘Unveröffentliche Klavierlieder Paul Hindemiths: Vertonungen von Gedichten von Claudius, Novalis, Angelus, Silesius, und Brentano’, Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Just and R. Wiesend (Tutzing, 1989), 513–29

‘Die Musikstadt in der Schweiz: Zürich als Wiege des Chorgesangs’, Schweizer Monatshefte, lxxi/7–8 (1991), 609–20

‘A propos du concerto pour violoncello et orchestre’, Norbert Moret, compositeur: études et témoignages, ed. L.-M. Suter (Lausanne, 1993), 38–43

ed. G. Schubert: Musikalische Koexistenz: Vorträge, Essays, Kritiken (Mainz, 1993)

‘Paul und Gertrud Hindemiths literarische Interessen: eine Studie aufgrund der Bibliothek in Blonay und einiger Materiellen im Hindemith-Institut’, Hindemith-Jb 1993, 158–99

‘Paul Hindemiths Privatbibliothek (Musikalien)’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., xiii–xiv (1993–4), 275–330

ed., with T. Garmann and F. Meyers: Rudolf Kelterborn: Komponist, Musikdenker, Vermittler (Berne, 1993) [incl. ‘Zu Rudolf Kelterborns Opern’, 51–65]

Von Johannes Brahms zu Arnold Schönberg: die ‘Novitäten’ in der ‘Neuen Tonhalle’ Zürich von 1895 (Zürich, 1995)

JÜRG STENZL

Brinkmann, Reinhold

(b Wildeshausen, 21 Aug 1934). German musicologist, active in the USA. After completing studies in school music at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg (1955–61), he studied musicology at Freiburg University with Eggebrecht and German philology with Walter Rehm and Friedrich Maurer. He took the doctorate at Freiburg with a dissertation on Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke op.11 in 1967. From 1967 to 1970 he was assistant lecturer at the musicological institute of the Free University, Berlin, where in 1970 he completed the Habilitation and in 1971 was appointed reader. In 1972 he became professor of musicology at the University of Marburg. He was appointed chairman in 1976 of the Institut für neue Musik und Musikerziehung, Darmstadt, whose publications he also edited (1978–80), and became professor at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, in 1980. In 1985 he was appointed professor at Harvard, where he was named James Edward Ditson Professor of Music in 1990 and acted as department chair, 1990–94. He was made an honorary professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1996; he is also an editor for Archiv für Musikwissenschaft and has prepared several volumes for the Schoenberg collected edition. Brinkmann is considered an important music scholar in both Germany and the USA. He has written on a range of 19th- and 20th-century composers, including Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Skryabin, Varèse, Ives and those of the Second Viennese School, particularly Schoenberg. In addition to music analysis, Brinkmann is known for his writings on the social history of music and his interest in interdisciplinary studies.

WRITINGS

Arnold Schönberg: Drei Klavierstücke op.11: Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1967; Wiesbaden, 1969)

‘Schönberg und George: Interpretation eines Liedes’, AMw, xxvi (1969), 1–28

‘Zur Entstehung der Zwölftontechnik’, ‘Anmerkungen zu Varèse’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 287–7, 313–16

‘Kompositorische Massnahmen Eislers’, Über Musik und Politik, ed. R. Stephan (Mainz, 1971), 9–22

‘Kritische Musik: Bericht über den Versuch H. Eislers’, Über Musik und Kritik, ed. R. Stephan (Mainz, 1971), 19–41

‘“Drei der Fragen stell’ ich mir frei”: zur Wanderer-Szene im 1. Akt von Wagners “Siegfried”’, JbSIM 1972, 120–62

‘Vom Pfeifen und von alten Dampfmaschinen: zwei Hinweise auf Texte Theodor W. Adornos’, Beiträge zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1975), 113–20

‘“… Einen Schluss machen!”: über externe Schlüsse bei Wagner’, Festschrift Heinz Becker, ed. J. Schläder and R. Quandt (Laaber, 1982), 179–90

ed., with W. Breig and E. Budde: Analysen: Beiträge zu einer Problemgeschichte des Komponierens: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart, 1984) [incl. ‘Lied als individuelle Struktur: ausgewählte Kommentare zur Schumanns “Zwielicht”’, 257–75]

‘Kleine Eroica-Lese’, ÖMz, xxxix (1984), 634–8

‘On the Problem of Establishing “Jugendstil” as a Category in the History of Music: with a Negative Plea’, Art Nouveau and Jugendstil and the Music of the Early 20th Century: Adelaide 1979 [Mma, xiii (1984)], 19–47

‘Wirkungen Beethovens in der Kammermusik’, Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Bonn 1984, 79–110

‘What the Sources Tell Us …: a Chapter of Pierrot Philology’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, x/1 (1987), 11–27; Ger. trans., enlarged in Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 679–93

‘The Lyric as Paradigm: Poetry and the Foundation of Arnold Schönberg's New Music’, German Literature and Music: Houston 1989, 95–129

Späte Idylle: die zweite Symphonie von Johannes Brahms (Munich, 1990; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1995)

‘Rezeptionsgeschichte und Wirkungspoetik: Versuch einer persönlichen Standortbestimmung’, Festschrift Hans-Peter Schmitz, ed. A. Eichhorn (Kassel, 1992), 31–42

‘Anton Webern: eine Situationsbeschreibung’, Vom Einfall zum Kunstwerk: der Kompositionsprozess in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. H. Danuser and G. Katzenberger (Laaber, 1993), 273–86

‘Varèse in Darmstadt: Dokumentarischer Bericht und kurzer Kommentar’, 50 Jahre Neue Musik in Darmstadt, ed. R. Stephan (Darmstadt, 1996)

‘The Fool as Paradigm: Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire and the modern artist’, Schönberg and Kandinsky: The Hague 1993, ed. K. Boehmer (Amsterdam, 1997), 139–67

Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum ‘Liederkreis’ Opus 39 (Munich, 1997)

ed., with C. Wolff: Driven into Paradise: the Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (1999)

‘Schoenberg the Contemporary: a View from Behind’, Festschrift for Leonard Stein (Berkeley, forthcoming)

EDITIONS

Arnold Schönberg: Sämtliche Werke, A/4: Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen (Mainz, 1968) [with E. Steuermann]; B/4: Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen: Kritischer Bericht (Mainz, 1975); B/24/i: Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten: ‘Pierrot lunaire’: Kritischer Bericht (Mainz, 1996); A/24: Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten (Mainz, forthcoming); B/24/ii: Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten: ‘Herzgewächse’, ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’, ‘Nachtwandler’: Fragmente, Kritischer Bericht (Mainz, forthcoming)

HANS HEINRICH EGGEBRECHT/R

Brinsmead.

English firm of piano manufacturers. John Brinsmead (b Weare Giffard, Devon, 13 Oct 1814; d London, 17 Feb 1908) founded the firm in Windmill Street, London, in 1835. His sons Thomas James Brinsmead (d London, 9 Nov 1906) and Edgar Brinsmead (b London, March 1848; d London, 28 Nov 1907) became partners in 1863, when the firm took new premises in Wigmore Street. The firm became a limited company in 1900, by which time annual production totalled 2000 pianos. Following John Brinsmead’s death, the firm was run by his grandson Henry Billinghurst until a long strike in 1920 led the firm into receivership and Walter Saville, a director of J.B. Cramer & Co., purchased the controlling interest in the firm for £4000 in 1921. Manufacture of the Brinsmead and Cramer pianos continued until 1964, when the firm was bought out by Kemble & Co, which retains the title purely as a brand name.

Although the firm made grand pianos, John Brinsmead had built up a wide reputation for good-quality upright pianos at moderate prices. The firm won prizes at several international exhibitions, and an image of high quality was carefully developed through extensive advertising and press manipulation. Surviving instruments suggest that Brinsmead’s were good medium-class pianos, but not comparable with the best of those made in Germany and the USA. John Brinsmead’s major improvement to the upright piano (patented in 1885) included the use of a cast-iron frame which incorporated a flange projecting at the top, at right angles to the frame. The frame was in front of the soundboard, and the wrest pins, which were hollow so that the strings ran inside the pins, screwed into threads on the upper side of the flange. Tuning, effected by turning a nut, was simple and precise. The system demanded very accurate thread-cutting, and was used by other makers including Mason & Hamlin; it eventually became obsolete.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Brinsmead: The History of the Pianoforte (London, 1870/R, 4/1889)

A. Dolge: Pianos and their Makers (Covina, CA, 1911–13/R)

J. Hatton: How Pianos are Made (London, ?1912)

C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976, 2/1990)

MARGARET CRANMER

Brio

(It.: ‘vivacity’, ‘energy’, ‘fire’).

A descriptive term for a playing style of brilliance and dash. The tempo designation allegro con brio was used particularly often by Beethoven, e.g. in the openings of the Waldstein Sonata, the Third Symphony and the Fifth Symphony, and in the finale of the Seventh Symphony. His Third Piano Concerto opens allegro con brio with a time signature, though needing relatively slow performace. Con brio appears by itself both as a tempo designation and as an indication of mood. The fugue at the end of Verdi's Falstaff is headed allegro brioso, crotchet = 120. Koch (Musikalisches Lexikon, 1802) translated brioso as ‘fröhlich und männlich’ (‘cheerful and masculine’).

For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.

DAVID FALLOWS

Brioschi [Briochi, Briuschi, Prioschi], Antonio

(fl c1725–c1750). Italian composer. His name suggests that he may have come from Briosco, close to Milan. He probably worked near Milan, since some of his music was published with that of G.B. Sammartini in Paris and London, and six symphonies in Prague (CZ-Pnm) are in a Milanese hand. He is identified as a Milanese composer on some symphony manuscripts, and should be considered representative of the Milanese symphonic school. Ten symphonies are ascribed to both Brioschi and Sammartini, and Brioschi evidently knew Sammartini’s music, as he modelled the Andante of one of his symphonies (F-Pc Fonds Blancheton op.2 no.61 and US-BEm 103) on the Largo of a Sammartini symphony (Jenkins and Churgin, no.65), dated before January 1738.

Brioschi was a popular and prolific early symphonist. Of the extant symphonies attributed to him, the authorship of at least 51 appears to be certain; 22 of these can be dated to about 1741 or earlier, and three are among the earliest of all known dated symphonies. These three works have connections with Casale Monferrato, south-west of Milan: one was incorporated into a Hebrew cantata for the holy day Hoshana Rabbah (ed. I. Adler, Jerusalem, 1992; overture ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. A, iii, New York, 1985), performed there in October 1733, and the other two are dated 1734 in manuscripts in Casale Monferrato (I-CMbc; ed. in RRMCE, li 1998). Prints and manuscripts of Brioschi’s symphonies exist in about 30 European and American libraries. His music was especially popular in Paris, Prague, Stockholm and Darmstadt. 29 works are listed in the Breitkopf catalogues of 1762, 1763 and 1766 (including works listed under other names).

25 authentic symphonies in the Fonds Blancheton of the Paris Conservatoire library, compiled c1740–44, are among the most important in the earliest stage of the symphony, and exemplify the leading role played by Milan as the main centre of early symphonic writing. They bear such titles as ‘sinfonia’, ‘overtura’, ‘sonata’ and ‘trio’, and consist of three movements in the order fast–slow–fast. Scored for a string orchestra in three or four parts (eight and 17 works respectively), they feature a mixture of Baroque traits (a beat-marking bass, one- or two-bar modules, independent part-writing and sequential harmony) and Classical rhetoric, especially in structure and harmony. All works use major keys, favouring B, D, E and G; slow movements are usually in relative or parallel minor keys, especially G minor, but subdominant or dominant major keys also occur. First movements, typically marked Allegro, employ common time or alla breve metres (though other metres, such as 3/4, 12/8 and 6/8, sometimes appear). Second movements are usually designated as Largo or Andante, seven of them being marked sempre piano. While Brioschi favoured 2/4 metre for these, he also exploited varied metres, such as common time and 3/4. The finale is most commonly a buffo Presto in 2/4 time; eight finales are dance types in 3/8.

The outer movements of Brioschi’s symphonies have two main parts, each repeated. All the first movements and several finales display sonata-form procedures. The primary theme, which may contain a mosaic-like succession of contrasting motifs, is usually the longest unit; the remaining thematic functions are less defined. Expositions may contain extensive derivations. Developments are long and complex, featuring thematic recombination, variant forms of themes and new material. Recapitulations tend to be condensed and reformulated after an exact (or almost exact) recall of the primary theme, ideas from the development sometimes being integrated. More heterogeneous forms characterize the second movements; among 13 in sonata form, six have no development section and eight employ a special, non-modulating layout. Brioschi’s music gains vitality from a highly active second violin part (a Milanese trait), wide melodic leaps, and frequent syncopations. Textures change frequently, alternating homophonic passages with independent part-writing and imitation, reduced texture, solo–tutti effects and unisons.

WORKS

published ‘sonatas’ are symphonies (except op.1 no.4)

XII Sonate (G, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, B, G, D, F), 2–3 vn, bc, op.1 (Paris, 1741–2); no.11 by Hasse

[6] Sonate (G, E, F, G, E, B), 2 vn, va, bc, op.2 (Paris, 1745)

4 sonatas, 2–3 vn, bc: nos.2 (B), 6 (B), 10 (E), 12 (B) in G.B. Sammartini, XII sonate op.2 (Paris, 1741–2), attrib. G. Sammartini

6 sonatas, 2 vn, bc: no.3 (E) in G.B. Sammartini, 6 Sonatas op.1 (London, 1744); no.5 (E) in G.B. Lampugnani and Sammartini, 6 Sonatas (London, 1744); nos.3 (A), 4 (B), 5 (G) in Sammartini, Brioschi and others, 6 Sonatas (London, 1746); no.2 (G) in Sinfonie … dei piu celebri autori d’Italia (Paris, 1747)

Sym. no.2 (E), in 6 simphonies a 4 e 5 parties del Sigr. Sans Martini et Briochi (Paris, c1750); ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. A, iii (New York, 1985)

Sym. (A), 2 vn, va, bc, in [Joseph] Camerloher, XII sinfonie op.4 no.8 (Paris, c1752–60)

In MS, principal sources CZ-Pnm, D-DS, F-Pn Fonds Blancheton, S-Skma: 91 string syms., concertinos and trio sonatas, a 3–4; 51 authentic syms., concertinos and a trio; at least 25 syms. doubtful, others not yet evaluated

Lost: Violons quatuor, 2e livre (Paris, 1751); 11 syms. (2 may be trios); conc., 2 ob, orch; 2 sonatas, 2 vn, bc, listed in Leclerc, Breitkopf, Egk and Lambach catalogues

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

G. de Saint-Foix: ‘La chronologie de l’oeuvre instrumentale de Jean Baptiste Sammartini’, SIMG, xv (1913–14), 308–24

L. de La Laurencie: Inventaire critique du Fonds Blancheton (Paris, 1930–31)

B.S. Brook, ed.: The Breitkopf Thematic Catalogue, 1762–1787 (New York, 1966)

N. Jenkins and B. Churgin: Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Giovanni Battista Sammartini: Orchestral and Vocal Music (Cambridge, MA,1976)

B. Churgin: ‘Introduction’, The Symphony, 1720–1840, ser. A., iii, ed. B. Churgin and T.A. Russell (New York, 1985), xi–xx

J. LaRue: A Catalogue of 18th-Century Symphonies, i: Thematic Identifier (Bloomington, IN, 1988)

S. Mandel-Yehuda: Early Symphonic Style as Reflected in the Symphonies of Antonio Brioschi (fl. ca. 1725–ca. 1750) in the Fonds Blancheton (diss., Bar-Ilan U., 1993)

J. LaRue and D.Cannata: ‘An Ancient Crisis in Music Bibliography: the Need for Incipits’, Notes, l (1993–4), 502–18

M. Brusa and A.Rossi: Sammartini e il suo tempo: fonti manoscritte e stampate della musica a Milano nel Settecento, Fonti musicali italiane, i (1996), suppl.

B.S. Brook and R. Viano: Thematic Catalogues in Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 2/1997)

S. Mandel-Yehuda: ‘Introduction’, Antonio Brioschi, Six Symphonies, RRMCE, li (1998), vii–xvi [Critical Report, 55–9]

S. Mandel-Yehuda: ‘The Symphonies of Antonio Brioschi: Aspects of Sonata Form’, Min-ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, i (1999)

B. Churgin: Thematic Index of the Compositions of Antonio Brioschi (MS)

BATHIA CHURGIN, SARAH MANDEL-YEHUDA

Briou, Nicolas-Antoine Bergiron de.

See Bergiron, nicolas-antoine.

Briquet

(fl early 15th century). ?French composer. His little two-voice rondeau Ma seule amour et ma belle maistresse (ed. in CMM, xi/2, 1959) appears in three manuscripts, two of them ascribed. He could be the Jehan de Villeroye, called ‘Briquet’, who was a sommelier de corps and diplomat at the court of Burgundy from 1388 to 1415, married in 1407, and was a member of Duke Philip the Good's court of love in 1416. A more likely candidate, however, would be the singer Briquet who came from Avignon to join the chapel of King Charles III of Navarre in 1396–7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PirroHM

H. Anglès: Historia de la música medieval en Navarra (Pamplona, 1970), 255

C. Wright: Music at the Court of Burgundy 1364–1419 (Henryville, PA, 1979)

DAVID FALLOWS

Briquet, Jean.

See Philipp, Adolf.

Brisbane.

Capital city of Queensland, Australia. The population was only 829 in 1846, but had risen to over 100,000 by 1900 (mostly owing to European migration) and 1.5 million in the 1990s. In the 1850s there were some visiting musicians; the first suitable venue for music was Mason's Concert Hall (1865). The most durable 19th-century musical societies were the choral and orchestral Brisbane Musical Union (established 1872, presenting mainly oratorios and cantatas) and the male-voice Brisbane Liedertafel (formed 1884), which merged with the Brisbane Orchestral Society in 1886. Many other choral and small orchestral groups were formed, but few survived. The first touring opera company came in 1864; from 1875 more arrived, particularly after the opening of the Theatre Royal in 1881 and the Opera House (later called Her Majesty's Theatre) in 1888.

The pioneer of band music was Andrew Seal, who arrived in 1857. Promenade concerts were popular, featuring vocal solos and ensembles from opera and instrumental arrangements. Bands represented the armed services (notably the Headquarters Band), the Salvation Army, particular occupations (e.g. police, railways or tramways) and local city or suburban areas. The activity of such groups has continued to the present.

The organist appointed to St John's Pro-Cathedral in 1873, Richard Jefferies, was outstanding in Brisbane's musical life up to 1900, promoting not only church music but also choral, orchestral and chamber music. He conducted Mendelssohn's Elijah at the opening of St Stephen's Roman Catholic Cathedral in 1874. He was succeeded as conductor of the Brisbane Musical Union by George Sampson in 1898. The first stage of St John's Anglican Cathedral was completed in 1910; Sampson was organist and choirmaster there, and at the Pro-Cathedral before that, for nearly 50 years (1898–1947), and conducted the Brisbane Musical Union choir to 1935. Another choral group of note was the Brisbane Austral Choir, conducted by E.R.B. Jordan. These amalgamated in 1936 as the Queensland State and Municipal Choir, still in existence as the official choir for the ABC. Other choirs were the Handel Society, which broadcast all of Handel's oratorios (many arranged by the conductor, Robert Dalley-Scarlett, from his private library of first-edition scores), the Bach Society and the Queensland University Musical Society (founded 1912).

By 1900 most middle-class homes boasted pianos, which were even being manufactured in Brisbane. Until 1930 (when the City Hall was opened), the main concert venue was the Exhibition Hall (built 1891). In the years before access to gramophone and radio, many amateur orchestral groups emerged, but most foundered because of a lack of interest in orchestral music in the community. The Brisbane Musical Union Orchestra, later called the Sampson Orchestra, was subsidized by the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council from 1923. The ABC Orchestra joined it in 1936 to form the Brisbane SO. The first full-time professional group, the Queensland SO (55 musicians), was formed by the ABC in 1947. It offers over 100 performances each year in subscription series, mostly in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Trust (completed 1985). In 1995 it played Mahler's Symphony no.8 and Wagner's Parsifal in the Brisbane Biennial Arts Festival. The Queensland PO, with 31 full-time players, was formed in 1976, originally to provide support for local opera and ballet companies. By far the most enterprising and successful amateur orchestra is the Queensland Youth Symphony, conducted by its founder, John Curro, since 1966.

Various local opera and light opera companies performed with government support from 1948 onwards. The Lyric Opera of Queensland (formed 1982) has staged three operas each year since the opening of the Lyric Theatre (run by the Performing Arts Trust) in April 1985. Musica Viva Australia has presented concerts given by Australian and overseas chamber groups since 1956. The Australian Chamber Orchestra also has a subscription series.

The University of Queensland (established 1910) had no lectureship in music until 1934. The Foundation Professor of Music (Noël Nickson) arrived in 1966; the Faculty of Music was established in 1967, initially offering both practical and academic subjects in a BMus degree course and later postgraduate degrees. After several decades of public lobbying, the government finally established a conservatorium, with courses beginning in 1957, the first director being William Lovelock. Now part of Griffith University, the conservatorium offers both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. There is also a degree course at Queensland University of Technology.

From the 1970s onwards Brisbane-based composers Colin Brumby and Philip Bracanin have earned national reputations; Mary Mageau and Betty Beath have also had many works performed. Younger composers include Gerard Brophy, Stephen Cronin, Robert Davidson, Kent Farbach, Stephen Leek, Peter Rankine and Nigel Sabin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (A.I. Gyger)

R.K. Boughen: An Account of the Music at St John's Cathedral (thesis, U. of Queensland, 1974)

A. Schultz: Brisbane Orchestras 1920 to 1947 (MS, 1981, U. of Queensland)

J. Dawson: Opera in Colonial Brisbane: the First Twenty-Five Years (1859–1884) (thesis, U. of Queensland, 1987)

F.J. Erickson: The Bands and Orchestras of Colonial Brisbane (diss., U. of Queensland, 1987)

J. Cargher: Bravo! 200 Years of Opera in Australia (Melbourne, 1988)

GORDON D. SPEARRITT

Bristol.

City and seaport. It is located on the west coast of England, near the junction of the River Avon and River Frome. It was at the height of its prosperity, which was reflected in its musical life, in the mid-18th century. A festival of St Cecilia on 22 November 1727 included possibly the first performance of Handel’s music outside London. The ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and Jubilate were performed in the cathedral, and a concert at St Augustine’s Back Theatre featured a number of other works by Handel. Simultaneously the ‘Gentlemen of the Musick Society’ assisted at a concert in Merchants’ Hall. After festivals in 1728 and 1730 the celebrations were replaced by annual benefit concerts, which ran until about 1760. The 1758 event included the first performance in England of Handel’s Messiah in any church apart from the chapel of the Foundling Hospital.

After the opening in 1756 of the Princes Street Rooms the popularity of the St Augustine’s Back Assembly waned. Among visiting musicians at the New Rooms were Charles and Samuel Wesley in the 1770s and the nine-year-old William Crotch in 1784. Regular concerts were given in the New Rooms until the opening of the New Assembly Room in Clifton in 1811. The Victoria Rooms, completed in 1842, staged various musical events including a recital by Jenny Lind in 1848. A triennial four-day festival conducted by Charles Hallé was inaugurated in 1873 after the opening in 1867 of the Colston Hall. The festival, which ran intermittently until 1912, featured lesser-known choral works such as Macfarren’s St John the Baptist (1873), which was specially written for the festival.

One of the earliest of Bristol’s many amateur musical groups is the Bristol Madrigal Society, founded in 1837 and initially directed by John Davies Corfe, and now known as the Bristol Chamber Choir. Other groups include the Bristol Choral Society, founded by George Riseley in 1889, and the Bristol Bach Choir, founded by Alan Farnill and Adrian Beaumont in 1967.

Music has flourished in the two cathedrals at Bristol. The first organ at the Anglican cathedral was built in 1685 by Renatus Harris, who spent his last years in the city, and was rebuilt by Mander in 1989. Organists at the cathedral in the 20th century have included Hubert Hunt (1901–45), Alwyn Surplice (1946–9) and Malcolm Archer (1983–9). The Roman Catholic cathedral in Clifton (consecrated in 1973) has established an active role in Bristol’s musical life under the leadership of David Ogden, director of music from 1990. St Mary Redcliffe, reportedly commended by Elizabeth I in 1574 as ‘the fairest, the goodliest and the most famous Parish Church in England’, also has a strong musical tradition. Its organ was built in 1912 by Harrison & Harrison, the firm who built the organ at the Colston Hall in 1956.

After being destoyed again by fire in 1945 the Colston Hall was reopened in 1951 with a seating capacity of 2180. Much praised for its acoustics, it is visited by many international ensembles and has had a long association with the Bournemouth SO. Other concert venues include the Arnolfini, where contemporary music performances are held, and St George’s, Brandon Hill, a 19th-century chapel renovated and equipped for recording by the BBC. The Bristol Hippodrome, built in 1912, has been host to many touring productions of musicals and in particular has featured performances by the WNO and the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The Bristol Old Vic Company, performing at the Bristol Theatre Royal, was the originator of the highly successful musical Salad Days in 1954, which was tailored to the resources of the repertory company and had music by the company musical director, Julian Slade. Salad Days transferred to London for a run of over five years and remains the only piece originated by the Bristol Old Vic Company to have maintained a prominent place in the repertory, although Slade’s Trelawny, written as the opening show of the redeveloped Theatre Royal in 1972, did transfer to London for a brief spell in the summer of that year. The most notable other musical first seen at the Bristol Theatre Royal is The Card, by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, which opened in Bristol in June and in London in July, 1973; the show is one of the earlier ventures of Cameron Mackintosh, who acted as co-manager. The university music department, founded in 1946, moved in 1996 to the Victoria Rooms, where the facilities include a concert hall and a recital room that contains a fine example of a William Drake chamber organ. The city has a specialist music library.

In popular music, Bristol came to prominence in the early 1990s with the emergence from the city’s influential and innovative dance music scene of such artists as Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, whose collective sound came to be known as Trip hop. The music of the drum ’n’ bass artist Roni Size is an example of the vital black contribution to the ‘Bristol sound’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.G. Hooper: A Survey of Music in Bristol with Special Reference to the Eighteenth Century (diss., U. of Bristol, 1963)

H. Byard: The Bristol Madrigal Society (Bristol, 1966)

W.L. Goodman: ‘Musical Instruments and their Makers in Bristol Apprentice Register, 1536–1643’, GSJ, xxvii (1974), 9–14

BETTY MATTHEWS, IAN STEPHENS, JILL TUCKER, JOHN SNELSON

Bristow, George Frederick

(b Brooklyn, NY, 19 Dec 1825; d New York, 13 Dec 1898). American composer, conductor, teacher and performer. He was the son of William Richard Bristow (1803–67), conductor and clarinettist in the New York area. After piano study with his father, his principal teachers were Henry Christian Timm for piano, George Macfarren for harmony, counterpoint and orchestration, and Ole Bull for the violin.

Bristow began his professional career as a violinist at the age of 13 with the Olympic Theatre orchestra, a group of six that performed in popular musical comedies. He joined the first violin section of the New York Philharmonic SO in its second season of 1843 (not 1842 as reported in other sources) and remained a member until 1879. In the 1850s he performed in and often led the violin section of such notable orchestras as Jullien’s (1853–4) and those that accompanied Jenny Lind (1850–51) and Marietta Alboni (1852). His versatility as a performer was also reflected in occasional public piano performances and in positions as church organist.

As a conductor, Bristow led such choral groups as the New York Harmonic Society (1851–63) and the Mendelssohn Society (1867–71) in performances of large choral and orchestral works. He also held posts as choir director in New York churches, principally St George’s Chapel (1854–60). As a public school teacher from 1854 to the end of his life and an author of several pedagogical works, Bristow contributed significantly to both public and private music education in New York.

With Anthony Philip Heinrich and William H. Fry, Bristow attempted to establish a native style in American art music. However, although Bristow’s works were often American in title or textual content (e.g. Rip Van Winkle, Jibbenainosay, The Great Republic, Columbus and The Pioneer) his music was typically European in the style of Mendelssohn. In his notable symphonies Bristow progressed from the early student work, Sinfonia in E (1848), which called for Classical orchestral forces, to the proportions of late Beethoven in his Niagara Symphony (1893), written for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra. The symphonic repertory with which he became acquainted as a performer greatly influenced his compositional style. Although his orchestrations and melodic-harmonic ideas exhibit solid craftsmanship, his larger forms are frequently over extended, with redundancies in thematic development. The chamber works, written during his early years, are especially unique and creditable representatives of a medium rarely explored by American composers in the 19th century.

Bristow's best-known works, including his opera Rip Van Winkle, oratorio Daniel, and symphonies in D minor, op.24, and F minor, op.26, have been revived in either recordings or live performances. However, many fine unknown works, such as his two string quartets, two duos for violin and viola, Arcadian Symphonie, Niagara Symphony, violin sonata, solo song The Abode of Music and piano piece Dreamland, which are all in manuscript, reveal a talented composer. A valuable autobiographical sketch, Life of a Musician, shows a strong sense of humour and provides much new information about his life.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in New York unless otherwise stated; MSS of unpublished works mainly in US-NYp; for more detailed list see Rogers

dramatic

Rip Van Winkle (op, 3, J.H. Wainwright, after W. Irving), op.22, 1852–5; New York, Niblo’s Garden, 27 Sept 1855; rev. 1878–82 (J.W. Shannon), vs pubd (1882/R)

Daniel (orat, W.A. Hardenbrook), solo vv, SATB, orch, op.42, 1866, lib. pubd (1867)

King of the Mountains (op, M.A. Cooney), op.80, 1894, inc.

sacred vocal

for SATB, organ, unless otherwise stated

To the Lord our God (sentence), S, A, T, B, op.15, 1850

I will arise (sentence) [op.23], ?1853

Morning Service (TeD, Jub, Ky), E, op.19 (1855), TeD separately pubd (1888)

Gloria Patri, Praise to God, solo vv, SATB, orch, op.31, vs pubd as op.33 (Boston, 1860)

Evening Service (Bonum est, Benedic anima mea), op.36 (1865)

Christ our Passover (Easter Anthem), op.39, ?1866

The Lord is in his holy temple (sentence), S, A, T, B, org, op.40, ?1866; rev. 1891 (inc.)

c130 hymns, chants, ?1867

4 Offertories, op.48, ?1870

Morning Service (TeD, Bs), op.51, ?1873; TeD pubd (1873)

Easy Morning Service, F [op.58], ?1881

There is joy today, SATB, pf, in Tonic Sol-Fa Advocate (Nov 1882)

Holy Night, SATB, pf, in Tonic Sol-Fa Advocate (Nov 1884)

Evening Service, G [op.56], 1885

Mass, C, solo vv, SATB, orch, op.57, 1885

Christmas Anthem (Light flashing into the darkness) (J. Elmendorf), op.73, 1887

O bells of Easter morning, SATB, pf, in Tonic Sol-Fa Advocate(March 1887)

Where the holly boughs are waving, SATB, pf, in Tonic Sol-Fa Advocate(Nov 1887)

Easter Anthem, solo vv, SATB, org [op.77], ?1894

Except the Lord build the house, S, A, chorus, org [op.79], ?1894

Sweet is the prayer [after pf study by S. Heller], op.81, ?1894

Come ye that love the Saviour's name [after H. Praher]

I heard a voice from heaven, S, A, T, B, org

Oh that the salvation of Israel, SATB, pf/org

O Lord, thy mercy, my sure hope, SATB [op.76] (sketch)

There's rest for all in heav'n, 1v, pf

secular vocal

choral

Ode, S, female vv, orch [op.29], ?1856

The Pioneer (H.C. Watson), cant., solo vv, SATB, orch, op.49, ?1872 [orig. intended as prol. to Arcadian Symphonie: see orchestral]

The Great Republic, Ode to the American Union (W.O. Bourne), solo vv, SATB, orch, op.47, vs pubd (1880)

Niagara Symphony, solo vv, SATB, orch, op.62, 1893

The Bold Bad Baron, male vv, ?1896

Call John, SATB

Ode Written for G. S., 1v, SATB, kbd (kbd part inc.)

songs for 1 voice, piano, unless otherwise stated

Thine eye hath seen the spot, ?1846, inc., part quoted in W.T. Upton: Art-Song in America (Boston, 1930/R1969 with suppl. 1938); The Welcome Back (Boston, 1848); I would I were a favorite flower, in The Message Bird: a Literary and Musical Journal (1 Dec 1849); The opening day (W.H. Carew), glee, SATB, pf, in The Message Bird (15 Feb 1850); The dawn is breaking o'er us, ?1852; Spring time is coming (Wainwright) (Springfield, MA, 1852); The Abode of Music (M. Marseilles), canzonet, op.31, 1855

The Cantilena: a Collection of Songs, Duets, Trios and Quartetts (1861) [130 works]; Keep step with the music of the Union, unison vv, orch, 1862, vs in The Centennial School Singer, ed. G.H. Curtis and W.O. Bourne (1876); Lily Song (1869); A Song of the Hearth and Home (W.P. Durfee) (1869); Only a little shoe (A.D.T. Cone) (1884); Woman's Love, ?1887; The ghost came bobbing up (Shannon); When morning's bright sun, 1v, orch

orchestral, chamber

Orch: Ov., E, op.3, 1845; Sinfonia, E, op.10, 1848; Captain Raynor's Quickstep, 1849; Serenade Waltz, 1849; Waltz, ?1849; La cracovian, vn, orch, op.13, 1850 [rev. of Duetto concertante, vn, pf, op.1, 1844]; Jullien Sinfonia, d, op.24, ?1853; Winter's Tale, ov., op.30, 1856; Symphonie, f, op.26, 1858; Columbus, ov., op.32, 1861; Arcadian Symphonie, op.50, 1872; Fantasie cromatica con fuga [arr. of J.S. Bach], op.53, 1879; Jibbenainosay, ov., op.64, ?1889

Chbr: Duetto concertante, vn, pf, op.1, 1844 [rev. as La cracovian, vn, orch, op.13, 1850]; Fantasie Zampa, vn, pf, op.17, 1844; Duo no.2, g, vn, va, 1845; Duo no.3, G, vn, va, op.8, 1845; Quartetto, str, F, op.1, ?1849; Quartetto, str, g, op.2, 1849; Violin Sonata, G, op.12, ?1849; Friendship, vn, pf, op.25, ?1855; The Judge, march, pf, perc, op.60, ?1886

keyboard

Pf: Rory O'Moore, variations (1842); Grand waltz de bravura, op.6 (1845); Grand duo … sur … La fille du régiment, pf 4 hands, op.7, 1845; Septour, pf duet, op.16, 1846; Dream of the Ocean [arr. of J. Gungl] (1849); Duo La fille du régiment, 2 pf, op.5, 1849; Andante et polonaise, op.18, ?1850 (n.d.); A Life on the Ocean Wave, op.21, ?1852; Souvenir de Mount Vernon, op.29 (1861); Eroica, op.38, ?1865; Raindrops, op.43, ?1867

La vivandière, op.51, ?1884; Dreamland, op.59, ?1885; Saltarello [op.61], ?1886; March, op.69, ?1887; Marche-caprice, op.51 (1890); School March, op.63 (Boston, 1893); Impromptu [op.76], ?1894 (inc.); Plantation Pleasures, op.82, ?1894; Plantation Memories no.2, op.83, ?1895; Plantation Memories no.3, ?1895; March Columbus (inc.); A Walk Around (inc.); arrs., transcrs.

Org: [53] Interludes, in Melodia sacra: a Complete Collection of Church Music, ed. B.F. Baker, A.N. Johnson, and J. Osgood (Boston, 1852); Pot pourri, op.28, 1856; Impromptu Voluntaries, op.45, pubd as 6 Pieces (1883); 6 Easy Voluntaries, op.72, in George F. Bristow's New and Improved Method for the Reed or Cabinet Organ (1887)

pedagogical works

with F.H. Nash: Cantata, or Teacher of Singing (1866, enlarged 2/1868)

George F. Bristow's New and Improved Method for the Reed or Cabinet Organ (1887)

Bristow's Two-Part Vocal Exercises, op.75 (1890–95)

Principal publishers: Pond, G. Schirmer, Ditson, Dodworth

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (C.N. Boyd)

EwenD

W.M. Thoms: ‘George F. Bristow’, American Art Journal, xxxvii (1882), 241–2

G.H. Curtis: ‘G.F. Bristow’, Music [Chicago], iii (1893), 547–64

‘Violinist and Composer; Sketch of his Life’,Music, xv (1899), 471–3

D.D. Rogers: Nineteenth-Century Music in New York City as Reflected in the Career of George Frederick Bristow (diss., U. of Michigan, 1967)

B.F. Kauffman: The Choral Works of George F. Bristow (1825–1898) and William H. Fry (1815–1864) (diss., U. of Illinois, 1975)

K.E. Gombert: ‘Leonora’ by William Henry Fry and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ by George Frederick Bristow: Examples of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Opera (diss., Ball State U., 1977)

T.J. Dox: American Oratorios and Cantatas, i (Metuchen, NJ, 1986), 25–9, 326

S. Ledbetter: Introduction to George F. Bristow: Rip Van Winkle, Earlier American Music, xxv (1991)

DELMER D. ROGERS

Britain, Radie

(b nr Silverton, TX, 17 March 1899; d Palm Springs, CA, 23 May 1994). American composer. After studying the piano with European-trained teachers in Clarendon, Texas, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, she enrolled at the American Conservatory, Chicago (BM 1921), where she studied with Heniot Levy, among others. She later studied the organ with Marcel Dupré in Paris (1923), the piano with Adele aus der Ohre in Berlin (1924) and composition with Albert Noelte in Munich (1924), where her first works were performed in 1926. Later that year, she accepted a post at the Girvin Institute of Music and Allied Arts, Chicago. Her orchestral work, Heroic Poem, won the Juilliard National Publication Prize in 1945; other orchestral works were performed by the Illinois SO and the Chicago SO. In 1935 and 1936 Britain was resident at the MacDowell Colony. She eventually settled in Hollywood, California, where she taught the piano and composition and continued to compose.

Britain’s music is romantic, colourful and often programmatic; melody plays a central role in her works and pitch material rarely strays from traditional tonal structures. One of her primary concerns was to forge an immediate connection with her audience. Nature, famous people and current events inspired many of her compositions, a number of which evoke the American West. Her autobiography is titled Ridin’ Herd to Writing Symphonies (Lanham, MD, 1996).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Ubiquity (musical drama, L. Luther), 1937; Carillon (op, R. Hughs), 1952; Kuthara (chbr op, 3, Luther), 1960; The Dark Lady Within (musical drama, W. Shakespeare), 1962; Western Testament (musical drama, S.L. Stadelman), 1964; 4 ballets, 2 children’s operettas

Orch: Prelude to a Drama (Ov. to Pygmalion), 1928; Sym. Intermezzo, 1928; Heroic Poem, 1929; Rhapsodic Phantasie, pf, 1933; Nocturn, 1934; Light, 1935; Southern Sym., 1935; Drouth, 1939; Ontonagon Sketches, 1939; Pastorale, 1939; Saturnale, 1939; Suite, str, 1940; St Francis of Assisi, 1941; San Luis Rey, 1941; Phantasy, ob, orch, 1942; Jewels of Lake Tahoe, 1945; Red Clay, 1946; Serenata sorrentina, 1946; Umpqua Forest, 1946; Paint Horse and Saddle, 1947; Cowboy Rhapsody, 1956; This is the Place, 1958; Cosmic Mist Sym., 1962; Kambu, 1963; Little Per Cent, 1963; Texas, 1987

Vocal (1v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Had I a Cave (R. Burns), 1925; Half Rising Moon (B. Tabb), 1925; Open the Door to Me (Burns), 1926; Hail Texas (Britain), 1927; Drums of Africa (R.L. Jenkins), chorus, 1934; Elegy (L. Luther), 1937; The Earth Does Not Wish for Beauty (Luther), 1940; Lasso of Time (A. Mckenzie), 1940; Love Still Has Something of the Sea (C. Sedley), 1952; The Star and the Child (J. Lancaster), chorus, 1956; Hush My Heart (A. Halff), 1961; Nisan (K. Hammond), chorus, 1961; Translunar Cycle (Hammond), 1970; many others

Chbr: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (Epic Poem), str qt, 1927; Legend, vn, pf, 1928; Str Qt, 1934; Prison, vn, pf, 1935; Chipmunks, ww, hp, perc, 1940; Barcarola, vn, pf, 1948; Casa del sogno, vn, pf, 1955; In the Beginning, 4 hn, 1962; Processional and Recessional, 4 trbn, 1969; Hebraic Poem, str qt, 1976; Ode to Nasa, brass qnt, 1981; Soul of the Sea, vc, pf, 1984

Pf: Prelude, 1925; Western Suite, 1925; Dance Grotesque, 1929; Infant Suite, 1935; Wings of Silver, 1951; Cactus Rhapsody, 1953; Sonata, 1958; Les fameux douze, 1965; Epiphyllum, 1966; Ridin’ Herd in Texas, 1966; Egyptian Suite, 1969; Invocation, 1977; Anwar Sadat, 1981; Upbeat, 1985; many others, incl. teaching pieces

MSS in Amarillo Public Library, Amarillo, TX; US-AUS; US-BLu; US-CA; Wyoming U. Library, Laramie, WY; US-LAum; US-SPma; US-Wc; US-PHf

Principal publishers: Clayton Summy, C. Fischer, Heroico, Kjos, Ricordi, Seesaw, Wilmark

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

GroveW (K.K. Preston) [incl. further bibliography]

C. Reis: Composers in America: Biographical Sketches (New York, 4/1947/R, rev. and enlarged edn of American Composers)

W.B. and N.G. Bailey: Radie Britain: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1990)

WALTER B. BAILEY

British Columbia, University of.

University in Vancouver; it has had a music department since 1946 and a music school since 1986.

British Council.

Founded in 1935, the British Council promotes cultural co-operation between Britain and other countries with support from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; it is represented in over 100 countries with offices in over 200 cities. It assists over 1500 arts events each year selected for their potential to reach key groups in individual countries, including the younger generation, and to gain recognition for British artistic achievement. In music (including jazz, traditional and rock music as well as British classical, early and contemporary music), tours are usually organized by overseas promoters. The Council has sponsored recordings and provides information and advice on British music and music education, as well as scores, to professional users overseas, including through the quarterly magazine Soundings, published jointly with the British Music Information Centre.

British Federation of Music Festivals.

Association active in Britain since 1921. See Festival, §3.

British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

A UK society that aims to further the study of music and dance from all parts of the world from an ethnomusicological perspective. The organization was initially formed in 1973 as an affiliated national committee of the International Folk Music Council on the instigation of Peter Cooke. When the parent organization became the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), the UK affiliated national committee became ICTM (UK Chapter). It remains the UK National Committee of the ICTM, but changed its name to the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in 1995. Two conferences are held each year, either separately or in conjunction with other academic societies and interest groups. Since 1992, the Society has published the British Journal of Ethnomusicology.

BFE homepage: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/1-M/mus/staff/js/BFE.html

CAROLE PEGG

British Guiana.

See Guyana.

British Institute of Recorded Sound.

See National Sound Archive.

British Library National Sound Archive.

See National Sound Archive.

British Music Information Centre.

Centre founded in 1967 by the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. See also British Council and International Association of Music Information Centres.

British Music Society.

Society founded in 1978 by Peter Middleton (who became its chairman). Although taking inspiration from the now defunct society of the same name founded in 1918 by Arthur Eaglefield-Hull, it has no direct connection with it. The present society's objective is to promote interest in the music of lesser-known British composers; the emphasis is on composers no longer living and those without their own supporting organizations. The society's worldwide membership comprises both musicians and non-musicians. It carries out its objectives through publications, recordings, research, competitions and occasional concerts. The society's opera project of 1985 resulted in performances of operas by Arthur Bliss, Stanford, Smyth, Boughton and MacCunn. Biennial competitions began in 1988 with piano awards. Later events included string (1990), song (1992), woodwind (1994) and organ (1996) awards providing opportunities for young musicians. The society became a registered charity in 1995. Its publications include works on Arnold Cooke, British song and British opera; among its recordings are works by York Bowen, Foulds, John Joubert, Moeran and Ernest Walker. It is run by a volunteer committee and has no permanent financial support.

STEPHEN TROWELL

British National Opera Company.

British organization. It was set up in 1922 by leading singers and musicians of the Beecham Opera Company (see London, §VI, 2(i)). The company first performed in Bradford on 6 February 1922 with a production of Aida; it gave its first Covent Garden season in May and June that year. Three further Covent Garden seasons were given until the spring of 1924, after which its London seasons were at His Majesty's Theatre. The company toured the provinces widely and performed a number of British operas. It also staged the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal and a notable production in English of Pelléas et Mélisande with Maggie Teyte. Distinguished guest artists who appeared with the company during its London seasons included Melba, Joseph Hislop, Edward Johnson and Dinh Gilly. British singers and conductors who began their careers with the company included Heddle Nash, Dennis Noble, Barbirolli, Sargent and Clarence Raybould. The first broadcast in Europe of a complete opera was of the company's matinée performance of Hänsel und Gretel at Covent Garden on 6 January 1923. By the autumn of 1929 the company was in serious financial difficulties and went into voluntary liquidation. It was taken over by the Royal Opera House, and survived as the Covent Garden English Opera Company until 1938.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/R

Brito, Estêvão de

(b Serpa, nr Évora, c1575; d Málaga, between 25 May and 2 Dec 1641). Portuguese composer. According to Barbosa Machado he studied music with Filipe de Magalhães. On 1 June 1597 he was formally appointed maestro de capilla of Badajoz Cathedral, although he had performed the duties of the office since at least 8 February. Upon the recommendation of the cathedral chapter he was ordained by the Archbishop of Évora in February 1608. Each November of the following three years he was given time off to compose special Christmas villancicos. On 16 February 1613 he was elected over five other candidates to the post of maestro de capilla of Málaga Cathedral. There, as at Badajoz, he was allowed leave to compose villancicos for Christmas and for Corpus Christi celebrations. In January 1618 he was offered the post of maestro de capilla of the Madrid royal chapel, but for unknown reasons he refused the appointment. He remained at Málaga until his death, conducting, teaching the choirboys and composing festival music until he became ill in November 1640. His motets often begin with short phrases of two to four notes, imaginatively imitated in the other voices. He was fond of melodic 5ths and running passages bounded by a 5th. He used a variety of note values; running semiquavers and dotted rhythms appear at appropriate places in the text, contrasting with earlier passages in minims and semibreves. His 31 Christmas villancicos (for up to ten voices) and a Tratado de musica that were in King João IV's library (item 513) are lost.

WORKS

Officium defunctorum (incl. Missa pro defunctis), 4–6vv; 9 pss, 29 hymns, 4–6vv; 25 motets, 4–8vv: E-Mba, all ed. in PM, ser.A, xxi (1972) and xxx (1976)

31 Christmas villancicos (incl. a negro, 8vv, Hidalgos de Portugal, 6vv, and Sesu, que de cosa viuo, 8vv); lost, listed in JoãoIL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JoãoIL

D. Barbosa Machado: Bibliotheca lusitana, i (Lisbon, 1741/R), 753

S. Kastner: ‘La música en la Catedral de Badajoz’, AnM, xii (1957), 123–46; xv (1960), 63–83

A. Llordén: ‘Notas históricas de los maestros de capilla en la catedral de Málaga (1583–1641)’, AnM, xix (1964), 71–93, esp. 84; xx (1965), 105–60

M. Querol Gavaldá: Preface to Estêvão de Brito: Obras diversas, PM, xxi (1972); xxx (1976)

R.V. Nery, ed.: A música no ciclo da ‘Bibliotheca lusitana’ (Lisbon, 1984), 52–3

ROBERT STEVENSON

Brito, Manuel Carlos de

(b Oporto, 26 April 1945). Portuguese musicologist. He obtained the MMus (1977) and the doctorate (1985) from King's College, London, and also studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Between 1979 and 1986 he taught music history successively at the Oporto Conservatory and the Lisbon Conservatory, and in 1987 joined the musicology department of the New University of Lisbon, where from 1994 he has held the position of associate professor of Portuguese music history.

His research has focussed mainly on the music of Portugal from the 17th century to the 19th, and most particularly 18th-century opera (the subject of his doctoral dissertation and later his groundbreaking study published in 1989, which was awarded a prize by the Conselho Português da Música). In addition to the influence of Italian opera during the 18th century, he has explored wider issues of relationships between Portuguese musical culture and that of other countries, including the musical aspects of the Portuguese overseas expansion. With regard to the 17th century, he has studied in particular the sacred villancico, especially the repertory originating at the priory of S Cruz in Coimbra. His publications include (with Luísa Cymbron) a general history of music in Portugal, and he is editor of the Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia.

WRITINGS

‘A Little-Known Collection of Portuguese Baroque Villancicos and Romances’, RMARC, no.15 (1979), 17–37

‘Musicology in Portugal since 1960’, AcM, lvi (1984), 29–47

Estudos de história da música em Portugal (Lisbon, 1989)

Opera in Portugal in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989)

with D. Cranmer: Crónicas da vida musical portuguesa na primeira metade do século XIX (Lisbon, 1990)

‘The Relations Between Opera and Spoken Drama in 18th-Century Portugal’, JbO, vi (1990), 7–23

‘Renascença, maneirismo, barroco: o problema da periodização histórica na música portuguesa dos séculos XVI e XVII’, De musica hispana et aliis: miscelánea en honor al Prof. Dr. José López-Calo, ed. E. Casares and C. Villanueva (Santiago de Compostela, 1990), i, 539–54

with L. Cymbron: História da música portuguesa (Lisbon, 1992)

‘Novos dados sobre a música no reinado de D. João V’, Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, ed. M.F. Cidrais Rodrigues, M. Morais and R.V. Nery (Lisbon, 1992), 515–33

‘A música na Expansão portuguesa/Music in Portuguese Expansion’, Revista cultural de Macau, new ser., xxvi (1996), 5–20

EDITIONS

Vilancicos do século XVII do Mosteiro de Santa Cruz de Coimbra, PM, ser.A, xliii (1983)

OWEN REES

Britpop.

A term first used in the British music press around 1992 to describe the indigenous talent emerging in the wake of the commercial success of American grunge and ‘slacker’ youth culture. These groups, such as Suede and Elastica, performed playful, indie-inspired guitar-based pop. By 1995 intense media rivalry existed between Manchester’s Oasis and London’s Blur, as the two groups briefly brought back a sense of competition not seen in pop since the days of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Indeed, nostalgia was a key element of the Britpop boom, as rock artists reasserted ‘songwriterly’ values and traditional rock instrumentation in the aftermath of the hegemonic influence of acid house in the late 1980s. Significantly Britpop was used almost exclusively to describe white English musicians who played guitar-based, 1960s-influenced pop: Oasis were dubbed Britpop, but the black trip hop artist Tricky was not, despite his mainstream success. By 1996 new and more derivative groups such as Kula Shaker, The Verve and Ocean Colour Scene played what their detractors dubbed ‘Dad-rock’, a less threatening and more complex homage to 1960s and 70s icons such as Traffic and Paul Weller, which demonstrated that the initial energy of the Britpop scene was dying out. By the late 1990s the quintessential Britpop group Blur had taken to recording grunge-inspired music which resembled the sort of American music Britpop had once united against. Significantly none of the Britpop groups really broke into the lucrative American market.

DAVID BUCKLEY

Britten, (Edward) Benjamin

(b Lowestoft, 22 Nov 1913; d Aldeburgh, 4 Dec 1976). English composer, conductor and pianist. He and his contemporary Michael Tippett are among several pairs of composers who dominated English art music in the 20th century. Of their music, Britten’s early on achieved, and has maintained, wider international circulation. An exceedingly practical and resourceful musician, Britten worked with increasing determination to recreate the role of leading national composer held during much of his own life by Vaughan Williams, from whom he consciously distanced himself. Notable among his musical and professional achievements are the revival of English opera, initiated by the success of Peter Grimes in 1945; the building of institutions to ensure the continuing viability of musical drama; and outreach to a wider audience, particularly children, in an effort to increase national musical literacy and awareness. Equally important in this was his remaining accessible as a composer, rejecting the modernist ideology of evolution towards a ‘necessary’ obscurity and developing a distinctive tonal language that allowed amateurs and professionals alike to love his work and to enjoy performing and listening to it. Above all, he imbued his works with his own personal concerns, some of them hidden, principally those having to do with his love of men and boys, some more public, like his fiercely held pacifist beliefs, in ways that allowed people to sense the passion and conviction behind them even if unaware of their full implication. He also performed a fascinating, as well as problematic, assimilation of (or rapprochement with) the artistic spoils of the East, attempting an unusual integration of various non-Western musical traditions with his own increasingly linear style.

2. College and the profession, 1930–39.

3. North America, 1939–42.

4. Return to England, 1942–50.

5. Success and authority, 1951–5.

6. Transition and triumph, 1955–62.

7. Further travels, 1963–9.

8. Final testaments, 1970–76.

9. Reception, influence, significance.

ARRANGEMENTS BY OTHERS OF BRITTEN WORKS

ARRANGEMENTS BY BRITTEN

PHILIP BRETT (text), JENNIFER DOCTOR, JUDITH LeGROVE, PAUL BANKS (works), JUDITH LeGROVE (bibliography)

1. Childhood, adolescence, 1913–30.

Britten was the youngest of four children born into a middle-class family in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast. The family house was a substantial villa overlooking the sea. His father, a dentist, appears to have been a bit severe, even ‘hard’, and not a contributor to the family's extensive musical life, though charming and supportive in letters to his son. Benjamin received encouragement from his mother Edith, herself a singer and pianist. She was determined that he should succeed and controlled his life rigorously until his death in 1937. She was clearly the centre of his emotional world. The coincidence of his birthday with St Cecilia's day must have seemed a good omen for her ambitious dream of his becoming ‘the fourth B’: like many aspects of the composer's childhood, it has been celebrated in Britten lore and literature. An early attempt at play writing and fervent exploration of the piano as well as a substantial number of compositions written before he was ten have been taken to suggest an almost Mozartian precocity in his otherwise standard progress to preparatory school, a small local day school which he entered at eight.

At school, he appears to have diverted any adult disapproval and schoolboy bullying occasioned by his music and sensitive nature by proficiency at sports (he was a keen cricketer) and a certain toughness. He had piano lessons with Edith Astle, passing the Associated Board Grade 8 at 13, and began viola lessons at ten with Audrey Alston, who encouraged him to attend concerts in Norwich. It was through her he met the composer Frank Bridge. Mrs Britten had failed in attempts to draw wider attention to the prolific output of her son, who at 14 had 100 opus numbers to his credit (several have been published, mostly since his death; see Mark in Cooke, D1999). But Bridge was impressed, and persuaded Britten's parents to allow him to travel to London for composition lessons. These may have injured his ego, but they also helped Britten to introduce a certain rigour into his composition. The cardinal principles of Bridge’s teaching were ‘that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other … was his scrupulous attention to good technique’ (Britten, Sunday Telegraph, 17 Nov 1963). The String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, is among the first substantial works written under Bridge, whose influence is also evident in a song cycle with orchestra, Quatre chansons françaises, composed that summer for the older Brittens’ 27th wedding anniversary. These settings of Hugo and Verlaine allude to Wagner filtered through Gallic gestures, but the diatonic nursery-like tune for the sad boy with the consumptive mother in L'enfance is entirely characteristic.

In September 1928 Britten entered Gresham's, a public school at Holt in north Norfolk. This was a difficult and belittling experience, for the music master disparaged his composition, and the bullying (of other boys, not himself) outraged his always incendiary sense of justice. He felt keenly his first separation from home. One outlet was intensely passionate letters to his mother, another talk of suicide in his diary, yet another lapsing into psychosomatic illness, an involuntary defence that continued as a safety valve throughout his life. The music master eventually came round, at least to the extent of performing his Bagatelle for violin, viola and piano in a school concert in March 1930. But the family allowed him to leave after two years when he unexpectedly passed his School Certificate in 1930.

The lessons with Bridge continued to stimulate and direct his need to compose. The single-movement Rhapsody for string quartet of March 1929 looks forward to the two Phantasy compositions of the early 1930s. The following year came the Quartettino, with its conscientious if garrulous motivic working out of a five-note motto; and there were several works featuring the viola, including a solo piece (published posthumously as Elegy), written just after Britten left Gresham's and perhaps hinting at his unhappiness there. It was followed by two sketches (published posthumously as Two Portraits), the first a vigorous movement for strings depicting his school friend David Layton (whom Britten described in his diary as ‘clean, healthy thinking & balanced’, Carpenter, C1992, p.75) and the second entitled ‘E.B.B.’, with solo viola playing a melancholic folklike tune, evidently a self-portrait. The well-known Hymn to the Virgin, composed during his last term at Gresham's, was long one of the two earliest compositions in his published catalogue of works, together with the setting of Hilaire Belloc's The Birds composed a year earlier.

2. College and the profession, 1930–39.

The Birds, A Wealden Trio (a carol for women's voices) and several instrumental pieces had been sent off as part of a successful application for a scholarship to the RCM. Although this was an improvement over Gresham's, Britten did not in later years conceal his dismay at the ‘amateurish and folksy’ atmosphere he encountered among the students. Arthur Benjamin was his piano teacher, and he went to John Ireland for composition lessons, though Bridge remained more influential. Britten seems to have aroused defensiveness (and perhaps seductiveness) in the erratic Ireland, and the lessons have often been portrayed as a dismal failure. Later, Britten admitted to Joseph Cooper that ‘Ireland nursed me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence’ (Letters from a Life, A1991, p.147).

Living in London, however, gave the young composer the opportunity to widen his knowledge of the repertory. Although Bridge had steered his interests in the direction of modernism (he would not have encountered Schoenberg at the RCM, as Henry Boys later noted: Letters, 397), the young Britten was still in love with Beethoven and Brahms during his early years there and showed little of his later hostility to the English ‘pastoral school’. His diary entries from January 1931, however, chronicle a fascinating array of performances and reactions to them: he ‘could not make head or tail’ of Schoenberg's Erwartung; found Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ‘bewildering & terrifying’ but his Petrushka ‘an inspiration from beginning to end’; and the Symphony of Psalms quickly became a classic for Britten. Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was ‘a lesson to all the Elgars & Strausses in the world’ – Mahler was of course to become a major influence on his orchestral technique and sense of compositional irony, and in 1943 he wrote about the Fourth Symphony that ‘I have almost more affection for that piece than for any I know’. Britten found himself ‘absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar, for more than 2 minutes’. He later told Walton that hearing his Viola Concerto and overture Portsmouth Point at that time ‘was a great turning point in my musical life … you showed me the way of being relaxed and fresh, & intensely personal & yet still with the terms of reference which I had to have’. Many of the observations have to do with individual performers, not just conductors and soloists, but also players in the orchestra. After a performance by the Berlin PO under Furtwängler in 1932 he wrote: ‘F's readings were exaggerated & sentimentalised (esp. so in last item [Tchaikovsky's Symphony no.6] – no wonder a member of the audience was sick!! The orch, is a magnificent body, tho’ slightly off colour to-day (e.g. wind intonation, 1^st clar. & 1^st Horn) Strings are marvellous. Timpanist great. Marvellous ensemble and discipline’.

By 1933 his attitudes were clarifying. From 3 March dates his comment on ‘two brilliant folk-song arrangements of Percy Grainger … knocking all the V. Williams and R.O. Morris arrangements into a cocked-hat’. Early in 1935 he complained to the composer Grace Williams about the ‘“pi” and artificial mysticism combined with … technical incompetence’ in Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, and later in the year he lamented to Marjorie Fass, a quaint intimate of the Bridges, the news of Berg's death: ‘The real musicians are so few & far between, arn't they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schönbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn't one? Markievitch may be – but personally I feel that he's not got there yet. Shostakovitch – perhaps – possibly’. In October 1936 Britten condemned the Sibelius in Moeran's G minor Symphony: ‘This is going to be almost as bad as the Brahms influence on English music I fear’. By 1952 Britten admitted that ‘I play through all his [Brahms's] music every so often to see if I am right about him; I usually find that I underestimated last time how bad it was!’. That quotation comes from the frankly canonizing anthology edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller in which Lord Harewood presented what is tantamount to an official lineage: Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Schubert, Verdi, Mahler, ‘even Tchaikovsky, if he is played in a restrained, though vital way’, Berg and Stravinsky.

At the end of the second year at the RCM Britten won the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize with his Phantasy in F minor for string quintet. It received its first professional performance at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert in 1932 together with three two-part songs on poems of de la Mare (his first published works). The Phantasy is more adventurous and focussed than the String Quartet in D of the first year and shows a tug of war between Ireland, who appears to have been pushing Britten to the vocal-pastoral version of Englishness (he wrote mainly vocal music during his first year with Ireland), and Bridge.

More remarkable is the Sinfonietta, his op.1, written in three weeks during summer 1932 and first performed at another Macnaghten-Lemare concert in January 1933, with Britten himself conducting it at the RCM in March (the Mendelssohn prize for which it was submitted went to another student, though Britten received a consolatory £50). Its opening A–B dissonance and adventurous scoring aggressively advertises an allegiance to European modernism, and even when it lapses into English rhapsodic lyricism in the slow movement the tautness of the ensuing violin duo rescues it from any debility. The debt to Schoenberg's first Kammersymphonie (pointed out by Erwin Stein in Mitchell and Keller, D1952), ultimately extends perhaps to the manner of thematic derivation that Peter Evans has argued as central to Britten's technique. The careful working out of themes and contrasts also dominates the Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, also written in 1932, and first performed in August 1933 on the BBC. As remarkable as either is an ambitious Double Concerto in B minor for violin and viola begun in May 1932 and interrupted for the composition of the Sinfonietta. It shares features with op.1, such as the three-movement plan, the rhapsodic middle movement leading directly into the tarantella-like finale. Though perhaps less self-consciously modern, with its virtuoso solo writing, it is longer than the Sinfonietta and equally well sustained and argued. (It has been realized from Britten's annotated composition sketch, his customary original short score written in pencil.)

In December 1932 Britten graduated and garnered a £100 travel grant. He returned to Lowestoft after a further Macnaghten-Lemare concert which included the unfinished quartet Alla quartetto serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’. He intended to use the money to go to study with Berg, but his parents, to whom the RCM authorities had suggested that Berg was in some way ‘immoral’ and ‘not a good influence’, scotched the plan.

So he stayed at home, riffling through his voluminous juvenilia for material for his Simple Symphony and getting the first performance on the BBC of A Boy was Born, an ambitious set of choral variations in which his hard-won instrumental technique was problematically assigned to voices. Even here, though, the unusual juxtaposition of an accompanimental texture built on the ‘snow on snow’ image in Christina Rossetti's ‘In the bleak midwinter’ and the regular strophes of the Corpus Christi carol sung by a boys' chorus is characteristic of later Britten. In March 1934 he visited Florence for a performance of his Phantasy oboe quartet at the ISCM festival, which brought him to the notice of the international new music community. Later in the year came the Te Deum in C and the Jubilate Deo in E for St Mark's, North Audley Street, London, whose choir furnished the boys for the BBC performance of A Boy was Born. Apart from his father's death in April 1934, things were beginning to turn out well for Britten's 21st birthday: the BBC performed the Sinfonietta; OUP decided to publish more works (Boosey & Hawkes were to step in barely a year later with an exclusive contract and, slightly later, a regular stipend); and he finally visited Vienna – though with his mother as chaperone and without meeting Berg – where he began work on the Suite for violin and piano.

At this point Britten started job hunting, and in May 1935 found ideal employment under Albert Cavalcanti in John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit, working on the documentary The King's Stamp. It offered the challenge of writing to order at high speed, devising sound-effects and matching aspects of film technique that had a lasting impact on his composition. More important, it gave him entry into an artistic and intellectual world as liberating for him as the Diaghilev circle had been for Stravinsky. At its centre, and the most influential of all Britten's close friends, was the poet W.H. Auden, who quickly gave him the vacant post of composer in his ‘gang’ of artists and writers (Carpenter, 69). It included those associated with the GPO Film Unit, including Christopher Isherwood, and with the experimental Group Theatre, for which Britten wrote incidental music, including that to the Auden-Isherwood The Ascent of F6. Also involved in the GPO films was Montagu Slater, eventually the librettist of Peter Grimes, for several of whose plays Britten wrote the music. Films that involved an Auden-Britten collaboration, such as Coal Face and Night Mail, though celebrated, are only a small proportion of his projects, which included Lotte Reiniger's film about the Post Office Savings Bank, The Tocher, from which in 1935–6 was drawn material for the choral and orchestral suites based on Rossini. Britten's facility in this field led to work with other film companies and to an even longer association with the BBC (1937–47) on feature programmes and radio dramas whose music is only now beginning to reveal latent trends as well as a wide range of parody. If the clever cabaret songs (some to words by Auden) written for Hedli Andersen cause no surprise, the pseudo-Bach arias in one of R. Ellis Roberts's pretentious BBC religious features, ‘The World of the Spirit’, show how easily Britten could have fallen into a more conventional ‘neo-classicism’.

Britten's political awakening was much accelerated by his fresh circumstances. Dazzled by his new friends, he embraced their values and politics, which allowed him the ‘outsider’ status and rebellious stance he needed to jettison the safety of Lowestoft: he must have enjoyed, and been pained by, arguing about communism with his mother and refusing to go to Communion with her, as well as the slight disapproval of the ‘Brits’ (the Bridge ménage à trois) towards his clever new friends. Politics went hand in hand with a growing awareness of his sexuality and its social implications. He had carried off the asexual British schoolboy role rather well – for one thing, it concealed the obscure wounds also revealed in the stories, probably fictional, of early sexual abuse from a schoolmaster and his father's liking for boys, told to Eric Crozier and Myfanwy Piper (Carpenter, 19–25) – but his undoubted desire for ‘his own kind’ was beginning to break through. Many of his new friends, including Auden, who imparted a carpe diem message and undoubtedly lectured Britten on the topic, were almost openly gay, at least among themselves, and he must have realized that the left-wing, pacifist, agnostic and queer model they offered him provided a suitable identity niche in which to lodge his particular personal concerns, though few of his friends believed that he was ever entirely comfortable with it.

The immediate result of the friendship with Auden, apart from the flood of film scores, was a large orchestral song cycle on human relations to animals that would both attack the fox-hunting set at home and act as a parable for the worsening political situation abroad. Early in 1936, Auden chose three poems and wrote a prologue and an epilogue. In April Britten attended the ISCM festival in Barcelona, where he played his Suite with Antonio Brosa and heard Berg's Violin Concerto. The important new work, Our Hunting Fathers, went forward during the summer, and predictably met some disapproval at its first performance at the Norwich Triennial Festival in September. Later even Britten himself treated it as something of an embarrassment. Perhaps Auden's voice ventriloquizes too insistently; yet it is Britten's first major work to encapsulate a social or political issue in a way calculated to challenge received opinion because of the unusual combination of high drama and biting irony in an up-to-date eclectic score brilliantly orchestrated. If this way of thinking about music and art were all that Auden gave Britten, it was ultimately the gift that turned him into a composer of lasting impact. On this aspect of his work, Britten later wrote (in connection with Sinfonia da Requiem), ‘I don't believe you can express social or political or economic theories in music, but by coupling new music with certain well known musical phrases, I think it's possible to get over certain ideas’ (Letters, 705).

In January 1937, Edith Britten died unexpectedly after on illness. Britten was both devastated and, at a level just beginning to find expression in his diary, relieved to be free from her controlling influence. An immediate result was an exploration of those submerged sexual feelings that Auden, Isherwood and others had attempted to urge to the surface. On 6 March, at lunch with the conductor Trevor Harvey, he met a tenor, named in his diary as ‘Peter Piers’. A year later they were sharing a London flat. For some time there was a parental element in Pears's relation to Britten preventing a complete union, which only came about as a result of happy sexual experiences early in their time in North America (1939–42). It was a fortunate match for Britten on account of his real need for protection. On a cultural level it was unusual for being between two individuals of the same race, class and age, each with commensurable and connected talents that led to their spurring one another on.

In 1937 and for some time after, Britten was still trying out potential liaisons of a similar kind. But much of his own affectional and sexual imagination he invested in people younger than himself. In summer 1938 he renewed contact with Wulff Scherchen (son of the conductor Hermann), who had made an impression four years earlier in Florence. Scherchen, now 18, responded with alacrity and an affair appears to have ensued. Piers Dunkerley, a slightly younger boy whom Britten had met in 1934 while visiting his old preparatory school, brought out a typically parental, advisory streak in the composer: ‘I am very fond of him – thank heaven not sexually’, he wrote, ‘but I am getting to such a condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex) near me’ (Letters, 403).

So it was prove: the ease with which he could enter into children's worlds, as well as the precipitous moments in his encounters with young boys, are outlined in some detail by Carpenter (especially 341–54). It seems that Britten was captured at many levels by the notion of return to a perfect state symbolized by childhood – it has been called ‘innocence’, but a more useful concept is that of the ‘pre-symbolic’ explored by disciples of Lacan or of ‘nescience’ in the words of Hardy's poem ‘A time there was’ (set in Winter Words). The entry into the ‘symbolic’ (language) and the patriarchal order make this state impossible to recapture, and much of Britten's music is about the difficulty and pain of separation from it, but it is arguably his principal fount of non-verbal inspiration. Lack produces desire (in the already lost adult); and the sexual element that occasionally obtrudes, and can never satisfy or be satisfied, is a symptom of that lack. What Britten discovered – possibly aided by his constant invocation of pre-symbolic elements such as the mother's voice (many noted that Pears's voice strongly resembled his mother's) – was a way of accessing powerful messages from beyond the pre-verbal barrier, even perhaps occasionally of breaking that barrier, at a time when musical modernism was setting up barbed wire fences everywhere and driving ‘art’ music increasingly into the cold unfeeling camps of masculine intellect and order.

Meanwhile, the stream of film and incidental music was augmented by some important events, such as the amazingly rapid completion of a major new work, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, for the Boyd Neel Orchestra to play at the Salzburg Festival in August 1937. With its penetrating and unexpected parodies of genres and styles, and magnificent fugue and finale containing other references to Bridge's music, this work became for a time a standard against which other Britten works were judged. His adopting the congenial variation form had been foreshadowed in the slight Temporal Variations for oboe and piano written and performed at the end of 1936 and abandoned – the Times critic's reaction was to become a standard refrain: ‘It is the kind of music that is commonly called “clever”’ (Letters, 784). The same might have been said of the Auden song collection that followed the Bridge Variations. On this Island open with a Baroque flourish and Purcellian melisma that no sensitive English songwriter of the previous 50 years would have countenanced, and ends with a throwaway dance-hall tune to match Auden's parody of bourgeois materialistic existence. December 1937 saw the completion of the suite of Catalan dances, Mont Juic, written in collaboration with Lennox Berkeley in memory of Peter Burra, a close friend of Pears's. Berkeley was to move to the Old Mill at Snape that Britten had bought using his inheritance from his mother.

The following year brought an unusual triumph when on 18 August 1938 Britten played the first performance of his Piano Concerto, a display piece dedicated to Berkeley, at the BBC Promenade Concerts under Sir Henry Wood. An eloquent passacaglia-style Impromptu supplanted the weakest movement, the cheekier Recitative and Aria, in a 1945 revision. But the original slow movement belongs more fully to a work that is as much a milestone as the Bridge variations. After the responsible, serious instrumental pieces of the 1930s, this display of high spirits touched with sentimentality indicates a willingness to abandon a too-limiting decorum and give in to sensuality. The reference in this simply joyous, often almost campy work is Poulenc rather than Shostakovich, Prokofiev or any more approved master. No wonder Britten's friends and chief defenders, as well as the avuncular journalistic critics, deplored it: according to Marjorie Fass, the Brits ‘all utterly agree with the drastic criticisms of The Times & Sunday Times & Observer & Telegraph’ (Letters, 577), and even Peter Evans refers to ‘the irritatingly smart vulgarity of the final march’ (D1979, p.47). Britten himself could not ‘see anything problematic about the work. I should have thought that it is the kind of music that either one liked or disliked – it is so simple’ (Letters, 576).

After this, apart from incidental music for a big Basil Dean production (J.B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan) opening in February 1939, there were several parting salutes to Britten's radical affiliations: incidental music for the Group Theatre production of the Auden-Isherwood play On the Frontier, and a partsong Advance Democracy, written for the Co-operative movement to words by the editor of Left Review, Randall Swingler (both in November, 1938); and in February–March 1939 an orchestral cantata, Ballad of Heroes, to words by Swingler and Auden in commemoration of the British members of the International Brigade who fell fighting the fascists in Spain.

3. North America, 1939–42.

Britten left for North America in April 1939. There were many reasons for him to try his hand abroad: the growing cloud of fascism over Europe; the plight of pacifists in the war that seemed inevitable; the departure of Auden and Isherwood in January; the frantic pace of his career and the need to determine his own direction; discouragement from patronizing or hostile reviews (to which the thin-skinned composer had already begun to show sensitivity); the opening up of new opportunities; and the curtailing of difficult emotional and sexual situations from which, from his letters, he appears to be trying to rescue himself – with Scherchen, Berkeley and perhaps others. The way was now clear for a commitment to Pears, and the union of the two men took place early in the visit, which began in Canada. After a trip to New York, they visited Copland at Woodstock in the Catskills and rented accommodation there for part of the summer. They then went to Amityville on Long Island to visit Pears's friend Elizabeth Mayer, who accommodated them and also provided a surrogate mother for Britten.

The music of Britten's American years reflects his emotional turmoil. Young Apollo, written in summer 1939 for a CBC broadcast with the composer as piano soloist, was inspired not only by the last lines of Keats's Hyperion but also by Scherchen; originally designated op.16, it was withdrawn and not heard again until after Britten died, either because of the personal association, or (more likely) because of its dependence, musically, on an elaboration of the A major triad, a kind of musical minimalism that was not the order of the day. Les illuminations, completed in October, presents a fuller and more complicated picture of (homo)eroticism, focussed on the inevitably confused subject who ‘alone holds the key to this savage parade’. It incorporates a typical double focus on the major triads on B and E which is used not only to sustain ambiguity over long musical stretches but also (as in the opening fanfare) to express simultaneously exhilaration and confusion. Whatever one makes of the dedication of Antique to Scherchen and Being Beauteous to Pears, or of the direct sexual imagery with which the latter ends, or indeed the cruising depicted in Parade (its theme taken from the abortive Go play, boy, play suite), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the piece as a whole encapsulates a certain hard-won victory over the distancing effect from the purely corporeal to which British middle-class education was dedicated. It joyously and unashamedly reclaims music as an immediate, physical act. It is ironic that the decade of technical struggle towards professionalism should have led to the moment at the end of Phrase, after the transfigured exclamation ‘et je danse’ on a top B, where the string orchestra turns into a giant guitar to accompany a delirious diatonic melody supported by root position major chords. Copland – surely the ‘older American composer’ who said of Antique that he ‘did not know how Britten dared to write the melody’ – was shocked; even Pears labelled this incandescent work ‘a trifle too pat’ (Mitchell and Keller, D1952, pp.65–6): it is difficult to trust erotic joy on hearing it (at least, when it is unclouded by chromaticism), and musical solutions of personal problems are suspect. It is for reasons like this that one can see the Britten of this period castigated by friends and enemies alike for being too ‘clever’ and why even Copland ‘picked certain things in Ben to pieces’, as Colin McPhee put it, adding that ‘he must search deeper for a more personal, more interesting idiom … good craftsmanship is not enough’ (Brett, E1994, p.237).

The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, completed almost exactly a year later and written for and dedicated to Pears, can be taken as a further gesture towards this reclamation of the physical (as before, through another language and culture) and the official inception of their partnership. Among the other works, Sinfonia da Requiem, ‘combining my ideas on war & a memorial for Mum & Pop’ (Letters, 803), is a culmination of much of the earlier symphonically conceived music and is characteristic of later works in combining personal and social concerns. The Japanese government, who paid for it, would not perform it at the festival celebrating their empire's 2600th anniversary; one can only wonder at Britten's naivety in accepting the commission.

1939–42 was a prolific period, for Britten also completed the Violin Concerto in the summer and autumn of 1939 when Britain declared war. The work opens in a suitably foreboding manner and ends in melancholy and nostalgia – so different from the ebullient Piano Concerto of little more than a year earlier. There was also the rather homespun Canadian Carnival, a Sonatina romantica to wean a keen amateur pianist host from Weber, Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra, two two-piano works, a second Rossini suite, to be used by Balanchine in a work for Lincoln Kirstein's American Ballet Company, String Quartet no.1 and the eccentric-sounding Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra. Among works completed early in the visit, besides the Violin Concerto and incidental music for a further BBC play, was a setting of seven poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, intended for Pears's Round Table Singers, but abandoned. In late 1941 came another occasional piece (now called An American Overture) heavily indebted to Copland and written for Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra; when it came to light in the early 1970s, Britten commented that his ‘recollection of that time was of complete incapacity to work; my only achievements being a few Folk-song arrangements and some realisations of Henry Purcell’ (Letters, 985).

One important project of the American period, Paul Bunyan, was also one of its most problematic, a patronizing attempt by W.H. Auden to evoke the spirit of a nation not his own in which Britten was a somewhat dazzled accomplice – he was vague about the nature of the title role's manifestation and staging only six months before it opened. A bruising response from ‘old stinker Virgil Thompson’ [sic] and the other New York critics did not help matters. The work was withdrawn and reinstated as op.17 only when Britten took it up near the end of his life (a good overture, wisely abandoned as too long, was subsequently orchestrated and published). The composition and production of Bunyan involved Britten and Pears in exchanging the luxury of the Mayer Long Island household for Auden's louche and alcoholic lifestyle in a Brooklyn Heights villa; from this bohemian atmosphere they fled soon after the production of Bunyan at Columbia University in May 1941. They took up an invitation to stay with the duo pianists Rae Robertson and his wife Ethel Bartlett at Escondido in California (where the Scottish Ballad, dedicated to them, was mostly written); there they came across the radio talk by E.M. Forster printed in The Listener that began: ‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’. Dissatisfaction with American life had already surfaced in Britten's letters (‘the country has all the faults of Europe and none of its attractions’, he wrote to a friend: Letters, 797), as well as in one of those illnesses that often signalled his dissociation from his surroundings. Forster's article served as a catalyst to initiate the next stage in Britten's progress.

The flight to North America had enabled Britten to find out more about himself in general, to mature as an artist and person, and to find a certain level of acceptance among others and, more important, in himself about his sexual orientation (although many people recall continuing signs of shame). It had also given him an opportunity to reflect on his direction. The epiphany brought about by Forster's article not only sent him and Pears to Crabbe for the extraordinary subject of his first real opera but also may have given him the idea that if he did return it should be with the intention of becoming the central ‘classical music’ figure in Britain (as Copland was struggling to do in the far more diffuse culture of the USA).

Whether or not this was a fully conscious process, Britten began to define his relation to the British musical tradition during the American years. There was, for example, the need to release aggression towards it, palpable in the 1941 essay ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’, a statement so angry that it studiously avoids mentioning Vaughan Williams or Holst; Parry and Elgar are projected as the binary opposition haunting English composition, the one favouring ‘the amateur idea and … folk-art’, the other somewhat surprisingly seen as emphasizing ‘the importance of technical efficiency and [welcoming] any foreign influences that can be profitably assimilated’. The authenticity of folksong is intelligently attacked, and composers' dependence on it as raw material is deemed either unsatisfactory or the sign of a need for discipline which the second rate cannot find in themselves. Actual English folktunes are allowed a certain ‘quiet, uneventful charm’ but ‘seldom have any striking rhythms or memorable melodic features’. Yet the ambivalence, reflected in so many aspects of his life, did not prevent Britten from making a considerable investment in arranging them – ostensibly for himself and Pears to perform, though as time went on and volume after volume succeeded the first (printed in 1943) ulterior motives might be suspected. They gave Britten the chance, for example, to declare his independence from the ‘Pastoral School’ by conceiving the exercise of arrangement very differently. Unlike Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, who assigned an idealized, essential artistic quality to the melodies which their accompaniments were thought to reflect, Britten recognized that the venue changed the genre and turned them in effect into lieder or art-song, and proceeded brilliantly on that premise. To see how far he got one should turn from the easy seductiveness of The Salley Gardens and the psychological perceptiveness of The Ash Grove to the exquisite and exhilarating settings of Moore's Irish Melodies published in 1957.

Equally important in this redefinition of himself are Britten's ‘realizations’ of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries – the Tudor composers (except for Dowland) were out of bounds because of their adoption by Vaughan Williams and the pastoralists. Two song arrangements date from at least 1939, several were done in the USA, and a much larger number were prompted by the 1945 celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death. The choice was in tune with Britten's aesthetic as an aspiring dramatic composer: he had already adopted a rhetorical style far beyond the parameters of contemporary English songwriters with their devotion to speech-rhythm, and was later in the booklet accompanying Peter Grimes to make a manifesto-like statement about restoring ‘to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell’ (Brett, E1983, p.149). The results are not so easy to assess as the folksong arrangements. Partly it is a matter of culture and epoch: ‘realization’, prevalent up to the 1950s, became extinct in the light of understanding of the appropriate delivery of 17th-century song. To historically informed taste, Britten's contribution appears to vie for attention with Purcell's melodies or declamatory gestures, and the bifocal effect inevitably becomes distracting. Britten is at his best when Purcell's music is at its strangest: Saul and the Witch at Endor, for instance, is inspired in its use of piano sonorities to re-compose the work. The character and extent of these pieces (which number 40, far greater than the demand for mere recital fodder) raise another issue, however, about whether the process is more to do with appropriation or competition than homage, not a simple musical act enabling Purcell to be ‘heard’ but rather another Oedipal episode in Britten’s complicated trajectory.

With a relation to indigenous and historical music more clearly defined, one further element of the British tradition demanded attention. As if to think of England were to think of choral music, on the journey home Britten wrote two substantial pieces, the unaccompanied Hymn to Saint Cecilia and A Ceremony of Carols for boys' voices and harp. These pieces combine a secure technique and an exquisite sound palette, a modernistic coolness in expression with a plentiful supply of emotional intensity, a musical language distinguished at once by its pronounced character as well as its restraint: all the marks of a classicism that cannot easily be discerned in earlier British music of the century.

4. Return to England, 1942–50.

Any bid for pre-eminence, as Britten must have realized on arriving back in England in April 1942, was a matter not simply of matching Vaughan Williams's achievement but of contributing something new and powerful to British musical life. The choice was opera. Vaughan Williams had been unsuccessful in this sphere and, further, no English opera had made its way into the standard repertory. But the risk of failure was greater, as Britten was aware. He still played childlike superstitious games to bolster his confidence as a composer (Carpenter, 239–40), and made comments like the one remembered by Tippett, with whom Britten and Pears struck up a close friendship: ‘I am possibly an anachronism. I am a composer of opera, and that is what I am going to be, throughout’ (Carpenter, 193–4).

Pears had worked on the scenario of Peter Grimes, the story that the two had culled from Crabbe's The Borough after reading Forster's article. It was an unlikely and unpromising tale of a rough fisherman who beat and lost his apprentices, went mad and died. Isherwood, who turned down the job of librettist, was ‘absolutely convinced that it wouldn't work’ (Brett, E1983, p.36). But they persevered, turning Grimes into a more sympathetic figure of ‘difference’, a misunderstood dreamer. Montagu Slater, whom they now contacted, further shaped the libretto in a way that uncannily connected the private concerns of a couple of left-wing, pacifist lovers to public concerns to which almost anyone could relate.

The author Colin MacInnes confided to his private diary in the late 1940s that ‘Grimes is the homosexual hero. The melancholy of the opera is the melancholy of homosexuality’ (Tony Gould, Inside Outsider: the Life and Times of Colin MacInnes, London, 1983, p.82). Its theme of the individual persecuted by the community for no other reason than his difference cried out to be interpreted in this way, but could not then be publicly articulated. A more remarkable aspect of the allegory, however, had to do with ‘internalization’, the classic form of oppression. Those who do not have full status in society come to believe the low opinion others have of them: Grimes's fate is ultimately determined not simply by his isolation but by his capitulation to Borough opinion at the climax of Act 2 scene i, a much delayed, extremely powerful cadence on to B, the Borough's own key. On striking his friend Ellen in response to her ‘We've failed!’, Grimes takes up the offstage church congregation's ‘Amen’ in his ‘So be it’, proceeding to the long-awaited full cadence with ‘and God have mercy upon on me’ set to a motif that dominates the rest of the opera; the four triadic chords that define its limits and the angry brass canon it prompts both indicate that there can be no escape. Here Grimes internalizes society's judgment of him and enters the self-destructive cycle that inevitably concludes with his suicide. The two terrifying manhunts may have served as catharsis for Britten's own fear of persecution on returning to England as homosexual and pacifist and intensified the social message about internalization. The remaining problem, which apparently held up the opera for almost a year, was how to combat society's tendency to pathologize deviant behaviour such as Grimes's. To emphasize the social theme of the individual's tragic internalization of community values, the references to a domineering father in earlier versions of the libretto, for instance, had to be erased. The result was a brilliant appeal, made more palpable and convincing through music, to the alienation of every member of the audience: ‘In each of us there is something of a Grimes’ (Keller, in Brett, E1983, p.105).

It was a feat to get the audience to identify with an allegorical figure (easily interpreted as ‘the homosexual’) and to locate the problem as one of society's vicious treatment of difference. The opera also laid bare the paranoid nature of society's scapegoating someone wrongly felt to be threatening, and it questioned the operation of violence in which everyone is brutalized, not merely aggressor and victim. It also raised the issue of responsibility in the relation of individual and state in modern democracies, brought to the fore by the focus on the deviant as an ordinary working man. The authors' passionately held views on these topics, realized in music of enormous persuasiveness, led to success from the moment of the opera's first performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, on 7 June 1945 (see Opera , fig.27). It was quickly taken up by other companies in Europe and the USA, and in due course became one of the rare 20th-century operas to enter the repertory.

Britten's actual return to England had been anticlimactic. Although the tribunal he faced, as a conscientious objector, called him up for non-combatant duties, he was allowed on appeal to go free. This was also true of Pears. Their giving recitals all over the country for CEMA probably counted in their favour, as did Britten's continuing work for the BBC. Pears meanwhile branched out into opera and was taken into the Sadler's Wells Opera Company; seeing him in this new context evidently persuaded Britten that he should take the part of Grimes, originally planned for a baritone. Through Pears, Britten met such people as Eric Crozier, the staff producer who was to direct Grimes, and Joan Cross, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, which led to the company's giving the first performance.

There was a lull in Britten's flow of composition around this time, owing partly to a serious attack of measles for which he was in hospital and then off work in March and April 1943. Several projects were abandoned, but during the months he was resting he composed, at Snape, the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. In this work he invented his own kind of shadowed pastoralism, not the ideal England of the folksong composers but a place in which the worm finds the bud and a darker side of medieval experience is explored (in the Lyke Wake Dirge); the high ostinato that is also the strophic vocal line enabled a particularly fruitful orchestral dialogue to suggest deeper levels to this poem. The Serenade was followed by the Prelude and Fugue for strings, written for the tenth anniversary of the Boyd Neel Orchestra, with a part for each of the 18 players in the fugue. More important was a commission from a clerical visionary in the arts, Walter Hussey, which afforded Britten the opportunity to set lines from Jubilate Agno by the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, who himself had a persecution complex. At the heart of Rejoice in the Lamb, framed by a Purcellian prelude and postlude and cheerful choruses and solos, lies a chilling choral recitative rehearsing the theme of oppression that was to boil over in Peter Grimes, and a spiritual resolution (‘But he that was born of a Virgin shall deliver me’) that looks forward to the very different scenario of The Rape of Lucretia. The Serenade was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West, an elegant new gay admirer who had helped with the choice of poems. He was working on a radio version of The Odyssey called The Rescue (broadcast in November 1943) for which Britten wrote extensive incidental music. The year ended with a setting of The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard for a music festival organized by a British soldier in a German prison camp. The delayed composition of Peter Grimes began in 1944, which otherwise produced only a Festival Te Deum and two carols for Sackville-West's BBC programme ‘A Poet's Christmas’, one of them a setting of Auden's ‘Shepherd's Carol’.

The success of Peter Grimes led to a fresh outburst of compositional activity. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, another cycle written for Pears, much of it during illness, is among Britten's darkest works, couched in a severely modernist musical language incorporating what he had learnt from Purcell's declamatory style and (in the last song) ground bass technique. He himself attributed its despairing and angry mood to a visit to the Belsen camp where he and Yehudi Menuhin played for survivors during a ten-day tour of Germany in July 1945 immediately preceding composition. Purcell is also a presence in two other major non-operatic works: the third, final movement of the String Quartet no.2, entitled ‘Chacony’, is built on statements of a ground bass grouped in sets and separated by solo cadenzas for three of the instruments. The first movement is among Britten's most radical experiments with sonata form, both in the enormously extended exposition and the condensed recapitulation, in which the three successive phrases of the first theme are superimposed. He wrote to Mary Behrend, who commissioned it, that ‘to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made’. The third work, a set of variations on a very good dance-tune by Purcell, came about as the result of a film commission from Basil Wright (now with the Crown Film Unit, the successor to the original GPO unit) for the Ministry of Education. The film, with a commentary (by Slater) spoken stiffly by Malcolm Sargent, now seems dated, but the clarity and directness of Britten's score shines through in the concert version, entitled The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

A revolt within Sadler's Wells (several singers refused to take part in a recording of Peter Grimes) might have impeded further success in opera. But Britten had already begun planning, in summer 1945, a season at Dartington with an independent company giving opera on a small scale. In the event, Crozier and Cross broke away from Sadler's Wells, and Glyndebourne took over from Dartington. Crozier's enthusiasm for a French troupe, La Compagnie des Quinze, provided a model for the new Glyndebourne English Opera Company and led to his translating one of their plays, André Obey's Le viol de Lucrèce. Meanwhile, Britten had been in touch with the Rhodesian poet Ronald Duncan – they had collaborated over a Pacifist March in 1936–7, he had helped Britten change Slater's mad scene in Act 3 of Peter Grimes, and Britten was writing music for his play This Way to the Tomb in late 1945. Duncan put aside his planned libretto on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and set to work on Obey's play, preserving his narrators as Male and Female Chorus, to be sung by Pears and Cross. The result is not without problems. Instead of Slater's relatively workmanlike language, Britten was faced with an overwritten verse drama of the kind that T.S. Eliot had made fashionable. But the opera works well as a treatment of oppression, with gender as the mark of difference. Like Grimes, Lucretia is a victim. Roman society is also portrayed as corrupt and oppressive, and she is raped by an Etruscan prince, Tarquinius, who embodies its worst features. But there is nothing alienated about her. Whereas Grimes, implicated in his apprentice's deaths, is musically represented as a tarnished yet innocent victim of society, Lucretia is truly innocent, a victim of a vicious patriarchal order. Equally a victim of internalization, she is forced (in a manner familiar to rape victims) to create her own guilt out of the aggressor's crime. This cruel act is accomplished musically by the recall of his ‘Yet the linnet in your eyes / Lifts with desire’ during her ‘confession’. The introduction of a specifically Christian perspective, especially in the conclusion, leads to difficulties because, although a religion fully addressed to victimization and sacrifice, it sees suicide as sin, not noble sacrifice. It is easy enough to dispel these doubts, however, while listening to the E major finale, another brilliant passacaglia; and the opera also develops a distinctly Purcellian recitative style that matches the Baroque quality of Duncan's lines. Its scoring and pacing, too, mark a distinct advance over Peter Grimes.

In spite of a double cast of fine singers (one included as Lucretia the radiant Kathleen Ferrier in her operatic début), The Rape of Lucretia played to poor houses on tour after its Glyndebourne performance in July 1946. Britten and his supporters now founded the English Opera Group, independent of Glyndebourne. After Duncan's idea of a version of Mansfield Park was rejected, Crozier wrote a libretto for Albert Herring, moving Maupassant's short story Le rosier de Madame Husson from the French provinces to an imaginary Suffolk town, ‘Loxford’. Among its weaknesses are pert caricatures of, and condescending attitude towards, provincial working-class people. But the Oedipal subject matter touched an English nerve: the point of Maupassant's story lies in the subsequent ruin and degradation of the hero, not his mother-domination. One reason why the opera disturbs, why it can have the effect of Mozartian or Shakespearean tears behind laughter, is that it presents an intensified version of a complicated situation between mothers and sons. The sinister, obsessive nature of the music for Mrs Herring – one of the best of Britten's many predatory women – and the true musical pathos of Albert, as well as his rising anger in the important aria in Act 1 scene iii, create a viable central comic situation, close enough to the truth to hurt.

It is also notable that Albert does not ‘become a man’. He becomes himself, in his own way, without having subscribed to society's pattern of initiation: he returns without any trophy (the crumpled lost wreath thrown into the audience at the end a suitable symbol of his virginity). What Albert does sing in dismissing his mother and the rest of those arrayed against him is a splendid new integration of ‘light music’ into Britten's style, not simply the enjoyable pastiche of Paul Bunyan and the cabaret songs. Those whom he confronts and confounds on his return have just sung the Threnody, one of the most striking of Britten's many vocal passacaglias, one that invokes Verdi more obviously than Purcell, and that earlier critics often felt overbalanced the work. It is easy to see why they might from purely burlesque productions (like Frederick Ashton's original, from all accounts) without suggesting the sinister potential in characters like Lady Billows and Mrs Herring as well as their absurdity. It should also be noted that once again the physical plays an important part. Sid and Nancy's sexual appetites, portrayed in music of extraordinary excitement and allure, are as powerful as their spiked lemonade (and the Wagnerian reference that accompanies it) in enabling Albert to find himself.

During the English Opera Group's 1947 summer tour of Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia, Pears proposed the idea of an Aldeburgh Festival. It was an inspired response to Britten's vulnerability, personally as well as musically, to the kind of hostility he had experienced in his early operatic ventures. The festival also had the advantage of institutionally personifying him and what he stood for when he and Pears were about to move into Crag House, in the centre of the town. Moreover, besides benefiting from Britten's abilities as an accompanist of the highest rank, it offered a further outlet and focus for his other performing abilities (not to mention his astute grasp of finances). With Albert Herring, he had for the first time conducted one of his own operas. Apparently he never fully enjoyed the role, yet he won the devotion of almost every musician who performed under his direction and became a notable interpreter of other composers' works. The London critics were pointedly not invited to the opening, and many of them suspected its potential for cliquishness and provinciality. But by virtue of his abilities and his principles Britten drew to Aldeburgh the foremost international musicians of the age, whether composers or performers, after forming partnerships with them (such as his Schubert duet performances with Richter or his recitals with Rostropovich) in such a way as figuratively to invert the relation of country town to capital. The closeness of the Aldeburgh family (or clique) was often, and sometimes brutally, disturbed when members were suspected of giving less than their best. To have a literal family to whom to attach himself was always a prerequisite for Britten; having colleagues whom he trusted in a place that he knew was an extension of that. Like all unhappy families, it became increasingly unhappy in its own particular way and for a variety of reasons (explored particularly by Carpenter, 319–21, 368–70, 376–7, 520–29 and passim), including Britten's continuing insecurity. But, it was a positive force in British music, and encouraged Britten's work immensely.

A trio of joyful works followed in 1947, the first such outpouring since the lull before the composition of Peter Grimes (1946 had seen merely the Occasional Overture, commissioned to celebrate the opening of the BBC Third Programme and later withdrawn by Britten, and a slight organ work). The 17th-century cantata form exemplified in Purcell's longer songs impressed Britten into adopting it for Canticle I, a setting of Francis Quarles's poem ‘My beloved is mine’, inspired by passages from The Song of Solomon. In contrast to this serious and full-hearted work for his tenor, A Charm of Lullabies was a pleasant cycle written for a favourite mezzo-soprano, Nancy Evans, recently married to Eric Crozier. The third was a cantata for the opening of the first Aldeburgh Festival on 5 June 1948, with an official première a few weeks later (24 July) to celebrate the centenary of Lancing College (Pears's old school). Britten must have been by this time secure enough in his underlying convictions as a composer to ignore the undoubted disapproval of modernist taste for any endeavour involving a large number of amateur musicians. Apart from Peter Pears as the adult saint, Saint Nicolas required only a professional string quartet and percussionist, with a proficient organist and duo pianists. The school choir was supplemented at Lancing by parts for choirs of other linked schools, and the work included two hymns for the audience. This was not among Britten's most adventurous or even most accomplished works, and would have appeared ludicrous to the postwar avant garde. But from the lilting A major-Lydian waltz to which the story of Nicolas's birth and growth to adolescence is told to the broader issues of both involvement in Christian history and shared experience, it seems now as courageous and adventurous as the experimental music of the time. Forster, who had met and admired Britten and Pears, and was attending the first Aldeburgh Festival as lecturer, called it ‘one of those triumphs outside the rules of art’ (The Listener, 24 June 1948) and reported with enormous enthusiasm about the entire festival.

Meanwhile, the English Opera Group needed new material to keep going, and Britten had promised a version of The Beggar's Opera for their 1948 season, to be directed by Tyrone Guthrie (who had recently produced Peter Grimes at Covent Garden). Fortunately, Britten worked from an early edition of the original in which the tunes lack Pepusch's bass lines. He could therefore abandon the constraints of the Purcell realizations and construct both harmony and orchestration; he even brought numbers together in interesting cumulative sequences. The project signifies the culmination of a process of selfconscious rapprochement with history and national identity, part of what Britten thought necessary, as a newly connected and ‘located’ artist, to fulfil his role. Today, the work seems over-elaborate, trading immediacy for musical invention: the music goes upscale, like the accents of the opera singers who generally take the roles, and compared with the Brecht-Weill Die Dreigroschenoper it sounds musically tame and lacking in bite. The drama is in line with the critique of society, religion, the law, family and social order that Britten's works notably encompass. But the tone, as in Albert Herring, often veers towards cosiness in a way that undercuts the portrayal of brutality and mendaciousness that Britten would earlier have condemned more roundly in musical terms. The process is best understood with reference to Britten's own ambivalent position as a ‘discreet homosexual’ (Alan Sinfield's term), which encouraged both protest or subversion but also accommodation to the status quo. The particular consistency of that mix at any given time is a key to a deeper understanding of his career.

For the 1949 season, Crozier again worked on a project involving audience participation, the ‘entertainment for young people’ Let's Make an Opera, which included four audience songs. The opera that formed the second half of the event was The Little Sweep, a scaled-down version of the oppression theme in which the middle-class audience can identify with the stage children, who help poor mistreated working-class Sam, the chimney-sweep, to freedom. This constituted genuine release and fulfilment for Britten even if Carpenter (p.176) is right to comment on its regressive psychology.

Britten was deliriously happy while writing the opera in spring 1949; less so with the project it interrupted, the Spring Symphony. He described his ‘doubts and miseries’ over it to Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned it. The doubts must have been largely about projecting an orchestral song cycle as a symphony. He explained the symphony as ‘not only dealing with the Spring itself but with the progress of Winter to Spring and the reawakening of the earth and of life’, and its form as ‘in the traditional four-movement shape of a symphony, but with the movements divided into shorter sections bound together by a similar mood or point of view’ (Britten, 1949–50, p.237); he saw no need to produce a traditional symphonic ‘argument’ but rather wanted to project a series of controlled gestures in four distinct parts, the second and third analogous to the slow movement and scherzo of a symphony, and with a single poem for the more extended, joyous finale. The separate settings have an effect comparable to the series of discrete numbers through which Britten had learnt in his operas to generate cumulative feeling and climactic structures. The first invocatory movement is in ritornello form, and a fairly strict thematics of instrumentation persists, suggesting Baroque ‘affects’ rather than Romantic arguments. In the finale, a celebratory episode complete with rude blasts on the cowhorn, things are kept in motion by a rousing waltz tune upon which is projected, in a climactic peroration, the famous Sumer is icumen in cast in duple time. The emotional centre of the work, however, lies in the final section of the second part, a setting of W.H. Auden's Out on the Lawn. Britten would have known the significance of this poem (from which he selected four of the 16 stanzas) as a description of an actual spiritual experience of June 1933 which the poet called a ‘Vision of Agape’ and which prefigured his later conversion to Christianity. Britten's setting, which incorporates some of his most distinctive orchestral and vocal effects, recalls for an anguished moment in its last stanza the mood of the more radical Our Hunting Fathers, again providing a reminder of the darker reality of life, a touch that balances and therefore validates the ‘retrogressive’ search for ‘innocent’ states of mind in other parts of the score.

In late 1949 Britten found time to write a wedding anthem, Amo ergo sum, for his friends Lord Harewood and Marion Stein on a text by Ronald Duncan, and in early 1950 a charming and classic set of choral songs, the Five Flower Songs, for the Elmhirsts of Dartington Hall.

5. Success and authority, 1951–5.

It was natural, in the light of Britten's success as a composer, especially in opera and its performance, for the Arts Council to commission a major opera from him for the 1951 Festival of Britain. For his part, he must have realized that his first substantial work written specifically for Covent Garden ought also to break new ground, and in the event Billy Budd, besides representing a considerable musical advance, also marks a distinct transition in Britten's operatic output from a focus on oppression and its internalization to an exploration of authority and its ramifications. The issue of authority is of particular importance and also confusion to homosexual people. Pertinent in Britten's case is the conflict over parents, who are loved and adored on the one hand as encouraging protectors and mistrusted on the other as figures of authority, as uncomprehending as the rest of society in assuming universal heterosexuality and censuring homoeroticism. A crisis on this issue would predictably be generated as the composer moved into the ‘establishment’ (symbolized by his being created a Companion of Honour in 1953).

Inviting a major literary figure like E.M. Forster to become his librettist was possibly to risk a recurrence of the difficulties with Auden, but Forster was a master of prose, not poetry, and the author of Howard's End and A Passage to India held the promise of helping Britten move beyond his preoccupations with the innocent and the oppressed. After some discussion, the two settled unshakably on Melville's Billy Budd (see P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: a Life, London, 1977–8, ii, 283–6). In adapting the story, Forster wanted to ‘rescue Vere from Melville’ (that is, from the excessive respect for authority and discipline implicit in Melville's account of him), to ‘make Billy, rather than Vere, the hero’, and to suggest redemption through love, or at least eternal hope, through the image of the ‘white sail’, mitigating and limiting Melville's belief in Fate. But the Prelude–Epilogue frame in which the aging Vere recalls the action places the dramatic emphasis firmly on his moral choice and predicament. In this respect, one of Britten's main achievements was to develop the ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in Vere's actions and words through purely musical means. Notable is the way the stratified texture at the opening of the Prologue projects the conflict between B and B, which then persists as a musical ‘problem’ reflecting what attracted Britten to the topic, ‘the quality of conflict in Vere's mind’ (see Rupprecht, E1996). The famous ‘interview’ interlude in which, with triadic chords each harmonizing the notes F, A or C but contrasted by dynamics, orchestration and tessitura, Britten suggests the indeterminate nature of the private moment in which Vere tells Billy that he has been condemned has also been shown to promote an uneasy, unstable tonal dialectic expressing an essentially equivocal mental state rather than any firm triumph of F major (Whittall, E1990). Near the end of the Epilogue, Britten appears to dissolve and dispel the forces of both good and evil (the melody of Billy's farewell, a reference to the interview chords, and the ominous brass motif associated with Claggart as evil) in a final, radiant B chord. But that very epiphanic moment sets off once again the hefty drum-beat motif that underpins the trial and ultimately derives from the sea chase earlier in Act 2. The implication that Vere is hopelessly contaminated by his role in killing men – as leader in battle as well as naval disciplinarian – is powerful on the social as well as personal level. The advance of Billy Budd on Peter Grimes in both dramatic and musical terms is nowhere so telling as in this culminating moment, but is also readily apparent in almost every other aspect of the score.

The music of Billy Budd took over a year to write and months to score, leaving time only for two small-scale instrumental pieces written for individual soloists, Lachrymae, for viola (William Primrose) and piano, and Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, for oboe solo (Joy Boughton); the dedicatees played them at successive Aldeburgh festivals in 1950 and 1951. In addition, there was the ‘realization’ of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas for the English Opera Group's 1951 season. In the aftermath of Billy Budd Britten wrote the extraordinary Canticle II, on the Chester Miracle Play version of the story of Abraham and Isaac – a footnote to the theme of the opera, perhaps, but arresting in its own right for the opening, in which the alto and tenor voices combine to invoke the voice of God, punctuated by wide piano arpeggios reminiscent of the opening of the first quartet.

The death of George VI in 1952 catapulted Britten into another large-scale opera for Covent Garden. That year, Imogen Holst arrived at Aldeburgh as amanuensis and devoted disciple: her presence at festival concerts with Britten and Pears added status to Britten's English lineage – her father's work was also admitted into the local canon. Britten had been exploring various libretto ideas for some time with Forster's friend, William Plomer, an able literary figure personally less demanding than the novelist, when Lord Harewood began negotiations that led to the commission of an opera on the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Elizabeth's Tudor predecessor seemed the appropriate subject for what was intended as a quintessentially ‘national’ opera with a Verdian sweep about it. To base it on Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex, however, was to put the image of the Virgin Queen to as tough a test as Vere had undergone. His portrait deploys Freudian psychology to underpin an anti-authoritarian view of monarchy. Britten no doubt intended to create a portrait of monarchy, warts and all, in which a cultured homosexual man could believe: the brilliance of the celebratory style he devised (avoiding Elgarian imperialistic overtones) as well as the subtlety of his response to Elizabethan music in the songs and dances show that he was as inspired by this project as by the challenge of Billy Budd. Plomer had him read, as an antidote to Strachey, J.E. Neale's biography. Elizabeth's own speeches lie behind the debated Norwich episode that enshrines her ideal concept of authority rooted in humanity, intelligence and generosity. To invoke the ‘conflict between public and private’ to explain Gloriana, however, fails to get at the ultimate confusion that is part of homosexual social experience, and undermines the opera: if Britten imagined he was creating an Aida, or more pertinently a Boris Godunov, in which the private, human and vulnerable side of monarchy could be displayed in a healing manner, the downbeat ending, in which the aging, bald heroine muses on her mortality, only raised in the minds of a contemporary audience a spectre of empty and meaningless authority. Gloriana touched a national nerve-ending, and prompted not only its insecure dismissal by the first-night gala audience but also intensified the increasingly hostile response to Britten of the musical cognoscenti, disturbed by the cult status accorded him in the Mitchell and Keller Commentary of 1952.

All the more remarkable, then, that the next opera, begun during the preparations for Gloriana, should directly explore child sexuality and homoeroticism through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The horror of this gothic tale turns on the harrowing dilemma into which the reader is forced between experiencing the children, Miles and Flora, either as objects of depraved desires on the part of their dead servant and governess, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or as the victims of the hysterical fantasies of their new Governess, whose instability is hinted at by her frustrated desire for their distant guardian. The topic was suggested to Britten by Myfanwy Piper, a member of his ‘extended family’ through her husband John, designer of most of the opera productions after Peter Grimes. In her Britten found an ideal librettist for the adaptation of literary works; her work is seen at its best in the verbal images she produced for James's silent Quint, suggesting the man's imaginative allure to a child rather than any ‘evil’. Making the ghosts palpable militated against James; but Britten, aided by Piper, found other ways to reinforce the ambiguities and claustrophobic atmosphere, such as the division into short scenes separated by ‘variation’ interludes and a tonal scheme that mirrors the title. The theme of these variations is moreover the upbeat opening gesture of a bipartite theme, its first element comprising all 12 notes through which, at its second plain statement, the ghosts voice their power. The ‘downbeat’ second element – ingeniously derived by inversion from the original series (Evans, D1979, p.214) – quickly evaporates into the coach-ride of the opening interlude, but emerges climatically at the beginning of Act 2 as the music for the ghosts' inspired quotation from Yeats's The Second Coming, ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’. Throughout the opera, it provides the thematic material from which significant statements of both the Governess and Quint are derived. No more powerful or appropriate musical way could be found to match the dilemma of the original story. Critical approaches, which differ widely, reflect the success of this and other ambivalent musical symbols (such as the orchestration). One feature of the opera is the development of Miles, Britten's first extended role for boy treble. It was hauntingly sung in the first production (and Britten's recording) by the young David Hemmings (fig.6), whom the composer fell for. The evocative mnemonic rhyme, ‘Malo’, set by Britten to curiously self-revolving, abject music, managed acutely to symbolize the sexually active, precocious and yet guilty child and provide a focus for the Governess's final lament while undercutting her drive to resolution. The Turn of the Screw is arguably Britten's aesthetically and musically most satisfying work in the genre as well as the richest in dramatic tension and personal allusion.

The composition of three operas in so short a time had left little time for other music. What came between Gloriana and The Turn of the Screw, however, was among the most important of the song cycles, Winter Words, on lyrics and ballads of Thomas Hardy. A nostalgic mood is set by the first song, with its evocation of November twilight in the fused dominant and tonic chords resolving on to D (minor). It is captured differently in the cantata-like account of The Choirmaster's Burial, with its miraculous setting of an old hymn tune and evocation of honest country musicianship. And finally, in Before Life and After, accompanied by low-lying triads in the left hand that conflict increasingly with the voice and piano right-hand's lyrical dialogue, the lost world of nescience is hymned as the final D major is reached – though the conflict has been intense enough to disturb any notion of soothing resolution or fulfilment of any such goal.

What came after The Turn of the Screw was directly affected by its schematic design. The vocal stanzas of Canticle III, Still Falls the Rain, completed in November 1954, interact with the interspersed variations for horn and piano in a manner recognizable from the scenes and interludes in the opera. An allegory of Christ's passion linked by the poet, Edith Sitwell, to the air raids of 1940, it was an opportunity for the composer to test again the possibility of Christian salvation on a conclusive B, this time purging the almost serial-style chromaticism of the opening in expressive two-part counterpoint, and finally resolving onto a vocal monotone both the airiness of the refrain (‘Still falls the rain’) and the recitative-like stanzas (one of them with a Sprechstimme interjection, unusual in Britten, to mark the quotation from Marlowe's Dr Faustus in the poem).

6. Transition and triumph, 1955–62.

Having concluded a series of operas that offer as solid a claim to the attention of operagoers as any other 20th-century works, Britten must have been dimly aware of a need to fill in gaps in his total output as well as to try out new things – he wrote to Edith Sitwell that ‘I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I am not pretentious about it!)’ (Cooke, D1999, p.167). For the moment, however, exhaustion set in, and the composition of a major work, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, a project with the choreographer John Cranko for Covent Garden, was set aside for an extensive tour with Pears from November 1955 to March 1956, much of it in Asia (where they had as travelling companions their friends Prince Ludwig and Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine; fig.7). They appear to have sought out indigenous, traditional dance, music and drama, such as that of Japan (to bear fruit in the church parables). In Indonesia, first Java and then, during a free two-week period, Bali, Britten made a more detailed study of local musical styles. The brassy, brilliant sound of the Balinese gamelan was predictably more arresting to him than the less demonstrative Javanese. From Ubud, where he heard the Peliatan gamelan, he wrote to Imogen Holst extolling the music as ‘fantastically rich – melodically, rhythmically, texture (such orchestration!!) & above all formally. … At last I’m beginning to catch on to the technique, but it's about as complicated as Schönberg’ (Cooke, D1998, p.70).

Gamelan music was not new to him; he had been introduced to it in America by Colin McPhee, who spent much of the 1930s in Bali, becoming an authority on its music, which he incorporated into his own works. The sonorities received confirmation from a European source when Britten played Poulenc's Concerto for two pianos with its composer early in 1945 – the work contains substantial ‘gamelan’ passages in its mixture of styles (Brett, E1994, pp.238–9). Furthermore, although McPhee's comments indicate Britten's initial ambivalence, he soon latched on, using a heterophonic pseudo-gamelan sound to characterize the moon turning blue in Paul Bunyan and deriving the deep bell sounds in the ‘Sunday Morning’ interlude in Peter Grimes from the representation of the gong in McPhee's two-piano transcriptions of Balinese Ceremonial Music. Heterophonic passages and pentatonic scales can be traced in many Britten contexts (Cooke, D1998), but it was in The Turn of the Screw (see Palmer, in Howard, E1985) that gamelan-like sounds seeped into the colour of Britten's instrumentation to suggest not simply the ghosts but also Quint's allure for Miles and the attendant danger.

The visit to Bali provided the material (in the form of sketches and recordings) for a more literal reference to the gamelan in The Prince of the Pagodas (which opened on New Year's Day 1957), although the idea of employing such music may have occurred earlier in 1955 as the result of another performance of the Poulenc concerto. There is a corresponding shift of dramatic emphasis. Cranko's scenario is a Lear-inflected fairy tale. On being passed over in favour of her haughty sister by their foolish father, the emperor, the beautiful princess Belle Rose is carried off to Pagoda Land, where, to gamelan music, the pagodas revolve or swell at her touch, offering her food and finally blindfolding her. To another gamelan piece a green salamander enters who turns into a handsome prince as the trumpet plays a melody of Siegfried-like heroism and phallic intensity. Since the princess is blindfolded, and the gamelan music is attached to the pagodas (their captives are ultimately liberated) as well as to the disguised prince, sexuality, if suggested at all, is literally polymorphous. These are latent beings, waiting for the liberation that Rose's love will effect, but surely connected through their music to a vision that is either utopian or regressive: innocence or nescience, pre-verbal, even pre-visual, depending only on touch. The score, shot through with echoes of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, gloriously opulent and uninhibited, might serve as a model of Britten's orchestral brilliance. Ears now used to ‘world music’ swallow the gamelan episodes without finding them extraneous; yet, like the exotic references in The Turn of the Screw, they belong to the phenomenon of ‘orientalism’, that is, Western projections onto peoples thereby made Other.

Britten was to travel further in that direction: during summer 1957 Plomer suggested a libretto derived from the nō play Sumidagawa that had so impressed the composer in Japan. Its gestation took some time. Meanwhile, because of increasingly burdensome public exposure, Britten and Pears moved out of Crag House, which they exchanged in November 1957 for the Red House with the artist Mary Potter (a member of their recorder group, for whom Alpine Suite was written in 1955). Near a golf course on the road to Leiston, it now houses the Britten-Pears Library. Britten was working at the time on Songs from the Chinese, settings of translations by Arthur Waley for Pears to sing to the accompaniment of Julian Bream. Although the texts, which are largely about the transient nature of beauty and youth, provide a basis for exoticism, Britten avoids it in favour of a musical language that not only exploits the guitar's capabilities but also suggests the spare, thematically orientated manner that was to occupy him after 1961.

Meanwhile, the next large work, begun in late 1957 and given at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival, claims a special place in Britten's output. Begun as the result of a television commission that failed to materialize, Noye's Fludde became the centrepiece of Britten's investment in what has eventually become known as ‘outreach’, for it involves children of all ages in its performance and includes the audience who join in the hymns around which it is built. Brilliantly managed is the physical involvement of the children, as violinists in first position, buglers playing simple school-derived fanfares, recorder players galore, a variety of percussionists (including the innovation of the ‘slung mugs’ signifying the first raindrops; fig.8) and as a chorus of child-animals with cries of ‘Kyrie eleison’ and ‘Alleluia’: everyone can be included along with the few professionals, Britten appears to be saying, in a score that is uncompromisingly interesting on all levels and therefore with no patronizing air. As if to reinforce the point, the storm is an extended passacaglia on a theme, like that of The Turn of the Screw, both tonally anchored and comprising all 12 notes: this ambivalent device is not surprisingly attached to the destruction and abjection caused by the deity. Towards the end a handbell choir, slightly reminiscent of Balinese metallophones, epitomizes the rainbow, an image that melts into that of a newly recovered universe signified by Tallis's canon, which is disturbed briefly by an organ interlude that has not unreasonably been interpreted as a moment of residual hostility to the church as an institution. The impression most listener-participants carry away from this freshly conceived music-theatre event, however, is one of great spiritual and musical satisfaction.

If the Serenade can be seen as preparatory to Peter Grimes, the Nocturne of August–September 1958 is even more closely linked with A Midsummer Night's Dream, completed in 1960. In place of the Serenade's virtuoso painting of atmosphere, the Nocturne explores the dreaming state of mind to be conjured up so powerfully in the opera. The cycle is continuous – here the poems tend to be fragments of larger works rather than discrete lyrics – and it is held together by a gossamer thread of recall, the soft breathing motif of the opening string accompaniment and the rapturous melisma set to ‘nurslings of immortality’ in the opening song. This latter motif not only signifies the poetic vision but points to the eventual outcome of the work on a D chord. Dream-like, too, is the way the piece keeps aspiring to a blissful, clear C major (as in the Keats poem at the mention of ‘Sleep’) while continually being forced into stranger worlds of experience symbolized on the one hand by the obbligato instruments that join the basic string accompaniment (and in the Keats setting take over from it) and on the other by the constant flux of the harmony which explores areas scarcely imagined in the Serenade. The cycle closes with a Shakespeare setting in which the dichotomy of the self and the loved one is mirrored by the flux between and eventual fusion of the worlds of C and D that have inhabited the earlier songs. The orchestration, reminiscent of Mahler (to whose widow Britten dedicated the work as if to acknowledge the earlier composer’s influence), signals the seriousness and passionate nature of this dialogue of the soul, an exploration in miniature of the predicaments that were to extract such a rich response from Britten in his opera.

The same summer saw the completion (as a 50th birthday offering to Prince Ludwig, who drew Britten’s attention to the poems) of Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, which take up again the themes of the Songs from the Chinese in a fairly severe lieder-like style. At the heart of the cycle lies a radiant answer to the unbelieving questioner of the nature of Socrates’ love for Alcibiades in which the singer takes up the chromatic piano melody now ‘naturalized’ by the plain triads of the accompaniment. The concluding two songs, however, return to the autumnal atmosphere of the earlier cycle. The rigorous motivic and canonic workings of these songs prepare for the heterophonic yet tonally centred procedures of the final decade. A more jesting ‘academic’ approach to Schoenbergian procedures is to be found in the subsequent Cantata Academica, written in 1959 for the quincentenary of Basle University. With its ‘Tema seriale con fuga’ and other academic trappings lightly worn, a ponderous Latin text, and fairly unbuttoned manner (occasionally recalling Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex quite strongly), it is an occasional piece well calculated for the average university music group. A more spectacular piece of the same year, the Missa brevis, was written for George Malcolm and the boys of Westminster Cathedral Choir, and well calculated for the notably reedy tone of that group compared to the more usual white-toned English boys’ choir. In the Sanctus the boys magically project 12-note collections over D major triads in the organ to exciting effect, but Britten follows Bach in making the Agnus Dei a moment of personal tension that disturbs the otherwise lofty atmosphere of this tiny masterpiece.

A culminating work for the operatic stage of this period is A Midsummer Night's Dream, written to celebrate the enlargement of the Jubilee Hall at Aldeburgh. The idea occurred barely a year ahead of the first performance (in the 1960 festival), and Britten and Pears together cut and rearranged Shakespeare's play as a libretto. Britten (The Observer, 5 June 1960) said that the play appealed to him as the work of a very young man and as a story that involved three distinct groups, the Lovers, the Rustics (as he called the mechanicals) and the Fairies, which interact. More likely, after exploring the ambiguity of relationships in a realistic setting in Billy Budd and the fantasy of the unthinkable in the context of James's ghost story, he found in this play, which literary critics were just beginning to read as saturnalian rather than romantic, an ideal vehicle for pursuing his interests in the difficulties and dangers in human relationships. A crucial difference from Shakespeare occurs as the curtain rises: it is plain from the heavy breathing in the orchestra that we are already, in more senses than one, in the woods. Britten dispenses with the social context of Athens and the background of reality as an initiating device in favour of the darker world of the Nocturne, and moves here the furthest distance from the realistic borough of Peter Grimes into a private world, one of possibilities rather than limitations. The folk-festival or May-games aspect of Shakespeare's play, then, is matched by a contemporary notion of misrule, the world of the libido.

As if to reinforce the unreality, operatic convention itself is part of the subject, most obviously in the broad comedy of the mechanicals' play, a wicked send-up of 19th-century styles. The chorus that opens the opera is one of unbroken boys’ voices singing one of Britten's spiky unison tunes, as different from the romantic notion of fairies (and opera choruses) as could be imagined. On cue comes the expected entry of the prima donna and male lead, but in this case he is far from the ardent tenor of the Romantic era and as close as one can get to the primo uomo of 18th-century opera seria, the castrato. Along with the historical reference goes the association of unmanliness, and thus of gender liminality, that haunts the modern image of the homosexual, and the impression is enhanced by the Baroque style of his set pieces and the pseudo-gamelan sounds that attend his magic herb. A distant relation of Quint, he already has his Miles in Puck, not the hero's baritone friend of grand opera but a lithe tumbler with an adolescent voice who speaks rather than sings. The lovers sing lines that are eternally syllabic, in even notes, a sure sign in Britten's musical language that, though conventionally ‘good’, they are limited; their litany-like set piece after waking from their dream fails to separate their personalities, so that what is often seen as Shakespeare's own gloomy prognosis for love and marriage in patriarchal society finds an echo in Britten's pessimism. The only really tender relationship, and the only one that crosses social boundaries, is between the bewitched Tytania and the grotesque Bottom: the latter even usurps Oberon's falsetto voice in recalling it. But Bottom ends up back with his pals, and Tytania's radiant coloratura is silenced. The one truly romantic moment, as we might guess, is a regressive (and irresistible) transformation at the end of Act 2: Puck's ‘Jack shall have Jill / Naught shall go ill’ rhyme, sung by the fairy boys in 3rds against the ‘motto’ chords in a lush D major context that bleeds Shakespeare's verse of every drop of its irony.

In summer 1960 Britten revised Billy Budd, compressing its four acts into two. In September an invitation to a Shostakovich première led to his meeting the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who highly admired him, and with whom he immediately struck up a rich musical friendship and partnership (engagingly described by Carpenter, especially 397–404). This quickly led to a reawakening of abstract instrumental composition, abandoned since 1951 but for a few pieces for the Aldeburgh recorder group, a variation on Sellenger's Round for a composite coronation-year composition and a Fanfare for a pageant at Bury St Edmunds (1959). Too much has often been made of this ‘lapse’; Britten had no need of the ideology that demanded mastery in absolute instrumental forms. His adopting the Vaughan Williams model of national pre-eminence ruled out direct competition in symphonic music but not writing for outstanding, friendly and admiring performers – the impetus behind the ebullient Sonata in C for cello and piano, as it was behind the solo works of a decade earlier. 1961 and 1962 were otherwise dedicated to choral music, where it was necessary to stake a claim. A Hymn of St Columba (1962) is a slightly dark piece emanating from a bizarre anniversary, while Psalm 150 is the simplest of school songs written the same year for South Lodge (now renamed Old Buckenham Hall).

Britten’s crowning choral work, and for some possibly the pinnacle of his entire output, is the War Requiem, begun in the second half of 1961 as the result of a 1958 commission for the festival marking the consecration of the new cathedral at Coventry (see England, fig.14). Arguably, Britten became a victim of his own success, drowning his authentic ‘private voice’ as a result of inscribing himself into the English oratorio tradition with a grandiloquent work for soloists, massed choral forces and orchestra. An ingenious medievalism was evoked by troping the Latin text with a vernacular commentary. The historical resonance, combined with an evocation of the sublime in the form of a bombed cathedral in Britain's industrial midlands and of the metaphysical in the notion of reconciliation beyond the grave, gave the piece a portentous and grandiose character which seems oddly more of the age of Elgar than that of post-World War II. Some listeners have wondered whether the evocation of the end of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in the concluding chorus is sufficiently undermined by the interruptions of boys and bells sounding the ominous augmented 4th that underpins the work. In terms of politics, too, questions have arisen about the application of a World War I pacifist message in a post-World War II context, as though the holocaust were not a factor to be reckoned with, as well as the silence on the topic of nuclear disarmament so germane to the early 1960s. The integrity of Britten's homosexual politics explains a great deal here, particularly the use of fellow pacifist and homosexual Wilfred Owen's poetry to transmit his anger about the fate of young men sent to their deaths by an unfeeling patriarchal system as well as his critique of empty religious forms in collusion with that system; possibly a metaphorical extension can be made to all innocent victims. But the choice of a major establishment genre in which to couch the powerful message of pacifism can only be explained as part of a strategy, perhaps unconscious, to gain acceptance for the artist while maintaining the subversion of his message. ‘All a poet can do is warn’ (in the words of Owen); but if the medium overwhelms the message, the warning loses urgency, irony is overwhelmed, and reception tends to become complacent.

A return to the more typical and more modest occasional style of Britten's choral music came a year later in Cantata misericordium, commissioned for the centenary of the International Red Cross. The string quartet component, the bass-tenor duo (Pears and Fischer-Dieskau in the early performances and recording) and the Latin text recall the grander work. But the scale is more suited to the swift telling of the simple and relevant tale of the Good Samaritan. A mixture of harp and piano brilliantly characterizes the spine-chilling anxiety of the baritone Traveller before he is attacked, and the subsequent focus on the Samaritan (the priest and Levite are chorally described rather than vocally personified) is dramatically apt for the moral (‘you now know who your neighbour is: go and do likewise’) without the point being laboured.

7. Further travels, 1963–9.

Britten's 50th birthday year was marked by a number of events, including a visit to Moscow, a book of tributes from friends (Gishford, C1963), a Prom concert (12 September 1963) at which he conducted the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Spring Symphony and the first performance in Britain of Cantata misericordium, and on the birthday itself a concert performance of Gloriana. In a public tribute Hans Keller proclaimed him ‘the greatest composer alive’, greater even than Stravinsky (Music and Musicians, xii/3, 1963–4, p.13). There was another side to this institutionalization. Musical taste in Britain, long starved of avant-garde stimulation, insulated even from modernism, was now moving on owing to radical changes by the new BBC Controller of Music, William Glock, and a new generation of composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Cornelius Cardew. The general audience was as usual accepting of merely a few pieces that had crept into the repertory, a situation exacerbated rather than relieved by the success of the War Requiem. Having worked to gain the position that Vaughan Williams had held, Britten was made doubly insecure by the isolation of preeminence. Accordingly he set out on new paths somewhat unheralded.

First came a return to the grand, purely orchestral statement not heard from him since Sinfonia da Requiem. The Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, completed early in May 1963, was part of the series of works for Rostropovich. Referred to by its composer during composition as a sinfonia concertante, it proceeds, in spite of the opening dark flourishes that appear to herald a conventional concerto arrangement, as a discourse between equal forces, the soloist democratically exchanging roles with the orchestral basses at the recapitulation of the extensive and regularly proportioned sonata-form first movement. The dark, furtive-sounding Scherzo is followed by an Adagio that connects to the last movement and is strongly related to it. The year closed with a more intimate instrumental work, Nocturnal after John Dowland, for Julian Bream, whose interpretations of Dowland songs with Pears had become justly celebrated. Writing for the virtuoso guitar rather than the accompanimental lute, and adopting the strategy of the earlier Lachrymae, Britten allows the theme, the song Come, heavy sleep, to emerge in Dowland's own accompaniment only after eight insomniac variations (the last a ground-bass treatment of a detail from Dowland's accompaniment) have succeeded each other without ever achieving the final repetition of the second strain, whose curtailed presentation lends a witty and moving air to the conclusion.

Meanwhile, there was the long-postponed Sumidagawa to face. For the purpose, Britten, Pears and entourage (Graham as stage director and Holst as amanuensis) took an unusual six-week working vacation in Venice. The conception belonged to the visit to Japan eight years earlier, when Plomer had recommended that Britten see all forms of Japanese theatre, but particularly the nō. Although his initial reaction was of embarrassed amusement at the stylized acting, he soon became entranced by the story of a distraught mother searching for her lost child, went to see it again, and procured a translation of the Sumidagawa of the early 15th-century dramatist Jūrō Motomasa. He later visited the kabuki theatre, enjoyed shamisen songs at a geisha evening and heard the gagaku orchestra whose sounds were to reverberate in Curlew River. The principal nō characteristic of limiting expressivity in acting and presentation in search of a more profound underlying truth that springs from its stylization resonated with Britten's own training, and its all-male cast appealed to a gender identification intensified by upbringing and sexual orientation. Plomer and Britten initially planned an operatic translation of the original, presumably with musical imitation (‘oh, to find some equivalent to those extraordinary noises the Japanese musicians made!’: Cooke, D1998, p.141). In April 1959, however, came a change of heart: not a nō pastiche (‘which, however well done, would seem false and thin’) but a medieval church drama set in pre-conquest East Anglia. It was to be a Christian work, with ‘Kyrie eleison’ replacing ‘Amida Buddha’: in 1963 Britten finally identified himself as ‘a dedicated Christian’ (see Carpenter, 421)

In Curlew River Britten made a radical attempt to return Western music to its melodic origins (before the disease of harmony germed, as it were). A plainchant hymn, Te lucis ante terminum, provides the melodic fount (and, typically, the outer frame), its intervals extended to include the augmented 4th for the cry of the curlew and of the protesting Madwoman. The resonant acoustic works with the plainchant-inspired lines, already blurred by the heterophonic technique, emphasized here to a new degree, to create a new kind of ‘harmony’ more like the bright but kaleidoscopic hues of stained glass, with similar iridescence. Characterization is by single instrumental colours – the Ferryman his active horn, the Traveller a double-stopped double bass, the Madwoman a flute, imitating her extraordinary vocal line with its heavy portamento. The organ (imitating the shō) pours cold water on the ensemble; the harp injects its prismatic detail; and the percussion suggests otherness, whether exotic or historical. A disciplined ensemble of actor-singers and instrumentalists in monks' habits – three of them assuming the masks of the main characters in a ritual robing – performs, without conductor, from a score with special notational features to promote synchronization. The audience is mesmerized by an hour's-worth of radical renovation which opens out into time unaccounted for or differently measured. It is a ‘parable’ about various Christian themes – charity, the afterlife – but the focus is on the visionary Madwoman, one of Britten's few really sympathetic portrayals of women, sung by Pears in the original.

1964 was marked by other innovations in Britten's life. He parted company with his longtime publishers, Boosey & Hawkes; the literary publishers Faber & Faber founded Faber Music for him, with Donald Mitchell its head. Rosamund Strode entered the Aldeburgh household as Britten's music assistant, replacing her friend and mentor Imogen Holst (who continued to be involved with the festival). In July Britten flew to Colorado to receive the first Aspen Award for an outstanding contribution to ‘the advancement of the humanities’. In his acceptance speech, later published, he encapsulated his views about the relation of the composer to society, and about his own needs. ‘I want my music to be of use to people, to please them … my music now has its roots, in where I live and work. And I only came to realise that in California in 1941’ (Britten, 1964, pp.21–2). Later in the year, Britten reported to Plomer that his doctors had ordered rest, and that he and Pears would take 1965 off, beginning with a lengthy trip to India with the Hesses. He nevertheless composed the first of the three cello suites before the New Year (having earlier written cadenzas to Haydn's Cello Concerto in C for Rostropovich). Soon after his return from India, in March, he was awarded the Order of Merit (in place of T.S. Eliot who had recently died); this was the highest possible British honour (Vaughan Williams was the last musician to belong among the 24 most eminent living citizens personally appointed by the queen).

Composition continued in the ‘sabbatical’ year. The Indian holiday saw the completion of Gemini Variations, 12 variations and a fugue on a theme by Kodály written for Hungarian prodigy twins, Zoltán and Gabriel Jeney, who between them covered the flute, violin and piano and could accordingly change instruments between variations and during the final fugue. The following month produced a work in complete contrast – the bleak Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, inspired by Fischer-Dieskau's darkly coloured voice and extraordinary musicianship as well as Britten's most personal concerns. The cycle, a continuous one, interleaves a ritornello-like setting of the seven proverbs with seven songs that paint an increasingly sombre picture of human existence. Musically, the construction depends on a 12-note series arranged in three four-note segments, and only achieved as a melodic statement by the voice in Proverb VII to suitable words: ‘To see the World in a grain of sand’. Most remarkable is the powerful setting of Blake's insight into the processing of anger, A Poison Tree. Britten, who must surely have known the truth of Blake's words while spectacularly failing to act on them, at least in the Aldeburgh situation, uses a 12-note vocal melody closely related to the original set. It comes readily enough round to a cadence on E minor on its return to the first note in the initial ‘healthy’ statement (‘I told my wrath, my wrath did end’), but then develops, with the help of inversion in the bass line (symbolizing the internalization process), into a terrifyingly effective and highly dissonant contrapuntal build-up ending in the hollow chordal triumph (over the inevitable E pedal) of the death of the foe. There is no mild consolation of the kind offered in Winter Words in the prospect of, or longing for, nescience. The all-too-knowing subject is revealed in full frailty – a portrait (from a composer so often connected merely with ‘innocence’) all the more remarkable for its unblinking honesty and bleak integrity.

At another point in the ‘sabbatical’, Britten was tempted by a commission into writing a didactic work celebrating the 20th anniversary of the United Nations – it was performed in New York, Paris and London on the very day, 24 October 1965. Voices for Today is an unaccompanied choral work (with ad libitum organ part) for large mixed chorus with a smaller chorus of boys, or boys and girls. It begins sententiously though quietly with an anthology of positive thoughts from the world's great thinkers and poets – all of them noticeably male – before opening out into a setting of Virgil's fourth Eclogue. Shorn of its pagan specifics this becomes an address to a Christ-like boy figure, the harbinger of a new pastoral life of plenty and peace. So much high-mindedness somehow dampened the musical response. A more robust expression of Britten's musical character comes out in the Pushkin cycle, The Poet's Echo, written for the excitingly dramatic voice of Galina Vishnevskaya and first performed by her on 2 December 1965 with Rostropovich accompanying.

Britten had written to Plomer about an idea for ‘another opera in the same style’ less than a month after Curlew River's first performance. The Burning Fiery Furnace predictably replaced Japanese sources with story from the book of Daniel. Three young Israelites, Ananias, Misael and Azarias, attempt to deal with the favours and demands of Nebuchadnezzar and the jealousy of his astrologer and people. A crisis around naming (the trio are forced to accept the Babylonian names Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) makes this a parable of identity and difference. The luxury of Babylon, indicated by the dancing boys' ‘cabaret’ as well as the increased opulence of the scoring, can be understood as a reflection of the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ Britain of the Macmillan era and its anti-Semitism related to the growing anti-immigrant racism of the time. The identity politics may obliquely refer to the ‘coming out’ process for the homosexual (Hindley, E1992), but it is quite likely that Britten himself supported the literal Christian parable of faith. He devised a charmingly literal pun by emphasizing the interval of the 4th to mirror the appearance of the fourth figure in the furnace, the Angel (many such felicities are detailed by Evans, C1979, pp.480–89). The score is a little slow to get off the ground but reaches a cold and sinister brilliance with the march and hymn in praise of the heathen idol, answered by the four cool voices from the furnace. The extra brass and percussion, with more extrovert musical gestures (the alto trombone's brazen portamentos), effect the move to the Middle East from the Far East of the dramatic form, a collapsing of distinctions characteristic of orientalism.

Two fairly slight works intervened before the third and final church parable. The Golden Vanity, a ‘vaudeville’ with a libretto by Colin Graham, the dedicated stage director of the church operas, takes a folksong (one Vaughan Williams himself had set) as the basis for what has been described as a children's Billy Budd owing to the relation between the perfidious sea captain and his gallant cabin boy. It was written (in August 1966) for the Vienna Boys' Choir, who performed it at the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival. Hankin Booby is a salty little folk dance for wind and drums, originally written for the opening concert of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and later incorporated into the Suite on English Folk Tunes. But a concert hall closer to home occupied much energy during this period. The Maltings at Snape had been discovered by Stephen Reiss, manager of the festival, as an available space to improve on the now-outgrown Aldeburgh facilities. The way Britten threw himself into this project, cajoling and demanding by turns, shows not only how much he wanted to be able to mount his larger works, both instrumental and operatic, at the festival but also how very seriously he took himself and his position in British culture by this time (Carpenter, 454–8, 468–70, 472–5). The Maltings concert hall was opened on 2 June 1967 by the Queen, and the initial concert included Britten's arrangement of the national anthem and his specially composed overture, The Building of the House, with its (optional) choral setting of the Elizabethan metrical version of Psalm cxxvii, ‘Except the Lord the house doth make’. The Cello Suite no.2 occupied Britten during the summer.

The Prodigal Son is the least immediately appealing of the church parable triptych, but inside its purposely reticent interior is a significant return to the issues of patriarchy and authority. By assigning the viola to the title figure, moreover, the composer indicated his personal identification. A warm baritone Father, lyrically extolling the virtues of husbandry with Britten's favourite alto flute as accompaniment, signals a reconciliation with the patriarchy that is as unexpected dramatically as the rooted B triads are musically unusual in the melodically orientated music of the church parables. But an interpretation at one level leads to a contradiction at the next. The frame is broken by the Abbot's being in mufti and notably failing to present his religious credentials (‘you people … do not think I bid you kneel and pray’); he is a home wrecker (‘see how I break it up’) who insinuates himself as the alter ego of the younger son. The similarity with Quint has often been noted. The temptations (of wine, the flesh and gambling) are cleverly presented by a distant boys' choir – Britten's own idea – so that the Tempter can mediate them in extraordinary Sprechstimme with glissando harmonics on the double bass. That these temptations are not too musically alluring should not be surprising: Britten's idea of sin can never have involved bars, bath-houses, casinos or other material delights. No wonder they are overshadowed by the accelerating march home, in which the various instrumental strands suggest the coming together of a fragmented existence, ending in the radiant B of the father's acceptance. But the listener is also left to wonder if those B chords are not too restricting and binding, as alien as the Tempter himself. Auden's warning to Britten about the dangers of building a warm nest of love for himself seems appropriate to invoke.

On returning in February 1968 from Venice, where much of the opera was completed, Britten contracted infective endocarditis, which postponed its completion until April. The Maltings enabled the festival to be extended, and after the summer performances Britten settled down to recording projects there, including Schubert songs with Pears, the Brandenburg concertos, English string music and two LPs of Percy Grainger, culminating in early 1969 with a televised Peter Grimes. During the same period he wrote Children's Crusade for the 50th anniversary of the Save the Children Fund. The down-to-earth style and impersonal tone of Brecht's Kinderkreuzzug, a ballad about the death of a wandering band of children in the war-torn Poland of 1939, allowed Britten's anger to surface. The manipulations of a 12-note row appear to symbolize, here as elsewhere, the dying civilization of Europe, reflected through the fate of the children and their dog, whose death ends ‘a very grisly piece’ (as Britten himself called it) on an unsentimental note. This was shortly succeeded by one of the grimmest of the song cycles, Who are these Children?. The 12 songs are settings of ‘lyrics, rhymes and riddles’ by William Soutar (1898–1943), the caustic Scottish invalid poet. The riddles and rhymes in Scottish dialect, portraying the relatively carefree life of the ‘natural’ boy, as it were, are interleaved with settings of English poems depicting the cruelty of modern civilization in terms of irony and sheer pain. Commentators have invoked the Donne Sonnets to characterize the relentless accompanimental figuration of Slaughter; the background to the title song is a 1941 photograph of children in a bombed village staring uncomprehendingly at a fox-hunting party riding through; and the actual pitches of the wartime air-raid siren are used as an ostinato in The Children, a poem written in response to bombing in the Spanish Civil War (Johnson, in Palmer, D1984, p.305). The last song, to a dialect poem about the feeling of an oak, brings to reality in the ‘natural’ cycle the foreboding of the first ‘English’ poem, ‘Nightmare’. It is an uncompromising vision ending with the much-repeated word ‘doun’ (signifying ‘the end of everything’, Britten told Johnson). Some relief came between these works in the lucid C major music Britten composed for one of his favourite instruments and performers: the Suite for Harp was the first of a number of pieces for Osian Ellis, a valued collaborator and alternative accompanist for Pears, and its final variations on the Welsh hymn tune ‘Saint Denio’ constitute a special compliment to his and the harp's nationality.

The decade ended in flames with the dramatic conflagration of the Maltings concert hall on the first night of the festival, Saturday 7 June 1969. Britten's calm and practical nature excelled in such circumstances, and his leadership ensured that the festival programme continued. Served by an able administration and local builders, rebuilding with improvements forged ahead in time for the 1970 festival. There were other less flammable but perhaps more indicative disappointments about the decade. Two shelved opera projects that came to a head between 1963 and 1965, King Lear and Anna Karenina, both scotched because of premature press reports, show that Britten was beginning to accept his limitations. In returning to social protest in connection with boyhood at the end of the 1960s, he was all but announcing that his obsessions were what made him function. He could not entirely adopt the ‘universal’ voice expected of the ‘classical music’ composer, however much he had tried in the War Requiem to do so. To his credit he knew that, but could not be absolutely explicit about his private obsessions to the extent of their losing resonance for other human beings of his class and culture.

8. Final testaments, 1970–76.

Britten was no fan of television: he did not own a set until Decca gave him one for his 60th birthday. But with the Maltings available, he determined around 1968 to go ahead with a television opera on a more obscure Henry James ghost story which for him had ‘much the same quality as the Screw’ (Carpenter, 508). Owen Wingrave, completed in August 1970, recorded in November and broadcast simultaneously in Europe and America in May 1971, is at one level a final testament on pacifism. The hero, scion of a military family, determines not to embark on an army career; disinherited as a result, he is goaded by his financée's taunt of cowardice into being locked into the haunted room of the family mansion. On unlocking the door in remorse, she discovers him dead. The opera places great condemnatory weight on tradition and the family, the power of which is maintained in the almost complete absence of male authority (an old general totters through his expected gestures) by three women portrayed with unmitigated hostility in both music and television image as shoring up the patriarchy; we are barely invited to sympathize with any of them. ‘The massive audience was a wonderful opportunity for Britten to make his personal statement about war and the empty glory of heroism, in the context of the Vietnam War and the shooting of students … on Kent [State University] campus’ (Graham, in Herbert, E1979, p.54). Given McClatchie's successful attempt (E1996) to show at another level how the discourse of homosexuality is displaced on to that of pacifism, the work may equally represent Britten’s pessimism about gay militancy, recently energized by the New York Stonewall Riots of 1969. Owen's determination to be true to himself in the face of the enemy – tradition and the family – leads to a classic ‘coming out’ scene that Britten, schooled in a discretionary age, could never have contemplated for himself. James cannot resist the irony of Owen's embracing peace only to die ‘all the young soldier on the gained field’, a point that Britten and Piper underscore (Owen's reaction to past military heroes, like his own ancestors, is to want to ‘hang the lot’). Similarly, Britten and James send Owen literally back into his closet at the end of the opera, and kill him off as well: at least he has found ‘peace’. Musically this happens in one of Britten's most celebrated arias not only accompanied by diatonic triads (like the ‘interview’ scene in Billy Budd) but also given an overlay of gamelan music – the kind that in The Prince of the Pagodas signifies at best utopianism or nescience, at worst polymorphous perversity, definitely not erotic allure. Britten's musical irony, in which each level peeled away reveals a further one beyond, extends to a critique of his own exoticism. The Wingrave family portraits are heralded by a pseudo-gamelan flourish with a militaristic tattoo on the drums; it opens the opera and recurs whenever they loom. The almost inaudible pitches, however, consist of one of the several 12-note collections of the opera, one that notably provides the diminished intervals that consign the Wingraves to the obsolescent and evil European past. Britten once compared Balinese music to Schoenberg in terms of complication, but mapping the one onto the other was to commit a meaningful kind of sacrilege: it undermines any attempt to think of signs as stable in his music and supports a pessimistic reading. Self-determination is a chimera, the opera seems to say, for there is always some ghost to disturb the perfect dénouement. Just as the pacifist can fight militarism only in its own terms (and lose in those terms), so the problem of the homosexual is to escape the history of sexuality into a new life without replicating the old ‘straight’ order, something understandably inconceivable to Britten. As in Peter Grimes, Britten appears instinctively to have anticipated an argument that would take queer theorists a decade or more to articulate. This opera may seem to preach, but it repays study as the testament of a man resigned to the way things are but nevertheless continuing to protest.

The 1970 Aldeburgh Festival was marked not only by the attendance of the Queen for the reopening of the Maltings but also by an article in The Observer (7 June), ‘At the Court of Benjamin Britten’. This put a name to the atmosphere typified architecturally by the extraordinary aperture on the side of the auditorium in which Britten, Pears and Imogen Holst would appear as icons to be worshipped and as judges of all that took place. Britten seemed to be losing his draw, his music gleefully seen as increasingly ‘thin’ by cognoscenti, the working conditions alienating performers, Aldeburgh politics becoming extra-Byzantine and the Russians failing to turn up because of political problems of their own. The pointless game of Tippett versus Britten seemed to be going in Tippett's favour. Not unexpectedly, Britten retired further into the Suffolk countryside, taking a house at Horham to escape Aldeburgh's increasing aircraft noise. In the following summer, Britten and Pears, full of ambitious ideas for the expansion of the Maltings into a full-scale arts centre and music school, clashed with the long-suffering festival manager, Stephen Reiss, in a deplorable manner that led to his resignation. The first three months of 1971 nevertheless saw the completion of two new works. Canticle IV, Journey of the Magi, a slightly detached and interior setting of the uneasy T.S. Eliot poem about death-in-birth and the difficulty of change, was written for the three singers, James Bowman, Pears and John Shirley-Quirk, who were to be principals in the next opera, already then in the planning stage. The third and most passionate Cello Suite incorporates four Russian themes, three folksongs arranged by Tchaikovsky and the moving Kontakion (Hymn for the Dead) which, as in earlier Britten solo works, are offered in their plain forms only at the end. It marks the culmination of a body of work inspired by Rostropovich's rich and romantic performance of the Bach unaccompanied suites.

In September 1970 Britten asked Myfanwy Piper to write a libretto for an opera on Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, an idea he had entertained for some time. The project moved forward at an unusually deliberate pace for Britten, and was not thrown off the rails by advance publicity, or even by the need to do something about the cardiac deterioration his doctor diagnosed in August 1972. The composer was both determined and ‘desperately keen to make it the best thing I have ever done’ (Carpenter, 534). The composition sketch was finished by Christmas 1972, the scoring early the following spring. Britten's need to complete the work is understandable because it views the great themes of his music, from a fundamentally different and freshly revealing viewpoint. Aschenbach the writer's relation to a handsome young boy, Tadzio, is created entirely in his imagination through the play of bodily form, motion, gesture and sound. His obsession is reflected by dense motivic allusion and serial manipulation in the music, and the beauty of Tadzio appropriately represented by dance and the bright ring of Balinese-inspired sounds. A particularly brilliant decision was the assignment to a single singer of the seven Hermes-like characters who stage Aschenbach's journey towards death – or is it transfiguration? This has led critics into interpreting the work as a parable of artistic endeavour, hinging on the need for balance between Dionysian urges and Apollonian regulation along the lines of Mann's response to Nietzsche's theory of art.

But two facts have to be recognized before the critic can dispense with sex in favour of metaphysics: one is the cry wrung from Aschenbach at the end of Act 1 (‘I – love you’), the other (elegantly outlined by Travis, E1987, pp.132–3) that the notes accompanying the tortured 12-note monologue in which Aschenbach laments his creative impotence at the opening of the opera resolve into the ‘Tristan chord’, with a two-octave upward displacement of its tenor note B. The E–F tensions of Act 1 can also be seen to be derived from Wagner's opening melodic gesture. Sex and sexuality cannot, then, be spirited away but are presented along Nietzsche's inclusive model as reaching to the highest peaks of the intellect, not opposed to it. Further, the discourse Mann presents and Britten develops with Hellenic references – the Games of Apollo and The Dream – belongs to an older order of same-sex relations than 19th-century homosexuality, that of Greek pederasty, which embraces the entire history and condition of culture in the West. Imbuing the image of Tadzio with the sounds of Bali, moreover, took Mann's discourse a stage further, elaborating on his suggestion of the Asiatic origins of the libidinous cult of Dionysus, and also of the cholera carried by the sirocco. This was dramatically apt, since the mind-driven Aschenbach through whom we perceive both Venice and Tadzio would be culturally conditioned to project them both in terms of the exotic, that which is Other. This Asian-derived music, then, opens up the meanings of the opera to embrace the European philosophical discourse of Self and Other, and in turn to invoke the West's insatiable appetite for colonization – the same patterns of domination being apparent here as in classical pederasty. These are some of the themes of this multifarious and magnificient work, at one level a ‘musical autobiography’ (Carpenter, 554), at another an engagement with postwar, post-colonial Britain and the culture of the West.

After the completion of the opera, and celebrations of events with personal friends, Britten went into hospital on 6 April 1973, and underwent an operation on 7 May to replace a failing heart valve. The operation was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke which affected his right hand, and the results were ultimately disappointing. Convalescence did not go smoothly and Britten felt unable to compose, perhaps for the first time. 60th birthday celebrations in November were held without his participation. Rostropovich visited in January 1974 to play the Cello Suite no.3 to Britten, who made some revisions. A little later Donald Mitchell interested him in revising the String Quartet in D (1931) for publication by Faber Music. At the National Heart Hospital where the operation was done, Britten became friendly with a senior sister, Rita Thomson, who went to Aldeburgh that Easter to look after him and stayed for the rest of his life. He improved notably under her care and began slowly to face serious work again, revising Paul Bunyan, some numbers of which had been given at the 1974 Aldeburgh Festival.

The first new work, completed in July that year, was Canticle V, The Death of Saint Narcissus. The setting of a dense and complicated early poem of T.S. Eliot, it was written for Pears to the accompaniment of Ellis's harp, a poignant reminder that the composer's accompanying days were past – but not the imagination that could create the beautiful, damaged ‘dancer before God’ in so few and eloquent strokes, faintly recalling the erotic intensity of Les illuminations. A projected Christmas opera along the lines of Noye's Fludde never progressed beyond sketches, but while staying with Margaret Hesse at Wolfsgarten, he began the Suite on English Folk Tunes, and completed it in November. Its subtitle, ‘A time there was…’ comes from the Hardy poem, ‘Before Life and After’, that closes Winter Words, and the work, undertaken as a frame for Hankin Booby (1966), provides an elegant and nostalgic farewell to the folk and traditional music from which Britten had drawn so much; it was ‘lovingly and reverently dedicated to the memory of Percy Grainger’, with whom he identified as against the other English folksong composer-collectors. Another work recalling the brilliance of Britten's writing for unaccompanied chorus followed almost immediately. Sacred and Profane, written for Pears's Wilbye Consort and completed in January 1975, takes eight medieval lyrics and sets them with a breathtaking directness and artful simplicity. Most moving in their intensity are the two laments for Christ on the cross, but good humour is not lacking, especially in the final song, which not only catalogues the attributes of death and decay with verve but ends on a suitably defiant note. The delight that Britten took in modifying simple strophic shapes in setting these medieval poems also provides enormous pleasure in A Birthday Hansel, a short cycle of Burns poems for high voice and harp written at the request of Queen Elizabeth for her mother's 75th birthday (4 August 1975); completed in March, they were performed for the Queen Mother by Pears and Ellis the following January.

These three works were in a sense a final tribute to the musicianship and voice of Peter Pears, who was kept away from Aldeburgh for extended periods during Britten's illness. In autumn 1974 he was in New York for the Metropolitan Opera production of Death in Venice and during this period Britten, after hearing a broadcast of their last British recital in 1972, put down in writing all that Pears's voice, personality and artistry had meant to him: their exchange of letters is deeply expressive of their remarkable partnership, unparalleled in 20th-century music (for the texts, see Carpenter, 568–9).

At the 1975 festival, Janet Baker sang Berlioz's cycle Nuits d'été, and Britten decided to compose something for her on verse from Robert Lowell's free translation of Racine's Phèdre. An opera being now beyond his physical powers, he wrote a dramatic cantata in Handelian form, in which Phaedra addresses other characters (Aphrodite, Hippolytus, Oenone, Theseus) in discrete arias and recitatives, the latter accompanied by the traditional continuo instruments, harpsichord and cello. There is no glorification of Hippolytus in Phaedra, merely a ‘thin’ presto depiction of Phaedra's obsession, with Racinian irony (see Palmer, D1984, p.410). Theseus is more beautifully outlined in a sweeping Apollonian A major theme (in key and opening gesture it recalls Theseus's celebratory theme in Act 3 of A Midsummer Night's Dream). But more glorious still is the dénouement, in steadily rising ten-part string chords, an unusual sonority for Britten, in which the sexual outlaw, having made her forthright confession, finds nobility, peace and purity in an almost unsullied C major; sweet, fleeting, reminiscences of her life flicker as she dies and her spirit ascends in an apotheosis of muted string diatonic chord clusters rising through two octaves over the expiring pedal C.

Hans Keller, to whom Britten dedicated his last major work, the String Quartet no.3, wrote that here the composer had taken ‘that decisive step beyond – into the Mozartian realm of the instrumental purification of opera’ (Herbert, E1979, p.xv). Another way of putting that without endorsing the genre over the substance is to say that there is really no music of Britten's that fails to render meanings. Owing to his eternal seeking and questioning and the ambiguity with which he managed to imbue the common musical symbols of his tradition, those meanings are rarely simple. Quotations from Death in Venice occur in the recitative introduction to the passacaglia finale, appropriately sketched on a last visit to Venice in November 1975, and allusions to the opera are made in various ways throughout. The agenda probably includes the redemption or transfiguration of Aschenbach, with whom the composer clearly identified, to whose E major both first and last movements reach. But the most complete tonal resolution, on Britten's ‘own’ C major, occurs in the enigmatic central movement of the five, ‘Solo’; and the end, when it arrives, not only comes ‘with a question’, as Britten put it, but draws attention both to the arbitrary nature of closure (in art as in life) and in retrospect to the more complete closures earlier on (see Rupprecht, in Cooke, D1999, p.258). Whatever the interpretation, few listeners will doubt that this is as profound a work as anything Britten wrote.

It is nevertheless appropriate that his last complete work, finished in August 1976, was the unpretentious and cheerful Welcome Ode, written for a local occasion – a visit of the Queen Mother to Ipswich – and designed for ‘young people's chorus and orchestra’. As Evans pointed out (D1979, p.292), the development of instrumental teaching and growth of youth orchestras in Britain made it possible for Britten to demand a good deal, and it is fitting that his mission as a composer should have ended not with the high-flown quartet but this straightforward and unpatronizing gesture to the children he loved so much. In fact, work had become increasingly difficult during 1976, and was made up largely of what he might at other times have called ‘chores’ – a Tema ‘Sacher’ that Rostropovich could play for the 70th birthday of Paul Sacher, an arrangement for viola and string orchestra of Lachrymae and some folksong arrangements for Pears and Ellis. In July he started on a project to mark Rostropovich's first season with the National SO in Washington, DC, a cantata setting of the poem Edith Sitwell had dedicated to him, ‘Praise we Great Men’. The work remained incomplete, reaching a performable state only through the efforts of Colin Matthews, the young composer who had assisted with the scoring of Death in Venice and had become more intimately involved in Britten's composing as the older composer became increasingly infirm.

During the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, in which the revised Paul Bunyan was staged and Phaedra made a deeply emotional impact, Britten was awarded a life peerage. Plenty of musicians had received knighthoods but none a peerage; according to Rosamund Strode, ‘Ben didn't mind about himself in the least. He just felt it was marvellous for music’ (Carpenter, 580). Others have viewed his acceptance with puzzlement or irony: but it seems entirely characteristic of the man who wanted so much to belong to the society he thought he didn't fit into. By this time he was desperately ill, and even took communion from a bishop who visited. On his birthday in November he took leave of his closest friends, and during the night of 3–4 December he died in the arms of Peter Pears.

9. Reception, influence, significance.

After Britten's death there was no appreciable lapse of interest in his music; its audience rather increased during the last quarter of the 20th century. Perhaps the tide that swept away serialism, atonality and most forms of musical modernism and brought in neo-Romanticism, minimalism and other modes of expression involved with tonality carried with it renewed interest in composers who had been out of step with the times. Britten's 12-note manipulations could now be seen as retaliatory and subversive rather than as conciliatory and accommodating. His instinct for success, some would observe, had put him ultimately on the winning side. A simpler idea would be that his music is very good, and quality is irresistible. To maintain this as true (difficult in a postmodern environment) leads to the question ‘how good?’ and to unseemly comparisons. It is enough to note that Britten turned out to be more than the ‘local Shostakovich’ of Thomson's 1940s taunt – accurate to the extent that Britten was indeed to the UK what Shostakovich was to the USSR, and that he made an increasing issue out of locality. But to set Britten against the modernist ‘giants’ of the previous generation is as pointless as comparing him with innovatory popular musicians of a younger generation who reached a far wider audience still. Like most remarkable composers he was inimitable, possessed of a distinctive voice which renovated every aspect of the classical tonal tradition in which he worked, a voice and sound too dangerous to imitate.

The extent of his influence might nevertheless be taken up as an indication of his stature. Probably no subsequent British composer can have been entirely unaffected by his life and work, if not at a musical then at an organizational and operational level. He is a key figure in the growth of British musical culture in the second half of the 20th century, and his effect on everything from opera to the revitalization of music education is hard to overestimate. More formal homage came from composers everywhere as Britten's life drew on.

Britten reception, scholarship and criticism provides an avenue for exploring signs of his ultimate valuation. His financial success made possible the founding of several monuments to him and Pears in the Aldeburgh area, including a well-staffed library at the Red House where the autographs, sketches and papers are kept. A team of scholars headed by Donald Mitchell (Britten's musical executor) has produced an enormous amount of documentary and musical material as well as critical insight in a very short time. In some cases, as in Mitchell's sensitive musico-biographical sketch accompanying Letters from a Life, the level of critical thought has been high; but on the whole the tone has (almost inevitably) been both laudatory and protective. Into this world the arrival of the professional biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, came as a cold shower. His unfettered account of Britten's life produced a recognizable human being with a psychological profile in which anger, cruelty and evasion figured large (and in which Pears often appears as Svengalian); he also revealed details about Britten's love of adolescent boys which some had thought unmentionable. Possibly his concern to reveal Britten's pathology meant that he rarely looked beyond the psychological traits towards their grounding in social causes and conditioning; and Auden's famous diagnosis and prescription (Letters, 1015–16) figured large in his interpretation, especially in dealing with the music. At a polar opposite to this approach, musical analysis had been prominent in Britten criticism from the start (as represented by the distinguished work of Stein and Keller, for example). Peter Evans's analytical study (D1979) was the first major, single-author book on Britten's entire output to appear. Arnold Whittall, whose earlier work focussed heavily on ‘extended tonality’ but later took a broader view of analysis and ventured beyond its pure application into genre criticism, has continued this tradition, and in the 1990s North American theorists began to engage interestingly with Britten's music. An encouraging sign is the appearance of a younger generation of writers with new and sometimes interesting viewpoints (several are represented in Cooke, D1999).

Britten's canonical status has never been unassailable, and there have always been resistances to the personal nature of his achievement. As he grew older he became on the one hand more ‘English’ and on the other more committed to Asian musics, neither of which has won him praise from British music critics anxious for wider European viability for the national artistic product, scornful of the thinness of his melody-orientated music and perhaps uneasy about its religious overtones, strange brand of exoticism and political affiliations. Criticism by Paul Griffiths (D1991) and Robin Holloway (D1992) points in the one case regretfully to Britten's retreat from European eclecticism into cosy provincialism and in the other to a failure of musical nerve at important moments. Those unconcerned with questions of national identity may recognize what was gained in the move that disturbs Griffiths; the Wagnerian model conjured up usefully by Holloway to highlight Britten's institutional success, moreover, is hardly apt for a selfconscious figure of the mid-20th century, and many will share the feeling about both Britten and the Stravinsky of the 1920–50 period that the powerful emotional effect depends on the musical restraint. Dangerous enough was the Mahler connection, apparent in everything except the desire for totalization of the artistic experience, which Britten almost always successfully avoided.

He was in most respects an exceptionally aware composer; the areas in which that awareness failed are therefore all the more telling. Homosexual artists and thinkers have often shown great sensitivity to the oppression of women in patriarchal society. Britten made a gesture in this direction in Act 2 scene i of Peter Grimes, when Ellen is united musically with Auntie and her loose-living nieces in gender solidarity. The scene is an exception in Britten's output. Lucretia's sacrifice is overshadowed by reference to Christ's. A full half of the dramatic works (those in Herbert, E1979), include no women's voices or (like Paul Bunyan and Death in Venice) no significant female roles. Gloriana movingly portrays a woman's struggle with a traditionally male role; the Madwoman in Curlew River, arguably Britten's most touching female character, is sung by a man. This leaves the purposely ambivalent portrayal of the Governess in The Turn of the Screw as the chief contribution to gender variation in the operas (the fearsome group of female characters in Owen Wingrave would need special pleading under any circumstances). The musical depiction of Phaedra as ennobled rather than mad may be a last-minute reprieve, yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘for the most part [Britten] confines his women to traditional roles and stereotypes, often identifying them with the society that restricts or even destroys his main characters’ (McDonald, E1986, p.83). This limitation is perhaps the chief reason why claims for Britten's greatness need to be qualified. Compounding this limitation is the failure of ‘such a champion of the oppressed … to see the underlying connections among different kinds of oppression’ (ibid., p.100).

An un-Forsterian lack of connection can also be discerned in Britten's appropriation of Asian music and drama. He did not identify with his sources (towards the Japanese he adopted a distinctly patronizing attitude); nor did he limit the uses to which they were put, which included traditionally exotic colouring, the projection of aberrant sexual desire and even the utopian portrayal of such things as ‘peace’, the Platonic perfection of Beauty and, inevitably, nescience. His status as a homosexual oppressed in his own culture can be argued as a mitigating circumstance: his ‘Orientalism’ – to apply Edward Said's critique, and his terminology, to this phenomenon – was not of the same kind as Durrell's or Flaubert's (see Brett, E1994). Britten's enclosing of his own meanings in the protective borrowed frame, and in Curlew River his appropriating aspects of Japanese nō that appealed to him while discarding the Buddhist elements that did not, may argue the opposite (Sheppard, in Revealing Masks, E. forthcoming). Such examples, rather than distancing Britten from the ‘colonizing impulse’, put him in collusion with it, placing him in line with the Elgar he would have despised as the inheritor of limited and unthinking attitudes to other peoples of the world even while he was admiring of, as well as benefiting financially and artistically from, their artistic prowess.

Issues of gender and race are the more important because Britten shines out as one of the few composers of the 20th century with claims to effective political and social engagement in other areas. His political commitment, begun under the tutelage of Auden and Isherwood and developed through contact with Forster and others, stems from a complicated sense of himself as a homosexual. Sensing the difficulties surrounding the place of the homosexual in society, and positioning himself so that his partnership with Pears, projected as ‘normal’, masked his paedophilia, Britten pursued a political agenda far removed from the liberal socialism of his predecessor Vaughan Williams. It was similarly rooted in the past, and involved ‘a sense of disengagement from immediate politics’ that increased as Britten grew older (Carpenter, 486). Along the lines of interwar homosexual pacifist ideals, it placed personal relations above allegiance to institutions; it put the individual before society; it tended to show institutions such as the law, the military and the church as hypocritical, unjust or simply evil; it favoured erotic relations over marriage; it portrayed the patriarchal family as shallow and oppressive; it passionately argued justice for the victim and the victimized; and it presented the difficulty of homoerotic relations as a legacy of this society. Britten's assimilation into the British establishment, and his silence on contemporary issues, effectively camouflaged the devastating extent of this social and political critique in his works.

Two critical responses to the Other, or the marginal, have been discerned (see Champagne, The Ethics of Marginality, Minneapolis, 1995): the liberal humanist response, granting it greater subjectivity by trying to remake it in the image of the dominant or centre; and valorizing or privileging the marginality of the Other by making a resistant and transgressive use of the very lack at the centre that caused the construction of the margin. As a person compromised by his position in society, Britten nevertheless managed to cling to some semblance of the second view. ‘All a poet can do is to warn’, reads the War Requiem epigraph: but to warn, or do anything else, the poet has to be heard. It may be that North America taught Britten that to work for centrality at home would ultimately be more artistically and therefore politically effective than marginality abroad – as a means of articulating a message to society from that margin where Britten, at least, always imagined he lived. His old left friends like Slater and Auden were irritated to see him as a ‘courtier’, and gay politics, from which he distanced himself, have moved far beyond his nervous position. Yet one still needs to acknowledge his consistency and integrity in pursuing, sometimes to his friends’ acute discomfort, a fairly incisive and certainly passionate line on pacifism and homosexuality in relation to subjectivity, nationality and the institutions of the capitalist democracy in which he lived. This line he maintained in his work rather than his life, where he acted out a role of charm and compliance laced with occasional brutality. The political stance is all the more remarkable because it barely exists anywhere else in art music outside avant-garde circles already too self-marginalized to offer any hope of serious intervention in the status quo. Further, it scores over the credo of the many later composers who, though openly gay, vow that homosexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with their music; they do not see it as a site from which to disrupt present notions of subjectivity and the organization of power and pleasure, as Britten demonstrably did.

Britten's artistic effort was an attempt to disrupt the centre that it occupied with the marginality that it expressed. If in life he was less discerning than Forster, his achievement as an artist makes interesting counterpoint with that of the novelist who, though he contributed a great deal in A Passage to India to the eventual downfall of the British Empire, never specifically addressed the persecution of his own kind until Maurice, which appeared posthumously. ‘We are after all queer & left & conshies which is enough to put us, or make us put ourselves, outside the pale, apart from being artists as well’, wrote Pears in 1963 to Britten, who in his public life predictably ‘wanted to be just an absolutely normal person’ (as reported by Reiss to Carpenter, 419–20, 445). It was Britten's achievement (reinforced rather than contradicted by Tippett) that British art music during his years of ascendancy came to embrace what was indelibly ‘queer & left & conshie’: and, instead of being instantly marginalized, it has travelled all over the world. There is no need to argue that in the process of assimilation Britten’s music may have had some transformative effect; it is enough to note that, for anyone inclined to explore beyond its deceptively ‘conservative’ and desperately inviting surface, it offers not only a rigorous critique of the past but possibly also the vision of a differently organized reality for the future.

chamber and solo instrumental

WORKS

stage

incidental music

orchestral

instrumental ensemble

vocal

stage

original works

dates are of first publication; earlier printed rehearsal editions are in GB-ALb and Lbl



Op.	Title	Genre, acts	Composition

17	Paul Bunyan	operetta, prol, 2	1939–41
Libretto : W.H. Auden
First performance : cond. H. Ross, New York, Columbia U., 5 May 1941
	rev. version		1974–5
First performance : cond. S. Bedford, BBC, 1 Feb 1976; stage, cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 4 June 1976
Publication; autograph : vs 1978, fs 1993
33	Peter Grimes	op, prol, 3	1944–5
Libretto : M. Slater, after G. Crabbe: The Borough
First performance : cond. Goodall, London, Sadler’s Wells, 7 June 1945
Publication; autograph : vs 1945, study score 1963; US-Wc
37	The Rape of Lucretia	op, 2	1946; rev. 1947
Libretto : R. Duncan, after A. Obey: Le viol de Lucrèce
First performance : cond. Ansermet, Glyndebourne, 12 July 1946
Publication; autograph : vs 1946, vs 1947 (rev. edn), study score 1958
39	Albert Herring	comic op, 3	1946–7
Libretto : E. Crozier, after G. de Maupassant: Le rosier de Madame Husson
First performance : cond. Britten, Glyndebourne, 20 June 1947
Publication; autograph : vs 1948, study score 1970
45	The Little Sweep [Act 3 of Let’s Make an Opera, op.45]	‘an entertainment for young people’	1949
Libretto : Crozier
First performance : cond. N. Del Mar, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 14 June 1949
Publication; autograph : vs 1950, study score 1965
50	Billy Budd	op,4	1950–51
Libretto : E.M. Forster and Crozier, after H. Melville
First performance : cond. Britten, London, CG, 1 Dec 1951
Publication; autograph : vs 1952
	rev. version	op, 2	1960
First performance : cond. Britten, BBC, 13 Nov 1960; stage, cond. Solti,. London, CG, 9 Jan 1964
Publication; autograph : vs 1961, study score 1985
53	Gloriana	op, 3	1952–3; rev. 1966
Libretto : W. Plomer, after L. Strachey: Elizabeth and Essex
First performance : cond. Pritchard, London, CG, 8 June 1953
Publication; autograph : vs 1953, vs 1968 (rev. edn), study score 1990; GB-Lbl
54	The Turn of the Screw	op, prol, 2	1954
Libretto : M. Piper, after H. James
First performance : cond. Britten, Venice, Fenice, 14 Sept 1954
Publication; autograph : vs 1955, study score 1966
57	The Prince of the Pagodas	ballet, 3	1955–6
Libretto : J. Cranko
First performance : cond. Britten, London, CG, 1 Jan 1957
Publication; autograph : study score 1989
59	Noye’s Fludde	1	1957–8
Libretto : Chester miracle play
First performance : cond. Mackerras, Orford Church, 18 June 1958
Publication; autograph : vs 1958, fs 1959
64	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	op, 3	1959–60
Libretto : Britten and Pears, after W. Shakespeare
First performance : cond. Britten, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 11 June 1960
Publication; autograph : vs 1960, study score 1962
71	Curlew River	church parable, 1	1964
Libretto : Plomer, after J. Motomasa: Sumidagawa
First performance : dir. Britten, Orford Church, 12 June 1964
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1965, fs 1983
77	The Burning Fiery Furnace	church parable, 1	1965–6
Libretto : Plomer, after Bible: Daniel i–iii
First performance : dir. Britten, Orford Church, 9 June 1966
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1968, fs 1983
78	The Golden Vanity	vaudeville for boys and pf	1966
Libretto : C. Graham, after old Eng. ballad
First performance : Vienna Boys’ Choir, dir. A. Neyder, Snape Maltings, 3 June 1967
Publication; autograph : 1967
81	The Prodigal Son	church parable, 1	1967–8
Libretto : Plomer, after Bible: Luke xv.11–32
First performance : dir. Britten, Orford Church, 10 June 1968
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1971, fs 1986
85	Owen Wingrave	op, 2	1969–70
Libretto : Piper, after James
First performance : cond. Britten, BBC TV, 16 May 1971; stage, cond. Bedford, London, CG, 10 May 1973
Publication; autograph : vs 1973, fs 1995
88	Death in Venice	op, 2	1971–3; rev. 1973–4
Libretto : Piper, after T. Mann
First performance : cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 16 June 1973
Publication; autograph : vs 1975, fs 1979

realizations and completions

J. Gay: The Beggar's Opera, realized Britten (ballad op, 3, Gay, T. Guthrie), op.43, 1947–8; cond. Britten, Cambridge, Arts Theatre, 24 May 1948; vs (1949), study score (1997)

H. Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, z626, ed. Britten and I. Holst (op, 3, N. Tate), 1950–51, rev. 1958–9; cond. Britten, Hammersmith, Lyric, 1 May 1951; rev. version, cond. Britten, Drottningholm, 16 May 1962; vs (1960), fs (1961)

Purcell: The Fairy Queen, z629, ed. Pears, Britten and I. Holst (masque, after Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream), 1967; cond. Britten, Snape Maltings, 25 June 1967; vs (1970)

G. Holst: The Wandering Scholar, op.50, ed. Britten and I. Holst (chbr op, 1, C. Bax), ?1948–51; cond. I. Clayton, BBC, 5 Jan 1949; vs (1968)

incidental music

film

recording sessions were in year of composition unless otherwise stated

GPO	produced by General Post Office Film Unit

BCGA	produced by British Commercial Gas Association

The King's Stamp, fl + pic, cl, perc, 2 pf, April–May 1935 [rec. 17 May]; GPO, dir. W. Coldstream, 1935

Coal Face (verse: W.H. Auden, M. Slater), spkr, whistler, SATB, perc, pf, May–June 1935 [rec. 19, 26 June]; GPO producer J. Grierson, dir. A. Cavalcanti, 1935

CTO: the Story of the Central Telegraph Office, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [rec. 20 July]; GPO, producer S. Legg, 1935

Telegrams, boys' vv, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [1st recording session 20 July]; GPO [film unidentified]

The Tocher (film ballet), boys' vv, fl + pic, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [rec. 20 July]; GPO producer Cavalcanti, animator L. Reiniger, 1938 [see also choral, Rossini Suite]

Gas Abstract, fl, cl, bn, perc, pf, Aug–Sept 1935 [rec. 3 Sept]; ?BCGA [film unidentified]

Dinner Hour, fl, cl, perc, pf, vn, vc, Sept 1935 [rec. 16 Sept]; BCGA, dir. A. Elton, 1936

Title Music III, fl, cl, perc, pf, vn, vc, Sept 1935 [rec. 16 Sept]; BCGA, dir. A. Elton, ?1936 [film unidentified]

Men behind the Meters, fl, ob, cl, perc, glock, pf, vn, vc, Sept–Oct 1935 [rec. 16 Sept, 2 Oct]; ARFP for BCGA, dir. A. Elton, 1936

Conquering Space: the Story of Modern Communications, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. Legg, 1935

How the Dial Works, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, producer R. Elton, R. Morrison, 1937

The New Operator, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, producer J. Grierson, dir. Legg [soundtrack for silent film; never released]

The Savings Bank, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. Legg, 1935

Sorting Office, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. H. Watt [soundtrack for silent film; never released]

Negroes/God's Chillun (Auden), Sept–Nov 1935, rev. Jan 1938 [rec. 8 Jan]; S, T, B, TB chorus, ob + eng hn + tambourine, perc, hp, pf + b drum; GPO, 1938

GPO Title Music 1 and 2, fl, ob, bn, tpt, perc, hp, vn, va, vc, db, ?Nov 1935; GPO [film unidentified]

Night Mail (J. Grierson, Watt, B. Wright; verse: Auden), spkr, fl, ob, bn, tpt, perc, vn, va, vc, db, Nov 1935–Jan 1936 [rec. Dec 1935–Jan 1936] (2000); GPO, producer Grierson, dir. Watt, Wright, sound dir. Cavalcanti, 1936 [see instrumental ensemble]

Peace of Britain, fl, cl, tpt, perc, pf, str, March 1936 [rec. 21 March]; Freenat Films and Strand Films, dir. P. Rotha, 1936

Around the Village Green, 2 fl, ob, cl, tpt, trbn, timp, perc, hp, str, April, Sept–Oct 1936 [rec. 19, 21 Oct]; Travel and Industrial Development Association, dir. Spice, M. Grierson, 1937 [see orchestral, Irish Reel]

Men of the Alps, fl + pic, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str; Sept–Oct 1936 [rec. 20 Oct]; GPO and Pro Telephon, Zürich, producer, Watt, dir. Cavalcanti, 1937

The Saving of Bill Blewitt, fl, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str, Oct 1936 [rec. 20 Oct]; GPO, producer J. Grierson, dir. Watt, 1937; music lost

Calendar of the Year, March, Sept–Nov 1936 [rec. 9, 20 Oct, 3 Nov]; GPO, produced Cavalcanti, dir. E. Spice, 1937; most music lost

Line to the Tschierva Hut, fl + pic, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str, Sept–Nov 1936 [rec. 20 Oct, 3 Nov]; GPO and Pro Telephon, Zürich, producer, J. Grierson, dir. Cavalcanti, 1937

Four Barriers, ?Sept–Nov 1936; GPO and Pro Telephon, Zürich, producer Watt, dir. Cavalcanti, 1937; music lost

Message from Geneva, ?Sept 1936; GPO and Pro Telephon, Zürich, dir. Cavalcanti, 1937; music lost

Love from a Stranger (F. Marion, adapted from play by F. Vosper, after A. Christie: Philomel Cottage), orch, Nov 1936 [rec. 25, 27 Nov] (2000, transcr. C. Matthews); Capitol (Trafalgar) Films/Max Schach Productions, produced Schach, dir. R.V. Lee, 1937 [feature film; for pubd version, see Arrangements by others of Britten works]

The Way to the Sea (verse: Auden), spkr, fl + pic, ob + eng hn, cl, a sax, bn, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, pf, Dec 1936 [rec. 14, 16 Dec]; Strand Films for Southern Railway, producer Rotha, dir. J.B. Holmes, 1937

Book Bargain, ?1936–7; GPO, dir. N. McLaren, 1937

Advance Democracy (R. Bond), SATB, perc, 1938; Realist Film Unit, dir. Bond, Wright, 1938

Mony a Pickle, ?1938; GPO, dir. Cavalcanti, R. Massingham, 1938 [music taken from The King's Stamp, probably without Britten's knowledge]

Instruments of the Orchestra (Slater), orch, 1945 [rec. 28 March 1946] (1947); Crown Film Unit, producer A. Shaw, dir. M. Mathieson, 1946 [see orchestral, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, 1945]

radio

King Arthur (D.G. Bridson), SATB, orch, March–April 1937; BBC, 23 April 1937 [for pubd Suite, see Arrangements by others of Britten works]

The Company of Heaven (compiled R.E. Roberts), S, T, SATB, timp, org, str, Aug–Sept 1937 (1990); BBC, 29 Sept 1937 [see vocal: solo voices and chorus with orchestra]

Hadrian's Wall (W.H. Auden), solo male v, SATB, perc, str qt, Nov 1937; BBC, 25 Nov 1937; music lost

Lines on the Map (4 programmes: S. Potter, J. Miller, D.F. Aitken and E.J. Alway, Potter), 2 tpt, 2 trbn, perc, Jan 1938; BBC, Jan–April 1938

The Chartists’ March (J.H. Miller), TB, perc, April–May 1938; BBC, 13 May 1938; music lost

The World of the Spirit (compiled Roberts), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, April–May 1938 (2000); BBC, 5 June 1938 [see vocal: solo voices and chorus with orchestra]

The Sword in the Stone (6 pts, M. Helweg, after T.H. White), solo female v, 2 solo male vv, TB, fl + pic, cl, bn, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, April–May 1939; BBC, 11 June – 16 July 1939 [for pubd Suite, see Arrangements by others of Britten works]

The Dark Valley (Auden), solo female v, fl, eng hn, cl, tpt, perc, May 1940; CBS (New York), 2 June 1940

The Dynasts (after T. Hardy), brass, perc, str, 1940; CBS (New York), 24 Nov 1940; music lost

The Rocking-Horse Winner (Auden and J. Stern, after D.H. Lawrence), male vv, fl, cl, perc, hp, 1941; CBS (New York), 6 April 1941; music lost

Appointment (N. Corwin), orch, 1942; BBC, 20 July 1942

An American in England (6 programmes: Corwin), orch, July 1942; CBS (London), July–Sept 1942

Lumberjacks of America (R. MacDougall), fl, cl, bn, 2 tpt, trbn, perc, pf, hp, db, July–Aug 1942; BBC, 24 Aug 1942

The Man Born to be King, play 10: The Princes of this World (D.L. Sayers), solo male v, pf, 1942; BBC, 23 Aug 1942 [song: Bring me garlands, bring me wine]

The Man Born to be King, play 11: King of Sorrows (Sayers), S/Mez, male chorus, hp/pf, Sept 1942; BBC, 20 Sept 1942 [song: Soldier, soldier, why will you roam]

Britain to America (programmes i/9, ii/4, ii/13: L. MacNeice), orch, 1942; BBC North American Service, Sept, Nov 1942, Jan 1943

The Four Freedoms, programme 1: Pericles (MacNeice), 1943; BBC, 21 Feb 1943; music lost

The Rescue (E. Sackville-West, after Homer: Odyssey), S, Mez, T, B, orch, 1943; BBC, 25–6 Nov 1943 [for concert version, see Arrangements by others of Britten works]

A Poet's Christmas (Auden), SATB, 1944; BBC, 24 Dec 1944 [music for: 1 A Shepherd's Carol, 2 Chorale after an Old French Carol]

The Dark Tower (MacNeice), tpt, perc, str, 1945; BBC, 21 Jan 1946

Men of Goodwill (compiled L. Gilliam and L. Cottrell), orch, 1947; BBC, 25 Dec 1947

theatre

Timon of Athens (W. Shakespeare), 2 ob, perc, hpd, Oct–Nov 1935; producer N. Monck, London, Westminster Theatre, 19 Nov 1935

Easter 1916 (M. Slater), mixed vv, perc, accdn, Dec 1935; producer A. van Gyseghem, London, Phoenix, 8 Dec 1935; music lost

Stay down Miner (Slater), T/Bar, TB chorus, cl, perc, vn, vc, May 1936; producer W. Walter, London, Westminster Theatre, 10 May 1936

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (trans. L. MacNeice), SATB, 2 fl, eng hn, cl, perc, Oct 1936; producer R. Doone, London, Westminster Theatre, 1 Nov 1936

The Ascent of F6 (W.H. Auden, C. Isherwood), solo female v, 2 solo male vv, SATB, perc, ukelele, 2 pf, Feb 1937; producer Doone, London, Mercury, 26 Feb 1937

Pageant of Empire (Slater), mixed vv, cl, a sax, tpt, perc, pf, vn, vc, db, Feb 1937; London, Collins’ Music Hall, 28 Feb 1937

Out of the Picture (MacNeice), S, solo male v, SATB, tpt, perc, pf, Dec 1937; producer Doone, London, Westminster Theatre, 5 Dec 1937

Spain (Slater), mixed vv, cl, vn, pf, June 1938; London, Mercury, 22 June 1938; music lost

On the Frontier (Auden, Isherwood), male v, chorus, 2 tpt, perc, accdn, pf, Oct–Nov 1938; producer Doone, Cambridge, Arts, 14 Nov 1938

They Walk Alone (M. Catto), org, Nov 1938; producer B. Viertel, London, Q Theatre, 21 Nov 1938

The Seven Ages of Man (Slater), 1938; London, Mercury, 1938; music lost

Johnson over Jordan (J.B. Priestley), S, fl + pic, orch, Jan–Feb 1939; producer B. Dean, London, New, 22 Feb 1939 [for pubd Suite, see Arrangements by others of Britten works]

This Way to the Tomb (R. Duncan), S, A, T, B, SATB, perc, pf 4 hands, 1945; producer E.M. Browne, London, Mercury, 11 Oct 1945

The Eagle has Two Heads (J. Cocteau, trans. Duncan), brass, perc, 1946; producer M. MacDonald, Hammersmith, Lyric, 4 Sept 1946

The Duchess of Malfi (J. Webster, adapted Auden), 1946; producer G. Rylands, Providence, RI, Metropolitan, 20 Sept 1946; music lost

Stratton (Duncan), 1949; producer J. Fernald, Brighton, Royal, 31 Oct 1949; music lost

Am stram gram (A. Roussin), mixed vv, pf, 1954; producer V. Azaria, London, Toynbee Hall, 4 March 1954 [for pubn, see vocal: chorus with instrumental ensemble or solo instrument]

The Punch Revue (Auden, W. Plomer), female v, pf, 1955; producer V. Hope, London, Duke of York's, 28 Sept 1955

For further details of Britten's incidental music, see Evans, Reed and Wilson (B1987) and Reed (F1987).

orchestral

c60 unpubd juvenilia

—	Two Portraits, str (no.2 with solo va) 1930 (1997); M. Gerrard, Northern Sinfonia, cond. M. Brabbins, BBC, 5 Dec 1995
—	Plymouth Town, 1931 [orig. a ballet, never perf.]
—	Double Concerto, vn, va, orch, 1932 (1999, ed. C. Matthews); K. Hunka, P. Dukes, Britten-Pears Orchestra, cond. Nagano, Snape Maltings, 15 June 1997
1	Sinfonietta, chbr orch, 1932 (1935), London, 31 Jan 1933; version for small orch, 1936, cond. E. Cundell, London, 10 March 1936
4	Simple Symphony, str, 1933–4 (1935); cond. Britten, Norwich, 6 March 1934
9	Soirées musicales [after Rossini]: 1 March, 2 Canzonetta, 3 Tirolese, 4 Bolero, 5 Tarantella, 1935–6 (1938); BBC Orch, cond. J. Lewis, BBC, 16 Jan 1937 [nos.1, 2, 4 adapted from choral work, Rossini Suite, 1935; see also Matinées musicales, op.24]
—	Irish Reel, 1936, rev. 1937 (1996); Charles Brill Orchestra, cond. Brill, BBC, 21 April 1938 [composed as title music to film score, Around the Village Green, 1936]
10	Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, str, 1937 (1938); Boyd Neel Orchestra, cond. Neel, Radio Hilversum, Netherlands, 25 Aug 1937
12	Mont Juic [after Catalan dances], 1937 (1938), collab. L. Berkeley; BBC Orchestra, cond. Lewis, BBC, 8 Jan 1938
13	Piano Concerto, 1938 (red. score 1939), rev. 1945 (red. score 1946, fs 1967); Britten, BBC SO, cond. Wood, London, 18 Aug 1938
15	Violin Concerto, 1938–9 (red. score 1940), rev. 1950, 1954 (red. score 1958), 1965 (1965); A. Brosa, New York PO, cond. Barbirolli, New York, 28 March 1940
16	Young Apollo, pf, str qt, str orch, 1939 (1982); Britten, CBC String Orchestra, cond. A. Chuhaldin, CBC, 27 Aug 1939; withdrawn
19	Canadian Carnival (Kermesse canadienne), 1939 (1948); BBC Orchestra, cond. Raybould, BBC, 6 June 1940
20	Sinfonia da Requiem, 1939–40 (1942); New York PO, cond. Barbirolli, New York, 29 March 1941
21	Diversions, pf left hand, orch, 1940 (1941), rev. 1950, 1953–4 (red. score 1955, fs 1988); Wittgenstein, Philadelphia Orchestra, cond. Ormandy, Philadelphia, 16 Jan 1942
24	Matinées musicales [after Rossini]: 1 March, 2 Nocturne, 3 Waltz, 4 Pantomime, 5 Moto perpetuo, 1941 (1943); American Ballet Company, cond. E. Balaban, Rio de Janeiro, 27 June 1941 [no.1 is reorchestration of no.3 from choral work, Rossini Suite, 1935; see also Soirées musicales, op.9]
—	Paul Bunyan Overture, 1941, orchd C. Matthews 1977 (1980); European Community Youth Orchestra, cond. J. Judd, London, 6 Aug 1978
—	An American Overture, 1941 (1985); CBSO, cond. Rattle, Birmingham, 8 Nov 1983
26	Scottish Ballad, 2 pf, orch, 1941 (red. score 1946, fs 1969); E. Bartlett, R. Robertson, Cincinnati SO, cond. E. Goossens, Cincinnati, 28 Nov 1941
—	Movement for Clarinet and Orch, 1941–2, orchd C. Matthews c1990; M. Collins, Britten-Pears Orchestra, cond. T. Vásáry, London, 7 March 1990
29	Prelude and Fugue, 18-pt str orch, 1943 (1951); Boyd Neel Orchestra, cond. Neel, London, 23 June 1943
33a	Four Sea Interludes, from Peter Grimes, 1945 (1946); LPO, cond. Britten, Cheltenham, 13 June 1945
33b	Passacaglia, from Peter Grimes, 1945 (1946); BBC SO, cond. Boult, London, 29 Aug 1945
34	The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell (opt. text: E. Crozier), spkr ad lib, orch, 1945 (1947); Liverpool PO, cond. Sargent, Liverpool, 15 Oct 1946
38	Occasional Overture, 1946 (1984); BBC SO, cond. Boult, BBC, 29 Sept 1946; withdrawn
—	Men of Goodwill: Variations on a Christmas Carol (‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen’), 1947 (1982); LSO, cond. W. Goehr, BBC, 25 Dec 1947
48a	Lachrymae, va, str, 1976 (1977); R. Moog, Westphalian SO, cond. K.A. Rickenbacher, Recklinghausen, 3 May 1977 [arr. of chbr work, op.48]
—	Variation on an Elizabethan Theme, str, 1953; Aldeburgh Festival Orchestra, cond. Britten, BBC, 16 June 1953 [theme by Byrd, Sellenger's Round, arr. I. Holst, other variations by A. Oldham, Tippett, Berkeley, Searle, Walton]
53a	Symphonic Suite ‘Gloriana’ (R. Devereux), T/ob ad lib, orch, 1953; Pears, CBSO, cond. R. Schwarz, Birmingham, 23 Sept 1954
57a	Pas de six, from The Prince of the Pagodas, 1957; CBSO, cond. Schwarz, Birmingham, 26 Sept 1957
68	Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, 1963, rev. 1964 (1964); Rostropovich, Moscow PO, cond. Britten, Moscow, 12 March 1964
79	The Building of the House (Bible: Ps cxxvii), ov., SATB/org/brass ad lib, orch, 1967 (1968); East Anglian choirs, English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Britten, Snape Maltings, 2 June 1967
90	Suite on English Folk Tunes: ‘A time there was …’, 1974 (1976); English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 13 June 1975 [incl. Hankin Booby, 1966, written for opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 1 March 1967]
See also Arrangements by others of Britten works

instrumental ensemble

—	Night Mail (W.H. Auden), spkr, fl, ob, bn, tpt, 8 perc, vn, va, vc, db, 1935–6 (2000); concert perf. Apollo Chamber Orchestra, cond. D. Chernaik, London, 7 Nov 1997 [orig. composed as film score]
—	Russian Funeral, brass and perc ens, 1936 (1981); South London Brass Orchestra, cond. A. Bush, London, 8 March 1936
—	Fanfare [from Gloriana, 1953], tpts in multiples of 3; Herald Trumpeters of the Royal Artillery Band, Woolwich, Snape Maltings, 2 June 1967

solo voices and chorus with orchestra

vocal

solo voice with orchestra

chorus with instrumental ensemble or solo instrument

chorus unaccompanied

1–3 solo voices with 1 or 2 instruments

opera excerpts prepared in Britten's lifetime: choral

opera excerpts: solo voice with accompaniment

solo voices and chorus with orchestra

—	The Company of Heaven (compiled R.E. Roberts), spkrs, S, T, SATB, timp, org, str, 1937 (1990); F. Aylmer, I. Dawson, S. Rome, S. Wyss, P. Pears, BBC Chorus and Orchestra, cond. T. Harvey, BBC, 29 Sept 1937 [orig. a radio feature]
—	Pacifist March (R. Duncan), chorus 2vv, orch, 1936–7 (1937)
—	The World of the Spirit (compiled R.E. Roberts), spkrs, S, C, T, B, SATB, orch, 1938 (2000); Aylmer, L. Genn, R. Speaight, Wyss, A. Wood, E. Bebb, V. Harding, BBC Singers and Orchestra, cond. Harvey, BBC, 5 June 1938 [orig. a radio feature]
14	Ballad of Heroes (R. Swingler, W.H. Auden), T/S, chorus, orch, 1939 (vs 1939); W. Widdop, 12 choruses, LSO, cond. Lambert, London, 5 April 1939
42	Saint Nicolas (E. Crozier), T, 4, Tr, SATB, SA, pf 4 hands, perc, org, str, 1947–8 (chorus score 1948, fs 1949); Pears, Aldeburgh Festival Chorus, cond. L. Woodgate, Aldeburgh, 5 June 1948
44	Spring Symphony (various poets), S, C, T, mixed vv, boys' vv, orch, 1948–9 (vs 1949, fs 1951); J. Vincent, Ferrier, Pears, Dutch Radio Chorus, Concertgebouw Orchestra, cond. van Beinum, Amsterdam, 14 July 1949
62	Cantata academica, carmen basiliense (charter of Basle U. and other texts, compiled B. Wyss), S, A, T, B, chorus, orch, 1959 (vs 1959, fs 1960); A. Giebel, E. Cavelti, Pears, H. Rehfuss, Basle Chamber Orchestra, cond. Sacher, Basle U., 1 July 1960
66	War Requiem (Missa pro defunctis, W. Owen), S, T, Bar, SATB, orch, chbr orch, boys’ vv, org, 1961–2 (1962); Harper, Pears, Fischer-Dieskau, Coventry Festival Chorus, CBSO, cond. M. Davies, Melos Ensemble, cond. Britten, Coventry Cathedral, 30 May 1962
69	Cantata misericordium (P. Wilkinson), T, Bar, small chorus, str qt, str orch, pf, hp, timp, 1963 (chorus score 1963, fs 1964); Pears, Fischer-Dieskau, Le Motet de Genève, Suisse Romande Orchestra, cond. Ansermet, Geneva, 1 Sept 1963
95	Welcome Ode (T. Dekker, J. Ford, H. Fielding, anon.), young people's vv, orch, 1976 (1977); Suffolk Schools’ Choir and Orchestra, cond. K. Shaw, Ipswich, 11 July 1977
—	Praise we Great Men (E. Sitwell), S, Mez, T, B, SATB, orch, 1976, orchd C. Matthews 1977; M. McLaughlin, Harper, Langridge, R. Jackson, Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, cond. Rostropovich, Snape Maltings, 11 Aug 1985

solo voice with orchestra

9 unpubd juvenilia

—	Quatre chansons françaises: 1 Nuits de juin (V. Hugo), 2 Sagesse (P. Verlaine), 3 L'enfance (Hugo), 4 Chanson d'automne (Verlaine); high v, orch, 1928 (vs 1982, fs 1983); Harper, English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bedford, BBC, 30 March 1980
8	Our Hunting Fathers, sym. cycle: Prologue (W.H. Auden), 1 Rats away! (anon.), 2 Messalina (anon.), 3 Dance of Death (T. Ravenscroft), Epilogue and Funeral March (Auden); high v, orch, 1936 (vs 1936), rev. 1961 (fs 1964); Wyss, LPO, cond. Britten, Norwich, 25 Sept 1936
18	Les illuminations (A. Rimbaud), high v, str, 1939 (1940); Wyss, Boyd Neel Orchestra, cond. Neel, London, 30 Jan 1940
—	Now sleeps the crimson petal (Tennyson), T, hn, str, 1943 (1989, ed. C. Matthews); N. Mackie, A. Civil, English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bedford, London, 3 April 1987 [orig. composed as part of Serenade, op.31]
31	Serenade: Prologue, 1 Pastoral (C. Cotton), 2 Nocturne (Tennyson), 3 Elegy (W. Blake), 4 Dirge (anon., 15th century), 5 Hymn (B. Jonson), 6 Sonnet (J. Keats), Epilogue; T, hn, str orch, 1943 (1944); Pears, D. Brain, cond. W. Goehr, London, 15 Oct 1943
60	Nocturne: Prometheus Unbound (P.B. Shelley), The Kraken (Tennyson), from The Wanderings of Cain (S.T. Coleridge), Blurt, Master Constable (T. Middleton), from The Prelude (W. Wordsworth), The Kind Ghosts (W. Owen), Sleep and Poetry (Keats), Sonnet 43 (W. Shakespeare); T, 7 obbl insts, str, 1958 (1959); Pears, BBC SO, cond. Schwarz, Leeds, 16 Oct 1958
93	Phaedra (dramatic cant., R. Lowell, after J. Racine), Mez, perc, hpd, str, 1975 (vs 1977, fs 1992); Baker, English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 16 June 1976
See also Arrangements by Britten: folksongs

chorus with instrumental ensemble or solo instrument

20 unpubd juvenilia

—	Three Two-Part Songs (W. de la Mare): The Ride-by-Nights, The Rainbow, The Ship of Rio; boys'/female vv, pf, 1932 (1932); Carlyle Singers, pf Britten, cond. I. Lemare, London, 12 Dec 1932
—	Two Part-Songs: I Lov'd a Lass (G. Wither), Lift Boy (R. Graves); SATB, pf, 1932, rev. 1933 (1934); cond. Lemare, London, 11 Dec 1933
—	Jubilate Deo, E (Psalm c), SATB, org, 1934 (1984); Winchester Cathedral Choir, J. Lancelot, cond. M. Neary, Winchester Cathedral, 4 March 1984
—	Te Deum, C (Bk of Common Prayer), Tr, SATB, org/(hp/pf, str), 1934 (1935), orchd 1936; M. Bartlett, St Michael's Singers, G. Thalben-Ball, cond. H. Darke, London, 13 Nov 1935
—	May (anon.), unison vv, pf, 1934 (1935); BBC, 24 June 1942
—	Rossini Suite [after Rossini]: 1 Allegro brillante, 2 Allegretto, 3 Allegretto, 4 Bolero, 5 Allegro con brio; boys' vv, chbr ens, 1935 [nos.1, 2, 5 from film score, The Tocher, 1935; adaptation of nos.1, 2, 4 in Soirées musicales, op.9; reorch of no.3 in Matinées musicales. op.24]
7	Friday Afternoons, 12 children's songs: 1 Begone, dull care (anon.), 2 A Tragic Story (W.M. Thackeray), 3 Cuckoo! (J. Taylor), 4 ‘Ee-Oh!’ (anon.), 5 A New Year Carol (anon.), 6 I mun be married on Sunday (N. Udall), 7 There was a man of Newington (anon.), 8 Fishing Song (I. Walton), 9 The Useful Plough (anon.), 10 Jazz-Man (E. Farjeon), 11 There was a monkey (anon.), 12 Old Abram Brown (anon.); children's vv, pf, 1933–5 (1936); St Felix School Choir, Southwold, cond. R. Railton, BBC, 18 May 1949 [Lone Dog (I.R. McLeod), orig. composed as part of group, pubd in appx of 1994 edn]
28	A Ceremony of Carols: 1 Procession, 2 Wolcum Yole! (anon.), 3 There is no rose (anon.), 4a That yongë child (anon.), 4b Balulalow (J., J. and R. Wedderburn), 5 As Dew in Aprille (anon.), 6 This Little Babe (R. Southwell), 7 Interlude, 8 In Freezing Winter Night (Southwell), 9 Spring Carol (W. Cornish), 10 Deo gracias (anon.), 11 Recession; Tr vv, hp, 1942, rev. 1943 (1943); Fleet Street Choir, G. Mason, cond. T.B. Lawrence, Norwich Castle, 5 Dec 1942
30	Rejoice in the Lamb (festival cant., C. Smart), Tr, A, T, B, SATB, org, 1943 (1943); Choir of St Matthew's Church, Northampton, C. Barker, cond. Britten, Northampton, St Matthew, 21 Sept 1943
—	The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard (anon.), male vv, pf, 1943 (1952); Chorus of Prisoners of War, B. Grayson and F. Henson, cond. R. Wood, Eichstätt, Germany, 20 Feb 1944
32	Festival Te Deum (Bk of Common Prayer), Tr, SATB, org, 1944 (1945); P. Titcombe, Choir of St Mark's, Swindon, G.W. Curnow, cond. J.J. Gale, Swindon, 24 April 1945
46	A Wedding Anthem (Amo ergo sum) (R. Duncan), S, T, SATB, org, 1949 (1950); Cross, Pears, cond. Britten, London, 29 Sept 1949
—	Am stram gram (A. Roussin), (unison vv, pf)/SATB, 1954 (1973, in Tempo, no.107); London, 4 March 1954 [orig. composed as theatre incid music]
56a	Hymn to St Peter, Tr, SATB, org, 1955 (1955); Norwich, 20 Nov 1955
56b	Antiphon (G. Herbert), SATB, org, 1956 (1956); Tenbury Wells, 29 Sept 1956
63	Missa brevis, D, boys’ vv, org, 1959 (choral score 1959, fs 1960); Westminster Cathedral Choir, org and cond. Malcolm, London, 22 July 1959
—	Jubilate Deo, C (Ps c), SATB, org, 1961 (1961); Choir of St George's Chapel, Windsor, W. Harris, Windsor, 16 July 1961
—	Venite exultemus Domino (Ps xcv), SATB, org, 1961 (1983); Westminster Abbey Choir, G. Morgan, cond. S. Preston, London, 2 Oct 1983
—	Corpus Christi Carol, arr. 1v/unison vv, pf/org, 1961 (1961) [from A Boy was Born, op.3, variation 5]
—	Fancie (W. Shakespeare), unison vv, pf, 1961, rev. 1965 (1965); BBC, 2 March 1969
67	Psalm 150, children's chorus 2vv, insts, 1962 (1963); Old Buckenham Hall School Choir and ens, cond. K. Foster, Thorpe Morieux, 29 July 1962
—	A Hymn of St Columba: Regis regum rectissimi, SATB, org, 1962 (1963); Ulster Singers, R.A. McGraw, cond. H. Nelson, Co. Donegal, 2 June 1963
75	Voices for Today, anthem (Virgil and others), mixed vv (men, women, children), org ad lib, 1965 (1965); simultaneous premières in London, New York and Paris, 24 Oct 1965
—	The Oxen (‘Christmas eve, and twelve of the clock’) (T. Hardy), women's chorus 2vv, pf, 1967 (1968); East Coker Women's Institute Choir, 25 Jan 1968
82	Children's Crusade, ballad (B. Brecht, trans. H. Keller), children's vv, perc, 2 pf, org, 1969 (chorus score 1970, fs 1972); Wandsworth School Choir and Orchestra, cond. R. Burgess, London, 19 May 1969

chorus unaccompanied

—	A Wealden Trio: the Song of the Women (F.M. Ford), carol, SSA, 1929–30, rev. 1967 (1968); rev. version: Ambrosian Singers, cond. Ledger, Aldeburgh, 19 June 1968
—	A Hymn to the Virgin (anon., c1300), anthem, SATB double chorus, 1930, rev. 1934 (1935); Lowestoft, 5 Jan 1931
—	The Sycamore Tree (trad.), carol, SATB, 1930, rev. 1934, 1967 (1968); Lowestoft, 5 Jan 1931; rev. version, Ambrosian Singers, cond. Ledger, Aldeburgh, 19 June 1968
—	Christ's Nativity, Christmas suite: 1 Christ's Nativity (H. Vaughan), 2 Sweet was the song (W. Ballet's lute bk), 3 Preparations (Christ Church MS), 4 New Prince, New Pomp (Bible, R. Southwell), 5 Carol of King Cnut (C.W. Stubbs); S, C, SATB, 1931 (1994); A. Barlow, A. Murray, Britten Singers, cond. S. Wilkinson, Southwold, 14 June 1991
3	A Boy was Born (15th- and 16th-century carols, C. Rossetti), choral variations, male vv, female vv, boys’ vv, 1932–3 (1934), rev. 1955, rev. with org ad lib 1957–8 (1958); Wireless Chorus, Choirboys of St Mark's, North Audley Street, cond. L. Woodgate, BBC, 23 Feb 1934
—	Advance Democracy (R. Swingler), SSAATTBB, 1938 (1939)
—	A.M.D.G. (G.M. Hopkins): 1 Prayer I, 2 Rosa mystica, 3 God's Grandeur, 4 Prayer II, 5 O Deus, ego amo te, 6 The Soldier, 7 Heaven-Haven; SATB, 1939 (1989); London Sinfonietta Chorus, cond. T. Edwards, London, 22 Aug 1984 [orig. op.17, but number reassigned to Paul Bunyan]
27	Hymn to St Cecilia (W.H. Auden), SSATB, 1941–2 (1942), rev. 1966 (1967); BBC Singers, cond. Woodgate, BBC, 22 Nov 1942
—	A Shepherd's Carol (Auden), SATB, 1944 (1962); BBC Singers, cond. Woodgate, BBC, 24 Dec 1944 [orig. composed for radio feature, A Poet's Christmas]
—	Chorale after an Old French Carol (Auden), SSAATTBB, 1944 (1992); BBC Singers, cond. Woodgate, BBC, 24 Dec 1944 [orig. composed for radio feature, A Poet's Christmas]
—	Deus in adjutorium meum [from incid music to This Way to the Tomb] (Ps lxx), SATB, 1945 (1983); Elizabethan Singers, cond. L. Halsey, London, 26 Oct 1962
47	Five Flower Songs: 1 To Daffodils (R. Herrick), 2 The Succession of the Four Sweet Months (Herrick), 3 Marsh Flowers (G. Crabbe), 4 The Evening Primrose (J. Clare), 5 Ballad of Green Broom (anon.); SATB, 1950 (1951); cond. I. Holst, Dartington, 23 July 1950
—	We are the darkness in the heat of the day [arr. of no.2 from The Heart of the Matter] (E. Sitwell), SMezATB, c1956 (1997)
—	Sweet was the Song [rev. of Christ's Nativity, no.2] (W. Ballet's lute bk), carol, SSAA, 1966 (1966); P. Stevens, Purcell Singers, cond. I. Holst, Aldeburgh, 15 June 1966
—	Alleluia! For Alec's 80th Birthday, canon, 3-pt vv, 1971 (1972) [tribute to Alec Robertson]
91	Sacred and Profane (8 medieval lyrics), SSATB, 1974–5 (1977); Wilbye Consort, cond. Pears, Snape Maltings, 14 Sept 1975

1–3 solo voices with 1 or 2 instruments

c60 unpubd juvenilia

—	Beware! (3 early songs): 1 Beware! (H.W. Longfellow, after Ger. text), 2 O that I had ne'er been married (R. Burns), 3 Epitaph: The Clerk (H. Asquith); medium v, pf, 1922–6, rev. 1967–8 (1985)
—	Tit for Tat (5 settings from boyhood, W. de la Mare): 1 A Song of Enchantment, 2 Autumn, 3 Silver, 4 Vigil, 5 Tit for Tat; 1v, pf, 1928–31, rev. 1968 (1969); Shirley-Quirk, Britten, Aldeburgh, 23 June 1969
—	The Birds (H. Belloc), medium v, pf, 1929–34 (1935); Wyss, Britten, BBC, 13 March 1936
—	A Poison Tree (W. Blake), medium v, pf, 1935 (1994); H. Herford, I. Brown, London, 22 Nov 1986
—	When you're feeling like expressing your affection (? W.H. Auden), high v, pf, 1935–6 (1994); L. Shelton, I. Brown, Blythburgh Church, 15 June 1992
—	Two Ballads: 1 Mother Comfort (M. Slater), 2 Underneath the abject willow (Auden); 2vv, pf, 1936 (1937); Wyss, B. Bannerman, A Hallis, London, 15 Dec 1936
—	Johnny (cabaret song, Auden), 1v, pf, 1937 (1980); H. Anderson, N. Franklin, BBC, 29 June 1949
—	Funeral Blues [from incid music to The Ascent of F6] (cabaret song, Auden), 1v, pf, 1937 (1980); Pears, Britten, Long Island, NY, 14 Dec 1941
—	Not even summer yet (P. Burra), high v, pf, 1937 (1994); N. Burra, G. Thorne, Berkshire, 3 Dec 1937
11	On This Island (5 songs, Auden): 1 Let the florid music praise!, 2 Now the leaves are falling fast, 3 Seascape, 4 Nocturne, 5 As it is, plenty; high v, pf, 1937 (1938); Wyss, Britten, London, 19 Nov 1937
—	To lie flat on the back (Auden), high v, pf, 1937 (1997); N. Mackie, J. Blakely, BBC, 23 April 1985
—	Night covers up the rigid land (Auden), high v, pf, 1937 (1997); P. Rozario, G. Johnson, London, 22 Nov 1985
—	The sun shines down (Auden), high v, pf, 1937 (1997)
—	Fish in the unruffled lakes (Auden), high v, pf, 1938 (1997, ed. C. Matthews), rev. 1942–3 (1947); Pears, Britten, London, 28 Feb 1943
—	The Red Cockatoo (A. Waley, after Po Chü-i), high v, pf, 1938 (1994); Shelton, Brown, Snape Maltings, 17 June 1991
—	Tell me the Truth about Love (cabaret song, Auden), 1v, pf, 1938 (1980); H. Anderson, D. Ibbott, BBC, 14 June 1949
—	A Cradle Song: Sleep, beauty bright (W. Blake), S, C, pf, 1938 (1994), V. Bell, K. Roland, J. West, Snape, 23 July 1994
—	Calypso (cabaret song, Auden), 1v, pf, 1939 (1980); Pears, Britten, Long Island, NY, 14 Dec 1941
22	Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo: 1 Sonetto XVI: Sì come nella penna e nell'inchiostro, 2 Sonetto XXXI: A che più debb'io mai l'intensa voglia, 3 Sonetto XXX: Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi un dolce lume, 4 Sonetto LV: Tu sa’ ch'io so, signior mie, che tu sai, 5 Sonetto XXXVIII: Rendete a gli occhi miei, o fonte o fiume, 6 Sonetto XXXII: S'un casto amor, s'una pietà superna, 7 Sonetto XXIV: Spirto ben nato, in cui si specchia e vede; T, pf, 1940 (1943); Pears, Britten, London, 23 Sept 1942
—	What's in your mind? (Auden), high v, pf, 1941 (1997)
—	Underneath the abject willow (Auden), high v, pf, 1941 (1997) [recomposition of duet version in Two Ballads, 1936]
—	Wild with passion (T.L. Beddoes), high v, pf, 1942 (1994); Shelton, Brown, Blythburgh Church, 15 June 1992
—	If thou wilt ease thine heart (Beddoes), high v, pf, 1942 (1994); Shelton, Brown, Blythburgh Church, 15 June 1992
—	Cradle Song (Sleep, my darling, sleep) (L. MacNeice), high v, pf, 1942 (1994); Shelton, Brown, Blythburgh Church, 15 June 1992
35	The Holy Sonnets of John Donne: 1 Oh my black Soule!, 2 Batter my heart, 3 Oh might those sighes and teares, 4 Oh, to vex me, 5 What if this present, 6 Since she whom I loved, 7 At the round earth's imagined corners, 8 Thou hast made me, 9 Death, be not proud; high v, pf, 1945 (1947); Pears, Britten, London, 22 Nov 1945
—	Evening, Morning, Night [from incid music to This Way to the Tomb] (R. Duncan), medium v, hp/pf, 1945 (1988)
—	Birthday Song for Erwin (R. Duncan), high v, pf, 1945 (1994); C. Hobkirk, R. Jones, London, 22 Nov 1988
40	Canticle I ‘My beloved is mine’ (F. Quarles), high v, pf, 1947 (1950); Pears, Britten, Westminster, 1 Nov 1947
41	A Charm of Lullabies: 1 A Cradle Song (Blake), 2 The Highland Balou (Burns), 3 Sephestia's Lullaby (R. Greene), 4 A Charm (T. Randolph), 5 The Nurse's Song (J. Philip); Mez, pf, 1947 (1949); N. Evans, F. de Nobel, The Hague, 3 Jan 1948
51	Canticle II ‘Abraham and Isaac’ (Chester miracle play), A, T, pf, 1952 (1953); Ferrier, Pears, Britten, Nottingham, 21 Jan 1952
52	Winter Words: Lyrics and Ballads of Thomas Hardy: 1 At Day-Close in November, 2 Midnight on the Great Western, 3 Wagtail and Baby, 4 The Little Old Table, 5 The Choirmaster's Burial, 6 Proud Songsters, 7 At the Railway Station, Upway, 8 Before Life and After; high v, pf, 1953 (1954); Pears, Britten, Leeds, 8 Oct 1953
55	Canticle III ‘Still Falls the Rain – the Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn’ (E. Sitwell), T, hn, pf, 1954 (1956); Pears, D. Brain, Britten, London, 28 Jan 1955
—	Farfield 1928–30 (J. Lydgate), 1v, pf, 1955 (1955)
—	Three Songs from ‘The Heart of the Matter’ (E. Sitwell): 1 Prologue ‘Where are the seeds of the Universal Fire’, 2 Song ‘We are the darkness in the heat of the day’, 3 Epilogue ‘So, out of the dark’; T, hn, pf, 1956 (1994); Pears, D. Brain, Britten, Aldeburgh, 21 June 1956
58	Songs from the Chinese (trans. A. Waley): 1 The Big Chariot (from The Bk of Songs), 2 The Old Lute (Po Chü-i), 3 The Autumn Wind (Wu-ti), 4 The Herd-Boy (Lu Yu), 5 Depression (Po Chü-i), 6 Dance Song (from the Bk of Songs); high v, gui, 1957 (1959); Pears, Bream, Great Glemham, 17 June 1958
61	Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente: 1 Menschenbeifall, 2 Die Heimat, 3 Sokrates und Alcibiades, 4 Die Jugend, 5 Hälfte des Lebens, 6 Die Linien des Lebens; 1v, pf, 1958 (1963); Pears, Britten, BBC, 14 Nov 1958
—	Um Mitternacht (J.W. von Goethe), high v, pf, ?1960 (1994); Shelton, Brown, Blythburgh Church, 15 June 1992
—	Corpus Christi Carol, 1v, pf, 1961 (1961) [from A Boy was Born, op.3, variation 5]
—	The Ship of Rio [from Three Two-Part Songs, 1932] (W. de la Mare), arr. medium v, pf, 1963 (1964)
74	Songs and Proverbs of William Blake: Proverb I, London, Proverb II, The Chimney-Sweeper, Proverb III, A Poison Tree, Proverb IV, The Tyger, Proverb V, The Fly, Proverb VI, Ah, Sun-flower!, Proverb VII, Every Night and Every Morn; Bar, pf, 1965 (1965); Fischer-Dieskau, Britten, Aldeburgh, 24 June 1965
76	The Poet's Echo (A.S. Pushkin): 1 Echo, 2 My Heart, 3 Angel, 4 The Nightingale and the Rose, 5 Epigram, 6 Lines written during a sleepless night; high v, pf, 1965 (1967); Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich, Moscow Conservatory, 2 Dec 1965
84	Who are these Children?: Lyrics, Rhymes and Riddles by William Soutar: 1 A Riddle (The Earth), 2 A Laddie's Sang, 3 Nightmare, 4 Black Day, 5 Bed-time, 6 Slaughter, 7 A Riddle (The Child You Were), 8 The Larky Lad, 9 Who are these Children?, 10 Supper, 11 The Children, 12 The Auld Aik; T, pf, 1969 (1972); Pears, Britten, Edinburgh, 4 May 1971 [Dawtie's Devotion, The Gully and Tradition, orig. composed as part of cycle, pubd in appx of 1997 edn]
86	Canticle IV ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (T.S. Eliot), Ct, T, Bar, pf, 1971 (1972); Bowman, Pears, Shirley-Quirk, Britten, Snape Maltings, 26 June 1971
89	Canticle V ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (Eliot), T, hp, 1974 (1976); Pears, Ellis, Schloss Elmau, Upper Bavaria, 15 Jan 1975
92	A Birthday Hansel (Burns): 1 Birthday Song, 2 My Early Walk, 3 Wee Willie Gray 4 My Hoggie, 5 Afton Water, 6 The Winter, 7 Leezie Lindsay; high v, hp, 1975 (1978); Pears, Ellis, Schloss Elmau, Upper Bavaria, 11 Jan 1976
See also Arrangements by Britten: folksongs

opera excerpts prepared in Britten's lifetime: choral

from Paul Bunyan, 1941: Inkslinger's Love Song, T, TB, orch [removed from the opera 1974–5]; Lullaby of Dream Shadows, 2 S, 2 T, SATB, orch [removed from the opera 1941]

from Peter Grimes, 1945: Oh, hang at open doors the net, vv (2 pts), pf, 1965 (1967); Old Joe has gone fishing, SATB, pf (1947); Song of the Fishermen, SATB, pf (1947)

from The Little Sweep, 1949: Audience Songs, vv, pf (1950)

from Gloriana, 1953: Choral Dances, SATB (1954), BBC Midland Chorus, cond. J. Lowe, BBC, 7 March 1954; Choral Dances, T, SATB, hp, 1967 (1982), Pears, Ambrosian Singers, O. Ellis, cond. Britten, London 1 March 1967

from Noye's Fludde, 1958: Tallis's Canon, SATB, acc. (1967); Eternal Father, strong to save, unison vv, kbd (1967)

See also Arrangements by Britten: folksongs and Arrangements by others of Britten works

opera excerpts: solo voice with accompaniment

from Paul Bunyan, 1941: Ballads, 1v, pf/gui, rev. and arr. 1974 (1978)

from Peter Grimes, 1945: Church Scene (Ellen's aria), S, pf/orch (vs 1945); Embroidery Aria, S, pf/orch (vs 1945); Peter's Dreams, T, pf/orch (vs 1945)

from The Rape of Lucretia, 1946: Flower Song, C, pf/orch (vs 1947); The Ride, T, pf/orch (1947); Slumber Song, S, pf/orch (1947)

from Gloriana, 1953: The Second Lute Song of the Earl of Essex (R. Devereux), arr. I. Holst, 1v, pf (1954), Pears, Britten, Aldeburgh, 28 June 1953

from A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1960: Bottom's Dream, op.64a, B-Bar, pf/orch (1965)

Other excerpts in opera aria volumes: soprano (1992), mezzo-soprano (1993), tenor (1996), baritone and bass-baritone (forthcoming)

chamber and solo instrumental

for 3 or more instruments

c50 unpubd juvenilia

—	String Quartet, F, 1928 (1999); Sorrel Quartet, BBC, 21 Nov 1995
—	Rhapsody, str qt, 1929 (1989); Alexandra Quartet, BBC, 6 Nov 1985
—	Quartettino, str qt, 1930 (1984); Arditti Quartet, London Weekend Television, 15 May 1983
—	Movement, fl, ob, cl, b cl, bn, hn, 1930; Haffner Wind Ensemble, Aldeburgh, 11 June 1993
—	Rhapsodies, vn, va, pf, 1931
—	String Quartet, D, 1931, rev. 1974 (1975); Gabrieli Quartet, Snape Maltings, 7 June 1975
—	Phantasy, str qnt, 1932 (1983); London, 22 July 1932
2	Phantasy, ob, vn, va, vc, 1932 (1935); L. Goossens, members of International String Quartet, BBC, 6 Aug 1933
—	Alla marcia, str qt, 1933 (1983); Macnaghten String Quartet, London, 11 Dec 1933 [first conceived as 1st movt of 5-movt suite, Alla quartetto serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’; rev. as Three Divertimenti, 1936; re-used and expanded in ‘Parade’ from Les illuminations, 1939]
—	Three Divertimenti: 1 March, 2 Waltz, 3 Burlesque; str qt, 1936 (1983); Stratton Quartet, London, 25 Feb 1936 [rev. of earlier works; for derivation see Banks, B1999]
25	String Quartet no.1, D, 1941 (1942); Coolidge String Quartet, Los Angeles, 21 Sept 1941
36	String Quartet no.2, C, 1945 (1946); Zorian String Quartet, London, 21 Nov 1945
—	Scherzo, rec qt, 1954 (1955); Aldeburgh, 26 June 1955
—	Alpine Suite, rec trio, 1955 (1956); Aldeburgh, 26 June 1955
—	Fanfare for St Edmundsbury, 3 tpt, 1959 (1969); Cathedral of Bury St Edmunds, 10 June 1959
73	Gemini Variations, fl, vn, pf 4 hands [2/4 players], 1965 (1966); Z. and G. Jeney, Aldeburgh, 19 June 1965
94	String Quartet no.3, 1975 (1977); Amadeus Quartet, Snape Maltings, 19 Dec 1976

for 1–2 instruments

c150 unpubd juvenilia

—	Five Walztes [sic], pf, 1923–5, rev. 1969 (1970); A. Peebles, BBC, 10 Feb 1971
—	Reflection, va, pf, 1930 (1997); P. Dukes, S. Rahman, BBC, 28 Nov 1995
—	Elegy, va, 1930 (1985); N. Imai, Snape Maltings, 22 June 1984
—	Three Character Pieces: 1 John, 2 Daphne, 3 Michael, pf, 1930 (1989); S. Briggs, Chester, 28 July 1989
—	Fugue, A, pf, 1931 (1991)
—	Twelve Variations, pf, 1931 (1986); M. Perahia, Snape Maltings, 22 June 1986
5	Holiday Diary, suite, pf, 1934 (1935); B. Humby, London, 30 Nov 1934 [orig. title: Holiday Tales]
—	Two Insect Pieces: 1 The Grasshopper, 2 The Wasp, ob, pf, 1935 (1980); J. Craxton, M. Wright, Manchester, 7 March 1979
6	Suite, vn, pf, 1934–5 (1935); A. Brosa, Britten, BBC, 13 March 1936
—	Two Lullabies: 1 Lullaby, 2 Lullaby for a Retired Colonel, 2 pf, 1936 (1990); P. Frankl, T. Vásáry, Snape Maltings, 22 June 1988
—	Theme for Improvisation, org, 1936 (1936); A. Marchal, London, 12 Nov 1936
—	Temporal Variations, ob, pf, 1936 (1980); N. Caine, A. Hallis, London, 15 Dec 1936
—	Reveille, concert study, vn, pf, 1937 (1983); Brosa, F. Reizenstein, London, 12 April 1937
—	Moderato and Nocturne, pf, 1940 (1986), G. Benjamin, Aldeburgh, 16 June 1983 [movts 1 and 2 of Sonatina romantica]
23/1	Introduction and Rondo alla burlesca, 2 pf, 1940 (1944); E. Bartlett, R. Robertson, New York, 5 Jan 1941
23/2	Mazurka elegiaca, 2 pf, 1941 (1942); Bartlett, Robertson, New York, 9 Dec 1941
—	Themes for Improvisation, org, 1945 (1945); M. Dupré, BBC, 24 July 1945
—	Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria, org, 1946 (1952); A. Wyton, Northampton, 21 Sept 1946
48	Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of John Dowland, va, pf, 1950 (1951), rev. 1970 (1974); W. Primrose, Britten, Aldeburgh, 20 June 1950 [see also orchestral, op.48a]
49	Six Metamorphoses after Ovid: 1 Pan, 2 Phaeton, 3 Niobe, 4 Bacchus, 5 Narcissus, 6 Arethusa, ob, 1951 (1952); J. Boughton, Thorpeness, 14 June 1951
65	Sonata, C, vc, pf, 1960–61 (1961); Rostropovich, Britten, Aldeburgh, 7 July 1961
—	Night Piece (Notturno), pf, 1963 (1963); Leeds, 19 Sept 1963
70	Nocturnal after John Dowland: Reflections on ‘Come, heavy sleep’, gui, 1963 (1965); J. Bream, Aldeburgh, 12 June 1964
72	Suite no.1, vc, 1964 (1966); Rostropovich, Aldeburgh, 27 June 1965
80	Suite no.2, vc, 1967 (1969); Rostropovich, Snape Maltings, 17 June 1968
83	Suite, hp, 1969 (1970); Ellis, Aldeburgh, 24 June 1969
87	Suite no.3, vc, 1971, rev. 1974 (1976); Rostropovich, Snape Maltings, 21 Dec 1974
—	Tema ‘Sacher’, vc, 1976 (1990), Rostropovich, Zürich, 2 May 1976

concerto cadenzas

J. Haydn: Cello Concerto, C, hVIIb/I, 1964 (1966); Rostropovich, Blythburgh Church, 18 June 1964 [cadenzas to movts 1 and 2]

W.A. Mozart: Piano Concerto, E, k482, 1966 (1967); Richter, Tours, France, July 1966 [cadenzas to movts 1 and 3]

ARRANGEMENTS BY BRITTEN

folksongs

1 or 2 voices with 1 or 2 instruments

listed as published volumes in order of publication date

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.i, British Isles: 1 The Salley Gardens, 2 Little Sir William, 3 The Bonny Earl o’ Moray, 4 O can ye sew cushions?, 5 The trees they grow so high, 6 The Ash Grove, 7 Oliver Cromwell; high/medium v, pf, 1941–2 (1943)

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.ii, France: 1 La Noël passée (The Orphan and King Henry), 2 Voici le printemps, 3 Fileuse, 4 Le roi s'en va-t'en chasse, 5 La belle est au jardin d'amour, 6 Il est quelqu'un sur terre, 7 Eho! Eho!, 8 Quand j'étais chez mon père (Heigh ho! heigh hi!); high/medium v, pf, 1942 (1946)

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.iii, British Isles: 1 The Plough Boy, 2 There's none to soothe, 3 Sweet Polly Oliver, 4 The Miller of Dee, 5 The Foggy, Foggy Dew, 6 O Waly, Waly, 7 Come you not from Newcastle?; high/medium v, pf, 1945–6 (1948)

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.iv, Moore's Irish Melodies: 1 Avenging and bright, 2 Sail on, sail on, 3 How sweet the answer, 4 The minstrel boy, 5 At the mid hour of night, 6 Rich and rare, 7 Dear harp of my country!, 8 Oft in the stilly night, 9 The Last Rose of Summer, 10 O the sight entrancing; high v, pf, 1957 (1960)

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.v, British Isles: 1 The Brisk Young Widow, 2 Sally in our Alley, 3 The Lincolnshire Poacher, 4 Early one morning, 5 Ca’ the yowes; high v, pf, 1951–9 (1961)

Folk Song Arrangements, vol.vi, England: 1 I will give my love an apple, 2 Sailor-Boy, 3 Master Kilby, 4 The Soldier and the Sailor, 5 Bonny at Morn, 6 The Shooting of his Dear; high v, gui, 1956–8 (1961)

[Four English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians:] 1 Love Henry, 2 What's Little Babies Made of? 3 The Maid Freed from the Gallows, 4 The Frog and the Mouse; pf acc., 1967 (1968)

Eight Folk Song Arrangements: 1 Lord! I married me a wife, 2 She's like the swallow, 3 Lemady, 4 Bonny at Morn, 5 Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn (I was lonely and forlorn), 6 David of the White Rock, 7 The False Knight upon the Road, 8 Bird Scarer's Song; high v, hp, 1976 (1980)

Tom Bowling and Other Song Arrangements: for 1v, pf: 1 Tom Bowling [arr. of song and text by C. Dibdin], c1959, 2 Greensleeves, ?1941, 3 The Crocodile, c1941, 4 Pray Goody, ?1945–6, 5 The holly and the ivy, 6 I wonder as I wander [arr. of song collected by J.J. Niles], ?1940–41, 7 Dink's Song; for 2vv, pf: 8 Soldier, won’t you marry me?, c1958, 9 The Deaf Woman's Courtship; for 1v, vc, pf: 10 The Stream in the Valley (Da unten im Tale), c1946; (2000)

solo voice with orchestra

The Salley Gardens [vol.i/1], high v, str, 1942 (2000); Pears, New London Orchestra, cond. A. Sherman, London, 13 Dec 1942

The Salley Gardens [vol.i/1], high/medium v, bn/vc, hp/pf, str, c1955 (2000)

Little Sir William [vol.i/2], high v, orch, 1942 (2000); Pears, New London Orchestra, cond. Sherman, London, 13 Dec 1942

The Bonny Earl o’ Moray [vol.i/3], high v, orch, 1942 (2000); Pears, New London Orchestra, cond. Sherman, London, 13 Dec 1942

O can ye sew cushions? [vol.i/4], high v, orch, 1944 (2000); H. Cook, BBC Midland Light Orchestra, cond. R. Jenkins, BBC, 6 Nov 1944

Oliver Cromwell [vol.i/7], high v, orch, 1942 (2000); Pears, New London Orchestra, cond. Sherman, London, 13 Dec 1942

La Noël passée [vol.ii/1], 1v, str (2000)

Five French Folk Songs: 1 Fileuse, 2 Le roi s'en va-t’en chasse, 3 La belle est au jardin d'amour, 4 Eho! Eho!, 5 Quand j’étais chez mon père [vol.ii/3, 4, 5, 7, 8]; Bar, orch, 1945–6 (2000); M. Singher, Chicago SO, cond. Busch, Chicago, 23 Dec 1948

The Plough Boy [vol.iii/1], high v, orch, 1946 (2000)

O Waly, Waly [vol.iii/6], high v, str (2000)

Come you not from Newcastle? [vol.iii/7], high v, orch, ?1959 (2000)

choral

The Salley Gardens [vol.i/1], unison vv, pf (1955); Chorus and Orchestra of the Schools Music Association, cond. Boult, London, 6 May 1956

Oliver Cromwell [vol.i/7], unison vv, pf (1959)

The holly and the ivy, SATB, 1957 (1957); Haddo House Choral Society, cond. J. Gordon, BBC, 22 Dec 1957

King Herod and the Cock, unison vv, pf, 1962 (1965); London Boy Singers, Britten, Aldeburgh 16 June 1962

The Twelve Apostles, T, unison vv, pf, 1962 (1981), London Boy Singers, Britten, Aldeburgh 16 June 1962

purcell realizations and editions

in order of date of arrangement unless otherwise stated

instrumental ensemble

The Golden Sonata, z810, 2 vn, vc, pf, 1945 (1946); O. Zorian, M. Lavers, N. Semino, Britten, London, 21 Nov 1945

Chacony, g, z730, str qt/str orch, 1947–8, rev. 1963 (1965); Collegium Musicum Zürich, cond. Britten, Zürich, 30 Jan 1948

solo vocal (realized and edited by Britten and Pears)

Orpheus Britannicus (with orchestra)

Suite of Songs from Orpheus Britannicus: 1 Let sullen discord smile, z321/6 (from Tate: Birthday Song for Queen Mary), 2 Why should men quarrel?, z630/4d (from Dryden and Howard: The Indian Queen), 3 So when the glittering Queen of Night, z333/11 (from D'Urfey: The Yorkshire Feast Song), 4 Thou tun'st this world, z328/6 (from N. Brady: A Song for St Cecilia's Day), 5a ‘Tis holiday, z321/5 (from Tate: Birthday Song for Queen Mary), 5b Sound Fame thy brazen trumpet, z627/22 (from T. Betterton and Dryden: Dioclesian); high v, orch, 1946 (1956)

Three Songs: 1 Hark the ech'ing air!, z629/48b (anon., from The Fairy Queen), 2 Not all my torments, z400 (anon.), 3 Take not a woman's anger ill, z609/11 (from Gould: The Rival Sisters); high v, orch, 1963

Orpheus Britannicus (with piano)

Five Songs: 1 I attempt from Love's sickness to fly, z630/17h (from J. Dryden and R. Howard: The Indian Queen), 2 I take no pleasure, z388 (anon.), 3 Hark the ech'ing air!, z629/48b (anon. from The Fairy Queen), 4 Take not a woman's anger ill, z609/11 (from R. Gould: The Rival Sisters), 5 How blest are shepherds, z628/15b (from Dryden: King Arthur); high v, pf, 1939–59 (1960)

Seven Songs: 1 Fairest Isle, z628/38 (from Dryden: King Arthur), 2 If music be the food of love, z379C (H. Heveningham), 3 Turn then thine eyes, z425 (anon.), 4 Music for a while, z583/2 (from Dryden: Oedipus), 5 Pious Celinda, z410 (W. Congreve), 6 I'll sail upon the Dog-star, z571/6 (from T. D'Urfey: A Fool's Preferment), 7 On the Brow of Richmond Hill, z405 (D'Urfey); high/medium v, pf, 1943–5 (1947)

Six Duets: 1 Sound the trumpet, z323/3 (? from N. Tate: Birthday Song for Queen Mary), 2 I spy Celia, z499 (anon.), 3 Lost is my quiet, z502 (anon.), 4 What can we poor females do?, z518 (anon.), 5 No, resistance is but vain, z601/2a (A. Henly), 6 Shepherd, leave decoying, z628/16b (from Dryden: King Arthur); high and low vv, pf, 1945–?1954 (1961)

Six Songs: 1 Mad Bess, z370 (anon.), 2 If music be the food of love, z379A (Heveningham), 3 There's not a swain of the plain, z587 (Henly), 4 Not all my torments, z400 (anon.), 5 Man is for the woman made, z605/3 (P.A. Motteux), Sweeter than roses, z585/1 (from R. Norton: Pausanius); high/medium v, pf, 1943–5 (1947)

Harmonia sacra

The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, z196 (N. Tate), high v, pf, 1944 (1947)

Saul and the Witch at Endor, z134 (anon.), S, T, B, pf, 1945 (1947)

Job's Curse, z191 (J. Taylor), high v, pf, 1948 (1950)

Three Divine Hymns: 1 Lord, what is man?, z192 (W. Fuller), 2 We sing to Him, z199 (N. Ingelo), 3 Evening Hymn, z193 (Fuller); high/medium v, pf, 1944–5 (1947)

Two Divine Hymns and Alleluia: 1 A Morning Hymn, z198 (Fuller), 2 Alleluia, zS14 (J. Weldon), 3 In the black dismal dungeon of despair, z190 (Fuller); high v, pf, 1944–59 (1960)

Odes and Elegies

The Queen's Epicedium, z383 (Herbert), high v, pf, 1944 (1946)

other solo vocal (listed as published volumes in order of publication date)

When night her purple veil, zD201 (secular cant., anon.), Bar, 2 vn, continuo, 1965 (1977)

Let the dreadful engines of eternal will, z578/3 (T. D'Urfey), Bar/T, pf, 1971 (1993)

A Miscellany of Songs: 1 The Knotting Song, z371 (C. Sedley), high/medium v, pf, 1939, 2 O solitude, z306 (K. Philips), high/medium v, pf, 1955, 3 Celemene, pray tell me, z584 (D'Urfey), S, T, pf, 1946, 4 Dulcibella, whene'er I sue for a kiss, z485 (A. Henly), S/T, B, pf, 1971, 5 When Myra sings, z521 (G. Granville), S/T, B, pf, 1971 (1993)

Three Purcell Realizations: 1 Dialogue of Corydon and Mopsa, z629/22 (anon., from The Fairy Queen), 2vv, pf, 1950, 2 In these delightful, pleasant groves, z600/1d (T. Shadwell), S, C, T, B, pf, 1968, 3 You twice ten-hundred deities, z630.13a (J. Dryden, R. Howard), Bar, vn, vc, pf, 1948 (forthcoming)

other arrangements

in order of date of arrangement

orchestra, vocal-orchestral

E. Carpenter: England Arise! (opt. text: Carpenter), orch, vv ad lib, ?1939 (1939)

G. Mahler: What the Wild Flowers Tell me [arr. of Sym. no.3, movt 2], red. orch, 1941 (1950); BBC Scottish Orchestra, cond. G. Warrack, BBC, 14 Nov 1942

F. Schubert: The Trout [arr. of Die Forelle d550] (C.F.D. Schubart, Eng. trans.), 1v, 2 cl, str, 1942

R. Schumann: Spring Night [arr. of Frühlingsnacht, op.39 no.2] (F. Eichendorff, Eng. trans.), 1v, orch, 1942

God Save the Queen, orch, 1971; English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Britten, Snape Maltings, 13 June 1971

choral

The National Anthem, double SATB, orch, 1961 (vs 1961), red. orch 1967; Leeds Festival Chorus, Royal Liverpool PO, cond. Pritchard, Leeds, 7 Oct 1961

J.S. Bach: St John Passion [arr. of bwv245], ed. Britten and I. Holst (trans. Pears and I. Holst), S, Mez, T, B, SATB, 2 fl, 2 ob + ob d'amore, bn, org, lute, str, 1967; cond. Britten, London, 26 July 1967

solo vocal

F. Schubert: Gretchens Bitte [completion of d564] (from J.W. von Goethe: Faust, pt I, trans. A. Porter), version 1: S, pf, 1938 (1998), M. Blyth, BBC, 27 Dec 1938; version 2: high v, pf, c1942, Pears, Britten, 1943

C. Dibdin: Tom Bowling (Dibdin), high v, pf, 1959 (2000); Pears, Britten, Aldeburgh, 22 June 1959

J.S. Bach: Five Spiritual Songs [arr. of songs from Geistliche Lieder] (trans. Pears): 1 Gedenke doch, mein Geist, zurücke, bwv509, 2 Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag, bwv479, 3 Liebster Herr Jesu, bwv484, 4 Komm, süsser Tod, bwv478, 5 Bist du bei mir, bwv508; high v, pf, 1969 (1971); Pears, Britten, Blythburgh Church, 18 June 1969

J. Blow: Oh! that mine eyes would melt (anon.), high v, hp/pf, 1975 (1998); Pears, O. Ellis, Cardiff, 19 March 1976

J. Clarke: A Divine Hymn (Blest be those sweet regions) (anon.), high v, hp/pf, 1975–6 (1998)

W. Croft: A Hymn on Divine Musick (anon.), high v, hp/pf, 1976 (1998); Pears, Ellis, Cardiff, 19 March 1976

P. Humfrey: Hymn to God the Father (J. Donne), high v, hp/pf, 1975–6 (1998); Pears, Ellis, 20 Aug 1976

Humfrey: Lord! I have sinned (J. Taylor), high v, hp/pf, 1975–6 (1998)

chamber

F. Bridge: There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook [arr. of orch work, h173], va, pf, 1932 (1990); N. Imai, R. Vignoles, Isle of Man, 27 Aug 1988

See also stage: realizations and completions

ARRANGEMENTS BY OTHERS OF BRITTEN WORKS

>orchestral, vocal-orchestral

Love from a Stranger: Music from the Film [1936], transcr. C. Matthews, orch, c1995 (2000); BBC Concert Orchestra, cond. C. Davis, London, 20 May 1995

Temporal Variations [1936], arr. C. Matthews, ob, str orch, c1994 (1995); N. Daniel, English Chamber Orchestra, cond. S. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 12 June 1994

Suite, from King Arthur [1937], arr. P. Hindmarsh, orch, c1995 (1996); RAM SO, cond. L. Köhler, Snape Maltings, 21 Oct 1995 [orig. composed as radio incid music]

Concert Suite, from The Sword in the Stone [1939], arr. O. Knussen and C. Matthews, chamber ens, c1983 (1989); Aldeburgh Festival Chamber Ensemble, cond. O. Knussen, Snape Maltings, 14 June 1983 [orig. composed as radio incid music]

Suite, from Johnson over Jordan [1939], arr. P. Hindmarsh, orch, c1990 (1993); Northern Sinfonia, cond. O. de la Martinez, BBC, 25 Feb 1990 [orig. composed as theatre incid music]

The Rescue of Penelope: concert version of the music to the radio drama The Rescue [1943] (E. Sackville-West, after Homer: Odyssey), arr. C. de Souza with D. Mitchell and C. Matthews, spkr, S, Mez, T, Bar, orch (1998); BBC SO, cond. N. Cleobury, Snape Maltings, 23 Oct 1993

A Charm of Lullabies [1947], arr. C. Matthews, Mez, orch; M. Forrester, Indianapolis SO, cond. R. Leppard, Indianapolis, 17 Jan 1991

Five Courtly Dances, from Gloriana [1953], arr. D. Stone, school orch, 1963 (1965) [arr. of 3rd movt of Symphonic Suite, op.53a]

Prelude and Dances, from The Prince of the Pagodas [1956], arr. N. Del Mar, op.57b, orch, c1963 (1980); BBC Scottish Orch, cond. Del Mar, BBC, 26 Dec 1963

Suite, from The Prince of the Pagodas [1956], arr. D. Mitchell and M. Cooke, orch, c1997; Deutsches SO Berlin, cond. V. Ashkenazy, Amsterdam, 4 June 1997

Suite, from Death in Venice [1973], arr. S. Bedford, op.88a, orch, c1984 (1993); English Chamber Orchestra, cond. S. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 13 June 1984

Welcome Suite, from Welcome Ode [1976], arr. T. Osborne, str orch (1994)

band

Russian Funeral [1936], arr. R. Farr, brass band (1987); Grimethorpe Colliery Band, cond. Farr, Framlingham, 15 June 1984

Soirées musicales [1936], arr. T. Conway Brown, military band (1946)

Spider and the Fly, from Johnson over Jordan [1939], arr. D. Barry, brass band (1993); cond. P. Hindmarsh, Spenmoor, Co. Durham, 18 Nov 1990

Paul Bunyan Overture [1941], arr. C. Fussell, concert band (1985)

The Courtly Dances, from Gloriana [1953], arr. J. Bach, sym. band (1995)

The Building of the House [1967] (opt. text: Ps cxxvii), arr. T. Marciniak, concert band, SATB ad lib (1977)

choral

Friday Afternoons [1935], arr. H. Tircuit, SSA, orch

Old Abram Brown, from Friday Afternoons [1935], arr. SATB, pf (1947?)

Five Choruses, from Paul Bunyan [1941]: 1 Prologue I, 2 Prologue II, 3 Blues, 4 Hymn, 5 Litany; arr. SATB, pf (1978)

Carry her over the water, from Paul Bunyan [1941], arr. C. Matthews, SSATTBB (1980)

A Ceremony of Carols [1942], arr. J. Harrison, SATB, hp/pf (1948)

Rejoice in the Lamb [1943], arr. I. Holst, Tr, A, T, B, SATB, org, orch; A. Deller, P. Pears, T. Anthony, org R. Downes, Aldeburgh Festival Choir and Orchestra, cond. I. Holst, Aldeburgh, 20 June 1952

Rejoice in the Lamb [1943], arr. E. Walters, SSAA, org (1973); Liverpool, 3 July 1966

Agnus Dei, from War Requiem [1962], arr. P. Brunelle, T, SATB, org (1989)

O can ye sew cushions?, arr. I. Holst, SSA, pf (1955)

Three Folk Songs: 1 The Bonnie Earl O'Moray [sic], 2 The Salley Gardens, 3 Oliver Cromwell; arr. E. Walters, TTBB, pf (1986)

solo vocal

Funeral Blues from The Ascent of F6 [1937], Johnny [1937], Tell me the Truth about Love [1938] and Calypso [1939]: arr. D. Runswick, female v, a sax, tpt, perc, vn, db; Aldeburgh, 8 June 1990

The Salley Gardens [vol.i/1], The Foggy, Foggy Dew [vol.iii/5], O Waly, Waly [vol.iii/6], The Lincolnshire Poacher [vol.v/3]; arr. G. Nestor, 1v, gui (1984)

Four Burns Songs, from A Birthday Hansel [1975], arr. C. Matthews, high v, pf (1978)

Eight Folk Song Arrangements [1976], arr. C. Matthews, medium v, pf (1980)

chamber and solo instrumental

Playful Pizzicato and Sentimental Saraband, from Simple Symphony [1934], arr. H. Ferguson, pf 4 hands (1972)

Soirées musicales [1936], arr. B. Easdale, 2 pf (1938)

The Clock on the Wall, from On the Frontier [1938], arr. D. Runswick, a sax, tpt, perc, pf, vn, db; Aldeburgh, 8 June 1990

Spider and the Fly, from Johnson over Jordan [1939], arr. D. Runswick, a sax, tpt, perc, pf, vn, db; Aldeburgh, 8 June 1990

Blues, from Paul Bunyan [1941], arr. D. Runswick, a sax, tpt, perc, pf, vn, db; Aldeburgh, 8 June 1990

This Little Babe, from A Ceremony of Carols [1942], arr. C. Norton, pf (1989)

Boogie-Woogie, from This Way to the Tomb [1945], arr. D. Runswick, a sax, tpt, perc, pf, vn, db; Aldeburgh, 8 June 1990

Theme, from The Young Person's Guide [1945], arr. C. Norton, pf (1989)

Theme, from The Young Person's Guide [1945], arr. R. Brison, pf 4 hands (1990)

Morris Dance, from Gloriana [1953], arr. I. Holst, 2 descant rec (1957)

March, from Gloriana [1953], arr. I. Holst, descant rec (1959)

Concord, from Gloriana [1953], arr. C. Norton, pf (1989)

Most MSS at GB-ALb

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Faber, OUP, Chester

For further details see Banks (B1999)

WRITINGS

‘“As You Like It”: Walton's Music’, World Film News, i/7 (1936), 46 only

‘An English Composer sees America’, Tempo [New York], i/2 (1940), 1–3

‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’, MM, xviii (1941), 71–5

‘Au revoir to the U.S.A.’, MM, xix (1942), 100–1

‘On Behalf of Gustav Mahler’, Tempo [New York], ii/2 (1942), 5 only; repr. in Tempo [London], no.120 (1977), 14–15

‘Conversation with Benjamin Britten’, Tempo, no.6 (1944), 4–5

‘Introduction’, Peter Grimes, ed. E. Crozier (London, 1945), 7–8

with M. Tippett: 250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell: Homage (London, 1945)

‘How to Become a Composer’, The Listener (7 Nov 1946)

‘Foreword’, The Rape of Lucretia: a Symposium, ed. E. Crozier (London, 1948), 7–8

‘A Note on the Spring Symphony’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 237 only

‘How I Became a Composer’, The Radio Listener's Week-End Book (London, n.d.), 108–12

‘Freeman of Lowestoft’, Tempo, no.21 (1951), 3–5

‘Verdi: a Symposium’, Opera, ii (1951), 113–15

‘A Composer in our Time’, Adam International Review, nos.224–6 (1952), 14–16

‘Variations on a Critical Theme’, Opera, iii (1952), 144–6

‘Three Premieres’, Kathleen Ferrier: a Memoir, ed. N. Cardus (London, 1954), 54–61

with I. Holst: The Story of Music (London, 1958/R1968 as The Wonderful World of Music)

‘Dennis Brain (1921–1957)’, Tempo, new ser., no.46 (1958), 5–6

‘On Realizing the Continuo in Purcell's Songs’, Henry Purcell: 1659–1695, ed. I. Holst (London, 1959), 7–13

‘On Writing English Opera’, Opera, xii (1961), 7–8

Speech on receiving an honorary degree from Hull University, London Magazine, new ser., iii/7 (1963), 89–91

‘Britten Looking Back’, Sunday Telegraph (17 Nov 1963); repr. in Musical America, no.84 (1964), 4–6

On Receiving the First Aspen Award (London, 1964/R)

‘A Composer in Russia’, Sunday Telegraph (24 Oct 1965)

‘Tributes and Reminiscences’, Michael Tippett: a Symposium on his 60th Birthday, ed. I. Kemp (London, 1965), 29–30

‘Early Influences: a Tribute to Frank Bridge’, Composer, no.19 (1966), 2–3

‘Frank Bridge (1879–1941)’, Faber Music News (1966), aut., 17–20

‘Britten on Aldeburgh and the Future’, Opera (1967), festival issue, 7–9

‘No Ivory Tower’, ON, xxxiii/23 (1968–9), 8–11

‘Some Notes on Forster and Music’, Aspects of E.M. Forster: Essays and Recollections Written for his Ninetieth Birthday, ed. O. Stallybrass (London, 1969), 81–6

‘“Oedipus Rex” and “Lady Macbeth”’, Tempo, no.120 (1977), 11–12

Britten on Music, ed. P. Kildea (Oxford, forthcoming)

b: catalogues of works and source books

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: letters and diaries

a: letters and diaries

L. Foreman: From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900–1945 (London, 1987)

D. Mitchell and P. Reed, eds.: Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (London, 1991, 2/1998)

J.K. Law: ‘“I must get a better composer … but how?”: the Early Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten’, OQ, ix/2 (1992), 31–51

D. Mitchell: ‘Schoenberg in Lowestoft: a Chronology Compiled from Britten's Pocket Diaries (1928–1939)’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections Presented to O.W. Neighbour, ed. C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (London, 1993), 354–62

P. Reed, ed.: The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears (1936–1978) (Woodbridge, 1995/R)

b: catalogues of works and source books

Benjamin Britten: a Complete Catalogue of his Works (London, 1963, 2/1973)

J. Evans, P. Reed and P. Wilson: A Britten Source Book (Aldeburgh and Winchester, 1987/R)

C.H. Parsons: A Benjamin Britten Discography (Dyfed, 1990)

B. Ford, ed.: Benjamin Britten's Poets: the Poetry he Set to Music (Manchester, 1994, 2/1996)

P. Hodgson: Benjamin Britten: a Guide to Research (New York, 1996)

P. Banks and others, compilers: Benjamin Britten: a Catalogue of the Published Works (Aldeburgh, 1999)

c: life

G. Cockshott: ‘English Composer Goes West’, MT, lxxxii (1941), 308 only

E.W. White: Benjamin Britten: a Sketch of his Life and Works (London, 1948, 2/1954; Ger. trans., 1948)

A. Gishford, ed.: Tribute to Benjamin Britten on his Fiftieth Birthday (London, 1963)

R.M. Schafer: ‘Benjamin Britten’, British Composers in Interview (London, 1963), 113–24

M. Tippett: ‘Benjamin Britten: a Birthday Tribute’, Composer, no.12 (1963), 6–7

S. Lazarov: Bendzhamin Britten (Sofiya, 1965)

A. Tauragis: Bendzhamin Britten (Moscow, 1965)

I. Holst: Britten (London, 1966, 3/1980)

M. Hurd: Benjamin Britten (London, 1966)

P.M. Young: Benjamin Britten (London, 1966)

E.W. White: Benjamin Britten: his Life and Operas (London, 1970, 2/1983)

R. Blythe, ed.: Aldeburgh Anthology (Aldeburgh, 1972)

A. Kendall: Britten (London, 1973)

L. Kovnatskaya: Bendzhamin Britten (Moscow, 1974)

M. Tippett: ‘A Tribute to Benjamin Britten’, The Listener (16 Dec 1976); repr. in About the House, v/2 (1977), 56–7

I. Holst: ‘Working for Benjamin Britten’, MT, cxviii (1977), 202–6

D. Mitchell and J. Evans, eds.: Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976: Pictures from a Life (London, 1978)

‘Peter Pears Talks about Benjamin Britten’, Keynote, ii/2 (1978), 6–15

A. Blyth: Remembering Britten (London, 1981)

R. Duncan: Working with Britten: a Personal Memoir (Bideford, 1981)

C. Headington: Britten (London, 1981, 2/1996)

M. Kennedy: Britten (London, 1981, 2/1993)

G. Schmiedel: Benjamin Britten: für Sie porträtiert (Leipzig, 1983)

T. Bray: ‘Frank Bridge and his “Quasi-Adopted Son”’, MR, xlv (1984), 135–8

D. Mitchell: ‘Outline Model for a Biography of Benjamin Britten’, Festschrift Albi Rosenthal, ed. R. Elvers (Tutzing, 1984), 239–51

M. Thorpe, ed.: Peter Pears: a Tribute on his 75th Birthday (London, 1985)

Beth Britten: My Brother Benjamin (Bourne End, 1986)

P. Evans: ‘Benjamin Britten’, The New Grove Twentieth-Century English Masters, ed. S. Sadie (London, 1986), 237–96

S. Bedford: ‘Composer and Conductor: Annals of a Collaboration’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 60–74

H. Carpenter: Benjamin Britten: a Biography (London, 1992)

N. Evans and E. Crozier: ‘After Long Pursuit’, OQ, x/3 (1993–4), 5–17

M. Saremba: ‘Und wo bleibt das Positive, Herr Britten? Benjamin Britten (1913–76)’, Elgar, Britten & Co.: eine Geschichte der britischen Musik in zwölf Portraits (Zürich, 1994), 275–318

X. de Gaulle: Benjamin Britten, ou L'impossible quiétude (1996)

M. Oliver: Benjamin Britten (London, 1996)

H. Metzelaar: ‘Who Sent Benjamin Britten Hundreds of Eggs from Holland?’, Key Notes, xxxi/3 (1997), 17–21

J. Wake-Walker, ed.: Time & Concord: Aldeburgh Festival Recollections (Saxmundham, 1997)

M. Garnham: As I Saw it: Basil Douglas, Benjamin Britten and the English Opera Group 1955–1957: a Personal Memoir (London, 1998)

d: criticism

N. Lopatnikoff: ‘England's Young Composers’, MM, xiv (1936–7), 204–7

H. Boys: ‘The Younger English Composers, v: Benjamin Britten’, MMR, lxviii (1938), 234–7

J.A. Westrup: ‘The Virtuosity of Benjamin Britten’, The Listener, xxviii (1942), 93

C. Mason: ‘Britten: Another View’, MMR, lxxiii (1943), 153

S. Goddard: ‘Benjamin Britten’, British Music of Our Time, ed. A.L. Bacharach (Harmondsworth, 1946), 209–18

H. Keller: ‘Britten and Mozart: a Challenge in the Form of Variations on an Unfamiliar Theme’, ML, xxix (1948), 17–30

C. Mason: ‘Benjamin Britten’, MT, lxxxix (1948), 73–5, 107–10, 139–42

H. Keller: ‘Resistances to Britten's Music: their Psychology’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 227–36; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

C. Stuart: ‘Britten “The Eclectic”’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 247–50; repr. in Mitchell and Keller, op. cit.

P. Hamburger: ‘Mainly about Britten’, Music Survey, iii (1950–51), 98–107; repr. in Mitchell and Keller, op. cit.

D. Mitchell and H. Keller, eds.: Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists (London, 1952) [incl. The Earl of Harewood: ‘The Man’, 1–8’; D. Mitchell: ‘The Musical Atmosphere’, 9–58; P. Pears: ‘The Vocal Music’, 59–73; G. Malcolm: ‘The Purcell Realizations’, 74–82; H.F. Redlich: ‘The Choral Music’, 83–100; A. Oldham: ‘Peter Grimes I: the Music; the Story not Excluded’, 101–10; H. Keller: ‘Peter Grimes II: the Story; the Music not Excluded’, 111–24; E. Stein: ‘Peter Grimes III: Opera and Peter Grimes’, 125–31; N. Del Mar: ‘The Chamber Operas’, 132–85; G. Malcolm: ‘Dido and Aeneas’, 186–97; E. Stein: ‘Billy Budd’, 198–210; P. Hamburger: ‘The Chamber Music’, 211–36; B. Neel: ‘The String Orchestra’, 237–44; E. Stein: ‘The Symphonies’, 245–56; J. Chissell: ‘The Concertos’, 257–65; G. Auric: ‘The Piano Music I: its Place in Britten's Development’, 266–8; A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘The Piano Music II: Critical Survey’, 269–75; I. Holst: ‘Britten and the Young’, 276–86; L. Berkeley: ‘The Light Music’, 287–94; W. Mann: ‘The Incidental Music’, 295–310; E.W. White: ‘Bibliography of Britten's Incidental Music’, 311–13; P. Hamburger: ‘The Pianist’, 314–18; H. Keller: ‘The Musical Character’, 319–51; D. Shawe-Taylor: ‘Discography’, 352–60]

E. Stein: ‘Britten Seen against his English Background’, Orpheus in New Guises (London, 1953), 149–63

P. Tranchell: ‘Britten and Brittenites’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 124–32

D. Brown: ‘Stimulus and Form in Britten's Works’, ML, xxxix (1958), 218–26

A. Whittall: ‘Benjamin Britten’, MR, xxiii (1962), 314–16

H. Keller: ‘The World around Britten’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 32–4

R. Strode: ‘Benjamin Britten and the Recorder’, Recorder and Music Magazine, i (1965), 262–3

P. Evans: ‘Sonata Structures in Early Britten’, Tempo, no.82 (1967), 2–13

P. Garvie: ‘Darkly Bright: Britten's Moral Imagination’, Canada Music Book, no.1 (1970), 59–66

D. Handel: ‘Britten's Use of the Passacaglia’, Tempo, no.94 (1970), 2–6

F. Routh: ‘Benjamin Britten’, Contemporary British Music: the Twenty-Five Years from 1945 to 1970 (London, 1972), 203–29

P. Evans: ‘Britten's Fourth Creative Decade’, Tempo, no.106 (1973), 8–17

H. Keller: ‘Benjamin Britten and the Rôle of Suffering’, Frontier, xvi (1973), 235–9

W. Thomas: ‘Britten as Humanist: a Redefinition’, Composer, no.60 (1977), 9–11

P. Evans: The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979, 2/1996)

A. Whittall: ‘The Study of Britten: Triadic Harmony and Tonal Structure’, PRMA, cvi (1979–80), 27–41

D. Mitchell: Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the Year 1936 (London, 1981)

H. Aguilar: ‘A Dangerous Faith: Benjamin Britten's Language’, Parnassus, x (1982), 135–70

A. Whittall: The Music of Britten and Tippett (Cambridge, 1982, 2/1990)

C. Mark: ‘Simplicity in Early Britten’, Tempo, no.147 (1983), 8–14

C. Palmer, ed.: The Britten Companion (London, 1984) [incl. D. Mitchell: ‘What do we know about Britten now?’, 21–45; I. Holst: ‘Working for Benjamin Britten (I)’, 46–50; R. Strode: ‘Working for Benjamin Britten (II)’, 51–61; J. Culshaw: ‘“Ben”: a Tribute to Benjamin Britten’, 62–7; C. Palmer: ‘The Ceremony of Innocence’, 68–83; B. Britten and D. Mitchell: ‘Mapreading’, 87–96; W. Mellers: ‘Paul Bunyan: the American Eden’, 97–103; P. Pears: ‘On Playing Peter Grimes’, 104–7; C. Palmer: ‘Chaos and Cosmos in Peter Grimes’, 108–19; C. Headington: ‘The Rape of Lucretia’, 120–26; E. Stein: ‘Albert Herring’, 127–32; P. Brett: ‘Salvation at Sea: Billy Budd’, 133–43; W. Mellers: ‘Turning the Screw’, 144–52; W. Mellers: ‘Through Noye's Fludde’, 153–60; I. Holst: ‘Entertaining the Young: The Little Sweep’, 161–4; D. Mitchell: ‘Small Victims: The Golden Vanity and Children's Crusade’, 165–9; D. Mitchell: ‘Public and Private in Gloriana’, 170–76; B. Britten: ‘The Composer's Dream’, 177–80; W. Mellers: ‘The Truth of the Dream’, 181–91; D. Mitchell: ‘Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land’, 192–210; D. Mitchell: ‘The Church Parables (I): Ritual and Restraint’, 211–14; R. Holloway: ‘The Church Parables (II): Limits and Renewals’, 215–26; J. Evans: ‘Owen Wingrave: a Case for Pacifism’, 227–37; D. Mitchell: ‘Death in Venice: the Dark Side of Perfection’, 238–49; C. Palmer: ‘Towards a Genealogy of Death in Venice’, 250–67; P. Porter: ‘Composer and Poet’, 271–85; G. Johnson: ‘Voice and Piano’, 286–307; C. Palmer: ‘Embalmer of the Midnight: the Orchestral Song-Cycles’, 308–28; A. Milner: ‘The Choral Music’, 329–46; E. Roseberry: ‘The Purcell Realizations’, 356–66; D. Mitchell: ‘The Chamber Music: an Introduction’, 369–74; E. Roseberry: ‘The Solo Chamber Music’, 375–82; D. Matthews: ‘The String Quartets and Some Other Chamber Works’, 383–92; C. Palmer: ‘The Orchestral Works: Britten as Instrumentalist’, 393–410; J. Evans: ‘The Concertos’, 411–24]

C. Mark: ‘Contextually Transformed Tonality in Britten’, MAn, iv (1985), 265–87

M. Bowen: ‘Britten und Tippett: die Erneuerung in der englischen Musik’, ÖMz, xli (1986), 155–64

B. Docherty: ‘Aschenbach's Wilderness’, Tempo, no.157 (1986), 9–11

W.R. Maust: Benjamin Britten's Music of Conscience and Compassion (Waterloo, 1987)

M. Cooke: ‘Britten and Bali’, JMR, vii (1988), 307–39

M. Cooke: ‘Britten and the Shō’, MT, cxxix (1988), 231–3

M. Kennedy: ‘Under the Influence: Britten's Debt to Mahler: Enthusiasm, Advocacy and Inspiration’, The Listener (18 Aug 1988)

P. Griffiths: ‘A Mind Withdrawing: Britten’s Music and the Lure of Might-Have-Beens’, Times Literary Supplement (28 June 1991)

R. Holloway: ‘Strange Victor: the Abyss in Britten’s Soul and the Triumph of his Will’, Times Literary Supplement (13 Nov 1992)

P. Rupprecht: Tonal Stratification and Conflict in the Music of Benjamin Britten (diss., Yale U., 1993)

L. Whitesell: Images of Self in the Music of Benjamin Britten (diss., SUNY, 1993)

A. Whittall: ‘The Signs of Genre: Britten's Version of Pastoral’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections Presented to O.W. Neighbour, ed. C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (London, 1993), 363–74

C. Mark: ‘Britten and the Circle of Fifths’, JRMA, cxix (1994), 268–97

S. Robinson: ‘“You absolutely owe it to England to stay here”: Copland as Mentor to Britten, 1939–1942’, Context, viii/sum. (1994–5), 3–11

C. Mark: Early Benjamin Britten: a Study of Stylistic and Technical Evolution (New York, 1995)

P. Reed, ed.: On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on his 70th Birthday (Woodbridge, 1995) [incl. M. Cooke: ‘From Nō to Nebuchadnezzar’, 135–45; D. Drew: ‘Britten and his Fellow Composers: Six Footnotes for a Seventieth Birthday’, 146–66; O. Knussen: ‘The Key to the Parade’, 170–71; L. Kovnatskaya: ‘Notes on a Theme from Peter Grimes’, 172–85; E. Mendelson: ‘The Making of Auden's Hymn for St Cecilia's Day’, 186–92; K. Mitchell: ‘Edinburgh Diary 1968’, 193–212; C. Palmer: ‘Towards a Genealogy of Death in Venice’, 213–28; M. Piper: ‘Venice, 1954’, 229–30; P. Reed: ‘On the Sketches for Billy Budd’, 231–52; E. Roseberry: ‘“Abraham and Isaac” Revisited: Reflections on a Theme and its Inversion’, 253–66; E. Said: ‘Not All the Way to the Tigers: Britten's Death in Venice’, 267–74; S. Ketukaenchan: ‘A (Far Eastern) Note on Paul Bunyan’, 275–9; R. Strode: ‘Writing and Copying: a Superficial Survey of Benjamin Britten's Music’, 280–89; A. Whittall: ‘Along the Knife-Edge: the Topic of Transcendence in Britten's Musical Aesthetic’, 290–98]

L. Brauneiss: ‘Zur Akualität Benjamin Brittens’, Musiktheorie, xi (1996), 125–37

P. Brett: ‘Toeing the Line: Britten's Relationship to the Pastoral Tradition’, MT, cxxxvii (1996), 7–13

G. Elliott: ‘Britten and Plainsong’, Melos [Stockholm], nos.19–20 (1997), 18–36

D. Mitchell: ‘Benjamin Britten: the Quiet Innovator’, Melos [Stockholm], nos.19–20 (1997), 4–17

S. Robinson: ‘“An English Composer sees America”: Benjamin Britten and the North American Press, 1939–42’, American Music, xv (1997), 321–51

A. Tuchowski: ‘Between Modernity and Tradition: the Tritone as a “diabolus in musica” in Britten's Works’, Melos [Stockholm], nos.19–20 (1997), 72–8

M. Cooke: Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Woodbridge, 1998)

C. Pond: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten: Englishness, Authenticity and Irony (diss., U. of Leeds, 1998)

A. Whittall: ‘Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Britten, Maxwell Davies and the Sense of Place’, Tempo, no.204 (1998), 5–11

M. Cooke, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge, 1999) [incl. C. Mark: ‘Juvenilia (1922–1932)’, 11–35; P. Kildea: ‘Britten, Auden and “Otherness”’, 36–53; P. Reed: ‘Britten in the Cinema: Coal Face’, 54–77; S.A. Allen: ‘“He Descended into Hell”’: Peter Grimes, Ellen Orford and Salvation Denied’, 81–94; A. Whittall: ‘The Chamber Operas’, 95–112; A. Malloy-Chirgwin: ‘Gloriana: Britten's “Slighted Child”’, 113–28; M. Cooke: ‘Britten and Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream’, 129–46; C. Hindley: ‘Eros in Life and Death: Billy Budd and Death in Venice’, 147–64; M. Cooke: ‘Distant Horizons: from Pagodaland to the Church Parables’, 167–87; D. Mitchell: ‘Violent Climates’, 188–216; A. Ashby: ‘Britten as Symphonist’, 217–32; E. Roseberry: ‘The Concertos and Early Orchestral Scores: Aspects of Style and Aesthetic’, 233–44; P. Rupprecht: ‘The Chamber Music’, 245–59; R. Woodward: ‘Music for Voices’, 260–75; S.A. Allen: ‘Britten and the World of the Child’, 279–91; E. Roseberry: ‘Old Songs in New Contexts: Britten as Arranger’, 292–305; J. LeGrove: ‘Aldeburgh’, 306–17]

J. Day: Englishness in Music: from Elizabethan Times to Elgar, Tippett and Britten (London, 1999)

P. Brett: ‘The Britten Era’ [the 1997 Proms Lecture], Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance, ed. S.-E. Case, P. Brett and S.L. Foster (Bloomington, IN, forthcoming)

P. Kildea: Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place (Oxford, forthcoming)

e: operas

general

J. Klein: ‘Britten and English Opera’, MO, lxxii (1948–9), 517–18

H.F. Redlich: ‘The Significance of Britten's Operatic Style’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 240–45; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

E. Stein: ‘Benjamin Britten's Operas’, Opera, i (1950), 16–21

Benjamin Britten: das Opernwerk, Musik der Zeit, no.11 (Bonn, 1955)

D. Mitchell: ‘Britten's Revisionary Practice: Practical and Creative’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 15–22

P. Howard: The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London, 1969)

E.W. White: Benjamin Britten: his Life and Operas (London, 1970, 2/1983)

D. Herbert, ed.: The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979)

H. Keller: ‘Zu Benjamin Brittens Opernschaffen’, ÖMz, xxxvi (1981), 379–87

J. Kuhnel: ‘Die Novelle als Opernvorwurf: zur Dramaturgie einiger Opern Benjamin Brittens’, Oper und Operntext, ed. J.M. Fischer (Heidelberg, 1985), 227–60

G. Elliott: ‘The Operas of Benjamin Britten: a Spiritual View’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 28–44

E. McDonald: ‘Women in Benjamin Britten's Operas’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 83–101

S. Corse: Opera and the Uses of Language: Mozart, Verdi and Britten (Cranbury, NJ, 1987)

J.K. Law: ‘The Dialogics of Operatic Adaptation: Reading Benjamin Britten’, Yearbook of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Fine Arts, i (1989), 407–27

P. Brett: ‘Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas’, Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. P. Brett, E. Wood and G.C. Thomas (London, 1994), 235–56

M. Kennedy: ‘Britten's Operas: 20 Years On’, Opera, xlvii (1996), 1004–11

M. Wilcox: Benjamin Britten's Operas (Bath, 1997)

Peter Grimes

E. Crozier, ed.: Peter Grimes (London, 1945/R)

E. Stein: ‘Opera and “Peter Grimes”’, Tempo, 1st ser., no.12 (1945), 2–6; repr. in Orpheus in New Guises (London, 1953), 110–17

C. Stuart: Peter Grimes (London, 1947)

F. Abbiati: Peter Grimes (Milan, 1949)

H. Keller: ‘Britten: Thematic Relations and the “Mad” Interlude's 5th Motif’, Music Survey, iv (1951–2), 332–4; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

J.W. Garbutt: ‘Music and Motive in “Peter Grimes”’, ML, xliv (1963), 334–42

A. Payne: ‘Dramatic Use of Tonality in Peter Grimes’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 22–6

P. Garvie: ‘Plausible Darkness: Peter Grimes after a Quarter of a Century’, Tempo, no.100 (1972), 9–14

P. Brett: ‘Britten and Grimes’, MT, cxviii (1977), 995–1000

L'avant-scène opéra, no.31 (1981) [Peter Grimes issue]

P. Brett, ed.: Peter Grimes (Cambridge, 1983/R)

N. John, ed.: Peter Grimes; Gloriana (London, 1983) [ENO opera guide]

P. Brett: ‘Grimes and Lucretia’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 353–65

C. Hindley: ‘Homosexual Self-Affirmation and Self-Oppression in Two Britten Operas’, MQ, lxxvi (1992), 143–68

P. Banks, ed.: The Making of Peter Grimes (Woodbridge, 1995) [incl. B. Britten: ‘Introduction’, 1–3; P. Pears: ‘Peter Grimes’, 5–6; E. Crozier: ‘Notes on the Production of Benjamin Britten's “Peter Grimes”’, 7–19; P. Reed: ‘A “Peter Grimes” Chronology, 1941–1945’, 21–50; P. Brett: ‘“Peter Grimes”: the Growth of the Libretto’, 53–78; P. Reed: ‘Finding the Right Notes’, 79–115; R. Strode: ‘The Later History of the Composition Draft’, 117–23; D. Mitchell: ‘“Peter Grimes”: Fifty Years On’, 125–65; P. Banks: ‘Bibliographic Notes and Narratives’, 167–228; facs. of complete composition sketch]

H. Keller: Three Psychoanalytic Notes on Peter Grimes (London, 1995)

The Rape of Lucretia

W.H. Haddon Squire: ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis and “The Rape of Lucretia”’, Tempo, no.1 (1946), 1–9

H. Searle: ‘Britten's Lucretia’, MM, xxiii (1946), 284 only

H. Keller: The Rape of Lucretia; Albert Herring (London, 1947)

E. Crozier, ed.: The Rape of Lucretia: a Symposium (London, 1948)

D. Mitchell: ‘A Note on the “Flower Aria” and “Passacaglia” in “Lucretia”’, Music Survey, iii (1950–51), 276–7; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

Earl of Harewood: ‘Das Lucretia-Libretto’, Musik der Zeit, no.11 (1955), 35–8

R. Duncan: ‘The Problems of a Librettist: is Opera Emotionally Immature?’, Composer, no.23 (1967), 6–9

P. Brett: ‘Grimes and Lucretia’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 353–65

M. Mertz: History, Criticism and the Sources of Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia (diss., Harvard U., 1990)

N. Evans and E. Crozier: ‘After Long Pursuit’, OQ, xi/2 (1994–5), 9–16

T. Power: ‘Opera as Literature: The Rape of Lucretia’, Irish Musical Studies, iv (1996), 232–46

Albert Herring

H. Keller: The Rape of Lucretia; Albert Herring (London, 1947)

E. Stein: ‘Form in Opera: “Albert Herring” Examined’, Tempo, no.5 (1947), 4–8; repr. in Orpheus in New Guises (London, 1953), 118–23

G. Larner: ‘Albert from Aldeburgh’, Records and Recording, viii/1 (1964–5), 10–12

R.T. Bledsoe: ‘Chastity and Darkness in “Albert Herring”’, Mosaic, xviii/4 (1985), 125–33

E. Crozier and others: ‘An Albert Herring Anthology’, Glyndebourne Festival Opera 1985, 113–23 [programme book]

P. Brett: ‘Character and Caricature in “Albert Herring”’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 545–7

D. Mitchell: ‘The Serious Comedy of Albert Herring’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 45–59

J.K. Law: ‘Daring to Eat a Peach: Literary Allusion in Albert Herring’, OQ, v/1 (1987–8), 1–10

M. Kennedy: ‘How Albert Became Our Kind of Thing’, Glyndebourne Festival Opera 1990, 121–7 [programme book]

P. Brett: ‘Albert Herring: Britten's Celebration of Liberation’, Performing Arts, xxvi/4 (1992), 21–6

E. Crozier: ‘The Writing of Albert Herring’, Opera L.A., ix/3 (1992), 3–5

C. Hindley: ‘Not the Marrying Kind: Britten's “Albert Herring”’, COJ, vii (1994), 159–74

Billy Budd

Tempo, no.21 (1951) [Billy Budd issue]

D. Mitchell: ‘More off than on “Billy Budd”’, Music Survey, iv (1951–2), 386–408; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

C. Campbell: ‘Second Thoughts on “Billy Budd”’, Adam International Review, nos.224–6 (1952), 19–21

E. Crozier: ‘Writing an Opera’, Adam International Review, nos.224–6 (1952), 17–19

I. Holst: ‘Billy Budd’, Foyer, ii (1952), 28–32

A. Porter: ‘Britten's “Billy Budd”’, ML, xxxiii (1952), 111–18

E. Stein: ‘Billy Budd’, Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1952), 198–210; repr. in Opera, iii (1952), 206–14, 249 only, and in Orpheus in New Guises (London, 1953), 124–36

P. Brett: ‘Salvation at Sea: Britten's Billy Budd’, San Francisco Opera Magazine (1978), 61–2, 88 only, 101–3

A. Porter: ‘Some Other Budds’, About the House, v/8 (1979), 47–51

N. Bradley: ‘The Non-Clinical Test of a Clinical Theory: Billy Budd, Novel and Libretto’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis (1980), 233–49

J.K. Law: ‘“We have ventured to tidy up Vere”: the Adapter's Dialogue in Billy Budd’, Twentieth Century Literature, xxxi (1985), 297–314

E. Crozier: ‘The Writing of “Billy Budd”’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 11–27

C. Hindley: ‘Love and Salvation in Britten's “Billy Budd”’, ML, lxx (1989), 363–81

A. Whittall: ‘“Twisted Relations”: Method and Meaning in Britten's “Billy Budd”’, COJ, ii (1990), 145–71

B. Emslie: ‘Billy Budd and the Fear of Words’, COJ, iv (1992), 43–59

M. Cooke and P. Reed, eds.: Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd (Cambridge, 1993)

L'avant-scène opéra, no.158 (1994) [Billy Budd issue]

C. Hindley: ‘Britten's Billy Budd: the “Interview Chords” Again’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 99–126

P. Rupprecht: ‘Tonal Stratification and Uncertainty in Britten's Music’, JMT, xli (1996), 311–46

S. McKellar: ‘Re-Visioning the “Missing” Scene: Critical and Tonal Trajectories in Britten's Billy Budd’, JRMA, cxxii (1997), 258–80

P. Reed: ‘On the Sketches for Billy Budd’, Melos [Stockholm], nos.19–20 (1997), 48–63

T. and J. Uppman: ‘Novel Approach’, Stagebill (1997), Feb, 20–22

Gloriana

J. Klein: ‘Some Reflections on “Gloriana”’, Tempo, no.29 (1953), 16–21

A. Porter: ‘Britten's “Gloriana”’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 277–87

Opera, iv (1953), 455–69 [symposium on Gloriana]

Tempo, no.28 (1953) [Gloriana issue]

W. Plomer: ‘Let's Crab an Opera’, London Magazine, new ser., iii/7 (1963), 101–4

H. Keller and S. Walsh: ‘Two Interpretations of Gloriana as Music Drama’, Tempo, no.79 (1966–7), 2–9

J. Klein: ‘Britten's Major Setback’, MO, xc (1966–7), 13–14

W. Plomer: ‘The Gloriana Libretto’, Sadler's Wells Magazine, iv (1968), 8–9

N. John, ed.: Peter Grimes; Gloriana (London, 1983) [ENO opera guide]

P.F. Alexander: ‘The Process of Composition of the Libretto of Britten's “Gloriana”’, ML, lxvii (1986), 147–58

P. Banks, ed.: Britten's Gloriana: Essays and Sources (Woodbridge, 1993)

R. Holloway: ‘“Gloriana” and “The Beggar's Opera”’, Tempo, no.189 (1994), 39–41

The Turn of the Screw

E. Stein: ‘“The Turn of the Screw” and its Musical Idiom’, Tempo, no.34 (1955), 6–14

L. Landgraf: ‘Bemerkungen des Übersetzers’, Neues Forum, vii (1957–8), 119–23

P. Howard, ed.: The Turn of the Screw (Cambridge, 1985)

M. Stimpson: ‘Drama and Meaning in The Turn of the Screw’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 75–82

C. Hindley: ‘Why does Miles Die? A Study of Britten's “The Turn of the Screw”’, MQ, lxxiv (1990), 1–17

M. Schulz: ‘An Unending Horror: Henry James's and Benjamin Britten's Turn(ings) of the Screw’, Yearbook of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Fine Arts, ii (1990), 37–48

P. Brett: ‘Britten's Bad Boys: Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw’, Repercussions, i/2 (1992), 5–25

L. Whitesell: ‘Doubt and Failure in Britten's The Turn of the Screw’, Indiana Theory Review, xiii/2 (1992), 41–87

L'avant-scène opéra, no.173 (1996) [The Turn of the Screw/Owen Wingrave issue]

A Midsummer Night's Dream

P. Evans: ‘Britten's New Opera: a Preview’, Tempo, nos.53–4 (1960), 34–48

D. Mitchell: ‘In and Out of Britten's Dream’, Opera, xi (1960), 797–801

E. Roseberry: ‘A Note on the Four Chords in Act II of A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 36–7

R. Warren: A Midsummer Night's Dream: Text and Performance (London, 1983)

W. Riehle: ‘Benjamin Brittens Oper A Midsummer Night's Dream aus heutiger Sicht’, Jb Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (1984), 149–63

D. Mitchell and P. Reed: ‘“A Midsummer Night's Dream” Anthology’, Glyndebourne Festival Opera 1989, 133–41 [programme book]

L'avant-scène opéra, no.146 (1992) [A Midsummer Night's Dream issue]

Performing Arts, xxvi/9 (1992) [A Midsummer Night's Dream issue]

P. Brett: ‘Britten's Dream’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R.A. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 259–80

M. Cooke: ‘Britten and Shakespeare: Dramatic and Musical Cohesion in “A Midsummer Night's Dream”’, ML, lxxiv (1993), 246–68

W.H. Godsalve: Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (London, 1995)

church parables

E. Vermeulen: ‘Höhepunkt des Holland-Festivals: “Curlew River” von Britten’, Melos, xxxi (1964), 313–14

W.T. Flynn: ‘Britten the Progressive’, MR, xliv (1983), 44–52

M. Mayer: A Structural and Stylistic Analysis of the Benjamin Britten Curlew River (diss., Columbia U. Teachers College, 1983)

P.F. Alexander: ‘A Study of the Origins of Britten's “Curlew River”’, ML, lxix (1988), 229–43

C. Hindley: ‘Homosexual Self-Affirmation and Self-Oppression in Two Britten Operas’, MQ, lxxvi (1992), 143–68

C. Hindley: ‘Britten's Parable Art: a Gay Reading’, History Workshop Journal, xl (1995), 63–90

M. Cooke: ‘Eastern Influences on Britten's The Prodigal Son’, Melos [Stockholm], nos.19–20 (1997), 37–45

W.A. Sheppard: ‘Britten's Parables’, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (Berkeley, forthcoming)

Owen Wingrave

P. Evans: ‘Britten's Television Opera’, MT, cxii (1971), 425–8

H. Raynor: ‘Owen Wingrave’, MR, xxxii (1971), 271–3

S. Sadie: ‘Owen Wingrave’, MT, cxii (1971), 663–6

B. Schiffer: ‘Benjamin Brittens neue Fernsehoper’, Melos, xxxviii (1971), 313–14

D. Cescotti: ‘Pacifismo in musica: il caso di Owen Wingrave di Benjamin Britten’, Ottocento e oltre: scritti in onore di Raoul Meloncelli, ed. F. Izzo and J. Streicher (Rome, 1993), 591–601

S. McClatchie: ‘Benjamin Britten, “Owen Wingrave” and the Politics of the Closet: or, “He shall be straightened out at Paramore”’, COJ, viii (1994), 59–75

‘A Collaboration Recalled: Myfanwy Piper Talks to Roderick Dunnett’, Opera, xlvi (1995), 1158–64

A. Whittall: ‘Breaking the Balance’, MT, cxxxvii (1996), 4–7

L'avant-scène opéra, no.173 (1996) [Owen Wingrave/The Turn of the Screw issue]

S. McKellar: ‘Music, Image and Ideology in Britten's “Owen Wingrave”: Conflict in a Fissured Text’, ML, lxxx (1999), 390–410

Death in Venice

J. Blades: ‘Making Percussion Instruments for Benjamin Britten’, The Listener (15 June 1972)

P. Evans: ‘Britten's “Death in Venice”’, Opera, xxiv (1973), 490–96

T.J. Reed: ‘Death in Venice’, About the House, iv/3 (1973), 44–7

B. Schiffer: ‘Thomas Manns Aschenbach lernt durch Britten singen?’, Melos, xl (1973), 358–69

C. van Zwol: ‘Death in Venice, de laatste opera van Benjamin Britten’, Luister, xxi (1973), 16–19

S.M. Stroff: ‘Britten's Death in Venice: if it isn't Opera, what is it?’, New Jersey Music & Arts, xxx/5 (1975), 36–8

G. Schmidgall: ‘Death in Venice’, Literature as Opera (New York, 1977), 321–55

J. Evans: ‘Britten's Venice Workshop’, pt i: ‘The Sketch Book’, Soundings, xii (1984–5), 7–24; pt ii: ‘The Revisions’, xiii (1985), 51–77

J. Evans: ‘Death in Venice: the Apollonian/Dionysian Conflict’, OQ, iv/3 (1986–7), 102–15

D. Mitchell, ed.: Death in Venice (Cambridge, 1987)

R. Travis: ‘The Recurrent Figure in the Britten/Piper Opera “Death in Venice”’, Music Forum, vi (1987), 129–246

S. and L. Corse: ‘Britten's “Death in Venice”: Literary and Musical Structures’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 344–63

C. Hindley: ‘Contemplation and Reality: a Study in Britten's “Death in Venice”’, ML, lxxi (1990), 511–23

C. Hindley: ‘Platonic Elements in Britten's “Death in Venice”’, ML, lxxiii (1992), 407–29

B. Diana: Il sapore della conoscenza: Benjamin Britten e ‘Death in Venice’ (Turin, 1997)

other operas

H. Keller: ‘Britten's Beggar's Opera’, Tempo, no.10 (1948–9), 7–13

D. Mitchell: ‘Britten's “Let's Make an Opera” op.45’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 86–8; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

I. Holst: ‘Britten's “Let's Make an Opera!”’, Tempo, no.18 (1951–2), 12–16

E. Roseberry: ‘The Music of “Noye's Fludde”’, Tempo, no.49 (1958), 2–11

E. Stein: ‘Britten's New Opera for Children: “Noye's Fludde”’, Tempo, no.48 (1958), 7–8

H. Raynor: ‘Paul Bunyan’, MR, xxxviii (1977), 112–15

W.H. Auden: Paul Bunyan (London, 1988) [libretto with introductory essay by D. Mitchell]

P. Reed: ‘A Rejected Love Song from “Paul Bunyan”’, MT, cxxix (1988), 283–8

C. Hindley: ‘Britten, Auden and Johnny Inkslinger’, Perversions, ii (1994), 42–56

R. Holloway: ‘“Gloriana” and “The Beggar's Opera”’, Tempo, no.189 (1994), 39–41

(2) František [Franz] Xaver Brixi

f: other works

orchestral

E. Stein: ‘Brittens Sinfonien’, Musik der Zeit, no.7 (1954), 46–53

N. Del Mar: ‘The Orchestral Music’, London Magazine, new ser., iii/7 (1963), 96–101

P. Evans: ‘Britten's Cello Symphony’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 2–15

J. Warrack: ‘Britten's Cello Symphony’, MT, cv (1964), 418–19

L. Berkeley: ‘Views from Mont Juic’, Tempo, no.106 (1973), 6–7

D. Mitchell: ‘Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land’, Tempo, no.146 (1983), 13–24

D. Mitchell: ‘An After Word on Britten's Pagodas: the Balinese Sources’, Tempo, no.152 (1985), 7–11

E. Roseberry: ‘Britten's Piano Concerto: the Original Version’, Tempo, no.172 (1990), 10–18

L. Kovnatskaya: ‘Russian Funeral through Russian Ears’, International Journal of Musicology, ii (1993), 321–33

G. Weiss-Aigner: ‘Zum Violinkonzert von Benjamin Britten: eine ungewöhnliche thematische Konzeption im Brennpunkt melodischer Entwicklungslinien und rhythmischer Profile’, Neues musikwissenschaftliches Jb, iv (1995), 159–206

J. Duchen: ‘Pastoral Puzzle’, The Strad, cviii (1997), 628–9

choral

H. Searle: ‘Growing Pains in England’, MM, xvi (1939), 220–24

I. Holst: ‘Britten's “Saint Nicolas”’, Tempo, no.10 (1948), 23–5

R. Manning: From Holst to Britten: a Study of Modern Choral Music (London, 1949)

D. Mitchell: ‘A Note on St. Nicolas: Some Points of Britten's Style’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 220–26; repr. in Music Survey: New Series, 1949–52, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 1981)

L. Berkeley: ‘Britten's “Spring Symphony”’, ML, xxxi (1950), 216 only

E. Stein: ‘Britten's “Spring Symphony”’, Tempo, no.15 (1950), 19–24

S. Bradshaw: ‘Britten's “Cantata academica”’, Tempo, nos.53–4 (1960), 22–34

E. Roseberry: ‘Britten's “Missa brevis”’, Tempo, nos.53–4 (1960), 11–16

R. Myers: ‘Carmen basiliense’, Adam International Review, nos.289–90 (1961), 4–6

P. Evans: ‘Britten's “War Requiem”’, Tempo, nos.61–2 (1962), 20–39

A. Robertson: ‘Britten's “War Requiem”’, MT, ciii (1962), 308–10

A. Whittall: ‘Tonal Instability in Britten's “War Requiem”’, MR, xxiv (1963), 201

M. Dawney: ‘Some Notes on Britten's Church Music’, Tempo, no.82 (1967), 13–20

M. Boyd: ‘Britten, Verdi and the Requiem’, Tempo, no.86 (1968), 2–6

J. Churchill: ‘The Sacred Works of Benjamin Britten’, Music: the AGO and RCCO Magazine, xi/11 (1977), 40–43

M. Stimpson: ‘Britten's Last Work’, Tempo, no.155 (1985), 34–6

D. Jarman: War Requiem: the Film (London, 1989)

E. Lundergran: Benjamin Britten's War Requiem: Stylistic and Technical Sources (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1991)

M. Cooke: Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge, 1996)

songs and song cycles

P. Pears: ‘Britten, der Erneuerer des englischen Liedes’, Musik der Zeit, no.7 (1954), 21–30

I. Holst: ‘Britten's Nocturne’, Tempo, no.50 (1958), 14–22

J. Noble: ‘Britten's “Songs from the Chinese”’, Tempo, no.52 (1959), 25–9

D. Brown: ‘Britten's Three Canticles’, MR, xxi (1960), 55

E. Roseberry: ‘Britten's Purcell Realizations and Folksong Arrangements’, Tempo, no.57 (1961), 7–28

H. Wood: ‘Britten's Hölderlin Songs’, MT, civ (1963), 781–3

S. Northcote: Byrd to Britten: a Survey of English Song (London, 1966)

I. Holst: ‘Purcell Made Practicable’, Music and Musicians, xvii/10 (1968–9), 48 only

A. Whittall: ‘Tonality in Britten's Song Cycles with Piano’, Tempo, no.96 (1971), 2–11

A.S. Jacobson: Analysis of ‘Journey of the Magi’, Benjamin Britten (thesis, U. of London, 1980)

C. Mark: ‘Britten's Quatre chansons françaises’, Soundings, x (1983), 23–35

E. Simeon: ‘Les illuminations de Benjamin Britten’, Revue d'études rimbaldiennes, iv (1986), 102–10

B. Docherty: ‘Sentence into Cadence: the Word-Setting of Tippett and Britten’, Tempo, no.166 (1988), 2–11

M. Kremin: ‘“Happy were he … ”: Benjamin Brittens Werke für Gitarre und Gesang’, Gitarre & Laute, x/6 (1988), 49–56

E. Simeon: ‘Arthur Rimbaud e Benjamin Britten: Villes II ovvero la nostalgia della forma chiusa’, Rimbaud: le poème en prose et la traduction poétique, ed. S. Sacchi (Tübingen, 1988), 123–31

B. Docherty: ‘Syllogism and Symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text’, CMR, v (1989), 37–63

E. Simeon: ‘Rimbaud in musica: tre versioni di Départ’, Confronto letterario, vii (1990), 271–82

D. Mitchell: ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal: Britten's Other Serenade’, Horn Call, xxii/1 (1991), 9–14

E. Speranza: ‘“Inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato”: brevi note, con alcune licenze, su Britten e Michelangelo’, Esotismo e scuole nazionali: itinerari musicali tra l'Europa e le Americhe (Rome, 1992), 83–107

B. Docherty: ‘“When Feeling Becomes Thought”: Britten, Text and Biography 1928–31’, Tempo, no.184 (1993), 24–9

M. Prictor: ‘The Poems of Thomas Hardy as Song’, Context, vi (1993–4), 34–42

B. Docherty: ‘“We Know for Whom we Mourn”: Britten, Auden and the Politics of 1936’, Tempo, no.192 (1995), 22–7

chamber and solo instrumental

H. Keller: ‘Benjamin Britten's Second Quartet’, Tempo, 1st ser., no.18 (1947), 6–8

P. Evans: ‘Britten's Cello Sonata’, Tempo, no.58 (1961), 8–16

F. Waterman: ‘Britten's New Piano Piece’, Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 34–6

J. Lloyd Webber: ‘The Cello Music of Benjamin Britten’, The Strad, lxxxvi (1975–6), 387–91

C. Matthews: ‘Britten's Indian Summer’, Soundings, vi (1977), 42–50

D. Matthews: ‘Britten's Third Quartet’, Tempo, no.125 (1978), 21–4

S. Banfield: ‘“Too Much of Albion?”: Mrs Coolidge and her British Connections’, American Music, iv (1986), 59–87

A. Payne: ‘Britten and the String Quartet’, Tempo, no.163 (1987), 2–6

M. Donley: ‘Britten's Nocturnal’, Classical Guitar, v/9 (1987–8), 18–22

C. Lo Presti: ‘Il Nocturnal di Britten: note di ricerca per una teoria dell'opera eseguita’, Il Fronimo, no.64 (1988), 10–37

M. Giani: ‘“Agghiacciante simmetria”: tritono e variazione in sviluppo nel Nocturnal, op.70 di Benjamin Britten’, Il Fronimo, no.67 (1989), 45–51

K. van Slogteren: ‘Benjamin Britten: Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, für Oboe Solo’, Tibia: Magazin für Freunde alter und neuer Bläsermusik, xv (1990), 268–73

T. Seedorf: ‘Tonalität und Form in Benjamin Brittens 3. Streichquartett’, Musiktheorie, vi (1991), 245–56

M. Greet: ‘Inconclusive Conclusions: Ambiguity, Semiotics and Britten's Third String Quartet’, Context, vi (1993–4), 43–8

E. Speranza: ‘Britten e le Metamorfosi di Ovidio’, I fiati, i/2 (1994), 46–51

radio, film and theatre music

B. Wright: ‘Britten and Documentary’, MT, civ (1963), 779–80

E.W. White: ‘Britten in the Theatre’, Tempo, no.107 (1973), 2–8

P. Reed: The Instrumental Music of Benjamin Britten: a Study and Catalogue of his Music for Film, Theatre and Radio (diss., U. of East Anglia, 1987)

La cosa vista (1988), July, 23–48 [symposium on Night Mail]

P. Reed: ‘A Cantata for Broadcasting: Britten's “The Company of Heaven”’, MT, cxxx (1989), 324–31

Britton, Thomas

(b Rushden, Northants., 14 Jan 1644; d London, 27 Sept 1714). English patron of music and amateur musician. He served a seven-year apprenticeship with a London coal dealer and, after returning to Northamptonshire for a while, set up in business in London, where by 1677 he was dealing in small-coal in Aylesbury Street, Clerkenwell. He amassed a large collection of books, from which he acquired a wide knowledge of chemistry, astrology and both theoretical and practical music. In 1678, according to Hawkins, he established with the encouragement of Sir Roger L'Estrange the music meetings which were held every Thursday in a long narrow room over his shop. It was approached by stairs outside the house and was lit by a window ‘no bigger than the bung-hole of a cask’ according to an entertaining account by his neighbour Ned Ward.

Despite their mean surroundings the meetings were attended by such leaders of fashion as the Duchess of Queensberry. The performers included professionals like John Banister (ii) and Philip Hart and, in Britton's later years, Handel, Pepusch (who wrote a trio sonata entitled ‘smalcoal’) and Matthew Dubourg. Britton and L'Estrange played the viola da gamba, and other amateurs included Henry Needler, the poet John Hughes and the painter Woolaston. At first the concerts were free, Britton providing his guests with coffee at a penny a dish; later the visitors apparently paid ten shillings a year each, though the Yorkshire diarist Ralph Thoresby paid nothing when he attended a meeting in 1712.

Britton knew the Earls of Oxford, Pembroke and Sunderland and other eminent book collectors of the time. He is thought to have brought together the Somers tracts and was partly responsible for the formation of the Harleian library (now in GB-Lbl). His connections with these noblemen led some to believe that his music meetings were only a cover for seditious purposes, and he was variously and wrongly suspected of being a magician, atheist, Presbyterian and Jesuit. His death was brought about by the practical joke of a ventriloquist who so frightened him that he never recovered. Woolaston's portrait of him is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Britton sold part of his library in 1694, possibly so as to enlarge his music collection. The catalogue of this early sale (in GB-Lbl) lists over 1000 items – prints, manuscripts, tracts, pamphlets and books on ‘English Divinity, Magick, and Chymistry’. His music and fine collection of instruments were sold on his death for the benefit of his widow (Hawkins reproduced the sale catalogue). Understandably, English 17th- and 18th-century chamber music is well represented, but there are also works by Walther and Biber, music in editions by Roger of Amsterdam and a wide range of Italian music from Domenico Gabrielli and Cazzati to Albinoni and Vivaldi, as well as many vocal works. With such resources the programmes of Britton's concerts must have been impressively wide-ranging. Several manuscripts from the collection have been preserved, including GB-Lbl Add.22098 (‘Tho. Britton His Book July y^e 12 1697’) and Add.24889 (transcriptions of theatre music by Purcell and others); Lcm 2087; Ob Mus. Sch.C.75 (Corelli's op.1 in Britton's hand, inscribed ‘used at his Assembly for many years’); US-NYp Drexel 3849 (‘Thomas Britton his Book 1680’); and probably Pu Fi 9–12.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB; HawkinsH

N. Ward: A Compleat and Humorous Account of all the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1745)

H. Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England (Twickenham, 1762–71, many later edns)

J. Pulver: A Biographical Dictionary of Old English Music (London, 1927/R)

R. Elkin: The Old Concert Rooms of London (London, 1955)

M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719)’, RMARC, i (1961/R)

C. Price: ‘The Small-Coal Cult’, MT, cxix (1978), 1032–4

J.C. Kassler: ‘Thomas Britton: Musician and Magician?’, Musicology, vii (1982), 67–72

MICHAEL TILMOUTH/SIMON McVEIGH

Briuschi, Antonio.

See Brioschi, Antonio.

Brivio, Giuseppe Ferdinando

(b Milan, ? end of the 17th century; d Milan, ?c1758). Italian composer, possibly an impresario, singing teacher and violinist. 18th-century sources (e.g. BurneyH; GerberL; GerberNL and La BordeE) blur the distinction between two or more musicians active in Milan by failing to give first names. Only the revised edition of Mancini (1777) supplies Giuseppe Ferdinando as the composer’s first names and describes him as a prominent Milanese singing teacher without identifying him with the violinist, composer and impresario also active in Milan. In fact a family of Brivios could be involved, including an older singing teacher, Carlo Francesco Brivio, who appeared in Milanese operas of 1696, Teodolinda and L’Etna festante, the librettos for which call him ‘musico di S.E. il Castellano’ (the castle commander’s musician). Suggested as Giuseppe Ferdinando’s father (Martinotti in DBI), this Carlo Francesco may have been the bass employed in the ducal court chapel until 1737 and then as a substitute singer until 1749. Recent sources (relying on GerberNL but based on La BordeE) credit Carlo Francesco with having taught Giuseppe Appiani and Felice Salimbeni. Since Mancini (1777) stated that Giuseppe Ferdinando taught Caterina Visconti and Giovanna Astrua, both Brivios may have taught singing at about the same time.

In 1720 the orchestra of the ducal theatre in Milan included two performers named Giuseppe Ferdinando Brivio, a first violinist and a trumpeter; only the latter, however, was cited in a list of June 1711 naming the Milanese players in Novara for the festival of S Gaudenzio. Although the ducal theatre orchestra did not include any player named Giuseppe Ferdinando Brivio in 1748 or 1765, a Gaetano Brivio played second violin in both years. It is generally assumed that the violinist Giuseppe Ferdinando Brivio also composed operas and symphonies and served as impresario in Milan. Archival documents indicate that he was in charge of the ducal theatre for a relatively long time: 26 February 1727 to 13 October 1732. Contrary to reports in modern encyclopedias, Brivio did not assist Giuseppe Milesio or any other of his predecessors, and his successor, G.A. Rozio, was forbidden to use him as partner.

Perhaps because some of Brivio’s arias were used in pasticcios at the King’s Theatre or because Brivio’s pupils Giulia Frasi (according to Burney) and Visconti sang in these pasticcios, Loewenberg and others have supposed that Brivio was in London about 1742–5; no document proving a visit has come to light, however. Even though certain arias were published by Walsh, the pasticcios Gianguir, Mandane (both 1742) and L’incostanza delusa (1745; with music from Brivio’s earlier opera of that name) were not especially popular with London audiences.

Archival papers of the ducal theatre at Milan indicate that Giuseppe Ferdinando Brivio was reimbursed for lodging Leonardo Leo (1740), the choreographer François Sauveterre (1748) and the prima donnas A. Conti (1753) and Columba Mattei (1754) at his residence in Milan. No known documents, however, verify his death in 1758, and no evidence has been found to link unequivocally some of the instrumental music published at Paris and London (1730–63) under the name Brivio with Giuseppe Ferdinando.

WORKS

dramatic

operas unless otherwise indicated

Ipermestra (3, A. Salvi), Milan, Regio Ducal, 26 Dec 1727, probably a pasticcio arr. Brivio

Olimpiade (3, P. Metastasio), Turin, Regio, 5 March 1737, for wedding of King Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy and Princess Elisabetta Teresa of Lorraine

Demofoonte (3, Metastasio), Turin, Regio, carn. 1738, A-Wgm (attrib. Carlo Francesco Brivio), arias, F-Pc

Artaserse (3, Metastasio), Padua, Obizzi, 2 June 1738, for visit of Maria Amalia, Queen of the Two Sicilies

Merope (3, A. Zeno), Milan, Regio Ducal, 26 Dec 1738

Didone abbandonata (3, Metastasio), Milan, Regio Ducal, Jan 1739, sometimes attrib. A. Bernasconi

La Germania trionfante in Arminio, Milan, Regio Ducal, 2 May 1739, for visit of Maria Teresa as Archduchess of Austria

L’incostanza delusa (2), Milan, Regio Ducal, ? sum. 1739, 2 arias (London, 1745/R)

Alessandro nell’Indie (3, Metastasio), Milan, Regio Ducal, Jan 1742, aria, Pc

Music in: Gianguir, 1742; Mandane, 1742; L’incostanza delusa, 1745

Unidentified arias and duet in A-Wn, I-Gl

instrumental

some may be by other Brivios

Sonata, fl/vn, bc, in 6 Solos … by Mr Handel, sigr Geminiani, sigr Somis, sigr Brivio (London, 1730)

Sonata in XII sonates en trio, fls/vns/obs, bc, bks 1–2 (Paris, c1730)

Pieces in A Choice Collection of Aires and Duets, 2 fl, bks 1–4 (London, 1730–41)

Sonata, ob, bc (Paris, 1739)

Pieces in The Delightful Pocket Companion, fl, i–vi (London, c1745)

2 sonatas, 2 fl, kbd, in Musica curiosa or A Curious Collection of Celebrated Airs (London, c1745)

Sonata in XII sonates en trio, fls/vns/obs, bc, bks 1–2 (Paris, c1750)

Ov. in VI overture a più stromenti composte da varii autori (Paris, 1755)

Sym. in Sei sinfonie … da varii autori (Paris, 1757) (pubd by Venier)

Conc., 2 ob, 2 vn, va, bc, hpd, D-ROs, F-Pn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (S. Martinotti)

EitnerQ

G. Mancini: Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato (Vienna, 1774, rev. 2/1777; Eng. trans., 1967, comparing 2 edns, as Practical Reflections on Figured Singing)

C. Cesari: ‘Giorgio Giulini musicista’, RMI, xxiv (1917), 1–34, esp. 25

C.A. Vianello: Teatri, spettacoli, musiche a Milano nei secoli scorsi (Milan, 1941), 276, 365, 372

C. Sartori: ‘Giovanni Battista Sammartini e la sua corte’, Musica d’oggi, new ser., iii (1960), 106–21

G. Barblan: ‘La musica strumentale e cameristica a Milano nel ’700’, Storia di Milano, xvi (Milan, 1962), 619–60 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

SVEN HANSELL

Brixi.

Czech family of musicians. Of the family’s three branches the first, which settled at the beginning of the 17th century in Skalsko, Bohemia, included Dorota Brixi (1686–1762), the mother of František and Jiří Antonín Benda, and (5) Viktorin (Ignác) Brixi. To the second branch, which settled at Vlkava near Nymburk, belonged the organist and composer (1) Šimon Brixi and his son (2) František Xaver Brixi. The third branch, originating from Mělník, included (3) Jan Josef Brixi and his son (4) Václav Norbert Brixi.

(1) Šimon Brixi

(3) Jan Josef Brixi

(4) Václav Norbert [Jeroným] Brixi

(5) Viktorin (Ignác) Brixi

VLADIMIR NOVÁK

(1) Šimon Brixi

(b Vlkava, 28 Oct 1693; d Prague, 2 Nov 1735). Organist and composer. He received his musical education at the Jesuit Gymnasium Jičín (1711–17). He became a law student at Prague University, but abandoned these studies to devote himself to music and became organist at the Týn Church. In 1720 the success of his works for the musica navalis, the annual St John’s Eve festivities on the river Vltava, earned him a commission for the festal music for each year from 1722 to 1729. His wedding in 1724 was celebrated by Bohuslav Matěj Černohorský, a composer and priest at the Franciscan monastery in Prague. In 1725 Brixi became a music teacher at the school of St Martín and organist at the church, and from 1727 was choirmaster at St Martín.

Brixi’s compositions are in the Venetian style represented by Fux and Caldara, with some elements of Czech folk music. His style is marked by full instrumentation and a preference for brass. He handled contrapuntal texture skilfully, and in homophonic passages often made use of concertato interplay between soloists and chorus. The tunefulness of his melodic lines is reminiscent of folk music, and his use of Czech texts is unique in 18th-century Czech music.

Of Brixi’s extensive output only 34 works survive. The majority of his autographs are in the collection of (3) Jan Josef Brixi, now in the National Museum, Prague. His other compositions, mostly in manuscript, are in the National Museum, Prague, the Moravian Museum at Brno and the archives of Czech and Moravian churches. He wrote principally church music, including several masses, settings of the Te Deum and the Magnificat (including one in MAB, 2nd ser., ii, 1967, 2/1982), litanies, offertories and motets; one school comedy is known, Cancet preambulans.

(2) František [Franz] Xaver Brixi

(b Prague, bap. 2 Jan 1732; d Prague, 14 Oct 1771). Organist and composer, son of (1) Šimon Brixi. He received his musical education at the Piarist Gymnasium, Kosmonosy (1744–9), where in 1748 he was classified ‘felicissimus ingenii’. In his last year at the Gymnasium his teacher was Václav Kalous (1715–86), a composer who was also choirmaster at the monastery church. In 1749 Brixi left for Prague where he became organist first at St Havel, and later at the churches of St Martín, St Mikuláš and St Mary na Louži. He soon became one of the best-known composers in Prague, evidence of which can be seen in that from 1757 to his death he was consistently chosen to write the musica navalis for St John’s Eve. On 1 January 1759 he was appointed Kapellmeister of St Vít Cathedral, thus attaining at the age of 27 the highest musical position in the city. At the same time he is said to have become choirmaster of the Benedictine monastery of St Jiří at Hradčany in Prague. He died 12 years later of tuberculosis in the hospital of the Brothers of Charity.

Brixi was one of the leading musical figures of mid-18th-century Bohemia. His tremendous output of about 500 works was rooted in the Neapolitan style, particularly that of Alessandro Scarlatti, Francesco Feo and Francesco Durante, and he was also influenced by the Viennese school of Mancini, Reuter and Bonno. Brixi’s style is distinguished from that of his contemporaries by its fresh melodic writing, vivacious rhythm and lively bass lines, and from that of his predecessors by its simple yet effective instrumentation. He often made use of folk music in his works. During his lifetime his music was widely disseminated in Bohemia and Moravia, as well as in other countries, especially Austria, Bavaria and Silesia. He had a profound effect on Bohemian musical taste, and Mozart’s favourable reception in Prague in the 1780s was at least partly due to Brixi’s lasting influence. The easy appeal of his musical style left an impression on Czech composers for the rest of the 18th century.

WORKS

most MSS in CZ-Pnm, Bm, Czech, Bavarian, Austrian and Polish church and monastery archives

vocal

c350 sacred works: 65 masses, mostly 1–4 solo vv, 4vv, acc., and 11 requiem settings, incl. Missa, C, 4vv, vs (Bonn, c1855); Missa pastoralis, D, 4vv, orch, ed. E. Trolda (Prague, 1947), ed. R. Walter (Zürich, 1977); Missa integra, D, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, in MAB, 2nd ser., vi (1971), ed. K. Pojar (Adliswil, 1992)

Messe, C, vs (Speyer, 1980); Missa Dominicalis, C, 4 solo vv, 4vv, orch, ed. M. Franěk (Prague, 1991); offs, incl. Offertorium, C (Kutná Hora, 1936); Motetto pastorale, G, 4vv, orch, ed. D. Hellmann (Wiesbaden, 1971/R); Scapulis suis, 4vv, orch (Prague, 1992); Confitebor tibi, Domine, 4vv, orch (Prague, 1992); lits, vespers, TeD, Regina coeli, D, 4vv, orch, ed. R. Walter (Hilversum, 1973), other works

Orats: Opera de passione Domini; Parva reflexio super casu Petri (Opera quadragesimalis); Jesus Christus Dei filius; Trias in monade; Filius prodigus; Crux morientis Jesu Christi, incl. Introductio, ed. in Maestri antichi Boemi (Prague, 1970); Judas Ischariotes; Die obsiegende Liebe, incl. Symphonia, ed. in Maestri antichi Boemi (Prague, 1970); Opus patheticum de septem doloribus BMV, incl. Fugis Maria, fugue, ed. B. Kothe, Handbuch für Organisten, ii (Leipzig, 1879), ed. in Fliegende Blätter für katholische Kirchenmusik, xxii (1887), 43; Sermo Jesum inter Magdalenae; Stabat mater; Ursach des Lebens und des Heils Maria

Dramatic cants: Sanctus Adalbertus Pragensium episcopus, 1764; Corona dignitatis senectus, 1766; Ad sanctam crucem majorem triplicis crucis praepositus, 1767; Divina providentia, 1771

Interludes to Lat. school dramas: Meditatio IV, Gustus, in Drama sensus humani, 1761; Meditatio II, Religio in aulis, in Religio seu Cultae religionis emolumenta, 1763; Meditatio III, Detrimentum vitae, in Religio seu Neglectae religionis detrimenta, 1764; Meditatio I, Turba negotiorum, in Religio seu Conservandae religionis impedimenta, 1766

Comic school dramas: Erat unum cantor bonus (Schola latino musica; Il cantore; Der Schulmeisterius), ed. H. Krupka (Prague, 1970); ed. in Musica rinata, ix (Budapest, 1966), as Der Schulmeister, attrib. Paisiello; Luridi scholares (Kartenspiel), ed. H. Krupka (Prague, 1970)

Spurious: Veni sancte spiritus, D, 4vv, orch, ed. R. Walter (Hilversum, 1973) [by J. Mentzel]

instrumental

Orch: Symphonia seu concertus, D, 1760, ed. in P. Eben and J. Burhauser: Čtení a hra partitur [Score reading and playing] (Prague, 1982), ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser.B, xii (New York, 1984); Sym., D, 1760, ed. in The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. B, xii (New York, 1984); Sym.; Sym. frag.; Va conc., ed. W. Lebermann (Mainz, 1970); Conc., 2 fl; 2 concs., fl; 6 org/hpd concs., 1, F, ed. in MAB, 1st ser., xxvi (1956/R), 2, G, D, ed. in MAB, 1st ser., lxxv (1970/R)

Partitas, wind insts, incl. Intermezzo, ed. in P. Eben and J. Burhauser: Čtení a hra partitur [Score reading and playing] (Prague, 1982)

Preludes, fugues, toccatas, org, incl. 1 prelude, 2 fugues, 1 toccata ed. in MAB, 1st ser., xii (1956/R); 1 fugue, 1 prelude ed. in MVH, xxi (1968/R); others ed. C.F. Pitsch, in Museum für Orgel-Spieler (Prague, 1832–4) and Fugen und Praeludien (Prague, 1832); others ed. in Varhanní skladby starých českých mistrů [Organ compositions of old Czech masters], ed. B. Geist and M. Kampelsheimer (Prague, 1997)

Suites, partitas, hpd, incl. 2 movts ed. in MAB, 1st ser., xiv (1953/R); Partita, G, ed. in Bertramka, xii (1982)

(3) Jan Josef Brixi

(b ?1712; d Mělník, 27 April 1762). Organist and composer. He became organist at St Petr and St Pavel in Mělník and teacher at the municipal school, but in 1738 moved to Manětín, where his son (4) Václav Norbert Brixi was born. From 1748 to his death he lived again in Mělník, where he held the position of choirmaster at the cathedral and raised the standard of its music to the highest level. He left a large collection of music (now in the National Museum of Prague), much of it copied in his own hand, containing works by the most prominent composers of his time. Of his own compositions only a single mass for mixed choir, orchestra and organ is known.

(4) Václav Norbert [Jeroným] Brixi

(b Manětín, 20 Sept 1738; d Planá, 15 April 1803). Organist and composer, son of (3) Jan Josef Brixi. He entered the Cistercian monastery at Plasy near Plzeň in 1758, and took his vows the following year; in 1766 he was ordained a priest under the name Jeroným, with which he signed all his compositions. He became organist and later choirmaster of the monastery church, and from 1781 he was parish priest in Planá. His church music is Neapolitan in style, but fails to rise above the average level of its time.

1. Churches and monasteries.

(5) Viktorin (Ignác) Brixi

(b Plzeň, 26 June 1716; d Poděbrady, 30 March 1803). Organist and composer. He received his basic musical education from his uncle Viktorin Zádolský, who was the parish priest at Skalsko. Later he studied at Čelákovice with the organist Josef Hojer, and completed his studies at the Piarist Gymnasium at Kosmonosy, where he is entered in the register for 1731 with the remark: ‘In musica et literis pari pasu ambulat’. His musical talent was already evident during his time at the Gymnasium. He took part in school plays as an actor and singer, and composed music for several of them. After a short stay in Liberec, he became a schoolmaster in Poděbrady and was later an organist and choirmaster at the church there. According to his autobiographical note written for Dlabač’s Künstler-Lexikon, he was offered a position at the imperial court in Vienna by Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis of Lorraine, who had heard him play in Poděbrady, and received a similar offer from the Prussian court through his half-brother Franz Benda who was at that time in the service of Frederick the Great. In declining the opportunity to leave his native country Brixi was exceptional among his Czech contemporaries, and he remained in Poděbrady until his death.

Brixi’s works are typical of the music composed by Czech cantors and organists for village choirlofts. Like those of (2) František Xaver Brixi, they are rooted in the Neapolitan style, but in comparison they are simpler and less ambitious. His use of folk idioms occurs mainly in his Christmas music. A Missa pastoralis in D is at St Gilet’s Church in Nymburk; his other works include cantatas, offertories, arias, a Latin oratorio Jephta written in 1769 and a piano sonata. (Principal sources, CZ-Bm, Pnm.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

general

ČSHS

DlabacžKL

E. Trolda: ‘Kostelní archiv mělnický’ [Church archives of Mělník], HR, ix (1915–16), 6–10, 75–81, 127–33, 176–80

O. Kamper: Hudební Praha v XVIII. věku [18th-century musical Prague] (Prague, 1936)

G. Černušák and V. Helfert, eds.: Pazdírkův hudební slovník naučný [Pazdírek’s music dictionary], ii/1 (Brno, 1937)

J. Němeček: Nástin české hudby XVIII. století [Outline of 18th-century Czech music] (Prague, 1955), 94–6, 131–8, 145–7

D. Idaszak: Katalog kompozycji czeskich w Polsce [Catalogue of Czech compositions in Poland] (Bydgoszcz, 1963)

V. Novák: ‘Zur Katalogisierung von Werken der Familie Brixi’, Mf, xxii (1969), 335–7

V. Novák and L. Mašlaňová: Musicae navales pragenses [Prague naval music] (Prague, 1993) [summary in Ger.]

V. Novák: ‘Brixiana in Břevnov und Braunau im 18. Jahrhundert’, Tausend Jahre Benediktiner in den Klöstern Břevnov, Braunau und Rohr, ed. J. Hofmann (St Ottilien, 1993), 497–517

V. Novák: ‘Pražský hudební život a svatojánský kult v 18. století’, [Prague musical life and the cult of St John in the 18th century] Svatojánský sborník [St John of Nepomuk memorial volume] (Prague, 1994), 27–41

V. Novák: Tematický katalog skladeb F.X. Brixiho, Šimona Brixiho, Viktorina Brixiho, Jeronyma Brixiho (MS, author’s private collection)

(1) šimon brixi

E. Trolda: ‘Šimon Brixy’, Cyril, lxi (1935), 61–3

V. Bělský: Introduction to MAB, 2nd ser., ii (Prague, 1967)

V. Novák: ‘Šimon a František Brixi v souvislosti s hudebním životem pražských křižovníků s červeným srdcem’ [Šimon and František Brixi in connection with the musical life of the Prague canons of the Knights of the Red Heart], Zprávy Bertramky (1967), 68–88

E. Hradecký: ‘Nationalsprache in lateinischen Schulspiel aus der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Music and Word: Brno IV 1969, 77–9

V. Novák: ‘Dílo Šimona Brixiho v souvislosti s pražským hudebním životem první poloviny 18. století’ [The work of Šimon Brixi in connection with the Prague musical life of the first half of the 18th century], HV, xxxii (1995), 379–88

(2) františek xaver brixi

O. Kamper: Frantisek X. Brixi (Prague, 1926)

R. Perlík: ‘F.X. Brixi’, Cyril, lviii (1932), 10–14

J. Racek: Introduction to MAB, 1st ser., xxvi (Prague, 1955)

J. Pohanka: Dějiny české hudby v příkladech [History of Czech music in examples] (Prague, 1958)

R. Münster: ‘František Xaver Brixi v Bavorsku’ [Brixi in Bavaria], HV, ii (1965), 19–22

V. Straka: Introduction to MAB, 1st ser., lxxv (Prague, 1970)

V. Novák: Introduction to MAB, 2nd ser., vi (1971)

V. Novák: ‘Slavnostní kantáta F.X. Brixiho, věnovaná B. Grundmannovi’, HV, xx (1983), 60–68

V. Novák: ‘Tématický katalog brixian Otakara Kampera’, HV, xxx (1993), 54–9

(5) viktorin brixi

Autobiografie Viktorina Brixiho (MS, CZ-Ps)

J. Hellich: ‘Vynikající hudebníci 18. věku v Poděbradech’ [Prominent 18th-century musicians in Poděbrady], Věstník Poděbradska, vii (1904), 4, 17–21

Brixides, Jan

(b Brno, c1712; d Brno, ?1772). Czech organist and composer. As a boy he sang in St Jakub's church in Brno (1720–26) and learnt to play the organ from Jakub Wachter (d 1741). He became organist at the Benedictine monastery at Rajhrad, near Brno (1726–35), and at the Augustinian church of St Tomáš in Brno (from 1735 to his death), where he was noted for his improvisation at the keyboard. In 1742 he married Terezie Schulzová. Brixides had a reputation as an outstanding composer, though he was 29 when he began to compose. His works, all sacred, were written for his own choir; stylistically they are indebted to Fux and Caldara, with the Baroque effects of virtuoso clarino parts and loud timpani, but with simplified counterpoint. His earliest extant work is Veni Sancte Spiritus (1755), written for the first Mass celebrated by Anselm Hackenwälder, the choirmaster at St Tomáš. Brixides's works, which survive in manuscript at the Moravian Regional Museum, Brno, include six masses, one requiem in E dated 1772 (with a note that it was composed shortly before his death for his own funeral), four settings of Veni Sancte Spiritus and 20 smaller sacred works using liturgical and non-liturgical Latin texts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

B. Štědroň: ‘Mozartovi vrstevníci v Brně’ [Mozart’s contemporaries in Brno], Bertramka, ii/5–6 (1950), 2–3

JIŘÍ SEHNAL

Brixiensis, Giovanni Battista.

See Fachetti, Giovanni Battista.

Brixiensis, Prepositus.

See Prepositus Brixiensis.

Brizeño, Luis de.

See Briçeño, Luis de.

Brkanović, Ivan

(b Škaljari, Boka Kotorska, 27 Dec 1906; d Zagreb, 20 Feb 1987). Croatian composer. He studied at the Zagreb Academy with Fran Lhotka and Blagoje Bersa (composition), graduating in 1935, and then at the Schola Cantorum in Paris with J. Léfebre. Between 1935 and 1951 he taught in Zagreb schools. He was made music adviser to the Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb, in 1951 and director of the Zagreb PO in 1954. He was president of the composers’ unions of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1950–51) and of Croatia (1953–5), and a visiting professor at Sarajevo Music Academy (1957–62). He was also a prolific writer on music (see Majer-Bobetko, and Supičić, 1989), particularly in the period 1932–41.

Brkanović was one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called national style in Croatian music. Using traditional musical means, he blended elements of Croatian folk music with his own strong artistic ideas, and in an attempt to evoke folk art in all its aspects, he drew on traditional rites, particularly on their most primitive features. His musical style is characterized by innovative formal and harmonic procedures, and dense polyphonic textures. Brkanović’s feeling for dramatic tension and powerful emotions made him an ideal operatic composer. His first opera, Ekvinocij (‘Equinox’), is a realistic musical drama, while the opera-oratorio Škrinja svetog Šimuna (‘St Simon's Shrine’), inspired by scenes from a 14th-century shrine in Zadar, is strongly archaic. Brkanović’s best-known work is the Triptihon (‘Triptych’) of 1936, a requiem setting of epic folk poetry. This intensely emotional work contrasts restrained choral settings, striking for their Slavonic melodic inflections, with passages of blazing passion and intensity, reinforced by a sharp-edged orchestration. The five symphonies are dramatically conceived; outstanding among them is the traditionally-planned, tragic Second Symphony. Its freely tonal, and sometimes harsh, harmonic structure shows Brkanović’s great contrapuntal skill with simple melodic lines, often reminiscent of folksong. The accumulation of motifs and the magnificent handling of the brass are equally noteworthy. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Brkanović has chosen not to investigate new techniques, but has aimed to draw the best from traditional means.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Ekvinocij [Equinox] (op, 3, T. Prpić, after I. Vojnović), 1945, rev. 1950; Škrinja svetog Šimuna [St Simon's Shrine] (Zlato Zadra) (op, 3, D. Robić), 1954, rev. 1955; Heloti (ballet-orat, Pino and Pina Mlakar, after Robić), 1960, rev. 1963; Hod po mukah Ambroza Matije Gupca, zvanog Beg [The Passion of Ambroz Matija Gubec, called Beg] (staged orat, Robić), 1972, rev. 1973; Fedra (musical tragedy, 2, T. Prpić, after J. Racine), 1975

vocal

Konavosko pirovanje [Konavli Wedding], chorus, 1933; Triptihon [Triptych], S, T, chorus, orch, 1936; Krijes planine [Mountain Fire], chorus, 1942; 5 Songs, T, chbr orch, 1949; Dalmatinski diptih [Dalmatian Diptych] (M. Marulić], Mez, T, chorus, orch, 1953; Žrtvene pjesme [Sacrificial Song], chorus, pf, wind, 1958; Bosanska sjećanja [Bosnian Reminiscences] (cant.), Bar, chorus, orch, 1959; Zelena zmija ljubavi [Green Serpent of Love] (cant.), S, Bar, chorus, 1965

instrumental

Orch: Pričalica, chbr orch, 1933; Sym. no.1, 1935; Živo srce u mrtvom gradu, 1940; Sym. no.2, 1946; Sym. no.3, 1947; Kolo iz Dolca, 1948; Zurlaši uoči praznika, 1948; Sym. no.4, 1948; Sym. no.5 ‘Ples Junaka’, 1949; Zemljo Hrvatska [Our Croatian Land], sym. poem, 1951; Concertino, str, 1955 [from Str Qt no.1]; Sarajevo, suite, 1957; Zagrebačka, suite, 1985

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1933; Theme and Variations, pf, 1937; Igra i pjesma [Songs and Dances], vn, pf, 1940; Str Qt no.3, 1983; Wind Qnt, 1984

Principal publishers: Ars Croatica, Društvo hrvatske kompozitora, Muzička naklada (Zagreb)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Kirigin: ‘Ekvinocij I. Brkanovića’, Muzička revija (1950), 270–83

K. Kovačević: ‘Ivan Brkanović’, Hrvatski kompozitori i njihova djela (Zagreb, 1960), 76–90

K. Kovačević: The History of Croatian Music of the Twentieth Century (Zagreb, 1967)

I. Supičić: ‘Estetski pogledi u novijoj hrvatskoj muzici: pregled temeljnih gledanja četrnaestorice kompozitora’ [Aesthetic views in contemporary Croatian music: a survey of the basic concepts of 14 composers], Arti musices: musikološki zbornik, i (1969), 23–61

T. Reich: Susreti sa suvremenim kompozitorima Jugoslavije [Meetings of contemporary composers of Yugoslavia] (Zagreb, 1972), 34–9

J. Andreis: Music in Croatia (Zagreb, 1974, 2/1982)

A. Koci and others: Jugoslovanska glasbena dela [Musical works of Yugoslavia] (Ljubljana, 1980), 60–67

S. Majer-Bobetko: ‘Publicistička djelatnost Ivana Brkanovića’ [The journalistic activity of Ivan Brkanović], Arti musices: musikološki zbornik, xix/1 (1988), 3–19

I. Supičić, ed.: Ivan Brkanović 1906–1987: Spomenica [Memorial] (Zagreb, 1989) [pubn of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences with list of works and bibliography]

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Brnčić (Isaza), Gabriel

(b Santiago, 16 Feb 1942). Chilean composer, active in Spain. He received his early musical training at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Santiago. After studying engineering and chemistry (1961–4), he pursued the Título Superior de Licenciado in composition at the Facultad de Ciencias y Artes Musicales of the Universidad de Chile, where his teachers included Becerra-Schmidt. His first work, Oda a la energía for orchestra, was given its première in 1963. In 1965 a stipend from the Buenos Aires Instituto Di Tella enabled him to study in Argentina, where he continued his training at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) with Ginastera, Gandini, Sessions, Maurice La Roy, Xenakis, Francisco Kröpfl (in 1966) and Nono (in 1967). From 1967 to 1970 he lectured at the Instituto Di Tella, where, in collaboration with Fernando von Reichenbach, he tested the Convertidor Gráfico-Analógico (CGA), a conversion system similar to the UPIC prototype developed by Xenakis in France.

From 1971 to 1974 Brnčić directed the electronic studio of the Centro de Investigaciones en Comunicación Masiva, Arte y Tecnología (CICMAT) in Buenos Aires. When the political situation in Argentina caused him to leave the country in 1974, he moved with his family to Spain, where he settled in Barcelona. Active as a lecturer at the recently founded electro-acoustic studio of the Fundación Phonos from 1975, he served as its director from 1983 to 1992. During the 1980s and 90s his reputation as an expert in electro-acoustics brought him a series of invitations to lecture throughout Spain. In 1994 he was appointed to a post at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. His honours include first prize at the Concurso Casa de las Américas of Cuba (1966), first prize at the Bourges International Competition for Electro-Acoustic Music (1984; for Chile fértil provincia …, 1975–83), the Premio Ciudad de Barcelona (1986; for the Viola Concerto, 1967) and election to the Academia Chilena de Bellas Artes del Instituto de Chile (1999). He has completed commissions from SWF Baden-Baden, Radio Nacional de España, the Associació Catalana de Compositors, the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale of Bourges and the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea, among others.

Brnčić's experiences at the Instituto Di Tella inspired him to investigate new musical systems, combining techniques of sound generation and manipulation with modern compositional theories. His research into musical structure, form, instrumentation and notation are reflected in the extensive series of works Quodlibet (1966–88), pieces that typify an analogue depiction of music. Brnčić is also recognized for his integration of artificial sounds with traditional orchestral timbres. Almost half of his catalogue of works are scores in which natural musical instruments are combined with electro-acoustic elements. Purely instrumental music also occupies a prominent place in his output. His solo instrumental works take an experimental approach to the technical possibilities of various instruments. His unpublished Catálogo de sonidos no convencionales en el oboe y el corno inglés is the outcome of systematic study of the sounds of the oboe and the english horn, instruments which he plays himself.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Yasí-Yateré (ballet), 1963, Santiago, 1964; Génesis (ballet), Santiago, 1964; Máquinas (ballet), Santiago, 1964; Grisalla (ballet), 1982, Sant Just Desvern, 1982; Opera Rotas, 1985, Barcelona, 1993; Sirocco (espectáculo/danza), Valladolid, 1988; incid music

Orch: Oda a la energía, 1963; Quodlibet III, 1966; Va Conc., 1967; Quodlibet XI, wind, 1968 [version 1]; Volveremos a las montañas, 1968; Quodlibet IX, pf, orch, 1969; Sinfonía, 1969; Fl Conc., SATB, fl, orch, 1970; Vc Conc., SATB, vc, orch, 1976; Florida invierno, 1985; Diaphonia, 1987; Sinfonía concertante, 1988; Vn Conc., 1993; Polifonía de la lluvia, 1995

Vocal: Quodlibet XIX, 6vv, SATB, 1970 [version 1]; Cançó del fruiter, chorus, 1978; Tonada larga a Recabarren (A. Silva), TBarB, str, pf, 1978; A la mayor gloria de El Salvador, 1v, 4 fl, vn/mar/hp, synth, 1980; Triunfo por las madres de Plaza de Mayo, Mez, gui, tape, 1983; Argentina, 5vv, kbd, 1984; Momotombo (R. Dario), TBarB, 1985; Despedida (F. García Lorca), Mez, fl, b cl, vib, gui, vc, db, 1998; Vuelta de paseo (García Lorca), S, hp, tape, 1998; Amico ai vinto (L. Tasso), A, 2 va, elec, 1999; In te sperant Domine, chorus; see also orch [Fl Conc., 1970; Vc Conc., 1976]

Chbr: Octet, 2 tpt, 2 hn, 2 trbn, 2 tuba, 1966; Quodlibet I, 1966–88 [5 versions]; Str Sextet, 1967; Oboes, 5 ob, 3 wind, 3 perc, 3 str, 1969 [study for Diaphonia]; Quodlibet XIII a Enrique Belloc, str qt, 1969 [version 2]; Ritmos, vib, 3 perc, 1969; Sueño de una noche de verano, hn, vn, va, vc, db, 1969; Pf Qt ‘a Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt’, 1970; Quinteto vienés a Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, vn, va, vc, db/bn/sax/b cl, pf, 1970; Sinfonía, 12 va, 1971; Viaje al invierno, 2 fl, 1974; Cueca para la exaltación de Jorge Peña Hen, 2 gui, 1976; Sagrada familia, 14 insts, 1978; Sextet, tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, 2 gui, 1980; Str Qt, 1980; Zelestial, 8 fl, 1980; Historia de dos ciudades, str qt, 4 perc, 1981; Wind Qnt ‘John Lennon en Andalucía’, 1981; Pf Trio ‘a la memoria de Alberto Ginastera’, 1983, rev. 1984; Concierto-Espacio, 12 wind, 1985; Duo, vn, vc, 1985; Duo, vc, gui, 1985; 3 estilos, vc, pf, 1985; Duo, va, vc, 1986; Qnt, 5 va/(vn, 3 va, vc), 1987; Música de cámara II, fl, cl, bn, va, gui, 1988; Música de cámara III, 2 fl, b hn, gui, db, 1988; Str Qt, 1988; Scherzo (a Cirilo Vila), vn, vc, trbn, pf, 1997

Solo inst: Sonata, vn, 1962; Passacaglia, org, 1965; Quodlibet II, synth, 1966 [version 1]; Quodlibet V, 1967–88 [5 versions]; Cubana, gui, 1982; Secuencia, gui, 1984; Melodías, a sax, 1987; Solo, hp, 1987; 7 Concerts for different sax, 1990–96; Vn Study, 1990; Partita, ob, 1991; Vc-Concert nos.1–3, 1992–4; A Joan Miró (Va-Concert), 1993; Retrato, pf, 1995; 3 piezas, va, 1996; Variaciones, org, tape ad lib, 1996

El-ac: Dialexsis, 9 perc, pf, cel, tape, 1966; Acuérdate, ha muerto …, inst, tape, 1967 [2 versions]; Quodlibet IV, accdn, tape, 1968 [version 1]; Quodlibet VIII, inst, tape, 1968 [3 versions]; Volveremos a las montañas, tape, 1968 [arr. fl, cl, pf, vib, tape, 1968]; Música de 1973, va, prep pf, synth, tape, 1973; Chile fértil provincia …, va, db, perc, tape, 1975–83; Quodlibet IV, pf, tape, 1976 [version 2]; Aria y pasacalle, fl, cl, gui, db, tape, 1980; Memorias, vn, perc, tape, 1980; Música de las apariencias, vn, tape, 1980; Cielo, va, tape, 1981; Nuestra América, perc, tape, 1981; Las afinidades electivas, 2 PolyMoog synth, 1982; Polifonía de Barcelona, fl, ob, cl, hn, pf, va, vc, elecs, 1983; Variaciones sobre sonatas e interludios, fl/cl, va, gui, synth, tape, 1984; Concierto-gótico, tape, 1985 [arr. va and/or vc, tape, 1985]; Clarinen tres, fl/cl/va/vc, tape, 1986; Des être, 2 va, synth/cptr, 1986; 3 estilos, gui, elecs, 1986; Ese mar, hn/trbn, tape, 1987; Historia de dos ciudades, radiophonic music, 1988; Passacaglia, 2 synth, 1988; Sextet, va, tape, 1988; Dulcíán-Concert, va, bn, tape, 1989; Kientzy-Concert, t sax, tape, 1989; Va-Concert, va, tape, 1992; ‘Que no desorganitza cap murmuri’ a Joan Brossa, rec, tape, 1994–5; 2 esbozos para antiguos instrumentos electrónicos, 1995; Constanza, 4 rec, tape, 1996; Meng, fl, b hn, vc, 1997; La casa del viento, fl/a fl, cl/b cl, va, vc, tape, 1998; Quodlibet VII, perc, tape, 1998 [version 2]; Coréutica, va, tape, 1999; more than 20 pieces for tape

Principal publishers: Catalana, Clivis, Boileau, Boosey & Hawkes, H. Lemoine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.J. Ordinas: ‘IX encontre de compositors a Mallorca’, Revista musical Catalana, no.51 (1989), 11 only

A. Medina: ‘Presencia de los músicos de América en la nueva música española’, Cuadernos de música Iberoamericana, i (1996), 223–4

G. Brnčić: Guía profesional de laboratorios de música electroacústica (Madrid, 1998) [incl. A. Lewin-Richter: ‘La música electroacústica en España’, 7–14]

CHRISTIANE HEINE

Brno

(Ger. Brünn).

Second largest city in the Czech Republic and the cultural centre of Moravia. From the 13th century onwards the original Slavonic inhabitants were augmented by German colonists and by a large number of Romance/Norman and Jewish immigrants. A systematic Germanization of Brno took place, especially after the Battle of the White Mountain (1620), so that by the end of the 19th century under half the inhabitants claimed Czech nationality. A reversal in the relative proportion of Czechs and Germans took place after 1919, but until 1945 there was still a sizeable German minority in Brno. As a result of this ethnic dichotomy, from the 18th to the 20th centuries the city's cultural life developed along parallel lines, Czech and German.

2. Civic and concert music.

3. Opera and ballet.

4. Education and musicology.

ALENA NĚMCOVÁ

1. Churches and monasteries.

Medieval musical relics preserved in the city include 13th-century neumatic missals, 14th-century antiphoners belonging to Queen Eliška Rejčka, and 14th- and 15th-century liturgical volumes from the church of St Jakub. In the 13th century schools were founded at the churches of St Petr and St Jakub; at the time of the Reformation (16th century and early 17th) Protestant hymn-singing was also taught at private schools. The large Jewish community preserved Hebrew chanting, and this was used to give a festive welcome to King John of Luxembourg during his entry into the city in 1311.

One noted choirmaster active at St Petr was Matěj František Altmann (late 17th century to 1718), who later moved to St Jakub, where he compiled a collection of Italian Baroque music and kept in touch with Roman and Viennese composers. A number of works by the St Petr choirmaster Gotthard Pokorný (1733–1805), revealing the influence of Viennese and Italian Classicism, have also survived. The choirmaster Josef Dvořák (1807–69) also held several posts in the city, from chorister at the Augustinian monastery in old Brno to solo bass at the municipal theatre and director of German choral societies. Under his direction the organist Josef Neruda (1807–75), founder of a well-known musical family, worked with the choir of St Petr from 1832 to 1845. In 1714 Jakub Wachter (d 1741) became the first of a long line of remarkable organists active at St Jakub; his Requiem, performed at his own funeral, displays elements of the mature Viennese Baroque style. From 1762 the musical tradition of St Jakub was fostered by the choirmaster Peregrino Gravani (1732–1815), an ardent admirer of Haydn and Mozart, who left behind a large number of works composed in the Viennese Classical style and an extensive thematic catalogue.

The archives of the Brno monasteries contain evidence of an intensive cultivation of music, both within the liturgy and in the monks' refectories and at public academies, and also allude to the choristers' participation in opera performances. The Premonstratensians at Brno-Zábrdovice were visited by Jacobus Gallus around 1579. The library of the Augustinians includes 16th- and 17th-century publications by masters of the Dutch, Roman and Venetian schools, as well as a collection of manuscripts including works by native organists and members of the Augustinian order, such as Jeronym Haura (1704–50), composer of the Czech pastoral song Hej, chval každý duch, Jan Brixides (c1712–c1772) and Pavel Křížkovský (1820–85). The collection also contains a number of symphonic, chamber and dramatic works, among them a musical play on a Czech text, Opera bohemica de camino (c1772), ascribed to the composer Karel Loos.

The Augustinian foundation, established in 1653, had a far-reaching effect on the training of young musicians right up to the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, when the young Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) arrived at the choir school, the Augustinian monastery was the centre of intellectual life in the city and its systematic musical training provided the basis for Brno's musical education. The atmosphere of national revival prompted the priest František Sušil to compile and publish his collection Moravské národní písně (‘Moravian Folksongs’, 1835), which during the course of further editions grew into a monumental work (comprising 2361 texts and 2091 melodies), which provided the basis and the model for later studies of folk music. It was also a source of inspiration for many Czech composers, including Křížkovský, Dvořák, Janáček, Novák and Martinů.

2. Civic and concert music.

Secular music was cultivated in medieval Brno at the court of the margrave. The brother of the Emperor Charles IV, Jan Jindřich (Margrave of Moravia 1349–75), had at his court two pipers; his successor Jošt (margrave 1375–1411) appears to have added two trumpeters to these. In the following century information about secular music is restricted to references to the participation of trumpeters and drummers in ceremonial welcomes given to important personages. In 1674 the municipal council commissioned Jan Jiří Janczi to retain a group of tower musicians; alongside these there existed in 18th-century Brno the trumpeters of the Regional Estates, whose function was to lend brilliance to meetings of the regional assembly and other administrative bodies. The municipal trumpeters took part on 30 December 1767 in a performance given by the 11-year-old Mozart and his sister in the hall of the Brno Reduta (Redoutensaale).

Concerts were given in the Reduta as early as the 1730s, at a time when music could also be heard in the town residences of the music-loving nobility. The orientation of the Moravian nobility towards Vienna had a decisive effect on musical taste. During the first half of the 18th century, on the recommendation of Cardinal Wolfgang Hannibal Schrattenbach of Olomouc, choral works by composers of the Venetian and Neapolitan schools (Caldara, Porpora, Leo) were performed in Brno, as well as oratorios by the cardinal's court composer Václav Matyáš Gurecký (in service from 1731 to 1736).

The Philharmonische Gesellschaft, founded in 1808, took over the organization of concerts, and the age of the virtuoso brought Hummel, Spohr and Nikolaus Kraft to Brno. In the 1840s performances by Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Clara Schumann and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst attracted attention; Ernst returned to his native city for several appearances. In 1848 the Male Choral Society was founded, whose mixed Czech and German repertory was directed alternately by Czech and German conductors (Křížkovský and Gottfried Rieger). In the 1860s two competing organizations were founded almost simultaneously, the Czech Beseda Brněnská (Brno Club) (1861) and the German Brünner Musikverein (1862), which later found homes in two newly built cultural and educational centres: the Czechs in the Besední Dům (meeting house, 1872) and the Germans in the Deutsches Haus (1891). The latter provided a base for other musical institutions: the Brünner Kammermusikverein (founded in 1886) and the ambitious Brünner Philharmoniker, the first Brno symphony orchestra, founded in 1902 on the model of the Vienna PO. The rich German concert societies continued to invite famous virtuosos (Henri Marteau, Anton Schnabel, Eugen d'Albert) and conductors; in 1906 Mahler conducted his First Symphony in the city, and in 1911 Richard Strauss conducted his Don Juan. During the second half of the 19th century an important contribution was made by the pianist-composer Agnes Tyrrell (1846–83), whose Zwölf grosse Studien, op.48 received a favourable verdict from Liszt.

Music in the Besední Dům was principally provided by the Philharmonic Society of the Brno Beseda (originally known simply as the Brno Beseda), founded in 1861, whose first choirmaster was Křížkovský. The Beseda's artistic stature was enhanced after 1876, when Janáček became its musical director, a function he performed until 1888. Janáček expanded the original male-voice choir into a mixed choir and raised the artistic level of the Beseda's programmes, in which he took part as both choirmaster and pianist. Other noted choirmasters of the Brno Beseda included Rudolf Reissig (1874–1939) and Jaroslav Kvapil (1892–1958).

Smetana gave a piano recital in Brno under the auspices of the Brno Beseda (1873), and Dvořák appeared several times as conductor of his own works. As the Brno Czech community did not have its own symphony orchestra, the Czech PO was invited to give concerts, and the Czech Quartet and other chamber ensembles and soloists (e.g. Jan Kubelík and František Ondříček) often took part in chamber concerts. The choirs of D.A. Slavjanský and N. Slavjanská also gave performances in Brno. Janáček's efforts to create a permanent Czech orchestra came to fruition only in 1940, when the Brno RSO was set up; in 1956 it merged with the Brno Regional SO to form the Brno State PO, whose first chief conductor was Janáček's pupil Břetislav Bakala. Regular symphony concerts had, however, already been initiated by František Neumann with the opera orchestra of the Czech Theatre. Between the wars the Moravian Quartet (founded in 1923), the Moravian Wind Quintet (1927), the Vachův Sbor Moravských Učitelek (Moravian Women Teachers' Choir) conducted by Ferdinand Vach (formally constituted 1917) and the Academic Male-Voice Choir Moravan (1931) all flourished. After World War II further chamber ensembles were formed, notably the Janáček Quartet (1947), as well as three chamber orchestras and several high-class choruses. The political changes of 1989 brought an end to many of these ensembles but brought too the triumphal return of Rudolf Firkušný, who had begun his studies in Brno with Janáček.

3. Opera and ballet.

In the 1730s companies run by various Italian impresarios (Angelo and Pietro Mingotti, Filippo Neri del Fantasia, Francesco Ferrari) performed Italian opera (Galuppi, Bambini, Porpora, Lucchini, Orlandini) in the Reduta. In the second half of the 18th century the Italians alternated with German companies performing Gluck, Mozart, Dittersdorf and Wenzel Müller. The first operatic performance in Czech was of Jan Tuček's Zamilovaný ponocný (The Lovelorn Nightwatchman) by a German touring company in 1767. In 1783 a new German opera by the local composer Ignaz Holzbauer, Günther von Schwarzburg, scored a great success, and three years later Josef II granted the city a theatrical privilege.

The initially bilingual municipal theatre company in 1840 staged Škroup's Dráteník (‘The Tinker’) alongside a German Hamlet by the Brno native and later successful operatic impresario Max Maretzek, and in 1841 put on Žižkův dub (‘Žižka's Oak’) by another local composer, František Bedřich Kott. From the 1860s onwards the company gradually became biassed in favour of German productions, and after the 1870 fire in the Reduta performed exclusively in German, at first in the hastily constructed Interimstheater and from 1882 onwards in the Stadttheater later known as the Divadlo na Hradbách (Theatre on the Ramparts). The repertory of this theatre was grounded in the standard Classical and Romantic repertory, with a definite emphasis on German opera and especially the operas of Wagner. Later, audiences at the German opera were introduced to the contemporary works of Strauss, the Brno-born Korngold and others. Singers from the Viennese Hofoper often made guest appearances, among them another Brno native, Maria Jeritza, and her compatriot Leo Slezak.

Opera in Czech for a while found refuge in the Besední Dům (1874–81). From 1884 Czech performances were given in a makeshift converted dance hall; against all expectations, these continued for 35 years. In 1894 Janáček's The Beginning of a Romance was performed here, followed on 21 January 1904 by the world première of Jenůfa, and several Czech artists made their débuts in the theatre, including the tenor Karel Burian and the conductor Karel Kovařovic.

Czech opera in Brno enjoyed a real flowering after 1919, when the company moved into the Stadttheater, thereafter known as the Národní Divadlo (National Theatre), and František Neumann (1874–1929) took charge. He created and maintained an artistically superior ensemble, and with the world premières of Kát'a Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), Šárka (1925) and The Makropulos Affair (1926) laid the foundations for a Janáček tradition that was to be continued by Bakala (who led the première of From the House of the Dead in 1930), Milan Sachs (1884–1968) and František Jílek (1913–93). Other works introduced here included a whole series of operas and ballets by Martinů, as well as Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1938) and Rafael Kubelík's opera Veronika (1947). In 1965 the opera company acquired a new building known as the Janáček Theatre.

(5) Francis Fane Broderip

4. Education and musicology.

Brno is home to a conservatory which grew out of Janáček's organ school in 1919, the Janáček Academy of Musical Arts (JAMU, founded in 1947), and the institute of musicology at the philosophical faculty of Masaryk University. Extensive archives, including Janáček's manuscripts, are preserved by the music history division of the Moravian regional museum. Valuable folk music collections are compiled by the Brno-based Institute of Ethnographical and Folklore Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Every year Brno hosts an autumn music festival (latterly known as the Moravian Autumn) in connection with the musicological conferences that have taken place since 1966. The periodical Opus musicum (founded in 1969) is published in Brno. The Leoš Janáček Foundation was set up in 1991 to promote the works of Janáček.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SČHK [incl. further bibliography]

A. Rille: Aus dem Bühnenleben Deutsch-Oesterreichs: die Geschichte des Brünner Stadttheaters, 1734–1884 (Brno, 1885)

G. Bondi: Zehn Jahre Brünner Philharmoniker 1902–1912 (Brno, 1912)

G. Bondi: Geschichte des Brünner deutschen Theaters 1600–1925 (Brno, 1929)

K. Tauš: K padesátiletému jubileu českého divadla v Brně, 1884–1934 [On the fiftieth anniversary of the Czech Theatre in Brno] (Brno, 1934)

B. Štědroň: ‘Hudební sbírka augustinianů na Starém Brně’ [The musical collection of the Augustinians in Old Brno], Věstník České akademie věd a umění, lii (1943), 1–29

L. Kundera: Janáček a Klub přátel umění [Janáček and the Club of the Friends of Art] (Olomouc, 1948)

L. Kundera: Janáčkova varhanická škola [Janáček's organ school] (Olomouc, 1948)

B. Štědroň: ‘Základy fundační kapely v Brně prěd Křížkovským’ [The beginnings of the monastery chapel in Brno before Křížkovský], Slezský sborník, xlix (1951), 155–83

B. Štědroň: ‘Zemští trubači a tympanisté’ [Regional trumpeters and drummers], Vlastivědný věstník moravský, vii (1952), 122–34, 167–92

A. Kolář, ed.: Sto let Filharmonického sboru Besedy brněnské [100 years of the Philharmonic Choir of the Brno Beseda] (Brno, 1960)

A. Němcová and S. Přibáňová: ‘Příspěvek k dějinám opery Národního divadla v Brně 1884–1919’ [The history of opera at the National Theatre in Brno] ČMm, xlviii (1963), 261–82 [incl. bibliography and Ger. summary]

V. Telec and Z. Zouhar, eds.: Vachův sbor moravských učitelek [The Moravian Women Teachers' Choir] (Brno, 1963)

V. Jestřab, ed.: Dvacet let Janáčkovy akademie múzických umění [20 years of the Janáček Academy of Musical Arts] (Brno, 1967)

J. Racek: ‘Vladimír Helfert and the Brno School of Musicology’, SPFFBU, H4 (1969), 29–47

C. Hálová-Jahodová: ‘Reduta’, OM, ii (1970), 302–8

J. Sehnal: ‘Die Bläserharmonie des Augustinersklosters in Altbrünn’, SPFFBU, H8 (1973), 126–43

J. Trojan: ‘Das Brünner Konzertleben in der Zeit der Nationalen Wiedergeburt’, SPFFBU, H8 (1973), 161–91

F. Vítová: ‘Der Widerhall des Brünner tschechischen Kulturlebens in der Zeitschrift “Květy” (1834–47)’, SPFFBU, H8 (1973), 43–9

R. Hurt: ‘Hudba u starobrněnských cisterciaček’ [Music at the Cistercian convent in Old Brno], OM, vi (1974), 248–51

J. and V. Telec and E. Dufková: Soupis repertoáru českého divadla v Brně 1884–1974 [List of the repertory of the Czech theatre in Brno] (Brno, 1974)

P. Vít, ed.: Státní filharmonie Brno 1956–1976 [The Brno State Philharmonic] (Brno, 1977)

T. Straková: ‘Hudební vývoj Brna a jeho postavení ve strědní Evropě’ [The musical development of Brno and its standing in central Europe], Brno mezi městy střední Evropy: Brno 1979 [Brno among the cities of central Europe], ed. F. Zřídkaveselý and V. Peša (Brno, 1983), 149

E. Dufková, ed.: Putování múzy Thálie: sto let stálého českého divadla v Brně [Pilgrimages of the muse Thalia: 100 years of a permanent Czech theatre in Brno] (Brno, 1984)

I. Petrželka and J. Bártová, eds.: Konzervatoř Brno: sborník k sedmdesátému výročí trvání první moravské odborné umělecké školy [The Brno Conservatory: in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the first specialist arts school in Moravia] (Brno, 1989)

R. Wurmová: Repertoár brněnského divadla v letech 1777–1848 [The repertory of the Brno theatre] (Brno, 1990)

J. Trojan: ‘Hudební Brno za doby Mozartovy’ [Musical Brno in Mozart's time], OM, xxiii (1991), 2–12

V. Kyas: ‘Slavná hudební rodina Nerudů: k hudební historii Brna v 19. století’ [The famous musical family, the Nerudas: the musical history of Brno in the 19th century], OM, xxv (1993), 229–41

R. Jeřábek: ‘Národopis v Brně a národopis Brna’ [Ethnography in Brno and the ethnography of Brno], Brno, město uprostřed Evropy: Brno 1993 (Brno, 1994)

V. Kyas: Slavné osobnosti koncertního života Brna v letech 1859–1914 [Famous personalities of concert life in Brno] (Brno, 1995)

J. Procházková: ‘Leoš Janáček a Česká národní kapela v Brně’ [Leoš Janáček and the Czech national band in Brno], OM, xxvii (1995), 91–6

M. Štědroň, L. Frimlová and Z. Geist, eds.: Besední dům (Brno, 1995)

J. Trojan: ‘Opera v Brně v první polovině 19. století’ [Opera in Brno in the first half of the 19th century], OM, xxvii (1995), 128–39, 183–7 [incl. bibliography]

Broadcast Music Inc [BMI].

See Copyright, §V, 14(ii).

Broadstock, Brenton (Thomas)

(b Melbourne, 12 Dec 1952). Australian composer. Raised in a Salvation Army family where he played band instruments, he took an arts course at Monash University before studying composition with Donald Freund at Memphis State University and with Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney. In 1982 he began teaching at the University of Melbourne, becoming head of composition in 1990. His Tuba Concerto (1985) won the 1987 Hambacher Preis, and after his 1988 residency with the Melbourne SO he steadily emerged as one of Australia's most recorded and performed composers. A gently expressive voice, richly coloured in his orchestral works with a sure ear for brass and percussion sonority, his music stems from themes of personal anguish (Symphony no.1 ‘Towards the Shining Light’), concern with the environment (Deserts Bloom … Lakes Die), or vivid literary images (Symphony no.5 ‘Born from Good Angel’s Tears’); in recent years his style has become increasingly lyrical.

WORKS

Stage: Fahrenheit 451 (chbr op, 1, Broadstock after R. Bradbury), 5vv, elec, 1990, 22 Oct 1992, Sydney, Belvoir Street Theatre

Orch: Festive Overture, 1981; The Mountain, small orch, 1984; Tuba Conc., 1985; Battlements, 1986; Pf Conc., 1987; Sym. no.1 ‘Towards the Shining Light’, 1988; Sym. no.2 ‘Stars in a Dark Night’, 1989; Sym. no.3 ‘Voices from the Fire’, 1991; In a Brilliant Blaze, small orch, 1993; Sym. no.5 ‘Born from Good Angel’s Tears’, 1995; Sax Concertino, sax, wind ens, 1995; Dancing on a Volcano, 1996; Catch the Joy, ov., 1998

Brass band: Aurora Australis, trbn ens; St Aelred, rhapsody, 1981; Click: Festival March, 1982; Fantasia, 1984; Fanfare and Processional, 1985; Festival Prelude, 1986; My Shepherd, 1988; Meditation on Rapture, 1990; Rutherford Variations, 1990; Songs of the Pilgrim, 1991

Vocal: Eheu fugaces, S, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1981; Valiant, 1994; Bright Tracks, song cycle, S, vn, va, vc, 1994; Vía Crucís, SATB, 1994–7

Chbr: Str Qt no.2, 1981; Aureole 1, fl, pf, 1992; Aureole, 2, b cl, 1983; Aureole 3, ob, pf, 1984; Beast from Air, trbn, perc, 1985; And No Birds Sing, fl, cl, vn, pf, perc, 1987; In Chains, alto fl, gui, 1990; Str Qt no.4, 1990; Deserts Bloom … Lakes Die, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn, db, 1990; All that is Solid …, fl, b cl, pf, 1992; Nearer and Farther, hn, pf, 1992; Pennscapes, cl, va, vc, pf, 1994; Sym. no.4 ‘Celebration’, fl, cl, pf, str qt, 1995; The Clear Flame Within, vc, pf, 1995; Dancing on a Volcano, str qt, 1996; At the Going Down of the Sun, tpt, org, 1996; Catch the Joy, tpt, org, 1998; I Touched Your Glistening Tears, (s sax/ob, pf)/pf trio, 1998

Pf: Aureole 4, 1984; In the Silence of Night, 1989; Giants in the Land, pf/org, 1991; Breath … In Time, 1993

Principal publishers: G. Schirmer, AUS-Smc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Kouvaras: ‘Brenton Broadstock: a Composer of Two Minds’, Sound Ideas: Australian Composers Born since 1950, ed. B. Broadstock (Sydney, 1995), 282–6

WARREN A. BEBBINGTON

Broadway, Richard

(d Dublin, 1760). Irish organist and composer. His father was Edward Broadway, organist of St Finbarr's Cathedral in Cork, 1711–12. He acted as deputy to Ralph Roseingrave at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1744 until Roseingrave's death in 1747. On 12 December 1747 he was appointed organist to that cathedral at a yearly salary of £5, which had been reduced from the usual £30 ‘on account of an expensive lawsuit then pending’.

From 1747 he performed at a number of Dublin concerts, introducing new organ concertos of his own composition, and was recitalist at the opening of new organs at Christ Church Cathedral in July 1752 and at St Audoen's in May 1756. On 13 April 1749 his New Ode to Peace was performed at the Philharmonic Room in Fishamble Street, and his oratorio Solomon's Temple was given at the same venue on 15 May 1753 ‘for the benefit of sick and distressed Free Masons’. The book of words by J.E. Weekes was published in Dublin in the same year, and several times reprinted in masonic collections. Fétis mentioned this oratorio as having been performed in London in 1745. No trace of his music has been found.

BRIAN BOYDELL

Broadwood.

English firm of piano makers. John Broadwood (b Cockburnspath, Scotland, 6 Oct 1732; d London, 1812) was a joiner and cabinetmaker who went to London in 1761 and worked with the harpsichord maker Burkat Shudi. He married Shudi’s daughter in 1769 and became his partner in 1770. After Shudi’s death (1773) the partnership was continued with Shudi’s son, but Broadwood was the senior partner and from 1782 onwards he managed the firm alone from Shudi’s house in Great Pulteney Street. Broadwood continued to make harpsichords until at least 1793, but by this time the market had shifted almost completely towards pianos.

Broadwood’s early square pianos were modelled on those of Johannes Zumpe, but within a decade he completely reconstructed the design. Wrest plank and pins were shifted from the right, as in the clavichord, to the back of the case (distributing evenly the pressure on the bridge); the keys were straightened, dampers improved and Zumpe’s hand stops replaced by pedals. In 1783 a patent was granted for this ‘new modelling’. He had by then begun the manufacture of grand pianos, a return to earlier interests, for during the late 1760s he had worked with Americus Backers and Robert Stodart on the invention of the English grand action. Broadwood’s first grands (earliest surviving instrument, 1786) were based on the Backers model; the cases were in the style of contemporary English harpsichords (see Pianoforte, fig.13), with leather-covered hammers in place of jacks and quills. Three unison strings to a note were provided throughout the compass and there was a true una corda pedal, but the crucial questions of string scaling and striking point were decided arbitrarily; there was considerable scope for improvement. Acting on the advice of his friend Muzio Clementi, Broadwood consulted the botanist Dr Edward Whitaker Gray and the acoustician Tiberius Cavallo, and by 1788 was able to produce a greatly improved instrument, louder, more even throughout its compass and, above all, with increased dynamic flexibility. Such were the instruments that impressed Haydn when he visited Broadwood’s workshop in 1794; his instruments were used by leading musicians from the 1790s until well into the 19th century.

James Shudi Broadwood (1772–1851), John Broadwood’s eldest son, entered the business in 1785 and was made a full partner in 1795. The name of the firm then became John Broadwood & Son. Thomas Broadwood (1786–1861), John Broadwood’s third son by his second wife, entered the firm in 1803 and was taken into partnership in 1808. The name was changed once again to John Broadwood & Sons. After their father’s death in 1812, the brothers expanded production vigorously to meet the burgeoning English market. During the 1790s they were probably making about 400 squares and over 100 grands a year. By the 1820s annual output exceeded 1000 squares and 400 grands. These levels were achieved by a large labour force efficiently organized with a high degree of specialization. Nevertheless, comparisons with contemporary factories of the industrial revolution are misleading, for machinery was not employed and productivity, as distinct from production, was not high.

After the early decades of innovation the firm concentrated mainly on increasing the power, compass and durability of its instruments without changing the approach to design in any fundamental way. The most important development was the introduction of iron bracing to grand pianos about 1820 (see Pianoforte; fig.20). Devised to improve the tuning stability of the treble, it was further developed by James Shudi Broadwood’s son Henry Fowler Broadwood (1811–93) into the ‘iron grand’ of 1846. The high string-tension was resisted by a full iron frame having various components bolted together rather than the single casting of the ‘American’ system.

At this time Broadwood attained a pinnacle of distinction, output and prosperity which it never again achieved. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 Broadwood failed to obtain the Gold Medal for piano manufacture, which went instead to Pierre Erard. Sales fell due to French and other direct competition and were further undermined by Broadwood’s concentration on the production of square pianos, then rapidly going out of favour. Prestige and high standards of workmanship allowed the firm to maintain production at some 2500 instruments a year for another generation, but refusal to embrace the new technology led to a precipitous decline by the 1890s. Neither the barless grand of 1888, nor the belated introduction of over-stringing in 1897, were sufficient to regain Broadwood’s former eminence as one of the great piano makers, though the firm has continued.

For detailed descriptions of Broadwood’s inventions, see Pianoforte, §I, 4, 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Dodd: Days at the Factories (London, 1843)

E.F. Rimbault: The Pianoforte: its Origin, Progress and Construction (London, 1860)

J.S. Broadwood: Some Notes Made by J.S. Broadwood, 1838, with Observations & Elucidations by H.F. Broadwood, 1862 (London, 1862)

List of Pianofortes … Exhibited by John Broadwood and Sons, International Exhibition, London 1862 (London, 1862)

A.J. Hipkins: A Description and History of the Pianoforte and of the Older Keyboard String Instruments (London, 1896/R, 3/1929/R)

R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)

A. Loesser: Men, Women and Pianos: a Social History (New York, 1954/R)

C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976, 2/1990)

D. Wainwright: Broadwood by Appointment (London, 1982)

DEREK ADLAM, CYRIL EHRLICH

Broadwood, Lucy E(theldred)

(b Melrose, 8 Aug 1858; d Dropmore, nr Canterbury, 22 Aug 1929). English folksong collector and scholar. The great-granddaughter of John Broadwood (1732–1812), founder of the piano firm, and daughter of Henry Fowler Broadwood (1811–93), she spent her youth at the family home at Lyne, Sussex, where she developed an interest in local folksong. Inspired by her uncle, John Broadwood (1798–1864), she reissued his collection of folksongs, Old English Songs (1843) with H.F. Birch Reynardson as Sussex Songs (1890). She also travelled with Baring-Gould to Cornwall, to collect folksongs, and collaborated with J.A. Fuller Maitland to publish English County Songs (1893), thus establishing herself as a key figure in the folksong revival.

Her arrival in London (1894) precipitated a greater involvement with musical life, especially early music for which her voice was well suited. She also flourished as an amateur singer in charitable concerts. She continued her work on folksong, both arranging songs for performance by singers such as Plunket Greene, and composing some of her own in a similar style, with encouragement from Liza Lehmann and Arthur Somervell. In 1898 she was a founder member of the Folk-Song Society, becoming its honorary secretary (1904) and editor (1908), applying high standards of scholarship with colleagues Frank Kidson, Anne Gilchrist, Fuller Maitland and Cecil Sharp. Her own account of her experiences as a collector inspired Percy Grainger to join the society in 1905.

Although devoted to folksong, Broadwood maintained close contact with the musical establishment. She was much in demand as an adjudicator of singing from 1896, having previously met the music festival pioneer Mary Wakefield (1853–1910), and was later involved with Vaughan Williams's Leith Hill Music Festival. She remained an active musician and scholar to the end of her life, succeeding Tennyson as President of the Folk-Song Society in December 1928.

FOLKSONG EDITIONS

ed., with H.F. Birch Reynardson: Sussex Songs (London, 1890)

ed., with J.A. Fuller Maitland: English County Songs (London, 1893)

English Traditional Songs and Carols (London, 1908/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.E. Broadwood: ‘On the Collecting of English Folk-Song’, PRMA, xxxi (1904–5), 89–109

M. Dean-Smith, ed.: ‘Letters to Lucy Broadwood’, JEFDSS, ix (1964), 233–68

E. Bassin: ‘Lucy Broadwood, 1858–1929: her Contribution to the Collection and Study of Gaelic Traditional Song’, Scottish Studies, ix (1965), 145–52

V. Gammon: ‘Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843–1914’, History Workshop Journal, x (1980), 61–89

D. de Val: ‘The Transformed Village: Lucy Broadwood and Folksong’, British Music and Culture, 1785–1914, ed. C. Bashford and L. Langley (Oxford, forthcoming)

D. Wainwright: Broadwood by Appointment: a History (London, 1982)

DOROTHY DE VAL

Brocarte, Antonio de la Cruz

(d after 1716). Spanish theorist and organist. He was first organist with a benefice at the principal church in Zamora in 1707 and was still in that position in 1716. He also wrote a treatise, Medula de la música theorica (Salamanca, 1707), which discusses the fundamentals of music, plainchant, polyphony, counterpoint and composition. He was regarded highly enough to be cited as an authority: he approved for publication theoretical treatises by Francisco Valls and Pablo Nassarre.

Antonio de la Cruz Brocarte is not identifiable with Antonio Brocarte (d 21 Aug 1696), who was second organist at Palencia Cathedral and held a position at Santo Domingo de la Calzada before he was named organist at Segovia Cathedral on 15 June 1655. He remained there until 2 Dec 1676, when he became first organist at Salamanca Cathedral, a position he held until his death. Four tientos by him survive (P-Pm 1577, Loc. B, 5).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Hudson: A Portuguese Source of Seventeenth-Century Iberian Organ Music: MS 1577, Loc. B, 5, Municipal Library, Oporto, Portugal (diss., Indiana U., 1961) [includes transcrs. of the tientos]

D. Preciado: ‘Antonio Brocarte, organista en la Catedral de Segovia’, TSM, lvii (1974), 74–82

D. Preciado: ‘Antonio Brocarte, organista en la catedral de Salamanca’, TSM, lix (1976), 38–51

D. Preciado: Los Brocarte: ilustres organistas riojanos del siglo XVII (Logrono, 1987)

BARTON HUDSON

Brocco, Giovanni

(fl early 16th century). Italian composer. It is not known whether he was related to Nicolo Brocco. The ascription to Ayme che doglia calls him Ioannes Brocchus Vero. It has been assumed that he was a priest from Verona. He composed mainly frottolas; one or two were apparently popular, but they are in no way distinctive.

WORKS

for 4 voices unless otherwise stated

Alma svegliate hormai, 1504⁴, ed. in Publikationen älterer Musik, Jg.viii (1935), and in IMa, 1st ser., i (1954); Ayme che doglia e questa, 1504⁴, ed. in Publikationen älterer Musik, Jg.viii (1935), and in IMa, 1st ser., i (1954); Io mi voglio lamentare, 1505⁴; Ite caldi sospiri, 1505⁴; La mia se non vene ameno, 1505⁴; Lieta e lalma, 1505⁴; Mai piu sera, 3vv, I-MOe α.F.9.9, ed. in La Face Bianconi; Oyme che io sento al core, 1505⁴; Se me abandoni, MOe α.F.9.9, ed in La Face Bianconi; Se non son degno donna, 1505⁴; [textless frottola], MOe α.F.9.9, ed. in La Face Bianconi

Salve regina, VEcap 759

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Jeppesen: La frottola (Copenhagen, 1968–9) [incl. details of concordant sources]

G. La Face Bianconi: Gli strambotti del codice Estense α.F.9.9. (Florence, 1990)

STANLEY BOORMAN

Brocco, Nicolo

(fl early 16th century). Italian composer. It is not known whether he was related to Giovanni Brocco. His frottola Poi che in te is a risposta to Josquin's In te Domine speravi. Me levava may use a popular tune of the period; the melody and words appear in other settings. Se mia trista is more likely to be by Nicolo Brocco than by Giovanni Brocco, but there is not enough evidence to make a definitive ascription.

WORKS

all for 4vv

Me levava una mattina, 1517²; O tiente a lora, 1507⁴; Per servirte perdo i passi, 1507⁴; Poi che in te donna speravi, 1507⁴; Se ben fatto o del mio resto, 1517²; Se mia trista e dura sorte, 1517² (doubtful)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Jeppesen: La frottola (Århus and Copenhagen, 1968–70) [incl. details of concordant sources]

STANLEY BOORMAN

Broche, Charles

(b Rouen, 20 Feb 1752; d Rouen, 30 Sept 1803). French organist and composer. A pupil of Desmazures, the organist of Rouen Cathedral, he began his career at the age of 14. In 1771–2 he was organist at the Académie des Beaux-Arts at Lyons, succeeding Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier. Thence he went to Bologna to study with Padre Martini. In 1777 he returned to Rouen as successor of his teacher at the cathedral, where he remained until his death. One of his pupils at the cathedral choir school was Adrien Boieldieu, with whom he played concert duets in 1793. Many of Broche’s works are known only through reports: a mass, Revolutionary hymns and songs, cantatas, canons, concertos, quartets, trios and piano duets. Three sets of keyboard sonatas with violin accompaniment ad libitum survive: op.1 (1782), op.2 (1783) and op.3 (1787). The interest is concentrated in the pianist’s right hand while the left accompanies with stock figures, and the violin, though treated with some care at least in op.3, generally doubles the melody or fills in the harmony. The music often has a dark and stormy colouring, owing partly to the minor keys chosen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Vallas: Un siècle de musique et de théâtre à Lyon, 1688–1789 (Lyons, 1932/R)

G. Favre: La musique française de piano avant 1830 (Paris, 1953/R)

DAVID FULLER

Brockes, Barthold Heinrich

(b Hamburg, 22 Sept 1680; d Hamburg, 16 Jan 1747). German poet. The son of Margaretha Elmhoff and Bernard Brockes, a businessman, he received his education at the Johanneum and Gymnasium in Hamburg and studied law at Halle University (1700–02) and in Leyden. In addition to his regular academic studies he cultivated riding, fencing, dancing, art and music; while at Halle he organized weekly concerts in his room. He continued his education with a European tour (1703–4), studying art in Nuremberg, Italian in Venice, antiquities in Rome and botany in Lausanne, returning to Hamburg in 1704 through Paris and Amsterdam. He considered practising law but decided instead to devote his time to art collecting, music (he once again gave weekly concerts), literature and good company. His acknowledged search for a wealthy bride resulted in his marriage in 1714 to Anna Ilsabe Lehman: she bore him 12 children, of whom seven survived him, including his eldest son, Barthold Heinrich (b 1715), a minor literary figure. He was a founder in 1715 of the Teutschübenden Gesellschaft, a group of literati concerned with purifying the German language. In 1720 he was chosen a member of the Hamburg Senate, and he was active in government affairs for the rest of his life.

Brockes’s literary activity began with translations from French and Italian, and he published his first original poem in 1708. His chief importance for music history rests on a Passion oratorio libretto which he published in 1712, Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (repr. in W. Flemming, ed.: Oratorium-Festspiel, Leipzig, 1933). It was set by Keiser (1712), Telemann (1716), Handel (1716), Mattheson (1718), Stölzel (1725), Fasch (1723) and five lesser composers. Bach and his sister copied Handel’s score and used parts of the text in his St John Passion. It is a poetic paraphrase of the biblical account compiled from all four gospels, retaining the role of the Evangelist but adding many contemplative recitative and aria texts. The allegorical figures of the daughter of Zion and the faithful soul figure prominently; the chorale is relatively unimportant. Apart from its musical settings, the text itself was extremely popular as devotional poetry, and ran to more than 30 editions between 1712 and 1727. Its wide appeal for both composers and the general public lay in its infusion of dramatic elements of a more personal nature into the biblical story, thus finding a middle ground between orthodoxy and pietism.

Brockes is remembered in the history of literature as an Enlightenment figure who was the first German to cultivate nature poetry. His nine-volume collection, Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (Hamburg, 1721–48/R), extols the virtues of the observation and enjoyment of nature through all the senses. The poems bring together ideas from diverse sources, including Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (1681) from which Brockes developed his concept of the sublime (see Kimber). Handel drew the texts for his Neun deutsche Arien (1724–7) from the 1724 edition of the first volume, and Telemann used it for cantatas and songs. These settings stimulated a debate on aesthetics and the relationship between the arts; Mattheson and Fabricins felt that the poems which expressed violent movements and used onomatopoeia were not suitable for musical setting. Brockes’s 1745 translation of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30) was the model for both F.W. Zachariä’s poem Die Tageszeiten, set by Telemann in 1757, and Gottfried van Swieten’s text for Haydn’s oratorio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Braun: ‘B.H. Brockes’ “Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott” in den Vertonungen G. Ph. Telemanns und G. Fr. Händels’, HJb 1955, 42–71

H. Kuhn: Die Brockes-Passion (Munich, 1974)

H. Frederichs: Das Verhältnis von Text und Musik in den Brockespassionen Keisers, Händels, Telemanns und Matthesons (Munich, 1975)

K. Schaefer: ‘Aktuelle Aspekte in den durch Telemann vertonten Texten von Barthold Hinrich Brockes’, Telemann und seine Dichter: Magdeburg 1977, 68–74

H.P. Fry: ‘Barthold Heinrich Brockes und die Musik’, Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747), Dichter und Ratsherr in Hamburg, ed. H.-D. Loose (Hamburg, 1980), 71–104

I.M. Kimber: ‘Barthold Heinrich Brockes’, Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott als zeitgeschichtliches Dokument, ibid., 45–70

W. Braun: ‘Händel un der Dichter Barthold Heinrich Brockes’, Händel und Hamburg (Hamburg, 1985), 87–97

T. Höft: ‘“Meine Seele hört im Sehen”: Libretti von Barthold Heinrich Brockes im Irdischen Vergnügen in Gott’, Concerto, vii (1990), 15–21

A. Weidenfeld: ‘Die Sprache der Natur: zur Textvertonung in Händels Deutschen Arien’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, iv (1991), 67–93

KERALA J. SNYDER/IDA M. KIMBER

Brockhaus, Heinz Alfred

(b Krefeld, 12 Aug 1930). German musicologist. He studied musicology in Berlin at the Weimar Hochschule für Musik and under Ernst Hermann Meyer and Walther Vetter at the Humboldt University, where he took the doctorate in 1962 with a dissertation on Shostakovich's symphonies and completed his Habilitation in 1966 with a study of Hermann Abert's concept of musical historiography. He also worked at the university as a research assistant (1956–68) before being appointed lecturer (1968–9) and professor (1969–90) in musicology. Most of his research has been on the music history of the late 19th century and the 20th, and includes biographical studies of Shostakovich, Eisler and Prokofiev. In the late 1950s he became interested in the theory and history of musical aesthetics, particularly intonation theory and aspects of axiology. He became a director of the East German Verband Deutscher Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler in 1967, and a member of the IMS council and the editorial board of Acta musicologica in 1972.

WRITINGS

Hanns Eisler (Leipzig, 1961)

ed.: Michail Glinka: Aufzeichnungen aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1961)

Die Sinfonik Dmitri Schostakowitschs (diss., Humboldt U. of Berlin, 1962)

Dmitri Schostakowitsch: mit einer Auswahl von Aufsätzen des Komponisten (Leipzig, 1962)

Sergej Prokofjew (Leipzig, 1964)

‘Über einige Probleme und Kriterien des Neuen in der zeitgenössischen Musik’, BMw, vii (1965), 328–35

‘Fortschritt und Avantgardismus’, GfMKB: Leipzig 1966, 25–33

Hermann Aberts Konzeption der musikalischen Historiographie (Habilitationsschrift, Humboldt U. of Berlin, 1966)

‘Georg Kneplers Konzeption der musikalischen Historiographie’, BMw, ix (1967), 81–90

‘Probleme der musikalischen Analyse’; ‘Probleme des Kategoriensystems der marxistischen Musikästhetik und musikalischen Analytik’, MG, xvii (1967), 433–46; xviii (1968), 145–57; both abridged in Zur musikalischen Analyse, ed. G. Schuhmacher (Darmstadt, 1974), 618

ed., with K. Niemann: Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, i–v (Berlin, 1969–79)

ed., with K. Niemann: Beethoven-Kongress: Berlin 1970 [incl. ‘Konflikthaftigkeit und Idealität im klassischen Realismus Ludwig van Beethovens’, 235]

‘Bemerkungen zur Verbalisierung des Musikalischen im Prozess der Analyse’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 309–13

‘Probleme und Tendenzen der Musikästhetik’, BMw, xv (1973), 117–33

‘Überlegungen zur Theorie der Musikgeschichte’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 274–9

B. Burkhardt and M. Dasche, eds.: Europäische Musikgeschichte, i: Europäische Musikkulturen von den Anfängen bis zur Spätrenaissance (Berlin, 1983); ii: Europäischen Musikkulturen vom Barock bis zur Klassik (1986)

‘Überlegungen zum Spätwerk Dimitri Schostakowitschs’, Shostakovich Symposium: Cologne 1985, 69–85

HORST SEEGER/MATTHIAS BRZOSKA

Brockhaus, Max

(b Leipzig, 13 April 1867; d Lörrach, 9 May 1957). German music publisher. He purchased several companies which formed the basis for his music publishing firm founded in 1893 in Leipzig. From 1906 he belonged to the Gewandhaus-Direktorium and was its chairman from 1920 to 1936. He provided 30 years of valuable stimulus for the development of Leipzig’s concert life. The publishing firm was especially concerned with the promotion of contemporary opera (Humperdinck, Leoncavallo, d’Albert), and by 1918 had published 30 music dramas. From 1898 Brockhaus promoted Hans Pfitzner’s work, publishing his operas and some orchestral, choral and chamber works, as well as 53 lieder and songs; he also published numerous compositions by Siegfried Wagner (Brockhaus considered himself a friend of both composers). The firm’s publications have consistently achieved a high artistic standard. In 1940 Brockhaus’s daughter Elisabeth Gruner took over the business, which suffered considerable war damage in 1943; reconstruction began in Lörrach in 1949. (A. Hübscher: Hundertfünfzig Jahre F.A. Brockhaus 1805 bis 1955, Wiesbaden, 1955)

HANS-MARTIN PLESSKE

Brockland, Cornelius [Corneille de].

See Blockland, Cornelius.

Brockshorn, Samuel Friedrich.

See Capricornus, Samuel Friedrich.

Brockton, Lester.

See Lake, Mayhew Lester.

Brockway, Howard

(b Brooklyn, NY, 22 Nov 1870; d New York, 20 Feb 1951). American composer, pianist and teacher. He studied piano with H.O.C. Kortheuer and in 1890 went to Berlin, where he remained for five years, studying composition with Otis Boise and piano with Heinrich Barth. A successful concert of his chamber and orchestral pieces was given by the Berlin PO on 23 February 1895. Returning to the USA, he gave many concerts and taught at the Peabody Institute (1903–9), Mannes College and, from 1910 to 1940, the Institute of Musical Art (which was taken over by the Juilliard Musical Foundation in 1926). He produced few original works after 1911, but his arrangements of Kentucky folksongs, collected with Loraine Wyman, enjoyed popularity in the USA and England. Brockway was a gifted composer, whose works display a rare sensibility and warmth of melody and harmony, best expressed in his numerous song settings. Notable among his larger-scale works are the Violin Sonata and the Cello Suite.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Ballad, op.11, 1894; Sym., op.12, 1894; Cavatina, op.13, vn, orch (1895); Sylvan Suite, op.19 (1900); Scherzo (Scherzino), lost; Pf Conc., inc., lost

Chbr: Sonata, op.9, vn, pf (1894); Moment musical, op.16, vn, pf (1897); Romance, op.18, vn, pf (1897); 3 Compositions: Aria, The Coquette, Romance, op.31, vn, pf (1906); Suite, op.35, vc, pf (1908); Pf Qnt, ?op.38, lost; Fugue, 2 vn, pf

Choral: Cantate Domino, op.6, 1892; 2 Choruses: Wings of a Dove, Hey Nonino, op.24 (1899); Des Saengers Fluch, op.27 (1902); Herr Oluf (J. Herder), op.37 (1913); Matin Song (T. Heywood), op.40 (1911)

Pf: 2 Preludes, 1925, unpubd; other pieces incl. Dreaming, Unrest, At Twilight, An Idyl of Murmuring Water

Songs incl. Would thy faith were mine, Intimations, The Mocking Bird, An Answer

Folksong arrs. incl. Lonesome Tunes (New York, 1916), 20 Kentucky Mountain Songs (Boston, 1920)

MSS in US-Wc and US-NYp

Principal publishers: G. Schirmer, Schlesinger (Berlin), Church (Cincinnati), Margun Music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Hughes: Contemporary American Composers (Boston, 1900, 3/1914), 298–304

H. Brockway: ‘The Quest of the Lonesome Tuner’, Art World, ii/3 (1917–18), 227–30

BARTON CANTRELL/MICHAEL MECKNA

Brod, Henri

(b Paris, 13 June 1799; d Paris, 5/6 April 1839). French oboist, wind instrument maker and composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire from 1812 under Gustave Vogt, who shared Brod’s Protestant Alsatian background. Having received the premier prix in 1818, the following year Brod was appointed second oboist in the Opéra orchestra alongside his teacher. During Vogt’s absences in 1826 and 1828 Brod filled Vogt’s place as first oboist. The abilities of the two players were often compared; Fétis found Brod’s tone sweeter than that of his teacher. A statuette by Dantan jeune (Paris, Musée Carnavalet) caricatures Brod playing a musette. He died just 3 months before he would have been eligible for a pension to support his wife and young son. His widow petitioned repeatedly for support from the administration of both the Conservatoire and Opéra.

Oboes by Brod, some made in collaboration with his brother Jean-Godefroy (b ?1801) were held in high regard. Brod had acquired tools and plans from Christophe Delusse (fl 1781–89), and his earliest oboes were modelled on those of Delusse. Brod quickly gained a reputation for innovation and did much to influence the oboe’s development. He was probably the first oboe maker in France to add octave keys, to extend the range to b (and on some instruments to a) and to design a pierced plate to half close the first hole. Brod promoted a straight english horn (cor anglais moderne), conceived an hautbois baritone, pitched an octave below the treble oboe, and made a petit hautbois, pitched above the treble oboe. It was reported that he was developing an oboe with Boehm keywork. Other inventions include a gouging machine used in oboe and bassoon reed making. His two-part Méthode pour le hautbois (Paris, 1825–35), includes important technical information and explains the rationale for these innovations.

In addition to pièces de salon, romances and operatic fantasies for oboe, including Variations on Lucia di Lammermoor and Siège de Corinthe, Brod composed an opera on Quinault’s libretto Thesée which was rejected by the audition panel of the Opéra in 1826. The only known performance of excerpts of this score (now lost) took place in 1837 under the direction of F.-A. Habeneck. A definitive list of Brod’s compositions has yet to be established.

See also Oboe, §II, 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB; SchillingE; YoungHI

F.J. Fétis: ‘Variétés: Machine à faire les anches de hautbois et de basson’, Revue musicale, xiv (1834), 221 only

P. Hedrick: ‘Henri Brod’s “Méthode pour le hautbois” Reconsidered’, The Consort, no.30 (1974), 53–62

K. Ventzke: ‘Henri Brod (1799–1839): ein Oboenvirtuose als Oboenbauer’, Tibia (1977), 347–50

P. Hedrick: ‘Henri Brod on the Making of Oboe Reeds’, Journal of the International Double Reed Society, vi (1978), 7–12

C.D. Lehrer: ‘A List of Henri Brod’s Compositions with a Short Discussion of his Oboe Concertos’, Journal of the International Double Reed Society, xix (1991), 5–17

GEOFFREY BURGESS

Brod, Max

(b Prague, 27 May 1884; d Tel-Aviv, 20 Dec 1968). German-Israeli writer, translator, composer and librettist of Czech birth. He began piano studies at the age of six, and was then a pupil of Adolf Schreiber; later, after Schreiber’s suicide, Brod had some of his songs published and wrote his biography. He studied law and worked in Prague for a time as a state employee. He was a fine pianist and a composer (mostly of songs); his first published volume of verse (1907) earned the approval of Rilke, his first novel (1909) brought him notoriety. Thoughts on music are woven into his novels and poetry: his final book (1962) was a novelistic defence of Karel Sabina, librettist of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, who was discovered to be a police informer. Brod was a friend of other German-Jewish writers in Prague such as Kafka and Werfel, and did much to promote their careers, becoming Kafka’s biographer and literary executor. His own talents and wide sympathies enabled him to become a prominent music and theatre critic (for the Prager Abendblatt, Prager Tagblatt and various foreign German-language publications), the translator of some of Novák’s operas into German and the author of original librettos for Gurlitt (Nana), W. Kaufman (after Gogol’s story Nos) and Lavry (Dan Hashomer).

Alerted by Josef Suk to the Prague production of Jenůfa, Brod wrote an enthusiastic review in Die Schaubühne (1916), on the basis of which Janáček begged him to translate the opera into German. Brod did so, initiating a friendship with the composer and a series of translations of most of the subsequent operas. Brod’s suggestions as he translated resulted in some additions to Kát’a Kabanová and a free reinterpretation of The Cunning Little Vixen, but Janáček made Brod withdraw most of his changes to The Makropulos Affair. Brod also wrote the first substantial biography of Janáček, a valuable source relying on information drawn directly from the composer. Other Czech opera texts which Brod translated included that of Weinberger’s Švanda dudák (‘Švanda the Bagpiper’), where he rewrote the first act and made Weinberger change the music accordingly.

In 1939 he went into exile on the last train to leave Czechoslovakia before the arrival of the Germans and settled in Palestine, where he was artistic adviser to the Habimah Theatre until his death. He continued his activities as a music critic, writing a column ‘Klang und Schatten’ for the daily paper Jedioth Chadashoth, and wrote Die Musik Israels (1951), which deals with the early development of Israeli music and demonstrates Jewish elements in the work of Mendelssohn and Mahler; the latter was the subject of a further pamphlet.

Brod began composing in 1900, and grouped his output non-chronologically in 38 opus numbers. The music is lyrical, openly expressive and predominantly vocal. In some works written in Europe (particularly the piano pieces) there is a Czech influence, but after his move to Palestine, Brod, like several of his colleagues, searched for a harmonic blend of oriental and European traditions in the evolution of the ‘Mediterranean’ style. This matter prevails in the Mittelmeersuite for piano and the Zwei israelische Bauerntänze, which were frequently played by the Israel PO, whereas the Requiem hebraicum, written in memory of his wife, draws partly on Hebrew cantillation. In the two songs Tod und Paradies (1951–2) Brod’s style became more individual, while retaining the ‘Mediterranean’ character.

WORKS

(selective list)

vocal

Requiem hebraicum (Shin Shalom), op.20, Bar, pf/orch

Songs: Tagebuch in Liedern (Frühe Klänge), 19 Songs, op.2, 1900–10; 11 Goethe Lieder, op.4, 1901–10; 4 Lieder (W. Shakespeare), op.5; 4 Lieder (J.W. von Goethe, G. Flaubert, F. von Schiller, Ps cxxvi), op.10, 1908–21, Psalm rev. 1953; 8 Lieder, op.32 (Goethe: Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten), op.32; Tod und Paradies (F. Kafka: Diary), op.35, 1951, orchd 1952; 46 other songs

instrumental

Sonata, op.11, vn, pf; 2 Israelische Bauerntänze, op.30, pf/orch; Pf Qnt, op.33

Pf: Hradčanské hodiny [The Clocks of Hradčany], op.12, 1916; Elegie auf den Tod eines Freundes, op.13, 1908; Aphorismen, op.17, 1938–9; Sonatine, op.18; Sonata no.2, op.23; Mittelmeersuite, op.28; Unseren Toten, op.29; Hayishuv [The People in Their Land], suite, op.34

Incid music to Brod’s plays: Die Höhe des Gefühls, op.14, 1912; Die Fälscher, op.15a, 1922; Eine Königin Ester, op.15b, 1918

Principal publishers: Israeli Music Publications, Universal

WRITINGS

Adolf Schreiber: ein Musikerschicksal (Berlin, 1921)

Sternenhimmel: Musik- und Theatererlebnisse (Prague, 1923, rev. 2/1966 as Prager Sternenhimmel: Musik- und Theatererlebnisse aus den zwanziger Jahren; Cz. trans., 1969) [incl. ‘Tschechisches Opernglück’, first pubd 1916]

Leoš Janáček: život a dílo [Life and works] (Prague, 1924; Ger. orig., 1925, 2/1956)

Die Musik Israels (Tel-Aviv, 1951, rev. 2/1976 by Y.W. Cohen with 2nd pt., Werden und Entwicklung der Musik in Israel; Eng. trans., 1951)

Gustav Mahler: Beispiel einer deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose (Frankfurt, 1961)

Die verkaufte Braut: der abenteuerliche Lebensroman des Textdichters Karel Sabina (Munich, 1962)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (J. Tyrrell)

J. Racek and A. Rektorys, eds.: Korespondence Leoše Janáčka s Maxem Brodem (Prague, 1953)

H. Gold, ed.: Max Brod: ein Gedenkbuch, 1884–1968 (Tel-Aviv, 1969)

B.W. Wessling: Max Brod: ein Portrait (Stuttgart, 1969)

E. Hilmar: ‘Ergänzungen zum Briefwechsel Janáček/Brod und Dokumente zum musikalischen Wirken des Dichter-Komponisten Brod’, Festschrift Othmar Wessely, ed. M. Angerer and others (Tutzing, 1982), 253–64

C. Susskind: Janáček and Brod (New Haven, CT, and London, 1985)

P. Jost: ‘Max Brods Kafka-Vertonungen Tod und Paradies op.35’, AMw, xliv (1987), 282–305

Y. Shaked: ‘Max Brod a hudba’ [Brod and music], HRo, xiv (1991), 454–8; Eng. trans. as ‘In his own right: on Max Brod and Music’, IMI News (1991), no.1, pp.1–4

J. Tyrrell: Janáček’s Operas: a Documentary Account (London, 1992)

V. Vysloužilová: ‘Max Brod als Übersetzer und Librettist’, Der jüdische Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte Böhmens und Mährens: Regensburg 1992, 25–37

J. Ludvová: ‘Hudební texty v překladech Maxe Broda’ [Musical texts translated by Max Brod], Die Verwandlung: Věstník Společnosti Franze Kafky (1995), no.1, pp.22–5

YEHUDA WALTER COHEN, JOHN TYRRELL

Broda, Paulus de.

See Paulus de Roda.

Broder, Nathan

(b New York, 1 Dec 1905; d New York, 16 Dec 1967). American editor and musicologist. He attended City College, New York, and studied music privately, but as a music scholar he was largely self-educated. His career in editing and music publishing began with his appointment as associate editor of the Musical Quarterly (1945–67) and manager of the publications department at G. Schirmer (1945–54); he subsequently became chairman of the publication committee of the American Musicological Society (1952–4), executive director of the American Section of RISM (1961–5) and music editor at W.W. Norton & Co., New York (1963–7). He also taught at Columbia University (lecturer 1946–52, associate professor 1959–62) and served as president of the American Musicological Society (1963–4). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1956) and a Ford Foundation Grant (1961).

Although Broder’s career was devoted largely to guiding and publishing the work of others, he was himself a productive scholar. He published a book of essays, The Great Operas of Mozart (which includes the librettos translated by W.H. Auden and others), several articles on Mozart, and a standard edition of Mozart’s piano sonatas and fantasias. His main interest was the 18th century, but he was not restricted to it: he wrote on contemporary Americans, among them Samuel Barber and William Schuman, he assisted Reese in writing Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940) and at his death he was working on a long-planned history of orchestral music. He was an energetic reviewer, and his contributions to dictionaries include 70 articles in MGG1.

WRITINGS

‘The Wind-Instruments in Mozart’s Symphonies’, MQ, xix (1933), 238–59

‘Mozart and the “Clavier”’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 422–32

‘American Music and American Orchestras’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 488–93

with A. Mendel: Mozart: his Character, his Work (New York, 1945, 2/1956) [trans. of A. Einstein: Mozart Stockholm, 1947]

‘The Music of William Schuman’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 17–28

Samuel Barber (New York, 1954/R)

‘The First Guide to Mozart’, MQ, xlii (1956), 223–9

The Collector’s Bach (Philadelphia, 1958/R)

‘The Beginnings of the Orchestra’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 174–80

‘The American Representation in the International Inventory of Musical Sources’, FAM, ix (1962), 15–16

The Great Operas of Mozart: Complete Librettos in the Original Language (New York, 1962)

ed., with P.H. Lang: Contemporary Music in Europe: a Comprehensive Survey (New York, 1965) [originally pubd in MQ, li (1965), 1–297]

ed.: W.A. Mozart: Symphony in G minor, K. 550 (New York, 1967) [annotated score]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.H. Lang: Obituary, MQ, liv (1968), 249–51

G. Reese: ‘Nathan Broder (1905–1967)’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 526–7 [obituary]

JON NEWSOM

Broderie

(Fr.).

See Auxiliary note.

Broderip.

English family of musicians. They were descended from Richard Broderip (b 1555).

BETTY MATTHEWS

(1) William Broderip

(b 10 July 1683; d Wells, 31 Jan 1727). Organist and composer. His father Adrian was a great-grandson of Richard. He became a vicar-choral of Wells Cathedral on 1 April 1701 and organist in 1713. In that year he composed an anthem, God is our hope and strength (GB-Lbl), to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht. He also wrote a verse Morning Service and Evening Service in D (Lbl) and a Chant in G minor (Och). He had ten children by his wife Martha (d 1773). A later William Broderip (1744–70), organist of Leominster, 1766–9, may have been his grandson.

(2) John Broderip

(b Wells, 2 Feb 1719; d Wells, bur. 30 Dec 1770). Organist and composer, son of (1) William Broderip. On 2 September 1740, during a brief period as organist of Minehead, he advertised for subscribers to his New Set of Anthems (Wells, c1747). On 2 December he was admitted vicar-choral of Wells Cathedral and from 1 April 1741 until his death he was organist. He may also have been organist at Shepton Mallet, a post that was advertised as vacant in January 1771. A second book of anthems was published in London in about 1750, and Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1769.

(3) Edmund Broderip

(b Wells, bap. 4 April 1727; d Bristol, 9 Sept 1779). Organist, son of (1) William Broderip. A pupil of Geminiani and Kelway, he was probably the Mr Broderip who played at many West Country festivals in the mid-18th century. He was appointed organist of St James’s, Bristol, in 1746, where he was associated with the infant Samuel Wesley, and organist of the Mayor’s Chapel in 1764. He performed regularly at the Prince Street Assembly. He is the Broderip castigated by Chatterton in Kew Gardens.

(4) Robert Broderip

(b ?Wells, c1758; d Bristol, 14 May 1808). Organist and composer, son of (2) John Broderip. He was organist of the Mayor’s Chapel, Bristol, from 1780 and of St Michael’s from 1793. His publications include Portions of Psalms Selected from the Version of Brady and Tate, by ‘The late John Broderip and Robert Broderip’ (Bath, 1798), many songs and works for keyboard, among them organ voluntaries (op.5, London, c1785), a harpsichord or piano concerto (op.7, London, c1785), a set of sonatas for keyboard and violin (London, c1790), a collection of vocal works (op.9, London, c1790), and Plain and Easy Instructions for Young Performers on the Piano-forte (London, c1788).

1. Early years: up to 1845.

(5) Francis Fane Broderip

(b ?Wells, c1750; d London, 18 Feb 1807). Music publisher, probably son of (2) John Broderip. He was associated with the firms of Longman & Lukey, Longman & Broderip and Broderip & Wilkinson. He is described (Salisbury Journal, 2 March 1807) as a brother of Edmund Broderip of Wells (1752–18), a son of (2) John. He is probably the music dealer who, according to Burney, was advised by Haydn to buy a Mozart manuscript.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituary (F.F. Broderip), Gentleman’s Magazine, lxxvii (1807), 190 only

L.G. Pine, ed.: ‘Broderip formerly of Cossington Manor’, Burke’s Landed Gentry (London, 17/1952)

J.G. Hooper: A Survey of Music in Bristol with Special Reference to the Eighteenth Century (diss., U. of Bristol, 1963)

D.E. Padgett-Chandler: ‘Thomas Chatterton and Music’, MT, cxi (1970), 799–800; also correspondence, cxi, 998, 1220; cxii, 130

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995), 360

Broderip & Wilkinson.

See Longman & Broderip.

Brodsky, Adolph

(b Taganrog, 21 March/2 April 1851; d Manchester, 22 Jan 1929). Russian violinist. He studied under Joseph Hellmesberger at the Vienna Conservatory, 1860–63, thereafter combining solo appearances with academic work, and becoming senior professor at Leipzig in 1880. In 1881 he gave the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s concerto, which had been declared unplayable by Leopold Auer, at a Vienna PO concert under Hans Richter. From 1891 to 1894 Brodsky led Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony Society Orchestra. In 1895 he was invited to Manchester as leader of Hallé’s orchestra and as senior violin professor at the newly founded Royal Manchester College of Music. Brodsky played only one concert under Hallé before Sir Charles died in October 1895. He succeeded him as principal of the RMCM and resigned the Hallé leadership after the 1895–6 season. Among Brodsky’s best-known pupils were Anton Maaskoff, Arthur Catterall, Philip Hecht and Alfred Barker. He also attracted many distinguished musicians to the staff, notably Wilhelm Backhaus, Egon Petri, Max Mayer, Carl Fuchs and later Arthur Catterall. The Brodsky Quartet played a major part in Manchester’s musical life for nearly 30 years. (A new, unrelated, Brodsky Quartet was founded in 1972.) Brodsky received the honorary degree of MusD from Manchester University in 1902. He retired from the concert platform as a soloist in 1921 but returned in 1927 to play Elgar’s concerto as a tribute for the composer’s 70th birthday.

MICHAEL KENNEDY

Brodsky Quartet.

English string quartet. It was founded in 1972 by Michael Thomas, Ian Belton, A. Robertson and Jacqueline Thomas, who at the time were aged 11 to 13 and at school in north-east England. They studied at the RNCM in Manchester and named their ensemble after Adolph Brodsky. Their teachers included the cellist Terence Weil, members of the Vermeer and Amadeus Quartets, Zoltan Székely and Andras Mihály. The group won prizes at the Portsmouth competition in 1979 and at Evian in 1980 and 1981. With Paul Cassidy replacing Robertson as the viola player, it made its London début in 1982 and in 1985 became the first resident quartet at Cambridge University, remaining there for three years. In 1989 it played a Shostakovich cycle at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Its début at Carnegie Hall, New York, followed two years later. It has been resident at the Dartington Summer School since 1982 and at Trinity College, London, since 1996. Works have been written for it by Peter Sculthorpe, Morton Feldman, Dave Brubeck, David Matthews and Dmitri Smirnov, among others. Its recordings include a Shostakovich cycle and works by Crumb, Brubeck, Stravinsky and Weill as well as The Juliet Letters (1993), on which the quartet collaborated with the rock musician Elvis Costello. It has taken part in ‘crossover’ ventures with such popular artists as Björk and Paul McCartney, has made videos and television programmes – in 1994 it became the first quartet to appear on the ‘Tonight’ show in the USA – and has experimented with concert presentation in order to bring string quartet music to new audiences. In 1999, in collaboration with Eurovision, the ensemble began a project of performing and recording the Beethoven cycle, alongside a series of works commissioned from contemporary composers, each based on one of the Beethoven Quartets.

TULLY POTTER

Brodszky, Nicholas [Miklós; Nikolaus]

(b Odessa, Ukraine, 7/20 April 1905; d Hollywood, CA, 24 Dec 1958). Hungarian composer, active in England and the USA. He learnt the piano as a child, later studying in Rome, Vienna and Budapest. By the late 1920s he had contributed songs to long-forgotten and newly-arranged Viennese operettas. He mainly specialized in film music, writing his first score in Vienna for a film starring Richard Tauber and Gitta Alpar. He continued to write numerous European popular song hits during this period. His reputation took him to England in 1937, where he wrote the songs for C.B. Cochran’s revue Home and Beauty.

Although he is credited with the scores to 14 British films over the next ten years, he was solely a songwriter and incapable of scoring incidental music for dramatic situations. Collaborators were employed, often uncredited, and he is known to have relied upon the skills of Charles Williams and Philip Green, and probably also worked with Mischa Spoliansky, Clive Richardson and Sidney Torch.

In his later Hollywood career Brodszky, who became a naturalized American citizen, composed many hit songs, including several that perfectly suited the voice of Mario Lanza, such as Be my love (The Toast of New Orleans, 1950).

WORKS

(selective list)

Operetta: Szökik az assozny [The Runaway Girl], 1929; Az első tavasz [The First Spring], 1930; Die verliebte Königin, 1934

Revue: Home and Beauty, 1937

Film (Germany): Der brave Sünder, 1931; Gitta entdeckt ihr Herz, 1932

Film (Austria): Peter, 1933; Csibi, der Fratz, 1934; Die 4½ Musketiere, 1935; Ende schleht, alles gut, 1935; Katharina die Lezte, 1935; Kleine Mutti, 1935; Peter, 1935; Bubi, 1936

Film (England): French Without Tears, 1939; Spy for a Day, 1940; Freedom Radio, 1941; Unpublished Copy, 1942; Tomorrow we Live, 1943; The Demi-Paradise, 1944; English Without Tears, 1944; The Way to the Stars, 1945; Beware of Pity, 1946; Carnival, 1946; While the Sun Shines, 1946; A Man About the House, 1947; The Turners of Prospect Road, 1947

Film (USA): The Toast of New Orleans, 1950 [incl. Be my Love]; Because You’re Mine, 1952 [incl. Because You’re Mine]; Latin Lovers, 1953; Small Town Girl, 1953; The Flame and the Flesh, 1954; Love Me or Leave Me, 1955 [incl. I’ll never stop loving you]; The Opposite Sex, 1956; Serenade, 1956

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Gammond: The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (Oxford, 1991)

W. Pass, G. Scheit and W. Svoboda: Orpheus im Exil: die Vertreibung der österreischen Musik von 1938 bis 1945 (Vienna, 1994)

THOMAS L. GAYDA

Brody, Martin

(b Chicago, 8 July 1949). American composer and writer on music. The son of a jazz musician, he first studied the piano and cello, and later worked as a jazz and rock musician. He began composing while a student of Lewis Spratlan and Donald Wheelock at Amherst College. After further study in composition at Brandeis University with Seymour Shifrin, and in computer music with Barry Vercoe at MIT, he was awarded a doctorate (1981) at Yale University, where his main teachers were Yehudi Wyner and Robert Morris. Brody has taught at MIT, Bowdoin College, Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis, and was appointed Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley College in 1992.

Brody’s compositional work encompasses music for the popular media in, for example, numerous productions for the Public Broadcasting System and the film The Brother from Another Planet (dir. J. Sayles, 1980), as well as the concert hall. As his focus has shifted from densely woven atonal chamber music in such works as What the Dead Know (1987) to the more transparent textures of large narrative theatrical works, his musical language has remained essentially harmonic: contrapuntal surfaces emerge from the prolongation of jazz-derived chords. Heart of a Dog (1990–92), which sets an early 20th-century Russian tale in an idiom which incorporates both operatic and rap styles, and Earth Studies (1993–5), which integrates dance and opera, both exemplify the power and flexibility of such a harmonic language.

His theoretical work ranges from technical articles for a professional readership to general cultural criticism directed towards a broader audience. In ‘Music for the Masses: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory’ (1993) he argues that the antecedents of late 20th-century American music theory can be found in the mid-century literary and political culture of the ‘New York intellectuals’.

WORKS

(selective list)

Music-theatre: Heart of a Dog, S, T, 2 Bar, B-Bar, fl, cl, tpt, vn, va, vc, perc, pf, tape, 1990–92; Earth Studies, Mez, T, B, vc, perc, pf, tape, 1993–5

Orch: Concertino, chbr orch, 1978; Elgin Ritornelli, pf, orch, 1985

Chbr: Saxifrage, pf, 1975; Duo, fl, pf, 1976; Music for Cellos, 2 vc, 1977; Turkish Rondo, tape, 1979; Nocturnes, fl, 1979; Moments musicaux, pf, tape, 1980; Apparitions, pf, 1981; Voices, vn, 1983; Doubles, ww qnt, tape, 1984; What the Dead Know, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, perc, pf, tape, 1987; Commedia, vc, perc, pf, 1987; Anthem, 4 tpt, 1993; Rocket’s Musette (with Cosmos Song), pf, 1994; Reliquary: Nun komm, ob, str trio, 1994

Solo vocal: Casabianca (E. Bishop), S, ob, vn, 1988; La Tortuga (P. Neruda), S, vc, 1989

Principal publishers: APNM, Margun

WRITINGS

‘Sensibility Defined: Set Projection in Form, for Piano, by Stefan Wolpe’, PNM, xv/2 (1976–7), 3–22

‘An Anatomy of Intentions: Observations on Seymour Shifrin’s Responses for Solo Piano’, PNM, xix/1–2 (1980–81), 278–306

‘Roger Sessions on Music’, JMT, xxvii/1 (1983), 111–19

‘Criteria for Grouping in Milton Babbitt’s Minute Waltz (or 3/4 +/- 1/8)’, PNM, xxiv/2 (1986), 30–78

‘MSHJ: Faith and Deeds in The White Island, by Donald Martino’, PNM, xxix/2 (1991), 294–311

‘Music for the Masses: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory’, MQ, lxxvii/2 (1993), 161–93

‘Our Music’, MQ, lxxix/3 (1995), 544–51

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Interview with Composer Martin Brody’, S. I. Currents, ii/1 (1996), 1–6

STEPHEN DEMBSKI

Broeckx, Jan L(ea)

(b Antwerp, 17 Oct 1920). Belgian musicologist. Son of the composer Jan Pieter Karel Broeckx, he undertook his musical studies at the Koninklijk Vlaemsch Conservatorium, Antwerp, where he obtained in 1938 the high diploma for the keyboard. He also studied counterpoint and fugue with Poot and Absil at the Brussels Conservatory. He later studied the history of art at the University of Ghent, gaining the doctorate in 1943; in the same year he received an award from the Belgian Royal Academy for his study of the composer Lodewijk Mortelmans. He was professor of the history of music at the conservatories of Ghent (1944–8) and Antwerp (from 1948). Concurrently he worked at the Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts, writing publications on Belgian and foreign painters. In 1962 he was appointed to teach in the department of musicology at the University of Ghent, where he later became director of the Seminary of Musicology and the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music. Broeckx specializes in music of the Romantic period, Impressionism, Expressionism and aesthetics, especially semiotics. His interest in pedagogy is also evident from his educational books on the history of music. He is editor of the journal Interface, which is devoted to the study of contemporary musicological problems and methods.

WRITINGS

Bach-Mozart-Beethoven, proeve van stylistische vergelijking (Antwerp, 1941/R)

Lodewijk Mortelmans (Antwerp, 1945)

‘Mathis der Maler en de moderne opera’, Mens en melodie, ii (1947), 251–4

Begrip en schoonheid van de muziek: enkele vraagstukken van de muziekphilosophie en de muziekaesthetica (Antwerp, 1949)

Geschiedenis van de muziek in België (Brussels, 1950)

Hervorming van het muziekonderwijs aan onze conservatoria (Ghent, 1950)

Methode van de muziekgeschiedenis (Antwerp, 1959)

De liedkunst von Hugo Wolf (Antwerp, 1962)

‘Arnold Schoenberg: Interrelations between Compositional Systems and Musical Expression’, Interface, v (1967), 189–206

‘Adorno sociologue’, Musique en jeu, no.7 (1972), 44–66

Gustav Mahlers ‘Das Lied von der Erde’: musico-literaire verhoudingen (Antwerp, 1975)

Muziek, ratio en affect (Antwerp, 1981)

‘Modes of Appreciation’, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society, xvi (1985), 26–45

‘Music and Language: On the Pretended Inadequacy of Music as a Language of Feelings’, IRASM, xxvii (1996), 87–93

‘Beyond the Metaphor: Musical Figures or Gestalte as Expressive Icons’, Journal of New Music Research, xxvi (1997), 266–76

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.J. de Hen, A.-M. Riessauw and H. Sabbe, eds.: Liber amicorum J.L. Broeckx (Ghent, 1986) [incl. list of writings]

MARIE CORNAZ

Brognonico [Brognoligo], Orazio

(b Verona, c1576; d Verona, Jan 1623). Italian composer. He came of a noble, cultivated Veronese family; he should not be confused with a member of another branch of the family who bore the same name, was contemporary with him and was a doctor of law. He spent his life in Verona. He entered the Accademia Filarmonica on 1 June 1611, after proving his musical ability by composing a mass which was sung in the previous month in S Sebastiano to celebrate the anniversary of the academy’s foundation. He was asked to write works for the same occasion in some subsequent years. During his last years he was seriously ill; he sought to withdraw from the academy, but in recognition of his qualities he was supported by the members and relieved of duties and the need to make payments.

Brognonico himself probably wrote the separate poems dedicated to symbolic figures and related to the texts of the madrigals that appear in La bocca and Gli occhi. His music lends affective colouring to the images and states of mind explored in the texts, the declamatory writing making the words stand out in expressive relief. Harmonic writing, which is generally innocent of chromaticism, dominates both the contrapuntal textures and also the recurring rhythmic patterns that make up homophonic passages sung by all or some of the voices. Although he still worked within the traditional framework of the madrigal, Brognonico was not unaffected by the general tendency at the time towards a change in the musical language.

WORKS

all published in Venice

Primo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1611)

Primo libro de madrigali, 3vv (1612)

La bocca: secondo libro de madrigali, 3vv (1614)

Terzo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1615)

Gli occhi: terzo libro de madrigali, 3vv (1615)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (E.Paganuzzi)

F. Bolvito: Oratio in funere Honorati Brognonici (Verona, 1617)

A. Cartolari: Famiglie già ascritte al nobile consiglio di Verona (Verona, 1854/R)

G. Turrini: L’Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico (Verona, 1941)

O. Mischiati: Bibliografia delle opere pubblicate a stampa dai musicisti veronesi nei secoli XVI–XVIII (Rome, 1993)

ENRICO PAGANUZZI

Brogue (Henning), Roslyn

(b Chicago, 16 Feb 1919; d Beverly, MA, Aug 1981). American composer and harpsichordist. She studied at Drake University, the University of Chicago (BA 1937) and Radcliffe College (MA 1943, PhD 1947), where her teachers included Piston. Among her teaching appointments were positions at the Harvard Summer School (1951–61), Boston University (1959–60) and Tufts University (1962–75); she also taught privately. Earle Brown was her best-known pupil. A versatile performer, she played the piano, organ, violin and viola proficiently and also sang and conducted. Active in harpsichord building and restoration, she worked in the studio of Frank Hubbard and William Dowd for one year. Her other interests included classical paleography, poetry, sculpture, ceramics and photography.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: Trio, ob, cl, bn, 1946; Suite, small orch, 1947; Allegretto, fl, pf, 1948; Qt (Fantasy on Mille regretz), str, pf, 1949; Sinfonia missae, org, 1949; Suite, rec ens, 1949; Str Qt, 1951; Duo lirico, vn, hpd, 1952; Quodlibet, fl, vc, hpd, 1953; Trio, vn, cl, pf, 1953; Parade, cl, pf, 1954; Andante and Variations, hpd, orch, 1954–6; Arabesque, vc, pf, 1955; Sonatina, fl, cl, hpd, 1957; Ww Qnt, 1970; Equipoise, a sax/cl, hpd, pf, 1971

Vocal: Mass, chorus, 1937–9; Childing (S. Slobodkin), concert aria, S, fl, vc, hp, 1957; 5 Songs of Courtly Love (Slobodkin), S, fl, hpd, 1958; Sonnets from the Portuguese (E.B. Browning), S, pf, 1959; Come, lovely and soothing death (W. Whitman), SA, 1960; Song of Exploration (cant., Whitman), S, fl, cl, vc, hpd, 1960; The Baite (J. Donne), B, vc, hpd, 1961; Speed we say (M. Rukeyser), S, fl, hpd, 1961; A Valediction: Of Weeping (Donne), S, hpd/pf, 1962; 4 Elegies (T. Hume, T.L. Beddoes, W.S. Merwin), S, hpd/pf, 1962; Juggler (R. Wilbur), S, vc, hpd, 1962

MARK DEVOTO

Brohn, William David

(b Flint, MI, 30 March 1933). American orchestrator, conductor and composer. He studied music at Michigan State University and then at the New England Conservatory, which included conducting with Neel and Stokowski, and the double bass. The latter led to performing engagements with numerous orchestras; from 1961 to 1967 he also conducted, particularly ballet orchestras. At this time he began conducting tours and concerts of musicals, and in the 1970s his orchestrations for musicals were first heard. These included orchestrations reconciling a variety of sources with the requirements for modern revivals or compilations (as with Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, Carousel, Show Boat, and his contributions to the restoration of the Gershwins’ Strike up the Band). He has composed incidental music, arranged for television and film, provided arrangements for recording (for Mandy Patinkin, Plácido Domingo, Marilyn Horne, Frederica von Stade), and written songs and musicals, as well as concert and dance works. Additionally he has provided re-creations of Prokofiev’s film music (Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible), and concert extracts like his Suite of Dances from ‘Pacific Overtures’.

Brohn’s orchestration is characterized by a sensitivity to colour in support of drama, and by skill over a wide stylistic range, as shown by his orchestration of the very different The Secret Garden and Miss Saigon. The former stands as one of the most notable of theatre orchestrations, with its reconciliation of folk influences (even delicate hints of a rock beat) with the period of the story and the subtlety of its characterization, as well as its chamber textures, exposing the timbres of dulcimer, guitar, harp and recorder. His orchestration of Ragtime evokes the specific milieu of that story with its blues, piano rags, parlour song and other genres, both intimate and public. See also W.D. Brohn: ‘An Arranger Evens the Score’, The Instrumentalist, xlii/6 (1988), 20–26.

WORKS

(selective list)

Theatre orchs (composer in parentheses): Timbuktu (R. Wright and G. Forrest; after Borodin), 1978; King of Hearts (P. Link), 1978; Marilyn, 1983; The Wind in the Willows (W. Perry), 1985; Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, collab. 1989; Miss Saigon (C.-M. Schonberg), 1989; The Secret Garden (L. Simon), 1991; Carousel (R. Rodgers), rev. 1992; Crazy for You (G. Gershwin), rev. 1992; The Red Shoes (J. Styne), collab., 1993; Show Boat (J. Kern), rev. 1993; Ragtime (S. Flaherty and L. Ahrens), 1996

JON ALAN CONRAD

Broken chord.

The effect produced by performing the notes of a chord successively, rather than simultaneously, in any order: thus, a species of melodic figuration related to Arpeggio, and further discussed under Ornaments, §6. See also Alberti bass.

ROBERT DONINGTON

Broken consort.

A term generally taken to mean a consort of instruments of different kinds. See Consort.

Broken octave (i).

A term used to designate a variation of the Short octave in which the lowest ‘sharps’ on keyboard instruments are divided in order to permit sounding of some of the missing accidentals. The front portion of each divided key sounds the pitch that would be expected in a normal short octave, whereas the back portion sounds the accidental that would be expected in a chromatic bass octave. Thus in a C/E broken octave the front portions of the two lowest sharps sound D and E, respectively, while the back portions sound F and G; and in a G'/B' broken octave the front portions of the two lowest sharps sound A' and B' (or B'), while the back portions sound C and E. Occasionally in the latter arrangement only the second sharp is divided, so that the C remains unavailable. Keys divided for this purpose should not be confused with those divided to permit sounding additional chromatic degrees in non-equal temperaments.

EDWIN M. RIPIN

Broken octave (ii).

A term analogous to Broken chord, usually used in the plural to designate the sounding of the notes of a series of octave leaps successively rather than simultaneously. (See also Murky).

EDWIN M. RIPIN

Brollo [Brolo, Bruolo, Bruollo, de Brolis, de Bruolis], Bartolomeo [Bartholus]

(fl c1420–35). Italian composer. He was apparently from Venice, to judge from the ascription to ‘Bartholomeus de bruollis venetus’ in I-TRmn 90 for a Gloria that is perplexingly English in its style. Apart from J'ay grant desir, his songs all appear in the third and fourth gatherings of the Veneto manuscript GB-Ob Can.misc.213, grouped and ascribed in a way that suggests he was close to that manuscript's compiler. The manuscript contains revisions and notational adjustments, and nearly all the texts are in some respects thoroughly confusing. Viveve et recte opens with a very strange rebus; the only song with a clear form is his most successful work, Entrepris suis, which is found in sources as late as the 1480s (quite exceptionally for such an early piece) and with at least three later alternative contratenors. Even this work, however, is odd in its texting: normally five lines of equal length would have roughly equal musical settings, but here they occupy 12, 15, 5, 9 and 12 breves respectively. He uses imitation more than any of his contemporaries except Hugo de Lantins and Johannes Franchois de Gemblaco.

WORKS

Edition: Early Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. G. Reaney, CMM, xi/5 (1975) [complete edn]

mass movement

Gloria, 3vv

french songs

Entrepris suis par grant lyesse, 3vv [rondeau; texted ‘Congratulamini michi omnes’ in CZ-Ps D.G.IV.47; used for a mass by Vincenet]

J'ay grant desir de vostre amour, 2vv [music for 2 equal vv over a tenor; text a single quatrain rhyming ABAB]

Ma belle amour a qui je suy servant, 3vv [1 stanza of evidently corrupt text]

Nulx ne poroit ymaginer, 3vv [apparently a rondeau stanza, though text and underlay seem badly corrupt]

italian songs

O celestial lume agli ochi mei, 2vv [music for 2 equal vv, apparently in rondeau form]

Pulchra speciosa et decora, 2vv [text partly Latin; devotional; form unclear]

Viveve et recte reminiscere, 3vv [text partly Latin; devotional; form unclear]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 suppl. (‘Brolo’; G. Reaney)

G. Reaney: ‘The Italian Contribution to the Manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 213', L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento: Convegno II: Certaldo and Florence 1969 [L'Ars Nova del Trecento, iii (Certaldo, 1970)], 443–64, esp. 451–3

D. Fallows: ‘Two Equal Voices’, EMH, vii (1987), 227–41

M. Gozzi: Il manoscritto Trento, Museo Provinciale d'Arte, cod. 1377 (Tr 90) con un'analisi del repertorio non derivato da Tr 93 (Cremona, 1992)

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999)

DAVID FALLOWS

Broman, Sten

(b Uppsala, 25 March 1902; d Lund, 29 Oct 1983). Swedish composer, conductor, violist and critic. After private studies in Lund he was accepted by Henri Marteau for the latter’s violin masterclass at the German Conservatory in Prague, where he also studied composition with Finke and conducting with Zemlinsky for two years. He then studied musicology with Norlind in Stockholm, with Peter Wagner in Fribourg, Switzerland, and with Sachs in Berlin, taking a licentiate in philosophy at Lund in 1926. He was chief critic of the Sydsvenska dagbladet of Malmö (1930–66, having contributed from Lund from 1923) and co-founder of the Swedish section of the ISCM, serving as its president (1930–62) and as second chairman of the ISCM presidium (1956–9); he was appointed to honorary membership of the ISCM in 1963. He was founder-violist of the Skånekvartetten (1937–48) and the Pianokvartetten av 1948 (1948–51), also appearing as a soloist; and he conducted the South Swedish Philharmonic Society choir (1945–66) as well as various Swedish and Danish orchestras. From 1945 to 1966 he was programme director of the Salomon Smiths Chamber Music Society of Malmö and Lund, and he also worked as a lecturer and broadcaster, his televised music quiz reaching millions throughout Scandinavia.

Broman’s compositional output divides into two distinct periods: before and after 1962. The earlier style, developed in the 1920s, combined a free atonality based on Hindemithian harmonic relationships (e.g. Canon for piano, 1929) with the use of church modes (e.g. Gotisk svit for string orchestra, 1932) and contrapuntal severity. After a time of diminished productivity he began with the First Symphony to attempt to bring serialism and ‘point’ technique into contrapuntal forms. Eight more symphonies quickly followed, developing Broman’s serial procedures and incorporating newer resources such as clusters and tape music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Körsvit, male vv, 1935; Cant. for the 100th Anniversary of the ‘Sydsvenska dagbladet snällposten’, 1948; 2 fakirsånger, male vv, 1958; Musica cathedralis, S, B, choruses, 2 org, bells, orch, tape, 1971

Syms.: No.1 (Sinfonia ritmica), 1962; No.2, 1963; No.3, 1964; No.4, 1965; No.5, with S, 1967; No.6, with org on tape, 1969; No.7, with tape, 1971; No.8, with tape, 1972; No.9, with chorus, 1974

Other orch: Akademisk festuvertyr, 1930; Koralfantasi, 1931; Gotisk svit, str 1932, new finale 1945; Sententia crevit, orch, tape, 1967

Str Qts: 1928, 1936, 1971, 1973

Other chbr: Trio, vn, va, pf, 1936; Fantasi, fuga och koral, va, pf, 1949; Sextet, str, perc, pf, 1963; Septet, perc, cel, pf, 1968; Conc., brass, 1970

Solo inst: Canon, pf, 1929; 3 suites, va, 1935, 1937, 1942; pf and org pieces

Dramatic: Malmö dansar för er (ballet), 1952; music for the theatre and cinema

WRITINGS

Den svenska musikforskningen 1750–1900 (Lund, 1927)

‘Stilbrytningar i sexton- och sjuttonhundratalens musik’, STMf, ix (1927), 39–62

‘Berwalds instrumentalmusik före 1830’,Musikvärlden (1945–6)

‘Franz Berwalds stamträd’, STMf, 1 (1968), 7–50

Världsmusikfestens facit (Stockholm, 1982) [articles on the World Music Festivals of the ISCM 1926–7, facs.]

Upplevelser av 1900-talet: första kvartseklet (Stockholm, 1982) [autobiography]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bergendal: ‘Sten Broman’, 33 svenska komponister (Stockholm, 1972)

Å. Ohlmarks: Boken om Sten Broman (Malmö, 1984)

E. Broman and H.Åstrand, eds.: Sten Broman: en man med kontrapunkter (Stockholm, 1984)

HANS ÅSTRAND

Brombaugh, John

(b Dayton, OH, 1 March 1937). American organ builder. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he was apprenticed to Charles Fisk, Fritz Noack, and Rudolph von Beckerath before establishing his own business in Middletown, Ohio, in 1968. Unlike many small builders, he felt it important to maintain a complete operation in which pipes, keyboards, and other components were made in his own workshop rather than by subcontractors. After several small but distinguished instruments, he built his first sizable organ in 1970, for the First Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio. Brombaugh’s engineering skills are complemented by a scholarly interest in historic instruments, and he has been a pioneer in creating organs incorporating historic visual, tonal and mechanical principles, mainly derived from north European Renaissance and Baroque practices. One of the first of his organs to be built exclusively according to these principles is in the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church, Toledo, Ohio (1972; see illustration). In 1977 Brombaugh moved his firm to larger quarters in Eugene, Oregon, having completed an important instrument for the Lutheran Church there in 1976. His practice organs and positives have been popular with educational institutions. Some of his larger instruments incorporate features such as Swell divisions that permit historically faithful performances of the Romantic repertory. One of Brombaugh’s mechanical innovations is a drawknob with three positions that regulates the level and amplitude of wind pressure by controlling the concussion bellows and the Tremulant. Notable instruments can be found in the USA, in the United Methodist Church, Oberlin, Ohio (1974), Grace Church, Ellensburg, Washington (1974), St Mark’s Church, Storrs, Connecticut (1978), Fairchild Chapel, Oberlin College (1981), Southern Missionary College, Collegedale, Tennessee (1985), Iowa State University (1987) and Lawrence University (1995) and in Europe in Güteborg Organ Academy, Sweden (1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Boe: ‘The Brombaugh Organ at Toledo, Ohio’, Organ Yearbook, v (1974), 115–17

U. Pape: The Tracker Organ Revival in America/Die Orgelbewegung in Amerika (Berlin, 1978)

U. Pape: ‘John Brombaugh’, Organ Yearbook, x (1979), 106–16

J. Hamilton: ‘An Emerging US Organ-building Movement’, MT, cxxv (1984), 347, 407

M.J. Morris-Keinzle: The Life and Work of John Brombaugh, Organ Builder (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1984)

L. Edwards, ed.: The Historical Organ in America (Easthampton, MA, 1992)

BARBARA OWEN

Brommel, Antoine.

See Brumel, Antoine.

Brondino-Vegezzi-Bossi.

See Bossi family.

Bronhill, June [Gough, June Mary]

(b Broken Hill, 26 Feb 1929). Australian soprano. She won a singing competition in Australia and in 1952 moved to England to further her career, first studying with Dino Borioli, then joining the Sadler’s Wells Opera company in 1954. She worked with the company through the early 1960s, singing roles that included Norina, the Queen of the Night, Papagena, Leïla and Gilda. In 1960 she appeared at Covent Garden in the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor. She is, however, best known as Hannah Glawari in Die Lustige Witwe, and called her autobiography The Merry Bronhill (London, 1987); her voice can be heard in its prime on recordings of this role, in The King and I and Lilac Time, and especially as Sombra in The Arcadians.

She created the major role of Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett in Ronald Millar and Ron Grainer’s Robert and Elizabeth (1964), whose vocal part, atypical for a musical, particularly suited her through its high tessitura, wide vocal range and lyricism. Other roles included Maria and later the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music, as well as many further appearances in Die Lustige Witwe. On returning to Australia her versatility was demonstrated by appearances in shows ranging from Women Behind Bars through A Little Night Music to My Fair Lady.

PAUL WEBB

Bronnemüller [Bronmuller, Brunnemüller, Brunnenmüller etc.], Elias

(fl c1690–1712). German composer, active in the northern Netherlands. He is said to have been a pupil of Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti and C.A. Lonati, and, about 1690, he taught Johann Mattheson. In 1703 he visited Arnhem from Kleve, where he may have been employed. Shortly afterwards he went to The Hague, and then settled in Amsterdam, where, on 21 June 1709, he was granted a privilege to publish his own works. Three volumes, mainly of instrumental music, appeared in Amsterdam and Leeuwarden in 1709–12. 1762 is often given as the year of his death, but this is not confirmed by contemporary documents.

Bronnemüller’s compositions are all in the international, italianate idiom of the time, with something of a German flavour, being less polished than, for example, Corelli’s or Albinoni’s. His sonatas are all of the da chiesa type, but sometimes deviate from the standard slow–fast–slow–fast sequence and include the occasional dance movement. The keyboard suites contain an introductory toccatina and a number of dance movements, not following any standard scheme. A figure often employed, almost as a musical ‘signature’, is the chromatically descending 4th in the bass. (MatthesonGEP; WalterML, ‘Brunnmüller’)

WORKS

[6] Sonate, 2 vn, vc, bc (org), op.1 (Amsterdam, 1709); ed. T. Robberts (Fullerton, CA, 1986)

Fasciculus musicus (Leeuwarden, 1711/R): 3 suites, hpd, ed. W.H. Thysse (The Hague, c1950); 1 sonata, ob, bc; 1 sonata, rec, bc, ed. W.H. Thysse (The Hague, c1950); 1 sonata, vn, bc; 3 ariettas, 1v, bc, ob ad lib

VI sonates, ob/vn/fl, bc (Amsterdam, 1712); nos.5–6 ed. R. Rasch (Utrecht, 1985)

RUDOLF A. RASCH

Bronner, Georg [Jürgen]

(b Hamburg, bap. 17 Feb 1667; d Hamburg, bur. 8 March 1720). German composer and organist. In 1688 and 1689 respectively he succeeded his father, Christoph Bronner, as sacristan and organist of the Heilig Geist hospital, Hamburg, and held these positions until 1719. Although his name was put forward for the post of organist of the cathedral and although he also acted as deputy at the Nikolaikirche between 1696 and 1701, he was never appointed to a more important position. This is the more noteworthy in that he was obviously not inferior to other musicians in Hamburg. He was also the only organist there to have connections with the Hamburg opera, of which he was co-director in 1699 and for which he composed a series of works (some in collaboration with Mattheson and Schiefferdecker) between 1693 and 1702. These operas, which received Mattheson's critical approval, are lost, as are two oratorios by him that provoked a protest from the Hamburg city council. In his book of chorales (1715) each melody is set in three different ways – with figured and unfigured basses and as vocal trios, which are notable for their effective part-writing and interesting harmonies. Of Bronner's other music, all of it sacred, the manuscript chorale cantatas show that the strict cantus firmus tradition was beginning to relax its grip: the outer movements, based on the chorale melody, employ simple, traditional techniques, while the inner movements, freed from the chorale, are in up-to-date aria forms. The six sacred concertos (1696) are more important and occupy a special place in north German music of about 1700 in that they survive in print. The collection contains three works for soprano and three for soprano and bass and relies mainly on the psalms for its texts. In illustrating the transformation of the sacred concerto for few voices into cantata-like forms these works also typify the final stage of the genre before madrigal texts began to be used. In them a sound compositional technique, richly ornamented lines and colourful harmony are allied to expressive word-setting.

WORKS

dramatic

all lost, all performed in Hamburg

Echo und Narcissus, op, 1693

Venus oder Die siegende Liebe, op, 1694

Procris und Cephalus, op, 1701

Der Tod des grossen Pans, op, 1702, collab. J. Mattheson

Beatrix, op, 1702 [as Philippus Herzog von Mailand, 1701], ?collab. Mattheson

Victor Herzog der Normannen, op, 1702, collab. J.C. Schiefferdecker and Mattheson

Berenice, op, 1702, possibly by Schiefferdecker

1 orat, 1705

Der Gott liebenden Seelen Wallfahrt, orat, 1710, text, Senatsarchiv, Hamburg

sacred

VI geistliche Concerten, 1, 2vv, 3 insts (Hamburg, 1696)

6 deutsche Cantaten … nach italienischer Manier, 1v, 5 insts (Leipzig, 1699); lost, cited in Göhler

Das … vollkommene Musikalisch-Choral-Buch, 1v, bc (Hamburg, 1715)

Nun lob mein Seel den Herren, 4vv, 2 vn, 2 ob, bc; Nun lob mein Seel den Herren, 2vv, 2 vn, bc: D-Bsb

Es woll uns Gott genädig sein, 3vv, 2 vn, 2 va, vle/bn, bc, Bsb, LUC (dated 1714)

3 sacred works; lost, indicated by text incipits in the legacy of A. Meissner, St Ulrich, Halle (see Serauky)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WaltherML

J. Mattheson: Der musicalische Patriot (Hamburg, 1728/R)

J. Mattheson: Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (Hamburg, 1740); ed. M. Schneider (Berlin, 1910/R)

C. von Winterfeld: Der evangelische Kirchengesang, iii (Leipzig, 1847/R)

F. Chrysander: ‘Matthesons Verzeichnis Hamburgischer Opern’, AMZ, new ser., xii (1877), 198–200

A. Göhler: Verzeichnis der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759 angezeigten Musikalien (Leipzig, 1902/R)

L. Krüger: Die Hamburgische Musikorganisation im 17. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1930)

H.C. Wolff: Die Barockoper in Hamburg 1678–1738 (Wolfenbüttel, 1957)

M. Blindow: Die Choralbegleitung des 18. Jahrhunderts in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands (Regensburg, 1957)

R. Brockpähler: Handbuch zur Geschichte der Barockoper in Deutschland (Emsdetten, 1964)

F. Krummacher: ‘Über das Spätstadium des geistlichen Solokonzerts in Norddeutschland: Bemerkungen zu einem Druckwerk von Georg Bronner’, AMw, xxv (1968), 278–88; xxvi (1969), 63–79

F. Krummacher: Die Choralbearbeitung in der protestantischen Figuralmusik zwischen Praetorius und Bach (Kassel, 1978), esp. 224–8

A. Edler: Der norddeutsche Organist: Studien zu Sozialstatus, Funktion und Komposition (Kassel, 1982), esp. 179–81, 257–63

FRIEDHELM KRUMMACHER

Bronner, Mikhail Borisovich

(b Moscow, 25 Feb 1952). Russian composer. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he studied composition with Khrennikov; he completed his postgraduate studies in 1981 and had become a member of the Composers’ Union in 1979. Notable landmarks in his career were the premières of his ballets Optimistichskaya tragediya (‘An Optimistic Tragedy’) and Ukroshcheniye stropivoy (‘The Taming of the Shrew’) at the Stanislavsky–Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre in Moscow (1985, 1996) and the performance of the Yevreyskiy rekviem (‘Jewish Requiem’) in Germany in 1994.

Bronner writes music predominantly for the theatre and makes extensive use of theatrical elements in other genres: the monumental examples of this can be found in Yevreyskiy rekviem for soloists, chorus and orchestra in which he sets a poem by Chaim Byalik in Yiddish alongside prayers, the address of Maimonid in Tvrit, lines from the diary of Anne Frank, lyric poetry from the Song of Songs and psalms nos.53, 55 and 148. The choral concerto Vereskovïy myod (‘Honey from Heather’) revealed new perspectives for the choral theatre.

An expert choral composer, Bronner makes use of a range of contemporary expressive techniques. He has set a large number of sacred texts: besides the Yevreyskiy rekviem he has set the Dona nobis pacem, Stabat mater and Ave Maria and has written a Psaltïr' (‘Book of Psalms’) for children's choir. He has given much attention to the philosophical and metaphysical poetry of Akhmatova, Brodsky, Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva.

Bronner has written several works which reflect upon the tragedy of Jewish history; along with the Yevreyskiy rekviem, Yevrey: zhizn' i smert', (‘The Jew: Life and Death’) for cello and piano and Lesnitsa Iakova: Angel lyubvi, Angel pechali (‘Jacob's Ladder: the Angel of Love, the Angel of Sorrow’) for four cellos are of note. His chamber works are characterized by subtle differentiation of timbre, complex rhythmic polyphony and metrical and rhythmic mobility, while his music for children is regarded as being particularly effective.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Optimisticheskaya tragediya [An Optimistic Tragedy] (ballet, D.Bryantsev and G. Myatskyavichyus, after V. Vishnevsky), Moscow, Stanislavsky–Nemirovich-Danchenko, 23 Dec 1985; Kholodnoye serdtse [The Cold Heart] (op, S. Mitin, after W. Hauff), 1991; Zolotoy ostrov [The Golden Island] (op, S. Kozlov), 1992, Moscow, Nataliya Sats State Academic Children's Music Theatre, 3 Oct 1993; Ukroshcheniye stroptivoy [The Taming of the Shrew] (ballet, Bryantsev, after W. Shakespeare), Moscow, Stanislavsky–Nemirovich-Danchenko, 8 May 1996Choral: Dvesti desyat' shagov [210 Steps] (orat, R. Rozhdestvensky), chorus, orch, 1980; Krest'yanskiye pesni [Peasant Songs] (A. Kol'tsov), chorus, orch, 1981; Klyuch ot korolevstva/Chudesa v reshete [Key to the Kingdom/Miracles in a Sieve] (cant., Eng. and Scottish folk songs), children's chorus, orch, 1982; Gori-gori yasno [Burn, Burn Brightly] (cant.), children's chorus, orch, 1986; Goryachiy kamen' [The Burning Stone] (cant.-fairy tale, after A. Gaydar), B, children's chorus, orch, 1987; Pesni lyubvi, smerti i vechnosti bïtiya ‘Missa Humanis’ [Songs of Love, Death and the Eternity of Existence] (Ger. 17th-century poems), chorus, orch, 1988; Yevreyskiy rekviem [A Jewish Requiem] (after Ch. Byalik: Gorod Rezni [The City of Carnage]), solo vv, chorus, children's chorus, orch, 1992; Stabat mater, B, children's chorus, orch, 1993; many a cappella choral works; pieces for chorus and solo instsOther vocal: Simfonicheskiye pesni [Sym. Songs] (cant., R. Burns), S, T, orch, 1978; Pridanoye [The Dowry] (dramatic legend, D. Kedrin), S, T, Bar, inst ens, 1981; Pechal'nïye uzorï [Sad Patterns] (song collection, Faiza Akhmad Faiza), B, inst ens, 1984; Ten' derev'yev [The Shadow of the Trees] (chbr cant.), S, hpd, perc ens, 1989; Seraya ptitsa pechali [The Grey Bird of Sorrow] (O. Mandel'shtam), S, chbr orch, 1990; Ave Maria, conc., S, ob,org, 1991; 4 vremeni goda [The 4 Seasons of the Year] (after Ch. Ketszyu), 1v, perc, 1994; many song cycles, 1v, pfInst: Ov., orch, 1984; Qnt, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, 1984; Trio barbaro, cl, vn, vc, 1988; Odinokiy golos [A Lonely Voice], cl, 1989; Vn Conc., 1989; Conc., hn, sax, orch, 1990; Pf Sonata, 1990; Vremena goda ‘Venok Chaykovskomu’ [The Seasons ‘A Wreath for Chaykovsky’], fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1992; Snï Don Kikhota [The Dreams of Don Quixote], sym., orch, 1993; Conc., 2 cl, chbr orch, 1995; Yevrey: zhizn' i smert' [The Jew: Life and Death], vc, pf, 1995; Lestnitsa Iakova: Angel lyubvi, Angel pechali [Jacob's Ladder: the Angel of Love, the Angel of Sorrow], 4 vc, 1996; Sad snov [The Garden of Dreams], vc, bayan, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Ksenofontova: Mikhail Bronner (Moscow, 1987) [VAAP booklet]

M. Gorelik: ‘Bronnerovskoye dvizheniye: op.1, op.2’ [Bronner Movement: op.1, op.2], Ėkran i stsena (1995), no.27; (1996), no.26

I. Romashchuk: ‘Ya veruyu’ [I Believe], MAk (1996), no.1, pp.113–18

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Bronsart [née Starck], Ingeborg (Lena) von

(b St Petersburg, 12/24 Aug 1840; d Munich, 17 June 1913). German composer and pianist of Swedish parentage. She already showed remarkable pianistic and compositional talent before the age of eight. After studies with Henselt in St Petersburg (1855–7), she moved in early 1858 to Weimar to complete her training with Liszt, who came to esteem her as both pianist and composer. In the winter of 1858 she embarked upon a successful career as a travelling virtuoso. She was often accompanied by Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf, whom she had married in 1861. Ingeborg was required to forsake her career as a pianist in 1867 as a result of her husband’s appointments as Intendant at Hanover and Weimar. She then devoted herself to composition, primarily of songs and operas. She achieved her greatest successes with the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Marsch of 1871 (performed at the opening of the Women’s Exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago) and the Singspiel Jery und Bätely (1873), which was performed with acclaim in more than ten German cities. The opera Hiarne was also favourably received at its première in Berlin in 1891. After the couple’s retirement to Munich in 1895, Ingeborg composed the opera Die Sühne, which was produced in Dessau in 1909.

Bronsart’s compositional output embraces the major genres of the time, except for the symphony and oratorio. Regardless of genre, her music displays vocally derived melodies, traditional forms and mildly chromatic harmonies; it is generally characterized by technical mastery. For the piano music and some of the songs, Liszt served as the model, whereas Wagner’s works exerted an influence upon her last two operas (she herself vehemently denied any indebtedness to Wagner’s musical style). Her more successful works, including the opera Jery und Bätely and the Zwölf Kinderreime op.17, incorporate elements derived from folk music. The other operas suffer from poor librettos. The sensitive declamation of Bronsart’s vocal music anticipates the style of Richard Strauss’s songs and operas. Unfortunately, much of the early piano music and more than 30 songs were never published.

WORKS

stage

Die Göttin von Sais, oder Linas und Liane (idyllische Oper, 3, Meyer), Berlin, Kronprinzliches Palais, 1867, lost; lib (Berlin, 1867)

Jery und Bätely (operetta, 1, J.W. von Goethe), Weimar, Hoftheater, 26 April 1873, D-Bsb, Mbn, WRdn, US-NYp*; (Leipzig, 1876)

Hiarne (prol, 3, H. von Bronsart and F. von Bodenstedt), c1870–90; Berlin, Königliches Theater, 14 Feb 1891, D-WRdn*; lib (Weimar, 1896)

Die Sühne (Tragödie, 1, after T. Körner), Dessau, Hoftheater, 12 April 1909, DEl*; vs (Berlin, 1910)

other works

Orch: Pf Conc., f, before 1863; Kaiser-Wilhelm-Marsch (Berlin, 1872)

Chbr: Romanze, a, vn, pf (Weimar, 1873); Notturno, a, vc, pf, op.13 (Leipzig, 1879); Elegie, C, vc, pf, op.14 (Leipzig, 1879); Romanze, B, vc, pf, op.15 (Leipzig, 1879); Phantasie, vn, pf, op.21 (Leipzig, 1891)

Pf: 3 études, Nocturne, Tarantella, all pubd (St Petersburg, 1855); Fuge über die Namen Maria und Martha, Sonata, Variations on themes by Bach, toccatas, other fugues and variations, all before 1859; Kaiser-Wilhelm-Marsch (Berlin, 1871); 4 Clavierstücke (Mainz, 1874): Valse-Caprice, Impromptu, 2 Wiegenlieder; Phantasie, g, op.18 (Leipzig, 1891)

Vocal (for 1v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Die Loreley (H. Heine) (Mainz, 1865); Und ob der holde Tag vergangen (Sturm), 1870, Mbn*; 3 Lieder (Dunker, Neubauer, Zeise) (Mainz, 1871); Hurrah Germania! (F. Freiligrath), male vv (Hanover, 1871); 3 Lieder (Heine, O. Roquette) (Hanover, 1872); Kennst du die rothe Rose?, solo v, male vv, mixed vv (Weimar, 1873); 5 Lieder (Goethe, A. Platen, F. Rückert) (Oldenburg, 1878); 6 Lieder (from Lieder des Mirza Schaffy), op.8 (Leipzig, 1879); Hafisa, 3 Lieder (from Lieder des Mirza Schaffy), op.9 (Leipzig, 1879); 6 Gedichte (Bodenstedt), op.10 (Leipzig, 1879); 5 Weihnachtslieder (Jacobi), op.11 (Oldenburg, 1880); 5 Gedichte (Bodenstedt), op.12 (Oldenburg, 1880); 5 Gedichte (E. von Wildenbruch), op.16 (Breslau [Wrocław], 1882); 12 Kinderreime (after K. Groth: Vaer de Gaern), op.17 (Leipzig, 1882); 6 Gedichte (Lørmontov), op.20 (Leipzig, 1891); 3 Gedichte (P. Cornelius), op.22 (Leipzig, 1891); 3 Lieder (Goethe, N. Lenau), op.23 (Berlin, 1892); Im Lenz (P. Heyse), 1898, Mbn*; Rappelle-toi! (A. de Musset), op.24 (Leipzig, 1902); 3 Lieder (Bodenstedt, Goethe, Heine), op.25 (Leipzig, 1902); Abschied (F. Dahn), op.26 (Leipzig, 1902); Osterlied (Platen), mixed vv (Leipzig, 1903); Lieder (ded. to La Mara), 1910; Verwandlung (Heyse), 1910, Mbn*

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CohenE

FétisBS

Grove1 (W. Barclay Squire)

KompA-Z

NDB (G. Schmidt; ‘Bronsart v. Schellendorf’)

SchmidlD

R. Pohl: ‘Die 14. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins’, NZM, xliv (1877), 233–4 [Jery und Bätely]

E. Polko: ‘Ingeborg von Bronsart: biographisches Skizzenblatt’, Neue Musik-Zeitung, ix (1888), 142–3

‘Sangkönig Hiarne’, NZM, lvii (1890), 37–9

W. Asmus: ‘Ingeborg von Bronsart’, NZM, lxv (1898), 193–5

La Mara [M. Lipsius]: ‘Ingeborg von Bronsart’, Die Frauen im Tonleben der Gegenwart, Musikalische Studienköpfe, v (Leipzig, 1902), 35–53

A. Kohut: ‘Erinnerungen an Bronsart, mit ungedruckten Briefen desselben’, Deutsche Musiker-Zeitung, xliv/48, 50 (1913)

F. Stieger: ‘Opernkomponistinnen’, Die Musik, xiii (1913–14), 270–72

E. Öhrström: Borgerliga kvinnors musicerande i 1800-talets Sverige [Bourgeois women musicians in 19th-century Sweden] (diss., U. of Göteborg, 1987), 202

A.E. Feldman: ‘Being Heard: Women Composers and Patrons at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition’, Notes, xlvii/1 (1990), 7–20

J. Deaville: ‘Ingeborg von Bronsart’, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, ed. M.F. Schleifer and S. Glickman, vii (New York, 2000)

JAMES A. DEAVILLE

Bronsart von Schellendorf, Hans (August Alexander) [Hans von Bronsart]

(b Berlin, 11 Feb 1830; d Munich, 3 Nov 1913). German composer, pianist and conductor. He studied in Berlin with Siegfried Dehn and Kullak (1849–52) and in Weimar with Liszt (1853–7), forming a close association with the ‘New German School’. He toured as a pianist and was Intendant at Hanover (1867) and Weimar (1887–95). He was a co-founder of the Neu-Weimar-Verein (1854) and was influential in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, serving as its president from 1888 to 1898. The many references to his qualities include some from Liszt: ‘I value him as a character and a musician’ (letter to Draeseke, 10 January 1858). Liszt also praised his Piano Trio in G minor (op.1, 1856; published in 1877) as a ‘successful and very respectable work’ (letter to Raff, February 1857) and dedicated his own Second Piano Concerto to Bronsart, who gave the first performance. Bronsart was also closely associated with Bülow, who played the Trio and the Piano Concerto in F minor (op.10), a work that reflects some Wagnerian influence but also suggests an individual vein of lyricism in its Adagio and a virtuosity that is musical as well as pianistic. Bronsart accepted with good grace some bad behaviour by Wagner (who admitted it in Mein Leben) and greatly admired his music, though his loyalties to Bülow led him to refuse to join in public tribute to Wagner. On 14 September 1861 Bronsart married the Swedish pianist and composer Ingeborg Starck. He exacted high standards in his work as an Intendant, engaging distinguished artists; and his personal and artistic qualities are reflected in the correspondence of Liszt, Bülow, Brahms, Wagner and others. His compositions also include two symphonies (1889, 1897; both lost), Frühlings-Fantasie for orchestra op.11 (published c1889), his Piano Concerto in F minor op.10 (published in 1873) and many pieces for piano solo. He wrote Musikalische Pflichten (Leipzig, 1858).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H.R. Jung) [incl. list of works and bibliography]

JOHN WARRACK, BRUCE CARR

Bronskaya, Eugenia

(b St Petersburg, 20 Jan/1 Feb 1882; d Leningrad, 12 Dec 1953). Russian soprano. She studied first with her mother in Russia and later with Teresa Arkel in Milan. After her début at Tbilisi in 1901 she sang for three years in Kiev and from 1905 to 1907 in Moscow. Returning to Italy she performed Tatyana in the Venice première of Yevgeny Onegin. She toured widely until 1909, when she joined the Boston Opera Company, making her début there as Micaëla in Carmen. Other roles included Marguerite de Valois in Les Huguenots, Gilda in Rigoletto and on one occasion the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor, which she undertook for an indisposed colleague as the curtain was about to rise, knowing no more than the Sextet and Mad Scene. At this period she also became well known as a recording artist, and on her return to Russia in 1911 was engaged at the Mariinsky and Bol'shoy theatres. From 1923 to 1950 she taught at the Leningrad Conservatory. Recordings show a bright voice, sometimes hardening on the high notes but used with exceptional skill, especially in staccato passages.

J.B. STEANE

Bronson, Bertrand Harris

(b Lawrenceville, NJ, 22 June 1902; d Berkeley, 14 March 1986). American ballad scholar and musicologist. Like other ballad scholars such as Phillips Barry and S.P. Bayard, he studied English literature (Harvard University, MA 1922; Yale University, PhD 1927; Oxford University, MA 1929) and was able to use his expertise in literary studies in his scholarship on folksong. After teaching at the University of Michigan (1925–6), he joined the English department of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1927, and was appointed professor there in 1945; he retired in 1969.

While recognizing the achievement of F.J. Child in compiling ballad texts, Bronson insisted on the need to study the tunes and their variant forms. He conceived of the ballad as a structural unit within which text and tune were firmly wedded, and his major work, the four-volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959–72), was important both for its research on tunes and the supplementary ballad texts. In his later writings, Bronson combed through different source material, including plainchant, collections of traditional ballads and live recordings, to demonstrate that the ballad was a sung genre. He criticized literary scholars such as Kittredge for privileging text over tunes (The Singing Tradition of Child Popular Ballads, 1976), and in a series of essays spanning 30 years (published as a collection, 1969), he explored the identity of ballad tunes and how they are affected by features such as mode, contour and final. Influenced by G.P. Jackson’s theories on the ‘tune family’, he classified tune variants for each ballad with a Child number not by mode but by melodic typology, showing how the ‘same basic tune may pass from mode to mode almost imperceptibly’. Although he defended the use of church mode designations when this method was becoming unpopular, his perception of the structural dependence of the text and tune in the ballad remains an important contribution to the field.

WRITINGS

‘The Riverside Recordings of the Child Ballads: a Review Article’, Western Folklore, xvi (1957), 189–94

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, i–iv (Princeton, NJ, 1959–72)

The Ballad as Song (Berkeley, 1969)

‘Are the Modes Outmoded?’ YIFMC, iv (1973), 23–31

The Singing Tradition of Child’s Popular Ballads (Princeton, NJ, 1976)

‘Let’s Make It a Tradition’, YIFMC, xi (1979), 27–39

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Porter, ed.: The Ballad Image: Essays presented to Bertrand Harris Bronson (Los Angeles, 1983)

A. Green: ‘Bertrand Harris Bronson (1902–1986)’, Journal of American Folklore, c (1987), 297–9

JAMES PORTER

Bronteron.

See Thunder machine, thunder sheet.

Bronze drum.

A bronze idiophone (sometimes called bronze kettledrum) but with a bronze tympanum instead of a skin head.

1. General.

It dates from about 400 bce or earlier and has had wide distribution in South-east Asia and Southern China beginning with the spread of Dongson Culture in 300 bce. The first known bronze drum to reach Europe was sent to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1682 by G.E. Rumphius, who also first described the famous ‘Moon of Pedjeng’ drum on the island of Bali (1705). This, the largest bronze drum ever found (1·86 metres high with a tympanum 1·6 metres in diameter), is kept in a small pavilion of a temple in the village of Pejeng and is still revered as the former wheel of the ‘moon carriage’. Bronze drums were exhibited in Vienna and Amsterdam in 1883. In 1884 a study of 52 bronze drums (mostly in museums or private collections) was published by the ethnologist A.B. Meyer, and in 1902 Franz Heger established a classification of four types of bronze drum (Heger I–IV) based on the study of 165 instruments.

Six large stone moulds are required to cast the upper, middle and lower zones of the shell of the bronze drum (each zone being made in two halves and then brazed to form a longitudinal seam); another is needed to form the tympanum, which is later joined to the shell. Such moulds (needed to cast a Heger I bronze drum) have never been found in Java. Fragments of small stone moulds unearthed in Bali were apparently used locally to make bronze drums of the mokko type (the same form as the ‘Moon of Pedjeng’); these are distinct from the Heger types because of their hourglass shape and because the diameter of the tympanum is less than the height of the drum (whereas in all Heger drums this relationship is reversed). Small mokko drums were probably cast in Bali, but large stone moulds of this type have not been recovered, so there is some doubt whether the great ‘Moon of Pedjeng’ drum was made locally.

Bronze drums have been widely studied by Western historians and archaeologists since they provide probably the richest single source of information about the period of Dongson Culture. The tympanum usually has a raised star in its centre, and the drums are decorated with a variety of abstract designs and representations of the soul-ship or ship-of-the-dead, houses, animals, birds, fish, men, women, children, warriors etc. The Karen of Myanmar still use bronze drums called hpà-si (‘frog drums’; see Myanmar, §1) decorated around the circumference of the drumhead with figures of small frogs, which are thought to symbolize the drum’s rain-making powers, and some places in south-east Asia also distinguish the ‘male’ drum from the ‘female’ drum without frogs.

The bronze drum has been little studied as a musical instrument; that they were carried in battle suggests they were used as signalling instruments.

2. China.

The Chinese bronze drum (tong gu) can be found among many tribal peoples living in southern-central China (especially in Guizhou and Guangxi provinces), such as Miao, Zhuang, Yao and the eastern Yi. Tong gu is a Chinese name (literally, ‘bronze drum’, not to be confused with the Shang dynasty barrel-shaped drum of the same name, China, §III); local names differ from one culture to another (Yuan, 1986, p.324).

In terms of structure the instrument is essentially a gong. Constructed of a tubular shell with concave sides, it is covered at one end with a flat disc-shaped plate or ‘drumhead’ of bronze (its rim extending out beyond the shell), its other end open. Diameters of ‘drumheads’ usually vary between about 50 and 100 cm, though some instruments are considerably larger. Attached to opposite sides of the shell are two pairs of loops (called ‘ears’) through which stout ropes are inserted for suspension. The striking plate is often (but not always) decorated with a central star-shaped design (12 points are most common), concentric circles, various geometric patterns and four or six bronze figures in the shape of small frogs (though sometimes of bats or birds) attached to the surface around the outer rim. Two size groups are generally differentiated, small male gongs which sound a high pitch, and large female gongs which sound a low pitch.

While performance practice differs from area to area, the tong gu is usually suspended by its loops, striking plate sideways, and hit with either a padded beater or hand of the performer; the rim or side of the shell are often struck as well. Sometimes a large wooden tub is positioned opposite the tong gu to increase the resonance, or a barrel partially filled with water is placed underneath and shaken for special acoustical effects.

Many ‘bronze drums’ have been found in south-central China. The oldest instrument, uncovered at a site in central Yunnan province, has been dated to about the 6th century bce. This gong is relatively plain, with an eight-point star in the centre but without the raised figures found on later instruments. Gongs dating to about the 4th century bce and later have been found in extraordinary numbers (many presently in the collection of the Yunnan Provincial Museum in Kunming). Some are decorated with stars and geometric patterns only; others are more highly decorated with raised figures surrounding the striking plate. The tong gu is cited in Chinese literature and poetry from the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) onward for its usage in various tribal contexts. Sources suggest it was also considered a status symbol. While sometimes thought to be a relic of the past, the instrument is still in use among many Chinese tribal cultures, especially in accompaniment of dances associated with wedding ceremonies, agricultural festivals, lunar New Year celebrations and other contexts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Heger: Alte Metalltrommeln aus Südost-Asien (Leipzig, 1902)

K. Hayashi: Dongya yueqi kao [Study of East Asian musical instruments] (Beijing, 1962/R), 68ff

Jiang Tingyu: Tonggu shihua [Historical stories on the tong gu] (Beijing, 1982)

Yuan Bingchang and Mao Jizeng, eds.: Zhongguo shaoshu minzu yueqi zhi [Dictionary of musical instruments of the Chinese minorities] (Beijing, 1986)

Chen Weiye and others, eds.: Flying Dragon and Dancing Phoenix: an Introduction to Selected Minority Folk Dances (Beijing, 1987), 191–2, 220–22

Liu Dongsheng and others, eds.: Zhongguo yueqi tuzhi [Pictorial record of Chinese musical instruments] (Beijing, 1987), 96–8, 188–9

A.J. Bernet Kempers: Monumental Bali (Singapore, 1991)

Liu Dongsheng, ed.: Zhongguo yueqi tujian [Pictorial guide to Chinese instruments] (Ji’nan, 1992), 90–91

MANTLE HOOD (1), ALAN R. THRASHER (2)

Brook, Barry S(helley)

(b New York, 1 Nov 1918; d New York, 7 Dec 1997). American musicologist. He took the BS at the City College of New York in 1939 and the MA at Columbia University in 1942. At Columbia his professors included Lang and Hertzmann, and he also studied with Hugh Ross and Roger Sessions. He received the doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1959. From 1945 he taught at Queens College, New York; he was a visiting professor at New York University (1964–5) and the University of Paris (1967–8). In 1967 he founded and was appointed executive officer of the PhD programme at the Graduate School, CUNY and he taught the doctoral seminar and advised doctoral students at the Juilliard School, 1977–88. From 1974 he was responsible for assembling at CUNY a facsimile archive of 18th- and early 19th-century autographs, manuscripts and prints (a thematic catalogue of this archive was published as Symphonic and Chamber Music Score and Parts Bank, ed. R.H. Rowen, Stuyvesant, NY, 1996). He instigated a new doctoral programme in 1983 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and in 1986 he founded the DMA programme at the Graduate School. He was also general editor of the historical series The Symphony, 1720–1840 (New York, 1979–85), for which he prepared the reference volume (New York, 1986). He became professor emeritus in 1989, after which he served as director of the Center for Music Research and Documentation, New York. At the time of his death he was editor-in-chief of the projected 75-volume historical series French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; he was also president and editor of the planned 17-volume reference work Universe of Music, which seeks to write an international history of music by employing teams of scholars from each region.

Brook made a study of Renaissance secular music, musical iconography, the sociology of music, and music and aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries. His doctoral dissertation is an exemplary study of the development of the French symphony in the second part of the 18th century and provides extensive documentation, a thematic catalogue of more than 1,200 symphonies and an edition of eight representative works. As editor of a facsimile edition of the Breitkopf Thematic Catalogues (New York, 1966) he assembled into a single volume the many parts of the earliest and largest printed thematic catalogue of music, an important source for the identification and dating of 18th-century compositions. Brook was also interested in musical bibliography and its history, and he was founder (1966) and general editor of RILM, the first international bibliography of music scholarship. A pioneer in computer applications for music documentation, he developed the ‘Plaine and Easie Code System’ for notating music.

WRITINGS

La symphonie française dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (diss., U. of Paris, 1959; Paris, 1962)

‘The Symphonie Concertante: an Interim Report’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 493–516

‘Simon Le Duc l’aîné, a French Symphonist at the Time of Mozart’, MQ, xlviii (1962), 498–513

‘Jousting for Queens or Return to the (Music) Lists’, College Music Symposium, iv (1964), 25–35

with M. Gould: ‘Notating Music with Ordinary Typewriter Characters’, FAM, xi (1964), 142–59

ed.: Musicology and the Computer: Musicology 1966–2000: New York 1965 and 1966 [incl. ‘Music Documentation of the Future’, 28–36; ‘The Plaine and Easie Code’, 53–6]

ed.: The Breitkopf Thematic Catalogue, 1762–1787 (New York, 1966)

‘Music Bibliography and the Computer’, Computer Applications in Music: Morgantown, WV, 1966, 11–27

‘Music Literature and Modern Communication: some Revolutionary Potentials of the RILM Project’, AcM, xlii (1970), 205–17

‘Sturm und Drang and the Romantic Period in Music’, Studies in Romanticism, ix (1970), 269–84

‘The Earliest Printed Thematic Catalogues’, Festskrift Jens Peter Larsen, ed. N. Schiørring, H. Glahn and C.E. Hatting (Copenhagen, 1972), 103–12

ed., with E.O.D. Downes and S. Van Solkema: Perspectives in Musicology (New York, 1972/R) [incl. ‘Musicology as a Discipline: a Selected Bibliography’, 335–46]

Thematic Catalogues in Music: an Annotated Bibliography (Hillsdale, NY, 1972, enlarged 2/1997)

‘The Symphonie concertante: its Musical and Sociological Bases’, IRASM, vi (1975), 9–20

‘Piracy and Panacea in the Dissemination of Music in the Late Eighteenth Century’, PRMA, cii (1975–6), 13–36

‘Music, Musicology and Related Disciplines’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 69–77

‘New Directions in Music Documentation: Phantasy and Reality’, FAM, xxviii (1981), 4–12

‘Determining Authenticity through Internal Analysis’, Joseph Haydn: Vienna 1982, 551–66

with M. Paymer: ‘The Pergolesi Hand: a Calligraphic Study’, Notes, xxxviii (1982), 550–78

‘Haydn's String Trios: a Misunderstood Genre’, CMc, no.36 (1983), 61–77

‘Christian Ulrich Ringmacher (1743–1781): his Heritage, his Firm, and his Catalogue’, Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. E. Strainchamps, M.R. Maniates and C. Hatch (New York, 1984), 243–61

‘Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Kurt Dorfmuller, RISM, Musikalische Real-Zeitung und die Königin von Spanien’, Ars iocundissima: Festschrift for Kurt Dorfmüller, ed. H. Leuchtmann and R. Münster (Tutzing, 1984), 15–35

‘The Motets of François Martin’, Le grand motet français: Paris 1984, 277–90

‘Music in the Life of Man: Theoretical and Practical Foundations for a World History’, AcM, lvii (1985), 109–21

‘Music in the Life of Man: Two Country Profiles’, The World of Music, xxviii/2 (1986), 102–24

‘The Pergolesi Complete Works Edition and the General Problems of Using Internal Analysis for Determining Authenticity’, Opera incerta: Echtheitsfragen als Problem musikwissenschaftlicher Gesamtausgaben: Mainz 1988, 319–31

‘Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: the “Pergolesi” Sources’, Musiques, signes, images: liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. J.M. Fauquet (Geneva, 1988), 41–66

EDITIONS

with F. Degrada and H. Hucke: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: The Complete Works (New York and Milan, 1986–)

with B.C. MacIntyre: Streichtrios, Joseph Haydn: Werke, xi/1–2 (Munich, 1986–96)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Atlas, ed.: Music in the Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook (New York, 1985) [incl. list of pubns, 359–74]

PAULA MORGAN

Brook, Peter (Stephan Paul)

(b London, 21 March 1925). English director. He studied at Oxford, where his theatrical skills first became apparent. His main work has been in the spoken theatre, but between 1948 and 1950 he caused several sensations at Covent Garden with his avant-garde stagings. These included a highly idiosyncratic Boris Godunov designed by George Wakhévitch (1948), and an outrageous (for its time) Salome (1949), with decor by Dali, which was abandoned after six controversial performances. He also staged the première of Bliss’s The Olympians at Covent Garden (1949). Brook was regarded as an enfant terrible: he was determined to rehearse operas as he would plays, and was not prepared to tolerate good singers who were bad actors. In 1953 he filmed Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera with Laurence Olivier. His Faust at the Metropolitan in 1953 caused something of a furore, but his Yevgeny Onegin there in 1957 was by comparison more conventional. After that Brook gave up directing opera, concluding that the public for that art was not yet ready for his advanced ideas. He returned to the fray with his own company, producing La tragédie de Carmen at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris in the 1981–2 season. This was a reduction of the piece, both dramatically and musically, to fit into a tiny venue. The results were arresting and typically unconventional yet faithful to the Mérimée-Bizet ethos. The staging travelled to various centres and was filmed for television. He repeated the experiment, again at the Bouffes du Nord, with Impressions de Pelléas in 1993, and in 1998 directed Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival with Claudio Abbado conducting. He was made a CBE in 1965.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Trewin: Peter Brook (London, 1971)

J. Spenlehauer and others: ‘Carmen, ou l’essentialisation de l’opéra’, Les voies de la création théâtrale, xiii: Brook, ed. G. Banu (Paris, 1985), 165–255

P. Brook: Threads of Time: a Memoir (London, 1998)

ALAN BLYTH

Brooklyn Philharmonia.

New York orchestra founded in 1955. See New York, §3.

Brooks, (Troyal) Garth

(b Tulsa, 7 Feb 1962). American country singer and songwriter. Like others of his generation, Brooks was influenced by the country-rock movement of the 1970s and by rock songwriters such as Billy Joel, whose Shameless he recorded. Singing in a pleasant, unaccented but warm tenor, he managed to combine these influences with more conventional country music narrative concerns in such songs as the sentimental If Tomorrow Never Comes, the poetic The Dance, and such comic honky-tonk pieces as Friends in Low Places and American Honky-Tonk Bar Association. He was also prepared to take on the contemporary social issues of domestic violence in The Thunder Rolls (1991) and AIDS in The Fever (1996).

Brooks was the most commercially successful of all country music performers in the 1990s, selling over 60 million albums between 1989 and 1996. His appeal was built equally on the energetic character of his concert performances, where he used a portable microphone hooked to his trademark ten-gallon hat. Although his stage shows have brought comparisons with rock music concerts, the hat symbolized his skill in appealing to traditional country music audiences while broadening his constituency.

DAVE LAING

Brooks, James

(b Bath, 1757/1760; d London, before 7 Jan 1810). English violinist and composer. He played in major concerts in Bath as early as 1771, and was leading the city orchestra five years later. Apart from one short period, he subsequently led most of the major performances in Bath until just after the turn of the century. However, he was well known as a performer and concert director throughout the west of England, appearing in Bristol in 1791, 1792 and 1798. He also played in London, taking part in the Handel Commemoration performances in 1784, performing at St Paul's Cathedral in 1792 and 1794, at Vauxhall Gardens in 1800 and, possibly, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, during the 1807–8 season.

It was in the Bath theatre, nevertheless, that much of Brooks's success arose. In addition to directing the band and performing concertos, he provided original music for popular operas and incidental music for plays, and also arranged the scores for other stage productions. Many of these were performed in London and elsewhere. His vocal writing is mostly lightweight, and many ballads and glees were first heard in concerts he directed in the Bath pleasure gardens or at the city's Catch Club, of which he became the secretary in 1794. Some of his works were also performed in Rauzzini's subscription concerts.

Though most of Brooks's instrumental works are now lost, it was for these that he received most praise. He composed many of his own solos, and the surviving Concerto for the Violin ‘in nine parts’, published in 1792, reveals much charm. Apart from some excessive note-spinning in the last movement, it has melodic and harmonic qualities which well account for the general popularity of his music. Other works performed in the concerts include duets for violin and cello, and sonatas for harpsichord or pianoforte with violin accompaniment. The 36 pieces for military band were probably composed for the Bath Volunteers, who sometimes performed their ‘exercises’ in the theatre, and, in April 1794, ‘Several Select Pieces arranged for a Military Band’ were played between the acts of his benefit performance there.

Life in Bath was far from easy for Brooks. He seems to have had an abrasive side to his character, and financial disaster was always close at hand. His benefit performances at times attracted ‘all the leading Fashion [and] Royalty itself’, but rarely did one produce an adequate profit for the needs of his large family. He became increasingly active in Bristol and London and, early in the 19th century, his ‘last Benefit’ in Bath was announced. Thereafter, he spent most of his remaining years performing in the London theatres.

WORKS

published in London unless otherwise stated

instrumental

Concerto for the Violin in 9 Parts, pts (1792); arr. vn, pf (Bath, 1985)

Favourite Sonata, hpd/pf, vn (c1795)

36 Select Pieces for a Military Band, cl, hn, bn (1796)

2 Duets for 1 Performer, vn, op.4 (?1802)

12 English Ballads, pf, hp, op.5 (?1805)

Sonata, pf, vn (?1805)

Nocturne, pf, vc (1828)

vocal

Glees: 12 Glees, 3–4vv (Bath, c1796); A Second Sett of 12 Glees (c1798); The Shepherd's Daughter, Sally, arr. W. Hawes (1820)

Pastoral dialogues: Damon and Phillis, 2vv (c1800)

Songs and ballads, incl. Louisa (c1788); As when some maiden in her teens (c1790) [in The Lover's Device]; Fragrant garlands love shall strew (c1790) [in The Vicissitudes of Harlequin]; Now home again from foreign climes, 2vv (c1790) [in The Lover's Device]; William and Ann (c1795); Ere my dear laddie gade to sea (c1800); How sweetly did the moments pass (c1800); The Tambourine (Dublin, c1800) [with tambourine acc.]; Young Damon was a shepherd boy (c1800)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

B. Matthews, ed.: The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain List of Members 1738–1984 (London, 1985)

K.E. James: Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Bath (diss., U. of London, 1987)

KENNETH E. JAMES

Brooks, William (Fordyce)

(b New York, 17 Dec 1943). American musicologist and composer. He studied music and mathematics at Wesleyan University (BA 1965) and then attended the University of Illinois, receiving degrees in musicology (MM 1971) and composition and theory (DMA 1976). His instructors included Hamm in musicology and Johnston, Gaburo, Brün and Cage in composition. He taught at the University of Illinois (1969–73) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1973–7). He was active as a freelance composer, scholar and performer (1977–87), before returning to Illinois as associate professor of composition and theory (1987); he was visiting lecturer at the University of Keele (1977–8), Middlebury College (1982), the Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College (1983), and Goldsmiths' College, London (1995–6). As a musicologist he has written extensively on American music, particularly on Ives and Cage, and was adviser on 19th-century music for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. As a composer he has received commissions from the British Arts Council (1978), the Gulbenkian Foundation (1981) and the Kronos Quartet (1986). His compositions frequently refer to aspects of American music history, but challenge the listener (sometimes humorously) to hear familiar material in unexpected ways by recasting, juxtaposing and transforming it.

WORKS

Stage: Untitled (J.L. Borges), 8 solo vv, 2 spkr, 1972; The Legacy (chbr op, Brooks), 4 solo vv, live elecs, actor, 1982–3

Orch: Dancing on your Grave, chbr orch, 1990

Chbr and solo inst: Poempiece I: whitegold blue, fl, 1967; Wallpaper Pieces, pf, 1979–; Footnotes, gui, 1981–4; Different Drummers, snare drum, 1987–8; 5 Strings/3 Players, 2 vn, va, 1987–8; For Violin, vn, 1990; The Kitchen Sink and the Water in it, fl, cl, tpt, 2 trbn, perc, 1991; Makers, fl, cl, vn, vc, perc, 1992; Common Ground, wind ens, steel band, 1995; Lullaby, 4 tpt, 3 trbn, bell, 1998

Vocal: Gertrude Stein Trilogy: I, Many Returns, 50 songs, S, pf, 1977, II, Medley, 7 songs, S, pf, 1978, III, Madrigals (O. Gibbons, S. Foster, Brooks), S, A, T, B, amp, 1977–8; De Harmonium (W. Stevens), S, A, T, B, amp, amp st qt, tape, 1986; A Peal for Calm (J. Joyce), choruses, pf, 1987; 4 Alte Lieder (R.M. Rilke), amp S, vn, va, 1993; in memoriam reducere studemus (P. Joris), S, A, T, B, chorus, pf, 1996

WRITINGS

‘Ives Today’, An Ives Celebration: Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, CT, 1974, 209–23

‘Unity and Diversity in Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony’, YIAMR, x (1974), 5–49

‘Competenza Maledetta’, PNM, xviii (1979–80), 11–45

‘The American Piano’, The Book of the Piano, ed. D. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 172–86

‘Good Musical Paste: Getting the Acts Together in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Theatre in America: Greenvale, NY, 1981, 37–58

‘Choice and Change in Cage's Recent Music’, TriQuarterly, no.54 (1982), 148–66; repr. in A John Cage Reader, ed. P.G. Brent, J. Brent and D. Gillespie (New York, 1982), 82–100

‘On Being Tasteless’, Popular Music, ii (1982), 9–18

‘A Drummer-Boy Looks Back: Percussion in Ives's Fourth Symphony’, Percussive Notes, xxii/6 (1984), 4–45

‘Pocohontas: her Life and Times’, American Music, ii/4 (1984), 19–48

‘About Cage about Thoreau’, John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. R. Fleming and W. Duckworth (Lewisburg, PA, 1989), 59–73

‘The Americas, 1945–1970’, Man & Music, viii: From World War I to the Present, ed. R.P. Morgan (London and Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), 309–48

‘John Cage and History: Hymns and Variations’, PNM, xxxi/2 (1993), 74–103

‘Roaratorio Appraisiated’, ‘16 Dances’, Writings about John Cage, ed. R. Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor, 1993), 222–4, 341–4

‘Music in America: an Overview’, The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. D. Nicholls (Cambridge, 1998), 30–48, 257–75

KATHERINE K. PRESTON

Broonzy, Big Bill [William Lee Conley]

(b Scott, MS, 26 June 1893; d Chicago, 14 Aug 1958). American blues singer and guitarist. He grew up in Arkansas, where he lived on a farm until he was in his late 20s. After working as a fiddle player in the rural South, he settled in Chicago in 1920. There he learnt to play the guitar, on which he was already an outstanding performer when he began to record ten years later. In the late 1930s and the 1940s he was sympathetically supported by Joshua Altheimer or Black Bob Hudson on the piano in a manner reminiscent of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell.

One of the most prolifically recorded of black American blues singers, Broonzy formed a link between the country and urban blues traditions, playing with a light, lilting style. Some of his recorded blues are poetic statements, complemented by moaning notes on the guitar, such as Big Bill Blues (1932, Charnpion) and Friendless Blues (1934, Bb), while others are of a ribald or ‘hokum’ character, including Keep your hands off her (1935, Bb) and Good Jelly (1935, Bb). He was later one of the first blues singers to use the trumpet and saxophone in small-band accompaniments, but the several recordings he made in this form were less successful than his earlier work. He sang in France in 1951 and subsequently made several visits to Europe, where he recovered the old country songs he had played in his early years. He also recorded more than 200 titles, including several versions of John Henry and the protest song Black, Brown and White (both 1951, Vogue). Broonzy's generosity, his considerable talents and his support of younger singers, combined with a homely wit, made him one of the most popular of all blues musicians.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Broonzy and Y. Bruynoghe: Big Bill Blues (London, 1955/R)

P. Oliver: The Story of the Blues (London, 1969/R)

M. Rowe: Chicago Breakdown (London, 1973/R)

Living Blues, no.55 (1982–3) [several articles]

A. Lomax: The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993)

C. Smith: Hit the Right Lick: the Recordings of Big Bill Broonzy (Shetland, 1997)

PAUL OLIVER

Brophy, Gerard

(b Sydney, 7 Jan 1953). Australian composer. He initially trained as a pharmacist, his first serious musical studies, as a guitarist, beginning in 1975. Attending Kagel's composition seminar in Basel in 1977 stimulated him to pursue a career as a composer; he subsequently studied with Richard Toop at the Sydney Conservatorium (1978–81). In 1982–3, with his Sydney fellow student Riccardo Formosa, he worked with Donatoni at the Accademia Nazionale in Rome, and in 1983 acted as Donatoni's assistant at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena. In 1987 he was appointed to teach composition at the Queensland Conservatorium.

Until the early 1990s Brophy's music was primarily influenced by Italian music, especially that of Donatoni and Sciarrino. These earlier works are predominantly fast and rhythmically intricate, making virtuoso demands of performers and exploring various ‘extended techniques’; they also reveal a penchant for laconic, often provocative titles, such as Flesh and Head. Later, following trips to the USA, Brophy's work became more eclectic and lyrical in style, while developing a taste for the kind of sophisticated instrumentation first apparent in Forbidden Colours. Though his work of the mid-1990s consists mainly of short works for small ensembles, two significant new traits emerged during that decade: the use of live electronics, beginning with Le domaine enchanté, and the incorporation of styles and instruments drawn from non-Western cultures, as in the percussion quartet Umbigada, obrigado!

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Nadja, 1981; Exú, vn, orch, 1982; Orfeo, str orch, 1984; Mathô, 1987; Le réveil de l'ange, pf, orch, 1987; Forbidden Colours, chbr orch, 1988; Les roses sanglantes, b cl, orch, 1990; Lautréamont, fl, orch, 1992; Le domaine enchanté, chbr orch, live elecs, 1993; Colour red…your mouth…heart, 1994; Slang, a fl, b cl, pf, chbr orch, 1995; Samba Mauve, gui, chbr orch, 1997; Merge, 1998

Chbr and solo inst: Breathless, 3 fl, pf, 1982; Sofrê, hpd, cel, vib, str qt, 1983; Très doux tremblement de terre, 2 pf, 1983; Lace, str qt, 1984; Scintille, fl, b cl, pf, vn, va, vc, 1984; Head, fl, b cl, pf, 1988; Nymphe – Echo morphologique, fl, 1989; Angelicon, pf, 1991; Twist, cl/b cl/cb cl, 1993; Vox Angelica, 4 perc, str qt, live elecs, 1993; Tudo Liquido, 3 cl, 3 trbn, pf, 2 perc, 1994; Umbigada, obrigado!, 4 perc, 1995

Vocal: Flesh, 2 S, Mez, Bar, fl + picc + a fl, 3 cl, cel, hpd + pf, 2 perc, vc, 1987; Shiver, Mez, picc, b cl, mand, gui, hp, perc, vn, db, 1990; crimson songs, S, b cl, pf, va, vc, 1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Brown and B. Swain: ‘Gerard Brophy's Axé: a Critical Analysis’, AMC News: Australia Music Centre Newsletter, no.10 (1986), 6–9

RICHARD TOOP

Broqua, Alfonso

(b Montevideo, 11 Sept 1876; d Paris, 24 Nov 1946). Uruguayan composer. Along with Fabini and Cluzeau Mortet, he was a leading figure of early 20th-century musical nationalism in Uruguay. He left for Europe at the age of 18 and studied for six years with d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris before returning to Montevideo in 1904. The première of his lyric poem Tabaré in 1910 was a major event in the establishment of the nationalistic style that was to exploit, for the first time in Uruguayan art music, the forms, themes, instruments and dance types of Uruguayan folklore. Typical examples of the evocative quality of Broqua’s scores are Tabaré, Preludios pampeanos (1938) and Evocaciones criollas (1929). His Piano Quintet is considered one of his most significant works. Broqua’s extensive literary efforts encompass an opera libretto (La cruz del sur), song texts and frequent contributions to the newspaper El siglo.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tabaré (lyric poem), solo vv, female chorus, pf/orch 1910; La cruz del sur (lyric drama, 3, Broqua), 1919–22, unpubd; Telén y Nagüey (Inca ballet), 1932; Isabelle (children’s ballet), 1938

Orch: Impresiones sinfónicas, 1912; Noche campera, sym. poem, 1931; Poema de las Lomas, sym. triptych [after pf work], 1937

Chamber: Pf Qnt, g, c1914

Principal publisher: Eschig

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compositores de América/Composers of the Americas, ed. Pan American Union, xvi (Washington DC, 1970)

JOHN M. SCHECHTER

Brosa, Antonio

(b Canonja, 27 June 1894; d Barcelona, 23 March 1979). Spanish violinist. He studied with Ainaud in Barcelona and with Mathiell Čricboom in Brussels, and made his début at the age of ten in Barcelona. He settled in London in 1914 and was one of the first violinists to broadcast from the 2LO Studio in Savoy Hill in 1920. He formed the Brosa String Quartet (1925–39) which became well known in Europe and the USA, and had a great influence on the standards of ensemble playing. He went to the USA in 1940 and, on the death of Alphonse Onnue, became leader of the Pro Arte Quartet and toured the USA for four years. Brosa had a polished style and an incisive but sweet tone. He formed duo partnerships with Mathilde Verne (1924–7) and Kathleen Long (1948–66). He gave the first performance of Britten's Violin Concerto (New York, 1940, with Barbirolli), and the first broadcast performance for the BBC of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto. His instrument was the ‘Vesuvius’ Stradivari of 1727. He taught at the RCM for many years and was made a Commander of the Order of Civil Merit (Spain).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CampbellGV

SchwarzGM

J. Creighton: Discopaedia of the Violin, 1889–1971 (Toronto, 1974)

M. Campbell: ‘Antonio Brosa: Profile’, The Strad, xc (1979), 186–9

WATSON FORBES/MARGARET CAMPBELL

Brosche, Günter

(b Vienna, 17 Feb 1939). Austrian musicologist. He studied musicology and drama with Schenk, Wessely and Heinz Kindermann at the University of Vienna, where he took the doctorate in 1962 with a dissertation on Joseph von Sonnenfels and the Viennese theatre. He subsequently worked as a librarian in the music collection of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and became its director in 1981; in the same year he was made head of the Institut für Österreichische Musikdokumentation. In 1975 he became secretary of the Internationale Richard Strauss-Gesellschaft. He was awarded the title of Hofrat in 1984. In 1997, he became a lecturer at the University of Vienna.

His research has been mainly concerned with Austrian music from the 17th century to the 20th, and includes work on Beethoven, Richard Strauss and Bruckner. He is editor of the journals Publikationen des Instituts für Österreichische Musikdokumentation, Katalog der Sammlung Anthony van Hoboken and Musica manuscripta.

WRITINGS

Joseph von Sonnenfels und das Wiener Theater (diss., U. of Vienna, 1962)

‘Aus Beethovens Alltag: neue Forschungsergebnisse über einige Wiener Bekannte des Meisters in den Jahren 1819/20’, ÖMz, xxvi (1971), 381–6

Gottfried von Einem: das dramatische Werk, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 24 May – 5 June 1971 (Vienna, 1971) [exhibition catalogue]

ed., with others: Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, i–iii, vii–x (Leipzig, 1972–93)

Richard-Strauss-Bibliographie, ii: 1944–1964 (Vienna, 1973)

‘Anton Bruckners Traditionsbewusstsein’, ÖMz, xxix (1974), 430–33

ed., with others: Anton Bruckner zum 150. Geburtstag, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 29 May – 12 Oct 1974 (Vienna, 1974) [exhibition catalogue]

‘Anton Bruckner und Hugo Wolf’, Bruckner-Studien, ed. O. Wessely (Vienna, 1975), 171–85

ed.: Beiträge zur Musikdokumentation: Franz Grasberger zum 60. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1975) [incl. ‘Die musikalischen Werke Kaiser Leopolds I: ein systematisch-thematisches Verzeichnis der erhaltenen Kompositionen’, 27–82]

ed.: ‘Richard Strauss–Ludwig Karpath: Briefwechsel 1902–1933’, Richard Strauss-Blätter, no.6 (1975), 2–29; no.7 (1976), 1–18

ed.: Richard Strauss: Autographen in München und Wien (Tutzing, 1979)

ed.: Richard Strauss-Franz Schalk: ein Briefwechsel (Tutzing, 1983)

‘“Meine Sprache versteht die ganze Welt” (J. Haydn) die Musiksammlung’, Ein Weltgebäude der Gedanken: die Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ed. O. Mazal (Graz, 1987), 155–202

ed.: Beiträge zur musikalischen Quellenkunde: Katalog der Sammlung Hans P. Wertitsch in der Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Tutzing, 1989)

ed.: Requiem: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1791/1991, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 17 May – 5 Dec 1991 (Graz, 1991) [exhibition catalogue]

‘The Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra by Richard Strauss (1945): Remarks about the Origin of the Work’, Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Work, ed. B. Gilliam (Durham, NC, 1992), 177–92

‘Die Musiksammlung als Nachlassverwalter Anton Bruckners: mit dem Erstdruck einiger Briefe’, Flores litterarum: Ioanni Marte sexagenario oblati, ed. H.W. Lang (Vienna, 1995), 9–22

‘Gustav Mahler in der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek’, Gustav Mahler: Werk und Wirken, ed. E.W. Partsch (Vienna, 1996), 43–9

ed.: Richard Strauss-Clemens Krauss: Briefwechsel (Tutzing, 1997)

EDITIONS

Anton Bruckner: I. Symphonie c-moll: Wiener Fassung (Vienna, 1980/R)

Anton Diabellis Vaterländische Künstlerverein: zweite Abteilung (Wien 1824), DTÖ, cxxxvi (1983)

Huldigung der Tonsetzer Wiens an Elisabeth, Kaiserin von Österreich (Wien, 1854), DTÖ, cxlii–cxliv (1987)

Broschi, Carlo.

See Farinelli.

Broschi [Brosca], Riccardo

(b Naples, c1698; d Madrid, 1756). Italian composer, brother of Farinelli. According to Prota-Giurleo, his approximate date of birth can be ascertained from a declaration signed on 6 November 1725 while he was witnessing the marriage banns of his younger sister Dorotea: ‘I, Riccardo Broschi, Neapolitan, son of Salvatore (deceased), testify that I am a maestro di cappella of about 27 years of age’. The same document discloses that the Broschi family moved to Barletta (probably from Andria) about 1707 and returned to Naples some four years later. If, as Prota-Giurleo believed, Riccardo Broschi became a student at the Conservatorio di S Maria di Loreto, then the likely time of his enrolment would have been after his family’s return to Naples about 1711–12. The earliest news of his activities as a professional musician comes from the Gazzetta di Napoli for 6 February 1725 which states that on 3 February he provided sacred music for the festival of S Biagio in S Maria del Popolo degl’Incurabili. In the autumn of the same year he presented his one and only comic opera La vecchia sorda at the Teatro dei Fiorentini.

Broschi was in Rome by 1727, when his only known oratorio, Il Martirio di Santa Susanna Vergine, was performed at the Chiesa Nuova. In 1728 his first opera seria, L’Isola di Alcina, was produced at the Teatro Tordinona. An active and successful period of composition followed in northern Italy: Alcina, revised as Bradamante nell’isola d’Alcina, appeared in Parma in 1729; Idapse, Broschi’s only Venetian opera, was performed during Carnival 1730; and Ezio opened the carnival season at Turin in 1731. The cast for Ezio included Broschi’s brother Farinelli, Faustina Bordoni and Antonio Montagnano; a contract of 3 June 1729 from the Teatro Regio shows that Broschi was paid a salary of 50 luigi d’oro for the work. Earlier in 1730 both Broschi and his brother had been elected to the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna (the libretto of Ezio confirms this honour). Broschi’s most popular opera, Merope, was first performed at Turin in 1732, where the composer had been given the additional title of virtuoso del principe di Carignano.

There is no documentary evidence placing Broschi in London in 1734 for Farinelli’s English stage début in the pasticcio Artaserse (King’s Theatre, 29 October), even though the work included the apparently newly composed bravura aria ‘Son qual nave ch’agitata’ by him. He was certainly not in London for the revival of his opera Merope in 1736: the recently discovered Pepoli correspondence (see Vitali, 1998) includes a letter from Farinelli of 2 July 1735 describing his brother as penniless and in Milan. At the end of 1735 Broschi was probably still in Milan for the production of his new opera Adriano in Siria.

In November 1736 Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg appointed Broschi his compositore di musica. The Italian opera company then in the duke’s employ at Stuttgart performed Broschi’s Adriano in Siria at the beginning of 1737. The composer had no further chance to show his abilities at the court of Stuttgart, however, for on 12 March 1737 the duke died. His opera company was disbanded and Broschi lost his post on 1 April. In the autumn of that year, his Merope saw its last performance at the command of Count Johann Adam of Questenberg at Jaromeritz in Moravia, but Broschi was apparently not offered a permanent position there. He then made his way to Naples, where he was made a musician without pay on 8 October 1737. According to Strohm, Broschi composed act 3 of Demetrio, a new opera performed at the Teatro S Carlo on 30 June 1738, for which Leonardo Leo composed act 1, and various others act 2. Broschi failed, however, to gain other significant commissions for music from the Neapolitans. Nonetheless, he was not totally overlooked, for in October 1739 he was given the salaried post of administrator of wine within the city of Naples. These favours were bestowed because of intercessions made on his behalf by the Spanish court (whose viceroy ruled Naples), of which Farinelli had in 1737 become an influential member. However, all attempts to procure an official musical position failed, and during the 1740s Broschi joined his brother in Madrid, where he was named ‘familiar’ to the King. Letters in the state archives of Naples (see DBI) reveal that later attempts were made to acquire the position of maestro di cappella there for Broschi, after the deaths of Sarro and Leo in 1744, but these also failed. Broschi died in Madrid in 1756.

Broschi is best known for the virtuoso arias he composed for Farinelli. His music for other singers is not so extreme and fits squarely into the modern Italian style of the period. Haböck quotes G.V.G. Orloff as writing (1823): ‘Riccardo's style is powerful and well made, noble without being pompous, majestic and sustained, not so imposing as Leo and Jomelli, not so deep and pure as Feo, but with the most tender expression’. Broschi’s operas were performed by the best singers of the day and involved collaborations with the contemporary scene designer Pietro Righini (Alcina, Merope and Demetrio) and the ballet master Francesco Aquilante (Merope, Adriano and Demetrio). Broschi’s Bradamante, which Handel probably heard in Parma during one of his European trips to hire singers, served as the model for that composer's Alcina (1735). Since Broschi’s score does not survive, it is impossible to compare the complete settings. However, two arias from Bradamante and works from other lost operas do survive in aria collections and as insertions in other operas.

WORKS

operas

all in three acts; opere serie unless otherwise stated

La vecchia sorda (ob, S. Saddumene), Naples, Fiorentini, aut. 1725

L’isola di Alcina (A. Fanzaglia), Rome, Tordinona, 1728; as Bradamante nell’isola d’Alcina, Parma, carn. 1729, arias in GB-Lam, I-Rc

Idaspe (G.P. Candi and D. Lalli), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, carn. 1730, A-Wn, arias in GB-Cfm, I-Tn

Ezio (P. Metastasio), Turin, Regio, carn. 1731, arias in D-Bsb, I-Nc

Arianna e Teseo (P. Pariati), Milan, Ducale, 28 Aug 1731, aria in D-SW

Merope (A. Zeno), Turin, Regio, carn. 1732, A-Wgm

Adriano in Siria (Metastasio), Milan, Ducale, carn. 1735

?Anagilda (G. Gigli), 1735, Wgm

Demetrio [Act 3] (Metastasio), Naples, S Carlo, 30 June 1738 [Act 1 by Leo, Act II by others], aria in D-SW

Miscellaneous arias in A-Wn, D-ROu, GB-Lbl, I-Bc, Nc, Rsc

other works

Il martirio di S Susanna Vergine (orat), Rome, Chiesa Nuova, 1727, lost

Lurilla e Tirsi (cant.), 2 S, bc, A-Wn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

DBI (U. Prota-Giurleo)

ES (F. Schlitzer)

FlorimoN

J. Sittard: Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am württembergischen Hofe, ii (Stuttgart, 1890–91/R)

F. Haböck: Die Gesangskunst der Kastraten (Vienna, 1923)

A. Yorke-Long: Music at Court: Four Eighteenth-Century Studies (London, 1954)

M.-T. Bouquet: Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino, i (Turin, 1976)

R. Strohm: Italienische Opernarien des Frühen Settecento (Cologne, 1976)

C. Vitali and F. Boris: Carlo Broschi Farinelli: senza sentimento oscuro (Palermo, 1999)

MICHAEL F. ROBINSON/ELLEN HARRIS

Brosmann (à Sancto Hieronymo), Damasus [Antonín]

(b Fulnek, 7 Sept 1731; d Příbor, 16 Sept 1798). Moravian composer of Czech-German descent. He learnt the violin and the cello from the choirmaster Weissgräber of the Augustinian monastery in Fulnek, and in 1749 became a novice in the Piarist college in Lipník nad Bečvou. After completing his studies at colleges in Bílá Voda and Mikulov, he worked in various capacities in Piarist colleges. From 1755 to 1760 he taught both the lower and higher Gymnasium classes and was at the same time subregens in the Bílá Voda seminary.

After teaching senior Gymnasium classes in Kroměříž (1760–61), he returned to Bílá Voda as professor in philosophy, regens of the seminary and as choirmaster in the church (1761–6). He then became principal of the seminary and choirmaster in Kroměříž (1767–75), later holding the same posts in Příbor (1775–6, 1787–98) and Bílá Voda (1778–87). At Bílá Voda he taught the conductor and composer Gottfried Rieger (1784–6), his most important pupil, and kept up close contact with Dittersdorf, at that time working in nearby Johannisberg. Heavily burdened by monastic responsibilities, he was left little time for composition, and in his later years became ill, partly from overwork.

Brosmann was one of the most productive and popular composers in Piarist-influenced areas at the end of the 18th century. He made use of most of the expressive means then available to church music: High Baroque elements appear in his skilful polyphony, occasional use of obbligato trombones or violas in pairs and in the uninterrupted musical flow; pre-Classical elements figure in the numerous ornaments, concise melodic kernels and stereotyped bass rhythms; Classical elements are especially evident in the clearly articulated forms and carefully thought-out motivic development of his arias. Brosmann generally wrote for four concertante vocal parts, with instrumental accompaniment of two violins and organ, to which he occasionally added winds, depending on the character of the text. His melodic writing sometimes approached folk music in its simplicity, and he frequently used concertante-like ostinato figuration in the instruments as a unifying element. Dittersdorf thought highly of Brosmann’s works and regarded his church music particularly as exemplary.

WORKS

MSS mainly in CZ-Bm, SK-BRnm, CZ-KRa, OP, Pnm

Sacred: at least 20 masses, 5 Vespers, 11 Litaniae Lauretanae, 24 gradualia pro dominicis, 50 offs, 20 other works

Other works: Musica pro sacro sepulchro (short orat); Zur Zeit des Türken Krieges (cant.); incid music to Thomas Morus, lost, and to a stage work for Count Salm, lost; Die Tagzeiten (J.F.W. Zachariä), lost; teaching manuals for insts, singing, conducting, composition, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS

SchillingE

C. d’Elvert: Geschichte der Musik in Mähren und Oesterreich-Schlesien (Brno, 1873), suppl., 79–81

E. Trolda: ‘Dvě sepolkra’ [Two sepulchres], Cyril, lx (1934), 30–31

Č. Gardavský: Damasus Brosmann à Scto Hieronymo (diss., U. of Brno, 1937)

M. Zemek: ‘Školní divadlo u piaristů v Příboře’ [Piarist school theatre at Příbor], Časopis Slezského musea, ser.B, xv (1966), 51–2

JIŘÍ SEHNAL

Brossard, Sébastien de

(b Dompierre, bap. 12 Sept 1655; dMeaux, 10 Aug 1730). French priest, theorist, composer, lexicographer and bibliophile. He was descended from a family founded by Antoine de Brossard (b c1286), a natural son of Charles de Valois (son of Philip the Bold) and Hélène Broschart, daughter of the king's treasurer. Sébastien was the last of a family of glass-blowers from lower Normandy. He studied at the Jesuit college in Caen and then attended that city's famous university, studying philosophy for two years and theology for three. When he turned to music, therefore, he was self-taught; he studied the lute, copying and composing pieces for the instrument. He took minor orders in 1675 and became a sub-deacon the next year, but the date when he became a priest is not known, nor is the date of his arrival in Paris. He was living there in 1678, when he published a secular piece in the Mercure galant under the name of Robsard des Fontaines. He was thus working methodically on his music, but still with books as his only teachers. He never found a permanent post in Paris.

In May 1687 he was appointed a vicar at Strasbourg Cathedral, and soon afterwards became maître de chapelle there, when the musician who had been offered the post, Mathieu Fourdaux, did not take it up. In 1689, two years after his arrival in Strasbourg, the number of cathedral musicians was cut, since the chapter had suffered financial losses as a consequence of the war of the League of Augsburg. Brossard founded an Académie de Musique, where he directed concerts of secular music and French operas and ballets. During the time he spent in Strasbourg he wrote his two books of motets and six books of airs, including serious songs and drinking songs, and acquired a large part of the music books and scores in his library. In December 1698 Brossard left Strasbourg for Meaux, where he succeeded Pierre Tabart as maître de chapelle of the cathedral; he was made a canon in 1709. On 1 August 1715 he resigned as maître de chapelle in favour of a former pupil, Jean Cavignon, but he continued living in Meaux, where he was often consulted on theoretical questions. He died there and was buried in the cathedral.

In 1724 Brossard, then entering his 70th year, feared that his large and valuable library of music would be dispersed on his death; he therefore offered it to the Bibliothèque Royale, asking for a ‘gratification’ in return. His offer was accepted, and the king's librarian asked Brossard for the catalogue as well as the collection itself. The collection is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, together with the catalogue, which is more than simply a list of the books and scores in the canon's library; most of the entries have additional commentary, often providing information unavailable elsewhere.

At first Brossard was known only for his Dictionaire, the first work of its kind published in France, and then for his Catalogue. During his lifetime he acquired fame as a theorist and was often consulted on theoretical questions. With few exceptions, his music was never played, and only in the late 20th century did it begin to be performed. While he drew inspiration from contemporary French composers such as Lully, Lalande and Charpentier, Brossard borrowed certain technical and expressive formulae from Italian music, which he greatly liked, and he sometimes also employed the contrapuntal musical language of German-speaking countries, thus providing an example in his own way of the blending of styles, the goûts réunis, dear to his contemporary François Couperin (ii).

WORKS

Editions: L’oeuvre chorale, ed. J. Duron (Versailles, 1993)Les grands motets, ed. J. Krucker (Versailles, 1995)Les petits motets manuscrits, ed. J. Duron (Versailles, 1995)Cantates françaises et italiennes, ed. J. Dorival (Versailles, 1997)

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

airs

Airs in: Nouveau mercure galant (July–Aug 1678); Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire (1697–8, 1702–3, 1707, 1714); Recueil des meilleurs airs italiens (1701, 1703, 1705, 1708); Tendresses bacchiques (1712); Nouvelles poésies spirituelles et morales (1730–31, 1733); Nouveau recueil de chansons choisies (The Hague, 1735); Nouvelles poésies morales sur les plus beaux airs (1737); Airs sérieux et à boire (6 bks, 1691, 1694–8): a total of 112 airs

motets, oratorios

Elévations et motets à voix seule avec la bc (1695): Ave vivens hostie, O Jesu quam dulcis, Congratulamini filiae Sion, O vos Oaetherii plaudite cives, Festivi martyres (ed. R. Ewerhart, Cologne, 1971), Angele sancte, Sonitus armorum (ed. R. Ewerhart, Cologne, 1958), Quemadmodum desiderat (ed. R. Ewerhart, Cologne, 1958); 2nd edn, as Prodromus musicalis, ou Elévations et motets à voix seule avec une basse continue (1702) adds O Plenus irarum dies (ed. R. Ewerhart, Cologne, 1958) [incl. Avertissement: early version of Dictionaire de musique]

Elévations et motets à II et III voix et à voix seule, 2 dessus de vn ou 2 fl avec la bc (1698): Salve Rex Christe, O Domine quia refugium, Qui non diligat te, Festis laeta sonent, Psallite superi, Templa nunc fument

Les lamentations du prophète Jérémie, 1v, bc (1721)

Sicut cervus, 1v, bc, in Recueil de motets choisis (1712)

Over 35 motets, F-Pn, incl.: Miserere a 5, 1689 (ed. J. Krucker, Versailles, 1995); 13 motets, 1v, 2 vn, bc; Canticum eucharisticum pro pace, vv, chorus, insts, perf. to celebrate Treaty of Ryswick, Strasbourg, 1698 (ed. J. Krucker, Versailles, 1995); Laudate Caeciliam, 2 choirs without bc, perf. for Prix du Mans, 1705 (F. Raugel, Strasbourg, 1957); Oratorio seu Dialogus poenitentis animae cum Deo, 2vv, 2 vn; Oratorio sopra l’immaculata conceptione della B. Vergina, 5 solo vv, chorus (unfinished); 4 Lectiones officii defunctorum, 2vv, 3 insts; Stabat mater, a 5; Magnificat, 3vv, 2 vn; Beati immaculati, a 2

Spurious: Motets à I. II. et III. voix avec la bc (1703), probably by Suffret

masses

Missa quinti toni pro nocte Die festi natalis Domini, 1700, F-Pn

Mass movements, instrumental symphonies, basso continuo added to masses by Cosset, Fiocco, Baldrati, Minoret, Grossi, Helfer, Menault, Porta, Pn

cantatas

6 cantates françaises sur des sujets tirés de l’Ecriture Sainte: Abraham ou le sacrifice d’Isaac, La cheutte de Salomon, Judith ou la mort d’Holoferne, Les trois enfants de la fournaise de Babylone, Baltassar (unfinished), F-Pn

Cantata morale sopra la vanità de la richesse [sic] umane e la felicità delle pastourelle (1698), followed by 14 ariettes italiennes, Pn

Stese la notte franca l’ali, Italian cantata, Pn

instrumental

Recueil de pièces pour le luth de différens auteurs, 1672–3, F-Pn

2 sonatas, 2 vn, viol obbl, bc, Oct 1695, Pn

2 sonatas, vn, bc (unfinished), Pn

Chaconne, other dances, Pn

Symphonie de noël, 2 vn, bc, Pn

Sonate à 3 insts (unfinished), Pn

WRITINGS

Dictionaire des termes grecs, latins et italiens (Paris, 1701)

Dictionaire de musique, contenant une explication des termes grecs, latins, italiens et françois (Paris, 1703/ R, 2/1705; ed. and trans. A Gruber, 1982) [as 1701 edn, except in folio and includes ‘Catalogue de plus de 900 auteurs qui ont écrit sur la musique’]

Lettre en forme de dissertation à M. Demoz sur la nouvelle méthode d’écrire le plain-chant et la musique (Paris, 1729)

Catalogue des livres de musique, théorique et prattique, vocalle et instrumentalle (MS, 1724, F-Pn); ed. Y. de Brossard (Paris, 1994)

Fragments d’une méthode de violon (MS, Pn)

Recueil d’extraits d’ouvrages imprimés sur la musique (MS, Pn)

Meslanges et extraits relatifs à l’histoire de la musique (MS, Pn) [incl. unfinished essays and addns to dictionary]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Ormont, ed.: ‘La bibliothèque du roi au début du règne de Louis XV (1718–1736); journal de l'abbé Jourdain, secrétaire de la bibliotehèque’,Mémoires de la Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l’Ile de France, xx (1893), 207–94

M. Brenet: ‘ Sébastien de Brossard, prêtre, compositeur, écrivain et bibliophile, d’après ses papiers inédits’, ibid., xxiii (1896), 72

J. Combarieu: ‘ Compositeurs français du XVIIe siècle: Sébastien de Brossard’, RHCM, i (1901), 20–25

L. Froger: ‘ Sébastien de Brossard’, La province du Maine, xvi (1908), 181

F.A. Goehlinger: La musique à la cathédrale de Strasbourg … sous Louis XIV (Strasbourg, 1920)

F.-X. Mathias: ‘Le “Canticum eucharisticum pro pace facta anno 1697” de Sébastien de Brossard’, RdM, ix (1928), 77–85

L. Bourreau: ‘ Un musicien bibliophile: Sébastien de Brossard’, Bulletin de la Société littéraire et historique de la Brie, xv (1936), 2–15

E. Lebeau: ‘ L’entrée de la collection musicale de Sébastien de Brossard à la Bibliothèque du Roi’, RdM, xxix (1950), 77–93; xxx (1951), 20–43

M. Rollin: ‘ A propos d’un manuscrit de luth écrit en Normandie’, Musique et les musiciens en Normandie: meslanges (Rouen, 1957), 11–16

R. Kopff: ‘Les compositeurs de musique instrumentale en Alsace au XVIIe siècle’, La musique en Alsace hier et aujourd’hui (Strasbourg, 1970), 83–94

Y. de Brossard: Sébastien de Brossard, théoricien et compositeur 1655–1730 (Paris, 1987)

J. Duron: L'oeuvre de Sébastien de Brossard: catalogue thématique (Paris and Versailles, 1995)

J. Duron, ed.: Sébastien de Brossard à Versailles (Versailles, 1995)

YOLANDE DE BROSSARD

Brost, Raymond.

See Henderson, Ray.

Bros y Bertomeu, Juan (Joaquín Pedro Domingo)

(b Tortosa, Tarragona, bap. 12 May 1776; d Oviedo, 12 March 1852). Spanish composer. He received his earliest musical training as a chorister in the cathedral at Tortosa. He then studied with Francisco Queralt in Barcelona, where he became assistant maestro de capilla of the church of S María del Mar and organist of the chapel of S Severo. In 1806 he was appointed maestro de capilla at León Cathedral; he turned down offers for positions in Málaga (1807) and Oviedo (1815) and remained there until 1823, when he was arrested and tried for his political ideas. After his subsequent acquittal, he moved to Oviedo, married and, in 1834, became maestro de capilla of the cathedral there, a position he retained until his death.

Though forgotten today, Bros y Bertomeu was one of the last great masters of Spanish church music in the first half of the 19th century, along with Ramón Cuéllar y Altarriba, M.J. Doyagüe and others, and he enjoyed considerable fame and admiration from his contemporaries. His music, which achieved wide circulation in Spain and beyond, was noted for its expressive and well-schooled fugal writing. His works are preserved in several cathedral archives, including those at Avila, Huesca, León, Mondoñedo, Oviedo and Segovia.

WORKS

all sacred

Benedictus, 4vv, 2 vn, fl, ob, tpt, bc, E-E, ed. in Lira sacro-hispana, 1st ser., ii (Madrid, 1869)

MSS in Bc: Salve glosada and Cántico doloroso, 4vv, 2 vn, 2 ob, hn, bc; recit, aria for Virgen de los dolores, 1v, 2 vn, 2 ob, 2 tpt, vc; El hijo pródigo, duet, 2 vn, fl, 2 hn, bc; Lauda Jerusalem, 8vv, 1796; Domine non est, 12vv, 1797; Animam meam, 2 choruses, 4vv, Iste confessor, hymn, 2 choruses, 2 vn, va, 2 ob, bc, for competition at León, ?before 1806

MSS in Oratory of S Felipe de Neri, Barcelona, BUa, SD: 3 Miserere, c1815–23, Te Deum, after 1834, Office of the Dead, after 1834, Lamentations, Mag, psalms, masses, motets, villancicos

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (G. Bourligueux)

Gaceta musical de Madrid (2 March 1856)

Gaceta musical de Madrid (11 Jan, 7 April 1866)

A. Elías de Molins: Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de escritores y artistas catalanes del siglo XIX (apuntes y datos), i (Barcelona, 1889/R)

F. Pedrell: Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música españoles (Barcelona, 1894–7)

G. Bourligueux: ‘Juan Bros y Bertomeu (1776–1852), un maestro de capilla de la catedral de León: semblanza biográfica’, Archivos leoneses, xxv (1971), 183–99

GUY BOURLIGUEUX

Brotons (Soler), Salvador

(b Barcelona, 17 July 1959). Spanish composer, flautist and conductor. He studied at the Barcelona Conservatory (1967–85) and then won a Fulbright Scholarship (1985) to study in the United States, where he gained a doctorate at the University of Florida (1987). He was an associate professor at Portland State University (1987–97).

His musical language, free from aesthetic prejudices and avant-garde influence, is characterized by expressive accessibility and idiomatic naturalness, both instrumental and vocal, and this is partly due to the fact that he is both a performer and a composer. In view of this it is understandable that he should have been attracted early on by a figure such as Shostakovich, to whom he dedicated one of his first piano pieces; his North American experience in the 1980s and 90s has been equally influential. The extrovert character of his music, its fidelity to tonality in the broadest sense of the word, a vigorous rhythmic and melodic impulse, and a constant determination to communicate are combined with a strong feeling for formal balance. These qualities are evident in the sonatas for various solo instruments, chamber works such as the Mixed Sextet (1992), his works for mixed choir, the three symphonies and the symphonic movement Obstinació (1991).

In addition to being a prolific composer, he has had a distinguished career as a flautist and conductor. He played the flute in the Orchestra of the Teatro del Liceo, Barcelona (1977–85), was appointed music director and conductor of the Vancouver SO in 1991, and of the Vallès SO in 1997.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: Reverend Everyman (2, G. Corsery), 1989

Orch: 4 Pieces for Str, 1977; Sym. no.1, 1981; Rebirth, band, 1983; Sym. no.2 ‘Resplendor’, 1984; Ataraxia, 1984; Sinfonietta da camera, chbr orch, 1985; Absences, 1986; Fusion, chbr orch, 1987; Wondering, 1987; Sonata da conc., tpt, band, 1990; Phaedo, sym. movt no.5, 1991; Virtus, sym. movt no.6, 1991; Divertimento alla Mozart, 1991; Obstinació, sym. movt no.7, 1991; Terres llemosines, rapsòdia catalana, 1992; Sym. no.3, 1992; Liliana (children’s tale) nar, orch, 1993; The Chinese Zodiac Suite, ww orch, pf, perc, 1994; Trbn Conc., 1995; Fl Conc., 1996

Vocal: 4 songs (M. Martí i Pol), S, pf, 1981; 2 sonnets (J.V. Foix), T/S, pf, 1992; Nocturn per a una illa, SATB, 1982; 4 songs (Martí i Pol), S/T, orch, 1982; Aquesta remor que se sent, SATB, 1983; Sòn teus ullets, SATB, 1983; Cant per a un vell poble (cant.), SATB, perc, ww orch, 1983; Jam rara micant (cant.), SATB, perc, brass ens, 1985; Journey to the Myth, SATB, 1992; An Oregon Love Poem, SATB, 1993; Les quatre estacions, SATB, pf, 1993; The Grove, SATB, pf, 1994; Stabat mater, SATB, orch, 1997

Chbr: Emphasis, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, 1975; Fantasy, hn, pf, 1976; Ad infinitum, fl, hp, va, 1976; Sax-quintet-vent, fl, ob, sax, bn, hn, 1977; Suite a tres, fl, ob, cl, 1977; Str Qt, 1978; Fulles de tardor, tpt, pf, 1978; Sonata, vc, pf, 1978; Sonata, fl, pf, 1979; Simetries, cl, vn, pf, 1979; Sonata, va, pf, 1982; Sound of Eleven, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, perc, 2 vn, va, vc, 1984; Trio, vn, vc, pf, 1986; Fl Suite, fl orch, 1986; Sonata, cl, pf, 1988; Pf Qt, E, 1988; Virtus, fl, vn, va, vc, pf, 1990; Mixed Sextet, fl, cl, vn, perc, pf, 1992; Sonata, vn, pf, 1994

Solo inst: Elegy for Shostakovich’s Death, pf, 1975; 3 peces breus, pf, 1975; Ideals utòpīcs, pf, 1976; 2 Suggestions, gui, 1979; Impromptu, pf, 1985; Prelude and Dance, gui, 1986; Subtlety, hp, 1986; Sonatina, gui, 1988; Scherzo, gui, 1988; Interlude for the Left Hand, pf, 1988; Toccata, pf, 1993; Crystals, pf, 1995; Soliloquy, gui, 1996

Principal publishers: Boileau, Catalana d’Edicions-EMEC, Clivis, Tritò

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Willamette Week [Portland, OR] (6 May 1993)

M. Lluïsa Morán: ‘Salvador Brotons: un músic integral’, Revista musical catalana, no.150 (1997), 41–5

BENET CASABLANCAS I DOMINGO

Brott, Alexander

(b Montreal, 14 March 1915). Canadian composer, conductor and violinist. He studied at the McGill Conservatorium (1929–34) with Maurice Onderet (violin) and Douglas Clarke (composition), obtaining the Licentiate degree in 1932 and the Lauréat of the Académie de Musique du Québec in 1933. From 1934 to 1939 he studied at the Juilliard School with Sasha Jacobsen (violin), Bernard Wagenaar (composition) and Albert Stoessel (conducting). He won the Coolidge award for orchestral composition in 1937 (Two Symphonic Movements) and again in 1938 (Oracle). Owing to the war he had to forfeit a 1939 Strathcona Award for three years of composition study in England to return to Montreal, where he resumed playing in the Montreal SO, gave solo violin recitals, began teaching at McGill University and founded the McGill String Quartet. That year he also made his conducting début with the Montreal SO in a performance of his symphonic poem Oracle. With the composition of War and Peace (1944) he won a fourth Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada orchestral award in 1945; the same year he founded the McGill Chamber Orchestra. From 1945 to 1958 he was the leader of the Montreal SO and, during the period 1948–61, also its assistant conductor. He went on to conduct in many parts of the world, winning the Pan-American Conducting Prize in 1957. From 1965 to 1981 he was the music director of the Kingston SO. Throughout these years he maintained his post at McGill University, becoming chair of the instrumental department in 1955 and a full professor in 1965. In 1974 he gained the additional title of composer-in-residence. Upon his retirement in 1985 he founded the youth orchestra Les Jeunes Virtuoses de Montréal. Other awards and achievements include two Olympic medals for composition (1948, 1952), three honorary doctorates (Chicago 1960, Queen’s 1973, McGill 1980), the Bax Commonwealth Medal (1961) and the Prix du Disque (1969). He is a member of the Order of Canada (1979) and the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem ‘Knight of Malta’ (1985), is a FRS (1985) and a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Québec (1987).

Brott’s orchestral compositions exhibit a particular sensitivity to timbre. Most of his works adopt neo-classical forms allied with soaring melodies that are often treated contrapuntally. Some of his later works tend towards wit and satire and involve the reworking of well-known music by earlier composers. The Canadian national anthem O Canada is used in Mutual Salvation Orgy (1961) and Centennial Colloquy (1965), while Profundum praedictum (1964) contains fragments of God Save the Queen and Yankee Doodle. Paraphrase in Polyphony (1967) has as its theme the ten-bar canon ‘Freu dich des Lebens’ written by Beethoven in 1825 for the Quebec-based music teacher T.F. Molt. Canadian folksong and folklore play important roles in a number of other works. From Sea to Sea (1947) includes folksong material from each main region of Canada, the ballet La corriveau (1966) is based on a 18th-century French-Canadian folktale and How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be (1972) is a retelling of an Inuit legend. Brott has also arranged indigenous songs for voice and piano (1971–3). CBC-RCI produced a recorded collection of his works (1941–73) on Anthology of Canadian Music 20 (1985). A CD (Analekta ANC 9801) was released c1994.

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in CDN-Tcm

Principal publisher: Ricordi

instrumental

Orch: Oracle, 1938; 2 Sym. Movts, 1938; Ritual, str, 1942; Lullaby and Procession of the Toys, str, 1943; War and Peace, 1944; Concordia, 1946; From Sea to Sea, 1947; Delightful Delusions, 1950; Vn Conc., 1950; Arabesque, vc, orch, 1956–7; 3 Astral Visions, str, 1959; Spheres in Orbit, 1960; Circle, Triangle, 4 Squares, str, 1963; Profundum predictum, va/vc/db, str, 1964; Centennial Colloquy, wind insts, 1965; Le Corriveau (ballet), 1966; Paraphrase in Polyphony, 1967; Satie’s-Faction, str, 1973; E Dai P Milo, 1976; My Mother – My Memorial, 1978; arrs.: Beethoven: The Young Prometheus, 1971; Beethoven: 7 Minuets and 6 Canons, 1971; Hymn II Her, fl, bn, str, 1977

Chbr and solo inst: Invocation and Dance, vn, pf, 1941; Str Qt, 1941; Suite, pf, 1941; Berceuse, pf, 1947; Critic’s Corner, perc, str qt/str orch, 1950; Vignettes en caricatures, 1952; Mutual Salvation Orgy, brass qnt, 1961; 3 Acts for 4 Sinners, 4 sax, 1961; How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be (Inuit legend), nar, chbr ens, 1972; Psalmody, vc, 1973; Double Entente, str qt, 1976; Shofar, vc, 1976

vocal

Songs of Contemplation, high v, str, 1945; Israel, chorus, 1952, arr. SATB, str, 1956; Sept for Seven (Can. verse), nar, inst ens, 1954; Canadiana, chorus, 1955; The Prophet, S, T, pf, 1960; Elie, Elie Lama Sabachtani, chorus, 1964; L’espoiranto, chorus, 1967; Fun-Ethic-S, chorus, 1968; Indian Legends, S, Bar, pf, 1971; Songs of the Central Eskimos, S, Bar, pf, 1971; Two Haida Songs, S, Bar, pf, 1973; Time’s Trials Triumph, chorus, 1977

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMC2 (G. Potvin, C. Versailles)

J. Bagnell: ‘Alexander Brott: Founder of Orchestra that’s a Minor Miracle’, The Gazette [Montreal] (12 Nov 1995)

A. Kaptainis: ‘Classical Scene’s Master Survivor’, The Gazette [Montreal] (11 Mar 1995)

C. Richer: ‘Musicien, chef d’orchestre, compositeur et professeur’, La Presse [Montreal] (12 March 1995)

DORITH R. COOPER/ELAINE KEILLOR

Brott, Boris

(b Montreal, 14 March 1944). Canadian conductor and violinist, son of Alexander Brott. He studied with his father and with Monteux, Markevich and Bernstein, and made his début as a conductor with the National SO of Mexico in 1958. He founded the Philharmonic Youth Orchestra of Montreal (1959), was assistant conductor of the Toronto SO (1963–5); in England he became principal conductor of the Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle (1964–8), toured with the Royal Ballet (1966–8) and conducted the Covent Garden première of The Soldier's Tale in 1966. After winning the gold medal in the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Conductors' Competition in 1968, he was assistant conductor of the New York PO (1968–9), and musical director of the Lakehead SO in Thunder Bay, Ontario (1968–72), and the Regina (Saskatchewan) SO (1971–2). In 1969 he was appointed musical director of the Hamilton (Ontario) PO, and in 1972 chief conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra; from 1976 to 1983 he was chief conductor of the CBC Winnipeg Orchestra while holding several regional appointments. In 1988 he founded the Boris Brott Summer Festival in Hamilton; in 1989 he became co-conductor of the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal and in 1992 music director of the New West SO in California. He has appeared as a guest conductor with all the major Canadian orchestras and many leading European and American orchestras.

T. BROWN/CHARLES BARBER

B rotundum.

See B fa.

Brouck [Prugg], Jacob de

(fl 1568–83). Flemish singer and composer. He appears to have been attached to the chapels of Ferdinand I and Maximilian II. Five of his motets are included in a collection published by Gardane (RISM 1568³, 1568⁶). In 1573 he was a singer and master of the children at the imperial court chapel in Vienna, receiving several payments in addition to his salary in 1576, ‘on account of his poverty’. Christopher Plantin published a volume of his works, Cantiones tum sacrae (quae vulgo moteta vocantur); tum profane, 5, 6 et 8 vocum (Antwerp, 1579), dedicated to Archduke Karl II of Austria, containing 20 motets, 18 chansons and one lied. In the book he signed himself ‘Belga’, the only indication of his origin. In 1583 he was given 15 florins for a Magnificat setting; on its title-page he styled himself ‘ancien [old, or former] chapelmaster to the Archduke of Austria’. Brouck’s other works include two masses and a number of motets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGGI (‘Jacobus de Brouck’, H. Federhofer)

Vander StraetenMPB

J.A. Stellfeld: Bibliographie des éditions musicales plantiniennes (Brussels, 1949), 46–54, plates ix, x

LAVERN J. WAGNER

Broude, Alexander.

American firm of music publishers, distributors, importers and exporters. Alexander Broude (b New York, 1 Jan 1909) was originally associated with his brother, Irving, in Broude Brothers, and began publishing music in the 1930s in New York. In 1954 Alexander severed the association and founded his own company, Alexander Broude, Inc. (ABI Music), which from 1962 published music for all media, including educational materials and music textbooks. 20th-century American composers in the Alexander Broude catalogue include Richard Bales, Ruth Crawford, Dahl, Etler, Frost, Daniel Kessner, Alan Schulman, Elliott Schwartz, Riegger and Peter Westergaard. European composers of all periods, including Rachmaninoff, Casals and Dallapiccola, are also published by the firm. Alexander Broude retired in 1970. In 1982 the company was bought by Michael Lefferts (president) and Dean Streit (vice-president).

W. THOMAS MARROCCO, MARK JACOBS/R

Broude Brothers.

American firm of music publishers. Founded in New York in the 1930s by Irving and Alexander Broude, it publishes scholarly editions and reference books as well as performing editions of works by modern and older composers. Its projects have included new editions of the collected works of Buxtehude, Lully, Marais, Marenzio and Rameau. It publishes the series Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, as well as historical sets such as Tudor Church Music, Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance and Music at the Court of Ferrara. Among 20th-century composers published by the firm are Babbitt, Bacon, Berger, Bloch, Duke, Herrmann, Hovhaness, Krenek, La Montaine, Lockwood, Messiaen, Nin-Culmell and Rózsa. Alexander Broude left the organization in 1954 and established his own firm. Irving Broude’s widow, Anne, took over the firm after her husband’s death in 1973; when she retired in 1979, her son Ronald became president. The Broude Trust for the Publication of Musicological Editions was formed in 1981 to provide financial support for the preparation of the collected editions and historical sets.

W. THOMAS MARROCCO, MARK JACOBS

Broughton, Thomas

(b London, 5 July 1704; d Bristol, 21 Dec 1774). English priest, religious and historical writer and librettist. He graduated BA (1727) and MA from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and had a successful church career, including posts as reader of the Temple Church, prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and vicar of Bedminster, near Bristol, which he merited with several vindications of orthodox Christianity against contemporary free-thinking and a massive two-volume encyclopedia of comparative religion, An Historical Dictionary of all Religions (London, 1742). His literary work included an edition of John Dryden's miscellaneous verse, contributions to the Biographia Britannica (London, 1747–66) and a free adaptation of Sophocles' Trachiniae (with additions from Ovid's Metamorphoses IX) to suit contemporary taste for the libretto of Handel's Hercules (1745). Broughton was a lover of Handel's music, and subscribed to his Atalanta.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Dean: Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959)

R. Smith: Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995)

R. Smith: ‘Handel's English Librettists’, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. D. Burrows (Cambridge, 1997)

RUTH SMITH

Brouncker [Brounckerd, Brunkard], William, 2nd Viscount Brouncker of Castle Lyons, Ireland

(b 1620; d Westminster, 5 April 1684). English mathematician and music theorist. He was the elder son of Sir William Brouncker (created 1st Viscount in 1645), Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Charles I and vice-chamberlain to Prince Charles (the future Charles II). He was a staunch royalist and was the member for Westbury, Wiltshire, in the Convention Parliament of 1660. On the nomination of Charles II he became the first president of the Royal Society in 1662, when he was also appointed chancellor to Queen Catherine and keeper of her Great Seal.

Brouncker entered Oxford University at the age of 16, studied mathematics and received the degree of Doctor of Physick in 1647. He was proficient in languages and soon gained a reputation as a brilliant and original mathematician. At the same time he became well versed in the theory of music. In 1653 he published in London, as Compendium musicae: with Animadversions by a Person of Honour, a translation of Descartes' Compendium musicae, an early work that was written in 1618 but only published in 1650. Brouncker's Animadversions includes a commentary on and criticisms of the Compendium, including a suggestion for a new geometrical method of dividing the canon, that could be applied to the lute.

In his musical calculations Brouncker combined the methods of the Greeks (Euclid's canon and mean proportionals) with the use of logarithms, which he was among the first to apply to music. Unlike most theorists, who searched for a satisfactory division of the octave, he chose the interval of an 11th (consisting of an octave and a 4th) and divided it according to the geometrical progression (his detailed instructions appear on pp.84–5 of his version of the Compendium). By taking 2 : (3 – √5) as the overall ratio of his interval of 17 semitones, Brouncker based his system on a ratio taken from the Golden Section. He was well aware of the theoretical shortcomings of his system (it produced semitones of only 98 cents) but thought that they did not matter much ‘since the Sense of Hearing is not so perfect, as to confine the Consonances to so precise a Measure’. He believed that his new theory had a much wider application, promised to show with its help ‘how Astrologers may deduce their Aspects’ and intended to present it in ‘an entire and particular Tract’, but he did not in fact do so. Essentially a theoretical ideal, his system could notionally have worked in monodic music but was useless in a polyphonic context.

Brouncker's volume was read by contemporaries (including Newton) and even in the 18th century his reputation as a music theorist remained high. His interest in the science of music was reflected in the Royal Society meetings under his presidency. At a meeting on 12 November 1662 ‘Mr. Berchenshaw's paper on music was presented by Dr. Charlton and Lord Viscount Brouncker was desired to examine it’; he gave his thoughts on it a week later. A manuscript in the hand of Silas Taylor (GB-Lbl Add.4910) contains Birchensha's ‘6 Rules of Composition’ with ‘Enlargements there onto’ by Brouncker. Following a Royal Society meeting on 10 August 1664 Pepys and Taylor went to the Post Office ‘to hear some instrument musique of Mr. Berchenshaw's before my Lord Brounckerd and Sir Robert Murray [Moray]’. There are many other references in Pepys to Brouncker's interest in music theory as well as its practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

HawkinsH

J.F. Scott and H. Hartley: ‘William, Viscount Brouncker, P.R.S.’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xv (1960), 147–56

S. Pepys: Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (London, 1970–83)

D.P. Walker: Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978)

P. Gouk: Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1999)

SUSI JEANS/PENELOPE GOUK

Brouno, Guillermo [Guillelmo].

See Brown, William.

Brouwenstijn, Gré [Gerda Demphina]

(b Den Helder, 26 Aug 1915; d Amsterdam, 14 Dec 1999). Dutch soprano. She studied in Amsterdam and made her début there in 1940 as one of the Ladies in Die Zauberflöte. In 1946 she joined the newly formed Netherlands Opera, where her first successes were as Tosca and Santuzza. She made her Covent Garden début in 1951 as Aida and sang there regularly until 1964, appearing as an eloquent Elisabeth de Valois in Visconti’s noted production of Don Carlos (1958), as Desdemona and as Leonore (with Klemperer). She appeared at Bayreuth (1954–6) as Elsa, Elisabeth, Sieglinde, Gutrune and Eva; she also sang in Vienna and Stuttgart, where she took the leading role in Wieland Wagner’s controversial production of Fidelio (1956). She sang Jenůfa at Chicago (1959) and Amelia in Un ballo in maschera at San Francisco (1961). She appeared at Glyndebourne as an affecting Leonore (1959, 1961, 1963) and made her farewell in that role with Netherlands Opera in 1971. Her beautiful voice was enhanced by musical intelligence and natural dignity on stage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (F. Serpa; R. Vegeto)

H. Rosenthal: ‘Gré Brouwenstijn’, Opera, vii (1959), 440–44

A. Natan: ‘Brouwenstijn, Gré’, Prima donna (Basle, 1962) [incl. discography]

D. Cairns: Responses (London, 1973), 140ff

A. Blyth: Obituary, Opera, l (2000), 291–2

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Brouwer (Mezquida), Leo

(b Havana, 1 March 1939). Cuban composer, guitarist and conductor. In 1953 he began his studies in the guitar with Isaac Nicola, founder of the Cuban guitar school, and in 1955 he made his performance début. In the same year, and self-taught, he started to compose (e.g. Música para guitarra, cuerdas y percusión and Suite no.1 for guitar); his first works were published in 1956. He was awarded a grant (1959) for advanced guitar studies at the music department of the University of Hartford and for composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he was taught by Isadora Freed, J. Diemente, Joseph Iadone, Persichetti and Wolpe. In 1960 he started working in cinema, as head of the department of music in the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC); he has written scores for more than 60 films. He was involved in setting up (1969) and running the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora at ICAIC, becoming the teacher and mentor of its members, who included Silvio Rodríguez, Milanés and other important figures of contemporary Cuban music. He worked as musical adviser for Radio Habana Cuba (1960–68) and for other Cuban institutions, and taught counterpoint, harmony and composition at the Conservatorio Municipal in Havana (1960–67). His book Síntesis de la armonía contemporánea was a core text in his classes.

Together with the composers Juan Blanco and Carlos Fariñas and the conductor Manuel Duchesne Cuzán, Brouwer launched the avant-garde music movement in Cuba in the 1960s. He has been the most significant promoter of the bi-annual Havana Concurso y Festival de Guitarra, and in 1981 he was appointed principal conductor of the Cuban National SO. He has also conducted many other foreign orchestras including the Berlin PO and the Orquesta de Córdoba, Spain, which, under his direction, was formed in 1992. He is a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, of UNESCO, of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes Nuestra Señora de la Angustias in Granada (1996) and Honoris Causa Professor of Art at the Instituto Superior de Arte de Cuba (1996). For his contribution to the Cuban and international music scenes he was awarded the Orden Félix Varela, the highest honour granted by the Cuban state for culture.

Three phases can be identified in Brouwer’s work: the first, nationalistic (1955–62); the second, avant-garde (1962–7); and a third in which avant garde elements diminish and, particularly after 1980, a creative process described by the composer as ‘new simplicity’ emerges. The first phase is characterized by the use of traditional musical forms, including sonata and variation form, and by tonal harmonic structures rooted in nationalism (e.g. in Homenaje a Manuel de Falla (1957), Tres danzas concertantes (1958) and, Elegía a Jesús Menéndes (1960), among others). During this phase, despite the prevailing use of tonality, a tendency to structural fragmentation may be discerned, as well as the employment of several simultaneous tonal centres, a device that has remained throughout his output.

Though never lacking formal rigour, Brouwer’s works have in general sprung more from a sonic conception: ‘I use any form to help me find musical forms: that of a leaf, of a tree or geometric symbolisms. All these are also musical forms; despite the fact that my works appear very structured, what interests me is sound’. This concentration on the sensory, and an accompanying use of extra-musical formal sources, is most to the fore in Brouwer’s second phase, which was, with the Cuban avant garde in general, heavily influenced by the Polish school; he first heard this music at the Warsaw Autumn in 1961. Variantes for solo percussion and in particular Sonograma I for prepared piano typify this phase, which also included a brief turn towards serialism, in works such as Sonograma II and Arioso (Homenaje a Charles Mingus). Basic materials frequently comprise intervals of the 2nd, 4th and 7th and chords of superimposed 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. Complex polyphonic textures dominate, with thematic independence retained within the different planes of sound, and a resultant richness in rhythmic conjunction. Other common devices include pedals, ostinatos, sequences and melodic and rhythmic echoing. One of Brouwer’s most important avant-garde works, which has become a major piece of the guitar literature, is the solo Elogio de la danza (1964). In two movements – Lento and Ostenato – it was originally composed for dance with choreography by Luis Trápaga; it makes reference to primitive dances and to mysticism, and conveys an image of stamping feet and gyrations together with other dance elements.

Between 1967 and 1969 such works as Rem tene verba sequentur, Cántigas del tiempo nuevo and La tradición se rompe …, pero cuesta trabajo approach what would now be the postmodern, characterized by sharply defined contrasts in structure and texture and employing references to various historical periods. In La tradición se rompe …, pero cuesta trabajo, for example, the interpolation and superimposition of elements of such composers as Bach and Beethoven in a suggestive heterophony borders on caricature; further, the participation of the audience is invited with a persistent ‘sh’. All this is integrated into a process of thematic and instrumental development that evolves through a powerful, controlled aleatorism.

In the 1970s Brouwer continued to work on post-serial and aleatory ideas, for instance in La espiral eterna for guitar. But by the 1980s a ‘new simplicity’ had begun to take hold, involving neo-Romantic, minimalist and newly tonal elements. There is a marked lyricism in this third period, the use of varying nuclear cells to generate development, and the return of traditional forms exemplified in works like Canciones remotas, Manuscrito antiguo encontrado en una botella and La región más trasparente.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: 3 danzas concertantes, gui, str orch, 1958; Sonograma, 1964; Arioso (Homenaje a Charles Mingus), jazz combo, orch, 1965; Tropos, 1967; La tradición se rompe …, pero cuesta trabajo, 1967–9; Exaedros III, solo perc, 2 orch groups, 1970; Gui Conc., 1971; Conc., fl, str, pf obbl, 1972; Controversia (Sonograma IV), orch, 1972; El gran zoo (Guillén), nar, hn, orch, 1972; Vn Conc., 1978; Canción de gesta, 1979; Concierto de Liège (Quasi una fantasia), gui, orch, 1980; Concierto de Toronto, gui, orch, 1986; Concierto Elegíaco, gui, orch, 1988; Concierto (Helsinki), gui, orch, 1992; Wagneriana, str, 1992; Doble concierto ‘Omaggio a Paganini’, vn, gui, orch, 1995; Lamento por Rafael Orozco, cl, str, 1996

Vocal: Elegía a Jesús Menéndez (cant., N. Guillén), chorus, orch, 1960; Cantigas del tiempo nuevo, children’s chorus, actors, 4 insts, 1969; Es el Amor quien ve … (J. Martí), high v, 6 insts, 1973; Cantata de Chile (Manns), male chorus, orch, 1975

Chbr and solo inst: Danza característica, gui, 1957; Homenaje a Manuel de Falla, fl, ob, cl, gui, 1957; Micropiezas (Homenaje a Milhaud), 2 gui, 1957; Piezas sin título nos.1 and 2, gui, 1957; 3 apuntes, gui, 1959; 2 bocetos, pf, 1959; Vc Sonata, 1960; Variantes, perc, 1962; Sonograma I, prep pf, 1963; Elogio de la danza, gui, 1964; Trio no.2, ob, cl, bn, 1964; 2 conceptos del tiempo, 10 insts, 1965; Conmutaciones, prep pf, 2 perc, 1966; Canticum, gui, 1968; El reino de este mundo, wind qnt, 1968; Epigramas, vn/vc, pf, 1968; Rem tene verba sequentur, str qt, 1968; Exaedros I–II, 6 insts/any multiple of 6 insts, 1969; La espiral eterna, gui, 1970; Per suonare a 3, fl, va, gui, 1971; Ludus metalicus, sax qt, 1972; Tarantos, gui, 1974; Acerca del sol, el aire y la sonrisa, gui orch, 1978; El decameron negro, 3 ballads, gui, 1981; La región más transparente, fl, pf, 1982; Manuscrito antiguo encontrado en una botella, vn, vc, pf, 1983; Sonata, sones y danzones, vn, vc, pf, 1992; In memoriam ‘Toru Takemitsu’, gui, 1996

Tape: Sonata pian’e forte, pf, tape, 1970; Basso continuo I, (cl, tape)/(2 cl), 1972; Per suonare a 2, gui, tape, 1972

Principal publishers: Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales, Eschig, Editora Musical de Cuba, Schott

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Brouwer: La música lo cubano y la innovación (Havana, 1982)

D. Orozco: Rasgos de identidad, entonación y universalidad en la creación musical cubana contemporánea: su singular proyección en 30 años de realidad social revolucionaria, Conferencia ofrecida en al Simposio de Música Contemporánea, UNEAC, 1989

Z. Gómez and V. Eli Rodríguez: Música latino americana y caribeña (Havana, 1995)

Diccionario de la música española e hispano-americana, ed. E. Casares Rodicio, J. López-Calo, I. Fernandez de la Cuesta (Madrid, 1999)

VICTORIA ELI RODRÍGUEZ

Brown, Alice.

See Moyle, alice.

Brown, Chris(topher Owen)

(b Mendota, IL, 9 Sept 1953). American composer. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA 1974) with William Brooks, Gordon Mumma and others, and at Mills College (MFA 1985) where his teachers included David Rosenboom. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1985–92) and Mills College (from 1991), where he has served as co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music. During the 1980s he was active as an instrument builder, most notably of the ‘gazamba’, a prepared electric piano. His compositions explore the interaction of acoustic instruments and live electronics. Often improvisatory, they reflect his skills as a pianist. He has collaborated with the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Glenn Spearman and others, and is a member of the computer network band The Hub. Talking Drum (1995) received honourable mention at the Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, in 1996.

WORKS

(selective list)

Sparks, pf, 1976; Quay, pf, 1977; Alternating Currents, orch, 1983; Conjunction, carillon, amp rods, 1983; Post Mortem, sax, pf, perc, elecs, 1984; Iceberg, perc, elecs, 1985; Obedience School, inst, elecs, 1985; Hall of Mirrors, sax, pf, perc, elecs, 1986; Snakecharmer, inst, cptr, 1987; Qt with Shadows, sax qt, elecs, 1989–90; Lava, brass, perc, elecs, 1992; Flies, vn, pf, perc, elecs, 1993; Tenebrae, vn, elecs, 1994; Talking Drum, insts, cptr, 1995; Inventions, kbd, cptr, 1997

Principal recording companies: Artifact, Tzadik, Music & Arts, Centaur

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Brown, J. Bischoff and T. Perkis: ‘Bringing Digital Music to Life’, Computer Music Journal, xx/2 (1996), 28–32

J. Chadabe: Electric Sound (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997), 296–7

CARTER SCHOLZ

Brown, Christopher (Roland)

(b Tunbridge Wells, 17 June 1943). English composer. His musical training was as a chorister at Westminster Abbey and a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge (1962–5). He subsequently studied with Lennox Berkeley at the RAM and with Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In 1969 he began to teach at the RAM. Brown’s choral training and early career as a singer have left a lasting influence on his work as a composer. A substantial output, which includes works for chorus and orchestra, unaccompanied mixed-voice choir and solo voice, as well as church music, demonstrates a sensitivity to text and a concern for craftmanship, characteristic both of his teachers and other respected senior contemporaries, such as Britten and Tippett. His alertness to dramatic structure can be heard in early works such as the choral cycle Elegy (1967) and is typical of all his most successful pieces, including the atmospheric Seascape for speaker, soloists, chorus and brass quintet (1984). Brown’s output also includes a significant volume of orchestral, instrumental and educational music. He has been awarded the Prince Pierre of Monaco Prize, the Guinness Prize on two occasions and the Washington International Competition Prize.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sonata, str, op.42, 1974; The Sun, Rising, threnody, op.44, 1976; Org Conc.; Toy Sym., chbr orch, toy insts; Triptych

Vocal-orch: David (cant., Bible, C. Smart), op.21, Mez, Bar, chorus, orch, 1970; Soliloquy (E. Brontë, T. Wyatt, J. Joyce), op.35, Ct/Bar, orch, 1973; Missa brevis, op.16, A, T, Bar, chorus, chbr orch, 1976; Christmas Cant., S, chorus, chbr orch; Landscapes, S, orch; Mag, S, A, T, B, chorus, orch

Other vocal: 3 Shakespeare Songs, op.7, SSAATBB, 1965; Elegy ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ (W. Shakespeare, Herrick, anon.), op.14, SSATBB, 1967; The Snows of Winter (song cycle), op.32, S, S, A, T, Bar, B, ob, cl, bn, vn, vc, pf, 1971; Seascape (B. Devereaux), op.53, S, B, spkr, chorus, brass qnt, 1984; Mass, SATB

Chbr: Chbr Music, op.40, cl, hn, vc, pf, 1975; Str Qt no.2, op.43, 1975; Images, brass qnt; La légende de l’etoile, org, perc

Principal publishers: Chester, Novello, OUP

MATTHEW GREENALL

Brown, Clifford [Brownie]

(b Wilmington, DE, 30 Oct 1930; d Pennsylvania, 26 June 1956). American jazz trumpeter. He began to study the trumpet at the age of 13 and soon developed an extraordinary technical facility. While studying mathematics at Delaware State College and music at Maryland State College, he attracted attention through his exceptional performances with the college jazz bands and his brief appearances in Philadelphia with such leading jazz musicians as Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, all of whom praised and encouraged him. Navarro’s style was particularly important as a model for Brown, and the two men formed a close friendship. Brown spent a year in hospital after an automobile accident in June 1950, but thereafter resumed his career in Philadelphia, and in March 1952 made his first recordings, with Chris Powell’s Blue Flames. He joined Tadd Dameron’s band for a recording session and for appearances during the summer of 1953 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In September of that year Brown toured Europe with Lionel Hampton’s big band and recorded with American and European jazz musicians. On his return to the USA, he played with Art Blakey. In 1954, with Max Roach, he formed the Brown-Roach Quintet, with which he was associated until he was killed two years later in an automobile accident. The quintet had a major influence on the establishment of the African American style later known as hard bop.

Brown was one of the outstanding jazz trumpeters of the 1950s, and his reputation as an extraordinary improviser endures. His playing reflected a synthesis of certain stylistic aspects of Gillespie, Miles Davis and Navarro; it was characterized by a rich, broad tone and a percussive attack, unusually long yet carefully shaped phrases, exceptional virtuosity and a seemingly unending flow of logically developed musical ideas. The impeccable technique he displayed in solos at fast tempos, which were projected with equal fluidity from the highest to the lowest register of his instrument, was complemented by the haunting, introspective lyricism that distinguished his performances of ballads. His most mature work was with the Brown-Roach Quintet, as reflected in the albums Study in Brown (1955, EmA) and At Basin Street (1956, EmA). Brown’s style exerted a pervasive influence on jazz improvisation in the 1960s and 1970s, and represented an alternative approach to the subdued manner of Davis. This influence may be seen most directly in the work of Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Hodeir: Hommes et problèmes du jazz, suivi de La religion du jazz (Paris, 1954; Eng. trans., rev., 1956/R, as Jazz: its Evolution and Essence)

R. Atkins: ‘Clifford Brown’, JazzM, vi/6 (1960), 4–6, 30 only

M.L. Stewart: Structural Development in the Jazz Improvisational Technique of Clifford Brown (diss., U. of Michigan, 1973); pubd in Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, vi–vii (1974– 5), 141–273

M.L. Stewart: ‘Some Characteristics of Clifford Brown’s Improvisational Style’, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, xi (1979), 135–64

B. Weir: Clifford Brown Discography (Cardiff, 1982, enlarged 5/1990)

T. Owens: Bebop: the Music and its Players (New York, 1995), 128–37

OLLY WILSON

Brown, David (Clifford)

(b Gravesend, 8 July 1929). English musicologist. He studied English, Latin and music at the University of Sheffield (BA 1950, BMus 1951). During National Service (1952–4) he studied Russian and was subsequently commissioned in the RAF. He worked as a schoolteacher (1954–9) before becoming music librarian in the University of London Library at Senate House (1959–62). In 1962 he was appointed lecturer at Southampton University, becoming senior lecturer (1970), reader (1975), and professor of musicology (1983–9); in 1971 the university awarded him the doctorate for his book on Weelkes. In 1980 he joined the editorial committee of Musica Britannica. His special interests are Russian music and English Renaissance music, particularly the English madrigal. His book on Glinka was the first major study of the composer to appear in English, and contains translations of much valuable information derived from Glinka’s own memoirs and the reminiscences of contemporaries. His four-volume study of Tchaikovsky is his major achievement. An authoritative biography and the most comprehensive to date, it includes analyses of all the major works. The final volume includes a chapter on the essential Russianness of Tchaikovsky's music and also presents a lucid and balanced account of Tchaikovsky's last days, concluding in favour of the suicide theory. Tchaikovsky Remembered is an edition of important documentary sources, including all those relating to the composer's death. Brown has also appeared frequently as a broadcaster.

WRITINGS

‘William Byrd’s 1588 Volume’, ML, xxxviii (1957), 371–7

‘Stimulus and Form in Britten's Work’, ML, xxxix (1958), 218–26

‘Thomas Morley and the Catholics: some Speculations’, MMR, lxxxix (1959), 53–61

‘Britten’s Three Canticles’, MR, xxi (1960), 55–65

‘The Styles and Chronology of Thomas Morley’s Motets’, ML, xli (1960), 216–22

‘Vaughan Williams's Symphonies: some Judgements Reviewed’, MMR, xc (1960), 44–52

‘Balakirev, Tchaikovsky and Nationalism’, ML, xlii (1961), 227–41

‘Soviet Musical Life’, Survey, xxxix/Dec (1961), 61–8

‘The Anthems of Thomas Weelkes’, PRMA, xci (1964–5), 61–72

‘Jonathan Harvey’, ML, cix (1968), 808–9

Thomas Weelkes: a Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1969/R)

‘Twentieth Century Russian Music’, Music in the Modern Age, ed. F.W. Sternfeld (London, 1973), 1–45

Wilbye (London, 1974)

Mikhail Glinka: a Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974/R)

Tchaikovsky: a Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1978–92)

‘Tchaikovsky and Chekhov’, Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham, ed. M.H. Brown and R.J. Wiley (Ann Arbor and Oxford, 1985), 197–205; Swed. trans. in Melos: en musiktidskrift (wint. 1993), 40–48

‘The Concerto in Pre-Revolutionary Russia’, A Companion to the Concerto, ed. R. Layton (London, 1988), 177–202

‘The Introduction to Liszt's Faust Symphony, with a Postscript on the B minor Piano Sonata’, MR, xlix (1988), 267–71

‘Russia before the Revolution’, A Companion to the Symphony, ed. R. Layton (London, 1993, 2/1995 as A Guide to the Symphony), 262–91

Tchaikovsky Remembered (London, 1993)

Musorgsky (Oxford, forthcoming)

EDITIONS

with W. Collins and P. le Huray: Thomas Weelkes: Collected Anthems, MB, xxiii (1966)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.F. van Wijnen: ‘Tsjaikovski-biograaf David Brown’, Vrij Nederland (26 Oct 1991), 16–19

PETER LE HURAY/ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Brown, Earle (Appleton)

(b Lunenburg, MA, 26 Dec 1926). American composer. A leading representative of the New York School established in the early 1950s in association with Cage, Feldman, Tudor and Christian Wolff, he pioneered such concepts as graphic notation, time-notation and open form.

1. Life.

Brown's early musical background was in jazz. Intent on an aeronautical career, he studied engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944–5) before joining the Army Air Corps. Subsequently, he attended the Schillinger School of Music, Boston (1946–50), and studied the trumpet and composition privately. His encounter with the work of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder was particularly influential to his developing musical aesthetic. After moving to Denver (1950–52), he painted, taught the Schillinger method and explored various compositional techniques. At Cage’s invitation, he travelled to New York to work on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, the results of which included Octet I (1952–3). This studio experience proved valuable in his later roles as an editor and recording engineer for Capitol Records (1955–60) and as the director of artists and repertoire, and producer for Mainstream-Time Records’ ‘Contemporary Sound’ series (1960–73).

Through Cage and Tudor, Brown was brought to the attention of the European avant garde. Boulez was helpful in establishing contacts with publishers, performers and orchestras; later a strong relationship developed with Maderna. Beginning in 1956, Brown visited Europe on numerous occasions: he lectured at Darmstadt (notably in 1964–5) and received several commissions, including those for Penthatis (Domaine Musical, 1957–8), Available Forms I (City of Darmstadt, 1961) and Available Forms II (Rome Radio Orchestra, 1962). His notational and structural innovations were widely copied; as Feldman noted: ‘I think he’s been ripped off more than any of us, in an overt way’ (1989). Later European distinctions included appointments as composer-in-residence with the Künstler Programm, West Berlin (1970–71), and the Rotterdam PO (1974), visiting professor at the Basle Conservatory (1974–5) and guest conductor with the Cologne RSO (1963–5) and Saarbrücken RSO (1981).

Brown also received recognition in America. He held the W. Alton Jones chair of composition and was composer-in-residence at the Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore (1968–73), where he was awarded an honorary DMus in 1970. His visiting or guest appointments included positions at SUNY, Buffalo (1975), the California Institute of the Arts (1973–83), Yale University (1980–81) and the Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals (each on several occasions). In addition, he served as director of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University and programming director of the Fromm Weeks of New Music at Aspen, Colorado (1985–90). Among his numerous honours are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1965–6), an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972), a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation (Cross Sections and Color Fields, 1972–5), the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (1977), a Letter of Distinction from the AMC (1996) and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art's John Cage Award for Music (1998).

2. Works.

Many commentators have inaccurately categorized Brown’s work as chance music. With the arguable exception of a small number of graphically notated pieces from the 1950s (most famously December 1952 from Folio [I]; see illustration), however, Brown’s structures have consistently emphasized choice rather than chance. While the majority of his compositions are aleatory to some degree, they are also consistent in evincing a distinctly un-Cagean level of subjective involvement. Most of his scores allow for what he has termed ‘creative ambiguity’, which enables the performers to engage in the creative process, but within parameters (and using material) clearly defined by the composer. His time-notation, first employed in the 1950s (as in Music for Cello and Piano, 1954–5), specifies pitch and dynamics precisely but leaves durations relatively undefined, suggested through timings and visual note lengths in the score. Other contemporaneous pieces, including Twenty-Five Pages (1953) allow for additional flexibilities; as Brown has explained, ‘each page may be performed either side up [and] events within each two-line system may be read as either treble or bass clef’.

Brown’s open forms, influenced by Calder’s mobiles, are typified by Available Forms I (1961). In this work, each of the score’s six unbound pages specifies four or five events. The conductor, who has general control over dynamics and velocity, begins with any event on any page and, in almost a painterly fashion, creates from the available materials an individually shaped version of the work. Further permutations of basic principles occur in Brown’s largest compositions, such as Available Forms II (1962) and Event: Synergy II (1967–8), in which two conductors collaborate to create the sonic mix. Calder Piece (1963–6) uniquely employs a constantly changing mobile (especially made by Calder) as both a performance object and a structural point of reference.

Brown’s later music has tended towards other kinds of ‘creative ambiguity’. In Centering (1973), Windsor Jambs (1980) and Tracking Pierrot (1992), the overall shape of each work is fixed, while elements within each structure remain open. Centering, for example, contains three open-form areas, two of which are accompanied cadenzas. In the fully notated Summer Suite ’95, on the other hand, Brown employed computer technology to transcribe his own performances of graphed sketches, realizing an early desire to ‘get the time of composing closer to the time of performing’. Described as ‘the jazziest of my piano pieces’, the work shows Brown both returning to his musical roots and opening up new directions for his music.

WORKS

published unless otherwise stated

Orch: Indices, chbr orch, 1954, unpubd [concert and ballet versions]; Light Music, orch, lights, elecs, 1961, unpubd; Available Forms II, orch [2 conductors], 1962; Modules 1–2, 1966; Event: Synergy II, ens [2 conductors], 1967–8; Module 3, 1968–9; Cross Sections and Color Fields, 1972–5; Time Spans, 1972; Sounder Rounds, 1982–3, unpubd; see also vocal

Vocal: Music for ‘Tender Buttons’ (G. Stein), spkr, fl, hn, hp, 1953, unpubd; From Here, SATB opt., 20 insts, 1963; Small Pieces, chorus, 1969–70; New Piece Loops, SATB/(SATB, orch)/orch, 1972; Windsor Jambs (wordless text), Mez, fl, b cl, pf + cel, perc, vn, va, vc, 1980, unpubd

Chbr: Trio, cl, bn, pf, 1949, unfinished, unpubd; Str Qt, 1950, unpubd; Folio [I], partly unspecified insts, 1952–3 [available only from Brown]; Music for Vn, Vc and Pf, 1952; Music for Vc and Pf, 1954–5; Four Systems, unspecified insts, 1954 [available only from Brown]; Pentathis, fl, b cl, tpt, trbn, hp, pf qt, 1957–8; Hodograph I, fl, pf + cel, perc, 1959; Available Forms I, 18 insts, 1961; Novara, fl, b cl, tpt, pf, str qt, 1962; Str Qt, 1965; Calder Piece (Chef d'orchestre), 4 perc, mobile by A. Calder, 1963–6, unpubd; Folio II, unspecified insts, 1970–93, unpubd; Syntagm III, fl, b cl, vib, mar, hp, pf + cel, vn, vc, 1970; Sign Sounds, 18 insts, 1972; Centering, vn, 10 insts, 1973; ‘Oh, K’ for Mauricio Kagel, fl, cl, b cl, pf, perc, vn, vc, db, 1992, unpubd; Tracking Pierrot, fl, cl + b cl, pf + cel, vib, mar, vn, vc, 1992, unpubd; Special Events, vc, pf, 1999, unpubd

Kbd (pf, unless otherwise stated): Fugue, 1949, unpubd; Home Burial, 1949, unpubd; Passacaglia, 1950, unpubd; Strata, 2 pf, 1950, unpubd; 3 Pieces, 1951; Perspectives, 1952; Twenty-Five Pages, 1–25 pf, 1953; Forgotten Piece, 4 pf, 1954, unpubd; Four More, 1956, unpubd; Corroboree, 3/2 pf, 1964; Nine Rarebits, 1–2 hpd, 1965; Summer Suite ’95, 1995, unpubd

Tape: Octet I, 8 tapes, 1952–3, unpubd; Octet II, 8 tapes, 1957, unpubd; Times Five, fl, trbn, vn, vc, hp, 4-track tape, 1963; Tracer, fl, cl, b cl, vn, vc, db, 4-track tape, 1984, unpubd

Recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publishers: Schirmer, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

GroveA (W. Bland/J. Wierzbicki) [incl. further bibliography]

J. Cage: Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961, 2/1966), 37–8, 85

E. Brown: ‘Notation und Ausführung neuer Musik’, Notation neuer Musik: Darmstadt 1964, DBNM, ix (1965), 64–86; Eng. trans. in MQ, lxxii (1986), 180–201

E. Brown: DBNM, x (1966); Fr. trans. as ‘Sur la forme’, Musique en jeu, 3 (1971), 29–44

G. Chase, ed.: The American Composer Speaks (Baton Rouge, LA, 1966)

H. Russcol: The Liberation of Sound (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972), 143–8

M. Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London, 1974, 2/1999)

D. and B. Rosenberg: ‘Earle Brown’, The Music Makers (New York, 1979), 79–91

D. Bailey: Musical Improvisation (New York, 1980), 76–88

P. Gena: ‘Freedom in Experimental Music: the New York Revolution’, Tri-Quarterly, no.52 (1981), 223–43

D. Ashton: ‘Earle Brown's Continuum’, Arts Magazine, lvi/5 (1982), 68–9

R. Zierolf: Indeterminacy in Musical Form (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1983)

P.L. Quist: Indeterminate Form in the Work of Earle Brown (diss., Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins U., 1984)

K. Potter: ‘Earle Brown in Context’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 679–83

G. Rotter: ‘Interview mit dem Komponisten Earle Brown’, Zeitschrift für Musikpedagogik, xi/36 (1986), 3–10

R. Dufallo: ‘Earle Brown’, Trackings (New York, 1989), 103–12

M. Feldman: ‘Captain Cook’s First Voyage’, Cum Notis Variorum, no.131 (1989), 7–12 [interview]

P.-A. Castanet, ed.: ‘Musique et aleatoire(s)’, Les Cahiers du CIREM, xviii–xix (Rouen, 1990–91)

D.B. Denton: The Composition as Aesthetic Polemic: ‘December 1952’ by Earle Brown (diss., U. of Iowa, 1992)

J. Holzaepfel: David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959 (diss., CUNY, 1994)

J.P. Welsh: ‘Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967)’, PNM, xxxii/1 (1994), 254–90

O. Delaigue: ‘Earle Brown et la France’, Sillages Musicologiques: Hommages à Yves Gerard, ed. P. Blayard and R. Legrand (Paris, 1997), 289–308

D. Nicholls: ‘Getting Rid of the Glue: the Music of the New York School’, The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts, ed. S. Johnson (New York, 2000)

DAVID NICHOLLS

Brown, Howard Mayer

(b Los Angeles, 13 April 1930; d Venice, 20 Feb 1993). American musicologist and editor. He took the BA at Harvard College in 1951, then studied singing and conducting privately in Vienna. He returned to Harvard in 1953 for graduate studies with Piston, Gombosi, Merritt and John Ward and received the MA in 1954 and the PhD in 1959, with a dissertation under Ward on music in the French secular theatre of the Renaissance. While at Harvard he studied the flute privately with Georges Laurent of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and as a graduate student he conducted and performed both early and 20th-century music extensively in Boston and Cambridge. He first taught at Wellesley College, where he was instructor from 1958 to 1960. In 1960 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he later became associate professor (1963), professor (1967) and chairman of the music department (1970). At Chicago he conducted and played several instruments (including recorder, transverse flute, shawm and the entire viol family) in the university’s Collegium Musicum; he also recorded the first volume of the Historical Anthology of Music (ed. A.T. Davison and W. Apel, 1954) on ten LP records in which about half of the performances are by the Chicago collegium. In 1972 he replaced Thurston Dart as the King Edward Professor of Music, King’s College, University of London; he returned to Chicago in 1974 and succeeded Lowinsky as Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in 1976. He was eagerly sought after as a visiting professor around the world and his appointments included visiting professor at SUNY, Buffalo (1967), Alexander D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University (1972–8), visiting professor at New York University (1982), Kennedy Professor in the Renaissance at Smith College (1983), Una Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley (1986) and visiting professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Mainz, Zürich (1987) and Basle (1992). His particular interest in Renaissance music led him to take special responsibility for providing facsimiles and critical editions: he was editor of Renaissance Music in Facsimile (30 vols., 1977–82, with F. D’Accone and J.A. Owens), a member of the editorial board of the new Josquin des Prez collected edition and general editor of Recent Researches in Renaissance Music (1977–82, with J. Haar) and Monuments of Renaissance Music (1977–93). He was a member of the executive committee for the sixth edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, to which he contributed a number of articles. Brown’s accomplishments, about which he was astonishingly modest, were widely recognized by others. His professional appointments included president of the AMS (1978–80), vice-president of the IMS (1982–7) and president of the Renaissance Society of America (1990–91). He was named Citoyen d’Honneur by the City of Tours in 1980 (where he was closely associated with the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance); his edition A Florentine Chansonnier (1983) won the AMS Otto Kinkeldey Award for the best musicological book of the year; and he was awarded the Galileo Galilei Prize by the University of Pisa in 1987 for his preparation of two series of facsimile editions of Baroque operas (1977–84) and his edition of Peri’s Euridice (1980).

Brown’s research, centred on the Renaissance but extending into the Middle Ages and to the Baroque era and beyond, combined a magisterial control of the sources with innate musicianship and a broad humanistic frame. His dissertation, first books and music editions (1963, 1965) demonstrated his extraordinary grasp of two large repertories: the 15th- and early 16th-century chanson and 16th-century instrumental music. This early corpus set the foundation and standard for all succeeding work in the field. His avid interest in creating an accurate historical record for music can be seen throughout his career in publications of monumental editions and bibliographic resources. His ground-breaking handbook, Musical Iconography (with J. Lascelle, 1972), provided access to the huge reservoir of information concerning music to be found in the visual arts of the West and led to a series of detailed and imaginative articles on the playing of 14th-century fiddles, shawms, harps and gittern. In his multi-volume facsimile editions of Italian Baroque opera (97 vols., 1977–84; 1980–82 with E. Weimer), he made a whole repertory accessible for further research; moreover, in these publications he was at the forefront of emphasizing the importance of the libretto to the study of opera.

Brown’s musicianship was commensurate with his research and editorial skills, and he gently chastised both those who, in condemning fact-based scholarship, failed to recognize that certain research is not only worth doing but is also necessary, and those who believed, as he put it with his natural and sometimes cutting wit, that music should be seen and not heard. His voluminous publications on performance practice (see R. Jackson, 1993) attest to his abiding interest in the intersection of performance and scholarship. His command of the historical record and his engagement in music-making allowed him to reach beyond the surviving sources to imagine music sounding in context. He urged scholars who are reluctant to interpret (‘as opposed merely to chronicle’) to do more (Renaissance Quarterly, 1987) and provided examples of such efforts in his own publications. In Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation (1973) and his edition of Euridice, he drew on his knowledge of music theory, musical iconography and performing experience to argue persuasively that the performance of these works included improvised instrumental lines, thus transforming the traditional sound-picture of these works. In ‘Pedantry or Liberation?’ (1986–7), he argued that an ‘authentic’ musical performance should be understood as one which is ‘expertly played and sung, genuinely committed and artistically convincing’ rather than one which adheres to some pedantic list of allegedly authentic qualities. From the beginning of his work as a scholar he demanded that music be understood in its social and intellectual context. In his examination of Boccaccio’s Decameron and other literary works of the Trecento (1977), Brown followed two avenues of inquiry: how did music sound in the 14th century; and what place did it have in society. He insisted that such questions needed to be asked as urgently as those about style, genre and compositional technique, particularly since the latter seemed to preoccupy musicologists.

Brown cared deeply about the field of musicology and its future, and he was a model teacher and mentor, giving generously of time, advice and materials to all who asked. He had a tremendous impact on untold numbers of students and reached out even to those he did not know, giving his large library of modern English-language books and journals to Bologna University. The AMS appropriately chose to honour Brown by establishing an endowment fund to offer graduate fellowships in musicology to minority students. At his death, he left his personal papers, his vast archive of microfilm sources, books and music to the Newberry Library in Chicago.

ELLEN T. HARRIS

WRITINGS

‘The Chanson rustique: Popular Elements in the 15th- and 16th-Century Chanson’, JAMS, xii (1959), 16–26

Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (diss., Harvard U., 1959; Cambridge, MA, 1963)

‘The chanson spirituelle, Jacques Buus, and Parody Technique’, JAMS, xv (1962), 145–73

‘The Genesis of a Style: the Parisian Chanson, 1500–1550’, Chanson & Madrigal 1480–1530: Cambridge, MA, 1961, ed. J. Haar (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 1–50

Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: a Bibliography (Cambridge, MA, 1965)

‘Chansons for the Pleasure of a Florentine Patrician: Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 56–66

‘The Transformation of the Chanson at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 78–96 [incl. discussion]

‘The Music of the Strozzi Chansonnier (Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442)’, AcM, xl (1968), 115–29

‘How Opera Began: an Introduction to Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600)’, The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630, ed. E. Cochrane (New York and London, 1970), 401–44

‘Accidentals and Ornamentation in Sixteenth-Century Intabulations of Josquin’s Motets’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 475–522

‘Improvised Ornamentation in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson’, Quadrivium, xii/1 (1971), 235–58

with J. Lascelle: Musical Iconography: a Manual for Cataloguing Musical Subjects in Western Art before 1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1972)

‘Psyche’s Lament: some Music for the Medici Wedding in 1565’, Words and Music: the Scholar’s View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 1–27

‘On the Performance of 15th-Century Chansons’, EMc, i (1973), 3–10

Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: the Music for the Florentine Intermedii, MSD, xxx (1973)

‘Embellishment in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Intabulations’, PRMA, c (1973–4), 49–83

‘Guillaume Dufay and the Early Renaissance’, EMc, ii (1974), 219–33

‘A Cook’s Tour of Ferrara in 1529’, RIM, x (1975), 216–41

with H.T. David: Introduction to E. Romano: Musica duorum: Rome, 1521, MRM, vi (1975)

Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music (London, 1976)

Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976)

‘The Performance of Fifteenth-Century Chansons: Problems of Instrumentation and Ornamentation’, Current Thought in Musicology, ed. J.W. Grubbs (Austin, 1976), 89–138

‘Words and Music in Early 16th-Century Chansons: Text Underlay in Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio, Ms Basevi 2442’, Formen und Probleme der Überlieferung mehrstimmiger Musik im Zeitalter Josquins Desprez: Wolfenbüttel 1976, 97–141

‘Fantasia on a Theme by Boccaccio’, EMc, v (1977), 324–41

‘A Guardian God for a Garden of Music’, Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, ed. S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus, ii (Florence, 1977), 371–81

‘On Gentile Bellini's Processione in San Marco (1496)’, IMSC: Berkeley 1977, 649–58

‘Trecento Angels and the Instruments they Play’, Modern Musical Scholarship: Oxford 1977, 112–40

‘Music in Trecento Wedding Processions’, Musica antiqua V: Bydgoszcz 1978, 467–82

‘In Alamire's Workshop: Notes on Scribal Practice in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Datierung und Filiation von Musikhandschriften der Josquin-Zeit: Wolfenbüttel 1980, 15–63

‘La musica ficta dans les mises en tablatures d'Albert de Rippe et Adrian Le Roy’, Le Luth et sa musique II: Tours 1980, 163–82

‘Words and Music: Willaert, the Chanson and the Madrigal about 1540’, Florence and Venice: Florence 1976 and 1977, ed. S. Bertelli, N. Rubinstein, and C.H. Smyth, ii (Florence, 1980), 217–66

‘The Geography of Florentine Monody: Caccini at Home and Abroad’, EMc, ix (1981), 147–68

‘Notes (and Transposing Notes) on the Viol in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts, ed. I. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), 61–78

‘The Trecento Harp’, Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music: New York 1981, 35–73

‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 1–48

‘A “New” Chansonnier of the Early Sixteenth Century in the University Library of Uppsala: a Preliminary Report’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 171–233

‘A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical Subject Matter’, Imago musicae, i (1984), 189–243; ii (1985), 179–282; iii (1986), 103–87; v (1988), 167–241

‘Embellishing Eighteenth-Century Arias: on Cadenzas’, Opera & Vivaldi, ed. M. Collins and E.K. Kirk (Austin, 1984), 258–76

‘St. Augustine, Lady Music and the Gittern in Fourteenth-Century Italy’, MD, xxxviii (1984), 25–65

‘The Trecento Psaltery’, L’Europa e la musica del Trecento: Congresso IV: Certaldo 1984 [Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi (Certaldo, 1992)], 315–42

‘Ambivalent Trecento Attitudes towards Music: an Iconographical View’, Music and Context: Essays for John M. Ward, ed. A.Dhu Shapiro and P. Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 79–107

‘Josquin and the Fifteenth-Century Chanson’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxi (1985), 119–58

‘“Lord, Have Mercy On Us”: Early Sixteenth-Century Scribal Practice and the Polyphonic Kyrie’, Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, ii (1985), 93–110

‘Music for a Town Official in Sixteenth-Century Zwickau’, Musica antiqua VII: Bydgoszcz 1985, 479–92

with K. Moretto Spencer: ‘How Alfonso della Viola Tuned his Viols, and How he Transposed’, EMc, xiv (1986), 520–33

‘The Importance of Sixteenth Century Intabulations’, Lute Symposium: Utrecht 1986, 1–29

‘Notes (and Transposing Notes) on the Transverse Flute in the Early Sixteenth Century’, JAMIS, xii (1986), 5–39

‘A Rondeau With a One-Line Refrain Can be Sung’, Ars Lyrica, iii (1986), 23–35 [a response to H. Garey: ‘Can a Rondeau with a One-Line Refrain Be Sung?’, Ars Lyrica, ii (1983), 10–21]

‘Women Singers and Women’s Songs in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, Women Making Music: the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. J. Bowers and J. Tick (Urbana, IL, 1986), 62–89

‘A Ballade for Mathieu de Foix: Style and Structure in the Music of Trebor’, MD, xli (1987), 75–107

‘Clemens and Claudin’, Liber Amicorum Chris Maas, ed. R. Wegman and E. Vetter (Amsterdam, 1987), 245–66

‘Recent Research in the Renaissance: Criticism and Patronage’, Renaissance Quarterly, xl (1987), 1–10

‘Musica para la passion de Cristo de Anchieta y otros: musica española hacia 1500 en un conierto pan-europa’, Festival de Otono en Madrid 1984–1988, ed. P. de Yzaguirre (Madrid, 1988), 223–48

‘Pedantry or Liberation? Notes Toward a History of Authenticity in the Performance of Early Music’, Authenticity and Early Music, ed. N. Kenyon (Oxford, 1988), 27–56

‘Bossinensis, Willaert, and Verdelot: Pitch and the Conventions of Transcribing Music for Lute and Voice in Italy in the Early Sixteenth-Century’, RdM, lxxv (1989), 25–46

‘Minstrels and their Repertory in Fifteenth-Century France: Music in an Urban Environment’, Urban Life in the Renaissance: College Park, MD, 1983 and 1984, ed. S. Zimmerman and R.F.E. Weissman (Newark, NJ, 1989), 142–64

ed., with S. Sadie: Performance Practice, i: Music before 1600 (London, 1989); ii: Music after 1600 (1989) [vol. i incl. ‘Introduction’, 3–14, 147–66; ‘Instruments’, 15–36, 167–84]

‘The Trecento Fiddle and its Bridges’, EMc, xvii (1989), 308–29

‘The Mirror of Man's Salvation: Music in Devotional Life about 1500’, Renaissance Quarterly, xliii (1990), 744–73

‘Petrarch in Naples: Notes on the Formation of Giaches de Werts Style’, Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. R. Charteris (Sydney, 1990), 16–50

‘Theory and Practice in the Sixteenth Century: Preliminary Notes on Attaingnant's Modally Ordered Chansonniers’, Essays in Musicology: a Tribute to Alvin Johnson, ed. L. Lockwood and E.H. Roesner (Philadelphia, 1990), 75–100

‘A Typology of Francesco Corteccia's Madrigals’, The Well Enchanting Skill: Essays in Honour of F.W. Sternfeld, ed. J.A. Caldwell, E.D. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford and New York, 1990), 3–28

‘Verso una definizione dell'armonia nel sedicesimo secolo: sui “madrigali ariosi” di Antonio Barre’, RIM, xxv (1990), 18–60

‘Hans Ott, Heinrich Finck and Stoltzer: Early Sixteenth-Century German Motets in Formschneiders Anthologies of 1537 and 1538’, Von Isaac bis Bach: Festschrift Martin Just, ed. F. Heidlberger, W. Osthoff and R. Wiesend (Kassel, 1991), 73–84

‘Local Traditions of Music Patronage’, AcM, lxiii (1991), 28–32

‘Songs after Supper: How the Aristocracy Entertained Themselves in the Fifteenth Century’, Musica privata … Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, ed. M. Fink, R. Gstrein and G. Mössner (Innsbruck, 1991), 37–52

‘On Veronica and Josquin’, New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J. Wright and S.A. Floyd (Warren, MI, 1992), 49–61

‘Vincenzo Galilei in Rome: his First Book of Lute Music (1563) and its Cultural Context’, Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. V. Coelho (Dordrecht, 1992), 153–84

‘Cleriadus et Meliadice: a Fifteenth-Century Manual for Courtly Behavior’, Iconography at the Crossroads: Princeton, NJ, 1990, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 215–28

‘Knjige moteta Andrea Antica’ [The Motet Books for Andrea Antico], Istra: časopis za kulturu, xxx/1 (1993)

‘Madrigals for the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona: Nasco's First Book of 1548’, Akademie und Musik: Erscheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des Akademiegedankens in Kultur - und Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Werner Braun, ed. W. Frobenius, N. Schwindt-Gross and T. Sick (Saarbrucken, 1993), 165–80

‘Clemens non Papa, the Virgin Mary, and Rhetoric’, Musicologia humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 139–56

‘“Ut musica poesis”: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century’, EMH, xiii (1994), 1–63

‘Lasso in Naples and Rome: the Early Four-Part Madrigals’, Liber amicorum John Steele, ed. W. Drake (Stuyvesant, NY, 1997), 87–116

ed. H. Kellman: Printed Anthologies of Music, 1500–1550: their Contents, RISM, B/I (forthcoming)

Brown, Howard Mayer

EDITIONS

Theatrical Chansons of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1963)

Italian Opera, 1640–1770 (New York, 1977–84) [97 vols.; vols. lxi–xcvii with E. Weimer]

J. Peri: Euridice (Madison, WI, 1980)

A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, MRM, vii–viii (1983)

with F. D’Accone and J.A. Owens: Renaissance Music in Facsimile (New York, 1985–8) [30 vols.]

with J. van Benthem: Josquin des Prez: Secular Works for Three Voices, New Josquin Edition, xxvii (Utrecht, 1988)

Brown, Howard Mayer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituaries: V. Coelho, Preface to JLSA, xxiii (1990) [pubd 1994 in memory of H.M. Brown]; F. D’Accone and H.C. Slim, AcM, lxv (1993), 1–3; D. Fallows, T. Crawford and J.M. Thomson, EMc, xxi (1993), 507–9; M. Feldman, Renaissance Quarterly, xlvi (1993), 635–8; D. Fuller and others, Historical Performance, vi (1993), 3–8; I. Woodfield, JVdGSA, xxx (1993), 1–2

C. Cunningham: ‘A Selective Bibliography of Howard Mayer Brown's Books and Articles pertaining to the Viol’, JVdGSA, xxx (1993), 3–4

R. Jackson: ‘Pathfinder in Performance Practice: Howard Mayer Brown, 1930–1993’, Performance Practice Review, vi (1993), 107–12

Brown, Iona

(b Salisbury, 7 Jan 1941). English violinist and conductor. She showed early talent for the violin and played in the National Youth Orchestra from 1955 to 1960. Her teachers included Hugh Maguire in London, Remy Principe in Rome and Henryk Szeryng in Paris and Nice. She played in the Philharmonia Orchestra from 1963 to 1966, and began to pursue a solo career at this time. She had joined the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1964 and served as musical director from 1974 to 1980. She became musical director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in Oslo in 1980, and has conducted the orchestra in numerous acclaimed performances and recordings. From 1985 to 1988 she was guest director of the CBSO. She was appointed music adviser to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1986 and the following year became the orchestra's musical director, a post she held until 1992. Her playing is always musical and stylistically aware, and her technique impeccable. Brown's many notable solo recordings with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra include Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, concertos by Vivaldi and Telemann, and Mozart's ‘Haffner’ Serenade and Sinfonia concertante. As a conductor she has recorded works including Poulenc's Organ Concerto and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. She was created an MBE in 1986.

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Brown, James

(b Barnwell, SC, 3 May 1928). American soul and funk singer, composer, arranger and bandleader. Born into extreme poverty in the rural South, he began his career as a professional musician in the early 1950s with the gospel-based group, the Flames. By 1956 the group had recorded the rhythm and blues hit Please, Please, Please (Federal, 1956) and changed their name to James Brown and the Famous Flames. This early recording established what was to become a stylistic trademark: insistent repetition of a single phrase (in this case, the song's title) resulting in a kind of ecstatic trance. This approach and Brown's characteristic raspy vocal timbre and impassioned melismas display his debt to the black American gospel tradition. His stage shows, dancing and inspired call-and-response interactions with the audience also convey the fervour of a sanctified preacher.

The first decade of Brown's recording career saw him alternating energetic dance numbers such as Think and Night Train with searing ballads such as Try me, I don't mind and Lost Someone. He achieved his first pop hit in 1963 with an orchestrated remake of the melodramatic 1940s ballad Prisoner of Love. The biggest commercial breakthrough during this period, however, came with Live at the Apollo (King, 1963) which sold over one million copies, and remained in the LP charts for over a year, unprecedented achievements for a rhythm and blues album. Live at the Apollo featured performances of Brown's earlier hits, most notably the driving and polyrhythmic Think and the incantatory Lost Someone, and illustrated his rapport with the Apollo audience.

The innovations of the live Think prefigured Brown's next stylistic turn. During a contract dispute with King Records in 1964, Brown recorded and released Out of Sight on Smash Records. The recording was nearly as successful as Prisoner of Love; however, its importance lay in the heightened use of riffs and vamps, and in the polyrhythms, actual and implied, created by the band, not only the percussion. Re-signing a contract with King that gave him increased artistic autonomy, Brown released Papa's got a brand new bag and I got you (I feel good) in 1965. These songs were both commercial successes, and they further extended the textural innovations of Out of Sight. Brown's performances on these recordings relied almost exclusively on short riffs derived from blues and gospel phrasing, while increasing his use of paralinguistic grunts, growls and moans. All three of these innovative songs are based on blues harmonic form and phrase structure, and the lyrics were often as important for their sound as for their meaning.

By 1967 even the cursory nods towards previous song forms in Brown's music began to disappear with recordings such as Cold Sweat. Verse-chorus structures were replaced by sections of irregular length, defined by densely overlapping vamps played by each member of the band. Brown's lyrics grew increasingly impressionistic, celebrating black vernacular speech (often creating slang in the process) and emphasizing racial pride and self-determination in songs such as Say it loud – I'm black and I'm proud (1968). Brown's new style began influencing other artists at this time, such as Sly and the Family Stone, the Motown-based Temptations and Miles Davis, and came gradually to be known as funk.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s Brown continued to refine his funk style with great success. During this period he was influenced by a new band that he hired early in 1970, consisting of younger players, which came to be known as the JBs. However, his popularity with the top 40 audience began to wane. Despite this, the influence of funk was felt in a new wave of successful bands including Kool and the Gang, the Ohio Players and the Average White Band, while the popularity of older groups such as Parliament/Funkadelic soared. By the end of the 1970s, however, funk had largely been eclipsed by disco. Brown attempted to capitalize on disco's popularity and promote his concept of stylistic lineage, with the self-referential The Original Disco Man (1979), but audiences were unconvinced and the song failed. Although a role in the film The Blues Brothers (1980) kept Brown before the public, the late 1970s and early 80s saw no new stylistic innovations and his recordings met with little success.

Brown's fortunes shifted in the 1980s when he was acknowledged by a number of rap artists as the originator of the rhythmic foundations of their music; in 1984 he recorded Unity (Tommy Boy, 1984) with Afrika Bambaata. His comeback continued with the surprisingly patriotic theme song from the film Rocky IV, Livin' in America (1986), and more hits followed in 1987 and 1988. Despite the murkiness and sensationalist aspects surrounding his arrest and imprisonment in 1989, in the 1990s many re-issues and a rejuvenated performing career have heightened public awareness of Brown's enormous musical and cultural significance.

Brown stands out as one of the most influential and successful musicians in the history of rhythm and blues. His innovations as a singer, performer, composer, arranger and bandleader virtually defined the genre of funk and have contributed greatly to the development of hip hop and other contemporary dance styles. In the 1980s and 90s refinements in sampling technology have enabled many rap and dance music artists to use the actual drum patterns from Brown's music as the rhythmic basis for their music (see Breakbeat). However, his achievements cannot be measured only in terms of his musical contributions: during the height of his popularity he became a cultural icon in the black-American community, representing the limits of economic self-determination for a black performer, and demonstrating how crossover success could be achieved without forswearing the black vernacular.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Wilson: ‘The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American Music and West African Music’, BPM, ii/1 (1974), 3–22

R. Palmer: ‘James Brown’, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. A. DeCurtis and others (New York, 1976, 3/1992), 163–70

J. Brown (with B. Tucker): The Godfather of Soul (New York, 1986)

D. Brackett: ‘James Brown's “Superbad” and the Double-Voiced Utterance’, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge, 1995), 108–56

G. Brown: James Brown: Doin' it to Death (London, 1996)

DAVID BRACKETT

Brown, John

(b Rothbury, Northumberland, 5 Nov 1715; d Newcastle upon Tyne, 23 Sept 1766). English clergyman, writer and amateur musician. He was educated at Cambridge University and held several positions in the Church of England. His contribution to music historiography is contained in his Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763; Ger. trans. by J.J. Eschenburg, Leipzig, 1769; It. trans. by Oresbio Agieo, academic name of Francesco Corsetti, Florence, 1772). Proceeding on the assumption that music arose from the passions and principles of the human mind, Brown isolated 36 stages of musical history, from the early unity of gesture, voice and speech and its perfection as dance, melody and song in Greek society to the separation and degeneration of those arts in the 18th century. Thus, like Isaac Vossius (whom he cited with approval), he believed that music reached its perfection among the ancients and declined with the moderns.

In focussing on expressive aspects of music, Brown could treat it on the same principles as manners, so that, for example, during the unfettered state of ‘ignorance’ characteristic of ‘savage’ life, music existed as uncouth gestures, impassioned howls and ‘gabbling’ (unmeaning) song. For Brown, however, the ‘genuis’ of national music depends on religion, the ‘seeds’ or principles of which need to be inculcated early through habit and association. Since the luxury and effeminacy of opera illustrated the corrupt state and character of English manners and music, Brown advocated the establishment of a national academy not as an educational institution but as a coterie of inspectors of ‘a superior Taste and Authority’.

Brown’s answer to his critics was published anonymously as Some Observations on Dr. Brown’s Dissertation (London, 1764). He also extracted from the Dissertation subject matter relating to poetry, publishing this separately as The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry, through its Several Species (London, 1764); developed his views on education in Sermons on Various Subjects (London, 1764), in which he attacked the principles of Rousseau; and issued a general complaint about national corruption as An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757). In addition to two plays, he wrote the text of, and selected the music for, an oratorio, The Cure of Saul (perf. London, 1763; pubd in Dissertation, and separately, London, 1764). Brown had no hand in writing Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1752), although he read the manuscript, made some corrections in the style and recommended some alterations in the order and disposition of the parts. Recurrent fits of ‘phrenzy’ led him to commit suicide by cutting his throat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939, 2/1962)

D.D. Eddy: A Bibliography of John Brown (New York, 1971)

JAMIE C. KASSLER

Brown, Malcolm Hamrick

(b Carrollton, GA, 9 Nov 1929). American musicologist. He graduated from Converse College in South Carolina (BMus 1951) and took graduate degrees at the University of Michigan (MMus 1956) and Florida State University (PhD 1967). He began his teaching career as assistant professor of piano at Mount Union College, Ohio, in 1956. He joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1962, where he was appointed professor of music in 1976; he became professor emeritus in 1994.

Brown has studied Russian music and musical life of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular interest in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. From 1987 to 1992 he aided in negotiations for the exchanges of composers, musicologists, music theorists and ethnomusicologists between the USA and the USSR. He is founding editor and general editor of Russian Music Studies, the only series in any language or country exclusively devoted to the scholarly study of Russian music; he was also Russian area editor for RILM (1967–9) and from 1987 a member of the advisory board of Monuments of Russian Music.

WRITINGS

The Symphonies of Sergei Prokofiev (diss., U. of Florida, 1967)

ed.: Yugoslav-American Seminar on Music: Sveti Stefan 1968

‘The Soviet Russian Concepts of “Intonazia” and “Musical Imagery”’, MQ, lx (1974), 557–67

‘Prokofiev’s War and Peace: a Chronicle’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 297–326

‘Skriabin and Russian “Mystic” Symbolism’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 42–51

‘Skriabin and Young Prokofiev, 1905–15: Promethean vis-a-vis Pragmatist’, Music East and West: Essays in Honor of Walter Kaufmann, ed. T. Noblitt (New York, 1981), 371–80

ed.: Musorgsky, in Memoriam, 1881–1981 (Ann Arbor, 1982) [incl. ‘Modest Petrovich Musorgsky, 1881–1981’, 3–10]

‘Stravinsky and Prokofiev: Sizing up the Competition’, Confronting Stravinsky: San Diego 1982, 39–50

‘Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music’, Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. T. Stavrou (Bloomington, IN, 1983), 57–84

ed.: Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor, 1984)

ed., with R.J. Wiley: Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham (Ann Arbor and Oxford, 1985) [incl. ‘Prokofiev’s Correspondence with Stravinsky and Shostakovich’, 271–92]

‘Prokofiev in the USA’, Sergej Prokofjew: Cologne 1991, 41–56

PAULA MORGAN

Brown, Maurice J(ohn) E(dwin)

(b London, 3 Aug 1906; d Marlborough, 27 Sept 1975). English writer on music. At London University he took the BSc (1929) and BMus (1939). After teaching music at Belle Vue High School, Bradford (1939–44), and serving as a radio and telegraph instructor with the RAF, he taught physics at Marlborough Grammar School, where he was head of the science department (1945–66).

Brown was the leading Schubert scholar of his generation. His work was notable for its disciplined accuracy and depth, balance and perception, and was informed both by his thorough knowledge of the progress of Schubert research and by his enthusiasm for the music under discussion. His knowledge of and delight in literature contributed greatly to his understanding of the devices of word-setting in lieder. The other major subject of his research was Chopin: he compiled the standard thematic index of his works and studied their publishing history.

WRITINGS

‘Schubert and Neapolitan Relationships’, MT, lxxxv (1944), 43–4

‘An Introduction to Schubert's Sonatas of 1817’, MR, xii (1951), 35–44

‘Recent Schubert Discoveries’, ML, xxxii (1951), 349–61

‘Schubert's Winterreise Part I’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 215–22

Schubert's Variations (London, 1954)

‘Some Unpublished Schubert Songs and Song Fragments’, MR, xv (1954), 93–102

‘Schubert's Settings of the “Salve regina”’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 234–49

‘The Posthumous Publication of Chopin's Songs’, MQ, xlii (1956), 51–65

‘New, Old and Rediscovered Schubert Manuscripts’, ML, xxxviii (1957), 359–68

‘Chopin and his English Publisher’, ML, xxxix (1958), 363–71

Schubert: a Critical Biography (London, 1958/R; Ger. trans., 1969)

‘Schubert and Salieri’, MMR, lxxxviii (1958), 211–19

‘Schubert's Manuscripts: some Chronological Issues’, MR, xix (1958), 180–85

‘Schubert's “Wilhelm Meister”’, MMR, lxxxviii (1958), 4–12

‘Schubert's Two Major Operas’, MR, xx (1959), 104–18

‘Zwei Mazurkas von Chopin’, ÖMz, xiv (1959), 99–102

Chopin: an Index of his Works in Chronological Order (London, 1960, 2/1972)

‘Schubert: Discoveries of the Last Decade’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 293–314

‘Die Handschriften und Frühausgaben von Schuberts “Die Forelle”’, ÖMz, xx (1965), 578–88

Essays on Schubert (London, 1966/R)

with O.E. Deutsch: Schubert: die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig, 2/1966)

Schubert Songs (London, 1967)

‘Schubert's Fuge in E-Moll’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 65–70

Schubert Symphonies (London, 1970)

‘Schubert: Discoveries of the Last Decade’, MQ, lvii (1971), 351–78

‘Schubert and some Folksongs’, ML, liii (1972), 173–8

ed.: A. Hedley: Chopin (London, 3/1974)

‘Schubert's Piano Sonatas’, MT, cxvi (1975), 873–5

The New Grove Schubert (London, 1982)

ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Brown, Nacio [Ignatio] Herb

(b Deming, NM, 22 Feb 1896; d San Francisco, 28 Sept 1964). American popular songwriter. His family moved in 1902 to Los Angeles, where he attended the Manual Arts High School and, at home, was taught piano by his mother; later he studied composition formally. From 1916 to 1920 he ran a successful menswear store in Beverly Hills, after which he amassed a small fortune in property. During these years he wrote songs as a hobby, including one called When Buddha Smiles (to words by Arthur Freed), which became a national hit in 1921. In 1926 his ‘novelette’ Doll Dance, written for The Hollywood Music Box Revue, became an international hit. Still he felt no need, either artistic or financial, to become a full-time songwriter. But in 1929, at the urging of the MGM executive Irving Thalberg, he and Freed provided the songs for the first full-length film musical, The Broadway Melody. This immediately produced three international hits: The Wedding of the Painted Doll (using a catchy triplet motif from Doll Dance), where the tunes are linked by sparkling modulations, You were meant for me and The Broadway Melody, all written in a spare, breezy style.

For the next few years the songwriting team of Brown and Freed dominated Hollywood film musicals. For The Hollywood Revue of 1929 they contributed ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, the catchy octave leaps of which were later employed by Brown in such songs as ‘You are my lucky star’ (from Broadway Melody of 1936); ‘The Pagan Love Song’ was written for Ramon Novarro in The Pagan (1929); ‘Paradise’, full of innuendo, was sung by Pola Negri in A Woman Commands (1931) and prompted a sequel, ‘Temptation’, in Going Hollywood (1933). In 1934 their song ‘All I do is dream of you’ was introduced by Joan Crawford and Gene Raymond in Sadie McKee; it soon became a standard, and its simple tonic and dominant harmonies were repeated in ‘Good morning’ (from Babes in Arms, 1939). For Ziegfeld Girl (1941), an MGM extravaganza, Brown created an evergreen in ‘You stepped out of a dream’, this time in collaboration with Gus Kahn; a highly original song with daring chromaticism, it is still sometimes used as a model in harmony courses.

During the 1940s Brown gradually abandoned songwriting for other pursuits while Freed, a film producer from 1939, supervised many of MGM’s greatest musicals, culminating in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which took its songs from the Brown and Freed repertory. By this time Brown had announced his official retirement.

IAN WHITCOMB

Brown, Richard.

See Browne, richard (iii).

Brown, Timothy (David Andrew)

(b Salisbury, 18 Jan 1943). English horn player and teacher. He was born into a family of musicians and made his début as a horn soloist at the age of 17. After studying with Douglas Moore at the RCM, London, he performed with many orchestras, including the LPO and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He joined the BBC SO in 1985 and later succeeded Alan Civil as the orchestra's principal horn. He was appointed professor of the horn at the RCM in 1981 and is associated with many groups, including the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with whom he has recorded, on the natural horn, the complete Mozart concertos. His other recordings include the Haydn concertos (with the Academy of Ancient Music) and many discs of chamber music. Brown is one of the few horn players to have embraced the values and practices of the period-instrument movement while sustaining a high reputation as a modern orchestral and chamber player.

JEFFREY NUSSBAUM

Brown [?Browne], William [Brouno, Bruno; Guillermo, Guillelmo; ‘La Janetton’]

(fl c1600–25). English composer, active in the southern Netherlands. Dart identified him with William Browne (1578–1637), grandson of the first Lord Montague and benefactor of the Jesuit college at Liège, which he entered as a brother in 1614 and where he remained until his death. Another William Browne, nephew of Lord Montague, was born about 1558 and was studying music in Bologna in 1582 under Annibale Meloni; but the style of the music attributed to ‘Brouno’ or ‘Bruno’ makes it rather unlikely that this older man was the composer. In any event, there are good grounds for accepting Dart’s opinion that the composer was financially independent and not a musician by profession. The alternative forms of his name reflect only the italianizing propensities of the scribes of the three manuscripts in which his music, all for keyboard, is found: D-Bsb Mus.ms.40316 (in PL-Kj, containing three allemandes, a courante and a canzona ‘Mall Sims’), B-Lu 153 (containing a fantasia also found anonymously in GB-Och) and GB-Och Mus.89 (containing a toccata). All these sources are of Flemish Catholic origin. The first testifies to the composer’s English nationality and specifies his curious alias ‘La Janetton’. The Oxford manuscript opens with the toccata by Brown, and it is conceivable that the five anonymous, freely composed pieces immediately following it are also by him; indeed, there are parallels between Brown's works and the anonymous Catholic liturgical music that forms the bulk of this manuscript. The most substantial of the pieces attributed to Brown (all ed. R. Vendome and C. Good) are the fantasia, which is in three parts with bass entries in the manner of a double-organ voluntary, and the first of the allemandes, which has the scheme AA'BB' twice over, in duple and triple time respectively.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Dart: ‘The Organ-Book of the Crutched Friars of Liège’, RBM, xvii (1963), 21–8

O. Mischiati: ‘Studenti ultramontani di musica a Bologna’, AnMc, iii (1966), 1–42

T. Dart: ‘An Early Seventeenth-Century Book of English Organ Music for the Roman Rite’, ML, lii (1971), 27–38

R. Vendome and C. Good: Introduction to Works by William Browne (Oxford, 1983)

JOHN CALDWELL/ALAN BROWN

Browne (Garrett), Augusta

(b Dublin, 1820; d Washington DC, 11 Jan 1882). Irish-American composer and writer on music. Her family had moved to the USA by 1830, and during the 1840s and 50s she was organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York. She was described as a ‘professor of music’ on her compositions published in New York and Boston between 1842 and 1855. One of the most prolific women composers in the USA before 1870, she wrote mainly drawing-room songs and salon piano pieces; Moore, in one of the few published acknowledgments of an American woman composer before 1900, attributes ‘over 200’ compositions to her and describes her as ‘a composer of note’. Her songs are often in modified ABA form; the best known include The Chieftain’s Halls (1844) and The Warlike Dead in Mexico (1848). She made use of English and Irish musical sources (for example, John Braham’s The Death of Nelson was a model for The Warlike Dead, and Thomas Moore’s A Selection of Irish Melodies supplied the themes for The Hibernian Bouquet variations), and she resisted any vernacular American styles, describing them as ‘taste-corrupting’. Browne was confused in her own lifetime with another composer: Cheney describes her (in The American Singing Book, Boston, 1879) as best known for The Pilgrim Fathers, a work actually written by Harriet Browne (c1790–1858). Augusta Browne became a prominent author in the late 1840s, writing two books and contributing articles on musical taste to various magazines, including the Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine and the Musical World and New York Musical Times. In her article ‘A Woman on Women’ (Knickerbocker Monthly, lxi/1, 1863, p.10) she asserted the right of women to a thorough musical education.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in New York unless otherwise stated

Vocal: The Family Meeting (C. Sprague) (1842); Grand Vesper Chorus (R. Heber) (1842); The Chieftain’s Halls (Boston, 1844); A Song for New England (H.W. Elsworth) (1844); The Volunteer’s War Song (Mrs Balmanno) (1846); The Reply of the Messenger Bird (E. Young) (Philadelphia, 1848); The Warlike Dead in Mexico (Balmanno) (1848); Song of Mercy (J. Bunyan) (1851)

Pf: The Caledonian Bouquet, variations (1841); The French Bouquet, variations, op.31 (1841); The American Bouquet, variations (Philadelphia, 1844); The De Meyer Grand Waltz (1846); The Hibernian Bouquet, variations (1840s); The Mexican Volunteer’s Quickstep (c1850); Angels Whisper, variations (Philadelphia, 1850s); The Merry Mountain Horn, variations (Philadelphia, 1850s); The Ethereal Grand Waltz (n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Moore: Appendix to the Encyclopedia of Music (Boston, 1875)

C. Ammer: Unsung: a History of Women in American Music (Westport, CT, 1980)

J. Tick: American Women Composers before 1870 (Ann Arbor, 1983)

JUDITH TICK

Browne, John (i)

(fl c1480–1505). English composer and musician. In a contemporary musical source his Stabat mater is ascribed to ‘Johannes Browne Oxoniensis’. No-one of this name appears as a member of the choir of any of the major Oxford colleges at this time; however, during 1490 a John Browne was one of the chaplains of the household of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. This was the grandest of the aristocratic household chapels of its day, and there need be little doubt that this was the composer. His musical prowess was also known to royalty. His setting of Stabat iuxta Christi crucem employs as its cantus firmus the tenor of the song From stormy windes, composed by Edmund Turges in 1501 to commemorate the departure of Prince Arthur from court to begin his public life as Prince of Wales. The engagement of this musical quotation simultaneously with a text of maternal mourning suggests that Browne composed the piece for Arthur's mother, Queen Elizabeth, following the prince's untimely death in 1502. No more is known about Browne; there are no grounds for identifying him with the John Browne who, aged 14, applied for election as a scholar of Eton College in 1467.

In the quality of his accomplishment he may be considered the greatest English composer of the period between Dunstaple and Taverner. Among the contents of the Eton Choirbook (GB-WRec 178, compiled c1502–5) his work was accorded pride of place. Its index reveals that it originally included 15 of his compositions; of the 11 Marian antiphons nine remain complete (or it is possible to complete them), but the sole survivor of the four Magnificat settings is only fragmentary. Of the ten pieces written for full choir only four have survived, throwing into especial relief Browne's facility for composing for the restricted compass of men's voices alone. His polyphony is dense and endlessly resourceful. He was a master of cogency of overall planning, deploying cantus-firmus technique and the alternation of reduced-voice and full scoring with a seemingly effortless artistry that wholly conceals the fact that certain compositions (for example the first of the Salve regina settings) stand upon an elaborately mathematical disposition of their successive and component proportions.

The Eton Choirbook opens with his O Maria salvatoris mater, whose eight voices exhibit a remarkable assurance in contrapuntal finesse. Equally imposing are the three six-voice Marian antiphons on the Stabat mater and texts cognate with it. Browne is representative of the English florid style of composition not only at its most assured but also at its most imaginative. Few closing periods approach in breadth and sweep the ‘Salve’ concluding his first Salve regina, or in poignancy the setting of ‘gaudia’ ending Stabat iuxta Christi crucem, which (if Harrison's edition represents correctly contemporary practices in the realization of musica recta and musica ficta) engages a quite remarkable deployment of the technique of false relations (ex.1). Moreover, long before the contrivances of the madrigalists, Browne created in his masterpiece, the six-part Stabat mater, a mood of brooding and despairing melancholy and introspection (e.g. in the passage in ex.2) that gathers an inexorable momentum and energy until its eruption into a startling and percussive outburst at ‘Crucifige’ (‘Crucify!), articulated at the very top of the treble register (ex.3), that represents the work's greatest climax – an unforgettable piece of composition unequalled anywhere in the European music of his time (ex.3).

It was common for musicians of this period in aristocratic employment to compose songs and devotional pieces to vernacular texts as well as church music. Three compositions surviving in a songbook of 1501 (the Fayrfax Book, GB-Lbl Add.5465) that are attributed just to ‘Browne’ may well be the work of this composer. Two are to devotional texts and one to secular, two in three parts, one in four; however, in response to the difference in the destined ambience of performance they are considerably different in style from the sacred compositions. The counterpoint of Margaret meke is deft, though lightweight in comparison with that of the church music; the two devotional pieces are more reflective, especially in the occasional held chords and relatively flexible imitation of Woffully araid.

WORKS

Edition: The Eton Choirbook, ed. F. L1. Harrison, MB, x–xii (1956–61, 2/1967–73) [Hi–iii]

Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. J. Stevens, MB, xxxvi (1975) [S]

Magnificat, inc., 5vv, H iii, 162 (only incipit printed)

Magnificat, 4vv, lost

Magnificat, 5vv, lost

Magnificat, 7vv, lost

Ave lux totius mundi, 5vv, lost

Gaude flore virginali, 5vv, lost

O Maria Salvatoris mater, 8vv, H i, 1

O mater venerabilis, inc., 5vv, H iii, 14

O regina mundi clara, 6vv, H i, 72

Salve regina, 5vv, H i, 124

Salve regina, 5vv, H ii, 46

Stabat iuxta Christi crucem, 6vv, H i, 64

Stabat mater, 6vv, H i, 43

Stabat virgo mater Christi, inc., 6vv, H i, 54

Stabat virgo mater Christi, 4vv, H iii, 24

Jhesu mercy, 4vv, GB-Lbl Add.5465; S, 80

Margaret meke, 3vv, Lbl Add.5465; S, 121

Woffully araid, 3vv, Lbl Add.5465; S, 80

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HarrisonMMB

J.P. Collier, ed.: Household Books of John, Duke of Norfolk and Thomas, Earl of Surrey; temp. 1481–1490 (London, 1844), 516

R. Bowers: ‘University Library, MS Buxton 96’, Cambridge Music Manuscripts 900–1700, ed. I.A. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1982), 114–17

H. Benham: ‘Prince Arthur (1486–1502), a Carol and a Cantus Firmus’, EMc, xv (1987), 463–7

R. Bowers: ‘Early Tudor Courtly Song: an Evaluation of the Fayrfax Book’, The Reign of Henry VII: Harlaxton, nr Grantham, 1993, ed. B. Thompson (Stamford, 1995), 188–212

ROGER BOWERS

Browne, John (ii)

(b London, c1608; bur. Eydon, Northants., 8 June 1691). English music collector, copyist and amateur composer. On the death of his father in 1621 he was adopted by his wealthy uncle, the merchant taylor John Browne. He was a property-owner in Northamptonshire by the 1630s. In 1636 he was appointed Clerk of the Parliaments, a post that was initially a sinecure, but which led to notoriety at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, when he adhered to the parliamentary cause. His office was abolished under the Commonwealth in 1649, but he was restored from 1660 until his death.

Significant as a political archivist, Browne was an astute music lover whose collection is preserved almost entire in Christ Church, Oxford, as part of the music bequeathed by Henry Aldrich. His descendants retained some concordant manuscripts into the 20th century, alongside his parliamentary papers. The collection provides a rare view of Stuart Puritan London up to 1642. It includes early 17th-century vocal music and Jacobean consort music that he inherited through family connections (e.g. GB-Och 44/423–8, in which the instrumental music of John Milton is uniquely preserved). As the suite was evolving in the 1630s, he part-copied partbooks (Och 353–6, 367–70, 379–81) that constitute sole sources for a great deal of dance music by John Jenkins, Charles Coleman and others. The collection shows that the violin fantasia-suite was played by amateurs before 1642. Browne attempted an imitation of an otherwise unique In Nomine in B by William Lawes, formerly attributed to John Banister (i); he also composed three five-part dances (Och 473–8) and an incomplete three-part suite (pavan–alman–corant, Och 379–81).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ashbee: ‘Instrumental Music from the Library of John Browne (1608–1691), Clerk of the Parliaments’, ML, lviii (1977), 43–59

N. Fortune collab. I. Fenlon: ‘Music Manuscripts of John Browne (1608–91) and from Stanford Hall, Leicestershire’, Source-Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 155–68

D. Pinto: For the Violls: the Consort and Dance Music of William Lawes (London, 1995)

DAVID PINTO

Browne, Richard (i)

(fl 1615). English composer. No connection between him and Richard Browne (ii) has been established. The earlier Browne is named in an entry dated 26 March 1614 in the treasurer's accounts as vicar-choral and organist of Wells Cathedral. A year later he was made a perpetual vicar-choral, and payments continued to be made to him until 1619. A ‘Mr. Browne’ is mentioned in the Winchester Cathedral accounts between 1627 and 1629. Five anthems (Christ rising again; If the Lord himself (ii); I have declared; My God, my God, look upon me; O Lord, rebuke me not in thy fury) and an Evening Service, all in pre-Restoration sources (GB-GL, Lcm, Ob, WB), seem to be by this composer rather than by Richard Browne (ii).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music, 1549–1660, EECM, suppl. i (London, 1972)

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

PETER LE HURAY/JOHN MOREHEN

Browne, Richard (ii)

(b c1630; d Worcester, bur. 27 Aug 1664). English composer. No connection between him and Richard Browne (i) has been established. The later Browne was a chorister at Worcester Cathedral in 1639 and was probably the Richard Browne who was appointed a lay clerk there in 1642 and made a minor canon two years later. In an entry in the Chapter Acts dated 26 April 1662 he is named as organist and Master of the Choristers. His burial is recorded in the register of St Michael's, Worcester. Three verse anthems in a post-Restoration source (GB-Och; manuscript insertions in the Hereford set of J. Barnard's The First Book of Selected Church Musick, 1641) seem on stylistic grounds to be by this composer rather than by Richard Browne (i): By the waters of Babylon; If the Lord himself (i); and Unto him that loved us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Atkins: The Early Occupants of the Office of Organist and Master of the Choristers of the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Worcester (Worcester, 1918)

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

PETER LE HURAY/JOHN MOREHEN

Browne [Brown], Richard (iii)

(d Lambeth, London, bur. 21 May 1710). English composer and organist. Someone of this name makes a brief appearance among Charles II’s band of violins between 1670 and 1674, but it seems unlikely that this is the same man, as Browne became organist of St Lawrence Jewry in 1686. A vestry minute of 16 March that year records that ‘Browne … be Organist for one whole yeare, he haveing for his satisfacon left himself to the goodwill and kindness of the parish’. He apparently had a year’s trial while an organ was being built by Renatus Harris. After 17 months he was paid £27 and offered an annual salary of £20. He held the post of organist until his death. In March 1688 he was also appointed music master at the nearby Christ’s Hospital, at a salary of £20 a year and £4 for his lodgings. One of his most important tasks was to compose the Easter Psalms or Psalms of Thanksgiving, which were sung by the children of Christ’s Hospital on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in Easter week for their founders and benefactors. There are numerous references to Browne in the court and committee minutes of Christ’s Hospital, many with respect to his unsatisfactory behaviour. He was accused of using bad language to the children (1689) and was finally dismissed for ‘miscarriages & negligence in his office’ (1697), though he had the effrontery to reapply for his job. He still enjoyed his income from St Lawrence Jewry, however, and he eventually took up a further appointment in 1701 as organist of St Mary, Lambeth, at a yearly salary of £20. He held both posts until his death, despite complaints from each parish about his absences and use of deputies.

Browne was best known as a composer of catches and songs, many to his own words. Most of them were printed in such collections as Playford’s The Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (RISM 1686⁴, 4/1701) and Vinculum societatis (RISM 1687⁶, 1688⁹); some also appeared in 18th-century anthologies. At Christ’s Hospital he proved himself an innovator by composing his eight Easter Psalms in the style of contemporary verse anthems rather than the stolid psalm tunes of his predecessors (London, 1688–92, 1694, 1695, 1697). His psalm for 1694 consists of three verses (one in the minor) for treble solo and one for full chorus, all based on the same ground. He also wrote an elegy on the death of Jeremiah Clarke in 1707 (Weep all ye Swains). His most popular catches were Come, boy, light a faggot (The Drawer’s Catch), Peter White that never goes right (A Catch on a Man with a Wry Nose), I, Thomas of Bedford (The Bedford Catch), The duke sounds to horse boys (A Catch on the Duke of Marlborough’s Victory over the French) and Ah sorry poor Frenchman (A Catch on the Modern Courage and Conduct of the French), all for three voices, and War begets poverty (The Almanack Catch), for four voices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.H. Pearce: Annals of Christ’s Hospital (London, 1901)

A. Freeman: ‘Mr Richd. Browne of Lambeth, Organist’, The Organ, iii (1923–4), 54–6

C.L. Day and E.B. Murrie: English Song-Books, and Their Publishers, 1651–1702 (London, 1940/R)

S. Jeans: ‘The Easter Psalms of Christ’s Hospital’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 45–60

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983)

SUSI JEANS/IAN SPINK

Browne, William Charles Denis [Denis Browne, William Charles]

(b Leamington Spa, 3 Nov 1888; d Achi Baba, Turkey, 4 June 1915). English composer and critic. He was educated at Rugby and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he became a close friend of Dent; he graduated in classics and took a MusB in 1912. After a short spell of teaching at Repton he moved to London as a critic and teacher; his articles for The Times (1913–14) and the New Statesman (1914) reveal a brilliant musical mind. His posthumously published songs are particularly beautiful and the ballet suggests a rare ability to absorb new idioms. He was killed in action shortly after burying his friend Rupert Brooke.

WORKS

Songs: 2 Tennyson Settings, ?1909: Move Eastward, Happy Earth; The Snowdrop; The isle of lost dreams (W. Sharp), ?1909; Dream-Tryst (F. Thompson), 1909; Diaphenia (H. Chettle), 1912; Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy (B. Jonson), 1912; To Gratiana dancing and singing (R. Lovelace), 1913; Arabia (W. de la Mare), 1914

God is our Strength and Song (J. Montgomery), SSATB, 1912

Unpubd: The Comic Spirit, ballet, inc.; 3 songs, choral and orch music

MSS in GB-Cclc

Principal publishers: Oxford University Press, Winthrop Rogers, Stainer & Bell, Thames

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.D. Forbes, ed.: Clare College 1326–1926, i (Cambridge, 1928), 263ff

HUGH TAYLOR

Brownie.

See Brown, Clifford.

Browning.

The name most commonly applied by contemporary scribes to instrumental settings of an English 16th-century popular tune. It resembles an eight-bar galliard strain and was sung to various texts. The words, beginning ‘Browning my dear’, are otherwise lost, though they may be echoed in Ravenscroft’s round on the tune (in Deuteromelia, 1609) which starts ‘Browning Madame, browning Madame, so merrily we sing, browning Madame’. Two alternative titles, The leaves be green, and The nuts be brown, derive from a couplet underlaid to each statement of the tune in one source of Byrd’s Browning: ‘The leaves be green, the nuts be brown, they hang so high they will not come down’ (Byrd Edition, xvii, 39). One consort version is called Hey down, and Danyel’s lute variations (EL, 2nd ser., rev., viii, 72) are headed Mrs Anne Green her leaves be green.

Like Taverner’s somewhat earlier ‘Western Wynde’ mass, the mid-century Browning settings consist of continuous variations on a tune that moves freely from one part to another. One distinctive characteristic, shared by only two or three other pieces, is the use of these migrations as a formal principle. Thus Henry Stoning, in his five-part Browning (MB, xliv, 70), composed five variations with the tune occurring once in each part; Clement Woodcock (MB, xliv, 72) doubled these proportions (though the bass has only one variation); and Byrd quadrupled them, as the composer of the fragmentary anonymous Hey down also appears to have done. Strict rotation of the tune through the three-part texture governs William Inglott’s 13 keyboard variations (Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, ii, 381). Elway Bevin (MB, ix, 19) and John Baldwin (MB, xlv, 9) in their three-part consort sets, however, showed more interest in transposition than in consistent migration patterns. Carrying the process further than Byrd, who had used transpositions of the tune to C and G as well as its normal F pitch, they both added transpositions to B and Baldwin added D too (with a rhyme about hexachord changes). Such technical features are absent from William Cobbold’s consort song New Fashions (MB, xxii, 158), much of which employs the Browning tune, and from the variations for lute (two anonymous sets, respectively for solo and duet, and Danyel’s solo). Byrd worked two duple-time variations into his Barley Break.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Chappell: Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, 1855–9, rev. 2/1893/R by H.E. Wooldridge as Old English Popular Music), i, 154–5

W.A. Edwards: The Sources of Elizabethan Court Music (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974), i, 8–9

O. Neighbour: The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London, 1978), 65–74

O.W. NEIGHBOUR

Browning, Jean.

See Madeira, Jean.

Browning, John

(b Denver, 22 May 1933). American pianist. He made his first public appearance in Denver when he was ten. As a boy he studied in Los Angeles with Lee Pattison, a Schnabel pupil, and in 1953 went to Rosina Lhévinne at the Juilliard School of Music (BM, MM, 1956). He rapidly made his way to prominence by winning the Hollywood Bowl Young Artists Competition and the Steinway Centennial Award in 1954 and the Edgar M. Leventritt Award in 1955. He made his début, with the New York PO under Mitropoulos, in 1956, the same year in which he won second prize in the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels; thereafter he became one of the American pianists most in demand. In a move comparatively rare for an American pianist, he toured the USSR in 1965. In addition to many appearances as a soloist and recitalist, he has given masterclasses at Northwestern University and at the Manhattan School of Music, and has served as a juror at the Queen Elisabeth Competition. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in music from Ithaca College (1972) and Occidental College (1975).

Browning had particular success when he gave the world première of Barber's Piano Concerto (24 September 1962, with Leinsdorf and the Boston SO at Lincoln Center, New York). Except for Barber, Prokofiev (all of whose concertos he recorded with Leinsdorf in Boston) and Rachmaninoff, his repertory has tended to centre on the 19th century and Mozart. Other recordings include three recital-length discs of Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Musorgsky, and the complete Barber songs with Cheryl Studer and Thomas Hampson. He is a tasteful, serious and straightforward player, blessed with one of the easiest, most brilliant techniques of any pianist before the public.

MICHAEL STEINBERG/R

Brownlee, John

(b Geelong, 7 Jan 1901; d New York, 10 Jan 1969). Australian baritone. He first studied in Melbourne, then with Dinh Gilly in Paris, and was introduced to Covent Garden by his countrywoman Dame Nellie Melba, at whose farewell concert (8 June 1926) he made his London début as Marcello in the last two acts of La bohème. In the following February he made his first appearance at the Paris Opéra, remaining a prominent member there until 1936. At Covent Garden he sang Golaud in the 1930 revival of Pelléas et Mélisande and was also successful in such Verdi roles as Renato and Amonasro.

Brownlee was among the first group of artists who sang at Glyndebourne: under Fritz Busch he sang Don Alfonso in 1935, Don Giovanni in 1936, as well as the Speaker in Die Zauberflöte and the Count in some later performances of Figaro. He first appeared at the Metropolitan Opera as Rigoletto on 17 February 1937 and remained a valued member of the company until 1958, singing 348 performances of 33 roles. He also appeared widely elsewhere in North and South America, and became director (1956) and president (1966) of the Manhattan School of Music. As can be heard on the 1936 Glyndebourne recording, his Don Giovanni, if not irresistibly seductive in tone or manner, was musically very sensitive; and his singing in general, while neither so rich nor so resonant as to place him among the greatest baritones, was admirably schooled and always distinguished in style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (H.D. Rosenthal and W. Weaver; R. Vegeto)

D. Franklin: ‘John Brownlee’, Opera, xx (1969), 209–10

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/R

Brownson, Oliver

(b Bolton, CT, 13 May 1746; d ?Smithfield, NY, 20 Oct 1815). American composer, tune book compiler and singing master. Brownson taught at singing schools for 30 years in Connecticut and Massachusetts; he made his home in New Hartford and Simsbury, Connecticut between 1776 and 1802, when he moved to Smithfield. The first of Brownson’s 33 published compositions (all ed. K. Kroeger, Three Connecticut composers, New York, 1997) appeared in Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, CT, 1779). Brownson’s own Select Harmony (four issues, n.p., 1783-c1791) introduced a large number of new pieces by the compiler and other talented, original Connecticut composers such as Asahel Benham, Solomon Chandler, ?Joseph Strong and Timothy Swan. Its engraved title page depicts a choir arranged around three sides of a meeting house gallery, the leader at the centre with pitchpipe in hand. Brownson also compiled A New Collection of Sacred Harmony (Simsbury, CT, 1797), which he printed himself, adding his own portrait to the second issue. In tunes such as ‘Salisbury’ and the extremely popular ‘Virginia’, Brownson brought to the sturdy New England idiom an expressive use of melisma and a fine melodic gift.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.C. Bates: Simsbury, Connecticut, Births, Marriages and Deaths (Hartford, CT, 1898), 259

Correspondence: I.K. and W.G. Brownson and C.V. Kayner to James Terry, 1898 (US-WOa, James Terry Papers)

E.S. Welles: ‘Studies in Ancestry’, Connecticut Magazine, vii/3–4 (1902), 396–402

F.J. Metcalf: American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (New York, 1925/R), 65

R.M. Wilson: Connecticut’s Music in the Revolutionary Era (Hartford, CT, 1979), [6], 54–5, 99–100, 102

RUTH M. WILSON/NYM COOKE

Brożek, Jan.

See Broscius, jan.

Bruant [Bruand], (Louis Armand) Aristide

(b Courtenay, Loiret, 6 May 1851; d Paris, 10 Feb 1925). French singer and songwriter. He began as a chanson writer and performer in cafés-concerts in Paris, but in the 1880s gained renown as a critic of social injustice through his performances first at the Chat Noir, then at his own cabaret Le Mirliton, where he created the semblance of low life for a mostly bourgeois audience. He published many of his own songs in a journal named after the cabaret. His singing style and lyrics had a lasting influence on the 20th-century chanson. He continued performing into the 1920s but was more active after 1901 as a writer of novels and plays. Many of Bruant’s cabaret acts were published as Dans la rue: chansons et monologues (Paris, 1889–1909), Chansons et monologues (Paris, 1896–7) and Sur la route: chansons et monologues (Courtenay, 1897); a collection was edited as Dans la rue (Paris, 1962). He made more than 50 recordings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Méténier: Le chansonnier populaire Aristide Bruant (Paris, 1893)

F. Carco: La belle époque aux temps de Bruant (Paris, 6/1954)

Mouloudji: Aristide Bruant, 1851–1925 (Paris, 1972)

Marc, H.: Aristide Bruant: le maitre de la rue (Paris, 1989)

PATRICK O’CONNOR

Brubeck, Dave [David Warren]

(b Concord, CA, 6 Dec 1920). American jazz composer, pianist and bandleader. He received early training in classical music from his mother, a pianist, and by the age of 13 he was performing professionally with local jazz groups. He was a music major at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, studied compositon with Milhaud (1946) and, with fellow students, founded the experimental Jazz Workshop Ensemble, which recorded in 1949 as the Dave Brubeck Octet. Also in 1949, he organized the Dave Brubeck Trio. With the addition of the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (1951), Brubeck thereafter led a quartet. In 1967 Brubeck disbanded, ostensibly to concentrate on composing, but he soon formed a new quartet that included Gerry Mulligan (until 1972).

The Brubeck quartet was immensely popular on college campuses in the 1950s; the album Jazz at Oberlin, recorded in concert at that college in 1953, contains some of Brubeck's and especially Desmond's finest improvisations. During the 1950s and 60s Brubeck began experimenting with time signatures unusual to jazz, such as 5/4, 9/8 and 11/4. By 1959 he had recorded the first jazz instrumental piece to sell a million copies – Paul Desmond's Take Five (in 5/4 metre), which was relased with his own Blue Rondo à la Turk (in 9/8, grouped 2+2+2+3).

Brubeck, who considers himself in essence ‘a composer who plays the piano’, has written and, in some instances, recorded several large-scale compositions since the 1960s, including ballets, a musical, oratorios, cantatas and works for jazz combo and orchestra. In the 1970s he organized several new quartets which at various times included one or more of his sons Darius (keyboards), Chris (bass guitar and bass trombone) and Danny (drums) and (in the 1980s and 90s) the clarinettist Bill Smith, from the 1940s octet. His many honours include the National Music Council's American Eagle Award (1988) and a Lifetime Achievement award (1996) from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: A Maiden in the Tower (ballet), 1956; Points on Jazz (ballet), 1961; The Real Ambassador (musical), 1962; Glances (ballet)

Chorus, orch: The Light in the Wilderness (I. Brubeck), orat, 1968; The Gates of Justice (Brubeck, after Bible), cant, 1969; Truth is Fallen (Brubeck, after Isaiah, Jeremiah), cant, 1971; La fiesta de la posada (Brubeck, after Bible), cant, 1975; Beloved Son, orat, 1978; Festival Mass to Hope, 1980

Jazz combo, orch: Dialogues, 1959, collab. Mulligan: Cathy's Waltz, 1961; In Your Own Sweet Way, 1961; Summersong, 1961; Elementals, 1963; Fugal Fanfare, jazz soloists, orch, 1970; They all Sang Yankee Doodle, orch, opt. jazz improvisation, 1975, arr. pf/2 pf

Pf: Reminiscences of the Cattle Country, 1946

Principal publishers: Associated Music, Delaware Water Gap, Hansen, Shawnee, Schirmer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CBY 1956

GroveA

GroveJ

Dave Brubeck (New York, 1961) [incl. list of works]

Biography of Dave Brubeck (New York, 1972)

I. Storb: Dave Brubeck: Improvisationen und Kompositionen, die Idee der kulturellen Wechselbeziehungen (Frankfurt, 1991) [incl. discography by K.G. Fisher]

F.M. Hall: It's About Time: the Dave Brubeck Story (Fayetteville, AR, 1996) [incl. discography, pp.165–74]

RICHARD WANG

Brubeck, Howard R(engstorsff)

(b Concord, CA, 11 July 1916; d Escondido, CA, 16 Feb 1993). American composer, brother of Dave Brubeck. He studied at San Francisco State College (BA 1938) and Mills College (MA 1941), where he was a pupil of Milhaud. In 1944, after a few years of high school teaching, he became an assistant to Milhaud at Mills College. In 1950 he joined the faculty of San Diego State College as a teacher of composition. He became chair of the music department of nearby Palomar College in 1953. He retired in 1978, having served as Dean of Humanities at Palomar for 12 years.

Many of Brubeck’s works incorporate the essence of jazz by using an improvising jazz combo in concertino fashion with strict notation for the orchestra: this is the strategy employed in his Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra, his most widely played and best-known work. The influence of Milhaud – and sometimes echoes of Copland – can be heard in his music; a flair for orchestral writing, secure craftsmanship and sophisticated wit are also in evidence. In the late 1950s performances of both California Suite (in San Francisco and Brussels) and Dialogues (performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet with the San Diego SO and the New York PO) brought him to international prominence. After 1966 Brubeck’s attention turned to college administration and family.

WORKS

Dramatic: Harmony at Evening (dance score), spkr, pf, 1942; Latin-American Dance Suite (dance score), 2 pf, 1942; Mother’s Day (film score), bn, tpt, vn, prep pf, 1948; Of Strife Resounding (dance score), 7 perc, pf, 1950; Ritual of Wonder (dance score), pf, 1950; Daphni (film score), small orch, 1951; Christmas Carol (musical theatre), 1966; John Brown’s Body (musical theatre), 1966; incid music (Molière, J.F. Regnard, F.G. Lorca, Euripides, G.B. Shaw, H. Ibsen), 1941–50

Orch: Gigue, str, 1939; California Suite, 1942–3; Centenary, ov., c1945; The Gardens of Versailles, c1946; G Flat Theme, jazz ens, orch, n.d.; The Devil’s Disciple, ov., 1954; Dialogues, jazz ens, orch, 1956; Sym. Movt on a Theme of Robert Kurka, 1958; Brandenburg Gate Revisited, 1963 [based on D. Brubeck]; arrs. for jazz ens, orch, of works by D. Brubeck, incl. Summer Song, Brandenburg Gate, Cathy’s Waltz, In Your Own Sweet Way

Choral: Alleluia, S, SATB, orch, 1941; Elizabethan Suite, SA, chbr orch, 1944; Evening (J. Stevens), SSAA, 1950; 3 Dowland Songs, madrigals, SATB, n.d.

Chbr and solo inst: Color Counterpoint, cl, bn, a sax, 2 t sax, tpt, trbn, vn, perc, pf, n.d.; Adagio, vn, pf, 1943; 5 Short Pieces, pf, 1946; 3 Sketches, pf, c1946; 4 Short Pieces, pf, 1948; 6 Pieces, ww qnt, c1953

Principal publisher: Derry

BARBARA A. PETERSEN/JOE R. STANFORD

Bruce, (Frank) Neely

(b Memphis, 21 Jan 1944). American composer, pianist, conductor and musicologist. He studied the piano with Roy McAllister at the University of Alabama (BM 1965), with Sophia Rosoff, and with Soulima Stravinsky at the University of Illinois (MM 1966), where he also studied composition with Ben Johnson (DMA, 1971) and had contact with Hamm, Hiller, Kessler and Brün. He served on the music faculty at Illinois (1968–74) before joining the staff at Wesleyan University. He was a member of the editorial committee of New World Records (1974–8), founding chairman of New England Sacred Harp Singing (1976) and has held visiting professorships at Middlebury College, Bucknell University and the University of Michigan. In 1980 he was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College.

In 1968 Bruce founded the American Music Group (AMG), an ensemble innovative in its dedication to American music of all eras. AMG recorded the music of Anthony Philip Heinrich for Vanguard, toured widely in the United States and, under Bruce’s direction, gave the 20th-century première of Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle and the first continuous performance of Ives’s 114 Songs (co-directed by William Brooks). He has also conducted the Wesleyan Singers (since 1974) and commissioned works from Brant, Duckworth, Fulkerson, Oliveros and Wolff. In 1977 Bruce founded the American Music/Theater Group. As a pianist he gave the premières of Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD, Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes and Farwell’s Sonata op.113; his extensive repertory includes all his own pieces.

The obsessive lyricism and clearly delineated form of works such as the Suite Fantastique (1956) or Trio for Bands (1995) permeate Bruce’s prolific output. Much of his music since Variations on a Polonaise (1969) is characterized by the juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible musical elements, while later works such as Hansel and Gretel (1996–8) and Tanglewood (1993) exhibit greater accessibility. Certain periods focus on specific compositional concerns. Works after the Fantasy in C (1962) move from neo-classical styles and free chromaticism to serial procedures, culminating in the Fantasy for wind and percussion (1967). In 1969 he began to juxtapose widely contrasting compositional techniques. Information theory was used as a formal device to plot and shape the degree of incoherence in these ruptures of structure. Examples of this are the sixth piano sonata and The Trials of Psyche, the latter incorporating a rock group and requiring three conductors. From 1976 he focussed on assimilating the entire American musical tradition, including hymn tunes, marches and ragtime, and with Americana, or, A New Tale of the Genii he began his most ambitious project yet: a cycle of three operas, each encompassing a century of America’s musical heritage. Later works such as Arabesques Redux and The Blue Box use modes taken from jazz and non-Western traditional musics.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

Pyramus and Thisbe (chbr op, 1, Bruce, after W. Shakespeare), 1964–5; The Trials of Psyche (op, 1, J. Orr, after Apuleius), 1970–71; Americana, or, A New Tale of the Genii (op, 4, T. Connor), 1978–83; Hansel and Gretel (op, 2, Bruce, after J.L.C. and W.C. Grimm), 1996–8; incid music, film scores

instrumental

Large ens: Perc Conc., 1967; Vn Conc., 1974; Atmo-Rag, chbr orch, 1987; Americana, or, a New Tale of the Genii, ov., 1987–8; Santa Ynez Waltz, chbr orch, 1989; Orion Rising, rock group, orch, 1990; One, Two, Ready, Go!, chbr orch, 1991; Barnum’s Band, wind band, 1991–2; Songs of Zion Recycled, tuba, orch, 1992–3; Grand Polka de Bataille, chbr orch, 1996–7; other orch works

Small ens: Fantasy, 10 wind, perc, tape, 1967; Wind Qnt, 1967; Preludium, fl, ob, va, cl, bn, 1968; [7] Grand Duos, 1 inst, pf, 1971–78; Music for 2 Gui, 1980; The Hartford and Middletown Waltzes, vn, pf, 1986; Narrative Objects, ob, cl, 2 a sax, bn, 1991; Brass Bouquet, brass qnt, 1992; Analogues, vn, a sax, 1993; 4 + 1, str qt, pf, 1994; Trio for Bands, 3 rock bands, 1995; The 3 Rs, pedagogical sonata, db, pf, 1997; other orch works

Pf: Suite Fantastique, 1956; 7 Variations on ‘Suzy, Little Suzy’, 1961; Fantasy, C, 1962; Improvisations I, 1968; Variations on a Polonaise, 1969; Andante variée, 1970; Introductions and Variations, 1978; Esercizi, 1980; Furniture Music in the Form of 50 Rag Licks, 1980; [6] Gymnopédies, 1980–82; Siagi Tamu Tango, or, Tango Rue Jardin, 1984; Homage to Charlie, 1985; Rock Album, 1989–91; 2 Moods, 1990; Tango Variation, 1991; Chopin Jam, 1995; 40 x 40, 1996; The Blue Box, 1998; Homage to Seb, 1998; 9 nocturnes, 6 sonatas

Other kbd: Fantasia on Kyrie fons bonitatis, org, 1961; Org Prelude ‘Kyrie fons bonitatis’, 1961; Variations on an Original Theme, hpd, 1962; Sonata, org, 1963; 6 Meditative Pieces, org, 1964; Variations and Interludes, org, 1968; A Book of Pieces, hpd, 1968–85; Choral Fantasy on Old 124th, org, 1972; Homage to Maurice, org, 1986; Pink Music, org, 1989–92; O magnum mysterium, org, 1992; The Enchantment of Heavenly Love, cel, 1993; Grand March of the Brownies, org, 1996; Tunes ‘n’ Timbres ‘n’ Time, org, 1996–7; Partita on Arleby, org, 1997

Other solo inst: Music for Jim Fulkerson, trbn, 1977; For Tom Howell, fl, 1978–84; Music for Dancing II, fl, 1980; 12 Inventions, gui, 1985–6; Arabesques Redux, vn, 1996;

vocal

Choral: Psalms for the Nativity (orat), Mez, T, B, chbr orch, 1971, rev. 1998; 3 Choruses on Poems by Herman Melville, pf, 1971; There was a child went forth (W. Whitman), TTBB, fl, pf, perc, 1972; Perfumes and Meanings (Whitman), 16vv, 1980; Hamm Harmony (Old Baptist Hymnal, Bible), 1988–92; Hugomotion (orat, H. Grotius), S, A, T, B, orch, 1989–95; The First Noel, chorus, orch, 1990; O magnum mysterium, TB, 2 ob, eng hn, bn, 1991; Emily’s Flowers (E. Dickinson), 1991–2; Shaker Shapes, 1992–8; Tanglewood (orat, Bruce, after Ovid and N. Hawthorne), S, A, T, B, SATB, SSA, orch, 1993; Young T.J. (T. Jefferson) TB, 1993; Les eaux et les forêts (P. Jaccottet), 1994; Ps xxvii, chorus, steel drums, 1994; Elegy (Whitman), 3 S, 3 A, 3 T, 3 B, vc, 1997; Ps xix, tambura, mrdangam, 1997; Ps cxxii, insts, 1997; Not Xanadu, 1998; Ps cxxii, S, A, T, B, brass qnt, str qt, timp, org, 1998; other choral works

Songs: Chinese Love Poems, 1961, rev. 1980; The Blades o’ Bluegrass (various Kentucky poets), S, A, T, B, pf, vn obbl, fl obbl, 1974–97; 5 Songs (J. Ferdon), 1978; Marriage-Reflections (S. Jendall Bayles), S, fl, pf, 1980, rev. 1985; Stanzas for Shep and Nancy (G. Stein), 1980–85; Whitman Fragments (Song of Myself), B, 1981–4; Neighbors (cycle of 30 pop/rock songs, T. Connor), 4–6vv, 2 kbd, gui, rhythm gui, trap set, 1984–8; Paul Goodman Settings, 1985–9; Poètes vivants, S, 1995; many others

Other vocal: Aphorisms (Hong Zicheng), S, pf, 2 perc, 1969; For Robin Lustig (G. Stein), vv, pfs, tape, 1980; The Plague (rock-cant., Bruce, G. Boccaccio and others), S, A, T, B, tape, 1983–4; Stanzas for 3 (Stein), S, T, B, pf, 1984; 6 Whitman Settings, 12vv, 12 insts, 1986–7; The Dream of the Other Dreamers (Whitman), S, A, T, B, 2 SPX-90 Sound processor, 1987; 8 Ghosts (M. McClure), S, A, T, B, 4 SPX-90, 1989; 2+2+2 (Stein), 6vv, 1989; The Marriage in the Garden (cant., Bible: Solomon), S, T, str qt, hpd, 1995; Leon’s Invasion, S, fl, bar sax, trbn, vn, theremins, 1996

Principal publishers: American Music/Theater Group, Media

WRITINGS

‘Ives and 19th Century America’, An Ives Celebration: Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, CT, 1974, 36–41

‘Sacred Choral Music in the United States: an Overview’, The Cambridge Companion to the Voice, ed. J. Potter (Cambridge, MA, 1999)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Huserik: ‘Bruce, Neely’, American Keyboard Artists, ed. S. Husarik (Chicago, 1989, 2/1992)

D. Zavin: ‘Dancing in the Seats’, Rolling Stone, no.639 (1992), 83–9

R. Kostelanetz: Dictionary of the Avant Gardes (Chicago, 1993)

S. Metcalf: ‘A Very Original Opera’, Hartford Courant (15 March 1998) [on Hansel and Gretel]

KEITH MOORE

Bruch, Max (Christian Friedrich)

(b Cologne, 6 Jan 1838; d Friedenau, Berlin, 2 Oct 1920). German composer. The son of a police official, Bruch received his first musical education from his mother, herself a singer. He began to compose from the age of nine; a Septet, written when he was 11, bears early hallmarks of his future style and assured scoring. At 14 he won the coveted Frankfurt Mozart-Stiftung Prize, which enabled him to study with Hiller, Reinecke and Ferdinand Breunung. His first substantial work was an opera based on Goethe's Scherz, List und Rache, written and performed in Cologne in 1858 (no orchestrated version survives), after which his teachers encouraged him to travel throughout Germany. He went to Leipzig, a city whose musical life was still dominated by Mendelssohn's influence, but settled in Mannheim between 1862 and 1864. There he wrote two works which would bring his name before the German public, the opera Die Loreley and the male-voice cantata Frithjof. The opera, based on the Rhine legend and to a libretto by Emanuel Geibel (Mendelssohn considered it shortly before his death), is most effective in the second act, in which the heroine enters into a pact with the river spirits. After a few successful performances in German and other European cities, brief revivals in Leipzig under the young Mahler (1887) and in Stuttgart under Pfitzner (1916), the opera disappeared from the repertory until stagings in Oberhausen (1984) and its British première in London (1986). Bruch wrote one further opera, Hermione (based on The Winter's Tale), in 1870, but it had no success. Frithjof, however, was the first of many successful choral works which kept his name before the German public throughout his long life.

From 1865 to 1867 Bruch was music director to the court at Koblenz, and it was there that he wrote his first violin concerto, in G minor op.26, the work with which his name has always been associated (much to his distaste, for most of his other compositions were subsequently neglected). His friendships with such violinists as David, Joachim, Sarasate and Willy Hess, and the advice he received from them, inspired nine concerted works for that instrument, which ‘can sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music’. The slow movement of op.26 is a fine example of Bruch's ability to shape a melody. Between 1867 and 1870 he held a similar court post at Sondershausen and, after a freelance career as a composer until 1878, held conducting posts in Berlin (1878–80), Liverpool (1880–83) and Breslau (1883–90). He then directed a masterclass in composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin (1890–1911), where he died at the age of 82, honoured but lonely and somewhat neglected as a composer. His utter distaste for and outspoken criticism of the New German School of Wagner and Liszt isolated him more and more throughout his life. His reverence for the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann and his resistance to change meant that works written at the end of his life, such as the chamber music of 1918, sounded much the same as those compositions dating from 60 years earlier, although his ability to orchestrate almost equalled his melodic invention. He wrote three symphonies (1868, 1870, 1882), all of which contain good material. Bruch was respected as a teacher in his later years, with Respighi and Vaughan Williams among his pupils in his Berlin composition classes. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University in 1893.

Bruch loved folk music as a source of melody, and many of his works were derived from such countries as Scotland (Scottish Fantasy op.46, Das Feuerkreuz op.52), Sweden (Serenade on Swedish Melodies op.posth., Swedish Dances op.63) and Russia (Suite on Russian Folk Melodies op.79b). During his Berlin years he conducted the Sternscher Gesangverein, a choir from whose Jewish members he received material used in his three Hebrew songs, published in 1888, and Kol nidrei op.47. Both works were written in Liverpool, where he succeeded Sir Julius Benedict as conductor to the Philharmonic Society for three somewhat turbulent years. He was appointed on the strength of the successful performances he conducted there of his secular oratorios Odysseus op.41 in 1877 and Das Lied von der Glocke op.45 in 1879. These large works, together with Arminius op.43, Achilleus op.50 and Moses op.67, were often performed and well received throughout Germany, particularly during the 1870s when the country was unified under Bismarck and the subject matter appealed to prevailing nationalist sentiments. However their appeal in the British Isles and the USA (he conducted several American choral societies on a visit in 1883) was somewhat short-lived, largely because of poor translations and anti-German feeling at the outset of World War I; nevertheless several performances have occurred in more recent years. Max Bruch's precocious gifts remained largely unfulfilled for two reasons. He was an exact contemporary of Brahms and was forced to exist in the shadow of his greater colleague even beyond the latter's death over 20 years before his own, and the stubborn resistance he maintained to musical developments largely instigated by Wagner stifled any of his own originality. Nevertheless his name will endure, if only thanks to one superb violin concerto.

WORKS

stage

op.

1	Scherz, List und Rache (komische Oper, 1, L. Bischoff, after J.W. von Goethe), 1858, Cologne, 14 Jan 1858, vs (Leipzig, ?1858)
16	Die Loreley (grosse romantische Oper, 4, E. Geibel), 1862, Mannheim, 14 June 1863 (Breslau, 1862)
40	Hermione (Oper, 4, E. Hopffer, after W. Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale), 1870, Berlin, 21 March 1872 (Berlin, 1872)

sacred choral

3	Jubilate-Amen (T. Moore, trans. F. Freiligrath), S, SATB, orch (Leipzig, 1858)
20	Die Flucht der heiligen Familie (J. Eichendorff), SATB, orch (Breslau, ?1864)
21	Gesang der heiligen drei Könige (M. von Schenkendorf), 3 solo male vv, orch (Breslau, ?1864)
29	Rorate coeli (K. Simrock, from Lat.), SATB, orch, org (Leipzig, 1870)
31/1	Die Flucht nach Ägypten (R. Reinick), S, SSA, orch (Leipzig, 1870)
31/2	Morgenstunde (H. Lingg), S, SSA, orch (Leipzig, 1870)
35	Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, 2 S, SSAATTBB, orch, org ad lib (Leipzig, 1870)
62	Gruss an die heilige Nacht (R. Prutz), A solo, SATB, orch, org (Berlin, 1892)
64	Hymne (Bible), solo vv, SATB, orch, org ad lib (Magdeburg, 1893)
67	Moses: ein biblisches Oratorium (L. Spitta), S, T, B, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1895)
69	Sei getreu bis in den Tod (Bible), SSATB, org (Berlin, 1896)
81	Osterkantate (after E. Mörike and Geibel), S, SATB, orch, org (Leipzig, 1908)
82	Das Wessobrunner Gebet (anon. 8th century), SATB, orch, org (Leipzig, 1910)
92	[6] Christkindlieder (Margarethe Bruch), solo vv, SSAA, pf (Leipzig, ?1917)

secular choral with solo voices

8	Die Birken und die Erlen (G. Pfarrius), S, SATB, orch (Leipzig, 1859)
23	Frithjof: Szenen aus der Frithjof-Sage (E. Tegnèr), S, Bar, male vv, orch (Breslau, 1864)
24	Schön Ellen (Geibel), ballad, S, Bar, SATB, orch (Bremen, 1867)
25	Salamis: Siegesgesang der Griechen (H. Lingg), solo vv, male vv, orch (Breslau, ?1868)
27	Frithjof auf seines Vaters Grabhügel (Tegnèr), scena, Bar, female vv, orch (Leipzig, 1870)
32	Normannenzug (J.V. von Scheffel), Bar, unison male vv, orch (Leipzig, 1870)
39	Dithyrambe (F. von Schiller), T, 6vv, orch (Berlin, ?1871)
41	Odysseus: Szenen aus der Odyssee (W.P. Graff), solo vv, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1872)
43	Arminius (J. Cüppers), orat, solo vv, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1877)
45	Das Lied von der Glocke (Schiller), 4 solo vv, SATB, orch, org (Berlin, 1879)
50	Achilleus (H. Bulthaupt), solo vv, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1885)
52	Das Feuerkreuz (Bulthaupt, after W. Scott: The Lady of the Lake), solo vv, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1889)
66	Leonidas (Bulthaupt), Bar, male vv, orch (Berlin, 1894)
73	Gustav Adolf (A. Hackenberg), orat, solo vv, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1898)
78	Damajanti (anon. Indian poem), S, SATB, orch (Berlin, 1903)
87	Die Macht des Gesangs (Schiller), Bar, SATB, orch, org (Berlin, 1912)
93	Trauerfeier für Mignon (Goethe), solo vv, SSAATTBB, orch, org (Leipzig, 1919)

other secular choral

19	[4] Männerchöre (H. Lingg, Scots folksongs), male vv, orch (Breslau, c1863)
22	5 Lieder (E. Geibel, J. Rist, Lingg, Moore, J.G. Herder), SATB (Mainz, 1911)
34	Römische Leichenfeier (Lingg), SATB, orch (Leipzig, 1870)
37	Das Lied vom deutschen Kaiser (Geibel), SATB, orch (Bremen, 1871)
38	5 Lieder (Scheffel, Scots folksong, Lingg, Geibel, Schiller), SATB (Berlin, ?1871)
48	4 Männerchöre (Eichendorff, L. Uhland, Freiligrath after Moore, Scheffel), male vv (Berlin, 1881)
—	[3] Hebräische Gesänge (Byron), SATB, orch, org (Leipzig, 1888)
53	2 Männerchöre (Geibel), male vv, orch (Berlin, 1890)
60	9 Lieder (J. Nachtenhöfer, P. Gerhardt, Irish folksong, Mörike, Scheffel, Geibel, H. von Singenberg, Simrock, Geibel), SATB (Magdeburg, 1892)
68	[3] Neue Männerchöre (H. Kruse, Ps xxiii, Goethe), male vv, orch (Berlin, 1896)
71	7 Lieder (Ger. trad., Scheffel), SATB (Magdeburg, 1897)
72	In der Nacht (G. Tersteegen), male vv (Magdeburg, 1897)
74	Herzog Moritz (K. Storch), male vv (Magdeburg, 1899)
76	Der letzte Abschied des Volkes (Freiherr von Grotthus), male vv, orch, org (Berlin, 1901)
—	6 Volkslieder, male vv (Berlin, ?1908)
86	6 Lieder (Margarethe Bruch, Moore), SATB (Magdeburg, 1911)
89	Heldenfeier (Margarethe Bruch), 6vv, orch, org (Leipzig, 1915)
90	5 Lieder (Ger. trad., Margarethe Bruch, Ewald Bruch, M. Vorberg), SATB (Leipzig, 1917)
91	Die Stimme der Mutter Erde (anon. Pol.), SATB, orch, org (Leipzig, ?1916)

songs

for solo voice and piano unless otherwise stated

4	3 Duette (Graf A. Schlippenbach, Graf Toggenburg, von Wildenow), S, A, pf (Leipzig, 1859)
6	7 kleine Gesänge (H. Bone, A. Fröhlich, A.H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, A. Silesius, Ger. trad.), 2–3 female vv, pf (Cologne, 1859)
7	6 Gesänge (Geibel, Uhland, N. Lenau, A. von Chamisso) (Leipzig, 1859)
13	Hymnus (A. Kolte), S, pf (Leipzig, 1862)
15	4 Lieder (Bone, Geibel) (Leipzig, ?1862)
17	10 Lieder: i (Sp., trans. Geibel), ii (Sp. and It., trans. Geibel and P. Heyse), iii (Lingg) (Leipzig, ?1863)
18	4 Gesänge, Bar, pf (Mainz, ?1863)
—	12 schottische Volkslieder (Breslau, ?1863)
30	Die Priesterin der Isis in Rom (Lingg), A, orch (Berlin, 1870)
33	4 Lieder (Scheffel), Bar, pf (Bremen, 1870)
49	[7] Lieder und Gesänge (Goethe, Eichendorff, folksong, Kruse, Herder) (Berlin, 1882)
54	Lieder und Gesänge (Heyse), 1v, vn, pf (Leipzig, 1891)
59	5 Lieder (Mörike, Goethe, C. von Stieler), Bar, pf (Brussels, 1892)
80	Szene der Marfa (Schiller), Mez, orch (Berlin, 1906)
97	5 Songs (anon. Sp., Geibel, Margarethe Bruch, Goethe) (New York, 1921)

instrumental

Vn, orch: Conc., g, op.26 (Bremen, 1868); Romance, a, op.42 (Berlin, 1874); Conc., d, op.44 (Berlin, 1878); Fantasie unter freier Benutzung schottischer Volksmelodien (Schottische Fantasie), op.46 (Berlin, 1880); Adagio appassionato, op.57 (Berlin, 1891); Conc., d, op.58 (Berlin, 1891); In memoriam, adagio, op.65 (Berlin, 1893); Serenade, a, op.75 (Berlin, 1900); Lieder und Tänze nach russischen und schwedischen Volksmelodien, op.79 (Berlin, 1903); Konzertstück, f, op.84 (Berlin, 1911)

Other orch: Sym. no.1, E, op.28 (Bremen, 1870); Sym. no.2, f, op.36 (Berlin, 1870); Kol nidrei, adagio on Heb. melodies, vc solo, op.47 (Berlin, 1881); Sym. no.3, E, op.51 (Leipzig, 1887); Canzone, vc solo, op.55 (Leipzig, 1891); Adagio nach keltischen Melodien, vc solo, op.56 (Berlin, 1891); Ave Maria, vc solo, op.61 (Berlin, 1892); Suite nach russischen Volksmelodien, op.79b (Berlin, 1905); Romance, va solo, op.85 (Mainz, 1911); Serenade nach schwedischen Melodien, str (Hamburg, 1941); Conc., e, cl, va, op.88 (Berlin, 1943); Suite no.2 (Nordland) (Berlin, 1956); Conc., a, 2 pf, op.88a (London, 1977)

Chbr: Septet, E, 1849 (London, 1987); Pf Trio, c, op.5 (Leipzig, 1858); 2 str qts, c, op.9 (Leipzig, 1859), E, op.10 (Leipzig, 1860); Pf Qnt, g, 1886 (ed. R. Lück, Bad Schwalbach, 1988); Schwedische Tänze, vn, pf, op.63 (Berlin, 1892); 4 pieces, vc, pf, op.70 (Berlin, 1897); Lieder und Tänze, vn, pf, op.79 (Berlin, 1903); 8 pieces, cl, va/vc, pf, op.83 (Berlin 1910); Str Qnt, a, 1918 (ed. J. Beckett, Zürich, 1991); Str Octet, B, 1920 (ed. T. Wood, London, 1996)

Kbd: Capriccio, pf 4 hands, op.2 (Leipzig, ?1858); Fantasia, d, 2 pf, op.11 (Leipzig, 1861); 6 pieces, pf 2 hands, op.12 (Leipzig, ?1861); 2 pieces, pf 2 hands, op.14 (Leipzig, ?1862)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Deiters: ‘Lebende Komponisten 5: Max Bruch’, Ergänzungsblätter zur Kenntnis der Gegenwart, iv (1869), 658–64

J.A. Fuller-Maitland: Masters of German Music (London, 1894), 97–135

W. Altmann, ed.: Johannes Brahms: Briefwechsel, iii (Berlin, 1908)

F. Gysi: Max Bruch (Zürich, 1922)

H. Pfitzner: Meine Beziehungen zu Max Bruch (Munich, 1938)

A. Abell: Talks with Great Composers (New York, 1955), 189–201

K.G. Fellerer: ‘Aus Max Bruchs Briefwechsel mit Emil Kamphausen’, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des Rheinlandes, i: Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Ludwig Schiedermair, ed. W. Kahl, H. Lemacher and J. Schmidt-Görg (Cologne, 1956), 17–28

W. Kahl: ‘Zur Entstehung und Bonner Uraufführung von Max Bruchs Achilleus 1885’, Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte der Stadt Köln: zum 70. Geburtstag von Paul Mies, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1959), 26–54

W. Lauth: Max Bruchs Instrumentalwerk (Cologne, 1967)

M. Geck: ‘Max Bruchs Oratorium Gustav Adolf: ein Denkmal des Kultur-Protestantismus’, AMw, xxvii (1970), 138–49

D. Kämper, ed.: Max Bruch-Studien: zum 50. Todestag des Komponisten (Cologne, 1970) [15 essays on life, works and relation to important contemporaries]

K.G. Fellerer: Max Bruch (Cologne, 1974)

S. Luyken: Max Bruch (Cologne, 1984)

C. Fifield: Max Bruch: his Life and Works (London, 1988)

M. Schwarzer: Die Oratorien von Max Bruch (Kassel, 1988)

U. Bauer: Max Bruch und Koblenz (1865–67) (Mainz, 1996)

P. Riederer-Sitte, ed.: Max Bruch: Briefe an Laura und Rudolf von Beckerath (Essen, 1997)

CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bruči, Rudolf

(b Zagreb, 30 March 1917). Croatian composer. He studied music at the Zagreb Academy (until 1936) and composition at the Belgrade Academy (1946–9) with Petar Bingulac. In 1953 he took composition lessons with Uhl at the Vienna Music Academy. Bruči began his career as a violinist in the Belgrade PO (1945–50), opera orchestras and a string quartet, and he also took up conducting. He was appointed opera conductor at the Novi Sad People’s Theatre in 1950, and director of the Isidor Bajić Music School, Novi Sad, in 1954. Bruči’s music is marked by a clarity of expression and a desire to incorporate new ideas into what is basically a conventional approach. His use of bitonality, polytonality and atonality is always sensitive and considered, and normally enlivened by a strong rhythmic verve and brilliant orchestration; he has made occasional use of serial methods, but never completely or strictly. The symphonic suite Maskal, the ballet Night on the Railway and the cantata Čovek je vidik bez kraja (‘A Man is a Limitless Horizon’) are fine examples of the application of these qualities. Central to Bruči’s work, however, are his large-scale symphonic pieces, of which the best known is the Sinfonia lesta of 1965, which won the Queen Elisabeth Prize in 1966. His full-length opera Gilgameš (1986) represents a synthesis of the best of his work, incorporating rich orchestration, clear rhythmic structures and archaic choral writing.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Susreti [Encounters] (ballet), 1963; Demon zlata [Demon of Gold] (ballet, I. Otrin), 1965; Kirka [Circle] (ballet), 1967; Noć na pruzi [Night on the Railway] (ballet), 1968; Katarina Izmajlova (ballet, D. Pavlić), 1977; Gilgameš (op, 3, A. Milošević), 1986

Orch.: Rondo giocoso, 1947; Sinfonietta I, 1949; Sym. no.1, 1951; Vn Conc., 1952; Maskal, sym. suite, 1954; Trbn Conc. no.1, 1958; Conc. for Orch, 1959, rev. 1965; Trbn Conc. no.2, 1961; Sinfonia lesta, 1965; Sinfonietta II, str, 1965; Minijature, 1967; Sym. no.3, 1969; Conc., cl, str, 1970; Concertino for Orch, 1970; Metamorfoze B-A-C-H, str, 1972; Bn Conc., 1973; Sym. no.3, 1974; Varijacije na mađarsku temu [Variations on a Hungarian Theme], vn, orch, 1975

Choral: Srbija [Serbia] (cant., O. Davičo), B, chorus, ens, 1960; Čovek je vidik bez kraja [A Man is a Limitless Horizon] (cant., J. Horowitz, V. Milarić), 2 reciters, A, chorus, orch, 1961; Oči Sutjeske [Sutjeska's Eyes] (V. Popa), reciter, chorus, orch, 1963; Salut au monde – neka bude sreća [Greetings to the World – Let there be Happiness] (orat, Horowitz, Milarić), reciter, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1967, Sunčani mostovi [Sunny Bridges] (cant., W. Whitman), S, chorus, orch, 1968; Vojvodina (cant., M. Antić), 1972; Zvezdani brod [The Starship], chorus, 1978; Svi smo mi jedna partija [We're all One Party] (orat), chorus, 1979

Solo vocal: Samo peva tajni plamen [The Secret Flame Sings On] (D. Matić), B, ens, 1962; Kamerna poema za grad [Chbr Poem for a City] (I.V. Lalić), S, ens, 1965; Valami, Bar, pf, 1973; Grand Seigneur Danube (cant., Popa), A, wind qnt, pf, perc, 1991

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1950; 3 Sonatinas, pf, 1953–67; Cl Qnt, 1956; Mucis, org, flugelhorn, 1960; Musica Proibita, org, 1960; 3 pieces, vn, 1960–86; Scherzo, harmonica, 1964; 10 koncerti etidi [10 Concert Etudes] , harmonica, 1967; Str Qt no.2, 1967; Magic Flute, fl, pf, 1970; Imaginations I–III, chbr ens, 1971–90; Sonata, bn, pf, 1972; Sonata, vn, pf, 1977; 2 pieces, va, 1980; Str Qt no.3, 1981; Međimurska, cl, pf, 1984; Međimurska, vn, pf, 1984; Str Qt no.4, c1985; Str Qt no.5, 1989

Principal publishers: Vojvodina Composers’ Association, Vojvodina Academy of Science and Arts

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Antić: ‘Otvorene kapije sveta: kompozitor Rudolf Bruči o sebi svom delu “Simfonija”’ [Private questions: the composer Bruči on his ‘Sinfonija’], Dnevnik (18 Jan 1966)

M. Antić: ‘Da se pobedi ćutanje’, Dnevnik (27 Feb 1966) [interview]

V. Peričić: Musički stvaraoci u Srbiji (Belgrade, 1969), 67–78

T. Reich: Susreti sa suvremenim kompozitorima Jugoslavije [Meetings with contemporary Yugoslav composers] (Zagreb, 1972), 40–42

A. Koci and others: Jugoslovanska glasbena dela [Yugoslav musical works] (Ljubljana, 1980), 68–72

R. Popović: Vojvođanski razgovori: šesnaest umetnika o svom stvaralaštvu [Vojvodina conversations: 16 artists on their work] (Subotica, 1981)

D. Plavša: Musica humana: eseji i studije (Novi Sad, 1990)

R. Bruči and L. Andrić: ‘Između zvuka i logosa’ [Between sound and logic], Dometi, no.59 (1990), 71–8

L. Andrić: Novosadski razgovori 2 [Novi Sad conversations] (Novi Sad, 1991)

NIALL O’LOUGHLIN

Bruck, Arnold von [Pruck, Arnold de; Arnoldus Brugensis]

(b Bruges, ?1500; d Linz an der Donau, Upper Austria, 6 Feb 1554). South Netherlandish composer. It has been assumed that he was born between 1480 and 1490, but from the evidence of his will and of documents concerning his relatives, it seems that he was born somewhat later. He began his musical career as a choirboy in Charles V's chapel, where he probably remained until about 1519, and must have been a pupil of Marbrianus de Orto. Bruck does not appear to have been in the chapel by the time Maximilian became emperor, or to have served any other member of the Habsburg family. In 1527 he was ordained in the Thérouanne diocese (Pas-de-Calais). It was probably at this time that he arranged Févin's four-part Sancta Trinitas for six voices. He held an office at Archduke Ferdinand's court before he succeeded Heinrich Finck as court Kapellmeister in the second half of 1527; his vice-Kapellmeisters were Stephan Mahu and Pieter Maessens. Bruck remained in this post until his retirement on 31 December 1545. He was responsible for the musical education of the choirboys and among his pupils were Johann Zanger and Hermann Finck. The former, in his Practicae musicae praecepta (Leipzig, 1554), related a conversation on music theory between Erasmus Lapicida, Stephan Mahu and Bruck.

The years of service in the court of Ferdinand I brought Bruck a number of ecclesiastical honours. From 1527 to 1548 he held a canonry at Ljubljana Cathedral, from 28 December 1529 another at Zagreb Cathedral, and from 18 July 1531 the living of Laas (near Kočevje, Slovenia). Towards the end of his career he was made a privy councillor and given permission to continue using the title ‘Kapellmeister’ after leaving the court. After retiring he settled for a time in Vienna, where he received a chaplaincy for one of the altars at the Stephansdom, and in 1547 he wrote some works for the cathedral choir. In 1548 he moved to Linz, where from 1543 or 1544 he had held a very prosperous living, the Beneficium Sanctae Trinitas.

Bruck's high position in the service of a Catholic ruler and his ecclesiastical honours exclude the possibility that he may have been associated with Protestantism, as has been suggested. He cannot, therefore, have been connected, as he has been in the past, with Stephan Zirler's satirical song Ich will hinfort gut bepstisch sein, des Luthers sehr verachten. Bruck was highly regarded by his contemporaries. In 1536 the silversmith, Ludwig Neufarer made a medallion of him. Hans Ott in 1534 and Georg Rhau in 1542 rated him among the more famous composers of the time. The composer Caspar Copus, cantor at the Stephansdom, Vienna, dedicated his Salve regina (1550) to him, and Antonius Margaritha (Margolith), professor of Hebrew at Vienna University, wrote his Kurtze Auslegung über das Wort Halleluia (c1540) at his suggestion and dedicated it to him.

Bruck is one of the most important composers who worked in German lands in the first half of the 16th century. Prominent among his extant works is the sacred and secular German lied, although with the disappearance of the repertory of both Ferdinand I’s court chapel and the choir of the Stephansdom in Vienna it is probable that the greater part of his church compositions with Latin texts have been lost. Those which do survive show that Bruck composed in the Josquin tradition and was a master of liturgical cantus-firmus treatment seen for example, in the sequence Dies irae as well as in the Te Deum (in A-KN), an alternatim setting in which (with the exception of verse 16) the even numbered verses are set polyphonically. A four-voice Magnificat setting by Bruck is also transmitted in the Klosterneuburg manuscript as well as in the recently identified concordance Ws. Also of interest are his two- to four-part motets for high voices, written as exercises for the court chapel choirboys. One of these is the threefold setting of the sequence Grates nunc omnes, in which the number of voices is increased each time. Bruck's style in the German sacred lied shows the move towards the later motet-style settings of chorales, but his greatest achievements were in polyphonic arrangements of German folksongs and court melodies, as well as in the quodlibet. Among his polyphonic lieder the most prominent is the tenor cantus-firmus type with instrumental accompaniment, as practised from about 1500. There are few settings which appear to be intended exclusively for singing, for the style of the untexted parts suggests a distinctive character compared with those that have texts. To songs of this type belong the burlesque song Es ging ein Landsknecht and Ihr Christen allgleiche, which apply the technique of continuous imitation. The latter refers to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529.

WORKS

Editions: Newe deudsche geistliche Gesenge, 1544, ed. J. Wolf, DDT, xxxiv (1908/R) [Wo]Das deutsche Gesellschaftslied in Österreich von 1480–1550, ed. L. Nowak, DTÖ, lxxii, Jg.xxxvii/2 (1930/R) [N]A. von Bruck: Sämtliche lateinische Motetten, ed. O. Wessely, DTÖ, xcix (1961) [W]

sacred latin

Adesto nunc ecclesiae, 4vv, 1542¹², W

Ascendo ad Patrem, 5vv, 1540⁶, W

Audi benigne conditor, 4vv, 1542¹², W

Da pacem, Domine, 4vv, 1544²¹, W (high voices)

Deus misereatur nostri, 4vv, D-Rp, W (high voices)

Dies irae, 4vv, D-Mbs, W

Gloria, laus et honor, 4vv, A-Wn, W

Grates nunc omnes, 2vv, 1545⁵, W (high voices)

Grates nunc omnes, 3vv, 1545⁵, W (high voices)

Grates nunc omnes, 4vv, 1545⁵, W (high voices)

In civitate Domini, 5vv, 1538³, W

Jesu quadragenariae, 4vv, 1542¹², W

Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, 4vv, D-Rp, W (high voices)

Magnificat, 3vv, 1541², W

Magnificat, 4vv, A-KN, Ws

O crux ave, 4vv, 1542¹², W

Pater noster, 4vv, 1544²¹, W, Wo (high voices)

Pater noster, 5vv, 1538³, W

Quomodo miseretur, 3vv, 1542⁸, W

Te Deum laudamus, 4vv, A-KN, W (‘ad organum’; for Emperor Ferdinand I's coronation, Cologne, 1531)

Virgo prudentissima, 3vv, 1541², W

secular

Fortitudo Dei regnantis, 6vv, 1537¹, W (state motet; occasion unknown)

sacred german

Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Christ der ist erstanden, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo (2 settings)

Christ ist erstanden, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Christ lag in Todesbanden, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebote, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Gott der Vater wohn uns bei, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, Wo

Herr, wer wird wohnen in deiner Hütte, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, Wo

Komm heiliger Geist, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, Wo

Komm her zu mir, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, Wo

Mitten wir im Leben sind, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, Wo

O allmächtiger Gott, 5vv, 1544²¹, Wo

O allmächtiger Gott, 6vv, 1534¹⁷, W

Vater unser, 4vv, 1544²¹, Wo

Wir glauben all an einen Gott, 4vv, 1544²⁰, Wo

songs

Ach hilf mir leid, 5vv, 1556²⁹, N (quodlibet)

Alls von Gott, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, W (2 settings)

An aller Welt, 4vv, D-Mbs, N

Beschaffens Glück, 4vv, 1536⁹, N

Des Unfalls Kraft, 4vv, 1536⁹, N

Die Zeit bringt viel, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

Ein schönes Weib erfreut mich, 3vv, 1538⁹, N

Elend ich rief, 4vv, 1536⁸, N

Es geht gen diesen Sommer, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

Es ging ein Landsknecht, 4vv, 1540²¹, N

Geduld hoff Gnad, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

Ich stund an einem Morgen, 6vv, 1534¹⁷, N (quodlibet)

Ich weiss mir eine Mülnerin, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

Ihr Christen allgleiche, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

Kein Adler in der Welt so schön, 5vv, 1534¹⁷, N (quodlibet)

Mühe und Arbeit in der Welt, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

O du armer Judas, 6vv, 1534¹⁷

So trinken wir alle, 5vv, 1536⁹, N

Vertrauen herzlich far, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N (2 settings)

Wie geht es zu, 4vv, 1534¹⁷, N

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Wirth: Arnold von Bruck: sein Leben und seine Werke (diss., U. of Vienna, 1910)

L. Nowak: ‘Das deutsche Gesellschaftslied in Österreich von 1480 bis 1550’, SMw, xvii (1930), 21–52

H. Osthoff: Die Niederländer und das deutsche Lied, 1400–1640 (Berlin, 1938/R), pp.viiff

O. Wessely: ‘Zur Frage nach der Herkunft Arnolds von Bruck’, ÖAW, xcii (1955), 23–37

O. Wessely: Arnold von Bruck: Leben und Umwelt (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Vienna, 1958)

H. Osthoff: ‘Das Te Deum des Arnold von Bruck’, Festschrift Friedrich Blume, ed. A.A. Abert and W. Pfannkuch (Kassel, 1963), 252–7

R. Flotzinger: ‘Die Melodie zu Wolfgang Schmeltzls Türkenlied’, Festschrift Othmar Wessely, ed. M. Angerer and others (Tutzing, 1982), 147–9

W. Pass: ‘Das vierstimmige Magnificat des Arnold von Bruck in dem vor einigen Jahren wiederentdeckten Chorbuch Ws. Sign.2a 19’, SMw, xlii (1993), 467–74

M. Teramoto: ‘Word-Tone Relationship in the Sacred Works of Arnold von Bruck’, Austria 996–1996: Music in a Changing Society: Ottawa 1996 (forthcoming)

O. Wessely: ‘Die späten Jahre des Arnold von Bruck’, Österreichische Musik, Musik in Österreich: Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Mitteleuropas: Theophil Antonicek zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. E.T. Hilscher (Tutzing, 1998), 43–50

OTHMAR WESSELY/WALTER KREYSZIG

Bruck, Charles

(b Timişoara, 2 May 1911; d Hancock, ME, 16 July 1995). French conductor of Romanian birth. He studied at the Vienna Music Academy, and at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris under Perlemuter (piano) and Nadia Boulanger (composition). In 1934 he attended Monteux's conducting classes, and in 1936 won the conducting competition of the Paris SO and became its assistant conductor. After three years as head of the music department of the Ministry of Industrial Production, he held conducting posts with the Cannes and Deauville Casinos (1949–50), the Netherlands Opera (1950–54), the Strasbourg RSO (1955–65) and the Paris ORTF PO (1965–70). In 1970 he was appointed head of the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors and Orchestra Musicians in Maine, a post he held until his death. He made his American début in 1936, and conducted in numerous countries thereafter.

Although Bruck's preference was for the Classical and Romantic repertory, he conducted many contemporary works. He gave the first performances in France of Dallapiccola's Ulysses, Il prigioniero and Requiescant, Penderecki's Passion according to St Luke and Dies irae, Ligeti's Requiem, Lontano and Atmosphères, Lutosławski's Symphony no.2, and Janáček's The Makropoulos Affair and Glagolitic Mass. He also conducted the world premières of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (in concert form) and Xenakis's Nomos gamma. His success in contemporary music (he gave the premières of over 700 works) resulted from his flawless baton technique, his analytical skills and his understanding of the most widely differing styles. He possessed to a remarkable degree the ability to give a new work a clear outline even at its first playing.

CHRISTIANE SPIETH-WEISSENBACHER/CHARLES BARBER

Brucken Fock, Gerard(us Hubertus Galenus) von

(b Koudekerke, Zeeland, 28 Dec 1859; d Heemstede, 15 Aug 1935). Dutch composer. A descendant of an old noble family, he grew up at Ter Hooge, near Middelburg, where he received music lessons from Abraham de Jong. Already during his youth he composed music and made drawings. He studied in Utrecht with Richard Hol (composition) and T.L. van de Wurff (piano); there he also came into contact with Julius Röntgen. He continued his studies in Germany with Friedrich Kiel, Woldemar Bargiel and Ernst Rudorff.

A number of his works appeared in print both in and outside the Netherlands. His piano works are clearly influenced by Chopin and Liszt; for this reason Grieg called him ‘the Dutch Chopin’. Although his compositions sometimes show a lack of structure, they were generally well received. His oratorio De wederkomst van Christus made a great impression at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1910. His three symphonies were successfully performed by conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Wouter Hutschenruyter. Johan Wagenaar commented positively on his Requiem and Röntgen honoured him with three orchestral works based on his name, Drei Präludien und Fugen auf GHGBF. Von Brucken Fock was also a poet and a painter. Exhibitions of his drawings continued after his death.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Kerstcantate, 1900; Paaschcantate, solo vv, chorus, str qt, org, 1901; Pinkstercantate, solo v, chorus, orch, 1902; De wederkomst van Christus (orat, Brucken Fock), 1906, rev. 1910; Requiem, chorus, orch, 1933

3 syms.: C, op.12; B, 1907–8; c

Other orch: Liederen van de zee, 1906; 9 suites, incl. no.5 ‘Bretonsche’, 1933

Kbd: 5 moments musicaux, op.11, 1891; 224 preludes, 1886, 1890, 1891–5, 1924–31

Chbr music, songs

Principal publishers: Breitkopf & Härtel, Noske, G. Alsbach & Co.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Paap: ‘Gerard H.G. von Brucken Fock: componist en schilder’, Mens en melodie, viii (1953), 75–9

H.I.C. Dozy-de Stoppelaar: G.H.G. von Brucken Fock: een mens van twee werelden 1859–1935 (Zeist, 1959) [incl. complete work-list]

A.J.A. ten Bruggencate: Een leven voor de kunst: G.H.G. von Brucken Fock (1859–1935) (Middelburg, 1989)

A.J.A. ten Bruggencate: Gerard von Brucken Fock (Middelburg, 1995)

A. Clement: ‘Gerardus Hubertus Galenus von Brucken Fock (1859–1935): de musicus’, Zeeland: Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen, iv (1995), 86–90

A. Clement: Introduction to G.H.G. von Brucken Fock: 5 Moments Musicaux Op.11, 12 Klavierstukken Op.27/1, 3, 7, 8 (Middelburg, 1995)

ALBERT CLEMENT

Bruckner, (Joseph) Anton

(b Ansfelden, nr Linz, 4 Sept 1824; d Vienna, 11 Oct 1896). Austrian composer. One of the most innovatory figures of the second half of the 19th century, Bruckner is remembered primarily for his symphonies and sacred compositions. His music is rooted in the formal traditions of Beethoven and Schubert and inflected with Wagnerian harmony and orchestration. Until late in his career his reputation rested mainly on his improvisatory skills at the organ. As a teacher he communicated the contrapuntal system of Simon Sechter to a generation of Viennese students that included Felix Mottl, Heinrich Schenker, Franz and Josef Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe.

2. St Florian, 1845–55.

3. Linz, 1856–68.

4. Vienna, 1868–96.

5. Personality.

6. Publication and reception history.

7. Versions of the symphonies.

8. Metrical and part-writing theories, composition and revision processes.

9. Form, large-scale harmony and the revisions.

10. Vocal music.

11. Narrative and intertextuality.

12. Research issues.

PAUL HAWKSHAW (1–6, 12, work-list, bibliography), TIMOTHY L. JACKSON (6–12)

1. Early years: up to 1845.

Bruckner's birthplace, the tiny village of Ansfelden, is situated on a fertile strip of land between the Danube and the foothills of Upper Austria. Although it has been almost absorbed by the 20th-century suburban expansion of Linz, in 1824 it was a farming community relatively isolated from the social and cultural activities of the provincial capital. Bruckner was the eldest of 11 children, of whom only five survived early childhood. His father, Anton (1791–1837), was the local schoolmaster, a position which included the responsibilities of organist and director of music for the village church; he supplemented the family income by playing dance music on the violin at local taverns. Bruckner began participating in the musical activities at an early age: late in life, reminiscing for his biographer August Göllerich, he recalled that, at the age of four, he had often been invited to perform on a miniature violin for the parish priest.

Bruckner must have shown talent because, in 1835, his parents sent him to study with his cousin Johann Baptist Weiss (1813–50), a schoolmaster's assistant and organist in the nearby village of Hörsching, which offered a somewhat more sophisticated musical establishment than Ansfelden. Little is known about Bruckner's studies with Weiss, although almost certainly they included thoroughbass. A first edition (1799) of Haydn's piano variations in F minor (hXVII:6) survives with both Weiss's and the young Bruckner's signatures, indicating that piano instruction included music by Haydn. Göllerich and Max Auer (E1922–37) reported that Weiss also introduced Bruckner to the scores of The Creation and The Seasons. The Pange lingua in C (wab31), believed to be Bruckner's earliest surviving composition, may date from his time in Hörsching.

Studies with Weiss were brought to a premature close by the illness of Bruckner's father in autumn 1836, when Bruckner had to return to Ansfelden to help in the church, school and tavern. On 7 June 1837 his father died of what was referred to locally as ‘schoolteachers’ disease', described on the death certificate as ‘lung fever and exhaustion’ (euphemisms for alcoholism and overwork). Rather than allow her eldest son to bear the burden of supporting the family, Bruckner's mother persuaded Michael Arneth (1771–1854), prior of the Augustinian monastery of St Florian nearby, to admit him as a chorister. Many of the churches and schools in the vicinity, including those of Ansfelden, fell under the jurisdiction of St Florian, so it is not surprising that a widow with five children and no means of support would seek help there. Accepting the boy, whatever talent he may have been able to demonstrate, required some kindness on the part of the monastery: at the age of 13 Bruckner's voice was about to change.

Bruckner's first sojourn in St Florian lasted three years. If his Roman Catholicism had already been firmly established during his boyhood in Ansfelden, it was certainly reinforced here. The Baroque halls of the monastery were to be a source of spiritual strength and inspiration for the rest of his life. The church music repertory, compared with the amateur establishments of his early childhood, was vast and featured Austrian classical and pre-classical composers including Michael Haydn, the St Florian composer Franz Seraph Aumann (1728–97, whose music Bruckner admired), Albrechtsberger, Joseph Haydn and Mozart. Contrary to views expressed in much of the Bruckner literature, very little Renaissance and Baroque music (with the exception of that of Antonio Caldara) was performed at the monastery in those years. Bruckner's lifelong devotion to the music of Schubert can be traced directly to St Florian. Schubert's secular music had already been performed often at the monastery while he was still alive and continued to be actively cultivated during both of Bruckner's periods of residence there.

The choristers attended the local school, where records indicate that Bruckner was an excellent student, finishing highest in his class in 1839. He studied the violin with Franz Gruber, who had been a pupil of Beethoven's friend Schuppanzigh, and singing with another local teacher, Michael Bogner. It was his violin playing that earned him an extra year at St Florian after his voice had begun to change in 1839, but most important for his future career were lessons with the monastery organist Anton Kattinger (1798–1852), who was sufficiently impressed to allow him to serve as assistant at Sunday masses.

By autumn 1840 it was time to choose a career. Perhaps because he or his mentors lacked sufficient confidence in his musical abilities to trust his future to them entirely, it was decided that Bruckner should follow his father's profession. He spent the academic year 1840–41 taking teacher-training courses in Linz, where he also continued to study the organ, singing and the piano. His theory teacher was Johann August Dürrnberger (1800–80), whose Elementar-Lehrbuch der Harmonie- und Generalbass-Lehre was used as text; Bruckner's annotated copy survives. Other experiences included his first contact with important orchestral repertory; he is known to have attended, for example, a concert conducted by the Domkapellmeister Karl Zappe (1812–71) which included Weber's overtures to Der Freischütz and Euryanthe and Beethoven's Fourth Symphony.

In autumn 1841 Bruckner set out for his first teaching position. A ride on the horse-drawn train as far as Freistadt followed by a three-hour walk took him to the remote village of Windhaag in the Mühlviertal, where he remained as assistant schoolteacher for 16 months. The conditions of his employment were hardly more attractive than those of the journey to get there, although the severity of his circumstances was probably exaggerated by early biographers. Duties included teaching, assisting with the church music and helping out in the fields. Like his father, Bruckner supplemented his income by playing the violin at community festivities. The musical resources of the church were even more meagre than those at Ansfelden; the organ and a few amateur singers and instrumentalists were all he had to work with. An amelioration was the support of a local weaver, Johann Sücka, who placed the family clavichord at his disposal. Although his employer, Franz Fuchs, has often been pictured as unsympathetic, partly as a result of friction with Bruckner over farm work, he nevertheless provided a glowing reference when it was time for the young man to move on.

Bruckner remained in Windhaag until January 1843, when the intervention of Michael Arneth secured him a new position in the smaller, though more congenial, village of Kronstorf. He spent two relatively happy years there: he was closer to his beloved St Florian and within a few kilometres of the larger municipalities, Enns and Steyr. There were no onerous farm chores, and the schoolmaster Franz Seraph Lehofer indulged him in his musical endeavours. He allowed Bruckner to keep a clavichord in the schoolhouse (the living quarters were too small) where, according to anecdotes, he often practised until the early hours of the morning. From Kronstorf, Bruckner walked three times a week to Enns to study theory with the organist and choirmaster Leopold von Zenetti (1805–92), who was well versed in the music of Michael and Joseph Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Zenetti introduced Bruckner to Türk's Kurze Anweisung zum Generalbassspielen and Von den wichtigsten Pflichten eines Organisten as well as to Bach's chorales. A little further in the opposite direction from Enns was a fine organ by Franz Xaver Chrismann (who had also built the magnificent instrument at St Florian) in the Stadtpfarrkirche in Steyr. The composer valued his connection with Steyr throughout the rest of his life, and requested in his will that he be laid to rest there if arrangements could not be made at St Florian.

Whether or not the few compositions that survive from Bruckner's early years accurately reflect the quantity and quality of his output is not certain. Given the time-consuming nature of his employment and studies, it is doubtful that compositional activity could have been very extensive. An accurate assessment is complicated by questions of chronology, because many compositions that predate Bruckner's move to Linz in 1856 exist only in undated autograph parts. The only surviving composition from the Windhaag period is a Mass in C (wab25) for alto solo, horns and organ. In Kronstorf he wrote at least two masses (wab9 and 146), some small sacred pieces for mixed chorus and the secular cantata Vergissmeinnicht (wab93). Bruckner's earliest surviving work for male chorus, An dem Feste (wab59), was composed for the birthday of the pastor at Enns, Josef von Pessler, and first performed in his church on 19 September 1843. Although these early pieces contain occasional striking harmonic progressions, there is little in them to suggest that Bruckner was destined for a musical career any more distinguished than those of his Upper Austrian teachers Weiss and Zenetti.

2. St Florian, 1845–55.

However contented Bruckner may have been in Kronstorf, St Florian remained the centre of his world and on 25 September 1845 he achieved an objective in assuming the position of assistant schoolteacher there. This time he remained at the monastery for ten years, adding to his duties in 1849 the responsibility of singing instructor for the choirboys. Throughout the entire period the careers of schoolteacher and professional musician continued to compete for his allegiance: he studied Latin and travelled to Linz for a variety of classes and examinations with a view to continuing his promotion through the instructors' ranks. Musically he matured from a provincial church organist to a virtuoso player, becoming provisory monastery organist in 1850 when his teacher Kattinger departed for Kremsmünster. He continued his theoretical studies with Marpurg's Abhandlung von der Fuge, copying fugues by Caldara, Mozart and Eybler among others, and began to cultivate an interest in the music of Mendelssohn, whose St Paul was an object of investigation as early as 1848. At the same time traces of his future greatness as a composer began to emerge.

Several local people exerted a positive influence on his musical career: the family of his superior, the schoolteacher Michael Bogner, to whose daughter Aloisia Bruckner was attracted, and for whom he wrote the piano piece Steiermärker (wab122, c1850); the chorus director Ignaz Traumihler (1815–84), to whom he dedicated the Magnificat (wab24, 1852), the Ave Maria of 1856 (wab5) and later the Os justi (wab30, 1879); and his close friend the monastery administrator Franz Sailer, who died on 15 September 1848 and in whose memory Bruckner composed his first notable work, the Requiem in D minor (wab39), completed on 14 March 1849. Sailer bequeathed Bruckner the Bösendorfer piano which he used for the rest of his life. There was also Friedrich Mayer, who had arranged for Bruckner's return to St Florian in 1845 and who succeeded Michael Arneth as prior of the monastery in 1854. Bruckner composed his second important work, the Missa solemnis (wab29), for Mayer's inaugural mass as prior, celebrated on 14 September 1854.

Other works from the second St Florian period include six Tantum ergo settings (wab41, 42 and 44); the beautiful Libera me (wab22) and Vor Arneths Grab (wab53), both for the funeral of Michael Arneth in 1854; Psalms xxii and cxiv (wab34 and 36); and a number of secular cantatas – occasional pieces for celebrations at the monastery. The psalms and cantatas for solo voices and chorus with different combinations of instruments demonstrate a strong Baroque influence, sometimes with more than a hint of Mendelssohn. The enormous Psalm cxlvi (wab37) for double chorus, soloists and orchestra belongs stylistically with these pieces and the Missa solemnis, and probably dates from the late St Florian or early Linz years. Nothing is known about its origins or performance history.

As the 1850s progressed Bruckner became increasingly frustrated, both socially and musically, with St Florian (perhaps because his position as organist remained provisory), and he began to set his sights beyond the monastery walls. On 30 July 1852 he dedicated Psalm cxiv to the Viennese Hofkapellmeister Ignaz von Assmayr, with a request for help in finding a better situation. His dissatisfaction came to a head with his assignment to the servants' table at the banquet after the performance of his Missa solemnis. Still he did not place all his hopes on a musical future; as late as 28 January 1855 he passed the qualifying examinations for high-school teachers in Linz. That summer he applied in secret and unsuccessfully for the position of cathedral organist in Olmütz (now Olomouc). Friedrich Mayer is reported to have been so irate at learning of this attempt to leave the monastery that, when the post of organist at the cathedral in Linz became available later in the year, Bruckner did not apply for fear of arousing any further ire. He rushed to Linz only at the last moment, at the urging of a local organ tuner, Alfred Just, and had to be persuaded by his former teacher Dürrnberger to take part in the audition. Even after being awarded the position on a provisional basis on 13 November 1855 he was ambivalent about pursuing the permanent appointment. He was careful to secure a promise from Mayer to reserve the monastery post for him for two years.

3. Linz, 1856–68.

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1855, Bruckner performed his first mass as Dom- und Stadtpfarrkirchen-Organist in Linz and on Christmas Eve assumed full-time responsibilities. After he gained the permanent position with a second audition on 25 January 1856, school teaching was officially behind him. Bruckner now entered into a period which was in many ways the most stable and the most free from controversy of his entire career. Compared with the small towns of his early years, Linz was a metropolis of some 27,000 inhabitants. It had a theatre with an orchestra; an active church music establishment with a professional director; two men's choral societies, the Liedertafel Frohsinn and the Männergesang-Verein Sängerbund (established in 1857); and the amateur mixed chorus and orchestra of the Linzer Musikverein. His immediate superior was the Domkapellmeister Karl Zappe, a fine violinist and leader of a resident string quartet. His employer was Bishop Franz Josef Rudigier (1811–84), a man of extraordinary perspicacity and drive, who became one of Bruckner's most loyal and important benefactors. The lasting monument of his tenure as archbishop (1853–84) is the neo-Gothic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, begun as a result of his initiative and completed in 1924. Bruckner composed the Festkantate (wab16) for the cornerstone-laying ceremony on 1 May 1862, and the Mass in E minor (wab27) for the consecration of its votive chapel on 29 September 1869.

Much of Bruckner's time during his early years in Linz was probably absorbed by the new position, which required his performing services at both the cathedral (the Alter Dom) and the Stadtpfarrkirche; eventually he was able to persuade the diocese to engage assistants for some of the work. As early as July 1855 had begun a remarkable episode: a long period of study with the Viennese theorist Simon Sechter, during which Bruckner abstained almost entirely from composing. Already, at St Florian, Friedrich Mayer and the organist Robert Führer, while acknowledging Bruckner's talent as the composer of the Missa solemnis, had impressed upon him the need for more training in technique. The studies with Sechter began with elementary harmony and proceeded through four-part counterpoint to complex canon and fugue. They were carried on by correspondence punctuated by Bruckner's visits to Vienna; these increased in frequency and regularity with the bishop's blessing from 1858. Thousands of pages of exercises survive, testifying to Bruckner's diligence. In a letter of 13 January 1860 Sechter felt compelled to comment that he had never had such an industrious pupil and cautioned him against working too hard.

On 26 March 1861 Sechter signed a certificate declaring that Bruckner's instruction in harmony and counterpoint was successfully completed. A brief flurry of creative activity followed, including the composition of his first masterpiece, the seven-voice Ave Maria (wab6), performed in the cathedral on 12 May 1861 at a celebration commemorating the founding of the Liedertafel Frohsinn. Later that year, consistent with his lifelong preoccupation with diplomas and official credentials, Bruckner petitioned the conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna for permission to take an examination to assess his accomplishments in the hope of eventually obtaining a professor's title. The examination was arranged for 21 November in the Piaristenkirche, Vienna. Bruckner was asked to improvise a fugue, after which the Hofkapellmeister Johann Herbeck remarked, ‘He should have examined us!’ In addition to contributing to his legendary reputation as an improviser at the organ, the incident established Bruckner in Herbeck's mind as an Austrian musical force to be reckoned with.

By December 1861 Bruckner had again immersed himself in study – this time of form and orchestration – with Otto Kitzler (1834–1915), the cellist in Zappe's string quartet and conductor at the Linz theatre. Up to this time, with the exception of a few encounters with the works of Mendelssohn and Weber, for example, the repertory to which Bruckner had been exposed was relatively conservative. Until 1856 his own music had included figured bass parts (the Ave Maria with four-part chorus,wab5, was the last score to do so), often with Baroque-like arias and recitatives, and his orchestral scores employed an antiquated order with the brass at the top. Kitzler must be credited with bringing Bruckner up to date with 19th-century musical practices and introducing him to the music of Wagner (specifically Tannhäuser, which Kitzler conducted in Linz on 13 February 1863). Before studying with Kitzler, so far as is known, Bruckner had not attended the theatre.

The studies with Kitzler continued until July 1863. J.C. Lobe's Lehrbuch der musikalischen Komposition, E.F. Richter's Die Grundzüge der musikalischen Formen and A.B. Marx's Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition were used for Formenlehre. Studies began with the structure of cadences and periods and continued through the forms employed by the Viennese classicists – two- and three-part song forms, dances, marches, minuets and trios, rondos, études and sonatas – and concluded with orchestration based on Marx. Written exercises were reinforced by analyses of the Beethoven piano sonatas. Once again the studies were rigorous and Bruckner applied himself with extraordinary zeal. Compositions that he wrote for Kitzler included the String Quartet in C minor (wab111), the Overture in G minor (wab98), the ‘Study’ Symphony in F minor (wab99) and Psalm cxii (wab35) for double chorus and orchestra. There is no evidence that after 1863 Bruckner ever regarded these pieces as anything but exercises. In his own words, his ‘composition period’ began with the completion of the Kitzler studies. He began numbering his masses with the D minor Mass of 1864 (wab26) and the symphonies with the C minor Symphony no.1 of 1865–6 (wab101).

Another important aspect of Bruckner's musical activities in Linz was his participation in the Liedertafel Frohsinn. He joined the chorus in 1856 as a second tenor and was twice its director: November 1860 to September 1861 and again from 15 January 1868 until his departure for Vienna later that year. Contemporary reports indicate that he was an exacting choral conductor, particularly fastidious about dynamics. Under his direction the Frohsinn achieved a number of critical successes, specifically in 1861 at the Sängerfeste in Krems (29–30 June) and Nuremberg (20–22 July). Why he resigned as director in autumn 1861 is not clear; in a letter of 3 October to his friend Rudolf Weinwurm he referred to unspecified ‘nasty slanders’. Later he wrote several compositions for the choir, including Inveni David (wab19), Vaterländisches Weinlied (wab91) and Vaterlandslied (wab92), and on 9 June 1869 – after he had moved to Vienna – he was named an honorary member. The Frohsinn was also an important social outlet for Bruckner, who was a frequent participant in its parties and excursions.

The first composition after the studies with Kitzler was Germanenzug (wab70), a cantata for male voices (soloists and chorus) and brass, written during winter 1863–4 for a competition sponsored by the first Oberösterreichisches Sängerfest in Linz (4–6 June 1865). Much to Bruckner's chagrin his work was awarded only the second prize; his friend Rudolf Weinwurm's Germania was the winner. Now all but forgotten, Germanenzug enjoys the distinction of being Bruckner's first publication; it was printed in 1865 by the firm of Josef Kränzl in Ried as part of the competition prize. After Germanenzug there followed a series of works which moved Bruckner into the front rank of 19th-century composers: the Mass in D minor (June–September 1864), the Symphony no.1 in C minor (January 1865 – April 1866), the Mass in E minor (August–November 1866) and the Mass in F minor (September 1867 – September 1868). Bruckner conducted the première of the D minor Mass in Linz Cathedral on 20 November 1864 and the First Symphony in the Linz Redoutensaal on 9 May 1868. Johann Herbeck conducted the D minor Mass in the Hofburgkapelle on 10 February 1867, the first performance in Vienna of a work by Bruckner.

Meanwhile, Bruckner continued to cultivate his knowledge of and admiration for the music of Wagner, whom he came to refer to as the ‘Meister aller Meister’. He heard Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin and Das Liebesmahl der Apostel in Linz and in May 1865 at Wagner's invitation, went to Munich for the scheduled première of Tristan und Isolde where he met his idol for the first time. When the May performances of the opera were cancelled, Bruckner returned to Linz for the première of his own Germanenzug, only to return to Munich for the opening of Tristan on 10 June. He is believed to have attended every subsequent Wagnerian première. On 4 April 1868, with Wagner's permission, he conducted the Liedertafel Frohsinn in the first performance of the closing chorus from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Nor was his thirst for contemporary music confined to Wagner. On 15 August 1865 he was in Budapest for the first performance of Liszt's Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth and on 16 December 1866 he attended a performance in Vienna of Berlioz's La damnation de Faust conducted by the composer.

The Linz period was not without personal setbacks. On 11 November 1860 Bruckner's mother died. She had sacrificed a great deal by moving to Ebelsberg to work as a servant so that he could attend school at St Florian. Later, Bruckner had supported her financially whenever possible, and he kept her deathbed photograph with him for the rest of his life. Marriage was on his mind throughout much of the time spent in Linz, yet he was as unhappy there in affairs of the heart as he had been at St Florian. On 16 August 1866, in one of the rare emotional outpourings to be found in his letters, he proposed unsuccessfully to a butcher's daughter, Josefine Lang who, at 17, was less than half his age. The most serious crisis occurred in spring 1867; from 8 May until 8 August he was confined to the sanatorium at Bad Kreuzen as a result of a nervous breakdown. One of the symptoms was a number mania: he is reported to have counted such things as beads on necklaces, dots on clothes, windows in the town, leaves on trees and even stars. The specific cause of his collapse is not known, although overwork was certainly a factor. The stress of years of study followed by a period of intense compositional activity as well as the performances of the D minor Mass must have contributed to it. His failure to marry may also have been a cause of his breakdown.

Shortly after his release from Bad Kreuzen, disregarding doctors' orders, Bruckner began work on the Mass in F minor. It is clear that by that time he had become as uncomfortable in the provincial capital as he had been during his final days at St Florian. He began to look for a position elsewhere, though his ambivalence about actually making a move was reminiscent of the months immediately before going to Linz. He wrote to the Vienna Hofkapelle on 14 October 1867, the University of Vienna on 2 November and the Mozarteum in Salzburg on 29 March 1868. Strangely, he did not apply at first for the post of professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory, left vacant by the death of Simon Sechter on 10 September 1867. In May 1868 Johann Herbeck travelled to Linz to persuade Bruckner that he should consider it. Still he hesitated, in part because his income would have been lower than in Linz, and he wrote to Hans von Bülow in Munich about the possibility of an organ position there. Herbeck intervened again to sweeten the Viennese offer by adding organ teaching to the responsibilities at the conservatory and arranging for Bruckner to enter the Hofkapelle as an unpaid organist. Finally, on 28 June, after requesting that Bishop Rudigier reserve the Linz position for him as Friedrich Mayer had done at St Florian 14 years earlier, Bruckner committed himself to Vienna.

4. Vienna, 1868–96.

Bruckner assumed his duties at the conservatory in October 1868 at a starting annual salary of 800 gulden and remained on the faculty until he retired in January 1891. Dürrnberger's harmony book, Sechter's Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, Marpurg's Abhandlung von der Fuge, and E.F. Richter's Lehrbuch der Fuge served as his texts, and Sechter's ‘Fundamentalbasstheorie’ provided the substance for the lectures. Student reminiscences report consistently that his subject matter was textbook harmony and counterpoint, not musical composition. During his conservatory years Bruckner held two other teaching positions: lecturer in harmony and counterpoint at the University of Vienna and piano instructor at St Anna's teacher-training college for women. Despite dogged opposition from the critic Eduard Hanslick, who was also on the faculty, Bruckner was appointed to the university in October 1875 after three unsuccessful applications. At St Anna's Bruckner suffered one of the most humiliating experiences of his career. He began as instructor at the school in autumn 1870 and was cited for disciplinary action in September 1871 after a complaint that he had improperly addressed some of the students. The education minister Carl Stremayr (dedicatee of the Fifth Symphony) ruled in Bruckner's favour and he was able to remain until 1874, when the position was given to Weinwurm in a bureaucratic reorganization.

As well as teaching, Bruckner was one of three organists in the Hofkapelle, where he performed until 1892, and was second singing instructor and vice-archivist between 1875 and 1878. Despite his unquestioned mastery of the organ (his reputation as an international virtuoso was established by highly acclaimed tours to Nancy and Paris in spring 1869 and London in July and August 1871) there are indications that he did not always perform the service music in a manner acceptable to his superiors. Perhaps he was more interested in improvising than in playing the prescribed pieces. Under Herbeck's successor as Hofkapellmeister, Joseph Hellmesberger, Bruckner often found himself demoted from High Mass to afternoon Benediction. The chapel afforded an occasional performance outlet for his compositions. The F minor Mass received its première with the Philharmonic Orchestra and the chapel choir in the Augustinerkirche in June 1872 (at Bruckner's own expense) and was performed in the Burgkapelle itself in 1873; it remained in the repertory along with the D minor Mass until the dissolution of the court in the 20th century.

Throughout Bruckner's years of service in Vienna, the Hofkapelle provided very little stimulus for composition; most of the important motets of the period – Locus iste, Os justi and Virga Jesse floruit, for example – were written for Linz or St Florian (though the last-named was first performed in Vienna). In fact, given the obligations of his various posts and the numerous private students, it is surprising that he found any time to compose. In Vienna the symphony became the focus of his creative activity, starting with the so-called ‘Nullte’ (no.0), which he completed in Linz in September 1869. Speculation in early biographies that its autograph score (dated 24 January – 12 September 1869) is a revised version of the work is incorrect: it was originally entitled ‘no.2’ and composed after the First Symphony (1865–6). The designation ‘Nullte’ or ‘zero’ came to be applied because of the symbol ‘ø’ which Bruckner wrote on the manuscript during the 1890s to indicate that he had withdrawn (‘annulliert’) the work from the corpus of numbered symphonies. It is not known when Bruckner rejected it, although it must have been by the end of December 1873, when he completed the first version of the Third Symphony (which was always ‘no.3’).

The next symphonic effort was an aborted work in B, which survives only in sketches dated 29–31 October 1869. After a hiatus during 1870 and much of 1871, he returned to the genre with renewed vigour and completed a remarkable series of four symphonies in little over four years: no.2, October 1871 to September 1872; no.3, October 1872 to December 1873; no.4, January to November 1874; and no.5, February 1875 to May 1876. A rehearsal of the Second Symphony (originally entitled no.3 because the ‘Nullte’ was still no.2) with the Vienna PO conducted by Otto Dessoff in 1872 produced the verdict that it was too long, with the result that the performance was aborted. Once again Herbeck intervened, and the première took place a year later under the composer's direction on 26 October 1873. Reaction to this first Viennese performance of a Bruckner symphony was mixed.

In August 1873 Bruckner went to Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně) for a vacation, taking advantage of the opportunity to visit Wagner in Bayreuth and secure his acceptance of the dedication of either the Second or the Third Symphony; Wagner chose the latter. Bruckner's continued allegiance to Wagner drew him painfully and irrevocably into the musical-political maelstrom that raged in Vienna for the remainder of the century. In Linz Bruckner had had a powerful ally in Hanslick, who thought he had found the contemporary symphonist so long absent from the Austrian scene. However, by the middle of the 1870s Bruckner's unabashed admiration for Wagner (and perhaps his repeated attempts to obtain a position at the university) turned Hanslick and his followers, Max Kalbeck and Gustav Dömpke, into vicious adversaries. In a segment of the press representing a combination of political liberalism and musical conservatism with Brahms as its idol, they vituperatively condemned what they described as the uncontrolled Wagnerism and decadence of Bruckner's ‘music of the future’.

A revival of the Second Symphony on 20 February 1876 and a disastrous première of the ‘Wagner’ Symphony (no.3) in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal on 16 December 1877 acted as catalysts. Herbeck, who had arranged for the performance of the Third Symphony after the Philharmonic had rejected the work three times, was scheduled to conduct. He died on 28 October 1877, and Bruckner, never a successful orchestral conductor, was forced to take the podium. The orchestra was rebellious; the audience streamed out of the hall during the finale; and Hanslick wrote a blistering review. The only redeeming aspect of the evening for the composer was the presence in the audience of the publisher Theodor Rättig, who agreed, in spite of the débâcle, to print the work. Mahler (possibly with Rudolf Kryzanowsky) made the four-hand piano arrangement. Herbeck's death and the ill-fated Third Symphony performance were the culmination of a series of personal setbacks for Bruckner that began with the loss of his position at St Anna's. His letters from the middle of the decade contain the refrain familiar from his days at St Florian and Linz: he was alone in the face of adversity and misunderstanding. One mitigating factor was his promotion to paid membership in the Hofkapelle in January 1878.

The completion of the Fifth Symphony has been cited as the culmination of a major chapter in Bruckner's compositional history. In 1876 he entered a period in which he became preoccupied with revising earlier scores. Some pieces, such as the masses in D minor and F minor, were subject to a process of subtle ‘fine tuning’ with adjustments in part-writing and hypermetrical structures on the basis of analyses he had made of Beethoven symphonies and music by Mozart (especially the Requiem). The First Symphony underwent a similar ‘rhythmic adjustment’ in 1877. The Second, Third and Fourth were subject to more sweeping changes. In 1876 and again in 1877 Bruckner revised the Second in preparation for and probably as a consequence of the February 1876 performance. A series of rejections in Vienna and Berlin combined with the December 1877 disaster in the Musikvereinssaal prompted a dramatic series of alterations to Symphonies nos.3 and 4 between 1876 and 1878, including the composition of a new finale for the Fourth. He made further changes in the Third in preparation for the 1879 publication and continued reworking the Fourth during 1880. These and subsequent alterations obscured, until the publication of the first versions in Leopold Nowak's collected works edition, the gradual evolution of Bruckner's conception of the genre up to 1876.

In December 1878 Bruckner began his only mature chamber music composition: the String Quintet commissioned by Joseph Hellmesberger, who requested that its original scherzo be replaced by the Intermezzo (wab113). The Quintet was the first of another remarkable series of works including the Sixth Symphony (September 1879 – September 1881), the Seventh (September 1881 – September 1883) and the Eighth (first version, July 1884 – August 1887), and the Te Deum, which he began in 1881 and, after an extended diversion for work on the Seventh Symphony, completed in March 1884. On 14 February 1883 work on the end of the Adagio of the Seventh was interrupted by news of Wagner's death. The closing bars with their magnificent horn outcry were his ‘lamentatio’ on the passing of the ‘Meister aller Meister’. Bruckner had last seen Wagner in summer 1882 at the première of Parsifal in Bayreuth.

He made his final tour as an organ virtuoso in spring 1884, this time to Prague. The same year he was spurned by Liszt, to whom he offered to dedicate the Second Symphony during the latter's visit to Vienna in October. Bruckner was mollified a few months later when Liszt invited him in May 1885 to a performance of the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony in Karlsruhe. August Stradal reported that the relationship remained cool, in part because of Bruckner's outmoded dress and unsophisticated manners on the occasion. Yet when Liszt died in July 1886 Bruckner and August Göllerich attended the funeral in Bayreuth and, at the request of Cosima Wagner, on 4 August Bruckner performed at a Requiem in Liszt's honour, improvising on themes from Parsifal.

The middle 1880s began to bring Bruckner some of the renown as a composer which had so long eluded him. His Seventh Symphony was an overwhelming success conducted by Arthur Nikisch at its première in Leipzig (30 December 1884) and again in Munich under Hermann Levi (10 March 1885). Also in 1885 the String Quintet was performed in Munich and Cologne, and the Third Symphony in Amsterdam, Dresden, Frankfurt and The Hague and at the Metropolitan Opera House (conducted by Walter Damrosch) in New York. Despite Bruckner's fear that Hanslick would undo the accomplishments abroad, Hans Richter conducted the Seventh Symphony in Vienna on 21 March 1886. Hanslick's criticism notwithstanding, the performance was Bruckner's first success in the imperial city. Richter was able to report ‘a radical about-face on the part of the entire Philharmonic Society regarding Bruckner’.

The socio-political climate had become more receptive to Bruckner, in part because Hanslick's musical conservatism and the political circles to which it appealed had come to be counterbalanced by the expanding Viennese Wagnerian movement and the pro-German groups where it found fertile ground. In the Academic Wagner Society Bruckner became something of a cultural cause célèbre. Young Wagnerites including Mahler, Wolf, Göllerich, Ferdinand Löwe and the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk became his staunchest supporters and were often responsible for the performance and promotion of his music. In large part through their efforts, more of his music appeared in print: the String Quintet in 1884, the Seventh Symphony and Te Deum in 1885, and the Third and Fourth symphonies in 1890 and 1889 respectively. With increased fame came honours: in July 1886 Bruckner was appointed a member of the Order of Franz Joseph and in November 1891 a lifelong objective was achieved when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna. Professor Anton Bruckner revised the First Symphony between March 1890 and April 1891 and dedicated it to the university as a token of his gratitude.

One major disappointment was the rejection of the Eighth Symphony by Hermann Levi in 1887. Levi had been one of Bruckner's most active and devoted supporters; among other things he arranged for the dedication of the Seventh Symphony – which he had conducted so successfully – to King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Bruckner's hopes for a Munich première of his new symphony were dashed when the conductor declined on the grounds that he did not understand the work. There is no truth in the story that Levi did not have the courage to tell the composer and asked Franz Schalk to inform Bruckner of his decision. Levi conveyed the news himself in what must have been a difficult letter to write on 7 October 1887. Bruckner recomposed the symphony between 1887 and 1890.

His final burst of compositional energy was focussed on the Ninth Symphony, which he had begun in 1887. He broke off in 1892 to compose his last motet, Vexilla regis (wab51), Das deutsche Lied (wab63) and Psalm cl (wab38), and completed Helgoland (wab71) in August 1893. He finished the first movement of the Ninth on 14 October 1892, the Scherzo on 15 February 1894 and the Adagio in November the same year. In 1895 he was given a small apartment in the Belvedere Palace, where he spent his remaining days wrestling with the finale. His maid reported that he was still trying to complete it on the day he died (11 October 1896).

In 1891 he had suffered a stomach disorder, the first in a series of debilitating ailments which, with few respites, rendered the last years of his life a constant struggle. By 1894 it was almost impossible for him to play the organ because of swelling in his feet; in April that year he was too ill to travel to Graz to hear the long-awaited first performance of the Fifth Symphony conducted by his pupil Franz Schalk. His lifelong religious fervour manifested itself at the end in the dedication of the Ninth Symphony to ‘Almighty God’ as well as in a regimen of prayer carefully recorded in his diaries. His funeral took place in the Karlskirche on 14 October and the following day, in accordance with his will, his remains were placed in the crypt under the great organ in St Florian. Thousands attended the procession to the Westbahnhof, among them Brahms, himself extremely ill, with whom something of a reconciliation had been effected after years of rivalry. At the entombment ceremony the organist Josef Gruber improvised on themes from Parsifal.

5. Personality.

After Bruckner died the large number of obituaries reflected, not surprisingly, the polemics of late 19th-century Vienna with an extraordinary range of assessments of his personality and accomplishment. Admirers described him as an unpretentious, modest man and a ‘daring innovator who shied away from no enterprise’. Detractors recognized his originality, yet found nothing of value in the work of a modest Viennese church musician ‘who lived a solitary dreamlike existence without ambition’ and who had been dragged into the limelight by an ‘excessive Wagnerian cult’. To the outside world, both his and ours, Bruckner was an enigma; many of his actions were confusing and even contradictory. He was a solitary person more at home in rural Upper Austria than in the urban environments of Linz and Vienna. His provincial manners and dress were a source of bewilderment and amusement to his Viennese colleagues, and he often found himself the subject of caricatures and humorous anecdotes testifying to his lack of polish. The incident at St Anna's was a more serious manifestation of his awkward behaviour. His Roman Catholic faith was an important source of consolation and no doubt added to the attraction of the monasteries of St Florian, Kremsmünster and Klosterneuburg, which he visited more often as he grew older.

His repeated thoughts of marriage, even relatively late in life, reflect his disquiet at being alone. His few close friendships, as with Rudolf Weinwurm whom he met in 1856, were sincere and lasting, although interrupted by career moves from one locale to another. Contemporary reports from his early days in the Upper Austrian schoolroom describe him as a compassionate and well-organized teacher. There is no question about the admiration of his Viennese students, many of whom went on to have distinguished careers of their own. Their continued loyalty in the face of his, to their minds, often difficult and contrary behaviour over the texts they were publishing, is poignant evidence of his charisma and abilities as a teacher.

That Bruckner's mental stability was suspect on at least one occasion is verified by his period of confinement in the sanatorium at Bad Kreuzen in 1867. Throughout his life ample confidence in his musical abilities was counterbalanced by a nervous, introverted and often obsequious disposition. Perhaps his strongest endorsement of his own creative accomplishment was the will that he signed on 10 November 1893 bequeathing the autograph manuscripts of his most important compositions to the imperial library. Up to that time he had pursued his career with a professional caution which often demonstrated his insecurity. The ambivalence with which he approached the moves to both Linz and Vienna typifies a lifelong behavioural pattern.

His propensity for revising his own scores and his willingness to allow others to influence their content have also been interpreted as illustrative of his indecision and lack of confidence. It must be said that, however negative were the events to which he may have been reacting, his revisions demonstrate an inner logic and musicality which only a great composer could apply. Although he was often more than willing to accept the musical suggestions of others, to the best of our knowledge he never did so without careful scrutiny. He corrected and adjusted his students' arrangements of the Third and Fourth symphonies, for example, with a parental solicitude which they found pedantic. Sometimes another's contribution, such as Nikisch's famous cymbal crash in the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony, became part of his own vocabulary, as at the rehearsal letter ‘U’ in the slow movement of the first version of the Eighth.

Throughout his life Bruckner was preoccupied with financial security and the social stature which a doctorate or professorship would convey. His constant expressions of consternation over his financial position exceeded reasonable anxiety and, especially towards the end of his career, were not justified by his circumstances; he was not poor. Financial concerns pushed him to the limits of his physical and mental endurance: he held three positions simultaneously in Vienna and taught an untold number of private students. In many ways he was remarkably skilful at managing his career; twice, for example, he was able to persuade his former employers (the prior Mayer and Bishop Rudigier) to hold a position for him while he tried out a new one. As a public figure in Vienna Bruckner was able to accomplish a difficult balance between the roles of devoted imperial employee (textbook representative of the status quo) and avant-garde Wagnerian composer (resident symbol of a new world order). Many of the Wagnerian fundamentalists from whom he received the critical acclaim he desperately craved participated in a reactionary, pro-German, often anti-Semitic political fringe which was an embarrassment to the palace. The extent to which he actually supported their politics is not clear; so far as is known he never commented publicly on the issues beyond the selection of a number of patriotic German texts for his settings for male chorus, and his letters are remarkably non-committal. The frequently expressed view that he had no political awareness or that he did not know what was happening cannot be substantiated.

Bruckner left few clues as to his private thoughts and motivations. His surviving correspondence is not large by 19th-century standards and most of the letters are either terse and businesslike or replete with obeisant, not always diplomatic, gestures towards people of influence. They seldom offer a point of view on any subject other than to lament his financial circumstances and complain about the lack of appreciation he sensed in those around him, or to express his gratitude to those who helped him. There is no question but that Bruckner was deeply hurt by the setbacks of the 1870s and the criticism of Hanslick, although at times one wonders, particularly with regard to Linz, where his situation was relatively secure and free of controversy, if he did not ‘protest too much’.

6. Publication and reception history.

Assessing the relative merits of Bruckner's various versions and searching for their raison d'être was a concern of Bruckner performers and scholars for most of the 20th century. The problem is twofold. He revised a number of his compositions, sometimes more than once, so that many are preserved in two or more manuscript versions. The masses and symphonies also appeared in printed scores, many of which differ yet again from any surviving manuscript. The precise nature of the involvement of the Schalk brothers, Ferdinand Löwe, Cyrill Hynais and Max von Oberleithner – all former pupils upon whom Bruckner relied for editorial assistance – in the publication of these scores is one of the thorniest source-critical problems of the 19th century. Controversy over the validity of ‘first editions’ over ‘manuscript’ versions lay at the heart of the Bruckner ‘Streit’ from the late 1920s to the 1940s and continues to haunt the composer's legacy. The issue has been complicated by the loss of most of the engravers’ copies for Bruckner's first editions.

The two collected works editions – the first published from 1930 to 1953 and left incomplete by Robert Haas and Alfred Orel, the second begun in 1951 by Leopold Nowak – are based primarily on the manuscripts, although each addresses the question of versions with different strategies. In his editions of the Second, Seventh and Eighth symphonies, Robert Haas spliced together different manuscript versions to produce an ideal reading. His term ‘Originalfassung’ or ‘original version’ is misleading because his scores sometimes have little to do with the actual first versions by Bruckner. Haas's score of the Eighth Symphony, for example, mainly follows manuscripts of the 1890 revision. He used ‘Originalfassung’ to distinguish his ‘manuscript’ version from the first edition of 1892. Nowak criticized Haas's ideal readings as ahistorical and published editions based on distinct manuscript versions which Bruckner made at different points in his career. Nowak identified, for example, three such versions of the Third Symphony.

For both Haas and Nowak, establishing the unauthenticity of the early prints became almost an editorial first principle. In some cases it was an easy position to take: the first editions of the Sixth and Ninth symphonies had appeared in altered scores in 1899 and 1903 respectively, years after the composer's death. Scores published while Bruckner was alive were harder to discredit. A series of arguments, sometimes tenuous, were brought to bear to the effect that the composer, in some instances, had not known what was happening and, in others, had disavowed the work of his editors. The crowning piece of evidence was the instruction in Bruckner's will, that whatever had happened during his lifetime, he wanted the ‘original’ autograph manuscript versions he had left to the library to be printed after his death.

Alfred Orel, among others, and even Haas and Nowak came to realize that ignoring all the first prints was not prudent. After the 1884–5 successes of the Seventh Symphony, Bruckner hoped that extensive publication would cement his reputation and bring financial rewards. With his consent, the Schalk brothers and Löwe made reorchestrated and abbreviated arrangements of the Third and Fourth symphonies for publication, hoping perhaps to couch Bruckner's ideas in terms more accessible to the public. They admired him as a highly gifted symphonist on paper, but whose music was marred by simplistic orchestration, too much influenced by organ registration and not sensitive enough to the performing problems of a large ensemble. Although the extent to which Bruckner participated in making these arrangements at the outset is not clear, there is no questioning that, in the case of these two symphonies, he was well aware that they had been done and corrected them extensively. The engraver's copy for the 1890 edition of the Third Symphony (A-Wn Mus.6081) is full of Bruckner's emendations, and a photograph of the lost engraver's copy, similarly corrected, for Albert Gutmann's 1889 edition of the Fourth survives in the Vienna Stadtbibliothek. These readings must be regarded as Bruckner's last versions; accordingly, Nowak included the 1890 edition of the Third in his collected works and Haas, in 1944, after Orel had called attention to the existence of an engraver's copy of the Fourth, admitted that its reading should also be included in the complete edition. However, because the engraver's manuscript has since disappeared, this version has yet to be included in the collected works.

It has already been observed that the collaboration initiated with the students in 1887 was successful from the point of view of getting Bruckner's works into print. There is evidence, primarily in the correspondence of the Schalk brothers, that Bruckner's pupils began to grow impatient with the composer's ‘tedious’ corrections to their arrangements and began to exclude him from the publication process. Even the first prints of both the Third and the Fourth symphonies contain unauthorized alterations inserted after Bruckner had placed his imprimatur on the engravers’ manuscripts. These alterations were removed from Nowak's edition of the last version of the Third Symphony. Towards the end of his life the students conspired to bypass Bruckner entirely. Perhaps the most striking case of Bruckner's loss of control over the publication process involved the Doblinger edition (1896) of the Fifth Symphony. The Schalks' letters provide incontrovertible evidence that they deceived the composer into believing it was the autograph version of the score which Franz Schalk conducted in 1895 and which they supplied to the engraver for the edition. The masses in E minor and F minor as well as the Eighth Symphony also went to the printer without Bruckner's supervision. Given the overwhelming evidence of unauthorized tampering with printed scores which appeared during the 1890s, for most of Bruckner's compositions, today the autograph manuscripts he gave to the library must be the measure by which issues of authenticity are judged.

The history of the first collected edition was marred by its association with the Nazi movement which endorsed it. Bruckner was one of Hitler's favourite composers; the correspondences between the careers of the two native sons of Upper Austria who had triumphed over the Viennese bourgeoisie were obvious. Bruckner's well-documented admiration for Wagner and his known association with ultra-nationalist predecessors of the Nazi party certainly contributed to his value in the cultural propaganda of the Third Reich. As the 1930s progressed, justification for the new Bruckner scores came to resonate more and more with the racial theories of National Socialism: the first editions had been ‘contaminated’ by ‘foreign’ influences which had to be ‘purged’ in a ‘purifying’ process to reveal the true German genius which was Bruckner. Despite these underlying ideological biases, Haas's fundamental position regarding most of the first editions continues to be valid.

After World War II, public sentiment demanded the expurgation of Nazi influences. The Bruckner who emerged was something of an Austrian mystic, a genius and a simple soul who was, at times, psychologically unstable. Although the association of his music with the Third Reich militated against its acceptance in many parts of the world, by the 1970s it had found a home in the programmes of most major orchestras and choral societies. Scholarly interest followed slowly and was confined largely to Austria and Germany for most of the century. With international conferences in the USA (New London, Connecticut) in 1994 and England (Manchester) in 1996 the situation has begun to change in the English-speaking world.

7. Versions of the symphonies.

Bruckner's symphonies can be divided into three groups. To the first may be assigned the two early symphonies from the Linz years: the ‘Study’ Symphony, sometimes referred to as no.00 (1863), and Symphony no.1 (1865–6). The second group includes the five symphonies composed after Bruckner's move to Vienna in 1868: the ‘Nullified’ or ‘Nullte’ Symphony in D minor (1869) and Symphonies nos.2–5 (1871–6). Completion of the contrapuntal Fifth Symphony, which testified to Bruckner's consummate mastery of all the technical aspects of composition, marked a watershed in his creativity. From 1876 to 1879 he paused to rework his music; there was a hiatus in the composition of symphonies while he revised nos.2–4. Then he composed the String Quintet (1878–9) and between 1879 and 1887 completed in unbroken succession the next three symphonies in the final group (no.6, no.7 and the first version of no.8) and began the Ninth.

It is noteworthy that Bruckner had already embarked upon an overhaul of the Fourth Symphony before Hermann Levi's rejection of the first version of the Eighth in 1887; therefore, the significance of the Levi episode for the later revisions remains controversial. Another sequence of revisions, of the First, Third, Fourth and Eighth symphonies, in the late 1880s and early 1890s slowed down composition of the Ninth so that its finale was unfinished at Bruckner's death. Symphonies nos.2–4 underwent considerable revision, resulting in multiple versions; by contrast, nos.5–7 were comparatively little revised and exist in only one version. There are two distinct versions of the Eighth (1887 and 1890) but only one of the Ninth. It is notable that in the last three symphonies (1883–96) the orchestra is enlarged to include Wagner tubas and in the last two the scherzo is placed before the slow movement (as in Beethoven's Ninth).

It is important to bear in mind that international success and recognition came late in Bruckner's life. Until the 1880s the symphonies were mostly unperformed and unpublished. The extent to which they remained unknown in the 19th century is revealed by the lack of performances (especially of the first versions): the ‘Nullte’, the Sixth (not given complete until 1899), the Ninth and the first versions of the Third, Fourth and Eighth symphonies were never played during the composer's lifetime. Also, Bruckner never heard the Fifth Symphony, except in a two-piano arrangement. The second performance of the Seventh Symphony (Munich, 10 March 1885), conducted by Levi, was one of Bruckner's first unequivocal triumphs and important for the wider dissemination of his music. The Berliner Tageblatt critic summed up the general reception when he wrote (10 August 1885) that Bruckner ‘beguiled us all so that when the last chord of his creation died away, we asked with amazement: how is it possible that you remained unknown to us for so long?’

The two versions of the First Symphony elegantly straddle Bruckner's symphonic output. The first (‘Linz’) version was composed in 1865–6 (edited by Robert Haas in 1935 and by Leopold Nowak in 1953) and reworked and reorchestrated in 1890–91, during Bruckner's last creative period, to celebrate the granting of the honorary doctorate by the University of Vienna in 1891. It is notable that Bruckner confined his revisions to reworking the texture and orchestration in accordance with his own ideas concerning consecutives (see §8 below). The first printed edition (supervised by Cyrill Hynais) was published during Bruckner's lifetime (1893), but the Stichvorlage (engraver's copy) has disappeared and it is impossible to verify which of its variants from the ‘Vienna’ manuscript (A-Wn Mus.19473) originate directly from the composer.

The Second Symphony exists in at least three versions. The first was completed in 1872 and Bruckner revised it in 1873, 1876, 1877 and 1892. The editions of 1938 (Haas) and 1965 (Nowak), which purportedly presented the 1877 version, actually conflated elements of the earlier and later versions. The first edition, published by Doblinger in 1892, used the copyist's manuscript (A-Wn Mus.6035, one of the copy scores owned by Bruckner) as a Stichvorlage.

One of the many remarkable features of the Second Symphony is the extensive use of rests between main formal sections, for which the work was nicknamed (not entirely in a friendly manner) the ‘Symphony of Rests’ (Pausensymphonie). Using Bruckner's metrical grids (see §8 below), research has shown that the cuts and ‘tightening’, particularly of the rests in the later versions, were made by Bruckner (not by the conductor, Herbeck) to make the music fit the grid. The main cuts indicated by Bruckner in 1877, preserved in the first edition, concern the approach to the final cadence and the coda in the finale. Bruckner cut the citation of the Kyrie of the Mass in F minor in bars 540–62, probably because he felt it was redundant after the citation in bars 200–19. The original coda twice completes a cycle through related material; Bruckner eliminated the first cycle as redundant.

There are three distinct versions of the Third Symphony. Bruckner completed the first version in 1873 (ed. Nowak, 1977). The second version exists in no less than three phases. In 1876 Bruckner revised the symphony rhythmically and reworked the Adagio (ed. Nowak, 1980). Between May 1876 and 25 April 1877 Bruckner made substantial revisions to the entire symphony. He further revised the Adagio in October 1877, and in January 1878 added two bars to the first movement and modified the Scherzo, including the addition of a new coda. In 1948 the autograph score of the first three movements of the 1876–8 version (including the October 1877 Adagio), which Bruckner had given to Mahler, was acquired by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. In 1981 the 1878 score was published by Nowak, who incorrectly identified it as the 1877 version. In fact, it is the 1878 version, which includes two additional bars in the First movement, slight modifications to the scherzo and a coda for the scherzo. In 1950 Fritz Oeser's new edition of the first print was published as the ‘Second Version of 1878’. This also is misleading because the first print was not published by Theodor Rättig until 1879. It contained the third and last stage of the second version of the symphony. Perhaps the most important difference between the Mahler manuscript and the printed edition are the cuts indicated (with ‘Vi-de’ signs) in the recapitulation of the finale at bars 379–432, eliminating the first theme group, and bars 465–514, removing the second part of the second group and the first part of the third. Another cut, in the development (bars 283–96), was indicated by Bruckner in his copy of the first print. These cuts, already suggested by Bruckner in 1879, were later incorporated into the third version (1887–9), which served as the basis for the first printed edition (1890; the 1889 Stichvorlage was edited by Nowak and published in 1959). For this last revision, Bruckner used a score of the finale prepared by Franz Schalk. It is interesting that he rejected, early in the revision process, the single passage where Schalk had introduced a substantial recomposition of his own. Perhaps at Bruckner's request, Schalk tried to abbreviate the final appearance of the principal theme in the third group (Nowak, 1959, bars 393–441); but Bruckner was clearly unhappy with Schalk's rather tame and incoherent 27-bar version of this crucial climax, and on 15 March 1890 sketched his own 44-bar reading of the climax, which became the final version.

The Fourth Symphony, like the Third, exists in three distinct versions. The first was completed in November 1874 (ed. Nowak, 1974). In 1878, Bruckner ‘tightened up’ the first two movements, revised the finale (now entitled ‘Volksfest’) and replaced the original scherzo with a new movement designated ‘Jagd-Scherzo’ (ed. Haas, 1936, Nowak, 1953 and 1981). In 1880 Bruckner substantially recomposed the finale (ed. Haas, 1936 and 1944, Nowak, 1953). The ‘second’ version, comprising the first three movements of 1878 and the finale of 1880, was given its first performance by the Vienna PO, conducted by Hans Richter, on 20 February 1881. After this performance, Bruckner unsuccessfully attempted to get the symphony published. In undertaking the third and final revision, Bruckner was assisted by Ferdinand Löwe and probably by the Schalk brothers. The new score – which may have contained further unauthorized revisions by the pupils – was eventually published by Gutmann in September 1889. Of the changes between the second and third versions, those concerning the structure of the scherzo and the finale, and the orchestration, are the most significant. In the finale, the recapitulation of the first group was removed, necessitating a new transition from the development to the reprise of the second group. That Bruckner sanctioned this large cut is revealed by his metrical numbers at the affected place in the Stichvorlage. The third version was first performed on 22 January 1888 (again with Richter). Based on his experience of this performance and in accordance with his ideas concerning consecutive octaves, extensive revisions to the pupils’ reorchestration were made by Bruckner in February 1888. It is interesting that shortly afterwards, in March, Bruckner was already revising the Stichvorlage of Schalk's arrangement of the finale of the Third Symphony. A larger picture emerges: in 1887–8, Bruckner extensively ‘regulated’ (his word) the pupils' reorchestrations of the third versions of the Third and Fourth symphonies.

The Fifth Symphony exists in essentially one version which is authentic (ed. Haas, 1936, and Nowak, 1951). Bruckner's manuscript (A-Wn Mus.19477) contains both the first version (completed in 1876) and a slightly later revision (completed in 1878). Franz Schalk made an arrangement (1892–3), which formed the basis for the first printed edition (1896). Since Schalk's Stichvorlage is lost, there is no way of knowing whether Bruckner saw the Schalk manuscript and corrected it. It is likely that the kind of collaboration with Schalk that had taken place with the arrangements of the Third and Fourth symphonies did not occur in 1892–3 because by that time Bruckner had become suspicious of his collaborators. The letters between Franz and Josef Schalk reveal that from 1892 they conspired to publish and perform Franz's arrangement while convincing Bruckner that it was his own version which was being reproduced.

The Sixth Symphony exists in only one authentic version (ed. Haas, 1935, and Nowak, 1951). It appears that Bruckner wanted the original manuscript to serve as the basis for the edition since he lent it to the publisher Eberle. An annotation on the wrapper in the hand of Cyrill Hynais – ‘Original [manuscript]. Returned into my hands after typesetting.’ – is signed by Bruckner and witnessed by Hynais. It seems that the manuscript had been sent to the printer under Hynais's supervision and returned safely to the composer. Since Bruckner's signature is shaky, presumably from illness and old age, one suspects that these events date from the last few years of his life, perhaps even from early 1896. But in spite of its trip to the typesetter, the Sixth Symphony was not published until 1899, in an arrangement by Hynais. Hynais's Stichvorlage for the edition surfaced during the 1940s before disappearing again; Alfred Orel, who had the opportunity to study it, reported that Bruckner's handwriting did not appear anywhere in the manuscript. This suggests that Hynais made his arrangement without any involvement by Bruckner, probably after the composer's death; it is therefore unauthentic.

The Seventh Symphony probably existed in three distinct versions. The original version dates from 1881–3. A second version resulted from changes apparently made in preparation for the first performance, conducted by Arthur Nikisch on 30 December 1884. In a letter written shortly before the première, Nikisch told Bruckner that ‘in certain places you will have to change the instrumentation, because it is written impractically and does not sound good’ (21 December 1884). The third version resulted from revisions made in January 1885. They were suggested by Josef Schalk and Löwe, who went through the score with Bruckner and discussed further improvements to the instrumentation. However, since these seem to have been relatively minor changes, and no cuts were involved, the revisions were entered directly into the manuscript with paste-overs and erasures rather than into a copy score. The autograph (A-Wn Mus.19479), incorporating the changes, then served as the Stichvorlage for the printed edition, published by Gutmann in December 1885 (this is the only case where a Bruckner autograph was used as the Stichvorlage for the first edition). Haas, in the first collected edition (1944), tried to restore the piece to its ‘original’ state, presumably to the reading before the changes made for the first performance. Nowak, on the other hand (1954), incorporated the revisions suggested by Nikisch, Schalk and Löwe as sanctioned by Bruckner. Since the tempo indications were probably Bruckner's (conveyed to Nikisch in preparation for the première), Nowak included them in parentheses.

There are two authentic manuscript versions of the Eighth Symphony: the first from 1887 (ed. Nowak, 1972) and the second from 1890 (Nowak, 1955). The first printed edition (1892), based on Bruckner's 1890 version, was supervised by Max von Oberleithner working in consultation with Josef Schalk. The Stichvorlage for the first print is lost; it is therefore impossible to ascertain whether the variants between Bruckner's 1890 score and the first edition were authorized by him. Probably they were not, since by that time the Schalk brothers and Oberleithner had already distanced Bruckner from the publication process.

Like his edition of the Second Symphony (1938), Haas's version of the Eighth (1939) conflates two versions. For the most part, he followed the second (1890) score, but he restored passages from the first version where he felt that Josef Schalk had given Bruckner poor advice and the 1887 reading better reflected the composer's original intentions. Although Haas's method of splicing disparate sources now seems untenable, Deryck Cooke (G1969, pp.480–82) supported Haas's restorations and criticized Nowak for following Bruckner's 1890 treatment of the ‘Gesangsgruppe’ (see §9 below) in the exposition and recapitulation. Cooke was troubled because the 1890 version includes a reminiscence of the Seventh Symphony in the exposition (Nowak, 1955, bars 85–98) but not in the recapitulation (bars 563–6). In the course of preparing the first edition, Josef Schalk asked Oberleithner to make a cut in the exposition so that the citation would be eliminated in both places. According to Cooke, in making the cut in the exposition [Schalk] did show that he cared about the ‘balance of motives’, whereas Nowak, by leaving out what Bruckner and Schalk had cut in the recapitulation and keeping in what Schalk had cut of his own accord in the exposition [in the first edition], achieved only a piece of musicological pedantry which makes no structural sense at all.But Nowak was fully justified in following Bruckner's 1890 cut: in 1877 Bruckner had made a similar cut in the finale of the Second Symphony, when he kept the first citation of the Kyrie, in the exposition, but removed the second (presumably redundant) from the recapitulation.

The Ninth Symphony, like the Fifth and Sixth, has been published in only one authentic version (ed. Orel, 1934, and Nowak, 1951). The first edition (1903), based on an arrangement by Löwe, was probably not sanctioned by Bruckner. In addition to making cuts and reorchestrating the work, Löwe toned down the dissonance of the original. For example, at the climax of the Adagio (bars 205–6), Bruckner's score presents a seven–note dominant 13th chord of C minor (G–B–D–F–A–C–E); Löwe apparently found it too harsh and in his version eliminated the dissonant 11th and 13th (C–E).

To what extent did Bruckner complete the finale of the Ninth Symphony? The answer to this question is much more problematic than in the case of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Mahler drafted almost all of his last symphony in one continuous short score which could be orchestrated by others. Bruckner, on the other hand, especially in his late period, tended to work in a more piecemeal way, sometimes drafting sections of music directly into full score several times before continuing with composition. Marianna Sonntag has observed (H(iii) 1987) that, in composing the first movement of the Ninth Symphony,in general, [Bruckner] evidently did not establish an over-all structure for the piece, at least not on paper, but composed one section at a time, systematically completing one before moving on to the subsequent passage.Dr Heller, Bruckner's physician during his last years, reported a similar kind of sectional approach: then [Bruckner] sat at the piano and played for me with trembling hands, but correctly and energetically, parts [of the Ninth Symphony's Finale] … Although he was really weak, I often begged him to write down the symphony in its main ideas, but he was not to be moved. Page by page, he composed the whole instrumental realization.The sketches for the last motet, Vexilla Regis (1892), show a similar process of drafting the piece phrase by phrase.

Research has suggested that in spite of this sectional approach Bruckner had progressed considerably further with the composition of the finale than Orel, in the early 1930s, recognized; indeed, it has been shown that the incompletely preserved sources contain a rough draft for the whole movement – though with unfortunate lacunae – to the end of the coda. Bruckner began composing the finale in May 1895 and, although gradually becoming weaker, he continued to work on it from January to May 1896. In drafts dated 19 and 23 May 1896, he set down the main outlines of the final cadence and then began to revise the movement's earlier sections. An article that appeared in the Steyrer Zeitung (10 May 1896) reported that he ‘has already completely sketched [vollständig skizziert] the final movement of his Ninth Symphony but, as he himself told [his friend, the choral conductor from Steyr,] Mr. Bayer, no longer believes that he will be able to work it out completely'. There are gaps in the draft because of lost pages and the sketch itself is ‘not completely worked out’ (as Bayer stated).

During the last three years of his life, distracted by illness and preoccupied with new projects, Bruckner realized that he had lost control of the publication of his music. As a consequence, he became increasingly suspicious of the Schalk brothers and Löwe, and concerned – with good reason – that the published versions did not represent his final intentions. The making of his will (10 November 1893), in which he declared his intention to lend the original manuscripts (‘die Originalmanuskripte’) of his most important works to the imperial library and asked that they serve as the basis for publications by the firm of Eberle, may be taken as an indication of his lack of confidence in the published scores. Are we to assume from the stipulations in the will that in 1893 Bruckner reconsidered the 1889 version of the Fourth Symphony? Did he want the ‘original manuscript’ of the 1878–80 version (A-Wn Mus.19476), which he lent to the library, to be the definitive reading? Without more evidence, the question must remain.

To summarize: the versions of the symphonies which Bruckner regarded as definitive at the time of his death are preserved in a combination of autographs and copy scores. When Bruckner accepted the suggestions of others, he made them his own. His extensive involvement in the pre-publication revisions of the Third, Fourth and Seventh symphonies – his ‘regulation’ of their orchestration – suggests that the readings preserved in the Stichvorlagen when they left Bruckner's possession are his final readings. The last authentic versions of the symphonies are as follows:No.1: A-Wn Mus.19473, autograph of the ‘Vienna’ version completed in 1891 (ed. Nowak, 1980).
No.2: A-Wn Mus.6015, copy score of the 1877 version.
No.3: A-Wn Mus.6081, copy score of the version completed in 1889 (ed. Nowak, 1959).
No.4: A-Wst M.H.9098/c, photograph of the 1889 copy score; or, because of Bruckner's instructions in his will, the 1878–80 autograph A-Wn Mus.19476.
No.5: A-Wn Mus.19477, autograph of the version completed in 1878 (ed. Nowak, 1951).
No.6: A-Wn Mus.19478, autograph, completed in 1881 (ed. Nowak, 1951).
No.7: A-Wn Mus.19479, autograph, including the changes made for the 1885 publication (ed. Nowak, 1954).
No.8: A-Wn Mus.19480, autograph of the version completed in 1890 (ed. Nowak, 1955).
No.9: A-Wn Mus.19481, autograph of movements 1–3 and draft of finale, 1896 (ed. Nowak, 1951, excluding finale); finale reconstructed by J.A. Phillips (Vienna, 1994).

8. Metrical and part-writing theories, composition and revision processes.

Bruckner is one of the few front-rank composers to have adopted an analyst's perspective vis-à-vis his own and other composers' music. Although the literature has focussed on his ‘obscurantist’ side – his religiosity and mysticism – there was a profoundly rational and analytical aspect to his thinking, intimately connected with his composition and revision processes. From 1875, when he initiated his campaign to make music theory a university subject and undertook the first thorough overhaul of his symphonies and masses, Bruckner became increasingly concerned with demonstrating the ‘scientific’ aspects of harmony, part-writing and metre, and with testing or ‘regulating’ (his term) the correctness of his own and other composers' music from a theoretical perspective. From about 1876 or 1877, with regard to pitch, Bruckner became interested in the problem of doubling; namely, when does momentary doubling constitute parallel octaves? About the same time, he began to use the ‘metrical grid’, which systematically analyses the phrase structure of a whole piece, and he continued to employ it to the end of his career, while both composing and revising his music.

One can distinguish two different types of metrical analysis: the first concerns the composition's large-scale durational proportions, while the second tracks the lengths of phrases and the emphases of given bars within phrases. The sketches for the Mass in F minor, dating from 1867–8, bear witness to the first type of durational analysis; these comparatively early sources reveal Bruckner counting the number of bars in large sections of music (fig.6). Many later manuscripts contain the so-called metrical numbers, which represent the number of bars in phrases. By 1872, Bruckner was already employing the numbers in a few places while composing. These early analyses tend to be mechanical and even at odds with the music, but by 1876 his use of the grid had become systematic. By the time of his first revision period he had become deeply concerned with rhythmic problems and with achieving an absolutely accurate conception of the rhythmic structure of his works.

From about 1888 Bruckner was prepared to go to great lengths in the pursuit of ‘correct’ part-writing in an orchestral context; indeed, in order to ensure that his orchestrations met his stringent test for correctness, he was willing to delay still all-too-rare orchestral performances and to pay for expensive recopying of parts. After the first performance of the new arrangement of the Fourth Symphony on 22 January 1888, Bruckner's dissatisfaction with consecutives prompted him to revise the orchestration immediately (in February). As the score was ‘regulated’ and the unwanted consecutives were eliminated, Bruckner carefully kept note of the revisions in his pocket calendar. The issue of proper part-writing had become so important to him that, in preparation for the next performance (conducted by Levi), he paid for the recopying of the parts. Two years later, for the same reason, he took back the score of his First Symphony from Richter and the Vienna PO; its revival was delayed for a year to allow Bruckner to correct the part-writing. In the ‘Vienna’ version (1891) Bruckner dispensed with the services of his students and regulated the part-writing with the utmost care himself.

Some scholars have awarded the Schalk brothers and Löwe the title of ‘collaborators’, arguing that Bruckner asked them to help him reorchestrate the Third and Fourth symphonies because he lacked their practical experience. Without denigrating their musicianship (which was, by all accounts, formidable), it is unlikely that Bruckner considered them his superiors in the art of orchestration; on the contrary, in seeking their help with the revision of the Third and Fourth symphonies, he allowed them to assist in the preparation of the score and then carefully revised what they had done in light of his own theories of correct orchestral part-writing. Until Bruckner's theoretical concern with the issue of consecutives is fully understood it will not be possible to explain the rationale for his revisions of his assistants' reorchestrations of the Third and Fourth symphonies and his dissatisfaction with their work, so that he subsequently attempted to prevent any other unauthorized revisions. Furthermore, an understanding of the significance of Bruckner's concern with consecutive octaves will illuminate his late orchestral style and extensive use of part-writing diagrams in the post-1890 manuscripts.

9. Form, large-scale harmony and the revisions.

Bruckner's pupil Carl Hrubý recounted important comments regarding his teacher's formal-harmonic innovations and their relationship to the Viennese tradition. After a performance of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’, a symphony which Bruckner revered and had studied closely (especially its metrical and orchestral part-writing aspects), Hrubý recalled:

After he had spent a while sunk in thought, his gaze as it were turned inwards, he suddenly broke the silence: ‘I think, if Beethoven were still alive today, and I went to him, showed him my Seventh Symphony and said to him, “Don't you think, Herr von Beethoven, that the Seventh isn’t as bad as certain people make it out to be – those people who make an example of it and portray me as an idiot – ” then, maybe, Beethoven might take me by the hand and say, “My dear Bruckner, don’t bother yourself about it. It was no better for me, and the same gentlemen who use me as a stick to beat you with still don’t really understand my last quartets, however much they may pretend to”’.

After apologizing to Beethoven's shade for ‘going beyond’ him in terms of form, Bruckner asserted that he had ‘always said that a true artist can work out his own form and then stick to it’. These comments not only document Bruckner's assimilation of the formal innovations of late Beethoven, they also reveal that he consciously ‘went beyond’ them.

After completing harmony and counterpoint studies with Simon Sechter, Bruckner nevertheless felt that his grounding in practical compositional matters remained incomplete; he had acquired from Sechter a solid technique, but he turned to the conductor and cellist Otto Kitzler for instruction in form and orchestration. With Kitzler, the investigation of sonata form began logically with short first groups and proceeded to first groups with bridge sections, lyrical second groups (Gesangsgruppen) and short closing sections. It is noteworthy that Bruckner considered sonata form to comprise essentially two (rather than three) large spatial units, whereby the exposition is one element and the development and recapitulation together form the other. He retained this way of thinking until the end of his career, still referring to the development and recapitulation in the first and last movements of his Ninth Symphony as the second part (‘2. Abtheilung’). Bruckner repeated the exposition in the first movement of the String Quartet and in the ‘Study’ Symphony. But, interestingly, as early as the First Symphony (begun in 1865), Bruckner abandoned the repeated exposition and did not employ it again in his later symphonies.

The ideal of the Classical sonata in practice (in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) had been dynamism: the music evolved both tonally and motivically to create the effect of goal-orientated forward motion. This dynamism was created both by harmonic motion and logical motivic transformation. But in the later 19th century, sonata form became increasingly segmented or sectionalized into comparatively stable and self-contained thematic-harmonic units. (Perhaps this tendency towards sectionalism combined with sometimes awkward harmonic stasis resulted from the codification of sonata form by theorists in their mid-century Formenlehre treatises.) In the later versions of his symphonies, Bruckner sought to counteract such stasis by restoring the dynamic continuity that had characterized the Classical symphony. His revisions were focussed on improving transitional or linking passages to create greater synthesis and dynamism; more rarely they involved changing the primary thematic materials themselves. Comparing the 1874 and 1878 finales of the Fourth Symphony, for example, reveals that the main themes in their particular sequence and keys remained fixed, while the intermediary passages were substantially recomposed to increase continuity. The same process underlies the 1890 version of the Eighth Symphony: the main ideas were unchanged, but the transitional passages were tightened or cut.

Bruckner's imaginative unorthodoxy with regard to the key schemes of his sonata form was already apparent in the works composed for Kitzler and continued through to the late works. A typical strategy was to present the Gesangsgruppe in an unexpected key, which then fails to set up the ‘redemptive’ tonic at the parallel place in the recapitulation. For example, in the Third Symphony, in D minor, the second theme in the exposition of the finale is presented in the unexpected key of F major (III/D minor, 1873 score, bars 65ff) instead of the conventional F major (III/D minor). Furthermore, when the Gesangsgruppe is restated in the recapitulation, it does not appear in the tonic but rather is transposed to the even more distant key of A major (V/D minor, 1873 score, bars 537ff). In this version of sonata form, where the recapitulation fails to secure the tonic, the form's inability to achieve tonic closure sparks a crisis in the ‘redemptive’ symphonic narrative: the pilgrimage is endangered and promised redemption threatened. Only in the coda, which remains outside the sonata space proper, can the triumphant tonic be reasserted and, in terms of the narrative, bring about salvation: hence the considerable importance of the coda in a Bruckner symphony.

It is widely believed that Bruckner made large cuts in the later versions of his symphonies to conform to the contemporary Viennese taste for shorter works. Certainly he was sensitive to critics who, like Brahms, had condemned his works as ‘symphonische Riesenschlange’ (‘giant symphonic serpents’). For example, in an attempt to obtain a performance of the first (1873) version of the Third Symphony, Bruckner even proposed splitting the work between two concerts (letter to the Vienna PO, 8 January 1875). However, it can be strongly argued that his cuts, which decisively affect the large-scale form, the harmony and the symphonic narrative, were made for more fundamental compositional, theoretical and aesthetic reasons.

Bruckner employed sonata form, expressively transformed, in the outer movements of all his symphonies except the ‘Nullte’, which has a finale in rondo form. In the final versions of the outer movements of the symphonies and the String Quintet, Bruckner's larger tonal-narrative strategy was to achieve ‘redemption’ in the coda of the finale by deferring the full force of the tonic until that point. Reversing the recapitulation – as in the finales of the String Quintet and the Seventh Symphony – can postpone the definitive return of the tonic associated with the primary theme group until the end of the movement. Similarly, cutting the recapitulation and eliminating the tonic reprise of the first group, or both the first and the second groups (as in the last versions of the finales of the Third and Fourth symphonies), is associated with postponing the definitive arrival on the tonic until the third group, or the coda.

Another aspect of Bruckner's formal innovations that upset the normative sonata paradigm is the ‘breakthrough’ technique. A striking example is provided by the first movement of the First Symphony. Here the music appears to follow the three-group expositional pattern established by the first movement of the earlier ‘Study’ Symphony: in bars 94–100 Bruckner interpolated a completely new, unexpected melody in the trombones accompanied by filigree passage-work in the upper winds (evoking the chorale in Tannhäuser and betraying Wagnerian impulses). Playing through the score in 1865, Hans von Bülow remarked, ‘This is dramatic!’, to which Bruckner replied, ‘Ah, that's just it!’ The entire passage is ultimately revealed to be completely extraneous to the sonata form since it does not recur in the recapitulation; instead, Bruckner drew upon the breakthrough material for the music of the first section of the development. The concept of the breakthrough is intimately connected with the epiphanic-revelatory connotations of the chorale. A clear example of the interrelatedness of the breakthrough and the chorale is provided by the finale of the Fifth Symphony (1876), where the chorale theme ‘breaks through’ at the end of the exposition space (bars 175–200), inserting itself into the exposition's third group.

With regard to the inner movements of Bruckner's symphonies, the slow movements are often the most popular and considered the most accessible (the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony made Bruckner famous). In the two unnumbered symphonies and in nos.1–7 Bruckner placed the slow movement second (at one point, while composing the Second Symphony, he considered putting the Andante after the Scherzo, but rejected this idea); in the Eighth and Ninth, on the other hand, he followed the model of Beethoven's Ninth with the slow movement preceding the finale. The rondo schemes in Bruckner's slow movements are considerably more varied than one might expect. In the slow movements of the later symphonies rondo and sonata principles are synthesized; the manner in which Bruckner varied and embellished the returns was strongly influenced by the concept later described by Schoenberg (as ‘developing variation’). The Adagio of the Ninth provides a characteristically Brucknerian variation of six-part rondo form in which the first and second subjects are recapitulated in reverse order. The fundamental compositional idea in this remarkable movement is the gradual ‘liquidation’ of the opening theme – which is characterized by an anguished leap of a minor 9th – as the music attains a state of peace and tranquillity. To comply with this larger strategy, Bruckner reversed the recapitulation of the first and second subjects, postponing the final return of the A section (at bar 207) and then truncating its recapitulation to eliminate the initial 9th.

If Bruckner's slow movements exhibit great formal variety, his scherzos display less significant variation in design. In the ‘Study’ Symphony and the First Symphony, Bruckner repeated both parts of the scherzo's ‘two-section form’; but from the ‘Nullte’ onwards he abandoned the repetition. In that symphony he expanded the trio to achieve formal parity with the scherzo. Furthermore, from the Second Symphony onwards, he compensated for abandoning literal repeats in the scherzos and trios by expanding their content. Comparing the colossal, ultimately abandoned 1874 scherzo of the Fourth Symphony with its counterpart in the First Symphony reveals a fourfold increase in the number of bars. In the 1874 scherzo, Bruckner further inflated the scherzo's rounded binary form (ABA') by subdividing both the A and A' components into small-scale ABA' forms. Similar ternary expansions occur in the scherzos of the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, and the scherzo of the second version (1878–80) of the Fourth Symphony.

The strategy of delaying the tonic epiphany, which was observed in the cut finales of the Third and Fourth symphonies, also underlies the scherzos of the Fourth (1874 version) and Sixth symphonies. Especially striking is the manner in which the tonic arrival is postponed until the end of both these scherzos; like the finale of the String Quintet, they are structured harmonically as large-scale perfect cadences. The same idea of withholding the definitive tonic arrival underlies the 1888 version of the 1878–80 ‘hunting’ scherzo of the Fourth Symphony. In the first edition, the tonic at the end of the first statement dissolves into a quiet transition (bars 247–55), which leads into the trio. Then, uniquely in Bruckner's entire output, the whole scherzo is repeated with a fortissimo conclusion, thereby reserving the full force of the triumphant tonic for the end of the scherzo.

10. Vocal music.

Bruckner's upbringing at St Florian ensured that his models for sacred music would include Austrian masses, beginning with Lotti, Assmayr and Mozart, and including Michael and Joseph Haydn. His first large-scale sacred choral works, the Requiem in D minor (1849) and the Missa solemnis (1854), reveal the strong influence of these Classical precedents. Later, Mendelssohn's influence can be detected in the cantata-like structure of a work such as Psalm cxlvi, composed in the mid-1850s. The setting of Psalm cxii (1863), which Bruckner wrote under Kitzler's tutelage, however, remains Classical – even neo-Baroque – in spirit and inspiration.

Bruckner's short works for the Liedertafel Frohsinn consist of songs on patriotic German texts and poems about nature, and drinking-songs, which were in vogue with the German male-chorus movement in the mid-19th century. They sometimes feature special effects such as humming and even yodelling, occasionally combined with some of Bruckner's most sophisticated and idiosyncratic harmonic gestures.

With the Ave Maria and Afferentur regi, both composed in 1861, Bruckner found his own distinctive style of vocal music. Later, in Germanenzug (1863–4), and especially the masses in D minor (1864) and F minor (1867–8), he succeeded in combining the neo-Baroque structural matrix of his earlier choral music with the freedom and expressiveness of Wagnerian chromatic harmony. Simultaneously, the D minor and F minor masses continue the tradition of the Viennese concerted mass; in style and scope they are the direct descendants of Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's Missa solemnis.

While the great choral works of Bruckner's later period such as the Te Deum (1881–4), Psalm cl (1892) and Helgoland (1893) all extend the stylistic synthesis first achieved in the masses in D and F minor, the Mass in E minor and the later small-scale sacred choral works develop a neo-Palestrinian style enriched by chromatic harmony. In these masterpieces, Bruckner frequently exploited enharmonic transformation to represent redemption through faith. In Christus factus est (1884), for example, the pain of Christ's Crucifixion and Original Sin are associated with the ‘fallen’ D (bars 14–19). Through Christ's sacrifice, the fallen D is then raised, on the word ‘Christ’, by its emphatic enharmonic transformation into ‘risen’ (i.e. resurrected) C (bars 38–40). With Os justi (1879), Bruckner proved to the sceptical Ignaz Traumihler, choirmaster at St Florian, that he could compose a work in the best spirit of the Cecilian movement entirely in the Lydian mode. In spite of relinquishing all chromatic-harmonic metaphors, Bruckner was still able to do justice to the text: in this magnificent motet, the ‘all-encompassing’ laws of God are represented by the dramatic octave jumps in contrary motion in the outer voices in the opening bars (1–10) and by the marvellous suspension sequences (bars 10–16) that realize divine law expressed in musical terms.

Mozart's Requiem continued to fascinate Bruckner throughout his life and to serve as the yardstick against which he measured his own sacred music. Research has revealed that, in the process of revising the Mass in F minor in 1877, Bruckner referred directly to the Requiem for justification of his own composition procedures. An interesting feature of his method with regard to the large-scale choral works is that he generally wrote out the choral lines in their entirety before filling in the instrumentation. While, in later revisions, changes made to the accompaniment could be far-reaching, the vocal parts tended to remain – like a sacred cantus firmus – largely untouched. Thus, the choral part of the first version of the Mass in F minor (completed in 1868) remained the same while the figuration in the instrumental accompaniment was substantially reworked in later revisions (1877, 1881 and the 1890s). The structural priority of the vocal lines can be observed in the genesis of the later large-scale choral works such as the Te Deum and Helgoland.

Some writers have commented on the ‘gothic’ quality of Bruckner's music, both symphonic and choral. Perhaps this stylistic trait is most noticeable in the neo-gothic style – organum-like parallel octaves and 5ths – of the Te Deum. Bruckner first sketched the work in May 1881 but was apparently dissatisfied with it and put the draft aside. In September 1883 he returned to the project, inserted the fugue (bars 402–48) and recomposed the ascending harmonies from the climax of the Adagio (bars 163–76) of the Seventh Symphony at the climax of the Te Deum (bars 449–66). Wagner's death provided the impulse to finish the Te Deum. Indeed, it was the possibility of a programmatic connection between the two compositions – the earlier passage in the Adagio of the Seventh representing Wagner's apotheosis and the music of the ‘non confundar’ passage in the Te Deum derived from it – that precipitated completion of the Te Deum, which Bruckner himself considered his greatest work. Surely, the motivic reference to the Te Deum in the finale of the Ninth Symphony and Bruckner's proposal that it crown the Ninth if the finale remained unfinished, suggest that he considered the Te Deum his ultimate statement of faith. Bruckner's faithful disciple Mahler concurred; in his personal score, he crossed out the instrumentation and wrote: ‘For the tongues of angels, heaven-blest, chastened hearts and souls purified by fire’.

11. Narrative and intertextuality.

All Bruckner's numbered symphonies may be considered ‘persona symphonies’, in that a symphonic narrative can be posited in which a hero experiences a ‘pilgrim's progress’ from the mystical-tragic to the triumphant. That this narrative model is central to the symphonies should not be surprising, since Bruckner's most important symphonic models were also heroic ‘persona’ works. Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and La damnation de Faust and Liszt's Faust-Symphonie. In Bruckner's symphonies, in spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles encountered along the way, the narrative is sustained by faith and the deity always redeems the hero. Important elements of this discourse can be the sudden shifts and unusual combinations of stylistic registers, that is, of high (heroic) and low (pastoral) styles. For example, a pastorale may follow a heroic outburst, as in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony at the conclusion of the first group and beginning of the second (1878–80 version, bars 63ff); or a chorale may be combined with a polka, as in the finale of the Third Symphony (1887–9 version, second group, bars 65ff).

While Hanslick and others had attacked Bruckner, claiming that he merely transferred the style of Wagner's music drama to the symphony, many of Bruckner's supporters from the 1920s onwards countered by defending the symphonies as ‘absolute music’. Robert Haas, August Halm and Ernst Kurth, in different ways and from different perspectives, all described Bruckner as an ‘absolute musician’. In his monumental study Anton Bruckner (E1925), Kurth devoted an entire chapter to celebrating Bruckner's symphonies as absolute music, and in various writings Halm praised Bruckner's symphonies as ‘the summit of absolute music’. Later scholarship, however, has challenged the Haas-Kurth-Halm position, calling attention to hitherto ignored biographical and internal evidence that Bruckner intended to incorporate the semantic aspects of his references to other music – especially Wagner's music dramas – into his own symphonic narratives. An especially fascinating aspect of intertextuality in Bruckner's symphonies are the allusions to his own music; subtle links forged between the symphonies suggest that he may have considered each symphony to be a component of a single ‘meta-symphony’ encompassing all nine symphonies, each symphonic statement building directly upon its predecessor. For example, the Adagio of the Sixth Symphony (bars 40ff) incorporates the sequentially falling 7th motif of the Fifth Symphony's Adagio (bars 23ff). Similarly, the quotation of the Eighth Symphony's Adagio in the coda to the Adagio of the Ninth points to a network of motivic and semantic connections between the last two symphonies.

Pfitzner and others have accused Bruckner of ‘recomposing the same symphony nine times’. A more considered appraisal reveals each symphony to possess its own unique general character, which often derives in part from its particular blend of intertextual references. The First Symphony, with oblique allusions to Tannhäuser (in the first movement) and the Tristan prelude (in the second), and neo-Baroque festive counterpoint in the finale, is for the most part a secular, celebratory work. The Second, by contrast, is shot through with allusions to Bruckner's own F minor Mass and wears a sacred mantle. While the Third is a ‘Wagner’ symphony, especially in its 1874 version (including many Wagner quotations), like the ‘Nullte’ it also emphasizes the redemptive narrative as in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The ‘romantisch’ Fourth Symphony evokes the world of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’, Weber's Der Freischütz and Wagner's Tannhäuser. The Fifth and Sixth both celebrate the technical aspects of musical composition: the Fifth through its intense focus on counterpoint, chorale and cyclic features, the Sixth through its complex interaction of harmony and sonata form. The Seventh is a ‘Wagner’ symphony in a way quite different from the Third: it is a musical commentary on the death of the ‘Meister aller Meister’. While secular, nationalist allusions colour the scherzo and finale of the Eighth Symphony, the Ninth, dedicated to God and with unequivocal allusions to the Te Deum, is clearly orientated to the sacred, if not to the sublime.

12. Research issues.

A principal challenge for Bruckner scholarship is a reassessment of the music and its historical position. That the composer remains cloaked in an almost exclusively Wagnerian mantle is no longer justifiable. Although he admired Wagner and often made references to his music, aesthetically, politically, philosophically and even musically, the two men were far apart. All evidence indicates that during periods of self-analysis Bruckner turned to the music of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert rather than to Wagner. In view of the Classical roots of his symphonic and choral styles, theorists have begun to explain his composition techniques in relation to Classical precedents.

Bruckner continues to pose serious source-critical problems. The chronology and significance of his layers of metrical numbers, and the purpose of the marginalia concerning part-writing in his late orchestration, for example, remain far from clear. Deciphering his complex manuscripts, in which many revisions may have been superimposed, is difficult. Issues of authenticity will continue to be decided on the basis of careful re-examination of the primary sources. For information about Bruckner's life, scholars have relied mainly on the indispensable though often unreliable biography Anton Bruckner: ein Lebens- und Schaffensbild (1922–37), begun by August Göllerich (whom Bruckner appointed to be his official biographer) and completed by Max Auer. Perhaps now the most important task is to remove the layers of special interest which accumulated during the 20th century. Archival research by the Anton Bruckner Institut Linz should continue to add to knowledge of his activities, especially those of his early years. The collected edition of Bruckner's letters will be a major contribution. There is still much to learn about his personal views, musical and otherwise, in particular concerning the socio-political issues encountered during the years in Vienna.

Finally, largely unaddressed is the question of Bruckner's influence on later composers. Some of the outstanding composers of the younger generation, including Mahler and Wolf, were devoted to him; Sibelius and Richard Strauss made efforts to obtain and study his music. Later, Hindemith was a champion of the symphonies and Ligeti professed his admiration for Bruckner. At the end of the 20th century, the extent to which the symphonies and choral works of this ‘modest Viennese church musician’ had an impact on the careers of others remained to be explored.

large choral with instruments

WORKS

Detailed lists:R. Grasberger: Werkverzeichnis Anton Bruckner (Tutzing, 1977) [WAB]U. Harten, with R. Grasberger and others, eds.: Anton Bruckner: ein Handbuch (Salzburg and Vienna, 1996)Editions:Anton Bruckner: Sämtliche Werke, i–ii, iv–viii, xiv–xv, ed. R. Haas (Augsburg, 1930–53); iii, ed. F. Oeser (Wiesbaden, 1950); ix, xi, ed. A. Orel (Vienna, 1934); xiii, ed. R. Haas and L. Nowak (Leipzig, 1940) [A]Anton Bruckner: Sämtliche Werke (Vienna, 1951–): i/1, ii/2, iii–xii/1, xiii/1–xix, ed. L. Nowak; i/2, ed. G. Brosche; ii/1, ed. W. Carragan; xii/2–3, xii/7, ed. W. Litschauer; xiii/6, ed. E. Horn; xii/4–5, ed. H. Jancik and R. Bornhöft; xii/8, ed. R. Bornhöft; xx/1–5, ed. P. Hawkshaw; xx/6, ed. F. Grasberger; xxi, ed. H. Bauernfeind and L. Nowak; xxii, ed. F. Burkhart, R.H. Führer and L. Nowak; xxiii/1, ed. A. Pachowski; xxiv/1, ed. O. Schneider and A. Harrandt; Sonderbände, ed. W. Grandjean and J.A. Phillips [B]A. Göllerich and M. Auer: Anton Bruckner: ein Lebens- und Schaffensbild (Regensburg, 1922–37) [GA]

Exercises written for Simon Sechter, 1855–61, and Otto Kitzler, 1861–3, are not included unless published as complete compositions.

Composition dates are of completion unless otherwise stated; first published in Vienna unless otherwise stated.

orchestral

band

small sacred choral

small secular choral and vocal ensemble

songs

chamber

keyboard

orchestral



WAB	Title	Date	First print	Edition

96	March, d	12 Oct 1862	A xi	B xii/4
First performance : Klosterneuburg, 12 Oct 1924
97	3 pieces, B, e, F	Oct – 16 Nov 1862	GA iii/2, 33–60	A xi, B xii/4
First performance : Klosterneuburg, 12 Oct 1924
98	Overture, g	18 Nov 1862 – 22 Jan 1863	1921 ed. J.V. Wöss	B xii/5
First performance : Klosterneuburg, 8 Sept 1921
99	Symphony, f (‘Study’ Symphony)	7 Jan – 26 May 1863	1913 (2nd movt)	B x
First performance : Vienna, 31 Oct 1913 (2nd movt)

First performance : Klosterneuburg, 18 March 1923 (1st, 2nd, 4th movts)

First performance : 12 Oct 1924 (3rd movt)
101	Symphony no.1, c 1st version	Jan 1865 – 14 April 1866	A i	A i, B i/1
First performance : Linz, 9 May 1868
		rev. May 1877, 1884, 1889
	Scherzo, g	10 March – 25 May 1865	arr. pf by M. Auer, GA iii/2, 136–8	B i/1
Remarks : orig. scherzo for 1st version
	Adagio, A	12 April 1866	arr. pf by M. Auer, GA iii/2, 125–35	B i/1
First performance : Essen, 26 Oct 1993
Remarks : frag., orig. 2nd movt
	2nd version	11 March 1890 – 18 April 1891	ed. C. Hynais, 1893	A i, B 1/2
First performance : Vienna, 13 Dec 1891
100	Symphony, d (‘Nullte’)	24 Jan – 12 Sept 1869	ed. J. Wöss, 1924	B xi
First performance : Klosterneuburg, 17 May 1924 (3rd, 4th movts), 12 Oct 1924 (complete)
142	Symphony, B	29 Oct – 31 Oct 1869	GA iv/1, 112–18
102	Symphony no.2, c	11 Oct 1871 – 11 Sept 1872		B ii/1 (1872 and 1873)
First performance : Vienna, 26 Oct 1873
Remarks : wab142 MS may have sketch for finale dated 1 Feb 1870
		rev. 1873, 1876
	2nd version	1877		A ii (1877) [contains passages from 1872 version], B ii (1877)
		rev. 1892	ed. C. Hynais, 1892	B iii/1
First performance : Vienna, 25 Nov 1894
103	Symphony no.3, d	Oct 1872 – 31 Dec 1873
First performance : Dresden, 1 Dec 1946
		rev. 1874
	Adagio	1876		B iii/1
First performance : Vienna, 23 May 1980
Remarks : intermediate stage of slow movt
	2nd version	May 1876 – 25 April 1877		A iii, B iii/2
First performance : Vienna, 16 Dec 1877
		rev. Oct 1877 – Jan 1878
		rev. 1878–9	1879
Remarks : for 1st edn
	3rd version	1887 – March 1889	ed. F. Schalk, 1890	B iii/3
First performance : Vienna, 21 Dec 1890
Remarks : composed with F. Schalk
104	Symphony no.4, E (‘Romantic’)	2 Jan – 22 Nov 1874		B iv/1
First performance : Linz, 12 Dec 1909 (3rd movt)

First performance : Linz, 20 Sept 1975 (complete)
	2nd version	18 Jan 1878 – 5 June 1880		A iv, B iv/2
First performance : Vienna, 20 Feb 1881
Remarks : with new scherzo and finale
		rev. 1881, 1886
	Finale (Volksfest)	1 Aug – 30 Sept 1878		A iv, B iv/2
Remarks : rev. finale of 1st version; replaced by new finale in 2nd version
	3rd version	18 Feb 1888	ed. F. Löwe and F. Schalk, 1889
First performance : Vienna, 22 Jan 1888
Remarks : composed with F. Löwe and perhaps F. ?and J. Schalk
105	Symphony no.5, B	14 Feb 1875 – 16 May 1876	ed. F. Schalk, 1896	A v, B v
First performance : Graz, 8 April 1894 (Schalk version)
		rev. May 1877 – Nov 1878
106	Symphony no.6, A	Sept 1879–3 Sept 1881	ed. C. Hynais, 1899	A vi, B vi
First performance : Vienna, 11 Feb 1883 (2nd, 3rd movts)

First performance : Vienna, 26 Feb 1899 (complete)
107	Symphony no.7, E	Sept 1881 – 5 Sept 1883	ed. F. Löwe and F. Schalk, 1885	A vii, B vii
First performance : Leipzig, 30 Dec 1884
108	Symphony no.8, c	July 1884 – 10 Aug 1887	B viii/1	B viii/1
First performance : Munich, 2 May 1954 (1st movt)

First performance : London, 2 Sept 1973 (complete)
	2nd version	Oct 1887 – 10 March 1890	ed. J. Schalk and M. von Oberleithner, Berlin, 1892	A viii, B viii/2
First performance : Vienna, 18 Dec 1892
109	Symphony no.9	21 Sept 1887 – 30 Nov 1894 (1st, 2nd, 3rd movts)	ed. F. Löwe, 1903	A ix, Bix
First performance : Vienna, 11 Feb 1903 (Löwe version)
	Finale	24 May 1895 – 11 Oct 1896		A ix (sketches), B Sonderband (sketches and reconstruction)
Remarks : unfinished

band



WAB	Title	Date	First performance	Remarks	First print	Edition

116	March, E	12 Aug 1865			facs., GA iii/2, 225–33	B xii/8

large choral with instruments

sacred and secular



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

25	Mass, C, (‘Windhaager’), A solo, 2 hn, org	?1842	B xxi, 4–11
First print : GA i, 173–89
146	Mass, d, SATB	?1844	B xxi, 167–71
Remarks : Ky, San, Bs, Ag only; San as inwab9
First print : B xxi, 167–71
9	Mass, F, SATB	1844	B xxi, 17–23
Remarks : for Maundy Thursday; grad (Christus factus est), Cr, off (Dextera Domini), San, Bs, Ag; Ky, Gl, composed 1845, lost
First print : GA 1, 258–74
133	Requiem, TTBB, org	1845
Remarks : lost
93	Vergissmeinnicht (secular cant.), D, S, A, T, B, SSAATTBB, pf	?1845	B xxi, 3–15
First print : B xxi, 3–15
		rev. June 1845, Sept 1845	B xxi, 19–32
First print : B xxi, 19–32
			B xxi, 35–48
First print : facs., GA i, 283–300
140	Missa pro Quadragesima, g, SATB, 3 trbn, org	?1845–6	B xxi, 172
Remarks : frag., Ky sketch only
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 84–5
139	Mass, E, SATB, 2 ob, 3 trbn, str, org	?1845–8	B xxi, 173–8
Remarks : frag., Ky sketch only
First print : facs, GA ii/2, 86–93
39	Requiem, d, S, A, T, B, SATB, 3 trbn, str, org	14 March 1849	A xv, B xiv
First performance : St Florian, 15 Sept 1849
First print : A xv
		rev. 1892
14	Entsagen (cant., O. von Redwitz), B, S/T, SATB, org/pf	?1851	B xxii, 51–6
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 47–58
34	Psalm xxii, E, S, A, T, B, SATB, pf	?1852	B xx/2
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 119–30
36	Psalm cxiv, G, SAATB, 3 trbn	spr./sum. 1852	B xx/1
First performance : St Florian, 1852
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 151–77
24	Magnificat, B, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, org	sum. 1852	B xx/3
First performance : St Florian, 15 Aug 1852
First print : GA ii/2, 99–110
61	Heil, Vater! dir zum hohen Feste (secular cant. E. Marinelli), D, T, T, B, B, SATTBB, 3 hn, 2 tpt, trbn	27 Sept 1852	B xxii, 59–95
First performance : St Florian, 28/29 Sept 1852
First print : GA ii/2, 131–40
		rev. 10 July 1857, 1870
First performance : St Florian, 17 July 1857
Remarks : 1857 as Auf, Brüder! auf zur frohen Feier (Marinelli); 1870 as Heil dir zum schönen Erstlingsfeste (B. Piringer)
29	Missa solemnis, b, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, org	8 Aug 1854	A xv, B xv
First performance : St Florian, 14 Sept 1854
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 189–228
37	Psalm cxlvi, A, S, A, T, B, SATB, SATB, orch	c1854	B xx/4
First print : B xx/4
60	Auf, Brüder! auf, und die Saiten zur Hand (secular cant., Marinelli), D, T, T, B, B, SATB, TTBB, 2 ob, 2 bn, 3 hn, 2 tpt, 3 trbn	1 July 1855	B xxii, 92–126
First performance : St Florian, 17 July 1855
First print : GA ii/2, 229–39
15	Festgesang (Festlied; Jodok-Kantate) (cant.), C, S, T, B, SATB, pf	6 Dec 1855	B xxii, 129–45
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 241–54
16	Festkantate (M. Pammesberger), D, T, T, Bar, B, B, TTBB, ww, brass, timp	26 March – 25 April 1862	B xxii, 149–77
First performance : Linz, 1 May 1862
First print : GA iii/2, 197–216
35	Psalm cxii, B, SATB, SATB, orch	June – 10 July 1863	B xx/5
First performance : Vöcklabruck, 14 March 1926
First print : ed. J.V. Wöss, 1926
70	Germanenzug (secular cant., A. Silberstein), d, T, T, B, B, TTBB, brass	29 July 1863 – wint. 1864	B xxii, 181–212
First performance : Linz, 5 June 1865
First print : Ried, 1864
26	Mass no.1, d, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, org	June – 29 Sept 1864	B xvi
First performance : Linz, 20 Nov 1864
First print : Innsbruck, 1892
		rev. Aug 1876, 1881, 1882
27	Mass no.2, e, SSAATTBB, ww, brass	Aug – 25 Nov 1866	B xvii/1
First performance : Linz, 29 Sept 1869
First print : B xvii/1
		rev. July 1876, July 1882	A xiii, B xvii/2
First performance : Linz, 4 Oct 1885
First print : ed. F. Schalk, 1896
28	Mass no.3, f, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, org	14 Sept 1867 – 9 Sept 1868	A xiv, B xviii
First performance : Vienna, 16 June 1872
First print : ed. J. Schalk, ?1894
		rev. Aug 1876, 1877, 1881, 1890s
141	Requiem, d	18 Sept 1875	A xv, B xxi, 179
Remarks : frag.
First print : A xv
45	Te Deum, C, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, org	May 1881 – 16 March 1884	B xix
First performance : Vienna, 10 Jan 1886
First print : 1885
38	Psalm cl, C, S, SATB, orch	11 July 1892	B xx/6
First performance : Vienna, 13 Nov 1892
First print : 1893
71	Helgoland (Silberstein), g, TTBB, orch	7 Aug 1893	B xxii, 215–76
First performance : Vienna, 8 Oct 1893
First print : 1899

small sacred choral



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

31	Pange lingua, hymn, C, SATB	?1835–6	B xxi, 3
First print : GA ii/1, 228
		rev. 14 April 1891	B xxi, 158
First print : facs., GA ii/1, 230
21	Libera me Domine, F, SATB, org	1843–5	B xxi, 12–15
First print : GA i, 243–8
4	Asperges me, ant, F, SATB	1843–5	B xxi, 16
First print : GA iii/2, 140–41
3	2 Asperges me, ants, Aeolian mode, F, SATB, org	1843–5	B xxi, 24–31
First print : GA ii/2, 67–76
32	Tantum ergo, D, SATB	? aut. 1845	B xxi, 32–3
First print : 1914
134	Salve Maria	?1844
Remarks : lost
43	Tantum ergo, A, SATB, org	1844–5 rev. 1848	B xxi, 34–6
First print : GA ii/2, 116–18
12	Dir, Herr, dir will ich mich ergeben, A, SATB	1844–5 rev. 1848	B xxi, 37
First print : GA ii/2, 114–15
144	Herz-Jesulied (?Marinelli), B, SATB, org	?1846	B xxi, 39–40
First print : GA ii/2, 11–12
41	4 Tantum ergo, B, A, E, C, SATB	1846	B xxi, 41–7
First print : B xxi, 41–7
		rev. 1888	B xxi, 150–54
Remarks : pubd in the order E, C, B, A
First print : Innsbruck, 1893
42	Tantum ergo, D, SSATB, org	Feb 1846	B xxi, 48–51
First print : B xxi, 48–51
		rev. 1888	B xxi, 155–7
First print : Innsbruck, 1893
17	In jener letzten der Nächte, f, SATB	?1848	B xxi, 55
First performance : St Florian, Maundy Thursday ?1848
Remarks : also exists as a song
First print : GA ii/2, 97–8
47, 48	Zwei Totenlieder, E, F, SATB	1852	B xxi, 56–7
First performance : St Marienkirche
First print : GA ii/2, 141–4
22	Libera me Domine, f, SSATB, 3 trbn, vc, db, org	28 March 1854	B xxi, 58–67
First performance : St Florian, 28 March 1854
First print : 1922
44	Tantum ergo, B, SATB, 2 vn, 2 tpt, org	1854–5	B xxi, 68–74
First print : GA ii/2, 255–8
5	Ave Maria, F, S, A, SATB, vc, org	24 July 1856	B xxi, 75–81
First performance : St Florian, 7 Oct 1856
First print : Innsbruck, 1893
132	Litany	before Sept 1858
Remarks : lost
6	Ave Maria, off, F, SAATTBB	spr. 1861	B xxi, 82–5
First performance : Linz, 12 May 1861
First print : 1887
1	Afferentur regi, off, F, SATB, 3 trbn	7 Nov 1861	B xxi, 86–7
First performance : St Florian, 13 Dec 1861
First print : 1922
33	Pange lingua, hymn, Phrygian mode, SATB	31 Jan 1868	B xxi, 88–9
First print : ed. F. Witt, Musica sacra, xviii (1885), music suppl., 44
19	Inveni David, off, TTBB, 4 trbn	21 April 1868	B xxi, 90–93
First performance : Linz, 10 May 1868
First print : facs., GA iii/2, 239–44
18	Iam lucis orto sidere (P.R. Riepl), hymn, e, SATB, org	1868	B xxi, 94–5
First performance : Wilhering, 1868
Remarks : also arr. male vv, see below
First print : Linz, 1868
23	Locus iste, grad, C, SATB	11 Aug 1869	B xxi, 98–9
First performance : Linz, 29 Oct 1869
First print : 1886
10	Christus factus est, grad, d, SSAATTBB, str, 3 trbn	1873	B xxi, 100–06
First performance : 8 Dec 1873
First print : 1934
46	Tota pulchra es, ant, Phrygian mode, T, SATB, org	30 March 1878	B xxi, 107–12
First performance : Linz, 4 June 1878
First print : 1887
30	Os justi, grad, Lydian mode, SSAATTBB	18 July 1879	B xxi, 113–17
First performance : St Florian, 28 Aug 1879
First print : 1886
		rev. Aug 1879
20	Inveni David, chant, unison chorus, org	28 July 1879	B xxi, 117
First performance : St Florian, 28 Aug 1879
Remarks : setting of verse to Os justi
First print : B xxi, 117
11	Christus factus est, grad, d, SATB	28 May 1884	B xxi, 122–5
First performance : Vienna, 11 Sept 1884
First print : 1886
40	Salvum fac populum, F, SATB	14 Nov 1884	B xxi, 126–8
First print : facs., GA iv/2, 496ff
50	Veni Creator Spiritus, hymn, unison chorus, org	?1884	B xxi, 129
First print : GA iv/1, 524
13	Ecce sacerdos magnus, ant, SSAATTBB, 3 trbn, org	28 April 1885	B xxi, 130–40
First performance : Vöcklabruck, 21 Nov 1912
First print : 1911
52	Virga jesse floruit, grad, SATB	3 Sept 1885	B xxi, 141–5
First performance : Vienna, 8 Dec 1885
First print : 1886
18	Iam lucis orto sidere, g, TTBB	wint. 1886	B xxi, 146–7
Remarks : also for SATB, see above
First print : An der schönen blauen Donau, i/8 (1886), 240
8	Ave regina coelorum, ant, unison chorus, org	?1886	B xxi, 148–9
First performance : Klosterneuburg, 25 March 1886
First print : Jb des Stiftes Klosterneuburg, iii (1910), 132
51	Vexilla regis, hymn, Phrygian mode, SATB	9 Feb 1892	B xxi, 159–64
First performance : St Florian, 15 March 1892
First print : 1892

small secular choral and vocal ensemble



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

59	An dem Feste (A. Knauer), D, TTBB	1843	B xxiii/2
First performance : Enns, 19 Sept 1843
First print : GA i, 231–3
		rev. 1843, 1893
67	Festlied (L. Kraus)	1843
Remarks : rev. version of wab59
First print : Augsburg and Vienna, 1928
86	Tafellied (K. Ptak)	22 Feb 1893
First performance : Vienna, 3 Nov 1893
Remarks : rev. version of wab59; see alsowab67
78	Das Lied vom deutschen Vaterland, D, TTBB	?1845	B xxiii/2
First print : GA ii/2, 14–15
84	Ständchen, G, T, TTBB	?1846	B xxiii/2
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 61–4
77	Der Lehrerstand (? E. Marinelli), E, T, T, B, B, TTBB	?1847	B xxiii/2
First print : GA ii/2, 16–22
85	Sternschnuppen, (Marinelli), F, TTBB	1848	B xxiii/2
First print : GA ii/2, 94–6
83	Zwei Sängersprüche: Ein jubelnd Hoch, D, Lebt wohl, ihr Sangesbrüder, mottoes, A major, TTBB	1851	B xxiii/2
First performance : Passau, between 5 and 7 July 1851
First print : GA ii/2, 145–6
65	Das edle Herz (Marinelli), A major, TTBB	?1851	B xxiii/2
First print : GA ii/2, 111–13
69	Die Geburt, D, TTBB	19 March 1852	B xxiii/2
First print : GA ii/2, 147–50
53	Vor Arneths Grab (Marinelli), f, SATB, 3 trbn	March 1854	B xxiii/2
First performance : St Florian, 28 March 1854
First print : GA ii/2, 184–8
62	Des Dankes Wort sei mir vergönnt (Marinelli), F, T, B, TTBBB	1855	B xxiii/2
66	Das edle Herz (Marinelli), A major, SATB	Dec 1857	B xxiii/2
First print : GA iii/2, 13–17
2	Am Grabe (Marinelli/H. von der Mattig), f, TTBB	Feb 1861	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 11 Feb 1861
Remarks : same text as Vor Arneths Grab wab53
First print : 1923
64	Du bist wie eine Blume (H. Heine), F, S, A, T, B	5 Dec 1861	B xxiii/2
First performance : 16 Dec 1861
First print : facs., GA iii/2, 193–6
55	Der Abendhimmel (J.C. von Zedlitz), A, TTBB	Jan 1862	B xxiii/2
Remarks : 1st setting; see also wab56 below
First print : GA iii/2, 18–20
76	Lasst Jubeltöne laut erklingen, E, TTBB, 2 hn, 2 tpt, 4 trbn	after 1861	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 22 April 1854
Remarks : new text Dir, holde Heimat (A. Naaf, A. Weiss, 1898)
First print : GA iii/2, 161–79
135	Zigeuner-Waldlied
Remarks : lost; ? early version of Germanenzug: see large choral wab70
89	Um Mitternacht (R. Prutz), f, A solo, TTBB, pf	12 April 1864	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 11 Dec 1864
Remarks : same text as wab90, see below
First print : 1911
73	Herbstlied (F. von Sallet), f, 2 S, TTBB, pf	March 1864	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 24 Nov 1864
First print : 1911
49	Trauungslied (F.I. Proschko), F, SATB	8 Jan 1865	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 5 Feb 1865
First print : facs., GA iii/2, 219–24
91	Vaterländisches Weinlied (A. Silberstein), C major, TTBB	cNov 1866	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 13 Feb 1868
First print : 1892
92	Vaterlandslied (Silberstein), A, T, B, TTBB	cNov 1866	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 4 April 1868
First print : 1902
56	Der Abendhimmel (Zedlitz), F, TTBB	6 Dec 1866	B xxiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 17 Dec 1898
Remarks : 2nd setting; see above wab58
First print : 1902
95	Das Frauenherz, die Mannesbrust (K. Kerschbaum), A major, SATB	1868	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 17 May 1868
Remarks : also known as 2 Wahlsprüche [mottoes]
First print : Linz, 1888
	Des höchsten Preis (A. Mittermayr), C, TTBB	?1850	B xxiii/2
First print : Linz, 1888
148	Two mottoes: Im Wort und Liede wahr und treu, C, Wir alle jung und alt (J.K. Markus), d, TTBB	28 Oct 1869	B xxiii/2
First print : facs.,ZfM, Jg.106 (1939), 256
80	Mitternacht (J. Mendelssohn), A, T, TTBB, pf	Nov 1869	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 15 May 1870
First print : 1903
147	Freier Sinn und froher Mut, motto, D, TTBB	21 March 1874	B xxiii/2
First print : Linz, 1905
74	Das hohe Lied (Mattig), A (T, T, B, TTTTBBBB)/(T, TTTTBBBB, 2 va, vc, kbd, 4 hn, 3 trbn, tuba)	31 Dec 1876	B xxiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 10 Dec 1879 [rehearsal]
First print : 1902
81	Nachruf (Mattig), c, TTBB, org	19 Oct 1877	B xxiii/2
First performance : St Florian, 28 Oct 1877
		rev. 1886
88	Trösterin Musik (A. Seuffert), TTBB, org	1886
First performance : Vienna, 11 April 1886
Remarks : rev. version ofwab81
First print : 1911
57	Abendzauber (Mattig), G, T, 3 Yodellers, TTBB, 4 hn	13 Jan 1878	B xxiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 18 March 1911
First print : 1911
54	Zur Vermählungsfeier (?Mattig), D, TTBB	27 Nov 1878	B xxiii/2
First print : Jb des Stiftes Klosterneuburg, iii (1910), 133–7
82	Sängerbund (?Mattig and Kerschbaum), C, TTBB	3 Feb 1882	B xxiii/2
First performance : Wels, 10 June 1883
First print : 1911
94	Volkslied (J. Winter), C, TTBB	wint. 1882	B xxiii/2
Remarks : also exists as a song
First print : facs., GA iii/2, 192
90	Um Mitternacht (R. Prutz), f, T, TTBB	11 Feb 1886	B xxiii/2
First performance : Linz, 15 April 1886
Remarks : 2nd setting; see alsowab89 above
First print : Strassburger Sängerhaus (1886), 13–16
87	Träumen und Wachen (F. Grillparzer), A, T, TTBB	15 Dec 1890	B xxiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 15 Jan 1891
First print : 1891
		rev. 4 Feb 1892
63	Das deutsche Lied (Der deutsche Gesang) (E. Fels), d, TTBB, brass	29 April 1892	B xxiii/2
First performance : Salzburg, 5 June 1892
First print : 1911

songs



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

138	Mild wie Bäche (? E. Marinelli), A, 1v, pf	?1845	B xxiii/1
Remarks : frag.
First print : facs., GA 2/ii, 59–60
145	O du liebes Jesukind, F, S, org	?1845	B xxi, 38
First print : facs., GA ii/2, 13
17	In jener letzten der Nächte, f, 1v, pf	?1848	B xxi, 54
First performance : St Florian, Maundy Thursday ?1848
Remarks : also for SATB: see small secular choral wab17
First print : B xxi, 54
137	Wie des Bächleins Silberquelle, G, 2 S, pf	?1848	B xxiii/1
Remarks : frag.
First print : GA 2/ii, 65–6
68	Frühlingslied (H. Heine), A major, lv, pf	1851
First print : GA ii/2, 44–6
58	Amaranths Waldeslieder (O. von Redwitz), G, 1v, pf	1856	B xxiii/1
First print : Die Musik, i (1901–2), suppl. [following p.1619]
72	Herbstkummer (Ernst), e, T, pf	April 1864	B xxiii/1
First print : GA iii/2, 151–7
75	Im April (E. Geibel), A, 1v, pf	before Sept 1865	B xxiii/1
First performance : Vienna, 5 Feb 1903
First print : 1898
79	Mein Herz und deine Stimme (A. von Platen), A major, 1v, pf	Linz period	B xxiii/1
First print : GA iii/2, 144–50
7	Ave Maria, F, A, pf/org/hmn	5 Feb 1882	B xxi, 118–21
First performance : Stuttgart, Oct 1921
First print : ed. in Neue Musik-Zeitung, xxiii (1902), suppl.
94	Volkslied, C major, 1v, pf	wint. 1882	B xxiii/1
Remarks : also for TTBB: see small secular choral wab94
First print : facs., GA iii/2, 192

chamber



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

114, 149	2 Aequale, c, c, 3 trbn	Jan 1847	B xxi, 52
Remarks : bass of wab149 missing from autograph pts; added in B xxi by H. Bauernfeind
First print : GA ii/2, 83 [wab114]
			B xxi, 53
First print : B xxi, 53 [wab149]
111	String Quartet, c	7 Aug 1862	B xiii/1
First performance : 15 Feb 1861
First print : B xiii/1
—	Rondo, c	15 Aug 1862	B xii/1
Remarks : alternative finale for str qt wab111
First print : B xii/1
110	Abendklänge, e, vn, pf	7 June 1866	B xii/7
First print : facs., GA i, 104–5
112	Quintet, F, 2 vn, 2 va, vc	Dec 1878–12 July 1879	B xiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 17 Nov 1881 (1st, 2nd, 3rd movts)
First print : 1884

First performance : Vienna, 8 Jan 1885 (complete)
113	Intermezzo, d, 2 vn, 2 va, vc	21 Dec 1879	B xiii/2
First performance : Vienna, 23 Jan 1904
Remarks : for str qnt wab112, replacing scherzo
First print : 1913

keyboard

organ



WAB	Title	Date	Edition

128	4 preludes, E	?1837	B xii/6
Remarks : doubtful; by ? J.B. Weiss
First print : GA i, 97–102
127	Prelude, E	?1837	B xii/6
Remarks : doubtful by ? J.B. Weiss
First print : M. Auer: Anton Bruckner (1932), ex.1
131	Prelude and Fugue, c	15 Jan 1847	B xii/6
First print : Augsburg, 1929
130, 126	Prelude and Postlude, d	?1846	B xii/6
First print : Augsburg and Vienna, 1927
125	Fugue, d	7 Nov 1861	B xii/6
First performance : 27 July 1862
First print : F. Gräflinger (D1911)
129	Prelude, C	Aug 1884	B xii/6
First performance : Kremsmünster, 21 Aug 1884
Remarks : ‘Perger Präludium’, for harmonium
First print : 1926

piano

solo unless otherwise stated



WAB	Title	Date	Remarks	First print	Edition

120	Lancer-Quadrille, C	?1850			B xii/2, 5–14
122	Steiermärker, G	?1850		GA ii/2, 43	B xii/2, 15
124	Three Little Pieces, G, G, F, 4 hands	1853 (no.1), 1854 (no.2), 1855 (no.3)		1925	B xii/3, 4–7
121	Quadrille, A, 4 hands	?1854		facs., GA ii/2, 23–42	B xii/3, 8–23
119	Klavierstück, E	1862–3		facs., GA iii/2, 182	B xii/2, 16
M	sonata movement, g	29 June 1862	draft only	B xii/2, 29–39	B xii/2, 29–39
123	Stille Betrachtung an einem Herbstabend, f	10 Oct 1863		facs., GA iii/2, 217–18	B xii/2, 17–18
118	Fantasie, G	10 Sept 1868		GA iii/2, 245–9	B xii/2, 19–24
117	Erinnerung, A	?1868		1900	B xii/2, 25–8

a: bibliographies, catalogues, source studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

b: iconography

c: letters and documents

d: general biography, memoirs

e: life and works

f: personal and musical character studies

g: editorial problems

h: symphonies

i: sacred music

j: early works

k: other music studies

l: reception

m: special periodicals

a: bibliographies, catalogues, source studies

O. Keller: ‘Anton Bruckner-Literatur’, Die Musik, xiv/4 (1914–15), 158–71, 217–26

Katalog der Anton Bruckner Gedächtnisaustellung im O.-Ö. Landesmuseum (Linz, 1935)

L. Nowak, ed.: Anton Bruckner und Linz, Landhaus, Linz, 20 June – 11 Oct 1964 (Vienna, 1964) [exhibition catalogue]

L. Nowak: ‘Das Bruckner-Erbe der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek’, ÖMz, xxi (1966), 526–31

A.D. Walker: ‘Bruckner’s Works: a List of the Published Scores of the Various Versions’, Brio, iii/2 (1966), 4–9

F. Grasberger and others, eds.: Anton Bruckner zum 150. Geburtstag, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 29 May – 12 Oct 1974 (Vienna, 1974) [exhibition catalogue]

R. Grasberger: Werkverzeichnis Anton Bruckners (Tutzing, 1977)

W. Kirsch: ‘Die Bruckner-Forschung seit 1945: eine kommentierte Bibliographie’, AcM, liii (1981), 157–70; liv (1982), 208–61; lv (1983), 201–44; lvi (1984), 1–29

R. Grasberger: Bruckner-Bibliographie, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, iv (Graz, 1985) [detailed bibliography up to 1974]

C. Howie: ‘Bruckner Scholarship in the Last Ten Years (1987–96)’, ML, lxxvii (1996), 542–54

H. Litschel, ed.: Vom Ruf zum Nachruf: Künstlerschicksale in Österreich, Anton Bruckner, Landesausstellung Oberösterreich 1996 (Linz, 1996) [exhibition catalogue]

b: iconography

F. Gräflinger: Anton Bruckner: Leben und Schaffen (Berlin, 1927)

A. Orel: Anton Bruckner 1824–1896: sein Leben in Bildern (Leipzig, 1936)

W. Abendroth: Bruckner: eine Bildbiographie (Munich, 1958)

J. Lassl: Das kleine Brucknerbuch (Salzburg, 1965/R, 2/1972)

H. Schöny: ‘Anton Bruckner im zeitgenössischen Bildnis’, Kunstjahrbuch der Stadt Linz 1968, 45–84; pubd separately as Bruckner-Ikonographie (Vienna, 1968)

L. Nowak: Anton Bruckner: Musik und Leben (Linz, 1973)

H.C. Fischer: Anton Bruckner: sein Leben (Salzburg, 1974)

W. Wiora: ‘Über die Würdigung Anton Bruckners durch eine Bildbiographie’, Mf, xxvii (1974), 281–9

R. Grasberger: Bruckner-Ikonographie, i: (Um 1854–1924), Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, vii (Graz, 1990)

c: letters and documents

O. Kitzler: Musikalische Erinnerungen (Brno, 1904) [incl. Bruckner letters]

M. Auer, ed.: Anton Bruckner: Gesammelte Briefe, new ser. (Regensburg, 1924)

F. Gräflinger, ed.: Anton Bruckner: Gesammelte Briefe (Regensburg, 1924)

R. Lach: Die Bruckner-Akten des Wiener Universitäts-Archivs (Vienna, 1926)

F. Schalk, ed.: Briefe und Betrachtungen (Vienna and Leipzig, 1935)

E. Schwanzara, ed.: Anton Bruckner, Vorlesungen über Harmonielehre und Kontrapunkt an der Universität Wien (Vienna, 1950)

A. Orel, ed.: Bruckner-Brevier: Briefe, Dokumente, Berichte (Vienna, 1953)

K.A. Hartmann and W. Wahren: ‘Briefe über Bruckner’, NZM, Jg.126 (1965), 272–6, 334–8, 380–87

E.N. Waters: ‘Variations on a Theme: Recent Acquisitions of the Music Division’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, xxvii/1 (1970), 51–83 [Bruckner’s harmony and counterpoint exercises]

O. Biba: ‘Bruckner-Neuerwerbungen des Archivs der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien’, Mitteilungsblatt der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft, xvii (1980), 20–24

T. Leibnitz: Die Brüder Schalk und Anton Bruckner (Tutzing, 1988)

d: general biography, memoirs

F. Brunner: Dr Anton Bruckner (Linz, 1895/R)

H. Rietsch: ‘Anton Bruckner’, Biographisches Jb und deutscher Nekrolog, i (1896), 302–19; pubd separately (Berlin, 1898)

C. Hrubý: Meine Erinnerungen an Anton Bruckner (Vienna, 1901)

F. Gräflinger: Anton Bruckner: Bausteine zu seiner Lebensgeschichte (Munich, 1911, enlarged 2/1927)

E. Decsey: Bruckner: Versuch eines Lebens (Berlin, 1919/R)

F. Eckstein: Erinnerungen an Anton Bruckner (Vienna, 1923)

F. Klose: Meine Lehrjahre bei Bruckner (Regensburg, 1927)

J. Gruber: Meine Erinnerungen an Dr Anton Bruckner (Einsiedeln, 1929)

G. Engel: The Life of Anton Bruckner (New York, 1931)

M. von Oberleithner: Meine Erinnerungen an Anton Bruckner (Regensburg, 1933)

F. Grüninger: Der Ehrfürchtige: Anton Bruckners Leben dem Volk erzählt (Freiburg, 1935, 6/1953)

O. Wessely: ‘Anton Bruckner und Linz’, Jb der Stadt Linz 1954, 201–82

N. Tschulik, ed.: Anton Bruckner im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Vienna, 1955)

O. Wessely: ‘Beiträge zur Familiengeschichte Anton Bruckners’, Jb des Oberösterreichischen Musealvereines, c (Linz, 1955), 143–51

A. Kellner: Musikgeschichte des Stiftes Kremsmünster (Kassel, 1956)

W. Schulten: Über die Bedeutung der St-Florianer-Jahre Anton Bruckners (1845–1855) (Aachen, 1960)

A. Orel: ‘Bruckner und Wien’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 225–31

H. Schöny: ‘Neues zu Anton Bruckners Vorfahren’, Jb des Oberösterreichischen Musealvereines, cviii (Linz, 1963), 251–5

G.F. Wehle: Anton Bruckner im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen: sein Lebensroman in Tatsachen (Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1964)

H. Winterberger: Anton Bruckner in seiner Zeit (Linz, 1964)

R. Quoika: Die Orgelwelt um Anton Bruckner (Ludwigsburg, 1966)

E. Kroll: ‘Anton Bruckner und die Berliner Philharmoniker’, Das Orchester, xv (1967), 241–2

F. Grasberger: ‘Anton Bruckners Auslandsreisen’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 630–35

D. Kerner: ‘Anton Bruckner’, Hessisches Ärzteblatt, xxx (1969), 336–48 [medical history]

D. Kerner: Krankheiten grosser Musiker, ii (Stuttgart, 1969, enlarged 3/1973), 109–26

H.J. Busch: ‘Anton Bruckners Tätigkeit als Orgelsachverständiger’, Ars organi, no.39 (1971), 1585–93

C. van Zwol: Op reis door ’t land van Bruckner [Travelling through Bruckner's land] (Amersfoort, 1974)

F. Grasberger: ‘Adalbert Stifter und Anton Bruckner’, Stifter-Symposion: Linz 1978, ed. J. Lachinger (Linz, 1978) 48

T. Antonicek: Anton Bruckner und die Wiener Hofmusikkapelle, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, i (Graz, 1979)

F. Grasberger, ed.: Anton Bruckner in Wien: eine kritische Studie zu seiner Persönlichkeit, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, ii (Graz, 1980) [incl. studies by M. Wagner, J.-L. Mayer, E. Maier, L.M. Kantner]

E. Maier and F. Zamazal: Anton Bruckner und Leopold von Zenetti, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, iii (Graz, 1980)

M. Hansen: Anton Bruckner (Leipzig, 1987)

Anton Bruckner als Schüler und Lehrer: Linz 1988

R. Grasberger and E.W. Partsch: Bruckner skizziert: ein Porträt in ausgewählten Erinnerungen und Anekdoten, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, viii (Vienna, 1991)

Bruckner-Freunde, Bruckner-Kenner: Linz 1994

O. Wessely, ed.: Staat – Kirche – Schule in Oberösterreich, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, x (Vienna, 1994)

U. Harten, ed.: Anton Bruckner: ein Handbuch (Salzburg, 1996)

E. Maier: Anton Bruckner: Stationen eines Lebens (Linz, 1996)

F. Scheder: Anton Bruckner Chronologie (Tutzing, 1996)

e: life and works

MGG1 (F. Blume)

R. Louis: Anton Bruckner (Berlin, 1904)

R. Louis: Anton Bruckner (Munich, 1905, rev. 3/1921 by P. Ehlers)

M. Morold: Anton Bruckner (Leipzig, 1912, 2/1920)

A. Westarp: Anton Bruckner: l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris, 1912)

F. Gräflinger: Anton Bruckner: sein Leben und seine Werke (Regensburg, 1921)

A. Göllerich: Anton Bruckner: ein Lebens- und Schaffensbild, i (Regensburg, 1922/R); ii–iv, ed. M. Auer (1928–37/R)

K. Grunsky: Anton Bruckner (Stuttgart, 1922)

H. Tessmer: Anton Bruckner (Regensburg, 1922)

M. Auer: Bruckner: sein Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1923, 6/1967)

R. Wetz: Anton Bruckner: sein Leben und Schaffen (Leipzig, 1923)

K. Kobald, ed.: In memoriam Anton Bruckner (Zürich, 1924) [incl. studies by G. Adler, M. Auer, E. Decsey, F. Eckstein, W. Fischer, A. Göllerich, M. Graf, F. Gräflinger, R. Holzer, J. Kluger, K. Kobald, F. Löwe, V.O. Ludwig, F. Moissl, F. Müller, A. Orel, M. Springer]

E. Kurth: Anton Bruckner (Berlin, 1925/R)

A. Orel: Bruckner: ein österreichischer Meister der Tonkunst (Altötting, 1926)

R. Haas: Anton Bruckner (Potsdam, 1934)

W. Paap: Anton Bruckner: zijn land, zijn leven en zijn kunst (Bilthoven, 1936)

K. Laux: Anton Bruckner: Leben und Werk (Leipzig, 1940, 2/1947)

L. van Vassenhove: Anton Bruckner (Neuchâtel, 1942)

R.W. Wood: ‘Anton Bruckner’, The Music Masters, ii, ed. A.L. Bacharach (London, 1950), 63–70

H.F. Redlich: Bruckner and Mahler (London, 1955, 2/1963/R)

A. Basso, ed.: Anton Bruckner simposium (Genoa, 1958) [incl. studies by S. Martinotti, A. Machabey, A. Basso, E.D.R. Neill]

E. Doernberg: The Life and Symphonies of Anton Bruckner (London, 1960/R)

F. Grasberger, ed.: Bruckner-Studien: Leopold Nowak zum 60. Geburtstag (Vienna, 1964) [incl. studies by W. Boetticher, K.G. Fellerer, K. Geiringer, F. Grasberger, W. Hess, H. Jancik, E. Jochum, A. Kellner, F. Kosch, H. Kronsteiner, J. Kronsteiner, F. Racek, H.F. Redlich, H. Sittner, E. Tittel, W. Waldstein, A. Weinmann]

M. Lancelot: Anton Bruckner: l’homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1964)

Approdo musicale, no.24 (1966) [Bruckner issue; incl. studies by S. Martinotti and G. Gavazzeni]

H.-H. Schönzeler: Bruckner (London and New York, 1970, 2/1978)

M. Moroianu: Anton Bruckner (Bucharest, 1972)

D. Watson: Bruckner (London, 1975)

O. Wessely, ed.: Bruckner-Studien (Vienna, 1975) [incl. studies by T. Antonicek, O. Biba, G. Brosche, R. Flotzinger, F. Grasberger, E. Hilmar, E. Maier, S. Martinotti, G.K. Mitterschiffthaler, L. Nowak, W. Pass, E. Schenk and G. Gruber, K. Schütz, M. Wagner, E. Werner, O. Wessely]

M. Wagner: Bruckner (Mainz, 1983)

L. Nowak: Über Anton Bruckner: gesammelte Aufsätze 1932–84 (Vienna, 1985)

Anton Bruckner: Leipzig 1987

C.-H. Mahling, ed.: Anton Bruckner: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung: Walter Wiora zum 30. Dezember 1986 (Tutzing, 1988)

f: personal and musical character studies

A. Orel: Anton Bruckner: das Werk, der Künstler, die Zeit (Vienna, 1925)

F. Grüninger: Anton Bruckner und seine Werke: der metaphysische Kern seiner Persönlichkeit und Werke (Augsburg, 1930, 2/1949)

F. Grüninger: Wege zu Anton Bruckner: Erinnerungsblätter zu seinem 40. Todestag (Karlsruhe, 1936)

W. König: Anton Bruckner als Chormeister (Linz, 1936)

W. Abendroth: Deutsche Musik der Zeitwende: eine kulturphilosophische Persönlichkeitsstudie über Anton Bruckner und Hans Pfitzner (Hamburg, 1937, 3/1943)

O. Loerke: Anton Bruckner: ein Charakterbild (Berlin, 1938, new edn, 1957/R)

W. Furtwängler: Johannes Brahms – Anton Bruckner (Leipzig, 1942/R)

W. Wolff: Anton Bruckner' Rustic Genius (New York, 1942)

D. Newlin: Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York, 1947, 2/1978)

E. Schenk: Um Bruckners Persönlichkeit (Vienna, 1951)

W. Furtwängler: ‘Anton Bruckner’, Ton und Wort: Aufsätze und Vorträge 1918 bis 1954 (Wiesbaden, 1954, 9/1966/R), 102–20 [1939 essay]

F. Eymann: Von Bach zu Bruckner (Berne, 1968, 2/1986)

F. Grasberger: ‘Das Jahr 1868: Brahms – Bruckner – Wagner’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 197–200

P.-G. Langevin, E.-P. Stekel and G. Kars: Le siècle de Bruckner: essais pour une nouvelle perspective sur les maîtres viennois du second âge d'or, ReM, nos.298–9 (Paris, 1975)

O. Wessely: ‘Anton Bruckner und Gustav Mahler’, ÖMz, xxxii (1977), 57–67

C.C. Röthig: Studien zur Systematik des Schaffens von Anton Bruckner auf der Grundlage zeitgenössischer Berichte und autographer Entwürfe (Kassel, 1978)

C. Floros: Brahms und Bruckner: Studien zur musikalischen Exegetik (Wiesbaden, 1980)

Anton Bruckner: Persönlichkeit und Werk: Linz 1992

E.W. Partsch: ‘Über Wert und Unwert von Bruckner-Anekdoten’, Musica, xlvi (1992), 166–70

P. Benary: ‘Zu Anton Bruckners Personalstyl’, Musiktheorie, viii (1993), 119–30

M. Wagner: ‘Bruckner und das Problem der Zeit’, Musik und Kirche, lxvi (1996), 221–5

g: editorial problems

M. Auer: ‘Der Streit um den “echten” Bruckner im Licht biographischer Tatsachen’, ZfM, Jg.103 (1936), 538–45, 1191–6

F. Klose: ‘Zum Thema “Original und Bearbeitung bei Bruckner”’, Deutsche Musikkultur, i (1936–7), 222–5

A. Orel: ‘Original und Bearbeitung bei Anton Bruckner’, Deutsche Musikkultur, i (1936–7), 193–222

E. Wellesz: ‘Le versioni originali delle sinfonie di Bruckner’, RaM, x (1937), 13–18

F. Wohlfahrt: ‘Der Ur-Bruckner’, Deutsche Musikkultur, ii (1937–8), 144–51

M. Auer, R. Pergler and H. Weisbach: Anton Bruckner: wissenschaftliche und künstlerische Betrachtungen zu den Originalfassungen (Vienna, 1938) [with discussion by several distinguished conductors]

F. Oeser: Die Klangstruktur der Bruckner-Symphonie: eine Studie zur Frage der Originalfassungen (Leipzig, 1939)

E.T.A. Armbruster: Erstdruckfassung oder ‘Originalfassung’? (Leipzig, 1946)

W. Hess: ‘Die Urfassung von Bruckners dritter Sinfonie und das Problem der Gesamtausgabe’, SMz, lxxxviii (1948), 453–7

A.D. Walker: ‘Bruckner Versions’, Gramophone, xliii (1965–6), 289 only

D. Cooke: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified’, MT, cx (1969), 20–22, 142–4, 362–5, 479–82, 828 only

Brucker-Symposion [II]: Die Fassungen: Linz 1980

P. Hawkshaw: The Manuscript Sources for Anton Bruckner's Linz Works: a Study of his Working Methods from 1856–68 (diss., Columbia U., 1984)

P. Hawkshaw: ‘The Bruckner Problem Revisited’, 19CM, xxi (1997–8), 96–107

h: symphonies

(i) General studies

A. Halm: Die Symphonie Anton Bruckners (Munich, 1914, 2/1923/R)

W. Abendroth: Die Symphonien Anton Bruckners: Einführungen (Berlin, 1940, 2/1942)

F. Wohlfahrt: Anton Bruckners sinfonisches Werk: Stil- und Formerläuterung (Leipzig, 1943)

R. Simpson: ‘Bruckner and the Symphony’, MR, vii (1946), 35–40

G. Engel: The Symphonies of Anton Bruckner (New York, 1955)

I. Krohn: Anton Bruckners Symphonien: Untersuchung über Formenbau und Stimmungsgehalt (Helsinki, 1955–7)

S. Martinotti: ‘Aspetti e caratteri del sinfonismo di Anton Bruckner’, Anton Bruckner simposium, ed. A. Basso (Genoa, 1958), 177–228

P.-G. Langevin, ed.: Anton Bruckner, apogée de la symphonie (Lausanne, 1977)

P. Barford: Bruckner Symphonies (London, 1978)

J.I. Cahis: ‘The Bruckner Symphonies Problem Reconsidered’, Journal of the Conductors' Guild, xv (1994), 66–79; see also xvi (1995), 57–63

(ii) Special studies

E. Kurth: Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Berne, 1920, 2/1923/R)

H.A. Grunsky: Das Formproblem in Anton Bruckners Symphonien (Augsburg, 1929)

H.A. Grunsky: Formenwelt und Sinngefüge in den Bruckner-Symphonien (Augsburg, 1931)

K. Grunsky: Fragen der Bruckner-Auffassung (Stuttgart, 1936)

K. Schiske: Zur Dissonanzverwendung in den Symphonien Anton Bruckners (diss., U. of Vienna, 1940)

J.H. Wilcox: The Symphonies of Anton Bruckner (diss., Florida State U., 1956)

F. Grasberger: ‘Form und Ekstase: über eine Beziehung Haydn–Schubert–Bruckner in der Symphonie’, Anthony van Hoboken: Festschrift, ed. J. Schmidt-Görg (Mainz, 1962), 93–100

E. Werner: ‘The Nature and Function of the Sequence in Bruckner’s Symphonies’, Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. G. Reese and R.J. Snow (Pittsburgh, 1969/R), 365–84

M. Bushler: Development in the First Movements of Bruckner's Symphonies (diss., CUNY, 1975)

W. Wiora: ‘Über den religiösen Gehalt in Bruckners Symphonien’, Religiöse Musik in nicht-liturgischen Werken von Beethoven bis Reger, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, li (1978), 157–84

Die österreichische Symphonie nach Anton Bruckner: Linz 1981

W. Notter: Schematismus und Evolution in der Sinfonik Anton Bruckners (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1983)

(iii) Individual studies

H. Kretzschmar: Anton Bruckner: 3. Symphonie (Leipzig, 1898)

H. Kretzschmar: Anton Bruckner: 4. Symphonie (Leipzig, 1898)

K. Grunsky: Anton Bruckner: 9. Sinfonie in D moll (Leipzig, 1903)

H. Grunsky: Anton Bruckner: 1. Sinfonie C moll (Berlin, 1907)

H. Grunsky: Anton Bruckner: 6. Sinfonie A dur (Berlin, 1907)

W. Niemann: Anton Bruckner: 5. Symphonie (Leipzig, 1907)

R. Simpson: ‘The Seventh Symphony of Bruckner’, MR, viii (1947), 178–87

H.F. Redlich: ‘The Finale of Bruckner's Symphony IX’, MMR, lxxix (1949), 143–9

H.F. Redlich: ‘Bruckner's Forgotten Symphony (No. “0”)’, Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 14–20

E. Schwebsch: Anton Bruckners VI. Symphonie A-dur (Stuttgart, 1953)

L. Nowak: ‘Das Finale von Bruckners VII. Symphonie: eine Formstudie’, Festschrift Wilhelm Fischer, ed. H. von Zingerle (Innsbruck, 1956), 143–8

L. Nowak: ‘Anton Bruckners Formwille, dargestellt am Finale seiner V. Symphonie’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), ii, 609–13

P. Dawson-Bowling: ‘Thematic and Tonal Unity in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony’, MR, xxx (1969), 225–36

J. Tröller: Anton Bruckner: III. Symphonie d-moll (Munich, 1976)

M. Wagner: Der Wandel des Konzepts: zu den verschiedenen Fassungen von Bruckners Dritter, Vierter und Achter Sinfonie (Vienna, 1980)

P. Hawkshaw: ‘The Date of Bruckner's “Nullified” Symphony in D Minor’, 19CM, vi (1982–3), 252–63

T. Roder: Auf dem Weg zur Bruckner Symphonie: Untersuchungen zu den ersten beiden Fassungen von Anton Bruckners Dritter Symphonie (Stuttgart, 1987)

H. Schönzeler: Zu Bruckners IX. Symphonie: die Krakauer Skizzen (Vienna, 1987)

M. Sonntag: The Compositional Process of Anton Bruckner: a Study of the Sketches and Drafts of the First Movement of the Ninth Symphony (diss., U. of Chicago, 1987)

J.A. Phillips: ‘The Finale of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony: New Light on an Old Problem’, MMA, xvii (1990), 193–277

T. Schipperges: ‘Zur Wiener Fassung von Anton Bruckners Erste Sinfonie’, AMw, xlvii (1990), 272–85

B.M. Korstvedt: The First Edition of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony: Authorship, Production and Reception (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1995)

B.M. Korstvedt: ‘The First Edition of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony: Collaboration and Authenticity’, 19CM, xx (1996–7), 3–26

i: sacred music

S. Ochs: Anton Bruckner: Te Deum (Stuttgart, 1896)

A. Göllerich: ‘Anton Bruckners 114. Psalm’, Die Musik, vi/1 (1906–7), 36–45

K. Singer: Bruckners Chormusik (Stuttgart, 1924)

M. Auer: Anton Bruckner als Kirchenmusiker (Regensburg, 1927)

K.J. Perl: Christliche Musik und Anton Bruckner (Strasbourg, 1937)

W. Kirsch: ‘Anton Bruckners Motetten der Wiener Zeit’, Musik und Altar, xi (1958–9), 56–9

H.-G. Scholz: Die Form der reifen Messen Anton Bruckners (Berlin, 1961)

S. Martinotti: L'opera sacra di Anton Bruckner (diss., U. of Milan, 1962)

L. Nowak: ‘Probleme bei der Veröffentlichung von Skizzen dargestellt an einem Beispiel aus Anton Bruckners Te Deum’, Anthony van Hoboken: Festschrift, ed. J. Schmidt-Görg (Mainz, 1962), 115–21

A. Schmitz: ‘Anton Bruckners Motette “Os justi”: eine Erwägung zur Problematik der kirchenmusikalischen Restauration im 19. Jahrhundert’, Epirrhosis: Festgabe für Carl Schmitt, i, ed. H. Barion and others (Berlin, 1968), 333–43

A.C. Howie: The Sacred Music of Anton Bruckner (diss., U. of Manchester, 1969)

A.C. Howie: ‘Traditional and Novel Elements in Bruckner's Sacred Music’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 544–67

Anton Bruckner und die Kirchenmusik: Linz 1985

R.L. Miller: ‘The Motets of Anton Bruckner’, Choral Journal, xxxvii/2 (1996–7), 19–25

j: early works

A. Orel: Unbekannte Frühwerke Anton Bruckners (Vienna, 1921)

L. Böttcher: ‘Ein bedeutsamer Brucknerfund’, Neue Musikzeitschrift, iii (1948–9), 177–8 [pf works]

k: other music studies

E. Wellesz: ‘Anton Bruckner and the Process of Musical Creation’, MQ, xxiv (1938), 265–90

O. Lang: ‘Die Thematik Anton Bruckners’, Deutsche Musikkultur, iv (1939–40), 65–72

B. Walter: ‘Bruckner and Mahler’, Chord and Discord, ii/2 (1940), 41–9; repr. in ii/9 (1960), 3–12

W. Vetter: ‘Das Adagio bei Anton Bruckner’, Deutsche Musikkultur, v (1940–41), 121–32

H.F. Redlich: ‘Bruckner and Brahms Quintets in F’, ML, xxxvi (1955), 253–8

W. Kirsch: Studien zum Vokalstil der mittleren und späten Schaffensperiode Anton Bruckners (diss., U. of Frankfurt, 1958)

L. Nowak: ‘Symphonischer und kirchlicher Stil bei Anton Bruckner’, Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Regensburg, 1962/R), 391–401

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Bruckner und der Barock’, NZM, Jg.124 (1963), 335–6

W.F. Korte: Bruckner und Brahms: die spätromantische Lösung der autonomen Konzeption (Tutzing, 1963)

L. Nowak: ‘Form und Rhythmus im ersten Satz des Streichquintetts von Anton Bruckner’, Festschrift Hans Engel, ed. H. Heussner (Kassel, 1964), 260–73; repr. in Zur musikalischen Analyse, ed. G. Schuhmacher (Darmstadt, 1974), 187–203

R. Simpson: The Essence of Bruckner (London, 1967, 3/1992)

K. Unger: Studien zur Harmonik Anton Bruckners: Einwirkung und Umwandlung älterer Klangstrukturen (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1969); summary, Mf, xxv (1972), 87–8

B. McIntyre: Conductorial Decisions in Bruckner’s Symphonies nos.8 and 9 (diss., Indiana U., 1970)

M. Wagner: Die Melodien Bruckners in systematischer Ordnung (diss., U. of Vienna, 1970)

O. Wessely: ‘Zur Geschichte des Equals’, Beethoven-Studien, ed. E. Schenk (Vienna, 1970), 341–60 [derivation of brass chorales in Bruckner’s syms.]

P.W. Grant: ‘Bruckner and Mahler: the Fundamental Dissimilarity of their Styles’, MR, xxxii (1971), 36–55

Bruckner-Interpretation: Linz 1982

H. Federhofer: ‘Heinrich Schenkers Bruckner-Verständnis’, AMw, xxxix (1982), 198–217

Johannes Brahms und Anton Bruckner: Linz 1983

Bruckner-Vorträge: Budapest 1983 and 1984

Bruckner, Wagner und die Neudeutschen in Österreich: Linz 1984

P. Coad: Bruckner and Sibelius (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1985)

Anton Bruckner e la musica sacra: Rome 1986

Bruckner, Liszt, Mahler und die Moderne: Linz 1986

Bruckner und die Musik der Romantik: Linz 1987

Orchestermusik im 19. Jahrhundert: Linz 1989

Musikstadt Linz, Musikland Oberösterreich: Linz 1990

T.L. Jackson: ‘Bruckner's Metrical Numbers’, 19CM, xiv (1990–91), 101–31

Entwicklungen, Parallelen, Kontraste: zur Frage einer ‘österreichischen Symphonik’: Linz 1993

Zum Schaffensprozess in den Künsten: Linz 1995

B. von Haken: ‘Brahms und Bruckner’, Musiktheorie, x (1996), 149–57

A. Harrandt: ‘Bruckner and the Liedertafel Tradition: his Secular Music for Male Chorus’, Choral Journal, xxxvii/5 (1996–7), 15–21

T.L. Jackson: ‘Bruckner's Oktaven: a Study of his Notes on Mozart's Requiem’, ML, lxxviii (1997), 391–410

T.L. Jackson and P. Hawkshaw, eds.: Bruckner Studies (Cambridge, 1997) [incl. studies by W. Darcy, B. Gilliam, P. Hawkshaw, T. Jackson, B. Korstvedt, J. Kraus, E. Laufer, E. Maier, S. McClatchie, M. Notely, R. Wason]

G. Heldt, ed.: Bruckner Probleme (Munich, forthcoming)

l: reception

M. Hansen: ‘Die faschistische Bruckner-Rezeption und ihre Quellen’, BMw, xxviii (1986), 53–61

S. Lieberwirth: Anton Bruckner und Leipzig, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, vi (Graz, 1988)

Bruckner-Rezeption: Linz 1991

R. Osborne: ‘The Gramophone Collection: Bruckner’, Gramophone, lxix/Aug (1991–2), 33–6

H. Kreczi: Bruckner Orchester Linz und Brucknerhaus, Anton Bruckner: Dokumente und Studien, ix (Vienna, 1992)

B. Gilliam: ‘The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 584–604 [see also M. Wagner and B. Gilliam, MQ, lxxx (1996), 118–31]

L. Botstein: ‘Music and Ideology: Thoughts on Bruckner’, MQ, lxxx (1996), 1–11

B.M. Korstvedt: ‘Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: an Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception’, MQ, lxxx (1996), 132–60

C. Brüstle: Anton Bruckner und die Nachwelt: zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Komponisten in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1998)

m: special periodicals

Organon (Munich, 1924–34) [pubn of the Deutsche Bruckner-Gemeinde]

Bruckner-Blätter: Mitteilungen der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft (Vienna, 1929–37); renamed Mitteilungen der Deutschen Bruckner-Gesellschaft (1939–40)

Chord and Discord (New York, 1932–41, 1947–98) [journal of the Bruckner Society of America]

Mitteilungsblatt der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft (Vienna, 1971–)

Bruckner-Jb (Linz, 1980–)

Anton Bruckner, Musik-Konzepte, nos.23–4 (1982)

ÖMz, li (1996)

Bruckner Journal (Manchester, 1997–)

Brückner-Rüggeberg, Wilhelm

(b Stuttgart, 15 April 1906; d Hamburg, 1 April 1985). German conductor and teacher. He studied in Munich under August Schmid-Lindner and Siegmund von Hausegger, and began his operatic career as a répétiteur at the Staatsoper in Munich. After engagements in Essen, Dortmund and Kiel, among other places, he conducted a Beethoven cycle with the Berlin PO in 1937 at Furtwängler’s invitation, and he received an appointment at the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1938. In addition to his commitments at the opera, he undertook the directorship of the Hamburger Lehrergesangverein in 1940. Three years later he assumed responsibility for a class in conducting at the Schule für Musik und Theater (later the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik), and became a professor there in 1955. He also conducted the Hamburg PO in more than 700 concerts for schoolchildren.

Brückner-Rüggeberg was an enthusiast of Handel’s works and was considered in Germany and South America an exceptional oratorio conductor. In 1969 he conducted the first complete performance in Rio de Janeiro of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. His recordings include Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny with Lotte Lenya.

HANS CHRISTOPH WORBS/R

Bruckner societies.

Austrian, German and American organizations. After World War I numerous Bruckner societies were established in Austria and Germany; the one founded in Leipzig in 1925 became the International Bruckner Society (Ger. Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft), based in Vienna, in 1929. It published the periodical Bruckner-Blätter until 1940 and collaborated with the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in publishing the earlier volumes of Robert Haas's complete Bruckner edition. Nationalist propaganda among the German-speaking parts of the society led to its decline and in 1939 it became simply the Deutsche Bruckner-Gesellschaft, ceasing its activity soon afterwards. A second international society, again based in Vienna, published Mitteilungsblatt der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft from 1971. The Bruckner Society of America was founded in 1931 to ‘develop in the public an appreciation of Bruckner, Mahler, and the other moderns’; it publishes the periodical Chord and Discord (1932–41, 1947–) and has awarded medals to Koussevitzky, Toscanini and other outstanding Bruckner conductors.

Bruder.

German family of organ builders which specialized in mechanical instruments. Ignaz Blasius Bruder (1780–1845) was the founder of the organ-building industry in Waldkirch. He had five sons, those of greatest significance being Wilhelm (1819–82) and Ignaz (1825–91). Each of these in turn produced three sons who ultimately formed three partnerships – Wilhelm Bruder Söhne, Gebrüder Bruder and Ignaz Bruder Söhne. The precise output of each partnership is hard to identify but they all produced work of outstanding quality starting with organ-playing clocks, progressing through portable street organs and ending with showground and dance organs. The Bruders kept to the forefront of technical and musical development and were among the first to apply music programmes in the form of perforated paper rolls to the fairground organ, using a keyless pneumatic system. They also fitted Swell shutters to these instruments. Bruder enjoyed a worldwide reputation and until the outbreak of World War I they supplied organs to the Wurlitzer company in America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.V. Cockayne: The Fairground Organ: its Music, Mechanism and History (Newton Abbot, 1970)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ: the Story of the Mechanical Organ and its Repair (London, 1978)

H. Rambach and O. Wernet: Waldkircher Orgelbauer (Waldkirch, 1984)

ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME

Brudieu, Joan

(b diocese of Limoges, c1520; d Urgell, Catalan Pyrenees, between 22 April and 10 May 1591). French-Catalan composer. He was listed as a ‘French singer’ in the pay voucher he received for conducting an imported vocal quartet at the 1538 Christmas services in La Seu d'Urgell cathedral. The chapter members were so pleased with his services that they named him permanent choirmaster on 20 July 1539. After an unexplained absence from 16 April 1543 to 28 October 1545, perhaps spent studying for the priesthood, he returned as choirmaster, and upon being ordained sang his first Mass at Christmas in 1546. On 3 March 1550 Brudieu made his will before beginning a trip lasting several months. After retiring on 15 March 1577 for a one-year retreat at Balaguer (south of Urgell), he became maestro de capilla and organist of S María del Mar at Barcelona in May 1578. Disliking the climate, he returned to his old post at Urgell in April 1579.

Six years later he revisited Barcelona to superintend the publication there of his madrigals dedicated to Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy. Next year the Urgell chapter permitted Rafael Coloma to substitute for him from 14 August 1586. When Coloma left, on 21 January 1589, he was recalled to active duty.

Apart from De los madrigales del muy reverendo Ioan Brudieu maestro de capilla dela sancta yglesia de La Seo de Urgel a quatro bozes (Barcelona, 1585; the four partbooks survive uniquely in E-E), he left a four-part requiem mass in manuscript at Urgell Cathedral. The texts of the 13th and 15th madrigals are by the great Catalan poet Auzias March. Except for the Goigs de Nostra Dona (‘Joys of Our Lady’), with which the 1585 collection begins, and madrigals 13–16, all the rest are in Spanish (nos.6 and 7, 8 and 9 set identical texts). All the Spanish madrigals except no.5 are in two partes. One madrigal celebrates the victory at Lepanto on 7 October 1571. Throughout the longest – no.5 (which runs to seven partes) – Love and Majesty break cane lances (las cañas), Love at length winning the tourney. Janequin’s La guerre served as Brudieu’s model for the battle-sounds that enliven las cañas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Pedrell and H. Anglès, eds.: Els madrigals i la missa de difunts d’En Brudieu, PBC, i (1921)

C. van den Borren: ‘Les Madrigaux de Jean Brudieu’, ReM, vi/9–11 (1924–5), 207–19

A. Mangeot: ‘The Madrigals of Joan Brudieu’, The Score, no.7 (1952), 25–32

M. Querol Gavaldá: ‘La forma musical en el libro de madrigales de Joan Brudieu (ca.1520–1591)’, Musica antiqua [Córdoba], no.1 (1986), 3–5

J.M. Gregori: ‘El manierisme a Catalunya a través dels madrigals de Pere Alberch (1560–1561) i Joan Brudieu (1585)’, Nassarre, iii/1 (1987), 99–112

ROBERT STEVENSON

Brueggen, Frans.

See Brüggen, Frans.

Brugensis, Arnoldus.

See Bruck, Arnold von.

Bruges

(Flem. Brugge).

City in Belgium. Thanks to its situation on the Zwin estuary to the North Sea, it became one of the most important trading centres of northern Europe in the 13th century; in size (c35,000 inhabitants) it was comparable with Cologne and London in the 14th century. Then and in the 15th century it was a favourite residence of the dukes of Burgundy. When the Zwin silted up in the 16th century, Bruges lost its dominant position to other Flemish towns.

1. Sacred music.

Before the foundation of the diocese of Bruges (1559), the town belonged to the diocese of Tournai. Three collegiate churches employed professional musicians. In 1368 the oldest chapter, St Donatian (St Donaas, founded c918–44), included 31 canons and more than 60 chaplains. The earliest records of polyphony, mentioning an organ, date from 1127. In 1251–2 there was an organist and a zangmeester (choirmaster) who, from 1312, was charged with training eight chorales (choirboys). The existence of a liber motettorum of 1377 indicates that polyphony was performed, sung by the ghezellen van der muzycke or socii de musica, a select company of about 12 musicians from a total of 18 clerici installati. In 1421 the chapter established a daily polyphonic Maria mass (Missa de Salve). A number of important composers received a canon prebend without duty of residence, among them Grenon, Binchois, Du Fay and Joye. 15th-century choirmasters included Fabri, Heyns, Obrecht and Cordier. The 16th century produced the composers Antonius Divitis and Lupus Hellinck, who was trained as a chorister in Bruges. Hellinck was choirmaster at St Donatian, as was Antonius Galli; Adrian Willaert was also associated with the church. In the 17th century the permanent core of musicians remained and an instrumental ensemble was added.

The church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk) was a parish church as early as 909 and became a collegiate church in 1091; by about 1400 it had 11 canons, 24 chaplains, four vicars and at least 14 clerici installati, among whom many were musicians. The dukes of Burgundy considered it their ‘court chapel’. The confraternity of Our Lady of the Snow (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe-ter-Sneeuw), founded shortly before 1450, played an important role in musical life. In the 16th century Jeronimus de Clibano, Lupus Hellinck and Galli, all also employed by St Donatian, were active in the church of Our Lady. The Cacheux organ dates from 1721–2. In 1787 the church employed about 20 musicians. The church of St Saviour (St Salavtor), founded in about 850, became a collegiate church in 1501 and included 20 prebends; it had known a flourishing musical life before this time, not least during the choirmastership of Antoine Busnoys (before 1492). Confraternities and private foundations ensured a varied musical practice. Musicians from the 15th century included: Jacobus Buus (in 1499 also organist at the church of Our Lady and in 1504 mentioned as choirmaster) and Nicasius de Brauwere (Braxatoris), who in 1484–5 composed motets for the ‘Salve concerts’ by the town musicians. During the 16th, Galli and Andreas Pevernage were active there. The number of canons was reduced to 12 in 1600 and in 1787 about ten musicians were permanently employed. The rood-loft, moved in 1935–6 to the west side of the nave, contains the restored Jacob Van Den Eynde organ of 1717.

In addition to the parish churches of St Gillis (St Giles), in which the choirmaster Johannes Richafort probably died in 1547, and St Walburga, St Jacob (St James) is worth mentioning. It was a rich institution as various prosperous merchants, among them Giovanni Arnolfini from Lucca, lived within its parish. The hairdressers' guild held an annual feast, including organ music during evensong, a procession during which boys sang a motet, the singing of hours and a mass in descant by six or seven singers (typical of such services on special occasions). In the 16th century Benedictus Appenzeller, Antoine Barbé, Geerkin De Hondt and Pevernage were among the choirmasters. Convents, monasteries and confraternities also played an important role in the city's musical life. The Carmelite convent included from 1428 the confraternity of the Chamber of Rhetoric of the Holy Ghost, which organized an annual passion play, performed refrains and hired singers. The Droge Boom (Dry Tree) confraternity (before 1396), in the Franciscan monastery, hired singers on Sundays and holy days to perform masses in discante.

2. Music for court and town.

The Burgundian court chapel was often in Bruges. Largely by awarding prebends in St Donatian to the best singers, the dukes developed an outstanding chapel which was held in great respect throughout Europe. Notable performances were at the three 15th-century gatherings of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, in 1468, at the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in Bruges. Through the activities of the court (e.g. peace negotiations with foreign countries), musicians from many regions (France, England, the Habsburg empire) met there.

As early as 1310 and more regularly from 1331–2, Bruges employed four or five town musicians. They served as tower guards and played the trumpet, organ or fiddle. They participated in processions and other ceremonies with musicians from other towns (e.g. Sluis, Ghent or even Florence) or courts. In the 14th century minstrel courses, which enjoyed an international reputation, were held during Lent. The town musicians continued in existence until the French Revolution.

In 1280 there is mention of three bells in the belfry tower: the campana nuptiana, the scepenen scell (alderman bell) and the magna campana, used to announce important events. As early as 1533 there was a town carillonneur (Adriaen Vander Sluus), a post still financed by the town council. The current carillon (47 bells, four octaves) still contains 26 bells cast by J. Dumery, a native of Bruges, in 1743.

The Gruuthuse manuscript (c1390–1400), an exceptional collection of monophonic songs in stroke notation, is an example of music performed in middle-class society. Important references to domestic music can be found in the manuscripts of Hieronymus Lauwereyn van Watervliet (GB-Lbl Add.35087, shortly after 1500), the so-called Tournai/Brussels partbooks, which probably also originated from Bruges (B-Tv 94, Br IV 90, 1274; 1511) and the superb songbook of the merchant Zeghere van Male (F-CA 125–8, 1542). This last volume contains many compositions by local choirmasters. The 17th century produced Charles Guillet, an alderman and organist who composed 24 fantasias for organ (Paris, 1610). Carolus Hacquart probably received his musical training in Bruges.

After the foundation of a local music school in 1841 (from 1854 the Stedelijk Conservatorium), the responsibility for musical tuition was placed in the hands of the municipality. A concert society was formed in 1895. Since 1964 an annual two-week summer festival of early music has been organized as part of the Festival van Vlaanderen. As well as concerts, lectures and an exhibition, a competition is held following a triennial cycle: organ; harpsichord and pianoforte; singing, melodic and bass instruments, lute and ensembles. Important ensembles in Bruges include the Collegium Instrumentale Brugense, the Capella Brugensis (both conducted by Patrick Peire) and the Nieuw Vlaams Symfonie-Orkest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (M. Boereboom)

MGG2 (I. Bossuyt, A. Böker)

StrohmM

Vander StraetenMPB

D. Van De Casteele and E.Vander Straeten: ‘Maîtres de chant et organistes de Saint-Donatien et de Saint-Sauveur à Bruges: documents annotés’, Annales de la Société d'Emulation de Bruges, xxiii (1870), 105–74

A.C. De Schrevel: Histoire du Séminaire de Bruges (Bruges, 1883–5)

A. Duclos: Bruges: histoire et souvenirs (Bruges, 1910)

L. Gilliodts-Van Severen: ‘Le carillon de Bruges: recueil de textes et analyses de documents inédits ou peu connus’, Essais d'archéologie Brugeoise, ii (Bruges, 1912)

L. Gilliodts-Van Severen: ‘Les ménestrels de Bruges’, Essais d'archéologie Brugeoise, i (Bruges, 1912)

K. Heeroma and C.W.H. Lindenburg, eds.: Liederen en gedichten uit het Gruuthuse-Handschrift (Leiden, 1966)

A. Dewitte: ‘De kapittelschool van de collegiale Sint-Salvator te Brugge, 1516–1594’, Annales de la Société d'Emulation de Bruges, civ (1967), 5–65

A. Dewitte: ‘De geestelijkheid van de Brugse Lievevrouwekerk in de 16de eeuw’, Annales de la Société d'Emulation de Bruges, cvii (1970), 100–35

A. Dewitte: ‘Zangmeesters, organisten en schoolmeesters aan de Sint-Jacobsparochie te Brugge 1419–1591’, Biekorf, lxxi (1971), 332–49

A. Dewitte: ‘Gegevens betreffende het muziekleven in de voormalige Sint-Donaaskerk te Brugge’, Annales de la Société d'Emulation de Bruges, cxi (1974), 129–74

A. Dewitte: ‘Zangmeesters, “schoolmeesters” en organisten aan de Sint-Gilleskerk te Brugge, ca.1471–ca.1570’, Biekorf, lxxvii (1976), 88–99

L. Lannoo: ‘Orgels te Brugge’, Het Brugs Ommeland, xviii (1978), 3–34; xxii (1982), 59–80

J.A. Van Houtte: De geschiedenis van Brugge (Bruges, 1982)

H. Dacquin and M. Formesyn, eds.: Brugge, belfort en beiaard (Bruges, 1984)

M. Awouters, I. De Keyser and S. Vandenberghe: Brugge: Gruuthusemuseum: catalogus van de muziekinstrumenten (Bruges, 1985)

B. Huys: ‘A Recently Rediscovered Sixteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscript: a Study of the Sources and Concordance of the Third “Tournai” Partbook’, Musicology and Archival Research, ed. B. Haggh, F. Daelemans and A. Vanrie (Brussels, 1994), 522–41

H. Vanhulst: ‘Le manuscript 41 des archives communales de Bruges’, Le concert des voix et des instruments à la Renaissance, ed. J.-M. Vaccaro (Paris,1995), 231–42

EUGEEN SCHREURS

Brüggen [Brueggen], Frans

(b Amsterdam, 30 Oct 1934). Dutch conductor, recorder player and flautist. He studied the recorder with Kees Otten, the flute at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum and musicology at the University of Amsterdam. His early career as a recorder and Baroque flute virtuoso won him international fame for his highly individual translucent tone, brilliance and rapidity, and the depth of his interpretations. At the age of 21 he was appointed professor at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague and in 1972–3 he held the position of Erasmus Professor at Harvard University.

He commissioned many works for recorder, outstanding among them Berio’s Gesti (1965), of which he gave superbly theatrical performances. Brüggen has left a legacy of his career as a flautist and recorder player in numerous remarkable recordings, including over 50 for Telefunken’s ‘Das Alte Werk’, many associated with Gustav Leonhardt (harpsichord) and Anner Bylsma (cello).

In 1981 he embarked on a career as a conductor, founding the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, a period-instrument group comprising some 50 members from 16 countries. Their recordings of a wide-ranging repertory, encompassing works by Purcell, Bach, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, have received a number of international awards. Brüggen has also conducted orchestras including the Chicago SO, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Oslo PO, the CBSO, the Vienna PO and the Tonhalle in Zürich. He made his début at the Salzburg Festival with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in 1991 and returned in 1992 and 1995 for highly praised series of concerts with the Mozarteum Orchestra. His operatic début was with the Netherlands Opera, conducting Idomeneo, in 1991. In 1992 Brüggen became the joint principal guest conductor, with Simon Rattle, of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with whom he has recorded works by Bach, Haydn and Mozart. He is also artistic director of the Radio Hilversum Chamber Orchestra and the Stavanger SO. His recordings are notable for their clarity of articulation, strong dramatic sense and rhythmic vitality, specially evident in the Haydn London symphonies, Mozart’s late symphonies and the symphonies of Beethoven.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.J. Hedlund: ‘An Untenable Esthetic Posture’, American Recorder, xiv (1973), 12–14

S. Johnson: ‘Back to the Future’, Gramophone, lxvii (1989–90), 1452–3

R. Ehrlich: ‘Frans Brüggen, oder: Die Vermarktung eines Star-Musikers’, Tibia, xviii (1993), 449–53

J.M. THOMSON

Brugk, Hans Melchior

(b Munich, 24 Nov 1909). German composer and teacher. Gifted in the visual arts as well as in music, he first studied art education at the University of Munich; then, from 1935 to 1938, he studied composition and conducting at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst. After six years of military service and imprisonment in Russia he returned to Germany as a teacher and freelance composer. From 1963 to 1976 he taught theory, composition and music education at the Musikhochschule in Munich. In 1981 he was awarded the Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Brugk has composed in all genres except opera and ballet, in a style ranging from a traditional to an expanded tonality. His music bears the stamp of a Bavarian background in its songfulness, its clarity of form and its lively appeal to both performer and listener. His instrumental works, including the numerous pieces for wind band and for brass choir are animated and colourful, full of a rhythmic drive and metrical variety that reflects his admiration for the music of Orff. Brugk’s greatest achievement is considered to be his liturgical music, especially the Missa Cantate Dominum and the Deutsches Te Deum, which draw upon both polyphonic tradition and contemporary practice in their marked use of harmonic colour and declamatory rhythm.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Variationen und Rondo über ein heiteres Thema, op.5, 1941, rev. 1975; Festouvertüre, op.9, 1962; Für die Jugend, suite, op.16, str, pf obbl, perf. 1964; Karneval, op.24, pf, orch, 1963; Sinfonietta, op.27, str, 1966; Sinfonia Serena, op.33, 1976

Choral: Deutsches Te Deum, op.15, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1950; Missa Cantate Dominum, op.19, S, chorus, 1953; Festmesse, op.20, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, 1953; Die Hochzeit zu Kana (cant., B. von Heiseler), op.25, solo vv, chorus, 1956; Hymne an die Musik (G. Flossmann), op.26, chorus, brass, 1961; Bläser-Messe, op.30, 3vv, brass (1965); Ps xlvii, op.31, chorus, 4 brass/org, perf. 1964; Kammermusik (J. Weinheber), op.34/1, chorus, insts ad lib, perf. 1968; other unacc. pieces

Solo vocal: 3 Abschiedslieder (Ger. texts), op.1/3, 1v, pf, 1936–40; Leuchtende Nacht (H. Carossa), op.18, Mez, fl, pf, 1952; Gesänge an Gott (O. Butzer, R. Schaukal, von Heiseler, G. Schüler), op.39, high v, pf, 1974; Gezeiten der Liebe (J.M. Lutz, H. Frank), op.37, S, B, ob/fl, pf, 1975; Letzte Liebe, op.44, B, pf, 1981

Chbr: Pf Qt, op.2, perf. 1950; Pf Qt, op.4, perf. 1966; Pf Trio, op.6, perf. 1967; Str Trio, op.11, perf. 1951; Sonata, op.14, vn, pf, 1951; Serenade, op.22, wind qnt, 1955; Qt, op.32, fl, ob, cl, bn, 1955; Divertimento, op.29, wind qnt, hn, tpt, 1961; Sextet, op.38, wind qnt, pf, 1973; Sonata, op.36, vc, pf, 1974; brass pieces, opp.1, 7, 8, 13, 21, 43

Kbd: 2 pf sonatas: op.3, 1939, op.17, perf. 1955; Präludium, Toccata und Fuge, op.35, org, 1971

Principal publishers: Simrock, Anton Böhm, Kistner & Siegel, Leuckart, Sikorski

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Ott: ‘Hans Melchior Brugk’, Blätter der Bayerischen Staatsoper (7 March 1965)

F. Messmer and G. Weiss: Hans Melchior Brugk (Tutzing, 1984)

CHARLOTTE ERWIN/R

Bruguera (i Morreras), Juan Bautista

(fl 1750–66). Catalan composer. He studied at the Escolanía (choir school) of Montserrat. In 1750 he competed for the post of maestro de capilla of S María del Pino, Barcelona, and in 1763 for that of Toledo Cathedral. In 1765, while maestro de capilla at Figueras (Catalonia), he won a prize medal from the London Catch Club for his Canon Nine in One (to the text of Psalm cxi.1), published in Warren’s Fourth Collection of Catches, Canons and Glees. To aid his brother Pedro, a harpist in Descalzas Reales monastery at Madrid who had challenged Antonio Soler, he published a Carta apologetica que en defensa del Labyrinto de labyrintos compuesto por un autor, cuyo nombre saldrá presto al publico (Barcelona, 1766), chiefly notable for the autobiographical data on the sixth page. Fragments of his sacred works survive in manuscript at the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Pedrell: Catàlech de la Biblioteca musical de la Diputació de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1908–9), i, 87–8; ii, 116, 118

H. Anglés and J. Subirá : Catálogo musical de la Biblioteca nacional de Madrid, ii (Barcelona, 1949), 209–10

ROBERT STEVENSON

Bruhier [Bruchier, Brugier, Bruyer], Antoine

(b ?Noyon; d after 1521). French singer and composer. He described himself in an unpublished document (I-Rvat Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Registra supplicationum 1425, ff.24v–25r) as a cleric of the diocese of Noyon and as the illegitimate son of a priest and a single woman. As he is identified as a cleric of Noyon in other documents, he would appear to have been French, even though he once received a dispensation from Pope Leo X allowing him to take possession of benefices in Geneva and Lyons without being able to speak the language common in those dioceses (but as Bragard has pointed out, this may not have been the same French that was spoken in northern France). He may have been the Antonio Brugier who was in the Milanese court chapel in 1474. For a few months in 1504, Bruhier was master of music at Langres Cathedral and may also have had some connection with the French court, since he is mentioned in Moulu's motet Mater floreat florescat. Between 1505 and 1508 he was employed by Cardinal Ippolito d'Este in Ferrara, also possibly by Sigismondo d'Este and then by the Duke of Urbino. Shortly after the accession of Leo X (11 March 1513), perhaps as early as April 1513, Bruhier became one of the pope's cantori segreti, a position he held for the entire length of Leo's pontificate. Whether he was at the same time a member of the papal chapel is not altogether clear; his salary of 8 ducats (higher than any of the other private singers) was precisely that of the papal singers, but he appears not to have been designated specifically as a singer of the papal chapel until 1519 (not 1517 as published by Frey: see Sherr). There is no trace of Bruhier after Leo's death in 1521.

Along with Ninot le Petit, Bruhier was a master of four-part arrangements of popular French melodies in a kaleidoscopic style mixing short duets, four-voice imitation, homophony and rapid triple-time sections, occasionally setting texts of doubtful literary quality (such as the frankly obscene ‘Frappez petit coup’). This style seems to have flourished at the beginning of the 16th century in the hands of French composers who had some connection with Italy (where most of the music was preserved). Bruhier's sacred music also shows distinct traces of this style. Popular songs (not all identified) underlie most of the movements of the Missa Carminum. This mass uses ‘constructive’ cantus-firmus procedures, such as the consecutive mensural reinterpretation of a segment in the Kyrie and the Obrecht-like procedure of choosing only the breves of the contratenor of Ghizeghem's Allez regretz for the cantus firmus of the Agnus III (and placing that cantus firmus in the bass); but other sections resemble the arrangements that Bruhier excelled in (see for example the Benedictus and Agnus II). Bruhier's other masses have not yet been published in modern transcription. The chanson style can also be seen in his motets, two of which are decidedly secular: both Vivite felices, undoubtedly written to celebrate the meeting of François I and Leo X in Bologna in 1515, and Ave color boni vini might be termed drinking motets. In a letter to Cardinal Ippolito d'Este written from Urbino in about 1508 (I-MOs, Musica e Musicisti, B.I.), Bruhier claimed to have composed two extra voices for the third Agnus Dei of Josquin's Missa ‘L'homme armé’ super voces musicales, as well as a Marian motet and ‘the seven hours of the Passion for three voices’. The additions to the Josquin mass and the Passion pieces have not survived, but the motet could be his Ave celorum regina (I-Bc Q20).

WORKS

masses

Missa Carminum, 4vv, I-CMac M(D), ed. in Cw, cxxvii (1979); Missa ‘Mediatrix nostra’, 4vv, A-Wn 1549⁵; Missa, 4vv, I-CMac M(D)

motets

Ave celorum regina, 4vv, I-Bc Q20, ed. in SCMot, viii (New York, 1990); Ave color boni vini, 4vv, 1544²⁰, ed. in PÄMw, i–iv (1873–6/R); Ecce Panis angelorum, 4vv, I-Fl 666, MOd IX, ed. in MRM, iv (1968); Vivite felices, 4vv, I-Bc Q19, ed. in Cw, cxx (1977)

chansons

Et un gentil clerc, 4vv, I-Fc B.2442; Frappez petit coup, 4vv, Fc B.2442, Fn 164–67; Jaquet, Jaquet, 4vv, Fc B.2442, Fn 164–67; La douleur de mon compère, 4vv, Fc B.2442; L'amour de moy, 2vv, 1545⁷; La turatu, 4vv, Fc B.2442, 1501¹, ed. H. Hewitt, Harmonices Musices Odhecaton A (Cambridge, MA, 1942, 2/1946); Ung amoureux, 3vv, 1536¹, ed. in Masters and Monuments, iii (New York, 1984); Vray Dieu qui me confortera, 4vv, B-Br 11239, I-Rvat 11953, 1502², ed. in MRM, ii (1968) M. Picker, The Chanson Albums of Marguerite of Austria (Berkeley, 1965)

untexted

Canon, 4vv, I-MOd IV

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.-W. Frey: ‘Regesten zur päpstlichen Kapelle unter Leo X. und zu seiner Privatkapelle’, Mf, viii (1955), 58–73, esp. 61–2; 178–99; 412–37, esp. 413–14

A.-M. Bragard: ‘Musiciens flamands et wallons à la cour du Pape Léon X (1513–1521)’, Bulletin de l'Institut historique belge de Rome, xxxii (1960), 75–112, esp. 79–80

H.M. Brown: ‘Chansons for the Pleasure of a Florentine Patrician: Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966, 2/1978), 56–66

F. Lesure: ‘La maîtrise de Langres au XVIe siècle’, RdM, lii (1966), 202–3

H.M. Brown: ‘The Music of the Strozzi Chansonnier’, AcM, xl (1968), 115–29

A. Dunning: Die Staatsmotette 1480–1555 (Utrecht, 1970)

D. Crawford: Sixteenth-Century Choirbooks in the Archivio Capitolare at Casale Monferrato, RMS, ii (1975)

L. Lockwood: ‘Jean Mouton and Jean Michel: New Evidence on French Music and Musicians in Italy, 1505–1520’, JAMS, xxxii (1979), 191–246

R. Sherr: ‘Notes on Some Papal Documents in Paris’, Studi musicali, xii (1983), 5–16

L. Lockwood: ‘Adrian Willaert and Cardinal Ippolito I d'Este: New Light on Willaert's Early Career in Italy 1515–21’, EMH, v (1985), 85–112

RICHARD SHERR

Brühl [of Martinskirche], Hans Moritz, Count of

(b Wiederau, Saxony, 20 Dec 1736; d London, 9 June 1809). German musical dilettante. He is sometimes designated ‘of Martinskirche’ to distinguish him from his cousin Hans Moritz ‘of Seifersdorf’. He was a nephew of the famous minister Count Heinrich Brühl and the son of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Brühl, and served in diplomatic posts in Paris and Warsaw before becoming Saxon ambassador to London in 1764. The count’s marriage (1767) to Lady Egremont, an attendant at the English court, placed him in association with the queen’s retinue of German musicians. He became the patron of, among others, C.F. Horn and the pianist J.S. Schroeter, who dedicated to him his op.1. Clementi’s sonatas op.13 were dedicated to Brühl and Haydn’s canons on the Ten Commandments (hXXVIIa: 1–10) written for him. Brühl himself published a set of six sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment op.1 (c1785) in the modern ‘singing’ style of J.C. Bach and Schroeter, and probably wrote the several interesting but more conservative manuscript sonatas attributed to ‘Count Brühl’ in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden; in 1791 he provided the theme for a set of keyboard variations by Hummel (GB-Lbl). According to Forkel, he supervised the construction of the first piano with strings of tempered steel in 1778; it was subsequently demonstrated by Philidor to the Académie in Paris with much acclaim. Brühl also made notable contributions to astronomy both as patron and in his own right. As he seems not to have been on the Continent at the time, the Count Brühl whom Burney heard sing and perform in Vienna was probably his younger brother Heinrich Adolph Brühl (1744–78), who had been a patron and student of J.A. Hiller in Dresden and Leipzig, 1754–60.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (A.M. Clerke)

EitnerQ

GerberL

J.N. Forkel: Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, i (Gotha, 1778/R), 299

J.S. Ersch and others, eds.: Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Leipzig, 1818–89)

M.T. Baillie: What I have been Told Concerning my Great-Grandmother and my Great-Grandfather, and also my Grandmother, Lady Polwarth (Selkirk, 1900)

R.R. Kidd: The Sonata for Keyboard with Violin Accompaniment in England (1750–1790) (diss., Yale U., 1967), 271

RONALD R. KIDD

Bruhns, Friedrich Nicolaus.

German composer. See under Bruhns, Nicolaus.

Bruhns, Nicolaus

(b Schwabstedt, nr Husum, Advent 1665; d Husum, 29 March 1697). German composer, organist, violinist and viol player. His family formed a small musical dynasty in Schleswig-Holstein. His grandfather, Paul (d Lübeck, 17 Jan 1655), a professional lutenist to the ducal court at Gottorf and to Lübeck town council, was married to the daughter of Nicolaus Bleyer. Their three sons chose different musical careers. Friedrich Nicolaus (b Schleswig, 11 Feb 1637; d Hamburg, 13 March 1718), the eldest, directed music for the cathedral and town council of Hamburg; two arias by him were published (Hamburg, 1692 and 1693); Satanas und sein Getümmel, formerly attributed to Böhm, is also probably by him (ed. in G. Böhm: Sämtliche Werke: Vokalwerke, ed. J. Wolgast, rev. G. Wolgast, ii, Wiesbaden, 1963). The youngest son, Peter (b Lübeck, 20 Nov 1641; d Lübeck, 23 April 1698), studied string instruments with his father and stepfather, Nathanael Schnittelbach, and the middle son, Paul (b Lübeck, 6 April 1640; d Schwabstedt, c1689), became an organist and may have studied with Tunder. As was a practice of the time, he secured a position at Schwabstedt by marrying his predecessor’s daughter. They had two sons, Nicolaus and Georg (b Schwabstedt, Nov 1666; d Husum, 18 Jan 1742).

According to Gerber, Nicolaus Bruhns ‘at an early age could play the organ and write quite well for keyboard and voice’. When he was 16 his father sent him and his brother to live at Lübeck with their uncle Peter. Bruhns learnt the violin and bass viol from him and the organ and composition from Buxtehude, who regarded him as a favourite pupil and who sent him out into the world with the highest recommendation. For a few years he worked as a composer and virtuoso violinist in Copenhagen, where Italian musicians, among others, broadened his stylistic background. On 29 March 1689 he competed for the position of organist of the Stadtkirche, Husum. The decision to appoint him was unanimous, ‘since never before had the city heard his like in composition and performance on all manner of instruments’. Only a month or two elapsed before the civic authorities at Kiel tried to woo him away to fill the vacancy caused by the departure for Copenhagen of their organist, Claus Dengel. Making an exception in his case alone, the authorities at Husum protected their interests by raising his salary. As a result he remained in this pleasant, thriving town, enjoying the support and approbation of clergy and musicians until his untimely death. Since his only son, Johan Paul, had chosen theology as a career, he was succeeded by his brother, Georg.

It is unfortunate that none of Bruhns’s chamber music has survived, especially his compositions for violin and viol. The solo cantata Mein Herz ist bereit opens with a brilliant polyphonic sonatina that displays the double and multiple stopping technique of the north German school of violin virtuosos. A well-known passage in Mattheson may relate to such works as this: ‘Sometimes he took his violin up to the organ loft and played with such skill that it sounded like two, three or more instruments at once. Thus he would realize the upper parts on the violin while his feet played an appropriate bass on the pedals’. His extant compositions are for the church and amount to five organ works and 12 vocal works – not an insignificant number considering his early death. Kölsch considered two other cantatas that Eitner ascribed to him to be the work of his uncle Friedrich Nicolaus; Sanctus est Dominus Deus Sabaoth, not mentioned by Eitner, may be a third (all three works are in D-Bsb).

Bruhns’s four praeludia are modelled after Buxtehude’s. Two of them, the G major and the longer of the two E minor ones, are in his five-section form: brilliant toccata-like prelude, 4/4 fugue, middle section, 3/4 (3/2) or 4/4 (12/8) fugue and concluding toccata. Bruhns also employed elements of his teacher’s fugal technique, in particular repeated-note subjects and counter-subjects, and thematic transformation in the G major and shorter E minor works. The latter also makes extensive use of the echo device, after the manner of Sweelinck’s fantasias. The toccatas equal Lübeck’s in technical brilliance and include extended passages for solo and double pedal and others that recall violin figuration, but apart from the two excellent E minor works there is not quite the same strength of internal organization as in Lübeck’s music. Bruhns’s setting of the Advent chorale Nun komm der Heiden Heiland is open to similar criticism, though the north German chorale fantasia, itself a potpourri of three diverse older forms, the organ ricercare, organ chorale and toccata, tends to be disjunctive in its line-by-line treatment of the verbal text. Bruhns’s piece, played perhaps during the Communion, is in the tradition of Buxtehude, Lübeck, Reincken, Scheidemann and Tunder and uses imitative, free-fantasia and echo techniques. He could not possibly have known Böhm’s ornamental style, as Sharp suggested.

It is the 12 vocal works that, despite their marked inequality, firmly establish Bruhns’s importance in the mid-Baroque period. He brought the Italian solo cantata to new heights of virtuosity in Germany with his four small-scale sacred concertos. Three of these, De profundis, Mein Herz ist bereit and, perhaps the weakest, Der Herr hat seinen Stuhl, may have been written between 1689 and 1691 for the famous bass Georg Ferber, who had been Kantor at Husum for 14 years before moving to nearby Schleswig two years before Bruhns arrived. The three sacred madrigal cantatas, Hemmt eure Trähnenfluht, Muss nicht der Mensch and O werter heilger Geist, provide a direct link with the 18th century and the work of Bach. For some reason Bruhns seemed to attach less importance than his contemporaries to two other forms, each of which is represented in his output by only a single work: the chorale concerto by Erstanden ist der heilige Christ and the concerto-aria cantata by Ich liege und schlaffe, though Geck considered the latter undoubtedly the most beautiful of his larger-scale works. The three remaining ensemble concertos include Die Zeit meines Abschieds, a work of strong formal organization. The instrumental writing in the vocal works suggests that Bruhns, like Lübeck, could draw on musicians of only average competence. In the main he used a five-part string ensemble with two violas or viols, typical of French music of the period, and with bassoon and continuo.

Concerning Bruhns’s influence on Bach the evidence is inconclusive. The obituary of Bach by J.F. Agricola and C.P.E. Bach stated that he took the keyboard works of Bruhns, among others, as models. Some of Bach’s early works do show superficial resemblances – bwv568, for example, to the Prelude in G – but in formulae common to the period.

WORKS

Edition:N. Bruhns: Gesammelte Werke, ed. F. Stein, EDM, 2nd ser., Schleswig-Holstein und Hansestädte, i–ii (1937–9) [S]

sacred vocal

all in S

Alleluja. Paratum cor meum (ensemble conc.), 3vv, vn, 2 b viol, bc

De profundis clamavi (sacred conc.), B, 2 vn, bc, ?1689–91

Der Herr hat seinen Stuhl im Himmel bereitet (sacred conc.), B, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc, ?1689–91

Die Zeit meines Abschieds ist vorhanden (ensemble conc.), 4vv, 5 insts [2 vn, 2 va, bn], bc

Erstanden ist der heilige Christ (chorale conc.), 2vv, 2 vn, bc

Hemmt eure Trähnenfluht (sacred madrigal cant.), 4vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc

Ich liege und schlaffe (conc.-aria cant.), 4vv, 5 insts [2 vn, 2 va, bn], bc [first chorus retexted as Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden]

Jauchzet dem Herren alle Welt (sacred conc.), T, 2 vn [bn], bc

Mein Herz ist bereit (sacred conc.), B, vn, bc, ?1689–91

Muss nicht der Mensch auff dieser Erden im steten Streite seyn (sacred madrigal cant.), 4vv, 2 clarini, 2 vn, bn, bc

O werter heilger Geist (sacred madrigal cant.), 4vv, 2 clarini, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc, ?Easter 1691

Woll dem, der den Herren fürchtet (ensemble conc.), 3vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc

organ

[4] Praeludia, 2 in e, G, g; ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1972); ed. M. Radulescu (Vienna, 1993); 3 ed. in Organum, iv/8 (Leipzig, 1925)

Nun komm der Heiden Heiland; ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1972); ed. M. Radulescu (Vienna, 1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

EitnerQ

GerberNL

FrotscherG

MatthesonGEP

H. Keller: Die Orgelwerke Bachs: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte, Form, Deutung und Wiedergabe (Leipzig, 1948/R; Eng. trans., 1967)

H. Kölsch: Nicolaus Bruhns (Kassel, 1958)

R.C. Fosse: ‘Nicolaus Bruhns’, The Musical Heritage of the Lutheran Church, ed. T. Hoelty-Nickel, v (St Louis, 1959), 92–107

G.B. Sharp: ‘Nicolaus Bruhns’, MT, cvii (1966), 677–80

M. Geck: Nicolaus Bruhns: Leben und Werk (Cologne, 1968)

K.G. Powell: The North German Organ Toccata (1650–1710) (DMA diss., U. of Illinois, 1969)

K.G. Powell: ‘An Analysis of the North German Toccatas’, The Diapason, lxii/5 (1970–71), 27–9

K.J. Snyder: Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (New York, 1987)

G.A. Webber: North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford, 1996)

HUGH J. McLEAN

Bruins, Theo

(b Arnhem, 25 Nov 1929; d Haarlem, 8 Jan 1993). Dutch pianist and composer. He studied with Jaap Spaanderman at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum, and gave his first concerts and recitals in 1946. From 1948 to 1950 he studied in Paris with Yves Nat, and in 1951 he became a composition pupil of Kees van Baaren. In 1960, after a recital in London, he was awarded the Harriet Cohen Beethoven Medal. Bruins’s playing was distinguished by great clarity and intelligence, and he was one of the most sought-after interpreters of contemporary music, although his repertory was by no means limited to this field. The Dutch composers van Baaren, Jan van Vlijmen and Tristan Keuris dedicated concertos to him. After his death recordings of several of his concerts were released on CD, among them a recital of works by Debussy and Berg, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and the three piano concertos of Bartók. Bruins’s own compositions include a piano concerto in serial style (1952); for solo piano, a sonata (1955), the serial Sei studi (1963) and Quartet ’84 (1984); Tremani (1991) for two pianos and Sincope (1992) for harpsichord.

TRUUS DE LEUR

Brulé, Gace.

See Gace Brule.

Brüll, Ignaz

(b Prossnitz [now Prostějov], 7 Nov 1846; d Vienna, 17 Sept 1907). Austrian pianist and composer. He came from a musical family that had settled in Vienna by 1850. There he studied the piano with Julius Epstein and composition with Johann Rufinatscha and Otto Dessoff. In 1861 Epstein played a concerto by Brüll; this brought the young composer to the public’s attention. In 1864 his First Serenade for orchestra was played in Stuttgart, and in the same year he completed his first opera, Die Bettler von Samarkand. He appeared as a concert pianist in Vienna and made several concert tours, including one in 1878 to London, where he played in 20 concerts; however composing gradually replaced performing as his main activity. He taught at the Horák piano school in Vienna (1872–8) and became one of its directors in 1881. A retiring, modest man, he was a member of the Brahms circle in Vienna and a close friend of Brahms, for and with whom he often played. His greatest success was the opera Das goldene Kreuz, which was first produced in Berlin in 1875 and revived in London three years later by Carl Rosa.

WORKS

Stage: 10 ops, incl. Die Bettler von Samarkand (op, O. Prechtler), Vienna, 1874; Das goldene Kreuz (romantische Oper, 2, S.H. Mosenthal, after A.H.J. Mélesville and N. Brazier: Catherine), Berlin, Kgl, 22 Dec 1875 (Berlin, 1876); Ein Märchen aus der Champagne (ballet), Vienna, 1896

Vocal: partsongs, a cappella and with pf acc.; vocal duets; numerous solo songs

Orch: Sym., e; 3 serenades; 4 ovs.; 3 ints; 2 pf concs.; Rhapsody, pf, orch; Andante and Allegro, pf, orch; Vn Conc.

Chbr and pf: Pf Trio; Sonata, vc, pf; 4 sonatas, other works, vn, pf; Sonata, other works, 2 pf; Sonata, 4 suites, many other works, pf solo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (J.A. Parkinson) [incl. complete list of ops]

NDB (W. Bollert)

E. von Komorzynski: Obituary, Die Musik, vii/1 (1907–8), 229–30

H. Schwarz: Ignaz Brüll und sein Freundeskreis (Vienna, 1922)

H. Wecker: ‘“Der liebenswürdige Komponist des Goldenen Kreuzes”: eine kritische Würdigung Ignaz Brülls’, Brahms Congress: Vienna 1983, 471–80

H. Wecker: Der Epigone: Ignaz Brüll – ein jüdischer Komponist im Wiener Brahms-Kreis (diss., U. of Marburg, 1991)

R.J. PASCALL

Brumby, Colin (James)

(b Melbourne, 18 June 1933). Australian composer. After undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne (BMus, 1956) and a spell of teaching in Australia, he undertook advanced compositional studies in Spain, England (with Goehr), and Italy (1962–4). In 1964 he was appointed to a lecturership at the University of Queensland, where he later became senior lecturer, then reader. In 1971 he received the DMus of the University of Melbourne; other awards have included the Don Banks Fellowship (1990).

Strongly influenced by Anglican and Catholic choral traditions in his youth, Brumby came under the spell of Schoenberg's music during his BMus studies. Many of his works until the early 1970s were constructed serially. One of his first systematic serial explorations was Fibonacci Variations (1963), in which the number series was applied to the durations of a 12-note row. Brumby still worked with simple, motivically generated melody, however, and nurtured these qualities in several highly popular operettas for children written during the late 1960s and toured throughout Queensland. A series of full operatic and choral works soon followed, and with them the start of a long-lasting collaboration with librettist Thomas Shapcott.

Sabbatical studies with Evangelisti during 1972 engendered a stylistic crisis, from which Brumby emerged convinced of the derivative nature of much of his existing serial output. He dedicated himself to ‘melody as the principal means of expression, and a harmony in which the notes do matter’. The Phoenix and the Turtle (1973), a free fantasia for strings and harpsichord, was the first work in Brumby's new tonally affirming style. Since 1973 he has written prolifically, both for professional and amateur ensembles. Victimae paschali (1977), for chorus and string orchestra, is one of the finest examples of his preferred, mixed vocal/instrumental medium. Brumby's many original songs and folksong arrangements have proven immensely popular in schools and with choirs of all levels. The reaffirmation of tonality has also been associated with varied approaches to traditional forms. His Piano Concerto (1984) is identical formally with Beethoven's ‘Emperor’, and his Piano Quartet (1983–4) is formally indebted to Dvořák.

Many of Brumby's recent compositions have been commissioned for institutional anniversaries. His cantata A Special Inheritance (1990), for Pymble Ladies' College, Sydney, explores in part the sounds of a birds' dawn chorus, with freely interpolated cockatoo sounds. Brumby does not, however, promote an ‘Australian’ style, believing that European traditions still predominate in the nation's, and his own, musical thinking.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

librettos by the composer unless otherwise stated

The Seven Deadly Sins (op, 2, T. Shapcott), 1970, Brisbane, 1970; The Marriage Machine (op, 1), 1971, Sydney, 1972, orchd 1985, Sydney, 1985; Masques (ballet), 1977; La donna (op, 1, D. Goddard), 1986, workshop perf., Sydney, 1988; Lorenzaccio (op, 3, after A. de Musset), 1986, 2 scenes, Sydney, 1986; Fire on the Wind (op, 2, after A. Coburn), 1990, excerpts, workshop perf., Brisbane, 1991; Summer Carol (op, 1, Shapcott), 1990, Canberra, 1991; 7 chldren’s operettas, 1967–70 [listed in GroveO]

instrumental

Orch: Fibonacci Variations, 1963; The Phoenix and the Turtle, str, hpd, 1973; Fl Conc., 1975; Sym. no.1, 1981; Bn Conc., 1982; Paean, 1982; Vn Conc. no.2, 1982–3; Gui Conc., 1983; Pf Conc., 1984; South Bank Ov., 1984; Ob Concertino, 1986; Cl Conc., 1988; Scena, eng hn, str, 1988; Va Conc., 1990; Tpt Conc., 1991; Sym. no.2, 1993; West End Ov., 1993; Org Conc., 1994; Vc Conc., 1994–5

Chbr: Str Qt, 1965; Haydn Down Under, bn qnt, 1980; Cl Sonata, 1981; The Seven Ages of Man, wind qnt, 1981; Pf Qt, 1983–4; Bn Sonata, 1984; Mundoolun, eng hn, pf, 1989; Aubade, vn, pf, 1991

Solo inst: Doubles, pf, 1972; Captain Logan's Fancy, org, 1988; Toccata, org, 1995

vocal

Stabat mater speciosa (cant.), S, Mez, T, Bar, SATB, str qt, wind qt, hp, timp, 1965; Bring out your Christmas Masks (T. Shapcott), S, Mez, T, Bar, SATB, dancers, actors, orch, org, 1969; Charlie Bubbles' Book of Hours (Brumby), S, Mez, T, Bar, SATB, orch, 1969; Victimae paschali, SATB, str orch, 1977; Three Baroque Angels (Shapcott), SATB, orch, 1978; Orpheus Beach (Shapcott), S, Bar, orch, 1978

The Vision and the Gap (Shapcott), S, A, T, Bar, 1984; The Ballad of Sydney Hospital (Shapcott), S, Bar, SATB, orch, 1988; Canti pisani (trad. Italian), 1v, orch, 1989; A Special Inheritance (Shapcott), cant, 4 choirs, orch, 1990; many other choral works, acc. and unacc.; songs, 1v, pf

Principal publishers: Augsburg Fortress, York, Fentone, Walton, Aberdeen Music

WRITINGS

The Art of Prolonging the Musical Tone (Brisbane, 1968)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC1 (J. Dawson)

P. Bračanin: ‘Colin Brumby’, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century, ed. F. Callaway and D. Tunley (Melbourne, 1976), 173–81

W.M. Penny: Developing Variation in Selected Works by Colin Brumby (diss., U. of Queensland, 1977)

R.F. Justum: An Examination of Musical–Textual Relationships in the Choral Music of Colin Brumby (diss., U. of North Texas, 1995)

MALCOLM GILLIES

Brumel [Brummel, Brommel, Brunel, Brunello], Antoine

(b c1460; d ?1512–13). French composer. He was prominent among a group of composers who ranked, after Josquin des Prez, as the most eminent masters of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. He was praised by numerous writers: Crétin, Eloy d’Amerval, Gaffurius, Ornithoparchus, Heyden, Rabelais, Glarean, Coclico, Hermann Finck, Zarlino and Morley. He was perhaps the first of the great Renaissance composers of French rather than Netherlandish origin.

BARTON HUDSON

1. Life.

Brumel may have been born at Brunelles, near Nogent-le-Rotrou, west of Chartres, about 1460. A famous passage in Crétin’s déploration on the death of Ockeghem has often been interpreted to mean that Brumel was a pupil of the great master of Tours:

Agricolla, Verbonnet, Prioris
Josquin Desprez, Gaspar, Brumel, Compère,
Ne parlez plus de joyeulx chantz ne ris,
Mais composez ung Ne recorderis,
Pour lamenter nostre maistre et bon père.

However, nothing in Brumel’s early works points to a close connection with Ockeghem. The earliest mention of the composer is found at Chartres, where the cleric Anthonius de Brumel became an horarius et matutinarius (singer at the day and night Office) at Notre Dame on 9 August 1483. Because of his abilities, he was granted the larger stipend of the church. By 4 October 1486 he had become Master of the Innocents at St Pierre, Geneva, where he remained until 1492. Meanwhile he was given leave for a period during 1489–90 to visit the court of the Duke of Savoy at Chambéry. Although offered a position there, he returned to Geneva, where relations with the chapter authorities became so strained that he suddenly left in August 1492. His immediate destination remains unknown, but in 1497 he was a canon at Laon Cathedral. At some time he became a priest, probably during that interim.

On 5 January 1498 Brumel was placed in charge of the education and musical training of the children at Notre Dame, Paris. In September 1500 he was given two weeks’ vacation to visit his birthplace, which, although unnamed, must have been in the general vicinity. Later the same year a controversy arose over the appointment of a new choirboy, so that again Brumel resigned in unpleasant circumstances. From 1 June 1501 to 1 July 1502 he was employed at Chambéry as a singer at the ducal court.

In July 1505 Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara entered negotiations through an intermediary, Sigismondo Cantelmo, Duke of Sora, then at Lyons, to employ the composer as maestro di cappella. The lifetime contract offered provided a benefice valued at 100 ducats a year, an annual salary of 100 ducats, a house in Ferrara and 50 ducats toward the expenses of travel to Ferrara. Brumel began his duties in August 1506 and remained at Ferrara until the chapel was disbanded in 1510. A document of 11 May 1512 indicates that Brumel was then archpriest of the united churches of S Johannes in Libia and S Sabina outside Faenza, and that he was probably in Mantua at about this time. Circumstances surrounding the document suggest that the composer was then quite ill and may have died soon after. At least one important work, the Missa de beata virgine, seems to have been composed after Brumel left Ferrara.

Vincenzo Galilei wrote a treatise (I-Fn Anteriori Galilei, vol.i, f.138) in which he listed a number of French and Netherlandish composers, including Brumel, who he said assembled in Rome in 1513, when Leo X was elected pope (see Lowinsky). Nothing has been found to confirm Brumel’s activities there. Since Galilei was born at about the time Brumel died, he could have had no direct knowledge of the event, and his report may be incorrect.

Brumel, Antoine

2. Works.

Brumel lived during a period of profound changes in style, as his music exemplifies. Elusive, meandering lines gave way to sensuous, harmonically orientated textures; abstract melismatic polyphony following purely musical precepts relatively independent of text was replaced by word-orientated, increasingly syllabic settings with growing care for text underlay. Varied mensurations and irregular rhythmic patterns were progressively eliminated in favour of a more predictable flow, most often in duple measure. Simultaneous rather than successive composition of voice parts became the norm and greater harmonic direction was achieved. The reasons for the reorientation were at least partly geographical: Franco-Flemish masters who emigrated to Italy developed a new musical language resulting from the fusion of traditional northern contrapuntal prowess and elements of native Italian music. Brumel was one of the masters who played a leading role in effecting this transformation.

Brumel was primarily a composer of sacred music. Most prominent among his works are the masses, not only because of their quantity and bulk, but also because of the frequency with which they occur in the sources. It was to them that theorists turned most often for music examples. Petrucci devoted an early volume to five of Brumel’s masses, and later publications regularly featured masses and motets. Andrea Antico’s celebrated Liber quindecim missarum (1516) contains three masses by Brumel, including his Missa de beata virgine, which opens the volume.

Brumel’s masses may conveniently be divided into three stylistic periods. The first is represented by the five in the Petrucci publication (‘Berzerette savoyenne’, ‘Je nay dueul’, ‘L’homme armé’, ‘Ut re mi fa sol la’ and ‘Victimae paschali’) as well as by Missa ‘Bon temps’. All depend primarily on a cantus firmus for their formal design, though Missae ‘Berzerette savoyenne’ and ‘Je nay dueul’ occasionally draw material from several voices of their models, indicating an incipient parody technique. Missa ‘Ut re mi fa sol la’ is a kind of fantasy in which the hexachord material not only provides the sole material of the tenor but also pervades the surrounding voices. Characteristic of all the earlier masses are irregular, unpredictable rhythms and lengthy overlapping phrases lacking pronounced internal divisions. Often there seems to be little relationship between music and text. On the other hand rapid declamatory passages, which seem to be peculiar to Brumel, are occasionally encountered (ex.1). Ternary mensuration, variety of mensuration and occasional simultaneous use of different mensurations are evident. Of special interest is the final Agnus Dei of Missa ‘Bon temps’. The cantus firmus is disposed in half-blackened breves, so that an implied quintuple metre results.

The masses of the middle period (‘Descendi in hortum’, Missa dominicalis, Missa ‘Et ecce terrae motus’ and the first untitled mass) show a tendency towards greater regularity of rhythm – sometimes very pronounced, as in Missa ‘Descendi in hortum’ – more flexible and thinner textures and more concise phrases. Greater interest is shown in apt text-setting. Vertical sonorities are clearer and the harmonic progressions more predictable. Occasionally considerable vocal virtuosity is required, as in ex.2.

The most striking of these masses is Missa ‘Et ecce terrae motus’ for 12 voices, which foreshadows polychoral writing. A work of such proportions must have been a distinct novelty at the time. The Easter antiphon which serves as the cantus firmus is often skilfully moulded into a three-part canon. Very slow harmonic movement is offset by vigorous rhythmic movement, with triadic motifs overlapping one another in quick succession. The rather close grouping of the lower voices sometimes produces a thick, heavy texture, perhaps reflecting the composer’s inexperience with large forces.

Among the later masses is a Missa pro defunctis, one of the earliest extant requiem settings, and the oldest that includes the Dies Irae. Brumel’s love of canon, exemplified in numerous earlier masses, is most evident in Missa ‘A l’ombre d'ung buissonet’; like Josquin’s chanson, on which it is based, it consists entirely of canons, mostly double canons. It also represents the extreme of the trend in the later works towards concentration and brevity; the entire Kyrie, for example, is only nine bars long. A work from which Glarean drew several examples is the Missa de dringhs, whose title he gave in Greek letters. Although the title has never been satisfactorily explained, the mass is now known to be a parody of the composer’s own chanson Tous les regretz. Both are characterized by a strongly chordal style, reminiscent of the contemporary Italian lauda. Probably the most famous of Brumel’s works is the Missa de beata virgine, which Glarean found ‘worthy of a great man’. He compared it, not entirely favourably, with Josquin’s mass of the same title, and said that both had been written when their composers were ‘verging towards extreme old age’. Both are in a learned, somewhat retrospective style.

Numerous bicinia by Brumel are found in 16th-century collections. All but one of these prove to be mass sections, usually excerpts from complete masses, such as ‘Pleni sunt caeli’, Benedictus or the second Agnus Dei.

Brumel’s motets include a wide variety of types: sequences, antiphons, hymns, prayers, psalms and the like, as well as those composed to texts compiled from a variety of sources. The greatest number are devoted to Marian themes, somewhat fewer to feasts of the Temporale, and the remainder to various saints or unspecified liturgical use. Three of what appear to be the older motets are bitextual, one voice bearing the cantus firmus with its text, the others composed to different words. One of these, Nativitas unde gaudia, can be dated with reasonable certainty from Brumel’s years at Chartres and may well be his oldest extant work.

Motets which do not have a cantus firmus in long note values frequently do present a borrowed melody in one or more voices, skilfully paraphrased and in a style indistinguishable from the surrounding voices. Such is the case with nearly every liturgical text which has a well-known melody, such as Haec dies, Regina caeli laetare and Sub tuum praesidium. Sequences, prayers and rhymed metrical antiphons, however, seem to be without borrowed material.

Magnificat settings use material from the plainchant tones. Settings vary from only six verses to all 12, with a single work usually appearing in two or three distinct versions. Especially noteworthy is an Exemplum octo modorum, which occurs singly and also as the ‘Sicut erat’ of a dubious Magnificat octavi toni. Each voice paraphrases a different tone, so that all eight modes are in use simultaneously. The Magnificat secundi toni is attributed in E-Bc M.454 to ‘Fr. Benito’ or ‘Fr. Venito’, and the three other works carrying this ascription may also be Brumel's.

Secular works are of secondary importance. Several incorporate recognized borrowed material; others are probably settings of unidentified pre-existing melodies. The later ones are clearly of a popular nature (e.g. Dieu te gart and Le moy de may). Four-voice pieces have texts whereas, with one exception, the three-voice ones are purely instrumental.

Brumel, Antoine

WORKS

Edition:A. Brumel: Opera omnia, ed. B. Hudson, CMM, v/1–6 (1969–72) [H]

masses and mass sections



Title	No. of voices	H	Comments

Missa ‘A l’ombre d’ung buissonet’	4	iv, 52	Double canons throughout; parody of Josquin’s chanson
Missa ‘Berzerette savoyenne’	4	i, 20	Cantus firmus: S of Josquin’s chanson
Missa ‘Bon temps’	4	ii, 1	Cantus firmus: a melody common to several chanson settings, e.g. anon. piece in Petrucci’s Canti B (ed. in MRM, ii, 1967)
Missa de beata virgine	4	iv, 1	Paraphrases plainchant melodies: Kyrie IX, Gloria IX, Credo I, Sanctus IX, Agnus Dei XVII
Missa de dringhs	4	iv, 35	Parody of Brumel’s chanson, ‘Tous les regretz’; the title, written in Greek letters by Glarean and Wilfflingseder, is unexplained
Missa ‘Descendi in Hortum’	4	ii, 48	Paraphrase of plainsong antiphon
Missa dominicalis	4	ii, 24	Paraphrases plainsong melodies: Kyrie XI, Gloria XI, Credo IV, Sanctus VIII
Missa ‘Et ecce terrae motus’	12	iii, 1	Cantus firmus: Easter plainsong antiphon; the mass survives in a Munich choirbook used for a performance under Lassus, c1570
Missa ‘Je nay dueul’	4	i, 1	Cantus firmus: T of Agricola’s chanson, which is also parodied at times
Missa ‘L’homme armé’	4	i, 65	Cantus firmus mass on chanson melody treated by numerous other composers
Missa pro defunctis	4	iv, 65	Based on introit, Kyrie, sequence and communion of plainsong Mass for the Dead; earliest known requiem to include the Dies irae
Missa ‘Ut re mi fa sol la’	4	i, 41	A hexachord mass
Missa ‘Victimae paschali’	4	i, 89	Cantus firmus: Easter sequence
Missa [untitled]	4	ii, 74
Missa [untitled]	4	iv, 84 (Kyrie)	Survives in I-Rvat Pal.lat.1982, a S partbook; only Kyrie is complete in Bc Q19
Benedictus, fuga ex una	2	iv, 114	Probably belonged to a complete mass now lost
Benedictus	2	iv, 115	Probably belonged to a complete mass now lost
Credo	4	iv, 87
Credo	4	iv, 92
Credo	4	iv, 99
Credo villayge	4	iv, 106
Pleni sunt caeli, fuga ex una	2	iv, 113	Probably belonged to a complete mass now lost

other sacred

Ave, ancilla Trinitatis	3	v, 1	Extra-liturgical prayer
Ave cujus conceptio	4	v, 3	Votive antiphon
Ave Maria, gratia Dei plena	3	v, 6
Ave stella matutina	4	v, 8	Sequence
Ave virgo gloriosa	4	v, 12	Sequence
Beata es, Maria	4	v, 18	Marian antiphon and other texts
Bonus et rectus Dominus [=Noe, noe, noe]	4
Conceptus hodiernus Mariae semper virginis	4	v, 21	Rhymed office antiphon
Da pacem, Domine	4	v, 28	Antiphon for peace; plainsong paraphrased in double canon
Dominus dissipat consilia	2	iv, 116	Probably part of a complete mass now lost
Exemplum octo modorum	8	vi, 62	Occurs also as the ‘Sicut erat’ of Magnificat (doubtful works); each voice is in a different mode
Gloria, laus et honor	4	v, 29	Hymn; conflicting ascriptions to Brumel and Josquin
Haec dies quam fecit Dominus	4	v, 37	T lost; Easter gradual respond or antiphon
Heth. Cogitavit Dominus	4	v, 38	Lamentation
Languente miseris	5	v, 43	Text: incipits only; cantus firmus ‘Clamor meus ad te’ in T; sub-titled Lamentatio Brumel (perhaps a ?secular motet)
Lauda Sion Salvatorem	4	v, 46	Sequence
Laudate Dominum de caelis	4	v, 53	Psalms cxlviii and cl
Magnificat primi toni	3	vi, 1
Magnificat secundi toni	4	vi, 7, 24	Attrib. Brumel and ‘Fr. Benalt’ or ‘Fr. Venalt’
Magnificat sexti toni	4	vi, 39
Mater patris et filia	3	v, 63	Rhymed office antiphon
Nativitas unde gaudia/Nativitas tua, Dei genitrix	4	v, 65	Compilation of various texts
Nato canunt omnia	5	v, 71	Compilation of various Christmas texts
Noe, noe, noe	4	v, 84	Text inc.; exists also with text Bonus et rectus Dominus (Psalm xxiv.8–11)
O crux, ave, spes unica	4	v, 85	Passion hymn (verse 6 of Vexilla regis)
O Domine Jesu Christe	4	v, 86	Prayer
Philippe, qui videt me	4	v, 89	Antiphon; T lost
Quae est ista	4	v, 91	Responsory
Regina caeli laetare	4	v, 95	Marian antiphon
Regina caeli laetare	4	v, 99	Marian antiphon
Rosa novum dans adorem	4	v, 103	Sequence
Sicut lilium inter spinas	4	v, 110	Antiphon
Sub tuum praesidium	4	v, 111	Marian antiphon
Vidi aquam	4	iv, 80	Mass antiphon

secular vocal

Dieu te gart, bergere	4	vi, 70	B lost
Du tout plongiet/Fors seulement	4	vi, 74	S of Ockeghem’s rondeau appears in T; exists also as inst piece, Fors seulement as incipit in all voices
James que la ne peult estre	4	vi, 80	Opening of the Du Fay-Binchois chanson, Je ne vis oncques la pareille appears in T
Le moy de may	4	vi, 84	B lost
Tous les regretz	4	vi, 101

instrumental

Amours, amours	3	vi, 68
En amours que cognoist	3	vi, 76
En ung matin [=Vray dieu d’amour]	3
Esnu sy que plus ne porroie	3	vi, 78
Fors seulement [=Du tout plongiet/Fors seulement]	4
Gracieuse gente meuniere	3	vi, 79	Based on popular melody known from two earlier quodlibets; given title ‘Jamay’ in H (from E-SE), but correct title in CH-Bu F IX 22
Jamays [=Gracieuse gente meuniere]	3	vi, 79
Je despite tous	3	vi, 83
So ich bedenck [=Vray dieu d'amour] Pour vostre amour	3	vi, 87
Tandernac	3	vi, 88
Una maistresse	3	vi, 102
Vray dieu d’amour	3	vi, 104, 113	Based on popular melody from F-Pn 12744; appears with text and without; also found with incipit En ung matin and So ich bedenck

doubtful works

Missa sine nomine			Attrib. ‘Fr. Benalt’ or ‘Fr. Venalt’; ed. Ros-Fábregas, ii, 73–96
Ave Maria, gratia plena	4	v, 113	Attrib. Brumel in index, Jo. Brumes at heading in I-Rvat C.S.45
Credo	4	iv, 118	In MOd IV the christian name is Antonius but the surname has been seriously damaged; enough remains to show it is neither Brumel nor Fevin, the names added in pencil by E. Pancaldi (d 1950)
Magnificat primi toni			Attrib. ‘Fr. Benalt’ or ‘Fr. Venalt’; ed. Ros-Fábregas, ii, 179–89
Magnificat octavi toni	4	vi, 48	Only the ‘Sicut erat’ (Exemplum octo modorum) is attrib. Brumel
Magnificat octavi toni			Attrib. ‘Fr. Benalt’ or ‘Fr. Venalt’; ed. Ros-Fábregas, ii, 201–14

Brumel, Antoine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LockwoodMRF

Vander StraetenMPB, vi

P. Wagner: Geschichte der Messe (Leipzig, 1913/R)

A. Pirro: ‘Dokumente über Antoine Brumel, Louis van Pullaer und Crispin van Stappen’, ZMw, xi (1928–9), 349–53

C. van den Borren: Geschiedenis van de muziek in de Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 1948–51)

E.E. Lowinsky: ‘A Newly Discovered Sixteenth-Century Motet Manuscript at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome’, JAMS, iii (1950), 173–232

L. Biggle: The Masses of Antoine Brumel (diss., U. of Michigan, 1953)

H.C. Wolff: Die Musik der alten Niederländer (Leipzig, 1956)

C. van den Borren: ‘L'énigme des “Credo de Village”’, Hans Albrecht in Memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 48–54

P. Pidoux: ‘Antoine Brumel à Genève (1486–1492)’, RdM, l (1964), 110–12

C. Maas: ‘Josquin – Agricola – Brumel – De la Rue: een authenticiteitsprobleem’, TVNM, xx (1964–5), 120–39

C.J. Maas: Geschiedenis van het meerstemmig Magnificat tot omstreeks 1525 (Groningen, 1967)

M.-T. Bouquet: ‘La cappella musicale dei duchi di Savoia dal 1450 al 1500’, RIM, iii (1968), 233–85

C. Gottwald: ‘Antoine Brumels Messe “Et ecce terrae motus”’, AMw, xxvi (1969), 236–47

H.L. Schmidt: The First Printed Lute Books: Francesco Spinacini's Intabulatura de Lauto, Libro Primo and Libro Secundo (Venezia: Petrucci, 1507) (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1969)

M. Staehelin: Der Grüne Codex der Viadrina: ein wenig beachtete Quelle zur Musik des späten 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Mainz, 1970), 577–644

B. Hudson: ‘Antoine Brumel’s Magnificat 8. Toni: an Erroneous Ascription?’, RBM, xxv (1971), 103–7

B. Hudson: ‘Antoine Brumel’s Nativitas unde gaudia’, MQ, lix (1973), 519–30

E. Russell: ‘The Missa in agendis mortuorum of Juan García de Basurto: Johannes Ockeghem, Antoine Brumel, and an Early Spanish Polyphonic Requiem Mass’, TVNM, xxix (1979), 1–37

C. Wright: ‘Antoine Brumel and Patronage at Paris’, Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts, ed. I. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), 37–60

A.F. Carver: ‘Polychoral Music: a Venetian Phenomenon?’, PRMA, cviii (1981–2), 1–24

H.M. Brown: ‘A “New” Chansonnier of the Early Sixteenth Century in the University Library of Uppsala: a Preliminary Report’, MD, xxxvii (1983), 171–33

R.E. Murray: ‘The Influence of the Cantus Firmus on Modal Structure in the Masses of Antoine Brumel’, Theoria, i (1985), 61–83

H.M. Brown: ‘The Importance of Sixteenth-Century Intabulations’, Lute Symposium: Utrecht 1986, 1–29

B. Hudson: ‘Josquin and Brumel: the Conflicting Attributions’, Josquin Symposium: Utrecht 1986, 67–92 [See also Discussion, 99]

A. van Campen: ‘Conflicting Attributions of Credo Vilayge II and Credo Chascun me crie’, ibid., 93–8

L.T. Woodruff: The ‘Missae de Beata Virgine’ c. 1500–1520: a Study of Transformation from Monophonic to Polyphonic Modality (diss., North Texas State U., 1986)

M.J. Bloxam: A Survey of Late Medieval Service Books from the Low Countries: Implications for Sacred Polyphony, 1460–1520 (diss., Yale U., 1987)

S.F. Weiss: ‘Bologna Q18: Some Reflections on Content and Context’, JAMS, xli (1988), 1–39

C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1989)

M.J. Bloxam: ‘La contenance italienne: the Motets on Beata es, Maria by Compère, Obrecht, and Brumel’, EMH, xi (1992), 39–89

E. Ros-Fábregas: The Manuscript Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M.454: Study and Edition in the Context of the Iberian and Continental Manuscript Traditions (diss., CUNY,1992)

R. Sherr: ‘A Biographical Miscellany: Josquin, Tinctoris, Obrecht, Brumel’, Musicologia humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmienwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 65–73

E. Kovarik: ‘Two Instrumental Arrangements from Early Sixteenth-Century Bohemia’, Canadian University Music Review, xv (1995), 91–107

Brumel [Brumello], Jacques.

See Brunel, Jacques.

Brumen [Brument], Denis [Denys]

(fl c1530–40). Composer of probable French origin. The style of his music is reminiscent of Willaert; structure depends entirely on points of imitation, the melodic and rhythmic style is smooth and fluent, and there is little textural contrast. The use of dissonance is freer and more piquant than Willaert’s, but still controlled and purposeful like Gombert’s. The motets were evidently highly regarded by contemporaries, appearing in an impressive number of sources. In illo tempore is attributed to ‘Brumen’ in all sources but two: the ascription to Richafort in the Munich manuscript (D-Mu Art.401) can be dismissed on stylistic grounds. Domine, labia mea aperies, by contrast, is attributed to ‘Denys Brument’ in one source only (1542⁵); it is anonymous in the other sources, which also present it a 4th higher.

Eitner (probably following a suggestion of Haberl’s) mistakenly identified Brumen with Denis Briant. The styles of the two composers are sufficiently distinct to indicate two separate composers. The chanson Quant me souvient, though ascribed only to ‘Denys’, demonstrates the characteristics of Brumen rather than Briant.

WORKS

Domine, labia mea aperies, 5vv, 1542⁵, 1542⁶, A-Wn Mus.15500, I-Lg 775; In illo tempore … Cum venerit paraclitus, 5vv, 1543³, 1553¹³, 1555¹⁰, CZ-HKm II.A.26, II.A.29, II.A.30, D-Mu Art.401, I-Lg 775, Rvat C.S.19 (attrib. ‘Brumeti’ above music, ‘Brumen’ in table of contents), formerly in Breslau, Stadtbibliothek, MSS 3, 5 (now lost)

Come havrò dunqu’il frutto, 5vv, 1542¹⁶; arr. for vihuela, 1554³² (attrib. ‘Verdeloth’); L’autr’ier je vois dans un bosquet, 4vv, F-Pm Rés.30345A; Quant me souvient de ma triste, 6vv, 1553²⁵, 1560⁵, DK-Kk 1873 (anon.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

F.X. Haberl: Bibliographischer und thematischer Musikkatalog des päpstlichen Kapellarchives im Vatikan zu Rom (Leipzig, 1888), 119

J. Dean: ‘Johannes Brunet and Nato canunt omnia’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2656–72

JEFFREY DEAN

Brummeisen

(Ger.).

See Jew's harp.

Brummer

(Ger.).

See Drone (i).

Brummstimme

(Ger.).

Wordless singing with the mouth closed. See Bocca chiusa.

Brummtopf

(Ger.).

Friction drum. See also Drum, §I, 4.

Brun, Fritz

(b Lucerne, 18 Aug 1878; d Gross Höchstetten, canton of Berne, 29 Nov 1959). Swiss composer, conductor and pianist. After lessons with Willem Mengelberg in Lucerne, he studied at the Cologne Conservatory (1897–1901), where his teachers included Franz Wüllner (composition) and Max van de Sandt (piano). Upon the completion of his studies, he became music tutor to Prince George of Prussia (1901) and met Busoni and Nikisch in Berlin. Short stays in London and Dortmund were followed by an appointment to teach the piano at the Berne Music School (1903). During this period he performed regularly as a soloist in orchestral and chamber concerts promoted by the Berne Music Society. In 1909 he succeeded Karl Munzinger as principal conductor of the Berne SO, the Cecilian Choral Society and the Berne Liedertafel. Despite a busy conducting schedule (until his retirement in 1941), he also remained active as a composer.

Brun’s early works coincided with an upsurge in nationalist schools of composition. While the Austro-German Romantic antecedents of his Second Symphony (1911) are clear, especially in its yearning slow movement, features of the symphonies nos.3–5 are more closely associated with the Swiss Alps; the Third (1919), for example, includes a set of variations on the Ticinese folksong Noi siamo in tre re. His string quartets also express the atmosphere of his homeland. He characterized the finale of the First Quartet (1898) as suggesting ‘mountain air, the smell of hay’. The Fourth Symphony (1925), however, suggests the influence of Stravinsky, as well as Brahms and Bruckner. The Fifth (1929), which is lighter in texture, grapples with the disintegration of the tonal system; after an elegy for Hermann Suter, the work concludes with a jagged fugue. Showing greater freedom of expression, the Seventh (1937) begins with a noble meditation on themes from Schoeck’s opera Venus and culminates in a hymnic finale. More programmatic in nature, the movements of the Eighth (1942) correspond to times of day and the Ninth (1950) was conceived as a kind of diary. With the Tenth (1953), Brun returned to the absolute music and formal procedures of his youth. Although his music fell out of favour in the latter half of the 20th century, he has continued to be considered a pre-eminent Swiss symphonist.

WORKS

Orch: Sym. no.1, b, 1901; Aus dem Buche Hiob, sym. poem, 1906; Sym. no.2, B, 1911; Sym. no.3, d, 1919; Sym. no.4, E, 1925; Sym. no.5, E, 1929; Sym. no.6, C, 1933; Sym. no.7, D, 1937; Sym. no.8, A, 1942; Sym. Prologue, E, 1942; Variations on an Original Theme, pf, str, 1944; Pf Conc., 1946; Vc Conc., 1947; Sym. no.9, F, 1950; Ov. ‘For a Jubilee’, 1950 [based on hymn In Gottes Namen he’ ich’s an]; Sym. no.10, B, 1953; Divertimento, pf, str, 1954; Rhapsody, 1958

Vocal: Verheissung (J.W. von Goethe), chorus, org, orch, 1915; Il cavalli, children’s chorus, pf, 1956; Natale, chorus, pf, 1956; songs, 1v, pf, incl. Abendständchen (C.M. Brentano), Die Entschlafenen (F. Hölderlin), Es wehet kühl und leise (F. Schlegel), Lebensgenuss (Hölderlin); Wunsch (F. Hagedorn); a cappella choruses for male, female and mixed vv, incl. Altjahr-Nacht (G.F. Caderas), Tramunt (G. Bundi) and settings of L. Uhland, E. Mörike and others; folksong arrs.; orch of songs by O. Schoeck

Chbr: Str Qt no.1, E, 1898; Sonata no.1, d, vn, pf, 1920; Str Qt no.2, G, 1921; Str Qt no.3, F, 1943; Str Qt no.4, D, 1949 [based on radio signals]; Sonata no.2, D, vn, pf, 1951; Sonata, vc, pf, 1952

MSS in CH-Bps

Principal publisher: Hug

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kleine Festgabe für Fritz Brun (Berne, 1941)

W. Schuh: Schweizer Musik der Gegenwart (Zürich, 1948)

M. Engeler and E. Lichterhahn: : Briefe an Volkmar Andreae (Zürich, 1986), 127–39

P. Palmer: ‘Fritz Brun: a Swiss Symphonist’, Tempo, no.195 (1996), 14–18

PETER PALMER

Brün, Herbert

(b Berlin, 9 July 1918). German composer. He left Germany in 1936 for Palestine, where he studied the piano and composition at the Jerusalem Conservatory. He later studied with Stefan Wolpe, Eli Friedman and Frank Pelleg, and attended Tanglewood and Columbia University (1948–50). From 1955 to 1961 he conducted research into electronic composition in Paris, Cologne and Munich. During this period he also worked as a composer, conductor and guest lecturer, and broadcast a series of programmes on contemporary music. After a lecture tour of the USA in 1962, he joined the composition department at the University of Illinois, where he continued to work in the electronic studio and began composing with computers. Brün has held residencies and guest professorships at Ohio State University (1969–70), the Hochschule der Künst and Technische Universität, Berlin (1978) and the University of Kassel (1989). Beginning in 1980, he toured and taught with the Performer’s Workshop Ensemble, a group he founded. Many of his writings and lectures focus on the social and political significance of composition. His work with computers can be seen broadly as an exploration of two questions. Firstly, is it possible to define a musical idea in such a way that a computer will generate the compositional realization of it?; and secondly, is it possible to design a computer system which would ‘compose’ with the input of an initial idea?

WORKS

(selective list)

MSS in US-AKu

Principal publishers: Smith, Lingua, Tonos

instrumental

Ballets: The Student and the Nightingale, 1949, Vacation, 1951

Orch: Concertino, 1947; Hora, pf, orch, 1949; Nia nua, 1949; Ov., 1949; Mobile, 1958; Non sequitur III, 1963, unfinished

Chbr: Str Qt no.1, 1952; Trio, fl, cl, vn, 1953; Str Qt no.2, 1957; Str Qt no.3, 1963; Gestures for Eleven, 4 ww, 2 brass, perc, vn, vc, db 1964; Trio, fl, db, perc, 1964; Gesto, pic, pf, 1965; Trio, tpt, trbn, perc, 1966; Nonet, fl, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, perc, vn, db, 1969; at loose ends, 4 perc, pf + cel + chimes, 1974; In and … and Out, 3 ww, 3 brass, perc, pf, bn, db, 1974; Twice Upon Three Times, b cl, tuba, 1980; Two Scientists’ Souls Fall in Love with Guess Whom, fl, tap dancer, 1989; Come Scenario and Go, 4 ww, 3 brass, mar, perc, str, 1995

Solo: 5 Pf Pieces, 1945; Sonatina, fl, 1948; Sonatina, vn, 1948; Sonatina, va, 1950; Pf Sonata, 1951; Sonatina, bn, 1953; Suite variable, hpd, 1957; Touch and Go, perc, 1967; Just Seven, drum, snare drum, 1987; The Laughing Third, pf, 1993; … yet with a heart of gold, db, 1997

electro-acoustic

Tape: Anepigraphe, 1958; Klänge Unterwegs, 1962; Futility, 1964; Infraudibles, 1968; Piece of Prose, 1972; Dust, 1976; More Dust, 1977; Dustiny, 1978; A Mere Ripple, 1979; U-Turn-To, 1980; i tOLD You so!, 1981

Tape and insts: Sonoriferous Loops, fl + pic, tpt, xyl, mar, perc, db, tape, 1964; Non sequitur VI, fl + pic, 2 perc, pf, hp, vc, tape, 1966; Infraudibles with Perc, 3 perc, tape, 1968, rev. 1984; Infraudibles with Qnt, s sax, hn, elec gui, db, cymbalum, tape, 1968; More Dust with Perc, 3 perc, tape, 1977; SNOW (Sentences Now Open Wide), 3 spkr, 2 fl, 2 bn, hn, pf, gui, vc, tape, 1984; Aufhören, fl, bn, 2 perc, 2 gui, vc, tape, 1989; On Stilts Among Ducks, va, tape, 1997

Cptr with graphics: Mutatis mutandis, 1968; Floating Hierarchies, 2, 3 and 4 insts, 1995

WRITINGS

Synthetischer Klang und Klangsynthese (Munich,1961)

Music and Information (Munich, 1961)

‘Against Plausibility’, PNM, ii/1 (1963), 43–50

‘Drawing Distinctions Links Contradictions’, PNM, xii/1–2 (1973–4), 29–39

‘From Musical Ideas to Computers and Back’,The Computer and Music, ed. H. Lincoln (Ithaca, NY, 1970), 23–36; repr. in Journal SEAMUS, ii/2 (1987), 18–28

‘Technology and the Composer’, Interpersonal Relational Networks, ed. H. von Foerster (Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971), 1–25

Über Musik und zum Computer (Karlsruhe,1971)

My Words and Where I Want Them (1986, 2/1990)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Hamlin and C. Roads: ‘Interview with Herbert Brün’,Composers and the Computer, ed. C. Roads (Los Altos, CA, 1985), 1–15

V. Hein: ‘Ästhetische Diskussion’, Music … , verwandelt, ed. F. Gertich, J. Gerlach, G. Föllmer (1997), 235–40

MARK ENSLIN

Brun, Jean.

See Lebrun, Jean.

Brun, Jean le.

See Lebrun, Jean and Le Brung, Jean.

Bruna, Pablo

(b Daroca, bap. 22 June 1611; d Daroca, 26/27 June 1679). Spanish composer and organist. Known as ‘El ciego de Daroca’, he was blinded by smallpox in early childhood. He became organist of the collegiate church of S María, Daroca, in 1631 and was named its choirmaster in 1674. He was honoured as one of the foremost organists and organ teachers in Spain; his pupils included Pablo Nassarre.

Apart from seven Pange lingua settings and one incomplete set of psalm versets, most of Bruna’s 32 known organ pieces are of the tiento type (though a few have other titles). The tientos for undivided keyboard (lleno) are quite varied, some brief and quiet (especially those termed ‘de falsas’, which feature suspensions and chromatic inflections), others long and full of tumultuous figuration. All begin with imitation and retain their opening subjects throughout, though in the longer works these are transformed in various ways. The tientos for divided keyboard (partido or medio registro) also begin with imitation, but this gives way to passage-work with accompaniment in which series of figures are taken through long sequential progressions. Bruna’s music is sonorous, well suited to the keyboard and imbued with an intensity peculiarly Spanish; at times it achieves a real magnificence through its fantastic figuration and dense, close imitation. He was the leading Spanish keyboard composer between Correa de Arauxo and Cabanilles.

Bruna's two nephews were also musicians, both taught by him. Diego Xaraba y Bruna (b Daroca, 1652; d c1716) was organist of the cathedral of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Zaragoza, and a chamber musician to Don Juan José of Austria, governor of Aragon 1674–7. In May 1677 he became organist of the royal chapel in Madrid and in 1700 maestro de clavicordio to Charles II's queen, Marie-Louise. Some of his organ works survive (E-J, Mn 1357). His brother Francisco Xaraba y Bruna (d 30 July 1690) was appointed organist of the collegiate church at Pastrana, Guadalajara, in 1680, then (1687) of the royal chapel in Madrid, where he was also maestro de clavicordio to the queen.

WORKS

instrumental

Edition:Obras completas para organo de Pablo Bruna, ed. J. Sagasta Galdos (Zaragoza, 1979)

14 tientos, 7 Pange lingua, psalmodia, gaytilla, batalla, clausulas, E-Bc

Registro de hũ tiple de clarin, P-Pm

6 tientos, E-E

vocal

Venid, almas, venid, 4vv, Bc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

F. Pedrell: Catàlech de la Biblioteca musical de la Diputació de Barcelona, ii (Barcelona, 1909)

W. Apel: ‘Die spanische Orgelmusik vor Cabanilles’, AnM, xvii (1962), 15–29

H. Anglés: ‘Supervivencia de la música de Cabezón en los organistas españoles del siglo XVII’, AnM, xxi (1966), 87–104

P. Calahorra Martínez: ‘Pablo Bruna, “El ciego de Daroca” ’, AnM, xxii (1967), 173–95

P. Calahorra Martínez: La música in Zaragoza en los siglos XVI y XVII, i (Zaragoza, 1978)

P. Calahorra Martínez: ‘Dos inventarios de los siglos XVI y XVII en la Colegial de Daroca’, RdMc, iii (1980), 33–75, esp. 66–7

ALMONTE HOWELL/LOUIS JAMBOU

Brunckhorst, Arnold [Andreas] Matthias [Melchior, Martin]

(b Celle or Wietzendorf, 1670; d ?Hanover, 1725). German composer and organist. From 1693 to 1697 he was employed as an organist at Hildesheim, first at the church of St Martini, then at the Andreaskirche. In 1697 he was called by Duke Georg Wilhelm of Brunswick-Lüneburg to become organist of the Stadtkirche in Celle, where a large organ had been erected in 1653 as a ducal donation. Around 1700 he may have met the young J.S. Bach on one of his visits from Lüneburg to hear the duke’s famous French instrumentalists. When the court was dissolved after Georg Wilhelm’s death in 1705, Brunckhorst retained his post until, in 1720, he was appointed court organist at Hanover. In this capacity he is last mentioned in the Hamburgischer Relations-Courier of 10 August 1723. The paper reported that the organ of the residential church had been greatly enlarged at Brunckhorst’s instigation. He was also frequently called on to test new organs, but he did not work as an organ-builder himself, as some writers have supposed from a misinterpretation of a passage in J.H. Biermann’s Organographia (Hildesheim, 1738).

Brunckhorst’s one-movement keyboard sonata, written about 1715–20, is a remarkably early testimont to the reception of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas in Germany; Bach is said to have owned the autograph at one time. The only surviving example of Brunckhorst’s organ music, a prelude and fugue, shows features typical of the post-Buxtehude north German style, while his Christmas and Easter cantatas are obviously influenced by the Thuringian tradition: choral polyphony has been abandoned in favour of simple homophonic movements, most of them in the same key. The melodic invention, however, is original. During his years at Celle Brunckhorst dedicated to the duke several Passion works, now lost, the payment for which is documented in the account books.

WORKS

Christmas cantata, 4vv, 2 tpt, 3 vn, vle, bc; Easter cantata, 4vv, tpt, 2 vn, va da braccio, bc: D-Bsb; Christmas cantata ed. A. Egidi, Musikschätze der Vergangenheit (Berlin, 1931); both ed. D. Hellmann (Stuttgart, 1959)

Sonata, A, hpd, Bsb; prelude and fugue, e, org, LEm, ed. in Organum, iv/7 (Leipzig, 1925)

Passion music, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG; FrotscherG;

W. Wolffheim: ‘Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Hofmusik in Celle (1635–1706) und über Arnold M. Brunckhorst’, Festschrift … Rochus Freiherrn von Liliencron (Leipzig, 1910/R), 421–39

C. Cassel: Geschichte der Stadt Celle, ii (Celle, 1934)

G. Linnemann: Celler Musikgeschichte bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Celle, 1935)

C. Meyer-Rasch: Kleine Chronik der Kalandgasse (Celle, 1951), 63–4

H. Kümmerling: Katalog der Sammlung Bokemeyer (Kassel, 1970), 107

DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Bruneau, (Louis Charles Bonaventure) Alfred

(b Paris, 3 March 1857; d Paris,15 June 1934). French composer. He began his musical studies as a cellist, studying at the Paris Conservatoire with Franchomme (1873–6) and winning a premier prix on the instrument and in his twenties playing in the Orchestre Pasdeloup. From 1879 to 1881 he studied composition with Massenet, who left an indelible impression on his musical style. A cantata, Geneviève, won him a second prize in the Prix de Rome in 1881 and his Ouverture héroïque and cantata Léda saw their première with the Pasdeloup Orchestra (1884). In 1887 his first opera, Kérim, was successful enough to convince him that he should devote himself largely to opera.

Kérim, like a number of Bruneau's operas, directly incorporates folk melodies (in this case of oriental origin), and these are clearly indicated in the score. Although they are blended with more conventional elements of contemporary French operatic style, following Massenet and Gounod, Bruneau attempts to present the oriental elements in an unconventional way, using harmonies derived from the melodies themselves as well as highly coloured orchestration.

It is easy to dismiss the central period of Bruneau's output, dominated by his collaborations with Emile Zola, as one of realism, naturalism or French verismo. Yet despite his close identification with Zola's works, strong elements of fantasy, symbolism and extravagant musical effects are found in his many operatic transformations of Zola's tales. The first, Le rêve, to a Zola adaptation by Louis Gallet, has as its central character an ange-femme, Angélique. She is strongly characterized in Gallet's libretto and Bruneau responds extravagantly, incorporating both folksong and plainsong and employing an unseen choir and orchestra for the hidden virgin voices which she frequently hears. The opera, whose blend of eroticism and religiosity caused it to enjoy considerable success at the Opéra-Comique after its première in 1891, was precisely in tune with artistic tastes in the 1890s, although these soon went out of favour, causing such works to fall into neglect. But Bruneau's fundamental achievement should not be overlooked: namely, in the words of Georges Pioch, who attended the première, ‘to have introduced on to the stage of an opera house [in 1891] singers dressed in 1891 costumes’. Among those who wrote to congratulate him was Chabrier: ‘c'est un début de maître, absolument’.

In L'attaque du moulin Bruneau repeated the formula of setting a Gallet adaptation of Zola, again with considerable success, but this time more dependent on the pace and realism of the story than on special effects. Originally set during the Franco-Prussian war, but transposed in Carvalho's first production to the time of the Revolution, its theme is the effects of war on a miller's family and a stranger who has fallen in love with the miller's daughter. Bruneau provides two possible endings.

From this time onwards, Zola, who had become a close friend of the author, himself supplied Bruneau with librettos. Messidor (1897) was the first fruit of this collaboration. Although initially successful, it was produced at the height of the Dreyfus affair, in which Bruneau actively followed Zola's support of Dreyfus and was his constant companion during the trial. This led to a marked fall in his popularity and for some years his works were less than welcome in Paris.

Alongside the operas of the 1890s, Bruneau also composed several collections of songs. In choosing poetry for these, he returned several times to the poet Catulle Mendès, a fellow enthusiast of Wagner who had produced librettos for several composers including Chabrier, Messager and Debussy. The 10 Lieds de France are deliberately simple in style, modelled on folksongs from different regions of France. In strong contrast to the heavy, Wagnerian style of much of his operatic music, these strophic songs use accompaniments which are pared down to bare essentials and ally themselves to the late 19th-century interest in the regional music of France led by Bourgault-Ducoudray and d'Indy, among others. Each of the Chansons à danser, also to poems by Mendès and delicately orchestrated for chamber orchestra, is named after an antique dance, and Bruneau responds by using elements of pastiche. A number of his other songs are more forward-looking, reflecting the composer's continual experimentation with word-setting. Several were also orchestrated, one of the most ambitious and widely performed being Penthésilée, reine des Amazones, styled a ‘poème symphonique avec chant’ also to a text by Mendès and scored for large orchestra. These collections were later complemented by more elaborate and advanced settings notable among which are Les chants de la vie, to poems by various poets, four of which were orchestrated, while a few single songs were directly composed for voice and orchestra.

Among a modest output of religious music, the Requiem stands out as the most ambitious. Commissioned by the Bach Choir, and first conducted in London by Stanford, it follows the model of Gounod's more ambitious works by including dramatic effects with various groups of singers and players spatially separated, including two groups of brass, a cappella singing and a children's choir accompanied by harps and organ.

The first opera of the new century, L'ouragan (1901), is an opera in which libretto and music are particularly closely wedded. The hurricane of the title not only provides an opportunity for descriptive music but also mirrors the increasing conflict between the two pairs of brothers and sisters on whom the story centres. As a magic tree (common in the Celtic mythology on which this opera is based) sings to the lovers, Bruneau employs an orchestra behind the scenes. Bruneau's final direct collaboration with Zola was L'enfant roi, a comédie lyrique set in a Parisian bakery. Here the composer introduces extended passages evoking Parisian street life: children singing nursery rhymes in the Tuileries, the cries of flower sellers in a street market and scenes in the patisserie. After Zola's death in 1902, Bruneau continued his allegiance by fashioning his own librettos from the author's work. In Naïs Micoulin (1906), the first of these, Bruneau's libretto is curiously lacking in drama, although its extended dialogues are faithful to Zola in their inclusion of poignant physical detail. Les quatre journées is an opera concerned with a family before, during and after a war. It is a naively sentimental work recounting the fortunes of a couple brought up on the banks of the river Durance. Each act represents one of the seasons and Bruneau plays to the contemporary audience with some appropriately jingoistic choruses.

Henceforth Bruneau turned away from contemporary realism, Le jardin du paradis being the first of his works to take such a step. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale, the work has as its centrepiece an oriental paradise garden, with appropriately stylized music, and is characterized by more static, scenic music than found elsewhere in Bruneau's output.

Musicological interest in Bruneau's role in the politics of turn-of-the-century French opera has largely outweighed interest in reviving his music. While some have been critical of his lack of a natural melodic gift comparable to Massenet, others have found that his harmonic turns, once seen as experimental, with hindsight seem merely clumsy. It was perhaps inevitable that the first monograph on his work should have come from the English critic Arthur Hervey rather than a French contemporary, for apart from the unpopularity he encountered after allying himself with Zola in support of Dreyfus, the themes of his earlier operas frequently raised political issues which many thought had no place in the opera house. The issues of class conflict and distasteful social realities dealt with in the Bruneau-Zola collaborations can hardly have endeared the composer to the richer patrons of the Opéra. Messidor, for example, the story of a village community starved of water because a wealthy industrialist has diverted a river to purify gold, brought an entirely new, and by no means entirely welcome, level of social realism into establishments traditionally dealing only with the historical, the fictional and the make-believe. Even though, as Bruneau himself explained, his operatic vérismewas much less confrontational than Zola's undiluted brand, and wove in more fantasy with more idealised characters, the association with the figurehead of naturalism remained paramount in his critical reputation in France. He was also criticized for using a prose instead of a rhymed libretto. This practice had already been advocated by Berlioz, even though he set prose only once, and subsequently by Gounod and Massenet, but Bruneau's Messidor was the first opera to use prose specifically in the service of naturalism. A similar practice was employed by Charpentier, in Louise, and later by Gabriel Dupont and Xavier Leroux. In an important article ‘Vers ou prose’, originally published in Le figaro in 1897 and reprinted in his collection of essays Musiques d'hier et de demain, he defended the practice, although he returned to verse librettos in his later, less naturalistic works.

His ideas in general were constantly challenging tradition and his admiration for Wagner was based on his view that Wagner was the great liberator of 19th-century music. Although he used leitmotifs and owed a great deal to Wagner's chromatic language, his music is far less Wagnerian than that of many of his contemporaries and in his later music he used a plurality of musical languages and effects.

Bruneau's writings on music include important memoirs of Zola (Paris, 1932), a book on Massenet (Paris, 1935), essays outlining his own theory of opera (notably in Le figaro and Rivista musicale italiana in 1897), and perceptive comments on other operas in reviews and articles.

(1) Giovan Gualberto Brunetti

RICHARD LANGHAM SMITH

Bruneau, Alfred

WORKS

Unless otherwise indicated, printed works were published in Paris and unpublished MSS are in F-Pn.

OC	Opéra-Comique
PO	Opéra

operas

unless otherwise stated, drames lyriques, first performed in Paris

Kérim (opéra, 3, P. Milliet and H. Lavedan), Château d'Eau, 9 June 1887, F-Pn; (1887)

Le rêve (4, L. Gallet, after E. Zola), OC (Favart), 18 June 1891, Pn; (1892)

L'attaque du moulin (4, Gallet, after Zola), OC (Favart), 23 Nov 1893, Pn; (1893)

Messidor (4, Zola), Opéra, 19 Feb 1897, Pn; (1897)

L'ouragan (4, Zola), OC (Favart), 29 April 1901 (1901)

L'enfant roi, 1902 (comédie lyrique, 5, Zola), OC (Favart), 3 March 1905 (1905)

Lazare, 1902 (1, Zola), Radio France, 20 May 1954, Pn

Naïs Micoulin (2, A. Bruneau, after Zola: La douleur de Toine), Monte Carlo, 2 Feb 1907, Pn; (1907)

Les quatre journées (conte lyrique, 4, Bruneau, after Zola), OC (Favart), 25 Dec 1916, Pn; (1916)

Le jardin du paradis, 1913–21 (conte lyrique, 4, R. de Flers and G.-A. de Caillavet, after H.C. Andersen), Opéra, 31 Oct 1923, Pn; (1924)

Le roi Candaule, 1917–19 (comédie lyrique, 4 acts and 5 tableaux, M. Donnay), OC (Favart), 1 Dec 1920, Pn; (1922)

Angelo, tyran de Padoue, 1923–5 (5, C. Méré, after V. Hugo), OC (Favart), 16 Jan 1928, Pn; (1928)

Virginie, 1928–30 (comédie lyrique, 3, H. Duvernois and Bruneau), Opéra, 7 Jan 1931, Pn; (1930)

Undated: Vercingétorix, vs frag. Pn

other stage works

first performed in Paris

Les bacchantes (ballet, 2, F. Naquet and Bruneau, after Euripides), 1888, OC (Favart), 30 Oct 1912, F-Po, vs (1912)

La faute de l'abbé Mouret (incid music, Bruneau, after Zola), 1904–5, Odéon, 1 March 1907 (1907)

L'amoureuse leçon (ballet, C. Mendès), Arts, 6 Feb 1913 (1913) [from Chansons à danser, 1895]

vocal with orchestra

Jeanne d'Arc (A. de Musset), scène (1879)

L'arabe, chorus, orch, 1881, F-Pc

Geneviève (E. Guinand), scène lyrique (c1881)

Léda: poème antique (H. Lavedan), choral sym., solo vv, chorus, orch, 1882

Requiem, solo vv, chorus, orch, org, ?1884–8, B-Bsp, vocal score (1895)

Penthésilée (Mendès), sym. poem, 1888 (1892)

Le tambour (Saint-Georges de Bouhélier), poème lyrique (1915)

Le chant du drapeau (M. Boukay), hymne, 1916 [orig. with pf acc. (1915)]

Le navire (R. Puaux), poème lyrique (1917)

Other orchd songs, orig. for 1v, pf

other vocal

Choral: Ave Maria, mixed vv, org/pf, 1880 (1903); O salutaris, mixed vv, org/pf, vc, 1880 (1903); Hymne du neuvième dragons (Martinet) (1888); Notre amour (A. Silvestre), female vv (1903); Les petiots (J. Richepin), 2 female vv/(S, Mez) (1903); 2 choruses or vocal quartets (M. Desbordes-Valmore), 4vv (1933): Les cloches et les larmes, La jeune fille et l'oiseau; several unpubd choruses

Songs: 5 mélodies (F. Coppée, L. Adrien, G. Chezol) (1880); 2 mélodies (Lavedan), 1883 (1885); 3 mélodies (Lavedan, Richepin) (1889); Les [10] lieds de France (Mendès) (1892); 6 chansons à danser (Mendès) (1895) [later used for L'amoureuse leçon, ballet, 1913]; 3 lieds de France (Mendès) (1896); [8] Mélodies de jeunesse (Ronsard, C. Hugues, Richepin, P. Bourget, Silvestre, R. Rousseil, Gautier) (1903); La nouveau-né (H. Lavedan) (1903); Les amants fidèles (Mendès) (1904); Chanson de s'amie bien belle (C. Marot) (Milan, 1904); Les [20] chants de la vie (Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, F. Gregh, H. Bataille) (1913); Vocalise-étude (1914); Nocturne (R. Puaux) (1915); Résurrection (P. de Choudens) (1915); Ode à la paix (Puaux) (1920); Amitié (A. de Mollet) (1921); [10] Chansons d'enfance et de jeunesse (Desbordes-Valmore) (1928); [10] Chants antiques (A. Chénier) (1928); Plein air (Gautier), 10 songs (1933); several unpubd songs

instrumental

Orch: Idylle, suite, 1881; Romance, hn/vc/va, orch/pf, 1882, with pf acc. (1885), with orch (1909); Ouverture héroïque, 1883; La belle au bois dormant, sym. poem, 1884 (1902); Romance, F, vn, orch, acc. arr. pf (1901)

Chamber: 2 morceaux de genre, vc, pf (1878); [3] Pièces, pf, 1883: Maman, Petit frère, Grande soeur; Romance, fl/vn, pf, 1884 (1902); Nuit de mai (de Musset), 2 vn, va, vc, harp, recitation, 1886; Fantaisie, hn, pf (c1901); several other unpubd romances and morceaux de lecture for various solo insts, pf and for 2 cl

Bruneau, Alfred

WRITINGS

Musiques d'hier et de demain (Paris, 1900)

La musique française (Paris, 1901)

‘L'influence de Wagner sur la musique française’, Musica (Oct 1903)

Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (Paris, 1903)

La vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Fauré (Paris, 1925)

A l'ombre d'un grand coeur [Zola] (Paris, 1932)

Massenet (Paris, 1935)

Other articles and reviews in Revue indépendante (1889–90), Revue illustrée (1891), Gil Blas (1892–5), Figaro (1895–1901),Grande revue (1902), Le matin (1904–7,1909–33) [many collected in his books (1900–03)]

Bruneau, Alfred

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Destranges: Thematic guides to A. Bruneau operas (Paris): Le rêve (1896); Messidor (1897); L'attaque du moulin (1901); L'ouragan (1902); Naïs Micoulin (1907)

A. Bruneau and E. Zola: ‘Messidor expliqué par les auteurs’, Le Figaro (20 Feb 1897)

A. Hervey: ‘Alfred Bruneau and Modern Lyric Drama’, Studies in Music, ed. R. Grey (New York, 1901)

A. Jullien: ‘L'ouragan’, Le théâtre, no.60 (1901), 3–13

A. Jullien: ‘L'enfant roi’, Le théâtre, no.152 (1905), 8–14

L. Laloy: ‘Le drame musical moderne, ii: Zola – Bruneau’, Mercure musicale (1 June 1905)

A. Hervey: Alfred Bruneau (London, 1907)

A. Boschot: La vie et les oeuvres de Alfred Bruneau (Paris, 1937)

G. Pioch: ‘Alfred Bruneau’, Le théâtre lyrique en France (Paris,1937–9) [pubn of Poste National/Radio-Paris], ii, 214–23; iii, 37

S. Wallon: ‘Chronologie des oeuvres d'Alfred Bruneau’, RdM, xxix (1947), 25–62

J.-M. Guieu: ‘Lazarus, a musical comedy by Emile Zola’, French American Review, ii/3 (1978), 135

D. Pistone: La musique en France de la Révolution à 1900 (Paris, 1979)

R.M. Longyear: ‘Political and Social Criticism in French Opera 1827–1920’, Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and Other Divers Subjects: a Tribute to Gerhard Herz (Louisville, 1981), 245–54

F. Nicolodi: ‘Parigi e l'opera verista: dibattiti, riflessioni, polemiche’, NRMI, xv (1981), 577–623

G. Favre: Musique et naturalisme: Alfred Bruneau et Émile Zola (Paris, 1982)

D. Pistone: ‘Souvenirs inédits d'Alfred Bruneau’, RIMF, vii (1982), 9

J.-M. Guieu: Le théâtre lyrique d'Emile Zola (Paris, 1983)

M. Kelkel: Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme dans l'opéra d'1890 à 1930 (Paris, 1984)

H. Macdonald: ‘The Prose Libretto’, COJ, i (1989), 155–66

A.M. Spies: Opera, State and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914 (New York, 1998)

S. Huebner: French Opera at the ‘Fin de Siecle’: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford, 1999)

Brunei [State of Brunei Darussalam]

(Malay Negara Brunei Darussalam).

Country in South-east Asia. An independent Islamic sultanate, Brunei is located on the north-west coast of the island of Borneo, about 440 kilometres north of the equator. The country is bounded on its northern edge by the South China Sea and on all other sides by the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

Despite a relatively small land mass of 5765 km² Brunei is anything but geographically and demographically homogeneous. Swampy tidal plains line the coast, hilly lowlands mark the western interior, and thickly-forested mountains rise in the east to 1850 metres above sea-level. The inland areas are sparsely inhabited compared to the coastal plains, where more than 85% of the population resides. According to 1998 estimates, the population of the sultanate is approximately 323,600. About 67% of this figure comprises the ‘Brunei Indigenous’ peoples, a governmental category officially embracing Brunei Malays, Kedayan, Tutong, Belait, Bisaya, Dusun and Murut communities. The Brunei Malays are numerically (and culturally) dominant, having been reported in various sources to amount to more than 50% of the total population. Recent censuses, however, do not provide figures for the less statistically substantial groups, largely because of increasing ambiguity of ethnic affiliations, the result of intermarriage and cultural assimilation. Consequently, diverse Brunei Indigenous peoples are typically subsumed under the official rubric ‘Malay’, despite differences in language, history and religion etc. Second to the Brunei Malays in numerical significance are the ethnic Chinese, who constitute their own census category. Government statistics indicate that 15% of the population is Chinese, though studies conducted during the 1990s suggest that a much higher figure, 25–30%, might be more accurate. ‘Other Indigenous’ communities, primarily Iban and Kelabit peoples who have entered the sultanate through Sarawak, form about 6% of the population. The remaining inhabitants of Brunei include Europeans (mainly British), Indians and assorted non-indigenous groups.

Islam is the principal religion of Brunei, with over 80% of the population adhering to this faith. Other prominent religions or belief systems include Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism within the Chinese community, and Christianity, which is also common among the Chinese as well as among many non-Malay-speaking peoples of the interior. In general, inland dwellers exhibit a more pronounced tendency to retain indigenous belief systems and practices, often but not always within a broader Muslim or Christian context.

At an international symposium on the music and drama of South-east Asia in 1969, the Brunei delegation bemoaned the absence of any systematic study of these traditions in its country. This situation remains remarkably unchanged. Of the little work that has been conducted in Brunei, most has highlighted only Malay practices, if not specifically those of the royalty, and vocal performance has yet to be addressed in any detail. Further complicating the matter is the inconsistent use of various ethnic labels in the literature. Bisaya, Belait, Tutong and other peoples, who may or may not have their own category in government records, are sometimes collectively called ‘Dusun’, and ‘Dusun’ may again be lumped into the ‘Malay’ category for census purposes. Some publications have described Brunei traditions without mentioning ethnic groups or regions at all. The following musical sketch must therefore be understood as necessarily imbalanced (see also Malaysia, §§II and III).

1. Music of the Royal Sultanate and the Malay majority.

Like other Malay sultanates of South-east Asia, the Sultanate of Brunei maintains a royal ensemble of gongs, drums and double-reed aerophones, called nobat. Staffed by specially appointed musicians, the ensemble marks an array of royal occasions, including coronations, marriages, circumcisions, bestowal of titles and visits by noble officials, as well as the departure from the palace of the Sultan or his consort. The nobat may also announce the morning, late afternoon and evening prayers of the Muslim faith. At the installation of the present Sultan in 1968, the nobat comprised two large hanging gongs, four smaller hanging gongs (canang), four double-headed barrel drums (gendang labek), two silver-covered goblet drums (nakara) and four double-reed aerophones (serunai). Specific melodies, rhythms and combinations of instruments characterize various events, if not particular portions of them. In the case of death of a member of the royal family, the nobat ensemble is silenced. Only after a prescribed period may the orchestra be ritually ‘re-opened’.

An instrument most closely associated with Malay communities at large is the gambus, a plucked lute. Ultimately of Middle Eastern origin, the gambus of Brunei has developed so idiosyncratically that it may sometimes scarcely resemble its Arab ancestor. The Brunei instrument is carved from softwood, with a soundboard made from the skin of a deer, goat, monitor lizard, snake or other animal. Three courses of fibre or nylon strings are tuned in 4ths and are plucked with a rattan or water buffalo horn plectrum. The gambus typically combines with drum, flute and voice to provide dance accompaniment for all sorts of festive occasions.

Hadrah is a type of ensemble music that typically marks major Muslim religious celebrations (e.g. the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the end of the fasting month of Ramadan), as well as Malay weddings, betrothals, circumcisions and other festivities. Comprised of several rebana frame drums (without jingles), hadrah accompanies songs of praise for the Prophet Muhammad, usually in Arabic. Consequently, while it may be used in multifarious recreational settings, hadrah nevertheless retains its religious association. Different playing styles demand different types of rebana, and the singing, in turn, is stylistically dependent on the nature of the accompaniment.

2. Minority music.

The shallow pool of literature on the musical practices of Brunei’s Malay population appears bottomless compared to the sprinkling of studies on the musics of minority groups. Sporadic reference is often made to various dance forms such as the Murut umak rumak house-warming dance or the ceremonial alai dances, through which certain Dusun communities contact spirit realms. The musical components of these and other dances, however, are usually not mentioned. Similarly, while Chinese New Year is described as the largest annual celebration for much of the Chinese population, its musical elements still await rigorous research.

Among the minority groups whose traditions have received some attention over the years are the Kedayan, Belait and Bisaya. Gulintangan gong ensemble music (see below) is a feature of the Kedayan harvest festival, Makan Tahun, as is a special procession and incantation called ratib saman. This incantation is performed throughout the second night of the festival by a group of Muslim religious leaders, who slowly proceed in a circle inside the men’s hall while rhythmically intoning Arabic words. It is thought that this part of Makan Tahun stems from a pre-Islamic practice during which spirits and deities were called to partake of the feast.

Earlier in the 20th century, Belait villages conducted a type of harvest ritual (Perakong) that employed hanging gongs, a drum and a special percussion board, perakong, from which the ritual drew its name. The perakong board was suspended from the rafters and played by two individuals who stood at each end of the instrument, striking it rhythmically with two wooden rods. Sounding together with the perakong were eight vertically-hanging knobbed gongs: five large agung and three smaller canang. At one point in the ritual sequence, two dancers performed to the beat of the gongs with bell-bearing bamboo stamping sticks. Although the Perakong was evidently characteristic of Belait villages in the past, the extent to which this ritual and the musics associated with it continue to be practised remains unclear.

3. Gong ensembles.

These are common to many of the ‘indigenous’ peoples of Brunei. The most prominent of these ensembles, gulintangan, can be heard in coastal Malay, Kedayan, Murut and Belait communities. Among the Iban, the cognate tradition is called engkerumong (see Malaysia, §III, 2). The gulintangan ensemble takes its name from the lead melody instrument (gulintangan), which consists of a row of seven or eight small knobbed gongs, resting horizontally on ropes or rattan strips in a wooden frame. The ensemble also includes three types of vertically-hanging gongs, which support the melody of the gulintangan. Of these the gong is the largest in diameter and lowest in pitch. The tawak-tawak has a deeper rim than the gong, but a smaller diameter, yielding a higher tone. The highest-pitched supporting gong is the canang, which can be identified by its narrow rim and flat face. Canang surfaces are sometimes decorated with Chinese dragons, which has elicited speculation that some of the components of the gulintangan ensemble are of Chinese origin. All of the gongs are made of brass and are usually cast in Brunei. The only non-gong instrument included in the gulintangan ensemble is the gendang labit, a double-headed conical drum with parallel cord- and belt-lacing and wedge bracing.

The composition of the gulintangan ensembles varies from community to community in terms of the number of supporting gongs and gendang labit. Malay and Kedayan groups, for instance, may use as few as five hanging gongs and two gendang labit in addition to the gulintangan. Belait villages, on the other hand, may use more than twice as many hanging gongs and a single drum as supporting instruments. The instrumentation of a Murut ensemble would likely fall somewhere in between its Malay and Belait counterparts.

Oral tradition holds that the gulintangan ensemble was the province of the Brunei elite until the nobility converted to Islam early in the 15th century. At that time, the Sultanate accepted the nobat as its official musical ensemble, and the gulintangan subsequently spread to the coastal communities and the inland areas. There, it typically marked harvest festivals, marriage ceremonies and the start and finish of headhunting expeditions. While headhunting has long ceased to be practised, the gulintangan is still performed in conjunction with various local celebrations; within the Malay communities, it also accompanies the martial art pancak silat.

The Bisaya at one time maintained an ensemble tradition similar to the gulintangan, but evidently the gulintangan itself was not present. In a 1960 publication, G.C. Davis described a Bisaya gong ensemble without making any reference to a gulintangan-like row of gongs. His instrument inventory included two large hanging gongs, four to six medium hanging gongs, four to six smaller ones, and a single-headed drum, which certainly seems to parallel the gong and drum backdrop of the gulintangan ensemble. The Brunei delegation to the 1969 conference on Traditional Music and Drama of South-east Asia also mentioned an ensemble of the ‘indigenous race of the Kuala Balai’ estuary (i.e. Bisaya) that consisted exclusively of hanging gongs and a drum. Such hanging gong ensembles are common to many of the inland populations of the neighbouring Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah and have often been associated with indigenous ritual activities. Consequently, some have speculated that these ensembles pre-date Islam in the area. Among the Bisaya, the gongs once accompanied a dance intended to honour the spirit of the deceased leader, but the position of the gong ensembles in a contemporary setting remains to be investigated.

4. New directions.

As indicated above, little work has been done to assess the role of older musical practices in contemporary society, including the extent to which these forms have interacted with newer musical styles. At Malay weddings, older vocal and instrumental sounds may be juxtaposed with recent popular musics. Sometimes electric keyboards and amplified guitars are added to ensembles of Malay instruments. Fearing an extinction of local music traditions and their replacement by Western styles, the Brunei Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports has made an effort to revive interest and perpetuate many of the country’s indigenous music traditions through its programmes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Hughes-Hallett: ‘An Account of a Berhantu Ceremony Called ‘Perakong’ by the Orang Belait of Brunei’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, xvi (1938), 41–7

G.C. Davis: ‘Borneo Bisaya Music in Western Ears’, Sarawak Museum Journal, ix (1960), 496–8

Traditional Drama and Music of Southeast Asia: Kuala Lumpur 1969 [incl. ‘A Short Survey of Brunei Gulintangan Orchestra’, ed. Brunei Delegation, 198–308; M.T. Osman: ‘Some Observations on the Socio-Cultural Context of Traditional Malay Music’, 309–19]

P.M. Shariffuddin and Abdul Latif Haji Ibrahim: ‘The Royal Nobat of Brunei’, Brunei Museum Journal, iv/1 (1977), 7–20

Borneo, Musiques Traditionelles, coll. G. Wen, Playa Sound PS33506 (1979)

D. Leake, jr: Brunei: the Modern Southeast Asian Islamic Sultanate (Kuala Lumpur, 1989)

Haji Manaf Haji Kamis: ‘Gambus Brunei Asli’, ASEAN Composers Forum on Traditional Music II: Singapore 1993, 16–18

I. Skog: North Borneo Gongs and the Javanese Gamelan: Studies in Southeast Asian Gong Traditions (Stockholm, 1993)

S. Meyers, W. Moore and J.R. Yogerot: The Golden Legacy: Brunei Darussalam (Brunei, 1994)

VIRGINIA GORLINSKI

Brunel [Brunello], Antoine.

See Brumel, Antoine.

Brunel [Brumel, Brumello, Brunello], Jacques [Giaches, Jacomo]

(d Ferrara, 1564). French organist and composer. A certain Jacques Brunel vacated an organist's post at Rouen Cathedral in December 1524. He was probably the same Brunel who was organist at the Este chapel from early 1532 until 1564. Thus from 1547 to 1558 he would have served under Cipriano de Rore. During the years 1543–59 Brunel received money for the keep of a horse, apparently for travel to Modena and Reggio nell'Emilia to oversee the Este chapels there; he is also known to have spent some time in Pesaro and Urbino, at the request of Duke Guidubaldo II of Urbino, in the summer of 1534 and during the period 1561–3. He was last paid in March 1564 and had died by May. It is not known whether he was related to Antoine Brumel who was at Ferrara from 1506 to 1510.

The few 16th-century references to Brunel make it clear that he was regarded as an outstanding organist. Jacopo Corfini (Primo libro de motetti, Venice, 1571), Luigi Dentice (Due dialoghi della musica, Naples, 1552), and Cinciarino (Introduttorio, Venice, 1555) praised him. In Ragionamenti accademici (Venice, 1567) Cosimo Bartoli said that ‘he plays with more grace, with more art and more musically than any other, whoever he may be’. Brunel was succeeded by a son, Virginio, who was organist at the Cathedral of Ravenna from August 1572 until some time after 1580.

Anthony Newcomb has made the case that 14 anonymous ricercares preserved in the so-called Bourdeney Codex (F-Pn Rés.Vm 851), four of which are attributed to ‘Giaches’ in I-Rvat Chigi Q.VIII.206, were composed by Brunel in the 1550s and 60s. If so, they show him to have been a major innovator in the genre. They are rigidly contrapuntal, based on between one and four subjects. In multi-thematic pieces the various themes are closely related through evolving variation, often using inganno, inversion or augmentation, and the works often employ countersubjects as well.

WORKS

Edition: The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex, ed. A. Newcomb, RRMR, lxxxix (1991) [N]

Messa de la dominica (‘Jaches’), I-CARc; ed. in Jeppesen (1943)

Ricercare di Jaches (in F), CARc; ed. in Slim

Ricercare di Jaches (in d), CARc; ed. in Jeppesen (1943)

Recercare del nono tuono, F-Pn, N

Ricercar sopra la sol fa re mi, Pn, I-Rvat, S-Uu (‘Giaches organista’), N

Ricercar del terzo tono, F-Pn, I-Rvat, N

Ricercar del nono tono, F-Pn, N

Ricercar del quinto tono, Pn, I-Rvat, N

Ricercar del duodicesimo tono, F-Pn, I-Rvat, N

Ricercare del primo tono, F-Pn, N

Ricercare del primo tono, Pn, N

Ricercare del secondo tono, Pn, N

Ricercare del seconto tono, Pn, N

Ricercare del terzo tono, Pn, N

Ricercare del quarto tono, Pn, N

Ricercare del duodecimo tono, Pn, N

Ricercare sopra Cantai mentre ch'i arsi [di] Cypriano [de Rore], Pn, N

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

Vander StraetenMPB, vi

K. Jeppesen, ed.: Die italienische Orgelmusik am Anfang des Cinquecento (Copenhagen, 1943, enlarged 2/1960)

A.-M. Bautier-Regnier: ‘Jachet de Mantoue (Jacobus Collebaudi) v. 1500–1559: contribution à l'étude du problème des Jachet au XVIe s.’, RBM, vi (1952), 101–19

K. Jeppesen: ‘Eine frühe Orgelmesse aus Castell’Arquato’, AMw, xii (1955), 187–205

H.C. Slim: The Keyboard Ricercar and Fantasia in Italy, ca. 1500–1550, with Reference to Parallel Forms in European Lute Music of the Same Period (diss., Harvard U., 1961)

C. MacClintock: ‘The “Giaches Fantasias” in MS Chigi Q VIII 206: a Problem in Identification’, JAMS, xix (1966), 370–82

G. Nugent: The Jaquet Motets and their Authors (diss., Princeton U., 1973)

F. Piperno: ‘Guidubaldo II della Rovere: la musica e il mondo’, Saggiatore musicale, iv (1997), 249–70 [incl. Eng. summary]

BARTON HUDSON

Brunelli, Antonio

(b S Croce sull’Arno, Tuscany, 20 Dec 1577; d Pisa, before 19 Nov 1630). Italian composer, organist, teacher and writer on music. It has often been stated that he was born at Bagnarea (now Bagnoregio), near Viterbo. In his op.12 he himself called it his place of origin, but he was referring to the fact that his family came from there – they had been there since the 15th century – while making it clear that he was born in Tuscany. He received his main musical education in the 1590s in Rome, where his teacher was G.M. Nanino; he stated in the preface to his Regole utilissime that he had visited many other cities and schools besides. In 1603 he became maestro di cappella and organist of the cathedral at S Miniato, near Pisa. The last recorded payment to him was made in August 1607. He moved to Prato in March 1608 as maestro di cappella at the cathedral and at the same time came into contact with Florentine society. In March 1613 he was appointed maestro di cappella of the Grand Duke of Tuscany to the Knights of St Stephen at Pisa. In their letter to the grand duke recommending him, the knights praised his qualities as a composer, singer and general musician; they paid him a monthly salary of ten scudi, six scudi more than his predecessor received. G.P. Bucchianti, in the preface to his Arie, scherzi, e madrigali (1627), paid a warm tribute to Brunelli as his teacher; Giovanni Bettini was another pupil. Indeed, Brunelli's didactic publications suggest that he was much concerned with teaching, including, perhaps, the teaching of singing. He was on intimate terms with Giulio Caccini, to whom he dedicated his 1612 book of canons (his dedication is a useful source of information about Caccini). In his op.10 he included two songs by Caccini and others by Lorenzo Allegri, Vincenzo Calestani and Peri; his op.12 includes three pieces by Bettini. He was replaced at Pisa by his brother Lorenzo on 19 November 1630, so he probably died shortly before then.

Brunelli is an important, versatile figure in the period of stylistic transition in Florence at the beginning of the 17th century. Until recently, he has been studied mainly as a composer of songs, dances and dance-songs, but he was brought up in the polyphonic traditions of Rome and he published a good deal of sacred polyphony as well as pedagogical writings, vocal exercises and canons. Indeed, recent studies confirm that he was one of the most significant Italian music theorists of his time. In the preface to his Regole utilissime (1606), dating from after his arrival in Tuscany from Rome, he questioned the lasting quality of the new monodic style, which he clearly considered an ephemeral fashion. Contact with the lively Florentine environment, home of Caccini, Peri and other monodists and an active centre of court entertainment music, must, however, have tempered his enthusiasm for polyphony, and in his opp.9, 10 and 12 he produced some of the most attractive of all Florentine monodies, duets and trios; a good example is Pur si rupp'il fero laccio (in op.10), with its persistent Lombard rhythm (facs. in Racek, 282; transcr. in FortuneISS, appx iv, 18). Some of his songs have ritornellos, and in this and other aspects they are akin to those of Vincenzo Calestani. In his op.12 he included dance music that had been performed in court entertainments, as did, for example, Lorenzo Allegri in his Primo libro delle musiche (1618) and Marco da Gagliano in his Musiche (1615); he is known to have written with Peri the music for the Ballo della cortesia, performed at court on 11 February 1614. Moreover, his Varii esercitii is not only for voices but also ‘for practising on cornetts, flutes, recorders, viols, violins and similar instruments’.

WORKS

extant works published in Venice unless otherwise stated

sacred vocal

Prato di sacri fiori musicali, 1–8vv, bc, op.7 (1612)

Sacra cantica, 1–4vv, bc (org), op.13 (1617)

Missae tres pro defunctis, 4, 7vv, bc (org), op.14 (1619)

Parte prima delli fioretti spirituali, 1–5vv, org, op.15 (2/1626²) [1st edn, 1621: lost]; 1 ed. in Gargiulo (1999)

Motet, 3vv, bc, 1616²

secular

Canoni varii musicali sopra un soggetto solo (1612)

Arie, scherzi, canzonette, madrigali, 1–3vv, bc, op.9 (1613)

Scherzi, arie, canzonette, e madrigali, libro secondo, 1–3vv, bc, op.10 (1614¹⁴; facs. in FortuneISS, ii, 1–40); 1 scherzo facs. in Racek, ed. in FortuneISS; 1 aria facs. in Gargiulo, ed. (1999) and ed. in Aldrich; 1 duet ed. in Gargiulo, ed. (1999)

Varii esercitii, 1–2vv, insts, op.11 (Florence, 1614); ed. R. Erig (1977)

Scherzi, arie, canzonette, e madrigali, libro terzo, 1–3vv, insts, op.12 (1616¹²); balletto a 5 ed. in Nettl and Aldrich; 1 aria facs. in Racek; 1 madrigal ed. in Aldrich; 1 duet ed. in Gargiulo, ed. (1999)

Aria, 2vv, bc, 1617¹²

theoretical

Regole utilissime … sopra la pratica della musica (Florence, 1606)

Regole et dichiarationi di alcuni contrappunti doppii (Florence, 1610)

lost works

cited in FétisB

Esercizi, 2vv (Florence, 1605)

Mottetti, libro primo, 2vv (Florence, 1607)

Mottetti, libro secondo, 2vv (Florence, 1608)

L'affettuoso invaghito: canzonette, 3vv (Florence, 1608)

I fiori odoranti: madrigali, libro primo, 3vv (?, 1609)

Le fiammette d'ingenio: madrigali, libro secondo, 3vv (?, 1610)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

FétisB

FortuneISS

A. Solerti: Musica, ballo e drammatica alla corte medicea dal 1600 al 1637 (Florence, 1905/R)

E. Schmitz: ‘ Antonio Brunelli als Monodist’, ZIMG, xi (1909–10), 383–6

P. Nettl: ‘Eine Sing- und Spielsuite von Antonio Brunelli’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 385–92

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)

P. Aldrich: Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody (New York, 1966)

H.W. Hitchcock: ‘A New Biographical Source for Caccini’, JAMS, xxvi (1973), 145–7

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

P. Gargiulo: ‘Le regole “prattiche” e “utilissime” nei trattati di Brunelli’, NRMI, xviii (1984), 554–71

A. Rossi-Espagnet: ‘Aspetti biografici e musicali nei “Canoni” di Antonio Brunelli dedicati a Giulio Caccini’, Studi musicali, xx (1991), 85–110

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)

P. Gargiulo, ed.: Musiche d’ingegno: studi per Antonio Brunelli da Santa Croce (1577–1630) (Pisa, 1999)

FABIO BISOGNI, NIGEL FORTUNE

Brunello, Jacques.

See Brunel, Jacques.

Brunet, Johannes

(fl c1510–30). French composer. He may have been active in Rome; his motets all appear in manuscripts of the Cappella Sistina, but he was never a member of that institution or of the Cappella Giulia. His musical style resembles that of Richafort, having affinities also with Moulu, Le Brung and De Silva, as well as certain (doubtless conscious) reminiscences of Josquin. But Brunet’s musical personality is distinctive, combining an extravagant deployment of dissonance and a colourful use of subsidiary tonalities with superb control of form, pace and texture. Only two motets have unequivocal ascriptions to ‘Brunet’; three others have disputed, confused or no ascriptions.

Reynolds identified the composer with a Breton Benedictine priest named Johannes Brunet who was a member of the papal household in Rome from 1486 until 1493 and served as organist of S Pietro in 1490–91. He died on 6 June 1515 at the monastery of St Mathieu-de-Finistère, of which he had been abbot since 1489. This man would have been an exact contemporary of Févin’s, but the style of the motets and the sources in which they are preserved point to a member of the next generation of French composers, contemporary with Richafort. It is possible that the abbot of St Mathieu is the composer of the chanson Hellas, madame, which does not share stylistic characteristics with the motets: it is a typical example of the three-voice chanson as cultivated by Févin, and unlike any of the motets it is preserved in a French manuscript, one closely associated with Queen Anne of Brittany.

WORKS

complete sources and ascriptions in Dean

Ite in orbem universum, 4vv, ed. in MRM, iv (1968), 193–201; Veni, Sancte Spiritus, 5vv, I-Rvat C.S.46 Victime paschali laudes, 6vv (also attrib. Josquin; see Sparks), ed. M. Antonowycz, Josquin des Prez: Motetten, Werken, v, fasc. 48 (Amsterdam, 1959), 98–108; Hellas, madame que j’ayme tant, 3vv, GB-Cmc Pepys 1760

conjectural

Ascendo ad patrem meum, 6vv (anon. in sources), attrib. Brunet by Dean; Ave Maria … Virgo serena, 4vv, ed. CMM v/5 (1972), 113–20, (‘Jo. Brumes’ with music, ‘Brumel’ in index) attrib. Brunet by Dean

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.H. Sparks: ‘Problems of Authenticity in Josquin’s Motets’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 345–59

C. Reynolds: ‘Musical Careers, Ecclesiastical Benefices, and the Example of Johannes Brunet’, JAMS, xxxvii (1984), 49–97

J. Dean: ‘Johannes Brunet and Nato canunt omnia’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2656–72

JEFFREY DEAN

Brunet, Pierre

(fl late 16th century). French composer and lutenist. The Parisian archives, in recording the baptism of his two sons in 1579 and 1589, describe him as lutenist to Henri III. He is known to have written a volume of music (in tablature) for the mandora, published by Le Roy & Ballard in Paris in 1578, but no copy of it survives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955), 198

L.E.S.J. de Laborde: Musiciens de Paris, 1535–1792, ed. Y. de Brossard (Paris, 1965), 50

HOWARD MAYER BROWN

Bruneti, Gaetano [Caetano, Cayetano].

See Brunetti, Gaetano.

Bruneto (dalli Organi) [Bruneto dalli alpichordi].

See Pontoni, Bruneto.

Brunette.

A species of song popular in France during the late 17th century and the 18th. It has been claimed that the name derives from the refrain (‘Ah, petite Brunette! Ah, tu me fais mourir’) of the song Le beau berger Tirsis, which became very popular (see GMB, no.217). Such airs, usually in bipartite form (generally for one to three voices with or without accompaniment), are characterized by tender sentiments and references to young brunettes, although the latter are not mentioned in every piece of this name. Melodic variations, often introduced into the later verses, were sometimes included in publications of brunettes, as in those issued in Paris by the firm of Ballard between 1703 and 1711. Chambonnières and D’Anglebert made some use of brunette melodies in their harpsichord pieces.

The brunette bore the same relationship to the Italian Baroque aria as did the romance to the lied in the 19th century; in its simplicity and elegance it was regarded as quintessentially French. Its many champions (including Montéclair and L’Affilard) regarded it as the perfect means of developing ‘taste’ because of the sensitivity demanded from the performer. A number of brunettes were also reworked as instrumental pieces, especially for teaching purposes. The brunette remained popular until well into the second half of the 18th century. Pierre de La Garde, for example, published in Paris in 1764 three volumes of his brunettes in which the accompaniment could be played on the harpsichord, guitar or harp and in some cases the violin too.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LaBordeE

MGG2 (H. Schneider)

P.-M. Masson: ‘Les brunettes’, SIMG, xii (1910–11), 362–8

G. Cammaert: ‘Les brunettes’, RBM, xi (1957), 35–51

E. Schwandt: ‘L’Affilard’s Published Sketchbooks’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 99–113

J. Fiedler: ‘Brunettes ou petits airs tendres: Unterrichts- und Unterhaltungsmusik des französischen Baroque’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xii (1988), 65–79

DAVID TUNLEY

Brunetti.

Italian family of musicians.

(2) Antonio Brunetti (i)

(3) Giuseppe Brunetti

(4) Antonio Brunetti (ii)

FRANCO BAGGIANI

(1) Giovan Gualberto Brunetti

(b Pistoia, 24 April 1706; d Pisa, 20 May 1787). Composer. His father was Giovanni Piero Brunetti (not the Antonio created by an error of Fétis). He had his first music lessons in Pistoia from a priest, Atto Gherardeschi, specializing on the violin. In 1723, when G.C.M. Clari left Pistoia to become maestro di cappella at the primatial church in Pisa, Brunetti followed him there and studied counterpoint with him for five years. In 1728 he became a student at the Turchini conservatory in Naples, where he had intended to continue the study of the violin, but instead was forced by his superiors to train as a tenor. In 1733 he had a comic opera performed in Naples, where he remained after leaving the conservatory and worked as a church singer. Later he became maestro di cappella to the Duke of Monte Nero, in whose service he spent six months in Sicily, where he composed a serenata for the arrival of Carlo IV in Messina in 1735 and two comic operas to librettos by Pietro Trinchera. Another six months were spent away from Naples teaching at the Oratorio dei Padri Filippini in Genoa. After the death of Leo in 1744 Brunetti was in 1745 appointed secondo maestro at the Turchini conservatory, a post he held until 1754, when he succeeded Clari as maestro di cappella in Pisa, where he remained until his death. On 23 January 1756 he became a member of the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica; his test piece, a Kyrie, is in the Accademia archives. In 1763, the year after the death of his wife Giuseppina, he became a priest.

Brunetti produced most of his large output of church music in Pisa, for both the primatial church and that of the Cavalieri di S Stefano. Those works conceived for the whole cappella are intended to be performed with the four vocal parts taken by one or two singers (the second singer called ‘di rinforzo’) and usually accompanied by orchestra (responsories and Lamentations are accompanied only by violins and violas). Works for ordinary circumstances have only a figured bass accompaniment, performed on the organ. Brunetti also composed occasional cantatas for Pisa and, in 1763 and 1776, three more operas, all serious, performed in Pisa and Lucca. He was the father of several children. Three of his five sons, (2) Antonio (i), (3) Giuseppe and Paolo, became musicians. Paolo (b Naples, c1735–45; d Pisa, 18 April 1769) was a singer at the primatial church.

WORKS

Sacred: 21 masses, 17 Kyrie–Gloria, 4 requiems, many mass movts, 12 Magnificat, 16 litanies, 2 Te Deum, numerous psalms, Lamentations, hymns, motets, introits, antiphons etc., I-PIp, many in autograph; 9 masses, Magnificat, many psalms, Lamentations, responsories, antiphons etc., I-PS; others, D-Dkh, MÜs, GB-Ob, I-Baf, Bc, Fc, Gl, Ls, PIst

Operas: Amore imbratta il senno (3), Naples, Fiorentini, 1733; Don Pasquino (chelleta, 3, P. Trinchera), Naples, Pace, aut. 1735; Lo corrivo (pazzia, Trinchera), Naples, Pace, 1736; Ortensio (commedia per musica, G. Federico), Naples, Fiorentini, carn. 1739; Alessandro nell’Indie (os, P. Metastasio), Pisa, Publico, carn. 1763; Arminio (T. Reghini), Lucca, Giglio, 1763, collab. G. Puccini; Temistocle (Metastasio), Lucca, Publico, 1776

Occasional: L’augurio di tutte le felicità (serenata), Messina, 1735; Dori alle ninfe dell’Arno (M. Coltellini), 1757; Componimento drammatico, Pisa, for wedding of Archduke Joseph, 1761; Il trionfo d’Arno (cant.), Pisa, for visit of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, 1766

Other vocal: Ester (orat), Florence, 1758; Il trionfo della casta Susanna (componimento sacro), Palermo, 1742; Cant., I-Nc; 5 cants., Mc [attrib. Giovanni Aliberto Brunetti]

(2) Antonio Brunetti (i)

(b Naples, between c1735 and 1745; d Salzburg, 25 Dec 1786). Violinist, son of (1) Giovan Gualberto Brunetti. He may have been the Antonio Brunetti listed in 1755 as a student at the Turchini conservatory in Naples. On 1 March 1776 he was appointed Hofmusikdirektor and Hofkonzertmeister at Salzburg; he was called Konzertmeister from 1777 when he succeeded Mozart as leader. On 11 November 1778 he married Michael Haydn’s sister-in-law, Maria Judith Lipps, by whom he had had a child earlier that year. Mozart composed for him (k261, 269, 373, 379) but held him personally in low esteem, referring to him in a letter (9 July 1778) as ‘a thoroughly ill-bred fellow’ and in a later one (11 April 1781) as ‘that coarse and dirty Brunetti … who is a disgrace to his master, to himself and to the whole orchestra’. (H. Schuler: Mozarts Salzburger Freunde und Bekannte: Biographien und Kommentare (Wilhelmshaven, 1996) 146–8)

(3) Giuseppe Brunetti

(b Naples, between c1735 and 1745; d after 1780). Composer, son of (1) Giovan Gualberto Brunetti. He lived mainly in Pisa from 1754 to 1775. In 1759 he had an opera, Didone abbandonata, performed at Siena. In 1762–3 he was at Brunswick, where his opera La Galatea was performed (the score is in D-BS, along with a Gloria). He was living at Siena in 1779, when he applied for the post of maestro di cappella at Milan Cathedral. In 1780 he was living at Florence. Two psalms by him are in the Florence Conservatory library, two lezioni and a Tantum ergo in that of Genoa.

1. The royal chapel and religious institutions.

(4) Antonio Brunetti (ii)

(b ?1767; d ? after 1845). Composer, grandson of (1) G.G. Brunetti. He was probably the Antonio born to (3) Giuseppe Brunetti in 1767. He is frequently called a Pisan in contemporary sources, but may have been born elsewhere. In 1786 he composed an opera and oratorio for Bologna and in the next six years six more operas (the Demofoonte performed in Venice in 1791 and ascribed to him by Gerber has no composer’s name on the libretto and was perhaps a pasticcio). Another five followed intermittently until 1815. He was maestro di cappella at Chieti Cathedral from 1790 to 1800. His whereabouts in the next decade are uncertain, but in 1810, when he applied for the post of maestro di cappella at Urbino Cathedral, he was described as maestro at Chieti. He held the Urbino post until 1816, when he took a similar one at Macerata, remaining there until 1826. On 27 December 1826 he was again elected to his former post in Urbino, but resigned it on 22 March 1827 without having taken it up. At that time he was serving as maestro in Imola. In 1837 he was reported in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (xxxix, col.423) as living in Bologna as a theatrical agent and later that year (col.730) as having been the impresario of an unsuccessful opera season in Imola. He wrote a large amount of church music (82 works are in I-Us, the latest dated one being from 1846). He was a member of the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica.

WORKS

operas

Lo sposo di tre e marito di nessuno (dg, F. Livigni), Bologna, Zagnoni, aut. 1786; Le stravaganze in campagna (dg, 2), Venice, S Cassiano, aut. 1787; Il Bertoldo (dg, 2), L. da Ponte), Florence, Pergola, carn. 1788, F-Pn [attrib, G.G. Brunetti], I-Fc; Vologeso re de’ Parti (os, 3, A. Zeno), Florence, Intrepidi, spr. 1789; La serva alla moda (dg, 2), 1789; Fatima (2), Brescia, Accademia degli Erranti, sum. 1791; Le nozze per invito, ossia Gli amanti capricciosi (dg, 2), Rome, Valle, 1791; Li contrasti per amore (dg), Rome, Dame, aut. 1792

Il pazzo glorioso (dg, 2, G. Bertati), Rome, Tordinona, carn. 1797; Il libretto alla moda (2), Naples, Fiorentini, carn. 1808, Nc; La colomba contrastata, ossia La bella carbonara, Rimini, Comunale, carn. 1813; Amore e fedeltà alla prova (2), Bologna, Corso, May 1814; La fedeltà coniugale (G. Rossi), Parma, Ducale, 30 Jan 1815 [same work as the preceding]

other works

Sacred: numerous masses, motets, psalms, antiphons, responsories, Lamentations etc., I-Fc, RI, Us, Macerata Cathedral, Chieti Cathedral

Other vocal: Il sacrificio d’Ifisa (orat), Bologna, 1786; Ascoli avventurata (cant.), Fermo, 1796; Davide e Assalonne (orat), Chieti, 17 Sept 1797; La giustizia placata (cant.), Pianella, July 1799; Betulia liberata (orat, Metastasio), Tagliacozzo, 27 Aug 1799; Il trionfo della religione, ossia Il martirio di S Pietro (orat), Urbino, 1814; Il presagio fortunato (cant.), Ancona, 28 Aug 1826

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberNL

GiacomoC

L. Torri: ‘Una lettera inedita del Padre Giambattista Martini’, RMI, ii (1895), 262–86

G.G. Brunetti: autobiographical letter (MS, I-Bc, H/65, Carteggio Martiniano)

Gazzetta toscana (Florence, 1787), no.28, p.131; no.29, p.112

B. Ligi: ‘La cappella musicale del Duomo di Urbino’, NA, ii (1925), 1–369, esp. 182, 184, 195, 231

A. Sacchetti-Sassetti: ‘La cappella musicale del Duomo di Rieti’, NA, xvlii (1940), 121–70

P. Peretti: ‘Due Stabat Mater di Giovanni Gualberto Brunetti (1764) e di Antonio Brunetti (1825) “ad imitazione dell'esimo Sig. Pergolesi”’, RIM, xxix (1994), 401–57

Brunetti, Domenico

(b Bologna, c1580; d Bologna, between late April and 7 May 1646). Italian composer and organist. In 1609 he was organist of S Domenico, Bologna. From 1618 until his death he was maestro di cappella of the cathedral there, a somewhat lesser establishment than the better-known S Petronio. He founded the Accademia dei Filaschisi in 1633.

Brunetti was one of the very first composers to publish accompanied monodies: there are 19 in L'Euterpe. 14 of them are madrigals in a bland diatonic style reminiscent of that of the madrigals in Caccini's Le nuove musiche (1601/2); a good example is O miei pensieri (ed. in Fortune, appx iv, 3–4), which is notable for a very early example of a change near the end from the prevailing common time to 3/2. The other five monodies are simple little arias with attractive melodies. The volume also includes seven pieces that can be sung as either solos or duets, four genuine chamber duets with continuo, a three-part madrigal featuring echoes, and four pieces for four voices. Of the latter, two – Stanchi miei lumi and Bocca amorosa – are versions of pieces from earlier in the book, one a monody, the other one of those that can be sung as either solos or duets. They are for two mezzo-sopranos and two basses, with two continuo parts that are virtually identical to the bass voice parts. The latter are elaborations of the bass of the other versions, while the first mezzo-soprano part is the same as before and the second is new. These pieces are likely to have been arrangements of those for smaller forces, but it is possible that the latter are reductions from the four-part versions.

Brunetti's sacred music shows that he also early adopted the new concertato style popular in northern Italy: his 1609 collection includes solo motets, duets and trios, but the seven-part Ave verum (RISM 1612³), written for two unequal groups of voices, is in a more transitional style. Another seven-part piece, Congratulamini mihi (1609), has a rondo structure alternating solos and tuttis. This collection is interesting for the presence of a right-hand part to go with the basso continuo; sometimes it is an unornamented version of the vocal melody, sometimes it fills in the harmony. Brunetti's pleasing melodic gift is apparent in small motets such as Lux aeterna (RISM 1625¹) for two sopranos, tenor and continuo; the sopranos comment intermittently on a declamatory tenor solo.

WORKS

L'Euterpe … opera musicale di madrigali, canzonette, arie, stanze, e scherzi diversi, in dialoghi et echo, 1–4vv, theorbo/other insts (Venice, 1606); 1 ed. in Fortune; 2 ed. in Leopold

Concentus cum gravi et acuto ad organum, 1–4 and more vv (Venice, 1609)

Canticum Deiparae Virginis octies iuxta singulos rhytmorum sacrorum ordines gradatim repetitum decantandum, 5vv, bc ad lib (Venice, 1621)

7 motets, 1612³, 1616², 1619⁵, 1620², 1623², 1625¹; 1 piece in Exercitatio musica, ed. J. Dilliger (Magdeburg, 1624)

1 madrigal, 1624¹¹; 1 in Madrigali, 4–5vv, bc, ed. G.P. Biandrà (Venice, 1626)

1 litany, 6vv; 1 piece, 2vv, org: lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM, iv

FortuneISS

G. Gaspari: ‘Dei musicisti bolognesi al XVII secolo e delle loro opere a stampa’, Atti e memorie delle RR. Deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie dell’Emilia, new ser., v/2 (1880), 17–21

E. Schmitz: ‘Zur Geschichte des italienischen Kammerduetts im 17. Jahrhundert’, JbMP 1916, 43–60, esp. 45

M.F. Bukofzer: Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947), 29, 36–7

O. Mischiati: ‘Per la storia dell'oratorio a Bologna: tre inventari del 1620, 1622 e 1682’, CHM, iii (1962–3), 131–70

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

S. Leopold: Al modo d'Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.29 (1995)

NIGEL FORTUNE, JEROME ROCHE

Brunetti [Bruneti], Gaetano [Caetano, Cayetano]

(b ?Fano, 1744; d Colmenar de Orejo, nr Madrid, 16 Dec 1798). Italian composer, violinist and orchestra director, active in Spain. The son of Stefano Brunetti (of Fano) and Vittoria Perusini, he probably studied the violin in Livorno with Pietro Nardini. Having moved with his parents to Madrid by 1762 (the date of a collection with one small piece by him), he entered the service of Charles III in 1767 as a violinist of the royal chapel. He also taught music and the violin to the king’s son, the Prince of Asturias, and composed for the court. By 1771 his duties had expanded to include commissions for festivities at Aranjuez, and in 1779 he was appointed music director of such festivities.

When Charles IV became king (1788) he appointed Brunetti director of the newly formed royal chamber orchestra; Brunetti wrote much for the group and selected a wide repertory from contemporary European composers, with works of Haydn strongly featured. Brunetti was also responsible for collecting and maintaining the royal library, and he is partly responsible for the rich collection now housed in the royal palace, Madrid. In spite of the social and governmental weaknesses of his court, the king’s interest in art (as Goya’s patron), his accomplishments as a violinist and his insatiable appetite for new works provided a stimulating cultural atmosphere in which Brunetti flourished. Brunetti was also a welcome and frequent visitor at the court of the Duke of Alba, to whom he dedicated several works, and his influence extended to numerous other courts in Madrid, including that of Boccherini’s patron, the Infante Don Luis. He remained in Charles’s service until his death, which occurred within a month of his second marriage. He was survived by a daughter and a son Francesco (b c1770), a cellist in the royal chamber orchestra.

Brunetti’s music has remained virtually unknown since the 18th century; very little was published during his lifetime, and only a few pieces are available in modern editions. Most of his 451 works are chamber pieces written to be performed by and for the king and his ensemble. The symphonies, mostly in four movements, form another important group. The music found in the royal palace archives indicates Brunetti’s exposure to a wide range of stylistic influences from composers of various nationalities. The king’s preference, however, was for the style of the early Classical composers, and Brunetti’s music, written with unusual imagination in a blend of traditional and progressive styles, best fits into that category. He most frequently wrote in Classical forms – sonata-allegro, variation and rondo; he also used dance forms and occasionally inserted a minuet into a final rondo. The sonata-form movements have extended development sections (generally based on the principal theme and favouring the minor mode) and abbreviated recapitulations that may invert the order of thematic material or omit the principal theme altogether; there is seldom a coda. The transitional or developmental passages frequently make use of interesting and original chromatic or enharmonic modulations, and the return to the tonic is often intentionally unprepared. The symphonies feature prominent wind parts, and some of the later works, particularly the minuets and contredanses, use large-scale forces: flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. The third movements are usually in a double dance form other than the minuet and trio, with the first dance scored for a wind quintet and the second for strings.

Brunetti’s consistently graceful melodic lines are built from a single small motif, providing the cohesive structural element of a whole movement. The phrases are balanced, with the second half of each usually longer than the first and closing with an extension or development of the thematic idea. The texture is usually homophonic and is given an impelling rhythmic drive by the frequent juxtapositions of triplets and duplets. His manuscripts explicitly indicate tempo, embellishments, dynamics, phrasing, bowing and other performing techniques (ponticello, spiccato, col legno etc.). Of particular interest are the group of 13 adagios glosados, of which ten have been identified as alternative second movements to existing sonatas. They form an important group of Brunetti’s works from a historical point of view, both within his own output and as part of the history of ornamentation.

WORKS

orchestral

Edition: Gaetano Brunetti 1744–1798: Nine Symphonies, ed. N. Jenkins, The Symphony 1720–1840, ser. A, v (New York, 1979) [S]

Incid music for a comedy by Garcia de Casttañal, 1762, inc., E-Mp*

6 ovs., 1772, US-Wc*; 31 syms., 28 numbered 7–34: 14, C, 1779, Wc*, E-Mp; 15, B, 1779, D-Bsb*; 18, D, 1779, US-Wc*; 19, b, 1779, Wc*, E-Mp; 20, E, 1779, D-Bsb, S; 13, D, 1780, Bsb*; 33 ‘Il maniatico’, c, US-Wc*, ed. in Classici della musica, iii (Rome, 1960); 26, B, 1782, E-Mp, S; 22, g, 1783, US-Wc*, E-Mp, ed. in Classici della musica, iii (Rome, 1960); 23, F, 1783, US-Wc*, E-Mp, ed. N. Jenkins (New York, 1966); 24, C, 1783, US-Wc*, E-Mp; 25, D, 1783, US-R*, E-Mp; 29, C, 1783, US-R*, E-Mp; 30, E, 1783, US-Wc, E-Mp; 31, d, 1783, US-Wc*, E-Mp; 21, E, 1784, Mp, S; 27, B, 1787, US-Wc*, E-Mp; 16, D, 1789, Mp, S; 17, B, 1789, US-Wc*, E-Mp; 28, A, 1789, Mp, S; 34, F, 1790, Mp, S; 7, c, D-Bsb*, E-Mp; 8, A, D-Bsb*, E-Mp; 9, D, US-NYpm*, E-Mp, S; 10, B, US-Wc*, E-Mp; 11, F, lost; 12, G, Mp; 32, c, US-Wc, ed. H.T. David (New York, 1937/R); [35], E, E-Mp, S; [36], a/A, Mp, S; [37], C, Mp

4 sinfonie concertante: 1, C, 1769, lost; 2, C, 1787, US-CAL*, E-Mp; 3, B, 1788, D-Bsb*, E-Mp; 4, C, 1794, US-Wc*, E-Mp

Variations, F-Pn*; 18 minuets, US-Wc; 12 contredanses; 7 marches, 1779–87, F-Pn*; 8 galops

chamber

12 sextets: 6, 3 vn, va, 2 vc, E-Bc* (Paris, 1776), 6, 2 vn, ob, 2 va, vc, I-PAc; 66 qnts, 2 vn, 2 va, vc: 6 as op.1 (Paris, 1771), 6 as op.3, E-Mp, I-PAc, US-Wc, 6 as op.4, Wc* (without no.4), E-Mp, I-PAc, US-Wc, 6 as op.5, Wc* (nos.3, 4, 6), E-Mp, I-PAc, US-Wc, 6 as op.6, Wc* (without no.5), E-Mp, I-PAc, US-Wc, 6 as op.7, Wc* (nos.2, 4, 6), E-Mp, I-PAc, 6 as op.8, US-Wc* (nos.4, 6), E-Mp, 6 as op.9, Mp, 6 as op.10, US-Wc, E-Mp, I-PAc, 6 as op.11, E-Mp, I-PAc, US-Wc, 6 in I-Mc; 6 qnts, 2 vn, va, bn, vc, op.2, US-Wc, E-Mp, US-Wc

44 str qts: 6 as op.2, 1774, F-Pn*, US-Wc, 6 as op.3, 1774, F-Pn*, US-Wc, 6 as op.4, Wc, 6 (1 lost) as op.5, Wc, 15 others, F-Pn*, US-Wc, 5 others, Wc (1 autograph); 70 minuets, str qt, Wc; 30 str trios: 6 as op.1, E-Mp, 6 as op.2 (Paris, 1776), 6 as op.3 (Paris, 1782), 6, 1st vn pt. Palacio de Liria, Madrid, 6 in I-Gl; 64 sonatas, vn, b (incl. 24 dated 1767–88), E-Mp, F-Pn, US-Wc, 3 adagio glosados, vn, b, E-Mp

Sonata, va, b, 1789, Mp; Divertimento, 2 vn, US-Wc*; 6 divertimenti, vn, va, US-Wc*, no.1 ed. C. Arnold (New York, 1963); 23 divertimenti, vn, va, vc, E-Bc; 6 duos, 2 vn, op.3 (Paris, 1776); 4 duets, 2 vn (Paris, 1776); Solo, vn (Paris, 1776)

vocal

Ops: El Faetón, lost; El Jason, lost

Sacred: Mass, 8vv, orch, 1766, US-Wc*; Miserere, 4vv, insts, 1794, E-Mp; 3 Lamentations, 1794, Mp

Others: 6 concert arias: E ver’ pur troppo, 1783, F-Pn*, L’ossa insepolte, US-Wc, Non so più dov’io sia, Wc, Involarmi il mio tesoro?, Wc, Se pietà, E-Mp, Se sapesti che soffri, Mp; Che fa il mio bene, cavatina, Mp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Labitte: Catalogue thématique des oeuvres inédites, la plupart autographe de Gaetano Brunetti (MS, F-Pn) [catalogue of sym. works]

M. Godoy: Cuenta dada de su vida política … ó sean Memorias críticas y apologéticas (Madrid, 1836–8)

G. Chapman, ed.: The Travel Diaries of William Beckford of Fonthill (Cambridge, 1928)

A. Salazar: ‘La música española en tiémpos de Goya’, Revista de occidente, vi (1928), 334–77

J.A. Ruiz Casaux: La música en la corte de Don Carlos IV y su influencia en la vida músical española (Madrid, 1959)

J. Subirá: ‘Pretéritos músicos hispanicos’, Academia: anales y boletín de la Real academia de bellas artes de bellas artes de San Fernando, xx (1965), 9–43; xxi (1965), 15–56

A.B. Belgray: Gaetano Brunetti: an Exploratory Bio-Bibliographical Study (diss., U. of Michigan,1970) [incl. thematic index of violin sonatas]

S. Martinotti: ‘Sinfonie concertanti e trii fra Illuminismo ed età romantica’, Chigiana, xxxiii, new ser. xiii (1976), 337–50

K. Fischer: ‘Die Streichquartette Gaetano Brunettis (1744–1798) in der Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris im Zusammenhang mit dem Streichquartett des 18. Jahrhunderts’, GfMKB: Bayreuth 1981, 350–59

T. Cascudo: ‘La formación de la orquesta de la real cámara en la corte madrileña de Carlos IV’, Artigrama, xii (1996–7), 79–98

ALICE B. BELGRAY, NEWELL JENKINS

Brunetti, Giovanni

(b Sabbioneta, nr Casalmaggiore; fl 1613–31). Italian composer. He was maestro di cappella of Novara Cathedral from 1613 to 1617, at the Accademia della Morte, Ferrara, from 1621 to 1625 and at the ducal chapel of Urbino between 1625 and 1631. In the preface to his Salmi intieri of 1625 he remarked on the different manners of singing he had found in the various districts of Italy to which his career led him. He also explained how to add a ripieno choir in these psalms by using it only at the forte markings – a common procedure in much functionally conceived Italian church music at the time. He is known only as a composer of such music. Much of it is in the modern concertato idiom, as the titles of three of his collections indicate, but the five-part motets in the first collection listed below are in the more impersonal stile antico beloved of some composers of the Roman school (appropriately enough he dedicated them to Pope Urban VIII). (J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi, Oxford, 1984)

WORKS

all published in Venice

Motecta 5vv … liber primus (1625)

Motecta 2–4vv, una cum bc (org) … liber primus (1625)

Motetti concertati, 2–6vv, con le letanie della Madonna, 5vv, con bc (org) … libro secondo (1625)

Salmi intieri concertati, 5–6vv … con bc (org) (1625)

Salmi spezzati concertati, 2–4vv … con bc (org) (1625)

Salmi spezzati concertati, 2–4vv, con una messa, 4vv, bc … libro 2 (1626)

1 motet in 1619⁵; lit in 1626³

JEROME ROCHE

Brung, Jean le.

See Le Brung, Jean.

Bruni, Antonio Bartolomeo

(b Cuneo, 28 Jan 1757; d Cuneo, 6 Aug 1821). Italian violinist, composer and conductor, active in France. According to Fétis he studied the violin with Pugnani in Turin and composition with Speziani in Novara. He arrived in Paris in spring 1780, and on 15 May made his début as a violinist at the Concert Spirituel, performing one of his own concertos; the performance won considerable acclaim from the Mercure de France. In 1781 he joined the orchestra of the Comédie-Italienne. His first published work, a set of six violin duos, appeared in the following year and was soon followed by numerous other instrumental works, mostly for violin, and by the periodical collection Journal de violon (Baillon and Porro), on which Bruni collaborated. His first opera, Coradin, was performed at Fontainebleau in 1785 and in Paris the following year, and began a series of nearly 20 comic operas produced in Paris with considerable success over the next 15 years. In 1789 he was appointed by Viotti to the orchestra of the Théâtre de Monsieur as first solo violinist, and for a short time served as director of this orchestra, succeeding Mestrino, and of the orchestra of the Théâtre Montansier.

A supporter of the Revolution, Bruni was made a member of the Commission Temporaire des Arts in 1794, and in that year wrote the hymn O Dieu puissant, sung in the presence of Robespierre by ‘blind labourers’ and a chorus of blind children. In 1795 he was appointed by the Directoire to catalogue the musical instruments confiscated during the Terror; his inventory was later edited by J. Gallay and published (1890).

From 1799 to 1801 Bruni directed the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique. Upon the opening of the Théâtre Italien in 1801 he was appointed director of that orchestra. He retired to Passy in 1806, and later that year returned to Cuneo. In 1814 he returned to Paris to produce two theatrical works, Le règne de douze heures and Le mariage par commission; but these were badly received and, threatened by the restoration of the Bourbons, he retired in 1816 to his newly purchased estate, ‘La Magnina’, near Cuneo.

Apart from the mythological subject of L’isle enchantée and the oriental plot of his late opera Le règne de douze heures, the core of Bruni’s stage works shows the civic life of revolutionary France with a mixture of sentimentality and realism. Stylistically, in common with contemporary Italian composers, Bruni had a penchant for the insistent repetition of certain phrases, octave leaps and a quick-paced recitation on the same pitch. But the brevity of many song-like arias, the syllabic text-setting without repetitions, and vaudevilles at the ends of operas such as Claudine and La rencontre en voyage reveal his reliance on the French style. Bruni is probably best remembered, however, for his viola method, a valuable work which was translated into several languages and has undergone many new editions to the present day.

The Consiglio Comunale in Cuneo possesses an outstanding portrait of Bruni, probably the work of David; another portrait attributed to David, in the Frick Collection (New York), may also be of Bruni.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris, unless otherwise stated

stage

unless otherwise stated, first performed in Paris

Coradin (comédie lyrique, 3, Magnitot or Tacusset), Fontainebleau, 15 Nov 1785, OC (Favart), 19 Jan 1786

Célestine (comédie lyrique mêlée d’ariettes, 3, Magnitot), OC (Favart), 15 Oct 1787 (1788)

L’isle enchantée (opéra bouffon, 3, J.-F. Sedaine de Sarcy), Monsieur, 3 Aug 1789 (n.d.)

Le mort imaginaire (oc, 2. Ponteuil), Montansier, 27 April 1790, F-R

Spinette et Marini, ou La leçon conjugale (1, ?Bodard de Tezay), Montansier, 21 June 1790, Mc, ov. (n.d.)

Cadichon, ou Les bohémiennes (opéra-vaudeville, 1, J.B. Pujoulx), Feydeau, 12 March 1792, Pc*, CH-N

L’officier de fortune, ou Les deux militaires (cmda, 2, J. Patrat), Feydeau, 24 Sept 1792, F-A, Pc, excerpts (n.d.)

Claudine, ou Le petit commissionnaire (1, J.M. Deschamps, after Florian), Feydeau, 6 March 1794, A, Pc (n.d.)

Le mariage de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (intermède, 1, Baunier and Blanvillain), Egalité, 25 Oct 1794

Galatée (mélodrame, F.-M. Poultier) d'Elmotte, République, 1 Feb 1795

Toberne, ou Le pêcheur suédois (comédie mêlée de morceaux de musique, 2, Patrat), Feydeau, 2 Dec 1795, Pn (inc.), R, S-St (inc.), excerpts (n.d.)

Les sabotiers (oc, 1, C. Pigault-Lebrun), Feydeau, 23 June 1796 (n.d.)

Le major Palmer (drame, 3, Pigault-Lebrun), Feydeau, 26 Jan 1797, CH-Gc (n.d.)

La rencontre en voyage (comédie, 1, Pujoulx), Feydeau, 28 April 1798, F-Pc, CH-Gc (n.d.)

L’auteur dans son ménage (oc, 1, E. Gosse), Feydeau, 28 March 1799, F-Pc (n.d.)

L’esclave (op, 1, Gosse), Feydeau, 16 March 1800

Augustine et Benjamin, ou Le Sargines de village (oc, 1, Bernard-Valville and E. Hus), OC (Favart), 4 Nov 1800

La bonne soeur (comédie lyrique, 1, Petit aîné and L. Philipon de la Madeleine), Feydeau, 21 Jan 1801

Le règne de douze heures (oc, 2, E. de Planard, after Mme de Genlis), OC (Feydeau), 8 Dec 1814, Pc (n.d.)

Le mariage par commission, ou Le seigneur allemand (oc, 1, J.B. Simonnin), OC (Feydeau), 4 Dec 1815, Po

Doubtful: L’époux déguisé (1, Gosse), 1800; Théodore l’Auvergnat (2, Hus)

other vocal works

O Dieu puissant: hymne à l’Etre Suprême (J.-M. Deschamps), solo vv, boys’ chorus, 3 June 1795 (1794)

Tentazione di S Antonio (P. Trivelli), ?after 1816, lost

Cantata for visit of Vittorio Emanuele I at Cuneo, ?lost

Se meritar potessi, canzonetta, 1v, hpd (Dresden, n.d.); 3 airs, 1v, insts, arr. hp/pf (n.d.)

Pieces in contemporary anthologies

instrumental

fuller list in Cesari, with partial thematic catalogue

60 str qts in 10 bks, 2 bks lost; 36 trios concertants, vn, va/vc, in 6 bks

At least 81 vn duos in 14 bks; at least 42 vn duos faciles ‘pour les commençants’ in 7 bks; at least 21 duos concertants, vn, va, in 4 bks; 12 duos concertants, 2 va, in 2 bks

21 sonates, vn, vn/b acc., in 4 bks; 6 sonates, va, b, in 2 bks; 6 duos, solo vn

Kbd sonatas, c1786, advertised by Imbault, lost

Pieces in contemporary anthologies

pedagogical

[29] Caprices et airs variés en forme d’étude pour un violon seul, op.1 (1787)

50 études, vn, vn acc. (c1790)

50 études, vn, 2me partie (c1795)

Méthode pour le violon composée sur l’alphabet musical de Mme Duhan (c1810)

Méthode pour l’alto viola contenant les principes de cet instrument suivis de 25 études (c1820)

Leçons de chants faciles, F-Pc

WRITINGS

ed. J. Gallay: Un inventaire sous la Terreur: état des instruments de musique relevé chez les émigrés et condamnés (Paris, 1890/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

GerberL

DBI (G. Scalabrino)

ES (F. Lesure)

GroveO (M. Fend, M. Noiray)

C. Pierre: Les hymnes et chansons de la Révolution (Paris, 1904/R)

G. Cesari and others: Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni, musicista cuneese (1751–1821) (Turin, 1931)

L. de La Laurencie: ‘Un musicien italien en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, RdM, xv (1931), 268–77

R. Collino Pansa: ‘Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni’, La Scala (1956), 49–53

A. Marfini and O. Masoero: ‘Contributi alla biografia di Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni’, NRMI, v (1971), 861–6

G. Pestelli: ‘“Claudine ou Le petit commissionnaire” di Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni (1794)’, Quadrivium, xiv (1973), 217–34

K.M. Stolba: ‘Bartolomeo Bruni and the First Violin Etudes’, Michigan Academician, xv (1983), 275–83

LELAND FOX/MICHAEL FEND, MICHEL NOIRAY

Bruni, (Pietro) Francesco Caletti [Caletto].

See Cavalli, Francesco.

Brunkard, William.

See Brouncker, william.

Brunnemüller [Brunnenmüller], Elias.

See Bronnemüller, Elias.

Brünn

(Ger.).

See Brno.

Brunner, Adolf

(b Zürich, 25 June 1901; d Thalwil, 15 Feb 1992). Swiss composer. He studied composition in Berlin with Jarnach, Schreker and Gmeindl (1921–5) and then pursued general studies in Paris and elsewhere before returning to Zürich in 1933. In common with his belief that music ‘should be an element of our active life’, he combined his compositional activity with a concern for the practical and the social. During World War II he was a member (and later executive president) of the ‘Gotthardbund’, a Swiss non-political organization for opposition to Nazism. He was subsequently employed by Swiss radio as an expert on politics and sociology (1948–60). His deep preoccupation with Protestant theology and with the place of music in the church, evident in his choral works and his book Wesen, Funktion und Ort der Musik im Gottesdienst, led him in 1955 to establish the Swiss Society for Protestant Church Music.

Brunner's music is linear and transparent. A number of his works – such as the Concerto for Large Orchestra (1955–6), with its contrasts between different groups of instruments, and Konzertante Musik (begun in 1928 and finally completed from sketches in 1959) – show the influence of the Italian concerto grosso principle. The concertante element is equally evident in the chamber and piano works, which, featuring extended tonality and a more pervasive chromaticism, achieve a concentrated harshness of restrained emotion. By contrast, his choral music is predominantly modal: whether in the Schütz-inspired Geistliche Konzerte or the a cappella pieces – which range from the contrapuntally complex Mass and motets to simple, almost homophonic works such as the Chorlieder nach alten Texten (1949) – the text provides the sole foundation for the form. After the Passionsgeschichte nach dem Evangelisten Markus (1970–71), which presents a synthesis of his vocal and instrumental techniques, Brunner ceased composing, instead writing 12 books of philosophical fragments under the title Natur und Mensch (unpublished).

WORKS

vocal

Acc. choral: Das Gleichnis von den 10 Jungfrauen (geistliches Konzert), 4vv, hn, str orch, 1938–9; Das Weihnachtsevangelium, 4–6vv, str, 1963; Passionsgeschichte nach dem Evangelisten Markus, 8 solo vv, double chorus, org, orch, 1970–71

Unacc. choral: Mass, 4vv, 1933; 4 Altdeutsche Liebeslieder, 3 female vv, 1938; Der Mensch, 6vv, 1938; Gott ist Geist, motet, 4vv, 1939 [from Jesus und die Samariterin, 1939]; 5 Motets, 4vv, 1942; Die Versuchung Jesu (geistliches Konzert), 4vv, 1945; Sprüche nach Angelus Silesius, 4vv, 1947; 4 Chorlieder nach alten Texten, 4vv, 1949; 16 Spruchmotetten, 4vv, 1956–60; 4 Jahrzeiten-Choräle, 4vv, 1959; 8 Chorales, unison vv, 1961

1–3 solo vv: Jesus und die Ehebrecherin (geistliches Konzert), 1v, org, 1939; Jesus und die Samariterin am Brunnen (geistliches Konzert), 3 solo vv, fl, 5 str insts, org, 1939; Taufkantate, 1v, vn, vc, org, 1946; Das Gespräch Jesu mit Nikodemus (geistliches Konzert), 2 solo vv, ob, 5 str insts, org, 1947; 3 Lieder, S, A, va, 1949

instrumental

Orch: Symphonisches Orchesterstück mit Suite, 1924–5; Konzertante Musik, 1928–59; Partita, pf, orch, 1938–9; Conc. grosso, str orch, timp, 1943–4; Conc. for Large Orch, 1955–6

Chbr/pf: Str Trio, 1929; Sonata, pf, 1933; 15 Kleine Klavierstücke, 1933, rev. 1956; Sonata, fl, pf, 1935–6; Sonata, vn, pf, 1948; Str Qt, 1961–2

Org: Pfingstbuch, 1936–7; 3 Eingangspiele, 1960–61; Chorale Variations ‘Vater unser im Himmelreich’, 1962; Chorale Variations ‘Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein’, 1962–3

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Hänssler

WRITINGS

Wesen, Funktion und Ort der Musik im Gottesdienst (Zürich, 1956, enlarged 2/1968)

Erinnerungen eines Schweizer Komponisten aus der Schule Philipp Jarnach und Franz Schrekers, ed. C. Walton (Zürich, 1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (B. Billeter)

O. Riemer: ‘Zuchtvolle Freiheit: zur geistlichen Musik von Adolf Brunner’, Musica, iii (1949), 7–13

B. Billeter: ‘Neue Chorwerke von Adolf Brunner’, Der evangelische Kirchenchor, lxxii (1967), 66–8

B. Billeter: Adolf Brunner (Zürich, 1972)

B. Billeter: ‘Natur und Mensch: zur Philosophie von Adolf Brunner’, Schweizer musikpädagogische Blätter, lxxxiv (1996), 193–9

BERNHARD BILLETER

Bruno, Giovanni Battista Caletti di.

See Caletti, Giovanni Battista.

Bruno, Guillelmo [Guillermo].

See Brown, William.

Bruno, Rinaldo.

See Burno, Rinaldo.

Brunold, Paul

(b Paris, 14 Oct 1875; d Paris, 14 Sept 1948). French harpsichordist, organist and musicologist. After studying the piano with Marmontel and harmony with Lavignac and Leroux at the Paris Conservatoire he became a pupil of Paderewski, and from 1910 he took up the study of early music (he owned an 18th-century harpsichord). From 1912 to 1920 he edited the periodical Echo musical. In 1915 he became organist of St Gervais, and from 1946 to his death he was also curator of the instrument collection at the Conservatoire. His research was almost entirely confined to French Classical keyboard music; his monograph on the organ of St Gervais is his most thorough piece of archival research. His short biography of François Couperin (1949, translated by J.B. Hanson from notes provided by the author shortly before his death) is a popularization based on the work of Tessier, Tiersot and Bouvet, but he contributed to this research in Documents inédits sur les premiers Couperin à l'orgue de Saint-Gervais, 1932. He was well acquainted with the problems confronting the interpreter of French Classical keyboard music, and he provided one of the earliest aids for the modern performer in Traité des signes. His interest in French harpsichord music resulted in his preparation of the first critical modern editions of, among others, Chambonnières (with Tessier), Dieupart, Louis Couperin and above all François Couperin.

WRITINGS

‘Un motet manuscrit de 1735 provenant des anciens organistes de l'église Saint-Gervais’, RdM, iii (1922), 66–8

‘Une romance de M. Couperin l'aîné, organiste du roi’, RdM, vi (1925), 121–6

Traité des signes et agréments employés par les clavecinistes français des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Lyons, 1925/R)

‘Les pianos de Chopin’, KM no.1 (1928), 50–54

Documents inédits sur les premiers Couperin à l'orgue de Saint-Gervais (Aurillac, 1932)

Le grand orgue de Saint-Gervais à Paris (Paris, 1934)

‘Musées d'instruments de musique’, La musique des origines à nos jours, ed. N. Dufourcq (Paris, 1946), 532–8

François Couperin (Monaco, 1949) [in Eng.]

‘Les D'Andrieu’, L'orgue, no.76 (1955), 65–70; no.77 (1955), 97–105; no.78 (1956), 1–9; no.79 (1956), 54–7; no.80 (1956), 71–81

EDITIONS

with H. Expert: Amusement des musiciens français du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1913) [works for musette and hurdy-gurdy by C. Baton, N. Chédeville and J. Aubert]

with H. Expert: Les maîtres français du clavecin des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1914–25) [incl. works by F. Dandrieu, L.-C. Daquin, E. Jacquet de la Guerre, N. Lebègue and A.-L. Couperin]

with A. Tessier: Jacques Champion de Chambonnières: Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1926/R)

François Couperin: Oeuvres didactiques, Oeuvres complètes, i (Paris, 1933); Pièces d'orgue, ibid., vi (Paris, 1932); Musique vocale profane i, ibid., xi (Paris, 1932) [with A. Tessier]; Musique vocale profane ii, ibid., xii (Paris, 1933)

C. Dieupart: Six suites pour clavecin, Collection, i (Paris, 1934); Airs et chansons, ibid., ii (Paris, 1934)

Louis Couperin: Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1936)

Louis Nicolas Clérambault: Pièces de clavecin (Monaco, 1964)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Paul Brunold’, RdM, xxvii (1948), 137

EDWARD HIGGINBOTTOM

Brunswick (i)

(Ger. Braunschweig).

City in Lower Saxony, Germany. The early development of music there was largely the responsibility of the ruling house of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. The city was notable for its liturgical music in the 14th and 15th centuries. Numerous manuscripts from this period are in the libraries at Wolfenbüttel (among them several Passion plays from Brunswick Cathedral; see Sievers), Hanover and Hildesheim. After the Reformation closer links were forged between civic, church and court music by Dukes Julius (1568–89) and Heinrich Julius (1589–1613). Under Julius, singers from the mining districts of the Harz mountains were invited to perform at court, and in 1571 a Hofkapelle was established at neighbouring Wolfenbüttel. Heinrich Julius recognized the genius of John Dowland, who was a guest of the ducal household in 1594.

In the 14th century an organ was made for the Benedictine abbey church of St Aegidien. A two-manual instrument without pedals was installed in the cathedral of St Blasius in 1499 and in 1560 replaced by one built by Johann Thomas. In 1596 Duke Heinrich Julius arranged a congress attended by 53 organists at his country residence in Gröningen. In 1603 the cathedral organ was rebuilt by Henning Henke and Christopher Münch. Other builders of this period were Gottfried Fritzsche, Jonas Weigel and Esaias Compenius. Thomas Mancinus and Michael Praetorius (chronicler of these developments) were also conspicuous figures in the musical life of the area.

Renowned 17th-century Kapellmeisters at Brunswick were Heinrich Schütz (non-resident, but visiting several times), Johann Rosenmüller and Johann Theile. The development of opera, fostered by a strong tradition of Singballette and similar festivities at the ducal residence in nearby Wolfenbüttel, was largely due to Duke Anton Ulrich (vice-regent from 1685, reigning duke 1704–14). His extant librettos (e.g. for J.J. Löwe von Eisenach's Amelinde, oder Dy triumphirende Seele (of 1657) are closer to Singspiel than to the Italian opera of the period. In 1689 the derelict Rathaus am Hagenmarkt was converted at great expense into the city's first opera house, where performances were given during trade fairs in February and August (for the repertory, see Schmidt). The first work to be heard there was Kusser's Cleopatra with a festive prologue, followed by operas of German origin (by Bronner, Erlebach, Krieger, Steffani, Keiser, Schürmann, Hasse and Graun) as well as from Italy (Giannettini, Orlandini). Because of the close dynastic bonds between the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Habsburgs, many court operas from Vienna were also performed at the Hagenmarkt, and after 1732 Brunswick became a German stronghold of Metastasian opera. During the 17th and 18th centuries school drama was also enthusiastically supported; a colloquy between Croesus and Solon presented at the Catharineum in 1737 is extant.

Musical life was much assisted towards the end of the 18th century by two professors at the Carolineum (founded 1745), F.W. Zachariä (a friend of Telemann) and J.J. Eschenburg (a friend of C.P.E. Bach). Eschenburg translated English theoretical works on music into German and also befriended W.F. Bach, who was anxious to establish himself in Brunswick. The Carolineum promoted public concerts, which were subsequently organized by the Musikliebhaber Gesellschaft. J.G. Schwanenberger, court music director, and K.A. Pesch, leader of the court orchestra, were significant pioneers of the symphony. Schwanenberger was succeeded by C.L. Maucourt (1760–1825), Spohr's first teacher. Franz Abt went to Brunswick in 1852 as conductor at the opera house, which in 1818 had been designated a national theatre. Abt, who also took an active part in the Gesangsverein, became director of the Hofkapelle in 1855, founded the Singakademie, and was principally responsible for introducing Wagner's operas to Brunswick.

In 1861 the existing theatre was replaced by the new Hoftheater, which became the Landestheater in 1919. At the turn of the century the Brunswick composer Hans Sommer enjoyed success throughout Germany. During World War II the Landestheater was destroyed, to be reconstructed as the Staatstheater, which opened in 1948.

In the second half of the 19th century music publishing (Carl Weinholtz, Henry Litolff) began to flourish. In 1837 the piano manufacturing firm of Zeitter & Winkelmann was established. Two years later Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (Steinway) successfully exhibited two square pianos and a grand at the State Fair in Brunswick. Steinway's oldest son Theodore set up business in Brunswick in 1858. When he followed his father to New York in 1866, he sold his firm to Friedrich Grotrian; Grotrian-Steinweg and Schimmel continued to make pianos in Brunswick. Notable institutions in the city are the Städtische Musikschule, the cathedral choir and the Musikgesellschaft. There is a collection of early instruments in the Städtisches Museum, while music education is taught at the Technische Universität and research in acoustics is carried out at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. An annual festival of contemporary chamber music takes place in November.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (‘Braunschweig’; H. Sievers)

F. Chrysander: ‘Geschichte der Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttelschen Capelle und Oper vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert’, Jb für musikalische Wissenschaft, i (1863), 147–286

E. Rosendahl: Geschichte der Hoftheater in Hannover und Braunschweig (Hanover, 1927)

H. Schröder: Verzeichnis der Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente im städtischen Museum Braunschweig (Brunswick, 1928)

G.F. Schmidt: Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am herzoglichen Hofe zu Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (Munich, 1929)

H. Sievers: Die lateinischen liturgischen Osterspiele der Stiftskirche St. Blasien zu Braunschweig (Wolfenbüttel and Berlin, 1936)

M. Härting: Der Messegesang im Braunschweiger Domstift St. Blasii (Regensburg, 1963)

M. Ruhnke: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Hofmusikkollegien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1963)

U. Pape: Die Orgeln der Stadt Braunschweig (Wolfenbüttel, 1969)

U. Pape: ‘Orgelbauer und Orgeln im ehemaligen Herzogtum Braunschweig’, Acta Organologica, iv (1970), 119–44

S. Smart: Doppelte Freude der Musen: Court Festivities in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel 1642–1700 (Wiesbaden, 1989)

K. Kindler: Findbuch zum Bestand Musikalien des herzoglichen Theaters in Braunschweig 18.–19.Jh. (46 Alt) (Wolfenbüttel, 1990)

PERCY M. YOUNG, DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Brunswick (ii).

Record company and label. The company was owned by the firm Brunswick-Balke-Collender of Dubuque, Iowa (originally a piano manufacturer but by this time primarily involved in producing bowling and billiards equipment). Records were first issued in 1916; four years later the company released its first discs manufactured using lateral cutting methods. Among the jazz musicians who recorded early for the company were the Original Memphis Five (under the pseudonym the Cotton Pickers) and Fletcher Henderson. Around November 1924 the company acquired Vocalion from the Aeolian Co.; it operated the two labels separately, but with considerable interchange of material and cataloguing. The resulting confusion of issues and matrix numbers continues to perplex discographers. Although it recorded such vaudeville blues singers as Rosa Henderson and Lena Wilson in 1923–4, Brunswick did not have a ‘race series’ (see Race record) as such until the launch of its 7000s in March 1927. Like Vocalion’s race catalogue, it was directed by Jack Kapp; issue was particularly prolific towards the end of the decade under the supervision of J. Mayo Williams.

In Britain issue of Brunswick’s recordings began in 1923; the discs, manufactured by Cliftophone, Ltd., and bearing American issue numbers, were marketed by the Chappell Piano Co., Ltd. In 1927 the operation was transferred to the British Brunswick Company, formed by Count Anthony de Bosdari, then taken over by the Duophone and Unbreakable Record Co., Ltd, in August 1928. Trading ceased within a year, but the company released on the Duophone label a number of recordings made for, but never issued by, American Brunswick.

In April 1930 Warner Bros. bought Brunswick-Balke-Collender and moved the company headquarters from Chicago to New York, but in December the following year they sold it to Consolidated Film Industries, which already owned the American record company. Brunswick and ARC remained formally independent but were effectively run as one organization (and have often been referred to collectively as ARC-BRC). The 7000 series was discontinued in July 1932. During the 1930s Brunswick’s catalogue included work by some of the most important jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey (both from 1933), and Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday (both from 1935). In February 1938 ARC-BRC was bought by CBS, which in 1940 discontinued the label name Brunswick in favour of Columbia. In 1942 the Brunswick trademark was sold to Decca, which had already acquired the rights to Brunswick’s pre-1932 catalogue and was using the name for its own issues in territories other than the USA. The Brunswick label was used in the USA by American Decca from 1944 for the 80000 series of reissues of early jazz but otherwise was little used there until 1957, when it was revived, mainly for popular music. Brunswick’s significance as a jazz label ended in 1967 when MCA Music, which by that date owned American Decca, adopted a policy of using its own name for issues outside the USA.

Warner Bros. revived the British label Brunswick in December 1930; in April 1932 the rights to use the trademark in Britain, and to issue there material recorded by American Brunswick, were purchased by British Decca. Companies using the Brunswick name also operated in several European countries, including France, where many sessions involving American expatriates were organized. In Germany the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft established a Brunswick label in 1926; issues in the A100 series (1926–9) and the A7500 series (from 1928) included alternative takes of recordings made for Vocalion in the USA by King Oliver and others. In the late 1920s American Brunswick began pressing, specifically for issue in Germany, versions of recordings without the vocal part; of particular jazz interest are items by Red Nichols and King Oliver. After 1934, however, most of the European Brunswick companies began drawing their material from American Decca after its foundation. Many of these, especially those in Britain and Germany, remained active for many years; there were many important reissues of early jazz on German Brunswick in the 1950s and 60s.

A limited number of classical recordings were also made by Brunswick in the USA. A few recordings were made by the Cleveland and Minneapolis orchestras between 1924 and 1928, notably Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony by the Cleveland. A very few recordings of the New York Philharmonic under both Willem Mengelberg and Toscanini were made in 1926, using the light-ray method. Brunswick had a number of singers on its roster, and Polydor’s singers also recorded during their American tours. After 1930 only re-pressings of Polydor masters were added to Brunswick’s classical catalogue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveJ [incl. further bib]

E. Jackson and L. Hibbs: Decca, Brunswick, Vocalion Encyclopedia of Swing (London, 1941)

F. Dutton: ‘Brunswick Modern Rhythm Series’, Matrix, no.50 (1963), 3–12

J. Hayes: ‘Brunswick Special Series (Golden Era Jazz Series/Sepia Series)’, Matrix, no.74 (1967), 3–4

H. Sagawe: ‘A Glimpse of the Past: the Green Label German Brunswick A100 to A499 Series’, Storyville, no.42 (1972), 230–32

R.D. Kinkle: ‘Brunswick Numerical Listing’, The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950 (New Rochelle, NY, 1974), iv, 21–99

B. Rust: The American Record Label Book (New Rochelle, NY, 1978), 46–52

P. Pelletier: ‘The Brunswick Label’, Record Information, no.3 (1984), 13

J. Hayes: English Brunswick 78/45 r.p.m. (0)1000 Series, i: Issues 1001 to 02000 (Dec 1930 to May 1935), Numerical Catalogue Listings, E1 (Southampton, 1967)

JEROME F. WEBER

Brunswick, Mark

(b New York, 6 Jan 1902; d London, 26 May 1971). American composer. After studies with Rubin Goldmark (harmony, counterpoint, and fugue) and Bloch (composition), he lived in Europe (1925–38), where he studied with Boulanger (1925–9). He also associated with a group of Viennese musicians that included Webern, who admired his Two Movements for string quartet. On his return to the USA he was made chairman of the National Committee for Refugee Musicians (1938–43). He taught at Black Mountain College (1944) and Kenyon College (1945) before his appointment as chairman of the music department of the City College of New York (1946–67). He was also president of the American section of the ISCM (1941–50) and of the College Music Association (1953). Brunswick's music, from the earliest works, is economical, non-rhetorical, and extremely intense. His dissonant linear writing shows the influence of 16th-century polyphony, to which he was very much drawn, and an imaginative and individual use of colour is apparent in each of his works. Most of the vocal pieces are settings of his own verse or of ancient Latin or Greek poetry. He contributed to the Musical Quarterly, Modern Music and the Saturday Review of Literature.

WORKS

Op: The Master Builder (3, after H. Ibsen), 1959–67, inc.

Orch: Sym., B, 1945; Air with Toccata, str, 1967

Vocal: Lysistrata (Aristophanes), suite, Mez, female vv, orch, 1930; Eros and Death: Death (Lucretius), Fragment of Sappho (Sappho), Hymn to Venus (Lucretius), Potiundi tempori (Lucretius), Death and Eros (Lucretius), Epilogue (Hadrian), choral sym., Mez, chorus, orch, 1932–54; 4 Madrigals and a Motet (Brunswick), SATB, va, vc, org/pf, 1960; 4 Songs (Brunswick), T, pf, 1964; 5 Madrigals, chorus, va, vc, db, 1965

Chbr: 2 Movts, str qt, 1926; Fantasia, va, 1932; 7 Trios, str qt, 1956; Septet, wind qnt, va, vc, 1957; 6 Bagatelles, pf, 1958; Qt, vn, va, vc, db, 1958; Choral Prelude, Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, org

MSS in US-NYcc

Principal publishers: Bomart, G. Schirmer, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD

M. Gideon: ‘The Music of Mark Brunswick’, American Composers Alliance Bulletin, xiii/1 (1965), 1–10

G. Warfield: ‘An Interview with Mark Brunswick’, Contemporary Music Newsletter, iii/3–4 (1969), 1–2

M. Lederman: The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Brooklyn, NY, 1983), 129–31

MIRIAM GIDEON/MICHAEL MECKNA

Brunzema, Gerhard

(b Emden, 6 July 1927; d Fergus, ON, 7 April 1992). Canadian organ builder of German birth. He was apprenticed to Paul Ott in Göttingen and attended technical college in Brunswick. In 1954 he went into partnership with Jürgen Ahrend in Leer, East Friesland, to build and restore mechanical-action organs in accordance with historical North German principles. In 1972 Brunzema left Germany to become tonal director for Casavant Frères in Quebec, a position he held until 1979. During his tenure several distinguished organs were built, including the instrument at Dordt College in Iowa (1976). In 1980 he established his own firm, Brunzema Organs, Inc., in Fergus, Ontario, where he built a number of three- and four-stop ‘box’-style continuo organs (Kistenorgeln) for churches and colleges, as well as several two-manual mechanical-action organs based on historical tonal principles, but with attractive casework in a contemporary style. Among the latter were those in Central College, Pella, Iowa (1982), St Anne’s, Glace Bay, Nova Scotia (1986), and St John’s, Charlotte, North Carolina (1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Pape: ‘Jürgen Ahrend and Gerhard Brunzema’, Organ Yearbook, iii (1972), 24–35

C. Cramer: ‘An Interview with Gerhard Brunzema’, American Organist, xxiii/3 (1989), 46–9

‘In Memoriam Gerhard Brunzema’, The Diapason, lxxxiii/8 (1992), 12 only

T. Donahue, ed.: Gerhard Brunzema: his Work and Influence (Lanham, MD, 1998)

BARBARA OWEN

Bruolo, Bartolomeo.

See Brollo, Bartolomeo.

Brusa, (Giovanni) Francesco [Gianfrancesco]

(b Venice, 1700; d Venice, 20 May 1768). Italian composer. His name first appears in connection with his four opere serie of 1724–6. On 22 December 1726 he was made organista del palchetto at S Marco, where he was succeeded on 24 July 1740 by Angelo da Cortona. Quadrio, writing a little later, mentioned Brusa as having ‘flourished’ about 1724, reflecting the fact that he had ceased composing operas for the time being. In reminiscences set down in the 1760s, Goldoni mentioned a serenade set to music in 1732 by ‘Sig. Francesco Brusa, dilettante in quel tempo e poi per sua disgrazia professore di musica’, implying that necessity had compelled Brusa to turn professional (a particular reiterated in 1780 by Goldoni's friend La Borde and in 1789 by Burney, who copied La Borde). In the meantime there is evidence of Brusa's activity as a church composer in two oratorios he produced in Genoa in 1736. He was again active as an opera composer in 1756 and soon turned to opera buffa, setting Le statue (1757) to a libretto by his son Giovanni Battista, who later had a career as a buffo singer. In 1758 Brusa produced La cascina in Pesaro and in 1759 revived it and produced La ritornata di Londra in Forlì, where he appeared as the impresario of a company that included his wife Arcangela and two daughters, Emilia and Laura. Another daughter, Angiola, also became an opera singer.

Brusa was appointed maestro di coro of the Ospedale degli Incurabili in Venice in 1766, replacing Galuppi who had gone to Russia. There he continued until his death, distinguishing himself with sacred works that included a requiem and several other things ‘written beyond the call of duty’ to satisfy the ‘repeated requests of the prioress and the girls, who evinced the keenest pleasure in all these compositions’ – thus a report, dated 10 June 1768, in which the hospital's governors granted an allowance to the composer's widow and her ‘numerous family’. Galuppi, who had meanwhile returned, was reappointed choirmaster on 22 December 1768. Of Brusa's extant works, only Le statue has been critically appraised in modern times (by Della Corte).

WORKS

music lost unless otherwise stated

operas

drammi per musica in three acts unless otherwise stated

Il trionfo della virtù (P. d'Averara), Venice, S Giovanni Grisostomo, aut. 1724, 25 arias I-Vnm

L'amore eroico (A. Zeno and P. Pariati), Venice, S Samuele, Ascension 1725

Arsace (A. Salvi), Milan, Ducale, 28 Aug 1725

Medea e Giasone (G. Palazzi), Venice, S Angelo, 26 Dec 1726

La Semiramide riconosciuta (P. Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, Feb 1756, Vcg

Adriano in Siria (Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, Jan 1757

La cameriera scaltra e fortunata (dg, 3, G.B. Brusa), Finale Emilia, Grillenzoni, aut. 1757

Le statue (dg, 3, G.B. Brusa), Venice, S Samuele, 27 Dec 1757, Fc; as farsetta, Rome, Valle, carn. 1758

La cascina (dg, 3, C. Goldoni), Pesaro, del Sole, carn. 1758; Barcelona, 1761 [perf with Scolari's setting]

La ritornata di Londra (dg, 3, Goldoni), Forlì, Pubblico, carn. 1759

L'olimpiade [Act 3] (Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, carn. 1767, P-La [Act 1 by P.A. Guglielmi, Act 2 by A.G. Pampani]

other secular vocal

L'Angelica (serenata, 2, Metastasio), Venice, S Benedetto, 28 Feb 1756

La libertà: a Nice (cantata, Metastasio), I-Vc

Several arias, duets etc. in D-Bsb, Dl, SHs

oratorios

S Antanasia (G.B. Gambarucci), Rome, 1722; Genoa, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 1736

II sacrifizio d'Abramo, Genoa, Oratorio di S Filippo Neri, 1736

Redemptionis veritas, Venice, Ospedale degli Incurabili, 1766

Caelum apertum in Transfiguratione Domini, Venice, Ospedale degli Incurabili, 1767

Aeternum humanae reparationis divinum decretum, Venice, Ospedale degli Incurabili, 1767

Manes justorum a sino Abrahae revocati in gloriosa Christi Resurrectione, Venice, Ospedale degli Incurabili, 1768

other sacred vocal

Processional cantata (G. Castellini), 2vv, chorus, insts, Pesaro, Good Friday (24 March) 1758, I-Vgc

Requiem mass, SSA, insts, Venice, Ospedale degli Incurabili, 1767, A-Wn, D-MÜp

Antiphons: Regina coeli, S, insts, Feb 1754; Salve regina, 1v, vns, Sept 1754; Ave regina coelorum, S, vns, March 1757; Alma Redemptoris mater, 1v, insts, Sept 1757: all in I-Nc

Psalms: Credidi, 3vv, insts, 22 March 1754; Laudate Dominum, 4vv, insts, 9 July 1756; Miserere, 4vv, insts, 1757; Deus in adiutonum, 3vv, insts, 1765; Confitebor tibi Domine, 3vv, insts, Aug 1765; Memento Domine David, 4vv, vns, 1766; In exitu Israel, 4vv, vns, 1766; Deus misereatur nostri, 1v, vns, Aug 1766; Confitebor angelorum, 4vv, vns, Sept 1766; Qui habitat, 3vv, insts; Afferte Domine, 3vv, vns: all in Nc

Hymns: Deus tuorum militum, 1v, insts, April 1755; Improperia [for Holy Week], 4vv, 1753; Jesu corona Virginum, 1v, insts, 1765; Pange lingua, 4vv, 1757: all in Nc

3 motets, 1v, texts only I-Vnm Misc.261643

instrumental

2 syms., D, cited in Breitkopf catalogue, 1766

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookB

BurneyH

CaffiS

La BordeE

MGG1 (S. Simonetti)

SartoriL

F.S. Quadrio: Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia, iii/2 (Bologna and Milan, 1744), 521

Ospedali e luoghi pii (MS, I-Vas busta 1031, ff.11, 42, 43, 46, 64)

Provveditori alla Sanità, necrologi (MS, I-Vas busta 956)

E.A. Cicogna: Delle inscrizioni veneziane, v (Venice, 1842), 321–2

G. Fantoni: ‘N. Monferrato e G.F. Brusa veneziani, maestri di musica’, Archivio veneto, xi (1876), 258–76

A. Della Corte: L’opera comica italiana nel ’700 (Bari, 1923)

A. Mambelli: Musica e teatro in Forlì nel secolo XVIIIo (Forlì, 1933), 114, 118, 137–9

G. Ortolani, ed.: Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, i (Milan, 1935), 680

S.H. Hansell: ‘Sacred Music at the Incurabili in Venice at the Time of J.A. Hasse, II’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 522–3

C. Valder-Knechtges: ‘Musiker am Ospedale degl'Incurabili in Venedig 1765–1768’, Mf, xxxiv (1981), 50–6

PIERO WEISS

Bruscantini, Sesto

(b Portocivitanova, Macerata, 10 Dec 1919). Italian bass-baritone. He studied with Luigi Ricci in Rome and made his début at Civitanova in 1946 as Colline. He first sang at La Scala in 1949 as Geronimo (Il matrimonio segreto). In 1951 he made his Glyndebourne début as Don Alfonso (Così fan tutte) and returned there regularly until 1956, as Guglielmo, Dandini, Figaro (both Rossini’s and Mozart’s), Raimbaud (Le comte Ory), and then in 1960 as Ford and Leporello and in 1961 as Rossini’s Figaro. He sang Malatesta in Salzburg (1953) and made his American début in 1961 in Chicago.

After 1962 he added further Verdi roles to his repertory – Rigoletto, Germont, Renato and Iago. He sang Falstaff for the first time in 1976 with Scottish Opera. He made his Covent Garden début in 1971 as Rossini’s Figaro, returning in 1974 as Malatesta. He appeared several times at Wexford, notably in Ricci’s Crispino e la comare (1979) and Un giorno di regno (1981), which he also directed. In 1988 he sang Don Alfonso at Los Angeles and in 1989 Michonnet at Rome. His recordings of Alfonso, Germont and Rossini’s Figaro show his musicality, sense of style and dramatic ability, which compensate for a voice of limited tone and range.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Forbes: ‘Sesto Bruscantini’, Opera, xxii (1971), 491–6

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Bruschi, Giulio

(b Piacenza; fl 1622–9). Italian composer. He was maestro di cappella of S Francesco, Piacenza, in 1625. He was one of many provincial north Italian composers of liturgical music, though his inclinations were not wholeheartedly towards the new concertato style usually adopted in the 1620s; this was partly because much of his published music was intended for the Offices, in which there were few opportunities for expressive underlining of the texts. In the collection of 1627 he writes for a double-choir medium in which the first choir consists of solo voices in an up-to-date manner; but the solos are never florid and a simple recitando style prevails. Interesting features include the more frequent use of triple time than formerly and the use of the same motif at the beginning of each movement of the mass. But the musical ideas are on the whole dull, tuttis occur in predictable places, and there is little pathos in the ‘Crucifixus’ of the mass. The motets in the 1629 collection include two dialogues, and a duet with obbligato violins which uses echo effects.

WORKS

Modulatio Davidica ad vesperas, 5 vocibus concinenda una cum parte infime ad org, op.1 (Venice, 1622)

Liber secundus sacrarum modulationum, 2–4vv, … missa, cum litaniis, 5vv, bc (org), op.3 (Venice, 1625)

Completorium cum hymno, antiphonis, et litaniis B.M. Virginis, 5vv, … cum litaniis B.V. Mariae, 6vv, op.4 (Venice, 1625)

Missa, et psalmi, cum B. Virginis laudibus, et hymno Te Deum laudamus, 8vv, primo choro concertantibus, op.5 (Venice, 1627)

Il terzo libro delli concerti ecclesiastici, 2–4vv, con le laudi della B. Vergini, et bc (org), op.6 (Venice, 1629)

1 motet in 1643⁷

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Roche: ‘Musica diversa di Compietà: Compline and its Music in 17th-Century Italy’, PRMA, cix (1982–3), 60–79

J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (Oxford, 1984)

JEROME ROCHE/ELIZABETH ROCHE

Brusilovsky, Yevgeny Grigor'yevich

(b Rostov-na-Donu, 30 Oct/12 Nov 1905; d Moscow, 9 May 1981). Kazakh composer. He developed a serious interest in music while serving in the Red Army, which he left in 1922 to spend a year at the Moscow Conservatory; in 1926 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied with Steinberg, graduating in 1931. In 1933 he settled in Alma-Ata, where he began work in the research department of the Kazakh Music and Drama Technical College, studying Kazakh folksongs and kyui (programmatic fantasias for the dömbra, a plucked-string folk instrument); his folksong arrangements provided material for later compositions. From 1934 to 1938 Brusilovsky, who was of Jewish descent, was artistic director of the Kazakh Music and Drama Theatre (later the Abay Opera and Ballet Theatre), for which he composed works that laid the foundations of Kazakh national opera. In addition, he created the first Uzbek national ballet, Gulyandom (1940). From 1940 he turned his attention to instrumental music as well as stage works, producing the Third Symphony ‘Sarï arka’ (‘The Golden Steppe’, the first important work in this genre to be written in Kazakhstan, and a piece based on kyui themes) and chamber works. Brusilovsky was an organizer and the first chairman of the Kazakhstan Composers’ Union (1939–59). In 1955 he was made professor at the Alma-Ata Conservatory, where he had taught since 1934; all the leading younger Kazakh composers have been among his pupils. He settled in Moscow in 1970. He was awarded the Badge of Honour (1936), the title People’s Artist of the Kazakh SSR (1936), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1945, 1956), the State Prize of the USSR (1948), the Order of Lenin (1959) and the State Prize of the Kazakh SSR (1967).

Brusilovsky was trained in Russian classical traditions, and his works represent an interesting attempt to introduce the characteristic vocal monophony and distinctive instrumental harmonies of Kazakh music into the standard European genres, but without superficial orientalism. His path led from arrangements in quartal and quintal harmonies, to the introduction of these arrangements into operas as separate numbers – the operas of the 1930s were, in their first versions, essentially conversational dramas with aria-songs and instrumental dance episodes – and then (from about 1940) to the harmonic enriching of folk melodies and their organic development into large-scale sonata-symphonic forms. The experiment of introducing a kyui into the symphony proved particularly successful; apart from the Third, the Sixth, on a theme by the folk musician Kurmangaza, is notable in this respect.

WORKS

(selective list)

all first performed in Alma-Alta

Ops: Kïz-Zhibek (G. Musrepov), 1934; Zhalbïr (B. Maylin), 1935, rev. 1938, rev. 1946; Er-Targïn (S. Kamalov), 1936, rev. 1954, rev. 1977; Ayman-Sholpan (M. Auezov), 1938; Zolotoye zerno/Altïn stïk [Golden Grain](S. Mukhanov), 1940; Gvardiya vperyod!/Gvardiya, alga! [Forward, Guard!](Mukhanov), 1942; Amangel'dï (Musrenov), 1945, collab. M. Tulebayev; Dudaray (A. Khangel'din), 1953, rev. 1978; Nasledniki [The Heirs] (A. Anov and M. Balïkin), 1962

Ballets: Gulyandom (T. Khanum, Uygun, M. Yankovsky), 1940; Kozï-Korpesh i Bayan-Slu (D. Abirov), 1971; Aksak-Kulan, after 1970

9 syms.: 1931, 1932, 1944, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1969, 1972, 1976

Other orch: Pf Conc., 1947; Dudaray, ov., 1953; Tpt Conc., 1967; Vc Conc., 1970; Zhalgïz kayïn [Lonely Birch], sym. poem, 1972

Vocal: State Hymn of the Kazakh SSR, 1945, collab. Tulebayev and L. Khamidi; Dzhambul, song cycle, T, orch, 1946; Sovetskiy Kazakhstan (cant., D. Snegin), 1947; Slava [Glory] (cant., K. Amanzholov); songs, choruses

Orch of Kazakh folk insts: Zhelderme pamyati Isï Bayzakova [Zhelderme in Memory of Isa Bayzakov], 1949; 30 let [30 Years], 1950; Rumïnskiye napevï [Romanian Choruses], 1952

Other inst: Str qt [no.1], 1946; Sonata, vn, 1969; Str Qt [no.2], 1973

Incid music, film scores, arrs. of Kazakh folk music

Principal publishers: Kazgiz, Muzgiz, Muzïka, Sovetskiy kompozitor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Kel'berg: Ye.G. Brusilovskiy (Moscow, 1959)

I. Vïzgo-Ivanova: Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo kompozitorov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana (1917–1967) [The orchestral work of central Asian and Kazakh composers] (Leningrad and Moscow, 1974), 58–64, 119–22

Ye. Trembovel'sky: ‘Ot priyoma k kontseptsii’ [From reception to conception], SovM (1980), no.12, 37–42

Obituary, SovM (1981), no.8, pp.143–4

B. Yerzakovitch: ‘Aksakal kazakhskoy muzïki: stranitsï tvorcheskoy biografii Ye.G. Brusilovskogo’ [The patriarch of Kazakh music: the pages of Brusilovsky’s creative work], Kompozitory Kazakhstana, ed. M.M. Akhmetova, ii (Alma-Ata, 1982), 21–42

L.M. BUTIR

Bruson, Renato

(b Este, nr Padua, 13 Jan 1936). Italian baritone. He studied singing at Padua and made his début in 1961 at Spoleto as Luna. After singing in many of the major Italian theatres, in 1969 he made his Metropolitian début as Enrico Ashton, returning as Luna, Germont, Don Carlo (Forza del destino) and Posa. In 1972 he made his début at La Scala as Antonio (Linda di Chamounix) and sang Ezio (Attila) in Edinburgh with Palermo Opera. He made his Covent Garden début in 1976 as Anckarstroem (Ballo in maschera), returning for Macbeth, Boccanegra, Miller, Iago and Falstaff. He has also appeared in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he sang Falstaff (1982) under Giulini. A specialist in Donizetti as well as Verdi, he has sung in revivals of Belisario, Gemma di Vergy, Les martyrs, Le duc d’Albe, Torquato Tasso, Caterina Cornaro and La favorite. Warm, well-focussed tone and eloquent phrasing have made him an ideal exponent of noble characters such as Boccanegra and Posa, but he has also been effective as Scarpia and Don Giovanni. He has recorded many of his best roles, including Rigoletto, Boccanegra and Falstaff; producing a more serious, wise and musing reading than many. (G. Gualerzi: ‘Renato Bruson’, Opera, xxx (1979), 214–18)

ALAN BLYTH

Brussel, Tiburtius van.

See Tiburtius van Brussel.

Brusselmans, Michel

(b Paris, 12 Feb 1886; d Brussels, 20 Sept 1960). Belgian composer. After studying at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, he continued his education at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and finally studied composition with Gilson. In 1911 he won the Belgian Prix de Rome, and three years later won the Agniez Prize with his symphonic poem Hélène de Sparte. Thereafter he lived in seclusion in Paris and Provence. An Impressionist composer, Brusselmans excelled in orchestral music which displays originality in its sonorities and language. Although he drew his inspiration from Flanders on several occasions (e.g. in the Rhapsodie flamande), he also evoked contemporary subjects in his symphonic poems, such as The Railway.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch works incl. 3 syms., Scènes breugheliennes, 1911; Hélène de Sparte, 1914; The Railway, 1927; Esquisses flamandes, 1927; Rhapsodie flamande, 1931; Suite phrygienne, 1932; Suite d'orchestre d'après les caprices de Paganini, 1936; many other sym. poems and suites, ovs. and concertante pieces

Kermesse flamande (ballet), 1912; 2 other ballets, radio and film scores

Jésus (orat, A. Guéry), 1936; choral works, songs

Chamber music incl. Vn Sonata, Vc Sonata, Ww Octet

Principal publishers: Salabert, Cranz, Eschig, CeBeDeM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

Catalogue des oeuvres de compositeurs belges: Michel Brusselmans (Brussels, 1956)

HENRI VANHULST

Brussels

(Flem. Brussel; Fr. Bruxelles).

Capital city of Belgium. The city dates from the 10th century, when it consisted of a small group of artisans and merchants gathered round the military encampment of the Duke of Lorraine. In 1012 it became part of the territory of the Count of Leuven. From the 13th century it developed as a centre of textile manufacture; it was well known in the 15th and 16th centuries for its tapestries. It became important when the dukes of Brabant came to live there, and when Brabant was absorbed into the Burgundian territories Brussels retained a privileged position as their favoured residence. As a result it became the administrative and political capital of the principalities of the Low Countries, and frequently housed the governors of these territories under the King of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries and the Emperor of Austria in the 18th. When Belgium became independent in 1830, Brussels was the obvious choice for the capital of the new state and its main development started then.

2. Opera.

3. The conservatory.

4. Concert life.

5. Festivals, composers.

6. Music publishing.

7. Instrument making.

ROBERT WANGERMÉE/HENRI VANHULST

1. The royal chapel and religious institutions.

Duke Henri III of Brabant (d 1260) was a trouvère and entertained minstrels at his court, including Adenet le Roi, author of chivalrous romances. The use of polyphony in Brussels is first documented in 1362 at the collegiate church of Ste Gudule (now Ste Gudule et St Michael). A papal bull of 12 April 1444 gave the chapter the permission to appoint new chaplains who were trained to sing polyphony. The church became a centre for the practice of polyphony; a choirmaster (sangmeester) directed the music and was responsible for the musical education of the young choristers (choraelen), who sang soprano in the services and were trained as professional musicians. In the second half of the 15th century Ste Gudule had a full complement of choristers and professional cantors directed by a choirmaster, and an organist. Until the end of the 18th century it was a centre of musical life, and its choirmasters and organists were often well-known composers. During the 15th century polyphonic music was also practised in the other Brussels churches, but to a lesser extent.

The sumptuous court of the dukes of Burgundy and the choice of Brussels by Philip the Good as his favourite residence attracted many musicians to the city. In their picturesque narratives chroniclers often stressed the importance of fêtes and court rejoicings and, more prosaically, account books also testify to the brilliance of occasions such as the Festival of the Golden Fleece (1435), the Shrove Tuesday tournament (1444) and the funeral ceremonies for Catherine of France (1446), first wife of Charles the Bold.

The musicians were permanent members of the ducal court and fell into two distinct categories: those who were attached to the chapel, the chapelains, and those who were attached to the hôtel or town house, the ménestrels, who were socially far inferior. The minstrels were in turn divided into ‘high instruments’ (oboe, trumpet and sackbut) and ‘low instruments’ (harp, flute, lute and hurdy-gurdy). Some chapelains were composers of polyphonic music but of those who won fame at the Burgundian court (Binchois, Busnoys, Fontaine, Grenon, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Morton, Vide and La Rue) not one was born or trained in Brussels. At the beginning of his reign, when he inherited the chapel of John the Fearless, Philip the Good employed only French musicians. Later, he preferred to engage northern artists, as did Charles the Bold and his successors to an even greater extent, but there was never a native of Brussels among them. This confirms the theory that Brussels developed musically fairly late and lacked the standing of Liège, Courtrai, Bruges, Ghent or Antwerp as a centre of musical training. From the time of Maximilian, Philip the Fair and, later, Charles V, the princes resided only occasionally in the Low Countries and took their chapels with them to Austria, Germany or Spain.

In the Low Countries there is evidence that musicians were employed by the governors. While Margaret of Austria, Charles V’s aunt, lived in Mechelen from 1506 to 1530, her successors moved to Brussels. Maria of Hungary, the emperor’s sister (1531–55), employed Benedictus Appenzeller as choirmaster from 1530 to 1551; he was the first composer who had his music printed in the Low Countries. The chapel of Margaret of Parma, the emperor’s natural daughter, who was the governor from 1555 to 1567, consisted of a choirmaster, 12 cantors, four young choristers and an organist. Alessandro Farnese, her son, contributed to the diffusion of the madrigal in the Low Countries, and Jan-Jacob van Turnhout, his maître de chapelle, was one of the first local musicians to compose mainly to Italian poems.

The Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella were more than just governors, for Philip II wished them to rule the Low Countries as a political entity with considerable independence from Spain. The musical chapel was therefore reorganized as the ‘royal chapel’ of Brussels with statutes based on those of the Burgundian chapel. Géry Ghersem, a prolific composer who had begun his career as chapelain and later became assistant director of Philip II’s chapel in Spain, was director in Brussels from 1604 to 1630, which was a particularly brilliant period. The chapel included some exiled Catholic musicians from England, such as the chapelain Peter Philips and the organist John Bull (1613–14).

Even when mere governors ruled the Low Countries again, the royal chapel was always the most important centre of religious music. In contrast to ‘chamber’ music, used in the 17th century for court entertainments and usually directed by Italians or Spaniards, the chapel was always headed by a native musician, often from Brussels itself, and thus the royal chapel maintained a continuity during the successive regimes – Spanish, French and Austrian – until the French Revolution.

Other composers (whose works have not survived) succeeded Ghersem as master of the chapel: Charles Caullier (1630–58), Jean Tichon (1658–66), Honoré Eugène d’Eve (1666–85) and Nicholas van Rans (1685–98). However, the masses and motets of 18th-century masters of the chapel such as the Venetian Pietro Antonio Fiocco (1698–1714), his son Jean-Joseph Fiocco (1714–46), Henri de Croes (1749–86) and Ignace Vitzthumb have survived. Among the best musicians of the royal chapel were the organists Peeter Cornet (1611–43) and Abraham van den Kerckhoven (1656–c1680).

In the 18th century chamber and chapel were no longer distinct from each other, for the same musicians played both types of music. The master of the chapel, Croes, wrote sonatas for various instruments, concertos for flute or violin, and divertissements in the galant style for the court orchestra.

Apart from the royal chapel, the most important centre in Brussels for religious music was Ste Gudule, where there is an important music collection. Its organists included Nicolaus a Kempis, who published at Antwerp three volumes of ‘symphonies’ (which are in fact sonatas for one to five instruments with basso continuo), and Josse Boutmy, whose pieces for harpsichord were influenced by Couperin and Handel. Among the choirmasters who were also composers were Petrus Hercules Bréhy, Joseph-Hector Fiocco and Charles-Joseph van Helmont.

2. Opera.

The first opera production in Brussels, Ulisse all’Isola di Circe, by Gioseffo Zamponi, took place in 1650 to celebrate the marriage of Philip IV of Spain and Maria Anna of Austria. Zamponi was master of chamber music to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Low Countries, and he, the librettist, set-builder, designer and singers were all Italian. The first public theatre, the Académie de Musique on the Quai du Foin, dates from 1682. Apart from some Italian works, it was Lully’s tragic operas that had the greatest success in Brussels. Although no operas by local composers were produced there, Pietro Antonio Fiocco, musical director of the theatre, wrote prologues in praise of the governor. Opened in 1700, the Théâtre de la Monnaie quickly became the centre of theatrical activity. In the 18th century the French repertory still predominated; after Lully came Destouches, Campra, Mouret, Collasse and, later, Favart’s opéras comiques, but a few italianate works were also performed. Operas by Flemish composers were seldom performed, with the exception of those by Pierre van Maldere, who wrote some opéras comiques, and Grétry, from Liège, who achieved fame in Paris.

When the ancien régime came to an end, so did the roles of the royal chapel and of Ste Gudule, but the Théâtre de la Monnaie survived, and the riots after a performance there of Auber’s La muette de Portici (commonly called Masaniello) on 25 August 1830 (fig.2) helped to spark off the revolution from which the modern state of Belgium was born. In the 19th century La Monnaie was particularly successful under Stoumon and Calabresi (1875–85, 1899–1900), Dupont and Lapissida (1886–9) and Maurice Kufferath and Guidé (1900–14). They were followed by Corneil de Thoran and various collaborators (1918–53), J. Rogatchewsky (1953–9) and Maurice Huisman (1959–81). In 1963 the city of Brussels relinquished ownership of La Monnaie for financial reasons and it became a national theatre, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie (Koninklijke Muntschouwburg). From then on operas were given in their original languages. Many French, as well as Belgian, opera premières were given there, including Massenet’s Hérodiade (1881), Reyer’s Sigurd (1884), Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1886), d’Indy’s L’étranger (1903) and Les chant de la cloche (1912), Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1903), and the first French-language performances of many Wagner operas. Other French-language productions included Richard Strauss’s Salome (1907) and Elektra (1910), Berg’s Wozzeck (1932), Prokofiev’s The Gambler (1929) and works by Ravel, Milhaud and Honegger either as premières or immediately after their premières in Paris.

Huisman’s administration was noted for the foundation in 1960 of the famous Ballet du XXème Siècle, directed by Maurice Béjart. The company’s performances of The Rite of Spring, Ninth Symphony and Romeo and Juliet with inventive modern choreography aroused the enthusiasm of a vast, mainly young, public. Béjart placed great emphasis on the spectacular in works such as Mathilde, Messe pour le temps présent, Baudelaire and Bakhti. He also founded an international ballet school, the Mudra.

Under Gérard Mortier (1981–91) La Monnaie achieved an international reputation for the quality of its productions and the originality of its programming (including Janáček and the lesser-known operas of Mozart). Bernard Fouccroulle (from 1991) introduced Baroque works (e.g. Cavalli) to the repertory. La Monnaie also gave the world premières of André Laporte’s Das Schloss (1986), Philippe Boesmans’s La passion de Gilles (1983) and Reigen (1993), and John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).

3. The conservatory.

One of the most important 19th-century musical institutions in Brussels was the conservatory, founded as a state academy in 1832. From 1833 to 1871 its director was the famous musicologist François-Joseph Fétis. Taking the Paris Conservatoire as his model he planned the musical instruction on very strict lines and engaged excellent teachers. His successor, another musicologist, François-Auguste Gevaert (1871–1908), exercised a despotic authority over contemporary musical life. Thereafter the conservatory was directed by the composers Edgar Tinel (1908–12), Léon Du Bois (1912–25), Joseph Jongen (1925–39), Léon Jongen (1939–49), Marcel Poot (1949–66), Camille Schmit (1966–73), Eric Feldbusch (1973–87) and Jean Baily. Teachers included the violinists Charles-Auguste de Bériot, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Ysaÿe, César Thomson, Gertler and Grumiaux and the pianists De Greef, Bosquet, Del Pueyo, Vanden Eynden and Blumenthal. In 1967 the conservatory was divided into two separate institutions (Conservatoire Royal de Musique and Koninklijk Muziekconservatorium) giving instruction in French and Flemish respectively, with Kamiel D’Hooghe as director of the Flemish one (1967–95).

4. Concert life.

The conservatory was for a long time the centre of the city’s musical life, as it organized the principal concerts, including both classical and non-controversial modern masterpieces in its programmes. Fétis organized ‘historic concerts’ of 16th-, 17th- or 18th-century music, or concerts devoted to a particular musical genre, for example church music, dance music etc. Gevaert chiefly promoted the great choral works of Bach and Handel, Gluck’s operas and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. After 1850 the conservatory concerts became less important because of the development and diversification of musical life. In 1865 Adolphe Samuel founded the Concerts Populaires de Musique Classique, which, in spite of their name, presented innovatory modern works as well as a traditional repertory. Most of Wagner’s works were played at these concerts before they were staged, a policy initiated by Samuel and encouraged by his successor, Joseph Dupont, who also introduced Richard Strauss’s music to Brussels. However, the most innovatory group before World War I was the Cercle des XX (1884–93, later known as the Libre Esthétique). This was a group of artists working in the visual arts who publicized the work of the impressionists, pointillists and symbolists before they were appreciated elsewhere, and regularly gave concerts of chamber music in conjunction with their exhibitions. Octave Maus (1856–1919) was a friend of d’Indy and Ysaÿe, and presented concerts of important contemporary French chamber works by Franck, Duparc, Chausson, Fauré, Chabrier, Debussy, Roussel and Milhaud.

After World War I the Pro Arte concerts continued this policy of innovation and between 1921 and 1934 often presented works by young composers such as Milhaud and Poulenc before they were heard in France, as well as many works by Stravinsky, Satie, Bartók, Hindemith, Berg and others. The nucleus of the Pro Arte was the excellent Quatuor Pro Arte (later resident in the USA as the Pro Arte Quartet) and the impresario Paul Collaer.

The work of the Concerts Populaires was continued by the Société Philharmonique de Bruxelles, founded in 1927 by Henry Le Boeuf. The concerts, which include orchestral and chamber music, take place in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a building with facilities for music, theatre, cinema, lectures and exhibitions. Marcel Cuvelier, during his time as the director of the society, raised the quality of performance by inviting great international conductors and soloists; however, he favoured familiar works, often at the expense of contemporary music. The Brussels SO was founded in 1931 by Désiré Defauw and the Belgian National Orchestra formed from it in 1936.

In 1946 Cuvelier founded Jeunesses Musicales, which has since become a powerful international movement concerned with the musical education of young people. However, like the Société Philharmonique, it has neither encouraged the performance of contemporary music nor attracted audiences from all social classes. André Souris, director of the music section of the Séminaire des Arts, promoted music that was largely unfamiliar at the time, such as English Renaissance music, as well as contemporary music, including 12-note works by Messiaen and Boulez’s early compositions.

5. Festivals, composers.

Since the 1950s several festivals have sprung up in Brussels, with Reconnaissance des Musiques Modernes (1964–75) and Ars Musica (from 1988) devoted to contemporary music. The Festival van Vlaanderen (from 1958) and the Festival de Wallonie (from 1971) organize concerts in Brussels. The Concours Musical Reine Elisabeth (founded in 1937 as the Concours Eugène Ysaÿe) is a competition for pianists, violinists and singers which has brought some virtuosos to public attention.

Musical activity in Brussels intensified when the city became the home of the EEC and NATO and therefore an international economic and political centre. Because of its cultural attraction as a capital city, many important Belgian musicians, although often born elsewhere, have spent at least part of their working lives in Brussels and many important national organizations are located there (see Low countries,§I, 5). A list of composers who have worked in Brussels is in fact a summary of Belgium’s musical history from 1830. The composer Paul Gilson, whose work was influenced by Wagner, Richard Strauss and The Five, was also a renowned teacher of several generations of composers. His best-known pupils include Marcel Poot, Gaston Brenta and René Bernier (founders of the ‘Synthétistes’ group in Brussels in 1925), Jean Absil and André Souris. Other composers who have spent most of their working life in Brussels include: Léopold Samuel, Raymond Moulaert, René Barbier, Willem Pelemans, René Defossez, Pierre Moulaert, Jacques Stehman, Jean Louël, Victor Legley, Marcel Quinet, David van de Woestijne, Frederic Devreese, André Laporte, Jacques Leduc, Raphael D’Haene and Frederik van Rossum.

6. Music publishing.

In the second half of the 18th century Brussels became an important centre of music publishing, notably with the Van Ypen brothers and their associates Pris and Mechtler. From 1795 to 1813 Weissenbruch ran a music store where a stock of 23,000 manuscripts and editions was assembled. In the 19th century local publishers (Messmaeckers, Katto) were forced to compete with branches of foreign firms (Schott, Breitkopf & Härtel, Bosworth). After 1918 some firms specialized in music for brass and wind bands or in jazz, while others (Editions de l’Art Belge, Editions Ysaÿe) commissioned such artists as Magritte to design the covers of their editions of Belgian composers. The decline in publishing after World War II prompted the Belgian government to create CeBeDeM.

5. Institutes, libraries, associations and publishing.

7. Instrument making.

Court archives show that instruments were being made in Brussels as early as the 15th century. The heyday was in the 18th and 19th centuries, with makers of string instruments (Boussu, Snoeck, Vuillaume), wind instruments (Rottenburgh, Mahillon), pianos (Hoeberechts, Berden, Hanlet) and organs (Forceville, Merklin).

See also Burgundy and Low Countries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CeBeDeM directory

J. Isnardon: Le Théâtre de la Monnaie depuis sa fondation jusqu’à nos jours (Brussels, 1890)

G. van Doorslaer: ‘Henry Bredemers, organiste et maître de musique, 1472–1522’, Annales de l’Académie royale d’archéologie de Belgique, lxvi (1915), 209–56

Les concerts populaires de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1927) [60th anniversary]

C. van den Borren: ‘Le fonds de musique ancienne de la collégiale SS. Michel et Gudule’, Annuaire du Conservatoire royal de musique de Bruxelles, lii (1928–9), 127–35

L. Renieu: Histoire du théâtre à Bruxelles (Paris, 1928)

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg, 1939/R)

S. Clercx-Lejeune: ‘La chapelle royale de Bruxelles sous l’ancien régime’, Annuaire du Conservatoire royal de musique de Bruxelles, lxv (1942), 159–79

H. Anglès: La música en la corte de Carlos V (Barcelona, 1944, 2/1965/R)

J. Cuvelier: ‘La confrérie des musiciens instrumentistes de Bruxelles sous l’ancien régime’, Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique: classe des beaux-arts, xxviii (1946), 35–63

Le Palais des Beaux-Arts à Bruxelles (Brussels, 1949)

E. Clossen and C. van den Borren, eds.: La musique en Belgique du Moyen-Age à nos jours (Brussels, 1950)

R. Wangermée: Les maîtres de chant des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles à la collégiale des SS. Michel et Gudule à Bruxelles (Brussels, 1950)

R. Wangermée: La musique belge contemporaine (Brussels, 1959)

C. Mertens: Hedendaagse muziek in België (Brussels, 1967)

Société philharmonique de Bruxelles et Société des concerts populaires: cinquantième anniversaire (Brussels, 1979)

P. Raspé: ‘Les débuts de la gravure musicale à Bruxelles à la fin de l’Ancien Régime’, Annales d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie, ii (1980), 123–34

R. Wangermée and P. Mercier, eds.: La musique en Wallonie et à Bruxelles (Brussels, 1980–82)

G.G. Thompson: ‘Music in the Court Records of Mary of Hungary’, TVNM, xxxiv (1984), 132–73

W.F. Prizer: ‘Music and Ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, EMH, v (1985), 113–53

Un théâtre d’opéra: l’équipe de Gérard Mortier à la Monnaie (Paris, 1986)

M. Haine and N. Meeùs: Dictionnaire des facteurs d’instruments de musique en Wallonie et à Bruxelles du 9e siècle à nos jours (Liège, 1986)

B.H. Haggh: Music, Liturgy and Ceremony in Brussels, 1350–1500 (diss., U. of Illinois, 1988)

M. Cornaz: ‘Jean-Joseph Boucherie et Jean-Louis de Boubers: deux imprimeurs de musique bruxellois dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, RBM, xlvi (1992), 179–88

R. Mortier and H. Hasquin, eds.: Musiques et spectacles à Bruxelles au XVIIIe siècle (Brussels, 1992)

H. Vanhulst and M. Cornaz: ‘Le marchand de musique bruxellois Weissenbruch et la diffusion de la musique de Beethoven (1804–13)’, RBM, xlvi (1992), 189–223

H. Vanhulst: ‘Le Conservatoire royal de musique de Bruxelles: ses origines et le directorat de François-Joseph Fétis’, Le Conservatoire de Paris, 1795–1995: des Menus plaisirs à la Cité de la musique, ed. Y. Gérard and A. Bongrain (Paris, 1996), 201–17

Brusser [Bruster, Brusters].

See Brewster.

Brustad, Bjarne

(b Christiania [now Oslo], 3 March 1895; d Oslo, 22 May 1978). Norwegian composer and viola player. He studied under Gustav Lange (violin and theory) at the Kristiania Conservatory (1907–12), under Thornberg and Flesch (1915–16) in Berlin, and later briefly in Paris, London and Budapest. Having made his début as a violinist in 1914 he was concert master in the Stavanger Sinfonieorkester (1918–19), then violinist in the Kristiania Philharmonic Society Orchestra (1919–22), of which he became the solo viola (1929–43). He then concentrated on composition and teaching, and taught theory and composition at the Oslo Conservatory between 1937 and 1961. He received a state pension for life from 1953.

Brustad’s first compositions, already in sharp contrast with the Griegian late Romantic style that dominated Norwegian music until the 1920s, helped to establish him in the forefront of radical Norwegian composers. There are early signs of French influence, and the Suite no.1 (Orientalsk suite) for orchestra (1920) is strongly Impressionist. Towards the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s, like many contemporaries, he took a more national line. This was already to be heard in the Norsk suite for viola and piano (1926), in which Brustad combines Norwegian folk elements with new techniques. Writing of the Trio no.1, Brustad noted that ‘it was important … not to follow in Grieg’s footsteps, … but to free oneself and find new means of expression, indeed, to create a form which could link up with the Norwegian folk ballad’. He took personal inspiration from meetings with Bartók and Kodály; at the same time he pursued the international neo-classical manner, characterized by rhythmic vigour and dissonant harmony, often bi- or polytonal (Violin Concerto no.4); after the war this side of his work gained precedence. His open-minded interest in new ways of musical expression, including microtonal music, comes to the fore in the polytonal and dissonant Str Qt no.3 (1959). His progressive and imaginative use of instrumentation made him one of the foremost teachers of composition in Norway in the 1950s.

WORKS

(selective list)

Opera: Atlantis, 1945

Orch: Suite no.1, 1920; Vn Conc. no.1, 1922; Vn Conc. no.2, 1927; Rapsodi, vn, orch; Concertino, va, chbr orch, 1932; Conc. grosso, 1938; 9 syms., 1938–73; Vn Conc. no.4, 1961; Conc., cl, str, 1969

Chbr and solo inst: Nature morte, str qt, 1926; Norsk suite, va, pf, 1926; Capricci, vn, va, 1931; Partita, va, 1931; Eventyrsuite [Fairy Tale suite], vn, 1932; Kinderspiele, pf, 1934; Sonata no.1, vn, 1935; Trio no.1, cl, vn, va, 1938; Fanitulsuite, vn, 1946; Divertimento, fl, 1958; Str Qt no.3, 1959

Songs

Principal publishers: Lyche, Norsk Musikforlag

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Hove: ‘Bjarne Brustad’, DMt, x (1935), 83–8

H. Huldt-Nystrøm: ‘B. Brustad 60 år’, Nordisk musikkultur, iv/1 (1955), 2–4

B. Brustad: Liv og virke i ord og toner [Life and work in words and music] (Oslo, 1971)

RANDI M. SELVIK/HARALD HERRESTHAL

Brustwerk

(Ger.: ‘breast department’; Dut. Borstwerk).

A small organ-chest, usually with its own manual, encased compactly above the keyboards and below the Hauptwerk, ‘in the breast’ of the organ. Many early examples contained a regal or two only, and even later the department usually kept its character as a regals or chamber organ. Such subsidiary chests were common in the 17th century, the pedal keyboard sometimes communicating with a so-called Brustpedal chest in north European organs. The term Brustwerk belongs only to 18th-century theorists like Agricola who standardized terminology; previous names had been ‘positive forn an die brust’ (A. Schlick, 1511), ‘voer yn dye borst’ (Amsterdam Oude Kerk, 1539), Brustpositiff (M. Praetorius, 1619; A. Schnitger, 1682), ‘in der Brust zum Manual’ (Praetorius, G. Silbermann, 1710). Some builders between about 1710 and 1730 in central Germany referred to the ‘Unterwerk’ as Brustpositiv or Brustwerk. If the Brustwerk regal rank (placed near the organist for convenient tuning) were played by the main manual's keyboard, as sometimes happened in Italy, Spain and Austria, there might be no written indication that an organ contained such a department. In modern ‘organ revival’ organs, the Brustwerk is often, as a compromise, given the shutters of a Swell organ instead of the usual solid doors.

See also Chair organ.

PETER WILLIAMS/BARBARA OWEN

Bruxelles

(Fr.).

See Brussels.

Bruynèl, Ton

(b Utrecht, 26 Jan 1934). Dutch composer. He studied from 1952 to 1956 with Wolfgang Wijdeveld at the Utrecht Conservatory, at the same time taking private composition lessons with Kees van Baaren. From 1957 he concentrated on electronic music, establishing his own studio, where he composed Reflexes (1960), based on manipulations of a recorded drumbeat. His Mobile, for two soundtracks, was awarded a prize during the Gaudeamus Music Week in 1966. Since then he has sought to refine the combination and blending of synthetic and acoustic sounds. For his achievements in this field his Chicharras and Adieu petit prince won prizes in 1986 at the Festival International de Musique Electroacoustique ‘Synthèse’ in Bourges.

Bruynèl has been interested in combining electronic music with other art forms. One such work, Signs, a collaboration with the artist Gérard van den Eerenbeemd, was played and exhibited at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. In 1997 Bruynèl was composing a video opera on the history of flying, using texts by the Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek.

WORKS

(selective list)

Reflexes, tape, 1960; Reliëf, org, 4 tapes, 1964; Mobile, tape, 1965, rev. 1972; Signs, wind qnt, projections, tape, 1969; Elegy, opt. female vv, tape, 1972; Looking Ears, b cl, tape, 1972; Phases, orch, tape, 1973; Soft Song, ob, tape, 1974; Translucent, str qt, tape, 1974, str orch, tape, 1978; Toccare, pf/hpd, tape, 1979; From the Tripod, female chorus, tape, 1980; Rain, 2 pf, tape, 1981; Denk mal das Denkmal, B-Bar, tape, 1984; Chatarra, hpd, tape, 1991; Le jardin, female v, a fl, hpd, tape, 1993; Brouillard, pf, tape, 1994; Imker, 4 fl, tape, 1995; Ball’alla luce, str orch, perc, tape, 1997–

Principal publisher: Donemus

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Vermeulen: ‘Signs by Ton Bruynèl’, Sonorum speculum, xlii (1970)

J. Paagiviströmn: ‘Trying to Set the Ear Free’, Key Notes, xv (1982), 24–9

K. Arntzen: ‘Softness in the Air’, Key Notes, xxx/2 (1996), 12–15

KEES ARNTZEN

Bruzdowicz, Joanna

(b Warsaw, 17 May 1943). Polish composer. She studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw, graduating in 1966. She was awarded a French government scholarship and studied in Paris (1968–70) with Messiaen, Boulanger and Schaeffer. In 1969 she was a co-founder of the Groupe International de Musique Electroacoustique. In 1975 she moved to Belgium, where she has combined composing with a wide range of other artistic interests, including writing film scripts for television. She is active as a critic and broadcaster, promoting new music in programmes for French, Belgian and German radio, and has directed composition courses at Aix-en-Provence, in the USA (MIT, UCLA and Yale University) and at the University of Montreal. She also promotes Polish music in Belgium and was the founder and first president (1983) of the Belgian Chopin and Szymanowski Society. She has worked in the electronic studios of Ghent University and Belgian radio and television.

Bruzdowicz’s large output is diverse and her music is performed worldwide. Though she uses all modern techniques and media, they are never employed for ostentatious effects or radical experiments but are subtly integrated into the fabric of the music. (GroveO, A. Thomas)

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Kolonia karna [The Penal Colony] (musical drama, 1, J. Simonides, after F. Kafka), 1968, Tours, Grand Théâtre, 12 Feb 1972

Trojanki [Les Troyennes] (musical tragedy, 17 scenes, J. Luccioni, after Euripides), 1972, Paris, Théâtre Gérard Philippe, 29 March 1973

Le petit prince (ballet, 28 scenes, after A. de Saint-Exupéry), 1976

Bramy raju [The Gates of Paradise] (musical drama, 1, J. Lisowski and J. Bruzdowicz, after J. Andrzejewski), 1982, Warsaw, Wielki Theatre, 15 Nov 1987

Tides and Waves (op-musical, Bruzdowicz, H. Fuers-Garcia, J. Tittel), 1991, Barcelona, 1992

Maisonneuve (op-musical, L. Gareau-Du Bois), Montreal, Sept 1992

other works

Orch: Sym., 1974; Pf Conc., 1974; 2 vn concs., 1975, 1981; Db Conc., 1982; 4 Seasons’ Greetings, solo insts, str orch, 1988–9; Vc Conc., ‘The Cry of the Phoenix’, 1994

Vocal: Urbi et Orbi (cant., H. Hess, J. Tittel), T, children’s choir, 2 tpt, org, 1985; La espero (cant., L. Zamenhof), S, Bar, ens, 1990; Stabat Mater, chorus, 1993; World (C. Miłosz), 5 songs, 1995–6

Chbr and inst (incl. insts with tape): Erotiques, pf, 1966; Stigma, vc, 1969; Episode, pf, 13 str, 1973; Mater polonica, org, 1973; An der schönen blauen Donau, 2 pf, tape, 1974; Einklang, hpd, org, 1975; Sonate d'octobre, pf, 1978; Marlos Grosso Brasileiras, fl, vn, hpd, tape, 1980; Trio dei due mondi, vn, vc, pf, 1980; Dum spiro spero, fl, tape, 1981; Dreams and Drums, perc, 1982; Str Qt no.1 ‘La vita’, 1983; Str Qt no.2, ‘Cantus aeternus’ (H. Miller, Miłosz, I. Bachmann), rec., str qt, 1988; Aurora borealis, hpd, org, 1988; Sonata no.1 ‘Il ritorno’, vn, 1990; Sonata no.2 ‘Spring in America’, vn, pf, 1994; Song of Hope and Love, vc pf, 1997

Film scores (elec): Sans toit, ni loi (dir. A. Varda), 1985; Stahlkammer Zürich (J. Bruzdowicz, J. Tittel), 36 films, 1985–91; Jacquot de Nantes (dir. Varda), 1991; C’est l’homme que j’ai tué (dir. G. Ferrara), 1994

Principal publishers: Choudens, PWM

BARBARA ZWOLSKA-STESZEWSKA/R

Bryan, Albertus.

See Bryne, Albertus.

Bryanston Summer School.

A summer school of music established in 1947 at Bryanston School, Dorset; in 1953 it moved to Dartington Hall, near Totnes, Devon. It became the Dartington International Summer School in 1985.

Bryant [O’Brien], Dan(iel Webster)

(b Troy, NY, 1833; d New York, 10 April 1875). American minstrel performer and manager. He began as a performer in the late 1840s, and made his first New York appearance with Charley White’s Serenaders in 1851. From 1852 to 1854 he and his brother Jerry performed with Wood’s Minstrels in New York, and late in the 1854 season he formed Bryant and Mallory’s Minstrels with Ben Mallory. By this time he was being advertised as ‘the unapproachable Ethiopian comedian’. In February 1857 he formed Bryant’s Minstrels with his brothers Jerry and Neil. As a versatile and brilliant performer, Bryant quickly became a public idol; the troupe performed with great success in New York until Bryant’s death in 1875, and also toured in California and elsewhere in 1867–8. Bryant’s Minstrels excelled in the portrayal of black ‘plantation life’, marking a return to the classic type of minstrelsy of the 1840s; they were also innovators, placing a greater emphasis on burlesque skits. Bryant engaged Dan Emmett in 1858 as performer and composer, and it was for Bryant’s troupe that Emmett wrote I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land (1859) and other walk-arounds; Emmett enjoyed a second heyday with the Bryants until 1866.

Bryant was the leading minstrel performer of his day, appearing as comedian, dancer, musician and singer. He was one of minstrelsy’s greatest dancers, and his widely imitated song-and-dance skits The Essence of Old Virginny and Shoo fly don’t bodder me are regarded as true classics of minstrelsy. As a musician his primary instrument was the banjo, but he also played the tambourine and the bones. He also had a secondary career as a whiteface Irish comedian during summer seasons from 1863 to at least 1870, winning great acclaim in Handy Andy and The Irish Emigrant. He wrote the lyrics ‘Turkey in the Straw’ (1861) to G.W. Dixon’s tune Zip Coon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.L. Rice: Monarchs of Minstrelsy (New York, 1911)

C. Wittke: Tambo and Bones: a History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, NC, 1930)

G.C.D. Odell: Annals of the New York Stage, v–ix (New York, 1931–7/R)

H. Nathan: Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962/R)

R.C. Toll: Blacking Up: the Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974)

ROBERT B. WINANS

Bryars, Gavin

(b Goole, Yorkshire, 16 Jan 1943). English composer. He read philosophy at Sheffield University (1961–4) and studied composition with Cyril Ramsey and George Linstead. In 1968 he became part of London's fast-developing experimental music scene; although never a member of the Scratch Orchestra, he worked regularly for a while with the pianist John Tilbury. His best known works of this period – The Sinking of the Titanic (conceived in 1969 and still officially in progress 30 years later) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed me Yet (1971) – are good working examples of his early aesthetic. While conceptual concerns are central (the former work is based on a series of hypotheses surrounding the disaster that befell the liner), these are explored via a rigorous, not to say relentless, extrapolation of found objects, be they the music which evidence suggests was performed on board the Titanic as it sank, or the tape of a London tramp's song, incessantly repeated in Jesus' Blood. A further dimension of the experimental aesthetic was demonstrated by the concerts of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, founded while Bryars taught at the Portsmouth College of Art: here, the performances of Western classical music by untrained musicians embodied what Michael Nyman called the ‘wide discrepancy between intention and effect’ (Experimental Music, London, 1974). The first period of Bryars' work offers a very English perspective on the experimental tradition, augmenting territory already defined by Satie, Cage and others with an openness towards, for instance, frankly sentimental materials and their associations.

The influence of Marcel Duchamp, already detectable in earlier works, was enhanced by intensive study during two fallow compositional years (1973–4), by which time Bryars had established what was to become a long-standing relationship with Leicester Polytechnic. A determination – inspired in part by the composer's affiliation to the 'Pataphysics movement – to justify every compositional decision via specific, though often hidden or arcane, associations with its literary or artistic inspiration is here harnessed to musical processes derived in part from American minimalism. Bryars's main source of performances during this period was his own ensemble, formed in 1979 and initially dominated by keyboards and percussion, since the early 1990s by low strings. Pieces such as Out of Zaleski's Gazebo for two pianos, six or eight hands (1977) and My First Homage (1978 onwards, best known in the version of 1981 for eight performers) submit familiar-sounding borrowed materials – many taken from his then favourite composers: Lord Berners, Grainger, Bill Evans, Karg-Elert – to repetitive forms governed as much by the logic implied by these pieces’ musical and extra-musical reference points (and by the significant play of irony) as by purely internal musical processes. This approach governs Bryars's second period which lasted until the opera Medea (1982, rev. 1984). The flexibility, if not compromise, demanded of a composer in the theatre led to changes in Bryars's attitude and working methods; the Duchamp-inspired principle of justification was then abandoned in favour of a more free-wheeling approach to structure. Since Medea his output has often been for more conventional forces, such as orchestras and string quartets, and commissioned by musicians of repute in other fields; there has been a number of works, for instance, for the Hilliard Ensemble, including The First Book of Madrigals (1998–2000). While a modal but often chromatically restless melancholy remains an important component of his idiom, the opportunities to write for much larger forces later enriched and sometimes energized Bryars's melodic and harmonic style while offering him a broader timbral palette. These developments are well illustrated by the opera Doctor Ox's Experiment, first performed in 1998.

WORKS

stage

Medea (op, 5, after Euripedes, dir. R. Wilson), 1982, rev. 1984, 1995; Opéra de Lyon, 23 Oct 1984, concert perf. of rev. version, Glasgow, Tramway, 3 Nov 1995

Four Elements (dance score, choreog. L. Childs), A/taped v, a sax, b cl, flugelhorn, hn, trbn, pf, elec kbd, amp db, 2 perc, 1990, Oxford, Apollo, 16 Nov 1990

Biped (dance score, choreog. M. Cunningham), kbd, elec gui, vn, 1999, University of Berkeley, CA, 23 April 1999

Doctor Ox's Experiment (op, 2, B. Morrison, after J. Vernes), London, Coliseum, 15 June 1998

instrumental

Orch: The Sinking of the Titanic, orch, tapes, 1997 [arr. of work for ens]; Jesus' Blood Never Failed me Yet, orch, tape, 1994 [arr. of work for ens]; By the Vaar, db, b cl, perc, str, 1987; The Green Ray, s sax, chbr orch, 1991; The North Shore, va, str, hp/pf, perc, 1994, arr. vc, str, hp/pf, perc, 1995 [arrs. of chbr work]; The East Coast, b ob, chbr orch, 1994; The North Shore, vc, str, hp/pf, perc, 1995 [arr. of work for va, pf]; Vc Conc. ‘Farewell to Philosophy’, 1995; Epilogue from Wonderlawn, va, vc, elec gui/pf/hp, str, 1995 [arr. of chbr work]; Allegrasco, cl/s sax, str, 1998 [arr. of chbr work]; The Porazzi Fragment, 21 solo str, 1999

Ens (9 or more insts): The Sinking of the Titanic, ens, tapes, 1969; Jesus' Blood Never Failed me Yet, ens, tape, 1971; The Cross-Channel Ferry, cl, b cl, t hn, vib/mar, mar (2 players), b mar/mar, pf, perc, va, db/tuba/(db, tuba), 1979; The Old Tower of Löbenicht, vn/va, b cl, t hn/trbn, vc, db, 2 perc, pf, elec gui, 1987; The Archangel Trip, 2 pan-pipes, 2 a sax, b cl, 2 sampling kbds, octopads + sampler, 5-str vn, 5-str vc, elec gui, elec b gui, 1993; 3 Elegies for 9 Cl, 1993 version for b cl, tape

(4–8 insts): Allegrasco, cl/s sax, vn, elec gui, db, 2 perc, pf, 1983 [arr. of work for cl/s sax, pf]; Les fiançailles, pf, str, qt, 2 perc, 1983; Str Qt no.1 ‘Between the National and the Bristol’, 1985; Viennese Dance no.1 (M.H.), hn, opt. hn, 6 perc, opt. str trio, 1985; Sub Rosa, rec, cl, vib, pf, vn, db, 1986 [written for dance work Slingerland, choreog. W. Forsythe]; Alaric I or II, sax qt, 1989; After the Requiem, elec gui, 2 va, vc, 1990; Str Qt no.2, 1990; A Man in a Room, Gambling (Str Qt no.4) (J. Muñoz), pre-recorded v, str qt, 1992; Aus den Letzen Tagen, cl, b cl, 2 vn, vc, 2 perc, elec kbd, 1992; Epilogue from Wonderlawn, va, vc, db, elec gui, 1994; Wonderlawn, suite, elec gui, va, vc, db, elecs, 1994, withdrawn; One last bar then Joe can sing (A Homage to Deagan), perc ens, 1994; In nomine after Purcell, 2 tr viol, 2 t viol, 2 b viol, 1995; Str Qt no.3, 1998

Other inst: The Squirrel and the Ricketty-Racketty Bridge, 2 gui (1 player) or multiples of this, 1971; Out of Zaleski's Gazebo, 2 pf (6/8 hands), 1977; My First Homage, 2 pf, 1978; Allegrasco, cl/s sax, pf, 1983; Die Letzten Tage, 2 vn, 1992; After Handel's Vesper, hpd, 1995; The North Shore, va, pf, 1993, arr. vc, pf, 1995; The South Downs, vc, pf, 1995

vocal

Choral: On Photography (Pope Leo XIII), SATB, hmn, pf, 1983 [written for The CIVIL WarS, dir. R. Wilson]; The War in Heaven (J. Chaikin and S. Shephard: Genesis A), S, male A, semi chorus, SATB, orch, 1993; Expressa solis, TTBar, 1997; And so ended Kant's travelling in this world (T. de Quincy), SATBarB, 1997; 3 Poems of Cecco Angiolieri, solo vv, SSATTBarB, 1997; The First Book of Madrigals, SATB, 1998–2000

Solo vocal: Effarene (M. Curie and others), S, Mez, 2 pf, 6 perc, 1984; Pico's Flight, S, orch, 1986, arr. S, chbr orch, 1990; Doctor Ox's Experiment: Epilogue (Morrison, after Vernes), S, ens, 1988; Glorious Hill (P. della Mirandola), A, 2 T, Bar, 1988; Incipit vita nova (Dante, Mirandola), A, vn, va, vc, 1989; Cadman Requiem (Caedmon), A, 2 T, Bar, 2 va, vc, opt. db, 1989, arr. 4 vv, viol consort, 1997; The Black River (Vernes: 20,000 Leagues under the Sea), S, org, 1991; The White Lodge (Vernes: 20,000 Leagues under the Sea), low Mez, elecs, digital tape, 1991, arr. low C, ens, 1992; The Adnan Songbook (E. Adnan: Love Poems), S, b cl + cl, elec gui + gui, str, 1995–6 [orig. version of no.5 for S, cl, b cl, va, vc, db, 1992]; The Island Chapel (Adnan: The Manifestations of the Voyage), Mez, elec kbd, vc, 1997, arr. Mez, b cl, elec gui, elec kbd, str; Expressa Solis (Pope Leo XIII), 2T, Bar, 1998; Super Flumina (Ave Regina Caelorum and others), A, 2T, Bar, 2000

Principal publisher: Schott

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Potter: ‘Just the Tip of the Iceberg: some Aspects of Gavin Bryars' Music’, Contact, no.22 (1981), 4–11

P. Griffiths: New Sounds, New Personalities (London, 1985)

R. Bernas: ‘Three Works by Gavin Bryars’, New Music, i (1987), 34–42 [followed by A. Thomson: ‘Worklist’, 42–6]

A.H. Thomson: ‘The Apprentice in the Sun: an Introduction to the Music of Gavin Bryars’, MT, cxxx (1989), 724–8

‘“To Make Room for Experiment”: Gavin Bryars, Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage on the State of Opera as an Institution and its Future’, NZM, Jg.158, no.4 (1997), 26–9

N. Kimberley: ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, Opera, xlix (1998), 655–8 [interview]

KEITH POTTER

Bryceson.

English firm of organ builders. In 1868 the Bryceson brothers acquired the sole rights to use Charles Spackman Barker’s practical electric organ mechanisms in England, and the same year the firm, based in London, built organs with electric key action at Drury Lane Theatre, Christ Church, Camberwell, St Michael Cornhill and St George’s, Tufnell Park. The Camberwell instrument was first used at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral, where the organ was placed in the south aisle and its console in the orchestra. The firm also supplied an instrument for the Three Choirs Festival in 1869 in Worcester Cathedral, where it was placed on the chorus platform in front of the west window, with the console next to the conductor. Bryceson Brothers was taken over by Alfred Kirkland some time after 1874, and the combined business was later absorbed by Hill, Norman & Beard. A contemporary account is given in ‘Electric Organ’, Musical Standard (28 Mar 1868).

MICHAEL SAYER

Brydon, Roderick

(b Edinburgh, 8 Jan 1939). Scottish conductor. After studying at Edinburgh University and in Siena and Vienna, he worked as an associate conductor with the Scottish National Orchestra, Sadler’s Wells Opera and Scottish Opera. He was founder and first artistic director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (1975–83), and principal conductor at the municipal theatres in Lucerne (1984–7) and Berne (1987–90), where his repertory included Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet, Peter Grimes, Owen Wingrave, Parsifal and Capriccio. He made his Australian début in 1991 conducting Madama Butterfly for Victoria State Opera, and has since been based in Sydney, where he conducted Lucia di Lammermoor in 1996. Widely respected for his Britten interpretations (he conducted A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival), Brydon also has a special affinity for the music of Mozart, Verdi and Stravinsky.

ANDREW CLARK

Bryennius, Manuel [Bryennios, Manouēl]

(fl Constantinople, c1300). Byzantine scholar and music theorist. Although academically eccentric, Bryennius instructed the statesman Theodorus Metochites (c1260–1332) in mathematics, astronomy and, probably, music (a didactic poem by Theodorus reflects his teaching). No works by Bryennius on mathematics and astronomy survive, but his doctrines on these subjects can be seen in a letter to the monk Maximus Planudes (c1260–c1310) and in scholia (annotations) to manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Almagest.

The only work attributed to Bryennius that survives is the Harmonics (Harmonika), in three books. It was compiled in order to prevent the music theory of antiquity falling into oblivion (i.1). Like the somewhat earlier treatise of Georgios Pachymeres (d c1310), Harmonics is based on ancient Greek tradition, but Bryennius drew on more sources than Pachymeres, treated his material in a more independent fashion, and carried his conclusions further. The neo-Pythagorean numerological theory of music is Bryennius’s most important source (though for facts more than for metaphysical speculation); his other sources include the works of Nicomachus of Gerasa, Aristides Quintilianus, Theon of Smyrna and, above all, Ptolemy, for his theory of the eight tonoi (Harmonics, ii.3–4; iii.1–2), the ‘shadings’ (chroai) of the tetrachords (i.7; ii.1) and the monochord and its division (ii.6–7).

Unlike his more one-sided precursors, Bryennius also drew extensively on the empiricist school of Aristoxenus. Its basic theories on the elements of melody are quoted according to the sources underlying the Introduction to Harmonics attributed to Cleonides (formerly to Euclid). On the other hand, the detailed accounts of melodic species and figures (Harmonics, iii.3, 5, 10) appear to have been derived from the lost account by Aristoxenus of the composition of melody.

The first section of the treatise is based largely on Aristoxenus and his school; the second, however, is based on the neo-Pythagorean tradition and concludes, like the treatise by Pachymeres, with a comparison of the divisions of the tetrachords, but in a different order (ii.8–15). The third section unites the Pythagorean and Aristoxenian traditions and culminates in a theory of melodic construction. It cannot be accidental that the final quotation in the treatise is drawn from the Harmonics of Aristoxenus: it is a general comparison of the procedures to be adopted by the musician and the geometrician (iii.11).

One section of the treatise deals with the Byzantine ecclesiastical modes (ēchoi) and identifies them with the ancient transposition scales (tonoi, tropoi); this section contains evidence concerning the musical practice of Bryennius’s own time. Like Pachymeres, Bryennius connected the relative pitch of the tonoi with the eight ēchoi; he based the numbering of the modes in the Oktōēchos, however, on the respective position of the note mesē within the tetrachord (iii.4).

Bryennius’s Harmonics is the most comprehensive surviving codification of Byzantine musical scholarship. Its composition reflects the increase in interest in mathematics at the beginning of the Palaeologan dynasty and contributed to the rediscovery of ancient music theory. The treatise was highly valued in the period of the late Byzantine empire and in the Italian Renaissance: there are 46 surviving manuscripts from before 1600, and two early Latin translations (1497, by Gian Francesco Burana of Verona, commissioned by Gaffurius, and 1555, by Antonio de Albertis). After Meibom, in the preface to his collected edition of Greek music theorists (Antiquae musicae auctores septem, Amsterdam, 1652/R), had promised a publication of Bryennius, the Oxford mathematician John Wallis in 1699 published his treatise together with those of Ptolemy and Porphyry.

WRITINGS

J. Wallis, ed.: ‘Manouēl Bryenniou harmonika’, Operum mathematicorum, iii (Oxford, 1699), 357–508

G.H. Jonker, ed. and trans.: The Harmonics of Manuel Bryennius (Groningen, 1970) [with introduction ‘On Manuel Bryennius and his Work’, 17–34]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Westphal: Griechische Rhythmik und Harmonik nebst der Geschichte der drei musischen Disziplinen (Leipzig, 2/1867), 310–20

W. Christ: ‘Über die Harmonik des Manuel Bryennios und das System der byzantinischen Musik’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, zu München, Philosophisch-philologische Klasse, ii (1870), 241–70

K. von Jan: Die Harmonik des Aristoxenianers Kleonides (Landsberg, 1870), 19ff

J. Tzetzes: Über die altgriechische Musik in der griechischen Kirche (Munich, 1874/R), 21ff

H. Reimann: ‘Zur Geschichte und Theorie der byzantinischen Musik, IV: Die Theorie des Manuel Bryennios’, VMw, v (1889), 322–44, 373–95

H. Riemann: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, i/1 (Leipzig, 1904, 2/1919), 26, 183–4; i/2 (Leipzig, 1905, 2/1920), 75ff

W. Vetter: ‘Bryennios’, Paulys Real-Encyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xxviii (Stuttgart, 1930), 1362–6

O. Gombosi: ‘Studien zur Tonartenlehre des frühen Mittelalters’, AcM, xi (1939), 28–39

L. Richter: ‘Antike Überlieferungen in der byzantinischen Musiktheorie’, DJbM, vi (1961, rev. in AcM, lxx (1998), 133–208), 75–115

C. Hannick: ‘Byzantinische Musik’, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, ed. H. Hŭnger (Munich, 1978), ii, 183–218, cf 246–7

T.J. Mathiesen: ‘Aristides Quintilianus and the Harmonics of Manuel Bryennius: a Study in Byzantine Music Theory’, JMT, xxvii (1983), 31–54

For further bibliography see Byzantine chant.

LUKAS RICHTER

Brygeman, William

(d Bristol, 1524). English musician and composer. Between 1503 and 1504 he was a clerk of the choir of Eton College; three parts of his five-part Salve regina survive in the Eton Choirbook (incipit in MB, xii, 1961, no.59); a five-part Magnificat, listed in the index of the choirbook, is now lost. At the time of his death he was clerk, and possibly master, of the choir maintained in the parish church of All Saints, Bristol. There exists an inventory of the polyphonic music bequeathed by him to the church (see F.Ll. Harrison: ‘The Repertory of an English Parish Church in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance-muziek 1400–1600: donum natalicum René Bernard Lenaerts, ed. J. Robijns and others (Leuven, 1969, pp.143–7); it includes three choirbooks, three sets of partbooks and some 50 smaller items providing music for use on all liturgical occasions throughout the church's year. The music was in up to five parts, and included such items as Fayrfax's Magnificat and Mass O bone Jesu, and a Mass Ascendo ad patrem by Brygeman. Since the most important of the Bristol religious fraternities, the Gild of the Kalendars, was established in All Saints, this inventory gives an impressive insight into the musical repertory of the choirs widely maintained in parish churches throughout England by such fraternities in the century before the Reformation.

ROGER BOWERS

Brymer, Jack

(b South Shields, 27 Jan 1915). English clarinettist. He began his career as a schoolmaster and achieved sudden prominence in the musical world in 1947 when Beecham appointed him successor to Reginald Kell in the RPO. He held the appointment for 16 years, and was subsequently co-principal of the BBC SO, 1963–72, and then principal of the LSO, 1972–86. He is a founder-member of the Wigmore, London Baroque and Prometheus Ensembles, and director of the London Wind Soloists. Among his recordings are Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the Quintet and music for wind ensemble. He lectures widely and has taught at the RAM, Kneller Hall and the GSM. He was made an OBE in 1960, and awarded an honorary MA from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1973. Brymer is one of the most outstanding British clarinettists of the 20th century. His playing style is somewhat similar to his predecessor in the RPO, Reginald Kell, and his tone is flexible and beautifully rounded. He has continued into his 80s to undertake concerto engagements with consumate skill.

WRITINGS

Clarinet (London, 1976/R)

From Where I Sit (London, 1979)

In the Orchestra (London, 1987)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Weston: Clarinet Virtuosi of Today (London, 1989), 38–46

PAMELA WESTON

Brymley, John.

See Brimley, John.

Bryne [Bryan, Brian], Albertus [Albert]

(b ?London, c1621; d Westminster, 2 Dec 1668). English organist and composer. He studied under John Tomkins, succeeding him as organist at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1638. Under the Puritans he was dismissed from this post and he taught the harpsichord in London during the Commonwealth. At the Restoration he returned to St Paul’s and petitioned unsuccessfully to the king to appoint him organist at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. After the Great Fire he moved to Westminster Abbey and when he died in 1668 he was succeeded there by Blow. Anthony Wood stated that he was buried in the cloisters at the Abbey, but his grave cannot now be traced. The signature of his son, also Albertus, appears in a salaries book at St Paul’s until January 1671, and he was organist at Dulwich College as a ‘young man’ (1671–7). He is probably the ‘Mr Bryan’ who was organist at All Hallows, Barking-by-the-Tower, from 1676 until his death in 1713, but he is not known as a composer.

The elder Bryne was evidently well respected by contemporaries, being described as ‘that famously velvet fingered Organist’ (J. Batchiler, The Virgin’s Pattern, 1661) and ‘an excellent musitian’ (Wood). He composed anthems and services, the words of some being printed in Clifford’s Divine Services and Anthems (1663), and was one of the leading English harpsichord composers of his day; his suites were a strong influence on harpsichord composers of the next generation and some are among the earliest English examples with four movements (GB-Ob).

WORKS

sacred

Short Service, in G (TeD, Jub, Ky, Cr, San, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, org, GB-DRc, Lcm, LF, Och

3 full anthems, 4vv, 2 with org, DRc, Lbl, Mp, Ob, Y, US-BEM

2 verse anthems, inc., GB-Mp

Anthem (text only) in J. Clifford: The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 1663)

instrumental

5 dance movts, a, hpd, 1678⁶; 3 suites, d, D, a, hpd, Ob, Och (inc.), US-NYp; 2 suites, D, d, hpd, NYp; 1 suite, F, hpd, GB-Och (first 2 movts doubtful); 2 single movts, G, C, hpd, Och, US-Cn; Voluntary, a, org, GB-Lbl (doubtful): 4 suites ed. in RRMBE, lxxxi (Madison, WI, 1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Clark, ed.: The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 1891–5)

B. Cooper: ‘Albertus Bryne’s Keyboard Music’, MT, cxiii (1972), 142–3

B. Hodge: English Harpsichord Repertoire: 1660–1714 (diss., U. of Manchester, 1989)

S. Boyer: ‘The Manchester Altus Partbook MS 340 Cr 71’, ML, lxxii (1991), 192–213

C. Bailey, ed.: Late Seventeenth-Century English Keyboard Music (Madison, WI, 1997)

S. Boyer: The Cathedral, the City and the Crown: a Study of the Music and Musicians of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1660 to 1697 (diss., U. of Manchester, 1999)

B.A.R. COOPER

Bryn-Julson, Phyllis (Mae)

(b Bowdon, ND, 5 Feb 1945). American soprano of Norwegian parentage. Trained as a pianist at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, she was heard by Gunther Schuller, who was struck by her facility at sight-reading 12-note music. At his instigation she undertook vocal study at Tanglewood, receiving additional encouragement from Erich Leinsdorf. After further study at Syracuse University she made her official début with the Boston SO in Berg’s Lulu Suite in 1966; this led to orchestral engagements throughout the USA, including an appearance with the New York PO under Boulez. Although her repertory was broad and eclectic, she achieved her greatest successes in an extraordinary variety of testing modern works, many written specially for her. The clarity and pure timbre of her voice, her perfect pitch, three-octave range and ability to sing accurately (even in quarter-tones) made her a valued exponent of Boulez, Crumb, Ligeti and Foss. She has served on the faculties of Kirkland-Hamilton College (Clinton, New York) and the University of Maryland, and given masterclasses in Europe and the USA. Her first operatic role was Malinche in the American première of Sessions’s Montezuma under Sarah Caldwell (1976, Boston). The following year she made an acclaimed début at the Proms in Henze’s Das Floss der ‘Medusa’, and in 1987 sang in Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges at Covent Garden. Bryn-Julson’s many recordings include Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, The Nightingale, Pierrot Lunaire (of which she was a famous exponent) and several works by Boulez.

MARTIN BERNHEIMER/R

Bryssiger, Peter.

See Breisiger, Peter.

Brysson, John

(d 1818). Scottish music publisher. He managed the Edinburgh firm founded by Robert Bremner.

Brzezina, Antoni

(d Lemberg [now L'viv], June 1831). Polish bookseller, music publisher, printer and lithographer. In 1822 in Warsaw he founded a bookshop which until 1825 dealt mainly in music. He was in contact with many booksellers in Poland and abroad, and imported much music from other countries, including Schott’s edition of Beethoven’s collected works. One of Brzezina’s regular customers was the young Chopin. From about 1823 Brzezina published 309 lithographed musical works, including Śpiewy historyczne (‘Historical songs’) to words by J.U. Niemcewicz, Chopin’s Rondo op.1 (1825) and Rondo à la Mazur op.5 (1828), works by J. Damse, J. Stefani, K. Kurpiński (keyboard method, 1829), as well as Auber, Boieldieu, Rossini, Weber and others. In 1832 Gustaw Sennewald, Brzezina’s partner from 1828, purchased the firm, which then traded under his name until 1905. Brzezina also published his own trade and publishing catalogues, of which four survive (1827–30).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Frączyk: Warszawa młodości Chopina [Warsaw in Chopin's youth] (Kraków, 1961), 278–93

H. Miłakowska: Antoni Brzezina (diss., U. of Warsaw, 1961)

[M. Prikopowicz]: ‘Brzezina Antoni’, Słownik pracowników książki polskiej [Dictionary of the Polish book trade], ed. I. Treichel (Warsaw, 1972)

W. Tomaszewski: Bibliografia warszawskich druków muzycznych 1801–1850 [Bibliography of Warsaw music prints] (Warsaw, 1992)

W. Tomaszewski: Warszawskie edytorstwo muzyczne w latach 1772–1865 [Music publishing in Warsaw] (Warsaw, 1992)

KORNEL MICHAŁOWSKI

Brzeziński, Franciszek (Ksawery)

(b Warsaw, 6 Sept 1867; d Warsaw, 6 Aug 1944). Polish composer and music critic. He studied law (graduating in 1890) at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu) and until about 1903 practised law in Warsaw. During the same period he also studied the piano with Jan Kleczyński. Later, he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Reger (composition) and Nikisch. From 1916 to 1921 he was a music reviewer for Kurier Warszawski. In 1921 he was appointed Polish Consul in Breslau (now Wrocław) and later appointed to the equivalent position in Berlin, where, from about 1928, he served as music correspondent for the monthly Warsaw journal Muzyka. After returning to Poland (in 1931) he contributed to a range of musical and non-musical publications. In 1929 he became a board member of the Association of Writers and Music Critics.

Brzeziński's music is strongly based in the late Romantic tradition, although it shows signs of restrained modernism. His works are characterized by an integrity of feeling, a good command of polyphony and a predilection for the use of folk melodies and their occasional humour.

In contrast to his compositions, which are now largely forgotten, Brzeziński's writings are of historical value and a good source of information about Polish musical culture at the turn of the century. As a critic he was interested in a broad range of issues; he was objective, honest and without prejudice towards the new music of such composers as Szymanowski or Stravinsky. His main interest lay in music of the Romantic era; he valued highly the music of Brahms, Smetana, French and Italian composers (particularly Verdi) and was sharply critical of Liszt and Mahler. He placed his erudition and fine literary style not only at the service of music criticism (including music for the church, schools and radio) but also wrote about operatic production and choreography (especially Polish dances). He defined the boundaries of good music criticism in an article for Muzyka polska in 1935.

WORKS

Orch: Tema con variazioni, f, op.3, c1904; Polnische suite, G, op.4, c1907; Tryptyk, op.5 [3 Preludes and Fugues], 1910; Polonez-Ballada, 1917, arr. pf; Toccata, op.7, c1910; Concerto, g, op.9, before 1916

Other: Sonata, D, op.6, vn, pf, c1910; Śpiewnik studencki [Student's Songbook], c1890, collab. S. Brzeziński; songs, 1v, pf

WRITINGS

Smetana (Warsaw, 1933)

‘O zadaniach krytyki muzycznej’ [The role of the music critic], Muzyka polska, ii (1935), 280–85

Articles in Rzeczpospolita, Nowiny muzyczne i teatralne, Sztuka, Muzyka polska, Świat and Obrona kultury

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMuz(E. Szczepańska-Gołas)

A. Chybiński: ‘Z najnowszej muzyki polskiej’ [Recent Polish music], Sfinks, no.46 (1911), 479–82 [review of Tryptyk, op.5]

J. Rosenzweig: ‘Wieczór sonat’ [Evening of sonatas], Kurier polski (11 Dec 1916) [review of violin sonata]

P. Rytel: ‘Koncert fortepianowy Fr. Brzezińskiego. Zbigniew Drzewiecki’ [Piano Concerto by Brzeziński, played by Zbigniew Drzewiecki], Nowa gazeta (11 Nov 1918) [concert review]

S. Niewiadomski: ‘Z muzyki’, Gazeta warszawska (21 March 1920) [review of Toccata, op.7]

S. Jarociński: Antologia polskiej krytyki muzycznej XIX i XX wieku [Anthology of Polish music criticism from the 19th and 20th centuries] (Kraków, 1955) [incl. reprints of 21 articles by Brzeziński]

BARBARA CHMARA-ŻACZKIEWICZ

Brzoska, Matthias [Johannes Maria]

(b Frankfurt, 24 June 1955). German musicologist. After studying musicology in Marburg with Brinkmann and Sieghart Döhring (1977–81), he attended the Technical University of Berlin (1982–6) and took the doctorate under Dahlhaus with a study on Schreker's opera Der Schatzgräber. From 1981 to 1986 he worked as an assistant at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin with Budde and Schnebel. In 1992 his Habilitationsschrift on the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk during the July Monarchy was accepted by the Technical University and he became professor at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen the same year. His main areas of study are French music from the 18th to the 20th centuries, music aesthetics in the 19th and 20th century and the history of opera. A pioneering scholar of opera, he has contributed important articles to Pipers Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters and Metzlers Komponisten-Lexikon.

WRITINGS

‘Mosè und Massimilla: Rossinis “Mosè in Egitto” und Balzacs politische Deutung’, Oper als Text: Berlin 1983, 125–46

Franz Schrekers Oper ‘Der Schatzgräber’ (diss., Technical U. of Berlin, 1986; Stuttgart, 1988)

‘Das “Anscheinende” der “Willkür”: E.T.A. Hoffmanns Es-Dur-Symphonie und seine Beethoven-Deutung’, Musiktheorie, iii (1988), 141–55

‘Die französischen Opern Poniatowskis’, Deutsche Musik im Wegekreuz zwischen Polen und Frankreich: Mainz 1988, 45–55

‘Historisches Bewusstsein und musikalische Zeitgestaltung’, AMw, xlv (1988), 50–66

‘Exilstation Paris’, Musik in der Emigration 1933–1945: Essen 1992, 183–91

Die Idee des Gesamtkunstwerks in der Musiknovellistik der Julimonarchie (Habilitationsschrift, Technical U. of Berlin, 1992; Laaber, 1995)

‘Camilla und Sargino: Ferdinando Paers italienische Adaptation der französischen Opéra comique’, Recercare, v (1993), 171–94

‘Max von Schillings Oper: Mona Lisa’, Deutsche Oper zwischen Wagner und Strauss: Dresden 1993

‘Franz Schrekers Diskurs’, Visionen und Aufbrüche: zur Krise der modernen Musik 1908–1933, ed. G. Metz (Kassel, 1994), 303–20

‘ “Loin de la ville”: verfremdete Natur als musikalischer Diskurs: zum Pastoraltopos in Meyerbeers Prophète’, Giacomo Meyerbeer: Musik als Welterfahrung: Heinz Becker zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. S. Döhring and J. Schläder (Munich, 1995)

‘Richard Wagners französische Wurzeln ossia Warum Wagner kein Zukunftsmusiker sein wollte’, Der Wagnerisme in der französischen Musik und Musikkultur: Berlin 1995

ed., with E.Schmierer and others: Töne, Farben, Formen: über Musik und die bildenden Künste: Festschrift Elmar Budde (Laaber, 1995) [incl. ‘Vertontes Licht: die Entwicklung der Beleuchtungstechnik auf der Opernbühne in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, 323–36]

EDITIONS

G. Meyerbeer: Le prophète (New York, 1978)

CHRISTIAN BERGER

Brzowski, Józef

(b Warsaw, 1805/03; d Warsaw, 3 Dec 1888). Polish composer and teacher. He was a pupil at the Piarist School and the Warsaw lycée, studying music with Karol Kurpiński and then (from 1821) at the Conservatory where he studied theory with Wilhelm Würfel and the cello with J. Wagner. From 1827 to 1832 he was successively cellist, coach and conductor of the ballet at the Warsaw Opera. In 1836 and again in 1843 and 1867 he toured Germany, France and Belgium. From 1861 until his death he was inspector and piano teacher for singers in the Warsaw Institute of Music. In 1877 he was decorated with the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic.

His sister Zofia (19 Jan 1800–28 June 1879) was an opera singer and the wife of Karol Kurpiński. His daughter Jadwiga (1830–after 1886) was a well-known pianist, a pupil of Moscheles. She gave concerts in Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, England and America (1840–58). In 1860 she married the Marquis Méjean, Belgian ambassador in New Orleans, where from 1858 she was director of the Institute of Music. Towards the end of her life she lived in Brussels and in Paris.

WORKS

unpublished MSS in PL-Kj unless otherwise stated

vocal

Sacred: Oratorium-Requiem, c1845 vs PL-Wtm; Messe solennelle, 1861; La foi messe, 3 male vv, org, 1862; Te Deum, c1867; Benedictus, chorus, orch; Crux fidelis, A, pf

Ops: Hrabia Weseliński [Count Merrymaker] (1, L. Dmuszewski), Warsaw, 24 Nov 1833; Rejent z Flandrii czyli Piwowar z Gandawy [The Regent of Flanders or The brewer of Ghent] (4, J. Jasiński), 1880, frags. perf. Warsaw, 15 June 1887

Choral: Grande cantate, 1v, chorus, orch, 1868; Kantata na cześć Kopernika [Cantata in honour of Copernicus] (J. Łuszczewska), chorus, pf, 1873; Polowanie na lwa [Hunting the lion], male vv; Serenade-quintuor (‘L’adieu’), 5vv, orch/pf; Polonez-Kanata, male vv, orch; Quintet, solo vv, chorus, pf

Songs to Polish texts

instrumental

Orch: Uwertura fantastyczna, 1834, lost; Grand rondeau-notturno, pf, orch, 1837; Symfonia dramatyczna, 1840; Valse fantaisie, 1840; Grand allegro, 2 pf, orch, 1846; Ouverture de concert, c1850; Elegia, vn, orch, 1875

Chamber: Pf qt, 1859, lost; Pf qnt, 1859, lost; Str septet; Rapsodia, pf, hmn, va, vc

Pf: Rondeau brillant sur le finale de l’opéra ‘Freischütz’ (Leipzig and Warsaw, 1827); 3 waltzes (Warsaw, 1828); 2 polonaises op.4 (Warsaw, 1829); Krakowiak, grand rondeau de concert, 1834; 2 polonaises op.7 (Leipzig, 1837); 4 mazurkas op.8 (Leipzig, 1837); Grandes variations op.11, 1838; Caprice, 1838; Impromptu-étude op.10 (Warsaw, 1856); 3 mazurkas op.12 (Paris, 1861); other polonaises, mazurkas, waltzes and arrs.

WRITINGS

Pamiętnik [Memoirs], lost; excerpts pubd in Kronika rodzinna [Warsaw] (1871), 261–6, 281–4, 292–7, 308–12, 344, 358–60

O instrumentacji [Instrumentation], PL-Kj, inc.

‘Słów kilka o operze’ [A few words on opera], Świat dramatyczny [Warsaw], i (1838), 122–4

‘Słówko o smaku w muzyce’ [A word on taste in music], Przegląd naukowy (Warsaw, 1845), ii, 90–106

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PSB (T. Ochlewski)

J. Kleczyński: ‘Jósef Brzowski’, Echo muzyczne, teatralne i artystyczne, iii (1886), 379–80

S. Lachowicz: ‘Brzowski, Józef’, Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM, ed. E. Dziebowska (Kraków, 1979–93)

A. Nowak-Romanowicz: Klasycyzm 1750–1830: historia muzyki polskiej, iv, ed. S. Sutkowski (Warsaw, 1995)

ALINA NOWAK-ROMANOWICZ/BARBARA CHMARA-ŻACZKIEWICZ

Buarque (de Hollanda), Chico (Francisco)

(b Rio de Janeiro, 19 June 1944). Brazilian composer and singer-songwriter. The son of a prominent historian and intellectual, he began studying architecture at the University of São Paulo in 1963 but decided soon after to pursue a career in popular music. Although he was a great admirer of the bossa nova musician João Gilberto, his first hits, Pedro Pedreiro and Sonho de um Carnaval (both recorded in 1965), as well as Olê Olá, revealed innovative talents. The first piece is an early expression of his concern for and subsequent criticism of some of Brazil's urban social problems. The well-known poet-diplomat Vinicius de Morais, a family friend and fundamental figure of the bossa nova movement, exerted a strong influence on Buarque's music and poetry. Indeed the ‘master of the language’, as Jobim characterized him, went on to produce some of the most sophisticated popular songs of his generation, both poetically and musically. In 1966 vocalist Nara Leão presented his A Banda at the second festival of Brazilian Popular Music, a song that brought him overnight success. Following the song and subsequent play Roda-Viva (1967, produced in 1968), which denounced the machinations of showbusiness against a popular artist, he developed problems with the military censors. At the end of 1968 the political climate became strongly repressive and he left for Italy in early 1969 and remained there in voluntary exile for about 15 months.

Upon his return to Brazil, Buarque recorded an LP of his new songs, and in 1971 released the album Construção. Although several of his songs continued to be banned, censorship diminished in the late 1970s. During that time he also became involved with theatre, film and literature. His musical Opera do malandro (‘Hustler's Opera’, 1977–8), based on Die Dreigroschenoper of Brecht and Weill, was a well-received social satire of the Vargas regime of the 1930s and 1940s. The return to democracy in 1985 finally gave the composer the chance to express himself freely. His lyrics indeed reflect the hopes and frustrations of his generation and especially of the 1964–85 period of authoritarian regime. Buarque's prolific song output reveals a creative individual whose facets have been classified as those of a troubadour, lover, politician, chronicler and hustler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Béhague: ‘Brazilian Musical Values of the 1960s and 1970s: Popular Urban Music from Bossa Nova to Tropicalia’, Journal of Popular Culture, xiv/3 (1980), 437–52

A.B. de Menezes: Desenho mágico: poesia e política em Chico Buarque (São Paulo, 1982)

A.T. da C.M. Munhoz: A música no Processo cultural brasileiro: o poeta Chico Buarque (Bauru, 1986)

C. Perrone: ‘Dissonance and Dissent: the Musical Dramatics of Chico Buarque’, Latin American Theater Review, xxii/2 (1989), 81–94

L.V. Cesar: Poesia e política nas canções de Bob Dylan e Chico Buarque (São Carlos, 1993)

J. Woodall: A Simple Brazilian Song: Journeys through the Rio Sound (London, 1997)

GERARD BÉHAGUE

Bubblegum.

South African popular music style. The worldwide popularity of disco during the 1980s spawned a South African township variant commonly called ‘bubblegum’, although its exponents prefer the official classification ‘township pop’. Catering for the tastes of the black urban youth, bubblegum retains some indigenous characteristics such as call-and-response in the vocal parts, but is dominated by synthesizers and a disco beat, commonly supplied by a drum box. Lyrics are often in English, although vernacular languages and the latest phrases in township lingua franca are also used.

The icon of township pop is Brenda Fassie, who has enjoyed more top-selling albums over a longer period than any other female singer. Her closest competitor, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, is known as the ‘Princess of Africa’ for her popularity throughout the continent. The most successful male vocalists and producers are Dan Tshanda with his group Splash and Sello ‘Chicco’ Twala. In the mid-1990s the township dance music market was taken over by kwaito (a South Africanized blend of hip hop with European and American house, pop and techno) in which the latest township catch phrases are sung and chanted over computer-generated backing. Top kwaito groups include Boom Shaka, Arthur, Trompies and Bongo Maffin.

RECORDINGS

The Best of Brenda, perf. B. Fassie, CCP Records CDBREN 001

The Best of Chicco, perf. S. ‘Chicco’ Twala, Teal Records CDRBL 189

The Best of Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Teal Records CDRBL 190

LARA ALLEN

Bucaenus, Paulus.

See Bucenus, Paulus.

Buccellanito, Nicolaus de [‘Auritus’ (‘Big Ears’)]

(fl ?c1450). Italian theorist. He is the otherwise unknown author (possibly from Bizzolano, a quarter of Canneto sull’Oglio west of Mantua) of a short treatise for boys, Introductiones artis musice (incomplete in I-Vnm lat.Cl.VIII.85 (3579), ff.61v–67v, copied in Mantua and Bozzolo in 1463–4). Book 1 treats letters, notes, hexachords, avoidance of the tritone, and intervals in summary fashion. Book 2, on the species of intervals, is copied largely verbatim from Book 2 of Johannes Ciconia’s Nova musica (2. 1–8, 13–14, 16, 20; part of Book 1 is also used). Buccellanito appears to be the only theorist who was directly influenced by Ciconia; like him, he uses Greek note names as a matter of course. (O.B. Ellsworth, ed.: Johannes Ciconia: nova musica and De proportionibus, GLMT, ix, Lincoln, NE, 1993)

BONNIE J. BLACKBURN

Bucchi, Valentino

(b Florence, 29 Nov 1916; d Rome, 9 May 1976). Italian composer. He studied with Frazzi, Corrado Barbieri and Dallapiccola at the Florence Conservatory, where he was awarded the diploma in composition in 1944; he also took a degree in philosophy at the University of Florence. From 1945 he taught in the conservatories of Florence, Venice and Perugia, and he was later artistic director of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana (1958–60) and director of the Florence Conservatory (from 1974). He worked as a music critic for various daily newspapers, including La nazione and Avanti!.

Non-conformist in character with an ironic burlesque streak, Bucchi has occupied a unique position in Italian 20th-century music. Equally removed from the avant garde and from tradition, he developed a compositional technique based on the play of permutations, a collage of elements drawn from a broad, heterogeneous spectrum, mixing classical and popular, old and new features. Following a series of pieces inspired by the tragedy of World War II and the Resistance (La dolce pena, Pianto delle creature, Cori per la pietà morta) characterized by vehement vocal phrases and violent juxtapositions of voices and instruments, Bucchi went on to use more moderate means of expression. In 1952 he turned to early music, re-writing Li jeus de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle and Laudes evangelii, a kind of sacred stage work which draws on the melodies of medieval laudes. With these works, Bucchi made a decisive move towards simplifying his musical language; this led both to further achievements in the theatrical domain and also to a small number of instrumental compositions of a concertante type, essentially playful in character, for example the Concerto grottesco for double bass and strings (1967). From this point on, Bucchi formed his own personal style based upon an aesthetics of simplicity, defined by d’Amico as using ‘minimum means’.

Bucchi’s interest in the theatre, which marks all his work, had a particularly fruitful result in the one-act Il contrabbasso (1954), based on a Chekhov short story. The strange narrative is matched by Bucchi’s acute sense of irony, together with an underlying bitterness and a disconcertingly simple musical language. In his next operatic piece, Una notte in paradiso (1960), a treatment of an Italian folktale collected by Italo Calvino, the humorous style reflects popular culture: an approach already seen, if with a surrealist character, in the evocation of folk myth in Il giuoco del barone (1939). In Una notte, Bucchi experiments with a fusion of technical devices and stylistic ‘levels’ – popular song, jazz, art music – which is also fundamental to Il coccodrillo (1970), after Dostoyevsky. In this, his last work for the theatre, Bucchi eschews a conventional dramatic sequence. Instead the action is split into 32 episodes and matched by a multiplicity of artistic means: spoken sections, rhythmic recitative, song, orchestral music, recorded sound, the projection of filmed sequences, mime and dance. In his works of the 1970s, Bucchi abandoned montage techniques, and devoted himself to exploring new sound worlds, including microintervals and clusters. His final compositions, Lettres de la religieuse portugaise and Colloquio corale, draw the threads of all his previous works, including the expressive tension of the postwar operas, together.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Il giuoco del barone (1, A. Parronchi), Florence, Sperimentale, 20 Dec 1939, rev. 1955, Spoleto, 26 June 1958; Il contrabbasso (grottesco, 1, M. Mattolini and M. Pezzati, after A. Chekhov: Roman s kontrabasom [Love Affair with a Double Bass]), Florence, Comunale, 20 June 1954; Una notte in paradiso (cantafavola, 1, L. Bazzoni, after I. Calvino: Le fiabe italiane), Florence, Comunale, 11 May 1960; realization of Monteverdi: Orfeo, RAI, 1966; Il coccodrillo (4, in 2 pts, Bucchi and Pezzati, after F.M. Dostoyevsky), Florence, Pergola, 9 May 1970

Ballets: Laudes evangelii (choreographic mystery, G. Signorini), Perugia, 1952; Racconto siciliano, Rome, 1956; Mirandolina, Rome, 1957

Orch: Ballata del silenzio, 1951; Conc. in rondò, pf, orch, 1957; Conc. lirico, vn, str, 1958; Suite, 1958; Fantasia, str, 1963; Banditi a Orgosolo, suite, 1965; Conc. grottesco, db, str, 1967; Un incipit, str, 1972; Il coccodrillo, suite, 1973 [based on op]; Conc., pic/fl, str, 1973; Conc. di concerti, str, 1974

Vocal: 4 liriche (P. Verlaine), 1v, pf, 1934–40; 3 poesie di G. Noventa, 1v, pf, 1940; La dolce pena, 1v, hp/pf/orch, 1946; 5 madrigali (A. Poliziano), 1v, pf, 1946, orchd 1946; Lettres de la religieuse portugaise, S, 1970; Vocalizzo nel mondo dei fiori, S, 10 insts, 1975

Chbr and solo inst: Concertino, 8 insts, 1936; Pf Sonatina, 1938; Hp Sonatina, 1940; Serenata, 11 insts, 1940; Str Qt, 1956; Fogli d'album, pf, 1957–73; Conc., cl, 1969; Ison, vc, 1971; Le petit prince, vc, 1971; Battaglia, 6 tpt, 2 trbn, timp, drum, 1973; Soliloquios, va, 1976

Incid music, film scores

Principal publishers: Carisch, Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni

WRITINGS

L’Orfeo di Claudio Monteverdi (Florence, 1949)

Musica alla specchio (Rome, 1983)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella, S. Ragni); DEUMM (P. Guarino); GroveO (R. Pozzi)

A. Hermet: Poesia e poetica musicale di Valentino Bucchi (Florence, 1954)

F. d’Amico: I casi della musica (Milan, 1962), 30ff

R. Sabatini: Medaglioni musicali umbri: Valentino Bucchi (Perugia, 1968)

L. Pannella: Valentino Bucchi: anticonformismo e politica musicale italiana (Florence, 1976)

S. Ragni: ‘Ricordi perugini di Valentino Bucchi’, NRMI, x (1976), 423–33

L. Alberti: ‘Valentino Bucchi e l'etica della curiosità’, Chigiana, new ser., xiv (1981), 387–93

C. Orselli: ‘Ricordo di Valentino Bucchi’, ibid., 395–402

C. Prosperi: ‘Bucchi: un libro prezioso’, Chigiana, ibid., xiv (1981), 375–86

R. Zanetti: La musica italiana del novecento (Busto Arsizio, 1985), 1383–7

Dell'insopprimibile utilità del discorso: intorno a ‘Soliloquios’ di Valentino Bucchi (Rome, 1992)

Esercizi: musica e spettacolo, xvi–xvii (1997–8) [incl. essays by B. Brumana, F. Cagianelli, G. Ciliberti and M. Marini]

VIRGILIO BERNARDONI

Bucchianti, Giovanni Pietro

(b 1608; d after 1627). Italian composer. He was appointed a musician to the Cavalieri di S Stefano at Pisa, whose director of music was Antonio Brunelli. In his only known music, Arie, scherzi, e madrigali, for one and two voices and continuo (Venice, 1627), he states that he was a pupil of Brunelli and that he has ‘not yet completed 19 years’. He may have died soon afterwards, for while the 27 songs in his volume are naturally derivative they are promising enough for one to expect more music to have followed them. They are exceptionally wide-ranging, as though as a student he were trying his hand at as many forms and styles as possible. In the madrigals in particular he handled with some imagination a variety of possible influences ranging from Caccini to d'India and Saracini. Vagh'e dolc'augelletto shows the strong influence of the aria on the declining madrigal at this date. The strophic arias are less appealing, though one interesting setting of a strophic poem, Hor ch'io posso dolente, illustrates another recent influence in being a cantata in the manner of Alessandro Grandi (i). The cantata-like duet Tu sei pur bella is structurally more resourceful still and also includes a few notably expressive passages.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Schmitz: ‘Zur Geschichte des italienischen Kammerduetts im 17. Jahrhundert’, JbMP 1916, 43–60, esp. 51

F. Ghisi: Alle fonti della monodia (Milan, 1940/R), 74, 78

J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)

P. Aldrich: Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody (New York, 1966), 14, 36, 123–4

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

NIGEL FORTUNE

Buccin (i).

A crude wind instrument, created during the French Revolution for use in outdoor music (see Revolutionary hymn). It was frequently paired with the Tuba curva. The buccin has not survived, but is known to have incorporated crooks in the same way as the natural trumpet. It possessed ‘a prodigious strength of sound’ according to Choron (Pierre, 1894, p.52); this combined with a high tessitura made it less popular with composers than the tuba curva.

The buccin was first heard publicly at Voltaire’s reburial on 11 July 1791 and is last known to have been written for in Méhul’s Chant National du 14 juillet 1800 (1800), for three choirs and three instrumental ensembles. Engravings made of the Voltaire ceremony vary in their portrayal of the instrument, but historically the most likely shape was a straight conical tube ending in a slight flare after the Greco-Roman pattern. Three such instruments are found in J.-L. David’s drawing The Reception of the Emperor and Empress at the Hôtel de Ville (1804; see illustration). This design confirms what an examination of the buccin’s music reveals, namely that it was between 1 and 1·5 metres long, and most frequently sounded the harmonic series f'–c''–f''–a''.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Chouquet: Le musée du Conservatoire National de Musique: catalogue raisonné des instruments de cette collection (Paris, 1875)

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique, les luthiers et la facture instrumentale: précis historique (Paris, 1893), 352–3, 399

C. Pierre: Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française (Paris, 1894), 51–2

D.P. Charlton: ‘New Sounds for Old: Tam-tam, Tuba Curva, Buccin’, Soundings, iii (1973), 39–47

D.P. Charlton: Orchestration and Orchestral Practice in Paris, 1789 to 1810 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1973)

F. Gétreau: ‘Le museum, section de musique: une utopie révolutionnaire et sa descendance’, Orphée phrygien: les musiques de la Révolution, ed. J.-R. Julien and J.-C. Klein, Vibrations, special no. (1989), 217–31

M. Haine: ‘Sonorités nouvelles aux fêtes de la Révolution française’, Fêtes et musiques révolutionnaires: Grétry et Gossec, ed. R. Mortier and H. Hasquin (Brussels, 1990), 193–210

DAVID CHARLTON

Buccin (ii).

A form of Trombone with a bell terminating in a stylized serpent's or dragon's head, often with a metal tongue, free to flap, protruding. Berlioz scored for buccin in the Kyrie and ‘Resurrexit’ of his Messe solennelle of 1824.

ARNOLD MYERS

Buccina [Bucina]

(Gk. bukanē).

A curved Roman brass instrument (an Aerophone). It is less easily definable than its contemporaries owing to the scarcity of iconographic evidence and the ambiguity of the literary references, some of which confuse it with the Cornu. The majority of evidence, nevertheless, points to a distinct instrument. Originally it was a curved animal’s horn but it came to be covered with brass and even to be fashioned entirely from brass. Its musical capability seems to have been limited to a few pitches of the overtone series; this would agree with the literary references, which consistently attributed to it a signalling function.

In earlier times it was associated with country folk, particularly shepherds, and although it became primarily a military instrument, it maintained something of this early association throughout the classical period. Roman authors described the herding of sheep and the summoning together of rural communities as among its early uses. The later, more common, military references give the impression that it was used within the camp, unlike the more powerful tuba (see Tuba (ii)) and cornu, which were used on the field of battle. Within the camp, it gave signals, for example, for the changing of the watch and for reveille. A number of poetic references contrasted its sleep-shattering call to arms with the soporific and erotic associations of instruments such as the kithara. In conformity with its smaller size, it was used also by the cavalry, whereas the tuba and cornu were played by men on foot.

A final association was with Triton, the sea god who blew upon a horn of shell; this instrument was referred to as a buccina in Roman literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SachsH

G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1978)

G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967)

D. Charlton: ‘New Sounds for Old: Tam-Tam, Tuba Curva, Buccin’, Soundings, iii (1973), 39–47

R. Meucci: ‘Roman Military Instruments and the Lituus’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 85–97

JAMES W. McKINNON

Bucenus [Bucaenus], Paulus

(b Holstein; fl 1567–84; d ?Riga). German composer. In 1567 he matriculated at Greifswald University; adjoined to his name was the indication ‘Philorhodus, Holsata’, but it cannot now be determined what place of origin in Holstein this signified (possibly Rostock). The same document makes clear that he was already a musician of talent. About 1570 he became Kantor at the Gymnasium at Thorn (now Toruń, Poland) and by 1576 was Kantor of Riga Cathedral, where he was also very active as a composer.

Bucenus composed a six-part Passio Domini Jesu Christi (Stettin, 1578, inc.). His work and a Passion by Ludwig Daser published in the same year are the last Lutheran settings to Latin words; like those of Balthasar Resinarius and Johannes Galliculus they used a composite version rather than the words of a single gospel. Bucenus set the opening and closing choruses, the Saviour’s words and the Evangelist’s narration all in six parts, and this may be the reason for Kadès’ faulting it as unexpressive. In 1583–4 Bucenus assembled a large, two-volume collection of his music, Tomi musici operis ecclesiae rigensis. The first volume, Cantiones … ad tria contrapuncti genera accomodatae musicis instrumentis scholisque aptissimae decantatae, for four to six voices, contains over 100 motets on texts from the Old and New Testaments, among them many dedicatory pieces. The second volume begins with 24 parody and cantus firmus masses (‘Missae aliquot … ad clarissimorum musicorum motetas et sacros quosdam tenores accomodatae’), for four, five, six and eight voices; the second section (‘Preces vespertinae’) consists of numerous responsories and hymns, and Magnificat settings in all the tones. Some of Bucenus’s compositions also appeared in a large anthology compiled by Paul Praetorius, Kantor of Stettin from 1579 to 1587, but only the list of contents survives.

Although Bucenus’s work has yet to be studied in detail, it is evident that he was a fluent, gifted and orderly composer of church music. The dedicatory compositions show that he was an educated humanist and that he was held in high regard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Kade: Die ältere Passionskomposition bis zum Jahre 1631 (Gütersloh, 1893/R)

G. von Keussler: Paulus Bucaenus (Riga, 1931)

M. Ruhnke: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Hofmusikkollegien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1963)

K.W. Niemöller: Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600 (Regensburg, 1969)

G. Pietzsch: Zur Pflege der Musik an den deutschen Universitäten bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 1971) [repr. of articles pubd in AMf (1936–43)]

WALTER BLANKENBURG

Buchan, John

(fl 1562–1608). Scottish composer. Described in the 1635 Scottish Psalter as one of the ‘primest Musicians that ever this kingdome had’, he is today known only for two identified psalm settings (Psalms lxvii and cxxviii). Certainly these are very good examples of their kind, and have an added interest in being in Thomas Wood (i)’s collection (IRL-Dtc GB-Eu, Lbl, US-Wgu) in the composer’s own hand. He appears in contemporary records possibly as ‘schoolmaster’ in Ayr (1554–9), but more likely as master of the song school in Haddington (1584) who was appointed prebendary of the Chapel Royal in the same year. In 1592, as master of the song school in Glasgow, he was given a prebend of Glasgow Cathedral and is mentioned frequently in civic documents until 1608.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acts and Decreets, cxvii (MS, GB-Esro), 201

J. Johnson, ed.: The Scots Musical Museum, i (Edinburgh, 1787, enlarged 3/1853)

J.D. Marwick, ed.: Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, A.D.1573–1642 (Glasgow, 1876)

J.D. Marwick, ed.: Charters and other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow, 1175–1649, i (Glasgow, 1897)

G.S. Pryde, ed.: Ayr Burgh Accounts, 1534–1624, Scottish History Society Publications, ser.3, xxviii (Edinburgh, 1937)

KENNETH ELLIOTT

Buchanan, Dorothy Quita

(b Christchurch, 28 Sept 1945). New Zealand composer and teacher. The second of six daughters, she grew up in an intensely musical environment. She graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1967. In 1973 she founded the influential Christchurch music workshops, and later formed and directed the Centre Sound choral group. She gained a teaching diploma in 1976 and the following year became the first ‘composer-in-schools’. Her work as a teacher has led to a ‘school’ of young Christchurch composers. She also plays a leading role as a lecturer, writer, adjudicator and musical director.

A prolific composer, she has been influenced above all by landscape. She has worked closely with painters and has set texts by leading New Zealand poets such as Ian Wedde and Ruth Gilbert as well as the writings of Janet Frame and Margaret Mahy. Of her Five Vignettes of Women, for flute and female chorus (1987), Elizabeth Kerr wrote in the New Zealand Listener (23 May 1987) ‘this moving work is unashamedly romantic … The idiom is a simple tonal one, with the gentle and imaginative melodic, harmonic and rhythmic surprises often found in Buchanan’s music’. In 1984 she became composer-in-residence at the New Zealand Film Archives in Wellington, where she also composed scores for classic silent films.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Missa de angelis: Pro anno infantum, 1979; Sinfonietta in 5 Movements, 1989; Duo concertante, vn, vc, orch, 1991; Of Women’s Voices, women’s choir, orch, 1994; The Layers of Time, vc, women’s vv, orch, 1995

Stage and film: Lincoln County Incident (film score), 1976; The Tempest (theatre music), 1983; Oedipus (theatre music), 1983; The Adventures of Algy (silent film score), fl, vc, pf, 1984; Queen of Rivers (film score), cl, 1985; Greenleaf (op), 2 T, 2 Bar, fl, vib, perc, windchimes, 1985

Vocal: Motet to the Virgin, SSA, 1966; 3 Jacques Prévert Settings, T, B, vn, pf, nar, 1969; 5 Witchy Poo Songs, 1v, pf/(fl, ob, cl, bn, vc), 1976; Shaduf (I. Wedde), SSAATTBB, 1977; The Lord’s My Shepherd, chorus, orch, pf, 1978; Magnificat, S, Mez, A, T, B, SSA, fl, 2 tpt, 5 trbn, 1981; The Birds Began to Sing (J. Frame), S, A, T, B, SSA, 1983; 26 Songs (TVNZ Margaret Mahy Series), chbr ens, 1983; Mary Magdalene and the Birds (F. Adcock), Mez, cl, 1989; The Clio Legacy (W. Ihimaera), S, nar, women’s chorus, Maori women’s group, orch, 1991; Fragments and Letters (Buchanan), 1v, cl, vc, 1992

Chbr: 7 Interpretations (on the painting of Rosemary Campbell), ens, 1979; Song without Words, pf, duet, 1980; Echoes and Reflections, cl, gui, vn, vc, 1993

Principal publisher: Nota Bene Music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Norman: ‘Dorothy Buchanan’, Canzona, no.12 (1982), 16–26

J. Commons: ‘A Conversation with Dorothy Buchanan’, New Zealand Opera News (1989), July, 6–8

W. Dart: ‘Music in New Zealand talks to Dorothy Buchanan’, Music in New Zealand, ix/wint. (1990), 8–15

J.M. Thomson: Biographical Dictionary of New Zealand Composers (Wellington, 1990), 32–3

J.M. THOMSON

Buchanan, Jack (Walter John)

(b Helensburgh, 2 April 1890; d London, 20 Oct 1957). Scottish actor, producer and director. After a disastrous début as a comic in music hall in Glasgow, he danced in West End musicals until he understudied, then replaced, Jack Hulbert in Tonight’s the Night (1915–17), in which he sang Kern’s ‘They didn’t believe me’. He established himself as a leading man, particularly in the revues of André Charlot, then starred with Gertrude Lawrence in A to Z (1921), introducing Ivor Novello’s ‘And her mother came too’. He also scored success in New York in two editions of Charlot’s London Revue (1924 and 1925). An ambitious and astute businessman, he produced Battling Butler (1922) as a vehicle for himself, and in 1926 brought Kern’s Sunny to the London Hippodrome, which became the home to a series of Buchanan productions. With Elsie Randolph he appeared in That’s a Good Girl (1928), Stand Up and Sing (1931), Mr Whittington (1934) and This’ll Make You Whistle (1936). Having already introduced ‘Who?’ and ‘Two Little Bluebirds’ to London in Sunny, Buchanan regularly imported the songs of other American composers, so giving his musicals a distinctly modern feel. He swept away many of the sentimental clichés associated with musical production, despite his romantic reputation; his shows used contemporary settings and composers and arrangers from a popular music backround. Indeed, many of his recordings were accompanied by Ray Noble, who contributed ‘I think I can’ to Buchanan’s film Brewster’s Millions (1953).

In America he was the original star of George and Ira Gershwin’s Pardon My English (1933), and Schwartz and Dietz wrote ‘By Myself’ and ‘Triplets’ for him in Between the Devil (1937), songs later used in the MGM film musical The Bandwagon (1953) in which Buchanan sang and danced ‘I guess I’ll have to change my plan’ with Fred Astaire, the perfect synthesis of British and American elegance. He had previously starred in Hollywood with Irene Bordoni in Paris (1929) and with Jeanette MacDonald in Monte Carlo (1930). His many British films included versions of his stage successes as well as the popular Good-Night Vienna (1932), featuring the sinuous title song by George Posford and Eric Maschwitz. Buchanan’s last appearance in a stage musical was in 1951, when he replaced the late Ivor Novello in King’s Rhapsody.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Curtis, ed.: The Rise and Fall of the Matinée Idol (London, 1974)

M. Marshall: Top Hat and Tails: the Story of Jack Buchanan (London, 1978)

ROBERT HOWIE

Buchardo, Carlos López.

See López Buchardo, Carlos.

Bucharest

(Rom. Bucureşti).

Capital city of Romania. It is situated on the southern plain between the Carpathian mountains and the river Danube. Its origins go back to the Neolithic age. Documentary evidence from 1459 shows that it was the residence of Vlad Ţepeş, the ruler of Wallachia; it became the capital of Romania in 1859.

Vocal and instrumental folk melodies and the psalms of the Orthodox church dominated the music of the medieval city. The royal court acted as a catalyst for both Western and Eastern musicians. The earliest known concert was given by the organist Hieronimus Ostermayer in 1539. From the 18th century the European style became dominant as professional musicians introduced instruments such as the harpsichord and violin into aristocratic salons. This process culminated in visits by opera troupes, beginning with that of Livio Cinti in 1770 and followed by Italian and German groups. A new trend appeared in liturgical music when in 1713 Sân Agăi Jipei Filothei produced the Psaltichia rumânească with psalms written in the Romanian vernacular. These began to replace the Greek and Slavonic psalms in use at that time; Constantin Şerban and Radu Duma Braşoveanu continued the trend. F.J. Sulzer (fl 1782) helped European instrumentalists to gain recognition while also encouraging the popularity of Ottoman music, which was favoured in official circles.

By the beginning of the 19th century European styles had almost completely replaced indigenous music. A fashion for violin, piano and guitar music spread, and well-known instrumentalists and opera singers gave concerts; in 1812 Bernhard Heinrich Romberg performed his own compositions, which made use of Romanian songs, and Liszt appeared during the winter of 1846–7. Foreign opera companies performed in halls built for the purpose: the Cişmeaua Roşie (Red Water Pump, opened 1818), the Momolo (1833), the Bossel (1848) and the Teatrul cel Mare (Grand Theatre) or Teatrul National (1852; seeillustration). From 1843 the Teatrul Italian, with its own local company, offered the latest operas of the day.

The Şcolii de Psaltichie, opened in 1814, taught the hrisantic system with its new characteristic notation. Macarie Ieromonahul (1770–1836) and Anton Pann (1796–1854) continued the process of romanizing religious vocal music, which had been monodic but began to use harmony. Pann founded the first music printing firm in Bucharest; he also collected secular popular melodies, as published in his Hospital of Love booklets. The need to train performers encouraged the development of Western-style musical tuition under the auspices of the Societăţii Filarmonice (1833). Classes in vocal and instrumental music were held, along with productions of musical scenes, vaudevilles and such works as Triumful amorului (‘The Triumph of Love’) by Ion Andrei Wachmann (1807–63), who directed the Teatrul National from 1852 to 1858. In 1836 Archimandridul Visarion founded the Chorul Cântăreţilor (Choir of Singers). After 1840, under Western European influences, Romanian composers began to produce works that synthesized folk elements with features of art music. Works that had their premières in Bucharest during this period included Alexandru Flechtenmacher’s National Moldavian Overture (1846) and his operetta Baba Hîrca (‘The Old Witch Hîrca’, 1848); Wachmann’s opera Mihai Braval în ajunal bătăliei de la Călugăreni (‘Michael the Brave on the Eve of the Battle of Călugăreni’, 1848); and the Concert patetic for violin and orchestra by Ludwig Wiest (1852).

By the second half of the 19th century the foundations for stable municipal musical institutions were in place. From 1850 orchestral ‘concerte spirituale’ were given in the Slater, Mimi and Raşca gardens. In 1868 the orchestra of the Societăţii Filarmonice gave its inaugural concert, conducted by Eduard Wachmann. From 1888 the venue for its concerts was known as the Ateneul Român (the Romanian Atheneum). On 1 March 1898 George Enescu made his conducting début, presenting his Poème roumain. From 1873 Constantin Dimitrescu encouraged concerts of chamber music. At the same time the development of choral music gained pace. The most important ensemble was the Societate Corală Carmen, established in 1901 by Dumitru Kiriac-Georgescu and, after a period of fruitful activity, disbanded in 1948 by the Communist regime.

George Stephănescu, who had been both singing tutor and conductor at the Teatrul National, established Opera Română in 1885, aiming to present performances in Romanian featuring Romanian soloists; among premières given by the company was Eduard Caudella’s Petru Rareş (1889), one of the first Romanian national operas. The Italian theatre companies competing with Opera Română also adopted works with Romanian subject matter, some based on popular folk music: the ballets Doamna cu părul de aur (‘The Lady with Golden Hair’, 1869) by Wiest, Fidanţata Română (1871) by Grazziani and Mattiuzzi and Ielele (‘The Pixies’, 1892) by Francesco Spetrino; and the operas Magdalena (1861) by Zissu, Vârful cu dor (‘The Peak of Longing’, 1879) by Lubicz and Haiducul (‘The Outlaw’, 1884) by Bimboni. Music critics became very exacting in the periodicals of the time, which included Musicul român (1860), Lyra română (1879–80), Doina (The Ballad, 1884–6), România muzicală (1890–1905) and Muzica (1908–10, 1916–25). Stephănescu’s successors at Opera Română included Alfred Alessandrescu, I.N. Otescu, Jonel Perlea, George Georgescu and Constantin Silvestri. In 1921 it became a government institution. It has given productions of works by indigenous composers including Tiberiu Brediceanu, Sabin Drăgoi, Paul Constantinescu, Mihail Jora, Gheorghe Dumitrescu, Pascal Bentoiu and Mircea Chiriac. The Teatrul de Opereta was established in 1950 and later named after Dacian, one of its principal tenors.

In 1864 the Conservatorul de Muzică şi Artă Dramatică was established, with Alexandru Flechtenmacher as its director for the first five years. Eduard Wachmann then ran it for four decades, lending it prestige and training musicians in all disciplines, many of whom achieved recognition abroad. After 1900 the conservatory improved under Alfonso Castaldi, who taught harmony and composition and introduced the students to modern techniques. Under Otescu, director from 1919 to 1940, the conservatory became the Academia Regală de Muzică şi Artă Dramatică in 1931. George Breazul was the first to hold the chair of music literature and music education (1929–36). During the turbulent years of World War II and after, Jora took charge of the academy, but he was later removed by the Communist authorities. Among those who taught there after the war were Ion and Gheorghe Dumitrescu, Georgescu, Silvestri, Ioan Chirescu, Theodor Rogalski and Drăgoi. After 1949 the institution became the Conservatorul Ciprian Porumbescu, and in 1990 the Academia de Muzică. There were also private conservatories in Bucharest. In 1929 the Academia de Muzică Religioasă came into being, with Constantin Brăiloiu as its director; among teachers there were Petrescu, Constantinescu, Chirescu, Ion Dumitrescu and Breazul.

Enescu took part in the concert life of Bucharest as a conductor, pianist and violinist. In 1913 he established the Premiul Naţional de Compoziţie, designed to encourage chamber and orchestral composition; it later took his name and was awarded until 1946. For 29 years Enescu was also the president of the Societăţii Compozitorilor Români (Society of Romanian Composers), which was founded on 2 November 1920 by a group of musicians led by Brăiloiu, who later became its general secretary. The society’s purpose was to promote indigenous compositions by giving concerts, printing new scores and protecting the moral and material rights of its members. The Communist authorities tried without success to transform the society into a syndicate, facing stiff opposition from Jora, then its vice-president. It became the Uniunea Compozitorilor (Composers’ Union) in 1949 and published a new series of the journal Muzica from 1950; the union later also included musicologists.

The Orchestra Filarmonică, the leading orchestra in Bucharest, has since 1955 been named after Enescu. Among its conductors have been Otescu, Alessandrescu, Dimitrie Dinicu, Georgescu, Perlea, Silvestri, Mihai Brediceanu and Mandeal. Performances still take place in the Ateneul Român, acoustically the best hall in the city. The orchestra has worked with composers including Richard Strauss, Mascagni, Ravel, Prokofiev, Bartók and Stravinsky; guest conductors including Weingartner, Walter, Karajan and Barbirolli; and soloists including Menuhin, Casals and Rubinstein. Other orchestras in Bucharest have been the Societatea Muzica (from 1922); the Romanian RSO (from 1928), first conducted by Jora, who had been the music director of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation since 1928; the Orchestra Armatei (Army Orchestra, 1940–43); the Orchestra Cinematografiei (1953–61); the Romanian Broadcasting Studio Orchestra (from 1955); and the orchestra and chamber orchestra of the Academy of Music.

Regular concerts have been provided by numerous chamber ensembles such as the Cvartetul Regina Maria, Cvartetul C. Nottara, Pro Arte, Muzica Nouă, Cvartetul Uniunii Compozitorilor, Ansamblul Ars Nova, Arheus and Traect; and also by the choral ensembles Cantarea României (founded 1919), Hora, Corurile Filarmonicii, Radio and Madrigal. In addition to the theatres and the Ateneul Român, concert venues include the Sala Dalles (1936), the Sala Mare Palatului and Sala Mică Palatului (the great and small halls of the palace, cap. 3000 and 500 respectively), the Studioul de Concerte al Radioteleviziunii Române (1967) and the George Enescu hall of the conservatory.

In 1928 Breazul laid the foundations of the Arhiva Fonogramică and in the same year Brăiloiu established the Arhiva de Folclore; the two archives were amalgamated in 1949 to form the Institutul de Folclore, an important centre for collecting and research in folk music which houses a substantial collection. The publishing firm Editura Muzicală was established in 1956. Actualitatea muzicală was published from 1990. The triennial Festivalul şi Concursul Internaţional George Enescu has been held since 1958, and the annual Săptămâna Muzicii Noi (New Music Week) since 1991.

For further bibliography see Romania.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.C. Ollănescu: Teatrul la români (Bucharest, 1897), ed. C. Dumitrescu (Bucharest, 1981)

I. Dumitrescu: Muzica in Bucureştiul de ieri şi de azi [Music in Bucharest yesterday and today] (Bucharest, 1959)

V. Cosma: Filarmonica ‘George Enescu’ din Bucureşti (1868–1968) (Bucharest, 1968)

For further bibliography see Romania.

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Bûche.

See Epinette de Vosges.

Buchla.

A Synthesizer, several models of which have been designed by Donald (Frederick) Buchla (b Southgate, CA, 17 April 1937) and manufactured by Buchla Associates (later Buchla & Associates) in Berkeley, California, since 1964. Between 1969 and 1971 CBS Musical Instruments had manufacturing and marketing rights to the original model. Donald Buchla gained experience in electronics by building devices such as a sonar-like guide for blind people and also constructed acoustic sound sculptures; in 1962 he began designing voltage-controlled electronic music modules for the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC), and in the following year a complete Buchla synthesizer was installed there. The instrument became commercially available in 1964. A close collaborator in this development was the co-founder of the SFTMC, the composer Morton Subotnick, who with his tape works produced on Buchla instruments (including several created for gramophone recordings) became their best-known exponent.

Although they are classified as such, Buchla has never called his instruments ‘synthesizers’. His models include the Modular Electronic Music System (Series 100, 1962–70), the Electric Music Box (Series 200, 1971–78), the larger hybrid Series 500 (1971–75), the monophonic Music Easel (1974, nicknamed ‘Weasel’), the polyphonic Series 300 (1975–82), the short-lived Touché (1980–?1983), the Series 400 (1982–?1987) and Series 700 (1987–); all except the Touché and the Series 400 and 700 are modular or quasi-modular, and from 1970 most of his instruments have featured programmable computerized elements. Already in the Series 100 a special feature was introduced that characterizes nearly all the Buchla models – control by means of capacitative pressure-sensitive fixed touch-plates. In this Buchla also pioneered the Sequencer.

In 1979 Buchla constructed an electric cello (‘Essence of Cello’), and he designed the circuitry for Subotnick’s ‘ghost box’ Voltage control system. Since the late 1980s Buchla has concentrated on the development of two sophisticated MIDI synthesizer controllers, Thunder (1990; an array of 50 programmable touch-sensitive touch-plates on a small stand) and Lightning (1991, second version 1996; a 3-D location-sensing spatial controller, with a wand held in each hand).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (‘Buchla, Donald (Frederick)’, Stephen Ruppenthal); GroveI (Hugh Davies)

M. Subotnick: ‘The Use of the Buchla Synthesizer in Musical Composition’, Audio Engineering Society Preprint, no.709 (1970)

F.L. McCarty: ‘Electronic Music Systems: Structure, Control, Product’, PNM, xiii/2 (1975), 98–125

T. Rhea: ‘Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments’, Contemporary Keyboard, vii/4 (1981), 54 only; repr. in The Art of Electronic Music, ed. T. Darter and G. Ambruster (New York, 1984), 57–9

J. Aikin: ‘The Horizons of Instrument Design: a Conversation with Donald Buchla’, Keyboard, viii/12 (1982), 8–21; ibid., 75–83

M. Vail: ‘Buchla’s First Modular System: Still Going Strong After 30 Years’, Keyboard Presents Vintage Synthesizers: Groundbreaking Instruments and Pioneering Designers of Electronic Music Synthesizers (San Francisco, 1993), 97–101

B. Hopkin: Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments (Roslyn, NY, 1996), 38–40 (incl. CD)

HUGH DAVIES

Buchner, Alexandr

(b Prešov, 3 Sept 1911). Czech musicologist. After taking violin lessons at Prague Conservatory (1931–2), he studied at Prague University under Nejedlý and Hutter (1932–6), taking the doctorate in 1936 with a dissertation on Liszt. He then went to Košice, first teaching at a music school and later working as music editor of the local radio station (1939–45). From 1948 to 1962 he was head of the music department of the National Museum, Prague. The wide-ranging collection of musical instruments there is largely due to Buchner's long years of steady collecting, and the valuable experience he gained in this has led to his numerous popular publications. From 1962 he worked in the theatre department of the National Museum, continuing his specialization in organology, from which he retired in 1979. He has also been involved in regional studies focussing mainly on Prague.

WRITINGS

Lisztův myšlenkový svět [Liszt's intellectual world] (diss., U. of Prague, 1936)

Zaniklé dřevěné dechové nástroje 16. století [Obsolete woodwind instruments of the 16th century] (Prague, 1952, 2/1957; Eng. trans., 1956)

Hudební sbírka Emiliána Troldy [The music collection of Emilián Trolda] (Prague, 1954)

Hudební nástroje od pravěku k dnešku [Musical instruments through the ages] (Prague, 1956; Eng. trans., 1956, 4/1962)

České automatofony [Czech automatophones] (Prague, 1957) [with Eng. summary]

Mozart a Praha [Mozart and Prague] (Prague, 1957, 2/1960; Eng. trans., 1957)

Hudební automaty [Mechanical musical instruments] (Prague, 1959; Eng. trans., 1959/R)

Franz Liszt in Böhmen (Prague, 1962; Eng. trans., 1962)

Die musizierenden Engel auf Burg Karlstein (Prague, 1967)

Hudební nástroje národů [Musical instruments of different nations] (Prague, 1969; Eng. trans., 1971, as Folk Music Instruments of the World)

Oskar Nedbal: život a dílo [Nedbal’s life and work] (Prague, 1976, 2/1986)

Encyclopédie des instruments de musique (Paris, 1980; Eng. trans., 1980)

Bunte Welt der Musikinstrumente (Prague, 1981)

Handbuch der Musikinstrumente (Hanau, 1981, 3/1995)

Opera v Praze [Opera in Prague] (Prague, 1985)

JOSEF BEK

Büchner, Georg

(b Goddelau, nr Darmstadt, 17 Oct 1813; d Zürich, 19 Feb 1837). German dramatist. The son of a doctor, he studied medicine in Strasbourg and Giessen before settling in Switzerland, where he began a promising career as a lecturer in comparative anatomy. He left Germany in 1835 after publication of the pamphlet Der hessische Landbote, which was born of the same desire to effect social justice and relieve the sufferings of the poor that informs his best-known drama, Woyzeck. His first drama, Dantons Tod, was his only work to be published in his lifetime; indeed, despite the advocacy of Hebbel and Gutzkow, his works were hardly performed until the 20th century. Danton, sickened by the Terror and his involvement in the September Massacres, makes no effort to save his own life; indeed, his denunciation of Robespierre hastens his end. The only positive message is of the invincibility of the human spirit. The play was turned into an opera by von Einem, to a libretto by Blacher, and was first heard at the Salzburg Festival in 1947. In 1929 Eisler wrote incidental music for a production of the play in Berlin.

The best-known work based on Büchner is Berg’s Wozzeck (1925, Berlin) which sets almost verbatim Büchner’s text as edited by K.E. Franzos (1879), but in a revised ordering of scenes. Other composers who have written music for Woyzeck are Gurlitt (1926) and Gerhard (1961, for BBC radio). Not surprisingly, Büchner’s brilliant and disturbing comedy Leonce und Lena (1836–7) has been most often taken up by musicians, though none of the resulting works has established itself. Robert Müller-Hartmann wrote incidental music for a production in 1923, and a year later Weismann set it as an opera to a text by himself and W. Calé (1925, Freiburg); it was set as Valerio by Hans Simon, to a libretto by Theodor Ginster in 1931. Will Eisenmann wrote an opera based on the story in 1943, and Svend Erik Tarp in 1955; in 1972 Peter Maxwell Davies used the play for his masque Blind Man’s Buff. Paul Dessau’s last opera (1979) was a setting of Leonce und Lena. Wagner-Régeny’s Der Günstling (1935), to a libretto by Caspar Neher, was based on Büchner’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Marie Tudor. Büchner’s unfinished prose work Lenz (published 1839), a narrative depiction of an episode in the life of the 18th-century dramatist Jakob Lenz, formed the basis of operas by Sitsky (1974) and Rihm (1979).

WRITINGS

Dantons Tod (play, written 1835): von Einem, 1947

Lenz (prose work, written 1835–6, inc.): Sitsky, 1974; Rihm, 1979

Leonce und Lena (play, written 1836): Weismann, 1925; H. Simon, 1931, as Valerio; S.E. Tarp, 1955; Schwaen, 1961; P.M. Davies, 1972, as Blind Man’s Buff; Dessau, 1979

Woyzeck (play, written 1836, inc.): Berg, 1925; Gurlitt, 1926

PETER BRANSCOMBE

Buchner [Buschner, Puchner], Hans [Johannes] [M. Hans von Constanz]

(b Ravensburg, 26 Oct 1483; d ?Konstanz, 1538). German organist and composer. He belonged to a family of organists and organ builders. He took lessons from Paul Hofhaimer, living in his house for two or three years. Afterwards he may have spent several years as organist to the imperial court choir during the time that Hofhaimer was living in Passau. According to Boemus (Liber heroicus, 1515), he received 100 ducats a year from Emperor Maximilian – as much as Hofhaimer. When the emperor came with his choir to Konstanz for a parliamentary session, he seems to have recommended the cathedral chapter to give Buchner the post of cathedral organist, which had fallen vacant. On 19 June 1506 Buchner succeeded Johannes Gross from Basle and on 9 January 1512 he was appointed for life. When the Reformation movement spread to Konstanz in 1526, the clergy and with them Buchner moved to Überlingen. Like many of his contemporaries, he spent the next several years in comparative poverty. Among his pupils, one of his two sons, Hans Konrad Buchner, and Fridolin Sicher, organist of the collegiate church in St Gallen, became well known.

Although Buchner was highly regarded by his contemporaries as an organist as well as an organ builder and teacher, his only musical achievement recognized is his Fundamentum, which he wrote in about 1520. It arose out of his teaching and playing and contains an introduction to the ‘ars organistarum’ and a collection of examples with arrangements of vocal pieces. The theoretical part of the Fundamentum deals with the different skills involved in organ playing: the ‘ars ludendi’, in which he included fingering and explanations of the keyboard, tablature, scale and note values; the ‘ars transferendi’, which is concerned with the techniques of arranging vocal pieces for the organ; and the actual Fundamentum, which is described as ‘brevis certissimaque ratio quemvis cantum planum redigendi in justas duarum, trium pluriumque vocum symphonias’. This third part is the most interesting in being the first methodic description of a method for handling a cantus firmus contrapuntally. It is followed by a collection of examples comprising some 50 liturgical compositions (the Basle copy has an additional 30) made up of ten introits, one gradual, two sets of responsories, four sequences, nine hymns, a Magnificat and mass sections (without the Credo). Most of the three- and four-voice examples have instructions such as ‘fugat in quarta’ or ‘fugat in tenore cum discantu in octava’. Each of these is based on a single-line melody from the chant: in some the melody passes from voice to voice while the free parts move around it, in others it is treated imitatively.

Apart from a few compositions in the tablature books of Kleber, Kotter and Sicher and some motets and lieder, the chant arrangements in the Fundamentum constitute the major part of Buchner’s output as a composer. Intended for teaching purposes, they have great historical value as the earliest surviving complete collection of liturgical organ music.

WORKS

Edition:H. Buchner: Sämtliche Orgelwerke, ed. J.H. Schmidt, EDM, liv–lv (1974) [complete edn of the organ works]

Fundamentum, sive ratio vera, quae docet quemvis cantum planum, sive (ut vocant) choralem redigere ad iustas diversarum vocum symphonias, CH-Zz 284, c1520, ed. in Paesler; Bu F.I.8a, 1 dated 1551 (contains 30 additional pieces); Ger. trans. Zz

2 org pieces, D-Bsb Mus.ms.40026

12 songs, 1538⁹, CH-Bu, SGs 530; 4 ed. in SMd, vi (1967) and viii (1992)

2 dances, Bu, ed. in SMd, vi (1967)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Paesler: ‘Das Fundamentbuch von Hans von Constanz’, VMw, v (1889), 1–192

J.H. Schmidt: Johannes Buchner, Leben und Werk (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1957)

P. Léonard: ‘Le Fundamentum de Hans Buchner’, Musica sacra ‘Sancta sancte’, lxiv (Mechelen, 1963), 44, 72

M. Schuler: ‘Ein Beitrag zur Biographie Hans Kotters’, Mf, xxii (1969), 197–200

HANS JOACHIM MARX

Buchner, Philipp Friedrich

(b Wertheim, 11 Sept 1614; d Würzburg, 23 March 1669). German composer. Grandson of the Poet Laureate and Kantor Huldrich Buchner of Wertheim, Buchner was a choirboy at first at Wertheim and then from 1625 to 1627 in Frankfurt under Andreas Herbst. In 1634 he became organist at the Barfüsserkirche, Frankfurt, a position he relinquished to his father two years later. Possibly from 1637, certainly from 1641, he was a tenor and Kapellmeister at Kraków in the service of Stanisław Lubomirski, lord of Wiśnicz; from there he visited Italy (notably Venice, where he published music) and France. He left Kraków in 1647, and about 1648 he became Kapellmeister to the Archbishop and Elector of Mainz.

Buchner is a representative composer of German Catholic church music in the mid-17th century. He published several collections of Latin sacred vocal concertos obviously under the influence of Monteverdi, Herbst, Widmann and Schütz. His instrumental works illustrate the German development of the sonata at a point midway between the works of Biagio Marini and Corelli.

WORKS

Concerti ecclesiastici, 2–5vv, bc (Venice, 1642); 1 ed. A. Gottron, Christmas Cantata for Soli, Choir and Continuo (Organ) (St Louis, 1956)

Concerti ecclesiastici, 2–5vv, bc (Venice, 1644)

Catholische Sonn- und Feyertägliche Evangelia, 1v, bc (Würzburg, 1656)

Sacrarum cantionum opus tertium, 2–5vv, bc (Konstanz, 1656)

Die Psalmen des königlichen Propheten Davids (Frankfurt, 1658/R)

Plectrum musicum, 2 vn, va, b viol, bn, b, bc, op.4 (Frankfurt, 1662), 24 sonatas

Harmonia instrumentalis, 2 vn, bn, bc, op.5 (Würzburg, 1664)

Veni Sancte Spiritus, 4vv, 2 vn, 2 va, bc, Würzburg, Domchorbibliothek

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (A. Gottron)

B. Klitz: ‘Some 17th-Century Sonatas for Bassoon’, JAMS, xv (1962), 199–205, esp. 203–5

A. Szweykowska: ‘W sprawie datowania działalnosci kapeli Stanisława Lubomirskiego’ [On the correct dating of the activities of Lubomirski’s band], Muzyka, xiv/1 (1969), 91–2

JOHN H. BARON

Bucht, Gunnar

(b Stocksund, 5 Aug 1927). Swedish composer, teacher and writer on music. After studying the piano with Y. Flyckt and theory with Eppstein, he read musicology at Uppsala University, taking his doctorate in 1953 with a thesis on the ritual of the nuns of Vadstena. He studied composition with Blomdahl (1947–51), Orff, Petrassi and Deutsch. Thereafter he was a university lecturer (1965–9) and cultural attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Bonn (1970–73). Elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy in 1964, between 1975 and 1985 he was professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, and its director from 1987 to 1993. As an administrator he has served as chairman of Fylkingen (1956–9), chairman of the Society of Swedish Composers (1963–9), a director, chairman and secretary of the Swedish section of the ISCM (1960–69), and vice-president of the ISCM international presidium (1969–72). Bucht’s music is marked by the contrast between a striving for purely musical form and a strongly emotional content. Characteristic works include La fine della diaspora, Kattens öron – about a lonely war veteran talking with his cat – and the opera Tronkrävarna (‘The Pretenders’), which concerns the struggle for the Norwegian crown in the 13th century. In the mid-1960s he found a new freedom in electronic music, in which he was particularly influenced by Schaeffer; the tape piece Jerikos murar confronts news reports from both sides of the Middle East conflict. Since the 1970s the titles of his works have revealed much about their content. He believes, as he has said, ‘in an absolute music permeated with extra-musical ideas of the world, with echoes of history, with inner pictures and visions, with wordless drama’.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Tronkrävarna [The Pretenders] (op, after H. Ibsen: Kongsemnerne), 1962–5; Jerikos murar (op-orat), 1966–7

Orch: 12 syms., 1952–97; Divertimento, 1956; Couplets et refrains, 1960; Strängaspel, str, 1965; Vinterorgel, after E. Karlfeldt, 1974; Journées oubliées, 1976; Au delà–Beyond–Jenseits, 1977; Vn Conc., 1978; The Big Bang – and after, 1979; Georgica, 1980; En clairobscur, chbr orch, 1981; Sinfonia concertante, 1981–2; Musica Bothniae, wind orch, 1983; En vår gick jag ut i världen [One Spring I Went out into the World], novel in 16 chapters, 1983–4; Fresques mobiles, 1985–6; Tönend bewegte Formen, 1987; Konsert för Arholma, str, 1989; Vc Conc. no.2, 1989–90; Pf Conc., 1994; Rörelser i rummet [Movements in the Room], 1996

Vocal: Hommage à Edith Södergran, chorus, 1956; Canto di ritorno (Super flamina Babylonis), chorus, 1958; La fine della diaspora (S. Quasimodo: Auschwitz), chorus, orch, 1958; Kattens öron (lyric-musical suite), 1959, collab. L. Forssell; Ein Wintermärchen (F. Dürrenmatt), 1959; Hund skenar glad (G. Björling), 1961; Eine lutherische Messe (D. Forte), solo vv, children's chorus, chorus, orch, 1972–3; Musik för Lau, children's chorus, wind orch, perc, tape, 1975

Chbr and solo inst: Pour écouter, org, 1973–4; A huit mains, fl, vn, vc, hpd, 1976; A mon gré, fl, cl, hp, cel, va, vc, db, 1978; Quintetto amichevole, wind qnt, 1976; Tableaux à trois, vn, vc, pf, 1978; Blad från mitt gulsippeänge 1 [Petals from my yellow anemone meadow], cl, pf, 1985; 4 pièces pour le pianiste, pf, 1985; Unter vollem Einsatz, org, 5 perc, 1986–7; Blad från mitt gulsippeänge 2, hpd, 1988; Coup sur coup, 6 perc, 1995; Str Qt no.3, 1997

Tape: Symphonie pour la musique libérée, 1969; Jerikos murar, 1970

Principal publisher: Suecia

WRITINGS

‘Min fjärde symfoni’, Nutida musik, ii/6 (1958–9), 4 only

‘Tonsättaren inför traditionen’, Nutida musik, vi/3 (1962–3), 37–9

‘Karl-Birger Blomdahl som musikdramatiker’, Operan 200 år: Jubelboken, ed. K. Ralf (Stockholm, 1973), 165–78

‘Wagner och Lorenz: tankar kring musikdramat som analysföremål’, STMf, lvi/1 (1974), 39–47

‘Mitt 50-tal: 17 dec 1949–29 dec 1959’, Nutida musik, xxv/2 (1981–2), 32–9

‘Koreografi och musik’, Lodet och spjutspetsen (Stockholm, 1985), 246–55

Född på krigsstigen: minnesbilder, människor, musik (Stockholm, 1997)

‘History – Science – Art: Some Reflections’, Crosscurrents and Counterpoints (Göteborg, 1998), 95–110

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Bergendal: 33 svenska komponister (Stockholm, 1972)

G. Larsson: ‘Gunnar Bucht och traditionen’, Svensk musikhistoria, ed. M. Tegen (Stockholm, 1972), 212–16

R. Haglund: ‘Gunnar Bucht – Sveriges mest ickespelade tonsättare’, Musikrevy, xxxi (1976), 225–30

H. Larsen: ‘Samtal med Gunnar Bucht’, Musikrevy, xl (1985), 323–5

L. Reimers: ‘Gunnar Bucht – en uppbrottets komponist’, Musikrevy, xliii (1988), 22–6

B. Wallner: ‘Gunnar Bucht: tonsättaren’, Lyran (1992–3), no.4, ppp.5–6

ROLF HAGLUND

Büchtger, Fritz

(b Munich, 14 Feb 1903; d Starnberg, 26 Dec 1978). German composer, conductor and teacher. He studied the organ, the flute, voice, conducting and music theory at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich and from 1921 to 1923 was a composition pupil of Beer-Walbrunn and Waltershausen. Together with Carl Orff he formed a Society for the Promotion of Contemporary Music in Munich in 1927, immersing himself thoroughly in the most advanced musical developments of the period. Between 1929 and 1931 he was instrumental in performing such works as Hindemith’s Kammermusik no.5 and Lehrstück and Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat in front of a largely conservative Bavarian audience. He also assisted Hermann Scherchen with the first performance of Alois Hába’s opera Matka (‘The Mother’) in 1932. With the rise of the Nazis, Büchtger felt compelled to renounce his earlier predilection for the avant garde and now composed in a nationalist style that was deemed acceptable to the new regime. After World War II, however, he once again took up the cause of contemporary music, founding the Studio für Neue Musik in Munich in 1948, and composing in a mainly dodecaphonic style.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Der Name des Menschen, cant., choir, orch, 1933; Flamme (cant., S. George), Bar, SATB, orch, 1935; Feierstunde für die Gefallenen des 9. November 1923 (H. Rehm), SATB, orch, 1940; Drusus, dramatic scenes, solo vv, SATB, orch, 1943; Aus der 24. Psalm, SATB, orch, 1946; Der weisse Reiter, orat, Bar, choir, str, pf, timp, 1948; Das gläserne Meer, orat, Bar, choir, orch, 1953; Die Auferstehung, orat, choir, orch, 1954; Die Verklärung, chbr orat, Bar, female choir, str, 1956; Die Himmelfahrt Christi, orat, Bar, choir, str, 1956; Pfingsten, orat, Bar, choir, orch, 1957; Johannes der Täufer, orat, Bar, choir, orch, 1962; Die Botschaft (F. Kafka), Bar, choir, orch, 1969–70; Du hast den Drachen unter deine Füsse getan, 5-pt choir, 15 insts, 1970; Das Gesicht des Hesekiel, Bar, female vv, 15 insts, 1972; Sonnenwende (G. Richter), choir, insts, 1974

Other vocal: Stern des Bundei (George), 4 songs, Bar, str, 1934; Hymnen an das Licht (F. Rückert), middle v, orch, 1938; Auf einem sonnigen Feldrain (J. Weinheber), A/Bar, vn, vc, 1940; Herz werde gross (H. Claudius, J. Eichendorff, M. Mell, R. Schmid-Nörr, G.M. Nespitual, H. Grunow), 7 songs, v, pf, 1943–5; Feierstunde zum Gedenken der Machtergreifung der NSDAP am 30. Januar 1933 (H. Rehm), vv, spkr, chorus, insts, 1943; 4 Morgenstern Lieder, A/Bar, str qt, 1948; Der Tanz auf der Wolke (Li Tai Pe), v, fl, vn, va, 1949; An die Geliebte (George, Eichendorff, C. Morgenstern, E. Mörike), S, pf, 1950; Orpheus (R.M. Rilke), 4 songs, v, pf, 1951; Das Weihnachtsoratorium, solo vv, fl, ob, str, 1959; 4 Haiku, v, pf, 1959; Chansons irrespectueuses (J. Prévert), S, pf, 1962; Spiegelungen III (A. Klabund), Bar, ob, vn, vc, 1962; Vor der Tür, 23 Stücke (various authors), v, orch, 1975–6; Was Unguaz, unheimliche Geschichten (Morgenstern, H.C. Artmann), v, pf, 1976–8

Orch: Musik zu einer Feier, str orch, 1932; Musik für kleines Orchester, 1935; Kleines festliches Vorspiel, 1940; Konzert, str orch, 1952; Konzert für Orchester, 1957; Concertino I, ob, vn, vc, str, 1960; Spiegelungen II, 1961; Concertino II, pf, wind, str, vib, perc, 1962; Vn Conc., 1963; Mutazioni, fl, ob, cl, str, 1964; Tanz, fl, ob, cl, str, 1964; Stufen – Orchesterkonzert, 1966; Musik für Streicher, 1967; Schichten – Bögen, 1964, rev. 1970, 1972; Ascensio, 1973

6 str qts: 1950, 1958, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1973

Other chbr and solo inst: Kleine Sonate, vc, pf, 1930; 5 Metamorphosen, rec, str qt, 1946; Spielbuch für Ute, pf, 1946; Variations, fl, pf, 1951; Musik no.1, pf, 1953; 3 Pieces, vn, pf, 1955; Spiegelungen I, pf, 1960; Musik, vn, vib, perc, 1965; 3 Pieces, vn, org, 1965; 3 Pf Pieces, pf, 1968; Strukturen, nonet, 1968; Nyktodia, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn, 1972; Pf Qt, 1972; Piece, va, pf/org, 1973; Pf Trio, 1974

Incid music to several plays, incl. Revolution um Luther (Eggers), 1935; Ein Spielhansl, 1946

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Kistner & Siegel, Möseler, Orlando, Süddeutscher Musikverlag, Voggenreiter

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KdG (F. Riemer)

L. Wismeyer: Fritz Büchtger (Regensburg, 1963)

A.L. Suder, ed.: Fritz Büchtger (Tutzing, 1989)

ERIK LEVI

Buchwald, Theo

(b Vienna, 27 Sept 1902; d Lima, 7 Sept 1960). Peruvian conductor of Austrian birth. He received his musical training in Vienna under Arther T. Scholz (harmony, counterpoint and composition), Guido Adler and Wilhelm Fischer (musicology) and Richard Robert (piano). Performing first as a pianist, he began his conducting career at the Stadttheater of Barmen-Elberfeld (1922). Thereafter he held conducting positions in Magdeburg, Munich, Halberstadt and Berlin, working under Kleiber at the Berlin Staatsoper (1929–30). In 1935 he moved to Santiago, where during the next two years he directed symphony concerts and an opera season; at this time he also conducted at Viña del Mar. He moved to Lima in 1937, the Peruvian government entrusting him with the creation of a national symphony orchestra. Appointed permanent director of the National SO, he conducted its first performance, in December 1938 in Lima, and, during his 20-year tenure of the post, toured with the orchestra throughout South America.

JOHN M. SCHECHTER

Bucina.

See Buccina.

Buciu, Dan

(b Bucharest, 18 Nov 1943). Romanian composer. He was educated at the Arts Lyceum in Bucharest then at the Conservatory, where he studied composition with Tiberiu Olah and Dan Constantinescu. Buciu attended new music courses in Darmstadt in 1970, 1980 and 1982, and later returned to the Bucharest Academy to study musicology with Octavian Cosma (PhD 1992). Keen to broaden his approach to harmony, Buciu explored the possibilities of modal composition. His works are characterized by a combination of modal writing with improvisational and repetitive techniques. He became head of the composition department at the Bucharest Academy in 1990, and is also vice-president of the National Romanian Choral Association.

WORKS

(selective list)

Choral: Triptic (E. Jebeleanu), 1968; Remember Hiroşima, 1974; The Profane Suite, 1975; Pax mundi (cant.), 1976; Reunification Songs, 1978; Guess, Guess, 1980; Manole Sann, 1981; Earth's Grass (cant.), 1982; Le Jeu de Construction (P. Eluard), 1987; Greierele [The Crickets] (T. Arghezi), 1995

Orch: Antinomies, 1971; Lespezi [Flagstones], 1977; Romanian Suite, 1984

Other works: Croquis, fl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1970; Mosaic II, fl, 1973; Lirica mundi, 1v, insts, 1983–96; Winter Pastels, 1v, 1987

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G.W. Berger: Muzica simfonică contemporană, v (Bucharest, 1977)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România (Bucharest, 1989)

OCTAVIAN COSMA

Buck, Dudley

(b Hartford, CT, 19 March 1839; d West Orange, NJ, 6 Oct 1909). American composer and organist. In 1855 he began to study the piano; in the same year he entered Trinity College, Hartford. Two years later he left Trinity to study music in Leipzig, where his teachers were Hauptmann, Rietz, Schneider and Moscheles. In 1860 he followed Schneider, his organ teacher, to Dresden, and in 1862, after a year in Paris, he returned to Hartford as organist at the North Congregational Church. During the next decade he toured as a concert organist, playing symphonic transcriptions and giving premières of works by Bach and Mendelssohn.

His relocation to Chicago in 1869 was cut short by the Great Fire in 1871. He moved to Boston, where he served as organist for the Music Hall Association and faculty member of the New England Conservatory. In Boston he wrote his first large-scale compositions, The Festival Hymn, The Legend of Don Munio and The Forty-Sixth Psalm; the last was performed by the Handel and Haydn Society in 1874. In 1875 he went to New York as assistant conductor of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra and settled in Brooklyn. He became organist and choirmaster of Holy Trinity Church and director of the Apollo Club, retiring in 1901.

Buck played a central role in the establishment of organ and choral music in the USA. He was the first American-born composer to write an organ sonata, and pedagogical works such as Illustrations in Choir Accompaniment instructed generations of organists. It was his choral music, however, that won him an enduring place in American music. The popularity of his 12 large-scale secular cantatas made him the leading musical voice of American triumphalism; they received more reported performances than any other American choral works during the 1880s. The invitation from the US Centennial Commission to compose The Centennial Meditation of Columbia for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia won him national visibility. The Light of Asia was first performed at Novello’s Oratorio Concerts in London in 1885.

Buck’s gift lay in his ability to compose music that held popular appeal without sacrificing artistic substance. Engaging lyricism, genteel restraint and stylistic propriety elevated many of his works into cultural icons. His music epitomized the Victorian era in American culture. In 1898 Buck was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

His son Dudley Buck (1869–1941) was a tenor and teacher in London, New York and Chicago.

WORKS

(selective list)

printed works published in New York unless otherwise stated

stage

Deseret, or A Saint’s Affliction (comic op, W.A. Croffut), New York, 11 Oct 1880, lost; selections (1880)

Serapis (op, 3, D. Buck), 1889; vs (1891)

vocal

Sacred: The Forty-Sixth Psalm, solo vv, chorus, orch (Boston, 1872); Midnight Service for New Year’s Eve, chorus, org (1880); Communion Service, C, chorus, org (1892); 4 cants.; 55 anthems; c20 sacred songs

Secular cants., mixed chorus, orch: The Legend of Don Munio (Buck, after W. Irving), op.62 (Boston, 1874); The Centennial Meditation of Columbia (S. Lanier) (1876); Scenes from the Golden Legend (H.W. Longfellow) (1880); The Light of Asia (E. Arnold) (London, 1886)

Secular cants., male chorus, orch: The Nun of Nidaros (Longfellow), op.83 (1879); King Olaf’s Christmas (Longfellow) (1881); The Voyage of Columbus (Buck, after Irving) (1885); Paul Revere’s Ride (Longfellow) (1898)

instrumental

Orch: Andante et allegro de concert, pf, orch, op.12, lost; Sym. ‘In Springtime’, E, op.70, lost; Romanza, 4 hn, orch, op.71, c1875; Marmion (after W. Scott), ov., 1878

Org: Grand Sonata, E, op.22 (1866); Concert Variations on The Star-Spangled Banner, op.23 (1868); Sonata no.2, g, op.77 (1877); Variations on The Last Rose of Summer, op.59 (1877); other short pieces, transcrs.

Chbr: Concert Variations on The Last Rose of Summer, str qnt, op.68, 1875; 3 Fantasias, cl, pf, op.5

6 works, pf; 3 works, pf 4 hands

WRITINGS

llustrations in Choir Accompaniment with Hints on Registration (New York, 1877/R)

The Influence of the Organ in History (London, 1882)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (R.G. Cole)

GroveA (W.K. Gallo) [incl. fuller list of works]

Dudley Buck: a Complete Bibliography (New York, 1910) [list of works]

W. Gallo: The Life and Church Music of Dudley Buck (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1968)

N. Lee Orr: ‘Dudley Buck: Leader of a Forgotten Tradition’, The Tracker, xxxviii/3 (1994), 10–21

WILLIAM K. GALLO/N. LEE ORR

Buck, Ole

(b Copenhagen, 1 Feb 1945). Danish composer. He studied composition with Nørgård (1963–9) and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1965–9). From the mid-1960s he developed an individual serial style employing groups of notes, clusters, etc. as the fundamental units. Kalligrafi (1964), in which Buck’s handling of the orchestra recalls Boulez, exemplifies this technique. Later works are built from repetition of small melodic or rhythmic cells within a limited register; such pieces were often suggested by other works of art or by philosophical ideas. Buck has also used aleatory or improvised forms, as in Give me a word to sing. His works from the 1970s and 80s show similarities with American minimalist compositions, but later works such as the series Landscapes I–IV (1992–5) and A Tree (1996) tend to emphasize contrasting elements and modes of expression.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Testamente for en afdød komponist Nils Loewenborg, op, 1968; Felix luna, ballet, 8 scenes, 1970–71

Orch: Jeux d’eau, 1964; Envoi, 1964–5; Décor, chbr orch, 1965, rev. orch, 1969; Ouverture, 1966; Prelude I–IV, chbr orch, 1966–7; Punctuations, 1968; Granulations, 1971–2; Pastorals, 1975; Chbr Music I–II, 1979–82; Aquarelles, 1983; Frühlingsnacht, 1986; Landscape I–IV, 1992–5; Divertimento, 1994–5; A Tree, 1996

Vocal: To kinesiske sange, S, fl, cl, vn, 1962; Kalligrafi, S, orch, 1964; Fauna, S, children’s chorus, orch, 1966; Merle, Mez, 1967; Spleen, S, pf, 1967; Jan og Maj, reciter, fl, gui, vc, 1968; Give me a word to sing, S, insts, 1968; Fairies, S, orch, 1969–70, rev. 1972; Columbus, children’s chorus, orch, 1972; Songbook, S, 10 insts, 1972

Inst: Lirica, ens, 1963; Fioriture, fl, pf, 1965; Signes, wind qnt, 1967; In, 4 ens, 1968; Rondels, hpd, 1968; Sommertrio, fl, gui, vc, 1968; Masques, 6 perc, 1969; Hyperion, str qt, 1969–70; Summer is icumen in, org, 1970; Sonnabend, fl, ob, hn, vn, 1971; Ornamenter, various insts, 1971; Fraendeløs, wind qnt, 1973; Days and Days, vn, va, vc, 1976; Maya, fl, perc, 1980; Canaries, rec, hpd, vc, 1981; Petaki, 2 pic, 1983; Pan, fl, pf, 1983; Gymel, rec, spinet, 1983; Primavera, fl, vc, gui, 1984; Omaggio a Antonio Vivaldi, gui, 1984; Consonante, rec, 1985

Tape: Nocturne, 1967

JENS BRINCKER

Buck, Sir Percy (Carter)

(b London, 25 March 1871; d London, 3 Oct 1947). English writer on music, music editor, teacher, organist and composer. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Parratt, C.H. Lloyd and Parry (1888–92). He held posts as organist of Worcester College, Oxford (1891–4), Wells Cathedral (1896–9) and Bristol Cathedral (1899–1901), and was then appointed director of music at Harrow School, a post that he held until 1927. In 1910 he succeeded Prout as professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin, occupying the chair until 1920. In 1925 he was appointed King Edward Professor of Music in the University of London and had meanwhile begun to teach at the RCM. When he left Harrow he became music adviser to the London County Council (1927–36). In August 1937, on his retirement from the London professorship, he received a knighthood.

Buck's book The Scope of Music, a recension of a course of lectures given for the Cramb Foundation at Glasgow, indicates his personal outlook towards the problems of practical musicianship that the teacher encounters. Buck accomplished much in English musical education. He took a leading part in the establishment of a teachers' course at the RCM in 1919, and his lectures in psychology contributed greatly to its success. He exerted a consistent influence in favour of the more liberal treatment of examinations in music theory. As a member of the editorial committee for the Tudor Church Music series he found scope for his careful scholarship, and his skill as a contrapuntist was invaluable in the supply of missing parts. With C. Macpherson he edited The English Psalter (London, 1925); his own editions include The Oxford Song Book, i (London, 1929) and The Oxford Nursery Song Book (London, 1934). Buck's unpublished compositions include a piano quintet op.17, an overture Coeur de Lion op.18, a string quintet op.19, a violin sonata op.21 and a piano quartet op.22; the manuscripts of his early works were destroyed during World War II. His published works include three organ sonatas, op.3 (Leipzig, 1896), op.9 (London, 1902) and op.12 (London, 1904), and various piano pieces, anthems and songs.

WRITINGS

The Organ: a Complete Method for the Study of Technique and Style (London, 1909)

Unfigured Harmony (Oxford, 1911, 2/1920/R)

Organ Playing (London, 1912/R)

Acoustics for Musicians (Oxford, 1918, 2/1944)

The Scope of Music (Oxford, 1924/R, 2/1938)

A History of Music (London, 1929, 2/1947)

ed.: H.E. Wooldridge: The Polyphonic Period: Method of Musical Art, 330–1600, OHM, i, ii (2/1929–32/R)

ed.: introductory vol., OHM (1929/R)

Psychology for Musicians (London, 1944)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Dr Buck on the Value of Musical Learning’, MT, li (1910), 516, 524 [report of his first public lecture at Trinity College, Dublin]

W.S. Lloyd Webber: ‘Sir Percy Buck’, Music in Education, xi (1947–8), 167–9

Obituaries: MT, lxxxviii (1947), 366 only; MO, lxxi (1947–8), 56 only, 103–8

H.C. COLLES/MALCOLM TURNER

Buck, Zechariah

(b Norwich, 10 Sept 1798; d Newport, Essex, 5 Aug 1879). English organist and choir trainer. He became a chorister of Norwich Cathedral under John Beckwith in October 1808, and later an articled pupil of Beckwith's son, whom he succeeded as cathedral organist in 1819. He held this post for 58 years, resigning in September 1877. During this long period he acquired a formidable reputation as a choir trainer and as an organ teacher. He raised the Norwich choir to a high standard of excellence well before the more general improvement of cathedral singing began, achieving this simply by total dedication. He would travel far to secure a good boy for his choir, and he originated the system of probationers who were not admitted as full members until they had proved their ability. In training the boys he ‘adopted every conceivable plan likely to be productive of good results’ (Kitton, p.9), and would practise a single anthem for several months before admitting it to the service. The results were acclaimed by all who heard his choir, including Jenny Lind, who said she had ‘never heard children sing so well’.

Buck was also an outstanding teacher of the organ, and his pupils were to be found in the organ lofts of cathedrals, parish churches and college chapels throughout the country over a period of nearly a century – from Robert Janes, organist of Ely Cathedral 1831–66, to Arthur H. Mann, organist of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, 1876–1929; the list (Kitton, pp.53–4) includes a number of distinguished Victorian choirmasters, composers and scholars. Buck was awarded the Lambeth DMus in 1853.

As an executant and as a composer, Buck reached a respectable but not outstanding rank. In both activities he was conservative, scorning the current trends towards chromaticism and expressive organ playing and registration. He did, however, master the technique of pedal playing, although there were no pedals on the cathedral organ for some years after his appointment. He composed an Evening Service in A, settings of the Sanctus and Responses in G and F, six anthems, including I heard a voice from heaven (1849), five hymn tunes and 23 chants, 12 of which were published in 1824.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.G. Kitton: Zechariah Buck: a Centenary Memoir (London, 1899)

W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists (Oxford, 1991), 205–6

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Bückeburg.

Town in Germany, capital of the former principality of Schaumburg-Lippe. Continuous records of musical activity date from the reign of Count Ernst (1601–22), who began his rule when the flood of English musicians into Germany was at its height. The foundation of his Kapelle was a consort of English viol players including, at one time or another, William Brade, Thomas Simpson, Maurice Webster and Wilhelm Benthon. Of the German musicians heard at this court, two were former pupils of Giovanni Gabrieli and one was his ardent imitator: Heinrich Schütz was named ‘Kapellmeister von Haus aus’ from 1615 to 1617, Johann Grabbe was vice-Kapellmeister and then Kapellmeister, and Michael Praetorius had a tenuous connection with the court as performer and consultant in organ building. Among Count Ernst's other musicians were Michael Ulich, Nikolaus Bleier, J.M. Caesar, Johann Grosche, Konrad Hagius, Matthias Mercker, Christoph Schubhart, Caspar Textorius and J.B. Veraldi.

After the interruption of the Thirty Years War and during the first half of the 18th century the town's musical life was reduced to tower music, ad hoc ensembles and a succession of excellent but obscure organists in the local church; but with the reigns of Count Wilhelm (1748–77) and his 18th-century successors music in Bückeburg was returned to its former level of excellence. J.C.F. Bach served as chamber musician there from 1750 until his death in 1795 (for details of his activities there see Bach family, §III, 11). In later times important composition in Bückeburg virtually ceased, but concert life continued to flourish, particularly under the leadership of Richard Sahla, who was appointed Kapellmeister in 1888. In 1912 the Kapelle was reduced to ten; it was active for some 30 years after World War I as the Schaumburg-Lippisches Landesorchester, but was dissolved in 1949. Since then, concerts by guest ensembles have been organized by the Kulturvereins Bückeburg. The Fürstliches Institut für Musikwissenschaftliche Forschung was founded in 1917 under C.A. Rau; in 1935 it was moved to Berlin and became the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung, directed by Max Seiffert (see Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

MGG1 (W. Schramm)

MGG2 (H. Wohlfarth)

J. Domp: Studien zur Geschichte der Musik an westfälischen Adelshöfen im XVIII. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1934)

E. EUGENE HELM

Bücken, Ernst

(b Aachen, 2 May 1884; d Overath, nr Cologne, 28 July 1949). German musicologist. Before he decided to become a musician he studied jurisprudence in Bonn. He then took courses in musicology, Germanic studies and philosophy at the University of Munich and concurrently studied composition with Walter Courvoisier and the piano with Anna Hirzel-Langenhan and Walter Braunfels. He was indebted principally to Sandberger and Kroyer for his education in musicology; in 1912 he took the doctorate with a dissertation on the life and works of Anton Reicha. He completed the Habilitation at the University of Cologne in 1920 with a work on the heroic style in opera. For a short time he taught the history of music at the Technische Hochschule at Aachen. He returned to the University of Cologne, where he was named reader in 1924 and supernumerary professor in 1939. From 1937, he also taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. He became a member of the German Academy (1933), the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1936), the Staatliches Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung (1942), and an honorary member of the Società Antonio Vivaldi in Venice. After World War II the University of Cologne dismissed him from his post, citing his past exploitation of political alliances under earlier systems.

Bücken's significance and individuality as a musicologist rest on his works on musical styles and his biographical studies. In general treatises and in his treatment of various specialized areas and phases of development in music history he departed from the older, purely formal treatment of style (exemplified by Riemann and Kretzschmar) and tried to strengthen and invigorate research by basing stylistic studies on scholarship. He attempted to integrate musical aesthetics with music history and to evolve a historical concept of style; these ideas produced pioneering research. In the important Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft (ten volumes), which he published from 1927, such topics as Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (by H. Besseler) and Die Aufführungspraxis der Musik (by R. Haas) were presented for the first time in an academic musicological context; he himself contributed four volumes. In 1931 he edited a Handbuch der Musikerziehung, and from 1932 he directed an important series of editions, Die Grossen Meister der Musik, within whose framework he published biographies of Beethoven (1934) and Wagner (1934, 2/1943). In his later years, Bücken dedicated much of his writing to describing and glorifying the German musical essence, devoting three separate books to the topic.

WRITINGS

Anton Reicha: sein Leben und seine Kompositionen (diss., U. of Munich, 1912; Munich, 1912)

Tagebuch der Gattin Mozarts (Munich, 1915)

‘Anton Reicha als Theoretiker’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 156–69

Der heroische Stil in der Oper (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Cologne, 1920; Leipzig, 1924)

with P. Mies: ‘Grundlagen, Methoden und Aufgaben der musikalischen Stilkunde’, ZMw, v (1922–3), 219–25

München als Musikstadt (Leipzig, 1923)

‘Der galante Stil: eine Skizze seiner Entwicklung’, ZMw, vi (1924), 418–30

Führer und Probleme der neuen Musik (Cologne, 1924)

Musikalische Charakterköpfe (Leipzig, 1925)

Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927/R)

‘Grundfragen der Musikgeschichte als Geisteswissenschaft’, JbMP 1927, 19–30

Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Moderne (Potsdam, 1929–31)

Geist und Form im musikalischen Kunstwerk (Potsdam, 1928–32)

ed.: Handbuch der Musikerziehung (Potsdam, 1931)

Ludwig van Beethoven (Potsdam, 1934)

Richard Wagner (Potsdam, 1933, 2/1943)

Musik aus deutscher Art (Cologne, 1934)

Deutsche Musikkunde (Potsdam, 1935)

Musik der Nationen (Leipzig, 1937, 2/1951 as Geschichte der Musik)

ed.: Richard Wagner: Die Hauptschriften (Leipzig, 1937, abridged 2/1956 by E. Rappl)

‘Romantik und Realismus’, Festschrift Arnold Schering, ed. H. Osthoff, W. Serauky and A. Adrio (Berlin, 1937/R), 46–50

‘Aufgaben und Ziele der deutschen Musikwissenschaft’, AMz, lxv (1938), 65–6

Das deutsche Lied: Probleme und Gestalten (Hamburg, 1939)

‘Die Erneuerung der grossen Musikerbiographie aus dem Geiste von heute’, AMz, lxvi (1939), 596–8

Robert Schumann (Cologne, 1940)

Wörterbuch der Musik (Leipzig, 1940, 2/1953, ed. F. Stege)

Musik der Deutschen: eine Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Musik (Cologne, 1941)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: schöpferische Wandlungen (Hamburg, 1942)

Richard Strauss (Kevelear, 1949)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Gümmer: Obituary, Musica, iii (1949), 334–5

W. Kahl: ‘Ernst Bücken’, Mf, iii (1950), 12–18

W. Kahl: ‘Musikhandschriften aus dem Nachlass Ernst Bückens in der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln’, Aus der Welt der Bibliothekars: Festschrift für Rudolf Juchoff, ed. K. Ohly and W. Krieg (Cologne, 1959), 159–71

W. Kahl: ‘Bücken, Ernst’, Rheinische Musiker, i, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1960)

ANTON WÜRZ/PAMELA M. POTTER

Buckinx, Boudewijn

(b Lommel, 28 March 1945). Belgian composer. He attended the Antwerp Conservatory, and from 1964 studied composition and serial music with Goethals in Ghent. He also took courses in electronic music at the IPEM in Ghent. In 1968 he attended Stockhausen’s Kompositionsstudio in Darmstadt and participated in the composition of Stockhausen’s Musik für ein Haus. However, Kagel and Cage had the greatest influence on him, and he frequently played works by Cage with his group WHAM (a working group for modern music founded in 1963). He completed his musicological studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1972, with a dissertation on Cage’s Variations. In 1978 he became producer of new music at BRTN (the Belgian Flemish-speaking radio and television station), and he has taught music history at the Antwerp Conservatory since 1981. In 1980 he abandoned the avant-garde music of the 1960s and came closer to postmodernist trends, with quotation and reference to existing music in the foreground. In reinterpreting tonal and classical language Buckinx adds a humorous, ironic dimension which places him in direct line of descent from Satie and Cage. His Negen onvoltooide symfonieën is a reference work of musical and philosophical postmodernism. He published a book on postmodernist music, De kleine Pomo (Antwerp, 1994).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Piotr Lunaire (music theatre), spkr, 1v, pf, 1985; Karoena de zeemeermin (chbr op), 1995

Vocal: Kantate, TB, str, 1987; Nota bene, TB, 1989

Orch: Ce qu’on entend dans la salle de concert, 1987; Symposion, vn, str, 1991; 9 onvoltooide symfonieën., S, SATB, orch, 1992; Vc Conc., 1996

Ens and solo inst: zonder titel, str trio, 1973; Vóór het vertrek, fl, pf, 1984; In der buurt van Neptunus, vc, pf, 1987; 1001 Sonatas, vn, pf, 1988; De controversiële avonturen van Boduognat, pf, 1989; Pf Trio no.1, 1989; Kla4, pf 4 hands, 1991; Fles, ens, 1993; Vierarmenkruispunt, pf 4 hands, 1994; Kahk Deelah, vn, 1994; Air, pf, wind qnt, 1996

Multimedia ens: Sløjd, 1968

Principal publishers: Eigentijdse Muziek, Alain Van Kerkhoven, Chiola Music Press

ERIC DE VISSCHER

Buckley, John

(b Templeglantine, Limerick, 19 Dec 1951). Irish composer. His earliest musical studies were accordion and flute lessons. After moving to Dublin in 1969, he studied composition with A.J. Potter at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Subsequent studies were with James Wilson, also at the Royal Irish Academy, and Alun Hoddinott at Cardiff University. After receiving a composer's scholarship from the Arts Council of Ireland in 1982, he was able to devote himself to composition full-time. In 1984 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of creative artists. He is the founder of the Ennis Composition Summer School which provides training for young Irish composers.

Buckley's compositions are carefully tailored to suit the demands of their performers, resulting in what can be described as a practical musical style. Maynooth Te Deum, written to celebrate the bicentenary of Maynooth University, exemplifies Buckley's approach. The work is scored for a professional symphony orchestra with optional organ, four professional soloists and the combined resources of a large amateur chorus, an amateur chamber chorus and an amateur chorus of male voices. The eight movements of the work fuse the various performance capabilities of the individual ensembles in a variety of musical styles. A rich harmonic palette, vibrant rhythms and the assimilation of aleatoric techniques give Buckley's music a freedom that complements the flamboyant orchestration of works such as the Symphony no.1 and the Organ Concerto. His characteristic blend of lyrical melodies and brittle sonorities can be heard in Boireann, Winter Music and the Sonata for solo guitar.

One of the most prominent Irish composers of his generation, Buckley has received commissions from Radio Telefís Èireann (A Thin Halo of Blue), the National Concert Hall (Organ Concerto) and the University of Limerick (Rivers of Paradise). His work receives regular radio broadcasts and has been internationally performed. The Unaccompanied Violin Sonata has been included as a set exam piece in the Irish curriculum.

WORKS

(selective list)

Op: The Words upon the Window Pane (H. Maxton, after W.B. Yeats), 1991, Dublin, 1991

Orch: Taller than Roman Spears, 1977, rev. 1986; Conc., chbr orch, 1981; Sym. no.1, 1988; Where the Wind Blows, wind band, 1989; Conc., org, orch, 1992; Rivers of Paradise, 2 spkrs, orch, 1993; Conc., a sax, str, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: Wind Qnt, 1976, rev. 1985; Oileain, pf, 1979; Time Piece, fl, cl, vc, pf, 1982; Boireann, fl, pf, 1983; Sonata, vn, 1983; And Wake the Purple Year, hpd, 1985, arr. pf, 1986; At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, org, 1985; Winter Music, pf, 1988; Sonata, gui, 1989; Arabesque, a sax, 1990; The Silver Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun, pf, 1993; Sonata, hn, 1993; In Lines of Dazzling Light, cl, hn, vn, bn, pf, 1995; 3 Preludes, pf, 1995; Sax Qt, 1996

Vocal: Pulvis et umbra (Horace), SSSSAAAATTBB, pf, 1979; I am Wind on Sea, Mez + perc, 1987; Abendlied (C.M. Brentano, J. von Eichendorff), S, pf, 1989; A Thin Halo of Blue (Buckley), SATB, spkr, orch, tape, 1990; De profundis, S, A, SATB, opt. children's chorus, orch, 1993; Maynooth Te Deum, S, A, T, B, SATB, chbr chorus, male chorus, opt. org, orch, 1995

Principal publisher: Contemporary Music Centre (Dublin)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.M. Hamel: ‘Porträt John Buckley’, MusikTexte, no.20 (1987), 19–21

M. O’Flynn: Towards a Philosophy of Music Education: an Encounter with John Buckley (diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 1990)

G. Moore: John Buckley: an Analysis of Selected Works (diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 1994)

D. Brophy: The Piano Composition of John Buckley (diss., Dublin Institute of Technology College of Music, 1995)

MARTIN O'LEARY

Buckman, Rosina

(b Blenheim, New Zealand, 16 March 1881; d London, 31 Dec 1948). New Zealand soprano. She studied in England, at the Birmingham and Midland School of Music, returned home because of ill-health, and made her début in Australia with the Melba Grand Opera Company in 1911. At Covent Garden she was a flowermaiden in the first English performance of Parsifal (2 February 1914). Later that year she played Musetta in La bohème with Melba and Martinelli, and throughout the war was a leading member of the Beecham Opera Company, her performances with Frank Mullings in Tristan und Isolde being particularly admired; she also appeared with great success as Butterfly, Mimì and Aida. At Covent Garden in 1919 she created the title role of Isidore de Lara’s Naïl; in 1923 she sang in the only performances there of Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate. Her last Covent Garden appearance was in a benefit concert for Emma Albani in 1925. She married the tenor Maurice d’Oisly, and with him undertook a world concert tour in 1922–3. Her clear, generous voice is heard on many records that enjoyed considerable popularity, notably a complete English-language Madama Butterfly under Goossens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Simpson and P. Downes: Southern Voices: International Opera Singers of New Zealand (Auckland, 1992), 24–37

J.B. STEANE

Buckwheat notation [shape-note notation, character notation].

A type of notation used for Shape-note hymnody.

Bucur-Barbu, Sebastian

(b Talea, Prahova, 6 Feb 1930). Romanian musicologist and conductor. After a period as a psalm singer and conductor at various Bucharest monasteries, he studied at the Bucharest Music Academy (1957–63) and taught in schools and colleges in the city and in the Neamţ monastery; his posts included teaching Byzantine palaeography at the Bucharest Music Academy (1972–4, 1990–). In 1982 he received the doctorate from Cluj Music Academy, and between 1983 and 1985 continued his studies of Byzantine music with Dimitrios Sourlatzis at the Macedonian Conservatory at Thessaloniki. Bucur-Barbu has published modern transcriptions of 18th- and 19th- century neo-Byzantine notation, and numerous studies of the psalmist schools in Romania and Romanian music manuscripts at Mount Athos and on the island of Lésvos; this has led to discoveries of works by many unknown composers from the 17th–18th century and an edition (1981–2) of psalm settings by Filothei, Psaltichie rumănească. He has also composed religious works, and Psalmodia, his ensemble formed in 1989, has made many recordings of Byzantine and Romanian psalm music.

WRITINGS

‘Monumente muzicale: Filotei Sîn Agăi Jipei: prima psaltichie rumănească cunoscută pîna acum’ [Monuments of music. Filotei Sîn Agăi Jipei: the earliest Romanian psalter currently known], SMH, vi (1970), 99–133

‘Naum Rîmniceanu’, SMH, ix (1973), 147–94

‘Theoretical Elements and Musical Grammar in Romanian-Byzantine Church Music’, JMR, iv/3–4 (1983), 213–66

Cultura muzicală de tradiţie bizantină in secolul al XVIII şi XIX-lea [Musical culture of the Byzantine tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries] (Bucharest, 1989)

Teoria, practica şi metodica muzicii psaltice [Theory, practice and methods of psalm music] (Bucharest, 1991)

Lexicon pentru cursurile de paleografie muzicală bizantină [Dictionary for the study of Byzantine musical palaeography] (Bucharest, 1992)

‘Dimitrie Suceveanu’, Idiomelar i (1992), ii (1996), iii (1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Plămădeală: Clerici ortodoxi, ctitori de limbă şi cultură românescă [Orthodox clergy: the foundations of Romanian language and culture] (Bucharest, 1977)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România: lexicon bio-bibliographic, i [Musicians in Romania: a bio-bibliographic dictionary] (Bucharest, 1989–), 226–8

G. and C. Ionescu: Lexicon … Muzica de tradiţie bizantină în România [Dictionary of traditional Byzantine music in Romania] (Bucharest, 1994), 54–9

M. Păchrariu: Dicţionarul tealogilor români (Bucharest, 1996), 65–6

VIOREL COSMA

Bucureşti

(Rom.).

See Bucharest.

Budapest.

Capital city of Hungary. It was created in 1873 by the unification of three towns: Buda, on the right bank of the Danube, which with its great castle served as the royal seat of the kingdom from the 13th century; Óbuda, north of Buda on the right bank, which as Aquincum was the capital of the province of Pannonia, part of the Roman Empire from ce 100 to 400; and Pest, opposite Buda on the left bank.

DEZSŐ LEGÁNŸ

1. Early history.

The courts of King Louis the Great (1342–82) and King Sigismund (1387–1437) set a high standard of excellence, but Buda reached its first golden age of music under King Matthias Hunyadi [Corvinus] (1458–90). At the court of the great Renaissance ruler and his Italian wife, the Neapolitan Princess Beatrice of Aragon, excellent choirs performed with singers from Italy and the Netherlands, under the direction of Johannes de Stokem and Erasmus Lapicida; the court was visited by notable composers such as Verjus, Jacques Barbireau and Heinrich Finck. The viol and lute were greatly favoured, the most eminent lutenist in Buda being Pietro Bono, while fine organs of the royal palaces of Buda and Visegrád were played by Stefano da Salerno. Children's choirs also sang in the royal chapel, already under Hungarian direction long before the reign of King Matthias. Several performers of heroic songs, as well as the conductor of the royal orchestra, Miklós, and later the royal choirmaster, M. Huszti, were likewise of Hungarian origin. Printing developed in the workshop of A. Hess (Chronica hungarorum, 1473), but this ended after the death of King Matthias, and more and more publishers (e.g. Fegler and Pap) had the Missale strigoniense (the liturgy of Esztergom) printed by the south German presses or by the Venetian Giunta. Musical standards, however, did not decline significantly under the Polish Jagellon dynasty (1490–1526): Duke Sigismund Jagellon (later King of Poland) brought the virginals to Buda in 1502, and was entertained twice a day by singers from Buda schools. Around 1517 Willaert worked at court, while from 1522 to 1526 the director of the orchestra was Thomas Stoltzer. In the same period excellent organs were made at the nearby monastery of Budaszentlőrinc by the Pauline Friar János. Even after the Battle of Mohács (1526) there was still some musical life in Buda, at the court of King János Szapolyai (1526–40), but by then only native Hungarians were to be heard; the most outstanding was the lutenist Valentin Bakfark, who became famous throughout Europe. Musical culture ceased in Buda under Turkish rule (1541–1686). The three towns were devastated in the struggles leading to the recapture of Buda, and under Habsburg rule a German population eventually settled there. As a result musical life, which began to revive, was of a German character for a century and a half, and only slowly became Hungarian from the end of the 18th century onwards.

2. Opera.

Performances of opera took place regularly in Pest and Buda from 1786. At first all the companies were German; they performed in the theatre in the Buda castle, rebuilt in 1787 from the Carmelite Church, and in a theatre built in 1773 inside one of the bastions of Pest's city wall. Besides Wenzel Müller's Singspiele, operas by Dittersdorf, Haydn, Benda, Paisiello, Salieri, Sarti and, above all, Mozart formed the backbone of the programmes until about 1800. The Városi Színház (Town Theatre) in Pest opened in 1812 with two of Beethoven's overtures, König Stephan and Die Ruinen von Athen, and there the companies and their conductors (A. Czibulka, Frigyes Urbany and L. Schindelmeisser) excelled in performances of contemporary operas, chiefly those of Auber, Bellini, Donizetti and Meyerbeer. However, after the theatre burnt down in 1847 regular seasons of German opera in Pest took place only occasionally, such as those under the direction of C.E. Barbieri (1862–7); there were also great performances by companies such as the Viennese Komische Oper, and by Angelo Newmann's company touring the Ring in 1883.

Performances of Hungarian opera began with the acting company of László Kelemen (1790–96), who in 1793 gave a performance of the first Hungarian Singspiel, Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka Perzsi, by József Chudy, the company’s conductor. The company worked in difficult circumstances, often on the verge of financial disaster; despite the enthusiastic participation of the two important verbunkos composers Lavotta and (briefly) Csermák, as well as the Singspiel composer András Szerelemhegyi (1762–1826), the company did not survive. A second Hungarian company (1807–15), whose conductor Gáspár Pacha wrote Hungarian operas, was eclipsed by the success of the German company after it moved into the Town Theatre in 1812. For two decades it was relegated to giving performances in the provinces and not until 1833 did Hungarian opera return to the capital, when part of the Kassa (now Košice, Slovakia) company moved to Buda. In 1835 the best members of the Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) company were incorporated, Ferenc Erkel became conductor, and regular performances of Hungarian opera were resumed. The combined company found a home at the Hungarian Theatre, soon the Nemzeti Színház (National Theatre), when it opened in 1837 (fig.1), and moved into the new Magyar Királyi Operaház (Royal Hungarian Opera House) in 1884 (fig.2).

At the National Theatre (cap. 1460) the leading conductors of the company were Erkel (from 1838 until his retirement in 1874), Hans Richter, both during and after Erkel's term of office (1871–5), and Sándor Erkel (conductor 1874–1900; also director 1876–86). Apart from Fidelio, Don Giovanni and Hungarian operas, under Ferenc Erkel the company had a repertory of contemporary Italian and French works, the best of which usually appeared in Budapest about a year after their premières. The Royal Hungarian Opera House (cap. 1310) was designed by Miklós Ybl and opened in 1884; its company also performed in other theatres, including the Buda castle theatre until 1908 and the Town Theatre (cap. 2450) from 1921 to 1924. After World War I it was renamed Magyar Királyi Állami Operaház (Hungarian Royal State Opera House), and after World War II simply Állami Operaház. The Town Theatre was united with the Opera House in 1951 and renamed the Erkel Theatre.

Outstanding among the 19th-century opera conductors were Sándor Erkel, Mahler (1888–91), under whom the company achieved an international reputation, and Nikisch (1893–5), followed in the 20th century by Rezső Máder (1895–1907), István Kerner (1896–1915), Dezső Márkus (1903–11), Egisto Tango (1913–19), Nándor Rékai (1912–27), Antal Fleischer (1920–39) and Sergio Failoni (1928–48). A wide repertory has always been the company's aim, and the operas of Mozart, Verdi and Musorgsky, together with Fidelio, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Carmen and Faust, were always in its repertory. For some decades after 1890 Wagner's works were dominant; later music was limited to such composers as Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini and Richard Strauss. In the 1920s and 1930s Stravinsky's Petrushka (1926) and Falla's El sombrero de tres picos (1928) found an immediate and permanent place in the repertory. Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle had its première there in 1918, and around 1930 other modern works were also performed, such as Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1925), Stravinsky's Oedipus rex (1928), Hindemith's Hin und zurück (1929), Wolf-Ferrari’s Sly (1931), Milhaud's Trois opéra-minutes (1932) and Respighi's La fiamma (1935). The works of early 20th-century Hungarian opera composers (Hubay, Poldini and Dohnányi) ceased to be performed in the 1940s, but Bartók, Kodály and Ferenc Erkel (the only 19th-century Hungarian opera composer whose works have remained in favour) continue to be performed.

After World War II the first three principal conductors at the Opera House were Fricsay (1945–7), Klemperer (1947–50) and János Ferencsik (1953–83). Subsequent conductors have included Miklós Lukács, András Kórodi, Adám Medveczky, Miklós Erdélyi and Ervin Lukács. The Hungarian repertory has been supplemented by productions of numerous foreign operas, among them many 20th-century works. These have included Berg's Wozzeck (1964) and Lulu (1973), Britten's Peter Grimes (1947), Albert Herring (1960) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1972), Shostakovich's Katerina Izmaylova (1965), Henze's Undine (1969), Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1978) and Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery (1983). New Hungarian operas include works by Emil Petrovics (C'est la guerre, 1962; Bűn és bűnhődés (‘Crime and Punishment’), 1969), Sándor Szokolay (Vérnász (‘Blood Wedding’), 1964; Hamlet, 1968; Samson, 1974, Ecce homo, 1987), Zsolt Durkó (Moses, 1977), Sándor Balassa (Az ajtón kívül (‘The Man Outside’), 1978) and Attila Bozay (Csongor és Tünde, 1985).

The State Opera House underwent major refurbishments in 1980–84, in which the capacity was reduced to 1261 seats. During this time the company performed in the Erkel Theatre.

3. Concert life.

Tomasini, Haydn's Konzertmeister at Eszterháza, is the first outstanding musician known to have given concerts in the capital (1789). In 1793 J. Hoffmansegg noted the high standard of domestic concerts given in the homes of such music lovers as Podmaniczky, a pupil of C.P.E. Bach. At about that time the capital heard its first oratorio performances and, with the début of Lavotta, its first Hungarian concert; however, the importance of these events was surpassed by the performance at the royal palace in Buda of The Creation, under Haydn's direction, and a concert given by Beethoven in the castle theatre (both 1800).

There were occasional large-scale concerts after this, particularly during the existence of the earliest music society, the Pesti Musikai Intézet (Pest Music Institute, 1818–22). In addition to local artists, Moscheles (1818) and the young Liszt (1823) were resoundingly successful. Regular seasons of concerts began in 1834 and attracted Ferenc Erkel to the capital, where he became the most influential musician for nearly four decades. From 1834 to 1846 the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino), founded by István Széchenyi, was the setting for a series of excellent chamber concerts. The city also had two first-rate string quartets, while large orchestral concerts were held between 1836 and 1851, after the creation of the Pestbudai Hangászegyesület (Pestbuda Society of Musicians) from one of the earlier societies. The beginning of the regular steamship service between Vienna and Pest was partly responsible for an increasing number of famous foreign artists arriving to give concerts, among them S. Heinefetter (1836), Vieuxtemps (1837, 1843), Lacombe (1838), Ole Bull (1839), Rubinstein (1842), Briccialdi, Molique, Alboni, Ernst, Thalberg, David (1845), Berlioz (1846) and Leschetizky (1847). During this period a number of young Hungarians gave concerts which showed their remarkable gifts, such as Heller (1827, 1833), Gusztáv Fáy (1834, 1837–41), Imre Székely (1836, 1838, 1840, 1845–6), Joachim (1839, 1846), Károly Filtsch (1841) and Reményi (1847); however, none of these could compare with the success of Liszt's concerts (1839, 1840 and 1846).

The Philharmonic Concerts, given by members of the National Theatre orchestra under Ferenc Erkel, began in 1853; they have continued to contribute to the musical life of the capital. The Filharmóniai Társaság (Philharmonic Society), however, was not legally established until 1867 because of political oppression. The orchestra's conductor until 1871 was Ferenc Erkel, and from then until 1875 Hans Richter; he was followed by Sándor Erkel (1875–1900), István Kerner (1900–18) and Dohnányi (1919–44). Between the wars the orchestra made frequent concert tours abroad: to Czechoslovakia (1925), Germany (1927–9, 1937), Paris and London (1928, 1930), Belgium (1928), Switzerland (1928, 1931), Italy (1928, 1936) and Austria (1929, 1931 and 1936). Musical directors since World War II have included Klemperer, János Ferencsik, and András Kórody and Rico Saccani.

In the second half of the 19th century a prominent role was played by the two choral and orchestral societies, the Budai Zeneakadémia (Buda Music Academy, 1867–1914) and the Pesti Zenekedvelők Egylete (Music Lovers' Society of Pest, 1867–1906). Also of importance was the Országos Magyar Daláregyesület (National Hungarian Choral Association), an amalgamation of all the male-voice choirs, later known as Országos Magyar Dalosszövetség (Hungarian Singers' Association, 1867–1948), whose conductor from 1868 until 1881 was Ferenc Erkel. From 1869 Liszt, both through his compositions and his performances as pianist and conductor, was the leading figure in concert life, which flourished again during the period of the dual monarchy. It was partly due to Liszt's influence that from that time virtually all the leading performing artists of Europe gave concerts in Budapest, surrounded by a lively musical life supported by the large number of excellent ensembles and outstanding performers working there.

Among orchestras the Állami Hangversenyzenekar (State SO) is better known than the Philharmonic outside the country, making many concert tours abroad. It was formed from the Fővárosi Zenekar (Municipal Orchestra), founded in 1923, and gained its present name and structure in 1952, when Ferencsik became its chief musical director. He was succeeded in 1987 by Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi. In 1997 the orchestra, under its new musical director, Zoltán Kocsis, was renamed the Hungarian National PO. Another important symphony orchestra is the Magyar Rádió és Televízió Szimfonikus Zenekara (Hungarian Radio and Television SO), founded by Ernő Dohnányi as a radio orchestra in 1943. In 1992 Tamás Vásáry was appointed its chief conductor. The Budapest Concert Orchestra MÅV was founded in 1945 by the Hungarian State Railways, and accompanied the touring section of the opera from 1947 to 1953. Tamás Gál became the orchestra's principal conductor in 1988.

Iván Fischer and Zoltán Kocsis founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra in 1983. Under Fischer the orchestra has toured widely and appeared at many international festivals. Other professional symphony orchestras in Budapest include the Danube SO and the Symphony Orchestra of MATÁV (Hungarian Telecommunications). The Liszt Ferenc Kamarazenekar (Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra), under its musical director János Rolla, has been one of the most popular orchestras in Hungary since its foundation in 1963. Violinist Miklós Szenthelyi founded the Magyar Virtuózok Kamarazenekar (Chamber Orchestra of Hungarian Virtuosos) in 1988, and has been the orchestra's musical director since 1989. Another important chamber orchestra is the Budapest Strings. The Budapest Symphonic Band was founded in 1992 to perform wind music, mostly by Hungarian composers.

The Danubia Youth SO, etablished in 1993, is the youngest independent symphony orchestra in Hungary. Most of the members are leading students at the Bartók Conservatory and the Liszt Academy. Another youth orchestra, the Dohnányi Orchestra of Budafok, was founded by László Nemes in 1970; in 1993 it became Hungary's newest professional symphony orchestra. There are also excellent orchestras in Budapest's three state conservatories (the Bartók Conservatory, the St Stephan Conservatory and the Leó Weiner Conservatory), and at the Liszt Academy of Music.

The Budapesti Kórus was founded in 1941 by Lajos Bárdos, mainly for the performance of oratorios and cantatas; it was formed by the union of the Palestrina Kórus (1916) and the Cecilia Kórus (1921), joined in 1948 by the Budapesti Ének- és Zenekar Egyesület (Choral and Orchestral Society of Budapest, 1918). Another large mixed choir is the Magyar Rádió és Televízió Énekkara, established in 1950. The Children's Choir of the Hungarian Radio and Television was founded in 1954. The Hungarian State Chorus, etablished in 1985, became the Hungarian National Philharmonic Choir in 1997, working in association with the Hungarian National PO. Other important choirs in Budapest include the Béla Bartók Choir of the Eötvös University, the Budapest Academy Choral Society, the Budapest Tomkins Vocal Ensemble, the Monteverdi Chamber Choir, the Musica Nostra Choir and the Òbuda Chamber Choir.

The Honvéd Esemble, the successor to the Hungarian Army Art Ensemble (founded in 1948), consists of a male-voice choir, orchestra, dance team and theatrical company. The Magyar Állami Népi Együttes (Hungarian State Folk Ensemble) was formed in 1951 to foster Hungarian choral music, folk music and folkdance. The ensemble has performed throughout the world. In 1984 the Hegedős Ensemble was founded by professional folk musicians to perform authentic Hungarian folk music.

The earliest known chamber music ensemble in Pest is the Urbany String Quartet, formed in 1813. Later, numerous notable string quartets played in the capital; among these the Hubay–Popper Quartet (1891–1909) and the Waldbauer–Kerpely Quartet (1910–46) were outstanding. The Lener Quartet, formed in Budapest in 1919, performed and lived mostly outside Hungary. Among more recent quartets the Bartók (1957) and the Keller (1987) are particularly renowned. There are also several chamber ensembles in Budapest specializing in contemporary music, notably the Intermodulation Chamber Ensemble, Componensemble, the Electro-acoustic Research Group (EAR) and Kortárs Zene Mûhely (Contemporary Music Studio).

The Országos Filharmónica (State Philharmonia), the state institution for organizing concerts throughout the country, began in 1949 but did not acquire its name until 1952. In 1990 the institution became the National Philharmonia, and in 1997 it was divided into three regional concert organizations, one for the capital city. The agency Interconcert deals with foreign artists and arranges concerts abroad for Hungarian singers and instrumentalists. Since 1990 several other, mainly private, concert organizations have been set up in and around Budapest.

The most important annual festivals in the city are the Budapest Spring Festival and the Budapest Autumn Festival. A series of contemporary music concerts, Music of Our Age, runs parallel with the Autumn Festival at the beginning of October. Other contemporary music events include the mini-festival of the Hungarian Music Society (held in February) and the Review of New Music at the Merlin Theatre, held in early spring. World Music Day (1 October) is always celebrated with concerts, workshops, conferences and other events.

4. Education.

In the 19th century there was a school of music in the Piarist Gymnasium, where Lenau learnt violin (1811); there were also many private music schools, one of which Joachim attended (1837–9). The Hangászegyleti Énekiskola (Singing School of the Society of Musicians) was opened in 1840 and became an important educational institution. It was established by the Pestbudai Hangászegyesület (Pestbuda Society of Musicians). Its first director was Gábor Mátray (1840–75), and from 1867 it was known as the Nemzeti Zenede (National Conservatory); in 1949 it was taken over by the state and reorganized as a secondary school, the Bartók Béla Zeneművészeti Szakiskola (Béla Bartók Conservatory of Music), under the direction of Frigyes Sándor (1949–58), Árpád Fasang (1958–72), Ferenc Halász (1972–81) and Tibor Szabó (from 1981). Two other important conservatories in the city are the Leó Weiner Conservatory of Music and the St Stephan Conservatory of Music.

A significant number of students from these institutions continue their studies at the Országos Magyar Királyi Zeneakadémia (National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music), founded in 1875 and renamed the Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Főiskola (Franz Liszt Academy of Music) in 1925; it is the only institution of music education at university level in Budapest. In 1997 its Hungarian name was changed to Liszt Ferenc Zeneakadémia. Liszt was its first president (1875–86) and Ferenc Erkel its first director (1875–87); subsequent directors have been Ödön Mihalovich (1887–1918), the Dohnányi–Bartók–Kodály council of directors (1918–19), Jenő Hubay (1919–34), Ernő Dohnányi (1934–43), Ede Zathureczky (1943–57), Ferenc Szabó (1958–70), Dénes Kovács (1970–80), József Ujfalussy (1980–88), József Soproni (1988–94), István Lantos (1994–7) and Sándor Falvai (from 1997). Students can also specialize in music at the academy's training college for instrumental teachers and at Budapest University. In 1907 the academy moved to a new building, where five-year diplomas in performance, composition, musicology, church music, orchestral conducting, music teaching and choral conducting are offered. In recent years the academy has also offered PhD courses. Its old building, housing the Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Centre, has now been carefully restored.

Musical education is provided in all the city's general schools and in a number of specialist music schools. Hungarian music teaching, which draws significantly on native folk music, is based on the world-famous methods devised by Kodály and his many outstanding students and colleagues in the 1930s: Jenő Ádám, László Agócsy, Lajos Bárdos, György Kerényi, Benjamin Rajeczky and others. Almost all schools have their own choirs, and each year children's choral concerts are held as part of the Singing Youth movement started by Bárdos.

2. Historical contexts and sources.

5. Institutes, libraries, associations and publishing.

The Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Zenetudományi Intézete (Insitute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) was formed by the union of the Népzenekutató Csoport (Folk Music Research Group, 1952), established by Kodály, and the Bartók Archive, established by Szabolcsi in 1961. Their regular publications include the Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae (since 1951), an edited collection of Hungarian folksongs begun by Bartók and Kodály, Documenta bartokiana, Musicologia danubiana, Studia musicologica, Cantus planus, Zenetudományi dolgozatok (‘Studies in musicology’) and Magyarország zenetörténete (‘The musical history of Hungary’).

There are four important music libraries in Budapest: the music department of the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, the library of the Liszt Academy of Music, the music department of the Ervin Szabó Municipal Library and the library of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The richest collection of music scores connected with Hungary is in the National Széchényi Library, while manuscript material is also in the Bartók Archive of the Institute of Musicology, the library of the Béla Bartók Conservatory of Music (19th-century Hungarian music), the research centre of the Academy of Music (Liszt and his contemporaries), the Kodály Archive (Kodály), and the libraries of the Academy of Sciences and the university (early Hungarian music). Other notable institutions in the city include the Liszt Museum and research centre of the Academy of Music, the Béla Bartók Memorial House (the last Hungarian home of Bartók), the Zoltán Kodály Memorial Musuem and Archives, situated in the composer's former apartment, and the Museum of Music History at the Institute of Musicology.

The Hungarian Music Council (HMC), the Hungarian section of the International Music Council of UNESCO, was set up by 20 musical associations in 1990 with the aim of promoting the development of Hungarian musical culture. Since then its membership has steadily incresed: in 1997 it had 36 member organizations, nine associated institutional members and ten elected individual members. The HMC is the official successor of the Association of Hungarian Musicians founded by individual members in 1949. It publishes a musicological journal, Magyar Zene (‘Hungarian music’), edited by the Hungarian Musicological Society. The Hungarian Music Information Centre was established in 1973 and immediately joined the International Association of Music Information Centres. Since 1990 it has functioned under the auspices of the HMC. Based on its library and documentation centre, it provides information on all aspects of Hungarian music. The Budapest Music Centre (BMC) offers valuable information on Hungarian performers, composers and the musical life of the city. Since 1966 the younger generation of musicians has been represented by the Hungarian section of Jeunesses Musicales.

Hungarian music publishing is carried out by several companies, including Editio Musica Budapest, Accord and FAM. The record company Hungaroton has a high international reputation, above all for its recordings of music by Liszt, Bartók, Kodály and other native composers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

K. Isoz and I. Mészáros: A Filharmóniai társaság múltja és jelene, 1853–1903 [The Philharmonic Society past and present, 1853–1903] (Budapest, 1903; Fr. trans., 1903)

J. Kádár: A Budai és Pesti német színészet története [The history of German theatre in Buda and Pest] (Budapest, 1914–23)

B. Bartók: ‘Lettera da Budapest’, Il pianoforte, ii (1921), 153–4, 277–8

Z. Kodály: ‘La vie musicale à Budapest’, ReM, ii/3–5 (1921), 173–4; ii/9–11 (1921), 76–7; iii/6–8 (1922), 171–3

Z. Kodály: ‘Lettera da Budapest’, Il pianoforte, iii (1922), 222–3; iv (1923), 80, 158 only

K. Isoz: Buda és Pest zenei művelődése [The musical culture of Buda and Pest], i (Budapest, 1926)

O. Gombosi: ‘Vita musicale alla corte di re Mattia’, Corvina, ix (1929), 110–30

J. Kádár: A Nemzeti színház száz éves története [100 years of the National Theatre] (Budapest, 1938–40)

B. Csuka, ed.: Kilenc évtized a magyar zeneművészet szolgálatában: a Filharmóniai társaság emlékkönyve 90 éves jubileuma alkalmából [Nine decades in the service of Hungarian music: 90th anniversary book of the Philharmonic Society] (Budapest, 1943)

Muzsika (1958–)

I. Balassa, ed.: A hetvenötéves Állami operaház [75 years of the National Opera] (Budapest, 1959)

G. Gábry: ‘Das Meisterbuch der Pester Instrumentenmacher-Innung’, SMH, ii (1962), 331–44

L. Somfai: ‘Ungarische Musikinstitute’, ÖMz, xxi (1966), 631–3

I. Fábián: ‘Die ungarische Staatsoper’, ÖMz, xxii (1967), 279–80

A. Kubinyi: ‘Spielleute und Musiker von Buda in der Jagello-Epoche’, SM, ix (1967), 77–98

L. Zolnay: ‘Data of the Musical Life of Buda in the Late Middle Ages’, SM, ix (1967), 99–114

K. Szigeti: ‘A budai hajdani várkápolna zenei élete a XIV–XVI. században’ [Musical life in the Buda castle chapel from the 14th century to the 16th], Magyar zene, ix (1968), 402–28

K. Szigeti: ‘Die ungelöste Probleme der römischen Orgel von Aquincum’, SM, xiii (1971), 3–14

L. Berza, ed.: Budapest lexicon (Budapest, 1973, 2/1993)

A. Kubinyi: ‘Musikleben am Budaer Königshof, Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts’, SM, xv (1973), 89–100

M. Kaba: Die römische Orgel von Aquincum (3. Jahrhundert) (Budapest, 1976)

J. Ujfalussy, ed.: A Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Fűiskola 100 éve [100 years of the Liszt Academy of Music] (Budapest, 1977)

G. Staud, ed.: A Budapesti Operaház 100 éve [100 years of the Budapest Opera House] (Budapest, 1984)

J. Breuer: Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája [40 years of Hungarian musical culture] (Budapest, 1985)

Polifonia (1990–)

Opus: Newsletter of the Hungarian Composer's Union (1997–)

Budapest Quartet.

String quartet of Hungarian origin. The original members were Emil Hauser, Imre Poganyi, Istvan Ipolyi and Harry Son, all of whom played in the orchestra at the Royal Hungarian Opera House. They gave their first concert in 1917 at Kolozsvar (now Cluj-Napoca). Their European tours during the 1920s included visits to London, first in 1925 when their performances of Bartók’s First Quartet and Smetana’s Quartet in E minor were admired for their fine ensemble and depth of feeling. During the quartet’s subsequent history, the membership changed completely. In 1927 Joseph Roisman joined as second violin, becoming the leader within a few years, and during the early 1930s Ipolyi was replaced by Alexander Schneider, and Son by Schneider’s brother, Mischa. When Boris Kroyt joined as viola in 1936, the quartet became entirely Russian and Ukrainian, but its name remained the same. The character of its playing changed dramatically when the leadership passed from Hauser to Roisman. Hauser was a violinist of the old school, sparing in his use of vibrato, liberal in his use of portamento, and unhasty in his rhythms. Roisman, by contrast, was of the new generation of string players, with a faster and more continuous vibrato, and incisive in rhythm. The quartet reflected these qualities, being known for its expressive warmth under Hauser, and for its forthright brilliance and unanimity of style under Roisman – admittedly not without occasional suggestions of businesslike efficiency.

It was under Roisman that the quartet became internationally famous on both sides of the Atlantic. After extensive tours of Europe the players settled in the USA in 1938. From that year until 1962 they were quartet-in-residence at the Library of Congress, Washington. In 1962 they moved to a similar post at the State University of New York, Buffalo. During this period they continued to undertake world tours, becoming especially renowned for their interpretations of Beethoven’s quartets, which they performed in their entirety almost every year, and which they recorded three times. In the string quintet repertory they were often joined by Milton Katims and, after 1955, by Walter Trampler, with whom they recorded Mozart’s string quintets. The quartet made its last public appearance in 1967, after which the group was forced by illness to disband. During its last 30 years the Budapest Quartet achieved not only a high level of critical esteem but also a remarkable popular success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. James: ‘The Budapest Quartet’, Audio & Record Review, iii/3 (1963–4), 15–19 [with discography by F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming]

S. Smolian: Discography, American Record Guide, xxxvii (1970–71), 220–27

ROBERT PHILIP/R

Budd, Harold

(b Los Angeles, 24 May 1936). American composer. He grew up in Victorville in the Mojave desert, and was affected by the silence, the sounds of the wind, and country music heard on radio programmes broadcast from Mexico. During a short period in the army he played the drums in duet with the free-jazz saxophonist, Albert Ayler. Budd's earliest works, such as Coeur d'or, the Oak of the Golden Dreams and The Candy-Apple Revision, were examples of extreme minimalism that displayed elements of the styles of Terry Riley and La Monte Young; like them, his work was influenced by jazz, in particular the later ballads of John Coltrane and the lush romanticism of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. From 1972 his composing broke avant-garde taboos with a conscious pursuit of beauty and direct simplicity, using the rich, soft timbres of celeste, harp, electric piano and tuned percussion in combinations with ethereal female voices or the jazz alto saxophone of Marion Brown.

Brian Eno's release of The Pavilion of Dreams (Obscure, 1978) introduced Budd's work to an international rock audience. From this point, he performed his own compositions in the recording studio, rather than notating them for concert performances. A collaboration with Eno, The Pearl, was heavily processed with electronic reverberation. Admiration for Budd's music from the rock world is reflected by later collaborations with the Cocteau Twins, Hector Zazou, and Andy Partridge of XTC. An interest in poetry and the spoken word also surfaced in musical settings of his own texts and the writings of American beat poets. (Recorded interviews in US-NHoh)

WORKS

(selective list)

Notated: The Candy-Apple Revision, any inst(s), 1970; Madrigals of the Rose Angel, female vv, hp, cel, elec pf, perc, 1972; Butterfly Sunday, Mez, hp, 1973; Le Us Go into the House of the Lord, Mez, hp, glock, vib, perc, 1974; Song of Paradise: 17 Illuminations on the Holy Koran, B-Bar, hp, glock, vib, perc, 1974; Bismillahi ‘Rrahmani ‘Rrahim, a sax, elec pf, cel, vib, mar, perc, 1974–5; Juno, perc ens, 1975; Basheva Songs (D.G. Rossetti and P. Bethsebe), 1978

Studio: Coeur d'or, the Oak of the Golden Dreams (Advance, 1972); The Pavilion of Dreams (Obscure, 1978); The Pateaux of Mirror (Editions, 1980), collab. B. Eno; The Serpent (in Quicksilver) (Cantil, 1981); Abandoned Cities (Cantil, 1984); Lovely Thunder (Editions, 1986); The White Arcades (Land, 1988); By the Dawn's Early Light (Opal, 1991); Music for 3 Pianos (All Saints, 1992), collab. R. Garcia and D. Lentz; Walk into my Voice (Materiali Sonori, 1996), collab. Lentz and J. Karraker

DAVID TOOP

Budden, Julian (Medforth)

(b Hoylake, 9 April 1924). English musicologist and radio producer. He studied classics at Queen’s College, Oxford (BA 1948, MA 1951), and took the BMus at the RCM (1955), where his professors included Archie Camden, Patrick Hadley and C.T. Lofthouse. In 1951 he joined the BBC, subsequently becoming music producer (1956), chief producer of opera (1970–76) and external services music organizer (1976–83). He is a member of the editorial committee of the Verdi collected edition; he became Fellow of the British Academy in 1987 and was appointed OBE in 1991. His principal field of research is 19th-century Italian opera, particularly Verdi and his contemporaries, and Puccini. In his monumental The Operas of Verdi (1973–81) each work is taken in turn, first examining the framework of social conventions and historical background, then tracing the history of its composition and first performance and finally presenting a detailed critique of the music.

WRITINGS

‘L’influenza della tradizione del grand opéra francese sulla struttura ritmica di “Don Carlo”’, Studi verdiani II: Verona, Parma and Busseto 1969, 311–18

‘“La Battaglia di Legnano”: its Unique Character with Special Reference to the Finale of Act I’, Studi verdiani III: Milan 1972, 71–80

‘The Two Traviatas’, PRMA, xcix (1972–3), 43–66

‘Varianti nei Vespri siciliani’, NRMI, vi (1972), 155–81

The Operas of Verdi (London, 1973–81, 3/1992; It. trans., 1985–)

‘Verdi and the Contemporary Italian Operatic Scene’, The Verdi Companion, ed. W. Weaver and M. Chusid (London, 1979), 67–105

‘Verdi and Meyerbeer in Relation to Les vêpres siciliennes’, Studi verdiani, i (1982), 11–20

‘German and Italian Elements in Morlacchi's Tebaldo e Isolina’, Francesco Morlacchi e la musica del suo tempo: Perugia 1984, 19–27

‘Il linguaggio musicale di Ernani’, ‘Ernani’ ieri e oggi: Modena 1984 [Verdi: bollettino dell’Istituto di studi verdiani, no.10 (1987; Eng. trans., 1989)], 123–32

‘Differences in Musical Language between Stiffelio and Aroldo’, Tornando a Stiffelio: … drammaturgia del Verdi romantico: Venice 1985, 273–80

Verdi (London, 1985/R; Ger. trans., 1987/R)

‘Wagnerian Tendencies in Italian Opera’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 299–332

‘Il linguaggio musicale della “Messa per Rossini”’, Messa per Rossini: la storia, il testo, la musica, ed. M. Girardi and P. Petrobelli (Parma, 1988), 101–10

‘The Genesis and Literary Source of Giacomo Puccini's First Opera’, COJ, i (1989), 79–85

‘The Musical World of the Young Puccini’, The Puccini Companion, ed. W. Weaver and S. Puccini (London, 1994), 39–60

‘The Vocal and Dramatic Character of Jacopo Fresco’, Studi verdiani, x (1994–5), 67–75 [orig. given at Studi verdiani IV: Chicago 1974]

Puccini (Oxford and New York, 2000)

ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON

Buddhist music.

Musical traditions associated with Buddhist culture and practices found in South, South-east and East Asian countries, and in other communities worldwide.

1. Background.

3. Liturgical practices.

4. Para-liturgical and ritual practices.

5. Contemporary trends.

FRANCESCA TAROCCO

1. Background.

The International Buddhist Directory (1985) estimates that there are about six hundred million Buddhists around the world. The biggest communities are found in Asia (Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma) Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China, Tibet, Japan, Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Central Asian Republics, India and Bangladesh). In Europe and North America there are communities of Buddhist Asian emigrants as well as of Western practitioners.

A rich body of liturgical music forms the backbone of daily religious practice in Buddhist temples. Buddhist liturgy is eminently vocal, often accompanied by ritual percussion and sometimes by melodic instruments. Instrumental music, played both on wind and string instruments, is part of calendrical ceremonies (such as those for the dead) and non-calendrical ones. It often has a para-liturgical function, marking transitional points and introducing or concluding ritual events.

Buddhist music presents both regional and sectarian characteristics, and the repertories have developed in constant interaction with local musical traditions and performing practices. However, there are also significant parallels in the practices of Buddhist communities very distant in time and space from one another. The constant retrospection to the figure and teachings of the Buddha by the sangha, the community of monks and nuns, or in the broadest sense of all practitioners committed to the Buddhist faith, partially accounts for this phenomenon.

From the end of the 19th century (the first World's Parliament of Religions was held in 1893), Buddhism has gradually established itself as a ‘world religion’. Its progressive cosmopolitanisation and exposure to different musical idioms has led to the emergence of ‘new’ Buddhist sounds. The increasing availability of recording technologies and mass media have also had an impact upon Buddhist communities in Asia and worldwide.

2. Historical contexts and sources.

Scholars feel increasingly uncomfortable with unqualified statements regarding the historical facts of Buddha's life and teachings. The traditional dates of Buddha's life (563–483 bce) have recently been questioned by many who see his activities taking place as much as a century later. However, Buddhist communities were flourishing in India during the Mauryan dynasty (324–187 bce). By the end of the reign of the emperor Asoka, Buddhist institutions were established throughout the Indian subcontinent. Buddhist missionaries reached China, mainly from the north-west, sometime during the first century of the common era. In the late 4th century, contacts with China brought Buddhist teachings to the Korean peninsula and from there to Japan. Around the 7th century, Buddhist-influenced cultures extended from Java to Nepal and from Afghanistan to Japan.

For centuries, India was at the centre of the development and diffusion of Buddhist doctrine and religious practice. However, by the 13th century, Buddhist institutions had almost disappeared in India and Central Asia, only to be partially revived during the 20th century. After the decline of Buddhism in India, South-east Asian societies looked to Sri Lanka for doctrinal inspiration and guidance. As its notions of rulership appealed to the monarchs of Cambodia, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and Laos, Buddhism was adopted as the official ideology. Until very recent times, in China as well as in Japan, Buddhism was alternatively embraced or rejected, and underwent periods of fortune as well as fierce persecution.

The teachings of the Buddha were initially preserved orally by his followers and then committed to writing from the last decades of the common era by the Sinhala buddhists. Geographical diffusion brought about ritual and doctrinal differentiation, and the adoption of a number of canonical languages and scripts. Pāli was and still is the canonical and ritual language of Sri Lanka and South-east Asia. Sanskrit texts spread in East and Central Asia. The ritual use of Sanskrit survives today among the Newar of Nepal. Sanskrit texts were also translated into Chinese, which became the canonical language of Korea, Japan, Vietnam and, of course, China. Finally, part of the Sanskrit canon was translated into Tibetan, which still stands as the Buddhist language of the Himalayan areas, Mongolia and Siberia. Although translation was an ever-present cultural practice, many new texts were produced at different stages and incorporated into the canons. In most Buddhist-influenced cultures, texts and rituals also developed in languages other than the canonical ones.

Although Buddhist bibliographical habits limited the number of texts specifically devoted to music to be collected in the canons, such texts exist and can be counted among the sources for the study of liturgical and para-liturgical traditions. Textual sources include ritual and liturgical manuals, encyclopedias, the accounts of Buddhist pilgrims, first-hand descriptions by local observers or foreign travellers, and iconographic and epigraphic materials.

Buddhist ideas and practices are not accounted for in the writings of musical theorists belonging to Hindu religious and cultural traditions. However, attempts at reconstructing early Buddhist vocal and melodic theories have led scholars to conclude that they were relatively similar to those found in the later treatises of the so-called Indian musical theory (Ellingson, 1979). Regarding instrumental music, one major difference between the two is a classification system found in Pāli and Tibetan Buddhist sources. Musical instruments are divided into five classes (pañcā-tūrya-nāda), instead of the usual four based upon the manner of construction (‘solid’, ‘covered’, ‘hollow’ and ‘stretched’). From a theoretical point of view, it seems that Indian Buddhists' conception of sound differs from that of most traditional schools, including Vedāntic and Sāńkhya philosophers. Whereas the latter consider sound to be a ‘manifestation’ (of vital breath and inner consciousness, for example) and not subject to causation, Buddhist philosophers hold that sound is subject to ‘creation and destruction’, with inevitable musical and aesthetic consequences.

Buddhist musical notation systems, both instrumental and vocal, are known primarily through Japanese and Tibetan sources (see Japan, §IV, 3; Tibetan music, §II, 4), although they seem to have existed in other parts of Asia, including India (Ellingson, 1985). Two examples of Buddhist notations are the dbyangs yig and meyasu-hakase contour notations found in the Tibetan and Japanese traditions, respectively.

Modern studies of Buddhist musical traditions, their history and contemporary practice, are still fairly limited in number and scope. Some exceptions are the Japanese shōmyō ritual chants, carefully documented by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars, and some Tibetan and Chinese musical practices. A possible explanation for this neglect lies in the fact that, since the beginning of its academic study in late 19th century Europe, scholars conceived of Buddhism as essentially anti-musical and anti-ritual. In Asian societies, élite Buddhists' self-representations, in response to modernist ideas, tended to emphasize the individualistic and rationalist aspects of their religion over ritual and community-based practices. These misrepresentations reached well beyond the theoretical, and had an impact upon policy makers as well as upon the believers themselves, who were often persecuted and whose practices were deemed ‘superstitious’.

3. Liturgical practices.

(i) Choral chanting.

For many centuries Buddhist teachings have been preserved and transmitted through collective musical vocalizations. Although texts are used in contemporary practice, the memorization and execution of chants has retained this basic function. Ellingson (1979), for example, witnessed Buddhist monks correcting errors in print on the basis of memorized chants.

Choral chanting is fundamental to the Buddhist liturgical tradition. According to Ellingson (1986), the practice began c500 bce in Indian communities and then spread throughout Asia. A text of the Pāli Canon, the Cullavagga, reports that after the death of the Buddha, a senior monk invited others to ‘sing together the Dhamma (Buddhist teaching) and the Vinaya (monastic discipline)’. Other texts in the Pāli Canon refer to the institution of musical and ritual practices during Buddha's times. Sources relate that choral ‘intoned recitation’ (sarabhañña) was used by monks at regular calendrical occasions or as a ‘protective spell’ during ad hoc ceremonies.

Choral chanting is at the basis of contemporary monastic liturgical practice. At the beginning of the 20th century, special choral performances in Tibetan monasteries could involve up to 50,000 performers. In Thai Buddhist monasteries, chanting ceremonies are held twice a day by the assembly. The chants are intoned by the cantor who sings an introductory formula, followed by the chorus of the monastic assembly. The monks perform in unison, with the exception of young monks who sing at the upper octave, fifth or fourth. The texts chanted are taken from the Pāli canon and the melodic phrases begin and end together with the text phrases. In these types of chant, rhythm and melody seem to depend on the syllabic patterns of the texts. Another type of chant features in the Paritta protective rituals, where the performers take overlapping breaths in order not break the sonic flow (Ellingson, 1979). This particular performing practice has also been adopted in Sri Lanka and China.

In Japan the liturgical musical repertory was codified and written down at a rather early stage, and chant schools were established in the 8th and 9th centuries. Today, different styles and performing practices exist in the shōmyō of the Tendai and Shingon schools. Japanese Buddhist liturgical chant is traditionally divided according to the characteristics of the text chanted. There are three distinct categories. Bonsan are hymns in which Chinese characters stand for transliterated Sanskrit sounds, Kansan are hymns with a Chinese text and Wasan are hymns written in Japanese. The latter are usually described as the most melodious in style. The hymns are further classified according to their place and function in the liturgy. A number of temples in Japan maintain a significant chant tradition. Shōmyō chants are sung at the Enryaku-ji at Mount Hiei (almost daily services), Chishaku-in in Kyōtō (frequent services) and other temples. Shōmyō can be made of a combination of up to 50 codified melodic formulas. The performances range from the syllabic invocation of the Buddha Amida (nembutsu) to the very complex and melismatic settings of the pieces transmitted esoterically within the priesthood. Recently, the more esoteric pieces were left out from published recordings (Hill, 1982). Both Japanese shōmyō and chissori (the more elaborated chant style in the Korean Buddhist tradition) have a system of pitch scales based upon Chinese modes, whereas Tibetan dbyangs base the melodies upon patterns of tonal contour.

In China, the daily liturgy consists of morning, afternoon and evening prayers and meal offerings. The repertory of ordinary liturgy is fairly restricted. It is largely based on the classic collection Zhujing risong (‘Various Sūtras for the Daily Recitations’) produced by the monk Zhuhong (1535–1615). All Chinese sects share similar liturgical manuals. In addition to the texts of the Morning Lesson (zaoke) and Evening Lesson (wanke), the manuals contain texts for the purification of the altars and other calendrical ceremonies, such as Buddha's birthday. In China, the principal types of vocal delivery include reading (du), reciting (song), chanting (yin) and singing (chang).

An important hymn of the Chinese tradition is the Baoding zan, also known as Xiang zan (‘Hymn to the Precious Incense-Burner’ or ‘Hymn to Incense’). Offering incense is a very important act of worship in Buddhist contexts. The Chinese expression ‘burning incense’ (shao xiang), for example, refers to everyday worship at a temple. Apart from its importance as a religious offering, the presence of hymns in praise of incense bears witness to its symbolic and sensorial relation to music within the ritual.

The vocal quality of Buddhist liturgical music is often natural, although restricted production is also a Buddhist characteristic. In Cambodia the voice is distinctively nasal, whereas Vietnamese monks employ falsetto in the chant type tan. Several types of voice are used in Tibetan ritual music. The One Voice classification system (Ellingson, 1979) is based on the ‘byung gnas (‘place of origin’) in the body. Khog pa'i skad (‘body cavity voice’), for example, requires the singer to concentrate on the diaphragm, chest and abdominal muscles in order to produce a deep and resonant sound typical of most Tibetan ritual chanting. According to this system there are also ‘throat’, ‘mouth’ and ‘nose’ type voices.

(ii) Instruments.

The use of ritual percussion is characteristic of many monastic liturgical traditions; the use of other instruments is less frequent. Notable exceptions are found in some liturgies in Tibet, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam. In Vietnam a lute sounded by bowing with or without a coconut sound box is occasionally played by monks. In most Buddhist traditions, monastic chant assemblies are convoked by signals played on bells, gongs, drums and other idiophones. One text datable to the first century ce already described the qualities of a wooden idiophone. The use of drums, bells and conches is also attested by early textual sources.

In modern Korean monasteries, the monks are called to prayer when the verger beats rhythmically on a woodblock (mokt'ak). The verger then chants the incantation from the Thousand Hands Sūtra, and a series of blows on the gongs, bells, drums and wooden fish from the Bell and Drum Towers signals the beginning of the day (fig.1). When the large temple bell strikes 28 times, the monks gather in the main hall of the temple for the morning service (Buswell, 1992). In Haein-sa, Kyongsang-do province, Korea, a huge drum may be used to call the monks to evening lessons (fig.2).

An ensemble of ritual percussion (faqi: lit. ‘Dharma instruments’) is used in Chinese liturgical practice. A ritual ensemble consists usually of drum (gu), small brass bowl suspended on a stick (yinqing), woodblock (muyu, lit. ‘wooden fish’), bell (chanzhong), large brass bowl (qing), cymbals (chazi) and suspended gong (dangzi). In most Chinese liturgical manuals, on the right side of the texts, there are standard symbols indicating the coincidence of the strokes on the ritual instruments with the utterance of the words. However, the rhythmic framework is not explicit. In many contexts; although the woodblock establishes the beat, the congregation does not keep a steady tempo at all times.

In Myanmar, tempo is marked by a bell (sì) and clappers (wà) and in Laos by bells and a large suspended drum (kong vat). In the Sinhala tradition, the chanting is usually not accompanied by any instruments, with the occasional exception of a drum. In Vietnam, the chant type tan displays a very syncopated rhythm. The small gong and the wooden drum mark three rhythmic cycles which determine three different versions of the chant: the tan roi, tan xap and tan trao.

4. Para-liturgical and ritual practices.

Textual sources, mainly Tibetan and Chinese, together with other kinds of evidence, attest the existence of Buddhist dramas, including songs and dances, instrumental music and other types of ritual performances within early Buddhist communities in India. With the assimilation of Buddhist teachings into other cultures and the creation of Buddhist institutions there were many developments. However, in most Buddhist contexts, ritual, music and performance have always been fundamental aspects of the life of monasteries and communities at large.

From the 7th to the 9th centuries, Indian Buddhists introduced ritual and musical practices to Tibet and the interaction produced a very elaborate system of ritual music. Generally, there are many variations among the various Buddhist traditions in the numbers and types of instruments employed. In Sri Lanka, the instrumentarium is generally quite simple, whereas the music performed by the Tibetan monastic ensemble (commonly called rolmo) presents complex rhythmical and melodic structures. A typical ensemble usually includes two types of cymbals, double-headed frame drums, handbells with internal clappers, small hourglass drums, conch-shell trumpets, long metal trumpets, low-pitched oboes (rgya-gling) and bronze gongs. In Tibetan Buddhist ritual theory, musical styles and forms must be suited to the nature of the deities to which they are offered. The particular type of deity will influence the orchestration, rhythm, tempo and repertory, as well as other elements. Instrumental music is required on every occasion, whether or not instruments are played or ‘mentally produced’ through meditation and visualization techniques (Ellingson, 1979). In some rituals, no instruments are physically present, in some others the cymbals and drums are played. The full ensemble is present on special occasions such as the healing and propitiation rituals addressed to the deity Mahākāla.

Important observances throughout the Buddhist world are rituals of salvation and services for the welfare of the dead. In China, the sources for the ritual of salvation yulanpen have been traced back to the Tantric formularies translated into Chinese in the 7th and 8th centuries. Large-scale mourning rituals were codified from the 17th century onwards. Buddhist practitioners regard these services as descendents of the ritual of oblation and the ‘incantation’ (dhāranī) taught by the Buddha to his disciple Ānanda, who was afraid of being reborn a hungry ghost. Offerings of food and drink consecrated with music and recitation are considered necessary to ensure demise from suffering and rebirth in the Buddhist heavens. In East Asia, these rituals were (and are) of fundamental importance for the budgets of big monasteries, as members of the laity who order them pay conspicuous amounts of money for their performance. The great ‘Water and Land Dharma Assembly’ (shuilu fahui), performed in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere, can last up to eight days and nights, requires the presence of hundreds of officiants. The ceremony involves the use of ritual instrumental music, specially made paper props and offerings of food and drink. More common are smaller-scale versions of the ‘Releasing the Flaming Mouths’ (fang yankou) rituals performed for funerals and associated also with the Ghost festival ritual.

Buddhist monasteries have often been important centres of transmission of musical practice. The shen-guan musical tradition of northern China (named after the sheng free-reed mouth-organ and the double-reed pipe, guanzi), still performed at funerals and at mourning rituals, bears witness to the constant interaction between monastic and popular traditions. During the ritual, melodic and instrumental music punctuates the vocal and percussion music. The music is heterophonic, with the musicians playing different ornamented versions of the same melody.

In Vietnam, lay musicians are often asked to perform during Buddhist funeral ceremonies. In Korea, instrumental ritual music, together with dance and chanting, is performed by an outdoor instrumental ensemble (chorach'i), usually consisting of one or two conical double-reed pipes, a large gong, a barrel drum and cymbals. A long trumpet (nabal) and conch shell (nagak) are optional. The musicians of the ensemble have traditionally been lay people, whereas the chanters and reciters were ordained clergy. In Cambodia, in the early 20th century, the monasteries were training centres for classical musicians, and in Sri Lanka the clergy have sometimes been sponsors of secular music.

5. Contemporary trends.

In recent years, Buddhist organizations in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries have explored the use of recorded sound and broadcasting to disseminate Buddhist teachings and reach new or wider audiences. Performances of rituals and liturgical services take place on stage and in concert halls. An example of this was the 1989 tour by the monks from Drepung Monastery, Tibet, of Canada, the USA and Mexico. Exponents of the Buddhist institutional world have advocated the necessity of modernising their strategies of communication. They tend to attribute to recording technologies and electronic media the same importance traditionally attributed to printing in disseminating Buddhist teachings.

Recordings of daily services, lectures by famous masters, calendrical and occasional rituals are available in many temples as well as in shops. New versions of rituals and prayers are also available on cassette tapes and CDs, featuring traditional instruments as well as pianos, guitars and synthesizers. Videos and video CDs of ‘Buddhist karaoke’ are produced in Malaysia and Singapore for the national and international market.

The songs written by the Chinese musician Wang Yong have recently been described as ‘Buddhist rock music’ because the artist tries to convey Buddhist-inspired experiences through the music. This kind of music relies on the record and media industries for its diffusion.

A number of professional composers have been involved in the production of ‘new Buddhist music’ with different styles and characteristics. In 1994, for example, a choral symphonic poem composed by Yao Shenchang with lyrics by the Buddhist music expert Tian Qing, was premiered in the large Chinese municipality of Tianjing.

See also China, §IV, 3; Korea, §I; India; Japan, §II, 1–4; Mongol music, §6; Tibetan music, §II, 1(ii); and Vietnam.

(5) Censinu [Vincenzo, Vincent] Bugeja

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

Yijing (635–713): Nan hai qi gui nei fa zhuan (MS); Eng. trans. as A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Oxford, 1896)

Ennin (794–864): Nittō guhō junrei gyōki (MS); Eng. trans. as Ennin's Diary: the Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York, 1955)

S. Lévi: ‘La récitation primitive des textes bouddhiques’, Journal asiatique, 11th ser., v (1915), 401–47

P. Demiéville: ‘Bombai’, Hōbōgirin: dictionnaire encyclopédique du Buddhism, ed. P. Demiéville, J. Takakusu and S. Lévi (Tokyo, 1929, 2/1931), 97–113

J. Prip-Möller: Chinese Buddhist Monasteries (London, 1937/R)

Trân Van Khê: ‘Aspects de la cantillation: techniques du Viet-nam’, RdM, xlvii (1961), 37–55

S. Dutt: Buddhist Monks and Monasteries of India: Their History and Their Contribution to Indian Culture (London, 1962)

J. Brunet: ‘Le plain-chant bouddhique au Cambodge’, Annales de l'Université royale des beaux-arts, i (Phnom Penh, 1967)

Trân Van Khê: ‘Musique bouddhique au Viet-nam’, Encyclopédie des musiques sacrées, ed. J. Porte (Paris, 1968–70), 214–21

Jao Tsung-i: Airs de Touen-houang: textes à chanter des VIIIe-Xe siècles, ed. P. Demiéville (Paris, 1971)

W. Giesen: Zur Geschichte des Buddhistischen Ritualgesangs in Japan: Traktate des 9 bis 14 Jahrhunderts zum Shōmyō der Tendaisekte (Kassel, 1977) [with Eng. summary]

C. Hooykaas: A Balinese Temple Festival (The Hague, 1977)

P. Demiéville, H.Durt and A. Seidel, eds.: Répertoire du cannon bouddique sino Japonais (Tokyo, 1978)

T.J. Ellingson: The Mandala of Sound: Concepts and Sound Structures in Tibetan Ritual Music (diss. U. of Wisconsin, 1979)

P. Demiéville: ‘Notes on Buddhist Hymnology in the Far East’, Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula, ed. S. Balasoorya and others (London, 1980), 44–61

J. Hill: ‘Ritual Music in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism: Shingon shōmyō’, EthM, xxvi (1982), 27–39

T. Ellingson: ‘Buddhist Musical Notation’ The Oral and the Literate in Music: Tokyo 1985, 302–41

B.W. Lee: Buddhist Music of Korea (Seoul, 1987)

R.E. Buswell Jr.: The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (Princeton, NJ, 1992)

M. Helffer: Mchod-rol: les instruments de la musique tibétaine (Paris, 1994)

S. Jones: Folk Music of China: Living Instrumental Traditions (Oxford, 1995, 2/1998 with CD)

D.S. Lopez Jr., ed.: Buddhism in Practice (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

B. Yung, E.S. Rawski and R.S. Watson, eds.: Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context (Stanford, CA, 1996)

L.E. Sullivan, ed.: Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions (Cambridge, MA, 1997)

A. Steen: ‘Buddhism and Rock Music – a New Music Style’, CHIME, no.11 (1998), 151–64

C.B. Jones: Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660–1900 (Honolulu, 1999)

recordings

Buddhist Music, The Music of Japan, iv: A Musical Anthology of the Orient, UNB BM 30L2015 (?1960)

Tibetan Buddhism: Tantras of Gyütö: Mahakala, Nonesuch H-72055 (1973/R) [incl. disc notes]

Japon Shōmyō chant liturgique bouddhique, secte Tendai, Ocora C 558539 (1979) [incl. disc notes; Eng. trans.]

Chine: fanbai chant liturgique bouddhique, leçon du soir au temple de Quanzhou, Ocora C559080 (1989/R) [incl. disc notes]

Buddhist Music of Tianjin, Nimbus Records NI 5416 (1994) [incl. notes by S. Jones]

Amdo Monastère tibétain de Labrang, Ocora C560101 (1996) [incl. disc notes in Eng. and Fr.]

Vietnam: Traditions of the South, Auvidis/Unesco D 8070 (1996) [incl. disc notes in Eng. and Fr.]

Budweis.

See České Budějovice.

Buechenberg [Bugamberghi, Boccaber, Puchenberg], Matteo [Matheus]

(b ?Büchenberg, nr Bernbeuren, c1566–70; d c1627–8). German lute maker, active in Italy. He was first mentioned in Roman sources in December 1591, when he married Virginia, daughter of the luthier Pietro Alberti; the last reference to him is in 1626. His workshop in Rome included Magno Graill from 1599 until 1626. Baron (1727) wrote that Buechenberg ‘was German by birth but worked after the Italian fashion with small staves’. This refers to the bodies of his instruments, which are usually of multi-rib construction, using striped heartwood and sapwood yew. His handwritten labels, in a flowing italic script, bear the wording ‘Matheus Buechenberg/Roma’ with the date. He also used a brand-mark consisting of a tree resting on a triple mountain (Büchenberg = beech-mountain). This brand is clearly visible on a theorbo in a portrait by Luciano Borzone in the Palazzo Bianco, Genoa. His theorbos include some of the largest surviving specimens, some of which are fitted with single fingerboard courses.

Buechenberg instruments survive in the following museums: Barcelona, Museu Municipal de Musica (10-course lute, no.409); Brussels, Musée Instrumental (theorbo no.1570); The Hague, Gemeentemuseum (a theorbo back converted to a 13-course lute, no.Exl-55, and an archlute, no.878); Edinburgh, University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments (lute attributed to Buechenberg but much restored, no.3249); Florence, Museo Bardini (theorbo no.142); Lisbon, Conservatório Nacional (an archlute); London, Victoria and Albert Museum (one complete theorbo, no.190–1882, and a cut-down theorbo body, no.218–1882); Oxford, private collection (a theorbo back with new neck and soundboard); Paris Conservatoire (a composite archlute, no.E 1557).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VannesE

E.G. Baron: Historisch-theoretische und practische Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten (Nuremberg, 1727/R; Eng. trans., 1976, as Study of the Lute)

A. Baines: Catalogue of Musical Instruments [in the Victoria and Albert Museum], ii: Non-Keyboard Instruments (London, 1968)

L. Cervelli: ‘Brevi noti sui liutai tedeschi attivi in Italia al secolo XVIo al XVIIIo’, AnMc, no.5 (1968), 299–337

E. Pohlmann: Laute, Theorbe, Chitarrone (Bremen, 1968, enlarged 5/1982)

F. Hellwig: ‘Makers’ Marks on Plucked Instruments of the 16th and 17th Centuries’, GSJ, xxiv (1971), 22–32

P. Barbieri: ‘Cembalaro, organaro, chitarraro e fabbricatore di corde’, Recercare, i (1989), 123–209

LYNDA SAYCE

Buel [Büel, Buhel, Buhl, Bul, Bull, Puel, Puhel], Christoph

(b Nuremberg, bap. 9 Jan 1574; d Nuremberg, bur. 17 May 1631). German composer. He entered the University of Altdorf to study theology in 1588 and then went on to study jurisprudence. In 1598 he became registrar in the so-called ‘Grosses Registratur’ at Nuremberg and he held this position until a few months before his death. He also assisted the civic authorities as a music expert and formed a choir at the Frauenkirche of which he became the conductor in about 1615. In 1600, 1608 and 1613 he was given leave to help organize the music at the court of the Palatine Electors Friedrich IV and V at Heidelberg and his first individual print (1615) was dedicated to the latter and his wife, the English Princess Elizabeth. In 1614 he helped to get his friend J.A. Herbst appointed Kapellmeister to the Landgrave of Hesse at Butzbach. Like others at Nuremberg at the time he was essentially an amateur musician. He probably turned to music relatively late in life, when he may have had some lessons with H.L. Hassler: a few isolated pieces appeared in anthologies in and shortly after 1600, but his music appeared regularly in print only after about 1610. On the whole it shows the influence of Hassler and other south German composers of the period, and there are impressive sonorities in the works for eight or more voices. That Buel was highly regarded by his contemporaries is suggested by the frequency with which he was represented in anthologies. Krautwurst saw him as the most important Nuremberg musician between Hassler and Johann Staden, and his music, which is little known, will no doubt repay further study.

WORKS

Melos harmonicorum serenissimis ac potentissimis princibus … Friderico, 8vv (Nuremberg, 1615)

Magnifici … viri … Christophori Füreri ab Haimendorff, 4vv (Nuremberg, 1624)

Ein new Osterlied: Der Tod ist verschlungen in den Sieg, 4vv (Nuremberg, 1625); lost, cited in Eitner

Jani cum Jesu collatio, 4vv (Nuremberg, 1625); lost, cited in Eitner

7 Latin motets, 5, 6, 8, 13vv, 1600², 1611¹, 1612³, B. Praetorius: Corona imperialis (Nuremberg, 1613), 1615², 1621²; 1 facs. tablature in AMP, vii (1965)

5 hymns, 4, 5vv, 1602³, G. Erythraeus: Psalmen und geistliche Lieder (Nuremberg, 1608), F. Ridt: Soli Deo gloria (Nuremberg, 1623)

Latin motet, D-Bim; Latin motet (see Zulauf)

Song, 8vv, 1610²¹; Galliard, 1616²⁴

theoretical works

Doctrina duodecim modorum musicalium (n.p., n.d.), according to Gerber

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEUMM

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberL

MGG1 (F. Krautwurst)

E. Zulauf: Beiträge zur Geschichte der landgräflich-Hessischen Hofkapelle zu Cassel (Kassel, 1902), 128

W. Diehl: ‘Wie J.A. Herbst nach Butzbach kam’, Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, xxvii (1922), 139

MIROSŁAW PERZ

Buelow, George J(ohn)

(b Chicago, 31 March 1929). American musicologist. He received the BM in 1950 and the MM the following year from Chicago Musical College, where he studied piano with Rudolf Ganz. In 1951 he began graduate studies in musicology at New York University under Martin Bernstein, Reese and Sachs; he took the PhD there in 1961. From 1961 to 1968 he taught at the University of California at Riverside. He was then professor of music and chairman of the department at the University of Kentucky from 1968 until 1969, when he was appointed professor of music at Rutgers University. In 1977 he was appointed professor of musicology at Indiana University. He has served as president of the American Bach Society (1987–92), a director of the IMS (1987–97) and vice-president of the American Handel Society; he was also founder and editor of the series Studies in Musicology (1977–90) and a member of the commission for RISM.

Buelow specializes in German music of the 17th and early 18th centuries, with emphasis on performing practice, theory and opera. His study of Heinichen’s treatise on thoroughbass accompaniment, one of the principal works in English on German Baroque theory, provides a concise exposition of the relationship between the performing practice and music theory of the time. His studies of operas by Mattheson include an edition of Cleopatra (EDM, 1st ser., lxix, 1975).

WRITINGS

Johann David Heinichen, ‘Der General-Bass in der Composition’: a Critical Study with Annotated Translation of Selected Chapters (diss., New York U., 1961)

‘Heinichen’s Treatment of Dissonance’, JMT, vi (1962), 216–74

‘The Full-Voiced Style of Thorough-Bass Realization’, AcM, xxxv (1963), 159–71

‘The loci topici and Affect in Late Baroque Music’, MR, xxvii (1966), 161–76

Thorough-Bass Accompaniment according to Johann David Heinichen (Berkeley, 1966, 2/1986)

‘An Evaluation of Johann Mattheson’s Opera Cleopatra (Hamburg, 1704)’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: a Tribute to Karl Geiringer, ed. H.C.R. Landon and R.E. Chapman (New York and London, 1970), 92–107

‘Die schöne und getreue Ariadne (Hamburg, 1691): a Lost Opera by J.G. Conradi Rediscovered’, AcM, xliv (1972), 108–21

‘Symposium on Seventeenth-Century Music Theory: Germany’, JMT, xvi (1972), 36–49

‘Music, Rhetoric and the Concept of the Affections: a Selective Bibliography’, Notes, xxx (1973–4), 250–59

‘In Defence of J.A. Scheibe against J.S. Bach’, PRMA, ci (1974–5), 85–100

with D. Daviau: The Ariadne auf Naxos of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975)

‘The Concept of Melodielehre: a Key to Classic Style’, Mozart und seine Umwelt: Salzburg 1976 [MJb 1978–9], 182–95

‘A Lesson in Operatic Performance Practice by Madame Faustina Bordoni’, A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 79–96

‘Symbol and Structure in the “Kyrie” of Bach’s B minor Mass’, Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and Other Divers Subjects: a Tribute to Gerhard Herz, ed. R.L. Weaver (Louisville, KY, 1981), 21–42

ed. with H.J. Marx: New Mattheson Studies (Cambridge, 1983) [incl. ‘Johann Mattheson and the Invention of the Affektenlehre’, 393–407]

‘The Case for Handel’s Borrowings: the Judgment of Three Centuries’, Handel Tercentenary Collection: London 1985, 61–82

‘Handel's Borrowing Techniques: some Fundamental Questions Derived from a Study of “Agrippina”’, Gottinger Händel Beitrage, ii (1986), 105–28

‘Originality, Genius, Plagiarism and English Criticism of the 18th Century’, Florilegium musicologicum: Hellmut Federhofer zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. C.-H. Mahling (Tutzing, 1988), 57–66

‘Expressivity in the Accompanied Recitatives of Bach's Cantatas’, Bach Studies, ed. D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989), 18–35

‘Hamburg Opera during Buxtehude's Lifetime: the Works of Johann Wolfgang Franck’, Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and its Contexts in Seventeenth-Century Germany, ed. P. Walker (Ann Arbor, 1990), 127–41

ed.: Man & Music/Music and Society: The Late Baroque Era (Basingstoke, 1993) [incl. ‘Music and Society in the Late Baroque Era’, 1–39; ‘Hamburg and Lubeck’, 190–215; ‘Dresden in the Age of Absolutism’, 216–29]

‘A Bach Borrowing by Gluck’, Eighteenth-Century Music in Theory and Practice: Essays in Honor of Alfred Mann, ed. M.A. Parker (Stuyvesant, NY, 1994), 187–203

‘The Italian Influence in Heinichen's Der General-Bass in der Composition’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xviii (1994), 47–65

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Mathiesen and B. Rivera, eds.: Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J. Buelow (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995) [incl. autobiography, 489–503]

PAULA MORGAN

Buenaventura, Alfredo S(antos)

(b Santa Maria, Bulacan, 14 Oct 1929). Filipino composer, conductor and teacher. He studied at the universities of S Tomas and Centro Escolar, and at the Gregorian Institute. Teaching appointments followed at the Philippine Women’s University, St Scholastica’s College and other institutions. For a time he was the organist of Manila Cathedral, and he has also been active as the director of several bands and of the glee club of Ateneo University, Loyola. He became dean of the Centro Escolar University Conservatory and received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award twice (1964, 1972); he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Philippine Women's University in 1989. His compositions, often based on Philippine legend and history, use Romantic, Impressionist and contemporary idioms.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Mariang Makiling (op), 1961; Diego Silang (op), 1966; Alamat ng pinya [Legend of the Pineapple] (op), 1967; Prinsesa Urduja (op), 1969; Itim-Asu [The Onyx Wolf] (ballet, 1), 1970; Hinilawod (op), 1971; Love Legend of a Mountain Goddess (operetta-dance drama), 1971

Orch: Philippine Festival Ov., 1964; Bataan, sym. poem, 1968; Bathaluman, ov., 1965; Sym. ‘Kayumanggi’ [Brown Race], 1971; Manik Buangsi, sym. poem, 1973; Philippine Panorama, sym. suite, 1969; Dakilang Lahi, sym., 1978; Exultation, pf conc., 1978; Lakambini, vn conc., 1983

Vocal: A las flores de Heidelberg, cant., 1962; Reminiscence, Mez, fl, banduria, gui, xyl-mar, perc, va, db, 1973; Sym. of Psalms, SSA, 1985; songs, hymns, 3 masses

Chbr: Brass Qt, G, 1962; Tryptich X–I, 1967; Tryptich X–II, 1987

LUCRECIA R. KASILAG

Buenaventura, Antonino

(b Baliuag, Bulacan, 10 May 1904; d Manila, 25 Jan 1996). Filipino composer and conductor. He graduated in composition and conducting from the Conservatory of the University of the Philippines in 1929, after which he joined the staff of that institution and then went into the armed forces. In 1948 he was made co-conductor of the Manila Municipal SO, with which he toured Hong Kong, Yokohama, Guam and Hawaii, and in the next year he received a UNESCO study grant to travel to the USA. On retiring from army service he was appointed director of the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory (1961–4). He was president of the National Music Council of the Philippines, and later founded the school of music and arts at the University of the East, directing it until 1981. He was awarded the Republic Cultural Heritage Award in music in 1961 and in 1985 was named National Artist for Music. He wrote in a neo-classical and neo-romantic style, and used elements of traditional Filipino music.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Buhay [Life] (ballet), 1965; Bukang liwayway [Dawn] (zar), 1966; Anong tamis ng mga sandali sa sariling bayan [How Sweet are the Moments in My Own Country] (zar), 1969; Kulas na batugan [Lazy Kulas] (ballet, 1), 1973; Talinghaga ng Pag-ibig [The Magic of Love] (op, 3), 1979

Orch: By the Hillside, sym. poem, 1941; Youth, sym. poem, 1946; Mindanao Sketches, sym. poem, 1947; Divertimento, pf, orch, 1959; Sym., C, 1961; Variations and Fugue on a Mountain Tune, 1972; Sym., B, 1980; Tpt Conc., 1985; Hn Conc., 1987

Vocal: Ode to the Filipino Heroes; Philippines Triumphant; Mass, C; songs

Chbr: Children’s Str Qt, 1934; Pf Qnt, C, 1963; Sonata, va, pf, 1969; Ww Qnt, 1970; Suite no.2, str qt, 1971; Moods, ww qnt, str qt, pf, 1981

LUCRECIA R. KASILAG

Buencamino, Francisco

(b San Miguel, Bulacan, 5 Nov 1883; d Milan, 16 Oct 1972). Filipino composer and conductor. He learnt the rudiments of music from his father and, at the age of 13, was sent to the Liceo de Manila to study composition and harmony with Adonay. After graduating from the Liceo (BA 1904) he worked in the theatre and composed zarzuelas and orchestral pieces. He taught at the Ateneo de Manila, Centro Escolar University and then at his own music academy, where he was assisted by his children, Pilar, a concert pianist, and Francisco, a popular pianist-arranger and orchestra leader. In later years he was music director for several Manila film companies. His compositions are in a distinctly romantic folk vein.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Brizas de mi patria, sym. suite, 1930; Pizzicato Caprice, 1948

Vocal: Ave Maria, 1935; Daughters of Bathala, historical pageant, 1935; O salutaris, 1938; mass

Pf: Luha [Tears], 1942; Ang larawan [The Portrait], 1943; Hawig-Hawig [Similar], variations, 1943; Mayon, 2 pf, 1944

Principal publisher: Presser

LUCRECIA R. KASILAG

Buenos Aires.

Capital city of Argentina. Sacred music was first used in the church of the Jesuit College about 1611 and at the cathedral, which was completed in 1622. In that year a primitive organ was installed at the Jesuit College church; the cathedral had a similar one. The missionary Jesuit priests taught music, and from the late 17th century their church had a rudimentary choir of black American slaves. The cathedral choir was supplemented by an orchestra of 14 players, and the earliest local compositions are those of the first known organist and maestro de capilla Juan Vizcaíno de Agüero (b Tucumán, Argentina, 1606); they date from 1628, the year of his arrival in Buenos Aires. He was succeeded at the cathedral by his pupil Juan de Cáceres y Ulloa and later by Francisco Vandemer (1756), Antonio Beles (1775–90), Bernabé de San Ginés (1775), Francisco del Pozo (1780), Mario Cabral (to 1785), Teodoro Guzmán (fl 1750–1820), Ambrosio Belarde (fl 1760–1815) and Tiburcio Ortega (1759–1839). The Portuguese musician Salinas de Lima played there in 1806 and the Italian Gaetano Lino Loforte in 1810. From 1785 to 1813 the organist was Bautista Goiburu, a noted teacher who guided local musical activity during this period. Music books of the period 1617–1809 are in the Universidad del Litoral, Santa Fé, the Museo Histórico, Córdoba, the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, and the Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. The early colonial works clearly show Spanish influence, whereas the more elaborate settings of the mass written after 1800 attest to some Italian influence.

The first public theatre, the Teatro de Operas y Comedias, opened in 1757; its productions included puppet shows, tonadillas escénicas (musical intermezzos) and a few short plays. The Teatro de la Ranchería (1783) presented tonadillas, zarzuelas and later the major Italian operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante and others. The period of the viceroyalty (1776–1810) was characterized by lively musical activity in the salons of the colonial mansions, where parts of tonadillas and zarzuelas were staged. Italian opera became overwhelmingly popular in the early 19th century and during the century led to the opening of many more theatres, including the Coliseo Provisional (1804, where the first complete opera heard in Buenos Aires, Rossini’s Il barbiere de Siviglia, was performed in 1825 – the Argentine national anthem being performed for the first time on the same occasion), the Teatro de la Victoria (1838), the Teatro del Buen Orden (1844) and the Teatro de la Federación (1845). The first Teatro Colón, built in front of the Plaza de Mayo, was inaugurated with La traviata with Sofia Vera Lorini and Enrico Tamberlik in 1857. It had 2500 seats but a short life as an opera house; the building became the Banco de la Nación Argentina in 1888. The leading opera season was transferred to the Teatro de la Opera (1872), which held the Buenos Aires premières of Verdi’s Don Carlo (1873) and Gomes’s Il Guarany (1874), and the world première of Pampa (1897) by the Argentine Arturo Berutti. Caruso sang there for the first time in Giordano’s Fedora in 1899; the theatre’s highpoint was in 1901 when he sang in Tosca with Hariclea Darclée, conducted by Toscanini. The new Teatro Colón, now Buenos Aires’s principal opera house (see illustration), opened in 1908 with Aida under Luigi Mancinelli. The house seats around 4000 (2500 at the time of its opening). The new Colón became the biggest and most prominent opera house in Latin America and one of the leading in the world. It has staged 58 premières of Argentine operas, among them Héctor Panizza’s Aurora (1908), Felipe Boero’s El matrero (1929), Juan José Castro’s Bodas de sangre (1956), Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo (1964) and Mario Perusso’s La voz del silencio (1969) and Escorial (1987). As well as the traditional repertory the Colón has given the South American premières of operas by such composers as Berg, Stravinsky, Janáček, Dallapiccola, Pizzetti, Schoenberg, Milhaud and Poulenc. A highpoint was the completed version of Manuel de Falla’s Atlántida sung in Catalan (1963); a rarity was the production in 1982 of the earliest surviving Spanish opera, Celos aun del aire matan (1660) by Juan Hidalgo. The Colón is also used for symphonic concerts, solo recitals and ballet seasons.

Concert life began likewise in the colonial salons, where the favourite form was the popular song with guitar accompaniment. Simple song genres of Spanish origin ranged from the salve (song of praise), saeta (hymn to the Virgin), alabanza (chant of praise) and rogativa (chant of supplication) to lovers’ songs and Christmas carols. The most notable salon was that of the composer and statesman Amancio Alcorta (c1850).

The musical life of the new capital was dominated by the composers Juan Bautista Alberdi and Amancio Alcorta, who wrote mainly chamber works for piano and some Romantic songs, and Juan Pedro Esnaola, who wrote works for voice and for piano and some chamber and orchestral music, also in the European Romantic idiom.

Throughout the 19th century philharmonic societies were founded to perform symphonic and chamber music; more than 20 remain, of which the most important are the Sociedad Filarmónica (1822), the Escuela de Música y Canto (1822), another Sociedad Filarmónica (1823) and the Sociedad de Mayo (1854). The repertory of chamber music alternated with symphony concerts and concertos performed by visiting foreign soloists; small instrumental concerts were given by local players, supplemented when necessary by players from elsewhere. The Orquesta Filarmónica of the Asociación del Profesorado Orquestal was founded in 1919; its first conductors were Ernesto Drangosh, Ferruccio Cattelani, Georges Zavlawsky and, in 1924, Ernest Ansermet. It performed the symphonic repertory, giving first performances in Buenos Aires of works by Stravinsky, Honegger, Falla, Malipiero, Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev and by young Argentine composers. This association and others like it (the Asociación Wagneriana, 1912, the Amigos de la Música, 1946 and especially the Grupo Renovación, 1929) did much to promulgate new works and unfamiliar genres (e.g. lieder) as well as the standard repertory. The present orchestras are that of the Teatro Colón (1924), the Orquesta Radio El Mundo (1930), the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (1948), the Orquesta Filarmónica (1949) and the Orquesta Radio Nacional (1951), all of which have had native and foreign conductors. Smaller groups formed in the 1960s include the Camerata Bariloche (1966, founded by the violinist Alberto Lysy), the Ensemble Musical de Buenos Aires (1968, founded by Pedro Calderón) and the Orquesta de Cámara Juvenil (1970, founded by the composer, cellist and conductor Washington Castro). Other orchestras are the Sinfonieta Omega Seguros, founded and conducted by Gerardo Gandini; the Orquesta San Isidro Labrador, under Charlotte Stuijt; and the Orquesta de Mayo and the Orquesta Juvenil (founded 1995), both conducted by Mario Benzecry.

The concert-promoting organizations, the Asociación Amigos de la Música, Asociación Amigos del Arte, Asociación Argentina de Compositores, Asociación de Conciertos de Cámara, Asociación de Jóvenes Compositores de la Argentina and Asociación del Profesorado Orquestal, all organize annual concert seasons (from April to October) including solo recitals, chamber music cycles and symphony concerts. The Agrupación Nueva Música is directed by Francisco Kroepfl and Lucía Maranca. Many organizations (e.g. the Asociación Amigos de la Música) have their own concert halls; others use rooms in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Artes Decorativas, the Biblioteca Nacional and the great hall of the Facultad de Derecho (school of law, cap. 1500), the hall of the Editorial Argentina de Musica, the Teatro Cómico (cap. 1200) and the Municipal S Martín which has three halls, Martín Coronado (2000), Lugones (1000) and Casacuberta (700).

The first public institution to provide music instruction was the Colegio Real de S Carlos, now the Colegio Nacional, founded by Juan José Vertiz (viceroy 1778–84); the influential Juan Bautista Goiburu was professor there. The Spanish priest José Antonio Picazarri founded the Escuela de Musica y Canto in 1822 and the Argentine composer Juan Pedro Esnaola was the first president of the Escuela de Música de la Provincia founded in 1875. The city also has a Conservatorio Municipal de Música and the Conservatorio Nacional de Música. The municipal radio broadcasts cultural programmes. The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella, founded in 1962 and directed by Ginastera, no longer exists. The Facultad de Artes y Ciencias Musicales of the Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) was established in 1958 with Ginastera as dean. It has departments of composition, musicology and criticism, sacred music, music education, orchestral conducting and choral conducting. Roberto Caamaño was dean until his death in 1993; he was succeeded in 1994 by Marta Lambertini. The UCA also has a symphony orchestra and centres of electro-acoustic music (directed by Pablo Cetta), contemporary music (Gerardo Gandini) and early music (Clara Cortázar). In 1994 the UCA and the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes together established the Premio Nacional de Piano Roberto Caamaño. The Centro de Experimentación de Opera y Ballet (CEOB) was created by Gandini in 1994 as an experimental group, with regular performances in three small halls: the Centro Cultural Recoleta, an auditorium of the Teatro S Martín, and one of the secondary stages of the Teatro Colón. Each year one of the productions is selected to have its première on the principal stage of the Colón.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (R. Stevenson)

O. Schiuma: Música y músicos argentinos (Buenos Aires, 1943)

N. Slonimsky: Music of Latin America (New York, 1945, 3/1949/R)

O. Schiuma: Músicos argentinos contemporaneos (Buenos Aires, 1954)

V. Gesualdo: Historia de la música en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1961, 2/1978)

H. Dianda: Música en la Argentina de hoy (Buenos Aires, 1966)

R. Caamaño, ed.: La historia del Teatro Colón (1908–1968) (Buenos Aires, 1969)

R. Arizaga: Enciclopedia de la música argentina (Buenos Aires, 1971)

E. Valenti-Ferro: Las voces del Teatro Colón 1908–1982 (Buenos Aires, 1983)

SUSANA SALGADO

Buescher.

American firm of band instrument manufacturers. It was founded in Elkart, Indiana by Ferdinand August ‘Gus’ Buescher (b Elk Township, Noble County, OH, 26 April 1861; d Elkhart, 29 Nov 1937). Buescher worked first for Conn from 1876, becoming foreman in 1888. In 1894 he established the Buescher Manufacturing Co. to make band instruments and metal tools in partnership with John L. Collins, a clothing merchant and Harry L. Young, a salesman. In 1904 the firm was reorganized as the Buescher Band Instrument Co. and in 1916 Buescher sold the company to five Elkhart businessmen, remaining as the manager and later as an engineer. In 1928 the Elkhart Band Instrument Co. bought the Buescher firm and continued manufacturing under the Buescher name until 1963 when it was sold to H. & A. Selmer. From 1932 to 1937 Buescher was a partner with Harry Pedler (1872–1950) of Art Musical Instruments Inc. of Elkhart, a manufacturing company which supplied brass instruments and parts to other businesses.

The Buescher company specialized in saxophones (which were particularly popular in the USA) and all types of brasswinds. The company also manufactured some flutes and clarinets and between 1910 and 1920 the ‘clariphon’, a clarinet with a curved metal barrel and a curved metal bell pitched in A, B, C or E. Buescher was probably the earliest American manufacturer of saxophones; he developed the technique of drawn tone-holes on the metal body, an improvement over the process of soldering a connecting ring to the tube. Buescher instruments bore the trademark ‘True-Tone’ and competed successfully with the rival Conn company's products; however, both firms shared parts and designs. Buescher introduced off-set middle valves for cornets, an air cushion valve mechanism, snap-on saxophone pads, and developed a seamless tube leadpipe for cornets and trumpets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterhouse-LangwillI

‘The Beuscher Clariphon’: advertisement in The Metronome, xxvii/8 (1911)

Buescher Band Instrument Company: The Origin of the Saxophone (Elkhart, c1918)

Buescher Band Instrument Company: Catalog No.14 (Elkhart, 1920)

D. McMakin: Musical Instrument Manufacturing in Elkhart, Indiana (unpubd typescript, 1987)

L. Farrar: A Directory of American Wind Instrument Makers (unpubd typescript, 1991)

ALBERT R. RICE

Buffalo.

American city, in western New York state. In 1808 the frontier village of Buffalo recorded its first musician and its first music critic. A contemporary writer noted ‘how hearts leaped’ when the fiddler Russell Noble came over the hill ‘to set the tune for the country dance’, and added: ‘He had no more regard for time than eternity’. In 1827 the city’s first three pianos were towed to Buffalo on the Erie canal’s mule-drawn barges. They were ordered by James Sheppard for his pioneer music shop, headquarters from 1838 of the Handel and Haydn Society, and the ancestor of one of the city’s most important musical institutions for over 100 years, the firm of Denton, Cottier & Daniels. The city’s first organ was placed in St Paul’s Church in 1829. Early musical life was dominated by German settlers; the Buffalo Liedertafel was established in 1848 and lasted well into the 20th century. In 1883 a music hall was built. Victor Herbert and his orchestra were a major attraction of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. From 1908 to 1917 the Philharmonic Society of Buffalo organized an annual May Festival featuring the Chicago SO under Frederick Stock, but the city had no official resident professional orchestra until the Buffalo PO was founded in 1935. Franco Autori was its first conductor and William Steinberg took over the post in 1945. He was followed by Josef Krips (1953–63) and Lukas Foss (1963–70). Under Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor from 1971 to 1978, the orchestra presented 32 concerts in series subscription form and many other popular and school concerts outside Buffalo.

The succession of Buffalo PO music directors continued with Julius Rudel (1978–85), Semyon Bychkov (1985–9) and Maximiano Valdes (1989–98). This was generally a period of strained finances and diminishing personnel which saw the orchestra’s very existence in peril. But the ensemble was able to maintain high artistic standards, and the tenure of Bychkov was a period of great optimism and vitality which reached its peak with the orchestra’s first European tour in 1988. When JoAnn Falletta was named music director in 1998, it was considered the most prestigious American orchestral appointment held by a woman, and optimism again rose.

Kleinhans Music Hall, designed by the architect Eliel Saarinen and built in 1940, is the orchestra’s home and provided the model for the Israel PO’s auditorium in Tel-Aviv. The adjoining Mary Seaton Room is one of the city’s principal recital rooms. In 1958 the orchestra purchased the NBC Symphony-Toscanini Library of scores containing 2000 titles, including the first editions and many others with notations by Toscanini on technical and stylistic matters.

The Buffalo Chamber Music Society is one of the oldest and most successful organizations of its type in the country, presenting an annual series of eminent chamber ensembles. Founded in 1924, the series hosted no fewer than 66 performances by the legendary Budapest String Quartet from 1931 to 1965. The city has not, however, enjoyed the same history of success in supporting locally produced opera. In 1988 several smaller companies merged into the regional Greater Buffalo Opera Company, but in 1998, during its tenth season, finances faltered and the company ceased operation.

Buffalo has a long tradition of fine music instruction, and has produced such national and international musicians as the soprano Rose Bampton, the pianist and pedagogue Guy Maier and the pianist Leonard Pennario. The First Settlement Music School was established in 1924. Paul Hindemith was brought to the city as a resident teacher in 1939 under the auspices of Cameron Baird, the music patron and founder of the University of Buffalo (since 1962, State University of New York at Buffalo) music department. The Budapest Quartet became the university’s resident chamber group in 1965, but the illness and death of the violist Boris Kroyt suspended the quartet’s activities a few seasons later. The Cleveland Quartet became the resident ensemble in 1971.

The Slee Beethoven Cycle is an unusual tradition which started in 1956. Frederick and Alice Slee left a bequest yielding some $40,000 annually, in part for a yearly presentation ‘in perpetuity’ of all 17 Beethoven works in quartet form, in a series of six concerts, in which the Budapest, Juilliard, Guarneri, La Salle and other leading quartets have taken part over the years. The university’s Slee Professorship, an endowed chair which is part of the bequest, provides for a leading composer to establish residence for an academic year, give lectures and supervise performances. Among Slee Professors since 1956 have been Carlos Chávez, Aaron Copland, Leon Kirchner, Ned Rorem, Mauricio Kagel, David Diamond, Henri Pousseur, Alexei Haieff, George Rochberg, Leo Smit, Virgil Thomson, Nicolas Nabokov and Lejaren Hiller. Hiller was also co-director with Lukas Foss of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, which has its headquarters in the university. Founded in 1964 by Foss and Allen Sapp, then chairman of the university music department, the centre has brought young composers and instrumentalists to Buffalo from many countries, usually for one-year residencies. Their functions are to compose and perform; they have no teaching duties. Among them have been Sylvano Bussotti, Niccolò Castiglioni, Cornelius Cardew, Vinko Globokar, Yuji Takahashi, Paul Zukofsky, Terry Riley and George Crumb. They have given annual series in Carnegie Hall, New York, and on several campuses in the eastern USA.

The attention generated by these activities made Buffalo one of the world’s leading centres for new music during the 1960s and 70s. When funding for the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts eventually dried up, the momentum it had established allowed the university at Buffalo to continue its prominence with two new annual events, the North American New Music Festival (1983–96) and the June in Buffalo Festival, with emphasis on the work of young, emerging composers, founded in 1975 by Morton Feldman and still thriving in 1999 under the direction of David Felder.

The Buffalo and Erie County Library (incorporating the Grosvenor Library founded in 1836) contains a small but important collection of musical Americana, including sheet music and tunebooks. Among the internationally known musicians who have been Buffalo residents are the baritone Heinz Rehfuss, Morton Feldman, who was appointed Edgard Varèse Professor at the University in 1976, Lejaren Hiller, a pioneer in computer music, and the pianist and composer Leo Smit (ii).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Larned and E. Choate: Music in Buffalo: a Centennial Monograph (Buffalo, 1932)

A.P. Stiller: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra: Golden Anniversary Commemorative Book (Buffalo, 1985)

JOHN DWYER/HERMAN TROTTER

Buffalo Springfield.

American country rock and folk rock group. It was formed in Los Angeles in 1966 by Neil Young (b Toronto, 12 Nov 1945; vocals, guitar), Bruce Palmer (b Liverpool, NS, 9 Sept 1946; bass guitar), Stephen Stills (b Dallas, 3 Jan 1945; vocals, guitar) and Richey (Paul Richard) Furay (b Yellow Springs, OH, 9 May 1944; vocals, guitar). Other members have included Dewey Martin (drums, vocals) and Jim Messina (guitar). Their first album Buffalo Springfield (Atco, 1966) featured Young’s introspective ballads contrasted with Stills’ folk rock songs including the latter’s For What It’s Worth, an evocation of an anti-Vietnam student demonstration, which became an anthem for West Coast youth. Buffalo Springfield Again (Atco, 1967) contains some of the group’s best songs, including Stills’ Bluebird and Everyday, Young’s Broken Arrow and Expecting to Fly, and Furay’s A Child’s Claim to Fame. Often seen as their seminal work, this album is more a collection of individual songs than a cohesive whole.

A transatlantic success, the group undertook a series of high-profile concerts, culminating in their performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, one of the event’s highlights. Short-lived, but extremely significant within their field, Buffalo Springfield were heavily influenced by the Byrds and, like them, often seen as America’s answer to the Beatles. They split up shortly before the release of their third album, Last Time Around (Atco, 1968).

Essentially a hybrid, mixing Greenwich Village's folk derivatives with mainstream pop, Buffalo Springfield was a catalyst in the development of folk rock and country rock.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Zimmer: Crosby, Stills and Nash: the Authorized Biography (London, 1984)

Neil Young: the Rolling Stone Files (New York,1994)

N. Young: Love to Burn: Thirty Years of Speaking Out, 1966–9 (London, 1997)

LIZ THOMSON

Buffardin, Pierre-Gabriel

(b Provence, c1690; d Paris, 13 Jan 1768). French flautist and teacher, active in Germany. Marseilles is sometimes cited as his native city, but 18th-century sources indicate only that he came from Provence. As a young man he was taken to Constantinople by the French ambassador, and there, sometime before 1712, taught Johann Jacob Bach, J.S. Bach's younger brother. In November 1715 Buffardin entered the service of Augustus II in Dresden, and was soon regarded as one of the outstanding players in the court orchestra. Under Augustus III his stipend of 500 thalers was raised to 1000, and in 1749 he was pensioned. During his years in Dresden he maintained contacts with his homeland, and in 1726 and 1737 performed in the Concert Spirituel in Paris. He returned to France in 1750 and on 24 July of that year performed for the Dauphine. A letter by Buffardin concerning the use of quarter-tones on the flute appeared in the September 1764 volume of the Mercure (pp.186ff; discussed by Reilly and Solum).

For four months Buffardin was the teacher of J.J. Quantz, and also of F.J. Götzel and P.G. Florio. Quantz indicated that his special skill lay in the performance of quick pieces. The Dutch flautist A. Mahaut credited him with the invention of a divided foot-piece with a tuning slide for the flute. Buffardin was not well known as a composer, and only two of his compositions appear to survive: a trio-sonata in A for flute, violin and continuo (F-Pn; facs., Banhagen, 1989) and a flute concerto in E minor (D-SWl; ed. H. Augsbach, Leipzig, 1984). The latter is also credited, probably mistakenly, to Quantz (B-Bc) and to Scherer (S-Skma). A set of sonatas is listed in a 1742 catalogue of Leclerc, but no copy has been traced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Cucuel: ‘Notes sur quelques musiciens, luthiers, éditeurs et graveurs de musique au XVIIIe siècle’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 243–9

L. de La Laurencie: ‘La musique française de Lully à Gluck (1687–1789)’, EMDC, I/iii (1921), 1362–562, esp. 1532

L. de La Laurencie: Inventaire critique du Fonds Blancheton (Paris, 1930–31), i, 59

N. Dufourcq, ed.: La musique à la cour de Louis XIV et de Louis XV d’après les mémoires de Sourches et Luynes, 1681–1758 (Paris, 1970), 141

J. Bowers: ‘A Catalogue of French Works for the Transverse Flute, 1692–1761’, RMFC, xviii (1978), 89–125

F. Vester: Flute Music in the 18th Century: an Annotated Bibliography (Monteux, 1985), 86

R.L. Marshall: The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach: the Sources, the Style, the Significance (New York, 1989)

E.R. Reilly and J. Solum: ‘Die Lusse, Buffardin and an Eighteenth-Century quarter tone piece’, Historical Performance: the Journal of Early Music, America, v (1992), 19–23

I. Gronefeld: Die Flötenkonzerte bis 1850: ein thematisches Verzeichnis (Tutzing, 1992)

A. Powell and D. Lasocki: ‘Bach and the Flute: the Players, the Instruments, the Music’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 9–29

EDWARD R. REILLY

Buffet, Louis-Auguste [jeune]

(b La Couture, nr Dreux, 6 Aug 1789; d Anet, 30 Sept 1864). French maker of woodwind instruments, brother of Denis Buffet-Auger (founder of the Buffet-Crampon firm). He was born into a family of woodturners, and by the time of his marriage in 1813 he was already working in La Couture as a wind instrument maker (although he was living in nearby Anet). By 1830 he had established a workshop in Paris, where he continued to specialize in making woodwind instruments. In about 1834 he made a 15-key bass clarinet in C for the clarinettist I.-F. Dacosta, and a little later he made another, this time in B. Buffet went on to work with the flautist Victor Coche and in 1838 their work culminated in an improved Boehm flute (see Flute, §II, 4(iii)). However, Buffet is best remembered for his work with the clarinettist H.E. Klosé, which resulted in an improved clarinet exhibited at the 1839 Paris Exposition. The clarinet’s keywork incorporated ring keys similar to those on the Boehm flute, and Buffet’s design later became known as the Boehm clarinet (see Clarinet, §II, 4). This system is still the one most widely used on clarinets, and has been little altered from Buffet’s original design. Working with the Spanish oboist P.J.R. Soler, Buffet also exhibited a Boehm system oboe at the 1844 Paris Exposition, but his work in this direction was not so successful.

By 1845 Buffet jeune had been joined in his workshop by his son (Louis-)Auguste Buffet (b Anet, 15 July 1816; d Paris, 7 April 1884), their signatures appearing that year on a letter protesting about the activities of Adolphe Sax. The son signed the letter Auguste Buffet, while the father continued to call himself Buffet jeune. Between 1859 and 1862, Auguste took out several patents concerning woodwind instruments. He took over the business on the death of his father, and exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1867.

ANTHONY BÉTHUNE, WILLIAM McBRIDE

Buffet-Auger, Denis

(b La Couture, 28 July 1783; d Paris, 24 Sept 1841). French woodwind instrument maker. He was the founder of the firm that later became known as Buffet-Crampon.

Buffet-Crampon.

French firm of woodwind instrument makers. It was founded by Denis Buffet [Buffet-Auger] (b La Couture, 28 July 1783; d Paris, 24 Sept 1841), elder brother of Louis-Auguste Buffet [Buffet jeune] (whose own business was wholly independent). After his marriage to Marie-Anne Auger, Denis became known as Buffet-Auger. In 1825 he set up a workshop at 22 passage du Grand Cerf, Paris, where he made both string and wind instruments. Later 19th-century advertising states that the business was founded in 1830, not 1825, and this probably signifies that from 1830 onwards, Buffet-Auger’s son Jean-Louis (b La Couture, 18 July 1813; d Paris, 17 April 1865) gradually took over the running of the firm. In 1836, Jean-Louis married Zoë Crampon. At the Paris Exposition three years later, the business obtained a mention honorable. When Buffet-Auger died, Jean-Louis was left in charge of the business, taking the name Buffet-Crampon by 1844.

Buffet-Crampon were awarded bronze medals at the Paris Expositions of 1844 and 1849. One exhibit at the latter was probably the firm’s ‘omnitonic’ clarinet, based on Iwan Müller's 13-key model (with added left- and right-hand ring-keys), developed in consultation with the clarinettist Victor Blancou and patented in 1845. The firm’s advertising for that year also featured the new ring-keyed clarinets (later known as Boehm clarinets), as well as more usual 13-, 14- and 15-keyed clarinets, and a selection of Boehm flutes and piccolos. It is clear that Buffet-Crampon must have had some sort of commercial arrangement with his uncle’s firm for, at that time, the Boehm clarinet was still the patent-protected property of Louis-Auguste.

Having gone into partnership with his younger brother Louis (b Anet, nr La Couture, 10 March 1823) and F. Tournier (d 1859), Buffet-Crampon established a second workshop in Mantes-la-Ville in 1850. Within five years the workforce had grown to about 15 employees. At some stage Louis left to set up his own company, Louis Buffet & Cie, at a different address. A few instruments bearing the name of Louis Buffet have survived. Louis was replaced in his brother’s business by (Jean-)Pierre(-Gabriel) Goumas (b Mesnil-sur-l’Estrée, nr Dreux, 2 Jan 1827), the husband of a niece of Buffet-Crampon, who had joined the firm in 1851 and became a partner in 1855. Following Tournier’s death, Buffet-Crampon and Goumas formed a new company, named Buffet-Crampon & Cie, with Adolphe-Marthe Leroy. The death of Buffet-Crampon left Goumas solely in charge and he lost no time in diversifying the company’s activities. A steam-engine was installed in the Mantes factory in 1866, perhaps necessitated by the introduction of saxophones to their product line.

Goumas formed a new partnership, called Goumas & Cie, with his sons-in-law Léon Leguay and Léon Crampon in 1870 although they continued to use the Buffet-Crampon & Cie trademark. In 1874 Goumas & Cie began to publish military music. In 1875 they patented a modification to the saxophone’s left-hand keywork (with further modifications over the succeeding four years), allowing the mechanism to function in a similar way to that of the Boehm clarinet. Many saxophones were ordered for French regimental bands, and they also received regular orders from other instrument makers, including Lecomte, Mahillon, Besson, Gautrot and Romero.

Goumas sold his share of the business to former pupils Paul Evette (d 25 March 1918) and Ernest Schaeffer in January 1885. During the year 1888 Evette & Schaeffer exhibited at international expositions in Barcelona, Bologna and Melbourne. During the next 40 years or so more than a dozen Evette & Schaeffer patents were obtained, primarily concerned with saxophone developments. Several of their innovations have become standard features on the modern saxophone. In 1896 they began to manufacture brass instruments. By the end of the century their catalogue of published music included about 2000 titles. Between 1885 and 1927 Evette & Schaeffer had offices in London.

Paul Evette was succeeded on his death by his son Maurice (d 1929). The partnership of Evette & Schaeffer ended in 1926, and Maurice continued to run the company on his own until his retirement in 1929. That year also saw the creation of a new company under the name of Buffet-Crampon, by Paul-Eugène Leseigneur, Gabriel Franot (d 1938) and Paul Lefèvre. The new company suffered a serious decline in the 1930s, but after World War II they introduced a new range of ‘Dynaction’ saxophones. In 1953 Robert Carrée took over factory management, and the following year introduced a range of clarinets with the so-called ‘Continentale’ bore. Leseigneur was succeeded in 1959 by his nephew Jean Blondelet. In 1963 Buffet-Crampon introduced three ranges of clarinets with different bores, one intended for classical music, another for chamber music and the third suited to jazz. Buffet-Crampon continued to manufacture a complete range of woodwind instruments, although they stopped making flutes in 1965.

In 1970 Buffet-Crampon were bought by the American group, Tolchin Instruments Inc. About the same time, the Buffet-Crampon company introduced less expensive ranges of clarinets and saxophones under the name of Evette. They also introduced new alto and tenor saxophones, designated S1, for the top end of the market in 1974. In 1975 they released the ‘RC’ range of clarinets, and Hugo Schreiber became vice-president of the company. Towards the end of the 1970s, Buffet-Crampon revived the Evette & Schaeffer name for a range of Japanese-made flutes intended for students. During 1981 the Tolchin Group was bought by Boosey & Hawkes, and seven years later, Michael Winter and Paul Baronnat took over management of Buffet-Crampon in France. In 1994 the company introduced ‘Green Line’ clarinets and oboes, made of a synthetic material composed of grenadilla wood powder and carbon fibre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Pierre: Les facteurs d'instruments de musique (Paris, 1893/R)

A. Petiot: Buffet-Crampon depuis 1825 (Paris, 1962)

ANTHONY BÉTHUNE, WILLIAM McBRIDE

Buff stop [harp stop and (erroneously) lute stop]

(Fr. registre de luth; Ger. Lautenzug; It. sordino, liuto).

A device found on harpsichords of most periods and schools (though more rarely on Italian instruments) as well as on some pianos, especially square pianos of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It mutes the tone by lightly pressing a piece of buff leather, cloth or felt against the strings near the nut, and has the effect of damping the vibrations, especially the high harmonics, so that the sound takes on a duller, pizzicato quality. In harpsichords, the buff stop usually consists of a sliding batten fitted with a small block of material for each note. Sliding the batten to one side brings the blocks against one register of strings, usually at 8' pitch. In harpsichords by members of the Ruckers family, the buff batten was usually divided into separate treble and bass sections. Occasionally in harpsichords but normally in pianos the buff-stop batten is covered with material along its entire length, so that all the unison strings are damped when the batten is raised or (if placed over the strings) lowered against them. The buff stop should not be confused with the Peau de buffle register, which is a row of jacks equipped with soft leather plectra, nor with a Lute stop, which is a row of jacks plucking close to the nut.

See also Registration, §II.

EDWIN M. RIPIN/JOHN KOSTER

Bugamberghi, Matteo.

See Buechenberg, Matteo.

Buganda.

See Uganda, §III.

Bugeja.

Maltese family of composers and church musicians. Together with the Nani family they dominated Maltese ecclesiastical music during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many Bugeja manuscripts are in the Maltese Dominican Province music archives and Mdina Cathedral Museum.

(1) Pietro Paolo Bugeja

(2) Vincenzo Bugeja

(3) Filippo Bugeja

(4) Riccardo Bugeja

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cenni storici sulla vita del maestro di cappella Vincenzo Bugeja maltese (Malta, 1861)

A. Levanzin: ‘Il melodramma maltese: P.P. Bugeja’, Malta letteraria, ii/11 (1905), 75–6

A. Levanzin: ‘Il melodramma maltese: Vincenzo Bugeja’, ibid., ii/12 (1905), 99

V. Caruana dei Conti Gatto: Malta artistica illustrata parte 2da: musica (Malta, 1910)

‘Ricardo Bujega’, La Vallette, ii/3 (1926), 42–3

U. Rolandi: Musica e musicisti in Malta (Livorno, 1932)

R. Mifsud Bonnici: Mużiċisti Kompożituri Maltin: Maestri di cappella tal-Kattidral (Malta, 1950)

R. Mifsud Bonnici: Mużiċisti Kompożituri Maltin u Għawdxin tal-Bieraħ u tal-Lum [Maltese composers of yesterday and today] (Malta, 1951)

J. Eynaud: Il teatro italiano a Malta (Malta, 1979)

J. Refalo Rapa: Iċ-Ċirklu u Ġrajjietu [The Club and its history] (Malta, 1987)

R. Micallef: The Bugeja Musicians (diss., U. of Malta, 1989) [with list of works]

F. Bruni: Musica sacra a Malta (Malta, 1993)

J. Vella: ‘Music’, Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. H. Frendo and O. Friggieri (Malta, 1994), 159–79

A.G. Miceli: L’istorja ta’ l’opra f’Malta (1631–1886) (Malta, 1999)

JOSEPH VELLA BONDIN

(1) Pietro Paolo Bugeja

(b Valletta, 29 April 1772; d Valletta, 12 June 1828). He studied with Francesco Azopardi and with Insanguine, Furno and Respoli at the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio in Naples (1791–9), where he was also maestro di cappella of the church of S Ivo, for which he composed his first masses. In 1798 he became assistant to Azopardi, working mainly in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta during the French blockade.

On Azopardi’s death in 1809, Bugeja was appointed maestro di cappella at the cathedrals of Mdina and St John, where he worked for the rest of his life. The quality of his performances and compositions induced other churches to seek his services, and to meet these demands he established his own cappella. His compositions are based in the Classical style, although there are indications of earlier idioms, especially in his liturgical music. His settings of Jeremiah’s lamentation Recordare and the Benediction hymn O salutaris hostia, still justly popular, are outstanding examples of the late 18th-century Italian cantata da chiesa. Pietro Paolo was also an accomplished conductor, and from the 1806–7 season was engaged at the Manoel Theatre, where he directed operas by Paisiello and Cimarosa, among others.

WORKS

(selective list)

Sacred vocal (all with orch): Gioas, re di Guda (orat, P. Metastasio), 1813; Messa breve, 1811, Messa Pastorale, F, 1814, Messa (Kyrie and Gloria), E, Messa dei morti, mass movts; many other liturgical works and hymns, incl. Laudate Pueri, 1797, Ave Maris stella, 1798, Recordare, 1800, Improperi per il Venerdì Santo, 1804, Salve regina, 1805, Miserere, 1817, Responsori del Giovedì Santo, 1819, Laudate Pueri, 1820, Dixit Dominus, 1825, Tantum ergo, TeD, Mag, Stabat mater

Other: 9 sinfonias, orch, lost; qnt, fl, str

(2) Vincenzo Bugeja

(b Valletta, 29 Oct 1805; d Valletta, 20 June 1860). Second son of (1) Pietro Paolo Bugeja. He studied with his father and with Furno and Zingarelli at the Naples Conservatory (1829–31). On 15 June 1828 he succeeded his father as maestro di cappella of the cathedrals of Mdina and St John. It is likely that in Naples he started working on Lodoviska, which became the first work presented during the Manoel Theatre’s 1832 spring season; despite its warm reception and musical merit it was the only opera that he completed. After his father’s early death Vincenzo, in addition to his cathedral duties, inherited the rapidly expanding Bugeja cappella, and he was fully occupied not only with composition but also with the cappella’s management. Moreover he was now facing tough competition from the newly instituted Nani family cappella, a rivalry that spilled over into several directions, not least the formation of two powerful groups of supporters.

Apart from Lodoviska and six short sinfonias which were probably intended for church use, Vincenzo wrote only sacred vocal music; his festa antiphons were renowned, and are still popular. He wrote in a bel canto style reminiscent, according to Caruana dei Conte Gatto, of Norma and Donizetti’s Lucia; although clearly operatic, his music is spontaneous and appropriate to its liturgical context.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Lodoviska (op, 2, F. Malagricci), Malta, Manoel, 15 March 1832

Sacred vocal: Masses and mass movts; ants, incl. Beata mater, 1836, Ingresso Zacchariae, 1839, Sancte Paule, 1839, Hodie egressa est, 1846, Pie Pater, 1848, Nativitas tua, 1853, O Melitae, 1860; c14 hymns, incl. 2 Ave maris stella, 1836, 1853; 8 Tantum ergo, Requiem aeternam, 1854, Laudate Dominum, Lauda Jerusalem, Dixit Dominus

Orch: Sinfonia (‘Il torneo’); Sinfonia no.2; 4 others, lost

(3) Filippo Bugeja

(b Valletta, 23 Jan 1808; d Valletta, 8 Oct 1891). Third and youngest son of (1) Pietro Paolo Bugeja. He was well known as a pianist, organist and conductor, and took over the Bugeja cappella after the early death of (2) Vincenzo Bugeja until (4) Riccardo Bugeja was ready to assume its directorship. He refused a similar temporary engagement as the Cathedral’s maestro di cappella, which would have kept that prestigious post within the Bugeja family. Composition did not interest him and his few extant works, distinguished by good vocal writing, were dictated by cappella requirements.

(4) Riccardo Bugeja

(b Valletta, 25 Oct 1844; d Floriana, 8 Oct 1926). Son of (2) Vincenzo Bugeja. He studied with his father and from 1862 to 1869 at the Naples Conservatory, where according to Mifsud Bonnici he studied with Mercadante. In 1870 he assumed full responsibility for the Bugeja cappella; its continuing popularity prompted new commissions which produced the writing of a number of admirable antiphons, hymns and psalms. His musical style is based on his father’s but the orchestration tends to be heavier and more operatic. Mainly, however, he relied on his forefathers’ output, and completed only one mass.

Riccardo was slow to respond to Pius X’s Motu proprio of 1903, and only after 1906 did he take steps to conform. This delay gave other maestri di cappella working in accord with the Motu proprio the chance to encroach upon the domain of the Bugeja cappella, and by the time of Riccardo’s death in 1926 it was much reduced. This diversity was actually beneficial for Maltese liturgical music, and helped to revitalize it.

WORKS

(selective list)

Sacred: Messa in omaggio alla Immacolata Maria, 3vv, 1907; Off, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Libera me, 1886; mass movts; psalm settings, incl. Juravit Dominus, Laudate Dominum, Dixit Dominus, Virgam virtutis, De torrente, Gloria Patri, Deus in adjutorium, Laudate Pueri; 6 ants

Orch: Sinfonia (‘Cordelia’); Marcia trionfale (‘La vittoria’)

(5) Censinu [Vincenzo, Vincent] Bugeja

(b Rabat, 24 May 1910; d Sliema, 25 Jan 1967). Son of (4) Riccardo Bugeja. He studied with Luigi Vella and Giuseppe Abdilla and, between 1927 and 1934, mainly with Paolo Ferretti, Casimiri and Refice at the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra in Rome. On his return to Malta, he started reorganizing and revitalizing the family cappella, though radically changed liturgical and social conditions after the Moto Oroprio of 1903 and World War II resulted in a reduced level of activity. His compositions, though technically sound, only sporadically show high imagination.

In 1939, to fill the void created by the non-availability of Italian singers and musicians in Maltese theatres during World War II, he brought together Maltese substitutes to form the Malta Amateur Theatricals Company and, except for an interval when hostilities were at their height, continued to direct and produce operas till 1948, when the cessation of war saw the return of predominantly foreign casts.

Censinu's marriage was childless and, although the two-centuries-old cappella Bugeja continues to function and still uses compositions of the Bugeja family, it has passed outside family control, its present maestro being the Dominican monk Salv Galea.

WORKS

(selective list)

unless otherwise stated, with 1–4 voices and orchestra

Masses: Messa ‘Beate Marie Virginis’ (1931–32); Messa ‘San Publii’ (1934); Messa solenne no.3 (1935); Messa, children's vv, orch; Messa (Kyrie and Gloria)

Pss: Confitebor tibi, Domine (Ps cx), 1932; Domine probasti me (Ps cxxxviii), 1932; Beatus vir (Ps cxi), 1933; Dixit Dominus (Ps cix), 1933; Lauda Jerusalem (Ps cxlvii), 1933; Deus in adjutorium (Ps lxix), children's vv, orch, 1934; Laudate Dominum (Ps cxvi), 1936; Laudate pueri (Ps cxii), 1936; Laetatus sum (Ps cxxi); Nisi Dominus (Ps cxxvi)

Other: Tantum ergo no.1, 1930; Tantum ergo no.3, 1931; Quem vidisti, 1934; O salutaris hostia, 1935; Tantum ergo no.9, 1935; Mag, 1935; Antifona per San Domenico, 1936; Sacerdos et pontifex, 1944; Ave regina coelorum, 1948; Quia eduxi te (Reproach)

Orch: Preludio ‘Ritmi di vita’

Bugel

(Ger.).

See Bouts.

Bughici, Dumitru

(b Iaşi, 14 Nov 1921). Romanian composer,teacher and musicologist. He studied with Zirra (harmony), Antonin Ciolan (conducting) and Constantinescu (piano) at the Iaşi Conservatory (1935–8), and with A. Dimitriyev (counterpoint), Schnittke (form) and Voloshinov (composition) at the Leningrad Conservatory (1950–55). In 1955 he was appointed to teach form at the Bucharest Conservatory. His compositions show a dramatic temperament and an inclination towards symphonic music of significant proportions, both coming together in his many programme works. Concern with instrumental colour and improvisation led him to use jazz in some pieces, but in an entirely serious manner; his late Romantic style, showing, particularly in choral music, a preference for linear polyphony, includes allusions to folk material. His musicological work is concise and rigorously analytical. From 1985 he has been resident in Israel.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Poemul vieţii noi [The Poem of New Life], op.2, 1953; Vn Conc., op.6, 1955; Evocare, op.8, 1956; Simfonietta tinereţii [Sinfonietta for Youth], op.13, 1958; Poem eroic. ‘Filimon Sîrbu’, op.15, 1959; Poemul primăverii, op.17, 1960; Simfonia-poem, op.20, 1961; Poemul bucuriei [Poem to Joy], op.22, 1962; Simfonia coregrafică, op.28, 1964, rev. 1967; Sym. no.3 ‘Ecouri de jazz’, op.30 no.1, 1966; Dialoguri dramatice, op.31, 1967; Sinfonietta da camera, op.38, 1971; File de letopiseţ [Chronicle Pages], op.40, 1972; Concert in ritm de jazz, op.43, tpt, orch, 1975; Concertino, op.44, pf, orch, 1975; Vn Conc. no.2, op.49, 1977; Tablouri coregrafice [Choreographic Tableaux], op.51, 1978; Simfonia Bucegilor [Sym. of the Bucegi Mountains], op.52, 1978–9; Sinfonietta, str, op.53, 1979; Sym. Concertante no.1, op.55, str qt, orch, 1979–80; Sym. Concertante no.2, op.58, 1980–81; Simfonia-balet, op.61, 1983; In Memoriam, lyric-dramatic sym., op.63, 1984; Fl Conc., op.64, 1985; Simfonia romantica, op.65, 1985; Sym. ‘Aspirations’, op.66, 1985; B Cl Conc., op.67, 1986; Sym. of Gratitude, 1987–90

Str Qts: no.1, op.4, 1945; no.2, op.33 no.1, 1968; Cvartet fantazie, op.34, 1968–9; no.3, ‘The Plains of my Childhood’, op.38, 1971; no.4, op.47, 1976–7; no.5, op.50, 1977; no.6, op.60, 1983

Other chbr: Suite, op.1, vn, pf, 1953; Sonata, op.25, vn, pf, 1963; Fantezie ritmică, op.30 no.3, ob, cl, bn, 1968; Miniaturi, op.45, brass qnt, 1975; Trio no.2, op.46, vn, vc, pf, 1976; Sonatina, op.54, vn, pf, 1980; Sonata ‘Sonances’, op.56 no.1, vn, 1980; Fantasia, op.56 no.3, xyl, db, 1980; Septet, op.57 no.1, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, db, 1980–81; Brass Qnt no.2, op.57 no.2, 1981; Wind Qnt, op.59 no.1, 1982

Choral works

Principal publishers: Muzgiz (Moscow), Muzicală (Bucharest)

WRITINGS

Suita şi sonata (Bucharest, 1965)

Formele muzicale (Bucharest, 1969)

Dicţionar de forme şi genuri muzicale (Bucharest, 1974, 2/1978)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BakerB

D. Popovici: Muzica românească contemporană (Bucharest, 1970)

V. Cosma: Muzicieni români: lexicon (Bucharest, 1970), 92–94

M. Berindei: Dictionar de jazz (Bucharest, 1976), 44 only

Z. Vancea: Creaţia muzicală românească: sec. XIX–XX (Bucharest, 1978), 335–49

VIOREL COSMA

Bugle (i)

(Fr. clairon; Ger. Signalhorn; It. corna da segnale; Sp. corneta).

In the Middle Ages a not very common Old French word (also cor buglèr, bugleret) for a small bovine signalling horn, derived from the latin buculus (‘bullock’); in Old English the term seems clearly to be derived from bugle (‘wild ox’). The modern bugle of copper or brass, used by the armed forces of most countries and by civilian boys' bands in Britain, has a wide conical bore and pitch of B (on the Continent often C) like the ordinary modern trumpet. The relatively wide, rapidly expanding bore of bugles gives a short series of modes of vibration of the air column, resulting in a concentration of the sound energy in the fundamental and lower overtones, a small useful compass, and often poor intonation. The regulation British bugle (fig.1) has the compact twice-wound form with small bell, first authorized in 1858. Other countries use variants of this or else keep the larger once-wound model, usually with wide bell, made first in London about 1800 (bugle horn) and officially adopted throughout the British army in 1812 (and by the French in 1822). Bugle calls employ harmonics from the 2nd to the 6th, written c' to g''. The British calls are given in Trumpet and Bugle Sounds.

Some calls originated in the late 18th century, when they were sounded on the large semicircular bugle horn with leather harness, which was the original military bugle introduced in Germany during the Seven Years War as a distinguishing instrument for Jäger battalions and other light troops (fig.2). Known as Halbmond this had the general form of the older Flügelhorn of the German hunt. A. and R. von Sichart in Geschichte der Königlich-Hannoverschen Armee (Hanover, 1866) mentioned it as used by the Hanoverian forces in 1758. By 1764 it reached the English Light Dragoons as ‘bugle horn’. The Grenadier Guards adopted it in 1772, the light artillery in 1788 and the light infantry meanwhile. By a War Office order of 1814 light infantry and rifle regiments were granted the design of a bugle horn as a badge, though it was already worn by the 60th Royal American, later the King's Royal Rifle Brigade. Also in infantry use during this period was a small circular horn. The ‘German post horn’ mentioned in English inspection reports of 1774 was presumably this, which was also used by some Hanoverian regiments, and by French and Dutch chasseurs during the Napoleonic wars.

The Halbmond type of bugle horn was normally pitched in D, often sounded with a C crook. Its calls are published in John Hyde's New and Compleat Preceptor, and some of them were quoted in operas by Bishop. Continental calls for this and for the subsequent bugles are in Georges Kastner’s Manuel général (Paris, 1848). Some German and Russian regiments retained the Halbmond until past the mid-19th century and today it lives on in parts of north Germany such as Sauerland, serving in the Brackenjagd in its original capacity as a hunting horn.

In America, the terminology is less straightforward: the British type of bugle is sometimes known as the ‘cavalry bugle’ while the word ‘bugle’ is often for a trumpet-like instrument of brass pitched in G and usually provided with a piston valve to lower the pitch by a 4th whereby the written b', d'' and (flat) f'' can be added to the natural C chord. This idea was known in France by 1912 and it is probably from there that it spread also to Italy, in the one- to three-valve bugle known as the Bersag horn. Combination bugle-trumpets with two bells and switch valve were patented in England and France between 1855 and 1873, but did not win success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Hyde: A New and Compleat Preceptor for the Trumpet & Bugle Horn (London, c1799)

J. Gilbert: The Bugle Horn Calls of Riflemen and Light Infantry (London, 1804)

S. Potter: The Bugle Horn Major's Companion (London, c1815)

Trumpet and Bugle Sounds for All Branches of the Army, with Instructions for the Training of Trumpeters and Buglers (1883, with many subsequent eds., 1966 as Trumpet and Bugle Calls)

Gunnery Drill Book for his Majesty's Fleet, Corrected to January 1, 1909 (London, 1909)

Manual for Buglers, U.S. Navy, NAVPERS 10137–B (Washington DC, 1953)

The Bugler's Handbook, Royal Marines (London, 1966)

Trumpet and Bugle Calls for the Army with Instructions for the Training of Trumpeters and Buglers (London, 1966)

FM 12–50, U.S. Army Bands, U.S. Army Element, School of Music, Department of the Army (Washington DC, 1991)

R. Dudgeon: The Keyed Bugle (Metuchen, NJ, 1993)

ANTHONY C. BAINES/TREVOR HERBERT

Bugle (ii)

(Fr.).

See Flugelhorn.

Bugle à clefs

(Fr.).

See Keyed bugle.

Bugle alto

(Fr.).

See Tenor horn.

Bugleret

(Fr.).

See Bugle (i).

Buglhat [Boglhat, Bulhat], Johannes de

(fl 1528–55). Music printer. He joined the chapel of Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara, as a clerk between 1525 and 1528, and probably travelled with her household from Paris to Ferrara in September 1528. A Ferrarese document of 1549 describes him as a priest of the diocese of Clermont and almoner to Renée, and he also served there as clerk of the chapel and surgeon to Renée until 1555 or later. Together with his associates Henrico de Campis and Antonio Hucher, he was one of the first to use the single-impression method of music printing in Italy, a technique introduced to Paris early in 1528 by Attaingnant, which Buglhat may have learnt before leaving France. Campis, possibly related to the Lyonnaise music printer Jannot de Campis (fl 1504–10), is listed on the rolls of the Ferrarese court chapel as a singer from 1534 until 1549. Hucher was a wood engraver, to whom the illustrations in Messi Sbugo's Banchetti (Ferrara, 1549) have been attributed.

Their earliest publication, Liber cantus (1538), was printed by Francesco Rossi (Rubeus), with Buglhat, Campis and Hucher providing ‘expensis & labore’. In 1540 Campis published Alfonso della Viola's second book of madrigals and then seems to have withdrawn from publishing. Buglhat and Hucher continued as partners, printing non-musical works and two more books of madrigals (1548 and 1550). A 1558 reprint of one of the madrigal books was described by Vogel, but no copy is known to survive.

In the dedication to Antonio Gardano's Mottetti del frutto a sei voci (1539), Buglhat, Campis and Hucher were attacked for impinging on Gardano's rights, but the exact nature of the rivalry is unknown, as there seems to have been no direct piracy. The two publishing houses may have been competing for the right to use the new printing process, which was just becoming established in Italy. Buglhat's first publication, the Liber cantus, had appeared in March 1538, one month before Gardano's earliest surviving publication, but the lack of a precise date for Gardano's lost first edition of Arcadelt's madrigals prevents definite priority being assigned to Buglhat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SartoriD

A. Schmid: Ottavio dei Petrucci da Fossombrone … und seine Nachfolger im sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1845/R)

L. Cittadella: Documenti ed illustrazioni risguardanti la storia artistica Ferrarese (Ferrara, 1868)

W. Weyler: ‘Documenten betreffende de muziekkapel aan het hof van Ferrara’, Vlaams jb voor muziekgeschiedenis, i (1939), 81–113

M.S. Lewis: ‘Antonio Gardane's Early Connections with the Willaert Circle’, Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts, ed. I. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), 209–26

M.S. Lewis: Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer 1538–1569: a Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study, i: 1538–49 (New York, 1988); ii: 1550–59 (New York, 1997)

M.S. Lewis, ed.: The Buglhat Motet Anthologies (New York, 1995)

MARY S. LEWIS

Buhel, Christoph.

See Buel, Christoph.

Buhl, Joseph David

(b nr Amboise, 1781; d after 1828). French trumpeter. He was successively a member of the band of the Garde Parisienne (organized 1792) and of the Consuls’ Grenadiers de la Garde, and had charge of the short-lived Ecole de Trompette at Versailles for the cavalry (1805–11). In 1814 he was appointed conductor of the band of the Gardes du Corps by Louis XVIII, and was decorated by the Légion d’Honneur; he was also first trumpet at the Paris Opéra and the Théâtre Italien (1816–25).

Buhl, whom Dauverné called ‘the outstanding trumpeter of his age’, lived in the period immediately preceding the advent of valves, a dim period for trumpeters. His Méthode de trompette (Paris, 1825), according to its author the first elementary method, was written both for the trompette d’harmonie or orchestral trumpet in G, which employed crooks and for which he gave a table of stopped notes (a semitone below the notes of the harmonic series), and for the trompette d’ordonnance (trompette de fanfare) or cavalry trumpet, which was in E and did not make use of stopping. The method was plagiarized by José de Juan Martinez. Buhl is best known, however, for revising the traditional French military signals (1803–29); even today, his Ordonnance de trompette pour les troupes à cheval forms the principal body of signals of the French cavalry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Kastner: Manuel général de musique militaire (Paris, 1848)

F.G.A. Dauverné: Méthode pour la trompette (Paris, 1856–7)

F. Anzenberger: Ein Überblick über die Trompeten- und Kornettschulen in Frankreich, England, Italien, Deutschland und Österreich von ca. 1800 bis ca. 1880 (diss., U. of Vienna, 1989)

J. de Juan Martinez: Metodo de clarín (MS, 1830, E-Mc); ed. B. Kenyon de Pascual (Madrid, 1990); see also review by E. Tarr, GSJ, xlv (1992), 183–4

EDWARD H. TARR

Bühler [Bihler, Pühler], Franz [Gregor]

(b Unterschneidheim, nr Wallerstein, 12 April 1760; d Augsburg, 4 Feb 1823). German composer. He received his musical education at the minorite monastery of Maihingen, at the Benedictine abbey of Neresheim and at the Jesuit school in Augsburg in 1777. In 1778 he entered the Benedictine abbey of Donauwörth; he took vows in 1779, adopting the monastic name of Gregor, and was ordained priest on 5 June 1784. After obtaining permission to live outside the community in 1794, he became Kapellmeister and composer at the Palazzo Menz in Bolzano, and in 1798 at the latest assistant organist at the parish and collegiate church there. From 1801 to 1822 he was Kapellmeister of Augsburg Cathedral. As a composer Bühler was influenced especially by J.M. Demmler and Antonio Rosetti. Settings of the mass are at the heart of his extensive output, which ranges from simple hymns to the monumental Passion oratorio Jesus, der göttliche Erlöser and includes over 100 publications; careful instrumentation, attention to the interpretation of words and distinct early Romantic tendencies are notable features of his music. After the secularization of 1802–3, Bühler composed sacred works (mostly published by Lotter and Böhm of Augsburg) suitable for simple circumstances. Interest in his sacred music was aroused in America and England when a transcription of a Mass in F was published by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston in 1832. Between 1840 and 1876 other arrangements and vocal scores were published in London, Paris and Cincinnati, and were distributed in Boston, New York and Mexico. Bühler also wrote several pedagogical and theoretical works.

WORKS

for further details see MGG1 and Chini and Tonini

Principal sources: D-Au, Bsb, Mbs, Tmi, I-Bztoggenburg

Sacred vocal: Klaglied auf den Tod Jesu (orat), 1804, A-KR; Jesus, der göttliche Erlöser (Passion orat), Burgau, 1816, Burgau, Stadtarchiv; further orats, lost; 48 masses, 8 requiem settings, 5 collections of sacred songs, 123 other works, all pubd; other works

Secular vocal: Die falschen Verdachte (op), 1793, I-BZtoggenburg; other ops, Sple, incid music, lost; 43 songs with pf, pubd; cants.

Inst: 4 pubd collections of org music; 52 pf pieces in 9 pubd collections; chbr and orch works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL

LipowskyBL

MGG1 (‘Bihler’; W. Matthäus)

F.J. Lipowsky and H.E. von Wintter: Portraite der berühmtesten Compositeurs der Tonkunst (Munich, 1813–21), no.60

F. Bühler: Preface to Sex missae opus X (Augsburg, 1821) [autobiography, incl. portrait]

Th. Wohnhaas: ‘Über Leben und Werk des Augsberger Domkappellmeisters Franz Bühler (1760–1823)’, Jahrbuch des Vereins für Augsburger Bistumsgeschichte, iv (1970), 93–102

T. Chini and G. Tonini: La raccolta di manoscritti e stampe musicali ‘Toggenburg’ di Bolzano (Turin, 1986)

H. Ullrich: Franz Bühler (1760–1823): ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte des Vorderen Rieses (Nördlingen, 1990)

HERMANN ULLRICH

Buhlig, Richard

(b Chicago, 21 Dec 1880; d Los Angeles, 30 Jan 1952). American pianist. After early training in his native Chicago, he completed his studies in Vienna with Leschetitzky from 1897 to 1900. His début took place in Berlin in 1901, following which he undertook an extensive tour of Europe, including a series of concerts in London in 1906. The following year he made his mature American début with the Philadelphia Orchestra in New York. In 1918 he joined the staff of the Institute of Musical Arts in New York to teach the piano, a post he held for a short period before returning to Europe. He later settled in Los Angeles, where he devoted much of his time to teaching, his pupils including the composers Henry Cowell and John Cage as well as Leon Kirchner.

Although Buhlig gave the American première of Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke op.11 and was the dedicatee of the third version of the Fantasia contrappuntistica by Busoni, whom he had met in Berlin during his first European concert tour, it was as a performer of Bach, of whose works he made transcriptions, the late sonatas of Beethoven and, especially, the works of Brahms that he was most highly regarded; he also had an affinity with the music of Franck. Private recordings made in Los Angeles in 1938 of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier and op.109 sonatas as well as Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, reveal a powerful technical and intellectual command underpinned by a strong rhythmic control and a rich variety of timbre and deep tone.

CHARLES HOPKINS

Bühmler, Georg Heinrich.

See Bümler, Georg Heinrich.

Buhr, Glenn (Arthur)

(b Winnipeg, 18 Dec 1954). Canadian composer and pianist. He studied at the University of Manitoba (MusB 1979), the University of British Columbia (MM 1981) and the University of Michigan (DMA 1984); his principal teachers included Casey Sokol, Lawrence Ritchie, William Benjamin, Stephen Chatman, Leslie Bassett, William Albright and William Bolcom. He was appointed professor at Wilfrid Laurier University (Ontario) in 1984. He has served as composer-in-residence for the Winnipeg SO and as curator of its New Music Festival (1990–96), which he co-founded with Bramwell Tovey in 1990.

Buhr’s music is largely tonal in orientation but frequently includes unconventional juxtapositions of complex chords; ostinato figures often anchor harmonic constructions. Beren and Lúthien (1984) and Lure of the Fallen Seraphim (1986) exhibit his brilliant orchestral imagination and his ability to plan distinctive large-scale forms. Musikalisches Opfer (1988) shows the influence of jazz (Buhr sometimes performs as a jazz pianist). His handling of large forces and his control of sonority and timbre are particularly evident in the cathedral songs for children’s chorus, brass, orchestra and percussion (1995). Also notable are the solo concertos for piano, bassoon, viola and trumpet, the double concerto for flute and harp, and the triple concerto for violin, clarinet and piano.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Beren and Lúthien, 1984 [after J.R.R. Tolkien]; Lure of the Fallen Seraphim, 1986; Tpt Conc., 1990; Double Conc., fl, hp, orch, 1991; Pf Conc., 1992; winter poems, 1994; cathedral songs, children’s chorus, 3 brass sextets, orch, perc, 1995; Va Conc., 1995; faust flying, 1996; Sym. no.1 ‘de Joie’, 1997; Triple Conc., vn, cl, pf, orch, 1998

Vocal: The Tale of Tinúviel (J.R.R. Tolkien), T, hp, 1987; The Cycle of Spring (Buhr), S, SATB, orch, 1988; Lacrimosa (Buhr), Mez, pf, 1989; Níniel (Buhr), S, fl, ob, vn, vc, pf, 1990; The Jumblies (E. Lear), S, orch, 1993; Season of Spring Days (trans. from B. Matsuo), SSA, pf, 1995; Ritchot Mass, SATB, str qt, 1997; 3 Songs (M. Sweatman), Mez, str qt, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: The Ebony Tower, sax, db, pf, 1985; Tanzmusik, hp, 1986; Musikalisches Opfer, jazz octet, 1988; Variazioni, va, pf, 1988; 3 Pieces, str, 1990; Str Qt no.1, 1992; Sonata, vn, 1993; foxnocturne, pf, 1996; Str Qt no.2 ‘sixblues’, 1996; … through the heat we’re barely moving, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, pf, perc, 1997

CARL MOREY

Buini [Bovina, Buina], Giuseppe Maria

(b Bologna, 2 Feb 1687; d Alessandria, 13 May 1739). Italian opera composer and librettist. Of humble Bolognese origin, he was first trained as an organist. In 1718 he was active as an impresario with G.M. Alberti in Lugo di Romagna. He was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica as an organist on 11 December 1721 and promoted to the rank of composer on 21 May 1722. Between 1716 and 1737 he composed nearly 40 operas, writing his own librettos for several of them. In 1720 he published a collection of chamber sonatas, practically his only surviving music. He married a singer, Cecilia Belisari, daughter of the famous buffo singer Francesco Belisari. In 1723 he became manager of the Teatro Formagliari in Bologna (a copy of the lease is in GB-Cfm) where he produced his own operas and those of other composers. With his wife, he went to Mantua in 1729 in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt; he returned to Bologna in 1730, serving the Accademia Filarmonica as principe that year and also in 1735.

Only two arias from his considerable operatic output have survived. However, several librettos exist (I-Bc, US-Wc). These reveal an original flair, particularly for comic opera. He often wrote in Emilian (Bolognese) dialect, which confers a certain provincialism on the works but at the same time helps towards a vivid delineation of the comic characters. Probably he was influenced by Benedetto Marcello’s satire Il teatro alla moda, for many of these librettos are caricatures of the world of serious opera, and ironic and satirical exposures of its foibles. Buini’s versification is frequently careless, and his plots puerile; but this is unsophisticated comedy on a level with the French vaudeville. Especially notable is his satirical Il Malmocor (later version entitled Artaganamennone: tragichissimo dramma per musica), which is a direct parody of the heroic melodrama. His direct simplicity and effective use of dialect may well have influenced the librettos of Goldoni, since many of Buini’s operas were produced in Venice. As to his musical language, one can only make hypotheses based on a few secondary sources. Penna relates that ‘a rare eccentricity and invention, and an excellent natural aptitude for composing won him universal esteem’, while a contemporary satire characterized Buini’s stage music by his use of ‘tarantella airs easy to the ear’ (the same source suggests also that many of the operas for which he composed music were actually pasticcios, which would partly explain the rare survival of scores). Such comments would suggest the frequent use of simple song structures and an attractive, catchy and effective idiom. It is probable that Tosi’s polemic against composers of ‘canzonette’ was aimed at Buini, among others. In such a context his presentation of a difficult and erudite composition for admission to the Accademia Filarmonica could be interpreted as an attempt to silence possible accusations of incompetence.

His op.1 is a collection of ten sonatas in binary form, each with three or four movements. Some are written idiomatically for strings; others are definitely in a harpsichord style. The stile galante of these sonatas is noticeable in the absence of counterpoint and in the clear opposition between sweet melodies and accompaniment.

WORKS

operas

drammi per musica in three acts, unless otherwise stated, all lost

BF	Bologna, Teatro Formagliari
BMR	Bologna, Teatro Marsigli-Rossi
VM	Venice, Teatro S Moisè

L’ipocondriaco (G.C. Villafranchi), Florence, Pratolino (Villa Medici), 1695

Armida abbandonata (F. Silvani), BF, 16 Aug 1716

Il mago deluso della magia (divertimento per musica, A. Zaniboni), BF, carn. 1718

La pace per amore (A. Schietti), VM, carn. 1719, collab. F. Chelleri; rev. as Il nemico amante, VM, carn. 1724

La caduta di Gelone (F. Rossi), Venice, S Angelo, aut. 1719

Armida delusa (Buini), Venice, S Angelo, carn. 1720

Gl’inganni fortunati (pastorale per musica, B. Valeriani), VM, May 1720

Apollo geloso (pastorale per musica, P.J. Martelli), Lugo, Aug 1720

Il filindo (pastorale eroica, P. d’Averara), VM, 19 Oct 1720

Cleofile (A. Zaniboni), VM, carn. 1721

Amore e maestà (A. Salvi), BMR, 26 Dec 1721

Pithonessa sul Monte Olimpo, BMR, carn. 1722

Gl’inganni felici (A. Zeno), Vm, aut. 1722

La fede ne’tradimenti (G. Gigli), Faenza, Accademia de’Remoti, 21 June 1723

Amor non vuol rispetti, BMR, carn. 1724

La ninfa riconosciuta (Silvani), BF, carn. 1724

Il Tolomeo re d’Egitto (Silvani), Verona, Accademia, carn. 1724

La vendetta disarmata dall’amore (A. Passerini), BF, carn. 1724

L’Agrippa tetrarca de Gerusalemme, Milan, Regio Ducal, 1724

La Cleonice, BF, carn. 1725

Li sdegni cangiati in amore (Silvani, rev. ?Buini), VM, carn. 1725

L’Adelaide (Salvi), BF, spr. 1725

Il savio delirante (divertimento comico per musica, Buini), BF, carn. 1726; as Le frenesie d’amore, VM, May 1726

Albumazar (Buini), BF, carn. 1727

Il potestà di Colognole (G.A. Moniglia), Florence, 1727

Il Malmocor (dramma tragichissimo per musica, Buini), BMR, carn. 1728; as Artaganamennone, VM, Ascension 1731

La forza del sangue (?Buini), BMR, spr. 1728

Teodorico (Salvi), BF, aut. 1728

Chi non fa non falla (divertimento comico per musica, Buini), BMR, carn. 1729

I diporti d’amore in villa (scherzo drammatico, A.N. Monti), BMR, carn. 1729

Endimione (F. Mazzari), BF, Aug 1729

Amore e gelosia (dramma pastorale per musica, A. Aureli), S Giovanni in Persiceto, Accademia dei Candidi Uniti, aut. 1729

La maschera levata al vizio (Silvani), BMR, carn. 1730; as Il filosofo ipocrita, BF, carn. 1735

Fidarsi è bene, ma non fidarsi è meglio (divertimento comico per musica, Buini), VM, Ascension 1731

Gli amici (pastorale per musica, P.J. Martelli), Bologna, spr. 1734

La Zanina maga per amore (dramma comico per musica, Buini), S Giovanni in Persiceto, Accademia dei Candidi Uniti, aut. 1737

2 arias, 1720, D-Mbs

Doubtful: Andromaca, Ferrara, Scroffa, carn. 1723; Al fatto ci vuol pazienza, Rome, Tordinona, 1753, according to Mamczarz

Collaborations: L’ortolana contessa, Venice, S Angelo, Ascension 1732, collab. others; Il Regno posposto ad Amore (dramma pastorale), Reggio, carn. 1732; Il protettore alla moda (Buini), VM, aut. 1747, collab. B. Galuppi and others; Il re dispietato (Buini), Venice, S Angelo, 1747

other works

Suonate da camera, hpd/(vn, vc), op.1 (Bologna, 1720)

Laudate Dominum, 1721; examination piece for Accademia Filarmonica, cited in Catalogo del archivio della R. Accademia filarmonica, I-Bc

S Petronio vescovo e protettore di Bologna (orat, A. Zaniboni), Bologna, 1721; cited by U. Sesini in catalogue, Bc

Chi ben ama ben sceglie (cant., Catena), Ravenna, 1722, lost

Il giocatore (int), Bologna, Formagliari, spr. 1725, collab. others

1 canzona in La ricreazione spirituale (Bologna, 1730)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AllacciD

FétisB

RicciTB

SartoriL

E.J. Dent: ‘Giuseppe Maria Buini’, SIMG, xiii (1911–12), 329–54

G. Rossi: Varietà letterarie (Bologna, 1912), 165 [on Malmocor]

L. Frati: ‘Bolognesi musicisti e cantanti del ’700’, RMI, xxi (1914), 189–202

F. Vatielli: ‘Operisti-librettisti dei secoli XVII e XVIII’, RMI, xliii (1939), 1–16, 315–32, 605–21, esp. 605

A. Della Corte: Satire e grotteschi di musiche e di musicisti d’ogni tempo (Turin, 1946), 365

I. Mamczarz: Les intermèdes comiques italiens au XVIIIe siècle en France et en Italie (Paris, 1972), 363

M.G. Accorsi: Dialetto e dialettalità (Bologna, 1982)

P. Fabbri and R. Verti: Due secoli di teatro per musica a Reggio Emilia (Reggio nell’Emilia, 1987), 60–61

O. Gambassi: L’Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna (Florence, 1992), 289–91, 296, 426

ANNE SCHNOEBELEN/SERGIO DURANTE (with MARC VANSCHEEUWIJCK)

Buini, Matteo

(fl Bologna, 1748–9). Italian singer and composer. This minor figure in 18th-century comic opera is noted here mainly to distinguish him from his more illustrious predecessor, Giuseppe Maria Buini. Librettos refer to him as ‘bolognese’, but no relationship has been traced to either G.M. Buini or the singer Rosalba Buini. He sang in the 1748 production of Cocchi's La maestra in Modena. For Carnival 1748–9 in Bologna he reset the recitatives and ‘almost all’ of the arias in La virtuosa corteggiata da tre cicisbei ridicolo for performance at the Teatro Formagliari; the original opera was Li tre cicisbei ridicoli (text, V.A. Vasini; music, N. Resta; Bologna, 1748). The following autumn he did the same for Parma with Lo scolaro alla moda (apparently from the original A. Palomba–Latilla–Pergolesi work Orazio, Rome, 1738). He did not sing in either of these productions, the music of which has been lost. The attribution sometimes made to Matteo Buini of Il protettore alla moda (Venice, 1747) is mistaken: it was a whole or partial resetting by Galuppi of G.M. Buini’s Chi non fa non falla (Bologna, 1729).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GaspariC

A. Gandini: Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena dal 1539 al 1871 (Modena, 1873/R), i, 61

P.E. Ferrari: Spettacoli drammatico-musicali e coreografici in Parma dall'anno 1628 all'anno 1883 (Parma, 1884/R), 338

JAMES L. JACKMAN

Buisine [buysine, buzine, busine, etc.].

Medieval name for a herald’s trumpet; it was long and straight with a cylindrical or slightly conical bore. Pictures indicate that the instrument was often one to two or more metres long, and that its tube of brass or silver was made up of several joints, their junctions concealed by ornamental bosses. The bell joint was flared to varying degrees. Buisines are frequently shown bearing the banner of a noble person.

The instrument was apparently introduced into Europe from the Islamic world as a result of contact between Christians and Saracens during the Crusades. In literature before the 13th century the word ‘buisine’ seems to have had a general meaning. It first appears in the Chanson de Roland (c1100); the line there, ‘Si fait suner ses cors et ses buisines’, suggests that the author was distinguishing between horns and trumpets. More probably, however, buisines referred to both types of instruments, and perhaps particularly to the long heavy war-horns made of animals’ horns, wood, bronze or iron. It obviously relates to the earlier word, Buccina.

Associated with drums, and particularly with small kettledrums (Nakers), or with shawms, buisines – often in pairs – were probably used to play fanfares and simple melodies at military functions, meals and for ceremonial occasions, but we have no certain knowledge either of their repertory or of their playing technique.

Buisines continued to be made into the 16th century, by which time they had probably become mere symbols of social prestige, traditional adjuncts of courtly ceremony. The German word for trombone, Posaune, is a corruption of ‘buisine’, by way of ‘busaun’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E.A. Bowles: ‘Unterscheidung der Instrumente Buisine, Cor, Trompe und Trompette’, AMw, xviii (1961), 52–72

E.A. Bowles: ‘Iconography as a Tool for Examining the Loud Consort in the Fifteenth Century’, JAMIS, iii (1977), 100–21

HOWARD MAYER BROWN

Buisson, Du [Buissons, Des].

See Du buisson.

Bujarski, Zbigniew

(b Muszyna, 21 Aug 1933). Polish composer. He studied composition with Wiechowicz, graduating from the State Higher School (now the Academy) of Music in Kraków in 1960. In the early 1970s he started teaching at the school and from 1978 to 1986 he was dean of composition; he was appointed full professor in 1992. He has won prizes at the UNESCO International Composers' Rostrum (for Contraria in 1967 and Musica domestica in 1978) and in 1991 received the award of the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation of New York. In 1958, while still a student, Bujarski became the first Polish composer to investigate microtonal clusters, the harmonic and melodic properties of which he termed ‘synthetic monophony’. Subsequently he adopted a more conventional Polish response to Western serial and aleatory practices, namely an expression based on sound effects and textural writing that became collectively known as ‘sonorism’. Contraria (1965), however, demonstrates Bujarski's individual approach: seductive rather than aggressive, its extended instrumental techniques and swirling clouds of sound form an impressionistic tapestry of several layers. His Musica domestica and Concerto per archi I are intimate, lyrical pieces, partly on account of their quasi-modal or -tonal material. In Ogrody (‘Gardens’), written as a distraction from the political upheaval in Poland during the early 1980s, Bujarski recaptures the sensuality of Szymanowski's song cycles. Other vocal-instrumental works place an emphasis on expressing a humanitarian or spiritual dimension, particularly in works such as the large-scale oratorio El hombre. The passion of his convictions and the luminosity of his musical vocabulary – often heterophonic and arguably descended from technical experiments he made in 1958 – characterize much of his output. Bujarski's parallel activity as a painter is reflected in a number of works, notably Similis Greco I, a tribute to the visionary Greek artist.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Tryptyk, str, perc, 1958, lost; Strefy [Zones], 1961; Kinoth, 1963; Contraria, 1965; Musica domestica, 18 str, 1977; Conc. per archi I, vn, str, 1979; Similis Greco I, 1979; Conc. per archi II, vc, str, 1992; Scolaresca, str, 1993; Pawana dla oddalonej [Pavane for the Distant One], str, 1994; Lumen, 1997

Vocal: Krzewy płonące [Burning Bushes] (T. Śliwiak), S, pf, 1958; Synchrony no.1, S, ens, 1959, lost; Synchrony no.2, S, chorus, orch, 1960, lost; Kompozycja kameralna (S. Tsuboi, K. Tanaka), 1v, fl, perc, hp, pf, with amp, 1963; El hombre (orat, Bible, M. Lowry, T.S. Eliot and others), S, Mez, Bar, chorus, orch, 1969–73; Narodzenie [Birth] (Constantine of Preslav), chorus, orch, 1981; Ogrody [Gardens] (M. Krużel, K. Iłłakowicz, J. Iwaszkiewicz), S, orch, 1981–7; Da Bóg nam kiedyś zasiąść w Polsce wolnej [May the Lord Give us a Free Poland in which to Settle] (J. Lechoń), 1v, pf, 1982; 5 pieśni [5 Songs] (J.G. Brown), S, str, 1994–7

Chbr and solo inst: Kwartet na otwarcie domu [Qt for a House-Warming], str qt, 1980; Veni Creator Spiritus, org, 1983, orchd 1988; Kwartet na Adwent, str qt, 1984; Kwartet na Wielkanoc [Qt for Easter], str qt, 1989; Lęk ptaków I [The Fear of Birds], vn, va, perc, 1993; Lęk ptaków II, 2 cl, perc, 1994; Lęk ptaków III, cl, b cl, vn, va, perc, 1994; Cassazione per Natale, wind ens, 1996; Per cello, vc, 1996

Principal publisher: PWM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Meyer: ‘Zbigniew Bujarski: a Sketch to a Portrait’, Polish Music (1980), no.3, pp.28–34

T. Malecka: ‘Zbigniew Bujarski: od “El Hombre” do “Narodzenia”’, Przemiany techniki dźwiękowej, stylu i estetyki w polskiej muzyce lat 70, ed. L. Polony (Kraków, 1986), 147–57

T. Malecka: ‘Świat muzyki Zbigniewa Bujarskiego: twórczość pieśniowa’ [Bujarski's musical world: songs], Krakowska szkoła kompozytorska 1888–1988 (Kraków, 1993), 203–13

M. Lebecka and Ż. Groborz-Mazanek: ‘“Wysyp” kompozytorów’ [An explosion of composers], Forum akademickie, nos.7–8 (1996), 58–9 [interview]

T. Malecka: ‘Odnawianie tradycji w muzyce Zbigniewa Bujarskiego’ [The renewing of tradition in the music of Bujarski], Muzyka polska 1945–1995, ed. K. Droba, T. Malecka and K. Szwajgier (Kraków, 1996), 217–33

ADRIAN THOMAS

Bukofzer, Manfred F(ritz)

(b Oldenburg, 17 March 1910; d Oakland, CA, 7 Dec 1955). American musicologist of German birth. He entered Heidelberg University to study law but also took music courses under Besseler and soon decided on musicology as a career. In 1930 he went to Berlin to further his musical studies at the Stern Conservatory and at the Hochschule für Musik under Schering, Wolf, Sachs and Blume (musicology) and Hindemith (composition). In 1933 he entered Basle University, where he took the doctorate under Handschin (1936). In 1937 he was lecturer at the Volkschule of Basle University. He emigrated to the USA in 1939, later becoming an American citizen. After a year as lecturer at Western Reserve University in Cleveland (1940–41), he was appointed assistant professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941. He was made associate professor in 1944 and full professor in 1946.

Bukofzer’s doctoral dissertation firmly established his reputation as one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation. Based on the writings of English and continental theorists of the 15th century, it showed that a style of improvised singing practised in England was distinct from the continental fauxbourdon practice and that this practice strongly influenced the art music of English composers, who created a style recognized as distinctively English by contemporary continental musicians. There followed many other pioneering studies on English music of the 14th and 15th centuries. Bukofzer was the first to point out the pre-eminence of Dunstable in the first half of the 15th century and produced the first complete edition of his works. He devoted intensive study to documents of pre-Tudor English polyphony, amplifying and in some cases revising earlier views. The first four essays of his Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (1950), together with his chapters in The New Oxford History of Music, constitute a valuable account of musical style in England from the 14th century to the mid-15th.

Bukofzer’s interests extended well beyond English music of the Renaissance. His first article, published when he was only 19, dealt with jazz, and he also did research in ethnomusicology. He was a capable conductor and directed many performances of little-known music of all periods in Berkeley. Although he disclaimed being a specialist in Baroque music, his Music in the Baroque Era (1947) was long a standard survey. Like his shorter studies, it shows an ability for clear organization and for establishing systems of classification which are still valid because based on a highly informed knowledge of musical style. Four sentences from the preface precisely state his general objectives in writing about music:

The ideas that underlie musical styles can only be shown in a factual stylistic analysis that takes music apart as a mechanic does a motor and that shows how musical elements are combined, how they achieve their specific effect, and what constitutes the difference between externally similar factors. This analysis is at once historical and ‘technological’ and takes beauty for granted. Those writers to whom the description of music is no more than a matter of elegant variation in judiciously chosen adjectives may be shocked to learn that the word ‘beautiful’ does not occur in this book. My aim has been not the expatiation on the obvious but the explanation of the specific musical results of baroque style.

This ‘stylistic’ approach was highly influential in musicological writing, to the considerable benefit of the discipline, and is well demonstrated in ‘Caput: a Liturgico-Musical Study’ (Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music, 217–310). Starting with an apparently small and specialized topic, an unidentified cantus firmus used in three masses, this study expands to illuminate virtually every important musical aspect of the last half of the 15th century.

Bukofzer was keenly interested in the nature and purpose of musicology and its relationship to other academic disciplines. At the end of his life he presented to his doctoral seminars the first stage of a large-scale outline of the field, setting forth its major divisions and subdivisions and discussing their relationship and relative importance; some of this work appears in The Place of Musicology in American Institutions of Higher Learning (1957). Throughout his career he was concerned with promoting the activities of musicological organizations from the local to the international level; he was the first American chairman of the committee for the publication of RISM, helped to found the yearbook Annales musicologiques and represented musicology in the American Council of Learned Societies.

The Bukofzer Collection of the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley, contains many of his unpublished notes and transcriptions.

WRITINGS

‘Soziologie des Jazz’, Melos, viii (1929), 387–91

‘Zur Interpretation des Fauxbourdon-Begriffs’, Mitteilungen der Schweizerischer musikforschenden Gesellschaft, ii (1935), 61–73

Geschichte des englischen Diskants und des Fauxbourdons nach den theoretischen Quellen (diss., U. of Basle, 1936; Strasbourg, 1936/R)

‘Über Leben und Werke von Dunstable’, AcM, viii (1936), 102–19

‘Präzisionsmessungen an primitiven Musikinstrumenten’, Zeitschrift für Physik, xcix (1936), 643–65

‘The First Motet with English Words’, ML, xvii (1936), 225–33

‘Hegel’s Musikaesthetik’, Congrès international d’esthétique et de science de l’art: Paris 1937, ii, 32–5

‘Kann die “Blasquintentheorie” zur Erklärung exotischer Ton-Systeme beitragen?’, Anthropos, xxxii (1937), 402–18

‘John Dunstable and the Music of his Time’, PMA, lxv (1938–9), 19–43

‘Allegory in Baroque Music’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, iii (1940), 1–21

‘Popular Polyphony in the Middle Ages’, MQ, xxvi (1940), 31–49

‘An Unknown Chansonnier of the 15th Century (the Mellon Chansonnier)’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 14–49

‘Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music’, Speculum, xvii (1942), 165–8

‘Sumer is icumen in’: a Revision, University of California Publications in History, ii/2 (Berkeley, 1944)

‘Music of the Laudes’, in E.H. Kantorowicz: Laudes regiae: a Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley, 1946/R); also pubd separately (Berkeley, 1946)

‘A Newly Discovered 15th-Century Manuscript of the English Chapel Royal’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 38–51

Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947)

‘Two Mensuration Canons’, MD, ii (1948), 165–71

‘Some Sources of 15th-Century English Music’, RN, ii (1949), 65–72

Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New York, 1950)

‘Towards a New Inventory of Musical Sources’, Notes, viii (1950–51), 265–78

‘Caput Redivivum: a New Source for Dufay’s Missa Caput’, JAMS, iv (1951), 97–100

‘Fauxbourdon Revisited’, MQ, xxxviii (1952), 22–47

‘Interrelations between Conductus and Clausula’, AnnM, i (1953), 65–103

‘John Dunstable: a Quincentenary Report’, MQ, xl (1954), 29–49

The Place of Musicology in American Institutions of Higher Learning (New York, 1957/R)

‘The Unidentified Tenors in the Ms. La Clayette’, AnnM, iv (1956), 255–8

‘Changing Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music’, MQ, xliv (1958), 1–18

‘Popular and Secular Music in England to 1470’, ‘English Church Music of the 15th Century’, NOHM, iii (1960/R), 107–28, 165–213

EDITIONS

G. Coprario: Rules How to Compose [c1610] (Los Angeles, 1952) [facs. with introduction]

John Dunstable: Complete Works, MB, viii (1953)

A. Coclico: Compendium musices, DM, 1st ser., Druckschriften-Faksimiles, ix (1954)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obituaries: D.D. Boyden, MQ, xlii (1956), 291–301 [incl. list of pubns]; E. Hertzmann, Mf, ix (1956), 281–5; P.H. Lang, AcM, xxviii (1956), 7–8

C.E. Steinzor: American Musicologists, c.1890–1945: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook to the Formative Period (New York, 1989), 18–24

SYDNEY ROBINSON CHARLES

Bukoreshtliyev, Angel

(b Plevnya, nr Drama, 31 Jan 1870; d Plovdiv, 3 Jan 1950). Bulgarian composer, conductor, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He received his musical training at the Prague Organ School, where he graduated in 1890. He was among the first musicians to work professionally after Bulgaria's liberation from the Ottoman empire in 1876. Like Dobri Khristov and other composers he collected previously unresearched folksongs from various regions of the country. These collections played an important role in popularizing traditional music among the urban middle classes, but they were also a significant source for Bukoreshtliyev's own creative work. The most important of his compositions were the ten choral suites of the type known as kitki (garlands); these depended for their effect on the contrasts between folksongs and were widely disseminated in the late 19th century. Bukoreshtliyev was also a prominent choral conductor, who made an important contribution to the spread of Bulgarian choral music through the choir he founded in Plovdiv. Among his compositions also are Elf Lieder for male chorus (1927) and Zwei Lieder for female chorus (1945–6).

WRITINGS

A. Bukoreshtliyev: ‘Pomashkite pesni’ [Pomaken songs], Muzikalen zhivot, i/3 (1928), 1–3

A. Bukoreshtliyev with V. Stoin and R. Katsarova: ‘Sredno-rodopski pesni’ [Middle Rhodope folksongs], Sbornik' za narodni umotvoreniya i narodopis, xxxix (1934), 3–11

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Kamburov: Angel Bukoreshtliyev (Plovdiv, 1946)

Ye. Stoin: Angel Bukoreshtliyev (Sofia, 1961)

MARIYA KOSTAKEVA

Bul, Christoph.

See Buel, Christoph.

Bulant, Antoine.

See Bullant, Antoine.

Bulgaria

(Bulg. Republika Bulgaria).

Country in south-eastern Europe. Bulgaria is a country of 110,994 sq. km with a population of approximately 9 million people, over 60% of whom live in urban centres. The national language is Bulgarian, a south-Slavic language. Orthodox Christianity is the official religion. Minority groups include Pomaks (Slavic Bulgarian Muslims), ethnic Turks, Macedonians, Christian and Muslim Roma, Jews, Albanians, Vlachs and Armenians.

1. The national renaissance and development of music ethnography.

STOYAN PETROV/MAGDALENA MANOLOVA (I), DONNA A. BUCHANAN (II)

Bulgaria

I. Art music

Bulgarian musical culture began to take shape when the Bulgarian state was founded in 681, and its character was initially determined by the interaction of three fundamental ethnic groups: the Slavs (who were in the majority), the Proto-Bulgarians and the remnants of the assimilated ancient Thracian population. After the introduction of Christianity in 865 the starobalgarskiyat napev (old Bulgarian church chant) came into being, at first influenced by Byzantine chant. Kliment, Naum and several other followers of SS Cyril and Methodius restored the Slav chantbooks which had been destroyed in Moravia, and created new ones. The musical traditions were handed down from generation to generation and the old Bulgarian chant was gradually formed: it took on certain distinctive characteristics, primarily because of the discrepancy between the number of syllables and the differences of stress in the Greek and Bulgarian languages, and also because of the influence of folk music. Among the few musical works to have survived are the 9th-century Keramichna plochka (‘Ceramic tile’) from Preslav, the 11th-century Kupriyanovi listove (‘Kupriyan’s sheets’), the 12th-century Bitolski triod (‘Bitolya triod’), the 13th-century Bolonski psaltir (‘Bologna psalter’) and Draganov miney (‘Draganov’s menologion’; also known as the Zografski trifologii, ‘Zograph triphologion’), and the Moldavski rakopis (‘Moldavian manuscript’), dated 1511. The Bulgarian monasteries on Mount Athos, such as Zograf and Pavel, played an important part in the cultural collaboration with Byzantium; musically gifted children from the lands north of the empire were trained in Constantinople and often stayed on in the service of the Greek churches and monasteries (a notable example is Joannes Koukouzeles).

Until the 19th century secular musical culture in Bulgaria was dominated by folk music, but after the liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 from the Turks, who had ruled the country since the late 14th century, professional music-making developed rapidly. The first Choral Society, Balgarski Pevcheski Tsarkoven Khor (Bulgarian Church Choir), which had been established in Ruse in 1870, was the expression of a protest against the Greek church-singing tradition. Musical activities were unified by Balgarskiyat Muzikalen Sayuz, the Bulgarian Musical Union (1903–41). In 1901 the first professional union of musicians was established. Balgarskiyat Pevcheski Sayuz, the Bulgarian Choral Union, formed in 1926, organized the country's amateur choir activities. It also funded the activities of the national choirs, orchestras and chamber ensembles. Cultural clubs, which had been of considerable importance up to the liberation, went on playing an important role in amateur musical activities. Concerts by Bulgarian and foreign performers were organized by private bureaux called ‘kontsertni direktsii’ (concert management boards). Between 1933 and 1944 Bulgarian composers were linked through the association Savremenna Muzika (Contemporary Music). The first music school in Sofia was opened in 1904, becoming the Darzhavna Muzikalna Akademiya (State Music Academy) in 1921; the Operna Druzhba (Opera Society), founded in 1908, became the Sofiyska Narodna Opera (Sofia National Opera) in 1921. Military bands, amateur choirs and various professional orchestras were founded, notably the Balgarska Narodna Filkharmoniya (Bulgarian National Philharmonic, 1924), the Darzhaven Simfonichen Orkestar (Academic SO, 1928; renamed the Tsarski Voenen Simfonichen Orkestar, Royal Military SO, 1936) and the Sofiya Darzhavna Filkharmoniya (Sofia State Philharmonic, 1946).

Although Bulgarian music has not been as widely disseminated abroad as the music of most other eastern European countries, it has flourished domestically since the late 19th century, when Nikolay Atanasov (1886–1969) composed the first Bulgarian symphony and such composers as Georgi Atanasov (1882–1931) and Panayot Pipkov (1871–1942) produced operas, and solo and choral songs on folk subjects. After World War I and the September Uprising (1923), a new stage in the development of Bulgarian music began. Composers professionally trained in Germany, France, Austria and Italy, who had assimilated the European tradition, returned to Bulgaria in order to found a Bulgarian musical tradition. They made it their aim to create a national Bulgarian style, drawing both on contemporary trends and the folklore traditions of the country. Composers such as Pancho Vladigerov, Lyubomir Pipkov, Marin Goleminov, Veselin Stoyanov, Dimitar Nenov, Parashkev Khadzhiev, Petko Staynov and Georgi Dimitrov created the basis of the Bulgarian musical tradition in all genres, and through their teaching were a prime influence on the generation of composers after World War II.

After the socialist revolution in 1944, the new social and cultural situation led to changes in the development of Bulgarian musical life. All cultural activities were centralized and acquired a strong ideological orientation. Socialist realism and the slogan ‘The more among the people, the closer to life!’ became the order of the day. The new state performing institutions were responsible for organizing concerts and popularizing music. Composers and musicologists, all belonging to the Union of Bulgarian Composers, consolidated the new socialist musical culture and organized festivals of Bulgarian music, as well as musical education and criticism sessions. State opera and operetta companies and symphony orchestras (foremost among them the Simfonichem Orkestar na Balgarskoto Radio i Televiziya (Bulgarian Radio and Television SO, 1949)) were subsidised by the state, and their activities were directly under state control. The Committee of Culture and the Arts presided over the work of musical educational establishments such as the Balgarska Darzhavna Konservatoriya, or BDK (Bulgarian State Conservatory), and state music schools. Amateur groups received support from trade-union funds, community centres and the Committee of Culture and the Arts. The state also controlled other activities, such as the production and distribution of records and music scores.

The development of Bulgarian music between 1944 and the beginning of the 1960s was determined by the imposition of a new model of national culture. This was the time of revolutionary change, of realism. The neo-Romantic pathos found in Bulgarian music of the 1930s and 40s was replaced by an emphasis on folklore as the expression of a democratic aesthetic, particularly in genres such as cantatas, oratorios and other choral work. Most young composers were unable to study abroad, and contact with contemporary European trends was inevitably limited. Leading representatives of new trends in Bulgarian music included Konstantin Iliev, Lazar Nikolov, Alexandar Raychev, Simeon Pironkov, Krasimir Kyurkchiyski, Vasil Kazandzhiev and Ivan Spasov.

With the relaxation of the political situation in the 1960s, composers enjoyed greater aesthetic freedom. The reinterpretation of folklore and the adoption of many of the experiments carried out in the 1960s and 70s led to a new stage in the development of Bulgarian music. The analytical, anti-Romantic aesthetic also characterized the generation which emerged at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, including Stefan Dragostinov, Emil Tabakov, Plamen Dzhurov, Bozhidar Spasov, Alexandar Kandov, Rumen Balïozov, Yuliya Tzenova and Neva Krasteva. Familiar with modern trends, the majority of these composers were able to create an individual style, independent from the totalitarian regime's realist aesthetic. Their work appeared in contemporary music forums around the world and won prestigious prizes.

During the 1970s and 80s several Bulgarian choirs achieved international fame, while singers such as Nikolay Gyaurov, Rayna Kabaivanska, Anna Tomova-Sintova and Gena Dimitrova were among the leading names in the international opera world. The Sofiyskata Filharmoniya (Sofia Philharmonia), Sofiyski Solisti (Sofia Soloists) and many individual soloists were enthusiastically received abroad, as were numerous folk ensembles.

After 1989 the centralization of the totalitarian regime was replaced by a democratic system. The state could no longer subsidise the many institutions and activities, and could only provide modest funds for education and a few national institutions. Nevertheless, private initiatives developed and sponsorship became the chief means of subsidy in the music profession. Foundations now supported activities which under the former regime had encountered ideological opposition.

With the lifting of travel restrictions many young artists chose to work abroad; these included Bozhidar Spasov (Germany), Alexandar Kandov (Spain), Simeon Pironkov jr (Austria) and Tsvetan Dobrev (France). Others remained in Bulgaria, notably the composers Georgi Arnaudov and Petar Petrov.

See also Burgas, Plovdiv, Ruse, Sofia, Stara Zagora and Varna.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Krastev: Ocherki varkhu razvitieto na balgarska muzika [Essays on the development of Bulgarian music] (Sofia, 1954, 2/1970)

S. Petrov: Orchertsi po istoriya na balgarskata musikalna kultura [Essays on the history of Bulgarian musical culture] (Sofia, 1959)

V. Krastev, ed.: Entsiklopediya na balgarskata muzikalna kultura [Encyclopedia of Bulgarian musical culture] (Sofia, 1967)

D. Khristov: Muz-teoretichesko i publitsistichesko nasledstvo [The heritage of music theory and writing] (Sofia, 1967–70)

S. Petrov and Kh.Kodov: Starobalgarski muzikalni pametnitsi [Old Bulgarian music] (Sofia, 1973)

D. Cvetko: Musikgeschichte der Südslawen (Kassel and Maribor, 1975)

Entsiklopediya Balgariya (Sofia, 1984)

Bulgaria

II. Traditional music

The hilly and mountainous topography of Bulgaria made contact between villages difficult and at certain times of year impossible. Thus communities evolved in relative seclusion. This, coupled with the country’s long rule by, and isolation in, the Ottoman Empire, aided both the preservation and development of great cultural diversity. The country is divided into six ethnographica regions: the Shop, or Sofia district; Pirin-Makedoniya in the south west; Rodopa, comprising the Rhodope Mountainregion along the southern border; Trakiya, the central Tracian plain, Dobrudzha, in the north east; and the area known simply as ‘Northern Bulgaria’ in the north west.

2. Characteristics of pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944.

3. Urban musics, 1850–1944.

4. Institutionalized neo-traditional music after 1930.

5. Neo-traditional popular music.

1. The national renaissance and development of music ethnography.

Bulgarian musical ethnography originated in the Vazrazhdane, the 19th-century cultural renaissance which helped form a unified Bulgarian nationalist ideology. This period witnessed the institutionalization of education, the standardization of literary Bulgarian and the establishment of the periodical press, local library clubs and reading rooms whose activities facilitated later developments in music and theatre. Major literary figures of the time collected and used folkloric materials in their writings. Several, like the brothers Dimitar Miladinov (1810–62) and Konstantin Miladinov (1830–62), published song text compilations that were characteristic of Bulgarian scholarship up to the late 1980s: the collection, documentation and systematization of narodni pesni (‘folk songs’).

By the early 1900s scholars began publishing the melodies of narodni pesni together with their texts, which in turn promoted theoretical studies of their musical characteristics by academics such as Dobri Khristov (1875–1941). In 1926 Sofia’s ethnographic museum established a department of narodna muzika (‘folk or traditional music’) directed by Vasil Stoin (1880–1938) who, with such co-workers as Stoyan Dzhudzhev (b 1902) and Raina Katsarova (1901–84), instigated the systematic collection, documentation and analysis of narodna muzika throughout Bulgaria. Beginning in the late 1920s their findings were published in volumes called sbornitsi (sing. sbornik). Although scholars began to use recording devices in 1939, they did not employ tape recorders widely for collection purposes until 1954. In 1948 the Institute for Musicology was founded within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences incorporating the ethnographic museum’s music department and personnel two years later.

The institute’s sbornitsi are the cornerstone of ‘musical folkloristic science’ as ethnomusicology was known until the late 1980s, and were used extensively by contemporaneous composers to form a national school of composition. The collections also generated important studies of indigenous music theory, including rhythmic patterns, diaphony and pentatonicism; specific genres such as epic recitative; organology; and the music of expatriate Bulgarian communities and Bulgarian Muslims. By the mid-1960s numerous publications addressed topics such as state-sponsored folk ensembles, their festivals, repertory and relationship to the mass media. Concomitantly, this period witnessed the foundation of Bulgarian ethnochoreology. These themes prevailed until the mid-1980s, when the scope of publications broadened to include such subjects as urban musics, popular culture and the music of minority communities.

Ethnomusicological scholarship has long been supported by two archival collections housed within the Institute for Musicology: a large library of scores, books and periodicals; and an ethnographic archive containing more than 300,000 notated or mechanically recorded songs and instrumental melodies, and 6000 videotaped examples of indigenous dances and customs accompanied by music. As a result of perestroika, the institute was renamed the Musical Sector of the Institute of Art Studies in 1990, but still retains its ethnographic archive.

(i) Gender, genre and labour.

2. Characteristics of pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944.

Despite its diversity, certain basic characteristics typify the performance practice of 19th- and early 20th-century village music throughout Bulgaria. This music was an oral tradition performed for calendrical and life-cycle rites, during work and for entertainment. Contemporary scholars and musicians describe such music as ‘authentic’, and ‘traditional’, and although Bulgarian society experienced many changes after 1944, elements of traditional music continue to underlie contemporary music-making.

(ii) Seasonal musics.

(iii) Instruments.

(iv) The khoro.

(v) Texture and timbre.

(vi) Structure, form and mode.

(vii) Rhythm and metre.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(i) Gender, genre and labour.

Songs formed the basis of village musical culture. Bulgarians believe that their instrumental traditions developed in emulation of singing. This belief was expressed metaphorically and in song texts that praised the vocal quality of instrumental performance, such as Kavalat sviri, govori (‘as the flute plays, it speaks’). Playing instruments and singing were otherwise considered separate, gender-specific activities. Instrumentalists almost never accompanied singers; while a singer sang songs (pevitsa pee pesni), a village musician played instrumental tunes (svirach sviri svirni), melodies (melodii), pieces (piesi) or dance music (khora). Women rarely played indigenous instruments, a convention still prevalent. Although it was not uncommon for men to sing, women acted as the primary bearers of the singing tradition.

The reason for this gender specificity derives from the division of labour in village life, which in turn prescribed the context and manner in which musical skills were acquired. Men were engaged predominantly with animal husbandry; women with domestic and agricultural work. As herders followed their livestock from pasture to pasture, they entertained themselves by playing music, especially on aerophones like the kaval or duduk, considered shepherds’ instruments. Their melodies blended with the tinkling of bells (zvantsi) hung around the necks of their animals. Carefully chosen by shepherds for their clear tone in a range of sizes, these bells not only identified one herd from another but formed an integral part of the pastoral soundscape. As one song text states, ‘He played on a mellifluous kaval, his silvery zvantsi accompanying him’.

Herding left men’s hands relatively free to play instruments. Boys absorbed instrumental technique through individual experimentation, initially with whistles and then with more complex instruments. They observed older, more experienced musicians, eventually learning enough to play along with them at local celebrations such as weekly dances. Women’s hands, however, were continually occupied with housework, food preparation, textile production and work in the fields. They utilized their voices to accompany their work and express their emotions. Girls mastered songs by listening to other women, especially their older female relatives, following the lyrics and embellished contours of unfamiliar songs until they, too, could perform them.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(ii) Seasonal musics.

For villagers musical performance was not a profession but an integral aspect of everyone’s daily experience inseparable from the community’s social life. Music accompanied every aspect of labour. Women sang songs while cultivating produce, as they walked to and from the fields or orchards, during short breaks and at lunch. Songs performed while doing field work were usually slow, sustained, non-metrical and executed with an open throat so that the resultant intense, ringing sound would reach women working in neighbouring plots. Songs performed during periods of rest, on the other hand, were often rhythmic, lively and humorous. In both cases the songs’ lyrics were frequently related to some aspect of the work process (ex.1).

During the evening hours of autumn and winter women attended ‘bees’ (sedenki, tlaki); in the former to work on their individual handiwork, often spinning or needlework, in the latter to help their host with a particular task, such as shucking corn or stringing tobacco. While working they sang songs and ballads, some of which referred to the specific events of the sedyanka (ex.2). Later in the evening the young men of the village joined them, and the sedyanka or tlaka became an occasion for flirtation and courtship. Young men and women engaged in singing competitions (nadpyavane) in which teasing songs (pripevki) singled out potential couples. The youths also danced ring, line or chain dances (khora, sing. khoro) to the accompaniment of their own energetic khorovodni pesni (‘dance songs’), or instrumental tunes played by the young men.

Ritual songs and dances celebrating calendrical- and life-cycle events were usually performed by groups of singers. Important occasions for male singing were Badni Vecher (Christmas Eve) and Koleda, when the village men travelled from home to home in festive dress singing antiphonal carols that blessed the livestock, the household or specific members of the family. Stereotypical refrains such as ‘koledo le’ or ‘oy, koledo, moy koledo’ (‘Oh, koleda, my koleda’) distinguished koleda songs. Most were also typified by an asymmetrical metric structure, usually 5/16, 7/16 or 9/16 (ex.3).

Koleduvane (the performance of koleda traditions) was part of a larger group of mid-winter mumming customs enacted to bring good health, fertility, abundance and luck to the surrounding community. In some of these traditions (Surva, Kukerovden) men dressed in elaborate masked costumes decorated with sheep- and cow-bells, some of which were enormous. As the participants (survakari and kukeri) moved or danced, the cacophony produced by the ringing bells expelled any evil spirits in the vicinity.

Another substantial body of beneficial ritual customs surrounded Lent and Easter. On Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday teenage girls wandered throughout the village singing and dancing brisk, laudatory lazarski pesni (‘Lazar songs’). These ‘lazarki’ dressed ornately in costumes symbolizing blooming flowers, a metaphor of their own budding beauty and the healthful good wishes they spread. This custom (lazaruvane) was also part of the courtship process, for the lazarki made eligible men the target of special singing games in which participants obliquely expressed their interest.

Songs also marked the calendar year in various ways. Some commemorated important Christian holidays, such as the feast day of St George. In Strandzha the feast of St Constantine and St Helena (3 June) was celebrated with a two-day ritual called Nestinarstvo that culminated in fire-dancers (nestinarki) walking through hot coals in an ecstatic state, bearing icons of these holy figures above their heads. During Lent, when dancing was proscribed, young men pushed girls in swings while they sang songs connected with courtship, good health and a rich harvest. The higher a girl was swung, the higher the wheat would grow. Magical songs likewise brought rain during periods of drought (Peperuda) or protected the community from inclement weather in general (German). Songs connected to divinatory customs practised by young women foretold whom they would marry.

Music and dance enhanced village weddings, which occurred during winter months when the community, free of the burden of agricultural work, had more time to celebrate. The wedding process, a week-long affair, comprised more than 30 episodes. The bride was fêted by her female friends and relatives throughout the festivities with songs that described her wedding preparations, extolled her beauty, offered her advice or expressed her sorrow at leaving her natal family for a new life (see ex.4). Musical activity accompanied the creation of the wedding banner, shaving the groom, the fetching of the bride by the groom’s entourage, the procession to the church and celebratory banquets held after the wedding ceremony.

Deaths, too, were greeted musically. Women improvised laments (oplakvaniya) from the moment of death to that of interment. These commented on the life of the deceased, his or her relationship with the village community and the pain of the lamenters (oplachki). Particularly gifted lamenters were prized by the community and sometimes led the other women. Although spontaneous laments were, like the epic songs to which they are related, non-metrical and recitative-like in character, particularly fine examples were sometimes transformed into more lyrical mourning songs or instrumental melodies.

Selections from the Bulgarian epos, a genre that includes heroic epics, and historical and khayduk ballads, regaled guests at banquets held in honour of holidays, weddings, engagements, christenings and other important community events. For this reason they were also known as songs performed ‘at the table’ (na trapeza), or for enhancing conviviality (na moabet).

The heartland of epic singing was western Bulgaria. Sung by male or female solo vocalists, commonly to the accompaniment of a single instrument (often a gayda or gadulka that heterophonically imitated the voice by following slightly behind it), heroic epics recounted the legendary escapades of Momchil or of Krali Marko, who fought against the Ottomans in the 14th century. Such epics contain hundreds of lines; these were improvised to a small number of similar, non-metrical melodies falling within the range of a 5th called epicheski rechitativi (‘epic recitatives’) or trapezni melodii (‘table melodies’). Each verse was distinguished by three features: an introductory, embellished flourish on the syllable e or khey starting on the melody’s highest pitch; several lines of text performed in recitative fashion to sequential, often descending passages; and a melismatic, concluding phrase that, like the introduction, was sometimes marked by a trill-like shaking of the voice called tresene (ex.4). The instrumentalist provided an interlude between verses, improvised from the song’s melody.

Historical ballads took figures and events from Bulgaria’s more recent past, particularly the struggle for liberation from Ottoman forces. They described the fall of Tsarigrad, presented episodes from the reigns of specific tsars and related tales of forced conversion to Islam. A significant portion of historical ballads portrayed the deeds of khaydusti (sing. khayduk) or voyvodi (sing. voyvoda: ‘leader’, ‘chieftain’), rebel fighters who launched attacks against Ottoman brigades from the hidden recesses of Bulgaria’s forested mountains (ex.5). Historical ballads were performed to epic, harvest and dance-song melodies and usually exhibited a wider vocal range than heroic recitatives.

In addition to these heroic and historical songs, village lore included mythological ballads that told of dragons and their human lovers, wood and water sprites, demons and fairies, human heroes endowed with superhuman qualities and other miraculous or supernatural phenomena. Some of these were part of larger ballad families found throughout the Balkans.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(iii) Instruments.

Village life embraced several indigenous instruments whose distribution was regionally differentiated. Originally constructed by the musicians themselves or by master craftsmen, the size and tuning of these instruments were not standardized until the mid-20th century, when the creation of ensembles demanded precise pitch.

Four aerophones were found throughout the country with some local variation: the Kaval (semi-traverse, rim-blown wooden flute), ovcharska svirka or tsafara (shepherd’s pipe), duduk (vertical wooden flute), and gayda (see Bagpipe, §7(vi)). The kaval’s large range and its timbre, said to resemble the human voice, made it suitable for playing inside the home, at the sedyanka and in the pasture (fig.1).

While there used to be several styles of kaval playing, the Thracian style, with articulation and vibrato produced by the fingers, is prevalent today.

The svirka or tsafara, a smaller version of the kaval, was played in a similar manner. Once fashioned from the bones of eagles’ wings, the traditional instrument was made from a single piece of wood or reed. Contemporary svirki may be constructed of metal and are often considered children’s toys.

The duduk (also dyuduk) was a shepherd’s plugged whistle flute blown through an apical slit, constructed in one to three sections in a range of sizes. The large, three-piece dudutsi of central western Bulgaria had a three-octave range; the single-piece instruments encompassed two octaves. Usually made of reed or wood, dudutsi possessed six finger-holes spaced equally or arranged in two groups of three along the instrument’s face. In north-western Bulgaria the duduk was once the most popular instrument; it is now nearly obsolete.

The favourite instrument for accompanying weddings and outdoor celebrations was the gayda. This is a bagpipe with a single chanter (gaydanitsa) and drone (ruchilo). Three sizes of gaydi exist, the most widespread being the middle-range Thracian bagpipe (fig.2).

Two other wind instruments popular in pre-socialist Bulgaria were the dvoyanka, a wooden, double fipple block flute characteristic of western Bulgaria, and the zurna (also zurla), a double-reed wooden aerophone that existed most prominently within Pirin’s Muslim Rom communities and the towns of Ludogorie, Shumen, Razgrad and Kardzhali. Both instruments were played to produce diaphony. Finger-holes were drilled into only one of the dvoyanka’s two pipes, allowing the instrumentalist to play a melody while simultaneously blowing into the second pipe, which produced a drone. Likewise, musicians always played zurni in pairs, one sounding a melody, the other a drone, to the accompaniment of one or two circular, double-headed, wooden frame drums called tapani. Such ensembles only played outdoors due to their raucous sound.

The tapan is the most widespread membranophone, used throughout Bulgaria in varied performance contexts. The drum’s heads traditionally were fashioned from sheep or dog skin and secured with hemp cords. In performance the tapan is suspended from the left shoulder with string or a belt, and is played with two drumsticks: a thick, slightly curved stick (kiyak or tokmak) that accentuates strong metric pulses, and a long, thin willow or apple switch (shibalka, shibka), played with the left hand to mark weaker beats. In village life the tapan was considered important for wedding processionals, dances and celebrations.

Pirin is home to two other membranophones that are linked to Macedonian and Middle Eastern culture. The tarambuka (tarabuka, darabuka) is a goblet-shaped drum with a terracotta base and a single drum head of cat or lamb skin. The drum is held under the left arm or placed between the knees and struck with both hands. The dayre is a small wooden frame drum with a single kid-skin head that, like the tarambuka, provided rhythmic accompaniment for singing, instrumental music and dancing. The modern dayre also has pairs of round metal plates (zilove) inserted in slits in the drum’s frame.

Until the creation of folk ensembles in the 1950s the tambura, a strummed long-necked fretted lute with a rounded back, was found only in Pirin-Macedonia and among the Muslim population of Rhodope, where it functioned as both a solo and accompanying instrument. Tamburi once existed in several sizes with two, four, six, eight, or twelve metal strings. The four-string tambura was the most common beofre 1950; the eight-string (arranged in four double courses) dominates today. In pre-socialist Bulgaria three of the four strings were tuned as unison drones; the fourth, or melody string, was pitched a 4th or 5th away. The courses of the contemporary tambura, however, are tuned d–g–b–e', which enables the production of chords. The tambura and dayre are the only indigenous instruments sometimes played by women.

The Gadulka is a bowed, three-string short-necked wooden lute, with a pear-shaped rounded or, less frequently, flat body, found everywhere except Pirin and Rhodope. The instrument is played vertically, resting on the knee or on a belt (fig.3). Previously the gadulka existed in several forms, the standard instrument today being the large Thracian gadulka.

Until the early 20th century Bulgarian musicians rarely combined different indigenous instruments together in groups. There were some regional exceptions: the zurna and tapan ensembles of south-western Bulgaria; orchestras of variously sized mandolins and tamburi that appeared in Pirin-Macedonia in the mid-19th century; and the so-called Dobrudzhan trio, of the small dzhura gayda, kopanka and the (fiz)kharmonika, an instrument resembling a button accordion that probably came to the Danubian area from Russia. These groups performed melodies in unison or with a drone.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(iv) The khoro.

Few festive events were complete without communal dancing. In addition to sedenki or tlaki, weddings and calendrical rites, villagers performed a wide variety of khora at community dances held every Sunday afternoon (except during Lent) on the village square or green. They danced at evening parties called vecherinki, and at summer fairs termed sborove or panairi that commemorated the patron saint of the community’s church.

Khora were executed in closed or open circles, spirals, a single long line or several short, straight rows. Dancers clasped each other by the hand, belt, shoulder or around the waist to produce human chains. Dance gestures involved primarily foot and arm movements, especially steps on the heel, toes or whole of the foot; slides, hops, squats and knee bends. The torso and head remained comparatively fixed. Characteristic dance movements often emulated animal behaviours or the motions of work, such as churning butter, in a stylized fashion. These had descriptive names that could be shouted as commands during the dancing. Each khoro combined such gestures in specific figures that varied in number.

Every khoro possessed a head, middle and tail. The best dancers joined at the head to lead the khoro, while girls, boys and children learning to dance made up the tail. Those at the front were free to extemporize their movements. Likewise, good dancers sometimes attached themselves to the tail to energize the dance line or make it twist. The structure of the dance line reflected the community’s social order in that the men were usually at the head, the women in the middle and the children at the end. For a bachelor to join the khoro next to a young woman was a public expression of interest and sometimes a sign of betrothal.

Most khora were performed to khorovodni pesni (‘dance-songs’) sung by the dancers themselves, one after the other for hours on end (see ex.2). Customarily these dance-songs were sung antiphonally by two pairs of women located near the front of the line, but could include larger groups of singers. Most were in duple metre, but many also had asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. Tempos ranged from sedate to very fast.

A single instrument, often a gayda or gadulka, also commonly accompanied dancing. The musician stood near the khoro’s centre and spontaneously improvised a dance-tune from brief melodic fragments (persenkove) that he developed into longer phrases called kolena (sing. kolyano), usually within the interval of a 5th. These kolena were irregular in length due to their improvisatory character and because their substance was linked to the dancers’ actions. Sometimes an entire khoro resulted from extemporization on one persenk. Other khora comprised variations on three or four kolena, but in all cases the melodic material developed organically throughout. Repetition of a single motif, movement to a new pitch area, the instantaneous working out of fresh material and tempo increases all heightened the musical tension and inspired dancers.

Under the influence of emerging urban ensembles in the 19th and early 20th centuries, two or three svirachi began playing khora together in unison to ease the strain of lengthy solo performance. Instrumentation depended on local availability, but typical combinations included homogeneous ensembles of two or three gadulki, gaydi or kavali, and mixed ensembles of gadulka, gayda and kaval, or, gayda and tapan. Along the Danube small groups of Western and central European string instruments fulfilled the same function. Like the Dobrudzhan trio and zurna and tapan ensembles mentioned above, these groups performed melodies in unison or with drone, although intonation was not uniform.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(v) Texture and timbre.

Both instrumental music and singing were predominantly monophonic, solo traditions that emphasized the unfolding of intricately embellished melodic lines. When women or men sang together they usually sang in unison. Such songs were often performed antiphonally by two soloists or two groups of voices that repeated or alternated verses. Repeating verses gave novices a chance to learn unfamiliar texts and lengthened a song’s duration. Antiphony gave singers a chance to catch their breath while dancing or cultivating crops. It was customary for the first group to sustain its last pitch while the second group began to sing a new verse, creating a momentary diaphonic texture.

Although monophony prevailed, diaphony (dvuglas) existed throughout Bulgaria and was especially strong in the west. Every indigenous instrument produced two-voiced textures except the duduk, svirka and kaval; the dvoyanka, gayda, tambura, gadulka, chift kavali (a pair of kavali) and zurna were either designed, tuned or customarily played to yield a melody and drone simultaneously. In the north-west musicians even growled a drone while playing duduk, a technique termed ramzhene (‘grumbling’).

Moreover, songs in the Shop and Pirin regions were distinguished by unique diaphonic styles linked to similar traditions in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia and Albania. In both districts this dvuglas, sometimes also called mnogoglasie (‘many voices’, part singing), consisted of a solo upper voice and a lower, drone voice traditionally executed by one or two singers, but sometimes more. Singers characterized the two parts with terms that metaphorically described their movement, timbral quality or function: the first voice izvikva (‘cries out’), izviva (‘winds’), vodi (‘leads’), diga (‘rises’) or trese (‘shakes’), while the second voice slaga (‘lays’), vlachi (‘trails behind’), buchi (‘roars’), and occasionally trese (‘shakes’). These terms also indicated the physical stance of the singers, as the melody bearer sometimes positioned herself slightly ahead of the droners. Here the first voice was said to go napred (‘in front’), while the drone voice followed.

The types of songs performed diaphonically varied from village to village, but generally included harvest, dance, sedyanka, wedding, calendrical and all-occasion lyric songs. Textual and rhythmic precision were vitally important. Once they had learnt the lyrics and parts from older women, girls formed duos and trios to practise songs on their own. Some of these singing partnerships lasted a lifetime.

Vocal colour and blend were also significant. Women described two basic categories of timbres: voices that were chist (‘clean’) or piskliv (‘reedy’), and those that were debel (‘thick’), mazhen (‘buttery’) and maten (‘muddy’). Singers preferred not to mingle the two timbres. When singing antiphonally a ‘reedy’ group was often juxtaposed with a ‘buttery’ group. This differentiation was also associated with age, as an older woman’s voice tended to be thicker than that of a teenage girl. In both cases women projected their voices to produce an open-throated, focussed and intense sound that could be heard some distance away.

Within western Bulgaria the movement of the drone voice, degree of pitch manipulation, cadential formulae, ornamentation practices and even the number of women singing all varied from one village to the next. Diaphonic songs from the Shop district were marked by arched contours, antiphonal performance and a constricted range, usually a minor 3rd, resulting in a plethora of narrow interval simultaneities. One woman ordinarily sang the first voice, and two or three the underlying tone. Shop diaphony was particularly loud and powerful; women preferred the drone to nearly overwhelm the melody. The melody bearer thus often ended sustained tones with a glottal stop, a result of the vocal tension caused by this forceful singing.

The drone voice, while variable in this region, typically followed one of two patterns: it either sang the text on a tonic drone, dropping to the sub-tonic together with the first voice at certain moments; or it moved to the sub-tonic whenever the melody voice descended to the tonic. The latter practice created occasional parallel motion between the voices and a preponderance of 2nds. Moreover, singers often manipulated pitches so as to further close the distance between them, causing them to ‘ring like bells’, perhaps referring to the pulsation of the resultant difference tones. Singers frequently prolonged a song’s final tone, dwelling on the ringing sound. In harvest songs performed during rest periods, the first voice enhanced such moments with tresene (‘shaking’), a vocal technique comprising a trill-like succession of glottal stops. This was often followed by a cadential formula called izvikvane that entailed a ‘unison leap of a minor 7th or octave on the vowel sound “eee” followed by descending glissando and decrease in volume’ (Rice, 1977). This technique dissipated the singers’ accumulated vocal and respiratory tension and intensified the sonic collision created when two groups of singers overlapped (ex.6).

The diaphonic songs of Pirin and Velingrad were more lyrical than Shop songs. Melodies contained wider ranges, could begin on any scale degree and were sung with much lighter voices. Antiphony occurred less frequently. Tresene and izvikvane were also atypical. Songs were performed by the traditional trio of women, but also by groups with six or seven singing a drone. In Muslim communities pairs of girls sang diaphonically, as did large groups of men. In Bansko a Christian male ensemble performed a similar style of dvuglas. Such male ensembles were exceedingly rare elsewhere.

Songs frequently began in unison and then split into the characteristic drone and melody. Two types of drone movement distinguished Pirin diaphony: the second voice remained on the tonic, sometimes dropping to the sub-tonic in unison with the upper voice; or it moved in accordance with the melody to produce as many 2nds and 3rds as possible. In the latter case the drone fell on any pitch from the sub-tonic to the dominant. Voice crossings were common in both song types (ex.7).

A distinctive corpus of vocal diaphony in Bansko called na atsane was typified by a first voice that frequently swooped up to the octave, moved to the sub-tonic and then descended to the tonic in a glissando. The octave swoops were further demarcated by a sustained vocal clucking in the high register.

Styles of performance in the Pazardzhik-Ikhtiman area marked a shift from western Bulgarian diaphony to the monophonic singing of eastern Bulgaria. There were several styles of dvuglas. As elsewhere, a tonic drone sounded constantly or occasionally dipped to the sub-tonic, usually in unison with the first voice. In many villages, however, the upper voice performed an elaborately embellished melody whose basic skeleton was sung by the second voice in long, sustained tones, producing a heterophonic texture. Moreover, in towns like Ikhtiman the lower voice, rather than the lead singer, performed tresene in both heterophonic or the more usual melody-drone song types.

Performers in the villages west of the Struma river used the second voice to maintain a tonic drone on the vowel sound ‘eee’ throughout a song. When cadential izvikvane occurred the first voice sustained a minor 7th above the drone voices. Other songs cadenced on tonic and sub-tonic together. Songs in this area generally had a slightly wider range, lacked tresene, and frequently opened with an ascending 4th, setting them apart from those of the Shop district.

Outside western Bulgaria, dvuglas was practised only in the Rhodope village of Nedelino and its environs. Unique styles of narrow-interval three-voice singing existed in the Pirin town of Kostursko, near Petrich, where the voice movement resembled that of Albanian polyphony, and in villages surrounding Sofia, where the voices frequently produced three-note clusters of adjacent pitches, an intensification of the parallel 2nds found in Shop diaphony.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(vi) Structure, form and mode.

Bulgarian melodies usually move by step and frequently have a narrow compass, often within an octave. Two to five pitch melodies are the norm; these regularly drop one whole step below the tonic. Songs are structured in verses containing one to three lines of text. Each line usually comprises six, eight, ten or twelve syllables, divided into two syllabic groups by a caesura. Within a single song the placement of the caesura may be inconsistent. Phrase structure and rhythm generally follow the text’s syllabic structure and phrases do not always contain the same number of bars. Refrains of one to three lines are common. Vocables, expressive variations of names or common nouns and other evocative interjections frequently fill out text phrases. Such poetic devices can create full lines or an entire verse; these often function as refrains.

Five varieties of anhemitonic pentatonicism exist in Rhodope and Thrace, but songs do not always feature all five requisite tones. The intonational system of pre-socialist village music was untempered, nonstandardized and frequently employed untempered intervals, including microtones, making any discussion of modality problematic. Melodies are generally constructed within diatonic tetrachords or pentachords. However, innumerable melodies display underlying chromatic tetrachordal, pentachordal, hexachordal or heptachordal structures distinguished by the presence of augmented 2nds between any two successive scale degrees except one and two (see exx.9, 10 and 11). Some of these structures may be related to Middle Eastern modal configurations, or the old Bulgarian or Byzantine church modes.

Bulgaria, §II, 2: Pre-socialist musical culture, 1800–1944

(vii) Rhythm and metre.

A large repertory of unpulsed rubato, improvisatory, densely ornamented songs generically termed bavni pesni (‘slow songs’) exists throughout Bulgaria. These can include harvest and other agricultural work songs performed to extended, sustained ‘long melodies’ (dalgi glasove); lyric songs and ballads performed to more moderate tempo, parlando rubato ‘drawn-out melodies’ (vlacheni glasove; see ex.1); and songs performed to ‘broken’ or ‘chopped-up’ melodies (secheni glasove), a phrase that describes the rapidly flowing, recitative-like character of many laments and ‘table’ songs (see ex.4).

Musicians perform similar non-metrical solos called bavni melodii (‘slow melodies’) or svirni (sing. svirnya). Some are shepherds’ melodies, freely improvised from idiomatic motifs and phrases; others are instrumental renditions of slow songs (ex.8), which musicians contend thay cannot play well unless they know the associated texts.

The terms used to specify pulsed rhythmic patterns also designate particular types of khoro melodies and dance steps. The most popular and widespread duple metre dance is the pravo khoro (‘straight dance’). Although described and written by contemporary musicians as ‘in two’, this dance has the underlying compound duple character of 6/8 (ex.9). Other common duple metre dances include the buenek, a moderate tempo khoro found in Strandzha; the lively trite pati (lit., ‘three times’) of eastern Thrace, in which a sense of four semiquavers underlies every beat; and lyavata (‘to the left’), another Thracian khoro in which the dancers move anticlockwise. Melodies in triple metre are rare except in Pirin.

Bulgaria’s asymmetrical rhythms may be thought of as combinations of duple and triple metres strung together to create heterometric patterns.Ex.10 illustrates many commonly performed heterometres. Each pattern serves as the basis for one or more dance types, which may be differentiated by region and choreography. Khoro melodies may be named after their associated locales (e.g. Makedonsko khoro and Shopsko khoro), after a musician who creates or favours a particular melody or after distinguishing elements of the dance itself (e.g. the kalaydzhiysko khoro from Pirin is danced by turning the body to the right and left, causing the dancer to ‘spin like a kalaydzhiya’, or ‘dried pea’ – a name for a fidget).

The most popular heterometric dance is the rachenitsa, an energetic khoro in 7/16 (2 + 2 + 3) with various local names (ex.11). It is performed individually, by couples or in groups, indoors or outside, especially during weddings and other celebrations. In Pirin the khoro subdivided 3 + 2 + 2 is named pravo makedonsko (‘straight Macedonian’) and mazhka rachenitsa (‘men’s rachenitsa’). The kalaydzhiysko khoro mentioned above and the paydushko (ex.12) are dances in 5/16 (2 + 3).

Melodies in 9/8 (or 9/16)when divided 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 are known as daychovi khora (see ex.2). The daychovo is associated with northern Bulgaria, where it is usually a quick dance accompanied by an instrumental ensemble, often a wind band. It is also encountered in other areas, but under different names. A favourite dance of central and western Bulgaria is the kopanitsa in 11/16 (2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 2). This is known by various local names, including gankino khoro in the Shop area and krivo (‘crooked’) khoro in Pazardzhik, western Thrace. Numerous dances in increasingly complex asymmetrical patterns, such as the petrunino khoro in 13/16 (2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3) of the Shop region and the buchemish in 15/16 (2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 2) from western Thrace, are found throughout the country.

Although these heterometres, of which there are many more than mentioned here, were termed ‘Bulgarian’ by Béla Bartók (1938); they are linked to similar patterns found in Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

3. Urban musics, 1850–1944.

The late 19th century witnessed the emergence of a vibrant musical life in towns and cities that differed substantially from older village traditions. These new urban styles derived from the musics of neighbouring peoples. During the last years of Ottoman rule Turkish administrators, Balkan merchants, and emigrant workers maintained continuous inter-city contact, spreading new styles throughout the Balkans. Their popularization marks the beginning of both professional and amateur institutionalized musical activity.

Gradski pesni (‘urban songs’) became important even before the Liberation (1878), when residents of larger cities began to favour songs imported from Greece, Turkey, Russia and Germany, with translated or new Bulgarian texts. Other new gradski pesni appeared soon afterwards, based on local melodies but modelled on the foreign songs. Unlike village songs, gradski pesni had known authors, including famous Bulgarian, Russian or German poets; their lyrics were composed in rhymed couplets; their melodies were metred, often in 6/8, 3/4 or 4/4, displayed wide ranges, and had pitch movements that implied functional harmony; and they were published as part of the Vazrazhdane’s literacy movement.

By 1900, as villagers sought employment in cities, town and village culture intermingled. Two urban song types became widespread in both venues: lyrical love songs with poetic texts by well-known literary figures performed to Greek or Turkish melodies, romances, waltzes, tangos and German Schlager tunes; and songs with patriotic or revolutionary texts, sung to marches and other militaristic or nationalistic genres. These included songs of the Vazrazhdane and Liberation, soldiers’ songs, workers’ songs, which first appeared in Bulgaria during the 1890s and gained popularity with the rise of socialism and, as institutionalized education developed, school songs. These genres were performed by amateur civic and military choirs established in the 1890s in emulation of similar Russian groups that arose along the Danube in connection with the Liberation’s military campaigns.

During the 1930s and 40s sentimental, melancholic love songs from Macedonia, which contemporary Bulgarians call starogradski pesni (‘old urban songs’), acquired great popularity. These songs were composed in regionally specific metres to Greek- and Turkish-influenced melodies, and frequently performed as duets in parallel 3rds with orchestral accompaniments. They were disseminated through a growing recording industry and by professional (often foreign) musicians who sang at restaurants and taverns.

The Liberation era also saw radical developments in instrumental performance practice. By the late 19th century five types of non-indigenous instrumental ensembles existed in Bulgaria: symphonic chamber groups established by immigrants in the Danubian region; Ottoman Turkish Janissary orchestras; Czech wind bands; urban ensembles of minority musicians, often Christian and Muslim Roma, called svirdzhii or chalgadzhii; and small bands of foreign musicians from Serbia, Romania, Turkey and Bohemia. Together with the civic choirs mentioned above, these introduced Bulgarians to western European instruments, notation and collective musical performance. By 1911 wind bands directed by Czech Kapellmeisters existed throughout the country, performing brass band arrangements of symphonic works, operatic overtures, marches and medleys of Bulgarian folk tunes (kitki, ‘bouquets’). Such groups influenced local musical practices significantly, inspiring village musicians to form small ensembles of mixed instrumentation.

The svirdzhii and foreign bands constitute early examples of semi-professional musicianship in Bulgaria. Although often employed as labourers, they travelled from town to town according to the calendar of local festivities, providing music for engagements, weddings, fairs and even upper-class Macedonian balls to augment their incomes. The svirdzhii’s repertories and instrumentation were eclectic, often combining indigenous and Western European instruments and genres. Svirdzhii who played clarinet, bass, double-bass and drums became widespread around 1900, especially in north-western Bulgaria. A villager’s ability to hire such groups as wedding entertainment enhanced his social status. The players were highly talented musicians whose repertories included narodni pesni, gradski pesni, khora and svirni, the music of ethnic minorities and neighbouring Balkan peoples, and popular Western European dances, like waltzes and mazurkas. This reflected the increasingly international and syncretic Balkan music scene. The svirdzhii’s performance of these genres emphasized virtuosic, improvisatory, highly embellished solo or heterophonic playing, sometimes over a rudimentary bass line; an idiomatic style called chalga.

By the 1920s and 30s, therefore, major cities possessed a thriving, cosmopolitan population of musical ensembles. The small foreign orchestras performed for occasions similar to those of the svirdzhii and these groups influenced each other’s repertory. During the early 20th century such ensembles were hired in restaurants, taverns and cinemas, where they became known as salon orchestras (salonni orkestri). These orchestras performed Schlager, celebrated symphonic works, khora, kitki, narodni pesni, patriotic songs and many imported American dances then fashionable in Europe. Urban Slavic Bulgarian musicians soon formed similar ensembles to perform indigenous music; these groups were important forerunners of later, state-sponsored folk orchestras.

4. Institutionalized neo-traditional music after 1930.

The Bulgarian National Radio (established 1929) promoted live performances of khora and narodni pesni with instrumental accompaniment by small ensembles of well-known musicians and singers. These groups, such as the Bistrishka Chetvorka (Bistrista Quartet, established 1936; gayda, kaval, gadulka and tambura), were basically salon orchestras of indigenous instruments. The Ugarchinska Narodna Grupa (Ugarchinska Folk Group) (established 1939; kaval, gayda, tambura, gadulka, tapan and cello gadulka) also performed under the name Tsvyatko Blagoev using Western European instruments (clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin, accordion and tapan), illustrating the musicians’ abilities to adapt to varied performance contexts. Such ensembles were eventually designated ‘modern orchestras’ because of their non-indigenous instrumentation; bitovi narodni orkestri (‘traditional folk orchestras’) described groups like the Bistritsa Quartet.

The collective playing fostered by the Radio altered village musical practices considerably. Musicians learned to play khora more or less in unison, each performing the melody in a manner idiomatic to his instrument, with slight differences in ornamentation. They structured their khora in a new, sectional format known as the kolenna forma, in which each successive phrase derived from the last. Every phrase was repeated, and as the years passed, became equal in length, so that the khoro’s phrase structure became regularized. Instrumentalists interspersed solo improvisations on fragments of the khoro melody within the larger group structure while the other musicians vamped on the tonic pitch. When accompanying singers the musicians improvised an appropriate introduction and refrain, called a pripev or otsvir. During the sung verses one or two instruments, generally the kaval, gayda or gadulka, followed the melody heterophonically, while the others played a drone or ceased playing. Whether a song or instrumental piece, the tambura accentuated metric patterns through rhythmic strumming, followed the melody, or provided an underlying drone or rudimentary chordal accompaniment.

The political events of 1944 resulted in the total institutionalization of all musical activities within a monolithic network of state administrative organs whose representative bureaus extended into every city, town and village, and whose structure and ideals emulated those of Soviet cultural development. The Vazrazhdane’s civic choral and instrumental groups were incorporated into the larger, state-directed programme of khudozhestvena samodeynost (‘amateur artistic creativity’), which dictated the collectivization of musical performance in kolektivi (‘collectives’) and ansambli (‘ensembles’) for song and dance. By 1950, 3400 such groups existed in association with labour unions, agricultural cooperatives, factories, schools, local libraries, communist youth organizations and houses of culture. The groups’ activities were closely associated with political life; the development of khudozhestvena samodeynost fell directly under the government’s Agitation and Propaganda department until 1954, when a separate administrative bureau, the centre for khudozhestvena samodeynost, was established in Sofia.

One chief function of these kolektivi, whose numbers had swelled to 22,760 by 1987, was to popularize socialist mass songs. These included songs in praise of the September Uprising of 1923, the Bulgarian army, Bulgarian–Soviet relations and political figures such as Joseph Stalin and Georgi Dimitrov; partisan and revolutionary workers’ songs, many of which substituted new names and events into the basic structure of pre-existing heroic, khaiduk or soldiers’ song texts; and songs ‘for the new village’ (ex.13), whose melodies are in folk style but whose texts celebrate the building of socialism. New work songs commented on agricultural collectivization, the activities of work brigades and the construction of reservoirs or similar projects.

During the late 1940s amateur ensembles promoting more traditional presentations of folklore arose, among them the Ensemble for Macedonian Folk Songs and Dances Gotse Delchev (Sofia, 1945) the Ensemble for Folk Songs and Dances Yane Sandanski (Gotse Delchev, 1946) and the Plovdiv Folk Ensemble for Songs and Dances (1948). Unlike other ensembles these groups employed regionally specific orchestras of indigenous instruments. The popularity of these amateur ensembles, coupled with a visit from the USSR’s folk choir Pyatnitski in 1949, inspired the Council of Ministers and composer Filip Kutev (1903–82) to establish the first professional folk song and dance ensemble in 1950–51.

The primary objective of the National Folk Song and Dance Ensemble Filip Kutev was the preservation and performance of village music from all over Bulgaria, but in a contemporary format representative of the new socialist state. Kutev travelled widely, auditioning the best performers from every ethnographic region to build a women’s folk choir, a mixed dance troupe and a (male) folk orchestra constructed from the five most prevalent indigenous instruments (kaval, gaida, gadulka, tambura and tapan). Leading composers produced polyphonic arrangements of folksongs and khora, termed obrabotki, for these groups, while choreographers designed similarly complex presentations of dance figures. Together the three units enacted theatrical, stylized renderings of traditional lore called postanovki on concert stages at home and abroad. In 1952, shortly after the Kutev Ensemble’s first concerts, the Ensemble for Folk Songs of the Bulgarian Radio and Television was established in Sofia to popularize new obrabotki through the mass media. Several other professional narodni ansambli with regional foci soon arose in major cities. These included Ensembles Pirin (Blagoevgrad, 1954), Rodopa (Smolyan, 1960), Dobrudzha (Tolbukhin, 1970), Trakiya (Plovdiv, 1974) and the Severnyashki Ensemble (Pleven, 1970).

Initial members of early folk ensembles were villagers who possessed no formal musical training. While participants learnt how to read notation and follow a conductor, performing narodna muzika in a collective fashion posed significant obstacles whose solutions dictated drastic modifications in traditional performance practice. Vocalists, for example, learnt to sing together in multiple parts and with orchestral accompaniment. Although two or three lines characterized early choral obrabotki, over the next 40 years they became steadily more contrapuntal, complex and classical in nature, employing four to ten parts.

Contemporary folk orchestras expanded the instrumentation of earlier bitovi narodni orkestri into a larger symphonic scheme. Kutev enlisted master craftsmen to construct standardized families of neo-indigenous instruments, including new bass, cello, and viola gadulki and tamburi modelled on the Western European viola, cello, and double bass. Intonation subsequently became more precise, but the new instruments required special instruction. Ensembles therefore often employed conservatory-trained musicians to play the newly-designed strings, which supplied the bass lines and inner parts of polyphonic arrangements. The gayda was utilized without its ruchilo, so that its drone would not interfere with an obratbotka’s harmonic scheme. The large kaba gayda and Dobrudzhan trio were utilized primarily in appropriate regional ensembles, while the dvoyanka, duduk and small Shop gadulka fell into virtual oblivion. The tambura, however, became part of every folk ensemble despite its localized distribution.

Although folk orchestras initially performed melodies in a style similar to bitovi narodni orkestri, in succeeding years orchestral obrabotki featured multiple parts, large-scale forms, chromatic harmonies, countermelody, imitation and symphonic playing techniques. While the kolenna forma still provided a structural basis, contemporary obrabotki exhibited many more kolena than a traditional khoro; these were often unrelated in substance, incorporated modulations to different key areas, and displayed marked registral contrasts.

By 1988 the state supported 14 professional folk ensembles and hundreds of similar, amateur formations. These became the principal vehicle through which traditional music and customs were experienced. Secondary schools providing intensive training in narodna muzika were established at Kotel and Shiroka Laka; a third school for choreography and ‘traditional dance’ was founded in Sofia. The Vissh Muzikalno Pedigogicheski Institut (Higher Musical Pedagogical Institute), located in Plovdiv, furnished Kotel and Shiroka Laka graduates with additional instruction at the collegiate level. These institutions equipped professional ensembles with a ready supply of qualified personnel, and amateur ensembles with skilled directors. They also affected conventional modes of performance greatly, for younger people no longer acquired knowledge of narodna muzika within the course of daily life, but in a structured environment from notated materials written specifically for this purpose: obrabotki for folk choir and orchestra, scale and technical studies for each instrument and chamber works for soloists with folk orchestra accompaniment. Numerous juried competitions and festivals for both amateur and professional groups (a contemporary manifestation of pre-socialist village fairs) allowed panels of official adjudicators, usually folklorists, government officials and folk ensemble directors, to supervise the shape of folk music performance through their awards, and through lectures following the staged events.

As their repertories became further divorced from their village roots, folk ensembles grew less popular. The glasnost era, however, prompted an increased number of international tour and recording invitations for prominent groups. Foreign impresarios sponsored governmentally selected concertizing formations derived from major ensembles, especially choirs performing multipart obrabotki and more conventional instrumental groups of three to five musicians. After 1989 ensemble members established privately sponsored chamber and choral groups seeking international contracts. Intense competition arose between them, as each strove to devise a unique creative identity. Moreover, the personnel ranks of large folk ensembles were weakened as major artists resigned to perform in private organizations. These factors, together with a sharp decrease in state funding, caused many ensembles to disband in the 1990s. Some persevere with financial backing from diverse public and private sources, adapting their concert programmes to contemporary circumstances.

5. Neo-traditional popular music.

During the 1970s an eclectic non-state-sponsored genre termed svatbarska muzika (‘wedding music’) rose quickly to popularity. This genre, which blends narodna muzika with other Balkan styles and pop music elements, is performed by svatbarski orkestri (‘wedding orchestras’), bands of four to ten professional musicians, usually of minority heritage, which developed from the svirdzhii and salon orchestras of the early 20th century. Instrumentation varies, but often includes accordion, clarinet, electric bass guitar and drum kit. To this configuration electric guitar, synthesizer, trumpet, violin, saxophone, kaval, gayda and gadulka are added. The clarinet is generally the lead melody instrument; accordion, saxophone or violin also perform this function. Most bands include a female vocalist who characteristically employs a wide vibrato.

Wedding orchestras perform at weddings, christenings, holiday celebrations and farewell parties commemorating a young man’s departure for military service. Their repertory comprises khora and svirni, and Greek, Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian and Turkish melodies, especially the kyuchek, a Turkish Rom solo dance in 2/4 or 9/8 with undulations of the hips and arms. These are performed in the chalga style typical of Rom musicians, frequently with Turkish nuances. The influence of American jazz and rock is evident in certain chord progressions, the use of electric instruments and the emphasis on solo improvisation.

The musician credited with originating wedding music is Ivo Papazov (Ibrahim Hapasov), a clarinettist of minority extraction who founded his band, Trakiya, in Stara Zagora in 1974. During the 1980s, when hundreds of bands emulating Trakiya formed throughout Bulgaria, the government censured this genre harshly for three reasons. Firstly, it evolved and was performed outside the state-sponsored music industry. Non-professional, privately made cassette recordings of wedding bands were duplicated and passed from person to person in an informal, grassroots music economy. Secondly, many wedding musicians were from minority groups. During the 1980s they were therefore targeted by the Zhivkov administration’s campaign to eradicate all vestiges of Turkish culture from Bulgarian society. Thirdly, government authorities believed that wedding music’s amalgamated nature threatened narodna muzika’s purity. Wedding musicians were consequently taxed heavily and denied certain civil liberties.

In the late 1980s the government established control over wedding orchestras by incorporating them into the state network of adjudicated festivals and competitions. Scholars reversed their position on the value of wedding music by valorizing its links to narodna muzika. By 1990 it had become an acceptable musical style whose influence was evident even in folk ensemble obrabotki.

In the late 1980s prominent members of the Bulgarian Radio’s folk ensemble, together with composer Dimitar Penev, produced studio recordings that set traditional music to a disco beat, a genre termed disco folk. At the same time, rock bands started incorporating digitally sampled snippets of narodna muzika into pop songs or performing rock ballads with a folk flavour. Other groups produced political pop that satirized the events and results of the 1989 political transition. Western pop musicians sampled or otherwise utilized Bulgarian musicians or repertory in their creative work. These trends continue to evolve in the late 1990s, although their popularity is overshadowed by three other genres: wedding music, ‘Pirin folk’, and pan-Balkan ethnopop.

Pirin folk music, also called ‘authored Macedonian music’, is performed largely by amateur musicians who present starogradski pesni and Macedonian urban songs in updated pop or wedding music formats. This genre developed in Pirin-Macedonia during the early 1990s under the influence of ethnopop from Serbia, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and is performed and recorded at annual festivals called Pirin fest, held in Blagoevgrad, and Pirin folk, held in Sandanski.

Since about 1993 numerous bands have promoted pan-Balkan songs that put various components of Turkish, Arab, Macedonian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Rom musics together in a pop music context. Both the bands and their repertories are linked to wedding music, Pirin folk, and the ‘newly composed folk music’ of Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Many performers of this trend are Rom or Turkish. Song lyrics appear in various Balkan languages, and are often sung with the vocal inflections of Rom, Turkish and wedding music. Instrumentation is variable but may include electric bass, synthesizer, drum machine and electric guitar. Many groups also feature a clarinet or saxophone, played in the Rom style. Songs abound with Middle Eastern idioms: musicians utilize synthesizers imported from Arab countries, which facilitate the use of makamlar or the timbres of Turkish or Arab instruments; lead instruments perform taksims during instrumental breaks; and percussion patterns and bass lines incorporate common Turkish or Arab rhythms. While such ethnopop styles signify Bulgaria’s strategic position within Balkan geography, they have essentially replaced the indigenous music-making of the country’s heritage.

Bulgaria, §II, 5: Neo-traditional popular music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

collections

Bratya [Brothers] (Dimitar and Konstantin) Miladinovi: Balgarski narodni pesni [Bulgarian folksongs], ed. M. Arnaudov (Sofia, 1861/R, 3/1942)

V. Stoin, ed.: Narodni pesni ot Timok do Vita [Folksongs from the Timok river to the river Vit] (Sofia, 1928)

D. Khristov: Chansons populaires des bulgares macédoniens (Sofia, 1931)

V. Stoin, ed.: Narodni pesni ot sredna severna Balgariya [Folksongs from central northern Bulgaria] (Sofia, 1931)

V. Stoin, ed.: Narodni pesni ot iztochna i zapadna Trakiya [Bulgarian folksongs from eastern and western Thrace] (Sofia, 1939)

V. Primovski: Rodopski narodni pesni [Rhodope folksongs] (Sofia, 1940)

V. Stoin and I. Kachulev, eds.: Balgarski savremenni narodni pesni [Contemporary Bulgarian folksongs] (Sofia, 1958)

N. Kaufman, ed.: Pesni na balgarskoto rabotnichesko dvizhenie 1891–1944 [Songs of the Bulgarian workers’ movement 1891–1944] (Sofia, 1959)

V. Stoin: Narodni pesni ot zapadnite pokraynini [Folksongs from the western border regions], ed. R. Katsarova (Sofia, 1959)

N. Kaufman, ed.: Balgarski gradski pesni [Bulgarian urban songs] (Sofia, 1968)

N. Kaufman and T. Todorov, eds.: Narodni pesni ot yugozapadna Balgariya, i [Folksongs from south-western Bulgaria], Pirinski kray [The Pirin region] (Sofia, 1968)

N. Kaufman and T. Todorov, eds.: Narodni pesni ot rodopskiya kray [Folksongs from the Rhodope region] (Sofia, 1970)

E. and V. Stoin, eds.: Narodni pesni ot Samokov i Samokovsko [Folksongs from Samokov and the Samokov region] (Sofia, 1975)

A. Ilieva: Narodni tantsi ot Srednogorieto [Folkdances from the region of the Sredno Gora mountain range] (Sofia, 1978)

N. Kaufman, ed.: Narodni pesni na balgarite ot Yukraynska i Moldavska SSR [Folksongs of the Bulgarians from the Ukrainian and Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republics] (Sofia, 1982)

N. and D. Kaufman, eds.: Pogrebalni i drugi oplakvaniya v Balgariya [Funeral and other laments in Bulgaria] (Sofia, 1988) [incl. Russ. and Eng. summaries]

books and articles

GEWM, viii (T. Rice)

Grove5 (R. Katsarova)

Grove6 (S. Petrov and N. Kaufman)

V. Stoin: Balgarskata narodna muzika: metrika i ritmika [Bulgarian folk music: metre and rhythm] (Sofia, 1927)

S. Dzhudzhev: Rhythme et mesure dans la musique populaire bulgare (Paris, 1931)

K. Obreshkov: Das bulgarische Volkslied (Berne, 1937)

B. Bartók: ‘Az úgynevezett bolgàr ritmus’, Eneskzó, v (1938), 537ff

A. Motsev: Ritam i takt v balgarskata narodna muzika [Rhythm and metre in Bulgarian folk music] (Sofia, 1949)

R. Katsarova: ‘Tri pokoleniya narodni pevitsi’ [Three generations of female folksingers], IIM, i (1952), 49–90

B. Kremenliev: Bulgarian–Macedonian Folk Music (Berkeley, 1952)

S. Dzhudzhev: Teoriya na balgarskata narodna muzika [Theory of Bulgarian folk music], i–iv (Sofia, 1954–61)

A. Motsev: Balgarskata narodna pesen [Bulgarian folksong] (Sofia, 1954)

R. Katsarova-Kukudova and K. Dzhenev: Bulgarian Folk Dances (Sofia, 1958)

V. Krastev: Nasoki v balgarskata masova pesen [Trends in Bulgarian mass song] (Sofia, 1958) [incl. Russ., Fr. and Eng. summaries]

R. Katsarova: ‘L’ethnomusicologie en Bulgarie de 1945 à nos jours (1959)’, AcM, xxxii (1960), 77–89

A. Motsev: Ornamenti v balgarskata narodna muzika [Ornaments in Bulgarian folk music] (Sofia, 1961)

R. Katsarova-Kukudova: ‘Phénomènes polyphoniques dans la musique populaire bulgare’, SMH, iii (1962), 161–72

N. Kaufman: ‘Pesnite na balgarite mokhamedani’ [Songs of the Bulgarian Muslims], IIM, viii (1962), 13–111 [incl. Russ. and Fr. summaries]

N. Kaufman: ‘Pesnite na maloaziyskite balgari’ [Songs of the Bulgarians from Asia Minor], IIM, ix (1963), 73–109 [incl. Russ. and Fr. summaries]

S. Petrov: ‘Pevcheskata kultura na banatskite balgari’ [The song culture of the Banat Bulgarians], IIM, xi (1965), 79–147 [incl. Russ. and Fr. summaries]

B. Kremenliev: ‘Extension and its Effect in Bulgarian Folk Song’, Selected Reports, i (1966), 1–27

V. Krastev, ed.: Dobri Khristov: muzikalno-teoretichesko i publitsistichesko nasledstvo [Dobri Khristov: musical-theoretical and journalistic legacy] (Sofia, 1967–70)

V. Krastev, ed.: Entsiklopediya na balgarskata muzikalna kultura [Encyclopedia of Bulgarian music culture] (Sofia, 1967)

N. Kaufman: Balgarskata mnogoglasna narodna pesna [Bulgarian polyphonic folksong] (Sofia, 1968)

B. Krader: ‘Bulgarian Folk Music Research’, EthM, xiii (1969), 248–66

S. Dzhudzhev: Balgarska narodna muzika: uchebnik za balgarskata darzhavna konservatoriya [Bulgarian folk music: a textbook for the Bulgarian state conservatory] (Sofia, 1970–75, 2/1980)

T. Rice: Music of a Rhodope Village in Bulgaria (thesis, U. of Washington, 1971)

M. Todorov: Balgarski narodni muzikalni instrumenti: organografiya [Bulgarian folk musical instruments: an organology] (Sofia, 1973)

S. Abrasheva: Balgarski naroden dvuglas [Bulgarian folk diaphony] (Sofia, 1974) [incl. Eng. summary]

T. Todorov: Savremenni problemi v izuchavaneto na balgarskoto muzikalno narodno tvorchestvo [Contemporary problems in the study of Bulgarian folk musical creativity] (Sofia, 1974)

T. Butler, ed.: Bulgaria Past and Present: Studies in History, Literature, Economics, Music, Sociology and Linguistics (Columbus, OH, 1976)

A.I. Ilieva: Bulgarian Dance Folklore (Pittsburgh, 1976)

R. Katsarova-Kukudova and K. Djenev: Bulgarian Folk Dances (Cambridge, MA, 1976)

N. Kaufman: Balgarskata svatbena pesen [Bulgarian wedding song] (Sofia, 1976) [incl. Eng. summary]

W.W. Kolar: The Folk Arts of Bulgaria (Pittsburgh, 1976)

M. Todorov: Balgarska narodna muzika: uchebnik za srednite muzikalni uchilishta [Bulgarian folk music: textbook for the secondary music schools] (Sofia, 5/1976)

T. Rice: Polyphony in Bulgarian Folk Music (diss., U. of Washington, 1977)

I. Kachulev: Bulgarian Folk Musical Instruments (Pittsburgh, 1978) [incl. cass.]

V. Krastev: Bulgarian Music (Sofia, 1978)

T. Todorov: Savremennost i narodna pesen [Contemporaneity and folksong] (Sofia, 1978)

B. Krader: ‘Vasil Stoin, Bulgarian Folk Song Collector’, YIFMC, xii (1980), 27–42

G.F. Messner: Die Schwebungsdiaphonie in Bistrica: Untersuchungen der mehrstimmigen Liedgormen eines mittelwestbulgarischen Dorfes (Tutzing, 1980)

T. Rice: ‘Aspects of Bulgarian Musical Thought’,YIFMC, xii (1980), 43–66

E. Stoin: Balgarski epicheski pesni [Bulgarian epic songs] (Sofia, 1980)

B. Krader: ‘Raina D. Katsarova: a Birthday Appreciation and List of Publications’, EthM, xxv (1981), 287–94

E. Stoin: Muzikalno-folklorni dialekti v Balgariya [Musical-folkloristic dialects in Bulgaria] (Sofia, 1981)

E. Valchinova: ‘Cheshkite kapelmaystori i prinosat im v razvitieto na balgarskata muzikalna kultura’ [The Czech Kapellmeisters and their contribution to the development of Bulgarian musical culture], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, v/4 (1981), 53–68

R. Katsarova: ‘Bulgarian Funeral Laments’, International Folklore Review, ii (1982), 112–30

I. Markoff: ‘Persistence of Old World Cultural Expression in the Traditional Music of Bulgarian-Canadians’, Culture and History of the Bulgarian People: their Bulgarian and American Parallels, ed. W.W. Kolar (Pittsburgh, 1982), 218–39

K. Roth and J. Roth: ‘Zum Problem des Bänkelsangs in Bulgarien’, Aspekte des europäischen Nänkelsangs und weitere Probleme der heutigen Liedforschung, ed. S. Top and E. Tielemans, i (Brussels, 1982), 60–73

E. Valchinova: ‘Za repertoara na voennite dukhovi orkestri v Balgariya (1879–1944) i myastoto na balgarskoto muzikalno tvorchestvo v nego’ [On the repertory of military wind orchestras in Bulgaria (1879–1944) and the place of Bulgarian musical creativity within it], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, vi/3 (1982), 66–71

K. and J. Roth: ‘Naj-nova pesnopojka s narodni pesni…’: Populare Liederbücher und Liederheftchen in Bulgarien’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xxvii–xxviii (1982–3), 242–57

V. Atanasov: Die bulgarischen Volksmusikinstrumente: eine Systematik in Wort, Bild und Ton (Munich, 1983) [incl. cassette]

B. Kremenliev: ‘Mnogoglasie: a Compositional Concept in Rural Bulgaria’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, iv (1983), 181–203

C. Silverman: ‘The Politics of Folklore in Bulgaria’, Anthropological Quarterly, lvi (1983), 55–61

M. Levy: The Bagpipe in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria (diss., UCLA, 1985)

K. and J. Roth: ‘A Bulgarian Professional Folk Singer and his Songs’, Narrative Folk Song: New Directions: Essays in Appreciaition of W. Edson Richmond, ed. C. Edwards and K. Manley (Boulder, CO, 1985), 339–61

J. Sugarman: Singing in the Rhodope Region of Bulgaria: an Inquiry into the Determinants of Musical Practice (thesis, UCLA, 1985)

I. Manolov: Traditsionnata instrumentalna muzika ot yugozapadna Balgariya [Traditional instrumental music from south-western Bulgaria] (Sofia, 1987)

S. Zakharieva: Svirachat vav folklornata kultura [The traditional instrumentalist in folk culture] (Sofia, 1987) [incl. Russ. and Eng. summaries]

V. Atanasov: ‘Children’s Musical Instruments and Musical Playthings in Bulgaria’, World of Music, xxix/3 (1988), 68–85 [incl. Fr. and Ger. summaries]

T. Balakov: Maystori na narodnata muzika [Masters of folk music] (Sofia, 1988–92)

T. Rice: ‘Understanding Three-Part Singing in Bulgaria: the Interplay of Theory and Experience’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, vii (1988), 43–57

N. Kaufman: ‘Nyakoi predshestvenitsa na savremennite orkestri na narodna muzika’ [Some precursors of contemporary orchestras for folk music], Muzikalni khorizonti, xii–xiii (1989), 220–28

C. Silverman: ‘Reconstructing Folklore: Media and Cultural Policy in Eastern Europe’, Communication, xi (1989), 141–60

E. Valchinova: ‘Gradska orkestrova kultura v Balgariya do Osvobozhdenieto’ [Urban orchestral culture in Bulgaria until the Liberation], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xiii/4 (1989), 18–38

E. Valchinova: ‘Svirdzhii (chalgadzhii) ot sredata na 19 vek: mezhdina forma mezhdu folklornata i gradska muzikalna kultura’ [Svirdzhii (chalgadzhii) from the middle of the 19th century: a transitional form between folkloric and urban musical culture], Muzikalni khorizonti, xii–xiii (1989), 134–8

Zh. Yordanova: ‘Plashtane na folklorni izpalniteli’ [Payment of folk performers], Muzikalni khorizonti, xii–xiii (1989), 108–18

D. Kaufman: ‘Ot vazrozhdenskata chalgiya kam savremennite svatbarski orkestri’ [From the chalga of the Vazrazhdane to contemporary wedding orchestras], Balgarski folklor, xvi/3 (1990), 23–32

E. Valchinova-Chendova: ‘Gradska orkestrova kultura v Balgariya ot Osvobozhdenieto do 20-te godini na XX v.’ [Urban orchestral culture in Bulgaria from the Liberation until the 1920s], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xiv/3 (1990), 3–24

D.A. Buchanan: The Bulgarian Folk Orchestra: Cultural Performance, Symbol and the Construction of National Identity in Socialist Bulgaria (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1991)

E. Valchinova-Chendova: ‘Gradska lyubitelska orkestrova kultura ot 20-te do 40-te godini na XX v.’ [Urban amateur orchestral culture from the 1920s to the 1940s], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xv/3 (1991), 9–43

V. Kurkela: ‘Deregulation of Popular Music in the European Post-Communist Countries: Business, Identity and Cultural Collage’,World of Music, xxxv/3 (1993), 80–106

R. Statlova: Obarnatata piramida: aspekti na populyarnata muzika [The overturned pyramid: aspects of popular music] (Sofia, 1993)

T. Rice: ‘May it fill your soul’: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, 1994) [incl. CD]

D.A. Buchanan: ‘Metaphors of Power, Metaphors of Truth: the Politics of Music Professionalism in Bulgarian Folk Orchestras’, EthM, xxxix (1995), 381–416

V. Dimov: ‘Folkbumat i popkharakteristikite mu: kam sotsiokulturniya portret na savremennata etnopopmuzika v Balgariya’ [The folk boom and its pop characteristics: towards a sociocultural portrait of contemporary ethnopop music in Bulgaria], Balgarski folklor, xxi/6 (1995), 4–19 [incl. Eng. summary]

D. Kaufman: ‘Savremennite svatbarski orkestri kato “disidentski” formatsii’ [Contemporary wedding orchestras as ‘dissident’ formations], Balgarski folklor, xxi/6 (1995), 49–57

N. Kaufman: ‘Evreite i balkanskata gradska pesen’ [The Jews and the Balkan urban song], Balgarski folklor, xxi/5 (1995), 9–41

L. Peycheva: ‘Muzikalniyat polilingvizam na tsiganite v Balgariya: nablyudeniya varkhu 84 audiokaseti’ [The musical polylinguism of the Gypsies in Bulgaria: observation of 84 cassettes], Balgarski folklor, xxi/6 (1995), 58–72 [incl. Eng. summary]

R. Statelova: Prezhivyano v Balgariya: rok, pop, folk, 1990–1994 [Surviving in Bulgaria: rock, pop, folk, 1990–1994] (Sofia, 1995)

M. Forsyth: Slushaj, shterko, i dobre zapomni…: pesnite i zhivota na Linka Gekov Gergova ot selo Bistritsa, Sofiisko/Listen, Daughter, and Remember Well…: the Songs and Life of Linka Gekova Gergova from the Village of Bistritsa, Sofia (Sofia, 1996)

D. Dyer, ed.: ‘Bulgaria Past and Present: Transitions and Turning Points’, Balkanistica, ix (1996) [Bulgaria issue]

M. Slobin, ed.: Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe (Durham, NC, 1996)

D.A. Buchanan: ‘Bulgaria’s Magical Mystère Tour: Postmodernism, World Music Marketing and Political Transition in Eastern Europe’, EthM, xli (1997), 131–57

RECORDINGS

Bulgaria, coll. A.L. Lloyd, rec. 1954, Col. KL 5378 (n.d.)

Bulgaria: Musical Atlas, EMI Odeon 64 1653891 (1983) [incl. notes by B. Mauguin]

Balkana: the Music of Bulgaria, Hannibal Records HNBL 1335 (1987)

Le mystère des voix Bulgares, perf. Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, Elek. 9 79165-2 (1987) [incl. notes by I. Marshall]

Le mystère des voix Bulgares, ii, perf. Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, Elek. 9 79201-2 (1988)

A Harvest, a Shepherd, a Bride: Village Music of Bulgaria: in the Shadow of the Mountain: Bulgarian Folk Music, rec. 1968, Elek. 9 79195-2 (1988) [incl. notes by M. Koenig and V. Atanasov]

Bulgarian Polyphony, i, perf. Filip Kutev Ensemble, JVC VID-25001 (1989)

Bulgarian Polyphony, ii, perf. Filip Kutev Ensemble, JVC VID-25002 (1989)

Music of Bulgaria: Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic: Original 1955 Recording, Elek. 9 72011-1 (1989) [incl. notes by J. Hunter]

Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band: Orpheus Ascending, Hannibal Records HNCD 1346 (1989) [incl. notes by J. Boyd]

Le mystère des voix Bulgares, iii, perf. Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir and others, Fon. 846 626-4 (1990) [incl. notes by M. Cellier]

‘Two girls started to sing…’: Bulgarian Village Singing, Rounder Records CD 1055 (1990)

Ivo Papasov and his Orchestra: Balkanology, Hannibal Records HNCD 1363 (1991) [incl. notes by C. Silverman]

Vocal Traditions of Bulgaria: Bulgarian Village Traditional Song from the Archives of Radio Sofia, Saydisc Records CD-SDL 396 (1992)

Folk Music of Bulgaria, Topic Records TSCD905 (1994) [incl. notes by A.L. Lloyd]

Song of the Crooked Dance: Early Bulgarian Traditional Music (1927–42), Yazoo Records 7016 (1998) [incl. notes by L. Brody]

Bulhat, Johannes de.

See Buglhat, Johannes de.

Bull, Christoph.

See Buel, Christoph.

Bull, Edvard Hagerup

(b Bergen, 10 June 1922). Norwegian composer. Son of a well-known writer on music who also composed, he moved to Paris after studies in Oslo and studied at the Conservatoire (1948–53), winning a prize for composition. His teachers were Milhaud and Rivier, and he also attended Messiaen's analysis class. Later he studied with Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.

His works from the early 1950s exhibit a variety of styles, including atonality in the manner of Alban Berg. Gradually his own stylistic preferences came to the fore, and his trumpet concerto (1950), still one of his most performed works, has clear and free tonal lines welded together in a strict form. His personal stamp came to be heard in every work – the powerful and langorous contour of his melodies combined with a rhythmical vigorous drive creates a pronounced force which is contrasted with softer lyrical passages. His music is almost Germanic in its strong expression. For more than 30 years Bull lived mostly in France, where he received several commissions, including one from the Ministry of Culture, a rare honour for a foreigner. But his exile may explain the slow acceptance of his music in Norway. His music has, however, been performed by leading artists and orchestras, and gradually masterpieces such as Air solenelle (1972) and Chant d'hommage à Jean Rivier (1976) have also become known in Norway.

WORKS

[(selective list)]

Dramatic: Den standhaftige tinnsoldat (Le soldat de plomb) (ballet, after H.C. Andersen), op.6, 1949; Portrait Münchausen (ballet), op.25, 1961; Fyrtøjet (Le jeu de feu) (op, 1, Andersen), op.44a, 1974; Den grimme aelling (Lamentation pour un cygne maudit) (op, 1, Andersen), op.48a, 1977

Orch: 3 morceaux rapsodiques, op.7, 1950; Serenade, op.8, large orch, 1950; Tpt Conc. no.1, op.9, 1950; Sinfonia di teatro, prélude symphonique, op.10, 1950; 3 mouvements symphoniques (Sym. no.1), op.16, 1955; Sym. no.2, op.21, 1958; Cassation, op.22, chbr orch, 1959; Epilogue, op.26, str, 1961; Sym. no.3 ‘Sinfonia espressiva’, op.30, 1963–4; Sinfonia humana, op.37, 1968; Sinfonia in memoriam, op.41, 1972; Posthumes (in memoriam Jan Øvsthus et Edvard Fliflet Braein), op.47, wind orch, 1977; Lamentazione, sinfonia da camera, op.54, 1981–2; Postlude – pour l'épilogue d'un monde, op.58b, 1984; Hommage à George Gershwin’ avril 1998 – Rhapsody in Rag, tpt, orch, 1998; sym. movts., suites, works for solo inst and orch (for vn, trbu, fl, pf, a sax, tuba)

Chbr: Trois bucoliques, divertissement, op.14, ww trio, 1953; Ad usum amicorum, op.20, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1957; Epilogue – hommage à la mémoire d'un monde perdu, op.26b, str qt, 1961; Quadrige, op.28, 4 cl, 1964; Miniatures pour petite Aldis, op.29, fl, vn, va da gamba, spinet, 1963; Sextuor, op.31, wind, 1965; Conc., op.34, tpt, hn, trbn, 1966; Sonata cantabile à quatre, op.35, fl, vn, vc, pf, 1966; Sonata con spirito, op.40b, pf, vn, va, vc, 1970; Profils – pour un drame rustique, op.49, fl, ob, cl, bn, pf, 1978; Sinfonia à 5, op.54b, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1983; Sonata con moto, op.51b, vn, vc, pf, 1982; Sonata à quatro, op.57, str qt, 1983; Sextuor, op.58, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1985; Perpetuum mobile (Hommage à Johan Strauss), tpt, pf, 1995; other chbr works, incl. wind qnts, brass qnts, ens works, pieces with pf acc. (for fl, cl, sax, vn)

Kbd: Le soldat de plomb (after Andersen), op.6b, pf suite, 1948–9; Variantes multi-métriques, op.45, pf, 1975; Prélude con fuoco, op.50, pf, 1978; Miniscules pour piano, op.53c, 1980; Prélude pour piano, op.55a, 1981; Movimenti, op.56, org, 1985; 3 pièces miniatures, op.60d, pf, 1988; 2 pièces faciles, op.61a, pf, 1989

Principal publishers: Ballaudot, NMIC, Transatlantic

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.-L. Caron, ed.: Bulletin de l'Association Française Carl Nielsen, no.12 (1994) [Bull issue]

ARVID O. VOLLSNES

Bull [Boul, Bul, Bol], John [Jan] [Bouville, Bonville, Jean]

(b ?Old Radnor, Radnorshire, ?1562–3; d Antwerp, 12–13 March 1628). English composer, organist, virginalist and organ builder, probably of Welsh birth, active also in the southern Netherlands. He was one of the leading keyboard virtuosos of his time and an important composer of keyboard music.

1. Early years to 1597.

2. Middle years, 1597–1613.

3. In the southern Netherlands, 1613–28.

4. Library; portraits.

5. Works.

SUSI JEANS (1–4), O.W. NEIGHBOUR (5, work-list)

1. Early years to 1597.

The date of birth above derives from the Oxford portrait of Bull (see fig.1 and §4 below) and is probably more reliable than the one some three years earlier deducible from his marriage licence in 1607 (see §2 below). Wood stated that Bull was descended from a Somerset family but provided no evidence. It is more likely that he was born in Radnorshire, where, in and about Harpton (or Herton), several families with the surname Bull resided. This assumption is based on the existence of his petition to the queen in 1589 for a lease in reversion of Radnor Forest (see below) and of a pedigree submitted in the Court of Chancery in which one party claimed to be descended from ‘the musician, Dr. John Bull of Old Radnor’, which may well refer to him.

Bull entered the choir of Hereford Cathedral in 1573 – the relevant entry in the cathedral records is dated 31 August – and worked there under the cathedral organist, John Hodges. He had probably joined the Children of the Chapel Royal in London by 8 February 1574, the date on which a vacancy in the Hereford choir was filled. His music teacher was John Blitheman (whose epitaph mentioned him), and the Master of the Children was William Hunnis.

One of the patrons of the children was the Earl of Sussex, the Lord Chamberlain, who was an honorary freeman of the Merchant Taylors Company and made Bull his apprentice on 24 January 1578. Sussex’s second wife, Frances, was the younger sister of Sir Henry Sidney, the President of the Marches, who recommended Bull for the position of organist at Hereford Cathedral. He was appointed on 24 December 1582, at first jointly with the elderly Hodges. On 21 January 1583 he was also appointed master of the choristers. He was never a vicar-choral, but the new cathedral statutes allowed him to combine the posts of organist and master of the choristers. He now had to divide his time between London and Hereford. The cathedral chapter noted on 1 February 1585 that he had been absent longer than he had been allowed and therefore declared his offices vacant. This declaration was not carried out, but on 5 June 1585 he appeared before the dean and chapter on a complaint by the precentor that in his capacity as organist he was not following instructions and was in contempt of the precentor. He was first suspended from his offices and benefice and then dismissed, but he was allowed to retain his rooms at the college of vicars-choral. In January 1586 he was sworn a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and his fast-growing reputation there probably made the custos of the college of vicars-choral in Hereford grant him improved accommodation on 16 September 1587. On 18 January 1591 he was allotted better rooms still, at the request of the Archbishop of Canterbury; it is not known how long he held them.

Little is known about Bull’s university career. As a very experienced musician and a member of the Chapel Royal he did not need to matriculate, and the only reference to his connection with a college occurs in a minute of 23 March 1597 in the Common Council Journal Book of the City of London, where he is described as being of King’s College, Cambridge. An entry in the Oxford University Register relates to his Oxford DMus of 7 July 1592, and Wood stated that he ‘practised [in] the Faculty of Music for 14 years’, supplicated for the BMus at Oxford on 8 July 1586 and was admitted to the degree the following day. Wood added that he would have proceeded to the doctorate at Oxford ‘had he not met with Clownes & rigid Puritans that could not endure Church music’. He therefore supplicated for the MusD at Cambridge (which enabled him to obtain the Oxford DMus by incorporation in 1592): that he was awarded this degree by 1589 can be assumed from the reference to him as ‘doctor’ in his certificate of residence in connection with an assessment for the lay subsidy taken in the queen’s household in that year. On 4 July 1592 he contributed to the steeple fund of St Mary the Great, Cambridge. Earlier that year he was a victim of highway robbery: an entry in the Old Cheque Book on 29 May 1592 (see Rimbault), relating to the admission of one William Phelps of Tewkesbury as an extraordinary Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, gives as one reason for this ‘that he dyd show a most rare kyndness to Mr. Doctor Bull in his great distress, being robbed in these parts’.

That Bull was poor can be gathered from his petitions to Elizabeth I. The free university education allowed to former Children of the Chapel Royal was discontinued in her reign. Moreover, the wages of those serving in the royal household were very rarely increased, but the Tudor monarchs had other ways of making rewards, such as the granting of leases in reversion of crown land. Two petitions by Bull to the queen for such a lease survive at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (Cecil Papers 165/140, 615, 818). The first, undated but endorsed on 7 February 1589, relates to Radnor Forest; although the queen was sympathetic, it was not granted. She did, however, decide to give him a ‘thinge’ about the value of £10 or £12 yearly. As the promised reward did not materialize, he had to petition again, this time for a lease in reversion amounting to the value of £30 without fine or an increase of his wages, so that ‘his great poverty, which altogether hindereth his studies, shall be relieved’. The petition, endorsed on 20 April 1591, was successful, and Bull was granted ‘a lease in Reversion for 21 yeares of Twentie Marks by the yeare … without fyne’. He did not receive his gift until 12 July 1592, and even then it amounted to barely half the amount he had requested; a number of properties in several counties – all former monastic lands and now crown lands – are mentioned in the letters-patent. On 31 March 1597 a lease in reversion was granted to Robert Holland ‘at the humble suite and in consideration of the service of John Bull, Organist of her Majesty’s Chappell’; Holland no doubt rewarded Bull suitably.

2. Middle years, 1597–1613.

Bull’s financial position had now improved, however, for on 6 March 1597 he was elected the first Public Reader in music at Gresham College, London, with an annual salary of £50. The queen had recommended him in a letter to the mayor and aldermen of the city, who administered the bequest of the late Sir Thomas Gresham through a committee jointly with the Mercers Company. The committee appointed seven unmarried learned readers from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in divinity, astronomy, geometry, music, law, medicine and rhetoric respectively. The readers had to obey the committee’s ordinances, lodge at Gresham House and give public lectures in Latin and English. Bull received the queen’s special permission to give all his lectures in English. On 8 June 1597 the readers were ordered to deliver their inaugural lectures the following week in the presence of the mayor, the aldermen, the Bishop of London and the master and warden of the Mercers Company. Bull, however, had not yet been able to move into his rooms at Gresham House, as they were still occupied by William Reade, Gresham’s stepson; fearful of losing his readership through not living there, he engaged a mason and went with friends (including the City Chamberlain) to the part of the house where Reade lived, broke down a wall and forced an entry into his rooms. This led to an action in the Star Chamber, the outcome of which is unknown. In the event Bull did not deliver his lecture until 6 October 1597. It was printed soon afterwards, but the title-page (GB-Lbl Harl.5936) is all that survives; the offset of the first page is visible on the reverse, however, and this has been reconstructed (see King, 270–71).

Bull had further troubles at Gresham College. He was one of the readers who refused to sign the ordinances, and his salary was consequently withheld. He complained to the Privy Council, who in a letter of 4 November 1599 to the mayor and committee ordered it to be paid. In June 1601 he asked for leave of absence, eventually granted on 5 February 1602. According to the relevant minute he was ‘visited with sicknes’, and Thomas Byrd (son of William) was ordered to replace him during his leave and sickness. Bull’s movements during much of his leave are uncertain. No documentary evidence has yet come to light to confirm Wood’s reports about travels abroad, including an episode at St Omer, where, when travelling incognito, Bull was allegedly challenged by a musician to add one part to a composition and added 40. He was certainly present at the queen’s funeral on 24 March 1603 when, according to the Lord Chamberlain’s accounts, his name stood at the head of the list of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. He had served the queen well and had played the organ for festivals and state receptions for royal visitors and foreign envoys. He was not one of the queen’s private musicians as has generally been assumed, and there is no record of his being paid for playing the virginals to her (her virginalist was Walter Earle). On 29 June 1603 he applied for readmission to his readership at Gresham College and was accepted. He also continued in royal service under the new king, James I. On 5 December 1604 the king ordered that the salaries of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal be increased from £30 to £40 annually. In April 1605 the king granted Bull a pension of £40 in consideration of his past and future service; this sum compares unfavourably with those awarded to several other musicians. On 15 December 1606 Bull was admitted into the freedom of the Merchant Taylors Company. On 16 July 1607 the company gave a sumptuous banquet for the king and Prince Henry; Bull played the organ throughout dinner, and Nathaniel Giles and Children of the Chapel sang. The following day both men were accepted into the livery of the company and were excused any payment because they had performed at the banquet without being paid. Under the statutes of Gresham College, Bull had to resign his readership on 20 December 1607, for he had fathered a child with one Elizabeth Walter and had to marry her (his petition for a licence to marry, dated 22 December 1607, survives in the registry of the Bishop of London). He was thus deprived of his most lucrative source of income as well as his quarters there and had to look for other income. He had built instruments for the queen in 1599, and in 1609 he was active as an organ builder. His name appears in the diplomatic correspondence of 1609–10 (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna) between the secretary of the Austrian Archduke Albert, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and his envoy in England. The archduke wanted to buy an organ in England, and his envoy suggested that he approach Bull (who wished to be known as Jean Bouville or Bonville). The organ was to be of the same size and tone as one that the archduke had presented to a convent in Madrid. Bull was to be paid £2000 (or 6000 reales), but before half of this sum was paid to him in advance – so that he could buy the necessary materials, such as English tin – he was asked to find guarantors. He could not do so and at one stage offered to give the archduke one of his organs as a surety, but when the instrument was examined by several musicians, including Byrd, it was pronounced to be not worth the £1000. He then proposed to build the organ using his own resources and went to Madrid, but on his way home he was attacked by pirates, who seized his money. The archduke, who had waited patiently for the organ for a year and a half, had finally to engage another builder. Among the interesting sidelights in the correspondence are comments on Bull’s property (including references to a house near Plymouth) and his friendship with Peter Philips.

Bull’s occasional absences from England did not interfere with his duties at the Chapel Royal as the king’s organist. He had joined the musical establishment of Prince Henry probably by 1610; he is nowhere mentioned as the prince’s music master, but he was charged with buying music books for him. After the prince’s death on 6 November 1612, he received a pension of £40 a year for two years. Early that year he had been appointed music teacher to the 15-year-old Princess Elizabeth. It was to her and her betrothed, Prince Friedrich, the Elector Palatine, that the first printed volume of virginal music, Parthenia, or The Maydenhead, was dedicated. Its publication can therefore be dated between 27 December 1612, the date of their engagement, and 14 February 1613, when they were married. The dedication refers to the ‘three famous Masters’ Byrd, Bull and Orlando Gibbons, who had written the pieces in it, ‘whereof one had the honor to be your teacher … and (had he not had it before) thereby deserved the stile of a Doctor’. Bull composed the anthem God the father, God the son (now lost) for the wedding. On 26 April 1613 he addressed a letter to Sir Michael Hicks (Kent County Archives, Maidstone) in which he asked for his letters-patent for £40 a year to be transferred to his child. (He had a daughter, not a son as used to be assumed.)

3. In the southern Netherlands, 1613–28.

Bull now became involved in a serious scandal, and articles were laid against him in the Court of High Commission. The substance of the charge, which was of adultery, is described in a letter of December 1613 from George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, to Sir William Trumbull, the English envoy at Brussels. Bull was charged to come into a church a little before the beginning of the prayer, and there ‘as the minister was entering into service, in the sight of the congregation Bull pulled him violently out of his seat, and despitefully intreated him’. The archbishop concluded: ‘The man hath more music than honesty and is as famous for marring of virginity as he is for fingering of organs and virginals’. The outlook for Bull was grim indeed, and in August 1613 he fled the country, never to return. He went to the southern Netherlands, where he had friends, and Archduke Albert employed him at Brussels from Michaelmas (24 September) 1613. Here Bull joined Peter Philips and the other three organists, one of whom was Pieter Cornet. Trumbull and others in the Netherlands knew of his arrival and employment by the archduke but kept silent for at least two months. By that time, however, James I had discovered the flight of his organist on whom he vented his wrath with a severity and hatred that were out of all proportion. Trumbull, now worried about his own position, gave the king many excuses for his long silence: he wrote that Bull had said that he had left England for reasons of religion, that he had at that time not yet made up his mind whether to remain in Brussels or to move on to Paris or Heidelberg and that it was only when he received Archbishop Abbott’s letter that he realized the real reasons for his flight. The king insisted that Trumbull ask the archduke for an audience and give him a true report of Bull’s behaviour. On 30 May 1614, in a well-known letter, Trumbull wrote

that it was notorious to all the world, the said Bull did not leave your Majesties service for any wrong done unto him, or for matter of religion, under which fained pretext he now sought to wrong the reputation of your Majesties justice, but did in that dishonest matter steal out of England through the guilt of a corrupt conscience, to escape the punishment, which notoriously he had deserved, and was designed to have been inflicted on him by the hand of justice, for his incontinence, fornication, adultery, and other grievous crimes.

The king was still not satisfied and insisted on Bull’s dismissal from the archduke’s chapel. Trumbull told the king a month later that he had spoken accordingly to the archduke – successfully, since the archduke dismissed Bull for diplomatic reasons at the end of August 1614. Bull, who had been receiving an annual stipend of 750 florins, found that the archduke continued to support him with gratuities from his privy purse until April 1618; the first payment was made on 20 February 1615 and was followed by payments of 250 florins about twice a year.

Bull addressed a letter to the Mayor of Antwerp in which he set out his own case alleging that the real reason why he had been driven into exile was his adherence to the Catholic faith, describing his present great poverty and asking for a post as organist pensioner. From September 1615 he was in fact assistant organist at Antwerp Cathedral, but in 1616 he was still so poor that the city had to support him with alms. On 29 December 1617 he was appointed cathedral organist, with a salary of 80 florins a year plus a special supplement of 20 florins. He was also employed by the guilds and could count on a regular income of 150 florins for playing and tuning. He sometimes acted as organ consultant and examiner and on 9 December 1617 advised the churchwardens of St Janskathedraal, ’s-Hertogenbosch, to have, on their new organ, keyboards that included all the semitones and that had 29 white keys and 20 black ones. He also advised them on the length of the resonators of the pedal reeds and wanted the eight bellows to be 7½' × 3½' and to be arranged in pairs. On 14 October 1624 his salary at the cathedral was increased to 160 florins. In 1626 he drew up a specification for a little one-manual organ for the Guild of the Holy Sacrament. According to a lease dated 15 March 1620 he lived in a house by the south door of the cathedral at a rent of 33 florins a year. On 2 December he sublet half of his house to the verger, and on Christmas Day he moved into rooms in the Papenhof (vicars’ close). He stayed there until 25 May 1624, when he was granted new rooms in the Papenhof. In March 1626 a substitute organist was appointed to deputize for him because he was ill; he also had assistance from Guillaume Messaus, of Antwerp, who later copied some of his manuscripts. After his death he was buried, on 15 March 1628, in the South Cemetery, and his will was proved on 26 October. He was succeeded as organist by Hendrik Liberti.

4. Library; portraits.

Some sumptuously bound books which once belonged to Bull have survived. The most interesting is a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, dating from about 1600. The stamped inscription on the front cover reads: ‘JOHN BULL DOCTER OF MUSIQUE ORGANISTE AND GENTLEMAN OF HER MAIESTIES MOSTE HONORABLE CHAPELL’. The volume is not in Bull’s hand, and the scribe has not yet been identified. It contains a large number of anonymous five-part pieces in score, without titles and texts, which Edwards has identified as transcriptions of madrigals by Giulio Eremita, Alfonso Ferrabosco (i), Marenzio, Lucrezio Quintiani and Pompilio Venturi. The manuscript also includes music by Diomedes Cato, the bass part of eight songs from Dowland’s First Booke of Songs or Ayres (1597) and an interesting collection of virginal pieces by Byrd, Marchant, William Randall (i), William Tisdale and others. Another volume once owned by Bull is in the University Library, Cambridge, and contains Claudius Sebastiani’s Bellum musicale (1563), Arbeau’s Orchésographie (1596 edition) and Antony Holborne’s Cittharn Schoole (1597). A third volume from Bull’s library contains Boethius’s De musica and (incomplete) Guido’s Micrologus (NZ-Wt).

A fine portrait of Bull (fig.1) hangs in the library of the Faculty of Music at Oxford. It was painted in 1589 and bears the inscription ‘anno aetatis suae, 27’. In one corner of the picture are a skull and crossbones and an hourglass. These are not symbols of mortality but the alchemist’s symbols of victory of life over death: Bull may have been interested in the hermetic sciences (as were others with whom he came into contact, including Hunnis and the Elector Palatine). The following rhyme is painted round the frame:

The Bull by force
In field doth Raigne
But Bull by Skill
Good will doth Gayne.

Infra-red photography has revealed that Bull was not the sitter of a second portrait – the so-called Antwerp portrait – once thought to be of him.

5. Works.

It is perhaps not surprising that Bull, having been employed both at Hereford and in the Chapel Royal as an organist, should have written little vocal music. Even so the nine anthems of which there is some record seem a small harvest for three decades. The four for which music survives show that at his best he was able to sustain interest through a lengthy piece, but that sometimes, as in Deliver me O God, he could relapse into routine. In the songs for Sir William Leighton’s Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule (RISM1614⁷) he likewise attempted very little.

The few textless consort pieces appear to be special exercises of one kind or another, the In Nomine a production of his apprenticeship, the three-part fantasia an essay in stretto imitation, the four-part fantasia a ‘Doric’ piece. ‘Doric’ music was invariably defined as solemn theatre music suitable for great personages; the consort piece, like the Doric keyboard preludes K57 and K58, fits this description, though the other Doric pieces are in a quite different, much less sober style. The chromatic Hexachord Fantasia (K17), which appears to have been composed originally for consort, is manifestly experimental, the only piece of its kind to include all twelve possible transpositions of the hexachord. It is unusual among Bull’s compositions in giving scope to the side of his mentality that enjoyed constructing complex canons.

Bull’s keyboard music forms by far the most important and extensive part of his output. A comprehensive assessment of it is difficult, however, for although most of the more substantial pieces from his English years are securely attributed to him, scarcely any of the sources are entirely trustworty in their ascriptions. Indeed, the most important source of all (F-Pn Rés. 1185, sometimes claimed as autograph), contains no ascriptions except some provided by Benjamin Cosyn, who acquired it and made additions and annotations. The great majority of the pieces can be shown to be by Bull, but a few are by other composers, so that Bull’s authorship of those that lack ascribed concordances cannot be assumed . The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (GB-Cfm Mu.Ms 168, strong in early pieces and versions) and Cosyn’s own virginal book (GB-Lbl R.M.12.l.4, copied before he came into possession of Rés. 1185) are usually reliable, but such later English manuscripts as GB-Lbl Add.31403 (copied by Edward Bevin) and GB-Och Mus.1113 cannot always be trusted. The difficulties become still more acute for the Antwerp period. The surviving music is confined almost entirely to two manuscripts, one copied in Antwerp possibly by Guillaume Messaus (GB-Lbl Add.23623), the other a German organ tablature now in Vienna (A-Wm 17771). Both ascribe nearly everything to Bull, English or continental, genuine or spurious. Any list of Bull’s works must therefore include anonymous pieces almost certainly by him and ascribed ones that may well not be. Uncertainty arises primarily in three categories: early works not yet fully representative of the composer, smaller dances and teaching pieces giving restricted scope for individuality of treatment, and late works adopting continental styles.

It seems that Bull studied with both Blitheman and Byrd. The epitaph of the former, who died in 1591, speaks of Bull as his pupil; at the beginning of his inaugural Gresham oration of 1597 Bull says that his master is still living and implies that he is referring to Byrd. Blitheman was presumably his earlier teacher and certainly the more fundamental influence. He passed on to him his enthusiasm for the English tradition of elaborate figuration in plainsong settings for keyboard, and apparently introduced him as well, if only as an exercise, to the plainer three- and four-part styles of the mid-century. In the latter class the Antwerp manuscript contains a number of hymn verses and alleluias attributed to Bull which pose a peculiarly intractable problem of authenticity. One is known to be by Tallis, but the rest can scarcely be by him: they suggest the work of a somewhat later generation, for instance in their use of rhythmic ostinato, sequence, loosely spaced canonic writing and later styles of figuration. They could be by Blitheman, or by Bull himself, as Vexilla regis (K44) appears to be; if some at least were his own early efforts it might explain why he bothered to take arrangements of Sarum melodies abroad with him, where they could serve no practical purpose.

Another piece that at first sight raises doubts is Fantasia K15, from a fallible English source, an essay in the old three-part ‘mean’ style of Blitheman’s Felix namque, but more consistently imitative. Yet such pieces cannot be dismissed out of hand, for there are well attested early works that stand quite as much apart, for instance the five-part consort In Nomine composed in the tradition of Parsons and Byrd, or the Spanish Pavan, based entirely on types of scalar figuration familiar from Byrd’s big grounds of the 1570s. At this early date Bull could look a long way back: the beginning of the keyboard In Nomine K31 would be hard to accept as his were the continuation not such as to remove all doubt.

The relatively simple but already characteristic figuration in this In Nomine, and the exceptionally lively extension of a much earlier tradition in his two-part Fantasias K10 and K11, show the direction his music was to take. His rise to fame as a keyboard player brought a need for display pieces. The method he preferred was to develop patterns of figuration against an undecorated cantus firmus, writing bicinia with a single very active free part, three-part studies in which the predominant note-value of one free part is likely to be double that of the other, and, more rarely, quasi-imitative four-part textures; Veni redemptor gentium K43/2, Miserere K34 and Salvator mundi K37/3 are good examples of each. Here the patterns remain constant, but sometimes a series of them may succeed one another, notably in the large group of In Nomines. Precedents for all these techniques were to hand in mid-century composers such as Redford and Preston, in the Tallis of the two vast Felix namque settings and in Blitheman. Bull’s contribution lay in the variety and profusion of his figurative detail and, where applicable, the motivic cogency with which one pattern led to the next.

In every way the eleven A minor In Nomines (K20–30) represent the furthest development of Bull’s work in the genre. Yet they are problematical works. The moments of change between the various stages through which they pass are unsupported by any firm cadence structure or other means of measurement that might impart a real sense of direction to the music. The sources transmit the pieces for the most part in groups of three. Two groups (In Nomines K20–22 and K23–5) appear consistently together, and it is possible that they are intended to make up a group of six. If so they invite a comparison with Blitheman’s smaller-scale set of six which they cannot sustain. Blitheman gives each piece its own character. Bull has a wider range of procedures at his disposal, but not wide enough to prevent each piece from sounding like a different but occasionally overlapping selection from the same general pool.

One In Nomine, K28, differs considerably from the rest. Each note of the cantus firmus, which is placed in the bass, is lengthened from the normal breve by three crotchets. The uneven pulse draws attention to the harmonic shifts in the unusually full four-part texture, so that to some extent the music moves as in a secular ground, though without the stability provided by a repeating pattern. Bull only once attempted a large-scale ground, in his Quadran settings. Something of their history may be gleaned from their relation to Byrd’s similar works, probably composed about 1590. Byrd picked up hints from Bull’s first pavan and his galliard, but not from his second pavan, which is therefore likely to have been written a little later as a more elaborate substitute for the first. Certainly in the earlier work Bull’s customary figurative exuberance seems cramped, perhaps because it had not yet developed fully, but more probably because the composer was inhibited by the demands of the harmonic scheme.

Among repeating formulae he took most readily to treble ostinatos, such as the hexachord or the four-note pattern of God save the king. These gave a little more definition than a chant but left his fingers equally free. In his 30 variations on Walsingham he shows the same preference, confining the tune to the treble almost throughout, and thereby inducing a structural monotony for which the extraordinary instrumental brilliance cannot entirely compensate. The definitive Quadran Pavan and Galliard, the Hexachord Fantasia K18 and Walsingham are by some way the longest pieces that Bull composed. Together they provide a compendium of his keyboard techniques. Tomkins, comparing Quadran settings and hexachord fantasias by Bull and Byrd, characterized Bull's as ‘excellent for the hand’ and Byrd's respectively as ‘excellent for matter’ and ‘for substance’. That puts it in a nutshell; no doubt he would have drawn the same distinction between their Walsingham settings. Yet virtuosity has its place, and Bull’s remorseless bravura establishes a special position for these pieces in the music of the time, even if his most imaginative strokes are to be sought elsewhere.

None of Bull’s other grounds or variations approaches the scale or importance of the Quadran settings and Walsingham. Among the grounds The King’s Hunt is a vigorous and original descriptive piece, but several of them seem to be teaching exercises, in some cases raising doubts about authenticity. A quite different side of his work is represented by Bonny Peg of Ramsey and Why ask you (K62 and K63). Like them, most of the variation sets draw on well-known tunes, though this does not appear to be true of the accomplished example called Bull’s Goodnight. This belongs with a handful of attractive pieces claiming to depict the composer’s character and moods: My Self, My Grief and so on. It resembles an alman; the others are in coranto style with varied repeats to each strain, and some have a complete variation of the whole as well. It seems fairly clear that they are original compositions.

The same cannot be said, however, of the numerous smaller dances associated with Bull’s name. While many are no doubt his own, for instance the pieces made for the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, he may sometimes, like Gibbons, have arranged popular dances or masque tunes, or elaborated a complete composition, such as John Johnson’s in Galliard K70, or merely added decorated repeats, as in Coranto K105, where the original is by Edmund Hooper. In some cases the ascriptions may be wrong. The corantos especially need accepting with reserve: most occur only in the Antwerp manuscript, where the occasional English title may guarantee nothing more than provenance. Although the galliards are generally much more ambitious pieces than these, there are exceptions. The scribe of Rés.1185 grouped the light-weight Galliard K92 with four other dances in the same mode, labelling them German, Dutch, Italian, English and French. Similarly he transcribed Galliard in C, K103, as a pendant to the Dallying Alman and added purportedly French and Welsh dances also in C.

Many of the independent galliards, however, bear comparison with those accompanying the more important pavans, for instance the apparently early K72 and K73, the spirited Vaulting Galliard (K90), the two variant versions of the Regina Galliard (K132), and best of all the fine Prince’s Galliard (K113). The last was almost certainly composed for Prince Henry not long before Bull left England: Byrd parodied some of its features in his Mary Brownlow Galliard, published in Parthenia. In the preface to this book the hope is expressed that the Bull’s royal pupil will play the pieces in it. This may help to explain why his contributions are so disappointing. They are not teaching pieces like some of the preludes and grounds, nor even particularly easy. But they tend to play safe harmonically and preserve rather uniform textures, thereby throwing into relief Bull’s weakness as a melodist. Three are slightly revised versions of older pieces that the princess may have known already. To four variations in galliard measure on St. Thomas Wake, very dull by comparison with, for instance, those on Go from my window, he added two equally dull new ones as a companion pavan. Another weak pavan and galliard (K131) waters down some of the best ideas from the far superior Lord Lumley pair (K129), and the inclusion of a galliard (K70) based quite exceptionally on another composer’s work, John Johnson’s Jewel, suggests that this may have been a favourite of the princess’s. Several earlier pavans and galliards in the major G mode tend towards the limited style of the Parthenia pieces and thus may have been intended for pupils. In any case, among them only Lord Lumley’s belong with Bull’s more important pavans and galliards, the rest of which are all in minor modes: A (K86–8), D (K66–7) and G (Cunningham App.III and K78).

This is a group of works on which he appears to have expended much thought and effort. In the absence of a cantus firmus or a variation pattern his figuration could not proliferate so freely here. He needed to replace that kind of neutral framework with harmonic and cadential schemes strong enough to span the long pavan strains and support a variety of character and texture that he scarcely attempted elsewhere. He was not invariably successful: if the venture drew from him some of his most original ideas it also made demands on a purely technical level that he could not always meet.

Difficulties arose in two quite different ways. Whether he chose to work with strains of 8 or 16 bars or with less regular ones, he seems to have planned them to some extent in the abstract. Where the often rather characterless melodic lines receive insufficient support from the harmony, or where, especially in four-part textures, the harmonic direction itself becomes blurred by a need to maintain constant quaver movement among the parts, the defining cadences fail in their effect; strains I and III of Pavan K66a provide illustrations of such points. Then certain pavans contain strains in styles that endanger the continuity of the whole, for example the close imitations in strain III of the Pavan in G minor (paired with Galliard K78), or the chromatic middle strains of the Melancholy and Chromatic Pavans (K67a and K87a). In the Chromatic Pavan an outbreak of cantus firmus style in strain III compounds the weakness, though in the Melancholy Pavan the independent excellence of the corresponding strain may be felt to save the day. However, the Lord Lumley pair (K129) and the pair K88 each in their own way achieves far greater consistency, and the Fantastic (K86) is altogether outstanding, remarkable for its arresting invention, assured decoration and motivic coherence. Any moments of harmonic slackness count for little in such a work, which would suffice by itself to give Bull a high place among keyboard composers of the time.

The surviving output of Bull’s 14 or so years in Brussels and Antwerp is not large; in several categories it adds only one or two pieces. These are of unequal interest, but all show the impact of continental styles. The rather unadventurous Dutch carol settings make use of standard techniques of keyboard intabulation not much favoured in England, and the variation set on Revenant is a sober affair by comparison with its English counterparts. On the other had the fine Salve regina settings for alternatim use profit greatly from an almost total break with Bull’s English chant settings and his absorption of local techniques, and, although their antecedents are less easily identified, the Symphony Pavan and Galliard (K68) and Pavan K77 add something distinctive in their quiet way to his already wide-ranging work in the genre.

It is the fantasias, however, that enter the newest territory, if the ascriptions to Bull of no fewer than eleven extremely heterogeneous examples from this period are to be trusted. The only guide here is style, and it proves an inadequate one. Bull’s English fantasias give very little help. Apart from the early pieces in three or two parts (K15, K10–11) and the hexachord fantasias, all in their own ways special cases, Fantasia K12 is his only essay in the genre. It is a confident loose-limbed piece, not much concerned with imitation after the opening, and dependent on harmony to direct its succession of varying texures. It has little bearing on the later pieces.

Among these, and at the opposite extreme, are three relatively short, close-knit contrapuntal essays built on motifs from a canzona by Gioseffo Guami and Palestrina’s madrigal Vestivi i colli. They belong to an entirely different category from any earlier work of Bull’s, yet much of the detail seems acceptable as his. If they are genuine they show that he retained the adaptability observable from the very beginning of his career, and that none of the late fantasias can be rejected merely on the grounds of its wider conception. There is in any case a lack of consistency of thought even in his accredited works that makes his personal traits hard to pin down. These lie primarily in figuration, and in a certain restlessness or even lack of control where no ready-made structural formula is present. When he adopts Sweelinck-like augmentation, diminution or more sustained imitation in Fantasia K14, which is related to God save the king and the Hexachord Fantasia K18, and in the chromatic fantasias K4 and K5, he shows no interest in deploying them in the orderly fashion of Sweelinck and other continental composers. Thus it may be indicative that, among the at first sight more doubtful fantasias, the keyboard textures suggest Bull less in the structurally consistent works, K1 and K13, than in the less well thought through K2 and K6.

Even if all the music attributed to Bull in his years of exile could be proved authentic, it would not add greatly to his achievement. In emulating continental genres he never recaptured the originality of the pavans and galliards, the liveliness of some of the smaller works or the brilliance of the big display pieces composed in England. Nor does whatever influence he may have exerted on continental keyboard styles date primarily from this time. Such influence must in any case be seen as part of a more general picture. It appears to have been largely through Sweelinck that elements of English keyboard writing gained wide currency abroad. The foundations of Sweelinck's style must have been laid well before the turn of the century. Many English musicians visited the Continent at that time and Peter Philips was resident in Antwerp from 1590, so English music could have reached him by various routes. He arranged English pieces, imitated English secular variations, and adopted patterns of figuration used in England since the middle of the century. How far his knowledge of these derived from Bull’s music it is hard to say, but at least some passages suggest Bull rather than earlier music, and travellers from England are more likely to have brought the new with them than the old. In later times the sheer difficulty of Bull’s music continued to attract the interest of historians (fig.3), but much of it remained unpublished till the appearance of the Musica Britannica edition. No comprehensively detailed study was undertaken until that of Cunningham (1984).

WORKS

Editions: John Bull: Keyboard Music I, ed. J. Steele, F. Cameron and T. Dart, MB, xiv (1960, rev. 2/1967) [K]John Bull: Keyboard Music II, ed. T. Dart, MB, xix (1963, rev. 2/1970) [K]

works included in K are identified by edition number, not page number; for a more systematic numeration see Cunningham (1984)

keyboard music

this list includes everything in MB xiv; xix; questions of authenticity are discussed in the commentary to the edition and in Cunningham (1984); no attempt has been made here to distinguish degrees of doubt

Plainsong settings: Aeterne rerum conditor, K47/3–5; Alleluia: per te, K48; Alleluia: post partum, K49; Christe redemptor omnium, K33; 12 In nomine settings, K20–31; Jam lucis orto sidere 1, K45a; Jam lucis orto sidere 2, K45b; 3 Miserere, K34–36 (K36 anon.); 3 Salvator mundi, K37–39; 2 Salve regina, K40–41; Sermone blando (Aurora lucis rutilat), K47/1,6,7; Te lucis ante terminum, K46; Telluris ingens conditor, K47/2; 2 Veni redemptor gentium, K42–43; Vexilla regis prodeunt, K44

Preludes and Doric music: Doric music, 3 pts (? based on piece by Gibbons), K57; Doric music, 4pts, K58; D[oric], K61; Doric music (anon), K59; Dor[ic], K60 13 untitled preludes: K1–2, 16, 30, 43, 82–4, 117–121

Fantasias: On a theme of Sweelinck, K4; Quinti toni, K6; Sexti toni, K13; Octavi toni, sopra sol ut mi fa sol la, K2; Octavi toni, sopra re re re sol ut mi fa sol, K14; Duo, K10; Hexachord, K17; Hexachord, K18; God save the king, K32; ‘La Guamina’ (on a canzona by G. Guami), K3; ‘A Leona’, K7; ‘Vestiva i colli’ (i) (on Palestrina’s madrigal), K8; ‘Vestiva i colli’ (ii) (on Palestrina’s madrigal), K9; 5 untitled fantasias, K1, 5, 11, 12, 15

Grounds: A Battle and no battle (Phrygian music. The ground for a second player. anon.), K108; Boerendans (Country dance), K111; Bonny Peg of Ramsey, K75; Les Bouffons, K101; Dr. Bull’s Ground (i), K102a; Dr. Bull’s Ground (ii), K102b; The King’s Hunt, K125; Het nieu bergomasco (The new bergomask), K124; 2 Quadran pavans, K127ab–c; Quadran galliard, K127d–f; Spanish pavan, K76; Why ask you (i), K62; Why ask you (ii), K63; Why ask you (iii), K64; Why ask you (anon), ed. in MB, lv (1989), 119

Variations: Bonny sweet Robin, K65 (?later revised by Farnaby); Bull’s Goodnight, K143; Go from my window, K123; Revenant, K100; Rosasolis (?revision of a setting by Farnaby), K122; St. Thomas Wake pavan and galliard, K126a–b; St Thomas Wake galliard (anon.), K126c; Walsingham, K85

Pavan and galliard pairs: Fantastic, K86; Chromatic (Queen Elizabeth’s), K87; Melancholy, K67; Symphony, K68; Battle (anon.), K109; Trumpet, K128; Lord Lumley’s, K129; 5 untitled pairs, K66, 78 (galliard, paired with pavan in Cunningham, App. iii), 88, 130 (anon.), 131

Pavans: 2 untitled, K69 (anon., inc.), K77

Galliards: Vaulting, K90; Italian (anon.), K92; Piper’s (2 arrs. from Dowland), K89a–b; ‘Air’, K91; The Prince’s, K113; Lady Lucy’s, K72; Lord Hudson’s, K133; Regina, K132a; Regina; K132b–c; Galliard (arr. from J. Johnson’s ‘Jewel’), K70; 3 untitled, K71, 73, 103 (anon.)

Almans: Duke of Brunswick’s, K93; German’s, K94; French, K95; Dallying (Lydian music), K104; Ionic (Phrygian music), K110; Fantasia (Meridian) (also attrib. Farnaby), K134; 3 untitled, K114, 115 (anon.), 135

Corantos: The Princes (anon.), K98; French (anon., arr. from E. Hooper), K105; Bataille, K106; Brigante, K74; Joyeuse, K136; A round, K137; Alarm, K80; Kingston, K81; 6 untitled, K79 and 5 in GB-Lbl Add.23623 ff.88–92

Other dances: Duchess of Brunswick’s Toy (Most sweet and fair), K97; Dutch Dance (anon.), K99; English Toy, 96; Irish Toy (anon.), K112; Welsh Dance, K107; What care you? (anon.), K116

Various short pieces: Canon, 4 in 2, K50; My choice I will not change, K140; My grief, K139 (omitting the variation in GB-Lbl R.M.23.l.4); My Jewel (i), K141; My jewel (ii), K142; My self, K138; Den lustelijken Meij K52; 3 Een kindeken is ons geboren, K53–55; Prelude and Carol: Laet ons met herten reijne, K56

[suggested attributions]

Aurora lucis rutilat, ed. in MB, lxvi (1995), 4

Prelude, ed. J.A. Fuller Maitland and W.B. Squire: The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (London and Leipzig, 1894–9/R, 2/1979–80 by B. Winogron), ii 25

Robin Hood, ed. in MB, v (1955, 2/1964), 139

misattributed works

Canon 2 in 1 with running bass (by Tallis), K51; Coranto (by Gibbons), ed. in MB, xx (1962, 2/1967), 78; Fantasia ‘De Chappel’ (?by van Kappell); Fantasia Chromatica (by Sweelinck), ed. G. Leonhardt: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Opera Omnia, i/1 (1968), 1; Galliard to Bull’s Fantastic Pavan (by Cosyn), ed. in Memed (1993); Hexachord Fantasia (by Du Caurroy), K19; The King’s Hunt (by Cosyn), ed. in Memed (1993); Pavan and Galliard, Sinfonia ‘De Chappel’ (?by Van Kappell), pavan ed. in H.F Redlich: Harpsichord Pieces from Dr. John Bull’s Flemish Tabulatura (Wilhelmshave, 1958) 2; Prelude (i) (by Gibbons), ed. in MB, xx (1962, 2/1967), 1; Prelude (ii) (by Gibbons), ed. in MB, xx (1962, 2/1967), 3; Prelude (by Byrd), ed. in MB, xxvii (1976, 3/2000), 85; Voluntary upon a plainsong (by Gibbons), ed. in MB, xx (1962, 2/1967), 84; Veni redemptor gentium (by Tallis), MB, i (1951, 2/1962), 75; Why ask you? (by Cosyn), ed. in Memed (1993)

anthems

Verse Anthems: Almighty God, which by the leading star [Almight God who didst manifest; Deus omnipotens; O Lord my God] (in musically identical versions for 5vv and 6vv) TCM, xci (1937, 2/1962); Deliver me O God; How joyful and how glad (inc.); In thee O Lord put I my trust [first chorus: I am feeble]

Words only: God the father, God the son; O God best guide; Praise we the Lord our God; Preserve most mighty God; The man that fears the Lord

spritual songs and carol

Attend unto my tears (W. Leighton), 4vv, insts; EECM, xi (1970), 48

Attend unto my tears (W. Leighton), 5vv; EECM, xi (1970), 100

Den lustelijken Meij, 4vv; ed. in Noske (1963)

In the departure of the Lord (W. Leighton), 4vv, insts; EECM, xi (1970), 52

consort music

Fantasia a 3; MB, ix (1955, 2/1962), 7

Fantasia a 4; ed. S. Beck: Nine Fantasias in Four Parts (New York, 1947), 2; kbd score, K58a

Fantasia a 5, GB-Lpro SP 46/126, SP 46/162, inc. [possibly a consort song]

Hexachord Fantasia 1; K17 [chromatic; known only in kbd score]

In nomine a 5; MB, ix (1955, 2/1962), 86

Masque music (Bull's authorship perhaps implied by the titles): Bull’s Toye [for a masque], ed. A.J. Sabol: Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Hanover, NH, 1978); The Bull Masque, ed. in A.J. Sabol: Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Hanover, NH, 1978)

Canons: Many canons of English provenance on Miserere and puzzle canons are attributed to bull in A-Wn 17771, GB-Llb R,M.24.c.14, R.M.24.f.25; also Sweelinck, Werken, x, 84

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

AshbeeR, iv, v, viii

DNB

Le HurayMR

J. Ward: The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740/R)

A. Wood: Appendix to the History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford … containing Fasti oxonienses, ed. J. Gutch (Oxford, 1790)

E.F. Rimbault, ed.: The Old Cheque-Book or Book of Remembrance of the Chapel Royal (London, 1872/R)

H.R. Hoppe: ‘John Bull in the Archduke Albert’s Service’, ML, xxxv (1954), 114–15

J. Jacquot: ‘Sur quelques formes de la musique de clavier élizabéthaine (d'après des oeuvres inédites de John Bull)’, La musique instrumentale de la Renaissance: Paris 1954, 241–58

W. Mellers: ‘John Bull and English Keyboard Music’, MQ, xl (1954), 364–83, 548–71

J.H. van der Meer: ‘The Keyboard Works in the Vienna Bull-Manuscript’, TVNM, xviii/2 (1957), 72–105

M.A. Vente: Die Brabanter Orgel (Amsterdam, 1958, enlarged 2/1963)

A.H. King: ‘Fragments of Early Printed Music in the Bagford Collection’, ML, xl (1959), 269–73

T. Dart: ‘An Unknown Letter from Dr John Bull’, AcM, xxxii (1960), 175–7

T. Dart: ‘Calendar of the Life of John Bull’: introduction to MB, xiv (1960, rev. 2/1970), pp.xxi ff

T. Dart: ‘A Letter of Recommendation Written for John Bull in 1617’, RBM, xvii (1963), 12–4

F. Noske: ‘John Bull's Dutch Carol’, ML, xliv (1963), 326–33

J. Caldwell: ‘Keyboard Plainsong Settings in England, 1500–1660’, MD, xix (1965), 129–53

A. Curtis: Sweelinck’s Keyboard Music (London, 1969, 2/1972)

G. Dodd: ‘Coperario or Bull?’, Chelys, i (1969), 41 only

P. Chappell: A Portrait of John Bull (Hereford, 1970) [incl. transcrs. of several documents relating to Antwerp]

F. Cameron: ‘John Bull: a Retrospect: Homage to Thurston Dart’, SMA, v (1971), 43–53

J. Caldwell: English Keyboard Music before the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1973)

W.A. Edwards: The Sources of Elizabethan Consort Music (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974)

W. Shaw: The Organists and Organs of Hereford Cathedral (Hereford, 1976, 2/1988)

O. Neighbour: The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London, 1978)

W. Cunningham: The Keyboard Music of John Bull (Ann Arbor, 1984)

A. Silbiger: Intoduction to London, British Library, MS Add.23623 (New York, 1987)

T. Baranova: ‘Rekopiśmienna tabulatura lutniowa ze zbiorów Biblioteki Akademii Nauk ZSSR w Leningradzie’, Muzyka, xxxiv (1989), 49–56

O. Memed: Seventeenth-Century English Keyboard Music: Benjamin Cosyn (New York, 1993)

T. Mäkelä: ‘“As I went to Walsingham”: Über den Sinn einer zyklischen Betrachtung der Liedvariationen von John Bull’, AcM, lxviii (1996), 23–47

R. Rasch: ‘The Messaus-Bull Codex, London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 23623, RBM, l (1996), 93–127

Bull, Ole (Bornemann)

(b Bergen, 5 Feb 1810; d Lysøen, nr Bergen, 17 Aug 1880). Norwegian violinist and composer. He was one of the greatest 19th-century violinists and a central figure in Norwegian music.

2. Reputation, works.

JOHN BERGSAGEL

1. Life.

His father was an apothecary from a cultivated Bergen family of clergymen and military officers. At the age of five he was given a violin and made rapid progress; by the age of eight he could play in the weekly string quartet meetings at his home. The statutes of the Bergen Harmonic Society were altered to admit so young a musician to membership in the orchestra, and in 1819 he made his début as a soloist. He was first taught by the town musician Niels Eriksen, and then by leaders of the Harmonic Society orchestra, J.H. Poulsen (until 1820) and Mathias Lundholm (1820–27), pupils of Viotti and Baillot respectively, who provided a sound technical foundation on which he later superimposed a very personal manner. He also learnt much from the peasant fiddlers around Valestrand on Osterøy, north of Bergen. It was not however intended that he should follow a musical career. He went to Christiania in 1828 to read theology at the university, but failed the entrance examination. As his reputation as a violinist had already secured him a leading position in the city’s musical life, he was invited to take over the conductorship of the Musical Lyceum and of the theatre orchestra during the illness of Waldemar Thrane; when Thrane died a few months later Bull was appointed to succeed him as conductor.

Bull now devoted himself to theory and composition. In a letter he mentioned work on a symphony; two settings in 1829 of poems by Henrik Wergeland, Hymne til Friheden (‘Hymn to liberty’) and Tordenen (‘In the thunder’), significantly reveal what was to be a guiding principle of his career: to use his gifts in the service of his country and national independence. In Wergeland he encountered a dynamic spirit who had given expression to ideas with which Bull could identify. His exalted place in Norwegian history is due to the success with which, as the first really internationally famous Norwegian, he propagandized on his country’s behalf.

In May 1829 Bull made his first trip abroad, to Copenhagen and Kassel. He wrote to his father that he intended to visit Spohr, then his favourite composer. It has often been said that Spohr was critical and discouraging, but it is unlikely that they met at that time (Spohr’s description of Bull’s playing in his autobiography dates from January 1839). Returning to Christiania in September, Bull resumed his musical activities and studies, making a short concert tour in Norway in summer 1830. In summer 1831 he met Torgeir Augundson, the most famous Norwegian peasant fiddler, known as ‘Myllarguten’, from whom he learnt a number of slåtter (folkdances) which he used later in his own compositions and as the basis for the improvisations that were a characteristic part of his concerts. When he left for Paris in August, he took with him a Hardanger fiddle, the Norwegian peasant violin with extra (sympathetic) strings.

In Paris Bull met and shared rooms with the brilliant young Austrian violinist H.W. Ernst, who introduced him to Paganini’s style of playing. Unsuccessful in finding employment, he suffered serious privation and was nursed through a long illness by a kindly landlady, Mme Villeminot, whose granddaughter Félicie he married in 1836. In April 1833 he heard Paganini play and gave a concert at which he played his Souvenirs de Norvège, which used Norwegian slåtter and folksongs arranged for the Hardanger fiddle (then unknown in Paris), with the accompaniment of string quartet, double bass and flute. His performance got a good review, but in June he left Paris having attracted little significant attention.

Bull went first to Switzerland, where he visited his countryman, the pianist Hans Skramstad, in Lausanne, and then to Italy, where he intended to spend a year taking composition lessons and studying in the music library in Milan. He developed a new manner of holding the violin and experimented with modifications to his violin and bow, making the bridge flatter, after the fashion of the Hardanger fiddle, and the bow longer and heavier, like Myllarguten’s. After concerts in Milan, Venice and Trieste, he appeared in Bologna, creating a sensation and receiving honorary membership in the Accademia Filarmonica. There he met the violinist Bériot and the singer Malibran (later Bériot’s wife). From the account of their meeting it appears that Bull could now play only on his own instrument, the tone of which Malibran preferred to Bériot’s. In Bologna Bull performed his first large composition with full orchestra, his Concerto in A, which Bériot said had so many difficulties of a type previously unknown that he doubted whether any other violinist could play it – even if he were in possession of Bull’s violin and bow. In autumn 1834 in Naples he played his Quartet for solo violin, composed to outdo Paganini’s famous Duo. Bull’s remarkable ability to play polyphonically, made possible by the low bridge on his violin and his specially shaped bow, became a legendary feature of his technique (Albert Schweitzer credited it to the survival of Baroque practices in the conservative north and cited Bull on behalf of his efforts to encourage a round violin bow for the performance of Bach’s music). In February 1835 he went to Rome, where he completed and performed his Recitativo, adagio amorosa con polacca guerriera for violin and orchestra (inspired, he said, by the sight of the smoking Vesuvius), which became his most frequently performed composition.

Returning to Paris, Bull gave a concert at the Opéra on 17 June, the only violinist other than Paganini ever to do so, describing himself on the programme simply as ‘artiste norvégien’. It was a bold patriotic gesture that succeeded in putting Norway on the cultural map of Europe (a leading Paris critic, Jules Janin, took the point and began his enthusiastic and widely circulated review with a description of Norway itself). After further concerts in Paris and the provinces, Bull went to London (May 1836), where he had an overwhelming success at the Philharmonic Society and established himself as the greatest violin virtuoso of his time. He returned to Paris in July to be married, then embarked on a tour of the British Isles that included 274 concerts in 14 months. After two months’ rest in Paris he toured with triumphant success through Germany and Russia, then back to Stockholm and Norway, where he was welcomed in July 1838 as a national hero.

In 1839 Bull gave nearly 200 concerts in Germany and Austria (see illustration); in 1840 he was again in London, where he played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with Liszt at a Philharmonic Society concert. In November he played in Leipzig, where Schumann, who had heard him the year before in Vienna, heard him again. He then learnt that a wealthy Viennese collector had bequeathed him a valuable Gasparo da Salò violin, the scroll of which was reputedly carved by Benvenuto Cellini; a chamber music concert, in which Bull was assisted by Mendelssohn and David, was held on 20 January 1841 to present the instrument to the public. The following month in Prague he composed his E minor Violin Concerto, then continued to Poland and Russia. In 1842 he was in Germany and the Netherlands, in 1843 in Sweden and Denmark, and in November 1843 he gave his first concert in the USA. Before sailing for America he arranged for the publication by Schuberth in Hamburg of some of his compositions, including the Bellini Variations approved by Liszt.

As a democrat and Romantic adventurer, Bull admired and enjoyed the USA, which in turn responded to him in a quite exceptional manner. ‘My relationship to the Americans is that of an adopted son’, he wrote. He was back in Paris for Christmas 1845 and for three months contented himself with private music-making with Liszt and T.D.A. Tellefsen, a Norwegian pupil of Chopin, before setting out again for southern France, Algeria, Spain and Portugal. He had reached Nantes on the return journey when he learnt of the February 1848 Revolution in Paris, where, on his return, he led a deputation to greet Lamartine on behalf of the Norwegian people, a characteristically flamboyant and presumptuous gesture that caused offence in official circles in Norway. At the end of the year he was back in Norway giving concerts and speaking on behalf of an independent Norwegian republic. After a particularly enthusiastic reception arranged by the Society of Students on 10 December Bull promised a composition to commemorate the occasion. The resulting fantasia, originally called Den 10. December, is a programmatic piece describing a summer visit to mountain pastures; under the title Et saeterbesøg (‘A visit to the mountain pasture’) it became Bull’s most enduring composition. It contains one of the most beloved of all Norwegian melodies known as ‘Saeterjentens Søndag’, later sung to the words by J. Moe, ‘Paa solen jeg ser’ (‘I gaze upon the sun’).

At this meeting with the students Bull spoke of the need to appreciate and preserve true Norwegian art and to establish a Norwegian national theatre. These projects occupied him during the next two years. He invited Myllarguten to Christiania for a concert with him on 15 January 1849, the first of several appearances designed to make Norwegians aware of their national heritage of folk music. On 23 July he announced the establishment of the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen to encourage Norwegian dramatists and actors and through them the Norwegian language, which had traditionally been subjugated to Danish as the language of educated culture. The theatre opened on 2 January 1850 but despite acknowledged artistic success and public support Bull’s application in 1851 for a state subsidy for the theatre was turned down and Bull was obliged to go on tour again. He installed the 23-year-old Henrik Ibsen at the theatre on a five-year contract with the stipulation that he write a play each year.

In January 1852 Bull was once again in the USA, where he became involved in the establishment of a colony, a New Norway centred round a town to be called Oleona. For this purpose he bought 11,144 acres in Potter County, Pennsylvania, and in September 1852 the first settlers moved in. Because of the condition of American citizenship required for the ownership of such a large tract of land, it has been assumed that Bull gave up his Norwegian citizenship, a supposition which aroused considerable resentment in Norway. However, he was given dispensation by the State of Pennsylvania, and did not take American citizenship. The widely held belief that Bull was sold land to which the sellers had no title is also incorrect. The undertaking had been entered into too hastily, and after a year it was evident that the land was better suited to timber and industry than to farming. In September 1853 Bull sold his holdings back to his partners for the same price he had paid, and the colonial scheme collapsed. His responsibilities to the immigrants cost him much money, and he was obliged to tour extensively, with Maurice Strakosch and his eight-year-old sister-in-law Adelina Patti, to meet his obligations. Back in New York at the beginning of 1855, he made an unsuccessful attempt to establish a permanent opera house at the Academy of Music in New York, which ended in an acrimonious dispute with Strakosch and his nephew Max Maretzek, the incident being reported in New York newspapers as ‘the great Opera House war’.

Bull’s return to Bergen in August 1857 was greeted by a newspaper article by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson that led to his being invited by Bull to take over the position at the Bergen Theatre that had been held by Ibsen, who had now moved to the new Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. Thus Bull helped to initiate the careers of Norway’s two great 19th-century dramatists. In 1858, after hearing Grieg play and seeing some of his compositions, he convinced the boy’s parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1859 he encouraged the young Rikard Nordraak by inviting him to accompany him in some concerts, Nordraak’s first public appearances. Grieg’s first set of folksong arrangements (op.17, 1869) is dedicated to Bull, who had himself, in 1852, published a little collection of folk melodies in piano arrangements as an appendix to Tønsberg’s Norske folkedragter.

In 1859 Bull was one of the founders of the Norwegian Society for the Advancement of the National Element in Art and Literature. On his return to Norway in 1838 he had given a concert to start a fund to establish a conservatory. In 1862 he took up the idea again, but in spite of elaborate preparations and the promise of help from the king, his enemies in the government rejected his application for public support. This was the last scheme in which Bull tried to enlist government aid. But in 1872 he sponsored a fund for the purchase of a collection of Scandinavian literature for the University of Wisconsin, preliminary to the establishment of a professorship in Scandinavian languages and literature there, and during his last years he collected money for erecting a statue of Leif Erikson in Boston.

Bull made an extended tour of Germany, Poland and Russia in 1866–7, then again visited the USA. His first wife having died in 1862, in 1870 he married the 20-year-old daughter of a Wisconsin senator. During the last ten years of his life he spent the winters in the USA and the summers in Norway. He continued to perform with undiminished success until his death. The occasion of his 66th birthday, when he played his Et saeterbesøg from the top of Cheop’s pyramid in fulfilment of a promise to King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, is worth mentioning as an example of the sort of extravagant gesture that made him a legend and his life a fairy story to enthral every Norwegian child.

2. Reputation, works.

It is difficult to separate the impact of Bull’s playing from that of his personality, or the musical value of his compositions from the impression created by his performance of them. Bjørnson said his personality was so powerful that when he entered a room he obliterated all others. He was a figure of fascination for writers: George Sand used him as the model for Abel in her novel Malgrétout, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt owes not a little to him (Peer’s ‘Gyntiana’ is an obvious reference to Bull’s ‘Oleona’). Thackeray met him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1852 and 1855, and wrote ‘Last night … at Longfellow’s … there was a mad-cap fiddler, Ole Bull, who played most wonderfully … and charmed me still more by his oddities and character. Quite a figure for a book’. Indeed, he is easily recognized as the Musician in Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), who, interspersed with playing his violin, tells a story from the Norse sagas. In 1880 Mark Twain wrote ‘If Ole Bull had been born without arms, what a rank he would have taken among the poets – because it is in him, and if he couldn’t violin it out, he would talk it out, since of course it would have to come out’. He had a lively, quick intelligence with an unlimited range of interests. He was a connoisseur and collector of violins and an expert in their construction and repair, often working with Vuillaume when in Paris. He designed and built a violin whose tone was much admired, and in the USA he collaborated with the engineer John Ericsson in building an improved piano, which he introduced into Norway at a concert played by Agathe Backer.

Schumann regarded Bull as at least Paganini’s equal, and in technical feats, such as playing four parts at once, in a class by himself. He was struck by his unusually beautiful tone and by his playing of Mozart with German simplicity and intimacy; but he noticed too that he often played impulsively, in an almost improvisatory manner, dazzling and swaying his audience, which was not the German way. He regarded Bull’s own compositions at that time as unfinished, but revealing flashes of inexplicable genius. Similar opinions, which praise the melody and harmony, but tend to criticize the form and coherence of his compositions as well as his performance, are echoed by many critics, but on the whole Bull’s appearance, manner, presence and playing disarmed all popular criticism of his music. His genius for simple and touching melody is evident in two of his songs, Saeterjentens Søndag (from Et saeterbesøg) and I ensomme stunde (‘In moments of solitude’), which have become part of the Norwegian national song repertory.

Bull’s historical significance, however, derives from the fact that he was ‘more than a fiddler’; as Bjørnson said at this funeral, ‘Ole Bull was the first and the greatest celebration in the life of this people. He gave us self-confidence, the greatest gift that could be given us at that time’, sentiments echoed by Grieg. Few of Bull’s compositions were published, perhaps because of his predilection for improvisation or because of their virtuoso difficulties and personal idiosyncracies; they probably deserve more serious attention than they have received.

WORKS

many lost

Hymne til friheden [Hymn to Liberty], Tordenen [In the thunder] (H. Wergeland), 1829; Cantata, wind insts, for the funeral of Westye Egeberg, 1830; Song (Bjerregaard), 1830; Souvenirs de Norvège (? = Norges fjelde), Hardanger fiddle, 2 vn, va, vc, db, fl, 1832–3; Fantaisie et variations de bravoure sur un thème de Bellini, 1832–3, pubd vn, orch, op.3 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843); Aria appassionata with variations, June 1833; Vn Conc., A, 1834; Capriccio fantastico, solo vn, 1834; Capriccio; Qt, solo vn, 1834; Adagio religioso (A Mother’s Prayer), vn, orch, op.1, 1834 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843), arr. pf (Christiania, n.d.); Recitativo, adagio amorosa con polacca guerriera, 1835, Polacca guerriera, pubd vn, pf (Christiania, n.d.)

Concerto irlandais (Farewell to Ireland), 1837; Homage to Edinburgh (Fantasy on Scottish Folk Melodies), 1837; Preghiera dolente e rondo ridente (Cantabile dolorosa e rondo giocoso), perf. Berlin, 19 Feb 1839; Nordmannens heimlengt (Norwegers Traum und Heimweh), perf. Vienna, 1839; Vn Conc., e, Feb 1841, Adagio arr. pf, vn (Christiania, n.d.); Grüss aus der Ferne (En fjern hilsen), March 1841; Concerto romantico, begun 1834, perf. Christiania, 1841; Til hende [To Her], 1842; Villspel i Lio [Wild Playing in Lio], 1842; Nocturne, vn, orch/pf, op.2, 1842 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843); Siciliano e Tarantella, vn, orch, perf. Bremen, 1843, arr. vn, pf (Oslo, 1949), full score N-Ou; El agiaco cubana, 1844; Recuerdos de Habana, 1844; Niagara, 1844; The Solitude of the Prairies, 1844; Davids Salme, 1844; Washingtons minde [In Memory of Washington], perf. New York, 1845, march, arr. pf (Christiania, n.d.); La verbena de San Juan, 1847; Guitarspilleren fra Sevilla, 1847; Et saeterbesøg [A Visit to the Mountain Pasture] (Den 10. December), vn, orch/pf, 1848 (Christiania, n.d.); music for prol for opening of Norwegian Theatre, Bergen, 2 Jan 1850; music for Wergeland’s play Fjeldstuen [The Mountain Cottage], Bergen, 1850

I ensomme stunde [In Moments of Solitude] (M.J. Monrad), song, arr. male vv by J. Behrens, orig vn, pf (?=Ensomhed [Solitude], perf. Bergen, 16 June 1850); also arr. str orch by J. Halvorsen as La mélancolie (Copenhagen, 1914); Kunstens magt [The power of art] (H. Ibsen), male vv, orch, 1851, autograph score Ou; Lørdagskveld på saetren [Saturday Night in the Mountain Pasture], perf. Drammen, 1859; Kringen, perf. Drammen, 1859; ?Carnival in Venice (Paganini), variations; Kjaempeslåtten [Giant’s Folkdance], perf. Christiania, 10 Oct 1862; Hommage à Moscou, vn, vv, orch, April 1866; Nattergalen, fantasia on Russ. folksong, April 1867

Lily Dale, fantasia on American folksong, 1872; Vision, 1872; Arioso, vn, orch, Ou (inc.)

Songs using melodies by Bull: Her, hvor i alt hvad jeg ser han er til [Here, where he exists in everything I see] (Sigrid’s Song, or Den forladte [The Abandoned One]) and Saa ganger nu ind [Go in Now] (Huldre Song) (H. Wergeland), from the music to Fjeldstuen, 1850; I ensomme stunde [In Moments of Solitude] and I granskoven [In the Spruce Forest] (M.J. Monrad); Paa solen jeg ser [I Gaze upon the Sun] (J. Moe), to Saeterjentens Søndag from Et Saeterbesøg

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NBL (O.M. Sandvik)

R. Schumann: Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1854/R, rev. 5/1914/R by M. Kreisig; Eng. trans., 1877–80; new Eng. trans. [selection], 1947)

Ole Bull, et mindeblad [Ole Bull, a memorial] (Christiania, 1880)

A. Bull, ed.: Ole Bulls breve i uddrag, med en karakteristik og biografisk skitse af Jonas Lie (Copenhagen, 1881)

S.C. Bull: Ole Bull (Boston, 1882)

A. Grønvold: Norske musikere (Christiania, 1883), 123

H.L. Braekstad: Ole Bull: biografisk skitse (Bergen, 1885)

O.M. Sandvik and G. Schelderup, eds.: Norges musikhistorie (Christiania, 1921), i, 172

A. Schweitzer: ‘Der runde Violinbogen’, SMz, lxxiii (1933), 197–203

C. Aarvig: Den unge Ole Bull (Copenhagen, 1934)

A. Bjørndal: Ole Bull og norsk folkemusikk (Bergen, 1940)

M. Smith: The Life of Ole Bull (Princeton, NJ, 1943/R)

F. Bull: ‘Ole Bull og Norge’, Landet og litteraturen (Oslo, 1949), 119–54

O. Linge: Ole Bull (Oslo, 1953)

Ø. Gaukstad, ed.: Edvard Grieg: Artikler og taler (Oslo, 1957)

N. Grinde: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971, 3/1981; Eng. trans., 1991), 119–20

E. Haugen and C. Cai: Ole Bull (Oslo, 1992; Eng. trans., 1993)

Bull, William

(b Pavenham, Beds., 1650; d Brasted, Kent, bur. 12 April 1712). English trumpeter and brass instrument maker. He was apprenticed to the widow of a member of the Haberdashers Company of London in 1664, presumably through a family connection. At the age of 16 he was appointed Trumpeter in Extraordinary to Charles II. He married at the age of 21 on taking his freedom of the Haberdashers and moving to Hatchett Alley on Tower Hill. In 1678 he was appointed Trumpeter in Ordinary and also became a trumpeter in the second Troop of Horse Guards. He moved to The Horne and Trumpet in Salisbury Street and advertised trumpets of silver and brass for sale. The surviving plate books of the Royal Jewel House show that Bull was also responsible for instrument repairs from at least 1685 until 1700. Bull moved from Salisbury Street to the Haymarket in 1682. He entered his mark (BV) as a large plate worker at Goldsmiths Hall in 1699. In 1700 he retired as a King’s Trumpeter and moved to Hunt’s Court off Castle Street by the Mews. He issued a trade card from this address (see illustration) in which he described himself as Trumpet Maker to His Majesty [William III] and advertised, as well as trumpets and horns, kettle drums, speaking trumpets, hearing horns for deaf people, along with powder horns and even air guns.

In 1705 Bull moved to Berwick Street to live with his elder daughter Denis who had married Bull’s colleague, the King’s Trumpeter John Stevenson. During his final months he lived in Brasted where his son Michael had been vicar since 1708. In his will, which shows that he had considerable property, he left his tools to John Stevenson (d before 1716).

The quality of Bull’s surviving instruments establishes him as the finest English maker of his period. Four trumpets (two of silver and two of bronze with silver mounts) and a horn (dated 1699) survive; only the bell of this latter is original. The instruments are signed william bvll londini fecit. The silver is not hallmarked but appears to be of Sterling and Britannia standard. His instruments had a high reputation; for example in 1728 John Baptist Grano was lent ‘an excellent trumpet of old Bull’s making’; one of the surviving bronze trumpets was raised in pitch and fitted with a slide, indicating that it was used well into the second half of the 18th century.

Bull’s son-in-law John Harris and grandson William Bull Harris were both trumpet makers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AshbeeR, ii, iii

E. Halfpenny: ‘William Bull and the English Baroque Trumpet’, GSJ, xv (1962), 18–24

E. Halfpenny: ‘Two Oxford Trumpets’, GSJ, xvi (1963), 49–62

A.C. Baines: ‘The William Bull Horn’, GSJ, xxxv (1982), 157–8

A. Ashbee, ed.: Records of English Court Music, ii: 1685–1714 (Snodland, 1987), 180–98; ii: 1625–1649 (Snodland, 1988), 255–9

M.A. Byrne: ‘William Bull, John Stevenson and the Harris Family’, GSJ, xlv (1992), 67–77

MAURICE BYRNE

Bullant [Bulant, Bullandt, Bullanto, Bulan, Byulan], Antoine [Antonín Štěpán, Anton, Antonio]

(b Mělník, Bohemia, 9 Feb 1751; d St Petersburg 13/25 June 1821). Czech composer and bassoonist, active in France and Russia. All 18th-century printed and manuscript copies of his own works spell the name ‘Bullant’. Confusion about his origins has been resolved by the discovery of his birth record in the Mělník register, confirming Dlabač’s statement about his Bohemian origins. According to the register his parents were Josef Bulant from Mělník (Podolí quarter) and his wife Kateřina. The name Bulant occurs quite frequently in the Mělník register in the years 1742–1804, frequently spelt in different ways (Bulan, Bulanan, Bulanti, Belant). It is clearly of non-Czech origin (fuelling older musicological speculation about the composer’s origin in northern France); it may have arrived in central Bohemia via the French army, for instance during the Silesian wars (Mělník lies on the direct path often taken by foreign armies). There is no record of Bullant’s musical schooling or of when and why he went to France. Prince August Anton Joseph Lobkowitz maintained an orchestra and theatre on his Mělník estate, in which Bullant may have played. It is possible that Bullant’s departure for Paris may have been connected with Prince Lobkowicz’s departure for Madrid (1772–6) as the imperial ambassador at the royal court, where he may have taken some of his musicians.

Bullant went to Paris in about 1771 or 1772, and there published his first known works, the quartets op.2, in 1772. On the title-page of his Quatre sinfonie a grand orchestro op.5 (1773) he is identified as ‘Virtuoso di Musica de S.E. il Sigr. Marchese di Brancas’; the opus is dedicated to the tsar’s chamberlain, Count Stroganov, a well-known patron and lover of the arts, who was visiting Paris during this period. This connection with the Russian court may have led ultimately to Bullant’s settling in St Petersburg in 1780, having left Paris in the late 1770s (possibly via Bohemia). In 1778 Ignác Řehoř Foyta (1748–1808, also from Mělník and Roudnice) also left Prague to work for 20 years in St Petersburg as violinist and double bass player. According to Dlabač both Czech musicians worked several years together in the service of the tsar. In St Petersburg, Bullant probably gave his first concert there as a virtuoso bassoonist on 20 November/1 December 1780 (MGG1; according to Findeyzen not until 21 February 1781), playing some of his own works; by January 1783 he had given at least four other concerts. In June 1783 he was engaged as a bassoonist at the court of Catherine II, and soon thereafter successfully produced the first comic opera that can be attributed to him with certainty, Sbitenshchik (‘The Merchant of Mead’); this was followed by a number of other Russian-language operas in both St Petersburg and Moscow until 1799.

In 1784, having been ousted from his post as bassoonist, Bullant opened a shop for keyboard instruments imported from England; he later possibly sold music from this shop, as well as string and wind instruments. In 1785 he was re-engaged as bassoonist with the first orchestra of the imperial theatre, a post which he held until 1792 (according to Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya), or until before his death, receiving an annual pay of 600 rubles, which was comparable to that received by other foreign musicians in the orchestra. In 1787 he wrote a prologue with choruses and ballets to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Empress Catherine’s reign; he may have accompanied Catherine to Moscow for its first performance and remained there for a year or two, as four comic operas attributed to him were produced there in 1787–8. Bullant was a founder-director of the St Petersburg Philharmonic Society (1802), which granted him a small pension in 1821, shortly before his death.

Despite Bullant’s small output of symphonies, he was listed by Sulzer (1777) among the 72 important symphonic composers of the time. His five extant symphonies (a sixth bearing his name is of questionable authenticity) are in three movements and are written in the international vernacular style common in Paris in the 1770s. In Russia Bullant played a significant role in the musical life of the two major cities. The Merchant of Mead, his only opera with extant music, was one of the most popular works of its kind in 18th- and early 19th-century Russia. The opera remained in the repertory of Russian theatres until 1853 and rivalled the popularity of the most successful Russian opera of the time, Solokovsky’s The Miller who was a Wizard, a Cheat and a Matchmaker. In subject matter The Merchant of Mead is related to Molière (L’école des femmes) and Beaumarchais (Le barbier de Seville). It is possible, however, to see a more general relation to the tradition of commedia dell’arte and to home-grown Russian folk farce. Knyazhnin’s libretto is attractive for its lively dialogue, satirical wit, humour and true to life Russian characters. Musically Bullant does not do anything new, but his music is lively, effective, reflective of the libretto’s character and situations and deals sensitively with the Russian language. Bullant makes no use of Russian folksongs, but instead composes in the spirit of Russian folksong. The surviving material (four acts, two preludes, 16 sung numbers out of 21) gives no evidence for sung recitative, so the dialogue was probably spoken. The four-bar fragment from its fashionable prelude also adorns the title-page of the song collection Novïy rossiyskïy pesennik (‘The New Russian Song-book’; St Petersburg, 1792) arranged for voice and various musical instruments, leading Findeyzen to conclude that Bullant could have compiled it.

WORKS

printed works published in Paris unless otherwise stated

stage

Sbitenshchik [The Merchant of Mead] (comic op, 3, I. Knyazhnin), St Petersburg, 1783 or 1784, RUS-SPtob

Dobrodetel'nïy volshebnik [The Virtuous Magician] (op, 5, ?Knyazhin ), Moscow, 1787

Milozor i Prelesta [Milozor and Prelesta] (comic op, 3), Moscow, 1787

Vinetta, ili Taras v ulee [Vinetta, or Taras in the Beehive] (comic op, 2, K. Damsky), St Petersburg, 1799

Schastlivaya Rossiya, ili Dvatsatipyatiletniy yubiley [Joyous Russia, or the 25th Jubilee] (prol with choruses and ballets, M. Kheraskof), Moscow, 9 July 1787

Choruses for Sofonisbe (tragedy, Knyazhnin), St Petersburg, 1789

Doubtful: Dva okhotnika [Two Hunters] (comic op, 1, I. Dmitrevsky, after L. Anseaume), Moscow, 1780; Kuznets [The Blacksmith] (comic op, 1, ? S. Vyazmitinov), St Petersburg or Moscow, 1780 or 1784, ?arr. of F.-A. Philidor: Le maréchal ferrant; Muzh'ya zhenikhi svoikh zhyon [The Husbands Engaged to their Wives] (comic op, 2, Knyazhnin), St Petersburg, 11 Feb 1784; Ribak i dukh [The Fisherman and the Spirit] (comic op, 3, Knyazhnin), Moscow, 1787; Tsïganï [The Gypsies] (comic op, 2), Moscow, Pétrovsky, 25 June 1788

other works

Vocal: several romances, pubd as suppls. to Le mercure du nord (St Petersburg, 1809)

Orch: 4 sinfonie a grand orchestro, op.5 (1773); 2 addl syms., D-Rtt, incl. 1 also attrib. F.X. Pokorny; Bn Conc., perf. St Petersburg, 1782, lost

Chbr: 6 quartetti concertanti, op.2 (1772), lost; [6] Trios, op.3 (1773), lost; [7] Duos, 2 cl, op.4 (1773); several collections of airs harmoniques, 2 cl, 2 hn, 2 bn, mentioned in Tablettes de renommée des musiciens, ed. R. de Chantoiseau (Paris, 1785)

Other inst works announced in St Petersburg, 1781–3, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BrookSF; Choron-FayolleD; DlabacžKL; EitnerQ; FétisB; GerberL; JohanssonFMP; MooserA; GroveO (R. Taruskin) [incl. further bibliography]

J.G. Sulzer: Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig, 1771–4, 2/1778–9, enlarged 3/1786–7 by F. von Blankenburg, 4/1792–9/R)

S.L. Ginzburg: Russkïy muzikal'nïy teatr 1700–1835 gg. [Russian music theatre 1700–1835] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1941)

R.-A. Mooser: Opéras, intermezzos, ballets, cantates, oratorios joués en Russie durant le XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1945, 3/1964)

S.I. Vavilov, ed.: Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya [Great Soviet encyclopedia] (Moscow, 2/1949–58)

A.S. Rabinovich: Russkaya opera do Glinki [Russian opera to Glinka] (Moscow, 1948)

D. Lehmann: Russlands Oper und Singspiel in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1958)

A.A. Gozenpud: Muzïkal'nïy teatr v Rossii ot istokov do Glinki: ocherk [The music theatre in Russia from its origins to Glinka: a study] (Leningrad, 1959)

J. Brabcová: Antonín Štěpán Bulant (diss., U. of Brno, 1979)

S. Karlinsky: Russian Drama from its Beginning to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985)

J. Brabcová: ‘O deyatel'nosti v Rossii chesskogo kompozitora XVIII veka A. Sh. Bulanta’ [The Czech composer A.Š. Bulant’s activities in 18th-century Russia], Chesskaya muzïka kak natsional'noye i yevropeyskoye yavleniye, ed. G. Fel'dgun (Novosibirsk, 1987), 51–7

BARRY S. BROOK, RICHARD VIANO/JITKA BRABCOVÁ

Buller, John

(b London, 7 Feb 1927). English composer. Although he showed musical talent as a child (he was a chorister at St Matthew's, Great Peter Street, London) and had already had a work accepted by the BBC by the time he was 19, he decided against a career in music and worked as an architectural surveyor until 1974, when he was appointed composer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh (1975–6). He had meanwhile taken a part-time degree in music at the University of London (1959–64), where he studied composition with Milner. Apart from a second short-term appointment as composer-in-residence at the Queen's University of Belfast (1985–6), Buller was based in London until he moved to France in the late 1980s.

Always in search of a technical control that would be both absolute yet able to embrace certain freedoms, Buller has consistently chosen to pit himself against remorselessly difficult odds, particularly in relation to word-setting. The intellectual solemnity of the prose argument chosen for The Melian Debate (1972) is mirrored in a musical argument based entirely on two five-note groups, and although the speech rhythms employed here are set against a metrical pulse almost throughout, they seem already straining to be free of their enforced synchronization. Two Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake (1971) had already begun to engage with the Joycean possibility of free permutation of a limited number of ideas as a preliminary to the first of Buller's large-scale works: together with three associated pieces, it was The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies that was to occupy him for the next four years. The work has an extraordinarily evocative flavour, casting long shadows in the mind of the listener and setting the scene for Buller's masterly orchestral works Proença (1977) and The Theatre of Memory (1980–81), both of which call upon echoes of the past, whether actual or imagined.

Proença is a breathtakingly lavish piece, rich in decorative effects, yet centred on a slowly evolving melody that is shaped and propelled by means of its own reflections; reinventing the long-forgotten language of the troubadours, its reflected melodic layers give Proença a three-dimensional harmonic background that can readily absorb Buller's unbarred rhythmic patterns. The Theatre of Memory is even more striking in respect of form, since its structure is entirely abstract: without a background of verbal imagery, the voices of seven solo instruments are used to focus attention on the many contrasting aspects of an orchestral fabric that expresses memory as a function of the collective subconscious.

Six years in the making, his full-length opera, Bakxai/The Bacchae, is by any standards a unique achievement. Set in the original Greek of Euripides, its rigorously selfless compositional restraints can seem both austere and overwhelming, expressively stark and intensely moving by turn. It is a crowning example of Buller's visionary ability to complete large-scale designs without blurring his initial inspiration.

WORKS

The Cave, fl, cl, trbn, vc, tape, 1970; 2 Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake, S, fl, cl, pf, vc, 1971; Scribenery, vc, 1971; Finnegan's Floras (J. Joyce), SSSSAAATTTTBBB, hand perc, pf, 1972; The Melian Debate (Thucydides, trans. R. Warner), T, Bar, fl, eng hn, hn, tpt, hp, pf, 1972; Poor Jenny, fl, perc, 1973; Le terrazze, 14 insts, tape, 1974; Familiar, str qt, 1974; The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (Joyce), S, T, Bar, 13 vv, 12 insts, spkr/tape, 1977; Proença (troubadour texts), Mez, elec gui, orch, 1977; 7 spazi, 2 cl, vn, vc, pf, 1978

The Theatre of Memory, orch, 1980–81; Kommos (Aeschylus), S, A, T, B, elecs, 1982; Towards Aquarius, chbr ens, tape, 1983; A la fontana del vergier (Marcabrun), Ct, 2T, Bar, 1984; Of 3 Shakespeare Sonnets, Mez, fl, cl, hp, 2 vn, va, vc, 1985; Bakxai/The Bacchae (op, after Euripides), 1985–91, London, Coliseum, 5 May 1992; Bacchae Metres, orch, 1993; Mr Purcell's Maggot, chbr ens, 1994; Players, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, trbn, vc, 1995; Illusions, orch, 1997

Principal publisher: OUP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CC1 (S. Bradshaw)

S. Bradshaw: ‘Proença’, Tempo, no.122 (1977), 35–6

J. Buller: ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’, Tempo, no.123 (1977), 24–9

P. Griffiths: ‘Songs Betune the Acts’, MT, cxix (1978), 131–3

C. MacDonald: ‘Amphitheatre of Sound’, The Listener (17 Sept 1981)

D. Rudkin: ‘Proença’, Tempo, no.139 (1981), 52–3

G. Rickards and A. Bye: ‘Two Views of Buller's “Bakxai”’, Tempo, no.182 (1992), 26–7

SUSAN BRADSHAW

Bull horn.

See Stierhorn.

Bullis, Thomas (i)

(b Ely, bap. 26 Aug 1627; d Ely, bur. 23 Jan 1708). English composer. He was probably a chorister at Ely before the Civil War. In 1661 he was appointed a lay clerk at £10 p.a., serving first under John Ferrabosco and then under James Hawkins. During Ferrabosco's final illness (1677–82) he received a further £10 p.a. ‘for teaching the Choristers’ and shortly afterwards a testimonial of £5. In addition to his cathedral activities as lay clerk, informator choristarum, composer and organist, he was bailiff of the dean and chapter manor of Ely Porta and a churchwarden of Holy Trinity. In addition, he had a considerable family business as a cordwainer.

The Ely manuscripts (GB-Cu) contain a Service in G minor, a Sanctus and three anthems, unfortunately none complete. From organ scores which survive his style seems very much that of the earlier part of the century.

Bullis, Thomas (ii)

WORKS

all in GB-Cu

Service in g (TeD, Jub, Ky, Cr, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, inc.; Holy, Holy, 4vv, inc.; Lord, thou hast been our refuge, 4vv, inc.; O God, thou hast cast us out, 4vv, inc.; O Lord, Holy Father, 4vv, inc.

For bibliography see Bullis, thomas (ii).

FREDERICK HUDSON/IAN SPINK

Bullis, Thomas (ii)

(b Ely, bap. 8 Nov 1657; d Ely, bur. 24 Aug 1712). English organist and composer. He was the third child of Thomas Bullis (i) and his first wife, Sara. He served under John Ferrabosco as a chorister at Ely Cathedral and as a lay clerk at £10 p.a. from 1677 until his death. He acted as organist during the six months' interregnum between the death of John Ferrabosco and the appointment of James Hawkins, receiving £5, and it is probable that he had also acted thus during Ferrabosco's last illness between 1677 and 1682. From 1684, when the dean and chapter allowed Hawkins ‘to be absent at Bury [St Edmunds] for ye teaching of children there in Musick three days in a fortnight and no more’ if he filled ‘his two places of Organist and Informator’, it is likely that Bullis and his father assumed these offices, Hawkins being responsible for their salaries. Like his father, he was a churchwarden of Holy Trinity, Ely, but unlike him he was probably wholly engaged as a musician.

Three services (one including a setting of the Benedicite) and seven anthems by him are known. O Clap your hands, erroneously attributed to his father, is in score in the Ely manuscripts (GB-Cu), another is in a Tenbury manuscript (Ob) originally from Peterborough; otherwise, only incomplete parts survive. The style is much more up to date than his father's and, as might be expected, rather similar to that of James Hawkins.

WORKS

Service in A (TeD, Jub, San, Ky, Doxology, Cr, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, inc., GB-Cu

[Evening Verse] Service in G (CanD, DeM), 4vv, Cu (inc.)

Service in g (Bte, Jub, Mag, Nunc), 4vv, Cu (inc.)

Blessed is the man, 4vv, Cu (inc.); I will magnify thee, 4vv, Cu (inc.); O clap your hands together, 4vv, Cu; ed. F. Hudson (London, 1973); O Lord, rebuke me not, 4vv, Ob, Cu (inc.); O ye little flock, 4vv, Cu (inc.) [a reworking of John Amner's setting]; The Lord is my strength, 4vv, Cu (inc.); Why do the heathen, 4vv, Cu (inc.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.E. Dickson: A Catalogue of Ancient Choral Services and Anthems … in the Cathedral Church of Ely (Cambridge, 1861)

Muniments of the dean and chapter (MS, GB-EL)

Registers of Marriages (1559–1737), Baptisms (1627–1710) and Burials (1627–1713) (MS, Ely, Holy Trinity Church)

Holy Trinity Churchwardens' Accounts (MS, Ely, St Mary’s Church)

Petitions (A, 1673, 1696), Bedford Level Records, Cambridgeshire (MS, Cambridge Record Office)

F. Hudson: ‘Thomas Bullis, Father and Son’, MT, cxiv (1973), 420–21

I. Spink: Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995), 241–3

FREDERICK HUDSON/IAN SPINK

Bullock, Sir Ernest

(b Wigan, 15 Sept 1890; d Aylesbury, 24 May 1979). English organist and educationist. He was a pupil of and assistant organist to Bairstow at Leeds (1907–12), and took the BMus (1908) and DMus (1914) degrees at Durham University, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists in 1909. His first important post, suborganist at Manchester Cathedral (1912–15), was interrupted by war service, after which he was organist at St Michael’s College, Tenbury (1919), and organist and choirmaster of Exeter Cathedral (1919–27). On Nicholson’s retirement from Westminster Abbey in 1928, Bullock succeeded him as organist and Master of the Choristers. In this post he was obliged to provide the music for several royal functions; for the coronation of King George VI (1937) he wrote the fanfares and conducted the choir and orchestra, in acknowledgment of which he was created CVO. He also provided all but one of the fanfares for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953).

In 1941 his career took a new turn when he became Gardiner Professor of Music at Glasgow University, an appointment which carried with it that of principal of the Scottish National Academy of Music. He was knighted in 1951, and in 1952 succeeded Sir George Dyson as director of the RCM, a post he held until his retirement in 1960. Bullock was essentially a church musician, as is evident from his published compositions: these include 12 anthems, among them Give Us the Wings of Faith (1925), two settings of the Te Deum and two of the Magnificat. Still, he was also widely influential as an administrator and as an adjudicator at many musical competitions. He served as president of the Royal College of Organists (1951–2), chairman of the music committee of the Scottish Arts Council (1943–50), a member of the music panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1945–7) and joint chairman of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (1952–60).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (L. Duck) [incl. list of works]

H. Foss: ‘Salute to Ernest Bullock’, Music Teacher, xxx (1951), 346 only

G. Baker: ‘Sir Ernest Bullock’, Music Teacher, xxxvi (1957), 37 only

MALCOLM TURNER/R

Bullroarer

(Fr. rhombe; Ger. Schwirrholz).

An instrument made from a spatulate piece of wood tied to a string which is knotted into a hole close to one end. To produce sounds the player whirls the blade through the air, holding it by the free end of the string (fig.1). Blades vary in size (15 to 75 cm), shape, material and decoration. The shapes range from lanceolate to narrowly rectangular, with straight, sometimes waisted, or often serrated edges. One of the two surfaces is usually uneven as a result of patterns carved in relief; experiments have indicated that this one-sided unevenness may be essential to make the blade rotate around its axis when whirled through the air. The most common material is wood, but stone, bone and similar materials (and very rarely iron) are also used. The acoustic functions of these manifold ergological elements have apparently not been studied comprehensively; many bullroarers simply serve as ritual objects, and are never used for sound. In general, smaller bullroarers give a high noise when whirled, while larger specimens sound low in pitch. The speed of rotation and length of the string also affect volume and pitch.

The oldest surviving specimen is presumably the prehistoric (Magdalenian) bullroarer from a site in the Dordogne, carved from a reindeer antler (fig.2b and see Schaeffner). Its edges are smooth, and one surface has an incised geometrical pattern. Prehistoric rock paintings from several parts of Africa show figures using bullroarers, presumably in ritual. The bullroarer’s distribution has been described as ‘confined to a few widely scattered localities’ (see Sachs, 1929; Hornbostel, p.270), i.e. it has survived in a remarkable number of areas. The pattern suggests polygenesis rather than monogenesis of the instrument. Haddon reported that the word ‘bullroarer’ was itself of English folk origin. Other terms recorded by him in England and from various countries in Europe are ‘bummer’, ‘buzzer’, ‘humming-buzzer’, ‘thunderbolt’, ‘thunder-spell’ and ‘swish’. The term ‘bullroarer’ was universally adopted in 1880 as the technical term in English. In ancient Greece the bullroarer was used in the Dionysian mysteries. Its Greek name, rombos, possibly the source of the geometrical term ‘rhombus’, survives in the French term ‘rhombe’.

Ethnologists have associated the bullroarer mainly with Oceanian specimens and Oceanian ritual practices. A function often referred to is that of frightening away women from ceremonies that are taboo for them. In many areas where bullroarers are still found the roaring noise serves to frighten away marauding animals from plantations; Haddon described this use by young herdsmen in Galicia, Poland: ‘The noise excites pasturing cattle. As soon as the bullroarers are started, calves stretch out their tails into the air and kick out their hind legs as if they were dancing. After some time the old cattle follow the young ones, and there is a general stampede’. It is likely that bullroarers are still in use in many other regions besides those hitherto reported.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SachsH

MGG1(‘Schwirrholz’; M. Schneider)

A.C. Haddon: ‘The Bull-Roarer’, The Study of Man (London and New York, 1898/R), 277–307

C. Sachs: Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R, 2/1964)

C. Sachs: Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1929/R)

E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘The Ethnology of African Sound Instruments’, Africa, vi (1933), 129–57, 277–311

A. Schaeffner: Origine des instruments de musique (Paris, 1936, rev. 1994 by N. Cousin and G. Léothaud)

H. Fischer: Schallgeräte in Ozeanien: Bau und Spieltechnik, Verbreitung und Funktion (Strasbourg,1958/R; Eng. trans., 1983, 2/1986)

K.A. Gourlay: Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society: a Study of Esoteric Instruments and their Role in Male–Female Relations (Port Moresby and Canberra, 1975)

A. Dundes: ‘A Psychoanalytic Study of the Bullroarer’, Man, new ser., xi (1976), 220

D. Reimer: Bumerang und Schwirrholz: eine Einführung in die traditionelle Kultur australischer Aborigines (Berlin, 1985)

KLAUS WACHSMANN

Bülow, Hans (Guido) Freiherr von

(b Dresden, 8 Jan 1830; d Cairo, 12 Feb 1894). German conductor, pianist and composer. His musical studies began at the age of nine with piano lessons from Friedrich Wieck. Further studies took him to Dresden (with Max Eberwein) and Leipzig (with Plaidy and Hauptmann); he also met Raff and other musicians at Stuttgart in 1846–8. After hearing Wagner conduct in Dresden in 1849 and the première of Lohengrin under Liszt at Weimar in 1850, he abandoned the law career chosen for him by his mother. He sought advice from Liszt and practical help from Wagner, by then in Zürich, who arranged for him to conduct Donizetti’s La fille du régiment. Bülow’s lack of tact soon led to his dismissal from Zürich, however, and he moved as musical director to the small opera house in St Gallen, where he began with Der Freischütz. It was well received, not least because he conducted it without the score, a feature of his working method that was to become renowned.

His conducting work was then interrupted by Liszt, who accepted him as a piano pupil in Weimar in 1851. He completely rethought his piano technique, embarking on a strict regimen of hard work; he also began to compose and wrote some reviews that both impressed and offended. Liszt regarded Bülow as one of the greatest musical phenomena he had encountered, assuring his parents that ‘his talent will place him in the first rank of the greatest pianists’. After teaching in Berlin (1855–64) and undertaking concert tours as a pianist, Bülow began an important phase in his career when he was appointed Hofkapellmeister in Munich. There he gave the premières of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). In his meticulous preparation and rehearsal from memory of both operas (for five years he had been preparing a piano score of Tristan), Bülow virtually developed the procedure by which operas have since come to be staged in Germany and elsewhere. He began with individual coaching of his répétiteurs so that they in turn could prepare the singers to his satisfaction. He would then rehearse the singers both singly and in ensembles before they began production rehearsals with piano. This schedule of preparation was also used for the orchestra, with sectional and then full orchestral rehearsals before combining players and singers in Sitzproben and stage rehearsals (there were 11 pre-dress rehearsals for Tristan before the final dress rehearsal).

In 1869 Bülow resigned from Munich, unable to cope when his wife, Liszt’s daughter Cosima, whom he had married in 1857, left him for Wagner and when he foresaw the problems of staging the première of Das Rheingold according to demands made by King Ludwig against the composer’s wishes. Despite the humiliation of having been publicly cuckolded for so long by Wagner, Bülow remained remarkably loyal to him as a musician, though he never set foot in Bayreuth. When Wagner died in 1883 Bülow telegraphed his distraught widow, ‘Soeur, il faut vivre’. He began to undertake concert tours from 1872, visiting England in 1873 and the USA in 1875–6, where he gave 139 concerts, including the première of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in Boston (a turbulent affair, according to James Huneker, in which conductor, orchestra and audience alike were subjected to advice and insults). Bülow was a fervent champion of Tchaikovsky, and was one of the first west European musicians to recognize the composer’s talent; the concerto was dedicated to him.

Bülow spent the years 1878–80 as Hofkapellmeister in Hanover, but resigned after a quarrel with the tenor Anton Schott (whom he had described during Lohengrin as a Knight of the Swine rather than of the Swan). Bülow moved on to Meiningen as Hofmusikdirektor, where from 1880 to 1885 he moulded the orchestra into one of Germany’s finest, insisting that they play standing up and from memory. On one occasion he included two performances in one evening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He was an admirer and friend of Brahms, and with his 48-piece Meiningen orchestra gave the première of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in October 1885. He caused astonishment by conducting Brahms’s First Piano Concerto from the keyboard, and by his performance with full strings of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – innovations that bear witness to the orchestral discipline he had instilled. He also introduced five-string basses, the Ritter alto viola and pedal timpani into the orchestra. In 1882 he married the actress Marie Schanzer, who became his biographer and the editor of his letters. His last years were spent touring (including appearances in Glasgow in 1878 and London in 1888), teaching at Raff’s Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and the Klavier-Schule Klindworth in Berlin, or guest conducting at the Berlin and Hamburg opera houses. His precarious mental state began to decline in the 1890s and he entered a private institution in 1893. Ill-health persuaded him the following year to seek the warmth and dry air of Egypt, but he died in a Cairo hotel.

Eduard Dannreuther described Bülow’s pianism as possessing a ‘passionate intellectuality’ (his detractors preferred to omit the word ‘passionate’) with ‘all effects analysed and calculated with the utmost subtlety, and yet the whole left an impression of warm spontaneity’. His physical and intellectual stamina is illustrated by his habit in the 1880s of performing Beethoven’s last five sonatas in a single recital. In New York in 1889 he played 22 sonatas in 11 days. The critic Henry Krehbiel observed that ‘those who wish to add intellectual enjoyment to the pleasures of the imagination derive a happiness from Bülow’s playing which no other pianist can give to the same degree’. Yet Clara Schumann found him a ‘wearisome player’ (the dislike was mutual). Bruno Walter noted ‘a certain didactic element which may have deprived it of some of the spontaneity manifested in his orchestral work’. Amy Fay called him a ‘colossal artist’, saying that ‘he impresses you as using the instrument only to express ideas. With him you forget all about the piano, and are absorbed only in the thought or the passion of the piece’. She also remarked on his disdainful manner to his audiences, reporting that he liked to have two pianos on the stage at a recital so that he could present either his face or his back to the public. According to Richard Strauss, a Bülow protégé, he had small hands and could barely stretch an octave. Nevertheless, Bülow’s technique was highly accomplished, even for an age of great pianists, although it declined in his later years.

As a composer Bülow naturally attached himself to the New German School. He never wrote an opera, despite considering the subjects of Tristram and Merlin. His piano works are technically demanding, and reflect the manner of Liszt in their bravura and some of the thematic handling. He composed music for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar op.10, the orchestral ballad Des Sängers Fluch op.16, the symphonic poem Nirwana op.20, and Vier Charakterstücke for orchestra op.23. He also prepared editions of keyboard works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Cramer, Domenico Scarlatti, Weber and others.

Bülow was a musician of formidable ability, with absolute self-command and an acute intellectual power of interpretation, notably of new German works. But he also possessed an irascible nature; he was quarrelsome, nervous, passionate and given to extremes of mood. As a conductor, Weingartner thought he lacked the necessary instinct for working in opera and that by devoting his entire attention to the orchestra he ignored his singers; Bülow’s 1887 performance of Carmen in Hamburg horrified Weingartner with its musical aberrations and excessive rubato. Yet Richard Strauss had the highest regard for his intellect, analysis of phrasing and grasp of the psychological content of the music of Beethoven and Wagner.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (W. Kahl) [incl. list of works]

A. Fay: Music-Study in Germany (New York, 1881/R)

M. von Bülow, ed.: Hans von Bülow: Briefe und Schriften (Leipzig, 1895–1908) [i–ii, 2/1899; iii, 2/1911]

C. Bache, ed. and trans.: The Early Correspondence of Hans von Bülow (London, 1896/R)

La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Hans von Bülow (Leipzig, 1898)

E. Förster-Nietzsche and P. Gast, eds.: Friedrich Nietzsches Briefwechsel mit Hans von Bülow, Hugo von Senger, Mawilda von Meysenburg, Gesammelte Briefe, iii/2 (Berlin, 1905), 331–68

D. Thode, ed.: Richard Wagners Briefe an Hans von Bülow (Jena, 1916)

M. von Bülow: Hans von Bülow (Stuttgart, 1925)

R. du Moulin-Eckart, ed.: Neue Briefe von Hans von Bülow (Munich, 1927; Eng. trans., 1931)

E. Newman: The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933–47/R)

L. Schemann: Hans von Bülow im Lichte der Wahrheit (Regensburg, 1935)

M. Millenkovich-Morold: Dreigestirn: Wagner, Liszt, Bülow (Leipzig, 1940)

K. Huschke: Hans von Bülow als Klavierpädagoge (Horb, 1948)

P. Tinel: ‘L’enseignement pianistique de Hans von Bülow’, Bulletin de la classe des Beaux-Arts de l’Académie royale de Belgique, xli (1959), 53–68

M. Gregor-Dellin, ed.: R. Wagner: Mein Leben (Munich, 1963, 2/1976; Eng. trans., 1983)

S.B. Partick: Hans von Bülow as Music Critic (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1973)

W. Bollert: ‘Hans von Bülow als Dirigent: Marginalien zur künstlerischen Laufbahn zum Wesen’, Melos/NZM, i (1975), 88–95

J. Deaville: ‘Cornelius über ein Konzert Hans von Bülows in Partenkirchen: ein bisher unveröffentlichter Artikel’, Musik in Bayern, no.42 (1991), 121–40

R.A. Lott: ‘“A Continuous Trance”: Hans von Bülow’s Tour of America’, JM, xii (1994), 529–49

P. Crombie: Hans von Bülow: a Biography (forthcoming)

CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD

Bulterijs, Nini

(b Temse, 20 Nov 1929; d Wilrijk, 12 Dec 1989). Belgian composer. At the Antwerp Conservatory she studied the piano with Jozef D’Hooghe and harmony with Yvonne Van den Berghe; Later she studied counterpoint, fugue and composition with Louël and Absil at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth. Placed second in the Prix de Rome contest (1963) and in the Queen Elisabeth International Composition Competition (1966), she won the Emile Doehaerd Prize in 1969. In 1970 she was appointed professor of counterpoint at the Antwerp Conservatory. She retired in 1988. Her works, rhythmically elaborate and solid in texture, have a dodecaphonic basis.

WORKS

(selective list)

Sonata, 2 vn, pf, 1960; Sym. Movements, orch, 1960; Pf Conc., 1961; Pf Trio, 1962; Arion (cant., B. Decorte), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1963; Conc., 2 vn, orch, 1964; Sym., 1965; Vn Conc., 1968; Rondo, vn, pf, 1972; choral pieces; songs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveW (C. Mertens, M. Cornaz)

C. Mertens: Hedendaagse muziek in België (Brussels, 1967), 54–5, 65

A. Stoop and B. Moenssens: Lexicon van het Muziekleven in het Land van Waas (Sint Niklaas, 1987)

CORNEEL MERTENS/DIANA VON VOLBORTH-DANYS

Bultitude, Arthur R(ichard)

(b London, 14 Jan 1908; d 20 March 1990). English maker of violin, viola and cello bows. He joined the firm of W.E. Hill & Sons in London as an apprentice bow maker under Retford in 1922, becoming manager of the workshops in 1945. He remained with Hill until 1961, when he moved to Hawkhurst, Kent, to begin making bows on his own account; he subsequently achieved worldwide recognition. In his first ten years at Hawkhurst he made more than 1200 bows, all branded ‘a.r. bultitude’ and many inlaid on the frog with his individual Tudor rose design.

CHARLES BEARE/JOHN DILWORTH

BUMA

[Bureau voor Muziek-Auteursrecht]. See Copyright, §VI (under Netherlands).

Bumbass

(Fr. basse de Flandre; Ger. Bumbass).

A bowed monochord consisting of a heavy gut string attached at each end to a long wooden pole and stretched over a pig’s bladder. It is sounded with a notched stick or sometimes a horsehair bow and used in many parts of Europe to provide a droning rhythmic accompaniment to folksong or dance. Its name varies according to region, the German name Bumbass being commonly adopted in folk-instrument literature. In England the instrument was called the ‘drone’ or ‘bladder and string’, and was used by wandering musicians up to the early 19th century; L. Jewitt, in Ballads and Songs of Derbyshire (London, 1867), gave an illustration of ‘Singing Sam’ (1760) using it. A form manufactured in Germany has the addition of bells and a pair of cymbals to the top end, which sound as the pole is struck on the ground in time with the music ‘while the drawing of the bow across the string brings forth a sound similar to the roll of a Drum’ (from a German exporter’s catalogue of the 1890s).

For further information see M. Ehrenwerth: Teufelsgeige und ländliche Musikkapellen in Westfalen (Münster, 1992)

ANTHONY C. BAINES

Bumbry, Grace (Melzia Ann)

(b St Louis, 4 Jan 1937). American mezzo-soprano and soprano. She studied at Boston and with Lotte Lehmann in Santa Barbara. A joint winner in 1958 of the Metropolitan Opera auditions, she made her début in 1960 at the Paris Opéra as Amneris, then joined Basle Opera for four seasons. In 1961 she sang Venus at Bayreuth, the first black artist to appear there. She made her Covent Garden (1963) and Metropolitan (1965) débuts as Eboli. At Salzburg she sang Lady Macbeth (1964) and Carmen. Her roles included Azucena, Ulrica, Delilah, Fricka, Gluck’s Orpheus and Santuzza, which she sang at the Vienna Staatsoper (1966). Taking on soprano roles, she sang Salome, Sélika (L’Africaine), Adalgisa and Norma at Covent Garden, while adding Tosca, La Gioconda, Leonora (Trovatore and La forza del destino) and Gershwin’s Bess to her Metropolitan repertory. She sang Jenůfa at La Scala (1974) and Dukas’ Ariane in Paris (1975), while continuing to sing mezzo roles. Her voice, particularly in the middle and lower registers, was warm and voluminous and she had a commanding presence on stage. In 1990 she sang Cassandra (Prise de Troie) at the opening of the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and in 1995 performed Cherubini’s Medea for the first time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Blyth: ‘Grace Bumbry’, Opera, xxi (1970), 506–11

ALAN BLYTH

Bümler [Bümmler, Bümmeler, Bühmler, Bimler, Bimbler], Georg Heinrich

(b Berneck, Franconia, 10 Oct 1669; d Ansbach, 26 Aug 1745). German singer, composer and theorist. As a founder-member with Lorenz Mizler of the Leipzig Correspondierende Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften, he was accorded a detailed necrology in Mizler’s Neu eröffnete musicalische Bibliothek, iv (1745). This states that he was born near Bayreuth in Berneck, where his father served as Kantor before moving to Naila as a manager of mines. At ten, on the death of his father, Bümler was sent to Münchberg to become a student in the Lateinschule. When he was about 13 he joined the Bayreuth court as a chamber discantist, where he studied singing and keyboard instruments with Ruggiero Fedeli. During the next two decades his exceptional talent as a singer made possible an extensive career at Wolfenbüttel, Hamburg, Berlin, and back again at Bayreuth. In 1698 he was appointed chamber musician and solo alto at the court of Ansbach, where in 1717 he succeeded Johann Christian Rau as Kapellmeister. In May 1722 he accompanied his first wife, the singer Dorothea Constantia Bauer, to Italy, but they were required to return to court in February 1723 for the funeral of Margrave Georg Friedrich. Following his release from court duties, he was briefly Kapellmeister to Queen Eberhardine of Poland and Saxony at Pretsch (on the Elbe), but for unknown reasons left for Hof (Saale). In 1726 he regained his post as Kapellmeister at Ansbach. His wife died in 1728 and he married the singer Sabina Sophia Schneider in 1729.

Bümler was a well-educated musician who not only worked as a composer and performer, but also had a lifelong interest in mathematics, astronomy, optics and chronometry. His method of equal temperament was reported in Mattheson’s Critica musica, i (1722). Unfortunately much of his music seems to be lost, including a two-year cycle of church cantatas for Ansbach. In the funeral cantata text by Lorenz Mizler, published with the necrology, it says: ‘In your church music, as in other music, you did much, and Ansbach still stirs pious souls with your devout music at every service for the Lord’.

WORKS

all cantatas

Lauda Jerusalem, 4vv, insts; Miserere, SATB, insts, bc: Schaffe in mir Gott, 4vv soli, insts, bc: all in D-Bsb

L’anima che contempla Christo; Dove, dove mia corri; E che ti fece; Mi luci e che mirate; Oh dio di qual contento, A, bc; La Rosa; Venga chi veder vuol, S, bc; Ecce homo, S, 2 ob, bc: all in WD

2 church cant. cycles listed in Bümler’s necrology, lost

WRITINGS

‘Neueste Temperatur’, in J. Mattheson: Critica musica, i (Hamburg, 1722/R), 52–3

‘Archimedes’ [pseud. of Bümler] Meinung auf die Frage: warum zwey Quinten und Octaven, welche … auf einander folgen, nicht angenehm zu hören’, in L. Mizler: Neu eröffnete musicalische Bibliothek, ii/4 (Leipzig, 1743/R), 89

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Mattheson: Critica musica (Hamburg, 1722–5/R)

J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R)

L. Mizler: Neu eröffnete musicalische Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1739–54/R)

J.A. Hiller: Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit (Leipzig, 1784/R)

G. Schmidt: Die Musik am Hofe der Markgrafen von Brandenburg-Ansbach (Kassel, 1956)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Bumpus, (Mary) Frances.

See Allitsen, Frances.

Bumpus, John Skelton

(b London, 6 Aug 1861; d Stoke Newington, London, 10 April 1913). English antiquarian and writer on cathedral music and ecclesiology. He was the son of Benjamin Bumpus, a London bookseller, and the twin brother of Thomas Francis Bumpus (d Stoke Newington, 11 Nov 1916), a noted writer on cathedral architecture.

J.S. Bumpus was deeply influenced by the ecclesiological movement in the Church of England, and was a member of the St Paul's Ecclesiological Society. Watkins Shaw observed that ‘it does not seem to be known whether J.S. Bumpus followed any profession or occupation’, but that ‘he seems to have enjoyed ample leisure to indulge his interconnected passions for ecclesiology and cathedral music’. In 1901 he was appointed honorary librarian of St Michael's College, Tenbury, a post he held until his death. In this capacity he was in charge of the large and important collection of manuscripts and early printed editions assembled by Sir Frederick Ouseley, the founder and first warden of the college. In addition, Bumpus compiled a considerable collection of his own (described in ‘Libraries and Collections of Music’, Grove 2), that furnished important source material for his writings on cathedral music. The collection was broken up after his death. His burial service was held at the noted Tractarian parish church of St Matthias, Stoke Newington.

Bumpus is probably best known as the author of A Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Terms (London, 1910) and a two-volume History of English Cathedral Music, 1549–1889 (London, 1908). The latter was at that time the most ambitious work on its subject. By later scholarly standards the book is flawed by the author's limited knowledge of musical technique, some misunderstandings of his sources, the transmission of inaccurate second-hand information and some questionable critical judgments. On the other hand, the book retains its vitality and continuing interest for the sheer volume and variety of its detail while remaining eminently readable. Watkins Shaw especially commends Bumpus's treatment of early printed sources. Considering the connection with St Michael's College, it is noteworthy that Bumpus chose to end his history with the death of Ouseley in 1889.

WRITINGS

The Organists and Composers of St. Paul's Cathedral (London, 1891)

The Compositions of the Rev. Sir Frederick A. Gore Ouseley, Bt. (London, 1892, repr. in F.W. Joyce, The Life of Rev. Sir F.A.G. Ouseley, Bart. (London, 1896)

Sir John Stevenson: a Biographical Sketch (London, 1893)

‘Irish Church Composers and the Irish Cathedrals’, PMA, xxvi (1899–1900), 90–93

A History of English Cathedral Music, 1549–1889 (London, 1908/R)

A Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Terms (London, 1910)

Articles in Musical News

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Shaw: Introduction to reprint of J.S. Bumpus: A History of English Cathedral Music, 1549–1889 (Farnborough, Hants, 1972)

Obituary, MT 843, liv (1913), 317 only

WILLIAM J. GATENS

Bunaldi, Francesco.

See Bonardo Perissone, Francesco.

Bunbury Virginal Book [Priscilla Bunbury's Virginal Book].

See Sources of keyboard music to 1660, §2(vi).

Bund

(Ger.).

See Fret.

Bunde.

A circle-dance performed by couples among Afro-Hispanic communities of the Pacific lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador, often in the context of the currulao or chigualo rituals. Secular and Afro-Christian religious themes are sung in responsorial style by an entonadora (female leader) and respondedoras (female chorus). Instrumental accompaniment is played on reed flutes, cununas (conical drums) and guasas (rattles). Early reference to the Bambuco identify it with the bunde: individuals who participated in bundes in the mid-1700s (when the term was used as a generic name for African dance) were often censured. Its 19th-century relationship with the bambuco identified it as being played in a major mode without the melancholy character ascribed to the bambuco. Popular bunde found its way as a form into classical composition when Alberto Castilla (1830–1938), who founded the Ibagué Conservatory, composed Bunde Tolimense (Bunde of Tolima), with words by Cesáreo Rocha Castilla.

WILLIAM GRADANTE/R

Bungert, (Friedrich) August

(b Mülheim an der Ruhr, 14 March 1845; d Leutesdorf, 26 Oct 1915). German composer. After studies in piano, organ and violin at the Cologne Conservatory he went to Paris in 1866, sponsored by the first of several benefactors. Returning to Germany in 1868, he worked in Königswinter and Düsseldorf before becoming music director in Kreuznach, where his developing commitment to German nationalism bore fruit in a patriotic historical festival play, Hutten und Sickingen. Joseph Joachim, whose wife Amalie had sung some of Bungert's songs in 1873, became interested in his work and arranged for him to continue his compositional studies with Friedrich Kiel in Berlin from 1874. A period of European travel, financed in part by a composition prize for his E Piano Quartet (Brahms had been a judge), took him to Italy for the first time in 1878, where he became interested in Homer and Greek mythology. When Bungert met Nietzsche in Genoa in 1883 he had already begun work on Die Homerische Welt, a projected multi-cycle opera series whose completed parts comprise the tetralogy Die Odyssee. His association with the most significant of his benefactors, Queen Elizabeth of Romania, began in 1889. Her friendship and support later ensured his security and might have financed a planned Bayreuth-style theatre at Godesberg to house his Homerische Welt operas; his songs include many settings of poems written by her under the name of Carmen Sylva.

The first opera of the Odyssee tetralogy, the ‘Musik-Tragödie’ Odysseus' Heimkehr, received its première in Dresden in 1896, achieving some success and inspiring debate about his status as either a true or apostate Wagnerian. Dismissed by such critical historians as Rudolf Louis and Walter Niemann (in 1909 Louis described the Homerische Welt project as an ‘audacious artistic confidence-trick’ in which Bungert relied upon ‘a parterre full of Gymnasium graduates in every city of his beloved German Fatherland’), he was most enthusiastically championed by Max Chop, a founder-member of the ‘Bungert Bund’ and editor of its journal (Der Bund). In his 1915 study of the composer, Chop hailed Bungert as an exemplary idealist in times of decadent and directionless modernism. Die Homerische Welt was to some extent intended as an alternative to Wagner's Ring cycle, expressing its Germanness in a manner both more ‘universal’ and more conservative; it demonstrated stylistic affinities with the German Romantic tradition (some critics also detected the influence of Meyerbeer) in a way that anticipated the nationalist conservatism of Pfitzner and others. Odysseus' Heimkehr was given 16 times in Berlin in 1898, establishing Bungert's reputation there, but none of the other operas of the cycle (Hofkirke, Nausikaa and Odysseus' Tod) moved far from Dresden. His later works included two grandiose oratorios and a programme symphony celebrating Zeppelin's invention of the airship. Bungert eventually retired to his Wahnfried-like house in Leutesdorf and was rapidly forgotten, save as the composer of songs favoured by Lilli Lehmann.

WORKS

stage

librettos by the composer

Die Studenten von Salamanka (Musiklustspiel, 3), Leipzig, Stadt, 1884; rev. as Aurora [Liebe Siegerin]

Die Odyssee (Musik-Tragödie, 4 pts, after Homer), Dresden, Hofkirke (prol., 3), 24 Jan 1898

Nausikaa (prol., 3), 20 March 1901

Odysseus' Heimkehr (prol., 3), 12 Dec 1896 (Leipzig, 1896)

Odysseus' Tod (prol., 3), 30 Oct 1903

other works

Orch: Torquato Tasso, sym. ov., op.14; Auf der Wartburg, sym. poem, op.29; Sinfonia victrix, A, B, 4vv, op.70; Genius triumphans, Zeppelins erste grosse Fahrt, op.71

Choral: Chorlied der Deutschen in Amerika (E. Ritterhaus), male vv, op.39; Unter der Blume, Lieder vom Rhein (C. Sylva), male vv, pf, op.57; Warum? Woher? Wohin?, soloists, 4 vv, orch, org, op.60; Lieder im Volkston, male vv, op.61

Vocal and chbr works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Chop: August Bungert: ein deutscher Dichterkomponist (Leipzig, 1903)

F. Nietzsche: Briefe an Peter Gast (Leipzig, 1908)

R. Louis: Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich and Leipzig, 1909)

W. Niemann: Die Musik seit Richard Wagner (Berlin and Leipzig, 1913)

M. Chop: August Bungert (Berlin, 1915)

R. Sietz: ‘Bungert, Friedrich August’, Rheinische Musiker, iii, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1964)

PETER FRANKLIN

Bunin, Revol' Samuilovich

(b Moscow, 6 April 1924; d Moscow, 3 July 1976). Russian composer. He graduated in 1945 from the Moscow Conservatory, where his composition teachers were Litinsky, Shebalin and Shostakovich. In 1947 he was an assistant teacher in Shostakovich's composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory, and then became an editor at the state music publishers Muzgiz in Moscow (1948–53).

Although Bunin worked in many genres, the core of his output lies in orchestral and chamber music. This music possesses links with Russian 19th-century traditions and folk-music (Musorgsky in particular) and also with 20th-century composers such as Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Sviridov. Bunin attempted to reinterpret past experience in his renewal of classical genres, forms and harmonic and modal resources, and in his creation of a fresh orchestral palette. Contrasts of genre and style abound in his work: the oratorio Vedi nas, doroga (‘Lead Us, Road’), juxtaposes diatonic passages, folksong motifs and depictions of Russian antiquity with the angular rhythms and modal specificity of traditional jazz. In his largest-scale symphony, the seventh, lyrical forms are contrasted with dramatic, grotesque and tragic elements. An elevated and tragic current runs through much of Bunin's music.

Bunin's works have been performed by the conductors Mravinsky, Rozhdestvensky and Svetlanov, the pianists Lyubimov and Nikolayeva; Bunin's close friend Rudol'f Barshay gave the first performances of the Viola Sonata and the Viola Concerto, as well as conducting the premières of Music for Strings, the Concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, Vedi nas, doroga and the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth symphonies.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Maskerad (Bunin, after M.Yu. Lermontov), 1944; Narodovol'tsï [Members of The People's Will] (A. Medvedev, after S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky: Andrey Kozhukhov and A. Tolstoy: Azev), 1987 [completed by Eshpay, Ledyonev, Vaynberg, B. Chaykovsky, Basner and L. Pris]

Vocal: Neszhataya polosa [The Unreaped Strip] (N. Nekrasov), chorus, 1958; Vedi nas, doroga [Lead Us, Road] (orat, W. Shakespeare), S, Bar, 2 choruses, chbr orch, 1964; romances for voice and pf (after A. Blok, Nekrasov, S. Petőfi, A.S. Pushkin, S. Yesenin, Eng. poets)

9 syms., 1943, 1945, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1966, 1969, 1970, 1975

Other orch: Kamennïy gost' [The Stone Guest], sym. poem, 1949; Poėma, va, orch, 1952; Ov.-Fantasy, 1953; Va Conc., 1953; Conc., chbr orch, 1961; Conc., pf, chbr orch, 1963; Music for Str, 1965; 1967, sym. poem, 1967; Conc.-Sym., vn, orch, 1972

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt, 1941; Pf Qnt, 1946; Pf Trio, 1946; Partita no.1, pf, 1947; Partita no.2, pf, 1951; Sonata, va, pf, 1955; Str Qt no.2, 1956; Pf Sonata, 1971

Film scores: Sovetskaya Litva, 1951; Khabarovskiy kray, 1953; radio scores

Principal publishers: Muzgiz, Peters, Sovetskiy Kompozitor

WRITINGS

with N. Peyko: ‘O simfonii B. Klyuznera’ [Klyuzner's symphony], SovM (1957), no.7, pp.30–34

‘Kompozitorï Verkhney Volgi’ [Composers of the Upper Volga], Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1972), no.15, p.5 only

‘Tvorchestvo molodïkh’ [The work of young composers], Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1973), no.19, pp.6–7

‘S glubochayshey priznatel'nost'yu: k 70-letiyu D.D. Shostakovicha’ [In deepest gratitude: on the 70th birthday of Shostakovich], SovM (1976), no.9, pp.14–17

‘Samobïtnïy khudozhnik’ [An original artist], German Galïnin, ed. A.Ya. Ortenburg (Moscow, 1979), 217–19

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Shlifshteyn: ‘Revol' Bunin’, SovM (1957), no.5, pp.92–7

S. Savenko: ‘Ser'yoznaya rabota’ [Serious work], SovM (1973), no.6, pp.46–7

Ye. Podosyonova: ‘Tri rozhdeniya operï: “Narodovol'tsï” R. Bunina’ [Three operatic births: Bunin's ‘Narodovol'tsï’], Muzïka Rossii, ed. Ye. Grosheva and others, ix (Moscow, 1991)

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Bunn, Alfred

(b London, 8 April c1797; d Boulogne, 20 Dec 1860). English librettist and theatre manager. He became stage manager at Drury Lane in 1823 and manager of the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, in 1826. In 1833 circumstances combined to make him joint manager at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and from 1835 onwards he attempted to establish English opera, relying heavily on the popularity of Balfe’s works. His highly stylized librettos, set mainly by Balfe and Benedict, were carefully tailored to middle-class tastes. In lyrics such as ‘The light of other days’ (Maid of Artois) and ‘When other lips’ (Bohemian Girl) there is no doubt, however, that Bunn unerringly touched on a vein of plaintive nostalgia which lies at the heart of early Victorian opera.

As a manager Bunn has been accused of ‘cheeseparing methods’ (Rosenthal) because the artists he engaged (principals, chorus and corps de ballet) often found themselves appearing at both his theatres on the same evening. Yet he was a shrewd and energetic businessman who did not stint to pay an artist of Malibran’s calibre £125 a night. Declared bankrupt in 1840, he had extricated himself by 1843, and in 1848 retired from the management of Drury Lane.

WORKS

The Maid of Artois, Balfe, 1836; Guillaume Tell, Bishop, 1838; The Bohemian Girl, Balfe, 1843; The Brides of Venice, Benedict, 1844; The Daughter of St Mark (drama), Balfe, 1844; The Enchantress, Balfe, 1845; The Crusaders, Benedict, 1846; Loretta, a Tale of Seville (drama), L.H. Lavenu, 1846; The Bondman, Balfe, 1846; Matilda of Hungary, Wallace, 1847; The Sicilian Bride, Balfe, 1852; The Devil’s In It, Balfe, 1852

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (J. Knight)

LoewenbergA

NicollH

A. Bunn: The Stage (London, 1840)

C. Forsyth: Music and Nationalism (London, 1911)

M. Hurd: ‘Opera: 1834–1865’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981), 307–29

E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983)

NIGEL BURTON

Bunney, Herrick (Cyril William)

(b London, 12 May 1915; d London, 17 Dec 1997). English organist. He was a leading figure in the postwar revival and development of musical life in Edinburgh. He studied the organ and piano at the RCM (1932–9), where his organ tutor was Sir Walter Alcock. He was organist of All Souls, Langham Place, London (1938–40), then served with the Royal Signals until he was demobbed in 1946. That year he was appointed organist and master of the music at St Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh, where he nurtured and developed the choral contribution for 50 years, retiring in 1996. He was on the council and programme panel of the Edinburgh International Festival. As director of the Edinburgh Choral Union (1947–67) he rehearsed the choir for Edinburgh Festival performances conducted by Walter, Beecham and Klemperer. He gave four complete cycles of Bach's organ works at the festival, and for 30 years conducted Easter performances of the St Matthew Passion, communicating an intimate relationship with Bach's music. He founded the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra (1964) and the Tudor Hall summer school (1972). Bunney conducted the Elizabethan Singers (1967–76) in London, as well as the Edinburgh University Singers (1952–82). He gave the premières of several sacred works by Kenneth Leighton and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (1986), Edinburgh University (1990) and the RCM (1996).

IAN CARSON

Bunnus, Hermann.

See Bonnus, Hermann.

Bunraku.

Japanese puppet theatre. See Japan, §VI, 2.

Buns.

See Benedictus a Sancto Josepho.

Bunting, Christopher (Evelyn)

(b London, 8 Aug 1924). English cellist and composer. He studied composition with Thurston Dart at Cambridge, and also studied with Maurice Eisenberg in the USA and with Casals at Prades. He made his recital début with Gerald Moore at the Wigmore Hall in 1952 and subsequently performed with leading orchestras and conductors, and appeared regularly at the Proms. He gave recitals with Peter Wallfisch and Yonty Solomon, and formed trios with William Glock and Olive Zorian and also with Franz Reizenstein and Maria Lidka. Bunting gave the first performances of the cello concertos of Finzi (1955, under Barbirolli) and Rawsthorne (1966, under Sargent), and broadcast the premières of the Concerto, Sonata and Solo Sonata of Francis Routh (dedicated to him). He is also a distinguished teacher, and has given masterclasses internationally. He made a notable recording of Kol nidrei (with the LPO under Boult), and has published Essay on the Craft of Cello Playing (Cambridge, 1982) and Cello Technique ‘from One Note to the Next’ (with Dorothy Churchill Pratt, Cambridge, 1987); of his compositions, the Concerto for cello and strings (1989) is outstanding. He plays a Grancino cello of 1695.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CampbellGC

M. Campbell: Interview, The Strad, lxxxvi (1975–6), 409–15

M. Campbell: ‘Christopher Bunting: Masterclasses’, The Strad, xci (1979–80), 326–31

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Bunting, Edward

(b Armagh, Feb 1773; d Dublin, 21 Dec 1843). Irish folksong collector. He was the son of a Derby mining engineer who had settled near Dungannon and married Mary O’Quin; he studied music with his brother Anthony. In 1784 he was invited by William Ware to take over his duties as piano teacher and organist at St Anne’s, Belfast, in which town his other brother, John, was already established as a teacher and pianist. He became articled to Ware and soon rose to prominence in Belfast’s musical life; in 1806 he was appointed organist of the Second Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, and St George’s, High Street. He became the best-known Belfast piano teacher of his day and was the chief driving force behind the organization of such events as the visit of Catalani in 1809 and the Belfast Music Festival of 1813, in which he took a prominent part as a pianist, playing a Mozart concerto. He was a founder of the Belfast Harp Society (1808–13) and the Irish Harp Society (1819–39). In 1819 he married Marianne Chapman, moving to Dublin where his brother Anthony was a piano teacher. There he was appointed organist of St Stephen’s, and was for a short time (1825–7) a partner in a music warehouse.

Bunting was the first systematic collector of Irish folksongs; of particular significance in his career was the meeting of harpers in Belfast in July 1792. On this occasion he acted as scribe, notating the performances of Hempson, O’Neill, Fanning and seven others who remained from the rapidly declining class of traditional players. He was thus only just in time to preserve the melodies from oblivion, and became virtually the only source for the manners and customs of the ancient tradition, which he described in the preface to his third publication. He embarked upon a systematic collection of further material, and travelled through the countryside where he was assisted by Patrick Lynch, an Irish scholar, who collected the Gaelic texts. Apart from his notebooks, which are extant (in the library of Queen’s University, Belfast), his publication A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music appeared in three volumes: the first containing 66 tunes (London, 1797), the second having 75 additional airs (with English words by Campbell and others) and a dissertation on Egyptian, British and Irish harps (London, 1809), and the third with over 150 airs and a 100-page dissertation on the history of music in Ireland (Dublin, 1840). Valuable as these publications are, it should be realized that Bunting was limited by the ignorance of his time concerning the characteristics of traditional Irish music, by the limitations of orthodox notation in coping with melismatic decorations, and by the demands of his day to provide the melodies with inappropriate words and unsuitable harmonies in the form of piano arrangements.

Bunting's collection (containing the original source of many of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies) has been re-edited, restoring the appropriate Gaelic verses collected by Lynch, as Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland: Edited from the Original Manuscripts by Donal O'Sullivan with Mícheál O Súilleabháin (Cork, 1983).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Petrie: ‘Edward Bunting’, Dublin University Magazine, xxix (1847), 64–73

E. O’Curry: On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (London, 1873/R)

C.M. Fox: Annals of the Irish Harpers (London, 1911/R)

M. McNeill: The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1865: a Belfast Panorama (Dublin, 1960/R)

G. Yeats: The Harp of Ireland (Belfast, 1992)

BRIAN BOYDELL

Bunya Koh.

See Jiang Wenye.

Buona, Valerio.

See Bona, Valerio.

Buonamente, Giovanni Battista

(b Mantua, late 16th century; d Assisi, 29 Aug 1642). Italian composer, choirmaster, violinist and singer. He was a member of the Franciscan order. His Mantuan origins are apparent from documents at Bergamo. He was first active at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, where he may have worked under Monteverdi. He was perhaps among the musicians accompanying Princess Eleonora Gonzaga to Vienna for her wedding in 1622 to the Emperor Ferdinand II. From at least 1626 to 1629 he was in Vienna as musicista da camera to the emperor and in that post played an active role in the festivities in Prague for the coronation of the emperor's son, Ferdinand III, as King of Bohemia in 1627. It is likely that he remained in the emperor's service until early 1631, as can again be seen from documents at Bergamo.

On 13 July 1631 he was in Bergamo to take part in a Vespers service at S Maria Maggiore as a trial for an appointment there. He was accepted and on 17 July signed a three-year contract to serve as contralto and violinist at an annual salary of 840 lire – a figure surpassed only by the salaries of the maestro di cappella Tarquinio Merula and the organist Benedetto Fontana. However, he left Bergamo abruptly on 30 September 1631. The stated reason for his departure, given later by an officer of the Franciscan order to placate the irate governing body of S Maria Maggiore, was that the head of the order had revoked permission for his service; it was implied that Buonamente had sought release from the emperor's service for the sole purpose of going to Assisi and that if he were to remain in Bergamo the emperor might discover the breach of faith. Notwithstanding this he was appointed violinist at the ducal church, the Madonna della Steccata, of Parma on 2 July 1632, but there is no subsequent record of his service in Parma. His next and final post was at the Basilica di S Francesco, Assisi. On his arrival there from Parma about 15 February 1633 he was listed as a violinist, but later that year he was appointed maestro di cappella. He served as such until his death but from 1635 on was increasingly incapacitated by illness and his obligations were taken over by Felice Cinaglia.

Buonamente is remembered today as a composer of violin music. But from an inventory of 1647 (at I-Af) it is evident that he wrote over 160 sacred vocal works as well, ranging from motets for up to three voices to settings of the Offices and Mass for four to 17 voices, some with violins. Of these works one collection of motets for four voices was published but appears to be no longer extant. All the rest are apparently lost except for a few in two manuscripts.

Along with G.P. Cima, Salamone Rossi, Carlo Farina and G.B. Fontana, Buonamente was one of the earliest composers to cultivate the violin and with Farina, Biagio Marini and Giovanni Valentini was one of those who introduced the new violin style north of the Alps. His role in the development of violin style and the sonata is, however, difficult to assess since only the last four of his seven books of instrumental music survive, the earliest of them dating from 1626. Like Rossi, with whom he appears to have worked at Mantua, he favoured the new three-part scoring borrowed from vocal collections such as Monteverdi's Canzonette (1584) and Scherzi musicali (1607). However, his sixth book includes pieces for two to six parts. His surviving works include sinfonias, sonatas, canzonas and dances. There is little difference between the canzonas and the sonatas. The sonatas, following Crocker's classification, comprise three types – variation sonata, canzona-sonata and real sonata – of which Buonamente favoured the first two. His variation sonatas appeared during the height of the form's popularity in the third decade of the century. Like those of his contemporaries Rossi, Marini and Francesco Turini they are based on melodies such as the romanesca and Ruggiero and on popular tunes such as Tanto tempo ormai and Questo è quel luoco. They explore the possibilities of abstract figuration and display a careful concern for overall rhythmic organization. His canzona-sonatas represent an adaptation of the three-part texture to the ensemble canzona and show the influence of both Giovanni Gabrieli and Frescobaldi. His few real sonatas open with a non-fugal section and are more concerned with the exploitation of violin techniques: he ventures on occasion as high as e'''. The level of sophistication of his violin writing is shown in ex.1.

WORKS

Il quarto libro de varie sonate, sinfonie, gagliarde, corrente, e brandi, 3 insts (Venice, 1626); edn of Ballo del Gran Duca in Kirkendale

Il quinto libro de varie sonate, sinfonie, gagliarde, corrente, e ariette, 3 insts (Venice, 1629)

Sonate et canzoni … libro sesto, 2–6 insts (Venice, 1636)

Il settimo libro di sonate, sinfonie, gagliarde, corrente, et brandi, 3 insts (Venice, 1637)

Antiphone del primo e secondo vespro, e del primo e terzo notturno con i responsorij del istesso primo e terzo notturno di S Francesco, 4vv, I-Af 144/2 (inc.)

5 vesper psalms and Magnificat for Feasts of Our Lord and Sundays, 4vv, I-Af 5

For lost works, see text above

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MoserGV

NewmanSBE

P. Nettl: ‘Giovanni Battista Buonamente’, ZMw, ix (1926–7), 528–30

N. Pelicelli: ‘Musicisti in Parma nel secolo XVII’, NA, ix (1932), 217–46, esp. 236

E.C. Crocker: An Introductory Study of the Italian Canzona for Instrumental Ensembles and its Influence upon the Baroque Sonata (diss., Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, 1943)

J. Solie: Aspects of Harmony and Form in the Music of Giovanni Battista Buonamente (diss., U. of Chicago, 1967)

W. Kirkendale: L’Aria di Fiorenza, id est Il Ballo del Gran Duca (Florence, 1972)

F. Pajerski: ‘Background to the String Music of Alessandro Stradella’, Chigiana, xxxix/2 (1989), 387–97

W. Apel: Die italienische Violinmusik im 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1983); Eng. trans., enlarged by T. Binkley (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 75–86

S.E. Romanstein: Giovanni Battista Buonamente and Instrumental Music of the Early Baroque (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1990)

P. Allsop: The Italian ‘Trio’ Sonata from its Origins until Corelli (Oxford, 1992)

STEPHEN BONTA

Buonamici, Giuseppe

(b Florence, 12 Feb 1846; d Florence, 17 March 1914). Italian pianist and composer. He studied first with his mother, then with his uncle Giuseppe Ceccherini and with Laussot. Following the latter's advice he went to Munich, where he completed his studies at the conservatory (1868–70) with Bülow (piano) and Rheinberger (composition). He then took over von Bülow's post there (1870–73). On his return to Italy in 1873 he founded the Società del Trio Fiorentino, following the disbanding of the Florence Società del Quartetto. In 1875 he was conductor of the Cherubini Choral Society in Florence; he also taught at the Conservatory (then the Istituto Musicale), and was appointed professor of piano there in 1893. A fine concert artist (whom Liszt regarded highly), he trained some excellent pianists at his school. He performed several times in Italy, Germany and England, where he was made an honorary member of the London Philharmonic Society. He was a fine contrapuntist and composed a string quartet (Wilhelmshaven, 1965), a concert overture, some piano pieces, and vocal and chamber music. He also wrote pedagogical works for piano, including The Art of Scale Study (London, 1903) and some preparatory studies for Beethoven's piano sonatas, and he made an edition of selected studies by Bertini. He edited Beethoven's sonatas as well as works by Handel, Haydn, Schumann, Czerny, Dussek, Kuhlau and others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (L. Pannella)

B. Becherini: ‘La vita musicale fiorentina del XIX secolo e la scuola di Giuseppe Buonamici’, I grandi anniversari del 1960 e la musica sinfonica e da camera nell’Ottocento in Italia, Chigiana, xvii (1960), 81–92

S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972)

DINA ZANETTI MASIELLO/RAFFAELLA VALSECCHI

Buonanni, Filippo.

See Bonanni, Filippo.

Buonaparte.

French family of rulers and patrons. See Napoleon i.

Buonavita, Antonio [‘Il Bientina’]

(b Bientina, nr Pisa, 28 March 1548; d Pisa, 16 Aug 1618). Italian organist and composer. He was ordained a priest in 1574 and was a cavaliere of the Order of S Stefano from 1577. He was a member of the nobility and in 1566, while still a seminarian, he received a benefice in Pisa. In 1571 he became assistant to the maestro di cappella, his teacher Bocchini, as well as an organist at the cathedral of Pisa. In 1574 he substituted for Bocchini as maestro di cappella at the cathedral and served again as maestro from 1581 until 1584; when the organist Alessandro Sassi died, Buonavita abandoned his position as maestro for that of organist. He played an important role at the cathedral: organising concerts, undertaking trips to Lucca and Florence to choose musicians and choristers, and introducing the practice of having four choirs positioned around the church.

The little of his music that survives shows a competent (if conservative) contrapuntist. He was chosen to compose the music of the intermedi for two famous events: the entry into Pisa of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, in 1588, and the visit of Ferdinando and his new wife, Christine de Lorraine, in 1589. According to a description by Giovanni Cervoni da Colle the ‘eccellentissima’ music for the former event displayed skill not only in composition but also in the quality of sound obtained by Buonavita. The music was for 64 voices with ‘two Gravicembali, four cornetts, four trombones, organ, two gambas and four lutes’. Similarly, for the latter event, he recounted that ‘Arabs’ sang three octave stanzas of poetry with ‘the most sweet’ music: the first octave was a solo aria, the second was for ten voices, sung by ‘52 people with six trombones, four cornetts’ and organ, played by Buonavita himself; the third was for 20 voices with the same instruments. Later, a five-voice madrigal was performed, with Buonavita singing one part and playing the spinet.

In 1595 the cathedral organ was destroyed by fire and Buonavita, together with Emilio de’ Cavalieri, took charge of the construction of a new organ. On his death he was accorded a solemn mass and was buried in the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa.

WORKS

Il primo libro de madrigali, 4vv (Venice, 1587)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 6vv (Venice, 1591)

Hieremiae lamentationes, 4, 5vv (Venice, 1600)

2 books of madrigals, 5vv; lost, see Bragantini and Fedeli

Music for 2 intermedi, 1588–9, lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Bragantini)

C. Fedeli: Studi sulla musica a Pisa (Pisa, 1905)

F. Baggiani: Gli Organi nella Primaziale di Pisa (Pisa, 1981)

F. Baggiani: ‘I Maestri di Cappella nella Primaziale’, Bollettino Storico Pisano, li (1982), 276–9

F. Baggiani: Organi e organisti nella Cattedrale di Lucca (Lucca, 1982)

S. Chierici: Gli organi della Cattedrale di Sarzana (La Spezia, 1994)

F. Iacoponi: Antonio Buonavita (1548–1618): ricostruzione della vita e carriera tramite documenti d’archivio con un’edizione critica dei suoi madrigali (thesis, U. of Pisa, 1998)

JAMES HAAR/FRANCESCA IACOPONI

Buoni, Giorgio

(b Bologna, mid-17th century; d ?Bologna, after 1693). Italian teacher and composer. For 16 years he was a priest at S Petronio, Bologna, and for a further 16 years held the position of vicemaestro di cappella and teacher of grammar there. In fact he was principally concerned with teaching music in the so-called Concerto de’ Putti, a music school for boys, which, among other activities, gave concerts, directed by him, in Cremona, Lucca, Milan and Prato. Giovanni Bononcini was among his pupils. Buoni composed for his pupils three volumes of music, published in Bologna in 1693: Divertimenti per camera op.1, for two violins and cello; Suonate op.2, for two violins, cello and organ; and Allettamenti per camera op.3, for two violins and bass. Each volume contains 12 works comprising a short sinfonia and three dances. The simplicity of all of them betrays their didactic purpose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (R. Bragantini)

EitnerQ

NewmanSBE

SartoriB

SchmidlD

L. Torchi: ‘La musica istrumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’, iii, RMI, v (1898), 281–320, esp. 291, 313

ARGIA BERTINI (with MARC VANSCHEEUWIJCK)

Buono, Gioanpietro del.

See Del Buono, Gioanpietro.

Buononcini.

See Bononcini family.

Buontalenti, Bernardo [Bernardo delle Girandole]

(b Florence, c1531; d Florence, 6 June 1608). Italian architect, stage designer, engineer and painter. He studied with Vasari and in 1574 succeeded him as director of all the elaborate productions staged at the Florentine court; the theatre that he built in 1586 in a hall in the Uffizi became the centre of all such festivities. For the Medicis he designed palaces, villas (including Pratolino, outside Florence), fortresses, canals and harbour installations in Florence and Tuscany.

Buontalenti had worked for the court before his appointment as director, designing costumes and special machines for transformation scenes in intermedi directed by Vasari in 1565 and Lanci in 1569. He gave the new theatre in the Uffizi an advanced system of revolving periaktoi that were a great improvement on the clumsy machinery of his predecessors, enabling the scenery to be changed virtually as often as wanted. The capabilities of the stage were demonstrated by the productions of the comedies L’amico fido (1586) and La pellegrina (1589), each accompanied by six intermedi and involving respectively six and seven different sets, changed in front of the audience (see Intermedio, figs.2, 3, 4 and 5). The purpose of these court festivities was to glorify the prince by ostentation and splendour, and Buontalenti created a form of production that was equal to the task. Visual splendour based on machinery became obligatory in all later musico-dramatic enterprises in every court in Europe, especially in opera, the new musical genre that evolved in Florence. The earliest opera productions at the Florentine court, for which Buontalenti was still at hand to design the sets (e.g. Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo, 1600), not only took advantage of the mechanics of stage transformation, but also retained the cycle of mythological settings (Helicon, the Underworld, pastoral scenery, the sea, etc.) developed in the intermedi of 1586 and 1589, which were to set their seal on the visual conventions of opera for decades.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (I.M. Botto)

ES (P. Turchetti)

B. de’ Rossi: Descrizione del magnificentiss., apparato e de’ maravigliosi intermedi fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze (Florence, 1585)

B. de’ Rossi: Descrizione dell’apparato, e degl’intermedi, fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze (Florence, 1589)

M. Buonarotti: Descrizione delle felicissime nozze della Cristianissima Maestà di Madama Maria Medici Regina di Francia e di Navarra (Florence, 1600)

A. Warburg: ‘I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589’, Atti dell’Accademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, xxxiii (1895), 103–46; repr. in G. Bing, ed.: Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften, i (Leipzig, 1932), 259–300, 394–438

J. Laver: ‘Stage Designs for the Florentine Intermezzi of 1589’, Burlington Magazine, lx (1932), 294–300

J. Jacquot: ‘Les fêtes de Florence (1589): quelques aspects de leur mise en scène’, Theatre Research, iii (1961), 157–76

A.M. Nagler: Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1939–1637 (New Haven, CT, 1964/R), 58–100

G. Gaeta Bertelà and A. Petrioli Tofani, eds.: Feste e apparati medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (Florence, 1969) [illustrated catalogue]

A. Testaverde Matteini: L’officina delle nuvole: il Teatro Mediceo nel 1589 e gli intermedi del Buontalenti nel memoriale di Girolamo Seriacopi (Milan, 1991)

A. Dugdale: ‘Buontalenti, Bernardo’, The Dictonary of Art, ed. J. Turner (London, 1996)

J.M. Saslow: The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, CT, 1996)

MANFRED BOETZKES

Buontempo, João Domingos.

See Bomtempo, João Domingos.

Būq

(Iran. bāq).

Generic term of the Arab world denoting an aerophone. It is used in written records but unknown in oral transmission. In modern Iraq, the horn is called tūata, a word with which būq is associated (see Qassim Hassan, 1980, p.50). The instrument has been much modified. From being crescent-shaped, it became straight or coiled; it was originally of animal horn, but was later made of wood, metal or ivory. The determining factors are that the instrument ends in a bell and that the longer the pipe, the more powerful the sound. In Islam, the word was first used in the sayings of Mohammed, whose 9th-century biographer, Ibn Hishām, compared the būq of the 7th century to ‘the būq of the Jews, which was used to call them to prayer’.

The use of the instrument by Jews and Christians was inspired by emergent Islam. Like the zūrnā (oboe), the būq was used, at an early stage of its development, to lead the singing in responsories. Subsequently it was played in military bands and its function changed. It is referred to in literary sources in company with various other instruments: with the dohol (double-headed drum) and surnā (Cairo band, 11th century), the tabl (double-headed drum) and the nafīr(long trumpet) (Mogadishu band, 14th century), tabl, nafīr and the sornā (south Yemen band, 14th century) – a remarkable progression, recording an instrumental vocabulary of increasing richness in less than three centuries.

It is hard to establish whether the būq should be classified as a trumpet (straight or curved) or an oboe; students of Arab music now restrict the term būq to the trumpet (nafīr), while qarn denotes the horn. The following terms may be derived from būq: albogón(Spanish: hornpipe), alboka (Basque), bānkiā (Indian: trumpet), buki (Georgian: trumpet) and buçalla (Albanian: the drone pipe of the gajdë). These instruments have no organological connection with each other, still less with the būq, which has never been precisely defined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EI1 (‘Buk’, H.G. Farmer)

A. Chottin: ‘Notes sur le nfir’, Hesperis (1927), 376–80

F. Butros: Al-mūsīqā wan ghināl’ [Music and singing] (Alexandria, n.d.)

H. Hickmann: Terminologie arabe des instruments de musique (Cairo, 1947)

M.A. al-Hifnī: ‘Ifīm al-ālāt al-mūsīqiyya [Understanding musical instruments] (Cairo, 1971)

S.A. Rashīd: Al-Ālāt al-mūsīqiyya al-‘usūr al-islāmiyya [Islamic instruments] (Baghdad, 1975)

S. Qassim Hassan: Les instruments de musique en Irak et leur rôle dans la société traditionelle (Paris, 1980)

CHRISTIAN POCHÉ

Burada, Teodor T(eodor)

(b Iaşi, 3 Oct 1839; d Iaşi, 17 Feb 1923). Romanian writer on music, folklorist and violinist. He studied music in Iaşi (1855–60) and at the Paris Conservatoire with Reber, Clapisson and Alard (1861–5). At the Iaşi Conservatory he held posts as professor of violin (1860–61) and of music theory (1893–1903). He undertook concert tours in Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Turkey, Croatia, Italy, Asia Minor and elsewhere, and collected folklore material of various peoples, particularly of the Romanians in Moldavia, Dobruja and Transylvania. The published results concerned wedding and burial customs (including remarkable studies on dirges), and Romanian folk music instruments. He was a founder of Romanian musicology, and published research on music education, the musical theatre, military songs and church choirs. He was also the founder of Romanian music lexicography: he edited the first Romanian dictionary of music (Dicţionar muzical, MS, c1862–75) and provided a great number of articles for encyclopedias and dictionaries. He published a periodical review Almanach muzical (Iaşi, 1875–7), and was the first musician elected a member of the Romanian Academy (1878).

WRITINGS

O călătorie în Dobrogea [A journey through Dobruja] (Iaşi, 1880, 2/1962)

Datinile poporului român la înmormîntări [Funeral rites of the Romanian people] (Iaşi, 1882)

Cercetări asupra Conservatorului filarmonic–dramatic din Iaşi [Research on the Iaşi Conservatory] (Iaşi, 1888)

O călătorie în satele româneşti din Istria [A journey through the Romanian villages of Istria] (Iaşi, 1896)

Articles in Enciclopedia română, ed. C. Diaconovich (Sibiu, 1898–1904)

Scrierile muzicale ale lui Dimitrie Cantemir [Dmitri Cantemir's musical writings] (Bucharest, 1911)

Istoria teatrului în Moldova (Iaşi, 1915–22, rev. 2/1975 by I.C. Chiţimia)

ed. V. Cosma: Opere (Bucharest, 1974–80)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Cosma: Teodor Burada: viaţa în imagini [Life in pictures] (Bucharest, 1966)

I.C. Chiţimia: ‘Teodor Burada, folclorist şi etnograf’, Folclorişti şi folcloristică românească (Bucharest, 1968), 73–158 [incl. list of works]

E. Dolinescu: ‘Teodor T. Burada violinist’, Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei, xvii (1970), 225–31

D. Vacariu: ‘Aspecte ale activităţii lui T.T. Burada oglindite în muzeului de literatură din Iaşi’, Revista muzeelor, iv (1973), 356–7

VIOREL COSMA

Burbure (de Wesembeek), Léon-Philippe-Marie, Chevalier de

(b Dendermonde, 16 Aug 1812; d Antwerp, 8 Dec 1889). Belgian music historian. He studied music from the age of seven under the direction of the choirmaster Troch of Onze-Lieve Vrouwkerk, Dendermonde, and was later a cello pupil of François Devigne. He completed his humanistic studies at the Royal College of Ghent and graduated as a doctor of law at Ghent University in 1832, all the while maintaining his interest in music. He began composing when he was 18, and shortly after his arrival at the university founded a symphonic society, the Lyre Académique. In 1836 his services to music brought him membership of the state jury for the Prix de Rome.

Upon his appointment as churchwarden at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk, Dendermonde, he undertook a catalogue of the old church archives, and this project initiated his career of historical study. He next occupied himself with cataloguing the archives of St Lambert's Cathedral, Liège, and of Antwerp Cathedral, thus acquiring a unique source of information about the golden age of Flemish music. He wrote several valuable monographs, of which Les oeuvres des anciens musiciens belges (1882) is perhaps the most important. He also continued to compose throughout his career, and besides his 30 books and smaller studies, he left 168 musical works. In his will he left to Antwerp ten indexed volumes of notes dealing with the city's history, as well as a volume relating to the cathedral's choir school and three volumes relating to the church's archives. He was awarded many honours, including election to the Classe des Beaux-Arts of the Belgian Royal Academy in 1862; in 1879 he became director.

WRITINGS

Aperçu sur l'ancienne corporation des musiciens instrumentistes d'Anvers, dite de St Job et de Ste Marie-Madeleine (Brussels, 1862)

Recherches sur les facteurs de clavecins et les luthiers d'Anvers, depuis le seizième jusqu'au dix-neuvième siècle (Brussels, 1863)

Notice sur Charles-Louis Hanssens (Brussels, 1872)

Charles Luython, compositeur de musique de la Cour impériale, 1550–1620: sa vie et ses ouvrages (Brussels, 1880)

Les oeuvres des anciens musiciens belges: étude sur un manuscrit du XVIe siècle contenant des chants à 4 et à 3 voix (Brussels, 1882) [Basevi MS, I-Fc B.2439]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (P. Tinel)

A. Goovaerts: Levensschets van ridder Leo de Burbure, toonzetter en geschiedschrijver (Antwerp, 1871)

F.-A. Gevaert: ‘Notice sur le Chevalier Léon de Burbure’, Annuaire de l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, lix (1893), 457–81

C. Bergmans: Le Conservatoire royal de musique de Gand (Ghent, 1901)

L. Theunissens: ‘La musique à Anvers aux XIVe, XVe et XVIe siècles: copie du manuscrit de M. le Chevalier Léon de Burbure’, Annales de l'Académie royale d'archéologie de Belgique, lviii (1906), 159–256

MARIE-THÉRÈSE BUYSSENS

Burchard, Johannes.

See Burkard, johannes.

Burchardi, Udalricus [Borckhart, Burchard, Burckhart, Burgardus, Purckhart; Ulrich]

(b Waischenfeld, c1484). German music theorist and theologian. He attended the cathedral school in Bamberg and in 1500 entered Leipzig University where he became Bachelor of Arts in 1507, Master of Arts in 1511 and from 1513 until 1515 taught as Master of Law. In 1515 he joined the theology faculty, but left Leipzig in 1516 and returned to Bamberg, where he was court chaplain until 1527 and served the prince-bishops Georg III of Limburg and Weigand von Redwitz. In Bamberg he got to know Tilman Riemenschneider and Albrecht Dürer and in 1517, 1518 and 1520 had contact with von Hutten. The publication of Burchardi’s Ein schöner Dialog von dem christlichen Glauben (Bamberg, 1527), in which he presented a German translation of his treatise Dialogus de fide christiana (Bamberg, 1522), a work in the spirit of Erasmus’s reforming zeal, led to his dismissal from the service of the prince-bishops. He resumed his teaching at Leipzig University and in 1531 became a Licentiate of Theology.

Burchardi’s treatise Hortulus musices practicae omnibus divino gregoriani concentus modulo se oblectaturis tam jucundus quam proficuus (Leipzig, 1514) contains in seven chapters a description of musica plana. The chapters follow the same order as in the treatises of Michael Keinspeck and Balthasar Prasperg, and the work has the character of an elementary music primer. With this treatise Burchardi attempted to make good the obvious lack of books on music at Leipzig University, as Michael Koswick, Ornithoparchus and Rhau later did.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Pietzsch: ‘Zur Pflege der Musik an den deutschen Universitäten bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, AMf, iii (1938), 303–30, esp. 307, 312

H. Hüschen: ‘Ulrich Burchard als Musiktheoretiker’, KJb, xxxiv (1950), 101–5

H. Grimm: ‘Der Bamberger Hofkaplan Udalricus Burchardi, ein humanistischer Musiklehrer’, AMw, xv (1958), 251–7

L. Vikár: ‘A theoretical compilation’, Cantus Planus IV: Pécs 1990, 141–61

HEINRICH HÜSCHEN

Burchiella.

See Molino, Antonio.

Burchuladze, Paata

(b Tbilisi, 12 Feb 1955). Georgian bass. He studied in Tbilisi, making his student début there in 1976 as Gounod's Méphistophélès, then becoming a member of the Georgian State Opera, for whom he sang Leporello, Prince Gremin and King René (Iolanta). He studied further in Milan (1978–81), where he sang Banquo, Pagano (I Lombardi), Walter (Luisa Miller) and Zaccaria (Nabucco) at La Scala. He made his Covent Garden début in 1984 as Ramfis, returning as Rossini's Don Basilio, Khan Konchak, Boris Godunov and the Inquisitor (Fiery Angel). Having made his US début at Philadelphia (1987) as Boris, he sang Basilio at the Metropolitan (1989), followed by Boris and the Commendatore (1995–6). His other roles include Silva (Ernani), Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra), Philip II, Boito's Mefistofele and Dosifey (Khovanshchina), of which he has made an impressive recording. His magnificent dark-toned voice and imposing stature are ideal for both the Russian repertory and Verdi's bass roles.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Burck [Burgk], Joachim a [à] [Moller, Joachim]

(b Burg, nr Magdeburg, 1546; d Mühlhausen, 24 May 1610). German composer, organist and public official. His surname was Moller, but he always called himself after his place of birth. He attended the grammar school at Magdeburg, where he must have been taught by Martin Agricola and then probably by Gallus Dressler. He next spent some time at Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, Erfurt and Schwarzburg. In 1563, in only his 17th year, he was appointed Kantor of the newly founded grammar school at Mühlhausen, and by the end of 1566 he was also organist of St Blasius there. In order to augment his income he took an additional post as a clerk at the law courts and also performed clerical duties for the consistory. He later became public notary and in 1583 a town councillor. He remained at Mühlhausen until his death. His reputation eventually reached beyond the town: for example, in 1596, together with many of the leading musicians in Germany, he took part in the famous organ trials at Gröningen, near Halberstadt, and in 1603 he acted as an organ consultant at Sondershausen and in 1604 at Hersfeld. As a musician, he may have been largely self-taught, but in the preface to his Sacrae cantiones (1573) he acknowledged a debt to the example of Johann Herrmann, as well as of Cipriano de Rore, Alexander Utendal, Jacobus Vaet, Giaches de Wert and especially Lassus, whom he extolled as ‘princeps artis Musicae’. He was closely associated at Mühlhausen with the theologian and hymn writer Ludwig Helmbold, and at the grammar school he must have taught Johannes Eccard, with whom he shared two volumes of Helmbold settings (1574–8; Herrmann also appears in the second). The high regard in which he was held at Mühlhausen can be inferred from the decision taken by the town councillors in 1626 to bring out his works in a complete edition. This was, however, abandoned after the first volume, Odarum sacrarum … pars prima (Mühlhausen, 1626¹⁰), which contained six collections.

Burck's first published work, the Harmoniae sacrae (1566), comprises motets composed in a late Netherlandish idiom, and closely based on Gregorian chant. The madrigalian motets of the Sacrae cantiones show his interest in concepts of musica reservata; individual words are emphasized by melismas, expressive chromaticisms and clear, harmonically orientated textures. With the through-composed four-part Deutsche Passion (1568) – allegedly according to St John though in fact a compilation from all four evangelists – Burck realized to the full his ideal of textural lucidity. The work is freely based on the style of the liturgical Passion, characterization being secured by a variety of vocal groupings: the words of Christ, for instance, are generally sung by the lower voices. In the mid-1570s Burck finally and decisively abandoned the polyphonic motet in favour of the homophonic song and ode. Among the earliest of these pieces, many of which draw on the poetry of Helmbold, are those in the four-part XX Odae sacrae (1572), which, as the title-page indicates, is unequivocally Italianate in its simplicity. With this volume and the series of collections of odes and songs that followed up to 1599, Burck established himself as a notable and prolific composer of up-to-date sacred songs. In some of them it is difficult to decide which vocal part (descant or tenor) carries the ‘melody’.

Burck was a minor master in a period of transition. He saw it as his task ‘to meet the demands of my calling by using such gifts as I have received from God’ in the service of Christian teaching in church and school, for which reason, as he said in the preface to his Deutsche Passion, ‘I have endeavoured to avoid setting to music any songs other than those that occur in Holy Writ or stem from it and which can be sung to the glory of God and for the purpose of self-improvement’.

WORKS

Edition: Joachim von Burck: 30 geistliche Lieder auf die Feste durch’s Jahr, ed. L. Schoeberlein, Schatz des liturgischen Chor- und Gemeindegesangs, ii–iii (Göttingen, 1868–72) [S]

hymns

20 deutsche Liedlein (L. Helmbold), 4vv (Erfurt, 1575); ed. in PÄMw, xxii (1898/R)

Lyricorum, libri primus et secundus (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1577)

Crepundia sacra … christliche Liedlein, 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1578⁵; repr. in 1626¹⁰) (10 hymns by Burck); ed. in Prüfer

Vom heiligen Ehstande: 40 Liedlein … libro primo (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1583); 3 in S [from 2/1595 edn]

30 geistliche Lieder auff die Feste durchs Jahr (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1585³⁶; repr. in 1626¹⁰; 20 in S [12 from 1585 edn, 8 from 1626 edn]

15 Psalmi graduum, das ist, Die 15 Lieder im höhern Chor … Rheim und Gesangweise, durch M. Cyriacum Schneegass verfasset, 4vv (Erfurt, 1595)

Vom heiligen Ehstande: 41 Liedlein … libri secundi, 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1596); 2 in S

40 deutsche christliche Liedlein (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1599⁸) (22 hymns by Burck)

Schöne geistliche Lieder über alle Evangelia auff jede Fest unnd Sontage durchs gantze Jahr (Helmbold), 4vv (Erfurt, 1615)

Das ander Theil der geistlichen Lieder, auff etliche Psalmen … gerichtet (Helmbold), 4vv (Erfurt, 1615) (2 hymns by Burck)

3 hymns, 4vv, 1610¹²; ed. F. Blume and others: Michael Praetorius: Gesamtausgabe (Wolfenbüttel, 1928–41/R), viii

1 hymn, 4vv, 1625⁶

passions

Die deutsche Passion … nach dem Evangelisten Sancte Johanne in Figural-Gesang bracht, 4vv (Wittenberg, 1568); ed. in PÄMw, xxii (1898/R), ed. H.L. Berger (Stuttgart, 1967)

53. Cap. Esaiae: von dem Leiden und Auferstehen Jesu Christi, 4vv (Leipzig, 1573) [addl to Die deutsche Passion, 1568]

Passio Jesu Christi: im 22. Psalm des Propheten Davids beschrieben, 4vv (Erfurt, 1574); ed. in PÄMw, xxii (1898/R), ed. H. von Hildebrandt (Stuttgart-Hohenheim, 1963)

Die Historia des Leidens Jesu Christ auss dem Evangelisten Sancte Luca, 5vv (Mühlhausen, 1597)

occasional

Cantio in honorem nuptii … Johannis Guntheri … et nuptae Annae Antonii, 5vv (Mühlhausen, 1566)

Genethliakon carmen: in nativitatem primogeniti filii … D. Guilielmi Langravii Hassiae, 5vv (Mühlhausen, 1572)

Threnodia: Komm wenn du wilt, Herr Jesu Christ, 4vv in N. Basse: Leichpredigt bey Begräbnuss der … Frauwen Clara geborene Brede (Frankfurt, 1581)

3 christliche Brautlieder … den 23. April Anno 1610, ?5vv (Jena, 1610)

2 Epithalamia, zu Glückwünschung … 28. Januarii Anno 1610 (Jena, 1610)

other sacred vocal

Harmoniae sacrae, 5vv (Nuremberg, 1566)

Decades IIII: sententiosorum versuum celebrium virorum germaniae (Mühlhausen, 1567)

Symbolum Apostolicum Nicenum, et canticum symbolum sanctorum Augustini et Ambrosii, ac verba institutionis coenae dominicae, 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1569)

20 odae sacrae … ad imitationem italicarum villanescarum (Helmbold), 4vv (Erfurt, 1572; repr. in 1626¹⁰); ed. in Prüfer

Sacrae cantiones plane novae, ex Veteri et Novo Testamento, 4–6vv (Nuremberg, 1573)

IIII. Odae Ludovici Helmboldi, latinae & germanicae … neue Gesänglein, 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1574¹⁰)

Secundus liber odarum sacrarum … ad imitationem italicarum villanescarum (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1578; repr. in 1626¹⁰)

Ein christlich Lied und Erinnerung, von bestendigem Anhalten und Bekentnis der waren Religion (Mühlhausen, 1579)

Hebdomas divinitus instituta: sacris odis celebrata (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1580; repr. in 1626¹⁰)

Officium sacrosanctae coenae dominicae, super cantiunculam ‘Quam mirabilis’ … ex primo libro odarum … compositum, 4vv (Erfurt, 1580)

Quadraginta odae catecheticae (Helmbold), 4vv (Mühlhausen, 1599; repr. in 1626¹⁰)

Ein schön geistlich … Lied aus dem 19. Capitel des Buchs Jobs, von der … Aufferstehung … Jesu Christi, 4vv (Erfurt, 1604)

1 ode, 4vv, 1574¹⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

C. von Winterfeld: Der evangelische Kirchengesang und sein Verhältnis zur Kunst des Tonsatzes (Leipzig, 1843–7/R)

P. Spitta: ‘Joachim a Burck’, MMg, ii (1870), 65–180, esp. 65–7, 176–80

A. Prüfer: Untersuchungen über den ausserkirchlichen Kunstgesang in den evangelischen Schulen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1890)

O. Kade: Die ältere Passionskomposition bis zum Jahre 1631 (Gütersloh, 1893)

R. Jordan: Aus der Geschichte der Musik in Mühlhausen (Mühlhausen, 1905)

T.W. Werner: ‘Die im Herzoglichen Hausarchiv zu Zerbst aufgefundenen Musikalien aus der 2. Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 681–714

H. Birtner: Joachim a Burck als Motettenkomponist (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1924)

H. Birtner: ‘Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der protestantischen Musik im 16. Jahrhundert, dargestellt an J. a Burck (1546–1610)’, ZMw, x (1927–8), 457–94

L.D. Cook: The German Troped Polyphonic Magnificat (diss., U. of Iowa, 1976)

ADAM ADRIO/CLYTUS GOTTWALD

Burdach, Konrad

(b Königsberg [now Kaliningrad], 29 May 1859; d Berlin, 18 Sept 1936). German philologist. He studied piano and music theory with Constanz Berneker, and considered musicology as a career before choosing German philology. He taught in Halle, where he became reader in 1897, became professor in Berlin in 1900 and was finally appointed general secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His musical interests led him, in his chosen field of medieval humanism, to devote particular attention to the Minnesinger; in addition to his valuable work on the origin and decline of the Minnesang he was the first to place the study of Walther von der Vogelweide on a sound historical basis.

WRITINGS

Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1879; Leipzig, 1880, enlarged 2/1928/R)

Über die musikalische Bildung der deutschen Dichter, insbesondere der Minnesinger im 13. Jahrhundert (Halle, 1884)

Studentensprache und Studentenlied in Halle vor hundert Jahren (Halle, 1894/R)

Walther von der Vogelweide: philologische und historische Forschungen (Leipzig, 1900)

‘Zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der moderne Musik: biographische Studie über Constanz Berneker’, Deutsche Revue (1907), 229–41, 325–36

‘Schillers Chordramen und die Geburt des tragischen Stils aus der Musik’, Deutsche Rundschau, Jg.36 (1910), no.5, pp.232–62; no.6, pp.400–33; no.7, pp.91–112

Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation (Berlin, 1912–35)

Über den Ursprung des mittelalterlichen Minnesangs, Liebesromans und Frauendienstes (Berlin, 1918)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Romain: ‘Aus der Werkstatt Konrad Burdachs’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung, iii (1927), 634–6

P. Piur: Burdach-Bibliographie, 1880–1930: zum fünfzigjährigen Doktorjubiläum … dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern (Berlin, 1930)

P. Piur: ‘Konrad Burdach zum Gedächtnis’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, lxii (1937), 106–12

MALCOLM TURNER

Burden [burthen, burdoun].

(1) A refrain. This is the standard modern English word for any repeated sections in hymns and songs of the 15th and 16th centuries. In particular, the presence of a burden structurally independent of the verse is the prime distinguishing characteristic of the Carol (see Bukofzer, 153ff). The medieval term, according to Richard Hill’s Commonplace-book (Balliol College, Oxford, MS 354), seems to have been ‘fote’ (foot).

(2) A drone or pedal note, particularly on a bagpipe. This usage is found in both English and French music from the 13th century onwards.

(3) A shawm. Presumably this meaning is related to the preceding one: the 15th-century chronicle of St Albans describes the reception of a new abbot to the Te Deum with bells and ‘shawms which we call burdones’ (sonantis chalamis quos burdones appellamus; see HarrisonMMB, 206).

(4) In 1338 Robert Manning of Brunne used the word to describe the bottom line of a three-voice texture in his Rimed Story of England: ‘Of tho clerkes that best couthe synge, Wyth treble, mene, & burdoun’. Many later English references define burden as a deep bass.

(5) A special type of burden may have been called Faburden, as suggested by Besseler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HarrisonMMB

H. Besseler: Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (Leipzig, 1950, rev., enlarged 2/1974 by P. Gülke)

M.F. Bukofzer: Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New York, 1950)

B. Trowell: ‘Faburden and Fauxbourdon’, MD, xiii (1959), 43–78

H.H. Carter: A Dictionary of Middle English Musical Terms (Bloomington, IN, 1961/R)

G. Strahle: An Early Music Dictionary: Musical Terms from British Sources, 1500–1740 (Cambridge, 1995)

DAVID FALLOWS

Burdet, Jacques

(b Lutry, Lausanne, 19 June 1905; d Lausanne, 13 Sept 1984). Swiss musicologist. He received his first music lessons from his father Louis Burdet, a music teacher; later teachers included Denéréaz, Fornerod, Bamboni, Haug and Klecki. In addition to his musicological research and choir conducting, he taught music in Lausanne at the Collège Scientifique Cantonal (1941–57) and the Ecole Normale (1958–72). For ten years he was president of the Association Vaudoise des Directeurs de Chant and collaborated regularly with Radio Lausanne for its school music transmissions as well as with the music chronicle of the Feuille d’avis de Lausanne. With his untiring, detailed research Burdet neatly contributed to the knowledge of the musical past of the French community in Switzerland. He is known primarily for his main books, La musique dans le pays de Vaud sous le régime bernois, 1536–1798, La musique dans le canton de Vaud au XIXe siècle and La musique dans le canton de Vaud, 1904–1939, works which go beyond mere local research.

WRITINGS

La joie de savoir écouter la musique (Yverdon, 1939)

‘Une société de chant au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue historique vaudoise, xlvii (1939), 299–315

‘Notes sur la musique à Yverdon’, Revue historique vaudoise, xlix (1941), 120–28

Les origines du chant choral dans le canton de Vaud (Lausanne, 1946)

L’accord parfait, livres du maître et de l’élève (Lausanne, 1949/R)

‘Mozart à Lausanne en 1766’, Revue historique vaudoise, lxi (1953), 106–21

La danse populaire dans le pays de Vaud (Basle, 1957)

La musique dans le pays de Vaud sous le régime bernois, 1536–1798 (Lausanne, 1963)

Souvenir d’un voyage en Suisse, 1842: Félix Mendelssohn et la Suisse (Basle, 1966)

‘Les vaudois et la Société helvétique de musique’, Revue historique vaudoise, lxxv (1967), 3–84

‘Orchestres vaudois au XIXe siècle’, Revue historique vaudoise, lxxvii (1969), 53–171

La musique dans le canton de Vaud au XIXe siècle (Lausanne, 1971)

‘L’orchestre symphonique de Lausanne, 1903–1914’, Revue historique vaudoise, lxxx (1972), 155–208

La musique dans le canton de Vaud, 1904–1939 (Lausanne, 1983)

Le musicien Charles Troyon: 1867–1948 (Yverdon, 1984)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SML

J.J. Rapin: ‘Jacques Burdet †’, Revue musicale de la Suisse romande, xxxvii (1984), 143–4 [obituary]

J.-L. Matthey: Hommage à Jacques Burdet, 19.6.1905–13.9.1984 (Lausanne, 1987)

ETIENNE DARBELLAY

Burdoun.

See Burden.

Bureau Central de Musique.

See Escudier.

Bureau d’Abonnement Musical.

French firm of publishers. It was founded in Paris on 22 July 1765 by Antoine de Peters, a Flemish artist, with the violinist and composer Jean-Baptiste Miroglio. De Peters was granted a privilege for the publication of music in September 1765, but a group of influential publishers, including La Chevardière, Bailleux, Le Clerc and Venier, tried to stop his venture in a court battle which lasted two years; their efforts were unsuccessful and De Peters continued to issue new works. In 1783 the firm advertised G.J. Vogler’s La kermesse ou La fête flamande. The firm continued to appear in trade directories until 1789, though De Peters died about 1779 and Miroglio about 1785. Early catalogues of the firm include instrumental works by Wagenseil, J.P.E. Martini and Jommelli. Its most important publications were the first editions of Gluck’s Alceste (second version, 1776) and La Cythère assiégée (second version, 1775) and the second edition of Iphigénie en Aulide, all in full scores.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEMF

HopkinsonD

JohanssonFMP

C. Hopkinson: A Bibliography of the Printed Works of C.W. von Gluck 1714–1787(London, 1959, 2/1967)

NIGEL SIMEONE

Bureau des Arts et d'Industrie.

See Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir.

Bureau International de l’Edition Mécanique [BIEM].

See Copyright, §II.

Bureau voor Muziek-Auteursrecht [BUMA].

See Copyright, §VI (under Netherlands).

Burell [Burrell], John

(d before 5 Feb 1423). English composer. He is known from a Gloria and a Credo in the second layer of the Old Hall Manuscript which are ascribed simply to ‘Burell’. A royal chaplain of this name appears in the wardrobe lists of 1413, 1415 (when he was on the sick-list at Harfleur) and 1421. He held canonries at Chichester, Hereford and York (where he was precentor for a mere ten days in 1410) and a corrody at Meaux Abbey from 1416. He is mentioned as deceased in a warrant, dated 5 February 1423, to present one John Hunt, also a clerk of the royal chapel, to his Meaux corrody. This reference to his death eliminates other candidates reported in Grove6 and elsewhere.

His Gloria and Credo (ed. in CMM, xlvi, 1969–73, nos.12 and 65) are both written in three-part score and neither is based on chant. Both alternate sections in contrasting mensurations, the Gloria C C C C C and the Credo C C . The part-ranges are virtually identical, but there are no strong grounds for suggesting a pairing between them. The musical style is plain and the compositions are not known from any other source.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.L. Greene: ‘Two Medieval Musical Manuscripts…’, JAMS, vii (1954), 1–34, esp. 31

A. Wathey: Music in the Royal and Noble Households in Late Medieval England: Studies of Sources and Patronage (New York, 1989), 49

For further bibliography see Old Hall Manuscript.

MARGARET BENT

Burette.

French family of musicians.

(1) Claude Burette

(2) Pierre-Jean Burette

(3) Bernard Burette

DAVID TUNLEY/PHILIPPE VENDRIX

Burette

(1) Claude Burette

(b Nuits, Burgundy; fl 2nd half of the 17th century). Composer and harpist. After an unsuccessful career in medicine in Burgundy he left first for Lyons and then for Paris, where he settled, establishing a fine reputation as harpist and teacher. He ultimately became musicien du roi. His compositions for harpsichord and harp were collected into two manuscript volumes by his son (2) Pierre-Jean in 1695 but are not extant.

Burette

(2) Pierre-Jean Burette

(b Paris, 21 Nov 1665; d Paris, 19 May 1747). Musician and scholar, son of (1) Claude Burette. Because of delicate health as a child he received no formal schooling. Instead his father gave him lessons in music, for which he revealed such talent that at the age of eight or nine he performed at court, playing the harpsichord while his father played the harp. Despite his musical precocity he was gradually drawn to the pursuits of scholarship and medicine, and through intensive study equipped himself to become one of the most erudite men of his time. His knowledge of languages is said to have embraced Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, English and German, and his library contained some 15,000 volumes. He was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres from 1705 and the following year became an editor of the Journal des savants. His output includes important writings dealing with aspects of ancient Greek music: although his ideas did not go unchallenged even in his own day, his works remained the standard ones on the subject for many years. Several cantatas were ascribed to him by Fétis but they are more likely to be by (3) Bernard Burette.

THEORETICAL WORKS

15 essays in Mémoires de littérature … de l'Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, i–xvii (Paris, 1717–51):

‘Dissertation sur la symphonie des anciens’, iv (1723), 116–31; ‘Dissertation où l'on fait voir que les merveilleux effets attribuez à la musique des Anciens, ne prouvent point qu'elle fût aussi parfaite que la nôtre’, v (1729), 133–51; ‘Dissertation sur le rythme de l'ancienne musique’, v (1729), 152–68; ‘Dissertation sur la mélopée de l'ancienne musique’, v (1729), 169–99; ‘Addition à la dissertation sur la mélopée de l'ancienne musique’, v (1729), 200–06; ‘Discours dans lequel on rend compte de divers ouvrages modernes touchant l'ancienne musique’, viii (1733), 1–27; ‘Examen du traité de Plutarque sur la musique’, viii (1733), 27–44; ‘Observations touchant l'histoire littéraire du dialogue de Plutarque sur la musique’, viii (1733), 44–62; ‘Nouvelles réflexions sur la symphonie de l'ancienne musique’, viii (1733), 63–80; ‘Analyse du dialogue de Plutarque sur la musique’, viii (1733), 80–96; ‘Dialogue de Plutarque sur la musique: traduit en François avec des remarques’, x (1736), 111–80 (orig. pubd separately, Paris, 1735); ‘Remarques sur le dialogue de Plutarque’, x (1736), 180–310; ‘Suite des remarques sur le dialogue de Plutarque’, xiii (1739), 173 only; xv (1743), 293–394; xvii (1751), 31–60; ‘Dissertation servant d'épilogue et de conclusion aux remarques sur le traité de Plutarque touchant la musique, dans laquelle on compare la théorie de l'ancienne musique avec celle de la musique moderne’, xvii (1751), 61–106; ‘Supplément à la dissertation sur la théorie de l'ancienne musique comparée avec celle de la musique moderne’, xvii (1751), 107–26

Paragon dell'antica colla moderna musica: dissertazione del Signor Burette, in qui si dimastro che i maravigioli effetti attribuiti alla musica degli antichi nonprovano niun modo ch'essa fosse più perfetta della nostra (Venice, 1748)

‘Petri Joh. Buretti Dissertation musicam veterum’,Thesaurus antiquitatum, xxxii, ed. B. Ugolinus (Venice, 1767)

Burette

(3) Bernard Burette

(fl 1702–29). His relationship to (1) Claude and (2) Pierre-Jean Burette is not clear. He was harpsichord master to Mlle de Charolais. As a composer he is known to have written only vocal music, notably cantatas.

WORKS

all published in Paris

Bacchus; L'Isle de Delos: Cantates françoises, 1v, insts (n.d.)

Daphné, cantate, 1v, insts (n.d.)

Le bal, cantate, 1v, insts (1723)

Le printemps; L'été: Cantates françoises, 1v, insts (1722)

Sapho et Phaon, 1v, insts (1729)

Aeglé, formerly in F-Pa, lost, listed in La Laurencie and Gastoué

Bk of cants., lost, listed in Ballard catalogue (1742)

3 airs, Recueil d'airs sérieux et à boire (Paris, 1702, 1711)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

LabordeE

G. Martin: Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu M. Burette (Paris, 1748)

N. Fréret: ‘L'éloge de Burette’, Mémoires de littérature, xxi (Paris, 1749)

D. L' Aulnaye: Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, ed. L.G. Michaud and E.E. Desplaces (Paris, 2/1843–65/R)

L. de La Laurencie and A. Gastoué: Catalogue des livres de musique (manuscrits et imprimés) de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal à Paris (Paris, 1936)

P. Vendrix: Aux origines d'une discipline historique: la musique et son histoire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Geneva, 1993)

Burgas.

City on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. It is the second largest city in the country. The first evidence of opera performances in the city dates from 1901. In 1954 a permanent opera company, Burgaska Samodeyna Opera (Burgas Amateur Opera), was formed, consisting predominantly of instrumentalists from the State SO and singers from the Naroden Khor (Folk Choir) and the Rodna Pesen (Homeland Song) choir. Its first production, La traviata, in 1955 was followed mainly by Italian operas and operas by Mozart and by Bulgarian composers. The Burgas Amateur Opera became the State (National) Opera on 2 March 1972 when it opened with Krasimir Kyurkchiyski’s Yula. Its notable conductors have included Nevin Mikhalev, Ivan Vulpe, Stoyan Kralev and Romeo Raychev, and it has engaged Dragan Kardzhiyev and Nikolay Nikolov (as guest directors) and the baritone Stoyan Popov. The opera’s repertory is influenced by the summer resort character of the city and by the opportunities offered by the open-air stage at the Sunny Beach resort. Until the early 1980s the opera performed in the 670-seat hall of the Culture Club of a petrochemical plant; since 1983 a new building, the Burgas Opera House (800 seats), intended for drama, opera and ballet, has been used for two or three opera performances a week.

MAGDALENA MANOLOVA

Burgate [Burg], R. de

(fl late 13th century). English composer. He is probably to be identified with the R. de Burgate who was abbot of Reading from 1268 to 1290, and who apparently resigned because of his inability to cope with the abbey's financial difficulties. His name occurs in the first item of the list of compositions contained in a book, now lost, which was owned in the later 13th century by W. de Wintonia: ‘Spiritus et alme. R. de Burg’. Fragments of a four-voice setting of the Spiritus et alme trope of the Gloria exist in the manuscript GB-Omc 60, ff.84v–85. If, as is likely, this is R. de Burgate's composition, it is understandable that it was given pride of place in the manuscript; not only was it written by a prominent man, but it also reveals such first-rate craftsmanship and imagination as to indicate the work of a superior composer. In view of its advanced style he probably composed the piece in the late years of the century, perhaps after his abbacy, rather than before 1268, as Handschin assumed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Schofield: ‘The Provenance and Date of “Sumer is icumen in”’, MR, ix (1948), 81–6, esp. 82–3

J. Handschin: ‘The Summer Canon and its Background’, MD, iii (1949), 55–94, esp. 91; v (1951), 65–113

L.A. Dittmer: ‘An English Discantuum Volumen’, MD, viii (1954), 19–58, esp. 38–9

E.H. Sanders, ed.: English Polyphony of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, PMFC, xiv (1979), appx 15

ERNEST H. SANDERS

Burge, David (Russell)

(b Evanston, IL, 25 March 1930). American composer and pianist. He received the BM (1951) and MM (1952) from Northwestern University, the DMA and artist’s diploma (1956) from the Eastman School of Music, where he later served as professor of music (1975–93) and chairman of the piano department (1975–87). He has also taught at the University of California at Davis (1975), the University of Pennsylvania (1977), the universities of Gothenburg (1980, 1981, 1992), Stockholm (1981, 1992), Alberta (1983), Auckland (1988), the Banff Centre (1983, 1984, 1986) and the Chautauqua Institution (1986–90). As a pianist noted for his support of the music of the second half of the 20th century he has given over one thousand concerts throughout the USA, Europe, Asia and Australia. These have included numerous first performances, including works by Berio, Crumb, Albright, Krenek and Persichetti; he has regularly recorded for Nonesuch, Candide, Vox, Musical Heritage Society and CRI. He has also written Twentieth Century Piano Music (New York, 1990) as well as many articles and reviews for, among other journals, Keyboard, Clavier, Piano Quarterly and PNM. He received the Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 1978 and 1979 for articles in Keyboard. He was national chairman of the American Society of University Composers and chairman of the National Association for Advancement in the Arts (1989–94), after which he left academia to devote himself more fully to composing and performing. As a composer he moves easily and effectively between several 20th-century styles.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Blood Wedding (incid music, F. García Lorca), 1951; Popoff (musical comedy, R. Alexander and N. Jackson, after A. Chekhov), 1961; Intervals (chbr op, P. Jackson), 1961; Twone in Sunshine, an Entertainment for Theater, 1969; Liana’s Song (ballet, 6 parts), pf 4 hands, 1995; Luna Lunera (ballet, 12 parts, F. García Lorca), 1996

Other works: Str Qt no.1, 1950; Pie Jesu, S, pf, 1952; Vanish Spring (Korean poem, trans. Y. Kang), S, pf, 1953; Portami il girasole (E. Montale), S, pf, 1957; Pf Sonata no.2, 1958; Serenade I, vn, orch, 1960; Sources II, vn, cel, pf, 1965; Sources III, cl, perc, 1967; … that no one knew, vn, orch, 1969; Songs of Love and Sorrow (Burge), S, pf, 1989; 24 Preludes, pf, 1997

Principal publishers: Bowdoin College Press, A. Broude, CPE, C.F. Peters

JOHN HOLZAEPFEL

Burge, John [Byson, David]

(b Dryden, ON, 2 Jan 1961). Canadian composer. He studied the piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto (diploma, 1979), and composition with John Beckwith, Walter Buczynski, Derek Holman and John Hawkins at the University of Toronto (BMus 1983, MMus 1984), then with Stephen Chatman and Wallace Berry at the University of British Columbia (DMA). In 1987 he became a professor of composition and theory at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Burge has based his large and diverse output on an eclectic mix of styles, from the neoclassical idioms of Britten and Stravinsky to the theatrical gestures of Maxwell Davies. His choral music, for which he has increasingly become known, resembles oratorio in scope and intent, and is often based on religious or philosophical ideas with links to contemporary issues. In Divinum mysterium (1995) he integrates a plainchant melody, in choral and instrumental combinations, into four of the seven movements. His four-movement Symphony no.1 (1997) demonstrates further his interest in innovative structural features and instrumental texture. The recipient of many commissions in Canada and the USA, Burge serves as president of the Canadian League of Composers. His work places him at the forefront of his generation of Canadian composers.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: The Last Day of Summer, chbr orch, 1986; Pf Conc., 1991; One Sail, vc, str, 1993; Forgotten Dreams, fl, str/pf, 1995; Rocky Mountain Ov., 1996; Snowdrift, 1996; Upper Canadian Fiddle Suite, str, 1996; Sym. no.1, 1997Chbr and solo inst: Still Time, vc, pf, 1987; Homage, sax qt, 1989; Interplay, 3 db, 1989; Sonic Shadows, 2 pf, 1990; Dance, org, 1993; Sonata breve no.1, pf, 1993; Still Falls the Snow, pf trio, 1993; 2 Chorale Preludes, org, 1994; Elijah's Lullaby, pf, 1994; Sonata breve no.2, cl, pf, 1995; St Peter's Sonata, org, opt. choir, 1995; Watercolour, pf, 1996Vocal with acc.: Lullaby and Dream (D. Livesay), high v, pf, 1987; Mass for Prisoners of Conscience, Tr, Mez, Bar, SATB, orch, 1989; The Flute Player (C. Aiken), SATB, a fl, 1990; A Festive Gloria, SATB, tpt, org, 1992; That we may not lose loss (M. Avison), S, SATB, orch, 1993; Divinum mysterium, chorus, brass band, 1995; Libera me (Ps xxii), chorus, org, 1996; Elegy as a Message left on an Answering Machine (S. Heighton), high v, cl, pf, 1997; Glory to God (Bible: Luke, ii), SATB, org, opt. tpt, 1997; Love Divine (C. Wesley), SSATB, org/(tpt, timp, str), 1997Unacc choral: Magnificat, Mez, SSATBB, 1985, rev. 1987; Sunblue (M. Avison), 1987; Released Flow, 1995; Thaws, 1995; March Morning Music, 1996

Principal publishers: Boosey and Hawkes, Jaymar, Gordon V. Thompson

GORDON E. SMITH

Burgess [Wilson], [John] Anthony

(b Manchester, 25 Feb 1917; d London, 22 Nov 1993). English writer and composer. Widely known as a novelist, especially for A Clockwork Orange (London, 1962), he was also a talented and prolific composer. Essentially self-taught in music, he had composed his first symphony by the time he graduated from the University of Manchester in 1940. As musical director of the 54th Division Entertainment Section (1940–43) during World War II, he composed and arranged extensively for dance band. He was subsequently stationed in Gibraltar (1943–6), and his first novel, A Vision of Battlements, written in 1949, is a fictionalized account of his experiences there. After holding various teaching posts in England (1946–54), Burgess worked from 1954 to 1959 as an Education Officer in Malaya and Borneo. A number of compositions written during that time, including his Second Symphony ‘Sinfoni Malaya’, reflect the influence of traditional Malayan music. With his first major publication, the novel Time for a Tiger (London, 1956), he adopted the pseudonym Anthony Burgess, a combination of his confirmation name Anthony and his given name John Burgess Wilson. A physical collapse forced his return to England in 1959, where he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given less than a year to live. Determined to provide an income for his first wife, he wrote furiously, producing five novels in 12 months. By the end of that year, showing no signs of ill health, he had become an established author.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Burgess wrote scripts and music for a number of film, television, video and theatre projects. One of these, a production of Cyrano de Bergerac in his translation and featuring his own incidental music, was performed at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis (1971) to high acclaim. The success of that production led to the Broadway musical Cyrano, with the book and lyrics by Burgess and music by Michael Lewis. The Symphony no.3 (1974–5), the first of Burgess’s orchestral compositions to be performed in public, dispelled many of his own doubts about his musical competence, marking a turning point in his musical career. From then on, in addition to writing, he composed prolifically.

In 1971 Burgess began a collaboration with composer Stanley Silverman, who wrote the music for the Guthrie production of Oedipus the King in Burgess’s translation. The two subsequently turned the work into the cantata King Oedipus. They also planned an off-Broadway show called Trotsky’s in New York!, for which Burgess wrote the text in 1975; in the end, however, Burgess composed the music himself, completing the score around 1980. The libretto of Trotsky was eventually published as one of three intertwined plots in The End of the World News (New York, 1982). Blooms of Dublin, a two-act musical based on Joyce’s Ulysses, was completed by Burgess in 1982. The music hall style of the show may have been influenced by Burgess’s memories of his mother, the ‘Beautiful Belle Burgess’, a music hall performer who died before he reached the age of two.

In 1985, Burgess was commissioned by Scottish Opera to write a new libretto for Weber’s Oberon (1826), replacing J.R. Planché’s text with an updated story about hijackers and hostages set in the contemporary Middle East. In 1986 he completed a translation of Carmen for the ENO and rewrote A Clockwork Orange as ‘a play with music’, restoring the original ending of the novel, which had been omitted from Stanley Kubrick’s film (1971). As in the case of Trotsky’s in New York!, he wrote two versions of the score for A Clockwork Orange. At the time of his death in 1993, he was at work on an Italian version of Blooms of Dublin (Ulyssea).

Burgess composed in an angular, vigorous, often dissonant style that can be described as a hybrid of Holst and Hindemith. Much of his music is contrapuntal; few of his large-scale works do not contain a fugal section. (An abundance of extant fugues and contrapuntal sketches support his claim that he wrote at least the exposition of a fugue every morning.) Harmonically, his music tends towards dense sonorities built on 4ths; melodically, 4ths and 2nds predominate. Rhythmic vitality and metric ambiguity are characteristic as well. He wrote quickly, completing works such as Master Coale’s Pieces (1978) and the Guitar Quartet no.1 (1986) within a few days. His talent as a parodist is evident in his Elizabethan ballet score Mr W.S. (1979) and the Beethovenian score to the Singspiel version of A Clockwork Orange (1986). Music figures prominently in many of his books. Napoleon Symphony (London and New York, 1974), for example, follows the structure of Beethoven’s Symphony no.3 ‘Eroica’. The Pianoplayers (New York, 1986) is a tribute to his father Joe Wilson, who played the piano professionally in British pubs and silent movie houses.

WORKS

(selective list)

most compositions before 1970 are lost

Dramatic: Will! (film score, Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun), 1968 [film never produced]; Cyrano de Bergerac (incid music, E. Rostand, trans. Burgess), 1971, Minneapolis, 1971; Moses the Lawgiver (TV score), 1973; The Eyes of New York (video score), 1975; Trotsky’s in New York! (musical, Burgess), c1979–80; Blooms of Dublin (musical, Burgess, after J. Joyce: Ulysses), 1982, RTÉ and BBC, 2 Feb 1982; A.D. (film score), 1983; A Clockwork Orange (Singspiel, Burgess), 1986; incid music for works by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, J. Osborne

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1935; Gibraltar Ov., 1946; Passacaglia, 1946; Moto perpetuo, 1948; Partita, str, 1950; Conc., fl, str, 1951; Suite, small orch, 1956; Sym. no.2 ‘Sinfoni Malaya’, band, orch, 1957; Passacaglia, 1967; Sym. no.3, 1974–5; Pf Conc., E, 1976 [based on Preludes, pf, 1964]; Rome in Rain, pf, orch; Mr W.S., ballet suite, 1979; Vn Conc., 1979; A Glasgow Ov., 1981; In memoriam Princess Grace, str, 1982; Sym., 1984, unfinished; Concerto grosso, gui qt, orch, 1987; Gui Conc., 1987; Concertino, eng hn, orch, 1988; A Little Conc., ob, orch, 1988; Petite symphonie pour Strasbourg, 1988; A Manchester Ov., 1989; March pour une révolution 1789–1989, 1989; Meditations and Fugues, brass band, 1989; Sinfonietta for Liana, 1990

Choral: Spring Rondel (anon., Pervigilium Veneris, C. d'Orléans, trans. Burgess), SATB; Bethlehem Palmtrees (L. de Vega, trans. E. Pound), SATB, 1972; King Oedipus (cant., Burgess), chorus, orch, 1972, collab. S. Silverman; Song for St Cecilia's Day (J. Dryden), chorus, orch, 1978; The Wreck of the Deutschland (G.M. Hopkins), Bar, chorus, orch, 1982; Song by George Mikes and Anthony Burgess, 1v, chorus, fl/other wind inst, pf, 1983; In Time of Plague (T. Nashe), SATB, 1984; Weep you no more, SATB, 1984

Other vocal: Kalau tuan mudek ka-ulu (5 Malay Pantuns), S, folk insts, 1955; Pantun, 1v, a fl, xyl, 1971; The Brides of Enderby (song cycle, Burgess), S, fl, ob, vc, pf/hpd, 1977; Qt Giovanni Guglielmi (A.E. Housman), S, fl, ob, vc, pf, c1978; The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), S, spkr, fl, ob, vc, pf, 1978; Ecce puer (Joyce), 1v, pf, 1982; Strings (Joyce), 1v, pf, 1982; Man Who Has Come Through (D.H. Lawrence), song cycle, T, chbr ens, 1984; 3 Shakespeare Songs: nos.1–2, 1v, pf, no.3, chorus, pf; The Oxen (T. Hardy), 1v, pf; La pioggia nel pineto (G. D'Annunzio), T, pf, 1988

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata, g, vc, pf, 1945; Ludus polytonalis, rec ens, 1948; Wiegenlied, pf, 1952; Fantasia, 2 rec, pf, 1960; 12-Tone Polyrhythmics, pf, 1961; Song of a Northern City, pf, 1962; Preludes, pf, 1964; Minuets, e, gui, 1969; Suite, pf duet, 1972; Master Coale’s Pieces, pf, 1978; Nocturne, 4 bn, 1980; Str Qt, 1980; A Scottish Rhapsody, pf, 1981; Tango, pf, 1984; The Bad-Tempered Elec Kbd (24 Preludes and Fugues), 1985; Gui Qt no.1, 1986; Mr Burgess’s Almanack, 14 players, 1987; Qt, ob, str trio, 1987; Gui Qt no.2, 1988; Gui Qt no.3, 1989; Qt, fl, ob, vc, pf, 1990; Brief Suite for pf, 6 movs; Schnee in Savosa, pf 4 hands; series of works for harmonica; rec sonatas; Irish folksong arrs. for gui qt

Arrs., incl. works by C.M. von Weber, G. Holst

MSS in US-AUS, CDN-HNu

Principal publisher: Barnard Street, Saga

WRITINGS

This Man and Music (London, 1982) [incl. work-list]

Little Wilson and Big God (London, 1986)

You’ve Had Your Time (London, 1990)

PAUL SCHUYLER PHILLIPS

Burgess, Sally

(b Durban, 9 Oct 1953). British mezzo-soprano of South African birth. She studied in London at the RCM, then joined the ENO in 1978 as a soprano, singing Zerlina, Pamina, Cherubino, Martinů's Julietta, Jenny (Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur), Marzelline and Mimì. By 1981 her voice had deepened, and she took on mezzo travesty roles such as the Composer, Octavian, Orlovsky, Nicklausse and Handel's Sextus, as well as Charlotte, Pauline (The Gambler), Nefertiti in the British première of Akhnaten (1985), Sonetka (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), Laura in the British stage première of Dargomïzhsky's The Stone Guest (1987), Carmen, Judith (Bluebeard's Castle), the Witch (Die Königskinder) and Dulcinea (Don Quichotte). In 1983 she sang Siébel (Faust) at her Covent Garden début and Smeraldina (The Love for Three Oranges) at Glyndebourne. For Opera North she has appeared as Berlioz's Dido, Amneris, Laura (La Gioconda) and Azucena, all parts which, like Carmen, are particularly well suited to her vibrant voice and dramatic temperament. Having made her US début in 1994 at Portland, Oregon, as Carmen, Burgess sang the same role for her Metropolitan début the following year. In 1997 she sang in the first performance of Mark Anthony Turnage's Twice Through the Heart at Aldeburgh. She also enjoys a considerable career as a jazz singer, and has recorded Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio and Julie LaVerne in Show Boat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Forbes: ‘Sally Burgess’, Opera, xlii (1991), 16–21

ELIZABETH FORBES

Burghauser [Mokrý], Jarmil

(b Písek, 21 Oct 1921; d Prague, 19 Feb 1997). Czech composer and musicologist. He studied composition with Křička (1933–7) and Jeremiáš (1937–41) and conducting at the Prague Conservatory with Pavel Dědeček, Method Doležil and Talich (1941–46). Between 1945 and 1948 he continued his training at the University of Prague. He held appointments with the Prague National Theatre as Dramaturg for chamber opera (1943–4) and then choirmaster and conductor (1946–53), also lecturing at the Academy of Music (1946–9). After 1953 he worked freelance, as a composer and as an editor for the complete editions of Dvořák, Fibich and Janáček. In 1991 he was awarded a doctorate on the basis of his book (1959) on the orchestration of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. The stimulus for his compositions came first from the music of Dvořák and Novák, and at the same time he made considerable use of stylized Czech folk music (for example, in the ballet Honza a čert, ‘Honza and the Devil’). However, he then moved towards neo-classicism in the ballet Sluha dvou pánů (‘The Servant of Two Masters’, 1958) and other works, and at the beginning of the 1960s he began to seek an original means of expression using techniques including serialism (Sedm reliéfů, ‘Seven Reliefs’, for large orchestra), aleatory music (Cesty, ‘The Ways’) and unconventional colour combinations (Barvy v čase, ‘Colours in Time’).

Burghauser was one of the most accomplished all-round Czech musicians and scholars of his generation. A successful career as a composer was halted by the 1970s' ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia. Performances of his works were discouraged and he stopped composing, apart from a brief flourish in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But composition was only one of his many talents. With his Dvořák thematic catalogue (1960, 2/1996) he provided one of his fundamental tools for studying the composer. His thorough scholarship and broad grasp of his subject matter are evident in the extensive prefaces he wrote for critical editions of Dvořák librettos (Dimitrij, King and Charcoal Burner). He was a hugely experienced music editor. His skills as a composer, arranger and scholar came together in his reconstruction of Janáček’s sketches for his incidental music to Schluck und Jau. His writings include popular books and practical manuals as well as detailed large-scale evalutations, e.g. of Janáček’s entire instrumental oeuvre. Burghauser’s most controversial legacy is the Janáček collected edition, whose detailed guidelines (a book of over 200 pages) he published in 1979 as a model for all future critical editions of 20th-century composers. His approach was disputed from the outset. Many scholars as well as performing musicians with Janáček connections (Firkušný, Mackerras) were dismayed at the obliteration of Janáček’s distinctive Notenbild and by the extensive renotation, which affected pitch classes, metres, rhythms and even barring. Such were Burghauser’s force of personality and debating skills that he successfully defended his guidelines from all attacks and the Janáček collected edition has continued to appear according to his original vision.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ops: Lakomec [The Miser] (3, L. Mandaus, after Molière), 1950, Liberec, North Bohemian, 20 May 1950; Karolinka a lhář [Caroline and the Liar] (lyrical comedy, 3, Mandaus, after C. Goldoni), 1955, Olomouc, Great, 13 March 1955; Most [The Bridge] (anti-op, 2, J. Pávek), 1967, Prague, National, 31 March 1967

Ballets: Honza a čert [Honza and the Devil] (J. Rey), 1954; Sluha dvou pánů [The Servant of Two Masters] (Rey, after Goldoni), 1958; Tristram a Izalda (ballet-saga, after V. Vašut), 1969

Orch: Conc., wind, str, 1942; Toccata, small orch, 1947; Sym. Variations, 1952; Sym., d, 1959; 7 reliéfů [7 Reliefs], 1962; Cesty [The Ways], str, perc, 1964; Barvy v čase [Colours in Time], small orch, 1967; Strom života [The Tree of Life], 1968; V zemi české [In the Czech Land], sym. fantasy, 1982

5 str qts: no.1, A, 1935; no.2, C, 1939; no.3, D, 1941; no.4, B, 1944; no.5, A, 1944–5

Other chbr: Trio no.1, fl, va, gui, 1938; 5 českých tanců [5 Czech Dances], nonet, 1940, rev. wind qnt, 1955; Trio no.2, fl, va, gui, 1962; Možnosti [Possibilities], cl, cimb, perc, 1965; 10 skic [10 Sketches], fl, 1965; 5 barevných střepin [5 coloured splinters], hp, 1966; 5 zamyšlení [5 Pensive Moods], va, gui, 1966; 6 malých leptů [6 Little Etchings], pf left hand, 1970; Šera a úsvity [Dusks and Dawns], b cl, pf, 1971; Stanze dell’ansietà, fl, ob, hpd, str trio, 1971; Surfaces and Lines, vn, vc, gui, 1972

Song cycles: 4 písně [4 Songs] (Old Czech), 1942; Zahradník [The Gardener] (R. Tagore), 1944; Písně z Loretky (V. Nezval), 1951; V slezském tónu [In Silesian Folktone] (P. Bezruč), 1953; Mozartovské motivy (O. Zemek), 1957

Other works: cants., choral cycles; choruses incl. Labakam, 1956; songs; melodramas; film music; incid music; audiovisual compositions

Principal publishers: Český Hudební Fond, Dilia, Panton, Supraphon

WRITINGS

‘Kvantitativní rozbor hudebních struktur’ [The quantitative analysis of musical structures], Muzikologie, ii (1949), 147–64

‘Janáčkova tvorba komorní a symfonická’ [Janáček’s chamber and orchestral output], Muzikologie, iii (1955), 211–305

Orchestrace Dvořákových slovanských tanců (Prague, 1959)

Antonín Dvořak: thematický katalog, bibliografie přehled života a díla [Thematic catalogue, bibliography, survey of life and work] (Prague, 1960, enlarged 2/1996, addl bibliography with J. Clapham)

with P. Eben: Čtení a hra partitur [Score reading and playing] (Prague, 1963)

‘Harmonický seriální princip’, Nové cesty hudby, i (1964), 94–108

Nejen pomníky: Smetana – Dvořák – Fibich [Not only memorials] (Prague, 1966)

with A. Špelda: Akustické základy orchestrace [The acoustical rudiments of orchestration] (Prague, 1967; Ger. trans., 1971)

Antonín Dvořák (Prague, 1967)

Moderní instrumentace po Janu Rychlíkovi [Modern instrumentation after Rychlík] (Prague, 1968)

‘Janáčkovo poslední hudebně dramatické torso’ [Janáček’s last musico-dramatic fragment], HV, xv (1978), 317–25 [on incid music to Schluk und Jau, JW IX/11]

‘K problematice Janáčkova zápisku tónových výšek’ [The problem of Janáček’s notation of pitches], OM, x (1978), 149–52

with M. Šolc: Leoš Janáček: souborné kritické vydání – ediční zásady a směrnice: k notační problematice klasíků 20. století [Leoš Janáček: a critical edition of the collected works – Editorial principles and guidelines: concerning the problems in notating music of classic composers of the 20th century] (Prague, 1979)

‘Zur Bedeutung der Hindemith-Gesamtausgabe’, Hindemith-Jb, vii (1980), 7–23

‘Historie retuší ve Smetonově Mé vlasti’ [The history of retouchings in Smetana’s My Fatherland], HRo, xxxvi (1983), 180–83; Eng. trans., Czech Music, xx (1997–8), 62–71

ed.: Národnímu divadlu: vklad zakladatelské generace [To the National Theatre: the investment by the founding generation] (Prague, 1983)

‘Hudební metrika v Janáčkovo teoretickém díle’ [Musical metre in Janáček’s theoretical works], SPFFBU, H19–20 (1984), 137–53 [incl. Ger. summary]

‘The Principles of the Janáček Critical Edition’, Janáček and Czech Music: St Louis 1988, 217–20

‘Zur Entstehung der Editionsrichtlinien für die Janáček-Gesamtausgabe’, Festschrift Wolfgang Rehm zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. D. Berke and H. Heckmann (Kassel, 1989), 246–51

‘Dvořákova a Janáčkova Dumka’, HRo, lxiv (1991), 86–9; Eng. trans., Czech Music, xx (1997–8), 41–56

‘Dvořákův návrh Americké hymny’ [Dvořák’s suggestion for the American national anthem], HRo, xlv (1993), 131–4; Eng. trans., Czech Music, xx (1997–8), 56–61

‘Antonín Dvořák: ein Europäer’, Dvořák-Studien, ed. K. Döge and N. Jost (Mainz, 1994), 11–23

‘Smetana's Influence of Dvořák's Creative Evolution’, Bedřich Smetana: Prague 1994, 43–53

‘Tyranie snobisme’ [The tyranny of snobbism], HRo, xlix/7–8 (1996), 19–22 [review of Norrington’s performance of Smetana’s Má vlast]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Jarmil Burghauser: profil’, Rytmus, x (1945–6), 28

M. Beckerman: ‘Janaček's Notation Revisited: an Interview with Jarmil Burghauser’, Notes, xli/2 (1984–5), 249–58

P. Wingfield: ‘The Performer as Co-Editor: Proposals for a New Complete Edition of Janáček's Works’, Janáček and Czech Music: St Louis 1988, 243–52

M. Kuna: ‘Za Jarmilem Burghauserem’, HRo, 1/4 (1997), 24 only

M. Kuna: ‘Monumentáĺni dílo Jarmila Burghausera’ [Jarmil Burghauser’s monumental work], HV, xxxiv (1997), 445–51 [review of 2nd edn of Dvořák thematic catalogue]

G. Melville-Mason: ‘Jarmil Burghauser (1921–1997)’, Czech Music, xx (1997–8), 6–11

J. Smaczny: ‘Jarmil Burghauser: a Personal Reminiscence’, Czech Music, xx (1997–8), 11–15

OLDŘICH PUKL/JOHN TYRRELL

Burghersh, Lord [Fane, John; later 11th Earl of Westmorland]

(b London, 3 Feb 1784; d Wansford, Northants., 16 Oct 1859). English amateur musician. He was the eldest son of the 10th Earl of Westmorland, a Tory politician, and was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge (MA 1808), where he studied music under Charles Hague. His career was political, military and diplomatic. He was MP for Lyme Regis (1806–16). From 1803 to 1815 he served in various campaigns in the Napoleonic wars, at one time as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington (his wife's uncle). He became a privy councillor in 1822, a major-general in 1825, lieutenant-general in 1838 and full general in 1854. He was British envoy at Florence from 1814 to 1830, resident minister at Berlin from 1841 to 1851 (acting as mediator between Prussia and Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein dispute), and ambassador to the imperial court at Vienna from 1851 to 1855. He received many British and foreign decorations and distinctions; he succeeded to the earldom in 1841. In 1855 he retired to his country residence at Apthorpe House, Wansford, where he died.

Burghersh devoted most of his leisure hours to the study of music. Wherever his career took him, he brought together local professional musicians and profited from their instruction and entertainment. He was a good violinist and a remarkably prolific composer: this fact helped to improve the standing of the musical profession in England. But (like many aristocrats) he regarded Italy as the only source of good music. His compositions, which include seven full-length operas, are entirely in the older Italian style, and show no trace of individuality. It is their existence, rather than their quality, that is remarkable.

His most important achievement was the foundation of the Royal Academy of Music. Though several proposals for a national school of music had been put forward, it was Burghersh's energy and determination, as well as his political influence, that made the scheme a reality in 1822. As president of the RAM for its first 37 years he was tireless in raising funds for its support; he also took far more interest in the details of its administration than was expected of a gentleman amateur. His autocratic rule at times irritated the professional staff, from whom he expected obsequious obedience. He kept control of the RAM concerts, insisting on programmes of Italian operatic music and allowing no English compositions but his own. The Times in 1837 complained of these programmes scathingly:

Above all, we would exclude all the compositions to which the name of Lord Burghersh is attached. They belong to no school, have no sort of merit, and can only serve to pervert the taste, such as it is, of the pupils … . As he is known to be absolute dictator in the affairs of the Academy, the making himself judge of his own merit, is what any man of refined feeling would avoid … . The institution has degenerated into a job of Lord Burghersh, or is made to administer to his vanity and conceit.

Near the end of his life, Burghersh had an unfortunate quarrel with Sterndale Bennett on a similar issue. Bennett felt, with some justice, that he regarded the RAM students only as an object of charity, and did nothing to encourage their efforts at composition. On the whole, however, the professors submitted to the annoyance of their president's overbearing ways, and they were wise to do so, for it is unlikely that the RAM would have survived without him.

WORKS

for full list of non-operatic compositions see Cazalet

operas

unless otherwise stated, first performed at Burghersh's residence in Florence and published in Berlin

Bajazette, perf. 1821 (c1848)

Fedra (os), 17 Nov 1824, vs (1848)

Il torneo (os), carn. 1829; London, St James's, 18 July 1838, vs (London, 1839)

L'eroe di Lancastro (dramma serio, 2, G. Rossi), 13 June 1829, vs (c1845)

Lo scompilio teatrale (melodramma giocoso), carn. 1830, vs (1849)

L'assedio di Belgrado (3), 15 April 1830; as Catherine, or The Austrian Captive (after J. Cobb: The Siege of Belgrade), London, RAM, Oct 1830, vs (London, 1830)

Il ratto di Proserpina, unperf., vs (1846)

other works

3 syms.: no.1, G, Philharmonic Society, 26 May 1817; no.2, d/D; no.3, D: all GB-Lbl

Cathedral Service, 1841; Grand Mass, 4vv, orch, Berlin, 1858; Magnificat, 2 anthems, 4 hymns; 12 canzonets, arias, choruses, songs: all Ge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (‘Fane’; G.C. Boase) [incl. list of literary works]

‘Abstract of the Rules and Regulations of the Royal Academy of Music’, The Harmonicon, i (1823), 6

Review of Catherine, The Harmonicon, viii (1830), 525–6

Musical World, v (1837), 203 [state of RAM]; vi (1837), 18–21 [RAM concert]; xiv (1840), 27 [Battle Symphony from L'eroe di Lancastro]

W.W. Cazalet: ‘Biographical Sketch of the Right Hon. The Earl of Westmorland, G.C.B.’,The History of the Royal Academy of Music (London, 1854), pp.ix–xxiv

J.R. Sterndale Bennett: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge, 1907), 281–4

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Burgho, Cesare.

See Borgo, Cesare.

Burgk, Joachim a.

See Burck, Joachim a.

Burgmein, J.

See under Ricordi.

Burgmüller, Johann August Franz

(b Magdeburg, 28 April 1766; d Düsseldorf, 21 Aug 1824). German musical director and composer. Burgmüller’s father intended him for an academic career, but a love of the theatre drew him into stage management. At 20 he held a post as theatre director in Weimar and subsequently obtained similar positions in various south German centres. In 1805 he married Baroness Anne Therese von Zandt and settled in Düsseldorf the following year, remaining there until his death. He founded the Lower Rhine Festival in 1818, an important event in the German musical calendar to this day; and while principally an organizer and director, he also found time to compose many songs, sacred pieces and stage works, some of which (e.g. the Singspiel Das hätte ich nicht gedacht and the incidental music for Macbeth) contain elements of Romanticism. His sons Johann Friedrich and Norbert became prominent composers and pianists. Friedrich settled in Paris after 1832, where he established himself as a fashionable writer of songs of little merit, descriptive piano studies mostly intended for children, and stage works including a ballet, La péri (1843).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Thomas: ‘Johann August Franz Burgmüller’, Rheinische Musiker, i, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1960), 40–42

RICHARD KERSHAW

Burgmüller, (August Joseph) Norbert

(b Düsseldorf, 8 Feb 1810; d Aachen, 7 May 1836). German composer and pianist. A son of Johann August Franz Burgmüller, Norbert possessed far greater ability than his father or his brother Friedrich, but lacked their ambition and worldliness. One of his early patrons was Count von Nesselrode-Ehreshoven, who brought him to his estates near Kassel after his father's death and had him educated there. From 1826 to 1831 Burgmüller studied composition with Moritz Hauptmann and Spohr, his most important teacher.

During these years Burgmüller made frequent appearances as a pianist and composer, for instance performing his Piano Concerto op.1 in January 1830. The following year he moved to Düsseldorf, hoping to obtain a permanent appointment in the flourishing musical atmosphere of that city, but the project came to nothing. He was suffering very frequent epileptic fits at this time, and his decline in social status began, partly because of financial problems but also because of the reclusive life he led, remaining in contact with only a few close friends including the poet C.D. Grabbe.

Burgmüller's compositions attracted an increasing amount of attention, and won the approval of Mendelssohn, who performed his Symphony in C minor op.2, among other works. But his social situation remained insecure, and he was considering moving to Paris when he died of an epileptic fit while staying at Aachen to take the waters. In an impassioned obituary, Schumann wrote: ‘Since the early death of Schubert, nothing more deplorable has happened than that of Burgmüller’ (Gesammelte Schriften, 111, 145), and a funeral march composed by Mendelssohn himself (op.103) accompanied him to the grave.

During Burgmüller's short career his musical language underwent a remarkable development. While the chromaticism of the early string quartets (op.4 and op.7) reflects not only his passionate Romantic feeling but also the influence of his teacher Spohr, he soon moved on to a classical fluency of style which also marks several of his songs. On the other hand his Piano Concerto op.1 in F minor, a key seldom previously used in an instrumental concerto, is notable for its large-scale form, particularly in the very expansive orchestral introduction, and is not solely designed for brilliant virtuosity. The same formal expansiveness distinguishes the Symphony no.1. The Second Symphony (in D major) remained unfinished. The finale breaks off after 58 bars, and Amalie von Sybel, in a letter to Karl Immermann, wrote that Burgmüller had ‘not been able to find’ the continuation of the finale, and that it was ‘half comical, half moving, to hear him answer enquiries with the words: “It's not come yet”.’ Schumann applied himself to this work during his years in Düsseldorf; he orchestrated the scherzo and thought of completing the finale, but gave up the idea.

In the second half of the 19th century several of those who championed music of the school of Mendelssohn and Schumann tried to reintroduce a number of Burgmüller's chamber works, songs and overtures into the repertory, as well as his two symphonies and the very substantial Rhapsody for piano op.13, which anticipates Brahms. They also had some of his scores printed for the first time, but Burgmüller's music has really been rediscovered only in 1986 in connection with the 150th anniversary of his death, and with more intensive research into the early 19th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Eckert: Norbert Burgmüller (Augsburg, 1932)

G. Thomas: ‘Burgmüller, Norbert’, Rheinische Musiker i, ed. K.G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1960)

K. Tischendorf: Norbert Burgmüller: Leben und Werk (Köln, 1980)

U. Tank: ‘Norbert Burgmüller: ein Frühvollendeter der Schumman-Zeit’, NZM, cxlvii/7–8, (1986), 22–3

B. Appel: ‘Werkfragmente in Robert Schumman's Skizzen zur Messe op.147’, Schumann in Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf 1988

C.H. Porter: ‘The reign of dilettanti: Düsseldorf from Mendelssohn to Schumann’, MQ, lxiii (1989), 476–512

H. Vogt: ‘Romantische Sinfonik, frühvollendet: zu den Sinfonien Norbert Bürgmullers’, Musica, no.43 (1989), 126–33

E.F. Jensen: ‘A New Generation: Juan Arriaga and Norman Burgmüller’, Walls of Circumstance: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Music (Metuchen, NJ, 1992) 1–19

C. Bolzan: Norbert Burgmüller: La vita e l'opera di un grande sinfonista della Germania del primo ’800 (Treviso, 1995)

K.M. Kopitz: Der Düsseldorfer Komponist Norbert Burgmüller (Kleve, 1998)

MATTHIAS WIEGANDT

Burgo, Cesare.

See Borgo, Cesare.

Burgon, Geoffrey (Alan)

(b Hambledon, Hants., 15 July 1941). British composer. An early ambition to become a jazz trumpeter gained him entry to the GSM, London (1960), where he studied composition with Peter Wishart and trumpet with Bernard Brown; he later studied composition privately with Lennox Berkeley and received the Prince Pierre of Monaco Award for his Five Sonnets of John Donne in 1968. He abandoned his career as a freelance trumpeter in 1971 in order to concentrate on composition, providing scores for BBC television and ballet companies, and achieving his first major concert success in 1976 when his Requiem was performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. Later television scores earned him considerable popular exposure: the Nunc dimittis from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (BBC) entered the UK pop charts in 1979, while the soundtrack album from Brideshead Revisited (Granada) achieved gold status. His output of concert works remained prolific, and in 1992 he was composer-in-residence at the Bury St Edmunds Festival.

Burgon’s early stylistic development was influenced by both medieval music and the Balinese gamelan (the latter celebrated in Gending, 1968), while his incidental music at times reveals the influences of Britten and the earlier English pastoral school. The unusual accessibility of his idiom, in which expressionistic boldness can co-exist with strikingly simple material and a broad melodic appeal, has remained constant since his early works for children and amateurs in the 1960s. His interest in metaphysical and mystical poetry inspired a series of song cycles to widely contrasted texts, many of which feature the countertenor voice: among the most intense are his settings of the Renaissance Spanish poetry by St John of the Cross (Noche oscura, Canciones del Alma, Veni spiritus and the Requiem).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Epitaph for Sir Walter Raleigh (music theatre), 1968; The Calm (ballet), 1974; Goldberg’s Dream (Running Figures) (ballet), 1975; Step at a Time (ballet), 1976; The Fall of Lucifer (music theatre), 1977; Songs, Lamentations and Praises (ballet), 1979; Orpheus (music theatre), 1982; Mass (ballet), 1984; The Trial of Prometheus (ballet), 1988; Hard Times (op, 2, Burgon, after C. Dickens), 1991

Orch: Gending, wind, perc, 1968; Alleluia nativitas, 1970; Cantus alleluia, 1973; Tpt Conc. ‘The Turning World’, 1993; Perc Conc. ‘City Adventures’, 1996; Fantasia on R.E.X., vc, orch, 1997; Pf Conc., 1997; A Different Dawn, 1999

Vocal: Acquainted with Night, Ct, hp, timp, str, 1965; 5 Sonnets of John Donne, S, Mez, fl, ob, cl, b cl, hn, pf, timp, vc, 1967; Noche oscura, 6vv, 1974; Canciones del Alma, 2 Ct/Mez, 13 str, 1975; Requiem, S, Ct/A, T, SATB, orch, 1976; Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, 2 S, opt. tpt, org, opt. str, 1979; Veni spiritus, S, Bar, SATB, orch, 1979; Hymn to St Thomas of Hereford, SATB, orch, 1981; The World Again, S, orch, 1983; Revelations, S, T, Bar, SATB, orch, 1984; Title Divine, S, orch, 1986; A Vision, T, str, 1991; First was the World, 1994; Merciless Beauty, 1996

Film, TV scores: Dr Who, 2 series, 1975; Monty Python’s Life of Brian (film score, dir. T. Jones), 1979; Testament of Youth, 1979; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1979; The Dogs of War (film score, dir. J. Irvin), 1980; Brideshead Revisited, 1981; Bleak House, 1985; Turtle Diary (film score, dir. Irvin), 1985; The Chronicles of Narnia, 1988–9; Robin Hood (film score, dir. Irvin), 1990; Martin Chuzzlewit, 1994

Principal publisher: Chester

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Fawkes: ‘Burgon Revisited’, Classical Music (15 June 1991)

J. Williams: ‘Geoffrey Burgon: Scoring Martin Chuzzlewit’, Music from the Movies (1994–5), wint., 34–5

MERVYN COOKE

Burgos, Rafael Frühbeck de.

See Frühbeck de burgos, rafael.

Burgundy.

French region, south-east of Paris. During the Middle Ages Burgundy was successively a kingdom (c500–800), a group of counties (800–956) and a duchy (956–1477). Under the dukes of Burgundy of the house of Valois (1364–1477), the Burgundian domain became the most powerful political entity in western Europe (fig.1) and the Burgundian court a centre of musical activity. The importance of the dukes of Burgundy as patrons of music was such that the entire era has come to be called ‘the Burgundian epoch’ and the composers of the period ‘the Burgundian school’. These designations do not mean that music or musicians native to Burgundy were important. The Burgundian court was a cosmopolitan centre, French in language and culture, and the music that emanated from it was international in style.

For music history, the term ‘Burgundy’ is geographically misleading. It is important to note that the ‘Burgundian era’ in music had almost nothing to do with either the Duchy of Burgundy (with its capital in Dijon and a major residence in Beaune) or with the adjoining County of Burgundy, also known as Franche Comté (with its capital in Besançon). Initially the dukes were mainly resident in Paris; and their culture was entirely French. But with the onset of political difficulties surrounding Duke John the Fearless the centre of activity moved to the richest acquisitions of Philip the Bold, namely Flanders and Artois; after about 1410 the Burgundian court was almost permanently resident in the Low Countries, though the dukes were normally buried in Burgundy and they retained an accounting office there (which became subsidiary to the far larger accounting office at Lille established in 1419). When Philip the Good accessed Brabant, Hainault and Holland, he had amassed a formidable economical entity that also had considerable political power, since he owed allegiance to the King of France for some of his lands but to the Emperor for others.

For this reason, the grand flowering of the ‘Burgundian’ era in music happened in the courts at Lille, Arras, Bruges and (from about 1430) particularly Brussels – then, as now, a reluctantly French-speaking city within a thoroughly Flemish area. The chapel singers were almost all drawn from the great churches of the Low Countries. That is why the word ‘Burgundian’ has been a continued matter of dispute among musicologists, many of them preferring terms like ‘Franco-Flemish’, ‘Netherlandish’, ‘Low Countries’, ‘Flemish’ or ‘Northern’.

The domain ruled by the dukes of Burgundy was a patchwork of disparate territories and not a geographical unity (fig.1). Philip the Bold (1364–1404), the first duke, formally received the duchy of Burgundy from his brother, King Charles V, in 1364, and by marriage he added to it the county of Flanders with its wealthy commercial centres of Ghent, Bruges and Ieper. John the Fearless (1404–19) maintained and consolidated the Burgundian holdings at a time when France was being dismembered by the events of the Hundred Years War. Holland, Brabant, Hainault, Limbourg and Luxembourg were added to the patrimony during the long reign of Philip the Good (1419–67). A precipitate attempt by Charles the Bold (1467–77) to seize new territories between Burgundy and the Low Countries led to his untimely death at the battle of Nancy (1477). The duchy of Burgundy was then annexed to the French crown lands, but the Burgundian possessions in the Low Countries were passed to Charles’s daughter and only heir, Marie of Burgundy (1477–82), and ultimately to her son, Philip the Fair (1482–1506).

Such an illustrious dynasty naturally supported a large, resplendent court. The dukes patronized music on a munificent scale and took a personal interest in the art. Charles the Bold, for example, played the harp and is said to have composed chansons and motets (Fallows, D1978, pp.300–24). The musical institutions the dukes maintained consisted of two totally separate forces: a chapel and an assemblage of minstrels.

The chapel of Burgundy was first organized by Philip the Bold in the spring of 1384, and by the time of his death in 1404 it had grown to 28 in number, surpassing in size and splendour the chapels of the king of France and the pope of Avignon. Eight of the new Burgundian singers were engaged from the household of the recently deceased count of Flanders and eight others directly from the papal court. After his father’s death Duke John the Fearless was forced to disband the organization, although he did maintain three to five choirboys under the direction of Johannes Tapissier and later Nicolas Grenon. In summer 1415 the chapel was reconstituted and included the composers Pierre Fontaine, Nicolas Grenon and Cardot. John the Fearless drew most of his singers from the cathedral and collegiate churches of northern France. The Burgundian chapel achieved its greatest fame under Duke Philip the Good. In 1445 it numbered 17 chaplains, two clerks and four sommeliers (porters) and was reported to have been ‘among the largest and best maintained chapels that could be found anywhere’. Besides Fontaine, the ducal musicians included Binchois, Constans Breuwe, Robert Morton and Gilles Joye, all of whom composed. Hayne van Ghizeghem was in the service of Charles the Bold as a singer and chamber valet, and Busnoys was a musician at Charles’s court. The poet Martin le Franc asserted in Le champion des dames (c1440) that he saw Du Fay at the court; in 1446 Du Fay was described as ‘capellanus’ of the duke. Although his appointment at Burgundy was undoubtedly only an honorary one, he specified in his will that Duke Charles should receive from him six books of ‘divers chanteries’.

A member of the chapel of Burgundy was expected to serve as priest, performer, composer, teacher and scribe, assisting at the daily celebration of the Mass and canonical hours. The liturgy at Burgundy was normally sung in monophonic plainchant. On the major feast days of the church year, however, the divine service was made more splendid by the interpolation of polyphonic hymns, mass movements and motets sung from the music books of the chapel library. John the Fearless owned three manuscripts of sacred polyphony and two volumes of works by Machaut; Philip the Good and Charles the Bold added to the collection. Yet despite the attention they gave to religious observance, the dukes of Burgundy at their worldly, luxury-loving court also encouraged secular music.

Much of the secular music in Burgundy was provided by the resident minstrels. Instrumentalists from France, England, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sicily and the Low Countries were employed. Most played the ‘haut’ (loud) instruments (trumpets, tambourins, bagpipes and shawms); the ‘bas’ (soft) instruments (vielles, harps, flutes, crumhorns and lutes) were less favoured by the dukes. The trumpets and shawms heard at Burgundy were invariably made in the Low Countries, usually at Sluis, Bruges or Brussels. Banquets, baptisms, weddings, jousts, ceremonial entries and conferences of state all occasioned an instrumental display. The Feast of the Pheasant given by Philip the Good in Lille on 17 February 1454 achieved especial renown: 28 minstrels placed in a pie played various instruments including a trumpet, a bagpipe, a crumhorn, tambourins, lutes, flutes and vielles. Like the singers of the ducal chapel, the minstrels of the court were required to follow their lord in all his progresses, even when he went to war.

After the death of Charles the Bold at the battle of Nancy the musical institutions of the court of Burgundy were maintained by Marie of Burgundy and her husband Maximilian I. In 1493 they passed to Charles’s grandson, Philip the Fair; he retained such talented composers as Pierre de La Rue and Alexander Agricola, and so increased the size of the chapel that by the time of his death in 1506 it numbered 33. Under Philip’s son and successor, Emperor Charles V, the musical traditions of the dukes of Burgundy merged with those of the Spanish Habsburgs.

Despite the court’s cultural and musical fame, reported mainly by chroniclers of the time, there is a remarkable shortage of direct evidence for the actual music performed at the court. In the 1980s it became gradually clear that the famous chansonniers of the 1460s and 70s normally called ‘Burgundian’ (among them D-W 287 Extrav, DK-Kk Thott.291 8°, F-Dm 517 and US-Wc M2.1 L25) were almost certainly copied in central France, around the French royal courts. The only musical manuscripts of the 15th century that can possibly be connected with the court of Burgundy are the chansonnier E-E V.111.24 of the late 1430s, the chansonnier fragments D-Mbs cgm 902 (early 1440s) and Mus.Ms.9659 (1460s), the elegant Basse Danse manuscript B-Br 9085 (dated variously between 1465 and 1500) and the choirbooks B-Br 5557 (1470s) and I-Nn VI E 40 (1470s, see L’homme armé); these last three can be associated with Charles the Bold's very special enthusiasm for music. While it can be assumed that most of Binchois’ sacred music – much of it extremely simple – was composed for the court chapel, it is harder to feel confident about much of the other music by the few named composers in the court: it seems increasingly clear, for example, that much of the surviving music by Busnoys was composed before he arrived at the court in 1465; and all but the very earliest songs of Hayne van Ghizeghem seem to be from after he disappears from the court records in 1477. Only after 1500, with the rise of the great scribal workshop later associated with Pierre Alamire is there a substantial body of surviving manuscripts from the court circle.

While the exceptionally extensive and detailed financial records of the duchy report regular and very high payments to the court musicians, there seem to be only two moments in the 15th century when ducal patronage of music was active and enthusiastic. The first was around the time when Duke Philip the Good married Isabella of Portugal (1430), at the same time founding the Order of the Golden Fleece – an institution that seems to have patronized music enthusiastically and has often been associated with the earliest group of masses on the melody L’homme armé. The second was with the brief and stormy reign of Charles the Bold, who has left a splendidly detailed account of the duties of his musicians (ed. in Fallows, D1983); it was evidently Charles who brought Busnoys, Morton and Hayne to the court.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Chronicles. B Political History. C Documentation. D Musical History. E The Order of the Golden Fleece. F Terminology.

a: chronicles

E. de Monstrelet: Chroniques, ed. L.-C. Douët-d’Arcq (Paris, 1857–62)

M. d’Eschouchy: Chronique, ed. du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris, 1863–4)

G. Chastellain: Oeuvres, ed. H. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1863–6)

O. de la Marche: Mémoires, ed. H. Beaune and J. Maulbon d’Arbeaumont (Paris, 1883–8)

P. de Commynes: Mémoires, ed. J. Calmette and G. Curville (Paris, 1924–5)

J. Molinet: Chroniques, ed. G. Doutrepont and O. Jodogne (Brussels, 1935–7)

b: political history

R. Vaughan: Philip the Bold: the Formation of the Burgundian State (London, 1962)

R. Vaughan: John the Fearless: the Growth of Burgundian Power (London, 1966)

R. Vaughan: Philip the Good: the Apogee of the Burgundian State (London, 1970)

R. Vaughan: Charles the Bold: the last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London, 1973)

R. Vaughan: Valois Burgundy (London, 1975)

c: documentation

H. Vander Linden: Itinéraires de Charles, duc de Bourgogne, Marguerite d’York et Marie de Bourgogne (Brussels, 1936)

A. de Lagrange: Itinéraire d’Isabelle de Portugal (Lille, 1938)

H. Vander Linden: Itinéraires de Philippe le Bon, de the Bourgogne (1419–1467), et de Charles, comte de Charolais (1433–1467) (Brussels, 1940)

d: musical history

StrohmM

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d’archéoloie et d’histoire de l’art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (Strasbourg, 1939)

E.H. Bowles: ‘Instruments at the Court of Burgundy (1363–1467)’, GSJ, vi (1953), 41–51

D. Fallows: Robert Morton’s Songs (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1978)

C. Wright: Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419: a Documentary History (Henryville, PA, 1979)

D. Fallows: ‘Specific Information on the Ensembles for Composed Polyphony, 1400–1474’, Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, ed. S. Boorman (Cambridge, 1983), 109–59

P.M. Higgins: Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late Fifteenth-century France and Burgundy (diss., Princeton U., 1987)

A.E. Planchart: ‘Guillaume Du Fay's Benefices and his Relationship to the Court of Burgundy’, EMH, viii (1988), 117–71

W.H. Kemp: Burgundian Court Song in the Time of Binchois: the Anonymous Chansons of El Escorial, MS V.III.24 (Oxford, 1990)

e: the order of the golden fleece

F. de Reiffenberg: Histoire de l’Ordre de la Toison d’Or (Brussels, 1830)

H. Kervyn de Lettenhove: La Toison d’Or (Brussels, 1907)

W. Prizer: ‘Music and Ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, EMH, v (1985), 113–53

R. Taruskin: ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L'homme armé Tradition’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 255–93 [with responses by B. Haggh, D. Giller and D. Fallows, followed by a counter-response from Taruskin in JAMS, xl (1987), 139–53]

J. van Benthem: ‘A Waif, a Wedding and a Worshipped Child: Josquin's Ut Phebi radiis and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, TVNM, xxxvii (1987), 64–81

A. Roth: ‘L'homme armé, le doubté turcq, l'ordre de la toison d'or: zur “Begleitmusik” der letzten grossen Kreuzzugsbewegung nach dem Fall von Konstantinopel’, Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter, ed. D. Altenburg and others (Sigmaringen, 1991), 469–79

B. Haggh: ‘The Archives of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Music’, JRMA, cxx (1995), 1–43

f: terminology

P.H. Lang: ‘The So-Called Netherlands Schools’, MQ, xxv (1939), 48–59

V. Féderov: ‘Peut-on parler d'une école bourguignonne de musique au XVe siècle?’, Cahiers techniques de l’art, ii (1949), 29–36

F. Van der Mueren: ‘École bourguignonne, école nérlandaise au début de la Renaissance’, RBM, xii (1958), 53–65

H.L. Clarke: ‘Musicians of the Northern Renaissance’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966), 67–81

CRAIG WRIGHT/DAVID FALLOWS

Buri, Bernard de.

See Bury, Bernard de.

Burian, Emil František

(b Plzeň, 11 June 1904; d Prague, 9 Aug 1959). Czech composer, stage director and writer. His father, Emil Burian, and more especially his uncle Karel Burian were outstanding singers, and his mother taught singing. He studied at the Prague Conservatory, graduating from Foerster’s composition masterclasses in 1927. Before completing his studies he was active in the Prague avant-garde theatre as director, dramatist and actor for the Modern Studio and the Artistic Society (1923). He also appeared as an actor and musician in Voskovec and Werich’s theatre Na Slupi (1925) and in the Dada Theatre (1927). From 1920 he organized with his mother concerts of new works, and in 1924 founded Přítomnost, a society for contemporary music. In 1927 he founded the Voice Band, which attracted attention at the Siena ISCM Festival and on an Italian tour in 1928. From 1929 to 1932 he worked as a director in Brno, then in Olomouc, then again in Brno where, with the literary critic Václavek, he formed the left-wing cultural organization Levá Fronta. Back in Prague he worked for the cabaret ‘Červené eso’ as a jazz band leader, vocalist, composer and director, and in 1933 established his own theatre, D 34, where he was able to concentrate his musical and dramatic efforts. During the German occupation the theatre was closed and Burian was sent to a concentration camp, but after returning to Czechoslovakia he reopened D 34 and worked as a director in Brno (1945–6) and at the musical theatre Karlín, Prague (1946). He also became active politically, giving regular radio commentaries, founding his own weekly paper Kulturní politika and acting as a deputy to the National Assembly.

Despite the variety of Burian’s spheres of interest, composition remained the foundation of his creative work. He began to write in a Straussian style, shown in the first operas Alladine a Palomid (1923) and Před slunce východem (‘Before Sunrise’, 1924), but he was soon influenced by jazz, Les Six and dadaism. The ballet Fagot a flétna (‘The Bassoon and the Flute’, 1925) and the parody opera buffa Mastičkář (‘The Quack’, 1925) document this new orientation. At about the same time he became interested in folk music. This interest developed, and his enthusiastic use of fairground songs, urban music and national songs culminated in the folk play with songs and dances Vojna (‘The War’, 1935), influenced by Janáček and, in particular, by Stravinsky’s The Wedding. An important aspect of Burian’s activity in the 1920s was his work with the Voice Band, a choral group whose material, provided by Burian, stressed speech sounds, with onomatopoeic effects and non-verbal vocal utterances. Their performances were usually accompanied by a percussion ensemble, piano and jazz group. The most interesting of Burian’s works for the Voice Band was Máj (‘May’, 1936); he never returned after the war to the methods developed here.

Another major work is the opera Maryša (1938), for which Burian was composer, dramatist and director. Continuing Janáček’s melodic style, the vocal parts often take a middle position between singing and excited speech. The naturalist approach is furthered in the stark harmony, the violent interjections and the general expressive quality of the orchestral writing, but the promise of the work was never fully developed. After World War II Burian adopted the precepts of socialist realism, composing political and work songs and a few orchestral pieces. His best work had been completed in the inter-war period, when he was a leader of the Czech avant garde. Although he lacked strong individuality, he knew how to weave the techniques of others into clever, grotesque or amusing music.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Alladine a Palomid (op, after M. Maeterlinck), 1923 rev, and completed version, Prague, 14 Oct 1959

Před slunce východem [Before Sunrise] (op, 1, B. Bělohlávek), 1924, Prague, 24 Nov 1925

Fagot a flétna [The Bassoon and the Flute] (ballet), 1925

Mastičkář [The Quack] (parody ob, V. Lacina and J. Trojan), 1925, Prague, 23 May 1928, rev. with new lib. by R. Krátký, 1955

Bubu z Montparnassu [Bubu from Montparnasse] (jazz lyric op, after C.-L. Philippe), 1927, Prague, 20 March 1999

Milenci z kiosku [The Lovers from the Market Stall] (vaudeville, after V. Nezval), Prague, 13 Nov 1935

Vojna [The War] (folk play), 1935

Maryša (op, 5 scenes, Burian, after A. and V. Mrštík), op.81, 1938, Brno, 16 April 1940 (Prague, 1964)

Opera z pouti [Country Fair Scenes], Prague, 28 Jan 1956

Račte odpuslit [Please Forgive me] (Krátký), 13 Oct 1956

other works

Works for Voice Band: Requiem, chorus, jazz band, 1927; Máj [May] (cant., after K.H. Mácha), op.91, solo vv, chorus, hp, 2 pf, timp, 1936

Song cycles: Koktaily (V. Nezval), 1v, jazz band, 1926; Dětské písně [Children’s Songs] (Nezval), 1v, chbr orch, 1937

6 str qts incl.: no.3, 1937; no.4, op.95, 1947; no.5, op.99, 1947; no.6, op.101, 1948

Other inst: American Suite, 2 pf, 1926; Sonata romantica, vn, pf, 1937; Nonetto, C, wind qnt, vn, va, vc, db, 1938; Siréna, op.96, sym., 1947 [after film score]; Sym., op.100, pf, orch, 1948; Accdn Conc., 1949; Prědehra socialismu, ov., 1950

WRITINGS

O moderní ruské hudbě (Prague, 1926)

Polydynamika (Prague, 1926)

Jazz (Prague, 1928)

Památník bratří Burianů [Almanac of the Burian brothers] (Prague, 1929)

Pražská dramaturgie (Prague, 1938)

Emil Burian (Prague, 1947)

Karel Burian (Prague, 1948)

Divadlo za našich dnů [The theatre of our days] (Prague, 1962)

Nejen o hudbě: texty 1925–1938 [Not only about music: texts 1925–1938], ed. V. Paclt (Prague, 1981)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (J. Bek) [incl. further bibliography]

J. Volek: ‘Na okraj Burianovy Maryši’ [On the margin of Burian’s Maryša], Rytmus, x (1945–6), no.8, pp.13–15

K. Bundálek: ‘Působení J. Honzla a E.F. Buriana v brněnském divadle na počátku třicátých let’ [Honzl and Burian’s work in the Brno theatre at the beginning of the 1930s], Sborník JAMU, ii (1960), 77–104

M. Obst: ‘Dramatizace v režisérském díle E.F. Buriana’ [Dramatization in Burian’s work as a director], Divadlo, xvii (1966), no.10, pp.43–50

B. Karásek: ‘Emil František Burian – skladatel’, HV, v (1968), 522–47 [with Eng. summary]

J. Jiránek: ‘Burianův přínos slohovému vývoji české hudby meziválečného období’ [Burian’s contribution to the stylistic evolution of Czech music of the interwar period], HV, viii (1971), 277–87 [with Eng. summary]

J. Bajer: ‘Vztah vyjadřovacích prostředků hudby, poezie a divadla v Burianově tvorbě dvacátých a třicátých let’ [The relationship of the means of expression of music, poetry and theatre in Burian’s works of the 1920s and 30s], HV, viii (1971), 288–97 [with Eng. summary]

B. Srba: Poetické divadlo E.F. Buriana [The poetic theatre of E.F. Burian] (Prague, 1971)

J. Bajer: ‘Burianova opera Dítě’, Česká hudba světu, svět české hudbě [Czech music to the world, the world to Czech music] (Prague, 1974), 269–86

J. Kladiva: E.F. Burian (Prague, 1982)

L. Šíp: Česká opera e její tvůrci [Czech opera and its creators] (Prague, 1983), 229–34

J. Bek: Avantgarda: ke genezi socialistického realismu v české hudbě [The avant garde: development of socialist realism in Czech music] (Prague, 1984)

H. Valentová: ‘Bubu z Montparnassu: lyrická opera E.F. Buriana’, OM, xxvii/1 (1995), 3–12

JOSEF BEK

Burian, Karel [Burrian, Carl]

(b Rousinov, 12 Jan 1870; d Senomaty, nr Prague, 25 Sept 1924). Bohemian tenor. He made his first appearance at Brno on 28 March 1891 as Jeník in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride; after singing the title role in the same composer’s Dalibor the next day, he was offered a contract. By 1899 he had reached the National Theatre in Prague, but he did not remain for long with that company, having by then become a Heldentenor much in demand in Germany. For over a decade before World War I Burian was a leading and much-admired tenor at the Dresden Opera, where he made a powerful impression in the première (1905) of Strauss’s Salome as Herod, repeating this role in the first productions of the opera in both New York and Paris in 1907. Wagner was the mainstay of his international repertory; as well as singing Tristan in the Hungarian première of Tristan und Isolde, he sang several of the chief Wagner roles at Covent Garden in four seasons between 1904 and 1914, and virtually all of them (Die Meistersinger excepted) during seven seasons at the Metropolitan. He appeared in Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1908. In Burian’s numerous but somewhat primitive recordings, the penetrating clarity of his tone is more in evidence than the golden quality for which he was also praised. Reminiscences of Mahler and Toscanini are included in his memoirs, Z mých pameti (Prague, 1913).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ČSHS [incl. list of writings and extensive bibliography]

GV (J. Dostal and R. Celletti; T. Kaufmann)

E.F. Burian: Karel Burian (Prague, 1948)

J. Dennis: ‘Karel Burian’, Record Collector, xviii (1968–9), 149–64 [incl. discography by D. Brew and G. Sova]

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR

Burke, Solomon

(b Philadelphia, 1936). American soul and gospel singer. He came from a family of Christian ministers and became known as the ‘Wonder-Boy Preacher’ after appearing on the radio in Philadelphia at the age of nine. Burke developed what he called his ‘rock and soul music’ in the early 1960s, recording hit versions of Harlan Howard's country and western song Just out of Reach (Of my Two Empty Arms) and Cry to me. Most of his best recordings were melodramatic ballads such as If You Need Me and Goodbye Baby, although the insistent dance song Everybody needs somebody to love was one of his biggest hits. Like Ray Charles, Burke helped to shape the soul music genre by adapting the vocal motifs of black American religious music to secular themes. This approach was in turn a major influence on Mick Jagger, and the Rolling Stones later recorded versions of Everybody needs somebody to love and Cry to me. By the 1980s Burke's histrionic but controlled approach was out of fashion, and he subsequently emphasized his gospel music roots in recordings on which he was billed as ‘Bishop Burke of the House of God for All People’.

DAVE LAING

Burke, Thomas [Tom] (Aspinall)

(b Leigh, Lancs., 2 March 1890; d Sutton, Surrey, 13 Sept 1969). English tenor. He studied at the Manchester College of Music and the RAM, and in Italy with Ernesto Colli and De Lucia. He made his début at the Teatro Dal Verme, Milan, in 1917 as the Duke in Rigoletto. He first sang at Covent Garden in 1919 as Rodolfo, returning in 1920 as Rinuccio and Luigi in the English premières of Gianni Schicchi and Il tabarro. Puccini said of him: ‘I have never heard my music sung so beautifully’. He returned to Covent Garden in 1927 and 1928, when he sang Turiddu. Burke sang opera and song alike with full-blooded tone and extraordinary conviction, as his recordings amply confirm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Winstanley: ‘Thomas Burke’, 78 rpm, no.8 (1969), 31–4 [incl. discography]

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Burke of Thomond.

See Thumoth, burk.

Burkhanov, Mutal' (Mutavakkil) Muzainovich

(b Bukhara, 5 May 1916). Uzbek composer. He graduated from the Academic Research Institute of Uzbek Music and Choreography in Samarkand in 1932, and from the Moscow Conservatory in 1949, where he studied composition with Vasilenko and conducting with Stolyarov. Burkhanov played the tambura at the Khamza Drama Theatre, Tashkent (1932–3); he was artistic director of Tashkent Radio (1950–1) and chairman of the Uzbek Composers' Union (1955–60).

Burkhanov has written for an orchestra of Uzbek folk instruments, but his compositions are predominantly choral; he is the composer of the first Uzbek polyphonic choral works, including the music for the national anthem of the Uzbek Republic (text by T. Fattakh, 1947). He unites Uzbek monophonic traditions with European polyphony; the choral works interweave homophonic and polyphonic styles and freely interpret rhythmic and modal features of Uzbek folk music, such as the ostinato usul' rhythm and consonance in fourths and fifths. These pieces display original and subtle instrumentation and freshly expressive coloration. Burkhanov's numerous arrangements of the folksongs of Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Kara-Kalpak, Iranian and of other peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East are well known. Burkhanov established a number of new genres in Uzbek music.

WORKS

Doch' Uzbekistana [Daughter of Uzbekistan], orch suite, 1938; Pesnya bez slov [Song without Words], Uzbek folk orch, 1943; Tsvetushchiy Uzbekistan [Blossoming Uzbekistan] (cant., Kh. Alimzhan, Uygun), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1949; Mavrigi, Uzbek folk orch, 1950; Partiya – nashe schast'ye [The Party is our Happiness] (Uygun), chorus, 1952; Ogon' lyubvi [Fire of Love] (ballade, Kh. Gulyam), 1v, orch, 1959; Partii Lenina [To the Party of Lenin] (ode, Gulyam), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1959; Alisher Navoy (A. Arapov), solo vv, chorus, orch, 1968; Golos serdtsa [Voice of the Heart] (romance), 1v, orch, 1970

Film scores, incid music, choral arrs. of folksongs from central Asia, various songs and romances (Lakhuti, Uygun, Mashrab, Tula)

Principal publishers: Gosizdat UzSSR, Muzïka, Sovetskiy Kompozitor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Vinogradov: ‘Narodnïye khorï M. Burkhanova’ [Burkhanov's folk choruses], SovM (1953), no.2, 58–60

N. Yanov-Yanovskaya: ‘Kompozitor Mutal' Burkhanov’, Muzïkal'naya zhizn' (1972), no.7, p.17 only

Ch. Nasïrova: ‘Novïye proizvedeniya M. Burkhanova’ [New works by Burkhanov], Uzbekskaya muzïka na sovremennom ėtape, ed. N. Yanov-Yanovskaya (Tashkent, 1977)

ALLA VLADIMIROVNA GRIGOR'YEVA

Burkhard [Burchard], Johannes

(b Niederhaslach, Alsace, c1450; d Rome, 16 May 1506). Alsatian Cleric and liturgist. Born in a town near Strasbourg, Burkhard began his ecclesiastical career in that city. By 1467 he was in Rome, where he rose through the ranks of the papal curia. An assiduous collector of benefices and curial offices, he passed through the households of various cardinals to become a member of the papal household and, as of 29 November 1483, one of the masters of ceremonies in the papal chapel. While still holding this position, he was appointed Bishop of Orte in 1503. As a master of ceremonies, Burkhard collaborated in producing the definitive papal Caeremoniale and kept a diary (a major source for the history of the period) recording in detail ceremonies and other occurrences at the papal court. Although the presence of the papal choir is often noted, Burkhard did not describe the specifics of musical performance except when referring to innovations, mishaps and occasions when something happened that he did not like. Thus we learn about various mistakes made by celebrants and papal singers, about the new use of polyphony in the singing of the Passion (apparently introduced from Spain), and about the motet Gaude Roma vetus, written in honour of Alexander VI to a text by Johannes Tinctoris (the music is lost). The Pontificale romanum of 1485 is Burkhard's revision of a Pontificale written by Agostino Patrizi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Thuasne, ed.: Johannis Burchardi Diarium sive urbanarum commentarii (Paris, 1883–5)

J. Lesellier: ‘Les méfaits du cérémoniaire Jean Burkhard’, Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire, xliv (1927), 11–34

P. Paschini: ‘A proposito di Giovanni Burckardo cerimoniere pontificio’, Archivio della Società romana di storia patria, li (1928), 33–59

A. Schering: ‘Musikalisches aus Joh. Burckards Liber notarum (1483–1506)’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin, 1929/R), 171–5

E. Celani, ed.: Johannis Burckardi Liber notarum, Rerum italicarum scriptores, xxxii (Bologna, 1940), 1906ff

M. Schuler: ‘Spanische Musikeinflüsse in Rom um 1500’, AnM, xxv (1970), 27–36

M. Dykmans: L'oeuvre de Patrizi Piccolomini ou le cérémonial papal de la première renaissance, i, Studi e Testi, ccxciii (Vatican City, 1980), 70*–97* [chap. ‘La collaboration de Burckard’]

R. Sherr: ‘The “Spanish Nation” in the Papal Chapel’, EMc, xx (1992), 601–9

RICHARD SHERR

Burkhard, Paul

(b Zürich, 21 Dec 1911; d Zell, 6 Sept 1977). Swiss composer and conductor. After studies at the Literargymnasium and the Zürich Conservatory, he was conductor at the Berne Stadttheater (1932–4) and conductor and house composer for the Zürich Schauspielhaus (1939–45). He also served as director of the Beromünster RO (1944–57). From 1959 he lived in Zell, Zürich, appearing as a guest conductor, particularly of his own works, throughout Europe. As a composer he was particularly known for entertainment music. He tried to free operetta from antiquated forms, and his song O mein Papa, on his own text, achieved international success. In the 1960s he turned to religious vocal music, including a series of Zell plays for schools; the most important of these is Ein Stern geht auf aus Jaakob.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Hopsa (Revueoperette, R. Gilbert), Zürich, 1935; Dreimal Georges (operetta, R. Schanzer and W. Welisch), 1936; Das Paradies der Frauen (operetta, F. Rogati), 1938; Der schwarze Hecht (musical comedy, J. Amstein, after E. Sautter), 1939 [rev. as Feuerwerk (E. Charell), 1949]; Casanova in der Schweiz (comic op, R. Schweizer), 1942; Tic-Tac (operetta, F. Tschudi and F. Schulz), 1943; Weh dem, der liebt (musical comedy, K. Nachmann), 1948; Das kleine Märchentheater (Märchenspiel, Tschudi), 1949; Die kleine Niederdorfoper (musical comedy, W. Lesch), 1952; Spiegel das Kätzchen (musical comedy, G. Keller), Munich, 1956; Die Pariserin (musical comedy, N.O. Scarpi, Tschudi), Zürich, 1957; Die Schneekönigin (after H.C. Andersen), Zürich, 1964; Bunbury (H. Weigel, after O. Wilde), 1965; Ein Stern geht auf aus Jaakob (Christmas op), Hamburg, 1970

Liturgical plays: Die Zeller Weihnacht, 1960; Der Zeller Josef, 1964; Die Zeller Gleichnisse, 1965; Noah, 1966; Zeller Ostern, 1970

Other works: Das Examen (R. Schweizer), Mez, hp, 1946; Der Schuss von der Kanzel, ov. (1946); Frank V. (incid music, F. Dürrenmatt), 1959; other incid music, film scores, many songs

Principal publishers: Universal, Zürich AG

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Flury and P. Kaufmann: O mein Papa …: Paul Burkhard (Zürich, 1979)

D. Baumann: ‘Paul Burkhard’, Musiktheater (Bonstetten, 1983), 225–45

PETER ROSS/THOMAS GARTMANN

Burkhard, Willy

(b Evilard-sur-Bienne, 17 April 1900; d Zürich, 18 June 1955). Swiss composer. Having attended the teachers' seminary in Berne (1916–20) he began music studies at the conservatory there with Reding and Graf. Further studies took him to Leipzig (Teichmüller and Karg-Elert), Munich (Courvoisier) and Paris (d'Ollone). From 1924 he taught composition, theory and the piano in Berne, where he was appointed to the conservatory in 1928; later he was obliged by reasons of health to live for several years in Montana and Davos. He settled in Zürich in 1942 and taught at the conservatory. In 1950 he received the composer's prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein. A Willy-Burkhard-Gesellschaft was founded in Berne in 1964.

Burkhard quickly turned from the late Romantic subjectivity found in a few early songs to look for formal and technical models in Bach and the Renaissance, evolving a contrapuntal and strictly linear, imitative style that has some affinities with Hindemith and Bartók, although his works from about 1930 are more acrid and less sensuous than those of foreign contemporaries. The organ trio sonatas op.18 (1927) were a starting-point, and this period found a summation in the Musikalische Übung op.39 (1934). From 1934 onwards Burkhard benefited greatly from contact with the chamber orchestra movement of that time and especially with the conductor Paul Sacher (who commissioned several works). In his chamber music and works for chamber orchestra, Burkhard developed a new reconciliation of horizontal with vertical writing. The harmony is based on church modes and on a distinctive chromaticism; 4ths and 5ths play an important part in its construction, and there is a strong relation between harmony and melody. In slow movements in particular the melodic line is widened and has a vocal character. The forms reshape Baroque models, sometimes with patent lines of development connecting a whole work, as in the Second Quartet and the Second Violin Concerto.

Burkhard's main interest, however, was composing for the voice. In his lyric, dramatic and liturgical works, as well as in his oratorios, he achieved convincing syntheses of exact and vivid declamation, strong expression and melodic simplicity. His opera Die schwarze Spinne op.80 is an important, but unfortunately little-known, contribution to the experimental music theatre of the 20th century, combining traditions of the Swiss Festspiel with spoken parts, dance and operatic elements. Three works display Burkhard's spirituality most powerfully and impressively: the oratorio Das Gesicht Jesajas op.41, the Mass op.85 and the cantata Die Sintflut op.97. The first, forceful and of woodcut simplicity, is the crown of his pre-1936 sacred works, the last a fully mature masterpiece. In the Mass, Burkhard's treatment of the liturgical text is original, particularly in its distribution between soloists and chorus; some influence of the times may be seen in the suffering cries of ‘Miserere’ inset in the Kyrie, Gloria and Agnus Dei. Burkhard's music is at its most profound in settings of religious texts, and its Christian quality is supplemented by a feeling for nature, most fully expressed in Das Jahr op.62. More relaxed than the earlier oratorio, as befits its subject matter of the four seasons, Das Jahr initiated a movement to a more sensuous handling of harmony and instrumentation. With his last work, the Piano Preludes, Burkhard showed an aptitude for 12-note writing, but retained a dependence on tonality in his melodic, harmonic and formal structures. On the other hand, his instrumental melody had become increasingly chromatic with the years, as in the fourth prelude and especially in the last, Burkhard's only pure 12-note composition.

WORKS

dramatic

Im Zeichen des Kreuzes, incid music, 1938–9; Laupenspiel, op.56, radio score, 1939; Oedipus rex, op.72 (incid music, Sophocles), speaking choruses, wind, timp, 1944; Die schwarze Spinne (op, 2, R. Faesi, G. Boner after J. Gotthelf), op.80, 1948, rev. 1954

accompanied choral

Choral duets, op.22/1 (C. Morgenstern), male chorus, tpt, trbns, op.22/2 (C.F. Meyer), chorus, vn, fl, 1926–8; Till Ulenspiegel, cant., op.24, T, B, male chorus, orch, 1929; Vorfrühling (cant., Morgenstern), op.27, chorus, str, 1930; TeD, op.33, chorus 2vv, tpt, trbn, timp, org, 1931; Spruchkantate, op.38 (J. von Eichendorff), male chorus, str, 1933; Musikalische Übung, op.39 (Ps xii, trans. M. Luther), chorus, org, 1934; Das Gesicht Jesajas, orat, op.41, 1v, chorus, org, orch, 1933–5; Die Versuchung Jesu, cant., op.44, A/B, unison vv ad lib, org, 1936

Ps xciii, op.49, unison vv, org, 1937; Genug ist genug (cant., Meyer), op.53, chorus, 2 tpt, timp, str, 1938–9; Lob der Musik, cant., op.54, solo vv, chorus, orch, c1939; Cantate Domino, op.61/2, S, chorus, str, timp, 1940; Heimatliche Kantate (G. Keller), op.61/3, Mez/Bar, unison vv ad lib, orch, 1940; Kreuzvolk der Schweiz (Meyer), op.61/4, chorus, org, 1941; Das Jahr (orat, H. Hiltbrunner), op.62, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1942; Christi Leidensverkündigung, cant., op.65, T, small chorus, org, 1942; Cantique de notre terre (J.P. Zimmermann), op.67, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1943; Mass, op.85, S, B, chorus, orch, 1951; Psalmen-Kantate, op.90, S, chorus, org, chbr orch, 1952; Ps clxviii, op.96, unison vv, insts, 1954

unaccompanied choral

2 Choruses, op.2, 1923; Cant. (Bible), op.3, T, chorus, 1923; Motets, op.10, boys' and male chorus, 1925; 8 Sprüche aus dem ‘Cherubinischen Wandersmann’, 2 sets op.17/1, 2 (Silesius), 1927; Ezzolied, op.19, motet, 1927; 5 Gesänge (R. Dehmel), op.26, 1930; 24 Melodien aus den Hassler'schen Choralgesängen, op.30, 4vv, 1931; Das deutsche Sanctus, 2 unison choruses, 1932; Neue Kraft (suite, Bible etc.), op.34, 1932; 4 Choruses, op.35, male chorus, 1936; Der Tod, chorus 4vv, 1933

Vermahnlied, 2–4vv, 1934; Bärnerlüt, male chorus 4vv, 1935; 2 Gesänge, chorus 4vv, 1936; Choruses, op.47, male chorus, 1936; Die Verkündigung Mariä, motet, op.51, 1938; 5 Choräle, chorus, 1939; Sommerzeit, op.61/1, 1940; 9 folksong arrs. and chorus, female chorus, 1942; 2 Choruses: Mon âme, bénis l'éternel, Oui, glorifiez l'éternel, 1942; Kleiner Psalter, op.82, 1949; Frühlingsglaube (Keller), male chorus, 1950; Wer das längere Lebensteil wünscht, male chorus 4vv, 1950; 2 Gesänge, 2vv, 1952; Die Sintflut, cant., op.97, chorus 8vv, 1954

orchestral

Vn Conc. no.1, op.7, 1925; Suite aus der Musik zu einem Weihnachtsmärchen, op.12, 1926; Sym., op.21, 1926–8; Ulenspiegel-Variationen, op.37 [prelude to op.24], 1932; Fantasy, op.40, str, 1934; Kleine Serenade, op.42, str, 1935; Conc., op.50, str, 1939; Hymnus, op.57, 1939; Concertino, op.60, vc, str, 1940; Vn Conc. no.2, op.69, 1943; Sym., 1 movt, op.73, 1944

Conc., op.74, org, str, brass, 1945; Konzertstück, op.75, org, orch, 1945; Canzona, op.76, 2 fl, low str, 1945; Kleine konzertante Suite, op.79, 1946; Piccola sinfonia giocosa, op.81, small orch, 1949; Fantasia mattutina, op.83, 1949; Toccata, op.86, 1951; Sonata da camera, op.89, str, perc, 1952; Va Conc., op.93, 1953; Concertino, op.94, 2 fl, hpd, str, 1954; Divertimento, op.95, str, 1954

chamber and instrumental

Fantasie, op.1, pf, 1922; Variationen über ein Volkslied, op.8, pf, 1925; Inventionen, op.14, pf, 1926; Str Trio, op.13, 1 movt, 1926; Kleine zweistimmige Suite, op.14a [arr. op.14], 11 insts, 1926; 3 Preludes and Fugues, op.16, pf, 1927; 2 Trio Sonatas, op.18, org, 1927; Kleine Serenade, op.15, vn, va, 1927; Stinis Puppe Theresli, pf, 1928; Str Qt no.1, op.23, 1929; Variations on a Minuet by Haydn, op.29, pf, 1930; Variations on Chorale settings by Hassler, op.28, org, 1930; Kleine Stücke, op.31, pf, 1931

Fantasie, op.32, org, 1931; Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, partita, org, 1932; Grosser Gott wir loben dich, partita, org, 1932; Praeludium und Fuge, E, org, 1932; Was die Hirten alles erlebten, pf, 1935; Pf Trio, op.43, 1936; Sonatina, op.45, vn, pf, 1936; Suite, op.48, 2 vn, 1937; 8 kleine Klavierstücke, 1938; Sonatina, op.52, org, 1938; Fantasy and Chorale ‘Ein' feste Burg’, op.58, org, 1939; Sonata, op.59, va, 1939; Etude concertante, vc, pf, 1940; Sonatina, pf, 1940; Weichnachtssonatine, op.71/1, pf, 1940

Sonata, op.66, pf, 1943; Str Qt no.2, op.68, 1943; Suite en miniature, op.71/2, vn, pf, 1944; Serenade, op.71/3, fl, gui, c1945; Serenade, op.77, fl, cl, bn, hn, vn, va, db, hp, 1945; 4 intermezzi, op.77a, hp, 1945; Sonata, op.78, vn, pf, 1946; Canzona, op.76a, 2 fl/fl, ob, pf/org, 1947; Sonata, op.87, vc, pf, 1952; Lyrische Musik, op.88, fl, va, vc, pf, c1952; Choral-Triptychon, op.91, org, 1953; Serenade, op.92, fl, cl, 1953; Suite, op.98, fl, 1955; 6 Preludes, op.99, pf, 1955; Romanze, hn, pf

solo vocal

7 Songs, op.4, 1v, pf, 1924–5; 6 Songs, op.5, 1v, pf, 1923–5; 4 Nachtlieder, op.6, 1v, pf, 1924; Frage, op.9, song cycle, 1v, pf, 1925; 3 Duets, op.11 (F. Hebbel), 2S, vn, 1926; 2 Rilke Cycles, op.20/1, B, chbr orch, op.20/2, S, chbr orch, 1927; 10 Songs, op.25, 1v, pf, 1930; Herbst (cant., Morgenstern), op.36, S, pf trio, 1932; Das ewige Brausen (K.L. Hamsun), op.46, B, orch, 1936; Der Sonntag (cant., Gotthelf), op.63, Mez/Bar, pf trio, 1942; Magnificat, op.64, S, org, 1942, arr. as op.64a, S, str, 1942; 9 Songs, op.70 (Morgenstern), 1v, pf, 1943; Und als der Tag der Pfingsten erfüllt war, op.84, A/B, org, 1951; Psalmenmusik, S, orch, 1953

MSS in CH-Bps

Principal publishers: Bärenreiter, Hug, Schott, Universal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Zurlinden: Willy Burkhard (Zürich and Stuttgart, 1956)

E. Mohr: Willy Burkhard: Leben und Werk (Zürich, 1957)

G. Sievers: ‘Das Ezzolied in der Vertonung von Willy Burkhard und Johann Nepomuk David – ein Vergleich’, Festschrift Hans Engel, ed. H. Heussner (Kassel, 1964), 335–63

K. von Fischer: ‘Willy Burkhard und die von ihm vertonten Texte’, Jahresgaben der Willy-Burkhard-Gesellschaft (1982), 35–43

F. Muggler: ‘Willy Burkhard (17. April 1900 bis 18. Juni 1955): “Die schwarze Spinne” – Oper oder Mysterienspiel?’, Musiktheater: zum Schaffen von Schweizer Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. D. Baumann, R. Merz and C. Höchli (Bonstetten, 1983), 64–89

E. Lichtenhahn: ‘Willy Burkhards Briefwechsel mit Volkmar Andreae: Zwei Hauptwerke des Schweizer Musiktheaters: Honeggers “Jeanne d'Arc” und Burkhards “Schwarze Spinne”’, Jahresgabe der Willy-Burkhard-Gesellschaft auf das Jahr 1986 [whole issue]

M. Weber: Das Orgelwerk Willy Burkhards (Zürich, 1996)

FRITZ MUGGLER/ERNST LICHTENHAHN

Burkholder, J(ames) Peter

(b Chapel Hill, NC, 17 June 1954). American musicologist. He received the AB in music from Earlham College in 1975. He continued his studies at the University of Chicago, where he took the MA in 1980 in composition and music history and theory with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran; he took the PhD in 1983 in musicology with Robert P. Morgan and Howard Mayer Brown. Burkholder began his teaching career at the University of Chicago in 1979. He joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1982, chairing the musicology area, 1987–8. In 1988 he was appointed associate professor of music at Indiana University; he was named associate dean of the faculties in 1995 and professor of music in 1996. He became president of the Charles Ives Society in 1992.

Burkholder’s research interests include modernism and meaning in music and musical borrowing and quotations. He has focussed these interests particularly on the compositions and ideas of Charles Ives, but he has also written on Brahms and Berg and authored the study and listening guides for the fifth edition of Grout’s History of Western Music and the third edition of the Norton Anthology of Western Music.

WRITINGS

The Evolution of Charles Ives’s Music: Aesthetics, Quotation, Technique (diss., U. of Chicago, 1983)

‘Museum Pieces: the Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years’, JM, ii (1983), 115–34

‘Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 75–83

Charles Ives: the Ideas Behind the Music (New Haven, CT, 1985)

‘Johannes Martini and the Imitation Mass of the Late Fifteenth Century’, JAMS, xxxviii (1985), 470–523

‘“Quotation” and Emulation: Charles Ives’s Uses of his Models’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 1–26

‘The Twentieth Century and the Orchestra as Museum’, The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. J. Peyser (New York, 1986), 409–33

‘“Quotation” and Paraphrase in Ives’s Second Symphony’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 3–25

‘Charles Ives the Avant-Gardist–Charles Ives the Traditionalist’, Charles Ives und die amerikanische Musiktradition bis zur Gegenwart: Cologne 1988, 37–51

‘The Critique of Tonality in the Early Experimental Music of Charles Ives’, Music Theory Spectrum, xii (1990), 203–23

‘Berg and the Possibility of Popularity’, Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. D Gable and R.P. Morgan (New York, 1991), 25–53

‘Musical Time and Continuity as a Reflection of the Historical Situation of Modern Composers’, JM, ix (1991), 412–29

‘Music Theory and Musicology’, JM, xi (1993), 11–23

‘The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field’, Notes, l (1994), 851–70

All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT, 1995)

‘Rule-Breaking as a Rhetorical Sign’, Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J. Buelow, ed. T.J. Mathiesen and B.V. Rivera (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995), 369–89

ed.: Charles Ives and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1996)

ed., with G. Block: Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (New Haven, CT, 1996) [incl. ‘Introduction: a Continuing Spirit’, 1–8; ‘Ives and the Nineteenth-Century European Tradition’, 11–33]

PAULA MORGAN

Burkina Faso, République Démocratique du [formerly Upper Volta].

Country in West Africa. It has an area of 274,122 km², with a rapidly expanding population estimated at 12·06 million in 2000, representing 54–60 ethnic groups. The country was annexed by France in 1896 and granted independence in 1960; the colonial period had a profound effect in the absorption of French customs and the French language. There are, however, three general musical areas, the Voltaic, Mande and Sahelian, which correspond fairly closely with the linguistic, ethnic and geographic divisions of the country, although such generalizations often misrepresent the degree of variation in musical styles.

1. Main musical areas and traditions.

The Voltaic area, made up of central, southern, eastern and south-western Burkina Faso, includes the following groups (fig.1): the Mossi, Gurma, Kurumba, Yarse, Bwa (Bobo), Lela (Lyela), Kasena, Nuna, Ko, Pwo (Pwẽ), Nankanse (Nankani), Birifor, Dagara, Lobi, Gan, Komono (Khisa), Sénoufo (Senufo), Karaboro, Gouin, Wara and Ble (Blé). These groups, as well as the Mande groups listed below, use gourd drums, hourglass tension drums, cylindrical and conical drums to perform complex interwoven rhythms based on ostinato-like figures. There is a strong emphasis on chanting, while solo singing is less common. The Birifor, Dagara, Lobi and Sénoufo also use xylophones, often for funeral music but also for recreation. These instruments usually have 14–18 keys with gourd resonators. The style and pitch of the instruments vary greatly across the region, with the northern instruments resembling the Malinké bala. There is very little information on the music of other Voltaic groups, such as the Bolon, Dorosie (Doghosié), Dyan, Pana, Natioro, Sambla, Siamou, Sisala, Kusasi (Kusaal), Tiefo, Vigye (Viemo), Wala (Dagaari Dioula), Tusia (Toussian), Turka, Nabe (Téén), Degha and Padoro (Kpatogo) from within Burkina Faso, but some studies exist from neighbouring countries such as Ghana.

The Mande area that constitutes western and north-western Burkina Faso includes the following ethnic groups: the Samo, Bisa (Bissa), Bobo, Dyula (Jula), Bobo-Dyula and Marka. Mande music is distinguished from Voltaic music by the emphasis placed on solo singers; chanting and chorus singing are secondary. Both Mande and Voltaic groups use music in the same or similar social and cultural situations.

The Sahelian area in northern Burkina Faso includes the following ethnic groups: the Fulani (Fula or Fulɓe), Bella, Tuareg and Songhay (Songhai). Their music shows prominent Saharan and Islamic influences in the use of melisma, a tense voice production and songs that often have a religious and moral content. The most commonly used instruments are the single-string plucked lute, the three-string plucked lute, the single-string fiddle, transverse bamboo flutes, oblique end-blown flutes and inverted gourd percussion vessels. Drums are rare, although the Songhay use hourglass tension drums and barrel drums, and some Fulani use hourglass tension drums and cylindrical drums. Hand-clapping and the use of inverted gourds and bracelets provide complex interwoven rhythms based on ostinato-like figures.

Musical patterns do overlap in these three cultural areas and extend beyond artificial international frontiers. Both Voltaic and Mande societies, but not Sahelian societies, use gourd drums, mirlitons, the bala, lamellophones, water-drums, gourd rattles, vertical end-blown flutes, trumpets, musical bows, raft zithers and harp-lutes (bridge-harps). Voltaic and Sahelian societies, but not Mande societies, use oblique end-blown flutes. In addition, many peoples from surrounding countries have settled in Burkina Faso, bringing their music with them. The Yoruba are found in urban communities, the Hausa in urban trade centres and in rural south-east Burkina Faso, the Dogon and the Somono in rural north-west Burkina Faso, and the Bamanakan and Bambara in the west of the country.

The most common occasions for music-making in most societies in Burkina Faso are name-giving celebrations, initiation rites, marriages, Christian, Islamic and animist religious rites and celebrations, funerals, post-funeral celebrations, agricultural and household work, harvest celebrations, and the praising of chiefs, elders and other important men and women. Drums, xylophones, flutes, rattles and iron plates struck with a ring are used to accompany singing and chanting for agricultural work. Household work done in rhythm and usually involving singing or hand-clapping includes grinding and pounding grain and leaves for food, pounding floors, weaving and spinning cotton, building and other work.

Most of the Voltaic and Mande languages are tonal so that messages and signals can be sounded on gourd, hourglass, conical and cylindrical drums. In many cases, especially with the xylophone, flutes and drums, music has a linguistic basis, so that even in the absence of singing or chanting, an underlying text is understood. Mossi musicians transmit the history of their empire, dating back to the 14th century, by the use of gourd, hourglass and cylindrical drums. This tradition may or may not be accompanied by a voice which translates the drum language.

In many groups in Burkina Faso, musicians form a professional caste and belong to families that specialize in one instrument or in one category of instruments. Mossi and Gurma drummers who belong to specialist families perform mainly in the courts of chiefs and pass on their tradition from generation to generation. Fulani professional musicians who perform on the three-string plucked lute travel extensively in the savanna of West Africa, singing the history of empires, chiefdoms and families, and praising men and women as a means of livelihood. On the other hand, many professional musicians in these and other societies do not belong to an accepted musical family.

Some of the finest and most renowned musicians are blind and have become musicians because of the lack of opportunities for other work. Many blind Mossi men and boys travel throughout Burkina Faso and the coastal countries to the south making a living by performing on fiddles and by singing historical accounts, praise-songs and songs of amusement. Most musicians are, however, amateurs and perform most often for amusement and village activities, such as work parties, marriages and name-giving celebrations usually involving dance.

2. Musical instruments.

The gourd drum is made from a spherical gourd with a large hole cut out and covered with goatskin (fig.2). The hourglass tension drum, the cylindrical drum and the conical drum are all made from a hollowed-out trunk or branch of a tree covered with goatskin or cowhide. The frame drum is made from rectangular slats of wood and goatskin and the barrel drum from a metal barrel covered with cowhide. The various kinds of drum can all be struck with one or two hands, with one hand and a stick (except gourd and frame drums), or with two sticks in the case of cylindrical and conical drums.

Bamboo transverse flutes and oblique end-blown flutes, which are made of millet stalk or a metal tube, have four finger-holes. Vertical end-blown flutes have one, two or three finger-holes, or none at all, and are all made of wood. Ocarinas are made of clay or a globular fruit and have one or two finger-holes. The gourd clarinet is made from a hollowed-out millet stalk with an idioglot reed, one finger-hole and two small gourd-resonators placed over the ends of the stalk (fig.3). Another clarinet is formed from a thinner hollowed-out millet stalk with an idioglot reed, no finger-holes and the right or left hand used as a resonating chamber. Trumpets are made of wood or of antelope or cow horn. Bullroarers and whirling discs are also used.

The stick zither is made from a solid millet stalk with a single idiochord string that is struck by a stick. The eight-string gourd-resonated zither and the twelve-string raft zither are made of millet stalks, the former with a large gourd-resonator attached beneath (fig.4). Harp-lutes with seven or twelve strings, plucked lutes and bowed harps have strings made of nylon, goat leather or wire. Harp-lutes in Burkina Faso are similar in construction to the Kora of Mali, Senegal, Guinea and The Gambia and, like bow harps, have a large gourd as resonator (fig.5). The one-string plucked lute has a tin can as a resonator, the two-string plucked lute a gourd-resonator and the three-string plucked lute a hollowed-out block of wood (fig.6). The single-string fiddle is made of a hemispherical gourd covered with an iguana skin and has a wooden neck; its strings and bow are made of horsehair. Musical bows can be mouth- or gourd-resonated. Struck idiophones include pentatonic xylophones, iron forks or plates struck with a ring or stick, wooden slit-drums, concussion sticks, percussion vessels made from inverted gourds, and water-drums. Shaken idiophones include gourd rattles, wickerwork rattles, metal-can rattles and suspension rattles of various kinds. Scraped idiophones include notched iron rods and plucked idiophones include lamellophones with five or 12 keys.

Xylophones are made with 12–21 wooden keys on a frame with a gourd-resonator attached beneath each key. These are struck with wooden sticks, the heads of which are traditionally covered with rubber, but the rubber is now frequently replaced by a disc cut from a truck tyre (fig.7). Mirlitons are made from membranes taken from a spider’s egg-case and glued over holes in the gourd-resonators of a xylophone to add a vibrating buzz. With the increase of concrete housing, the spider is becoming scarce and mirlitons are now often cut from a high-density plastic bag.

The ocarina, lamellophone, water-drum and stick zither are children's instruments. The water-drum is an inverted half-gourd placed in a larger gourd or pan containing water and struck with a spoon. The inverted half-gourd is struck with hands, elbows or fingers, or is rubbed with the hands. The five-key lamellophone is made from umbrella supports attached to a soundboard placed or fixed on to a tin can. The twelve-key lamellophone is similarly constructed with a larger can as resonator.

3. Modern developments.

There is a strong Western music influence in Burkina Faso, especially in urban areas and trade centres where youths play Spanish guitars and perform in rock and highlife bands using electric guitars, electric pianos, saxophones, trumpets, flutes, drum kits, conga drums, güiro and maracas. Sometimes these musicians use traditional instruments such as the gourd rattle or the hourglass drum. They look to Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea and AfricanAmerica for inspiration, imitation and adaptation. Western popular music heard on radio or cassette has permeated traditional music and dance ensembles, even at the village level. Xylophone and drum ensembles, children’s singing groups using hand-clapping and the water-drum, as well as modern bands, perform their own versions of popular tunes.

National ensembles sponsored by the government have adapted traditional music and dance forms for theatre audiences in Burkina Faso, other African countries, Europe and America. Religious belief in the region is divided between animism, Christianity and Islam. Christian churches often adapt and use traditional musics. Traditional music and dance ensembles perform at government-sponsored competitions, regional fairs, youth weeks, Independence Day activities, state receptions and the public opening of new buildings. At the same time modern band leaders and musicians compose in new forms and adapt traditional songs and dances to popular music styles.

There are few traditional music apprentices today, and rapid social and economic changes are largely responsible for the orientation of the young people towards the modern urban culture with an almost total abandonment of traditional music, dance forms and styles in their traditional contexts. There is a growing awareness of the importance of cultural heritages. Some traditional music is preserved by semi-professional and cultural ensembles, and the influence of traditional styles is a continuing strand through much local popular music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

E.P. Skinner: The Mossi of the Upper Volta (Stanford, CA, 1964, 2/1989 as The Mossi of Burkina Faso)

A. Schweeger-Hefel: ‘Les tambours de Lurum’, Systèmes de signe: textes réunis en hommage à Germaine Dieterlen (Paris, 1978), 435–48

F. Bebey: ‘Traditional Music in Upper Volta’, Balafon, no.1 (1981), 22–7

C. Poche: ‘Rythme impair et danse boiteuse’, Cahiers musique culture: mémoire 1981, ed. G. Erismann (Paris, 1981), 97–101

P. Titinga: La poésie des griots (Paris, 1982, 2/1983)

F. Bebey: ‘La transmission des musiques traditionelles en pays Mossi’, Notes et documents voltaïques, xiv/2 (1983), 52–9

O. Kabore: ‘Les chants traditionnels mooses: essai d'une typologie analytique’, Notes et documents burkinabè, xvi/3–4 (1985), 78–103

P. Titinga: Yiile sebere: cantiques en mooré et français/Assemblées de dieu au Burkina Faso (?Ouagadougou, c1985)

E.Y. Soma: ‘Les instruments de musique du pays Cerma (ou Gouin), sud-ouest du Burkina Faso’, Anthropos, lxxxiii (1988), 469–83

C.D. Roy: ‘A Nuna Flute: Attribution and Meaning’, Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments, ed. M.-T. Brincard (New York, 1989), 83–4

P. Titinga: Le langage des tam-tams et des masque en Afrique (bendrologie): une littérature méconnue (Paris, 1991)

J.-M. Kambou-Ferrand: ‘Nani Pale: chanteur, compositeur, balafoniste et poète lobi 1925–1985’, Images d'Afrique et sciences sociales: Ouagadougou 1990, ed. M. Fiâeloux, J. Lombard and J.-M. Kambou-Ferrand (Paris, 1993), 470–79

D. Branger: ‘Le xylophone à resonateurs multiples des Lobi’, Images d'Afrique et sciences sociales: Ouagadougou 1990, ed. M. Fiâeloux, J. Lombard and J.-M. Kambou-Ferrand (Paris, 1993), 460–69

recordings

Haute Volte, Ocora SOR 10 (1962)

Musiques du pays Lobi, Ocora OCR 51 (1970)

Savannah Rhythms: Music of Upper Volta, Nonesuch H-72087 (1981)

Rhythms of the Grasslands, Nonesuch 72090 (1983)

Dances of Burkina Faso: balafons, percussion, chanteurs de Bobo Dioulasso, Buda Records 82481-2 (1992)

Bolomakote, perf. Farafina, Intuition INT 2026 2 (1992)

Anka Dia: musique et chant de Burkina Faso, perf. Les Frères Coulibaly, Ethnic SAGA Label B6775 (1992)

Faso denou, perf. Farafina, RealWorld CAROL 2328-2 (1993)

Balafons & tambours d'Afrique, perf. Koko du Burkina Faso, PlayaSound PS 65101 (1993)

Balafons et tambours d'Afrique, perf. Sababougnouma, PlayaSound PS 65156 (1995)

JIM ROSELLINI/TREVOR WIGGINS

Burla

(It.: ‘jest’).

A term used occasionally during the 18th century, together with its diminutives Burletta and burlettina, to indicate comic Italian operas. In about 1720 the buffo singer Francesco Belisani used it to distinguish between comic operas and the intermezzos inserted between the acts of serious operas. It has been suggested that burla is probably a colloquialism, as no operas of the period are specifically entitled such; but Benedetto Marcello’s polyphonic five-voice satire of castrato singers, No’ che lassù ne’ cori (1721), is entitled burla. A later use of the term is the burla in Schumann’s Albumblätter (1832–45). (ES, N. Pirrotta)

Burlas, Ladislav

(b Trnava, 3 April 1927). Slovak composer and music theorist. Initially a pupil of Schneider-Trnavský, he studied aesthetics and musicology at Bratislava University (1947–51, PhD) and composition with Alexander Moyzes at the conservatory in Bratislava then at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (1951–5). He worked at the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (1951–5, 1961–90), later serving as its director (1964–74); he also taught at the University of Bratislava and at the academy of which he became a full professor in 1993. He was president of the Slovak Composers’ Union (1983–9) and in 1982 he was awarded the title of Merited Artist.

As a theorist and publicist, Burlas rose to prominence in Slovakia in 1957 when he spoke of the trend among younger Slovak composers (with their polemical attitude to the Moyzes generation) towards current European modernism. In addition to music theory and history he became engaged in the study of new compositional techniques. His own music (e.g. Symfonický triptych and Spievajúce srdce, ‘A Singing Heart’) uses chromatic and modal extensions of tonality enriched with elements of Slovak folk music. In works such as Metamorfózy krás (‘Metamorphoses of Beauty’) this is combined with new sonorities and typically linear thinking. Inspired by Bartók and the techniques of new music, his greatest achievements are highly individual in their organization of musical material: modal structures are combined with clusters in Planctus and with dodecaphony in Music for Violin and Orchestra. His works, especially those for strings (e.g. Koncertantná sonáta and the Third String Quartet), often possess a meditative quality. In later works, for example Poetická hudba (‘Poetic Music’) and Stretnút’ človeka (‘To Meet a Man’), this becomes nostalgic retrospection.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Symfonický triptych, op.2, 1956; Epitaf, op.3, 1957; Bagatelles, str, 1959; Planctus, str, 1968; Concertino, wind, perc, 1971; Music for Vn and Orch, 1977; Org Conc., 1983–4; Sym. no.2, 1986

Vocal: Svadobné spevy z Horehronia [Wedding Songs from Upper Hron], folksong arrs., chorus, orch, 1957; Metamofózy krás [Metamorphoses of Beauty] (J. Smrek), female chorus, vn, 1964; Zvony [Bells] (M. Rúfus), chorus, 1969; 6 básní lásky [Love Poems] (V. Reisel), chorus, 1975; Dobrý deň! [Good Day!] (L. Novomeský), chorus, 1980; Hymnus času [Hymn of the Time] (J. Kostra), male chorus, 1980; Stretnút’ človeka [To Meet a Man] (vocal sym., J. Kostra), Mez, Bar, chorus, orch, 1984

Chbr and solo inst: Spievajúce srdce [A Singing Heart], sonata, op.4, str sextet, 1960; Sonatina, vn, 1968; Music for Str Qt, 1969; Str Qt no.2, 1972; Cadenza, vn, 1974; Koncertantná sonáta [Conc. Sonata], vn, 1974; Sonata, vn, 1975; Str Qt no.3, 1977; Sonatina, pf, 1978; Lyrická hudba [Lyric Music], pf, 1979; Poetická hudba [Poetic Music], wind qnt/org, 1983; Sonata ‘Matici slovenskej’ [To the Matica slovenská], pf, 1987

Principal publisher: Slovenský hudobný fond

WRITINGS

Alexander Moyzes (Bratislava, 1956)

‘Jednota a vývoj v diele Eugena Suchoňa’ [Unity and development in the work of Suchoň], Musicologica Slovaca, i (1969), 187–199

Hudobná teória a súčasnost’ [Music theory and our time] (Bratislava, 1978)

Slovenská hudobná moderna [The Slovak musical avantgarde] (Bratislava, 1983)

Pohl’ady na súčasnú slovenskú hudobnú kultúru [A glimpse of contemporary Slovak musical culture] (Bratislava, 1987)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Hatrík: ‘Môj malý burlasovský koncert’ [My little Burlasian concert], Hudobný život, xiv/10 (1982), 3

Ľ. Chalupka: ‘Slovenská hudba 20. storočia: vývoj po roku 1945’ [Slovak music in the 20th century: development after 1945], Dejiny slovenskej hudby, ed. O. Elschek (Bratislava, 1996), 273–341, esp. 289, 301, 313

VLADIMÍR ZVARA

Burlas, Martin

(b Bratislava, 23 Oct 1955). Slovak composer. Born into a family of musicians (his father and brother are also composers), he studied privately with Hatrík while attending secondary school. In 1975 he entered the College of Music and Performing Arts in Bratislava, where he continued his studies under Cikker until 1980. He has held appointments as producer at the recording company and publishers Opus (1980–86) and with Slovak Radio (1987–94). During the 1980s he founded several rock groups, and in the 1990s became a member of Slovak experimental music ensembles, including Vapori del Cuore and Veni.

Burlas was among the first composers in Slovakia to commit wholeheartedly to the aesthetics of minimalism. By writing in a repetitive style and promoting the new wave he became a protagonist for a young generation of Slovak postmodernists. His minimalist works include Kol’ajnice bez vlakov (‘Rails without Trains’), Predposledné leto (‘The Summer before Last’) and Decrescendo. For the avant-garde rock groups he founded he has composed pieces and songs, the texts for which contain criticism of the political and social conditions in Slovakia during the 1980s. His rock-song style is that of sophisticated underground rock music. In the late 1980s Burlas started to combine his rock and minimalist styles: the melodic-rhythmic phrase remains the basic structural element but is attached to freely progressing harmonic sequences. This later music has a wider range of expression, including aggression, paradoxy and chaos. As with rock music, new sounds are created by combining electronic music with acoustic instruments, as in Simultánne kvarteto (1986) and 33 for chamber ensemble. The importance of experimentation and random selection in his music is represented, for example, by a simulation of re-tuning a radio in 33 or by the stage presentation of a doll’s execution in Hexenprozesse (‘Witch Trials’).

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: Ružové král’ovstvo [Rose Kingdom], op, chbr orch, 6vv, chorus, 1985; Hexenprozesse [Witch Trials], inquisition pieces, chbr ens, 1990; Súmrak bohov [Twilight of the Gods], trad. songs, tapes, bicycle, projection, synth, 1993

Large ens: Sotto voce, chorus, orch, 1982; Predposledné leto [The Summer before Last], hp, cel, vib, mar, pf, chbr orch, 1984; Logika kriku [The Logic of the Cry], tpt, orch, 1986; Bricks Game, chbr orch, 1994

Chbr ens: Lament (Nenia), str qt, 1979; ‘13’, cl, vn, va, vc, 1980; Hudba pre Roberta Dupkalu [Music for Robert Dupkala], fl, 2 sax, str qt, bells, hpd, accdn, synth, elec gui, b gui, 1981; Hymnus pre zabudnutých [Hymn for the Forgotten], vn, vc, synth, 1984; Rozlúčka duše a tela [Separation of Soul and Body], vc, pf, tape, 1984; Decrescendo, ob, bn, vc, hpd, 1986; Simultánne kvarteto [Simultaneous Quartet], synth, chit, vc, perc, trbn, 1986; 33, chbr ens, 1987; Zavesené žily [Hung Veins], chbr ens, 1991; Agónia [Agony], vc, pf, 1995

Solo inst: Kol’ajnice bez vlakov [Rails without Trains], pf, 1984; Uspávanky [Lullabies], kbd inst, 1984; Z môjho života… [From my life… ], insts, noises, 1992

El-ac: Hudba pre modrý dom [Music for the Blue House], 1979; Plač stromov [Weeping Trees], ob, tape, 1981; Oáza [Oasis], 1985; Kríž a kruh [Cross and Circle], 2 tpt, tape, 1989; Talking about Paradise Lost, 1993; Záznam siedmeho dňa [Record of the 7th Day], str qt, tape, 1994; Bratislava, vykládka prístavu [Bratislava, Unloading at the Port], fl, tape, 1995; Mutrance, 1996; Overload, 1996

Principal publisher: Slovak Music Fund

Principal recording companies: Globus International, Zoon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Dehner: ‘Pokus o skupinový portrét’ [An attempt at a group portrait], HRo, xxxvii (1984), 324–6

M. Burlas: ‘Stalin a postmodernizmus?’ [Stalin and postmodernism?], SH, xvii (1991), 291–2

V. Godár: ‘O rozkoši a bolesti (Rozhovor s Martinom Burlasom)’ [About passion and pain (An interview with Burlas)], SH, xvii (1991), 293–6

Y. Lábska-Kajanová: ‘Rozmanitost’ kultúr – mnohotvárnost’ posolstiev’ [A variety of cultures – a variety of messages], Melos-Ethos 1994, 45–57 [programme book]

Y. Kajanová: ‘Generácia 80/90’ [Generation 80/90], Hudobný život, xxviii (1996), 6–7

YVETTA LÁBSKA-KAJANOVÁ

Burleigh, Henry [Harry] T(hacker)

(b Erie, PA, 2 Dec 1866; d Stamford, CT, 12 Sept 1949). American composer and singer. He received his earliest musical instruction from his mother and later had piano lessons. By the age of 16 he was singing in three church choirs near Erie. In 1892 he won a scholarship to the National Conservatory, New York, where he met Victor Herbert and Antonín Dvořák. His performances of African American spirituals strengthened Dvořák’s conviction that America possessed a rich folksong repertory. In 1894 Burleigh became the baritone soloist at St George's Episcopal Church, New York, a position he held for the next 52 years. Six years later, he became a soloist at Temple Emanu-El, where he sang for 25 years. From 1911 he was a music editor at Ricordi.

Burleigh was one of the first important African American composers born after the Civil War. His arrangements of African American folksongs set a standard for several generations of composers. The majority of his 265 vocal compositions are solo settings of spirituals, characterized by sparse piano accompaniments that add subtle counterpoint to the melodic line. Among his most acclaimed compositions are: Six Plantation Melodies for Violin and Piano (1901); the song cycles, Saracen Songs (1914), Passionale (1915) and Five Songs on Poems of Laurence Hope (1915); and Jubilee Songs of the USA (New York, 1916), a collection that includes his popular arrangement of the spiritual Deep River.

MSS in US-NYpsc, US-Whu, US-Wcg

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Locke: The Negro and his Music (Washington DC, 1936)

A.K. Simpson: Hard Trials: the Life and Music of Harry T. Burleigh (Metuchen, NJ, 1990)

J.E. Snyder: ‘A Great and Noble School of Music’: Dvořák, Harry T. Burleigh and the African American Spiritual (Portland, OR, 1993)

WILLIE STRONG

Burle Marx, Walter

(b São Paulo, 23 July 1902; d Akron, OH, 28 Dec 1990). Brazilian composer, conductor and pianist. His early musical studies were with Henrique Oswald and Angelo França, and at the age of 12 he appeared in a two-piano concert with Artur Napoleão. He continued his preparation in Europe with Kwast for the piano (1924–6), Rezniček for orchestration (1926–8) and Weingartner for conducting (1928–9). In 1925–6 he made a concert tour of Europe as a pianist. On his return to Brazil he made his début as an orchestral conductor and founded the short-lived Rio de Janeiro PO in 1931. Thereafter he lived for a period in the USA, where he conducted performances of Brazilian music at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1947 he was made director of the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1952 was appointed to teach the piano and composition at the Settlement Music School, Philadelphia. In addition to symphonic works he has written cantatas, other choral pieces and songs.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: 4 syms., 1945, 1950, 1956, 1970; Samba concertante, 1961; Passacaglia and Fugue ‘Hallowe’en’, 1967; Música, 1970; 2 concertinos, pf, orch, 1980, 1984; Vc Conc., 1982–4

Chbr music: music for gui

Vocal: Ave Maria, female vv, orch; In memoriam, vv, orch; Padre nosso, Bar, vv, children’s vv, orch, org

JOHN M. SCHECHTER

Burlesque

(Fr.; It. burlesca; Ger. Burleske).

A humorous piece involving parody and grotesque exaggeration; the term may be traced to folk poetry and theatre and apparently derived from the late Latin burra (‘trifle’). As a literary term in the 17th century it referred to a grotesque imitation of the dignified or pathetic, and in the early 18th century it was used as a title for musical works in which serious and comic elements were juxtaposed or combined to achieve a grotesque effect. In England the word denotes a dramatic production which ridicules stage conventions, while in 19th- and 20th-century American usage its principal meaning is a variety show in which striptease is the chief attraction.

1. Instrumental music.

J.G. Walther (1732) described burlesque music as ‘jocular’ and ‘amusing’ (‘schertzhafft’, ‘kurzweilig’) and referred to ‘burleske Ouvertüren’ as pieces in which ‘laughable melodies, made up of 5ths and octaves, appear along with serious melodies’. This probably referred to the comic effects achieved by composers of Italian opera buffa in the early 18th century, effects that doubtless helped to set a standard of musical humour for the ‘burlesca’ movements sometimes included in contemporary suites. The example in Bach’s Partita bwv827, which is called a minuet in Anna Magdalena’s Notebook (1725), has nothing particularly jocular about it, although it displays some striking harmonies, as well as a passage in parallel octaves. J.L. Krebs placed a ‘bourlesca’ between the saraband and the minuets of his Partita no.2 in B; the movement is not a dance, but rather a small-scale sonata form with a few melodic and harmonic surprises. François Couperin subtitled some of his harpsichord pieces ‘dans le goût burlesque’; two examples are Le gaillard-boiteux (ordre no.18) and Les satires (ordre no.23). Les satires exploits the lower registers of the harpsichord, using percussive chords and harsh dissonances. L’arlequine (ordre no.23) surely belongs to the burlesque category, for it is marked ‘Grotesquement’.

‘Burlesque’ is used as a title for some independent characteristic piano pieces, of variable length and with no special formal characteristics (e.g. the fourth of Paderewski’s Humoresques de concert op.14). Schumann planned a set of 12 ‘low-comedy’ Burlesken in 1832 as a companion to his Papillons op.2. Some of them, under different titles, found places in his Albumblätter op.124 and in the third movement of his Sonata op.11. Britten’s Introduction and Rondo alla burlesca for two pianos op.23 no.1 (1940) is playful and humorous; the Introduction is in the manner of a French overture, and the Rondo begins with a march-like accompaniment to a striding and angular theme based on melodic 7ths and 4ths.

The titles of some explicitly comic pieces for various media include the word ‘burlesque’. Leopold Mozart’s Sinfonia burlesca (1760) is scored for two violas and two cellos with an independent bass part for bassoon and violone, a combination whose unusual register accords with the symphony’s name. The last two movements are titled after commedia dell’arte characters: ‘Il signor Pantalone’ and ‘Harlequino’. Méhul’s Ouverture burlesque (1808), for three mirlitons, drum, violin and piano, is almost grotesquely comic in both its scoring and its musical content. Richard Strauss alternated the wickedly humorous with the lyrical in his Burleske for piano and orchestra (1885–6): the piece begins with a timpani solo in galliard rhythm, there is a quotation from Wagner’s Die Walküre, and the piccolo provides shrill and grotesque punctuation. Bartók’s Three Burlesques for piano (1908–11) are witty and full of wry humour; in the third of the set even the rests are used in a jocular manner. Other works that use the word in their titles to evoke a sense of irreverence include Reger’s Sechs Burlesken op.58 for piano duet, Ernst Toch’s Burlesken op.31 for piano, Casella’s Sicilienne et burlesque for flute and piano (1914; arranged for piano, violin and cello, 1917), Bartók’s Scherzo (Burlesque) op.2 for piano and orchestra, Messiaen’s Fantaisie burlesque for piano and Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque for orchestra op.78.

2. English theatrical burlesque.

Burlesque was related to and in part derived from Pantomime and may be considered an extension of the introductory section of pantomime with the addition of gags and ‘turns’ such as traditionally accompanied a transformation scene. But whereas pantomime most often took its subject matter from stories familiar to children – fairy tale, nursery rhyme, folk story, familiar fiction or exotic tales – burlesque tended to employ more elevated and serious models: mythology, classical or historical legend (Medea, Ivanhoe), literature, Shakespearean drama and history (Guy Fawkes, Lucrezia Borgia). Among the objects of ridicule were the conventions of serious theatre and melodrama. Burlesques followed the appearance of virtually every major opera, as for example J. Halford’s Faust and Marguerite (1853) after Gounod’s Faust.

Like pantomime, burlesque became a largely seasonal entertainment, appearing in legitimate theatres at Christmas and Easter in place of more serious bills. Occasionally a burlesque appeared as a companion piece to other works. Whereas pantomime entertained all classes and all ages, the burlesque and extravaganza tended to appeal to a relatively educated and sophisticated audience. In both genres dialogue was cast in rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter verse (less often in blank verse). Music was an essential if often a minor feature, consisting chiefly of arrangements of songs and incidental music to underscore the action or for comic effect. In operatic burlesques, numbers were appropriated from the model, with new words and often with humorous touches; additional numbers were interpolated from a variety of familiar sources (such as music hall and minstrel songs). Rarely was there any attempt at musical parody.

The heyday of burlesque began with Lucia Elizabeth Vestris’s production in 1831 of Olympic Revels, or Prometheus and Pandora by James Planché, written with Charles Dance with music by John Barnett. Planché virtually invented this style of burlesque and for a generation he dominated the genre. A master of refined, delicate effect, he deplored the absurdity, inconsistency and broader physical and verbal foolery found in the works of later and lesser dramatists. The appearance of W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) signalled the last important phase of burlesque. His first dramatic work, Dulcamara, or he Little Duck and the Great Quack (1866), was a successful burlesque on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Gilbert’s five operatic burlesques (each announced as an Extravaganza) led to the evolution of the genre into the more sophisticated Savoy-style comic opera, characterized by original stories, absurdity regulated by internal consistency, satire in place of parody, the absence of travesty and clowning, close directorial supervision and highly developed musical scores.

Although the works of those such as Planché and Gilbert had literary merit, with sophisticated word-play and current and historical allusions, works of lesser providers seldom seem satisfactory on the printed page. Their success in the theatre may be explained by their eccentric and often lavish staging, with interpolated physical humour and sometimes extraneous displays of skill and spectacle, as distinct from their unsubtle verbal humour, with an emphasis on punning and often inept verse. Although an almost indispensable element of burlesque was the display of attractive women dressed in tights, often in travesty roles, the plays themselves did not normally tend to indecency.

The extravaganza was a special, highly developed species of burlesque. The various genre terms were always applied freely, however, often in combination with such other equivocal terms as Burletta; by the 1860s their use had become arbitrary and capricious.

3. American burlesque.

In the USA, burlesque followed the English form until the 1860s. From the late 1830s burlesques of operas and romantic plays were presented in New York, and the English émigré John Brougham wrote and acted in numerous burlesques from 1842 to 1879. Brougham’s Po-ca-hon-tas (1855, after Longfellow’s narrative poem) is peopled with ‘Salvages’, its dialogue is a string of doubles entendres and its songs were selected from such popular tunes as Widow Machree and Rosin the Bow and Tyrolean melodies. Several minstrel troupes presented such satires; in the 1860s the Kelly & Leon Negro Minstrels performed burlesques of Offenbach (La Belle L.N., Grand Dutch S.) throughout the north-eastern states, and Sanford’s Minstrel Burlesque Opera Troupe advertised a ‘change of programme every night’. From about 1860 burlesque often provided the framework for elaborate spectacles, beginning with those produced in New York by Laura Keene, who employed ballet troupes of women whose costumes exposed their legs; nearly all New York theatres presented shows that relied less for their effect on dramatic elements, wit or satire than on female beauty, and the term ‘burlesque’ gradually shifted in meaning from the ridicule of stage conventions to an emphasis on women in various degrees of undress, with striptease elements prominent by the 1920s. The burlesque was banned in New York in 1937.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (V.C. Clinton-Baddeley, W. Green)

FiskeETM

MGG2 (‘Burleske’; M. Struck) [incl. list of instrumental works]

NicollH

T.F. Dillon Croker and S. Tucker, eds.: The Extravaganzas of J.R. Planché, Esq. (Somerset Herald, 1827–1871) (London, 1879)

W. Davenport Adams: A Book of Burlesque (London, 1891)

I. Goldberg, ed.: New and Original Extravaganzas by W.S. Gilbert, Esq. (Boston, 1931)

H. Granville-Barker: ‘Exit Planché – Enter Gilbert’, The Eighteen-Sixties, ed. J. Drinkwater (Cambridge, 1932), 102–48

W.H. Rubsamen: ‘The Ballad Burlesques and Extravaganzas’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 551–61

A. Green and J. Laurie: Show Biz from Vaude to Video (New York, 1951)

V.C. Clinton-Baddeley: The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London, 1952)

M.R. Booth, ed.: English Plays of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1969–76), v

G. Rowell: The Victorian Theatre, 1792–1914 (Cambridge, 2/1978)

D.B. Wilmeth: Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements: a Reference Guide (Westport, CT, 1982)

I. Landy-Houillon, ed.: Burlesque et formes parodiques dans la littérature et les arts: Le Mans 1986 (Seattle, 1987)

R.C. Allen: Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991)

ERICH SCHWANDT (1), FREDRIC WOODBRIDGE WILSON (with DEANE L. ROOT) (2, 3)

Burletta.

A type of English operatic comedy that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term was one of several used for Italian comic operas of the light intermezzo variety: for instance Pergolesi’s La serva padrona was so described at its first London performance in 1750. Several Italian burlettas were played at Dublin with great success in the 1750s, and Lord Mornington commissioned Kane O’Hara to write an English imitation of one. The result was Midas, the first English burletta, performed privately near Belfast in 1760, and publicly at Dublin in 1762 and at Covent Garden in 1764. It was a burlesque on classical mythology; the music was a pasticcio, partly folksongs and partly tunes from Italian and English operas, with recitative. Its compiler is unknown.

Midas was a great success and was imitated both in Dublin and in the London patent theatres. These early burlettas, in verse throughout and all-sung, satirized the mythological and historical conventions of opera seria, though the music rarely participated in the joke. Prominent examples were The Judgment of Paris (Barthélémon, 1768), The Portrait (Arnold, 1770), The Golden Pippin (J.A. Fisher, 1773) and Poor Vulcan (Dibdin, 1778).

The decline of the burletta began with an adaptation of the burlesque tragedy Tom Thumb, revived at Covent Garden in 1780, a spoken play with added songs from various sources, compiled by J. Markordt. According to George Colman the younger, it was ‘inadvertently announced by the managers … as a burletta’, thus giving the minor theatres a precedent for the evasion of the Licensing Act (1737), which had conferred a monopoly in legitimate drama on the two patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Comedies of all sorts, often with no burlesque element, were now put on at the minor theatres under the general title ‘burletta’, and they departed increasingly from the original model. The orchestra was reduced to a harpsichord or piano. Songs became shorter and scarcer. The dialogue was still supposed to be in rhyme and sung in recitative: in 1812, according to the Theatrical Inquisitor, ‘the tinkling of the piano and the jingling of the rhyme’ were still the distinctive marks of the burletta. But by degrees the recitative became indistinguishable from spoken dialogue. In 1824 Colman told the Lord Chamberlain that a burletta must have at least five or six songs ‘where the songs make a natural part of the piece, and not forced into an acting piece, to qualify it as a burletta’, but even this was an optimistic description. In some of John Barnett’s early stage pieces the few songs, though often highly successful in themselves, were mere ‘music-shop ballads’, introduced irrelevantly into a spoken play for subsequent sale as sheet music.

The term ‘burletta’ did not long survive the repeal of the Licensing Act in 1843, although it was occasionally used later in the century in the USA as a synonym for Burlesque.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FiskeETM

NicollH, iv–v

R.B. Peake: Memoirs of the Colman Family (London, 1841/R), ii, 397ff

E.B. Watson: Sheridan to Robertson (Cambridge, MA, 1926/R), 38ff

E.W. White: The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951/R)

J. Donohue: ‘Burletta and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Theatre’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, i (1973), 29–51

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY

Burlini, Antonio

(b Rovigo; fl 1612–17). Italian composer. A Benedictine monk, he is known to have been at Siena in 1612 but took up the post of organist at S Elena, Venice, later that year. He was one of many minor Italian church composers to adopt the small-scale concertato style in the second decade of the 17th century; all his music belongs to this genre except the double-choir publication of 1615. But he did not treat it imaginatively. Although solo motets in the two collections of 1612 display a rudimentary approach to musical form, the vocal lines are undistinguished, and the optional instrumental parts in the second are, though an interesting idea, musically superfluous. Single added instrumental parts appear again in the collections of 1614 and 1615. The first of these is a set of Lamentations, not commonly set to measured music at this period, while the preface of the second includes interesting advice about making several copies of the basso continuo part for various instruments, including chitarrone and lute, in polychoral music. (J. Roche: North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi, Oxford, 1984)

WORKS

Fiori di concerti spirituali, 1–4vv, bc (org/other inst) (Venice, 1612)

Riviera fiorita de concerti musicali … con una messa, 1–4vv, bc, 1–2 insts, op.3 (Venice, 1612)

Salmi intieri … al vespro … con due Mag, 4vv, tr inst, b inst, bc, op.5 (Venice, 1613)

Lamentationi per la settimana santa, 4vv … un Benedictus, 5vv … e due Miserere, 8vv, il tutto concertato alla moderna (with vn, hpd/spinet), op.7 (Venice, 1614)

Messa, salmi et motetti concertati, 8vv, vn, bc, op.8 (Venice, 1615)

Concerti spirituali, 2–4vv, bc, op.9 (Venice, 1617)

8 motets in 1622², 1623², 1627¹, 1627²

JEROME ROCHE

Burma.

See Myanmar.

Burmeister, Joachim

(b Lüneburg, 1564; d Rostock, 5 March 1629). German theorist, composer and teacher. He was one of the leading German theorists of his time and one of the most influential, especially for his work on rhetorical figures in music.

1. Life.

Burmeister studied music at the Johannisschule, Lüneburg, under the Kantors Christoph Praetorius and Euricius Dedekind and the vice-Rektor Lucas Lossius, who particularly impressed him with his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic. In 1586 he matriculated at Rostock University, where his academic teachers included, among other widely educated humanists, the mathematician and professor of medicine Henricus Brucaeus. He took his master’s degree in 1593. From Easter 1589 he was on the staff of the Rostock town school and was Kantor, first of the Nikolaikirche, then, from the autumn of that year, of the principal church, the Marienkirche; from 1593 until his death he was regular teacher (collega classicus).

2. Writings.

None of his published works dates from his four years as Kantor. He wrote no school singing manuals, for it was his objective to regain for music its rightful place among the sciences. He emphasized the connection between the three parts of music theory and the dependence of musica practica and musica poetica on musica theorica; nevertheless he laid most emphasis on the teaching of composition, which he developed through three published treatises. For example, his important list of 22 musical-rhetorical figures in Hypomnematum musicae poeticae (1599) grew to 25 in Musica autoschediastikē (1601) and to 26 in Musica poetica (1606). The definitions of some figures were substantially altered, and the musical examples became sometimes more specific, sometimes less. Musica autoschediastikē was by far the most extensive of the three treatises, including such topics as the ancient modes and genera, tuning, mensuration, transposition and the art of singing. The term autoschediastikē (meaning ‘improvised’) apparently refers to the random organization of the volume; musical improvisation is not discussed.

Burmeister’s approach to composition reflected the period’s growing emphasis on the vertical, harmonic aspect of music. After treating consonant and dissonant intervals, he began his instruction not with two-part counterpoint, as had earlier been the custom, but with the theory of chord construction, which he called ‘syntax’. His formulation and illustrative charts owed much to the example of Johannes Avianus’s Isagoge in libros musicae poeticae (1581). He described chords as consisting of three ‘conjugate’ notes: a basis, a media a 3rd above the basis and a suprema either a 5th or a 6th above the basis. Octave equivalents could be substituted for the media and suprema, but in a four-part chord only the basis was to be doubled. In Burmeister’s theory 5th chords and 6th chords remained different species; he had no concept of ‘root’ or ‘inversion’. Though he was clearly an important forerunner of triadic theory, he never used the term ‘triad’ in the main text of his treatises. However, in Hypomnematum musicae he included a poem extolling the manifestations of certain mysteries of the Divine Triad (triados mysteria diae), the Trinity. One of these manifestations, he wrote, consists of the three pitches that make a concordant harmony; the Divine Triad is also heralded by the three structural pitches in every mode (the final, 5th and 3rd) and by the three main cadential pitches (again the final, 5th and 3rd).

This amalgamation of modal theory with triadic theory had originated in the teachings of Gioseffo Zarlino and spread throughout Protestant Germany through the mediation of Seth Calvisius. But Burmeister also suggested a fascinating taxonomy of musical affections that combined triadic theory with the 12-mode system in a way that foreshadowed the major-minor typology. He explained the affects associated with each mode in terms of the position of the semitones relative to the three governing scale degrees. In the first place Burmeister treated the modes in which one of the semitones, located between the 6th and 7th degrees, was isolated from the basis, the 3rd and the 5th. The Mixolydian mode (and its plagal, Hypomixolydian), having the other semitone above the 3rd degree, was ‘happy and uplifting’; the Dorian, with the semitone beneath the 3rd, was ‘serious and weighty’. The second pair was more extreme, having both semitones in the same relation to the basis and the 5th: Lydian, with its semitones beneath, was hard, ‘tragic and turbulent’, while Phrygian, with its semitones above, was soft, ‘lamenting and tearful’. Finally, if the two semitones were in opposite relations to two of the governing degrees, Burmeister defined the affect as ‘moderate’; he showed how this worked in the case of the Ionian mode, with one semitone beneath the basis and the other above the 3rd, but he left implicit the case of Aeolian, with one semitone beneath the 3rd and the other above the 5th. Presumably the former mode would be identified as moderately hard or happy and the latter moderately soft or sad.

Burmeister is justly famous for his application of rhetorical doctrine to music. From the start he, and colleagues who had read his writings prior to publication, were conscious of the pioneering import of his accomplishment. He aimed to assimilate extensively the language of music theory to that of grammar and rhetoric (compare the concepts, already mentioned, of ‘syntax’ and ‘conjugation’), and went further than earlier German Lateinschule masters like Johannes Frosch in adopting a classicizing vocabulary in place of the traditional musical terms. His substitution of the word disparatum (‘a prefix of opposition’) for ‘accidental’ to describe the sharp and flat signs, for instance, is not only explicitly Ciceronian but also implies a more modern conception of the effect of the signs, indicating inflection of pitch rather than an alteration of nature. While Burmeister’s general terminology, which was never widely imitated, may seem pretentious or distracting, his goal was to make the language of theory more precise, and this was especially fruitful in the realm of rhetoric.

Through his development of a doctrine of musical-rhetorical figures, Burmeister sought to grasp abstractly the means for musical decoration and text emphasis, just as in rhetoric the figures are the artistic means for the orator to deviate from ordinary speech. Burmeister’s figures served not only for expressive purposes, but also (as Palisca has pointed out) for musical construction. While 16th-century music theory had discussed as artistic compositional means only cadences, imitation, syncopation, and dissonance, Burmeister tried, using as examples Lassus’s motets, to list and name all the special musical details and all the divergences from normal musical language, which for him was represented by the homophonic structures of the genus humile. In order to underscore the analogy between rhetorical and musical text explication, he chose most of his terminology of figures from rhetoric. It is as necessary for musical figures as for rhetorical ones that a deviation from the norm should occur, so that the listener can grasp it as a figure. A deviation from normal language must be legitimized or excused by the text; otherwise all gross violations of the rules were forbidden because they offended the ear. The relationship between Burmeister’s names for musical figures and their rhetorical analogues was sometimes remarkably close, but more often the association was with the root meaning of the word rather than its technical sense. For example, in rhetoric hyperbole (‘throwing beyond’) signifies exaggeration, hypobole (‘laying under’) verbal substitution; Burmeister used the terms to mean the extension of pitch respectively above and below the limits of the modal octave. He also refined his nomenclature of figures in successive treatises. A prominent example concerns the terms for motivic repetition. In Hypomnematum musicae he defined pallilogia as the repetition of a motif in several voices, whereas anaphora was repetition in the bass voice alone. In Musica autoschediastikē, however, pallilogia was redefined as repetition in any single voice, while anaphora now signified a repetition in several but not all voices (one in all voices would be fuga), and climax was introduced as a term for sequential repetition.

Most of the examples that Burmeister provided for each figure come from motets by Lassus. In Musica autoschediastikē and Musica poetica, he went on to discuss analysis, especially as a foundation for the imitation of models. Using Lassus’s motet In me transierunt as a paradigm, he expounded the analysis of five musical criteria: mode, genus (diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic), style (simplex, fractus, coloratus), quality (durus, mollis), and division into ‘affections’ or periods (seeAnalysis, fig. 1). These last need not correspond to grammatical divisions in the words, but might be signalled by a cadential gesture followed by new thematic material. Burmeister named composers as models of the ‘lowly’, ‘grand’ or ‘elevated’, ‘middle’ and ‘mixed’ (of grand and middle) styles; he identified Lassus with the last. Although he often referred to specific loci in Lassus’s works, he seldom provided notated examples, partly in order to avoid inflating his book, but also to spur his readers to transcribe the music themselves as models for imitation (in the didactic rather than the strict musical sense).

As regards musica practica, Burmeister was concerned to systematize the elements of notation – a knowledge of which he assumed – by means of a clear and unambiguous terminology that would satisfy scientific criteria. To the existing solmization syllables he added se for B and si for B in order to avoid the problems of mutation and make the syllables correspond to the octave structure of the scale. He thought that there were too many mensural signatures, since a conductor could make the semibreve beat faster or slower according to the character or affection of a composition. Burmeister transferred to singing much of what Quintilian said about the delivery, voice and gesture of the orator. He also recommended keeping to the right tempo in the execution of vocal embellishments.

Burmeister’s last publication, Musica theorica (1609), concerns the mathematical calculation of intervals and is based on the manuscript of a lecture by his teacher Henricus Brucaeus, with an extended commentary for each section. It deals only with Pythagorean intervals; the proportions of pure 3rds are not considered.

3. Music.

As a composer, Burmeister ranks lower than other leading theorists such as Zarlino and Michael Praetorius. His collection of 1601 contains 91 harmonizations of hymn tunes and a few sacred school songs and Benedicamus settings by other composers. His hymn settings are in a very simple note-against-note style following the model of Lucas Osiander and thus correspond to the rules that Burmeister gave for musical syntax in the genus humile. The individual lines, however, lack the singability that distinguishes comparable pieces by Praetorius. The four motets that Burmeister composed as examples of the chromatic genus and the three types of counterpoint (aequale, fractum and coloratum) in the first two versions of his theory of composition are modelled on Lassus’s. The example of the genus aequale is homophonic but contains several instances of syncopation that help expressive declamation of the text. Transposition by a 3rd would have avoided the artificially complex notation of the chromatic example, in which the essential variability of the 3rd and the 7th is clear. In the other two motets Burmeister used numerous rhetorical musical figures like those he identified in Lassus’s motets. It is clear, however, that an ability to imitate Lassus’s stylistic devices does not guarantee music of comparable quality.

WORKS

all published in Rostock

theoretical works

Hypomnematum musicae poeticae … ex Isagoge … ad chorum gubernandum cantumque componendum conscripta synopsis (1599)

Musica autoschediastikē (1601)

Musicae practicae sive artis canendi ratio (1601) [separate edn of pt iv of Musica autoschediastikē]

Musica poetica: definitionibus et divisionibus breviter delineata (1606/R; Eng. trans., 1993)

ed.: Musica theorica Henrici Brucaei (1609)

sacred vocal

Geistlicher Psalmen D.M. L[utheri] und anderer gottseligen Menner, 4vv (1601); 7 ed. L. Schöberlein: Schatz des liturgischen Chor- und Gemeindegesangs, i (Göttingen, 1865); 3 ed. in Handbuch der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenmusik, i/2 (Göttingen, 1942)

4 Lat. motets, 5vv, in Hypomnematum musicae poeticae and Musica autoschediastikē

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (‘Rhetoric and Music’: G.J. Buelow)

ZahnM

H. Brandes: Studien zur musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1935)

H.-H. Unger: Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1941/R)

M. Ruhnke: Joachim Burmeister (Kassel, 1955)

F. Feldmann: ‘Das “Opusculum bipartitum” des Joachim Thuringus’, AMw, xv (1958), 123–42

H. Leuchtmann: Die musikalischen Wortausdeutungen in den Motetten des Magnum opus musicum von Orlando di Lasso (Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, 1959)

C. Dahlhaus: Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Kassel, 1968; Eng. trans., 1990)

C.V. Palisca: ‘Ut oratoria musica: the Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism’, The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. F.W. Robinson and S.G. Nichols (Hanover, NH, 1972), 37–65

M. Ruhnke: ‘Lassos Chromatik und die Orgelstimmung’, Convivium musicorum: Festschrift Wolfgang Boetticher, ed. H. Hüschen and D.-R. Moser (Berlin, 1974), 291–308

B.V. Rivera: ‘The Isagoge (1581) of Johannes Avianus’, JMT, xxii (1978), 43–64

M.R. Maniates: Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530–1630 (Manchester and Chapel Hill, NC, 1979)

B.V. Rivera: German Music Theory in the Early Seventeenth Century: the Treatises of Johannes Lippius (Ann Arbor, 1980)

M. Ruhnke: ‘Die Motette Exaudi, Domine, vocem meam von Orlando di Lasso’, Chormusik und Analyse, ed. H. Poos (Mainz, 1983), i, 103–19; ii, 43–50

B. Vickers: ‘Figures of Rhetoric – Figures of Music?’, Rhetorica, ii (1984), 1–44

D. Bartel: Handbuch der musikalischen Figurenlehre (Laaber, 1985, 2/1992; Eng. trans., 1997, as ‘Musica poetica’: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music)

H.J. Daebeler: ‘Zur Entwicklung des Rostocker Musiklebens im 17. und frïhen 18. Jahrhundert’, Zur norddeutschen Musikkultur in der Zeit des Absolutismus und der Frühaufklärung: Rostock 1985, 18–27

A. Forchert: ‘Musik und Rhetorik im Barock’, Schütz-Jb 1985–6, 5–21

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Zur Geschichtlichkeit der musikalischen Figurenlehre’, Festschrift Martin Ruhnke zum 65. Geburtstag (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986), 83–93

D. Harrán: Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, MSD, xl (Stuttgart, 1986)

J. Markowsky: ‘Zwei für die Schütz-Analyse relevante musiktheoretische Quellen des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Quellenkunde in Thüringen: Bad Köstritz 1987, 36–53

L. Zoppelli: ‘“Ut prudens et artifex orator”: sulla consistenza di una “dottrina” retorico-musicale fra Controriforma e Illuminismo’, RIM, xxiii (1988), 132–56

A. Forchert: ‘Madrigalismus und musikalisch-rhetorische Figur’, Die Sprache der Musik: Festschrift Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller, ed. J.P. Fricke and others (Regensburg, 1989), 151–69

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Die musikalische Rhetorik und ihre Genese in Musik und Musikanschauung der Renaissance’, Renaissance-Rhetorik: Essen 1990, ed. H.F. Plett (Berlin, 1993), 285–315

W. Braun: Deutsche Musiktheorie des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, ii: Von Calvisius bis Mattheson, Geschichte der Musiktheorie, ed. F. Zaminer, viii/2 (Darmstadt, 1994)

B.McD. Wilson: ‘Ut oratoria musica in the Writings of Renaissance Music Theorists’, Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J. Buelow, ed. T.J. Mathiesen and B.V. Rivera (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995), 341–68

BENITO V. RIVERA, MARTIN RUHNKE

Burnacini, Giovanni

(b ?Cesena, c1605; d Vienna, 21 July 1655). Italian stage designer and architect. His first known works as an artist were the tournament theatre and stage designs for Marazzoli’s Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po (1642, Ferrara). These show the influence of Alfonso Rivarola (‘il Chenda’), whose pupil he may have been and whom he may have succeeded as stage designer and engineer at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, about 1640, where he probably staged operas by Monteverdi. He was active there in 1643 and 1651 and may have built the small Teatro SS Apostoli (opened 1648), for which he directed and designed until 1651. With his brother Marc’Antonio he was summoned to Vienna by Ferdinand III in 1651, and until his death, assisted by his son Ludovico Ottavio, he was responsible for the décor of the operatic and festive productions at the imperial court.

In the librettos of La finta savia (1643, music by Ferrari and others) and Lucio’s Gl’amori di Alessandro magno e di Rossane (1651) Burnacini was hailed as the true pioneer of Venetian theatrical machinery. His stage designs, preserved in a number of engravings (A. Bertali: La gara, 1652, and L’inganno d’amore, 1653), confirm this high estimate and show that in both technical and artistic respects he was the equal of his better-known rival Giacomo Torelli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (E. Povoledo)

P. Bjurström: Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design (Stockholm, 1961, rev. 2/1962)

For further bibliography see Burnacini, Ludovico Ottavio.

MANFRED BOETZKES

Burnacini, Ludovico Ottavio

(b ?Mantua, 1636; d Vienna, 12 Dec 1707). Italian stage designer and architect, son of Giovanni Burnacini. He went to Vienna in 1651 as his father’s assistant and pupil. After his father’s death (1655) he at first succeeded him as stage designer at the imperial court, but on 30 June 1657 he was dismissed by the new emperor, Leopold I, in favour of G.B. Angelini. Re-engaged from 1 January 1659, for nearly five decades he designed all the stage sets, machines and costumes for the theatrical performances, sacre rappresentazioni, festivals and memorial ceremonies of the Viennese court. He also did architectural work, including the building of the new court theatres, 1666–8.

Burnacini’s unique scenic imagination stamped Viennese opera in the 17th century – the works of Bertali, Cesti, Draghi and the Zianis – with an unmistakable imprint. Surpassing even the masterly theatrical machinery of his father, he developed a spectacular style of courtly stage design, particularly in the great ‘homage operas’ of the 1660s and 70s (e.g. Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro, 1668, and Draghi’s La monarchia latina trionfante, 1678; see illustration). This style satisfied most effectively his employer’s demands for supreme strength, both at an emotional level, by virtue of its ostentatious splendour, and at a didactic one, through a stringent symbolism. His costumes, notably for masquerades, ventured into the grotesque. He also trod new paths with his stage designs for comic operas and with the stage presentation of religious works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Barigozzi-Brini)

ES (J. Gregor)

J. Gregor: Wiener szenische Kunst: die Theaterdekoration der letzten drei Jahrhunderte nach Stilprinzipien dargestellt (Vienna, 1924)

J. Gregor, ed.: L.O. Burnacini: maschere (Munich, 1925; Eng. trans., 1925)

F. Biach-Schiffmann: Giovanni und Ludovico Burnacini: Theater und Feste am Wiener Hof (Vienna, 1931) [incl. list of works]

P. Fleischacker: Rekonstruktionsversuch des Opernhauses und des Bühnenapparates in dem Theater des L.O. Burnacini (diss., U. of Vienna, 1960)

H. Berger: Die Grotesken Kostümentwürfe Lodovico Ottavio Burnacinis (diss., U. of Vienna, 1962)

M. Baur-Heinold: Theater des Barock: festliches Bühnenspiel im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1966; Eng. trans., 1966)

S. Solf: Festdekoration und Groteske: der Wiener Bühnenbildner Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini: Inszenierung barocker Kunstvorstellung (Baden-Baden, 1975)

W. Greisenegger: ‘Set Designs and Costumes’, The Vienna Opera, ed. A. Seebohm (New York, 1987), 177–82

MANFRED BOETZKES

Burnand, Sir F(rancis) C(owley)

(b London, 29 Nov 1836; d Ramsgate, 21 April 1917). English librettist and dramatist. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he founded the Amateur Dramatic Club, he studied for the church and later read law and was admitted to the bar. But he soon became instead a prolific writer of farce, pantomime, burlesque and extravaganza for the London stage. In the 1860s he was a chief provider of burlesque for the Royalty Theatre, where his first marked success was Black Eyed Susan (1869). He was knighted in 1902.

Although one of the most popular of Victorian dramatists, Burnand was a facile and slapdash writer; his favourite devices included puns, topical references and slang. His only piece to hold the stage was Cox and Box (1866), adapted from J. Maddison Morton’s 1847 farce Box and Cox and set as a one-act operetta by Sullivan. He wrote nearly 20 pieces for the German Reeds’ entertainments and it was Reed who brought Burnand and Sullivan together again for The Contrabandista, or The Law of the Ladrones (St George’s Hall, 1867), later expanded as The Chieftain (Savoy Theatre, 1894). Among Burnand’s other collaborators in comic opera were Alexander Mackenzie, Alfred Cellier, Edward Solomon, J.L. Molloy and German Reed himself. He also provided translations for London productions of operas by French composers, including Audran, Lecocq and Planquette.

FREDRIC WOODBRIDGE WILSON

Burnett, Avery.

Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1526; he may be identifiable with Avery.

Burnett, Duncan

(fl Glasgow, 1614–52). Scottish composer. He was related to the illustrious family of Burnets of Leys in Aberdeenshire. In 1614 he was described as schoolmaster in Glasgow, and in 1638 he was granted a licence ‘to tak up ane musik schooll’ there. His will is dated 1652 and was made in Glasgow. Burnett’s surviving music, which is for keyboard, is in an early 17th-century manuscript collection (GB-En), probably made by the composer in about 1615, and comprises a named pavan, two other pavans, a set of variations on a ground and two song arrangements attributable to him on internal evidence of style. The pieces range from decorative (possibly early) song transcriptions (which include Lassus’s popular and much arranged Susanne un jour; ed. in EKM, xv) to elaborate and effective dance movements, which reveal a liking for sombre key, low tessitura, expressive harmony and a contrapuntal texture. These include a powerful pavan and a spectacular setting of The Queine of Inglands Lessoune (both ed. in EKM, xv), the latter on a theme known elsewhere as Pavanne d’Angleterre (Gervaise, Sixième livre, 1555), Prince Edward’s Paven (ed. in MB, xv) and Heaven and Earth (in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book). Burnett’s manuscript also contains most of the surviving keyboard music of William Kinloch, as well as keyboard music by Byrd, consort versions of 16th-century Scottish and French partsongs, Scottish consort music by John Black and 44 settings of the Proper psalm tunes by Andrew Kemp.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Dart: ‘New Sources of Virginal Music’, ML, xxxv (1954), 93–106

K. Elliott and H.M. Shire, eds.: Music of Scotland 1500–1700, MB, xv (1957, 3/1975)

K. Elliott, ed.: Early Scottish Keyboard Music, EKM, xv (1958, 2/1966)

K. Elliott: Music of Scotland, 1500–1700 (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1960), i, 149ff, 350ff

K. Elliott and F. Rimmer: A History of Scottish Music (London, 1973), 34, 44

K. Elliott, ed.: Early Scottish Music for Keyboard (forthcoming)

KENNETH ELLIOTT

Burnett, Richard (Leslie)

(b Godstone, Surrey, 23 June 1932). English fortepianist. He studied at the RCM with Geoffrey Tankard and privately with Peter Katin and Maria Donska. His interest in early pianos was first stimulated by the tenor Nigel Rogers, with whom he recorded Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. From the late 1960s Burnett built up a collection of harpsichords, chamber organs, clavichords and especially early pianos, which has been housed at Finchcocks in Kent since 1971. He has developed this manor house as a museum and music centre with many of the instruments in playing order. Burnett has made about 30 recordings of the Finchcocks collection including Die Winterreise with Ian Partridge, Classical clarinet sonatas with Alan Hacker and Mozart piano quartets, as well as solo works of the English Piano School.

GEORGE PRATT

Burney, Charles

(b Shrewsbury, 7 April 1726; d Chelsea, London, 12 April 1814). English musician, composer and music historian. A fashionable and popular teacher of music, he was a composer and performer of modest talents whose greatest success and legacy are his writings on music.

KERRY S. GRANT

1. Life.

His father, James Macburney, was a dancer, violinist and portrait painter who dropped the prefix from his surname about the time that Charles was born. Charles and his twin sister Susanna, born to Macburney's second wife, were the last of 20 children in the family. Before the age of eight he was sent to Condover under the care of a nurse. He returned to Shrewsbury to enrol in the Free School, and in 1739 rejoined his family in Chester, where he entered Chester Free School as a King's Scholar. Here the early introduction to music he had received at Condover was continued under the direction of the organist of the cathedral, and he was soon able to perform the services. His education and interest in music were heightened by the many famous musicians who travelled through Chester on their way to or from Ireland.

In 1742 Burney returned to Shrewsbury to assist his half-brother James, who had become the organist of St Mary's Church. James proved to have limited talents and Burney's autobiographical reflections on this period are of intense self-guided study in music, letters and practising. In 1743 he returned to Chester ‘inflamed with a rage for composition’. He again benefited from association with the many notable musicians in transit between London and Dublin. The visit of Thomas Arne in 1744 ultimately led to Burney's becoming apprenticed to him for a period of seven years. Burney's association with Arne was troubled. He was obliged to carry a very heavy burden transcribing music, teaching Arne's less important singers, giving lessons to Arne's instrumental pupils and playing in various orchestras. All of the income from these activities accrued to Arne. Nonetheless, Burney gained invaluable experience and important associations. In 1745 Arne sent him to Handel, who engaged him to play in the orchestra for his new oratorios Hercules and Belshazzar. He eventually obtained a regular place in the orchestra of the Drury Lane Theatre and performed at Vauxhall Gardens.

In 1746 Burney met Fulke Greville, a well-travelled and sophisticated gentleman, who took an interest in Burney because of his uncommon intellect and social ability. For several years Greville purchased a portion of Burney's time from Arne so that Burney could entertain his friends at his country home. In 1748 Greville purchased the remaining years of Burney's apprenticeship from Arne. Burney became apprentice, music-master and intellectual companion to Greville. However, after less than a year, in May 1749, Burney was released from all obligations to Greville so that he could marry Esther Sleepe, who had clandestinely given birth to their first child one month earlier. Freed from all apprentice obligations, he quickly established himself. He became a Freeman of the Musician's Company in July 1749. The friends he had made during his service to Arne and Greville assisted all of his efforts. With their help he was appointed organist of St Dionis Backchurch. In 1749 he replaced John Stanley when the fashionable series of concerts held at the Swan Tavern were relocated, after a fire destroyed the former site, to the King's Arms Tavern. Burney states that he ‘began to be in fashion in the City, as a Master, and had my hands full of professional business of all kinds with scholars at both ends of the town, Composition, & public playing’. Among his pupils were Giulia Frasi and Gaetano Guadagni, two of Handel's leading singers. In 1750 Burney provided the music for the comic opera Robin Hood (with a libretto by Moses Mendez) under the name of the pretend Society of the Temple of Apollo, an institution of which Burney repeatedly asserted he was the sole member. The ‘Society’ also provided music for the pantomime Queen Mab, based on a libretto by Henry Woodward, to great success. Burney subsequently provided many new songs for Garrick's production of The Masque of Alfred (1751), but it was only moderately successful.

Burney fell seriously ill in 1751. Forced to leave London for the cleaner air of the countryside, he settled in King's Lynn, as organist of St Margaret's Church. For nine years he served as organist, music instructor to the best families in the area, and as impresario and performer for concerts. He continued his course of self-directed study of languages, literature and music history and befriended many of the leading citizens in the region. In 1760 he returned to London, where he quickly re-established himself as a leading music teacher. He did this in part by displaying the talents of his daughter Esther, who was already an impressive harpsichordist at the age of ten. His many influential friends ensured the rapid success of his return to London; however, his wife's protracted illness and subsequent death in 1762 deprived him of the full enjoyment of this success. In 1763 David Garrick enlisted him as musical director for his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Burney provided 14 of the songs for the production which, however, was unsuccessful and quickly withdrawn. He visited Paris for the first time in 1764 to enrol his daughters in a school, and used the occasion to become acquainted with the state of theatre, opera and music. Burney collaborated with Garrick again in an English adaption of Rousseau's pastoral Le devin du village. Burney had translated the work during his stay in King's Lynn and he reworked this version for the production in 1766. Adapted as The Cunning Man, Rousseau's work enjoyed moderate success. Burney was to produce nothing more for the theatre.

In 1767 Burney married his second wife, Mrs Stephen Allen, the widow of a close friend from his time in King's Lynn. In 1769 he sought and gained an appointment to write the ode for the installation of the chancellor of the University of Cambridge, but withdrew over disagreement about the cost of the orchestra. Instead, he wrote an exercise for Oxford and matriculated from University College in June 1769 with the degrees of BMus and DMus.

Burney's lifelong interest in astronomy, as well as his passion for literature, found expression in 1769 in the anonymous publication An Essay towards a History of the Principal Comets that have Appeared since the Year 1742, a work calculated to benefit from the scheduled reappearance of Halley's Comet that autumn. Burney next turned to writing about the history of his own art, but determined that he would need to engage in research in France and Italy to augment his broad acquaintance with the relevant and available material in England. In June 1770 he left England on a tour of the leading cities of France and Italy, bearing numerous letters of introduction to leading intellectuals and musicians on the Continent. Burney's published account of this tour, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, established him as one of music history's keenest observers and most entertaining commentators. By virtue of its reflection of his wide ranging intelligence and interest, it laid the foundation for Burney's acceptance as a man of letters rather than what his daughter Fanny would call ‘a mere musician’.

In 1772 Burney undertook a trip through the Low Countries, Germany and Austria, motivated in part because of his desire to know more about the music in these countries and in part at the prompting of Christopher Daniel Ebeling, who was translating Burney's Italian tour into German. His sojourns in the great musical cities (such as Vienna, Berlin, Potsdam and Hamburg) included visits to Metastasio, Hasse and Gluck, as well as to C.P.E. Bach. Less than a year later he published his extensive The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces. His work, which contained criticisms of German manners and taste, drew strong protests from loyal Germans, but was highly successful in England.

The success of his writings only increased his fashionable status. His home was the gathering place for prominent musicians, men of letters, politicians and artists. The Sunday Evening Concerts held there were justly famous (fig.1). His musical activities continued unabated and he secured the post of organist of Oxford Chapel (now St Peter's, Vere Street) in 1773. Burney moved to the former home of Sir Isaac Newton in St Martin's Street, Leicester Fields in 1774.

Three years in the writing, the first volume of Burney's General History of Music was published in 1776, two years later than proposed. He barely succeeded in his ambition to beat to publication the history of music written by Sir John Hawkins. However, Hawkins published his complete five-volume history at one time, whereas it was to take Burney until 1789 to complete his task. Contemporary reviews cast the books as rivals and the relative merits of the two histories have been in debate continuously since. Burney's initial volume enjoyed immediate success and very positive reviews, some of which Burney contrived to manipulate to ensure favourable comment. The second volume of the History was delayed by a relaxing of Burney's ambition, partly because he enjoyed his earlier successes and because of his distaste for the Gothic music that was his subject; it did not appear until 1782. The volume was a critical success, nevertheless, and drew notable attention because its publication coincided with the publication of Cecelia by his daughter Fanny. Work on the third volume of the History was interrupted by Burney's involvement with the Handel Commemoration of 1784. He was appointed official historian of the event, which caused him considerable difficulty and expense. He found himself in the hands of the exclusive admirers of Handel, who expected him to surrender all of his earnings to the charitable fund that was the beneficiary of the event. As a result of the direct intervention of the king, and others whom Burney could not afford to offend, the essays on Handel and his music in the Account of the Commemoration of Handel do not always reflect his honest critical opinion.

In 1789, at the age of 63, Burney published the third and fourth volumes of his History. A new, somewhat revised, edition of the first volume was also published, enabling the purchase of all four volumes (the first volume had gone out of print many years earlier). The completed work, though inevitably compared with that of Hawkins, was favourably received. The following year Burney began writing a biography of Metastasio. He worked on it only sporadically, not completing the work until 1796. In addition to his broad participation in the social and cultural life of London, his work was delayed by Haydn's two visits to England. It was to Burney that Haydn came when he first arrived in England. Burney published a poem of welcome and the two spent a great deal of time together during a total of the three years Haydn spent in England between 1791 and 1795.

In 1801 Burney undertook his last large-scale project, the writing of the articles on music for Rees's Cyclopaedia. This task occupied him for much of the rest of his life. In 1806 he received a pension of £200 a year. In 1810 he was appointed a Correspondant of the Institut de France Classe des Beaux-Arts. During the final years of life Burney worked on his memoirs, attempted to bring order to an immense correspondence and spent time organizing his very extensive library. After his death, his library was separated into three lots. The Miscellaneous Library and his collection of music were sold at two separate auctions. His extensive library of books on music was sold as he had wished, without being separated, to the British Museum. In 1817 a monument to Burney was erected in the North Choir Aisle of Westminster Abbey.

Burney joined the Royal Society of Musicians in 1749 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1764 and the Royal Society (FRS) in 1773. He was a member of the Music Graduates Meeting throughout its existence. In 1767 he was appointed ‘Extra Musician’ in the King's Band, and in 1774 he was promoted to musician-in-ordinary. He made a number of attempts to achieve more notable and more lucrative appointments but without success.

Portraits of Burney exist as follows: (1) Reynolds (original, fig.2, now in the National Portrait Gallery, and formerly the property of the descendant of the Rev. Dr Charles Burney; copies in the Music Faculty, Oxford, and the Conservatorio di Musica G.B. Martini, Bologna; engraving by Bartolozzi in the History). (2) Drawing by Dance (in the National Portrait Gallery). (3) Engravings in the European Magazine, 1 April 1785 (possibly after the now lost portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds's sister, Frances). (4) Bust by Nollekens (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802; copies in the British Museum and the Music Faculty, Oxford). (5) Drawing in black chalk, done at Calais, 1770 (collection of J.M. Osborne, Yale University).

Burney figures in Barry's huge painting Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames (1783) in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts, John Adam Street, London. Finally, there is a well-known colour-print caricature, A Sunday Concert (1782; fig.1), recalling the celebrated musical parties at Burney's St Martin's Street residence: a silhouette copy of this on glass formerly belonged to Percy A. Scholes.

2. Achievements

(i) Compositions.

Burney's compositions are competent and reflect his activities as a performer, impresario and church musician. None has achieved lasting fame, although the link to Rousseau's Le devin du village has attracted attention to The Cunning Man. Late in life he described his own music as negligible.

(ii) Literary works.

Burney's Tours and the General History of Music remain wellsprings of observation and insight into 18th-century musical life and practice. The History remains an impressive, if inconsistent, work of great value even after more than 200 years of specialized scholarship. The distinguishing mark of Burney's history, in comparison to that of Hawkins, is his greater familiarity and interest in contemporary music and his skill in addressing the general reader. Burney intended his work to be a distinctively English history of music directed to improving the taste of his readers. He wrote for a specific audience and sought the help of his collaborators, particularly Thomas Twinning (1735–1804) as much to assist him with the literary and general interest aspects of his work as with its musical content. The extensive treatment of Handel in the fourth volume of the History is the result both of Burney being granted access to the king's great collection of Handel manuscripts and of his catering to the general enthusiasm for Handel's music that dominated English taste for many years. Burney himself was a modernist who, though capable of admiring what was exceptional about Handel's music, was unprepared to accept Handel or any other composer as the greatest that ever lived or ever would live.

It is essential in reading Burney's writings to pay due attention to the tenets laid out in his ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’. Many misinterpretations, such as the often-repeated notion that Burney was an ‘enemy of counterpoint’ can be avoided by considering his comments against the principles he followed in making his critical judgments. The prudent reader will remember that Burney wrote in a period and under conditions quite different from those available to contemporary authors. Throughout his life he was hopeful of receiving positions through patronage and later pensions. He consciously avoided placing his ambitions in jeopardy and this affected the content of his work. At its least intrusive this anxiety led him to ‘praise what is worthy and to be silent about the rest’. In at least one instance, his Account of the Commemoration of Handel, Burney's reliance on the favour of those who might be his beneficiaries caused him to alter his opinion to the point of prevarication.

The Memoirs of … Metastasio are largely unsuccessful. His articles for Rees's Cyclopedia are inconsistent and have been frequently ridiculed: they are an uneven compilation of material drawn from other authors, especially from Burney's early translation of Rousseau's Dictionnaire de Musique, and from his own works. Nevertheless, they are valuable in that they offer a good deal of new material, including assessments of Mozart and Haydn, and even mention of Beethoven. The comparison of essays in their original form in Burney's early works with the versions found in the Rees articles yields many interesting insights. Burney assembled his own memoirs late in his life, but his incomplete work was taken up by his daughter Fanny, whose editorial work reshaped his career to her own conception, protecting her sense of family dignity by emphasizing his accomplishments as a man of letters. Her wish to de-emphasize the place of music in Burney's later life led to the destruction of material of inestimable value, including what was essentially a diary of Haydn's activities in London.

(iii) A man of letters.

Unquestionably one of Burney's greatest accomplishments was his transcendence of the cultural and practical limitations of musicians in his time to a place in London's best society. He was largely self-educated, yet could hold his place in the company of England's finest intellects. He was not without character faults – one observer noted that he had no fault save that of obsequiousness – yet he presented himself in such an agreeable manner that Samuel Johnson could say of him ‘my heart goes out to meet him. I much question if there is in the world such another man for mind, intelligence, and manners’. Although he succeeded in moving to such levels of society that he would be in the company of the king and queen, he was constantly aware of the necessity of protecting his success by accommodation to the powerful or merely influential. Not surprisingly, this affected his writings to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his subject.

(iv) His children.

Several of Burney's children achieved recognition in their right: Esther (Hester, ‘Hetty’), a well-known harpsichordist; Frances (‘Fanny’, Madame d'Arblay), diarist and novelist; Rear Admiral James Burney, FRS, who twice sailed round the world with Captain Cook and wrote an important five-volume History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean; the Rev. Charles Burney, DD, LID, FRS, one of the most eminent classical scholars of his day, whose magnificent library together with his extensive collection of newspapers and materials about the history of the theatre was purchased for the British Museum; and Charlotte Ann (Mrs Broome) and Sarah Harriet, both minor novelists. The musician Charles Rousseau Burney (who married Hester) and the artist Edward Francis (or Francesco) Burney were his nephews, sons of his brother Richard.

WORKS

printed works published in London, unless otherwise stated

instrumental

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, vc/hpd, op.1 (1748)

VI Cornet Pieces … and a fugue, hpd (1751)

VI Sonatas or Duets, 2 fl/vn, op.3 (1754)

6 Sonatas, 2 vn, b, op.4 (1759)

6 Concertos a 7, 4 vn, va, vc, bc, op.5 (c1760)

6 Sonatas, hpd (1761)

2 Sonatas, hpd/pf, vn, vc, 1st set (1769)

2 Sonatas, hpd, pf, vn, vc, 2nd set (1772)

4 Sonatas or Duets for 2 performers, pf/hpd (1777/R)

A 2nd set of 4 Sonatas or Duets, pf/hpd (1778/R)

? Sonate à 3 mains, hpd (c1780)

Preludes, fugues and interludes, org, bk 1 (c1787)

other works

6 songs composed for the Temple of Apollo, bk 1, op.2 (c1750)

The Cunning Man [adapted from J.-J. Rousseau: Le devin du village], Drury Lane, 21 Nov 1766 (c1767/R 1998 in RRMCE, l suppl.)

Ode on St Cecilia's Day (burlesque, B. Thornton), Ranelagh Gardens, 1769, ?1760/1763, ?lost

I will love thee, O Lord my strength (Ps xviii), solo vv, chorus, orch, DMus exercise, 1769, GB-Ob

XII Canzonetti a 2 voci in canone (P. Metastasio) (c1790)

Other songs, airs, etc., some perf. in stage works, pubd singly and in 18th-century anthologies, see Scholes, 1948

WRITINGS

Journal of Burney's travels in France and Italy (MS, 1771, GB-Lbl Add.35122) [see Poole, 1969]

The Present State of Music in France and Italy, or the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to collect Materials for a General History of Music (London, 1771, 2/1773) [based on Journal, 1771; see Scholes, 1959, and Poole, 1969]

Lettere del defonto Signor Giuseppe Tartini alla Signora Maddalena Lombardini inserviente ad una importante lezione per i suonatori di violini/A Letter from the late Signor Tartini to Signora M. Lombardini (now Signora Sirmen) published as an Important Lesson to Performers on the Violin, Translated by Dr Burney (London, 1771, 2/1779/R)

The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces, or the Journal of a Tour through these Countries, undertaken to collect Materials for a General History of Music (London, 1773, 2/1775) [see Scholes, 1959]

A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to which is prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, i (London, 1776, 2/1789), ii (1782, repr. 1811–12), iii–iv (1789); ed. F. Mercer in 2 vols. with the 1789 text of the orig. vol. i (London, 1935/R)

‘Account of an Infant Musician [W. Crotch]’,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lxix (1779), 183–206; also pubd separately (London, 1779)

An Account of Mademoiselle Theresa Paradis (London, 1785)

An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3rd and 5th, 1784, in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785/R)

Verses on the Arrival in London of the Great Musician Haydn (London, 1791)

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (London, 1796/R1971)

Reviews, etc., in Monthly Review (1785–1802) [see index of contributors in B.C. Nangle: The Monthly Review, First Series, 1749–1789 (Oxford, 1934) and The Monthly Review, Second Series, 1790–1815 (Oxford, 1955)]

Notes signed ‘B’ in J. Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. E. Malone (London, 3/1799)

Articles contributed to Rees's Cyclopaedia (1819–20)

Memoirs (MS, n.d. US-NH, Osborn collection 73.1–Journal O) [see F. D’Arblay, 1832, Scholes, 1959, and Klima, Brown and Grant, 1988]

Letters, journals, memoranda, memoirs, etc., in various libraries [summary list in Lonsdale, 1965; complete guide, incl. MSS of other members of Burney family, in J. Hemlow: A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence, 1749–1878 (New York, 1971), see also Ribeiro, 1991]

1. Early years in France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.-J. Rousseau: ‘Lettre à M. Burney sur la musique, avec fragmens d'observations sur l'Alceste italien de M. le chevalier Gluck’, Traités sur la musique (Geneva, 1781), 375–427

The Late Dr. Burney's Musical Library: a Catalogue of the … Collection of Music … which will be sold … on Monday, the 8th of August, 1814 (London, 1814); facs. edn by A.H. King (Amsterdam, 1973) [review by K.S. Grant, Notes, xxxi (1974–5), 45–8]

‘Dr Burney's Letter to Haydn’,The Harmonicon, v (1827), 63 only

F. D'Arblay: Memoirs of Doctor Burney (London, 1832/R)

J.W. Croker: ‘Madame d'Arblay's Memoirs of Dr Burney’, Quarterly Review, xlix (1833), 97–125

[C.F. Barrett, ed:] Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay [Fanny Burney] (London, 1842–6, rev. 4/1904–5 by A. Dobson)

A.R. Ellis, ed.: The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778 (London, 1889, 2/1907)

F.G. Edwards: ‘Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814): a Biographical Sketch’, MT, xlv (1904), 435–9, 513–15, 575–80

F. Kidson: ‘James Oswald, Dr Burney and “The Temple of Apollo”’, MA, ii (1910–11), 34–41

L.M. Isaacs: ‘A Friend of Dr Johnson’, MQ, i (1915), 583–91

J. Pulver: ‘Burney in Berlin’, MMR, lix (1929), 169–70

E.M. Lockwood: ‘At Dr Burney's’, ML, xi (1930), 78–86

V. Woolf: ‘An Evening at Dr Burney's’, The Second Common Reader (1932), 108–25

W.W. Roberts: ‘Charles and Fanny Burney in the Light of the New Thrale Correspondence in the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xvi (1932), 115–36

W.W. Roberts: ‘The Trial of Midas the Second’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xvii (1933), 322–32; also in ML, xiv (1933), 303–12

R.H. Nichols and F.A.Wray: The History of the Foundling Hospital (London, 1935)

A.T. Hazen: Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven, CT, 1937)

R.S.M. Hughes: ‘Dr Burney's Championship of Haydn’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 90–96

K.C. Balderston, ed.: Thraliana: the Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776–1809 (Oxford, 1942, 2/1951)

P.A. Scholes: ‘Notes on a Collection of Burneyana’, MR, iii (1942), 130–44

O.E. Deutsch: ‘Haydn's Hymn and Burney's Translation’, MR, iv (1943), 157–62

C.G.T. Dean: ‘Dr Burney's Connection with the Royal Hospital, Chelsea’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, new ser., viii/3 (1944)

P.A. Scholes: The Great Dr Burney (London, 1948/R)

A.D. McKillop: ‘Bonnell Thornton's Burlesque Ode’, Notes and Queries, cxciv (1949), 321–4

B.C. Nangle: ‘Charles Burney, Critic’, The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed. F.W. Hilles (New Haven, CT, 1949), 99–109

R. Stevenson: ‘The Rivals: Hawkins, Burney and Boswell’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 67–82

R.A. Leigh: ‘Les amitiés françaises du Dr Burney’, Revue de littérature comparée, xxv (1951), 161–94

P.A. Scholes: The Life and Activities of Sir John Hawkins, Musician, Magistrate, and Friend of Johnson (London, 1953/R)

J. Hemlow: The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford, 1958)

M. Benkovitz: ‘Dr Burney's Memoirs’, Review of English Studies, new ser., x (1959), 257

R. Lonsdale: ‘Dr Burney and the Integrity of Boswell's Quotations’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, liii (1959), 327–31

P. Scholes, ed.: Dr. Burney's Musical Tours in Europe (London, 1959) [i, An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in France and Italy, based on Memoirs, n.d., and The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 2/1773; ii, An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands, based on The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces, 2/1775]

A.H. King: Some British Collectors of Music c.1600–1960 (Cambridge, 1963)

R. Lonsdale: ‘Dr Burney and the Monthly Review’, Review of English Studies, new ser., xiv (1963), 346–58; xv (1964), 27–37

R. Lonsdale: Dr Charles Burney: a Literary Biography (Oxford, 1965/R)

H.E. Poole, ed.: Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy, 1770: being the Journal written by Charles Burney during a Tour through these Countries (London, 1969) [based on Journal, 1771, and The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 2/1773]

R. Lonsdale: ‘Dr. Burney's “Dictionary of Music”’, Musicology, v (1977), 159–71

H. Brofsky: ‘Doctor Burney and Padre Martini: Writing a General History of Music’, MQ, lxv (1979), 313–46

K.S. Grant: Dr. Burney as Critic and Historian of Music (Ann Arbor, 1983)

S. Klima, G. Brown and K.S. Grant, eds.: Memoirs of Charles Burney, i: 1726–1769 (Lincoln, NE, 1988)

A. Ribeiro, ed.: The Letters of Dr. Charles Burney, i: 1751–1784 (Oxford, 1991)

H.R.C. Landon: ‘A Letter from Dr. Charles Burney to Longman, Clementi & Co.’, Haydn Yearbook 1992, 170–74

V. Rumbold: ‘Music Aspires to Letters: Charles Burney, Queeney Thrale and the Streatham Circle’, ML, lxxiv (1993), 24–38

W. Weber: ‘The Intellectual Origins of Musical Canon in Eighteenth-Century England’, JAMS, xlvii (1994), 513–16

K.S. Grant: ‘Dr. Burney, the Bear and the Knight: E.F. Burney's Amateurs of Tye-Whig Music’, Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. T. Bauman and M.P. McClymonds (Cambridge, 1995), 43–60

P. Howard: ‘Did Burney Blunder?’, MT, cxxxix (1998), 29–31

Burnham, Robertus de.

See Robertus de brunham.

Burno, [Bruno] Rinaldo

(fl 1546–70). Italian composer. He was one of the circle of composers and noblemen living in Naples during the 1540s who contributed to the early history of Neapolitan song. Seven of his works were included in Elletione de canzone alla napoletana a tre voci (RISM 1546¹⁸), which was compiled in Naples by his friend, Dionisio de Palii, but probably printed in Padua by Fabriano and Bindoni. The print was listed by Antonfrancesco Doni in his Libraria (1550). The characters in Burno’s strophic songs (five napolitane and two mascherate) are complaining lovers whose colourful anecdotes are saturated, like Nola’s, with local proverbial expressions. Only the bass partbook of the Elletione is extant, but it reveals that Burno cultivated two essential features of the Neapolitan style: syllabic declamation on short note values (flagged semiminims are common) and spirited truncation of words and phrases. A napolitana by Burno in the later style, S’io havesse tantillo, was published in Primavera’s first book of napolitane (RISM 1565¹⁷) and reworked, possibly by Arpa (RISM 1570²⁹, 1570³¹).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

G.M. Monti: Le villanelle alla napoletana e l’antica lirica dialettale a Napoli (Città di Castello, 1925)

B.M. Galanti: Le villanelle alla napolitana (Florence, 1954)

D.G. Cardamone: The Canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537 to 1570 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

J. Bernstein: ‘The Burning Salamander: Assigning a Printer to Some Sixteenth-Century Music Prints’, Notes, xlii (1986), 483–501

DONNA G. CARDAMONE

Burns, Robert

(b Alloway, Ayrshire, 25 Jan 1759; d Dumfries, 21 July 1796). Scottish poet and songwriter. His father was a poor tenant-farmer, an occupation Burns himself followed though with no success. He decided to emigrate but was dissuaded, partly by the success of his first published volume, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), and then trained as an excise officer. He had little formal education, first at a local school, then from his father, but his appetite for wide reading, and his intense interest in and love for the Scottish countryside and the oral literature and music of its people, gave him an enviable command over two languages, English and Scots, and a deep appreciation of the wide range of sentiment expressed in Scots traditional melody. In 1786 he began supplying material to James Johnson for publication in The Scots Musical Museum (six vols., 1787–1803) and later also to George Thomson, editor of the Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (five vols., 1793–1818). His work entailed drawing on the vast store of Scots songs he already knew and collecting others, using fragments of existing lyrics as a basis for his own poems and selecting suitable airs on which to compose new lyrics. He produced over 350 songs, including more than one third of those published in the Musical Museum and about 114 of those printed in the Select Collection: this represents the major part of the published repertory of Scottish national song. Those tunes printed in the Musical Museum were given basses by Stephen Clarke, Johnson's musical editor; both airs and lyrics in the Select Collection were probably subjected to a considerable amount of editorial tinkering and were given ‘Symphonies and Accompanyments for the Violin and Piano Forte’ by Pleyel, out of character with the simple and affecting nature of the songs. Though few of his songs were published before his early death, they soon became immensely popular and have since appeared in innumerable arrangements and editions. Among the most recent have been those of the American pianist-composer Serge Hovey, who, in collaboration with Jean Redpath, a professional Scots folksinger, published seven volumes of his arrangements on disc and cassette.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Dick, ed.: The Songs of Robert Burns (London, 1903/R)

J.C. Dick, ed.: Notes on Scottish Song by Robert Burns (London, 1908/R)

D.A. Low, ed.: Critical Essays on Robert Burns (London, 1975) [incl. C. Thorpe Davie: ‘Robert Burns, Writer of Songs’; J. Kinsley: ‘The Music of the Heart’]

C. Ericson-Roos: The Songs of Robert Burns: a Study of the Unity of Poetry and Music (Uppsala, 1977)

D.A. Low, ed.: The Songs of Robert Burns (London, 1993)

K. Simpson, ed.: Burns Now (Edinburgh, 1994)

PETER COOKE

Buroni [Burroni], Antonio.

See Boroni, Antonio.

Burrell, Diana

(b Norwich, 25 Oct 1948). English composer. After studying music at Cambridge University (BA 1971) she worked as a teacher and freelance violist before concentrating on composition, in which she has largely been self-taught. Her first work to attract critical attention was Missa Sancte Endeliente (1980) for five soloists, chorus and orchestra, in which she set the liturgy in both Latin and Cornish and used a characteristically wide range of sonorities and harmonies within a clearly defined structure. She has fulfilled a steady stream of commissions in a variety of genres for many different performers, festivals, ensembles and orchestras, including the City of London Sinfonia, with which she was composer-in-association (1994–6).

Burrell has said that her works begin with the idea of a visual form and that she composes her music as ‘architectural shapes on paper’. She has developed a bold, distinctive and deeply spiritual musical language that is always concerned to communicate directly with the audience, while refusing to compromise its rhythmic and harmonic complexity. Central to much of her work is a vivid depiction of place. Landscape (1988), for orchestra, creates a primeval urban landscape, using the unusual sounds of steel pans, scrap metal and tenor recorders, while Das Meer (1992), for strings, is a dark, teeming seascape. The massive Symphonies of Flocks, Herds and Shoals (1995–6) reflects the abundant life forms of the universe. Burrell’s places are often inhabited by swooping, shrieking birds, as in her string quartet Gulls and Angels (1993) and the orchestral Resurrection (1992), which also incorporates one of her favourite themes, that of rebirth. The english horn plays a central dramatic role in Resurrection and in Dunkelhvide månestråler (1996), for contralto, english horn and orchestra, where it reflects on the agony behind Tove Ditlevsen’s words with a virtuoso keening.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Dalliance of Eagles (elec ballet), 1986; The Albatross (op, Burrell, after S. Hill), 1987; Sequence, vc, tape, 1993

Orch: Praeludium, 1983; Io!, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, str, 1984; Archangel, 2 ob, eng hn, 3 tpt, str, wind, 1987; Landscape, 1988; Landscape with Procession, 1988; Scene with Birds, 1989; Das Meer, das so gross und weit ist, da wimmelt’s ohne Zahl, grosse und kleine Tiere, str, 1992; Resurrection, chbr orch, 1992; Anima, str, 1993; Va Conc. ‘… calling, leaping, crying, dancing …’, 1994; Enchaînements, chbr orch, 1994; Cl Conc., 1996; Symphonies of Flocks, Herds and Shoals, 1995–6; Fl Conc., 1997

Vocal: Pavan (B. Jonson), S, Bar, va, vc, pf, 1979; Missa Sancte Endeliente (liturgy in Cornish and Lat., trad. hymn), S, C, Ct, T, Bar, chorus, orch, 1980; Io Evoe! (ancient Gaelic and Amerindian texts), chorus, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, str, 1984; Angelus, S, vc, db, perc, 1986; Creators of the Stars of Night (trad. hymn), chorus, eng hn, org, 1989; Lights and Shadows (trad. spells), children’s choir, chorus, recs, brass insts, perc, str, 1989; Night Songs (Burrell, P. Verlaine), S, chorus, orch, 1991; Invocation for Justice (Carmina gaedelica, ed. A. Carmichael), S, cl, va, 1992; Heil’ger Geist in’s Himmels Throne (trad. Lutheran chorale), chorus, perc, org, 1993; Tachograph (S. Armitage), Bar, pf, 1993; Dunkelhvide månestråler (T. Ditlevsen), C, eng hn, orch, 1996; Mag & Nunc, treble vv, org, 1996; Michael’s Mass, unison vv, org/pf, 1997

Chbr and solo inst: Concertante, 6 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, db, 1985; Heron, vc, pf, 1988; Shadow, 2 va, 4 vc, db, cel, 1988; Untitled Composition, cl, vc, opt. pf, 1988; Arched Forms with Bells, org, 1990; Wind Qnt, 1990; Aria, vn, 1991; Barrow, hn, bn, vc + drums, el gui + drums, pf, 1991; Lucifer, vn, tpt, 1991; Bright Herald of the Morning, cl, pf, 1992; Gulls and Angels, str qt, 1993; Constellations I, II, pf, 1995; Confession, any combination of 2 or more insts, 1996; Constellations III (The Little Bear), pf, 1997; Gate, 6 vn, 2 va, 2 vc, db, 1997; Bronze, 18 insts, 1997–8; Earth, str qt, 1998; Ritual Sentences, str trio, 1999

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FullerPG

E. Kelly: ‘A Sense of Structure’, Classical Music (23 May 1987), 43

D. Burrell: ‘Accepting Androgyny’, Contact, no.32 (1988), 52–3

D. Burrell: ‘Diana Burrell, b. 1948’, CMR, xi (1994), 55–7

S. Fuller: ‘Calls of the Wild’, MT, cxxxviii (1997), 12–17

SOPHIE FULLER

Burrell, John.

See Burell, John.

Burrian, Carl.

See Burian, Karel.

Burrowes, John F(reckleton)

(b London, 23 April 1787; d London, 31 March 1852). English organist and composer. He was a pupil of William Horsley. He lived in London, where for nearly 40 years he held the post of organist at St James’s, Piccadilly. His works include an overture produced at the concerts of the Philharmonic Society (of which he was one of the original associates), songs and piano pieces, and arrangements of operas. Burrowes was the author of The Piano-Forte Primer (1818) and The Thorough-Base Primer (1819), both of which passed through many editions and were used for nearly a century. He was also a correspondent of R.M. Bacon and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, and supplied his own entry, with work-list, for Sainsbury’s Dictionary. (DNB, W.B. Squire; SainsburyD)

W.H. HUSK/LEANNE LANGLEY

Burrowes, Norma

(b Bangor, Co. Down, 24 April 1944). British soprano. She studied in London at the RAM, where she sang Thérèse in Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias (1968), Monteverdi's Poppaea and Magda in La rondine (1969). In 1970 she won a Gulbenkian Foundation Award and made her professional début with Glyndebourne Touring Opera, as Zerlina. That year she sang Philidel in Purcell's King Arthur with the English Opera Group and made her Covent Garden début as Fiakermilli in Arabella. In 1971 she appeared at Salzburg as Blonde, a part she also sang with the ENO, the Netherlands Opera, the Paris Opéra and the Metropolitan (1979), and recorded with Colin Davis. Other roles in her repertory included Fiorilla in Il turco in Italia, Elisa in Il re pastore, which she sang at Wexford in 1971, Oscar, Alison in Holst’s The Wandering Scholar (which she recorded) and Sophie. At Glyndebourne (1970–81) she sang Papagena, Janáček's Vixen, Pamina and Susanna. Her pure, bright-toned voice, secure coloratura technique and charming appearance were much admired when she sang Zerbinetta for Scottish Opera (1975). Burrowes was also a delightful singer of Purcell and Handel, as can be heard in several recordings; she gave many recitals and appeared on television, notably as Susanna and Nannetta. She retired in 1982.

ELIZABETH FORBES

Burrows, (James) Stuart

(b Cilfynydd, nr Pontypridd, 7 Feb 1933). Welsh tenor. A schoolteacher before winning the tenor solo competition at the Royal National Eisteddfod in 1959, he studied at Carmarthen. He made his début in 1963 with the WNO as Ismaele (Nabucco), also singing Rodolfo (La bohème), Macduff, Jeník (The Bartered Bride), the Duke of Mantua and Ernesto (Don Pasquale). At Athens in 1965 he sang the title role in Oedipus rex under Stravinsky. He made his Covent Garden début in 1967 as Beppe (Pagliacci), returning for 22 seasons as Fenton, Elvino (La sonnambula), Faust, Lensky, Jack (The Midsummer Marriage), and in Mozart roles. He made his San Francisco (1967) and Vienna Staatsoper (1970) débuts as Tamino and sang Don Ottavio at Salzburg (1970) and for his Metropolitan début (1971), returning there as Belmonte, Des Grieux (Manon) and Alfredo. He also sang in Aix-en-Provence and Santa Fe. He was a renowned exponent of Idomeneus, Tamino and Titus. His sweet-toned voice of great flexibility was ideally suited to Mozart and it was used with skill. He recorded many of his best roles, notably Don Ottavio, Tamino and Lensky with Solti and Titus with Colin Davis.

ALAN BLYTH

Burt, Francis

(b London, 28 April 1926). English composer, active in Austria. He studied at the RAM (1948–51), where his teachers included Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley, and at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1951–4) with Blacher, among others. After a scholarship enabled him to spend close to a year in Rome, he settled in Vienna as a freelance composer (1956). By that time he had already made a name for himself with his String Quartet op.2, which received its first performance at Darmstadt in 1953. He received increasing recognition in the following years with his stage and orchestral works. His opera Volpone, for example, was produced by five different companies. In 1973 he was appointed professor of composition at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, where he also directed the institute for electro-acoustic music (1989–91).

Burt took an expanded vision of late Romanticism as his starting point, but also found inspiration in the work of Stravinsky and in Nigerian drum music, with which he became familiar during a year of army service in Nigeria (1946–7); dance and gesture became particularly important, aspects of expression that led him to the world of music theatre. Through Blacher he became acquainted with a varied palette of stylistic and technical possibilities. In his works, rhythms often become germ-cells for development and expressive melodic lines converge to form dense chordal structures. Later compositions retain a greater linearity, so that even dramatic concentrations of material can be heard as the interaction of individual voices. He has also composed music employing quarter-tones and rhythmic phasing.

WORKS

Stage: Volpone (Der Fuchs) (op, 2, B. Jonson, trans. A.E. Eichmann), op.9, 1952–8, rev. 1960–61, Stuttgart, 2 June 1960; Der Golem (ballet, E. Hanka, Y. Georgi and Burt), op.11, 1959–63, Hannover, 31 Jan 1965; Barnstable (Jemand auf dem Dachboden) (op, 1, J. Saunders, trans. H. Spiel), op.13, 1967–9, Kassel, 30 Nov 1969

Orch: Jamben, op.5, 1953; Espressione orchestrale, op.10, 1958–9; Fantasmagoria, op.12, orch, 1963; Morgana, 5 Bilder, orch, 1983–6; Blind Visions, ob, small orch, 1994–5

Vocal: 2 Songs of David, op.1, chorus, 1951; Hüte (C. Sandburg), 7 lieder, medium v, pf, 1952; The Skull (Der Schädel) (C. Tourneur), op.6, T, pf/orch, 1955; Bavarian Gentians (D.H. Lawrence), op.8, 4 solo vv, pf, 1956; Unter der blanken Hacke des Monds (P. Huchel), Bar, orch, 1974–6; Und GOtt der HErr sprach (Betrachtungen nach einer goldenen Hochzeit) (from Bible: Old Testament, trans. M. Luther), Mez, Bar, B, 2 mixed choruses, orch, 1976–83

Chbr and solo inst: 3 Little Pieces for J.J., pf, 1949; Str Qt, op.2, 1951–2; Musik, op.4, 2 pf, 1952; Serenata notturna, op.3, ob, cl, bn, 1952; Duo, op.7, cl, pf, 1954; Echoes, fl, cl, hn, tpt, perc, str trio, 1988–9; For William, fl, cl, hn, tpt, perc, pf, str trio, 1988; Für AlFrED SCHIEE (Ein postmoderner Geburtstagsgruss), str qt, 1991; Str Qt no.2, 1992–3; Hommage à Jean-Henri Fabre, 2 fl, vn, mand, perc, 1993–4

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Wiesmann: ‘Neues Musiktheater in Österreich’, ÖMz, xxxv (1980), 273–7

G. Brosche, ed.: Musikalische Dokumentation Francis Burt (Vienna, 1990)

HARTMUT KRONES

Burt, Warren

(b Baltimore, 10 Oct 1949). Australian composer of American birth. He studied at SUNY, Albany (BA 1971), where his teachers included Joel Chadabe, and at the University of California, San Diego (MA 1975) with Robert Erickson, Kenneth Gaburo and others. His appointments have included the posts of composer-in-residence at the American Composers Forum, St Paul, Minnesota (1994–5), and visiting lecturer in computer music at the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology, Canberra (1994–6). Among his numerous honours are the Bicentennial Commission for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1988) and the Australian Council Composers' Fellowship (1998–2000). An important figure in the development of Australian avant-garde music in the 1970s and 80s, he is best known for his algorithmic and multimedia works. His other interests have included microtonality and extended tunings, and acoustic instrument building. His live electronic and computer music often involves a degree of physical interaction.

WORKS

(selective list)

Nighthawk (media op), 1972–6; Le Grand Ni, live elecs, 1978–9; Green, bn, str trio, 1981–5; Meditations, video, elecs, 1986; Sensus, installation, 1988; The White Room, installation, 1992; Two Enharmonic Cycles, SATB, tuning forks, 1993; Dense Room, installation, 1994–9; Three Bicycles, tape, 1996; Diversity, multimedia theatre piece, 1998

Principal publishers: Frog Peak, Red House

Principal recording companies: Tall Poppies, Scarlet Aardvark

WRITINGS

‘A Set of Justly-Tuned Aluminum Tuning Forks’, Experimental Musical Instruments, ii/5 (1987), 12–13

‘Australian Experimental Music 1963–90’, Leonardo Music Journal, i (1991), 5–10

‘Experimental Music from Australia Using Live Electronics’, CMR, vi (1991), 159–72

‘Thoughts on Physicality and Interaction in Current Electronic Music and Art’, Continuum, viii/1 (1994), 69–82

‘Some Parentheses around Algorithmic Composition’, Organized Sound, i/3 (1996), 167–72

‘Microtonal and Structural Aspects of my Monodies I and II for Microtonal Guitar’, Leonardo Music Journal, vii (1997), 81–3

MICHAEL C. FRENGEL

Burthen.

See Burden.

Burtius, Nicolaus.

See Burzio, Nicolò.

Burton, Avery [Averie].

See Avery.

Burton [Burten], David [Davy].

Gentleman of the Chapel Royal at the beginning of the 16th century; he may be identifiable with Avery.

Burton, Gary

(b Anderson, IN, 23 Jan 1943). American jazz vibraphonist, band leader and writer on music. He taught himself to play the vibraphone, and made his first recordings, for RCA with the country guitarist Hank Garland, when he was 17. After studying for two years at Berklee College of Music he joined George Shearing’s quintet (1963), then rose to prominence as a member of Stan Getz’s quartet (1964–6). From 1967 Burton led his own groups. In the early 1970s he made tours of Europe, Japan and Australia. Burton’s ensembles have included the guitarists Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny and John Scofield. He has also performed in duos, notably with Chick Corea (Crystal Silence, 1972, ECM), and as a soloist, and in 1986 he recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival as a member of the ensemble New Tango led by the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla. He has occasionally played marimba. Burton’s activities as a teacher form a major part of his career. In 1971 he became a member of the staff at Berklee, and by the 1990s he had become Dean of Curriculum there. He has published method books and A Musician’s Guide to the Road (Ontario, 1981) and has toured the USA with his groups presenting lecture-concert programmes.

A virtuoso vibraphonist, Burton developed an original style of improvisation quite distinct from those of his influential predecessors on the instrument, Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson. In the early 1960s he promoted a playing style that made use of four mallets at once, and in many ways he created a compromise between contemporary jazz wind and piano styles (he cites Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk as inspirations). He has employed electronic attachments that produce fuzz tone and reverberation, and has performed on a vibraphone that has no pulsator. Burton is one of the few modern jazz improvisers not to have drawn substantially on the melodic conceptions of the bop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He replaced their vocabulary with a fresh one that emphasizes 20th-century classical music as well as country music. He frequently employs accompanying devices rich in vamps and pedal points, reminiscent of country music, as well as the flavour of Latin American styles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. DeMicheal: ‘Gary Burton: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Vibraharpist’, Down Beat, xxxii/16 (1965), 20–22

D. Morgenstern: ‘Gary Burton: Upward Bound’, Down Beat, xxxv/16 (1968), 14–15

J. Beránek: Gary Burton Discography (Brno, c1984)

B. Milkowski: ‘Gary Burton: Vibes Alive’, Down Beat, lvi/4 (1989), 20

R. Mattingly: ‘Gary Burton: an Improviser’s Game Plan’, Musician, no.154 (1991), 24, 28 only

Oral history material in US-NEij

MARK C. GRIDLEY

Burton, John

(b Yorks., 1730; d Portici, ?3 Sept 1782). English harpsichordist, organist and composer. A pupil of Keeble, he acquired considerable celebrity as an organist and harpsichordist. Burney remarked that Burton ‘was an enthusiast in his art: but having in his youth exercised his hand more than his head, he was not a deep or correct contrapuntist. He had, however, in his pieces and manner of playing them a style of his own’. In 1754 he made a successful concert tour of Germany, where he must have become acquainted with the new continental fortepianos (probably he was among the first Englishmen to do so).

Burton's Ten Sonatas for the Harpsichord, Organ or Piano-forte (1767) represents one of the earliest known references to the instrument on an English title-page. Busby observed that ‘a movement in one of this master's lessons, called the “Courtship”, was, for many years, upon the harpsichord desk of every practitioner in England’. In fact, two other titled pieces, equally tuneful (‘The Chace’ and ‘Tit for Tat’), shared this popularity. Some of his keyboard music was included in a manuscript anthology compiled by Thomas Attwood, dated 1779. Burton wrote in an assured pianistic style, reflected in his liberal but precise indication of dynamics. Contemporary advertisements indicate that he played organ concertos between the acts at Drury Lane; and a keyboard concerto by him survives in manuscript. He apparently played the harpsichord at the London residence of Lord Clive in March 1765, at the time of Mozart's visit.

Burton travelled to Italy in the 1770s; he is reported to have played the harpsichord at concerts in Rome on 20 December 1775 and in March 1776. In 1782 he accompanied William Beckford to Portici, near Naples, where he died of malaria at the home of Sir William and Lady Hamilton. He is said to have left a personal estate worth £9000.

WORKS

all printed works published in London

vocal

12 Italian Canzonetts (P. Rolli), 1v, hpd, op.3 (c1770)

Welcome, welcome, brother debtor, song, transcr. M. Cooke (1795)

instrumental

Concerto, A, kbd, GB-Cfm*

10 Sonatas, hpd/org/pf (1767)

6 Sonatas, pf/hpd/org, vn, op.2 (c1770); with addl fugues, Lbl Add.16155

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH

T. Busby: A General History of Music (London, 1819/R)

‘Harpsichord’, Rees's Cyclopaedia (London, 1819–20)

C.L. Cudworth: ‘The English Organ Concerto’, The Score, no.8 (1953), 51–63

J. Harley: British Harpsichord Music (Aldershot, 1992–4)

I. Woodfield: ‘New Light on the Mozarts' London Visit’, ML, lxxvi (1995), 187–208

J. Ingamells, ed.: A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, CT, 1997)

GERALD GIFFORD

Burton, Robert

(b Dewsbury, 1 Sept 1820; d Harrogate, 2 Aug 1892). English organist and conductor. He studied under Cipriani Potter and succeeded S.S. Wesley in 1849 as organist of Leeds Parish Church, a post he occupied till 1880. As conductor and chorus master of many Yorkshire choral societies, at York, Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, Barnsley, Harrogate and elsewhere, he took an important part in directing and improving the choral music for which the West Riding of Yorkshire became famous. He was chorus master to the first Leeds Festival in 1858 and again in 1874, but resigned the position after differences of opinion with the committee. With Vincent Novello he jointly edited The Choral Service, as used in the Parish Church of Leeds (1855) by James F. Hill. His most important work was perhaps in connection with the Bradford Festival Choral Society, which he trained and conducted from 1878 to 1887. The essence of his method was his careful attention to vocal phrasing.

HERBERT THOMPSON/R

Burton, Stephen Douglas

(b Whittier, CA, 24 Feb 1943). American composer. He was educated at the Oberlin and Peabody conservatories (MM 1974), and at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Henze. In 1973 he was appointed professor of music at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has received commissions from major orchestras, including the Berlin PO, the Chicago SO and the Orchestre National de France. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Opera Institute and the Coolidge Foundation.

Burton's compositional aesthetic centres around melody, supported by a rich range of harmonies and enlivened by a fluid sense of rhythm. He handles large forms with assurance, and the eclectic diversity of his style is particularly apparent when he is responding to a text. He writes artfully and colourfully for the voice, and his music is challenging to the singer in its requirements of both range and expression. His choice of stories for his stage works demonstrates a sophisticated literary sense as well as a bold concept of dramaturgy. He makes use of all the resources of the modern orchestra and has the symphonists's characteristic capacity to sustain and develop a musical line.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage: No Trifling with Love (op, 1, Burton, after A. de Musset), 1970; Finisterre (ballet), 1970; An American Triptych (3 ops, Burton): [1] Maggie (1, after S. Crane), [2] Dr Heidigger's Experiment (1, after N. Hawthorne), [3] Benito Cereno (1, after H. Melville), 1975; The Duchess of Malfi (op, 3, C. Keene, after J. Webster), 1975–8

Syms.: no.1, 1968; no.2 ‘Ariel’ (S. Plath), Mez, Bar, orch, 1976; no.3 ‘Songs of the Tulpehocken’ (Pennsylvanian Ger. folk texts), T, orch, 1976; no.4 ‘Homage to Bach’, org, orch, 1980; no.5 ‘Prelude’, 1981; no.6 ‘I Have a Dream’ (Burton, after M.L. King), S, nar, chorus, orch, 1987; no.7 ‘The Tempest’, 1988

Other: Ode to a Nightingale (J. Keats), S, orch, 1962; Stravinskiana, fl conc., 1971; Dithyramb, orch, 1972; Str Qt, 1973; Impressione Romani, pf, perc, tape, 1974; 6 songs (H. Hesse), S, chbr ens, 1974; 6 Hebrew Melodies (Byron), Mez, pf, 1975; Eurydice, vn, chbr ens, 1977; Fanfare for Peace, orch, 1983; Consecration, 14 brass, 8 timp, 1996

Principal publisher: Dryad Music

WRITINGS

Orchestration (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982)

SAM DI BONAVENTURA

Burundi.

Country in Central Africa. See under Rwanda and Burundi.

Bury, Alison (Margaret)

(b Woking, 20 Jan 1954). English violinist. She studied the violin at the RCM with Sylvia Rosenberg and Jaroslav Vanáček, and the viol and Baroque performance practice with Francis Baines. Aided by a Boise Scholarship and a Countess of Munster Award, she studied in Salzburg (1976–7) with Sandor Végh (modern violin) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Baroque performance practice), and at this time also performed with Vienna Concentus Musicus. She has subsequently played with a large number of the leading period instrument orchestras (frequently as leader and soloist): the Academy of Ancient Music (1975–90), with whom she recorded Vivaldi's ‘Four Seasons’ as soloist, the Taverner Players (1976–92), with whom she made a second recording of the ‘Seasons’, the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra (1978–80), the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (1980–86), the Raglan Baroque Players (1980–) and, most importantly, Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists (1979–), which she has led from 1983. She is also a co-leader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (1986–). Bury has made recordings of the Bach Double Violin Concerto with both Monica Huggett (Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) and Elizabeth Wallfisch (Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and is highly respected as a chamber musician, working with groups including the Chandos Baroque Players (1981–9), L'Ecole d'Orphée (1982–9) and the Geminiani Trio (1983–90). She teaches at the RCM and directs its Baroque Orchestra. Bury's playing style is characterized by a beautiful open sound and sensitive phrasing.

LUCY ROBINSON

Bury [Buri], Bernard de

(b Versailles, 20 Aug 1720; d Versailles, 19 Nov 1785). French composer. The son of Jean-Louis Bury, ordinaire de la musique du roi, he came of a musical family, many of whom held court appointments. He was a pupil of his father and Collin de Blamont. At about 15 he published his Premier livre de pièces de clavecin, five suites in the style of François Couperin, and at 19 he composed the music for a three-act ballet produced by the Duke of Tremouille. On 25 November 1741 he bought for 6000 livres the reversion of Marguérite-Antoinette Couperin’s post of keyboard player to the chambre du roi. In 1743 he was commissioned to write a three-act opéra-ballet, Les caractères de la folie, for the Paris Opéra; the following year he married a niece of Collin de Blamont, who assured him in a note of 27 February 1744 of the reversion of his post as maître de chapelle and also of his patronage. In 1745 Blamont suggested to Bury that he compose a divertissement in honour of the victory at Fontenoy; as a result the five-act tragedy Jupiter vainqueur des Titans was performed in the Grande Ecurie at Versailles for the dauphin’s wedding on 11 December 1745, being acclaimed as the highlight of the festivities. In 1751 Bury was given the reversion of Rebel’s post as surintendant de la musique du roi; he later relinquished the position to Pierre Berton and then to François Giraut for a sum of 10,000 livres and an annuity of 1000 livres, payable also to his widow and children. He was commissioned to edit the operas of Lully, and in May 1770 he collaborated with Dauvergne, Rebel and Francoeur on a revival of Persée for the marriage of the dauphin to Marie Antoinette. He had earlier composed a new prologue for the same opera, of which the Mercure de France (March 1747) remarked: ‘L’ouverture, qui est dans le goût moderne, passe, avec raison, pour une des plus belles de ce genre. Toutes les paroles sont fort bien exprimées, il y a un Choeur très-beau, et les symphonies sont agréables, mélodieuses, pleines de tours de chant heureux, et faciles à danser’. From 1779 he received a royal pension, and in June 1785 he was ennobled by Louis XVI: he died little more than five months later.

While Bury’s early works are in the style of Lalande and Collin de Blamont, his later compositions show the influence of Mondonville and Rameau, especially in the descriptive instrumental symphonies. Although rather conventional in melodic invention, Bury excelled in dances and in his treatment of the orchestra, notably when writing for flutes and bassoons. Almost all his works were very successful: the divertissement La nymphe de Versailles was repeated at the personal request of the queen, and the third entrée (‘Les caprices de l’Amour’) of Les caractères de la folie (which the Mercure of September 1743 stated to be ‘sans contredit, la plus belle de ce Ballet … elle a parû trop courte, quoiqu’elle soit une des plus longues du Théâtre Lyrique’) was selected together with ‘Les Incas’ from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes for a gala performance in March 1744. Only the pastorale Titon et l’Aurore (1750) appears to have had little success: according to the Mercure of April 1751 ‘l’ancienne et grande reputation de M. Roy; les charmes de M. Jeliotte et beaucoup de fort bonne musique répandue dans cet ouvrage, n’ont pû le faire réussir’.

WORKS

all printed works published in Paris

stage

Les caractères de la folie (opéra-ballet, prol, 3, C.-P. Duclos), Paris, Opéra, 20 Aug 1743 (1743), F-Pn; with new entrée, Hylas et Zélie, Opéra, 6 July 1762

Jupiter vainqueur des Titans (tragédie lyrique),Versailles, 11 Dec 1745, lib Pc, music ?lost

La nymphe de Versailles (divertissement, Mlle de Lussan), Versailles, 19 March 1746

Titon et l’Aurore (pastorale héroïque, prol, 3, Abbé de la Marre, A.H. de la Motte), Versailles, Théâtre des petits appartements, 14 Jan 1750 (1750)

La parque vaincue (divertissement, 1, A. Tanevot), ‘sur la convalescence de Mgr le duc de Fronsac’, Versailles, Hôtel de Richelieu, 1751, ?lost

Palmyre (ballet héroïque, S.-R.-N. Chamfort), Fontainebleau, 24 Oct 1765, Pc

Zénis et Almasie (ballet héroïque, 1, Chamfort), Fontainebleau, 2 Nov 1765 (1765), collab. J.-B. de La Borde, ?lost

Addns for Lully’s Persée (N. Joliveau after P. Quinault), Versailles, wedding of dauphin and Marie Antoinette, 17 May 1770, lib Pc

La nymphe de la Seine (divertissement), 1746; Les bergers de Sceaux (divertissement), for Duke of Maine: both cited in FétisB

other works

Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (c1736)

La prise de Berg-op-Zoom (cant.) (1747)

Le retour de Philis (cantatille), T, vn, bc (n.d.)

Other works pubd in 18th-century anthologies

De profundis, grand motet, Pc; 73 arrs. of orchestral pieces by Berton, Trial, Monsigny, Martini, Dauvergne, Rameau, 1774, Pc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (J.-F. Paillard)

FétisB

GroveO (P. Weller; incl. further bibliography)

MGG1 (F. Raugel)

P. Fromageot: ‘Les compositeurs versaillais: Bernard de Bury’, Versailles illustré, ix (1904–5)

C.D. Brenner: A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language, 1700–1789 (Berkeley, 1947, 2/1979)

F. Rebel: ‘Maîtres et surintendants du roi au XVIIIe siècle: une nouvelle querelle’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 222–60

Burzio, Eugenia

(b Turin, 20 June 1872; d Milan, 18 May 1922). Italian soprano. She appeared first as a violinist, then studied singing at the Milan Conservatory, making her début in 1899 at Turin in Cavalleria rusticana. Specialising in the new verismo school, she sang throughout Italy, in South America and at St Petersburg. Among her many appearances at La Scala were admired performances in Gluck’s Armide and Bellini’s Norma. For a while she was one of the leading dramatic sopranos in Italy, but suffered from nerves and ill-health. She made her final appearance in 1919 in Ponchielli’s Marion Delorme. Her recordings show a vibrant voice and a passionate style, which was imaginative and exciting at best but open to many criticisms on grounds of unevenness and over-emphasis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GV (R. Celletti; R. Vegeto)

M. Scott: The Record of Singing, i (London, 1977), 156–9

J.B. STEANE

Burzio [Burtius, de Burtiis, Burci], Nicolò [Nicolaus]

(b Parma, c1453; d Parma, Aug 1528). Italian music theorist, poet and chronicler. He was a member of a noble Parmesan family and was destined for the religious life. During the course of his seminary training he studied music with the well-known theorist Johannes Gallicus. He was ordained as sub-deacon on 28 March 1472 and promoted to priest by 1478. He then began to study canon law at Bologna, where he seems to have enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Bentivoglio family. When Annibale Bentivoglio married Lucrezia, daughter of Ercole d’Este, in 1486, Burzio celebrated the event in verse: his Musarum nympharumque is dedicated to Antongaleazzo Bentivoglio. By 1498 Burzio had returned to Parma and by 1503 he held benefices in two Benedictine monasteries. In December 1504 he was named guardacoro at Parma Cathedral, a post he held until his death.

Although Burzio was active as a poet and historian of Bologna and Parma (on these works, see Rizzi), his most significant work is the Musices opusculum, printed by Ugo de Rugeriis in Bologna on 30 April 1487 (facs. in BMB, section 2, iv, 1969; ed. as Florum libellus: introduzione, testo e commento, Historiae musicae cultores: biblioteca, xxviii, Florence, 1975; trans. in MSD, xxxvii, 1983). It consists of three tracts: the first, in 30 chapters, treats the nature of music, the elements of musical sound, solmization, modal theory and the conservation of the voice; the second, containing six chapters, discusses the rules of counterpoint; and the third contains 21 chapters on notation, number theory and the division of the monochord, and a final chapter on astrology. The treatise includes a number of musical illustrations printed from woodcuts, which are the first of their kind (see ..\Frames/F005488.html Printing and publishing of music, fig.2a).

Burzio wrote his Musices opusculum as a defence of the hexachord system of Guido of Arezzo, which had been vigorously attacked by the Spaniard Bartolomeus Ramis de Pareia in his Musica practica (Bologna, 1482), in which Ramis advocated an octave system based on a new solmization pattern. Burzio’s counter-attack, defending his teacher Johannes Gallicus as well as Guido, was part of a controversy which lasted almost half a century and involved Hothby and later Gaffurius on one side and Spataro, Ramis’s principal defender, on the other. Burzio claimed that he had lent a treatise by Guido to Ramis but that the Spaniard had not understood it. The vehemence of Burzio’s attack on Ramis was without precedent, though Ramis’s sarcastic remarks and personal criticism set the tone. Burzio’s colourful and vitriolic comments reveal the intensity of his emotions; his most polite description of the Spanish theorist is ‘prevaricator’. Ramis himself remained silent, but Spataro, in his Honesta defensio (Bologna, 1491), replied in equally heated invective.

Musices opusculum is based, in part, on the Ritus canendi of Johannes Gallicus, which Burzio copied in 1478 (GB-Lbl Add.22315). Several sections use a question-and-answer pattern of disciple and teacher; since Burzio called himself the ‘primus discipulus’ it is quite possible that he was the pupil. He certainly quoted extensively from Gallicus in his own treatise, and several of his woodcuts are exact copies from the Ritus canendi. He also shared Gallicus’s view that an enormous gulf existed between the ordinary singer and the educated musician.

In support of his theses Burzio cited numerous authorities, including Euclid, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, Pythagoras, Boethius, Guido, Hothby, Gallicus and many others. The woodcut in book 2, chapter 5, is the first complete polyphonic composition in print. It demonstrates the technique of successive composition, in which the soprano is written first, then the tenor, and finally the lowest part, called the contrabassus. In compositions based on plainchant, however, the tenor is created (i.e. mensuralized) first, then the soprano and lastly the contrabassus. Burzio was well aware of the compositional techniques being developed in his time and in one of his contrapuntal rules (bk 2, chap.2) he observed that the best method of writing a soprano part against a given tenor was to use imitation or fuga, a procedure he found applicable in contemporary mensural music. He also discussed (bk 2, chap.6) two-part improvised counterpoint, based on the theory of sights, and gave principles which he said were used daily in royal chapels in Gallic territories.

The Musices opusculum is a Janus-like treatise. Burzio was essentially conservative and presented in a compendious but thorough way the traditional teachings based on Boethius and later medieval writers. Yet he appreciated current trends, as is evident in the tract devoted to mensural music and in his comments on the imitative style of composition. In the history of printing his treatise is an important landmark among musical incunabula. He also wrote a number of non-musical treatises (for details see Rizzi).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Ballistreri)

G. Spataro: Honesta defensio in Nicolai Burtii parmensis opusculum (Bologna, 1491) facs. in AntMI, Monumenta bononiensia, ii/1 (1967)

N. Pelicelli: ‘Musicisti in Parma nei secoli XV–XVI’, NA, viii (1931), 132–42, esp. 135–7

F. Rizzi: ‘Un parmigiano a Bologna: Nicolò Burci’, Aurea Parma, xxxix (1955), 103–15

G. Massera: ‘N. Burzio di Parma, trattatista e guardacoro’, Aurea Parma, xlix (1965), 109–27

G. Massera: ‘N. Burtii Parmensis Regulae Cantus Commixti’, Quadrivium, vii (1966), 91–101; viii (1967), 33–49

G. Massera, ed.: Nicolai Burtii Parmensis Florum libellus: introduzione, testo e commento (Florence, 1975) [incl. earlier literature]

C.A. Miller: Introduction to Nicolaus Burtius: Musices Opusculum, MSD, xxxvii (1983), 9–21

R.E. Murray: ‘New Documentation concerning the Biography of Nicolò Burzio’, Studi musicali, xxiv (1995), 263–82

CLEMENT A. MILLER/BONNIE J. BLACKBURN

Bus, Gervais de.

French notary and writer. See also Fauvel, roman de.

Busatti [Busatus], Cherubino

(b early 17th century; d Venice, before 15 Aug 1644). Italian composer and organist. He was a priest who in 1638 was organist of S Sebastiano, Venice. He composed a number of short, secular strophic arias, but nearly all are lost. Those that survive are mainly pleasant, urbane pieces. The three solo madrigals in his 1638 book are more ambitious, and the sonnet Angela siete in the same book uses both an ostinato bass and the genere concitato.

WORKS

Arie, 1v, gui/bc (hpd/chit/other inst) (Venice, 1638); 4 ed. in K. Jeppesen, La flora, i, ii (Copenhagen, 1949); 1 ed. in Leopold

Compago ecclesiasticorum motectorum, 1v, bc, op.3 (Venice, 1640)

Settimo libro d’ariette, 1v, gui, bc (Venice, 1644); 1 ed. in Leopold

Arie, 1v, bc, libri II–VI; lost, cited in Vincenti

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AmbrosGM

FortuneISS

MischiatiI

S. Leopold: ‘Al modo d'Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts’, AnMc, xxix (Laaber, 1995)

JOHN WHENHAM

Busby, Thomas

(b Westminster, 26 Dec 1754; d London, 28 May 1838). English composer, writer and musician. He was the only surviving son of Thomas Busby, a coach painter of Southwark, and had instruction in music from Jonathan Battishill, Samuel Champness and Charles Knyvett. In summer 1769 he was engaged to sing at Vauxhall Gardens. The changing of his voice terminated the engagement soon afterwards, and he was articled to Battishill for five years as resident pupil, taking advantage of Battishill’s library to educate himself in science and general literature. Busby sang tenor at the 1784 Handel commemoration. He was organist at St Mary’s, Newington, Surrey, from 23 March 1784 and from 1798 at St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street. In 1786 he married Priscella Angiers, with whom he had seven children. In summer 1800 he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, and received the MusD in June 1801. His pupils included Thomas Adams, the actress Mrs Edwards, Thomas Howell and Giovanna Sestini.

Busby composed pianoforte sonatas, odes, songs and assorted theatre music. The Prophecy (1799) was billed as the only oratorio ‘composed in this Country, nearly these 30 years’, and enjoyed some success. Busby also introduced London audiences to the French melodrama, spoken drama in which musical cues punctuate action and portray mood. His most popular scores were for Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery (1802), claimed as the first English ‘Melo-Drame’, and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis's Rugantino (1805).

Throughout his life, Busby was also concerned with literature and journalism. He was for several years connected with the Literary Fund, the New Musical Fund (1805) and the Wittinagemot Club that met at the Chapter Coffee House. In winter 1795–6 Sir Richard Phillips lodged there, looking for contributors to his new venture, the Monthly Magazine. Phillips supported liberal writers, among them Busby, who contributed signed and unsigned articles and reviews to several of Phillips’s undertakings. He also wrote many separate works, edited the first four numbers of the Monthly Musical Journal (1801) and achieved contemporary notoriety for his translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura: it was much reviewed, discussed and parodied.

Because of the furore in connection with Busby’s Lucretius, his A General History of Music attracted more notice than was its due. The powerful Edinburgh Review accused Busby of plagiarism, an accusation that is not altogether valid. Busby was a popularizer, and his writings must be seen in this perspective. Like most of his other books, the History was a compilation; by compressing subject matter contained in the massive tomes of Burney’s and Hawkins’s histories, Busby attempted to reduce the size and cost of his own volumes, thereby making them accessible to a wide audience. Of value to present-day scholarship are Busby’s biographies of his contemporaries, for they present information not to be found elsewhere. These lie scattered throughout the periodical literature, in the last chapter of the History, in some pages of the Anecdotes, and in a preface to a collection of music. An engraving of Busby by R. White was published in Public characters for 1802–3 (London, 1803).

WORKS

stage

The Man the Master (afterpiece), ?1774, inc., unperf., lost

Joanna of Montfoucon (musical drama, 5, R. Cumberland, after A. von Kotzebue), London, CG, 16 Jan 1800, vs (London, 1800)

Alfonso, King of Castile (tragedy, 5, M.G. Lewis), London, CG, 15 Jan 1802, 1 song pubd in Monthly Magazine (April 1802), 249

A Tale of Mystery (melodrama, 2, T. Holcroft, after R.-C. Pixérécourt: Coelina), London, CG, 13 Nov 1802, vs (London, 1802)

The Captive (tragic monodrama, 1 scene, Lewis), London, CG, 22 March 1803, lost

The Fair Fugitives (afterpiece, 2, A. Porter), London, CG, 16 May 1803, ov. and 7 songs (London, 1803), song texts pubd

Rugantino, or The Bravo of Venice (melodrama, 2, Lewis, after Pixérécourt: L'homme à trois visages), London, CG, 18 Oct 1805, vs (London, 1805)

Macbeth (burletta, J. Cross, after W. Shakespeare), London, Royal Circus, 30 Aug 1809, lib pubd in Sprague

oratorios, odes

The Prophecy (orat, after A. Pope: The Messiah), ?1776, London, Little Theatre, Haymarket, 29 March 1799

The Creation (orat), 1788, unperf., excerpts pubd in The Divine Harmonist (London, 1792)

Ocean (ode), London, Little Theatre, Haymarket, 29 April 1799

Britannia (orat, after T. Gray: The Progress of Poesy; addl text by J. Gretton and T. Dutton), excerpts perf. London, King's, 28 May 1800; London, CG, 16 June 1800

Thanksgiving Ode on the Naval Victories (ode, M. Crespigny), private perf., St Mary the Great, Cambridge [as doctoral degree exercise], ?May/June 1801; London, Little Theatre, Haymarket, 14 May 1801

Secular Anthem (ode, H. Pye), London, Little Theatre, Haymarket, 14 May 1801

4 odes, lost: Ode to Peace, ?1783; British Genius (after T. Gray: The Progress of Poesy), ?1800; Comala (after J. Macpherson: Ossian), ?1800; Ode for St Cecilia's Day (A. Pope), ?1800

other vocal

Nymph of the Hill, ballad (London, ?1772)

Thou worthy cask, glee (London, 1773)

When I drain, glee (London, 1776)

Ode to Philanthropy, song (Busby) (London, 1794)

Love, Wine and Friendship, song (Busby), 1v, 2 vn, pf (London, 1797)

Go, dimpled boy, glee (London, ?1800)

William and Jane, ballad (Baltimore, 1802)

Sacred: O God, thou art my God (Ps lxiii), anthem, S/T, SAATB (London, ?1780); pubd in Harmonia sacra, ed. J. Page (London, 1800); vocal works in A Collection of Hymns, ed. J. Page (London, 1804)

instrumental

6 Sonatas, hpd/pf, op.1 (London, ?1785); no.4, E, ed. in LPS, vii (1985)

10 marches, pf/military band, in The British Military Library or Journal (London, 1798–1801)

Other vocal and inst works in The Anacreontic Magazine, La belle assemblée, The Monthly Magazine and in works ed. by Busby

editions

The Divine Harmonist, or Sunday Associate (London, 1792)

Melodia Britannica, or The Beauties of British Song (London, c1794), lost [a few nos. only]

attrib. H. Purcell: A New Edition of the Celebrated Music in the Tempest (London, c1800 or later)

Songs sung by E. Billington in T. Linley (i) and T. Linley (ii): The Duenna, S, pf (London, 1801) [incl. vocal embellishments by Billington]

Songs sung by E. Billington in T. Arne: Artaxerxes, S, pf (London, ?1805) [incl. vocal embellishments by Billington]

T. Arne: ‘Let not rage’, 1v, pf, from Artaxerxes (London, ?1805)

WRITINGS

An Universal Dictionary of Music (London, 1783–6) [inc., issued in pts in The New Musical Magazine without title-page or attrib.; probably Busby compiled the literary portion, Samuel Arnold the musical portion]

A Complete Dictionary of Music (London, c1801, 6/1827)

‘Memoirs of the Late Mr Jonathan Battishill’, Six Anthems and Ten Chants Composed by the Late Mr Jonathan Battishill, ed. J. Page (London, 1804)

A Complete and Comprehensive Dictionary of Music (London, 1805)

A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ed. J. Joyce (London, 1806–7)

‘Life of the Late William Jackson, Esq.: Organist of Exeter Cathedral’, West of England Magazine (May 1813), 369–72

A Grammar of Music (London, 1818/R, 3/1834)

A General History of Music, from the Earliest Times to the Present(London, 1819/R; Ger. trans., 1821)

Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient and Modern (London, 1825)

A Musical Manual, or Technical Directory: Containing Full and Perspicuous Explanations of All the Terms, Ancient and Modern(London, 1828/R)

Catechism of Music (London, 1829)

Reviews and articles in Attic Miscellany, European Magazine (1784–5), Analytical Review (1788–9), Monthly Magazine (1796–1826), Public Characters, various newspapers

Editorship of the English Musical Gazette formerly attrib. Busby on unknown grounds

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

FétisB

FiskeETM

SainsburyD

[T. Busby:] ‘Dr Busby’, Public Characters for 1802–3 (London, 1803), 388–411 [with portrait]

J. Timbs: Club Life in London (London, 1866, 2/1872/R as Clubs and Club Life in London, 3/1908)

T. Rees and J. Britton: Reminiscences of Literary London from 1779–1853(London, 1896)

M. Winesanker: ‘Musico-Dramatic Criticism of English Comic Opera, 1750–1800’, JAMS, ii (1949), 87–96

K.G.F. Spence: ‘The Learned Doctor Busby’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 141–53

A. Sprague: ‘A Macbeth of Few Words’, All These to Teach: Essays in Honor of C.A. Robertson, ed. R.A. Bryan and others (Gainesville, FL, 1965), 80–101

C. Grabo: ‘The Practical Aesthetics of Thomas Busby's Music Reviews’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxv (1966), 37–45

J. Donohue: Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford, 1975)

J.C. Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830 (New York, 1979)

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983), 85

A.D. Shapiro: ‘Action Music in American Pantomime and Melodrama, 1730–1913’, American Music, ii/3 (1984), 49–72

JAMIE C. KASSLER/LINDA TROOST

Busca, Lodovico

(b Turin; fl 1670–88). Italian composer. He was a Cassinese monk at S Simpliciano, Milan. Earlier he had probably been in the service of the court of Savoy. His Mottetti op.1 (Bologna, 1672) and Ariette da camera op.2 (Bologna, 1688), both for one voice and continuo, survive. He also composed operas. The music of most of these is lost, but the librettos of three operas by him presented at the Teatro Ducale, Milan, survive: La Regina Floridea (?1669, text by G. Pancieri with P.S. Agostini and F. Rossi), L'Ippolita, Reina delle Amazzoni (1670, text by C.M. Maggi with Agostini and P.A. Ziani; score in I-Nc) and Amor tra l'armi, overo Corbulone in Armenia (1673, text by Maggi).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Schmitz: Geschichte der weltlichen Solokantate (Leipzig, 1914, 2/1955), 35, 137ff

G. Barblan: ‘La musica a Milano nei secoli XVII e XVIII’, Storia di Milano, xii (Milan, 1953–62), 947 [pubn of the Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano]

SERGIO LATTES

Busch.

German family of organ builders. Johann Dietrich Busch (b Mesmerode, Hanover, 27 Dec 1700; d Itzehoe, 18 Jan 1753) studied organ building in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Danzig. From at least 1721 he was working in Itzehoe as the principal journeyman of L.D. Kastens, a former pupil and co-worker of Arp Schnitger. Eight years later Kastens moved to Copenhagen, leaving the management of his Itzehoe workshop to Busch; after Kastens’s death in 1744 Busch also took over his organ-building licence in Schleswig and Holstein. Johann Daniel Busch (b Itzehoe, 6 Sept 1735; d Apensen, 12 Sept 1787), a son of Johann Dietrich, was trained in his father’s workshop, and in 1753 took over the management of the family firm. He died on a journey, and is buried in Itzehoe. The Busch family were among the best organ builders of their time, and continued to build in the Arp Schnitger tradition, though in a rather conservative way. Most of their organs were built in Schleswig, Holstein and Hamburg; owing to his close relationship with the Moravian Brethren, Johann Daniel exported organs to other parts of Europe, including Sarepta (now Krasnoarmeysk, near Volgograd) in Russia. Façades from several of Busch’s organs have survived in northern Germany and southern Jutland, and some organs, such as those at Jade and Neuenkirchen (both near Oldenburg), retain a considerable portion of the original parts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Friis: Orgelbygning i Danmark: Renaessance, barok og rokoko (Copenhagen, 1949, 2/1971)

E.M. Boyhus: ‘Orgeldispositioner fra Sønderborg amt’, Sønderjyske årbøger (1961), 231–49

W. Kaufmann: Die Orgeln des alten Herzogtums Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1962)

E. Busch: Slaegten Busch fra Mesmerode (Copenhagen, 1964–7)

O. Schumann: Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Orgelbaus im Herzogtum Schleswig vor 1800 (Munich, 1973)

G. Fock: Arp Schnitger und seine Schule (Kassel, 1974)

OLE OLESEN

Busch, Adolf (Georg Wilhelm)

(b Siegen, 8 Aug 1891; d Guilford VT, 9 June 1952). German violinist and composer, brother of Fritz Busch. He was taught the violin by his father from the age of three, and when only 11 entered the Cologne Conservatory as a pupil of Willy Hess and Bram Eldering. He also studied conducting and composition with Fritz Steinbach, the director of the conservatory, and in 1908 became a composition pupil in Bonn of Hugo Grüters, whose daughter he married in 1913. From 1907 he was associated with Reger, and played many of his chamber works with him. In 1912 he became leader of the orchestra of the Konzertverein in Vienna, under Ferdinand Löwe, and in 1918 he succeeded Henri Marteau as a violin teacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In 1913, with Löwe's encouragement, he founded the Wiener Konzertvereins-Quartett, but the war intervened, and it was not until 1919 that it was reformed as the Busch Quartet, with Karl Reitz, Emil Bohnke and Paul Grümmer. Two years later, Reitz and Bohnke were succeeded by Gösta Andreasson and Karl Doktor, and in this form the quartet achieved international fame. In 1930 Busch's brother Hermann (b Siegen, 24 June 1897; d Bryn Mawr, PA, 3 June 1975) became its cellist (see illustration).

Busch settled in Basle in 1927, and adopted Swiss nationality in 1935. He toured in many countries both as a soloist and with his quartet. In England in the late 1930s, he established the Busch Chamber Players, whose small-scale performances of Bach's Brandenburg concertos were highly praised. He also formed a piano trio with Hermann Busch and Rudolf Serkin, who often accompanied him in sonatas, and who later became his son-in-law. In 1939 all three musicians moved to the USA, and a year later the other two members of the quartet followed. Apart from a lapse of three years (1945–8), the quartet was active until Adolf Busch's death, but from 1948 the second violin and viola were played by Ernst Drucker (later Bruno Straumann) and Hugo Gottesmann. While in the USA, Busch continued to perform as a soloist, in chamber works with Serkin, as leader of the re-established Busch Chamber Players, and also as a conductor of larger-scale orchestral works. In 1950 he founded the Marlboro School of Music in Vermont.

Busch was greatly admired as a soloist, especially in the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, but his outstanding importance was as a player and director of chamber music. Although he commanded a superb technique, he disliked showmanship and superficial charm, and concentrated on showing the true qualities of the music with honesty, clarity and intensity. Among the characteristics of his playing were a careful control of vibrato, sparing use of portamento, and subtle variation in shades of staccato and legato. His quartet was especially famous for its fervent and lucid performances of Beethoven, and for its ability to make the supposedly difficult late quartets perfectly comprehensible. The Busch Chamber Players, which he directed from the violin, brought to the music of Bach and Handel clear textures, sensitive moulding of melodic lines, and a degree of rhythmic poise and vitality that has seldom been equalled. His recordings include string quartets by Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, Bach's complete Brandenburg concertos and orchestral suites, Handel's concerti grossi op.6 and, with Serkin, several works by Brahms, among them a famous performance of the horn trio with Aubrey Brain. His compositions, rarely performed, show the influence of Reger, and include orchestral and choral works, concertos, songs and a large number of chamber works. Busch was a distinguished teacher, and Yehudi Menuhin was among his pupils.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Creighton: Discopaedia of the Violin, 1889–1971 (Toronto, 1974)

J. Delalande and T. Potter: ‘The Busch Brothers: a Discography’, Recorded Sound, no.86 (1984), 29–90

T. Potter: Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Man (Billericay, 1984)

I. Busch, ed.: Adolf Busch: Briefe, Bilder, Erinnerungen/Letters, Pictures, Memories (Walpole, NH, 1991)

T. Potter: Adolf Busch: the Life of a Musician (London, 2000)

For further bibliography see Busch, Fritz.

ROBERT PHILIP

Busch, Carl (Reinholdt)

(b Bjerre, Denmark, 29 March 1862; d Kansas City, MO, 19 Dec 1943). American composer, conductor and teacher. He studied at the Copenhagen Conservatory with J.P.E. Hartmann and Gade (1882–5), at the Brussels Conservatory (1885) and in Paris with Benjamin Godard (1886). In 1887 he emigrated to the USA and settled in Kansas City. He founded and conducted several musical organizations, including the Kansas City SO (1911–18), and appeared as guest conductor with orchestras throughout the USA and Europe. He was a noted teacher of string instruments and of theory and composition, numbering among his pupils Robert Russell Bennett and William Dawson. From 1924 to 1938 he taught at the Chicago Musical College, Brigham Young University, Notre Dame University, Kansas City-Horner Conservatory and Kansas City University. As a composer, he was especially noted for works based on American subjects, particularly the Amerindian; his several award-winning compositions include A Chant from the Great Plains, which won the first Goldman Band Composition Contest (1920). He was knighted by the kings of Denmark and Norway. (D.R. Lowe: Sir Carl Busch: his Life and Work as a Teacher, Conductor, and Composer, diss., U. of Missouri, 1972)

WORKS

Orch: 6 suites, 1890–1928; Rhapsody no.1, 1897; 14 works, str orch, 1897–1918; Sym., 1898; March, 1898; 4 sym. poems, 1898–1924; Prologue (1899); Rhapsody no.2 (1905); Vc Conc., 1919

Inst: 4 str trios (1893–1926); 44 str solos (1893–1926); 8 ww solos, 1893–1940; Sonata, vn, pf, 1897; Str Qt, 1897; Str Qnt, 1897; 24 str études (1909); 26 works, ww ens (1930–43)

Vocal: 13 choruses, female vv, 1887–1930; 69 songs, 1891–1925; 15 choruses, male vv, 1893–1928; 22 cants., 15 with orch, 1894–1929; 14 choruses, mixed vv, 1900–35

Other: 8 works, band, 1906–34

Principal publishers: Breitkopf & Härtel, Ditson, FitzSimons, C. Fischer

DONALD R. LOWE

Busch, Fritz

(b Siegen, Westphalia, 13 March 1890; d London, 14 Sept 1951). German conductor, brother of Adolf Busch. He was the eldest child of Wilhelm Busch, an itinerant musician who settled at Siegen as an instrument maker. As children, Fritz and Adolf played dance music with their father in taverns. In 1906 Fritz went to the Cologne Conservatory, where he joined Steinbach’s conducting class. His career began in 1909 with a season as the conductor at the Deutsches Theater, Riga. In 1912 Busch was appointed music director at Aachen, with responsibility for the city’s distinguished choral society (from this period dated his close friendship with D.F. Tovey). In 1914 he volunteered for the army; in 1918 he conducted the Aachen Municipal Opera for six weeks, then became music director at the Stuttgart Opera. There he brought a fresh mind to widening the repertory and encouraging new artistic developments: for instance, with first performances of the young Hindemith’s one-acters Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Nusch-Nuschi; the inclusion of five Verdi operas, and three by Pfitzner; the choice of Appia’s designs for Das Rheingold.

From 1922 to 1933 Busch was music director of the Dresden Staatsoper; in addition he made many guest appearances, including the reopening of Bayreuth with Die Meistersinger in 1924, visits to New York in 1927 and 1928, and to London in 1929. Though he was not immediately accepted as the fine opera conductor he became, and was criticized for not doing enough German repertory, Busch and his Intendant Alfred Reucker between them brought the Staatsoper to high renown. First performances given by Busch included Strauss’s Intermezzo (1924) and Die ägyptische Helena (1928), Busoni’s Doktor Faust (1925), Weill’s Der Protagonist (1926), Hindemith’s Cardillac (1926). The German Verdi revival, too, was now in its stride; and as well as the new works, Strauss’s earlier operas were given, often with the composer conducting. Guest designers included Max Slevogt, Oskar Kokoschka and Oskar Strnad. Nonetheless Busch remained dissatisfied with the difficulty of maintaining repertory performances at the level of new productions, and with the inability of the solo ensemble to do justice to Mozart. In 1932 he found a congenial spirit in Carl Ebert. The two worked harmoniously on Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail for that year’s Salzburg Festival, and subsequently on Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Städtische Oper, Berlin. Busch held that production to mark the culmination of his work in Germany. Outside events now intervened. Busch was not Jewish and, until he began openly to express dislike and mistrust of the Nazis, was not politically active. Bitter intrigues led to his dismissal from Dresden in March 1933.

Busch left Germany in May, refusing to take his friend Toscanini’s place at Bayreuth, but accepting an invitation to the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. On his return to Europe that winter to start a long association with the Danish RSO and the Stockholm PO, he was greeted with the proposal to become music director of the private opera house John Christie had recently built at Glyndebourne. He accepted, on condition that Ebert was made artistic director. The level achieved by the carefully chosen and rehearsed ensemble at the summer festivals, 1934–9, is part of operatic history. The repertory was based on Mozart but included Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and the first staging by a British company of Verdi’s Macbeth. Ironically, it was at patrician Glyndebourne rather than at Dresden that the democratically minded Busch came nearest to his ideal of being able ‘to build up an opera production in the smallest detail and with … complete respect for the work’. He conducted three more seasons in Buenos Aires (in 1934 he gave there the first complete St Matthew Passion on the American continent). Winters up to 1940 were spent in Scandinavia, Busch having grown so attached to Copenhagen that he turned down the offer of Toscanini’s post with the New York PO. From June 1940 to 1945 he was mostly in South America, except for a Broadway experiment (New Opera Company) and guest appearances with the New York PO, both in 1942. In 1945 he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and toured with the company for four seasons. Busch was never entirely at ease in New York, where one concert promoter complained that ‘he was not a showman’. He conducted the Chicago SO in 1948–9 and 1950, resumed work in Copenhagen and Stockholm in 1949, and went back to Glyndebourne for the 1950 season. That year he took the Danish RSO to the Edinburgh Festival, then appeared as a guest conductor at the Vienna Staatsoper. Early in 1951 Busch revisited West Germany, conducting the North-west German radio orchestras at Cologne and Hamburg. At Glyndebourne in 1951 he conducted four Mozart operas including Idomeneo. The Glyndebourne Don Giovanni he repeated at the Edinburgh Festival, adding Verdi’s La forza del destino.

Busch was the soundest type of German musician: not markedly original or spectacular, but thorough, strong-minded, decisive in intention and execution, with idealism and practical sense nicely balanced. Recordings of three Mozart operas remain as testimony of his work at Glyndebourne, where a plaque dedicated to his memory and bearing his effigy is on the wall of the main foyer.

WRITINGS

Aus dem Leben eines Musikers (Zürich, 1949/R; Eng. trans., 1953/R as Pages from a Musician’s Life)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Christie: ‘Fritz Busch: an Appreciation’, Opera, ii (1951), 697 only

J. Strachey: ‘Fritz Busch 1890–1951’, Glyndebourne Festival 1952 [programme book]

S. Hughes: Glyndebourne: a History of the Festival Opera (London, 1965)

G. Busch: Fritz Busch, Dirigent (Frankfurt, 1970) [incl. discography]

B. Dopheide: Fritz Busch (Tutzing, 1970)

R. Bing: 5000 Nights at the Opera (London, 1972)

D.-R. De Lerma: The Fritz Busch Collection: an Acquisition of Indiana University (Bloomington, 1972)

J. Delalande and T. Potter: ‘The Busch Brothers: a Discography’, Recorded Sound, no.86 (1984), 29–90

D.E. Anderson: ‘Fritz Busch and Richard Strauss: the Strauss Scores in the Busch Nachlass’, MR, xlix (1988), 289–94

RONALD CRICHTON

Busch, Hermann.

German cellist. See under his brother Busch, Adolf.

Busch, Lou(is) [Bush, Louis Ferdinand; Carr, Joe ‘Fingers’]

(b Louisville, KY, 18 July 1910 ; d Camarillo, CA, 19 Sept 1979). American ragtime pianist, composer and recording executive. At the age of 16 he left home to tour as a pianist with the Clyde McCoy band, a popular dance orchestra of the 1930s. He later served as a pianist and arranger with a series of big bands, notably those of George Olsen, Ray Noble, Vincent Lopez and Henry Busse. In 1941 he settled in Los Angeles and, after a period as accompanist to Lena Horne, was employed by the newly formed West Coast record label Capitol. When Euday L. Bowman’s Twelfth Street Rag (recorded in 1948 by Pee Wee Hunt) sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, Busch was placed in charge of Capitol's artists and repertory department and invited to capitalize on the success of the recording. He then adopted his pseudonym, Joe ‘Fingers’ Carr, and agreed to be marketed on record covers as a typical black bar-room pianist with gartered sleeves, cigar and derby hat; despite this promotional gimmickry, he played fine ragtime piano. He also wrote a long series of sturdy hit rags. His 36 singles and 14 albums during the 1950s created a congenial setting for the ragtime revival and inspired many young musicians who later developed the second revival in the late 1960s. Under the name Lou Busch he also enjoyed success in Britain with his recording Zambesi (1956). After moving to Warner Bros. Records he was associated, as music director, with the comedian Allan Sherman, and in the late 1970s he toured with a former pupil, Lincoln Mayorga, as a ragtime duo called the Brinkerhoff Piano Company.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Waldo: This is Ragtime (New York, 1976)

D.A. Jasen and T.J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978)

IAN WHITCOMB

Busch, William

(b London, 25 June 1901; d Woolacombe, Devon, 30 Jan 1945). English composer and pianist. Both parents were of German birth but naturalized British subjects. He studied the piano in Berlin with Leonid Kreutzer – and to some extent with Backhaus and Egon Petri – and harmony and composition with Hugo Leichtentritt. From 1924 onwards he completed his training in London: with Mabel Lander (piano), and Ireland, van Dieren and Alan Bush (composition).

He first became known as a pianist, making his début in London in 1927, and later in Berlin and New York. During the 1930s he was well known in England and was a regular broadcaster. However, composition was his chief interest, and from about 1935 he devoted more and more time to it. For several years before his early death he was a sick man, often unable to work. It was in pursuit of better health that he settled at Woolacombe, in Devon, where his last compositions, mainly elegiac in tone, were written.

A distinctive minor composer, the works from Busch’s most active period include the Prelude (1936) for orchestra, Ode to Autumn (1937) for voice and string quartet, the Piano Concerto in F minor (1937–9) which was first given by the BBC with Boult conducting and the composer as soloist, the four-movement Piano Quartet (1938–9), the Cello Concerto (1940–41) and the Nicholas Variations for piano, inspired by Busch’s young son. One of Busch’s last compositions was the cycle to poems by Wilfrid Gibson, There have been happy days. There are some 20 songs, four of which were recorded by Henry Cummings for Decca, the second in a series of recordings made by the Council for the Promotion of New Music in the 1940s.

WORKS

(selective list)

Inst: 2 Pieces, op.1, wind insts, 1927; Theme, Variations and Fugue, pf, 1929; Gigue, pf (1933); Allegretto quasi pastorale, pf (1936); Prelude, orch, 1936; Pf Conc., f, 1937–9; Pf Qt, str, pf, 1938–9; Vc Conc., 1940–1; Suite, vc, pf (1946); Nicholas Variations, pf

Songs: Ode to Autumn (J. Keats), 1v, str qt, 1937; The Centaurs (J. Stephens) (1944); Come, o come, my life’s delight (T. Campion) (1944); If thou wilt ease thine heart (T. Lovell Beddoes) (1944); Rest (1944); 2 Songs (W. Blake) (1944): Memory, hither come, Laughing Song; 2 Songs of William Blake (1944): The Echoing Green, The Shepherd; There have been happy days (W. Gibson), song cycle; other songs

Principal publishers: Chester, OUP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Amis: A Miscellany: my Life, my Music (London, 1985), 87–8

HUGH OTTAWAY/LEWIS FOREMAN

Busch Chamber Players.

Ensemble founded by Adolf Busch.

Buschop, Cornelius Symonszoon.

See Buscop, Cornelis Symonszoon.

Busch Quartet.

String quartet founded by Adolf Busch, a continuation in 1919 of his Wiener Konzertvereins-Quartett.

Buscop [Buschop, Boscoop, Boskop etc.], Cornelis [Cornelius] Symonszoon

(b before 1531; d Amsterdam, bur. 9 Oct 1573). Dutch organist and composer. He was organist at the Grote Kerk, Alkmaar (1 May 1551–4), at the Oude Kerk, Delft (1 May 1554–March 1573), and finally at the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (June–October 1573, as successor to Peter Swybbertszoon, father of Sweelinck, who in his turn succeeded Buscop). He composed the Psalmen David, Vyfftich, mit vier partyen, seer suet ende lustich om singen ende speelen op verscheiden instrumenten, gecomponeert by M. Cornelius Buschop Ende nu erstmaell … in druck gestelt (Düsseldorf, 1568; ed. in UVNM, xxii, 1899; an edition of 1562 was formerly believed to exist, but the book’s title suggests that this is unlikely). The dedication is to Duke Erick of Brunswick and Lüneburg, Baron of Liesvelt and Master of Woerden, and was written at Delft. Towards the end Buscop stated that he had composed other psalms in five- and six-part settings, which he would, perhaps, be able to publish; as far as is known, these never appeared. In the series of ‘Souterliedekens’, based on van Zuylen van Nyevelt’s Dutch translation of the psalms, Buscop’s book takes an important place. The simple polyphony, with some imitation and ornamentation, makes no great demands on the performers, so these psalms are likely to have been intended for domestic use.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (R.A. Rasch)

H. Tiedemann: ‘J.P. Sweelinck (nieuwe levensbijzonderheden)’, Bouwsteenen: JVNM, ii (1872–4), 146–55

J.C. Boers: ‘Boskop (Cornelis)’, Bouwsteenen: JVNM, iii (1874–81), 48–9

C.M. Dozy: ‘Jan Pietersz. Sweelinck en andere organisten der 16e eeuw’, Oud-Holland, iii (1885), 277–300, esp. 284–5

M. Seiffert: ‘Cornelis Boskop’, TVNM, v/4 (1897), 261–2

C. van den Borren: Geschiedenis van de muziek in de Nederlanden, i (Antwerp, 1948), 365

W.H. Thijsse: Zeven eeuwen Nederlandse muziek (Rijswijk, 1949)

C.C. Vlam and M.A. Vente, eds.: Bouwstenen voor een geschiedenis der toonkunst in de Nederlanden, i (Amsterdam, 1965)

GODELIEVE SPIESSENS

Busenello [Businello], Giovanni [Gian] Francesco

(b Venice, 24 Sept 1598; d Legnaro, nr Padua, 27 Oct 1659). Italian librettist, poet and lawyer. He was born into a wealthy and prominent Venetian family, and his elder brother Marc'Antonio played an active and varied role in Venetian public life. He probably studied at the University of Padua just before 1620. According to his own account, Paolo Sarpi and Cesare Cremonino were his teachers. In 1620 he was named a dean of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia della Val Verde. In 1623 he was admitted to practise law, his primary profession and one in which he enjoyed much success. His supposed international travels, notably to Madrid, have been doubted (see Livingston, 1913). He was a member of several academies: the Delfici, the Umoristi, the Imperfetti and most notably the Accademia degli Incogniti, a circle of libertines, including Venice's most prominent authors, who dominated the literary, and to some extent the commercial, side of Venetian public opera in its first years. A follower of G.B. Marino, he entered briefly into the polemics over L'Adone. He wrote a great deal of verse in Italian and in Venetian dialect, including a poetic exchange with Giacomo Badoaro and a number of poems to singers.

Busenello's significance for music history derives mostly from five librettos written for Venice, set to music by Cavalli and Monteverdi and published collectively in Delle hore ociose (Venice, 1656). As one of Venice's earliest librettists he played a significant role in establishing the literary conventions of Venetian opera. The succession of his dramas exemplifies the variety of ways in which this first generation of Venetian librettists transformed myth and history in a manner that was appropriate for musical setting and spectacle, while serving the political, social and commercial interests of the Republic. Busenello drew upon a broader range of ancient sources than did his predecessors at the courts of Mantua or Florence, infusing Ovid, Plutarch, Lucan, Tacitus and Virgil with the ideologies in currency among the members of the Accademia degli Incogniti, ignoring the Aristotelian unities of time and place, and deftly combining the comic, the serious and the erotic. In Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne (1640, Teatro S Cassiano, music by Cavalli), he juxtaposes two contrasting love stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Apollo and Daphne with that of Cephalus and Procris), citing Guarini's Il pastor fido as a precedent for its multiple love affairs. La Didone (1641, Teatro S Cassiano, music by Cavalli) is the first operatic treatment of Virgil's Aeneid; it emulates the epic structure of the poem by devoting the entire first act to the fall of Troy, yet contradicts its model with the obligatory happy ending in which a guilt-ridden Dido eschews suicide in favour of marriage to the suitor Iarbus. L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643, Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, music by Monteverdi) is today among the best known of all early operas, largely because of its strong musical setting, although in its own day it had no greater currency than Busenello's other works. Specially striking features of L'incoronazione di Poppea are the variety of character types portrayed and the fullness of relationships between them. The apparent amorality of its conclusion – in which Nero exiles his wife Octavia and marries his mistress Poppaea – violates the nascent Venetian tradition: a rejected spouse would nearly always have been re-embraced at the last. It shares with Busenello's other dramas a language rich in erotic expression in keeping with his place in the Marinist tradition and with the literary conventions and political aspirations of the Accademia degli Incogniti. La prosperità infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore (meant for Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, supposedly performed in 1646 with music by Cavalli, but perhaps never even composed) resembles L'incoronazione di Poppea in its historical origin and wealth of character type. Like Badoaro's L'Ulisse errante it is in five acts (instead of the more normal three) separated by time and place, each a discrete episode with largely different characters. The decade between La prosperità infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore and La Statira (1655) saw a rise of intricate and multi-layered dramas to which Giovanni Faustini and G.A. Cicognini were principal contributors. La Statira adheres to many of the same conventions, such as disguise, multiple pairs of lovers, and exotic settings and characters. A sixth drama by Busenello, La discesa d'Enea all'inferno, survives in manuscript and was apparently not set to music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (M. Capucci) [incl. extensive literary bibliography]

ES (C. Sartori)

MGG1 (A.A. Abert)

G.M. Mazzuchelli: Gli scrittori d'Italia, ii/4 (Brescia, 1763)

A. Livingston: Una scappatella di Polo Vendramino e un sonetto di Gian Francesco Busenello (Rome, 1911)

A. Livingston: La vita veneziana nelle opere di Gian Francesco Busenello (Venice, 1913) [incl. list of sources]

W. Osthoff: ‘Neue Beobachtungen zu Quellen und Geschichte von Monteverdis “Incoronazione di Poppea”’, Mf, xi (1958), 129–38

F. Degrada: ‘Gian Francesco Busenello e il libretto della Incoronazione di Poppea’, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 81–102

K. von Fischer: ‘Eine wenig beachtete Quelle su Busenellos L'incoronazione di Poppea’, ibid., 75–80

P.J. Smith: The Tenth Muse: a Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York, 1970)

A. Chiarelli: ‘L'incoronazione di Poppea o Il Nerone: problemi di filologia’, RIM, ix (1974), 117–51

L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454

E. Rosand: ‘Seneca and the Interpretation of L'incoronazione di Poppea’, JAMS, xxxviii (1985), 34–71

P. Getrevi: Labbra barocche: il libretto d'opera da Busenello a Goldoni (Verona, 1987)

A. Curtis: ‘La Poppea impasticciata, or Who Wrote the Music to L'incoronazione [1643]?’, JAMS, xlii (1989), 22–54

I. Fenlon and P. Miller: The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea (London, 1992)

P. Fabbri: ‘New Sources for Poppea’, ML, lxxiv (1993), 16–23

W. Heller: Chastity, Heroism, and Allure: Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice (diss., Brandeis U., 1995)

T. Carter: ‘Re-Reading Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi's Last Opera’, JRMA, cxxii (1997), 173–204

G. Gronda and P. Fabbri, eds.: Libretti d’opera italiani (Milan, 1997) [Libretto of L‘incoronazione di Poppea]

W. Heller: ‘“O castita bugiarda”: Cavalli's Didone and the Convention of Abandonment’, A Woman Scorn'd: Responses to the Dido Myth (London, 1998)

R. Ketterer: ‘Militat omnis amans: Ovidian Elegy in L'incoronazione di Poppea’, Journal of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, iv (1998), 381–95

R. Ketterer: ‘Neoplatonic Light and Dramatic Genre in Busenello's L'incoronazione di Poppea and Noris's Il ripudio d'Ottava’, Music and Letters, lxxx (1999), 1–22

W. Heller: ‘Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L'incoronazione di Poppea’, JAMS, lii (1999), 39–96

THOMAS WALKER/WENDY HELLER

Buset, Martin

(b ?Hennuyères, Hainaut, c1565; d Madrid, 29 Nov 1618). Flemish composer and singer. Engaged as a singer in the chapel of Philip II of Spain, he arrived at the Madrid court on 28 June 1586 together with seven other singers recruited in the Low Countries, among them Englebert Turlur. After studying composition with Philippe Rogier, the maestro de capilla, he served Philip II and Philip III as singer and composer. He enjoyed the goodwill of Philip III, who on several occasions bestowed financial favours on him. The music library of King João IV of Portugal, destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, contained several works by him: two masses, for five and eight voices; eight motets, for four, six and eight voices; a five-part hymn; and two settings of Spanish texts, both for one and six voices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (P. Becquart)

JoãoIL

MGG1 (P. Becquart)

P. Becquart: ‘Martin Buset, chantre et compositeur néerlandais à la cour de Philippe II et Philippe III (vers 1565–1618)’, Archives, bibliothèques et musées de Belgique, xxxii (1961), 239–53

P. Becquart: Musiciens néerlandais à la cour de Madrid: Philippe Rogier et son école (1560–1647) (Brussels, 1967)

P. Becquart: ‘Philippe Rogier et son école à la cour des Philippe d'Espagne: un ultime foyer de la création musicale des Pays-Bas (1560–1647)’, Musique des Pays-Bas anciens – musique espagnole ancienne: Brussels 1985, 215–29

PAUL BECQUART

Bush, Alan (Dudley)

(b London, 22 Dec 1900; d Watford, 31 Oct 1995). English composer, pianist and teacher. He studied music at the RAM (1918–22) with Corder for composition and Matthay for piano, winning numerous scholarships during this period. In 1921 he met Ireland and in the following year began to study composition with him privately, continuing until 1927. He took further piano lessons privately from Moiseiwitsch, Mabel Lander and Schnabel (1924–9). To complete his training he studied philosophy and musicology at the University of Berlin (1929–31). In 1925 he was appointed a professor of composition at the RAM; he was elected FRAM in 1938 and continued teaching there until 1978. From 1925 he took an active role in working-class movements, joining the Communist Party in 1935. In 1929 he succeeded Boughton as music adviser and conductor to the London Labour Choral Union (until 1940) and in 1936 founded the Workers’ Music Association, of which he became president in 1941. During the years up to World War II Bush made various appearances as a pianist and conductor in performances of his own works. He served in the army (1941–5) and then made several tours as a conductor, mainly in eastern European countries. For a time he conducted his own string orchestra.

Bush’s first success as a composer was in 1924 when his String Quartet op.4 won a Carnegie award. Another work for quartet, Dialectic (1929), did much to establish his reputation abroad when it was played at the Prague ISCM Festival (1935). The successful performance of the Piano Concerto at a BBC concert in 1938, with Bush playing the solo part and Boult conducting, was followed by that of the First Symphony at a promenade concert in 1942. In 1949 the Nottingham Cooperative Society commissioned a symphony for the quincentenary celebrations of the granting of the royal charter to the city. Bush’s opera Wat Tyler was one of the four prize-winning works in the Arts Council’s Festival of Britain opera competition in 1951. Its first stage production took place at Leipzig in 1953, where it had 14 performances during the season and was revived the following year; a further production took place at Rostock in 1955. Following this success Bush received three more commissions from East German opera houses, and also wrote his Byron Symphony for performance in Leipzig (1962). Of his four important operas, however, only Wat Tyler received a professional English production (1974), though his second, Men of Blackmoor, was staged by the Oxford University Opera Club in 1961. Bush was awarded the Händel Prize of the city of Halle in 1962, was elected a corresponding member of the DDR Akademie der Künste in 1965, and received doctorates from the universities of London and Durham (1968 and 1971). His Fourth Symphony, the ‘Lascaux’, inspired by a visit to the famous prehistoric caves in 1982, was first performed at a BBC concert conducted by Downes (1986). Bush continued to compose prolifically until his eyesight failed him in his 90th year. His late works displayed the characteristic features of his postwar music: clarity of tonality and thematic integration, athletic vigour and contrapuntal mastery.

There is an important division in Bush’s works between those written before and those written after the end of World War II, when he began consciously to simplify his style. The break was not abrupt, for the works written during the war had already begun the process of simplification, and Bush continued in the later works to employ his ‘thematic’ method of composition, which, although he expounded it only in 1946 (in the article ‘The Crisis of Modern Music’) he had always used, if not always consistently or consciously. This method, in which every note must be thematically significant, has something in common with Schoenberg’s 12-note method, in which he was always deeply interested, although he came to reject it. Some sort of serial melodic structure can be discerned in many of his works, and there are 12-note themes in the first and slow movements of the First Symphony and of the Violin Concerto. These series, however, are used in a tonal context, with an accompaniment of, or as an accompaniment to, freely moving (though thematically composed) other parts.

The harmonic use of series in the Violin Concerto, particularly in common chords, is symptomatic of a general movement in Bush’s later works from a strongly contrapuntal and harmonically rather severe style to one more sensuously and directly harmonic. Many of the works up to the Piano Concerto (1937) were written in the most advanced central-European idioms of the 1920s and 30s. Bush’s temperamental sympathy and intellectual acuteness enabled him to use such techniques with complete mastery and conviction, and hence in an entirely personal way which is unmistakably English. In later works the national element became more obviously discernible as extreme technical sophistication gave way to a simpler harmonic style, in which Ireland’s teaching and Bush’s early admiration for Ravel bore fruit for the first time. Mild dominant discords, of consonant effect, are used with great originality in uncommon progressions alive with swift, purposeful harmonic movement. Consonances in unusual relation are typically English, but except in Britten they are nowhere used with more telling expression, colour and sense of movement than in Bush. An excellent example is the introduction to The Winter Journey, and there are many others in the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto.

In his essays (1980) he wrote that for him ‘as a musician and as a man, Marxism is a guide to action’. Bush’s political beliefs greatly influenced both his work and its reception. In forging the stylistic simplification that came after the war, considerable modifications were called for, but in his later works he never attempted the use of popular idioms that might win support among the musically naive. He often adopted a folklike idiom, but the connections it suggests are with Vaughan Williams rather than Weill. The plots of his operas (three of which have librettos by his wife Nancy) and the themes of his vocal works have been criticized for reflecting his political views too directly and for a lack of psychological subtlety. Yet the issues he chose to treat were a powerful stimulus and gave him a constantly fresh sense of direction.

WORKS

for details of unpublished works and works without opus numbers

see Stevenson (1981)

stage

The Press-Gang (The Enraged Apprentice) (children’s op, N. Bush), 1946, Letchworth, St Christopher School, 7 March 1947

Wat Tyler (op, prol, 2, N. Bush), 1948–51, Leipzig, Staats, 6 Sept 1953

The Spell Unbound (operetta for girls, N. Bush), 1953, Bournemouth School for Girls, 6 March 1955

Men of Blackmoor (op, 3, N. Bush), 1954, Weimar, National, 18 Nov 1956

The Sugar Reapers (Guyana Johnny) (op, 2, N. Bush), 1960–62, Leipzig, Opernhaus, 11 Dec 1966

The Ferryman’s Daughter (op for schools, N. Bush), 1961, Letchworth, St Christopher School, 6 March 1964

Joe Hill: the Man who Never Died (op, 2, B. Stavis), 1965–7, Berlin, Staatsoper, 29 Sept 1970

orchestral

Syms: no.1, C, op.21, 1940; no.2 ‘Nottingham’, op.33, 1949; no.3 ‘Byron’, op.53, Bar, chorus, orch, 1959–60; no.4 ‘Lascaux’, op.98, 1983

Solo inst with orch: Pf Conc., 1937; Meditations on a German Song of 1848, op.22, vn, pf/str, 1941; Vn Conc., op.32, 1948; Concert Suite, op.37, vc, orch, 1952; Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Seasong, op.60, pf, orch, 1962; Africa, sym. movt, op.73, pf, orch, 1971–2; Song Poem and Dance Poem, op.109, pf, orch, 1986

Other orch: Sym. Impression, op.8, 1927; A Birthday Ov., op.23, 1942; Fantasia on Soviet Themes, op.24, 1942; Resolution, ov., op.25, 1945; English Suite, op.28, str, 1946; Homage to William Sterndale Bennett, op.27, str, 1946; Piers Plowman’s Day, suite, op.30, 1947; Character Study ‘Defender of Peace’, op.39, 1952; Dorian Passacaglia and Fugue, op.52, 1959; For a Festal Occasion, op.58, 1960 [arr. of org work 2 Occasional Pieces, op.56, no.2]; Partita concertante, op.63, 1965; Time Remembered, op.67, chbr orch, 1968–9; Concert Ov. for an Occasion, op.74, 1971–2; The Liverpool Ov., op.76, 1972; Song and Dance for Junior Str Orch, op.96, 1982; Meditation in Memory of Anna Ambrose, op.107, 1985

Band: Dance Ov., op.12, military band, 1930, orchd 1935; Russian Glory, op.20, military band, 1941; Pavane for the Castleton Queen, op.42, brass band, 1953; Scherzo, op.68, wind, perc, 1969; Festival March of British Youth, op.78, brass band, 1973

vocal

Solo vocal: 2 Songs (H. Monro), op.7, S, chbr orch, 1925; Pages from ‘The Swallow Book’ (E. Toller), A, pf, 1939, collab. A. Rawsthorne; Voices of the Prophets (Bible: Isaiah, J. Milton, W. Blake, P. Blackman), op.41, 1v, pf, 1952; Seafarers’ Songs, op.57, Bar, pf, 1961; The Freight of Harvest, op.69, T, pf, 1969; 4 Songs (N. Bush, C. Day Lewis), op.77, Mez, pf, 1973; 2 Songs (P. Neruda), op.80, Bar, pf, 1974; De plenos poderes (Neruda), op.86, Bar, pf, 1976; Woman’s Life (N. Bush), op.87, S, pf, 1977; 2 Shakespeare Sonnets, op.92, Bar, orch, 1980

Choral with orch: Conc. (R. Swingler), op.18, Bar, pf, chorus, orch, 1937; Winter Journey (Swingler), op.29, S, B, chorus, str, hp, 1946; Song of Friendship (N. Bush), op.34, B, chorus, orch, 1949; The Ballad of Freedom’s Soldier (J. Manifold), op.44, T, B, chorus, orch, 1953; Ballad of Aldermarston (A. Mueller, trans. N. Bush), spkr, chorus, orch, 1958; The World is his Song (N. Bush), op.51, Bar, chorus, orch, 1958; The Tide that will Never Turn (Hugh McDiarmid), 2 spkr, B, chorus, orch, 1961; The Alps and Andes of the Living World, op.66, spkr, T, chorus, orch, 1968; Africa is my Name (N. Bush), op.85, Mez, chorus, pf/orch, 1976; The Earth is in Shadow (N. Bush), op.102, chorus, orch, 1985; Mandela Speaking (N. Mandela), op.103, Bar, chorus, orch, 1985

Choral with other acc.: Songs of the Doomed (F.C. Boden), op.14, T, female chorus, pf, 1929; Toulon (N. Bush), Mez, chorus, pf, 1942; Britain’s Part (A. Bush), spkr, chorus, pf, perc, 1943; Our Song, chorus, pf, 1948; The Dream of Llewelyn ap Gruffydd (Swingler), op.35, male chorus, pf, 1950; 5 Songs of Asian Struggle, chorus, pf, 1968–9; Song for Angela Davis, chorus, pf, 1972; Turkish Workers’ Marching Song, op.101, chorus, fl, cl, tpt, trbn, pf, perc, 1985

Unacc. choral: Song to the Men of England (P.B. Shelley), op.10, 1928; The Road (V.A. Friedlander), op.13, 1929; 20 Eng. Folksongs, 1945; Lidice (N. Bush), 1947; 10 Eng. Folksongs, 1952; Like Rivers Flowing (N. Bush), 1957; During Music (D.G. Rossetti), op.62, 1963; Men of Felling (N. Bush), op.72, male chorus, 1971

Chamber and solo instrumental

3–8 insts: Str Qt, a, op.4, 1923; Pf Qt, op.5, 1924; 5 Pieces, op.6, cl, hn, str trio, 1924–5; Dialectic, op.15, str qt, 1929; 3 Concert Studies, op.31, pf trio, 1947; Prelude, Air and Dance, op.61, vn, str qt, perc, 1963–4; Serenade, op.70, str qt, 1969; Suite of Six, op.81, str qt, 1975; Voices from Four Continents, op.91, cl, vc, pf, 1980; Concertino, op.94, 2 vn, pf, 1980–81; Qnt, op.104, str qt, pf, 1984; Canzona, op.106, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1985; Octet, op.105, fl, cl, hn, str qt, pf, 1985; Septet, op.118, ww qt, str trio, 1987

2 insts: Sonata, op.2, bn, pf, 1921; Fantasy, op.3, vn, pf, 1923; Concert Piece, op.17, vc, pf, 1936; Lyric Interlude, op.26, vn, pf, 1944; Outdoors and Indoors, 2 easy pieces, vc, pf, 1951; Trent’s Broad Reaches, op.36, hn, pf, 1951; Northumbrian Impressions, op.42a, ob, pf, 1953; Autumn Poem, op.45, hn, pf, 1954; 2 Melodies, op.47, va, pf, 1957; 3 African Sketches, op.55, fl, pf, 1961; Sonatina, op.82, tr rec + a rec + t rec, pf, 1975; Sonatina, op.88, va, pf, 1978; Pro pace et felicitate generis humani, op.89, vc, pf, 1979; Meditation and Scherzo, op.93, db, pf, 1980; Summer Fields and Hedgerows, op.100, cl, pf, 1984; 2 Preludes and Fugues, op.108, vn, pf, 1986; Sonata, op.120, vc, pf, 1987; Summer Valley, op.125, vc, pf, c1988

Solo inst: 3 Eng. Song Preludes, op.40, org, 1952; 2 Occasional Pieces, op.56, org, 1960; Suite, op.54, hpd/pf, 1960; 3 Raga Melodies, op.59, vn, 1961; 2 Dances, op.64, cimb, 1965; Compass Points, op.83, pipes, 1976; Prelude and Concert Piece, op.116, org, 1986; Sonata, op.122, org, 1987

Pf: 3 pieces, op.1, 2 pf, 1921; Prelude and Fugue, op.9, 1927; Relinquishment, op.11, 1928; Esquisse: le 14 juillet, op.38, 1943; Times of Day, 3 children’s pieces, 1950; Nocturne, op.46, 1957; 2 Ballads of the Sea, op.50, 1957–8; Mister Playford’s Tunes, op.49, 1958; Suite, op.65, 2 pf, 1967; Sonata, A, op.71, 1969–70; Corenty ne Kwe-Kwe, op.75, 1972; Letter Galliard, op.79, 1974; 24 Preludes, op.84, 1977; Souvenir d’une nuit d’été après Sergei Liapunov, op.90, 1979; Scots Jigganspiel, op.95, 1982; 6 Short Pieces, op.99, 1983; Distant Fields, op.110, 1986; 3 Five Beat First Year Pieces, op.114, 1986; 2 Pieces for Nancy, op.115, 1986; Sonata, G, op.113, 1986; 2 Etudes, 1987; 2 Preludes and Fugues, op.123, 1987; The Six Modes, op.119, pf duet, 1987; A Heart’s Expression, op.121, unfinished; Spring Woodland and Summer Garden, op.124, 1988

MSS in GB-Lbl, Lmic

Principal publishers: Boosey & Hawkes, Henschel, Novello, Williams

WRITINGS

‘The Crisis of Modern Music’, Keynote, i/4 (1946)

Strict Counterpoint in the Palestrina Style (London, 1948)

‘The Study and Teaching of Musical Composition’, MT, xciii (1952), 539–42

In my Seventh Decade (London, 1970)

In my Eighth Decade and Other Essays (London, 1980)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Clanc, ed.: Tribute to Alan Bush on his Fiftieth Birthday: a Symposium (London, 1950)

H. Ottaway: ‘Alan Bush’s “Wat Tyler”’, MT, xcvii (1956), 633–6

C. Mason: ‘Alan Bush in High Middle Age’, The Listener (26 May 1960)

M. Schafer: British Composers in Interview (London, 1963), 53ff

S. Goddard: ‘Alan Bush: Propagandist and Artist’, The Listener (16 Apr 1964)

A. Payne: ‘Alan Bush’, MT, cv (1964), 263–5

R. Stevenson: ‘Alan Bush in the 70s’, MT, cxiii (1972), 661–3

B. Kotljarov: Alan Buš (Moscow, 1981)

R. Stevenson, ed.: Time Remembered: Alan Bush – an 80th-Birthday Symposium (Kidderminster, 1981)

R. Stevenson: ‘Alan Bush’, Tempo, no.195 (1996), 19 only [obituary]

W. Mellers: ‘Alan Bush and the English Tradition’, Clarion [Alan Bush Music Trust], no.1 (1998), 3 only

COLIN MASON/HUGO COLE/D. WATSON

Bush, Geoffrey

(b London, 23 March 1920; d London, 24 Feb 1998). English composer. He was educated at Salisbury Cathedral Choir School, Lancing College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took the MA in classics and the DMus, both in 1946. He was an extra-mural music lecturer at Oxford and London universities, and from 1969 to 1989 was visiting professor at King’s College London. In 1986 he was made an honorary Fellow of the University College of Wales. He was mainly self-educated as a composer, although Ireland helped him with advice and criticism while he was at school. In 1949 his popular overture Yorick won the Royal Philharmonic Society prize. His achievement as a composer was enriched by his scholarly pursuits as an editor, particularly of Elizabethan and Victorian music. Aside from contributing to a revival of interest in neglected English composers, these activities had a direct bearing on his vocal and dramatic output. His six operas attest to the affinity he shared with his models Purcell and Britten in their idiomatic vocal lyricism, clarity of text-setting and theatrically effective accompaniment; such qualities can also be found in the song cycles of the 1980s and 90s (e.g. Mirabile misterium and Four Chaucer Songs). His insights into Elizabethan polyphony and 19th-century harmony infuse his many transcriptions and Stravinskian arrangements, while his music’s chromaticism, within a broadly tonal idiom, its love of counterpoint and its delicate, colourful orchestration betray the influences of Prokofiev. Bush has also edited several collections of music by John Ireland.

WORKS

(selective list)

Principal publishers: Basil Ramsey, Novello, Stainer & Bell, Thames

opera

(librettos by Bush unless otherwise stated)

The Blind Beggar’s Daughter (ballad op for young people, 3 scenes, S. Bathurst), Farnham, 21 Jan 1954, rev, 1964

If the Cap Fits (1, after Molière: Les précieuses ridicules), 1956, Cheltenham, 12 July 1956

The Equation (1, after J. Drinkwater), 1967, London, 11 Jan 1968

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1, after O. Wilde), 1972, London, GSM, 5 Dec 1972

Love’s Labours Lost (2, after W. Shakespeare), 1988, unperf.

other

Choral: A Christmas Cant., S, chorus, ob, str, 1947; A Summer Serenade, T, chorus, str, pf, timp, 1948; In Praise of Mary, S, chorus, orch, 1955; A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, SATB, 1971; Dafydd in Love (D. ap Gwylim), Bar, vv, pf, 1974; Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, SATB, org, 1976; Phantoms, S, children’s chorus, orch, 1978; Daystar in Winter (C. Causley), chorus, org, 1982; A Little Triptych for a Birthday, 1991

Orch: Divertimento, str, 1943; Yorick, ov., 1949; Sym. no.1, 1954; Sym. no.2 ‘The Guildford’, 1957; Music for Orch, 1967; Concertino no.2, pf, orch, 1976; Consort Music ‘6 Victorian Sketches’, str, 1987

Songs: 4 Songs (R. Herrick: Hesperides), Bar, pf, 1949; Songs of Wonder, S/T, str/pf, 1959; A Lover’s Progress (17th-century text), T, ob, cl, bn, 1961; Greek Love Songs (Meleger, trans. D. Fitts), Bar, pf, 1964; Mirabile misterium, 1v, pf/(str qt, hpd), 1985; 4 Chaucer Settings, Bar, ob, pf, 1987; Songs of the Zodiac (D. Gascoigne), high v, pf, 1989; Yesterday (C. Causley), high v, pf, 1990

Chbr and solo inst: Trio, ob, bn, pf, 1952; Dialogue, ob, pf, 1960; Whydah Variations, 2 pf, 1961; Wind Qnt, 1963; Tpt March, org, 1981; Pavans and Galliards, wind qt, 1982; Tributes: 5 Respectful Pieces, cl, pf, 1986; Suite Champêtre, pf, 1990

WRITINGS

Musical Creation and the Listener (London, 1954, 2/1967)

‘Song’, ‘Chamber Music’, The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley, The Athlone History of Music in Britain, v (London, 1981)

Left, Right and Centre: Reflections on Composers and Composing (London, 1983)

‘Sterndale Bennett and the Orchestra’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 322–4

An Unsentimental Education and Other Musical Recollections (London, 1990)

Introduction, John Ireland: a Catalogue, Discography and Bibliography, compiled S.R. Craggs (New York, 1993)

EDITIONS

with N. Temperley: English Songs, 1800–1860, MB, xliii (1979)

Hubert Parry: Songs, MB, xlix (1982)

Sterndale Bennett: Piano and Chamber Music, MB, xxxvii (1985)

C. Villiers Stanford: Songs, MB, lii (1986)

Songs 1860–1900, MB, lvi (1989)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Rayl: ‘The Choral Music of Geoffrey Bush’, Choral Journal, xxi/3 (1980), 25–9

Geoffrey Bush (London, n.d.) [privately pubd booklet, incl. C. Palmer: ‘Geoffrey Bush and his Music’, list of works, editions, writings and discography]

Obituary, Daily Telegraph (5 March 1998)

MALCOLM MILLER

Bush, Kate [Catherine]

(b Bexleyheath, Kent, 30 July 1958). English pop singer. She began performing professionally in 1974, fronting the K.T. Bush band, then came to the attention of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, who was instrumental in securing her a solo recording contract. Her first single, Wuthering Heights (EMI, 1978), was an astonishing début and reached number one in the UK charts. The accompanying album, The Kick Inside (EMI, 1978), was a moving collection which showcased Bush’s affected, almost hysterical, confessional lyrics. She bridged the gap between the earnest melodicism of 1970s singer-songwriter styles and arty progressive rock, and also became well known for her intensely theatrical videos incorporating dance and mime. Perhaps Bush’s most realised work was 1980’s Never For Ever EMI, which contained the UK hit single Army Dreamers, the most telling of any commentary on the ‘Troubles’ of Northern Ireland. The Dreaming (EMI, 1982) and Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985), her second UK number one album, saw Bush appropriating ethnic folk influences from Ireland and central Europe into her music. By the mid-1980s, she was one of the most commercially successful, if reticent, pop stars in the UK. Since then she has only made two albums in over a decade, and her unwillingness to perform live has denied her wider global success. Despite this, she has maintained a large popular following and influenced many artists, most notably the American singer Tori Amos.

DAVID BUCKLEY

Bushman music.

The music of the Khoisan-speaking people of southern Africa, a semi-nomadic people with a tradition of hunting and gathering. They were historically referred to as ‘Bushmen’, a name that many still prefer. To avoid negative connotations associated with this term, the Nama name ‘San’ has also been used, though this is now considered by some to be even more derogatory. The primary social unit of the people is a band usually consisting of between 20 and 50 members related either by blood or by marriage. They have no leaders or formal legal institutions, and their mode of social organization is among the most simple and egalitarian known.

The most common musical instrument used by the Bushmen is the (goma g!oma) or (nao n!ao) mouth-resonated musical bow, which is usually a hunting bow: the string is stopped by the left hand while the right hand strikes the string with a small stick. Another instrument, the mbira (see Lamellophone), is gaining popularity, having been adopted by the Bushmen from Bantu-speaking neighbours.

The heart of Bushman music, however, is singing. The vocal music is usually polyphonic and polyrhythmic, characterized by a kind of yodelling and using a high tonal centre, and the voices are supported by complex hand-clapping, sometimes supplemented by one or two drums. The songs, sung by choirs of women and girls, accompany dances performed mainly by men and are given titles such as The Giraffe, The Elephant, The Kudu etc. These dances are at the core of Khoisan religious life and are frequently used for trance therapy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

I. Schapera: The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa: Bushmen and Hottentots (London, 1930)

P.R. Kirby: ‘A Study of Bushman Music’, Bantu Studies, x (1936), 205–52

P.R. Kirby: ‘The Musical Practices of the /?auni and # khomani Bushmen’, Bantu Studies, x (1936), 373–431

P.R. Kirby: ‘Physical Phenomena which Appear to have Determined the Basis and Development of a Harmonic Sense among Bushmen, Hottentot and Bantu’, AfM, ii/4 (1961), 6–9

N. England: ‘The Organisation of Rhythm in Kxo Music’, Papers Read at the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society: Seattle 1963, 28

N.M. England: ‘Bushman Counterpoint’, JIFMC, xix (1967), 58–66

L. Marshall: ‘The Medicine Dance of the Kung Bushmen’, Africa, xxxix (1969), 347–81

G. Kubik: Música tradicional e aculturada dos Kung! de Angola uma introdução ao instrumentário, estrutura e técnicas de execução da música dos Kung!, incidindo em especial nos factores psicologico-sociais da actual mudança na cultura dos povos Khoisan (Lisboa, 1970)

D. Rycroft: ‘Comments on Bushmen and Hottentot Music Recorded by E.O.J. Westphal’, Review of Ethnology, v/2–3 (1978), 16–23

N.M. England: Music among the Žũ/wã-si and Related Peoples of Namibia, Botswana, and Angola (New York, 1995)

recordings

Bushman Music and Pygmy Music, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Harvard LD-9 (1954/R1983) [incl. notes by Y. Grimaud and G. Rouget]

Africa South of the Sahara, coll. H. Courlander, Smithsonian Folkways FE 4503 (1957/R1992) [incl. notes by A.P. Merriam]

The Music of !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, Africa, Smithsonian Folkways FE 4487 (1962) [incl. notes by J. Phillipson]

Traditional Music of Botswana, Africa, Smithsonian Folkways FE 4371 (1993) [rec. 1975–8]

ROGER L. HEWITT

Busine.

See Buisine.

Businello, Giovanni [Gian] Francesco.

See Busenello, Giovanni Francesco.

Busnoys [Busnois, Bunoys, de Busnes], Antoine [Antonius]

(b c1430; d shortly before 6 Nov 1492). French composer, singer and poet. He was the most prolific French composer of songs between Guillaume Du Fay and Claudin de Sermisy, and was widely acknowledged, along with Johannes Ockeghem, among the most outstanding composers of the second half of the 15th century.

2. The Burgundian years.

3. Burgundian benefices.

4. Busnoys and the origins of the ‘L'homme armé’ tradition.

PAULA HIGGINS

1. Early years in France.

The place and date of Busnoys' birth are unknown. In all likelihood he hailed from the tiny village of Busnes near Béthune (Pas-de-Calais) in the province of Artois. He could conceivably have been related to ‘Messire et maître Philippe de Busnes’, recorded as priest, dean and canon of Notre-Dame, Lens (about 30 km from Busnes), in 1499, a descendant of the noble counts of Busnes. Nothing is known of his early musical training, though he surely attended an ecclesiastical choir school, as did most late-medieval singers, probably in northern or central France.

Literary, musical and other circumstantial evidence points to Busnoys' activity in aristocratic circles surrounding the French royal court in the Loire valley by the 1450s, if not earlier. The recent re-attribution to Busnoys of the motet-chanson Resjoïs-toy, terre de France/Rex pacificus (see Lindmayr in Higgins, 1992), probably composed for the accession of Louis XI to the crown in 1461, signals his proximity to French court circles, and the earliest known biographical document places him squarely in Tours. A petition for absolution preserved in the papal archives, dated 28 February 1461, recounts an incident in which Busnoys (then a chaplain in Tours Cathedral), along with a number of unnamed associates, had allegedly beaten a certain priest to the point of bloodshed on five separate occasions. He had then proceeded in open defiance of canon law to celebrate Mass in his state of anathema, actions for which he was excommunicated and afterwards pardoned by Pope Pius II. The document gives no further details about the circumstances of the beatings, but it resembles many similar accounts of clerical violence preserved in the archives of the Sacred Penitentiary.

By 1465 Busnoys had moved from Tours Cathedral to the collegiate church of St Martin, where Ockeghem held the dignity of treasurer; this would have facilitated even more direct musical contact between the two composers than had probably already existed. According to an 18th-century transcript of the now lost chapter acts, ‘Antonius Bunoys, clericus de choro et pannus’ was promoted to acolyte and the other minor orders on 7 April and to subdeacon on 13 April. Soon thereafter he must have assumed responsibility for the church's maîtrise, for he was styled ‘currently master of the choirboys of St Martin of Tours’ in September 1465, when he proposed himself for the same position at the allied church of St Hilaire le Grand, Poitiers. In doing so he was challenging the incumbent master, one Jehan le Begue, whom most of the canons of St Hilaire preferred to retain in spite of his inadequacy (or even incompetence). Busnoys' reputation by 1465 is made clear by the superlatives his advocates invoked to describe him: ‘extremely skilled in music’, ‘exceptionally qualified in music and poetry, and best able to instruct the boys, especially in music and morals’, ‘a most dignified and eminent man’. In the end Busnoys was hired, but the chapter continued to disagree about the handling of his appointment. Within weeks of his arrival in Poitiers a flood of new musical talent descended upon St Hilaire. The chapter accepted a new singer named Etienne Aubry, ‘expertus in musica’, who lodged in Busnoys' house. Shortly thereafter they admitted a certain ‘poor tenor’, as well as a number of new choir clerks who were identified as ‘expertus in musica’ and whose admission was contingent on satisfying the succentor of their competence in ‘musica et letteratura’. Busnoys' arrival appears not only to have stimulated the chapter to augment its polyphonic resources but also to have served as a magnet for capable singers.

What might have induced Busnoys to leave St Martin, one of the most prestigious churches in France, for an identical position at its equally renowned sister institution – particularly since the ancient ties of confraternity between the two churches formally prohibited the raiding of each other's personnel? One obvious lure was the renowned University of Poitiers, established in 1432. Numerous allusions by 15th- and 16th-century theorists, as well as the profusion of pseudo-Greek terminology in prescriptive texts and canons in his music, suggest that Busnoys' learning and erudition surpassed that of most 15th-century musicians. Scholars have thus supposed that he must have had a university education, but it is not known where he studied. At least two contemporary composers followed precisely such a career trajectory: Johannes Tinctoris studied at the University of Orléans while serving as magister puerorum of Orléans Cathedral in the early 1460s, and Philippe Basiron pursued a degree in canon law at the University of Bourges in 1471 while he was master of the choirboys at the Ste Chapelle of Bourges. Busnoys may well have matriculated at the University of Poitiers in 1465, but it seems unlikely that he made substantial progress towards a degree at this time. By 26 July 1466 he was described as ‘master of the choirboys during the year just past’, and Le Begue had his old job back. Busnoys' decidedly precipitous departure may have been due to irreconcilable power struggles within the chapter over his appointment. In January 1467 the canons were still trying to find the best way of settling their debt to their ‘former master of the choirboys’.

Busnoys seems to have written nearly two-thirds of his chansons by 1466 (see Fallows in Higgins, 1992) – that is, by the time he left Poitiers. Much of the surviving sacred music, too, must have been composed before 1467. The four-voice setting of the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes, with its unusually high ranges, unique in his oeuvre, may have been written with the choirboys of Tours or Poitiers in mind; likewise the two settings of Regina caeli, the second of which has been described as ‘one of the loveliest stretches of music ever written’.

2. The Burgundian years.

Not long after Busnoys left Poitiers his name turns up in a document of 14 March 1467, as a chantre in the service of Charles, count of Charolais and heir to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Within a few months of his arrival at the court Busnoys must have composed the motet In hydraulis, whose text pays homage to Ockeghem as ‘a new Orpheus’ and designates Busnoys himself ‘the unworthy musician of the count of Charolais’ (the count became duke of Burgundy on 15 June 1467). Charles the Bold took a far more active interest in music than his predecessors, and over the period 1467–70 he augmented the vocal forces of his chapel and issued payments for the copying of ‘new’ musical works into the chapel's choirbooks; Busnoys undoubtedly composed some of these. One choirbook of the Burgundian chapel survives (B-Br 5557) with nine sacred works by Busnoys added to its original nucleus. Most of these are in a single hand, and the care with which they were copied – especially the rubrication of the composer's name at the beginning and end of Anthoni usque limina (‘Anthoni usque limina … fiat in omniBus Noys’; see illustration) – suggests that the scribe was Busnoys himself.

It is not clear exactly when, how or why Busnoys entered Charles's service in 1466 or 1467, but he did not join the ducal chapel on Charles's accession. From time to time over the next three years he received ‘gifts’ from Charles's treasury in order to defray his expenses in performing unspecified services. The sums he was given were much less in aggregate than the salary of a chaplain, conforming more to the wages of a domestic servant. Probably he was not working for Charles full-time or officially and had other resources to live on, though the nature of these is unknown. The freelance ‘services’ he was paid for were almost certainly specifically musical ones, such as composing and performing, but probably included the more delicate diplomatic task of recruiting new musicians from other courts. In November 1470 Busnoys was paid for ‘services … of which the duke wished no further mention to be made in the accounts’, a formula regularly used in payments for embassies and other political missions. It is also possible that Busnoys acted as the duke's teacher in musical or poetic composition. There is no evidence that he served in the dual function of chantre and varlet de chambre, as Hayne van Ghizeghem and Adrien Basin are known to have done at this time; in all the documents before his entry into the ducal chapel he is called simply chantre. In any case, with the majority of his chansons having been already composed before he came to Burgundy, there is no need to suppose his status as varlet de chambre as an explanation of his chiefly secular oeuvre.

Busnoys finally became an official member of the Burgundian chapel staff as a demi-chappellain in October 1470, although the ducal ordinance confirming his appointment was still pending. A separate entry in the next month's accounts refers to him as ‘a chaplain in my lord's domestic chapel’, but on the next surviving roster of the chapel, from 8 March 1471, he was still on half pay, which may mean that his status was still contingent; by July 1472 he had become a full chaplain of the ducal chapel. He probably had a semi-official connection with the chapel before his appointment, however: a clothier and a furrier had been paid in the autumn of 1469 for the materials for robes matching those of the chapel, which the duke had given to Busnoys and another chantre. From 1471 onwards Busnoys' name appears on all the surviving escroes or daily rolls of the ducal household up to 1475, which enables us to follow his whereabouts with uncommon precision. Charles the Bold spent much of his decade-long reign on military campaigns, extending his territories and consolidating his power within them; unlike his predecessors, who had taken only a skeleton crew of chaplains into combat, Charles almost invariably travelled with his entire chapel. Chroniclers consistently reported that the duke was nowhere more at home than in his military camps, where foreign dignitaries and ambassadors were received and entertained with as much ceremony as at his palaces in the Low Countries. It is not surprising that music played an important role in life on the battlefield. The Milanese ambassador Johanne Pietro Panigarola reported from the siege of Neuss in May 1475: ‘Even though [the duke] is in camp, every evening he has something new sung in his quarters; and sometimes his lordship sings, though he does not have a good voice; but he is skilled in music’. It seems certain that ducal composers such as Busnoys and Robert Morton would have supplied at least some of the ‘new’ music performed on these occasions.

Along with the other singers of the Burgundian chapel, Busnoys accompanied Charles to all his major military confrontations before 1476: Liège and Péronne in 1467–8, Péronne, Beauvais and the conquest of the Somme towns in 1472–3, and the siege of Neuss, which lasted nearly a year during 1474–5. The escroes for 1476 show a substantially reduced chapel staff, and it is probable that Busnoys and the other singers did not accompany Charles on the particularly brutal campaigns in Lorraine that led to his death early the next year. On 7 December 1476, at the outset of Charles's disastrous siege of Nancy, most of his chaplains were in Ghent serving his wife, Margaret of York. The duke's chaplains may have rejoined him later on his final engagement at Nancy: at least one of the regular chaplains, the Englishman John Stewart, died in that battle, as did the duke himself on 5 January 1477. The appearance of Busnoys' name on the wardrobe accounts for Charles the Bold’s funeral marks the end of his association with the mercurial warrior-prince, who balanced an obsession with military conquest with a passionate interest in music and musicians. Busnoys remained in the service of Charles's daughter and heir, Mary of Burgundy, and on her marriage in 1478 transferred to the chapel of her consort Maximilian of Austria. The last appearance of Busnoys' name in the records of the Habsburg-Burgundian court is on 17 April 1483. Nothing more is known of him until his death was reported almost a decade later. It has been conjectured that he may have spent part of the 1480s in Italy, though no supporting evidence has come to light. Certainly his music was well known and highly prized in Italy, to judge from surviving sources of his music, and it is not impossible that, like so many of his contemporaries, he may have sought employment beyond the Alps.

3. Burgundian benefices.

Most of what is known of Busnoys after the death of Charles the Bold comes from the records of ecclesiastical benefices he held. Only one benefice is certainly known to have been bestowed on him by Charles himself (though the one mentioned immediately below may well have been): the chaplaincy of St Silvestre in the ducal château at Mons, Hainaut. Charles wrote from Maastricht to the wardens of the château on 4 June 1473 to inform them that on that day Busnoys had resigned the chaplaincy in favour of Bernard Buillot (who was later organ porter in the ducal chapel). The benefice must have been at least partly residential, since the officials of the château needed to know of the change in personnel, but Busnoys is now known to have been absent from the ducal court during the previous two years; he may have resided in Mons at periods when the escroes do not survive.

The remaining records of benefices concerning Busnoys are all problematic in one way or another. Jean Molinet referred to Busnoys as ‘Monseigneur le doyen de Vorne’, which has led to some confusion as to whether he meant Veurne [Furnes] near the Flemish coast or Oostvorne on the island of Vorne in Zeeland. Molinet spoke of Busnoys as flourishing in ‘ce bas pays flandrinois’, which led Dupire to suppose that Veurne was meant, but Busnoys' name does not appear among the deans of the collegiate church of St Walburge. Fétis, however, working with evidence supplied by the Brussels archivist Alexandre Pinchart, had argued on behalf of Oostvorne, where one of the canonries of the small collegiate church of St Pancrace was in the collation of the dukes of Burgundy. Jongkees (without citing specific documents) confirmed that Busnoys was dean of St Pancrace and canon of Tholen (also in Zeeland) in 1473. It is not known how long Busnoys may have held the deanship in Oostvorne; the as yet untapped archives of the Burgundian court in the southern Netherlands may hold valuable information.

There is a supplication in the Vatican archives, dated on the day of Charles's death, 5 January 1477, requesting a canonicate for Busnoys in the diocese of Thérouanne (the church is not specified but may be that of Saint Omer), but it is not known whether the application was successful. On 10 November 1478 Busnoys, described as canon of an unspecified church (perhaps the one supplicated for), acquired a chaplaincy in St Nicolas, Brussels, through a permutation of benefices with the former Burgundian singer Walter Henrici, only to resign it on 14 November in exchange for another chaplaincy in the park of Tervuren near Brussels, probably in the ducal hunting lodge in the park. A collation list of Maximilian's, dating from about 1480, lists Busnoys' name against benefices in Mons (probably not the same as the chaplaincy in the château he had held earlier), Condé (undoubtedly Notre Dame, where Josquin was later provost and where the dukes of Burgundy had the collation of some of the prebends) and Tholen. Unfortunately this document does not name the churches involved, although it is probable that it refers to benefices actually held rather than nominations, as Jongkees's researches, mentioned above, confirm the canonry in Tholen (the prebends at Oostvorne, unfortunately, are left blank). A tantalizing entry in the list names ‘Marie, daughter of Hughes Busnois’, who may have been – if not the composer's sister and father – at least relatives.

Vander Straeten published a document recording the permutation of a prebend at Lier [Lierre] on 27 January 1481 from ‘Buysnois’ to ‘Jans bastaert van Brabant’. This must have been at St Gommaire, the only collegiate church in Lier whose benefices were in the collation of the dukes of Burgundy. According to Theunissens, who gave no supporting evidence or dates, Busnoys was among the holders of the tenth prebend; a Jean de Brabant did in fact hold the fourth prebend in 1481, dying in 1486. A number of Busnoys' colleagues in the Burgundian chapel also held prebends in this chapter, including Jean Cordier and Jean Bracconier dit Lourdault. Busnoys' final and biographically most significant benefice is also rather mysterious: he seems to have been responsible for directing the choir at St Sauveur, Bruges, in the late 1480s and early 1490s. Busnoys was listed as a deceased member of the choir confraternity of the church about 1510, and a now lost document of 6 November 1492 recorded the appointment of a replacement to ‘the job (onus) of directing the choir’ after Busnoys' evidently recent death. The office of cantor at St Sauveur seems to have united both the normal responsibility for ruling the plainchant and the duty of teaching the choirboys; Busnoys probably obtained the office after 1484/5, when another singer is described as master of the children. Strohm (StrohmM) has suggested that Busnoys may well have owed the position to the nomination of Maximilian of Habsburg, and noted that he was probably not permanently resident. It is striking that, just as had happened when Busnoys become master of the choirboys at St Hilaire, Poitiers, in 1466, the practice of polyphony began to flourish at St Sauveur in the latter half of the 1480s; it undoubtedly owed much to his efforts.

It is worthy of remark that Busnoys is not known to have held any benefices at the most important churches (either musically or ecclesiastically) of France or the Burgundian territories, as so many of his counterparts both among the major composers of the time and in the Burgundian chapel – even if not composers – did. Further research may turn up more benefices than are known of at present, but it seems likely that the only one with much prestige was the possible prebend at Condé; all Busnoys' other benefices were in the geographical and musical backwaters of the Burgundian lands.

4. Busnoys and the origins of the ‘L'homme armé’ tradition.

The most important claim made about Busnoys by 15th- and 16th-century theorest’s is Pietro Aaron's statement in his Thoscanello (1523): ‘It is believed that the tune (canto) called L'homme armé was invented (trovato) by Busnoys, and that he took the tenor and, because it was short, transferred the beat from the semibreve to the minim in order to have a wider field’. It is uncertain whether Aaron meant that Busnoys had reworked the rhythm of an existing composed or popular chanson, or that he had newly composed it himself, either as a monophonic or polyphonic chanson or as the tenor of his mass. Giovan Tomaso Cimello (c1540) stated that Ockeghem had written the original song; in 1613 Pietro Cerone repeated the claim that Busnoys had composed the tune, but added that Ockeghem had been the first to write a mass on it. Perhaps more important than the question of the truth of Aaron's claim (whatever it was) is its testimony to a tradition – three decades after his death and in a country where he is not known to have been active – associating Busnoys with the origin of one of the most stimulating cantus prius facti in music history.

Busnoys' Missa ‘L'homme armé’ may or may not have been the original mass in the series of ultimately more than 40 composed on this tune, but in any case it was one of the first, probably written about 1460, and plainly the most influential of the first generation of L'homme armé masses. Strunk first pointed out the extreme dependence of Obrecht's mass on Busnoys', employing virtually the identical rhythmic schema in the tenor (though diverging in placing the tune on E rather than the usual G). Wegman (JRMA, 1989) has shown how an anonymous Missa de Sancto Johanne Baptista similarly appropriates the entire rhythmic plan of Busnoys' cantus firmus. Other L'homme armé masses, particularly those of Du Fay, Faugues and Basiron, seem to quote literally from portions of Busnoys'. Taruskin has drawn attention to the careful demonstration of Pythagorean proportions in the mensural relationships of Busnoys' tenor, showing a similarity to the procedure in several masses in the cycle of six anonymous L'homme armé masses in Naples, which he argued (as Cohen and others had earlier proposed) were also composed by Busnoys. Taruskin has emphasized the anomalous number of 31 breves that distinguishes the ‘Et incarnatus est’ section of the Credo, which he associated with the number of 31 knights in the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece during the reign of Charles the Bold. This coincidence is regarded with less favour now, especially since the L'homme armé tradition in general and Busnoys' mass in particular seem clearly to antedate Busnoys' association with the court of Burgundy. Charles, however, undoubtedly had the opportunity to acquaint himself with Busnoys' mass after 1467, and he is unlikely to have overlooked its potential for allegorizing his own military ambitions.

5. Musical style.

Busnoys' musical style is characterized melodically by wide-spanned lines, patterned and organized through the use of melodic and rhythmic sequences, complex rhythmic combinations and syncopation. Contrapuntally, his music shows a propensity for conservative dissonance treatment, invertible counterpoint and frequent use of imitation in all voices, including precocious examples of four-part pieces using paired imitation and three- and four-voice pieces beginning each textual phrase with a new point of imitation. Harmonically, he had a strong preference for triadic sonorities, strong harmonic (quasi-tonal) progressions, V–I cadences and non-quartal harmonies.

Busnoys' long, arching, wide-spanned melodic lines are perhaps his most singular achievement. He was a brilliant melodist, and this undoubtedly accounts for the great appeal of his works and their frequent use as a basis for other composers’ creative endeavours. Busnoys shared this melodic style with Ockeghem, who also wrote similar lines consistently, though less frequently. Wide-spanned lines are an important instance of the general trend towards expansion of vocal ranges and increasing independence of voice-parts manifest in the later 15th century. This particular characteristic of Busnoys' music may have arisen as a natural result of his career as a professional singer: to judge from the great rhythmic complexity and wide range of his melodic lines, there can be little doubt that he and the singers for whom he composed were vocal virtuosos of the highest calibre. Perle singled out the virelai Je ne puis vivre ainsi as typical of ‘the wonderful subtlety and ingenuity of his rhythmic ideas, probably unsurpassed in the entire history of music’. Busnoys' works are characterized by a ‘rational’ organization of the wide-spanned melodic line into syncopated rhythmic patterns and sequences, as well as an increasing use of structural imitation. For Sparks, Busnoys was the pivotal figure of the late 15th century, in whose works these new trends are most clearly visible:

Busnois exceeded any of his contemporaries in his exploration of the possibilities of linear organization of the counter-melodies; passages dominated by motifs stated in sequence, close imitation or ostinato appear frequently in his works, particularly at cadences. These passages, which often sound experimental, are of considerable significance, since they point to a direction that Franco Netherlands style was to take for the next 30 years.

Busnoys' ingenious use of syncopated rhythms is a feature of his style that had a great impact on his younger contemporaries. In addition to hemiola, he delighted in accentual displacement and intricate cross-rhythms, often emphasized by close imitation. Evident already in the motet Anima mea liquefacta est/Stirps Jesse (in all likelihood his earliest sacred work), one finds stunning examples in In hydraulis as well as in sections of the Missa ‘L'homme armé’ where the cantus firmus is silent (Kyrie II, Agnus II), involving long quasi-canonic duos or trios. Several of these passages bear striking similarities to passages in Josquin's Illibata Dei virgo nutrix and Missa ‘Hercules Dux Ferrariae’, as has been frequently noted in the literature. In equal-voiced pieces, Busnoys' tendency to employ motivically-constructed lines in imitation often results in brilliant passages of ostinato, best exemplified throughout the songs Bel Acueil, Ha que ville et abominable (canonic version), A vous sans autre and especially in the concluding passages of the motets Victimae paschali laudes and Anthoni usque limina, where the ostinato passages create a strong sense of impending climax and drive to the cadence.

The strong sense of tonality evident in many of Busnoys' works arises not only from his systematic use of V–I cadences as well as linear and vertical triadic sonorities, but also from his preference for eliminating essential 4ths between voices. A concomitant feature of this avoidance of 6-3 chords is an increasing use of parallel 10ths between the outer voices, which also appear in abundance. Trowbridge has shown that Busnoys more than any other composer of his day figured centrally in the general trend towards the greater spacial integrity of individual voice parts, key aspects of which include the employment of textures spanning larger ranges, less frequent voice-crossing, the increasing isolation of the contratenor part as a fundamental bass line and especially the use of non-quartal harmonies, all of which are especially prevalent in Busnoys' style. An important linear aspect of his ‘quasi-tonal’ harmony is his propensity for writing conjunct melodic lines exploiting the octave species of the prevailing modality. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, whose melodies more consistently articulate discrete species of the 4th or 5th, Busnoys shows a marked tendency towards a seamless expression of the species of the entire modal octave, resulting in wider-spanned phrases frequently encompassing an octave and often a 10th. Striking examples occur at the openings of Je ne puis vivre ainsi, Ha que ville et abominable, Joye me fuit and Ung plus que tous; one often finds similar gestures near the conclusion of a work, where syncopated scalar passages sometimes ascend the tonic octave, or the octave of the 3rd degree of the modal scale, from which the final tonic will be approached, as in Ma plus qu'assez, Amours nous traitte, Je ne demande aultre degré and Bel Acueil.

One particular gesture appearing so frequently in Busnoys' works as to be a stylistic fingerprint is the ascending scalar passage, spanning an octave and often a 10th, fitted to a sharply syncopated trochaic rhythm. This became perhaps the most striking linear characteristic of the music of virtually every composer of the next generation, especially Obrecht, Josquin, Agricola and Isaac. Examples of these syncopated lines are so pervasive in Busnoys' works that it is difficult to isolate a few of the best, though certainly two of the most brilliant occur at the closing of both partes of Anthoni usque limina, the first on the words ‘psallentem tua dulciter’, and the second on the syllables of his own last name. ‘-Bus noys’. The only other composer who regularly wrote similar lines, albeit infrequently, was Ockeghem. We might draw attention to the parallel moments in the Sanctus of both composers' L'homme armé masses, with their soaring bass lines on the words ‘Domini’ and ‘Sabaoth’. One especially memorable passage of Busnoys' that could easily stand comparison with some of the more sublime moments in all the history of Western music appears in the ‘Qui tollis’ of the L'homme armé mass, where the bass begins a majestic, syncopated ascending scale on D, soars up a breathtaking span of a 10th to f and gracefully winds its way back down to its starting pitch. One cannot help wondering if this unforgettable moment in Busnoys' mass inspired the striking and equally memorable entrance of the bass in the ‘Et in terra’ of Josquin's Missa ‘L'homme armé sexti toni’, which follows the opening duo between the upper voices.

Busnoys' penchant for a kind of formal ‘rationalism’, as Sparks called it, extends to the background level of cantus-firmus organization. Recent studies of individual works have further demonstrated Busnoys' preference for contrapuntal floor plans consisting of a strictly literal presentation of the cantus firmus laid out according to a carefully wrought rhythmic scheme. The Missa ‘L'homme armé’ now appears to have been constructed by planning the lengths of discrete sections according to mathematical ratios corresponding to Pythagorean proportions. In hydraulis provides an example of a ‘constructed’ cantus firmus consisting of a three-note ostinato stated in transpositions at the 5th and octave – corresponding to the Pythagorean intervals named in the text – and in successive proportional diminutions. Anthoni usque limina is similarly based on a ‘constructed’ tenor consisting of the note D, whose performance on (or in imitation of) a bell must be rhythmically reconstructed from an obscure verbal and pictorial ‘canon’ in the sole source (see illustration), and the text itself incorporates Busnoys' full name (Anthoni usque limina … fiat in omniBus Noys). The four-part hymn Conditor alme siderum assigns a different mensuration to each voice-part. The cantus firmus of the virelai Maintes femmes is based on an elaborate hexachordal scaffolding ingeniously constructed from notes of the superius in the first section and from solmization syllables in the second, a procedure strikingly evocative of the even more recondite canon in Ockeghem's Ut heremita solus. J'ay pris amours tout au rebours incorporates the tenor of the well-known anonymous rondeau J'ay pris amours in inversion (‘au rebours’).

6. Reception.

Busnoys' musical legacy of some 75 chansons, 10 motets, a Magnificat setting, two masses and a Credo survives in more than 50 manuscripts and prints of the 15th and 16th centuries, whose provenances extend from England to Hungary. He is the composer most frequently represented in no fewer than nine major late-15th-century chansonniers – Dijon (F-Dm 517), Laborde (US-WcM2.1 L25 Case), Wolfenbüttel (D-W Guelf.287 Extrav.), Copenhagen (DK-Kk Thott 291 8°), Nivelle de La Chaussée (F-Pn Rés.Vmc 57), Mellon (US-NHub 91), Casanatense (I-Rc 2856), Bologna Q16 (I-Bc Q16) and Seville (E-Sc 5-1-43/F-Pn n.a.fr.4379) – and he figures prominently in the Pixérécourt (Pnfr.15123) and Braccesi (I-Fn B.R.229) chansonniers as well. More than half of his secular songs are found only in sources of Italian origin, further attesting the international scope of his reputation and specifically to their popularity within the musical circles of the Este family in Ferrara, the Medici in Florence and the Aragonese court of Naples. Busnoys' sacred music can have been no less popular than his chansons. In a rare description of the reception of the now lost motet Gabrielem, an Italian instrumentalist reported in 1494 to Duke Francesco Gonzaga in Mantua that ‘in truth, all Venice wishes to hear no other’.

A late exponent of the venerable but moribund tradition of the medieval poet-musician, Busnoys was also exceptional among his contemporaries in enjoying a purely literary reputation as well, happily corroborated by the first-hand testimony in Poitiers of his exceptional qualifications in ‘music and poetry’. Quite apart from the likelihood that he wrote the Latin texts of Anthoni usque limina and In hydraulis as well as the French poems for many of his secular songs, he holds the singular distinction among 15th-century composers of having no less than three poems attributed to him in literary manuscripts and treatises of the period. Pierre Fabri, in his treatise on the Seconde Rhétorique, used a text attributed to Busnoys, Cent mille fois le jour, as a paradigm of the bergerette (virelai). A poetry manuscript (F-Pn fr.9223) emanating from the French court circle of Charles VII and Charles d'Orléans transmits an otherwise unknown rondeau, Lequel vous plairoit mieulx trouver, ascribed to Busnoys. The grand rhétoriqueur Jehan Molinet, whose poetry contains references to Busnoys and his compositions, paid homage to Busnoys in his clever Je te rends honneur et tribus, which uses only the two end-rhymes ‘-bus’ and ‘-nois’. Busnoys responded to Molinet with the rondeau quatrain Reposons nous entre nous amoureux, based in turn on the refrain of Molinet's poem. This is the only one of Busnoys' texts for which music survives – curiously, not by the composer himself, but by Pierre de Manchicourt, in Susato's second book of chansons (RISM 1544¹⁰). The texts Busnoys favoured in his own musical settings seem to be those of the French formes fixes, particularly the rondeau and the virelai.

Quite apart from his alleged role as progenitor of the L'homme armétradition, Busnoys was among the most imitated and emulated composers of his generation, to judge from the number of composers who used his songs as a basis for their own musical settings. The composer most heavily indebted to Busnoys was Jacob Obrecht, whose Missa diversorum tenorum quotes the tenors of Busnoys' Joye me fuit, Mon mignault musequin and Acordés moy, while his mass on Fortuna desperata, like that of Josquin, incorporates all three voices of Busnoys' song. One of only two Italian texts associated with Busnoys (the other, Con tutta gentileça, is unlikely to be the original text for its music), Fortuna desperata gave rise to some 30 further polyphonic elaborations, including multiple secular settings by Henricus Isaac, Alexander Agricola and Ludwig Senfl. (Busnoys' authorship of Fortuna has recently been challenged by Joshua Rifkin on stylistic grounds and reattributed to one ‘Ser Felice’ of Florence.) Johannes Ghiselin employed Busnoys' four-part Mon mignault musequin/Gratieuse plaisante in his Missa ‘Gratieuse’ and also wrote a Sanctus-Agnus pair based on Busnoys' Joye me fuit. Isaac employed all three voices of Busnoys' Quant j'ay au cueur in his mass on the tune, and he also set Fortuna desperata at least twice. Busnoys' setting of the popular tune In myne zynn, his only piece with Flemish text, may have been the polyphonic model for the some dozen subsequent polyphonic settings by other composers. A version virtually identical to Busnoys' is preserved in a Dutch painting of 1533. Je ne demande aultre degré served as the basis for polyphonic mass settings by Obrecht and Agricola, a lost setting by Prioris, an incomplete anonymous setting, a six-voice secular setting by Agricola, a lute intabulation by Spinacino and Compère's Missa ‘Ave Domine Jesu Christe’.

Busnoys stands out as a composer with an unusual interest in his own self-fashioning as a creator of music. In the quasi-autobiographical motet Anthoni usque limina, he concealed his own name in the text itself, wrote a clever verbal canon to ensure the reader wouldn't miss it, and constructed the piece in symmetrical halves corresponding to the numerical cipher (108) of his own name. With In hydraulis, while cloaking his last name in the protective shroud of the conventional medieval humility topos, he nevertheless declared himself the ‘unworthy musician of the count of Charolais’ and as the musical ‘offspring’ (propago) of its dedicatee, Johannes Ockeghem, ‘the reincarnation of Orpheus’. The artistic selfconsciousness manifested in these works goes beyond the way Du Fay inserted his name in a petition in his Ave regina celorum or the simple acrostic ‘here I am’ of Josquin's Illibata Dei virgo nutrix. His emphasis on his having composed Anthoni usque limina and In hydraulis betrays the ambition to present himself as an auctor. His thematizing of creative genealogy and invocation of the classical past (Pythagoras, Orpheus, Graecizing musical terms) manifests a certain anxiety about legitimation. His description of himself as the metaphorical son of the composer he identified with the greatest musician of antiquity suggests that he had a high opinion of himself. And this apparently arrogant self-assessment seems to have been shared by his contemporaries, who regarded him as a truly exceptional man and consistently invoked superlatives to describe him.

Tinctoris dedicated his Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum jointly to Busnoys and Ockeghem as ‘the most outstanding and most famous professors of the art of music’, whose music was ‘worthy of the immortal gods’, and in his Proportionale musices he referred to them as ‘pre-eminent in Latinity’ and among ‘the most excellent of all the composers I have ever heard’. Adam von Fulda's chronological list (in his Musica) of the most important musical figures of all time singled out only two composers of the 15th century: ‘the most learned (doctissimi) Guillaume Du Fay and Antoine Busnoys'. In crediting him with the creation of the L'homme armé tune, Pietro Aaron noted that he was ‘a great man and an excellent musician’. The same language was used by the supporters of his bid to become master of the children in Poitiers: ‘a very dignified and eminent man’, ‘exceptionally skilled in music and poetry’, who would ‘best teach the choirboys’. Even those who would criticize Busnoys acknowledged his authority and power. Tinctoris, who aimed at a thoroughly consistent theory of music, expressed his frustration at Busnoys' ‘inconsistent’ notational practices, implicitly acknowledging the composer's influence on other practitioners when he emphasized that ‘Busnoys alone disagrees …’. Adrianus Petit Coclico (Compendium musices, 1552) categorized Busnoys among his ‘mathematicians’, identifying his faults as ones of excess: ‘In teaching precepts and speculation they have specialized excessively, and in accumulating a multitude of symbols and other things they have introduced many difficulties’.

Some 70 years earlier Bartolomeus Ramis de Pareia (Musica practica, 1482) had cited examples drawn from the works of Busnoys to illustrate the ways in which composers might use cryptic canons or esoteric inscriptions to conceal the resolutions of their contrapuntal manipulations of a cantus firmus. This facet of his creative personality marks Busnoys as the virtually unrivalled magister ludi of late-15th-century music. Typical of Busnoys' delight in this sort of musical puzzle is the song Ha que ville et habominable (Oh how vile and abominable), in which Busnoys ingeniously fashioned the upper voice to function both as a strict three-part canon at the unison (signalled in the manuscripts with the rubric trinitas in unitate) and as the highest voice against two additional lower parts. The text of the song is itself a pun on the name of one Jacqueline de Hacqueville, for whom Busnoys wrote at least three other songs, all of them concealing her name in some form of acrostic or cryptogram. Another of these songs is the three-voice virelai Je ne puis vivre ainsy tousjours (I cannot live like this any longer), of which the first letters in each line form the acrostic JAQUELYNE DAQVEVJLE. Benthem (in Higgins, 1992) has demonstrated the probability that Busnoys originally wrote the ostinato tenor of In hydraulis as a canonic entity (notated only once with instructions for resolving the mensuration of its successive statements), proposed emendations necessary to effect a correct transcription from the work's two rather corrupt surviving sources, and explored a complex nexus of numerically significant textual and musical relationships that may represent an exegesis in ‘sounding number’ of Busnoys' identity and his relationship to Ockeghem.

Until quite recently Busnoys has stood very much in the shadow of Ockeghem in the eyes of modern scholarship, even though the two were regarded as equals in their own time. Much of the responsibility for this imbalance lies with one of the defining moments in the evolution of modern musicology: Raphael Georg Kiesewetter's prizewinning essay in the competition, What were the contributions of the Netherlanders to music? (1829). Kiesewetter imposed what is now seen to be an inappropriately strong separation between Netherlandish and French musical traditions in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries; it is surely no accident that he proclaimed Ockeghem, with his patently Flemish surname, head of the ‘First Netherlandish School’ rather than the French surnamed Busnoys – never mind that Ockeghem spent nearly all his working life at the French court while Busnoys devoted his last three decades to Burgundy. Furthermore, the preponderance of chansons over masses composed by Busnoys has led to his being viewed as a less serious composer than Ockeghem, who wrote more masses and fewer chansons, in the same way that Chopin is often regarded as less serious than Brahms. The last two decades have gone far to redress this inequity. Although there is still no complete edition of Busnoys' chansons, all of them are now available in modern editions, and the publication of his complete sacred music in 1990 has shown unmistakably how serious and influential he was in that sphere. Even before the quin-centenary year of 1992 there had been an upsurge in scholarly writing and in the performance of Busnoys' music; 1992 saw an exceptionally lively conference devoted to him, and attention to Busnoys has not lost momentum in the meantime. Busnoys is at last taking his rightful place in the attention of scholars and musicians.

The character that emerges from what we have learnt of Busnoys' life and music is one of excess, flamboyance and brilliance, exploding with energy, disrupting convention, thwarting expectation, and determined to experiment with his own way of doing things. The physical and emotional excess evident in the episode of his beating the priest in Tours, together with the precarious circumstances of his later activity, offers a tantalizing sketch of a somewhat marginal, Villonesque character, headstrong and independent, ‘living on the edge’, defying ecclesiastical authority. This nascent if incomplete picture of Busnoys as a musical and social renegade may account in part for the attraction his life and music holds for us today. His works are rife with harmonic surprise, abrupt changes of tempo and texture, musical canons, extensive imitation, melodic sequences, and large-scale repetitions of motifs and even of whole passages. He exceeded conventionally accepted limits of the gamut in cultivating wide-spanned melodic lines that prefigure those of Josquin and Obrecht. And in extending the outer ranges of the upper and lower voices and enabling individual musical lines to operate unobstructed by interference with crossing parts, Busnoys essentially reconfigured the existing boundaries of tonal space. Standing at the crossroads of an era that witnessed the ideological transformation of the composer from an able craftsman to an innately endowed creator, Busnoys emerges as a pivotal figure in a critical period of changing styles and one of the most original and powerful musical minds of the 15th century. Further investigation into the activities of Busnoys and his contemporaries, coupled with a more discerning critical scrutiny of Busnoys' individual musical legacy, will gradually dispel much of the mystery still surrounding this enigmatic and ingenious composer.

WORKS

Editions: Antoine Busnoys: Collected Works, ii–iii: The Latin-Texted Works, ed. R. Taruskin (New York, 1990) [T]Sechs Trienter Codices, ed. G. Adler and O. Koller, DTÖ, xiv–xv, Jg.vii, xxii, Jg.xi/1 (1900–04/R) [A]Trois chansonniers français du XVe siècle, ed. E. Droz, Y. Rokseth and G. Thibault (Paris, 1927) [D]Der Kopenhagener Chansonnier, ed. K. Jeppesen (Copenhagen, 1927, 2/1965) [J]Das Glogauer Liederbuch, ed. H. Ringmann and C. Väterlein, EDM, 1st ser., iv, viii, lxxxv, lxxxvi (1936–81) [R]Van Ockeghem tot Sweelinck, ed. A. Smijers (Amsterdam, 1939–56) [S]O. Petrucci: Harmonice musices odhecaton A, ed. H. Hewitt (Cambridge, MA, 1946) [H]The Mellon Chansonnier, ed. L.L. Perkins and H. Garey (New Haven, CT, 1979) [P]A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. H.M. Brown, MRM, vii (1983) [B]Der Wolfenbütteler Chansonnier, ed. M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff (Mainz, 1988) [G]

masses and mass sections

Missa ‘L'homme armé’, 4vv; T 1, ed. in Monumenta polyphoniae liturgicae sanctae ecclesiae romanae, i/2 (Rome, 1948)

Missa ‘O crux lignum triumphale’, 4vv; T 49, ed. in Cw, cxxiii (1978)

Patrem Vilayge, 4vv, T 94

motets and ritual works

Ad coenam agni providi, inc., 4vv, T 125 (hymn)

Alleluya, Verbum caro factum est, 4vv, T 129

Anima mea liquefacta est/Stirps Jesse, 3vv, T 132, S i, 22

Anthoni usque limina, 4vv, T 138

Asperges me, lost, copied into a choirbook for Louis XI in 1471 (see Higgins, 1987, p.141)

Conditor alme siderum, 4vv, T 149 (hymn)

Congaudebant, lost, mentioned by Tinctoris (CSM, xxii/2, 1978, p.156)

Gabrielem [archangelum], 4vv, lost, mentioned in a letter to Francesco Gonzaga of 1494 (see Davari); probably 2p. of a setting of the resp Gaude Maria virgo (see Stephan, 89)

Gaude celestis domina, 4vv, ed. Wegman in Higgins (1992)

In hydraulis, 4vv, T 151, A 105, ed. Benthem in Higgins (1992)

Lamentations, lost, copied into a choirbook for Cambrai Cathedral in 1475 (see Houdoy, 201)

Magnificat [sexti toni], 4vv, T 111

Noel, noel, 4vv, T 166

Regina caeli (i), 4vv, T 168 (Marian antiphon)

Regina caeli (ii), 4vv, T 178, S i, 16 (Marian antiphon)

Victimae paschali laudes, 4vv, T 183 (Easter sequence)

secular works

Acordés moy ce que je pense, 4vv, H 290, B no.154 (rondeau)

Advegne que advenir pourra, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 325 (rondeau)

Amours nous traitte honnestement/Je m'en vois au vert bois, 4vv, B no.117 (rondeau)

A qui vens tu tes coquilles, 3vv, P no.10 (rondeau)

Au gré de mes ieulx, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 343 (virelai)

A une dame j'ay fait veu, 3vv, P no.5 (virelai)

Au povre par necessité [= Regina regnancium], 3vv, P no.39 (rondeau)

Ave rosa rubicunda (= Mon seul et celé souvenir), R lxxxv, 7

A vous sans autre me viens rendre, 3vv, D 34, P no.42 (rondeau)

Bel Acueil le sergent d'Amours, 3vv, D 36, P no.1 (rondeau)

Bone chere, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 369 (?rondeau)

Ce n'est pas moy, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 345 (virelai)

C'est bien maleur, 3vv, D 40; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 341 (rondeau)

C'est vous en qui j'ay esperance, 3vv, D 78; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 348 (virelai)

Chi dit on benedicité, 3vv, A xiv–xv, 246, B no.56 (rondeau)

Con tutta gentileça, 3vv, B no.53 (ballata; text by A. Stefani)

Corps digne/Dieu quel mariage, 4vv, S i, 27, B no.182 (?rondeau)

En soustenant vostre querelle, 3vv, P no.2 (rondeau)

En tous les lieux, 4vv; ed. in Brooks (1953), 134, Goldberg (1994), 351 (virelai; text by ‘Monsr Jaques’)

En voyant sa dame, 3vv; ed. in Brown (1971), Goldberg (1994), 318 (rondeau)

Est il merci, 3vv, P no.7, G 5; ed. G. Thibault and D. Fallows, Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Paris, 1991), 56 (rondeau)

Faites de moy tout ce qu'il vous playra, 3vv, B no.221 (rondeau)

Faulx mesdisans, 3vv, B no.58 (rondeau)

Fortune, trop tu es dure = O Fortune

Ha que ville, 3vv, 2 versions: (i) D 28, B no.197; (ii) B no. 197a (rondeau)

In myne zynn, 4vv; ed. R. Lenaerts, Het nederlands polifonies lied in de zestiende eeuw (Mechelen, 1933), 24, Goldberg (1994), 370 (ballade)

Ja que lui ne s'i attende, 3vv, J 60, P no.14, G 10 (virelai)

J'ay mayns de bien, 3vv, B no.57; ed. G. Thibault and D. Fallows, Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Paris, 1991), 40 (virelai)

Je m'esbaïs de vous, 3vv, D 94; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 328 (rondeau)

Je ne demande aultre degré, 4vv, H 311, S i, 65, B no.147 (rondeau)

Je ne demande lialté, 3vv, B no.59 (?rondeau)

Je ne puis vivre ainsi tousjours, 3vv, D 64, P no.12 (virelai)

Joye me fuit, 3vv, A xiv–xv, 247, D 50, P no.29 (rondeau)

Laissez dangier, 3vv; ed. in Brooks (1953), 132 (virelai)

L'autrier la pieça/En l'ombre du buissonet/Trop suis jonette, 4vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 360

L'autrier que passa, 4vv; ed. in MRM, ii (1967), 117

Le corps s'en va, 3vv, P no.21, G 65 (rondeau)

Le monde est tel pour le present, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 320 (?rondeau)

Le second jour d'avril = In myne zynn

Ma damoiselle ma maistresse, 3vv, D 22; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 330, Perkins (1995), 174 (rondeau)

Ma doulce ceur = M'a vostre cueur

Maintes femmes m'ont dit souvent, 4vv; ed. in Hewitt (1957), 109, Goldberg (1994), 356 (virelai)

Ma plus qu'assez, 3vv, D 54, J 24 (virelai)

Ma tres souveraine princesse, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 323

M'a vostre cueur mis en oubli [= Terribile fortuna], 3vv, J 16, B no.228 (virelai)

Mon mignault/Gracieuse playsante muniere, 4vv, H 258, B no.184; ed. in RRMR, lxxvii (1989), no.30 (rondeau)

Mon seul et celé souvenir [= Ave rosa rubicunda], 3vv, A xxii, 74, B no.49 (rondeau)

O Fortune, trop tu es dure, 3vv, P no.37 (rondeau)

On a grant mal par trop amer/On est bien malade pour amer trop, 4vv, B no.183; ed. in RRMR, lxxvii (1989), no.29 (rondeau)

On en bien maldi pour amor trop (= On a grant mal), kbd intabulation; ed. in SMd, viii (1992), 172

Pour entretenir mes amours, 3vv, R iv, 64, P no.15 (rondeau; text attrib. F. Villon)

Pucellotte que Dieu vous gart, 3vv; ed. in Brooks (1953), 122, Goldberg (1994), 379 (ballade)

Quant j'ay au cueur, 3vv, S vi, 185; ed. in CMM, lxv/7 (1984), 136, Goldberg (1994), 332 (rondeau)

Quant vous me ferez, 3vv, J 44; ed. in Besseler (1931), 212 (rondeau)

Quelque povre homme (i), 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 334

Quelque povre homme (ii), 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 336

Regina regnancium virgo puellaris (= Au povre par necessité), R viii, 64, lxxxv, 10

Resjoïs-toy terre de France/Rex pacificus magnificatus est, 4vv; ed. I. Pope and M. Kanazawa, The Musical Manuscript Montecassino 871(Oxford, 1978), 391, Lindmayr-Brandl in Higgins (1992); the mutilated ascription in F-Pn fr.15123, almost certainly to Busnoys (see Lindmayr-Brandl), has also been read as Ockeghem

Seule a par moy en chambre bien paree, 3vv, B no.60; ed. in Brooks (1953), 129 (rondeau)

Soudainement mon cueur a pris, 3vv, J 42 (virelai)

Terribile fortuna = M'a vostre cueur

Terrible dame, 4vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 381 (rondeau)

Une filleresse d'estouppes/S'il y a compagnon/Vostre amour, 4vv, B no.62 (?rondeau)

Ung grand povre homme insanne, 3vv, B no.61 (?rondeau)

Ung plus que tous, 3vv, 2 versions: (i) P no.8; (ii) B no.52 (rondeau)

Vostre beauté/Vous marchez du bout du pié/L'autrier quand je chevauchoie, 4vv, A xiv–xv, 236; ed. in RRMR, lxxvii (1989), no.34 (also attrib. Isaac)

Vostre gracieuse acointance, 3vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 339 (rondeau)

works with conflicting ascriptions

Amours, amours, amours, 4vv, H 270, B no.164 (ballade); attrib. Busnoys in I-Bc Q17, attrib. Japart in 1500

Amours fait moult tant qu'argent dure/Il est de bonne heure né/Tant que nostre argent dura, 4vv, H 286, B no.157 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in I-BcQ17, attrib. Japart in Fn B.R.229, Rc 2856, attrib. ‘Pirson’ [La Rue] in CH-Bu F.X.1–4

Ave stelle fulgida (= Fortuna desperata); ed. In EDM, 1st ser., xxxiv (1975), 408

Cent mille escus quant je vouldroye, 3/4vv, R iv, 67, B no.70 (rondeau); ed. J. Thomson, Les oeuvres complètes de Philippe(?) Caron, ii (Brooklyn, NY, 1976), 167; attrib. Busnoys in I-FnB.R.229, ?F-Pn fr.15123, attrib. Caron in I-Rc 2856, Rvat C.G.XIII.27

Et qui la dira dira, 4vv; ed. in Goldberg (1994), 385 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in I-Bc Q17, attrib. Japart in Fn Magl.XIX.107bis

Fortuna desperata [= Poi che t'hebi nel core, Ave stella fulgida, Virginis alme parens], 3/4vv, S i, 170; ed. in Strohm (1993), 621, Meconi in Higgins (1992), Rifkin in Higgins (1992) (? text by Poliziano; see Meconi); attrib. Busnoys in E-SE s.s., attrib. ‘Felice’ in I-Rvat C.G.XIII.27

Gaude mater miserorum = Quant ce viendra

J'ay bien choisi a mon voloir [= Virgo pudicicie], 3vv, B no.109; ed. J. Marix, Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle(Paris, 1937/R), 111, CMM, lxxiv (1977), no.18 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in F-Pn fr.15123, attrib. Hayne in I-Rc 2856

J'ay pris amours tout au rebours, 4vv, H 305 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in 1500, attrib. Martini in E-SE s.s.

Je ne fay plus, je ne dis ne escrips, 3vv, H 235, B no.55 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in I-Bc Q17, Fn B.R.229, attrib. Compère in E-SE s.s., attrib. Mureau in I-Fn Magl.XIX.176, Rvat C.G.XIII.27

Je suis venu vers mon amy [= Suis venu, O stella maris limes pietatis], 3vv, B no.29; ed. J. Marix, Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle (Paris, 1937/R), 129, Aldrich (1969), CMM, lxxiv (1977), no.19 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in F-Pn fr.15123, attrib. Hayne in I-Rc 2856

Le serviteur [hault guerdonné], 4vv, A xiv–xv, 238, H 294 (rondeau; 2 new vv to ?Du Fay's Dc and T); attrib. Busnoys in 1500, ascription removed in later edns

Malagrota = Sans avoir fait

O stella maris limes pietatis (= Je suis venu), R lxxxvi, 234

Poi che t'hebi nel core (= Fortuna desperata); ed. in CMM, lxxvi (1977), no.35

Quant ce viendra au droit destraindre [= Gaude mater miserorum], 3/4vv, D 5, P no.16, G 45; ed. M. Hanen, The Chansonnier El Escorial IV.a.24(Henryville, PA, 1983), no.105 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in F-Dm 517, US-Wc M2.1 L25 Case, attrib. Ockeghem in E-E IV.a.24

Sans avoir fait [= Malagrota, S'amaur vos faj], 3vv (?rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in I-PEc 431, attrib. Isaac in F-Pc Rés.Vm⁷ 676, anon. in I-Bc Q17

Se brief je puys ma dame voir, 3vv, B no.74; ed. J. Thomson, Les oeuvres complètes de Philippe(?) Caron, ii (Brooklyn, NY, 1976), 194 (rondeau); attrib. Busnoys in F-Pn fr.15123, attrib. Caron in I-Fn B.R.229

Suis venu = Je suis venu

Virginis alme parens (= Fortuna desperata); ed. in EDM, 1st ser., xxxii (1956), 71

Virgo pudicicie (= J'ay bien choisi); ed. in R lxxxvi, 235

conjecturally attributed works

6 ‘L’homme armé’ masses (cycle), 4–5vv; ed. in CMM, lxxxv (1981); anon., attrib. Busnoys by Cohen (1968), Taruskin (1986), Long in Higgins (1992)

Missa ‘L'ardant desir’, 4vv, I-Rvat C.S.51; anon., attrib. Busnoys by L. Feininger, Wegman (1990)

Missa ‘Quant ce viendra’, 4vv, T 208; anon., attrib. Busnoys in edn

Magnificat octavi toni, 4vv, T 193; anon., attrib. Busnoys by C. Hamm, RBM, xiv (1960), 45

Chargé de deuil plus que mon fais, 3vv, G 61; ed. in CMM, lxv/6 (19XX), 180 (virelai); anon., attrib. Busnoys and ed. Perkins in Higgins (1992)

Par Dieu, madame, c'est a tort, 3vv (virelai); anon., attrib. Busnoys and ed. Perkins in Higgins (1992)

Pour les biens qu'en vous je parçoy, 3vv, F-Pn Rés.Vmc 57 (rondeau); anon., attrib. Busnoys by Higgins in Higgins (1992)

S'il vous plaist bien que je vous tiegne, 3vv (virelai); anon., attrib. Busnoys and ed. Perkins in Higgins (1992)

poems

Lequel vous plairoit mieulx trouver (rondeau), attrib. Busnoys in F-Pnfr.9223; ed. G. Raynaud, Rondeaux et autres poésies du XVe siècle(Paris, 1889/R), 153

Mille foiz le jour tout du maings (virelai), attrib. Busnoys (as Cent mille fois le jour) by P. Fabri, Le grand et vrai art de pleine rhétorique, ed. A. Heron (Rouen, 1890/R); ed. M. Löpelmann, Die Liederhandschrift des Cardinals de Rohan (XV. Jahrh.) (Göttingen, 1923), 152

Reposons nous entre nous amoureux (rondeau), addressed to J. Molinet and attrib. Busnoys in Molinet MSS; ed. in Dupire, 797; beginning quoted in Dc of quodlibet O rosa bella/Seule esgaree, 2vv, ed. in Plamenac (1965), 177; the whole poem set by P. de Manchicourt, 4vv, 1544¹⁰

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

StrohmM

StrohmR

Vander StraetenMPB, vi

J. Houdoy: Histoire artistique de la cathédrale de Cambrai, ancienne église métropolitaine Notre-Dame (Lille, 1880/R)

M.L. Theunissens: ‘Liste des chanoines de la collégiale de St-Gommaire à Lierre’, Analectes pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique de la Belgique, xvii (1881), 392–434

S. Davari: ‘La Musica a Mantova’, Rivista storica mantovana, i (1885), 53–71; ed. G. Ghirardini (Mantua, 1975)

C. Samaran: ‘Cinquante feuillets retrouvés des comptes de l'argenterie de Louis XI (1466–1471)’, Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu’à 1715) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1928–9), 79–89

H. Besseler: Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1931/R)

G. van Doorslaer: ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art, iv (1934), 21–57, 139–65

N. Dupire, ed.: Les faictz et dictz de Jean Molinet, ii (Paris, 1937), 795–801

W. Stephan: Die burgundisch-niederländische Motette zur Zeit Ockeghems (Kassel, 1937/R)

O. Strunk: ‘The Origins of the L'Homme armé Mass’, BAMS, ii (1937), 25–6; repr. in Essays on Music in the Western World (New York,1974), 68–9

C.L.W. Boer: Het Anthonius-Motet van Anthonius Busnois (Amsterdam, 1940)

H.E. Bush: ‘The Laborde Chansonnier’, PAMS 1940, 56–79

C. van den Borren: Etudes sur le quinzième siècle musical (Antwerp, 1941)

M.F. Bukofzer: ‘An Unknown Chansonnier of the 15th Century (the Mellon Chansonnier)’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 14–49

A. Jongkees: Stat en kerk in Holland en Zeeland onder de Bourgondische hertogen, 1425–1477 (Groningen, 1942)

C.W. Fox: ‘Non-Quartal Harmony in the Renaissance’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 33–53

G. Perle: ‘The Chansons of Antoine Busnois’, MR, xi (1950), 89–97

C.V. Brooks: Antoine Busnois as a Composer of Chansons (diss., New York U., 1951)

S.W. Kenney: ‘Origins and Chronology of the Brussels Manuscript 5557 in the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique’, RBM, vi (1952), 75–100

D. Plamenac: ‘A Reconstruction of the French Chansonnier in the Biblioteca Colombina, Seville’, MQ, xxxvii (1951), 501–42; xxxviii (1952), 85–117, 245–77

D. Plamenac: ‘Deux pièces de la Renaissance française tirées de fonds florentins’, RBM, vi (1952), 12–23

C. Brooks: ‘Antoine Busnois, Chanson Composer’, JAMS, vi (1953), 111–35

E.H. Sparks: ‘The Motets of Antoine Busnois’, JAMS, vi (1953), 216–26

H. Hewitt: ‘The Two Puzzle Canons in Busnois's Maintes femmes’, JAMS, x (1957), 104–10

N. Bridgman: ‘Ockeghem et son époque’, Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland-Manuel, i (Paris, 1960), 975–83

G. Thibault: ‘La chanson française au XVe siècle de Dufay à Josquin des Prés (1420 à 1480)’, ibid., 890–944

W.H. Rubsamen: ‘From Frottola to Madrigal’, Chanson & Madrigal 1480–1530: Cambridge, MA, 1961, 51–87, 172–242

C. van den Borren: ‘L'énigme des “Credo de Village”’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 48–54

E.H. Sparks: Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963)

E.R. Lerner: ‘The Polyphonic Magnificat in 15th-Century Italy’, MQ, l (1964), 44–58

M. Picker: ‘Newly Discovered Sources for In minen sin’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 133–43

D. Plamenac: ‘The Two-Part Quodlibets in the Seville Chansonnier’, The Commonwealth of Music, in Honor of Curt Sachs, ed. G. Reese and R. Brandel (New York, 1965), 163–81

H.M. Brown: ‘The Transformation of the Chanson at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 78–96

P. Aldrich: ‘An Approach to the Analysis of Renaissance Music’, MR, xxx (1969), 1–21

M.R. Maniates: ‘Combinative Chansons in the Dijon Chansonnier’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 228–81

H.M. Brown: ‘Improvised Ornamentation in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson’, Quadrivium, xii/1 (1971), 235–59

A. Seay: ‘The Conditor alme Siderum by Busnois’, ibid., 225–34

H.M. Brown: ‘On the Performance of Fifteenth-Century Chansons’, EMc, i (1973), 3–10

L. Lockwood: ‘Aspects of the “L'Homme armé” Tradition’, PRMA, c (1974), 97–122

A. Atlas: The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier (New York, 1975–6)

W. Prizer: ‘La Cappella di Francesco II Gonzaga e la musical sacra a Mantova nel primo ventennio del Cinquecento’, Mantova e i Gonzaga nella civiltà del Rinascimento: Mantua 1974 (Mantua, 1977), 267–76, esp. 274

D. Fallows: Robert Morton's Songs (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1978)

L.L. Perkins: ‘Antoine Busnois and the d'Hacqueville Connection’, Musique naturelle et musique artificielle: in memoriam Gustav Reese, ed. M.B. Winn (Montreal, 1979), 49–64

C.E. Barret: A Critical Edition of the Dijon Chansonnier (diss., George Peabody College, Vanderbilt U., 1981)

C. Gamer: ‘Busnois, Brahms, and the Syntax of Temporal Proportions’, A Festschrift for Albert Seay, ed. M.D. Grace (Colorado Springs, CO, 1982), 201–15

M.K. Hanen: Introduction to The Chansonnier El Escorial IV.a.24 (Henryville, PA, 1983)

P. Higgins: Introduction to Chansonnier Nivelle de La Chausée: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Rés.Vmc Ms 57) (Geneva, 1984) [facs.]

L.L. Perkins: ‘The L'Homme armé Masses of Busnoys and Okeghem’, JM, iii (1984), 363–96

M. Gutiérrez-Denhoff: Der Wolfenbütteler Chansonnier: Untersuchungen zu Repertoire und Überlieferung einer Musikhandschrift des 15. Jahrhunderts und ihres Umkreises (Wiesbaden, 1985)

L.M. Trowbridge: ‘Style Change in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson: a Comparative Study of Compositional Detail’, JM, iv (1985), 146–70

W. Arlt: ‘Vom Überlieferungsbefund zum Kompositionsprozess: Beobachtungen an den zwei Fassungen von Busnois’ “Je ne puis vivre ainsy”’, Festschrift Arno Forchert, ed. G. Allroggen and D. Altenberg (Kassel,1986), 26–40

P. Higgins: ‘In hydraulis Revisited: New Light on the Career of Antoine Busnoys’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 36–86

R. Taruskin: ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L'Homme armé tradition’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 255–93

P.M. Higgins: Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy (diss., Princeton U., 1987)

D.J. Kennedy: Six chansonniers français (diss., U. of California, Santa Barbara, 1987)

R. Sherr: ‘Illibata Dei Virgo Nutrix and Josquin's Roman Style’, JAMS, xli (1988), 434–64

R.C. Wegman: ‘Busnoys's “Anthoni usque limina” and the Order of Saint-Antoine-en-Barbefosse in Hainaut’, Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 15–31

R.C. Wegman: ‘Another “Imitation” of Busnoys's Missa L'Homme armé: and Some Observations on Imitatio in Renaissance Music’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 189–202

R.C. Wegman: Introduction to Choirbook of the Burgundian Court Chapel: Brussel Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Manuscript 5557 (Peer, 1989) [facs.]

D. Fallows: ‘Busnoys and the Early Fifteenth Century: a Note on “L'ardant desir” and “Faites de moy”’, ML, lxxi (1990), 20–24

R.C. Wegman: ‘Another Mass by Busnoys?’, ML, lxxi (1990), 1–19

T. Brothers: ‘Vestiges of the Isorhythmic Tradition in Mass and Motet, ca.1450–1475’, JAMS, xliv (1991), 1–56

P. Higgins: ‘Parisian Nobles, a Scottish Princess, and the Woman's Voice in Late Medieval Songs’, EMH, x (1991), 145–200

M. Natvig: The Latin-Texted Works of Antoine Busnois (diss., U. of Rochester, 1991)

P. Higgins, ed.: Antoine Busnoys: Notre Dame, IN, 1992 [incl. P. Higgins: ‘Celebrating Transgression and Excess: Busnoys and the Boundaries of Late Medieval Culture’, 1–20; D. Fallows: ‘“Trained and immersed in all musical delights”: Towards a New Picture of Busnoys’, 21–50; H.M. Brown: ‘Music and Ritual at Charles the Bold's Court: the Function of Liturgical Music by Busnoys and his Contemporaries’, 53–70; M.J. Bloxam: ‘On the Origins, Contexts, and Implications of Busnoys's Plainsong Cantus Firmi: Some Preliminary Remarks’, 71–88; F. Warmington: ‘The Ceremony of the Armed Man: the Sword, the Altar, and the L'homme armé Mass’, 89–130; M. Long: ‘Arma virumque cano: Echoes of a Golden Age’, 133–54; P. Higgins: Musical Politics in Late Medieval Poitiers: a Tale of Two Choirmasters’, 155–71; R.C. Wegman: ‘Mensural Intertextuality in the Sacred Music of Antoine Busnoys’, 175–214; J. van Benthem: ‘Text, Tone, Symbol: Regarding Busnoys's Conception of In hydraulis and its Presumed Relationship to Ockeghem's Ut heremita solus’, 215–53; M. Natvig: ‘The Magnificat Group of Antoine Busnoys: Aspects of Style and Attribution’, 257–76; A. Lindmayr-Brandl: ‘Resjois toi terre de France/Rex pacificus: an “Ockeghem” Work Reattributed to Busnoys’, 277–94; B. Haggh: ‘Busnoys and “Caron” in Documents from Brussels’, 295–315; L.L. Perkins: ‘Conflicting Attributions and Anonymous Chansons in the “Busnoys” Sources of the Fifteenth Century’, 317–58; P. Urquhart: ‘False Concords in Busnoys’, 361–88; R. Wexler: ‘Simultaneous Conception and Compositional Process in the Late Fifteenth Century’, 389–98; A. Blachly: ‘Reading Tinctoris for Guidance on Tempo’, 399–427; M. Picker: ‘Henricus Isaac and Fortuna desperata’, 431–46; A. Atlas: ‘Busnoys and Japart: Teacher and Student?’, 447–64; H. Meconi: ‘Poliziano, Primavera, and Perugia 431: New Light on Fortuna desperata’, 465–503; J. Rifkin: ‘Busnoys and Italy: the Evidence of Two Songs’, 505–71]

L.L. Perkins: ‘Text and Music in the Chansons of Busnoys’, L'edizione critica tra testo musicale e testo letterario: Cremona 1992, 165–79

P. Starr: ‘Rome as the Centre of the Universe: Papal Grace and Musical Patronage’, EMH, xi (1992), 223–62, esp. 249–56, 260

C. Goldberg: Die Chansons von Antoine Busnois: die Ästhetik der höfischen Chansons (Frankfurt, 1994)

R.C. Wegman: Born for the Muses: the Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994)

D. Howlett: ‘Busnois' Motet In hydraulis: an Exercise in Textual Reconstruction and Analysis’, PMM, iv (1995), 185–91

R. Taruskin: ‘Busnoys and Chaikovsky’, International Journal of Musicology, iv (1995), 111–37

E. Schreurs and A. Wouters: ‘De Lierse biotoop van Antonius Busnoys en Johannes Pullois: muziek in Sint-Gummarus ten tijde van het huwelijk van Philips de Schone en Johanna van Castilië (20 oktober 1496)’, Musica antiqua, xiii (1996), 106–32

C. Goldberg: Das Chansonnier Laborde: Studien zur Intertextualität einer Liederhandschrift des 15. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1997)

P. Higgins: ‘Love and Death in the Fifteenth-Century Motet: a Reading of Busnoys's Anima mea liquefacta est/Stirps Jesse’, Hearing the Motet, ed. D. Pesce (New York, 1997), 142–68

R.C. Wegman: ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: Reading and Hearing Busnoys's Anthoni usque limina’, ibid., 122–41

D. Fallows: A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford, 1999)

Busoni, Ferruccio (Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto)

(b Empoli, 1 April 1866; d Berlin, 27 July 1924). Italian composer and pianist, active chiefly in Austria and Germany. Much to his detriment as composer and aesthetician, he was lionized as a keyboard virtuoso. The focus of his interests as a performer lay in Bach, Mozart and Liszt, while he deplored Wagner. Rejecting atonality and advocating in its place a Janus-faced ‘Junge Klassizität’, he anticipated many later developments in the 20th century. His interests ranged from Amerindian folk music and Gregorian chant to new scales and microtones, from Cervantes and E.T.A. Hoffmann to Proust and Rilke. Only gradually, during the final decades of the 20th century, has his significance as a creative artist become fully apparent.

3. Transcriptions and editions.

2. Works.

ANTONY BEAUMONT

1. Life.

Busoni's father, Ferdinando, was a clarinet virtuoso of Corsican origin, his mother, Anna (née Weiss), an Austrian-born pianist. Although he considered himself a Tuscan, the family moved to Trieste when he was only a few months old, transplanting him into a cosmopolitan, German-orientated environment. He had no regular schooling; the theatre and literature were mainstays of his self-education, and he became a talented linguist. Early piano tuition, in which the study of Bach played a major role, came from his father. His first compositions date from 1873, and his career as virtuoso pianist began the same year. Two years later followed his concerto début, with Mozart's Concerto in C minor. During his early years Busoni served as breadwinner for his parents; later he recalled his early maturing and said: ‘I never had a childhood’.

With the help of patronage, he entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of nine. Though encouraged by Ambros, Brahms and Hanslick, he was dissatisfied with the tuition, and left after two years. In 1881 he began composition lessons in Graz with Wilhelm Mayer (W.A. Rémy) who, apart from schooling him in counterpoint, fostered his lifelong attachment to the music of Mozart and stimulated his interest in mysticism and oriental philosophy. There followed a period of study in Leipzig (1885–8), where he befriended Delius, Mahler, Henri and Egon Petri and made contact with leading German music publishers. Three years later he took a teaching post at the Helsinki College of Music, where his circle of pupils and friends (the ‘Leskovites’) included Sibelius and the Järnefelt brothers. In 1890, in St Petersburg, he won the Rubinstein Prize for both piano and composition. The following season he taught in Moscow, where he married Gerda Sjöstrand, daughter of a Swedish sculptor. Finding prospects in Russia limited, he emigrated to the USA. But he was disappointed by the low standards he found at the New England Conservatory in Boston and soon moved to New York, where he began to expand his activities as a concert pianist. In 1894 he settled in Berlin, where he established a permanent home. He gave masterclasses at Weimar (1900–01), the Vienna Conservatory (1907–8), where his pupils included Eduard Steurmann and Louis T. Gruenberg, and Basle (1910).

During the 1890s he had devoted his energies primarily to perfecting his piano technique, but from 1898, with the Second Violin Sonata, he turned his attention increasingly to composition. From 1902 to 1909 he promoted and financed orchestral concerts of new music (by Bartók, d'Indy, Elgar, Magnard, Sibelius, Ysaÿe and many others) in Berlin. At the fourth of the series he introduced his monumental Piano Concerto with choral finale, the work with which he signalled the conclusion of his apprenticeship and emergence, in the craftsman's sense, as master. Two years later, with the publication of the Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, he proposed bold and visionary guidelines for the future of music. He took a lively interest in Schoenberg, whose move to Berlin in 1911 he facilitated. Other young composers he particularly encouraged at this time were Bartók, Varèse and van Dieren. His most distinguished piano pupil, later his assistant and an authoritative interpreter of his music, was Egon Petri.

The climax of Busoni’s pre-war career as a pianist was probably the 1911 series of six recitals in Berlin devoted to the music of Liszt. Yet acclaim in the concert hall served to diminish his reputation as a composer, and his Bach transcriptions were held in far higher regard than his original works. At its world première in Hamburg, the opera Die Brautwahl, which had taken six years to complete, scarcely achieved a succès d'estime.

In the spring of 1912 he set out on an Italian tour, which concluded with a series of eight recitals charting the development of keyboard literature since Bach. Shortly afterwards he was offered the directorship of the Liceo Musicale, Bologna. Himself a latterday Renaissance man, Busoni hoped to find in Italy those qualities which in the Renaissance had made the country the centre of European culture. But modern Italy failed to fulfil his expectations, and shortly after the outbreak of war he resigned his post. Early in 1915 he returned to the USA for a four-month tour. Highly critical of the American way of life, but unwilling to return to wartime Germany, he first thought to settle in Italy; but when his home country declared war on its erstwhile allies, in May 1915, he found himself stranded in New York. Only in the autumn did he return to Europe, taking refuge in Switzerland. During his six-year sojourn in Zürich he gave recitals and masterclasses, occasionally travelling to Italy for concert appearances; Volkmar Andreae entrusted him for a season with the direction of the Tonhalle concerts; he composed Arlecchino and Turandot and completed the libretto of Doktor Faust. Among the many other artists and intellectuals seeking shelter from the war, he made the acquaintance of Joyce and Lenin, Jakob Wassermann and Philip Jarnach.

With the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1920, he accepted the invitation of his former pupil Leo Kestenberg, now a high official at the ministry of culture, to lead a masterclass for composition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Of his pupils, the most distinguished were Weill and Wladimir Vogel, but he also held open house for young musicians at his apartment on the Victorie-Luise-Platz, where his many guests included Hába, Hindemith, Krenek, Erdmann, Horenstein and Mitropoulos. Ill health prevented him appearing in concert after 1922. He had always made light of his stupendous abilities as a pianist, preferring to consider himself primarily a composer. Now the completion of Doktor Faust became his final goal; when he died, two scenes were left incomplete.

Aside from his undisputed powers as composer, pianist and man of letters, Busoni was an enterprising (if sometimes erratic) conductor, a passionate bibliophile, a talented draughtsman and a bon vivant. Baptized into the Catholic church, he was at heart an atheist; a lucid commentator on world affairs, he remained politically uncommitted.

2. Works.

Busoni's attitude to his extensive output of juvenilia was equivocal. ‘My early works on your desk! I blush’, he wrote to Leichtentritt, his first biographer; yet the catalogue of compositions he prepared in 1921 lists every item published during his early years, including many long out of print. Thanks to the recordings of Geoffrey Douglas Madge, the early piano works have become more readily accessible. The young Busoni is revealed as a composer of taste and imagination, impeccable technique, clear, well organized forms and a precise sense of colour, well versed in counterpoint but of stereotyped melodic invention. In place of original ideas he often alludes to extrinsic material, particularly folksong or plainchant. Melodic pluralism was increasingly to dominate his mature style. He later came to rationalize the ‘latently allusive character’ of his music (Reithmüller, 1988) by hypothesizing the ‘omnipresence of Time’. ‘The absolutely modern does not exist’, he wrote, ‘only that which arises at an earlier or later moment of time … “Modern” and “old” have always existed’ (Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 1907). Another of his catchwords was ‘Toujours recommencer’, a motto reflected in his disordered opus numberings. He declared the Second Violin Sonata op.36a to be his true op.1 but continued to sanction performances of several earlier works, including the D minor String Quartet, the Konzertstück, the Violin Concerto and the Lustspielouvertüre.

During his Leipzig years he worked at an opera, Sigune, which was abandoned in 1889. Some of the music was salvaged for the Konzertstück, and one theme, associated with the building of a cathedral, was incorporated into the Piano Concerto. Verdi's Falstaff revived his belief in the future of Italian music and influenced his further development. He began to search for a synthesis of the Nordic and Latin elements of his own personality: the Piano Concerto polarizes the contrast, alternating between architectural solidity and Italianate pliancy, and closing with a setting of the ‘Hymn to Allah’ from Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin (the remainder of an unfulfilled plan to set the play ‘not as an opera but as a Gesamtkunstwerk with drama, music, dance, magic’).

Although Busoni was never able to implement the boldest prophecies of his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik – the use of microtones and of mechanical or electronic instruments – his revolutionary dictum ‘Music is born free and destined to regain its freedom’ echoes through his mature compositions. Striving to break down the barriers erected by ‘the law-givers’, he set out in search of a new language. The first fruits of his quest, the Elegien for piano, explore a nebulous terrain, adjacent to that of the late works of Liszt. From 1909, with the piano pieces An die Jugend and the first Sonatina, the influence of Schoenberg's first experiments with atonality became palpable. Yet when Varèse declared his intention of abandoning tonality, Busoni countered: ‘Tu te prives d'une belle chose’. In striving for an ‘unattainable ideal of perfect beauty’, he stressed, the achievements of the past should never be overthrown.

In the Berceuse élégiaque (1909) he sensed that finally he had found his individual sound world and succeeded in ‘dissolving the form into feeling’. In 1910, between stations of a North American tour, he completed the unfinished final Contrapunctus from Bach's Art of Fugue (a composition entitled in its definitive form Fantasia contrappuntistica). Applying techniques of symmetrical inversion first exploited in the Canonic Studies of Bernard Ziehn, he discovered a new harmony (ex.1) in which ‘precise calculation converges with mystic belief’ (‘The “Gothics” of Chicago’, 1910). The introduction to the Chopin Variations (1922) is a locus classicus of this ‘free tonality’ (ex.2).

During the years preceding World War I Busoni came into contact with progressive artists in other fields – the Viennese Secessionists, the futurists, d'Annunzio, Max Reinhardt, Rilke – and himself entered a phase of intensified experiment, which bore fruit in the Sonatina seconda (subtitled ‘senza tonalità’ at its first performance) and the Nocturne symphonique (‘woven with nerve fibres’ as he described it). Between 1911 and 1916 he composed several works based on folksongs of the Amerindians, the suppression of whose culture he viewed as a crime against humanity. While the Indianische Fantasie does not entirely succeed in integrating the idiosyncratic vernacular melodies into a symphonic framework, the other pieces remain at a far remove from the ‘brightly-painted frontier posts’ of the folksong revivalists. The enigmatic Gesang vom Reigen der Geister, connected with the massacre at Wounded Knee, superimposes a Pawnee melody as cantus firmus on a polytonal, triadic background.

Busoni viewed the 1914–18 war as the relapse of Europe into barbarism. When hostilities ceased, he was among the first to perceive the need for cultural change: ‘Many experiments have been made in this young century; now … it is time to form something durable again’ (letter to H.W. Draber, 9 April 1919). His ultimate artistic ideal he redefined as ‘Junge Klassizität’ (Young Classicality), a concept which embraces many styles and in theory precludes none. His first essays in this direction were the Sonatina ad usum infantis and the theatrical caprice Arlecchino. Both works wear a Mozartian mask of wide-eyed, childish simplicity, but in Arlecchino the mask cannot entirely conceal aspects of scorn, bitterness and disillusionment. The libretto, Busoni stressed, was his ‘confessione giocosa’, but the manuscript was initially subtitled ‘eine Marionetten-Tragödie’. The score is spiked with ironic quotations from the Italian and German classics; orchestral colours of icy brilliance coupled with turbulent pacing unify the bewildering dramatic structure. In the revised edition of the Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik (1917), Busoni elaborated on his idea of opera as a spectacle which should ‘rely on the incredible, untrue or unlikely’. He was convinced that theatre was the ‘universal domain’ of contemporary music and that his own musical language was essentially theatrical.

Apart from the Klavierübung and the Sonatina super Carmen, every major work after 1918 was conceived as a study for Doktor Faust. The ‘Faustian’ language of Busoni’s final years, rich in extrinsic allusions and numerological symbols, serves to unify such diverse works as the sombre Sarabande and its light-footed companion piece, the Cortège, the ebullient Tanzwalzer and the tense, hard-driven Toccata. In the opera score, direct quotation from these and other ‘satellite’ works (altogether there are 23) is rarer than paraphrase or free adaption. Work on the music of Doktor Faust was begun, with the opening orchestral carillon, in 1916. Each ‘satellite’, once tested in performance, was duly incorporated into the opera. The distant cry of ‘Pax’, which concludes the Symphonia, was penned shortly before the end of World War I; the scene of goose-stepping Protestant students at Wittenberg, composed in 1921, already prophesied the descent of Germany into the maelstrom of Nazism. Commentators at the world première were surprised, even disappointed, that the music represented no further bold leap forward. But Doktor Faust represents a final synthesis, a meeting of the myriad paths along which Busoni's imagination led him. As drama, it stands beside Pfitzner's Palestrina, Hindemith's Mathis der Maler and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, an operatic allegory of the crisis of the 20th-century artist.

3. Transcriptions and editions.

‘Every notation is the transcription of an abstract idea. … The performance of a work is [also] a transcription. For a musical art-work … stands at once inside and outside time’ (Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik). The first published transcriptions (Bach's organ Preludes and Fugues in D and E, and the Chaconne) date from the early 1890s, the last (a movement from Weill's Frauentanz) from 1924. The ‘allusive character’ of Busoni's music often makes it impossible to draw a line between transcription and original idea. Every work which passed through his hands – even Schoenberg's op.11 no.2 – he adapted to his individual sense of sonority, keyboard geometry and formal equilibrium. Mozart's piano concertos, Field's nocturnes and Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte are numbered among the many works of which his concert transcriptions remain unpublished. He considered his copiously annotated edition of Das wohltemperierte Clavier his musical testament: the first book for pianists, the second for composers. His editorial work for the Franz-Liszt-Stiftung is a model of scholarship and textual accuracy; the cadenzas to Mozart concertos reveal an imaginative, anti-historical approach.

4. The pianist.

The surviving legacy of recordings is too meagre to do justice to a great virtuoso. Busoni felt ill at ease in the recording studio, and his monumental style was unsuited to the brevity dictated by the medium. Of his piano-roll recordings, those of Liszt's Feux follets and Réminiscences de Don Juan best document the demonic brilliance of his playing. Selden-Goth characterized his powerful sonority as founded on incisive, non legato attack combined with ‘entirely new use of the pedal, in which single notes or chords were struck or silently depressed and left to resonate through a passage’; Dent recalled in Bach's C major fugue (from Book 1 of the ‘48’) ‘a haze of pedal-held sound that was not confusion but blinding clearness’.

Busoni's large repertory (published, with some omissions, in Dent's biography) ranged from Rameau to Balakirev; its mainstays were Bach and Liszt (‘The two make Beethoven possible’). His predilection for ‘historical’ concert cycles was inspired by the idol of his early years, Anton Rubinstein. In later years concert-giving became irksome. Wary of Chopin and disinclined to Beethoven, he was among the first virtuosos to champion the Mozart concertos. Despite his interest in 20th-century piano literature, he rarely performed modern music other than his own.

5. The writer.

As much a virtuoso of the pen as of the piano, Busoni commanded a literary style capable of the same variety of attack and nuance for which he was renowned as a musician. He was one of the most copious letter writers of his time: at a conservative estimate, c15,000 autograph letters are preserved in archives and private collections. Often brief essays in their own right – travelogue or self-portrait, political statement and, in later life, protest or lament – many letters, including those to his wife, are seemingly directed at a wider public and lend themselves uncommonly well to publication.

In 1887 Busoni published his first major essay, ‘Zum Don Juan – Jubiläum’, which testifies to his precocious talent as linguist, humanist, philosopher and theoretician. Soon after formulating the ingenious ‘Mozart – Aphorismen’ (1906), he began work on the Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik, ‘the outcome of long-held convictions slowly matured’. Beyond his immediate circle of friends and admirers the book aroused little resonance, but in 1914 Busoni met Rilke, who recommended it to his Leipzig publisher. Hence the revised edition was published in time of war: ideas which had previously been passed over as the musings of a ‘loveable dreamer’ – deprecating remarks on ‘the Apostles of the Ninth Symphony’, criticisms of Schumann and Wagner – were now interpreted in Germany as a national affront. A fierce controversy was fought in the press, with Pfitzner leading the fray in a counterblast entitled Futuristengefahr (‘The Danger of Futurism’). When Busoni returned to Berlin, he was hailed by the younger generation as leader of the anti-establishment, an evaluation which only partly concurred with his vision of a ‘sounding universe’ as delineated in the Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik.

His distinctive concept of music theatre required Busoni to write his own librettos. Die Brautwahl proved verbose, and Arlecchino, all wit and brilliance, left the audience, as the author himself admitted, ‘at a loss’. D'Annunzio and Hofmannstahl were consulted for advice on an opera whose hero was to be Leonardo or Dante. After a long period of gestation emerged the ‘poem for music’ Doktor Faust, Busoni's literary and theatrical masterpiece. Eight weeks before his death, he dictated ‘Vom Wesen der Musik’, in which he proclaimed himself less a leader than a seeker. ‘Forced to the opinion that our conception … is still fragmentary and dim’, he concluded that ‘Mankind will never know the essence of music in its reality and entirety’ and closed with a yearning cry: ‘Hail to the prophets!’

WORKS

k numbers are from Kindermann's catalogue

stage



op.	k

—	231	Sigune (op, 2, F. Schanz), 1887–9, short score only
——	Turandot (incid music, C. Gozzi, trans. K. Vollmoeller), Berlin, Deutsches, 26 Oct 1911
—	258	Die Brautwahl (op, 3, Busoni, after E.T.A. Hoffmann), 1908–11, Hamburg, Stadt, 13 April 1912
50 270	Arlecchino oder Die Fenster (op, 1, Busoni), 1914–16, Zürich, Stadt, 11 May 1917
—	273	Turandot (op, 2, Busoni, after Gozzi), 1917, Zürich, Stadt, 11 May 1917; addn, 1921
-– 303	Doktor Faust (op, 8 scenes, Busoni), 1916–24, completed P. Jarnach, Dresden, 21 May 1925; completed A. Beaumont, Bologna, 2 April 1985

orchestral

25 201	Symphonische Suite, 1883
—	210	Introduction et scherzo, pf, orch, 1882–4
29 230	Konzert-Fantasie, pf, orch, 1888–9
31a 236	Konzertstück (Introduktion und Allegro), pf, orch, 1890
32a 240	Symphonisches Tongedicht, 1893, rev. of Konzert-Fantasie
34a 242	Zweite Orchester-Suite no.2 (Geharnischte Suite), 1895, rev. 1903
35a 243	Violin Concerto, D, 1896–7
38 245	Lustspielouvertüre, 1897, rev. 1904
39 247	Piano Concerto, with male chorus in finale (A. Oehlenschlaeger), 1903–4
41 248	Turandot, suite from incid music, 1905; Verzweiflung und Ergebung, appx no.1 (1911), Altoums Warnung, appx no.2 (1918)
42 252a	Berceuse élégiaque (Elegie no.1), 1909
45 261	Die Brautwahl, suite (1912)
43 262	Nocturne symphonique (Elegie no.2), 1913
44 264	Indianische Fantasie, pf, orch, 1914
46 266	Rondò arlecchinesco (Elegie no.3), 1915
47 269	Indianisches Tagebuch: bk 2 Gesang vom Reigen der Geister (Elegie no.4), 1915
48 276	Concertino, cl, small orch, 1918
51 282	Sarabande und Cortège: Zwei Studien zu Doktor Faust (Elegien nos.5–6), 1918–19
52 285	Divertimento, fl, orch, 1920
53 288	Tanzwalzer, 1920
54 290	Romanza e scherzoso, pf, orch, 1921; pubd with op.31a as Concertino [k292]

vocal orchestral

39a 98a	Des Sängers Fluch (L. Uhland), A, orch, 1879
55 174	Gott erbarm sich unser (Ps.lxvii), SATB, orch, 1880
—	183	Requiem, S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1881
35 190	Ave Maria, Bar, orch, 1882
40 191	Primavera, Estate, Autunno, Inverno (F. dall'Ongaro), TTBB, orch, 1882
—	192	Il sabato del villaggio (G. Leopardi), S, A, T, B, SATB, orch, 1882
18/2 207a	Unter der Linden (Walther von der Vogelweide), S, orch, 1893
40 277–8	Zwei Gesänge, Bar, small orch: Altoums Gebet, from Turandot, 1917; Lied des Mephistopheles (J.W. von Goethe), 1918
—	281a	Lied des Unmuts (Goethe), orchd 1924
—	294	Grausige Geschichte vom Münzjuden Lippold, partly from Die Brautwahl, Bar, orch, 1923
55/2 295	Zigeunerlied (Goethe), Bar, orch, 1923
—	298	Schlechter Trost (Goethe), orch, 1924

choral

27 90	Benedicta et venerabilis es, Mez, SATB, org/pf, 1878
34 103	Missa I, SATB, 1879
—	169	Missa (im alten Stil), SSATBB, 1880
44 171	Frühlingslied (O. von Kapff), TTBB, 1880
45 172	Der Wirtin Töchterlein (Uhland), TTBB, 1880
—	173	Guten Abend, gute Nacht (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), TTBB, 1880

chamber and instrumental

10 88	Suite, cl, pf, 1878
13 101	Solo dramatique, cl, pf, 1879
—	135	String Quartet, f, c1880
—	136	Allegretto, D, str qt, c1880
43 156	Duo, 2 fl, pf, 1880
76 157	Praeludium (Basso ostinato) und Fuge (Doppelfuge zum Choral), org, 1880
—	176	Suite, g, cl, str qt, c1880
—	177	String Quartet, C, 1881
18 184	Andante mit Variationen und Scherzo, pf trio, 1881
34 196	Serenata, vc, pf, 1883
19 208	String Quartet [no.1], C, c1883
23 215	Kleine Suite, vc, pf, 1885
26 225	String Quartet no.2, d, c1887
28 229	Four Bagatelles, vn, pf, 1889
29 234	Sonata no.1, e, vn, pf, c1890
—	237	Kultaselle, variations on a Finnish folksong, vc, pf, c1890
36a 244	Sonata no.2, e, vn, pf, 1898–1900
—	272	Albumblatt, fl/vn, pf (1916)
—	286	Elegie, cl, pf, 1921

piano

8 62	Scherzo, from a sonata in E, 1877
3 71	Cinq pièces, 1877
14 77	Minuetto, 1878
18 81	Suite campestre, 1878
21 85	Preludio e fuga, c, 1878
25 89	Gavotta, 1878
12 100	Racconti fantastici, 1878
11 126	Danze antiche, 1879
61 124	Menuetto capriccioso, c1880
—	151	Der Tanz (Walzer), 1880
70 152	Gavotte, f, 1880
10 159	Tre pezzi nello stilo antico, 1880
—	164	Sonata, f, 1880
74 166	Praeludium und Fuge, g, 1880
—	179	Praeludium und Fuge, a, 1880
36 180	Praeludium und Fuge, C, 1880
37 181	24 preludi, 1881
9 185	Una festa di villaggio, 6 pieces, 1881
13 189	Danza notturna (1882)
32 193	Marcia di paesani e contadine, 1882
33 194	Macchiette medioevali (1883)
4–6 197	Trois morceaux (1883): Scherzo, Prelude et fugue, Scène de ballet
—	198	Etude, D, en forme d'adagio d'une sonate, c1883
—	199	Etude (Nocturne), b, c1883
—	200	Studio, f, 1883
16 203	Sechs Etüden, 1883
20 204	Sonata, f, 1883
17 206	Etude en forme de variations, 1884
20 209	Ballettszene no.2, F (1885)
22 213	Variationen und Fuge in freier Form über Fr. Chopins c-moll Präludium, 1884
—	222	Anhang [variations] zu Siegfried Ochs ‘Kommt a Vogerl g'flogen’, c1886
—	B52	Fantasie über Motive aus ‘Der Barbier von Bagdad’ von Peter Cornelius, 1887
—	B56	Trascrizione di concerto sopra motivi dell'opera ‘Merlin’ di C. Goldmark, 1887
30a 235	Zwei Klavierstücke: no.1 Kontrapunktisches Tanzstück, no.2 Kleine Ballettszene [no.3], 1890, rev. as Zwei Tanzstücke k235a: no.1 Waffentanz, no.2 Friedenstanz, 1914
33a 238	Ballettszene no.4 in Form eines Concert-Walzers, 1894, rev. as Ballettszene no.4 (Walzer und Galopp) k238a, 1913
33b 241	Sechs Stücke 1895–6: Schwermut, Frohsinn, Scherzino, Fantasia in modo antico, Finnische Ballade, Exeunt omnes
—	249	Elegien, 1907: Nach der Wendung, All'Italia!, Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu dir…, Turandots Frauengemach, Die Nächtlichen, Erscheinung
—	251	Nuit de noël, esquisse, 1908
—	252	Berceuse, 1909
—	253	Fantasia nach J.S. Bach, 1909
—	254	An die Jugend, 1909: Preludietto, fughetta ed esercizio; Preludio, fuga e fuga figurata; Giga, bolero e variazione; Introduzione, capriccio ed epilogo
—	255	Grosse Fuge, 1910
—	256	Fantasia contrappuntistica, edizione definitiva, 1910
—	256a	Fantasia contrappuntistica, edizione minore, 1912
—	257	Sonatina [no.1], 1910
—	—	Indianisches Erntelied, 1911
—	259	Sonatina seconda, 1912
—	267	Indianisches Tagebuch, bk 1, 1915
—	268	Sonatina [no.3] ad usum infantis, 1915
—	274	Sonatina [no.4] in diem Nativitatis Christi MCMXVII, 1917
—	B40	Zwei Kontrapunktstudien nach J.S. Bach, 1916–7: Fantasie und Fuge, a; Kanonische Variationen und Fuge
—	279	Notturni, Prologo, 1918
—	280	Sonatina [no.5] brevis ‘in signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni’, 1918
—	284	Sonatina [no.6] super Carmen (Kammerfantasie), 1920
—	287	Toccata: Preludio, Fantasia, Ciaccona, 1921
—	289	Drei Albumblätter, no.1, from Albumblatt for fl, pf, 1917, nos.2–3, 1921
—	213a	Zehn Variationen, rev. of op.22, 1922
—	—	Klavierübung, 1st edn in 5 parts, 1917–22, 2nd edn in 10 vols. (1925)
—	296	Fünf kurze Stücke zur Pflege des polyphonen Spiels, 1923
—	297	Prélude et étude en arpèges, 1923

four hands

—	226	Fuge über das Volkslied ‘O du mein lieber Augustin’, 1888
27 227	Finnländische Volksweisen (1889)

two pianos

—	256b	Fantasia contrappuntistica (1922)
—	271	Improvisation über Bachs Chorallied ‘Wie wohl ist mir’, 1916
—	B88	Duettino concertante nach dem Finale von Mozarts Klavierkonzert k459, 1919

songs

for voice and piano unless otherwise stated

—	—	Abendfriede (N. Müller), A, pf, 1876
1 67	Ave Maria, 1877
2 91	Ave Maria, A, pf, 1878
29 93	Salve Regina, A, pf, 1878
38 94	Lied der Klage (O. von Kapff), A, pf, 1878
30 114	Album vocale, 1879: Il fiore del pensiero (Ferdinando Busoni), L'ultimo sonno (M. Buono), Un organetto suona per la via (L. Stecchetti), Luna fedel ti chiamo (A. Boito)
—	144	Espère enfant demain (V. Hugo), S, pf, c1880
31 167	Zwei Lieder, 1880: Wer hat das erste Lied erdacht (V. Blüthgen), Bin ein fahrender Gesell (R. Baumbach)
15 202	Zwei Lieder (Byron) (1884): I Saw thee Weep, By the Waters of Babel, no.2 rev. 1901, k202a
18 207	Zwei altdeutsche Lieder, 1884: Altdeutsches Tanzlied (Neidhart von Reuenthal), Unter der Linden (Walther von der Vogelweide), no.2 orchd
—	211	Gesang aus Mirza Schaffy (F. Bodenstedt), 1884
24 216	Zwei Lieder, A, pf, 1879: Lied des Monmouth (T. Fontane), Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat (E. von Feuchtersleben)
—	218	Eine alte Geschichte in neue Reime gebracht, (Bodenstedt), melodrama, c1884
—	299	Lied des Brander (Goethe), Bar, pf, c1919
—	278a	Lied des Mephistopheles (Goethe), Bar, pf, 1919
—	281	Lied des Unmuts (Goethe), Bar, pf, 1919
—	291a	Die Bekehrte (Goethe), Mz, pf, 1921
—	298a	Schlechter Trost (Goethe), Bar, pf, 1924

arrangements and editions

works by J.S. Bach; for piano unless otherwise stated

Bach–Busoni gesammelte Ausgabe (Leipzig, 1920):

i: Bearbeitungen (Lehrstücke): Widmung, 1914; 18 Short Preludes and Fughetta, 1914; 2-part Inventions (1892); 3-part Inventions (1892); 4 Duets (1915); Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, E (1915)

ii: Bearbeitungen: Chromatic Fantasia (1911); Clavier Conc., d, 1899; Goldberg Variations, 1914

iii: Übertragungen: Prelude and Fugue, D, bwv532, 1888; Prelude and Fugue, E, bwv552 (1890); Toccata, d, bwv565 (1900); Toccata, C, from bwv564 (1900); 10 Chorale Preludes (1907–9); Chaconne, from bwv1004 (?1897)

iv: Compositionen und Nachdichtungen: Fantasia alla memoria di mio padre, 1909; Preludio, fuga e fuga figurata [from An die Jugend] (1909); Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo (1915); Fantasia, adagio e fuga (1915); Fantasia contrappuntistica, versions 2–3, 1910–12

v: Das wohltemperierte Klavier, bk 1: with appendix, Prelude and Fugue, e, bwv548, 1894

vi: Das wohltemperierte Klavier, bk 2 (1916)

vii: Nachträge zu Band I–IV: Toccata, e, bwv914; Toccata, g, bwv915; Toccata, G, bwv916; Fantasia and Fugue, a, bwv904; Fantasia, Fugue, Andante and Scherzo; Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, vc, pf (1917); Improvisation über Bachs Chorallied ‘Wie wohl ist mir’, 2 pf, 1916; Kanonische Variationen und Fuge (1917); Sonatina no.5 (1919)

Not in complete edition: Prelude and Fugue, e, bwv533; Sarabanda con Partite, C, bwv990; Aria variata alla maniera italiana, a, bwv989

works by other composers; for piano unless otherwise stated

Beethoven: ‘Benedictus’ from Missa solemnis, vn, orch; Ecossaises, concert version

Brahms: 6 Chorale Preludes, op.122

Chopin: Polonaise, op.53, A, edn

Cramer: 8 Etudes, edn

Gade: Noveletten, op.29, pf trio, arr. 2 pf

Goldmark: Merlin, vs

Liszt: Etudes, edn; Harmonies du soir, La campanella, Ronde des lutins, Etude de concert, D, Murmures du bois, edn; 6 Paganini Etudes, concert version; Fantasia and Fugue on ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’; Fantasie über zwei Motive aus W.A. Mozarts ‘Die Hochzeit des Figaro’, completion; Réminiscences de ‘Don Juan’, critical-instructive edn; Heroischer Marsch im ungarischen Stil, edn; Hungarian Rhapsody no.19, concert version; Hungarian Rhapsody no.20, edn; Mephisto-Walzer [no.1], arr. of orch version; Polonaise no.2, E, edn with cadenza; Légendes, edn; Scherzo, g, edn; Rhapsodie espagnole, arr. pf, orch; Totentanz, pf, orch, edn; Petrarch Sonnet no.104, orchd; Valse oubliée, vc, pf

Mendelssohn: Symphony no.1, 2 pf 8 hands

Mozart: Idomeneo, concert suite; Don Giovanni, ov., concert ending; Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ov., concert ending; Die Zauberflöte, ov., 2 pf; Die Zauberflöte, ov. pianola; Syms., k202, k318, k444; Pf Conc., k271: Andantino; Pf Conc., k453, concert version; Pf Conc. k482: Rondo concertante, concert version; Fantasy, k608, 2 pf; Sonata, 2 pf, k448, edn with cadenza

Nováček: String quartet no.1: Scherzo

Schoenberg: Klavierstück op.11 no.2, concert version

Schubert: Der Teufel als Hydraulicus, d4, ov.; Ovs. d26, d470, d556, d648; Ovs. in the Italian Style, d590, d591; 5 Minuets with 6 Trios, d89; 5 deutsche Tänze, d90

Schumann: Konzert-Allegro, op.134, 2 pf

Spohr: Introduktion (with Elegie by H.W. Ernst), cl qnt

Wagner: Die Götterdämmerung: Siegfrieds Trauermarsch

Weill: ‘Ach wär’ mein Lieb ein Brünnlein kalt’ (Frauentanz op.10), vc score

cadenzas

Beethoven Vn Conc. op.61, 3 cadenzas, vn, timp

Brahms Vn Conc. op.77, vn, timp

Mozart Pf Concs., k271, k453, k459, k466 [2 versions], k467, k482, k488, k491, k503; Cl Conc. k622, 2nd movt, cl, orch; Fl Concs., k313, k314, 2nd movt, fl, orch

MSS in D-Dsb, Leipzig, Staatsarchiv, I-TSmt, PL-Kj, US-Wc

Principal publisher: Breitkopf & Härtel

WRITINGS

essays

Lehre von der Übertragung von Orgelwerken auf das Klavier, Bach–Busoni gesammelte Ausgabe, v (Leipzig, 1894), appx

Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Trieste, 1907, 2/1916/R; Eng. trans, 1911); Eng. trans. repr. in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York, 1962); repr. with marginalia by Schoenberg, ed. H.H. Stuckenschmidt (Frankfurt, 1974)

Versuch einer organischen Klavier-Notenschrift (Leipzig, 1910); repr. in Bach–Busoni gesammelte Ausgabe, vii (Leipzig, 1920), appx

Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin, 1922), rev., enlarged 2/1956 by J. Herrmann as Wesen und Einheit der Musik; Eng. trans., 1957/R, as The Essence of Music

‘Franz Liszts Vorrede zur ersten Kollektivausgabe von Fields Nocturnes’. Die Musik, xvi (1924), 309–16

J. Kapp, ed.: ‘Ungedrucktes aus dem Nachlass: Aphorismen; “Das Geheimnis”, ein Opernentwurf’, Blätter der Staatsoper, v/Nov (1924–5), 1–10

F. Schnapp, ed.: ‘Uber Melodie: nachgelassene Skizzen’, ZfM, Jg.97 (1930), 95–101

P. Rattalino, ed.: ‘Scritti giovanile di Ferruccio Busoni’, Musica d’oggi, iii–iv (1959), 105–11

F. d’Amico, ed.: Lo sguardo lieto: tutti gli scritti sulla music a le arti (Milan, 1977)

J. Willimann, ed.: ‘Magister und Scholarus: zwei Busoni-Texte von 1923’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., xi (1991), 139–68

M. Weindel, ed.: “‘The Hundred Best Books”: eine unveröffentlichte Literaturliste aus dem Nachlass Ferruccio Busonis’, AMw, liii (1996), 65–85

librettos

Aladdin (after A.G. Oehlenschlaeger), c1901–06, D-Bsb

Der mächtige Zauberer (after J.A. Gobineau), 1905 (Trieste, 1907)

Frau Potiphar, 1909, D-Bsb

Der Tanz vom Leben und vom Tode, 1913

Die Götterbraut, 1915, Blätter der Staatsoper [Berlin], i/v (1920–21), 16–28; set by L.T. Gruenberg

Der Arlecchineide Fortsetzung und Ende, 1918, B, Bds

Das Wandbild (Leipzig, 1920); set by O. Schoeck

Das Geheimnis (after V. de l’Isle-Adam), ?1912, pubd in Blätter der Staatsoper [Berlin], v/Nov (1924–5), 5–10

letters

F. Schnapp, ed.: Busoni: Briefe an seine Frau (Zürich, 1935; Eng. trans., 1938/R)

G. Selden-Goth, ed.: Fünfundzwanzig Busoni-Briefe (Vienna, 1937)

E. Refardt, ed.: Briefe Busonis an Hans Huber (Zürich, 1939)

A. Briner, ed.: Briefe Busonis an Edith Andreae (Zürich, 1976)

J. Theurich, ed.: ‘Briefwechsel zwischen Arnold Schönberg und Ferrucio Busoni 1903–1919 (1927)’, BMw, xix (1977), 163–211

A. Beaumont, ed.: Ferruccio Busoni: Selected Letters (London, 1987)

A. Beaumont, ed.: ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Ferruccio Busoni und Otto Klemperer 1909–1924’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., viii–ix (1988–9), 11–36

J. Willimann, ed.: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Ferruccio Busoni und Volkmar Andreae 1907–1923 (Zürich, 1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Kindermann: Thematisch-chronologisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Ferruccio Busoni (Regensburg, 1980)

M.-A. Roberge: Ferruccio Busoni: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1991)

general

H. Leichtentritt: Ferruccio Busoni (Leipzig, 1916)

H. Pfitzner: Futuristengefahr: bei Gelegenheit von Busonis Ästhetik (Stuttgart, 1917)

Musikblätter des Anbruch, iii/1–2 (1921) [Busoni issue]

G. Selden-Goth: Ferruccio Busoni: der Versuch eines Porträts (Leipzig, 1922/R1964 as Ferrucio Busoni: un profilo)

J. Wassermann: In memoriam Ferruccio Busoni (Berlin, 1925)

H. Jelmoli: Ferruccio Busonis Zürcherjahre (Zürich, 1929)

K. Sorabji: Around Music (London, 1932)

E.J. Dent: Ferruccio Busoni (London, 1933/R)

B. van Dieren: Down among the Dead Men (London, 1935)

K. Sorabji: Mi contra Fa: the Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician (London, 1947)

R. Stevenson: ‘Busoni and Mozart’, The Score, no.13 (1955), 25–38

G. Busoni: Erinnerungen an Ferruccio Busoni (Berlin, 1958)

R. Stevenson: ‘Busoni: the Legend of a Prodigal’, The Score, no.15 (1960), 15–30

E. Hilmar: Eine stilkritische Untersuchung der Werke Ferruccio Busonis aus den Jahren 1880–1890 (diss., U. of Graz, 1962)

H. Krellmann: Studien zu den Bearbeitungen Ferruccio Busonis (Regensburg, 1966)

H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Ferruccio Busoni: Zeittafel eines Europäers (Zürich, 1967; Eng. trans., 1970)

U. Prinz: Ferruccio Busoni als Klavierkomponist (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1970)

K. Weill: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1975)

A. Brendel: Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (London, 1976)

J. Samson: Music in Transition: a Study of Tonal Expansion and Tonality, 1900–1920 (London, 1977)

Piano Quarterly no.108 (wint. 1979–80) [Busoni issue]

S. Sablich: Busoni (Turin, 1982)

A. Beaumont: ‘Ferruccio Busoni: Composer and Bibliophile’, Librarium, ix (1983), 119–33

P. op de Coul: Doktor Faust, Opera van Ferruccio Busoni (diss., Groningen U., 1983)

A. Beaumont: Busoni the Composer (London and Boston, 1985)

A. Beaumont: ‘Doktor Faust: Ferruccio Busonis unvollendetes Meisterwerk’, Oper und Operntext, ed. J.M. Fischer (Heidelberg, 1985), 209–25

Ferruccio Busoni e la Germania degli anni venti: Bolzano 1985

T.P. Berio, ed.: La trascrizione Bach e Busoni (Florence, 1986)

A. Riethmüller: Ferruccio Busonis Poetik (Mainz, 1988)

A. Brendel: Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (London, 1990)

T. Seedorf: Studien zur kompositorischen Mozart-Rezeption im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Laaber, 1990)

A. Latanza: Ferruccio Busoni e il pianoforte meccanico ai primi anni del novecento: storia, tecnica, documenti (Bolzano, 1993)

T. Levitz: Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio Busoni's Master Class in Composition (Frankfurt, 1996)

Bussani [née Sardi], Dorothea

(b Vienna, 1763; d after 1810). Austrian soprano. She was the daughter of Karl von Sardi, a professor at the military academy in Vienna. On 20 March 1786 she married the Italian bass Francesco Bussani. She specialized in opera buffa and made her début creating the role of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro (1786); she also sang Despina in the première of Così fan tutte (1790) and created the role of Fidalma in Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (1792). She always pleased the public, and a contemporary wrote that he had never heard such a beautiful and charming chest voice, nor one used with such humour and so mischievously (Grundsätze zur Theaterkritik, 1790). Da Ponte, on the other hand, wrote: ‘though awkward and of little merit, by dint of grimaces and clowning and perhaps by means even more theatrical, she built up a large following among cooks, grooms, servants, lackeys and wigmakers, and in consequence was considered a gem’ (Memorie, 1823–7).

In 1795 she went to Florence and sang in Italy during the next decade. She appeared in Lisbon, 1807–9, and then sang at the King’s Theatre, London; Parke later described her as having ‘plenty of voice, but whose person and age were not calculated to fascinate an English audience’ (Musical Memoirs, 1830).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Michtner: Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna, 1970)

B. Hay: ‘Dorothea Bussani and the Miscasting of Despina’, NATS Journal, xlvii/5 (1990–91), 14–15, 45

D. Link: The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (Oxford, 1998)

CHRISTOPHER RAEBURN

Bussani, Francesco

(b Rome, 1743; d after 1807). Italian bass. He started his career as a tenor, appearing in Rome in 1763 in Guglielmi’s Le contadine bizzare. He sang in Venice, Milan and Rome for the next 15 years, and first appeared in Vienna in 1771. In 1777 he was described in Florence as singing primo buffo and mezzo carattere roles; by this time his voice was a bass-baritone. He appeared in Venice from 1779, and in 1783 was invited to Vienna where he remained until 1794. With 20 years’ experience of the theatre he was engaged not only as a singer but also as manager of scenery and costumes, and as such was paid for stage-managing Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor at Schönbrunn in 1786. He also arranged pieces, and in 1784 adapted Goldoni’s Il mercato di Malmantile as a libretto for music by Barta. He appeared regularly in the Italian repertory and sang Pippo in Bianchi’s La villanella rapita, for which Mozart wrote the quartet ‘Dite almeno’ k479 (28 November 1785); he doubled the roles of Bartolo and Antonio in the première of Le nozze di Figaro (1 May 1786). He was an active member of the Italian faction in Vienna during the 1780s and according to Da Ponte (Memorie, 1823–7) intrigued against him and Mozart when Figaro was in rehearsal. Da Ponte described Bussani as knowing something of every profession except that of a gentleman.

Bussani sang the Commendatore and Masetto in the first Vienna performance of Don Giovanni (1788) and created the role of Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte (26 January 1790). According to Da Ponte, Bussani found little favour with the new emperor, Leopold II. He achieved only moderate success as a singer as he was always in the shadow of Benucci, who had the stronger stage personality and was the public’s favourite. In 1795 he sang in Florence, in 1799 in Rome, and in 1800–01 in Naples and Palermo. He remained active in Italy and went with his wife, the singer Dorothea (née Sardi), to Lisbon in 1807.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Michtner: Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna, 1970)

J. Rushton: ‘Buffo Roles in Mozart's Vienna: Tessitura and Tonality as Signs of Characterization’, Opera Buffo in Mozart's Vienna, ed. M. Hunter and J. Webster (Cambridge, 1997), 406–25

D. Link: The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (Oxford, 1998)

CHRISTOPHER RAEBURN

Bussani [Bussano], Giacomo [Giovanni] Francesco

(b Cremona; fl 1673–80). Italian librettist. He was a canon regular of the Lateran Congregation at Scuola Grande della Carità in Venice. He wrote seven librettos for Venetian theatres from 1673 to 1680; five were for the Teatro S Salvador and were set to music by Antonio Sartorio (Massenzio, 1673; Giulio Cesare in Egitto, 1676; Antonino e Pompeiano, 1677; Anacreonte tiranno, 1677; Ercole sul Termodonte, 1678). The other two were for theatres owned by the Grimani brothers Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo: the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo staged Enea in Italia, set to music by Carlo Pallavicino, in 1675 , and the Teatro S Giovanni Grisostomo staged Il ratto delle Sabine, set by P.S. Agostini, in 1680.

Except for Enea in Italia and Ercole sul Termodonte, Bussani’s works are loosely based on history enlivened with added love interests. Most of his works were restaged in several Italian cities within two decades of their Venetian premières. Sartorio’s associations with Hanover (he served Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Luneburg as Kapellmeister) and Bussani’s own connection (Antonino e Pompeiano was dedicated to the same duke) may have played some part in bringing Bussani’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto to Handel’s notice. In 1724 N.F. Haym’s adaptation of this work formed the basis for one of Handel’s greatest operas. Native Italian composers also drew upon this old-fashioned work, including L.A. Predieri (Rome, 1728), Giacomelli (Milan and Venice, 1735), Jommelli (Rome and Strasbourg, 1751) and Giuseppe Sarti (Copenhagen, aut. 1763).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mercure galant (August 1677)

C. Monson: ‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto: from Sartorio (1677) to Handel (1724)’, ML, lxvi (1985), 313–43

C. Monson, ed.: A. Sartorio: Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Collegium musicum, 2nd ser., xii (Madison, WI, 1991) [incl. trans. of lib]

L. Bianconi and G. La Face, eds.: I libretti italiani di Georg Friedrich Händel e le loro fonti, i (Florence, 1992)

HARRIS S. SAUNDERS

Busscher, Henri de.

See De Busscher, Henri.

Büsser [Busser], (Paul-)Henri

(b Toulouse, 16 Jan 1872; d Paris, 30 Dec 1973). French composer and conductor. Encouraged by his organist father, Büsser showed early musical aptitude: he sang as a choirboy at Toulouse Cathedral under Aloys Kunc before entering the Ecole Niedermeyer in 1885 to study with Alexandre George. From 1889 he studied organ (Franck) and composition (Guiraud, Gounod and Massenet) at the Paris Conservatoire, taking second Grand Prix in the 1892 Prix de Rome contest. Also that year, Gounod arranged his appointment as organist of Saint Cloud, near Paris, a post he held for 30 years. In 1900, Büsser was appointed conductor at the Théatre du Château-d’Eau. In 1902 he directed the off-stage chorus at the première of Debussy's Pelléas at the Opéra-Comique, incurring the composer's criticism when he replaced Messager as conductor after the third performance. In 1905 he succeeded Taffanel as conductor at the Opéra. He taught at the Conservatoire from 1904, becoming professor of composition in 1931, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1939 in succession to Pierné. From 1939 Büsser was director of the Opéra-Comique, a post from which he was dismissed in 1941 on account of some inflammatory remarks on Wagner printed in Paris-Soir attributed to him.

Büsser edited and arranged a vast amount of music. In 1913 he contributed to the final volume of the complete Rameau edition, editing Pygmalion, Les surprises de l’amour, Anacréon and Les sibarites. His arrangements include many of works by French composers, such as Lully, Rameau, Berlioz, Franck, Bizet and Fauré, as well as of Mozart, Schubert and Verdi. He also transcribed and orchestrated a number of Debussy’s works, including Petite suite.

Firmly rooted in the French 19th-century tradition, Büsser’s symphonic and choral writing is indebted to Gounod and Saint-Saëns. He is best known, however, for his dramatic works, which betray Wagner's impact in both their form and their use of the orchestra. The influence of Debussy, whose advice Büsser sought over the opera that became his most successful, Colomba (c1902–10), is also evident in certain harmonic procedures and in an acute sensitivity to orchestral colour. The ballets, such as the light-hearted La ronde des saisons (1905) with its amusing descriptive touches, provide further evidence of his keen dramatic sense.

WORKS

(selective list)

stage

Daphnis et Chloé (scenic pastorale, 1, C. Raffalli), c1896; Paris, OC (Lyrique, 14 Dec 1897

Blanc et noir (pantomime, 1, V. Capoul), Paris, Palais du Luxembourg, 1900

La ronde des saisons (ballet, 3, C. Lomon), Paris, Opéra, 1905

Colomba (drame lyrique, prol., 3, Büsser, after P. Mérimée), c1902–10, Nice, Casino Municipal, 4 Feb 1921

Les noces corinthiennes (tragédie lyrique, 3, A. France, after J.W. von Goethe), 1916–18, Paris, OC, 10 May 1922

La pie borgne (comédie lyrique, 1, after R. Benjamin), Aix-les-Bains, Grand Cercle, 5 Aug 1927

Le carrosse du Saint Sacrement (comédie lyrique, 1, Büsser, after Mérimée), Paris, OC, 2 June 1948

Roxelane (comédie lyrique, 3, Büsser, after C.-S. Favart), Mulhouse, Municipal, 31 Jan 1948

Le vert galant (ballet), 1951, Paris, Opéra, Oct 1951

Diafoirus 60 (farce musicale, 1), Lille, Opéra, 4 April 1963

La Vénus d’Ille (drame lyrique, 2, Büsser, after Mérimée), Lille, Grand, 15 April 1964

other works

Inst: A la villa Médicis, sym. suite, c1895; Minerva, concert ov., perf. 1896; Hercule au jardin des Hespérides, sym. poem, 1900; Suite funambulesque, 1900; Marche de fête, orch, perf. 1910; Cantigril, based on Languedoc airs, cl, pf, perf. 1924; Cantecor, hn, pf, perf. 1926; Etudes de concert, trbn, perf. 1927; Cantabile et scherzando, trbn, pf, perf. 1943; Tourangelles, suite, pf, 1943; Divertissement, str qt, 1948

6 masses, incl. Messe solenelle de St Etienne, perf. 1937; La messe de Domrémy à la gloire de Ste Jeanne d’Arc, 1948; Magnificat, 33 motets, secular choruses

Songs, incl. Chansons perpétuelles (C. Cros), 1896; pieces for pf, org

Orchs: C. Debussy: Petite suite (1907); Printemps, 1912; La cathédrale engloutie, La Puerta del vino, La soirée dans Grenade, 1917

Arrs., incl. G. Bizet: Ivan IV (Bordeaux, 1951); J.-P. Rameau: Les Indes galantes, collab. Dukas (Paris, 1952)

Edns: J.P. Rameau: Oeuvres complètes, xvii (Paris, 1913) [Pygmalion, Les surprises de l’amour, Anacréon, Les sibarites]

Principal publishers: Durand, Leduc

WRITINGS

‘Les formes dramatiques de Lully à Wagner’, EMDC, II/5 (1930), 3239–372

with E. Guiraud: Traité d’instrumentation (Paris, 1933)

Le précis de composition (Paris, 1942)

De Pelléas aux Indes galantes (Paris, 1955)

Gounod (Lyons, 1961)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (A. Hoérée, R. Langham Smith)

MGG1 (M.-M. Bourla)

J. Bryr: ‘Un entretien avec … Henri Busser’, Guide du concert (17 Jan 1930)

P. Landormy: La musique française après Debussy (Paris, 1943)

R. Dumesnil: La musique en France entre les deux guerres 1919–1939 (Paris, 1946)

E. Vuillermoz and J. Lonchampt: Histoire de la musique (Paris, 1973)

R. Langham Smith and F. Lesure, eds.: Debussy Letters (London, 1987)

A. Orenstein, ed.: A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York, 1990)

R. Nichols: Debussy Remembered (London, 1992)

M. Chimènes, ed.: F. Poulenc Correspondance 1910–1963 (Paris, 1994)

BARBARA L. KELLY

Bussetto, Giovanni Maria del

(fl c1670–80). Italian violin maker. He worked towards the end of the 17th century, probably in Cremona. In style he combined something of the Amati tradition with a certain individual squareness of outline, and slightly hooked corners foreshadowing P.G. Rogeri of Brescia. Several of Bussetto's instruments can be ranked with those of the greatest makers; others, however, are less inspired and are both tonally and visually weak. His work is very rare, and has often been attributed to better-known Cremonese makers. (LütgendorffGL; VannesE)

CHARLES BEARE

Bussi, Francesco

(b Piacenza, 14 Sept 1926). Italian musicologist and librarian. He took the classics degree at the Catholic University, Milan (1948), a diploma in piano at the Piacenza Conservatory (1949), a diploma at the Scuola di Paleografia Musicale, University of Parma (1953), and a diploma in choral music at the Parma Conservatory (1954). He studied the piano with Gino Tagliapietra and Enzo Calace, and composition with Giulio Cesare Paribeni. He then taught music history at Parma Conservatory (1954–9) before becoming professor of music history and librarian at the Piacenza Conservatory (vice-director from 1975) as well as music critic for the Piacenza daily newspaper Libertà. His main area of research has been the music of Piacenza, especially its early sacred music; in 1987 he founded the collected edition Monumenti Musicali Piacentini e Farnesiani. He has also studied the instrumental and vocal music of Brahms and the sacred music of Francesco Cavalli, and has translated into Italian and added pertinent information to volumes ii, iv and v of the New Oxford History of Music (Milan, 1963, 1968 and 1977). He has been awarded three prizes in recognition of his work promoting the music of Piacenza, including the Piacentino benemerito in 1998.

WRITINGS

Il Teatro municipale di Piacenza (Piacenza, 1954)

Panorama musicale piacentino (Piacenza, 1955)

Alcuni maestri di cappella e organisti della cattedrale di Piacenza, sec. XVI–XIX (Piacenza, 1956)

L’antifonario-graduale della Basilica di S. Antonino in Piacenza: sec. XII (Piacenza, 1956/R)

La ‘Messa concertata’ et la musique sacrée de Pier Francesco Cavalli (Paris, 1960)

Umanità e arte di Gerolamo Parabosco, madrigalista, organista e poligrafo (Piacenza, 1524c.–Venezia, 1557) (Piacenza, 1962)

Piacenza, Archivio del Duomo: catalogo del fondo musicale (Milan, 1967)

‘La produzione sacra di Cavalli e i suoi rapporti con quella di Monteverdi’, RIM, ii (1967), 229–54

‘Amilcare Zanella musicista piacentino (1873–1949)’, Studi storici in onore di Emilio Nasalli Rocca (Piacenza, 1971), 83–123

‘Storia, tradizione e arte nel Requiem di Francesco Cavalli’, NRMI, x (1976), 49–77

‘L’opera veneziana dalla morte di Monteverdi alla fine del Seicento’, Storia dell’opera, ed. A. Basso and G. Barblan (Turin, 1977), i, 121–82

‘Il compositore farnesiano Gabriele Villani e le sue Toscanelle’, Studi musicali, xiii (1984), 107–38

La musica nel duomo di Piacenza: mostra di libri e documenti, in occasione del VII Convegno organistico italiano, Piacenza, 31 Oct – 3 Nov 1985 (Piacenza, 1985) [exhibition catalogue]

‘Altro Cavalli sacro restituito’, RIMS, vii (1987), 377–411

‘Frivolezza mondana e festo austero: dicotomia della musica sotto Ranuccio I’, Convegno su ‘I Farnese nella storia d’Italia’: Piacenza 1986 (Florence, 1988), 365–80

‘Un monumento di ufficialità musicale farnesiana: le “Gratiarum actiones” del piacentino Gasparo Villani’, RIMS, xi (1990), 229–52

La musica strumentale di Johannes Brahms: guida alla lettura e all’ascolto (Turin, 1990)

‘I teatri d'opera di Piacenza prima della costruzione del Teatro Municipale’, NRMI, xxv (1991), 456–64

‘Jules Massenet e altri per la musica della Festa dei Fiori a Piacenza’, Bollettino storico piacentino, xc (1995), 3–16

‘Sacro e profano in musica alla corte di Ranuccio I Farnese’, NRMI, xxix (1995), 221–34

‘Tornano alla luce il tre “Vesperi” (1675) di Francesco Cavalli’, RIMS, xvii (1996), 75–85

‘Brahms: il problema della sinfonia’, Civiltà musicale, xii (1997), 367–78

‘La musica a Piacenza dai Visconti (1313) e gli sforza fino all'avvento dei Farnese (1545)’, Storia di Piacenza, ed. P. Castignoli, iii (Piacenza, 1997)

‘Ricordo di Giuseppe Zanaboni’, Strenna piacentina, xviii (1997), 197–200

‘Personaggi e casi della musica in Piacenza nel 600 sotto i duchi farnese’, Steria di Piacenza, iv (Piacenza, 1999), 609–37

Tutti i Lieder di Johannes Brahms per voce e pianoforte, con la traduzione in italiano di tutti i testi poetici (Lucca, 1999)

EDITIONS

Gerolamo Parabosco: Composizioni: a due, tre, quattro, cinque e sei voci (Piacenza, 1962)

Francesco Cavalli: Missa pro defunctis [Requiem] a otto voci, con il responsorio Libera me a cinque voci, 1675 (Milan, 1978)

Gabriele Villani: Il primo e il secondo libro delle Toscanelle a quattro voci (Florence, 1987)

Francesco Cavalli: Sei pezzi vocali sacri [inediti] con basso continuo (Milan, 1988)

Gasparo Villani: Gratiarum actiones in ser.mi Alexandri II Farnesii natali die a venti voci, aggiunto il mottetto O sacrum convivium a cinque voci, Monumenti Musicali Piacentini e Farnesiani, ii (Florence, 1992)

Francesco Cavalli: Vesperi: a otto voci con basso continuo (Milan, 1995)

CAROLYN GIANTURCO/TERESA M. GIALDRONI

Bussler, Ludwig

(b Berlin, 26 Nov 1838; d Berlin, 18 Jan 1900). German music theorist and conductor. His maternal grandfather was the famous tenor Karl Bader; his father, Robert Bussler, was a painter, author and privy counsellor. Ludwig studied music with A.E. Grell, Siegfried Dehn (theory) and W.F. Wieprecht (instrumentation). From 1865 he taught theory at the Ganz School of Music (later the Schwantzer Conservatory) in Berlin. In 1874 he was nominated professor at the Mohr Conservatory and in 1877 he resumed his post at the Schwantzer Conservatory. From 1879 he taught theory at the Stern Conservatory, receiving the title of royal professor in 1898. Bussler was also active as a conductor at various Berlin theatres. In 1883 he began contributing music criticism to the Nationalzeitung, and he also wrote for other Berlin journals.

Riemann noted that the wide acceptance of Bussler's theoretical works was due to their practical focus. Bussler's texts are full of examples from 18th- and 19th-century masters, and are punctuated by many exercises. Like Riemann, Bussler wrote about a large variety of musical subjects, including harmony, counterpoint, form, melodic construction, modulation and instrumentation. Contemporary appreciation of Bussler's work is indicated by the fact that Russian editions of five of his works were completed in the mid-1880s. S.I. Taneyev personally translated Der Strenge Satz into Russian and collaborated on a translation of the Formenlehre. Schoenberg used the Musikalische Formenlehre in his teaching, and his library contained the Partiturstudium (Modulationslehre).

WRITINGS

all published in Berlin

Musikalische Elementarlehre (1867, 16/1926; Eng. trans., 1890)

Praktische Harmonielehre in Aufgaben (1875, ed. 9/1920 by H. Leichentritt; Eng. trans., 1896)

Der Strenge Satz (1877, 2/1905)

Harmonische Übungen am Klavier (1878; Eng. trans., 1890)

Kontrapunkt und Fuge im freien Tonsatz (1878, ed. 2/1912 by H. Leichentritt)

Musikalische Formenlehre (1878, 3/1909 by H. Leichentritt; Eng. trans., 1883)

Praktische musikalische Kompositionslehre, i: Lehre vom Tonsatz (1878); ii: Freie Komposition (1879); iii: Instrumentation und Orchestersatz (1880)

Elementarmelodik (1879)

Geschichte der Musik (1882)

Partiturstudium (Modulationslehre) (1882)

Lexikon der musikalischen Harmonien (1889)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker8

DEUMM

MCL

RiemannL5

S.I. Taneyev: Ucheniye o kanone [The study of canon], ed. V.M. Belyayev (Moscow, 1929)

JANNA SASLAW

Bussotti, Sylvano

(b Florence, 1 Oct 1931). Italian composer. Born into a family of artists (notably his brother Renzo, and his uncle, Tono Zancanaro), he began to take violin lessons at the age of five. He studied harmony and counterpoint at the Florence Conservatory, where he also attended Dallapiccola's courses on the piano (which were generally more concerned with philosophical and cultural discussion than with instrumental technique). His intense affection for French culture was reinforced by his studies in Paris, where from 1956 to 1958 he attended Deutsch's private courses, and encountered Boulez. Throughout the earlier 1950s, he produced a number of youthful works, including several marionette shows. They remain unpublished, though several have been revisited by the composer in more recent years.

Bussotti first attended the Darmstadt summer schools in 1958, the year in which Cage caused such an effective flutter in the post-Webernian dovecot. There, his remarkable musicality caught the attention of Maderna, and accordingly he was invited to return the following year as one of a group of 16 young composers participating in a special composition course (tutored by Nono, Pousseur and Stockhausen). He rapidly acquired a certain notoriety for the visual aestheticism of his graphic scores – soon to be regarded as art objects in their own right. One of his Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor of that year so goaded its dedicatee by its refusal of any obvious relationship with traditional performance instructions, that Tudor was reduced to attacking the keyboard in boxing gloves. (1959 also saw the first appearance at Darmstadt of Cathy Berberian, who was over the next decade to prove one of Bussotti's most persuasive interpreters.)

But just as radical, and in many ways more enduring, was his assertion of an affinity between the New Music and eroticism. His espousal of blatantly homo-erotic and sado-masochistic themes left critics in some confusion as to how to respond (there was to be much abashed reference to ‘private’ obsessions, though given Bussotti's cheerfully provocative exhibitionism, this is a somewhat mysterious choice of adjective). The first step along this road was taken in 1958, when Bussotti wrote his Due voci for soprano, ondes martenot and orchestra, based upon a fragment from La Fontaine apostrophizing sexual pleasure. Originally conceived with the two soloists and orchestra pursuing different metric schemes, it was coordinated by Boulez into a workable performing score. Bussotti saw this as an appropriate moment to cast aside the constraints of the serial games then in fashion – he wrote directly onto transparencies, thereby not only bypassing ‘pre-composition’ but also eliminating the possibility of subsequent alterations. Not for nothing did he thereafter regard Due voci as his ‘op.1’, although it is by no means his first composition. The new direction was consolidated in his collection Pièces de chair II (1958–60). These 14 pieces were never performed as a cycle, but certain of them (including the Five Pieces for David Tudor) maintained a vigorous independent existence – most notably no.7, voix de femme, which remains a classic example of the ‘new vocalism’ then being pioneered by such singers as Berberian. The leaps between vocal lyricism, every form of spoken and whispered declamation and Sprechstimme, between literary and colloquial texts, and between 14 different languages, set the agenda for some time to come.

The next five years were to see Bussotti consolidate his role as one of the most aesthetically inventive provocateurs of his generation. Even when his scores were not as gnomic as the ‘occult collection’ of graphic scores Sette fogli (1959), they conveyed to reader and listener alike a sensual extravagance – an almost unrealizable torrent of notes and gestures – that profoundly perplexed critics. Their patrimony in Expressionist delirium (particularly as reincarnated in Boulez's piano works) was evident, yet in Bussotti's hands the style seemed calculatedly frozen, crystalline. It was, in other words, an aestheticizing objectification of the erotic turmoil evoked by his texts and titles. Scores such as Phrase à trois (1960) for string trio, Fragmentations pour un jouer de harpes (1962), and above all the calculatedly monstrous Pour clavier (1961) – postlude to the Pièces de chair – typify the tendency.

All this flowed into his seminal work of the 1960s, the ‘mystère de chambre’ La passion selon Sade (1965–6). The title, impeccably calculated to outrage, was rendered decent by asterisks in the publicity for early performances. (But then, from a radically secular viewpoint, Bach's Passions may well seem exercises in aesthetically mediated sadism.) Bussotti's chamber ensemble hints at a chiselled baroque mannerism. His vocalist, an amalgam of Sade's Justine and Juliette and the heroine of Paulhan's L'histoire d'O (memorably incarnated by Berberian), elaborates upon phrases from a sonnet by the 16th-century poetess of erotic suffering, Louise Labé. She is pleasurably constrained by the machinations of the ensemble around her. The aesthetic-erotic object that is the score invites exploration, but evades anything more than partial realization: it is a repository of virtual performances.

In the years immediately following La passion selon Sade, Bussotti planned a more grandiose theatrical project, to be entitled All'Italia. This came to nothing, but the Cinque frammenti all'Italia (1967–8) that are its residue established a neo-madrigalian writing for vocal ensemble that was to remain a central resource. Indeed, it was but one sign of an ever-greater readiness to incorporate into his work musical passions that subverted any aspiration to ‘absolute modernity’. Puccini had never been far below the surface of his vocal solos, and now his immersion in the delights and temptations of 19th-century opera lirica was to become blatant. From 1968 to 1972 he amassed the materials that were to form a five-act opera, Lorenzaccio. Alfred de Musset's play of the same name (1834) – a quasi-Shakespearean saga of corruption in Renaissance Florence, whose profusion of incident and character rendered it unperformable for many years, but had provided a memorably charismatic vehicle for Gérard Philipe in the 1950s – yielded the materials for the first three acts. The final two incorporated Bussotti's concert work The Rara Requiem as the frame within which de Musset, played by Bussotti himself, could bid farewell to the characters of his imagination. It was perhaps no accident, granted Bussotti's self-dramatizing career to date, that the hero of the play is shown to be uncertain whether he can distinguish the mask he has adopted from a putative ‘real self’ beneath.

Lorenzaccio established Bussotti's determination to assume responsibility for all aspects of his theatrical work. The score mixes conventionally notated music and scene and costume designs that form an obligatory part of any performance. The highly eclectic musical idiom owes much to the ‘gestural’ traditions of 19th-century musical theatre (or indeed 20th-century Hollywood) but revisits them armed with the textural and harmonic resources of his own generation. As in much of the theatre work that was to follow throughout the 1970s and 80s, the score is conceived as a contribution to a multi-sensory whole, and not necessarily as its dominant determinant. When set apart as extraits de concert, the music's fragile self-sufficiency always carries with it a nostalgic whiff of grease-paint.

This insistence upon the integral relatedness of concert works, pieces for dancing and sung musical theatre prompted Bussotti, from 1976 onwards, to adopt the single label of BUSSOTTIOPERABALLET as a genre description for his entire production. Many of these compound works, notably Oggetto amato (1975), Nottetempo (1975–6), and le rarità, Potente (1976–8) originated in collaboration with Romano Amidei (whose initials are echoed by the omnipresent rara-based titles of Bussotti's output). All are marked by the presence of dance, by now an insistent feature of Bussotti's work, even to the point, in Bergkristal (1974), of re-engaging with the conventions of 19th-century narrative ballet. Indeed, the set of four orchestral collections compiled during the 1980s, each bearing the Da Pontean title Il catalogo è questo, evoked contemplation of the body through balletic subtitles, when not teasing listeners with hints of wickedness recalled.

It was merely a further extension of this all-embracing appetite for theatrical adventures that prompted the proliferation of Bussotti's activities as director and stage designer from the mid-1970s on. He became artistic director of the Teatro La Fenice, Venice (1975) and director of the Puccini Festival at Torre del Lago (1982–3), as well as creating a festival and theatre school around his own work. This plethora of activity focussed into one of Bussotti's most long-matured projects. Ever since seeing a performance of Racine's Phèdre at the age of 20, Bussotti had resolved to find his own way of working on that text. In 1980 he produced a typically louche interpretation, Le Racine, pianobar pour Phèdre, in which an elderly actress, once a distinguished tragedienne, mistakes for Hippolytus various of the gigolos who frequent the thespian-friendly piano-bar. The text is a meticulous dismemberment of Racine's verse, whose 12-syllable structure is reflected in the dodecaphonic series that generates the protagonist's elaborate melodic lines. In the course of the 1980s, Bussotti reworked Le Racine for full operatic resources, renaming it Fedra. Each of three acts is set in a different historical context – ‘ancient Greece’ (Racine's source is the Hippolytus of Euripides), the Hotel de Bourgogne during the first performance of Racine's tragedy, and contemporary Paris – and reworks different strands of Racine's meditations upon an ‘impossible love’. Much of the text is dispersed among a ‘madrigalian’ background of minor characters, but Acts 1 and 2 both centre upon a major monologue for Fedra that shows Bussotti at his most assured (and extends the dramatic lyrical serial writing that Dallapiccola achieved a generation earlier). Bussotti's designs for scenery and costumes were in the most sumptuous operatic tradition.

Fedra was quickly followed by another theatre-piece, L'ispirazione (1986–8) – a more typically extravagant compilation around a narrative sketch by Ernst Bloch. With the musical portrayal of forbidden loves temporarily satisfied Bussotti here resumes another idée fixe, that of the creative personality as a focus for theatrical narrative. Bloch's protagonist is an elderly musician at odds with current musical fashion, and sacked from his job in the opera orchestra. His own opera is rescued from obscurity by a loving, though disregarded daughter, who makes of it a vehicle for her own singing career. The work incorporates a memorial to Cathy Berberian.

Bussotti's subsequent project bears the title of Tredici trame, each of which is to be realized in a different medium. They include a verista operatic fragment, Bozzetto siciliano; a film-opera, Intégrale Sade; a concerto for orchestra with poems and ‘posed figures’, Nuit du faune; and a characteristically all-inclusive event with chorus, orchestra, singers, speakers and a dancer, La Maestà.

DAVID OSMOND-SMITH

WORKS

complete list after 1958

stage

Marionette shows: Nottetempolunapark, Arlechinbatoceria, Tre in gloria; Florence and Aix-en-Provence, 1954–6, unpubd

Tema-variazioni ‘géographie française’ (music theatre, 2, A. Braibanti), Zagreb, 1965 [from concert work Memoria, section b]

La passion selon Sade (mystère de chambre, 1, Bussotti, after L. Labé), 1965–6, part perf. Palermo, Biondo, 5 Sept 1965, complete perf. Stockholm, 1969

Lorenzaccio (melodramma romantico danzato, 5, Bussotti, after A. de Musset), 1968–72, Venice, Fenice, 7 Sept 1972

Raramente (choreographic mystery-play, Bussotti, A. Milloss) [from other works], Florence, 1971

Bergkristall (ballet, 1, Bussotti, U. Dell’Ara, after A. Stifter), 1974, Rome, 1974

bussottioperaballet

Musica per amici, pf, 1957–71

Novelletta, pf, 1973

Syro-Sadun-Settimino (Il trionfo della Grand'Eugène) (operina monodanza, 1, D. Maraini and Bussotti), concert perf., 1974

Sadun (ballet blanc), 1974 [based on Syro-Sadun-Settimino]

Ripetente, cl, bn, tpt, trbn, vn, db, pf, perc, 1975 [based on Syro-Sadun-Settimino]

Rondò di scena, fl, 1975 [incl. in ballet Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Oggetto amato (danced mythology, R. Amidei), 1975, Milan, 1976

Brillante, dancer, pf, 1976 [after 5th movt of ballet Bergkristall]

Nottetempo (dramma lirico, 1, Amidei and Bussotti, after Varagine, Michelangelo and Sophocles), 1975–6, Milan, Lirico, 7 April 1976

Danza di bufera, orch [based on Nottetempo]

Voce bianca, children's vv, 1978

Gran duo, vc, pf, 1977–8

‘Dai, dimmi, su!’, 11 insts, 1978 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Lachrimae, v, 1978

Passo d'uomo, pic, timp, 2 perc, 1978 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Three lover’s ballet, vn, vc, pf, 1978

Tramonto, fl, cl, hn, 1978 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

le rarità, Potente (rappresentazioni liriche, 1, Amidei), 1976–8, Treviso, Comunale, 12 Oct 1979

La Donna, v, fl, [based on le rarità, Potente]

Accademia, fl, pf, 1980 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Brutto, ignudo, b cl, 1980 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Le Racine, pianobar pour Phèdre (op balletto, 3, Bussotti, after Racine), Milan, 1980

Nudo disteso, va, 1980 [incl. in Phaidra/Heliogabalus]

Phaidra/Heliogabalus (ballet), 1975–80, Turin, 1981

Il catalogo è questo: I (Opus Cygne), Venice, 1981

Le Bal Mirò (ballet, J. Dupin), Venice, 1981, arr. as 2 suites

Pomeriggio musicale, orch [incl. in Il catalogo è questo: II], 1981

Il catalogo è questo: II (Raragramma), fl, vn, orch, 1982

Citazione con Quartina per Maurice, Bar, pf, 1982

La vergine ispirata, hpd, 1982

Due Ballabili, 1v/fl, pf, 1983

Due concertanti, 1983: I, pic, db; II, Naked Angel Face, db, opt. db, 1983

Nympheo (tredici trame 6), spkrs, vv, fl, va, db, pf, Genazzano, 1984

Il catalogo è questo: III (Intermezzo), va, orch, 1984

Intermezzo, va, orch, 1984 [from Il catalogo è questo: III]

Timpani, orch, 1984 [from Il catalogo è questo: III]

La Fiorentinata (Die Florenze), orch, 1984 [from Il catalogo è questo: III]

Fogli d'album, pf, 1984

In memoriam (Cathy Berberian), v, fl, va, pf, 1984

Rosso, orch, 1984

(nascosto), fl, ob, b cl, bn, va, db, pf, 2 perc, 1985

Frammento (A. Strindberg), v, b cl, va, pf, perc, 1985

Regina, perc, 1985

Pianino, Tr, pf, 1986

‘qu'un corps défiguré’, ob, bn, trbn, va, perc, 1986

Labirinti, hp, 1987

Olof Palme, pf, 1987

Il catalogo è questo: IV (I Poemi), orch, 1988

H-III, orch [from Il catalogo è questo: IV]

‘A Fiesole un poema giovanile’, orch [from Il catalogo è questo: IV]

Tragico (Bussotti, after Seneca), Bar, B, 18 female vv, 37 insts [based on Il catalogo è questo: IV]

Andante favorito (Portrait), str qt, 1956–88

Deborah Parker, vc, 1988

Gemelli, kbd, perc, 1988

Fedra (tragédie lyrique, 3, Bussotti after Racine), Rome, Opera, 19 April 1988

Fedra no.4, orch [based on Fedra]

Fedra no.5, orch [based on Fedra]

L'ispirazione (melodramma, 3, Bussotti, after E. Bloch: Die gutmachende Muse), 1986–8, Florence, Comunale, 26 May 1988

Le Bagatelle de camera, chbr ens, 1957–88

Intégrale Sade (tredici trame 1) (film-op, 1, E.F. Carabba, after Rocco), Paris, 1989

Voliera (Concerto a l'Aquila), fl, ob, cl, bn, sax, trbn, vn, va, db, pf, perc, 1986–9

Solfeggio in Re della Regina, tpt, 1989

Bozzetto siciliano (tredici trame 9) (op, 1, Bussotti, after E. Navarro della Miraglia), Catania, 1990

Catania, pf, 1990

Nuit du faune (tredici trame 4), solo vv, dancer, orch, Frankfurt, 1991

La Maestà (tredici trame 2), 191 pfmrs, Venice, 1991

Un poema del Tasso, v, pf, 1957–91

Autotondo Tondodono (tredici trame 7) (indeterminate sound design), 1991

Fedr’ancora (dance drama, Bussotti, after Racine), spkr, B, pf, dancers, Genazzano, 1992

Nuovo scenario a Lorenzaccio, spkr, S, T, gui, orch, Graz, 1993

concert

Les petits plaisirs, ondes martenot, 1946–57, unpubd

Autunno (R. Villanova, J. Joyce, G. Trakl), 4 solo vv, 1950–53, unpubd

Tre canti (Gide), 1v, pf, 1951–2, unpubd

La recherche du bal perdu, pf, 1953–7, unpubd

Nottetempo con lo scherzo e una rosa (F. De Pisis), 1v, chbr orch, 1954–7, unpubd

El Carbonero (anon.), 5vv, 1957

Pas de deux, ondes martenot, pf, 1957, unpubd

Breve, ondes martenot, 1958

Due voci (J. de La Fontaine), S, ondes martenot, orch, 1958

Pièces de chair II, 1958–60: 14 nos., most for 1v, pf, but nos.7 and 13 for 1v, ens; nos.1a, 5b, 8a, 8b, 14 pubd as Five Pieces for David Tudor, pf (1959)

Sette fogli, 1959: [1] Couple, fl, pf; [2] Coeur, perc; [3] Per tre sul piano; [4] Lettura di Braibanti, 1v; [5] Mobile-stabile, 1v, pf, guis; [6] Manifesto per Kalinowski, ens; [7] Sensitivo, 1 str

Pearson Piece (W. Pearson), Bar, pf, 1960

Phrase à trois, str trio, 1960

Torso (Letture di Braibanti), solo vv, orch, 1960–63 [4 fragments pubd as Il nudo, S, pf qnt (1964)]

Pour clavier (après Pièces de chair II), pf, 1961

Memoria, 1962: [a] Memoria Marcello Elisei (Braibanti), spkr, solo vv, orch; [b] Per un manifesto antifascista ‘géographie française’ (Braibanti), actors; [c] Siciliano (anon., P.E. Carapezza), male chorus; [d] Alla bandiera rossa (P. Pasolini), solo vv, orch; [e] La partition ne peut se faire que dans la violence, orch

Fragmentations, 2 hp (1 player), 1962

I semi di Gramsci, str qt, orch, 1962–71, red. for str qt as Quartetto Gramsci

Novelletta, pf, 1962–73

Mit einem gewissen sprechenden Ausdruck, chbr orch, 1963

Rara (eco sierologico), gui, str trio, db, 1964–7; other versions

Tableaux vivants, 2 pf, 1964 [from stage work La passion selon Sade]

Solo, any inst/ens, 1965 [from La passion selon Sade]

‘extraits de concert’, 1v, ens, 1965 [from La passion selon Sade]

Rara (dolce), rec, mime, 1966 [from La passion selon Sade]

Cinque frammenti all’Italia, 1967–8: [1] ancora odono i colli, vocal sextet; [2] solo el misterio, chorus; [3] la curva dell’amore, vocal sextet; [4] per ventiquattro voci adulte o bianche, vocal ens; [5] rar’ancora, vocal sextet

Marbre, str, spinet obbl., 1967

Julio organum Julii (Liturgia d'organo) (Braibanti, Bussotti), spkr, org, 1968

The Rara Requiem (various texts), solo vv, vocal sextet, gui, vc, wind orch, pf, hp, perc, 1969–70

Foglio d'album, pf, 1970 [from The Rara Requiem]

Frammenti da ‘The Rara Requiem’, vv, gui, vc, ens

Ultima rara (Pop Song) (various texts), spkr, gui, 1970

Lorenzaccio Sym. no.1, ed. G. Taverna, perf 1973 [from stage work Lorenzaccio]

Lorenzaccio Sym. no.2, ed. G. Sinopoli, perf 1978 [from Lorenzaccio]

Aria di Mara, ed. G. Taverna, 1972 [from Lorenzaccio]

Da un preludio riassunto in pezzo chiuso d’opera, pf, vc obbl., 1975

Poesia di De Pisis (Campane), S, orch, 1975

Principal publishers: Bruzzichelli, Moeck, Ricordi, Universal

Bussotti, Sylvano

WRITINGS

‘Nuova musica’, L’arc, no.16 (1961), 37–40

‘Note sui “Piano Pieces for David Tudor”’, Marcatre, no.2 (1964), 53

‘Due postscritti’, Marcatre, nos.16–18 (1965), 232

‘20 appunti di scena per La passion selon Sade’, Marcatre, nos.16–18 (1965), 350

‘Due testi rifiutati’, Marcatre, nos.26–9 (1966), 31

‘Con i Beatles Cathycanta e Giulioballa’, Quindici, i/3 (1967), 4

‘Il gioco e la musica’, Almanacco letterario Bompiani 1966, ed. V. Bompiani and others (Milan, 1967), 40–46

‘Sull’espressione grafica di esperienze sonore’, Collage, no.7 (Palermo, 1967), 73 [incl. introductory text ‘Memoria: un testo per Scherchen’]

‘Theodor W. Adorno, l’extra e la linea della vita’, Marcatre, nos.34–6 (1967), 118

Antonio Veretti: i sette peccati: mistero musicale e coreografico: schema generale di allestimento scenico e regia (Milan, 1968)

‘“Sognato dalla storia”: materiali per un “Lorenzaccio”’, Spettatore musicale (Bologna, 1972), special no., p.7 [forewords by M. Bortolotto, G. Manganelli, S. Sciarrino; Bussotti’s contribution is almost identical with the libretto of Lorenzaccio]

Untitled notes on Puccini, NRMI, viii (1974), 357

I miei teatri (Palermo, 1982)

with J. Maehder: Turandot (Pisa, 1983)

Letterati ignoranti (Siena, 1986)

Other writings incl. column ‘Extra: pubblichiamo il privato’ in Discoteca (Milan), almost all issues from no.59 (1966) to no.96 (1969)

Bussotti, Sylvano

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6 (C. Annibaldi)

GroveO (J. Maehder)

H.-K. Metzger: ‘Ecksteine neuer Musik’, Magnum, no.30 (1960), 41

H.-K. Metzger: ‘Festival und Contre-Festival’, Magnum, no.31 (1960), 62

P. Santi: ‘Engagement e sperimentalismo a Palermo’, il verri, 3rd ser., no.4 (1962), 107 [on Memoria]

P.E. Carapezza: ‘Asterisco’, Collage, no.1 (1963), 45; with Eng. summary [on Torso]

A. Titone, ed.: ‘Scheda-2: Sylvano Bussotti’, Collage, no.2 (1964), 89

J.S. Weissmann: ‘Current Chronicle: Italy’, MQ, l (1964), 246–50 [on Torso]

M. Bortolotto: ‘New Music in Italy’, Contemporary Music in Europe, ed. P.H. Lang and N. Broder (New York, 1965); repr. in MQ, li (1965), 61–77

‘Asterisco secondo x: Sylvano Bussotti intervistato da Anne Capelle’, Discoteca, no.66 (1967), 18–20

G. Taverna: ‘Intervista con Sylvano Bussotti’, Spettatore musicale, ii/12 (1967), 16

C. Annibaldi: ‘Musica gestuale e nuovo teatro: ritorno alla teatralità’, Musica moderna (1967–9), iii, 145–60

P. Castaldi: ‘Caro Sylvano’, Marcatre, nos.41–2 (1968), 138

F. Degrada: ‘Cinque domande a: Franco Donatoni, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Giacomo Manzoni’, Discoteca, no.77 (1968), 33–6

M. Bortolotto: ‘Le cinque tentazioni di Bussotti’, Fase seconda (Turin, 1969/R), 201–26

A. Gentilucci: Guida all’ascolto della musica contemporanea (Milan, 1969, 8/1990), 98ff

L. Pinzauti: ‘A colloquio con Sylvano Bussotti’, NRMI, iv (1970), 898–909; Ger. trans. in Melos, xxxviii (1971), 284–91

G. La Face: Eros, grafia e musica nell’opera di Sylvano Bussotti (diss., U. of Messina, 1970–71); extract pubd as ‘Teatro, eros e segno nell’opera di Sylvano Bussotti’, RIM, ix (1974), 250–68

D. Schnebel: Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972, ed. H.R. Zeller (Cologne, 1972), 297–8 [on Torso], 307ff [on Tableaux vivants and Mit einem gewissen sprechenden Ausdruck], 410–11 [on Siciliano]

L. Pestalozza: ‘La rosa di Gramsci secondo Bussotti’, Rinascita (18 Oct 1974)

F. Degrada, ed.: Bussottioperaballet: Sylvano Bussotti e il suo teatro (Milan, 1976) [incl. Bussotti: Cinque frammenti autobiografici, p.13, lib of Nottetempo, interview, several articles]

D. Osmond-Smith: ‘Bussotti, Sylvano’, Viking Opera Guide, ed. A. Holden, N. Kenyon, S. Walsh (London, 1993)

R. Petazzi: ‘Some Remarks on New Music for the Theater in Italy’, Sonus Contemporary Music Materials (Potenza, 1993), 3–24

Bustelli, Giuseppe

(d Vienna, before 10 April 1781). Italian impresario, active in Bohemia and Germany. He was a merchant in Brno. On 13 January 1764 he applied to lease the theatre in the Old Town of Prague; his opera company opened at the theatre on 4 October 1764 with Vologeso (with Pietro DeMezzo in the title role) by the musical director, Domenico Fischietti. He later introduced opere buffe, by Galuppi, Pietro Guglielmi, Gassmann, Hasse, Borono, Piccinni, Righini, Paisiello and others, which gradually came to dominate the repertory. Each summer the company was at Carlsbad (now Karlový Vary); they also visited Laibach (now Ljubljana) (Carnival 1769), Hamburg (1770) and Leipzig (1773). From 1765 Bustelli had a company at Dresden where, in 1770, 1776 and 1778, he negotiated contracts and subsidies from the electoral court. Between 1765 and 1778 the Prague and Dresden companies shared musical directors, repertory and singers. But at the same time Bustelli paid regard to local interests; in Prague he introduced works by the Czech composers Mysliveček and J.A. Kozeluch and in Dresden works by J.G. Naumann. His successor was Pasquale Bondini, a member of his company. Some opera scores from his estate were bought for Haydn’s ensemble at Eszterháza.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Teuber: Geschichte des Prager Theaters, i–ii (Prague, 1883–5)

R. Haas: ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der Oper in Prag und Dresden’, Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte and Altertumskunde, xxxvii (1916), 68–96

P. Kneidl: ‘Libreta italské opery v Praze v 18. století’ [Italian opera librettos in Prague in the 18th century], Strahovská knihovna, ii (1967), 115–86

J. Pokorny: ‘Jossef Bustelli a jeho hudební pozustalost’, [Bustelli and his musical legacy], Miscellanea musicologica, xxxiii (1992), 85–111

TOMISLAV VOLEK

Bustijn [Bustyn, Bustin, Bystyn], Pieter [Pierre]

(b ?Middelburg, bap. 25 July 1649; bur. Middelburg, 22 Nov 1729). Dutch organist, carillonneur and composer. His family were French-speaking. He may have studied with Remigius Schrijver (d 11 Feb 1681), a Middelburg organist; he completed the music for Uitbreidinge over het Bouk der Psalmen (3vv, bc; Middelburg, 1682; lost), begun by Schrijver, who had died before completion of the work. In 1681 Bustijn was appointed organist of the Nieuwe Kerk, and carillonneur of the abbey bell tower in Middelburg. He served as organ adviser in Middelburg and Goes and may have been director of the Middelburg collegium musicum during the period 1681–1729. In 1712 the carillon of the Middleburg abbey tower was destroyed; its replacement, constructed by the famous bellfounders Jan Albert de Grave and Claas Noorden of Amsterdam in 1714, was inspected by Bustijn and Abraham de Coup, organist of the Walloon church and carillonneur of the market bell-tower, and, according to various reports, was of outstanding quality.

Relatively little Dutch keyboard music of the time has survived. Bustijn’s IX suittes pour le clavessin (Amsterdam, c1712/R in Exempla Musica Zelandica, i (Middelburg, 1992 [incl. biographical information]); 3 ed. in EMN, i, Amsterdam, 1964) are of great importance to the history of the genre in the Netherlands. Their balanced arrangement by key is reminiscent of the use of symmetrical cycles culminating in the art of Bach. Their style points to that of the keyboard works of Bach and Handel, as well as showing some French influence. The suites were known to members of Bach’s circle: no.VIII (in A), in J.L. Krebs’s hand, can be found in an anthology of keyboard music (D-Bsb) compiled by Johann Gottfried Walther, who also mentions the works in his Musicalisches Lexicon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Clement: ‘Pieter Bustijn, “musicyn en Organist”’, TVNM, xxxviii (1988), 81–99

A. Clement: ‘De Zeeuwse organist als componist in de 17e en 18e eeuw’, Het Orgel, lxxxix (1993), 241–8, 281–6

ALBERT CLEMENT

Buterne, Charles

(fl 1st half of the 18th century). French composer and organist, son of Jean-Baptiste Buterne. Two of his publications have survived: Six sonates pour la vielle, musette, violon, flûtes, hautbois et pardessus de violles op.2 (Paris and Lyons, n.d.; ed. H. Ruf, Wilhelmshaven, 1981–3) and Méthode pour apprendre la musique vocale et instrumentale (Rouen, 1752).

EDWARD HIGGINBOTTOM

Buterne, Jean-Baptiste

(b Toulouse, c1650; d Paris, 28 March 1727). French organist. He was the son of Jean Buterne (d before 1687), organist in Toulouse and subsequently Pontoise. When Louis XIV had to appoint a new organiste de la chapelle du Roi in 1678 Buterne was one of four to be chosen. He took the April quarter, the others being covered by Nivers, Jacques Thomelin and Lebègue. It may be assumed that the honour reflected his accomplishments; we have no extant music of his to judge by, apart from the manuscript Petites règles pour l’accompagnement (F-Psg). He was also organist of St Etienne-du-Mont from 1674 and of St Paul from 1684 in succession to Du Mont, his former teacher. In 1721 his court duties were taken over by Jean-François Dandrieu. At St Etienne he was assisted from 1723 by C.N. Ingrain, who succeeded him in 1726. Buterne was also active at court as a harpsichord teacher. In 1702 he was named ‘capitoul [magistrate] de la ville de Toulouse’, a title he is also given in legal documents. (P. Hardouin: ‘Sur Jean-Baptiste Buterne’, RdM, xxxvi, 1954, pp.66–8)

David Buterne (d 1705), Jean-Baptiste’s brother, shared the post of organist at St Etienne with Jean-Baptiste from 13 October 1685 until his death.

EDWARD HIGGINBOTTOM

Buth.

Sign indicating the lowering of the pitch by degrees in Armenian Ekphonetic notation.

Büthner [Buthnerus], Crato.

See Bütner, Crato.

Buths, Julius (Emil Martin)

(b Wiesbaden, 7 May 1851; d Düsseldorf, 12 March 1920). German conductor, pianist and composer. He was the son of an oboist and studied with Hiller and Gernsheim at the Cologne Conservatory (1869–71) and with Kiel in Berlin. After winning the Meyerbeer prize (1873) he travelled in Italy and to Paris, there winning success as a pianist. In 1875 he settled in Breslau, where he directed a choral society, and in 1879 became town music director at Elberfeld (near Wuppertal). His most important opportunity came with his appointment in 1890 as music director at Düsseldorf, where he was in charge of the Lower Rhine Festivals and gave a number of outstanding performances of works by composers including Berlioz, Franck, Mahler, Reger, Strauss, Debussy and Delius. He made the German translation of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and produced it at the festival of 1902. In that year he became director of the newly founded Düsseldorf Conservatory. He also composed a number of vocal and instrumental works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Thoene: ‘Buths, Julius Emil Martin’, Rheinische Musiker, i, ed. K. G. Fellerer (Cologne, 1960), 52

H.C. COLLES/R

Buti, Francesco

(b ?Narni, 1604; d Rome, 15 June 1682). Italian librettist. A man of some learning, he held doctorates in both church and civil law and served as an apostolic prothonotary. His earliest known musical collaboration is the 20 poems that comprise Girolamo Kapsberger’s sixth book of villanelle (Rome, 1632). His poems were also set by the Roman composers Marco Marazzoli, Mario Savioni and Giacomo Carissimi. Marazzoli set Buti’s comic morality play Il Capriccio, overo Il Giuditio della Ragione tra la Beltà e l’Affetto for a carnival performance in 1643 (lib in I-Rvat and Rdp as La Bellezza amata). The music for another undated comedy, Il giusto inganno, no longer survives (lib in Rvat). Buti’s first known connection with Luigi Rossi was through Cardinal Antonio Barberini whom he followed to Paris in 1645, where he soon gained favour with jules Mazarin and became involved with the presentation of Italian spectacles at the French court. In 1647 he helped convert a machine ballet planned by the Duke of Enghien and the Venetian stage engineer Giacomo Torelli into the first Italian opera designed for Paris, L’Orfeo, with music by Rossi (lib in Rvat; printed in disc notes, Orfeo, Harmonia Mundi, France, CD 901358.60, 1991). After Mazarin’s fall and restoration, Buti co-wrote Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti, set to music by Carlo Caproli and performed in 1654. Following the success of this work, Mazarin obtained for him French citizenship and a substantial benefice. With Jean-Baptiste Lully Buti turned to court ballets: Prunières attributed Psyché (1656) and Impazienza (1661) to him and Mandosio credits him with Spropositi (1657). His final work for Paris was an opera for the wedding of Louis XVI, Ercole amante (1662, music by Cavalli), largely fashioned to exploit new stage machines by Gaspare Vigarani. Little is known of him after the death of Mazarin in 1661. Buti also wrote two oratorio texts, La purificazione della B.V. Maria and Il Giuseppe venduto, set to music by Egidio Magli (both texts in Rv).

Buti was a principal figure in the introduction of Italian opera to the Parisian court. His later works manage a fusion of the Italian dramatic tradition and that of the French court ballet. Perhaps through Lully, whose assimilation of French taste recalls Buti’s, his librettos appear to have exerted some influence on Quinault.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (A. Lanfranchi)

ES (E. Zanetti)

MGG1 (F. Torrefranca)

C.-F. Ménestrier: Des représentations en musique anciennes et modernes (Paris, 1681), 195–206

P. Mandosio: Bibliotheca romana (Rome, 1692), i, 45

A. Ademollo: I primi fasti della musica italiana a Parigi (1645–1662) (Milan, 1884)

A. Ademollo: I teatri di Roma nel secolo decimosettimo (Rome, 1888/R)

H. Goldschmidt: Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Oper im 17. Jahrhundert, i (Leipzig, 1901/R), 78–86

R. Rolland: Musiciens d’autrefois (Paris, 1908; Eng. trans., 1915)

H. Prunières: L’opéra italien en France avant Lulli (Paris, 1913/R)

M.-F. Christout: ‘“Les Noces de Pelée et Thétis”: comédie italienne en musique entremêlée d’un ballet dansé par le Roi (1654)’, Baroque: Revue internationale, v (1972), 59–62

T.E. Lawrenson: ‘Les “Noces de Pelée” et la guerre des bouffons’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 121–9

N. Zaslaw: ‘The First Opera in Paris: a Study in the Politics of Art’, Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honour of James R. Anthony, ed. J.H. Heyer (Cambridge, 1989), 7–24

M. Murata: ‘Why the First Opera Given in Paris Wasn’t Roman’, COJ, vii (1995), 87–105

THOMAS WALKER/MARGARET MURATA

Butler, Charles

(b Wycomb [?High Wycombe], Bucks., c1560; d Wootton St Lawrence, 28/29 March 1647). English priest, philologist and amateur musician. He was a chorister at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, from 1579 to 1585, and later served as a Bible clerk at Magdalen College, taking the BA in 1583 and the MA in 1587. On leaving Oxford in 1593 he served for seven years as parish rector in Nately Scures, near Basingstoke, and as master of the Holy Ghost School in Basingstoke. In 1600 he became vicar of nearby Wootton St Lawrence, a post he held until his death. He was buried in the church he served.

Butler’s principal contributions were to the science of bee-keeping, the study of the English language, and 17th-century music theory. The Feminine Monarchie is devoted to the hierarchy, virtues, benefices and ‘music, of bees’; added to the minute detail on bee-keeping are Butler’s musical transcriptions of the buzzing of bees. In the first edition these consist of two simple melodies (one for the ‘Princess’ and one for the ‘Queen’) arranged in triple time; by the third edition, however, they have expanded into a large-scale four-part madrigal, the Melissomelos, including a section with all four voices ‘buzzing’ together. The English Grammar propounds a method of reforming the orthography of the English language by substituting new characters – some derived from ancient Anglo-Saxon and some from phonetics – and by greater consistency in spelling. Butler’s Grammar itself was printed in his new orthography, as was The Principles of Musik, published three years later.

The Principles of Musik is both an instruction manual for the performer and a forum where Butler pleaded the cause of music in sacred and secular usages. Book 1, three-quarters of the volume, proceeds from the rudiments of music through sight-singing to simple and then more complex composition. Its material owes much to Boethius, Glarean, Calvisius and Morley. Most of the technical rules correspond to the standard theories of the 17th century, but, unusually, and unlike his source authors, Butler classed the 4th as a consonance, possibly because – almost a century before Rameau – he identified an ‘affinity’ between inverted consonant intervals like the 5th and 4th and the 6th and 3rd. Despite the rapid development of tonality, Butler, like most English theorists of the 17th century, continued to advance the hexachord system as a means of organization. However, he suggests the addition of a seventh solmization syllable, pha, which effectively leads him to describe major and minor scales. Book 2, while offering a brief for music in English society, provides much information on instruments, word-setting, performing practice and the mundane problems of the church musician. The argument for church music, backed up by patristic and biblical authority, may be seen largely as a reaction to the growing antipathy to music during the Puritan age. Since both the Principles and the English Grammar were dedicated to Charles I, it is clear that Butler’s sympathies lay with the royalist cause. Burney’s high praise of Butler’s Principles was not misplaced, for its scope, clarity of exposition, pithiness and wit mark it as a major contribution to early 17th-century musical thought.

WRITINGS

The Feminine Monarchie, or A Treatise Concerning Bees and the Due Ordering of Bees (Oxford, 1609/R, 3/1634)

The English Grammar, or the Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words in the English Tongue (Oxford, 1633, 2/1634/R); ed. A. Eichler (Halle, 1910)

The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting: with the Two-fold Use thereof, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London, 1636/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BurneyH; HawkinsH

A. Wood: Athenae oxonienses (Oxford, 1691–2), rev. and enlarged 3/1813–20/R by P. Bliss)

J. Foster: Alumni oxonienses (Oxford, 1891)

G.R. Hayes: ‘Charles Butler and the Music of Bees’, MT, xlvi (1925), 512–15

G. Sarton: ‘The Feminine Monarchie of Charles Butler, 1619’, Isis, xxxiv (1943), 469–72

N.C. Carpenter: ‘Charles Butler and the Bees’ Madrigal’, Notes and Queries, (1955), 103–6

J. Pruett: ‘Charles Butler: Musician, Grammarian, Apiarist’, MQ, xlix (1963), 498–509

D. Baker and J. Baker: ‘A 17th-Century Dial-Song’, MT, cxix (1978), 590–93

G.G. Butler: ‘Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 53–64

C. Lewis: ‘Incipient Tonal Thought in Seventeenth-Century English Theory’, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, vi (1981), 24–47

JAMES W. PRUETT/REBECCA HERISSONE

Butler [Boteler, Botoler], Mrs Charlotte

(b c1660; d after 1692). English singer and actress. As a girl Charlotte Butler had connections at court and sang in Crowne's masque Calisto there in 1675. She may have appeared on the public stage before this and was acting regularly from the 1679–80 season. Cibber wrote that she was ‘not only a good Actress, but was allow'd in those Days to sing and dance to great Perfection’. She performed a number of Purcell's incidental songs, created the roles of Philidel and Cupid in King Arthur, in which her performance was praised by Roger North, and was also in The Fairy Queen. She had dark eyes and a lively personality and was attacked in satires as a mercenary whore. In 1692 she was tempted to the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin by a higher salary; an epilogue survives which was spoken by her there in spring 1693.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDA

Poeta infamis (London, 1692)

C. Cibber: An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (London, 1740)

J. Wilson, ed.: Roger North on Music (London, 1959)

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Purcell's Stage Singers’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 105–29

R. Savage: ‘Calling up Genius: Purcell, Roger North and Charlotte Butler’, ibid., 212–31

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON

Butler, Henry [Botelero, Enrrique]

(b Sussex; d 1652). English composer and viol player. He served in the chapel of Philip IV of Spain as musico violon or musico de bihuela de arco (1623–52). In 1637 he was made a gentilhombre de casa. The younger James Wadsworth observed (The English Spanish Pilgrime, London, 1629) that Butler ‘teacheth his Catholike Maiesty to play on the Violl, a man very fantasticall, but one who hath his pension truely payd him for his fingers sake’. Butler is commended as a composer of ‘divisions on a ground’ by Christopher Simpson (The Division-Violist, London, 1659). Butler’s 20 surviving works include preludes, divisions, sonatas and an aria (all ed. in RRMBE, lxvi (1991)). An untitled piece for bass viol and continuo may arguably be the earliest sonata for solo instrument by an English composer. The 13 divisions and two preludes for bass viol and continuo are similar to those by Simpson, although some of the divisions are longer and more technically demanding. The three sonatas for violin, bass viol and continuo display many features of Italian sonatas of the 1620s and 30s and yet their scoring is that of some English fantasia-suites and was not used by Italian or Spanish composers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Evans: ‘Seventeenth-Century Chamber Music Manuscripts at Durham’, ML, xxxvi (1955), 205–23

J. Subirá: ‘Dos músicos del Rey Felipe IV: B. Jovenardi y E. Butler’, AnM, xix (1964), 201–23

E.V. Phillips: The Divisions and Sonatas of Henry Butler (diss., Washington U., St Louis, MO, 1982)

E.V. Phillips: ‘Henry Butler and the Early Viol Sonata’, JVdGSA, xxi (1984), 45–52

ELIZABETH V. PHILLIPS

Butler, Martin (Claines)

(b Romsey, 1 March 1960). English composer. He studied the piano and composition at the RNCM and the University of Manchester (1978–82), following which he undertook postgraduate studies with Babbitt and J.K. Randall at Princeton University (1983–7). He became a lecturer at the University of Sussex in 1988, and was later appointed reader in music. In 1988 he was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship which enabled him to work at Tempo reale, Berio’s electro-acoustic studio in Florence, on Graffiti. Butler has forged a distinctive musical identity rooted, on the one hand, in the European tradition of Stravinsky and Berio, and, on the other, in American folk and popular music, and minimalism. Concerns for direct melodic expression and dynamic rhythmic working remain pre-eminent in his music. These origins and transcontinental loyalties are most fully evident in his controversial opera, Craig’s Progress (1993–4), written to a libretto by Stephen Pruslin. It is a modern-day opera buffa which maps the characters and settings of 1950s American comic books onto the familiar narrative of a quest opera. It is selfconsciously plural: the libretto ranges from the Greeks to Superman, while the music quotes and parodies ideas from Mozart to the Broadway musical. Other significant works which demonstrate, in particular, the breadth and vitality of Butler’s rhythmic imagination, include Tin Pan Ballet (1986), Jazz Machines (1990) and O Rio (1990).

WORKS

stage

The Siren’s Song (op, 1, C. Butler), 1986; cond. T. Antoniou, Heraklion, Garden Theatre, 24 Aug 1986

Craig’s Progress (an operatic adventure story, 2, S. Pruslin), 1993–4; cond. A. Manson, London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 29 June 1994

A Better Place (op, 1, C. Oswin), 1998–9

instrumental

Orch: From an Antique Land, ww, brass, perc, pf, 1982; The Flights of Col, 1983; Cavalcade, 1985; Fixed Doubles, 1989; O Rio, 1990; Still Breathing, ww, brass, perc, 1992

Chbr and solo inst: Sonata for Pf, 1982; Concertino, 14 insts, 1983; Dance Fragments, cl, hn, perc, hp, vn, vc, 1984; Str Qt, 1984; Spells and Chants, 2 pf, 1985; Bluegrass Variations, vn, 1987; Songs and Dances from a Haunted Place, str qt, 1988; Chaconne, ob, 1990; Jazz Machines, fl, cl, vib, pf, va, vc, 1990; Down-Hollow Winds, wind qnt, 1991; Going with the Grain, mar, fl, cl, vn, va, vc, 1991; On the Rocks, pf, 1992; Arr. J.S. Bach: Preludes, c#, C#, fl, cl, mar, vn, va, vc, 1992; Hootenanny, 13 insts, 1994; Cl Qnt, 1995; Relay, 4 perc, 1995; Small Change, pf, 1995; Back to Ground, rec, hpd, vc, 1996; Craig’s Progress, suite, 2 wind qnt, 2 pf, 1997 [based on op]; Carillon, cl, vib, pf, 1998; Suzanne’s River Song, vn, pf, 1999

El-ac: Capistrano Song, cl, tape, 1984; Tin Pan Ballet, fl, trbn, perc, pf, synth, vc, 1986; Ballet con Salsa, brass, perc, synth, 1987 [version of Tin Pan Ballet]; Night Machines, tape, 1987; Piano, Piano, 2 pf, tape, 1988; Graffiti, tape, 1989; American Dream, str qt, tape, 1991

vocal

3 Emily Dickinson Songs, S, cl, pf, 1985; To see the beauties of the earth (carol, C. Butler), SATB, 1987; Dirty Beasts (R. Dahl), spkr, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, pf, 1988; Roll it Along, S, 2 b cl, va, vc, db, 1991; Dirty Beasts II (Dahl), spkr, pf, 2 vn, va, db, 1994

Principal publisher: OUP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Cross: ‘Redefining the Endless Melos of Ecstatic Monody’, MT, cxxxvi (1995), 330–36

JONATHAN CROSS

Butler, Samuel

(b Langar, nr Bingham, Notts., 4 Dec 1835; d London, 18 June 1902). English writer, amateur painter and composer. His interest in music was encouraged by Henry Festing Jones (a descendant of the 18th-century violinist Michael Christian Festing), with whom he collaborated on a collection of short piano pieces and two quasi-Handelian secular cantatas. The second of these, Ulysses, reflected both his interest in the Homeric epics – he translated both of them after writing The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) – and his ardent worship of Handel the man and musician. His admiration for that master, expressed in his letters and occasional music criticism, almost wholly overshadowed every other composer for him, and even his judgment of Bach was derogatory. This unbounded veneration also had its effect on his own music, which is completely devoid of any originality. Butler copied Handel’s manner to the letter with (for an amateur) very fair success, without however coming anywhere near it in spirit. His complete literary works, in 20 volumes, were edited by H.F. Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (London, 1923–6).

WORKS

all published in London

Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues and other Short Pieces, pf (1883), collab. H.F. Jones

Narcissus (dramatic cant., Butler, Jones), 1884–6, GB-Lbl, vs (1888)

Ulysses (dramatic cant., Butler, Jones), 1892–1902, Lbl, vs (1904)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.F. Jones: Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 1835–1902: a Memoir (London, 1919/R)

H.F. Jones: ‘Samuel Butler as Musical Critic’, The Chesterian, no.7 (1920), 197–201

E. Blom: Stepchildren of Music (London, 1925/R), 183

R.M. Myers: ‘Samuel Butler: Handelian’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 177–98

H.-P. Breuer: ‘Samuel Butler and Georg Frederic Handel’, Dalhousie Review, lv/3 (1975), 467–90

ERIC BLOM/BRUCE CARR

Butler, Thomas Hamly

(b London, c1755; d Edinburgh, 1823). English composer. He was probably the son of the Butler (John or James) who sang occasionally for Handel. As a boy he was in the Chapel Royal under Nares, and later studied for three years in Italy under Piccinni, with whom he travelled to Paris in 1776. In 1778 he became Covent Garden harpsichordist and composed two stage works to words by Cumberland (then being represented at Drury Lane as Sir Fretful Plagiary in Sheridan’s The Critic). Calypso (20 March 1779) was a long, all-sung masque, of which only the words survive; The Widow of Delphi (1 February 1780) was a dialogue opera of which only the music was printed. Neither was successful, and in 1782 Butler settled as a piano teacher in Edinburgh, where he composed a profusion of unambitious piano rondos and sonatas on ‘Scotch’ themes; a rondo on Lewie Gordon was popular. He also published a ‘Military Rondo’ for piano called The Landing of the brave 42^d in Egypt, and A Select Collection of original Scottish Airs (1800) on the lines of George Thomson’s collections, with ‘symphonies and accompanyments for the flute, violin & piano forte’.

ROGER FISKE

Bütner [Büthner, Bytner, Buthnerus], Crato

(b Gotha or Sonneberg, Thuringia, 1616; d Danzig, 1679). German composer and organist. According to Curicke the inscription on his grave in St Catherine, Danzig, stated that he was born at Sonneberg, but he himself stated that he came from Gotha: he did so in his publication of 1651, which he dedicated to Georg Neumark, who was born at Langensalza, near Gotha, and whom he called his ‘friend and countryman’. From 1650 he was organist of St Saviour, on the outskirts of Danzig. He soon became Kantor and director of music at St Catherine; according to Rauschning he was appointed in 1652, though he still described himself as organist of St Saviour in publications up to 1654. In both parishes he was required to teach in schools, and as director of music at St Catherine he could rely on the services on average of eight instrumentalists and six singers. It was to his directorship that the church owed its prominent position in the musical life of Danzig.

Evidence of Bütner's activities and of the extensive and varied cultivation of music in the Danzig of his day was afforded by a collection of printed music (formerly in PL-GD, lost since 1945), consisting of some 150 pieces, both instrumental and vocal, by Italian, Polish and German composers and including over 50 sacred vocal works by Bütner himself. His numerous surviving works are very varied both in their forms and in the forces for which they are scored, some of the latter being substantial. Most of them are Lutheran settings of German words which introduced the sacred concerto to Danzig. He took many of his texts from the Bible and particularly from the Psalms; he also set sacred poems, though the two types are never found in the same work. Typical features of his music include short-winded motivic writing, simple harmony, a quick succession of short, compressed sections and the setting off against each other of homophonic groups of voices. The style of his music, even if it is somewhat inexpressive, was something quite new in Danzig, and the particular Danzig tradition of chorale arrangements can also be traced back to him.

WORKS

published in Danzig unless otherwise stated

Geistliche Concerte, 2vv, 2 vn, b viol/dulcian, bc (Hamburg, 1651); ed. F. Kessler, Danziger Kirchenmusik, i (Stuttgart, 1973)

Musicalisches Concerto, 1v, 2 vn, bc (1652)

Musicalische Hertzens-Frewde, 3vv, 2 vn, bn, bc (1653)

Aria Sunamithica, 1v, 2 vn, bc (1654)

Geistreiche Concerto … aus dem Hohen-Liede, 2vv, 2 vn, bc (1654)

Hochzeitliche Parnassuswünsche (?1654)

Anima Christi, 4vv, 2 vn, bc (1661)

Lobet den Herrn (Ps cxlvii), 2vv, 2 vn, b viol, bc (1661)

Wo der Herr nicht bei uns wäre, 3vv, 2 vn, va, bc (1661)

Te Deum laudamus, 12vv, 11 insts, bc (1662)

7 sacred lieder in 1652⁶, 1657³, 1660³, J. Franck: Geistliche Sion (Guben, 1674)

Missa germanica, 4vv, vn/cornett, 3 str/trbn, bc, 5 Nov 1677, D-Bsb

19 motets, 1–14vv, 2–9 insts, bc, Dlb, PL-GD, S-Uu; 1 ed. F. Kessler (Stuttgart, 1966)

For lost holographs see Günther: Katalog (1911)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MatthesonGEP

WaltherML

ZahnM

R. Curicke: Der Stadt Dantzig historische Beschreibung … 1645, ed. G.R. Curicke (Amsterdam and Danzig, 1687), 328

G. Döring: Zur Geschichte der Musik in Preussen, i (Elbing, 1852), 61–2

O. Günther: Katalog der Handschriften der Danziger Stadtbibliothek, iv: Die Musikalischen Kirchenbibliotheken von St. Katharinen und St. Johannis in Danzig (Danzig, 1911)

O. Günther: ‘Musikgeschichtliches aus Danzigs Vergangenheit’, Mitteilungen des Westpreussischen Geschichtsvereins, x (1911), 22

E. Noack: ‘Die Bibliothek der Michaeliskirche zu Erfurt’, AMw, vii (1925), 65–116

H. Rauschning: Geschichte der Musik und Musikpflege in Danzig (Danzig, 1931)

B. Grusnick: ‘Die Dübensammlung: ein Versuch ihrer chronologischen Ordnung’, STMF, xlvi (1964), 27–82; xlviii (1966), 63–176

F. Krummacher: Die Choralbearbeitungen in der protestantischen Figuralmusik zwischen Praetorius und Bach (Kassel, 1978)

MICHAEL SPAETH/LOTHAR HOFFMANN-ERBRECHT

Butor, Michel

(b Mons-en-Baroeul, Nord, 14 Sept 1926). French writer. His work shows a particular fascination with means of perceiving, organizing and recording periodicity and the passage of time – journals, timetables, the names of months or geological ages – and so it is not surprising that music should be among the objects of his interest; it has profoundly influenced the handling of time in his novels. He has written texts for music, and in his ‘dialogue’ with the Diabelli Variations he produced a stimulating series of ‘interventions’, part imaginative elaboration, part analytic and historical exegesis. The conception of Midi–minuit Stravinsky, with its complex structuring of a 12-hour span, its exploration of the ‘genius of place’ (Olympus, Earth, Hell, the Fair, the Arch) and its involvement of Stravinskian character-symbols (Pulcinella, Apollo, Noah etc.), is peculiarly Butorian.

WRITINGS

texts for music

Répons: music by H. Pousseur, 1965; text worked into Paysage de répons, pubd in Travaux d’approche (Paris, 1972), 85–129, and elsewhere; new musical version Répons avec son paysage

6,810,000 litre d’eau par seconde (Paris, 1965): music by C. Shapira, also set by E. Brabant as Cantata profana Niagra

Votre Faust: music by Pousseur, 1960–67; derived works: Miroir de Votre Faust, 1964–5; Portail, 1966; Echos de Votre Faust, 1967; Jeu de miroirs de Votre Faust, 1967

Midi–minuit: music by Pousseur and others, Liège, 1971

Midi–minuit Stravinsky: music by Stravinsky, Pousseur and others, Liège, 1972

Centre d’écoute: music by R. Koering, 1972; derived works: La nuit écoute…, 1973; Manhattan Invention, 1973

Liège à Paris: music by Pousseur, 1977

L’étoile des langues: music by Pousseur, 1984

Arc-en-ciel de remparts: music by Pousseur, 1986

Cinq soupirs pour une clarinette: music by Pousseur, 1987–9

L’école d’Orphée: music by Pousseur, 1989

Stravinsky au piano: spoken interventions for a concert of music for piano 4 hands, Arles, 1995

Les montagnes rocheuses: set by J. Charbonnier as Conditionnement

other writings

‘Mallarmé selon Boulez’, L’express (22 June 1971); repr. in Répertoire II (Paris, 1964); Ger. trans. in Melos, xxviii (1961), 356–9

‘La musique, art réaliste’, Répertoire II (Paris, 1964), 27–41; Ger. trans. in Melos, xxxiv (1967), 37–44; Eng. trans. in PNM, xx (1981), 448–63

‘L’opéra c’est à dire le théâtre’, L’arc, no.27 (1965); repr. in Répertoire III (Paris, 1968), 383–90

Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli (Paris, 1971)

‘Influences de formes musicales sur quelques oeuvres’, ‘Les mots dans la musique’, Musique en jeu, no.4 (1971), 63–72

‘L’école d’Orphée’, RBM, xliii (1989), 35–8

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Michel Butor et la musique’, Musique en jeu, no.4 (1971), 63–111 [contains two texts by Michel Butor, 63–72, one by H. Pousseur, ‘Écoute d’un dialogue’, 73–82, and one by D. and J.-Y. Bosseur, ‘Collaboration Butor/Pousseur’]

J.-Y. Bosseur: ‘Votre Faust’, miroir critique (diss., U. of Paris VIII, 1974); partially pubd in RBM, xliii (1989), 57–70

J.-Y. Bosseur: ‘Journal d’un dialogue: avec les Strophes pour Don Juan de Michel Butor’, Revue des sciences humaines, lxxvi (1987), 161–77

H. Danuser: ‘Neue Kritik oder alte Hermeneutik? Zu Michel Butors Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli’, Musik in der modernen Dichtung, ed. C. Dalhaus and N. Miller (Munich, 1988), 91–104

H. Sabbe: ‘Pousseur-Butor: Text–Musik–Text’, Musik-Konzepte, no.69 (1990), 43–86

PAUL GRIFFITHS (writings and bibliography with JEAN GRIBENSKI)

Butsko, Yury Markovich

(b Lubnï, Poltava province, 21 May 1938). Russian composer. Born into a military family, he attended the history faculty of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and the Moscow Conservatory where he studied composition with Balasanian, graduating in 1966 and finishing postgraduate work in 1968, when he began teaching instrumentation and score-reading in the theory and composition department. His first compositions, which achieved wide currency, continue 19th-century traditions established by Musorgsky in particular – as in Zapiski sumasshedshego (‘Diary of a Madman’) after Gogol – while other works of the 1960s and 70s, such as the cantatas Vecherok (‘The Soirée’) and Svadebnïye pesni (‘Wedding Songs’) are linked to the so-called new folklore wave prominent in Russian music of this period. Butsko has continued to work in both of these areas and has concentrated on developing a special modal-harmonic and polyphonic system rooted in the principles of early Russian monodic religious chants (znamennïy raspev). The principal work in the latter style is the Polyphonic Concerto for four keyboard instruments which employs original early Russian themes.

In the 1980s Butsko turned to large instrumental forms and opera, the last of which, Zolotoy treugol'nik (‘The Golden Triangle’), based on a story by the economist and writer Aleksandr Chayanov, employs a plot most reminiscent of that of Mikhail Bulgokov's The Master and Margarita which it predates. Since the mid-1960s Butsko has worked extensively in theatre and the film industry, writing music for a number of productions by Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre.

Butsko does not consider himself linked to any particular direction in contemporary music; his work is rooted primarily in Russian tradition, and is oriented towards a type of national musical thought in which folk music serves as a source of popular religious consciousness. He has lived in Moscow since 1941.

WORKS

(selective list)

dramatic

all with libretto by composer

Zapiski sumasshedshego [Diary of a Madman] (mono-op, 2, after N.V. Gogol), 1964, concert perf., Moscow, 1971; Belïye nochi [White Nights] (op, 1, after F.M. Dostoyevsky), 1968, première, All-Union radio broadcast, USSR, 1969, stage, as Weisse Nächte, Dresden, Staatsoper, 15 Sept 1973; Iz pisem khudozhnika: muzïkal'nïye povesti [From an Artist's Letters: Musical Tales] (mono-op, after K. Korovin), 1974, concert perf., Moscow, All-Union House of Composers, 29 Oct 1979; Prozreniye [Enlightenment], (ballet, 3, choreog. V. Vasilev and N. Kasatkina), Stanislavsky-Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, perf. Feb 1974; Venediktov/Zolotoy treugol'nik [Venediktov/The Golden Triangle] (op, 4, after A. Chayanov), 1983, 2 excerpts perf. 18 Nov 1994

instrumental

Orch: Sym. for Str, 1965; Conc. no.1, pf, chbr orch, first perf. Nov 1967; Vc Conc. no.1 (Sym.-Conc.), 1968; Kanon ‘Yevkharisticheskiy kanon na drevnerusskuyu znamennuyu temu’ [Eucharist Canon on an Early Russian Znamennïy Theme], 1969; Drevnerusskaya zhivopis' [Early Russian Painting] (Sym. Suite no.1), 1970; Sym. in 4 Fragments (Sym. no.2), 1972; Ėpitafiya (Vn Conc. no.1), 1975, rev. 1981; Iz russkoy starinï [From Russian Antiquity] (Sym. Suite no.2), 1978; Sym.-Dithyramb (Sym. no.3), pf, orch, 1978; Ricercare (Vc Conc. no.2), 1979; Torzhestvennoye pesnopeniye [Triumphal Psalm] (Chbr Sym. no.1), str, 1979; Lacrimosa, str, 1982 [movt from Chbr Sym. no.3]; Plach [Lament] (Vn Conc. no.2), 1982; Sym.-Recitative (Sym. no.4), 1986; Ėkloga, conc., va, orch, 1993; Sym.-Intermezzo (Sym. no.5), 1993; Sym. no.6 (1999)

Chbr and solo inst: Partita, pf, 1965; Pastorali, 26 pf pieces, 1966; Prelude, Dithyramb, Postlude, org, 1968; Trio-Quintet ‘Es muss sein’, str, pf, 1970; Pf Sonata in 4 Fragments, 1972; Pf Trio no.1, 1972; Polyphonic Conc., 4 kbd, 1972 [19 counterpoints on a theme from Znamennïy chant]; Sonata no.1, 2 pf, 1974; Sonata no.2, 2 pf, 1974; Sonata no.1, vn, pf, 1975; Str Qt no.1, 1975; Va Sonata, 1976; Str Qt no.2, 1979; Str Qt no.3, 1982; Str Qt no.4, 1983; Pf Trio no.2 ‘Chemin à la rencontre’, 1994

vocal

6 stsen [6 Scenes] (song cycle, A.A. Blok: Dvenadtsat' [The Twelve]), B, pf, 1957–62; Vecherok [Soirée] (lyrical cant., folk texts), S, female chorus, chbr orch, 1961; 2 skazki [2 Fairy-Tales] (song cycle, I. Bunin), Mez, orch, 1964; Svadebnïye pesni [Nuptial Songs] (cant., folk texts), Mez, chorus, orch, 1965; Odinochestvo [Solitude] (song cycle, V. Khodasevich), B, pf, 1966; Oda Revolyutsii (cant., V. Mayakovsky), 1968; Skazaniye o Pugachyovskom bunte [The Tale of the Pugachyov Revolt] (cant., A.S. Pushkin and folk texts), spkr, solo vv, chorus, boys chorus, db, perc, 2 pf, 2 hp, org, 1968; 6 zhenskikh khorov [6 Female Choruses] (cant., folk texts), 1968; Tsvetnik [The Flower-Bed], (cant., religious verses), solo vv, small chorus, orch, 1969; Liturgicheskoye pesnopeniye [Liturgical Psalm] (cant., Church Slavonic canonical texts), chorus, orch, 1982; Gospodin Velikiy Novgorod [Master Great Novgorod] (Sym. Suite no.3) (folk texts), Mez, chorus, orch, 1985; Dukhovnïy stikh [Religious Verse] (Chbr Sym. no.3), chorus, str, first perf. 18 Nov 1989; Rus' narodnaya Khrista radi [The People of Rus' for the Sake of Christ] (Sym. Suite no.4), solo vv, male chorus, orch, 1990

Film Scores incl. music for documentaries and cartoons; incid music

Principal publishers: Muzïka, Sovetskiy kompozitor

WRITINGS

‘Zasluzhennoe priznanie’ [A Well-Deserved Acknowledgement], SovM (1972), no.9, pp.23–7 [tribute to S. Balasanian]

‘O moikh uchitelyakh’ [About my teacher], MAk (1998), nos.3–4, pp.200–02

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Gerlach, ed.: Fünfzig sowjetische Komponisten der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1984)

Y. Dubinets: ‘Znaki stilya Yuriya Butsko: znamennïy raspev v XX veke’ [Butsko's stylistic trademarks: znamennïy raspev in the twentieth century], MAk (1993), no.1, pp.49–52

T. Starostina: ‘Pomïshleniye o svete nezakhodimom: o tvorchestve Yuriya Butsko’ [Reflection on inexhaustible light: the work of Butsko], Muzïka iz bïvshego SSSR, ed. V. Tsenova and V. Barsky, ii (Moscow, 1996) [incl. short work-list]

MARINA PAVLOVNA RAKHMANOVA

Butt, Dame Clara (Ellen)

(b Southwick, Sussex, 1 Feb 1872; d North Stoke, Oxon, 23 Jan 1936). English contralto. She studied with Daniel Rootham in Bristol, and in 1890 gained a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, where she was a pupil of J.H. Blower. She made her début at the Royal Albert Hall as Ursula in Sullivan’s Golden Legend on 7 December 1892, and three days later sang the role of Orpheus in the RCM production of Gluck’s opera at the Lyceum Theatre. From that date her success was assured.

It was almost entirely a success of the concert platform, and later of her own platform: that is, in her own concerts, more or less of the ballad type, given all over the British Empire. She was also much in request for other concerts, and particularly for the English festivals. Elgar’s Sea Pictures (Norwich Festival, 1899) was written for her, and she made his Land of Hope and Glory (1902) her own. In 1900 she married the baritone Kennerley Rumford, and thenceforward they pursued their careers together. In 1920 she made a reappearance on the operatic stage, singing Gluck’s Orpheus at Covent Garden under Beecham. In the same year she was created DBE for her services during the war (she organized and sang in countless performances for war charities, including a week’s run of Gerontius in aid of the Red Cross).

Dame Clara was a tall woman, standing 6'2''. Her voice was exceptionally powerful (someone remarked that the Albert Hall must have been built in intelligent anticipation of Butt’s advent), with a trombone-like boom in the lower register. She made many records. Such majestic and powerful means when applied to a song such as Goodhart’s A fairy went a-marketing may raise a smile, but the smile is tempered by admiration for the magnificent voice and the beautiful articulation of the words.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Ponder: Clara Butt: her Life-Story (London, 1928/R)

‘Clara Butt Discography’, Record Advertiser, ii (1971–2), no.1, pp.2–8; no.2, pp.2–9

J.A. FULLER MAITLAND, H.C. COLLES/ANDREW PORTER

Butterley, Nigel (Henry)

(b Sydney, 13 May 1935). Australian composer and pianist. He studied privately with Frank Warbrick (piano), and at the NSW State Conservatorium of Music (1951–60), where his teachers included Alexander Burnard (music theory), Nöel Nickson (composition) and Raymond Hanson (composition), and in London with Priaulx Rainier (1962). An employee of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for 21 years, he served as both presentation officer (1957–66) and programme planner (1966–72). In 1973 he was appointed to a lectureship in contemporary music at the Newcastle (NSW) Conservatorium of Music. Upon his retirement in 1991 he was awarded an Australian Artists’ Creative Fellowship and appointed to membership in the Order of Australia. Other awards have included an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, NSW (1996). Active as a pianist as well as a composer, he took part in the Australian première of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in 1958 and gave the first Australian performance of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes in 1973.

Vocal compositions showing the influence of Vaughan Williams, Warlock, Ireland and Britten comprise much of Butterley’s early work. Although he first heard Vaughan Williams’s Ten Blake Songs for Voice and Oboe (1957) after he had written his own settings, the general influence of Vaughan Williams’s style is evident not only in his choice of text, but also in his rhythms and harmonies. The Six Blake Songs (1956) follow natural speech patterns, are essentially homophonic in texture and make use of harmonies based on perfect intervals. Other settings, such as the cycle Child in Nature (1957), are characterized by recurring accompanimental motifs. Stated in the piano at the beginning of each song and repeated throughout, these motifs underscore evocative titles such as The Cricket and The Spider’s Web. Strophic form is common, as is a use of quintuplets, sextuplets and septuplets in the melodic line. Harmonies are employed atmospherically to change a prevailing mood (as in The Child and The Wind and the Songs) or to heighten a dramatic effect (as in Brown Jack).

In 1961 Butterley left Australia for a tour of Europe and the Middle East. Although he had only a few lessons with Rainier, her teaching had a profound effect on him. Laudes (1963), the first composition he completed after his study with her, established his reputation at the 1964 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The work, in praise of God in the context of four European churches, transcends his previous struggle with extended tonality, exhibiting a fragmented yet luminous part-writing that melds plainsong with note rows, impressionistic harmonies and quasi-aleatory writing. After Laudes, he frequently employed serial techniques; The White-Throated Warbler and the First String Quartet (both 1965) use 12-note rows. Typically, however, his music departs from strict row forms to undergo relatively free development. In the Head the Fire (Italia Prize, 1966), commissioned by the ABC, features a range of dramatic and timbral devices, as well as tape manipulation, to blend texts from ancient Irish mystical verse, the Dead Sea scrolls and Greek and Roman liturgies. In Carmina (1968, rev. 1990), Butterley attempted to achieve greater lyricism within an avant-garde style. While the vocal line and the accompaniment tend to move independently of each other, recurring motifs help to create unity.

Butterley’s works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Variations (1967), Pentad (1968), Refractions (1969), Explorations for Piano and Orchestra (1970) and the Violin Concerto (1970), are remarkable in his output for their abstraction. Meditations of Thomas Traherne (1968) and Letter from Hardy’s Bay (1971) are written in a more conservative idiom. Each of the five sections of Meditations begins with a solitary held note. Letter from Hardy’s Bay is also meditative in character. The piano, prepared with metal bolts between the e', f', b' and c'' strings, produces a gong-like chord that is incessantly repeated throughout the piece.

Important works from the 1970s include Fire in the Heavens (1973), inspired by the poetry of Christopher Brennan and Judith Wright, and Sometimes with One I Love (1976), a setting of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). While Fire is expansive and exuberant, Sometimes is more reflective, marking Butterley’s acceptance of his own changing philosophies and growing agnosticism. Textual themes of the lover and poet are assigned in the score to singers and speakers respectively; heterosexual love is allocated to the soprano and homosexual love to the baritone. In the tenth song, the speaker (poet) and Baritone (lover) are united in a celebration and prophecy of the immortality of love. New compositional features in the work include a use of: the whole-tone scale, employed as the motif of love; angular declamation, to emphasize dramatic tension; and Sprechstimme, to represent the union of poet and lover. Simple structural relationships, such as palindromes (seen most clearly in the rhythm and harmonic progression of the first song), are also evident.

In the 1980s Butterley’s work reaffirmed its earlier lyricism. The Third String Quartet (1980) suggests a return to the early influences of Britten, Vaughan Williams and Hindemith. Lawrence Hargrave Flying Alone (1981), inspired by a sculpture by Peter Taylor, represents musically Hargrave’s struggle towards flight. (In 1988 Hargrave’s aspirations became the subject of an opera of the same name.) Other works from this period include: The Owl (1983), a dramatic monologue exploring emotional states related to everyday reality; Il Gubbo (1987), a work depicting the thoughts of a marble hunchback supporting two baptismal bowls in a Verona church as he imagines himself free of his burden; and Forest I–II (1990–93), companion pieces that explore isolation and alienation as projected onto the seven tall figures of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Forest.

Many compositions of the 1990s were inspired by the writings of Kathleen Raine. From Sorrowing Earth (1991), prefaced by a Raine verse, is a spiritual journey through the human condition. Originally conceived as a tightly constructed work making reference to June Opie’s biography of Priaulx Rainier, the final version develops motifs freely in one evolving movement. Texts for The Woven Light (1994) draw on three decades of Raine’s work. The main motif of the composition, associated with Siena where the first movement was composed, is a repeating sequence of five descending chords. The Fourth String Quartet (1995), inspired by Beethoven’s string quartets, fuses expressive originality and emotional power.

WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: In the Head the Fire (radio score), spkr, T, Bar, SATB, ww, org, pf, perc, 1966; Watershore (radio score, W. Whitman), 4 spkrs, fl, 3 vc, prep pf, perc, 1978; Lawrence Hargrave Flying Alone (op, 2, J. McDonald), 1988

Orch: Meditations of Thomas Traherne, 22 rec, orch, 1968; Pentad, 1968; Refractions, 1969; Explorations, pf, orch, 1970; Vn Conc., 1970, rev. 1975; Fire in the Heavens, 1973; Sym., 1980; Goldengrove, str, 1982, rev. 1993; In Passing, 1982; From Sorrowing Earth, 1991; Poverty, 1992

Choral: The True Samaritan (anon., W. Austin, W. Dunbar), SATB, 1958, rev. 1976; Prayer During Sickness (R. Herrick), SATB, 1960; Who Build on Hope (B. Beaver), SATB, org, 1960; Ps, c, SATB, 1961; What shall I render to the Lord?, SATB, 1965; No Man is an Island (J. Donne), 4 S, 4 A, 4 T, 4 B, 1977; Flower in the crannied wall (A. Tennyson), SSAATTBB, 1980; There came a Wind like a Bugle (E. Dickinson), SSAATTBB, 1987; Sleep (K. Raine), SSATBB, 1992; Spring’s Ending (Du Fu), SATB, 1997

Solo vocal: 3 Serenades (S. Sitwell), T, pf, 1954, rev. 1993; 6 Blake Songs, medium v, pf, 1956, rev. 1996; Child in Nature (R. Gurr), S/T, pf, 1957; Joseph and Mary (trad.), S, fl, 1959; Song of Christ the Rock (trad.), 1v, 1962; Carmina (4 Latin Poems of Spring), medium v, wind qnt, 1968, rev. 1990; Sometimes with One I Love (Whitman), spkr, S, Bar, fl, cl, hn, 2 vc, pf, 1976; The Owl (McDonald), S, fl, vn + va, vc, pf, perc, 1983; 2 Burns Songs, T, pf, 1992; The Woven Light (Raine), S, orch, 1994; Frogs (Dickinson), T, pf, 1995

Chbr and solo inst: 3 Pieces, org, 1961–79; Laudes, fl + pic, cl + b cl, hn, tpt, vn, va, pf, 1963; Str Qt no.1, 1965; The White-Throated Warbler, sopranino rec/fl/pic, hpd/pf, 1965; Music for Sunrise, rec ens, perc, 1967 [for young pfmrs]; Variations, wind qnt, pf, tape, 1967; Voices, wind qnt, 1971; Str Qt no.2, 1974; Fanfare and Processional, 4 tpt, 2 trbn, timp, 1977; Evanston Song, fl, pf, 1978; Trio, cl, vc, pf, 1979; Str Qt no.3, 1980; Conversation Pieces, fl, pf, 1982 [for young pfmrs]; Forest I, va, pf, 1990; The Wind Stirs Gently, fl, vc, 1992; Forest II, tpt, pf, 1993; Of Wood, vc, 1995; Str Qt no.4, 1995

Pf: Arioso, Toccata, Comment on a Popular Song, 1960; Grevillea, 1962, rev. 1985; Games, 1970 [for young pfmrs]; Letter from Hardy’s Bay, prep pf, 1971; Lawrence Hargrave Flying Alone, 1981; Uttering Joyous Leaves, 1981; Il Gubbo, 1987

Principal publisher: Australian Music Centre

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Covell: Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne, 1967)

N. Butterley: ‘Butterley on Butterley’, Music Now, i/1 (1969), 29–34

R. Edwards: ‘Nigel Butterley’s “In the Head the Fire”’, Music Now, i/2 (1969), 7–11

A.D. McCredie: Catalogue of Forty-Six Australian Composers and Selected Works (Canberra, 1969)

A.D. McCredie: Musical Composition in Australia (Canberra, 1969)

J. Murdoch: Australia’s Contemporary Composers (Melbourne, 1972)

D. Sale: ‘Nigel Butterley’, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century, ed. F. Callaway and D. Tunley (Melbourne, 1978), 201–10

J. Sykes: ‘Nigel Butterley at Fifty’, APRA [Australian Performing Rights Association], v/Oct (1985), 6–11

A. Ford: Composer to Composer (Sydney, 1993), 163–9

MICHAEL BARKL

Butterworth, Arthur (Eckersley)

(b Manchester, 4 Aug 1923). English composer, conductor and teacher. He was a composition pupil of Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he also studied the trumpet and conducting. He played the trumpet in the Scottish National and Hallé orchestras and as a freelance until 1963, after which he combined composing with conducting and teaching at the Huddersfield School of Music. Though he experimented with 12-note techniques as a student, his mature and characteristic compositions are conservative in idiom, influenced primarily by Sibelius and Nielsen, Elgar and other English symphonists of a generation before his own. The major source of inspiration for his music, especially his four expansive symphonies, is the north country in which he lives, its poetry, its painting and its landscapes. His contributions to the brass band repertory have been notable. He was made an MBE in 1995.

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballet: Creatures in the Night, op.37, also orch suite, 1969

Orch: Suite, str, op.8, 1948; Legend, op.11, chbr orch, 1950; Romanza, op.12, hn, str qt/pf/orch, 1954; Sym. no.1, op.15, 1957; 3 Nocturnes, op.18, 1959; The Path across the Moors, op.17a, 1958, arr. brass band, op.17b, 1959; The Green Wind, op.22, 1961; The Quiet Tarn, op.21, 1961; Concertante, op.27, 2 ob, 2 hn, str, 1962; The Moors, op.26, org, orch, 1962; Sym. no.2, op.25, 1965; Duo concertante, op.35, ob, hpd, str, 1967; From the Four Winds, op.40, org, orch, 1970; Gigues, op.42, 1973; Italian Journey, op.34, 1973; Org Conc., op.33, 1973; Pageantry, op.48, 1973; Vn Conc., op.58, 1978; Sym. no.3 ‘Sinfonia Borealis’, op.52, 1979; Nex Vulpinus, op.63, str, 1981; Beowulf, op.68, str, 1982; September Morn, op.62, 1983; Bn Conc. ‘Summer Music’, op.77, 1986; Sym. no.4, op.72, 1986; Northern Light, op.88, 1991; Solent Forts, ov., op.90, also arr. brass band, 1992; Tpt Conc. ‘Concerto alla Veneziana’, op.93b, also arr. brass band, op.93a, 1992; Va Conc., op.82, 1993; Ragnarok, ov., op.97, 1995; Vc Conc., op.98, 1997

Brass band: A Dales Suite, op.24a, 1965; 3 Impressions, op.36, 1968; Caliban, scherzo malèvolo, op.50, 1971; Nightflight, op.57, 1973; Winter Music, op.71, 1978; Tundra, op.75, 1979; Odin, op.76, 1986; Paean, op.86, 1990; Sinfonia ‘Maoriana’, op.85, 1990; Passacaglia on a Theme of Brahms, op.87, 1991

Chbr and solo inst: Trio, op.6, ob, cl, bn, 1947; Lakeland Summer Nights, op.10, pf, 1949; Suite, op.13, va, vc, 1951; Scherzo, op.19, brass qt, 1956; Sextet, op.16, pf, wind, 1957; Sonata, op.47, db, pf, 1970; A Triton Suite, op.46, 3 tpt, 3 tbn, tuba, 1972; Aubade, op.53, fl, pf, 1973; Fanfare and Berceuse, op.54, tpt, pf, 1975; A Gabriel Sonata, op.59, tpt, org, 1976; Flamboyance, op.64, tpt, pf, 1977, Héjnal, op.69, tpt, pf, 1979; Sonatina, op.74, vn, pf, 1979; Pf Trio, op.73, 1983; Sonata, op.78, va, pf, 1986; 3 Knightly Pieces, op.81, tpt, pf, 1987; Partita, op.89, euphonium, pf, 1990; Qt, op.91, brass, 1992; Pf Qnt, op.95, 1995; Wedding Music, op.99, tpt, org, 1996; Str Qt, op.100, 1997; Actaeon's Ride, op.102, 13 wind, 1998; Morris Dancers, qt, op.101, 4 hn, 1998; Music for Wind Insts, op.104, 1998; Saxhorn Sonata, E, op.103, 1998; Str Qt, op.100, 1998; Bubu, op.107, eng hn, va, hp, 1999; Org Sonata, op.106, 1999

Vocal: 4 Nocturnal Songs, op.4, S, pf, 1947; A Moorland Sym., op.32, B solo, chorus, orch, 1967; The Night Wind, op.38, S, cl, pf/orch, 1969; Trains in the Distance, op.41, nar, chorus, orch, tape, 1971; Ancient Sorceries, op.49, Ct, rec, hpd, 1973; 5 Part-Songs, op.55, male vv, pf, 1978; Hunter's Moon, op.60, male vv, pf, 1979; The Great Frost, op.94, nar, orch, 1993; Mist on the Marshes, op.105, S, db, pf, 1999

Principal publishers: Peters, Chester, Comus

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R.D.C. Noble: ‘Arthur Butterworth: a 75th Birthday Tribute’, British Music Society Newsletter, no.77 (1998), 143–6

GERALD LARNER/RICHARD D.C. NOBLE

Butterworth, George (Sainton Kaye)

(b London, 12 July 1885; d Pozières, 5 Aug 1916). English composer. From an ancient northern family, he was born in London but grew up a gruff, blunt Yorkshireman. His father, Alexander Kaye Butterworth, was solicitor to and later general manager of the North Eastern Railway in York; his mother, Julia Wigan, had been a professional singer before her marriage. Butterworth showed early musical ability. He was educated at Aysgarth (1896–9), Eton (1899–1904), Trinity College, Oxford (1904–8), where he read Classics, and the RCM (1910–11). He studied privately with Christian Padel (a Moscheles pupil) in York, and with C.H. Lloyd and Thomas Dunhill at Eton. While at Oxford he was elected president of the University Musical Club (to the detriment of his studies) and came into fruitful contact with Hugh Allen and fellow-student R.O. Morris. He fell into stereotypical conflict with his father when he decided to pursue a musical career rather than a legal one. This necessitated that he earn a living, which he did first on the music staff of The Times under Fuller Maitland (1908–9) and then by teaching (the piano, among other subjects) at Radley (1909–10). At the RCM he studied with Walter Parratt and Charles Wood, but left after a year; thus ended three years of unsuccessful attempts at musical satisfaction. He moved back into the family home (his parents had relocated to London) and sought fulfilment in the folk revival and, when war came in 1914, on the battlefield.

Too much has perhaps been made of Butterworth's diffident development and fastidious self-criticism (he destroyed compositions before leaving for the front). Many of his generation took, and were given, much longer to find themselves, notably Vaughan Williams, who valued Butterworth's friendship and judgment highly. (Butterworth prompted Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony and watched over its early history). Nevertheless, his father's ambitions for him, the death of his mother in 1911 and the fact that he was almost certainly gay, may all have left their inhibiting mark.

Butterworth belonged to the generation of British composers constructing for themselves, after the downfall of Oscar Wilde and decadence, a minimalist masculinity in two pastoral images: the conservation of folk music and the poetry of A.E. Housman. Having met Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp at Oxford, he joined the Folk Song Society in 1906 and started collecting. In 1911 he became a founder-member of the English Folk Dance Society and began intensive activities as a morris and country dancer. These seem to have given him more artistic fulfilment than anything else; his fine dancing was captured on film with Sharp and the Karpeles sisters in 1912. He also collected morris and sword dances with Sharp during 1912–13, and was a member of Sharp's original six-man morris side that danced at Stratford and on the Savoy Theatre stage for Granville Barker, inaugurating an important if short-lived historical moment that allied Shakespeare and the folk revival. Although half the members of Sharp's team, including Butterworth, died at the Somme, Butterworth's prediction that ‘if ever the opportunity occurs for a truly national production of ballet or opera, the success of the undertaking will rest in the hands of those who have mastered the technique and absorbed the spirit of our English dances and songs’ must have rung in the ears of Holst and Vaughan Williams as they wrote their Shakespeare operas and the latter his ballet Job.

Butterworth's compositional output was small but influential. While a 1916 review, written just before his death, described him as ‘an unknown composer’, Boughton had in 1913 already heard in the Shropshire Lad songs an ‘amazing restraint [and] the same terrible beauty which one finds in the verses’, and in 1922 the young Finzi wrote that his music ‘sums up our countryside as very little else has ever done’. Not everyone has admired his approach to Housman's formula of metric simplicity foiling lovelorn passion; the opening of his best-known song, ‘Loveliest of trees’, encapsulates the aesthetic, bare and wan (learnt from Stanford in folksong accompaniments), motivically algebraic like late Brahms, yet emotionally nuanced (a secondary-7th harmonic pang as the cherry blossom falls to earth). Butterworth himself seems to have sensed the need for a more dramatic exposé of Housman when he used material from ‘Loveliest of trees’ in his orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad (first performed by Arthur Nikisch at the 1913 Leeds Festival). Here we find fantasy, perhaps sexual tragedy, with Wagnerian crisis and Debussyan aftermath, from a man who clearly ‘knows about’ Tchaikovsky (Butterworth could almost have been E.M. Forster's Maurice), all easily masked from ears more attuned to landscape than figure by the framing dorian modality.

Butterworth's rhapsody, which ends by quoting his song ‘With rue my heart is laden / For golden friends I had’, became his epitaph. He enlisted as a private in August 1914, the first month of the war, received a commission in the 13th Durham Light Infantry, went to France in August 1915, and in the Somme action of July 1916 commanded his company gallantly, receiving the Military Cross. He was killed the following month by sniper fire near Butterworth Trench, named after him.

WORKS

Inst (orch, unless otherwise stated): Barcarolle, perf. 1903, lost; 2 English Idylls, 1911; A Shropshire Lad, rhapsody, 1912; The Banks of Green Willow, idyll, 1913; Fantasia, 1914, inc.; Suite, str qt, unpubd

Vocal: I Fear Thy Kisses (P.B. Shelley), 1v, pf, 1909; I Will Make You Brooches (Stevenson), 1v, pf; Requiescat (O. Wilde), 1v, pf, 1911; 6 Songs from A Shropshire Lad (A.E. Housman), 1v, pf (1911); Love Blows as the Wind Blows (Henley), 1v, str qt, 1911–12, orchd c1914; Bredon Hill and Other Songs (Housman), 1v, pf (1912); In the Highlands (Stevenson), SSA, pf (1912)

Arrs.: 11 Folk Songs from Sussex, 1v, pf, 1912; On Christmas Night, carol, SATB (1912); We Get Up in the Morn, harvest song, TTBB (1912); Morris Dance Tunes, pf, 1913

Other works incl. juvenilia, lost early works

MSS in GB-Ouf, Ob, Lbl, WRec, Lcs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Boughton: ‘Modern British Song Writers: IV–George Butterworth’, Music Student, vi/4 (1913), 85–6

J. Rippin: ‘George Butterworth 1885–1916’, MT, cvii (1966), 680–2, 769–71

K. Thompson: ‘A Butterworth Catalogue’, MT, cvii (1966), 771-2

M. Dawney: ‘George Butterworth's Folk Music Manuscripts’, Folk Music Journal, iii (1976), 99–113

R. Wortley and M. Dawney, eds.: ‘George Butterworth's Diary of Morris Dance Hunting’, Folk Music Journal, iii (1977), 193–207

S. Banfield: ‘A Shropshire Lad in the Making: a Note on the Composition of George Butterworth's Songs’, MR, xlii (1981), 261–7

S. Banfield: Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge, 1985), 144–52, 244 only, 400–5

I. Copley: George Butterworth and His Music: a Centennial Tribute (London, 1985)

M. Barlow: Whom the Gods Love: the Life and Music of George Butterworth (London, 1997)

P. Leitch: ‘Lad Culture: Butterworth's Housman Re-Assessed’, MT, cxl (Spring, 1999), 18–28

STEPHEN BANFIELD

Butting, Max

(b Berlin, 6 Oct 1888; d Berlin, 13 July 1976). German composer. Although his father, an ironmonger, wished him to pursue a career in business, he studied musicology, philosophy and psychology at Munich University (1908–18) and composition and conducting at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst, where his teachers included Courvoisier. In 1919 he returned to Berlin where he worked in the family business and completed a business course, continuing to compose in his spare time. During the 1920s he was also active as a music critic and administrator: he headed the music section of the revolutionary Novembergruppe (1922–5); served as music reviewer for the Sozialistische Monatshefte (from 1925); held a managerial position in the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer (GdT); served on the cultural advisory board of the Berlin Funkstunde; and was a board member for the German section of the ISCM. These activities, as well as performances of his compositions at the Donaueschingen chamber music festival, gradually established his position as a member of the 1920s German avant garde. His intensive preoccupation with radio earned him a reputation as the leading exponent of broadcast theory; in 1928 he was appointed to a professorship in composition for radio at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin.

Convinced ‘that music is the expression of social perceptions’ and that ‘music’s development must derive from social developments’ (1955), Butting embraced the ‘pure humanism’ of the Neue Sachlichkeit. In 1928 he composed in quick succession two of his most successful symphonic works, the Third Symphony and the Sinfonietta mit Banjo. Despite the strong stylistic relationship between these, they nonetheless reflect in both form and aesthetic the dualism of Butting’s musical thought. In the symphony dry, often austere atonal elements are intensified with tension-laden expressivity; even in the finale jazz-inspired rhythms are integrated into complex polyphonic structures. In the Sinfonietta, composed for mass consumption over the radio, complex polyphonic textures are combined with more transparent musical statements, challenging traditional definitions of ‘easy-listening’ music.

Butting’s early works, such as the Klavierstücke opp.31 and 33 (1925, 1927), possess compactness, clarity and an immediate intelligibility. Around 1928, having become preoccupied with popular music, he began composing Gebrauchsmusik. He developed this new interest in his second composition for radio, Heitere Musik (1929), and in the 15 Tänze composed during the 1930s. In 1929, on becoming a member of the GdT’s copyright committee, he gave up both his employment in his father’s firm and his journalistic activities, and for several years found little time for composition. Initially able to continue his copyright work after Hitler assumed power, his connections with the Novembergruppe and the Sozialistische Monatshefte led to his dismissal in 1938, at which time he returned to his father’s business. Although he joined the Nazi party in 1939, in response to increasing chicanery against himself and his family, he ultimately turned away from the cultural life of the Third Reich.

The 1940s saw Butting’s most serious, introverted compositional phase. He wrote four symphonies, which resume the serious atonal language of the Second and Third, the didactic Die Schuld, an answer to the question of collective German guilt, and Lieder aus Berlin, a musical critique, to his own texts, of postwar life. Works from late in the decade, among them symphonies and string quartets, do not attain the same degree of musical expressivity as their earlier counterparts. His output, however, does include numerous works for children, pieces of Gebrauchsmusik and his only opera, Plautus im Nonnenkloster. After the establishment of the DDR, Butting was appointed to a senior editorial post at Radio DDR; he also taught at the East Berlin Akademie der Künste and worked for the Anstalt zur Währung der Aufführungsrechte auf dem Gebiete der Musik (AWA). A regular stream of commissions resulted in a sizable corpus of late works. His honours included the DDR national prize for art and literature (1954) and the medal for patriotic merit (1961).

WORKS

stage

Die Schuld (Lehrstück, W. Stehr), op.45, 1946; Plautus im Nonnenkloster (op, 3, H. Zinner, after C.F. Meyer), op.98, 1958, Leipzig, Grosses Opernhaus, 1959

orchestral

Sym. no.1, op.21, 1922; Chbr Sym., op.25, 13 insts, 1923; Sym. no.2, op.29, 1926; Sym. no.3, op.34, 1928; Blues und Marsche für Berlin im Licht, op.36, wind ens, 1928; Sinfonietta mit Banjo, op.37, 1929; Heitere Musik, op.38, 1929; Filmmusik, op.39, 1930; Tänze, op.40, 1936–40; Sym. no.4, op.42, 1942; Sym. no.5, op.43, 1943; Sym. no.6, op.44, 1944, rev. 1953; 5 Orchesterstücke, op.60, 1948; Konzertstück, op.64, 1948; Concertino, op.66, 1949; Sym. no.7, op.67, 1949; Sonatine, op.68, str, 1949; Ov., op.69, 1949; Fl Conc., op.72, 1950; 5 Stücke, op.73, youth orch, 1950; Sonntagskonzert, op.76, 1950; Sym. no.8 ‘Die Urlaubsreise’, op.84, 1952

Sinfonische Variationen, op.89, 1953; Orchesterballade, op.91, 1954; 5 ernste Stücke, op.92, 1955; Sym. no.9, op.94, 1956; Sinfonietta, op.100, 1960; Burleske, op.103, 1961; Wochenendkonzert, op.104, 1962; Sinfonische Rhapsodie, op.106, 1962; Serenade, op.107, 1963; Sym. no.10, op.108, 1963; Legende, op.109, 1966; Pf Conc., op.110, 1964; Triptychon, op.112, 1967; Groteske, op.113, 1967; 2 Orchesteretüden, op.114, 1968; Kleine Festmusik, op.115, 1968; Moritat, op.116, 1969; Stationen, op.117, 1970; Gespenstermusik, op.120, 1972; Konzertouvertüre, op.121, 1973

vocal

Choral (texts by Butting, unless otherwise stated): 3 a-cappella-Chöre (S. George), op.27, 1924–5; Das Memorandum, op.52, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1947–8; Stille Nacht (cant.), op.57, chbr chorus, chbr orch, 1947; 3 Königslieder Kantaten, op.58/2, solo vv, chorus, orch, 1947; Fröhliche Kantate nach alten Liedern, op.58/3, chorus, chbr orch, 1947; An den Frühling (cant.), op.59, chorus, chbr orch, 1948; Der Sommer (cant.), op.61, chorus, chbr orch, 1948; Der Herbst (cant.), op.62, chorus, chbr orch, 1948; Der Winter (cant.), op.63, chorus, chbr orch, 1948; Lügengeschichte vom schwarzen Pferd (cant., A. Eckener), op.71, Bar, chorus, chbr orch, 1949

Lieder: Lieder aus Berlin (Butting), op.47, chorus, 1946; 5 ernste Lieder, op.48, chorus, 1946; Die 18 Tage, op.49, chorus, 1946; 3 Spottlieder, op.50, chorus, 1946; 4 Lieder und ein Nachwort (J.R. Recher, H. Zinner, W. Herzfelde, Butting), op.105, Bar, pf, 1962

chamber and solo instrumental

5 or more insts: Str Qnt no.1, op.10. 1915; Qnt, op.22, ob, pf qt, 1921; Spiel, op.30, 5 wind, 1925; Hauskonzert bei Langners, op.65, fl, vn, vc, pf duet, 1949; Festschrift für Bach, op.77, fl, eng hn, bn, str trio, 1950; La serenata gentile, op.80, 8 insts, 1951; 4 Sätze, op.101, wind qnt, 1960

Str qts: no.1, op.8, 1914; no.2, op.16, 1917; no.3, op.18, 1918; no.4, op.20, 1919; Kleine Stücke, op.26, 1925; no.5, op.53, 1947; Musik für Feierstunden, op.85, 1952; no.6, op.90, 1953; no.7, op.95, 1956; no.8, op.96, 1957; no.9, op.97, 1957; no.10, op.118, 1971

Other works: 3 Stücke, op.11, vn, 1915; Duo, op.32, vn, pf, 1926; Pf Trio, op.54, 1947; Kleine Kammermusik, op.70, fl, eng hn, vn, vc, 1949; Hausmusik, op.75, 2 rec, gui, 1950; Schnürchen und Steffen, 1950: op.79a, rec, pf; op.79b, 3 rec; 8 Gedichte, op.83, 2 vn, 1951; 3 Sätze, op.86, str trio, 1952; Schulmusik, op.119a, 2 vn, vc, 1971; Hausmusik, op.119b, fl, C-cl, C-tpt, gui, 1971; Vorschulmusik, op.119c, fl, accdn, side drum, 1971

Pf: Fantasie, op.28, 1924; 4 Klavierstücke, op.31, 1925; 15 kurze Klavierstücke, op.33, 1927; 2 Vortragsstücke, op.46, 1946; Spielereien, op.74, 1950; Sonata, op.82, 1951; Sonatine für Gretl, op.87, 1952; 2 Toccaten, op.88, 1953; Diarium, op.93, 1956; Klavierstücke, op.102, 1960, op.111, 1966

Principal publishers: Hofmeister, Internationale Musikbibliothek (Leipzig), Sikorski, Universal

WRITINGS

Articles and reviews in Sozialistische Monatsheft, Jg.31–6 (1925–30)

‘Aufgaben der Musik im Rundfunk’, Die Sendung, v (1929), 245

‘Der Komponist über Rundfunkmusik’, Anbruch, xi (1929), 86–7

‘Lehrgänge für Rundfunkkomposition’, Deutsche Rundfunk, vii (1929)

‘Rundfunkmusik: wie wir sie brauchen’, Die Musik, xxi (1928–9), 443–7

‘Music of and for the Radio’, MM viii/3 (1930–31), 15–19

‘Musikinterpretation im Rundfunk’, Melos, ix (1930), 128–32

‘Das Verhältnis des schaffeneden Musikers zum Rundfunk’, Kunst und Technik, ed. L. Kestenberg (Berlin, 1930), 279–98

Musikgeschichte die ich miterlebte (Berlin, 1955)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Schulze: ‘Die Klavierwerke Max Buttings’, MG, v (1955), 381–3

W. Vetter: ‘Max Butting als schaffender Musiker der Gegenwart’, MG, xiii (1963), 604–11

D. Brennecke: ‘Max Butting: die Musik und die Menschen: Aufsätze, Vorträge und ästhetische Überlegungen eines Komponisten’, Sinn und Form, xx (1968), 1345–68

E. Krause: ‘“Geburtstagsmusik”: Max Butting zum Achtzigsten’, MG, xviii (1968), 668–70

D. Brennecke: Das Lebenswerk Max Buttings (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1973)

N. Grosch: Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Bonn, 1998)

NILS GROSCH

Büttner, Erhard

(b Römhild, Thuringia, bap. 19 July 1592; d Coburg, 19 Jan 1625). German composer and writer on music. On 3 December 1616, while still studying at Jena University, he applied for the post of Kantor at the city school at Coburg; he assumed the position before the end of the year and kept it until his death. He was highly respected as both Kantor and composer, though his way of life was by no means irreproachable: this dichotomy is summed up in the description of him as ‘Vir optimae artis, pessimae vitae’ in a document of 1625 at the Morizkirche. He committed suicide because he had been unfaithful to his wife (whom he had married on 8 February 1619). An estimate of his achievement as a composer is impossible, since virtually all his works – most of which are occasional pieces for princely birthdays, weddings and funerals – survive only in individual parts. His educational textbook Rudimenta musica is thus all the more deserving of attention. About a quarter of this very instructive volume is devoted to the most important rules of music. The rest consists of 46 bicinia, some based on chorales, the others freely composed. Of these, 33 (19 of them canons) are by Büttner himself and show that he was an excellent contrapuntist; in those based on chorales he showed a preference for melodies from the time of the Reformation. Melchior Franck, who was Kapellmeister at the Coburg court and whom Büttner doubtless knew, is represented by seven hitherto unknown bicinia. When he published a wedding song in 1617 and another in 1618 he included one by Büttner on each occasion.

WORKS

Psalm cxxvii, 8vv (Coburg, ?1617)

Teutsches Echo … in dreyen Chören (Wer Gottes Wort flussig lehret) (Coburg, 1618)

Echo (Cum bonus oeconomus), ?3vv, inc. (Coburg, 1618)

Trostgesänglein (Ach wie elend), 4vv (Coburg, ?1619)

D.C.F.S.G. Fewriges Stossgebetlein, 4vv (Coburg, 1622)

Herr Gott mein Jammer hat ein End, 6vv (Coburg, 1622)

Musicalische Glückwunschung (Komm mein Freund), 4vv (Coburg, ?1623)

2 songs, 4vv (n.p., n.d.)

1 sacred song, 5vv (n.p., n.d.)

2 wedding songs, 5, 8vv, 1617²³, 1618¹⁸

WRITINGS

Rudimenta musica oder deutscher und deutlicher Unterricht vor die jenigen Knaben, … mit etlichen Biciniis vermehret (Coburg, 1623, 2/1625)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GerberNL

WaltherML

J.P. Hönn: Sachsen-Coburgische Historie, ii (Leipzig and Coburg, 1700), 251

J.E. Schirmer: Geschichte des Hochwürdigen Ministerii der Stadt Coburg von der Reformation bis auf unsere Zeiten (MS, D-Cs, c1780), 582–3

KURT GUDEWILL/DOROTHEA SCHRÖDER

Büttner, Hieronim.

See Wietor, Hieronim.

Büttner, Jacob.

See Bittner, Jacob.

Button & Whitaker.

English music publishers. They were active in London in the 19th century. S.J. Button, a bookseller, was a junior partner with Thomas Purday in the firm of Thompson in London. They directly succeeded Henry Thompson in about 1805 as Purday & Button (from about 1807, Button & Purday), and in 1808 the firm was joined by the organist and composer John Whitaker (b 1776; d London, 4 Dec 1847) to become Button & Whitaker. Besides republishing works originally issued by the Thompson family, such as Apollonian Harmony, the firm produced great quantities of popular songs, small volumes of flute music, collections of glees and country dances, and books of sacred music such as the two volumes entitled The Seraph (1818), edited by Whitaker. From about 1814 to 1819 the firm was variously known as Button, Whitaker & Beadnell, Button, Whitaker & Co., or Button & Co., and from 1819 as Whitaker & Co. The business ceased in 1824 and the stock and premises were sold by auction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humphries-SmithMP

KidsonBMP

J.D. Brown and S. Stratton: ‘Whitaker, John’, British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897)

D. Dawe: Organists of the City of London, 1666–1850 (Padstow, 1983)

FRANK KIDSON/PETER WARD JONES

Buttstett, Franz Vollrath

(b Erfurt, 2 April 1735; d Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 7 May 1814). German composer and organist, probably the grandson of Johann Heinrich Buttstett. Some uncertainty exists about this relationship because his Catholic baptismal record lists his father as Johann Samuel, a ‘soldier’, and his mother as Josepha, born Schaar. J.H. Buttstett’s son Johann Samuel, however, was baptized as Protestant in the Erfurt Reglerkirche and is known to have married Anna Barbara Brückner in the Predigerkirche, where he was organist. This apparent conflict in the facts connecting Franz Vollrath to Johann Heinrich may be explained by a second marriage for Johann Samuel, by which time (between 1730 and 1735) he had changed profession and had been converted to Catholicism. After his parents’ early death, Franz Vollrath was brought up by an uncle, Johann Andreas Buttstett, J.H.’s eldest son. For a brief period in 1756 he is believed to have been a pupil of J.F. Doles in Leipzig (himself a former pupil of J.S. Bach). In May 1756 he became organist at Weikersheim an der Tauber and, three years later, married Margarete Eleonore Adami, daughter of a pastor in Rothenburg. In 1766 he applied for the position as successor to the organist Anschütz at the Jakobskirche in Rothenburg, where he moved in the following year. While waiting for the position to be vacated Buttstett was supported by the city council and composed a large amount of music. In 1772 he became assistant to the 84-year-old Anschütz and, finally, in 1776 he gained the position. Almost all of his large output is lost; what remains indicates a gifted composer successfully writing in the pre-Classical, transitional period. His cantatas are similar in style to those of Telemann and Graun. Three extant keyboard sonatas (of more than 40 written as solo and accompanied sonatas) are interesting examples of the integration of galant and empfindsam components of musical style, and suggest a pre-Classical idiom which was extensively developed in the music of C.P.E. Bach and Georg Benda.

WORKS

1 Jg. grosse Musiken [cant cycle], 4vv, insts, 1773, frag. (36 cants) D-RB; thematic index in Kern

Choral-Buch gestellt von F.V. Buttstett, 1792–3, RB; 33 melodies in Schmidt (1928)

1 Jg. Communionsmusiken, 4vv, insts, 1788, frag. RB; thematic index in Kern

Lob, Ehr und Preis sei Gott, cant, 4vv, insts, RB; see Kern

Qnt, 2 cl, 2 hn, bn, vle, 1793; frag. discovered Vienna, 1922, according to Schmidt (1928), location unknown

3 sonatas, hpd, in Oeuvres mêlées, pt 9 (Nuremberg, 1761–2), pt 10 (Nuremberg, 1764); 2 kbd works, 2 songs in Blumenstrauss für Klavierliebhaber, i–ii (Speyer, 1782): thematic index in Kern

Lost works cited in F.V. Buttstett, Verzeichnis derer in der Hauptkirche zu St Jakob befindlichen Kirchenmusik und Instrument (MS, 1774, ?RB), see Kern: 1 Passionmusik (J.A. Lehmus), 4vv, insts, 1770; 1 Jg. grosse Musiken, 4vv, insts, 1773 [see above]; 1 Jg. Communionsmusiken, 4vv, insts, 1778 [see above]; 1 Jg. Gassengesang vor die Schüler, 4vv, 1788; 1 Jg. Oden, 4vv, n.d.; 1 Jg. Figural-Vespern, 4vv, n.d.

Lost works cited in Schmidt (1905); cants with German and Latin texts; 2 orats; Latin psalms and motets; sinfonias; concs. for vn, fl, and kbd with orch; qts; trios; 12 pieces for wind insts; dances; lieder; 40 sonatas, hpd, vn acc.; 1 fantasie, kbd; 12 choral variations, org, cl/fl/cornett/trbn; 200 preludes, org; 20–30 postludes, org; 12 fugues, org

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NewmanSCE

E. Schmidt: Zur Geschichte des Gottesdienstes und der Kirchenmusik in Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Rothenburg, 1905)

E. Schmidt: Die Geschichte des evangelischen Gesangbuches der ehemaligen freien Reichsstadt Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Rothenburg, 1928)

H. Kern: Franz Vollrath Buttstett (Würzburg, 1939)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Buttstett [Buttstädt, Buttstedt], Johann Heinrich

(b Bindersleben, nr Erfurt, 25 April 1666; d Erfurt, 1 Dec 1727). German composer and theorist. He was one of four children of Johann Henricus Buttstett (d 25 Dec 1702), pastor in Bindersleben, who had been educated at the University of Erfurt. He received his early education in Bindersleben, and at the age of 15 was sent to the Erfurt Ratsschule. As early as 1678 he began to study with Johann Pachelbel, organist at the Erfurt Predigerkirche. Buttstett's first appointment as organist was in 1684 at the Reglerkirche, where he also taught in the church school. In 1687 he held positions as organist and Latin teacher at the Kaufmannskirche and school, and in July of that year he married Martha Lämmerhirt of Erfurt, a distant cousin of J.S. Bach's mother. Their marriage produced ten children between 1688 and 1704, among whom was Johann Samuel, probably the father of Franz Vollrath Buttstett. In 1690 Pachelbel vacated his post at the Predigerkirche; it was held until 1691 by another of his students, Nicolaus Vetter, and then (on 19 July) became Buttstett's. In this appointment Buttstett became the leading organist of the city; he received the title of Ratsorganist in 1693, and began a distinguished 36-year career of performing and composing keyboard and vocal music. He also held an organ position at one of the Erfurt Catholic churches and wrote keyboard music as well as masses for the Catholic service. Like Pachelbel, Buttstett gathered around him a number of organ students, including the great lexicographer, organist and composer Johann Gottfried Walther.

Buttstett's life and career were typical of many late 17th-century German musicians. He was an erudite and talented figure who shared the Thuringian-Saxon background and training of several generations of composers living in this central but somewhat isolated region of Germany. His keyboard compositions, which show the influence of Pachelbel, include a number of chorale preludes and one volume of keyboard music, the Musicalische Clavier-Kunst, containing a wide variety of preludes, fugues, ricercares, dance movements and an aria with 12 variations. He failed to realize his plan to publish several such volumes of keyboard music, even though he stated that he had available in manuscript hundreds of large fugues and ricercares, as well as 1000 fughettas, short preludes and all kinds of fantasies, as these works were used in the Catholic service. None of this music seems to be extant.

As important as his keyboard works are as examples of the continuing influence of Pachelbel's musical style in central Germany, Buttstett's greatest significance to music history is contained in his remarkable published disagreement with Johann Mattheson. In Ut, mi, sol, re, fa, la, tota musica et harmonia aeterna (1716), Buttstett attacked the first major treatise of Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713). In that work Mattheson gave wide-ranging musical information which he hoped would serve to educate the galant homme, the composer and musician, the amateur as well as professional, who sought to learn everything about the new art of music – that is, the 18th-century styles of French and Italian secular music. As such, Mattheson's work was the first important treatise in Germany to sever all connection with traditional German theory of the past. Buttstett, however, stood on the opposite side of the musical world, and believed that only in the past could musical truth be found. For this reason, he condemned almost every facet of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre: first and foremost, as the title to his work implies, he derided Mattheson's disparagement of Guido of Arezzo and his system of solmization. He criticized the abandonment of the Greek modes, the glorification of the ear as the sole judge of musical questions, and what he thought were Mattheson's incorrect concepts of musical styles. In sum, he believed that Mattheson was leading musicians to chaos by abandoning the rules of music which had been valid for more than 100 years. Buttstett, however, was no match for his famous Hamburg colleague who in 1717 published Das beschützte Orchestre, in which he countered most of Buttstett's arguments with devastating satire and often brilliant logic. Music historians generally have failed to evaluate correctly this extensive polemic drama (Blume is a notable exception). For what occurs in the volumes by Mattheson and Buttstett is the last struggle of German conservative, traditional music theory, with its noble and decisive 17th-century heritage inevitably defeated on the battleground of the 18th century, where new music from Italy as well as France had compelled such writers as Mattheson to formulate an entirely new theoretical approach to the understanding of their art.

WORKS

Musicalische Clavier-Kunst und Vorraths-Kammer, hpd (Leipzig, 1713)

Opera prima sacra, bestehend aus 4 neukomponierten Missen, chorus, insts (Erfurt, 1720), lost

Missa a 6 voci, SATB, 2 vn, bc, 1695, score and parts; Missa I, SATB, 2 vn, bn, bc, score; Ein Mensch in seinem Leben, cantata fragment: all D-Bsb

36–42 chorale preludes, org, in autograph J.G. Walther, Bsb; also LEm, NL-DHgm, and elsewhere; see MGG1

2 marches, hpd, in Ut, mi, sol (Erfurt, 1716); many fugues, ricercares, fughettas, preludes, fantasies, all for kbd, announced in Musicalische Clavier-Kunst, lost

theoretical works

Ut, mi, sol, re, fa, la, tota musica et harmonia aeterna (Erfurt, 1716)

Der wider das Beschützte Orchestre ergangenen öffentlichen Erklärung (Erfurt, 2/1718) [1st edn lost]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FrotscherG

MGG1 (F. Blume)

WaltherML

E. Ziller: J.H. Buttstett (Halle, 1934/R)

B.C. Cannon: Johann Mattheson, Spectator in Music (New Haven, CT, 1947/R)

W. Blankenburg: ‘Der Titel und das Titelbild von J.H. Buttstetts Schrift’, Mf, iii (1950), 64–6

E. Ziller: ‘Der Erfurter Organist Johann Heinrich Buttstädt: 1666–1727’, Beiträge zur Musikforschung (Hildesheim, 1971)

W. Blankenburg: ‘Zum Titelbild von Johann Heinrich Buttstetts Schrift UT–MI–SOL–RE–FA–LA, tota musica et harmonia aeterna (1716)’, Heinrich Sievers zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. G Katzenberger (Tutzing, 1978), 21–8

H. Joelson-Strohbach: ‘Nachricht von verschiedenen verloren geblaubten Handschriften mit barocker Tastenmusik’, AMw, xliv (1987), 91–140

J. Lester: Between Modes and Keys: German Theory 1592–1802 (Stuyvesant, NY, 1989)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Buttykay, Ákos (de Gálszécs et Buttka)

(b Halmi [now Halmeu], Romania, 22 July 1871; d Debrecen, 26 Oct 1935). Hungarian composer and pianist. From 1885 he studied the piano with Tomka and Székely and composition with Benkő at the National Conservatory, Budapest. In deference to parental wishes he read law (1888–94), but concurrently studied the piano with Thomán and composition with Herzfeld at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music. He went to Weimar in 1894 to complete his piano studies under Stavenhagen, and he appeared in Berlin and elsewhere as a concert pianist. In 1903 he returned to Budapest, where he taught the piano at the Academy until 1923. His music follows French and Italian Romantic models, with little trace of Hungarian material. Considerable technical skill is evident in his counterpoint and harmony, but his orchestration is often over-emphatic and his forms excessively extended. He devoted a lot of time to composing operettas for his wife, Emmy Kosáry.

WORKS

(selective list)

Operettas: A bolygó görög [The Vagrant Greek] (A. Pásztor), op.15, Budapest, 16 Oct 1905; A csibészkirály [The Urchin King] (L. Széll), op.16, Budapest, 29 Feb 1907; Ezüst sirály [Silver Seagull] (I. Földes), Budapest, 6 Feb 1920; Olivia hercegnő [Princess Olivia] (Földes and A. Gábor), Budapest, 23 Dec 1922; A császárné apródja [The Empress’s Page], Budapest, 24 March 1925; Itt a macska [Here’s the Cat]; Happy End; Sonne von Paris (E.B. Kosáry)

Other stage: A bűbájos malom [The Fairy Mill] (ballet), 1895; A harang [The Bell] (legend), 1907; Hamupipőke [Snow White] (fairytale, K. Bakonyi), op.20, Budapest, 26 Oct 1912; Hertha (ballet, F. Korányi)

Orch: Fantasy, op.6, pf, orch, perf. 1897; Sym. no.1, c, op.8, perf. 1900, rev. perf. 1907; Scherzo, b, op.9, perf. 1898; Sym. no.2 ‘Salammbó’, d, op.11, perf. 1907; Ünneprontók [Feast Spoilers], sym. poem after J. Arany, op.12, perf. 1905; Szvit magyar stilben, e, perf. 1900; Vn Conc., b, op.19, 1909; Magyar rapszódia, perf. 1931

Other inst: Valse-caprice and Scherzo, op.1, pf; Sonata no.1, a, op.10, vn, pf, 1907–8; Sonata appassionata, op.13, pf; 5 Variations on ‘Hej dinomdánom’, op.14, pf; Bölcsődal [Lullaby], pf, ?1900; Capriccio, d, vn, pf, 1928; Sonata no.2, f, vn, pf, perf. 1930

Songs: 3 Songs, op.2 (J.W. von Goethe, J. Pikler); Ich kann es nicht, op.3 (Rolletschek); Mailied, op.4 (Goethe); 4 Lieder, op.5 (H. Heine etc.); 2 Lieder, op.7 (Heine, N. Lenau)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Papp: Arcképek a magyar zenevilágból [Portraits of Hungarian musical life] (Budapest, 1926)

Obituary, Országos Magyar királyi ‘Liszt Ferenc’ zeneművészeti főiskola évkönyve [Yearbook of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music] (Budapest, 1936), 35–6

L. Koch: ‘Buttykay Ákos’, Magyar zenei szemle, i (1941), 212–16

JOHN S. WEISSMANN

Butz [Putz, Buz].

German family of organ builders. They were active mainly in Tyrol, Bavaria, Carinthia and Upper Austria. Andreas Butz (b Rosswangen, Württemburg; d Passau, 25 Feb 1657) was living in Salzburg in 1612 but in 1613 he was given the freedom of Passau where he established his workshop, initially with Matthias Aigner who was already a citizen of Passau. On 29 January 1621 the prince-bishop of Brixen (now Bressanone) bestowed on him a coat of arms with three white organ pipes on blue ground. He is known to have built organs in the following places: Franciscan Church, Schwaz (1613; with Matthias Aigner); Benedictine abbey, Tegernsee (1614); Maria Saal (1617); Franciscan Church, Bozen (Bolzano) (1618; with Matthias Aigner); St Andreas, Lienz (1618); parish church, Villach (1619); Clarissan church, Brixen (1620); parish church, Brixen (1621); Benedictine abbey, Kremsmünster (1624 and 1628); Maria-Hilf, Passau (1628); collegiate church, Innichen (San Cándido) (1629; with Niclas Lembricht); parish church, Innichen (1630); Premonstratensian abbey, Schlägl, near Rohrbach (1634-8; with Johann Freund; restored 1986–90); Rohrbach (1636); Aigen, near Rohrbach (1637); Deggendorf (1637); Augustinian abbey, Reichersberg (1638). In 1639 he installed a Hornwerk in the Benedictine abbey, Lambach.

Organs by Andreas Butz used the following specifications: the Great Organ had a chorus of 8', 4', 3', 2' (4', 3', 2' in the treble, sometimes doubled), Mixture, Cimbel, Copl 8', Spitzflöte 4' (possibly an open wooden flute 8', Copl 4', or a reed). The Choir had a chorus of 4', 2', 1½' (Cimbel); Copl 8', Spitzflöte 2'. The Pedal chorus was based on 16', possibly completed by Posaune 8'. An essential component of all Butz organs was the tremulant. The cases, equipped with doors, show three, five or seven flats, the towers being crowned by broken pediments and statues.

Jacob Butz (d Tulln), son of Andreas, maintained the organs built by his father in Schlägl and Kremsmünster. Apparently he also built stringed keyboard instruments. He built organs at Thalheim bei Wels (1659); Burghausen (1668); the pilgrimage church, Adlwang (1668); Pettenbach (1674); St Peter and St Johannes Berchtesgaden (1685); Münzkirchen, near Schärding (1689). A positive organ of unknown origin, built by Jacob Butz in 1680, is now in Reichersberg. Martin Butz (b Passau, 10 Nov 1666; d Passau, 9 March 1704), son of Jacob Butz, was of less importance: he is known only to have carried out repairs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Senn: ‘Andreas Putz: Beiträge zu seiner Tätigkeit in Tirol’, Acta Organologica, viii (1974), 33–51

J. Saam: ‘Die alten Passauer Orgelbauer’, Ostbairische Grenzmarken, xix (1977), 108–37

A. Reichling: Orgellandschaft Südtirol (Bolzano, 1982)

R.G. Frieberger: Der Orgelbau in Oberösterreich im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck, 1984)

R.G. Frieberger, ed.: Die gross Orgel in der Stiftskirche Schlägl (Innsbruck, 1989)

ALFRED REICHLING

Buus, Jacques [Jakob]

(b ?Ghent, c1500; d Vienna, 18 Aug–1 Sept 1565). Flemish composer. His early career may have been in France, for Moderne published some chansons and a motet by him between 1538 and 1543. He travelled to Venice, probably arriving after 9 January 1541, for the competition for the post of second organist at S Marco. This he won and was installed on 15 July 1541. Most of his compositions were published and probably composed during the nine years he remained at the basilica. However, continuing ties with France are suggested not only by Moderne's publications of his music, but also by Antonfrancesco Doni's request of April 1550, that Buus write to some musicians in France to obtain a list of all the music printed there. Moreover, a collection of chansons spirituelles (1550) and a volume of chansons (1543), the latter printed at his own expense and dedicated to the Protestant Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara, strongly suggest Calvinist leanings on the part of the composer. In the autumn of 1550, finding difficulty supporting his family and in debt, Buus obtained a four-month leave of absence from S Marco, ostensibly to return to Flanders. Late that year, however, he was at Vienna in the court chapel of the emperor, Ferdinand I, to whose son, the Archduke Ferdinand II, Buus had dedicated his 1550 volume of Protestant chansons. An attempt by the Venetian procurators, in March 1551, to make him return to S Marco was unsuccessful, and he remained in Vienna until his death.

The 18 ricercares published in partbooks are the longest in existence, one of them running to 358 breves (bk 1, no.6). There are three types: monothematic, polythematic with different points, varying in number from three to 11, and polythematic with the reappearance of earlier points. Buus's ricercares are two to three times longer than Willaert's or Segni's, and have a clearer profile and individuality in their points of imitation. His polythematic pieces also repeat their points more often, and up to 20 entries of a single point are not uncommon. No.8 of book 2 is an extreme case, presenting its first point 56 times and its seventh 43 times. Buus also more often used the ‘learned’ Netherlandish contrapuntal devices: augmentation, diminution, treatment of a point both as a stationary and as a migrant cantus firmus (bk 1, no.7, first point), inversion, and cantus-firmus treatment, both inverted and augmented (bk 1, no.8, first point). In a keyboard version of one of the ricercares, embellishment occurs mostly in the top voice, lessening progressively from alto to bass. The added turns, short trills and passing notes correspond to those found in the diminution treatises of the period, particularly Ganassi's Fontegara of 1535. Part-writing is treated more freely in the keyboard version, creating a thinner texture in many places. The general stylistic resemblance of the other three keyboard ricercares to this one suggests that they too had partbook models, at present unknown.

19 four-voice motets show strong influence by Gombert, and treat both their biblical texts and their Gregorian melodies very freely. Eight of the 1543 chansons are parodies of chansons by Sermisy, Sandrin and Gombert, among others. In the chansons of 1550 he reshaped existing melodies and then treated them with imitative entries, making a dense texture with virtually seamless counterpoint.

WORKS

vocal

Primo libro de [19] moteti, 4vv (Venice, 1549)

5 other motets in 1539⁵, 1546¹⁰, 1555¹¹, 1556⁹, 1564³

Further motets in D-Rp 848, 867

Il primo libro di [27] canzoni francese, 6vv (Venice, 1543); 1 ed. H.M. Brown, Theatrical Chansons of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1963)

Libro primo delle [21] canzoni francese, 5vv (Venice, 1550)

Chansons in 1538¹⁷, 1540¹⁶, 1541⁸, 1543¹⁴, 1544²², D-Rp 940/1; 7 ed. in SCC, xxv (1993), xxvi (1993), xxviii (1993), 1 ed. F. Malipiero, Antonfrancesco Doni: Dialogo della musica (Vienna, 1965), 1 ed. in Cw, lxi (1957)

1 madrigal, 4vv, 1542¹⁷

instrumental

[10] Recercari da cantare et sonare, libro primo, a 4 (Venice, 1547) [also in I-Fn Magl.XIX.107, P-Cug 48, dated 1559]; ed. T.D. Schlee: Jacob Buus: Orgelwerke, II (Vienna, 1983)

Secondo libro di [8] recercari, a 4 (Venice, 1549); ed. in IIM, xviii (1993)

Intabolatura d'organo di [4] recercari, libro primo (Venice, 1549) [no.1 from Secondo libro, 1549, no.1]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

ReeseMR

H. Kraus: ‘Jacob Buus: Leben und Werke’, TVNM, xii (1926–8), 35–9, 81–96, 221–35

G. Sutherland: ‘The Ricercari of Jacques Buus’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 448–63

H.M. Brown: ‘The chanson spirituelle, Jacques Buus, and Parody Technique’, JAMS, xv (1962), 145–73

C.W. Young: ‘Keyboard Music to 1600, II’, MD, xvii (1963), 163–93, esp. 171

D. Kämper: Studien zur instrumentalen Ensemblemusik des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien, AnMc, no.10 (1970)

W. Breitner: Jacob Buus als Motettenkomponist (Tutzing, 1977)

H. COLIN SLIM

Buxheim Keyboard Manuscript [Buxheimer Orgelbuch]

(D-Mbs Mus.3725 (also Cim.352b)). See Sources of keyboard music to 1660, §2(iii).

Buxtehude, Dieterich

(b ?Helsingborg, c1637; d Lübeck, 9 May 1707). German or Danish composer and organist. He is best known as a composer of organ music, of which he was one of the most important composers before J.S. Bach. He also left equally impressive repertories of sacred vocal and instrumental ensemble music.

4. Sources, chronology and literature.

2. Vocal works.

3. Instrumental works.

KERALA J. SNYDER

1. Life.

No documents exist to verify the date and place of Buxtehude’s birth, and even his nationality has been disputed. The only contemporary information comes from a notice (in Nova literaria Maris Balthici) shortly after his death: ‘he recognized Denmark as his native country, whence he came to our region; he lived about 70 years’. Although his family must originally have come from the town of Buxtehude, south-west of Hamburg, his ancestors had settled at Oldesloe (now Bad Oldesloe) in the Duchy of Holstein early in the 16th century. His father, Johannes (1601/2–74), migrated from Oldesloe to the Danish province of Scania; his presence there as organist of the St Maria Kyrka in Helsingborg is documented for the year 1641. The hypothesis advanced by Pedersen and by Stahl (1951) that he could be identified with a German schoolmaster named Johannes, present in Oldesloe in 1638, and that Dieterich was therefore born in Oldesloe, appears questionable in the light of a review of the archives there. The death notice does not exclude Oldesloe as a birthplace, however, since Holstein was under Danish control at the time. In 1641 or 1642 Johannes moved across the sound to Elsinore, Denmark, to become organist of the St Olai Kirke, a position he held until his retirement in 1671. A son, Peiter, was born there to him and his wife, Helle Jespers Daater, in 1645; it is unknown whether Helle was also the mother of Dieterich. There were two daughters in the family, Anna and Cathrine, both presumably older than Dieterich.

Dieterich Buxtehude most likely attended the Latin School at Elsinore and received his music education from his father. In 1657 or 1658 he became organist at his father’s former church at Helsingborg and in 1660 moved back to Elsinore as organist of the Marienkirche, a German-speaking congregation. With the death of Franz Tunder on 5 November 1667 the position of organist of the Marienkirche at Lübeck, one of the most important in north Germany, became vacant. After several other organists had applied for the post and been rejected, Buxtehude was chosen on 11 April 1668. At the same time he was appointed Werkmeister, a post encompassing the duties of secretary, treasurer and business manager of the church; it carried a separate salary but at this period was given to the organist. Buxtehude became a citizen of Lübeck on 23 July 1668, and a few days later, on 3 August 1668, he married Anna Margarethe Tunder, the younger daughter of his predecessor. It is not known whether this was a condition of his employment, as it was to be with his successor, but the practice was not unusual at the time. Seven daughters were born of this union, four of whom survived to adulthood: Magdalena (or Helena) Elisabeth (b 1670), Anna Margreta (b 1675), Anna Sophia (b 1678) and Dorothea Catrin (b 1683). Buxtehude’s father joined him at Lübeck in 1673 and died there in 1674; his brother Peter (Peiter), a barber, followed in 1677.

Buxtehude’s official duties required him to play for the main morning service and the afternoon service on Sundays and feast days and for Vespers on the preceding afternoon. In addition to the customary preludes to the congregational chorales and the musical offerings of the choir, Buxtehude supplied music during Communion, often with the participation of instrumentalists or vocalists, or both, who were paid by the church. Part of his fame, however, rested on an activity totally outside his official church duties: his direction of the concert series known as the Abendmusiken (see Abendmusik). Tunder had given concerts in the church on weekdays, but Buxtehude moved them to five specific Sundays in the church year – the last two in Trinity and the second, third and fourth in Advent – and introduced the performance of sacred dramatic works in 1678, the same year as the inauguration of the Hamburg opera. Buxtehude’s Abendmusiken were in fact considered the equivalent of operas; Hinrich Elmenhorst, a librettist for the Hamburg opera, referred to them as such in 1688.

There is little evidence of travel, but a painting by Johannes Voorhout from 1674 (fig.1) documents his close friendship with the Hamburg organist Johann Adam Reincken and suggests frequent visits to Hamburg, where he would also have known Christoph Bernhard and Matthias Weckmann. His friendship with Johann Theile is attested by a poem that he contributed to Theile’s St Matthew Passion (Lübeck, 1673) and his help in financing the publication of Thiele’s masses (Wismar, 1673). The claim that Theile was Buxtehude’s teacher (J. Mattheson: Critica musica, ii, 1725/R) must be discounted in view of Buxtehude's greater skill in composition at that time. Poems by Buxtehude also appear in the Harmonologia musica (1702) of Andreas Werckmeister; it was Werckmeister who conveyed many of Buxtehude’s organ compositions to J.G. Walther, whose copies still exist. Buxtehude was also friendly with the Düben family in Stockholm; most of Buxtehude’s vocal music survives in the large manuscript collection (now at S-Uu) that the elder Gustaf Düben assembled.

Among the younger generation of organists, Nicolaus Bruhns was Buxtehude’s pupil, and Pachelbel dedicated his Hexachordum Apollinis (1699) to him. Mattheson and Handel visited him in Lübeck on 17 August 1703; Mattheson was being considered as a successor to him, but at the mention of the condition relating to marriage described above he quickly lost interest. The documentary evidence for Bach’s famous trip to Lübeck rests on the proceedings of the Arnstadt consistory of 21 February 1706, where it is noted that he ‘has been to Lübeck in order to learn one thing and another about his art’ and that he had requested a leave of four weeks but had stayed ‘about four times as long’. Thus he was probably present at the ‘extraordinary’ Abendmusik performances of 2 and 3 December 1705, commemorating the death of the Emperor Leopold I and the accession of Joseph I. Bach’s obituary confirms the length of his stay in Lübeck and the fact that he took Buxtehude, among others, as a model ‘in the art of the organ’. But Buxtehude’s role as the effective director of music for the city, commanding all genres of music except staged opera, may have inspired Bach as well.

Buxtehude was buried on 16 May 1707 in the Marienkirche beside his father and four daughters who had predeceased him. A successor agreeable to the ‘marriage condition’, J.C. Schieferdecker, had been serving as his assistant; he was appointed organist and Werkmeister on 23 June and married Anna Margreta Buxtehude on 5 September 1707.

2. Vocal works.

Although Buxtehude never held a position that required him to compose vocal music, his vocal works survive in greater number than do his keyboard or ensemble works. They cover an extremely wide range of texts, scoring, genres, compositional styles and length. Texts are found in four languages, and performing forces range from one voice with one instrument and continuo (buxwv64 and 98) to six choirs (buxwv113). The very freedom with which Buxtehude composed this music – as communion and vesper music in church services, for the Abendmusiken, for occasions such as weddings and funerals or perhaps on commission from Gustaf Düben (i) – may help to explain its great variety. And Buxtehude seems to have adapted his style to suit the tastes of his patrons and audience. Glimpses of a broad, popular style can be seen in a work such as Schwinget euch himmelan (buxwv96), whose text is directed towards the Lübeck business community, while he dedicated the highly refined, Latin Membra Jesu (buxwv75) to the connoisseur Düben.

German and Latin sacred texts, either biblical prose or strophic poetry, serve as the basis for the majority of these works, with German poetry predominating. Buxtehude usually followed well-established German tradition in setting the prose texts as sacred concertos and the poetic texts either as arias or, in the case of church hymns, as chorale settings of the melodies associated with them. He did not always keep these genres as separate as his predecessors had done, however. In Buxtehude’s works concerto and aria can come together in two distinct ways: he could extend one genre by bringing into one or more sections of a work stylistic attributes associated with the other, or he could juxtapose them as separate movements to form composite works that are now generally called cantatas. This term appears in none of the sources, however, and was used in the 17th century mainly with reference to secular music.

(i) Concertos.

Buxtehude drew all his German prose texts from the Luther Bible and most of his Latin texts from the Vulgate, with a strong preference in both cases for excerpts from psalms. In addition there are three non-biblical Latin texts (buxwv11, 83, and 94) in a highly subjective, sometimes mystical, devotional prose which was a popular element of both Catholic and Protestant piety in the 17th century. In setting prose texts as vocal concertos Buxtehude usually followed the procedure, inherited from the motet, of dividing the text into short phrases and giving each a new musical motif closely tied to the words. The musical sections thus generated are often strongly contrasting, but they remain dependent parts of a larger whole and cannot be considered separate movements. The prevailing style is the concertato, where voice or voices and instruments, or voices alone with continuo, toss these word-bound musical motifs back and forth in a manner ultimately derived from the Venetian polychoral style (e.g. buxwv49). Sections of arioso are often introduced as well, and changes of metre provide additional contrast. Examples of concertos with sections in a more lyrical aria style can be found among both the German works (e.g. buxwv71, 73 and 98) and those with Latin texts (e.g. buxwv12 and 64), especially those with non-biblical texts, such as buxwv83, which approaches the style of the Italian secular cantata.

(ii) Arias.

The aria is the central genre within Buxtehude’s vocal output and is found both singly and in composite works. All texts are strophic, most of them in German and many from 17th-century hymnals. His favourite poets were Johann Rist, Ernst Christoph Homburg, Johann Scheffler (also known as Johann Angelus Silesius), Heinrich Müller, and Ahasverus Fritszch. His choice of these poems, many of them on topics of love for Jesus and longing for heaven, has raised the question of whether Buxtehude was of Pietist persuasion (see Geck, 1965). But although he may have shared a personal piety with these authors, he could not have espoused the Pietist programme of Lutheran church reform as first set forth by Theophil Grossgebauer in 1661, which criticized the use of Latin texts, italianate concerted style, artful organ music and festive music performed during the distribution of communion (see Snyder, 1987, and Irwin, 1993). Many of Buxtehude’s arias betray their roots in the sacred songbooks (e.g. buxwv105), with pure strophic form, a syllabic or paired-note declamation of the text and a strongly periodic phrase structure. Unlike the songbooks, however, Buxtehude’s arias always call for instrumental participation, either in ritornellos or for concertato interjections. And although the sacred song and aria is often considered to be a genre for solo voice, Buxtehude’s arias are more often set for a small or large ensemble of singers and instrumentalists.

The formal range in Buxtehude’s treatment of strophic poetry is vast. At one end of the scale is pure strophic form, which is found in all the wedding arias and in some of the sacred arias as well, particularly within cantatas. Most of his arias, however, are expanded in some way, as varied strophic form, completely through-composed or a combination of both. Works in varied strophic form contain changes in the music from strophe to strophe while still maintaining an overall unity and highlighting the strophic nature of the text in some way, with an unvarying strophic bass (e.g. buxwv58 and the arias in buxwv75), a ritornello or sometimes a vocal refrain. Although the scoring may change, the metre is constant throughout, and one or more strophes of music recur as the piece progresses. Of the settings of strophic texts where the melody is completely through-composed, some are highly unified by means of a ritornello and/or a homogeneous style (e.g. buxwv84), and a few show concerto-like sectional contrast that does not always correspond to the strophic structure (e.g. buxwv87). A small group approach the cantata in their juxtaposition of concerto and aria styles (e.g. buxwv22). Here the first strophe is a closed section for all the voices in concertato style, with the succeeding strophes set as an aria for solo voices, unified by a ritornello or a refrain. A closing concertato section uses the final strophe or an appended ‘Amen’ or ‘Alleluia’, or both.

(iii) Chorale settings.

Although in purely poetic terms a chorale text is identical to a strophic poem, there is an important musical difference in that it is usually identified with a specific melody, and with only a few exceptions Buxtehude used this as a cantus firmus. Four different compositional styles can be seen in his chorale settings: the chorale concerto and the chorale sinfonia, both inherited from earlier generations, the concertato chorale harmonization and the transformation of the choral melody into aria style.

In Buxtehude’s chorale concertos (e.g. buxwv32) the voices and instruments engage in extensive concertato interchange as equal partners and the texture is often quite contrapuntal, whereas in the chorale sinfonia (e.g. the opening strophe of buxwv41) the instruments predominate while a single voice sings the unadorned cantus firmus. The concertato chorale harmonization represents a grafting of the instrumental interjections characteristic of the concerto on to the four-part chorale harmonizations found in hymnals; it is Buxtehude’s most characteristic form of chorale treatment for voices. Most of them contain two to eight chorale strophes that vary only slightly from one to the next. The degree to which the instrumental ensemble breaks into the presentation of the chorale varies from slightly (e.g. buxwv103) to extensively, as in buxwv10 and 52. Transformations of the chorale Jesu meine Freude into aria style are found in buxwv60, as a concertato aria for bass and instruments in versus 3 and as continuo arias for soprano in versus 2 and 5. This work, like buxwv21, 41, 78 and 100, approaches the cantata in its differentiation of separate strophes by means of style and scoring.

(iv) Cantatas.

Buxtehude combined independent movements in the different genres discussed above to form composite works that are now generally called cantatas. The concerto and the aria are by far the most important single genres among Buxtehude’s vocal compositions, and their combination to form the concerto-aria cantata also produces the largest number of works within the cantatas. Each of these cantatas begins with a concerto movement, usually preceded by an instrumental sonata; beyond this there is considerable formal variety. The aria, however, can always be perceived as the core of the cantata and is quite highly unified in either pure or varied strophic form. Concertato style almost always returns as a framing element at the end, usually by means of a simple repetition of the opening movement, sometimes with a movement on a different biblical text or an ‘Amen’ or ‘Alleluia’. Sometimes the concertato writing appears, in the manner of a rondo, between the strophes of the aria. All Buxtehude’s cantatas have German texts with the exception of Membra Jesu (buxwv75), a cycle of seven concerto-aria cantatas dedicated to Gustaf Düben in 1680. Only in isolated instances did Buxtehude combine chorale and aria (buxwv86) or concerto and chorale (buxwv29) to form a cantata, but there are four examples of the older mixed cantata, which combines all three elements (buxwv4, 34, 51 and 112). His method of building cantatas by drawing together these previously diverse elements was shared by many of his contemporaries, providing the foundation for the sacred cantata of the 18th century, with its addition of recitative set to madrigalesque poetry.

(v) Ciaccone.

Buxtehude composed six works (buxwv38, 57, 62, 69, 70 and 92) over an ostinato bass; except for the opening sinfonia of buxwv62 the ostinato is maintained rigorously throughout the work without variation or modulation. Four are designated ‘Ciaccona’ in their manuscript sources, and they include both concertos and arias, with prose and poetic texts. In one work (buxwv57) Buxtehude set a poetic text in the manner of the concerto. He also used ostinato basses in portions of other vocal works, most frequently in a final ‘Amen’ or ‘Alleluia’ section (e.g. buxwv3, 15, 89 and 96).

(vi) Dialogues.

Two works (buxwv111 and 112) are designated ‘Dialogus’ in their sources, and two others (buxwv36 and 61) likewise belong to this smaller dramatic form, with specific voice parts assigned to identified or implied characters, usually Jesus and the Soul. Like the ciaccona, this designation cuts across the other genres, including a concerto, two arias and a mixed cantata.

(vii) Miscellaneous vocal works.

A few pieces by Buxtehude do not fit well into any of the above categories. The music for his father’s funeral on 29 January 1674 (buxwv76) might be called a chorale-aria cantata, but it is more likely that its two parts were performed separately. The chorale setting was in fact composed earlier (in 1671) for another funeral, and in its extremely learned contrapuntal style it is unlike any other of Buxtehude’s chorale settings. It is modelled on a similar work by Chistoph Bernhard (see Snyder, 1980). The aria, to a text undoubtedly written by Buxtehude himself, is in simple strophic form with string accompaniment but is also more contrapuntal than any of his other arias. The Missa alla brevis (buxwv114) is Buxtehude’s only surviving work in the stile antico; its manuscript can be dated to c1675. These works in learned counterpoint, including the two canons (buxwv123–4) entered in autograph books, reflect Buxtehude’s friendship with Theile, Reincken and Bernhard in the early 1670s. Finally, Benedicam Dominum (buxwv113), scored for six choirs – two vocal and four instrumental – is his one extant contribution to the genre of the ‘colossal’ Baroque style.

(viii) Abendmusik.

From the oratorios that Buxtehude presented at his numerous Abendmusiken, three librettos are the only sure survivals: Die Hochzeit des Lamms, a two-part oratorio from 1678, and the two ‘extraordinary’ presentations of 1705, Castrum doloris and Templum honoris. The libretto for 1700, consisting of four programmes of shorter selections and a repeat of the music from the preceding New Year, is summarized in the literature but has been missing since World War II. The surviving librettos indicate that the oratorio-like Abendmusiken consisted of a mixture of choruses, recitatives, strophic arias and chorale settings, with considerable instrumental participation. The mixed programmes of 1700 were made up of arias, chorale settings and concertos; unfortunately, none of Buxtehude’s extant music is set to those specific texts.

The titles or themes from some other years are also known: in 1688 the subject was the prodigal son, and the catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs for spring 1684 listed the future publication of two works by Buxtehude described as Abendmusiken, Himmlische Seelenlust auf Erden über die Menschwerdung und Geburt unsers Heylandes Jesu Christi and Das Allerschröcklichste und Allererfreulichste, nemlich, Ende der Zeit und Anfang der Ewigkeit. Whether these were to be librettos or music and whether they were in fact published is unclear. Willi Maxton claimed to have found Das Allerschröcklichste in Uppsala in a set of anonymous parts for an oratorio beginning ‘Wacht! Euch zum Streit gefasset macht’, and he published an abridged arrangement of it in 1939 under the title Das jüngste Gericht (buxwvsuppl.3). Its authenticity as a work of Buxtehude became a subject of continued controversy, leading to Ruhle’s dissertation (1982), which includes a summary of the discussion, a complete libretto and an edition of those movements omitted by Maxton. Snyder’s hypothesis (1987, amplified in Walker, 1990) that Wacht! Euch zum Streit is the work that Buxtehude composed for the Abendmusiken of 1682 has thus far gone unchallenged.

3. Instrumental works.

(i) Keyboard music.

Buxtehude’s keyboard works fall into several distinct genres: praeludia, canzonas, ostinato works, chorale settings, suites, and secular variation sets. As was customary at the time, their sources do not name a particular keyboard instrument, but most of the praeludia and chorale settings and all three ostinato works require pedals (many of the praeludia are specifically designated pedaliter) and thus are presumably intended for the organ. The works in the remaining genres are all manualiter and could have been played on any keyboard instrument. If Buxtehude composed the canzonas primarily for instructional purposes, as apppears to be the case, he may have had the clavichord in mind, and keyboard suites and secular variation sets were often performed on quilled keyboard instruments. It is worth noting that the keyboard instrument specified for the continuo in Buxtehude’s published sonatas is the cembalo, or harpsichord. None of his manualiter compositions requires more than one manual.

The 52-stop organ that Buxtehude played in Lübeck had 15 stops in the pedal, more than in any of its three manual divisions; this included two 32' stops and a full complement of principals, mixtures and reeds. Thus it is not surprising to find that in his organ music the pedal goes far beyond what had been its traditional role – as slow harmonic support or bearer of the cantus firmus – to participate fully in the fabric of the music, including its share of virtuoso display, particularly in the pedaliter praeludia. Another characteristic of the north German organ was its Brustwerk and Rückpositiv divisions, featuring solo reeds and many upper partials which could be combined to produce a sharply differentiated melodic line. This type of sound is particularly well suited to a solo voice, such as highly ornamented cantus firmus, with the other voices played on another manual using a contrasting registration. If there are three accompanying voices, as in most of Buxtehude’s chorale preludes, the pedal becomes almost mandatory for the bass line. This tonal contrast between divisions naturally lent itself also to echo effects and to works with strong sectional contrasts, both of which are especially prominent in Buxtehude’s chorale fantasias.

(a) Praeludia.

Buxtehude’s praeludia (including a few works entitled ‘toccata’ or ‘praeambulum’, but none headed ‘Praeludium and Fuga’) form the heart of his repertory for organ, indeed of his works altogether. Their essence lies in the alternation of sections in a free, improvisatory and idiomatic keyboard style with sections in a structured, fugal style. They may contain one, two or three fugues, using a wide variety of styles and contrapuntal devices. The free sections, with which they invariably begin and which normally appear later in the piece, are composed in a dazzling array of textures and styles, from lengthy pedal points to fleeting semiquaver and even demisemiquaver scales and arpeggios, from pure chordal homophony through various stages of its decoration to imitative counterpoint and fugato subsections, from tonal stability to daring harmonic excursions. The subjects of the fugues are usually instrumental in character, with repeated notes, wide leaps and rests; some, indeed, are idiomatic to the pedal (e.g. buxwv137). Within a praeludium they are often related to one another in the manner of the variation canzonas inherited from Frescobaldi and Froberger, perhaps through Matthias Weckmann. Each fugue consists of a series of expositions, usually confined to entries in the tonic and dominant, with tonal answers predominating. Although Buxtehude makes frequent use of double counterpoint and stretto, there is very little episodic material or real modulation, these functions being fulfilled by the free sections between the fugues and the frequent dissolution of fugal procedure as they end.

With their wide variety of forms and multiplicity of styles, Buxtehude’s praeludia may appear improvisatory, and indeed the art of the north German organist lay chiefly in improvisation. Behind this appearance of freedom, however, careful planning can be detected, and their multiple sections are related to one another in often subtle ways. The Baroque concept of the stylus fantasticus, as discussed by Athanasius Kircher in 1650, can help to explain this seeming dichotomy:

The fantastic style is suitable for instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing; it is bound to nothing, neither to words nor to a melodic subject; it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues.

By the time Mattheson discussed this style in 1739, the emphasis had shifted to include the improvising performer as well as the composer, and formal fugues no longer had a proper place within it. Mattheson’s stylus fantasticus does not well describe Buxtehude’s praeludia as complete compositions, but it contains important information concerning the style and performance of their free sections: ‘now swift, now hesitating, now in one voice, now in many voices, now for a while behind the beat, without measure of sound, but not without the intent to please, to overtake and to astonish’.

(b) Canzonas.

Buxtehude’s canzonas, also entitled ‘canzon’, ‘canzonet’ and ‘fuga’, form the only genre among his keyboard works that is strictly contrapuntal. Marpurg used part of buxwv168 as an illustration of a counter fugue in his treatise on fugue, but on the whole they do not rise to the heights of the fugues of the praeludia in their contrapuntal art. Half of them are variation canzonas, the others single fugues, and they all have lively subjects, mainly in quavers and semiquavers. All manualiter works, they were probably composed as teaching pieces. Indeed, they continued to be used as such; Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber copied a portion of buxwv166 into his notebook at the age of 13.

(c) Ostinato works.

The three ostinato pieces (buxwv159–61) are among Buxtehude’s best-known works and exerted their influence on Brahms as well as on Bach. Here he took a form which was popular in Italy and south Germany but not in north Germany and made it into truly idiomatic pedaliter organ music. In all three pieces the pedal is used chiefly for the ostinato, thereby freeing both hands to execute more complex variations above it than can occur in a manualiter work. The formal design of the passacaglia (buxwv161) is particularly noteworthy: four sections, each containing seven variations of a seven-note ostinato, in the keys of D minor, F, A minor and D minor. Buxtehude also used ostinato sections to good effect within the praeludia (e.g. buxwv137 and 149).

(d) Chorale settings.

A speciality of the north German organist lay in the imaginative presentation of Lutheran chorales, and Buxtehude’s 47 chorale settings constitute the major part of his organ works. They fall into three groups – chorale variations, chorale fantasias and chorale preludes – each showing a distinctive approach to the chorale. Sets of chorale variations had been cultivated extensively by Sweelinck and Scheidt but do not figure very prominently in Buxtehude’s output. Consisting of only three or four verses, they are often restricted to the manuals alone and sometimes to only two voices (as in the traditional bicinium) and the cantus firmus frequently appears unornamented (e.g. buxwv213). In terms of variety and keyboard technique they do not match the variations of Pachelbel and Böhm. The variations on Auf meinen lieben Gott (buxwv179) form an exception; as a dance suite on a chorale tune, however, they were more likely intended for performance on the harpsichord.

The chorale fantasia is perhaps the most distinctive genre cultivated by the north German organists on the large instruments of the Hanseatic cities during the 17th century, particularly Scheidemann, Weckmann and Reincken in Hamburg and Tunder and Buxtehude in Lübeck. These enormous and virtuoso settings of a single chorale strophe are analogous in compositional method to vocal concertos: each phrase of the chorale is developed separately and extensively to form a highly sectionalized piece full of dramatic contrast (e.g. buxwv210 and 223). The four works based on chant (buxwv203–5 and 218) belong to this group as well. The term ‘chorale fantasia’ is a modern one but these works indeed demonstrate the stylus fantasticus, albeit in a distinctly Lutheran way. Kircher might not have accepted them into his style category on account of their adherence not only to a cantus firmus but also to its associated text, as exemplified in Buxtehude’s use in buxwv210 of a gigue fugue to project the affect of joy at the words ‘sweet wonderful deed’, followed by a chromatic countermelody in an allusion to the Crucifixion in the last line of the chorale Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein. And yet these works are as filled with fantasy as the pedaliter praeludia. If they have not found as much favour with modern players and audiences, it is perhaps because a thorough familiarity with the underlying chorale is essential to their appreciation.

The majority of Buxtehude’s surviving chorale settings, and among his most characteristic works, are chorale preludes, concise and expressive settings of one stanza of the chorale (e.g. buxwv184) in a single voice. Most of them are very similar in outward appearance: clearly intended for two manuals and pedal, the cantus firmus is set apart in the upper voice in a richly ornamented version, accompanied by three parts which are contrapuntal but not necessarily imitative. Beneath the surface, however, each is unique, eloquently laying out the unspoken text of the chorale by means of the extensive vocabulary of rhetorical figures available to the Baroque composer (see Reichert, 1994). In this group of works the organ comes closest to imitating the human voice; as Christoph Bernhard wrote in his singing treatise, ‘Cantar d’affetto pertains only to singers, because only they have a text; nevertheless, instrumentalists can also make use of it to a degree, if they know how to use and moderate their instruments with joyful or doleful harmony appropriate to them’. Buxtehude probably composed them to introduce the congregational singing in Lübeck, and they are his only organ works whose use within the liturgy is completely unproblematic.

(e) Suites and secular variation sets.

Both Walther and Mattheson bemoaned the fact that Buxtehude had never published any of his keyboard music. Mattheson (1739, p.130) specifically mentioned seven keyboard suites depicting the nature of the planets. These have never come to light, but there is one manuscript tablature (in DK-Kk) which contains 19 suites and six sets of secular variations ascribed to Buxtehude. The fact that two of the suites were actually composed by Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue (Paris, 1687) underlines the stylistic similarity of the German keyboard suite to French models, particularly in the use of style brisé. The suites are nearly all in the standard order allemande–courante–sarabande–gigue, with an occasional double. The courantes always begin as variations of the allemandes, as do some of the sarabandes; the gigues go their own way, often in a loose fugal style that is not nearly as structured as that of the numerous fugues in gigue rhythm found in the praeludia and canzonas. The suites are more conventional than most of Buxtehude’s organ music and do not match the individualized expression attained by Froberger. The secular variations, on the other hand, show a much greater interest in the variation process than can be seen in the organ music. La capricciosa (buxwv250), a set of 32 variations on the bergamasca, presents a virtuoso showpiece, layering dance upon dance by including variations in gigue, saraband and minuet rhythm.

(ii) Ensemble music.

Buxtehude’s only major publications during his lifetime were two sets of ensemble sonatas. A collection of sonatas for two or three violins, viola da gamba and continuo, announced for publication in 1684, is either lost or never appeared; it is listed in the same catalogue as the two Abendmusiken that have never been found. The two extant prints, from ?1694 and 1696, each contain seven sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord continuo, a scoring found in Germany, Austria and England but noticeably absent in Italy. These are sonatas a due, based on virtuoso and integrated writing for the violin and gamba. Although real trio texture sometimes occurs, the continuo line is more often a simplification of the gamba part. The structure of the sonatas is based on an alternation of tempo and texture, but this can take place either by means of tonally closed, independent movements or with sections that flow together; there is no standardization of their number, which ranges from three to 14. Half the sonatas have at least one ostinato movement, with the pattern remaining unvaried in the continuo bass. The gamba part consists sometimes of divisions on this bass, sometimes of an independent part above it. The contrapuntal movements are fugal in style but are usually in only two real parts; as a result there is much more episodic writing than in the organ fugues. The continuo bass is more likely to be independent in the slow, homophonic sections, many of which are transitional in nature; in their harmonic intensity these sections are often reminiscent of the transitions in his organ praeludia and of Rosenmüller’s sonatas of 1682. Kircher included sonatas among the genres associated with the stylus fantasticus, and Buxtehude’s sonatas embody it to an extent even greater than that seen in the organ praeludia, nowhere more so than in the 14 sections of buxwv257. By the time of their publication in the mid-1690s most Italian sonatas were normally cast in four movements, but Buxtehude’s are totally unpredictable. One can expect at least two orderly, structured sections within each sonata, but these might be a fugue, a variation set or a dance. Behind the improvisatory style of some sections and the seemingly haphazard overall arrangement, however, lie careful planning and organic unity.

The sonatas surviving in manuscript all appear to be earlier than those of opp.1 and 2. buxwv266, 269 and 271, scored for two violins, viola da gamba and continuo, may have belonged to the 1684 collection. Buxtehude’s reworking of buxwv273 (from the 1680s) as op.1 no.4 shows that he had experimented with the sonata-suite combination cultivated by Reincken, Becker and Erlebach but abandoned it in favour of the sonata alone, perhaps because he wished to avoid the predictability of the arrangement of dances in the suite.

4. Sources, chronology and literature.

Since Buxtehude published no keyboard music and, besides the sonatas, only a few occasional vocal works, the survival of the bulk of his works has depended on manuscript transmission, and it must be assumed that a considerable amount has been lost. The two principal sources for his vocal music were both compiled during his lifetime and with his knowledge. Gustaf Düben’s collection, which his son Anders von Düben (ii) gave to Uppsala University Library in 1732, contains 99 vocal works by Buxtehude in manuscript (fig.2). These include five autographs in German organ tablature (buxwv75, 78–9, 85 and 88), one in score (buxwv31), one in parts (buxwv36) and numerous other manuscripts that appear to have been copied by Düben and his assistants from loaned autographs. The other important source is the Lübeck tablature A373 (D-Bsb) comprising 20 vocal works and one fragment. The first nine pieces contain autograph insertions, and the source appears to have been prepared under Buxtehude’s direction, perhaps towards the end of his life. There is a remarkable absence of his vocal music from all the important central German manuscript collections and inventories of the period.

The situation is completely reversed with regard to the organ music. Here the sources are widespread, many of them being of central German provenance, yet there is not a single manuscript that can be closely identified with Buxtehude himself. He undoubtedly wrote his organ music in tablature, but most of these manuscripts are in staff notation; there is only one group of north German sources in tablature (in the Wenster Collection, S-L), copied by Gottfried Lindemann and dated 1713–14. Lindemann had studied in Stettin, perhaps with Gottlieb Klingenberg, who in turn had studied with Buxtehude until 1689. Owing to the scattered nature of the sources, the variants between concordances are much greater than is the case with the vocal music.

The most striking aspect in all the organ manuscripts is the selectivity with which they were compiled. Walther was interested only in Buxtehude’s chorale settings, and most of these works owe their preservation to seven separate manuscripts in his hand. The rest of the larger manuscripts, however, together with Lindemann’s collection, show a decided preference for free organ works, especially praeludia. The oldest of these is the ‘codex E.B. 1688’ at Yale University, which was copied in Dresden by Emanuel Benisch, probably in 1688. A different repertory of praeludia survives in a family of manuscripts circulated among pupils of Bach; one of these (in B-Bc) was copied by J.F. Agricola, another belonged to Kirnberger. These manuscripts contain only pieces with obbligato pedal and were largely extracted from an earlier collection which also contained preludes and canzonas for manuals alone (D-Bsb Mus 2681), which once belonged to J.N. Forkel. A final example of the selective manuscript compiler is seen in Johann Christoph Bach (1671–1721), J.S. Bach’s elder brother. Among his unique copies of pieces by Buxtehude (in D-LEm and D-Bsb) are the three ostinato pieces and the famous Praeludium in C with its ciaccona (buxwv137)

There is as yet no complete chronology of Buxtehude’s works. Research on the manuscripts of the Düben collection by Grusnick, Rudén and Snyder has established dates for the copying of many of his vocal works, giving a terminus ante quem that may be quite close to the date of composition. Most of them came into the collection during the years 1680–87. Those copied before 1680 show a greater preference for concertos and arias with Latin texts, and for strict ostinato and contrapuntal procedures; most of the cantatas appear after 1680. Very little vocal music survives from the 20 years of Buxtehude’s life after Gustaf Düben ceased collecting in 1687. Although the Lübeck tablature A 373 was copied later, not all of its repertory is more recent, for there are a number of concordances with the Düben collection. This manuscript seems, moreover, to have been compiled with the intention of providing a representative selection of Buxtehude’s music; there is a higher proportion of cantatas here, however, including three of the five mixed cantatas. Anders von Düben (ii) visited Buxtehude in Lübeck in 1692 and returned with copies of two sonatas. Linfield has demonstrated that Buxtehude’s composition of chamber music extended from the early 1660s (buxwv270) to his op.2 of 1696.

A chronology for the organ music is more difficult, since most of the existing manuscripts were copied after Buxtehude’s death. Snyder’s hypothesis (1987) that the Marienkirche organs were tuned in 1641 to modified mean-tone allowing E/D equivalence, further in 1673 for G/A, and in 1683 to Werckmeister’s ‘first correct temperament’ from his Orgel-Probe (1681) (no.III in his Musicalische Temperatur) has suggested a terminus post quem of 1683 for the composition of those works that require a circulating temperament. Working also from a thorough revaluation of the sources, a study of the keyboard compasses of the organs that Buxtehude played and a consideration of stylistic elements, Belotti (1995) proposed a chronology for the free organ works divided into three categories: those certainly composed before 1690 (buxwv136, 139, 142, 144, 148–9, 152, 154–5, 158, 162, 166–7, 169–70, 173 and 175), those probably composed before 1690 (buxwv140–41, 143, 145, 153, 156, 163–4, 168, 171 and 176), and those which may have been composed after 1690 (buxwv137, 146–7, 150–51, 159–61, 165 and 174). Schneider (1997) proposed that all the chorale fantasias were composed relatively early with only buxwv194 and 195 after 1673. Many of the chorale preludes can be played in mean-tone, but this does not necessarily mean that they were composed before 1683.

It is clear from the state of the sources that Buxtehude was regarded in the 18th century as a composer of keyboard music, and the scanty biographical notices from Walther and Mattheson reinforce this picture. Buxtehude scholarship began with Spitta’s Bach biography in 1873, and he too was interested primarily in the organ music, with a decided preference for the free works over the chorale settings. He also published the first comprehensive edition of Buxtehude’s organ music (1875–6), which Seiffert later revised and enlarged. Interest in Buxtehude’s organ music began in France in 1879, when Alexandre Guilmant performed it on the new Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Trocadéro in Paris. The only vocal music known to Spitta was the Lübeck tablature, but following Stiehl’s discovery in 1889 of the works by Buxtehude at Uppsala there was a definite shift of interest to the vocal music, which is evident in Pirro’s monograph of 1913. Publication of a complete edition of Buxtehude’s vocal works began in Germany in 1925 but reached only the eighth volume. A new international edition, begun in 1987, will complete the publication of the vocal works and include also the keyboard and ensemble music. Buxtehude’s vocal music continued as the main focus of scholarly interest during the 1960s, but a revaluation of Buxtehude’s historical importance by Krummacher (1966–7) concluded that it lay more in his organ music, and a concurrent reawakening of scholarly activity on Buxtehude’s organ music has continued unabated. Stiehl published most of Buxtehude’s chamber music in 1903, but only in the late 1970s did it begin to attract much attention from scholars and performers.

Interest in all genres of Buxtehude’s music inceased considerably during the last two decades of the 20th century, and performances, recordings, scholarly activity, new editions and conferences were occasioned by the 350th anniversary of his birth. At the beginning of the century Buxtehude was regarded primarily as a precursor of Bach; at its close his reputation as an important composer of keyboard, vocal and instrumental ensemble music rested secure.

doubtful and misattributed works

WORKS

Editions: Dietrich Buxtehude: Orgelwerke, ed. P. Spitta (Leipzig, 1875–6, rev. 2/1903–4/R by M. Seiffert); suppl. ed. M. Seiffert (Leipzig, 1939/R) [S]Dietrich Buxtehudes Werke, ed. W. Gurlitt and others, i–viii (Klecken and Hamburg, 1925–58/R); continued as Dieterich Buxtehude: The Collected Works, ed. K.J. Snyder, C. Wolff and others, ix–xvi (New York, 1987–) [CW]Dietrich Buxtehude, 1637–1707: Klaver vaerker, ed. E. Bangert (Copenhagen, 1941, 2/1953) [Ba]Dietrich Buxtehude: Orgelwerke, ed. J. Hedar (Stockholm, 1952) [H]Dietrich Buxtehude: Sämtliche Orgelwerke, ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1971–2, 2/1997) [B]Dietrich Buxtehude: Sämtliche Suiten und Variationen für Klavier/Cembalo, ed. K. Beckmann (Wiesbaden, 1980) [Bk]

Catalogue: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Dietrich Buxtehude: Buxtehude-Werke-Verzeichnis, ed. G. Karstädt (Wiesbaden, 1974, 2/1985) [BuxWV]

†	authenticity questionable

sacred vocal



BuxWV	Title	Scoring	Source, edition, remarks

1†	Accedite gentes, accurite populi	SSATB, 2 vn, bc	ed. S. Sørenson, Fire latinske kantater (Copenhagen, 1957), 37
2	Afferte Domino gloriam honorem	SSB, bc	CW v, 10
3	All solch dein Güt’ wir preisen	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1956)
4	Alles, was ihr tut	SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW ix, 3
5	Also hat Gott die Welt geliebet	S, 2 vn, va da gamba, bc	CW i, 10
6	An filius non est Dei	ATB, 2 vn, va da gamba, bc	CW vii, 49
7	Aperite mihi portas justitiae	ATB, 2 vn, bc	CW vii, 62
8	Att du, Jesu, will mig höra	S, 2 vn, bc	ed. J. Hedar (Copenhagen, 1944)
9	Bedenke, Mensch, das Ende	SSB, 3 vn, vle, bc	CW v, 14
10	Befiehl dem Engel, dass er komm	SATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW viii, 73
11	Canite Jesu nostro	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW v, 21
12	Cantate Domino canticum novum	SSB, bc	CW v, 29
13	Das neugeborne Kindelein	SATB, 3 vn, vle, bn, bc	CW viii, 121
14	Dein edles Herz, der Liebe Thron	SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW ix, 35
15	Der Herr ist mit mir	SATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW viii, 85
16	Dies ist der Tag	—	D-LUh, frag.; ed. in Pirro, p.437, and BuxWV
17	Dixit Dominus Domino meo	S, 2 vn, 2 va, spinet, vle, bc	CW ii, 27
18	Domine, salvum fac regem	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	ed. S. Sørensen, Fire latinskekantater (Copenhagen, 1957), 51
19	Drei schöne Dinge sind	SB, 2 vn, vle/bn, bc	CW iii, 10
20	Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ	SSATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1957)
21	Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ	SSB, 2 vn, 3 va (or 2 va, bn), bc	CW v, 35
22	Du Lebensfürst, Herr Jesu Christ	SATB, 2 vn, 2 violette, vle, bc	CW ix, 61
23	Ecce nunc benedicite Domino	ATTB, 2 vn, bc	CW viii, 105
24	Eins bitte ich vom Herrn	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc	DDT, xiv (1903, 2/1957), 15
25	Entreisst euch, meine Sinnen	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 15
26	Erfreue dich, Erde!	SSAB, 2 tpt, 2vn, 2 va, vle, timp, bc	(parody of buxwv122), ed. D. Kilian, 37 Kantaten von Dietrich Buxtehude, xxvi (Berlin, 1958)
27	Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort	SATB, 2 vn, vle/bombarde, bc	CW viii, 47
28	Fallax mundus, ornat vultus	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 17
29	Frohlocket mit Händen	SSATB, 2 tpt, 4vn, vle, bc	ed. S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1972)
30	Fürchtet euch nicht	SB, 2 vn, bc	CW iii, 18
31	Fürwahr, er trug unsere Krankheit	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va da gamba, vle/bn, bc	Uu*; ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1937, 2/1968)
32	Gen Himmel zu dem Vater mein	S, vn, va da gamba, bc	CW i, 23
33	Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen	SSB, 2 vn, 2 va, trbn, 2 cornetts, 2 tpt, bn, bc	CW v, 44
34	Gott hilf mir	SSSATBB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	DDT, xiv (1903, 2/1957)
35	Herr, auf dich traue ich	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 29
36	Herr, ich lasse dich nicht	TB, 2 vn, 2 va da gamba, braccio, vle, va da gamba, bc	Uu*; CW iii, 21
37	Herr, nun lässt du deinen Diener	T, 2 vn, bc	CW ii, 39
38	Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab’	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 35
39	Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe	S, 2 vn, vle/va da gamba, bc	CW i, 38
40	Herren vår Gud	SATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW viii, 64
41	Herzlich lieb hab ich dich o Herr	SSATB, 2 tpt, 2 vn, 2 va, vle/bn, bc	ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1956)
42	Herzlich tut mich verlangen	S, 2 vn, bc	ed. J. Hedar (Copenhagen, 1943)
43†	Heut triumphieret Gottes Sohn	SSATB, 2 tpt, bc	ed. T. Fedtke (Kassel, 1957)
44	Ich bin die Auferstehung	B, 2 vn, 2 va, 2 cornetts, 2 tpt, bn, bc	CW ii, 60
45	Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron	B, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW ii, 66
46	Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden	SSB, 2 vn, vle/bn, bc	CW v, 56
47	Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden [rev.]	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW v, 62
48	Ich halte es dafür	SB, vn, violetta, vle, bc	CW iii, 30
49	Ich sprach in meinem Herzen	S, 3 vn, bn, bc	CW i, 47
50	Ich suchte des Nachts	TB, 2 vn, 2 ob, vle, bc	CW iii, 41
51	Ihr lieben Christen, freut euch nun	SSATB, 3 vn, 2 va, vle, 3 cornetts, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, bc	DDT, xiv (1903, 2/1957)
52	In dulci jubilo	SSB, 2 vn, bc	CW v, 69
53	In te, Domine, speravi	SAB, bc	CW vii, 8
54	Ist es recht	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1959)
55	Je höher du bist	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW v, 76
56	Jesu dulcis memoria	SS, 2 vn, bn, bc	CW iii, 51
57	Jesu dulcis memoria	ATB, 2 vn, bc	CW vii, 72
58	Jesu, komm, mein Trost und Lachen	ATB, 2 vn, violetta, vle, bc	CW vii, 81
59	Jesu meine Freud und Lust	A, 2 vn, violetta, vle, bc	CW ii, 10
60	Jesu meine Freude	SSB, 2 vn, bn, bc	CW v, 87
61	Jesu, meiner Freuden Meister	SATB, 3 va, vle, bc	(Ratzeburg, 1677); ed. S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1977)
62	Jesu, meines Lebens Leben (2 versions)	SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW ix, 91, 249
63	Jesulein, du Tausendschön	ATB, 2 vn, vle/bn, bc	CW vii, 89
64	Jubilate Domino, omnis terra	A, va da gamba, bc	CW ii, 19
65	Klinget mit Freuden	SSB, 2 vn, 2 tpt, bc	(parody of buxwv119); CW v, 96
66	Kommst du, Licht der Heiden	SSB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW vi, 14
67	Lauda anima mea Dominum	S, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW i, 57
68	Lauda Sion Salvatorem	SSB, 2 vn, bc	CW vi, 24
69	Laudate pueri Dominum	SS, 5 va da gamba, vle, bc	CW iii, 59
70	Liebster, meine Seele saget	SS, 2 vn, bc	CW iii, 65
71	Lobe den Herren, meine Seele	T, 3 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW ii, 44
72	Mein Gemüt erfreuet sich	SAB, 4 vn, 2 fl, 4 cornetts, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, 3 bn, bc	CW vii, 10
73	Mein Herz ist bereit	B, 3 vn, vle, bc	CW ii, 74
74	Meine Seele, willtu ruhn	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW vi, 30
75	Membra Jesu		Uu*, 1680; ed. D. Kilian (Berlin, 1960); ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1963)
	1. Ecce super montes	SSATB, [2 vn, vle], bc
	2. Ad ubera portabimini	SSATB, [2 vn, vle], bc
	3. Quid sunt plagae istae	SSATB, [2 vn, vle], bc
	4. Surge, amica mea	SSATB, [2 vn, vle], bc
	5. Sicut modo geniti infantes	ATB, [2 vn, vle], bc
	6. Vulnerasti cor meum	SSB, 5 va da gamba, bc
	7. Illustra faciem tuam	SSATB, 2 vn, va da gamba, bc
76	Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfahrt		(Lübeck,1674/R); CW ii, 85
	1. Mit Fried und Freud	SB, 3 insts (or org)
	2. Klage Lied	S, [2 va], bc
77	Nichts soll uns scheiden	SAB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW vii, 20
78	Nimm von uns, Herr	SATB, 2 vn, 2 violette, bn, bc	Uu*; CW ix, 109
79	Nun danket alle Gott	SSATB, 2 vn, vle, 2 cornetts, 2 tpt, bn, bc	S-Uu*; ed. S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1975)
80	Nun freut euch, ihr Frommen	SS, 2 vn, bc	CW iii, 69
81	Nun lasst uns Gott dem Herren	SATB, 2 vn, bc	CW viii, 9
82	O clemens, o mitis	S, 4 str, bc	CW i, 65
83	O dulcis Jesu	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 71
84	O fröhliche Stunden, o fröhliche Zeit	S, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW i, 77
85	O fröhliche Stunden, o herrliche Zeit	SSATB, 5 str, bc	Uu*; CW ix, 151
86	O Gott, wir danken deiner Güt’	SSATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	ed. D. Kilian, 37 Kantaten von Dietrich Buxtehude, xii (Berlin, 1965)
87	O Gottes Stadt	S, 2 vn, va, vle, bc	CW i, 84
88	O Jesu mi dulcissime	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	Uu*; CW vi, 39
89	O lux beata Trinitas	SS, 3 vn, vle/bn, bc	CW iii, 76
90	O wie selig sind	TB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW iii, 83
91	Pange lingua gloriosi	SSAB, 2 vn, 2 violette, vle, bc	CW ix, 183
92	Quemadmodum desiderat cervus	T, 2 vn, bc	CW ii, 54
93	Salve desiderium	SSB, 2 vn, vle/bn, bc	CW vi, 46
94	Salve, Jesu, Patris gnate unigenite	SS, 2 vn, bc	CW iii, 86
95	Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein rein Herz	S, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW i, 96
96	Schwinget euch himmelan	SSATB, 3 vn, vle, bc	ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1959)
97	Sicut Moses exaltavit serpentem	S, 2 vn, va da gamba, bc	CW i, 101
98	Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied	S, vn, bc	CW i, 108
99	Surrexit Christus hodie	SSB, 3 vn, bn, bc	CW vi, 51
100	Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme	SSB, 4 vn (or 3 vn, va), bn, bc	CW vi, 60
101†	Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme	ATB, 2 vn, bc	(without c.f.); CW vii, 100
102	Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit	SATB, 2 vn, bc	CW viii, 22
103	Walts Gott, mein Werk ich lasse	SATB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW viii, 31
104	Was frag’ ich nach der Welt	SAB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW vii, 29
105	Was mich auf dieser Welt betrübt	S, 2 vn, bc	CW i, 113
106	Welt, packe dich	SSB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW vi, 75
107	Wenn ich, Herr Jesu, habe dich	A, 2 vn, bc	CW ii, 25
108	Wie schmeckt es so lieblich	SAB, 2 vn, vle, bc	CW vii, 39
109	Wie soll ich dich empfangen	SSB, 2 vn, bn, bc	CW vi, 84
110	Wie wird erneuet, wie wird erfreuet	SSATTB, 3 vn, 2 va, vle, 3 cornetts, 3 tpt, 3 trbn, cimbalon, bc	ed. S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1977)
111	Wo ist doch mein Freund geblieben?	SB, 2 vn, bn, bc	CW iii, 93
112	Wo soll ich fliehen hin	SATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	CW ix, 211
113	Benedicam Dominum	6 choirs (SSATB, concertato; SATB capella; 2 vn, vle; 4 tpt, trbn, bombarde; 2 cornetts, bn; 3 trbn), bc	CW iv, 23
114†	Missa alla brevis	SSATB, bc	CW iv, 12

secular vocal

115	Auf, Saiten, auf!	S, 2 vn, 2 va da gamba, bc	(1673), lost; ed. W. Stahl (Kassel, n.d.)
116	Auf! stimmet die Saiten	AAB, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, bn, bc	(1672); CW vii, 115
117	Deh credete il vostro vanto	S, 2 vn, bc	(Lübeck, 1695), lost, MS copy in D-LUh
118	Gestreuet mit Blumen	A, 2 vn, 2 va, bn, bc	(Lübeck, 1675)
119	Klinget für Freuden	SSB, 2 vn, vle, 2 tpt, bc	S-Uu* (1680); CW v, 96
120	O fröhliche Stunden, o herrlicher Tag	S, vn, 2 ob, bc	(Lübeck, 1705), lost; ed. W. Stahl (Kassel, n.d.)
121	Opachi boschetti	S/T, 2 vn, bc	(Lübeck, 1698), lost; extracts ed. in Pirro, p.473
122	Schlagt, Künstler, die Pauken	SSAB, 2 tpt, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, timp, bc	ext (Lübeck, 1681); ed. D. Kilian, 37 Kantaten von Dietrich Buxtehude, xxvi (Berlin, 1958)
123	Canon duplex per augmentationem	4vv	1674, facs. and ed. in Snyder (1980, 1987)
124	Divertisons nous aujourd’hui	3vv	1670, facs. and ed. in Snyder (1980, 1987)
124a	Canon quadruplex	?5vv	ed. in Snyder (1987)

lost vocal works

125	Christum lieb haben ist viel besser	SSATB, 11 insts	listed in Lüneburg inventory
126	Music for ded. of Fredenhagen altar, 1697	3 choirs	text unknown
127	Pallidi salvete	4vv, 6 insts	listed in Ansbach inventory
128	Die Hochzeit des Lamms, Abendmusik, 1678	lib, B-Bc, S-Uu	pr. in Pirro, 173ff
129	Das Allerschröcklichste und Allererfreulichste, Abendmusik		listed in catalogue, 1684
130	Himmlische Seelenlust auf Erden über die Menschwerdung … Jesu Christi, Abendmusik		listed in catalogue, 1684
131	Der verlorene Sohn, Abendmusik, 1688		mentioned in Buxtehude letter
132	Jubilaeum (Hundertjähriges Gedicht), 1700		mentioned in Nova literaria
133	Abendmusikan, 1700		lib lost, extracts pr. in Stahl (1937), 18–19
134	Castrum doloris, Abendmusik, 1705		lib, D-LÜh, facs. in Karstädt (1962)
135	Templum honoris, Abendmusik, 1705		lib, LÜh, facs. in Karstädt (1962)

keyboard

ped	pedaliter (presumably for organ)

136	Praeludium, C, ped	CW xv/A, S suppl., H ii, B i
137	Praeludium, C, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
138	Praeludium, C, ped	CW xv/A, B i
139	Praeludium, D, ped	CW xv/A, S i, S suppl., H ii, B i
140	Praeludium, d, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
141	Praeludium, E, ped	ed. in CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
142	Praeludium, e, ped	CW xv/A, S i, S suppl., H ii, B i
143	Praeludium, e, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
144†	Praeludium, F, ped	CW xv/B, S suppl., H ii, B i
145	Praeludium, F, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
146	Praeludium, f, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
147	Praeludium, G, ped	CW xv/A, H ii, B i
148	Praeludium, g, ped	CW xv/A, S i, S suppl., H ii, B i
149	Praeludium, g, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
150	Praeludium, g, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
151	Praeludium, A, ped	CW xv/A, S suppl., H ii, B i
152	Praeludium, Phrygian, ped	CW xv/A, S suppl., H ii, B i
153	Praeludium, a, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
154	Praeludium, B, ped (frag)	CW xv/B, H ii, B i (suppl.)
155	Toccata, d, ped	CW xv/A, S suppl., H ii, B i
156	Toccata, F, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
157	Toccata, F, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H ii, B i
158	Praeambulum, a, ped	CW xv/A, S suppl., H ii, B i
159	Ciaccona, c, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H i, B i
160	Ciaccona, e, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H i, B i
161	Passacaglia, d, ped	CW xv/A, S i, H i, B i
162	Praeludium, G	H ii, B i
163	Praeludium, g	S i, H ii, B i
164	Toccata, G	S i, S suppl., H ii, B i
165	Toccata, G	S i, S suppl., H ii, B i
166	Canzona, C	S suppl., H i, B i
167	Canzonetta, C	H i, B i
168	Canzona, d	S i, S suppl., H i, B i
169	Canzona, e	H i, B i
170	Canzona, G	H i, B i
171	Canzonetta, G	S i, H i, B i
172	Canzonetta, G	B i
173	Canzona, g	H i, B i
174	Fuga, C	S i, H ii, B i
175	Fuga, G	S suppl., H i, B i
176	Fuga, B	S i, H i, B i
177	Ach Gott und Herr, d, ped	S suppl., H iii/1, B ii
178	Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, Phrygian, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
179	Auf meinen lieben Gott, e	S ii/2, H iii/1, B ii (suppl.)
180	Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, Dorian, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
181	Danket dem Herren, g, ped	S ii/1, H iii/1, B ii
182	Der Tag der ist so freudenreich, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
183	Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt, Dorian, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
184	Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, C, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
185	Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, g, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
186	Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, C, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
187	Es spricht der Unweisen Mund wohl, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
188	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, G, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
189	Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
190	Gott der Vater wohn uns bei, C, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
191	Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
192	Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
193	Herr Jesu Christ, ich weiss gar wohl, a, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
194	Ich dank dir, lieber Herre, F, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
195	Ich dank dir schon durch deinen Sohn, F, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
196	Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, d, ped	S ii/2, H iii/2, B ii
197	In dulci jubilo, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
198	Jesus Christus, unser Heiland, der don Tod, g (Dorian), ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
199	Komm heiliger Geist, Herre Gott, F, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
200	Komm heiliger Geist, Herre Gott, F, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
201	Kommt her zu mir, spricht Gottes Sohn, g, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
202	Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
203	Magnificat primi toni, Dorian, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
204	Magnificat primi toni, Dorian, ped	S ii/1, S suppl., H iii/1, B ii
205	Magnificat noni toni, d, ped	S suppl., H iii/1, B ii
206	Mensch, willt du leben seliglich, Phrygian, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
207	Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott (Vater unser in Himmelreich), d, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
208	Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
209	Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist, G, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
210	Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein, G, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
211	Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, g, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
212	Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, C, ped	S suppl., H iii/1, B ii
213	Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, G, ped	S ii/1, H iii/1, B ii
214	Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, G, ped	S ii/1, H iii/1, B ii
215	Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, G	S ii/1, H iii/1, B ii
216	O lux beata Trinitas, Phrygian (frag.)	S suppl., B ii, suppl.
217	Puer natus in Bethlehem, a, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
218	Te Deum laudamus, Phrygian, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
219	Vater unser in Himmelreich, d, ped	S ii/1, H iv, B ii
220	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, a, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
221	Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, a, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
222	Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit, a, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
223	Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, G, ped	S ii/1, H iii/2, B ii
224	Wir danken dir, Herr Jesu Christ, Dorian, ped	S ii/2, H iv, B ii
225	Canzonetta, a	B i
226	Suite C	Ba no. 1, Bk
227	Suite C	Ba no. 2, Bk
228	Suite C	Ba no. 3, Bk
229	Suite C	Ba no. 4, Bk suppl.
230	Suite C	Ba no. 5, Bk
231	Suite C	Bk
232	Suite D	Ba no. 9, Bk
233	Suite (‘d'amour’) d	Ba no. 6, Bk
234	Suite d	Ba no. 7, Bk
235	Suite e	Ba no. 10, Bk
236	Suite e	Ba no. 11, Bk
237	Suite e	Ba no.12, Bk
238	Suite F	Ba no. 13, Bk
239	Suite F	Bk
240	Suite G	Ba no. 17, Bk
241	Suite g	Ba no. 14, Bk
242	Suite g	Ba no. 15, Bk
243	Suite A	Ba no. 19, Bk
244	Suite a	Ba no. 18, Bk
245	Courant zimble, 8 variations, a	Ba no. 23, Bk
246	Aria and 10 variations, C	Ba no. 20, Bk
247	Arias: More Palatino, 12 variations, C	Ba no. 21, Bk
248	Aria: Rofilis, 3 variations, d	Ba no. 22, Bk
249	Aria, 3 variations, a	Ba no. 24, Bk
250	Aria: La capricciosa, 32 variations, G	Ba no. 25, Bk
251	7 suites on the nature and quality of the planets	lost, mentioned in Mattheson (1739), 130

other instrumental

252–8	VII suonate (F, G, a, B, C, d, e)	vn, va da gamba, hpd, op.1	(Hamburg, ?1694); CW xiv; DDT, xi (1903, 2/1957)
259–65	VII suonate (B, D, g, c, A, E, F)	vn, va da gamba, hpd, op.2	(Hamburg, 1696); CW xiv; DDT, xi (1903, 2/1957)
266	Sonata, C	2 vn, va da gamba, bc	CW xiv; DDT, xi (1903, 2/1957)
267	Sonata, D	va da gamba, vle, bc	CW xiv; DDT, xi (1903, 2/1957)
268†	Sonata, D	va da gamba, bc	CW xiv
269	Sonata, F	2 vn, va da gamba, bc frag.	CW xiv
270	Sonata, F	2 vn, bc	CW xiv (frag.)
271	Sonata, G	2 vn, va da gamba, bc	CW xiv
272	Sonata, a	vn, va da gamba, bc	CW xiv
273	Sonata and suite, B	vn, va da gamba, bc	CW xiv; DDT, xi (1903, 2/1957) (suite only)
274	Sonaten … zur Kirchen- und Tafel-Music bequemlich	2/3vn, va da gamba, bc	lost

doubtful and misattributed works



BuxWV suppl.	Title	Scoring	Source, edition, remarks

1	Magnificat	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, vle, bc	S-Uu (anon.); ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1931)
2	Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg	SSATB, 2 tpt, 2 vn, 2 va/trbn, bn, bc	D-Bsb; ed. T. Fedtke (Stuttgart, 1964) [? by J. Schelle, see Kilian]
3	Wacht! Euch zum Streit (Das jüngste Gericht)	SSATB, 2 vn, 2 va, bc	S-Uu (anon.); ed. W. Maxton (Kassel, 1939)
4	Natalitia sacra (Lübeck, 1682)		(Lübeck, 1682) [contains texts only of some works possibly by Buxtehude]
5	Trio sonata	org (or vn, va da gamba, bc)	(Lübeck, 1682, anon. texts) CW xiv; B ii, suppl.
6	Courante, d	kbd	DK-Kk (anon.); Ba no. 26, Bk suppl.
7	Courante, G	kbd	Kk (anon.); Ba no. 27
8	Simphonie, G	kbd	Kk (anon.); Ba no. 28, Bk suppl.
9	Erbarm dich mein, O Herre Gott		S-Uu; ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1937) [attrib. L. Busbetzky]
10	Laudate Dominum omnes gentes		Uu; ed. B. Grusnick (Kassel, 1937) [attrib. L. Busbetzky]
11	Erhalt uns Herr, bei deinem Wort		D-Bsb, NL-DHgm; S ii/2 and H iv [? by J. Pachelbel or G. Böhm]
12	Suite, d	kbd	DK-Kk (entitled ‘di D.B.H.’); Ba no. 8, attrib. N.-A. Lebègue, Second livre de clavessin (Paris, ?1687)
13	Suite, g	kbd	Kk; Ba no. 16 [attrib. N.-A. Lebègue, Second livre de clavessin (Paris, ?1687)]
—	Kyrie	SSATB, 2 vn, bc	MS, Gross Fahrer, nr. Gotha; see Snyder (1987), 20 [J. Bocksdehude]
—	Christ lag in Todesbanden	org	US-NH, see Snyder (1987), 320 [N. Vetter]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

catalogues, bibliographies, source studies

GöhlerV

C. Stiehl: ‘Die Familie Düben und die Buxtehude’schen Manuscripte auf der Bibliothek zu Uppsala’ MMg, xxi (1889), 2–9

B. Grusnick: ‘Zur Chronologie von Dietrich Buxtehudes Vokalwerken’, Mf, x (1957), 75–84

F. Riedel: Quellenkundliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musik für Tasteninstrumente in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (vornehmlich in Deutschland) (Kassel, 1960)

B. Grusnick: ‘Die Dübensammlung: ein Versuch ihrer chronologischen Ordnung’, STMf, xlvi (1964), 27–82; xlviii (1966), 63–186

F. Krummacher: Die Überlieferung der Choralbearbeitungen in der frühen evangelischen Kantate (Berlin, 1965)

J.O. Rudén: Vattenmärken och Musikforskning: Presentation och Tillämpning av en Dateringsmetod påmusikalier i handskrift i Uppsala Universitetsbiblioteks Dübensamling (diss., U. of Uppsala, 1968)

H. Kümmerling: Katalog der Sammlung Bokemeyer (Kassel, 1970)

G. Karstädt, ed.: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Dietrich Buxtehude: Buxtehude-Werke-Verzeichnis (Wiesbaden, 1974, 2/1985)

H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1984)

R. Hill: The Möller Manuscript and the Andreas Bach Book: Two Keyboard Anthologies from the Circle of the Young Johann Sebastian Bach (diss., Harvard U., 1987)

H. Wettstein: Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707): Bibliographie zu seinem Leben und Werk (Munich, 1989)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘Bach und Buxtehude: eine wenig beachtete Quelle in der Carnegie Library zu Pittsburgh, PA’, BJb 1991, 177–81

K.J. Snyder: The Choir Library of St. Mary’s in Lübeck, 1546–1674 (forthcoming)

historical studies, biography

MatthesonGEP

WaltherML

A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in x. libros digesta (Rome, 1650); ed. U. Scharlau (Hildesheim, 1970)

Nova literaria Maris Balthici et Septentrionis (Lübeck, 1698–1708)

J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R)

J. Moller: Cimbria literata (Copenhagen, 1744), ii

W. Stahl: Franz Tunder und Dietrich Buxtehude (Leipzig, 1926)

L. Pedersen: ‘Fra Didrik Hansen Buxtehudes barndom og ungdom 1636–37 til 1. maj 1668’, Medlemsbald for Dansk Organist og Kantorsamfund af 1905, iii (1937), 25–37

W. Stahl: ‘Die Lübecker Abendmusiken im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, xxxix (1937), 1–64

W. Stahl: Dietrich Buxtehude (Kassel, 1937, 2/1952)

W. Stahl: ‘Dietrich Buxtehudes Geburtsort’, Mf, iv (1951), 382 only

J. Hennings and W. Stahl: Musikgeschichte Lübecks (Kassel, 1951–2)

N. Friis: Diderik Buxtehude (Copenhagen, 1960)

S. Sørensen: Das Buxtehudebild im Wandel der Zeit (Lübeck, 1972)

A. Elder: Der nordelbische Organist: Studien zu Sozialstatus, Funktion und kompositorischer Produktion eines Musikerberufes von der Reformation bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Kassel, 1982)

C. Wolff: ‘Das Hamburger Buxtehude-Bild’, 800 Jahre Musik in Lübeck, ed. A. Grassman and W. Neugebauer, i (Lübeck, 1982), 64–79; repr. in Musik und Kirche, liii (1983), 8–19; repr. (with ‘Nachwort’) in Studien zur Musikgeschichte der Hansestadt Lübeck, ed. A. Edler and H.W. Schwab (Kassel, 1989), 44–62

K.J. Snyder: ‘Buxtehude's Organs: Helsingør, Helsingborg, Lübeck’, MT, cxxvi (1985), 365–9, 427–34

J. Irwin: Neither Voice nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in the Age of the Baroque (New York, 1993)

discussions of works, some with biography

ApelG

MGG1 (F. Blume)

NewmanSBE

SmitherHO

P. Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach, i (Leipzig, 1873–80, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1884, 2/1899/R), 256–310

A. Pirro: Dietrich Buxtehude (Paris, 1913/R)

F. Blume: ‘Das Kantatenwerk Dietrich Buxtehudes’, JbMP 1940, 10–39; repr. in Syntagma musicologicum, i (see below: 1963), 320–51

J. Hedar: Dietrich Buxtehudes Orgelwerke: zur Geschichte des norddeutschen Orgelstils (Stockholm, 1951)

H. Lorenz: ‘Die Klaviermusik Dietrich Buxtehudes’, AMw, xi (1954), 238–51

D. Kilian: Das Vokalwerk Dietrich Buxtehudes: Quellenstudien zu seiner Überlieferüng und Verwendung (diss., Free U. of Berlin, 1956)

S. Sørensen: Diderich Buxtehudes vokale kirkemusik: studier til den evangeliske kirkekantates udviklingshistorie (Copenhagen, 1958)

G. Karstädt: Die ‘extraordinairen’ Abendmusiken Dietrich Buxtehudes (Lübeck, 1962)

F. Blume: ‘Dietrich Buxtehude in Geschichte und Gegenwart’, Syntagma musicologicum: gesammelte Reden und Schriften, i, ed. M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1963), 351–63

S. Sørensen: ‘Monteverdi–Förster–Buxtehude: Entwurf zu einer entwicklungsgeschichtlichen Untersuchung’, DAM, iii (1963), 87–100

H.J. Pauly: Die Fuge in den Orgelwerken Dietrich Buxtehudes (Regensburg, 1964)

M. Geck: Die Vokalmusik Dietrich Butxtehudes und der frühe Pietismus (Kassel, 1965)

F. Krummacher: ‘Orgel-und Vokalmusik im Oeuvre norddeutscher Organisten um Buxtehude’, DAM, v (1966–7), 63–90

G. Karstädt: Der Lübecker Kantatenband Dietrich Buxtehudes: eine Studie über die Tabulatur Mus. A373 (Lübeck, 1971)

O. Mortensen: ‘Ein Vergleich der Couranten und Sarabanden Buxtehudes und Lebègues’, DAM, vii (1973–6), 129–39

G. Karstädt: ‘Die Instrumente in den Kantaten und Abendmusiken Dietrich Buxtehudes’, Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Nordeuropas: Kurt Gudewill zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. U. Haensel (Wolfenbüttel, 1978), 111–21

F. Krummacher: Die Choralbearbeitung in der protestantischen Figuralmusik zwischen Praetorius und Bach (Kassel, 1978)

F. Krummacher: ‘Stylus phantasticus und phantastische Musik: kompositorische Verfahren in Toccaten von Frescobaldi und Buxtehude’, Schütz Jb 1980, 7–77

K.J. Snyder: ‘Dietrich Buxtehude's Studies in Learned Counterpoint’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 544–64

S.C. Ruhle: An Anonymous Seventeenth-Century German Oratorio in the Düben Collection (Uppsala University Library vok. mus. i hskr.71) (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1982)

E. Linfield: Dietrich Buxtehude’s Sonatas: a Historical and Analytical Study (diss., Brandeis U., 1984)

L. Archbold: Style and Structure in the Praeludia of Dietrich Buxtehude (Ann Arbor, 1985)

C. Defant: Kammermusik und Stylus phantasticus: Studien zu Dietrich Buxtehudes Triosonaten (Frankfurt, 1985)

C. Wolff: ‘Präludium (Toccata) und Sonata: Formbildung und Gattungstradition in der Orgelmusik Buxtehudes und seines Kreises’, Orgel, Orgelmusik und Orgelspiel: Festschrift Michael Schneider zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. C. Wolff (Kassel, 1985), 55–64

Dietrich Buxtehude und die europäische Musikseiner Zeit: Lübeck 1987

K.J. Snyder: Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (New York, 1987)

A. Edler: ‘Fantasie and Choralfantasie: on the Problematic Nature of a Genre of Seventeenth-Century Organ Music’, Organ Yearbook, xix (1988), 53–66

E. Linfield: ‘North and South European Influences on Buxtehude's Chamber Music: Despite Influences, a Unique Repertory’, Schütz Jb 1988, 104–25

C. Defant: ‘“… ad ostentandum ingenium, abditam harmoniae rationem, ingeniosumque … contextum docendum”: Aspekte des Stylus phantasticus in den Orgelwerken und der Kammermusik Dietrich Buxtehudes’, Schütz Jb 1989, 69–103

K.J. Snyder: ‘To Lübeck in the Steps of J.S. Bach’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 672–7; repr. in Bach, xx/2 (1989), 38–48

C. Defant: Instrumentale Sonderformen in Norddeutschland: eine Studie zu den Auswirkungen eines Theologenstreites auf Werke der Organisten Weckmann, Reincken und Buxtehude (Frankfurt, 1990)

S.L. Gorman: Rhetoric and Affect in the Organ Praeludia of Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) (diss., Stanford U., 1990)

P. Walker, ed.: Church, Stage and Studio: Music and its Contexts in Seventeenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 1990)

T. Koopman: ‘Dietrich Buxtehude's Organ Works: a Practical Help’, MT, cxxii (1991), 148–53

P. Reichert: ‘Musikalsche Rhetorik in den Choralvorspielen von Dietrich Buxtehude’, Acta organologica, xxiv (1994), 145–84

D. Yearsley: Ideologies of Learned Counterpoint in the Northern German Baroque (diss., Stanford U., 1994)

M. Belotti: Die freien Orgelwerke Dieterich Buxtehudes: überlieferungsgeschichtliche und stilkritische Studien (Frankfurt, 1995, 2/1997)

A. Silbiger, ed.: Keyboard Music Before 1700 (New York, 1995)

G. Webber: North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford, 1996)

M. Schneider: ’? (Kassel, 1997)

Buyanovsky, Vitaly

(b Leningrad, 27 Aug 1928; d St Petersburg, 7 May 1993). Russian horn player. He studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with his father Mikhail Buyanovsky, who was first horn of the Kirov Opera, and in 1953 won the Reicha Competition in Prague. In 1955 he became principal horn in the Leningrad PO, and in 1959 won the gold medal at the international competition in Vienna, surprising Western audiences unaccustomed to the tonal characteristics of the isolated Russian wind school. Despite the unfamiliarity of his vibrato-laden style, Buyanovsky won admirers in the West for the technical control and musical conviction evident in his solo and orchestral recordings. As professor at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1959, he influenced an entire generation of Soviet hornists. He composed adventurously for his instrument, his most significant work being the unaccompanied solo sonata.

OLIVER BROCKWAY

Buyevsky, Borys

(b Kryvy Rig, 7 June 1934). Ukrainian composer. He graduated from Kharkiv Conservatory where he studied composition with Klebanov (1959), after which he taught at the Donets'k music school (1959–61) and then settled in Kiev. Buyevsky first achieved acclaim with his variety songs (in which he was one of the first composers from the Ukrainian levoberyozh'ye [left bank] to use the folklore of the Carpathian region) and has also written a great deal of film music. Since the 1970s he has become more active as a composer of symphonies which introduce features new to Ukrainian music (such as the evocations of urban life in the second and sixth symphonies, and the elements of farce and the grotesque in the fourth and ninth).

WORKS

(selective list)

Ballets: Pisnya syn'ogo morya [Song of the Blue Sea], 1965; Ustym Karmalyuk (3), str, 1980 [in the form of 3 concs.]

10 syms.: 1965, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988

Other orch: Suite no.1 ‘Ukrainian’, 1959; Ov. [no.1], 1961; Suite no.2, 1968 [after ballet Pisnya syn'ogo morya]; Va Conc., 1980; Vc Conc., 1980; Vn Conc., 1980; Ov. [no.2], 1981

Vocal: Mandrivky sertsya [Wanderings of the Heart] (orat, L. Kostenko, T. Kolomyets), 1964; vocal cycles (W. Shakespeare, P. Verlaine, R. Burns)

Many film scores incl.: Kak kozaki olimpiytsami stali [How the Cossacks became Olympic Competitors]; Kak kozaki v futbol igrali [How the Cossacks Played Football]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ye. Zin'kevich: Dinamika obnovleniya: Ukrainskaya simfoniya na sovremennom etape, 1970-e–nachalo 80-kh godov [The dynamics of renewal: the contemporary Ukrainian symphony, the 1970s to the early 80s] (Kiev, 1986), esp. 148–57

Ye. Zin'kevich: ‘Ukrainische Sinfonik der Gegenwart’, Sowjetische Musik im Licht der Perestroika, ed. H. Danuser, H. Gerlach and J. Köchel (Laaber, 1990), 73–80

Ye. Zin'kevich: ‘Buntivna muza Borysa Buyevs'kogo’ [The rebellious muse of Buyevsky], Svitovyd, iv/9 (1992), 67–75

YELENA ZIN'KEVICH

Buys, Cornelis.

See Brandts Buys family, (1).

Buysine.

See Buisine.

Buysson, du.

See Du buisson family, (1).

Buz.

See Butz family.

Buzain

(Dut.).

See under Organ stop (Posaune).

Bužarovski, Dimitrije

(b Skopje, 8 Aug 1952). Macedonian composer. He studied the piano and composition at the University of Skopje before attending the Belgrade Academy of Music (MA in composition, 1976); he defended his doctoral dissertation on the aesthetics of music at the university in 1984. He served as head of music programmes at Skopje Television, and in 1991 was appointed professor at the university’s school of music, where he subsequently became dean. He was a Fulbright research fellow at Boston University in 1985, and has since revisited the USA on several occasions to give lectures, performances and to engage in research. His early works are neo-classical. His style from the mid-1980s he defines as polystylistic: incorporating elements of folk, jazz and rock, his music employs electronics and computers both in performance and as an aid in composition.

WORKS

(selective list)

Stage and vocal: Humoristicni pesni [Humorous Songs] (folk text), Bar, pf, 1976; Sekerna prikazna [Candy Tale] (children's op, S. Janevski and Bužarovski), 1976; Vozovi [Trains] (ballet), 1986; Ohrid (orat), nar, S, A, T, Bar, chorus, orch, 1988; Despina i Mister Doks [Despina and Mr Dox] (comic op, 3, M. Popovski and Bužarovski), 1991; Duhovni pesni [Spiritual Songs] (folk text), S, Bar, children's chorus, synths, 1992; Songs of Peace and War (W.B. Yeats and others), S, Mez, synth, 1994; Eco Songs (Chief Dan George and others), 1996

Inst: Str Qt, 1971; Fantasia quasi una sinfonia, orch, 1973; Sonatine, pf, 1973; Pf Sonata no.1, 1976; Varijacii na narodna tema [Variations on a Folk Theme], cl, 1978; Sym. no.2, orch, 1979; Pf Sonata no.2, 1983; Pf Sonata no.3, 1987; Baroque Concertino, str, synth, 1988; Musurgia ecclectica, orch, synth, 1989; Conc., str, hp, synth, 1990; Sextet, wind qnt, synth, 1990; All that Dance, variations, 2 pf, 1995; Parahodot Variations, vc, 1997; TechnoSymph, orch, 1997; Pf Conc., 1998

Principal publisher: Društvo na Kompozitorite na Makedonija

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Prosev: Sovremena makedonska muzika (Pula, 1986)

M. Kolovski: Makedonska kompozitori i muzikolozi (Skopje, 1993)

JANA ANDREEVSKA

Buzine.

See Buisine.

Buzzolla, Antonio

(b Adria, nr Rovigo, 2 March 1815; d Venice, 20 March 1871). Italian composer and conductor. He learnt to play several instruments with his father, Angelo, who was maestro di cappella at Adria Cathedral and primo violino at the theatre. In 1832 he went to Venice to study at the school of Antonio Pizzolato, and joined the orchestra of La Fenice as flautist and violinist. Buzzolla was highly sought after as an accompanist and as a composer of barcarolles, ariettas and canzonettas in Venetian dialect, of which several were published by Lucca and Plet. Many of these works can still be considered small masterpieces of the genre because of their fresh melodic grace and refined craftsmanship. His first opera, Il Ferramondo, was performed successfully at the Teatro S Benedetto on 3 December 1836. He completed his studies at the Naples Conservatory from 1837 to 1839 under Donizetti and Mercadante. After his return to Venice in 1839 he had two more operas performed there (Mastino della Scala and Gli avventurieri), with only moderate success.

In 1843 Buzzolla travelled to Berlin, where he served as conductor of the Italian Opera and taught and conducted at the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. He toured Poland and Russia and in 1847 went to Paris where he was conductor at the Théâtre Italien and became acquainted with Rossini. Returning to Venice, he took part in the Revolution of 1848 and had two more operas performed at La Fenice: Amleto and Elisabetta di Valois. In 1855 he was appointed maestro primario effettivo at S Marco and in 1867 he helped found the Società dei Concerti Benedetto Marcello, which later became the conservatory. Among Buzzolla’s students there were Boito and Drigo.

Buzzolla also wrote some fine sacred music and was invited by Verdi to contribute to the collaborative Requiem for Rossini in 1869.

WORKS

operas

first performed in Venice unless otherwise stated

Il Ferramondo (os, 2), S Benedetto, 3 Dec 1836

Mastino I della Scala (op, G. Fontebasso), S Benedetto, 31 May 1841

Gli avventurieri (ob, 2, F. Romani), Fenice, 14 May 1842

Amleto (os, G. Peruzzini, after W. Shakespeare), Fenice, 24 Feb 1848

Elisabetta di Valois (F.M. Piave), Fenice, 16 Feb 1850

La puta onorata (after C. Goldoni), inc.

other works

Vocal (many sacred works in I-Vlevi): Requiem (1846); Miserere; other masses; cants.; songs, incl. Serate a Rialto; ariette veneziane

Inst: syms., ovs., concs., pf pieces

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (G. Piscitelli Gonnelli)

F. Regli: Dizionario biografico (Turin, 1860/R), 99–100

A. Casellati: ‘Antonio Buzzolla’, Musica d’oggi, xii (1930), 311–17

P. Mioli: ‘Considerazioni su alcune arie da camera di Antonio Buzzolla’, Subsidia musica Veneta, i (1980), 143–59

M. Girardi: ‘I compositori della “Messa” per Rossini’, Quaderni dell’Istituto di studi verdiani, v: Messa per Rossini: la storia, il testo, la musica (1988), 151–60

F. Passadore and L. Sirch, eds.: Antonio Buzzolla: una vita musicale nella Venezia romantica (Rovigo, 1994)

GIOVANNI CARLI BALLOLA/ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN

Byalik, Mikhail Grigor'yevich

(b Kiev, 13 March 1929). Russian musicologist. He graduated from the Kiev Conservatory as a musicologist (1951) and pianist (1953). He completed his education in Leningrad at the Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, where he took the Kandidat degree with a dissertation on the works of Revuts'ky. In 1968 he became a professor in the departments of performance and music criticism at the Leningrad Conservatory; in 1988 he began simultaneously giving classes at the Theatrical Academy. Byalik's sphere of interests is broad, and includes the music of his Leningrad contemporaries, the art of conducting and other forms of performance, and music theatre production. He is among the leading music theatre critics in St Petersburg and works for a number of newspapers and journals.

WRITINGS

L.N. Revutsky: ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva [Life and work] (Moscow, 1963)

with A. Chernov: O lyogkoy muzïke, o dzhaze, o khoroshem v kuse [On light music, jazz and good taste] (Leningrad, 1965)

L.N. Revuts'ky: rysy tvorchosti [Features of his work] (Kiev, 1973)

L.N. Revutsky (Leningrad, 1979)

Kamernaya opera segodnya [Chamber opera today] (Leningrad, 1981)

‘Sovetskaya muzïka’, Muzïkal'naya ėntsiklopediya, ed. A.N. Sokhor (Moscow, 1981)

‘La culture musicale’, Revue d'esthétique, new ser., xxiii (1993), 75–83

ERA BARUTCHEVA

Bychkov, Semyon

(b Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 30 Nov 1952). Russian conductor, active in the USA and Germany. He was the brother of Yakov Kreizberg. He began conducting lessons at the Glinka Choir School in Leningrad at the age of 13 and entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1970, where he studied the piano and was a conducting student of Ilya Musin. In 1973 he won first prize in the Rachmaninoff Conducting Competition. He left the Soviet Union two years later, enrolling as a conducting student at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, where he directed the student orchestra for the next four years. In 1980 he became chief conductor of the Grand Rapids SO in Michigan and principal guest conductor of the Buffalo PO. By the mid-1980s Bychkov was conducting important European orchestras, including the Concertgebouw and the Berlin PO. In 1985 he was appointed music director in Buffalo, and in 1989 he was made music director of the Orchestre de Paris, a position he held until 1998. With the orchestra he made numerous recordings, including Yevgeny Onegin, Cavalleria rusticana and works by Bizet, Ravel, Dutilleux and Berio. From 1990 to 1994 he was principal guest conductor of the St Petersburg PO, and from 1992 to 1998 principal guest conductor of the Maggio Musicale in Florence. During the 1990s Bychkov devoted much of his time to opera, garnering engagements at La Scala, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Aix-en-Provence Festival. He made his début at the Vienna Staatsoper, conducting Elektra, in 1999. In 1997 he became chief conductor of the WDR SO in Cologne and in 1999 chief conductor of the Semperoper in Dresden. Bychkov, who became a naturalized American citizen, is married to the pianist Marielle Labèque.

DAVID MERMELSTEIN

Bydgoszcz

(Ger. Bromberg).

Capital city of the Bydgoszcz province of Poland. The earliest information on musical life in the city’s religious institutions (churches, monasteries and the Jesuit College) dates from the 16th century. By the 17th century the clerical schools had their own musical establishments, and the earliest information about the teaching of music, in the Carmelite convent school, dates from 1669. Other extant souces record the building of church organs by the Bernardines in 1618. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when the city suffered greatly from war and plague, theatrical works were performed at the Jesuit College. During the long period of Prussian rule (1772–1919) the city’s Polish inhabitants struggled to sustain a sense of Polish cultural identity. In 1824 a new Stadttheater was built and regular guest appearances by the company from Poznań were organized. It was only in the second half of the century that Polish operatic troupes began to perform regularly in the city. From 1885 to 1902 summer seasons were given by the Polish Theatre from Poznań, presenting works such as Moniuszko’s Halka and many Polish folk pieces; these were forbidden by the German authorities in 1902. In 1883 the ‘Halka’ male-voice choir was founded, and other choral groups were established from the turn of the century.

After Poland regained its independence in 1918 there was an upsurge in cultural activity. In 1922 the Bydgoskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne (Bydgoszcz Music Society) was established, under whose auspices various choirs were formed. In 1927 a conservatory was founded under the direction of Zdzisław Jahnke. Polish Radio opened a studio in Bydgoszcz in 1937, and in 1938–9 the city established a concert subscription series for its own 46-member symphony orchestra. Other musical institutions during this period included a salon orchestra, a broadcasting ensemble, the collegium musicum of the conservatory, comprising an orchestra and choir performing early music, and two private music schools.

After World War II institutions which had been destroyed during the German occupation were rebuilt. In 1945 the conservatory was reconstituted as the Pomorską Średnią i Niższą Szkołę Muzyczną (Pomeranian Middle and Lower Music Schools). In 1946 the city opened the Pomorski Dom Szłuki (Pomeranian House of Culture), with a concert hall in which daily concerts were given. Two symphony orchestras were established in parallel: the Bydgoszcz Radio Orchestra, under the direction of Arnold Rezler, and the Pomeranian SO, later known as the Pomeranian PO. In 1956 the Teatr Muzyczny Opery i Operetki (Musical Theatre of Opera and Operetta) was opened; it became state owned in 1960, and was renamed the Państwowa Opera (State Opera House) in 1980. In 1992 the company moved into its own 1000-seat theatre. The chamber ensemble, Capella Bydgostiensis, created in 1962, performs on period instruments. The Gmach Filharmonii (Philharmonic Hall) was built from 1951 to 1958. Many leading international soloists and conductors have appeared there, including Stokowski, Rubinstein, Richter and David and Igor Oistrakh.

The Akademia Muzyczna im. Feliksa Nowowiejskiego (Nowowiejski Academy of Music) grew out of two pre-war institutions: the Instytut Muzyczny (Music Institute) and the Konserwatorium Miejskiego (City Conservatory). In 1974 the Nowowiejski Music Academy was affiliated to the State High School of Music in Łódź, and in 1979 became an independent institution. The academy has reciprocal arrangements with the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, and music schools in Osaka, Bratislava and Greifswald, as well as with other Polish musical institutions.

Bydgoszcz hosts, in alternation, two important music festivals. The Bydgoszcz Music Festival, founded in 1963, was initially devoted to Polish early music, but later broadened its scope to include Polish contemporary music, including works specially written for the festival by Górecki, Kilar and Twardowski. Since 1992 the theme of the festival has been ‘The Integration of Europe in Music’. The International Music Festival for Central and Eastern Europe has been held every three years since 1966, in association with the musicological congress ‘Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis’. Music publishing in Bydgoszcz centres on the imprint Z dziejów muzyki polskiej (From the history of Polish music), a company which publishes series of materials from the history of early Polish music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Podejko: ‘Życie muzyczne w Bydgoszczy do końca XVIII w.’ [Musical life in Bydgoszcz up to the end of the 18th century], Z dziejów muzyki polskiej, vii (1964), 91–109

Z. Guldon and R. Kabaciński: Szkice z dziejów dawnej Bydgoszczy XVI–XVIII w. [Sketches from the history of old Bydgoszcz from the 16th century to the 18th] (Bydgoszcz, 1975)

Z. Mrozek: Życie kulturalno-społeczne, teatralne i literackie Bygoszczy w latach 1919–1939 [The socio-cultural, theatrical and literary life of Bydgoszcz in the years 1919–39] (Bydgoszcz, 1984)

B. Janiszewska-Mincer: Kultura w Bydgoszczy (1945–9) [Culture in Bydgoszcz (1945–9)] (Bydgoszcz, 1988)

JOLANTA GUZY-PASIAKOWA

Byers, David

(b Belfast, 26 Jan 1947). Northern Irish composer. He studied composition with Raymond Warren (1965–7) at Queen's University, Belfast, and in 1968 became the Manson Scholar at the RAM, where he studied with James Iliff. Funding from the Belgian and Irish governments enabled him to study with Pousseur in Liège from 1972 to 1973. In 1977 he became a producer for BBC Northern Ireland.

The impulse for many of Byers' compositions, whether instrumental or vocal, is poetry; his scores often begin with a poem or quotation. His use of poems by the Belfast-born poet Joseph Campbell in the song cycle Moon-Shadows, the orchestral work The Moon is Our Breathing and the preface to Canto for solo flute, clearly illustrates his keen interest in both English literature and Irish culture. Pre-existing musical sources are also common elements of his compositions. Whether plainsong (The Journey of the Magi), psalm (Dunfermling Rune), folk song (The Harp that Once) or French chanson (Cerises d'amour), borrowed material is transformed to the point where it is barely recognizable.

Byers' compositions combine strong linearity with intricate polyphony. Pitch material is structured through the use of note rows of varying lengths, devices the composer calls ‘nets’ and ‘sieves’ that generate intervallic structures, and magic squares. The resultant musical language is harmonically eclectic, covering the spectrum from diatonic to densely chromatic.

WORKS

(selective list)

Incid music: Woyzeck (radio drama, G. Büchner), 1986; Sweeney Agonistes (radio drama, T.S. Eliot), 1988; Sweeney Astray (radio drama, S. Heaney), 1989; Seize the Fire (radio drama, T. Paulin), 1990; Medea (radio drama, B. Kennelly), 1991

Inst: Canto, fl, 1972, rev. 1982, 1990; Pholypony, fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, 1975; The Harp that Once, org, 1976; William Cowper: His Delight, fl, ob, cl, bn, tpt, trbn, vn, vc, pf, org, hpd, 1978; Pibroch: Dunfermling Rune, org, 1978; Dragons, org, 1979; Dodecophony, 2 org, 1980; At the Still Point of the Turning World, str qt, 1981; Caliban's Masque, wind band, 1982; Verses, org, 1982; Magnificat, org, 1983; A Planxty for the Dancer, orch, 1983; The Wren's Blether, vv, fl + pic, cl + b cl, hn, vc, hpd, tape, 1984; Tuba mirum, org, 1984; St Columba and the Crane, tuba, tape, 1985; The Deer's Horn, ob, vc, 1988; The Journey of the Magi, str qt, 1990; Out of the Night, orch, 1991; Madrigale: ecce Orfeo, orch, 1996; Toccata: la morte d'Orfeo, orch, 1996; Distractions of the Mind, pf, 1998; Epigrams, pf, 1998

Vocal: As in their Time (L. MacNeice), SATB, 1969, rev. 1976; Cerises d'amour (var. Elizabethan, trans. P. de Rothschild), SSA/SSS, 1972; Rhymes, SATB, 1980; Segue (N. Hopper, W.B. Yeats, K. Tynan, trad.), S, fl, vn, hp, pf, 1980; Moon-Shadows (J. Campbell), Mez/S, fl + pic, cl + b cl, hn, vn, vc, pf, 1981; The Moon is Our Breathing (Campbell), nar, str qnt, ww qnt, perc, 1985, arr. opt. nar, orch, 1989; Colours (Campbell); Mez, pf, 1985; Mortality's Eclipse (medieval Latin), 1v, pf, 1988

MICHAEL RUSS

Byfield.

English family of organ builders.

(1) John Byfield (i)

(2) John Byfield (ii)

(3) John Byfield (iii)

(4) John Byfield (iv)

MICHAEL GILLINGHAM/NICHOLAS PLUMLEY

(1) John Byfield (i)

(b ?London, c1694; d Wolverhampton, 1751). He married Renatus Harris’s daughter Catherine, and started in partnership with his brother-in-law John Harris in 1725. He built several important organs with Harris and, after the latter apparently retired in about 1740, he continued on his own, probably assisted by his son. He was highly reputed for his reed voicing (John Stanley said that his reeds in the 1740 Doncaster parish church organ were worth their weight in silver); in this, as in his specifications, he followed the Harris tradition. Together with Harris he built new organs for the City of London churches of St Alban Wood Street (1728–9) and St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange (1732), and added Swell departments to many existing organs, for example at St Mary Abbots, Kensington (1730), Holy Sepulchre without Newgate, London (1739; payments were made to ‘Mr. Byfield and Co.’), the Temple Church (1741) and St Andrew Undershaft, London (1749). He made considerable alterations to the Renatus Harris organ in St Botolph Aldgate (1744), almost certainly adding a new case. The case there, with gabled cornices over the pipe flats, is very similar to others from his workshop, including those at St Lawrence’s, Reading (1741), and St Mary’s, Truro (c1750; now part of the cathedral). His last work was a new organ for Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (1751); he took the old Renatus Harris organ there in part exchange. Byfield died on the return journey to England and his widow sold the instrument to St John’s, Wolverhampton, where it survives (though reconstructed).

(2) John Byfield (ii)

(d London, 1767). Son of (1) John Byfield (i). He evidently succeeded to his father’s business in 1751, and like him was a good reed voicer. He almost certainly built an organ for the Music Room of Curzon House, South Audley Street, in about 1760. The case of this organ is now in the parish church of Thorpe Morieux, Suffolk. An excellent example of his work survives at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, London (1764), where there is a relatively unaltered Great diapason chorus and Trumpet and a very handsome Rococo case. For Grant Castle, Scotland, he made a large chamber organ in 1766; the entire instrument survives, with remarkably little alteration, at Finchcocks, Goudhurst, Kent. It is an organ of exceptional importance as one of the very few from the 18th century in a trustworthy state.

(3) John Byfield (iii)

(d ?London, c1799). Son of (2) John Byfield (ii). He was in partnership with Samuel Green, a builder of approximately the same age, in 1768– 72, and was organ builder to the royal household in 1770–82. With Green he built at least ten organs; the case survives of their instrument of 1770 in St Margaret’s, Barking, Essex. At St Mary, Islington, an elaborate four-towered case dating from 1771 by Byfield and Green survived until World War II. Between 1774 and 1780 he seems to have been in loose partnership with England and Russell, working with them at Christ’s Hospital, London, in 1780. He is mentioned in a number of City of London parish records in connection with tuning and repairs to City organs as at St Katharine Cree, St Bride’s, Fleet Street, St Andrew Undershaft and St Edmund the King. In these parish accounts there is mention of a salary for ‘John Byfield and Son’ in 1793. Possibly the last work carried out by John Byfield (iii) was at St Andrew Undershaft in 1799.

5. Anthologies of 1588–91.

(4) John Byfield (iv)

(b 1766; d ?1806). Son of (3) John Byfield (iii). He and his father provided an organ for St Bartholomew-the-Less, Smithfield (1794), on an annuity basis, and payments ceased after 1806; the agreement with the parish stated that the 28-year-old Byfield would be paid until his own decease and that of his sister, Mary Frances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hopkins-Rimbault

A. Freeman: ‘John Harris and the Byfields’, The Organ, xxv (1945–6), 112–18, 145–52

W.L. Sumner: The Organ: its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use (London, 1952, enlarged 4/1973/R)

C. Clutton and A. Niland: The British Organ (London, 1963/R, 2/1982)

N.M. Plumley: ‘The Harris-Byfield Connection’, JBIOS, iii (1979), 108–34

N.M. Plumley: The Organs of the City of London (Oxford, 1996)

Bykanē [bukanē]

(Gk.).

Ancient Greek brass instrument, the Roman Buccina. See also Ibycus.

Byland, Ambrose.

See Beeland, Ambrose.

Bylsma, Anner

(b The Hague, 17 Feb 1934). Dutch cellist. He studied with Carel van Leeuwen Boomkamp at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague (1950–55), and was awarded the Conservatory's prix d'excellence in 1957. The following year he was appointed principal cellist of the Netherlands Opera Orchestra and in 1959 won first prize in the Casals Competition in Mexico. From 1962 to 1968 he was principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam (1962–8). During this time he began to tour the world as a soloist and chamber musician and made his British début at the Wigmore Hall in 1963. Bylsma is renowned for his versatility, and uses both period and modern instruments. In addition to his solo performances he has made many trio appearances with Frans Brüggen and Gustav Leonhardt, and is a co-founder of the chamber ensemble L'Archibudelli. He teaches at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, and the Sweelinck Conservatorium, Amsterdam, and also gives masterclasses throughout the world. He has made many recordings, ranging from Bach's solo suites and Vivaldi concertos to works by Schumann and Brahms. His playing is based on a faultless technique and a lyrical tone of uncommon sweetness and purity. He plays a Gofriller Baroque cello, dated 1695, on which he uses two gut and two silver-plated strings. His modern cello is a Pressenda dated 1865, on which he has an all-gut A string, an aluminium D and silver-wound gut for the lower strings. (CampbellGC)

MARGARET CAMPBELL

Byrd, William

(b London, c1540; d Stondon Massey, Essex, 4 July 1623). English composer.

6. Late years, 1593–1623: liturgical music.

7. Late songs and instrumental music.

8. Byrd in his time and ours.

JOSEPH KERMAN

1. Early years.

Byrd was born in London, the son of a Thomas Byrd of whom little is known (Harley; source of much new information on Byrd’s life). Though a family genealogy has survived, record of William’s birth has not, and his birth date is deduced from a deposition of October 1598 where he gave his age as ‘58 yeares or ther abouts’. The Byrds styled themselves ‘gentlemen’; Symond, the oldest brother, took out a coat of arms in 1571. A family member had been an abbot, and the composer was able to arrange a marriage between his oldest son Christopher and a great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More.

While Symond and another older brother, John, are listed as choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral, William’s name does not appear. It is assumed that he was brought up in the Chapel Royal (whose records do not name the choirboys), for he is said to have been a pupil of its organist and most eminent figure, Thomas Tallis. Byrd was later very close to Tallis, witnessing both his and his wife’s wills, and it seems likely that after Byrd’s voice broke he stayed on at the Chapel Royal as Tallis’s assistant. This would have put him in an advantageous position when a post became available at Lincoln in 1563.

Several of Byrd’s surviving compositions date from his teens. The three-part Sermone blando for consort and the second organ Miserere are typical student works, involving strict or free canons over a plainchant melody, and the two-part organ hymns and antiphons in the manner of John Redford and Thomas Preston inhabit a different world from Byrd’s other music. One or two vocal works (motets) for the Sarum Use, the form of Catholic liturgy used in most of England, would appear to have been composed before the death of Queen Mary in 1558, that is, before Byrd was 18. Similes illis fiant is an unusual collaborative cantus firmus setting with John Sheppard and Thomas Mundy; although the musical style is of course more like theirs than his, features have been detected in it suggestive of the composer to come. The Easter antiphon Christus resurgens provided a favourite cantus firmus for competitive setting which he might have approached as a technical exercise after the liturgical conditions for it had lapsed. Again, though this work is more primitive than Byrd’s later cantus firmus settings, there are touches in it to admire, and he thought well enough of the piece to publish it in 1605.

2. Lincoln, 1563–70.

Byrd was appointed to the position of Organist and Master of the Choristers at Lincoln Cathedral on 25 March 1563, taking on the educational duties that such a post implies. He was given a larger salary than usual and also received a long-term grant of a rectory at Hainton, Lincolnshire, presumably by way of extra emolument. In 1568 he married Julian Birley, who came from a Lincolnshire family, and their first children, Christopher and Elizabeth, were baptized in the cathedral close in 1569 and 1572. Born later were Thomas (1576–c1652; he became a musician and spent some time in the Jesuit college at Valladolid), Rachel and Mary.

A dispute between Byrd and the cathedral chapter in 1569 was serious enough to cause a suspension of his salary; though few of the documents have survived, it seems that an increasingly Puritan chapter resented Byrd’s protracted organ playing in the services as too popish. This is the first indication of the stubborn Catholicism that was a defining feature of Byrd's life and works. The dispute was resolved, and in 1573, after he had left for London and his successor had been appointed (at a lower salary), the chapter heeded representations from certain ‘noblemen and councillors of the Queen’ and agreed to continue paying Byrd. On condition that he send it ‘church songs and services’ from time to time, he received a quarter of his former salary up to 1581. This is the first indication of the composer’s proficiency in the great Elizabethan art of applying influence, and in the management of his financial affairs in general.

At Lincoln Byrd found his stride as a composer; the chapter knew what it was doing when it drew up its condition. Although the chronology of his music is naturally uncertain at many points, and it is only from later that we have a good number of dated sources, internal musical evidence allows us to draw up a reasonable list of works composed at Lincoln. A striking feature of this early music is the large number of styles, forms and genres that Byrd essayed and the rapid, sure moulding of them all into something individual. It is as though he had embarked on a deliberate programme of experimentation, both in the kinds of music he wrote and in the composers whose work he looked to. Tallis, Redford, Christopher Tye, Robert White, Robert Parsons, William Hunnis and (a little later) the émigré composers Philip Van Wilder and Alfonso Ferrabosco (i) served him as models, sometimes suggesting general ideas, techniques, textures or groundplans, and sometimes providing material that he could quote directly.

Of his organ music, the three linked settings of Clarifica me, Pater, and perhaps other works, show signs of having been composed in the Lincoln years. The third Clarifica, in four parts, is Byrd’s first exciting composition. And at Lincoln he laid the foundations for what was perhaps to be his greatest single accomplishment, the perfection of English virginal music from primitive beginnings. In works like those described by his pupil Thomas Tomkins as ‘Byrd's old fancy’ and ‘Byrd's old ground’ (MB 62 and 86), one can see his emerging control of ‘open’ expansive form on the one hand and of ‘closed’ periodic form on the other. In an ambitious but uneven variation work, The Hunt’s Up (MB 40; not to be confused with the patently spurious work printed as no.41 in the MB edition of 1969 and 1976), Byrd wrestled with a longer bass pattern than those of his earlier grounds; he drew on this work for several later ones and rewrote it in later years. (This practice, incidentally, can be inferred for a surprisingly large number of his compositions.) In general, Byrd was more successful at this time in the ‘open’ style, as witness the brilliant keyboard Fantasia in A minor, the best of the early motets, and the In Nomine settings for consort. To judge from the few manuscripts surviving from this period, the In Nomines were the first of his works to circulate widely.

Byrd’s earliest settings of English poems are consort songs for one voice and four viols. Similar songs were written in the 1560s by such composers as Parsons, Richard Farrant and Nicholas Strogers, and Byrd’s Triumph with pleasant melody is a fair example of the style at its most elementary and drab. His consort settings of metrical psalms, however, show a characteristic advance in their more interesting vocal lines and consistent imitative counterpoint in the string parts. Certain of these psalms, in which the stanzas end with simple choruses, come close to verse anthems – another genre developed in the early 1560s by Farrant, Mundy and Hunnis. Byrd followed them closely. His verse anthem Alack, when I look back takes over both words and music of a similar composition by Hunnis (see Monson, 1982).

Most of Byrd’s English liturgical music (except for the Great Service) seems to have been written at Lincoln, even though apparently little polyphonic music was required there. Was he writing this music already with an eye to London? A hard look at his output of Anglican music encourages the suspicion that he set out to establish his mastery in each of its genres – Preces, psalms, simple and festal services and so on – with one or two commanding works, and then cultivated them no further. This is rather different from Fellowes’s picture of an unstoppable flow of sacred composition spilling ecumenically over Anglican and Catholic genres alike. In any case, Byrd’s famous Short Service became a staple of the cathedral repertory and a fixture after it appeared in John Barnard’s First Book of Selected Church Musick (1641). The melodic freshness and harmonic variety of this work mark an obvious advance over its model, the Short Service of Tallis.

Some of the Latin motets published in 1575 were evidently also written considerably earlier. These include the most subtle of Byrd’s cantus firmus motets, Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, the brilliant if naive psalm motet Attollite portas, and the long tripartite collect Tribue, Domine–Te deprecor–Gloria Patri set in the form of the ancient votive antiphon and in a style (or rather, styles) best described as a dazzling concatenation of old and new. The astonishing eight- and nine-part settings in continuous imitative style of Psalms cxx and xv (Ad Dominum cum tribularer and Domine, quis habitabit), which Byrd never published, also seem to date from the Lincoln years.

Another very impressive unpublished early composition, a setting from the Lamentations, is the first of many that employ fluid, dense polyphony to achieve gravity and pathos. The work lacks the smooth consistency of White’s five-part Lamentations and the simple intensity of those by Tallis. In its contrapuntal sweep, however, and in the powerful rough climax on ‘Jerusalem convertere’, it goes beyond the range of either of the older composers.

3. London, 1570–75.

Byrd was sworn in as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in February 1572, after the accidental death of Robert Parsons. He is also described as joint organist of the chapel with Tallis, the description appearing first on the title-page of their first joint publication, the Cantiones of 1575 (see illustration).

In London, as Squire remarked, Byrd ‘seems rapidly to have made his way’. From his first years in the chapel and on through the next two decades, he is found in association with important persons. Powerful Elizabethan lords figure among the dedicatees of his various publications; Thomas, Lord Paget, the Earl of Worcester and the Petre family were to become his special patrons. In about 1573 he obtained the lease of a property in Essex from the Earl of Oxford, the poet; this was the first of several leases that plunged Byrd into endless litigation. Among his song texts are poems by Oxford, Sidney, Thomas Watson and Sir Edward Dyer, including some that he could only have come by as a result of direct contact with the advanced poets of the 1570s and 1580s. The same is true of certain anonymous song texts with a decided ‘literary’ flavour.

The Earl of Oxford was a Catholic, as were all of Byrd’s closest associates and patrons. His first major patron was Paget, a music enthusiast who later employed Peter Philips; Paget may have known Byrd as early as 1573, and by 1585 was providing him with an annuity. Indeed the composer seems to have acted as a sort of coach to a circle of noble amateurs who were sending each other their works. ‘I understand that youe thinke there was a berd sange in my ere that made me alter my vayne’, wrote the future Earl of Worcester to Paget. ‘Yt is verye true the thing came not to youe w^th owt the sight of m^r byrde, saving the last part w^ch he never sawe.’ An undertone of respect in this correspondence confirms the impression that Byrd moved easily among the Elizabethan aristocracy; in 1579 the Earl of Northumberland called Byrd ‘my friend’ (Byrd was teaching his daughter). These men were Catholic activists; Northumberland was executed in the wake of the Throckmorton plot, and Paget fled the country. Worcester was also Catholic, but famously loyal to the throne. He remained a music enthusiast – a catalogue survives of his extensive library – and became another of Byrd’s patrons: he was the dedicatee of the Cantiones sacrae of 1589. Byrd had a room in Worcester’s house in London.

Queen Elizabeth I, too, must be counted among Byrd’s benefactors. In 1575 she granted Byrd and Tallis a patent for the printing and marketing of part-music and lined music paper, a trade with only a very limited history in England up to that time. They issued the famous Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, comprising Latin motets for five to eight voices by both composers, and dedicated it with much ceremony to the queen. The prefatory matter includes a poem in Latin elegiacs by Richard Mulcaster, a foremost Elizabethan scholar and educator, praising the art of music, the queen and the two composers in lavish terms, and even claiming that the publication would spread the fame of English music abroad. It has rather the air of a combination thank-offering to the queen and advertisement for the new business, furnished with patriotic rhetoric as insurance against the charge of promulgating music with texts taken in some cases from the Roman liturgy (though to be sure, never with any explicit sectarian reference). Even the laboured title may have been composed with this in mind – ‘Songs which are [strictly speaking not sacred but only] called sacred on account of their texts’. In 1586 a suspect under interrogation allowed that ‘songes of M^r byrdes and M^r Tallys’ had been sung, but ‘no other unlawfull song’.

Since Queen Elizabeth accepted the dedication of the Cantiones, it seems reasonable to suppose that the motets, or some of them, were sung in her Chapel Royal. They were surely written to be sung somewhere; and it is known that Elizabeth liked the Latin service. However this may be, the publication was a failure, and the chastened monopolists published nothing more for 13 years. In 1577 they complained to the queen that the patent was a source of little profit and petitioned for further benefits in terms which, said Fellowes, ‘may be regarded as lacking a little in dignity’. Few Elizabethans would have regarded the matter in this light, and Byrd received the lease of the manor of Longney in Gloucestershire – the source of another litigation in his old age. The audacity of this entire episode suggests that the driving force behind it was Byrd rather than Tallis.

His motets published in 1575 are full of musical audacities, too. Their variety of experimentation, novelty and expressive range must have dazzled contemporary musicians. Next to some of the older pieces already mentioned, which draw imaginatively on native traditions of church music, there is a newer group of penitential motets which show a significant foreign influence by way of Alfonso Ferrabosco, the prolific Italian composer who was in England in Elizabeth’s service intermittently between 1563 and 1578. (The two composers wrote canons on the Miserere plainchant in a ‘vertuous contention’; a seemingly unauthorized edition of these canons, Medulla: Musicke sucked out of the sappe of two of the most famous musitians that ever were in this land, was announced in 1603 but never published.) As a motet composer, ‘Master Alfonso’ had absorbed, a little stiffly, the early style of Lassus. Through Ferrabosco, Byrd came to know – and became, it seems, the first English composer really to understand – classical imitative polyphony.

One technique he learnt and used extensively was ‘double imitation’ (Andrews, 1966) – imitation based on a subject which, being moulded distinctively to two text fragments, breaks down into two sub-themes which can be developed and combined freely. Byrd’s Domine, secundum actum meum closely follows Ferrabosco’s Domine, secundum peccata mea in this technique, though its artistic promise is realized fully only in motets of a slightly later period, such as Domine, praestolamur (ex.1; see Kerman, 1994). Notable here is the power Byrd achieved through the flexibility of the expositions of the first sub-theme, and the rhetorical plan whereby the heart of the text-fragment (‘adventum tuum’) dominates at the end as a result of free strettos on the second. Technical innovations such as double imitation set Byrd’s motets in the 1575 Cantiones apart from their neighbours by Tallis, fine as they are, as also from Byrd’s own earlier work such as the large-scale psalm settings or the Lamentations.

Equally new features in English composition were the use of highly expressive subjects in Byrd’s penitential motets in the 1575 Cantiones, their long fluent paragraphs constructed in reference to melodic and harmonic goals, and the power with which these paragraphs are often balanced one with another. Ponderous though they may be, and sometimes rough in counterpoint, these motets always convey more urgency and weight than do their models in Ferrabosco, something that is even more true of Emendemus in melius, an unusually intense (and concise) essay in affective homophony. This motet Byrd placed at the head of his first group in the publication, and it is one that is often found in copies by contemporary scribes.

Another very popular piece, the variations for five-part consort on the ground Browning my dear, was already being copied into manuscripts around 1580. The fecundity of invention shown throughout the 20 variations is astonishing, though hardly more so than the sheer contrapuntal brilliance and the secure layout of the architectural design. Large-scale keyboard masterpieces that represent a comparable level of technique are the Passing Measures Pavan and Galliard (based on the passamezzo antico ground) and the variations on the melody Walsingham. The development that led from The Hunt’s Up to these works can be traced through several other grounds and variations, presumably dating from the 1570s.

In the mid-1570s Byrd also started his marvellous series of pavans and galliards for keyboard. ‘The first that ever hee made’ (MB 29), according to the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (also according to the numbering in My Ladye Nevells Booke), exists in a version for five-part consort, and other early examples may be suspected of having a similar origin (MB 17 and 23). The result of this is a clear, solid basis in polyphony which provides unique richness in almost all Byrd's pavans and galliards – and a striking contrast or counterpoise to the plastic figuration of the repetenda, or strain-variations. In addition, dance form offered him the opportunity for endless subtle manipulations of different rhythms and different phrase lengths, all within the prescribed limits of three times eight or (usually) three times 16 bars. It was a form that proved to be especially congenial to Byrd’s genius.

4. London, 1575–93.

Between the publication of the Cantiones in 1575 and the Cantiones sacrae of 1591 lies Byrd’s most fertile period as a composer, but also the most stormy in his personal life. Sectarian conflict in England escalated fatefully in the late 1570s with the arrival of seminary priests from abroad and the foundation of the English College at Rome. A turning-point was the brutal execution of Edmund Campion and two other Jesuits in 1581; this event shook all England, not only the Catholic community, and set off the grim chain of Elizabethan religious persecutions. A well-known inflammatory poem about their execution, Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?, found its composer; Byrd’s song caught the attention of at least one contemporary witness, and in calmer times he actually published it (without, of course, any seditious stanzas).

Laws against recusancy (refusal to attend Church of England services) began to be enforced around 1577; in that year Julian Byrd was cited in Harlington, Middlesex, where the Byrds were now living (Harlington was near a Paget manor in West Drayton). Usually cited with her was a servant, John Reason, a former Lincoln singing man, who was once caught during a raid on a Catholic household delivering a letter from Byrd and some music; Reason ultimately died in gaol. Byrd himself was not cited for recusancy until 1584, probably because as a member of the Chapel Royal he could claim that his abode was London, not Harlington. In later years he and his family were repeatedly presented as recusants and once, in 1605, as long-time ‘seducers’ in the Catholic cause. At this time they were said to be excommunicated.

Byrd was closely associated with Jesuits; in 1586 he attended a clandestine week-long assembly at a country house to welcome two of the most prominent Jesuit missionaries, Robert Southwell, the poet and controversialist, and Henry Garnet, the future provincial or head of the mission. He played the organ at another gathering at which Garnet was present, in 1605. More seriously, around 1580 a list of ‘reli[e]vers of papistes and conveyers of money and other thinges unto them’ includes Byrd’s name, and in a letter to Paget from a fellow Catholic he is described as no less than a ‘Lean-to by whom we are Releved upon every casuale wreke’. It looks as though he were delivering something more to the Catholic underground than music for clandestine services. He may have harboured Jesuits or other fugitives, as the authorities that searched his home suspected; he may even have been in a position to provide financial support, for his brother John was a wealthy money-lender (although not a Catholic).

Less speculative is Byrd’s remarkable covert musical contribution to the recusant cause. In the 1580s this appears to have kindled his main compositional energies. The genre he chose for this purpose was the Latin motet. Intimately identified with Roman Catholicism, the motet should by rights have died out in England after the Reformation; it is marvellously apt that it should enjoy a new lease of life at the hands of Byrd and emissaries of the Counter-Reformation. There were few opportunities in England for the public performance of Latin motets, especially with texts of the sort often chosen by Byrd; they must have been destined for domestic, not church, use, particularly in Catholic residencies. Some motets lament for Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian captivity, some pray that the congregation may be liberated, others ring changes on the theme of the coming of God. Irreproachable texts from the Bible and elsewhere would be read for double meanings. Indeed many of the same metaphors and the same actual texts were familiar to Catholics (and others) from their use in the extensive Jesuit controversial literature of the time. Certain of Byrd’s texts correspond to the last words of individual martyrs on the gallows, words that were always reported and dilated upon by hagiologists (Monson, 1997). Thus Byrd’s Cantiones of 1589 and 1591 and a tract such as Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort (1587) are parallel in metaphor and propagandistic intent. Poet and composer were joined in the same project.

About half of Byrd’s motets of this period seem clearly to have been directed to Catholics (the others would appeal to Catholics and Protestants alike). A few motets can be linked to particular occasions: Deus, venerunt gentes, which laments the bodies of martyrs thrown to the birds and beasts, must refer to Campion, and Circumspice, Jerusalem, which celebrates sons returning from the East in the service of God, was very likely Byrd’s offering at the welcome for Southwell and Garnet.

What Byrd was doing must have been an open secret, and is all but acknowledged in an exchange of motets between Byrd and Philippe de Monte, Kapellmeister to the Holy Roman Emperor. Monte (perhaps acting ex officio) sent Byrd an eight-part motet with words selected from Psalm cxxxvii: ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept … How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’. Using the same psalm, Byrd replied: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ and to drive the point home he included in his motet a three-part canon by inversion.

Despite all this Catholic activism, however, Byrd was never seriously troubled by the authorities. For this his powerful patrons were responsible, including the queen herself. Over and above the printing patent, her major bounty to Byrd was a remittance of some sort for his recusancy (known only from a document in the next reign in which he petitioned for its continuance). Elizabeth’s regard for Byrd was revealed most openly in the year of the Spanish Armada, when she had him compose an anthem on words of her own, Look and bow down, thanking God for its defeat. Byrd also wrote Rejoice unto the Lord for her 20th Accession Day in 1587, and the first known madrigal in her praise, This sweet and merry month of May (1590).

Byrd’s sense of security in view of this backing helps explain the audacities in his publishing career. His publication of the Campion song belongs to these; in the 1590s he actually brought out three masses, and while the printer left off the title pages, the composer’s name is coolly entered on every page of the music. For the Gradualia he was able (no doubt through his connections) to obtain a licence for publication from the Bishop of London (Nasu). Thus emboldened, he spelt out the (Catholic) liturgical scheme in his preface, taking no more precaution than the omission of words from some of the more sensitive items.

5. Anthologies of 1588–91.

In 1587 Byrd made a new effort to launch himself into the world of publishing. Both Tallis and Thomas Vautrollier, the printer of the 1575 Cantiones, had recently died, leaving Byrd in sole possession of the patent and perhaps also free to make more advantageous business arrangements. He must also have decided that he needed print to order, anthologize and preserve his music; this project occupied him for the next few years. With the printer Thomas East as his assignee, Byrd now presided over the first great years of English music printing – great years in spite of his evident determination not to flood the market (there is evidence that he exerted strict control or even censorship during his years as monopolist).

His great initial success was the Psalmes, Sonets and Songs of 1588. This is only the third book of English songs ever known to have been published. The prefatory matter includes (besides the well-known ‘Reasons … to perswade every one to learne to sing’) a clear explanation that most of the songs had originally been for one voice and instrumental consort but had been adapted to words in all the five parts. Indeed, earlier consort-song versions of them survive in manuscript. By rescoring them, Byrd presumably meant to capitalize on the new vogue for madrigals, though he took care to designate the original sung line as ‘the first singing part’ in most cases.

The contents consist of grave ‘Psalmes’ and ‘Songes of Sadnes and Pietie’ and lighter ‘Sonets and Pastorales’, such as Though Amaryllis dance in green and I thought that Love had been a boy. Some were written in the 1580s (e.g. the fine Campion song and the two elegies for Sir Philip Sidney) but an earlier date is quite possible for others, such as the ten metrical psalms and the Lullaby. So famous was this piece that the whole publication came to be known as ‘Byrd's Lullabys’. It was intabulated for keyboard (probably not by Byrd) and mentioned in a letter by Worcester, who wrote rather grumpily in 1602 that while Irish tunes were just then all the rage at court, ‘in winter Lullaby an owld song of Mr Birde wylbee more in request as I thinke’.

The 1588 set sold out and East printed two further editions before 1593. For a second songbook in 1589, Songs of Sundrie Natures, Byrd chose and converted only a few consort songs from his remaining stock; he seems to have composed a good deal of new music and also cast around for material of ‘sundrie natures’. There is music for three, four, five and six parts. The book includes a consort song in its original form for voices and instruments, two carols, and the large verse anthem Christ rising, which was rewritten for the publication.

Although Byrd produced two accomplished madrigals described as ‘in the Italian vein’ for the poet Thomas Watson's First Sett of Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), in praise of ‘Eliza … beauteous Queen of Second Troy’, the polyphonic songs published in 1589 are only slightly touched by the madrigal style which was fascinating England at that time, but which Byrd obviously found basically unsympathetic.

Also in 1589, Byrd put out the first of his two new collections of motets. The Cantiones sacrae (for five voices) assembled motets which with few exceptions had been circulating in manuscript over the previous ten years or so, though for publication Byrd touched them up slightly. The second book of Cantiones sacrae (for five and six voices) is more miscellaneous than the first, like the second of the English songbooks. It includes some rather old pieces such as Cunctis diebus and some rather new ones such as Haec dies and the popular Laudibus in sanctis. The unusual half-madrigalian style of the latter motet was adopted to match the text, a ‘literary’ paraphrase of Psalm cl in Latin elegiac verse.

The basic style of the new motets stems from the rich imitative polyphony of the earlier penitential motets. The counterpoint is now wonderfully supple and there is freer alternation between polyphony, semichoir work and homophony or half-homophony, notably in the frequent appeals ‘Miserere’, ‘Domine, ne moreris’, and so on – always an impressive and moving feature of the motets in which they occur. The pieces are smoother and less ponderous than before, though many are still of monumental proportions. The ‘Babylon’ motets, all of which are very long, depart from this stylistic norm. In Tribulationes civitatum and Ne irascaris, Domine we hear for perhaps the first time Byrd’s characteristic mild major-mode sonorities, with warm 6ths and 3rds and drawn-out pedal or ostinato effects, while in Vide, Domine, afflictionem nostram Phrygian progressions agitate the largely homophonic texture: an extreme, almost manneristic composition. Ne irascaris is found in two manuscripts dated 1581 and in many others. Purcell’s copy of it has been preserved, and its second part, Civitas sancti tui, is still often sung (sometimes with its English contrafactum text, Bow thine ear).

The motets of the 1580s no longer show the direct influence of Ferrabosco, but there is doubtless much still to be learnt about Byrd’s relation to other composers, native and foreign, in the later as well as the earlier periods of his career. Civitas sancti tui has been shown to take something from Aspice, Domine, a widely circulated motet by Philip Van Wilder (D.Ll. Humphreys, Soundings, ix [recte viii], 1979–80, pp.13–36). The Sanctus of Byrd’s four-part mass is derived from Taverner’s ‘Meane’ Mass – surely a gesture of tribute rather than apprenticeship (Brett, 1981). Two late pavans (no.3 in C and no.2 in F) adopt ideas from younger composers, John Bull and Morley respectively (Neighbour).

Byrd’s fifth collection was not a publication but a manuscript, My Ladye Nevells Booke, dated 1591. Here he preserved and, to a considerable extent, ordered the best of his virginal music then written. It opens with two grounds composed specially for Lady Nevell – brilliant, concise pieces which were evidently Byrd’s last essays in this ancient form. There follow two illustrative pieces, The Battle and The Barley Break, one a sort of 16th-century Wellingtons Sieg and the other a spring shower of irresistible little dance phrases. A little later comes a carefully chosen series of nine pavans, mostly with galliards, including the impressive canonic Pavan (MB 74) and the Pavan and Galliard Kinborough Good (a lady’s name; MB 32). Byrd included a number of quite old pieces that he must have regarded highly, but he omitted the lengthy early fantasias in favour of new examples of a more deft and concise nature (MB 25 and 46). Again, these appear to be the last keyboard fantasias that he composed.

One of Byrd’s most imaginative compositions, the Quadran Pavan and Galliard, was not included in My Ladye Nevells Booke, though as a companion piece to the Passing Measures Pavan and Galliard (the Quadran is based in a complex way on the passamezzo moderno ground) it is probably not much later. ‘Excellent For matter’, said Tomkins of this piece, in contradistinction to the Quadran Pavan by Bull, which he considered ‘Excellent For the Hand’.

Another masterpiece that could not find a place in Byrd’s anthologies was the Great Service. This work, for ten voices and in seven sections, cannot have been composed before the later 1580s; probably parts of it were written for some great state occasion and the rest filled in (as in the case of Bach’s Mass in B minor) to make a statement about a major genre that was ideologically out of the composer's orbit. In style it shows occasional affinities with later anthems, and some of its structural divisions derive from earlier traditions of English service setting. But Byrd here worked on an incomparably grander scale, repeating the text with polyphonic elaboration at numerous points, and supporting the long narrative spans with every technical resource at his command.

6. Late years, 1593–1623: liturgical music.

Laws against recusancy stiffened once again in 1593, and at about this time Byrd moved further away from London, to a rather large property including a farm and woodlands in Stondon Massey, Essex, between Chipping Ongar and Ingatestone. This was a homecoming in more than one sense: the Byrd family hailed from Ingatestone, and Ingatestone Hall was now a safe haven for Catholics, thanks to Sir John Petre, the most important of all Byrd’s patrons.

Petre, whose manorial account books provide rich evidence of his musical proclivities, had known Byrd since the 1570s and played host to him in Essex many times in the 1580s (Mateer, 1996). Unlike Paget, Petre was a very cautious man who stayed out of politics, instead concentrating on his role as a country magnate, and he evidently enjoyed the confidence of the Crown. Though ostensibly a conformist, he is known to have harboured a priest, and it must be assumed that Byrd and his family now joined a community centred at the Petre manors that worshipped throughout the church year, on the whole without disturbance.

For only under such circumstances could Byrd’s last great body of music have come into being: his extensive body of carefully ordered music for the Proper and Ordinary of the Mass. It is moving to read in the dedication of the second volume of Gradualia Byrd’s acknowledgement to Petre that the contents ‘mostly proceeded from your house’ and, having been ‘plucked as it were from your gardens’ are ‘most rightfully due to you as tithes’.

Records of his life in this period are scarce, save for the inevitable recusancy entries and the copious legal briefs. From the former it can be inferred that his wife died in about 1606. Byrd now spent less and less time in London. His name appears in none of the 20-odd lists of witnesses and petitioners recorded in the Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal from 1592 to 1623, only in two formal registers of all the members. He continued to compose, but his main efforts were directed away from London, where in any case new musical fashions reigned with which he was out of sympathy. Much time was consumed in litigation concerning the numerous leases he had acquired by grant or purchase. No fewer than six cases are known in which he was a principal, some of them very voluminous; the one concerning the Stondon property dragged on for 17 years. Extensive extracts from legal documents are given by Fellowes (1936) and Harley.

In these documents Byrd does not always appear in too favourable a light, even after the bias of his adversaries is discounted. As a litigant he was most tenacious, and indeed almost everything we know about his career suggests that he was an exceedingly tough-minded individual. It is like Byrd to have included the psalmist’s vengeful verse ‘Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem’ in the ‘Babylon’ motet for Monte, one of his most personal. In his will there is pointed reference to a past quarrel with his daughter-in-law Catherine and to ‘the undutifull obstinancie of one whome I am unwilling to name’. Obstinacy perhaps ran in the family – in personal affairs, in litigation and in religion.

After 1590 Byrd’s attitude towards Latin sacred music underwent a significant change. The early motets were monumental and expressive; they were also personal in the sense that the texts represented the free choice of Byrd or his patrons – penitential meditations or outbursts in the first person singular as well as prayers, exhortations and protests on behalf of the Catholic community. He now started work on a grandiose scheme to provide music specifically for Catholic services. The texts were of course drawn from the appropriate sections of the liturgy, and the musical settings became much less monumental, in view of the liturgical context.

If this music was to serve a practical purpose it had to be published. The three famous masses were printed between c1593 and c1595 separately, that is, in very slim books. The two large books of Gradualia appeared in 1605 and 1607. The political climate may well have appeared favourable in early 1605, but things changed with the Gunpowder Plot and there is record of someone being arrested for possessing Gradualia partbooks. Byrd seems merely to have withdrawn the edition and stored the pages. He issued a second volume of Gradualia in 1607 and reissued both, with new title-pages, in 1610.

In musical style, the five-part mass is much simpler and more concise than any of Byrd's previous five-part music. The three- and four-part masses are simpler still. They have relatively little word repetition, even in the shorter mass movements, and there is no place for the extended polyphonic periods that had given such intensity and grandeur to the earlier music. Despite some very well-placed exceptions, such as the wonderful ‘Dona nobis pacem’ points in the four- and five-part masses, Byrd tended to avoid explicitly expressive setting, concentrating instead on more neutral, ‘classic’ musical material moulded with extreme care and beauty. In form, the masses are original, owing nothing to the imitation (‘parody’) technique that was universal on the Continent. Their head-motifs and frequent semichoir excursions recall English masses of a much earlier period; ideas taken from Taverner in the four-part mass are seamlessly modernized.

In the Gradualia, containing 109 items, Byrd’s total programme involved the provision of complete mass Propers (introit, gradual, tract or alleluia, offertory, communion) for the major feasts of the church year, Marian feasts and Marian votive masses. Book 1 (with works in three, four and five parts) contains masses of particular importance to the Jesuits, whose input is strongly indicated: Corpus Christi, All Saints and the large Marian section. Book 1 also includes a number of non-liturgical items, some with texts taken from the Primer, the prayer book for private devotions. Book 2 (in four, five and six parts) fills in the rest of the church’s year from Christmas to Whitsun. But the one six-part mass, for St Peter and St Paul, has both a political and a personal reference – to Byrd’s patron Petre and to Peter the patron saint of Rome.

To understand the Gradualia one must understand that when Byrd encountered the same text in two different liturgical contexts he did not usually set the second. He directed that his first setting should be transferred – sometimes with omissions or additions – from earlier in the book. Hence the ‘motets’ as printed are not always what they seem. To mention an extreme case, Diffusa est gratia is never to be sung in its printed form, which is an artificial composite of several sections to be selected from in three different ways for three different Marian services. The required transfers, not understood at the time of earlier editions (TCM and F), are explained in The Byrd Edition (v, 1989).

To allow for such transfers, if for no other reason, the Propers and groups of related Propers hold to the same mode and vocal scoring. There are no other explicit unifying factors among the constituent pieces beyond a strong consistency of style, which incidentally suggests that they were composed within a relatively short period (this is not true of the non-liturgical pieces included in the publications, some of which are older). The sustained effort represented by the Gradualia goes far beyond anything Byrd had attempted in his youth or middle years. Impressive, too, is the intricacy of the scheme, the sheer extent of it (it is larger than that of any analogous continental project) and the quality of the execution. The music is fluid, concise and effortless; simple binary structures and light homophonic phrases abound. Byrd was entirely at home with texts of a new kind, ecstatic and devotional in place of the predominantly penitential and lamenting texts of the earlier Cantiones sacrae.

Ex.2, from the gradual for the Nativity of the BVM, shows a typically quiet but subtle binary opening. The text might conceivably have been treated in ‘double imitation’, but Byrd now had no time for this leisurely technique – new text fragments start to crowd in as early as bar 5 – and he used it only exceptionally in the late period. Even more sharply ‘motivic’ are the famous ‘alleluia’ phrases, of which the Gradualia provides over 80 examples and for which Byrd developed a great variety of symmetrical and sequential structures. The alleluias in Sacerdotes Domini, Non vos relinquam orphanos, Constitues eos and other Gradualia numbers are among Byrd’s most haunting passages.

7. Late songs and instrumental music.

One wonders in just how many Jacobean households Catholic Mass was celebrated in choir with music from the Gradualia. Appleton Hall in Norfolk was one, the home of Edward Paston. At court in the 1570s Paston had been known as something of a poet, but he had soon retired to the quiet life of a country squire, a life that allowed him to practise the old religion with less interference and to indulge his hobbies, poetry and especially music. An enormous number of the manuscripts that he had copied have survived, and a dozen anonymous consort songs in these manuscripts have been securely identified as being by Byrd. Several of them have topical poems which can be dated from 1596 to 1612, and the music shows that in his late years Byrd was constantly developing the consort-song style towards new flexibility and elaboration.

Perhaps on Paston’s instructions, Byrd did not include any of these songs in his next and last published songbook, Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611). The 70-year-old composer was engaging in a new flurry of publication; the years 1610–12 also yielded the third edition of the 1589 songbook, reissues of the Gradualia, and Parthenia. The 1611 songbook includes jubilant full anthems (really motets in English), mournful verse anthems, six-part consort songs and polyphonic songs for three to five voices which are appreciably more madrigalian than those of 1589 (but still not very italianate). A masterpiece in this set is the (unmadrigalian) five-part song Retire, my soul.

In this thoroughly miscellaneous collection Byrd also included two fantasias for consort, one in four parts and one in six, perhaps with the idea of preserving the best of a genre that had not been anthologized in the period around 1590. He missed out the five-part canonic Fantasia in C, a keyboard version of which had been copied into My Ladye Nevells Booke.

The published fantasias seem to date from the 1590s. In the six-part one, and in another similar work in manuscript, Byrd worked out a remarkable large-scale form consisting of what are in essence linked movements, contrasting with one another and culminating in a galliard followed by a coda. The manuscript fantasia also includes snatches of pre-existing melodies – Greensleeves and evidently others – as also happens in several other of the consort and keyboard pieces. This phenomenon should be considered along with Byrd’s celebration of popular songs such as Walsingham and Fortune my foe in his variation sets. He was closer to ‘folksong’, it would seem, than any of the other great composers of early times.

Byrd wrote less keyboard music in his later years, but what he did write is full of new fantasy and new subtlety. He turned to writing mostly pavans and galliards, though three of the most imaginative variations also appear to date from after 1590, Go from my window, John come kiss me now and O mistress mine, I must. When at last he found occasion to have some keyboard music published, in Parthenia (c1612/13), jointly with Bull and Orlando Gibbons, he included only pavans and galliards and some short matching preludes. The Pavan and Galliard Sir William Petre spans the entire late period. Presumably it was written in 1591, for it was included in My Ladye Nevells Booke as a last-minute addition outside the main series of pavans; 20 years later it was the one old composition to be printed in Parthenia. The cogent linear and contrapuntal articulation of this superb dance pair can be gathered from ex.3, the opening strain of the pavan, without the ornamented repetendum; only a much longer example could show how, beyond this, keyboard texture is used in a much more integral fashion than before.

Keyboard figuration, too, became more flexible in the works dating from Byrd’s late years, no doubt under the impetus of younger members of the English virginal school that Byrd had founded. The intricate Galliard Mistress Mary Brownlow and the limpid Pavan and Galliards The Earl of Salisbury, which appeared for the first time in Parthenia, show new prospects opening up to Byrd’s imagination in the very last of his keyboard compositions.

His last printed works were four quiet sacred songs contributed to Sir William Leighton’s Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule in 1614. Byrd died at Stondon Massey on 4 July 1623, a man of some means, and was presumably buried in the parish churchyard according to the wish expressed in his will, though the grave has not been located.

8. Byrd in his time and ours.

Byrd retained a fondness for the jog-trot ‘plain style’ or ‘drab-age’ verse poetry of the 1560s throughout his life, from the earliest consort songs to the pieces written for Leighton. This may serve as a reminder that, although he composed steadily throughout Elizabeth's reign and well into that of James, he was essentially an early Elizabethan figure. He belonged to the generation of Sidney, Hooker and Nicholas Hilliard, not that of Shakespeare, Dowland and Bacon. He was as impervious to late Elizabethan elegance, Euphuistic or italianate, as he was to the subsequent Jacobean ‘disenchantment’. Decorum, solidity and a certain reticence of expression were qualities that were prized in his formative years, qualities that came to him naturally.

He belonged to the pioneer generation that built Elizabethan culture. In music Byrd did this alone, for, unlike Tallis before him and Morley after, he had no immediate contemporaries of any stature (except perhaps Ferrabosco). The essential work was completed by the time of the Armada, as he himself seems to have acknowledged by his retrospective anthologizing at about that time. He lived to write some of his greatest music later, but his younger contemporaries could not learn from this in the same way that they had from the earlier path-breaking compositions.

In recording his death, the ordinarily laconic Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal described him as ‘a Father of Musick’; to another contemporary admirer he was ‘Brittanicae Musicae Parens’. While Byrd’s versatility as a composer is often mentioned, and quite rightly, it is less often pointed out how much he indeed fathered for English music. With his motets, first of all, he achieved nothing less than the naturalization of the high Renaissance church style. The true power and expressiveness of imitative counterpoint had never been channelled in native composition before his motets of the 1575 Cantiones. As has been remarked, he rather stood back from the madrigal; but he was the first English composer to employ word illustration extensively – in vivid motets of the 1580s such as Deus, venerunt gentes and Vigilate. He found the English song in the 1560s in a dishevelled state and pulled it together to produce an extensive repertory of consort songs, a form that was very personal to Byrd and found no serious imitators. Its influence on the lute air, however, was palpable, and a relative of the consort song, the verse anthem, might be said to constitute Byrd’s most lasting legacy to English music, at least in one sense. Verse anthems, of which he had provided the most authoritative models – he even wrote a ‘verse’ service – were composed and sung widely during his lifetime and for long after it.

He kindled English virginal music from the driest of dry wood to a splendid blaze that crackled on under Bull and Gibbons and even lit some sparks on the Continent. Even his later music for consort, which was overshadowed at the turn of the century by the new fantasias of John Coprario and the younger Alfonso Ferrabosco, provided a seminal idea of considerable importance. The crystallization of dance movements out of the sections of Byrd's two six-part fantasias looks forward to the fantasy suites of the 1620s and beyond.

Byrd’s earlier music for consort represents a culmination of an older tradition. Traditional elements live on in his music along with innovatory ones: the Redfordian flashes in even some of the later keyboard works, the echoes of Taverner and Tallis in some of the Gradualia motets, and especially certain technical features such as ‘irregular’ dissonance treatment, 6–5 harmonic progressions, and unison ostinatos or rotas. There are pieces in which these features have to a large extent been filtered out, such as Siderum rector from the 1575 Cantiones and the four-part mass, but Byrd deliberately returned to a more archaic, rougher technique as better suited to the grain of his musical personality. Sometimes he turned archaic features to exquisite effect. The point about the familiar beginning of Ave verum corpus from the Gradualia is not simply that it illustrates ‘the vicious English taste for false relations’, as Tovey was pleased to call it, but that this is used in such a fresh way.

Byrd’s musical mind is as hard to characterize in a few words as that of any other of the great composers. Though he was ‘naturally disposed to Gravitie and Pietie’, in Henry Peacham’s famous phrase, there is no music at the time that projects such exuberance and gaiety as the English motets that he published in 1611, his sparkling keyboard galliards and his blithe ‘pastorals’ in the old consort song tradition. He was always doing something unexpected. He is probably to be regarded as one of the more intellectual of composers, and yet he also had a magic touch with sonority, as witness such diverse works as the pellucid Callino casturame, the Browning for consort, Iustorum animae from the Gradualia, and Domine, quis habitabit, a motet (in manuscript) for nine voices including three basses.

One admires most, perhaps, his manifold ways of moulding a phrase, a period or a total piece. Line, motif, counterpoint, harmony, texture, figuration can all be brought into play, and they are brought not singly but in ever new combinations. Form was expression for Byrd, and the extraordinary variety of effect that he obtained in his pieces stemmed from his fertile instinct for shape and for musical construction.

Morley and Tomkins were his pupils. If, as seems likely, Philips, Bull and Thomas Weelkes were too, Byrd's direct impact on English composition can be seen to have assumed almost Schoenbergian proportions. Much of his teaching must surely be preserved in Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), which also contains some of the many tributes to Byrd known from the period. His contemporary reputation was comparable to that of Sidney in another artistic field or Josquin in another era; this was something new in English music, and there can be little doubt that it went along with a sense of artistic mission on Byrd’s part that was also new. We can detect this in the way he went about anthologizing his best work, in his frequent rewriting of old pieces, and in his tendency to go back to a problem that he had not quite mastered in one piece and attack it in another: Tribue, Domine and Infelix ego, The Hunt’s Up and Hugh Aston’s Ground, the two six-part consort fantasias.

After Byrd’s death it was his Anglican music that survived, and the Short Service and a few favourite anthems, printed by Barnard and Boyce, never dropped out of the cathedral repertory. Interest in his Latin church music was revived by the antiquarians who scored his motets in the 18th century. In the 1840s the Musical Antiquarian Society issued scores of the five-part mass and book 1 of the Cantiones sacrae, with bowdlerizations by Rimbault and editorial lectures by the insufferable Horsley. The modern revival of this music dates essentially from Sir Richard Terry’s regime at Westminster Cathedral from 1901 to 1924, when it seems that the entire corpus was sung, and the subsequent publication of Tudor Church Music, including much of the Latin church music and all of the English. Thanks to the efforts of many conductors in the intervening generations, Byrd now has a special place in the hearts and ears of English and American choral singers. According to Squire (Grove4), it was the attention drawn to Byrd in the 1880s and 1890s that began the ‘recent revival of interest in the music of Tudor and Jacobean composers’.

Burney printed The Carman’s Whistle, and Ambros wrote luminously of Byrd’s keyboard music. But the general appreciation of the keyboard music dates from the landmark edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book by Fuller Maitland and Squire in 1899, reinforced by Hilda Andrews’s edition of My Ladye Nevells Booke in 1926. Also in the 1920s the three English songbooks were published by Fellowes, the great pioneer of Byrd scholarship, in the English Madrigal School series. A complete edition was undertaken by Fellowes late in his life; at last all of Byrd’s music was made available in one place, in a form designed to encourage performance. Fellowes’s editorial work, however, lacked sophistication, and a revision by a new generation of scholars was begun after World War II.

Apart from some initiatives in the 1920s by Fellowes with his English Singers and by the harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse, next to no music by Byrd was recorded until the 1950s. However, between the 1960s and the late 1990s recordings were made of the entire Cantiones and Cantiones sacrae, and the entire corpus of keyboard music. By 1994 a complete Byrd discography could list nearly 700 titles, with ten or more versions of some 20 works (Greenhalgh, 1992–96). At the end of the 20th century a complete recorded Byrd edition was underway, under the direction of Andrew Carwood.

alphabetical list of latin works

WORKS

The Collected Works of William Byrd, ed. E.H. Fellowes (London, 1937–50) [F]; rev. under general ed. T. Dart (London, 1962––70) [D]William Byrd: English Church Music, Part I, ed. P.C. Buck and others, TCM, ii (1927) [TCM ii]William Byrd: Gradualia, Books 1 and 2, ed. P.C. Buck and others, TCM, vii (1927) [TCM vii]William Byrd: Masses, Cantiones and Motets, ed. P.C. Buck and others, TCM, ix (1928) [TCM ix]William Byrd: Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Piety, ed. E.H. Fellowes, rev. P. Brett, EM, xiv (2/1963) [= D xii]William Byrd: Songs of Sundry Natures, ed. E.H. Fellowes, rev. P. Brett, EM, xv (2/1962) [= D xiii]William Byrd: Psalms, Songs and Sonnets, ed. E.H. Fellowes, rev. T. Dart, EM, xvi (2/1964) [= D xiv]William Byrd: Keyboard Music I, ed. A. Brown, MB, xxvii (1969, rev. 2/1976)William Byrd: Keyboard Music II, ed. A. Brown, MB, xxviii (1971, rev. 2/1976)The Byrd Edition, general ed. P. Brett (London, 1970–) [B] [incl. D xv, xvii]William Byrd: Music for the Lute, ed. N. North (London, 1976) [15 transcrs. for lute of kbd and vocal works, and doubtful works]

*	inc. but can be reconstructed
†	known in earlier consort song version, pubd in B xvi

printed latin music

printed english music

english liturgical music

printed latin music

Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, 5–8vv (London, 1575), with Tallis [C], F i, TCM ix, B i

Liber primus sacrarum cantionum [Cantiones sacrae], 5vv (London, 1589) (CS i], D ii, B ii

Liber secundus sacrarum cantionum [Cantiones sacrae], 5–6vv (London, 1591) [CS ii], D iii, B iii

Mass, 4vv, c1592–3, F i, 30, TCM ix, 17, B iv, 24

Mass, 3vv, c1593–4, F i, 1, TCM ix, 3, B iv, 1

Mass, 5vv, c1595, F i, 68, TCM ix, 36, B iv, 36

Gradualia ac cantiones sacrae, 3–5vv (London, 1605) [G i./part no.] F iv–v, TCM vii, B v–via, b

Gradualia seu cantionum sacrarum, liber secundus, 4–6vv (London, 1607) [G ii], F vi–vii, TCM vii, B viia, b

alphabetical list of latin works

Ab ortu solis, 4vv, G ii 13; F vi, 69, TCM vii, 239, B viia, 64

Ad Dominum cum tribularer, 8vv, GB-Lbl; F ix, 54, TCM ix, 164, B viii, 50; text missing

Adoramus te, Christe, 1v, 4 viols, G i/I 26; F iv, 152, TCM vii, 85, B via, 1

Adorna thalamum tuum, 3vv, G i/III 11; F v, 207, TCM vii, 205, B vib, 136

Ad punctum in modico, 5vv, CH, Ob; F xvi, 122; only two parts extant

Afflicti pro peccatis nostris (c.f. chant), 6vv, CS ii 27–8; D iii, 193, B iii, 212

Alleluia, Ascendit Deus [= All ye people, clap your hands], 5vv, G ii 26; F vii, 10, TCM vii, 286, B viib, 11

Alleluia, Ave Maria … in mulieribus. Alleluia, Virga Jesse, 5vv, G i/I 20; F iv, 101, TCM vii, 58, B v, 117

Alleluia, Cognoverunt. Alleluia, Caro mea, 4vv, G ii 16; F vi, 87, TCM vii, 247, B viia, 75

Alleluia, Confitemini Domino, 3vv, Lbl Add. 18936–9, R.M. Baldwin, Och Mus.45; F viii, 23, TCM ix, 181, B viii, 1

Alleluia, Emitte spiritum tuum, 5vv, G ii 32; F vii, 37, TCM vii, 302, B viib, 42

Alleluia, [Vespere autem sabbati] quae lucescit, 3vv, G i/III 6; F v, 185, TCM vii, 196, B vib, 117

Alma Redemptoris mater, 4vv, G i/II 13; F v, 93, TCM vii, 155, B vib, 35

Angelus Domini descendit de coelo, 3vv, G i/III 8; F v, 192, TCM vii, 199, B vib, 123

Apparebit in finem, 5vv, CS ii 12; D iii, 83, B iii, 89

Ascendit Deus, 5vv, G ii 28; F vii, 17, TCM vii, 290, B viib, 19

Aspice, Domine, de sede sancta tua (c.f. chant), 5vv, CS i 18–19; D ii, 139, B ii, 156

Aspice, Domine, quia facta est desolata civitas, 6vv, C 10; F i, 149, TCM ix 86, B i, 39

Assumpta est Maria … Dominum. Alleluia, 5vv, G i/I 24; F iv, 144, TCM vii, 81, B v, 166

Attollite portas [= Let us arise; Lift up your heads], 6vv, C 11; F i, 159, TCM ix, 92, B i, 52

Audivi vocem, 5vv CH, Lbl, Ob, Och; F viii, 48, TCM ix, 182

Ave Maria … fructus ventris tui, 5vv, G i/I 14; F iv, 75, TCM vii, 40, B v, 83

Ave maris stella, 3vv, G i/III 4; F v, 162, TCM vii, 186, B vib, 97

Ave regina, 4vv, G i/II 14; F v, 103, TCM vii, 159, B vib, 44

*Ave regina caelorum, attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add.31992 (lutebook); attrib. Taverner in Ob Tenbury 1486 and Willmott MS, Spetchley Park, Braikenridge; B viii, 156

Ave verum corpus [= O Lord, God of Israel], 4vv, G i/II 5; F v, 27, TCM vii, 127, B via, 82

Beata es, virgo Maria, 5vv, G, i/I 10; F iv, 53, TCM vii, 30, B v, 60

Beata virgo, 4vv, G ii 9; F vi, 25, TCM vii, 228, B viia, 38

Beata, viscera, 5vv, G i/I 11; F iv, 57, TCM vii, 32, B v, 65

Beati mundo corde, 5vv, G i/I 32; F iv, 199, TCM vii, 112, B via, 53

Benedicta et venerabilis, 5vv, G i/I 7; F iv, 43, TCM vii, 25, B v, 50

* Benigne fac, Domine, 5vv, Ob, Och; F viii, 56, TCM ix, 186

Cantate Domino, 6vv, CS ii 29; D iii, 203, B iii, 223

[Christe, qui lux es … praedicans] Precamur (c.f. chant), 5vv, Och; F viii, 63 TCM ix, 279, B viii, 14

Christus resurgens (c.f. chant), 4vv, G i/II 10; F v, 64, TCM vii, 143, B vib, 9

Cibavit eos, 4vv, G i/II 1; Fv, 1, TCM vii, 116, B via, 61, B viia, 137

Circumdederunt me dolores mortis, 5vv, CS ii 15; D iii, 102, B iii, 111

* Circumspice, Hierusalem, 6vv, Lcm, Ob; F ix, 1, TCM ix, 190

Civitas sancti tui [= Be not wroth very sore; Bow thine ear]: see Ne irascaris

Confirma hoc, Deus, 5vv, G ii 34; F vii, 44, TCM vii, 306, B viib, 49

Constitues eos, 6vv, G ii 39; F vii, 82, TCM vii, 327, B viib, 91

Cunctis diebus, 6vv, CS ii 30; D iii, 211, B iii, 232

Da mihi auxilium, 6vv, C 23; F i, 206, TCM ix, 115, B i, 113

Defecit in dolore, 5vv, CS i 1–2; D ii, 1, B ii, 1

* De lamentatione Hieremiae, 5vv, Lbl, Och, Ob; F viii, 1, TCM ix, 153, B viii, 20

Deo gratias, 4vv G i/II 20; F v, 139, TCM vii, 176, B vib, 82

Descendit de coelis (c.f. chant), 6vv, CS ii 21–2; D iii, 150, B iii, 163

* Deus, in adiutorium meum intende, 6vv, Ob, Och; F ix, 13, TCM ix, 196

Deus, venerunt gentes, 5vv, CS i 11–14; D ii, 80, B ii, 89

Dies sanctificatus, 4vv, G ii 3; F vi, 16, TCM vii, 216, B viia, 14

Diffusa est gratia, 5vv, G i/I 22; F iv, 116, TCM vii, 67, B v, 136

Diliges Dominum, 8vv, C 25; F i, 232, TCM ix, 149, B i, 151

* Domine, ante te omne desiderium, 6vv, Och; F ix, 38, TCM ix, 208

* Domine, exaudi orationem meam et clamor meus, 5vv, Ob Mus.Sch.E.526, Ob Tenbury 389; Ob 389 in F xvi, 127; only 3 parts extant

Domine, exaudi orationem meam, inclina, 5vv, CS ii 10–11; D iii, 68, B iii, 74

Domine, non sum dignus, 6vv, CS ii 23; D iii, 160, B iii, 174

Domine, praestolamur, 5vv, CS i 3–4; D ii, 14, B ii, 15

Domine, quis habitabit, 9vv, Lbl; F ix, 130, TCM ix, 223, B viii, 97

Domine, salva nos, 6vv, CS ii 31; D iii, 68, B iii, 245

Domine, secundum actum meum, 6vv, C 24; F i, 218, TCM ix, 122, B i, 132

Domine, secundum multitudinem dolorum meum, 5vv, CS i 27; D ii, 198, B ii, 221

Domine, tu iurasti, 5vv, CS i 15; D ii, 110, B ii, 124

Dominus in Sina, 5vv, G ii 27; F vii, 14, TCM vii, 288, B viib, 15

Ecce advenit dominator Dominus, 4vv, G ii 10; F vi, 48, TCM vii, 230, B viia, 42

Ecce quam bonum est, 4vv, G i/II 9; F v, 53, TCM vii, 139, B vib, 1

Ecce virgo concipiet, 5vv, G i/I 15; F iv, 78, TCM vii, 42, B v, 87

Ego sum panis vivus, 4vv, G ii 17; F vi, 96, TCM vii, 251, B viia, 82

Emendemus in melius, 5vv, C 4; F i, 119, TCM ix, 61, B i, 1

Exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine? [= Arise, O Lord, why sleepest thou?], 5vv, CS ii 19; D iii, 132, B iii, 144

Fac cum servo tuo, 5vv, CS ii 5; D iii, 33, B iii, 37

Factus est repente de coelo sonus, 5vv, G ii 35; F vii, 48, TCM vii, 308, B viib, 53

Felix es, sacra virgo, 5vv, G i/I 9; F iv, 49, TCM vii, 28, B v, 56

Felix namque es, 5vv, G i/I 19; F iv, 98, TCM vii, 56, B v, 113

Gaudeamus omnes, 5vv, G i/I 23; F iv, 134, TCM vii, 76, B v, 156

Gaudeamus omnes, 5vv, G i/I 29; F iv, 175, TCM vii, 98, B via, 27

Gaude Maria, 5vv, G i/I 21; F iv, 109, TCM vii, 63, B v, 127

Gloria Patri: see Tribue, Domine

Haec dicit Dominus, 5vv, CS ii 13–14; D iii, 90, B iii, 97

Haec dies, 6vv, CS ii 32; D iii, 228, B iii, 251

Haec dies, 3vv, G i/III 7; F v, 189, TCM vii, 198, B vib, 121

Haec dies, 5vv, G ii 21; F vii, 132, TCM vii, 267, B viia, 111

Hodie Beata Virgo Maria, 4vv, G i/II 19; F v, 134, TCM vii, 174, B vib, 77

Hodie Christus natus est, 4vv, G ii 6; F vi, 26, TCM vii, 220, B viia, 20

Hodie Simon Petrus, 6vv, G ii 42; F vii, 104, TCM vii, 340, B viib, 114

Iesu nostra redemptio, 4vv, G ii 19; F vi, 110, TCM vii, 257, B viia, 93

Infelix ego, 6vv, CS ii 24–6; D iii, 166, B iii, 180

In manus tuas, Domine, 4vv, G i/II 15; F v, 111, TCM vii, 163, B vib, 51

In resurrectione tua, 5vv, CS i 17; D ii, 134, B ii, 150

Iustorum animae, 5vv, G i/I 31; F iv, 194, TCM vii, 109, B via, 48

Laetania, 4vv, G i/II 16; F v, 118, TCM vii, 166, B vib, 56

Laetentur coeli, 5vv, CS i 28–9; D ii, 206, B ii, 229

Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, 6vv, G ii 45; F vii, 132, TCM vii, 356, B viib, 143

Laudate, pueri, Dominum [= Behold, now praise the Lord], 6vv, C 17; F i, 181, TCM ix, 105, B i, 82

Laudibus in sanctis, 5vv, CS ii 1–2; D iii, 1, B iii, 1

Levemus corda, 5vv, CS ii 16; D iii, 110, B iii, 121

Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna (c.f. chant), 5vv, C 33; F i, 275, TCM ix, 81, B i, 213

Libera me, Domine, et pone me juxta te, 5vv, C 5; F i, 124, TCM ix, 64, B i, 8

Memento, Domine, 5vv, CS i 8; D ii, 55

Memento, homo [= O Lord, give ear], 6vv, C 18; F i, 194, TCM ix, 112, B i, 97

Memento, salutis auctor, 3vv, G i/III 3; F v, 156, TCM vii, 183, B vib, 93

Miserere mei, Deus, 5vv, CS ii 20; D iii, 144, B iii, 157

Miserere mihi, Domine (c.f. chant), 6vv, C 29; F i, 240, TCM ix, 129, B i, 161

Ne irascaris (2p. Civitas sancti tui) [= Behold, I bring you; Let not thy wrath; O Lord, turn thy wrath] 5vv, CS i 20–21; D ii, 151, B ii, 169

Ne perdas (c.f. chant), 5vv, Lbl, Lcm, Ob, Och; F viii, 99, TCM ix, 243, B viii, 168

Non vos relinquam orphanos, 5vv, G ii 37; F vii, 66, TCM vii, 318, B viib, 73

Nos enim pro peccatis [= Let not our prayers]: see Tribulationes civitatem

Nunc dimittis servum tuum, 5vv, G i/I 4; F iv, 17, TCM vii, 11, B v, 19

Nunc scio vere, 6vv, G ii 38; F vii, 71, TCM vii, 321, B viib, 80

O admirabile commercium, 4vv, G ii 7; F vi, 33, TCM vii, 223, B viia, 28

Oculi omnium, 4vv, G i/II 2; F v, 8, TCM vii, 119, B via, 67, B viia, 142

O Domine, adiuva me, 5vv, CS i 5; D ii, 29, B ii, 32

O gloriosa Domina, 3vv, G i/III 2; F v, 150, TCM vii, 181, B vib, 89

O lux, beata Trinitas, 6vv, C 12; F i, 170, TCM ix, 99, B i, 69

O magnum misterium, 4vv, G ii 8; F vi, 40, TCM vii, 226, B viia, 34

Omni tempore benedic Deum (c.f. chant), 5vv, Lbl, Ob, Och; F viii, 122, TCM ix, 257, B viii, 178

Optimam partem elegit, 5vv, G i/I 25; F iv, 148, TCM vii, 83, B v, 170

O quam gloriosum est regnum, 5vv, CS i 22–3; D ii, 166, B ii, 187

O quam suavis est, 4vv, G ii 18; F vi, 101, TCM vii, 253, B viia, 86

O Rex gloriae, 5vv, G ii 30; F vii, 23, TCM vii, 294, B viib, 26

O sacrum convivium, 4vv, G i/II 7; F v, 37, TCM vii, 132, B via, 92

O salutaris hostia, 4vv, G i/II 6; F v, 31, TCM vii, 129, B via, 87

O salutaris hostia, 6vv, Ob, Och; F ix, 48, TCM ix, 257, B viii, 44

[Pange lingua … misterium.] Nobis datus, 4vv, Gi/II 8; F v, 43, TCM vii, 134, B via, 97

Pascha nostrum … veritatis, 5vv, G ii 24; F vii, 152, TCM vii, 278, B viia, 132

Peccantem me quotidie, 5vv, C 6; F i, 138, TCM ix, 72, B i, 28

Peccavi super numerum, 5vv, Lbl, Ob, Och; F viii, 133, TCM ix, 264

Petrus beatus (c.f. chant), 5vv, Ob; F viii, 145, TCM ix, 270, B viii, 137

Plorans ploravit, 5vv, G i/I 28; F iv, 165, TCM vii, 92, B via, 15

Post dies octo, 3vv, G i/III 9; F v, 195, TCM vii, 200, B vib, 125

Post partum, virgo, 5vv, G i/I 18; F iv, 94, TCM vii, 53, B v, 108

Psallite Domino, 5vv, G ii 29; F vii, 20, TCM vii, 292, B viib, 23

Preces Deo fundamus, Lbl; B xvi, 180; consort song, fragment

Puer natus est, 4vv, G ii 1; F vi, 1, TCM vii, 210, B viia, 2

Quem terra, pontus, aethera, 3vv, G i/III 1; F v, 140, TCM vii, 177, B vib, 83

Quis est homo, 5vv, CS ii 3–4; D iii, 18, B iii, 21

Quis me statim, 1v, 4 viols Lbl, Lcm, Ob, US-CA; B xv, 140; consort song

Quodcunque ligaveris, 6vv, G ii 44; F vii, 120, TCM vii, 349, B viib, 131

Quomodo cantabimus?, 8vv, GB-Lbl, Ob; F ix; 99, TCM ix, 283

Quotiescunque manducabitis, 4vv, G i/II 4; F v, 21, TCM vii, 124, B via, 77

Recordare, Domine, 5vv, CS ii 17–18; D iii, 120, B iii, 132

Reges Tharsis, 4vv, G ii 11; F vi, 57, TCM vii, 234, B viia, 49

Regina coeli, 3vv, G i/III 5; F v, 176, TCM vii, 192, B vib, 109

Responsum accepit Simeon, 5vv, G i/I 5; F iv, 28, TCM vii, 17, B v, 31

Resurrexi, 5vv, G ii 20; F vii, 123, TCM vii, 262, B viia, 102

Rorate coeli, 5vv, G i/I 12; F iv, 61, TCM vii, 34, B v, 70

Sacerdotes Domini, 4vv, G i/II 3; F v, 18, TCM vii, 123, B via, 75

Salve regina, 4vv, G i/II 12; F v, 84, TCM vii, 151, B vib, 26

Salve regina, 5vv, CS ii 6–7; D iii, 42, B iii, 47

Salve sancta parens, 5vv, G i/I 6; F iv, 35, TCM vii, 21, B v, 40

Salve sola Dei genetrix, 4vv, G i/II 17; F v, 123, TCM vii, 169, B vib, 67

Senex puerum portabat … adoravit, 4vv, G i/II 18; F v, 130, TCM vii, 172, B vib, 73

Senex puerum portabat … regebat, 5vv, G i/I 3; F iv, 14, TCM vii, 10, B v, 16

Sicut audivimus, 5vv, G i/I 2; F iv, 10, TCM vii, 8, B v, 12

Siderum rector, 5vv, C 19; F i, 199, TCM ix, 78, B i, 104

Similes illis fiant, 4vv, Lbl Add.17802–5; F viii, 42, B viii, 4

Solve iubente Deo, 6vv, G ii 40; F vii, 90, TCM vii, 332, B viib, 99

Speciosus forma, 5vv, G i/I 17; F iv, 88, TCM vii, 49, B v, 101

Spiritus Domini, 5vv, G ii 31; F vii, 28, TCM vii, 297, B viib, 34

Surge, illuminare, Ierusalem, 4vv, G ii 15; F vi, 82, TCM vii, 244, B viia, 58

Suscepimus Deus, 5vv, G i/I 1; F iv, 1, TCM vii, 3, B v, 2

Te deprecor: see Tribue, Domine

Terra tremuit, 5vv, G ii 23; F vii, 150, TCM vii, 277, B viia, 129

Timete Dominum, 5vv, G i/I 30; F iv, 185, TCM vii, 104, B via, 37

Tollite portas, 5vv, G i/I 13; F iv, 70, TCM vii, 38, B v, 78

Tribue, Domine (2p. Te deprecor; 3p. Gloria Patri), 6vv, C 30–32; F i, 14, TCM ix, 132, B i, 167

Tribulationes civitatum (2p. Timor et hebetudo; 3p. Nos enim pro peccatis [= Let not our prayers]), 5vv, CS i 24–6; D ii, 180, B ii, 202

Tribulatio proxima est, 5vv, CS ii 8–9; D iii, 58, B iii, 63

Tristitia et anxietas, 5vv, CS i 6–7; D ii, 37, B ii, 42

Tu es pastor ovium, 6vv, G ii 43; F vii, 144, TCM vii, 346, B viib, 125

Tu es Petrus, 6vv, G ii 41; F vii, 97, TCM vii, 336, B viib, 107

Tui sunt coeli, 4vv, G ii 4; F vi, 20, TCM vii, 218, B viia, 17

Turbarum voces in passione Domini secundum Ioannem, 3vv, G i/III 10; F v, 198, TCM vii, 202, B vib, 128

Unam petii a Domino, 5vv, G i/I 27; F iv, 155, TCM vii, 87, B via, 4

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, et emitte, 5vv, G ii 36; F vii, 53, TCM vii, 311, B viib, 59

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple, 5vv, G ii 33; F vii, 41, TCM vii, 304, B viib, 46

Venite, comedite panem meum, 4vv, G ii 14; F vi, 77, TCM vii, 242, B viia, 71

Venite, exultemus Domino, 6vv, G ii 46; F vii, 141, TCM vii, 361, B viib, 152

Victimae paschali laudes, 5vv, G ii 22; F vii, 137, TCM vii, 270, B viia, 117

Vide, Domine, afflictionem nostram, 5vv, CS i 9–10; D ii, 65, B ii, 73

Viderunt … Dei nostri, 4vv, G ii 5; F vi, 24, TCM vii, 219, B viia, 20

Viderunt … omnis terra, 4vv, G ii 2; F vi, 11, TCM vii, 213, B viia, 9

Vidimus stellam, 4vv, G ii 12; F vi, 64, TCM vii, 237, B viia, 54

Vigilate, 5vv, CS i 16; D ii, 120, B ii, 135

Virgo Dei genetrix, 5vv, G i/I 8; F iv, 46, TCM vii, 26, B v, 53

Viri Galilei, 5vv, G ii 25; F vii, 1, TCM vii, 281, B viib, 2

Visita quaesumus, Domine, 4vv, G i/II 11; F v, 76, TCM vii, 148, B vib, 19

Vultum tuum, 5vv, G i/I 16; F iv, 82, TCM vii, 45, B v, 94

printed english music

Psalmes, Sonets and Songs, 5vv (London, 1588) [PSS i], D xii, EM xiv

Songs of Sundrie Natures, 3–6vv (London, 1589) [SSN], D xiii, EM xv

Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets … fit for Voyces or Viols, 3–6vv (London, 1611) [PSS ii], D xiv, EM xvi, B xiv

english liturgical music

For sources see R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music 1549–1660, EECM, suppl.i (1972)

Short Service, 4–6vv: Ven, TeD, Bs, Ky 1–2, Cr, San, Mag and Nunc; F x, 52, TCM ii, 51, B xa, 59

Second Service, 1/5vv, org: Mag and Nunc; F x, 108, TCM ii, 99, B xa, 121

Third Service, 5vv, ‘three Minnoms’: Mag and Nunc; F x, 122, TCM ii, 111, B xa, 136

Great Service, 5–10vv: *Ven, TeD, Bs, Ky, Cr, Mag and Nunc; F x, 136; TCM ii, 123, B xb

First Preces and Psalms 47, 54, 100 (Jub; one part only); F x, 1, 18, 27, xvi, 138, TCM ii, 3, B xa, 9

Second Preces and Psalms 114, 55, 119, 24; F x, 36, 38, 46, i, 159, TCM ii, 13, B xa, 28

*Third Preces and Responses, 5vv; F x, 7, 10, TCM ii, 49, B xa, 1

* Litany, 5vv; US-NYp Chirk, B xa, 50

other english music



Title	No. of voices

A feigned friend	4
Source : PSS ii 11
Modern edition : D xiv, 54, B xiv, 30
Ah, golden hairs	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Och, Ob
Modern edition : B xv, 51
Remarks : Consort song; text after J. de Montemayor
Ah silly soul	1, 5 viols
Source : PSS ii 31
Modern edition : D xiv, 225, B xiv, 165
Ah, youthful years	—
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 175
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
Alack, when I look back	1/5, org
Source : DRc, Lbl, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc
Modern edition : F xi, 98, TCM ii, 223, B xi, 93
Remarks : Anthem; text: W. Hunnis; also as consort song
All as a sea	5
Source : PSS i 28
Modern edition : D xii, 150
All ye people, clap your hands [= Alleluia, Ascendit Deus]	5
Source : US-NYp Drexel 4180–84
Modern edition : —
Although the heathen poets	5
Source : PSS i 21
Modern edition : D xii, 110
Remarks : Fragment
Ambitious love	5
Source : PSS i 18
Modern edition : D xii, 90
An aged dame	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 119
Remarks : Consort song; text: G. Whitney
And think ye, nymphs, to scorn at love?	5
Source : SSN 42–3
Modern edition : D xiii, 245
An earthly tree (chorus Cast off all doubtful care)	2/4, 4 viols
Source : SSN 40, 25
Modern edition : D xiii, 145
Remarks : ‘A Carowle for Christmas day’
Arise, Lord, into thy rest	5
Source : PSS ii 18
Modern edition : D xiv, 88, B xiv, 57
Remarks : Ps cxxxii.8–9
Arise, O Lord, why sleepest thou? [= Exsurge]	5
Source : GB-Cp, Ob
Modern edition : —
Arise, O Lord, why sleepest thou?	5–6
Source : Cpc, Cu (formerly EL), DRc, GL, Lbl, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 148, TCM ii 227, B xi, 1
Remarks : Anthem; Ps xliv.23–4, lxxix.9
As Caesar wept	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Ob, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 54
Remarks : Consort song
As I beheld I saw a herdman wild	5
Source : PSS i 20
Modern edition : D xii, 101
Attend mine humble prayer	3
Source : SSN 7
Modern edition : D xiii, 38
Remarks : Ps cxliii.1–2
Awake, mine eyes	4
Source : PSS ii 12
Modern edition : D xiv, 59, B xiv, 33
Behold how good a thing	6
Source : SSN 38–9
Modern edition : D xiii, 225
Remarks : Ps cxxxiii.1–2
Behold, how good	—
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 175
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
Behold, I bring you [= Ne irascaris]	5
Source : Cp
Modern edition : —
Behold, now praise the Lord [= Laudate, pueri]	6
Source : Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : F xvi, 138
Behold, O God, the sad and heavy case [= Now Israel may say]	2/5, org
Source : DRc
Modern edition : F xi, 103, TCM ii, 233, B xi, 104
Remarks : Anthem
Be not wroth very sore [= Civitas sancti tui]	5
Source : Lsp, Ob, US-AUS
Remarks : Arr. probably by Aldrich (see US-AUS, Gostling MS)
Be unto me, O Lord, a tower of strength	4
Source : 1614⁷
Modern edition : F xi, 1
Blame I confess [= Remember, Lord]	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Och
Modern edition : B xv, 56
Remarks : Consort song
Blessed art thou, O Lord [= Tribulatio proxima est]	5
Source : Y M.29(S)
Remarks : One part only
†Blessed is he that fears the Lord	5
Source : PSS i 8
Modern edition : D xii, 44
Remarks : Ps cxii
Bow thine ear [= Civitas sancti tui]	5
Source : Cfm, WB
Modern edition : F xi, 155
†Care for thy soul	5
Source : PSS i 31
Modern edition : D xii, 165
Cease, cares (another chorus to An earthly tree)	—
Source : Lbl Add.31992
Modern edition : B xvi, 176
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
Christ rising again	6
Source : SSN 46–7
Modern edition : D xiii, 280, B xi, 120
Remarks : ‘The Easter Anthem’; text: I Corinthians xv.20–22, Romans vi.9–11; also in earlier version
Come help, O God	5
Source : 1614⁷
Modern edition : F xi, 8
Come, jolly swains	4
Source : PSS ii 13
Modern edition : D xiv, 63, B xiv, 36
Come, let us rejoice unto our Lord	4
Source : PSS ii 16
Modern edition : D xiv, 75, B xiv, 47
Remarks : Ps xcv.1–2
Come, pretty babe	1, 4 viols
Source : US-NYp
Modern edition : B xv, 59
Remarks : Consort song
†Come to me, grief, for ever	5
Source : PSS i 34
Modern edition : D xii, 190
Come, woeful Orpheus	5
Source : PSS ii 19
Modern edition : D xiv, 98, B xiv, 64
Compel the hawk to sit	5
Source : SSN 28
Modern edition : D xiii, 178
Remarks : Text: T. Churchyard
†Constant Penelope	5
Source : PSS i 23
Modern edition : D xii, 117
Remarks : Text after Ovid: Heroïdes i.1–8
Content is rich	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 63
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in sources
Crowned with flowers	5
Source : PSS ii 22
Modern edition : D xiv, 125, B xiv, 84
Crowned with flowers and lilies	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 100
Remarks : Consort song, in memory of Queen Mary I
Delight is dead	2, 3 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Lcm, US-NYp
Modern edition : B xv, 107
Remarks : Consort song
Depart, ye furies	—
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 177
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
E’en as in seas	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 66
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in source
Even from the depth	5
Source : PSS i 10
Modern edition : D xii, 53
Remarks : Ps cxxx.1
*Exalt thyself, O God	6
Source : Ob, Ojc, WO Ms A3.3 (T part and inc. score), Y
Modern edition : F xvi, 140 (Ojc only), B xi, 11
Remarks : Ps lvii.6, 9–12
Fair Britain isle	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 124
Remarks : Consort song, on the death in 1612 of Henry, Prince of Wales; anon. in source
†Farewell, false love	5
Source : PSS i 25
Modern edition : D xii, 131
Remarks : Text attrib. W. Raleigh
From Citheron the warlike boy is fled	4
Source : SSN 19–21
Modern edition : D xiii, 105
From depth of sin	3
Source : SSN 6
Modern edition : D xiii, 32
Remarks : Ps cxxx.1–2
From virgin’s womb (chorus Rejoice, rejoice)	1/4, 4 viols
Source : SSN 35, 24
Modern edition : D xiii, 135
Remarks : ‘A Carowle for Christmas day’
*Have mercy on us, Lord	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 8
Remarks : Consort song; Ps lxvii
*Have mercy upon me, O God	1/6, 4 viols
Source : PSS ii 25
Modern edition : D xiv, 154, B xiv, 105
Remarks : Ps li.1–2
Hear my prayer	1/5, org
Source : 1641⁵; org: DRc, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 122, TCM ii, 238, B xi, 129
Remarks : Anthem ‘For a meane alone’; Ps cxliii.1–2
Help, Lord, for wasted are those men	5
Source : PSS i 7
Modern edition : D xii, 38
Remarks : Ps xii
Help us, O God	6
Source : GB-Cpc, DRc, GL, Lbl, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : B x, 6
Remarks : Ps lxxix.9; 2p of Arise, O Lord, often alone in MSS
He that all earthly pleasure scorns	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 128
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in source
How long shall mine enemies triumph	5
Source : Cp, DRc, Lbl, Ob, Och, Ojc, SHR, Y, US-CA, NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 12, TCM ii, 242, B xi, 25
Remarks : Anthem; Ps xiii.2–5
†How shall a young man	5
Source : PSS i 4
Modern edition : D xii, 20
Remarks : Ps cxix.9–16
†How vain the toils	1, 5 viols
Source : PSS ii 32
Modern edition : D xiv, 223, B xiv, 171
Remarks : Ps cxix.9–16
If in thine heart	6
Source : SSN 44
Modern edition : D xiii, 253
†If that a sinner’s sighs	5
Source : PSS i 30
Modern edition : D xii, 159
If women could be fair	5
Source : PSS i 17
Modern edition : D xii, 84
Remarks : Text: Edward, Earl of Oxford
I have been young	3
Source : PSS ii 7
Modern edition : D xiv, 31, B xiv, 16
Remarks : Ps xxxvii.25
†I joy not in no earthly bliss	5
Source : PSS i 11
Modern edition : D xii, 57
Remarks : Text attrib. E. Dyer
I laid me down to rest	5
Source : 1614⁷
Modern edition : F xi, 20
In angel’s weed [= Is Sidney dead]	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 111
Remarks : Consort song; elegy for Mary, Queen of Scots; anon. in sources
In crystal towers	3
Source : PSS ii 8
Modern edition : D xiv, 35, B xiv, 18
Remarks : Text: G. Whitney
†In fields abroad	5
Source : PSS i 22
Modern edition : D xii, 112
In tower most high	—
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 178
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
In winter cold	3–4
Source : PSS ii 3
Modern edition : D xiv, 10, B xiv, 8
Remarks : Text: G. Whitney
Is love a boy?	4
Source : SSN 15–16
Modern edition : D xiii, 83
Is Sidney dead [= In angel’s weed]	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : —
Remarks : Elegy for Sir Philip Sidney (d 1586)
I thought that Love had been a boy	5
Source : SSN 32
Modern edition : D xiii, 204
I will give laud	—
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 178
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
I will not say	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 68
Remarks : Consort song
†La virginella [= The fair young virgin]	5
Modern edition : D xii, 125
Remarks : Text: Ariosto
Let not our prayers [= Nos enim pro peccatis]	5
Source : Ob
Modern edition : F xvi, 142
Let not the sluggish sleep	4
Source : PSS ii 10
Modern edition : D xiv, 49, B xiv, 27
Remarks : Text: ?J. Redford
Let not thy wrath [= Ne irascaris]	5
Source : DRc, Lbl, Y
*Let others praise what seems them best	6
Source : Cu, Lcm
Modern edition : B xvi, 16
Remarks : Text: T. Watson; printed as a broadside, 1589
Let us arise [= Attollite portas]	6
Source : Ob
Modern edition : F xvi, 142
Lift up your heads [= Attollite portas]	6
Source : see Second Preces and Psalms
Modern edition : TCM ix, 34
Remarks : Ps xxiv
Look and bow down	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 178
Remarks : Consort song; text: Elizabeth I, 1588; lute arr. only
Look down, O Lord, on me	4
Source : 1614⁷
Modern edition : F xi, 5
Lord, hear my prayer	3
Source : SSN 5
Modern edition : D xii, 27
Remarks : Ps cii.1–2
Lord, in thy rage	3
Source : SSN 1
Modern edition : D xiii, 1
Remarks : Ps vi.1–2
Lord, in thy wrath correct me not	3
Source : SSN 3
Modern edition : D xiii, 14
Remarks : Ps xxxviii.1–2
†Lord, in thy wrath reprove me not	5
Source : PSS i 9
Modern edition : D xii, 49
Remarks : Ps vi.1–2
*Lord, to thee I make my moan	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : B xv, 14
Remarks : Consort song; Ps cxxx
†Lullaby, my sweet little baby	5
Source : PSS i 32
Modern edition : D xii, 172
Make ye joy to God	5
Source : PSS ii 24
Modern edition : D xiv, 143, B xiv, 97
Remarks : Ps c.1–2
Mine eyes with fervency	5
Source : PSS i 2
Modern edition : D xii, 10
Remarks : Ps cxxiii
*Mount, Hope, above the skies	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 73
Remarks : Consort song; attrib. A. Ferrabosco (i) in Lbl Add.18936–9
My freedom, ah	—
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 76
Remarks : Consort song; only title of text extant
†My mind to me a kingdom is	5
Source : PSS i 14
Modern edition : D xii, 69
Remarks : Text attrib. E. Dyer
My mistress had a little dog	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 131
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in sources
My soul oppressed with care	5
Source : PSS i 3
Modern edition : D xii, 14
Remarks : Ps cxix.25–32
Now Israel may say [= Behold, O God, the sad and heavy case]	2/5, org
Source : GB-Ob Mus.d.162, Ob Tenbury 1382
Modern edition : F xvi, 144 (Tenor only)
Remarks : Anthem; inc.
O dear life	5
Source : SSN 33
Modern edition : D xiii, 208
Remarks : Text: Sidney
Of flattering speech	3
Source : PSS ii 2
Modern edition : D xiv, 6, B xiv, 4
Remarks : Text: G. Whitney
Of gold all burnished	5
Source : SSN 36–7
Modern edition : D xiii, 218
*O God, but God, how dare I	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : B xv, 17
Remarks : Consort song
O God, give ear	5
Source : PSS i 1
Modern edition : D xii, 2
Remarks : Ps lv.1–3
O God that guides the cheerful sun	1/6, 5 viols
Source : PSS ii 28
Modern edition : D xiv, 189, B xiv, 136
Remarks : ‘A Carroll for New-yeares day’
O God, the proud are risen against me	6
Source : Cp, Cu (formerly EL), DRc, Och, Ojc, Y
Modern edition : F xi, 72, TCM, ii, 248, B xi, 33
Remarks : Anthem; Ps lxxxvi.14–15
O God, which art most merciful	3
Source : SSN 4
Modern edition : D xiii, 20
Remarks : Ps li.1
O God, whom our offences have justly displeased	5
Source : 1641⁵; org: Lbl, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 25, TCM ii, 255, B xi, 42
Remarks : Anthem, ‘A prayer’; paraphrase of 1st collect at end of Litany
O happy thrice	—
Source : GB-Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : B xvi, 180
Remarks : Consort song; Ct and lute arr. only
O Lord, bow down	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 22
Remarks : Consort song
O Lord, give ear [= Memento, homo]	6
Source : Cp, Cu (formerly EL), DRc
Modern edition : F xi, 80, TCM, ii, 262
O Lord, God of Israel [= Ave verum corpus]	4
Source : Lbl Add.18396
O Lord, how long wilt thou forget?	5
Source : PSS i 5
Modern edition : D xii, 26
Remarks : Ps xiii
O Lord, how vain	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Ob, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 25
Remarks : Consort song; text attrib. Sidney
O Lord, make thy servant	6
Source : 1641⁵; org: GB-Cp, Cpc, Cu (formerly EL), DRc, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 85, TCM ii, 266, B xi, 51
Remarks : Anthem, ‘A prayer for the King’; Ps xxi.2, 4
O Lord, my God	4
Source : SSN 22
Modern edition : D xiii, 121
O Lord, rebuke me not	1/5, org
Source : 1641⁵; GB-Lcm, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 119, TCM ii, 271, B xi, 137
Remarks : Anthem; Ps vi.1–2, 4
O Lord, turn thy wrath [= Ne irascaris]	5
Source : 1641⁵
†O Lord, who in thy sacred tent	5
Source : PSS i 6
Modern edition : D xii, 32
Remarks : Ps xv
O Lord, within thy tabernacle	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Ob, Och
Modern edition : B xv, 1
Remarks : Consort song; Ps xv
O sweet deceit	5
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : F xvi, 34
†O that most rare breast	5
Source : PSS i 35
Modern edition : D xii, 194
Remarks : Text attrib. E. Dyer
O that we woeful wretches	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Ob, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 28
Remarks : Consort song
Out of the orient crystal skies	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Lcm, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 31
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in sources
†O you that hear this voice	5
Source : PSS i 16
Modern edition : D xii, 78
Remarks : Text: Sidney
Penelope that longed for the sight	5
Source : SSN 27
Modern edition : D xiii, 168
Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles	6
Source : PSS ii 29
Modern edition : D xiv, 199, B xiv, 144
Remarks : Ps cxvii
Prevent us, O Lord	5
Source : 1641⁵; GB-Cpc, DRc, GL (Bassus), Lbl, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 52, TCM ii, 277, B xi, 69
Remarks : Anthem, ‘The fourth Prayer after the Communion before the Blessing’
†Prostrate, O Lord, I lie	5
Source : PSS i 27
Modern edition : D xii, 143
Rejoice, rejoice: see From virgin’s womb	4
Source : SSN 24
Modern edition : D xiii, 141
Rejoice unto the Lord	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Ob, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 37
Remarks : Consort song, 1586
Remember, Lord [= Blame I confess]	—
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 56
Remarks : Consort song, inc; only title remains
Retire, my soul	5
Source : PSS ii 17
Modern edition : D xiv, 81, B xiv, 51
Right blest are they	3
Source : SSN 2
Modern edition : D xiii, 7
Remarks : Ps xxxiii.1–2
Save me, O God, for thy Name’s sake	5
Source : GB-Cpc, Cu (formerly EL), DRc, Lbl, Ob, Och, Ojc, WB, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 57, TCM ii, 266, B xi, 75
Remarks : Anthem; Ps liv.1–4
†See those sweet eyes	5
Source : SSN 29, 34
Modern edition : D xiii, 188
Sing joyfully unto God our strength	6
Source : 1641⁵; org: GB-Cp, Cpc, Cu (formerly EL), DRc, GL (Bassus), Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi 90, TCM ii, 288, B xi, 82
Remarks : Anthem; Ps lxxxi.1–4
Sing we merrily unto God	5
Source : PSS ii 20–21
Modern edition : D xiv, 106, B xiv, 70
Remarks : Ps lxxxi.1–2
Sing ye to our Lord	3
Source : PSS ii 6
Modern edition : D xiv, 24, B xiv, 13
Remarks : Ps cxlix.1–2
Sith death at length	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 78
Remarks : Consort song
*Sith that the tree	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 81
Remarks : Consort song; 2p. in lute arr. only
†Susanna fair	5
Source : PSS i 29
Modern edition : D xii, 154
Remarks : Text after G. Guéroult: Susanne ung jour
Susanna fair	3
Source : SSN 8
Modern edition : D xiii, 46
Remarks : Text after G. Guéroult: Susanne ung jour
The eagle’s force	3
Source : PSS ii 1
Modern edition : D xiv, 1, B xiv, 1
Remarks : Text: T. Churchyard
The fair young virgin [= La virginella]	5
Source : 1588²⁹
Modern edition : F xvi, 1
Remarks : Text after Ariosto
The greedy hawk	3
Source : SSN 14
Modern edition : D xiii, 77
Remarks : Text: G. Whitney
*The Lord is only my support	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 5
Remarks : Consort song; Ps xxiii
The man is blest	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : B xv, 11
Remarks : Consort song; Ps cxii
The match that’s made	5
Source : PSS i 26
Modern edition : D xii, 137
The nightingale	3
Source : SSN 9
Modern edition : D xiii, 52
The noble famous queen [= While Phoebus us’d to dwell]	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 97
Remarks : Consort song, on the death of Mary, Queen of Scots
This day Christ was born	6
Source : PSS ii 27
Modern edition : D xiv, 178, B xiv, 125
Remarks : ‘A Carroll for Christmas Day’
This sweet and merry month of May	6
Source : 1590²⁹
Modern edition : D xiv, 240, B xvi, 33
Remarks : Text attrib. T. Watson
This sweet and merry month of May	4
Source : 1590²⁹
Modern edition : D xiv, 42, B xiv, 22
Remarks : Text attrib. T. Watson
†Though Amaryllis dance in green	5
Source : PSS i 12
Modern edition : D xii, 60
Though I be Brown	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 144
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in source
Thou God that guid’st	2/5, org
Source : 1641⁵; org: Cu (formerly EL), DRc, Lcm, Llp, Ob, Och, Ojc, Y, US-NYp
Modern edition : F xi, 128, TCM ii, 296, B xi, 148
Remarks : Anthem, ‘A Prayer for the King’; text: Hunnis
*Thou poet’s friend	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lcm
Modern edition : B xv, 84
Remarks : Consort song
Triumphant with pleasant melody	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, Ob, Och
Modern edition : B xv, 43
Remarks : Consort song
*Truce for a time	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, Ob
Modern edition : B xv, 87
Remarks : Consort song
Truth at the first	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 90
Remarks : Consort song; anon in sources
Turn our captivity, O Lord	6
Source : PSS ii 30
Modern edition : D xiv, 211, B xiv, 154
Remarks : Ps cxxvi.5–7
Unto the hills mine eyes I lift	6
Source : SSN 45
Modern edition : D xiii, 264
Remarks : Ps cxxi
Upon a summer’s day	3
Source : SSN 12–13
Modern edition : D xiii, 68
Wedded to will is witless	5
Source : PSS ii 23
Modern edition : D xiv, 134, B xiv, 91
Weeping full sore	5
Source : SSN 26
Modern edition : D xiii, 155
What is life?	4
Source : PSS ii 14
Modern edition : D xiv, 68, B xiv, 39
What pleasure have great princes?	5
Source : PSS i 19
Modern edition : D xii, 96
What pleasure have great princes?	5
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 60
Remarks : Anon. MS composition in anon. Lbl copy of PSS i
*What steps of strife	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 93
Remarks : Consort song
What vaileth it	6
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : F xvi, 59
Remarks : Text: Sidney
What wights are these?	—
Source : GB-Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 181
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
†When first by force	5
Source : SSN 31
Modern edition : D xiii, 199
Remarks : Text of consort song version: I that sometime a sacred maiden Queen
When I was otherwise	5
Source : SSN 30
Modern edition : D xiii, 194
When younglings first on Cupid fix their sight	3
Source : SSN 10–11
Modern edition : D xiii, 59
†Where Fancy fond	5
Source : PSS i 15
Modern edition : D xii, 74
Where the blind	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 146
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in sources
While Phoebus us’d to dwell [= The noble famous queen]	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, Och
Modern edition : B xv, 97
Remarks : Consort song
While that a cruel fire	—
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 181
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
While that the sun	4
Source : SSN 23
Modern edition : D xiii, 129
†Who likes to love	5
Source : PSS i 13
Modern edition : D xii, 64
Who looks may leap	3
Source : PSS ii 5
Modern edition : D xiv, 18, B xiv, 10
Remarks : Text: G. Whitney
Who made thee, Hob, forsake the plough?	2, 4 viols
Source : SSN 41
Modern edition : D xiii, 241
Remarks : ‘A Dialogue between two Shepherds’
†Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?	5
Source : PSS i 33
Modern edition : D xii, 183
Remarks : Text attrib. H. Walpole
With lilies white	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xv, 149
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in source
With sighs and tears	—
Source : Lbl
Modern edition : B xvi, 182
Remarks : Consort song; lute arr. only
Wounded I am	4
Source : SSN 17–18
Modern edition : D xiii, 94
Wretched Albinus	1, 4 viols
Source : Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 152
Remarks : Consort song; anon. in sources
Ye sacred muses	1, 4 viols
Source : GB-Lbl, US-CA
Modern edition : B xv, 114
Remarks : Consort song; elegy for T. Tallis (d 1585)

canons

Most of the canons in F xvi are now thought to be spurious; see Brett (1972)

Canon two in one ‘per arsin et thesin’, B xvi, 169

Canon six in one (and four in two), B xvi, 171

consort music

all published in B xvii; p. nos. in parentheses

Fantasias, grounds and dances:

Browning a 5 (39)

Fantasia a 3 in C, no.1 (2)

Fantasia a 3 in C, no.2 (4)

Fantasia a 3 in C, no.3 (6)

Fantasia a 4 in a, inc. (11)

Fantasia a 4 in G [= In manus tuas, Domine], one part only (147)

Fantasia a 4 in g, PSS ii 15 (7)

Fantasia a 5 in C [= kbd fantasia in C, MB 26] (19)

Fantasia a 6 in F [= Laudate, pueri, Dominum], inc. (48)

Fantasia a 6 in g, no.1 (53)

Fantasia a 6 in g, no.2, PSS ii 26 (63)

Pavan a 5 in c [= kbd pavan in c, MB 29] (73)

Pavan and galliard a 6 in C (75)

Prelude [and Ground] (29)

In Nomines:

In Nomine a 4, no.1 (80)

In Nomine a 4, no.2 (83)

In Nomine a 5, no.1 (86)

In Nomine a 5, no.2, ‘on the sharpe’ (90)

In Nomine a 5, no.3 (94)

In Nomine a 5, no.4 (98)

In Nomine a 5, no.5 (103)

Hymn and Miserere settings:

Christe qui lux es a 4, no.1, 3 verses (110)

[Christe qui lux es] a 4, no.2, 3 verses (114)

[Christe qui lux es] a 4, no.3, 1 verse (117)

Christe Redemptor a 4, 2 verses (118)

Miserere a 4, 2 verses (122)

* Salvator mundi a 4, 2 verses (124)

Sermone blando a 3, 2 verses (108)

* Sermone blando a 4, no.1, 3 verses (127)

Sermone blando a 4, no.2, anon. (130)

* Te lucis ante terminum a 4, 12 verses (8 + 4) (134)

keyboard music

MB nos. follow in parentheses

Fantasias, preludes, hymns and antiphons:

Fantasia in a (13)

Fantasia in C, no. 1 [= consort Fantasia a 5 in C] (26)

Fantasia in C, no.2 (25)

Fantasia in C, no.3 (27)

Verse [Fantasia in C, no.4] (28)

Fantasia in d (46)

Voluntary for my Lady Nevell [Fantasia in G, no.1] (61)

Fantasia in G, no.2 (62)

Fantasia in G, no.3 (63)

Ut mi re (65)

Ut re mi fa sol la, in G (64)

Prelude in a (12)

Prelude in C (24)

Prelude in F, GB-Lbl R.M.24.d.3, anon.

Prelude in G, Lbl R.M.24.d.3, anon.

Prelude in g (1)

Clarifica me, Pater, 3 settings (47–9)

Gloria tibi Trinitas (50)

Miserere, 2 settings (66–7)

Salvator mundi, 2 settings (68–9)

Grounds and related pieces:

‘The seconde grownde’, in C (42)

[Short] Ground in C (43)

[Short] Ground in G (9)

[Short] Ground in g (86)

Hornpipe (39)

Hugh Aston’s Ground (20)

My Lady Nevell’s Ground (57)

Qui passe [Chi passa] for my Lady Nevell (19)

The Bells (38)

The Hunt’s Up, or Pescodd Time (40)

Ut re mi fa sol la, in F (58)

Variations:

All in a garden green (56)

Callino casturame (35)

Fortune (6)

Go from my window (79)

Gypsies’ Round (80)

John come kiss me now (81)

O mistress mine, I must (83)

Rowland, or Lord Willoughby’s Welcome home (7)

Sellinger’s Round (84)

The Carman’s Whistle (36)

The Maiden’s Song (82)

The woods so wild (85)

Walsingham (8)

Wilson’s wild (37)

Pavans and Galliards:

Pavan and Galliard in a, no.1 (14)

Pavan and two Galliards in a, no.2, The Earl of Salisbury (15)

Pavan and Galliard in a, no.3 (16)

Pavan in a, no.4 (17)

Pavan and Galliard in B (23)

Pavan and Galliard in C, no.1 (30)

Pavan and Galliard in C, no.2, Kinborough Good (32)

Pavan and Galliard in C, no.3 (33)

Galliard in C, no.4, Mistress Mary Brownlow (34)

Pavan and Galliard in c, no.1 (29)

Pavan and Galliard in c, no.2 (31)

Pavan and Galliard in d, no.1 (52)

Galliard in d, no.2 (53)

Pavan and Galliard in F, no.1, Bray (59)

Pavan and Galliard in F, no.2, Ph. Tregian (60)

Quadran Pavan and Galliard in G, no.1, on the passamezzo moderno (70)

Pavan and Galliard in G, no.2 (71)

Pavan and Galliard in G, no.3 (72)

Pavan and Galliard in G, no.4 (73)

Echo Pavan and Galliard in G, no.5, anon. (114)

Pavan in G, no.6, Canon 2 in 1 (74)

Lady Monteagle’s Pavan in G, no.7 (75)

Pavan in G, no.8 (76)

Galliard in G, no.9 (77)

Passamezzo Pavan and Galliard in g, no.1, on the passamezzo antico (2)

Pavan and Galliard in g, no.2, Sir William Petre (3)

Pavan and Galliard in g, no.3 (4)

Other dances, descriptive music and arrangements:

Alman in C, Lbl R.M.24.d.3, anon.

[Monsieur’s] Alman in C (44)

Alman in G (11)

Monsieur’s Alman in G, no.1 (87)

Monsieur’s Alman in G, no.2 (88)

Alman in g (89)

The Queen’s Alman (10)

The Ghost (alman) (78)

Coranto in C (45)

Three French Corantos (21)

Jig in a (22)

The Galliard Jig (18)

Lavolta in g, no.1, Lady Morley (90)

Lavolta in g, no.2 (91)

The Barley Break (92)

The Battle (94)

The March before the Battle, or The Earl of Oxford’s March (93)

In Nomine (Parsons, arr. Byrd) (51)

O quam gloriosum est regnum (?arr. Byrd), MB, lv, 48

Pavan and Galliard, Delight (Johnson, arr. Byrd) (5)

Lachrymae Pavan (Dowland, arr. Byrd) and Galliard (Harding, arr. Byrd) (54–5)

lost works

only text extant

Behold, O God, with thy all prospering eye [? = Behold, O God, the sad and heavy case], Lbl Harl.6346, Ob Rawl.poet.23; B xi, 190

God be merciful unto us, J. Clifford: The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 2/1664)

Let us be glad, Lbl Harl.6346, Ob Rawl.poet.23; B xi, 190

Sing ye to our God, Lbl Harl.6346, Ob Rawl.poet.23; B xi, 191

doubtful works

English

Service in F: TeD, Bs, Cp 34, 38–9, fragments; F xvi, 130; B xa, 162

Short Service: San, Lbl Add.34203; F x, 95, TCM ii, 89, B xa, 162

*Litany, 4vv, Cu (formerly EL 4); F x, 15, TCM ii, 49, B xa, 149

By force I live, 1v, 4 viols, Lbl Add.18936–9; B xv, 155

Glory to God on high, 1v only, Cu (formerly EL 28); B xi, 191

If trickling tears, Ob Tenbury 389, one part only; F xvi, 147

Methought of late, 1v, 4 viols, Lbl Add.17792–6; B xv, 158

My little sweet darling, consort song attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add. 17786–91; MB xxii, no.25

O Lord, turn not away thy face, 4vv, Ob Mus.Sch.F. 17–19 (attrib. ‘W. B.’)

O trifling toys, Ob Tenbury 389, one part only; F xvi, 149

Out of the deep, 5vv, Lbl Add.17792–6, US-NYp Drexel 4180–84; B xi, 192

Out of the deep, 6vv, GB-Och Mus.1001 (attrib. O. Gibbons), Ojc 181, US-NYp Drexel 4180–85; B xi, 57

The day delayed, 1v, 4 viols, GB-Lbl Add.31992, Och 984–8; B xv, 161

Latin

* Domine Deus omnipotens, 5vv, Och; F viii, 77, TCM ix, 213

Reges Tharsis, 5vv, Och Mus.979–83; F vii, 162

Sanctus, 3vv, Och Mus.45; F viii, 27

Sponsus amat sponsum, 5vv, Lbl Add.32377, Ob Mus.Sch.E.423, Ob Tenbury 389; two parts in F xvi, 128

Vide, Domine, quoniam tribulor, 5vv, Lbl Add.23624, Ob Tenbury 389; F vii, 169

keyboard music

MB nos. follow in parentheses

Galliard (105); Galliard, If my complaints (103); Malt’s come down, Fitzwilliam Virginal Book [no. 150] (107); Medley (112)

misattributed works

English

Short Service: *Ky 2, attrib. Byrd in GB-DRc E.4–11, Cp 31–46; attrib. Giles in Cjc 181; F x, 80, TCM ii, 81; alternative *Cr, attrib. Byrd in DRc E.4–11, Cp 31–46; attrib. Farrant in Cpc 6 (1–6); TCM ii, 82

Service, attrib. Byrd in Ob E 40; attrib. Inglott in Och 1001 and later MSS

Abradad, attrib. ‘Mr. B’ in Ob Tenbury 389; F xvi, 145, is Ah, Alas, you salt sea gods, consort song by R. Farrant; MB xxii, no.7

Come tread the paths, consort song, attrib. Byrd in Ob Tenbury 389; MB xxii, no.3

Let God arise, attrib. Byrd in Och Mus. 1012; F xvi, 141, is by T. Ford

O heav’nly God, consort song, attrib. ‘Mr B’ in Ob Tenbury 389 is by ?N. Strogers; MB xxii, no.22

O praise our Lord, ye saints above, 5vv, attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add.17797, attrib. A. Ferrabosco (i) in Lbl Add.18936–9; F xi, 33, B xi, 174

Latin

Decantabat populus, 5vv, attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add.37402–6, anon. in Och Mus.984–8; F viii, 68

Dies illa, 5vv, Lbl R.M. Baldwin, TCM ix, 303, is by R. Parsons (i)

Incola ego sum, 4vv, Ob Tenbury 354–8, TCM ix, 241, is by R. Parsons

Quia illic, 4vv, fragment, attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add.35001; TCM ix, 312

consort music

Fantasia a 4 in d, no.1, US-Ws V.a.405, f.40v; B xvii, 14

Fantasia a 4 in d, no.2, Ws V.a.405, f.41r; B xvii, 16

In Nomine a 7, attrib. Byrd in Lbl Add.32377, is by R. Parsons (i); F xvii, 119

1. Manuscript sources and their notation.

keyboard

MB nos. follow in parentheses

Alman (108); Alman (109); Lullaby (110); Medley (111); Pavan (101); Pavan (102); Pavan and Galliard (98); Pavan (99b); Pavan and Galliard, Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, nos.174–5 (99a, c); Pavan and Galliard (100); Prelude (96); Prelude (97); Bonny sweet Robin (106); The Hunt's Up (41); Miserere mei Deus (arr.), Lbl Add.31403, F viii, 29; Sir John Gray’s Galliard, Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, no.191 (104)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDECM

KermanEM

Le HurayMR

W.B. Squire: ‘A Father of Music’, Musical Review, i (1883), 299–300, 317–18, 331–2

E.H. Fellowes: The English Madrigal Composers (Oxford, 1921, 2/1948/R)

H.B. Collins: ‘Byrd’s Latin Church Music’, ML, iv (1923), 254–60

F. Howes: William Byrd (London, 1928/R)

E.J. Dent: ‘William Byrd and the Madrigal’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin, 1929/R), 24–30

E.H. Fellowes: William Byrd (London, 1936, 2/1948)

T. Dart and P. Brett: ‘Songs by William Byrd in Manuscripts at Harvard’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xiv (1960), 343–65

J. Kerman: ‘Byrd’s Motets: Chronology and Canon’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 359–82

P. Brett: ‘The English Consort Song, 1570–1625’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 73–88

H.K. Andrews: ‘Transposition of Byrd’s Vocal Polyphony’, ML, xliii (1962), 25–37

J. Kerman: ‘The Elizabethan Motet: a Study of Texts for Music’, Studies in the Renaissance, ix (1962), 273–308

H.K. Andrews: ‘Printed Sources of William Byrd’s “Psalmes, Sonets and Songs”’, ML, xliv (1963), 5–20

H.K. Andrews: ‘The Printed Part-Books of Byrd’s Vocal Music’, The Library, 5th ser., xix (1964), 1–10

H.K. Andrews: The Technique of Byrd’s Vocal Polyphony (London, 1966/R)

P. Clulow: ‘Publication Dates for Byrd’s Latin Masses’, ML, xlvii (1966), 1–9

P. Brett: ‘Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd’, PRMA, xcviii (1971–2), 47–64

P. Brett: ‘Did Byrd write “Non nobis, Domine”?’, MT, cxiii (1972), 855–7

J. Caldwell: English Keyboard Music before the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1973)

J. Kerman: ‘William Byrd, 1543–1623’, MT, cxiv (1973), 687–90

A. Brown: ‘Keyboard Music by Byrd “Upon a Plainsong”’, Organ Yearbook, v (1974), 30–39

J. Kerman: ‘Old and New in Byrd’s Cantiones sacrae’, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. F.W. Sternfeld, N. Fortune and E. Olleson (Oxford, 1975), 25–43

C. Monson: ‘Byrd and the 1575 Cantiones sacrae’, MT, cxvi (1975), 1089–91; cxvii (1976), 65–7

O. Neighbour: The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London, 1978)

C. Monson: ‘The Preces, Psalms and Litanies of Byrd and Tallis: Another “Virtuous Contension in Love”’, MR, xl (1979), 257–71

P. Brett: ‘Editing Byrd’, MT, cxxi (1980), 492–6, 557–9

P. Brett: ‘Homage to Taverner in Byrd's Masses’, EMc, ix (1981), 169–76

J. Kerman: The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (Berkeley, 1981); see also reviews by J. Milsom, RMARC, no.19 (1983–5), 85–95; A. Brown, JAMS, xxxviii (1985), 162–8

E.E. Knight: ‘The Praise of Musicke: John Case, Thomas Watson and William Byrd’, CMc, no.30 (1981), 37–59

C. Monson: ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Byrd's Verse Service as Reflected in Manuscript Sources’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 64–81

C. Monson: ‘Authenticity and Chronology in Byrd's Verse Anthems’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 280–305

R. Turbet: William Byrd: a Guide to Research (New York, 1987)

R. Turbet: ‘Homage to Byrd in Tudor Verse Services’, MT, cxxix (1988), 485–90

R.K. Duncan-Jones: ‘“Melancholic Times”: Musical Recollections of Sidney by William Byrd and Thomas Watson’, The Well Enchanting Skill: Essays in Honour of F.W. Sternfeld, ed. J.A. Caldwell, E.D. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford, 1990), 171–80

C. Harrison: ‘William Byrd and the Pagets of Beaudesert: a Musical Connection’, Staffordshire Studies, iii (1990), 51–63

J. Irving: ‘Penetrating the Preface to Gradualia’, MR, li (1990), 157–66

J. Caldwell: Oxford History of English Music, i (Oxford, 1991)

J. Irving: ‘Words and Notes Combined: some Questions of Text-Music Integration in Byrd's Masses’, MR, lii (1991), 267–78

P. Phillips: English Sacred Music, 1549–1649 (Oxford, 1991)

A.M. Brown and R. Turbet, eds.: Byrd Studies (Cambridge, 1992) [collection of essays]

M. Greenhalgh: ‘A Byrd Discography’, ibid., 202–62; suppl., Brio, xxxiii (1996), 19–54

C.A. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner, eds.: Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections, Presented to O.W. Neighbour (London, 1993) [incl. A.M. Brown: ‘The Woods so Wild: Notes on a Byrd Text’, 54–66; D. Moroney: ‘“Bounds and Compasses”: the Range of Byrd's Keyboards’, 67–88; P. Brett: ‘Pitch and Transposition in the Paston Manuscripts’, 89–118]

J. Kerman: Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley, 1994), 77–124

R. Turbet: Tudor Music: a Research and Information Guide (New York, 1994)

T. Nasu: ‘The Publication of Byrd's Gradualia Reconsidered’, Brio, xxxii (1995), 109–20 [rev. trans. of orig. in Ongaku-gaku, xxxviii (1992), 118–28]

D. Mateer: ‘William Byrd, John Petre and Oxford, Bodleian MS Mus.Sch.E.423’, RMARC, no.29 (1996), 21–46

J. Kerman: ‘On William Byrd’s Emendemus in Melius’, Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. D. Pesce (Oxford, 1997), 329–47

J. Harley: William Byrd, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot, 1997)

D. Mateer: ‘William Byrd's Middlesex Recusancy’, ML, lxxviii (1997), 1–14

C. Monson: ‘Byrd, the Catholics and the Motet: the Hearing Reopened’, ed. D. Pesce (Oxford, 1997), 348–74

J.L. Smith: ‘The Hidden Editions of Thomas East’, Notes, liii (1997), 105–91

J. Harley: ‘New Light on William Byrd’, ML, lxxix (1998), 475–88

Byrds, the.

American folk-rock group. Formed in 1964 and disbanded in 1973, it consisted of Roger McGuinn (forename changed from James in 1968; b Chicago, 13 July 1942; guitar and voice), David Crosby (b Los Angeles, 14 Aug 1941; guitar and voice), Gene Clark (Harold Eugene Clark; b Tipton, MO, 17 Nov 1941, d 24 May 1991; voice and tambourine), Michael Clarke (b New York, 3 June 1944; d 19 Dec 1993; drums and percussion) and Chris Hillman (b Los Angeles, 4 Dec 1944; bass and mandolin). They are generally credited with having done more than anyone else to establish folk-rock, by mixing their coffee-house folk-musician skills with the impact of British-Invasion rock. They were often described as a fusion of Bob Dylan and the Beatles: they expanded the vocal harmonizing of the Beatles while absorbing other aspects of their sound and rhythm, and many of their biggest hits were cover versions of Dylan's songs. Their music also reflected the eclectic experimentation of the psychedelic era in its imitation of the timbres of Indian music and the modal influences of John Coltrane. Their personnel changed; at the time of their influential album Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Col., 1968), which was the first album to be widely identified as country-rock, it included Gram Parsons on guitar. The Byrds’ vocal harmonies and the distinctive jangling sound of McGuinn's 12-string electric guitar were important aspects of their influence on later bands such as the Eagles and REM. (J. Rogan: Timeless Flight: the Definitive Biography of the Byrds, Essex, 1990)

ROBERT WALSER

Byron, Lord [6th Baron] [Byron, George Gordon (Noel)]

(b London, 22 Jan 1788; d Missolonghi [now Mesolóngion], 19 April 1824). English poet. The success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) brought him immediate fame, and even greater success followed The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Corsair (1814). Their cultivation of wild emotions, of exotic settings and of a disdainful gloom won him a European reputation; and the irregularity of his private life (which included an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh) did nothing to diminish his appeal to his generation as a Romantic outsider, ruled by his passions and tinged with doom. That this is a very incomplete view of him as a poet mattered little to European artists, who, further excited by his death fighting for the liberation of Greece, hailed him as an essential Romantic. The Byronic hero was widely imitated – notably by Pushkin in Yevgeny Onegin – and stimulated composers to base works on his poems, however loosely. One of his greatest admirers was Berlioz, whose Mémoires have a Byronic tinge and who turned to Byron for the overture Le corsaire and for Harold en Italie. The latter work in turn influenced Tchaikovsky’s Manfred symphony: Byron’s reputation was particularly long-lasting in Russia. Manfred was a popular subject for Romantic composers, including Schumann and Nietzsche (Manfred-Meditation, for piano). Liszt based his Tasso on Byron. His poems were set as songs by many composers, including Loewe (24 settings), Mendelssohn (two), Schumann (six), Wolf (two), Musorgsky (one), Balakirev (one), Rimsky-Korsakov (two), Gounod (one) and Busoni (three); and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon uses his poem. Over 40 operas are based on works by him (see list). There are also three operas about Byron himself, including Virgil Thomson’s Lord Byron.

WORKS SET TO MUSIC

only operas listed

The Bride of Abydos (1813): Poniatowski, 1845; A. Fell, 1853; F. Sand, 1858; Dubois, 1864; Barthe, 1865; Lebrun, 1897

The Giaour (1813): Bovery, 1840; A. Hermann, 1866; N. Berg, as Leila, 1912; Delmas, 1928

The Corsair (1814): Arditi, 1848; Verdi, 1848; Bronsart, 1875; Marracino, as Corrado, 1900

Lara (1814): Ruolz, 1835; Salvi, 1843; Maillart, 1864; Marsick, 1929

Parisina (1816): Donizetti, 1833; Giribaldi, 1878; Keurvels, 1890; Veneziani, 1901

The Siege of Corinth (1816): Cahen, as Le Vénitien, 1890

Cain (1821): Delvincourt, as Lucifer, 1948; Schmodtmann, 1952; Lattuada, 1957

Marino Faliero (1821): Donizetti, 1835; Holstein, 1881; Freudenberg, 1889

Sardanapalus (1821): Litta, 1844; Alary, 1852; Joncières, 1867; Maître, 1870; Famintsïn, 1875; Libani, 1880; Duvernoy, 1882; Grunenwald, 1961

The Two Foscari (1821): Verdi, 1844; Bogatïryov, 1940

Heaven and Earth (1823): Glier, 1900

Don Juan (inc., from 1819): Polignac, 1877; Fibich, as Hedy, 1896

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Pascall: ‘“Those Grand Heroics acted as a Spell”: Aspects of Byron's Influence on Music in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, xxxii (1988), 128–35

D. Pistone: ‘Byron et les musiciens français’, Revue de littérature comparée, lxiv (1990), 367–70 [incl. list of works]

A. Edler: ‘Landschaft und Mythos im Manfred von Byron und Schumann’, Festschrift Klaus Hortschansky, ed. A. Beer and L. Lütteken (Tutzing, 1995), 401–12

JOHN WARRACK

Byron, William, 4th Baron

(bap. Chaworth, Lancs., 4 Jan 1669; d Newstead, Notts., 8 Aug 1736). English amateur instrumentalist and composer. He was great-grandfather to the poet and was brought up on the family estates at Rochdale. He succeeded to the title in 1695, becoming a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Prince George of Denmark. He settled at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire in 1700, married three times and had ten children. He was a man of taste and learning, and received an honorary doctorate at Cambridge in 1705. He enlarged and improved Newstead, employed Peter Tillemans as his drawing master, collected paintings and formed a fine library. To judge from his publications, he was active as a composer during the decade 1695–1705. He was the dedicatee of Nicola Matteis's Collection of New Songs … The 1st Book (1696), and was probably the author of the rather poor recorder duets by ‘a person of Quality’ included with it; Matteis may have been his violin teacher. Byron was also the dedicatee of the op.1 trio sonatas (Amsterdam, 1700), by William Corbett, who praised him for ‘excelling both in composition and performance’.

Byron's most significant compositions are the four suites he wrote for plays at Drury Lane. He may possibly be identified with the ‘person of quality’ who published songs and other music around the turn of the century; An Overture and Aires for the Harpsichord or Spinett, Composed by a Person of Quality (London, 1705) is certainly by him, for it was subsequently advertised as ‘Ld Birons Lessons’. Byron wrote fairly competently in a post-Purcellian idiom, but his music is rather unimaginative and limited in scope.

WORKS

4 suites, str a 4, in the following plays: The Lost Lover, or The Jealous Husband (M. de la Riviere Manley), 1696, GB-Lbl (tr pt only), Lcm (inc.; facs. in MLE, A3, 1987); Woman's Wit, or The Lady in Fashion (C. Cibber), 1697, Cmc (inc.), Lbl (tr pt only); The False Friend (J. Vanbrugh), 1702, Harmonia Anglicana (London, 1702); She Wou'd if She Cou'd (G. Etherege), 1705, Harmonia Anglicana (London, 1705)

An Overture and Aires, hpd/spinett (London, 1705)

doubtful

2 duets, 2 rec, pubd with N. Matteis: Collection of New Songs … The 1st Book (London, 1696), by ‘a person of Quality’

Aires, 2 fl (London, n.d.), lost, by ‘a person of Quality’, listed in Smith

It is not Celia, song, 1v, bc, in N. Matteis: Collection of New Songs … The 1st Book (London, 1696), by ‘a person of Quality’

Mariana's charms wound my heart, song (London, c1710)

Various other songs, by ‘a person of Quality’, in anthologies pubd in London c1700

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.C. Smith: A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by John Walsh During the Years 1695–1720 (London, 1948)

M.B. Byron: The Byron Chronicle: a History of the Byron and Byrom Families 1066–1800 (Derby, CT, 1965)

A.L. Rowse: The Byrons and Trevanions (London, 1978)

R. Coope: ‘Newstead Abbey in the Eighteenth Century: the Building Works of the Fourth and Fifth Lords Byron’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire (1979), 46–62

C.A. Price: Music in the Restoration Theatre (Ann Arbor, 1979)

J. Harley: British Harpsichord Music (Aldershot, 1992–4)

PETER HOLMAN

Byström, Oscar (Fredrik Bernadotte)

(b Stockholm, 13 Oct 1821; d Stockholm, 22 July 1909). Swedish composer and scholar. He followed his father in a military career, rising to the rank of captain in 1857. During the 1840s he established a reputation in Stockholm as a pianist and song composer. In the following decade he developed his creative talent in a number of chamber works, the Piano Trio in E (1850), a cello duo (1851) and, more particularly, in the first of his two quartets, the Quartetto svedese (1856, rev. 1895). He was active as a teacher in the late 1850s and early 1860s; in 1866 he succeeded August Berwald as inspector of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, and in 1872 he was appointed professor. In 1871 he published a theory work for schools (Allmän musiklära, till skolornas tjenst). After a period as conductor of the Turku orchestral society (1872–6) he returned to Stockholm to devote his energies to church music, publishing Sequenser, antifoner och hymnen (1899) and working on the Swedish chorale book. In 1886 he studied the performance of liturgical music in London, Paris, Solesmes, Milan and Rome; on his return to Stockholm he presented ‘motet evenings’ of Lassus and Palestrina. At this time he was considered the leading church music specialist in Sweden. The best works of his small output are well wrought and show the influence of Franz Berwald, who befriended him in the 1850s or before and who supported one of his business ventures. Byström’s finest work is in the Symphony in D minor (1870–72, rev. 1895), which, despite its obvious debts to Berwald, has an eloquent slow movement, and in the two quartets, of which the second, in D, was written during the 1860s. There is an orchestral Fantasia on Finnish Themes and an operetta, Herman Vimpel, both composed while he was in Turku.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Lindgren: ‘Oscar Byström’, Svensk musiktidning, xxii (1902), 1–3

M. Roos: ‘Några ord om Oscar Byström och kyrkomusikens Renässans’, Idun, xix (1906), 557–8, 568

S.E. Svensson: ‘Oscar Byström som musiker: en biografisk skiss’, STMf, xviii (1936), 43–71

L. Hedwall: ‘Oscar Byström: en kyrkomusikalisk pionjär’, Kyrkomusikernas tidning (5 Sept 1959)

L. Hedwall: Konsertlivet i Åbo under Oscar Byströms kapellmästartid 1872–76: en kommenterad konsertförteckning (Turku, 1989–90)

ROBERT LAYTON/LENNART RABES

Byström, Thomas

(b Helsinki, 28 Aug 1772; d Stockholm, 2 Oct 1839). Swedish music teacher, composer and military officer of Finnish birth. In the mid-1780s he studied in Tallinn, and in December 1787 he entered the Artillery and Engineering Military Academy in St Petersburg, where he probably also studied music. In 1792 he was a second lieutenant with the Swedish Artillery and a company officer at the Karlberg Military Academy in Stockholm. From 1793 to 1795 he gave piano lessons to cadets and he was elected to membership of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1794. He held several high military posts, including chief adjutant to the King of Sweden; he was also a Russian translator on the king’s staff, and in 1813 he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. However in 1816 his position was suddenly terminated, and he did not resume his military career until 1825. Byström taught piano (1818–33) and organ (1818–24) at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and also had private students, including Crown Prince Oscar. He was elected an honorary member of the Harmoniska Sällskapet in 1832.

Byström’s compositions are from the period 1794 to 1805. Most interesting are three violin sonatas published by Breitkopf and Härtel in 1801, which imitate Mozart’s and Beethoven’s style. The variation suite Air russe variée for piano is also noteworthy. Other works include two polonaises for piano, and nine solo songs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Marvia: ‘Thomas Byström 1772–1839’, STMf, lxiii (1981), 35–58

S. Lappalainen: ‘A Breath of Classicism in the North’, Finnish Music Quarterly, i (1991), 50–56

S. Lappalainen: ‘Finnish Viennese Classical Composers and Europe’, Balticum: a Coherent Musical Landscape in 16th and 18th Centuries: Tallinn 1992, 91–102

SEIJA LAPPALAINEN

Bystrý, Viliam.

See Figuš-Bystrý, Viliam.

Bystyn, Pieter.

See Bustijn, Pieter.

Bytner, Crato.

See Bütner, Crato.

Bytown.

See Ottawa.

Byttering [Bytteryng, Biteryng, Bytering]

(fl c1410–1420). English composer. He was one of the stylistically more advanced contributors to the first layer of the Old Hall Manuscript. No certain identification has been made, though a possible candidate is Thomas Byteryng, a canon at Hastings Castle (1405–8) and a rector in the London area from 1414. The Gloria no.17, with its striking use of imitation and proportional passages, survives anonymously (in I-AO), and Nesciens mater in a fragment at York (GB-Ybi). The latter setting, his only piece notated in score, camouflages the plainsong by migration and transposition. The Credo no.85 in the Old Hall Manuscript is marked ‘Bittering’, but in a late 16th-century hand with no demonstrable authority. If, as can now be assumed, the reason for the interruption of work on the Old Hall Manuscript was the death of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, in 1421, the revised chronology comfortably accommodates the composition of En Katerine as a wedding motet for Henry V and Catherine de Valois (2 June 1420). The text of the middle voice is also found in a 14th-century motet (in GB-DRc).

WORKS

Edition: The Old Hall Manuscript, ed. A. Hughes and M. Bent, CMM, xlvi (1969–73) [OH]

Gloria, 3vv, OH no.17

Gloria, 4vv, OH no.18 (2 upper voices in canon)

Credo, 3vv, OH no.79

Nesciens mater, 3vv, OH no.50

En Katerine solennia/Virginalis contio/Sponsus amat sponsum [recre sponsam], 3vv, OH no.145

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F.Ll. Harrison: ‘Ars nova in England: a New Source’, MD, xxi (1967), 67–85

For further bibliography see Old Hall Manuscript.

MARGARET BENT

Byzantine chant.

Music of the liturgical rite of the Christian Roman Empire of the East from the time of the establishment of Constantinople (at the site of ancient Byzantium) in the early 4th century and persisting beyond the interruption of the Eastern imperial succession by the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The rite is still practised by tens of millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians whose native language, or liturgical language, is Greek. Through translation into Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Church Slavonic and other languages, it has remained the dominant liturgy of the Christian East during the past 1500 years. Its influence at various times has spread as far west as Spain (in the 6th century), and to north-east and south Italy (where isolated pockets still exist). It has prevailed in north-east Africa (Patriarchate of Alexandria), throughout Greece and Palestine (Patriarchate of Jerusalem), through most of the Christian Near East (Patriarchate of Antioch), all Russia, other Slavonic nations and Romania. The main focus of the following discussion is the music of the Greek rite before the fall of Constantinople. The Byzantine chant continued, however, to flourish after this event, specifically in monasteries throughout the former empire and at the patriarchal see of Constantinople. Almost all the medieval chant repertory survives in manuscript sources with musical notation, and in this respect Byzantine chant is wholly comparable to the repertories of the Roman and Ambrosian (Milanese) Churches in the West.

2. Ekphonetic (lectionary) notation.

3. Melodic notation.

4. Liturgical recitatives.

5. System of eight modes (‘oktōēchos’).

6. Syllabic psalm tones.

7. Formulaic chants.

8. Florid psalmody: ‘prokeimena’, ‘allēlouïaria’ and ‘koinōnika’.

9. Byzantine hymns.

10. Syllabic hymn settings.

11. Florid hymn settings in classical styles: ‘kontakion’ and ‘hypakoē’.

12. Post-classical florid styles: the kalophonic style and the emergence of personal styles.

13. The Ordinary of the Divine Liturgy and Office.

14. Paraliturgical and instrumental music.

15. Byzantium and the Slavs.

16. Byzantium and the West.

17. Byzantine music theory.

KENNETH LEVY/CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD

1. Manuscript sources and their notation.

Byzantine music manuscripts, whether from Alexandria or Jerusalem, Greece or Asia Minor, Mount Athos or southern Italy, Thessaloniki or Constantinople, in general show the same kind of unity of melodic tradition found among the widely diffused manuscripts of the Gregorian chant in Western Europe. In earlier times the controlling liturgical and musical centres seem to have been first Antioch and then Palestine (during the 6th and 7th centuries); in the 9th century at the latest, control of the melodic traditions shifted to the Constantinople region and eventually to Mount Athos and Thessaloniki, the importance of other centres being markedly reduced.

Of some 12,000 to 15,000 surviving Byzantine manuscripts dating from before the fall of the empire, an estimated 10% contain ‘melodic’ notation (see §3 below), used for the chanting of psalmody and hymns. In addition there are hundreds of manuscript lectionaries of the Old and New Testaments, noted throughout with the auxiliary musical signs of ‘ekphonetic’ or lectionary notation (see §2), indicating the musical tones for chanting the solemn readings of scripture. The earliest surviving sources with ekphonetic notation date from the 9th century, while melodic notation is documented with certainty from about the mid-10th. There are good reasons, however, to assume that both systems developed earlier. Several of the names and shapes of the neumes are common to both notations (the terminology is known from a number of medieval lists and exercises), but as their application in both systems is, with one or two possible exceptions, essentially distinct, a direct dependence of one on the other seems unlikely. The common features, therefore, must derive from a secondary influence. Likewise, no single origin of the various Byzantine notations has yet come to light; their creation and development probably resulted from practical needs or other influences, of which the most significant appear to be the systems of accentuation and punctuation and the letter classification of ancient Greek grammar.

While ekphonetic notation cannot be interpreted precisely, the melodic notation in use from about the mid-12th century is fully diastematic, making transcriptions of the chants possible. Aspects of the melodic tradition can be traced from the mid-12th century back to the earliest surviving manuscripts with notation (and in some cases even beyond) owing to the musical-syntactical punctuation and the modal assignments found in early books containing liturgical texts. Important parts of the repertory, however, were not notated until the 14th and 15th centuries or, in a few cases, even later. Nevertheless, inferences can be drawn about earlier centuries partly because of the stability of the later tradition. Thus virtually the full music of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy (corresponding to the Western Mass) and Office during the last centuries of the empire can be reconstructed.

2. Ekphonetic (lectionary) notation.

Ekphonetic (from Gk. ekphōnēsis: ‘reading aloud’) notation served as a mnemonic aid in the solemn reading of the Prophets, other passages from the Old Testament, and the Epistle and Gospel texts. In this notation, every phrase (comma) of the text bears two notational signs, one at the beginning and one at the end (see Ekphonetic notation, §3). There are about 20 conventional pairings, each conveying information about the pitch and formula to be used (see ex.1).

Høeg’s study of ekphonetic notation (D.i 1935) remains authoritative and has been supplemented by Engberg (D.i 1987, 1992) and others. A critical edition of the Constantinopolitan Old Testament Lectionary (the Prophetologion) with notation has also been published (Høeg, Zuntz and Engberg, D.i 1939–81).

(i) Palaeo-Byzantine notation.

3. Melodic notation.

This was employed from the 10th century for a wide variety of properly melodic chants. Five principal manuscript collections contain the majority of these melodies: the Heirmologion, consisting of hymns (heirmoi) used in the performance of the biblical canticles; the Stichērarion, a rough equivalent to the Western antiphoner and processional; the asmatikon, a Constantinopolitan choirbook containing florid chants of the Proper and ‘semi-Ordinary’; the psaltikon, a Constantinopolitan soloist’s book containing florid psalm and hymn settings, complementary to the asmatikon; the Akolouthiai manuscripts (‘orders of service’), a group of anthologies originating in about 1300 and containing traditional and contemporary settings of the Ordinary chants as well as elements drawn from the earlier repertories, principally the psaltikon and the asmatikon.

Melodic notation may be divided into three main types: Palaeo-Byzantine, 10th–12th centuries; Middle Byzantine (‘Round’ notation), from the mid-12th century to about 1815; and the New Method (‘Reformed’ or ‘Chrysanthine’ notation), from the 1820s.

(ii) Middle Byzantine notation.

(iii) The New Method (‘Reformed’ or ‘Chrysanthine’ notation).

Byzantine chant, §3: Melodic notation

(i) Palaeo-Byzantine notation.

In the earliest manuscripts containing examples of this stage of notation there are comparatively few signs and not every syllable of text is furnished with notation. It is noteworthy that some of the early chant books were originally text books to which notation was later added between the lines. In many cases the notation has been updated once or twice to a more developed stage or has even been converted into another type entirely. In the mid-11th century, signs began to appear above every syllable of text (Strunk, C1966; Floros, D.ii 1970), indicating the melodic features and style of performance though not the exact pitch. Precise transcription of Palaeo-Byzantine notation is impossible in isolation; approximate transcription of the melodies can be achieved only through careful and critical comparison with their diastematic counterparts in Middle Byzantine notation.

Three types of Palaeo-Byzantine notation can be distinguished: ‘Theta’, ‘Chartres’ and ‘Coislin’. All were used, with very few exceptions, to notate the syllabic chants of the heirmologion and the stichērarion. Chartres and Coislin notation are named after the manuscript collections in France where they were first observed and studied. Certain basic signs appear in both these branches, suggesting a common ‘parent notation’ closest to archaic Coislin notation (Strunk, C1966). Notational systems with a mixture of signs from these two traditions are not uncommon. A unique notation with many ‘big signs’ (megala sēmadia) was discovered in 1965 in a 14th-century manuscript in the cathedral library of Kastoria, Greece (MS 8; Politēs, C1967) and probably represents a trace of the otherwise lost Byzantine ancestor of the Slavonic ‘kondakarion’ notation (see Russian and Slavonic church music).

(a) Theta notation.

This is a rudimentary type characterized by the use of a single sign (or very few signs), often like the Greek letter theta (probably an abbreviation for thema, in the sense of ‘figure’ or ‘formula’) or like an acute accent (oxeia) or double acute accent, over single syllables of the chant text (Raasted, D.ii 1962). Comparison with later, more developed notational types shows that the ‘theta positions’ correspond to short melismatic formulae. Theta notation indicated only the position of a melisma in an otherwise predominantly syllabic style; the whole melody, including the melisma itself, had to be supplied from memory or ‘improvised’ in the conventional style of the stichērarion or heirmologion repertories. Possibly the earliest document with traces of Theta notation is a palimpsest heirmologion (US-PRu Garrett 24; see ex.2a), whose script can be dated to about 800 (Raasted, D.ii 1992).

(b) Chartres notation.

Occurring in relatively few sources, the earliest of which originated in Constantinople and Mount Athos, this notation is characterized by the use of many complex signs, apparently indicating groups of notes or whole melismas (fig.1). It appears to have become obsolete during the mid-11th century, probably as a result of the reform of the stichērarion repertory, after which Coislin notation in its developed form became the standard Byzantine notation (Strunk, C1966). However, some of the earliest developments towards diastematy may be seen in Chartres notation, and in about 1300 a number of its complex neumes reappeared in Middle Byzantine notation as ‘red’ or ‘big’ signs.

(c) Coislin notation.

This notation probably originated in Palestine, judging from the provenance of the earliest manuscripts in which it appears (Strunk, C1966). Its prevailing feature is the designation of each melodic step by a separate basic sign and the use of a relatively limited number of group signs. In its more developed stages, these signs are often combined in groups. In time, Coislin notation became refined and more precise in meaning. By at least 1106, as attested by RUS-SPsc gr.789, it had reached its most advanced stage and formed the basis for the transition to Middle Byzantine notation. The two earliest datable manuscripts transmitting Middle Byantine notation date from, respectively, 1177 (ET-MSsc gr.1218) and 1168–79 (GR-Psj 221).

Byzantine chant, §3: Melodic notation

(ii) Middle Byzantine notation.

The principles of Middle Byzantine (‘Round’) notation prevailed from the mid-11th century to about 1815. Whereas Western staff notation, which developed from the heighted neumes of Gregorian chant, can be described as a ‘heighted’ or ‘graphic’ notation, relative pitch being represented by relative height on the staff, Middle Byzantine notation can be described as essentially a ‘digital’ notation: its conventional signs designate the number of steps up or down between each note and the note succeeding it. The notation does not indicate explicitly the size of the intervals; the singers would have understood these from the mode (see Ēchos), the genre, and knowledge of the particular formulae indicated. During the Middle Ages the tonal system was basically diatonic, although some passages – even perhaps whole melodies – might have been performed chromatically, particularly in the second mode (authentic and plagal).

The starting note is indicated by a special sign, the martyria (modal signature), which defines the mode itself and gives the final note of the intonation formula (occasionally written out in full; Raasted, D.ii 1966). The first neume above the first syllable of the text of a hymn thus shows the first note to be sung in relation to the end of the intonation. The most frequently encountered forms of the martyria and the final notes of their intonations for each mode are given in Table 1. The signs consist of stylized forms of the first four letters of the Greek alphabet used as numerals, and of the neumes that indicate characteristic melodic movements of the particular mode.

Because the neumatic notation did not represent pitch precisely, it was not uncommon for Byzantine scribes to insert medial or reference signatures at cadence points in a melody; these generally served to confirm the pitch reached at such a point. However, a medial signature was occasionally used to mark an unexpected feature, for example, the pitch E at a point where the melody apparently stands on D, or F where it ostensibly stands on G. This is generally taken to mean a temporary ‘transposition’ of the normal diatonic system. Thus the D signature on the pitch E would cause the tetrachord E–F–G–A (the D tetrachord transposed up a tone) to be used in the following passage in place of E–F–G–A; similarly, an F signature on pitch G would cause an F to be used below the G (E–F transposed up a tone) in place of F.

The first lists of Middle Byzantine neumes did not appear until relatively late; the earliest known is in F-Pn gr.261, dating from 1289. On the basis of these lists the signs may be divided into three groups: the sōmata (‘bodies’) indicating conjunct movement only (Table 2a); the pneumata (‘spirits’) indicating leaps only (Table 2b); and signs that are neither sōmata nor pneumata (Table 2d), of which the majority are concerned with rhythmic features or tempo, whereas only a few are used for melodic movement. Of the last the most important is the ison, which indicates the repetition of a note at the same pitch as the preceding one.

The sōmata express the movement of an ascending or descending 2nd. For the latter there is one basic sign, the apostrophos, but there are no fewer than six signs for the upward movement, each of which conveys a special quality of enunciation and/or stress, the interpretation of which is partly conjectural (Table 2a). The kouphisma and pelaston occur less frequently than the other signs and are linked to special positions and genres.

The pneumata indicate only two intervallic steps, the 3rd and 5th, each having two forms, one for the upward movement, the other for the downward direction (Table 2b). In Middle Byzantine notation no pneuma could stand alone; for example, it could be preceded on its left-hand side by a sōma, which would reinforce the direction of the pneuma and also impart its quality to it. Thus the melodic movement of an ascending 3rd could be notated in two different ways, as in Table 2c: oligon and kentēma (neutral), and oxeia and kentēma (accented). The duo apostrophoi is an exception, for in this case the placing of signs side by side signifies a rhythmic lengthening; its melodic function is simply that of a descending 2nd.

Other steps such as the 4th or 6th could be obtained by the addition of two smaller intervals, indicated by special placing of the pneumata above the sōmata (see Table 2c): elaphron above apostrophos (descending 4th); kentēma above oxeia (accented ascending 4th).

The placing of the ison (neither a sōma nor a pneuma: Table 2d) above any of the sōmata cancels the melodic movement upwards; the note is therefore sounded at the same pitch as the preceding one but with the added quality. For example, when the ison appears above the petastē it cancels upward movement but acquires stress (Table 2c). Similarly, the placing of the apostrophos above any of the ascending sōmata indicates a downward 2nd with the appropriate quality. Occasionally, two sōmata may be placed one above another; for example, oligon above petastē implies the addition of two ascending 2nds resulting in an ascending 3rd with acquired stress (Table 2c). For an example of Middle Byzantine notation, with a transcription of various signs, see ex.3 (the transcription code used is that of MMB, Transcripta, 1936–59).

In addition to the signs for intervals, there are neumes that indicate lengthening of rhythmic values (Table 2d): diplē, interpreted as double length; kratēma, a considerable lengthening, involving some sort of special stress or grace notes; tzakisma, also called klasma, a moderate lengthening; apoderma occurs frequently at the ends of phrases, but its meaning is not clear.

Special signs indicate variations in tempo, for example, the gorgon for speeding up and the argon for slowing down (Table 2d); whether the individual signs are attached to a single neume or to a group of neumes (as seems to have been the case in later centuries), their precise effect is uncertain.

In addition to rhythmical signs, other megala sēmadia (also called megalai hypostaseis: ‘big signs’ or ‘group signs’) appear in the melismatic repertories from the beginning of the period in which Middle Byzantine notation flourished; in the stichērarion and other collections the frequent use of these signs occurred later. Although the megala sēmadia are often linked to specific constellations of interval neumes, their exact significance is not entirely clear. It is thought that they generally indicate agogic refinements, in some cases reinforcing the melodic contour expressed by the individual neumes themselves; it is also possible that they helped singers obtain a quick ‘synoptic’ view of the formulae applied; additionally, they may have been connected with Cheironomy (gestures performed by the choirmasters; see Moran, D.ii 1986). (For a fuller listing of Middle Byzantine neumes see Haas, D.ii 1973; for a manuscript illustration see fig.2.)

The term ‘Late Byzantine’ refers to the notation in use between the 15th and 19th centuries and distinguishes those musical manuscripts copied mainly after the fall of Constantinople into Turkish hands (29 May 1453) from those written in preceding centuries. Although megala sēmadia were used more profusely in these later centuries, giving a visual impression of a somewhat different notational practice, all the basic neumes of Middle Byzantine notation remained in use throughout the period.

From the 16th century onwards there is evidence to suggest that musicians ‘edited’ or ‘transcribed’ parts of the traditional repertory. These ‘transcriptions’ or ‘exegeses’ (Gk. exēgēseis) have created the impression that no Byzantine notation before the 17th century represented melodic movement in all details, but rather that it served as a shorthand record of a performance. On the basis of this assumption some Greek scholars have claimed that Western musicologists (particularly those associated with the series Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae) merely follow the metrophōnia (signs of duration and melodic steps) but ignore the real melos, which may be uncovered by interpreting the megala sēmadia while making allowance for oral tradition (see Stathēs, D.ii 1978).

As an argument against the shorthand interpretation of medieval Byzantine music, the specific nature of the neumatic notation itself and the adequacy of signs to express all kinds of melodic movement may be considered. No musical notation can record with absolute exactness the finer nuances of a composition and its interpretation, but 17th- and 18th-century exegesis appears to be concerned with a peculiar stylistic development that has more to do with a change in musical taste than with notational usage.

Non-tempered musical intervals of various sizes (e.g. the ‘oriental’ augmented 2nd) are known to have existed in 19th-century practice and are used in the current oral traditional of the Greek Orthodox Church; it is clear that during the period of Turkish domination some degree of interaction occurred between Byzantine and oriental music traditions (Zannos, F1994), but this does not exclude the possibility that such intervals may have been known in Byzantium before the 15th century.

Transcriptions of chants written in Middle Byzantine notation depend, as in all reconstructions of early music, partly on the notation itself and partly on a series of assumptions regarding its interpretation. The extant musical manuscripts indicate the intervallic steps between successive notes of a chant, but such elements as rhythm, dynamic nuance, non-tempered intervals and tempo cannot be determined exactly. When transcribing chants in medieval Byzantine notation for performance, it is necessary, therefore, to consider the living chant traditions of churches following the Byzantine rite and to compare them with other medieval chant traditions.

Byzantine chant, §3: Melodic notation

(iii) The New Method (‘Reformed’ or ‘Chrysanthine’ notation).

The 1814–15 reform of neumatic notation is associated with Chrysanthos of Madytos, Chourmouzios the Archivist and Gregorios the Protopsaltes, collectively known as ‘the three teachers’ (Morgan, R1971). This reform involved a significant reduction in the number of signs, especially the phrasing signs (megala sēmadia). New, special signs were introduced for chromatically altered intervals, duration and rests; and solmization syllables, based on the first few letters of the Greek alphabet, were used to define scales, for example pa, vou, ga, di, ke, zō and nē, for the diatonic scale from d to d'. Most important was a theory recognizing the presence of more than one type of mode, based on the ancient division into diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic modes. At the same time, the graphic forms of the intonation signs in 18th-century manuscripts were codified. The basic neumes that were retained remained similar to the Middle Byzantine notational forms (fig.3). A vast project of transcribing the Byzantine repertories as practised in the 18th and 19th centuries, including ornamented versions of the late medieval repertory, was undertaken as part of the reform (e.g. the monumental series of autograph manuscripts by Chourmouzios the Archivist in GR-An).

The New Method spread rapidly, owing to the systematic pedagogical activities of the Patriarchal School at Constantinople from 1815 onwards and the introduction of music printing in 1820. While some aspects of Chrysanthine theory were subjected to another reform in the 1880s (particularly with regard to the sizes of intervals), the New Method is still used in the official chant books of the Greek Orthodox Church and in other churches following the Byzantine rite (see Greece, §§II–III).

4. Liturgical recitatives.

From a study of the history of liturgical chant, it may be seen that, in general, the best-known, the simplest, the most venerable chants are the last to be taken out of oral tradition and committed to musical notation. For some of the commonest Byzantine chants there is written witness only from the end of the empire or later. Thus for the ‘amen’ or allēlouïa that accompany the Trisagion and Cheroubikon, the simple authoritative versions are late. Only one medieval melody survives for the deacon’s exclamation ‘sophia’ (‘wisdom’), intoned during every celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and this tradition is from an isolated town in south Italy. Acclamations of emperors were copied time and again from the early 14th century, but the more commonly heard acclamation of the celebrant bishop appears only in a few Byzantine manuscripts. There is no written music at all for the litanies, and for some of the most celebrated Ordinary chants, for example, the Phōs hilaron (‘O gladsome light’) of Hesperinos, no noted version survives from before the 17th century. The simple Ordinary chants are difficult to recapture, partly because they were congregational, and therefore too well known to be copied with notation, and partly because their origins often lay in modal recitatives or exclamations which lacked characteristic melodic profiles and thus made no call on notation.

5. System of eight modes (‘oktōēchos’).

The chants discussed hitherto are mainly in recitative styles; in their simplicity they stand essentially outside the Byzantine canon of characteristic musical modes. Chants that were complex enough to be composed properly in Byzantium were systematically assigned to one or other of eight musical modes (ēchoi) which, since at least the 8th century, provided the organizational framework for Byzantine melodic practice. The origins of the Oktōēchos may be found in ancient music theory and various Near Eastern musical practices. The system was attached to the corpus of Byzantine chant and was closely connected with a liturgical cycle of eight weeks, each ascribed to one mode. The oktōēchos is traditionally attributed to John Damascene, whose theological and hymnographic writings date from the first half of the 8th century at the monastery of St Sabas in Jerusalem. It is likely that the attempts to regulate chant practice and/or the dissemination of new chant repertories originated in the area of Palestine at about this time; these attempts were connected with early redactions of chant collections such as the heirmologion and the oktōēchos (paraklētikē, tropologion), both of which were conceived according to the eight-mode system.

During the latter part of the 8th century the Byzantine organization in turn left its imprint on the organization of chants in the West. The eight Byzantine modes (ēchoi) are, in external order and substance, related to the eight Western modes: both systems have the four finals on D, E, F and G, with an authentic (higher-range) form and a plagal (lower-range) form based on each final. Only the use of co-finals and the ordering of the modes differ somewhat in detail: in the Western system, authentic and plagal forms comprising modes 1 to 8 alternate (D authentic, D plagal, E authentic, E plagal etc.) whereas the Eastern numbering takes the four authentic modes in order and then the four plagal modes. More important, the relationship between Eastern and Western modes reaches beyond the systematic externals of organization to characteristic operating features of particular modes and specific details of melodic fabric. Idiomatic turns of corresponding modes may resemble each other on both sides of the liturgical and linguistic division.

6. Syllabic psalm tones.

Each Byzantine mode, like each Western mode, has one or more varieties of simple psalm tone attached to it. One common set is shown in ex.4, as first written out in late 13th- and early 14th-century sources; through a remarkable chain of evidence developed by Strunk (G1960), its lineage has been traced to the late 8th century. As in the West, there are intonations, recitation tones and cadences. One characteristic of this psalmody may place it closer to the origins of psalmody than most Gregorian examples; this is the use of the four-element syllable-count cadence, where the last four syllables of a line are applied mechanically and without regard for word accent to four fixed, stylized musical elements constituting the cadence. The Gregorian procedure favours a variety of ‘tonic’ cadences that make accommodations for differences in text accent. The simpler, more rigid Byzantine procedure of the four-element cadence is, as Strunk suggested, probably the more archaic. (For further discussion of Byzantine psalmody, including a more detailed example of syllabic psalm tones, see Psalm, §III, 2 and ex.1.)

7. Formulaic chants.

The process of assembling a chant as a selective patchwork (cento) of modally appropriate formulae – often termed ‘centonization’ – is a characteristic of many orally composed and transmitted repertories. In Gregorian chant it is a common feature of the structure of the tracts and the F-authentic graduals (among others), and its use is even more rigorous and widespread among composed Byzantine chants. Byzantium was also more explicit in its recognition in music theory of formulaic composition. The earliest Byzantine music treatise is a 10th-century catalogue containing elements of music theory, notational signs and names for melismatic groups or formulae. In about 1300 Joannes Glykys and Joannes Koukouzeles undertook the elaborate task of weaving together the music for a great many of these formulae into continuous didactic chants. Such chants, which found their way into elementary instruction manuals in Byzantine chant, present a broad selection of single neumes, groups and formulae from different genres. Some formulae from To mega ison by Koukouzeles are illustrated in ex.5.

The basic operations of Byzantine formulaic composition are familiar from their manifestations in the West. Melodic patterns and formulae may represent a single mode or several modes, though rarely all the modes. The relation of formulae to specific pitches in the tonal system seems often more decisive than allegiance to a particular mode or modes. Formulae and patterns also tend to function in specific positions – initial (phrase-starters), middle or cadential – within the natural contour of musical phrases, and they often underline the syntactic structure of texts. The accentuation of the text also seems to have a strong influence on the choice of formula, especially in the syllabic genres; thus a specific number of unaccented syllables before the first accent often results in the same melodic opening in several pieces of the same mode. The formulae are also made to serve larger formal designs: they may embellish a psalmodic framework or combine into some abstract compositional figuration with symmetries of its own; they may be attached to a specific category of liturgical chant, or to a specific performing medium, helping to define a particular style by their rejection of other categories. The characteristic florid choral style of the asmatikon and the florid soloist’s style of the psaltikon have few formulae in common. The choral, syllabic hymn repertories of the heirmologion and stichērarion, however, share a good deal of stock material, some of which is common also to the psaltikon and the asmatikon.

8. Florid psalmody: ‘prokeimena’, ‘allēlouïaria’ and ‘koinōnika’.

As in the West the Psalter has elaborate settings that take the shape of formulaic embellishments on a psalmodic framework. Corresponding in function to the Roman graduals (Mass responsories) and Ambrosian psalmelli are the Byzantine prokeimena (see Prokeimenon), which are delivered by a soloist before the Epistle at the Divine Liturgy (some are also used at Hesperinos and Orthros). The prokeimena are contained in the Constantinopolitan psaltikon; the refrains are given in a different version in the complementary choirbook, the asmatikon; and some parallel settings in syllabic, psalmodic style are found in the akolouthiai manuscripts. Ex.6 shows the refrain of the Easter prokeimenon in the psaltikon style. Like its Gregorian and Ambrosian counterparts, this chant is a setting of Psalm cxvii.24; it is in the plagal mode on G and perhaps has some melodic substance in common with the parallel Ambrosian chant.

The Byzantine allēlouïa refrain and florid psalm verse (allēlouïarion) precede the Gospel Lesson, as in the West (see Alleluia, §II). An old cycle of some five dozen Proper allēlouïaria survives in the psaltikon. A peculiar feature of this cycle is the complete avoidance of the authentic and plagal modes on F. This is also the case with the Ambrosian alleluia verses; in the Gregorian repertory the number of alleluias in F modes is smaller in comparison with those in the other six modes. Ex.7 gives the allēlouïa refrain and first verse, Anastētō ho Theos (‘Let God arise’, Psalm lxvii.1), for the Holy Saturday Divine Liturgy, in the version of the 13th-century south Italian psaltikon; this reading is somewhat more florid than the related version of the standard psaltikon considered by Thodberg (I1966). The chant is in the authentic mode on G.

The cycle of Byzantine Proper communions (koinōnika) was assigned to the select choirs (psaltai) of Hagia Sophia and is transmitted in the asmatikon (see Koinōnikon). A representative example is given in ex.8: the koinōnikon for Pentecost, To pneuma sou, to agathon (‘Thy good spirit’, Psalm cxlii.10), a chant in the plagal mode on G. Not only is this melody also found in 12th-century Slavonic sources, but it probably existed in the Greek tradition of the 11th century or perhaps even the 10th.

9. Byzantine hymns.

Unlike the Western Church, where hymns have had a relatively restricted role (they are practically excluded from Mass, and at Rome they were accepted for the Office only in the 11th century), in the Eastern Church the growth of hymnody far exceeded that of the psalmodic chants. Over 60,000 incipits of Byzantine hymns are recorded in Follieri’s six-volume Initia hymnorum ecclesiae graecae (J1960–66), which draws only on hymns in published sources. Other thousands lie unpublished in medieval manuscripts, and other tens of thousands must have disappeared as a result of the violent theological-political controversies that accompanied spiritual movements such as Iconoclasm.

Pitra’s 19th-century study Hymnographie de l’église grecque (J1867) did much to illumine the poetic nature of Byzantine hymns, yet some details of the poetic process are still in dispute. The vast majority of hymns are strophic, and metrically the standard verse is governed by accent and not (as in ancient Greek poetry) by quantity. Line-symmetries are tailored, more or less flexibly, to the number of syllables and the position of accents within a line. A kind of formulaic poetic procedure – the artistic accommodation of a select vocabulary of poetic-theological units – is as obvious a factor in the formation of the literary style of some hymns as it is in their musical setting.

10. Syllabic hymn settings.

(i) Troparion.

Most Eastern hymns have simple music, generally based on the principle of one note to each syllable of text, to render them suitable for congregational singing. A miscellaneous class of early monostrophic hymns also known as troparia (see Troparion) goes back in some instances to the 4th century. For these, no early written music survives since the tunes were familiar to everyone. The Ordinary hymn at Hesperinos, Phōs hilaron, had (as already observed) no written music before the 17th century. For the Doxa en hypsistois Theō (Gloria in excelsis Deo), dating from the 4th century or earlier and sung at the conclusion of Orthros, there are only partial settings from the 13th century; and the troparion melody sung at the beginning of every Divine Liturgy, Ho monogenēs huios (‘O only-begotten Son’), attributed to Emperor Justinian I (d 565), was written down at a very late stage.

(ii) Kontakion.

The first major form of Byzantine hymn writing was the Kontakion, a kind of long metrical sermon that was cultivated in the 5th century or early 6th, drawing on the Syriac tradition of church poetry. Kontakia are poetic-narrative elaborations on biblical texts, often of 20 or 30 long stanzas or more. The metrically similar stanzas, called oikoi (from Gk. oikos: ‘house’), have a short concluding refrain (ephymnion), and they are normally linked by their opening letters into an acrostic that incorporates the name of the poet-composer (melōdos), or the liturgical occasion of the poem, or the letters of the alphabet. The whole set of oikoi is prefaced by an introductory strophe called the koukoulion or prooimion, which is of differing structure and metre; it shares the common refrain and the musical mode of the oikoi but may be a later addition.

The foremost composer of kontakia was Romanos the Melodist, born in Syrian Emesa (Himş) and active at Constantinople during the first half of the 6th century. Some 85 works are attributed to Romanos, including kontakia for most major feasts of the liturgical year. His rich poetic style touches extremes of grandiloquence and pathos. Kontakia must have been intended originally for a syllabic musical setting, whether recitative or properly ‘composed’, because the hundreds of lines comprising each of these metrical sermons would take too long to perform in any other way.

However, the earliest surviving melodies (?9th century or 10th) were florid (see §11 below), consisting of settings of the prooimion and the first oikos from the psaltikon collection. A cycle of kontakia in syllabic style is preserved in a small group of 13th- and 14th-century manuscripts, most notably RUS-SPsc 674 (ex.9a). The main purpose of these syllabic kontakia was to serve as model melodies for contrafact troparia; they are similar in style to the rest of the model melodies of the troparia as well as to the model melodies of the stichēra automela (see Stichēron). It is possible that the occasional citations from kontakia found in the syllabic stichēra preserve characteristics of earlier syllabic kontakia (Levy, K.ii 1961). It would seem, therefore, that the syllabic and florid traditions co-existed for a considerable period. Although the earliest tradition of the kontakion was undoubtedly syllabic, it is difficult to identify with any certainty the archaic elements in the surviving examples written in syllabic style: during centuries of oral transmission the melodies were probably modified and reshaped; certainly, in the few extant sources, they display considerable variation.

(iii) Kanōn.

The second large-scale strophic form of Byzantine hymnody is the Kanōn. Although kontakia of reduced length were still being produced in the 9th century, it seems that from the later 7th century the kanōn was favoured above the kontakion. The first master of the new form was Andrew of Crete (c660-c740), whose Great Kanōn, sung in mid-Lent, is of the exceptional length of 250 stanzas. A kanōn is in substance an elaborate nine-section poetic trope on the nine biblical canticles sung at Orthros, among whose verses it is interspersed. (For a list of the biblical canticles see Canticle, §2; for the musical recitation of the canticles see Psalm, §III.)

Each biblical canticle has corresponding to it an ode (ōdē) of the nine-ode kanōn; each ode consists normally of three or four similarly structured strophes sung to the same music. The first strophe of an ode is its heirmos or model-strophe; the succeeding strophes are called troparia. The eight or nine odes of a complete kanōn (ode 2 is often omitted) are united by references to the general theme of the liturgical occasion, by the same musical mode and, at times, by an acrostic; but in other respects they are independent. Kanōn composition reached its peak in the 8th and 9th centuries, first in Palestine with the works of John Damascene (d c749) and Kosmas of Jerusalem (fl 1st half of the 8th century), then in Constantinople with Abbot Theodore of Stoudios (d 826), his brother Joseph, and the two Sicilians Methodius (d 846) and Joseph the Hymnographer (d 883). Although kanōn texts continued to be produced into the 13th century and beyond, after the 8th century or the 9th new texts were simply adapted to the music of existing heirmoi (model stanzas). For the heirmoi, the classical chants in syllabic styles are collected in a book called the Heirmologion, which may contain as many as 2000 model stanzas. Like a Western tonary, the heirmologion is divided into one section per mode. Within each mode there are two systems of internal organization: in the first, the full series of eight heirmoi follow each other; in the second, all odes with the same number are grouped together. One of the earliest surviving heirmologia (US-PRu Garrett 24; 2nd half of the 8th century to the early 9th) is a palimpsest manuscript containing only works ascribed to the Palestine masters (Raasted, D.ii 1992). The manuscript is outstanding not only because of its age and its use of a primitive melodic notation but also because, like the Slavonic and old Georgian heirmologia, it follows the second system of organization. The oldest extant heirmologion with full melodic notation dates from the 10th century.

The simple melodic style of the classical heirmos is illustrated in ex.10; this is the first ode of a ‘Resurrection’ (Sunday) kanōn in the authentic mode on E, attributed to ‘John the Monk’ (?St John Damascene). The style is almost wholly syllabic. The use of formulae plays a decisive role in the development of the musical fabric. The hundreds of heirmos melodies in each mode are patched together from a limited repertory of melodic patterns and formulae characteristic of the mode. Extreme care was given to the syntactical structure and to the proper accentuation of the text.

(iv) Stichēron.

The other major collection of classical Byzantine hymns whose full music survives is the Stichērarion. Unlike the few dozen extant medieval heirmologia (the tunes were probably too simple and familiar to warrant much copying), there are hundreds of surviving stichēraria which normally transmit a repertory of some 2000 longer hymns in a slightly more elaborate style than that of the heirmologion. The stichērarion resembles in style and content a collection of Latin antiphons. Much of its content dates from the 8th century, although some must go back as far as the 7th or earlier (as Strunk has demonstrated for certain Easter hymns); on the other hand, hymns such as the heōthina, or Morning Hymns, by the Emperor Leo VI (886–912), are later, even as late as the 12th century for saints recently entered in the Calendar. Most stichēra, as the individual hymns are called (see Stichēron), serve as choral interpolations among the concluding verses of the ordinary psalms at Hesperinos and Orthros. The musical style and procedures are like those of the heirmoi except that the stichēra are more lavishly punctuated with embellishing melismas, which in some cases may be quite lengthy. The opening of an elaborate stichēron for the Veneration of the Cross (sung in the fourth week of Lent) is given in ex.11.

11. Florid hymn settings in classical styles: ‘kontakion’ and ‘hypakoē’.

Two related classes of Byzantine hymns are transmitted in the classical, florid, formulaic styles of the asmatikon and psaltikon rather than the syllabic formulaic style of the heirmologion and stichērarion. The kontakia, in the music manuscripts represented by the introductory strophe and first oikos, had complete cycles of settings in both the soloist’s style of the psaltikon and the choral style of the asmatikon (the latter known mainly through derived 12th- and 13th-century Slavonic copies). Only for the most celebrated of all kontakia, the anonymous Akathistos Hymn, whose 24 strophes are still sung in full on the Saturday before Passion Sunday, is there a complete florid setting of all the strophes in psaltikon style; this hymn survives in a south Italian tradition of the late 13th century (transcr. E. Wellesz, MMB, Transcripta, ix, 1957).

The shorter monostrophic hymns called hypakoai (analogous to the Western responsories) also received florid settings in both psaltikon and asmatikon styles. The beginning of the kontakion-hypakoē for the Sunday of Orthodoxy (the 1st Sunday in Lent), a text of the mid-9th century, is given in ex.12 for both melodic traditions.

12. Post-classical florid styles: the kalophonic style and the emergence of personal styles.

The traditional syllabic stylizations of the heirmologion and stichērarion may be traced back with certainty to the 10th century; possibly they had already taken their definitive shape by the 8th century or even some centuries earlier. The classical florid stylizations of the psaltikon and asmatikon probably existed during the 11th century (by which time the Asmatic repertory was borrowed by the Slavs); and there are indications that they were formed by the 9th century. With the 12th century, however, the traditional formulaic styles had begun to give way to new styles. There were new techniques of embellishment that gave greater scope to the individual musician’s taste. By the later 13th century an enormous outpouring of such freer creative effort had taken place, and a new, post-classical stylization had emerged for handling the traditional melodies. Described by the Byzantine term ‘kalophonic’ (i.e. beautiful-sounding or embellished), it is a style of extravagant embellishments, loosed from the restraints of the formulaic procedures of the psaltikon and asmatikon. Much freedom is given to vocal display: there are many sequences, repeated articulations of a single pitch, and wide leaps. The expansive, kalophonic versions of traditional chants are recorded with great notational precision in new classes of manuscript: the kalophonic stichērarion, kalophonic heirmologion, kalophonic kontakarion (oikēmatarion) and similar florid collections. (See also Kalophonic chant.)

Parallel with this was a new attitude towards composition. Musical style was previously an anonymous fusion of prose or poetry with the traditional formulae of the musical vocabulary. Now, instead, the composer cultivated a personal style and attached his own name to the composition. A specific compositional technique was applied in the kalophonic stichērarion. Taking a traditional piece in syllabic style as their point of departure and frequently preserving the syntactical-musical division and the scheme of internal modulations, composers would repeat and/or embellish parts of words, single words and even short phrases, rearrange the text (anagrammatismos) and often add whole melismatic passages on meaningless syllables (teretismata or kratēmata) towards the end of each section. The kalophonic stichēra normally ended, however, with a melodic or textual quotation from the syllabic original, at which point the choir joined in (apo chorou). Many composers are known from the last century and a half of the empire but few from before. And these men were animated by an unprecedented sense of artistic competition. The most celebrated composer of the period around 1300 was the Constantinopolitan maïstōr Joannes Koukouzeles, the organizer of the big anthologies of the current musical repertory called Akolouthiai (‘orders of service’). These were the first Byzantine collections to contain in a single volume almost all the Ordinary music needed for the celebration of the Divine Liturgy and Office. From the time before Koukouzeles there are works attributed to Michael Aneotes (or Ananeotes), Kampanes and others (see below); later the leading composers were Joannes Glykys and Nikephoros Ethikos (both slightly older contemporaries of Koukouzeles); then Xenos Korones (perhaps a younger contemporary); the late 14th century had as its leading composer the lampadarios Joannes Kladas, and the mid-15th century, Manuel Chrysaphes. Competitive kalophonic elaborations of a single traditional chant are a common occurence. Three versions of the stichēron Meta to techthēnai, a hymn in the plagal mode on G for the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (21 November), are given in ex.13: ex.13a shows the first two lines in the classical syllabic style of the stichērarion; ex.13b is an elaboration attributed to the early kalophonic master Kampanes with further embellishments by Joannes Koukouzeles; ex.13c is what is supposed to be the same embellished version by Kampanes, but with more elaborate embellishments by Xenos Korones. All classical repertories, both syllabic and florid, were subsequently subjected to modernizations and individualizations of this nature. The most exuberant examples of the kalophonic style are the long, freely composed kratēmata, which were commonly interpolated among verses of the vesper psalms and elsewhere. Some of these last ten minutes or more in performance.

13. The Ordinary of the Divine Liturgy and Office.

The most important applications of the kalophonic procedure, however, were to the chants of the Ordinary. The Byzantine Ordinary includes textual counterparts to the Western Gloria in excelsis (at Orthros) and Sanctus. The Credo may have been sung at Byzantium in early times but in the middle and late Byzantine periods it was not sung, and the only independent melodies are from the mid-15th century and later. There was no Agnus Dei at Byzantium, but the Eastern rite has Ordinary or semi-Ordinary chants for some functions that in the West are Proper chants. The Byzantine offertory chant, known as the Cherubic Hymn or Cheroubikon, is Ordinary (with three alternatives for special liturgical occasions during the year). There is an Ordinary chant for the communion during Lent, based on Psalm xxxiii.8. The Trisagion, which is used at Rome principally on Good Friday, is Ordinary at Byzantium. Such chants never appear in earlier Byzantine musical manuscripts since they were intended for the congregation and their simple musical versions required no notation. During the 13th century, the Ordinary chants began to appear in manuscript, though not in their syllabic, congregational forms but rather in florid kalophonic elaborations. At times these offer glimpses of a simpler underlying chant. Thus for the Cheroubikon, Hoi ta chēroubim, there were some two dozen settings by kalophonic composers, produced between the later 13th and mid-15th centuries. Nearly all these use the same underlying materials of the plagal E or related plagal G modes. The earliest surviving tradition for this chant is given in ex.14, according to an authoritative 13th-century manuscript.

14. Paraliturgical and instrumental music.

Closely allied to the liturgical ceremonial of the Church is the public ceremonial of the Byzantine court. Practically no music survives from Byzantium that is not directly connected with the church service. But rich details concerning the genres of chant and the instruments used at receptions and imperial processions are contained in the Book of Ceremonies. In this book, transmitted under the name of the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetus (905–59), a large number of chants and their modal assignments are cited, and likewise also in the De officiis of Pseudo-Codinus, dating from the mid-14th century. Various wind and string instruments are represented in artistic monuments. Organs, which were excluded from church use, had an important part in imperial ceremonies. The chronicler Theophanes the Confessor (9th century) reported that the Emperor Constantine VI and Empress Irene had such instruments in their baggage when they visited the military frontier at Thrace in 784. It was the importation of Byzantine organs to the West that helped revive interest in the instrument, the most notable occasion being the organ sent to the Frankish King Pippin in 757. There is a 16th-century description of the reading of lessons at Hagia Sophia where bells were rung at the end of paragraphs. Each section of the reading was repeated three times in succession by different readers posted at different points in the church. The bellringing indicated to the distant reader when the previous reader had finished. At Patmos this was still the practice in recent times, although the triple reading was no longer needed.

To Western ears the most striking Byzantine performing practice is the use of an ison or drone to accompany liturgical singing. This is still heard in Orthodox churches. Rubrics in music manuscripts provide the earliest hints for the practice; this evidence can be traced back to about 1400, although the practice probably existed throughout the Middle Ages. It was described in 1584 by the German traveller Martin Crusius: ‘more utriculariorum nostrorum, alius vocem eodem sono tenet, alius, Dra Dra, saltatorium in modum canit’. There is no independent Byzantine polyphony of the kind that developed in the West.

Liturgical musical drama at Byzantium is scarcely documented. Only for the Akolouthia tēs kaminou (the drama of the Three Children in the Furnace) is music extant, dating from the 15th century (for a full discussion, and details concerning the traditions in Byzantium and Russia, see Velimirović, O1962).

Popular, orally transmitted traditions for liturgical chants have been insufficiently studied, although there is some documentation of such traditions in Greek enclaves by the Black Sea (Azov Greeks), in Crete, the Eptanese Islands and Corsica, and among the Albanian- and Greek-speaking minorities following the Byzantine rite in south Italy (Apulia, Calabria and Sicily).

15. Byzantium and the Slavs.

Byzantine liturgical influence began its decisive impact on the Slavs with the evangelizing mission of SS Cyril and Methodius to the south Slavs in the mid-9th century. It is possible that by this time the full complement of Byzantine liturgical books had already been translated into Old Church Slavonic; and there is also some possibility that the Byzantine liturgical melodies were transmitted with the translated texts. This was certainly the case by the 11th century and the heyday of Kievan Rus'. The vast corpus of Byzantine liturgical texts were translated, and there was wholesale appropriation of the liturgical melodies, apparently without significant alteration except for slight adaptations of the melodies to take into account the different number of syllables and the Slavonic accentuation. Through the early 13th century, the Slavic copies of the heirmologion, stichērarion and asmatikon (no full Slavic copy of the psaltikon survives) were essentially faithful to the melodic traditions of their Greek originals (see Russian and slavonic church music, fig.1) and it would appear from the evidence of the extant Greek versions that Slavic liturgical conservatism even conspired on occasion to preserve a more authoritative version of a traditional melody. After the Mongol invasions during the mid-13th century, however, the musical traditions grew apart.

The oldest layers of Slavic neumes are based on pre-diastematic stages of Byzantine notations. They cast precious light on early melodies for which Greek sources are lost or incomplete, but they themselves cannot generally be transcribed without a counterpart Greek melody as a guide. (Such counterpart transcriptions have been published by Velimirović, Strunk, Levy, Floros, Schidlovsky, Konstantinova Ulff-Møller, Shkolnik and Shkolnik; see bibliography, §P). The great wealth of early Slavic musical manuscripts that exist in libraries in Russia are yet to be examined in detail.

The Byzantine-derived chant repertories of the early south Slavic rites and the Kievan rite were absorbed by stages into later branches of the Slavic rites, those of the Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs, Ukranians and others. However, the synthesis between Byzantine and national idioms in these musical traditions has not yet been fully explored.

16. Byzantium and the West.

The wholesale musical borrowings that took place between Slavic and Byzantine chants did not occur between Byzantium and the West. Yet there are two important interrelationships between the Greek and Latin chant repertories. The broad classification of Gregorian chants into eight modes (with all that it entails – the symmetrical system of four finals, the high and low forms with each final, the canon of intonation formulae and psalmodic differentiae etc.) owes its definitive shape to Byzantine influence probably exercised most intensively during the latter half of the 8th century. On the other hand, there are a number of possible melodic borrowings (again from East to West) that can be dated variously between the 6th and 9th centuries. Notker reported (Gesta Karoli, ii.7) that Charlemagne himself during the first years of the 9th century ordered the translation of the well-known series of antiphons beginning with Veterem hominem, for the octave of Epiphany. Carolingian musical liturgists also experimented with a full ‘missa graeca’ for Pentecost, elements of which made their way into a ‘Greek’ Mass in honour of St Denis. The Good Friday antiphon O quando in cruce/Otin to stauron, found in both Latin and Greek forms in the Beneventan rite and in Latin in the Ravenna rite, is likely to have been borrowed from the Greek troparion Hote tō staurō by the mid-8th century, for at that point the submission of Ravenna to Lombard and eventual papal rule detached the former exarchate from primary Byzantine influence. The Ambrosian rite contains a number of melodic borrowings, among them the Maundy Thursday ingressa or post-evangelium Coenae tuae mirabili (based on the Byzantine Cheroubikon alternative Tou deipnou sou tou mystikou); and the ingressa Videns ne Elisabeth, for the special Ambrosian Marian Mass on the 6th Sunday in Advent, which is based on a stichēron idiomelon, Blepe tēn Elisabeth, sung in high medieval times at the feast of St John the Baptist. The Mozarabic rite also includes chants in Greek, and possible traces of Byzantine chant can be seen in early Spanish psalmody.

Some traits common to both Eastern and Western repertories are old enough to be traced directly to the early Christian chant tradition. Thus the Gregorian communion Omnes qui in Christo for Saturday in Easter week (based on the baptismal troparion Hosoi eis Christon) and the Sanctus of the Pentecostal missa graeca, while they probably represent specific borrowings of the 6th and later 8th centuries respectively, embody earlier melodic traditions. The modal and structural concordances in some florid responsorial psalm settings (prokeimena/gradual responsories and allelouïaria/alleluia verses) might also reflect an early interrelationship between East and West.

17. Byzantine music theory.

Byzantine music theory is less abundant and less concerned with specific cases than its Western counterpart. One conservative line simply continues late classical speculation and is minimally focussed on contemporary practice. The Quadrivium of Georgios Pachymeres (c1242–c1310) and the Harmonics transmitted under the name of Manuel Bryennius (?c1320) are both of this nature. The earliest Byzantine theoretical documents are simple catalogues of neumes and melodic formulae. The oldest, found in the 10th-century manuscript GR-AOml γ.67, lists rudiments of the tonal and modal systems together with names and signs for various formulae of the so-called ‘Chartres’ variety of early Byzantine melodic notation (see §3(i) (b) above). Similar catalogues of the 11th and 12th centuries detail the elements of ekphonetic (lectionary) notation; there are corresponding catalogues in the Georgian language.

A different type of theoretical document, again relatively early, appears within the classical stichērarion itself; this contains a handful of ‘multimodal’ stichēra that progress systematically through some or all of the eight modes. (Examples of such hymns, which illustrate the behaviour of the individual modes and the nature of the tonal and notational systems, were published by Strunk, R1942, and by Husmann, ‘Modulation and Transposition’, R1970.)

Perhaps the earliest discursive theoretical statement occurs in an anonymous fragment, the Hagiopolitēs, which ostensibly details the practice of the Holy City of Jerusalem (ed. Raasted, R1983). The most important source is F-Pn gr.360 which probably dates from the first half of the 14th century, and there are various later derivatives of this treatise, including I-Rvat gr.872 (see Tardo, R1938, pp.164ff). The Hagiopolitēs contains observations about the Byzantine modes (including modes supplementary to the standard eight) and intonation formulae. It also provides references to different layers of Palaeo-Byzantine and Middle Byzantine notations and quotes extensive passages from ancient theoretical works.

The main line of Byzantine theory is represented by the so-called Papadikē, a manual first compiled perhaps in the later 13th century at Constantinople or within the orbit comprising also Mount Athos and Thessaloniki. There are many elaborations of the basic materials of this handbook. From the early 14th century, a version of the papadikē often prefaced manuscript copies of the Koukouzelian Akolouthiai. The usual beginning of the treatise was Archē, mesē, telos … (‘The begining, middle, end and system of all the signs of the psaltist’s technique is the ison [the sign for tone-repetition]’). One of the simplest versions is that found in the 15th-century manuscript I-Rvat Barber. gr.300 (ed. Tardo, R1938, pp.151ff), which contains the names and signs of the rising and falling intervals, the modulation signs (phthorai), the nomenclature of the modes, the megala sēmadia (stenographic and dynamic indications), the intonation formulae of the eight modes, a discussion of the tonal system, and, finally, a recapitulatory dialogue. The papadikē presents an essentially different tradition of grouping Byzantine neumes from that of the Hagiopolitēs; mixed forms and divergent classifications are also found.

Related to the traditions of the papadikai are a number of mostly anonymous lists of signs and a few didactic chants whose theoretical doctrine is set to continuous music. The most influential of these is by Koukouzeles, beginning Ison, oligon, oxeia, kai petasthē. Based on earlier, partly anonymous lists, especially that of Joannes Glykys, the melody illustrates each of the neumes and formulae as they are mentioned in the text (see ex.5; also ed. Alexandru, R1996; facs., after I-Rvat gr.791, in Tardo, R1938, pp.179–82). A number of other didactic chants (methodoi), some of them anonymous, are also found in the manuscripts; these concern intonations (mostly anonymous), hand signs (cheironomiai, by Joannes Glykys and Xenos Korones), solmization and modulation (anonymous), the eight modes, the stichērarion style (ascribed to Korones), and the kalophonic style (Korones and Koukouzeles).

A number of treatises from the later Middle Ages include full discussion of theoretical and stylistic questions. While containing invaluable evidence on the history of music instruction and chant practice in Byzantium, these texts must be interpreted with caution; most of them were intended for those already proficient in the performance of chant, and they are often imprecise with regard to basic questions of rhythm, ornamentation, the exact tuning of scales (including the question of diatonicism versus chromaticism), vocal techniques etc. A group of dialogues beginning Egō mēn, ō paides, the so-called Pseudo-Damaskenos (ed. Wolfram and Hannick, R1997) is perhaps the oldest of these. The treatise of Gabriel, hieromonk at the monastery of Xanthopoulos in Constantinople in the first half of the 15th century, gives important details on notation and technical nomenclature (ed. Hannick and Wolfram, R1985). An anonymous treatise on musical signs (ed. Schartau, R1997) provides some evidence concerning the relationship between chant theory and practice. An important treatise on the history of the kalophonic tradition and on the use of modulation signs (phthorai) was written by Manuel Chrysaphes in the mid-15th century (ed. Conomos, R1985). Somewhat outside the mainstream of Byzantine music theory is the 16th-century treatise by the Cypriot Hieronymos Tragodistes which advocates a reform of Byzantine notation by analogy with the contemporary harmonic system of the West (ed. Schartau, R1990).

Finally, Byzantine theorists designed various graphic schemes to assist the learner (see Alygizakēs, R1985). Two of these, a ‘tree’ and a ‘wheel’, both illustrating the tetrachordal relationships between the eight modes, are traditionally attributed to Koukouzeles and are probably the two oldest. Other schemes to assist solmization (metrophōnia) and modulation (parallagē) exercises are attributed to Gabriel Hieromonachos, Joannes Plousiadenos and Joannes Laskaris.

For the subsequent development of Orthodox chant see Greece, §§II–III; see also Russian and Slavonic church music; Armenia, §II; Coptic church music; Ethiopia, §II; Georgia, §II; Romania, §II; and Syrian church music.

b: history of the liturgy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a: general surveys

c: manuscript sources

d: neumatic notations

e: liturgical recitatives

f: system of eight modes (oktōēchos)

g: syllabic psalm tones

h: formulaic chants

i: florid psalmody

j: byzantine hymns

k: syllabic hymn settings

l: florid hymn settings

m: post-classical florid styles: the kalophonic style

n: ordinary chants of the divine liturgy and office

o: paraliturgical and instrumental music

p: byzantium and the slavs

q: byzantium and the west

r: byzantine music theory

a: general surveys

MGG2 (C. Hannick)

H.J.W. Tillyard: Byzantine Music and Hymnography (London, 1923/R)

E. Wellesz: A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford, 1949, enlarged 2/1961)

H.-G. Beck: Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich, 1959), 233–66 [liturgy and hymnody]

E. Wellesz, ed.: Die Musik der byzantinischen Kirche, Mw, xiii (1959; Eng trans., 1959)

G. Marzi: Melodia e nomos nella musica bizantina (Bologna, 1960)

M. Velimirović: ‘Musique byzantine’, Encyclopédie des musiques sacrées, ed. J. Porte (Paris, 1969), ii, 145–64

‘Musica byzantina’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 737–99 [11 articles]

O. Strunk: ‘Die Gesänge der byzantinisch-griechischen Liturgie’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, ed. K.G. Fellerer, i (Kassel, 1972), 128–47

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977) [repr. of 22 articles on Byzantine chant, 1942–72]

D.E. Conomos: Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant (Brookline, MA, 1984)

D. Touliatos: ‘Women Composers of Medieval Byzantine Chant’, College Music Symposium, xxiv/1 (1984), 62–80

E.V. Gertsman: Vizantiyskoye muzïkoznaniye (Leningrad, 1988)

B. Schartau: ‘On Collecting “Testimonia” of Byzantine Musical Practice’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.57 (1988), 159–66

C. Hannick: ‘Reference Materials on Byzantine and Old Slavonic Music and Hymnography’, JPMMS, xiii (1990), 83–9

M. Velimirović: ‘Byzantine Chant’, NOHM, ii (2/1990), 26–68

K. Nikolakopoulos: ‘Literatur zum Studium der byzantinischen Musik’, Orthodoxes Forum, vii (1993), 239–56

G. Wolfram: ‘Der byzantinische Chor, wie er sich in den Typika des 9.–12. Jahrhunderts dargestellt’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 397–402

B. Schartau: ‘Testimonia of Byzantine Musical Practice, III’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no. 68 (1998)

b: history of the liturgy

L. Duchesne: Origines du culte chrétien (Paris, 1889, 5/1920; Eng. trans., 1903, 5/1919/R as Christian Worship: its Origin and Evolution)

A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus: Analekta hierosolymitikēs stachyologias (St Petersburg, 1891–8/R), ii, 1–254 [contains the typikon dated 1122 of the Church of the Resurrection at Jerusalem]

L. Clugnet: Dictionnaire grec-français des noms liturgiques (Paris, 1895/R)

A.A. Dmitriyevsky: Opisaniye liturgicheskikh rukopisey [An account of liturgical MSS] (Kiev and St Petersburg, 1895–1917)

J.-M. Hanssens: Institutiones liturgicae de ritibus orientalibus, ii–iii: De missa rituum orientalium (Rome, 1930–32)

P.N. Trempelas: Hai treis leitourgiai (Athens, 1935)

F. Mercenier and F. Paris: La prière des églises de rite byzantin (Amay-sur-Meuse, 1937–48)

A. Raes: Introductio in liturgiam orientalem (Rome, 1947)

D. Attwater: The Christian Churches of the East (Milwaukee, 1947–8, 2/1961–2)

P.N. Trempelas: Mikron euchologion (Athens, 1950–55) [historical discussion of the Ordines for Orthros and Hesperinos]

A. Baumstark: Liturgie comparée: principes et méthodes pour l’étude des liturgies chrétiennes (Chevetogne, 3/1953; Eng. trans., 1953)

R. Janin: Les églises orientales et les rites orientaux (Paris, 4/1955)

H.-G. Beck: Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich, 1959), 233–66

J.M. Sauguet: Bibliographie des liturgies orientales, 1900–1960 (Rome, 1962)

J. Mateos, ed. and trans.: Le typicon de la grande église: MS Sainte-Croix no.40, Xe siècle (Rome, 1962–3)

R. Bornert: Les commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1966)

M. Arranz: Le typicon du monastère du Saint-Sauveur à Messine (Rome, 1969)

Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, trans.: The Festal Menaion (London, 1969)

H. Leeb: Die Gesänge im Gemeindesgottesdienst von Jerusalem (vom 5. bis 8. Jahrhundert) (Vienna, 1970)

J. Mateos: La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie byzantine: étude historique (Rome, 1971)

H. Husmann: ‘Der Aufbau der byzantinischen Liturgie nach der Erzählung von der Reise der Abte Johannes und Sophronios zum Einsiedler Nilos auf dem Berge Sinai’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 243–9

R. Taft: The Great Entrance: a History of the Transfer of Gifts and Other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Rome, 1975)

H.-J. Schulz: Die byzantinische Liturgie: Glaubenszeugnis und Symbolgestalt (Trier, 1980)

R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville, MN, 1986)

J.F. Baldovin: The Urban Character of Christian Worship: the Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (Rome, 1987)

M. Ricci Miglietta: ‘I makarismi nella tradizione liturgico-musicale del rito bizantino’, RIMS, viii (1987), 303–66

S. Janeras: Le Vendredi-Saint dans la tradition liturgique byzantine: structure et histoire de ses offices (Rome, 1988)

G.T. Vergotēs: Lexiko leitourgikōn kai teletourgikōn horōn [Lexicon of liturgical and ceremonial terms] (Thessaloniki, 1988)

W. Hugh: The Orthodox Liturgy: the Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite (London, 1989)

R. Taft: A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, iv: The Diptychs (Rome, 1991)

R. Taft: The Byzantine Rite: a Short History (Collegeville, MN, 1992)

c: manuscript sources

A. Rocchi: Codices cryptenses (Grottaferrata, 1883) [Grottaferrata]

V. Gardhtausen: Catalogus codicum graecorum sinaiticorum (Oxford, 1866) [Mt Sinai]

A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus: Hierosolymitikē bibliothēkē, i–v (St Petersburg, 1891–1915/R) [Jerusalem]

I. and A. Sakkeliōn: Katalogos tōn chirographōn tēs ethnikēs bibliothēkēs tēs Hellados [Catalogue of the MSS in the Greek National Library] (Athens, 1892)

S.P. Lambros: Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts on Mount Athos (Cambridge, 1895–1900/R)

A. Gastoué: Introduction à la paléographie musicale byzantine: catalogue des manuscrits de musique byzantine de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris et des bibliothèques publiques de France (Paris, 1907)

V.N. Benesević: Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum graecorum qui in monasterio Sanctae Catherinae in Monte Sinai asservantur (St Petersburg, 1911–17)

Spyridōn and S. Eustratiadēs: Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Laura on Mount Athos (Cambridge, MA, 1925/R)

L. Tardo: ‘La musica bizantina e i codici di melurgia della biblioteca di Grottaferrata’, Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, iv (1930–31), 355–70

L. Tardo: ‘I codici melurgici della Vaticana’, Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania, i (1931), 225–49

C. Høeg, H.J.W. Tillyard and E. Wellesz, eds.: Sticherarium, MMB, Principale, i (1935) [facs. of A-Wn theol.gr.181]

O. Tiby: ‘I codici musicali italo-greci di Messina’, Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, xi (1937), 64–78

C. Høeg, ed.: Hirmologium athoum, MMB, Principale, ii (1938) [facs. of GR-AOi 470]

R. Devreesse, ed.: Le fonds Coislin (Paris, 1945)

M. Richard: Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs (Paris, 1948, 2/1958, rev. 3/1995 by J.-M. Olivier) [bibliography of bibliographies of Byzantine MSS]

L. Tardo, ed.: Hirmologium cryptense, MMB, Principale, iii (1950–51) [facs. of I-GR ε.γ.II]

L. Tardo: ‘I manoscritti di musica nella Biblioteca universitaria di Messina’, Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania, xxiii (1954), 187–204

C. Høeg, ed.: Contacarium asburnhamense, MMB, Principale, iv (1956) [facs. of I-Fl Ashb. 64]

R. Jakobson, ed.: Fragmenta chiliandarica palaeoslavica, MMB, Principale, v (1957) [facs. of GR-AOh 307 and 308]

C. Astruc and M.L. Concasty: Le supplement grec (Paris, 1960)

N.G. Wilson and D.I. Stefanović: Manuscripts of Byzantine Chant in Oxford (Oxford, 1963)

O. Strunk, ed.: Specimina notationum antiquiorum, MMB, Principale, vii (1966)

L. Politēs: ‘Duo cheirographa apo tēn Kastoria’ [Two MSS from Kastoria], Hellēnika, xx (1967), 29–41

N.A. Beēs: Ta cheirographa tōn Meteōrōn [The MSS of Meteora] (Athens, 1967–84)

J. Raasted, ed.: Hirmologium sabbaiticum, MMB, Principale, viii (1968–70) [facs. of IL-Jgp St Sabas 83]

P. Canart and V. Peri: Sussidi bibliografici per i manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City, 1970)

M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Mousika cheirographa tourkokratias, 1453–1832 [Music MSS from the period of Turkish rule] (Athens, 1975)

E. Follieri and O. Strunk, eds.: Triodium athoum, MMB, Principale, ix (1975) [facs. of GR-AOva 1488]

H. Husmann: Ein syro-melkitisches Tropologion mit altbyzantinischer Notation Sinai Syr. 261 (Wiesbaden, 1975–8)

G. Stathēs: Ta cheirographa byzantinēs mousikēs: Hagion Oros [Byzantine music MSS: Mt Athos] (Athens, 1975–93)

A. Dostál, H. Rothe and E. Trapp, eds.: Der altrussische Kondakar': auf der Grundlage des Blagovescenskij Nizegorodskij kondakar' (Giessen, 1976–90)

A.E. Pennington: ‘Seven Akolouthiai from Putna’, Studies in Eastern Chant, iv, ed. M. Velimirović (Crestwood, NY, 1979), 112–33

M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Cheirographa ekklēsiastikēs mousikēs, 1453–1820 [Liturgical music MSS, 1453–1820] (Athens, 1980)

G. Ciobanu, M. Ionescu and T. Moisescu, eds.: Manuscrisul nr. 56/544/576 I de la Mănăstirea Putna ‘Antologhion’ [MS no.56/544/576 I from the monastery of Putna: ‘Antologhion’] (Bucharest, 1980)

A. Jakovljević: ‘Cypriot Musicians and Copyists of Byzantine Musical Manuscripts in the 15th and 16th centuries’, Diptycha, ii (1980–81), 72–7

G. Ciobanu, M. Ionescu and T. Moisescu, eds.: Manuscrisul nr. I–26/Iaşi ‘Antologhion’ (Bucharest, 1981)

G. Pantiru, ed.: Lectionarul evanghelic de la Iaşi (MS 160/IV–34) [The Iaşi Gospel lectionary] (Bucharest, 1982) [with Eng. summary]

G. Ciobanu, ed.: Antologhionul lui Evstathie protopsaltul Putnei [The anthologion of Evstatie of Putna prōtopsaltēs] (Bucharest, 1983)

H. Hunger, O. Kresten and C. Hannick: Katalog der griechischen Handschriften der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna, 1984)

B. Schartau: ‘Manuscripts of Byzantine Music in Denmark’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.48 (1984), 15–104

T. Moisescu, ed.: Manuscrisul nr. 12/Leipzig ‘Antologhion’ (Bucharest, 1985)

T. Moisescu: Prolegomene bizantine: muzic bizantină în manuscrise şi carte veche românească [Byzantine prolegomena: Byzantine music in MSS and old Romanian books] (Bucharest, 1985)

N.K. Moran: ‘A List of Greek Music Palimpsests’, AcM, lvii (1985), 50–72

E. Toncheva: ‘A Middle Byzantine Fragment with Melismatic Chant in the Bachkovo Monastery Musical Manuscript Collection’, Musica antiqua VII: Bydgoszcz 1985, 109–34

H. Trebici-Marin, ed.: Anastasimatarul de la Cluj-Napoca, ms. 1106: relatii şi structuri în muzică de traditie bizantină [The anastasimatarion from Cluj-Napoca, MS 1106: relationships and structures in Romanian post-Byzantine music] (Bucharest, 1985)

P. Agapitos: ‘A Post-Byzantine Musical Anthology: MS Greek 21 in the Houghton Library’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xxxv (1987), 150–64

D. Touliatos-Banker: ‘Check-List of Byzantine Musical Manuscripts in the Vatican Library’, Manuscripta, xxxi (1987), 22–7

G. Wolfram, ed.: Sticherarium antiquum vindobonense, MMB, Principale, x (1987) [facs. of A-Wn theol.gr.136]

A. Jakovljević: Diglōssē palaiographia kai melōdoi-hymnographoi tou kōdika tōn Athēnōn 928 [Old dual-language writings and hymn melodies in Athens codex 928] (Leukosia, 1988)

A. Jakovljević: ‘Cod. Lavra E-108 iz XIV veka kao na stariyi srpsko-grchki antologiya sa Kukuzelyovom notacijom’, Hilandarski zbornik, vii (1989), 133–61

G. Stathēs: ‘Hē asmatikē diaphoropoiēsē: hopōs katagraphetai ston kōdika EBE 2458 tou etous 1336’ [A comparison of the chants in codex Gr-An 2458 dating from 1336], Christianikē Thessalonikē, palaiologeios epochē: Vlatadon 1987 (Thessaloniki, 1989), 165–211

A. Jakovljević: Catalogue of Byzantine Chant Manuscripts in the Monastic and Episcopal Libraries of Cyprus (Nicosia, 1990)

A. Doda: ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura e sulla notazione musicale dei Menaia “Carbonesi”’, Scrittura e civiltà, xv (1991), 185–204

C. Hannick: ‘Die byzantinischen liturgischen Handschriften’, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends, ed. A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (Cologne, 1991), 25–32

L. Perria and J. Raasted, eds.: Sticherarium Ambrosianum, MMB, Principale, xi (1992) [facs. of I-Ma A139]

J. Raasted: ‘The Princeton Heirmologion Palimpsest’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.62 (1992), 219–32

S. Kotzabassi: ‘Das Berliner Sticherarion’, Poikila byzantina, xii (1993), 11–173

G. Myers, ed.: The Lavrsky Troitsky Kondakar' (Sofia, 1994)

I. Papathanassiou: ‘Some Remarks on a Possible Syro-Melchite Origin of the Manuscript Sinai gr. 1258’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.64 (1994), 33–57

E.M. Schwarz, ed.: Das Lektionar von St. Petersburg: vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe des Codex Gr. 21, Gr. 21a aus der Besitz der russischen Nationalbibliothek in St. Petersburg (Graz, 1994)

C. Adsuara: ‘The Kalophonic Sticherarion Sinai gr. 1251: Introduction and Indices’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.65 (1995), 15–58

I. Papathanassiou: ‘The Dating of the Sticherarion EBE 883’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.66 (1996), 35–48

D.C. Skemer: ‘The Anatomy of a Palimpsest (Garrett MS 24)’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, lvii (1996), 335–43

S. Kotsabassi: ‘Das Sticherarion Laura Gamma 74: Beobachtungen zu seinem Repertoire und Indizes’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 109–27

C. Troelsgård: ‘An Early Constantinopolitan Sticherarion (MS Leukosia, Archbishopric of Cyprus, Mousikos 39) and its Notated Exaposteilarion’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 159–72

N. Schidlovsky, ed.: Sticherarium palaeoslavicum petropolitanum, MMB, Principale, xii (2000) [facs. of RUS-SPan 34.7.6]

d: neumatic notations

(i) Ekphonetic

C. Høeg: La notation ekphonétique, MMB, Subsidia, i/2 (1935)

C. Høeg and G. Zuntz: ‘Remarks on the Prophetologion’, Quantulacumque: Studies Presented to Kirsopp Lake, ed. R.P. Casey, S. Lake and A.K. Lake (London, 1937), 189–225

C. Høeg, G. Zuntz and G. Engberg: Prophetologium: lectiones anni mobilis, MMB, Lectionaria, i (1939–81)

G. Engberg: ‘Les Credos du synodicon’, Classica et mediaevalia, xxiii (1962), 293–301

G. Engberg: ‘Greek Ekphonetic Neumes and Masoretic Accents’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 37–49

K. Levy: ‘Three Byzantine Acclamations’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 43–57

D. Jourdain-Hemmerdinger: ‘La notation ekphonétique archaïque (Vaticanus gr. 2144)’, Annuaire de l’Ecole pratique des hautes études, iv (1968–9), 557–60

G. Pantiru, ed.: Lectionarul evanghelic de la Iaşi (MS 160/IV–34) [The Iaşi Gospel lectionary] (Bucharest, 1982)

G. Engberg: ‘The Greek Old Testament Lectionary as a Liturgical Book’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.54 (1987), 39–48

G. Engberg: ‘Greek Ekphonetic Notation: the Classical and Pre-Classical Systems’, Palaeobyzantine Notations: Hernen 1992, 33–55

(ii) Melodic

H.J.W. Tillyard: Handbook of the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation, MMB, Subsidia, i/1 (1935/R)

O. Strunk: ‘The Tonal System of Byzantine Music’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 190–204

O. Strunk: ‘Intonations and Signatures of the Byzantine Modes’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 339–55

B. di Salvo: ‘La trascrizione della notazione paleobizantina’, Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., v (1951), 92–110, 220–35

O. Strunk: ‘The Notation of the Chartres Fragment’, AnnM, iii (1955), 7–37

B. di Salvo: ‘Qualche appunto sulla chironomia nella musica bizantina’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xxiii (1957), 192–201

C. Thodberg: The Tonal System of the Kontakarium (Copenhagen, 1960)

J. Raasted: ‘A Primitive Palaeobyzantine Musical Notation’, Classica et mediaevalia, xxiii (1962), 302–10

J. Raasted: Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, MMB, Subsidia, vii (1966)

J. van Biezen: The Middle Byzantine Kanon-Notation of Manuscript H (Bilthoven, 1968)

C. Floros: Universale Neumenkunde (Kassel, 1970)

J. Raasted: ‘Modernization and Conversion: Two Types of Notational Change and their Consequences for the Transmission of Byzantine Music’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 775–7

M. Haas: Byzantinische und slavische Notationen, Palaeographie der Musik, i/2, ed. W. Arlt (Cologne, 1973)

G. Stathēs: ‘Hē palaia byzantinē sēmeiographia kai to problēma metagraphēs tēs ēs to pentagrammon’ [Old Byzantine notation and the problem of transcribing into staff notation], Byzantina, vii (1975), 195–220

G.T. Stathēs : Hē exēgēsis tēs palaias byzantinēs sēmeiographias [The explanation of old Byzantine notation] (Athens, 1978) [incl. Fr. summary]

H. Hucke: ‘Die Cheironomie und die Entstehung der Neumenschrift’, Mf, xxxii (1979), 1–16

J. Raasted: ‘Musical Notation and Quasi Notation in Syro-Melkite Liturgical Manuscripts’, Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen Age grec et latin, no.31 (1979), 11–37, 53–81

H. Husmann: ‘Interpretation und Ornamentierung in der nachbyzantinischen Musik’, AcM, lii (1980), 101–21

S. Kožucharov: ‘Paleografski problemi na tita-notacijata v srednobalgarskite rakopisi ot XII–XIII vek’, Slavyanska paleografiya i diplomatika (Sofia, 1980), 228–46

C. Floros: ‘Zur Rhythmik der byzantinischen Kirchenmusik’, Mf, xxxv (1982), 154–5

J. Raasted: ‘Pulse and Pause in Medieval and Postmedieval Byzantine Chant’, Jb der österreichischen Byzantinistik, xxxii (1982), 63–72

N.K. Moran: Singers in Late Byzantine and Slavonic Painting (Leiden, 1986)

J. Raasted: ‘Chromaticism in Medieval and Post-Medieval Byzantine Chant: a New Approach to an Old Problem’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.53 (1986), 15–36

Rhythm in Byzantine Chant: Hernen 1986 [C. Hannick: ‘Probleme der Rhythmik des byzantinischen Kirchengesangs’, 1–19; G. Ciobanu: ‘La rhythmique des neumes byzantins dans les transcriptions de J.D. Petrescu et de Egon Wellesz par rapport à la pratique actuelle’, 21–35; J. Raasted: ‘Rhythm in Byzantine Chant’, 67–91; B. Karastojanov: ‘Tonemas and Prosodemas as Rhythmic Elements in Znamennyj Chant’, 109–27]

K. Levy: ‘On the Origin of Neumes’, EMH, vii (1987), 59–90

J. Raasted: ‘Thoughts on a Revision of the Transcription Rules of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.54 (1987), 13–38

S. Kujumdzieva: ‘Über die Zeichen Aphona während der spät- und postbyzantinischen Periode’, Musikkulturgeschichte: Festschrift für Constantin Floros, ed. P. Petersen (Wiesbaden, 1990), 449–60

K. Romanou: ‘A New Approach to the Work of Chrysanthos of Madytos: the New Method of Musical Notation in the Greek Church’, Studies in Eastern Chant, v, ed. D. Conomos (Crestwood, NY, 1990), 89–100

E. Toncheva: ‘Die musikalische Bedeutung des Interpunktionszeichens “Punkt” in dem sticherarischen Repertoire der Handschrift NB 928’, Musikkulturgeschichte: Festschrift für Constantin Floros, ed. P. Petersen (Wiesbaden, 1990), 461–78

A. Doda: ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura e sulla notazione musicale dei Menaia “Carbonesi”’, Scrittura e civiltà, xv (1991), 185–204

J. Raasted: ‘The Princeton Heirmologion Palimpsest’, Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen Age grec et latin, no.67 (1992), 219–32

Palaeobyzantine Notations: Hernen 1992 [incl. J. Raasted: ‘Theta Notation and some Related Notational Types’, 57–62; A. Doda: ‘Coislin Notation, Problems and Working Hypotheses’, 63–79; C. Troelsgård: ‘The Role of Parakletike in Palaeobyzantine Notations’, 81–117; J. Raasted: ‘Observations on the Chartres and Coislin Versions of the Good Friday Stichēron O pos i paranomos synagogē’, 131–53]

G. Wolfram: ‘Modulationszeichen in der paläobyzantinischen Notation’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 33–44

Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999 [incl. M. Alexandru: ‘Bemerkungen zu den Neumen- und Formelbezeichnungen des Byzantinischen Gesanges’, 1–21; A. Doneda: ‘The “Hyperstases” in MS Kastoria 8 and the Kondakarian Notation’, 23–36; I. Papathanassiou: ‘The Use of Bareia in the Old Layer Melodies of the 4th Authentic Mode in MS Saba 83’, 129–43; G. Wolfram: ‘Das Sticherarion Vindobonensis Theol. gr. 136: eine Kurzbeschreibung und Weiteres zur Notationstechnischen Tradition’, 145–58 ]

e: liturgical recitatives

K. Levy: ‘The Byzantine Sanctus’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 7–67

K. Levy: ‘Three Byzantine Acclamations’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 43–57

K. Levy: ‘The Trisagion in Byzantium and the West’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 761–5

f: system of eight modes (oktōēchos)

H.J.W. Tillyard: The Hymns of the Octoechus, MMB, Transcripta, iii, v (1940–49)

O. Strunk: ‘Intonations and Signatures of the Byzantine Modes’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 339–55

O. Strunk: ‘The Antiphons of the Oktoechos’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 50–67

M. Huglo: Les tonaires: inventaire, analyse, comparaison (Paris, 1971)

M. Huglo: ‘Comparaison de la terminologie modale en Orient et en Occident’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 758–61

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977)

H. Husmann: ‘Syrischer und byzantinischer Oktoëchos, Kanones und Qanune’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xliv (1978), 65–73

D. Petrović: Osmoglasnik u muzičkoj tradicji Južnih Slovena [The oktōēchos in the musical tradition of the southern Slavs] (Belgrade, 1982) [with Eng. summary]

A.E. Alygizakēs: Hē oktaechia stēn hellēnikēn leitourgikē hymnographia [The oktōēchos in Greek liturgical hymns] (Thessaloniki, 1985) [with Eng. summary]

I. Zannos: Ichos und Macham: vergleichende Untersuchungen zum Tonsystem der griechisch-orthodoxen Kirchenmusik und der türkischen Kunstmusik (Bonn, 1994)

L. Richter: ‘Zur Lehre von den byzantinischen Tonarten’, JbSIM 1996, 211–60

g: syllabic psalm tones

O. Strunk: ‘The Byzantine Office at Hagia Sophia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, ix–x (1956), 175–202

O. Strunk: ‘The Antiphons of the Oktoechos’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 50–67

A. Jung: ‘The Settings of the Evening and Morning Psalms according to the Manuscript Sinai gr. 1255’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.47 (1984), 3–63

D.H. Touliatos-Banker: The Byzantine Amomos Chant of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1984)

E. Toncheva: ‘Za rannata polielejna pesenna praktika na Balkanite (po izvori ot XII–XIII v.)’ [Early Balkan polyeleos practice (after 12th- and 13th-century sources)], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, ix/3 (1985), 3–29

E. Toncheva: ‘Polieynoto tvorchestvo na Joan Kukuzel v konteksta na balkanskata carkovnopeveska praktika (po rukopis Atina no 2458 ot 1336 g.)’, Dokladi: Balgaristika II: Sofia 1986, ed. P. Zarev and others (Sofia, 1986–9), xvii: Teatr i kino: muzik, 224–62

S. Kujumdz'eva: ‘The “Kekragaria” in the Sources from the 14th to the beginning of the 19th Century’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 449–63

E. Toncheva: ‘The “Latrinos” Settings of the Polyeleos, Psalm 135: to the Typological Problems of the Late Byzantine Psalmody’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 473–92

M. Dimitrova: ‘Prokimenite vav vizantiyskite muzikalni rakopisi ot XIV i XV vek’ [The prokeimena in 14th- and 15th-century Byzantine music MSS], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xix/1 (1995), 39–53

h: formulaic chants

G. Devai: ‘The Musical Study of Koukouzeles in a 14th Century Manuscript’, Acta antiqua Academiae scientiarum hungaricae, vi (1958), 213–35

O. Strunk: ‘Melody Construction in Byzantine Chant’, Congrès d’études byzantines XII: Ohrid 1961, 365–73

E. Wellesz: ‘Melody Construction in Byzantine Chant’, ibid., 135–51

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

K. Levy: ‘Die slavische Kondakarien-Notation’, Anfänge der slavischen Musik: Bratislava 1964, 77–92

G. Amargianakis: ‘An Analysis of Stichera in the Deuteros Modes’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, nos.22–3 (1977) [whole issues]

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977)

H. Schmidt: Zum formelhaften Aufbau byzantinischer Kanones (Wiesbaden, 1979)

J. Simonović: ‘Melodijske formule stihira vizantijskog osmoglasnika od XII do XV veka’ [Melodic stichēra formulae in the 12th–15th-century Byzantine oktōēchos], Zvuk (1983), no.4, pp.41–57

J. Raasted: ‘Compositional Devices in Byzantine Chant’, Musica antiqua VII: Bydgoszcz 1985, 181–204

J. Raasted: ‘Formulaism and Orality in Byzantine Chant’, Cantus Planus IV: Pécs 1990, 231–40

A. Doda: ‘Considerazioni sulla “meccanica” delle melodie irmologiche’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 45–69

A. Jung: ‘The Long Melismas in the Non-Kalophonic Sticherarion’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.70 (1999), 18–30

i: florid psalmody

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

C. Thodberg: Der byzantinische Alleluiarionzyklus: Studien im kurzen Psaltikonstil, MMB, Subsidia, viii (1966)

S. Harris: ‘The Communion Chants in Thirteenth-Century Byzantine Musical Manuscripts’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 51–67

H. Husmann: ‘Modalitätsprobleme des psaltischen Stils’, AMw, xxviii (1971), 44–72

G. Hintze: Das byzantinische Prokeimena-Repertoire (Hamburg, 1973)

D.H. Touliatos-Banker: The Byzantine Amomos Chant of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1984)

S. Harris: ‘Psalmodic Traditions and the Christmas and Epiphany Troparia as Preserved in 13th-Century Psaltika and Asmatika’, Cantus Planus IV: Pécs 1990, 205–19

S. Harris: ‘Two Chants in the Byzantine Rite for Holy Saturday’, PMM, i (1992), 149–66

P. Jeffery: ‘The Lost Chant Tradition of Early Christian Jerusalem: some Possible Melodic Survivals in the Byzantine and Latin Chant Repertories’, EMH, xi (1992), 151–90

S. Harris: ‘The Byzantine Responds for Two Sundays Before Christmas’, ML, lxxiv (1993), 1–15

C. Troelsgård: ‘The Prokeimena in Byzantine Rite: Performance and Tradition’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 65–77

S. Harris: ‘The Byzantine Prokeimena’, PMM, iii (1994), 133–47

j: byzantine hymns

J.B. Pitra: Hymnographie de l’église grecque (Rome, 1867)

W. Christ and M. Paranikas, eds.: Anthologia graeca carminum christianorum (Leipzig, 1871/R)

J.B. Pitra, ed.: Analecta sacra spicilegio Solesmensi parata, i (Paris, 1876/R)

P. Maas, ed.: Frühbyzantinische Kirchenpoesie, i: Anonyme Hymnen des V–VI Jahrhunderts (Bonn, 1910, 2/1931)

H.J.W. Tillyard: Byzantine Music and Hymnography (London, 1923/R)

G. Cammelli: Romano il Melode: inni (Florence, 1930)

P.N. Trempelas: Eklogē hellēnikēs orthodoxou hymnographias [Examples of Greek Orthodox hymnography] (Athens, 1949)

N.V. Tonadakēs, ed.: Romanou tou Melodou: hymnoi (Athens, 1952–61)

O. Strunk: ‘St. Gregory Nazianzus and the Proper Hymns for Easter’, Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, ed. K. Weitzmann (Princeton, NJ, 1955), 82–7

H.-G. Beck: Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich, 1959)

E. Follieri: Initia hymnorum ecclesiae graecae (Vatican City, 1960–66)

P. Maas and C.A. Trypanis, ed.: Sancti romani melodi cantica (Oxford, 1963, 2/1970)

J. Grosdidier de Matons, ed. and trans.: Romanos le Mélode: Hymnes (Paris, 1964–81)

G. Zuntz: ‘Probleme des Romanos-Textes’, Byzantion, xxxiv (1964), 469–534

C.A. Trypanis: Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica (Vienna, 1968)

E. Follieri: ‘The “Initia hymnorum ecclesiae graecae”: a Bibliographical Supplement’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 35–50

H. Husmann: ‘Hymnus und Troparion’, JbSIM 1971, 7–86

K. Mētsakēs: Byzantinē hymnographia: apo tēn kainē diathēkē eōs tēn eikonomachia [Byzantine hymns: from the New Testament to the iconoclastic edict] (Thessaloniki, 1971)

C.A. Trypanis, ed.: The Penguin Book of Greek Verse (Harmondsworth, 1971/R)

J. Grosdidier de Matons: ‘Le kontakion’, Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. W. Arlt and others (Berne, 1973), 245–68

E. Metreveli: ‘Les manuscrits liturgiques géorgiens des IXe–Xe siècles et leurs importance pour l’études de l’hymnographie byzantine’, Congrès d’études byzantines XV: Athens 1976, 1005–10

J. Grosdidier de Matons: Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris, 1977)

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977)

J. Szövérffy: A Guide to Byzantine Hymnography: a Classified Bibliography of Texts and Studies (Brookline, MA, 1978–9)

J. Raasted: ‘Troping Techniques in Byzantine Chant’, Research on Tropes: Stockholm 1981, ed. G. Iversen (Stockholm, 1983), 89–98

C. Hannick: ‘Zur Metrik des Kontakion’, Byzantios: Festschrift für Herbert Hunger, ed. W. Hörandner and others (Vienna, 1984), 107–19

H. Hunger: ‘Romanos Melodos, Dichter, Prediger, Rhetor – und sein Publikum’, Jb der österreichischen Byzantinistik, xxxiv (1984), 15–42

W.L. Petersen: The Diatessaron and Ephrem Syrus as Sources of Romanos the Melodist (Leuven, 1985)

C. Hannick: ‘Das Tropenwesen in der byzantinischen und in der altrussischen Kirchenmusik’, La tradizione dei tropi liturgici: Paris 1985 and Perugia 1987, 227–41

M.C. Arata: ‘Some Notes on Cyprian the Hymnographer’, Studies in Eastern Chant, v, ed. D. Conomos (Crestwood, NY, 1990), 123–36

E. Follieri: ‘L’innografia bizantina del contacio al canone’, Da Bisanzio a San Marco: musica e liturgia: Venice 1993, 1–32

k: syllabic hymn settings

(i) Troparion

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

K. Levy: ‘The Italian Neophytes’ Chants’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 181–227

O. Strunk: ‘Tropus und Troparion’, Speculum musicae artis: Festgabe für Heinrich Husmann, ed. H. Becker and R. Gerlach (Munich, 1970), 305–11

N.K. Moran: ‘The Chant Crucem tuam in the Byzantine, Slavonic and Latin Recension’, SMH, v (1980), 35–48

A. Jung: ‘The Kathismata in the Sophia Manuscript Kliment Ochridski cod.gr. 814’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.61 (1991), 49–77

I. Shkolnik: ‘Stichera Automela in Byzantine and Slavonic Sources of the Late 11th – Late 18th Centuries’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 81–97

(ii) Kontakion

K. Levy: ‘An Early Chant for Romanus’, Contacium trium puerorum?’, Classica et mediaevalia, xxii (1961), 172–5

C. Trypanis: ‘On the Musical Rendering of the Early Byzantine Kontakia’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 104–07

O. Strunk: ‘Some Observations on the Music of the Kontakion’, Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977), 157–64

J. Raasted: ‘Zur Melodie der Kontakions “Hē parthenos sēmeron”’, Musica antiqua VI: Bydgoszcz 1982, 191–204; repr. in Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, lix (1989), 233–46

J. Raasted: ‘An Old Melody for “Tē hypermachō stratēgō”’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 4–14

(iii) Kanōn

A. Ayoutanti, M. Stöhr and C. Høeg, ed.: The Hymns of the Hirmologium: I, MMB, Transcripta, vi (1952) [preface with J. Raasted]

M.M. Velimirović: Byzantine Elements in Early Slavic Chant, MMB, Subsidia, iv (1960)

E. Jammers: ‘Der Kanon des Johannes Damascenus für den Ostersonntag’, Polychronion: Festschrift Franz Dölger, ed. P. Wirth (Heidelberg, 1966), 266–86

J. Raasted: ‘Some Reflections on Byzantine Musical Style’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 57–72

B. di Salvo: ‘Gli heirmoi e le akolouthiai dell’heirmologion’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xxxii (1966), 271–5

N. Somma: ‘Considerazioni sui canoni giambici liturgici’, Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., xxi (1967), 34–40

J. van Biezen: The Middle Byzantine Kanon-Notation of Manuscript H (Bilthoven, 1968)

J. Raasted: Hirmologium sabbaiticum, MMB, Principale, viii (1968–70)

E. Jammers: ‘Die jambischen Kanones des Johannes von Damaskus’, Schrift, Ordnung, Gestalt: gesammelte Aufsätze zur ältern Musikgeschichte, ed. E. Hammerstein (Berne, 1969)

R. von Busch: Untersuchungen zum byzantinischen Heirmologien: der Echos Deuteros (Hamburg, 1971)

M. Velimirović: ‘The Byzantine Heirmos and Heirmologion’, Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift für Leo Schrade, ed. W. Arlt and others (Berne and Munich, 1973), 192–244

M. Velimirović: ‘The Melodies of the Ninth-Century Kanon for St. Demetrius’, Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. M.H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1984), 9–34

H. Schmidt: Zum formelhaften Aufbau byzantinischer Kanones (Wiesbaden, 1979)

C. Hannick: ‘The Performance of the Kanon in Thessaloniki in the 14th Century’, Studies in Eastern Chant, v, ed. D. Conomos (Crestwood, NY, 1990), 137–52

A. Doda: ‘Considerazioni sulla “meccanica” delle melodie irmologiche’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 45–69

(iv) Stichēron

J. Raasted: ‘Some Observations on the Structure of the Stichera in the Byzantine Rite’, Byzantion, xxviii (1958), 529–41

J. Raasted: Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, MMB, Subsidia, vii (1966)

M.M. Velimirović: ‘Unknown Stichera for the Feast of St. Athanasios of Mount Athos’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 108–29

B. di Salvo: ‘Considerazioni sugli stichera del vespro e delle laudi dell’oktoechos bizantina della domenica’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xxxiii (1967), 161–75

D. Stefanović: ‘The Daily Menaia from Carbone’, Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., xxi (1967), 41–6

O. Strunk: ‘Padre Lorenzo Tardo ed il suo Ottoeco nei mss. melurgici: alcune osservazioni sugli Stichera Dogmatika’, ibid., 21–34; Eng. trans. in O. Strunk, ed.: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977), 255–67

H. Husmann: ‘Hymnus und Troparion’, JbSIM 1971, 7–86

J. Raasted: ‘Voice and Verse in a Troparion of Cassia’, Studies in Eastern Chant, iii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 171–8

O. Strunk: ‘The Menaia from Carbone at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana’, ibid., 285–96

H. Husmann: ‘Strophenbau und Kontrafakturtechnik der Stichera’, AMw, xxix (1972), 150–61, 213–34

G. Amargianakis: ‘An Analysis of Stichera in the Deuteros Modes’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, nos.22–3 (1977) [whole issues]

N. Schidlovsky: The Notated Lenten Prosomoia in the Byzantine and Slavic Traditions (diss., Princeton U., 1983)

G. Wolfram: ‘Ein neumiertes Exaposteilarion anastasimon Konstantins VII’, Byzantios: Festschrift für Herbert Hunger, ed. W. Hörandner and others (Vienna, 1984), 333–8

I. Shkolnik: ‘To the Problem of the Evolution of the Byzantine Stichera in the Second Half of the V–VIIth Centuries: from the “Echos-Melodies” to the Idiomela’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 409–25

S. Harris: ‘Mittelalterliche byzantinische Erhöhungshymnen’, Laborare fratres in unum: Festschrift László Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J. Szendrei and D. Hiley (Hildesheim, 1995), 87–104

J. Raasted: ‘Koukouzeles’ Revision of the Sticherarion and Sinai gr. 1230’, ibid., 261–77

C. Troelsgård: ‘The Exaposteilaria Anastasima with Round Notation in MS Athos, Ibērōn 953’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 15–28

l: florid hymn settings

C. Floros: ‘Das Kontakion’, DVLG, xxxiv (1960), 84–106

C. Thodberg: The Tonal System of the Kontakarium: Studies in Byzantine Psalticon Style (Copenhagen, 1960)

C. Floros: ‘Fragen zum musikalischen und metrischen Aufbau der Kontakien’, Congrès d’études byzantines XII: Ohrid 1961, 563–9

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

K. Levy: ‘The Slavic Kontakia and their Byzantine Originals’, The Department of Music, Queens College of the City University of New York: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Festschrift, ed. A. Mell (Flushing, NY, 1964), 79–87

L. Cali’: ‘Le ipacoè dell’octoichos bizantino’, Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., xix (1965), 161–74

C. Thodberg: Der byzantinische Alleuiarionzyklus: Studien im kurzen Psaltikonstil, MMB, Subsidia, viii (1966)

L. Cali’: ‘Innografia medievale bizantina: le forme e gli stili di un repertorio parallelo, RIM, ii (1967), 36–53

S. Harris: ‘The Communion Chants in 13th-Century Byzantine Musical MSS’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 51–67

H. Husmann: ‘Modalitätsprobleme des psaltischen Stils’, AMw, xxviii (1971), 44–72

O. Strunk: ‘San Salvatore of Messina and the Musical Tradition of Magna Graecia’, Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977), 45–54

A. Sirli: ‘The Akathistos Hymn in the Greek and Romanian Manuscripts of the 14th–18th Centuries’, Musica antiqua VI: Bydgoszcz 1982, 565–79

A.F. Gove: ‘The Relationship of Music to the Text in the Akathistos Hymn’, Studies in Eastern Chant, v, ed. D. Conomos (Crestwood, NY, 1990), 101–21

S. Harris: ‘The Byzantine Responds for Two Sundays before Christmas’, ML, lxxiv (1993), 1–15

G. Myers: The Asmatic Troparia, Katavasiai, and Hypakoai Cycles in their Palaeoslavonic Recensions: a Study in Comparative Palaeography (diss., U. of British Columbia, 1994)

S. Harris: ‘The Byzantine Office of the Genuflexion’, ML, lxxvii (1996), 333–47

G. Myers: ‘The Medieval Russian Kondakar and the Choirbook from Kastoria: a Palaeographic Study in Byzantine and Slavic Musical Relations’, PMM, vii (1998), 21–46

m: post-classical florid styles: the kalophonic style

L. Tardo: ‘Un manoscritto kalophonikon del secolo XIII’, Eis mnēmēn Spyridōnos Lamprou, ed. G.P. Charitakēs (Athens, 1935), 170–76

L. Tardo: L’antica melurgia bizantina (Grottaferrata, 1938)

B. di Salvo: ‘Gli àsmata nella musica bizantina’, Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., xiii (1959), 45–50, 127–45; xiv (1960), 145–78

O. Strunk: ‘The Antiphons of the Oktoechos’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 50–67

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

M.P. Dragoumis: ‘The Survival of Byzantine Chant in the Monophonic Music of the Modern Greek Church’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 29–36

D. Stefanović and M.M. Velimirović: ‘Peter Lampadarios and Metropolitan Serafim of Bosnia’, ibid., 67–88

M. Velimirović: ‘Two Composers of Byzantine Music: John Vatatzes and John Laskaris’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 818–31

M. Velimirović: ‘Byzantine Composers in MS Athens 2406’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 7–18

E.V. Williams: John Koukouzeles’ Reform of Byzantine Chanting for Great Vespers in the Fourteenth Century (diss., Yale U., 1968)

K. Mētsakēs: ‘Henas laïkos krētikos “Akathistos” tou 15. aiōna’, Byzantina, i (1969), 31–8

C. Hannick: ‘Etude sur l’akolouthia asmatikē’, Jb der österreichischen Byzantinistik, xix (1970), 243–60

S. Karas: Genē kai diastēmata eis tēn byzantinēn mousikēn [Genres and intervals in Byzantine music] (Athens, 1970)

M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Ta entypa mousika biblia (1820–1900) [Printed music books] (Athens, 1971)

M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Spoudē kai ereuna tēs hellēnikēs ekklēsiastkēs mousikēs [The study and research of Greek church music] (Athens, 1971)

M. Velimirović: ‘The Musical Works of Theoleptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 155–65

E.V. Williams: ‘The Treatment of Text in the Kalophonic Chanting of Psalm 2’, ibid., 173–93

G.T. Stathis: ‘I sistemi alfabetici di scrittura musicale per scrivere la musica bizantina nel periodo 1790–1850’, Klironomia, iv (1972), 365–402

G.T. Stathis: ‘I manoscritti e la tradizione musicale bizantino-sinaitica’, Theologia, xliii (1972), 271–308

M. Velimirović: ‘The Prooemiac Psalm of Byzantine Vespers’, Words and Music: the Scholar’s View: in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 317–37

A. Jakovljević: ‘David Raidestinos, Monk and Musician’, Studies in Eastern Chant, iii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1973), 91–7

M.M. Morgan: ‘The Musical Setting of Psalm 134: the Polyeleos’, ibid., 112–23

C. Patrinelis: ‘Protopsaltae, Lampadarioi, and Domestikoi of the Great Church during the post-Byzantine Period (1453–1821)’, ibid., 141–70

M. Velimirović: ‘“Persian Music” in Byzantium?’, ibid., 179–81

G. Stathēs: Hoi anagrammatismoi kai ta mathēmata tēs byzantinēs melopoiïas [Anagrammatismoi and exercises in Byzantine chant] (Athens, 1979) [with Fr. summary]

D. Terzakis: ‘Die Gattung “kalofonikos hirmos” der byzantinischen Musik’, Musica antiqua VI: Bydgoszcz 1982, 513–19

D.H. Touliatos-Banker: The Byzantine Amomos Chant of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1984)

D.H. Touliatos-Banker: ‘Nonsense Syllables in the Music of Ancient Greek and Byzantine Traditions’, JM, vii (1989), 231–43

C. Hannick: ‘Muzykal'noe i liturgiceskoe znacenie kratimy i prologosa v vizantijskih rykopisjah do XV v.’ [The musical and liturgical characteristics of kratēma and prologos in Byzantine MSS up to the 15th century], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xvi/2 (1992), 93–8

S.I. Karas: Iōannēs Maïstōr ho Koukouzelēs kai hē Epochē tou [Master Joannes Koukouzeles and his time] (Athens, 1992)

G. Wolfram: ‘Erneuernde Tendenzen in der byzantinischen Kirchenmusik des 13./14. Jahrhunderts’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 761–8

B. Schartau: ‘A Checklist of the Settings of George and John Plousiadenos in the Kalophonic Sticherarion Sinai gr. 1234’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.63 (1993), 297–308

M. Alexandru and B. Schartau: ‘A Note on the Late-Byzantine Ecclesiastical Composer Angelos Gregorios sive Gregoriou, a Pupil of Manouel Gazes’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.64 (1994), 18–32

C. Adsuara: ‘The Kalophonic Sticherarion Sinai gr. 1251: Introduction and Indices’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.65 (1995), 15–58

M. Velimirović: ‘Originality and Innovation in Byzantine Music’, Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music: a Collection of Essays, ed. A.R. Littlewood (Oxford, 1995), 189–99

C. Adsuara: ‘Asmatic, Psaltic and “Kalophonic” Fragments in Palaeobyzantine Notation’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 47–61

A. Doneda: ‘The “Hyperstases” in MS Kastoria 8 and the Kondakarian Notation’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 23–36

n: ordinary chants of the divine liturgy and office

K. Levy: ‘The Byzantine Sanctus and its Modal Tradition in East and West’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 7–67

G. Dévai: ‘Phōs hilaron’, Acta antiqua Academiae scientiarum hungaricae, xi (1963), 407–14; xiii (1965), 455–61

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

M.P. Dragoumis: ‘The Survival of Byzantine Chant in the Monophonic Music of the Modern Greek Church’, Studies in Eastern Chant, i, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1966), 9–36

K. Levy: ‘Three Byzantine Acclamations’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 43–57

K. Levy: ‘The Italian Neophytes’ Chants’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 181–227

I. Borsai: ‘Le tropaire byzantin “O Monogenes” dans la pratique du chant copte’, SMH, xiv (1972), 329–54

K. Levy: ‘The Trisagion in Byzantium and the West’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 761–5

O. Strunk: ‘Die Gesänge der byzantinisch-griechischen Liturgie’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, ed. K.G. Fellerer, i (Kassel, 1972), 128–47

D. Conomos: Byzantine Trisagia and Cheroubika in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1974)

N.K. Moran, ed.: The Ordinary Chants of the Byzantine Mass (Hamburg, 1975)

D. Touliatos-Banker: ‘The Byzantine Orthros’, Byzantina, ix (1977), 324–83

N.K. Moran: ‘The Musical Gestaltung of the Great Entrance Ceremony in the Twelfth Century in Accordance with the Rite of Hagia Sophia’, Jb der österreichischen Byzantinistik, xxviii (1979), 167–93

D.E. Conomos: ‘Communion Chants in Magna Graecia and Byzantium’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 241–63

D. Conomos: The Late Byzantine and Slavonic Communion Cycle: Liturgy and Music (Washington DC, 1985)

o: paraliturgical and instrumental music

G. La Piana: Le rappresentazioni sacre nella letteratura bizantina dalle origini al secolo X (Grottaferrata, 1912)

A. Vogt, ed.: Constantin VII Porphyrogénète: le livre des cérémonies (Paris, 1929–40)

V. Cottas: Le théâtre à Byzance (Paris, 1931)

G. La Piana: ‘The Byzantine Theater’, Speculum, xi (1936), 171–211

J. Handschin: Das Zeremonienwerk Kaiser Konstantins and die sangbare Dichtung (Basle, 1942)

M.M. Velimirović: ‘Liturgical Drama in Byzantium and Russia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xvi (1962), 351–85

W. Bachmann: ‘Das byzantinische Musikinstrumentarium’, Anfänge der slavischen Musik: Bratislava 1964, 125–38

K.D. Ioannides: ‘Notes on the Rhapsodic Melodies of Cyprus’, Kypriakou spoudai, xxx (1966), 247

W. Wünsch: ‘Vergleich eines byzantinischen Musikinstrumentes mit den südslavischen Guslen’, Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, iv (1966), 184 only

D. Mazarakēs: Mousikēs hermēneia tōn dēmotikōn tragoudiōn tēs monēs tōn Ibērōn (Athens, 1967)

M.M. Velimirović: ‘La Chevrette d’Esclavonie’, Zvuk (1967), nos.77–8, pp.146–7

J. Verpreaux, ed. and trans.: Pseudo-Kodinos: Traité des Offices (Paris, 1967)

K. Levy: ‘Three Byzantine Acclamations’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 43–57

D. Schuberth: Kaiserlich Liturgie (Göttingen, 1968)

M.P. Dragoumis: ‘Some Remarks on the Traditional Music of the Greeks of Corsica’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 28–34

G. Ciobanu: Studii de etnomuzicologie si bizantinologie (Bucharest, 1974–9)

C. Lombardo-Giordano: ‘La melurgia bizantina nei canti popolari della Sicilia e della Calabria’, Congrès d’études Byzantines XV: Athens 1976, 985–98

N.K. Moran: ‘Zwei Herrscherakklamationen in einer griechischen Handschrift aus Süditalien (Codex Messina gr. 161)’, Mf, xxx (1977), 3–13

J. Braun: ‘Musical Instruments in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts’, EMc, viii (1980), 312–27

T. Kapronyi: ‘Az elsöhangu tropár dallamtipusa a magyar görögkatolikus közösségek gyakorlatában’ [The melodic type of 1st-tone troparia in Greek Catholic congregations in Hungary], Zenetudományi dolgozatok (1982), 281–90

W. Puchner: ‘Liedtextstudien zur balkanischen Regenlitanei mit spezieller Berücksichtigung der bulgarischen und griechischen Varianten’, Jb für Volksliedforschung, xxix (1984), 100–11

R. Pejović: ‘Muzički instrumenti na umetničkim spomenicima južnoslovenskih naroda u periodu srednjeg veka i renesanse’ [Musical instruments on medieval and Renaissance monuments in South Slavic lands], Zbornik Matice Srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku, i (1987), 19–64

M. Alvarez Martinez: ‘Instrumentos bizantinos en una pintura medieval del Museo Diocesano de Palma de Mallorca’, De música hispana et aliis; miscelánea en honor al Prof. Dr. José López-Calo, ed. E. Casares and C. Villanueva (Santiago da Compostela, 1990), i, 43–54

N. Maliaras: Die Orgel im Byzantinischen Hofzeremoniell des 9. und des 10. Jahrhunderts: eine Quellenuntersuchung (Munich, 1991)

A. Carile: ‘Le ceremonie musicali alla corte bizantina’, Da Bisanzio a San Marco: musica e liturgia: Venice 1993, 43–60

F. De’ Maffei: ‘Gli strumenti musicali a Bisanzio’, Da Bisanzio a San Marco: musica e liturgia: Venice 1993, 61–110

p: byzantium and the slavs

V.M. Metallov: Russkaya simiografiya [Russian sign notation] (Moscow, 1912; Ger. trans., rev., 1984)

E. Koschmieder: Die ältesten Novgoroder Hirmologien-Fragmente (Munich, 1952–8)

C. Høeg: ‘The Oldest Slavonic Tradition of Byzantine Music’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxxix (1953), 37–66

L. Palikarova-Verdeil: La musique byzantine chez les bulgares et les russes (du IXe au XIVe siècle), MMB, Subsidia, iii (1953)

O. Strunk: ‘The Notation of the Chartres Fragment’, AnnM, iii (1955), 7–37

A. Bugge, ed.: Contacarium palaeoslavicum mosquense, MMB, Principale, vi (1960)

O. Strunk: ‘The Antiphons of the Oktoechos’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 50–67

M.M. Velimirović: Byzantine Elements in Early Slavic Chant, MMB, Subsidia, iv (1960)

R. Jakobson: ‘The Slavic Response to Byzantine Poetry’, Congrès d’études byzantines XII: Ohrid 1961, 249–67

K. Levy: ‘An Early Chant for Romanus’ Contacium trium puerorum?’, Classica et mediavalia, xxii (1961), 172–5

K. Levy: ‘The Byzantine Communion-Cycle and its Slavic Counterpart’, Congrès d’études byzantines XII: Ohrid 1961, 571–4

M.M. Velimirović: ‘Liturgical Drama in Byzantium and Russia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xvi (1962), 351–85

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

Anfänge der slavischen Musik: Bratislava 1964 [incl. L. Mokry: ‘Der Kanon zur Ehre des hl. Demetrius als Quelle für die Frühgeschichte des kirchenslavischen Gesanges’, 35–42; O. Strunk: ‘Zwei Chilandari Chorbücher’, 65–76; K. Levy: ‘Die slavische Kondakarien-Notation’, 77–92]

N.D. Uspensky: Drevnerusskoye pevcheskoye iskusstvo [The old Russian art of chanting] (Moscow, 1965, enlarged 2/1971)

C. Floros: ‘Die Entzifferung der Kondakarien-Notation’, Musik des Ostens, iii (1965), 7–71; iv (1967), 12–44

M. Velimirović: ‘Struktura staroslovenskih muzičkih irmologa’ [The structure of Old Slavonic musical heirmologia], Hilandarski zbornik, i (1966), 139–61

M.M. Velimirović: ‘The Influence of the Byzantine Chant on the Music of the Slavic Countries’, Byzantine Studies XIII: Oxford 1966, 119–40

C. Floros: Universale Neumenkunde (Kassel, 1970)

A.O. McCredie: ‘Some Aspects of Current Research into Russian Liturgical Chant’, MMA, vi (1972), 55–152

M. Velimirović: ‘The Present Status of Research in Slavic Chant’, AcM, xliv (1972), 235–65

M. Haas: Byzantinische und slavische Notationen, Palaeographie der Musik, i/2 (Cologne, 1973)

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977)

C. Hannick, ed.: Fundamental Problems of Early Slavic Music and Poetry, MMB, Subsidia, vi (1978)

N.K. Moran: ‘The Chant Crucem tuam in the Byzantine, Slavonic and Latin Recension’, SMH, v (1980), 35–48

D. Conomos: ‘The Monastery of Putna and the Musical Tradition of Moldavia in the Sixteenth Century’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xxxvi (1982), 15–28

M. Velimirović: ‘The Slavic Response to Byzantine Musical Influence’, Musica antiqua VI: Bydgoszcz 1982, 727–36

N. Schidlovsky: The Notated Lenten Prosomoia in the Byzantine and Slavic Traditions (diss., Princeton U., 1983)

S. Sava, ed.: Die Gesänge des altrussischen Oktoechos samt den Evangelien-Stichiren: eine Neumenhandschrift des Altgläubigen-Klosters zu Bélaja Kriníca (Munich, 1984)

M. Velimirović: ‘The Melodies of the Ninth-Century Kanon for St. Demetrius’, Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. M. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1984), 9–34

N. Schidlovsky: ‘A Note on the Slavic Modal Signature’, Cyrillomethodianum, viii–ix (1984–5), 175–81

N. Schidlovsky: ‘Melody, Text and the Slavic Notation of a Byzantine Sticheron’, Musica antiqua VII: Bydgoszcz 1985, 535–52

B. Karastojanov: ‘Tonemas and Prosodemas as Rhythmic Elements in Znamennyj Chant’, Rhythm in Byzantine Chant: Hernen 1986, 109–27

N.K. Moran: Singers in Late Byzantine and Slavonic Painting (Leiden, 1986)

J.L. Roccasalvo: The Plainchant Tradition of Southwestern Rus' (New York, 1986)

E. Toncheva: ‘The Bulgarian Liturgical Chant (9th–19th centuries)’, Rhythm in Byzantine Chant: Hernen 1986, 141–93

O. Störmer: Die altrussischen Handschriften liturgischer Gesänge in sematischer Notation als Hilfsmittel der slavischen Akzentologie (Munich, 1987)

A. Jakovljević: Diglōssē palaiographia kai melōdoi-hymnographoi tou kōdika tōn Athēnōn 928 [Old bilingual writings and hymn melodies in Athens codex 928] (Leukosia, 1988)

A. Jakovljević: ‘Cod. Lavra E-108 iz XIV veka kao najstariji srpsko-grčki antologion sa kukuzeljevom notacijom’, Hilandarski zbornik, vii (1989), 133–61

N. Konstantinova Ulff-Møller: Transcription of the Stichera Idiomela for the Month of April from Russian Manuscripts of the 12th Century (Munich, 1989)

C. Hannick: ‘Reference Materials on Byzantine and Old Slavic Music and Hymnography’, JPMMS, xiii (1990), 83–9 [bibliography]

E. Toncheva: ‘Über die Formelhaftigkeit in der mündlichen Kirchengesangstradition auf dem Balkan: das Automela-Proshomoia-Singen der Südslawen im 15. Jahrhundert nach MS. Athen Nr. 928’, Cantus Planus IV: Pécs 1990, 251–65

N.A. Gerasimova-Persidskaja, ed.: Altrussische Musik: Einführung in ihre Geschichte und Probleme (Graz, 1993)

G. Myers: The Asmatic Troparia, Katavasiai, and Hypakoai Cycles in their Palaeoslavonic Recensions: a Study in Comparative Palaeography (diss., U. of British Columbia, 1994)

I. and M. Shkolnik: ‘Echos in the Byzantine-Russian Heirmologion: an Experience of Comparative Research’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.64 (1994), 3–17

M. Karastoyanova: Die Sonntags-Stichera mit den Melodien aus dem heirmologischen Gesang in den bulgarischen gedruckten Neumenbüchern Wozkresnik (Sofia, 1995)

D. Stefanović: ‘Aspects and Principles of Adaptation of the Church Slavonic Texts to the Byzantine Melodic Formulae’, Laborare fratres in unum: Festschrift László Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag, ed J. Szendrei and D. Hiley (Hildesheim, 1995), 297–305

M. Velimirović: ‘Evolution of Byzantine Musical Notation in Russia’, Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. A. Doda (Lucca, 1995), 29–32

G. Wolfram: ‘Die Kreuzerhöhungshymnen in den palaiolslavischen und spätbyzantinischen Quellen’, Laborare fratres in unum: Festschrift László Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J. Szendrei and D. Hiley (Hildesheim, 1995), 341–50

G. Myers: ‘The Medieval Russian Kondakar and the Choirbook from Kastoria: a Palaeographic Study in Byzantine and Slavic Musical Relations’, PMM, vii (1998), 21–46

M. Shkolnik: ‘Reconstructing Znamenny Chant of the 12th–17th Centuries’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 63–70

N. Schidlovsky: ‘Medieval Russian Neumation: a preliminary Study in the Deuteros’, Palaeobyzantine Notations II: Hernen 1999, 71–9

q: byzantium and the west

E. Wellesz: Eastern Elements in Western Chant, MMB, Subsidia, ii (1947/R)

L. Brou: ‘Les chants en langue grecque dans liturgies latines’, Sacris erudiri, i (1948), 165–80; iv (1952), 226–38

M. Huglo: ‘La mélodie grecque du Gloria in excelsis’, Revue grégorienne, xxix (1950), 30–40

M. Huglo: ‘La tradition occidentale des mélodies byzantines du Sanctus’, Der kultische Gesang der abendländischen Kirche … aus Anlass des 75. Geburtstages Dominicus Johner, ed. F. Tack (Cologne, 1950), 40–46

M. Huglo: ‘Origine de la mélodie du Credo “authentique” de la Vaticane’, Congresso internazionale di musica sacra [I]: Rome 1950, 240–44

M. Huglo: ‘L’ancienne version latine de l’hymne acathiste’, Le muséon, lxiv (1951), 240–44

M. Huglo: ‘Source hagiopolite d’une antienne hispanique pour le Dimanche des Rameaux’, Hispania sacra, v (1952), 357–74

J. Handschin: ‘Sur quelques tropaires grecs traduits en latin’, AnnM, ii (1954), 27–60

M. Huglo and others, eds.: Fonti e paleografia del canto ambrosiano (Milan, 1956)

O. Strunk: ‘Influsso del canto liturgico orientale su quello della chiesa occidentale’, Musicae sacrae disciplina (Rome, 1957; Eng. trans., 1957), 343–8 [papal encyclical]

E. Jammers, R. Schlötterer and E. Waeltner: ‘Byzantinisches in der karolingischen Musik’, Byzantinisten-Kongress: Munich 1958, 1–29

J. Lemarié: ‘Les antiennes “Veterem hominem” du jour octave de l’Epiphanie et les antiennes d’origine grecque de l’Epiphanie’, Ephemerides liturgicae, lxxii (1958), 3–38

K. Levy: ‘The Byzantine Sanctus and its Modal Tradition in East and West’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 7–67

E. Jammers: Musik in Byzanz, im päpstlichen Rom und im Frankenreich (Heidelberg, 1962)

O. Strunk: ‘A Cypriote in Venice’, Natalicia musicologica Knud Jeppesen septuagenario collegis oblata, ed. B. Hjelmborg and S. Sørenson (Copenhagen, 1962), 101–13

K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75

O. Strunk: ‘The Latin Antiphons for the Octave of the Epiphany’, Mélanges Georges Ostrogorsky, ed. F. Barišić (Belgrade, 1963–4), 417–26

M. Huglo: ‘Les chants de la Missa graeca de Saint-Denis’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 74–83

M. Huglo: ‘Relations musicales entre Byzance et l’Occident’, Byzantine Studies XIII: Oxford 1966, 267–80

J. Raasted: Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, MMB, Subsidia, vii (1966)

C. Thodberg: Der byzantinische Alleluiaronzyklus, MMB, Subsidia, viii (1966)

M. Huglo: ‘Les diverses mélodies du Te decet laus à propos du vieux-romain’, JbLH, xii (1967), 111–16

K. Levy: ‘The Italian Neophytes’ Chants’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 181–227

K. Levy: ‘The Trisagion in Byzantium and the West’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 761–5

M. Huglo: ‘L’introduction en occident des formules byzantines d’intonation’, Studies in Eastern Chant, iii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1973), 84–90

M. Velimirović: ‘Egon Wellesz and the Study of Byzantine Chant’, MQ, lxii (1976), 265–77

O. Strunk: Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977)

N.K. Moran: ‘The Chant Crucem tuam in the Byzantine, Slavonic and Latin Recension’, SMH, v (1980), 35–48

D. Conomos: ‘Experimental Polyphony “According to the Latins” in Late Byzantine Psalmody’, EMH, ii (1982), 1–16

J. Boe: ‘The Beneventan Apostrophus in South Italian Notation, A.D. 1000–1100’, EMH, iii (1983), 43–66

K. Levy: ‘Toledo, Rome and the Legacy of Gaul’, EMH, iv (1984), 49–99

K.-H. Schlager: ‘Eine Melodie zum griechischen Credo’, AcM, lvi (1984), 221–34

D. Randel: ‘El antiguo rito hispánico y la salmodia primitiva en Occidente’, RdMc, viii (1985), 229–38

M. Adamēs: ‘Polifonikē ekklēsiastikē mousikē sto byzantinos tou 15. aiōna’ [Polyphonic liturgical music in 15th-century Byzantium], Mousikologia, iv (1986), 51–63

J. Raasted: ‘Die Jubili Finales und die Verwendung von interkalierten Vokalisen in der Gesangspraxis der Byzantiner’, Griechische Musik und Europa: Antike – Byzanz – Volksmusik der Neuzeit: Würzburg 1986, 67–80

J. Raasted: ‘Byzantine Heirmoi and Gregorian Antiphons: some Observations on Structure and Style’, Musica antiqua VIII: Bydgoszcz 1988, 837–62

H. Schmidt: ‘Zur Struktur gregorianischer und byzantinischer Melodien’, ibid., 899–908

T.F. Kelly: The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989)

C. Troelsgård: ‘Simeron and Hodie Chants in Byzantine and Western Traditions’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.60 (1990), 3–46

C. Troelsgård: ‘The Musical Structure of Five Byzantine Stichera and their Parallels among Western Antiphons’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin, no.61 (1991), 3–48

P. Jeffery: ‘The Lost Chant Tradition of Early Christian Jerusalem: some Possible Melodic Survivals in the Byzantine and Latin Chant Repertories’, EMH, xi (1992), 151–90

H. Schmidt: ‘Gregorianik und byzantinische Musik’, Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten: Cologne 1991, ed. O. Engels and P. Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1993), 417–32

P. Jeffery: ‘The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: the Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, JAMS, xlvii (1994), 1–38

C. Troelsgård: ‘Stational Liturgy and Processional Antiphons in the Ambrosian Rite’, Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan, ed. E.L. Lillie and N.H. Petersen (Copenhagen, 1996), 85–94

R. Dubowchik: ‘A Jerusalem Chant for the Holy Cross in the Latin and Eastern Rites’, PMM, v (1996), 113–29